Aleister Crowley (10 page)

After a time the two realized they had to part. Bennett had
decided to take the last step in becoming a monk; Crowley went big-game hunting in India. The idea was to eventually meet up with Eckenstein for their ascent of Chogo Ri. Once more Abramelin had faded into the background in the face of Crowley’s wanderlust
.
At one point Crowley again tried his hand at entering a monastery, and this time he had better luck than in Japan. Outside the great temple at Madura, Crowley sat in a loincloth with a begging bowl in hand. His hero Robert Burton had entered Mecca disguised as a Muslim, and Crowley wanted to follow suit. The natives saw through his disguise—Crowley was about as good a faux Hindu as he was a fake Russian—but his sincerity was evident and they allowed him into a secret shrine where he sacrificed a goat to Bhavani, the fearsome destructive face of the goddess Parvarti. When a desire to see Bennett once more took hold, Crowley decided to make the dangerous journey across the Arakan hills to the monastery in south Burma where Bennett was living. En route with a companion in a dugout canoe on the Irrawaddy, Crowley came down with fever and hallucinated that the jungle was speaking to him and that he could feel the elemental spirits of nature. He then passed the time blasting away at everything he could with his rifle. One duck persisted in avoiding his barrage and so infuriated the master of Dhyana that he went ashore after it. The duck finally made the fatal mistake of flying overhead and Crowley potted it. Regardie surmises that for all his yogic training, a “fundamental hostility” remained in Crowley, as was evident in this rampant killing.
¹¹

On February 14, 1902, Crowley reached Akyab, where he found Bennett in the monastery of Lamma Sayadaw Kyoung. Bennett was tall and stood out amid the shorter Burmese. But he was Frater Iehi Aour
no longer. Bennett had joined the
sangha
, the community of
monks, and was now the Bhikkhu Ananda Metteya, “Bliss of Loving Kindness.”
¹²
Magic was behind him, as was much else. Crowley tells the story of how Bennett, coming across a poisonous snake in the road, preached the four noble truths to it and exhorted it to banish its anger.
¹³
The snake bit his umbrella and then passed on. Bennett had become something of a guru and many visitors came to see the European
bhikkhu
, or monk. While they were together, Bennett and Crowley discussed plans for the spread of Buddhism to the West, but Crowley was often on his own and found time to work on his poem “Ahab”
and to study Hindustani in preparation for K2. He also took to smoking opium, which he had already experimented with back in Chancery Lane. Crowley tells how, after several days in which the food and water brought to Bennett’s hut remained untouched, concerned monks came to him, worried about the white
bhikkhu
. Crowley went to investigate and found his guru levitating, his motionless body rocking gently in the breeze.

On March 23, Crowley met Eckenstein in Delhi. Two days earlier he had written “Berashith,” an “Essay in Ontology,” his first attempt at metaphysics of magic.
Berashith
is a Hebrew word meaning “in the beginning.” It is the first word of Genesis and according to Kabbalah contains the secret of existence. Crowley claims to have “re-discovered the long lost and central Arcanum” of the “divine philosophers.”
¹⁴
Although filled with Buddhist ideas, Crowley’s movement away from Buddhism is clear. He rejects Buddha’s silence regarding the question of how existence began and asserts the “absoluteness of the Qabalistic Zero.” Crowley uses arcane mathematics to arrive at an idea of a positive nothingness about which we can nevertheless make no concrete statement.
¹⁵
Before creation this positive nothingness neither existed nor didn’t exist—“the idea of existence
was just as much unformulated as that of toasted cheese,” one of Crowley’s more memorable insights—but it was out of this pregnant Nothing that the universe emerged. Crowley’s remark that “There is not and could not be any cause” sits well with contemporary ideas about cosmogony, as voiced by Stephen Hawking; in
The Grand Design
(2010), Hawking declared that “spontaneous creation” was all that was necessary to get things going, the universe beginning in a “quantum fluctuation in a pre-existing vacuum,” having no need of a creator. Crowley here is trying to grasp the ungraspable, the realm of being beyond the Supernals. His argument may not convince us, but the gist is clear. He is making his way to the Abyss.

