Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  To the end of his life, Aleister Crowley regarded himself as a High Tory with an anarchic spin, a believer in aristocracy and spiritual tradition. Whether he inherited the Jacobite strand of old Tory tradition from his activist Aunt Annie is unknown, but somewhere along the track Crowley, by the age of twenty-three, had acquired enthusiasm for Legitimist beliefs, if for no other reason than that they were romantic and squarely against the tendency of the times, whose mood promised democracy, socialism, evangelicalism, more materialism—and ultimately, he believed, social and economic disaster.

  Crowley remained close to Aunt Annie. It was Aunt Annie’s late husband, Uncle Jonathan, who had saved Crowley from the brutality of a Plymouth Brethren school after his beloved father’s death in 1887. Crowley even moved Annie into his home, Boleskine House, by Loch Ness, after his marriage in 1903. His feelings for the legitimate House of Stuart were doubtless encouraged by Scottish cousin Gregor Grant and from reading Rob Roy and kindred historical romances set in the heyday of Jacobite rebellions. Crowley felt the Stuarts’ cause had been lost to the cause of Whig (anti-Tory) political expediency. England’s greater landowning aristocrats generally favored a controlled monarchy with no direct access to their pockets; the burgher class, in general, followed suit. Queen Victoria, doyenne of the Whigs—now known as “Liberals”—was, of course, the politically expedient Hanoverian married to a German.

  Crowley’s links to Legitimism were several. Louis Charles Richard Duncombe-Jewell (1866–1947) was, like Crowley, the son of Plymouth Brethren Christian sectarians, which put him in a small, exclusive world. Duncombe-Jewell emerged from it as an army lieutenant and journalist. A friend of Crowley’s since Duncombe-Jewell’s parents moved to Streatham, south London—where Crowley lived on and off from 1890 before going up to Cambridge in 1895—Duncombe-Jewell was, at the time of the Spanish-American War and impending Carlist insurgency, Times correspondent in Spain. Pursuing his correspondent’s career with the Morning Post during the Boer War, and subsequently for the Daily Mail (in 1902), Duncombe-Jewell combined features writing with devotion to uniting the “five Celtic nations,” quixotically proposing Cornish independence. Crowley needed little encouragement to be seduced by the supposed magic of an ancient, imaginary “Celtic Church,” an alleged hidden spiritual church, or quintessence, of Britain’s soul. Unlike either mainstream or sectarian Christianity, the Celtic Church was not noticeably concerned with sin. This “virtual Church,” or conceptual body, attracted members of like romantic and spiritual disposition.

  Most significantly, Duncombe-Jewell belonged to the Thames Valley Legitimist Club, a radical coterie close to Bertram, 5th Earl of Ashburnham, Knight Commander in the Order of Malta’s Society of the Order of the White Rose, reformed in 1886 for Legitimist activities.

  On December 14, 1883, Lord Ashburnham had granted part of his Welsh estate in Pembrey, Carmarthenshire, to the secretary of state for the War Department with right to use part of the manor for three months a year for seventeen years as a firing range for HM forces, at an annual rent of £20. Ashburnham now used this land as a training ground for a tiny, secret organization to support the Spanish pretender.

  What took time to dawn on new recruit Crowley was that Legitimism was in fact a servant of political intentions nourished within the Roman Catholic Church, which, like young Crowley, detested universal suffrage and materialism and hoped to replace such aspirations with a return to Catholic authority. Young Crowley, on the other hand, sought his “return” through science, individual freedom, poetry, and spiritual magic. The Catholic Church naturally feared anarchy (as did most conservatives, spiritual and otherwise), but Crowley felt something vital in the anarchic challenge; this would make for persistent paradoxical conflict in Crowley’s complex psyche and opinions. For Catholic Legitimists, “legitimacy” meant spiritual and, therefore, worldly authority: the essential right to rule. In his Confessions, Crowley describes his Legitimist training, and its shortcomings.

