Aleister Crowley (41 page)

13
. Quoted in Wilson,
Aleister Crowley
, 48.

14
. William Butler Yeats,
Autobiographies
(New York: Doubleday, 1958), 126–27.

15
. Abramelin the Mage is said to have been an Egyptian who taught his magic to Abraham of Worms (1362–1458), a German Jew who met him in Egypt. Some scholars believe the ritual to have been written by the German Jewish Talmud scholar Rabbi Yaakov Moelin (1365–1427). The version that Mathers translated was most likely a French translation of a German edition from the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

16
. Israel Regardie,
The Tree of Life
(York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1983), 183.

17
. Churton,
Aleister Crowley
, 55.

18
. Ibid.

19
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 182.

20
. Sutin,
Do What Thou Wilt
, 71.

21
. http://www.highlandclubscotland.co.uk/Around-Loch-Ness/Beast-of-Boleskine.php.

22
. Sutin,
Do What Thou Wilt
, 77.

23
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 51.

24
. Alex Owen,
The Place of Enchantment
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 151.

25
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 182.

26
. Ibid.
,
194.

27
. Ibid.

28
. Ibid., 195–96.

29
. For a description of the vault see Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 48–49. Christian Rosenkreutz was said to have been born in 1378 and to have died in 1484 at the age of 106. He traveled through the Holy Lands and North Africa in search of secret knowledge. When he returned to Europe he founded the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, a society dedicated to spreading hermetic wisdom and healing the sick. In 1614 strange manifestoes appeared in Germany speaking of the Rosicrucians. They claimed to have discovered Rosenkreutz’s hidden tomb and to be carrying on his work. See Lachman,
Politics and the Occult
, 1–7.

30
. The subsequent history of the various offshoots of the original Golden Dawn can be followed in Ellic Howe’s classic
The Magicians of the Golden Dawn
(York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1978) and R. A. Gilbert’s exhaustive
Revelations of the Golden Dawn
(Slough, UK: W. Foulsham & Co., 1997). For a full account of the order’s rituals and practices Israel Regardie’s
The Golden Dawn
(Saint Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1986) remains the most reliable source.

31
. See E. J. Dingwall,
Some Human Oddities
(Whitefish, MO: Kessinger Publishing, 2003); Wilson,
Aleister Crowley
, 63–67; and Sutin,
Do What Thou Wilt
, 75.

THREE: THE WORD OF THE AEON

1
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 202.

2
. http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/aqc/crowley.html.

3
. http://hermetic.com/crowley/articles/i-make-myself-invisible.html.

4
. Phil Baker,
Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist
(London: Strange Attractor Press, 2011), 69.

5
. Crowley himself recognized there was something wrong with this arrangement, and that it pointed toward a kind of insanity. Speaking of his mother, he wrote, “In a way, my mother was insane, in the sense that all people are who have watertight compartments to the brain, and hold with equal passion incompatible ideas, and hold them apart lest their meeting should destroy both.” (Crowley,
The Confessions
, 387.)

6
. Ibid., 204.

7
. Ibid., 214.

8
. Ibid., 223.

9
. John Symonds says that the affair with Alice taught Crowley that “he was not made for love.” (Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 58.) Israel Regardie disagreed. Crowley was not incapable of love, he tells us, but “he was incapable of a permanent,
interpersonal relationship or marriage.” (Israel Regardie,
The Eye in the Triangle
[Phoenix, AZ: Falcon Press, 1989], 224–25.) What this amounts to is that Crowley was capable of lust, or at best, passionate romantic love, but not the kind of commitment and durable affection that most of us recognize as mature love. That he “fell in love” on a regular basis is evidence not that he was capable of love but that he never matured beyond irresponsible infatuations.

10
. Aleister Crowley,
Eight Lectures on Yoga
(Las Vegas, NV: New Falcon Publications, 1991), 13, 16.

11
. Regardie,
The Eye in the Triangle
, 253.

12
. Bennett is often regarded as the first Englishman to be ordained as a Buddhist monk. Another Englishman thought to precede him is Gordon Douglas, Bhikkhu Asoka, who was ordained in Siam in 1899 and died soon after. Little is known about him. Another name given as an even earlier European monk is U Dhammaloka, an Irish migrant worker whose given name is unknown and who was ordained in Burma around the same time or slightly earlier than Douglas, depending on your sources. See Stephen Batchelor,
The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture
(Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1994).

13
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 270–71.

14
. Complete text available at http://www.thomasvoxfire.com/pdf/Berashith.pdf.

15
. http://www.the-equinox.org/vol1/no5/eqi05005.html.

16
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 63.

17
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 282–83.

18
. Ibid., 289.

19
. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/death_sakkara_gallery_03.shtml.

20
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 335.

21
. Ibid., 335–37.

