Aleister Crowley (6 page)

Crowley is disingenuous when he says that he resisted the influence of the decadent school that Pollitt introduced him to. He was obsessed with many of the same themes as the decadents were. His first published poem,
Aceldama: A Place to Bury Strangers In
, was privately printed in 1898 by Leonard Smithers—a friend of Pollitt’s and publisher of Wilde—in an edition of one hundred sumptuously produced copies, paid for by Crowley himself. This vanity production is suffused with much of the sentiment that Crowley tells us he rejected. The title comes from the field where Judas hanged himself after betraying Christ and, predictably, the setting is a brothel. It fits, as one critic has remarked, the fin de siècle
mode of “dark, tragic, blood-smeared musings.”
⁶⁰

Aceldama
seems to express the sense of pointlessness common to the time, a spiritual nausea at a meaningless cosmos. Crowley writes, “I crept, a stealthy hungry soul, to grasp / Its vast edge, to look to the beyond.” But when the poet does look beyond the edge of the cosmos, all he sees is “Nothing, Nothing, Nothing!” There is also a sense in which Crowley seems to conflate spiritual experience with homosexuality, a union he may have encountered in Stockholm. Sprouting wings the poet climbs to the infinite, where “all power, light, life, motion concentrate.” And there he finds “God dwelling / Strong immaculate / He knew me and he loved! / His lips anoint / My lips with love . . .”
⁶¹
Sex and the spirit, sensuality and asceticism vie for the poet’s faith. Blasphemy, degradation, masochism abound. Crowley believed that with the poem he had “attained, at a bound, the summit of Parnassus,” but it is clear he had landed in its well-trodden
foothills. Crowley himself must have recognized this. In 1910 Crowley issued a selection of his poetry in “response to a widely spread lack of interest in my writings.” More than a decade had passed and the hunger for recognition was still unsatisfied, but nothing from
Aceldama
, which he believed placed him among the poetic gods,
was included in his
Ambergris
(1910).

Typically, his nom de plume
for his maiden work was “A Gentleman of the University of Cambridge,” nicking the pseudonym from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous
The Necessity of Atheism
(1811), which was authored by “a Gentleman of the University of Oxford.”
Aceldama
was not well received—it garnered one review that suggested it should not be read by the young—but one enthusiastic reader played an important part in Crowley’s life. Gerald Kelly, who later became Sir Gerald Kelly and a president of the Royal Academy, was intrigued by this strange gentleman of the university and visited him in his rooms. The two became friends and continued to meet in London after they left university. Yet even with all his affinities to the “steamy, sex-soaked vapours” of the decadents, Crowley did have a fundamental toughness and, odd to say, health, that made him turn his back on them and Pollitt.
⁶²
Pollitt in any case had no interest in Crowley’s poetry or his spiritual aspirations and it’s no mystery Crowley moved on.

Some biographers have criticized Crowley for not coming out of the closet and affirming his homosexuality, which at the time was illegal, but his circumspection may have sources other than prudent self-regard. A related question is Crowley’s attitude toward Oscar Wilde. One would think Wilde would have been a hero of his. But precisely this may be the key. Crowley’s high opinion of himself could not accept his being regarded as merely a Wilde clone, and it has to be
said that much of Crowley’s poetry and his lust for the forbidden and antagonism toward Christian morality is very reminiscent of Wilde. Wilde’s trial for “gross indecency”—homosexuality—took place in 1895, the year Crowley went to Cambridge, and Crowley’s remarks about Wilde in the
Confessions
are mostly negative. Crowley suggests that Wilde became homosexual because he was a snob and it was a way to meet the “right people”; it was, Crowley infers, a “career move.” Ironically, his remark that Wilde had “adopted the standards of the English middle class, and thought to become distinguished by the simple process of outraging them” can very easily be laid at Crowley’s own door, as can his belief that Wilde “was not true to himself.”
⁶³
His remarks about Wilde’s writing also suggest a petulant envy. Crowley may have wanted to distance himself from Wilde out of a certain prudence but also because he realized that much of his own creative efforts were a kind of Wilde warmed up. In his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891), Wilde writes of the “true personality of man” in a way that presages Crowley’s ideas about the “true will” remarkably.
⁶⁴

