by Colin Wilson
This lifelong craving to shock and outrage the respectable stemmed from the hidebound pietism of Crowley's family background. His mother and father were fanatical members of the sect of Plymouth Brethren, and the cornerstone of their religious convictions was a belief in hellfire. They believed that every word of the Bible was divinely inspired, and that the Day of Judgement would arrive in the fairly near future, destroying everyone but members of their own sect. Crowley later described his mother as ‘a brainless bigot of the most narrow, logical and inhuman type’. The same seems to have applied to his father, Edward Crowley, except that he possessed a high degree of dominance and vitality, so that his son hero-worshipped him. Crowley's own opinion about his early years can be gathered from the title of the preface to his book The World's Tragedy: ‘A Boyhood in Hell’.
The elder Crowley was a ‘gentleman of leisure’, having inherited a flourishing brewing business from his own father, also named Edward; the latter had set up a series of ‘alehouses’ for the sale of his own beer, as well as ham and cheese sandwiches, and they became immensely popular with city clerks in the 1850s. The family wealth is almost as important as the family bigotry in explaining Crowley's own rebellious and autocratic temperament. In spite of the pietism of his background he was thoroughly spoilt. ‘I was taught to expect every possible luxury. Nothing was too good for me…When I came into my fortune [at twenty-one], I was utterly unprepared to use it with the most ordinary prudence, and all the inherent vices of my training had a perfect field day for their development.’ The result, of course, was that he spent most of his later life in a poverty that he furiously resented; it accounts for the note of self-pity that runs through the nine hundred pages of his autobiography.
Edward Alexander Crowley—who later coined the name Aleister—was born on 12 October 1875, in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. He comments typically: ‘It has been remarked a strange coincidence that one small county should have given England her two greatest poets—for one must not forget Shakespeare.’ And just in case the reader has never heard of Shakespeare, he adds his dates (1550–1616) in brackets, getting his birth date wrong for good measure.
When Crowley was six, the family moved from Leamington to Redhill, in Surrey. His comments about this period suggest that he was something of a snob and something of a bully. ‘Aristocratic feelings were extremely strong’, and he and his playmates, who played games in which they were aristocrats, used to lie in wait for what they called ‘cads’—children from the local school—and bombard them with peas and arrows. He was so convinced of his privileged position as one of the ‘masters’ that he one day charged a navvy working in a pit and knocked him down, then bolted home. On another occasion he attacked an errand boy with an Alpenstock, and was alarmed when the boy pursued him back home, ‘when, of course, the elders intervened’.
Crowley's father was also something of a bully. When a lady called at the house for a subscription in aid of soldiers, ‘he browbeat and bullied her into tears’. But he seems to have had a redeeming sense of humour. He told one of his congregations that he would prefer to preach to drunkards rather than teetotalers, because abstainers might fail to recognize their need for Jesus. When someone pointed out that this opinion might have some connection with the fact that his money came from beer, he replied that he had been an abstainer for nineteen years, during which time he had shares in a brewery; now he drank alcohol, but his money was invested in a waterworks.
Crowley's father died when the boy was eleven. It was partly his own fault; cancer of the tongue was diagnosed, but for religious reasons, Crowley senior decided to treat the illness with some quack-form of electro-therapy. Away at boarding school, Crowley dreamed that his father had died, and later recalled some peculiar quality in the dream that made him take it seriously; years later, he had a similar dream on the death of his mother. It seems clear that, in spite of his aggressive ‘normality’, Crowley was basically psychic. Crowley's reaction to his father's death was to cease to be a model schoolboy, and to begin to misbehave at school.
His mother moved to London, to be near her brother, Tom Bond Bishop, ‘a prominent figure in religious and philanthropic circles’. He seems to have been much the same kind of ‘brainless bigot’ as Crowley's mother, and inspired in the eleven year old boy a paroxysm of loathing which does much to explain his later attitude towards Christians and Christianity. He devotes a page to castigating him in the autobiography, a passage that tells us as much about Crowley's ability to hold grudges as about his uncle's stupidity. ‘Perfidious and hypocritical…he was unctuous as Uriah Heep, and for the rest possessed the vices of Joseph Surface and Tartuffe; yet, being without the human weakness which make them possible, he was a more virtuous, and therefore a more odious villain.’ What really enraged Crowley was that this uncle was a ‘right man’: ‘He was inaccessible to doubt; he knew he was right on every point.’ Crowley later asked him what a climber should do if his companion should fall, and the only way of saving his own life was to cut the rope. His uncle replied: ‘God would never allow a man to be placed in such a position.’
Uncle Tom started the process of turning Crowley into a rebel. A taste of injustice at school acted as a further catalyst. The school—in Cambridge—was run by Plymouth Brethren, and the headmaster encouraged tale-bearing. Some fellow pupil ‘with insane taint’ (Crowley always foams at the mouth when speaking of those who have done him down) told the headmaster that he had visited Crowley at home and found him drunk at the bottom of the stairs. Neither Crowley nor his mother was asked about this; the headmaster merely issued orders that Crowley was to be ‘sent to Coventry’—that no master or boy should speak to him. For a term and a half he became totally solitary, with no idea of what he had done. Finally his health broke down and he had to be removed. Crowley's account of the school—of ‘trials’ of wrongdoers that began with long prayers, and of pupils being half-flogged to death—make it clear why he became such a good hater of evangelical Christians.
