Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  It was during this summer that Crowley resolved, at last, to take greater control over the distribution of his literary works. In truth, he was left with no practical option but to do so. Since 1898, Kegan Paul had published—or more precisely, had distributed, after Crowley paid his own printing costs out of pocket—several volumes of Crowley’s verse. Crowley’s liking for the firm may have been based, at least in part, on its steadfastly laissez-faire attitude toward authors who paid their own way. As bibliographer Timothy d’Arch Smith has noted, “the printing bill footed, Kegan Paul did not much care what their authors wrote about. (The most notorious Kegan Paul author, the Revd Edwin Emmanuel Bradford, between 1908 and 1930, paid for twelve volumes of cheery but flagrantly paedophilic poetry without anyone at Kegan Paul’s turning a hair.)”

  But if Kegan Paul dwelled little over content, it did keep careful track of sales. The ledgers on Crowley’s books were uninspiring. A typical case in point was Jephthah and Other Mysteries, for which Crowley had provided eighty-two review copies to the press: Total sales to the public were a mere ten copies. Even this figure exceeded the abject zero sales for An Appeal to the American Republic (1899) and The Mother’s Tragedy (1901). Crowley must have seen that he could hardly do a worse job of marketing on his own. Such was the impetus for the founding of his own publishing imprint—the Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth, which, as d’Arch Smith points out, is “a deliberate mimicry of the two-hundred-year-old Church of England publishing firm, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.” Several volumes, including the aforementioned Collected Works, would follow in the next few years. Crowley would show great style and wit in his marketing broadsides for the S.P.R.T. volumes. Sales, however, remained nominal.

  But the signal event of the summer was not a literary one. On July 28, Rose gave birth to their first child, a daughter, whom Crowley grandly and weightily named Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith. As Crowley explained: “Nuit was given in honor to our Lady of the Stars; Ma, goddess of Justice, because the sign of Libra was rising; Ahathoor, goddess of Love and Beauty, because Venus rules Libra; I’m not sure about the name Hecate, but it may have been a compliment to the infernal gods; a poet could hardly do less than commemorate the only lady who ever wrote poetry, Sappho; Jezebel still held her place as my favorite character in Scripture; and Lilith, of course, holds undisputed possession of my affections in the realm of demons.” Three significant points emerge from all this badinage. First, the very first name of Crowley’s first daughter—Nuit—is in direct homage to the goddess of the New Aeon. Second, the second name of his daughter—Ma (or Maat), the Egyptian goddess of justice—is the goddess whom Crowley saw, pursuant to verse III, 34 of the Book, as presiding over the future Aeon that would supersede that of Nuit, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit. And third, the themes of sexuality and sacred whoredom—central to the Book—are pronouncedly present through the names of Ahathoor, Jezebel, and Lilith. In sum, the names given to his daughter are not merely whimsical or outlandish, but a plain testimony to the impact of the Book upon him. Again, one finds that, for all Crowley’s emphasis on his initial resistance to it, his acceptance of its teachings was equally in evidence.

  After the delivery, Rose went through the then traditional extended period of convalescence. Despite the presence of amiable house guests, as well as a live-in nanny to assist with the care of the baby, Rose—by Crowley’s testimony—found herself in a profound lassitude, unable to muster even the energy to play a hand of cards. Rose needed entertainment; Crowley resolved to entertain her. As none of the three thousand titles in his personal library interested his wife, Crowley resolved to write a book that would suit her tastes—“the only kind of literature she understood,” as he put it. This was pornography. The result, produced with some minor editing assistance from Back and Gerald Kelly, was the pseudonymous volume Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden, which included the graphic—and satiric—erotic prose narrative, “The Nameless Novel,” the eleven chapters of which were produced by Crowley in eleven days.

  There is wit, but seldom light, in “The Nameless Novel,” and its recitation of myriad couplings—in which all manner of humans and beasts participate—grows rather quickly tiresome. Crowley, in assessing his own motives, confessed that the pornographic style served to “arouse every instinct of my puritanism with almost insane intensity. I suppose I was really furious at the fact that the wife whom I loved so passionately and honoured so profoundly should be intellectually circumscribed in this way. My only remedy was a reductio ad absurdum.”

