23 Diary, 25 Jul 1920.
24 The paintings are described in an untitled essay on the Abbey of Thelema, p. 3, GARL. The quote is from “Paintings in the Chambre des Cauchemars,” GARL.
25 Captain J. H. E. Townsend to J. F. C. Fuller, 19 Apr 1921, HRHRC.
26 Leah Hirsig’s diary, 26 Sep 1924, Yorke Collection.
27 Confessions, 867.
28 Diary, 5 Nov 1920.
29 World War I recruitment card, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Magical record of C. F. Russell, courtesy of Martin P. Starr.
30 U.S. passport application, 11 Oct 1920, National Archives, College Park, MD.
31 Diary, 12 Dec 1920.
32 Jane Wolfe’s diary, 31 Mar 1921, quoted in “Jane Wolfe: Hammer and anvil, Part II.” In the Continuum 1981, 2(10): 38. A facsimile edition of Wolfe’s Cefalù diaries has been published as Jane Wolfe, Aleister Crowley, and David Shoemaker, Jane Wolfe: The Cefalu Diaries 1920–1923 (Sacramento: College of Thelema of Northern California, 2008).
33 Literally “to make his sausage inflate.” C. F. Russell, Znuz is Znees: Memoirs of a Magician (privately printed, 1970), v. 2, 176.
34 “Jane Wolfe: Hammer and Anvil, Part II,” op. cit., 35.
35 The Butts family’s collection of Blakes is now in the Tate Gallery, London.
36 AC to Gerald Yorke, 4 Dec 1928, Yorke Collection.
37 Douglas Goldring, South Lodge: Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review Circle (London: Constable & Co., 1943), 147.
38 Nathalie Blondel (ed.), The Journals of Mary Butts (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2002), 179.
39 This was a variation on the kabbalistic cross—a GD formula where the sign of the cross is coupled with intoning the Hebrew words Ateh Malkuth ve-Geburah ve-Gedulah le-Olam, Amen” (“Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory unto the ages, amen”). Crowley instructed his students to insert the name of their holy guardian angel between the first two words. In Butts’s case, he instructed her to use the word Therion. She evidently did not realize this was Crowley’s magical name, although her diary notes that she recognized the word a deriving from the Greek (wild beast), and considered it interesting that she had pinned to her wall a post card reproduction of a Mycenaean vase depicting the (mistress of the animals). See the diary of Mary Butts, 18 Mar 1921, Mary Butts Papers, Gen MSS 487, Box 2, folder 58, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
40 Butts diary, 31 Mar 1921.
41 Nathalie Blondel, Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co., 1998), 99.
42 Butts diary, 14 Apr 1921.
43 18 May 1921 in Blondel, Journals of Mary Butts, 182.
44 Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1973), 147.
45 J. W. N. Sullivan, An Attempt at Life (London: G. Richards, 1917).
46 J. W. N. Sullivan’s publications include: Gallio, or the Tyranny of Science (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1920); Atoms and Electrons (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, 1923); Aspects of Science (London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1923); The History of Mathematics in Europe: From the Fall of Greek Science to the Rise of the Conception of Mathematical Rigour (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1925); Three Men Discuss Relativity (London: Collins, 1925); Beethoven: His Spiritual Development (London: J. Cape, 1927); The Bases of Modern Science (London: E. Benn, 1928); Present-Day Astronomy (London: G. Newnes, 1930); (and T. L. Poulton), How Things Behave: A Child’s Introduction to Physics (London: Black, 1932); The Physical Nature of the Universe (London: V. Gollancz, ltd, 1932); But for the Grace of God (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1932); The Limitations of Science (London: Viking, 1933); Contemporary Mind; Some Modern Answers (London: H. Toulmin, 1934); (and Walter Grierson), Outline of Modern Belief: Modern Science, Modern Thought, Religious Thought (London: Newnes, 1935); A Holiday Task (London: Cape, 1936); Science: A New Outline (London: Nelson, 1937); (and Charles Singer), Isaac Newton, 1642–1727 (London: Macmillan, 1938); and Living Things (Cambridge: Orthological Institute, 1938).
47 “J. W. N. Sullivan, 51, Writer on Science: British Essayist also Served as Book Reviewer—Interpreter of Relativity Dies in England,” New York Times, 13 Aug 1937, 18. H. M. Tomlinson, “J. W. N. Sullivan: The Man and His Work,” Observer (London), 15 Aug 1937, 9. “J. W. N. Sullivan,” Manchester Guardian, 13 Aug 1937, 10. Crowley also penned an obituary of Sullivan, see “These Names Make News: Master of Maths,” Daily Express, 14 Aug 1937, 6.
