MÜNSTERBERG
Crowley had known of Münsterberg for some five years, considering him an “old enemy”: intellectual or spiritual enemy, that is.
We had quarreled about philosophy and physics. His mind was intensely positive, brutally matter-of-fact, but capable of appreciating subtlety, and far more open to new facts and theories than most of his opponents supposed. His arrogance was, to a great extent, the Freudian protection against his own uncertainty. He knew psychology, he knew men; he understood business; and in his capacity of instructor at Harvard, he had acquired the habit of forming and directing minds. So much I knew, and I pictured my duel with him in romantic terms of Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty.11
Crowley had come to the States armed with an introduction to English expat Hereward Carrington (1880–1958),*90 leading member of the American Society for Psychical Research.
Dear Carrington,
This will introduce you to Aleister Crowley, poet, sage, mountain climber, and general lunatic. I am sure you will have much in common.
E. Feilding12
As secretary of the British Society for Psychical Research, Everard Feilding had joined Carrington in investigating Italian medium Eusapia Paladino (1854–1918), famous for controversial “materializations” and vaunted psychic gifts. Concluding investigations in Naples in 1908, Feilding and Carrington found Eusapia innocent of fraud, a position modified later with the acceptance that sometimes she played tricks.
Carrington’s book Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena heralded the medium’s arrival in New York on November 10, 1909. During her seven-month stay, séances were observed at Columbia University. There, Professor Münsterberg found trickery at the house of Professor Lord. For example, Paladino seemed able to move curtains in a room where all windows and doors were closed. Münsterberg discovered that she manipulated a jet of air from a rubber bulb. The exposures were sensational, but Carrington insisted it was well known that Eusapia was occasionally fraudulent. Paladino told journalists that she felt tricks were expected, fearing harm from hostile investigators when in genuine trance. Despite Carrington’s warning to investigators against familiar tricks in a circular letter sent in advance, and his reminding Münsterberg of the many inexplicable phenomena still unaccounted for, Münsterberg, though himself a believer in life after death, determined to dismiss all “spiritualist” phenom-ena as fraudulent lest nascent interest in parapsychology be established as science. Feilding’s friend Crowley considered Münsterberg unnecessarily doctrinaire, with a one-track mind when convinced that he was right: a trait Crowley would claim he exploited to influence the nature and effectiveness of the German propaganda effort.
FIFTEEN
Getting Hotter
Crowley chose to attribute his successful wooing of Lola Augusta Grumbacher,*91 née Oliviera, on January 26 to the same Opus (XXII) for “sex attraction” with Lea Dewey on the 10th that he considered had warmed up Aimée Gouraud and S. K in his regard. Distinguished by a profile like Florentine poet Dante’s, and a muscular, masculine frame hailing from north Brazilian state Pará, Lola, wealthy widow of Very Illustrious Sir Knight Mauricio Grumbacher 33° (1850–1912),†92 was, according to Crowley, “astoundingly passionate.” At 9:15 p.m., by the light of a gas stove, with the temperature at 0°F, Crowley gave a grateful Lola the IX° treatment. A meeting with a Mrs. Schlessinger in the afternoon had put the idea of a “rich marriage” in his mind, and this would be the Object of a sex-magick operation in which “consciousness must have been lost absolutely; only at the last moment the Will asserted itself in an appropriate scream.” Crowley felt a complete mental upheaval. “The return of Aleister Crowley. No further comment is needed.”
Most unusually, a second operation followed almost immediately, though “naturally shorter!” “Both were most spontaneous, fervent, ardent, orgiastic, ecstatic; in fact, quite ideal. The screaming was very simultaneous. The Elixir in both cases was plentiful and of admirable quality.” The operation was, he recorded, “quite up to European standards.” His final note is intriguing: “As in the case of Beatrice Levy in the summer of 1914, Pan was so furiously incarnated in the girl that actual obsession occurred, the symptoms being those of violent and repeated sickness.”
Fig. 15.1. Song of Summer, 1914 by Beatrice Sophia Levy (1892–1974?)
