[T]hen the brothers led into the room a draped figure, masked in that curious blue tint we mentally associate with Hecate. The lady [Waddell], for it was a lady, was enthroned high on a seat above Crowley himself. By this time the ceremony had grown weird and impressive, and its influence was increased when the poet [Crowley] recited in solemn and reverent voice Swinburne’s glorious first chorus from “Atalanta,” that begins, “When the hounds of spring.” Again a Libation, again an invocation to Artemis. After further ceremonies, Frater Omnia Vincam [Neuburg] was commanded to dance “the dance of Syrinx and Pan in honour of our lady Artemis.” A young poet, whose verse is often read, astonished me by a graceful and beautiful dance, which he continued until he fell exhausted in the middle of the room where, by the way, he lay until the end. Crowley then made supplication to the goddess in a beautiful and unpublished poem. A dead silence ensued. After a long pause the figure enthroned took a violin and played—played with passion and feeling, like a master. We were thrilled to our very bones.
Neuburg, in turn, was assigned the draining task—an act of magical equilibration—of hurling himself into physical movement such as to “dance down” the gods. There was, tragically, a lasting cost to pay, which one may attribute to the magical efficacy of the Rites, or to the strength of Neuburg’s belief in them, as one likes. According to Neuburg, during one performance of the Rite of Luna, Crowley forgetfully failed to pronounce the words to release Neuburg from his possession by the lunar planetary spirit. Neuburg tried to remedy the damage by later pronouncing the words himself—but to no avail. According to biographer Jean Overton Fuller, Neuburg believed, some two decades later, that “for a considerable period of years he had suffered from a greater than usual possession by the moon.”
The full design of the Rites of Eleusis was fleshed out in August and September. The financially naive Crowley saw their public performance—on seven Wednesday nights in October and November 1910—as a means of raising funds to replenish his own rapidly draining inheritance. He also hoped that, by drawing the attention of an interested public, A∴A∴ membership might be expanded. The locale Crowley chose—or could afford—for the performances, Caxton Hall, was anything but a prestigious venue. One of the London tabloids described it as a “most respectable haunt of whist drives, subscription dances and Suffragette meetings.” The Cup of Libation was passed exclusively amongst the participating A∴A∴ members on stage; it is possible, but not certain, that it contained peyote. The audience was invited to participate in creating the appropriate atmosphere for each rite by wearing the color corresponding to the particular planet—black for Saturn, violet for Jupiter, red for Mars, and so forth. The printed program insisted on decorum: “The etiquette to be observed is that of the most solemn religious ceremonies.”
Before turning to the public reviews, it is worth considering Crowley’s own view of the performances—an exceedingly harsh one: “I throw myself no bouquets about these Rites of Eleusis. I should have given more weeks to their preparation than I did minutes. I diminished the importance of the dramatic elements; the dialogue and action were little more than a setting for the soloists.” As for the verdict of the British press, it ranged from skeptical to outraged. The more highbrow weeklies reported the proceedings in a perplexed but respectful tone. The headline run by The Sketch summed it up nicely: “The Elusive Rites of Eleusis.” But the popular tabloids tore into the Rites with vehemence. The Looking Glass, a racing tabloid, led the assault; its editor, West De Wend Fenton, published a series of four attacks that betrayed a virtually feral hatred of Crowley. According to Crowley, Fenton had, after the first of these publications, tried to arrange a meeting for the purpose of blackmail; Crowley alleged that he sent Fenton packing. Three years after his attacks on Crowley, Fenton was fined for the indecency of the writings in another of his publications, the Sporting Times. But Fenton’s Looking Glass pieces in October and November adopted the high ground of protecting British morals. The ringing conclusion was that blasphemy was afoot: “Remember the doctrine which we have endeavoured faintly to outline—remember the long periods of complete darkness—remember the dances and the heavily scented atmosphere, the avowed object of which is to produce what Crowley terms an ‘ecstasy’—and then say if it is fitting and right that young girls and married women should be allowed to attend such performances under the guise of the cult of a new religion.”
