Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  But what of the circumstances of the composition of the Book? For many, the bizarre trappings of the dictation will foster ineradicable skepticism, if not outright amusement and contempt. Especially given the current spate of “New Age” channelers-for-profit, it is justifiable to take claims of direct access to divine truth with a sizable grain of salt. At the same time, it must be conceded that the experience of receiving a text from what seems to be a source outside of oneself—whether the process be labeled “prophecy,” “dictation,” “automatic writing,” “channeling,” or something other—is one that recurs persistently throughout history, and that those who claim to have gone through this experience cannot uniformly be dismissed as mere charlatans. Two twentieth-century examples, roughly contemporary with Crowley, are C. G. Jung’s Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (1916) and William Butler Yeats’s A Vision (1925). A brief consideration of these two examples casts a useful comparative light upon Crowley and his Book.

  Jung left a careful record, in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963), of the genesis of Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead), which he put to paper in 1916. According to his friend and editor, Aniella Jaffe, Jung came to see Septum Sermones as “a sin of his youth and regretted it.” He hesitantly consented to its inclusion as an appendix to his autobiography only (as Jaffe quotes him) “for the sake of honesty.” Plainly, Jung attached nothing like the importance to Septem Sermones that Crowley did to the Book. Nonetheless, Jung believed that the Septum Sermones were the product of a decisive encounter with forms of intelligence rooted in the unconscious, yet separate from himself and capable of distinct manifestations in the external world.

  Briefly, during the period 1913–17, which included the onset of World War One, Jung was beset by inner doubts and upheavals both as to his role as a psychiatrist and as to the nature of his spiritual convictions. He began to experience both waking visions and dreams in which vivid animal and human figures—archetypal in nature, in Jung’s assessment—confronted him in so powerful a manner that he feared the onset of psychosis. In his journals, Jung privately recorded these fantasies, which constituted the preliminary writings leading to the Septum Sermones. Although his writing efforts here were conscious, Jung felt that the style of his entries was being imposed upon him. “Archetypes speak the language of high rhetoric, even of bombast. It is a style I find embarrassing; it grates on my nerves, as when someone draws his nails down a plaster wall, or scrapes his knife against a plate. But since I did not know what was going on, I had no choice but to write everything down in the style selected by the unconscious itself.”

  Amongst the figures who appeared in his dreams, one began to achieve an especial prominence. “I called him Philemon. Philemon was a pagan and brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration.” Through repeated encounters with Philemon and other dream figures, Jung came to “the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” Nor was Philemon entirely a sympathetic figure. But Jung found himself compelled to recognize this intelligence as higher than his own, even in his own field of specialization: “Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru.” By 1916, the need to come to terms with this guru-figure had become pressing. “I was compelled from within, as it were, to formulate and express what might have been said by Philemon. This was how the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos with its peculiar language came into being.”

  Let us turn now to our second example, William Butler Yeats and A Vision. In Chapter Two, the hostile relations between Crowley and Yeats during their time in the Golden Dawn were discussed, as well as their essential unity in the importance they placed upon magic. The circumstances surrounding the composition of A Vision, which reflect this latter viewpoint, have caused marked discomfiture amongst certain Yeats scholars. Yeats gave a brief but striking account in his introduction to the work. In October 1917, just days after his marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees, Yeats was surprised to find that his wife was “attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half-dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences. ‘No,’ was the answer, ‘we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.’” The ultimate result of the process, in Yeats’s own assessment, was that his poetry had “gained in self-possession and power.”