—

A
SIDE
FROM
CO
MMITTING
the unforgivable sin—and any others he could along the way—at twenty-one Crowley was still unsure of what to do with his life. For a time he thought of entering the diplomatic service. Imperial Russia attracted him and during his vacation of 1897 he visited St. Petersburg. But although courtly intrigue was fascinating—and he later enjoyed playacting as a spy—the diplomatic life didn’t appeal. He had also considered making a career of chess, and on the return trip from Russia he stopped in Berlin and
attended a chess conference. He was not impressed. He was struck with the revelation—he calls it a mystical experience—that he was not put on this planet to be a chess master. Like the hero of Robert Musil’s
The Man Without Qualities
, Crowley found himself an intelligent, strong-willed, and capable individual, with no idea what to do with his talents.
A profound depression came over him. All human effort seemed pointless; the deep truth of
Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas
(“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”) became painfully clear; it was this nihilism that informed
Aceldama
. A diplomat, a chess master, even a great poet: all would be forgotten within a century or two. Even a Shakespeare or a Napoleon would amount to nothing when the Earth and the entire cosmos were eventually destroyed. What was the point? Crowley embraced the Buddha’s grim truth, that “everything is sorrow.” This spiritual nihilism stayed with him the rest of his life—“nothing matters” is frequently the punch line to Crowley’s musings—but something in him resisted this feeling of inconsequence. “I must find a material in which to work which is resistant to the forces of change,” he told himself.
⁶⁵

We may feel that this is an expression of Crowley’s need to be an “object of primary importance in the universe,” but there is more to his insight than that. Crowley grasped the Platonic truth that while the material world is destined for decay, the world of the mind, of the spirit, can transcend this corruption and achieve a kind of immortality. “Spiritual facts,” Crowley saw, “were the only things worthwhile.” We must chalk up this insight to the part of Crowley that was great, and it is this sort of intuition that prevents us from relegating him to the status of a mere crank. Crowley was onto something real. Suddenly the meaning and purpose of his life became clear. “I had
never given myself wholly to chess, mountaineering or even to poetry,” he thought, but now Crowley had a plan. He had perceived the “worthlessness of the world.” He now devoted himself to what he called the “escape from matter” and a “definite invasion of the spiritual world.”

But no sooner had he embraced this insight than Crowley subjected it to his peculiar logic. His scientific mind required “first-hand sensory evidence of spiritual beings,” not recognizing the oxymoronic character of this demand, as by definition “spiritual beings” are not “sensory.” But Crowley went further. The spiritual world for him meant angels on one side and devils on the other. Crowley had sided with Satan, so it was only natural that his first step in his new life was to “get into personal communication with the devil.”
⁶⁶

To side with the devil for the sake of the spiritual seems odd. But Crowley’s spirituality is of the antinomian school; it embraces the idea that the spiritually awakened person is no longer subject to laws, is, indeed, “beyond good and evil.” This confusion between heaven and hell, good and evil, the spiritual and the satanic was at the heart of
Aceldama
. “It was a windy night, that memorable seventh night of December, when this philosophy was born in me. How the grave old professor wondered at my ravings!” Crowley writes. “I was in the death struggle with self: God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours. God conquered—now I have only one doubt left—which of the twain was God?”

Yet on a more immediate level, Crowley the literalist wanted something to
do
. He was not content with mere poetry, with echoing the kind of satanic verses other decadents had already voiced. Crowley’s decision to get a “manual of practical technical instruction” and devote himself to “black magic” was surely rooted in his taste for the
“impossible.”
⁶⁷
In that century of progress, reason, and rationality, surely no one believed that it was possible to evoke devils. No? Well, Crowley the impossibilist would prove them wrong.

He found what he was looking for in Arthur Edward Waite’s ponderous classic,
The Book of Black Magic and Pacts
. Typically, Crowley later had nothing good to say about Waite, and vilified him every chance he got; he is among the Golden Dawn crew Crowley eviscerates in
Moonchild
. According to Crowley, Waite is “not only the most ponderously platitudinous and priggishly prosaic of pretentiously pompous pork butchers of the language, but the most voluminously voluble.”
⁶⁸
This not only tells us that Crowley is unforgiving, even to the man who put him on the road to adeptship, but it also highlights one of the worst faults in Crowley’s own “pork butchery” of the language, his taste for alliteration. It is impossible to read much of Crowley without coming across this habit of his, which to him must have seemed poetic but to most readers is simply indulgent. Waite is a poor stylist, but Crowley often is, too, his claims to being a “master” of the English language notwithstanding. Yet worse than this is the fact that decades after he read Waite’s book, Crowley still can’t forgive Waite for actually helping him in his career.

