Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  His growing sense of independence showed itself also in the founding of a new magical society. According to Crowley, Mathers had bestowed upon him a “certain amount of latitude” to initiate into the Golden Dawn suitable new candidates whom he might encounter on his travels. This “latitude” was expanded by Crowley into the creation of the Lamp of the Invisible Light (L.I.L.), which appears to have had at most two members. The first was Crowley himself. The second was an elder personage, possibly apocryphal, named Don Jesus Medina, whom Crowley grandly described as “a descendant of the great duke of Armada fame, and one of the highest chiefs of Scottish rite free-masonry.” Having initiated this elder into the L.I.L., Crowley in turn received from the good Don Jesus accelerated Masonic initiation to the 33°, the highest degree of the Scottish Rite. It is noteworthy that Crowley’s claim was to the teachings of the loosely defined Scottish Rite and not those of the accepted body of “regular” Freemasonry in England—the United Grand Lodge, with its dominant presence in the aristocratic circles of London. Given his sorry reputation, it is doubtful that Crowley could have persuaded any “regular” lodge in his native land to initiate him into even the first degree.

  Don Jesus Medina vanished shortly thereafter, and the L.I.L. was abandoned by Crowley. But his researches continued apace. Himself both the subject and object of his experimentations, Crowley pursued two distinctly practical capabilities: the power of rendering oneself invisible, and the power of transforming at will the tendencies of one’s mundane consciousness. As to the former, Crowley attested that: “I reached a point where my physical reflection in a mirror became faint and flickering. It gave very much the effect of the interrupted images of the cinematograph in its early days.” This much represents Crowley’s own perceptions of himself. But he went on to claim an effect of invisibility upon others, based upon the psychological—not magical—theory that “the real secret of invisibility is not concerned with the laws of optics at all; the trick is to prevent people noticing you when they would normally do so. In this I was quite successful. For example, I was able to take a walk in the street in a golden crown and a scarlet robe without attracting attention.” We have only Crowley’s dubious account of this regal walk. In any event, he would retain a belief in his power of invisibility.

  Crowley’s experiments in the transformation of mundane or day-to-day consciousness constitute a more original contribution to the magical repertoire. These experiments were refined in a later essay, Liber Jugorum (1910), which may be translated as the Book of the Yoke. (Note that Liber Jugorum is only three pages long; Crowley would come to utilize Liber as a formal designation for his magical and mystical—as opposed to literary and personal—writings. These Libri are, without exception, written in the adjuring style of the King James Bible prophets.) Crowley credited the initial idea behind Liber Jugorum to Robert Louis Stevenson, whose famous novella The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde had posed the possibility of two watertight personae within a single human psyche. Crowley drew from this a design for a magical experiment to demonstrate that one’s daily persona is altogether secondary and arbitrary—an assemblage of tastes and opinions that one could alter at will, without affecting the essential consciousness within. His procedure in Mexico was as follows: When he wore a certain jeweled ornament over his heart (symbolic of his status as a member of the Second Order of the Golden Dawn), he would attempt to think no thought that did not pertain to his magical progress; when, on the contrary, he removed the ornament, he would seek to become “utterly uninitiate.” The mind was thus trained to control speech, action, and thought, so that the dictates of one’s higher will could govern daily life. Liber Jugorum was destined to contribute to Crowley’s ill-repute because of the discipline it recommended. On each occasion when one’s speech, action, or thought strayed from the vowed course, one was to “cut thyself sharply upon the wrist or forearm with a razor; even as though shouldst beat a disobedient dog.[ … ] Thine arm then serveth thee both for a warning and for a record.” For those unsympathetic to Crowley’s magical philosophy, the sight of such willful scarification on the arms of future students (a small number, in practice) was repellant in the extreme.

  Wonders and mysteries were plentiful in his practice of this time. But magic had failed to uproot his sense of sin, with its encumbent distance from godhead. As Crowley later explained, “My results were satisfactory so far as they went; but they did not aid my personal progress very much, since I had not formulated an intellectual link between the divine and human consciousness.” This failure induced in Crowley a sense of despair. The critical turning point—one that would permanently change the focus and emphasis of Crowley’s magical practice—was a visit, in January 1901, by his climbing mentor, Oscar Eckenstein.

