A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult

by Gary Lachman

  Crowley's history has been told several times24. Since his revival in the late 1960s (both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were impressed by him) and adoption by the devotees of heavy metal, he's achieved a posthumous notoriety that far exceeds the infamy of his day. Today, "Do what thou wilt," the catch phrase of Crowley's religion of thelema, is teenage lingo. As his own plunge into sex and sadism was prompted by his intolerable upbringing, Crowley's philosophy of indulgence appeals to the young, hemmed in by parental restrictions. Most people, however, get through this phase and adjust to life. Crowley made a religion of it, with himself, the Master Therion (the Great Beast in Greek), as high priest and deity.

  Crowley absorbed an enormous amount of experience. He climbed the Himalayas, walked across China, learned several languages, squandered a fortune, and belonged to several occult orders. He took a startling amount of drugs, and had erotic relations with members of both sex in a variety of ways and places, was a chess champion, wrote German propaganda during WWI and enjoyed the rare distinction of having his own magical abbey shut down by Mussolini. He was also in and out of the tabloids during the 1920s and 30s, and earned the tag of "the wickedest man in the world." Though technically not a black magician, there was little of the light about him, and as most accounts of his life relate, he left a trail of madness and shattered lives. Few close to him emerged unharmed.

  As mentioned earlier, Crowley became interested in magic (or `magick', as he would spell it) through a book of A.E. Waite's. Later, after reading Eckharthausen's The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, he became obsessed with the idea of a secret magical order. In 1898, while on a skiing trip in Switzerland, he met the chemist Julian L. Baker who introduced him to George Cecil Jones. It was through Jones that Crowley became a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, initiated into the society as Brother Perdurabo, "one who will endure to the finish."

  For the rest of his life, Crowley devoted himself to rehabilitating the reputation of magick. First, through study and mastery of a variety of occult arts, mostly Kabbalah and cere monial magic; then through the propagation of his religion. Initially called Crowleyanity - an obvious dig at Christianity - then thelema, the teaching came to him in the revelation of The Book of the Law in Cairo in 1904. Leaving the Golden Dawn in 1900, Crowley avoided magic for some time and turned his mind to Buddhism and meditation. Inheriting a considerable fortune, he threw himself into his other loves, travel and mountaineering. Crowley was a good, if unorthodox mountaineer; his ascent of Chogo-Ri in the Himalayas, the world's second highest mountain, though a failure, is impressive. But his later attempt on Kanchenjunga ended in ignominy, when he refused to help members of his party who had met with an accident. Crowley left them to their fate and several men died. He then excused himself in a spate of self-justifying newspaper articles, after withdrawing all of the expedition's funds from the bank.

  In 1904, as mentioned, Crowley received a communication from the Secret Chiefs, his version of Blavatsky's hidden masters. Through the medium of his first wife Rose - who later died a dipsomaniac - Crowley received the sacred text of his religion, the aforementioned Book of the Law. On 8 April a voice spoke out of the air in his hotel room in Cairo, revealing the new Word of the Aeon. He wrote at a feverish pace, capturing the doctrine he spent the rest of his life advocating. It was a heady blend of Nietzsche and de Slide, served up in fin de siecle prose, and assorted Egyptian motifs. Crowley convinced himself, and later many others, that it prophesised the dawning of a new age, and that he was its reluctant avatar.

  Crowley claimed that the Book of the Law was unlike any of his previous writings and clearly showed an alien hand. Any reader of Crowley's poetry will find this difficult to accept. By the time he received the Book of the Law, Crowley had already distinguished himself as a poet - at least to his own satisfaction - with several elegant, if self-published volumes. His first, Alcedema, A Place to Bury Strangers In, by "a gentleman of the University of Cambridge," was privately printed in 1898 in an edition of one hundred copies. The poem is a long exercise in blasphemy, degradation and masochism; the title refers to the field bought with Judas' thirty pieces of silver. With this first effort Crowley believed he had "attained, at a bound, the summit of Parnassus." The book, however, was not well received. A few other gentlemen of the University of Cambridge read it, and remarked that it should not be shown to the young. Undeterred (more likely encouraged) Crowley went on to produce poetry for the rest of his life. He wrote Swinburnian odes well into the heyday of modernism and seems not to have paid much attention to any poetry written after Wilde.

