Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  I refuse to take sides in any controversy. I observe dispassionately, sit in judgment. My own Fatherland is the Sun, and while I am traveling on this planet I never forget it. [ … ] I am not pro-German. I am pro-human. I have tried to save England from her fate by pointing out the elements of rottenness in her, so that she may set her house in order [ … ]

  This passage—with its veiled reference to the solar creed of Thelema—matched Crowley’s later beliefs as expressed in the Confessions: “I am English, and this in a very special sense, as being the prophet and poet appointed by the gods to serve her. We do not accuse Isaiah of being unpatriotic because he thunders against Israel. Isaiah’s motive is mine.”

  But the question of his treason or innocence is not decided by the fact that his views included sympathy for Germany. Whether Crowley was sincere in his alleged aim of working as an agent for the British and Americans remains the crux of the matter. Here the evidence weighs more strongly in Crowley’s favor.

  It must be conceded that Crowley’s plan was an absurd one, carried out in isolation by a man with romantic fantasies of espionage and no established contacts with the British and American intelligence communities. When, in 1916, he wrote to Commodore Guy Gaunt, head of British Naval Intelligence in the United States, Gaunt offered Crowley no encouragement to continue with his self-styled espionage plans. Commodore Gaunt—who became Admiral Sir Guy Gaunt—would concur with biographer John Symonds’s assessment of Crowley as a “small-time traitor.” But then, public disavowal of suspected agents is standard intelligence procedure.

  There is, however, firm evidence of at least one link between Crowley and Allied intelligence. This comes in the form of a 1929 letter by Everard Feilding, a prewar admirer of Crowley and a member of British Intelligence who held the rank of lieutenant during World War One. Crowley had contracted Feilding during the war about his plan to spy for the British. By 1929, Crowley and Feilding were no longer in regular communication, but Feilding was willing—at the request of Gerald Yorke—to offer his view of Crowley’s actions. As this letter has not been discussed in past biographies of Crowley, it is worth quoting:

  During the time I was a naval censor in the London Press Bureau & afterwards employed on Intelligence work in Egypt, Crowley wrote me from time to time that he was anxious to do work for the British Intelligence & that meanwhile he was doing his best, by various preposterous performances, to represent himself as disaffected & to get in with German connections.[ … ] I sent his letters to the Intelligence authorities with whom I was personally acquainted, but as this branch of work was in no way my job, I did nothing more beyond forwarding to Crowley a test question, which they suggested, regarding the identity of a certain personage [involved with the pro-German movement in America]. Whether it was to test his knowledge against their own, or because they really wished to know who the personage was, I did not enquire. Anyway, his answer did not, I understand, prove helpful, and, whether for that or other reasons I know not, they declined any direct communication with him.

  I can only add that my own personal very strong belief was & is that, whatever other vagaries Crowley may have indulged in, which have caused him to be expelled from two countries as widely different as Italy & France [in 1923 and 1929, respectively], treachery to his country was not one of them.

  It would seem that British Intelligence neither completely trusted Crowley nor—more to the point—found him particularly useful. Listen to his account, in the Confessions, as to why he failed the test posed him: “I was not going to risk my precarious position asking questions. The official English idea of a secret agent seemed to be that he should act like a newspaper reporter. The result was that the negotiations came to very little, though I turned in reports from time to time.” The discipline required of intelligence agents was anathema to Crowley. Small wonder the British chose to do without his services. Crowley did meet with William Jackson, assistant to the Attorney General for the State of New York, on two occasions—in July and October 1918—and was interrogated on the subject of his propaganda efforts. According to a later U.S. Department of Justice summary of those meetings, Crowley “admitted that though he had tried to obtain connection with the British Secret Service, he had been unable to do so.” The Department of Justice also stated (whether truthfully or not) that Crowley had never provided it with information during the war. But the fact that he did at least offer his services to the British may explain why, when Crowley did at last return to England in late 1919, he was not prosecuted for treason.

  There is one final point to be made concerning Crowley’s political stance during the war. While he was most certainly an Englishman at heart, it is reasonable to assume that—had the Germans emerged as victors—Crowley would not have hesitated to use whatever advantages came his way thereby. By the time World War One ended, Crowley and Viereck had parted company, their professional relations over. But in 1936, the two men would again correspond, and Crowley asked Viereck—still the pro-German spokesman in America—to mention The Book of the Law to the new German leader, Adolf Hitler, as it could serve as a suitable “philosophical basis for Nazi principles.” In the pursuit of political influence for himself and for Thelema—they became one for him—Crowley never hesitated to explore all avenues. Nothing came of this overture, and by the outset of World War Two Crowley was a staunch British patriot—and a close friend of many members of British Intelligence. That story will be told in due course.

  * * *

  In June 1915, Crowley fell deeply in love with Jeanne Robert Foster, a striking beauty who had already made a name for herself on the New York scene as a fashion model (the archetypal “Harrison Fisher girl”), as well as a journalist, editor and poet.

