Chapter Three • The Golden Dawn
1 “University Intelligence,” Times (London), 6 Aug 1869, 26509: 10. “Apothecaries’ Hall,” Times (London), 16 Apr 1870, 26726: 10.
2 Eliza Westcott’s death (from which her birth year is estimated) is reported in “Fatal Fall into a Courtyard,” Times (London), 10 Aug 1921, 42795: 5. The 1891 census lists three of her children as Ida, Elsie, and George (RG12, piece 161, 182: 39).
3 Westcott is referrred to as deputy coroner for central Middlesex in the Times’ reports of inquests as early as 28 Mar 1883, and as late as 2 Dec 1893; the first reference to him as coroner for north-east London appears in the 22 Dec 1894 issue.
4 25 in W. Wynn Westcott, “Twelve Years’ Experirences as a London Coroner,” Transactions of the Medico-Legal Society 1907, 4: 15–32.
5 W. Wynn Westcott, A Social Science Treatise: Suicide, Its History, Literature, Jurisprudence, Causation, and Prevention (London: H.K. Lewis, 1885). Westcott, “Twelve Years’ Experiences,” op cit. William Martindale and W. Wynn Westcott, The Extra Pharmacopœia of Unofficial Drugs and Chemical and Pharmaceutical Preparations (London: H. K. Lewis, 1883). Westcott contributed occasionally to the British Medical Journal and The Lancet, and his contributions there are: “Rupture of the Heart,” British Medical Journal 1872, 1: 554; W. Wynn Westcott and Samule Lloyd, “A Medico-Legal Mystery,” The Lancet 1883, 122(3142): 851–2; “Suicide,” The Lancet 1885, 125(3211): 497; “Deaths from Alcoholic Excess in London,” The Lancet 1888, 132 (3386): 132–3; “The Arsenio-Ferric Water of Levico,” The Lancet 1890, 135(3475): 748; “The Mandrake,” 1890, British Medical Journal 1: 620–4; “A Coroner’s Notes on Sudden Deaths,” British Medical Journal 1891, 2: 841–2; “An Address on the Coroner and his Relations with the Medical Practitioner and Death Certification: Delivered at a Meeting of the North London District of the Metropolitan Counties Branch of the British Medical Association,” British Medical Journal 1902, 2: 1756–9; “The Overlaying of Infants,” British Medical Journal 1903, 2: 1208–9; “On Suicide,” Transactions of the Medico-Legal Society 1905 2: 85–98; “Twelve Years’ Experiences,” 1907, op. cit.; “An Address on Sudden and Unexpected Deaths: Delivered before the St. Pancras and Islington Division of the British Medical Association,” British Medical Journal 1908, 1: 490–3; “Twins: A Curious Incident,” The Lancet 1908, 171(4401): 49–50; “A Note upon Deodands,” Transactions of the Medico-Legal Society 1910, 7: 91–7; “A Note on a Curious Result of Burning a New-born Child,” Transactions of the Medico-Legal Society 1912, 9: 69–70; “Exhibition of Specimens,” Transactions of the Medico-Legal Society 1918, 13: 48.
6 “2nd December, 1886,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum 1888, 1: 27–8. Representative British Freemasons: A Series of Biographies and Portraits of Early Twentieth Century Freemasons (London: Dod’s Peerage, Ltd., 1915), 159–60.
7 “2nd December, 1886,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, and the ballot result in Ars Quatuor Coronatorum 1893, 6: 168. See also “Friday, 5th October, 1894,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum 1894, 7, for the conclusion of his term.
8 For additional details on Westcott, see his obituary in Ars Quatuor Coronatorum 1925, 38: 224–5, and R. A. Gilbert, “William Wynn Westcott and the Esoteric School of Masonic Research,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum 1987, 100: 6–20. Westcott wrote around one hundred Masonic, Rosicrucian and other esoteric articles and reviews, too many to list here. Twenty-eight of these were collected as The Magical Mason: Forgotten Hermetic Writings of William Wyn Westcott, Physician and Magus, ed. R. A. Gilbert (Wellingborough: Aquarian, 1983). His books—as author, editor or translator—up to Crowley’s 1898 introduction to the GD include: Sepher Yetzirah: The Book of Formation and the Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom, Translated from the Hebrew (Bath: Robert H. Fryar, 1887); Tabula Bembina sive Mensa Isiaca: The Isiac Tablet of Cardinal Bembo, Its History and Occult Significance (Bath: Robert H. Fryar, 1887); Nicholas Flammel: His Exposition of the Hieroglyphical Figures which He Caused to Be Painted upon an Arch in St. Innocents Church Yard in Paris: Concerning Both the Theory and Practice of the Philosophers Stone. Bath (Bath: R. H. Fryar, 1890); Numbers: Their Occult Power and Mystic Virtue, Being a Résumé of the Views of the Kabbalists, Pythagoreans, Adepts of India, Chaldean Magi and Mediœval Magicians (London: Theosophical Pub. Society, 1890); The Science of Alchymy, Spiritual and Material: An Essay (London: Theosophical Pub. Society, 1893); Collectanea Hermetica, 10 vols. (London: Theosophical Pub. Society, 1893–1896); The Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum, Interpreted by the Tarot Trumps: Translated from the MSS of Eliphaz Levi, and Edited (London: George Redway, 1896).