It is safe to say that there was nothing whatsoever salacious about the performances of the Rites. There are numerous testimonies from attendees to this effect, the most significant of which comes from Fuller, who was both sexually conservative and adamantly opposed to the Rites being presented to the public. He may be trusted when he avowed, decades later: “In every sense the performances were most proper, though dim, because the stage was candle lit. So innocent were they that I took my mother to one of them. Innocence, however, is no shield to the vomitings of the gutter press.” Indeed, following the lead of The Looking Glass, a number of other tabloids tore into Crowley, most notably John Bull, a weekly edited by the flamboyant Horatio Bottomley.
Of all these attacks, the most fateful would appear in the November 26 Looking Glass. In part three of its continuing expose of Crowley’s life, there appeared information—almost certainly obtained from Mathers—about Crowley’s early days in the Golden Dawn. Allan Bennett was maligned as a “rascally sham Buddhist monk” who had, while living with Crowley in 1899, engaged in “unmentionable immoralities.” The implication was that Crowley and Bennett were homosexuals. George Cecil Jones, mentioned in the same paragraph, was thus included in that implication. For Jones, a father of four who made his living in respectable society as an analytical chemist, this was an appalling smear. Seconded vigorously by Fuller, Jones urged Crowley to take legal action against The Looking Glass. By vindicating himself, Crowley could, in turn, vindicate his friend.
Other A∴A∴ members, including Neuburg, concurred. As these men were aware of Crowley’s bisexuality, their hope must have been that Crowley could disprove other attacks upon him, such as the slurs upon his sincerity as a spiritual teacher. Crowley briefly considered suing, then resolved not to do so, leaving Jones to file his own action. In early December, the Rites having concluded, Crowley and Neuburg departed for their third Sahara trek together. In the December 17 Looking Glass appeared this somewhat misguided note: “We understand that Mr. Aleister Crowley has left for Russia. This should do much to mitigate the rigour of the St. Petersburg winter. We have to congratulate ourselves on having temporarily extinguished one of the most blasphemous and cold-blooded villains of modern times. But what were Scotland Yard about to let him depart in peace?” Fenton got Crowley’s destination wrong, but his sense of triumph was galling to Jones, Fuller, and other A∴A∴ members who now felt their Order under siege.
After the homophobic atmosphere of England, the more accepting social mores of Algeria, not to mention the seclusion of the Sahara itself, served as a release for both men. Crowley experienced, in these desert treks, a sharpening of consciousness that delighted him—“every incident acquires an intense and absolute value of its own. One can, for example, love as it is utterly impossible to do in any other conditions.” This latter remark would seem to be a veiled reference to his passion for Neuburg. Yet the trip was magically barren; their plan to obtain Enochian “visions of the sixteen Sub-Elements, as a sort of pendant to the Aethyrs” failed for lack of will and energy. Further, there was a bad parting between the two at Biskra. Crowley claimed that he left Neuburg there to recuperate after the hardships of the journey. Neuburg, for his part, felt abandoned. The upshot was that, for the remainder of this year, they kept apart; in an October 1911 letter, Crowley charged that Neuburg had received “quite a lot of money for deserting me.” If so, the logical source of the funds would have been Neuburg’s family, which was distressed by his bond with the disreputable Crowley. Neuburg had, in past years, willingly placed his family funds at the disposal of Crowley and The Eq
uinox. As Crowley was now beset by financial worries, the cutoff of funds could not have been pleasant. There is a startling story alleging the extent to which Crowley had gone to wring money from Neuburg’s family. According to one family friend, during one of their trips to the Sahara, Crowley had sent Neuburg’s mother a telegram reading “Send £500 or you will never see your son again.” Neuburg’s desertion would not be permanent, however; the two men renewed their erotic, magical and financial alliance the following year.
