Aleister Crowley (44 page)

30
. Crowley,
The Magical Record,
35.
The Magical Record
also shows that while Crowley and Alice, who he called Monkey, were performing opera, his aim in more than one of them was to attract “a perfect girl for the summer.” No new girl turned up, but Crowley considered Alice had been “perfect” herself, “writing wonderful love letters, etc.” Ibid., 35–36.

31
. Crowley,
The Confessions
,
774.

32
. Ibid., 810.

33
. Ibid.

34
. Ibid., 106. This kind of “everything is everything” view had some peculiar exponents, one of whom was Charles Manson, a product of the drug-informed milieu of 1960s San Francisco. See Lachman,
Turn Off Your Mind
, 318–29.

35
. Ibid., 122.

36
. Ibid., 122–23.

37
. Ibid., 143.

38
. Ouspensky,
A New Model of the Universe
, 290.

39
. William James, “On Some Hegelisms,” in
Mindscapes: An Anthology of Drug Writings
, ed. Antonio Melechi (West Yorkshire: Mono, 1998), 20–21.

40
. Aldous Huxley,
The Doors of Perception
(London: Grafton Books, 1987), 21.

41
. Sutin,
Do What Thou Wilt.

42
. Crowley,
The Confessions,
823.

43
. Ibid., 857.

44
. http://www.oxygenee.com/Crowley-Green-Goddess.pdf.

45
. http://hermetic.com/crowley/international/xi/10/cocaine.html and http://lib.oto-usa.org/crowley/essays/ethyl-oxide.html.

46
. Crowley,
The Magical Record,
51.

47
. Ibid., 49.

48
. Ibid., 73.

49
. See Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 241–53; and King,
Megatherion
, 118–23.

50
. Crowley,
The Confessions,
834–35.

51
. Crowley,
The Magical Record,
79.

52
. Ibid., 80.

53
. Ibid.

54
. Seabrook was an interesting character. He is known today mostly through his connection with Crowley, but at least two of his books are worth reading:
The Magic Island
(1929), about voodoo, and
Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today
(1940), in which he writes about Crowley and also Gurdjieff. He suffered from alcoholism, enjoyed sadism, and in 1945 committed suicide.

55
. William Seabrook,
Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today
(London: White Lion Publisher, 1972), 190.

56
. Wilkinson, Seven
Friends
105.

57
. Ibid., 114.

58
. Ibid.

59
. Oliver Marlow Wilkinson, Introduction to Wilkinson,
Seven Friends,
13.

60
. Crowley,
The Magical Record,
82.

61
. C. G. Harrison,
The Transcendental Universe
(London: Temple Lodge, 1993); and Rudolf Steiner,
Spiritualism, Madame Blavatsky, and Theosophy
(Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic Press, 2001).

EIGHT: IN AND OUT OF THE ABBEY OF
THELEMA

1
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 848.

2
. Crowley,
The Magical Record
, 94.

3
. Ibid., 86.

4
. Ibid., 94.

5
. Crowley,
The Confessions
,
856.

6
. Crowley,
The Magical Record
, 97.

7
. Crowley,
The Confessions
,
859.

8
. Crowley,
The Magical Record
, 98.

9
. In 1993 I visited Cefalù. Although I knew it was there, I did not seek out Crowley’s abbey, my interest in
thelema
having long since waned; I was also with my then wife and she did not want to ask the locals the way to the black magician’s house.
Like Crowley, I did, though, climb the great rock and visit the temples to Diana and Jupiter and no doubt came within a stone’s throw of the place.

10
. Crowley was not the only occult teacher to establish his own community in the 1920s. In 1922 Gurdjieff founded his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, Count Herman Keyserling’s School of Wisdom was founded in Darmstadt in 1920, and by then Rudolf Steiner’s Goetheanum, constructed during World War I, was already going strong.

11
. In the 1960s Timothy Leary applied a similar technique, administering high doses of LSD to his followers and subjecting them to a barrage of stimuli, aimed at erasing the “conditioning” bourgeois society had imprinted on them and so freeing them to make, as it were, a fresh start. Leary began his career as a behavioral psychologist and he applied the same methods in his subsequent work. Neither he nor Crowley was particularly successful. See Lachman,
Turn Off Your Mind.

12
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 282.

13
. Again, the similarity with Timothy Leary’s “acid house” in Millbrook, New York, is striking. Reports recount the place being a filthy, disordered mess; evidently the dishes there were as beautiful as the ones Aldous Huxley saw.

14
. Do what thou wilt, etc. Even
thelemites
find this tedious and many resort to a simple “93,” the Kabbalistic numerical value of
thelema
.

