Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

Fig. 7.5. Aleister Crowley; believed to have been taken in New York, 1906, to promote a Himalayan expedition (Ordo Templi Orientis)

  Crowley’s recollections of his relatively short stay in New York in 1906 suffer from a curious inaccuracy or confusion of memory, spiced with creative writing. It is a rare occurrence in the Confessions to be confronted with a plain fabrication, but that is what we seem to have.

  After the first days I could not even find a listener. The town had gone completely mad; first over Upton Sinclair’s [novel] The Jungle which had made canned food a drug on the market, though there was practically nothing else to eat; and secondly by the shooting of Stanford White, which let loose all the suppressed sexual hysteria of the whole population.

  They would talk of nothing else. Everyone screamed in public and in private about satyrs and angel children, and vampires, and the unwritten law, and men higher up, and stamping out impurity. For the first time in my life I came into contact with mob madness. Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales. They consequently seize upon every incident of this kind to let off steam. Knowing nothing and fearing everything, they rant and rave and riot like so many maniacs. The subject does not matter. Any idea which gives them an excuse of getting excited will serve. They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion, or some equally avowable emotion. It may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic reformer like Emma Goldman or even a doctor whose views displease the Medical Trust.7

  While Crowley’s account of “mob psychology” and hysteria over dramatic news stories involving unusual individuals, especially where sex is concerned, is doubtless as true today as when he wrote it in the early 1920s, the setting is wild and probably self-serving.

  Celebrated American architect Stanford White was murdered by Harry K. Thaw at Madison Square Garden’s roof garden theater in revenge for White’s having seduced Thaw’s wife, Evelyn Nesbit, when she was sixteen (and White forty-seven). A serial seducer of teenage girls, Stanford moved on to entice many more girls into his wine-dine-and-strip seduction habit. Chorus girl and artist’s model, Nesbit provided entertainment at erotic sessions at Stanford White’s specially appointed multistory apartment-for-sex at 22 West 24th Street, where his obsession was acted out without fear of interference. The Hearst papers reveled in it, calling it repeatedly the “Trial of the Century.” The only problem as regards Crowley’s account is that the murder took place on June 25, by which time Crowley had been back in England for three weeks, grief stricken at news on his return to Liverpool on June 2 that his and Rose’s baby daughter, Lilith, had died weeks before in Rangoon from a fatal infection. Perhaps Crowley read English reports of the trial in the papers that he claimed to loathe. However, the manner of his description suggests a more intimate response to the scandal. The likelihood would then be that he had a contact or contacts in New York at the time who wrote to him about it and that he, years later, imagined the scenes he recorded as having witnessed himself. It would be helpful to know about any such contacts. Anyhow, it is a rare thing to catch Crowley out on such a matter of fact.

  The other cases Crowley mentions are interesting. Leo Frank was a Jewish director of a factory in Atlanta, Georgia, where in April 1915 young girl worker Mary Phagan had been found strangled. There were serious shortcomings in the trial evidence, resulting in the commutation of the death penalty to life imprisonment by Governor John Slaton. Enflamed by an anti-Semitic backlash against Jewish-owned companies employing child labor, Frank was kidnapped by armed men from prison and lynched in August 1915. Crowley anticipated judicial opinion today by calling Frank a “harmless Jew”; Frank received an official pardon in 1986.

  Eugene Victor Debs (1855–1926), union leader and kind-natured socialist, was a founder of the radical, industry-disrupting I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World). Most remarkably, considering Crowley’s claimed role in promoting American participation in the Great War, Debs was arrested in 1918 for a speech against U.S. participation, charged under the Sedition Act of that year, and sentenced to ten year’s imprisonment, commuted in 1921 by President Harding. Crowley’s reference to Emma Goldman (1869–1940) is especially fascinating, as her name will loom amid Crowley’s spying activities during the 1914 to 1918 Great War. His description of her as an “enthusiastic reformer,” while doubtless expressing his anti-inflammatory view, deliberately avoids the usual description of Russian-born émigré Goldman as “anarchist” and “socialist,” meaning Crowley had sympathy with these people and saw how their being labeled undercut their genuine character, values, and usefulness. As readers may recall, the man who shot President McKinley claimed that he had been inspired to do something revolutionary after hearing a speech by Emma Goldman.