  The ostensible purpose of Eckenstein’s journey was to join with Crowley to climb the high volcanic peaks of central Mexico. But now, at their reunion in Mexico City, a new Eckenstein stepped forward—a mentor on spiritual matters who told Crowley frankly that his magical efforts were flawed because he had not yet undergone a fundamental training in the control of the powers of his mind. In the previous chapter, it was argued that Eckenstein may have achieved some knowledge and training in Sufi techniques. His instructions and advice to Crowley at this time further bear out this hypothesis. Here is Crowley’s diary account—in ornate Biblical style, so as to signify its spiritual importance:

  Now, the year being yet young, one Oscar Eckenstein came unto me, & spake.

  And he spake not any more (as had been his wont) in guise of a skeptick and indifferent man: but indeed with the very voice & power of a Great Guru or of one definitely sent from such a Brother of the Great White Lodge.[ … ]

  Under his direction, therefore, I began to apply myself unto the practice of Raj-yoga[,] at the same time avoiding all, even the smallest, consideration of things occult, as also he bade me.

  “Raj-yoga”—or raja yoga, as it is more commonly transliterated—is the most ancient known form of yogic practice, focusing upon control of the mind as a means to bring about spiritual transformation in the practitioner. The exercises suggested by Eckenstein began with the inner visualization of relatively simple objects and figures. Then came exercises for the envisioning of particular persons by means of superimposing a larger image of the person over a smaller version; this exercise offered the further benefit of heightened insights into the character of the person in question. Crowley’s progress heartened him. On February 22, 1901, in Guadalajara, he inscribed a fervent prayer in his diary asking that the “Peace of God” and “Christ Jesus our Lord” guide him to the “Higher” and the “Light.”

  During March 1901, Crowley also traveled with Eckenstein to various Mexican mountain ranges. The two men were intent on preparing themselves for an expedition to the Himalayas. Eckenstein, a veteran of Himalayan treks, was convinced that the setting of Mexico could offer to the younger Crowley two critical elements beyond his Alpine experiences: higher peaks, and the practical challenges of obtaining equipment and other necessities in a non-European, impoverished culture. This same spring of 1901, the two men formulated concrete goals for their proposed Himalayan expedition. Crowley’s diary confirms that their intent was to climb a “mountain higher than any climbed previously.” Their specific choice of Chogo Ri (designated K2 on the India Survey map) was, at 28,250 feet, the second highest peak in the world, and one which had defied the few European expeditions mounted against it in the late nineteenth century. The two men worked out a long and detailed agreement that established Eckenstein as leader and set stringent conditions for the conduct of the proposed expedition. For example, not a single supply item was to be purchased without Eckenstein’s express consent; there would be no interference with the prejudices and beliefs of “native” persons who might be encountered either as indigenous residents or hired as guides and porters; and there was to be nothing to do with women if possibly avoidable.

  In March and April, Crowley and Eckenstei
n completed a series of impressive Mexican climbs. Their first conquest was the beautiful peak of Iztaccihuatl in central Mexico. On the sides of Iztaccihuatl, the two friends made camp at 14,000 feet for some three weeks and climbed the mountain from all sides. Other peaks scaled by the pair included Colima, Nevado, Toluca, and Popocatapetl. Only the Volcan, in the same Colima district as Nevado and Toluca, frustrated the climbers, due to the fact that the Volcan was indeed a still active volcano capable of spewing ash that burned holes in their clothes and heated the rock surface so as to threaten to burn their boot soles as well.

