by Colin Wilson
He eventually located Bennett in his monastery, and spent some time there writing a sequel to Jezebel. He also wrote an invocation to Hecate, the goddess of the underworld, and claims that when he recited it, the goddess appeared to him in the form of Bhavani, the Hindu goddess who wears a necklace of skulls. He says the vision made him aware of the basic identity of all religions. After this, he sailed for India, where he wrote an essay called ‘Crowleymas Day’, explaining that the universe is basically Nothing; he adds modestly that it may be regarded as a fair sample of his genius.
In Delhi, in March 1902, he joined Eckenstein and four other climbers for the assault on Chogo-Ri; this is the world's second highest mountain, less than a thousand feet lower than Everest. (Crowley would no doubt have preferred to attempt Everest, but it was then forbidden to Europeans.) It was a risky venture, for Chogo-Ri was generally regarded as unclimbable. Crowley devotes more than fifty pages of the Confessions to describing the expedition, and the reader soon senses that he regarded it as far more than a mountaineering challenge. Crowley's lifelong problem was a failure to feel himself a fully fledged member of the adult community; the doctrinaire religion of his childhood had left him with a kind of permanent inferiority complex. This was the real purpose behind his travels, his adulteries, his persistent attempts to outrage the bourgeoisie: he was trying to escape his old personality, to shed it as a snake sheds its skin. The world's second highest mountain was a symbol of achievement. The conqueror of Chogo-Ri would become an international celebrity, and his sense of his own value would be permanently secure.
Regrettably, the attempt was a failure. The party began the ascent on 8 June 1902, and eight days later, they were at the foot of the glacier that led up into the mountain. The sheer size and majesty of the peak overwhelmed them. Crowley began to suffer from snow blindness and exhaustion, to counteract which he drank champagne. Before they could begin the final ascent, the weather broke. And although two other members of the expedition finally reached a point two hundred feet beyond that of any previous expedition, the mountain finally drove them back. One of the party began to suffer hallucinations and had to be sent back. The man who accompanied him stole the emergency rations. As Crowley lay in his tent, suffering from malaria and listening to the howling of the storm, an instinct told him that the weather had broken for good. In any case, they were exhausted. So, with the storm still raging, they packed and retreated down the mountain. Two months after they had set out, they were again down on the plain.
In mountaineering terms it was Crowley's first recorded defeat. And in personal terms, it might also be regarded as the point at which Crowley's life began to take a downward turn.
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1. See Conjuring up Philip, An Adventure in Psychokinesis by Iris M. Owen and Margaret Sparrow. Fitz Henry and Whiteside, Toronto.
Four
The Chosen of the Gods
IT WAS winter when Crowley arrived back in Paris. He stayed at the apartment of a Cambridge friend, Gerald Kelly, who admired Crowley's poetry, and who had decided to become a painter. (He ended up as a president of the Royal Academy.) In a restaurant called Le Chat Blanc, where Kelly dined every evening, he made the acquaintance of a young novelist named Somerset Maugham, who took an instant dislike to him, but who, five years later, used Crowley as the central character in a novel called The Magician. This is how he descibes him:
[Oliver Haddo] was a man of great size, two or three inches more than six feet high; but the most noticable thing about him was a vast obesity. His paunch was of imposing dimensions. His face was large and fleshy…
And in his preface to the novel, Maugham notes:
In early youth, I was told, he was extremely handsome, but when I knew him he had put on weight and his hair was thinning. He had fine eyes and a way…of so focusing them that, when he looked at you, he seemed to look behind you. He was a fake, but not entirely a fake. At Cambridge he had won his chess blue and was esteemed the best whist player of his time. He was a liar and unbecomingly boastful, but the odd thing was that he has actually done some of the things he boasted of.
Maugham also tells how, many years later, Crowley sent him a telegram saying: ‘Please send twenty-five pounds. Mother of God [Crowley's latest ‘scarlet woman’] and I are starving.’ Maugham, who was notorious for his meanness, ignored it.
