Aleister Crowley (31 page)

Regardie arrived at Gare St. Lazare in Paris on October 12, 1928. It was Crowley’s fifty-third birthday and he met his new amanuensis wearing blue-gray tweeds, plus fours, and a cap. From this point on, Crowley increasingly appears something of an anachronism, holding on to a British style that went out of fashion after World War I; from his photographs, one expects him to say “pip pip” and “cheerio.”
²⁵
Tall and heavyset, in a thin, slurring voice Crowley proclaimed the Law to Regardie, his eyes gleaming “pleasantly over the dark bags beneath them,” his hand offering a limp greeting.
²⁶
Regardie remarked that Crowley’s eyes were “inclined to fix themselves in one position and bore in,” the basilisk stare many have commented on.
²⁷
As soon as he arrived, Regardie handed over his savings, some $1,200; not only did he work for Crowley without salary, he also paid for his magical instruction. As he did with Germer’s largesse, Crowley soon spent Regardie’s tribute on his lavish lifestyle, although he maintained that this was in order to free Regardie of any attachment to money, something he certainly did.

Like Neuburg, Mudd, and Maitland, Regardie was a nervous, inhibited, self-conscious character—what in the 1960s was called “uptight”—and speaking with Crowley he felt “completely exposed.” He felt even more exposed that evening when, after dinner and cognac, Crowley and his latest Scarlet Woman, the Polish Kasimira Bass—her reign was brief—performed an opus before his eyes. Regardie, flustered, left the room. Crowley took note and his first assignment for his new recruit was to visit as many brothels as possible. This seems hardly instructive, but Crowley’s “teaching” aimed to make
applicants more like himself. He also told Regardie, whom he called the Serpent, to order a suit from his tailor and to send him the bill; it was, of course, never paid. Around the same time, Crowley attracted another well-heeled young man interested in magick. Gerald Yorke had been to Eton and Cambridge; he was the nephew of an earl and the cousin of a baron, and his father owned an impressive estate. Like Regardie, he had come upon the
Equinox
and was transfixed. Writing to Crowley, he suggested meeting in Paris. Crowley must have wondered if there were two “rich men from the west,” as Yorke arranged that they should meet at the Paris airport; air travel then was the prerogative of the very wealthy. They carried on to Cassis, where Yorke received his first magical training and his induction into the A.
^.
.A.
^.
. Yorke became Crowley’s business advisor and financial manager. Although their relationship had its rocky patches—several, in fact—Yorke remained loyal, and years later he donated his collection of Crowleyana to London’s Warburg Institute. Comprised of books, manuscripts, magical paraphernalia, and even clothes, it remains the largest single collection of Crowley material available for study.

Yorke and Regardie often met at Crowley’s flat, where Regardie lived. Here they were subjected to the Beast’s unnerving regimen of late hours, chess, cigar and pipe smoke, copious alcohol, and drugs. They were also concerned that, in Regardie’s words, he would try some “homosexual monkey tricks” on them, but Crowley didn’t. Regardie remained at Crowley’s side for four years, but eventually broke with him in 1932 over “the nasty, petty, vicious louse that occasionally he was.” One would only question that “occasionally,” but like many who encountered Crowley’s venom, Regardie often minimized Crowley’s nastiness and emphasized his own unworthiness. Even without the sex, there was something of a dominance/
submission relationship between them. When, after separating, Regardie sent Crowley a copy of one of his books, and Crowley replied negatively, Regardie wrote a petulant letter, calling Crowley “Alice” and saying he was a “contemptible bitch.”
²⁸
Crowley retaliated, circulating an anonymous letter in which, as he did with Neuburg, he berates Regardie for his Jewishness, and compiles a litany of his failings, including constipation, masturbation, and gonorrhea. (Oddly, Regardie publishes this piece of turpitude in full.) Their unedifying exchange is like that between two “queens” caught in a catfight. Yet Regardie’s book,
The Eye in the Triangle
,
written in response to John Symonds’s
The Great Beast
, often gives the impression that it doth protest Crowley’s innocence too much, and is thereby suspect; at the end of it, Regardie himself admits that it is with real relief that he can unburden himself of the task of exonerating Crowley. After Crowley, Regardie went on to join the Stella Matutina, a Golden Dawn offshoot, and to write a series of intelligent books bringing together insights from alchemy, Jungian analysis, and Reichian therapy. His
Tree of Life
, one of the first books on magick I read, which synthesizes Crowley’s system with that of the Golden Dawn, remains a classic. He did, however, pull a Crowley himself when he gathered the Golden Dawn material that he vowed to keep secret and, breaking his oaths, published it in
The Golden Dawn
(1937–1940)
.

