The next day, September 2, Crowley did descend to Camp 4. Guillarmod provided a terse account: “The following day one sees Crowley coming down from the upper camp without even knowing if our comrades will be found. He deserts the expedition in a cowardly manner [ … ]” Crowley offered his own version in one of his letters dashed off to the newspapers: “In consequence of this loss of life, I declined to assume further responsibility and returned with the remainder of the expedition. I am not altogether displeased with the present results. I know enough to make certain of success another year with a properly equipped and disciplined expedition.” Crowley’s claim to have returned from Kanchenjunga with the “remainder” of the expedition is misleading; a minority of the remaining porters transported Crowley’s belongings. Only later would he allow that his emotions had been at high pitch in Camp 4: “I have very much minimized what I felt. If ever I am summoned before Almighty God to give an account of my deeds, my one great shame will be that I did not shoot down these mutinous dogs who murdered Pache and my porters.” On no other occasion, in his mature writings, did Crowley ever imagine himself—even for rhetorical purposes—confessing before the paternal Christian God.
Crowley remained convinced that Kanchenjunga was his to conquer; indeed, shortly after his return, he proposed to Eckenstein that they mount an expedition the following year. There is no record of Eckenstein’s reply, which was surely in the negative. Crowley would toy with the idea of an expedition in the years to come. But his descent from Kanchenjunga was, in fact, his farewell to the Himalayas.
He made his way back to Darjeeling well in advance of Guillarmod and the others, and utilized his lead time to arrange for the publication of some five letters in the Pioneer and the London Daily Mail, seeking to vindicate his conduct. Guillarmod and de Righi, who arrived in Darjeeling on September 20, launched counterattacks by way of letters to the press that vehemently attacked Crowley’s character. The verdict of the mountaineering world (led by the British Alpine Club) and of the press went decisively against Crowley. On September 28, he left for Calcutta. A week later, he was somehow ensconced as a guest on the estate of the Maharajah of Moharbhanj, an eastern province along the Bay of Bengal, with an invitation to hunt big game. The Kanchenjunga expedition was at an end.
* * *
Crowley soon shifted from hunting to isolated camping in the wilds of Moharbhanj. He was practicing magic in the form of astral communications with his former love, Elaine Simpson, still married and living in Hong Kong. The importance of these astral sessions between Crowley and Simpson would intensify in the months to come. Crowley further enjoyed, in this month of October 1905, a renewal of poetic creativity, composing a number of lyrics (most of which were collected in Gargoyles (1906)) as well as the homoerotic mystical poems—a veiled homage to his Cambridge-era love, Pollitt—that make up The Scented Garden of Abdullah, or (in Persian) the Bagh-i-Muattar (issued privately and pseudonymously in 1910). It is striking that Pollitt should have remained so much in Crowley’s mind over six years later. Perhaps Crowley was shaken by Kanchenjunga and felt the need to take stock of his life—including the fact that his marriage was, at root, discontented.
Crowley had, during October 1905, studied Persian with an Indian munshi, which provided him with knowledge sufficient to craft a plausible fifteenth-century poet, Abdullah el Haji, as the putative author of The Scented Garden, a pseudonymous volume of lyrics and prose poems in praise of earthly—and divine—love. Pollitt—to whom the book was intended by Crowley as a “great monument”—is identified through a concealed acrostic of his name in the vertical first letters of each verse of the erotic poem “The Riddle.” The very next poem, “Bagh-i-Muattar” (Persian for “scented garden”), spells out Crowley’s name in similar style, but from bottom to top, a sly reference to Crowley’s preferred passive role in homosexual lovemaking; indeed, the title image of the book (rephrased as “the Garden of Perfume”) is applied, in the conclusion of this poem, to the male buttocks. The veiled ribaldry is extended to the name of the fictitious Anglo-Indian major, Alain Luity, whom Crowley posed as the translator of Abdullah’s Persian poems. In Persian, “luity” has, among other meanings, that of “sodomite”; “alain” means “eye,” in this context an allusion to the hind eye or anus. To pile mask upon mask for this potentially criminal work, Crowley invented a bisexual English clergyman, P. D. Carey, to serve as editor of the volume. Carey’s introductory essay is an homage to paganism and to homoerotic love: “I tell thee, man, that the first kiss of man to man is more than the most elaborately manipulated orgasm that the most accomplished and most passionate courtesan can devise. That is, it is not a physical, but a spiritual pleasure.” Carey, like Crowley a husband and father, further observed: “With sodomy, too, no children come, to cloud one’s love with cares material and profane. I love my own children deeply, intensely; but they are rivals to my wife.”