  The mention of his own “puritanism” is significant, because the supposed central motive of amusing his wife seems quite plainly a smokescreen—whether intended for himself, or for his future readers, or both, is less clear. Crowley enjoyed creating erotic writings; White Stains speaks for itself, as does The Scented Garden of Abdullah (composed the very next year, 1905; published 1910). Furthermore, Crowley viewed the writings in Snowdrops first and foremost as an attempt to cleanse his puritanism by direct confrontation—“to clean all germs out of the sexual wound,” as he expressed it in a letter some two decades later, adding, “My object is not merely to disgust but to root out ruthlessly the sense of sin.” But the human personality is not quite so simply transformed, and Crowley himself was no proof of his theory. White Stains, Snowdrops, The Scented Garden—none of these forays into forbidden imaginings sufficed to root out the sense of sin within him.

  But if amusing Rose was not, in truth, the primary motivation of Crowley in writing Snowdrops, she nonetheless figures prominently within it. In certain of the erotic poems included in the volume, the name Rose is used expressly. Crowley later averred that he wrote poems in this vein strictly for the sake of perfecting his craft—“I used to experiment with new forms by choosing a ridiculous or obscene subject, lest I should be tempted to publish a poem whose technique showed inexperience.” But are we really to believe that Crowley was seeking primarily to practice the technique of the limerick when he wrote:

  There was a young lady named Rose

  Who filled not one pom but twelve poes

  With piss, sweat, and come,

  Thick slime from her bumb,

  And snot from her bloody old nose.

  “Rosa Mystica,” also included in Snowdrops, is an obscene play upon the doctrine of immaculate conception; the conceit is that the Holy Ghost would have been repulsed by the scent of a woman’s genitalia. The opening two lines give a sense of the whole: “Rose, that you are a little sod/ Your shapely pouting asshole shows.”

  While the tone of the poems are playful, and Rose may well be believed to have enjoyed them (the participation of her own brother in the editing process lends credence to Crowley’s testimony here), there is here a radical shift in tone from “Rosa Mundi,” the ecstatic love poem written on the first night of their marriage. If it be objected that a tone shift is hardly surprising when the goal is to write blatantly obscene verse, there is further evidence that the marriage of Crowley and Rose—just over a year after their elopement—was showing serious strain.

  In October 1904, Crowley went off to St. Moritz in Switzerland, so as to make arrangements for Rose and the baby to join him there for the winter. They arrived in November, but in the interim, Crowley had composed a new poem in his serious lyrical vein, entitled Rose Inferni (ultimately published in book form in 1907). The title—which translates as Rose of Hell—is indicative. There is a return here to the poetic figuring (so prominent in Crowley’s poems from 1898 to 1903) of woman as damned and degrading vampiress, exercising her charms so as to destroy the man of true spirit:

  I see below the beautiful low brow

  (Low too for cunning, like enough!) your lips,

  A scarlet splash of murder. From them drips

  This heart’s blood; you have fed your fill on me.

  [ … ] Thirteen centuries ago

  They would have said, “Alas! the youth! We know

  The devil hath f
rom him plucked the immortal soul.”

  I say: you have dulled my centres of control.

  The final line is a warning against erotic bondage to woman: “The love of knowledge is the hate of life.”

  With the close of winter, the Crowley family returned to Boleskine. There ensued an episode which Crowley cited in his Confessions “as a warning to the world of the utter idiocy of women as a class and the criminal idiocy of trained nurses in particular.” Rose had not relished her previous pregnancy, and was now experiencing some irregularity in the timing of her periods—or, in Crowley’s language, “had not settled down to the normal course of her physiological life.” In the spring of 1905, she feared (falsely, as would shortly come clear) that she was again pregnant, and sought an abortion through the aid of her live-in nurse, who dosed Rose repeatedly with ergot (this while Crowley was away on business), which ultimately reached poisonous levels that threatened Rose’s life.