48 Sullivan, Aspects of Science, 94.
49 However, it should be pointed out that, during his time in Fontainbleau, he was also associated with Gurdjieff. See “Fontainbleau’s High Priest and His Cult: They Have a Snug Retreat in the Famous Old French Forest, Where Dazzling Beauty and Oriental Luxuriousness Are Sharply in Contrast with Cloister-Like Cells, Coarse Food and Hard Labour with the Hands—Trying to Bridge the East and the West,” Atlanta Constitution, 29 Apr 1923, H332.
50 Birth record, Q3 1896, GRO, East Preston, Sussex, 2b: 335.
51 Confessions, 869.
52 Confessions, 870.
53 Sullivan married Manooch in 1917. Sullivan depicts their relationship in his autobiographical novel, But for the Grace of God, calling himself “Julian” and her “Sybil.” In his account, Sybil was an aspiring composer married to Greek scholar Richard Sauncers, who did not love her. They eventually divorced; although Julian desperately loved her, Sybil refused to marry him, preferring each of them to retain their “freedom.” As Sullivan wrote, “I see now that this was a disastrous decision for both of us” (183). This may refer to her affair with Crowley and her subsequent affair with poet Vivian Locke-Ellis [see 1922–1923: The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan, Vol. 5. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), 323]. After months of wandering about Paris, Florence, and the Riviera, Julian realized that her ex-husband was right: “Nothing could make Sybil happy. The central core of her was something I could never touch. I would never even be able to understand her” (193). She was later stricken with an unspecified illness and died.
54 AC to Heinrich Tränker, An. XX Sol 26° Capricorn (16–17 Jan 1924), Yorke Collection. See also AC to Henri Birven, 29 Dec 1929 and 3 Feb 1930, Yorke Collection.
55 Master Therion [Aleister Crowley], Magick in Theory and Practice. (Paris: Lecram Press, 1929), 301.
56 Seabrook, Witchcraft, 198. This retirement, with slightly different details, is also described in “Jane Wolfe: Hammer and anvil, Part III” In the Continuum 1981, 2(12): 18–29.
57 Blondel, Mary Butts, 100–1.
58 Mary Butts, Ashe of Rings (Paris: Three Mountain Press, 1925).
59 Confessions, 922.
60 Butts diary, 7 Aug 1921 and 16 Aug 1921.
61 Butts diary, 4 Aug 1921, Mary Butts Papers, box 3, volume 9.
62 Butts diary, 17 Aug 1921.
63 Diary quoted in John Symonds, “Introduction,” in Aleister Crowley, White Stains (London: Duckworth, 1986), ix.
64 11 Jan 1922 in Blondel, Journals of Mary Butts, 193.
65 Blondel, Mary Butts, 106.
66 Russell, Znuz is Znees, 178–92. Confessions, 871–5.
67 Diary of C. F. Russell, courtesy of Martin P. Starr.
68 Frank Bennett, “Magical Record of Frater Progradior in a Retirement at Cefalue (sic) Sicily,” Yorke Collection. An edition of this diary, with supplemental material and an introduction by Crowley scholar Keith Richmond, was published as Frank Bennett, The Magical Record of Frater Progradior (London: Neptune Press, 2004).
69 Nina Hamnett, Laughing Torso. (London: Constable & Co., 1932), 177.
70 Russell, Znuz is Znees, 192.
71 Passenger and crew list, RMS Marama, 28 Jan 1922.
72 Cefalùsions, GARL.
73 Liber Nike, 14 Feb 1922, Old A4, Yorke Collection.
74 Liber Nike, op cit.
75 Liber Nike Part II, Old A4, Yorke Collection.
76 Liber Nike Part III, Old A5, Yorke Collection.
77 AC to Norman Mudd, 18 Mar 1924, Yorke Collection.
78 For a recent biography, see Martha S. Vogeler, Austin Harrison and the English Review (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008).
79 Crowley’s 1922 contributions to the English Review from this period are: A New York Specialist, “The Great Drug Delusion,” 163 (Jun): 571–6; A London Physician, “The Drug Panic,” 164 (Jul): 65–70; A Gentile, “The Jewish Problem Re-Stated,” 164 (Jul): 28–37; Prometheus, “Percy Bysshe Shelley,” 164 (Jul): 16–21; A Past Grand Master, “The Crisis in Freemasonry,” 165 (Aug): 127–34; Michael Fairfax, “Moon-Wane,” 167 (Oct): 283–5; Michael Fairfax, “The Rock,” 167 (Oct): 285–6; and Michael Fairfax, “To a New-Born Child,” 167 (Oct): 287.
80 Crowley, “The Drug Panic,” 65–6.
81 AC to Gerald Yorke, 1 Feb 1932, Yorke Collection.
82 Crowley, “Great Drug Delusion,” 573.
83 Ibid., 576.
84 AL ii..22
85 115 in J. D. Beresford, “Fate: Confessions of an Author, Part IV,” Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, Jan 1926, 76(393): 37, 114–6.