Waite’s book hinted at the existence of a Hidden Church, where the rites of true initiation were maintained. When Crowley wrote to Waite, the pork butcher replied by suggesting Crowley read
The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary
, an eighteenth-century classic of Christian mysticism by Karl von Eckartshausen, a friend of the great French mystic Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, who wrote as “the unknown philosopher.”
⁶⁹
Crowley read the book during the Easter vacation of 1898, which he spent with Pollitt in Wastdale Head, a rock-climbing area in the Lake District. Eckartshausen spoke of a secret, hidden church,
a congregation of the elect, an inner circle of adepts devoted to the noble cause of truth. Crowley’s new passion for the spiritual world and his aristocratic sense were hooked. Nothing else mattered now except to find that church and enter its ranks.

His opportunity came while he was in the mountains. In the summer of 1898—he had already left Cambridge—Crowley was with Eckenstein in the Alps. The weather was bad and climbing was impossible, even for Crowley. He had brought along a book that he found incomprehensible but which fascinated him for that very reason. It was a translation of a work by the seventeenth-century Silesian cabalist Knorr von Rosenroth, the
Kabbala Denudata
, or
The Kabbalah Unveiled
, by S. L. MacGregor Mathers. The translator of this strange work of Jewish-Christian mysticism proved to be one of the most important people in Crowley’s life. Crowley says his health was bad that summer and so, with climbing out of the question, he left camp for Zermatt. Here he held court in a beer hall, pontificating on the mysteries of alchemy, about which he knew practically nothing. But someone there that night did. An Englishman and chemist, Julian Baker, spoke to him afterward, and explained that he was, in fact, a practicing alchemist. Baker explained that he had prepared “fixed mercury,” a considerable achievement in the ancient art. Crowley felt fate had arrived. Ever since reading
The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary
, Crowley was determined to gain entry into its Hidden Church. That Easter he had sent out a mystical SOS, asking for a Master to come and take him by the hand. It seemed his call had been answered. When he parted from Baker that evening, he resolved to speak with him the next morning about his spiritual search.

But the next morning he discovered that Baker had left the hotel. No one knew where he was. Crowley would not let this opportunity
slip away. He telegraphed all over the valley. Baker had been seen at some locations, but when Crowley arrived, he was gone. Yet the impossibilist was not deterred. Crowley discovered that an Englishman fitting Baker’s description was heading down the valley toward Brique. Crowley followed and caught up with Baker some ten miles below Zermatt. He told the chemist of his search for the Hidden Church and the secret saints. He must have been convincing. Baker told him of a group in London who might be of interest to him. He also said that he knew someone who was much more of a magician than he was, and that he would introduce Crowley to him when they met again in London. Crowley’s SOS had been heard. The shadows of a golden dawn were drawing in. If a new life had started for Crowley when he entered Cambridge, it was destiny itself that beckoned now.

TWILIGHT OF THE GOLDEN DAWN

The year 1898 was an important one for Crowley. Along with
Aceldama
, Crowley wrote and self-published several other works that year, all in sumptuous editions:
The Tale of Archais
,
The Poem
,
Jezebel
,
Songs of the Spirit
,
Jephthah
, and
White Stains
.
Jephthah
, a verse play, is interesting in the context of Crowley’s inability to edit himself or accept editing from someone else, or even to absorb helpful criticism, a dangerous resistance in a writer. As his friend Louis Wilkinson remarked, Crowley was “too sure of his genius to criticize or revise adequately his own work.”
¹
Soon after his initiation into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—the group that Baker introduced him to—Crowley showed the printer’s proofs of
Jephthah
to his new magical brother, William Butler Yeats, a leading member of the order. By 1898 Yeats was a recognized author, having already published several important poems. For all his bluster about being England’s “other greatest poet,” Crowley, ten years Yeats’s junior, was hungry for approval. Yeats had already been in the Golden Dawn
for almost a decade when Crowley arrived; he had also been a Theosophist, and had met Madame Blavatsky.
²
Yeats was a dreamy, romantic personality, sensitive and distant, and Crowley’s self-assertive character no doubt grated on him. Yeats was too polite to say what he felt about the poem—readers can judge it for themselves—and offered some faint encouragement.
³
Crowley could not take this lightly—Yeats, of course, should have burst out in praise and robustly clasped the hand of his fellow poet—and decades later in the
Confessions
Crowley offered the reason for Yeats’s lack of appreciation. It was clear that, after reading a few lines of
Jephthah
, “black, bilious rage” shook Yeats to his soul because Yeats recognized that Crowley was a much greater poet than he would ever be. In later years Yeats fine-tuned his assessment and admitted that amid much rhetoric, Crowley had written at least six lines of real poetry.

