 |
Images Kabbalah Glossary Contact Me Shopping Useful Links Affiliates |
|
| |
|
|
|
|||
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
Aleister Crowley (12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947) 
A man totally misunderstood and even feared by many of his contemporaries during his lifetime, Aleister Crowley channelled his true genius and numerous talents into magick in his firm belief that he was the reincarnation of one of the world's greatest magicians, Eliphas Lévi (1810 - 1875), who died in the same year in which he was born. He also remembered other past incarnations as
Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743 - 1795) and
Pope Alexander VI (1431 - 1503) amongst others.
The spelling of magick in this manner, nowadays in more common practice, had been used centuries before Crowley came into being in his latest incarnation, but had gone out of fashion. It was revived by him to distinguish the true science of the Magi from its various 'counterfeits' such as stage magic, legerdemain and illusion.
It could ‘possibly’ be coincidence, but 'k' also has an esoteric meaning – kteis in Greek translates into vagina, a fact I'm sure of which uncle Aleister would have been very well aware.
N.B. This page is much more than just a simple, straightforward biography telling the story of Aleister Crowley's life. It contains several other major headings relating to certain aspects of his life as shown below. Should you wish to go immediately to any particular section, simply click on the appropriate link, or alternatively just scroll down the page until you reach it - which could take longer than you think!
Return to top of page. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
And now - a Biography of The Beast 666
By the age of four, young Edward could read extremely well, but the only book he was officially allowed to read was the Bible. From all accounts, although very well-versed in the narrative, he had no real interest in it with the exception of that found in Revelation in the New Testament. He was fascinated by the opponents of heaven such as the Dragon, the False Prophet, the Scarlet Woman, and in particular, The Beast 'whose number is the number of a man, six hundred and three score six', with whom he could identify.
Although he was an only child, his parents did conceive and bear another, a girl given the name Grace Mary Elizabeth, on 29 February 1880. Sadly, at least for his parents, she lived for just five hours. He was taken to see his sister's dead body, and although the incident made a curious impression on him, he did not see why he should be disturbed so needlessly. After all, he could do nothing; the child was dead. He had no affection for it and considered the matter to be of no importance.
The family moved from Leamington to The Grange in Redhill, Surrey, in June 1881. The reason for the move is unclear, but may have been as a consequence of the death of Grace. His memories of this period were mainly of uninterrupted happiness. In Redhill, he was afforded the luxury of private tutors, and received a thorough grounding in geography, history, Latin and arithmetic. It was shortly after the move to Redhill that a tailor named Hemming came down from London to make new clothes for his father. Being a 'Brother', he was a guest in the house. During his stay, he offered to teach the boy the game of chess and clearly succeeded far too well for he lost every game after the first. It was around this time that young Edward became known as Alick, particularly by his mother, much to his chagrin.
While living in Redhill, his father became gravely ill with cancer of the tongue. On the advice of extended family members, the family relocated to Glenburnie, near Southampton, to be closer to the doctor treating him, but despite the best treatment money could buy his father died on 5 March 1887; Aleister had dreamt of his death the night before. The result of his father's demise during Alick’s formative years changed his entire outlook on life. He began to rebel against authority and to question the concept of Christianity.
For a year or so after his father's death, his mother found it hard to settle down, and became fanatical about her religion. During holidays, they stayed with her brother (Uncle Tom Bishop) or in hotels and hydros. She was concerned about bringing Alick up in London, but when Uncle Tom moved to Streatham she compromised by taking a house in Polworth Road, Lambeth. Some years later, Uncle Tom contributed what he thought was a brilliantly witty article to the Boy's Magazine, an Evangelical attempt to destroy the manhood of our public schools, called ‘The Two Wicked Kings’. These were described as tyrants who ruined the lives of boys and enslaved them. Their names were SMO-King and DRIN-King. Uncle Tom called Alick’s attention to his masterpiece, who said, with shocked surprise, "But, my dear Uncle, you have forgotten to mention a third, the most dangerous and deadly of all!" He couldn't think who that might be, so Alick explained!
The Reverend H. d'Arcy Champney (1854 - 1942), M.A., of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, had opened a school for sons of the Brethren at 51, Bateman Street, Cambridge. It seemed the ideal place for the boy to be educated, but Alick became a terribly unhappy child at this school and developed a serious illness due to the constant bullying, deprivation and punishments he had to endure in those strict Victorian days, particularly under the Brethren. He was diagnosed with albuminuria, an indicator of severe damage to the kidneys, and for a while it really was touch and go as to whether the young lad would live. It was probably through experiencing hardships such as these at a tender age that he developed a strong survival instinct which would stand him in good stead in later years on his intrepid mountaineering expeditions and arduous exploration of barren countries.
Alick did recover, after which his mother and Uncle Tom decided private tuition would be more beneficial for his welfare. He was put on a special diet and prescribed a course of country life with a tutor. During the next few years he travelled constantly round Wales and Scotland. Besides receiving education, he climbed mountains and fished for trout. He also spent an enjoyable summer at St. Andrews where Andrew Kirkaldy (c. 1860 – 1934), a Scottish professional golfer, taught him to play golf. His health improved rapidly, and although he was allowed to study only for a limited number of hours daily, his knowledge progressed in leaps and bounds through having his tutor's undivided attention.
Within a short time of attending Tonbridge, his health started to deteriorate. It became evident that boarding school life was still detrimental to Alick's well-being, so it was arranged for him to live in Eastbourne, East Sussex, with a tutor named Lambert, another Plymouth Brother. Here, he got his introduction to the treacherous chalk cliffs at Beachy Head. Apart from climbing the cliffs with a Presbyterian cousin, Gregor Grant, he found another climbing companion in a man by the name of J.S. New, with whom he systematically worked out all the possible climbs and made a large-scale map to demonstrate them.
One summer day, Crowley took his mother to Beachy Head. He helped her down to the grassy slopes (the Grass Traverse), which used to extend eastwards from Etheldreda's Pinnacle. It was a bit of a scramble for her to reach the slopes from the top of the cliff, but with his guidance it was accomplished by descending a narrow gully called Etheldreda's Walk. He left her in a safe, comfortable position where she could make a watercolour sketch, and went off alone to do some climbing on the Devil's Chimney, some distance to the west of the pinnacle. Here is his account of what happened that day:
“The general contour of the cliff is here convex, so that I was entirely out of her sight, besides being a quarter of a mile away. Such breeze as there was, was blowing from the south-west, that is, from me to her. I was trying to make a new climb on the west of the Devil's Chimney and had got some distance down, when I distinctly heard her crying for help. At this time I had no acquaintance with psychic phenomena, yet I recognised the call as of this type; that is, I had a direct intuition that it was so. It was not merely that it seemed improbable that it could be normal audition. I did not know at the time for certain that this was impossible, though it was afterwards proved to be so by experiment. I had no reason for supposing the danger to be urgent: but I rushed madly to the top of the cliff, along it and down to the Grass Traverse. I reached her in time to save her life, though there were not many seconds to spare. She had shifted her position to get a better view and had wandered off the traverse on to steep, dusty, crumbling slopes. She had begun to slip, got frightened and done the worst thing possible; that is, had sat down. She had been slipping by inches and was on the brink of a cliff when I reached her. She had actually cried for help at the time when I heard her, as nearly as I could judge; but, as explained above, it was physically impossible for me to have done so. I regard this incident as very extraordinary indeed. I have never taken much stock in the regular stories of people appearing at a distance at the moment of death and so on; nor does the fact of something so similar having actually happened to me make me inclined to believe such stories. I cannot offer any explanation, apart from the conventional magical theory that a supreme explosion of will is sometimes able to set forces in motion which cannot be invoked in ordinary circumstances.”
Crowley's first experience of 'true' mountaineering was during a holiday in the Swiss Alps in 1894. He was unaccustomed to such vast areas of snow and ice when rock climbing, yet despite being a completely self-taught novice climbing alone on those dangerous mountains (he had already dismissed the 'incompetent guides' he hired), he became very proficient at the sport in a remarkably short time, even managing to rankle the senior members of The Alpine Club with his astonishing successes – he is purported to have led a cow to the top of the Matterhorn to prove how easy it is to climb. Dr. Tom Longstaff, President of the club from 1947 to 1949 said of him:
“Crowley was a fine climber, if an unconventional one. I have seen him go up the dangerous and difficult right (true) side of the great ice fall of the Mer de Glace below the Géant alone, just for a promenade. Probably the first and perhaps the only time this mad, dangerous and difficult route had been taken.”
Alick returned to the Alps the following year, but was recalled by telegram; the entrance examination to Trinity College, Cambridge, was only a week away. He passed without any difficulty, and in October took up residence at 16, St. John's Street, Cambridge. Throughout his three years at University, he lived in the manner of the privileged aristocracy, and indulged in copious amounts of sex with both women and men. In his practical life, Alick was still fervently engaged in cleansing himself of the ‘mire of Christianity’ through deliberate acts of 'sin'.
At Trinity, he wore pure silk shirts and floppy bow-knotted ties, while rings of semi-precious stones adorned his fingers. An air of luxury and strict attention to detail pervaded his rooms. Hundreds of books relating to science and philosophy, with a modest collection of Greek and Latin classics along with a sprinkling of French and Russian novels, covered the walls up to the ceiling and filled four revolving walnut bookcases. Valuable first editions of British poets stood alongside extravagantly bound volumes published by Isidore Liseux (1836-1894); his books were printed in small numbers, on high quality paper, and with excellent typography. An ice-axe with a well-used spike and scarred shaft hung over the door, while in the centre a canvas bag containing a salmon rod was visible. Displayed prominently in a mahogany box upon a card-table scattered with poker chips was an expensive set of leaded Staunton chessmen (named after Howard Staunton (1810 - 1874) their designer).
His literary faculties developed greatly at Cambridge; he read the whole of the works of such renowned writers as Carlyle, Swift, Coleridge, Fielding, Gibbon, and others, as well as a deal of French literature along with the best books by Greek and Latin authors. He was already becoming a proficient linguist without effort. During his final year, he published his first poem of any note, Aceldama, a Place to Bury Strangers in, copies of which were being sold privately in the University for half-a-crown (12½ pence).
For many years he had loathed being called Alick, partly because of the unpleasant sight and sound of the word, but mainly because it was the name by which his mother called him. He had no interest in Edward, and the diminutives Ted or Ned were even less appealing. He had read somewhere that the most favourable name for becoming famous was one consisting of a dactyl (a metrical foot of three syllables, one long, or stressed, followed by two short, or unstressed, as in happily) followed by a spondee (a metrical foot of two syllables, both of which are long, or stressed, as in married) such as Jeremy Taylor. Aleister Crowley fulfilled these conditions admirably, and since Aleister also happened to be a Gaelic form of Alexander he opted for that. He also concluded that he would have become famous irrespective of his name.
It was about this time that a genuine interest in the occult began to occupy his fertile mind. It may have started subconsciously as a result of a near fatal accident at a railway station during his childhood when a porter dropped a large trunk which was inches away from crushing him; had it landed on him he would doubtless have been killed. He heard his father remark, “His guardian angel was watching over him.” This latent interest was rekindled at midnight on 31 December 1896 during a vacation in Stockholm, after being woken from his sleep with a deep conviction that he had magical powers. In actual fact, he had discovered something which much younger boys were already doing and still do!
“I was awakened to the knowledge that I possessed a magical means of becoming conscious of and satisfying a part of my nature which had up to that moment concealed itself from me. . . . . “
He needed to know more, and thus began his lifelong quest for deeper knowledge and understanding of the occult. He discovered and read A. E. Waite’s (1857 – 1942) The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts (later republished as The Book of Ceremonial Magic). He described Waite as ‘not only the most ponderously platitudinous and priggishly prosaic of pretentiously pompous pork butchers of the language, but the most voluminously voluble’. Despite this, Aleister wrote to him enquiring as to how to find the ‘Secret Sanctuary of the Saints’. Waite replied telling him he needed to read much more and suggested Isabelle de Steiger's translation of Councillor von Eckhartshausen‘s The Cloud upon the Sanctuary. He read that book, followed by The Kabbalah Unveiled (a translation of Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah Denudata by S.L. Mathers) admitting to not understanding a word of it at the time. He later reasoned that to maintain equilibrium in the universe the forces of good and evil must be equal in power, and then further decided that true spiritual freedom had to lie with Satan because the forces of good had tried their hardest to trample him underfoot throughout his life.
Aleister was rapidly approaching the age where he ought to consider a choice of career. Entering the Foreign Office crossed his mind and met with his mother's and Uncle Tom's approval. He was already developing a passion for overseas travel and foreign languages, so during the summer vacation of 1897 he set off for St. Petersburg with the intention of learning Russian. It transpired that he not only lacked the inclination, but had no real interest in the Russian language, so he rejected that idea. What he really wanted, even at this stage of his life, was to be someone whose name would be remembered for so long as life existed on earth. Evidently, he was already smart enough to realise he was unlikely to achieve this ambition through devotion to duty in the Diplomatic Service.
On his way home, he interrupted his journey at Berlin to attend an International Chess Congress. He had hardly entered the room where the masters were playing when:
“I was seized with what may justly be described as a mystical experience. I seemed to be looking on at the tournament from outside myself. I saw the masters - one, shabby, snuffy and bleary-eyed; another, in badly fitting would-be respectable shoddy; a third, a mere parody of humanity, and so on for the rest. These were the people to whose ranks I was seeking admission. "There, but for the grace of God, goes Aleister Crowley," I exclaimed to myself with disgust, and there and then I registered a vow never to play another serious game of chess. I perceived with praeternatural lucidity that I had not alighted on this planet with the object of playing chess.”
He took an immediate liking to Eckenstein for several reasons. Firstly, he was a genuine expert in his field (and was to teach Crowley a great deal in the sport), secondly, his obvious disdain for ‘The Alpine Club’ which he described as ‘a retreat for self-advertising quacks who could barely climb a ladder without a guide’, and thirdly, the fact they both admired the works and achievements of the explorer Sir Richard Burton (1821 - 1890). In 1908, Eckenstein designed the first 10-point crampon, which dramatically reduced the need for step-cutting in ice. He was probably the best climber in England, even outstripping Mummery, but his achievements were little known because of his almost fanatical objection to publicity.
They may well have had similar thoughts about the Alpine Club and Burton, but their climbing techniques differed greatly. Eckenstein was a natural leader who climbed technically and logically without taking unnecessary risks, whereas Crowley was impulsive. Where Eckenstein studied each move before selecting which muscles to use Crowley tended to use his whole body. Nevertheless, they made a very good partnership and planned to meet later that year in the Alps. Crowley later summed up Eckenstein as a climber thus:
“Eckenstein, provided he could get three fingers on something that could be described by a man far advanced in hashish as a ledge, would be smoking his pipe on that ledge a few seconds later, and none of us could tell how he had done it.”
“I saw no sense in paying fifteen guineas for the privilege of wearing a long black gown more cumbersome than the short blue one, and paying thirteen and fourpence instead of six and eightpence if I were caught smoking in it; to write B.A. after my name would have been a decided waste of ink.”
He came into a large inheritance during his final year at Cambridge, so now had a substantial private income. Consequently, Aleister no longer considered gainful employment to be essential – in fact, to be honest, he never even considered employment!. His inheritance (£40,000 is mentioned by him in Confessions, although Susan Roberts, in The Magician of the Golden Dawn, tells us this sum was nearer £50,000) would have been sufficient to provide a very good standard of living for any normal person for the rest of his or her life had it been invested wisely. But Aleister, as we shall discover, was far from being that 'normal person' and set out on his mountaineering and magical quests with tremendous zeal and reckless extravagance.
Within a few weeks of leaving Trinity, he began some serious training on the Schönbühl glacier near Zermatt, in the Swiss Alps, with Eckenstein, the aim being a future assault on K2, the second highest peak in the Karakoram Range in the Himalayas. Bad weather caused them to remain on the glacier for longer than intended, during which time The Kabbalah Unveiled became Crowley's constant companion; he resolved to find the elusive 'Secret Sanctuary of the Saints'. He became ill during this training period and was compelled to go back down the mountain to Zermatt.
One evening, he gave an ad-hoc talk on alchemy (knowing little about the subject apart from what he had read) in one of the beer-halls. It appeared to impress the mainly English speaking captive audience, one member of which was Julian L. Baker (1848 – 1925), an analytical chemist who claimed to have fixed mercury. Either being dumbfounded by Crowley's unbridled bravado, or not wishing to embarrass him, Baker never commented on his speech on the walk back to the hotel they were sharing. However, as a result of their conversation, Crowley realised Baker was a man who could possibly help him in his quest.
He went to sleep determined to speak to him again in the morning, but Baker left the hotel early. Crowley set off in pursuit, and eventually tracked him down some distance from Zermatt. He convinced Baker of his desperate need to find the Secret Sanctuary, after which Baker intimated that he knew a man who was connected to an organisation that could possibly hold a key. They arranged to meet later that year in London, and did so in October.
Julian Baker introduced him to George Cecil Jones (c. 1870 - 1953), a Welsh industrial chemist and a member of the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (G.D.). He was very widely read in Magick and, being by profession an analytical chemist, was able to investigate the subject in a scientific manner. As soon as he realised that Jones really understood the matter, Aleister went to Basingstoke, Hampshire, where Jones lived, and more or less ‘sat in his pocket’. He quickly convinced his host of the knowledge he had already gained and his potential to become a great magician; Jones put his name forward for membership of the Order. Despite his being a member of the G.D. and his long association with Crowley, comparatively little is known about his proposer.
Aleister Crowley had money. In fact, at this early stage in his life he still had loads of money, so no time was wasted in recruiting him. He joined the G.D. on 18 November 1898 as a Neophyte and took his membership very seriously; he advanced quickly through its grades (its rituals have been printed in The Equinox, Vol. I, Nos. II and III). Upon initiation he took the magical motto Frater Perdurabo (Latin for 'I Will Endure'), and was shown the secret signs, handshake and steps of the Order. He was entrusted with some ‘priceless secrets’ including the Sacred Alphabet, the names of the planets with their attribution to the days of the week, and details of the ten Sephiroth of the Kabbalah. He was already well-versed in all of this and much more through his own reading and research, but understood how vitally important it is to drill any aspirant in the essential groundwork.
He achieved the grade of Zelator in December, and that of Practicus in February 1899, but could not advance to the next grade of Philosophus for another three months, so did not attain that until May. According to the G.D., a Philosophus cannot proceed to the Second Order in under seven months of achieving this grade, and even after that period of time must be specially invited.
Crowley soon became disillusioned with the members of the G.D., having found very few 'of any intellect or spiritual stature' as he put it. In the meantime, Jones, who was well aware of Crowley’s potential and passion for magick, had loaned him a copy of the recently translated Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage (click HERE for a FREE PDF COPY of this book), with which he became fascinated, or possibly fixated.
Crowley had built two temples in separate rooms in his apartment, one white, one black. These represented the twin pillars of the Light and the Dark, Jachin and Boaz, which stood in the porch of Solomon’s temple. The white temple was lined with six large mirrors to throw back the forces of invocations (so that nothing of the force was lost). The black temple was empty except for a human skeleton and a large cupboard in which could be found the figure of an ebony Negro standing on his hands supporting an altar. Inscribed on the floor in both rooms were a magic circle, a triangle, and pentagrams.
The pair worked together performing Ceremonial Magick, evoking spirits, consecrating talismans, and so on. He grew to respect and admire Bennett greatly, and considered him to be a friend - very few people in Aleister's life achieved this exalted status! An interesting tale relating to Bennett’s lustre (a long glass prism referred to as his blasting stick) concerns a member of a group of Theosophists who doubted it had any power. Completely unperturbed, he pointed the lustre at the unfortunate man; it took fourteen hours before he was able to move a muscle!
