Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  The particular avowed purpose of the representatives of the “committee” in America was to spread propaganda that would contribute, at the end of the European war, to the establishment of the Republic of Ireland. Members of the committee in Ireland, according to information obtained by a representative of the New York Times, were engaged in a secret effort to dissuade Irishmen from enlisting in the English army. But those members of the committee who would talk of their business at all admitted that there was no immediate intention of an attempt to wage active war on England by the instigation of an armed rebellion in Ireland. It was said that the present purpose of the formal declaration of war against England was more to enlist the sympathies of Irish and of Americans to the “cause” than to bring about what even the most visionary enthusiasts of the movement recognized as an impracticable war.

  Aleister Crowley was displeased when the news of the ceremonies at Bedloe’s Island and of the formation of the “committee” came into the possession of the Times, and he declined to discuss his plans and purposes further than to acknowledge the fact set forth. An American who is acquainted with Crowley’s beliefs and intentions, however, while frankly admitting that the Irishmen of the “committee” sympathize with Germany in the present war, asserted that this was due to anti-English feelings and not to any natural love of things Germaine. The members of the “committee” see in Germany, according to their unofficial spokesman, a factor that will impair the power of England to oppress them. That is all.

  A cool observer of these proceedings and the manner in which Crowley spent July 13 might well conclude that the mage had finally gone completely “off his rocker”; that is to say, that he was mad, not only mad—unhinged—but insanely stupid as well.

  When he later reflected on the inevitable reaction of British authorities to the stunt, he claimed that he couldn’t believe how conditions had led to them to lose their sense of humor. Couldn’t they see the surreal, ironic humor of it all? No, they couldn’t, and he knew they wouldn’t. He felt himself far above them. His laughter echoed among the summits, above the clouds of human folly. It was not he who was unbalanced, only those who took the stunt seriously, for the stunt was primarily intended to fool the German propagandists that his anti-Britishness was such that he was prepared to risk his security as regards Great Britain. But it was also a stunt; he thought it hilarious. This has the gob-stopping flavor of a childhood dare—“I’ll show them what I can do!”—and was psychologically typical of Crowley’s immaturity regarding other people. Crowley did not expect the Germans to see the funny side, but he expected his friend in London, Everard Feilding, to see it, because Feilding knew that he was a “lunatic,” and much else, and Crowley could, he claimed later, rely on Feilding to explain matters to the Naval Intelligence Department and to request that they cooperate with him. He was living on Planet Crowley, incidentally passing through the belt of World War I.

  During late 1923 and 1924, after the Beast was asked to leave Italy by order of Mussolini, ostensibly due to living immorally with two women in Cefalù, Sicily, and for having attracted tabloid publicity to Italy via the English tabloid Sunday Express, which falsely accused Crowley of many crimes, including treachery to his country, Crowley undertook a long campaign for a just hearing. His devotee, mathematics professor Norman Mudd (1889–1934) agreed to write to persons who knew Crowley, or might be sympathetic to his cause, to offer frank assessments of his character and, if they knew them, motives. Recipients of Mudd’s request included the U.S. Justice Department, Otto Kahn, philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the Honorable Everard Feilding, who in July 1915 had been working in association with the N.I.D. in the Censor’s Department. Here follows Mudd’s previously unpublished letter to Feilding, then a barrister, dated November 22, 1924.

  Your knowledge (however imperfect or patchy) of AC’s work during the war is highly relevant here. You could say that the fact that he wrote for and edited pro-German organs during the war does not prove for a moment that he was not pro-British. Could you not say again that you had corresponded with him during that period, that you did not doubt his loyalty and that he himself says the circumstances were too complex to be properly explained save in his autobiography?

  . . . I am merely venturing to remind you that your knowledge of AC however partial is really more than that of all but a score or two persons in London. I am sure it is such that you could say whole-heartedly that you would never dream of taking seriously the allegations that I specially denounce in the absence of definite proof.28

  While Mudd sent out letters, Crowley composed a “Vindication,” which survives today as dictated to his then Scarlet Woman, Lea Hirsig.

