The Hohenleuben Conference—at which Crowley was to emerge publicly as O.H.O.—would prove to be a tangled tale indeed. That tale begins in late 1924, when Crowley was contacted by one Heinrich Tranker (Frater Recnartus), who lived in the village of Hohenleuben in the region of Thuringia in eastern Germany. Tranker has been appointed by Reuss, prior to the latter’s death, as the X° Grand Master for Germany. But Tranker’s loyalty to Reuss was limited. His true ambition was to found an esoteric order of his own, which he did in 1924—the Collegium Pansophicum, or in more extended form, “The Pansophic Lodge of the Light Seeking Brethren of the Orient.” Tranker now wished to ascertain the whereabouts of Crowley, as to whom Tranker had received a vision indicating that he was the true World Teacher.
According to Crowley, Tranker led him to believe that there would be available, in Hohenleuben, written evidence of the legitimacy of both Tranker and his order. This evidence was not produced. Alas, Crowley failed the same standard with respect to his claim to Tranker that Reuss had “definitely designated me to succeed him.” For Crowley no longer had possession of the substantiating letter. Was it indeed sent? It is possible, but two countervailing points stand out: (1) There is no evidence, in Crowley’s own prior diaries or letters, that he had received such a designation. It would have been a signal enough event to merit notice. (2) Had Crowley received express designation, why not assert his O.H.O. status as a fait accompli? Instead, Crowley expressed to Tranker his humble acceptance of the Latter’s “nomination” of Crowley as the new O.H.O., when that position was a matter of appointment rather than election.
In early 1925, Tranker extended an invitation to Crowley and Olsen to come stay as his guests at the time of the summer solstice. In mid-June they arrived in Hohenleuben where, early on, prospects seemed bright to the Beast. That outlook would not survive the summer, as relations with Tranker steadily—and then precipitously—worsened.
But in the neighboring village of Weida there lived another high-ranking member of the Collegium Pansophicum, one who would prove as stable an ally as Tranker was fleeting. Karl Johannes Germer, born in 1885, was ten years Crowley’s junior. But, as a matter both of strict upbringing (albeit in a secular rather than a Christian household) and of pronounced sexual unease, Germer was very much a member of Crowley’s own generation—the generation chronicled by Freud. Ironically, given the centrality to Thelema of sexual magic, Germer would later acknowledge to Crowley (in an English that was Germer’s second language) that he had never experienced “physical satisfaction” with any woman and rued the fact that he had “heard many people express themselves most exultedly [sic] about the pleasures derived from the coition, an act which—try as I would—never was more to me than the act like dumping ashes or garbage.” Germer’s erotic fantasies stressed invisibility and escape: “Up to about 20 or 25 I got most enthusiasm out of imagining myself or actually seeing myself in the mirror with the sexual organs hidden. I saw myself as a girl then.” He allowed that “the idea of hermaphroditism has always appealed to me,” but there is no evidence that he ever acted upon it beyond the contemplation of alchemical symbolism; there were no sexual overtures whatsoever between Germer and Crowley.
Germer had long struggled to transform what he regarded as a neurotic and sterile middle-class existence, which included a troubled marriage to his wife, Maria. But his ardent esoteric yearnings were in paradoxical contrast with Germer’s own frank and humble assessment of his actual abilities. As he later declared in a letter to Crowley (written in an English that was a second language):
For me everything has been dark all the time since I have been in touch with occultists. The fact is, I never understood their language.[ … ] The same is with your books, though I have read in the Equinox, Magick etc. time and again. I guess I have no organ for the understanding of such things You might ask that cannot be so for why should I have kept on interesting myself then. The answer is, I think, that I vaguely felt there was something back of it and that some day miraculously the understanding of the expressions will spring up in my mind. That then I could start where others have started at an earlier age.
Germer was already a member of the Collegium Pansophicum, with the magical name Frater Saturnus, perhaps with reference to his brooding, saturnine nature. With Tranker and Otto Wilhelm Barth, Germer founded the Pansophia publishing house, for which Germer served as chief translator and funding source. By 1925, Pansophia had issued seven titles, three of which were by Crowley. Germer also paid the travel costs of Crowley and Olsen out of his own pocket. But Germer was not yet, prior to Crowley’s arrival, a committed Thelemite. It was not until Germer’s personal encounter with Crowley during this summer that he would cast his allegiance utterly to the Master Therion.