Allan Bennett suffered from the dire consequences of chronic asthma, and was relying heavily on a concoction of drugs to relieve the symptoms. Crowley and Jones were very concerned for their friend’s health, so together they persuaded him to leave England for warmer climes. Crowley knew Bennett would not go if he thought the cost of relocation had come from close charitable means, i.e. him, so he explained the situation to Laura Horniblow, the wife of a colonel serving in India with whom he was having an affair. She gave Aleister £100 for the purpose, but that ‘gift’ was to contribute much towards the adverse publicity to be heaped on him later in life. Bennett had no qualms about moving to the Far East as he believed his future lay in Buddhism.
He set sail for Ceylon (known as Sri Lanka since 1972) where he joined a Buddhist monastery, taking the name Bhikkhu Ananda Mettaya after qualifying. In 1902, he moved to Burma where he had been offered employment and, more importantly to him, where he considered Buddhism had remained uncorrupted. Before leaving these shores, Allan Bennett gave Crowley a number of his magical notebooks, one of which contained the start of a Kabbalistic dictionary which he would later develop into Liber 777.
“On first arriving at Boleskine, I innocently frightened some excellent people by my habit of taking long walks over the moors. One morning I found a large stone jar at my front door. It was not an infernal machine; it was illicit whisky - a mute, yet eloquent appeal, not to give away illicit stills that I might happen to stumble across in my rambles.”
Crowley, although slightly peeved to put it mildly, was not too perturbed. He went immediately to Paris to where Mathers now lived on a permanent basis. Being in desperate need of a trustworthy ally in the G.D., Mathers performed the necessary ceremony without hesitation in January 1900, an act which only served to outrage the fractious London members.
The ensuing uproar caused several of those London members to resign. Mathers was eventually expelled from the original Order, mainly on the grounds that he had put its authority into jeopardy by revealing his suspicions that the founding documents linking them to an older occult order in Germany had been forged by another member.
Frater Perdurabo, accompanied by Soror Fidelis (Elaine Simpson) who had also sided with Mathers, attempted to obtain possession of the Order's property on his behalf, and he too was expelled from the G.D. just two years after joining. This farce has been well documented. See also Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn for further details.
Tired with the incessant infighting, Aleister felt a compelling need to get away from it all. He decided to broaden his magical knowledge and outlook on life by circumnavigating the globe. After leaving a few personal belongings with Mathers, he headed for New York aboard the SS Pennsylvania, arriving there on 6 July, but stayed for only two or three days in the city. New York, like the whole of the eastern coast of the USA, was experiencing an unprecedented heat wave which caused more than 400 deaths in Manhattan, 800 throughout the metropolitan area, and hundreds more in New England and New Jersey. He decided it was ‘hotter’ than the mayhem he had left behind in London, so boarded a train bound for Mexico City.
There are insinuations that he chose Mexico because the police wanted to question him over allegations made by Laura Horniblow. She was a little annoyed with her toy boy for dumping her, so had written to him requesting repayment of the £100 she had supposedly given him. As was his wont, he ignored her request, so she lodged a complaint with the police. She also reported she had been tortured and sodomised by him, but did not wish to press charges for fear her husband would discover her infidelity. Nevertheless, the name 'Aleister Crowley' was now known to the authorities. A 'file' was opened which already contained inaccurate information, and which was to grow over the years.
He found Mexico, too, to be hot, but not humid as New York; Mexico City did not have huge glass and concrete skyscrapers which reflected and radiated the sun's heat on to the streets. Up to this point in his life, he had only experienced a Northern European climate. Aleister rented part of a house overlooking the Alameda, a municipal park in the downtown part of the city. He hired a young local girl as his maid and continued his magical studies.
He gained a new concept of the Kabbalah and began to perceive the real implications of what he was doing. For example, the word abracadabra is familiar to everyone, but he wondered why it possessed such a reputation. By means of the Kabbalah and his own analysis, he restored its ‘true spelling’ to abrahadabra (with its gematrical value of 418), which he considered to be the essential formula of the Great Work, adopting the word as the proper way to conduct all major Magical Operations.
Using the authority invested in him by Mathers, he formed an Order called The Lamp of the Invisible Light. The Order demanded a light burn continually in a temple containing talismans corresponding with the forces of Nature. Daily invocations were to be performed with the object of making the light itself a consecrated centre or focus of spiritual energy. This light would then radiate and automatically enlighten such minds as were ready to receive it. He left Don Jesus Medina, supposedly one of the highest chiefs of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, to run the Order as its High Priest. Before Crowley left Mexico, so he assures us, he was admitted to the thirty-third and final degree of Freemasonry by Don Jesus (Confessions, Part II, Ch. 23). Other than a small paragraph in Confessions, he never mentioned The Lamp of the Invisible Light or Don Jesus again:
"Even today, the experiment seems to me interesting and the conception sublime. I am rather sorry that I lost touch with Don Jesus; I should like very much to know how it turned out."
Other than continuing his magical studies and development, he travelled extensively throughout the country mainly on horseback. On one such excursion:
“Crossing a hillside, I saw a Mexican some thirty yards below the track, apparently asleep in the sun. I thought I would warn him of his danger and rode over. He must have been dead three weeks, for he had been completely mummified. Neither the coyotes nor the turkey-buzzards will touch a dead Mexican. His flesh has been too thoroughly impregnated with chillies and other pungent condiments.”
Oscar Eckenstein joined him in Mexico towards the end of the year. He told Crowley to put aside magick for the time being and to practice meditation and concentration instead. But the main reason Eckenstein was in Mexico was not simply to socialise with Aleister, but to climb, and to take him higher than he had ever climbed in the Alps.
On his departure from England, Aleister had corresponded with Soror F., who had moved to Hong Kong. They arranged to meet on a weekly basis in astral form, and to write down everything that occurred. Several of these visits turned out very well; she saw and heard him, and on comparing notes, their separate reports of conversations concurred. Later, when he reached Hong Kong, he recognised the place immediately and picked out her house on a hillside, even though he had never seen a photograph of it. But, as will be seen, their reunion was not to be the happy occasion he had expected it would be.
From Mexico, he travelled to San Francisco, which he described as "a glorified El Paso, a madhouse of frenzied money-making and pleasure-seeking." The one area of the city which he did consider interesting was ‘Chinatown’, where he spent the majority of his time.
He then paid a visit to Honolulu, arriving on 9 May 1901. He went there with the notion of renting a hut on Waikiki Beach, engaging the 'services' of a native girl, and devoting his time to poetry and magick. He did get to spend most of his time on Waikiki Beach writing poetry, but this was in between indulging his passions with a non-native 'girl' called Alice, an ‘exquisitely beautiful American woman of Scottish origin’, whom he met in his hotel shortly after arriving in Honolulu. She was ten years his senior and had a boy in his teens in tow. She was married to a lawyer in the USA and had gone to Hawaii to escape the hay fever season. After five or six weeks of passsion, Aleister persuaded Alice to accompany him to Japan; she did, but went back to ‘her provider’ shortly afterwards.
“Alice had broken my boy's heart; she had taught me what women were worth. For her I had surrendered my single-minded devotion to my spiritual Quest; I had sold my soul to the devil for sixpence, and the coin was counterfeit.”
He saw very little of Japan, but did spend some time in Kamakura, a city located in the Prefecture of Kanagawa, about 31 miles South West of Tokyo, now a popular tourist destination. Of Japan he said, “I did not understand the people at all and therefore did not like them very much.” He also resented their "racial arrogance."
Aleister set sail for Shanghai, but could not even be bothered to take a stroll through the city. He wanted to reach Hong Kong where he was to meet Elaine Simpson again. He thought she would be able to 'understand, judge, encourage and advise him'; there was no-one better qualified as far as he was concerned. Alas, he was dreadfully disappointed. "She was still playing at magick, as another might play at bridge." Fidelis had married a Hong Kong merchant called Paul Harry Witkowski in May 1900, and now spent her time living the life of a colonial lady discussing dresses, dinners and dances. The final shock came when he discovered she had attended a fancy dress ball in her Adept’s robes and regalia, and had walked away with the first prize!
Quickly putting his disappointment behind him, Crowley continued on to Singapore where he boarded a ship heading for Ceylon. Here, he was genuinely delighted to renew his friendship with Allan Bennett, who had been engaged by the Solicitor General of Ceylon, the Hon. Ponnambalam Ramanathan (1851-1930), a Tamil of high caste and ‘the greatest Ceylonese of all times’, as a private tutor to his younger sons. Together, the two friends went on a ‘retirement’ to Kandy, a tooth of the Buddha, in the centre of Ceylon (now a major tourist attraction) where they stayed for several months. Of his whole time in the Far East, he wrote:
“I had been studying the original scriptures of Hinduism and Buddhism very thoroughly. Besides this, I had discussed every aspect of religion and philosophy with immensely varied types of thinkers. From men of such spiritual and scholarly attainment as Allan Bennett, the Hon. P. Ramanathan, Prince Jinawaravansa, Paramaguru Swami, Shri Swami Swayam Prakashanand Maithala, to such excremental exponents of error as theosophists, missionaries and even members of the Salvation Army.”
In addition, Bennett taught him the principles of Yoga; fundamentally, there is only one – how to stop thinking! He was given advice on how to achieve his Samadhi (Union with the Lord), and he suggested Aleister develop a ‘magical memory’ (sammasati). Prior to his departure from Ceylon, Bennett warned Crowley not to trust Mathers, and to distance himself from the man. After bidding farewell to his mentor, he sailed to India. He began to grow a beard, and practised many of the points of conduct Eckenstein had told him should be observed when amongst Mohammedans.
During the few months Crowley was travelling throughout Southern India, to places such as Anuradapura, Tuticorin and Madras, Allan Bennett relocated to Akyab on the western coast of Burma. He was now living in a monastery called Lamma Sayadaw Kyoung, which is where the bhikkhus 'could at least boast fidelity to the principles of the Buddha'. Despite the fact he had seen Bennett recently, he decided to take the long coastal route to Burma and ‘drop in’ to pass the time of day with him. However, he stayed for only a couple of weeks before setting off for Calcutta – he was expecting a very important message from Oscar Eckenstein.
Eckenstein was the natural and actual leader, with Crowley appointed Second in Command (he had, after all, financed the whole operation and was certainly the next best and most experienced mountaineer in the assembled motley crew). After setting off on 29 March, the party suffered many hardships and logistical problems on the long trek to the base of the mountain. With some three tons of baggage to move, clearly no easy task, they hired 17 ekkas (two-wheeled carts drawn by oxen) and 150 porters. They also needed to hire new porters locally on a daily basis.
Travellers to Chogo Ri are limited as to season by the fact that the Zoji La, a high mountain pass between Srinagar (the capital of the northernmost Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir) and Leh in the western section of the Himalayan mountain range, is impassable before a certain date, which varies little from year to year. They were lucky to manage to cross as early as they did on 4 May. The pass closes again in the autumn, so if a traveller fails to get back to Kashmir before the snow blocks it, he is practically compelled to spend the winter in Baltistan, a region ofnorthern Pakistan.
In the middle of June, following many weeks of arduous trekking and climbing, they established Camp 10 at 18,733’. Eckenstein became ill before they reached Camp 11, at roughly 20,000’, so it was decided that Crowley should push on towards the summit with Pfannl and Guillarmod. After several attempts, the summit, so near yet so far away, proved impossible to reach due to terrible weather conditions preventing the party from conquering it. Crowley claimed to have climbed to above 22,000’, and gives compelling reasons to substantiate this claim, but official records show it was slightly less, at a mere 21,653’. After this, he suffered another severe bout of malaria, his temperature reaching 39.4° Centigrade. They were all suffering from one thing or another:
“Knowles had lost 33 of his original 186 pounds; the doctor some 20 of his 167; a man with galloping consumption could hardly do better! Their haemoglobin had diminished by twenty per cent. Eckenstein was suffering from various complicated pulmonary troubles; Knowles and the doctor were repeatedly down with influenza; as for myself, the recrudescence of my malaria, which began with a violent liver chill on the twenty-seventh of July and lasted till the end of the month, kept my temperature at 39.3° or thereabouts Pfannl was suffering from oedema of both lungs and his mind was gone.”
The entire story of this expedition takes up several chapters in Confessions. It is highly descriptive at every stage throughout and well worth reading as an adventure story in its own right, but is far too long to cover in a condensed biography such as this.
The expedition ended for A.C. in mid-September when he returned to what could be termed ‘civilisation’. Despite failing to reach the summit, the members of this K2 expedition made a remarkable effort at the time, and should be proud of what they achieved. A new record was set for the length of time spent on a glacier (68 days by Crowley on the Baltoro glacier), and debatably, a world altitude record. They would doubtless have reached the summit had it not been for the extremely adverse conditions. But regardless of the weather, when we consider the lack of modern-day communications and equipment, including clothing, footwear and provisions, it is no wonder the expedition failed to achieve its objective. No other person climbed higher on K2 until 1939, and the summit was not reached until 31 July 1954, some six and a half years after Crowley’s death and more than half a century after this attempt!
To cut a very long story short, the intrepid wanderer set off for home from Bombay on 4 October, calling at Egypt, via Aden, somewhere he describes as "a perfectly ghastly place to live in" (the author can personally vouch for this having spent almost 10 months there as a soldier between 6 September 1966 and 30 June 1967). He disembarked in Cairo ten days later and ‘was transported to the seventh heaven’. He booked in at Shephard's Hotel where he stayed until 5 November, "wallowing in the flesh pots." From Cairo he travelled to Paris, a city he loved and hated with equal passion. During his prolonged absence, he had maintained some irregular correspondence with Gerald Kelly; he met up with him again in his new studio in Rue Campagne-Première (off Boulevard du Montparnasse), where he imposed himself for a while.
Aleister ignored Allan Bennett’s warning, and called on Mathers. On his departure for New York, he had asked Mathers to take care of an expensive dressing-case, a bag and a few valuable books, so called on him to request their return. Mathers handed over the books, but was apparently in 'the process of moving' and could not lay his hands on the other items - they were never seen again. Crowley was keen to demonstrate his newly acquired skills in Yoga, but Mathers had no desire to listen, let alone treat him as an equal, which he now considered himself to be.
On returning to Gerald’s apartment, Aleister was asked by his host to free a friend of his, Miss Q, from the clutches of Mrs M, a 'vampire' and sorceress who was staying with Miss Q. Mrs M was modelling a sphinx with the intention of endowing it with life so that it could carry out her evil wishes; her victim was to be Miss Q. He agreed, so Gerald took him to Miss Q’s apartment where they managed to get her 'out of the picture'. Mrs M began to appear younger and more beautiful and voluptuous to Crowley with each passing second, but he skilfully resisted her wiles and managed to defeat her by turning her into an old hag who hobbled out of the room. He discovered later that Mrs M had been sent by Mathers to kill him. See Confessions Chapter 42 for a complete description of this tale.
A.C. soon became restless, as was his natural wont, and flitted regularly between Paris and London. At one stage he became engaged to be married, but on returning to the French capital after spending a week in London he was supposedly too 'shy' to resume relations with his fiancée, although he devoted several poems to her, one of these being Eileen. So, had he realised he was not actually in love? Had this engagement simply been as a result of boredom?
By April 1903, he had become totally jaded with the Parisian highlife, so returned to Boleskine. He had already spent nine months in his 'manor' during the last quarter of 1899 and the first two of 1900 preparing for the Operation of Abra-Melin the Mage. Throughout his three-year absence, the ‘manor’ had gained a fearful reputation among the locals who would walk miles out of their way to avoid the ‘demons’ living there. But the operation, which requires six months of dedicated preparation, was to be put on hold yet again.
Rose was engaged to a friend of Gerald’s by the name of Howell. She was not in love with him, but was being put under pressure by the family to remarry. She was, however, in love with another, a married man by the name of Frank Summers, but knew that affair would never go any further. Aleister, being the gentleman that he was, offered to help her out of her dilemma by marrying her with no strings attached, in other words, marry and then go their separate ways. She gratefully accepted.
They married in great haste on 12 August 1903, much to her family's initial dismay and strong disapproval. Although it was supposed to have been a marriage of convenience, it did not work out as planned for one unconsidered reason – they fell in love! The Kelly family eventually accepted the marriage, but not before Rose’s father, the Reverend Frederick Festus Kelly, demanded that Crowley settle ten thousand pounds on Rose – try to guess his response!
He called his new wife 'Ouarda', an Arabic word for rose. A belated honeymoon, beginning at the end of that summer, took them to Paris, where Crowley spotted Mathers' wife, Moina, looking like a 'streetwalker' while strolling over the newly constructed Pont Alexander III close to the Eiffel Tower; he assumed Mathers must have fallen on hard times. From Paris they journeyed south to Marseilles where they boarded a boat for Egypt. Here, they spent a night together in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. To quote Crowley:
“We went, accordingly, after dinner, with candles. More from habit than anything else, as I imagine, I had with me a small notebook of Japanese vellum in which were written my principal invocations, etc. Among these was a copy of the 'Preliminary Invocation' of The Goetia.
However, back to the facts. The King's Chamber was aglow as if with the brightest tropical moonlight. The pitiful dirty yellow flame of the candle was like a blasphemy, and I put it out. The astral light remained during the whole of the invocation and for some time afterwards, though it lessened in intensity as we composed ourselves to sleep. For the rest, the floor of the King's Chamber is particularly uncompromising. In sleeping out on rocks, one can always accommodate oneself more or less to the local irregularities, but the King's Chamber reminded me of Brand; and I must confess to having passed a very uncomfortable night. I fear my dalliance had corrupted my Roman virtue. In the morning the astral light had completely disappeared and the only sound was the flitting of the bats.”
On their departure from Cairo, Aleister and his bride set sail for Ceylon where Rose announced her pregnancy shortly after their arrival. Crowley abandoned his plans to visit Allan Bennett in Burma before continuing on to China. After the thrill (for A.C.) of a big-game hunting expedition in Ceylon, they returned westwards where they could be assured of better medical care and attention for Rose and their unborn child.
The honeymooners returned to Cairo in the middle of March, shortly after which Aleister underwent a dramatic life-changing experience. He had been trying for several years to contact his Holy Guardian Angel using the methods described in The Sacred Magick of Abra-Melin the Mage, but without success.
Ouarda next instructed him to enter the room of their apartment (where she had previously received the message from Horus) at noon exactly, and to leave at precisely 1 p.m., on 8, 9 and 10 April. He was to write down word for word what he was told. In those three hours on those three consecutive days he took dictation from a praeterhuman intelligence which identified itself as Aiwass. The resulting text was Liber AL vel Legis, which became known as The Book of the Law. Using Gematria, Crowley later discovered that the spelling of this name should be AIWAZ.
This book was to become the core of his future philosophy. He had been named the Prophet of a new Aeon, ending the Aeon of Osiris and bringing in the Aeon of Horus, signalling the start of a new era for mankind. The old religions were to be swept aside. Before leaving Cairo, Crowley arranged for a copy of the Stèle of Revealing to be made.
Following this remarkable episode, the couple returned to Europe, firstly to Paris where Crowley wrote a formal letter to Mathers to inform him that the Secret Chiefs had dismissed him and had appointed him (Crowley) as the visible Head of the Order. They then renewed old acquaintances before continuing on to Boleskine to await the arrival of their child, a girl by the name of Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith, born on 28 July 1904, and called Lilith (a mythological female Mesopotamian storm demon associated with wind) for short. On arriving at Boleskine, they arranged for a doctor named Percival Bott to stay with them to undertake the accouchement, and asked Crowley’s Aunt Annie (from Coventry) to preside over the household.
Having settled back in, they began to carry out the instructions given by Aiwass by preparing perfume and cakes according to the prescription in Chapter 3, verses 23 - 29 of the Book of the Law. Since his marriage, Crowley had more or less put his beloved magick to one side, but not long after their homecoming, and before the birth of their child, he had been forced to resume magical work of sorts on realising Mathers was attacking them magically. He kept a pack of bloodhounds for hunting purposes at Boleskine, but Mathers had managed to kill the majority of them, and the servants became ill in various ways.
