Aleister Crowley (21 page)

But Crowley was nothing if not versatile. Another moneymaking gambit was The Ragged Ragtime Girls, a troupe of women musicians led by Leila Waddell, whom Crowley had somehow engaged to perform in Moscow in the summer of 1913.
³²
(It is curious to note that Gurdjieff was starting his first Moscow groups at around the
same time.) In the spring some performances at London’s Tivoli had encouraged him, so they headed east for a six-week engagement in Moscow at an open-air pleasure park called the Aquarium. Once there Crowley left the girls—among whom, according to him, were “three dipsomaniacs and four nymphomaniacs” as well as a couple of prudes—to their devices and occupied himself with a Hungarian woman named Anny Ringler, a sadomasochist he met at a café who fulfilled Crowley’s requirements. Ringler ached for “some satisfaction beyond earth’s power to supply,” but apparently Crowley could do the trick. Pleasure had no meaning for her, only pain, and Crowley was accommodating. She met his masochistic needs as well, and the two seemed made for each other. Like sin-ridden flagellants they flogged each other; Crowley made Anny happy by inflicting “physical cruelties as she directed” and she returned the favor. Crowley’s account of their meeting in the
Confessions
suggests that he should have tried his hand at romance fiction: Anny was “tall, tense, lean as a starving leopardess, with wild insatiable eyes . . . We came together with irresistible magnetism.”
³³
Besides having a “strong” time with Anny, she also inspired his best known poetical work, the oft-quoted “Hymn to Pan,” as well as
The Ship
,
a verse play whose chorus found a place in some O.T.O. rituals. Anny lifted Crowley to “heights of ecstasy” and inspired him to an orgy of writing.

In September 1913 the last issue of the first volume of
The Equinox
appeared, and on his return to England Crowley felt the need for a change. The conversation with Reuss had made him think about his direction. It was time to forge a new magical methodology. The March issue of
The Equinox
had contained his essay “Energized Enthusiasm,” in which he proposed that the use of wine, women, and song—or, in more familiar parlance, sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—could be an aid
in magical ritual. Crowley wanted to put these insights into practice. What this amounted to was his first full-scale sex magick operation, known as “the Paris Working.”

It began in Paris on New Year’s Eve 1913 and continued for the next six weeks. For the work Crowley required Neuburg, who had apparently forgiven him for his perceived part in the suicide of Jeanne Heyse, an actress with whom Neuburg had fallen in love. For the Rites of Eleusis performances at Caxton Hall, a larger cast was needed and the part of the Moon was played by an actress named Ione de Forest, whose real name was Jeanne Heyse. Neuburg fell in love with Jeanne and they had an affair. Crowley disapproved; Jeanne got the message and married someone else. She and Neuburg continued their affair but the stress was great and the marriage was a failure. Depressed by this, she committed suicide in 1912. Neuburg was crushed and blamed Crowley for her death.

Jeanne was by all accounts neurotic and unstable and might very well have killed herself without Crowley’s help. But in
Magick in Theory and Practice
Crowley went out of his way to link himself to her suicide. Crowley wrote that “the Master Therion once found it necessary to slay a Circe who was bewitching brethren. He merely walked to the door of her room, and drew an Astral T (‘traditore’, and the symbol of Saturn) with an astral dagger. Within 48 hours she shot herself.” Whether Crowley actually drew his “Astral T” or not, the fact that he took credit for Jeanne’s death shows him in a very bad light.

The Paris Working would be the last magical ritual Neuburg performed with Crowley; after it he finally broke with his guru. Crowley also acquired some other participants. Walter Duranty was a foreign correspondent for the
New York Times
—in 1932 he won the
Pulitzer Prize—and his lover and future wife, Jane Chéron, was Crowley’s ex-mistress; the Paris Working took place at her flat. Jane smoked opium, and years later, in Sicily, Crowley mused over the women in his life and came to the conclusion that he loved Jane “for her opium soul.”
³⁴

The aim of the working was the invocation of Mercury—actually Hermes-Thoth, the Greco-Egyptian syncretic god—and Jupiter.
³⁵
Mercury, the god of writing, was to inspire Crowley to greater poetic heights, while Jupiter, the god of good fortune, was to bestow much-needed money. By this time Neuburg’s parents were frantic over the amounts he was handing over to his guru. The operation, which included drugs—most likely anhalonium—as well as sex began with Duranty bestowing the “sacrament” on Crowley: again, a euphemism for sodomy with Crowley as the passive partner. Crowley then painted a pantacle—a magical amulet—for Mercury while Neuburg danced the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. As in Boleskine, the Paris Working required S&M. Crowley scourged Neuburg’s buttocks, cut a cross over his heart, and bound his forehead with a chain. The sex magick began proper with another act with Neuburg taking the active part and Crowley again the recipient. During these proceedings the two fraters of the Great White Brotherhood—as Crowley often referred to the A.
^.
.A.
^.
.—chanted one of Duranty’s invocations:

Jungitur in vati vates, rex inclyte rhabdou

Hermes tu venias, verba nefanda ferens.

