Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  As winter came on at Cefalù, Crowley traveled once more to Paris. This time Hirsig accompanied him. They arrived in February 1922 and stayed at Crowley’s favorite Parisian lodgings at 50 rue Vavin, just off the Boulevard Montparnasse. But Hirsig went on to London, and Crowley did not remain long in Paris. In the Confessions he offers mere evasions as to the motives behind his departure: “For the first time in my life, Paris disappointed me. All the old enchantments had somehow vanished.”

  The harsher truth was that Crowley felt himself near the breaking point with respect to his dependence upon cocaine and heroin. The other drugs he had employed in his life—hashish, ether, anhalonium, and the rest—had never taken hold of him as these two had. In the light of modern knowledge of addiction, this is unsurprising. But Crowley held a view of drugs that was governed (or mirrored) by the voice of Hadit in The Book of the Law (from II, 22): “I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all.” As that selfsame prophet, it was inconceivable that he could not make himself master of any drug he wished. Yet, since January 1921, his average intake of heroin alone had been three grains per day. On February 14, he went to Fontainebleau, booked a room at an inn, Au Cadran Bleu, and began a diary that he entitled Liber Tzaba vel Nike—Tzaba being the Hebrew verb root for waging war, Nike the Greek for victory. Crowley thus utilized—some sixty years ahead of Ronald Reagan—the metaphor of a war on drugs.

  Here is the opening inscription of Liber Tzaba vel Nike, or The Fountain of Hyacinth. The “Storm-fiend” referred to was Crowley’s personal metaphor (inspired by legends of guardian storm spirits for the Himalayan peak Kanchenjunga) for his asthma and bronchitis symptoms:

  I, The Beast 666 wishing to prove the strength of my Will and the degree of my courage, have poisoned myself for the last two years and have succeeded finally in reaching a degree of intoxication such that withdrawal of the drugs (heroin & cocaine) produce a terrible attack by the “Storm-fiend.” The acute symptoms arise suddenly, usually on awaking from a nap. They remind me of the “For God sake turn it off” feeling of having an electric current passing through one, and of the “Sugar-starvation” of the Baltoro Glacier. The psychology is very complex and curious: I think a detailed record of my attempt at breaking the habit will be interesting and useful.

  Crowley, in his expeditions both to Chogo-Ri and to Kanchenjunga, had firmly insisted that high altitudes posed inherent physiological limitations to which climbers could not “acclimate” themselves. But he was unwilling to draw an analogous conclusion with respect to the physiological impacts of heroin and cocaine. He believed, rather, that he had poisoned himself so as to test the truth of his will and courage. These qualities would serve—must serve—to “acclimate” him to the force of the drugs.

  In Liber Tzaba, Crowley detailed the degradations stemming from his drug usage in the period just prior to his arrival at Fontainebleau:

  [M]y memory is quite clear that I have been taking heroin continuously for many weeks: three or four doses to help me get up, & others practically all day at short intervals. As to Cocaine, I must have had at least two or three prolonged bouts of it every week, plus a few “hairs of the dog” on most of the ‘off-days’. Most of my mental & moral powers were seriously affected in various ways, while I was almost wholly dependent on them for physical energy, in particular for sexual force, which only appeared after unusual excesses, complicated by abnormal indulgence in alcohol. My creative life had become spasmodic & factitious. [ … ]I avoided washing, dressing, shaving, as much as possible. I was unable to count money properly, to inspect bills, & so on; everything bored me. I could not even feel alarm at obviously serious symptoms.

  In his first week at Fontainebleau, Crowley struggled to reduce gradually his intake by the method of allowing himself dosages during certain portions of the day—the “Open Season”—but not others—the “Close Season.” He felt acutely the need for drugs when the “Storm-fiend” symptoms arose, though he tried—with very intermittent success—to employ substitute palliatives such as alcohol and strychnine. Struggles with his Thelemic vocation are frequent in Liber Tzaba, as in this February 20, 1922, entry:

  Mine inmost Identity says: “To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, and be drunk thereon”: it is lawful to do this, for to worship Him is to make him manifest, & so to fill the world with Truth & Beauty. But I have erred in going too far; the worship has become forced, & fallen into fanatical frenzy which blasphemes Him. [ … ] I must justify Him (& myself) by making myself unchallengably master of these “means of grace”. I must be as capable of using them, & as confident in my capacity, as an engineer is of handling high explosives; & every piece of work undertaken with the aid of these tools, must prove by its perfection that His precepts & His promises are wrought of Righteousness & tested by Truth.