Inevitably, Crowley hastened to call on Mathers. But the autobiography is oddly reticent about what occurred, except to record that Mathers failed to return a bag and a fifty guinea dressing case that Crowley had left with him before he set out on his round-the-world voyage—the impecunious Mathers had obviously pawned them. Symonds is probably not far from the truth when he suggests that Crowley was hoping to be received as an equal, and looking forward to showing off his newly acquired knowledge of yoga and Buddhism, while Mathers was not in the least interested in talking to ‘equals.’ Two such outsized egos were bound to clash sooner or later.
In the Confessions there follows one of those typically weird stories that leaves the reader baffled and irritated; moreover, Crowley quotes it in the words of his first biographer, Captain J.F.C. Fuller, as if to avoid the responsibility for personally vouching for its truth. Kelly is alleged to have told Crowley that a girl of his acquaintance—he calls her Miss Q—had fallen into the power of a ‘vampire.’ Crowley was asked to tea with Miss Q and the vampire—a middle aged lady he calls Mrs M. Left alone with her, he sat by the fire looking at a bust of Balzac. An odd dreamy feeling began to steal over him, and something ‘soothing and lecherous’ moved across his hand; the vampire was bending over him and touching his hand with the tips of her fingers. Moreover, she had been transformed into a twenty-year old girl ‘of bewitching beauty.’ Recognizing that he was almost in her power Crowley casually replaced the bust on the shelf and began making small talk. Suddenly, the woman leapt at him and tried to kiss him; Crowley held her at arm's length and re-directed her own evil current back against her. The fair skin wrinkled; the flaxen hair turned the colour of muddy snow, and the vampire, now a hag of sixty, hobbled from the room.
But there were stranger things to come. Crowley was convinced that the vampire was a puppet in the hands of far stronger masters. Kelly's girlfriend happened to be a powerful clairvoyant, and she obligingly went into a trance, and described a house which Crowley recognized as that of Mathers. But the inhabitants were not Mathers and his wife Moina, but a sinister pair called Mr and Mrs Horos, two dubious ‘messiahs’ who had been sentenced to long terms in prison the previous year. Now it dawned on Crowley why Mathers showed no gratitude to his former disciple. His body had been taken over by the evil Mrs Horos, while Moina was possessed by the husband, who was at present serving fifteen years for multiple rape. And as Crowley agonised about whether to try to save Mathers, the clairvoyant warned him to leave things as they were…
This is the kind of story that makes the reader suspect that Crowley was basically a total fraud. In The Great Beast, Symonds tells many such stories without any kind of commentary, and so produces the overall impression that the book is written tongue-in-cheek.
Now the truth is that, although Crowley was capable of outrageous invention, his tales were—as Maugham points out—usually based on fact. We have to remember that ‘magick’ is basically the development of a ‘psychic faculty’ which enables a person to see below the surface of the normal reality. If pressed to be quite specific, Crowley would probably have admitted that he ‘saw’ Mrs M transformed into a twenty-year old girl in the same sense that he ‘saw’ the Hindu goddess Bhavani when he recited his invocation to Hecate: that is, he saw it with his ‘mind's eye.’ We should also understand that when he speaks of vampires, he is not speaking of the bloodsucking variety described by Bram Stoker. It is undoubtedly true that some people have the power to drain others of vital energy; we have all encountered those irritating people who seem to leave us absolutely exhausted. Crowley would have described these as unconscious vampires. He also implies that there
are certain people who can exercise the same power consciously, like Mrs M.
Now it so happens that, where Mr and Mrs Horos were concerned, Crowley was not entirely wide of the mark. Their story is one of the strangest in the annals of psychical research, and is worth retelling briefly here. The ‘evil’ Mrs Horos was actually a rather talented American adventuress named Editha Salomon, who claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Lola Montez and Ludwig the Second of Bavaria. She had been described as a Madame Blavatsky without the intellect, and she certainly seems to have been a woman of commanding personality and considerable charm. Like Madame Blavatsky, she was probably a mixture of trickster and genuine clairvoyant. Like many mediums, she was a vast woman, whose eyes were totally compelling. Her career, like that of Madame Blavatsky, had many ups and downs, including a couple of brief periods in jail. In 1897, when she was forty-eight, she met a man fifteen years her junior, Frank Dutton Jackson, a failed priest, and the two married and went into partnership in the messiah business. Their disciples (sceptics said their dupes) adored them. But would-be messiahs always arouse hostility, and the Horoses, as they called themselves, were often driven to move on. To do them justice it must be said that even if they did have more than a touch of charlatanism, they were often treated with undue harshness by the authorities. In New Orleans, for example, the police could find nothing worse to charge them with than being ‘dangerous and suspicious characters.’ Later, charged with fortune telling, they were sentenced to thirty days in jail.
