Aleister Crowley (34 page)

Crowley’s central belief, that the tarot originated in Egypt and
that it is based on Kabbalah’s Tree of Life—an idea originating in Paris with Court de Gébelin in 1781—is rejected by most modern historians.
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But this hardly matters; whatever the real origin of the tarot, Crowley’s Thoth deck exerts an unmistakable power. And Crowley’s text—in equal parts lucid, convoluted, and turgid—has an equally mesmeric force. At times it reminds me of Jung’s early work
Symbols of Transformation
(1912), the book that ended his friendship with Freud. Both works have a tendency to lose themselves in their wealth of illustrations and allusions, until the reader has forgotten what set off a particular spiral of interpretation. But this may be unimportant; one is irresistibly carried along by the flow of Crowley’s occult erudition. The Fool, for example, takes us from the formula of Tetragrammaton to the Green Man, to the Holy Ghost, to Percivale, to the Egyptian god Set, to Hoor-Pa-Kraat, and so on to Baphomet. It is at times a striking but also baffling exposition. The idea is to learn how to see the world as Crowley does. Every idea, every symbol, he tells us, contains its contradictory meaning. “One must,” he says, “keep in mind the bivalence of every symbol. Insistence upon either one or the other of the contradictory attributes . . . is simply a mark of spiritual incapacity.”
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We are, of course, in a kind of dream world, where the strictures of logic do not apply.

Crowley’s work on the tarot kept him going through the Blitz. Just before the bombs fell he moved to Richmond, a leafy suburb of London. Here he enjoyed the company of Charles Cammell; like Israel Regardie, Cammell was appalled by Symonds’s book and wrote his own biography of Crowley in reply. Cammell did not think much of
thelema
or magick—as noted, he threw his copy of
The Book of the Law
into the fire—but he appreciated Crowley as a poet and man of the world. He felt that while
thelema
looked good on paper, “it loses
significance in the limelight of the philosopher’s application thereof to his own life.”
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Cammell also believed that Crowley’s troubles started because he broke his Abramelin oath to use his powers only for good, and he made the interesting observation that John Dee had received a similar message from a “spiritual creature” as Crowley had from Aiwass: “Do that which most pleaseth you.”
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Cammell had met Crowley in 1936 and won his friendship by surviving one of Crowley’s fiery curries. Like Gurdjieff and Jung, Crowley was a good cook; the Warburg collection even includes some of his recipes. Crowley enjoyed feeding guests blazing dishes and watching them sweat. When Cammell washed down a pyrotechnical repast with hefty swallows of vodka and then asked for more, the Beast was undone. In Richmond Crowley lived on Petersham Road, near the Thames, and Cammell introduced him to Ralph Shirley, the editor of
The Occult Review
, and Montague Summers, the popular writer on witchcraft. Summers had followed Crowley’s career, collecting press cuttings and magazine articles about him; Crowley, he thought, was “one of the few original and really interesting men of our age.”
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Cammell says that Crowley was living with a black woman on Petersham Road, and this may be one reason why he had to leave. Cammell found him a new flat on the Green, in the center of town, close to Cammell’s own flat. Crowley’s sex life was winding down. Alice Upham was Crowley’s last recorded lover; as with the other women in his life, their relationship was rocky. He had other lovers, too, but the long orgy was drawing to an end. On June 18, 1941, for the first time Crowley recorded that he failed to raise an erection. His last recorded opus was an act of cunnilingus with Alice at a flat in Hanover Square in October that year. He was sixty-six.