  I was plain pro-German in appearance until my Statue of Liberty joke aroused Feilding, whom I felt I could trust having known him for years. But even so, I used precautions, for example: in going to a cable office, not signing my name but the code name Edith (in memory of Edith Cavell).*101

  (I suspect the real difficulty in understanding me when I began private negotiations with the Naval Intelligence, was that I was trying to play a Philip Oppenheim†102 hero and became super-subtle.)29

  Feilding, meanwhile, replied to Mudd that he was assured of Crowley’s loyalty from letters Crowley sent to him during the war (now “lost”). He reckoned the authorities “might be” skeptical of Crowley’s intelligence value because of his “admitted taste for farcical situations.”30 Five years later, Crowley’s then pupil Gerald Yorke (1901–1983) wrote again to Feilding to ascertain for himself Crowley’s loyalties, as Yorke was trying to get some of Crowley’s works published in London and anticipated problems. In a letter of May 1, 1929, Feilding referred to what he received from Crowley in New York: “Such as I did not hand over to Intelligence, I destroyed after the war.”

  During the time that I [Feilding] was a Naval censor at the London Press Bureau and afterwards employed on Intelligence work in Egypt, Crowley wrote to me from time to time telling me that he was anxious to do work for the British Intelligence and that meanwhile he was doing his best, by various preposterous performances, to represent himself as disaffected and to get in with German connections. He sent me newspaper accounts, for instance, of his formally proclaiming Irish independence from the steps of the Statue of Liberty. He also asked me to start a defamation campaign against him in the English Press, with the idea that this would confirm his evil reputation in America so far as British allegiance was concerned. While I declined to do this, I sent his letters on to the intelligence authorities with whom I was personally acquainted, but this branch of work was in no way my job. I did nothing more beyond forwarding to Crowley a test question, which they suggested regarding the identity of a certain personage. Whether it was to test their knowledge against their own, or because they really wanted to know who this personage was, I did not inquire. Anyway, his answer did not, I understand, prove helpful, and whether for that or other reasons I know not, they declined any direct communication with him. [Note the word direct.]

  I can only add that my own personal very strong belief was and is that, whatever vagaries Crowley may have indulged in, which have caused him to be expelled from two countries as widely different as Italy and France, treachery to his country was not one of them.31

  There is no support in any of these documents for Spence’s hypothesis that Crowley was already an agent of Admiral Hall of the N.I.D. before arriving in New York in 1914. Help from Quinn, Crowninshield, Cosgrave, and even Belle da Costa Greene may plausibly be accounted for on the basis of recommendations from Austin Harrison and Raymond Radclyffe, as well as prewar business with John Quinn, and Crowley’s friendly relations with Frank Harris. Existing evidence points to contact occurring with Commodore Guy Gaunt and New York–based N.I.D. officers at 44 Whitehall after the Statue of Liberty stunt, at least after October (Edith Cavell’s death), possibly even as late as 1916. But then, in July 1915, Crowley admitted in his Confessions that he did not feel he had gotten far enough into the Propaganda
Kabinett’s confidence to be significantly useful to British Intelligence (reporting German secrets gained from intimacy with the enemy being his true aim), though Feilding’s concern would have signaled that he had better get somewhere in that regard with due haste.*103 Crowley’s dilemma was that, in order to progress, he felt he needed assistance, but could not get assistance unless he progressed. Thus, as he emphasized in “The Last Straw” and elsewhere, he was forced to play a “lone hand”: a miserable position one might even call masochistic were it not that he wanted to be relieved of it.

