Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  A fairly surprising entry occurs in Crowley’s diary for March 25, 1901. This was during a period following Eckenstein’s informing him that he lacked essential powers of concentration, a deficit that was messing up his magic, whereafter a chastened Crowley began a long series of grueling concentration exercises pursued daily for many months at convenient and inconvenient times, in which he had to hold an image or even sound or smell in his mind for as long as possible, while noting any break of attention. The entry reads: “Began recapitulatory course. I took a holiday.”10 First question: A holiday from what? There is nothing in the diary to suggest that he had been working in the ordinary sense. And if one should think, Ah! Magical workings—that is to say, the concentration exercises, which were, certainly, hard work—then one must contend with the fact that they were resumed on March 27, though one might argue two days’ respite was holiday enough. The “recapitulatory program” might imply reflection on what had been gained. However, the day after the “holiday” reference, Crowley noted leaving Mexico City, where Eckenstein had been feeling ill, for Vera Cruz, whence he didn’t return until Sunday, March 31, then, to hear the “alarming news” that “EBC”—that is, Crowley’s somewhat dreaded mother, Emily Bertha Crowley—was “coming out here!”

  Vera Cruz was of course Mexico’s main port, and Pearson’s company was rebuilding it. By 1905 it would be equipped with Pearson’s oil terminals and associated support structures. Was the Vera Cruz trip a holiday—from caring for a sick Eckenstein, if not the exercises, which continued at odd times in Vera Cruz—or was it some kind of work? We do not know; it would be unwise to build much on it.

  Returning to Mexico City, Crowley discussed with Oscar Eckenstein news of his mother’s apparently imminent, doubtless unnerving, arrival at their billet of personal liberty. Trying to concentrate on other matters, they also discussed quickly climbing Citlaltapetl, Nevado de Toluca, and Popocatapetl. Eckenstein agreed that Crowley could use his photographs of the magnificent scapes for a book Crowley planned on their climbs (this never transpired, though Eckenstein used some of them in an article about mountaineering in Mexico). They also made an arrangement for Crowley to wire Eckenstein by October 31 to confirm or abandon a plan for Eckenstein to join him on an Indian climbing expedition—which transpired as their famous assault on K2 in 1902.

  The third point of their agreement is interesting and unexpected. Having concurred that, with ten climbs accomplished, Eckenstein return to England about April 30, Crowley would “go to Japan, Hong Kong, and Ceylon: or to Texas, dependent on the affairs of H.M. of S—”11 (my italics). Well, we know that Crowley would go to Japan and Ceylon; but why was the alternative Texas?—and who was H.M. of S—? Is this an unsolved mystery, or might it be that this has nothing whatever to do with Texas oil drilling and much to do with “Her Majesty of Streatham” (or even “Her Majesty of Shit”)—that is, Crowley’s problematic mother, the bigoted Christian, as he considered her—coming to see her relatives! Emily Bertha Crowley’s grandfather’s son from his first marriage, William Bishop (b. 1822), had migrated to America and married Mary Martin of Illinois. William was buried in Livingston County, Kentucky in 1899; his wife, Mary, likewise after she died on March 27, 1900. While EBC had clearly not been summoned to a Kentucky funeral in spring 1901, Crowley’s comments about Queen Victoria indicate that he identified his mother with H.M. the late Queen-Empress as another hausfrau-repressed-repressor. Emily Bertha Crowley did not in fact visit her American relatives until August 1904, when the ship’s manifest gave her address as Eastbourne, not Streatham. She visited William’s son, Lawrence Bishop, and his wife, Birdie, in Kentucky. While ignorance is both a fruitful, and fruitless, ground for speculation, it is William Breeze’s surmise that “H.M. of S—” rather refers to “His Majesty of Spain,” and that possibility puts us back in the territory of Crowley’s Legitimist politics, because he held Don Carlos de Bourbon to be Spain’s rightful monarch.