* * *
As for the April 1911 Jones v. The Looking Glass trial, suffice it to say that Jones was routed. The jury found that The Looking Glass had indeed defamed Jones by implication, but that the defamation was substantially true. Although Jones, not Crowley, was the aggrieved party, the bulk of the evidence pertained to Crowley. The two chief witnesses for The Looking Glass were Mathers and his staunch magical ally, Dr. Edward Berridge. The magical warfare was continuing apace, and this time it was Crowley who would take his lumps.
Though Crowley sat in the courtroom during both days of the trial, he was never called as a witness. The Looking Glass would, of course, have violated accepted strategy by willingly summoning a hostile witness. Jones refrained from doing so on the grounds that honor forbade the use of a subpoena to coerce the aid of a friend. Crowley, in an instance of pure bluff in the Confessions, claimed that Jones had not called him “because he was afraid that my contempt for conventions [ … ] would lead me to make some damaging admission. He was ill advised. The intensity of my enthusiasm, my candour and my sheer personality would have dominated the court.” More realistically, Crowley would have been mercilessly grilled and forced, at last, either to perjure himself or to disable Jones’s case by speaking the truth—that Jones was the friend of a practicing bisexual.
Crowley could not bring himself to admit this, and Fuller would not allow it as a sufficient reason to betray a friend. A subsequent Crowley letter dated May 4 began with conciliatory words of praise for Fuller’s courage in testifying at the trial: “If my friendship ever cooled it was completely revived by your conduct in the box.” These words cast doubt on a later accusation, raised by Crowley in the Confessions, that after the negative verdict Fuller had “hinted that he could not afford to be openly associated with The Equinox.” Fuller’s testimony on behalf of Jones had, given the press coverage, constituted as public an association with Crowley and The Equinox as could be imagined. Fuller was not without the courage of his convictions. But there was genuine hesitance on Fuller’s part in continuing his friendship with Crowley, above and beyond the latter’s failure to testify. In one letter to Fuller from North Africa (perhaps during early 1911), Crowley had enclosed a number of sexually explicit postcards. As Fuller later explained, “At night, when drunk, it may seem funny to put obscene postcards in an envelope, but when one opens it, in the morning, and has them fall out on the breakfast table, it is merely disgusting. It could have been opened in transit and it could have been wondered why I should be the recipient of such stuff. I decided I could no longer be associated with him.”
The upshot was that the Looking Glass trial was the last time Fuller and Crowley saw each other. For all his subsequent efforts to retrieve him, Crowley had lost the greatest ally he would ever have.
The May 1911 break by Fuller paralleled a mounting disaffection with Crowley amongst A∴A∴ members generally. Crowley chastised the deserters in an Equinox piece entitled “X-Rays on Ex-Probationers”: “Rats leave sinking ships; but you cannot be sure that a ship will sink because you see a rat running away from it.” The disarray of 1911 spelled the practical end of Crowley’s efforts to actively promote the A∴A∴. While Crowley affirmed its ongoing existence in a mystical sense (and would further, from time to time, enter new members into its ranks), he never again utilized it as the primary outward vehicle of the New Aeon. This left an organizational vacuum that would be filled dramatically in the following year.
For now, Crowley managed to take some pleasure in being released from the bulk of his public-oriented leadership duties. He spent the summer of 1911 at his favorite Paris pied-à-terre, 50 rue Vavin, and enjoyed there a frenzied and fruitful stint of writing which included both literary works (plays, poems, and short stories) and no fewer than nineteen essays—each designated as a “book” or liber by Crowley—devoted to mystical and magical practices. All these were published in subsequent numbers of The Equinox as official instructions of the A∴A∴, as were the bulk of the literary works. They are highly heterogeneous in subject matter, ranging from philosophical exhortations to the Great Work; ritual enactments of the teachings of The Book of the Law; and practical instructions on breathing techniques, Tarot divination, and cultivation of the magical memory.
