Aleister Crowley (25 page)

When Crowley told his friend the journalist William Seabrook that he intended to take a magical retirement on Esopus Island in the Hudson, Seabrook, who knew Crowley was broke, passed the hat and came up with the money for the trip.
⁵⁴
Seabrook described Crowley at this time as a “strange disturbing fellow, with a heavy pontifical manner mixed with a . . . sly monkey-like and occasionally malicious humor,” whose “American Indian warlock” made him resemble a “nursery imp masquerading as Mephistopheles.”
⁵⁵
Seabrook and his wife, Kate, with whom Crowley had an affair, were part of the Greenwich Village set, which at that time included some important names: Theodore Dreiser, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, John Cowper Powys, and Powys’s friend, Louis Wilkinson.
Wilkinson became friends with Crowley, much to the dismay of his wife, the poet Frances Gregg. She disliked Crowley and hated his control over Wilkinson. She told a story of how at dinner with Crowley, Louis, who was normally very self-controlled, suddenly began to act strangely, laughing at nothing in particular and talking extravagantly; Frances believed Crowley exerted some hypnotic power over him.
⁵⁶
She also saw Crowley make a man act like a dog, a trick he performed on more than one occasion.
⁵⁷
Crowley’s dominance over Wilkinson was so great that he convinced him to have Frances certified as insane. The plan almost worked, until Frances realized what was up and escaped en route to the asylum. When she returned home, she found Crowley waiting for her at the top of her stairs, holding her young son by the hand. Crowley told her a story about a woman, like her, who disapproved of him, and who came home one day to find her two young children headless, by the fire. “The poor mad woman,” he told Frances, “imagined
I
had done it.” Crowley’s animus against Frances was also fueled by the fact that she caught him in the act of putting on his wig. For a time before he adopted the Erich von Stroheim look, Crowley’s vanity compelled him to use a toupee, and he was afraid Frances would pull it off.
⁵⁸

Louis Wilkinson revered Crowley. Wilkinson’s father was a clergyman and in Crowley he saw a “warrior against the moral and sexual hypocrisies of the time,” many of which Louis was eager to flout. Wilkinson shared many of Crowley’s predilections—he had “aberrations,” his son Oliver wrote, and followed Louis’s law: “that Louis should have what Louis wanted,” a kind of
thelema
in a nutshell—and the marriage with Frances soon foundered.
⁵⁹
She remained fearful of Crowley throughout her life, much like Victor Neuburg. Years later while living in Essex in England, she discovered strange markings
decorating her cottage and realized they were from Crowley and, according to her son Oliver, felt an “intensity of terror.” He knew how to nurse a grudge.

On Esopus Island, about ninety miles north of Manhattan, Crowley paddled in a canoe, meditated, visited the farms on the small island’s banks, was fed by local people—supplemented by provisions brought by the Camel, with whom he also performed opera—and worked on a translation of the
Tao Te Ching
. Another activity was to suspend himself with ropes along the island’s cliffs and in bright red paint cover the granite with his magical tags: “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law” and “Every Man and Every Woman Is a Star.” The idea was that people on passing boats would see his mottoes and be inspired to do their true will. (Crowley was, we might say, an early graffiti artist.) Seabrook popularized the story that Crowley had spent the money he had collected for him solely on the paint, brushes, and rope, and that he would, as Elijah was, be fed by the ravens. Crowley, however, stocked up on food, wine, brandy, and other essentials, and even had a woman sent out to him; she stayed when the Camel was away. When the red-haired and curvy Madelaine George arrived at the nearest train station, having been invited to lunch on his island, Crowley was dismayed to find she had brought along a huge trunk. Madelaine herself was put out that Crowley’s summer residence was a tent. Getting the trunk into Crowley’s canoe was a feat—they almost sank—and after lunch, Madelaine, who was married, became hysterical and demanded to return home.
⁶⁰
Crowley persuaded her to enjoy a row around the island—it was only a half mile long and a few hundred feet wide—during which the canoe sprang a leak. After some more hysterics, however,
Madelaine decided to make the most of things and settled into a weekend with the Beast.

