Aleister Crowley (13 page)

Yet another system of ages, which Crowley most certainly knew, is that of the twelfth-century Calabrian monk Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202). Joachim prophesized a new age of freedom that was due to arrive in 1260. Joachim saw history unfolding in three stages: the Age of the Father, characterized by the Old Testament and obedience to the laws of God; the age of the Son, beginning with Christ and carrying on to 1260, when man becomes the Son of God; and the age of the Holy Spirit, when mankind would achieve
direct
contact with God and experience the spiritual freedom that is the true message of
Christianity. At this point, the church, its hierarchy and rules, would no longer be necessary, and the true, rather than the literal, meaning of the Gospels would prevail. As you might suspect, the church did not much care for Joachim’s forecast, but breakaway sects like the Brethren of the Free Spirit were inspired by his ideas. Like Joachim of Fiore’s Age of the Holy Spirit, Crowley’s aeon of the “crowned and conquering child” is a time of antinomianism, that is, it is a time when “Abrogate are all rituals, all ordeals, all words and signs.”
¹⁸
All bets are off and we are “beyond good and evil.”

Crowley, or Aiwass, begins
The Book of the Law
with a phrase that has become almost as well known as “Do what thou wilt,” “Every man and every woman is a star.”
¹⁹
That is to say, every man and every woman has a peculiar orbit, a trajectory all their own. This is their “true will,” and complications and problems arise only if we move out of our orbit, or if someone else moves out of theirs and interferes with ours. It is a lovely phrase and it may not be coincidental that in 1970 the funk group Sly and the Family Stone had a number-one hit with the song “Everybody Is a Star.” By that time Crowley was well-known in the counterculture, and the idea chimed in well with “doing your own thing,” a catchphrase that itself has its origins in the
Upanishads
, which counsel us to do our own work, however humble, rather than that of another, however grand. The lyric “Everybody is a star / One big circle going round and round” suggests Crowley’s idea that we each have a personal orbit. It does not take much to see in this an argument for being left alone and not interfered with.

But another aspect to the “orbit” idea is that we have no will but to follow it; stars cannot change their mind. Aiwass’s counsel that “Thou hast no right but to do thy will” suggests that we
must
do our will, that is, must keep to our orbits, which have been calculated for
us ages before we were born.
²⁰
At least most of us must, as Crowley himself seemed able to shift what his will was depending on circumstances. Earlier I suggested that for all his talk of freedom and release from restrictions, there is a curious authoritarian sense to Crowley’s idea of
thelema
, which, keeping in mind the notion that we are stars with a unique orbit, is highly dubious. There is a Taoist sense to his idea of will; it has little to do with striving and struggle, with the kind of will that I was attracted to in Nietzsche, which has to do with effort and discipline. Crowley’s “will” is better translated as “way” in the Taoist sense. Crowley himself felt a great affinity with Taoism; he translated the
Tao Te Ching
,
and Simon Iff, his mystical detective—Crowley’s fictionalized image of himself in old age—is a Taoist sleuth. There is no striving or struggle in Taoism; one takes the path of least resistance. One is in tune with the cosmos and a part of it. It is going
out
of one’s “way” that creates problems. This is why at the beginning of
Magick in Theory and Practice
Crowley wants to help “the Banker, the Pugilist, the Biologist, the Poet, the Navvy, the Grocer, the Factory Girl, the Mathematician . . . fulfill themselves perfectly, each in his or her own proper function.” For “function” read “orbit” and we have these cardboard figures as “stars.” There is a curious sense of predestination to Crowley’s idea of will, and predestination was a central tenet of the Plymouth Brethren; Crowley, in fact, says that they held “predestination as rigidly as Calvin, yet this nowise interfered with complete free will,” a logical incompatibility that Crowley himself tries to accommodate and that, to my mind, ends in muddle.
²¹
In any case, in Aiwass’s new age, there will be many who must stick to their orbits—“The slaves shall serve”—but there will be a few who are allowed more leeway.
²²

