Aleister Crowley

by Colin Wilson

  Then the Sunday Express launched an attack on Drug Fiend; the author was James Douglas, the weekly columnist whom Lord Beaverbrook paid to be a kind of guardian of morality. He had already attacked Joyce's Ulysses and Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, thereby greatly increasing their circulation (just as his successor, John Gordon, launched Nabokov to fame by denouncing Lolita). Crowley was not quite so lucky. The Express realized he was good copy, and the following Sunday followed up the attack with an interview with Mary Butts, describing ‘profligacy and vice’ in the Abbey of Thelema—she was presumably getting her own back for Crowley's attack on her Drug Fiend. The Express smacked its lips over stories of ‘bestial orgies’, and another friend of Crowley's, a woman named Betty Bickers—with whom he had stayed in London—revealed that he had borrowed money from her. Collins (Crowley's publisher) had been delighted with the James Douglas article, which could only increase sales. But the ‘exposure’ of the orgies and depravities was another matter; Collins published the Bible and other improving works, and to go on selling Drug Fiend after these attacks would be tantamount to profiting by the wages of sin. So they quietly allowed Drug Fiend to drop out of print.

  Crowley's reaction to all this, in the final chapter of his autobiography, is typical; he finds the attitude of his publisher, ‘inexcusable’, and argues that the principles of fair play should be applied to ‘cases which involve the suspicion of sexual irregularity.’ The implication is clearly that he had been unjustly accused; Leah's copulation with the billy goat, and other similar episodes of sex magic, are conveniently forgotten.

  In retrospect, it certainly looks as if Crowley had become the victim of a malign fate. He was correct to believe that Drug Fiend would mark a turning point in his life; but in his worst nightmares, could hardly have imagined it would be quite such a disastrous one. It is true that he might have taken warning from that earlier episode in 1910 when George Cecil Jones sued The Looking Glass, and the whole thing blew up in his face. But on that occasion, he had at least been more or less innocent. On the present occasion, he had provoked the attack by writing a vainglorious novel, and by using it as an opportunity to work off his malice against ‘friends’ like Mary Butts and Cecil Maitland. Mary Butts—actually a writer of considerable merit—may or may not have intended to ruin Crowley when she gave the Sunday Express interview; but Crowley's sketch of her as ‘pompous, pretentious and stupid’ and the author of ‘the most deplorably dreary drivel’ certainly gave her the right to aim a blow in return. As it happened, it went home with devastating accuracy.

  Back in the Abbey, Crowley was not yet aware of the extent of the disaster. He was looking forward to the arrival of a new disciple, Raoul Loveday, a brilliant young Oxford man, to whom he had been introduced by Betty Bickers. Loveday had been studying The Equinox for two years before he met Crowley in the summer of 1922. Like Crowley, Loveday was a born anti-authoritarian. At Oxford, clambering over a wall to escape the proctors, he had transfixed his thigh on a spike and almost died. The same rebelliousness may explain his marriage to a Soho artist's model named Betty May, who had already been married twice before—Crowley says she was an alcoholic, a drug-addict and a prostitute (‘an artist's model of the most vicious kind’) as well as being brain-damaged; but then, Crowley had good reason to hate her. When Loveday was taken (alone) to meet Crowley, he stayed away for three days, and returned—by climbing a drain pipe—stinking of ether. For Crowley, it seemed that this was the disciple he had been seeking since the defection of Neuburg—intelligent, handsome (in a weak kind of way) and already devoted to the Beast. He lost no time in inviting the Lovedays to join him in Cefalu.

  Betty May, who later described the whole episode in her autobiography Tiger Woman, was dismayed to find that the Abbey of Thelema was a grubby farmhouse without sanitation or running water, and most of whose inhabitants seemed to have an objection to washing. (Jane Wolfe had already described Leah as ‘filth personified.’) Loveday, on the other hand, was delighted with everything he saw; he described in his diary waking the first morning to the throb of a tom-tom, and joining the others on the olive-green hill for their invocation to the rising sun. ‘I cannot express my feeling of exaltation as I stood there inhaling the sweet morning air…’ Then he and Crowley wrote all morning, and had a lunch of meat, fruit and sharp Sicilian wine. In the afternoon they climbed the great rock. When they returned, there was high tea and a magic ritual, followed by a reading from Crowley. Then talk, chess and mandolin playing until bedtime at nine. For Loveday it was literally a magical idyll.

