Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  Parsons did not live to see the prophecy fulfilled. On June 20, 1952, while working alone in a laboratory he had created in a garage, Parsons died in an apparently accidental explosion caused by a dropped vial of fulminate of mercury. Upon learning of his death, Parsons’s elderly mother committed suicide as well.

  Parsons and his workings, the Agapé Lodge and its struggles, these were the birthpangs of Thelema a continent away. Crowley fretted over these doings in his letters to America. But in the isolation of Netherwood, they were plainly beyond his control. There was, however, a task that Crowley could complete—the creation of a self-chosen legacy from the poems he had written throughout his life. Crowley had first conceived of this volume in 1942; he entitled it Olla (having considered, as an alternate title, The Book of Tears). The subtitle, An Anthology of Sixty Years of Song, reflected a pride which Crowley expressed privately in a March 1946 letter to Yorke: “I doubt whether anyone else can boast (if it is a boast) of 60 years of Song.[ … ] I have picked out 54 poems, all as different as possible and all written in as many different parts of the Northern Hemisphere as possible.”

  Olla was published by the O.T.O. in December 1946 in a limited edition of 500 copies, with a special edition of 20 copies on prewar mould-made paper. Within was a frontispiece sketch by Augustus John which the latter had completed during a visit to Crowley in July 1946. As opposed to Harris, John captured the face of the old man at a moment of perplexity—as if, at the end of his days, Crowley had startled even himself. Olla was issued to little response in the British press, and none whatsoever in literary circles. As to this, Crowley could hardly have been surprised.

  The small but steady stream of visitors continued. In 1946, Crowley befriended John Symonds, a man of letters whom Crowley sought to interest in the establishment of a new Abbey of Thelema. It is remarkable, given the Beast’s tenuous health, that he still harbored this dream so deeply. Another visitor was James Laver, the author of a biography of Nostradamus which Crowley admired, and the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Laver aptly portrayed the Beast’s sangfroid charm in the face of addiction and approaching death: “Hardly pausing in his conversation he took up the syringe, dissolved a little scarlet pellet in the glass chamber, rolled back his sleeve and gave himself a piqure. The heroin injection seemed to give him new life. The muddy look in his face vanished, and the wonderful brown eyes glowed. From time to time he turned them upon me, and I began to understand the hypnotic fascination he must once have possessed.” To Laver, Crowley insisted upon magic as “something we do to ourselves,” a rational use of one’s mental capacities: “It is more convenient to assume the objective existence of an Angel who gives us new knowledge than to allege that our invocation has awakened a supernatural power in ourselves.”

  In May 1947, Crowley wrote his first and only letter to his son, Aleister Ataturk, then age twelve. The letter was a conscious paternal summation and bequest. In its opening paragraph, Crowley informed the boy that this letter would be “very important and you should keep it and lay it to heart.” Crowley then offered advice on the subjects of handwriting (“you must write in such a way that it will impress your personality on the reader”), the proud family lineage, allegedly descended from the fifteenth-century French Duke of La Querouaille (“the Dukedom is no longer in existence legally, but morally it is so, and I want you to learn to behave as a Duke would behave”), the proper curriculum of studies (an admonition to learn Latin and Greek), and suitable recreation (chess was recommended as a lifelong pursuit and pleasure). Crowley concluded with a plea that the boy one day master the English language:

  The best models of English writing are Shakespeare and the Old Testament, especially the Book of Job, the Psalms, the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. It will be a very good thing for you to commit as much as you can, both of these books and of the best plays of Shakespeare to memory, so that they form the foundation of your style: and in writing English, the most important quality that you can acquire is style. It makes all the difference to anyone who reads what you write, whether you use the best phrases in the best way.

  The letter reads, in most respects, like that of a proper Victorian gentleman to his son, down to the admonition to study the Bible, albeit on stylistic grounds (did Crowley not wonder how its contents might impact his son?). Overall, the Beast seemed more concerned with laying a foundation for eminence than with directing his son to Thelema. Crowley did not live to influence further the future course of the boy, who chose to take his mother’s last name.