His health was so poor that it was predicted that he would never reach the age of twenty-one; so a doctor recommended a course of travelling around the country with a tutor. Crowley learned to climb mountains and fish for trout. The only drawback was that most of the tutors were chosen by Uncle Tom, and were of the ‘sawny [Scottish], anaemic, priggish type.’ ‘Of course, I considered it my duty to outwit them in every possible way and hunt up some kind of sin.’ One of them, the Rev. Fothergill, even tried to drown him after Crowley had thrown him out of a boat. And it seems to have been immediately after this that Crowley succeeded in hunting up his favourite kind of sin. ‘That night the gods still further favoured me, for a village girl named Belle McKay found herself with nothing better to do than to roam with me amid the heather. We returned together quite openly and Fothergill threw up the sponge. He took me back to London the next morning. Breaking the journey at Carlisle, I repeated my victory with a buxom chambermaid.’
Crowley's next tutor, the brother of the Dean of Westminster, did his best to seduce him. Crowley resisted—not, he admits, out of lack of inclination, but because he thought it was a trap to betray him to his family. The tutor later apologised to Crowley, explaining that he had been led into evil ways by his elder brother, a missionary. Crowley loves to tell this kind of story—the reader can almost hear him chortling and rubbing his hands. Like de Sade, he would love to believe that every clergyman is a secret pervert.
Subsequently, Uncle Tom made one of his rare mistakes with respect to tutors, and appointed a Bible salesman named Archibald Douglas who proved to be quite normally human, and who introduced Crowley to drinking, smoking, racing, billiards, cards and women. ‘The nightmare world of Christianity vanished at the dawn. I fell in with a girl of the theatre in the first ten days at Torquay, and at that touch of human love the detestable mysteries of sex were transformed into joy and beauty. The obsession of sin fell from my shoulders…I found that the world was, after all, full of delightful damned souls…’ As s
oon as Uncle Tom found out he got rid of Archibald Douglas, but it was too late.
Crowley's next achievement was to seduce the parlourmaid on his mother's bed. He explains that the girl ‘took it into her head to better herself by getting a stranglehold on the young master’. On Sunday morning he made an excuse to stay away from the prayer meeting, ‘got the girl into my mother's bedroom and made my magical affirmation’. For some reason, the girl decided to tell on him. Confronted by Uncle Tom, Crowley denied everything, and hit upon an ingenious method of allaying his uncle's suspicions. Pressed to reveal where he had been when the girl alleged they were together, Crowley pretended to be nervous and worried, then finally confessed that he had been buying tobacco. He had already taken the precaution of getting the tobacconist to back up his story. Crowley shed tears and pleaded that he had been led astray by bad companions, and felt doubly triumphant at having got the better of both his uncle and the parlourmaid.
In his book on Crowley, Israel Regardie argues that Crowley had incestuous feelings towards his mother, and that the consummation on her bed proves that he wanted to violate her. This seems to be an unnecessarily Freudian interpretation of Crowley's perfectly straightforward sexual obsession. Sex itself became for him another way of cocking a snook at authority, and if he could combine it with an act of defiance, the pleasure became ten times as great. The key to understanding Crowley is the same as the key to understanding the Marquis de Sade. Both wasted an immense amount of energy screaming defiance at the authority they resented so much, and lacked the insight to see that they were shaking their fists at an abstraction.
The problem with this kind of anti-authoritarianism is that it has the effect of tainting sex with violence and vice versa. The two become associated as gestures of revolt, and it is difficult thereafter to separate them. ‘My sexual life was very intense. My relations with women were entirely satisfactory. They gave me the maximum of bodily enjoyment and at the same time symbolized my theological notions of sin. Love was a challenge to Christianity. It was a degradation and a damnation…’ But he still insists that, sexually speaking, he is perfectly normal, quite free of ‘morbid sexual symptoms’, which he regards as a symptom of self-division. But, having explained his theory at some length (‘The complete man, harmonized, flows freely towards his natural goal’), he then goes on to relate how, at the age of fourteen, he decided to kill a cat to see whether it really had nine lives. ‘I therefore caught a cat, and having administered a large dose of arsenic, I chloroformed it, hanged it above the gas jet, stabbed it, cut its throat, smashed its skull and, when it had been pretty thoroughly burnt, drowned it and threw it out of the window that the fall might remove its ninth life…I remember that all the time I was genuinely sorry for the animal; I simply forced myself to carry out the experiment in the interest of pure science.’ But it is obviously unlikely that even the stupidest fourteen year old could really believe that it is impossible to kill a cat except with nine different forms of violence applied simultaneously; the incident merely illustrates a form of moral imbecility to which Crowley had become prone through sheer hatred of authority.
