Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  During February 1924, while in the throes of his heroin addiction and asthma attacks, Crowley visited his old haunt of Fontainebleau. Here he paid a visit to the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man that had been established by the spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff is as influential a figure in twentieth-century esotericism as Crowley himself, and their careers are markedly similar in certain respects—not only their shaven heads and penetrating gazes, but also their mutual fondness for outlandish behavior and hyperbole. A detailed comparison between the two men is not possible here, but in fundamental terms, it may be said that Crowley sought to establish a religion while Gurdjieff employed disparate teaching methods with individual students.

  Just what relations existed between Crowley and Gurdjieff must remain in some doubt, although varying accounts of an alleged meeting between them have become the stuff of legend. Let us begin with the less melodramatic version offered by Crowley. On February 10, he called upon Gurdjieff’s Institute, the main château of which was known as the Prieure des Basses Loges. Gurdjieff was not in, but a disciple named Major Pindar received Crowley graciously. In his diary, Crowley’s remarks on Gurdjieff were respectful:

  Gurdjieff, their prophet, seems a tip-top man. Heard more sense and insight than I’ve done for years.[ … ] Gurdjieff clearly a very advanced adept. My chief quarrels are over sex (I doubt whether Pindar understands G’s true position) & their [the Institute’s] punishments—e.g. depriving the offender of a meal or making him stand half an hour with his arms out. Childish & morally valueless.

  There was no mention by Crowley himself of a later visit to Fontainebleau. And yet, in circles sympathetic to Gurdjieff, the story passes of a face-to-face meeting with a combative denouement, as in this account by occult historian James Webb:

  Crowley arrived for a whole weekend and spent the time like any other visitor to the Prieure; being shown the grounds and the activities in progress, listening to Gurdjieff’s music and his oracular conversation. Apart from some circumspection, Gurdjieff treated him like any other guest until the evening of his departure. After dinner on Sunday night, Gurdjieff led the way out of the dining room with Crowley, followed by the body of pupils who had also been at the meal. Crowley made his way toward the door and turned to take his leave of Gurdjieff, who by this time was some way up the stairs to the second floor. “Mister, you go?” Gurdjieff inquired. Crowley assented. “You have been guest?”—a fact which the visitor could hardly deny. “Now you go, you are no longer guest?” Crowley—no doubt wondering whether his host has lost his grip on reality and was wandering in a semantic wilderness—humored his mood by indicating that he was on his way back to Paris. But Gurdjieff, having made the point that he was not violating the canons of hospitality, changed on the instant into the embodiment of righteous anger. “You filthy,” he stormed, “you dirty inside! Never again you set foot in my house!” [ … ] White-faced and shaking, the Great Beast crept back to Paris with his tail between his legs.

  Webb portrayed Gurdjieff’s triumph—and Crowley’s putative inner thoughts—with a heavy-handed novelistic touch. If this brutal banishment did occur, then it is remarkable that Crowley, who harbored animus toward so many rival teachers, never did so toward Gurdjieff.

  Hirsig joined Crowley in Paris toward the end of March 1924, having completed yet another mission of assistance to the failing Abbey in Cefalù. She was a solace to him now, as his health broke down decisively. Crowley underwent two painful surgeries during the winter of 1924, in hopes of alleviating his asthma symptoms. Hirsig wrote to Frank Bennett on April 14: “Beast lay ill in Paris for months—no care, and damn little food.[ … ] Since I’ve been here—two weeks—he has picked up remarkably but we still wonder where our next near-meal is to come from. Only the greatest tact has kept a roof over our heads & heaven knows what is happening in Cefalù!” By the end of the month, even tact had failed them—Bourcier at last evicted them. It was a dire time for Crowley; his physician, Dr. Jarvis, recommended a nursing home. Given his Thelemic convictions, Crowley could not have been pleased.

  The two returned that May to a former haunt, the inn Au Cadrau Bleu at Chelles-sur-Marne. With Crowley in a listless state, Hirsig tried to maintain herself as the fearless Scarlet Woman. In her magical diaries of this period, commenced in autumn 1923 and entitled Alostrael’s Visions, she vowed to cultivate a wisdom worthy of her exalted role. She repeatedly invoked Aiwass and, on December 12, felt herself “sliding into a vision.” It should be remembered that, while Hirsig had proven herself the most loyal and durable of Crowley’s Scarlet Women, she had never served as a medium for a revelation—as had Rose Kelly, Mary Desti, and Roddie Minor before her. The Vision diaries, which she kept through the end of 1924, were an attempt to remedy this.

  But the Scarlet Woman found herself challenged both by Crowley’s frailties and by her own lack of magical resolve. One night in June, she watched as Crowley spoke with Alexander Xul Solar, a moneyed Argentinian artist whom the Beast hoped to win as a disciple. Later she wrote that Crowley’s “rasping voice so jarred me that I wanted to scream.” On other occasions, she found the stink of his ether unbearable. As for the Beast, there is the sense, in his diary entries, of a low ebb between them. It was not a state of being for which he had a great appreciation.

  In late August he met Dorothy Olsen, who would, within weeks, formally supplant Hirsig as the primary Scarlet Woman. It is worth reflecting on the magnitude of this change. Crowley was sundering an intimate magical relationship that had endured since 1919. Hirsig was the last woman with whom Crowley would form so deep an alliance—or, in Rosicrucian terms, an alchymical marriage. The change was no less fundamental for Hirsig. She tried to retain an independent role as a Scarlet Woman capable of her own visions—and initiations of new sexual partners. But she would anoint no new Beast to replace Crowley. And in his absence, Thelema waned for her. Still, she persevered for nearly three years more, despite Crowley’s mounting indifference to her.

  The arrival of Dorothy Olsen transformed all. Olsen, of Norwegian extraction and raised in Wisconsin, was the product of a stable American middle-class background; she turned thirty-three just as her affair with Crowley began. Judging from her letters that survive (these are from the late 1920s, after the affair had ended), Olsen was warm and direct, with an enthusiasm rather than a passion for magic and a solicitous fondness for Crowley that stopped short of a devotion to Thelema itself. Olsen could not spiritually challenge the Beast as had the prior Scarlet Woman. But Hirsig had grown haggard, and Olsen was striking, with wavy blond hair and a Garboesque profile. Crowley tersely described the scene upon bringing Olsen to the Paris hotel room that he had been sharing with Hirsig: “Invaded 207. Leah collapsed.” The next day, September 23, Crowley and Olsen were off by train to Marseilles, en route to North Africa where Crowley had hopes of inspired magical workings with the new Scarlet Woman, who was also now “Soror Astrid”—her new magical name subsequent to her A∴A∴ initiation.

  On board a ship to Tunis, Crowley was moved by the Secret Chiefs to write a brief proclamation, “To Man,” later called “The Mediterranean Manifesto.” Crowley incorporated this into The Heart of the Master, a brief compendium of spiritual autobiography and esoteric arcana written the following year. The fundamental purpose of both “To Man” and The Heart of the Master was to proclaim Crowley as the World Teacher of the New Aeon. The former writing was specially directed to the Theosophical Society, then under the leadership of Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, who would soon announce the ascension of their protégé, the young Jiddu Krishnamurti, as the World Teacher. It was Crowley’s futile hope to dissuade the Society from this plan. Ironically, Krishnamurti soon renounced that role voluntarily, though he went on to become one of the most widely read of twentieth-century writers on mysticism.

  “To Man” concluded with an adjuration to prospective seekers to contact, not Crowley, but Dorothy Olsen, in Sidi bou Said, Tunisia—where Crowley had the
manifesto printed shortly after their arrival. In honor of Olsen, Crowley found a jeweler in Tunis who transformed his 9°=2□ Magus ring (pawned and then retrieved by Crowley just before their departure from Paris) “into a Jewel for the Brows of Astrid.” They spent the autumn of 1924 in wanderings along the Tunisian coast. In late November they returned to Tunis. En route, Crowley penned this blithe poem:

  I have got the girl I wanted

  (In my heart are dagger-thrusts)

  Her wicked little bats’ eyes slanted

  Gleaming with unfathomable lusts

  Glittering slits through which the soul

  Burns in hell like a live coal.

  The theme of torment at the hands of a woman governed by “unfathomable lusts” persisted through the years.

  As for Hirsig—the one amongst Crowley’s Scarlet Women who could be said to have possessed lusts which Crowley truly found “unfathomable”—she spent the last months of 1924 in spiritual and physical misery in Paris. Having endured the agony of losing Crowley, she learned shortly thereafter, by way of a telegram from Shumway, that her sister Alma, who had long detested Crowley, had come to Cefalù and—with no opposition from the local authorities—had taken Hirsig’s son, Hansi, back with her to America on the grounds that the Abbey was unfit for the boy. It could not have been made more plain that the standing of the Abbey—of Thelema itself—was a nullity in the eyes of the world.

  In her magical diary entry for September 26, 1924, Hirsig tried to see the destiny of Thelema whole; Olsen would play her necessary part, while Hirsig herself would fade away:

  A word to Dorothy. She is the Scarlet Woman & she will show her failure or her success quite differently to previous Scarlet Women, for she is the mother of a race of a new Dynasty. How I would love to write up my ideas of succession and breeding and all that. But it isn’t my job. That will be done by my Beloved Beast all in good time.

  He will arrange everything for the New Civilization—

  And I shall live in that Civilization I suppose. I don’t know and don’t care.

  Hirsig went on to cite—in a starkly stoic and unnerving passage—the brave example of Poupée, the infant daughter she had borne for the Beast, who had died in 1921: “A Thelemite doesn’t need to die with a doctor poking at him. He finishes up what he has to do and then dies. That’s what Poupée did. She didn’t pay attention to anything or anybody. Her eyes grew filmy & she died with a grin on her face. Such a wise grin.”

  Death was much on Hirsig’s mind now. She suffered often from cold and hunger. Unable to pay the rent, she was evicted from the hotel room she had once shared with the Beast. On September 28 she confessed to her diary: “I should have liked, as a human creature, to have died in the arms of the Beast 666 who, it will be noted in my very first diary, (commencing Mar. 21, 1919), was and is my lover, my mate, my Father, my child and everything else that Woman needs in Man. But I have never interfered with his Work; which was my Work, the Great Work, except in ignorance.”

  On September 30, Mudd left London, where he had failed in his efforts to vindicate the Beast, and joined Hirsig in Paris—but with no funds to help her in her plight. The meeting between the two Thelemic devotees—once primary in Crowley’s circle, and now left behind to type the Confessions (this was Hirsig’s task) and to promote potential lawsuits and literary deals (this to Mudd)—must have been a grim one. But then Hirsig saw the possibilities. As Scarlet Woman she was the magical Mother of Mudd the Son—whom Hirsig now termed a perfect esoteric Fool, a Parsifal. Her pet German nickname for him was “Dummling,” Little Fool. But Parsifal could be initiated—trained to utilize his lance by virtue of the Mother transforming into the Whore. The frustrated sexual energy in Mudd could become a magical boon both to his own progress and to the well-being of the Scarlet Woman. As she explained it plainly to him: “That was my only way in which to gain health quickly.” Mudd, who had for so long fretted over his adequacy, performed honorably for his Scarlet Woman. As Hirsig recorded, “Parsifal used his lance in my defence and being my champion will do so whenever his lady needs protection.” For his part, Mudd felt himself renewed. Five days later, after the completion of another opus, Hirsig described her partner as “a man who does not know who he is, but is commonly called Norman Mudd.”

  It was the hope of the Mother that the Son would at last discover who he was, but there was no signal breakthrough on that score. By early December, Mudd returned to London to renew his lonely efforts on that front. Neither he nor Hirsig had received any financial or moral support from the Beast in his desultory and sometimes surly correspondence. Hirsig passed a terrible early winter in Paris, briefly holding a job in a grubby little restaurant in Montparnasse. She waited tables, peeled vegetables, performed all manner of scullery work and wore herself to a frazzle. There is no evidence, despite the assertions of prior biographers, that Hirsig ever sold herself as a prostitute on the streets of Paris. But she was now pointedly snubbed in the Montparnasse cafés in which, with Crowley, she had been a habitué.

  Then came a summons from Crowley, in late January 1925, to come to Tunis. Olsen was pregnant and Hirsig’s assistance was required while the Beast continued with his magical work. Once Hirsig arrived, she resumed her duties as secretary for the Beast. She also became pregnant; the father was not Crowley but a new disciple, William George Barron, whom Crowley had met in Paris. Barron played no lasting role in the life of the mother or child.

  In the spring, Crowley attained a higher pitch of inspiration than during his magical pilgrimage the previous autumn. The Heart of the Master was composed in Sidi Bou Said. His diary entry on the rapt occasion, in which Barron (Brother Bar-On) was in attendance: “At night went into Trance, & beheld the Vision called The Heart of the Master. At one moment I nearly fainted: & just then Brother Bar-On saw physically in the courtyard an inverted cone of blue light.” Heart was written under the pseudonym “Khaled Khan,” a seeker who receives great wisdom from an unnamed Teacher (tacitly identified as Christian Rosenkreutz) who gives the good tidings that a new Prophet (tacitly, the Beast) has come.

  Crowley was not alone in seeking out visions in the desert. Dorothy Olsen, the Scarlet Woman, was conscious of her own role in the Book, and—like Hirsig before her—she sought vainly to induce in herself a worthy magical revelation. In a certain sense, her path was more difficult than Hirsig’s, for Olsen lacked the magical vocation that Hirsig possessed strongly, and she further lacked the ability to hold her own, psychologically or physically, with the Beast. There is no evidence that Crowley ever physically abused Hirsig. But in the early months of 1925, he most surely did abuse Olsen—a cruel blow to her eye that shattered the surrounding bone and left her in need of medical care through the spring. In a March 1925 letter to Mudd, Olsen displayed the complaisant attitude to domestic beatings that was part and parcel of her upbringing—and affirmed her devotion to her sadistic lover and teacher: “I am still alive in Tunis, with many of the bones of my head removed. This is a good thing; it gives more room for my brain, such as it is, to expand.”

  A month later, Crowley detailed a scene of ongoing domestic horror: “A single drink of rum (on top of a good deal of mental worry during the day) was enough to induce in D.O. an attack of acute mania. Lying in bed, close cuddled, I nearly asleep, she suddenly started to scratch my face without the least warning, with a spate of the filthiest incoherent abuse of me and everybody connected with me.” It is doubtful that a single drink of rum was the effective cause; since Rose Kelly, Crowley viewed women who drank with extreme suspicion. And the history of abuse between them surely played its part in Olsen’s “mania,” if such it was.

  Matters in North Africa were clearly at a crisis point. All the more reason, then, for a new leadership prospect—and a new setting—to appeal so strongly to Crowley. What came to be called the “Hohenleuben Conference” promised both an expansion of Thelema and a means of resolving his financial woes. Unlike his overtures to the Theosophical Society, there now
stood a real chance for Crowley to gain unified control over the O.T.O., which had lacked a recognized worldwide Outer Head of the Order (O.H.O.) since the death of Theodor Reuss in October 1923.

  A brief background to the Hohenleuben Conference is in order. In the final two years of Reuss’s life, relations between him and Crowley had grown unpleasant. The tensions began after Reuss suffered an impairing stroke in 1920. Crowley wrote to Frank Bennett, head of the O.T.O. in Australia (appointed by Crowley), as to the possibility of himself replacing Reuss as worldwide O.H.O. According to O.T.O. historians Tau Apiryon and Soror Helena, “Reuss discovered the correspondence and wrote Crowley an angry, defensive response on November 9, 1921, in which he appeared to distance himself from Thelema. Crowley replied to Reuss’s letter on November 23, 1921, and stated in his letter, ‘It is my will to be O.H.O. and Frater Superior of the Order and avail myself of your abdication—to proclaim myself as such.’” But Crowley never claimed that Reuss abdicated. Rather, he asserted that Reuss designated him—in his last letter to the Beast—as the successor O.H.O. Just how the rift had been healed Crowley did not explain.