  Foster was thirty-six when they met. The fact of her marriage to Matlock Foster, a wealthy insurance agent twenty-five years her senior, seems never to have been a serious barrier. Indeed, it was Foster who early on—so great was her infatuation—was jealous of Crowley’s previous marriage. Nor was Crowley’s reputation a drawback, for Foster herself had already delved enthusiastically into occultism and theosophy and was eager to learn more.

  Upon their first meeting, Foster was in the company of Helen Hollis, a friend and fellow New York journalist. Crowley would have affairs with both women, dubbing them with the theriomorphic names of The Cat and The Snake, drawn from the Egyptian gods Pasht and Apophis. Crowley saw himself, in this period, as passing through the initiation process—rooted in the experiences of daily life—of becoming a Magus. As he later explained, “In the ancient ceremonies of the Egyptians the candidate was confronted or guided on his journey by priests wearing the masks of various animals, the traditional character of each serving to indicate the function of its wearer. Quaint as it sounds, I found myself discovering an almost stupefying physical resemblance to divers symbolic animals in those individuals whose influence on me, during their appointed period, was paramount.” These individuals were, by this stage in his life, always women—those who played the Scarlet Woman to his Beast. The Cat and The Snake were the first of these in America.

  It was Foster, not Hollis, whom Crowley adored, but the three became entwined in a triangle due to what Crowley viewed as coy erotic hesitancies on Foster’s part. When Foster left New York for a time, Crowley arranged an assignation with Hollis, The Snake. A touch of sadism sparked what he described as a twelve-hour “orgy”:

  I had unusually pointed canine teeth. I fix a fold of flesh between the two points; and then, beating time with one hand, suddenly snap, thus leaving two neat indentations on the flesh concerned. I have often done this as a demonstration; often as a jest or a psychological experiment, sometimes as an intimation of affection, but never till then as a callous and cruel insult. Probably I misjudged my own motives. Somehow or other the genuineness and integrity of this lost soul [Hollis] began to appeal to me. I began to contrast her hard bitter cynical disbelief with the soft honied superficial assurance of her rival: before I knew what I was do
ing, our duel had developed into a death struggle in which my hate and hopelessness strove to swamp themselves in a surge of amorous frenzy.

  The spasm swept me away. I no longer remember how we went out and dined, or how we got down to her house. Every nerve in my soul was screaming with implacable pain. Through it all I stuck to my guns; I never forgot that I loved the other woman and all that she stood for.

  Crowley fell into an exhausted sleep. When he awoke, he felt himself “innocent in a sense more sublime than my imagination can conceive.” He proceeded to experience a mystical vision. From an account he set down that same day: “Mentally, I woke into Pure Love. This was symbolized by a cube of blue-white light like a diamond of the best quality.[ … ] I cannot describe the quality of the emancipation given by this most wonderful experience. Aum.”

  As Crowley viewed it, the Magus is “to make his every act an expression of his magical formula.” Hollis and Foster, The Snake and The Cat, were, on the magical plane, ordeals designed to test his “magical formula” of Thelema, or Will. With regard to these two, his will was to evade the blandishments of Hollis and to retain his ideal love for Foster, even if she was unworthy of it. Thus he would fulfill the essential paradox of the Magus—to make a lie become truth: “The word of a Magus is always a falsehood. For it is a creative word; there would be no object in uttering it if it merely stated an existing fact in nature. The task of a Magus is to make his word, the expression of his will, come true. It is the most formidable labour that the mind can conceive.”

  The practical challenges to the romance between Crowley and Foster were formidable in themselves. In early October 1915, Crowley resolved to make a trip to the West Coast, primarily to determine the state of affairs in the North American chapter of the O.T.O., headquartered in Vancouver. Foster was traveling with her husband, who was in poor health and apparently ignorant of the affair even as it was conducted under his nose.

  En route, Crowley made a brief stop in Detroit and paid a visit to the Parke Davis chemical plant. The cooperation Crowley received there was, by his account, complete; Parke Davis was “kind enough to interest themselves in my researches in Anhalonium Lewinii [peyote] and made me some special preparations on the lines indicated by my experience which proved greatly superior to previous preparations.”

  As for the nature of these “researches,” an amusing story was told by Louis Wilkinson, a British man of letters who befriended Crowley during these wartime years and would remain a friend and sympathizer—though never a disciple—for the rest of Crowley’s life. Crowley, while in New York, hosted anhalonium parties just as he had in London during the heyday of The Equinox. In London, Crowley had initiated Katherine Mansfield in the ways of the drug; in New York, the chief literary lion drawn into the experimentation was the famed novelist Theodore Dreiser. As Wilkinson recalled:

  I persuaded Dreiser to come to one [of the anhalonium parties]. He did so with some misgiving. “It will take treble the usual dose to move Dreiser,” said Crowley, as he prepared it for him. Dreiser, none the less, drank his glass of “the mixture” at one gulp, with determined bravado. Then he felt a little uneasy. He asked Crowley if there was a good doctor in the neighbourhood, “just in case anything goes wrong.” “I don’t know about a doctor,” said Crowley, “but,” he added in a tone of genial reassurance, “there’s a first-class undertaker on the corner of Thirty-third Street and Sixth Avenue.” Dreiser said nothing for a few moments, then he said, “I don’t like that kind of joke, Crowley.”