  Burns [the Scottish poet] and my cousin Gregor had made me a romantic Jacobite. I regarded the Houses of Hanover and Coburg [the British royal family] as German usurpers; and I wished to place “Mary III and IV” on the throne. I was a bigoted legitimist. I actually joined a conspiracy on behalf of Don Carlos, obtained a commission to work a machine gun, took pains to make myself a first-class rifle shot and studied drill, tactics, and strategy. However, when the time came for the invasion of Spain, Don Carlos got cold feet. The conspiracy was disclosed; and Lord Ashburnham’s yacht, which was running the arms, fell into the hands of the Spanish navy. [my italics]6

  Crowley’s recent training on a machine gun is probably behind a jocular reference in an unpublished letter from Crowley to his Cambridge undergraduate friend Gerald Kelly (1879–1982) written around November 1899 when Crowley had just moved in to his new estate at Boleskine, near Foyers, Inverness. Crowley asked Kelly to gather copies of his unpublished poetry collection Green Alps and other works deposited with risqué publisher, Leonard Smithers.

  If you do this, the Gods will reward you, for I never will, as Queen Elizabeth said. If you don’t, I shall apply a Maxim Gun to your anus and pic.*3 By the way, was I such a bloody fool of a prophet about this war?†4 Be good and take your grade. I may observe that. Gerald Kelly cannot take the grade 1° = 10▫.‡5Eritis similes Deo can.§6 Read mark learn and i.d. [inwardly digest]. Yours fraternally, P.¶77

  Before Ashburnham’s arms run hit the skids, Crowley had already met his second link to Legitimism, Samuel Liddell Mathers (1854–1918), a man up to his neck in Legitimist conspiracy. From a Paris base at 87 Rue Mozart, Auteuil, Mathers ran the secret Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well as a web of pro-Legitimist contacts throughout the Western world.

  Fig. 1.1. Allan Bennett (1872–1923)

  Famously initiated into the Golden Dawn magical order in November 1898 as Perdurabo, Crowley received not only training in gnostic magic and Masonic-style neo-Rosicrucianism but also a framework of spiritual attainment that, for better or worse, gave the rest of his life its essential structure and much of its meaning. What perhaps is curious is that in Crowley’s account, his introduction to Mathers followed an allegedly chance encounter with Londoner Julian Levett Baker (1873–1958). An analytical chemist working close to the brewing industry, Baker had been initiated into the Golden Dawn on June 16, 1894, taking as his motto, Causa scientiae (“for the cause of knowledge”). A few months later, George Cecil Jones was initiated. He and Baker had become friends at the City of London School. Baker and Jones also shared an interest in chemistry’s origins in alchemy, though it was Jones who was most immersed in the medieval tradition.*8 It seems likely that it was fellow chemist Allan Bennett who first recommended Baker to the GD (Bennett had been initiated in February 1894.) Bennett and Jones would become close friends of Crowley after Crowley and Jones first met in October 1898. A surviving envelope of picturesque hotel stationery, once containing a letter to Gerald Kelly at his parents’ house at Camberwell Rectory, London, pinpoints the occasion of Crowley’s meeting with Baker. It was sent by Crowley—mountaineering at the time—from the Hôtel Mont Rose, Zermatt, Switzerland, and postmarked July 25, 1898.8

  From the time scale, it looks as though Crowley’s interest in political Legitimism coincided with commitment to spiritual and magical initiation. If it was Duncombe-Jewell who was chiefly responsible for Crowley’s association with the Society of the Order of the White Rose, why had Duncombe-Jewell not mentioned his Legitimist colleague Mathers to Crowley in this context before? Crowley’s autobiography is mute on the question, but then again, Crowley did say, “There is a great deal more to this story; but I cannot tell it—yet.”9 Was this a clue?

  Sharron Lowena’s paper “Noscitur A Sociis: Jenner, Duncombe-Jewell and their Milieu” revealed hard evidence for Ashburnham and Mathers securing arms shipments from Bavaria in 1899.10 Close to the action was the Legitimists’ cryptographer Henry Jenner (1848–1934), “Bard of Cornwall” and chancellor of th
e Society of the White Rose. Jenner handled secret negotiations with Bavaria and elsewhere. Having been informed of Jenner’s anti-Hanoverian convictions and secessionist politics, Queen Victoria turned her back on Jenner at the Stuart Exhibition of 1889, where she is reported to have said with disdain, “I have heard of Mr. Jenner.” According to the New York Times (January 16, 1913), Her Majesty also snubbed Lord Ashburnham when Gladstone nominated him for the position of lord-in-waiting.11 Crowley knew Jenner through Duncombe-Jewell. Perhaps Crowley knew a lot of people the government would like to have known about, though who can doubt Salisbury had his sources? The Primrose League itself provided strategic intelligence for the Conservative Party.

