Aleister Crowley

by Colin Wilson

  In December 1916, Crowley went on a ‘General Strike’ against the Secret Chiefs, demanding some sign from them. Presumably this was successful, for by the end of January 1917 he was back in full swing with his sex magic, his ‘assistants’ including Sister, a ‘big black muscular negro whore’, Titusville Maddy, a prostitute, Anna Grey, and a man called Howard, on whom Crowley performed fellatio. In August he lived for a while with another Scarlet Woman, Anna Miller, a Dutch woman whom he called the Dog. Increasingly, the list of magical operations include the letters ‘p.v.n’, meaning per vas nefendum (‘by the unmentionable vessel’)—sodomy. When she became an alcoholic (a fate that seemed to overtake most of Crowley's mistresses) he got rid of her and began an affair with Roddie Minor, a ‘big muscular sensual’ matron, with whom the operations were also p.v.n. He called her the Camel. After her name, Crowley added the word ‘Aphrodite’—meaning, as the editors of the Magical Record point out, that the muscular, sensual type was Crowley's ideal of feminine beauty.

  Perhaps because Crowley encouraged her to take cocaine and opium, the Camel soon began having visions. She saw an egg full of convolutions of some flesh-like substance in a strange landscape, with a camel in the foreground. Then she encountered a wizard, an old man with a grey beard, dressed in a long black gown, who was infinitely wise. There was also a king who reminded her of a professor of her acquaintance. Crowley told the Camel to introduce herself as ‘Eve’, and ask the wizard's name. Instead of replying, he indicated that she had to build a fire of sticks. When she had done this, she saw a vision of a lion and a naked child. The wizard finally put his arm round her and told her: ‘It's all in the egg.’ So the vision ended.

  More visions followed. Crowley was excited because the wizard (his name proved to be Amalantrah) was able to answer a ‘test question’ on the exact spelling and meaning of Crowley's magical name Baphomet; he said it was Bafometh, and meant Father Mithras. Moreover, the Camel's visions always seemed to involve the same landscape. ‘There was,’ says Crowley, ‘what I may call a permanent background to the vision. He lived in a place as definite as an address in New York, and in this place were a number of symbolic images representing myself and several other adepts.’ Jung had made a similar observation about his own curious visions of an ‘underground world’ in 1913,6 and of an old man called Philemon. Jung had written: ‘Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.’ In his conversations with Philemon, the old man said things which Jung had not consciously thought. Jung also observed that these ‘visions’ were accompanied by curious ‘synchronicities’, meaningful coincidences, and Crowley made the same observations. When he asked the wizard whether he could transpose his magical title ‘Therion’ into Hebrew letters, he was told that it was possible; he tried hard, but had no success in making the Hebrew equal the number of the Beast, 666. Two days later, he received a letter from some unknown Hebrew scholar which solved the problem—a letter which had been written at just about the time he was trying to solve it himself.

  The Camel had a series of interesting visions, which are described in detail in an unpublished record, The Amalantrah Working. (Symonds gives a condensed version in later editions of The Great Beast.) They produce a strong impression that Crowley had discovered the key to the same mental ‘underworld’ as Jung, and that his excitement was justified. At the very least, Crowley's magical experiments may be regarded as an interesting development of what Jung called ‘active imagination.’

  Relations with the Camel began to deteriorate when Crowley met an attractive Russian woman called Marie Lavroff, whose resistance to his advances led him to call upon all his techniques of seduction. She held out for more than a fortnight, but finally, at midnight on 22 March 1918, joined Crowley and the Camel in an act of sex magic, designed to help Marie to transcend her ‘sin complex’ and to help the Camel to transcend her understandable jealousy. But two days later, after masturbating Crowley [which was apparently as far as she was willing to go] she fled, and the following operations of sex magic were conducted with the Camel alone. That summer, Crowley decided to go into another magical retirement, this time on Oesopus Island in the Hudson river. A writer friend, William Seabrook, managed to raise the money for Crowley's trip, as well as a canoe and a tent. When they went to see him off, they discovered that Crowley had spent every penny on tins of red paint and ropes—he told them that, like Elijah, he would be fed by the Ravens. Crowley used the ropes and red paint to print EVERY MAN AND WOMAN IS A STAR, and DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW on cliff faces on either side of the river, where they could be seen from passing steamers. In fact, he was fed by neighbouring farmers. The Camel made a habit of coming to join him for weekends.

