If Crowninshield found Crowley impressive, the sensibility was mutual. Crowley was charmed by the man who pulled the business up from “nothing” to a quarter of a million readers and reminded him a little of Austin Harrison, though the latter compared unfavorably, for Crowninshield was “extremely intelligent and understood his business thoroughly”: a typical Crowleyan swipe. If a piece did not suit, Crowninshield would talk it over and make the best of it. “I thus found out how to suit his taste without injuring my self-respect. Most editors drive away their best contributors by treating them like street beggars and leave them bewildered at the rejection.” Perhaps not most, but too many! “He treated me,” wrote Crowley, “through some inexplicable misunderstanding, as a human being and asked me to write for him. I began with an account of a baseball game as seen by a professor from the University of Peking.”14 Crowley’s memory may have been a little at fault, because the extant version of the very amusing article plainly depicts a Hindu at a baseball game between the Redsox and Yanks, which he describes in perfectly symbolic terms as a religious rite—a superbly effective idea that lingers.15 It appeared in the August 1915 issue of Vanity Fair. Crowley’s memory may have been at fault as his “Royal Art” sex-magick diary shows that he received $25 for a “Climbing Article” on February 2, 1915. “Aleister Crowley: Mystic and Mountaineer” appeared in Vanity Fair in June, before the baseball article, which makes sense, as the climbing article introduces Crowley to Vanity Fair readers as “Irishman,” “adept,” and “esoteric philosopher.” A letter to Cosgrave of 1917 shows that Crowley tended to think of Crowninshield and Cosgrave together and in close communication,*78 so it is very likely they first met in the Christmas season of 1914.
On the day the New York Evening World carried its feature on Evangeline Adams (December 14) its front page headline declared GERMANY’S SECRET SERVICE REVEALS HUGE ARMS ORDERS IT SAYS US HAS RECEIVED . . . GUNS IN THE MILLIONS. The subheading elaborated: “Says [Arms] Deal Indicates Allies Expect War to Last Two Years More.” Whatever Secretary of State Bryan might have wished, matériel was getting to the Allies, profits to U.S. business, and the Germans did not like it one whit. “The German secret service is working vigilantly in the U.S. to disclose the enormous orders for War Supplies placed in this country,” drumming up arguments “in favour of Germany’s demands upon President Wilson to stop the exportation of munitions of war. The Evening World has obtained the latest list . . .”
The essential story could be seen two columns to the right: US Steel Jumps to 55; All Other Stocks Boosted . . . “Hundreds of Employees return to Work.” The president would find it tough to argue with that.
That day, Monday, December 14, marks a special day in Crowley’s magical life. I was fortunate to have at my fingertips recently the small, pale diary, surmounted by a big bright yellow “mercury” symbol, in which can be found the Colloquy†79of VVVVV‡80that is to be a Magus 9° = 2▫of AAwith the God ΘΩΘ [Thoth = Hermes/Mercury]. In thick black ink can be found Crowley’s diary specific to invocations of Mercury. “About December 14,” Crowley writes, “I came to the Conclusion that [mercury symbol] was Lord of New York, and I began various invocations of this as best I could, notably by the O.T.O. method. I shall refer here, and after to the record ‘De Arte Regia’ [‘On the Royal Art’] . . . and my very blindness and impotence—which are at present considerable—give me hope.”16 Crowley knew his magical progress impended on becoming a Magus, but the process was neither simple nor automatic. There were tests and ordeals to pass through, to cleanse his being so as to incarnate additional insights, powers of consciousness from “on High.”
The Rex de Arte Regia record indicates that the attempted Hermetic transformation of Crowley’s consciousness and life actually began immediately after Sunday’s dinner party on the night of the 13th. From that time he had been “generally invoking Hermes or Mercury as the obvious God of this city of New York, and proposing to make this new temple a Temple of Hermes by getting eight people to assist, and by making a circle on the floor, with the idea of building up a great Mercurial force, a mighty Caduceus to rule this city.”
By 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday, December 15, the temple was ready. Crowley began magical invocations of Thoth and Hermes, interspersed with appropriate “Enochian Calls,” allegedly communicated by angels through Queen Elizabeth I’s astrologer-mathematician John Dee’s seer, Edward Kelley, in the early 1580s. The purpose was to access inner plane “Aethyrs” wherein flourished realms of symbol and angelic speech, visible and audible to inner ear and eye.17 Here translated is the opening of the “Call of the Thirty Aethyrs,” applied in this case to “KHR,” 20th Aethyr.
