Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  The questions which had for so long vexed Crowley were now, with sudden certainty, resolved. Aiwass was his Holy Guardian Angel. Thelema was the teaching to which he would devote himself. As he later wrote, “For the first time since the spring of 1904 I felt myself free to do my will.[ … ] My aspiration to be the means of emancipating humanity was perfectly fulfilled. I had merely to establish in the world the Law which had been given me to proclaim: ‘Thou hast no right but to do thy will.’” Crowley expressed here a vital distinction which has frequently been overlooked by commentators on his life and work. The rediscovery of the manuscript did not serve to confirm his vocation as a prophet to humankind—of that vocation he had been convinced since his 1905–06 Augoeides Invocations in China, which were guided by the postulate that he was the “Chosen One.”

  The June 28, 1909, manuscript rediscovery came directly on the heels of another magical working in Boleskine House. On the previous day, June 27, Victor Neuburg—or rather Omnia Vincam (I shall conquer all), a Probationer of the A∴A∴—had completed a ten-day magical retirement under the direction of his Holy Guru. The magical record kept by Neuburg, and annotated by Crowley, represents the earliest detailed account of Crowley’s teaching methods with a magical disciple. This record follows Crowley’s insistence—in line with the empirical approach of Scientific Illuminism—on precise accounts of mental states and practices entered virtually every waking hour. It reveals dark valleys of pitched emotion and jagged peaks of tentative insight. The completion of his retirement—a successful one, as Crowley adjudged it—entitled Neuburg to become a Neophyte in the A∴A∴. As Neuburg wrote at the end of his record: “I had always the sense of being God; also, I was waiting, it seemed, for something to happen—some event such as death. But nothing beyond the ecstasy ever occurred. My Holy Guru broke up this Vision entirely, giving me a purer but a far rarer one, which occurs very seldom indeed.”

  The basic course set for Neuburg was seclusion within his room with meals—sometimes hearty, sometimes meager—provided by Crowley. (Meat was a frequent menu item; Crowley resolved to break down Neuburg’s exclusionary belief system of vegetarianism.) Neuburg practiced basic yogic techniques, magical ritual (including the “Bornless One” invocation), astral travel, recitation of mantras and study of texts including the Book and other of Crowley’s holy books. The seclusion was not a rigid one; Crowley, in his role of teacher, would pay frequent visits to Neuburg’s room, and Neuburg was allowed to come to Crowley’s bedroom at night to talk, ask questions, and even feed on biscuits to supplement his dietary regimen. Wife Rose was living at Boleskine during this period; Neuburg witnessed her, on at least one occasion, drunk and in a seemingly sunken condition. Her presence seems to have made Neuburg uncomfortable, and his late-night visits to Crowley’s chambers were almost certainly premised on Rose sleeping in separate quarters.

  Whether or not Crowley and Neuburg had sexual relations during this magical retirement is unclear; it is possible that Neuburg’s final “Ordeal” as a Probationer included a sacred sexual act with his Guru. But there is certainly an erotic tension that shows through frequently in Neuburg’s written record. Crowley saw Neuburg as a masochist and indulged to the hilt his own sadistic tendencies toward Neuburg—this was, indeed, a constant not only during this retirement, but throughout the whole of their relationship. During these ten days, Crowley leveled numerous brutal verbal attacks on Neuburg’s family and Jewish ancestry (or “race,” as Crowley posed it erroneously—an egregious lapse for one who had seen firsthand the Jews of Morocco). At times, Neuburg bore up and saw the abuse as a tactic on his Guru’s part to shatter the limiting defenses of the personal ego. At other times, pain and anger prevailed, as in this entry:

  My worthy Guru is quite unnecessarily rude and brutal, I know not why. Probably he does not know himself. He is apparently brutal merely to amuse himself and to pass the time away. Anyhow I won’t stick it any more.

  It seems to me unnecessary and brutal rudeness is the prerogative of a cad of the lowest type.[ … ] It is ungenerous also to abuse one’s position as a Guru: it is like striking an inferior who will be ruined if he dares to retaliate.

  Recall that Neuburg had taken, at the end of their walk through Spain and North Africa in 1908, a Vow of Holy Obedience to Crowley. For Neuburg even to consider breaking off the retirement was a sign of genuine desperation.