On the island Crowley also worked at his magical memory, and added to his already rich array of past lives. Pope Alexander VI (the Borgia Pope with a taste for the occult), Eliphas Levi, Cagliostro, a suicide, a black magician, a monk who enjoyed inflicting pain on women, a Knight Templar, a deformed hermaphrodite who died of syphilis, and, appropriately, Ko Hsuen, a student of Lao Tzu, whose book Crowley was translating, were some who joined Crowley’s reincarnated ranks. Crowley also remembered a meeting of the Secret Chiefs sometime before Mohammed, at which the question of whether to release important occult secrets to humanity at large or to keep them for only an elite was discussed. Crowley was for releasing the knowledge; the majority was not. Curiously, this important discussion resembles a similar notion presented by Charles George Harrison, an obscure occultist, in a series of lectures given in 1893 in London, and later developed by Rudolf Steiner.
⁶¹
It is unknown if Crowley knew of Harrison’s lectures; they were published in 1894 by a company partly owned by A. E. Waite, who reviewed them in
The Unknown World
that year. But Crowley could have known of them.

When Crowley returned to Manhattan in early September, Seabrook asked if he had gained anything from his retirement. Crowley, who Seabrook said “held himself pompously erect and had a tendency to strut,” said he had gained greater power, and to prove it, Crowley offered a demonstration. Following lunch at the Plaza Grill, Seabrook and Crowley walked along Fifth Avenue. Crossing 42nd Street and passing the New York Public Library, Crowley pointed to a man in front of him and motioned to Seabrook to watch. Crowley
fell in step with the man, imitating his movements exactly, becoming an “astral ghost of the other.” Suddenly, Crowley buckled his knees, and then shot back up and immediately got back in step. The man he had been shadowing fell; his legs, it seemed, had been pulled from under him, and Crowley and Seabrook helped him to his feet. The unfortunate victim looked for a banana peel and checked his soles, but there was nothing to suggest why he had fallen. Puzzled, he then thanked Crowley and Seabrook and carried on. Seabrook tried to explain Crowley’s “power” in some rational way, but in the end suggested that he might really have possessed “power” after all.

While enjoying the Camel’s embrace and enduring the hysterics of Madelaine, Crowley already had another Scarlet Woman in sight. In early 1918 Crowley had given a lecture on magick to a small audience. At the end a young woman, who would later write a book about the dangers of joining a “love cult,” approached him. Her name was Alma Hirsig. Two months later, Alma and her sister Leah came to Crowley’s studio at 1 University Place. They were looking for lodgings in the area and thought Crowley could help. While Alma spoke, Crowley looked at Leah and apropos of nothing kissed her. He continued to kiss her even as Alma continued talking, and the two were still kissing when Alma left. It wasn’t until January 1919 that Crowley and Leah met again. By this time Crowley’s canvases had accumulated. While Alma and Leah stood admiring the screen that concealed his bed and on which he had painted a sun, a moon, and the Hindu holy fire, Crowley—the story goes—started to undress Leah. She was not his type: tall, thin, flat chested, “a little mouse like creature, pure and sweet,” according to her sister. Leah was thirty-five, teaching in the Bronx, and attending lectures in law at New York University; she also had a child by a man who had left her. Yet
Crowley detected something that allowed him to unceremoniously undress her and begin a sketch. “What shall I paint you as?” he asked. “Paint me as a dead soul,” she said.

He did. In an orgy of inspiration Crowley spent the night creating what he considered an undeniable work of genius. In
Dead Souls
, Leah’s thin body, her skin a garish green wrapped in bluish shadows, is flanked by two women, one white, one black, both gazing at the Queen of Dead Souls. On the black woman’s shoulder rests a huge parrot, while the white woman writhes in agony. Below all three are strangely shaped heads, suggesting, Crowley said, “all anguish, all perversity, all banishment from the world of reasonable things.”

Not long after Crowley completed his masterwork, Leah returned to his studio. Crowley had her kneel within a magic circle he had painted on the floor. After performing the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, he inaugurated her reign as the Scarlet Woman with, one assumes, a IX
⁰
opus. He then painted the mark of the Beast between Leah’s boyish breasts. How often he painted it or if Leah occasionally touched it up herself is unclear. But it was clearly visible to William Seabrook, who saw it often, as Leah hung about Crowley’s studio on most occasions stark naked. Crowley would return to England soon. He had not been a hit in the United States. The new world had not cottoned to the new aeon. In fact, he had made things worse for himself, as he was now considered a traitor. But he was not going back empty-handed. His new Scarlet Woman was coming with him.

