Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  Crowley’s second Christmas in the States brought him an unexpected gift; perhaps he had at last found the “medical care” he felt he needed in the summer, in the hands of a “tart with a heart.” New York had been blurred by a flurry of snow on the evening of Christmas day. The following afternoon—a Sunday—was warm again, and Rita Gonzales, “quite crazy” for Crowley (“God knows why”), came to secure a magical rite for “Health.” Crowley’s comments about his condition suggest many things, among them that he was, in today’s parlance, a genuine sex addict. “What I need is recreation, friends, amusements, and if I don’t get them my reason will go. The continuous eyestrain is always instantly relieved by sexual intercourse. If H. were always with me, and I could lead the normal life of a man of my station, I should be healthy, happy, and virtuous. As it is, I’m going the way of the Artist! Magick must come to the rescue.”29

  But would it? According to the New York Tribune that day, French president Clemenceau in an article called “Young America and Old Europe” urged America to forget the past and look kindly on England, while news from England suggested that what Britain needed was new leadership; Asquith, it was held, should make way for David Lloyd George. Who could Crowley make way for?

  TWENTY

  Replacement Therapy

  While Crowley was in San Diego in November, the Fatherland refocused its propaganda, attacking what it called “the Morgan Syndicate.” According to Charles A. Collman’s editorial:

  Probably nothing has so accentuated the growing distrust of Wall Street throughout the country as the recent revelations that many of the great savings banks of New York City were again keeping vast sums of their “surplus funds” on deposit with the Morgan banks and trust companies, whose officers were using these tremendous accumulations of the people’s savings in widespread syndicate operations.1

  Propagandists aimed to get pro-German supporters and shareholders to protest to savings banks participating in the “Anglo-French War Loan.” The Fatherland ’s Christmas 1915 issue, with a cover adorned by a “German’s Christmas Tree” unsubtly emblazoned with decorations made of the names of conquered European cities, opened its attack on John Revelstoke Rathom, editor of the Providence Journal who was distributing anti-German leaflets while running agents to watch German embassy staff, and propagandists, in New York and elsewhere. The Fatherland ’s reaction would soon grow into a campaign against British intelligence in New York.

  Aleister Crowley’s contribution to the issue was an invented trip to Europe to gauge Allied morale, Britain’s in particular. It may be that Crowley “covered” his West Coast trip by a story about going to Britain, though that seems unlikely, especially if his “introductions” came through Viereck’s team. While Crowley’s “Behind the Front: Impressions of a Tourist in Western Europe” (first of a two-part series) perhaps exhibited a feeling he had gained the German confidence, the articles would spark serious trouble for Crowley’s associates in England when reprinted in the Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung and brought to Rotterdam’s British Consulate General’s attention on June 30, 1916, leading to British Home and Foreign Office investigations and, in 1917, the kind of police harassment that Crowley had specifically asked Feilding to fabricate back in summer 1915. Crowley’s communication with British intelligence was poor. In his defense, Crowley reckoned he was too “subtle” for intelligence officers to get a grip on his motives.

  This would have to change.

  In his articles on London, the fake visitor described fake impressions of imaginary zeppelin damage, concluding about one raid in the first installment, “Hundreds, probably thousands must have perished. It is not clear why this district should have been selected for attack; it seems probable that the zeppelins had lost their bearings. The effect on London was not great; Hoxton was a place which it was the truest kindness to destroy!”—a conclusion pitiless, schoolboyish, and absurd.2 It can have done the German cause no credit, with zeppelin raids cruelly inefficient. That is understandably not how British authorities would see it, however.

  The second part continued the blasé account of carnage and damage. He mentions Croydon, on London’s outskirts, saying that had the Germans hit his aunt’s house there, he should not have had to trouble himself writing the article. In extreme satirical mode he requested that the zeppelins give it another shot and included his aunt’s actual address, “Eton Lodge, Outram Road,” to help them. One wonders if Crowley asked his dearest aunt’s permission for this, or did he reason that his being a German propaganda asset (as far as they knew) meant that they might leave Croydon alone in the future?

  He claimed a propaganda method of reductio ad absurdum, but this piece reduced absurdity to the absolute dregs. The article says his “friends” in London could not understand his position at all. He says he quoted scripture: “They whom the Lord loveth; he chasteneth,” adding, “If I had been at the Foreign Office as I ought to have been, there would have been no war at all. England would have stayed out, and insisted on France staying out. Germany would have been given a free hand to deal with Russia. This policy would have been in accord with every English statesman since 1830.”3 Palpable nonsense. He says his friends were “too busy hating the government to listen to anything I said.” This would certainly have upset British diplomats. Where the article would have really bitten was in his faux analysis of national psychology under stress of war: calm on the surface, uneasy and fearful beneath would be the conclusion. There was nothing simply “absurd” about this. However fabricated, it was good propaganda, because it undermined confidence in Britain’s confidence. It is difficult, as with all disinformation, to tell “who” was really writing the article at all. From other comments confided to his diary later in the year, it seems Crowley’s “pro-German” persona was on “automatic.”

  As for his personal feelings, Crowley entered 1916 in a deep mess over fear of rejection by Jeanne Robert Foster, a rejection that looked all the more final as Jeanne reflected more deeply on what it was in life she valued most.

  A note on Crowley’s psychology: After the sudden death of his father when Crowley was only twelve, he became aware at some level that his mother rejected him emotionally. Maintaining distance, her attention was confined to habitual religious strictures of a repressed and repressive kind. He claimed in mature years to have “hated” her; but it was love-hate, and not a little Oedipal. Sex marked his sense of freedom from that rejection: a rejection of constraint. His teenage triumph was to have laid the housemaid on his mother’s bed. Unorthodox psychologist and sometime Crowley disciple Israel Regardie remarked in his deeply considered book The Eye in the Triangle (1970) that Crowley was a bag of neuroses and unresolved psychological complexes. His mystical and magical attainments were extraordinarily impressive, as were his developed powers of self-expression, but for all the advances on the spiritual or inner planes, in terms of consciousness attained, the same old tangled web woven into reactive character armor in the mundane personality persisted below, round in circles, often uncontrollably.