  The “we” speaking to Yeats were several unknown teachers—whom he termed “communicators”—as to whose origin, nature or abode he never came to a fixed opinion. Yeats did draw an analogy to the legendary function of the Muses in poetic composition. For those who decried the spiritualist tone of A Vision, Yeats offered this elliptic, yet defiant, defense of the full exploration of consciousness: “But Muses resemble women who creep out at night and give themselves to unknown sailors and return to talk of Chinese porcelain—porcelain is best made, a Japanese critic has said, where the conditions of life are hard—or of the Ninth Symphony—virginity renews itself like the moon—except that the Muses sometimes form in those low haunts their most lasting attachments.” The role of the Muse outlined here by Yeats bears a limited symbolic resemblance to the Scarlet Woman of Crowley. Yeats was no advocate of sexual magic. But he did see the interplay of masculine and feminine as a key to imaginative realization, and he did recognize that the alleged purity of Christian society masked the realities of that interplay.

  Unlike Crowley, who deemed Rose (Ouarda the Seer) the first of his Scarlet Women, Yeats did not identify his Muse with his wife. On the contrary, he frankly characterized her as “bored and fatigued” by the frequent communications, which came ultimately to be conveyed as she slept; as Yeats described it, “My teachers did not seem to speak out of her sleep but as if from above it, as though it were a tide upon which they floated.” The end result was the four years of transcriptions by Yeats (from 1917 to 1920), followed by the writing of a A Vision. The communicators insisted, during these four years of dictation, that Yeats not speak of the material to others or undertake an independent study of philosophy; there is a rough analogy here to the insistence of Aiwass that Crowley not change a letter of the Book. When the dictation finally ended in 1920, Yeats possessed over fifty notebooks’ worth of automatic script. The first version of A Vision was published in 1925, but it dissatisfied Yeats, who renewed his studies in philosophy—as well as his contacts with the communicators—and later issued a revised edition.

  A Vision is an exceptionally challenging work, and an adequate summary of its full contents is beyond the scope of the present discussion. But there are parallels to The Book of the Law that are suggestive and instructive. Like Crowley, Yeats was a believer in a sequential progression of spiritual eras or aeons that governed human consciousness. Unlikely Crowley, whose sense of this progression was forward and ultimately indeterminate, Yeats conceived of a cyclical vision of the universe—“the Great Year,” as he called it—that had its historical roots in ancient Near Eastern and Greek thought. For Yeats, the Great Year included oscillating shorter eras of roughly two thousand years in length—Yeats’s designations for these eras were “primary” and “antithetical.” The most recent “primary dispensation” was that of Jesus Christ. The “antithetical influx” that Yeats felt to be arising in his own lifetime was that of the “Rough Beast,” a “supernatural incarnation” that Yeats believed would make its presence felt through an upheaval of the Christian epoch. What is most remarkable, for present purposes, is the extent to which Yeats and Crowley—for all their personal and magical differences—concurred in their descriptions of the re
spective epochs. Here is Yeats in A Vision:

  A primary dispensation [Christianity] looking beyond itself towards a transcendent power is dogmatic, levelling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace its means and end; an antithetical dispensation [that of the Rough Beast] obeys imminent power, is expressive, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical.[ … ]

  Somewhere in the sands of the desert

  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

  The closing quotation, of course, is from Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming.” The possible relationship of the fearsome beast of this poem to Crowley (as speculated upon by critic Kathleen Raine) was discussed in Chapter Two. But there is no definite evidence that Yeats had Crowley in mind, and it is noteworthy that Yeats saw the “complete systematization” of the era of the Rough Beast as a phenomenon yet to come, rather than as the fait accompli of Crowley’s Book.

  Yeats made no claims to be a prophet. But there was a shared insight between Crowley and Yeats that a hallmark of the modern age was the pitched yearning for a new revelation. As Yeats argued: “Why should we believe that religion can never bring around its antithesis? Is it true that our air is disturbed, as Mallarme said, by ‘the trembling of the veil of the Temple’, or ‘that our whole age is seeking to bring forth a sacred book’?”

  Crowley was convinced that he had brought forth just such a book.