Early in 1900, the Horoses arrived on Mathers’ doorstep in Paris; they had taken a large furnished flat, and said they had come to help him with his movement. Mathers was greatly impressed by the knowledge of magic shown by Mrs Horos, and since Mathers was himself a considerable scholar, we may conclude that Mrs Horos was not entirely a fraud. Mathers later told Yeats:
She is probably the most powerful medium living…At times she has been controlled by very great and high forces, but much more frequently by evil spirits.
She had convinced him of her genuineness by relating to him details of a private conversation he had had with Madame Blavatsky. And he believed he had spoken to Fräulein Anna Sprengel (the original founder of the Golden Dawn) through her mediumship. But when the Horoses left Paris, for Cape Town, they took with them some Golden Dawn rituals and books on magic that Mathers had lent them, which led the paranoid Mathers to decide they were common swindlers.
One year later they reappeared in London and set up a magical movement which they called The Order of the Golden Dawn the Outer, presumably making use of the ‘stolen’ rituals. They also rented a house at 99 Gower Street (where the Spectator later had its offices), and announced the formation of The College of Life and Occult Sciences, whose subjects included ‘mental and magnetic therapeutics, psychology, clairvoyance, clairaudience, mediumship, materialism, thaumaturgic power and Divine Healing.’ They had various teachers and healers on the staff, and gave courses of lectures at a reasonable fee of from six to twelve shillings a course.
They were also—as the subsequent court case made clear—practitioners of some form of tantrism or sex magic. They had inserted in various newspapers advertisements in which ‘an educated, attractive foreign gentlemen’ wanted to meet a lady with a view to matrimony. Many applied, and the Horoses selected, among others, three attractive girls called Vera Croysdale, Olga Rowson and Laura Faulkner. Olga Rowson—a twenty-six year old housemaid—was to tell how she answered the advertisement, and was taken out to tea by the dapper and attractive Theo Horos, who flattered her and tried to fondle her. Back at the house, she felt ‘quite helpless’, and allowed herself to be persuaded into bed with Mr and Mrs Horos (the latter posed as his mother), where she yielded up her person. But, like the other female neophytes, she seems to have had no regrets, and formed a strong attachment to the Horoses. So did sixteen year old Daisy Adams, who had accompanied the Horoses to London from Birkenhead (where they had stayed with her mother), and who seems to have lost her virginity in a peculiar manner, probably through the ritual use of a phallic object. But the loss of virginity was—it became clear in the court case—all part of the initiation ritual, as in certain modern witchcraft cults. Vera Croysdale and Laura Faulkner told similar stories.
It was Vera Croysdale who set the machinery of justice in motion by complaining that the Horoses had borrowed money and jewellery from her and seemed to have no intention of returning it. Two detectives called at Gower Street to make enquiries. What they saw there made them persistent, and they questioned the girls, who innocently divulged that they regularly took part in sexual rites. The Horoses scented danger and fled back to stay with Daisy's mother in Birkenhead, where they were tracked down and arrested.
The case caused a sensation. The Horoses seem to have had no real sense of their danger. After all, they were able to produce letters in court in which the girls testified to their warm affection for the Horoses. Although Horos was accused of rape, there can be no doubt that he was technically innocent; the girls were all perfectly willing, both before and after. The Horoses were shattered and incredulous when they were found guilty. Horos was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, Mrs Horos to seven. It was undoubtedly a major miscarriage of justice; the Horoses were really being imprisoned for immorality. And Crowley, who might have been expected to be on their side, was totally unsympathetic. He states in the Confessions that Mrs Horos had ‘bolted with such property of [Mathers] as she could lay her hands on’ (which was untrue), then goes on primly: ‘In the following year she was sentenced to seven years penal servitude for outrages on young girls. She had in some way used the rituals of the Order which she had stolen from Mathers to entice them to their doom.’ And in due course Crowley was able to combine his distaste for the Horoses with his resentment of Mathers in his extraordinary tale about Mathers being ‘possessed’ by the spirit of Madame Horos. It is another illustration of the ‘nasty, petty, vicious louse’ aspect of Crowley of which Regardie speaks. Confined in the Female Convict Prison in Aylesbury, Editha Horos was in no position to ‘possess’ anyone.