One such book, in particular, foreshadowed the focus of Crowley’s subsequent magical career. In the Confessions, Crowley stressed that the secret of sexual magic—which he described in veiled terms as “the art of producing phenomena at will”—had been known to him since the summer of 1911, which he spent in Fontainebleau with Leila Waddell. This would seem to be an allusion to Liber Stellae Rubeae (The Book of the Ruby Star), written during that summer and designated as a Holy Book. In Crowley’s system of symbolism, the star ruby represented the “Lingam, the Inner Robe of Glory.” Liber Stellae Rubeae was Crowley’s first formal ritual expression of the dynamics of sexual magic. His primary influence was not Indian Tantra, but rather that strand of the Western esoteric tradition that interpreted alchemical symbols in sexual terms and believed in the possibility of a summum bonum or philosopher’s stone being created, on the physical level, by the esoteric preparation and admixture of sexual fluids. That Crowley believed literally in material transmutations through the use of sexual magic is made plain in one of the more startling passages of the Confessions:
I personally believe that if this secret [of sexual magic], which is a scientific secret, were perfectly understood, as it is not even by me after more than twelve years’ almost constant study and experiment, there would be nothing which the human imagination can conceive that could not be realized in practice.
By which I mean such things as this: that if it were desired to have an element of atomic weight six times that of uranium that element could be produced. If it were desired to devise an instrument by which the furthest stars or the electrons could be brought within the range of every one of our senses, that instrument could be invented.[ … ] I make these remarks with absolute confidence, for even the insignificant approaches that I have been able to make towards the sanctuaries of the secret have shown me that the relations between phenomena are infinitely more complex than the wildest philosophers have ever imagined, and the old proverb ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way’ needs no caveat.
Crowley did not undertake the task of conscious experimentation in this realm until January 1914, when his working partner would be Victor Neuburg. That adventure will close this chapter.
On a personal level, Crowley was living in apparent loving harmony with Leila Waddell throughout the summer of 1911. There was, however, another woman with whom Crowley had an affair during this time—Jane Chéron. She would later marry Walter Duranty, the then-famous foreign correspondent for The New York Times, who during this period was a close friend of Crowley and his occasional homosexual partner. Waddell, however, remained central to Crowley’s life through these and other affairs. She fascinated him, even as she frustrated his hope that she would dedicate herself to magic; Crowley never came to regard her as a successor to Rose who, as Ouarda the Seer, had served as the first Scarlet Woman.
But on October 11, Crowley at last encountered a worthy successor. This was Mary Desti, an incandescent woman of medium height and abundant curly black hair. Desti possessed a remarkable range of talents. She had been a friend and confidante to the world-renowned dancer Isadora Duncan (Desti’s memoir, The Untold Story, The Life of Isadora Duncan (1929) stands as a fundamental text on Duncan) and had founded a successful Parisian
parfumerie, the Maison Desti. The origin of the name “Desti” reveals much about the woman. She was born Mary Dempsey into an Irish American family in 1871. At age five, she renounced the family Catholic faith. As she grew older, she grew convinced that the pronunciation of “Dempsey” was a slurring, over many generations, of the noble Italian name of “d’Este.” She became Mary d’Este Dempsey, then dropped the last name altogether. Only after being sued by the d’Este family in 1911 for commercial infringement did she bend—barely—by changing the spelling to “Desti.” She thus shared Crowley’s fondness for nobilities bestowed upon oneself as one deserved them.
The two shared the same astrological sign of Libra, for it was at a fortieth birthday party for Desti at the Savoy Hotel in London on October 11 (the day before Crowley’s thirty-sixth birthday) that they first met. Desti was married to an American stockbroker, Solomon Sturges, who did not accompany his wife on her European travels. There was an immediate mutual fascination between Desti and Crowley. As he later recalled, with gallant acceptance of her claims to nobility, “This lady, a magnificent specimen of mingled Irish and Italian blood, possessed a most powerful personality and a terrific magnetism which instantly attracted my own. I forgot everything. I sat on the floor like a Chinese god, exchanging electricity with her.” By mid-November, they commenced a passionate affair—and magical collaboration.
Do What Thou Wilt Page 29
