Aleister Crowley (16 page)

TOWARD THE SILVER STAR

For Crowley, 1906 was not a good year. His daughter had died, his wife, he discovered, was an alcoholic, and he himself suffered bad health. An infected gland in his groin required an operation, as did his right eye, which had picked up a chill. Neuralgia and migraines plagued him, and an ulcerated throat laid him up for months. His daughter’s death grieved him—his ill health may have been a psychosomatic response to repressed feelings of guilt—but he found solace in the belief that it was a sign that he had failed to accept the responsibility given him by the Secret Chiefs. Although he had mislaid the manuscript of
The Book of the Law
and was lax in fulfilling its commands, he nevertheless accused Rose of failing in her duties as the Scarlet Woman. To a reader of
The Book of the Law
this is nonsense. Crowley blamed her for not taking her maternal responsibilities seriously, but a mother is the last thing we would expect a Scarlet Woman to be. Aiwass warned that if “pity and compassion and tenderness” visit the heart of the Scarlet Woman, then his “vengeance shall be known.” He will “slay me her child.” But if she works “the work of wickedness,” is “loud and adulterous” and “shameless before all men,” he will “fill her with joy.”
¹
Rose may not have been
adulterous but she was hitting the bottle heavily and ignoring the baby’s needs, which seems fairly close to rejecting pity, compassion, and tenderness, which should have made Aiwass happy. Crowley’s accusation would have made more sense if Rose
had
taken better care of the child. But such logic escaped him. The madcap marriage was on the rocks, although Rose gave birth to a second child—a girl, Lola Zaza, in the winter of 1906—and it took another few years before they divorced. Saying she had failed in the office of the Scarlet Woman was tantamount to saying the position was vacant, and that he was on the lookout for new applicants.

The marriage in any case could not last much longer. As the word of the aeon, Crowley could no longer live along conventional lines, insofar as he ever had. He was in the service of the gods, the “Chosen One,” singled out to accomplish the Great Work of “emancipating mankind,” and such matters as having a home and family were negligible.
²
He renewed his friendship with George Cecil Jones and went through a ritual crucifixion, dedicating himself to a pure and unselfish life and identifying himself with his Higher Self. Oddly, Crowley’s oath referred to himself as a “member of the Body of Christ.” He may have been hedging his bets, just in case Christianity proved true, or displaying sheer perversity in including a Christian reference in an oath that more or less announced his identification with his Holy Guardian Angel.
³

Crowley declared that he had completed the Abramelin magic on October 9, 1906, in the Ashdown Park Hotel in Surrey, a few days before his thirty-first birthday. Rose was in attendance. His consciousness, he claimed, had been absorbed into that of his H.G.A.; his success was aided by his use of drugs, hashish in particular. Yet Crowley was ambivalent about using drugs in mystical pursuits—at least
at this time. He wasn’t sure if the altered states he experienced were the result of the hashish or the invocations to the
Augoeides
. He had experienced
Atmadarshana
, a “consciousness of the entire Universe as One and as all,” and
Shivadarshana
, the opening of the eye of Shiva that had so troubled Mathers, but was unsure if this was simply the effect of the drug. This was a problem; Aiwass had counseled him to take “strange drugs,” saying they would not hurt him—erroneously, as he was to discover. He wanted to follow Aiwass’s teachings, but he also wanted his mystical experiences to be independent of a drugged state.
⁴
Crowley eventually overruled any hesitation about the value of drugs.

—

T
O
PROMOTE
THE
SALE
of his
Collected Works
(volume 3 was published in 1907), Crowley offered a £100 prize for the best critical essay on his work, announcing the competition typically as

The Chance of the Year!

The Chance of the Century!!

The Chance of the Geological Period!!!

He had by this time received a bit more critical attention. G. K. Chesterton had called Crowley a “good poet,” and complained only about his excessive hatred of Christianity.
⁵
Even Florence Farr, his former enemy among the Golden Dawn, spoke out against the universal condemnation he attracted, writing about his work in A. R. Orage’s
New Age
.
⁶
But Crowley was still not as well known as he
would like, and in the
Confessions
he fantasized that “columns of eloquent praise” about his work were being written at the time by “the most important people in the world of letters,” who “acquiesced” in him as the “only living poet of any magnitude.”
⁷
Yet even with this imaginary praise hardly anyone read his work, and those who did failed to “get” it. His point of view was “so original,” his thoughts “so profound,” and his allusions “so recondite,” that superficial readers were “unable to penetrate to the pith.”
⁸

Such was not the case with at least one reader. Captain John Frederick Charles Fuller of the First Oxfordshire Light Infantry had served in the Boer War and had been stationed in India, from where he had corresponded with Crowley about his work. Crowley’s satire
Why Jesus Wept
(1905) especially moved him. Fuller’s father was an Anglican cleric, and Fuller, a Social Darwinist, had been published in the
Agnostic Journal
. He was nicknamed “Boney” because of his admiration for Napoleon. He now announced his entry into the essay competition about Crowley’s writings. Fuller was one of the few people who appreciated Crowley’s poetry; but even more important, he was an early convert to “Crowleyanity,” the religion Crowley promoted before accepting the law of
thelema
. The fact that Crowley presented himself as a kind of modern Christ before he heard from Aiwass seems to undermine the idea that he accepted his role as word of the aeon reluctantly. Crowleyanity is to
thelema
much as Dianetics is to Scientology.

