Perdurabo

by Richard Kaczynski

  Its solution of the fundamental problems of mathematics and philosophy will establish a new epoch in history.

  But it must not be supposed that so potent an instrument of energy can be used without danger.

  I summon, therefore, by the power and authority entrusted to me, every great spirit and mind now on this planet incarnate to take effective hold of this transcendent force, and apply it to the advancement of the welfare of the human race.

  For as the experience of these two and thirty years has shown too terribly, the book cannot be ignored. It has leavened Mankind unaware: and Man must make thereof the Bread of Life. Its ferment has begun to work on the grape of thought: Man must obtain therefrom the Wine of Ecstasy.

  Come then, all ye, in the Name of the Lord of the Aeon, the Crowned and Conquering Child, Heru-Ra-Ha: I call ye to partake this Sacrament.

  Know—will—dare—and be silent!

  The book was priced at eleven shillings (eleven being a key number in Crowley’s magick), with an autumnal equinox publication date.

  Within two days of receiving the prospectuses, he sent out nearly three hundred copies. He sold twenty-five books to poet and occultist Michael Juste, who, under his given name Michael Houghton (died. c. 1956), was the proprietor of London’s Atlantis Bookshop, which he, an Eastern European refugee, founded in 1922. By June 29 subscription checks began coming. On July 9, Simpkin Marshall agreed to distribute the book. Things were going his way.

  While Crowley got his destiny firmly in hand, Pearl was quickly losing her grip. Her uncontrollable visions from the early part of their relationship became what Crowley called “almost constant hallucinations.” On May 12 he recorded in his diary that she was “showing serious symptoms of insanity.” Granted that after three years of trying to conceive a child with Crowley, she’d just had a hysterectomy and was experiencing tremendous hormonal and psychological changes. Then, on June 14, a woman she had never seen before—Elsie Morris—came by and insisted Crowley had gotten her pregnant that January; while Crowley nonchalantly replied, “Possible, but I paid 5 shillings at the time,”21 it rubbed Pearl’s nose in her perceived biological inadequacy. Then there was Pat (Deirdre MacAlpine), who was out to have the baby she could never have. Pearl was more than jealous: she resented and loathed Pat for being able to give Crowley the one precious thing she could not.

  A firm kick awakened AC on June 25. Another soon followed before he realized that Pearl was thrashing about in her sleep, bedeviled by a nightmare. Having worked late that night, he was too exhausted to do anything but wait for the episode to subside; but after forty-five minutes, he crawled out of bed and into his sitting room. Then Pearl burst in, gesticulating and shouting, “You shan’t sleep all night unless you come back to bed!” Crowley was speechless. When she started crying and apologizing, he thought it was just as bad. When he finally slipped into sleep at 4 o’clock, he told himself, “This won’t do.”

  Alas the violent dreams continued, infrequent at first but growing more common as the weeks passed. By August they occurred regularly:

  August 1, 1936. A hellish night. Kicked out—much harder kicking than before—slept in chair? No! She started screaming & rushed in.

  August 2. To sleep. More violence.

  August 3. Pat to lunch. Foul remarks by Pearl.

  August 4. Kicked more violently than ever: much of it awake and deliberate.

  August 7. New nightmare of Pearl’s.

  August 19. 3rd Anniversary of Pearl … Pearl gave adequate demonstration of the kicking, moaning & muttering. Perhaps people will believe me in future.

  August 21. Pearl till 3 a.m. wakened by sudden & violent physical attack. She remembers nothing before finding herself in the room remaking the bed.

  Pearl had snapped, and Crowley felt he might also.

  On August 30 he moved out of what he called the “Doomed Bastion” and into Room 6 on 56 Welbeck Street. His new landlord was Allan Burnett-Rae, whom Crowley had met a few years previously at the Mayfair Hotel during one of Dr. Cannon’s teas. Crowley wore the same knickerbocker suit he had worn then—it, his books, asthma machine, and incense burner were his only remaining worldly possessions.