15
. Crowley,
The Magical Record
, 112.

16
. Ibid., 115. He misquotes the title of Poe’s story as “Buried Alive.”

17
. Ibid.

18
. Ibid., 101.

19
. Ibid., 105.

20
. Ibid., 140.

21
. Ibid., 177.

22
. Ibid., 177–78.

23
. Seabrook,
Witchcraft
, 198.

24
. Crowley,
The Magical Record,
234–35. The passage in the
Magical Record
seems to say that Leah ate it as well and that they kissed afterward.

25
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 289.

26
. Crowley,
The Magical Record
,
296.

27
. Crowley,
The Confessions
, 875.

28
. Ibid., 876.

29
. Quoted in Wilson,
Aleister Crowley
, 126.

30
. Nathalie Blondell,
Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life
(New York: McPherson & Co., 1998), 122.

31
. Ibid., 106.

32
. Ibid., 105.

33
. King,
Megatherion
, 137.

34
. Crowley,
The Magical Record
,
202.

35
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 300.

36
. Blondell,
Mary Butts
, 106.

37
. Strangely, the artist and writer Wyndham Lewis, whose similarities with Crowley have been noted by Colin Wilson, also satirized Mary Butts in his novel
The Apes of God
(New York: McBride), 1932
.

38
. Blondell,
Mary Butts
, 118.

39
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 298; King,
Megatherion
, 138.

40
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 298.

41
. Ibid.

42
. The amounts were £93 (the numerical value of
thelema
) or £418 (the numerical value of
Abrahadabra
, the word of Aeon).

43
. Oddly, Charles Manson was also known for his wild, frenetic dancing. See Lachman,
Turn Off Your Mind
, 324.

44
. Booth,
A Magick Life
, 390.

45
. Ibid., 395.

NINE: WANDERING IN THE WASTELAND

1
. Prior to his deportation Crowley regarded Mussolini and his Fascismo with “entire sympathy,” and considered the Fascisti patrolling the railway “delightful.” From the perspective of his hotel room in Tunis, however, it was “the beginning of the end for this upstart renegade with his gang of lawless ruffians . . .” (Crowley,
The Confessions
], 911; Aleister Crowley,
The Magical Diaries of To Mega Therion: The Beast 666
, ed. Stephen Skinner [St. Helier, Jersey: Spearman, 1979], 16). Crowley’s admiration for fascism was not, evidently, a blind for espionage activity, and he would soon show a similar admiration for Hitler.

2
. Crowley,
The Magical Diaries
, 17.

3
. Ibid., 20.

4
. Ibid.

5
. Ibid., 21.

6
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 375.

7
. Ibid., 372; Booth,
A Magick Life
, 407.

8
. G. I. Gurdjieff,
Meetings with Remarkable Men
(New York: Penguin Compass), 288.

9
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 303. In
Teachings of Gurdjieff
(New York: Samuel Weiser, 1971) C. S. Nott relates meeting Crowley at the Café Select in Montparnasse and that Crowley turned up at the Prieuré a few days later. In this account, Crowley did meet Gurdjieff, who “kept a sharp watch” on the dark magician (121–22). In
The Harmonious Circle
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980) James Webb states that Crowley stayed at the Prieuré for an entire weekend, at the end of which Gurdjieff subjected him to an oral beating (314–15). Unfortunately, Webb provides no sources for his account, and Nott’s seems to take place in 1925, not 1924, when Crowley noted down his meeting with Frank Pinder. One suspects that
Crowley would have mentioned an actual meeting with Gurdjieff as well as his meeting with Nott. But as far as I can tell, he doesn’t. Then again, Crowley might have judiciously omitted a record of a meeting at the end of which he “crept back to Paris with his tail between his legs” (Ibid.).

10
. Ibid., 304.

11
. Ouspensky,
In Search of the Miraculous
, 256–57.

12
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 380; Booth,
A Magick Life
, 411. Booth gives the year as 1926.

13
. Symonds,
The Great Beast
, 379.

14
. Ibid., 377.

15
. Ibid.

16
. Ibid., 382.

17
. Ninette, too, suffered at this time. She lived penniless at the abbey, and was made pregnant again by a local Sicilian. She tried to leave Cefalù, but having no passport, could not. She remained there until 1927. After living for years solely for her senses—or true will—she feared for her sanity and that her children would be taken from her. After repeated pleas for help, Crowley eventually sent her five hundred francs, but nothing else. She eventually reached France. Crowley tried to adopt his daughter Lulu by her, but this came to naught and she vanished. (Booth,
A Magick Life
, 412–14.)