  THE TWO REPUBLICS

  And so, just as astute readers may be thinking that absence of hard evidence indicates there is little to take seriously about the Crowley-on-a-mission theory as regards the Mexican period, there comes a remarkable discovery. I am grateful to William Breeze for sending me something he unearthed in a copy of English-language Mexican newspaper the Two Republics, one of two papers serving Mexico City’s American colony. The date (note): September 22, 1900. Below four harrowing columns devoted to the infamous Texas hurricane that devastated Galveston, killing around eight thousand people, the Boxer massacres of Americans in China, Philadelphia’s big coal strike, and to the left of a story about “Four Negroes Lynched” by a mob for alleged burglary at Pontchatoula, Louisiana, we find the following most curious headline and story.

  SAYS ENGLAND IS ON THE VERGE

  Isidor Achille O’Rourke, a prominent European politician, is in the city and will remain for some months, as he says, for the purpose of spending some time in mountain climbing. Mr. O’Rourke says he has been connected with a number of important political movements of Europe during the past few years and that he came to Mexico for the purpose of seeking a quiet rest from the turmoil of active life.

  “England is on the verge of a reign of terror,” said Mr. O’Rourke last evening. “People have been denied the right of free speech in England since the opening of the Boer War. The manipulations of the British powers during the course of the war have been characterized by the most disgraceful actions. As an example, at the time of the alleged capture of Spion Kop by Buller, the report which was said to have been received at the British war office in London was nothing more than the trumped up trick of the stock exchange to bloat the national bonds. At the time the message was received in London announcing the capture of Spion Kop, which was said to be the key to the situation of the war, another message was received containing the news of the recapture by the Boers, but was withheld by the war office for several days, in order that the purpose of the stock exchange might be accomplished.

  “The newspapers were aware of the fact, and one well known editor told me that it would be as much as his life was worth to allow the fact to be published in his newspaper. The impression given out that the Boer War is settled is a farce, and simply means that parliament will be dissolved and England will suffer another administration of the conservatives.”

  Mr. O’Rourke is staying at the Hotel Iturbide.

  And we should very much like to meet him! But who really would be attracted by such a tirade? First, note the name: Isidor Achille O’Rourke. The initial capitals make an acronym—I.A.O.—which is the Gnostic name for God. God is clearly on Ireland’s side and like much, but not all, of Irish opinion, is critical of British conduct over the Boer War and alert to war-time censorship. And should there be any doubt that Chevalier O’Rourke is Aleister Crowley, we need only look to contemporary issues of Mexico City’s more dominant English-language newspaper, the Mexican Herald, which, beginning October 14 and for the remainder of Crowley’s stay, reported the mountaineering exploits of “everybody’s friend,”*45 Chevalier O’Rourke, and, after December, his “aide” Mr O. Eckenstein.

  Another surprise: Chevalier O’Rourke is staying at the Hotel Iturbide, the city’s finest, a palatial residence still standing in its glory at 17 Madero Street in the city center, named after president and, briefly, emperor of Mexico, Agustín de Iturbide (1783–1824). Built 1779 to 1785 in grand style, it had been a hotel since 1855. Crowley’s Confessions strongly suggested a brief residency before moving to lodgings near Alameda Park, but here we find him at the Iturbide more than three months after his arrival, apparently holding court for a journalist. Was he by chance leading a double life? And had the Chevalier got over his disdain for newspapers, or was that condescension something Crowley projected back from the 1920s, after a decade of yellow journalism giving him trouble?

  What is even more intriguing is why Mexico City citizens had had to wait until September 22, 1900, for the public manifestation of the word of “
prominent European politician” Chevalier Isidor Achille O’Rourke. Was he not a “chevalier” (knight) when he arrived in mid July?

  Well, it transpires that he was! The evidence is printed on page 2 of Thursday July 12, 1900’s issue of the Mexican Herald. There, William Breeze’s penetrating eye located a tiny detail under a notice for “Today’s Arrivals—Central Passengers”*46 indicating that “the following persons passed Jimulco yesterday, and will arrive in Mexico this morning.” Along with two named passengers from El Paso and Cleveland, respectively, the capital could also expect one “Isidoro Achille, Orouke, Paris.”†47

  Let us look again at Crowley’s alias. We have already observed how the initials constitute the Gnostic name for God: “I.A.O.” The divine acronym is confirmed plainly, and obscurely, in the opening lines to Crowley’s Rosicrucian pastiche Ambrosii Magi Hortus Rosarum (“The Rose Garden of Magian Nectar,” 1902).