Crowley had of course been in Switzerland the previous summer, and I therefore wonder if the Beatrice Levy he mentions was not American watercolorist Beatrice Sophia Levy (1892–1974?). According to auction records, she painted in France and Switzerland. Her 1914 landscape (color etching; aquatint) Song of Summer, 1914 shows a naked lady in a grove looking up to a bird swooping above. Perhaps the “bird” was her freed soul, or the agent thereof, and the grove one sacred to Pan.
Lola, admitting an age of thirty-seven years, joined the Beast again three days later: a last encounter, the reasons why lost to history. The desire of the Beast for a rich marriage was doubtless perked up again, however, during the late afternoon of January 30.
Outside it had been “brilliantly fine, cold, exhilarating,” while inside the temple was darkness, save a little light from the remains of day creeping through the blinds. Into the charmed circle came “T[hrice] H[oly] T[hrice] I[lluminated] T[hrice] I[llustrious] Soror Aimée Crocker Gouraud. Initiate of the Sanctuary IX° O.T.O.” Crowley had either admitted her to the Order in London or Paris, or there had been a lead-up in New York. That he gives fifty-year-old Aimée IX° status means that he had explained the secret of the degree, and she therefore knew what she might herself achieve. As Aimée had a quite genuine hunger for esoteric knowledge and experience, she may already have acquired the essence of the matter from experiences in the east, which from her own account (And I’ d Do It Again, 1936) were both spiritual and sexual. Neither yogic meditation nor the word kundalini would have been new to her, and the couple doubtless compared notes on chakra matters. Crowley noted that he had been “wanting this particular partner since many months,” which does suggest an attraction on his part from before his arrival in New York.
The Beast wanted to marry Aimée, but one suspects that Aimée preferred men who did not have power over her, and she knew Crowley was both very hot stuff and very deep water. Crowley was respectful, noting the Thrice Holy Illuminated Soror had “a Will like the Holy Phallos itself!” She “kept concentrated on sex-force,” and Crowley did the same. “Either [object of each] may result therefore.”
As the operation was unexpected, the Beast did not feel fully prepared. It was “not very orgiastic” as his mind was rather confused. He was untypically afraid of getting things wrong in so important an operation. Still, the soror’s astonishingly prehensile vagina—something he loved to his last days—greatly impressed him, and the Elixir had a “rare delicacy of flavor.” Both he and Aimée felt very well afterward. But nothing came of it, despite an outsider’s thinking that perhaps AC and AG were (almost) made for one another. Crowley could hardly begrudge a soul mate the perfect freedom he valued so highly. He would go on wishing for years, but Aimée stuck to her guns. They remained friends, however, as this letter of October 1, 1923, from Crowley to Aimée illustrates abundantly.
Dearest Aimée,
Thanks for your letter.
. . . By the way, what do you do with your house [in Paris] while you are away? Do you shut it up or keep it going at low pressure? If the latter, and you’d like to lend it to us [Crowley and Leah Hirsig] while you are away, I can promise you I’ll fix up something really amusing by the time you return. Please cable me if you will.
In any case I will write to you in America. I shall probably be somewhere near Paris for the Winter.1
If sex magick proved useless for a rich wife, he would never stop using it to keep afloat financially, though he was still unsure as to whether he’d got the technique anything like right. As for money, why go to all that work for twenty cents when $20,000 might be just as likely, or unlikely? But if it was anywhere in the “air,” he hoped to attr
act it.
Late afternoon on February 11 the air was warm, and it felt like spring. Employing Lea Dewey’s professional skills, he set his mind on $20,000. “I made a mental image of the room being filled with showers and showers of big ten-dollar pieces and held this very well, even in the midst of the orgasm, which was lengthy; though I could feel her mouth sucking up mine, I could simultaneously see the gold filling the room.” He confessed that his sense of taste had been weakened a little as the pair had been sniffing cocaine before they commenced.
Two days later Leila Bathurst Waddell, Grand Secretary General of the British O.T.O., of 125 Victoria Street, London, boarded RMS Lusitania at Liverpool, bound for New York. On the ship Leila met an officer called McFall, who had saved up the desired sum. He offered to marry Leila and to settle the sum upon her.