  Crowley's choice of nom de plume for his first published work was an homage to Shelley's The Necessity of Atheism, whose author was "a gentleman of the University of Oxford." Crowley had a habit of associating himself with the greats of English literature; of his birthplace he famously said that it was "a strange coincidence that one small county should have given England her two greatest poets - for one must not forget Shakespeare. "25 The humour is typical, as is the inordinate self-esteem, suggesting in fact a sense of inferiority, one so great that even becoming a god did not quite compensate for it. (Crowley believed he had become a god in 1921, when he reached the magical rank of Ipsissimus). Every writer is touchy about his work, but Crowley was positively paranoid. When he brought the proofs of his verse play Jephthah (1898) (another privately printed work) to show his magical brother Yeats, he was crestfallen at the poet's unenthusiastic response. "He forced himself to utter a few polite conventionalities," Crowley recalled, but Frater Perdurabo could see through the sham. It was obvious that "black, bilious rage shook him to the soul." The reason? Yeats had obviously recognized in Crowley's work the hand of a poet much greater than himself...

  Jephthah, like much of Crowley's poetry, is fairly tough reading. It is not, as his biographer Martin Booth remarks, "true poetry, which, at its best, has that indefinable substance in it, that certain untouchable quality of the soul ... X26 Except for a few pieces, Crowley's poetry is mostly derivative and second rate, when it is not downright pornographic and nasty, as is his highly collectable collection White Stains (1898). Crowley, however, thought so well of his verse that in 1907 he published (privately again) his Collected Works. To stimulate notice, he offered a £100 prize for the best critical essay on his oeuvre. The announcement for the competition is typical:

  The Chance of the Year!

  The Chance of the Century!!

  The Chance of the Geological Period!!!

  Two years passed before anyone responded. Captain J.F.C. Fuller's effusive The Star of the West, which proclaimed that "Crowley is more than a new-born Dionysus, he is more than a Blake, a Rabelais, or a Heine ..." won hands down. Being the only entry, that was not difficult. Fuller became one of the early thelemites and Crowley, notorious for his meanness, neglected to pay him his prize. Later a noted military historian, Fuller had a thing for charismatic men, and was the only Englishman to attend Adolf Hitler's fiftieth birthday party.

  Crowley, however, can be readable, especially when he is talking about himself, a good trait in a raconteur, but deadly in a poet. His massive Confessions (complete edition 1969) exhibits the same megalomania (Crowley called it an "autohagiography"), yet it is entertaining and in places displays insight. His two occult novels, Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922), a fictionalized account of his Abbey of Thelema, and Moonchild (1929), a spiteful dig at the Golden Dawn, are enjoyable. Even some of the strictly magical texts, like the early Book Four (1911) and the later Eight Lectures on Yoga (1939) present no problems to the interested student, unlike his impenetrable magnum opus, Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), which fails in its attempt to bring his message to the average reader, who hasn't the slightest idea what he's talking about. It's in this work, however, that perhaps his best poem makes an importance appearance.

  Crowley's Hymn to Pan was first published in his magical magazine The Equinox, original issues of which are now highly collectable and fetch considerable sum
s. To have included it in his message to the world attests to the importance it had for its author. It is a highly effective piece of incantatory writing. Best read aloud, its succeeds admirably in evoking a sense of an impending crisis: the appearance of the ancient god of madness. Today it is often used by Crowley's devotees in their rituals, and it was read, much to the consternation of the city council, by Crowley's friend Louis Wilkinson, in Brighton on 5 December 1947, when Crowley was cremated. Wilkinson, a friend of another magical writer, John Cowper Powys (and as Louis Marlow, author of the Ouspenskyean novel The Devil in Crystal (1944)), was originally supposed to read the whole of The Book of the Law over Crowley's coffin. At the last minute, he quite rightly chose instead this moving, memorable paean to his departed friend's favourite deity.

