These revelations placed Second Order members, including Yeats, in the quandary described in a subsequent written statement by those members: “If his [Mathers’s] accusation of forgery be true, he has knowingly, and on his own showing for many years made use of that forgery for his authority as Chief; if this statement be false, he has been guilty of a slander on one to whom he was bound by the most solemn pledges of fraternity and fidelity, both as a member of this Order and as a Freemason.” As for Westcott, he refrained, on the advice of counsel, from making any statement unless legally compelled to do so. Privately, to Second Order member Percy Bullock, Westcott asserted that he had received “bona fide posted letters” from Sprengel. But a private avowal would not do when the dignity of the Order was at stake. The Second Order was left, in sum, to sort matters out for itself.
There was a further claim made by Mathers in his February 16 letter that added wonder upon wonder: Fräulein Sprengel herself—who was alleged by both Westcott and Mathers to have died in 1890—was now alive and living in Paris and promising to aid Mathers in putting on his public Rites of Isis. The woman whom Mathers believed, at this point, to be Fräulein Sprengel went primarily by the name of Madame Laura Horos, with other aliases including Swami Vive Ananda and Marie Louise of the Commune. She was roughly sixty years of age and obese, though Mathers believed her to possess “the power of changing her appearance from age to youth and vice versa.” Madame Horos was accompanied, on her visits to Mathers, by her husband Theo, an unprepossessing man thirty years younger. She succeeded in gaining the confidence of Mathers by revealing a knowledge of the Outer Order grades, by reciting the secret motto of Fräulein Sprengel—Sapiens Dominabitur Astris—and by relating to Mathers details of a private conversation he had had with the late Madame Blavatsky over a decade ago. Indeed, Madame Horos attributed her weight to having swelled up as a result of absorbing the spirit of Madame Blavatsky (herself very stout) upon the latter’s death. Within weeks, Mathers realized that they were frauds. But the realization was a tardy one, for he had by then loaned them copies of Golden Dawn rituals that would come to light in a highly negative fashion late the following year of 1901, when the Horos couple—who had by then used the rituals in an attempt to establish their own Golden Dawn initiations in England—were arrested on charges of rape by Theo, and of aiding and abetting in the rape by Madame Horos. Their December 1901 trial and conviction, with its lurid mix of sex and the occult, generated intense tabloid press coverage. Mathers and the Golden Dawn were held up to excruciating public ridicule.
While all this controversy was brewing Crowley was, for a rare change, on the sidelines up at Boleskine manor. But Crowley had written two letters to the London Second Order respectfully requesting the study materials to which Second Order members were entitled. On March 25, Crowley finally received a definitive no. This response, just two weeks before Easter and the Abra-Melin Operation, galled and galvanized him. There is a terse diary entry in which Crowley deemed the Second Order “apparently mad” and resolved to write to Mathers “offering myself.” He affirmed this resolve by a typical Crowley device—a parallel to the life of Jesus Christ: “His Face was fixed as a Flint to go unto Jerusalem.” The die was cast. There would be no Operation come Eastertime.
Given that Crowley would himself soon break with Mathers, the justification of leaving off Abra-Melin for Mathers’s sake is perplexing. In The Equinox of the Gods (1936), Crowley—speaking in the voice of a realized prophet—offered this verdict on Mathers, the Order, and the Abra-Melin Operation: “That the Master proved to be no Master, and the order no Order, but the incarnation of Disorder, had no effect upon the good Karma created by this renunciation of a project on which he had set his heart for so long.” By couching the decision as a renunciation rather than a breach of the Abra-Melin oath, it was possible to evade the stern words that Crowley himself had once written: “The Oath is the foundation of all Work in Magick, as it is an affirmation of the Will. An Oath binds the Magician forever.”
Crowley did not learn of Mathers’s formal acceptance of his services until April 6, when Crowley was confirmed as Mathers’s representative and plenipotentary in England. That day, Crowley went to 36 Blythe Road in London, the address of the Second Order Vault of the Adepts, and asked to be admitted. He was politely put off. That same day he met with Elaine Simpson, his lover and fellow Golden Dawn member, and enlisted her support for the coming struggle.