  Alas, trouble followed. “Pearl started her Macbeth act,” Crowley wrote in his diary for September 3. “Had to throw her out. She fought like a tiger-cat. Hell to pay in house.” Tenants’ complaints resulted in Burnett-Rae storming upstairs and pounding on the door; judging from the noise, he assumed Beast was beating her. “Crowley!” he demanded. “Open this door!” When Pearl opened the door and apologetically explained that Mr. Crowley was having a nightmare, he believed none of it and insisted they see him in the morning.

  Crowley and Pearl rose early the next day and ordered tea in their room. When the waiter arrived, Pearl screamed at him, “Go and shit yourself!” Crowley did his best to calm her before meeting their landlord. Burnett-Rae hadn’t even dressed when they called on him. Taking the rap for Pearl, Crowley explained to him that he had, in fact, had a nightmare. They were rare, and he promised it would never happen again. Convinced Crowley had been beating her, Burnett-Rae insisted they pay their rent immediately or be expelled. Crowley spoke vaguely of money from American supporters and a family trust, and Burnett-Rae prepared for the unpleasant business of eviction.

  After the meeting, AC sent Pearl away for a bit so he could continue his magical work. Then he met again with his landlord, paid him cash for the rent, and cleared things up about Pearl. Burnett-Rae told Crowley he could stay—he would even tolerate his incense—if Crowley promised to stop sending his helper Adolphe out for pigs’ trotters in the dead of night. Crowley agreed.

  This, combined with failing health, marked the beginning of Pearl’s inexorable passing out of Crowley’s life.

  As the autumnal equinox approached that September, Crowley was quite busy. Despite previous failures in both Berlin and London, Crowley sought a play or film deal for Mortadello. Asked to produce the play, athlete, actor, scholar, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson (1898–1976) smiled and politely shook his head; he later confided in Cammell, “There are certain lines and gestures which the British public would not care to see enacted between a Negro and a white woman. As for the American stage, why, if I were to produce it there, somebody in the audience would stand up and shoot me with a revolver.”22

  By September 18, despite difficulties with papermakers and printers, Crowley held an advance copy of The Equinox of the Gods, his first book in six years. Germer, visiting from Brussels, bought dinner for the celebration. On September 23, 1936, the book was officially released. Selling at one guinea, it was an opulent volume: the pages were large—quarto in size—on handmade Japanese paper. The white buckram cover was stamped with gilt lettering. In a pocket in the back of the book was a facsimile reproduction of the manuscript of The Book of the Law. Its contents included an extract from “Aha!,” the text of The Book of the Law, a brief account of Crowley’s life, and the comment that emerged from the Cephaloedium Working. Although some typos marred this edition, one has become legendary: The plate of the Stele of Revealing was ironically mislabeled “The Stele of Revelling.” The book sold well, and Crowley contemplated the need for a second printing.

  The autumnal equinox was indeed a special day for Crowley. His new book was out. That morning, he had a vision of four adepts representing four races of man presenting him with the Word of the Equinox. Then, celebrating with Pat that day, he first learned that she was pregnant.

  Internal strife wracked Agape Lodge in California. Regina had entered an asylum late in 1935, shortly after Smith tried to seduce her. Schneider, who never seemed to be around anymore, blamed the Lodgemaster for her fate. Then, in August 1936, Jacobi flipped. It began on Thursday night, August 13, when Smith received an anonymous phone tip: Jacobi was under investigation by his employers, the gas company, for living openly with a woman and for belonging to an immoral order wherein candidates for initiation were stripped naked. He was certain t
o lose his job.23 Smith, of course, immediately phoned Jacobi (Jake) with the information.

  The next night, members of Agape Lodge anxiously awaited Jacobi’s arrival. A letter arrived special delivery in his stead, stating he had severed his relations with his friends and OTO. Although Smith contacted Jacobi, urging him to stick to his principles and speak to his boss, they heard nothing from him until August 20. “Regina saw him last night, and he would hardly open the car window to talk to her,” Smith reported. “In almost a frantic way, he told her he was through with us all, and did not want to see any of us again, that he would send all of the books of the order to you, a copy of Oo and I°.”24

