Aleister Crowley

by Colin Wilson

  Oliver Wilkinson also leaves no doubt that Crowley's influence could be highly destructive. His father and mother met Crowley in New York towards the end of the First World War; his mother, Frances, was an American poetess. (Louis Wilkinson, who was, at that time, a well known man of letters, is now remembered mainly as a friend of the Powys brothers.) Frances took an instant dislike to Crowley from the first time they went to have dinner with him in his skyscraper apartment in New York. Wilkinson, who was normally a self-controlled man, behaved extravagantly and foolishly at dinner, and Frances seems to have suspected that Crowley was exercising some kind of sinister hypnotic influence over him. Later, Crowley turned Wilkinson so thoroughly against her that he persuaded him to have her certified insane; Frances got wind of the plot and succeeded in escaping. But when she returned home later, in a state of physical weakness and psychological shock, she found Crowley at the top of the stair, holding her three year old son Oliver by the hand. Crowley murmured:

  I met a silly woman yesterday…She had not approved of my friendship with her husband…She returned home to find her two lovely babes on the mat in front of the fire in extraordinary positions [she said] without their heads. This woman could imagine her babies’ heads rolling on the carpet—rolling!…cut off in their infancy. Poor mad woman—she imagined I had done it.

  This was clearly an attempt by Crowley to drive Frances Wilkinson mad by a form of hypnotic suggestion. It did not work; Frances managed to persuade one of the doctors—who was supposed to certify her—to tell her about Crowley's libellous allegations. Crowley was sufficiently alarmed—perhaps at the thought of another court case—to drop his threats. He apparently ceased to visit the Wilkinsons because he knew that Frances was aware he wore a wig (for some reason, he flatly denied this) and was awaiting a chance to tear it off. (Many commentators have remarked on Crowley's immense vanity.) But he warned her that he would follow her wherever she went. Later, after she and Louis Wilkinson had divorced, she found ‘tramp's signs’ outside the gate of her cottage in Essex, and recognised them as Crowley's magical symbols. Oliver Wilkinson comments: ‘None of us ever felt before or since such intensity of terror as then descended on us.’ It is an interesting example of that odd malevolence, the tendency to nurse grudges, that prevented Crowley achieving the kind of greatness he used to dream about. He remained essentially a petty human being.

  Like so many of Crowley's ‘Scarlet Women’, the nineteen-year-old girl who had approached him after the Nina Hamnett trial ended up in a mental home. Dorothy Olsen, the American woman who had stolen Crowley from Leah, drank herself to death. Hanni Jaegar, the German girl with whom he had gone to Spain, committed suicide soon after their separation. Symonds quotes Kenneth Grant to the effect that Crowley chose these borderline women because of ‘their aptitude for getting on the Astral Plane more easily than the average, better integrated person.’ But it is difficult not to feel that Crowley went through life trailing some cloak of death and insanity behind him.

  Crowley remained in London throughout the war, at 93 Jermyn Street, until, in 1944, he moved down to Aston Clinton, in Buckinghamshire, where he lodged at the Bell Inn. It was the flying bombs that led to the move. He soon found it too lonely, and asked Louis Wilkinson to try and find him somewhere else. Wilkinson asked his son Oliver, and when Oliver mentioned it in the dressing room of the Hastings theatre where he was acting, one of the actors said he was opening an ‘intellectual guest house.’ On 17 January 1945, Crowley moved into Netherwood, the Ridge, Hastings. Oliver Wilkinson, who had not seen Crowley since he was three, was surprised when he met him again. ‘I had expected a pretentious warlock, a dangerous clown, and I found an intelligent man…He was intelligent, with an intelligence that dried the air.’ Crowley sent Oliver a box of ‘the most expensive cigars in the world.’ Unaware until too late of how good they were, Oliver smoked them all, then confessed to Crowley that he had smoked them without appreciating them. Crowley thought he was asking for more, and sent another lot—a typical example of the generosity that was part of Crowley's charm.