But before he reached those depths he would scale some heights. At 28,251 feet, K2 towers less than a thousand feet below Mount Everest. Crowley would no doubt have preferred to attempt Everest, but at that time it was off-limits to Europeans. K2, however, is a more dangerous climb and has acquired the nickname of the “Savage Mountain”; this element of risk must have piqued Crowley’s interest. It was first surveyed in 1856 and is known as K2 because it is the second peak of the Karakorum Range; Chogo Ri is a kind of nickname and simply means “big mountain.” Crowley and Eckenstein’s expedition was the first to attempt this titan, and it was not until 1954 that its summit was reached. Although ultimately unsuccessful—they got as far as 21,407 feet before turning back—Crowley and Eckenstein did set some records, including the longest time spent at such altitude (sixty-eight days). Given the treacherous conditions and the lack of modern gear—they had, for example, no oxygen tanks—that the expedition got as far as it did is remarkable, and Crowley rightly felt proud of this climb.

Eckenstein was the expedition’s leader and he had gathered a few
other climbers. In Delhi Crowley met up with Guy Knowles, a young Cambridge man with no climbing experience; J. Jacot Guillarmod, a Swiss doctor and mountaineer; and two Austrian rock climbers, Heinrich Pfannl and Victor Wessely. Typically, Crowley has nothing good to say about any of them; Crowley was second in command and everyone had to sign an agreement pledging total obedience to Eckenstein. Crowley countermanded this obedience just before the true climb began, when he refused to jettison the bundle of poetry books he had brought with him. Eckenstein argued they would weigh him down but Crowley could not abandon Milton, so Eckenstein gave way. Although Crowley claimed that he paid the bulk of the expedition’s expenses, Symonds reports that Knowles rejected this and claimed that Crowley didn’t spend a cent.
¹⁶
That Crowley had ill will toward his companions did not bode well for the trek, and things got off to a bad start when Eckenstein was detained for three weeks by the authorities at Rawalpindi. No clear reason was given but most likely he was suspected of being a German spy.

This, however, was the least of their worries. Crowley did not get on well with the natives, and some of the “racial arrogance” he criticized in the Japanese appeared when he felt obliged to beat the leader of their drivers with his belt. Crowley claimed this was necessary in order to win the coolies’ respect. “The first business of any traveler in any part of the world is to establish his moral superiority,” he tells us.
¹⁷
Crowley’s moral superiority soon became a matter of concern and reappeared in a later climb. Dr. Guillarmod, who Crowley claimed “knew as little of mountains as he did of medicine,” had a different approach and set up a temporary clinic wherever they stopped, doing whatever he could to help people who rarely, if ever, saw a doctor.
¹⁸
Although Eckenstein was at least half German, Crowley referred to
Guillarmod, Pfannl, and Wessely as “undesirable aliens,” and would have preferred to have more Englishmen about.

They started out optimistically but soon the odds seemed against them. The weather wasn’t promising, the terrain was grueling, and the sheer size of the Savage Mountain overwhelmed. Crowley had a flare-up of malaria and suffered from snow-blindness. His remedy for this, and for the exhaustion that overcame him, was to drink champagne. His fever was so bad that he hallucinated butterflies in the snow and he became paranoid about Knowles and threatened him with a pistol. Knowles didn’t trust Crowley and quickly disarmed him, keeping the pistol as a memento, a humiliation Crowley didn’t report in his
Confessions
. At one point Pfannl went mad (a condition he felt only Crowley could understand) and Wessely, who Crowley paints as a glutton, stole the food supplies; a court-martial was planned. On July 10 the party reached its highest point, but the weather had broken and promised to remain bad. The days for climbing farther were lost; even remaining where they were was exhausting. The Savage Mountain had beaten them; by August they were retreating down the glacier. It was Crowley’s first major defeat. Had he been successful, he would have been “the man who climbed K2” and the world would have known about it. He would have been established—and in many ways it is a shame the attempt was unsuccessful. We’ve seen that Crowley was at peace with himself only on the mountains. He devotes a large section of the
Confessions
to the expedition and it is clear that it meant a great deal to him.
But now he was once again a wanderer of the wastes, and he had to press on.

