Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  Fig. 19.1. San Francisco welcomes the world . . . 1915

  Fig. 19.2. Advertisement for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco

  Fig. 19.3. The Machinery Building, Panama-California Exposition, San Diego, 1915

  Now it is more than a century past, and in 2015 San Francisco residents wondered why there was a giant “1915” neon display lighting the heights of the Ferry Building. What did those numbers mean? The only thing left of the greatest fair in the world is the refitted Palace of Fine Arts, still echoing Quo Vadis grandeur by a fountain at 3301 Lyon Street, with its colonnade and Pantheon-like rotunda. Gone are the Netherlands Pavilion, the Palace of Horticulture “matched by no marvel save in eastern scene” (now an apartment block on Divisadero and Chestnut Streets), the Palace of Transportation—like the walls of Byzantium and Hagia Sophia combined (replaced by a row of houses on Marina Boulevard and Scott Streets), while the once-throbbing Amusement Zone and Dayton Flood exhibition is today a playing field. The Machinery Palace on Filmore Street—all gone; the Court of Sun and Stars, a vision to rival Vatican City, “left not a rack behind”; the nine great arches of the Service Building, “baseless fabric”; the Liberal Arts Palace and Tower, not even a memory. Where once the State of Washington Pavilion stood in stately harmony, the Crissy Field Marsh has flooded the site. Nobody could ever imagine that a towering Buddha of gigantic, superhuman pro-portions once sat in tranquil asana above what is now Gough and Bay Streets: in 1915 it was the “Japanese Village.”

  Fig. 19.4. Festival Hall, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1915

  Well, the revels had not yet ended when Crowley and the Fosters arrived in October 1915. Crowley had nothing to say about the World’s Fair—ostensible reason for his journey west—and would doubtless have resorted to Prosperos’s speech regarding the life-dream’s “insubstantial pageant” from The Tempest, as I have done, had he done so.

  Since my last visit San Francisco had been rebuilt. The old charm had vanished completely. It had become a regular fellow. The earthquake had swallowed up romance, and the fire burnt up the soul of the city to ashes. The phoenix had perished and from the cinders had arisen a turkey buzzard.1

  He may have been thinking about his hotel. Booked into the Palace Hotel, at which site he had stayed in 1901, the hotel had changed. Reduced to a burned-out shell in the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake, the “new” Palace Hotel had risen from its ashes in 1909 on the corner of Market Street and new Montgomery Street. This had always been the hotel for “anybody who was anybody,” and while its interior was as sumptuous as its predecessor, its exterior, though of similar proportions to the original, was noticeably plainer.

  Fig. 19.5. Market Street, San Francisco, 1915, taken to promote the exposition (note the “1915” top-center)

  A stroll down Market Street would still have focused on the Ferry Building clock tower at the bay end (now with an electrically enhanced giant 1915 emblazoning its crown), and there were still horse-drawn milk carts obstructing automobiles as they wove about over the tramcar tracks, but some of the old grandeur and variety had necessarily gone as buildings appeared close together from the same temporally compressed mind-set, while ugly spaces signaled what had been lost amid Mother Nature’s violent indifference to concrete civilization.

  From the Palace Hotel, Crowley wrote to John Quinn on October 31 offering a typically acerbic view on the exhibition, as well as some comments on art, as is discernible from Quinn’s interesting and genial reply below, posted to the Palace Hotel on November 22 but returned to Quinn in New York, as Crowley had by then left the hotel.

  My dear Crowley,

  I am glad to hear from you. I enjoyed reading your letter of the 31st. I think you are right about the exhibition. I never saw but one and that was the one in Buffalo. I avoided the “great” Chicago exhibition of 1893 and the St Louis exhibition of 1900. They are a weariness of the flesh and a discouragement of the soul.

  I agree with you about art largely, but I can’t agree that “beauty is a side product”. An artist must have something to say and then must know how to say it. I can’t stand Mathew Arnold’s theory of poetry, but it isn’t so irritating to me as the theory of Stopford Brooke and the Dowden school, who are always claiming that “to be a great poet one must be a great and good man”. It is of course damn nonsense. The goodness or the greatness of the poet or artist hasn’t a damn thing to do with his technique or emotion. I have known good men who either were no poets or rotten poets and there are many great poets who must have been rotten men from the Stopford Brooke and Edward Dowden point of view. Catullus, for example, and Villon and Verlaine. The thing is that a poet or an artist must know his trade, must be the master of the technique of his art, and then he must be profoundly moved, and then there may be fine art and if the theme is great it may be great art.

