Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  The friendship of Bennett and Crowley surely contributed to Crowley’s prompt success in forging a relationship with Mathers. In May 1899, Crowley paid a visit to Paris and met his Chief for the first time. Each man had something to gain from the other: Mathers required obedient Golden Dawn members in London; Crowley needed assurance that the Second Order was his to attain, despite his bad relations with the London hierarchy. These were exemplified by Crowley’s unfortunate encounters with William Butler Yeats. Yeats was thirty, six years Crowley’s senior. But the disparities went far deeper. Yeats was not only Crowley’s superior within the Golden Dawn, but also a lionized poet, as Crowley yearned to be.

  Crowley requested a meeting with the older poet in the spring of 1899. He presented to Yeats, at this first meeting, the printed proofs of his verse tragedy Jephthah and a group of poems entitled Mysteries: Lyrical and Dramatic; these were published together in one volume, at Crowley’s expense, that same year. The poem entitled “Perdurabo” (Crowley’s magical name) is a naked spiritual autobiography:

  I am not lower than all men—I feel

  Too keenly. Yet my place is not above,

  Though I have this—unalterable Love

  In every fibre. I am crucified

  Apart on a lone burning crag of steel,

  Tortured, cast out; and yet—I shall abide.

  The final three words refer, of course, to the literal meaning of Perdurabo.

  The earnestness of the young Crowley apparently could not compensate, in Yeats’s mind, for the technical deficiencies and rhetorical excesses of his verse. Some two decades later, Yeats would concede that Crowley had written a very few lines of genuine verse. The poet and critic Katherine Raine has suggested that Yeats remained uneasily aware of Crowley’s writings well into the new century, and that Crowley the Great Beast and his creed of Thelema, “with its deliberate desecrations and reversals of sacred values,” may have echoed in Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” with its “rough beast, its hour come round at last” that “Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.” Raine pointed to a surprising blending of antagonism and unity between the two men: “Yeats and Crowley drew upon a common fund of esoteric tradition and shared a belief that a Second Coming is at hand. Both write of the ending of one Great Year, and of the advent of an antithetical phase; but whereas Crowley placed himself in the services of Antichrist, ‘the savage God’ of the new cycle, Yeats’s fidelity was to ‘the old king’, to ‘that unfashionable gyre’, the values about to be obscured to the ‘workman, noble and saint’ of Christian civilization.”

  At the time of their 1899 meeting, the differences between the two men prevailed. Yeats attempted to be tactful, but something of his true opinion was conveyed after he glanced through the apprentice page proofs. This infuriated Crowley, who later tried to discount the importance of the rebuff: “I had never thought much of his work; it seemed to me to lack virility.[ … ] However, at that time I should have been glad to have a kindly word from an elder man.” When Yeats could offer only “a few polite conventionalities,” Crowley, through his powers of “clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience,” recognized within Yeats a “black, bilious rage.” The root of this rage was obvious enough to Crowley the poet: “What hurt him was the knowledge of his own incomparable inferiority.” This insight, which as a matter of aesthetic judgment makes Crowley appear ridiculous, applies far more convincingly to Crowley himself.

  A far more severe attack on Yeats was leveled by Crowley in a short story, “At the Fork of the Roads,” written a decade after their first meeting and published in Crowley’s journal, The Equinox. Here Crowley offers what is, by his own testimony, a veiled factual account of the magical warfare that took place between Yeats and himself during this period. In the story, Crowley is Count Swanoff, a poet who has “concealed his royal Celtic descent beneath the pseudonym of Swanoff.” Crowley himself took on, in 1899, the pseudonym Count Svareff for reasons that shall be discussed shortly; the reference to a royal Celtic line bespeaks the influence of Mathers, whose Scots-Gaelic Second Order motto ‘S Rioghail Mo Dhream (Royal is my tribe) had at this point been taken up by Crowley, who had it printed on his personal stationery. Houseguest Allan Bennett is the anonymous “master” who serves as Swanoff’s ally in fending off the magical attacks being mounted by Will Bute (a contraction of Yeats’s first two names), a “poetaster” and “dabbler in magic” who harbored a “black jealousy” against Swanoff. The Gnostic magical name of Yeats—Demon Est Deus Inversus (The Devil is the inverse of God)—is derided in the narrative as “blasphemy.”