9 S. L. MacGregor Mathers, The Kabbalah Unveiled, Containing the Following Books of the Zohar: The Book of Concealed Mystery. The Greater Holy Assembly. The Lesser Holy Assembly (London: G. Redway, 1887). Anna Bonus Kingsford and Edward Maitland, The Perfect Way: Or, the Finding of Christ (London: Field & Tuer, 1882).
10 In 1927 Henri Bergson won the Nobel Prize in literature for Creative Evolution, trans. W. R. Victor Brade (Wilmslow: Stillings, 1911).
11 W. B. Yeats, Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1944), 115.
12 Maude Gonne MacBride, A Servant of the Queen: Reminiscences (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), 248.
13 Ellic Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887–1923 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 61fn.
14 From Soul of Osiris, rpt. Works 1: 196.
15 While Crowley and Fitzgerald place this book after Jephthah, Yorke places it after The Tale of Archais. Neither appears to be correct, as the Archives of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Henry S. King (Doheny Library, University of Southern California) show the date of Songs of the Spirit—the book traditionally believed to follow The Tale of Archais—as December 1898, while Archais is dated January, 1899. In either event, December, 1898, leaves little time for the remaining 1898–imprinted books to appear. Jezebel was probably published before Crowley’s introduction to the GD, fresh with Gerald Kelly’s praise for Aceldama. The correct order of publication then would be: Aceldama 1898; White Stains around May, 1898; Jezebel mid 1898; Songs of the Spirit, December, 1898; Tale of Archais, January, 1899; Jephthah, July, 1899.
16 Crowley and Svareff exchanged honors with Crowley’s Ahab and Other Poems (1903), Svareff penning the introduction and epilogue. Svareff is also listed as the author of “Au Theatre du Grand Guignol” in In Residence (1904), 89–94.
17 Stephensen, Legend of Aleister Crowley, 36–7.
18 Works 1: 28 fn: “With the exception of this epilogue and one or two of the lyrics, Crowley wished to suppress the whole of The Tale of Archais.”
19 Confessions, 556.
20 Stephensen, Legend of Aleister Crowley, 37.
21 “A First Glance at New Books,” Outlook, Dec 1898, 2(46): 640.
22 Aleister Crowley, “The Revival of Magick.” in Hymenaeus Beta and Richard Kaczynski (eds), The Revival of Magick and Other Essays (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon, 1998), 23–4; orig. pub. in International 1917, 11(8): 247–8; 11(9): 280–2; 11(10): 302–4; 11(11): 332–3.
23 Aleister Crowley, “Origins,” unpublished MS quoted in Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival (London: Muller, 1972), 84.
24 S. M. Mitra, The Life and Letters of Sir John Hall (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1911), 535.
25 Beatrice Irwin appeared in Broadway productions of There’s Many a Slip (Sep–Oct 1902), At the Telephone (Oct 1902), His Excellency the Governor (Oct–Nov 1902), The Unforseen (Jan–Apr 1903), and The Admirable Crichton (Nov 1903–Mar 1904). For her poetry, see “Miss Irwin’s ‘Color Poems,’ New York Times 25 Nov 1910, and “ ‘Pagan’ and Otherwise,” New York Times 31 Mar 1912.
26 Confessions, 225.
27 W. B. Yeats to John Quinn, 21 Mar 1915, Quinn Memorial Collection.
28 For a comparison of Yeats’s The Resurrection and The Book of the Law, see Kathleen Raine, Yeats, the Tarot, and the Golden Dawn (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1972), 34.
29 Gerald Yorke to Virginia Moore, 22 Oct 19
54, private collection.
30 Ithell Colquhoun, “Two Pupils and a Master,” Prediction, Oct 1971, 12–4.
31 Confessions, 177.
32 Josephine Johnson, Florence Farr: Bernard Shaw’s “New Woman” (Gerrards Cross, London: Colin Smythe, 1975), 84.
33 Reviews, good and bad, appear in Stephensen, Legend of Aleister Crowley, 38–40.
34 “A Mystery Man,” Outlook, Jul 1899, 3(78): 840–1.