In the summer of 1906 Crowley, Rose, and Fuller met at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand to discuss the idea. By October Fuller’s
The Star in the West
was finished; it was published the following year. It makes no mention of
The Book of the Law
, but this wasn’t necessary for Fuller to express his hero worship. According to Paul Newman,
The Star in
the West
“surges along on a rousing swell of purple foam,” and does not mince words.
⁹
Crowley is “more than a new-born Dionysus, he is more than a Blake, a Rabelais, or a Heine”; he is a “priest of Apollo.” “It has taken 100,000,000 years to produce Aleister Crowley. The world has indeed labored, and has at last brought forth a man.”
¹⁰
These are some of Fuller’s more sober remarks. Crowley agreed with Fuller’s assessment—he did admit it was a tad over the top—and as Fuller was the only reader to grasp the chance of the geological period, he won the competition hands down. Crowley, however, failed to pay him the prize money. Exactly why is unclear, although by now Crowley’s fortune had shrunk considerably.

Fuller’s admiration for Crowley survived this disappointment; his real connection was their shared detestation of Christianity and their mutual recognition as individuals apart from the herd, as, indeed, born leaders. Fuller’s admiration for leaders was not limited to Crowley and Napoleon. Years later, after falling out with the priest of Apollo, Fuller became infatuated with Adolf Hitler. Fuller wrote a book on tank warfare that inspired the blitzkrieg and earned him the honor of being invited to Hitler’s fiftieth birthday party, on the eve of World War II. After rising to the rank of major-general and retiring from the military, Fuller later turned his admiration to Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.
¹¹

—

C
ROWLEY
CALLED
1907 and 1908 “years of fulfillment.” His poetic powers, he felt, were at their height, but his satisfaction in his work was not mirrored in his life. His “domestic tragedy” had become more and more “acute.”
¹²
Rose sank deeper into alcoholism, which Crowley’s frequent absences and erratic lifestyle surely could not
have helped. From the start he had confided in his brother-in-law that he suspected Rose of being less than stable. But what stable personality would marry an acquaintance at the drop of a hat? Crowley himself wouldn’t have been interested in Rose if she had been stable; throughout his life, he unerringly attracted women who were “on the edge.” It was precisely their liminal character that drew him. In any case, Crowley blamed her parents. Rose’s father was a vicar, which put him immediately in Crowley’s bad books, and Crowley blamed Rose’s alcoholism on her mother, who, he said, allowed her children to drink champagne at too young an age.

Crowley showed his feelings for his mother-in-law when his newborn daughter Lola contracted bronchitis and came close to death. The doctor allowed only one person in the room with the baby at any time. Crowley claims his mother-in-law broke this rule, and so he threw her out of their flat, “assisting her down the stairs with my boot.” Crowley blamed Lola Zaza’s poor health on Rose’s alcoholism, and he did take steps to try to stop it, putting Rose into a clinic to dry out and getting her out into the open air, hiking and rock climbing. On one occasion he saved his daughter’s life by ensuring that oxygen was on hand when a nurse failed to supply it. He was rightfully proud of his quick action, but he had no interest in the practical, day-to-day work of raising children and wanted the freedom to do as he wilt. By the spring of 1907 he and Rose separated. Crowley took a flat on Jermyn Street in London’s Mayfair district, where he entertained mistresses and wrote another pornographic work,
Clouds without Water
(1909), in which some of his lovers appear. One, called Lola, he had known previously, and named his daughter after. Typically, the book recounted the “blasphemous litanies of their fornication.” It was
written under a pseudonym—the Rev. C. Verey—and privately printed for circulation among “Ministers of Religion.”

In the 1920s, during a difficult time, Crowley considered these years of fulfillment and reflected that it was then that he “went wrong,” a verdict he rescinded when his spirits lifted. Symonds suggests that Crowley could still have salvaged something of his life then, and settled down to some version of normality, a belief shared by his great friend Allan Bennett, who remarked to the writer Clifford Bax that Crowley could have done much good but took a wrong turn in life.
¹³

—

C
ROWL
EY
FREQUENTED
a chemist’s shop on Stafford Street in the West End, run by an E. P. Whineray. Here he got ingredients for his rituals—incense, perfume, his Abramelin oil—and also most likely his drugs.
¹⁴
One day Whineray introduced him to George Montagu, the seventh Earl of Tankerville. Crowley refers to Tankerville as the Earl of Coke and Crankum: Coke for his cocaine habit and Crankum because of his paranoia. The heavy-drinking, middle-aged earl believed his mother was trying to kill him via witchcraft and Whineray suggested that Crowley could help. Tankervilles’s paranoia was surely a product of his cocaine habit—Crowley could see that straightaway—but he nevertheless took on the challenge. One must fight fire with fire, Crowley thought, and so the witchcraft-bedeviled earl became Crowley’s first student in magick. Years earlier he said he could not pay Allan Bennett for his own magical instruction, but his attitude had changed and Crowley the mage was on the earl’s payroll. His fortune had dwindled and it was becoming
increasingly clear that he would soon have to earn a living; as he himself admitted, his “affairs in Scotland had fallen into great confusion.”
¹⁵

Crowley’s assessment of the Earl in the
Confessions
reads like a case study: he “enjoyed magnificent health” and was “one of the best preserved men of fifty to fifty-five” Crowley had ever seen. Crowley had the Earl read the proper books and consult his tarot regularly. For a time the two lived aboard a yacht that Tankerville had chartered and moored on the Beaulieu River, near the New Forest; here Crowley coached him in developing his astral body. But the best way for Crankum to develop his magical powers was to take what Crowley called a “magical retirement,” an occult holiday, a practice Crowley would enjoy throughout his life. He had to break away from his family, and so, leaving Lola Zaza in the care of her alcoholic mother, Crowley set off with Tankerville, first for Marseilles, then North Africa, the earl picking up the tab.