Crowley would gain two other key allies while in Thuringia. Martha Küntzel, Soror Ich Will Es (“I Will It”), had a history of occult involvement that stretched back to the nineteenth century, when she had joined the Theosophical Society and made the acquaintance of Madame Blavatsky. Küntzel now became an ardent Thelemite. And while Germer would be imprisoned by the Nazis and then forced to leave Germany, Küntzel—who embraced Hitler and the Nazi ideology—remained the standard-bearer of Thelema during the Third Reich until her death during the war. She formed, shortly after meeting Crowley, the Thelema Verlag press in Leipzig, aided by Otto Gebhardi, the only other attendee at Hohenleuben who accepted the Beast as Prophet.
It was Tranker, of course, whom Crowley wished most to win over—and with whom he encountered the most bitter difficulties. Crowley went to considerable effort to document these troubles in two formal written accounts as well as a pseudonymous account (under the name of Gerard Aumont, a Frenchman with whom Crowley had struck a friendship in Tunis). The briefest of these, “Statement Re Tranker,” encapsulates the Beast’s indignation: “I found this man completely ignorant even of the language of the classics of Magic and Mysticism. He was even unacquainted with elementary Latin. I found further that in his dealings with other people he was mean, unscrupulous and dishonest. I tested him magically and found his pretensions worthless and ridiculous.” As the summer wore on, Crowley spent ever more time at Germer’s residence in Weida, and finally moved there in the autumn.
In addition to reviling Tranker, Crowley waged character attacks on a second front during this same period. In July and August 1925, he launched an angry correspondence with his Magical Son Jones (Frater Achad) in Chicago, accusing him both of “megalomania” and of the theft of a valuable collection of books and manuscripts which Crowley had left in Jones’s possession when he returned from the United States to England in 1919. As to the former charge, it centered upon a series of three kabbalistic volumes authored under the name Frater Achad—Q.B.L., or The Bride’s Reception (1922); The Egyptian Revival (1923) and The Anatomy of the Body of God (1925)—in which, Crowley charged, “One who ought to have known better tried to improve the Tree of Life by turning the Serpent of Wisdom [a traditional kabbalistic symbolic figure of gnostic ascent] upside down!” In fairness to Jones, it must be said that these works continue to be read with interest by students of magical kabbalah. Jones would, some two decades later, teach kabbalah to the British novelist Malcolm Lowry, when both men lived in British Columbia; the influence of kabbalah shows itself in Lowry’s masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947).
It was the second charge—the alleged theft of Crowley’s books and manuscripts from a Detroit warehouse—that proved the breaking point between the two men. As Hymenaeus Beta has confirmed, “Jones was in fact innocent, as the books were found by the warehouse after both men were long dead.” Although the two reached a legal settlement in 1926, Jones soon thereafter ceased to be a Thelemite. His subsequent magical career included, on Christmas Day 1928, the taking of communion in the Roman Catholic Church and, in the 1930s, the dawning conviction that a New Aeon governed by Maat, the Egyptian goddess of Truth and Justice, would imminently supersede the Aeon of Horus declared by Crowley. Small wonder that
Crowley (who agreed that the Aeon of Maat would come—some millennia hence) would, after an attempted rapprochement in 1936, expel Jones from the O.T.O. Thus ended relations between Crowley and the most gifted theorist of all his magical students.
But in Hohenleuben, just before relations with Tranker began their fatal decline, Crowley did achieve a brief paper victory during this summer of 1925. The remarkable document entitled Ein Zeugnis der Suchenden—“A Testament of the Seekers”—which purported to confirm Crowley as Prophet of the New Aeon included as its signatories Tranker and his wife Helene as well as Collegium Pansophicum members Germer, Küntzel, and Otto Gebhardi. Hirsig and Mudd, who had joined Crowley in Hohenleuben that summer, also signed the Zeugnis, which was to be used as a persuasive document with other German occultists. It declared that “We, the undersigned, have seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears, and we know, ‘certain beyond lies,’ that He is in truth the Bearer of the Word which the soul of mankind thirsted for.” However, only three of the signatories, Gebhardi, Germer, and Küntzel, would keep to the sworn testimony of the Zeugnis for the rest of their lives. Tranker and his wife renounced it within roughly one month, Mudd in under one year, Hirsig within two years. Olsen would disappear from Crowley’s life, albeit gradually and with affection. Crowley, in one of his early letters to Tranker, had described a kind of “glamour” (a baffling and seductive quality; the term is used, in British folklore, to describe denizens of the Faerie realm) that distracted persons from a clear perception of Crowley’s character and teachings. A species of this glamour, working to Crowley’s benefit (at least, during August 1925), must have accompanied the signing of the Zeugnis.
