Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  Just a note re the title [Lord Boleskine]. We needn’t quarrel. Aleister Crowley is my nom de plume, but (intra nos)†12 Rose [Crowley’s first wife] is keen on it; so must I seem, if I am to go back to the East. “Lord” is not an English title, but a courtesy title which for example Scotch judges take. My bitter enemies in Inverness opposed me for a week and gave in at once when I explained. I did not know Camberwell [Kelly’s home] was so severe. B.K. [Rose’s mother Bridget] addresses her daughter as Lady Boleskine. Enough: I am not annoyed, especially when you overwhelm me with the masterpiece “I naturally shall do as they do.”—’S’truth I break down again every time I think of it!17

  Spence suggests the moniker under which Crowley lay “perdu”‡1318 in the heart of London at the time may rather have been part of elaborate schemes undertaken by the Special Branch to smoke out Russian anarchists and agents around London’s West End: a serious concern for Britain’s security services at the time after a series of terrorist atrocities. Such might explain the mystery of “Count Svareff’s” flat in Chancery Lane being watched by police.

  Crowley was at London’s Hotel Cecil when on January 15, 1900, he received two letters from Miss Evelyn Hall saying, “You (and all your friends at 67 [Chancery Lane]) are watched by police. This is connected with ‘the brother of a college chum’ but no doubt can be entertained of the meaning of her hints. She naively assumes the charge to be true.”19 Crowley doubted Evelyn Hall’s story.*1420 It is possible that any police observation derived from Crowley’s enemies in the Order, in particular Frederick Leigh Gardner, who condemned Crowley for alleged promiscuous liaisons with men and women and tried to trap him.21 It is also perfectly possible that Crowley hung out under a pseudonym so that his investigation of magic, black and white, should not come to his family’s notice. He may simply have been getting entertaining mileage out of what he’d picked up in St. Petersburg.

  Fig. 1.2. Evelyn Hall (L’Épée by Alfred-Pierre Agache, 1896; Ontario Art Gallery)

  Years later Crowley would claim his reason for acting incognito was a playful desire to extract obsequiousness from tradespersons, ironically observing their behavior for its psychological value. Conversely, he claimed that he did not want members of his family to know about his occult experimentation in Chancery Lane. These explanations may be disingenuous. Crowley foisted his “Count Svareff” card on all comers, not just tradespeople. According to Spence’s theory, there were no accidents in Crowley’s progress after Cambridge—the meeting with Baker in Switzerland, the cultivation of Mathers, joining Ashburnham’s Carlists—all together suggested to Spence a spy’s desire to infiltrate Legitimist intentions. “Everything about his association with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn smacks of an agent provocateur.”22 There is no doubt Crowley’s behavior contributed to bringing the Order’s simmering personality conflicts to the boil. But if speculation of this order is permitted to fathom obscurities, then it might also be speculated that Crowley simply enjoyed the role of occasional agent provocateur on his own terms and to satisfy his own anarchic tendencies, taste for adventure, pleasure in posing, and outré, sometimes contradictory, political and spiritual enthusiasms.

  When Mathers’s authority in the Golden Dawn was challenged, Crowley believed it was chiefly because certain members of the Second or Inner Order knew that Mathers had gone to Paris to facilitate plots against the governments of Spain, Portugal, and probably Great Britain. Legitimists dreamed of a Britain rid of “usurper” Victoria and her successor, the Prince of Wales, by offering the crown to Prince Rupprecht (“King Robert”), the son of Maria Theresa Henrietta Dorothea de Austria-Este-Modena, descendant of the House of Stuart.*15

  Crowley may conceivably have received an initial directive to observe Mathers’s activities, but when Order opposition to Mathers developed into an outright attack on Crowley himself (because Crowley was seen as Mathers’s delegated muscle), the idea of reforming the Golden Dawn may possibly have assumed priority in Crowley’s plans, based in part on his belief that the Order harbored persons he would later describe as “Black Brothers.” Black Brothers were, by Crowley’s definition, persons committed to imposing negative, destructive, or depressive spiritual beliefs, frustrating long-term plans of the invisible “Great White Brotherhood” that he believed guided humankind and to whose absolute service Crowley felt himself pledged. As far as Crowley was concerned, the purposes of the White (magic) Brotherhood included the integrity of Great Britain and—as we shall see—Britannia’s future alliance with the United States of America.