Besides these unfortunate incidents, he spotted a beetle in the bathroom, which, despite his worldly experiences, was like no other he had come across before. It was about an inch and a half long with a single horn, almost as long as itself, which ended in a small sphere similar to an eye. From then on, for probably a fortnight or so, a plague of these beetles descended upon Boleskine, not only in the house, but on the nearby rocks, in the gardens, and by what was known as the sacred spring - they were everywhere! He even sent a specimen to London to be examined by ‘experts’ at the Natural History Museum who were unable to identify the species.
Crowley saw this as a tangible piece of magick; the Book of the Law Chapter 3, verse 25 reads as follows: '..... make cakes & eat unto me. This hath also another use; let it be laid before me, and kept thick with perfumes of your orison: it shall become full of beetles as it were and creeping things sacred unto me'. This should have convinced him that the Book of the Law meant business, but he tells us, “It left me absolutely cold.”
Other than the aforementioned attacks, one of the workmen had suddenly become 'insane'; he attacked Rose for no apparent reason while she was inspecting the offices. Crowley grabbed a salmon gaff and threw him into the coal cellar to await the arrival of the police. After taking the necessary steps to ensure Rose was protected against these 'murderous attacks' by Mathers, he retaliated strongly by evoking Beelzebub along with his forty-nine servitors. As soon as Beelzebub 'got on the job', as Crowley put it, the magical assaults ceased and his interest in all things magical waned again. The Book of the Law was put to one side.
From time to time, various friends and acquaintances paid them a visit, including “a quite insignificant creature named Lieutenant-Colonel Gormley, who was a medical soldier and had spent countless years in India, Burma and South Africa without acquiring a single fact of interest. Gormley claimed to have been flagellated by over two thousand women. I rather suspect him of vain gloriousness: it seems a very large number. He was in love with my wife, chiefly because she treated him with such disgust and contempt. He had proposed to her several times a week, even before her first marriage, and he saw no reason why he should abandon this habit merely on account of Major Skerrett and myself.”
One of their guests was Guillarmod of the failed Chogo Ri expedition, with whom he discussed and arranged an assault on Kanchenjunga (K3), the third highest mountain in the Himalayas. Guillarmod considered he was a great hunter, and constantly bragged about his 'achievements', so Crowley decided to have a bit of fun with his guest. Consequently, a humorous tale from this vacation concerned the successful hunting and killing of a haggis by the said Guillarmod (a haggis being described by Crowley as a rogue ram to his gullible visitor). A few mornings later, Hugh Gillies, an employee of A.C., came rushing in to report a sighting of just such a beast. Guillarmod was armed with a 10-bore Paradox, with steel-core bullets, a reliable weapon "that will bring an elephant up short with a mere shock, even if it is not hit in a vital part." With such a firearm, he could advance fearlessly towards the most formidable haggis in the Highlands.
After an hour and a half of crawling and climbing in icy rain which chilled them to the bone, they reached the top of the hill where the haggis loomed large in the mist, barely fifty yards away. Unbeknown to Guillarmod, a huge supply of oats had induced the beast to feed in that spot all morning. "Guillarmod pressed both triggers. He made no mistake. Both bullets struck and expanded; he blew away the entire rear section of Farmer McNab's prize ram." Guillarmod was well pleased with his prowess. He had the ram's head stuffed and mounted, and a suitable inscription was engraved upon a plate of massive gold.
Crowley was egotistical, and was definitely not a team leader, as records show. In difficult situations, instead of reacting like normal human beings, he expected everyone to be as resilient as he. Without elaborating on the facts, it is suffice to say that regardless of holding almost every record alongside Eckenstein, Crowley was spurned by the entire mountaineering fraternity after this expedition for having walked down the mountainside alone leaving several members of the party dead while the remainder searched for their bodies. Unsurprisingly, he gave a completely different account from any of those given by other surviving members of the expedition:
“I made the necessary arrangements about digging out the corpses and building them a commemorative cairn, which was done. The next day, September 3rd, I left, and reached Darjeeling on Friday. I was very sad at heart about the death of my friends, but with regard to the mountain I was in excellent spirits. I had demonstrated beyond doubt the existence of an easy way up. I was sure of being able to establish a main camp within striking distance of the summit, and I had familiarised myself with all the vagaries of the weather and the snow. Cut short as the expedition had been, at its first leap, the actual attainment had not been insignificant. We had reached a height of approximately twenty-five thousand feet, and found life at that altitude as enjoyable and work as easy as anywhere else. I had written a detailed proposal to Eckenstein, suggesting that we should tackle the mountain in 1906 - but no foreigners!”
He wrote accounts of his version of the expedition for the Pioneer of India and the Daily Mail of London, and republished them at a later date in Vanity Fair.
Crowley went via Darjeeling to Calcutta to await the arrival of Rose and Lilith, which is where he received a most welcome invitation from the Maharajah of Moharbhanj to go hunting in his kingdom of Orissa (on the east coast of India, at the edge of the Ganges flood plain, by the Bay of Bengal). He willingly accepted his generous offer, which helped to pass the time spent waiting for his family. He also made astral contact with Elaine Simpson again; she had now moved to Shanghai. During one of their astral meetings, on 22 October, he noticed a Secret Chief in the form of a hawk in her company, and realised the Secret Chiefs still demanded he work for them. He had wiped the Book of the Law and its implications from his conscious mind, but now wondered where he might have left it.
When Rose and Lilith arrived in Calcutta, he said to Rose, "You've got here just in time to see me hanged!" He was overjoyed with the timing of her arrival because he had been advised by a local barrister to get out of the country 'pretty damn quick'. In his pocket he carried a Webley pistol, which he had used to shoot dead at least one of a group of assailants stalking him in a dark alley. Of this incident, he wrote:
“My arms were held firmly to my sides, but even so I was too economically minded to fire through my pocket; I managed to raise the muzzle above the edge. A violent explosion followed. I had fired without aim, in pitch blackness; I could not even see the white robes of the men who held me. In the lightning moment of the flash I saw only that these ‘whitenesses’ were falling backwards away from me, as if I had upset a screen by accident.”
Throughout his time in Mexico, he had been experimenting with making himself invisible, but was far from satisfied with the results. He had reached what he called the ‘flickering’ condition, but had never succeeded in reaching complete invisibility. Perhaps, because of the situation in which he found himself on this particular evening, he claimed to have accomplished it and slipped away unnoticed from the alley. The perpetrator of this crime was now being sought by the police. They were searching all ships and hotels for a European, possibly a sailor, matching the vague description given by the mob.
Rose was offered a choice between Persia (known as Iran since 1935) and China for the next stage of this excursion. Being 'bored' with Omar Khayyam, she opted for China, a country which they had intended to visit as a stage of their honeymoon trip in 1903/04 before Rose announced her pregnancy with Lilith. Leaving many of Aleister’s cumbersome personal belongings in storage, they sailed initially to Burma, which is where Aleister deposited Rose and Lilith in a hotel while he met up with Allan Bennett again. Bennett, who was now revered in his adopted land being a 'white' Buddhist, was living in a monastery near Rangoon, but his health was suffering terribly, and which, despite the much improved climate, seemed to be deteriorating. He had also picked up several tropical complaints. The Far East did not appear to be helping his condition as they thought and hoped it might.
On 15 November, the Crowleys set off up the Irrawaddy and arrived in Mandalay 6 days later. After a few days, they continued the journey to their next stop, Bhamo, reaching this town on 1 December. They were delayed in this outpost for seventeen days while Crowley awaited the arrival of his passport. On their fourth day out from Bhamo, on route to Tengyueh, they crossed the Chinese frontier, marked by a small stream in a ravine. They soon discovered there were hardly any decent roads; in fact there was nothing recognisable as a road for the majority of this long and dangerous excursion into mainly uncharted territory. Crowley rode on horseback for a major part of the journey, while Rose and Lilith travelled in a sedan chair. There were a series of minor accidents during the early days – horses slipping and tripping, people falling over and so on. It could not be considered "good going by the average goat".
Before leaving Tengyueh, Crowley was advised on how best to treat his coolies if he wanted to retain their loyalty, and Litton provided him with detailed notes describing various stages of the long trek to Yunnanfu, which proved to be extremely useful. He was also told that he must engage an interpreter, and found such a person in 'Johnny White' to fulfil this role. He was the first Chinese person with whom Aleister had been in direct permanent association; he thought it highly amusing when he discovered that Johnny White's Chinese name was 'Ah Sin'.
The Crowleys had been assured they would find ample supplies of fresh food of all sorts everywhere on all stages of the trek to Yunnanfu, but nothing could have been farther from the truth; they could not even get fresh milk as the Chinese considered it 'obscene to extract it'. They did, however, have an abundant supply of tea! But they didn’t have to endure hardship for the entire journey. In many of the major towns they came across, they were wined and dined in style by consuls and other high-ranking dignitaries.
China was where Aleister was introduced to the 'correct' art of smoking opium, which certainly must have contributed to his rapidly developing drug addiction. China was also where he began his Augoeides invocations, which lasted for several months.
The party reached Yunnanfu, the capital of Yunnan province in Southern China on the northern shore of Lake Dian, on 20 February, and stayed for ten days. A.C. was delighted when he managed to purchase a number of old prints at prices so low that "he could hardly believe his ears." After breakfast and Tiffin with the consul general, Mr. Wilkinson, on 2 March, they continued on their journey. When he hired new coolies for this next stage, Wilkinson made him promise on no account to strike any of the men, but to rely on him to punish any misconduct when they returned to Yunnanfu. On several occasions, Crowley had to bite his lip and ignore their rebellious and insolent attitude - for now.
For various reasons, his original plan to descend the Yangtze had to be abandoned. For one thing, earlier delays at Bhamo and Tengyueh had robbed him of precious time, and he was anxious to return to Europe to prepare a new expedition to Kanchenjunga in the spring of 1907. He decided, instead, to head south for Tonkin, the seaport for Haiphong, in Vietnam.
Arriving at Manhao, a village situated on the banks of the Red River (this river flows from southwestern China through northern Vietnam to the Gulf of Tonkin), Crowley hired a dug-out to take them down the rapids to Hokow. It was here he spotted an opportunity to get even with the coolies:
“Having got everything aboard, I proceeded to pay the head man the exact sum due to him - less certain fines. Then the band played. They started to threaten the crew and prevented them from casting off the ropes. They incited the bystanders to take their part; and presently we had thirty or forty yelling maniacs preparing to stone us. I got out my .400 Cordite Express and told Salama to wade ashore and untie the ropes. But like all Kashmiris, thoughtlessly brave in the face of elemental dangers, he was an absolute coward when opposed to men. I told him that unless be obeyed at once I would begin by shooting him. He saw I meant it and did his duty; while I covered the crowd with my rifle. Not a stone was thrown; three minutes later the fierce current had swept us away from the rioters.”
But the real danger was seemingly about to begin. According to A.C. this was the only part of the journey where they encountered any serious risk of disaster. The Red River, although broad and deep, has all the traits of the wildest of mountain torrents, and falls in a succession of dangerous rapids, made all the more perilous by sudden sharp curves in the channel. At almost every turn they saw one or more wrecks; not a reassuring spectacle.
“I was given to understand, however, that disaster rarely overtook boats going down stream. It is when they are being towed by insufficient power up the rapids that they get out of control and are dashed upon the rocks. For all that, we managed to hit two nasty snags in the course of the day; one of them ripped a hole in us amidships; but the men managed to stop the leak with tarpaulin nailed in place by short boards with extraordinary speed and efficiency. They were evidently well accustomed to similar jobs.”
Arriving safely in Hokow on 18 March, they met an Englishman (name unknown) who gave them Tiffin and dined with them later that same evening. According to Crowley:
“We got gloriously drunk celebrating the success of a journey, which in the opinion of all reasonable people was a crazy escapade, doomed from the first to disaster. Another bubble had burst! The awe-inspiring adventure had proved as safe as a bus ride from the Bank to Battersea.”
Aleister was astounded by his wife’s durability in the four months spent crossing that vast, barren country in extreme changes of climate and terrain. She had not only looked after Lilith admirably, but had 'flourished' in what were truly demanding conditions; but his admiration for her adept motherhood was to be short lived!
The next day they travelled to Lao Kay, from where they hurried on to Yen Bay by train. On 20 March, they arrived in the capital, Hanoi, but stayed only for lunch as they wanted to catch the afternoon train to Haiphong. Two days later, they took a boat to Hong Kong, but even this simple crossing was not without its problems:
“We could not even get clear of our moorings without tearing away the port companion. Twenty-four hours later we stopped. The captain freely admitted that he had lost his reckoning, didn't know where he was, didn't know how to find out and didn't see why he should worry about it. He went back to his cards, leaving a junior officer to get entangled with the sextant and chronometer. Whether he obtained any results will never be known, for during the day we drifted in sight of Hoiho. By some weird coincidence, this was our first port of call. There being no harbour, we stood half a mile out to sea, rolling and bucking sickeningly while boats came from shore bringing our cargo; pigs in wicker crates which were stacked all over the ship three deep; and large baskets of poultry. It became quite impossible to move about the main deck at all, and even on the upper deck there was considerable crowding. The stench created by these animals, a number of which died on the voyage, was the limit.”
Hong Kong was considered to be a haven after the rigours they had endured in a country Crowley surmised had not changed in a thousand years. In Hong Kong, they relaxed in resplendent luxury to shake off the dust and fatigue accumulated over the previous four months. Then using the excuse that he was probably still a ‘wanted’ man in Calcutta, Aleister persuaded Rose to return to England with Lilith via the Western route, calling there to collect his belongings they had not taken on the trek, while he went east to New York to try to raise the capital needed to finance another assault on K3.
As Rose departed for Calcutta, Crowley quickly set sail for Shanghai on 3 April to meet Fidelis again. Together, they invoked Aiwass who told him to forget Soror F. and continue working with his current Scarlet Woman, i.e. Rose, because F., staying ever faithful to her husband, would not consent to having a sexual relationship with him, and therefore could not become his Scarlet Woman. On his departure, he was in some doubt as to whether to go to North America via Honolulu (he wanted to visit the Hawaiian island of Oahu once more) or by the northern Pacific route to Vancouver. While he hesitated, "fate decided." The last berth for San Francisco via the Sandwich Islands was sold over his head. He sailed on 21 April by The Empress of India. After a fleeting glance at Japan they put out into the Pacific, and twelve days later docked in Vancouver.
“I was very disappointed with the Rockies, of which I had heard such eloquent encomiums. They are singularly shapeless; and their proportions are unpleasing. There is too much colourless and brutal base; too little snowy shapely summit. As for the ghastly monotony of the wilderness beyond them, through Calgary and Winnipeg right on to Toronto - words fortunately fail.”
He continued eastwards towards Buffalo to see the Niagara Falls before heading for New York. He spent about ten days in the city cementing some useful new acquaintances and sampling the restaurants and theatres (and no doubt the local women), but did little, if anything, to try to raise funds for a new expedition to K3 (it seems nobody had even heard of the Himalayas), before crossing the Atlantic to dock in Liverpool on 2 June. Upon his arrival, he was handed a letter informing him of the death of Lilith (she died of typhoid in Rangoon). Rose was already pregnant with their second child. What happened over the next few months is best summed up in Crowley’s own words:
“From the moment of landing I struck a sequence of physical shocks. As I struggled to my feet after the blasting bolt of my bereavement, I found myself with an infected gland in the groin which required excision. The first day I left the nursing home I got a chill in the right eye which obstructed a nasal duct and required a whole series of extremely painful operations which proved unsuccessful. In the course of these, I got neuralgia; this continued day and night for months, so violently that I felt myself going mad. After a bare month’s comparative health I acquired an ulcerated throat which knocked me out completely until the end of the year.
On the top of all this came the discovery that my wife was an hereditary dipsomaniac. When our baby was born it lay almost lifeless for more than three days and at three weeks old nearly died of bronchitis. I had the sense to send for oxygen before the doctor arrived and this precaution probably saved the child's life. I fought like a fiend against death. The doctor gave the strictest orders that not more than one person should be in the sick room at one time. My mother-in-law refused to obey. I thought I had suffered enough. It was her hypocrisy that had sought to justify her tippling by giving her children a share of the champagne and thus implanted in Rose the infernal impulse which had wrecked her life and love, and mine. I made no bones about it; I took the hag by the shoulders and ran her out of the flat, assisting her down the stairs with my boot lest she should misinterpret my meaning.
So Lola Zaza lives today. May her life prove worth the pains to preserve it.”
In shock from the news of Lilith’s death, he wandered round London for a while in a daze before meeting Rose again. It is said they fell into each other’s arms, sobbing uncontrollably. Crowley blamed Rose’s alcoholism for her mistake in forgetting to sterilise the teat on the baby’s bottle, which led to her developing typhoid. He never considered his own irresponsibility in abandoning her in Hong Kong on the other side of the world, leaving her to gather their belongings and make it home alone.
By coincidence, Fuller happened to be on sick leave and was recuperating in Britain in the summer of 1906. They met in one of Crowley's favourite haunts in London, the Hotel Cecil in The Strand. They took an instant liking to each other, both being interested in the occult and sharing several other common interests, one such being anti-Christianity. Fuller quickly finalised his essay and dispatched it forthwith to Boleskine. Needless to say, he won the prize with his entry, The Star in the West, which praised Crowley greatly, although it is widely accepted that he did not pocket the prize money for his efforts. It would also seem that Fuller’s effort was the only entry submitted for the competition. The Star in the West was published in its own right in 1907.
His own life, having been turned upside down through circumstances not entirely of his own making, Crowley resolved to concentrate on performing the Operation of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage. The operation, as has been said elsewhere, requires six months of preparation, with the purpose being to obtain the Knowledge and Conversation of one’s Holy Guardian Angel. When the Angel appears the magician must call forth the Four Great Princes of the Evil of the World followed by their eight sub-princes, and finally their 316 servitors. To achieve a successful operation it is vital to prepare and charge talismans with the powers of each of these spirits. Anything is then possible! Crowley eventually completed the operation on 27 September 1906.
He spent many months in and out of hospital with the various problems described earlier. Their baby, Lola Zaza, a very sickly child, was born in September. While Rose and Lola were recovering in Chislehurst, he paid a visit to George Cecil Jones, the man responsible for introducing him to the G.D. in 1898, and discussed setting up a new Order together. Then, because of his severe throat problems, he visited a doctor in Bournemouth in mid-December, returning home on 29 January 1907.
While convalescing in the south coast resort, Crowley wrote Liber 777 in a week in January without the aid of reference books. Considering his phenomenal memory, this is plausible. He had studied the Mohammedan secret tradition under a qualified teacher in Cairo, learned the elements of Shaivite Yoga from Sri Parananda, studied Vedanta and Raja Yoga with the Mahatma Jnana Guru Yogi Sabhapaty Swami, and Buddhism under Bikkhu Ananda Mettaya (Allan Bennett). Bear in mind, too, he had been given the majority of Bennett’s magical notes before he left these shores to become a Buddhist in Ceylon. Crowley apparently disliked Bournemouth intensely, for on leaving the resort he wrote in his diary, ‘Left Bournemouth – one may hope for ever’.
The years 1907 – 1909 were very constructive for Aleister. With Jones' assistance (with whom he was staying at the time due to illness yet again), and as a consequence of his own travels, experiences and the vast amount of occult knowledge he had acquired, plus the matter of the fragmentation of the G.D. along with the souring of relations between him and Mathers, Crowley decided to form his own replacement Order with the intention it supersede the G.D. Together they wrote Liber LXI vel Causae, and in 1907 founded the Astrum Argentum A
In February 1907, he was introduced to George Montagu Bennett (1852 - 1931), the 7th Earl of Tankerville, through a mutual acquaintance, a pharmacist by the name of Edward Whineray. According to Crowley, Whineray was one of the most learned men in his profession; he had supplied Crowley with rare ingredients for some of his magical preparations. The Earl was a paranoid cocaine addict, and utterly convinced his mother, the eldest daughter of the 6th Duke of Manchester, was using magick to try to 'dispose of him'. He asked Crowley to help, which he agreed to do without hesitation, particularly as the Earl was to pay him not only a handsome retainer, but was also prepared to meet any expenses he incurred. The unsuspecting Earl was blissfully unaware of just how quickly Aleister could spend money - especially someone else's!