  It is fitting that I, Ambrose, called I.A.O., should set down the life of our great Father (who now is not, yet whose name may never be spoken among men), in order that the Brethren may know what journeys he undertook in pursuit of that Knowledge whose attainment is their constant study.

  Ambrose comes from the Latin for “divine” or “immortal,” so that “ambrosia” is food pertaining to the immortals, or the gods, traditionally associated with “nectar.” For Crowley, the “nectar of the gods” was the ambrosial honey of divine sex. Isidore means “Gift of Isis,” mother of Horus, which chimes in with Crowley’s respect for high priest and priestess Mathers’s Parisian cult of Isis, incorporated into the dedication to his recent prophecy of exile, Carmen Saeculare, from which we drew Crowley’s bold statement: “I was born Fighter.” Achilles is Homer’s Iliad warrior par excellence, and we note that the only nonimmortal part of Achilles was his “heel” (by which water-goddess Thetis held him when she dipped baby Achilles into the protective waters of the River Styx), perhaps referred to in the near-acronym for “Seamus” on the cover of Carmen Saeculare (from the name “Jacob,” meaning “one who grabs at the heel,” with the possible allusion to one who “pulls legs”). With Paris on his mind, Crowley uses the French form, Achille. The Jacobites followed the last Stuart king of England, James, to Paris, where now Mathers (seeing himself as a reincarnation of James IV of Scotland) resided. Achilles may perhaps be derived from a combination of the Greek words “achos” and “laos,” suggesting the grief of a people, which may bring us again to the Celts, as delineated in Crowley’s song of exile, his “Song of the Sea,” Carmen Saeculare. We may also note that the arrow that hit Achilles’s vulnerable heel was shot from the bow of Paris!

  O’Rourke is appropriately a noble Irish surname of antiquity, a name for brave fighters, exiles and Jacobites, such as Count Owen O’Rourke, who served Empress Maria Teresa of Austria (ca. 1760–1780), descendant of “Tigernan the Great” O’Rourke, who compounded with Queen Elizabeth I and was permitted to rule his princedom of Breffny and Convacny independently of English government until Cromwell’s time.

  As regards the title “Chevalier,” we can hardly fail to notice its consonance with that of hero of Jacobite Freemasonry, Chevalier Ramsay (Andrew Michael Ramsay 1686–1743), whose famous “Oration” (1737), delivered in Paris, asserted famously that Masonry derived from the knightly orders of the Middle Ages, rather than the reverse, as asserted by the pro-Hanoverian Grand Lodge of England. Introduced to an enlightened Catholic mysticism by François Fénelon and Madame Guyon, Ramsay converted to the faith and entered the household of exiled Stuarts in Rome. In 1723 he was knighted into the Catholic Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem. He was universalist in spiritual and political outlook and, being Scottish by birth, fitted Crowley’s self-mythos rather well. In his time, Paris was the epicenter of Jacobite Masonry, actively promoting the return of the Catholic Stuart dynasty to Great Britain.

  Clearly, Crowley created his alias for its meaning rather than to disappear!—though it should be noted that its assumption rendered Crowley-as-Crowley quite invisible (perhaps the meaning of his claim to have walked in Mexico City undetected in a robe of red and crown of gold) as he combined his assumed Scottish “lairdship” with his knighthood granted in the service of Don Carlos de Bourbon within a composite new identity, with which he had fun.

  Anyone familiar with the situation surrounding Crowley’s arrival in New York on October 30, 1914, some three months after Britain’s entering World War I, will note a peculiar resonance between the two arrivals. Crowley will arrive in America in 1914, according to the Lusitania passenger manifest, as “Irish” from England. After an initial uneasy period, he allowed himself to be identified as one in favor of revolution for a free Ireland against British rule and as a sympathizer with Germany’s cause (Germany was offering Ireland independence in exchange for rebellion against England), and by the end of summer 1915 he was penning outrageous, apparently pro-German propaganda, which close research now recognizes as being what Crowley afterward claimed it was: a disinformation campaign to discredit and undermine the New York–based German propaganda aim of keeping the United States neutral in the war. Crowley’s campaign intended to outrage reasonable American opinion and so encourage the U.S. government to recognize overwhelming public support for joining the Allies against Kaiser Bill’s Germany. We have a recent analogy to how public outrage works as propaganda when we consider how TV images of alleged Syrian government atrocities against civilians in April 2017 encouraged support for military retaliation even among people with declared wishes to avoid confrontation with principal combatants.