Not long after Regardie arrived, Kasimira Bass departed. Regardie was asked to break the news. On hearing it, Crowley reflected that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. He was most likely happy she departed as Kasimira seems to have had a mind of her own. Her place was soon filled. The fortyish Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar, a native of Nicaragua, had considerable magical potential and Crowley called her the High Priestess of Voodoo. They met at the end of
1928 and were soon enmeshed in the sexual, emotional, and magical turbulence that invariably accompanied Crowley’s affairs.

Much of this time Crowley was occupied with the publication of his magnum opus,
Magick in Theory and Practice
, a continuation of his earlier
Book Four
. Synthesizing Western and Eastern occult systems, and binding the lot with the law of
thelema
, the work is full of Crowley’s obsessions and erudite but obscure humor. As mentioned earlier, it is not, in any way, written for “all,” despite Crowley’s protestations. For connoisseurs it remains rich fare, but for the average reader it is impenetrable, or, at best, an acquired taste. Crowley recaps material presented in
Book Four
and introduces the Beast, Scarlet Woman, and Whore of Babalon; I mention the rituals, exercises, and reading lists in the introduction. In essence Crowley tries to modernize magick, to free it of its traditional encumbrances, to anchor it in the psyche and imagination of the magician. But he is too fond of hinting at hidden knowledge, giving the work twists and turns that either fascinate or befuddle, but are clearly meant to entice the reader to seek him out. And he can’t avoid a generous sprinkling of his sardonic wit. In chapter XII, “Of the Bloody Sacrifice,” after assessing the virtues of different sacrificial animals, Crowley drops a subtle bombshell. “A male of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory and suitable victim,” he writes, adding, in a poker-faced footnote, that Frater Perdurabo made this sacrifice 150 times a year between 1912 and 1928.
²⁹
Crowley isn’t speaking of child sacrifice, but of his own sperm.
Magick
has no direct sexual references, but for those who know, they are there. Crowley surely chuckled at the readers who took his remark seriously. But why shouldn’t they, given he went out of his way to present himself as some demonic wizard?
In any case, the readers Crowley wanted to shock with this adolescent gag never even looked at the book.

One interesting passage escapes mention by most of Crowley’s commentators. Speaking of the Astral Plane, Crowley writes that the magician “may go for a long time being fooled and flattered by the Astrals that he has himself modified or manufactured.” “They will,” he writes, “pretend to show him marvelous mysteries.” He “will incline to accept them as true, for the very reason that they are the images of himself idealized by imagination.” “He will become increasingly interested in himself, imagine himself to be attaining one initiation after another. His Ego will expand unchecked, till he seems to himself to have heaven at his feet. Yet all this will be nothing but the fool’s face of Narcissus smirking up from the pool that will drown him.”
³⁰
Readers may detect a similarity here with Crowley’s dark musings following his expulsion from Cefalù. Did Crowley know he was talking about himself?

Crowley didn’t trust magick to make
Magick
a success. He hired a publicity agent to revamp his public profile. C. Vidal Hunt took on the daunting task of relaunching Crowley’s career. Hunt, however, soon discovered that Crowley could be his own worst enemy. He could not, Hunt complained, “act pretty over a cup of tea”—that is, make a good impression—nor could he be taught new tricks. Crowley had, it seems, “crystallized,” to use Gurdjieff’s term. Even with his own best interests at stake, he couldn’t act “out of character.” Hunt had other problems with Crowley. Hunt tried to embroil Crowley in a scheme involving a rich American widow and a pauper Spanish aristocrat. Crowley was to cook up a phony horoscope informing the millionairess that Don Luis Fernando de Bourbon was Mr. Right.
Crowley thought astrology was only minimally true, but to his credit he declined, and even warned the rich American about the scheme.
³¹
Hunt was not happy and he took his displeasure to the Sûreté Géneralé. Hunt was not the only person to mention Crowley to the French authorities. Regardie’s sister’s concerns had also reached them. Whether it was Hunt, Regardie’s sister, or some other influence, on January 17, 1929, Crowley was visited by an inspector from the Préfecture de Police. The encounter has the air of a Marx Brothers film. After questions about his past, drugs, magick, and Kabbalah—the inspector expressed a surprising wish to study it—the conversation shifted to a mysterious device Crowley had resting on a table. Crowley believed that the befuddled flic
thought it was a bomb, or an apparatus for distilling cocaine, but it was only a harmless espresso machine—although that a Parisian would not know this strikes me as unlikely.