Crowley suggested Tankerville develop his own magical powers to counteract those ‘being used by his mother’, so over the next few weeks he gave him several books to study. Then, to ensure they would not be disturbed during his training, Aleister hired a yacht which they moored upstream from Buckler’s Hard, a maritime village on the western bank of the River Beaulieu in Hampshire. For a week or so Crowley tried to teach the Earl how to establish his astral body, but it was proving to be a difficult task. As a consequence, he considered a magical retirement to Morocco might rid the Earl of his paranoia and cocaine dependency (and more of his seemingly limitless money).
Upon their arrival in Tangiers, they found the country to be in turmoil because of an uprising against the sultan. Despite being confined to the city, Crowley found plenty in the way of 'local entertainment', but was finding it more and more difficult to conduct a sensible conversation with the Earl of Coke and Crankum, as he referred to Tankerville. Fortunately, they were not 'confined to barracks' for long; the sultan was overthrown and the country quickly returned to normal. Aleister thoroughly enjoyed his wanderings while soaking up the atmosphere, particularly as it wasn't costing him a penny, but Tankerville was rapidly losing interest in his strange surroundings and instruction:
“I could not get Coke to take any interest in the people, their customs, their ideas and their art. The sunshine on the sparkling sea, the infinite variety of colour and form, the tingling mixture of races and religions meant nothing to him. Beauty was literally splashed over life like a bucket of cold water over an athlete. Instead of exhilarating him, he shivered and moaned. He kept on groaning like a wounded animal: I want my wife! I want my children! Of course, what he really wanted was cocaine, and that was just the thing I did not want him to have.”
He did have some success with the Earl magically, but it was limited:
“I had managed to get rid of his persecution mania for the time being. Whenever he noticed his mother flying past the moon on her broomstick, he would perform a banishing ritual, and sail out in his astral body on to the wood and chop the broomstick like Siegfried with the lance of Wotan, and down she would fall into the Straits of Gibraltar, plop, plop.”
Crowley had been expecting the bombshell for some time, and his expectations were realised when his financier for this excursion to his beloved North Africa pulled the plug. Tankerville flipped and accused Crowley of being in cahoots with his mother. After the Earl’s outburst of, “I’m sick of your teaching, teaching, teaching, as if you were God Almighty .... ,“ they returned home via Granada, never to cross paths again.
Following his free holiday, and because he had squandered his inheritance and no longer had a regular income, Crowley began to take in pupils, the proceeds from his instruction providing a vital route back into the type of society to which he was used. He spent a good deal of time between 1907 and 1909 writing, turning out reams of poetry while criticising other poets and writers of the day.
Louis Unfraville Wilkinson (1881 - 1946), a friend and very talented writer himseld, had tried to rid him of the habit, but to no avail. It was simply part of Crowley’s nature to criticise his peers. Wilkinson was later to say about Crowley, “His vanity was his handicap. He was too sure of his genius to criticise or revise his own work ......” Wilkinson was appointed a literary executor in Aleister's will.
“He was an agnostic, a vegetarian, a mystic, a Tolstoyan, and several other things all at once. He endeavoured to express his spiritual state by wearing the green star of Esperanto, though he could not speak the language; by refusing to wear a hat, even in London, to wash, and to wear trousers. Whenever addressed, he wriggled convulsively, and his lips, which were three times too large for him, and had been put on hastily as an afterthought, emitted the most extraordinary laugh that had ever come my way; to these advantages he united those of being extraordinarily well read, over flowing with exquisitely subtle humour, and being one of the best natured people that ever trod this planet.”
He spotted Neuburg’s capacity for magick (also known as homosexuality) almost immediately and regarded him as a new and important disciple. Crowley devoted much time building up Neuburg’s strength and training him in magical work. In July 1908, he decided to bring his chela (a Buddhist term meaning novice – i.e. Neuburg) face to face with reality, so took him on a demanding trek through Spain with the intention of crossing to Tangiers from Gibraltar.
They set off from Bayonne, in south-western France, with less than five pounds between them and made their way to Madrid on foot, a distance of approximately 240 miles, arriving on 2 August. By this time, Neuburg was not a well man; he could not stand the food, the fatigue or the exposure, though he stuck gamely to the set task. They booked into the first hotel they found in Puerto del Sol, one of the best known and busiest places in the city, and after two or three days in bed Neuburg was well enough to get about, but in no fit state to endure any further hardships. As a result, they continued their journey to Gibraltar by train, crossed to Tangiers where they stayed for a short while, then returned to England.
In the meantime, Crowley, who had first begun experimenting with Enochian Magick in Mexico, was becoming extremely proficient in its use. Many commentators say Enochian Magick is a fraud, but Aleister was utterly convinced of its power. It is worth mentioning that several occult organisations are so afraid of its potency that its use is strictly forbidden.
Allan Bennett visited England for about six months in 1908 to try to establish Buddhism as a religion in the country. After returning to Burma he and Crowley never met again. Bennett was intent on spreading Buddhism while Crowley was totally committed to magick. Allan Bennett was obliged to return to England later in his life because of his progressively deteriorating health, which a smog-bound London did nothing to help. He died in Lavender Hill, Clapham, in 1923.
On 17 November, he travelled to Algiers with Victor Neuburg, intent on discovering the secret of the Enochian Keys and their thirty Aethyrs. A magician has to work backwards through them! In the eleventh Aethyr, he saw the fortress on the frontier of the Abyss with its warrior wardens. He knew he was doing well and believed the ordeal was over until he realised he actually had to cross the Abyss. Crowley’s own words describe what happened next, but see also Liber CDXVIII, The Vision and the Voice, which chronicles Crowley's astral explorations of the thirty Aethyrs of Enochian Magick:
“We went far out from the city into a hollow among the dunes. There we made a circle to protect the scribe and a triangle wherein the Abyss might manifest sensibly. We killed three pigeons, one at each Angle, that their blood might be a basis whereon the forces of evil might build themselves bodies.
The name of the Dweller in the Abyss is Choronzon,
but he is not really an individual. The Abyss is empty of being; it is filled with all possible forms, each equally inane, each therefore evil in the only true sense of the word --- that is, meaningless but malignant, in so far as it craves to become real. These forms swirl senselessly into haphazard heaps like dust devils, and each such chance aggregation asserts itself to be an individual and shrieks, "I am I!" though aware all the time that its elements have no true bond; so that the slightest disturbance dissipates the delusion just as a horseman, meeting a dust devil, brings it in showers of sand to the earth.
Choronzon appeared in many physical forms to Omnia Vincam, while I abode apart in my magical robe with its hood drawn over my face. He took the form of myself, of a woman whom Neuburg loved, of a serpent with a human head, etc. He could not utter the word of the Abyss, because there is no word; its voice is the insane babble of a multitude of senseless ejaculations; yet each form spake and acted as if aping its model. His main object was to induce O.V. to leave the circle, or to break into it; so as to obsess him, to live in his life. O.V. had many narrow escapes, and once Choronzon made a long speech at a great pace to keep O.V. so busy writing it down that he would not notice that sand was being thrown from the Triangle so as to obliterate the Circle. The torrent of obscene blasphemy was beyond his power to keep up, concentration being impossible. It became an incoherent series of cries; then suddenly, perhaps catching the idea from O.V.'s mind, the demon began to recite Tom o'Bedlam.
There was now a gap in the circle; and Choronzon, in the form of a naked savage, dashed through and attacked O.V. He flung him to the earth and tried to tear out his throat with froth-covered fangs. O.V. invoked the names of God and struck at Choronzon with the Magical Dagger. The demon was cowed by this courageous conduct and writhed back into the Triangle. O.V. then repaired the Circle; Choronzon resumed his ravings, but could not continue. He changed once more into the form of the woman whom O.V. loved, and exercised every seduction. O.V. stuck to his guns and the dialogue took other forms. He tried to shake O.V.'s faith in himself, his respect for me, his belief in the reality of Magick, and so on. At last all the energy latent in the blood of the pigeons was exhausted by the successive phantoms, so that it was no longer able to give form to the forces evoked. The Triangle was empty.
During all this time I had astrally identified myself with Choronzon, so that I experienced each anguish, each rage, each despair, each insane outburst. My ordeal ended as the last form faded; so, knowing that all was over, I wrote the holy name of Babalon in the sand with my magical ring and arose from my trance. We lit a great fire to purify the place and destroyed the Circle and Triangle. The work had lasted over two hours and we were both utterly exhausted, physically and in every other way.”
In the spring of 1910, a few days before the publication of the third issue of The Equinox, which contained the Ritual of the 5° = 6ø degree of the G.D., Mathers served Crowley with an injunction restraining its publication. In a famous court case of the time Crowley won an appeal and was awarded costs. His name was now in the national press; he was becoming 'famous', but his name had also been noticed by Horatio Bottomley, a wealthy Liberal Member of Parliament and owner of John Bull magazine who perceived him as someone who worshipped Satan; he started to delve into Crowley’s past.
"It offers a rational basis for universal brotherhood and for universal religion. It puts forward a scientific statement which is a summary of all that is at present known about the universe by means of a simple, yet sublime symbolism, artistically arranged. It also enables each man to discover for himself his personal destiny, indicates the moral and intellectual qualities which he requires in order to fulfil it freely, and finally puts in his hands an unimaginably powerful weapon which he may use to develop in himself every faculty which he may need in his work."
On 9 May, Crowley made a successful evocation of Bartzabel, the spirit of Mars:
He met Leila Ida Nerissa Bathurst Waddell (1880 –1932), an Australian violinist (but not a very good one according to Crowley), in the spring of 1910, and initiated her into the A
During the summer, Crowley returned to Boleskine with Neuburg and Kenneth Ward, an undergraduate he had met while climbing in Wasdale. Neuburg was sent on a magical retirement, during which Crowley checked on his progress in between fell-walking, climbing and fishing with Ward. At the end of his 'sadistically cruel' retirement, Neuburg was initiated into the A
Following the successful evocation of the spirit of Mars, Crowley wrote a series of seven rituals titled The Rites of Eleusis, which centred on each of the seven classical planets of antiquity:
"Man, unable to solve the Riddle of Existence, takes counsel of Saturn, extreme old age.
Such answer as he can get is the one word "Despair".
Is there more hope in the dignity and wisdom of Jupiter? No; for the noble senior lacks the vigour of Mars the warrior. Counsel is in vain without determination to carry it out.
Mars, invoked, is indeed capable of victory: but he has already lost the controlled wisdom of age; in a moment of conquest he wastes the fruits of it, in the arms of luxury.
It is through this weakness that the perfected man, the Sun, is of dual nature, and his evil twin slays him in his glory. So the triumphant Lord of Heaven, the beloved of Apollo and the Muses is brought down into the dust, and who shall mourn him but his Mother Nature, Venus, the lady of love and sorrow? Well is it if she bears within her the Secret of Resurrection!
But even Venus owes all her charm to the swift messenger of the gods, Mercury, the joyous and ambiguous boy whose tricks first scandalise and then delight Olympus.
But Mercury, too, is found wanting. Now in him alone is the secret cure for all the woe of the human race. Swift as ever, he passes, and gives place to the youngest of the gods, to the Virginal Moon.
Behold her, Madonna-like, throned and crowned, veiled, silent, awaiting the promise of the Future.
She is Isis and Mary, Ishtar and Bhavani, Artemis and Diana.
But Artemis is still barren of hope until the spirit of the Infinite All, great Pan, tears asunder the veil and displays the hope of humanity, the Crowned Child of the Future.”
Aleister claimed that the rites were designed to inspire the audience with religious ecstasy, and that simply reading them would help people to cultivate their highest faculties. Not surprisingly, the popular press of the day thought otherwise. Horatio Bottomley of John Bull magazine, with De Wend Fenton of The Looking Glass following Bottomley’s lead, considered they were no more than an immoral display riddled with blasphemy and erotic suggestion. The Rites of Eleusis, just as Crowley had intended, had been brought into the public eye, but not in the manner he had hoped for.
De Wend Fenton’s ‘Puritan attitude’ towards and ‘virtuous indignation’ shown for The Rites of Eleusis seem completely inexplicable when we consider an article printed in 1913 by the Daily Mail which showed this man in his true light:
In November 1910, shortly after the conclusion of the Rites of Eleusis, Crowley divorced Rose on the grounds of her alcoholism (the doctor treating her had already thrown in the towel), leaving him free to indulge his insatiable passions for magick, drugs and sex (not necessarily in that order), no longer prohibited by the constraints of matrimonial duty. Despite the divorce, he and Rose continued to live together, and he provided and cared for her until she was committed to an asylum in September 1911 suffering from alcoholic dementia. Crowley’s relationship with her brother, Gerald Kelly, ended after the divorce. Lola Zaza was brought up by Rose’s parents.
The performances of the rites were over, so with no other pressing commitments he decided to return to North Africa. He took Neuburg with him, and headed initially to Algiers and thence to Bou Saâda (about 152 miles south of Algiers), which translates as ‘place of happiness’. This second journey to the Sahara together took them much deeper into the remoteness of the desert. They hired two camels, a man to drive them, and a boy to look after them, and A.C. no doubt. For several weeks they wandered through the desert absorbing the marvels of nature. During this time spent in isolation, Crowley seemed to have given up magick completely. After temporarily satisfying his irrepressible nomadic urge, he left Neuburg in Biskra in north-eastern Algeria to recuperate and returned to England to attend to the production of issue five of The Equinox.
The years leading up to World War I (WWI) were described as eventful, but then the whole of Crowley’s life could be described as such. In early 1911, Horatio Bottomley of John Bull and De Wend Fenton of The Looking Glass began reinvestigating Crowley’s past after reviewing The Rites of Eleusis. The Looking Glass in particular started to print more and more outrageous and scandalous reports about Crowley’s recent divorce, his adultery, the £100 gift from Laura Horniblow (which became £200 he had stolen from her), and more importantly, about his friends and allies such as Allan Bennett, of whom it was said 'conducted unmentionable immoralities with Crowley'.
Fuller pleaded with Crowley to sue, but he chose not to as he considered the magazine to be 'a rag' on the verge of bankruptcy and therefore unimportant. George Cecil Jones eventually sued because, although not mentioned specifically, he felt he had been implicated through his association with Crowley. Aleister sat in the gallery throughout the trial, which Jones lost (there was no proof of any implication and no suggestion of his homosexuality), refusing to testify:
“The case occupied two days. I sat in court hardly able to contain my laughter. Mr. Schiller, an admirably adroit and aggressive advocate of the uncompromising, overbearing type, had everything his own way. He actually got the judge to admit the evidence of an alleged conversation which took place ten years earlier and had no reference whatever to Jones. The judge, Scrutton, was evidently bewildered by the outré character of the case. He even remarked that it was like the trial of Alice in Wonderland.”
Unlike Crowley, Jones and Fuller obviously had scruples. Jones ended his friendship with Crowley immediately, although he continued to oversee the trust set up for Lola Zaza for several decades. Fuller also ended his friendship with him on the grounds that he had let down badly the man who set him on his magical path. Fuller went on to become a Major General and brilliant military strategist, writing several books on military history. The departure of these two friends and associates, due entirely to his egotism, was to formulate a pattern for the majority of Crowley’s 'close' relationships. Following the trial, new membership of the A
“My first surprise was to find that I had brought with me exactly those Magical Weapons which were suitable for the work proposed and no others. But a yet more startling circumstance was to come. For the purposes of the Cairo working, Ouarda and I had brought two abbai (robes), one, scarlet, for me; one, blue, for her. I had brought mine to St. Moritz; the other was of course in the possession of Ouarda. Imagine my amazement when Virakam produced from her trunk a blue abbai so like Ouarda's that the only differences were minute details of gold embroidery! The suggestion was that the Secret Chiefs, having chosen Ouarda as their messenger, could not use anyone else until she had become irrevocably disqualified by insanity. Not till now could her place be taken by another; and that Virakam should possess a duplicate of her Magical Robe seemed a strong argument that she had been consecrated by them to take the place of her unhappy predecessor.”
He was instructed to write Book Four (Liber ABA), but in a specific location in Italy that Crowley would recognise from a given description. With this, a picture came into his mind of a hillside on which were a house and garden marked by two tall Persian nut trees. Virakam had a dream of the location, and sure enough Crowley recognised it from the description given by Ab-ul-diz. It was Villa Caldarozzo in Posillipo, near Naples. Gematrically, Villa Caldarazzo equates to 418, as does 'Boleskine', the 'Great Work' and 'Abrahadabra'.
They started work on Book Four but never finished it at the time. A quarrel led to Mary's rushing back to Paris, but she repented almost before she arrived and telegraphed Crowley to rejoin her, which he dutifully did, and they went on to London. “There, however, an intrigue resulted in her hastily marrying a Turkish adventurer who proceeded to beat her and, a little later, to desert her. Her hysteria became chronic and uncontrollable; she took to furious bouts of drinking which culminated in delirium tremens.”
Throughout their six weeks in Moscow, Crowley indulged his passions with a young Hungarian girl named Anny Ringler. He had more or less forgotten the meagre amount of Russian he had bothered to learn in 1897, and she spoke no English or German. “But we had not need of speech. The love between us was ineffably intense. It still inflames my inmost spirit. She had passed beyond the region where pleasure had meaning for her. She could only feel through pain, and my own means of making her happy was to inflict physical cruelties as she directed.”
While in Moscow, Mr Groves, the British consul, related some incredible stories of corruption by the Russian authorities to Aleister, one of which he recounts:
“The most deliciously fantastic is that of what I may call the phantom battleship. This vessel cost well over two million sterling. She was to be the last word in naval construction. She was launched at Odessa in the presence of a great gathering of notables, and the scene lavishly photographed and described in the newspapers. Alas! upon her maiden cruise she was 'spurlos versenkt' (my translation - sunk without a trace). The fact of the matter was that she had never existed! Her cost had gone straight into the pockets of the various officials, the photographs were simply faked, and the descriptions imaginary.”
After publication of the tenth and final issue of Volume 1 of The Equinox in September 1913, Crowley decided to pay more attention to his own magical development. He went to Paris from where he summoned Neuburg to join him with the intention of embarking on a series of magical operations known as the Paris Working. During these workings, Neuburg appears as Frater Lampada Tradam. Having passed through the ordeal of a Neophyte, he was to undertake the next task to progress to Zelator.
The Paris Working (see Liber CDXV) involved copious amounts of sex magick, mainly of a homosexual nature. It began on 1 January 1914, and lasted for six weeks without interruption. At one stage, a lay-sister, Jane Cheron, was brought into the operations during which they used large quantities of opium. It was shortly after these workings that Neuburg, too, drifted away from Crowley's circle. He died from tuberculosis on 30 May 1940.
He took with him the equivalent of about fifty pounds in American dollars, which was probably all he could raise at the time, so money was in very short supply. One of the first persons he met was Mr D., whom he knew as a collector of rare books, paintings and sculptures. This gentleman already owned some of Crowley’s works and showed an interest in purchasing some more of his unique editions and manuscripts.
“I arranged to stay in New York until these could be sent over for his approval. (As a matter of fact, I had understood him as offering to purchase them all outright. In the upshot, he purchased between seven and eight hundred dollars' worth of my goods, instead of between three and four thousand dollars' worth, as I had expected; and this disappointment left me in great straits financially, as I had at that time no immediately available resources in England.)”
