by Gary Lachman
The Villa Santa Barbara had a magnificent view, west to Palermo, east to the sea, and was surrounded by a garden filled with flowers and fruit, with rolling green hills in the background. Nearby was the great rock of Cefalù, atop which were temples to Diana and Jupiter; on his second day there Crowley traversed the rock and thanked the gods.9 The farmhouse was soon christened the Abbey of Thelema, but it was also called the Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum and, occasionally, the Whore’s Cell.10 Crowley ordered fancy stationery and business cards with his title The Beast 666 and Leah’s The Scarlet Woman printed on them, with their address as the Abbey of Thelema, although it is doubtful Rabelais would have recognized the place. Crowley quickly turned the central room, from which the others radiated, into a temple. Here stood an altar on which The Book of the Law and the implements of magick were kept, as well as a record of daily activities and visitors, much as in any guesthouse; around this Crowley painted a dark red circle and blue pentagram. Crowley sat on a throne before an incense-burning brazier and around him were circled low stools where his flock would rest.
He got to work adorning his La Chambre des Cauchemars (“chamber of nightmares”) with his paintings. One depicted a man being sodomized by Pan with his own seed covering a naked Scarlet Woman. Others, of various couplings, followed suit. Crowley claimed that his erotic paintings neutralized sex so that his students could study it scientifically, yet his attitude toward it was anything but neutral.11 In 1955, decades after Crowley’s departure, the sexologist Alfred Kinsey and the filmmaker Kenneth Anger removed the whitewash with which the house’s owners had covered Crowley’s work. Although given high-sounding names, the property was rudimentary, without gas, electricity, sanitation, or plumbing and was barely furnished. As there was no toilet, Crowley’s thelemites met nature’s call as best they could and visitors found the place filthy, with a “foul miasma . . . stinking to high heaven.”12 No one cleaned. A Catholic housekeeper they had soon left, and no one cooked, that not being a part of their true will. The slaves, Aiwass said, shall serve, but as yet none of them had turned up at the abbey.13
Life at the abbey settled into a routine not unlike that at Christian monasteries. Mornings began with Leah proclaiming the Law.14 Then they made the Kabbalistic Cross—part of the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram—which was followed by a procession and then an adoration to the sun. Similar adorations were made at noon, sunset, and midnight, dedicated to the appropriate Egyptian god. Before meals they said, “Will”: “What is thy will?” “It is my will to eat and drink.” “To what end?” “That my body may be fortified thereby.” “To what end?” “So that I may accomplish the Great Work.” After supper Crowley read extracts from The Book of the Law, much as his parents had read from the Bible in his childhood. During the day there was magical work, invocations, banishments, entreaties to one’s Holy Guardian Angel, disciplines such as Liber Jogorum, all recorded in precise detail in one’s magical record, which the Beast perused regularly. The children, who had minimal supervision, must have found these rituals rather like being at church. Many who came to the abbey—bohemians and arty types, that generation’s hippies—did not follow the regimen although Crowley himself was strict about it. Whatever we may think of him, he took his magick seriously.
Unlike in monastic life, Crowley provided a variety of drugs for all who wished to experiment. Cocaine, heroin, ether, morphine, opium, hashish, as well as alcohol and tobacco were at one’s fingertips. Crowley believed that addiction was a fantasy bred by weak wills and that one could master drugs as one pleased. The Diary of a Drug Fiend, which presents an idealized and, at times, tempting picture of his abbey—his depictions of the surrounding scenery contain some of his best writing, and the book itself was an advertisement for the place—is based on the idea that through magick and thelema, one could learn to take or leave drugs as one willed. Crowley found to his dismay that this was not so, but Dionysus and Hermes, Hansi and Howard, had no restrictions and both were familiar with alcohol and tobacco at a, for us, scandalously young age. They were also exposed to the sex rituals that were a regular part of thelemic life. Crowley believed this would save them from his own lingering sexual shame, which, although he had been eradicating it for decades, apparently still troubled him.
For a time Crowley was happy, enjoying a serenity absent from his life—except for his times in the mountains—and he wrote, painted, and thought of schemes to make money and to further the work. At one point he even asked the I Ching if he should turn the abbey into a tourist resort.15 He came as close as he ever had to something approximating a normal life, but the idyll did not last long. For one thing Poupée was ill; from the beginning her grasp on life was weak. Crowley and Leah themselves suffered insomnia and Crowley recorded waking up in “absolute horror” feeling a “nameless apprehension,” which he compared to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial.”16 He and Leah also experienced hallucinations or possibly poltergeists: he speaks of hearing footsteps, raps, voices, and of sensing the “unauthorized presence . . . of a stranger.”17 Leah herself hallucinated seeing Crowley in various parts of the house simultaneously. How much of this was due to the cocktail of drugs they took, to the magick they performed, to sheer anxiety, or to Crowley’s asthma is up for grabs.