Crowley believed he had made a good impression, but the flic’s superiors did not, as a month later the Minister of the Interior issued a
refus de séjour
—an expulsion order—for
Crowley, the High Priestess, and the Serpent.
³²
They had twenty-four hours to leave France. Crowley managed to extend his stay, claiming illness; he would not leave until he had a copy of
Magick
in his hands. As no English publisher would touch it, Gerald Yorke and Karl Germer paid for a French publisher, the Lecram Press, to produce it. Regardie and Señora de Miramar had managed British visas, but Crowley’s doctor’s certificate allowed him to stay. The Serpent and the High Priestess, however, soon hit a bump. The British authorities refused entry and as soon as they arrived they were summarily shipped back to France. Eventually they obtained Belgian visas and reached Brussels nearly a week after leaving Paris.

On April 12 Crowley received a copy of his masterpiece. He was
ecstatic. Yet when it was released to the public, the book Crowley had written for all received few, if any, reviews, and was ignored by the Banker, Biologist, Grocer, and Factory Girl whose lives he had hoped to fulfill through it. It must have been disappointing; another advertisement for his new aeon had drawn a blank. Less than a week later he was heading to Brussels, where he stayed for a short time, reunited with his Scarlet Woman. But soon enough he was heading across the Channel. A Colonel Carter of Scotland Yard had contacted Gerald Yorke—the two knew each other through Masonic connections—and had warned him about associating with Crowley. Yorke convinced Carter that the Beast was not as black as he was painted, and according to one account, it was Carter himself who paid for Crowley’s voyage back to Britain. Carter, it seems, had plans for Crowley, and the two soon met with Yorke at dinner. Crowley wanted to confirm his legal standing, and Carter was interested in helping Crowley, in return for favors to be called in later. Crowley, at any rate, had no trouble returning to England. The tabloids growled about his evil doings, but the authorities apparently turned a blind eye.

Yet if
Magick
had received no notice, Crowley’s expulsion certainly did. It hit the international papers; in France even a “true crime” magazine,
Detective
, sported Crowley in his Ku Klux Klannish hood on its cover and reported his fiendish deeds.
³³
In an interview Crowley, ever the martyr, compared his plight to the famous Dreyfus case of the nineteenth century; the irony of an anti-Semite comparing the tragedy of a Jew wrongly accused and sent to Devil’s Island to his own situation escaped him.
³⁴
The most likely reason the French expelled Crowley was his pro-German work in America, and the fact that he was the head of a German occult organization. He was understandably suspected of being a German spy.

As had happened with Leah and Norman Mudd, in Brussels the Serpent and the High Priestess were thrown into each other’s arms. Or more likely the matronly High Priestess took charge of the young Serpent and performed an unscheduled opus. Regardie was concerned about the impropriety—what would the master think?—but soon enough there were new troubles. Now the Belgians wanted them out, too. Regardie, who was after all British born, should have been allowed entry to England. He was discovering what learning from Crowley was all about. Eventually Regardie somehow managed to enter Britain; most likely Colonel Carter helped. Karl Germer rescued Señora de Miramar, transporting her to Leipzig, where she stayed with the helpful Martha Küntzel. Soon after, Crowley arrived and on August 16, he and the High Priestess married. The main reason was to facilitate Maria’s entry into England; it was a union of practicality, not passion. Yet like all his others, it would not last.

One reason Crowley wanted to be in London was to find a publisher. He had completed the
Confessions
and it needed a home. It found one in June when Crowley met P. R. Stephenson, who ran the small Mandrake Press with his partner, Edward Goldston. Their offices were on Museum Street, near the British Museum. Stephenson admired rebels; he had recently published a collection of D. H. Lawrence’s erotic paintings and he saw in Crowley another warrior against repression. Stephenson offered Crowley a £50 advance for the
Confessions
and
Moonchild
and a collection of stories,
The Stratagem and Other Stories
. Stephenson himself wrote a book attacking Crowley’s treatment in the press, but
The Legend of Aleister Crowley
, intended to attract potential readers, was a failure, as were Crowley’s books. Bookshops refused to carry the
Confessions
; the enormous
A
of
Crowley’s signature on the cover, clearly an erect penis and testicles, could not have helped, likewise his equally phallic idealized self-portrait. Crowley had only himself to blame, but the work itself is in no way blasphemous. It is a very readable, often insightful, and occasionally brilliant account by an unabashed egoist of his undeniably unusual life. One tires of his tireless self-regard and self-justification, but then this is true of Casanova, Rousseau, and other celebrated self-proclaimers. Only the first two volumes appeared in 1930; the remaining four languished until an abridged one-volume edition appeared in 1969, edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant. That posthumous edition was something of a bestseller, but 1969 was not 1930. Eventually Crowley fell out with Stephenson and Goldston, and a reborn Mandrake Press with Gerald Yorke, Karl Germer, and Robin Thyme—who we will return to—at the helm did not do much better.