Aleister's so-called exploits ‘helping the German war machine’ in the USA are well documented, and were the reason for his being branded a traitor by many associates in the UK. He met George Sylvester Viereck, owner of the anti-British publication The Fatherland. He had already been introduced to him and considered him to be an intelligent man; but his intelligence was not sufficiently subtle to comprehend Crowley:
“I praised Germany - I sympathised with Germany - I justified Germany - and he erroneously deduced, as the average Englishman might have done, that I was pro-German.”
Crowley worked for The Fatherland writing much pro-German, pro-Sinn Fein and anti-British propaganda, but if we read between the lines we can detect that it was written ‘tongue in cheek’, and working for Viereck did at least provide him with a meagre income. Note, he was working for that income, something completely foreign to Aleister’s nature!
As a consequence of his expertise in Astrology, he met a lady by the name of Evangeline Adams, a meeting which led to a lengthy association. She wanted Crowley to write a book for her on the subject, but the plan was to fail through her efforts to "cheat him out of the profits." He also got an introduction to Frank Crowinshield the editor of Vanity Fair, another very intelligent man who understood his business thoroughly. In the space of a couple of years he had pulled the paper up from the gutter to sales of a quarter of a million. He asked Crowley to write for him, and he became a frequent contributor to the magazine.
In addition to this work, he was asked to submit articles to The International, and more or less took over writing that paper single-handedly under different guises from 1917. His salary was twenty dollars a week, two dollars more than that of his typist! He used The International not so much for political purposes or to ‘send up’ the Germans, but as a means of promoting the Law of Thelema. His detective stories, The Scrutinies of Simon Iff were also serialised in this newspaper.
In the spring of 1915, Crowley met two potential Scarlet Women at a party, Jeanne Foster (the Cat) and Helen Hollis (the Snake):
"A magnetic current was instantly established between the three of us. In the Cat, I saw my ideal incarnate, and even during that first dinner we gave ourselves to each other by that language of limbs whose eloquence escapes the curiosity of fellow guests. It was the more emphatic because we were both aware that the Snake had set herself to encompass me with the coils of her evil intelligence."
Almost exactly nine months to the day after trying to produce a son with the Cat, Jones contacted Crowley to let him know that the Secret Chiefs had made him a Master. This delighted Aleister who now considered Jones to be his ‘magical son’ who would eventually discover the 'key'. However, his delight was to be short-lived for Jones supposedly turned to Catholicism, which amongst other even more sordid deeds, caused Crowley to expel him from the O.T.O. in the mid-1920s. In 1924 Frater Achad wrote a paper on the R.R. et A.C. Click HERE to read this text.
Even those well-versed in Gematria and The Book of the Law could be surprised. You can find this text by clicking HERE.
Laylah joined him in the USA during 1915, but it is uncertain for how long she stayed. Her visit was apparently unannounced, so her unexpected arrival pleased him immensely, although he was certainly not without company of the female kind. She inspired numerous new poems in addition to several chapters in The Book of Lies aka Breaks. In due course, Laylah returned to Australia where, rather ironically from Aleister’s description of her musical talents, took up a position as a music teacher in Sidney. She died in 1932 of uterine cancer.
On 6 October, A.C. decided to take a trip round the coast. He combined this with a ‘honeymoon’ with Hilarion who thought to spice up the romance and adventure by taking her husband in tow, but the couple did not complete the course with Aleister. The first stop was Detroit, in the state of Michigan, where Albert Winslow Ryerson (1872 – 1931) lived and worked. Ryerson was the General Manager of Universal Book Stores Inc., who was later to prepare the publication of details of the O.T.O.’s US headquarters, and in the spring of 1919 would also print the first volume of The Equinox (known as The Blue Equinox because of the colour of its cover) after its five year period of silence. He then went to Chicago, which he described as "the forlorn outpost of civilised man."
He travelled westward to Vancouver where he was warmly welcomed by his ‘Magical Son’. Jones had already established a Lodge of the O.T.O. whose numbers were increasing steadily. These members had crafted effective furniture and ornamental decoration for the Lodge with their own hands, and Crowley was pleased to see Jones had drilled them well in the Rituals. After this brief sojourn to Vancouver, he headed for Seattle. He next stopped off at Santa Cruz to see the famous 'big trees' (the giant redwoods), from where he visited Los Angeles and San Diego.
Returning east, he journeyed to the Grand Canyon, which he thought was "the best thing in the whole country, but not in the same class as Himalayan scenery." He went down the Colorado River via Angel Trail (this trail starts on the south rim of the Grand Canyon and descends 4380’ to the Colorado River), and slowly returned to New York by short stages. From New Orleans he went to stay with a cousin, Lawrence Bishop, on his orange and grapefruit plantation in Florida. Cousin Lawrence's wife was just over thirty years of age, but 'looked sixty'; she persecuted Lawrence and their children beyond belief:
“Cousin Lawrence saw how ill I was. The family fed on offal which I would not have thrown to a decent pig. He had stayed with us in England and realised that I could not be expected to eat such garbage, so he asked me kindly what I would like to eat so as to build up my strength. I said, 'Don't bother about that'. All I need is plenty of fruit and milk.' It seems too rotten to be true but his wife made a point of cutting me off from milk as much as she dared, and went to the utmost pains to hide the supply, so as to cheat me out of the glass of milk I was supposed to have before going to bed. (I always stayed up late working.)
The mean malice of his hag is too dreadful to contemplate, yet all things serve the poet's turn. She gave me the idea of one of my best Simon Iff in America stories, ‘Suffer the Little Children’.”
Still sick, and penniless, Crowley arrived back in New York in the spring of 1916. He stayed with one of his old disciples, Leon Engars Kennedy, a portrait painter and the adopted son of a multi-millionaire. There followed a period when Aleister felt really down in America. He said:
“This period was inexpressibly distressing; apart from other unpleasantnesses, my health broke down in a quite inexplicable way. There was no satisfactory diagnosis; the symptoms were confined to a spiritual and physical malaise which deprived me alike of ambition and energy. The Secret Chiefs had it in mind that I should spend months of absolutely sickening solitude, direst poverty and impotence to take any action whatever, so that I might realise how the world feels to the very vast majority of the inhabitants of its civilised sections, to people without resources, prospects, friends or exploitable abilities.”
His health slowly began to improve and, following a Magical Operation on 27 May, was suddenly restored. He performed two further important Magical Operations on 28 and 30 May, followed by a third a few days later. The result was that he secured control of The International in July and became its contributing editor (implying practically sole responsibility for the contents) in August.
“This magazine was originally the organ of pure literature, the only one in the United States of any authority. Unfortunately, the editor - and to all intents and purposes the proprietor - was Mr George Sylvester Viereck. At the outbreak of the war, he transformed the character of The International, introduced pro-German propaganda and thus ruined its reputation. It was now on the black list in Canada and refused admission by the postal authorities of the colony. Its best friends had withdrawn their support; its circulation had dwindled almost to nothing, and it staggered on mechanically from month to month without heart or hope. In eight months I pulled it up so successfully that it became saleable. It was bought by Professor Keasbey, who issued one number so dreary, unintelligible and futile that it died on the spot.”
Aleister had conferred the grade of Magus upon himself and finalised this on a retirement to New Hampshire in 1916. According to Colin Wilson in Aleister Crowley, The Nature of the Beast 'this involved catching a live frog, baptising it as Jesus of Nazareth, then crucifying it on a cross and stabbing it with a dagger'. It was after this that he took the motto To Mega Therion (see Liber LXX - The Cross ofhich he a Frog). This act symbolised the removal of the dying god Osiris, thus bringing in the Aeon of Horus which would enable him to establish a new religion, Thelema, the very thing he had been chosen to do by the Secret Chiefs when taking dictation of the Book of the Law in 1904.
One note of sadness was that Crowley’s mother died in 1917 while he was away in the USA; although he supposedly 'despised' her, it is said he felt terribly alone after learning of her death.
In late 1917, he met Roddie Minor (Soror Achitha, known as the Camel because she carried him through the 'desert' of his life). She was a qualified pharmacist with a regular income and, more importantly, had unrestricted access to drugs! In January 1918, she had a vision of two Persian nut trees, the very same thing that Crowley and Virakam had been told to look for by Ab-ul-Diz. To begin with, he thought Ab-ul-Diz was also controlling her; she told him, however, it was someone called The Wizard. Eventually he discovered it was another entity identified as Amalantrah (see Liber XCVII the Amalantrah Working). For several months Crowley, the Camel and several others (including Frater Achad) worked together and regularly contacted this ‘being’ from whom he gained a substantial amount of magical knowledge, specifically over the correct meaning of 'Baphomet'. His relationship with Soror Achitha ended in August 1918.
The International was sold in the autumn, leaving him stranded; all his sources of regular income had now dried up, so having no immediate prospects he went on a magical retirement:
“I therefore borrowed a canoe, tent and camp outfit from a friend and started up the Hudson on a Great Magical Retirement with two dollars and twenty-five cents as my total capital, no prospect of obtaining more when that was exhausted, and full confidence that the Secret Chiefs would supply my physical needs. It was my business to do their work and theirs to look after their servant. This Magical Retirement proved of critical importance. A week's paddling put me in perfect physical and mental condition. I found an ideal solitude on Oesopus Island. I soon began to acquire the Magical Memory to recall my past incarnations. . . .”
He borrowed the canoe and tent from a reporter and occultist by the name of William Seabrook (1884 – 1945). Seabrook was concerned for his welfare, but A.C. assured him the Secret Chiefs would provide all he needed. For much of the time he sat meditating. During these long periods of meditation, local farmers would leave food and other vital supplies on the assumption that this strange man was a sage who would need nourishment when he came out of his trances.
On returning to New York, he told Seabrook he had developed and refined his magical skills during his retirement. Seabrook seemed to be in doubt, so Crowley gave him a demonstration of ‘sympathetic magick’. Walking down Fifth Avenue, he adopted the posture and gait of someone with the appearance of a well-to-do gentleman, and fell into step behind him. He quickly copied his mannerisms so strongly that when he dropped to a squat, the gentleman in front fell to the ground. He and Seabrook helped him to his feet as he searched for a banana skin and checked the heels of his shoes to find whatever had caused him to lose his footing.
He gladly accepted an invitation to visit his friends, William and Kate Seabrook, on their farm in Georgia in the autumn of 1919 at about the same time as Leah returned to Switzerland to care for her ailing sister. He spent several delightful weeks free of charge in the south, after which he went north to Detroit again. From Detroit he went to inspect the 'Mammoth Caves' of Kentucky. ‘Beneath the sandstone-capped ridges of Mammoth Cave National Park lies the most extensive cave system on earth, with over 350 miles of passageways mapped and surveyed. And yet, after 4,000 years of intermittent exploration, the full extent of this water-formed labyrinth remains a mystery.’ Following this excursion, a last glance at Detroit to finalise some publishing details left him free to return to England, to face the consequences!
Aleister arrived in London, penniless (which was more or less how he left these shores in 1914), a few days before Christmas. Considering his well-publicised exploits in America, he might well have been arrested as a traitor, but for some unknown reason the British authorities ignored him. Some suggest it was because the US authorities chose to ignore him after America entered the conflict having realised that his anti-British and pro-German columns in The Fatherland were genuinely written 'tongue in cheek’. Or was it because the British authorities had bigger fish to fry at the time? Whatever the reason, his activities in the USA had been noted.
Now back in his homeland, being destitute and spurned by his former acquaintances, and no longer having his mother to turn to, he stayed with an aunt in Croydon. Unable to raise desperately needed cash, he travelled to Paris at the beginning of January, where his credit rating seemed to have remained unaffected. He was joined later in the month by a heavily pregnant Leah Hirsig along with her two (or three) year old son, Hansi, from a previous relationship. They set up home at 11 bis rue de Neuville, Fontainebleau.
Prior to his departure to the USA, Crowley conveyed ownership of Boleskine to the M
Leah, now known as Alostrael, the Ape of Thoth or simply the Ape, gave birth to their child, Ann Léa, nicknamed Poupée, in February 1920. Shortly after Leah's arrival, Lady Luck paid Aleister a most welcome visit. The money he had been craving for dropped in his lap by way of an unexpected inheritance of £700 from an aunt (not the one in Croydon). They engaged the services of Ninette Shumway as a housekeeper and nanny. She was an unmarried mother with a three year-old son (Howard) whom Leah had met on her crossing from America.
A.C. now considered he was at his peak (what he really meant was he had temporary liquidity) and decided it was now or never. The time had come to release Thelema on the unsuspecting world. At the end of March, after consulting the I Ching which suggested Cefalu on the island of Sicily to be the ideal place to establish his abbey, he left Paris with Ninette (now Soror Cypris) and the two boys, while Leah and Poupée went to stay with Crowley’s aunt (the one still alive in Croydon) until suitable premises had been found, and to sort out various affairs in England.
On the last day of March, the advance party reached Cefalu where they spent the night in a ‘dirty and disgusting hotel room’. The next morning, Crowley was shown the Villa Santa Barbara by a man named Giordano Giosus. He rented the villa straightaway, describing it as ‘made to order'; it fulfilled all his requirements despite the fact that it was simply a run-down farmhouse which could hardly be considered a barn in real life.
Crowley ‘borrowed or stole’ the name
Abbey of Thelema from François Rabelais (c.1495-1553), a Benedictine monk, physician, and humanist scholar. Gargantua and Pantagruel was Rabelais' epic, in which he attacked clerical education and monastic orders and expressed an appreciation for secular learning and a confidence in human nature. Like other humanists, Rabelais criticised medieval philosophy for being concerned with obscure, confused, and irrelevant questions, and expressed his aversion to medieval asceticism. He attacked monasticism as life-denying, and regarded worldly pleasure as a legitimate need and aim of human nature. His Abbey of Theleme is described as a kind of 'anti-monastery', the inhabitants of which were not governed by laws, statutes, or rules, but lived according to their own free will. It was from here that the System of Thelema developed. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Sadly, Poupée died in October, six months after the abbey had been established. Crowley's inheritance had already been squandered along with his other windfalls, and he was also burdened with the responsibility of two mistresses and several children (not of his own making). After the loss of Poupée, he was not sure of which way to turn despite being a Master of every kind of magick, and spent long periods away in London and Paris.
“I went down to Fontainebleau for fresh air and exercise, and also to make a little Magical Retirement. As soon as I sat down to look at myself, I was aware of the old wound. I knew there was only one way. I must open it up and cleanse it thoroughly. I went out northward. On my left, as I came to the city wall, was the hospital where just over a year before, the child was born. I strode fiercely forward with clenched teeth. But at the first breath of forest air the universal sorrow of nature flooded me and I broke out into strong sobbing. I refused to fool myself in any of the familiar ways. I faced it open-eyed. I felt its fullest force in every nerve. So having attained the courage to accept it, without resistance or resentment, I conquered it. I slew the fiend that had beset me. From that hour to this I have suffered no more.”
Crowley was already a Magus, but above this is the ultimate ‘unattainable’ grade of Ipsissimus who is free from all limitations whatsoever, including differentiating between good and evil, someone incapable of description. Aleister, for whom nothing was impossible, was not going to be restrained from attaining this grade, so in the spring of 1921 he ‘achieved the impossible’. He entered the temple, followed by Leah. Of the actual ceremony he says nothing, and at the conclusion, only "As a god goes, I go". In the opinion of some occultists and writers, this is where he made a mistake, for the suggestion is he illegally assumed this most exalted grade and that it choked him. He did not reveal this attainment to anyone; there is no mention of it in Confessions. It is known only from his Magical Record, although in Magick, published privately in 1929, on page 301, he does hint of it:
“I, The Beast 666, lift up my voice and swear that I myself have been brought hither by mine Angel ...” Also, “He made me a Magus ... Yea, he wrought also in me a Work of Wonder beyond this, but in this matter I am sworn to hold my peace.”
The Ape found him unbearable after he had attained this grade, and wrote about him in her magical diary that it was ‘damn hard to think of the rottenest kind of creature as a Word‘ (i.e. Thelema).
In 1922, once again in desperate need of money, he returned to London with Leah where he signed a contract with the publishers, William Collins, to write a novel, The Diary of a Drug Fiend, and received a meagre £60 advance on the work. He rented a room in London and completed the task in less than four weeks, Leah taking dictation in longhand. The novel describes the disastrous results and physical torments of a drug addict. He promptly took the manuscript to the publishers who presented him with another cheque for £125 as payment of advanced royalties on his autobiography. The couple returned to Sicily, with much needed capital.
Upon publication of the novel, the gutter press barons became aware that Mr. Crowley had raised his ugly head again. James Douglas of the Sunday Express wrote it was ‘A Book for Burning’, and started to print stories about his past and the 'evils happening in his abbey'. The press reports caused the initial print of 3,000 copies to be sold almost immediately, but the publishers, in their infinite wisdom, chose not to reprint it. They also cancelled the order for Crowley’s autobiography (but he did get to keep the advance).
It was not long after his arrival in Cefalu that Raoul developed acute infectious enteritis from which he died. His illness came about not as a result of the lack of sanitation, as many havesuggested, but from his drinking from a polluted stream during a long, hot walk across the island with his wife. It was a well-known rule by everyone at the Abbey that under no circumstances should they drink the local water from such sources. The Abbey's fate had been sealed!
Each day thereafter, Betty May seemed to grow fonder of the Abbey and its members. She was grateful for the way Jane Wolfe and Leah had nursed Raoul during his illness, and greatly appreciated the sympathy and attention the members had shown and given her following his death and solemn funeral. Nevertheless, she made up her mind to return to England. It was upon her arrival that the trouble began! The reporters of England's gutter press pursued her, got her very drunk, and prompted her to give them a sensational story which became one long series of falsehoods.
A headline on 23 February 1923 read 'NEW SINISTER REVELATIONS OF ALEISTER CROWLEY'. It concerned testimony that Crowley had been responsible for the death of Raoul Loveday at the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, Sicily. Bear in mind, this scandal followed the Drug Fiend stories – Crowley really was an evil man according to the press.
Once again Crowley was advised to sue for libel, but on this occasion he simply couldn’t afford to, even though he was almost guaranteed to win substantial damages. Lord Beaverbrook, the owner of the Express Group, could afford to employ the best lawyers in the country, and Aleister was broke. In his words, “Five thousand pounds would not have given me a dog's chance.” Back in those days there were no solicitors offering their sordid ‘No Win, No Fee’ services!
These adverse press reports, along with an imagined threat of secret societies, came during the rise of the regime of Benito Mussolini, an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party in Italy. Shortly after these 'revelations' Crowley was summoned to the Chief of Police who handed him a deportation order signed by the Minister of the Interior expelling him from Italy, though he maintained no reason was given, and no accusation was made. Nevertheless, he was banished from Sicily at the end of April 1923.
After consulting the I Ching, Aleister's best course of action was to travel to Tunis. Leah, despite losing interest in him, along with all respect, was deeply concerned about his rapidly deteriorating health, so accompanied him on the journey. They arrived on 2 May. In Tunis, he began a new diary which has been published under the title The Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley Tunisia 1923.
A few days before Crowley left Cefalu, Norman Mudd arrived. Mudd, a lecturer in applied mathematics at Grey University College, Bloemfontein, South Africa, had been initiated into the O.T.O. by Charles Stansfeld Jones (Crowley’s so-called magical son), and took the motto Omnia Pro Veritae. He joined Crowley in Tunis two months later, and Leah returned to Cefalu for a much needed rest. Aleister Crowley’s own autohagiography ends at this point with the paragraph:
“It is heartbreaking to have to write on this matter, ‘So much to do, so little done’. I am overwhelmed by the multiplicity of urgent work. I need the co-operation of a whole cohort of specialists and my helplessness lies heavy on my heart, yet the word which I uttered at my first initiation, ‘Perdurabo’, still echoes in eternity. What may befall I know not, and I have almost ceased to care. It is enough that I should press towards the mark of my high calling, secure in the magical virtue of my oath, ‘I shall endure unto the End’."