There were other problems, too. Even before arriving at the abbey, Crowley found that having two wives and their children constantly underfoot was something of a strain; at one point in Fontainebleau he was “ready to bolt to some country where children are unknown.”18 In Cefalù things only got worse. On April 5 he “fiddled and spanked children”; what he means by “fiddled” is unclear, but he was consoled with the discovery of an “ugly girl with a big mouth.”19 And he found the sexual demands of having competing concubines too much even for him. On April 20 he looked forward to dictating a letter in order to “postpone sexual duties,” and wished Leah and Ninette were lesbians; their appetites, he said, would wear out any man’s lingham. Leah was open to the idea, but Ninette—who Crowley called “Beauty” and also “Cypris” and who was, he said, a “candidate for a lunatic asylum”—rebelled and ran out practically naked into the rain. Crowley followed, looking for her in the dark. By the time he brought her back, Leah had gotten drunk and when she saw Ninette, started another fight; she later had a hysterical fit and vomited. Crowley retreated to his opium pipe. He required his followers to live up to the saying that it is “never dull where Crowley is,” but there must have been times when he wished they wouldn’t. Like many “free love” advocates, Crowley failed (or refused) to recognize that, like the “territorial imperative,” sexual jealously is simply a part of human nature and it is only rare indifferent individuals who can flit from partner to partner without batting an eye. Leah invariably flared up if Crowley looked at another woman, and on one occasion Ninette, with an appalling lack of indifference, threatened the Beast with a revolver.
Yet with two women already to contend with, Crowley looked forward to adding another to his harem. The entries in the Magical Record anticipating the arrival of Jane Wolfe make for somewhat cringing reading. Like an adolescent fan boy, he was infatuated with her being a “movie star.” “I adore her name. I hope she is as hungry and cruel as a wolf . . . I have written three pages about her at three o’clock o’ the morning; that is to say, Q.E.D. I love her . . .”20 Crowley’s late-night confessions were fueled by the cocaine he was inhaling in increasingly large amounts; it often produced a Niagra of prose, with the infrequent gem amid the verbiage. He was soon disabused of his romantic notions, but for a time he wallowed in masochistic fantasies about Jane. On June 18, a month before her arrival, Crowley wrote “I drown in delight at the thought that I who have been Master of the Universe should lie beneath Her feet,” and he looked forward to being “splashed with the mire of her Triumph” and to choking as “her heel treads my throat.”21 These ecstasies of abasement segued into fantasies of omnipotence: “I am drunk with the pride-absinthe that I am great, the greatest man of
my century, its best poet, its mightiest mage, its subtlest philosopher.” He was “the self-crowned God whom men shall worship . . . for centuries”—this was “Fact steel hard”—and yet he wanted his “crown crushed by Her feet” and his face “fouled by Her spittle.”22
Jane’s arrival put a stop to all this. After a long and arduous journey and some mix-up over where to meet—first Bou-Saâda, then Tunis—on July 23, 1920, in the Hotel des Palmes in Palermo, Jane was greeted by Leah, who proclaimed the Law. Her black dress was greasy and dusty, her face unwashed, her hair a mess, and her fingernails dirty. “Filth personified,” was Jane’s first impression and she wondered why Crowley had sent such an emissary. Crowley was equally disappointed on meeting Jane. She was not like her pictures and, he soon learned, had lied about her horoscope. She was middle-aged and rather masculine, and photographs of her from Cefalù suggest a butch lesbian; her Hollywood claim to fame was a part in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm with Mary Pickford. From the moment she arrived at the abbey she complained and Crowley found her a tough customer, but he was determined to lead her to her true will. She suffered from the Hollywood “heebie-jeebies,” from affairs, bootleg gin, and veronal, and Crowley prescribed a simple but strict cure.23 She would subject herself to a month of meditation, living in a thatched lean-to, high on the promontory, alone. Food and drink would be left for her, her only clothes would be a woolen burnoose, and a lime pit latrine would meet her natural needs. Jane told Crowley he was crazy. He told her she could leave. She didn’t and she was one of Crowley’s few successes. After a few days Jane became excruciatingly bored with the “sun, moon, stars, sky, and sea” that Crowley said she had to entertain herself with. Then she sank into apathy. But by the third week something shifted and she felt a wonderful calm joy, a renewal of strength and courage. Crowley knew instinctively that she was wound up by the Hollywood rat race and had forgotten how to relax. He had forced her to do so and compelled her conscious mind to slow down and reconnect with her unconscious, which is the source of “power, meaning, and purpose.” There was no magick, no opera, no drugs, merely time and patience. After this Jane became one of Crowley’s most serious and devoted followers. It is a shame that Crowley himself, who knew this trick, forgot it when he most needed it.