By autumn, when Crowley and Olsen moved to Weida to stay with Germer, the German occult scene resembled a busy game board. Tranker retained leadership both of the German O.T.O. and of the Collegium Pansophicum (which would prove short-lived). As for the tiny German faction that valued Thelema but did not accept Crowley as a World Teacher, they founded a new order, the Fraternitas Saturni, led by Eugen Grosche, who would head its operations for some thirty years. For his part, Crowley had gained the valuable allegiance of Germer and Küntzel (Gebhardi was already very elderly and hence could play but a secondary role). Germer would henceforth serve as his aide-de-camp, with special emphasis on raising funds, while Küntzel became his trusted German contact. Her letters to Crowley in the years to come combined the ardor of a disciple and the chidings of a devoted mother.
By November 1925, Crowley and Olsen returned to Tunisia, taking up residence in a villa, the Seniat el Kitou, in La Marsa. Shortly thereafter, he penned what he regarded as the definitive “Comment” on the Book, at last fulfilling the dictate of III, 40: “But the work of the comment? That is easy; and Hadit burning in thy heart shall make swift and secure thy pen.” The reason for his prior failures, Crowley later explained, was that “I mistook ‘Comment’ for ‘Commentary’—a word-by-word exposition of every verse (and much of it I loathed with all my heart!) including the Qabalistic interpretation, a task obviously endless.” Succinct as it is, the “Comment” is suitably perplexing. Signed by “The priest of the princess, Ankh-f-n-khonsu,” it reads in full:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
The study of this Book is forbidden. It is wise to destroy this copy after the first reading.
Whosoever disregards this does so at his own risk and peril. These are most dire.
Those who discuss the contents of this Book are to be shunned by all, as centers of pestilence.
All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself.
There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.
Love is the law, love under will.
This “Comment” was first published in 1926 by Crowley in a private limited edition of the Book. Plainly, a literal reading will not unlock its meaning. The “Comment” is written in esoteric, symbolic language. It may be interpreted as calling for swift and rapt absorption as opposed to repeated analytical study, and for the shunning of discussion in favor of private labor and insight. Crowley later noted, in his Eight Lectures on Yoga (1939), that matters of ultimate experiential insight are necessarily beyond words: “It is no use discussing the results of Yoga, whether that Yoga be the type recommended by Lao-Tzu, or Patanjali, or St. Ignatius Loyola, because for our first postulate we have: that these subjects are incapable of discussion. To argue about them only causes us to fall into the pit of Because, and there to perish with the dogs of Reason.” As to the 1925 “Comment,” Crowley added: “I myself did not understand that injunction; I do so now.”
During the same period as the “Comment” was written, Crowley received a singular piece of correspondence from Mudd, who had been, for all that Crowley excoriated him, as devoted a disciple as a true-willed master could wish. Mudd had long felt entitled to goad Crowley to live up to his role as Prophet. Now, however, Mudd’s goadings reached an unparalleled intensity. In one letter, Mudd detailed Crowley’s errors since receiving the Book in 1904. Amongst these was that Crowley had “proceeded to exploit the divulged Script exactly like an infallible Pope.” The Beast’s tendency to judge others harshly—including Mudd—was explained by Mudd as stemming from Crowley’s own bitter psychological projections. In a subsequent February 1926 letter, Mudd broke with Crowley outright.
Hirsig, for her part, tried to assuage the enraged Beast—who now regarded Mudd as a traitor to Thelema. But she was facing difficulties of her own. Her son (by Crowley’s onetime disciple Barron) was born in Leipzig in December 1925. She named him Alexander Barron-Hirsig, though Barron had long since departed. “Alexander” was a cipher for “AL,” the key term of the Book discovered by Frater Achad. Hirsig now established a residence for herself and her infant son in Switzerland.