  As is well known, Crowley advanced quickly through the Golden Dawn order structure. Barely a year of progress through the seven grades of the “Outer Order” had passed before Crowley appeared an intimate of Mathers and, as Adeptus Minor, crossed the portal to the “Second Order” of the Ruby Rose and Cross of Gold, whose ascending grades led ultimately, on paper at least, to God–Self-realization and a role within the purposes of the Order’s supposed preternatural “Secret Chiefs.” Partly due to existing fissures and rivalries, Crowley’s progress through the Order elicited dismay among some members in London, particularly Irish, pro-Fenian poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), who for not altogether comprehensible reasons—other than Yeats’s eventual opposition to Mathers—despised Crowley, a contempt Crowley, refusing to take offense, characteristically laid at the door of pique at Yeats’s alleged sense of poetic inferiority to Crowley! Few concur with Crowley’s self-assessment, but estimates of poetic values have changed considerably since 1900. There was doubtless more to their rivalry than poetry, for according to the account Crowley maintained to the end of his life—part fictionalized in his story “At the Fork in the Roads” (1909)—Yeats seriously threatened him in 1899 using black magic via the vampiric agency of alleged accomplice, doomed artist-designer and poet Althea Gyles (1868–1949) of the Slade School of Art, whom Crowley also fancied and whose artwork he appreciated. Sexual jealousy probably played a part, and perhaps political suspicions also festered between the poets.

  Dear Kelly,

  Let me know how Pelleas is going and if I can help you in any way. . . . What about my design? I have seen a drawing of Althaea [sic ] Gyles which I shall use in some way, unless it is expensive, and you are less cantankerous than usual. Signed “To the re-seeing I kiss your hands and your feet” (Pollitt).*9

  Tata, Aleister Crowley12

  Yeats had been an enthusiastic admirer of redheaded Gyles (she had designed book covers for him) but withdrew support when in 1899 he learned of her involvement with Leonard Smithers, dismissed by critical observers as a drunken pornographer. While Smithers published Crowley’s earliest work, Crowley determined, in late 1899, to frustrate Smithers by loading him with unpaid publishing debts. Crowley wrote to Kelly sometime in November–December 1899:

  Will you do me a great favour? Get Green Alps [Crowley’s unpublished poetry] from Smithers if you possibly can—several copies. Say you have seen me and I shall not communicate with Smithers till Green Alps is published. If you can get any things you know I shall like for me on credit, &c so: perhaps this best done first. But I must increase my debts to Smithers at all cost. You should in any case buy most of my “Jezebels” [poetry by AC] in his possession and as many as you can of my Japanese “Book of Second 50 drawings” [?] as you can. And when you get the bill, say you’ve paid me. Also get a dozen of “Stains” [Crowley’s decadent work, White Stains].13

  Crowley was either trying to annoy Smithers deliberately or to make Smithers financially dependent on him and therefore disposed to be amenable to obtain payment, for reasons of Crowley’s own, probably connected with Althea Gyles, whom Smithers seems to have removed from Crowley’s involvement. Gyles may have constituted the nub of Crowley and Yeats’s bad relations.

  As easily as Crowley ascended to the upper echelons of the Golden Dawn—without bothering, or feeling able, to cozy up to the dominant faction of the London Isis-Urania Temple—he familiarized himself with the Legitimist plot to secure Carlist victory in Spain. He claimed in his Confessions to have been knighted by an unnamed lieutenant of Don Carlos for his services, whatever that might mean. It probably happened at Ashburnham’s Welsh estate where in 1899 Carlist volunteers expecting to serve in Spain’s northern provinces conveniently received training.

  Surviving Ashburnham correspondence contains telegrams and accounts relating to the purchase, equipping, and maintenance of Ashburnham’s steam yacht, Firefly.14 Commanding the yacht, Thames Valley Legitimist Club member Vincent J. English*10 oversaw the loading aboard of a hold full of Gras rifles from Bavaria.15 The Firefly duly steamed south in early July 1899 but failed to reach Spain. Somebody tipped off the Spanish consul at the port of Arcachon, near Bordeaux. The consul pressed French customs and on July 15 the vessel was seized. Letters in the Ashburnham papers to the British vice consulate at Arcachon reveal a tense showdown over possession of Ashburnham’s prize steam yacht.16 Ashburnham got his yacht back, but the conspiracy was exploded.