  The months that remained to him after this letter were a time of steady, and then precipitous, decline. “This is a good world to leave,” he told Wilkinson near the end. This sea change in Crowley’s life outlook was one that Wilkinson found telling: “I had always felt that there was something of pathos about him but in his last years this element seemed to me much stronger and he was in consequence lovable as I had not known him to be before. He knew then that he had not done what he wanted to do, that he had done only a part of it: he knew that, during his lifetime at least, he would have infamy rather than fame. When he had been again dangerously ill a year or two before his death he inscribed a book to the man who had devotedly tended him: ‘To __________, who saved my worthless life,’ and it is likely that in some moods he did think of his life as worthless.” Wilkinson, in a touching delicacy, did not wish to disclose, in this memoir, that the man who tended Crowley was himself.

  Crowley died on December 1, 1947, from myocardial degeneration coupled with severe bronchitis. As one might expect, there are different accounts of Crowley’s last words and moments. John Symonds recorded that “Frieda Harris told me that Crowley died unhappily and fearfully. She held his twitching hands while the tears flowed down his cheeks. ‘I’m perplexed,’ he said. She was not with him at the very end. A Mr. Rowe was there; he was in the room with a nurse, and according to him, Crowley’s last words were: ‘Sometimes I hate myself.’” Biographer Gerald Suster offers further variants. In one of these, which reached Suster secondhand, “Crowley is alleged to have passed from Samadhi to Super-Samadhi to Nirvana to Super Nirvana, expiring in the boundless bliss of the Infinite.” From another secondhand source, Suster learned of a Hastings bookseller who had espied, on the exterior brickwork of Netherwood, a magical sign apparently drawn by Crowley; in alarm, the bookseller wiped it away, and consequently Crowley expired the next day. Suster adjudged the accurate version of events to be that supplied him by a “Mr. W.H.,” an employee at Netherwood, according to whom “Crowley used to pace up and down his living-room. One day the Beast was pacing and Mr. W.H. was on the floor below, polishing furniture. Suddenly there was a crash. Mr. W.H. went upstairs and entered Crowley’s rooms to find him dead on the floor.”

  There is, however, credible testimony which contradicts all of the above accounts. Patricia MacAlpine, whom Crowley called “Deidre,” was the mother of his son, Aleister Ataturk. For some years, by her own volition, she had stayed out of the Beast’s life. But in the summer of 1947, she came to Netherwood with her four children, including Aleister Ataturk, spent most of the final months with Crowley, and was there beside him during his last days. According to MacAlpine, Frieda Harris had not come to visit at the end, and there had been no scenes of weeping. On the contrary, the Beast remained in good spirits, enjoying the comings and goings of Aleister Ataturk and the other children, who adored him in turn. Crowley did, however, remain in bed. The day before he died, he talked calmly and at length with MacAlpine. The following day was a still one, but at the moment of Crowley’s death, which came quietly, the curtains of his room were caught by a gust of wind, and a peal of thunder was heard. “It was the gods greeting him,” said MacAlpine.

  A legend has arisen from the circumstances of Crowley’s passing. His treating physician, Dr. William Brown Thomson, age sixty-eight, was found dead in his bath within twenty-four hours of the demise of his patient. Rumors immediately circulated t
hat Crowley had murdered his doctor by means of a ritual curse, in revenge for the latter’s refusal to supply adequate amounts of heroin. According to one London press account, a year before their near-simultaneous deaths, “Crowley tried to get more morphia than was prescribed. After that, Dr. Thomson always went to the chemist with him. Three months ago Crowley’s morphia was stopped. He put a curse on the doctor.” There was no source offered to support the allegation of a curse. But the story possesses the virtue of allowing the Beast to exit amidst fumes of brimstone.