  This last decade was not entirely unfruitful. In 1939 he delivered in London a series of Eight Lectures on Yoga, which show Crowley at his best—witty, combative, almost Shavian in tone, although the tendency to make schoolboy jokes remains: ‘In highly civilized communitites like our own (loud laughter)…’ But its eighty pages reveal that, in spite of the heroin and cocaine, Crowley's intelligence was as dry and sharp as ever.

  In 1943, Crowley met a woman who asked his advice on ‘occult, spiritual and practical matters’, and Crowley wrote her a series of letters beginning ‘Cara Soror’. He was back in his element again—the master giving advice to the disciple. In fact, he so enjoyed writing her letters that he asked other disciples to ask him questions. He intended to publish the result under the title Aleister Explains Everything, but never got around to it. The letters (eighty of them) were finally published by Karl Germer, in 1954, as Magick Without Tears, and they are probably the best introduction to Crowley's ideas in existence. The tone is casual and light hearted, but he throws in some of his keenest insights: for example, after a letter devoted mainly to debunking astrology, he admits that, for some odd reason, it seems to work, and adds: ‘I see no objection at all to postulating that certain “rays” or other means of transmitting some peculiar form or forms of energy, may reach us from other parts of the solar system…’ What is so remarkable about Crowley the ‘magician’ is that he remains Crowley the scientist, and always applies the same probing intellectual curiosity to every field he surveys. This is ultimately the most impressive quality about his mind, and the one that might—if he had concentrated on developing it to the full—have brought him the fame he craved. Crowley's tragedy was that he never concentrated for long enough to develop anything to the full.

  The other major impression to emerge from Magick Without Tears is that—as odd as it sounds—one of Crowley's chief drawbacks was his sense of humour. This is a disability he shares with Bernard Shaw: both were driven by a strange compulsion to be flippant. But when he becomes absorbed in ideas, Shaw can remain serious for a sufficiently long time to convince the reader of his intellectual stature. In Crowley, the flippancy has the tone of a schoolmaster trying to be funny for the benefit of the sixth form, or a muscular Christian trying to convince you that he isn't really religious. ‘How can a yogi ever be worried?…That question I have been expecting for a very long time!’ (Crowley has never learned that exclamation marks give the impression of a gushing schoolgirl.) ‘And what you expect is to see my middle stump break the wicket-keeper's nose, with the balls smartly fielded by Third Man and Short Leg!’ It makes us aware that there was something wrong with Crowley's ‘self image.’ He is one of those people who, no matter how hard they try, never feel quite grown up.

  The best description of Crowley in this late period can be found in The Magick of Aleister Crowley by John Symonds.1 In the early 1940s, Symonds moved into a flat at 84 Boundary Road, Hampstead, where Victor Neuburg had died in 1940. He became curious about the man who had ‘cursed’ Neuburg, and sent Crowley a telegram asking him if he would write an article on magic for a literary magazine. Crowley asked him down to Hastings for lunch. Symonds was accompanied by the astrologer Rupert Gleadow. ‘Netherwood’ was in a country lane, and stood in private grounds. As they stood waiting, a slow, feeble step sounded on the stairs, and an old man in plus fours, with a goatee beard and a bald head, intoned querulously: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ When Gleadow was introduced as an astrologer, Crowley remarked that he thought there was less than one per cent truth in astrology. Crowley had an odd stare; his eyes were ‘unusually wide as if he were prepared to hypnotise us.’ ‘I began to feel that there was something a little strange about Crowley. It was difficult to say what, exactly, it was. Apart form the ring and the brooch, and his peculiar sweetish smell (due to the holy oil of Abra-Melin the Mage) he might be considered, I thought, an ordinary old man;
and yet there was a quality of remoteness about him…I can best describe this quality by saying that it suggested that he cared very little for the usual occupations and considerations of mankind. He had, however, one common failing: he was ambitious, and did not want to depart hence without leaving as great a mark upon the earth as possible.’