Having done what he could in London, Crowley traveled to Paris on April 9. Mathers had not been idle in the interval. The epistolary cannonading had reached new intensity with a Mathers letter of April 2 which threatened the use of the “Punitive Current”: A “deadly and hostile Current of Will” that could be unleashed by the Chiefs against members who breached their oaths to the Order. Crowley later wrote that he had persuaded Mathers to utilize this Current, but could not resist mocking Mathers for his failure to wield it with effect—“as in the case of the Jackdaw of Rheims, nobody seemed a penny the worse.” Crowley further described a Sunday afternoon during which Mathers waged—in the ritual style of the old grimoires—a magical attack against the rebellious Order by “rattling a lot of dried peas in a sieve under the impression that they were the revolted members: as subsequent events proved, they were only the ideas in his head.” It seems to have eluded Crowley that these railleries made himself look foolish for his loyalty.
Nonetheless, Mathers and Crowley agreed upon a battle strategy for the capture of the Vault—the symbolic first step in regaining control of the Golden Dawn. According to Crowley, he himself formulated these plans while Mathers passively assented. In essence, they consisted of Crowley going to London, taking control of the Vault in the name and by the authority of Mathers, and then summoning all Second Order members, over the course of several days, to answer a series of questions in the course of an interview as to which they would be pledged to secrecy. Crowley, as the questioner, would wear a mask of Osiris to emphasize the impersonality of his role as Mathers’s emissary and judge. These questions would serve as a loyalty test culminating in the signing of a statement avowing Mathers as leader. If the member refused to sign, he or she would be expelled from the Order. These plans formulated, Crowley departed from Paris on April 13.
The battle itself raged for the three days of April 17–19. On Tuesday the seventeenth, Crowley, accompanied by Elaine Simpson, broke into the Second Order rooms at Blythe Road, placed new locks on the door and, most satisfyingly, inscribed “Perdurabo” on the official parchment roll of Second Order initiates (the Second Order would later order this entry removed). Three Second Order members arrived on the scene to object to the forced occupation on the basis that Mathers’s authority had been suspended by vote of the London members. A constable was summoned, but as the landlord was absent the question of legal right to possession could not then be resolved. Crowley’s new locks remained in place at day’s end. On Wednesday the eighteenth, Crowley sent off letters—signed in the name of Mathers—to the Second Order members demanding their presence at the Blythe Road headquarters on April 20. This letter would be utterly ignored.
The stage was set for the battle royal on April 19. Crowley was costumed (in accordance with Mathers’s instructions as to how to ward off potential magical attacks by Madame Horos) with a mask of Osiris, a dirk of “cold steel,” and a MacGregor tartan. But when Crowley arrived at Blythe Road, inimical forces of a different order were barring the way: Yeats and a fellow Second Order member, as well as the landlord—a member of the Trades Protection Association which had blacklisted Crowley for bad debts—and a constable. Crowley left promptly, without threats or altercation, stating that he would consult a lawyer. Later that day, the Second Order formally suspended Mathers and his few supporters and specially declared, with Crowley in mind, that only London initiates were proper members. The Vault—and the Order itself—had been retaken by the rebels.
There were scattered shots in the days that followed, but they hardly mat
tered. On April 23, Crowley (under the name “Edward Aleister”) filed a legal action against Second Order member Florence Farr, claiming that she had detained certain of his papers and other property worth some £15. The Second Order hired its own eminent attorney and counterclaimed that Crowley had stolen certain property on April 19. Further, the Trades Protection Association planned to join the action to press its claims against Crowley. It promised to be a messy battle. Crowley’s lawyer promptly filed a voluntary dismissal, including an agreement that Crowley would pay £5 in costs. It was an ignominious end.
