Aleister Crowley (42 page)

38
. Jacques Barzun,
The Use and Abuse of Art
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 67.

39
. Hermann Hesse,
My Belief
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), 71.

40
. Lachman,
Turn Off Your Mind
, 127–28.

41
. Hesse,
My Belief
, 77–81.

42
. Quoted in David Richards,
The Hero’s Quest for the Self
(Maryland: University Press of America, 1987), 101.

43
.
The Book of the Law
, II:71, 72.

44
. Israel Regardie,
The Eye in the Triangle
, 253.

45
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 414.

46
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 99.

47
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 432.

48
. Ibid., 430, 433.

49
. Ibid., 440.

50
. Ibid.

51
. Ibid.

52
.
Au Kangchenjunga. Voyage et explorations dans l’Himalaya du Sikhim et du Népal. Echo des Alpes, Nos 8 et 9. 1914,
quoted in Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 106.

53
. Ibid.

54
. Ibid., 108. Symonds also presents a letter from Righi giving “an example of the individual we had to deal with.” Righi quotes from a letter from Crowley to Guillarmod in which Crowley explains that, although useful, Righi is no gentleman and that they can send him packing if need be. This was after Righi had paid Crowley the equivalent of £100 in jewelry, carved lapis lazuli, and a Tibetan banner in order to join the expedition.

55
. During a period of mental and emotional instability, Strindberg (1849–1912) believed that his estranged third wife, Harriet Bosse, came to him at night in an astral form and compelled him to make love. See August Strindberg,
From an Occult Diary
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1965).

56
. Newman,
Aleister Crowley and the Cult of Pan
, 138.

57
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 460.

58
. Crowley,
Magick in Theory and Practice
, 415–22.

59
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 460.

60
. Ibid., 509.

61
. Ibid.

62
. Ibid., 517.

63
. Ibid., 465.

64
. “Imaginal” is a term developed by the philosopher Henry Corbin to denote a plane of reality midway between the concrete physical world and the abstract world of pure ideas. Corbin’s
Mundus Imaginalis
or Imaginal World
is not the imagination in the sense of “make believe” but in the sense that an artist or poet uses the imagination as a creative power. See my
The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus
(Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2011), 114.

65
. See Frances Yates’s classic
The Art of Memory
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

66
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 518.

67
. Ibid., 515.

FIVE: TOWARD THE SILVER STAR

1
.
The Book of the Law,
III:43, 44.

2
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 527.

3
. Martin Booth,
A Magick Life
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000), 239–40.

4
. Around the same time in Saint Petersburg, P. D. Ouspensky also experimented with drugs, nitrous oxide, and hashish, and he, too, had some spectacular results, which he recorded in his essay “Experimental Mysticism.” (P. D. Ouspensky,
A New Model of the Universe
[New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969], 274–304.) Curiously, both Ouspensky and Crowley use a similar language to discuss aspects of their experience. Ouspensky speaks of certain symbols or forms conveying meaning to him and acting as “hieroglyphs.” “These signs constituted the form of speech or thought, or of what corresponded to speech or thought, in the state of consciousness I had attained. Signs or hieroglyphs moved and changed before me with dizzying rapidity . . .” (Ibid., 291.) Crowley writes “Simple impressions in normal consciousness are resolved by hashish into a concatenation of hieroglyphs of a purely symbolic type. Just as we represent a horse by the five letters h-o-r-s-e, none of which in itself has the smallest relation to a horse, so even a simpler concept such as the letter A seems resolved into a set of pictures, a fairly large number, possibly a constant number of them. These glyphs are perceived together, just as a skilled reader reads h-o-r-s-e as a single word, not letter by letter.” (Aleister Crowley,
The Psychology of Hashish,
chapter Vat [http://www.luminist.org/archives/psychology_of_hashish.htm].) It is doubtful that either read the other’s work, although Crowley did not think highly of Ouspensky’s ideas about the tarot, dismissing him in the same way that he did practically everyone except himself. Aleister Crowley,
The Book of Thoth
(York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1984), 201.

5
. http://www.100thmonkeypress.com/biblio/acrowley/books/mr_crowley_and_the_creeds_1904/c_and_creeds_text.pdf.