Crowley left Bombay en route to Paris in October 1902. He had spent the weeks after K2 shooting, traveling, and sightseeing. He stopped off at Cairo but avoided the pyramids, preferring instead the
sophisticated entertainments at Shepheard’s Hotel, an Egyptian watering hole established in 1841 whose famous visitors included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and Noel Coward. Today Crowley is mentioned among its illustrious guests.
¹⁹
In Paris he stayed with his friend the painter Gerald Kelly. While Crowley had been traveling around the world, Kelly was establishing himself as an important artist. The two had been corresponding and Crowley, never one to flinch at asking favors, invited himself to visit. He of course wanted to touch base with his fellow Cambridge man, but the real reason for the visit was the serious business with Mathers. Bennett had answered his question and the way forward was open.

Crowley hoped to impress Mathers with his travels, his adventures, his knowledge of yoga, and his magical development. He wanted to be greeted as an equal, much as he wanted Yeats to greet him four years earlier. But when they met in Montmartre, where Mathers was living, his old master was singularly uninterested. In a letter to Kelly, Crowley anticipated this meeting as his Hour of Triumph, but the reunion was anticlimactic. Men such as Crowley and Mathers could not meet as equals and the tension was building. Crowley began his attack by inferring that Mathers had pawned an expensive dressing case and bag he had asked him to store while he was away. Mathers was as poor as ever and most likely did pawn them; this ignominious act lowered Mathers in Crowley’s eyes. Mathers had been in contact with the Secret Chiefs; of that Crowley had no doubt. But something had happened and he had fallen. Ironically, Crowley suggests Mathers’s fall came about through rashly invoking the forces of the Abramelin magic, something, as mentioned, often said about Crowley himself.
²⁰
Evidence for Mathers’s descent came in the form of a certain Mrs. M, who, according to Crowley, turned out to be a
vampire, sent by Mathers to seduce his ex-pupil. In the
Confessions
Crowley quotes the account given by his first biographer and advocate, J.F.C. Fuller, who we will meet further on.
²¹
Kelly is supposed to have asked Crowley to help free a certain Miss Q from the designs of a Mrs. M. Mrs. M, Kelly told Crowley, was a vampire and sculptor who was making a sphinx with the intention of giving it life; Miss Q was her victim. Crowley contrived a meeting and, alone with Mrs. M, saw her, “a middle aged woman worn with strange lusts” (exactly the kind of look designed to appeal to Crowley) transform into a “young woman of bewitching beauty.” The lustful Mrs. M now made advances on Crowley. Crowley knew that his life was at stake, so he began a “magical conversation,” which sent her evil energies back at her. After a struggle of wills, Mrs. M was transformed once again, this time into a hag of sixty, and Crowley left. Something suggested that Mrs. M could not be working alone and he was determined to discover her superiors. He then consulted a psychic who had a vision of Mathers’s home in Montmartre. There were Mathers and Moina, but it was Crowley’s shock to discover that their bodies had been taken over by the evil Mr. and Mrs. Horos! No wonder Mathers hadn’t been impressed with Crowley’s development: he was in the thrall of that evil couple.

Kelly denied that there was any truth in the story, but in one sense this hardly matters. Whether there actually was a Mrs. M or not, or whether or not she was a vampire and had anything to do with Mathers, one thing is clear. Crowley needed to justify his assault on Mathers and this episode allowed him to. Either Mathers had allowed these creatures to possess him—their physical bodies were at the time serving prison sentences for sex offenses, but no matter—or he was unwillingly their slave. Either way, the contact with the Secret
Chiefs was undoubtedly broken, and who else but Frater Perdurabo
could renew it?

But before making that contact Crowley was keen to make some others. Kelly introduced Crowley to the crowd of
artistes
and
poètes
who frequented Le Chat Blanc, a restaurant near Gare Montparnasse on la Rive Gauche, the bohemian part of Paris. Crowley was eager to ingratiate himself with Kelly’s friends, a circle of British expats that included the novelist Arnold Bennett, the art critic Clive Bell, and the writer Somerset Maugham; throughout his career, Crowley always sought out the latest “in crowd” and tried to make himself at home in it. Crowley was not very successful and the clique wouldn’t have him, but he used the milieu in the introduction to another collection of pornography,
Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden
(1904), where he speaks of that “witty and high-thinking informal club” at the restaurant “Au Chien Rouge.”
Snowdrops
was written, Crowley tells us, to amuse his first wife following her pregnancy; chapter titles such as “The Cocksucker’s Crime” and “The Futile Fuck-stick” give us some idea of how she was amused.
²²