  There were other occasions, however, when the sadomasochistic interplay between them was treated with mutual understanding—and banter. On occasion, the discipline, or abuse, took on physical form, as when Crowley scourged Neuburg on his naked back and buttocks with a gorse switch or a bundle of nettles. In an entry from the fifth day, Neuburg lamented that his Guru had upbraided him severely and was “apparently a homosexual Sadist.” In notes appended to this entry a week later, Crowley wryly warned: “Slandering one’s Guru is punished in the thirty-second and last Hell.” To which Neuburg replied: “A small price to pay for the invention of a new vice.”

  After Neuburg had completed the prescribed ten-day retirement and had devoted three days more to inscribing a polished copy of his record in a beautiful bound volume, Crowley surprised Neuburg by insisting on a still further ten days of physical discipline—sleeping naked on the cold floor of his room on a litter of gorse that Neuburg was sent off to cut for himself. Neuburg remembered the chill of these nights for the rest of his life; his biographer, Jean Overton Fuller, has speculated that it caused lasting damage to Neuburg’s health.

  The intense relationship between Crowley and Neuburg, coupled with Crowley’s frequent heterosexual affairs, must have been difficult for Rose to bear. Her drinking was, in turn, a source of embarrassment and sorrow for Crowley. At last, they reached the decision to divorce—a decision that Crowley later insisted was based on Rose’s refusal to “sign away her liberty” for the two years of controlled treatment her physician deemed necessary for her alcoholism. The divorce was filed in Scotland, a jurisdiction which allowed, as England then did not, adultery as grounds. Out of a chivalric impulse to protect his wife, Crowley consented to have necessary evidence of his adultery introduced and to allow her to be the plaintiff; the testimony included mention of a fictitious mistress, “Miss Zwee,” a working-class milliner. There would have been sufficient real mistresses to cite, but the goal was to avoid unnecessary embarrassment for living persons, as well as to protect Rose.

  In the months preceding the November 24, 1909, hearing, Crowley and Rose continued to share the same 21 Warwick Road address and, according to Crowley, they “went on living together, more or less” for a year or more after the divorce. The ultimate decree was clearly favorable to Rose, who was awarded guardianship of Lola Zaza and £52 annually in child support. There was also a discretionary trust fund created by Crowley earlier in this year, at Rose’s insistence, to shelter an anticipated £4000 that Crowley would inherit from his mother, Emily—as occurred when Emily died in 1917. The appointed trustees were Jones and Oscar Eckenstein, and they would, in later years, frequently annoy the Beast by apportioning the discretionary funds in greater amounts to Lola Zaza than to Crowley himself. In the autumn of 1911, Rose was committed to an asylum with a diagnosis of alcoholic dementia; she ultimately recovered and remarried and passed completely out of Crowley’s life, as did—but for very occasional correspondence—their daughter.

  In November 1909, following the publication of the second number of The Equinox, Crowley and Neuburg went off together to Algeria. Crowley had packed along—by happenstance, he would later claim—one of his early magical notebooks that contained transcriptions of the Nineteen Calls of Enochian Magic. Through the Nineteenth of these Calls may be invoked the Thirty “Aethyrs” or “Aires”—realms of spiritual being which Crowley saw as progressive in purity and wisdom and related to the kabbalistic Tree of Life. Crowley had conjured the first two of these Aethyrs in Mexico in November 1900, but found himself, at that time, unable to continue. Nine years later, on November 21, 1909,
in the Algerian town of Aumale, Crowley commenced anew the sequence of the Enochian Calls.

  A letter by Crowley to Fuller dated October 30, 1909—just prior to his departure with Neuburg to Algeria—indicates that his choice of the notebook was anything but happenstance. On the contrary, he had just completed some days of intensive study at Oxford, copying manuscripts by and related to John Dee and Edward Kelly, the sixteenth-century creators (or recipients, if you will) of Enochian magic. Dee (1527–1608) was one of the archetypal figures of the Renaissance, a polymath scholar, court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth, and a likely model for Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Kelly, a disreputable rogue by virtually all accounts, possessed the mediumistic gift of “scrying” (from “descry”) into a crystal (one provided him by Dee, who claimed that it had been given to him by an angel) and viewing therein visions from angelic realms. Kelly would speak aloud what was revealed while Dee acted as scribe. The resultant transcriptions filled several volumes. The sheer complexity of the contents weakens the rationalist theory that Kelly was somehow duping Dee, as that theory must hinge on an ironic assessment of Kelly as a literary and philological forger of genius. For the reciting angels taught a new language (with an alphabet, as well as a rudimentary grammar and syntax all its own) which Dee named “Enochian” after the Enoch of the Bible who was said to have walked with God. As Crowley explained to Fuller: “I am full of Kelly just now. I am perfectly miserable at having to stay away from the Bodder [Bodleian Library] all Sunday, and every word I read seems to bring me to the edge of a Great Revelation.” The letter is signed “Edward Kelly,” whom Crowley later dubbed “Sir Edward Kelly” and came to see as one of his prior incarnations.