86 J. D. Beresford, “A New Form of Matter,” Harper’s, May 1919. J. D. Beresford, “More New Facts in Psychical Research,” Harper’s, Mar 1922.
87 Marginalia from Crowley’s personal copy of Diary of a Drug Fiend, Yorke Collection.
88 Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend, 246.
89 “Jane Burr” was the pen-name of Rosalind Mae Guggenheim Winslow, an American writer on women’s rights, marriage, birth control and changing sexual attitudes. She was part of the Greenwich Village scene during the 1910s and 1920s. By this time, she had written City Dust (1917), The Glorious Hope (1918), I Build My House (1918), and The Passionate Spectator (1921).
Chapter Fifteen • Adonis
1 Marriage record, Q3 1922, GRO, Oxford, Oxfordshire, 3a: 2930.
2 See “More Lovedays in India,” http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/LOVEDAY/2003-03/1047503830 (accessed Feb 9 2009) and British army W.W.I service record, regimental number 13732. Greene describes George Loveday as a “very decent dependable fellow,” a retired naval petty officer who ran messages for Secretary of the Admiralty Sir Graham Greene [Raymond Greene, Moments of Being: The Random Recollections of Raymond Greene (London: Heinemann, 1974), 20]. Amelia Ann Lewendon was born on January 21, 1859, in Newington, Surrey; baptised August 26, 1860, in Bermondsley; and married October 1, 1882, at St. Saviour, Middlesex. (Birth record, GRO, Newington, Surrey, 1d: 197. Baptism record, GRO, Saint Paul, Bermondsley, Register of Baptisms, P71/PAU. Marriage record, 1 Oct 1882, GRO Saint Saviour, Denmark Park, Middlesex, Southwark, P73/SAV.)
3 British army WWI service record. Amelia A. Loveday, UK incoming passenger list, Caledonia, 2 Apr 1925.
4 British army WWI service record.
5 Greene, Moments of Being, 19–20. Anthony Powell, To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell (London: Heinemann, 1976), 161. Andrew Jones, private communication, 23 Apr 2008, and 24 Apr 2008.
6 W. B. Seabrook, “The Angel-Child Who ‘Saw Hell’ and Came Back: Heartfelt Confessions of the London Art Model Who Turned Apache and Took Drugs, and How a Genuine Vision Redeemed Her at the Brink,” Salt Lake City Tribune, 19 Aug 1928, 3. Greene, Moments of Being, 19.
7 Raoul Loveday, “A Song of Town,” Oxford Poetry 1922, 26.
8 Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning (Chatham, Kent: W.J. Mackay & Co., 1964), 179. See also Christine Berberich, The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007): “One of the places where young men could openly live out their homoerotic fantasies was the Hypocrites Club which achieved notoriety for its rowdy, drunken revels.” (117).
In Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), D. J. Taylor quotes an early impression of the Hypocrites Club by the Oxford undergraduate magazine Isis: “The Hypocrites are perhaps the most entertaining people in the University. They express their souls in terms of shirts and gray flannel trousers and find outlet for their artistic ability on the walls of their clubrooms. To talk to they are rather alarming. They have succeeded in picking up the whole series of intellectual catch-phrases with which they proceed to dazzle their friends and frighten their acquaintances: and they are the only people I have ever met who have reduced rudeness to a fine art” (p. 30). However, according to Lebedoff, “The discussions of philosophy that had formerly made up the principal entertainment were supplanted by drunken and licentious revels” when Waugh and his friends joined and transformed the club [David Lebedoff, The Same Man: George Orwell and Eveyln Waugh in Love and War (New York: Random House, 2008), 29].
9 As Waugh noted upon his election to this post, “My predecessor in the office, Loveday, had left the university suddenly to study black magic.” Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, a Novel (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), 180.
10 Greene, Moments of Being, 20. Seabrook, “The Angel-Child Who ‘Saw Hell.’ ” Oxford University, Oxford University Calendar 1922, 469.
11 Seabrook, “The Angel-Child Who ‘Saw Hell.’ ”
12 AC to Norman Mudd, 16 Mar 1923, Old D1, Yorke Collection.
13 In Seabrook, “The Angel-Child Who ‘Saw Hell,’ she gives her real name as Marlow Golding. Her marriage certificates, however, give her name as “Betty M. Golding.”
14 Seabrook, “The Angel-Child Who ‘Saw Hell.’ ” Epstein’s sculpture of Betty May sold at Sotheby’s on May 20, 2009.
15 According to U.K. marriage records, Betty M. Golding married Miles L. Atkinson at St. Marylebone in summer, 1914; George D. K. Waldron at St. Martin during autumn, 1916; and Frederick C. Loveday at Oxford in 1922. GRO, Q3 1914, St. Marylebone, London, 1a: 1623; Q4 1916, St. Martin, London, 1a: 1268; Q3 1922, Oxford, Oxfordshire, 3a: 2930.