O YE HEAVENS which dwell in KHR, ye are mighty in the parts of the Earth, and execute therein the judgment of the Highest! Unto you it is said: Behold the Face of your God, the beginning of Comfort, whose eyes are the brightness of the Heavens, which provided you for the Government of the Earth, and her unspeakable variety, furnishing you with the power of understanding to dispose all things according to the Foresight of Him that sitteth on the Holy Throne . . .
Or as read originally, and sonorously, by Crowley in Enochian:
MADARIATZA das perifa KHR, cahisa micaolazoda saanire caosago od fifisa balzodizodarasa Iaida. Nonuça gohulime: Micama adoianu MADA iaoda beliorebe . . .18
Fascinated to acclimatize himself fully to the proposed new Hermetic current, the magician reread his account of January’s Paris Workings in which he and Victor Neuburg had invoked Mercury with some success, as they perceived it.
At about twenty to midnight dark-haired Dutch prostitute Lea Dewey, whose “beautiful Yoni” with fair pubic hair that Crowley admired, was with him in the temple. With Lea he performed Opus XIV whose Object was simply “Hermes” (written in Greek in the record), meaning “a general invocation of his powers: magick, wisdom, eloquence, success in business, letters, &c &c. . . . The Operation was most orgiastic, but I formulated the God well and called aloud after his name. The Gluten of the Eagle was not very plentiful, and the Lion not very thoroughly dissolved therein. Still, I think the Elixir was formed well enough.”
A detail of the record that perhaps makes the events difficult to place is that after commenting that all the invocations had improved conditions for success, and noting the fine, if cold weather (10°F), he writes, “On returning to my hotel I found a dun . . .” This must mean either that the temple was not situated where he slept, or that he had left his hotel apartment again after the opus—perhaps to escort Lea out of the building. The latter seems likely. A dun is an importunate demand for payment. It came from his dentist. Because Mercury traditionally rules the mouth (oral communication), Crowley took it as a clue of Hermes’s presence. Signs continued: after dawn broke, he received letters from Cowie and Leila Bathurst (letters = Mercury/communication); then in the afternoon his private secretary brought into him “an ink pot, eight daggers, a tray with Hermes on it, a phallic night-light hold and a Virgo tray!” These all signified mercurial correspondences. He then adds briefly, and only as another proof of Hermes’s coloring of events, “Later, dined with Quinn who promised me $500 on a collection of books.”
Well, this was the notable Christmas dinner at John Quinn’s home at 31 Nassau Street on December 16, 1914, where Quinn introduced Crowley to his friends John Butler Yeats, writer and art critic Frederick James Gregg, and Quinn’s mistress, Dorothy Coates: the same Dorothy Coates whose favor for William Butler Yeats had opened the long, bitter rift between “Willie” and Quinn, only healed up that year (to John Butler Yeats’s relief), due to Coates’s pleading. We may recall that while JBY informed son Willie that he found Crowley entertaining and magnetic—though like “all Englishmen” he was always the hero of his stories—Crowley nonetheless seemed to him emotionally isolate, and therefore easily dominant. One wonders if John Butler Yeats had any idea of just how Crowley had spent the previous seventy-two hours! Perhaps that inner coldness or absence of personal sympathy discerned by Quinn’s f
avorite painter was the frost-sparkled, silvery edge left by Hermes’s having sprinkled the magician’s tongue with Mercurial spirit and penetrated his mind through his backside.
The next day, Quinn’s money came through. Were there any other Mercurial signs in the air? There was at least one, Crowley thought.
Having decided on December 19 to “now invoke Mercury daily as of old,” Crowley felt it his duty to record “one of the most curious experiences of my life.”