  It is also the case that eruptions in the Golden Dawn coincided with Crowley’s dedicated performance of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, by which he was bound by oath to overcome opposition and temptation from the “evil Princes of the World.” He was to expect perilous frustration and was encouraged by close friend and tutor in magic, Allan Bennett, to see physical opposition as a visible correlate of spiritual evil lined up against one who aspired to supreme spiritual attainment. Crowley was already living out a dynamic inner drama on the stage of the real world.

  Crowley’s personal commitment to progress in the Golden Dawn structure even extended to offering sincere help when encouraging the younger Gerald Kelly to follow in his footsteps. For Crowley, the spiritual ideal of the Order owned a sublimity transcending politics. Nowhere do we find Crowley gloating or rejoicing over the split that inexorably unpicked the seam of the Order, which process was, anyway, well advanced before he arrived on the scene. Crowley’s arrival may have been catalytic, but how could he have known that before joining, unless of course he intended it to be so? Mathers called for loyalty; Crowley gave it. All indications are that Crowley had first expected what Order propaganda offered: a romantic continuity of the ancient and spiritual Order R.C. (Rosy Cross). One may also discern from Crowley’s letters of the period that he took the Order’s doctrines seriously without ulterior motive and recommended assiduous attention to them from people he cared about.

  In late 1899, beneath gold-headed notepaper bearing Clan MacGregor mottoes—’S rioghal mo dhream, “My race is royal,” and “E’en Do and Spare Not,” meaning “in what you do, no expense is too much” (a preemptive corollary of “Do what thou wilt”)—Crowley addressed Neophyte Gerald Kelly, concerning Order exams.

  Care Frater E.S.D.,

  Do your exam for exam purposes. The meanings of the [Hebrew] wordsare important. But if you know them with the numbers and can makeshift to write the characters legibly—well.

  Your מ [Hebrew letter Mem = water] was well made. Don’t worry with Eastern Books. There is one after you who has been preferred before you.*16 My coming to town vibrates between the likely and the certain. Your “power of concentration” is all wrong because you are0°=0▫[neophyte]. 0 is the number of the Fool of the Tarot. Get clear without losing any more time and having your strength sapped by the void inane (Crowley).

  I am just over 10 days C.B. [confined to barracks] with flu. Written a few lyrics—only meditated K.F. [The King’s Friend: a play Crowley was working on]. The title is so good—that’s three parts of the job. Only five acts to write—and I can’t do one. Will try again now I’m better.

  Yours fraternally,

  Perdurabo23

  Another previously unpublished letter to Kelly from Boleskine House either around New Year or late March 1900—shortly before the critical rupture in the Golden Dawn—projects a happy spirit of accommodation very much against the covert agent provocateur hypothesis.

  Care Frater,

  . . . This grand here. I can work like anything. V.N’s address†17 is Iron Works, Basingstoke—MMH is Mark Masons’ Hall Great Queen Street. I wrote to you from Edinburgh re various people did I not? . . . We might get over to Paris for a few days or weeks. I have to go there, anyway, and would like you to meet the Chief, the Gregorach [Clan MacGregor], the Imperator of Isis-Urania. His wife whose painting makes you so wild.*18 Adieu! The Gods watch over you! Until we meet,

 
; Yours fraternally,

  P[erdurabo]24

  It is significant that in May 1900, within a month of the main rupture, we find Crowley still committed to Isis-Urania temple procedures in London even after rebellious members had quit on account of the rift with Mathers. Had it been Crowley’s aim to provoke revolt, he might have been expected to detach himself from the inconvenience of initiating fresh adepts. Instead, he calls on Kelly to do his bit and expresses relief to find Mathers’s—and his—opponents absent. He has no contention with Mathers and seems simply glad to see the back of persons who, in his view, were ill-equipped for the magical enterprise in the first place.

  MacGregor of Boleskine, Hotel Great Central, London

  Care Frater,

  There will be a meeting of GD [Golden Dawn] one day next week to initiate Madame Lucile Hill.†19

  You [Frater E.S.D. = Gerald Kelly] will be requested to act as an officer, as the number of members in Isis-Urania No 3 has been reduced. In fact, the whole crew of Hunters*20 and Blackdens†21 and Roshers‡22 and scabs and skunks and bitches &c &c has been swept into oblivion.