Crowley and Mudd travelled round Tunisia to various remote outposts for several months performing ‘magick’ together; Leah returned and joined them shortly before Crowley disappeared with whatever pittance was left towards the end of the year. Through various dubious means and after having endured some unbelievable hardships, Leah and Norman reached Paris, to where Crowley had scarpered. “Why on earth did they bother?” we may well ask.
On 28 October 1923, Theodore Reuss died of complications arising from an earlier stroke. At the time of his death there were only three National Grand Masters in the O.T.O.: Heinrich Tränker in Germany, Charles Stansfeld Jones in America and Aleister Crowley.
Aleister had become totally tired of Leah, regardless of everything she had sacrificed and done for him; the end of her reign as his Scarlet Woman was nigh. He met Dorothy Olsen, a wealthy 32 year-old American, and initiated her into the A
During that summer, as a result of the death of Reuss, Aleister, Dorothy, Leah and Norman were invited to an O.T.O. conference in Hohenleuben, near Weida, in Thuringia, Germany. Unfortunately, there was a small matter of a large unpaid hotel bill to settle for which the O.T.O. coughed up the funds in addition to paying their fares. The attendees were divided over the fact that Crowley had appointed himself head of the O.T.O., ousting Reuss with whom he had a misunderstanding some years earlier which, incidentally, had been resolved. Crowley maintained he had a letter from Reuss asking him to take over control of the Order, but that letter has never materialised.
The Germans were not convinced about The Book of the Law, of which they had previously been unaware (it had only recently been translated into German). Heinrich Tränker had temporarily taken control of the German faction. Fräulein Martha Künzel and Karl Germer sided with Crowley, Tränker following suit after realising Baphomet could be a serious threat, but several others decided to keep the Lodge independent from the Master Therion. Nevertheless, Aleister Crowley left the meeting as the undisputed Outer Head of the Order (OHO). Later, Germer spent most of his time promoting the organisation in the USA, and became one of Crowley’s invaluable and ever-needed sources of income.
For the next few years, he travelled widely round Western Europe and North Africa with Dorothy, but as only to be expected, he tired of their association. Maybe her money had run out, or was it because he found she had no useful magical potential? Probably the former in this writer's opinion! She returned to America and they never met again.
Any sort of relationship that remained between Crowley and Leah now hit true rock bottom; she bitterly renounced magick and returned to school-teaching in America. She died in Meiringen, Switzerland in 1975. Norman Mudd had also reached the end of his tether; he had finally come to realise that Crowley had no genuine interest in anyone but himself, simply discarding all those around him once they became surplus to requirements. After leaving Aleister's entourage he ended up as a down-and-out. On 16 June 1934, his body was found near the island of Guernsey, fully clothed, cycle clips around the bottom of the trousers and the pockets filled with stones.
At about the same time as Regardie was discovering Crowley, so was Gerald Joseph Yorke (1901 – 1983). He had attended Eton and Trinity Colleges where, unlike A.C., he gained a B.A. before joining the British Army in which he reached the rank of Major. Aleister invited Yorke to Paris, and soon developed an affinity for him because he appeared to be wealthy - he had actually flown to Paris – commercial flight was reasonably new and the domain of the very rich. Yorke was initiated into the A
Crowley’s book Magick was published by Lecram Press in Paris at more or less the same time as he and his entourage were declared ‘persona non grata’ in France in March 1929. The reasons are ambiguous and far from clear, with biographers differing. Some say the French authorities thought his coffee maker was a device for distilling drugs, or he was a German spy because of his connections to the O.T.O. Others suggest it was because of the actions of Regardie’s sister in America. She had read some of the material in copies of The Equinox which her brother had left behind, and became concerned for his welfare. She contacted the American authorities who in turn notified the French. This set the wheels in motion. They dug up his chequered past from police and newspaper records in England and America, and discovered he had already been deported from Sicily. Whatever the reason, Crowley was saddened at the thought of never being allowed to return to Paris, and it is said the area around Montparnasse became lifeless without his imperious presence frequenting its many cafés and restaurants.
Crowley concluded that the only way of getting a permit for Maria to enter England was to marry her. Was this to be a marriage of convenience or inconvenience? The Belgian authorities were not keen to marry foreigners in their country, so he took a chance on Berlin, a gamble which paid off; they were married on 16 August 1929. They returned to London, where Regardie, who had been working on Crowley’s publishing program and eventually having got permission to enter the country (he had been born in London), was to join them.
Here, Aleister met the proprietors of the Mandrake Press. One of these, Percy Reginald Stephensen (1901 – 1965), was impressed with much of Crowley’s work, so much so he persuaded his partner to begin publishing some of his works. Following Crowley's death, Stephensen wrote his own biography about the man.
Crowley became ill once again (the effects of malaria dogged him constantly). He moved to a rented house in Knockholt, Kent, close to where Stephensen resided. Regardie moved to Kent with the Crowleys, but the household was not a happy one so he spent the majority of his time advancing his own literary skills with Stephensen's aid.
Having been invited to speak at a meeting of the Oxford University Poetry Society on 3 February 1930, and knowing full well that the historic Gilles de Rais case had been a classic example of the suppression of knowledge by a theocracy, Aleister was about to give the Poetry Society the unexpurgated facts as he understood them. His lecture was in reality an attack on the Establishment with an explanation of how the Orthodoxy had always tried to suppress free thinkers. The University's Roman Catholic Chaplain, Father Ronald Knox, got wind of this and succeeded in getting the lecture banned at the last minute, but this did not frustrate Crowley (not many things did) who immediately had the Banned Lecture printed and distributed.
The first two volumes of Crowley's six-volume Confessions were published by the Mandrake Press in 1930, but the other four never saw print – Crowley, completely out of character, had a disagreement with the publishers! In a further attempt to raise funds he tried to exhibit his paintings in London, but no gallery was willing to accept his masterpieces. Aleister Crowley was becoming famous, or should that be notorious? Undaunted by this setback, he took a large quantity of them to Berlin (160 is the number suggested). Here, he met Hanni Larissa Jaeger, a nineteen year-old model and artist, who was to be nicknamed The Monster. Despite their age difference and Crowley's now flabby appearance, she was fascinated by him, as nearly all the women he encountered seemed to be – was he using magick?
While he was having a ball and living the high life with Hanni, Maria, who was still his wife, had been cast aside just like his previous Scarlet Women. Without any means, she was struggling to exist on her own in London. Gerald Yorke took pity on the distraught woman and helped her out by giving her money for food and rent, but his appeals to Crowley on her behalf fell on deaf ears. Maria was to become an insane alcoholic and was committed to Colney Hatch asylum in what is now the London borough of Barnett.
However, their patched-up relationship began to falter in January 1931, after which it is thought that Hanni actually did commit suicide, although I have found no records toconfirm this. During the spring and summer of that year he had sexual relationships with several women, then in August he became enamoured of a Swiss 36 year-old divorcee by the name of Bertha Busch, nicknamed ‘Billie’. They lived together in Karlsruher Straße in Berlin, where she became his Scarlet Woman (obviously on a temporary basis). Perhaps 'co-existed' is a far better term than 'lived together', for they were forever fighting tooth and nail, punching and kicking each other with no holds barred. Broken crockery was strewn throughout the apartment. In December, they had their most violent argument when, in the 'heat of battle', Bertha stabbed Crowley below his shoulder blade inflicting a deep wound from which he lost several pints of blood.
On Christmas Eve, Crowley wrote to Gerald Yorke pleading for money on the pretext that he would be ejected from his flat for non-payment of rent, and with having nowhere to live claimed exposure to the elements, particularly with his shoulder wound, would certainly kill him. He wrote his will naming Yorke as his executor, and asked to be buried in Poets’ Corner (a section of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey where a number of famous poets, playwrights, and writers are buried and commemorated).
In the meantime, Regardie, who was receiving no worthwhile instruction from Crowley because of his flightiness, became exasperated from being let down time and again, and he too decided to leave his tutor. He went on to have a highly successful career in the USA as a chiropractor, psychotherapist and magician. Even though it is said Crowley never forgave him until his dying day, Regardie acknowledged that everything he was he owed to Aleister Crowley. He even wrote his own biography of the great man under the title The Eye in the Triangle which put right many of the biased and disgusting remarks made by John Symonds in The Magic of Aleister Crowley. In addition to this, in his Introduction to P.R. Stephensen’s The Legend of Aleister Crowley (1970) he throws some interesting light on John Symonds' character and motives:
Not content with this insolence, Symonds has steadfastly refused permission to me and several other writers to use any of Crowley’s published material. Evidently he has assumed that his literary executorship, instituted on behalf of and for the Ordo Templi Orientis, should be for his own personal gain.”
Needless to say, even without Yorke‘s support, Aleister continued to exist. He was eventually ejected from his flat in June 1932, after which he returned to England with Bertha. I can remember reading somewhere during my research of an entry in his diary for 8 May 1932 which read, “Heard Rose died in February.” Nothing else was written that day, nor for two or three following it. This shows the man actually did have a heart, and still had some deep, inner feelings for his first, and probably only real love in his life.
Despite the ups and downs of their turbulent relationship, Crowley and Bertha remained together until March 1933 when he met a Bulgarian woman by the name of Marianne. But Marianne did not reign supreme for long, for just four months later he discovered Evelyn Pearl Brooksmith (née Driver), who became the next of his numerous Scarlet Women on 1 September. Pearl, as she was known, was a 34 year-old widow living at 40, Cumberland Terrace, east of Regent’s Park in the London borough of Camden. Within a week, he had moved in and they began performing sex-magick together with the aim of producing an heir. They were unsuccessful, and after a while she began to get on his nerves with her constant ‘visions’, which she insisted on describing in great detail. Although their relationship ended in 1936, they remained good friends.
Crowley had always abhorred litigation (he had foregone several opportunities to sue successfully for damages throughout his life), but had recently resorted to it out of desperation and won a libel case against a Mr Gray, a small London bookseller. He was awarded £50 in damages plus costs, so now assumed suing those guilty of libel to be a lucrative business after all. He may well have been correct in his assumption, but first and foremost guilt has to be established! This case was the beginning of the end for Aleister, or would have been for any lesser character!
A.C. complained that 'in her book, 'Laughing Torso', Miss Hamnett stated that in his temple in Cefalu, in Sicily, he was supposed to have practiced Black Magic'. The defendants denied that the words complained of were defamatory and further pleaded that if they were they were true in substance and in fact. Mrs. Betty Sedgwick (formerly Betty Loveday) gave evidence for the defence at the trial.
He lost the case, lodged an appeal, and lost again, after which he was evicted from his apartment in Grosvenor Square. The major problem for Aleister now was not so much where to live or even how to exist, but how best to avoid his clamouring creditors after so much publicity. He was now a cornered rat; he was summoned to appear before the Official Receiver in the bankruptcy court as case number 38 on 14 February 1935 with liabilities from both secured and non-secured loans totalling £4,695 (that were known of).
Although already penniless in reality, Crowley was now totally ruined financially and declared a bankrupt. He was now not only a junkie, but a bankrupt junkie without a publisher or a regular income. After losing the case, he eked a living from handouts, donations, small amounts received from sales of books, and money from initiates into the O.T.O. in America.
For much of the time he looked dishevelled and lived the life of a down and out, but he never gave up seeking opportunities. He had periods of apparent opulence, particularly during relationships with his many new Scarlet Women who willingly, although unwittingly, spent their money on him or allowed him to spend it lavishly on their behalf. But as per the norm for Aleister, once he considered himself ‘wealthy’ enough he abandoned them and lived the highlife until becoming destitute again.
Charles Richard Cammell, who was to write his own potted biography of Aleister Crowley (he became his first biographer), had read much of Crowley’s poetry besides other articles by him and about him, including much of his bad press. Viola Bankes, in her book Why Not?, had written an interesting article on Crowley, which only served to increase his curiosity about the man, so in the early spring of 1936 he accepted her invitation to join her for tea while she was entertaining this legend.
Crowley was 60 years of age when Cammell was introduced to him. He soon came to have the greatest respect for Crowley’s true genius, although he certainly did not agree with the majority of his views. He got to know The Beast as well as most people ever got to know him. In his biography Aleister Crowley The Black Magician he wrote:
“Almost any other man would have abandoned hope in such a position, would have gone into hiding, humiliated and desperate. Not so Aleister Crowley. His imperious spirit remained unquelled; his pride unshamed; his courage undaunted. His belief in his mission, real or imagined, his determination to dominate, remained inviolate. His stoicism was extraordinary and admirable. He never yielded to misfortune; he despised, and therefore stood above, disgrace. His personality remained confident and commanding.”
Some years later their paths crossed again. They were walking together towards Pearl Brooksmith’s flat when he put his arm around Deirdre and asked her if she would like to have his child. For some inexplicable reason she replied in the affirmative – apparently it took a very long time and a great deal of encouragement before Aleister was capable! Some writers suggest it was Deirdre who approached Aleister and asked if she could bear his child as opposed to the other way round. Whatever the truth, his son and heir was born on 2 May 1937, and named Randall Gair. His proud dad nicknamed him Aleister Ataturk. Deirdre already had two illegitimate children with two other partners, and was to have another child.
By Crowley’s own admission, the deck was supposed to have been purely traditional, but Lady Harris encouraged him to commit his brilliant occult, spiritual and scientific knowledge to the project. Originally planned as a six-month project aimed at updating the established pictorial symbolism found in other decks, it was to take five years (1938 – 1943) to reach fruition, because he and Lady Frieda were so thorough in their work; she painted some of the cards as many as eight times before achieving the desired result.
Unfortunately, neither she nor Crowley lived to see this fabulous deck published, the first full colour edition being issued in 1969 by Samuel Weiser Inc. That initial print proved to be of inferior quality, so in 1977 the publishers had the original paintings re-photographed to produce a much superior second edition, which has since been updated. The Thoth Tarot deck is now the most sought after design of Tarot cards in the world!
We also know he set up a second Abbey of Thelema in Barton Brow, near Torquay, in March 1941, with Grace M. Horner (Charis – Greek for Grace). It was here he completed Thumbs Up!, his 'national anthem of free England'. However, it failed to attract any new members, so lack of finance to sustain the venture meant this new abbey was doomed, just like its predecessor.
He continued working on the Book of Thoth in between flitting in and out of London as the German bombing raids lessened or increased in intensity. Many writers have theorised on whether Crowley became a government secret agent and provide several reasons to substantiate their theories. He had a profound knowledge of the occult and it was a well known fact that Hitler was obsessed with the matter, particularly Astrology, a subject in which he was very well-versed. In addition to this, he was fluent in German and very well connected in Germany through the O.T.O.
To further corroborate the possibility, he knew Guy Knowles (of the Chogo Ri expedition) who was now an MI6 agent. He met Dennis Wheatley (1897 – 1977) several times before and during the war, after which Wheatley began writing his famous novels based on the occult (Wheatley assured us at the beginning of each novel that he had never attended a Black Magic ceremony, but one can be dubious of this claim). Dennis Wheatley joined MI5 in 1943 and introduced Crowley to Maxwell Knight, a senior MI5 officer. Knight respected Crowley’s undoubted abilities regardless of his infamous WWI activities, and they met and spoke often. Another personality he knew well was Ian Fleming (1908 – 1964), author of the James Bond novels, who was also an MI5 agent. Whether or not a combination of his knowledge of magick and the occult, complex code/cipher (including Gematria) and/or the German language and people helped the cause still remains a mystery.
Although the first two volumes of Crowley’s autohagiography had been published by the Mandrake Press in 1930, the other four were still unknown entities; he had lost the galleys (long metal trays used for holding type ready for printing) of the third volume and the typescripts of the remaining three were scattered somewhere amongst his reams of papers. The incredible account of the life of The Beast 666 would probably have been lost forever had 'Fate' not paid a visit to Netherwood, Fate on this occasion being in the guise of John Symonds, who became one of his literary executors and biographers. Symonds suggested he gather these papers together and give them to a typist. Fortunately, he did, and sent one copy (bound in four parts) to Symonds. In his reply to Symonds’ letter of thanks, he wrote:
“You were a little light-hearted in asking me to make sure of these volumes of the Hag not being lost to the world. It cost me near forty pounds as makes no difference.”
Crowley wrote his one and only letter to his son in 1947 offering advice on handwriting, and suggesting he learn Latin and Greek, how to play chess, but most of all, master
the English language by reading the Old Testament and works such as those by William Shakespeare.
Bedridden for his last few days, although still jovial according to his visitors, Aleister died from myocardial degeneration and chronic bronchitis on 1 December 1947, aged 72, shortly after his doctor, William Brown Thomson, had refused to supply the morphine upon which he had become totally dependent. Many tales surround his moment of death, but the one that seems most plausible, written by Richard Kaczynski and concurred by Lawrence Sutin, two of his better non-biased biographers, is the one I have included here.
Deirdre McAlpine was at his bedside, but his son had left the room a few moments before his final breath. His last words were reported to be "I am perplexed.” Upon taking that breath, the curtains were blown in by a sudden gust of wind, and a peal of thunder was heard. In one of his pockets were found an Abramelin talisman and a tattered, folded letter dated 10 September 1939. It read:
“The Director General of Naval Intelligence presents his compliments and would be glad if you could find it convenient to call at the Admiralty for an interview.”
How ironic would it be if one day we were to discover under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 that Mr Aleister Crowley, The Beast 666 also known as The Wickedest Man in the World, really did work for the Secret Service during WWII after being branded a traitor by so many in the previous conflict?
His funeral was held at Brighton crematorium four days after his death, with readings from selected works as per his wishes. Other than the throng of reporters, about a dozen people attended the service, including Deirdre McAlpine, Louis Wilkinson, a friend of Norman Mudd by the name of Gilbert Bayley, John Symonds, Kenneth Grant, Lady Frieda Harris and Gerald Yorke.
Following the service, affirmed by those attending to have been sad but very dignified, reporters mobbed the attendees asking questions and jotting down notes upon which to elaborate at will in their respective newspapers. John Symonds is reputed to have looked one of the tabloid reporters straight in the eye and said, “Beware what you write, Crowley may strike at you from wherever he is.” Immediately afterwards, the heavens opened, releasing a tremendous downpour.
The newspapers naturally reported on a 'shocking and irreverent' funeral (their reporters did not understand the significance of the various readings and assumed a Black Mass ceremony was taking place). Brighton council had no alternative but to 'take appropriate steps to ensure this sort of thing could not happen again'. It would seem Aleister Crowley, often referred to as ‘The Old Man’ and ‘The Crow’ by those who knew him well, was still capable of shocking people, even after his death, irrespective of the fact he was innocent of the charge yet again!
Like so many other outstanding men who preceded him, Aleister Crowley was undoubtedly a man born before his time. He lived in a society that could neither understand him nor even begin to appreciate his true genius. He certainly did not suffer fools gladly, and much of his writing so shocked the vast majority of the people (peers does not seem an appropriate word to use here as most of them did not come close to being his equal) of the time that he was probably robbed of the praise that so much of it deserved – or was he really the wickedest man in the world? Fortunately, that same world today is a much more enlightened dot in the universe, and even more fortunately for those of us still living on it, his publications live on albeit many as costly reprints.
Return to top of page.
IN WITNESS whereof I have hereunto set my hand this nineteenth day of June one thousand nine hundred and forty-seven.