  Shortly after the assault on Popocatapetl, Crowley and Eckenstein parted company. Their Himalayan plans were still provisional. For now, Eckenstein would return to England while Crowley continued what would amount to a Grand Tour—a circumnavigation of the globe, which would include as its keynote a visit to his magical mentor, Allan Bennett, now studying yoga in Ceylon. On April 20, Crowley set out on a northward course for San Francisco, where he planned to embark by ship for the Orient. His first stop in America was El Paso, which struck him as embodying the “coarse and brutal barbarism of Texas.” Crowley pressed on to San Francisco, where he found the Chinatown district to his liking, spending most of the week of his stay burning joss sticks in the Buddhist temple and observing the Chinese community with fascination. It was to the East that Crowley’s thoughts were turned, and on May 3 he embarked on the Nippon Maru for Hawaii, where he planned to indulge himself in the pleasures of beach life before pushing on to the Orient. He arrived on the main island on May 9 and promptly suffered a jolt to his well-laid plans by falling passionately in love. The married woman’s name was Mary Beaton, an American in her mid-thirties, traveling with her teenage son; her lawyer husband had remained at work on the mainland. She and Crowley met at their hotel in Honolulu and Crowley was at once fascinated by her “imperial” beauty. Crowley’s early courtship of her was chaste, though their passion simmered; he convinced Mary—whom he took to calling Alice, as she preferred that name—to accompany him (with son in tow) on the America Maru to Japan.

  On shipboard, the passion between them kindled into a full-blown affair. At the time, Crowley regarded it as the greatest love of his life. To his friend Gerald Kelly in England, Crowley wrote: “On the boat we fell to fucking of course, but—here’s the miracle—we won through and fought our way back to chastity in far deeper truer love.” In this letter, Crowley avowed that Alice’s sweet influence had saved his soul—his lust had been transmuted into the ecstasy of composing fifty sonnets, one for each day of their brief affair (for they had parted after their arrival at Yokohama, with Alice resolved to return to her husband). Love and poetry had now taken up his mind, as opposed to occultism. Crowley stressed to his friend: “You will not recognize my mind when I come back.”

  The difference in tone between this contemporary letter and the Crowley of the Confessions is telling—typical of the gloss that the Beast laid over his younger, less fearsome self. Some twenty years later, Alice is reduced to a kind of nonentity who served well for poetic inspiration precisely because she was “herself worthless from the point of view of the poet.” The later Crowley expressed contempt for Alice for failing to give all for love and instead returning to her husband. At the same time, he insisted that his own nature precluded his ever reciprocating in kind:

  I had intoxicated myself utterly with Alice; I had invested her with all the insignia that my imagination could invent. Yet, loving her with all my heart and soul, she had not seduced me from my service.[ … ] I have loved many women and been loved. But I have never wavered from my Work; and always a moment has come when the woman had to choose between comradeship and catastrophe. For in truth there was no Aleister Crowley to love; there was only a Word for the utterance of which a human form had been fashioned.

  Alice: An Adultery—published by Crowley in 1903—stresses neither chastity nor passion but rather the sinful context of the affair. The thematic progress of the sonnets is predictable and tedious, akin to a gothic romance novel. The dichotomy of lust (“the stain”) and pure love shows the lingering Christian outlook. There are, however, occasional moments of original wit, as in the account of the parting on the fiftieth day:

  So the last kiss passed like a poison-pain,

  Knowing we might not ever kiss again.

  Mad tears fell fast: “Next year!” in cruel distress

  We sobbed, and stretched our arms out, and despaired,

  And—parted. Out the brute-side of truth flared;

  “Thank God I’ve finished with that foolishness!”

  Just at this time, back in England, Crowley began to receive favorable reviews for a verse collection entitled The Soul of Osiris (1901). No less a critic than G. K. Chesterton, the most gifted Christian apologist of his age, offered measured praise in the Daily News. But Chesterton as well took issue with mystical elements in Crowley’s verse, declaring that “the poets of Mr. Crowley’s school”—by whom Chesterton presumably meant those Decadents for whom alternative forms of spirituality held an allure—“have, among all their merits, some genuine intellectual dangers from this tendency to import religions, this free trade in gods.[ … ] If Mr. Crowley and the new mystics think for one moment that [ … ] a broken temple of Osiris is more supernatural than a Baptist chapel in Brixton, then they are sectarians, and only sectarians of no more value to humanity than those who think that the English soil is the only soil worth defending [ … ] But Mr. Crowley is a strong and genuine poet, and we have little doubt that he will work up from his appreciation of the Temple of Osiris to that loftier and wider work of the human imagination, the appreciation of the Brixton chapel.” Crowley, when he later read and replied in print to this review, mocked Chesterton’s defense of the prosaic Brixton district of London. But there is evidence that Chesterton’s argument stuck in Crowley. Nearly two decades later, in the Confessions, Crowley conceded that he had, in this period, wandered in search of a truth he could not place: “I had got to learn that all roads lead to Rome [ … ] and that the Himalayan Brotherhood is to be found in Brixton.”