  Crowley and Yeats would soon be pitted as antagonists in the struggle for control of the Golden Dawn, with Yeats abandoning his old friend Mathers while the younger Crowley emerged as his strongest ally. Indeed, Yeats and others in London would cite Crowley as evidence of the pattern of poor judgment that had overtaken Mathers. But Crowley, through Mathers, felt his entry into the Second Order assured and could afford to be indifferent to their claims.

  Ensconced in his Chancery Lane flat with Bennett as residing guest, Crowley commenced preparations for an intensive magical working—the Abra-Melin Operation—based on the Abra-Melin text (translated by Mathers) to which George Cecil Jones had introduced him just over a year earlier. Crowley planned to commence the Operation on Easter 1900; necessary preliminaries included the consecration of robes, oils, and implements, as well as the ongoing search for a secluded country locale. During these preliminary months, Crowley took on the public pseudonym of Count Vladimir Svareff, a Russian aristocrat new to London. The reason proffered in the Confessions was that “Abra-Melin warns us that our families will object strenuously to our undertaking the Operation.”

  If Crowley hoped to evade his mother by the Count Svareff ruse, he failed miserably. Ethel Archer, a later friend of Crowley, recorded this anecdote: Emily, hearing of the preposterous noble pseudonym of her son, paid a visit to his flat and sent in her card announcing herself as “The Countess of Cosmos.” Archer noted that this was “a characteristic move of the old lady, that showed both originality and wit” and, further, that in this shared sense of humor “one could see the unmistakable likeness of mother to son.” Crowley himself later mocked the pretension of his pseudonym, agreeing with his magical mentor Jones that “a wiser man would have called himself Smith.” Given Crowley’s limited knowledge of Russian, it is doubtful, in any event, that many Londoners were deceived.

  But it is equally doubtful that Crowley spent much of his time playing that outrageous role. The options available to a young man from Cambridge held at least an equal allure. In May 1899, during his visit to Mathers in Paris, Crowley took in Mathers’s original stage production (at the Bodinière Theatre) of the Rites of Isis and there met an American operatic prima donna, Susan Strong, who took him “by storm.” According to Crowley, Strong was married to a Texan who had unwisely remained in that state while Strong was performing the role of Venus in the Covent Garden production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and mingling with the occult avant-garde of London and Paris. She and Crowley had an affair and, by Crowley’s account, they became engaged and were resolved to marry immediately, but for the need of Strong to obtain a divorce in Texas. But her return to Texas signaled, instead, an end to the romance.

  Strong and Elaine Simpson were Crowley’s two great heterosexual loves of this period. But other, more casual affairs made their impacts as well. One of these was with Evelyn Hall, in connection with whom, in his diary, Crowley refers to a mysterious “Great Trouble” that arose in November 1899 and after. As another lover of this period, one Laura, also plays a significant part in the “Great Trouble,” the tangled stories behind these affairs conjoin naturally.

  The central thread stems from Crowley’s genuine concern for his friend, Bennett. The cold, damp climate of London had aggravated his asthma. By 1899, it seemed to Crowley that a move to a tropical climate was essential. This dovetailed with Bennett’s desire to study yoga with indigenous teacher
s in Ceylon. We have already seen that Crowley believed himself precluded from funding Bennett directly. The indirect aid that Crowley would seek involved his aforementioned lover Laura, the wife of a British Army colonel stationed in India. After a torrid beginning, Crowley’s passion had cooled, but to his dismay Laura retained her ardor. In response to her plea, Crowley paid a visit to her London hotel and, by his account, played out the following scene:

  She begged me to come back to her and offered to do anything I wanted. I said to her, ‘You’re making a mess of your life by your selfishness. I will give you a chance to do an absolutely unfettered act. Give me a hundred pounds, I won’t tell you whom it’s for, except that it’s not for myself. I have private reasons for not using my own money in this matter. If you give me this, it must be without hoping or expecting anything in return.’ She gave me the money—paid Allan’s passage to Ceylon and saved to humanity one of the most valuable lives of our generation.