  After lunch they drank brandy and Crowley talked about prophecies of the end of the world, a matter in which he was evidently well versed. He mentioned Nostradamus's prediction that Doomsday would occur in 1999, but was evidently unimpressed by it. So this thin, dessicated old man, whose daily doses of heroin would kill a normal man, was the formidable Great Beast, now old, bored and rather pathetic. His subsequent correspondence with Symonds occasionally has a querulous tone, as if he felt he was being neglected, and he sometimes signed his letters ‘Aleister.’ (In earlier days, acquaintances had always addressed him as Crowley, or A.C, or Beast.) Symonds often had to hold him steady as he injected himself in the armpit. And Symonds was responsible for the publication of Crowley's final volume of verse, Olla—which, as usual, was almost totally ignored by reviewers.

  The juvenile sense of humour remained in evidence. He told Symonds of a visit from a military man, who had pulled such a face when Crowley prepared to inject himself that Crowley went into the bathroom. There he placed his mouth near the keyhole and proceeded to squeal like a stuck pig. When he came out, the military man looked sick and shaken.

  Symonds saw the news of his death on the front pages of the newspapers, together with photographs of the ‘wickedest man in the world.’ Crowley would have been flattered. He had died of myocardial degeneration and chronic bronchitis on the night of 1 December, 1947. On Friday 5 December, Crowley was cremated at Brighton. Various ex-disciples and ex-mistresses were present, as well as Symonds and Gerald Yorke. Louis Wilkinson then read aloud Crowley's Hymn to Pan, beginning:

  Thrill with lissome lust of the light,

  O man! My Man!

  Come careering out of the night

  Of Pan! Io Pan!

  Crowley had also requested that the whole Book of the Law should be read aloud but—perhaps because this would have taken at least an hour—Wilkinson read only short extracts. The Brighton Council was shocked to hear what had gone on in their chapel, and a spokesman announced they would take steps to make sure it never occurred again. Since there was only one Aleister Crowley, this was a fairly safe promise to make.

  * * *

  1. Much of this was incorporated into the revised edition of The Great Beast, but the earlier book deserves to be read for its own sake.

  Epilogue

  WHEN John Symonds first took his wife Margaret to meet Crowley, she received a powerful impression of evil. ‘Yes, evil haunted that face, but the years had diluted its strength.’ And after Crowley had talked to her at some length about his trek across China, she felt that the room had become small and oppressive, ‘and he flooded me again with a sense of evil, so that I visibly shivered.’ But was Crowley really ‘evil’ or was this largely her imagination? If evil is defined as a pleasure in cruelty or destruction, then Crowley most certainly fails to qualify. He was self-centred, and he did a great number of ‘caddish’ things; but his worst behaviour was usually like that of a spoilt child.

  The argument that Crowley was evil depends upon some of his nastier writings. Oliver Wilkinson mentions that among Crowley's papers, there is a description of tying a negro to a tree, cutting a hole in his stomach, then inserting his penis. If Crowley had ever done such a thing, it would certainly qualify him as genuinely evil. But it is fairly certain that he was not, in the pathological sense, a sadist. The early Snowdrops from a Curate's Garden is an attempt to rival Sade. But the very fact that Crowley never returned to sadistic fantasy indicates that it was merely another experiment in shocking the bourgeoisie. It is worth bearing in mind that even Sade himself, who spent his whole life toying with such fantasies, never actually practised them; on one occasion when he had a chance to revenge himself on the mother-in-law who had caused him to be imprisoned for years, he showed Chrisitan forbearance.

  The chief impression left by a study of Crowley's life and works is that he wasted an immense amount of time and energy trying to shock everyone he came into contact with, and that his dislike of orthodoxy turned him into an unconsciously comic figure, like Don Quixote. Everyone has experienced a feeling of blind rage against authority—if only when a traffic warden hands them a ticket. And we have all known people in whom some early clash with authority has created a lifelong neurosis, a conditioned reflex of hatred against some group of people—homosexuals, Jews, blacks, policemen…Such people strike us as stupid as well as rather dangerous, because they have become victims of a purely mechanical reaction. Crowley's early contact with religious bigots made him the lifelong victim of such a reaction; the lightest touch on his anti-authority button made him swing into action like a mechanical toy.