  Whistler did many pleasant things but he wasn’t a great artist. One feels constantly that he was a Western reflection of the Japanese.

  I have never been in San Francisco. They used to be proud of their Bohemia. I am told that the big trees and the Yosemite are disappointing but that the Grand Canyon of the Colorado is really superb.

  There is nothing new here. This damn stupid war has almost killed art and is hard on writers, sculptors, painters and other artists. Ar present Germany is on top. I fear she will remain on top. France is the one bright spot. A nation that was supposed to be hysterical and decadent has shown itself to be much less hysterical than the English and the Germans and man to man as efficient as the Germans and has earned its right to live for a thousand years.

  We probably have entered upon a greater era of conquest than the Napoleonic era, and the things that we are witnessing may change the face of the world for a thousand years. The stupidity of the English, soldiers, diplomats, Cabinet and all can best be illustrated by the way Greece has fooled them. They say England has made three separate loans to the Greeks. Why, God damn it, the third assistant clerk in the foreign exchange department in any first class New York bank wouldn’t be deceived by the Greek Minister and Chargé D’Affaires or by seventy-five Greeks or by the whole Greek Cabinet, for fifteen minutes. He simply wouldn’t trust them. The third assistant clerk in any foreign exchange department has some horse-sense. He perhaps didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge or to Sandhurst and he would probably be a German or a Jew or a Frenchman.

  I hope this will find you less depressed than when you wrote your letter. You must have liked writing it for I enjoyed reading it.

  I don’t imagine your present journey will take you back into Mexico.*110 But wherever it takes you I hope you will have a satisfactory time.

  Sincerely yours,

  John Quinn2

  It is perfectly clear from this letter and one that Quinn sent following it that Crowley and Quinn shared cultural perceptions and humor, as well as politics, and that W. B. Yeats’s attempts to turn Quinn directly against Crowley were resisted in practice. Realizing that Crowley had not received his last letter, Quinn wrote Crowley again on December 9, at 25 West 44th Street, where Crowley lived under the name “Cyril Grey,” the name he would give himself as a character in his Simon Iff stories in 1917. Quinn wrote to him “c/o Cyril Grey,” which suggests that he was aware of the alias, and perhaps the reason for it. The letter does not lack a wit Crowley would have savored, or an interesting invitation.

  My dear Crowley,

  I just got back from Washington. I got your letter from San Francisco. At that time I had a moment’s leisure and I answered it. My letter was returned from the St Francis a few days ago. It is too stale now to send to you.

  I have been hellishly driven and busy and harassed and annoyed and irritated, till I have almost had murder in my heart and hell outside, and nearly all over preventable and unnecessary irritations and stupidities. The big things in life like illness, worry over friends, and so on, one can stand without the quiver of a nerve. But the other things, and the people who make a
ll sorts of demands on one’s purse and person, they are the devils. I remarked this to a friend of mine the other day, and promptly came back a letter stating that he had two girls in his office “either one of whom believes she could help me to successfully withstand these assaults that I hourly endure”. Which I thought slightly ambiguous. I wonder if their willingness to help me to endure assaults meant that they were willing to participate in assaults? And the man that wrote that letter wasn’t a Greek either. But I follow the old maxim: “Beware of such offers even when they come as a gift”. They are even more dangerous as a gift than as a commodity.

  Some time in the course of the next two or three weeks I am going to have Francis Grierson up to my place some night, and if you are here and free I shall want to ask you.*111

  I hope you had a pleasant trip in the west.