  Her gesture on behalf of Bennett led Crowley to consent to carrying on the affair so long as she promised to leave him to the Abra-Melin Operation (during which nonmaritial sexual relations are strictly forbidden), which he intended to commence at Eastertime of the following year.

  This arrangement must have seemed simple and pleasurable enough—it included a fortnight together in Paris—but it came to grief for two reasons. First, Laura sent importuning letters to Crowley even during his Abra-Melin retreat in 1900. Second, the matter of the £100 was reported to the police as theft—most likely by her husband—though Laura refused to prosecute. Matters were further entangled by the attentions paid Laura by another Golden Dawn member, W. E. H. Humphrys, of whom Crowley observed in his diary: “He seems nearly as big a blackguard as myself. I misbehave as usual. O Lord, how long?”

  Was the £100 the cause of the “Great Trouble?” There are other, equally likely possibilities. Here enters Crowley’s other lover, Evelyn Hall, who in January 1900 warned Crowley by letter that he and his friends at Chancery Lane were being watched by the police. In his diary, Crowley wrote of Hall’s warning to him: “This is concerned with ‘the brother of a college chum’ but no doubt can be entertained of the meaning of her hints. She [Hall] naively assumes the charge to be true!” Given this hint, it seems likely that alleged homosexual activity at Chancery Lane was the cause of the police surveillance. This is bolstered by the fact that Crowley had obtained an unsavory sexual reputation. Elaine Simpson, another of Crowley’s heterosexual loves, had informed him that London Second Order members believed him guilty of “sex intemperance” with both sexes.

  In late 1899, Crowley learned that his request for initiation into the Second Order had been turned down by the R.R. et A.C. London membership, including Yeats, who now viewed Crowley as “a person of unspeakable life.” Yeats offered this justification for refusing Crowley: “[W]e did not think a mystical society was intended to be a reformatory.” Crowley himself, as his diary confirms, was aware of behavior that rendered him a “blackguard.” He later cited, as one of the causes of this behavior, the strain of magical initiation. Borrowing from Freud and tacitly assigning to magical ritual a function similar to psychoanalytic therapy, Crowley wrote that an “aspirant on the threshold of Initiation finds himself assailed by the ‘complexes’ which have corrupted him, their externalisation excruciating him, and his agonised reluctance to their elimination plunging him into such ordeals that he seems (both to himself and others) to have turned from a noble and upright man into an unutterable scoundrel.” Even his onetime friend Julian Baker would conclude, by 1900, that his onetime protégé was “a man without principles.”

  But in Jones and Mathers, Crowley had his own powerful allies. He was resolved to continue his preparations for the Abra-Melin ritual. The most challenging step was to find a suitably secluded location in which to conduct the intensive six-month Operation. On this score, as in all matters of ritual conduct, the Abra-Melin text is precise and demanding. If the Operator intends to live in a house—as opposed to the stark simplicity of an isolated wood—there must be a room set aside exclusively as an oratory for prayer and magical ritual. A door must issue from this room facing north. Outside this door there must be constructed a terrace covered to the depth of two fingers with fine sand from a riverbed. At the north end of this terrace a lodge is to be constructed wherein spirits both good and evil may be conjured, the evil spirits to be pressed into the service of the good by the worthy Operator if, through ardent effort, the Operation was a success. Crowley hunted for months for a suitable location, until, in August 1899, he came upon the manor of Boleskine and Abertarff, on a southeast rise overlooking Loch Ness, home to the legendary monster. In his Confessions, Crowley insisted that he paid twice as much as the manor was worth, which may well be believed; but Boleskine would come to serve as Crowley’s home base for over a decade.

  He moved there in November 1899. Even prior to the move, the intense course of preparations had served, according to Crowley, to attract to him the Abra-Melin “demons”—the conquest of which is the culminating power conferred by the Operation. It is the prospect of defeating the Operator at the outset that lures the demons. Thus it was that, one night, Crowley and Jones returned to the Chancery Lane flat to find that the white temple was in disarray and that “semi-materialized beings were marching around the main room in almost unending procession.” After the move to Boleskine, hired workmen were “put out of action for several hours” by the demons.