In the Confessions, Crowley himself shows some awareness of the deterioration of his character at the time, writing:
…my spiritual state was in reality very enfeebled. I am beginning to suspect myself of swelled head with all its cohort of ills. I'm afraid I thought myself rather a little lion on the strength of my journey, and the big people in the artistic world in France accepted me quite naturally as a colleague.
By ‘the artistic world’ Crowley means Auguste Rodin, who was impressed by a sonnet Crowley wrote about his controversial bust of Balzac, and who invited Crowley to come and stay at Meudon ‘to give a poetic interpretation of all his masterpieces.’ The result was Rodin in Rime, which contains such lines as:
The veil o’ th’ mist of the quiet wood is lifted to the seer's gaze; He burns athwart the murky maze beyond into beatitude.
Crowley published the book privately and, well pleased with himself, returned to London. Reading between the lines of the Confessions, it looks as if he may have decided to leave Paris to escape from an artist's model to whom he had allowed himself to become engaged ‘out of sheer lack of moral energy.’ Then, still suffering from moral lassitude, he returned to Scotland. Boleskine, he discovered, had acquired a bad reputation in his absence, and locals refused to pass the house after dark, preferring to make long detours. Crowley plunged into boredom. He tried to dispel it with one of his juvenile practical jokes, writing to a society for the suppression of vice in London to complain that prostitution was unpleasanly conspicuous in the neighbourhood. The society sent an investigator, and in due course reported to Crowley that he could find no sign of vice in Foyers; Crowley replied on a postcard: ‘Conspicuous by its absence, you fools!’
Still bored, he went to Edinburgh to look for a companion-housekeeper, and found a suitable woman whom he calls ‘Red-headed Arabella.’ But she was not able to come immediately. So when Gerald Kelly wrote from
Strathpeffer suggesting that Crowley should join him, Crowley accepted with relief. Kelly's sister Rose was also present. She was a woman of some experience, which must have appealed to Crowley, who had no use for innocent virgins. She had been married and widowed, and had scandalised her family by subsequently getting engaged to two men at the same time and having an affair with a married man; to extract money from her family, she told them she was pregnant, and they gave her forty pounds for an abortion, which she spent on dresses. The family retaliated by putting pressure on her to marry one of the suitors. Rose felt herself thoroughly ill-done-by, and poured out her heart to Crowley. It aroused his ‘Shelleyan indignation’, and he immediately proposed to rescue her by offering her his name in matrimony. His intentions were not romantic; he explained that after the marriage, they could separate, and she need never see him again. But it would prevent her family from forcing her into marriage. Rose was delighted with the idea. The next morning they fled by train to Dingwall, found themselves a lawyer, and were married before breakfast. At that moment, Gerald Kelly burst into the office and, on learning that they were already married, tried unsuccessfully to hit Crowley. When he calmed down, it was decided that Rose should return to Strathpeffer and Crowley should go back to Boleskine, which is what he had intended anyway. (He adds complacently: ‘I have frequently noticed that interference with my plans ensures their being carried out with exactitude.’)
Partly to silence local scandal, Rose and he decided that they would take a train to some remote hotel together and pretend to be on honeymoon. The journey was passed in embarrassed silence; Crowley was feeling trapped, and was uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Unable to face the clerk at the hotel, he left Rose to register while he went off to contemplate the sea and brood on suicide; when he returned, he found that she had unsportingly booked a double room instead of two singles. It began to dawn on him that she was in love with him, overcome by his generosity in trying to save her. It would have been a pity to turn down a girl who was willing to give herself to him. ‘I was willing to propitiate physiology…’ So he did. And the next morning, he arrived at the astonishing conclusion that he was also in love. From then on, ‘the honeymoon was uninterrupted beatitude.’ Rose turned out to be exactly what he wanted: a rather masochistic female who liked to be dominated: