Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  Why did the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini (named Premier six months before, in October 1922) take action? Crowley would later insist, in a piece written for the London Sunday Express in 1933, that “The explanation of why I left is quite simple and unsensational.… Several people who were my guests at the ‘abbey’ made imaginative copy out of their visits. Then the Fascists came into power and some foreign newspaper correspondents were asked to leave. And so was I.” This is inaccurate as to basic chronology—the interviews given by Mary Butts and Betty May to the Sunday Express appeared after Mussolini came into power. But it may have been the case that the negative publicity was viewed by the Fascists as reflecting poorly upon their regime.

  Just what feelings Crowley would have held toward Mussolini, had the expulsion not occurred, is open to question. In the Confessions—completed in the months just after Crowley left Cefalù—Crowley allows that his first glimpse of Fascism—in Rome in October 1922, on his way back to the Abbey from London—was a favorable one: “Rome was wild with enthusiasm. The Fascisti swarmed all over the city. I thought their behaviour admirable. They policed the towns and suppressed any attempted breach of the peace with the utmost efficiency [ … ]” By April, however—prior to the expulsion—Crowley claimed to have concluded that Mussolini was a failure by virtue of having compromised his principles to obtain papal support. But Mussolini had been making overtures to the Church as early as the spring of 1921. Either Crowley was uninformed, or his politics were influenced by his exile—for it was only after May 1923 that Crowley spoke out against Mussolini.

  Crowley consulted the I Ching, plotting potential relocations. At last, he decided upon Tunisia, then under French rule. And so the Beast and the Scarlet Woman departed the Abbey over which they had ruled in a manner befitting their belief in the New Aeon. On May 1, they sailed from Palermo. The following day, they arrived in the port of Tunis. North Africa had served Crowley before as a place in which to test and cleanse his soul. It would do so now again.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Years of Exile and Wandering—and the Publication of a Masterwork (1923–30)

  Crowley and Hirsig landed in Tunisia as the Beast and Scarlet Woman in exile. By May 11, 1923, they found a cheap room in a hotel, Au Souffle du Zephir, in La Marsa Plage, a tourist beach town northeast of Tunis. Once ensconced here, Crowley tried, in his diary, to cheer himself by wishfully imagining that those who dared oppose him were futilely opposing the forces of destiny. In this case, the victim would be Mussolini: “It is the beginning of the end for this upstart renegade with his gang of lawless ruffians, and his crazy attempt to restore the tyranny of the Dark Ages. Only twenty-eight days since he signed the order for my expulsion from Italy, and already he totters.”

  Crowley was still struggling with his dependence on drugs—primarily heroin, but also cocaine, which he would attempt to employ (along with luminal and ethyl oxide) as a palliative for the heroin craving. His average heroin usage since October 1922 had reached three grains per day. Insomnia, dyspnoea, diarrhea, and days lost in lassitude were his most prominent symptoms.

  Yet Crowley was productive during this time, composing two incisive essays, “Ethyl Oxide” and “What is Qabalah?”, on consecutive days. But his primary labor during this summer, fostered by isolation, was to complete the dictation to Hirsig of the Confessions. Hirsig was a tireless amanuensis who also returned to the Abbey, this same summer, to look in on Shumway and the children. These now included a new arrival, born to Shumway on May 19—a baby girl whose father was Baron La Calce, the landlord of the Abbey. Baron La Calce took no responsibility for the child, nor did Shumway press him to. Crowley, in absentia, named the girl, in his typical exhaustive manner, Isabella Isis Selene Hecate Artemis Diana Hera Jane.

  Shumway would continue on at the Abbey until evicted by the Baron in late 1924 for failure to pay rent. It was Shumway, and Shumway alone, who cared for her daughter by Crowley, Astarte Lulu Panthea, whom Crowley would see but once more—late in 1928, when the girl paid her itinerant father a brief visit in Paris.

  For Crowley, in Tunisia, the psychological task of concluding his “Autohagiography,” as he termed it (half-seriously, half in jest), must have been severe. He had lost both his Abbey and his reputation, and no longer had a publisher for the massive work on which he labored. The tone of the Confessions reveals none of this—throughout, it is all but unremitting in its braggadocio. His diaries of the time reveal a more anguished self-analysis. On May 19, during an ethyl oxide session, Crowley considered, in studied hypothetical terms, what suicide would mean in the case of a man, such as himself, who might have been damaged by his drug “experiments” and might further be left “a mere shadow of my former self” should he subject himself to a “regular cure”—one administered by physicians, and not self-prescribed in a kingly manner as befitted the prophet of Thelema. “Why drag out a useless life, dishonouring my reputation, discrediting my methods, etc?” Crowley perceived a magical virtue in the capacity to embrace death as a needed means of change—in contrast to the self-absorption that marks the practitioner of black magic: “Here is another argument against the Black Brothers, against the idea of resistance to change in general, against the static conception of the Ego etc.” He further argued that suicide would represent, not the demise of his prophetic vocation, but rather a shifting of tactics—incarnations—for the sake of Thelema: “Suicide should not be taken as an indication of failure (in such a case) but of the (proper) determination to be done with a worn-out tool, or to make way for new ones, or (perhaps) to get a new one oneself.”

  Two subsequent entries, on June 4 and June 10, confirm how deeply shaken he was by his exile. In the first, Crowley revisited the Christian childhood that still lived within him, despite three years of arduous self-transformation in the Chambre des Cauchemars. The insistent critics of his character, to whom Crowley refers below, remain unknown:

  I got the intimation that I should be exceedingly welcome in the ranks of the enemy [Christianity, should Crowley convert to it] on account of my importance as the Incarnation of Evil.[ … ] Such at least are the imbecile arguments advanced by the people who are at present engaged in attacking me. They tell me too that this is my last chance to put myself right with God. They recall to me all sorts of psychological facts about my past. It is all part of a plan for making my excuses to an offended Deity.[ … ] They point out to me that I am a perfectly eligible candidate as King of the Puritans. They show me how easy it would be to interpret every incident of my career in this light. It is perfectly true, moreover, that I am legitimately the King of the Puritans, that the Law of Thelema is in fact the most perfect statement of Puritanism that has ever been promulgated.

  They also prove to me with the greatest wealth of detail (I am really rather ashamed that I have already forgotten it) that the Book of the Law is after all the perfect expression of my subconscious self & therefore much more truly my work than anything else I have ever written.[ … ] Of course they do not throw any doubt upon my sincerity; their idea seems to be that I am self-deluded through a lack of the sense of proportion; this being my most sensitive point. The attack is venomous.

  For Crowley to so much as consider the response of Christendom to a penitent Beast returning to the fold shows how deeply the attack struck.

  In a June 10 entry, Crowley tried to rally himself by reflecting upon his role as keeper of the age-old esoteric wisdom. If the risks he ran in obtaining and transmitting this wisdom had led him astray—even fundamentally astray—history would nonetheless absolve him. As Stephen Skinner has noted, the “Universal knowledge, wisdom” and other qualities referred to by Crowley below represent the sephiroth of the kabbalistic Tree of Life, which are coiled about by the serpent of wisdom. Crowley wrote:

  Nobody before Aleister Crowley had the means of tracing to their inmost recesses the secrets of the Magi[ … ]because I have got the secrets of Universal knowledge, wisdom & power & understanding & of the beauty & vict
ory & splendour that proceed from Him that is coiled within its coils. I may be a Black Magician but I’m a bloody great one. The world may have to pass through a period of error through me, but even the error will tend toward the truth.

  To resort to greatness as a Black Magician as a justification for his life was a low point to which Crowley did not—in his surviving writings—return.

  As for disciples such as Norman Mudd, they came to Crowley in dead earnest seeking no less than truth. And if Mudd pestered the life out of Crowley, Crowley gave as good as he got. The story of Mudd’s long devotion to Crowley is as remarkable and cautionary a tale of esoteric discipleship as one could wish.

  * * *

  Mudd, it will be recalled, had been a student supporter of Crowley during the latter’s failed attempt to lecture to the young men of Cambridge in 1910. While fellow undergraduate Victor Neuburg went on to an eventful partnership with the Beast, Mudd had faded away.

  But Mudd remained obsessed by a sense of shame at having abandoned Crowley. Over the next decade, Mudd desultorily pursued an academic career and emigrated to South Africa to become head of the Department of Applied Mathematics at Grey University College, Bloemfontein. A bachelor, he lost sight in one eye in 1915 due to gonorrheal complication. But in 1920, Mudd took advantage of a sabbatical leave to come to London and find the Master he still revered. Crowley, of course, was by this time in Cefalù. Poor Mudd abandoned his London search and—deceived by the address given in the Blue Equinox—crossed the Atlantic to Detroit.

  Crowley was nowhere to be found, but Charles Robert Stansfeld Jones (Frater Achad) was. Jones accepted Mudd as his student in early 1921, with unsatisfactory results from the perspective of both men. As a newly admitted Probationer of the A∴A∴, Mudd took the name Omnia Pro Veritate (“All for Truth”). He may fairly be said to have lived up to this name—in the years that followed, Mudd would indeed sacrifice all that he had in the name of Truth as he saw it or, ultimately, failed to see it.

  While studying under Jones, Mudd at last made contact through the mails with Crowley, who encouraged Mudd both to send money and to come to Cefalù. Paradoxically, this contact heightened Mudd’s doubts as to his magical vocation. On April 12, 1921, Mudd set aside his Oath as a Probationer, left Detroit with no explanation to Jones, and returned to South Africa. But on Christmas Day 1922, Mudd reversed himself once more. In a despairing frame of mind, Mudd read en masse the letters that Crowley had sent him since 1921—letters which Mudd had left unopened and unanswered, in a final futile effort to forget his teacher. These letters now confirmed his new course. Mudd, balding and entering middle age, would vindicate—at last—the cowardly Cambridge boy.

  He resigned his teaching post, liquidated his possessions, and set sail for Cefalù where, as previously described, he arrived on April 22, 1923, the day before Crowley’s expulsion. Mudd was now ordered by his long-sought Master to remain with Shumway at the Abbey while the Beast and Scarlet Woman went into exile.

  But Mudd did his best, bequeathing his funds to Crowley and his labor—for two months—to the dying Abbey. Mudd also became Crowley’s personal secretary, composing letters to potentially sympathetic persons who might intervene on the Beast’s behalf with the Italian government. But to proceed effectively, Mudd felt in need of an explanation as to why Crowley’s reputation was quite so black. Crowley composed a remarkably frank letter to Mudd on June 13, just prior to the latter’s arrival in Tunisia to join the Beast and the Scarlet Woman. The opening sentence may seem suspect to the reader, but it may be taken as sincere, in light of the extreme disclosures that follow:

  I have always been temperate and cautious until recently. I now find myself thrown into a spiritual state unfamiliar and terrible by the simple process of stopping Heroin for a short time. I get dissociation both of personality and ideas such as I never had even in the Abyss [the kabbalistic passage between the Second and the Third Orders of the A∴A∴]. Several fundamental ideas peculiar to A.C. have been ruthlessly annihilated in the last week. My point of view has been revolutionized. Also, I have ceased to struggle against death or insanity.[ … ]

  I quite agree that my career for all these 19 years [since 1904] has been a brilliant failure; a classic example of the results of a magical blunder.[ … ] I refused to act by CCXX [the Book of the Law]. I took all the reasonable measures I could to secure the success of my works. That is what has smashed my career. Might it then not be the final disastrous mistake to get myself back to normality as every reasonable element in my mind urges. At no time have I feared to risk insanity or death for the sake of the Work but there is still this feeling that part of my proof is to be a fine healthy old boy so as to escape the reproach of the ungodly.

  Here is a point where your ‘love’ is wanted. I can trust you because you once wrote that it doesn’t matter a fart whether I lived or died.

  In what context Mudd made this latter remark is unknown, but Mudd’s actions, at least, bespeak that it mattered very greatly. Once arrived in Tunisia, Mudd served as secretary and de facto worldly liaison. A letter by Mudd in praise of Crowley was published in the November 14, 1923, issue of the Oxford University magazine Isis. This was followed, in 1924, by the pamphlet An Open Letter to Lord Beaverbrook, privately printed and mailed to all manner of British literary and political figures. In it, Mudd cited the lies printed by Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express, confessed the Beast’s inability to bear litigation costs, and demanded fair play by the wealthy lord. The pamphlet had no impact whatsoever.

  For his part, Crowley struggled throughout the year to raise his flagging magical energies. He took a room in the Tunisia Palace, a swank hotel in the capital, while Hirsig remained in La Marsa. Crowley’s companion was a young black male, Mohammed ben Brahim, whom Crowley had hired as a servant and with whom he performed sexual magic. Life in the Tunisia Palace was well beyond Crowley’s means, but he managed it for a time.