  Crowley's relationship with other poets is curious. We've seen his reaction to Yeats. His most well known literary association was with the poet Victor Neuberg, with whom Crowley engaged in homosexual magic in North Africa and other places, evoking the demon Choronzon. Neuberg was understandably shaken by the affair and, like many involved with Crowley, came away from their association damaged.27 Outside of magical circles, Neuberg is practically unknown today, although he has a small niche in literary history as the man who discovered Dylan Thomas. Crowley seemed to have had a negative effect on Neuberg's protege as well, chasing Thomas out of a London pub with a feat of clairvoyance. Strangely, although no friend of modernism, Crowley's work had a powerful effect on the eccentric Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, today recognized as one of the central figures in European modernism, and who, like Crowley, had a penchant for other identities. The two corresponded on magical matters, but Pessoa is most known to Crowleyites as the man who helped the Great Beast fake a suicide in Lisbon. Pessoa himself was a highly hermetic writer, and his contribution to the occult will be looked at in the book's concluding essay.

  Arthur Machen

  The career of Arthur Machen is enough to make any wouldbe writer think twice about the prospects of making a living with his pen. With the exception of Henry Miller, I can think of no one who so self-consciously set himself the task of becoming a writer and who wrote so much about the process. Yet, unlike his brother in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Machen never achieved the kind of popularity enjoyed by Algernon Blackwood. The brief spurt of literary fame that did come his way in the 1920s, though appreciative of his genius, did not help him financially. Throughout his life Machen never quite escaped the poverty of his childhood. All accounts of him depict a robust, life-affirming character - Chestertonian in outlook and girth - full of contempt for the modern age, but thankful for life's small pleasures. Yet there is a grim, stoic atmosphere around Machen; with Blake he shares the poet's ability to maintain a much needed self-belief in the face of almost universal ignorance. Today he is known only to aficionados of the Golden Dawn and connoisseurs of gaslight and horror, though he is perhaps, more than any other, the writer for whom London was the most mystical arcana of all.

  Arthur Machen21 was born Arthur Llewelyn Jones on 3 March 1863 in Caerleon-on-Usk, Gwent, and died in St. Joseph's Nursing Home, Beaconsfield, on 15 December 1947. He was eighty-four. Like many writers Arthur was a dreamy, solitary child, and he spent his early years reading and wandering in his beloved Welsh countryside. Literature, ancient ruins, the beauties of nature and the sense that behind them lay some vast secret - the basic occult sensibility - were the strongest influences on him. A good student, in 1880 at seventeen Arthur had to leave school because his impoverished clergyman father could not afford the fees. That same year he. made his first visit to London, where he failed the preliminary examination for the Royal College of Surgeons. It was also at this time that he adopted Machen, his mother's maiden name, and decided that he wanted to become a writer. One hundred copies of a first attempt, Eleusinia, a long poem about the ancient Greek mystery tradition, was published the next year, and on the strength of this Machen's parents believed his fortune lay in journalism. He was sent to London again to Iearn the trade.

  He failed then too, and found work as a publisher's clerk and then a tutor, but oddly enough, for most of his life Machen did earn his living as a journalist, working on a number of London papers. It's difficult to see the Celtic mystic Machen in the cutthroat world of Fleet Street, but from 1909 until the '20s, Machen was a regular figure there, in his Inverness cape, felt hat and nearly shoulder-length white hair.29 Machen later said that having to write under a deadline eventually helped him to a mastery of style. A look at his later work shows less of a love for fine writing, the hurdle most modern readers hit in approaching him. However, it's the early decadent Machen that is the focus of a fiercely devoted cult.

  Machen's early years in London were an exercise in patience, endurance and want. Living alone in a tiny room on tea, bread and tobacco, Machen found himself in a sprawling, impersonal metropolis, his only escape his long, rambling walks through the city's interminable streets, recounted in books like Things Near and Far (1923) and The London Adventure (1924). Other would-be writers who launched themselves on the capital seemed to have their way made easy through friends, acquaintances, and family. Machen had none of this; what was worse, he felt a deadening inability to transfer the insights of his imagination onto the page. He was gripped by a "stuttering awkwardness" whenever he thought of "attempting the great speech of literature . . . " This excruciating pressure crushes most aspiring artists, as it does the hero of Machen's novel The Hill of Dreams (1907). To Machen's credit, he stuck to his dream and eventually made it come true.