  Crowley tells an amusing story that illustrates that, in spite of his increasingly bloated appearance and pointed teeth, he was still attractive to women. An artist friend in New York told him that he knew of a girl who was just Crowley's type, a redhead named Madelaine George. Crowley left a note at her hotel, inviting her to drop in for lunch on his island. To his surprise, he received a telegram a few days later asking him to meet her at the station. Crowley was disconcerted when she arrived with a huge trunk, and she was disconcerted to find that she was being taken to lunch in a canoe, and that instead of a mansion full of servants, Crowley possessed only a tent. She had hysterics and declared that she had to leave after lunch to see an imaginary brother. Crowley persuaded her to go for a row round the island, in the course of which the canoe sprang a leak and almost sank. After more hysterics and demands to be taken to the mainland, she decided to make the best of it and swooned into Crowley's embraces. She stayed for a long weekend.

  Crowley was already involved with another ‘scarlet woman’ who would become something of a permanent fixture. One evening in the spring of 1918, a woman named Alma Hirsig—whom Crowley had met after one of his lectures—called at his Washington Square studio, together with her younger sister Leah. The latter was tall and thin, with luminous eyes, a wedge-like face, and a totally flat chest. ‘She radiated an indefinable sweetness. Without wasting time on words, I began to kiss her. It was sheer instinct.’ Leah seemed to enjoy it, and they continued kissing for the rest of the evening, occasionally coming up for air to make polite replies to the sister. Leah stayed the night. The next time the two called, Crowley punctuated the conversation by removing Leah's clothes, and asked her to come and pose for him—Crowley had started to paint while he was in America. In due course, he painted her as a ‘dead soul’, with a ghastly green face, surrounded by monsters. And she became his latest Scarlet Woman.

  A subsequent ‘magical retirement’ on Long Island convinced him that his magical current was temporarily exhausted and that it was time to leave America. He stayed only long enough to supervise the publication of an eleventh and, it was to prove final volume to The Equinox, then, after a final night in the arms of the Camel, set sail for England.

  * * *

  1. Symonds and Francis King point out that the Book of Lies bears the date 1913, but King argues convincingly that it was actually published in the previous year.

  2. These have been published by Francis King: Secret Rituals of the OTO (1973.)

  3. In The Magic of Aleister Crowley (1958) and The Magical World, of Aleister Crowley (1977) as well as in King's Sexuality, Magic, and Perversion (1971.) There is also a lengthy account in the 1971 edition of The Great Beast.

  4. Symonds has no such inhibitions, and mentions the ‘Serpent's Kiss’—drawing blood by biting the woman's wrist—and defecating on people's carpets.

  5. An operation not without its hazards—Nancy Cunard claimed that Crowley's fangs gave her blood poisoning after she had rashly consented to a serpent's kiss without knowing what it involved.

  6. See my Lord of the Underworld, pp. 74–6.

  Seven

  The Abbey of Do-Wh
at-You-Will

  FOR A PENNILESS exile, London in the December of 1919 was not a particularly welcoming place. According to Frank Harris (quoted by Symonds) Crowley left behind him in New York a string of dud cheques. He was hoping that the OTO would have money in the kitty, but soon discovered that the treasurer had embezzled it. He went to stay with an aunt in Croydon while he brooded on the future. His mind turned to Victor Neuburg, but his ex-disciple was nowhere to be found—in fact, he had read of Crowley's return in a newspaper, and was determined to avoid him. (He was living in Steyning and going through an ‘Elizabethan period’, dressing in breeches and leggings.) Crowley's health was poor; he was suffering from asthma and bronchitis, and the heroin and cocaine to which he had become addicted in America had lowered his resistance. A meeting with George Cecil Jones—the man who had introduced him to magic—was a disappointment; Jones had become a respectable bourgeois. After less than two weeks in England, Crowley left for Paris. There, a week later, Leah Hirsig joined him; she was pregnant with his child.