The Scented Garden is, without question, the most frank and impassioned exploration of his own sexuality that Crowley ever achieved. Given the milieu in which he lived, it may be seen as an act—albeit veiled in pseudonyms—of literary heroism. Crowley’s unsavory reputation, coupled with the scarcity of the book itself, must explain the otherwise unaccountable failure of critics to recognize The Scented Garden as a classic of gay literature.
After this fruitful literary period of writing in Moharbhanj, Crowley journeyed to Calcutta, where he looked up the Englishman Edward Thornton, whom he had befriended some three years earlier. One day, in conversation, Crowley brought up the argument, raised by Hume in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, that events could be said to be consecutive in time yet not proven to be linked by causality. Thornton replied to Crowley, “Quite so, but there is equally no continuity in yourself.” This response had a sudden and unexpectedly shattering emotional effect. Crowley became quite literally sickened at the limitations of human thought. In a diary entry some weeks later, on November 18, he noted the continuing impact: “I realize in myself the perfect impossibility of reason; suffering great misery. I am as one who should have plumed himself for years upon the speed and strength of a favourite horse, only to find not only that its speed and strength were illusory, but that it was not a real horse at all, but a clothes-horse.”
Crowley’s interest in Buddhism—which held the impermanence (or voidness) of phenomena as a basic truth—had reached a crossroads. In a letter to Kelly, Crowley sensed himself at a dead end, emptied of convictions, hungry for experiences that would—if not enlighten—then enflame and transform him:
After five years of folly and weakness, miscalled politeness, tact, discretion, care for the feeling of others, I am weary of it. I say today: to hell with Christianity, Rationalism, Buddhism, all the lumber of the centuries. I bring you a positive and primaeval fact, Magic by name; and with this I will build me a new Heaven and a New Earth. I want none of your faint approval or faint dispraise; I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution, anything, bad or good, but strong.
Given all this, it was a remarkable coincidence that led him, during his stay in Calcutta, to take an evening walk that would give him his fill of violence.
Perhaps Crowley was rueing the last of his days of unencumbered freedom in India. Rose and daughter Nuit were due to arrive in Calcutta on October 29. Husband and wife had been apart for six months. A few days before this date, Crowley set forth, one evening, to try to find a district of the city he had previously visited in 1901—“a street of infamy called ‘Culinga Bazar.’” The festival of Durga-Puja—the worship of Durga, the goddess of sakti or female force—was underway. There were occasional fireworks in the sky, but the streets that Crowley walked were deep in shadow. At some point he felt himself being followed and ducked into a cul-de-sac: “And then I saw, faint glimpses in the gloom, the waving white of native robes. Men were approaching me and I was aware—though hardly by sight—that they moved in a semi-military order, in single file.”
Crowley pressed against a wal
l. Three of the men passed by, but then the group surrounded him. Some grabbed his arms while others searched for his possessions. Crowley spoke in the commanding tones of a white sahib—to no avail. He thought he saw the flicker of a knife blade. Since first spotting the white robes in the alley, Crowley had been gripping the Webley pistol which he kept in his pocket. Now, feeling himself in mortal danger, he raised the pistol just over the edge of his pocket and pulled the trigger. As he later explained: “I had fired without aim, in pitch blackness; I could not even see the white robes of the men who held me. In the lightning moment of the flash I saw only that whitenesses were falling backwards away from me, as if I had upset a screen by accident.”