  Here was a decisive interpretation of—and limitation upon—The Book of the Law, one which Crowley never incorporated into his formal commentaries. Drug use required subtlety and care if harm was to be evaded; the principle of moderation in all things withstood even the ecstatic verses of the Book. But moderation was difficult to achieve, particularly for the prophet of that Book. The hold of the drugs would not yield to mere written analyses. Thus it was that Crowley, after returning to Paris, contacted a Dr. Edmund Gros in early March to seek advice as to a suitable sanitorium. But, as he noted in Liber Tzaba, the facility would have to be one “where I can direct my own treatment. To submit to medical treatment would be to destroy my whole theory, & blaspheme the Gods whose chosen minister I am.” Dr. Gros prescribed luminal for Crowley and recommended the open air of Geneva, but unsurprisingly, could recommend no facility along the lines insisted upon by Crowley.

  Hirsig the Scarlet Woman had, at this same time, come to Paris to rejoin the Beast. It was an emotionally difficult reunion for Crowley, who back on February 12—in anticipation of his difficult self-treatment at Fontainebleau—had inscribed a “last Will and Testament” in his Liber Tzaba diary volume which left the whole of his property (nil, but for his books, magical implements, and the unprofitable rights to his writings) to Hirsig, whom he made his executrix. This, in essence, left the care and nurture of Thelema in her hands. But when they were face-to-face once more, Crowley sensed the mounting difficulties between them: “Lea[h] is a violent spiritual poison to me. We love deeply & truly; we sympathize; we do all we can to help each other; but we act on each other like Cancer. It is the formula of the independent growth in the One Flesh.” The “independent growth,” Crowley believed, was taking place in himself—he was, for the moment, confident of overcoming his drug dependence. Their bond continued, but by the end of March, the Beast recorded that he had escaped the delusion “that women exist in reality.”

  With little money in their pockets, the two journeyed to London in May 1922. Upon arrival, Crowley was without an adequate wardrobe, and so went to retrieve some traditional Highland garments—kilts and tunics—kept in storage by a friend since 1914. In these, Crowley made his way about 1920s London, renewing old contacts and seeking out new prospects, after having found an apartment for Hirsig and himself that overlooked Russell Square.

  There was, early on, a particularly awkward encounter. Crowley paid a call at Wellington Square, Chelsea, where his former brother-in-law, the now-eminent painter Gerald Kelly, resided. Kelly was bearing a considerable responsibility for the upbringing of Lola Zaza, Crowley’s daughter by Rose Kelly. Lola Zaza, now fourteen, was on hand for this visit; it may have been the first time she had seen her father since the divorce in 1910. Neither she nor her uncle bore any great love for Crowley. One may surmise the particulars of the visit from the brief diary account by a proud papa Crowley: “I have just seen Gerald Kelly, annoyed & bewildered because Lion’s Daughters do not grow wool! Lola Zaza is unmanageable. S
he despises everybody, thinks she is a genius, is stupid, inaccurate, plain, ill-tempered, etc. etc. God! but it’s good to be a Lion! For the first time in my life I taste the true pleasures of immortality. But the sheep are many, & their pressure may suffocate Lion cubs[ … ]” The sense of identification with his daughter is manifest, but after this all contact between them ceased. Gerald Yorke recalled that Lola Zaza “became a nursery governess, disowned her father, and when I tried to arrange for them to meet, she refused. She has married, and when last I met her she seemed a normal, happy wife.”