16 Marie Attree to John Symonds, 12 Jan 1952, New 96, Yorke Collection.
17 Seabrook, “The Angel-Child Who ‘Saw Hell.’ ”
18 Betty May, Tiger-Woman: My Story (London: Duckworth, 1929).
19 Stephensen, Legend of Aleister Crowley, 146–7.
20 Times Literary Supplement 1087: 749 (16 Nov 1922); New York Times Book Review 29 Jul 1923, 18. Additional review clippings may be found in New 87, Yorke Collection, and Stephensen, Legend of Aleister Crowley, 133 et seq.
21 Sunday Express, 26 Nov 1922, 1,7.
22 Her entry 7 Aug 1921 reads, “Leah—apparently—if the Beast’s word is worth anything, had sexual union with the goat before he was killed.” Butts papers, Yale.
23 Both John Symonds and Francis King present Butt’s account as accurate, even though it is at variance with Crowley’s diary as quoted above. Yorke maintained the story was untrue, and such was the view of biographer Susan Roberts (see Magical Link Vol 1 No. 8) and myself. While the ritual was certainly attempted, it did not unfold in the way that Butts describes.
24 Frank Vernon, “Books We’d Like to Burn,” John Bull 28 Apr 1923, 18.
25 “Life in Wild Parts of Earth Pursued by British Writer,” Fresno Bee, 14 Jul 1923, 2C.
26 A. Kemplen to AC, 2 Apr 1924, pasted into Crowley’s 1924, diary. In its brief history, Éditions Kemplen produced about a dozen titles, all between 1923 and 1924.
27 Symonds, Shadow Realm, 319.
28 Raoul Loveday to his parents, undated, New 92, Yorke Collection.
29 Betty May to Mr. and Mrs. Loveday, undated, New 92, Yorke Collection.
30 Raoul’s description of the Abbey of Thelema, New 92, Yorke Collection.
31 Seabrook, “The Angel-Child Who ‘Saw Hell.’ ”
32 Raoul Loveday to his parents, 11 Feb 1923, New 92, Yorke Collection.
33 “Foreign Office, January 1, 1912,” London Gazette, 19 Jan 1912, 444. Great Britain Foreign Office, The Foreign Office List and Diplomatic and Consular Year Book (London, 1925), 483. Death record, GRO, Paddington, London, 1
a: 27.
34 Spence, Secret Agent 666, 184.
35 Starr, “Aleister Crowley: Freemason!”
36 Reginald Gambier McBean (sic), A Complete History of the Ancient and Primitive Rite from Its Establishment down to the Present Time, together with Translations of Original Manuscripts and Illustrated, http://www.scribd.com/doc/7120414/McBean-Official-History-of-the-Ancient-and-Primitive-Rite (accessed Jan 3 2010), 40. Italy’s political situation forced the Rite to go dormant again in 1925.
37 The Equinox 1913 1(10): 76–9.
38 Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, act 1, scene 1, line 112.
39 Betty May to AC, Feb 1923, Old EE1, Yorke Collection.
40 Seabrook, “The Angel-Child Who ‘Saw Hell.’ ”
41 Crowley conceded that a wild cat had caused some damage at the Abbey, but stressed that he certainly never sacrificed it. Neither was he a hater of cats, for Yorke states that, in later years, Crowley kept one as a pet. In a letter to Roger Staples dated September 25, 1963, Yorke wrote, “Symonds is wholly incorrect about the death of Loveday and the sacrificed cat at Cefalù. He would follow the newspaper accounts of the day which were mostly fabrication by Betty May.” However, on November 3, 1963, Yorke conceded to Staples (private collection), “The cat was indeed sacrificed. It had been making a nuisance of itself by keeping the Cefalù inhabitants awake at nights. So AC used it for a blood sacrifice—a thing he rarely did. I only know of it, one goat, two pigeons and a few sparrows … and once a toad ritually crucified. They chloroformed it, but did not use quite enough chloroform. Loveday made a bosh of cutting its throat and it crawled out of the consecrated circle. Technically this broke the circle and let undesirable elements in. But it had nothing to do with Raoul’s death, which was due to typhoid or dysentery.”
42 John Bull, 14 Apr 1923 and 17 Mar 1923.
43 John Bull, 28 Apr 1923.
44 UK incoming passenger list, Balmoral Castle, 13 Dec 1920.
45 New York passenger list, Imperator, 18 Jan 1921.
46 UK incoming passenger list, Carmania, 7 Feb 1921.
47 Norman Mudd to Leo Marquard, 10–12 Feb 1921, BC 587, Leo Marquard Papers, University of Cape Town.
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