by Colin Wilson
Nevertheless, the twenty-two-year-old Crowley was a thoroughly mixed-up young man, a poor little rich boy, a snob who was not quite certain of his own social position, an incorrigible exhibitionist who was unsure of his own identity, a bully with a craving to be loved, a diabolist with a paradoxical desire to be a saint. The autobiography, written in his fifties, still reveals a festering ego, brooding on the humiliations of more than thirty years ago, and descending to a silly kind of abuse that suggests that his mental age is still that of an adolescent:
[A.E. Waite] is not only the most ponderously platitudinous and priggishly prosaic of pretentiously pompous pork butchers of the language, but the most voluminously voluble. I cannot dig over the dreary deserts of his drivel in search of the passage which made me write to him…
He devotes a full page to reviling the English Alpine Club, insisting that it was ‘bitterly opposed to mountaineering—its members were incompetent, insanely jealous of their vested interest and unthinkably unsportsmanlike.’ The reason for this abuse, it emerges, is that the Club had turned down his own admission for membership. Why? Because ‘the record of climbs I put in for admission was much too good.’ And we have to read between the lines, and call upon our knowledge of Crowley's character, to realise that they must have found him intolerably cocky and boastful. If Crowley had been alive half a century earlier, we might suspect that he was the model for Flashman in Tom Brown's Schooldays.
But the boastful exhibitionist also had a genuine desire to find some cause to which he could devote his life. Literature seemed to be the obvious choice—since his poetry flowed freely and naturally—but even here he could not make up his mind where the poet ended and the poseur began. John Symonds began the original edition of The Great Beast with this quotation from Crowley's first published poem Aceldama, which is an apt illustration of the problem:
It was a windy night, that memorable seventh night of December, when this philosophy was born in me. How the grave old professor wondered at my ravings! I had called at his house, for he was a valued friend of mine, and I felt strange thoughts and emotions shake within me. Ah! how I raved! I called on him to trample me, he would not. We passed together into the stormy night I was on horseback, how I galloped round him in my phrensy, till he became the prey of real physical fear! How I shrieked out I know not what strange words! And the poor good old man tried all he could to calm me; he thought I was mad! The fool! I was in the death struggle with self; God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours. God conquered—now I have only one doubt left—which of the twain was God?
Even the title of the poem (Aceldama was the field bought with Judas's thirty pieces of silver) brings to mind W.S. Gilbert's parody of Swinburne from Patience:
Oh! to be wafted away
From this black Aceldama of sorrow,
Where the earth of a dusty today
Is the dust of an earthy tomorrow!
In the Confessions Crowley writes: ‘But in Aceldama…I attained, at a bound, the summit of Parnassus. In a sense, I have never written anything better.’ But when, in 1910, he issued a selection of his poems ‘in response to a widely-spread lack of interest in my writings…’ he took care not to include anything from Aceldama. It is, in fact, a typical Crowleyan rhapsody to sin, whoredom and degradation.
Aceldama was the first of a series of poems and dramas that he printed at his own expense; in 1898 alone he published, in addition to Aceldama: The Tale of Archais, Songs of the Spirit, The Poem, Jephthah, Jezebel and White Stains. The last is a collection of obscene poems which professes to be the literary remains of a ‘neuropath of the Second Empire.’ In the Confessions he claims, typically, that the book proves his’ essential spirituality.. and preternatural innocence.’ He explains that he had been reading Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, and disagreed that sexual perversions are the result of disease. They are, ays Crowley, ‘merely magical affirmations of perfectly intelligible points of view’. Crowley thought that since his pervert ended in madness and murder, he had written a highly moral book that was suitable for Sunday schools.