IN AND OUT OF THE ABBEY OF
THELEMA

Crowley’s exit from New York in late 1919 was not auspicious. He had arranged for a publisher in Detroit to bring out a new issue of
The Equinox
. Volume II had been one of silence—to balance the first volume of speech—and volume III, no. 1, known as the blue
Equinox
—because of its sky-blue cover—was to get things back in step. Crowley, however, was unhappy with the way it was produced and, predictably, blamed the publisher, some Freemasons, for cutting costs. The publication did, however, contain the Leon Engers Kennedy portrait, Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan,” and an O.T.O. recruitment letter, and is now considered rare. To bring some closure to his U.S. adventure, Crowley took one last magical retirement, this time in Montauk on Long Island, but it was not a success; the magical current was exhausted, although today the area is considered a focal point for UFO sightings, which some suggest has something to do with Crowley’s being there. Just before crossing the Atlantic, Crowley headed south to spend some weeks visiting William and Kate Seabrook on their farm in Georgia. Crowley claims that, inspired by
his presence, Seabrook tried to escape from journalism—he worked for the Hearst chain—and become an artist, but as soon as Crowley left, Seabrook reverted to type. We can, in a way, see Crowley’s influence on Seabrook as emblematic of his time in America. Crowley arrived and kicked up a storm, but as soon as he left, things reverted to normal. He was, he admitted, “too young, ignorant, and bigoted to make any impression on the United States.”
¹
He reflected that his years there were really preparation for what was to come. We may see Frank Harris’s remark that Crowley left America floating a string of bad checks as emblematic, too.

Crowley arrived in London shortly before Christmas 1919. Even he was surprised at the ease with which he passed through immigration. He had, after all, been branded a traitor, supporting the Hun and the Irish rebels. One would expect he would have a little difficulty getting back onto British soil, but Crowley walked into England without a hitch. Those who believe that he really had been working for British Intelligence cite this as evidence that the government was behind him. A perhaps more plausible reason is that Crowley was simply not taken seriously. England deals with chaps like him by ignoring them and that seems to be what happened with Crowley.

It was a bit of good luck amid many difficulties. The O.T.O. was broke, either through Crowley’s profligacy or George Cowie’s pilfering. Victor Neuburg avoided him; he had heard of Crowley’s return and quickly ducked for cover. A reunion with George Cecil Jones proved disappointing; he had settled into comfortable normality and Crowley loathed him for it. Crowley’s own health was ailing; he had bronchitis and his asthma had returned; to battle it he obtained a prescription for heroin, which was still legal at that time. It was the beginning of an addiction that lasted the rest of his life.

For the two weeks he remained in England, Crowley was reduced to staying in Croydon with his aunt at the house he had berated the zeppelins for sparing. It was slightly ignominious, but Crowley must have appreciated the poetic justice. All during this time he consulted the
I Ching
, the ancient Chinese oracle,
every day, sometimes more, and would continue to do so—he would even produce his own translation of it—looking for some direction, although he was frequently uncertain as to why he did. On February 3, 1920, he was so confident that a “new Current or Word” would reach him that he didn’t “even seek an Oracle,” yet the next day he did, “because I have literally nothing else to do.”
²
His worldly affairs were not promising, but the magical future looked good. Intimations of being an Ipsissimus, the last grade left on the Golden Dawn ladder of success, came to him. When he finally achieved it, he would, as he wrote in
Magick in Theory and Practice
, be “wholly free from all limitations soever,” not distinguishing between “one thing and any other,” arriving at the indifferentism William James sagely backed away from. Such attainment, Crowley believed, “
is
insanity.”
³
We may well agree, but to this the Ipsissimus is also indifferent. How he could remain indifferent and yet hope that others attained a similar state was a conundrum that still baffled him, yet he seemed to have achieved at least an indifference to this.

