Aleister Crowley (4 page)

After attending a day school in Streatham, South London, where Crowley discovered masturbation—to which he applied himself “with characteristic vigor”—Crowley was taught by tutors chosen by
Bishop. Petty and punctilious, they were a challenge to Crowley’s goal of committing the ultimate sin. One tutor, Reverend Fothergill, tried to drown Crowley in a loch in Scotland after Alick threw him out of a boat. Crowley got revenge by finding his way to what would become his favorite sin. That evening a village girl lingered with him amid the heather. When he and the girl returned together openly, his tutor gave up and took him back to London. He had another dose of sin when, en route, stopping overnight in Carlisle, he enjoyed the favors of a chambermaid. Crowley’s next tutor was the brother of the Dean of Westminster. Apparently, he, too, had a taste for sin and tried to seduce young Alick. Crowley says that he resisted, not because he wasn’t inclined—Crowley was strongly bisexual—but because he thought he was being set up. The tutor later apologized and explained that he had been led astray by an elder brother, who was a Christian missionary. The incident secured in Crowley the belief that all clergymen are secretly lechers.

One tutor, however, seems to have penetrated Uncle Tom’s screening process. Archibald Douglas, a Bible salesman and a graduate of Oxford, was the closest thing to a normal person that Crowley had encountered. He introduced Crowley to smoking, drinking, gambling, billiards, and women. Douglas showed Crowley “a sane, clean, jolly world worth living in,” and it is tempting to speculate on how Crowley might have turned out if he were allowed to live in it longer.
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With Douglas, Crowley behaved like a “normal, healthy human being,” and the two enjoyed an excursion to the sea. In Torquay, a seaside town in Devon, Crowley met an actress and fell in love; for ten days “the detestable mysteries of sex were transformed into joy and beauty.” “The nightmare world of Christianity vanished”
and “the obsession of sin fell from my shoulders into the sea of oblivion.”
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But this beatitude was short lived. Uncle Tom found the two and dismissed Douglas; apparently letters back home suggested Crowley was too happy. Alick was returned to the world of guilt and repression. But it was too late. He had tasted real life and wanted more of it.

Crowley’s next act of sin was his most heinous yet. Sometime in his teens, Crowley seduced the parlor maid on his mother’s bed. It was probably not too difficult; the girl seemed to have designs on Crowley herself. Israel Regardie suggests that this shows that Crowley had Oedipal desires for his mother. This is doubtful: what it tells us is that for Crowley, sex was an act of rebellion. Crowley’s sexual relations with women remained acts of defiance against his Christian-Victorian upbringing, which is why they rarely contained any of the affection and intimacy that, along with sex, make up most male/female relationships. There was something deliciously wicked about sex—there must be, if the Plymouth Brethren disapproved of it—and the fact that Crowley was having it on his mother’s bed made it even more so. For the rest of his life Crowley couldn’t think of sex without feeling a frisson
of “forbiddenness,” and a sense that in having it he was shaking his fist at some vague “authority” that prevented him from enjoying himself. The danger, however, in enjoying “forbiddenness” is that it forces you to remain a child, and this, paradoxically, enforces the very authority you are rebelling against. Only a child is interested in doing what some authority tells him he shouldn’t, and only a child gets excited by being “naughty.” (This is why “transgressors”
need
the normality against which they transgress; they would not be “transgressing” otherwise.) In his attitude toward sex,
Crowley remained a child—he was in Jungian terms a
puer aeternus,
an eternal child, or Peter Pan—and it is no surprise that he later called his coming new age the era of “the crowned and conquering child.”

The outcome of Crowley’s latest sin also casts him in a bad light. For some reason, the parlor maid told Uncle Tom about their liaison. Crowley denied everything, but Uncle Tom insisted that he prove he was not with her. Crowley got a tobacconist to say that at the time the girl said she was with Alick, he was actually in his shop, buying tobacco. This, too, was forbidden, but Crowley feigned remorse and said bad companions had led him astray. Accepting guilt for this imaginary but lesser crime was a clever ploy. Uncle Tom believed him, and the girl was seen as a liar and dismissed. Crowley had shaken his fist at authority, gotten rid of the girl he had seduced, and come away innocent. It was a tactic of getting others to take the blame for his actions that served him well in later life.