35 W. B. Yeats to Lady Gregory, 25 Apr 1900, in Allan Wade, The Letters of W. B. Yeats (New York: MacMillan, 1955).
36 W. B. Yeats to John Quinn, 21 Mar 1915, Quinn Memorial Collection.
37 Johnson, Florence Farr, 84.
38 The Equinox 1909, 1(1): 101–8. In his copy Crowley wrote, “This story is true in every detail. Date of occurrence 1899 E.V. May or June.” (Equinox Notes, HRHRC: 115). In the story, Will Bute=William Butler Yeats and Hypatia Gay=Althea Gyles.
39 Despite many claims to the contrary, there is no evidence that Gyles was a member of the GD. Crowley certainly would have mentioned it, and she does not appear in any membership rolls or histories of the GD. Indeed, Hyde writes of the covers she designed for Yeats, “While Gyles was not a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as Yeats was, she was clearly aware of some of its symbolism.” Virginia Hyde, “Variant Covers of The Secret Rose” in Warwick Gould (ed.), Yeats Annual No. 13 (London: Macmillan, 1998).
40 William Butler Yeats, “A Symbolic Artist and the Coming of Symbolic Art,” Dome, Dec 1898, 233–7.
41 “At the Fork in the Roads,” 104.
42 Faith Compton Mackenzie, Tatting: A Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), 12.
43 The Equinox 1910, 1(3): 205. Although this essay was credited to J. F. C. Fuller, Crowley oversaw and edited the writing.
44 W. B. Yeats to Lady Gregory, 6 Jun 1900. In Wade, Letters of W. B. Yeats, 346.
45 By today’s standards, Crowley paid about $85,000; in 1991, Boleskine went on sale for a minimum bid of £225,000 or roughly $400,000.
46 AC to Gerald Kelly, n.d., Old D6, Yorke Collection. Itallics mine.
47 Francis Toye, For What We Have Received: An Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 124. Toye was Gerald Kelly’s cousin.
48 Johnson, Florence Farr, 81.
49 Lilian Horniblow née Horsford was also known as Laura Grahame; she married Frank Herbert Horniblow in 1895. See biographical appendix, unexpurgated Confessions. See also Crowley’s “Sirenae” from The Argonauts (1904), for which Laura Graeme is a dedicatee.
50 Confessions, 181–2.
51 These papers included material on kabbalistic numerology (gematria) and correspondences that would form the basis of later Crowley works Sepher Sephiroth and 777.
52 “To Allan Bennett MacGregor,” from The Soul of Osiris (1901), rpt. Works 1: 207. The phrase “Man of Sorrows,” besides reflecting his physical state, also applies to the Buddhist trance of dukkha.
53 Abramelin Diary, 24 Feb 1900, HRHRC. These letters came from one of Crowley’s lovers, Evelyn Hall, c.f. biographical appendix to the unexpurgated Confessions. Of Hall’s warning, Crowley wrote in his diary, “her description of the ‘college chum’ is absurd and her whole attitude ridiculous. She knows one fact only—the name Crowley at Cambridge.”
54 Abramelin Diary, HRHRC. Quoted in Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 223. Thomas Lake Harris (1823–1906) was a mystic whose theories about sex circulated informally among members of the GD’s Second Order.
55 These points refer to the ten sephiroth of the Tree of Life. The oath is taken from The Equinox 1910, 1(3): 214; the ritual appears on pages 208–3. and in Regardie, Golden Dawn and Complete Golden Dawn, and Torrens, Secret Rituals of the Golden Dawn.
56 Regardie suspected AC’s motto was very Christian and, given his later ventures into alternative forms of religion, embarassing in retrospect. His guess of “Heart of Jesus Girt About By a Serpent” is wrong. Skinner, in Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley, incorrectly gives the name “Parzival.” Crowley actually recorded his motto, Christeos Luciftias, in his notebook currently with Special Collections, Northwestern University Library. In Enochian, Christeos is “let there be,” while Luciftias is “brightness” or “light.” Its obvious Latin analogue Lucifer was not a name of the devil in mystic circles as it is in popular parlance. The name literally means “light bringer” and was an ancient name of Venus as the Morning Star. In its older, pre-Christian form, Lucifer was similar to Prometheus, the Greek god who brought fire and light to mankind. It is in this sense of the word that H. P. Blavatsky named the Theosophical Society’s magazine Lucifer.
57 Abramelin diary, HRHRC.
58 W. B. Yeats to George Russell, May 1900, in Wade, Letters of W. B. Yeats, 343–4. A 1920s Sunday Express article corroborates this claim; it reported that, in 1900, Crowley stole £200 from a widow with whom he cohabited (“Aleister Crowley’s Orgies in Sicily: Woman’s Account of His Last Visit to London. ‘The Beast 666.’ Black Record of Aleister Crowley. Preying on the Debased. His Abbey. Profligacy and Vice in Sicily,” Sunday Express, 26 Nov 1922).