  Jones [George Cecil] and self are in fact the only ones left bar a Doctor§23 and a Mrs. Simpson¶24 and her very charming daughter.\25 With probably one or two in the outer [or First Order]. But this will be a private meeting. Only officers will attend.

  Fig. 1.3. Lucile Hill (left), Attalie Claire Smith (right) from The Theatre, February 1891

  . . . Anyhow, let me have a line to say that you may be depended on to come—there will be a trouble to get seven officers.

  Ever thy P.

  P.S. Can you put me up a couple of nights [at Camberwell rectory] if I come down? You have my King’s Friend [play manuscript]. AC26

  On the inside folded sheet of the above letter, Crowley left careful instructions for Kelly as to how to make the “Lamen of Dadouchos,” appropriate to Kelly’s grade of Zelator. What looks to us today like a Nazi symbol was understood by the Order in 1900 as the Hermetic Cross, known also as Fylfot, hammer of Thor, and swastika (a Sanskrit health symbol), formed of seventeen squares, representing the sun, the four traditional elements, and twelve zodiacal signs. Crowley made two helpful drawings, “badly drawn here,” and showed pictorially how to attach a tag so that the lamen could be hung around the neck: “Let it be drawn accurately on a circular lamen with a tag to hang so. I have ordered the collar myself. The [symbol] is in white on a black ground. It is on both sides of your lamen alike.”

  Even in the years immediately after Mathers’s rift with most of the London Order, Crowley recommended that Gerald Kelly—who removed himself to Paris on graduating from Trinity Hall, Cambridge—keep in touch with Mr. and Mrs. Mathers. On December 13, 1901, Crowley, in Calcutta, asked Kelly, “Seen GD in newspapers? You should call on MacGregor [Mathers] of Paris.”27 Again, returning to Europe from India, Crowley wrote to Kelly from Cairo on October 22, 1902.

  Dear Gerald

  , . . . I come via Marseille to Paris. I have business also with the Chiefs of the Order [Mathers and his wife] of which I have recently heard so much and seen so little. But I do not wish my presence in Paris known till the Hour of Triumph, or some hour like that: so I will accept your kindness in the same spirit in which I have always received your insults and drive straight off to Montparnasse [where Kelly rented a studio at 8 bis Rue Campagne 1ère]. I know the Boulevard Montparnasse, not your street though. I am not likely to go to England until certain arrangements are made—tell you what later. . . . Get and cram up Michelet “Histoire des Templiers.”*26

  Ever,

  Aleister Crowley

  Can’t say when, as I am waiting for cash to see Pyramids &c. while I am here dictating the story of my journey to a stenographer. Result abject as literature. I will wire from Marseille. A.C.28

  Three days later, Crowley wrote to Kelly from Cairo’s famous Shepheard’s Hotel. “I most probably leave Port Said November 3 to Paris via Marseille. . . . I shall perhaps write SRMD [Mathers’s motto as “MacGregor”] and Vestigia [Moina Mathers’s GD motto, Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum]. I suppose you see them occasionally.”29 It is, of course, possible that Crowley felt it important to maintain links with the Order of which he was still part, while also keeping a watch on Mathers’s political activities, but if watching Mathers was an intelligence objective, why spend from June 1900 to November 1902 out of Europe altogether? Well, by 1902 a Carlist rising in Spain was out of the question, and if there is anything to Spence’s agent provocateur hypothesis, frustrating Legitimist plots in 1899 and 1900 would have sufficiently satisfied government. However, Spence’s argument must still contend with Crowley’s straightforward declaration that he supported the Legitimist cause, until, that is, he saw it as a Catholic-inspired subterfuge. Then the question would be, precisely when did he realize that? Crowley’s personal priorities were spiritual and occult, combined, as ever, with art and exploration for sport and enlightenment.

  There is another aspect of Crowley’s general approach to situations that casts doubt on Spence’s idea. It is in fact illustrated in a letter sent to Kelly—now Crowley’s brother-in-law—from the Hôtel d’Iéna, a little to the south of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, where Crowley stayed in late autumn 1904. Exasperated by psychological games and quarrels played out by the women in Kelly’s family, Kelly’s mother and sister particularly, Crowley vented his annoyance forcefully.