One sad aftermath of the “Battle of Blythe Road” was a lingering fear on Yeats’s part as regarded Crowley. While undertaking the reform of the Golden Dawn as its new leader, Yeats wearily complained, in a June 6, 1900, letter, of Crowley’s ongoing magical threats: “Even the fact that MacGregor’s masked man Crowley has been making wax images of us all, and putting pins in them, has not made life interesting.” In his memoir Things Near and Far (1923), Arthur Machen recalled an anxious meeting with the poet:
He described the doings of a fiend in human form, a man who was well known to be an expert in Black Magic, a man who hung up naked women in cupboards by hooks which pierced the flesh of their arms. This monster—I may say that there is such a person, though I can by no means go bail for the actuality of any of the misdeeds charged against him—had, for some reason which I do not recollect, taken a dislike to my dark young friend. In consequence, so I was assured, he had hired a gang in Lambeth, who were grievously to maim or preferably to slaughter the dark young man; each member of the gang receiving a retaining fee of eight shillings and sixpence a day—a sum, by the way, that sounds as if it were the face value of a mediaeval coin long obsolete.
The reference by Machen to a “cupboard” is striking, for Crowley used the exact same word in his Confessions to describe the Chancery Lane room in which he created his black temple.
While the Second Order regrouped in London, Crowley found himself strangely at odds. Easter had passed and with it the lure of Boleskine and the Abra-Melin opportunity. Crowley returned to Paris to report to Mathers. For the time being, Crowley remained loyal to his defeated Chief, though inwardly he harbored doubts. But the primary problem now confronting him was more basic: What to do with his time? Guests of Mathers in Paris had just returned from Mexico and spoke highly of the locale. There were volcanoes in the central ranges that could offer a climbing challenge. His Chief had neither a practical use for him, nor further teachings to offer. These are the reasons that Crowley sets forth in the Confessions for his spur-of-the-moment decision to go on a voyage. It may be that the mysterious “Great Trouble,” the pressing claims of creditors, and the unwanted attention of the police during the Chancery Lane period played roles as well.
In any event, travel plans were laid post haste. Leaving Boleskine to the care of his servants, and the battered Golden Dawn to the rebels, Crowley sailed in June 1900 for New York, the first stop in a journey that would lead first to Mexico and then extend around the world.
CHAPTER THREE
Years of Wandering in Which Crowley Pursues the Heights of Magic and Mountains, Embraces Buddhism, Then Abandons All for the Love of a Woman and the Life of a Country Laird (1900–04)
Edward Alexander Crowley had become, in turn, Aleister Crowley, Perdurabo, and, most recently, Lord of the Paths in the Portal of the Vault of the Adepts and an Adeptus Minor of the Second Order Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis. For these latter titles, Crowley had Mathers to thank.
And yet, as he set out on his voyage to the New World, Crowley’s loyalty to his Chief was marred by inward doubt. However much Crowley might scoff at the attainments of the Second Order rebels, it was plain that they had wrested control of the London Golden Dawn from Mathers, who had put up a poor enough fight on both the magical and the material planes. Whether or not Mathers possessed a genuine link to the Secret Chiefs had become a vexing question for which, as of yet, Crowley had no clear means of obtaining an answer.
Upon graduating from Cambridge, Crowley had yearned to make contact with the Great White Brotherhood. Upon initiation into the Golden Dawn, he had felt certain that such contact had been achieved. But by the time Crowley completed the wanderings to be recounted in this chapter, he would decide for himself that—on the human plane—there were no further teachers for him. The experiences and training gained during these years—from the practice of magic, the pursuit of yogic concentration of mind, and the climbing of mountains—would make him his own master forevermore.
Crowley landed in New York harbor on July 6, 1900. In the Confessions, Crowley could not resist a jibe at the Statue of Liberty—“a rejected statue of commerce intended for the Suez Canal.” The New York skyscape was merely “a series of disconnected accidents.” A severe heat wave kept him largely confined to his hotel room, where he immersed himself in cold baths during his short stay.
It was with a sense of relief that he boarded the train to Mexico City. Once arrived, he found the spirit of the Mexican people immediately to his liking. The absence of a sense of puritanism prompted Crowley to heights of praise:
Indoors and out nature and art combine to invite Cupid to pay every sort of visit, passionate, permanent, transitory, trivial. The caprice of the moment is the sole arbiter of the event.[ … ] There is no humbug about purity, uplift, idealism, or any such nonsense. I cannot hope to express the exquisite pleasure of freedom.[ … ] The problem of sex, which has reduced Anglo-Saxon nations to hysteria and anxiety, has been solved in Mexico by the co-operation of climate and cordiality.