  In his final Obsequies, executed in the summer of 1947, Crowley asked that Wilkinson read, at his funeral, the “Hymn to Pan,” The Book of the Law (Wilkinson chose to read extracts only), and the “Collects” and “Anthem” from the “Gnostic Mass.” This was done in a nondenominational chapel of the funeral home where Crowley, at his request, was cremated. The audience that day included both fervent mourners and discomfited members of the press. The ensuing headlines, in England and America, trumpeted the demise of the “World’s Worst Man” and his “‘Black Magic’ Farewell.” When the Brighton Council learned of the blasphemous service within its precincts, it formally resolved that there would be no recurrence.

  The urn containing Crowley’s ashes was sent to Germer in New York. In a June 1947 letter to the most loyal of his disciples, Crowley specified that Germer should succeed him in the leadership of the O.T.O. And now Crowley’s mortal remains were in Germer’s possession. In a letter to Crowley’s disciple Jane Wolfe, Germer specified that he buried the urn beside the largest pine tree on his property in Hampton, New Jersey—a tree he now named “Aleister.” But later, to Grady McMurtry, Germer claimed that his third wife, Sascha, had, of a sudden, smashed the urn against a tree to set the ashes free. Clear it is, at least, that no grave marking stands for the Wanderer of the Wastes.

  Crowley had, some three years before his death, written his own “Elegy” in the Maytime setting of a country farmyard. In the lineage in which Crowley placed himself, it is difficult to imagine that Lao Tzu, Christ, Mohammed, or the Buddha could have written such lines. They are, distinctly, the words of a man who sought to be a Prophet for a time that would have none:

  Here rests beneath this hospitable spot

  A youth to flats and flatties not unknown,

  The Plymouth Brethren gave it to him hot;

  Trinity, Cambridge, claimed him for her own.

  At chess a minor master, Hoylake set

  His handicap at 2. Love drove him crazy;

  Three thousand women used to call him “pet,”

  In other gardens daffodil or daisy?

  He climbed a lot of mountains in his time,

  He stalked the tiger, bear and elephant.

  He wrote a stack of poems, some sublime.

  Some not. Plays, essays, pictures, tales—my aunt!

  He had the gift of laughing at himself.

  Most affably he talked and walked with God.

  And now the silly bastard’s on the shelf,

  We’ve buried him beneath another sod.

  EPILOGUE

  An Assortment of Posthumous Assessments and Developments

  1955:

  Experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger makes a pilgrimage to Cefalù to restore and photograph the paintings and ritual decor of the Abbey of Thelema. Later, Anger would choose, as the epigraph for his underground classic on celebrity decadence, Hollywood Babylon (1975), the dictum of The Book of the Law that “Every man and every woman is a star.” Anger’s book is dedicated “To the Scarlet Woman,” to whom tacit reverence is paid in the title.

  1967:

  Crowley’s shaven head appears amongst the elite psychedelic throng on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

  1969:

  The London Times cites Crowley as one of the “1000 Makers of the Twentieth Century.”

  1970:

  The words “Do What Thou Wilt” are subtly engraved in the center vinyl of the Led Zeppelin III album. This same year, Jimmy Page, guitarist of Led Zeppelin, who had already amassed a major collection of Crowley books, manuscripts, and artifacts, purchases Boleskine House in Scotland, where Crowley began the Abra-Melin ritual working in 1900. From this time onward, Crowley becomes a recurrent presence in the Heavy Metal music scene.

  1970:

  In the New York Review of Books, Nigel Dennis reviews Crowley’s reissued Confessions and addresses the vexing issue of the Beast’s self-declared spiritual attainments: “The strong prose, the hilarious stories, the superb self-confidence—these are just as apparent after Crowley became God as they were when he was only a Saint. Criticism, in my opinion, is never just when it shows signs of envy.”

