Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  Even as he awaited Chogo Ri, Crowley continued his philosophical self-examinations. In India, on March 20 and 21, Crowley composed “Berashith” (Hebrew for ‘in the beginning’; the first word of Genesis), an essay he would publish privately in Paris in 1903. In the Paris edition, the author is given as “Abhavananda”—Crowley’s chosen Hindu name during his yogic tutelage under Bennett—and its intended audience is “the Sangha [Buddhist community] of the West.” Included is a discussion of ceremonial magic in which—in sharp contrast to his later writings—magic is viewed as a mere preparatory training for yoga—that is, “a magnificent gymnasium for those who are not already finished mental athletes.[ … ] When a man has evoked and mastered such forces as Taphtatharath, Belial, Amaimon, and the great powers of the elements, then he may safely be permitted to begin to try to stop thinking.”

  It had been a year since Eckenstein had introduced him to the techniques of raja yoga in Mexico. It must have been with a sense both of pride and affection that Crowley again greeted his friend in Delhi on March 23, 1902. Eckenstein, as leader, had assembled a core team of four climbers in addition to Crowley and himself. This team Crowley would now meet. He came to dislike most of them intensely, and with none—including Eckenstein—would his relations remain smooth. But together, they would mount an expedition that contemporary historians of Himalayan mountaineering have come to see as remarkable in achievement.

  * * *

  At the time of the Eckenstein-Crowley expedition, the very existence of K2 had been known to Europeans for less than sixty years. It was in 1856 that the British Captain T. G. Montgomerie sighted—from a survey point 137 miles removed—a cluster of peaks in the Karakoram Range that lies just to the east of the Hindu Kush. The sequential numerical entry of peaks in Montgomerie’s logbook accounts for the drab name “K2.” Amongst the native Baltis, K2 was known as “Chogo Ri” (“giant peak”). It is vital to understand, when considering the difficulties of the Eckenstein-Crowley expedition, that K2 is a far more isolated mountain than most, even in the Himalayas. Everest, by contrast, has relatively neighboring villages. But the closest village to K2, Askole, is a ten-day march away over rugged glacial terrain. Supplying a full-scale expedition to K2 was, and remains, a logistical nightmare.

  Small-minded personality disputes can wreak havoc on grand Himalayan explorations, and it was just such a dispute that nearly brought the Eckenstein-Crowley expedition to an end before it had fairly begun. The two hostile parties were Eckenstein and Sir Martin Conway, who in this same year of 1902 had just been named the president of the British Alpine Club. Eckenstein and Conway had a history of ill will that was intimately connected with K2. Ten years earlier, in 1892, Eckenstein had been a member of an expedition, headed by Conway, that would be the first to explore the Upper Baltoro Glacier, which extends southeast of K2. But Eckenstein did not accompany Conway as far as the Upper Baltoro. According to Eckenstein, it was friction between himself and Conway that led him to withdraw; according to Conway, his decision to ask Eckenstein to leave was based on the latter’s having become physically unwell. In private, Conway accused Eckenstein—the specifics are unknown—of having attempted to poison him. Eckenstein returned to England after having served six months under Conway in the Karakoram Range, and without ever having obtained Conway’s necessary permission to undertake a major climb. Shortly thereafter, on the Upper Baltoro, Conway made the ascents that were to win him knighthood. Amongst these was Pioneer Peak, at 22,600 feet, then a world record. Conway returned to England, published a book on the expedition in which his exploits were humbly but firmly set forth, and became a national hero.

  Eckenstein had waited ten years for his return to the Baltoro Glacier. In Crowley’s view, there were behind-the-scenes machinations by Conway intended to frustrate Eckenstein at every step. Definite proof here is lacking, but Crowley’s charge becomes plausible as one sifts through the evidence. First, Eckenstein found it difficult to convince experienced English climbers—most of whom were Alpine Club members—to join him. Only one Englishman did so—Guy Knowles, twenty-two, just out of Trinity College, Cambridge. Knowles would later agree with Crowley’s claim that Conway opposed the expedition, an agreement all the more significant in that Knowles—for reasons we shall soon come to—fairly detested Crowley. The three remaining members of the core team were all continental Europeans with Alpine climbing backgrounds. There were two Austrians, both age thirty-one: H. Pfannl and V. Wesseley. From Switzerland came the physician for the expedition, J. Jacot Guillarmod, age thirty-three. It was a disunified group, with only Eckenstein possessing first-hand experience of the Himalayas.