In the aftermath of the shooting, Crowley made his way directly to the house of his friend Thornton. Of course, the sound of the gunshot had caused an alarm and, in addition, Crowley would have attracted attention due to his race. Yet Crowley averred that he left the scene of the crime without being noticed due to the magical technique of “invisibility” which he had practiced with limited success in Mexico in 1900 (achieving a “flickering” condition), but which—by dint of his unconscious acting in a survival mode—he achieved fully in the moments after the shooting. In the Confessions, Crowley concedes the reader’s disbelief: “I am aware that this sounds like a fish story.” His explanation hinges—as is often the case in his magical analyses—upon the conjoined impact of will, concentration, and intense emotion: “There is a peculiar type of self-absorption which makes it impossible for people to be aware of one.[ … ] My theory is that the mental state in question distracts people’s attention from one automatically, as a conjuror does deliberately.”
Thornton accompanied Crowley, the next day, to a Scottish barrister who advised that Crowley report nothing to the police, since to risk a trial would—given the tensions of colonialism—invite treatment as a racial scapegoat. The Calcutta Standard soon featured an offer of a reward, by the Commissioner of Police, of 100 rupees for information leading to the arrest of the unidentified European. Crowley chose silence. This was, from a practical standpoint, a most advisable retreat, given the likelihood of testimony as to recent events on Kanchenjunga.
When Rose arrived on October 29, Crowley greeted her with the words: “You’ve got here just in time to see me hanged!” Their original plans had called for some time spent together in India, before departing for Burma to visit Allan Bennett, or Ananda Metteyya, who was still living the life of a Buddhist monk. But now, with a manhunt under way, a hasty departure was essential. Burma would still be the first port of call but, for some reason, Crowley now wavered between Persia and China and left the choice to Rose, who selected China. They engaged the services of a nanny and of Crowley’s favorite mountaineering servant, Salama Tantra, and promptly embarked to Rangoon. Whether as a matter of fate or of lingering fear, Crowley never again set foot in India.
* * *
It had been four years since Crowley and his mentor Bennett, now Metteyya, had met face-to-face. The recent events in India—from metaphysical despair to point-blank gunfire—had left him shaken. But there is a revelatory passage in the Confessions on his mood of the time, which reveals that the plea in his recent letter to Kelly—“I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution, anything bad or good, but strong”—had, in essence, been answered.
I embrace hardship and privation with ecstatic delight; I want everything that the world holds; I would go to prison or to the scaffold for the sake of the experience. I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck. I grow delirious to contemplate the delicious horrors that are certain to happen to me. This is the keynote of my life, the untrammeled delight in every possibility of existence, potential or actual.
Upon arrival in Rangoon, Crowley installed his family in a hotel and went off for a three-day visit to Metteyya’s monastery two miles outside the city. Metteyya had advanced, within the monastery structure, to the position of a sayadaw who guided fellow monks. Despite his quiescent life, Metteyya had roused some suspicion not only amongst the local population (some of whom suspected him of acting as a surreptitious British agent), but also within the British colonial regime in Burma, which viewed askance any embrace by British citizens of native beliefs. In Crowley’s view, Metteyya had adapted to monastic life, but at a cost—he seemed physically worn. When the two had parted in 1902, they had been in essential agreement as to the truth of Buddhist teachings. Now, however, Crowley was skeptical not only of the moral strictures of Buddhism, but also of its deterministic approach to the question of enlightenment. As Metteyya explained it, karma determined one’s capability for higher development such as Samadhi; the metaphor Bennett employed was the turning wheel of life—one’s ability to touch a certain stone on the road would depend upon one’s position on the wheel. Concentrated effort could reveal one’s true position on the wheel, but nothing could change the timing of its turning—upon which contact with the stone must ultimately depend. Crowley conceded that this was sound philosophy, but denied that it was good life sense; self-enervation alone could result once belief in the power of individual will had waned.