  Womb artists. Ann lied, you remember. . . . Their idea is to arouse sympathy; they suppress or subtly alter to suit; more rarely they fabricate—“more rarely” because they lack imagination in common with other high mental faculties; being fools, they usually fail even to attract the sympathy.

  R [Rose, Crowley’s wife and Kelly’s sister] has written me any number of exquisite letters to stir me up against F.F.K. [Rev. Frederic Festus Kelly, Rose’s father], B.K. [Rose’s mother] and yourself. This time I had the wit to see through it. I know they bully her—and so do you, don’t deny it!—but there is no reason for embroiling an already strained situation. . . . You do bicker dreadfully between yourselves; and I think the painter Gerald Kelly [whom Crowley is addressing] like the poet A.C. had best follow Christ’s advice about leaving father, mother &c. all the prohibited degrees in fact—and follow Art.

  The above is really my doctrine of Non-Interference—call it the Primrose doctrine, if you will. But I am sure you will subscribe to it.

  Yours more than ever,

  Aleister Crowley

  P.S. as soon as I can settle in a flat.30

  While reference to the Primrose doctrine may alert intelligence aficionados to Crowley’s link through his aunt with the Primrose League, it must surely refer in this context to the expression “the primrose path”; that is, to lead, or better, to let someone down a path of their own choosing that despite initial attractiveness invites ruin. This was Crowley’s way to deal with most conflicts, and the inspiration clearly came from Christ’s spiritual guidance, probably inculcated by Crowley’s father, the Christian preacher, adorned with Blake’s wisdom that “if a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise” plus a touch of friend Allan Bennett’s Buddhist nonreactionary, dispassionate-compassionate approach to the world. Don’t interfere with a fool; let them learn. There is no cheating in spiritual matters; no short cuts. After London members split with the autocratic Mathers, the Order degenerated into fragments, its magic, its larger influence depleted. Crowley would take the sword, melt it down, and, by the end of 1908, forge a new magical weapon that has survived to this day, through perpetually strained circumstances. In the end, when Crowley picked the “winning side” in the conflict, it turned out, as he would see it, to be his; that is to say, the gods’ side.

  To Crowley’s observation, Mathers too in due course found himself on the primrose path; what had once appeared a character of authority became bloated into self-defeating egoism and delusion. Crowley felt an estrangement, compounded by trusted friend Allan Bennett’s own doubts about Mathers’s fitness t
o lead. Convinced by 1904 that Mathers had fallen from grace as regards the supposed Lords of Initiation—Mathers released a magical attack on Crowley in July of that year—Crowley would have no qualms in his novel Moonchild, written in America in 1917, about presenting the fictional version of his onetime initiator as a German spy and tool of the Black Brotherhood. The allegation that Mathers was directly involved in “Jacobite conspiracies to overthrow the throne of England” appeared in a work Crowley published in 1911, a year after Mathers had unsuccessfully attempted by law to prevent publication of Golden Dawn rituals in Crowley’s journal, The Equinox.31

  If, despite existing evidence, Spence’s hypothesis was proved to resemble hidden facts inside the case, then Crowley’s battle with the Golden Dawn would stand as having been profoundly misread for more than a century. Unfortunately, chief witness against Spence’s reconstruction of events is probably Crowley himself.

  In a newspaper article published in 1935, Crowley appeared fairly direct—with a caveat—about his former activities. “I became a secret Jacobite agent, and fought to restore Don Carlos on the Throne of Spain. . . . What ridiculous nonsense! No: I’m nearing sixty, and it wasn’t nonsense at all.”32 He still saw something in the cause, or at least his part in it, and he does not say, nor does he imply, that he became a “secret Jacobite agent” on behalf of the government, or any other body.

  In the same article Crowley made light of the personal crisis that in his Confessions he asserted had led to his dropping the planned diplomatic career to pursue lasting reality in spiritual action. “It happened at the beginning of my third year at Cambridge. A trivial illness, but it led to the extraction of a tooth. They had economized on the nitrous oxide; and I came out of it into a universe which was nothing at all but Absolute Pain. I think the experience gave the last shock to my conventional ideas of Reality. All endeavor is in vain, on this plane. I must find a permanent material on which to found my work. I began to look for an ‘invisible world.’ Here scientific training helps. Science is wholly against materialism, as Huxley showed so finally.”