  All the more devastating then, was the seizure of Eckenstein by the Indian authorities. On March 30, in Tret, the deputy commissioner of Rawalpindi arrived to inform Eckenstein that, though not under arrest for any formal charge, he would be detained and compelled to return to Rawalpindi, there to attempt to take up the matter with higher authorities. The timing here was critical. For only in the spring, before the onset of the monsoon season, and in the fall, before the onset of the icelocked winters, are Himalayan climbs practicable. Eckenstein’s detainment would mean insupportable months of delay. Eckenstein placed Crowley in command with instructions to lead the team into Kashmir, where Eckenstein would rejoin it when he could. He did so after some two weeks of delay that ended when, after “waylaying one great man” (the phrase is that of the Friend of India, which reported on Eckenstein’s plight) “in the mail train on his way from Calcutta to Simla,” Eckenstein gained the requisite visa to proceed. The “great man” was Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India. In the view of both Crowley and Knowles, Conway had prevailed on Curzon to block Eckenstein, whose threats to tell all to the press at last caused Curzon to relent.

  During Eckenstein’s detention, Crowley had led the expedition on to Srinigar, the capital of Kashmir. Trouble had arisen with the horse-drawn ekka cart drivers, and Crowley was called on to quell the dispute. By his account, the drivers had begun to lag unnecessarily, so as to collect more days of pay—under ten cents a day, a not unusual wage for the region. It was for the sake of dignity, not money, that Crowley felt forced to act: “Had I failed to understand the psychology of the ekka driver, we should have been nagged to death by pin-pricks.[ … ] [The traveler] has to be uniformly calm, cheerful, just, perspicacious, indulgent and inexorable. He must decline to be swindled out of a farthing. If he once gives way, he is done for.” There is present here a colonialist bias that at times verged into outright racism. Crowley was, at least, more frank than most Englishmen of his age. As he later wrote: “England is losing India by consenting to admit the existence of the conquered races; by consenting to argue; by trying to find a value for incommesurables. Indian civilization is far superior to our own and to enter into open competition is to invoke defeat. We won India by matching our irrational, bigoted, brutal manhood against their etiolated culture.” (Crowley’s own “brutal manhood” included a vehement distaste for the notion of Indian men making love with English women.) In the case of the leader of the drivers, Crowley’s strategy was to remain impassive through the day, and then—once arrived in camp—to grab him suddenly by the beard (a blood insult by Muslim custom) and beat him with a belt: “The result was that I never had the slightest difficulties with natives in India ever afterwards and was able to practice perfect tolerance of genuine accidents. I had forced them to respect us, which, with an Indian, is the first step to acquiring his love.”

  Eckenstein rejoined the expedition on April 22. By late May, they had reached Askole, the last village before K2. Here they spent ten days gathering final supplies. So efficient had been their progress that they were two weeks ahead of their own schedule. In Askole, Eckenstein and Crowley had their first serious quarrel. As the expedition was about to cross the Baltoro Glacier, Eckenstein decreed that the baggage of individual team members not exceed forty pounds. But Crowley surpassed this limit due to his insistence on taking along editions of his favo
rite English poets, including Milton and Shelley, which had been specially bound in vellum so as to better withstand the elements. Eckenstein railed, but Crowley refused to give way, threatening to leave the expedition if his books were disallowed. It was Crowley’s belief that this reading matter aided him in maintaining “perfect mental balance” during the difficult weeks to come.

  En route to the Baltoro, Crowley once more intervened decisively in the affairs of his porters. This time there came a more sanguine judgment, one that reveals the best of the man. One of the Pathan overseers had been bullying one of the Kashmiri porters and went so far as to make a claim to have somehow won the Kashmiri’s old torn coat. What made this claim egregious was that the expedition had provided the Pathans with fine new coats for the journey. Crowley was called on to judge the claim, and in Solomonic fashion ruled that while the Kashmiri’s old coat had been fairly won by the Pathan, the Pathan’s coat belonged to Crowley himself, who would now take it and—to the delight of the assembled crowd—give it to the Kashmiri.