One thing he was not indifferent to was that
John Bull
once again targeted him. His old enemy Horatio Bottomley had dug up dirt about his traitorous doings in America and called for the government to take action. It was a libelous attack and George Cecil Jones urged Crowley to take legal steps, perhaps forgetting Crowley’s reluctance to do so against
The Looking Glass
. But Crowley had no money and it
is unclear exactly what would have come out in court. Again, those who believe Crowley really was a British agent suggest that he refused to sue in order to maintain official secrecy about his assignment. Yet a legal battle about his affairs in America may have forced the government to take him more seriously, with possibly unfortunate results. In any case the
I Ching
counseled laying low. Crowley may have been forgotten during his sojourn in the States, but whether he liked it or not, he was once again back in the tabloid spotlight and, like his heroin addiction, the bad press would hound him for the rest of his life.

John Bull
may have ranted, but Crowley was no longer in England. He had headed to Paris, where he arranged for Leah, whom he called Alostrael and the Ape of Thoth, to meet him. She arrived with her bastard toddler Hansi, very little money, and pregnant with Crowley’s child. She had been staying in Switzerland with her sister—they were Swiss born but their mother had brought them to America to escape her brutal alcoholic husband—and the plan now was to get to North Africa, where the hot, dry air would help Crowley’s recovery. But first Crowley had a reunion with Jane Chéron. He wanted to smoke opium with her and have sex; neither was forthcoming but Jane offered something else. She had embroidered in silk a copy of the stele of Ankh-F-N-Khonsu, the very one that had revealed to Crowley his destiny, and she now gave this to him. For Jane to do this was unusual; she had shown no artistic inklings before. She had copied it from an image in the
Equinox
some years back and Crowley took her unexpected present as an indubitable sign that the Secret Chiefs were once again directing his affairs. He looked for signs and he found them; as mentioned, Crowley had a knack for sparking
synchronicities. He maintained that he had proven beyond doubt the existence of “extra-human Intelligence,” and Jane’s gift was only more evidence of this.
⁴

Crowley and the Ape of Thoth headed to Fontainebleau, where Crowley looked for an appropriate dwelling for Leah to have their child. Shipboard, Leah had made friends with a French woman, Ninette Shumway, who had worked in America as a governess but had tired of the place and was returning home. She had a son—her husband had been killed in an accident—and Leah suggested that they invite her to join their growing family. Crowley had been performing several opera
p.v.n.
with Eliane, a local prostitute, and the idea of a ménage à trois appealed to him. He even fantasized about a ménage à quarte, as he contemplated the arrival of Jane Wolfe, a Hollywood actress who had been corresponding with him. He soon performed opera with Ninette, asking the gods what to do. Like Leah, Ninette was not his usual type. She was thin, pale, lifeless, and listlessly dragged along her equally lifeless “brat,” Howard—whom Crowley called Hermes. Crowley called them his patients and said his work of saving humanity would start with them.

Crowley paints a romantic picture of his first opera with Ninette, with wine going to their heads in a peaceful glade in the Fontainebleau forest, but he had already introduced her to the virtues of
p.v.n.,
although this took some work.
⁵
Crowley invariably overestimated his sexual partners’ capacity for indifference; whatever the magical result of their union, the most obvious one was that Ninette hoped to oust Leah as Crowley’s partner. Ninette’s possessiveness manifested in Crowley’s dreams: a casebook Freudian scenario found him inside a cave that he recognized as Ninette’s yoni; there he had a tandem bicycle without handles—a sign, perhaps, that he was losing control.
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Not long after this, on February 26, 1920, Leah gave birth to Crowley’s third daughter. Mercifully she was named Ann Léa, and quickly nicknamed Poupée. Perhaps out of spite or to keep up with Leah, Ninette, who soon took to the magical regimen, announced that she was pregnant; Crowley, in fact, performed opera to make her so. (Oddly, Crowley, who took delight in lurid and scatological pornography, was offended by some of Ninette’s magical diary, in which she recorded in “brutal obscenity” the details of her workings with the Beast.)
⁷