But poetry can be an unsatisfactory means of expression, particularly when no one buys it or reads it. Crowley was still obsessed with thoughts of magic. At Wastdale Head, he had ‘appealed with the whole force of my will to the adepts of the Hidden Church to prepare me as a postulant for that august company. As will be seen later, acts of will, performed by the proper person, never fall to the ground…’ This seemed to have no immediate effect. But he continued to read ‘occult’ texts in a desultory kind of way, struggling through Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah Unveiled, translated by S.L. MacGregor Mathers, and through various works on alchemy. In Zermatt in 1898, he found himself among a group of Englishmen in a beer hall, and began to ‘lay down the law on alchemy.’ ‘I trust I impressed the group of men with my vast learning.’ But one of the party proved to be a real alchemist—a chemist named Julian L. Baker. He walked back with Crowley to his hotel, and revealed that he himself had succeeded in ‘fixing’ mercury—turning the liquid into a solid. Crowley was immediately convinced that this was the Master for whom he had sent out his SOS signal the previous Easter at Wastdale. But the next day, Baker had left the hotel. Frantically, Crowley telegraphed all over the valley, and finally caught up with Baker ten miles below Zermatt. ‘I told him of my search for the Secret Sanctuary of the Saints and convinced him of my desperate earnestness. He hinted that he knew of an Assembly which might be that for which I was looking.’
Back in London, Baker met Crowley, and introduced him to a man whom he described as ‘much more of a Magician than I am.’ This man proved to be George Cecil Jones, an analytical chemist who looked like Jesus Christ, and who had a fiery and unstable temper. It was Jones who finally told Crowley about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded ten years earlier, and introduced him to MacGregor Mathers. Crowley paid his ten shillings membership fee, and on November 18, 1898, attended the Mark Masons’ Hall in Great Queen Street and was given the magical name Perdurabo (I will endure), then he went through the solemn, if rather absurd, magical ceremony that made him a member of the Golden Dawn. His SOS had been answered.
Three
Raising Hell
THE CHIEF of the Golden Dawn, Samuel Liddell Mathers, was quite as extraordinary a character as Crowley himself. The poet Yeats, who met Mathers in the British Museum Reading Room around the beginning of the 1890s, noticed:
…a man of thirty-six or thirty-seven, in a brown velveteen coat, with a gaunt resolute face and an athletic body, who seemed…to be a figure of romance…I believe that his mind in those early days did not belie his face and body—though in later years it became unhinged as Don Quixote's was unhinged—for he kept a proud head amid great poverty. One that boxed with him nightly has told me that for many weeks he could knock him down, though Mathers was the stronger man, and only knew long after that during those weeks Mathers starved.
It would be possible for a hostile biographer to see Mathers as almost a figure of fun. Born in Hackney, East London, in 1854, Mathers was the son of a clerk, and became a clerk himself when he left school. He joined the Hampshire Infantry Volunteers in his twenties, and there is a photograph of him in lieutenant's uniform. But he does not figure in the regiment's list of officers, so we must assume that he was a private or, at most, an NCO. The officer's rank seems to be a sign of his extremely active fantasy life, like the titles ‘MacGregor of Glenstrae’ and ‘Count of Glenstrae’ that he later awarded himself. At the age of twenty-three he became a Mason; it was through the Masons that he met the London coroner Dr Wynn Westcott, and Dr William Woodman, who introduced him to the English branch of the Rosicrucians. Mathers became their protegé, and they commissioned him to translate The Kabbalah Unveiled. Then the famous ‘cypher manuscripts’ turned up—according to the most popular version, on a second-hand bookstall in the Farringdon Road—and the Golden Dawn was founded. In the previous year, 1887, Mathers had met a beautiful Fren
ch art student in the British Museum, Moina Bergson, sister of the philosopher, and eventually persuaded her to marry him and share his poverty. She had strong psychic gifts, and Mathers used her as a ‘seeress’. By now, Mathers was calling himself ‘MacGregor’ and allowing it to be understood that he was the chief of the clan. He liked to be photographed in highland regalia.