  Crowley understood from bitter experience what being labeled publicly by ill-considered or malicious reaction does to an individual. Presumably, Crowley had sympathy with the values, if not the “cure,” advocated by socialist and anarchist philosophies. We need to grasp this to get a fix on what Crowley meant when he said that he was an “aristocratic anarchist.” It was Goldman who famously said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

  Crowley’s reference to Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, published in February 1906 by Doubleday, is also revealing. Passionate socialist, Sinclair (1878–1968) used his novel to describe shockingly exploitative conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry, a plaint that led to amelioration of conditions by law, more on account of public fear of unsanitary meat than understanding of wage slavery. This is the background to Crowley’s otherwise easily misunderstood joke about Sinclair’s novel having made “canned food a drug on the market,” while he bewails the lack of decent food available generally, on account of industrial standardization of product and aspiration. From 1918 to 1919, Crowley would become an habitué of the creative liberal and socialist circles of Greenwich Village, to which Sinclair was a regular visitor. With Crowley’s background in 1890s Symbolism and Decadence, he was bound to find Sinclair’s realist fixation a trifle obsessive and annoying: “laying it on a bit thick” as the English say when a sledgehammer is employed to crack a nut. Crowley saw that socialism based on materialism and the primacy of external, opaque “conditions” and ineluctable “historical forces” would itself become an oppressive phenomenon. He saw clearly though how religion had become discredited by revolutionaries as the “charity” of the bosses who gave with one hand then took twice as much with the other. In the end, sociology has as much propaganda value as conventional history. There’s precious little science in any of it. Can you weigh a tear, or assess greatness in grams?

  What Crowley did find of significant personal value, from the literary point of view, in New York in May 1906 was Fitzhugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater, first published by Harper and Bros. in the United States in 1857. The book had established a craze in America for places where cannabis extract could be taken and enjoyed for its own sake. New York–born Ludlow (1836–1870), a clergyman’s son, described the delirious escape from the bonds that kept the soul’s vision in check and how the drug admitted him into realms of extended thought, analysis, and sense-enhanced, dreamy states of consciousness. It was perfectly legal, and popular forms of cannabis extract created an enthusiastic market. Crowley felt sure this was something he could explore further to great effect, fully aware of the book’s clear warning that overindulgence led to debilitating psychological, though not physical, addiction, as well as nightmares, “psychoses,” and fundamental distortion of reality during the period of ingestion. Ludlow lamented how hasheesh easily came to dominate his life and diminish important life priorities by its seductive siren call of easy transport.

  On May 22, Crowley interrupted his record of i
nvocations of the “Bornless One” to record in his diary, “Reading The Hashish-Eater, a wonderful book. Sleeping, I got a mild hashish dream!” That Crowley was effectively getting what is today called a “contact high” is confirmed from his diary the next day. “A at first disturbed—with resolution better. Vision somewhat, but confused with hashish distortion. That book is clearly bewitched.”

  Crowley sailed from New York to England on the Campania on May 26. By the end of autumn, measured use of cannabis grains combined with ritual invocation enabled him finally to complete the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage; that is, to experience the “Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel,” “Samadhi,” with the “Self-glittering one” of his being’s Master. Such was the primary aim of Crowley’s “Magick” and the cornerstone of his doctrine from then on.

  EIGHT

  Art in America

  Jeanne Robert Foster and Aleister Crowley were closer to one another in the summer of 1911 than either of them knew. Jeanne was on a journalist’s mission to Europe at the behest of Albert Shaw, editor in chief of esteemed critical journal the American Review of Reviews. Crowley was getting over flak from April’s infamous Looking Glass trial. His friend George Cecil Jones had sued the Looking Glass, a low rag, for libel. Bizarrely, Jones lost his case; it being hinted at the trial that Crowley was homosexual and that Jones was his friend. Crowley would not defend himself in court, probably because he was bisexual and if the jury heard incontrovertible evidence attesting to the fact, he could have been arrested, his public life ruined. The jury was manipulated as to Crowley’s alleged immorality. As a result, Crowley lost some good friends, but not all.