Crowley maintained a venomous animosity toward Yeats for the rest of his life and lost no opportunity to vent it. In
Moonchild
, Yeats is portrayed as the black magician Gates, whose corpse is used in a hideous ritual, and in Crowley’s story “At the Fork of the Roads,” Yeats is again portrayed as a black magician. No doubt that early snub hurt. One wonders how Crowley felt about Yeats in 1923. That year Crowley was expelled from Sicily by Mussolini, had his name plastered over the tabloids, and was trying to kick heroin. Yeats, his poetic rival, won the Nobel Prize for literature.

White Stains
deserves mention because it is an early example of something Crowley enjoyed throughout his life: pornography. This particular collection, which Crowley claimed to be the work of George Archibald Bishop, “a neuropath of the Second Empire”—Bishop, of course, was Uncle Tom’s surname, and Archibald the name of Crowley’s one decent tutor—has been called the “filthiest in
the English language.”
⁴
The fact that Crowley’s literary alter ego dies in an asylum after exploring the depths of depravity led Crowley to argue that the book would be a helpful guide for Sunday school students, and would keep them on the straight and narrow: an example of Crowley’s often forced humor.

Connoisseurs of crude erotica and transgression may find some delight in
White Stains
, and one assumes that the stains in question are of semen. There are poems on bestiality, necrophilia, and even coprophagia, or “scat,” the eating of excrement, and urophagia, the drinking of urine. In “Go Into the Highways and Hedges, and Compel Them to Come In”—taken from Luke 14:23—Crowley writes:

Let my fond lips but drink thy golden wine,

My bright-eyed Arab, only let me eat

The rich brown globes of sacramental meat

Steaming and firm, hot from their home divine . . .

The poem goes on to extol the virtues of licking dirty feet, and Crowley himself would practice coprophagia as part of his attainment of godhood when he finally achieved the magical rank of Ipsissimus in Sicily. Another poem bemoans the inconvenience of “caught clap” (gonorrhea), another sings the virtue of “passive paederasty,” in which “a strong man’s love is my delight”—inspired by his “magical” experience in Stockholm—and another suggests sex with the crucified Christ, an idea that Crowley may have picked up from the sexual mysticism of the eighteenth-century German Count Zinzendorf.
⁵
What
White Stains
certainly communicates is that Crowley in no way rejected the obsession with depravity that characterized the decadent school that his lover Pollitt had introduced him to; like
Aceldama
it was published by Pollitt’s friend Leonard Smithers, who specialized in decadent literature.

Crowley’s explanation for why he wrote the book is that he had been reading Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s
Psychopathia
Sexualis
and wanted to prove that sexual perversions were not the result of disease, as Krafft-Ebing believed, but are “magical affirmations of perfectly intelligible points of view.”
⁶
But most readers, I think, will find it difficult to accept eating excrement as an expression of a “perfectly intelligible point of view,” or even as a no doubt peculiar but understandable erotic practice. In 1924 most of the original printing of
White Stains
was seized by His Majesty’s customs officials and destroyed.
⁷

That Crowley published his first work of pornography in the same year he was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is instructive. Just as
Aceldama
expresses a confusion about God and Satan, Crowley’s parallel pursuit of his Holy Guardian Angel and the “unforgivable sin” suggests a similar mix-up. At this point Crowley was pulled by contradictory desires, to become a member of a secret order of saints and a devil worshipper.
⁸
This spiritual confusion begins what we might call Crowley’s practice of “holy sinning,” or his belief in “the sanctity of the foul,” which reaches its apogee during Crowley’s own coprophagia in Cefalù. Some form of “holy sinning” has been a part of the Western spiritual tradition since the Gnostics, who saw the God of the Bible as an evil demiurge, and the world he created as false. One way to loosen the chains of falsehood is through acts of reversal, something we know Crowley did at the age of eleven, when he decided to switch sides in the great battle between Jesus and Satan. This antinomian sentiment has appeared in many forms. In Northern Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, the Brethren of the Free Spirit believed that God was in everything, and that through a direct experience of God—in the form of the Holy Spirit—we become one with Him and therefore incapable of sin, and so can act as we please. On the face of it this sounds desirable. Yet other forms of “holy sinning” seem less harmless. In 1969 Charles Manson’s “Family,” who also wanted to go beyond good and evil, committed several gruesome murders, which they claimed they did “out of love.” (Nietzsche himself wrote “that which is done out of love always occurs beyond good and evil.”)