A hallmark of the Confessions is Crowley’s resolve to paint an idealized portrait of a fully liberated life. But by the evidence of the poetry written during his stay in Mexico, it is clear that Crowley’s “Anglo-Saxon” anxieties had accompanied him. In “The Growth of God,” there is the despairing voice of one for whom existence and all its seeming pleasures and consolations (including the idea of God) are but tawdry deceptions:
I see all Nature claw and tear and bite,
All hateful love and hideous: and the brood
Misshapen, misbegotten out of spite;
Lust after death; love in decrepitude.
Thus, till the monster birth of serpent-man
Linked in corruption with the serpent-woman,
Slavering in lust and pain—creation’s ban,
The horrible beginning of the human.
The end of the poem affirms that the “seeker” must continue on his path, but the reward shall be, not luminous enlightenment, but rather the discovery of the “word” that “At last shall dissolve thee into rest.” In this sentiment, Crowley was approaching the viewpoint of Theravada Buddhism, the path now being pursued by his friend Allen Bennett in Ceylon. Within a year, Crowley would join Bennett in Ceylon, where this similarity of outlook would be intensified.
In Mexico City, Crowley rented a portion of a house overlooking the Alameda, a park in which prostitution was rife. The year before, in Paris, Crowley had fallen in love with Susan Strong, who had portrayed Venus in Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Now the erotic lure of the Tannhäuser legend again arose. As Crowley wrote: “One afternoon, in Mexico, I picked up a woman who attracted me by the insatiable intensity of passion that blazed from her evil inscrutable eyes and tortured her worn face into a whirlpool of seductive sin.” He returned with her to a slum dwelling where they had sex for some hours and then parted. Afterwards, he found himself quite unsatiated—even to the point of “delirium.” Upon returning to his rooms, Crowley promptly devoted himself for sixty-seven consecutive hours—without so much as taking a meal—to the composition of Tannhäuser, a “poetical and magical” drama which Crowley adjudged “the climax of the first period of my poetry.” Such was the capacity of sex laced exquisitely with sin to exhilarate Crowley. The torment of Tannhäuser is temptation of the flesh. Venus is a “serpent-woman.” Her sexuality is the purging fire through which Tannhäuser must pass to attain spiritual resurrection.
In Act IV, there is a scene in which Tannhäuser seems to merge with Crowley pursuing sex in the slums of Mexico:
Mine was, by weariness of blood and brain,
More bitter fruit of pain
Sought in the darkness of a harlot’s bed,
To make me as one dead:
To loose the girders of the soul, and gain
Breathing and life for the Intelligible;
Find death, yet find it living. Deep as Hell
I plunged the soul; by all blind Heaven unbound
The spirit, freed, pierced through the maze profound,
And knew Itself, an eagle for a dove.
Crowley privately published Tannhäuser in 1902 with a “Preface” that stressed the element of self-portraiture. He dreamed it a study in “the morbid psychology of the Adept” and avowed that it had “been written in the blood of slain faith and hope.”
Alone in Mexico, Crowley continued his magical studies. The latter months of 1900 were the first time that Crowley explored in isolation the realms of magical ritual. Isolation of at least a relative order would henceforth be a requisite condition for Crowley to do his best magical work. It heightened both his sense of freedom and his level of concentration; when the isolation took place in a distant foreign land, there was the further enhancement of the removal of the Anglo-Saxon world and its unfortunate associations. Most important, isolation served to confirm Crowley as the master of his own magical universe, himself capable of adjudging the degree of attainment his efforts had won him. Thus he accorded himself, on the basis of his work in Mexico and utterly upon his own authority, the exalted 6°=5□ magical grade of Adeptus Major—no mean step for one who had been a mere Neophyte rescued from the darkness two years previously. The Adeptus Major grade was just below the 7°=4□ Adeptus Exemptus grade habited by Mathers himself.
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