  After Mary Beaton deserted him in Japan, Crowley found himself suddenly alone, freed alike from love and from foolishness, but subject still to sudden and vehement impulse. His admiration for the Buddhist outlook, fostered through his friendship with Bennett, was now intensified by a sublime spirit of place. He even sought admission to certain of the local Buddhist monasteries, but was turned away. At the time, this must have been a severe blow to his confidence. But the elder Crowley claimed to find an ultimate triumph in this seeming rejection:

  The Inmost knew that my destiny lay elsewhere. The Lords of Initiation cared nothing for my poetic fancies and my romantic ideals. They had ordained that I should pass through every kind of hardship at the hands of nature, suffer all sorrow and shame that life can inflict. Their messenger [Crowley the future prophet] must be tested by every ordeal—not by those that he himself might choose.[ … ] I turned then sadly from Daibatsu, as I had turned from love, ambition and ease, my spirit silently acquiescing in the arcane arbitrament of the mysterious daimon who drove me darkly onward; how I knew not, whither I knew not, but only this, that he was irresistable as inscrutable, yet no less trustworthy than titanic.

  Crowley’s stay in Japan was relatively short. He found the Japanese people little to his liking, for the reason—it would seem—that their alleged character reminded him unpleasantly of defects in his own: “Their aristocracy was somehow at odds with mine. I resented their racial arrogance.”

  As he again took ship—this time to sail on to Bennett in Ceylon—Crowley was in a mental state he seldom admitted to: “not only contrite but confused.” In an August 1 diary entry, Crowley recorded the bleak skepticism that beset him: “I exist not: there is no God: no place: no time: wherefore I exactly particularize and specify these things.” En route to Ceylon, Crowley made a brief stop in Hong Kong to meet with Elaine Simpson, his fellow Golden Dawn initiate, to whom, by hi
s account, he had paid astral visits while in Mexico. Their reunion in the flesh was far less satisfactory. Simpson was now tepidly married to a wealthy English colonial and having affairs on the side. Worst of all, she had abandoned magic for social ambition and committed the desecration of wearing her Golden Dawn robes and regalia to a fancy dress ball—and winning first prize! The affair was not renewed. Crowley pushed on in his voyage, little savoring the intervening ports of call.

  At last, on August 6, he disembarked in the Ceylonese port of Colombo. The following day came the reunion with Bennett, whose health had improved away from the British climate, though he was far from robust. He was serving as tutor to the younger sons of P. Ramanathan, a high-caste Tamil who was the Solicitor-General of Ceylon. Ramanathan was a Shaivite Hindu, that is, one who worshiped the god Shiva, the embodiment of the great cyclical powers of procreation and destruction. As part of his Shaivite beliefs, Ramanathan practiced yoga and served as Bennett’s teacher in this area. Ramanathan wrote a book during this period, published under his Shaivite holy name of Sri Parananda and titled An Eastern Exposition of the Gospel of Jesus according to St. John (1902), in which he argued that the teachings of Christ could be understood as instructions in yoga. Crowley found Ramanathan a man of “profound religious knowledge” and joined Bennett as Ramanathan’s pupil for a short time.

  But before Crowley could focus on yoga in earnest, there was the question of Mathers to address. Was he indeed a credible spiritual teacher? Crowley put the following tale by Mathers (as filtered through Crowley) to Bennett and asked that it be verified: Some years before, there had been an argument over metaphysics between Mathers and Bennett. The magical result of their disagreement was to create, in the room in which they sat, the spirit of the Dyad, or the illusion that the universe was ultimately other than One. This troubled state enabled Abra-Melin demons, who had vexed Mathers during his translation of the Abra-Melin text, to take the material forms of Mathers and Bennett respectively. Each of these demons found its way to a pistol (which Mathers, a military buff, had on hand) and threatened to shoot the other. Catastrophe was averted when Mathers’s wife, Moina, came into the room and thus transformed the Dyad into a harmonious Trinity.