  From this point, the physical conditions became more challenging. Several days of difficult marches over the Baltoro led to the establishment of numerically designated base camps. On June 16, Crowley—leading an advance group of Balti porters—created Camp 8 (16,592 feet) within view of K2. He moved on to establish Camp 9 (17,332 feet) directly beneath the south face of K2, and then ascended to Camp 10 (18,733 feet)—but only after carefully training the Balti porters in the use of climbing ropes and scraped-out ice steps. At this point, Crowley decided that the final ascent could be made along what is now called the Abruzzi Ridge.

  Crowley had paid a price for progressing so far, as would all members of the expedition. An extreme alteration of temperature between night and day—and even between sun and shade—made it possible, as one marched along in one’s winter dress and gear, to burn from the extreme (in high altitudes) sun on one side of one’s face and body and to suffer from extreme cold on the other. On June 29, due to prolonged exposure to the glaring whiteness, Crowley went snow-blind, a temporary but terribly painful condition—like “having red hot sand at the back of one’s eyes.”

  Crowley’s choice of the Camp 10 site was not seconded by his team members upon their arrival. A snowstorm that endured for five days—from July 2 to July 6—made the Camp 10 exposure seem ill-advised. But there was a further challenge to Crowley’s judgment which he resented still more. Pfannl and Wesseley had gone on to establish a Camp 11 (roughly 20,000 feet) and argued that an ascent up the northeast ridge of K2 from that camp would be preferable to Crowley’s proposed route from Camp 10. By vote on July 7, Crowley was overruled. It is impossible, in retrospect, to properly judge the respective merits of the two routes. The eminent mountaineer and author Galen Rowell did note—in his generally admiring account of the Eckenstein-Crowley expedition—that Crowley had fallen victim to a mistaken sense of scale, in the face of the Himalayan vastness, by imagining that a mere two days would suffice for a K2 ascent from Camp 10. But Crowley’s firm belief that the alternate route was folly, coupled with the terrible weather, led to his conviction, as July wore on, that “the expedition had failed in its main objective, and I was not in the least interested in killing myself gradually against my judgment.”

  The worn nerves of the team members, each of whom faced a similar dawning sense of failure, began to show. The sheer physical strain made this all but inevitable. They suffered from cold, lack of exercise (due to cramped tent life during the repeated snowstorms), a limited diet, and the practical difficulties of maintaining a cooking fire, or even smoking pipes, at such high altitudes. Crowley, along with the others, suffered from severe indigestion and weight loss, as well as bouts of malarial fever. At one point, Crowley—while feverish—came for some reason to feel threatened by Knowles and pulled his Colt revolver on him. Knowles, who was well at the time, forcibly disarmed Crowley. This inglorious episode, to which Knowles subsequently attested—indeed, he displayed the captured Colt in his home to the end of his life—does not appear in the Confessions, in which the breakdowns of other team members are carefully accounted.

  In the case of an illness that afflicted Pfannl, Crowley showed himself to be—despite his contempt for his patient—a remarkable amateur diagnostician. Pfannl and Wesseley had gone off by themselves to establish a Camp 12 (roughly 21,000 feet). At this height, in mid-July, Pfannl’s health broke down, with fluid beginning to fill his lungs. He was brought back down to Camp 11, where Crowley concluded that he suffered not from a pathogen-related pneumonia—the usual diagnosis for lung fluids—but from pulmonary edema. This latter condition—it is now known—occurs spontaneously at high altitudes. Pfannl was treated for his pain with morphine and then, with Wesseley, sent back down the mountain by sledge. He lived. As Roswell later observed: “Many climbers died because the drugs used against pneumonia did absolutely nothing for pulmonary edema. By chance, Crowley’s group did exactly the right thing by removing Pfannl immediately to lower elevation. The isolation of edema from pneumonia in Crowley’s account was long before its time and one of the earliest ever recorded.”