Crowley enjoyed the bombings. Cammell records that one
evening a German bomber hit by antiaircraft fire came crashing down. Cammell rushed out of his door and so did Crowley, waving his hands and shouting “Hooray!”
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But soon the Blitz proved too much and Crowley left London for Torquay in Devon—Cammell paid his fare—where apparently he developed a reputation for propositioning the local ladies. But his health suffered and at one point Lady Harris found him half-dead from pneumonia; someone had even made arrangements for a coffin. Lady Harris found a doctor and nursed him back to health.
³⁹
Another time when Crowley was again near death, Cammell rushed to his bedside. Cammell and Crowley’s nurse both insist that Crowley had died, and the doctor asked Cammell to make the necessary arrangements. But the next day Crowley had revived; the Devil, the nurse said, had called him back from the dead.
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(For what it’s worth, Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, and Jung suffered similar resurrections.) While in Torquay, Crowley investigated Barton Cross, near Plymouth, as a potential site for a new abbey, but like many of these projects, it didn’t materialize. Crowley eventually broke with Cammell over money. Crowley asked Cammell’s wife to purchase some fabric for him; when she asked to be reimbursed, he refused, as usual making up some excuse. “Money,” Cammell notes, “never meant anything to him,” and “when challenged, he became defiant.”
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Cammell then joined the ranks of people who truly liked Crowley, but who the Beast invariably drove away.

—

W
HEN
THE
B
LITZ
was over Crowley returned to London, where he moved from room to room. Lodgings in the bombed-out capital were scarce, but at one point Crowley helped the heiress Nancy Cunard find a flat. Later her landlord named a room after Crowley and
used it to hold séances. In June 1941, an exhibition of Lady Harris’s tarot paintings was scheduled for an Oxford gallery, but it was cancelled because of Crowley’s connection. Another exhibition was arranged, but Harris felt it politic not to mention Crowley in the brochure. Understandably, Crowley was miffed, but with his reputation, it was difficult securing backers for a show. Harris also disapproved of his pamphlet
Liber Oz
, written in New York during World War I and now brought out as a broadside. It states his political stance with strident brevity, and its libertarian ideas are not far removed from those of Ayn Rand. Crowley, in fact, was a fan of Rand’s; in his last days he spoke highly of
The Fountainhead
, remarking that his American friends recognized him in the protagonist, Howard Roark.
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“Man has the right to live by his own law,” Crowley declares. He has the right to work, play, rest, die, and love as he will, and he has the right “to kill those who would thwart these rights.”
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The essence of these “rights of man” is the same as Crowley’s earliest desire to “let me go my own way,” the adolescent need to “do what I want to do” without interference.
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Like the oft-quoted line from his poem “Hymn to Lucifer”—“The Key of Joy is Disobedience”—Crowley’s “rights of man” remind us that Crowley never grew up.
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This is one of the truly remarkable things about him. Crowley swallowed enough experience to fill a dozen lives yet he emerges from it all exactly as he began. He remains a colossal example of arrested development.

At this time Crowley was known to wander around Fitzrovia, reeking of ether, happy to relate his exploits for a drink. On one occasion in early 1942 he frightened the poet Dylan Thomas with a demonstration of mind reading. At the French House—a famous watering hole—he handed Thomas some paper, asked him to draw something, and then left. Shortly after Crowley presented Thomas
with an exact copy of his handiwork. Thomas, a Welshman, knew second sight when he saw it and ran from the place. A young Peter Brook, later a prestigious filmmaker and stage director, saw a copy of
Magick
in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road and was intrigued enough to write to its author. Brook met Crowley at his flat in Hamilton House, Piccadilly, where he found him “elderly, green-tweeded and courteous.” Brook later persuaded Crowley to hide in his bedroom in Oxford; during the party that followed he manifested the aged magician to his fellow undergraduates’ delight. In 1944 Brook directed a production of Christopher Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
; Crowley was his “occult advisor.”
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Although slowing down, Crowley remained active: he wrote a poem for the French Resistance, made wax recordings of readings of the “Hymn to Pan” and the first two calls of the Enochian aethyrs—his voice is rather high and sibilant—and even thought about composing a new national anthem for America.

In the winter of 1943, Crowley set down at 93 Jermyn Street, Mayfair, an apt address. He liked his landlady, but she soon troubled him about things like rent. Most of Crowley’s income came from America, either from Karl Germer or from the O.T.O. branch in Pasadena, California. In the late 1930s, W. T. Smith, an initiate of Frater Achad’s Vancouver lodge, settled in the Golden State and started his own group, called Agape Lodge, in Hollywood. Jane Wolfe, who had returned to America, helped Smith. In 1943 Grady McMurtry, a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant in the U.S. Army and initiate of the Agape Lodge, was stationed in England and visited Crowley often. McMurtry, like Crowley, played chess—the game was one of Crowley’s last pleasures—and over one match Crowley initiated McMurtry into the IX
⁰
of the O.T.O., giving him, as mentioned earlier, the name
Hymenaeus Alpha. (It was during a visit from McMurtry that Crowley bellowed “To the lions with them” at some Christmas carolers.) McMurtry contributed to
The Book of Thoth
’s
publication; it appeared in 1944 in two hundred signed and numbered copies. They are now a rare collector’s item.