And leeway is certainly what they want—or at least what Aiwass
has to offer. “The word of Sin is Restriction,” Aiwass told Crowley, a conclusion Crowley had reached long before.
²³
“Enough of Because! Be he damned for a dog,”: this was an injunction that suited Crowley’s unreflective character nicely.
²⁴
“For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect”: in other words, “Just do it,” something Crowley must have communicated to Rose to clinch their marriage.
²⁵
Other aspects of Crowley’s personality are equally accommodated. For one thing, Aiwass seems as keen on alliteration as Crowley: “Veil not your vices in virtuous words.”
²⁶
This is said in criticism of the “modest woman,” whose “veil of sorrow” must be rent to allow for the new dispensation of the Scarlet Woman who shall be “loud and adulterous,” and “shameless before all men,” and whose “eyes shall burn with desire as she stands bare and rejoicing,” all of which sounds like the sort of thing Crowley liked in a woman—we remember the Mexican prostitute whose “evil inscrutable eyes” promised a “whirlpool of seductive sin.”
²⁷
And the command to “take your fill and will of love as ye will, when, where, and with whom ye will,” is something Crowley did not need to be told twice.
²⁸
The Scarlet Woman is not alone; the Great Beast, the other favorite biblical character of Crowley’s youth, plays a central role in the new aeon, too; a peculiar one, in that Crowley
is
the Great Beast—no one else can be—but the Scarlet Woman is an “office,” that many woman can and did occupy, in order to “work the work of wickedness,” a project Crowley began at the age of eleven. Even Crowley’s taste for Swinburne shows through: “Hear me, ye people of sighing / The sorrows of pain and regret / Are left to the dead and the dying / The folk that not know me as yet,” scans much as Swinburne’s “Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you? /Men touch them and change in a trice / The lilies and languors of
virtue / For the raptures and roses of vice” from Swinburne’s masochistic ode to “Our Lady of Pain.”
²⁹
Aiwass also seems quite fond of the Decadent School Crowley was introduced to by his lover Pollitt: “I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky. To me! To me!”
³⁰
This would not be out of place in the famous
Yellow Book
, the literary magazine of the 1890s that made Pollitt’s friend Aubrey Beardsley famous. Crowley’s incipient authoritarianism comes through in the Social Darwinism Aiwass prescribes in pastiche Nietzscheanisms such as “Let my servants be few & secret: they shall rule the many & the known”; “These are dead, these fellows; they feel not. We are not for the poor and sad”; “We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit; let them die in their misery”; “Compassion is the vice of kings; stamp down the wretched & the weak.”
³¹

It is not impossible that a discarnate intelligence communicated a vision of a new aeon whose characteristics suited Crowley to a tee, but if it did, it was awfully convenient for Crowley. It is also odd that Aiwass should choose “Do what thou wilt” and
thelema
as his battle cries; both show a curious familiarity with Western literature. Thélème is the name of the abbey in Rabelais’s
Gargantuan
; above its door is inscribed “
Fay ce que vouldras
,” or “Do what you will.” In “The Everlasting Gospel” Blake writes “Do what you will / This world’s a fiction / And is made up of contradiction.” Even Saint Augustine counsels us to “Love, and do what you will,” in the seventh homily on the First Epistle of John. And Aiwass can be clearly wrong about some things, although Crowley had to follow his advice in order to find out. “To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all.”
³²
Crowley took this advice and died a heroin addict.