  In relating this episode, Crowley stressed that abortion is—in a phrase that startles, coming from Crowley’s pen—a “sin against the Holy Ghost.” He fulminates that he should have prosecuted the nurse. And, finally, in a kind of blind rage, he lashes out at Rose as an inadequate mother and a nascent demoness:

  My marriage taught me many lessons, and this not the least: when women are not devoted to children—a few rare individuals are capable of other interests—they take a morbid pleasure in conspiring against a husband, especially if he be a father. They take advantage of his preoccupation with his work in the world to conceive and execute every kind of criminally cunning abomination. The belief in witchcraft was not all superstition; its psychological roots were sound. Women who are thwarted in their natural instincts turn inevitably to all kinds of malignant mischief, from slander to domestic destruction.

  Crowley gives no specifics of how he was conspired against as a father; indeed, once past the naming of his daughter, there is no further description of her in the prolix Confessions. In his later interpretation of the Book, he viewed the aborted life as the prophesied slain child of the Scarlet Woman. [III, 43] Yet his still-living daughter Nuit seems to have been left, despite Crowley’s vehement trepidations, as women’s work to the care of Rose and her nurse. This was hardly atypical for the time. But Crowley’s own day-to-day disinterest, coupled with his conviction that motherhood must satisfy any woman, made it impossible for him to regard with empathy the difficulties that Rose—a woman accustomed to social pleasures—faced in adapting to domestic routines.

  With his marriage in disarray, Crowley welcomed the first opportunity to flee Boleskine and resume his world travels. This opportunity arose in April 1905, when Dr. J. Jacot Guillarmod—one of the members of the K2 expedition of 1902—visited Crowley at Boleskine. Guillarmod had just published an account of that previous expedition, entitled Six mois dans l’Himalaya. (Crowley, too, had contemplated writing on K2; unsurprisingly, he had but faint praise for Six mois.) The few mentions of Crowley in Guillarmod’s book were innocuous, indicating, in context, an easy respect for Crowley’s mountaineering ability. During his visit, Guillarmod proposed a new Himalayan expedition—to Kanchenjunga, a towering peak of some 28,207 feet, the third highest mountain in the world, upon which no Western climbers had ever ventured.

  Crowley, for his part, seems to have had little regard for Guillarmod. In the Confessions, he dubbed him with the nickname “Tartarin”—after a comically inept Alpinist created by the French fiction writer Alphonse Daudet. During Guillarmod’s stay at Boleskine, Crowley played an elaborate prank by convincing him that the “haggis” (in reality, a Scottish meat dish cooked in the stomach of a sheep) was a rare and uniquely ferocious beast of the Scottish highlands, and then sending the trepidatious Guillarmod off to hunt a harmless domestic ram—subsequently served to him at a mock-triumphant banquet.

  By his own account, Crowley did not think Guillarmod a particularly gifted climber. Why, then, accept his offer to scale a peak that is still regarded—by Himalayan experts—as posing a more severe mountaineering challenge than even Everest? Crowley did insist upon a position of sole leadership. Guillarmod assented. Within weeks, preparations for the ill-fated expedition were under way.

  The debacle that was the 1905 assault upon Kanchenjunga would haunt Crowley for the rest of his days.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Assault on Kanchenjunga, the Establishment of a New Magical Order, and the Wanderlusts of a Magus (1905–08)

  To understand the magnitude of achievement, and of failure, achieved by the 1905 Kanchenjunga expedition led by Crowley, two fundamental facts must be kept in mind. The first is that this was the first attempt upon the summit peak of five-peaked Kanchenjunga (“the five treasure houses of the snow” in Nepalese). Not until fifty years later would that uttermost peak be scaled—by a British expedition led by Charles Evans in 1955. The second is that Kanchenjunga is judged by climbers themselves as posing the greatest challenge in all the Himalayas. Sir John Hunt, a member of the 1953 expedition that first conquered Everest, wrote shortly after that triumph: “There is no doubt, that those who first climb Kanchenjunga, will achieve the greatest feat of mountaineering, for it is a mountain which combines in its defences not only severe handicaps of wind and weather and very high altitude, but technical climbing problems and objective dangers of an order higher than we found on Everest.”