His masochistic fantasies, however, were not to be denied, and he directed them now at Alostrael. He took a vow of Holy Obedience to her and she did not shirk the task. To exorcize his physical cowardice, she took a lighted cigarette and pressed it to his chest. Then she attacked his ego. She saw through his boastfulness over his erudition, his skill with languages, his drug taking, even his success with women. But the final humiliation hinged on his power to transmute the foul into the sacred, the antinomian alchemy on which he based his whole philosophy. She tested this by forcing him to eat her excrement.24 It did not go down well. His mouth burned, his throat choked, his belly retched, and the next morning they were not much better. But he had proved himself to his Scarlet Woman.
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THEIR FIRST SUMMER WENT WELL but by October things took a bad turn. Poupée did not get better and Crowley experienced one of the few times when he was not Master of the Universe. His forty-fifth birthday was his saddest yet, but two days later he was sadder still when Leah returned from Palermo with the news that their child had died. They had taken her to the hospital there with hopes of saving her but the Secret Chiefs, it seemed, had decreed otherwise. Crowley was never happy with the I Ching oracles he had received about his baby girl and now she was gone, and he was truly shattered. This was not the last of their tragedies. Leah was approaching term and having difficulties; Ninette, too, was pregnant. Soon after Poupée’s death, Crowley’s dog, christened Satan, was “murdered.” Then Leah miscarried. Leah believed Ninette had caused it by black magic and when Crowley read Ninette’s diary, he agreed. He was appalled by what he read; the man who labored to revolt “every comparatively sane human being on earth” never dreamed such things were possible. He quickly excommunicated Sister Cypris, banishing her to town until the birth of her own child by him. That the Scarlet Woman to whom he had vowed obedience should fail to give Crowley an heir and that her rival should produce yet another daughter for Crowley—born on November 26 and named Astarte, after a temple prostitute Crowley had been in a previous life—must have caused much pain.
Crowley got over his loss by taking a magical retirement in Paris. There Nina Hamnett, the Queen of Bohemia, introduced him to the mathematician and musicologist J.W.N. Sullivan, who is one of the dedicatees of the Confessions; he is best known today for his book on Beethoven. Sullivan and Crowley hit it off immediately and Crowley also took a liking to Sullivan’s mistress, a depressed woman named Sylvia, a talented musician who lacked self-esteem. Like Leah, Ninette, and others, she was attracted to Crowley. While playing chess, Crowley discussed thelema with Sullivan and was so persuasive that the mathematician soon pledged himself to find and do his true will. The best way to do that, Crowley suggested, was to leave Sylvia in his hands and go off on his own. Sullivan did and Sylvia soon found that her true will was to become pregnant by Crowley; at least she learned she was pregnant after her tryst with the Beast. When Crowley said it was time to return to the abbey, expecting his new friends to join him, Sullivan demurred and took Sylvia back. Crowley didn’t care but Sylvia was furious. Soon after this she died of typhoid but Crowley’s exhortations to Sullivan to find his true will had taken root. Shortly after leaving Crowley, he began an impressive writing career with a book trying to understand his tragic affair with Sylvia.
But the abbey had acquired one new recruit. In November Cecil Frederick Russell, who had met Crowley in New York and joined the O.T.O., arrived. He had read Crowley’s articles in The International and had been in correspondence with him since. Russell had been thrown out of the U.S. Navy after injecting a huge dose of cocaine and attempting to burn a piece of glass through sheer will; he recounted this experiment in a strange book, Znuss is Znees: Memoir of a Magician, privately published in 1970. Russell, however, never really settled into the abbey. Crowley found him coarse, brash, and, like himself, antiauthoritarian; he was especially annoyed at Russell saying “God damn!” after sniffing ether. Russell adopted the name Frater Genesthai and was frankly put off by the idea of performing p.v.n. on Crowley. But Crowley was determined to further Frater Genesthai’s education, and to this end it was his will to paint himself like some New Orleans whore in order to seduce his reluctant swain.25 “Come, seize me, master me, come, Bull of mine, reach out and take me roaring,” he wrote in the Magical Record.26 But Crowley, who had trouble getting Victor Neuburg started, was not the beauty he once was, and Russell wasn’t turned on; Alostrael had to prime him per manu before the opus could start. Even ether didn’t help and years later Russell wrote that Crowley’s enchantments simply “didn’t give me a bone-on.” Russell left the abbey after an argument and some years later started his own magical society, the Choronzon Club, with a hodge-podge of rituals taken from the Golden Dawn and O.T.O.