Return to top of page.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||
|
Where are Crowley's Ashes?In his Will (see above), Aleister Crowley wrote:"I DESIRE that on my decease my body shall be cremated and that my ashes should be preserved in a casket together with my seal ring and entrusted to the Grand Treasurer of the Ordo Templi Orientis." Karl Germer, who had relocated to a rural property in or near Hampton, New Jersey, buried the casket containing Crowley’s ashes beside a large pine tree on the property. It has since been established that Germer’s house (which still exists at the time of writing) is not in Hampton proper, but rather in Changewater, which is in Lebanon Township. This coincides with the deed to the property, which states that it is in the said Township. Hampton was most likely associated with the site because it was the post office for the entire area, and Germer had a P.O. Box in the Hampton post office. For whatever reason, Germer told McMurtry in 1951 that his wife Sascha had smashed the urn upon the side of a tree, proclaiming it the Aleister Crowley Tree. However, in his correspondence with Jane Wolfe he stated that they had indeed buried the urn at the foot of the tree. He wrote: “On April 8th, Sascha and I gave A.C.’s ashes the final resting place. We have 5 very large Pines in the front of our house and Sascha suggested the foot of the finest (called Aleister) as the spot. I dug a pit under the pine and we had a small ceremony on April 8th. The ashes are in a small casket which in turn is in a strong box.” Years later, when the Germers moved to California, Karl attempted to recover the urn to take it with them, but someone had clearly beaten him to it. What he had revealed to Jane Wolfe was somehow leaked to someone with no qualms about stealing from Germer, for when he went digging for Crowley’s remains, all that he found were a few rusty nails that were once part of the strong box. The urn had gone. So, the current location of Aleister Crowley’s ashes remains an unsolved mystery. Return to top of page. |
|||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
In Summary
An appropriate entry from Crowley's diary in June 1923 with which to begin this short summary reads, “I may be a Black Magician, but I’m a bloody great one.”
It is quite clear even to the casual reader that Edward Alexander Crowley sought fame and recognition throughout his life; the fact that he changed his name to Aleister for the reasons described near the beginning of this biography make that patently obvious. But despite his exploits and the publication of his entire works (mostly privately funded), and even 'persuading' Captain J.F.C. Fuller to write a book declaring him to be the greatest man of his generation (The Star in the West), it was all to no avail. The vast majority of the great British public remained totally unaware of his existence.
 He who laughs last ................. ! So Crowley was now the (in)famous person he had yearned to be for so long, and appeared to revel in his nickname of The Wickedest Man in the World, but he soon discovered this was to cause new problems from which he would not find an escape route, either with or without the aid of the Secret Chiefs. Publishers shunned his work, and apart from a small band of loyal friends and followers very few people wanted to be associated with him. For the last fifteen years of his life he remained in relative obscurity, dying a penniless heroin addict in a boarding house in Hastings. During his magical career, he used several mottos:
He never saw his daughter Lola Zaza again, but Deirdre McAlpine visited him quite often with his son (officially called Aleister McAlpine) for whom he supposedly made provision through the O.T.O. Despite a great deal of research I can find no information about ‘Aleister Ataturk’. We know well how prolific a writer Aleister was, but upon reflection, what a pity he did not devote some time to writing travel guides as well. Considering the amount of travelling he did and the places he saw during his lifetime, I‘m certain they would have made very interesting and descriptive reading, and just imagine comparing those places of yesteryear with how they look today.
Note
Throughout his life Crowley claimed to be a 33rd Degree Mason, but it transpired that the regularity of his initiation with the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) has been not only questioned, but disputed. In a letter from the Supreme Council of Freemasonry we learn that the title of SOVEREIGN GRAND INSPECTOR GENERAL conferred upon him by John Yarker (1833 - 1913), a 33rd Degree Mason, on 29 November 1910 (the date shown on the charter to the right) is worthless because the Grand Lodge of England's records show that John Yarker was expelled from the Masonic Fraternity in 1870, some forty years before this. Remember also, Crowley told us Don Jesus Medina had granted him the 33rd Degree in Mexico in 1901. Click on the image to the right
to see a larger version of the charter.
Return to top of page. |
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
Life after Death
Rock artistes such as the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Jimmy Page (formerly of Led Zeppelin) all mentioned him by name or referred to Thelema in song. Jimmy Page used to run The Equinox Bookshop in London, which specialised in Crowley's publications. He also owned Boleskine, Crowley's 'manor' on the banks of Loch Ness, for twenty years between 1971 and 1991, and has a huge collection of Crowleyana including books, manuscripts and robes.
This list is far from exhaustive, but it reflects the continuing interest in the legendary Aleister Crowley. Return to top of page. |
|||||||||||||||
|
||||
|
In ConclusionShould you wish to learn more, or even begin to try to understand this incomprehensible enigma of a man, I would certainly recommend that you begin by reading his autohagiography titled The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. Apart from being a tremendous read, it may well alter any preconceived impression you had of him irrespective of what your thoughts were originally, saint or sinner.When alive he could hardly sell a copy of a book, but since his death the cost of some of Crowley's publications has rocketed so you may well feel that the expense is not worth it. In this case I would suggest you try the Public Library (if it is still open), which is from where I borrowed my first copy of Confessions, but you should bear in mind the fact that truly rare books can turn out to be a sound investment - I now own several different editions of his autohagiography along with many of his other important printed works. They won't amount to a comfortable retirement just yet, but I'm working on it. The only problem is I probably don't have enough time - woe is me, I should have begun my collection in 1967 when he came back into fashion! N.B. In September 2007 I emailed the Grand Secretary General of the UK Grand Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis simply to enquire as to whether he knew of any intention to reprint Crowley's Confessions. This is Frater Spiritus' reply, for which I thank him for taking the time and trouble:
Return to top of page. |
|||
|
||||
|
And Finally ...You may or may not have heard of 'Amado Crowley', an occult writer, magician, and head of a long-established magical order (called what?), who claims to be a biological son of Aleister Crowley. He was born on 26 January 1930, he said, as a result of a magical operation 'Uncle Aleister' performed in 1928 – eh? I am no mathematician, gynaecologist or midwife, but is there not a discrepancy between the date of conception and birth? Amado told us his mother is 'Stella Taylor' who was twenty-two at the time she allegedly met Crowley on a ferry to Boulogne.Aleister's illegitimate 'son' announced himself to the occult world in 1971 in a letter to 'Man, Myth, and Magic', but why did he wait for nearly a quarter of a century after Crowley's death before making this announcement? And why was it only after the resurgence of Aleister Crowley's name and works? In the same way as 'his father' did, Amado uses and teaches a combination of different Western Magical techniques along with Eastern methods which include meditation,Yoga and Tai Chi. However, he also teaches that the cornerstone of 'his father's' religion of Thelema, The Book of the Law, is a fraud, claiming that Aleister gave to him an as yet unpublished text, The Book of Desolation, which is the only true holy text by the Master. I can't wait for its publication, or maybe I won't get to read it because he too has passed it on to his own unknown 'illegitimate son'! It is reported that Amado died in February 2010, although I have not yet learnt of his 'illegitimate son'. Dave Evans Ph. D and lecturer, has researched in detail the claims and proven biographical details of the individual in question. He tells us, "Amado is important ... for being the only occultist to claim that Aleister's work is totally and deliberately fraudulent." Those few words sum up his opinion very well. Gerald Suster (2 August 1951 - 3 February 2001) was a British historian, occult writer, and novelist. He doubts Amado's claim of parentage, writing "Amado claims in his book that Aleister taught him between the ages of 7 and 14: i.e. 1937-1944. If so, why isn't there a single mention of this vital matter in Crowley's Diaries? There he records matters as trivial as the breaking of a tooth or the quality of his dinner: but he does not see fit to record meetings with the initiation of a son destined to be his successor." You can read a full review of Amado Crowley's 'book' The Secrets of Aleister Crowley [Diamond Books, Leatherhead, 1991, £5.99] by Gerald Suster if you click HERE. To read another interesting review by G. M. Kelly, click HERE.
If someone can answer this question satisfactorily ..... Why would a man such as 'his father', who was convinced of his own several incarnations on this earth, require someone to continue his work if he naturally assumed he would be reincarnated and thus able to continue that work in his own right albeit in a different existence? (Please don’t tell me he wanted a son to fulfil the prophecy in Chapter 3, verse 47 of the Book of the Law, i.e. ‘one cometh after him, whence I say not, who shall discover the Key of it all.’) ..... then I will believe in Father Christmas and the Tooth-Fairy again, but still not in his 'biological son' Amado Crowley! Return to top of page. |
|||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Quotes from the Master TherionMany of these quotes, all taken from Aleister Crowley's autohagiography Confessions can be found in several other places on the internet. The reason for my including them on this site is that not one of the other sites tells you where to find them within his great tome. Some of them are not really worthy of inclusion as quotes per se, so as time constraints permit I shall glean some others and add them to this section.
Return to top of page. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The Magical Mottos of A.C. & his AssociatesMagical mottos are the magical nicknames, noms de plume, or pseudonyms (normally in Latin) taken by various individuals in magical organisations, the motto generally being adopted upon initiation into the neophyte grade of the organisation. These members were known by, and often referred to in many publications by their mottos. Users of magical mottos typically referred to each other in their capacity as initiates as Frater (men) or Soror (women), Latin for brother and sister respectively, followed by the initials of their magical mottos.
E.&.O.E. Return to top of page. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Crowley's BiographersAleister Crowley has been the subject of numerous biographies and studies, not always accurate, with some showing outright hostility towards the man while others give a true account of his life, including his eccentricities. Some of the more well known are listed below.
I feel this first piece is of vital importance to balance what has been written about Crowley since his death. Israel Regardie in his Introduction to P.R. Stephensen’s The Legend of Aleister Crowley (1970) throws some interesting light on John Symonds (another biographer and one of his literary executors):
“Crowley died in 1947. Why he appointed John Symonds as one of his literary executors is a mystery that will never be divined. It is perhaps another example of Crowley’s poor judgement about people. Symonds wrote a disgusting book over a decade ago entitled ‘The Great Beast’. It is a malicious contemptible piece of work crammed with deliberate misinterpretation and ignorant understanding of what Crowley stood for. This wretched work was followed by another, ‘The Magick of Aleister Crowley’. In this second book, Symonds has extrapolated from the diaries and other works by Crowley in such a contemptible manner as to make ‘the old man’ look like a complete idiot.
Not content with this insolence, Symonds has steadfastly refused permission to me and several other writers to use any of Crowley’s published material. Evidently he has assumed that his literary executorship, instituted on behalf of and for the Ordo Templi Orientis, should be for his own personal gain.”
“Whatever Crowley was, he was not a charlatan. He believed, he worked, he suffered, he had power. He failed to put over the religion of Thelema in his lifetime, which, considering its nature, is not surprising. The Christian world regards him as one of the Devil’s Contemplates. His few friends will not see his like again; but his still fewer disciples mourn the passing of a Magus.”
"Aleister Crowley is a man. . . . . . . Moreover he is an interesting man, an extraordinary man; and, further, he is a dangerously good poet both in his poetry and in his life. Nothing much is known publicly about either of these activities. There is a great deal of dirty rumour. I am satisfied, after investigation, that rumour has lied, as usual; but more disgracefully and filthily than usual about this man."
“Crowley is, admittedly, a complicated case. One can hardly blame people for feeling hatred and fear toward Crowley when Crowley himself so often exulted in provoking just such emotions. Indeed he tended to view those emotions as inevitable, given what he regarded as the revolutionary nature and power of his teachings and the prevailing hypocrisy of society ... Revile Christianity (but not Christ, mind you) as he might, seek its downfall as he did, Crowley desired nothing less than a full-fledged successor religion — complete with a guiding Logos that would endure for millenia, as had the teachings of Jesus. "Thelema" was the Logos Crowley proclaimed, Greek for "Will." "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" was its central credo. Let us concede that this credo — so redolent, seemingly, of license and arnarchy, dark deeds and darker dreams — terrifies on first impact, as does Crowley the man. ... Say what you will of Crowley, judge his failings as you will, there remains a man as protean, brilliant, courageous, flabbergasting, as ever you could imagine. There endure achievements that no reasoned account of his life may ignore...”
“I would like to forget Crowley’s foibles, his sins, his fabulous claims, his ‘Magick’. I would remember rather his good-fellowship, his heroism, his learning, his genius. And, when all else has
been said about him, there remains to say what Louis Wilkinson has said truly, that he had never quite ‘grown up’, that there was in fact a ‘pathos’ about him, something irresistibly ‘lovable’.”
Return to top of page.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
A Short but Concise ChronologyThis section is designed to provide a 'snapshot' of some of the major incidents in Aleister Crowley's life. Not all known occurrences have been included at this stage, but, as I have mentioned on other pages, it will be updated as and when time constraints permit. I am not including details of Aleister's publications as these are the subject of a separate section.
Return to top of page. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
A
Edward Alexander Crowley, his surname being pronounced as one would pronounce the word ‘holy’ (ironic as it may seem to those who know anything about the man or 'Beast' he was to become), was born on 12 October 1875 at 30, Clarendon Square, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, into a wealthy and strictly religious Victorian family. His father, also called Edward, was a staunch member of the 
The Crowley family came from Alton, Hampshire. The Crowleys had owned a brewery in Croydon, Surrey, for more than 200 years, and became very successful at selling a glass of their ale with what was described as 'a first class sandwich' in the Alton alehouses for 4d (four old pence – equivalent to 1.67 pence in today's currency). This could be considered the forerunner of the modern-day ploughman's lunch. Edward senior sold his shares in the brewery in 1871, after which his branch of the family moved to Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. It is thought he invested the proceeds in the highly successful 
His feelings towards his parents during his childhood is one of the stranger facets of his early life, and clearly led to his later contempt for Christianity. His father was undoubtedly his hero, friend and mentor. He was a ‘natural born leader of men’ who influenced thousands through his expressive preaching. He remembered walking with his father in a field, when his attention was drawn to a clump of nettles. He was warned they would sting if he were to touch them. He did not remember what he answered, but whatever it was drew the question from his father, "Will you take my word for it or would you rather learn by experience?" He replied, "I would rather learn by experience," and did; he dived headlong into the clump. This attitude sums up Aleister’s entire life.
Although young Edward had the greatest respect for his father, he supposedly despised his mother and treated her as one would a servant. This becomes apparent when we read his autohagiography, but he did appear to have a ‘soft spot’ for her if we read between the lines. It was not only a physical repulsion, but an intellectual and social scorn. In her school days, she was known as the ‘Little Chinese Girl’ because of her features. She was also considered a talented painter in watercolour. He maintained contact with her throughout her life, albeit infrequently, and was even gracious enough to save her life at Beachy Head, near Eastbourne, East Sussex!
Later, Alick attended Malvern and Tonbridge public schools. Just as many mischievous schoolboys did, and probably still do, he amused himself through divers 'anti-social' activities. For example, he created an extremely powerful explosive device with which he caused considerable damage and nearly killed himself. Another memorable episode was his killing of a cat in several horrible ways (not maliciously so he assures us) 'to test the theory of its nine lives'. This experiment was obviously a great success, because he concluded that the unfortunate animal had only the one. Some writers suggest it was his own cat, ‘Mrs Hagar’, but in Confessions Chapter 6, Aleister tells us he simply caught a cat for the purpose.
As he began to mature, Alick was rapidly becoming an expert at rock climbing. He also made some ‘impossible climbs’ on the cliffs at Beachy Head, and more or less forced a congratulatory letter of apology from the 'greatest' rock climber in England at the time, A.F. Mummery (1855 – 1895). Mummery had published a short account of his own work on the cliffs at Dover, where he lived, stating that at more than twenty to thirty feet above sea-level no climbing was possible on chalk. Consequently, he doubted Alick’s claims of his achievements, that is, until he saw the undeniable photographic evidence!
Although considered to be heterosexual, bisexual might be a truer portrayal of his sexuality. He had been having an affair with Herbert Charles Pollitt (1871 – 1942), much better known as the dancer and female impersonator, Jerome Pollitt, a close friend of Aubrey Beardsley (1872 – 1898) the English illustrator and author. This liaison with Pollitt, a man four years his senior, had been going on for several years. In January 1898, Crowley rented rooms at 14, Trinity Street, Cambridge, where he and Pollitt spent most of their time together despite the fact that his guest disapproved strongly of his consistant study of the occult and the overwhelming ‘magical’ decor in the premises.
Aleister reached another major milestone in his incredible life during Easter 1898. He was staying at Wasdale in the Lake District with Pollitt, but as well as climbing he spent his time re-reading The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, more or less ignoring his companion, much to his disappointment. It was here he met Oscar Eckenstein (1859 - 1921), a mathematician and railway engineer, but more importantly, a vastly experienced rock climber and mountaineer.
In the summer of 1898, Aleister left Trinity College and Pollitt forever (he regretted their parting in the manner in which they did), but before doing so met a young undergraduate and aspiring artist, Gerald Festus Kelly (1879 - 1972), who had read his first published poem, Aceldama,, which had aroused his interest and curiosity. Kelly had two great passions in life, cricket and painting, although he was reading political science at Cambridge when Crowley met him. He was to continue a relationship with Kelly (who, later in life,would be knighted and appointed President of the Royal Academy) for a number of years during which their paths were to cross often. Aleister did not bother to attain a degree before leaving Cambridge because:
But his disappointment was to turn to delight in the spring of 1899 when he met an Adept of the Second Order by the name of Charles Henry Allan Bennett (1872 - 1923), known simply as Allan Bennett, who was already well-known as a magician and considered to be second only in this craft to Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, the Head of the G.D. On their first encounter, which occurred in the disrobing room, Bennett knew instinctively that Crowley had been experimenting with Black Magick. He looked him in the eyes, and said in a penetrating and, as it seemed to A.C., almost menacing tone, "Little Brother, you have been meddling with the Goetia!" (Goetia is the technical word employed to cover all operations of that aspect of Magick dealing with gross, malignant or unenlightened forces.) Crowley told him that he had not been doing anything of the sort. "In that case," he retorted, "the Goetia has been meddling with you." The conversation went no further.
Shortly after this brief encounter, Crowley discovered Bennett was living in a rather sordid, tiny tenement south of the River Thames in either Southwark or Lambeth, so invited him to stay at his more luxurious apartment in Chancery Lane (where he called himself Count Vladimir Svareff). He realised Bennett could teach him much more in a month than anyone else in five years. Bennett gratefully accepted his offer and thereafter took him under his wing, showing Aleister not only where to find 
Crowley spent a deal of time working from his Abra-Melin translation throughout the remainder of 1899. "To perform the operation of conjuring up your Holy Guardian Angel," says the Egyptian Mage, "you must first of all construct an oratory in a secluded place." His flat in Chancery Lane was much too noisy for this purpose, so he wandered round the Lake District and Scotland in search of a suitable place. In August, he came across a ‘Manor’ known as 'Boleskine' (which equates gematrically to 418) close to the village of Foyers; Loch Ness lay before it and a hill behind. It was certainly remote, and the view was magnificent; in fact, it was the ideal location in which to practice Abra-Melin magic. After several months of concentrated effort, he partially succeeded, attracting a host of demons, many of which materialised.
By the end of the year, partly through Bennett's earlier invaluable guidance and instruction, and partly through his own dedication and perseverance, Aleister had completed the work necessary to advance to the Second Order of the G.D. in the grade of Adeptus Minor. But the London controllers of the Order, Florence Farr and William Butler Yeats in particular (who disliked the ‘demonic upstart’ intensely - the feelings were mutual by the way), refused to advance him.
Together, they scaled many of the country’s highest peaks over the next few months, including Iztaccihuatl (17,343’) and Popocatepetl (17,802’), setting several new world records along the way. Having achieved all they had set out to do, they discussed the expedition to K2 in more detail before Eckenstein returned to England while Aleister continued on his worldly travels. His lasting legacy of Mexico was malaria, a disease from which he would suffer severe recurring bouts throughout the remainder of his life. He later decided that the best way to treat mosquitoes was as ‘friends’, i.e., welcome them, let them have their fill, then they’ll go away and leave you in peace.