  His wife found it all strange and nasty. She used to wash naked at the pump in the early morning until she discovered Crowley leering at her from round a corner. Observation of the children soon convinced her they were spoilt brats—the five year old smoked incessantly, and told her that he was Beast Number Two and could ‘shatter her.’ Crowley allowed them to witness the sex rites, believing it would keep them free from repressions. No one in the abbey was allowed to use the word ‘I’—they had to say ‘one’. For every transgression they had to slash their forearms with a razor (there exists an earlier photograph of Neuburg's slashed forearms). And when Crowley did his dance of dionysian frenzy, Betty found it impressive, but funny.

  But Crowley and Loveday were ill of some liver complaint much of the time (probably hepatitis) and medical attention was less thorough than it ought to have been due to Crowley's failure to pay the doctor. The climax came after three months in an episode involving the sacrifice of a cat. The animal had scratched Crowley when he tried to throw it out of the room, and when he again found it in the scullery he made the sign of the pentagram over it with his magic staff and ordered it to remain there until the hour of sacrifice. The cat did just that; it refused food, and when Betty May carried it outside, it came back to the same place. Finally, the ceremony was performed. Loveday, as a high priest, had to kill the cat. Invocations went on for two hours, then Raoul took a kukri—a big Gurka knife—and went towards the squirming sack on the altar. When he slashed the cat's throat, it escaped and ran round the room howling. It had to be anaesthetised before Loveday could complete the sacrifice. Then Leah held a bowl under the throat to catch the blood. Crowley dipped his finger in the blood and traced the pentagram on Loveday's forehead, after which he handed Loveday a silver cup of the blood, which the high priest drained to the last drop. Loveday's enteritis later became worse, and he took to his bed. Crowley cast his horoscope and looked grim; he announced that it was possible that Loveday might die on 16 February, at 4 o'clock. Two days later, when he found Betty May reading a newspaper as she sat by her husband's bedside, Crowley snatched it from her—newspapers were forbidden in the abbey, on the grounds that ‘having a library of first class books we should not spoil our appetites by eating between meals, especially the filth of the streets’. Betty began smashing things and threw glasses and jugs at Crowley's head; the sick Loveday had to stagger out of bed to defend his master. After that Betty left and went to a hotel; she had to be persuaded to return—after a promise of future good conduct. But Raoul's condition suddenly took a turn for the worst. At exactly the time forecast by Crowley, he died.

  There was an impressive burial ceremony. Then Betty May left. Jane Wolfe also went to London, to try and raise funds and more disciples. And only nine days after Loveday's death, the Sunday Express carried a headline: NEW SINISTER REVELATIONS OF ALEISTER CROWLEY. Betty May described in details scenes of ‘drugs, magic and vile practices’. John Bull followed up the attack, even accusing Crowley of cannibalism when in Kashmir. Crowley was ill in bed at the time—he had collapsed after the funeral. Now, perhaps feeling himself in need of moral support, he wrote off to another disciple, Norman Mudd, a young mathematical student who had unsuccessfully defied the Dean of Trinity on Crowley's behalf in 1909. At that time, Mudd had finally caved in to the pressure of the authorities, and had reproached himself for being a coward ever since. According to Crowley, ‘shame dogged him by day and haunted him by nig
ht’, and ten years after moving to South Africa, he had returned to England to search for the man who had impressed him so deeply. Hearing that Crowley was in America, Mudd had gone to Chicago, and succeeded in contacting Crowley's ‘magical son’ Jones, who had initiated him into the A.A. Now, at the summons of the Master, Mudd hurried to Cefalu eager to take over where Loveday had left off. He arrived on 20 April 1923.

  A few days later, Crowley was summoned to the police station in Cefalu, and told that he had been ordered by Italy's new ruler, Mussolini, to leave Italian territory immediately. On 1 May, shadowed by a detective, Crowley and his Scarlet Woman left the Abbey of Thelema for Tunis.