Though he fought off Bennett’s karmic determinism, he took up with alacrity Bennett’s suggestion that Crowley delve deeply, through concentrated meditation, on the question of what his own karma had laid in store for himself. In The Temple of Solomon the King, this portion of their dialogue is laid out in a solemn spiritual style: “It was from him [Bennett/Metteyya] that he received the instructions which were to help him to reach the great and terrible pinnacle of the mind whence the Adept must plunge into the Abyss, to emerge naked, a babe—the Babe of the Abyss.” To cross the Abyss is to proceed, on the kabbalistic Tree of Life as taught by the Golden Dawn, past the limits of rational thought to a recognition of the true dimensions of the universe—in which truth ceases to be seen as binary, true or false, but rather as multifold, a comprehension of the pattern of being.
This exploration of the Abyss involved the training of the Magical Memory—a training that Crowley later explicated in Liber Thisharb (1911). “Thisharb” derives from a backward phonetic spelling of Berashith (Hebrew for “in the beginning”), the first word of the Bible. The primary technique, first utilized by Crowley during this period, involved conscious reversal of the order of time (hence the backward spelling of Berashith) by remembering events in reverse sequence, as a film might be run backwards. (Crowley allowed, in the Confessions, that he had never himself mastered this technique.) Ultimately, this method was to be employed to push ever further into one’s own past life—and past lives.
After three days spent in such meditation—with no decided results—as Metteyya’s guest at the monastery, Crowley rejoined his family in Rangoon and made arrangements to pursue an extensive trek along a route that fired his imagination. In the border region of Burma and southern China, three great rivers ran roughly parallel to each other—the Salween, the Mekong and the Jinsha Jiang—though they later diverged to empty out of Asia at markedly different points. The entirety of this region—highly difficult of access—was sparsely settled wilderness. Crowley resolved to explore it.
A number of British colonials advised him that it might be unwise to take his wife and child along on a journey that could involve unpleasant encounters with Burmese and Chinese natives, who would be especially curious (Crowley was told) to view firsthand a white woman and child. This advice Crowley held in contempt. “I knew,” he wrote in the Confessions, “as I know that two and two make four, that it is only necessary to behave like a gentleman in order to calm the apprehensions of the aborigines and to appeal to the fundamental fact that all men are brothers. By this I do not mean anything stupid, sodden and sentimental; I mean that all men equally require food, clothing and shelter, in the first place; and in the second, security from aggression in respect of life and property.” For the sake of daughter Nuit, barely two years old, a nanny was hired to accompany them.
Crowley was
, in any event, convinced that the trek was essential to his spiritual progress. By applying his skill at designing and practicing magical ritual in difficult physical conditions, he would use the journey to explore the two fundamental questions set forth in Liber Thisharb: “Who am I?” and “What is my relation with nature?” In the Confessions, he confirmed that this time—from November 1905 through February 1906—was “the most important period of my life so far as my personal attitude to myself and the universe was concerned.”
Nagging delays in approval by the British colonial regime delayed departure until November 15, when they boarded the steamship Java to journey north along the Irrawaddy River. The spiritual task before him now was to proceed along the kabbalistic Tree of Life from 7°=4□ (the grade of Adeptus Exemptus, which he formally granted himself in this period) to 8°=3□ (the grade of Magister Templi, and the entrance to the Great White Brotherhood, the City of the Pyramids, and the realm of the Secret Chiefs themselves). To progress would necessitate the crossing of the Abyss, becoming a Babe within it, emerging newborn, wholly other, the traditional boundaries of self, reason, and reality shattered and reformed. The magical name he chose for his new Adeptus Exemptus grade—the Greek OY MH—means “certainly not.”
Crowley experienced a singular adventure on the physical plane in December 1905, just after he and family had crossed into China. His pony stumbled, and rider and animal tumbled—rolling over each other twice in the process—off a cliff of some forty feet. It was a fall that could have killed him, and yet Crowley had emerged unharmed. The jolt of the fall, and his remarkable survival, experientially affirmed his sense of a special purpose to his life (as later described, in the third person, in The Temple of Solomon the King):
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