  From 1883 to 1890 Machen worked at becoming a man of letters, producing several books and translations, including the twelve volume Memoirs of]acques Casanova, now the standard edition. In 1884 he was hired to catalogue a collection of occult texts, and it was this, as well as his meeting with A.E. Waite a few years later, that turned his thoughts to magic. Then, in 1890, Machen had his breakthrough. The first chapter of his macabre tale The Great God Pan was published in a literary journal, The Whirlwind; two years later it appeared in book form, along with- another weird story, "The Inmost Light." It was more a success d'estime than a financial one, but even here Machen found himself running up against difficulties. Machen's story recounts a gruesome tale of a scientist's attempts to dissolve the veil of the external world, and reveal the secret of reality. In order to do this he performs a brain operation on a young girl. Predictably, the results are shattering: she has a vision of the great god Pan, goes mad and is put in an asylum, where she eventually dies. Not, however, before giving birth to a beautiful daughter, the product of her union with the object of her mind-blowing vision. In later years the girl becomes an evil femme fatale, triggering a rash of suicides in Victorian London.

  The story made Machen's name, but his notoriety was not always welcome. While The Great God Pan found friends among the decadents it outraged more conservative critics and readers. Oscar Wilde, Machen's occasional dining companion and his only real link to the decadent movement, called it un grand succes.30 But not everyone agreed. The Westminster Gazette called it "an incoherent nightmare of sex." For the Manchester Guardian it was ". . . the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable (book) we have yet seen in English." Other mainstream papers offered a similar response. A literary agent Machen met at the time remarked that while having tea with "some ladies in Hampstead" he mentioned his story "and their opinion seemed to be that ... The Great God Pan should never have been written." They were not alone. Although its shocking effects seem dated today, in the Yellow Nineties, Machen's tale entered dangerous territory. He had `arrived', but the philistinism he would bash his head against for the rest of his life was undeterred.

  Machen continued to write, and it's in this period - 1890-1900 - that his most characteristic work appears. Other strange stories, like "The White People" and "The Shining Pyramid," as well as his Stevensonian novel The Three Impostors (1895), earned Machen an enduring place in the history of weird fiction. It's now that h
is basic theme emerges: that beneath the veneer of modern civilization lie ancient, atavistic forces that man encounters at his peril. It was a theme that H.P. Lovecraft, a great fan of Machen, would later adopt in the stories in his `Cthulhu Mythos'. Although they were quite different characters - Machen a religious man and Lovecraft an atheist - Machen and Lovecraft shared a profound disgust with the modern world, and in their tales there is a feeling that they are, at least in part, getting back at a civilization they find revolting. (Blackwood, however, who Lovecraft also thought highly of, and who also believed in a lost, primal world, never gives quite the same impression; the strange forces his protagonists encounter, even when destructive, produce a sense of wonder, not horror.) Much of Machen's early writing seems prompted more by his rejection of the visible world than by his belief in a hidden mystical reality, a theme, we know, shared by many Romantics.

  In 1899 Machen's first wife died of cancer. Understandably he was crushed. The depression led to a creative block, and Machen gave up writing. He joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, took an extreme dislike to Aleister Crowley, and soon left to take up a new career as an actor. For the next eight years Machen played minor Shakespearian roles in Frank Benson's stage company. Then, in 1909, he turned to journalism and later, in the 1920s, autobiography. In the 1930s, prompted by financial need, he turned his hand to fiction again, producing a few minor works, but the earlier spark had fled. Ironically, while he felt creatively drained, his early stories were enjoying a vogue in the US. In 1918 Vincent Starret published Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin. Decadence had reached the States and a Machen craze ensued. New editions of his works appeared and he was celebrated by writers like Carl Van Vechten and James Branch Cabell. Machen was dubbed "the flower-tunicked priest of nightmare" and seen as the equal of his beloved Poe and De Quincey. One work in particular was singled out for praise as the "most decadent book in all of English literature." It was Machen's early novel The Hill of Dreams.