It sounds then, as if he was an incorrigible fantasist, a dreamer who found the dull reality of his life as Samuel Mathers, underpaid clerk, impossible to bear, and who promoted himself to the rank which he felt to be more in accord with his nobility of spirit. But this would undoubtedly be a mistake. Whatever his pretensions, his ‘magical powers’ were real enough. Mathers handed Yeats various ‘tattwa symbols’ (yellow squares, blue discs, red triangles, etc), and when Yeats pressed them against his forehead, he began to see images that he could not control: a desert, with a black giant rising up among ancient ruins. Mathers told him he had seen a being of the order of the salamanders—fire elementals—because he had used the fire symbol. Yeats was at first inclined to think that these odd tricks were the result of imagination or telepathy, until constant experience convinced him that the symbols actually conjured up the appropriate image, and that when he accidentally gave someone the wrong symbol, it still conjured up the correct image. The same symbol—a star—evoked in one subject a vision of a rough stone house with the skull of a horse in it, and in another, a rough stone house with a golden skeleton it it. The similarity was too great to be accidental. At another session with Mathers and his wife, all three participated in lengthy hallucinations, Yeats seeing in brief flashes what Mrs Mathers was describing, and often seeing things before she described them. Even if these visions were merely form of imagination, it still seems obvious that some peculiar power was at work. So whether or not we can accept that these phenomena were ‘magical’ or merely psychological, there can be no doubt that Mathers had stumbled on some interesting secrets, and that he was not a fraud in the ordinary sense of the word.
What seems altogether more dubious is his apparently sincere belief that he was in touch with ‘Secret Masters.’ In 1892, Mathers became convinced that he had contacted these Masters, and that this confirmed his position as head of the Golden Dawn. In a manifesto issued four years later, Mathers declared that the Secret Chiefs were human and living on earth, but possessed of terrible superhuman powers. He claimed that contact with these chiefs was a frightening experience:
I can only compare it to the continued effect of that usually experienced momentarily by any person close to whom a flash of lightning passes during a violent storm; coupled with a difficulty in respiration similar to the half-strangling effect produced by ether.
We are naturally inclined to dismiss this kind of thing as pure imagination, that is, a deliberate lie. But before doing so, it is important to bear in mind that this ‘occult tradition’ of secret masters is not a modern invention, dating from Madame Blavatsky. It is genuinely a part of an ancient tradition, and it can be found in many religions of the world. The composer Cyril Scott expressed its essence when he wrote in An Outline of Modern Occultism (1935):
Firstly, the occultist holds that Man is in process of evolving from comparative imperfection to much higher states of physical and spiritual evolution. Secondly, that the evolutionary process in all its phases is directed by a Great Hierarchy of Intelligences who have themselves reached these higher states.
One of the best modern expositions of this notion is to be found in The People of the Secret by Edward Campbell (writing under the pseudonym Ernest Scott), who starts from the notion of a ‘Hidden Directorate’, referred to in Sufic tradition; Campbell identifies this directorate with a concept to be found in The Dramatic Universe by J.G. Bennett, a follower of Gurdjieff: of ‘a class of cosmic essences called Demiurges that is responsible for maintaining the universal order.’ The People of the Secret is an interpretation of western history in terms of this notion: of deliberate intervention in human history by these ‘Demiurgic Intelligences’. He sees the concept of these Intelligences as part of an occult tradition that can be traced from the Sufis, which entered Europe through the Arab invasion of Spain, and which also finds expression in the Tarot, the Kabbalah and alchemy.
It should be mentioned at this point that the Hebrew ‘magical’ system known as the Kabbalah is the foundation stone of western occultism. Its basic notion is that there are ten levels of reality, of which the one on which we live—the earthly plane—is the lowest. A kind of magical tree, the tree of life, connects these planes, rather like the beanstalk in the fairy tale. But they must also be seen as inner worlds, or planes of consciousness, which man can explore if he has enough mental discipline.
