Aleister Crowley (7 page)

—

T
HE
H
ERMETIC
O
RDER
of the Golden Dawn was the most famous magical society of the modern age. Although most likely apocryphal, the most well-known account of its origins concerns a cipher manuscript discovered in a secondhand bookstall in London’s Farringdon Road.
¹¹
The Reverend Alphonsus Woodford, who wrote about Freemasonry, is said to have found the manuscript; he could make nothing of it, and so gave it to his friend and fellow mason William Westcott, who was a member of the
Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia
, or the Rosicrucian Society in England. Westcott called in Mathers, another Mason, to help. They cracked the cipher—invented by the fifteenth-century German monk and occultist Johannes Trithemius—and saw that it contained magical rituals. It also contained a letter from a Fraulein Anna Sprengel in Nuremberg, with her address, saying that if more information about the cipher was needed, it could be had from her. Westcott corresponded with Fraulein Sprengel and asked about the rituals. She claimed to be the head of a magical order, Die Golden Dämmerung, “The Golden Dawn,” and she gave Westcott a charter to start a branch of the society in England. In the autumn of 1887, Westcott, Mathers, and Dr. William
Woodman inaugurated the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; the
Isis
a nod, perhaps, to Westcott’s previous esoteric teacher, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, whose first major work was the hugely influential
Isis Unveiled
. The actual charter from Fraulein Sprengel did not arrive until March 1888. It was unsigned, so Westcott signed it himself. Mathers was given the task of completing the fragments of ritual that the cipher contained. These were of an initiatory character. The cipher also contained material on the trumps of the tarot deck and some other magical materials.

Fraulein Sprengel, the story goes, died in 1891, and Westcott’s last letter to her was answered by her magical associates. They took a dim view of her activities and, in short, said her English correspondents could expect no more help from them. They had already been given enough information to carry on themselves, and if they needed more, they would have to contact the Secret Chiefs on their own. These mysterious Secret Chiefs were the true heads of their order.

The Secret Chiefs occupy the same position in the Western magical tradition that the Hidden Masters or Mahatmas do in Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy. They are beings of a higher spiritual nature with miraculous powers—supermen—who clandestinely watch over humanity and guide it in its evolution. Blavatsky always insisted that her Masters were actual men who had developed their dormant powers, not beings from another dimension, as Crowley and others would claim.
¹²
But whoever the Secret Chiefs were, at this point, the only person they were speaking to was the head of the order, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. By 1898 Woodman had died and Westcott had been forced to leave the order. Some papers Westcott left in a hansom cab that spoke of his magical pursuits came to the
attention of his superiors at the London Coroner’s office, and they explained that if he wished to keep his job, he would have to give up magic. This left Mathers in sole command. Like George Cecil Jones, Mathers (Deo Duce Comite Ferro
—
“God My Guide, My Companion a Sword”) had a fiery temperament and his dictatorial leadership style and later favoring of Crowley eventually led to a schism in the order. He claimed that in 1892 he had made direct contact with the Secret Chiefs and that this conferred on him sole authority. His account of the experience is worth noting. Mathers wrote that “I can only compare it to the continued effect of that usually experienced momentarily by any person close to whom a flash of lightning passes during a violent storm; coupled with a difficulty in respiration similar to the half-strangling effect produced by ether.”
¹³

Mathers had been the curator of the prestigious Horniman Museum in South London, but an argument with Frederick J. Horniman, his boss, led to his dismissal. Annie Horniman, Frederick’s daughter and a Golden Dawn initiate, gave Mathers a pension of £443 a year and with this he went to Paris, where he haunted the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. Mathers claimed that while walking through the Bois de Boulogne, a large park on the western edge of the city, he met three Secret Chiefs who told him that he was their representative and sole channel of authority for the Golden Dawn. This claim, coupled with the fact that Mathers was leading the order from a different city, led to great dissatisfaction with his leadership. Crowley’s appearance acted as a catalyst and in little more than a year the order fractured.

Like Crowley, Mathers was an eccentric character, mixing an obsession with magic with another passion, military history. Like Crowley, he was a vivid fantasist. Mathers joined a volunteer infantry
group and was photographed in a lieutenant’s uniform. Mathers didn’t have that rank but the photograph was a means of supporting his self-image as an officer. Mathers adopted
MacGregor
as a name in the middle of the Celtic craze that led Crowley to join the Celtic Church. Mathers was photographed in Highland regalia, but he had no Scottish blood. He was born in London’s East End in 1854, the son of a clerk; he never set foot in Scotland until 1897, and then only to inspect a Golden Dawn branch in Edinburgh. He also called himself the “Count of Glenstrae,” showing a taste for unwarranted titles that Crowley would soon also display.

In 1887 Mathers met Moina Bergson, sister of the philosopher Henri Bergson, in the British Museum, and they soon married. Moina was an art student at the Slade School; she was also psychic and Mathers often used her powers when he needed to contact the Secret Chiefs. Crowley, too, employed female seers when he needed to contact the higher planes. As with Mathers, it was Crowley’s wife who provided a direct line to the Secret Chiefs. Yeats, who met Mathers in the early 1890s, called him a “figure of romance.” Once, Yeats met Mathers when he was wearing Highland dress and had knives stuck into his stockings. He told the poet, “When I’m dressed like this I feel like a walking flame.”
¹⁴
Much of the Golden Dawn magic, as well as Crowley’s, has to do with what is called the “assumption of the god form,” when the magician imagines he has become the particular god he wants to invoke by visualizing his form enveloping his own. Mathers’s habit of photographing himself in fancy dress can be seen as a less magical version of this, as Crowley’s early playacting can be seen as a preparation for it.