  On 1 February 1920, he was cheered by what he took to be a sign from the gods. He called on an ex-mistress, Jane Chéron, hoping to smoke opium and make love to her. There was no opium and she refused to make love; but as he was leaving, she asked him to close his eyes, then presented him with a large square of cloth on which she had embroidered in silk the stele of Ankh-f-n-Khonsu, which he had seen so many years before in Cairo when The Book of the Law was dictated to him. She had made a drawing of it (from The Equinox) during a sleepless night, then decided to embroider it for him. Crowley was overwhelmed and he later referred to the event as a ‘miracle’. It confirmed his belief that his steps were being guided by the gods. After anal sex with Leah, he noted in his diary: ‘I am waiting without the least anxiety or eagerness for a new Current or a Word.’

  He had installed Leah and her three year old son Hansi—by a former lover1—in a rented house at Fontainebleau. Now she told him that, on the boat from New York, she had met a French girl named Ninette Shumway, a widow who also had a three year old son and who was looking for a position as a governess. Crowley proposed that she should join them; his imagination was already toying with the idea of a ménage à trois. In fact, he was even dreaming of a ménage à quatre, for he was in correspondence with an American film star named Jane Wolfe, who had declared her passion for him by post, and with whom he was convinced he would fall in love at first sight—Crowley had a powerful streak of old fashioned romanticism. He went to Paris to meet Ninette Shumway, who proved to be a pale, tired-looking girl with a miserable child. She was obviously the type who could be dominated, so Crowley lost no time in sweeping her off to Fontainebleau. In his autobiography he tells how, on a May afternoon, they had lunch in a restaurant, then made love in the woods. But his magical diary shows that he was already performing sex magic with her within a few days of her arrival in mid-February. Shortly thereafter, he dreamed that he was inside a cave which he recognized as her vagina—a dream possibly inspired by the fact that she was trying hard to take him away from Leah. A few days later, Leah gave birth to a daughter, whom Crowley called Poupée.

  Money was short, but Crowley was awaiting a cheque from his lawyer—probably an inheritance.2 He was thinking about setting up an abbey modelled on Rabelais's Thélème, and spent some time looking at houses. He was probably grateful to get out of the house; having two wives was proving less delightful than expected, and he had to call upon every ounce of his pedagogic authority to convince them that jealousy was a childish emotion. The children were also a strain (‘I am ready to bolt to some country where children are unknown’), but Crowley was unexpectedly patient with them. He tried asking the I Ching—the ancient Chinese oracle—where he ought to go. It was distinctively negative about Marseilles and Capri, but positive about Cefalu, the little port in northern Sicily. The I Ching also advised him to do nothing about an article in the magazine John Bull attacking him for his traitorous activities during the war; the oracle was undoubtedly correct. (Crowley relieved his indignation by writing the long apologia that appears in the Confessions, Chapter 76.) On 22 March 1920, he set out for Marseilles with Ninette and the ‘brats’, having despatched Leah to London to try to sort out his financial affairs. In Naples a few days later, Ninette was giving him trouble. ‘A long, miserable night due to Beauty's sexual insanities.’ Apparently Ninette had been something of a prude, and was shocked by Crowley's sexual demands. But she seems to have given way, for the following afternoon he records that she had taken part in an operation ‘by the unmentionable vessel’, and that it was orgiastic and prolonged. But he complains about being interupted by children. The following day, the money finally arrived, and he was able to go on to Cefalu.

  The local hotel was so dirty that he swore he would not spend a second night there. At that moment, a man arrived who told them he had a villa to let. It was up a narrow path that wound its way up a mountain outside the town. The ‘Villa Santa Barbara’ resembled a run-down farm, but for Crowley it looked like a haven of peace: ‘a well of delicious water…a vast studio opening northwards’. And there were two tall Persian nut trees outside the house, just as there had been in the earlier haven he shared with Mary Sturges. There was a magnificent view as far as Palermo and a garden full of flowers and fruit. The next day he clambered over the mighty rock of Cefalu, and visited temples of Jupiter and Diana; for dinner he ate thigh of kid and local sausage. It seemed a paradise. With his two wives and three children, the Master Therion felt he had at last come into his own.