This translates as “Magician is joined with magician, Hermes King of the Rod, appear, bringing the unspeakable word.” Apparently Neuburg was not excited by the proceedings, as he failed to climax.
Nevertheless, Crowley deemed it a success. He saw a golden Mercury against a brilliantly colored background, felt the god’s tongue inside his brain, making his skull phosphorescent, saw swarms of caducei fill the room, and a sword of light cut across a weird sky. Whether these were gifts of Mercury or the effect of the anhalonium is debatable. The next day they tried again and this time Neuburg did achieve orgasm and Crowley was able to speak with the god, or who- or whatever responded to his questions. A variety of insights were obtained, and Crowley recorded them in two texts,
The Book of the High Magick Art
and
The Esoteric Record
, which were compiled by Neuburg. Crowley was told that “Every drop of semen which Hermes sheds is a world . . . People upon the worlds are like maggots upon an apple, all forms of life bred by the worlds are in the nature of parasites . . . Ma is the name of the god who seduced the Phallus away from the Yoni [female genitals] . . . All worlds are excreta, they represent wasted semen . . .” Crowley was also informed that, even after Mount Dal’leh Addin, he still retained sufficient amounts of sexual shame to have to be humiliated again. Crowley complied and, in the presence of Jane Chéron and Neuburg, was ritually sodomized by Walter Duranty. Crowley had been ridding himself of sexual shame for some time by then and one wonders if he would have had better luck with a psychotherapist.

During another session Neuburg became possessed and spoke of the dangers of unleashing a powerful magical force that would result in international complications. He also later made several predictions, none of which panned out. Then it was Crowley’s turn, although they suspected that the entity possessing him was an evil spirit posing as Hermes-Thoth. Crowley was informed that the
supreme sexual-magical act was the ritual rape, murder, and dismemberment of a virgin. The body parts would be offered to various gods. Another “liberationist,” Georges Bataille, did plan the ritual murder of a member of his secret society, but Crowley drew the line here; they decided to pass. He would, though, tease his readers with remarks about human sacrifice in
Magick in Theory and Practice
.

During another session, Crowley sank into reveries about his and Neuburg’s past lives. He recalled that in ancient Crete, he was a female dancer named Aia, and Neuburg was Mardocles, an aspiring initiate. As part of his initiation Mardocles had to watch Aia perform an erotic dance. He had two choices: either he remain unaffected or rape her. Failing this, he would be castrated. Mardocles/Neuburg failed; he could not restrain himself but would not rape Aia/Crowley. But the high priest showed mercy and sold them both as sex slaves, whose job was to amuse their owners with “various copulations.”

Vittoria Cremers may have had a grudge against Crowley when she said he was a sex maniac, but the Paris Working suggests she wasn’t far off. I would even say that it was not sex as much as his own penis that obsessed Crowley. He later famously drew an idealized self-portrait with his forehead looking like an engorged glans and signed his name with a massively erect
A
, complete with testicles, and in 1917 Crowley would write another pornographic work,
Not the Life and Adventures of Sir Roger Bloxham
,
in which his penis, testicles, and other unmentionables are the protagonists.
³⁶
In one O.T.O. document written after the Paris Working, Crowley repudiates all organized religion, and states that the sun and its earthly representative, the penis, is the true deity. As Crowley was the vice regent of this faith, this made his own penis holy.

The Paris Working convinced Crowley of the efficacy of sex in magical operations, but we may question this. One of his aims was inspiration for writing, and a story written at the time, “The Stratagem,” is often held up as exemplary. At the time it was accepted by the
English Review
and H. L. Mencken, the great American editor, published it a few years later.
³⁷
It is, to my taste, a predictable work, although its self-collapsing character may suggest something done later and much better by Borges. As for money, Neuburg did, in fact, come in to some, sent by an aunt. His family sent him money regularly, although Crowley was peeved that his
chela
’s largesse no longer extended to his master. It was a sign that their magical and sexual
liaison dangereuse
was at an end. Neuburg, in fact, was sickened by the Paris Working; according to his biographer, he suffered a nervous breakdown afterward and required medical attention.

