Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  Crowley launched the article with a bold statement: “The Adventure of the Great Work is the only one worth while; for all others are but interludes in the sinister farce of Life and Death, which limits all merely human endeavor. . . . Death makes life futile and fatuous.”33 One might of course feel free to interpret that phrase “invisible world” in a dual sense: that of spiritual causes and covert, unseen, or “invisible” agencies of government. Neither realm excludes the other. But it is interesting that he ascribes his career turning point to the realization of futility and, even perhaps, ultimate meaninglessness, the abyss of existential pain; Crowley may simply have become a world-transcending nihilist who, unwilling to kill himself over the pit of nothingness and nullification of values, chose rather to have enlightened fun with the show, or at least to undertake an extreme adventure the world, even a damned world, would never forget, and if it did: What of it? “I don’t give a damn for the whole human race—you’re nothing but a pack of cards.”34 Some kind of anarchism would thereon have represented a political and religious baseline. Smash the lot; have a revolution, and smash that too! It doesn’t mean a thing. Crowley unleashed was god, devil, and who knows whom: the ultimate Decadent? Do what thou wilt.

  In a series of articles published two years earlier, Crowley expressed the crisis and its dénouement differently again, though in a manner some-what lending support to our latter possibility, albeit with a more positive resolution.

  It was at Cambridge that I perceived the futility of worldly ambitions. I had wanted to be a poet and to attain to the greatest success in the Diplomatic Service, for which the late Lord Salisbury had intended me. Suddenly all the ordinary ambitions of life seemed empty and worthless. Time crumbles all; I must find durable material for building. I sought desperately for help, for light. I raided every library and bookshop in the University.

  One book told me of a secret community of saints in possession of every spiritual grace, of the keys of the treasure of Nature.*27 The members of this church lived their secret life of sanctity in the world, radiating light and love on all those who came within their scope. The sublimity of the idea enthralled me; it satisfied my craving for romance and poetry. I determined with my whole heart to make myself worthy to attract the notice of this mysterious brotherhood.

  Then one of the first principles of magic was revealed to me. It is sufficient to will with all one’s might that which one wills. You who read this—whatever you will you can do. It is only a question of commanding the means.35

  There then follows, in the same article, a curiously ambiguous telling of how Crowley came to meet chemist Julian Baker in Switzerland. “The first proof that I had of this miracle-working capacity which is latent in every man was this: even before I had issued the call for guidance there was a man at my side to answer it. But the first call: 1898. In a Bier-halle under the shadow of the Matterhorn I met an alchemist.” That was Baker, strictly speaking, a chemist. “Through his good offices I was initiated into the Order in November, 1898.” There can be little doubt of Crowley’s sincerity here. It makes sense without positing any ulterior motive, though it does not altogether disallow duplicity. We can be certain Crowley was determined to tackle the rocky road of magical adventure: his amazing life is illustration of that. The only slight alarm here may come from close attention to Crowley’s words “before I had issued a call for guidance there was a man at my side to answer it.” One might think the reference was to Baker. However, the next sentence begins, “But the first call: 1898.” Baker’s providential appearance came apparently in response to the first call. But there was already, apparently, a man at Crowley’s side to answer it before the call was made. Strange. It might be a pious reference to the foresight of the gods—providence—or not. If Baker was not the man intended, we must admit ignorance as to who was at Crowley’s side. His Holy Guardian Angel? Who now can tell?

  There is no getting around the fact that Crowley’s precise personal position as regards motives and beliefs around this period, and subsequently, involves both apparent contradiction and, honestly faced, not a little mystery, often of a tantalizing nature. This characteristic “hall of mirrors” phenomenon will be evident throughout Crowley’s life, seldom more dramatically than during his uninterrupted five-year sojourn in the United States from November 1914 until November 1919. As Crowley’s sometime friend C. R. Cammell exclaimed in his 1951 account of Crowley, “Explain me the riddle of this man!”36

  TWO

  The Song of the Sea

  The persons in whom this power [Poetry] resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their own soul.

  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, A DEFENCE OF POETRY

  . . . believe me “God’s poet.”