Should they go to Algeria or the Italian lakes? Or Spain, Naples, or possibly Marseilles? The idea of establishing a magical community in a warm climate where Crowley could recover his health occupied the troupe, and Crowley repeatedly petitioned the
I Ching
for some hint or clue. Some money from an inheritance was on its way—exactly how much is unclear, but thanks be to the Secret Chiefs!—and Crowley wanted to get things right. On March 1, after much deliberation and filled with “contemptuous courage,” he finally decided on Cefalù, a small fishing port some forty miles east of Palermo in Sicily.
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Leah and little Poupée decamped for London, where Leah would tidy Crowley’s business affairs, while the Beast, Ninette, her son, and Leah’s headed for Sicily. In Marseilles Crowley and Ninette performed an opus
p.v.n.
to ensure a safe journey, and on March 31 they arrived in Cefalù. After a terrible night in a wretched hotel, a realtor showed them the Villa Santa Barbara, a run-down farmhouse up a narrow path that wound around a mountain on the outskirts of town. Crowley saw two Persian nut trees near the place, just like the ones he had seen with Sister Virakam in Posilipo, and knew he had found what he was looking for. With the money from his inheritance Crowley and Leah later signed the lease, he as Sir Alaster de Kerval, she as Countessa Lea Harcourt.

The Villa Santa Barbara had a magnificent view, west to Palermo, east to the sea, and was surrounded by a garden filled with flowers and fruit, with rolling green hills in the background. Nearby was the great rock of Cefalù, atop which were temples to Diana and Jupiter; on his second day there Crowley traversed the rock and thanked the gods.
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The farmhouse was soon christened the Abbey of Thelema, but it was also called the Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum and, occasionally, the Whore’s Cell.
¹⁰
Crowley ordered fancy stationery and business cards with his title
The Beast 666
and Leah’s
The Scarlet Woman
printed on them, with their address as the Abbey of Thelema, although it is doubtful Rabelais would have recognized the place. Crowley quickly turned the central room, from which the others radiated, into a temple. Here stood an altar on which
The Book of the Law
and the implements of magick were kept, as well as a record of daily activities and visitors, much as in any guesthouse; around this Crowley painted a dark red circle and blue pentagram. Crowley sat on a throne before an incense-burning brazier and around him were circled low stools where his flock would rest.

He got to work adorning his
La Chambre des Cauchemars
(“chamber of nightmares”) with his paintings. One depicted a man being sodomized by Pan with his own seed covering a naked Scarlet Woman. Others, of various couplings, followed suit. Crowley claimed that his erotic paintings neutralized sex so that his students could study it scientifically, yet his attitude toward it was anything but neutral.
¹¹
In 1955, decades after Crowley’s departure, the sexologist Alfred Kinsey and the filmmaker Kenneth Anger removed the whitewash with which the house’s owners had covered Crowley’s work. Although given high-sounding names, the property was rudimentary, without gas, electricity, sanitation, or plumbing and was barely furnished. As
there was no toilet, Crowley’s
thelemites
met nature’s call as best they could and visitors found the place filthy, with a “foul miasma . . . stinking to high heaven.”
¹²
No one cleaned. A Catholic housekeeper they had soon left, and no one cooked, that not being a part of their true will. The slaves, Aiwass said, shall serve, but as yet none of them had turned up at the abbey.
¹³

Life at the abbey settled into a routine not unlike that at Christian monasteries. Mornings began with Leah proclaiming the Law.
¹⁴
Then they made the Kabbalistic Cross—part of the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram—which was followed by a procession and then an adoration to the sun. Similar adorations were made at noon, sunset, and midnight, dedicated to the appropriate Egyptian god. Before meals they said, “Will”: “What is thy will?” “It is my will to eat and drink.” “To what end?” “That my body may be fortified thereby.” “To what end?” “So that I may accomplish the Great Work.” After supper Crowley read extracts from
The Book of the Law
, much as his parents had read from the Bible in his childhood. During the day there was magical work, invocations, banishments, entreaties to one’s Holy Guardian Angel, disciplines such as
Liber Jogorum
, all recorded in precise detail in one’s magical record, which the Beast perused regularly
.
The children, who had minimal supervision, must have found these rituals rather like being at church. Many who came to the abbey—bohemians and arty types, that generation’s hippies—did not follow the regimen although Crowley himself was strict about it. Whatever we may think of him, he took his magick seriously.