The anti-authoritarianism developed further when, at the age of sixteen, he was sent to Malvern public school, which he found as ‘brutal and imbecile’ as the previous one at Cambridge. ‘The prefects were hulking louts, shirking both work and play, and concentrating on obscenity and petty tyranny.’ And when one of them sought the housemaster's permission to flog Crowley for ‘some minor breach of discipline’, he found Crowley already there, pouring out his own accusations. ‘I got my licking’, Crowley reports gleefully, ‘but there was a fine series of expulsions to balance it.’ Then, aware that what he has just admitted places him in a thoroughly bad light, he hastens to add: ‘Of course, my action was technically indefensible; but after all, I had held my tongue uncomplainingly for months and it was only when they appealed to the housemaster to fight their battles that I appealed to him to fight mine.’ Crowley is an expert at self-justification; but it takes very little penetration to see through this one—that when he says ‘technically indefensible’ he means ‘morally indefensible’, but deliberately chooses the less accurate word, and that when he says ‘they’ appealed to the housemaster he is trying to gloss over the fact that only one prefect was concerned, and that he chose to inform on them all.
The orgy of tale-telling presumably made him unpopular, and this may have been why he persuaded his mother to take him away from Malvern, which he did with characteristic duplicity. ‘I…drew such a picture of the abominations which went on, though I knew nothing about them or even what they were, that my mother refused to let me go back. I told her…that if Mr Huntingdon [the housemaster] knew what was going on in the house, it would break his heart.’ She decided to send him to another public school, Tonbridge, and he records complacently: ‘I had developed a kind of natural aristocracy. People were already beginning to be afraid of me.’
Yet here we encounter the essence of the strange paradox that was Aleister Crowley. In page after page of the Confessions he emerges as a liar, a sneak, a bully and a hypocrite; we can understand what Regardie meant when he spoke of ‘the nasty, petty, vicious louse that occasionally he was on the level of practical human relationships.’ Yet a few pages later, dealing with the suggestion that Crowley was a schizophrene (he means a psychopath), Regardie says: ‘I do not believe that a schizophrene is capable of the tremendous self-discipline and mental training that Crowley embarked upon.’ It would be inaccurate to characterize Crowley as a schizophrene (employing the word in its usual incorrect sense of split-personality) because the split in Crowley was not in the area of the personality. Personality is the aspect of us that copes with the world around us. But the aspect that becomes absorbed in ideas or in work or in beauty is a kind of impersonality. Impersonality is what Socrates and Michelangelo and Beethoven and Einstein have in common. As a personality, Crowley was inclined to take moral shortcuts; yet another aspect of him could become totally absorbed in work and self-discipline. He loved to be alone, and it is characteristic that his original title for his Confessions was The Spirit of Solitude (which he borrowed from Shelley). He writes:
The problem of life was not how to satanise, as Huysmans would have called it; it was simply to escape from oppressors and to enjoy the world without any interference of spiritual life of any sort. My happiest moments were when I was alone on the mountains; but there is no evidence that this pleasure in any way derived from mysticism. The beauty of form and colour, the physical exhilaration of exercise, and the mental stimulation of finding one's way in difficult country, formed the sole elements of my rapture.
[And he adds an interesting piece of self-revelation:]
So far as I indulged in daydreams, they were exclusively of a normal sexual type. There was no need to create phantasms of a perverse or unrealizable satisfaction. It is important to emphasise this point, because I have always appeared to my contemporaries as a very extraordinary individual obsessed by fantastic passions. But such were not in any way natural to me. The moment the pressure was relieved every touch of the abnormal was shed off instantly. The impulse to write poetry disappeared almost completely at such periods…
It is an interesting thought that a Crowley who had been brought up in a non-repressive atmosphere might never have experienced the slightest desire to write poetry, perform ritual magic, or acquire himself the reputation of ‘the wickedest man in the world.’ On the other hand, he might well have made his mark as an explorer, a scholar or a scientist. As it was, the oversexed schoolboy continued his single-minded pursuit of sin and depravity, and was forced to leave Tonbridge when he caught gonorrhoea from a Glasgow prostitute. His mother felt that he again required the supervision of a Plymouth Brother, and sent him to lodge with one at Eastbourne. He began to attend Eastbourne College and, unexpectedly, discovered an enthusiasm for science. This event—in some ways one of the most important of his life—is dismissed in the Confessions in two
sentences: ‘During the day I worked at Eastbourne College in the chemical laboratory under Professor Hughes, and was privileged to assist the great man in several researches which go to prove that no two substances can combine in the absence of a third. It seems strange that I should have seen the bearings of this upon philosophy.’ References to science and mathematics can be found scattered throughout his work, emphasising that they remained lifelong interests. The science writer J.W.N. Sullivan is one of the dedicatees of the Confessions, and it is typical that although he seduced Sullivan's wife, Crowley always placed a high value on his friendship.
It was also during the Eastbourne period that Crowley taught himself to play chess and soon discovered that he was the best player in the town. The chess-playing mentality requires the same combination of intuition and logic as the scientist and mathematician; on the other hand, few of the great chess masters have shown remarkable artistic ability. Crowley's powers as a chess player, as well as his natural ability to learn languages, reveal that his cast of mind was objective and scientific rather than artistic. Under different circumstances, he would have made an excellent engineer or city planner.