  The brutal wear and tear of extended encampment at high altitudes led Crowley to another medical realization that—while disputed in his day—has since become accepted. Physiologists are now in agreement that, in altitudes over 17,000–19,000 feet, and varying to some extent with the individual, the human body is subject to constant deterioration. But the common wisdom at the time of the Eckenstein-Crowley expedition—and for some decades after—was that climbers could, with time and practice, “acclimate” to the very highest mountain altitudes. For Crowley, this notion was absurd. “The only thing you can do is to lay in a stock of energy, get rid of all your fat at the exact moment when you have a chance to climb a mountain, and jump back out of its reach, so to speak, before it can take its revenge. To talk of acclimatization is to adopt the psychology of the man who trained his horse gradually to live on a single straw a day, and would have revolutionized our system of nutrition, if the balky brute had not been aggravating enough to die on his hands.” Crowley would wrest for himself a dour world record from the hardships of the Baltoro—sixty-eight straight days of glacial life, two more than any other member of the party due to his having served as an advance scout. “I hope I may be allowed to die in peace with it. It would be a sorry ambition in anyone to grasp my laurels and I can assure him that to refrain will bring its own reward.”

  Eckenstein was one of those who believed in the possibility of acclimatization, but even he had to recognize that the team could hold out only so long. A July 27 letter by Eckenstein to a climbing friend in England—which came, ironically, to be published as a news note in the Alpine Club Journal—sounded the surrender: “Never anywhere in the world have I experienced such bad weather.[ … ] Our prospects of ascending a high mountain, or any mountain, are consequently practically nil on this occasion. We expect quite difficulty enough—unless material improvement in the weather ensues—in forcing our way down.” As it happened, the descent, begun in early August, was not a particularly difficult one, though the mood of the team members was sullen. At the village of Skardu came the joy of abundant food. Crowley rhapsodized: “There we found fresh ripe grapes, potatoes and green corn. Our joy was unconfined; youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm!” The remainder of the journey was an anticlimax. On September 6 they arrived once more in Srinigar.

  * * *

  A lassitude overcame Crowley at this point. Magic and yoga had palled and Buddhism now seemed a mere philosophical puzzle. As for his status as a climber, the expedition had made its mark as a first attempt, even if it had not conquered K2. But the disregard for Eckenstein and Crowley within Alpine Club circles led to minimal recognition in England. When, for example, Sir Francis Younghusband wrote a history of attempts on Himalayan peaks, he devoted one sentence to the Eckenstein-Crowley expedition, in which he pointedly avoided mention of either: “The Swiss, Dr. Jacot Guillarmod, explored in th
e same region.”

  Crowley’s travels in the next two months were guided only by the goal of eventual arrival in Paris, where Gerald Kelly now lived and where Mathers could be faced anew. On October 4, he voyaged from India on the S.S. Egypt—first to Aden and then, on October 4, to Cairo, where he disembarked and for some weeks led a life of luxury coupled with a careful observation of native Islamic ways. But a meeting with Mathers remained the signal event on the horizon. In a letter to Kelly, there was a dark conspiratorial tone: “I have business also with the chiefs of the Order of which I have recently heard so much and seen so little. But I do not wish my presence in Paris known until the Hour of Triumph[ … ]” Once arrived in Paris, November 1902, Crowley wasted little time in seeing Mathers, but their face-to-face meetings—as to which Crowley remained uncharacteristically reticent—must have been uneasy. Crowley came away with the conviction that Mathers had stolen certain expensive luggage that Crowley claimed to have entrusted to Mathers before leaving for Mexico in June 1900. For a genuine adept to engage in such theft would, of course, have been unthinkable. Adopting Mathers’s view that the scheming Madame Horos and her husband—who had deceived Mathers three years earlier—were black magic adepts, Crowley now saw Mathers and his wife Mina as having come under their spell.

  Small wonder, then, that in early 1903 magical warfare was launched by Mathers against Crowley, and that the means employed—as testified to by Crowley—should be one favored by Madame Horos: The transformation of a woman from aged crone to youthful, vampiric succubus. In The Temple of Solomon the King, the story of Crowley’s successful resistance is told. It begins with a plea from Gerald Kelly (who would later dismiss this entire episode as an invention on Crowley’s part) to rescue a friend of his—Miss Premble, an American painter—who had fallen into the evil clutches of a much older woman, Mrs. Longworth. Crowley paid a visit to the flat of Mrs. Longworth, who transformed herself, as they spoke, from a “middle-aged woman, worn with strange lusts” into “a young woman of bewitching beauty.” It took all of Crowley’s magical powers to ward off the attempted seduction, which would have drained him of his blood, or true spiritual life.