It would be easy to dismiss Mathers as a deluded fantasist, but like Crowley, Mathers had some natural talent for magic. Yeats recounts
how Mathers handed him cards with Hindu
tattwa
symbols on them, representing the five elements—fire, water, air, earth, and spirit—used in Golden Dawn training, and told him to press them against his forehead. When Yeats did, images came to him involuntarily, each one appropriate for each symbol. The fire symbol, a red triangle, raised a vision of a black giant rising up out of ruins in a desert. Mathers told him it was a being of the order of salamanders, whose element is fire. Yeats later wondered if telepathy might account for this, but ruled this out when he discovered that if he gave someone the wrong card—say water, a silver crescent, instead of air, a blue circle—they nevertheless received the correct vision for that card. The symbols themselves seem to possess some power, and in his essay “The Trembling of the Veil,” Yeats wrote that it was through Mathers that he was convinced that “images well up before the mind’s eyes from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious memory,” a remarkable anticipation of Jung’s notion of the “collective unconscious.” At a session with Mathers and Moina, Yeats discovered that he would visualize what Moina would describe even before she began to describe it. Somehow they had entered a kind of group or shared mind or, more magically, a section of the astral plane.

—

C
ROWLEY
,
TOO
,
felt like a walking flame at times, or at least wanted to. As in the case of Eckenstein, he saw in Mathers another father figure. There were strong similarities between them. Aside from being fantasists, they both had athletic physiques. Yeats tells the story of how a boxing partner of Mathers’s was surprised that he could knock him down, even though Mathers was the larger man; he later discovered that Mathers, perpetually in poverty, was starving
at the time. Both were unwilling or unable to brook any criticism. Both sought power and control. Both had paranoid suspicions about the people around them and often bit the hand that fed—indeed, they often made a banquet of it. In Paris, around the time of Crowley’s initiation, Mathers had begun performing public rituals of Egyptian Masses celebrating Isis that he had discovered in his researches. Moina acted as the high priestess and the performances were a success, at least according to the
L’Écho du merveilleux
, which reviewed them. In 1910, Crowley, we shall see, did the same in London.

The Golden Dawn membership was arranged hierarchically, with ten levels in all, grouped in three sections. This arrangement paralleled that of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Although it was called a hermetic order, and included many Egyptian and Rosicrucian motifs, much of the Golden Dawn’s teaching related to Kabbalah, the ancient Jewish mystical tradition. Crowley’s own metaphysical system is Egyptian through and through, but Crowley’s own thinking was well suited to the meticulous classifications peculiar to Kabbalah. This can be seen in his early Kabbalistic work
777
, a kind of Linnean filing system of magic, mapping out the correspondences between numbers, the Hebrew alphabet, the Tree of Life, gods, colors, perfumes, stones, planets, astrological signs, demons, and much else. In Kabbalah, existence is arranged in a descending scale, from the purest spiritual manifestation to the rock-solid earth. This scale is depicted as a kind of metaphysical tree, and its branches contain “vessels,” or
sephiroth
, designed to hold the spiritual energies at work in creation. Starting out from a nonmanifest source, the
Ain Soph Aur
, or “limitless light,” an indescribable dimension, the divine energies burst into being.
From highest to lowest we have
Kether
(Crown),
Chokmah
(Wisdom),
Binah
(Understanding),
Chesed
(Mercy),
Geburah
(Strength),
Tiphareth
(Beauty),
Netzach
(Victory),
Hod
(Splendour),
Yesod
(Foundation), and
Malkuth
(Kingdom).

With the Golden Dawn system, one begins as a Neophyte 0
⁰
= 0
, which is not yet on the magical ladder, then moves to Zealator 1
⁰
 
= 10
. Next comes Theoricus 2
⁰
= 9
, Practicus 3
⁰
= 8
, and Philosophus 4
⁰
= 7
, which form the grades of the first, or Outer, Order, to which technically the name Golden Dawn applies. The Second Order, that of the Ruby Rose and Gold Cross, a more Rosicrucian-influenced level, includes the degrees of Adeptus Minor 5
⁰
= 6
, Adeptus Major 6
⁰
= 5
, and Adeptus Exemptus 7
⁰
= 4
. In the first order, initiates performed ceremonies and rituals and studied the philosophy of magic, but it was only in the Second Order that actual magic was practiced. No Second Order could exist without direct contact with the Secret Chiefs, which is why Mather’s alleged link with them was so important. The next three grades, Magister Templi (Master of the Temple) 8
⁰
= 3
, Magus 9
⁰
= 2
, and Ipsissimus (roughly, one’s “most selfness”) 10
⁰
= 1
are separated from the others by what Crowley calls “the Abyss.” These three grades correspond to Binah, Chokmah, and Kether on the Tree of Life, which are known as the “Supernals.” Although not as far removed as the
Ain Soph Aur
itself, their existence is nevertheless quite beyond any ordinary human conception and can only be understood by crossing the Abyss. The Abyss is a chasm in existence in which our binary, dualistic conceptions dissolve and we either pass through it and enter that mystical realm beyond good and evil where “all is one” that the antinomian aspirant seeks, or plummet into madness. It was in this Third Order that the Secret Chiefs resided. No one in the Golden Dawn had reached this level; Mathers himself got only as far as an Adeptus Exemptus 7
⁰
= 4
. This, of course, did not deter Crowley.