  NORMAL SERVICE RESUMES

  In the midst of high pressure on the German propagandists over the Morgan assassination and Washington bomb, the July 14 issue of the Fatherland featured an advertisement for Crowley’s contribution to August’s International. “In this gripping article [“Lieutenant Finn’s Promotion”] Aleister Crowley brings to your attention again the Fashoda Incident, in which England humiliated France by compelling Col. Marchand to haul down the flag of France after he had raised it over the Egyptian Soudan [sic].”†104 The ad appeared the same day as Crowley and Jeanne undertook to get over Jeanne’s sexual difficulties. He noted that she was practically virginal. Nevertheless, the operation, on a hot still night in dim candlelight, was “intensely passionate,” but there was “not yet that confidence which brings deliberation.” It sounds like a school report. Concentration was lost “in the intensity of a pure normal orgasm.” The Elixir also was of “wonderful quality,” but still “normal.” Teacher concluded, “There are evidently great difficulties in Our way: the conscious mind is still in revolt.” The next day he offered to marry “this lady” and was accepted. All perfectly normal.

  At about 3:00 a.m. on July 15, Crowley confided that his triumph to “the King on the Royal Art,” a triumph proving Jeanne was not keeping strictly to John Butler Yeats’s advice about writing:

  Hilarion is mine, and I am hers. I have a wonderful letter from her. She is the High Prelate of the Chapter of Rose Croix, come to conduct me from the Valley wherein I have wandered so long into the full light of the Sun. I feel her guiding hand, but it is yet dark. The gates of the Graal Temple are not wholly open. But I am ready. I leave the devil-loves of the dusk. So tonight once more I strove to banish them.

  This he did by kissing Doris Gomez for two hours until he “wore her out utterly,” so utterly that she was unable to perform “her act as priestess.” He hoped his activities, including light concentration on sammasati would be his “induction to the grade of Magus. Aumn.” He also did a small experiment with heroin. He found it helpful to concentration and erection; it stopped orgasm.

  The night of July 17 was very hot and steamy, only cleared by a violent thunderstorm at 6:00 a.m. Before then, Jeanne and “A” (as she referred to him in her few highly obscure diary references to him) undertook their fourth act of sex magick, dedicated to Hilarion’s problems. He had asked her what she most wanted in the world, and she said—all honey—“You.” The result was a long talk about everything. He felt he had “got her,” and confidence between them began to grow apace.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Wrong Thing at the Right Time

  Point Breeze, Rockaway Point, Long Island, looked rather different in 1915 from what it does today. Lines of single-story wooden huts over-looked the sea, with sloping roofs, verandas, and short steps down to the beach, punctuated by tall flagpoles with Old Glories waving in the sea breeze beckoning a century of change. Men and boys wore sleeveless vests of course to cover their torsos and long shorts, or working pants, rolled up to the knees. There was also a shanty of large tents, the size of garden sheds with makeshift canopies for shade, made with bedsheets and any old wood, with clothes drying on anything above ground. Ladies and girls wore pleated calico dresses, usually with some covering at the shoulders, and stockings too, with lace-up canvas boots. They might wear a woolen hat to keep some of the hair from getting wet, or because ladies should wear something on their heads.

  “Swimming” generally meant paddling about close to the beach. Farther from the sand stood neat little bungalow colonies, each with a square “garden” at the front, consisting of a potted plant surrounded by cobbles set in mortar and concrete.

  Families, out for a breather on the Rockaway Beach train from Brooklyn or the Bronx or Queens or any other place that was hot and airless, alighting at Hammels Station (what is now Beach 85th Street), could let themselves go at the Rockaway Beach Playland, with its overbearing, wood-framed Wolz Thriller roller coaster, spiraling, grinding, and rattling above the scenic railway and boardwalk. Children in abundance vibrated the languid air with summer joys, and the sight of them must have made Crowley and his Scarlet Woman look at each other knowingly, for the couple were trying their best to conceive—at least that’s what Crowley thought.

  Having spent the afternoon of July 18 swimming, the amorous couple returned to Manhattan to dine at the imposing twenty-five-story McAlpin Hotel at the corner of Broadway and 34th Street. Three years old, the world’s biggest hotel employed 1,500 staff, could accommodate 2,500 guests, with gender-specific floors, and had a Turkish bath on the top floor—perhaps the scene for Crowley’s gay encounters. Constructed in red brick, the mighty building had cream stone facing at top and bottom and was so outstanding that at its opening the New York Times opined that it seemed completely separate from everything around it. It was like a new volcano born of a social and economic earthquake. Hilarion and the Beast then went home, whether to Crowley’s or Jeanne’s apartment is not apparent.