  ALEISTER CROWLEY, 1903*28

  The German Hamburg-American Line’s twin-screw SS Pennsylvania left Plymouth, England, on Tuesday, June 26, 1900. Commanded by Captain H. Spliedt, the four-mast, single-funneled steamship would bear Crowley across the Atlantic to New York in ten days. Behind him, the magician left the Golden Dawn in freefall with hostile London members in definitive breach with Mathers, even as Mathers expelled them for rebellion. W. B. Yeats and his anti-Mathers associates refused to recognize Mathers’s initiation of Crowley into the Inner Order, which had taken place in Paris on January 23 at Mathers’s Isis-Urania Temple in Paris. They had then thwarted Crowley and Golden Dawn colleague Elaine Simpson’s attempt, on Mathers’s behalf, to “repossess” the Order’s initiatic “Vault,” dedicated to Christian Rosenkreuz, in Blythe Road, Hammersmith: a scuffle over possession that led to Crowley’s taking a lawyer while Yeats’s colleague in revolt, Florence Farr Emery, took expensive legal counsel.

  Contemplating the implications of Mathers’s latest bombshell that the Order’s founding documents had been forged, Crowley assessed the odds and withdrew from legal action. He refocused his sights on the Americas: first New York and then Mexico.

  Something of the tumult broke into a work composed by Crowley on the high seas. Carmen Saeculare was completed on July 4, 1900, as cargo liner SS Pennsylvania approached the North American coast. Admitting a psychological interpretation, the poem may be seen as an emotional and spiritual retaliation to hostile treatment by brethren in London, a geyser for suppressed anger venting itself in apocalyptic loathing and extreme, even cosmic, reaction. But there is probably more to this important Crowleyan testament.

  Clearly impacted by the imminence of first physical contact with America, we may wonder if Crowley was not somehow mindful of his Quaker ancestry and how those more famous nonconformist Pilgrim Fathers viewed their first leaving Plymouth 280 years earlier. Perhaps the main difference was that while all parties resorted to apocalyptic imagery to express themselves, whereas the religious of old addressed their God as Jehovah, Crowley’s “Lord” in Carmen Saeculare is, as we shall see, his presiding god of the era, Horus, the red rising sun, avenger of his murdered father, and “ancestral voice prophesying war.”

  We cannot help noting that in the late Greco-Egyptian version of the Osiris myth, sun god Osiris is murdered by his brother, the evil Seth, whereupon Isis, Mother of life, gathers the scattered corpse, impregnates herself with Osiris’s redeemed seed, and gives birth to sun god Horus or (Greek) Harpokrates. Horus will avenge his father by killing evil Seth. Crowley believed his father had been “murdered” by Plymouth Brethren colleagues whose religious bigotry eschewed conventional surgery and elected to cure Edward Crowley’s mouth cancer by a speculative electrical method. Whatever drove the Brethren to their “crime,” Crowley made it his life’s work to destroy. He called the cause of their fatal error “Christianity.”

  Its title indicating a secular hymn (that is, “of the world”), or “hymn of the ages,” Carmen Saeculare was first published in 1901 by Kegan
Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd., at Crowley’s expense and with a title borrowed from Horace’s odes in the Sapphic meter. With a small number bound in buckram and printed on vellum for privileged recipients, its sixty-two pages consist of four sections: “Prologue: The Exile,” “Carmen Saeculare,” “In the Hour Before Revolt,” and “Epilogue: To the American People on the Anniversary of their Independence.” It is unclear from the poem whether Crowley looked forward to his first experience of the real, as opposed to ideal and poetic, America. It is, anyway, a song of self-imposed exile.

  Carmen Saeculare offers insight into the poet’s predominant personal preoccupations of the time. They might strike us as peculiar, even contradictory, though contradiction is hardly unknown in the minds of poets. As Walt Whitman famously ejaculated, “Do I contradict myself? Then I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes!” The poem’s contents certainly bear on the issue of Spence’s hypothesis regarding Legitimism and Crowley’s real loyalties, even though the debacle of Ashburnham’s Firefly adventure was now almost a year old.