  Sharron Lowena’s study of Cornish Carlists draws attention to a name on the yacht’s pay list dated August 26, 1899: one “C. Alexander.” Spence considers this possible twist on “Alexander Crowley” might just stand as one of “agent Aleister’s” first aliases; it might just as well not, and scanty evidence is against putting any weight on the identification, especially as a July 8, 1899, interview with Crowley in the Pall Mall Gazette about fatalities on Beachy Head puts him in London preparing for a mountaineering tour of Switzerland and the Tyrol at the time of the Firefly’s fateful voyage. However, Spence’s singular observation brings us to his most audacious speculation as regards Aleister Crowley and the British intelligence apparatus. Spence poses the question: What if Crowley was encouraged to involve himself with Mathers’s affairs so that he could inform on the Order chief ’s clandestine political activities? Spence believes Crowley’s subsequent conduct—his role in the April 1900 revolt that split the Order apart amid exposure of Mathers’s antiestablishment politics, for example—attains greater intelligibility when seen as Crowley operating as agent provocateur executing a secret mission.

  Spence’s admittedly speculative, though doubtless compelling, scenario begins with Crowley at the end of his second year at Cambridge, still intending a career “in the Diplomatic.” Crowley’s own account was that at this point in his university career he entered a personal crisis in which, realizing the ultimate futility of all worldly honors, he lost faith in his ambitions, abandoned his former course, and embarked instead on a life of spiritual exploration and service to invisible governors of human destiny, having come to the conclusion that all meaningful change is effected by spiritual causes. What if, asks Spence, Crowley did not abandon completely his original ambitions for diplomatic service, as his own story goes, but rather accepted a wholly clandestine role to serve the powers-that-be, a role he could never reveal?

  Readers, kindly note that we only enter this territory because Spence’s hypothesis, and the complex issues it raises, may help us to assess more accurately Crowley’s many mysterious activities in America following his first visit to New York in July 1900.

  Crowley was still a student when in the summer of 1897 he first traveled to St. Petersburg, which, he tells us in his autobiography, was undertaken to learn Russian, the Diplomatic Service requiring foreign language skills. At the time, Russia was deemed as great a threat to the British Empire as Imperial Germany’s expansionist naval and territorial ambitions. Spence asks us to consider Crowley’s presence in St. Petersburg as a kind of dry run for intelligence services to come, especially as Don Carlos’s son Don Jaime, favored by Tsar Nicholas II, had received a Russian Imperial Army commission the previous year. Foreign Office hawks may have interested themselves in knowing if the tsar also favored Don Jaime’s father’s plans. This seems a tall order for a student lacking a natur
al facility for modern languages. Nevertheless, with Crowley’s Cambridge studies completed a year later, and having in the meantime come into a private fortune, Spence’s hypothesis has Crowley moving in on Mathers’s world by sniffing out Julian Baker of the Golden Dawn in Switzerland.

  Crowley had read Golden Dawn member A. E. Waite’s The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts (1898) and ensuing correspondence with Waite had, Crowley stated, when joined to Baker and Jones’s promptings, crystallized his desire to approach the secret body of adepts of spiritual wisdom. Following Spence’s hypothesis, by using chemist-alchemist Baker to get into the Golden Dawn, Crowley could enter the Legitimist conspiracy while simultaneously satisfying his interests in magical psychology and spiritual effects, interests common to other distinguished men of Trinity College. These included Crowley’s older friend, barrister, naval officer, and—note—World War I intelligence officer, the Honorable Francis Henry Everard Joseph Feilding (1867–1937), and Britain’s leading anthropologist, James George Frazer (1854–1941), author of the classic The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparitive Religion (1890), which greatly influenced Crowley’s thinking about religion when he lived in America.

  CROWLEY AND “MACGREGOR” MATHERS

  It is perhaps curious that when Crowley met Mathers in Paris in early 1899,Mathers was prepared to deal with an Englishman whose card announced him as “Count Vladimir Svareff,” but then cash-strapped Mathers also enjoyed self-granted titles such as, “Count of Glenstrae,”*11 for example, and believed James IV of Scotland—that royal patron of alchemists—was his former incarnation. The prevailing view has been that Crowley emulated Mathers’s pretensions. While Crowley enjoyed role playing, and was in youth afflicted with snobbish vanity, the following previously unpublished letter to Gerald Kelly offers another slant on Crowley’s adoption of the title “Lord Boleskine”; that is, his being properly “laird” of Boleskine and Abertarff.