by Gary Lachman
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CROWLEY MET HIS next Scarlet Woman, Mary d’Este Sturges, in October 1911, through the current lover of his ex-mistress Nina Olivier. Crowley did not think much of Hener Skene, but he played piano for the famous dancer Isadora Duncan, and when Skene invited Crowley to a party at Duncan’s suite at the Savoy Hotel, he went. On arrival he immediately felt attracted to Duncan’s friend, Mary; Crowley was to use this scene in his novel Moonchild. Crowley says that he sat at Mary’s feet like a Chinese god, exchanging electricity.5 Their currents must have matched; after a brief courtship, Crowley took her to Switzerland, to a skating holiday in St. Moritz. On the way they stopped in Zürich at the National Hotel. After much alcohol, sex, and most likely anhalonium, Mary went into a trance and saw visions. An entity named Ab-ul-Diz spoke to her, mentioning that he had a “book for Frater Perdurabo.” Crowley claims that Mary had not heard the name before and it is possible that she picked it up telepathically from Crowley. It is also possible that she had indeed contacted another disincarnate being, or perhaps Aiwass himself under another name. The mention of a book intrigued Crowley; Ab-ul-Diz said it was called Aba and that its number was 4. Kabbalistically Aba adds up to four and Mary didn’t know Kabbalah. Other remarks suggested that she had other knowledge she shouldn’t have had, and at the end Ab-ul-Diz said he would reappear a week hence. The Scarlet Woman vacancy was now filled.
Mary had a checkered past. Her real name was Dempsey and she had two ex-husbands behind her; one of them, Solomon Sturges, gave her a son, Preston, who later became an Oscar-winning film director, famous for his screwball comedies. He was with Mary on this trip and he did not think well of Crowley. Preston disliked his shaved head and single hornlike tuft and he later felt lucky they had escaped with their lives. Crowley returned the regard, calling thirteen-year-old Preston a “god-forsaken lout.”6 Mary was later sued by the d’Este family for using their name for her perfume company; she claimed she had a right to it but they disagreed, and so she changed the name to Desti.
At St. Moritz it emerged that Mary had packed a blue robe much like the one Rose had worn on her honeymoon; Crowley himself had unexpectedly packed everything he needed for a proper invocation, including the Calvary Cross that had called up Choronzon. The Secret Chiefs were evidently on the case. On November 28 Crowley turned their hotel room into a temple and after warming up with drink, sex, and drugs, at 11:00 p.m. sharp Ab-ul-Diz arrived, just as he had said. After several more sessions, Mary, who had been given the name Virakam, wearied of the drugs and sex and asked to go home. Perdurabo persisted and the upshot was that they were to find the right place to compose a book together. Mary eventually left Crowley—she, too, showed signs of alcoholism—and married a Turk who soon deserted her. Crowley graciously gives her credit for her help and she is acknowledged as the co-editor with Neuburg of Equinox no. 7. She died in 1931.7
When Crowley asked Ab-ul-Diz exactly where he was to write the book, an image of a house on a hillside, flanked by two Persian nut trees, flashed in his mind. Out on a drive, Mary suddenly ordered their chauffeur to head down an overgrown lane off the main road. At the end was the house. The Villa Caldarazzo in Posillipo near Naples was under repair so the owner let them rent it cheap. It was cold and damp but this didn’t matter. Crowley quickly set up a temple and the two got to work. The result was Book Four (1912), Crowley’s most articulate exposition of his ideas about magick. Many consider Magick in Theory and Practice his masterpiece, but it can’t compare with Book Four for clarity and concision, and rereading it recently for this book was a delight, although Crowley discredits himself badly by including petty and unnecessary remarks about the “Jewish blood libel.”8 It was in this book that Crowley added the “k” to magic.
Book Four has two parts. The first is dedicated to mysticism—yoga—the second to magick. It is part of Crowley’s early pursuit of “Scientific Illuminism” and “genius on demand.” There is one unquestioned miracle, Crowley tells us: the influence of genius, and this appears only in man. With a nod to Nietzsche he remarks that one cannot think of a “‘superdog’ transforming the world of dogs” but this sort of thing happens regularly in human history. The key to genius is quieting the mind. “It is by freeing the mind of external influences . . . that it obtains the power to see . . . the truth of things.”9 “All geniuses have the habit of concentration of thought, and usually need long periods of solitude to acquire this habit.”10 Here Crowley hits on the key: concentration of the mind, something he learned from Eckenstein and Allan Bennett. Although the second half of the book is a brilliant exposition of the philosophy and symbolism of magick, one feels that after this central insight, all the paraphernalia of ceremony and ritual are unnecessary. Crowley himself had grasped this during his Augoeides invocations in China; he didn’t need his magical instruments because he could do everything in his mind. But if the mind can do that, what else might it do?