6
. Quoted in Crowley,
The Confessions
, 544. Alfred Richard Orage was a brilliant editor and critic and the central voice behind the
New Age
, a literary clearinghouse for “alternative” ideas in the early twentieth century. He was for a brief time interested in Crowley but was weaned off this by his lover, Beatrice Hastings, who later went on to write a book defending Madame Blavatsky from charges of fraud. Orage met P. D. Ouspensky just before World War I and through him became a leading disciple of Gurdjieff. See Lachman,
In Search of P. D. Ouspensky
, 177–189.

7
. Ibid., 545.

8
. Ibid., 534.

9
. Ibid., 13.

10
. http://hermetic.com/93beast.fea.st/files/section1/fuller/Star%20In%20the%20 West%20TNR.pdf.

11
. Booth,
A Magick Life
, 294.

12
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 534.

13
. Booth,
A Magick Life
, 243.

14
. Ibid., 249.

15
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 542.

16
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 125; Booth,
A Magick Life
, 251.

17
. Booth,
A Magick Life
, 284.

18
. Regardie,
The Eye in the Triangle
, 341.

19
. Ibid., 322.

20
. Readers can judge for themselves; two collections of Crowley’s short fiction are available:
The Drug and Other Stories
(Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2010) and
The Simon Iff Stories and Other Works
(Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2012).

21
. http://hermetic.com/crowley/worlds-tragedy/.

22
. Francis King,
Megatherion: The Magical World of Aleister Crowley
(n.p.: Creation Books, 2011), 47–49. Originally published as
The Magical World of Aleister Crowley
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977).

23
. Lachman,
Turn Off Your Mind
,
85–94.

24
. Aldous Huxley,
The Doors of Perception
and Heaven and Hell
(London: Granada Books, 1987), 69–70.

25
. Quoted in King,
Megatherion
, 51–52.

26
. Fritz Peters,
My Journey with a Mystic
(Laguna Niguel, CA: Tale Weaver Publishing, 1986).

27
. Phil Baker,
Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist
(London: Strange Attractor Press, 2011), 65–69.

28
. Havelock Ellis, “Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise” in
The Contemporary Review
January 1898; reprinted in
The Drug Experience
,
ed. David Ebin (New York: The Orion Press, 1961), 223–236. Ellis had written about the drug’s purely physiological effects for
The Lancet
in 1897, and the German pharmacologist Louis Lewin also wrote about the drug in 1888.

29
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 589.

30
. Ibid.

31
. King,
Megatherion
, 66–67.

32
.
The Daily Sketch,
August 24, 1910; reprinted in Booth,
A Magick Life
, 286–88, and King,
Megatherion
, 67–68.

33
. Jean Overton Fuller,
The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg
(London: W. H. Allen, 1965), 176.

34
. Crowley had apparently just been to Oxford, where he had copied some manuscripts by Dee. Sutin,
Do What Thou Wilt
, 199–200.

35
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 126–45; and King,
Megatherion
, 55–63, have extended accounts of this episode, on which I have drawn.

36
. Oddly, Timothy Leary, who based much of his career on Crowley’s, had a similar North African adventure. See Lachman,
Turn Off Your Mind
, 191–200.

37
. Benjamin Wooley,
The Queen’s Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Dr. Dee
(London: HarperCollins, 2001), 287.

38
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 621.

39
. Ibid.

40
. Steiner speaks of the Guardian of the Threshold in
Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment
(New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1947), 231–44. The idea comes from the Rosicrucian novel
Zanoni
(1842) by Bulwer-Lytton. Crowley was certainly aware of Lytton’s work and in the
Confessions
speaks of the “Dweller in the Abyss.” (Crowley,
The Confessions
, 623.)

41
. King,
Megatherion
, 61.

42
.
London Evening News,
March 23, 1910.

43
. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWbottomley.htm.

SIX: SEX AND MAGICK

1
. King,
Megatherion
, 47–49.

2
. Wilson,
Aleister Crowley
, 97.

3
. Fuller,
The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg
, 176.

4
. Sandy Robertson,
The Aleister Crowley Scrapbook
(York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1994), 64–81.

5
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 676.

6
. Martin Booth,
A Magick Life
(London: Hodder & Stougton, 2000), 298.

7
. Her other claim to fame is that she gave the scarf to her friend Isadora, which, on September 14, 1927, caught in the wheel of the open car the dancer was driving in and broke her neck.

8
. A new edition, combining
Book Four
and
Magick in Theory and Practice
along with other material, is available. See
Magick
, ed. Mary Desti, Leila Waddell, Hymenaeus Beta
(York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1998).