  Outraged by this news and by Schneider’s lurid reports about Smith, Crowley promptly sent a vicious letter to the Agape Lodgemaster, accusing him of running OTO as a racket to sell sex. He declared the Lodge at Winona Boulevard off-limits until matters were cleared up and said, “If you have a defense, you better cable me.”25 Although Smith promptly cabled Crowley that he was astounded beyond measure—denying the charges, professing his loyalty, and promising to write fully—AC simply rebuked him for sending such a long and costly telegram. Regarding charges of trafficking in sex, Smith wrote to Crowley, “in the last 20 years, up to last Sunday as a matter of fact, I have defended so many of the same and other attacks on yourself that I got quite hardened and merely considered the source.”26

  When Jane Wolfe sided with Smith and repudiated Max’s report, Schneider broke off from the Lodge, taking most of the students with him. Before long, other members—presumably warned off by Schneider—began avoiding the Lodge. On November 7, Smith wrote to Crowley that he was suspending the Lodge until they had a better core of initiates to work with.

  Back in 1934, Crowley’s former secretary Israel Regardie had joined the Stella Matutina branch of the GD with Crowley’s blessing. His introduction came from occultist Dion Fortune (1890–1946), who had long admired Regardie’s first two books, writing glowing appraisals of them in the Occult Review. Although Waite had considerably revised, polished, and Christianized the rituals from their original Isis-Urania form, they deeply impressed Regardie.

  In the following years he published GD influenced books like My Rosicrucian Adventure (1936) and The Golden Dawn (1936). The latter four-volume set contained the complete rituals and instructions of the Outer Order of the GD, and it quickly became a classic. Crowley, however, considered the book “pure theft”—particularly ironic since Crowley pirated much of “The Temple of Solomon the King” from Mathers.

  Crowley, noting Regardie’s pen name “Francis,” wrote a glib letter to “Frank,” chiding his former pupil about his Jewish faith and inferiority complex. Regardie took criticism poorly, and the jeering struck his insecurities like a sledgehammer. He rifled off a nasty retort, beginning with “Darling Alice, You really are a contemptible bitch!”27 It infuriated the Beast; perhaps, as Crowley’s letter triggered Regardie’s insecurities, something about this struck a nerve in him. In response, AC circulated a cruel letter about Regardie:

  Israel Regudy was born in the neighborhood of Mile End Road, in one of the vilest slums in London.

  Of this fact he was morbidly conscious, and his racial and social shame embittered his life from the start.

  “Regardie” is the blunder of a recruiting sergeant in Washington on the occasion of his brother enlisting in the United States Army. Regudy adopted this error as sounding less Jewish. “Francis” which he has now taken appears to be a pure invention.

  About the year 1924 he began to study the work of, and corresponded with, Mr. Aleister Crowley. He put up so plausible an appeal that the latter gentleman paid his passage from America and accepted him as a regular student of Magic.

  Apart from his inferiority complex, he was found to be suffering from severe chronic constipation, and measures were taken to cure him of this and also his ingrained habit of onanism.

  The cure in the latter case was successful, but Regudy abused his freedom by going under some railway arches and acquiring an intractable gonorrhoea.28

  This incident so embittered Regardie that he never again communicated with Crowley. Thirty years would pass before he overcame his resentment and regained his appreciation for Crowley.

  With the popularity of the phonograph, Crowley spent that autumn cutting some wax 78 rpm records of himself reciting poetry and invocations. On November 18 and 19 he did the first and second Enochian Calls, followed on the 23rd by the “Anthem” from “The Ship” and “Hymn to Pan.” On December 1 he recorded “Hymn for July 4” and some other pieces. “I did make a record of the ‘Hymn to Pan,’ ” Crowley reported, “5 minutes all, but for 2 or 3 seconds continuous roaring and raging, so my lungs are not quite done for. The magical effect of that recording will soon be seen in London.”29

  That winter he returned to the more familiar role of teacher, appearing at the Eiffel Tower on Wednesday, January 13, 1937, to give his first of four lectures on “Yoga for Yellowbellies.” Crowley thought the talk went well, but it was an uncharacteristic understatement. His talks on yoga, given twenty-seven years after he wrote about it in Book Four, rank among the best available expositions: lucid, direct, and good-humored.