Crowley liked McMurtry and, ever in search of a magical heir—and concerned about the state of the O.T.O. after his and Germer’s deaths—Crowley gave McMurtry the rank of Sovereign Grand Inspector of the O.T.O. Crowley later authorized McMurtry to take control of the O.T.O. in the event of an emergency and declared him head of the society in the United States after Germer died. As usually happens with occult societies, following Germer’s death, a leadership battle for the O.T.O. ensued, and the controversy continued for some time.

Crowley by this time was taking a potent medley of drugs: between four and six grains of heroin a day—he soon worked his way up to ten—as well as Veronal, ethyl oxide, cocaine, and other pharmaceuticals. His intake was so great that at one point he was visited by the police because of his many prescriptions. His health was clearly fading. He had lost much weight; it is remarkable to see photographs of his wizened, gnarled figure and recall the bloated hedonist of yesterday. From the gourmand famous for his steaks and devilish curries Crowley was reduced to a meager diet of biscuits, boiled eggs, milk, and heroin, along with alcohol. Crowley’s drink intake remained considerable. One story—possibly apocryphal—tells of his hiding gin bottles in a friend’s toilet cistern during a two-week visit. He accompanied her to town each day while she shopped and surreptitiously charged a bottle to her account; he later stashed
the empty in the cistern. After he left, someone remarked that the toilet was faulty and on inspecting it, fourteen empties were found.

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I
N
A
PRIL 1944,
Crowley relocated to the Bell Inn at Aston Clinton, Buckinghamshire, leaving London for good. It was pleasant enough and he liked the food, but Crowley ultimately found the place boring. There was nothing to do and no one to talk to. He had visitors—Alice Upham, Nancy Cunard, McMurtry, who thought he was “almost at the end of the road”—but most of his days he was alone. His only distraction was work. Crowley had started corresponding with a student, Anne Macky, explaining his occult philosophy. He suggested other students join in and the correspondence grew into a kind of fireside introduction to the
thelemic
way of life. He originally entitled this
Aleister Explains Everything
but it has come down to us as
Magick Without Tears
, first published by Germer in 1954. Depending on your tastes it is either an unbuttoned entry into Crowley’s thought or a garrulous recycling of his earlier work. Colin Wilson suggests it is the best introduction to Crowley’s ideas. It displays Crowley’s “probing intellectual curiosity,” but, oddly, also one of his drawbacks, his incorrigible flippancy, which undermines his stature as a serious thinker.
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Crowley’s landlady at the Bell Inn didn’t care for him. He was a “phony” and “nuisance” who scared his nurse by asking her to sharpen a hatchet and who stole food from the kitchen; the image of a wraithlike Crowley in his green plus fours, silver buckles, mandarin beard, and Tibetan bangles creeping out of the larder with the sugar ration is, we must admit, charming (Crowley generally took six spoons of sugar with his tea and was very fond of sweets). She also
complained that his room stank. Crowley asked friends to find another location and Louis Wilkinson passed the request on to his son. Oliver Wilkinson discovered that a fellow actor in a repertory theater did, in fact, run an “intellectual guest house” in Hastings. That a man who, as a boy, had been determined to kill Crowley because of the way he treated his mother should now find him a place to live says something about Crowley’s peculiar charisma; Wilkinson’s account is admirably balanced and even supplies examples of Crowley’s infrequent generosity.
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Most landlords considered the Beast a liability, but Vernon and Ellen Symonds, who ran the guesthouse, were delighted at having Crowley stay. In February 1945 Crowley moved into the aptly named Netherwood, on the Ridge, Hastings, and here he would die.