  But no difficulties could be allowed to stand in the way. The Operation was to be the culminating event of Crowley’s life. It is all the more perplexing, then, to trace the repeated ambivalence that led him, in its opening month, to put it aside. The Abra-Melin text specifies that the Operator must consider “whether ye be capable, not only of commencing but also of carrying through the Operation unto its end.” Serious illness alone constitutes an adequate excuse for termination: “Ponder the matter then well before commencing, and only begin the Operation with the firm intention of carrying it out unto the end, for no man can make a mock of the Lord with impunity.”

  Crowley had been earnest in his preparations for the Operation, but single-mindedness eluded him. In truth, the greatest distractions to Crowley’s progress were not Boleskine-based demons, but rather battles for power within the Golden Dawn. Tensions between Mathers and the Second Order members in London—the selfsame members who had refused Crowley’s request for initiation—had reached a high point. When Mathers learned of Crowley’s rejection by the London Second Order, he resolved to initiate Crowley in his own Ahathoor Temple in Paris.

  On January 15, 1900, Crowley interrupted both his Abra-Melin preparations and his liaisons with Laura to journey to Paris. The following day, he was admitted to the Second Order. The rituals which Crowley underwent that day must have been sui generis as compared to the standard Second Order framework. For Crowley became both a “Lord of the Paths in the Portal of the Vault of the Adepts” and a “5°6□ of the Order of the Golden Dawn.” The former title stems from passage through the Portal ritual—a ceremony designed by Mathers to signify the transition from the First (Outer) to the Second (Inner) Order. So transformative was the power of the Portal Ritual that Golden Dawn practice called for a nine-month gestation period prior to full initiation into the Second Order by means of the subsequent Adeptus Minor ritual. Crowley, in receiving both initiations in a single day at Mathers’s hand, was being accorded remarkable treatment.

  He had become an adept, one deemed to have mastered the knowledge necessary to integrate the fundamental elements of the soul. The Adeptus Minor ritual was—with Mathers as playwright and lead actor—an affair of high drama, drawing upon the central mythos of the Rosicrucian movement: the discovery, 120 years after his death, of the body of Christian Rosenkreutz undecayed in a seven-sided pastos (tomb), the seven sides representing the seven traditional planets, the seven days of creation, and the seven lower sephiroth of the kabbalistic Tree of Life. Within the pastos lay—as t
he symbolic presence of Rosenkreutz—the Chief Adept, Mathers himself. At this point the Aspirant—Crowley—is instructed to say: “Out of the darkness let the light arise.” Without moving, the Chief Adept replies with one of the most beautiful passages of the ritual—an identification of the new initiate and the master magus Rosenkreutz:

  Buried with that LIGHT in a mystical Death, rising again in a mystical resurrection, Cleansed and Purified through him our MASTER, O Brother of the Cross and the Rose! Like him, O Adepts of all ages, have ye toiled; like him have ye suffered Tribulation. Poverty, Torture, and Death have ye passed through. They have been but the purification of the Gold.

  In the Alembic of thine Heart,

  Through the Athanor of Affliction,

  Seek thou the true stone of the Wise.

  The vision of the pastos bestowed in Paris on January 16, 1900, would never die within him. In a will executed some three decades later, Crowley requested that his body be “embalmed in the ancient Egyptian fashion and then treated as nearly as possible like that of Christian Rosencreutz” in the Adeptus Minor ritual.

  Crowley returned to Boleskine on February 7, still intending to commence the Abra-Melin Operation in March. Disturbances seemed at an end. Elsewhere, however, events were taking on their own momentum. A fierce correspondence now arose between Mathers and the London Second Order. A new allegation by Mathers—in a February 16 letter to the Second Order in London—held that the correspondence alleged to have taken place between Westcott and the mysterious Fräulein Sprengel in Germany, upon which the Golden Dawn had based its foundation and teachings, was a mere forgery. As Mathers put it: “I again reiterate that every atom of the knowledge of the Order has come through me alone from 0°0□ to 5°6□ inclusive, and that it is I alone who have been and am in communication with the Secret Chiefs of the Order.”