  It is not the intention here to strain for flawless and overarching parallels between the received books of Jung, Yeats, and Crowley. Indeed, important distinctions between the three have already been noted. But the similarities are significant as well. The Book of the Law may readily be dismissed as the ravings of a self-deluded occultist who wished—despite his protestations—first and foremost to exalt himself. And there may well be some truth in that viewpoint. But it is not the entire truth. The experience that Crowley went through in Cairo in March and April of 1904 bears marked resemblances to those of Jung and Yeats. Human minds of great stature can sense themselves confronted by something other, remarkable, numinous—Yeats did not scruple to count his own experience a “miracle.” If the character of Crowley does not seem as savory as that of Jung or Yeats, he was no less sincere than they in his commitment to his life’s work. It strains credulity to dismiss him as a mere fraud. And if he was deluded, it was by an experience of great and subtle power that also baffled some of the most profound of his contemporaries.

  Crowley was well aware that many would see him as mad or worse. Indeed, he demanded that his Book be taken as the purest truth or the purest delusion—thus abandoning the middle ground of ‘interesting but inconclusive’ taken by Jung and Yeats. In The Equinox of the Gods, his final major attempt at an apologia, Crowley was adamant that his future readers take a definite stance:

  The reader must face the problem squarely; half-measures will not avail. If there be aught he recognize as transcendental Truth, he cannot admit the possibility that the Speaker, taking such pains to prove Himself and His Word, should yet incorporate Falsehood in the same body, and fence it about with the same elaborate engines. If the Book be but a monument of a mortal’s madness, he must tremble that such power and cunning may be the accomplices of insane and criminal arch-anarchs.

  Of course, the reader need not assent to this. The examples of Jung and Yeats indicate that Crowley’s experience was not quite so unique as he wished to believe. And the examples of literally scores of odd tracts throughout history confirm that shards of what might be seen as “transcendental Truth” may be imbedded in otherwise infirm, absurd, or pernicious viewpoints. Crowley often observed that Truth and Falsehood were mere apparent opposites within a higher Reality that included and superseded both. But in his arguments for the Book, this insight strangely fled him. No admixture of Falsehood might be permitted within its prophetic domain.

  Yet, try as he might to exclude it, Crowley may have sensed that it was there. The striking paradox of the man is that, for all his lifelong devotion to the cause of Thelema, he often allowed that he himself could not quite overcome an internal resistance to its teachings. He deemed it vicious, amoral, lamentable in its unremitting contempt for pity, crudely styled, disdainful toward his own Buddhistic leanings—these complaints continued throughout the remaining decades of his life. In The Equinox of the Gods, for example, Crowley confessed that “my own ‘conversion’ to my own ‘religion’” had not yet taken place, and further protested that he was no “fanatic partisan” of his Book. Crowley held passive skepticism of the Book in disdain; but he brandished his own tortured ambivalence:

  My sincerity and seriousness are proved by my life. I have fought this Book and fled it; I have defiled it and I have suffered for its sake. Present or absent to my mind, it has been my Invisible Ruler. It has overcome me; year after year extends its invasion of my being. I am the captive of the Crowned and Conquering Child.

  If ever Crowley uttered the truth of his relation to his Book, his teaching of Thelema, and his sense of the purpose and mission of his life, it is here.

  Henceforward, as we continue this narrative, Crowley may be taken at his word and seen as a “captive” of the Book and of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, the god of Force and Fire who had declared the imminent overthrow of the Old Aeon. But Crowley the aristocrat, Christian born and bred, was very much a child of that old Aeon. Small wonder that he felt himself a captive, that he watched so avidly for the birth signs of the New. Who has not wished for the full and final vanquishing of the past?

  * * *

  The remainder of 1904 was, necessarily, an anticlimax. Crowley and his bride, growing in her pregnancy, departed from Egypt shortly after the dictations of April. Crowley did take care, prior to leaving, to have a replica (or, as the Book put it, “abstruction”) of the Boulak stele—henceforth termed by Crowley the Stele of Revealing—made for him by a resident artist at the museum. He also had the Book manuscript typed and sent off a circular letter to fifteen of his friends—including Bennett, Eckenstein, and George Cecil Jones—declaring that a new Equinox of the Gods had come; pointedly, Mathers was also on the mailing list. Crowley’s friends may have been astonished or bemused; there is no record of responses on their part.

