Aleister Crowley

by Colin Wilson

  …what the world's million lips are searching for

  Must be substantial somewhere

  and a consequent longing for the ‘horns of elfland’.

  This is why Eckartshausen's Cloud Upon the Sanctuary exercised upon Crowley as powerful an influence as Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism (with its talk of ‘Secret Masters’) had upon Yeats. Unfortunately, the mystical order described in Eckarthausen was non-existent. But a chance meeting with George Cecil Jones led Crowley into what seemed to be the next best thing, the Golden Dawn, and established his course for the rest of his life.

  This is admittedly the point at which the modern reader tends to lose touch with Crowley and his motivations. The idea of dressing up in ceremonial robes and marching around in circles chanting ‘Adonai ha-Aretz, Malkuth, Geburah, Gedulah’ sounds rather absurd. Magic seems to be pure self-delusion. But, as I have suggested in the opening chapter, such a view may be superficial. For some strange reason, magic can work. And this, as Crowley recognized, is because it is based on a recognition of unknown powers of the human mind. For most of us, the word ‘magician’ conjures up a picture of a Walt Disney character in a conical hat waving a magic wand. Yet the things that take place at ‘spiritualist seances’ every day are a kind of magic, and would have been recognized as such by our ancestors. So is the kind of telepathy that takes place between most married couples. So is one of the most commonplace forms of paranormal phenomena known as the ‘projection of the double’. In 1881, a student named S. H. Beard told his girlfriend, Miss Verity, that he was going to try to ‘appear’ to her later that evening, and in due course, Miss Verity and her sister were terrified to see Beard standing in their bedroom, then vanishing into thin air. Beard said he did it by a peculiar ‘effort of volition’ which he could not describe. The Society for Psychical Research recorded hundreds of such cases in its early days. This is one of the simplest and most straightforward forms of ‘magic.’1

  This is obviously the major question raised by the study of Crowley's life and works. Did he possess magical powers? If so, what were their nature? In the early days, when Crowley was performing magic in his ‘temple’ in London or at Boleskine House, it seems fairly clear that what he was doing was closely related to what happens in the seance room, (although Crowley always professed a great contempt for seances). And the same is probably true of the strange events described in ‘The Visions and the Voice.’ But this was not the kind of magic in which Crowley was really interested. Crowley wanted to be a magician because he wanted power—power over other people. (One of his female admirers, Martha Kuntzel, was quite right to see a close resemblance between Crowley and Hitler.) And it seems clear that, in this department, he succeeded. Seabrook's story—related in the first chapter—of how Crowley walked down Fifth Avenue behind a businessman, and caused him to stumble and fall, is a typical example. So is a story related by Oliver Wilkinson, of a house party that took place after the Second World War, when Crowley was ‘old and harmless.’ Crowley was sitting on his haunches by the fire as two other men talked. One man suddenly fell sideways, his head close to the floor, and stayed there. The other dropped on all fours and began to behave like a dog, barking, whining, scratching the door. Then the other man got up and rushed out of the French windows; he returned the next day, his clothes torn and his face bleeding. Oliver's mother Frances had seen Crowley do something similar in New York—caused a man to act like a dog; when the man recovered, he tried to pass it off as a joke. Frances Wilkinson obviously suspected Crowley of exercising a similar influence on her husband that first evening when they went to dine with Crowley, and Louis Wilkinson began to talk ‘extravagantly, in a manner quite unlike his usual self.’