At about 8:45 p.m. he was at 34th Street and Broadway, looking for “a soul-mate, a destined bride, an affinity, a counterpartal ego &c., and should have considered the conditions satisfied by any orifice into which I might plunge my penis at a cost not exceeding $2.50. I now saw a girl who might have served but did not think it worth while to speak, as she looked expensive.” He had a flash to go to 42nd Street, having called on Hermes eight (symbolic to Hermes) times. He found the same lady, “Mildred Rose,” a pianist. They walked back up 40th Street until they reached a point where they stood chatting and “flirting, very mildly. I am to ring her tomorrow or she is to come to my lecture.” Miss Rose, if that was her name, never came to the lecture, and by December 28, Crowley had concluded that this was something attributable to “the boy trickster Mercury” reminiscent of the first Paris operation on January 1, 1914. No signs had issued from the lady since, and address and phone number failed to find her. Add to that, a fish appeared to have blocked the water main, leaving the taps “dry.” Fish, of course, are sacred to Mercury. What cheek!
As for the lecture, billed somewhere for December 20, even an afternoon rite with Lea Dewey whose Object again was “Hermes”—Crowley said that he had “nothing left to wish for”—was a washout, despite bright sunny conditions, cold, and frost. He says the opus was “very clumsily managed,” and he “lost control of Bindu” (semen). The mage was not feeling well and intuited all along that something was wrong, and in the event, the lecture was hopeless. “The whole Mercury force has been—to all appearance—thrown down instantly.” No one turned up but those he brought with him (no names, sadly). Even after an afternoon spent invoking Mercury, “brother” Frater F. L. (?) didn’t show up (and he was expected to assist with Mercury invocations in the evening), nor did his private secretary, nor “faithful Rooney.” Perhaps Hermes preferred different company that night.
He gave Hermes another go, by himself, on December 22 just after nine o’clock, and felt he’d made a reasonable fist at it, correcting errors in the previous rite. The next day he turned to Grace Harris’s services again. He hoped to acquire “the mantle of David and Solomon” so that he could write some great psalms and canticles. He realized with welcome humor that “a quarter-fledged Magus should not try for miracles of this size. ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine’ has been written; and if the O.T.O. Magick can equal that . . .!!!”*81 On returning home he began three psalms, woke up at 5:30 a.m. and wrote some more, then was “at it again” twelve hours later. After penning sixteen, the “current seemed to stop.” One wonders if David endured similar fits and starts.
The week before Christmas, Crowley got himself embroiled in a conflict with the notoriously troublesome Madame Frida Strindberg. Her venomous tongue apparently slandered Crowley to popular author and Brentano’s Publishers rare books expert, Temple Scott (1869–1934).
Who was this Madame Strindberg, and what was she doing in New York?
Divorced by Swedish playwright August Strindberg in 1895 after barely two years of marriage—the playwright found her too interfering in his business—out-to-shock Austrian Frida feinted suicide (regularly) then went to London where she founded in 1912 the notorious “Cave of the Golden Calf” and its Cabaret Theatre Club on Haddon Street, filling it with futurist paintings by Wyndham Lewis, Spencer Gore, and Charles Ginner; phallic sculpture by Jacob Epstein; and raucous ragtime music. The club attracted artist rebels like Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and Crowley’s friend Augustus John, whom Frida pursued until John was driven nearly mad. She also seduced Wyndham Lewis, founder of the Blast Vorticist magazine and designer of the club’s Vorticist poster.19 Madame famously waved men away with the words, “I’ll sleep with you, but don’t ask me to talk to you. One must draw the line somewhere.” Madame Strindberg quit London in 1914 for the United States, acquiring a screen-writing job with Fox Film. She was certainly not popular with everybody in the United States as this letter from John Quinn to friend, author, and art, literary, theater, and music critic James Huneker (1857–1921) in Brooklyn demonstrates. The letter, written on December 26, also suggests that Crowley was becoming a bit of a nuisance to Quinn, though Crowley, note, is not held responsible for the debacle.
My dear James,
Crowley called up my office several times last week. Each time I was “busy” or out. Finally his secretary began to call, and then Watson got the news that he wanted to consult me on a legal matter. It appears that Madame Strindberg has been slandering him to Temple Scott of Brentano’s and somebody else, telling them what a fearful man he was in London or God knows what. I can imagine myself defending a guilty correspondent in a divorce case; I can imagine myself defending a criminal or even a murderer if the court assigned me to the job; I can imagine myself having a prostitute for a client; I can imagine myself defending a nigger or chinaman where the facts appealed to me. But I cannot imagine myself having anything, even remotely, to do with a legal squabble between a woman whose friends call her a slut and a man whose enemies call him a bugger. There are some limits. Damn her, she seems to be always making mischief! And the funny thing about it is that Crowley about two weeks ago when I saw him casually, spoke about her as sweetly as possible; said that “she wasn’t a bad sort at all”; that he feared she was “up against it”; that he would do anything he could to help her; and that at heart she wasn’t bad, and that he hoped she would get along well. Crowley isn’t a bad sort. I know nothing about him personally. He is not a great poet. There is a good deal of the over-grown boy about him.