  Crowley wrote in his Confessions more than two decades later, “Carmen Saeculare was actually the result of a more or less prophetic vision. Some of its forecasts have turned out wonderfully well, though the century is yet young; others await fulfilment—but I do not propose to linger on merely to obtain so morbid a satisfaction!”2

  There seems little doubt that Mathers and wife Moina were still esteemed by Crowley, for the 1901 publication was dedicated to Mathers’s wife as “Countess of Glenstrae”:

  I DEDICATE

  ON EARTH MY POEM

  TO THE

  COUNTESS OF GLENSTRAE:

  IN HEAVEN MY VISION

  TO THE

  HIGH PRIESTESS OF OUR LADY

  ISIS

  The reference to Moina as High Priestess of Isis relates to a project she and her husband had launched in Paris as a means of broadening the Golden Dawn’s appeal. They undertook a semipublic revival of the cult of Egyptian goddess Isis, with the highly artistic and intuitive Moina as high priestess Anari and Mathers as high priest Rameses of the Isiac rite. What began in a suburban street in Passy proved so popular it moved, with the help of journalist, writer, and occultist Jules Bois (1868–1943), to a little theater on the Butte of Montmartre, the Théâtre de la Bodinière.

  Why had they done it? asked Frederic Lees when interviewing “Count and Countess MacGregor of Glenstrae” for the Humanitarian (February 1900). The count replied that it wasn’t what people thought: more decadence! No! On the contrary, it was to combat the decadence of the time.3 Crowley clearly shared something of their enthusiasm, for Isis is present in Carmen Saeculare as inspirational principle of liberty’s revelation.

  Republished in Crowley’s Collected Works in 1905, with notes by Crowley’s friend, surgeon, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge graduate Ivor Back (1879–1951), the poem’s dedication to Moina had disappeared. This was a predictable omission after Mathers’s autumn 1904 magical attack on Crowley, when Mathers retaliated for Crowley’s defection from the Golden Dawn, a defection grounded in Crowley’s belief that Mathers had forfeited the “Secret Chiefs” of the Order’s confidence and authority, an authority Crowley believed had been transmitted to him with the reception of The Book of the Law in Cairo the previous April.

  Another detail readers of the Collected Works version would miss was the outline drawing of a shamrock, sole adornment to the work’s original green cover. This announcement of a dominant theme of the poems’ prophecies is highly pertinent to Crowley’s adoption of the “cover” (if that is what it was) of Irish revolutionary advocate in America during World War I.

  The symbol of Ireland embodies the prophesied resurgence of the Celtic race, a theme recognized by a 1901 review of Carmen Saeculare in the English newspaper the Daily News. “The poet foresees the dawn of an era of love, justice, and peace, when the Celtic race shall be restored to their own. There are many strong, nervous lines, and some exalted thoughts.”*29

  By the time Ivor Back supervised the Collected Works in 1905, Crowley’s stance on the “Celtic movement” advocated by Mathers, Duncombe-Jewell, and Jenner had changed, for the first thing we see there is an asterisk next to the title, leading us to a footnote stating, “Crowley, an Irishman, was [my italics] passionately attached to the Celtic movement, and only abandoned it when he found that it was a mere mask for the hideous features of Roman Catholicism.”4 We may believe Crowley had been passionate about the Celtic movement, but Crowley was not, as stated, an Irishman, though his paternal forebears derived from that country before the eighteenth century. The Crowleys of Alton, Hampshire, whence Crowley’s paternal family settled, were thoroughly English, though their religion had long been nonconformist Quaker. Crowley’s father, Edward, had broken ranks, first as an Anglican, then by joining the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren, founded in Dublin in the early 1830s by John Nelson Darby (1800–1882).

  Celtic identity nonetheless continued to resonate for Crowley in the romantic sense. He would tell his son Randall Gair in the 1940s that the surname came from Breton aristocracy (“de Querouaille”). Celtic movement romantics considered the French northern province of Brittany an ancient Celtic kingdom, as Breton separatists do today. The Irish part of the Crowley name, Crowley would assert, was of Irish bardic provenance with more than a hint of mystical mastery, though Crowley would also joke about basing any genuine interest in Irish republicanism on this kind of supposition. Systems of government hardly matter; it is the spirit inhabiting them that counts above all. If the spirit can breathe, the system should evolve. Man as he is, is not the end of evolution. Such was Crowley’s maturing view.