  Fig. 17.1. The McAlphin Hotel, the largest hotel in the world when it opened in 1912

  A first: Crowley asked Jeanne to decide the Object for their fifth sex-magical encounter. She chose “the Regeneration of Humanity.” Utterly noble, timely, and Crowley took it as meaning they would create a child, who would, as The Book of the Law prophesied, “discover the Key of it all” (AL II:46; III:47) and “regenerate the world, the little world, my sister” (AL I:53).

  Their attempts at sex were troubled by Jeanne’s feelings about it and Crowley’s nervousness. She was unhappy with the physical composites of the experience, embarrassed, and shy about genitalia. He could tell she was resistant to cunnilingus, for example, which made access to the Elixir awkward. She liked the closeness, the romance, the passion, the feeling, the soul, the love, but not the vehicles of love; they were not ideal. Beauty was in the mind, the heart, not the flesh. For Crowley, they had long been indistinguishable. He could quote Blake: “God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes.” “The result,” noted Crowley, “was absolute fiasco.” He’d taken wine and cocaine, apparently, to calm his nerves. “The Domina [lady Lord], being to all intents and purposes a virgin, always does the wrong thing at the right time. No doubt heat, and her amazing beauty, aid this. However, I instructed her in the elements of concentration; she complied; God was in his heaven etc. . . . Orgasm prolonged and splendid.” He added a P.S.: “She is a Super-virgin, and always does the right thing at the wrong time!”

  Another first: on July 21 the Fatherland’s page 1 editorial was written by Aleister Crowley—ENGLAND ON THE BRINK OF REVOLUTION. The editor’s byline reintroduced Crowley, writing, “The author of the following brilliant article is not only a revolutionary thinker but is actually a revolutionist. The New York Times of July 13th gives a long account of how Aleister Crowley, accompanied by several patriotic Irishmen, renounced, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, all allegiance to England [note!] and declared the birth of the Irish Republic. In the dawning light Crowley solemnly read the new Irish Declaration of Independence.”

  Apparently well in at last with the Fatherland team, Crowley wrote of how “the hateful, the loathsome, the despicable Englishman is not of the old aristocracy, or of the peasantry, or of the working classes except in rare cases of corruption by cheap literature; he is of the mean, petty, cheating, hypocritical tradesman type; and unfortunately it is this type that rules the co
untry.”

  Crowley described a demoralized Britain, created in his imagination for purpose, and concluded, “Of course it is not difficult to foresee the course of events. They will not shoot the workman; they will keep on nagging at him. He will suddenly come to the end of his patience, run amuck, and burn the rags of the British flag, and of the British Constitution, on the altars of Anarchy.” Crowley perhaps could not resist having his own joke on what he considered his editors’ naïveté: Britain did not have a written constitution.

  On Friday, July 23, as the Battle of Warsaw tore in to the heart of Poland and thousands of British, Australian, and New Zealand troops were held down by the Turkish army in the faltering Gallipoli campaign, Crowley and Jeanne were back at Rockaway Beach, having a golden time swimming and cuddling. The previous night, while performing sex magick with Helen Westley, Crowley had been intent on Jeanne, saying and thinking, “Awake awake Hilarion.” Jeanne, at home in bed, dreamed that she was God “being adored by herself” and, as Crowley puts it, “ulti-mately woke at my call.”1 Anxious to waste not a moment, Crowley and Jeanne met up at 7:15 a.m. and headed for Rockaway to enjoy the wonder of sea, sun, and each other. They began to make love in the “shed” (a beach hut for changing clothes, presumably) in the late afternoon, were interrupted by the onset of Jeanne’s period, then dined and continued later, “the Elixir roseate and perfect.” They then slept in each other’s arms until half-midnight on the Saturday. “This marks a great advance toward the Perfect Union,” wrote Crowley in his record.