Upon his arrival in Calcutta on 26 February 1902, he checked his mail. It was confirmed the expedition to K2 (known to locals as Chogo Ri) was to go ahead; the members of the expedition were to meet at Rawalpindi. He left Calcutta on 7 March, passing through Benares, Agra (where he found the Taj Mahal to be 'interesting'), Delhi, and Pindi, from where he took a train. Unbelievable as it may be, the carriage reserved for the expedition comprised a part of this train, so he was introduced to his four new comrades earlier than expected. They were Guy Knowles, a Trinity man (who had no climbing experience), an Austrian judge named Pfannl, reputedly the best rock climber in Austria, Pfannl’s regular climbing companion Wessely, and a Swiss ex-Army doctor by the name of Guillarmod. The expedition was underway!
There are two ways of returning to Srinagar: one; the way they had come, the alternative; to cross the Deosai Plateau. Eckenstein chose the former while Aleister returned via the plateau, the highest in the world, not counting Tibet. Located at the boundary of the Karakoram and the western Himalayas, it is a high tableland (between 14,000’ and 17,000’) crossed by four principal rivers, and has a renowned reputation for its inhospitality.
A favourite haunt of artists, poets and writers in Paris at that time was a restaurant in the Rue d’Odessa, close to the Gare Montparnasse, known as Le Chat Blanc. Gerald Kelly was already part of the ‘in crowd’ and as such was able to introduce Crowley to some interesting personalities. One of these was the sculptor, Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917), who was being vilified over his statue of Balzac, the French novelist and playwright. Aleister thought it was magnificent, and Rodin’s best work to date, so wrote a sonnet in his defence and praise. This pleased him immensely, so much so he invited Crowley to stay with him. After Rodin, the most important of these new acquaintances was Marcel Schwob, a talented French scholar of English. Two of the other prominent people he met were William Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965), who based who based the protagonist in his book 'The Magician' (Oliver Haddo) on Crowley, and Arnold Bennett (1867 – 1931), to whom he was introduced by Schwob.
Aleister went to Edinburgh on 13 July, partly to replenish his extensive stock of expensive wines, partly to engage the services of a companion-housekeeper (which he managed to do but had to cancel), but ostensibly to pass the time of day with Gerald Kelly who was to spend the summer at Strathpeffer in the Scottish highlands. Then in early August, Kelly wrote to Crowley inviting him to join his party at Strathpeffer. He accepted, and here he met Gerald’s sister, Rose Edith, the widow of a Major Skerrett.
We reached the King's Chamber after dismissing the servants at the foot of the Grand Gallery. By the light of a single candle placed on the edge of the coffer I began to read the invocation. But as I went on I noticed that I was no longer stooping to hold the page near the light. I was standing erect. Yet the manuscript was not less but more legible. Looking about me, I saw that the King's Chamber was glowing with a soft light which I immediately recognised as the astral light. I have been accustomed to describe the colour as ultra-violet, from its resemblance to those rays in the spectrum - which I happen to be able to distinguish. The range varies, but it is quite noticeably beyond that visible to the normal human eye. The colour is not unlike that of an arc lamp; it is definitely less coloured than the light of a mercury lamp. If I had to affix a conventional label, I should probably say pale lilac. But the quality of the light is much more striking than the colour. Here the word phosphorescence occurs to the mind. It is one of the mysteries of physics that the total light of the sky is very much greater than can be accounted for by the luminous bodies in the heavens. There are various theories, but I personally believe that the force now called radio-activity which we know to be possessed in some degree by every particle of matter, is responsible. Our eyes are affected with the impression of light by forces which are not in themselves recognised as luminous.
They arrived back in Cairo on 9 February 1904, and toured Egypt for several weeks. Crowley wanted to study Mohammedism, particularly the mysticism of the fakir, the Darwesh and the Sufi. He posed as a Persian prince by the name of Chioa Khan (pronounced Hiwa Khan), Hebrew for The Beast. For his study of Islam, he persuaded (or most likely paid) a sheikh to teach him Arabic and the practices of ablution, prayer and so on. This sheikh was well-versed in the mysticism and magick of Islam, so on discovering Crowley was a genuine initiate, had no hesitation in giving him books and manuscripts on the Arabic Kabbalah. These formed the basis of his comparative studies, the correlation being given in Liber 777.
While trying to summon 
Upon examination of this Stèle (now referred to as the 
After invoking Horus following Rose’s precise instructions, Crowley made the breakthrough. He was told 
Aleister could now settle down into matrimonial bliss. The Crowleys enjoyed a pleasant summer at Boleskine relaxing and entertaining. “In summer in the Highlands, time seems to forgive. At midnight one can sit and read in the open air even in the absence of the moon.” At the end of that summer, because winters in Scotland could be cold, damp and miserable, Aleister and Rose left Lilith with Rose’s parents and spent the season in St. Moritz. (Is it not even colder there?) They returned home in early spring 1905.
Although he was now a husband and father, the associated responsibilities were cast aside; wanderlüst had beckoned again. On 6 May 1905, Crowley left Rose and Lilith behind to lead his unsuccessful (most writers justifiably say disastrous) expedition to Kanchenjunga. There was no time to spare if they were to attempt the climb this summer. Guillarmod was to stock up on the necessary provisions and equipment in Europe, while he went directly to Darjeeling to make arrangements concerning transport and communications. The entire party consisted of five Europeans, three Kashmiris, the sirdar (leader) of the porters, six personal servants and seventy-nine regular porters. It left Darjeeling on 8 August, but even before the expedition set off there were numerous logistical problems with supplies and equipment to overcome. Oscar Eckenstein had been invited to join the expedition but declined the offer, telling Crowley he would never consent to go on a mountain again with Guillarmod and that his entire plan was ‘a recipe for disaster’ - how prophetic this man was!
A gentleman called Mr. Litton was the British Consul in Tengyueh. He advised Crowley not to stay in the country, let alone attempt to cross it, particularly when he realised he was taking Rose and Lilith with him, because of the recent unrest in the country caused by the Boxer Uprising, a violent anti-foreign, anti-Christian movement by the Righteous Fists of Harmony. Many Europeans had been murdered recently; diplomats, foreign civilians, soldiers and some Chinese Christians had been forced to retreat to the diplomatic quarter. But, Aleister was undaunted by these warnings. After all, he was Aleister Crowley and if he had made up his mind to do something, he did it in his own inimitable manner!
Their primary objective was to reach the area where the rivers Salween, Mekong and Yangtze Kiang run almost parallel within a distance of forty miles, while at their mouths the distance between each is two thousand miles instead of twenty. They crossed the Salween by means of a rickety bridge decorated with shrines, with a 'delightful' house for the toll-keeper. The Mekong, which "flows through a superb gorge with extremely steep banks", was crossed on the day after New Year, 1906. East of the Mekong, the path became much more dangerous, partly due to geological differences. The whole journey between Sha Yang and Chu Tung was across a steep, wide range.
He had begun publishing his ‘Collected Works’ privately in 1905, offering a prize of £100 (a considerable sum of money at the time) for the best essay discussing his poetry and other
works. Captain John Frederick Charles Fuller (1878 – 1966) of the 1st Oxfordshire Light Infantry was stationed in Lucknow (now the capital city of Uttar Pradesh in India) and had written to Crowley when he was in Darjeeling (after the unsuccessful attempt on K3) to ask how he could obtain a copy of his book.
1907 was also the year in which he met Victor Benjamin Neuburg (1883 - 1940), an associate of Captain Fuller and an English poet and writer, particularly on theosophy. Neuburg was born into and raised in an upper middle-class Jewish family in London.
Liber 777, although written in 1907, was not published until 1909, but Crowley became dissatisfied with the first version and began its revision. Unusually for Aleister, he never got round to completing it. The actual revised version, Liber 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings, was edited and updated from Crowley’s own notes by Israel Regardie, his one-time secretary.
Aleister also began publication of The Equinox in 1909, a biannual publication released on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, which became the official mouthpiece of the A
Shortly after this lawsuit, Theodor Reuss, a Grand Master of the combined Scottish and Memphis Rites of Freemasonry in Germany, contacted Crowley. Reuss was not only a Grand Master of this organisation, but also the Head of the 
He became Head of the English speaking branch of the Order in 1912, an appointment which included authority over the lower (Masonic) degrees of the O.T.O., under the name Mysteria Mystica Maxima, or M
“My assistants were Commander Marston, R.N., one of the highest officials of the Admiralty, and Leila Waddell, an Australian violinist whom I had just met and who appealed to my imagination. In the Triangle was Frater Omnia Vincam, to serve as a material basis through which the spirit might manifest. Here was a startling innovation in tradition. I wrote, moreover, a ritual on entirely new principles. I retained the Cabbalistic names and formulae, but wrote most of the invocation in poetry. The idea was to work up the magical enthusiasm through the exhilaration induced by music.”
In October and November 1910, the Rites of Eleusis were performed at Caxton Hall, Westminster, by Crowley, Leila Waddell on violin, and Victor Neuburg. They were inended to bring Crowley's new organisation, the A
Crowley met Mary d'Este Sturges (also known as Mary Desti and Mary Preston) in October 1911. She was a friend and companion of the dancer Isadora Duncan (considered by many to be the creator of modern dance) celebrating her birthday at the Savoy in London. He travelled to Paris at the end of the month to visit her in her apartment. After ‘sweeping her off her feet’ he took her to Zurich, then to St. Moritz, and initiated her into the A
During this pre-war period, Aleister was gentlemanly enough to try to get some recognition for Laylah. He formed a female dancing troupe, The Ragged Ragtime Girls, which she headed, and launched them in London at the 'Tivoli Music Hall' in The Strand in March 1913 (demolished in 1914 to enable widening of The Strand; rebuilt and reopened as 'The Tivoli Picture Theatre' in 1923). He hired six young female violinists to accompany her and dressed them all in coloured rags. Even though they were described as 'dreadful' by A.C., they were well received by the audiences, so in his new role as an impresario he took the show to Paris and Moscow, with reasonable success. Of the six girls he hired, "three were dipsomaniacs, four nymphomaniacs, two hysterically prudish, and all ineradicably convinced that outside England everyone was a robber, ravisher and assassin." They each carried revolvers, 'which they did not know how to use', although we are assured they were quite prepared to shoot the first person who spoke to them.
Crowley spent the duration of WWI in America, sailing on the RMS Lusitania on 24 October 1914. He had been refused entry into any of the active services because of phlebitis in his leg, but had expected to work for the intelligence services. Consequently, he was a little narked to think that his offer to do so from a man of his intelligence and integrity had not been accepted. Had he bothered to pay the additional six shillings and eightpence to use the extra ink to write the initials B.A. after his name by taking his degree at Trinity, things may well have turned out differently.
The Cat (who became Soror Hilarion), a married woman, won his approval. He wanted a son to fulfil the prophecy in Chapter 3, verse 47 of the Book of the Law, i.e. ‘one cometh after him, whence I say not, who shall discover the Key of it all.' What the Cat did produce for Aleister was not a physical son but a metaphysical son, in other words, a magical son.
Charles Stansfeld Jones was a member of the A
After giving a presentation on magick in the winter of 1917/18, Crowley met a Swiss-American woman by the name of Alma Hirsig, who in turn introduced him to her sister Leah, a schoolteacher, several weeks later. He thought Leah was 'magnificent', but after a quick romp he did not see her again for about twelve months after that first meeting. In other words, Leah did not become his Scarlet Woman straightaway, although she was to attain that exalted status before he left America. He received an unexpected knock at his door in January 1919; Leah wanted his advice on finding an apartment in Greenwich Village. She had begun a course of lectures on law and wanted to live closer to New York University. A.C. suggested she move in with him!
The one-storey rectangular farmhouse had six rooms, five of which radiated from a central one which became his temple. The villa, although 'ideal' in Crowley's eyes, had no gas, electricity or sanitation, and the only available clean water came from a nearby well. However, included in the rent was an added 'bonus' in the guise of a goat which provided the residents with fresh milk. He set to work furnishing his temple and painting the interior walls and floors with all manner of images. Leah and Poupée joined them shortly afterwards.
Upon his return he was pleased to discover the abbey had a new member, Godwin (C.F. Russell), whom he had known in America. Many other guests came and went. Some stayed, including Jane Wolfe, a Hollywood actress who appeared in more than thirty films, and with whom Crowley had been corresponding for some time before she arrived. Besides their regular members, they had a visit from Cypris' two sisters, Mimi, her twin, and Helen, nearly twenty years her senior. Mimi stayed for just a fortnight.
Despite the fact that many people were coming and going, the Abbey was doomed, although the philosophy/religion of Thelema still thrives through the auspices of the 
Tales of horrors filled the pages of newspapers such as The Sunday Express for weeks and months thereafter; satanic rituals, black masses, animal sacrifice, and even human sacrifice were reported, or blatantly lied about, for the majority of the stories were simply not true or just fanciful exaggeration. Horatio Bottomley of John Bull magazine libellously expanded on Douglas’ stories and ran headlines such as 'THE KING OF DEPRAVITY', 'A HUMAN BEAST' and 'A MAN WE'D LIKE TO HANG.'
Meanwhile, an aspiring magician by the name of Israel Regardie (1907 – 1985), learnt of Crowley and wrote to him from America. Aleister replied and suggested he contact Karl Germer, who in turn encouraged him to keep in touch with Crowley. In October 1928, Aleister agreed to tutor him in magick, for which he was to become Crowley’s (unpaid) secretary. Regardie, obviously not knowing any better at the time, handed over his savings to A.C. for safe keeping!
Before being served with the deportation order, Aleister had already met his next Scarlet Woman, Maria Theresa Sanchez (née Ferrari) de Miramar, a reasonably wealthy Nicaraguan, whom he referred to as Old Nile. Crowley feigned illness resulting in a short stay of execution of the order, but Maria and Regardie had no alternative but to leave France. They were refused entry into England and sent back to France immediately (on the same ferry on which they had arrived), from where they went to Brussels in Belgium, another country which, although not deporting them, looked upon them as undesirables.
Hanni and Crowley took a trip to Portugal, but because of her painful sexual experiences while performing 'sex-magick' with Crowley (she apparently disapproved of the orifice he was using) she soon went home to Berlin. Crowley then faked his own death at Boca do Inferno (Hell’s Mouth) near Cascais in September, where he left a suicide note (as a result of which Boca do Inferno is now a major tourist attraction), before pursuing Hanni to Berlin to patch things up.
On 30 June, Crowley had dinner with Viola Bankes, the sister of Ralph Bankes who gave the Kingston Lacy estates to the National Trust in 1982, having recently met her at a party hosted by Gwendoline Otter. In August, Crowley and Viola tried to persuade Paul Robeson (1898 – 1976), a famous black actor and singer, to play the role of Orlando, 'a Negro of the Tunisian Sudan' in Mortadello, a play Aleister had published in 1912. Robeson respectfully declined their 'generous' offer saying something along the lines of, "I'm afraid it's no use, you see, there are certain lines and gestures which the British public would not care to see enacted between a Negro and a white woman. As for the American stage, why, if I were to produce it over there, someone in the audience would stand up and shoot me with a revolver!" The following month, Viola Bankes joined Crowley at Foyle's Literary Luncheon where he was giving a lecture titled 'The Philosophy of Magick' to an audience of a few hundred people, which was apparently very well received.
Another notorious event in Crowley's life - you may have noticed by now that he did have one or two during his 72 short years on this earth - happened in 1934 when he lost The Laughing Torso libel case against Nina Hamnett and her publishers. He had known Nina since 1913 when she became a member of the A
One remarkable achievement, of which we read or hear very little, is the fact that Aleister did eventually have a son, with a woman called Deirdre Patricia O’Doherty, later to become Deirdre McAlpine. The circumstances are bizarre to say the least. She had watched Crowley during The Laughing Torso libel case from the public gallery and been impressed by his humour and devil-may-care attitude, although she had not fallen in love with him.
While working on his now world-renowned Book of Thoth, Crowley was looking for an accomplished artist to illustrate the Tarot cards. In June 1937, he was introduced to Lady (Marguerite) Frieda Harris - née Bloxam (1877 – 1962), whose interest in the occult was limited to say the least. Her husband, Percy Harris, served as a Liberal Party MP and was Chief Whip for the party. He was created a baronet in 1932, after which she was entitled to style herself Lady Harris but preferred to use Lady Frieda Harris. He was dubious about how serious she was, but after she paid ten pounds for affiliation to the O.T.O., joined the A
Crowley's exploits during the World War II (WWII) years are not entirely clear. We do know he was delighted when Churchill became Prime Minister; he even posed in a Churchillian manner wearing a bowler hat, smoking a huge cigar, and scowling.
One extra snippet to make us ponder even more is Churchill’s prolific use of the V-sign. According to Crowley, it was particularly suited to the task of bringing victory because of its esoteric correspondences. In Magick, V was the sign of Apophis and Typhon which opposed the sign of the swastika, something Hitler or his advisers on occult matters would certainly have been aware of. The V for Victory sign was attributed to the BBC broadcasters Victor de Lavalege and/or David Ritchie, but it is known that Aleister had suggested it to the authorities long before it was first mentioned on the BBC. So, was it serendipity, or had the authorities actually been listening to Uncle Aleister?
On 17 January 1945, he retired to Netherwood, a large nineteenth century Victorian mansion, which had been converted into a delightful guest house. It stood in wooded grounds in an elevated area on the outskirts of the town of Hastings, East Sussex, called The Ridge. From this vantage point, he had panoramic views over the town and could see Beachy Head where he spent many happy times climbing the chalk cliffs in his younger days.
In 1946, shortly after the end of hostilities and towards the end of his life, Crowley was introduced to the man now considered the 'father of modern Wicca', Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1884 – 1964), after whom Gardnerian Wicca is named. His several meetings with Gardner led to controversy over the authenticity of Gardner’s Book of Shadows, the first draft for which was titled Ye Bok of ye Art Magikal. It was alleged that Gardner paid Crowley to write the book for him, but this has since been discounted by 'experts'. Extracts from material written by Aleister Crowley were supposedly contained within Gardner's book, but it was rewritten between 1954 and 1957 when most of that material was removed. Excuse me, am I stupid, or is that really proof that Crowley played no part in the writing of the book?
Aleister Crowley gained much well-deserved notoriety during his life and was (in)famously dubbed The Wickedest Man in the World, a title he did little to refute and doubtlessly
encouraged. His experiments with and continual use of drugs, which included laudanum, opium, cocaine, hashish, alcohol, ether, mescaline and heroin, had developed a dependency, particularly upon all forms of heroin, from which he suffered for the major part of his life. Almost destitute because publishers shunned his writings, he spent his remaining days in Netherwood.
It is worth mentioning that the Order of Service pamphlet printed for Aleister's commemoration showed an incorrect date of birth of 18 October 1875. Incidentally, he never got to be buried in Poets’ Corner as per his previous wishes – apparently it was already full to bursting point, but then again, he did revoke all former wills!
It was not until 1923, at the age of 48, that he got the attention he desired - he had finally become a household name, but for all the wrong reasons. This came about after the Sunday Express printed
its (mainly untrue) 'revelations' about the Abbey of Thelema, and
That, more or less, was the end of Aleister Crowley and probably would have remained so, had 
Today, The Beast 666 has become a household name once again and he is certainly more famous now than ever he was during his lifetime. This began twenty years after his death when the 'Fab Four' (The Beatles) from Liverpool included his portrait as one of the people they admired on the sleeve of their huge-selling 1967 LP - Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Crowley is circled, second from the left in the back row). This album has become one of the world's best-selling albums, having sold more than 32 million copies. Aleister was adopted as the 'patron saint' of Hippies and Flower-power children, while his former places of residence became shrines for their pilgrimages.
Having read both The Secrets of Aleister Crowley and The Riddles of Aleister Crowley, my personal opinion of Amado Crowley is that he is an 'uneducated fraud' without half the brainpower of a goldfish. Having achieved nothing of significance through his own means during his sad lifetime, and now virtually 'knocking on death's door', he is trying to make a killing out of the growing phenomenon that is Aleister Crowley without actually knowing anything about the man despite the wealth of information available 'out there' from people far more intelligent and knowledgeable than I.