We have no hesitation in rejecting Manson’s form of “holy sinning,” but what about Christ, who preferred the company of prostitutes and other riffraff to the self-proclaimed righteous? The problem with “holy sinning” is that it is difficult to tell when you are going beyond good and evil as a saint (Christ) or a sinner (Manson, who often referred to himself as a modern-day Christ). If, as the antinomian view has it, “anything goes”—meaning the norms no longer apply—then very questionable practices can be excused as expressions of a more intense spirituality that the lukewarm adherents to the straight and narrow are too cowardly to pursue. For the rest of his life, Crowley would espouse a philosophy expressing this antinomian rejection of opposites.

That way to godhead began when Crowley arrived in London and looked up the alchemist Julian Baker. Baker soon introduced Crowley to the Welshman George Cecil Jones. Jones, like Baker, was a chemist, and like Baker, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Jones was five years older than Crowley. He was also the son of a suicide and looked remarkably like Christ—or at least like Victorian representations of Christ. Unlike the Victorian Christ, he was an unstable character and possessed a fiery temper. Jones
remained a close friend and associate of Crowley’s for more than a decade, and Crowley’s first instructions in magic came from Jones. Jones quickly discovered that Crowley had a natural talent for magic, and that he was ready to devote his life to it. The impossibilist was on the scent, and Jones suggested Crowley join his magical order.

Like the death of his father and his escape from the Plymouth Brethren, Crowley’s initiation into the Golden Dawn was one of the most significant events in his life. “Beyond all other mundane events,” Israel Regardie tells us, “it was the influence of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn that shaped Aleister Crowley’s life.”
⁹
Yet Crowley himself was not that impressed with this tremendous turning point. After imagining the horrors his initiation at Mark Mason’s Hall on Great Queen Street on November 18, 1898, would entail—he asked Julian Baker if anyone had died during the ritual—Crowley was disappointed to discover that the ritual was a mere formality enacted by “muddled middle-class mediocrities.”
¹⁰
After an elaborate ceremony, at the end of which Crowley was told that, after dwelling long in darkness, he must now “Quit the night and seek the day,” Crowley took the magical name Perdurabo
(“I will endure to the end”). Perhaps this enabled him to endure meeting the “abject assemblage of nonentities” that his ten-shilling membership fee entitled him to join. There was the despicable Yeats (Daemon est Deus Inversus—“The Devil Is God Inverted”). There was also the writer Arthur Machen (Filus Aquarti), who was no nonentity, having made a name for himself a few years earlier with his decadent novella
The Great God Pan
, considered one of the classic horror tales of the “gaslight” age. William Westcott (Non Omnis Moriar), one of the founders of the order, had been a member of the Inner Order of Madame Blavatsky’s exclusive Esoteric Order. Florence Farr (Sapientia
Sapienti Dono Data) was a famous West End actress and women’s rights activist. The pork butcher of English A. E. Waite (Sacramentum Regis Abscondere Bonun Est), another member, was by then the author of several works on magic. The philanthropist and tea-heiress Annie Horniman (Fortiter et Recte) was another member. There were others, too; a full list can be found in one of the many accounts of the order’s history. Crowley’s slur that none of the members he met that day “made any mark in the world” is simply untrue and is another example of Crowley’s self-serving rewriting of history.

We can also recognize Crowley’s naivety. During his Cambridge days, Crowley had already joined two other groups before he found the Golden Dawn. The Celtic Church, whose pillars were “Chivalry and Mystery,” attracted him for a time and made him fantasize about the Holy Grail, while the Spanish Legitimist movement—which aimed to put the pretender Don Carlos on the Spanish throne—made him think of himself as a man of action; he even learned how to use a machine gun in preparation for an invasion of Spain. Both of these possibilities petered out and Crowley was still hankering for some romantic future. After reading Eckartshausen’s
The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary
, Crowley expected to find himself in a mystery-enshrouded hidden temple, far removed from the daily round, not in an ordinary Masonic lodge next door to Covent Garden. Crowley wanted the spiritual equivalent of his “unforgivable sin,” not a rented hall occupied by ordinary people who, like himself, had an interest in magic. With romantic expectations like these, practically anything that could have happened that day would have been a letdown.

Years later, when writing his
Confessions
, Crowley recognized that his snobbery was inappropriate. But at the time he felt he already knew more about magic than the cabal of mediocrities he was
introduced to, and no doubt his natural sense of superiority was evident to them, too. In the end he felt some respect for only two members: the head of the order, S. L. MacGregor Mathers, the eccentric translator of
The Kabbalah Unveiled
, which Crowley read in the Alps before meeting Julian Baker; and Allan Bennett, who, along with Oscar Eckenstein, was one of the few people Crowley never had a bad word for. (Oddly enough, as Israel Regardie points out, all three—Crowley, Eckenstein, and Bennett—were asthmatic.)