  In September, a perturbation arose. As a result of working closely with her, Mudd had fallen in love with Hirsig, the gaunt Scarlet Woman. He had even gone so far to broach the suggestion to Crowley that he, Mudd, could legally marry the Scarlet Woman, a step that the Beast had never taken. One might imagine this a friction-free matter in the realm of Thelema, in which love was identified with will and restriction with sin. But Crowley found nothing to admire in Mudd’s emotional state, which Hirsig seems to have reciprocated with affection, as opposed to passion. When Mudd, in his magical diary, accused Crowley of an “attitude of possession,” Crowley penned his denial: “No: unity with her. She is ‘mine’ just as my liver is.” Crowley also probed at Mudd’s sexual fear of “an ordeal of utter shame before Alostrael.” Wrote Crowley, perhaps remembering his own abasements in the Chambre des Cauchemars: “If you only knew! It was touch and go my saying, first time you came into the room, ‘There’s a choice of orifices, go to it’ and filling a fresh pipe. But I couldn’t inflict it on you: I’m getting tenderhearted in my old age!”

  Crowley depended upon Hirsig, and though he would not admit it to Mudd, he must have felt challenged by Mudd’s aspirations to his Scarlet Woman. After all, he had recently confided to his diary that “the enemy”—respectable Christendom—could best undermine him by undermining his Scarlet Woman: “If they could get me to distrust her, even in thought, the rest would be easy.” In a more intimate vein, there is this all-too-human confession on June 29: “I am always thinking of Alostrael, loving her.[ … ] The truth is (I fear) that the beauty of human love—as she & I know it—does really give a new meaning to the old foolish fear of death.” Small wonder that Mudd’s proposal of marriage rankled.

  To combat his lapse of love, Mudd was sent to the nearby village of Hamman-Lif for a Magical Retirement, from September 28 to October 8, during which he was to meditate upon the danger of abandoning the Great Work for the sake of a woman. The more Mudd pondered in isolation, the more he felt able to subjugate his desire. By October 1, he could write that his longing for Hirsig had been me
rely an example of a “false Will.”

  Crowley was no doubt pleased to have gotten Mudd back on tow, but he had greater tasks at hand. One such was to fire a poetic volley at Mussolini. He composed a pamphlet of verse, Songs for Italy, in the summer of 1923; copies were sent in October 1923 to members of the press. There was a conscious linkage to Byron and Shelley (who found inspiration in Italy) in the poem “Resurgam et Libertas,” in which Crowley proclaimed himself “the first English poet ever thrust/From Italy.” But there was little notice paid to Songs in England or anywhere else.

  On a quite different endeavor, Crowley remained determined to complete the Comment prophesied by the Book. He had failed at this twice before—neither the “Old Comment,” published in The Equinox in 1912, nor the “New Comment,” completed in Cefalù, satisfied the Beast. In November 1923, while conducting a Magical Retirement in Nefta in the company of Hirsig and Mohammed ben Brahim, Crowley girded himself once more and produced the “Djeridensis Comment,” a reference to the nearby lake Chott Djerid, which, as Hymenaeus Beta has pointed out, was the mythological birthplace of the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena. Crowley was ultimately displeased with this Comment as well. But stylistically, it was by far the finest effort of the three. The complementary roles of the Beast and the Scarlet Woman were set forth in terms that aptly blended Christian, Taoist, and Thelemic symbolism: “I am a Sun, giving out Light and Life; but She their guide in darkness, making them pure, single of heart, awake to the Highest.”

  During their stay at Nefta, both the Beast and the Scarlet Woman were bed-ridden by illness. Their moods suffered as well, leading to quarrels and a premature abandonment of the proposed month-long Retirement. They returned to Tunis. Then, in late December, Crowley set sail for France, leaving behind an emotionally and financially bereft Hirsig. The funds for his journey were provided by his old friend—and fellow Fatherland contributor—Frank Harris, himself in severe straits. Despite their mutual poverty, the two men corresponded avidly in the first months of 1924 as to an utterly futile scheme of raising some 800,000 francs for the purchase of the Paris Evening Telegram. Once in Paris, in January 1924, Crowley lodged again with Monsieur Bourcier at the Hotel de Blois at 50 rue Vavin in Montparnasse. Crowley still owed money from prior stays, and it is a tribute to Bourcier’s feeling for the Beast that he allowed him again to run up debt. Mudd was dispatched to London, joining Jane Wolfe, who worked a night shift in a nursing home and sent money when she could. There Mudd attempted to raise funds and public support for Crowley, failing on both counts.