  Oliver Wilkinson suggests that Crowley may have achieved these effects by drugs or hypnosis. Neither seems likely, unless we are willing to recognize that there is another form of hypnosis that operates directly from will to will. I have cited elsewhere2 a number of cases in which hypnotists were apparently able to achieve power over someone by a form of telepathic hypnosis. In the celebrated Heidelberg case, a criminal was able to achieve total power over a woman—even to the point of persuading her to murder her husband—by merely touching her hand. Crowley seems to have had a similar power over certain women. John Symonds tells a story of a titled lady who was looking into the window of Fortnum and Mason when she felt an ominous presence beside her. In the window, she saw Crowley's reflection staring at her. Crowley introduced himself; they vanished into the Ritz [where she was staying] and emerged ten days later. Soon after, her marriage collapsed.3 Crowley obviously sensed this same susceptibility to his power when he first met Leah Hirsig, and immediately began to kiss her. Leah was not, in fact, Crowley's usual type—he liked well-built, large-breasted women, and Leah was thin and flat chested. But Crowley sensed that she could be entirely dominated by his will. In A Voyage to Arcturus, David Lindsay mentions that this kind of domination ‘satisfies the hunger of the will exactly as food satisfies the hunger of the body.’ Crowley knew all about the hunger of the will.

  Another twentieth century ‘magician’, Gurdjieff, also seemed to know about these strange powers of the will, although he never used them as Crowley did, purely for his own satisfaction. Gurdjieff's chief disciple Ouspensky has described how Gurdjieff was able to communicate with him telepathically by causing a voice to speak inside his chest—even when they were in different rooms. Another follower, Fritz Peters, has described how Gurdjieff was able to cause a girl to faint by merely telling the pianist to play a certain musical chord when she was in the room.4 Gurdjieff also obviously knew some of the basic tricks of ‘magic.’ According to Rom Landau, he was also able to exercise a direct sexual influence upon women—one woman felt she had been suddenly ‘struck through the sexual centre’, and turned to find Gurdjieff's hypnotic gaze fixed upon her. Gurdjieff and Crowley seem to have met only once, when Crowley went to tea at Gurdjieff's priory at Fontainebleau; Gurdjieff apparently kept a watchful eye on Crowley, and C. S. Nott said of this meeting: ‘I got a strong impression of two magicians, the white and the black—the one strong, powerful, full of light: the other also powerful, but heavy, dull, ignorant.’5

  This, then, was the kind of magic Crowley knew how to exercise. He also seems to have possessed, to a high degree, the power that Jung called ‘active imagination’—the power to descend into the unconscious and see ‘visions.’ This is—as we have already noted—the power that the Kabbalist quite deliberately sets out to cultivate, and accounts of it can be found in most books on magic.6 We have seen that Crowley understood one of the basic secrets of the human mind: how to side-step the everyday personality and descend into the deeper levels of the mind; he showed Jane Wolfe how to call upon this power when he forced her to make a ‘magical retirement’ in a tent near the abbey of Thelema. And Crowley himself learned to call upon these powers of the unconscious mind—or the right brain—in his own magical retirements: for example, in the sixth of his Eight Lectures on Yoga, he describes a vision he experienced during a magical retirement near Lake Pasquaney in New Hampshire, when he saw a representation of the universe in which he saw that the stars were actually ideas and souls, and that the rays connecting them were—paradoxically—also stars.

  All this offers us one of the clearest clues to the nature of magic. Human beings find it very hard to realize that the experience of boredom and futility is an experience of feeling trapped in the external world, and that the experience of freedom consists of a descent into oneself. It may seem self evident, for example, that when a man is involved in lovemaking, his consciousness is focused upon the other person. In fact, a little introspection reveals that this is not so. The more deeply he is involved in lovemaking, the more deeply his centre of consciousness is ‘inside’ himself—just as, for example, when he is listening to music. It is as if he takes the girl (or the music) inside himself. The more we feel trapped in the external universe, the more we feel helpless and ‘contingent.’ The more
we can descend ‘inside’ ourselves, the more we feel a curious certainty that no unexpected catastrophes will occur—and this seems to be borne out by experience.

  Jung noted that it is in these ‘inward’ states in which we experience strange ‘synchronicities’—oddly significant coincidences. When, for example, I am working well, and am absorbed in what I am doing, I often seem to ‘stumble’ upon exactly the piece of information that I shall need for the next page or so, and I have described elsewhere7 how, when I was writing an article about synchronicity, absurd synchronicities began to occur in startling profusion, as if to reinforce my conviction that I was on the right track. ‘Magic’ seems to be, to some extent, inducing these states of mind in which synchronicities will occur. And since we can induce these states of mind—albeit rather haphazardly—this means that there is an element of natural magic about everyday living. We are all apprentice magicians.