  In 1900 the Saxon receives very poor press from Carmen Saeculare, and Crowley wants it understood that his England, his Britain, is an ancient bond of soul and soil, garlanded in green clover, loved by Celts and exploited by Saxon migrants after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries. There is, however, still something peculiar about Crowley’s proclaiming himself an Irishman, having abandoned the Celtic movement by 1905. This was not a momentary identification, as we shall see. Even an English provincial newspaper report on Crowley’s brave but disastrous attempt on the Himalayan mountain Kangchenjunga in 1905 refers to “Mr. A. E. Crowley, Engineer of Ireland.”5

  Crowley seems to have needed an Irish identification to secure his poetic vision of England as coming from outside in, and inside out. He saw himself as England’s prophet, much as William Blake had done, and he was familiar with W. B. Yeats’s mistaken belief that Blake’s family derived from an “O’Neil” of Dublin. Crowley simply could not imagine the blood red fire of inspired prophetic poetry emanating from an Anglo-Saxon, a race famously dismissed by Napoleon Bonaparte as “a nation of shopkeepers”; that is, materialistic, spiritually perfidious, provincial profiteers. An Anglo-Irish commander answered the jibe at Waterloo.

  Crowley also seems to have been affected by Samuel Mathers’s no less determined stance to be seen as of the once condemned, tragic Clan MacGregor. Mathers liked to be designated by the acronym SRMD from the Gaelic ’S rioghal mo dhream, translated as “my race is royal,” for MacGregors traced their origins to ancient Celtic kings of Ireland. While it seems Crowley did through experience grow out of asserting these romanticisms, something of them undoubtedly stuck: the idea of spiritual kingship—for example, of becoming an “initiated king”—remained important, as did a link to an ancient race of authentic spiritual and magical attainment. Crowley was familiar with the legends that made Blake believe the ancient biblical patriarchs were Druids connected to ancient Britain, and thus to the House of Stuart; that the Stone of Scone had been the stone against which Jacob slept when he dreamed of the angelic ladder to heaven (Genesis 28:10–17).

  In 1901, Crowley gave his name on Carmen Saeculare’s cover as “St E. A. of M. and S.” While “St E. A.” presumably refers to “St Edward Aleister,” of “M. and S.” (that is, the “Magpie & Stump” debating societ
y in Cambridge), one cannot help noticing the capitals practically give us the Gaelic name Seamus, equivalent to Jacob (Hebrew: “one who grabs at the heel”) and James—one thinks of King James IV of Scotland, who practiced alchemy and whom Mathers considered his former incarnation, as well, of course, of the hapless legitimate James of the first Jacobite rebellion (1715). The detail about Jacob/Seamus as “one who grabs at the heel” may just mean that Crowley is also pulling our leg with regard to some aspect of Carmen Saeculare. Crowley, anyway, could see a funny side to the poetic tract.

  It should be recognized that Crowley, when acting according to his own preferences, seldom exhibited much more than general interest in contemporary Irish politics, and his view of Ireland’s political state over the years was in some ways typical of many Englishmen; namely, that the country had plainly been treated very badly as a result of misguided, sometimes callous and shallow, policies, while the political results of history’s brew constituted an awful mess that resisted compromise and seemed insoluble to everyone’s contentment. While Crowley’s prophetic outburst of 1900 accepts spirited revolt as the outcome, he himself never visited Ireland once in his life, nor expressed any wish to, though, it may be allowed, the same may be supposed of many persons of Irish descent around the world who would nonetheless warm to the idea of Saint Patrick’s Day and consider themselves, even when subjects of other countries, as being Irish still. Crowley’s “Irishness” was essentially related to a spiritual ideal, a poetic, romantic, even antiquarian Celtic identity—but it would have its uses. Put another way, Crowley’s repeatedly claimed Irish identity had more to do with the way he felt about English attitudes and government than about the real Ireland. At the very least, it means that he did not wish to be identified as a typical Englishman, but that may be said of many great and untypical Englishmen, for England seldom fully recognizes her great children, certainly in their lifetimes. In due course we may feel driven to ask whether the poem really is a sincere effusion of the poet’s soul and not, say, a psychological preparation for a role. It does give us a key into Crowley’s mind as the SS Pennsylvania passed Nantucket Island and approached New York in the cool Atlantic breezes beneath the summer sun.