  Sincerely yours,

  John Quinn.3

  Precisely what Crowley had hoped to accomplish in San Francisco is obscure. He says in his Confessions that on arriving he found himself “invited to address a semi-public gathering”—whatever that might have been.4 Identifying himself with his message he opened it with “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” the injunction for which the Beast will be most remembered. Spence sees a coincidence here. German conspirators in sabotage Franz Bopp and Wilhelm von Brincken also used the Palace Hotel.5

  On October 27, a bright hot day, Crowley found himself behind lace curtains with “Juanita,” a “half-caste Mexican Indian prostitute; very nice, agreeable, and sensual.” Despite all his “sex feeling” being aimed at Hilarion, and despite its being undertaken against his “human will,” the opus was done for “proper magical reasons.” Object: “Magick Power. This has special reference to my wish to declare myself, and master California.” Crowley gave as the result of the IX° rite, “I went to see one of my introductions, and I think made a very big impression. I was full of life and glow, and felt myself radiating force in all directions.”6 An addendum of November 2 to that result says, “Everything looks as if this were going to work out A1.”

  Because Crowley made a point of distinguishing his San Francisco trip by his having proclaimed the Word of Thelema in himself in the Confessions, it seems likely that the “introduction” where he radiated power was linked to the “semi-public meeting” mentioned there, and if we bear in mind his desire to meet breakaway Theosophical Society head Katherine Tingley at Pont Loma, San Diego, just over a fortnight later, the introductions may more likely have been linked to theosophical and/or occult fraternities (perhaps assisted by Paul Carus) than German saboteurs. Besides, Crowley’s attempted espionage finds scant reference in his magical diaries; he kept the planes apart assiduously.

  Crowley was experiencing a moment of confidence in his assumption of the grade of Magus, reflected in his notes after reuniting with Jeanne on October 30. Asking her for the Object, Jeanne said she wanted “Nothing,” so Crowley replied, “Let us offer up our happiness to God,” a rite distinguished by a technical performance “better than any yet accomplished.” Jeanne seemed to have got over her demure resistance. “The Elixir, now granted freely and with understanding, was super-excellent,” to which Crowley added in Greek, “Glory to God the One Only Phallos,”7 doubt-less inspired by the regular symbolic representation of the Hindu Shiva, who, should he open his eye, dissolves the universe (“Nothing”). This was sexual gnosis, familiar to the Sethian Gnostics of late antiquity and resurrected from the ashes of his past karma by the Magus of Thelema.

  Jeanne conjoined with the Wild Beast again at the end of a hot day on November 1. The Object, “Hilarion’s Freedom.” From his record it appears they contracted a marriage, recorded on the back page of the original notebook. Judging from the astrological portents, Crowley was temporarily reassured that it looked “as if freedom would come through divorce, but without scandal.”8

  Four days later, the situation had somehow changed dramatically. Crowley noted the twelfth house of his “beloved wife and sister H” was “heavily afflicted.” He decided to take an “extreme course with the determination to bring permanent relief.”9 His magical intention was plain: to invoke the powers to rid Jeanne permanently of her husband, by such means to accelerate any tendency in Matlack Foster that would lead naturally to his death, and to remove any obstacle to Crowley’s formally marrying the Scarlet Woman so to establish the New Aeon afresh, after the Beast’s disastrous first marriage. Unfortunately, we don’t know what Jeanne thought of this specific course of action, except that, according to Crowley, she repeatedly expressed desperation to be free of her old man and had agreed to marry Crowley if it was God’s will. Nor do we know of the actual relations between the three of them or what might have taken place between Matlack, his wife, and her lover.10

  At 2:12 a.m. in San Francisco on November 5, Crowley found himself with a notable—Crowley says “brilliant”—actress, French American Myriam Deroxe (“admits 27 is about 35 at a guess”). Very dark, tall, strong, curvaceously hipped and “excessively sensual,” she was, he wrote, “an expert in every vice and addicted to every drug.” Surviving photos of her as Hermione in Andriomaque or as Vendramine in Bianca Capello (The Theatre, 1910; 1912) echo Crowley’s findings. One doubts if she was aware of her latest role in Crowley and Jeanne’s family drama, with a hint of “Clue” about it.