Back in London Neuburg avoided Crowley and eventually annulled his A.
^.
.A.
^.
. oath. Predictably, Crowley cursed him. Vittoria Cremers helped Neuburg during this period; for her, Crowley was little more than a charlatan and she encouraged Neuburg to cut his ties. He did, but it was not easy and for the rest of his life Neuburg retained a fear of Frater Perdurabo
.
When Neuburg was living in a cottage in Sussex, running a small poetry press, and more or less a broken man, Crowley knocked on his door. Neuburg had avoided him for years but he was in constant fear that Aia would return to darken his life; he must have dreaded the idea that they might reincarnate together again sometime. Neuburg’s wife told the Beast that Frater Omnia Vincam was not at home. He was out walking his dog and somehow word got to him to stay away. He did. Eventually the Beast left but it is said that on occasion he terrified Neuburg’s neighbors by sending his Scarlet Women who exposed their breasts upon
which he had made the mark of the Beast. Neuburg died in 1940 in London in his flat on Boundary Road, not far from where I live today.

The Paris Working may have cost Crowley Neuburg, but what he got in return seemed worth the price. He was convinced that sex magick surpassed all other forms and that it promised access to an incalculable power. In
Liber Agape
,
De Arte Magica
, and other works written after the Paris Working and limited to select members of the O.T.O., Crowley sings the praises—in very obscure and flowery language—of his discovery, calling the mixed male and female sexual fluids “the most powerful and radiant thing that existeth in the universe.”
³⁸
Through the proper use of sex magick, man may “impose his will on Nature herself,” and by consuming the “sacrament” (the mixed fluids) one becomes “capable of transmuting an unlimited quantity of base and blind matter into the plastic and docile image of the will.”
³⁹
It is best, however, if one’s partner in this miracle “should be in ignorance of the sacred character of the Office”—that is, she shouldn’t know what you are about.
⁴⁰
Although it is best if she is “robust, vigorous, eager, hot and healthy . . . easily enflamed and nigh inextinguishable,” it is also good to “make love to disgusting women,” and to apply oneself to “all such things as are naturally repulsive.”
⁴¹
This last chimes with Crowley’s crank idea that “the supreme masters of the world seek ever the vilest and most horrible creatures for their concubines,” in their need to “transcend normality.”
⁴²
This is so because “by extreme violence to Nature results are obtained equal to those garnered when Nature herself urges vehemently to the act of enthusiasm.”
⁴³
Hence Crowley’s championing of homosexual operations—magician on magician—but oddly not lesbian. For him woman alone, without the phallus, is “mere solvent.”
⁴⁴
But in the end one should let one’s phallus do the choosing. In
seeking an assistant, “it is not unreasonable to allow full sway to the caprice of the moment . . . For this caprice . . . is the deliberate choice of the Holy Phallus itself”—instruction most men have no need of.
⁴⁵

—

I
N
LATE
SUMMER
1914
the guns of August blazed and Europe was at war. Crowley was in Switzerland, training for a return match with Kangchenjunga, and it was with some difficulty that he made his way back to London. There he offered his services to the war effort, but phlebitis in his left leg and his reputation precluded that. He was nearly forty and once again at loose ends. His finances were dim. He had mortgaged Boleskine and tried to lease it, but that proved fruitless. His books sat unsold and unread, and O.T.O. applicants were thinning out. He had begun to put the insights of the Paris Working to work, and in
Rex De Arte Regia
—The King on the Royal Art—he began to record his experiments with sex magick. On September 3 he experimented with the aptly named Marie Maddingley, an “easily excitable and very keen” woman who was herself experimenting with adultery for the first time. The operation, Crowley noted, was “highly orgiastic” and the elixir—their mingled secretions—of “first rate quality.”
⁴⁶
The aim of the operation was “sex-force and sex-attraction,” that is, to increase Crowley’s own virility and to attract other participants. Later operations would be aimed at money, influence, the arrival of a new Scarlet Woman, or the furtherance of
thelema
and would be peppered with Latin euphemisms:
per vas nefandum
(“by the unspeakable vessel,” that is, sodomy),
per os
(“by mouth”),
per manu
(“by hand”).
⁴⁷
That Crowley judges the elixir “first rate” is typical of the rest of his sex magick diary. He gives a curious clinical air to his proceedings and at one point calls his sperm
“of excellent vintage.” Three days later his partner was a “Piccadilly prostitute,” Peggy Marchmont, a “sturdy bitch of 26 or so.” Then there was Violet Duval, a chorus girl, who was assisted—exactly how is unclear—by Leila Waddell.