  Crowley landed in Algiers on November 18, accompanied, as he wrote in his diary, by “but a single chela [Neuburg] and only five legions of angels.” These, it would seem, were the angels of the Enochian realms. The first invocation, of the Twenty-eighth Aethyr, took place in Aumale on November 23. During the following month, Crowley and Neuburg undertook a lengthy desert trek, interrupted by an extended stay in the garden oasis of Bou Saada, and concluding with the invocation of the First Aethyr in another luxurious oasis town, Biskra. For this trek, Crowley donned a turban, grew a beard, and acquired a ring with a large star sapphire—a precious stone that, according to Richard Burton, was revered by Moslems. As for Neuburg, Crowley shaved the younger man’s thick curly hair, leaving only two twisted tufts to resemble the horns of a djinn or genie. As Crowley later explained, “This greatly enhanced my eminence. The more eccentric and horrible Neuburg appeared, the more insanely and grotesquely he behaved, the more he inspired the inhabitants with respect for the Magician who had mastered so fantastic and fearful a genie.” To complete the effect, Crowley at times led Neuburg about on a chain leash.

  Crowley composed a record of his exploration of the Aethyrs, entitled The Vision and the Voice, wherein he argued for the value of his researches:

  I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me. I do not regret this. All I ask is that my results should convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine. I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.

  This is a surprising statement, because it applies—Crowley’s protestations notwithstanding—with equal force to The Book of the Law. As to the latter, he was never content with merely indicating that it offered “something worth seeking.”

  The Vision and The Voice, published in the fifth number of The Equinox (1911), emerged from transcriptions made by Neuburg of the exalted descriptions, visions, and ravings that issued from Crowley during the intensive series of twenty-eight invocations, conducted on a near daily basis, that were completed from November 23 to December 19, 1909. The text, highly polished for publication, is the most vivid and dramatic magical record Crowley ever produced. Crowley took care, in the Confessions, to delineate precisely the sense in which he had journeyed through the Aethyrs. Astral travel, such as he had utilized in Mexico, no longer seemed necessary nine years later:

  I realized that space was not a thing in itself, merely a convenient category (one of many such) by reference to which we distinguish objects from each other. When I say I was in any Aethyr, I simply mean in the state characteristic of, and peculiar to, its nature. My senses would thus receive the subtle impressions which I had trained them to record, so becoming cognizant of the phenomena of those worlds as ordinary men are of this.

  The method by which Crowley explored the Enochian Aethyrs roughly paralleled that of Dee and Kelly, with Crowley taking the part of the scrying Kelly and Neuburg serving in the scribe role of Dee. Crowley had brought along a shewstone to Algeria—“a great golden topaz (set in a Calvary cross of six squares, made of wood, painted vermilion), engraved with a Greek cross of five squares charged with the Rose of forty-nine petals. I held this as a rule in my hand. After choosing a spot where I was not likely to be disturbed, I would take this stone and recite the Enochian Key [Call], and, after satisfying myself that the invoked forces were actually present, made the topaz play a part not unlike that of the looking-glass in the case of Alice [in Wonderland].”