  * * *

  1. In The Occult I state, mistakenly, that this child was also Crowley's.

  2. Symonds mentions £3,000 inherited on the death of an aunt.

  3. Quoted in Symonds: The Magic of Aleister Crowley, p. 88

  4. Sphere Books, 1972.

  Eight

  Paradise Lost

  THE SITUATION in which Crowley now found himself was one of almost grotesque irony. Ever since he had been a teenager, Crowley had believed that he was a great poet, an original thinker, a ‘man of power’. The world had never shown the slightest sign of agreeing with him, so as time went by, Crowley's claims to genius became increasingly strident. He tried seriousness, he tried humour, he tried irony, he tried sarcasm, he even tried obscenity; the world continued to act as if he didn't exist. He published his collected works; he even published a book declaring himself the greatest man of his generation. That should have brought some response; in fact, it was hardly noticed. Yet writers like Shaw, Wells, Chesterton, and Yeats, seem to have had no difficulty whatever making themselves heard. There must have been times when Crowley felt like the invisible man. Even his most outrageous behaviour was ignored.

  Then, all at once, the world noticed his existence—and reacted with a cry of disgust, as if it had trodden on a slug. It was like one of those fairy tales where the bad fairy grants a wish—but in a manner guaranteed to cause disaster. His craving to become known was granted in full measure—but at the cost of universal loathing. He was not even a ‘figure of controversy’—like Ibsen or Zola—for he had no defenders. John Bull ran headlines like THE KING OF DEPRAVITY, A HUMAN BEAST and A MAN WE'D LIKE TO HANG, and the British public agreed with every word. It was also John Bull that coined the title that Crowley was to drag around like a ball and chain for the rest of his life: the wickedest man in the world. With a soubriquet like that, his chances of being taken seriously as a poet, a thinker, or even an anti-establishment rebel, were non-existent.

  To say that Crowley had no defenders is not, perhaps, quite accurate: he had one, Norman Mudd. Mudd was a short, ugly, snub-nosed man who had lost an eye through a venereal infection, and he had been devoted to Crowley—in a doglike, adoring way—ever since that meeting at Cambridge in 1909. He and Ninette stayed on at the abbey and Mudd wrote off letters to newspapers defending Crowley. In one of these, published in the Oxford student magazine Isis he asserts that Crowley's ‘ideals are noble his honour stainless, and his life devoted wholly to the service of mankind’. He also calls Crowley England's ‘greatest poet’. But he fails to explain why, if all the accusations against Crowley are ‘baseless falsehoods’, they came to be made in the first place.

  Crowley had settled in a cheap hotel in the Arab quarter of Tunis. He had still not grasped the extent of his unpopularity. In any case, his attention was completely occupied by the problems posed by his addiction to heroin and cocaine; he was sleeping badly and vomiting, and had bad attacks of dyspnoea—difficulty in breathing. The magical diary lacks the usual entries on sex magic—presumably his health was too poor—and he was angry with Leah for refusing to wake him in the morning by getting into his bed and caressing him. He seems to be suffering from odd illusions about himself: ‘If a man fucks a woman he admires her aesthetically…When a man fucks me I want to know it is for my beauty.’ But he confesses to having lost interest in sex.

  In June he made a remarkable attempt to break himself of the heroin habit—admittedly with the help of ether. He admits to having taken an average dose of three grains a day for more than two years. His ‘cold turkey’ treatment caused diarrhoea, vomiting, shortness of breath and delirium, but with impressive will power he persisted for three days, until on the fourth day he ‘woke fresh, strong and well’ and felt ten years younger. But two days later, he was back on heroin and cocaine. Much of the ‘autohagiography’—as he liked to call the Confessions (a hagiography being the life of a saint)—was written under the influence of drugs.