Crowley didn’t get the hint, and this is what’s frustrating about him; he often grabs hold of an important insight, but drops it and falls back into the “satanizing” and rebellion that he knows is unnecessary. Concentrating the mind does not require Aiwass or thelema or doing what you wilt, nor even Buddhism, just patience, effort, solitude, and time. For all his being the “spirit of solitude,” Crowley spent very little time alone—some of his “magical retirements” were taken at the best hotel in town. He was practically always surrounded by people, an example, perhaps, of his following the small part of himself rather than the great.
I should point out that the most important remarks Crowley made about magick are in the Confessions. “Even the crudest Magick eludes consciousness altogether,” he writes, “so that when one is able to do it, one does it without conscious comprehension, very much as one makes a good stroke at cricket or billiards. One cannot give an intellectual explanation of the rough working involved.”11 The Austrian novelist and occultist Gustav Meyrink, a contemporary of Crowley’s, best known for his Expressionist novel The Golem (1915), said much the same when he defined magic as “doing without knowing.” This is an insight supported by the philosopher Jean Gebser, who regards the “magical structure of consciousness” as the source of Jung’s “synchronicities,” those strange “meaningful coincidences,” which require, Gebser tells us, “a sacrifice of consciousness.”12 My belief is that Crowley’s magick, when it worked, somehow induced synchronicities. But Crowley did not know how he did this. He admits that most magicians suffer from the delusion that there is a “real apodeictic correlation between the various elements of the operation” and its results, meaning they believe that the circle, sigils, weapons, et cetera are necessary for the operation to work (apodeictic means “necessarily true” and is a term used in logic).13 Crowley knew they were not, yet he continued to use them. But he also knew that success in magick “depends upon one’s ability to awaken the creative genius which is the inalienable heirloom of every son of man.”14 The “creative genius” was one of Crowley’s phrases for the unconscious. So successful magick depends on throwing oneself into the unconscious, something Crowley was familiar with and pursued throughout his career.
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MAY 1912 SAW CROWLEY living at 33 Avenue Studios in Fulham, a fashionable part of West London today but back then predominantly working class. He had given up on the A...A... as the main means of promoting thelema; the Looking Glass scandal had dissipated the ranks considerably and Crowley lacked the patience to build them up again, although he occasionally found new probationers among the well-heeled and bored. One such was the socialite Gwendolyn Otter. At one of her parties in Chelsea he met the writer Katherine Mansfield and promptly dosed her with anhalonium. Katherine did not think much of the drug nor of Crowley, calling him a “pretentious and very dirty fellow”; she was then a protégé of A. R. Orage and it was through him that she eventually found her way to Gurdjieff.15 Other new recruits were the psychic and palmist William John Warner, who took the name Count Louis Hamon but was known prof
essionally as Cheiro; and the self-styled “Queen of Bohemia” Nina Hamnett, with whom Crowley later engaged in a disastrous legal battle. But among Crowley’s guests in Fulham was an eccentric German named Theodor Reuss, who saw him in a different light. Reuss, a Mason (he belonged to practically every occult society operating at the time), had already met Crowley after his legal victory over Mathers, when occultists were showering him with titles, but now he turned up on Crowley’s doorstep for another reason.16 Reuss had as checkered a past as Crowley. He had been a singer—he had performed in Wagner’s Parsifal at Bayreuth—anarchist, police spy, socialist (he was thrown out of the English Socialist League for spying on Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor for the Germans), occultist, and journalist and, at the time of his visit, he was the head of the Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of the Oriental Templars), or O.T.O., a fringe Masonic occult society that had at its heart something it shared with Crowley: an obsession with sex.17 Crowley had already been admitted into the O.T.O. but had not thought much of it; Reuss’s visit changed that.