Crowley tells us that at some point during his descent into sin, his mother was so scandalized by his behavior that she called him the Beast 666, from the Book of Revelation. The story may be apocryphal—he doesn’t mention his mother’s fateful christening until nearly the midpoint of the
Confessions
—and as we’ve seen, Crowley himself was a fan of the Beast from early on.
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No doubt he spoke with his mother about his sense of identification with this demonic individual; since there was little else but the Bible to discuss, it was bound to come up. Children, we know, need role models. Crowley had one with his father, then lost him. Uncle Tom wasn’t in the running and so this station fell to this mythical embodiment of all that was anti-Christian. If indeed Emily Crowley was responsible for her
son’s satanic self-image, he did his mother proud and lived up to this sobriquet with gusto.

—

C
ROWLEY
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S
REBELLIO
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CONTINUED
as he made his way out of his teens. At sixteen he was sent to Malvern public school in Worcestershire, where he stayed for three terms. The school proved just as bad as the one in Cambridge. (A public school in England is a fee-paying one as opposed to a free state school.) Crowley soon learned that in order to protect himself, he had to use the same tactics as those of his enemies. In order to avoid a beating by a prefect—another student given some authority over his peers, rather like a trustee in prison—Crowley found himself in the housemaster’s office, pouring out accusations against the prefect and the rest of his schoolmates. Crowley claims this snitching was only in self-defense, but the fact that he informed on all his schoolmates and not only the prefect suggests that he was trying to “get in good” with the authorities. His “orgy of tale-telling” understandably made him unpopular and in 1892 his mother was forced to take him out.
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At the public school in Tonbridge in Kent, where he was next sent, things were not much better, but at seventeen Crowley had recovered his health and was turning into an athletic, formidable figure who could throw his weight around. He felt that he possessed a “natural aristocracy” that made people fear him. This only fueled his pursuit of the unforgivable sin even more, and he added another notch to his belt when he caught gonorrhea from a Glasgow prostitute. Crowley was fast becoming a fin de siècle juvenile delinquent, a late-Victorian “rebel without a pause,” who was not particularly liked
by his schoolmates, and though capable, did not apply himself to his studies. Like most intelligent people, he was bored with whatever didn’t interest him. After Tonbridge his mother sent him to live with a Plymouth Brethren family in Eastbourne, overlooking the English Channel. Beachy Head, his early favorite climbing place, was nearby. He attended Eastbourne College, where he developed an interest in and a talent for science, assisting the chemistry professor in the laboratory. Crowley’s methodical mind was well suited for scientific work, and it is interesting to consider the possibility that, had he not decided on a career of sin, he would have made a good scientist. In later years the analogies he uses when trying to explain his philosophical and metaphysical beliefs are usually couched in mathematical and chemical terms. Another lifelong interest that developed in Eastbourne was chess. Crowley taught himself the game and he soon became the best player in town, beating the local champion and contributing a chess column to a local newspaper. Chess, like science and mathematics, also requires a methodical, logical mind and that Crowley excelled at it—at one point he even saw it as a career—suggests that his own talents lay more in that direction than in the one he actually chose in life.