A few days later, Crowley wondered about Opus IV for “Success,” concluding that each of the successes since that time had only partly materialized, before vanishing. Was it the Mercurial character of the invocations? Things were apt to be slippery, full of tricks and bizarre turns. Then there was the issue of technique. “I evidently don’t know how to fix the volatile at all, though the first half of the operation is all right.”2 He also noticed that when he sniffed cocaine his critical faculty went to pot. He and prostitute Lea Dewey had developed a temporary habit for the stuff; it might fill a vacant hour—with vacancy.
Any great hopes that his empty moments would be flooded with joys when Leila finally arrived at the Hotel Wolcott at 4 West 31st Street on Saturday, February 20, were soon dashed. After all their years of adventure together across Britain, Europe, and Russia, Crowley had that unhappy feeling of finding that a past passion now felt like a stranger; something had gone. Exhausted, they both hit the sack but roused each other in the dawning frosty light at 6:35 the next morning, presumably at Crowley’s place. Opus XXXV with Thrice Holy Thrice Illuminated Thrice Illustrious Soror Leila Waddell IX° O.T.O., Grand Secretary General for Ireland, Iona, and all the Britains was performed for sex attraction. Did they really need it?
A fortnight later Crowley observed that at the first opportunity the magick had to work, it was effective on a Mrs. O. R. Drey and on one Doris Gomez (“or Carlisle or Edwards”) the same day. Doris would become a regular “assistant.” Leila, it appears, pursued McFall, the officer with the nest egg. Leila and Crowley would join sexual forces again on March 19 with the Object of “All McFall’s savings . . . undertaken in unison by both parties.” While matters in that direction were observed to be going well in early May, with another boosting operation with Leila on the 4th of that month for “sex force and attraction,” a note added in January 1916 concluded, “a pure jest of the boy Mercury, all this.”
While Crowley fretted about money and sex attraction, Quinn was trying not to put his foot in it with John Butler Yeats and his poet son over his relations with Crowley. One surmises that Willie in Ireland was greatly annoyed that his father did not seem to share his abhorrence for Crowley and was incensed that Crowley was near to his source of patronage (and his father’s effective keeper). As can be seen from the following exchange, Quinn considered William Butler Yeats “confused” over the whole issue. Quinn’s response was to repeat the mantra that Crowley was not an artistic contender as far as he was concerned, and he was not interested in gossip about the man.
On Wednesday, February 24, Quinn wrote to John Butler Yeats to reassure him that he hadn’t implicated him where Crowley was concerned. “I have written W.B.Y. a letter of which I enclose you an extract re Crowley. You will see that it can’t possibly ‘get you in wrong,’ as the saying is. I was going to write to W.B.Y. shortly anyway.” Quinn’s postscript suggests that he’d asked JBY to make some inquiry about Crowley: “Good luck and let me know about the occultist.”3 Quinn wrote again to John Butler Yeats at 317 West 29th Street the next day.
I changed the letter to W.B. and took out all reference to you or to the reading of the letter and have referred back to a letter of mine of Jan. 13th to him in which I mentioned Crowley [see here]. So you need not have any fear that he will even know that you showed or read or mentioned to me anything about his letter to you. I am very glad that you told me what W.B.Y. had written, it is so easy to get things confused and he often does get things confused.4
Quinn sent his letter about Crowley (and Frank Harris) to William Butler Yeats the same day (February 25).
My dear Yeats,
I told Lady Gregory when she first came here, casually, of Crowley’s calling on me. I had a wonderful pencil drawing of him by Augustus John. He wanted to see it and wanted the right to reproduce it. John had written several times about it and asked me to have it lithographed here and I sent copies to John and sent some copies to Crowley.
He seemed desperately hard up and I believe still is hard up. He invited me several times to dine with him, but every invitation I declined, and have never dined with him at any hotel or at his apartment. I mentioned the fact that he was here to Miss Coates, who was here a month or so in the autumn on her way from the Adirondack Mountains to the South. Finally, I asked her and your father to meet me at dinner and invited Crowley. He did not talk badly, but he is not an interesting talker. Your father and Miss Coates did most of the questioning. Frankly, his “magic” and astrology bored me beyond words. Whatever he may be, he has no personality. I am not interested in his morals or lack of morals. He may or may not be a good or profound or crooked student or practitioner of magic. To me he is only a third or fourth rate poet.