  Undaunted by his meeting with Kelly and Lola Zaza, Crowley attempted to pay a personal call on Fuller at the War Office on May 13. Fuller refused to see him, transmitting to his former master a terse note of two words: “Nothing Doing.” But Crowley would continue to send letters to Fuller—letters that received no answer—for years to come.

  Matters fared somewhat better with Austin Harrison, the editor of The English Review, with whom Crowley now renewed a friendship. Harrison took on Crowley as a regular—and prolific—contributor through the summer of 1922. Harrison paid Crowley little but allowed him considerable creative freedom. Crowley thus contributed essays under a variety of pseudonyms. Two such essays, “The Great Drug Delusion” and “The Drug Panic,” appeared in the June and July 1922 issues under the authorial guise, respectively, of “A New York Specialist” and “A London Physician.” These were written in opposition to the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920, the first major instance in which Parliament sought to establish criminal penalties for possession of designated narcotic drugs. The Act included criminal penalties for heroin obtained through nonprescription channels. As Berridge and Edwards have observed in their study, Opium and the People, the 1920 Act “was not part of a smooth historical evolution, but a sharp and imposed change.” Certainly it was a change felt sharply by Crowley, who was anxious, on behalf of Thelema, to defend the value of drugs and the freedom of choice to use them. It is remarkable, however, that Harrison saw fit to accede to Crowley’s idea to give his arguments the coloration of official medical expertise. Crowley had long regarded himself as a gifted amateur diagnostician, and while at the Abbey he had, as Martin P. Starr has noted, “stationery printed up, listing his various imaginary medical degrees, including ‘M.D. Damc.’—Damcar being the mythical home of the Arab wise men included in the Fama Fraternitatis.” The Fama was a seventeenth-century Rosicrucian work, and it was in the esoteric tradition of the Rosicrucians, who regarded the work of the spiritually enlightened physician as a paramount human task, that Crowley viewed his own expertise.

  But these pieces offer alleged medical advice that, based upon Crowley’s own bitter experience, he must have known to be lies. For example, in “The Great Drug Delusion,” the pseudonymous Crowley emphasized his extensive personal knowledge of drugs, then added cavalierly that “I attempted to produce a ‘drug-habit’ in myself. In vain. My wife literally nagged me about it; ‘Don’t go out without your cocaine, sweetheart!’ or ‘Did you remember to take your heroin before lunch, big boy?’” At the end of this article, a note was appended recommending the “private clinic” of the “New York Specialist,” located in Cefalù, for readers interested in having their drug use treated not as a physiological habit but rather as a matter of human weakness to be cured by principles of “moral reconstruction.”

  The dilemma of his own personal addiction—as to which he alternated between lucidity and denial—now fused with his sense of mission on behalf of Thelema. Public expression on the drug question became a major priority for Crowley. As it happened, J. W. N. Sullivan had suggested that Crowley approach publisher Grant Richards with a view to selling his memoirs. When Richards was cool to this idea, Crowley offered an alternative project: “I would write a shocker on the subject which was catering to the hysteria and prurience of the sex-crazed public: the drug traffic insanity.[ … ] I proposed as a title The Diary of a Drug Fiend and sketched out a synopsis of its contents on a sheet of notepaper. This was mostly bluff. I had not really any clear idea of my story.” Richards rejected Drug Fiend, but it was thereafter accepted at Collins, which offered a £60 advance—a godsend to the financially strapped Crowley. Further, both Crowley and Hirsig saw the contract as a vital confirmation, on the spiritual plane, of their work on behalf of the New Aeon. According to Crowley, the contract called for delivery of the manuscript within a month of signing. This would have been most unusual, but in any event Crowley had his own reason for wishing to write in haste—he hoped that Drug Fiend could be rushed to release before the end of summer, as it would be “suitable for holiday reading.”