  Is it possible that Crowley’s basic operational template for conduct in America after 1914 was formed out of his experience in Mexico City in 1900? What could be the purpose of a newspaper article as provocative and apparently mendacious as that in the Two Republics? The Battle of Spion Kop in January, for example, had involved dreadful carnage, mostly on the British side; the Boers released a hurtful, controversial propaganda photograph of young British corpses piled up and horribly mutilated in a shallow trench; Churchill had witnessed the scene and described a notorious, merciless slaughter. A thorny question: Was “O’Rourke” aiming, through the publicity interview, at attracting persons hostile to, or critical of, Britain or vice versa—or was he enjoying an elaborate ruse for other purposes, possibly even a loose-tongued anarchic outburst or extreme, somewhat unfunny leg pull? If so, such, he knew, would hardly have passed unnoticed with acquaintances—or more?—at the British consulate. Was he simply succumbing to the role of insane joker?

  It is surely significant that there is no mention whatsoever of Chevalier O’Rourke in Crowley’s Confessions, or in any other document attributed to him, though he would use Irish pseudonyms in his work for German-owned magazines in America during World War I, and he found it amusing to tell his readers about his time as “Russian” Count Svareff in 1899. It might be borne in mind that Germany was at this time sup-porting the Boers with arms and intelligence against the British and that Germany was also trying to muscle in on British and American trade and influence in Mexico and with the president personally. One accusation made by German propagandists in World War I was that the war was an excuse for Britain to keep German business out of Mexico by trying to bottle up the German fleet.

  Perhaps we find a clue in Crowley’s adoption of a knighthood (chevalier) and the reference to “a number of important political movements” in Europe. Crowley’s Confessions inform us that, for services to the Carlist cause, Crowley received a knighthood from “one of Don Carlos’s lieutenants.” This statement carries a footnote asterisk: “There is a great deal more to this story; but I may not tell it—yet.” The word may suggests not being allowed to tell it; we can speculate the shadow of the British Official Secrets Acts (1889, 1911), or perhaps a vow of silence. It is clear from Crowley’s writing on the subject that he took what he considered authentic knighthood very seriously; he spent a night in a forest keeping vigil with his arms, and he was familiar with Legitimist theory r
egarding spurs being conferrable only by Legitimate sovereigns, and not by women.12 The account of the knighthood is separate from the training at Ashburnham’s estate, and he gives no indication of where it took place. And “Isidor,” by the way—the “Chevalier’s” Christian name—happened to be one of pre-tender Don Carlos’s middle names.

  Carlism was certainly a European political movement, but what had it to do with Mexico?

  First, General Weyler, former controversial Spanish governor of Cuba, had dallied with Carlists in Spain, as we have seen, and Cuban-related politics were of great moment to hispanismo politics in Mexico. Second, we recall the unknown couple introduced by Legitimist conspirator Mathers to Crowley in Paris in April 1900, lately returned from Mexico, to whose presence the Confessions account attributes the idea of Crowley’s going to Mexico at all. We note that Mathers had given Crowley authority to “initiate” persons in Mexico in partibus. This Latin phrase is short for the Catholic episcopal phrase in partibus infidelium, meaning “in the lands of unbelievers.” The Catholic origin is significant, and the reference in Mexico would hardly seem to apply to Roman Catholics as Mexico was very much a land of believers, so it might best apply in the circumstances either to Protestants or persons outside of the Legitimist or Celtic Church cause, for as Crowley writes in the Confessions, “The theory of the Celtic Church was that Romanism was a late heresy, or at least a schism.” This opens the field if the “unbeliever” in the triumph of the Celtic cause was possibly an uncorrected Catholic!