  The remaining talks followed on January 20, January 25, and February 3. So favorable was the response that Crowley ran a second series of four lectures, “Yoga for Yahoos.” Beginning at the Eiffel Tower on February 17, the talks were every bit as sublime and witty as their predecessors—perhaps too clever. During his second lecture on February 24, Crowley found his audience staring blankly at him; Cammell thought they couldn’t distinguish his learned words from deadpan one-liners. To remedy this, Crowley paused at odd intervals and blurted out, “To hell with the Archbishop of Canterbury!” Instead of waking the audience, he only confused them more. The third and fourth lectures followed on successive Wednesdays. Crowley offered the lectures to Daily Express reporter Tom Driberg, but the paper passed on the opportunity to print them. Someday, he thought, he would have to publish them himself.

  Although May 2, 1937, was one of the happiest days in Crowley’s life, his diaries are curiously silent on the matter. With no miscarriages or complications, Pat MacAlpine gave birth to a healthy baby boy at Newcastle-on-Tyne. Crowley had the heir he had sought. Contrary to popular rumor, he did not name the boy Mustapha because on seeing the mother for the first time he said, “I must ’ave ’er.” The mother named him Randall Gair Doherty, although Crowley would carry on the tradition that left AC with his father’s name, nicknaming the boy Aleister Ataturk.30 A celebration followed the next day.

  Since the start of 1937, Crowley was absorbed in the study of the Chinese oracle of I Ching, making some incisive observations and arriving at new theories. On June 7 Crowley recovered his I Ching sticks—a set of six turtle shell rectangles with a solid line on one side and a broken line on the other. This apparatus, which diverged from the traditional method of using fifty-one yarrow wands to produce a series of six broken, unbroken, and moving lines, provided a quick and dirty way of casting a hexagram. From this point on, Crowley consulted the I Ching daily for a general hexagram, and deferred to the Chinese oracle for many other decisions.

  On June 9, Crowley met Clifford Bax for lunch at the Royal Automobile Club. Although over thirty years had passed since he and Bax first met at St. Moritz, when Crowley was a newlywed and Bax but a boy, they were still good friends. “What has happened to the Queen of Heaven?” Bax would ask Crowley, who dryly requested, “Year and name, please.”

  That afternoon, three ladies escorted Bax to lunch. The first, artist Leslie Blanche,31 Bax introduced as “la Comtesse de Roussy de Sales,” but Crowley knew Bax was merely attempting to titillate him. Next was Meum Stewart,32 who spent much of the lunch asking for details about Raoul Loveday’s death. The last of these women, older and more staid, was Lady Harris.

  Marguerite Frieda Harris, née Bloxham (1877–1962), was the daughter of Charing Cross Hospital’s consulting sur
geon John Astley Bloxham (1843–1926) and wife of Sir Percy Harris (1876–1952), a member of Parliament. It was only a few years ago, in 1932, that Percy Harris was created a baronet, thus making his wife “Lady Harris” (although she preferred to eschew the formal title). She was also an artist, having illustrated her book Winchelsea: A Legend (1926) and having exhibited at the New English Art Club in 1929 under the name Jesus Chutney.33 Lady Harris also professed an interest in magick: having at one time been an adherent of Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, she would, at other points in her life, study Anthroposophy, Co-Masonry, Thelema, and Indian mysticism.34 As her friend, sculptor Edward Bainbridge Copnall (1903–1973), described her, “She had an alive and virile brain, though she was inclined to be very absent-minded, and a most amusing sense of humour and a love of the bizarre.”35 Bax had invited her at the last minute as an afterthought, and she failed to impress AC, who recorded their meeting only scantily in his diary. Nobody imagined that she would play a role in Crowley’s life every bit as important as Allan Bennett, George Cecil Jones, J. F. C. Fuller, Victor Neuburg, Leah Hirsig, Gerald Yorke, or Karl Germer.

  For the next few weeks, the I Ching was right on the money for Crowley. When, on June 25, he met Bobby Barefoot, he asked for a symbol for their relationship. Kwai, hexagram forty-three, came the response. Crowley interpreted this correctly as “Plain fucking and no more.” She became one of several women Crowley bounced between in his sixty-second year. On August 9, AC got the first hexagram, and Frieda Harris contacted him again through Leslie Blanche. When Crowley received the second hexagram the next day, he noted in his diary, “I think I and II coming like this should announce a totally new current prepared, without my will or knowledge, by the Gods.”36