59 Abramelin Diary, HRHRC. Also reprinted in Confessions; Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn; Regardie, Eye in the Triangle; and Charles Richard Cammell, Aleister Crowley: The Man, the Mage, the Poet (London: Richards Press, 1951).
60 Symonds describes many other incidents for which I can find no source, with one exception. He tells the story of how a local butcher cut himself and died after Crowley scribbled the names of two demons on the butcher’s bill. Symonds is in error, as AC gives the following account in the International:
His student J. F. C. Fuller once marked his place in the Abramelin book with a butcher’s bill. A few days later, the butcher slipped, stabbed himsself in the thigh, and died. Fuller’s reaction: “It may be only a coincidence, but it’s just as bad for the butcher!” (rpt. Crowley, Revival of Magick, 32).
61 This letter appears in full in Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 209–11 and is excerpted in The Equinox 1910, 1(3): 255–6. The relevant correspondence has also been collected in Darcy Küntz (ed.), Sent from the Second Order: The Collected Letters of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (Austin, TX: Golden Dawn Trust, 2005).
62 186 in George Mills Harper, “ ‘Meditations upon Unknown Thought’: Yeats’ Break with MacGregor Mathers,” Yeats Studies 1971, 1: 175–202.
63 Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 213.
64 Harper, “Unknown Thought,” 192; Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 216.
65 Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 207.
66 Confessions, 194–195.
67 The Equinox 1910, 1(3): 251.
68 Confessions, 196.
69 Crowley to Gerald Yorke, 27 Mar 1946, Yorke Collection.
70 Harper, “Unknown Thought,” 194; Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 225.
71 This was not, as some suggest, melodrama on Crowley’s part. The purpose of a mask for Crowley was to maintain anonymity: Mathers wanted his representative to act for him in media res, and not to be associated with any individual within the order. Further, the notion of masks is an adaptation of the GD instructional document Z1. As Mathers explained in a letter to M. W. Blackden on April 26, 1900: “to mark his impersonality in this matter, I distinguished him by a symbol, and not by a name, and advised him further to wear a mask of Osiris as laid down in Z, should the same be necessary; so as completely to separate and distinguish between his individuality and the office with which I had invested him. And I may remark that to term the Highland Dress a ‘masquerade’ is hardly even English good taste …”
72 Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 226–7.
73 Harper, “Unknown Thought,” 180; Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 229.
74 W. B. Yeats to Lady Gregory, 25 Apr 1900, in Wade, Letters of W.B. Yeats, 340.
75 Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 230. Fuller states that Crowley, during his raid of the GD temple, absconded with a copy of the Goetia, translated by Mathers;
this he published without Mathers’s consent in 1904. See John Frederick Charles Fuller, Bibliotheca Crowleyana (Tenterden, Kent: Keith Hogg, 1966).
76 W. B. Yeats to Lady Gregory, 29 Apr 1900, in Wade, Letters of W. B. Yeats, 341.
77 This partnership is curious given the accusation Mathers made of Westcott.
78 The Equinox 1910, 1(3): 266.
79 W. B. Yeats to George Russell, May 1900, in Wade, Letters of W. B. Yeats, 344.
80 W. B. Yeats, 1983. [1920]. “All Soul’s Night,” in Richard J. Finneran (ed.), The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Collier Books, 1983 [1920]), 229.
Chapter Four • The Mountain Holds a Dagger
1 Frederic Lees, “Isis Worship in Paris: Conversations with the Hierophant Rameses and the High Priestess Anari,” The Humanitarian, Feb 1900, 16(2): 82–7. Interestingly, Moïna used the publicity from these events to advance a feminist agenda, noting the centrality of priestesses in the ancient mysteries—something which has been neglected in recent history. “When a religion symbolises the universe by a Divine Being,” she asked, “is it not illogical to omit woman, who is the principal half of it, since she is the principal creator of the othr half—that is, man?” (p. 86).
2 “Obituary,” New York Times, 10 Nov 1893, 4. “Demas Strong,” New York Tribune, 10 Nov 1893, 7.
3 Theodore Baker and Alfred Remy, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (New York: G. Schirmer, 1919), 924. César Saerchinger, International Who’s Who in Music and Musical Gazetteer: A Contemporary Biographical Dictionary and a Record of the World’s Musical Activity (New York: Current Literature Pub. Co, 1918), 626. Critic 1906 48(1): 12–3. “The World of Music,” Munsey’s Magazine 1896, 14(5): 575. “Production of ‘The Valkyrie’ in English,” Manchester Guardian, 17 Oct 1895, 8. “The Opera,” Musical News, 19 Oct 1895, 9: 322. A. C. R. Carter, The Year’s Music: Being a Concise Record of All Matters Relating to Music and Musical Institutions (London: J. S. Virtue & Co., Ltd., 1896), 244–5.
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