  The chief problem of this reflex is that it is self-perpetuating. It arouses violent hostility, and the hostility reinforces the original resentment. Caught in this vicious circle, many ‘rebels’ turn into criminals, and a percentage of such criminals into mass murderers. (The annals of modern crime contain dozens of such cases—Manson, the Moors murderers, the Yorkshire Ripper…) The outraged ego, shaking its fist at authority, becomes trapped in its own resentment until it becomes—in theory at least—capable of destroying all mankind. Sensible people draw back long before they reach this point, and Crowley was restrained by an instinct of self-preservation. But it was this ‘criminal’ element in him that was sensed by people who felt he was evil.

  It is interesting to note Crowley's habit of relieving his bowels on people's carpets. In the twentieth century, this has become an increasingly frequent feature of burglaries, and criminologists recognize it as a gesture of rebellion. The burglar is not merely in someone's apartment for the practical purpose of taking money, but to commit a kind of symbolic rape, to express the resentment of the have-not for the haves. Crowley was expressing a different kind of resentment, but it undoubtedly has the same ‘criminal’ origin. It has become generally recognized—so much so that it has become a boring commonplace—that this type of pathology is usually associated with a lack of love in childhood. Animal ethologists have observed that creatures who have received no love in the early, formative period of their lives become permanently incapable of feeling affection. Crowley's parents, with their narrow religious obsession, seem to have been the type who were incapable of expressing spontaneous affection. In turn, he became incapable of showing affection for wives or children. Although he occasionally declares in the magical journals that he has ‘fallen in love’, none of his relationships with women involved what would normally be described as love. Women aroused in him a crude desire to assert his masculinity by penetrating them, which brought a triumphant sense of violation. He wanted them to behave like nymphomaniacs. He wrote of one mistress: ‘we went crazy…we tore off our clothes and fucked and fucked and fucked. And suddenly she got a jealous fit about three cheap whores…and I strangled her…Woke up early and finished the fuck.’ His relations with women were devoid of the normal element of solicitude or protectiveness.

  Sex is certainly the main key to Crowley's mentality; but so is the fact that he was a late Victorian. (The early Victorians were far less prudish than their children; nude mixed bathing was common until the 1860s at seaside resorts.) The Victorians became so embarrassed about sex that they covered up table legs, and invented a special kind of straitjacket for babies to prevent them from touching their genitals in bed. So for Crowley, sex was always something deliciously ‘dirty’ and wicked. In many ways, his development parallels that of Freud. When, in the 1880s, Freud first began to suspect that sexual frustration might be the key to mental illness, the idea so frightened and shocked him that he hardly dared to put it into words; he felt that it would mean professional disgrace and ruin. And the very fact that the idea created such inner tu
rmoil convinced him that it must be true. If he had lived in a less prudish society, he might simply have concluded that sexual problems can lead to neuroses, and left it at that. But the fact that the idea struck him as too awful to utter led him to go much further, and to assert that all neurosis, without exception, has a sexual origin, and to exaggerate the sexual element out of all proportion. Crowley reacted in exactly the same manner. The idea of prostitution, of seduction, of adultery, aroused in him a kind of feverish, panting excitement, and he was quick to suspect anyone with a touch of puritanism of the same violent response. ‘I cannot omit to mention one atrocity at Agra. Some prurient English curator had indulged his foul instincts by whitewashing a magnificent fresco in the palace because it was “improper”. In other words, he was so leprously lascivious that anything which reminded him of reproduction produced a frenzied spasm of sensuality in his soul…’ In fact, the unfortunate curator was probably thinking of the officers’ wives and daughters who would be shown around the palace, and trying to spare their blushes. So Crowley's overreaction to authority was compounded with an equally unrealistic overreaction to sex, which led him to believe he was being iconoclastic when he was only sticking out his tongue at long-dead Victorians. His sexual rebellion, like his social rebellion, tends to strike us as much ado about nothing.

  It might seem that, for a man handicapped by these paranoid obsessions, chances of real personal development were minimal. But there was a third component in Crowley's peculiar make-up: a kind of romantic mysticism, a feeling that Yeats expressed in the lines: