Aleister Crowley (23 page)

Crowley says that he took the job in order to undermine the German propaganda effort by writing articles so absurd that no one would take them seriously. He also aimed to infiltrate the espionage network behind
The Fatherland
and bring the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. He knew, he said, that by doing so he would cut himself off from his friends and his source of income, and be forced to dishonor his name, which it was his destiny to make immortal.
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Yet he had done these things already. He was alone in New York. He had no money, and had spent years building up his image as a satanic rebel and self-serving cad; he had already lost close friends because of it. What did he really have to lose?

He would, he said, work Viereck up slowly, starting with “relatively reasonable attacks on England” and then produce “extravagances which achieved my object of revolting every comparatively sane human being on earth.”
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Some of Crowley’s
Fatherland
pieces
are
patently ridiculous. In one he compares the German Kaiser to an incarnation of Lohengrin, Siegfried, and Parsifal, German mythological heroes immortalized in Wagner’s operas, in absurdly hyperbolic prose. Some are funny. Writing of bombing raids over London carried out by German zeppelins, Crowley criticized their accuracy. His aunt’s house in Croydon, South London, was spared, and Crowley asked the bombers to try again, giving them her address. Yet others are not unlike the standard propaganda work being produced at the time and would have been accepted by
The Fatherland
readers, who
were never very many, as reasonable. Nevertheless, others are indeed revolting. In one Crowley condones the execution of the British nurse Edith Cavell, who aided the wounded of both sides—“patriotism is not enough,” she famously said—and who helped two hundred Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium. She was arrested for this and found guilty of treason, and on October 12, 1915, Crowley’s birthday and the day he accepted the grade of Magus, she was executed. Crowley compares her to Judas Iscariot and Lucrezia Borgia while he ranks Moritz von Bissing, the Governor General of Belgium, who refused a stay of execution, with Jesus Christ.

Crowley had already produced quite a bit of work that revolted comparatively sane human beings, so doing so while getting paid at a time when he was broke was something of a heaven-sent. It was no new plan but much-needed business as usual. Crowley may well have convinced himself that he was working on England’s behalf when he accepted Viereck’s offer. His capacity for rationalization and romanticizing would have served him well here. He even speaks of his “duel” with Münsterberg in “romantic terms” as a battle between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty.
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But he was the only person to see it in this light. He wasn’t particularly pro-German. He was always and everywhere pro-Crowley, but getting paid to write bad press about the country that ignored him would have appealed to his sense of humor. Charles Richard Cammell, a friend of Crowley’s in his later years and one of his early biographers, suggested that Crowley’s pro-German work was motivated by his being snubbed by British Intelligence when he had offered his services to them. He was also, Cammell argued, appalled by the pro-British propaganda; it went to the silly extreme of attacking Santa Claus as a Teutonic myth. How writing for the Germans was a response to this is unclear,
but Cammell hits the nail on the head, I think, when he says that Crowley believed that the Germans would see through his plan while the British and pro-British Americans would grasp it, too, and Crowley, making a quick escape from a dangerous situation, would return to England in a “blaze of glory.”
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That blaze of glory really mattered, not the British war effort. Crowley had the unfortunate habit of many obsessives: if they think something
should
be so, it quickly becomes so, at least in their minds. Yet Crowley’s plan backfired. Word of his activities got back to England, and in the spring of 1917, police raided the O.T.O. headquarters at 93 Regent Street, not far from his favorite haunt, the Café Royal. Some of his associates were also raided. A bookseller who had a copy of
The Open Court
, a magazine edited by Paul Carus and that published Crowley’s propaganda, spent three months in jail. When Crowley heard about this, he was stunned and declared that he would go to Washington to sort it out. Naturally he didn’t. In 1918 William Jackson, assistant to New York’s attorney general, questioned Crowley about his pro-German work. He admitted that he had no connection with the British Secret Service, and the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed that Crowley had provided no information about the Germans or anyone else during the war. Word of one of his more flamboyant stunts, however, reached the British authorities who, in the phrase attributed to Queen Victoria, but possibly apocryphal, were not amused.

In order to prove his Irish sympathies to his employer, just before dawn on July 3, 1915, Crowley, with Leila Waddell and four “other debauched persons on the verge of delirium,” took a motorboat to the Statue of Liberty.
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Here Crowley read a parody of the Declaration of Independence and then tore up an envelope that allegedly
contained his British passport (it didn’t). Then Soror Agatha played “The Wearing of the Green.” Someone waved an Irish flag, and Crowley made a speech about life, liberty, and love in which he renounced his allegiance to England and dedicated his last drop of blood to liberating Ireland. He ended by proclaiming the Irish Republic before topping things off with an
“
Erin go Bragh
.”
The delirious crew then headed off to breakfast.
The New York Times
wrote a few lines about it. Word got back to the British Foreign Secretary, who was also told that Crowley was writing for an enemy publication. Word had also reached the British authorities that Crowley’s friend Frank Harris was also in New York and involved in similar activities; like Crowley, Harris was broke and needed the work. Crowley said he tried to contact the British Military Mission in Washington at around this time but was snubbed. If they had heard of this event, it isn’t surprising.

In New York Crowley made his way into the bohemian circles of Greenwich Village and began to think of himself as a painter. He rented a studio in Washington Square and took out a newspaper advertisement asking for “Dwarfs, Hunchbacks, Tattooed Women, Harrison Fisher Girls [named after a popular artist of the time], Freaks of All Sorts, Coloured Women, only if exceptionally ugly or deformed, to pose for artist.” We’ve seen that Crowley believed that “the supreme masters of the world seek ever the vilest and most horrible creatures for their concubines,” and his choice of models may have had something to do with this. It may also have had to do with the fact that no matter who his model was, Crowley’s paintings tended to deform his subject; whatever he began with, the end was more often than not freakish. Crowley attracted some attention to his work, and newspaper articles about him emphasized its outré
character. A reporter for the
Evening World
spoke of his studio being covered with “the wildest maelstrom of untamed and unrelated colors ever confined under one roof,” and suggested that they look like “a collision between a Scandinavian sunset and a paint-as-you-please exhibit of the Independent Artists’ Association . . .” When asked what kind of painter he was, Crowley said he was an old master, because “I’m a painter of mostly dead souls.”
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He also assured the reporter that he never studied art nor ever intended to. By this time his ex-friend and brother-in-law Gerald Kelly was regularly exhibiting at London’s Royal Academy. One wonders if Crowley’s taking up the brush had anything to do with Kelly’s continued success.
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Yet, aside from prostitutes, Crowley’s choice of women remained somewhat conventional. It is rare that we find him with a freak or a vile or horrible creature. In April 1916 he met and seduced Alice Ethel Coomaraswamy, a singer and the very attractive wife of the art historian and follower of the
philosophia perennis
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Seduced, however, may be too polite a term. Crowley did not think highly of Coomaraswamy; in his
Magical Record
he refers to him as a “bastard, thief, coward, and murderer.”
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The fact that Coomaraswamy was a Eurasian contributed to Crowley’s animus. In his
Confessions
Crowley remarks on his low regard for people of mixed European and Asian blood.
He calls Coomaraswamy a “half-breed,” “eminent mongrel,” and “worm” and claims that he effectively gave his wife to him, in exchange for a sex partner of his own.
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Naturally Crowley complied. In the bargain, recognizing Ratan Devi’s (Alice’s stage name) singing talent, Crowley used all his powers to make her a success. He also made her pregnant; his
Magical Record
recounts their first union as “the most magnificent in all ways since I can remember,” and they carried on with several opera after that.
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By this time Coomaraswamy, according to Crowley, hoping to palm off his wife, proposed divorce, to which Crowley agreed “with a yawn.” But after Ratan became a success—due, of course, to Crowley’s coaching—Coomaraswamy changed his mind; Crowley claims that financial considerations decided him. Although he loved her—as he had loved Jane, and Mary, and Rose, et cetera—Crowley did not care if Alice stayed with her husband or not, but the fact that she was pregnant with his child forced him to take action: the baby might be the magical son he so desired. Sadly, the fates, Secret Chiefs, or simply chance was against him. Alice decided to return to England, where she had other children, for her confinement; after the birth she would return. Crowley claims that the idea was Coomaraswamy’s; he knew Alice did not fare well traveling by sea—indeed she had been forced to break a previous sea voyage during an earlier pregnancy—and intended that this voyage would be disastrous. It was; she miscarried. Crowley claims that he was prepared to “make any sacrifice necessary to insure [Alice’s] welfare and that of our child,” but, in fact, he did nothing to prevent her leaving for England.
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He explains his nonchalance by saying that he “refused to put pressure on her,” but he would nevertheless serve her with “every ounce” of his strength. Yet if Alice and their child meant so much to him, one would think that a word of the aeon might make a bit more effort to secure their safety. When Alice “implored” him to take her back, he replied with “immovable firmness,” accusing her of killing their baby.

Crowley’s attempts at producing a flesh-and-blood magical child were fruitless, but magick works in mysterious ways, and on the summer solstice of 1916, while Crowley was performing an opus with Gerda Maria von Kothek—taking a break from Alice—Frater Achad
of the O.T.O. and Vancouver, otherwise known as Charles Stansfeld Jones, made an astonishing discovery. From a humble neophyte in the Order of the Silver Star he had graduated almost instantaneously into a Master of the Temple. Confirmation of this unheard-of metamorphosis came in a visitation by the Secret Chiefs and Jones sent a telegram to Crowley telling him of the news. At first Crowley had no idea what Jones meant; the thing was unprecedented. Then it dawned on him. Jones’s revelation came exactly nine months after Crowley’s opus with Jane Foster during the previous autumnal equinox. They had not conceived a physical child, but a truly magical one. Jones’s sudden elevation to a rank Crowley himself had just transcended conferred on him the status of being Crowley’s magical heir.

Jones had become a Babe of the Abyss, but he had also become the “child” predicted in
The Book of the Law
, the “one” that would come after Crowley and solve the book’s
Kabbalistic mysteries that even Crowley himself could not unlock. And Jones was indeed one: Achad means “unity” in Hebrew. Jones did work on
The Book of the Law
and Crowley was later astounded that he had unlocked the secret relations between AL in Hebrew, which means “God,” and LA, which means “not.” This, for Crowley, meant that there was a profound meaning in the revelation that God = 0, the Kabbalistic zero he had written about so long ago. AL and LA also have the numerical value of 31 and 31 × 3 = 93, the numerical value of
thelema
, or will. (Readers with a taste for gematria will grasp the import of this.)
Jones proclaimed these secrets in several books, but eventually Crowley turned on Jones and spread a story that he had gone insane and had taken to exposing himself in public. For a time Jones left
thelema
for Catholicism, and there is a rumor that he tried to convert the church
to Crowley’s creed. For his part Jones announced that Aiwass was a malignant intelligence and that the new aeon on its way was not that of Horus, but that of Maat, the Egyptian goddess of justice.

On the magical retirement when he crucified a frog and proclaimed himself a Magus, Crowley also had a mystical vision. On Lake Pasquaney (now Newfound Lake) near Bristol, New Hampshire, on property owned by the astrologer Evangeline Adams—they had, it seems, buried their hatchets—Crowley enjoyed the great outdoors. For reading he had with him Bernard Shaw’s
Androcles and the Lion
, and he took argument with Shaw’s preface. The result was one of Crowley’s best essays, “The Gospel According to Bernard Shaw.” But when not critiquing Shaw, Crowley continued his magick. Using ether, anhalonium, and other drugs, he had what he called “the Star Sponge Vision.” It was an important experience, and he referred to it years later in his lectures on yoga.

“There is a vision of a peculiar character which has been of cardinal importance in my interior life,” he wrote.
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He summed it up in the insight that the Universe consisted of “Nothingness with twinkles!”
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In essence it was a vision of the unity of things. Crowley saw space occupied by innumerable bright points. Then space itself became ablaze, without, however, blotting out the individual points. These points became stars, which were linked to ideas, souls, everything, in fact, as well as to each other. Crowley returned to this vision repeatedly, and his reflections reaffirmed the conviction that, since all is one, there is no reason to do one thing rather than another. The idea “flea,” he believed, is just as “full and interesting” as the idea “Ulysses,” and so, ultimately, one should make no distinction between them, something Aiwass told him long ago.
³⁴
“To emphasize positive and negative by labeling things ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is of
course to depart further from the Tao; but such an act is neither good nor bad, for its opposite had arisen with it.” “The Tao is not affected at all” and “nothing then matters, as indeed we knew before . . .”
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This being so, “it is obviously right, natural and easy for the blind being that does not comprehend all this to follow the line of least resistance, which is to do its Will . . .” “Nothing can be otherwise than it is,” because “the Tao goes on smiling.” “Nothing has happened in all these happenings; nothing can happen. Nothing is All . . .”
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