The last that I heard of Madame S. in London was that she had taken up with Wyndham Lewis. He is the man who was the chief chap in the Blast. It is too bad he didn’t turn on his blast and blight and blister the bitch, and in her larynx a galling give her.20
Apparently unfazed by ructions with Frida Strindberg, Crowley made no mention of the fuss in his diary. But that only reveals the problem with trying to reconstruct Crowley’s biography from extant sex magick diaries alone; they are completely inadequate to that purpose, even though they candidly deal with intimate matters most diaries seldom reveal.
Crowley seems to have taken a Christmas break, not that he believed in Christmas particularly. His parents insisted that it was a “pagan” festival, and they did not take much notice of it; certainly trees were not in evidence at the family home. One might have thought its pagan association might have attracted Crowley to Christmas excess. He would not have found much encouragement from the Christmas Eve edition of the Evening World. GERMANS WIPED OUT AT JOFFRE’S ORDER IN VOLLEY OF 600 GUNS roared the seasonal headline, while on page 2, beneath Hindenburg’s capture of Polish city Lodz, was a cartoon headed (in Gothic script), “The Three Wise Men of the West and their Star of Hope.” The three robed figures stood on the North American part of a globe in space, each with a sash inscribed, respectively, Humanitarianism, Democracy, and Neutrality. In the heavens above, a female figure opened her beckoning arms to reveal the word PEACE, beaming to all, but untouched.
The Tribune played the game. Its front page featured a photograph of a huge Christmas tree in Madison Square, pocked with electric lights in the city’s darkness. Next to it stood a native Indian with a sheet of music: “Os-ke-now-ton, a Mohawk Indian, Soloist in the Celebration.” The headlines: CITY GLOWS WITH FESTAL DAY JOYS; TREE OF LIGHT; SPARKLING THROUGH SNOW; and GLAD SONGS SYMBOLS OF NEW YORK’S THANKFULNESS FOR PEACE AND HAPPINESS THIS CHRISTMAS. Another little headline:: WHITE CHRISTMAS ON WEATHER MENU—no
t the song; that hadn’t been written yet. The saddest thing was page 8: a cartoon sketch of a Greek hoplite, teeth bared in helmet, astride the globe in greaves of war, wielding a massive sword over an Earth enveloped in flames. Beneath it: “War on earth; ill-will to men.”
Life, for some, goes on. Grace Harris was called for service again on the 27th: “object held tenaciously and the God-form fairly well sustained. The Elixir was excellent and ample.” Crowley did feel he had, as Neuburg used to put it, “got Thoth” and business went well enough the next day, whatever it may have been.
We know at least part of that business involved calling on Quinn in the morning, for Quinn wrote a friendly letter to Crowley on that day (December 28) to thank him for a seasonal gift.
Dear Mr. Crowley,
I don’t know what you will think of my not having thanked you personally when you called at the office this morning for your Christmas letter and for the MS. of your story the “King of Terrors.” I should have answered you last Saturday but I was so driven that I hadn’t a moment’s time.
I am grateful for your good wishes and I hope you will have nothing but good luck during the coming year. I am very much obliged to you for sending me the MS. Which I shall value the more highly as a personal gift from you.
Sincerely yours,
John Quinn21
It was nearly 11:00 p.m. on December 30 when Crowley and Lea Dewey got down, or up, to business again, this time with “Sex attraction” as the Object. Crowley was on considerably better form; the Elixir was of “super-excellent quality.” However, he felt judgment was influenced too much by pleasure, and the expectation of results “palsied.” Nevertheless, on January 2 Aimée Gouraud “called here of her own accord,” so there was a glimmer of light in midwinter’s gloom as the new year of 1915 began.
Aleister Crowley in America Page 27