  Upon arrival in Paris, Crowley socialized with two members of the Chat Blanc circle of 1902–03, Clive Bell and Arnold Bennett. He seems not to have paid Mathers a personal visit to announce the New Aeon. Crowley did, however, send a “formal letter” to Mathers “informing him that the Secret Chiefs had appointed me visible head of the Order, and declared a new Magical Formula. I did not expect or receive an answer. I declared war on Mathers accordingly, but it was a brutum fulmen [unwieldy thunderbolt].” The commencement of the rather pathetic magical warfare would await Crowley’s return to Boleskine. The portrayals of Mathers’s fearsome powers offered in the Confessions and in Crowley’s novel, Moonchild (written 1917, published 1929) drew from events of this period. In the Confessions, Crowley claimed that Mathers had, by his magical attacks from Paris, killed most of the Boleskine hunting dogs and beset the servants with various illnesses. There was also an attack on the pregnant Rose by way of a workman who, by magical means, was driven “suddenly maniacal”; Crowley repulsed him with a salmon gaff.

  Together, Crowley and Rose—the Beast and his Scarlet Woman—succeeded in defeating these attacks launched from Paris. Their ironic secret weapon, as it were, was the Abra-Melin text which Mathers had translated. According to this text, the only persons capable of gaining the service of the Abra-Melin spirits are those who have persevered to the end of the six-month ritual period and won the knowledge of their Holy Guardian Angel—thereby sanctifying the employment of the spirits for proper spiritual purposes. Crowley, of course, had not completed the Abra-Melin Operation. Nonetheless, at Boleskine, he consecrated the appropriate talismans and gain
ed the service of Beelzebub, one of the Eight Sub-Princes of the Abra-Melin spirits; Beelzebub, in turn, could wield forty-nine servitor spirits. Beelzebub and those servitors were promptly constrained to serve Crowley in the magical battle. As for Rose, she fought beside her husband, participating in the evocations of spirits—how she was entitled to do so, under the terms of the Abra-Melin text, is unclear—and also, through her “powers of clairvoyance,” envisioning the servitors of Beelzebub, such as Nominon: “A large red spongy jellyfish with one greenish luminous spot. Like a nasty mess.” Small wonder Mathers’s attacks fell by the wayside.

  Crowley could now turn his magical energies to a variety of studies related to the Book. These included the creation of secret rites, evidently of a sexual nature (and related to tantric practices, such as the emulation of the prone and passive Shiva in cosmic coupling with the mounted and energetic Shakti) as to which the following diary entry pertains: “But for private work the Beast is Hadit, the Scarlet Woman Nuit, and she is above him ever. Let him never assume power! Let him ever look to her! Amen.” This was the first time that Crowley recorded an act of sexual magic with a sense of fulfillment; the repulsion that had overcome him in 1901, when he had first practiced vamacharya in Ceylon, was no more.

  If the summer of 1904 was a time of private magical labors, it was also a time of social and literary pleasures and familial joy. There were houseguests aplenty, including an aunt of Crowley, Anne Bishop, whom he prevailed upon to look after household affairs while Rose went into her final weeks of the then traditional ‘confinement.’ Gerald Kelly came for a visit, accompanied by his mother—sufficient evidence that the Kelly family’s hostility toward the marriage had been quelled. Also on hand was Ivor Back, an old friend of Crowley who was both a practicing surgeon and an enthusiast of literature; Back would serve as editor for the three volumes of Crowley’s Collected Works published by their author in 1905 (and containing nearly all of the poetry, plays and essays written up to that time, with the exclusion of the pseudonymous and erotic White Stains).