At Eastbourne, too, his interest in climbing became a passion. On a trip to Skye in Scotland, he went rock climbing. In Langdale, in Cumbria, in the northwest of England, he climbed four of the highest fells in one day. The great outdoors suited Crowley; he enjoyed its rigors throughout his life, a sign that for all his later drug-filled adventures, he had a basic appetite for healthy exertion. Between 1894 and 1898 he made several excursions to the Alps, traveling with a tutor to the Suldenthal in the Austrian Tyrol. He became a remarkable, if unorthodox, climber, and could have made a lasting mark as
a mountaineer. Even John Symonds, generally seen as a critic of Crowley, can’t avoid mentioning that climbing authorities such as A. F. Mummery, H. V. Reade, and others ranked Crowley high as a climber.
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It was on one of his climbing excursions to the Lake District that Crowley met one of the few people for whom he felt real respect and loyalty, the German-born mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein.
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Seventeen years older than Crowley—hence a perfect father figure—Eckenstein was an experienced climber. Like Crowley, he was an eccentric character. Born in 1859 to a German sociologist father and an English mother, Eckenstein took degrees in chemistry in London and Bonn; he later worked as a railway engineer. Like Crowley, he had a taste for mathematics and shared with his young friend an insistence on exactitude. Eckenstein dressed oddly for the time, wearing straw sandals, and like Crowley was a fan of Sir Richard Burton, the explorer (Eckenstein later donated his large collection of Burton’s books, documents, and other items to the Royal Asiatic Society). Eckenstein also had an interest in psychic phenomena, such as telepathy, and there is some suggestion that at some point in his career he may have studied under a Sufi master. Crowley claimed that along with the art of mountaineering—he was, Crowley said, “the best all-round man in England” and “the greatest climber of his age”—Eckenstein taught him how to use his mind properly, to concentrate, and Eckenstein’s instructions in visualization aided Crowley’s later magical work.

In the end, however, Eastbourne did not prove suitable for the young Beast. Crowley found himself in the middle of a dispute among the Plymouth Brethren family he was staying with. One of the daughters, whom he describes as “beautiful, voluptuous and
normal,” was engaged to a young man who wasn’t a Plymouth Brethren.
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To agree to the marriage, the family insisted that their daughter’s suitor convert to their creed. The young man found that he could not. When he informed the family, an uproar ensued and he was summarily thrown out. From then on, the daughter was subject to continued abuse—“meals were a poisoned whirlwind”—and at one point, Crowley voiced some misgivings. The abuse was then aimed at him; Crowley even suggests the family attacked him physically. Asserting his natural aristocracy, Crowley—at least according to his account—soon had them cowed and left. He pleaded with the girl to leave her home and go to her fiancé. That her brutish family should destroy her love was insufferable to him; this sentimentality informed his later poetry but not his actual relationships. But she was too beaten down to oppose them. The family sent a telegram to Uncle Tom and Crowley was soon on his way home.

The one good thing to come of the incident was that his family realized that he had become too big for them to control. “The best thing they could do,” they saw, “was to let me go my own way.”
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This, in essence, became the kernel of Crowley’s later philosophy. Years later, when he had been thrown out of his abbey by Mussolini and was trying to kick heroin in Tunis, North Africa, Crowley wrote to his faithful disciple Norman Mudd complaining that the authorities were incessantly thwarting his plans to liberate humanity. “The essential for ourselves,” he told Mudd, “is to put a stop absolutely to this damned impertinent interference with us.”
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That “impertinent” conveys Crowley’s aristocratic sense and in the context—exiled, strung out, and broke—is almost comic. But this was the aim of his entire magical system. He should be left to do what he wanted. “The word of sin is restriction,” Crowley told the world a decade after this
family squabble. The source of this doubtful maxim was, Crowley tells us, a superior extrahuman intelligence, but its roots were in a very human affair and they were planted in a very human teenager in Eastbourne.

Crowley had by this time developed a love of poetry. His early reading was strictly supervised by his mother. Reading on Sunday was forbidden. Of contemporary authors, he was allowed Sir Walter Scott, enormously popular in Crowley’s childhood, and some Charles Dickens.
David Copperfield
, however, was banned because one of the characters, Little Em’ly, shared his mother’s name, and to read of this “naughty girl” would be disrespectful. One tutor was disciplined for reading Coleridge’s
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
aloud after dinner. The Ancient Mariner “blesses unawares” the water snakes following his ship; snakes are cursed in Genesis, his mother explained, and were responsible for Original Sin. We can appreciate Crowley’s resentment. Crowley suggests that the real reason his mother was offended was because of the sexual connotations of snakes. She no doubt had some Freudian dreams and as his mother was a “rather sensual type of woman,” her frustrations came out in warped ways. “Sexual repression had driven her as nearly as possible to the borders of insanity,” he tells us.
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Crowley’s growing polymorphously perverse attitude to sex can, then, be seen as a safeguard against insanity.