  The progression through the Aethyrs served as a psychological testing ground for Crowley in his role—ever more consciously assumed—as prophet of the New Aeon. In the Fifteen Aethyr, Crowley was found worthy, by the Secret Chiefs of the Third Order, of the grade of Master of the Temple. This was the formal confirmation for which Crowley had readied himself since his Augoeides Invocations of 1906. But the Enochian angels revealed that further ordeals would be necessary for Crowley to perfect himself in the knowledge of this grade. The Aethyrs which followed provided the framework for these ordeals. On the afternoon of December 3, on Da’leh Addin, a desert mountain outside of Bou Saada, Crowley attempted to invoke the Fourteenth Aethyr but failed. The angel dwelling therein commanded: “Depart! For thou must invoke me only in the darkness.” Crowley began his descent from the mountain when, without warning or conscious effort, he received a command to return to the summit, construct a large magical circle out of rocks, with words of divine power inscribed in the sand and an altar erected in the center, and therein perform a ritual. This ritual, which is not set forth in Vision, is described only circumspectly in the Confessions:

  The first of the all-seeing sun smote down upon the altar, consuming utterly every particle of my personality. I am obliged to write in hieroglyph of this matter, because it concerns things of which it is unlawful to speak openly under penalty of the most deadly punishment; but I may say that the essence of the matter was that I had hitherto clung to certain conceptions of conduct which, while perfectly proper from the standpoint of my human nature, were impertinent to initiation. I could not cross the Abyss till I had torn them out of my heart.

  What occurred was a magical sexual act—Crowley would later term it a rite of Pan—in which Neuburg took the active role. The “conceptions of conduct” alluded to here—conceptions which required shattering—likely refer to Crowley’s lingering sense of humiliation in playing the passive role sexually with Neuburg, with whom Crowley otherwise kept the sadistic upper hand. That evening, Crowley and Neuburg returned to the mountain, and Crowley now gained entrance to the Fourteenth Aethyr, wherein a whispering male figure (“Chaos is my name, and thick darkness.”) warned him of what was to come. The cost of becoming a Master of the Temple would be the excruciating death of his individual self: “Verily is the Pyramid a Temple of Initiation. Verily also is it a tomb.”

  In the Tenth Aethyr, Crowley would confront the Dispersion of the Abyss. A special precautionary vow was taken by Neuburg the Scribe in advance of the ritual. He would remain strictly within the magical circle, furnished with a consecrated dagger with which he was to “strike fearlessly at anything that may seek to br
eak through the circle, were it the appearance of the Seer [Crowley] itself.” The sense of danger expressed here raises the question of what role Crowley intended to play in this ritual. It has been stated as fact by virtually all of his previous biographers that Crowley chose to remain in the magical triangle—that consecrated area into which are bidden the spiritual beings summoned by the magician. As Crowley would be confronting Choronzon, the fearful and formless demonic abomination of Dispersion, a decision to remain within the triangle—if he did so decide—would have invited psychic possession by the most wrenching forces of the Enochian realms.

  But whether or not Crowley stayed within the triangle must be viewed as an open question. The Vision text specifies that the Seer was to “retire to a secret place, where is neither sight nor hearing.” Israel Regardie, among others, has argued that the phrase “secret place” was a cypher for the triangle itself. Then again, the setting of the Tenth Aethyr was a hollow in the dunes outside Bou Saada. Crowley could easily have concealed himself in an alternate “secret place.” The Beast, who was fond of touting his magical achievements, never boasted of having remained in the triangle. Perhaps the effect upon him was too searing. Or perhaps he never did so.

  Regardless of his physical location, Crowley’s immersion into the demon Choronzon during the Call was total. As he later wrote, “I had astrally identified myself with Choronzon, so that I experienced each anguish, each rage, each despair, each insane outburst.” The Vision record of the Tenth Aethyr is perhaps the most dramatically gripping narrative (taken as metaphysical fantasy, or as a demonic record, as the reader prefers) that Crowley ever produced. The first words which issue from Choronzon are both definition and warning of what is to come: “There is no being in the outermost Abyss, but constant forms come forth from the nothingness of it.” Choronzon is thus a shape-shifter, who in his attempts to breach the magical circle of Neuburg took the forms of a “beautiful courtesan” (most likely Euphemia Lamb) with whom Neuburg had been in love in Paris, as well as of a snake, a holy man, and a serpent. In these forms, Choronzon sought to appeal to Neuburg’s lust and pride. Against these temptations, Neuburg prevailed, at one point invoking Aiwass, the messenger of The Book of the Law. Choronzon replied by charging that the dealings of Crowley and Neuburg with Aiwass “are but a cloak for thy filthy sorceries.” Indeed, Choronzon was lacerating in his invective, particularly when it came to Crowley himself.