  So we can see that Crowley—in spite of that lifelong element of delinquency—was pursuing the basic ‘romantic quest’ in his own special way. This is why he could, even in his worst moments, feel a certain self-justification. In spite of his faults, he was engaged in his own rather bumbling, incompetent quest for the absolute. When he wrote poetry, when he climbed mountains, when he practised his magical incantations, he experienced the sudden glow of meaning, of immense affirmation. This is why he never ceased to insist that he was a mystic. This is why, even when he had just indulged in some appallingly selfish piece of behaviour, he could assure himself that he had never betrayed his ideals.

  Crowley's problem is summarized in the comment of Mencius—already quoted: ‘Those who follow the part of themselves that is great will become great men; those who follow the part of themselves that is small will become small men.’ We all consist of many possible selves, and our experience and our behaviour nourishes different aspects of ourselves. Every one of us contains a bit of Saint Francis of Assisi and a bit of Jack the Ripper, as well as assorted fragments of Casanova, John Knox, Einstein, Scrooge, Plato, W. C. Fields and a hundred others. The personality that finally becomes dominant depends partly upon chance, but much more upon individual choice. Acts of free will determine the ultimate balance. Crowley, for all his geniune idealism, leaned heavily towards self-indulgence. So when it became a choice between his own convenience and that of somebody else, he invariably chose himself. Every time the Shelley inside him started to gain the ascendancy, it was outmanoevred by the Flashman.

  One of the most puzzling things about Crowley is that he was so lacking in critical insight into himself. He could always manage to find some justification, even for his worst pieces of behaviour. Oddly enough, he possessed a highly developed sense of ‘karma’ or destiny, the feeling that life is full of hidden meanings, and that our conduct determines our fate. Yet as he left a trail of destruction and betrayals behind him, it never seemed to strike him that this same ‘law’ would sooner or later involve him in retribution. Reading about Crowley produces the same sensation as reading about Al Capone or Lucky Luciano or Bonnie and Clyde: that his downfall was somehow inevitable. There is a feeling that a man who deserts his wife and child and sacrifices a cat and forces his mistress to submit to intercourse with a goat is somehow creating his own bad luck.

  How, then, do we explain the currrent Crowley revival, which has led to all his major works (and many of the minor ones) being reprinted? This is partly because Crowley symbolizes a kind of mindless rebellion against authority. He has become—as Symonds points out—the ‘unsung hero of the hippies’; his ‘Do what thou wilt’ appeals to the feelings that produced the pot-smoking, flower-power rebellion of the 60s, as well as to the hatred of authority that led Hell's Angels to smear themselves in excrement. If Crowley had been alive in the era of Charles Manson and later of the Sex Pistols, he would have found a host of enthusiastic followers.

  But there is also a more discriminating response to Crowley's message. After the Second World War, there was a strong revival of interest in ‘occultism.’ The law that made witchcraft illegal in England was repealed in 1951, and three years later, a ‘witch’ called Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today, alleging that there are still dozens of covens—groups of witches—practising all over England. He explained that they were followers of a nature-religion called wicca. Gardner was a friend of Crowley's, and an initiate of the OTO, and Crowley authorised him to set up his own magical group. Gardner liked being flagellated, and his version of wicca laid heavy emphasis on sex rites in which everyone was nude. Understandably, it quickly gained hordes of disciples. Crowley's version of ‘magick’ was, naturally, much in evidence in these covens. Many members of such groups lost interest as they got older; others developed a wider interest in magic, and studied seriously the Enochian system of John Dee, the magic of the Golden Dawn, and Crowley's own sex-orientated system. For readers wishing to learn more of the modern magical revival, there are excellent books by writers like Francis King, Stephen Skinner and Robert Turner. These make it clear that there is a strong connection between magic and Jung's concepts of active imagination and synchronicity.