  The Kanchenjunga expedition was a revelatory crucible in which the strengths and weaknesses of Crowley were drawn forth. The courage, skill, dauntless energy, and remarkable focus of will of the man are evident. The brilliance of conception is there as well, as demonstrated by Crowley’s choice of a climbing route similar to that employed by the triumphant 1955 expedition. But his failings show equally plainly: blind arrogance, petty fits of bile, contempt for the abilities of his fellow men, and a corresponding inability to lead them. It is noteworthy that Crowley’s prodigal climbing achievements, in the Alps and in Mexico, were either solo feats or collaborations with his trusted friend Eckenstein.

  A further trait showed itself in the attempt on Kanchenjunga, one that was a strength and a weakness both—and a hallmark of the man. In the field of magic, Crowley claimed a status equal to the greatest magi. In the field of mountaineering, Crowley was, in his own words, “as keen as ever to capture the only world’s record which he [Eckenstein] and I did not, severally or jointly, hold; that of having reached a higher point on mountains than any other climbers.”

  * * *

  Eckenstein, the leader of the 1902 K2 expedition, declined Crowley’s invitation to attempt Kanchenjunga. In the Confessions, Crowley was awkwardly vague: “Eckenstein had been approached, but for one reason or another had refused.” Whatever he may have told Crowley, Eckenstein confided to their mutual friend, Gerald Kelly, that he felt the risks too great with Crowley as leader. Remarkably, Crowley also extended an invitation to Guy Knowles, another K2 expedition member, whom Crowley had threatened with a pistol during their extended encampment on the Baltoro Glacier. Knowles also declined. The offer indicates how little importance Crowley placed on the personal makeup of a Himalayan climbing team, which would necessarily endure extreme hardship in close, isolated quarters. Crowley’s own inquiries having failed, he left it to Guillarmod, whom Crowley regarded as a mediocre climber, to select the team members. This delegation to Guillarmod may have been less a matter of indifference than of sheer necessity, given that Crowley was persona non grata in British Alpine Club circles. In either event, it would prove folly.

  The speed with which Crowley commenced the expedition was equally unusual; typical Himalayan timetables called for months and even years of preliminary planning. It was in April 1905 that Guillarmod proposed Kanchenjunga; by May 12, Crowley had embarked on the S.S. Marmora for Calcutta. Some sense of the risks involved must have seized hold of him, for Crowley wrote out a will—magical, rather than practical—before departing. In it, he requested that, in the event of his death, his friend George Cecil Jones should arrange for Cro
wley’s body to be embalmed, dressed in Golden Dawn and Abra-Melin robes and raiment, and then sealed—along with vellum-bound editions of all of Crowley’s works—in a Christian Rosenkreutz-style pastos and vault in a hidden place. On the pastos was to be inscribed only his Golden Dawn Neophyte magical name: “Perdurabo.”

  Crowley landed at Bombay on June 9, and by June 12 arrived at Darjeeling, a British hill station from which—forty-five miles to the northwest—could be seen the towering peaks of Kanchenjunga. The western face of the mountain lies in Nepal, the eastern in Sikkim. Although Kanchenjunga is surrounded by glaciers on all sides, only those to the southeast (the Talung glacier, eight miles long) and to the southwest (the Yalung glacier, eleven miles long) would have been visible from Darjeeling. Even from a distance, the outsized scale of Kanchenjunga has been praised as one of the great vistas of the world.

  Crowley had acquainted himself with the findings of previous British expeditions to the region, and concurred with the opinion of William Douglas Freshfield (formed during an 1899 reconnaissance) that the rock wall at the head of the Yalung glacier seemed the most promising breach in the great mountain’s defenses. As previously mentioned, Crowley felt that he possessed clairvoyant ability with respect to mountains—that he could accurately describe conditions for ascent which he had not personally viewed in advance. This sense of clairvoyance filled in whatever gaps remained: The Yalung glacier would serve as the route to Kanchenjunga. Crowley spent the remainder of July arranging for supplies and porters; that same month, he wrote two articles for the Pioneer, an English-language newspaper based in Allahabad; one article included a fierce attack on the Alpine Club “that has crushed every spark of mountain ability from the youth of England.” The Alpine Club would soon have the opportunity for revenge.