22
. Lawrence Sutin suggests that
Snowdrops
“may be best described as a satire—and wildly lewd celebration of Victorian pornography” (Sutin,
Do What Thou Wilt
, 107), but this strikes me as another example of how Crowley avoids responsibility for his questionable works by arguing that he was “only kidding.” That someone intent on contacting his Holy Guardian Angel should occupy himself with such drivel is instructive. The complete text of
Snowdrops
is available at http://www.100thmonkeypress.com/biblio/acrowley/books/snowdrops_1903/snow drops.pdf.

23
. W. Somerset Maugham,
The Magician
(London: Pan Books, 1978), 7.

24
. Gerald Kelly, in
Alpine Journal
65 (1960), 68.

25
. Ibid., 361.

26
. Ibid., 355.

27
. The text is available at http://hermetic.com/eidolons/The_Initiated_Interpretation_of_Ceremonial_Magic.

28
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 370.

29
. Ibid.

30
. Ibid., 375.

31
. Ibid., 380.

32
. Ibid., 387.

FOUR: WHAT IS THE LAW?

1
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 393.

2
. Ibid., 397.

3
. Lachman,
Jung
, 113.

4
. Ibid., 123.

5
. Ibid., 213–24.

6
. Stephan Hoeller,
The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead
(Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1982), 8–9.

7
. Lachman,
Madame Blavatsky
, 102.

8
. Wilson Van Dusen,
The Presence of Other Words: The Findings of Swedenborg
(London: Wildwood House, 1975), 117–38.

9
. Julian Jaynes,
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
(Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976), 75.

10
. See Gary Lachman,
A Secret History of Consciousness
(Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2003), 145–46.

11
. Jaynes,
The Origin of Consciousness
, 75.

12
. Ibid., 86.

13
. Lachman
, A Secret History
, 144–45. Auditory hallucinations are a common experience of the hypnagogic state, the twilight no-man’s-land between sleeping and waking, which many researchers have argued is “self-symbolic.” See Lachman,
A Secret History
, 85–94.

14
. Friedrich Nietzsche,
Ecce Homo
, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1979), 102.

15
. J. F. Henley,
The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rilke
(Manchester: Carcanet, 1983), 87.

16
. We may remark that Christianity, too, has its own threesomes: God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as well as Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.

17
. There are many editions of
The Book of the Law
, or
Liber Al Vel Legis
, as it is known to
thelemites
. I am using the Booklegger/Albion edition, n.d., which was published in the 1970s. The reference here is technically AL III:3, that is, the third part, third line. The similarity to biblical references is instructive.

18
. Ibid., I:49.

19
. Ibid., I:3.

20
. Ibid., I:42.

21
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 41.

22
.
The Book of the Law
, II:58.

23
. Ibid., I:41.

24
. Ibid., II:33.

25
. In
Turn Off Your Mind
, I argue that much of the radical politics of the 1960s was motivated by similar ideas. See 357–59.

26
. Crowley,
The Book of the Law,
II:52.

27
. Ibid., III:44, I:62.

28
. Ibid., I:51.

29
. Ibid., II:17; Algernon Swinburne, “Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs),” full text at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174550.

30
.
The Book of the Law
, I:64, 65.

31
. Ibid., I:10; II:18, 21.

32
. Ibid., II:22.

33
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 396.

34
. Ibid., 403.

35
. Wilson,
Aleister Crowley,
74; Crowley,
The Confessions
, 398.

36
.
The Book of the Law
, I:22.

37
. Otto Gross (1877–1920), for a time considered Freud’s most brilliant disciple, advocated a blend of Freudian psychology and Nietzschean individualism. He was a champion of “free love,” fathering illegitimate children, and drug use, principally morphine and cocaine; he died a drug addict in Berlin, where he was found freezing and starving in the street. A social anarchist, Gross expressed his contempt for bourgeois society by, among other ways, refusing to bathe. Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was a writer on philosophy, sociology, pornography, and anthropology, and for a brief time was associated with the Surrealist movement. An advocate of a dark, nihilistic mysticism, he was fascinated by the idea of human sacrifice and formed a secret society, Acéphale, whose symbol was a decapitated man. Bataille and other members had planned to carry out a sacrificial ritual but were prevented by the outbreak of World War II. Like Crowley, Bataille was obsessed with transgression, debasement, and sex. Both Gross and Bataille embodied a philosophy of excess not unlike Crowley’s. Gross’s writings were minimal and he was most influential as a kind of analytical guru, principally in Munich’s bohemian quarter Schwabing and the early “alternative” commune Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland. Bataille’s philosophy of excess is presented in his book
The Accursed Share
(1946–49). In “When the Music’s Over,” Jim Morrison writes “We want the world and we want it now!” Iggy Pop wrote a song called “I Need More,” “More venom, more dynamite, more disaster / I need more than I ever did before.”