  The central hall was sanctified as a temple, in the centre of which stood an altar. Crowley soon covered the walls with pornographic paintings, one showing a man being sodomised by Pan, while his gushing seed covers a naked woman. But his aim, as he never tired of explaining, was to persuade people to take sex for granted, and stop regarding it as something thrillingly indecent—a notion that seems paradoxical, since this is obviously why Crowley enjoyed it so much. But it is a fact that visitors to the abbey were surprised that sex played so small a part in their lives.

  Symonds makes the penetrating comment that Crowley was as serious about his magical religion as his parents had been about the Plymouth Brethren. In a sense, he was reverting to type. Life in the Abbey of Thelema was conducted on monastic lines, starting with a kabbalistic prayer and a ritual procession, followed by an adoration of the sun. This was all repeated at noon, in the evening and again at midnight. The children—who had ceased to snivel and become healthy, outdoor types—probably found it all rather like being at a Baptist school. The chief difference was that Crowley left piles of heroin and cocaine around, from which guests could help themselves. (He even tried practising sex magic under ether, and found that it heightened his consciousness of the whole operation.) On great occasions they performed the lengthy Gnostic Mass which Crowley had written for the OTO in 1913. The Communion involved ‘cakes of light’, whose recipe included menstrual blood. But life was not quite idyllic. Leah and Ninette were inclined to quarrel, and to Crowley's disgust, a quarrel broke out in the middle of a sex ritual to celebrate the entry of the sun into Taurus, and Ninette, practically naked, rushed out into the rainy darkness, so Crowley had to search for her. When he got her back, Leah was drunk and started another fight.

  Crowley spent a great deal of time daydreaming about Jane Wolfe, who was now on her way to meet him. He had suggested that they should meet in Bou-Saada, scene of his vision of Choronzon, then changed his mind and telegraphed her to go to Tunis instead. He went there to meet her, but was unable to find her—she had failed to receive his telegram and gone to Bou-Saada. In his magical diary, Crowley frequently mentions his love for her. ‘I adore her name. I hope she is hungry and cruel as a wolf.’ On 18 June there is a long entry in which he vows total obedience to her. ‘I am hers…I die that She may live…I drown in delight at the thought that I who have been Master of the Universe should lie beneath Her feet, Her slave, Her victim, eager to be abased…’ But this thought
reminds him of his greatness:

  I am aflame with the brandy of the thought that I am the sublimest Mystic in all history, that I am the Word of an Aeon, that I am the Beast, the Man Six Hundred Sixty and Six, the self-crowned God whom men shall worship and blaspheme for centuries that are not yet wound on Time's spool…

  His imagination was further inflamed by the cocaine which he was taking in increasingly large doses. He was now an addict, and spends pages writing about the effects of cocaine in his magical diary. Sniffing it causes his nose to bleed. Cocaine seems to have intensified his masochistic feelings, and on 22 July he swore to take Leah as his high-priestess and to act accordingly. And Leah, also half-insane with drugs, was perfectly willing to assume the role; she ordered him to lick her dirty feet, and Crowley obeyed. The following day, while he was asleep, Jane Wolfe arrived at the Abbey of Thelema. She was a shattering disappointment. Crowley seems to have assumed that, because she had been a film star, she would be beautiful; in fact, she was a battered, tough-looking lady of about his own age. He compared himself to a girl who was told she would meet a dark distinguished gentleman, and found he was a one-eyed nigger. She had been attending spiritualist seances and had received messages from various ‘Masters’; Crowley read their messages, and was disgusted by their asininity. ‘During her first few weeks at the abbey, every day was one long battle. I hacked through her barbed wire of aggressive axioms. I forced her to confess the incongruity of her assertions. I drilled holes in her vanity and self-satisfaction.’ Moreover, she was a highly moral lady, who was shocked by the decor and the goings-on in the abbey. Crowley decided that she either had to be subdued or ejected. He told her that she should begin her training with a long period of meditation—in fact, a month of it, in a tent on top of the promontory, looking down on the sea. According to Seabrook (whose account is based on her diary) ‘she told the Master Therion he was crazy. He told her there was a boat touching next day at Palermo…and there was the open door.’