  After Crowley's death, Karl Germer became the active head of the OTO, although there continued to be splinter groups, particularly in Germany. (This has greatly confused the question of Crowley copyright, for Crowley left copyright in his works to the OTO, and several groups can therefore claim to own them.) It was Germer who gave a charter to an occultist named Kenneth Grant to set up his own OTO group in England. Germer later regretted his decision, and told Grant he was expelled, but Grant has continued to regard himself as head of the British organization of the OTO. In this capacity, he has written a number of remarkable and fascinating books on magic, with titles like The Magical Revival and Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, the first of which is probably the best history of modern magic in existence. Grant is less interested in Crowley's defects as a human being than in his insights as a magician, and he takes The Book of the Law as seriously as Crowley took it himself. Being, in general, a far clearer writer than Crowley, and lacking Crowley's tendency to drag in his own personality, he is a far better exponent of Crowleyan ‘magick’ than Crowley himself.

  Yet in spite of Grant's skilful advocacy, it is difficult to take Crowley seriously, even as a student of magic. The hatred of religion and the conviction that he himself was the new messiah taints all his serious work with a kind of silliness, just as The Book of the Law is tainted by his Swinburnian tendency to childish blasphemy. The anti-authoritarianism which originated in his dislike of the Plymouth Brethren led to an emphasis on the pleasures of the senses that strikes us as absurdly exaggerated; all the talk about lissom lusts and scarlet sins seems as old fashioned as the Yellow Book and Wilde's ‘love that dare not speak its name.’ Again and again, his ideas are marred by a kind of crudity that makes them seem too obvious, so the reader has an impulse to murmur ‘Elementary, my dear Crowley.’

  This can be seen clearly in his psychological system, as expounded to Frank Bennett at the Abbey of Thelema. The subconscious mind (Freud would have said the unconscious) is our true self, and we should not try to repress its desires. This is where the Plymouth Brethren went wrong—trying to weaken their sexual desires until they had become seething masses of repression. Freedom consists in ceasing to repress the subconscious mind, and instead, learning to do its will…

  This may be good Freudianism, but it is bad ‘occultism.’ Traditional occultism has always been based upon the view that man possesses a ‘higher will’, and that his problem is to learn to act in accordance with it. Aldous Huxley once summarized this view as the notion that the human mind possesses an unconscious basement, full of black beetles and vermin, but that it also possesses a superconscious attic, which is as much ‘above’ ordinary consciousness as the basement is below it. Huxley suggests that it is this ‘attic’ which is responsible for paranormal powers like telepathy, second sight and precognition.

  Crowley's psychological theories were s
o limited by his anti-authoritarianism and his sexual obsession that such a notion would have been completely beyond him. He often stated that ‘Do what thou wilt’ did not mean ‘Do whatever you like’ but ‘Do your true will.’ But this simple Freudian plan of the mind—bungalow-with-basement—meant that, like Freud, he felt that the basic answer lay in freedom from repression—in ‘letting it all hang out.’ And this is, in fact, what he practised, and encouraged his followers to practise—with results that could be seen in the cigarette-addicted five year old at the Abbey, and in Crowley's own slavery to heroin. Crowley, like Freud, ‘sold human nature short’, and his ideas—as expressed, for example, in The Confessions—seem oddly crude and simplistic, as if there was a whole dimension of meaning that he completely overlooked. The same applies to his poetry, where the use of overcoloured adjectives cannot disguise the lack of genuinely poetic dimension, a sense of ‘unknown modes of being’. And since Crowley himself failed to see this, the final impression he leaves behind is that his ultimate defect was lack of judgement.

  Yet when all this has been said, it has to be admitted that there is still an element in Crowley that commands respect. In moods of depression, he himself often recognized the defects of his character. Yet he insisted that these were unimportant compared to the doctrines for which he was the chosen vessel. This is why he wanted the complete Book of the Law read aloud at his funeral service. He believed he had been the recipient of an important message, and that it was his task to convey it to the rest of the human race. He was being perfectly serious when he compared himself to Mohammed, and he believed that the Book of the Law would one day be recognized as the new Koran. ‘I, the Beast, the Man Aleister Crowley, whose number is 666, help to show forth this truth to men.’