In my letter of Jan. 13th to you I said that “he seems hard up.” One hears all sorts of stories about him, but, aside from an appetite for strong drink, I have seen nothing wrong about him. His brand of the occult does not interest me in the least. I have never dined or lunched with him, and have no interest or curiosity as to what he is or is not doing and have not taken up with him in any way. He is not my kind of a person.5
Quinn’s attempt at self-justification seems curiously defensive and over-assertive at the same time. On March 21, Willie again wrote about Crowley to Quinn from Stephen’s Green Club, Dublin. Yeats’s preamble to calumniating Crowley is interesting in itself as it shows how close the worlds of Crowley and W. B. Yeats really were.
Yeats says he’s been reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which he thinks little of, only having bought it because, but for the war, he’d have otherwise gone to Austria with Everard Feilding of the Psychical Research Society (an important contact of Crowley’s) to investigate a haunted castle of Dracula there, while also calling on a “young lawyer, known to Feilding” who had been persecuted by “an imp.” Feilding, he says, had himself seen the “vagaries” perpetrated by the “priceless imp” who, with the young lawyer gone to fight in the war (and already perhaps dead), now had no one to haunt. Yeats then regaled Quinn with his discovery of a rare book about alchemical marvels occurring in Dublin around 1790. He then comes to his point.
I am interested in what you say of Crowley. I knew him 16 or 17 years ago but dropped him on finding that he lived under false names and left various districts without paying his debts. Lord Middlesex was one of his names, another was that of a Russian nobleman. I was also in a case against him. He dropped the case rather than go into the witness box. He is I think mad, but has written about six lines, amid much foul rhetoric, of real poetry. I asked about him at Cambridge, and a man described him being dragged out of the dining hall by a porter, thrown out, struggling, because of the indecency of his conversation. He is an English and French type. You I think have nothing like him. He used to be a handsome fellow.6
Yeats proceeds to lay into Frank Harris, with similar invective. “He [Harris] is probably as uneasy and as restless as Crowley is mad, and so without judgement—a tragic figure. I was told the other day in London that the authorities would arrest both men on their return, but that may be no more true than the other war rumours.”7 One hopes lawyer Quinn saw through the mire of uncritical hearsay and prejudice evinced in
this letter from one he so admired. Yeats clearly wanted Quinn to have nothing whatever to do with Crowley for his own good, and Yeats was hardly mollified by Quinn’s reply of April 24 on the same subject.
A word about Crowley in answer to your letter: He is a perfect misfit here of course. His writings have no popular appeal. One hears awful things about him but beyond a big capacity for strong drink I have seen nothing crooked about him. But I have not seen him since the beginning of January and I only saw him two or three times all told. He is apparently “up against” financial difficulties as they say here.8
It is just as well that Crowley knew nothing of this passage of letters, or he might have been on to Quinn about another case of slander, this time coming from Ireland. But he had enough on his hands with financial worries. Crowley tried again with Lea Dewey on Thursday after-noon, March 4, to effect relief from all New York debts. He didn’t get the money, but obtained some relief from worry, while his thoughts on technique began to crystallize. “I think the mental feeling at the moment of orgasm must be a Samadhi*93 between the Object and the Orgasm. As long as the two are separate, the Prana [current of vitality] which acts as an incarnating Ego on the ‘Child’ is not duly formulated.”
After Opus XXXVII with Doris Gomez to fathom “the further mysteries of the IX°” during late afternoon March 19, neatly expressed in Latin—and here translated, “In the hands of the mistress while I was licking her cunt”—Crowley confessed to being still “puzzled as to ‘Coagula,’ the fixing of the volatile created by the Operation.” He was sure the ancient alchemical formula “Solve et Coagula” (dissolve and coagulate) was the key to the Royal Art, but his interpretation of it felt inadequate.
Aleister Crowley in America Page 30