  Mudd arrived on 20 June 1923, and Crowley left him with Leah in the cheap hotel while he himself went off for a ‘magical retirement’ to the best hotel in Tunis, probably with money borrowed from Mudd. While he was there, the unexpected happened and Mudd and Leah fell in love. They told Crowley when he returned; Mudd even suggested marrying Leah, on the curious grounds that if she was his wife, she could then live up to her name of the Whore of Babylon by sleeping with Crowley. Crowley disagreed, and packed Mudd off to a ‘magical retirement’ in a nearby village. Crowley's sex desires were now reviving—perhaps because he had acquired himself a negro boy named Mohammed—and soon, he and Leah, with Mohammed in attendance, went off on their own magical retirement into the desert—hiring a camel for that purpose. Crowley and Mohammed performed sex magic; but when Crowley fell ill, Mohammed and Leah practised sex magic without his help. Finally, Mohammed and Leah fell ill too, and all three returned to Tunis. Crowley felt that his magical current was exhausted, for the time being. He wrote to the proprietor of a hotel in Paris where he had stayed before the war, assuring him that The Diary of a Drug Fiend had been an immense success, and that he would soon be able to pay the bill he had left owing in 1914; the proprietor agreed to allow him to come and stay on credit. So Crowley took whatever money was available—leaving Mudd and Leah penniless—and sailed off to Marseilles; he stayed in Nice with Frank Harris, who managed to borrow five hundred francs for Crowley's train fare, and then went on to Paris. There he stayed in the Hotel de Blois, and did his best to convince himself that all these adversities were part of the plan of the Secret Chiefs.

  Mudd and Leah eventually managed to rejoin him in Paris by pawning Crowley's magic ring. When Frank Harris wrote to ask for a return on his five hundred francs, Crowley wrote him a long letter explaining why repayment was impossible, and then put before him ‘the deepest conviction of his soul’ that, rotten as he was in a thousand ways, he had nevertheless been chosen by the gods to inaugurate the new post-Christian era on earth. Capitalism, he said, was doomed, but Bolshevism was no real alternative. (Crowley had written to Trotsky from Tunis, asking to be put in charge of the extirpation of Christianity on earth, but had no reply.) The true answer lay in Crowleyanity, and if only Harris would become a Believer, his own troubles would be over…

  Meanwhile, a new proprietor of his lodgings had decided to evict him; Crowley pronounced a solemn curse, and soon after, the hotel went bankrupt. An effort to put a magical curse on Lord Beaverbrook and the Sunday Express seems to have been less successful. Mudd wrote a long open letter to Beaverbrook, and was despatched to London to distribute it. There he was forced to seek shelter in the Metropolitan Asylum for the Homeless Poor. Crowley, who always managed to fall on his feet, had meanwhile succeeded in borrowing money from friends like Sullivan and Jones, and was living fairly well in Paris. He and Leah moved to a hotel at Chellessur-Marne, and there he was sought out by yet another self-divided female in search of a Master: Dorothy Olsen, an American. Crowley lost no time in accepting her as a probationer of the A.A, under the name of Sister Astrid. It then struck Crowley that a Scarlet Woman with a bank account was a more logical companion for the future Messiah than a Scarlet Woman who was a financial burden. So he explained to Leah that the Secret Chiefs had ordained a magical retirement in North Africa, during which he should be accompanied only by Dorothy Olsen. When Norman Mudd re
turned from his unsuccessful attempt to rehabilitate Crowley in London, he found Leah penniless and half-starved. The two declared themselves married as a result of a private magical ceremony, and Leah became a prostitute to support her new husband.

  Crowley was now on a three months magical retirement in North Africa with his new scarlet woman—who was presumably paying the bills. At one point a sheik recognized Crowley as a Secret Master and entertained him to a feast. But the strain of being a Whore of Babylon became too much for Dorothy, who began to exhibit the same signs of neurosis as Leah and other previous holders of the office—for example, abusing Crowley as a scoundrel. Yet when Dorothy found herself pregnant, Leah gave up her job as a potato-peeler in a restaurant and hurried to Tunis to help with the confinement; the journey proved unnecessary, for Dorothy miscarried.

  And now, once again, Crowley's luck turned. His guardian angel had prophesied the arrival of a rich man from the west who would pour his gold upon Crowley. Now Crowley heard that Theodore Reuss, German head of the OTO, had resigned his position after a stroke. The acting head, Heinrich Tränker, had had a vision in which he saw Crowley as the head of a group of Secret Chiefs. He therefore wrote to Crowley, inviting him to a conference of the OTO in Germany. The fares would be paid by a wealthy member named Karl Germer. The result was that Crowley, Leah, Mudd and Dorothy Olsen set out for Thuringia, Crowley having sent a copy of The Book of the Law ahead of him. This was a rash move; when Tränker read its juvenile blasphemies, he was appalled; he thought the book was demoniacally inspired. Fortunately, Tränker then had another vision that changed his mind; he now declared that the book could be summarized in one word, civilization. Crowley's reaction to this curious assessment is unknown.