  While Jeanne studied at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Crowley restored his health with Mater Coeli, his “Mother of Heaven”—that is, violinist, protohippy, beautiful person, and all-round sex goddess Leila Waddell—at nearby Fontainebleau, to which place Crowley would retire occasionally for health reasons. Officially divorced from Rose in the new year of 1910, Crowley informed his (then) friend JFC Fuller later that year that he and Leila were joyfully engaged; no marriage ensued. When autumn 1911 came, Crowley returned to England for the unenviable task of committing his divorced and alcoholically debilitated wife Rose to an asylum.

  By then, Jeanne had moved on to Ireland, thence to London, where she enjoyed an emotionally painful few days with the married man she was in love with, while invalided husband, Matlack Foster, resided with Jeanne’s family in Schenectady. In London again in August 1914, Jeanne confided to her diary recollections of her tryst with Albert Shaw in London’s Kew Gardens three years earlier when, with her “heart torn with pain,” her mind “bewildered” by guilt and excitement, she indulged the love of a married man. “Flesh is such a marvel, the body, the beautiful eyes, the delicate finger tips, the intricacies of nerve and muscle. Then what wonder, when there is the clear pure light of love, the immortal soul.”1 The spirituality of Jeanne’s emotional and physical life radiates from these passages.

  First introduced to fifty-two-year-old Albert Shaw while on a visit to New York from Boston in 1909—the year Jeanne heard and was impressed by Theosophical Society leader Annie Besant, also visiting New York—Jeanne fell for the man who was equally drawn to Jeanne’s intelligence and beauty. Shaw marveled at her active social conscience, penetrating curiosity, and, above all, deep understanding of the Adirondacks—a place of solace that he had considered private. Recognizing Jeanne’s qualities, Shaw surmised editorial work would suit her, whereupon, despite the fact that everyone else involved was male, Shaw employed Jeanne on Poetry and Eloquence from the Blue and the Gray, one in a series of volumes constituting The Photographic History of the Civil War, published by the Review of Reviews Co.

  Before April 1911’s trial of Jones versus the Looking Glass, Crowley came to the attention not only of the police but also of the press, in Britain and abroad, for his production of what he called The Rites of Eleusis, performed in London with Leila Waddell on violin, poet Victor Neuburg dancing, and other acolytes of Crowley’s magical order the AA in August, October, and November 1910. An admiring review flowed from friend Raymond Radclyffe’s pen into the Daily Sketch on August 24. “If there is any higher form of artistic expression than great verse and great music, I have yet to learn it.” The show was something of an Edwardian version of an early Pink Floyd concert, with lighting effects and a potion passed round. Its performance polarized opinion in much the same way as Pink Floyd did in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  Impressed by the reaction, Crowley moved the rites to Caxton Hall, Westminster. I have seen one of the original tickets, very well produced. It could have been from the “Monterey Pop” Festival of 1967. Tickets cost five guineas, an enormous sum, for the complete seven rites.

  Blackmailer De Wend Fenton’s scandal rag, the Looking Glass, ran a predictable smutty put-down of The Rites of Eleusis on November 12: the first serious attack on Crowley to appear in a public paper, even if it was lavatory paper. The headline read, An Amazing Sect. It promised “The Origin of their Rites and the Life History of Mr. Aleister Crowley.” De Wend Fenton’s modus operandi was to print a “taster” of scandal, calculate possible legal implications in proportion to sales, then offer a way out for the victim: a one-off payment to avoid further “revelations.” Crowley told Fenton what he could do with his threat, and the Looking Glass went to work making a calculated attack on Crowley’s friends, implying that they were deserving of the trials of Oscar Wilde.

  Jeanne was quite likely acquainted with the story, for its salacious telling was cabled stateside for readers of the Washington Post, which ran a long, sarcastic account on November 27, 1910, cobbled together from misquoted extracts from Crowley’s journal The Equinox combined with tidbits about the performances, headlined:

  TEACHING TITLED BEAUTIES TO RAISE EVIL SPIRITS

  Diversion of English Society Which Is Conjuring “Demons” and Practicing the “Black Art”—But Seems to Need a Lot More Practice

  London. Nov. 20.