As with the Golden Dawn, the origins of the O.T.O. are obscure, but they are generally thought to lie in the late-eighteenth-century revival of Templar Masonry. The Order of the Knights Templar was established in 1118 to ensure the safe passage of Christians in the Holy Land during the Crusades. They soon rose to great military and financial power and in 1314 were liquidated by the French king Philip IV, erroneously nicknamed “the Fair,” on spurious grounds of heresy, but more likely in order to obtain their riches. There is a long tradition that the surviving Templars fled to Scotland and there laid the foundations of Freemasonry.18 True or not, the idea had much appeal and in the late nineteenth century there appeared several fringe Masonic groups claiming a link to the Templars and their secrets. One secret, at least according to the O.T.O., was the use of sex in magical rituals and ceremonies. This put them on the “left-hand path” traveled by Hindu tantrists, who employ sex, drugs, and other “forbidden” items in their worship—something that would, of course, appeal to Crowley. This, at any rate, was the belief of Karl Kellner, a wealthy Austrian industrialist who in 1896 traveled in the East in search of occult knowledge; he was at one point in India at the same time as Crowley, but the two never met. He claimed he had been taught the secrets of sexual magic by three Orientals—an Arab and two Hindus—and wanted to revive the practice. In this he was aided by Reuss and two other occultists, Heinrich Klein and the ubiquitous Franz Hartmann, like Reuss a member of practically every occult group around at the time. (Hartmann was known as Dirty Franz; Madame Blavatsky once remarked that his magnetism was “sickening,” and Rudolf Steiner didn’t care for him, either.)19 In 1902 Klein, Reuss, and Hartmann had received from the impecunious John Yarker—a high-ranking Mason fallen on hard times—a charter to establish a Berlin lodge of the Memphis and Misraim rite—thought to have been started by Crowley’s earlier self, Cagliostro, in the eighteenth century. Apparently Yarker was so hard up he would grant a charter to whoever could pay; it was out of this that the O.T.O. emerged. Kellner is also thought to have had contact with the mysterious Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, an occult organization of the late nineteenth century that incorporated some of the ideas about sexual magic of the American mixed-race occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph.20 Like Crowley, Randolph used drugs as an aid to mystical states; he has been described by the esoteric scholar Christopher Bamford as “in equal parts authentic and a fake”—again like Crowley. Randolph, an unstable character, blew his brains out in 1875 at the age of forty-five.21
Reuss turned up at Crowley’s door because he believed Crowley had given away the secrets of the IX0 grade of the O.T.O.; the earlier grades were more or less straightforward Masonic affairs and were ritually conferred, but the later degrees were hush-hush and different. Crowley said he had no idea what Reuss was talking about, and in any case, could not give away secrets he did not have; Crowley had not been initiated into the IX0. Reuss is said to have grabbed a copy of Crowley’s The Book of Lies, a collection of obscure Kabbalistic aphorisms—something like Zen koans but less accessible—from his shelf and opened it. The import of The Book of Lies (1913) may occasionally reach an unprepared reader, but for the most part, in order to grasp its often-incisive wit a knowledge of Crowley’s philosophy and obsessions is required.22 But Reuss knew his stuff. He turned to the chapter titled “The Star Sapphire” and read: “Let the adept be armed with his magic rood and provided with his mystic rose.” At that the bell rang and Crowley understood: rood was penis and rose was vagina. The IX0 secret was about sex. Ever since his experience with Neuburg on Mount Dal’leh Addin Crowley knew there was some connection between his two favorite pastimes. His recent experience with Soror Virakam in Italy pointed in that direction, too. But now it hit him. Instead of using all the clumsy appurtenances of ceremony to work up the necessary state of ecstasy, Crowley could use sex, which would be faster and more reliable. It was obvious. Why hadn’t he thought of it earlier? The secret of sacred sex was not that secret; it formed part of Eastern religions and, as mentioned earlier, figures such as Count Zinzendorf and Swedenborg knew of it in the West. But its use for magic was something else.
Reuss accepted Crowley’s explanation—he had hit on the secret intuitively—and told Crowley of the importance of using the male and female sexual fluids in a kind of sexual alchemy. Crowley explained the importance of sodomy. It was clear they were both working along the same lines and should join forces. By June Reuss had initiated both Crowley and Leila Waddell into the IX0. (VIII0 O.T.O. workings involve “magical masturbation,” the X0 is a purely administrative grade, and Crowley soon added an XI0 homosexual working grade, the twin ones of the number 11 symbolizing, one imagines, two penises; one suspects that had Crowley created a lesbian grade, it would have been OO0.) Soon after in Berlin he made Crowley the head of the O.T.O. in Great Britain, giving him the title of Supreme and Holy King of Ireland, Iona, and all the Britains within the Sanctuary of the Gnosis.23 Crowley added to this the title Baphomet, the name of the satanic deity the Templars were accused of worshipping (it is thought to be a corruption of Mohammed). From then on the O.T.O. became Crowley’s main organ of dissemination; his British lodge was called Mysteria Mystica Maxima. One early recruit, Vittoria Cremers, was appointed manager of the M.M.M.’s property, but was soon relieved of her duties by Crowley, who accused her of embezzling funds. This was most likely untrue and is more likely an example of Crowley’s paranoia. Cremers had earlier been involved with Madame Blavatsky’s journal Lucifer and claimed to know the real identity of Jack the Ripper.24 Crowley joked that Blavatsky herself was the Ripper.25 Although Cremers may have been prejudiced, her assessment of Crowley bears noting: “It was sex that rotted him. It was sex, sex, sex, sex, sex all the way with Crowley. He was a sex maniac.”26
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ONE OF CROWLEY’S first acts as head of the British O.T.O. was to rewrite their rituals, incorporating the theology of The Book of the Law.27 Some of these were published in the O.T.O.’s journal, The Oriflame, and caused something of a scandal. O.T.O. members saw sex as sacred but Crowley’s thelemic ideas were frankly unpalatable and Reuss received some criticism. Especially questionable was Crowley’s Gnostic Mass, which made the secret of the IX0 fairly explicit and which called participants to believe in Baphomet and in “one Gnostic Catholic Church of Light, Love, and Liberty, the Word of whose Law is θEΛHMA” (thelema in Greek).28 Reuss himself had not counted on swallowing all of Crowley’s idées fixes or on his insatiable ego. Dissonance between Crowley’s philosophy and the aims of the O.T.O. arose again in the 1920s, but for the moment Crowley was in place and little could be done.