  As it happened, Dreiser fared well under the influence of the drug, reciting aloud in prolix detail the visions he witnessed.

  Having left Detroit and Parke Davis behind him, Crowley was on board a train on October 12, 1915, his fortieth birthday. As had become his habit on birthdays, Crowley engaged in Sammasati meditation—the technique of analysis of backward-flowing memory learned from Allan Bennett. During this meditation, Crowley felt suddenly compelled to rip the platinum lid off the engraved ring that symbolized his grade of Master of the Temple. The conjunction of these events produced an impact such that Crowley felt he could at last acknowledge himself as a Magus—completely identified with his word of Thelema.

  One of his immediate goals was to make the word flesh in a literal sense by begetting a male child. His magical name as Magus was To Mega Therion (Greek for “The Great Beast”). Foster was to serve as his Scarlet Woman and produce the son that had been denied him in the past. The undertaking would be magic of the highest order, the mystical union of the sexes. Crowley composed, in the summer and autumn of 1915, a lengthy sequence of poems (as yet unpublished) entitled The Golden Rose, which contained his most passionate love poetry since his first years with his wife Rose. In these poems, he addressed her as “Hilarion,” the magical name she had chosen for herself (that of a mahatma she had encountered in her Theosophical studies).

  But relations worsened between them during the trip out west. Despite a series of Magical Operations, Foster did not become pregnant, although at the time Crowley was convinced that she had. Later, in the Confessions, Crowley would remark that “I did not know that I was attempting a physical impossibility.” This was a bitter gibe at Foster, who had given birth during the first year of her marriage; the baby was stillborn. More to the point here is Crowley’s attitude toward women and childbearing. In an essay of this period, “The Whole Duty of Woman,” Crowley was adamant as to the nature of that duty in wartime: “And let every woman capable of bearing a child consider herself shamed unless she bears one in her womb or at her breast!” Crowley was not being intentionally humorous here; in his 1917 “Memorandum” written in defense of his propaganda efforts, he cited this essay as stating a serious and patriotic thesis. It surely was not Crowley’s intent that his son be borne by Foster to support the war effort. But he believed that childbearing was the essential function of woman, and he was bitter over the failure of Foster to do so.

  Together, Crowley and Foster paid a visit to the Vancouver O.T.O. Lodge. Its leader, Charles Robert Stansfeld Jones, was then twenty-nine and already an ardent disciple of Crowley for some years. An Englishman who earned his living as an accountant, Jones had joined the A∴A∴ in London as a Probationer in 1909; he met Crowley briefly during this period, but his primary instructor was J. F. C. Fuller. In 1910, Jones moved to British Columbia while maintaining contact with the London A∴A∴ headquarters. In 1913, he was promoted to the grade of Neophyte, for which he took the magical motto Achad (Hebrew for “one,” with the esoteric meaning of cosmic unity). It was under the name of Frater Achad that Jones would ultimately produce writings that marked him as Crowley’s most intellectually gifted disciple since Fuller. Jones had also become an O.T.O. VII°, and would ultimately be named, by Reuss, X° Grand Master for North America in 1921. Crowley inspected with approval the Lodge temple that Jones and his fellow members had constructed.

  But his central concern was with Foster. At some point during their West Coast journey, the two lovers quarreled fiercely. Foster returned to New York without him; when Crowley attempted to rejoin her some weeks later, Foster made it clear that the affair was over. The Beast was anguished by her loss, and did not acquiesce without a vicious struggle. The evidence here comes from letters written by the painter John Butler Yeats, the father of the poet, a confidant of Foster, and no admirer of Crowley. Yeats claimed that Foster had broken with Crowley as a result of a disturbing rumor—“to wit, that he had been libelling three distinguished novelists charging them with ‘unspeakable vices.’” The form of the alleged libels parallels Crowley’s inuendos against Viereck in the Confessions. According to Yeats, after Foster left him, Crowley fell to “persecuting her” by:

  sending her husband anonymous letters in which he asserts that she has been living with a wealthy lawyer & that she intends to poison her husband. Once he met her in the street by chance & then & there produced a curious looking knife & said that he would kill her. A crowd gathered & she escaped. He boasts that he
is not afraid because John Quinn [to whom this letter by Yeats was addressed] will always find bail for him and protect him. She thinks he is a cocaine fiend. At the very start I had warned her, so that she has never let him get so much as a letter from her. He has some girl with him, and he sent this girl to her with a message to say that she must help him or he would destroy her. The girl wept all the time while giving the message. Mrs. Foster told her politely to go to the devil. The Government here and the English government are both busy watching him with detectives. The English authorities say he is a spy and that he has been to Canada.

  No mention of any of this occurs in the Confessions. As for Foster, Crowley could not forget her. Some five years later, in May 1920, he wrote in his diary: “I have not been in love since 1915 [ … ] Did she really ‘break my heart’?”

  If his heart had been broken, his spirit had not. The next major love affair—or “ordeal,” as Crowley termed it—commenced in the spring of 1916. Again the beloved was married, and again she was paired—in Crowley’s mind—with a single but less noble woman. And again both women received theriomorphic names: The Monkey and The Owl.