  The titled beauties of England and for that matter beauties without titles and titles without beauty, have taken up most earnestly the pursuit of the higher “black art,” the conjuration of spirits evil and otherwise, the revival of ancient mysteries, such as those of Eleusis, for profanation of which beautiful Grecian Phryne was condemned to death and saved only by her advocate snatching aside her garments and dazzling her judges.

  Not perhaps since the days of Cagliostro and of the beginnings of the Spiritualistic era has such a fever for occultation and weird rites that flourish best at midnight seized upon aristocratic and literary London. Perhaps the cause is the dullness of the court of George and Mary, as contrasted to the always-something-doing reign of Edward. Perhaps it is only the natural progress from mind healing, Indian Swamis, Theosophy, and ghost hunting. At any rate, as the witty Countess of Warwick said the other day, “Everybody seems to have their hearts set on raising the devil!”

  The leader of the movement is Aleister Crowley, a distinguished English poet and literatear. He leads a society which, in 1888, revived the old order of the Rosicrucians, that medieval society of mystics, which even up to the end of the eighteenth century had for its members all the astrologers and alchemists, and most of the great scholars, chemists, and sages. If it had remained as it was two decades ago—a staid community of enthusiasts and dreamers—there would have been no occasion now to remark upon it, save as a curious reappearance of mysticism in modern time.

  But in the last five years the society has spread amazingly, and its adherents are in every country. Within the last year the soulful branch of the English aristocracy has embraced it, and chapters are soon to give demonstrations in the United States.

  Even Sir Oliver Lodge has not been above attending various séances in a scientific effort to discover if the old incantations could really raise anything. The beautiful and eccentric Lady Marjorie Manners, the daughter of the equally eccentric Duchess of Rutland,
is said to be among the foremost of the Rosicrucians.

  Meetings of the Rosicrucians for the purpose of conjuration and of invoking “forbidden knowledge” have been secret until last week. Then the Eleusinian rites were performed openly in a London hall. The original rites were celebrated in ancient Greece, in honor of Demeter or Ceres, the earth mother or goddess, and to Persephone of Proserpine, her daughter, who was captured by Pluto, god of the underworld.

  Purpose to Attain Religious Ecstasy

  The modern Rosicrucians admit frankly that their purpose is to attain religious ecstasy, and to get into communication with spirits, not disembodied common spirits which on earth were plain John Jones or William Smith, but spirits that were powerful when Lilith flirted with Adam and haven’t any place in a respectable Church of England heaven.

  Lady Marjorie isn’t certain that she has seen any spirits yet and betrays an impatience that may take her from the fold soon if her curiosity isn’t gratified. Raising the spirits is hard work according to the formulae prescribed by Poet Crowley, in his book, The Equinox, which, by the way, come down quite directly from the ancient sources. Sometimes it takes six months to raise even the semblance of one, and if the conjurator has fallen down anywhere during that time the spirit either doesn’t appear or else the applicant is afflicted in a manner that makes Job’s lot seem like a pleasant dream.

  For instance, the new Rosicrucians are very desirous of evoking the mighty spirit Taphthartharath, who seems to have knowledge of a lot of things they would like to learn from him. An elaborate “temple” has to be prepared for the conjuration. The ceremony takes a lot of people. If they can’t get Tapthartharath, he must be a very unreasonable and unaccommodating spirit.

  However, when the “Temple”—and it is very awe inspiring—is prepared, the Rosicrucians begin. The Magus of Art is usually a woman, and this is the part the titled beauties just simply love to take. She wears a white robe, yellow sash, red overmantic, indigo nemyss; upon her breast she wears a great tablet whereon is the magic seal of Mercury; and over this “the Lamen bearing the signature of Taph on its obverse and the Lamen of a Hierophant.” She wears a dagger in her sash and a red rose on her heart; and she carries in her left hand the Ankh of Thoth—that is the old crux ansata or cross of life of the Egyptians, and in her right the Ibis wand. This, in the language of ’Arry, is a neat but a bit gaudy outfit. The assistant does his best to compete. He wears a white robe with a girdle of snakeskin, a black headdress; he bears in his right hand a sword, in his left hand a magical candle, and a black chain about his neck. In commanding tones the chief Magus cries.