Crowley claimed that
The Book of the Law
contained proof of its own authenticity, but such claims will be accepted only by believers and require a knowledge and expertise of Kabbalah and other arcane hermeneutic disciplines most of us do not possess or have the time or inclination to acquire. Most readers will accept or reject Crowley’s new aeon based on what they read in the text. The strongest argument against
The Book of the Law
as an “utterance of an illuminated mind co-extensive with the ultimate ideas of which the universe is composed” is that it is too preoccupied with Crowley’s adolescent rebellion against his Plymouth Brethren upbringing.
³³
Crowley protested that he was a reluctant Messiah and that he was “bitterly opposed to the principles of the Book on almost every point of morality,” but given that the morality expressed is very much the one he was already living, it is difficult to take his protestations seriously.
³⁴
Colin Wilson is surely right when he remarks that when Crowley claims that “the emancipation of mankind from all limitations whatever is one of the main precepts of the book,” he really means “emancipation from the Victorian limitations that made my childhood so miserable.”
³⁵
This itself is a limitation Crowley never outgrew. With a kind of autistic persistence, he carried through his project of committing the “unforgivable sin” well beyond the age when most of us move past such concerns and direct our energies to making something out of life. “Bind nothing! Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other; for thereby cometh hurt” is the outlook of a child, for only a child believes that being “emancipated from all limitations” is an unqualified good.
³⁶
If Aiwass was a discarnate intelligence, he was a singularly immature one.

To my reading, the essence of
The Book of the Law
is a philosophy that can be found in other, equally dubious prophets, from the
Marquis de Sade, to the radical Freudian Otto Gross, to the “transgressive” French writer Georges Bataille and rock figures like Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop, to name a few.
³⁷
This is the “liberationist” philosophy I mention in the introduction. It is the “default setting” for an approach to life that rejects the need for limits and discipline—associated with the “straight” “conventional” world—and wants, as the late historian Jacques Barzun phrased it, a “wholly unconditional life,” which is another way of saying an antinomian one.
³⁸
In
Turn Off Your Mind
I borrow from the German novelist Hermann Hesse the term “Russian Man,” which he used in a book about Dostoyevsky,
In Sight of Chaos
(1922). Russian Man, Hesse writes, is the outcome of a “primeval, occult, Asiatic ideal,” a “turning away from every fixed morality and ethic.”
³⁹
In Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov brothers, Hesse sees an amorality that doesn’t distinguish between right and wrong, good or bad. For Russian Man, good and bad, right and wrong, God and Devil are one, just as they are for Crowley. Russian Man embraces the dictum of the Old Man of the Mountain, the leader of the deadly
hashishin
, that “nothing is true, everything is permitted.” In
Turn Off Your Mind
I write “Russian Man is a hysteric, a drunkard, a criminal, a poet, a holy man. He is murderer and judge, thug and gentleman, egomaniac and saint.”
⁴⁰
Hesse calls him “the unpredictable man of the future,” who sees “every law as a convention,” regards “every upright man as a philistine,” and overrates “every freedom and eccentricity.” He can as easily become a criminal as an ascetic, and believes in nothing “except the insane uncertainty of every belief.”
⁴¹
Hesse himself knew these dangers because he himself embraced much of the creed of Russian Man, believing that out of this chaos something new and creative might come. But unlike Crowley, he was reflective enough to recognize that the liberation Russian Man
promises is not an unalloyed good. In his
Tagebuch
for 1920–21, Hesse wrote:

I can’t really say whether I, with my attempt to find freedom and my immersion in chaos, am not just as dangerous, just as destructive as the patriots and the retroverts. I demand of myself that I go back beyond the pairs of opposites and accept chaos.
⁴²

Hesse, too, knew of the Abyss, but unlike Crowley he did not want to plunge into it headfirst. Russian Man is a kind of poster boy for the “liberating” 1960s, for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and one of the agents of this liberation was Crowley. “But exceed! exceed! Strive ever to more! and if thou art truly mine—and doubt it not, and if thou art ever joyous!—death is the crown of all.”
⁴³
Crowley did exceed; his cult, we know, was of “excess in all directions,” an ethos that characterized the sixties as well as several other antinomian times, those of the Beats, the Surrealists, the punks. Crowley did not need Aiwass or anyone else to tell him this, but for Crowley it was not enough that he himself had an insatiable hunger for excess, regardless of the consequences; it had to be a law of the universe, and in more local terms, demand the end of civilization as we know it.