Then, in July and August 1927, came a series of letters in which Hirsig, like Mudd, renounced the Zeugnis. Again like Mudd, her reasons for so doing lay not with the Book but with Crowley’s failure to heed its teachings. She now argued that the Book did not substantiate his claim to be its rightful Prophet: “The script alone cannot prove this: for no matter what its terms and qualities may be it is a mere piece of writing in your hand [ … ] it is not an executed instrument conveying authority.” Crowley’s response was to dismiss Hirsig’s “imbecile letter” and to declare her “cut off from all communication unless and until you write to me pledging your word of honour not to repeat this offense, & reaffirming your obligations to me personally.” Hirsig’s prompt reply formally revoked “all my recognitions [of Crowley] heretofore as Beast, or Priest of the Princes, or as having any authority whatsoever in respect of the Law of Thelema.” She forwarded copies of her renunciation to the other Zeugnis signatories, as had Mudd.
There is a final chapter—four years later—to these communications between Crowley and his two disciples. On September 6, 1930, a letter from Hirsig to “E. A. Crowley, Esq.”—a pointed absence here of any magical title—was written in the hand of Mudd as amanuensis. Hirsig and Mudd were together in Escorial, Spain; the nature of their relations at this point is not known. But Hirsig plainly felt that matters between Crowley and herself required final resolution. The letter consisted of four handwritten pages, with key points carefully outlined in the style of a mathematical proof, in support of Hirsig’s proposition that “I now Notify you that all promises which I have ever made to personally—whether called or describable as oaths, vows, obligations, pledges or what not [ … ] are now defunct in my sight.” In a handwritten note, written at the top of Hirsig’s letter after he had received it, Crowley denounced it as having been “composed by Norman Mudd—lunatic and thief.” What is most striking—and poignant—is that Hirsig and Mudd, in their isolation in Spain, should have bothered to compose it at all.
Their subsequent fates may be briefly told. Hirsig ultimately returned to the United States and, according to John Symonds, was rumored to have converted to Roman Catholicism. She resumed her
work as a schoolteacher and died in 1951. As for Mudd, he returned to England and committed suicide on May 6, 1934, drowning himself in Portelet Bay on the Island of Guernsey. Crowley would later claim to have prophesied this death.
At the time of Mudd’s break from Crowley in 1926, Crowley was busy cultivating a new potential disciple, Thomas Driberg, then twenty years old and an undergraduate at Christ Church College at Oxford. Driberg had, in November 1925, written in response to the Beast’s invitation to readers (included in Drug Fiend) to correspond with the author. A well-heeled product of the upper middle class, Driberg was precisely the sort of disciple Crowley most desired. Driberg would not have had occasion to meet Mudd—who was on the way out as Driberg was on the way in, as it were. But in his memoir, Ruling Passions (1977), Driberg, by then Baron Bramwell, took occasion to repeat a joke that Crowley must have told him, about “a dim, grey little man called Norman Mudd, who used to come up to one at parties and say ‘You won’t remember me—my name is Mudd.’” Given the pitiful sums on which Mudd lived while serving the Beast, as well as the duties assigned him, one might wonder when he would have had occasion to attend a party. One might also wonder how Crowley, as Mudd’s teacher, could have failed to see that the joke was ultimately on himself.
* * *
Driberg was one of Crowley’s key hopes in 1926, a year in which the Beast’s financial fortunes ebbed and flowed—his trust fund checks intermittently supplemented by gifts from scattered disciples. But though Driberg professed, in his letters from Oxford, great ardor for Crowley’s teachings, he was far too canny to emulate Mudd and give up all (or even a substantial portion) of his money to the World Teacher. Driberg never seriously pursued magic, nor did he deem it wise to make public the extent of his admiration—now at its peak—for the Beast. The social and political consequences would have been devastating, and Driberg was an ambitious man. He became, in the 1930s, a prominent political columnist, writing under the name “William Hickey” for the London Daily Express. Ultimately he was elected to Parliament and became a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive. Driberg was, typically for his time, an active but closet homosexual, though there is no evidence of erotic relations with Crowley. In his memoirs, Driberg was unwilling to admit that he had ever been drawn to Crowley. Rather, he described their relationship as a series of casual meetings during which Driberg could observe a fascinating eccentric.
Do What Thou Wilt Page 44