This ‘exploration’ has much in common with a technique devised by Carl Jung, which he called ‘active imagination.’ At a period of mental crisis before the First World War, Jung discovered that he could enter into states which might be described as waking dreams, and in these states, he held conversations with beings he was convinced were real, that is, who existed independently of his own mind. Jung's belief that there are realms of the mind that are common to us all—like some inner country—is closely related to the ideas of the Kabbalists. It may also be significant that Jung came to feel that alchemical texts offer a kind of symbolic guide to these inner realms.
It is possible to see then, that although Mathers sounds like a self-deceiving crank, he was actually working within a well-established tradition, and was convinced that he had simply been fortunate enough (with the help of the Secret Chiefs) to gain access to an ancient knowledge system virtually forgotten by western man. He believed that he had been influenced and guided by the Chiefs from an early point in his life.
So we may regard Mathers as an extremely fascinating psychological case, a romantic dreamer who wove around himself an extraordinarily complete web of self-delusion. Or we may regard him as a remarkable ‘outsider’, like so many of the great poets and artists of the nineteenth century, who chose to walk his own lonely path, sustained by a certainty that came from ‘inner vision.’ This is the way that Crowley saw him when he met him in 1898. At the time of the meeting, Mathers had been living in Paris for the past six years. He was partly supported by another Golden Dawn member, Annie Horniman—the tea heiress—but eventually quarrelled with her, and suspended her membership. So life in Paris was as poverty-stricken as in London. And it was hard to maintain his authority as head of the Golden Dawn from Paris. (Mathers was the sort of person to whom maintaining his authority was of major importance.) So when Crowley, with his capacity for hero-worship and his craving for father-figures, presented himself in Paris, Mathers immediately accepted him as a friend and ally. They had much in common: both were egoists; both were proud and dictatorial; both were inclined to make a fetish of physical fitness and athleticism; both were snobs, and liked to fantasize about belonging to the aristocracy. When Crowley turned on his Libran charm, he was hard to resist. Mathers was completely won over.
Other members of the Golden Dawn were less enthusiastic. To the romantic Yeats, Crowley must have seemed insufferably bouncy and conceited. Crowley thought Yeat's work ‘lacked virility.’ When he called on Yeats, he took with him the proofs of his play Jephthah, of which the following is a typical extract:
Oh the time of dule and teen!
Oh the dove the hawk has snared!
Would to God we had not been,
We, who see our maiden queen,
Love has slain whom hate has spared.
Yeats probably thought it was derivative rubbish, but was too polite to say so. ‘He forced himself to utter a few polite conventionalities.’ But Crowley felt he could see through to the ‘black, bilious rage that shook him to the soul’, because he instantly recognized Crowley's incomparable superiority as a poet. Crowley adds charitably that he saw this as proof that Yeats was a genuine poet, because no charlatan would have felt such fear of a greater poet than himself…
Meanwhile
, Crowley had taken himself a flat in Chancery Lane, and dedicated a mirror-lined room as a temple for white magic. There was also a black temple, whose altar was supported by a statue of a negro standing on his hands. It also contained a skeleton, which Crowley ‘fed’ with blood, and to which he sacrificed small birds—the idea being to give it life. Crowley shared the flat with another Golden Dawn member named Alan Bennett, one of the few members who took a liking to him. Bennett seems to have been a man of extremely strong personality, and he introduced himself to Crowley by looking into his eyes and saying in almost menacing tones: ‘Little brother, you have been meddling with the Goetia’ (black magic). When Crowley denied it, Bennett said: ‘Then the Goetia has been meddling with you. ‘In fact, Crowley was convinced that Yeats was trying to put a spell on him, out of jealousy of his poetry, so he was much impressed. As he got to know Bennett better, he must also have been impressed by his way of life. Bennett suffered from asthma, to alleviate which he took opium; then, after a month, he would find himself becoming accustomed to it, and instead of increasing the dose, would switch to morphine, then to cocaine, then to chloroform. When he was weak enough, the asthma would go away, and return as he became stronger. He seems to have had a Swiftian loathing for human physical functions, including sex and childbirth. Crowley became deeply attached to him.