  The rite’s Object Crowley put in cipher: Θ . . . 40 . . . Φ. Given everything else in the context, the Greek theta almost certainly stands for thanatos, death; the 40 is the number of the Hebrew letter mem (M), and the Greek phi stands for F: “Death . . . M. F.” M. F. is Matlack Foster. There are plenty more clues. After “closing the temple” he went away at 3:15 a.m., continuing the mantra Θ.Î" . . . O.M.Φ. He then, employing goetic magic, invoked (Hebrew letter tav, T or Th) by (figure of seal of Solomon) “using the proper names, and that also of [Hebrew aleph], the notorious angel appropriate.” That archangel was Azazel, Hebrew angel of death. “This I repeated outside the apartment of the person indicated; and I further invoked [figure for Saturn] to protect my beloved Hilarion.” Crowley and Deroxe inhaled ethyl ether (diethyl ether) and took cocaine. Plunging his ring into the Holy Book “Thelema,” he found the words “a drop of the poison of eld,” so there can be little doubt as to what he was up to.

  Fig. 19.6. Myriam Deroxe, actress, modeling furs in 1911

  According to her diary, Jeanne spent the later part of that day with her husband, observing, from a train presumably, “long ledges of rock running into the sea from a forest of gnarled cypress and cedar. Wild crags, covered with sea fowl, and lazy seals,”11 somewhere between San Francisco and Salinas.

  She does not mention that at the end of that day (November 5) she enjoyed a secret tryst with her lover who had headed south from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, by the Bay of Monterey, to see the big trees and get close to the nature he loved, wild and free. His account of their meeting outside the town limits is extremely romantic.

  I snatched a meal in the town and walked out in the gloaming. My sweetheart was waiting for me in the dusk just beyond the town limits. “How glad I am you have come,” she whispered. “Let us walk together to the grove. You shall sleep on my bosom all night, beneath the shadow of the giant sentinel whose spear points salute the stars.” My sweet-heart wove herself about me, an intoxicating ambience. Drunk with delight I strode through the silence. It must have been sheer luck that I found the grove, for one cannot see it from a distance, at least on a dark night. But I walked straight to the clump and threw myself down dog-tired and happy beyond all whooping. I gazed awhile through the tangle of branches up to the stars. They closed. I slept. At dawn, I woke refreshed, had breakfast in a cabin hard by and wandered back to the railway. I had had a perfect holiday from the Spirit of America! The fresh morning air became articulate and whispered a sound in my ear.12

  The sound became a poem about the experience, “At Big Trees, Santa Cruz,” composed while the Fosters headed south for Santa Barbara, about ninety mile
s north of Los Angeles. Jeanne’s diary comments innocently about ranches and farms in the Salinas Valley and south of Monterey. On the seventh the Fosters were in Santa Barbara writing up the wonders of nature and the character of the towns she and Matt had witnessed on their journey.

  We know from Crowley’s diary that the day following she was in Los Angeles, with the Beast, for at 11:27 a.m. they performed their sexual rite in thanks to God.13 Crowley thought little of the hub of the movie industry, dispatching it summarily, “having been warned against the cinema crowd of cocaine-crazed sexual lunatics, and the swarming maggots of near-occultists.”14Plus ça change, perhaps . . .

  Crowley retired briefly to the hills north of the city where, buoyant with sudden optimism, or needing an outlet for pent-up frustration, he ran tirelessly from crest to crest, like Hermes carrying an urgent message from Olympus, composing poetry in praise of Hilarion while gazing up to the skies, and down on Hollywoodland.

  D. W. Griffith, director of The Birth of a Nation, had been up to the San Francisco Exposition himself. So impressed was he by its Tower of Jewels that he wanted the Italian artisans who worked on it to rebuild Babylon, appropriately, on the corner of Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards. Most of the Italians had already returned to Italy, but three who remained found themselves in Los Angeles working on the epic movie Intolerance (released in 1916) in which the wickedness of Babylon was reincarnated on the most extravagant set ever seen in California. Surely Crowley had missed something here. One wonders who had warned him against the cinema crowd; he enjoyed much of it enough in later years, and it is reasonable to assume that his relations with Myriam Deroxe might qualify in objective eyes for the somewhat hypocritical invective he leveled at the dream academy. For one who could tolerate practically everything, he was pretty intolerant himself. But, to give him credit, he was always willing to be enlightened and adapt his thoughts.