The argument with Russell was over the arrival of another recruit. Frank Bennett, a bricklayer from Lancashire, had joined the A...A... and O.T.O. in 1909 before emigrating to Australia; he had originally sought Crowley’s counsel regarding the Abramelin magic and also about voices in his head. Bennett had written to Crowley and, having had such success with Jane Wolfe, Crowley advised coming to the abbey, where Bennett would benefit from Crowley’s direct instruction, what he called “frying the seeds of the ego.” When Bennett arrived, Russell was asked to give up his room to the new brother, who outranked him in both age and magick. Russell refused. Crowley then ordered him to do so. Russell refused again. Crowley then suggested a holiday in Palermo. At this, Russell rushed off in a huff to the top of the rock of Cefalù, where he cooled his heels until he finally decided to leave the abbey. But Frank Bennett, Frater Progradior (“I Advance”), was another story. Crowley said that his success with him was enough to “wipe out a dozen failures.”27
I say it was Crowley’s success, but it was really Freud’s, and, as Crowley had said about the best magick, Crowley himself didn’t know how he pulled it off.28 In essence, Crowley told Bennett that his “Real Self” was his unconscious mind. This, in reality, was his Holy Guardian Angel and the source of his true will, and he was cut off from it because he repressed its promptings out of society’s demands. This seems to contradict the idea that the Holy Guardian Angel, at least in the case of Aiwass, is an “extra-human intelligence,” but perhaps Crowley was making things easy for Bennett. Crowley explained this as they walked to the beach for a swim. Bennett was electrified with the insight and promptly tore off his clothes and dashed into the sea; Bennett was in his midfifties and for him to sprint like a young goat, as Crowley says, was unusual. As Crowley and the others swam, Bennett splashed about, filled with a sense of tremendous new knowledge. Later Bennett asked Crowley to repeat what he said. Crowley couldn’t remember but Bennett insisted, and Crowley traced over his remarks until he found the “winning shot.”
What Crowley told Bennett was essentially Freud’s central idea: that we repress our natural instincts and desires because society demands we do, and because of this, we are neurotic. What we need to do, Crowley told Bennett, is to listen to our unconscious—our true will—and follow its desires. Failing to do so leads to sickness and dissatisfaction; the title of Freud’s book Civilization and Its Discontents says it all. William Blake had said it with characteristic brevity well before either Crowley or Freud: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” and “He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.” Crowley’s desires were never unacted but Bennett, it seems, had spent most of life repressing his. Bennett was so shaken by Crowley’s remarks that, according to Crowley, he entered a trance that lasted three days. Bennett’s own account suggests something more spectacular—Symonds quotes it at length—but, as in the case of Jane Wolfe, in essence Crowley had turned Bennett’s mind toward the knowledge that he was something more than just his conscious mind, that there was a whole other part of himself—perhaps the larger part—that he was ignoring. It should be noted that Crowley’s (and Freud’s and Blake’s) insight is, of course, true, but is not the whole truth, and that the answer is not to simply abandon the conscious mind in favor of the unconscious, which Crowley invariably did, but to bring the two together, so that they support, rather than oppose, each other. (This was Jung’s central idea.) Crowley’s advice amounted to the 1960s dictum to “Let it all hang out” or today’s “Just do it,” and for Frank Bennett, a hardworking, highly disciplined, “self-made man,” relaxing and allowing the unconscious to open up was salutary. But as Crowley’s own life shows, letting the unconscious rip is not always fruitful. Yet Crowley triggered a positive reaction in Bennett and he was grateful. “I will spend the rest of my life in spreading his teaching,” Bennett wrote. “For he alone led me to the knowledge of my real subconscious self . . .”29 Whether we like it or not, for all his shortcomings, Crowley did have a positive effect on some people, and whatever we may think of thelema, Crowley’s message did produce some beneficial results.