  Crowley and Hirsig took a new lodging at 31 Wellington Street, Chelsea, and there the Beast and the Scarlet Woman worked in a feverish flurry. From June 4 to July 1, a course which Crowley calculated at 27 days, 12¾ hours, he dictated to Hirsig (who wrote in longhand) a novel some 121,000 words in length. Moreover, it was a readable and even, at times, a stylish and charming novel, particularly in its opening chapters, which chronicled the mad and giddy exploits of two perfectly cast Lost Generation romantic types, the former World War One flying ace Sir Peter Pendragon (knighted for his courage in the skies) and his true lady love with whom he eloped to Paris, nicknamed Unlimited Lou. The novel is written in three “books” or sections titled in the paradoxical sequence “Paradiso,” “Inferno,” and “Purgatorio,” turning the Christian narrative structure of Dante inside out. “Paradiso” is the realm of first unbridled indulgence by the two lovers in heroin and cocaine. “Inferno” is the cost of that indulgence—physical degeneration and psychological despair. “Purgatorio” is the ironic title for their cure and salvation by means of submitting themselves to the wisdom of King Lamus (his name, and not a literal royal title), who serves as the leader of the Abbey of Thelema located in the far-off town of “Telepylus.” The novel makes expressly clear—on the introductory page to “Purgatorio”—that the Abbey was a “real place” and that interested readers could communicate with the author.

  Drug Fiend is a roman à clef in which a number of figures from Crowley’s life appear. We know from notes made by Crowley in his own copy of the book that the dislikable aspects of Pendragon’s character were based on Cecil Maitland. As for Lou, she was “partly a wish-phantasm of my daughter, Lola Zaza Crowley.” The settled residents of the Abbey—Hirsig, Wolfe, Shumway, and the children—all were given secondary character roles. But the figure of King Lamus—based on Crowley himself—grows ever more dominant as the novel progresses. King Lamus is brilliant, gracious, and sufficiently impassive to stand up to the foul rumors and press libels that beset him during his visits to London. But in Telepylus there are no such distractions. Utopian peace and harmony reign. There Pendragon and Lou discover the truth of Thelema and the natural guidance their own True Wills could provide. As for the drugs that had enchained them, they could still be used in magical training—a vocation which suited Pendragon, but as for which Lou, a woman, had no affinity.

  Treatment through the exercise of True Will will justly be regarded as naive in the extreme by modern-day readers, but it fit nicely with the views of many of Crowley’s English contemporaries, who viewed drug abuse strictly as a moral weakness. Drug Fiend was accepted immediately upon completion by Collins; there seem to have been no editorial requests for changes. Indeed, so pleased was Collins with the work that it promptly advanced Crowley £120 for a second book, a full-scale autobiography which would ultimately be published—though not for seven years, and not by Collins—as the Confessions.

  Initial reviews of Drug Fiend upon its publication in November 1922 were mixed. The Times Literary Supplement offered an acute assessment: “Mr. Crowley has not the literary fascination of a DeQuincey or the power and stark realism of a Zola. His most conspicuous gift is an effervescent imagination, an exuberant direction[ … ] It is impossible to say that at any moment in the career of Peter and his wife do we seem to be in touch with reality.”

  Whatever weaknesses Drug
Fiend possessed, it hardly deserved the fate it was about to receive—a public thrashing at the hands of James Douglas, the book reviewer for the tabloid Sunday Express, who earlier that year had castigated James Joyce’s Ulysses as “the pinnacle and apex of lubricity and obscenity.” The headline for his review of Drug Fiend ran: “A Book for Burning.” Douglas reviled both Crowley’s methods of drug treatment and his Thelemic creed: “Although there is an attempt to pretend that the book is merely a study of the deprivation caused by cocaine, in reality it is an ecstatic eulogy of the drug and of its effects upon the body and the mind.” He urged that Collins withdraw the book from circulation. The Sunday Express followed up this review with a November 26, 1922, front-page story featuring a photo of a shaven-headed Crowley. Tiers of lurid headlines above it proclaimed “Orgies in Sicily” and the “Black Record of Aleister Crowley” and his “Preying on the Debased.” Collins was again urged to withdraw Drug Fiend. The publisher all but capitulated. Drug Fiend was not immediately withdrawn, but Collins ended marketing support and printed no further copies. The contract for the Confessions was abruptly canceled.