  1972:

  Gerald Yorke, in his “Foreword” to The Magicians of the Golden Dawn by Ellic Howe, warns that “the majority of those who attempt to tread the occult path of power become the victims of their creative imagination, inflate their egos and fall.” Crowley, Yorke’s teacher in his youth, is termed a “pseudo-Messiah.”

  1974:

  The Beast, by British playwright Snoo Wilson, is staged in London. Wilson, in interview, observes that “The point about Crowley is that he seems to contain all these sorts of ideas and identities—indeed most of the vices of the 20th century—and he was dead at the end of 1947.”

  1979:

  Timothy Leary, who regarded Crowley as his neurogenetic predecessor, offers this judgment, in The Game of Life, on the Beast’s life and influence: “The evolutionary process moves or freezes. Aleister Crowley represents human intelligence at its transition point. The rapturous body, floating detached from terrestrial-life lines, all wired up and nowhere to go. As he got older, he increasingly amused himself with childish jokes, playing on the ‘Black Magick’ and ‘Satanist’ image given to him by vulgar tabloids. Funny, frivolous, futile. Crowley understood the interstellar goal of human evolution and was bitterly aware of his imprisonment on the planet. Gravity and the inability of current technology to reach escape velocity kept him from breaking out.”

  1984:

  Tom Whitmore, a Berkeley bookseller, discovers the original manuscript of The Book of the Law, lost since the death of Karl Germer in 1962. Whitmore graciously donates the manuscript to the O.T.O.; it was received by Grady McMurtry and presently resides in a safety deposit box in Texas.

  1990:

  Blanche Barton publishes The Secret Life of a Satanist, the authorized biography of the late Anton Sandor LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, author of The Satanic Bible, and the most famous public Satanist in postwar America. Crowley is frequently cited as a guiding influence upon him. Barton offers this account: In 1951, LaVey “visited a chapter of the Order of Thelema in Berkeley, followers of Aleister Crowley, who prided himself on being ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’ [ … ] Anton was disappointed to find the Berkeley bunch mystically-minded card readers who emphasized the study of Eastern philosophy, Oriental languages, stars and contemplation to reach the spiritual Nirvana of Oneness.[ … ] Anton concluded that the Thelemites’ founder was a druggy poseur whose greatest achievements were as a poet and mountain climber.”

  1993:

  The name of Aleister Crowley is added to The Dictionary of National Biography, the grand register of British achievement published by the Oxford University Press.

  At the dawn of the new millennium: The formal membership of Thelemite organizations worldwide numbers is in the low thousands. Websites devoted to Crowley and Thelema proliferate. Crowley’s major works remain in print. His first editions, paintings, and magical artifacts are regarded as investments. He continues to fascinate and terrify, far more so through his photographs and sobriquets than by way of his writings. The unremitting bloodshed of the world confirms the descriptive power, if not the prophetic truth, of his Book.

  Endnotes

  Unpublished documentary material drawn upon for this biography comes from several different institutional sources, notably the Yorke Collection establ
ished by Crowley’s friend Gerald Yorke at the Warburg Institute, University of London; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Library of King’s College, London; and the George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University. However, as copies of all such materials are held within the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) Archives, I shall, for simplicity’s sake, cite the source of all of these documents as O.T.O. Archives. Quotations the sources of which are evident from the main text have not been cited herein. Full citations for materials are provided with the first reference thereto.

  INTRODUCTION

  “There is no sense…” Robert Anton Wilson, “Introduction” to Israel Regardie, The Eye in the Triangle: An Interpretation of Aleister Crowley, (Phoenix: Falcon Press, 1986) p. xiii.

  “I myself was first consciously…” Aleister Crowley (with Mary Desti and Leila Waddell), Magick (Liber Aba) Book Four: Parts I–IV, second revised edition, ed. Hymenaeus Beta (York Beach: Samuel Weiser, 1997) (hereinafter Magick), p. 125.