Crowley himself did well out of the bargain. A manifesto of the M.M.M. promising initiates “instruction in the whole body of hidden knowledge,” “the Knowledge of the Preparation and Use of the Universal Medicine,” as well as an introduction to “those persons most complemental to their own nature”—a kind of tantric dating service—attracted some custo
mers.29 Crowley charged around £100 for membership, as well as a hefty annual subscription. Yet even with this the Beast was often hard up. He made ends meet by putting on private occult shows for the curious and the jaded. The popular “haunted house” writer Elliott O’Donnell attended one in Crowley’s Fulham studio and wrote about it in Rooms of Mystery (1931). In the clichéd darkened room O’Donnell was treated to a reading of something called the Book of Death; he was then serenaded by different women emerging from wooden boxes playing harps, rather like jack-in-the-boxes. Crowley then announced that he would “cut my chest”—as Iggy Pop famously did at Max’s Kansas City in 1973—and then dip a burning wafer in his blood.30 O’Donnell knew it was all hokum and Crowley did, too, but it did his reputation no good. The American journalist Harry Kemp attended another performance and wrote about it in the World Magazine. In a dark, incense-laden room he found Crowley, the “high priest,” sitting before a black altar on which a gold circle and serpent rested. Women wearing masks formed a procession as the high priest chanted, “There is no good. Evil is good. Blessed be the principal of Evil. All hail, Prince of the World, to whom even God Himself has given dominion. . . .” Then general pandemonium broke out and an orgy ensued. It all sounds like something out of a Hammer horror film and, in fact, Crowley inspired some classic black magic movies. He was not pleased with Kemp’s article, but he had only himself to blame. From the beginning he placed himself on Satan’s side and this kind of thing was inevitable.31
But Crowley was nothing if not versatile. Another moneymaking gambit was The Ragged Ragtime Girls, a troupe of women musicians led by Leila Waddell, whom Crowley had somehow engaged to perform in Moscow in the summer of 1913.32 (It is curious to note that Gurdjieff was starting his first Moscow groups at around the same time.) In the spring some performances at London’s Tivoli had encouraged him, so they headed east for a six-week engagement in Moscow at an open-air pleasure park called the Aquarium. Once there Crowley left the girls—among whom, according to him, were “three dipsomaniacs and four nymphomaniacs” as well as a couple of prudes—to their devices and occupied himself with a Hungarian woman named Anny Ringler, a sadomasochist he met at a café who fulfilled Crowley’s requirements. Ringler ached for “some satisfaction beyond earth’s power to supply,” but apparently Crowley could do the trick. Pleasure had no meaning for her, only pain, and Crowley was accommodating. She met his masochistic needs as well, and the two seemed made for each other. Like sin-ridden flagellants they flogged each other; Crowley made Anny happy by inflicting “physical cruelties as she directed” and she returned the favor. Crowley’s account of their meeting in the Confessions suggests that he should have tried his hand at romance fiction: Anny was “tall, tense, lean as a starving leopardess, with wild insatiable eyes . . . We came together with irresistible magnetism.”33 Besides having a “strong” time with Anny, she also inspired his best known poetical work, the oft-quoted “Hymn to Pan,” as well as The Ship, a verse play whose chorus found a place in some O.T.O. rituals. Anny lifted Crowley to “heights of ecstasy” and inspired him to an orgy of writing.