  Put simply, Crowley just couldn’t bear being rejected by those he loved, even while dangerously, masochistically courting rejection; the rest didn’t matter. When rejected (as his poetic prophecies were), his personality immediately reached for the neurotic’s armor plating to protect itself. He became the vengeful lord of judgment whose liberty was being curtailed: the spoilt child lashing out. For a being who had, in order to become “Master of the Temple,” allegedly “destroyed” his ego—that is, no longer identified himself with the ego complex—the residuum of personal desires and neurotic forces presented a persistent pressure (temporarily assuaged through sex), for it was axiomatic for Crowley that mental health required letting them out. He might transcend the ensuing chaos in exalted trance, but then it was back to the machine and the nagging feelings appropriate to a human being who has lost, or fears losing, something he loves—and all this coated with a wild bravado and defensive-aggressive wit. For one who had destroy
ed his ego, he was persistently wrapped up in himself, and periods of “ego-lessness” might be equally described as subjective aeons of nihilistic indifference. It might be argued, “what is the point of spiritual advancement, if the mundane personality is not wholly redeemed?”

  The process of assuming the Grade of Magus exacerbated personal problems. Assumption of the penultimate grade in that magical system he accepted wholly necessitated ideal accomplishments. First, he was to be the bearer of a Word, a message that would overturn existing assumptions, as Gautama’s anatta (no soul) overturned traditional Hindu philosophical assumptions about the soul (atman). The Magus card in the tarot was numbered “I,” and that already looked forward to the ultimate attainment (“Ipsissimus”): being beyond duality. There could be no competing identities. The Magus had to identify himself utterly with the Word (in his case, Thelema = Will) so that he might say as a whole being, Thélème, c’est moi! Trying to work that out, or through—for he felt the essential initiation was taking place “above” his rational mind—would occupy much of Crowley’s inner life in 1916 and thereafter. His troubled love for Jeanne distracted him fundamentally from that process; she did not wish to go over to the strange territory in which he had chosen to develop himself. The pressure was too great, and she had alternatives.

  Crowley’s duty as a Magus was “Love”: to serve his fellow creatures, but it was a love impersonal. A Magus must be master of magick, meaning there should be nothing within him or beyond him to inhibit the True Will; the modern magician, he came to see, was one who dissolved complexes. To attain, he must leave the ashes of his former karma or accumulated spiritual balance sheet behind, in what he called the “Urn.” He must be reborn, and since that rebirth entailed a message the world had not grasped (else there would be no reason to utter it), a message that therefore seemed “contrary to Nature,” or the familiar course of things, the assumption of the grade involved also the assumption of the “curse of the Grade of Magus.” That is, he must speak, knowing he would be misunderstood; that he would therefore appear a sower of dissension and mischievous lies. He would appear to men not as he did to himself. “AC,” his mundane self, would be a machine, a vehicle of manifestation.

  Crowley was bringing innumerable problems into his life, and his task as Magus was to resolve them completely: a paradoxical aspiration, for following the general ethic of Neitzsche, Crowley believed the true artist must attempt impossibilities. That way greatness lay: spiritual transcendence in reality-facing embrace of life-as-it-is being the only thing worth living for, other than life itself. Did he then expect failure?

  There would be only four more rites of IX° magick with Jeanne in 1916. By the time of the last, on January 28—for a “pure heart”—the affair was all over bar the shouting. A session on January 12 was sullied by “genral depression caused by disappointment in the long absence of Soror HILARION.”4 The next occasion, on January 17, was also frustrated, “owing to general worry,” despite its touching Object: “I love you.”5

  These operations were interspersed by those with new pal Rita Gonzales, which, when not directed at acquiring money, were generously dedicated to “the well-being of Hilarion.”6 A notable operation was performed with Rita at half-past midnight on January 21, its Object desperate: “Hilarion back to me.” Crowley’s crazy confusion was indicated in the operational notes: “Some scoundrel—I suspect F[oster] himself—has sent a letter to F[oster]. and H[ilarion]. thinks I wrote it. Qualis gens stulta! [“What fools these men are!”]” Result: “I called H[ilarion] this P.M. (5:00). She spoke quite nicely, though she has not yet had my letter exonerating myself.”7 This was probably the letter referred to by Londraville above, telling Matlack Foster that his wife was living with a wealthy lawyer and was trying to poison him: an extremely desperate and foolish lover’s attempt to force a dramatic split in the marriage. Crowley added a P.S: “Camouflage. I wrote it.”

  In the event, Jeanne, perhaps fearful of what else he might do, called him on January 22. Just under a week later they celebrated their forty-third, and final, act of sexual magick. Crowley noted its necessary brevity, while praising a spontaneous and “orgiastic” quality; the Elixir: “most noble.” He wasn’t very sure its intended object—“a pure heart”—resulted. He was suffering, he wrote, “from curiosity and irritability and boredom. Otherwise I think I should be quite all right. But any IX° relieves the mental tension for a time.”8 Crowley needed sex to keep himself together, with or without Jeanne.

  He was in grim financial trouble. Despite January’s article for Vanity Fair (“Three Great Hoaxes of the War”),9 and a repellent disinformation piece, “The Crime of Edith Cavell,” for an undiscerningly omnivorous Fatherland, he was “flat broke.”10 A rite for “Money” with Rita on January 7 elicited the note: “Some arrived at once. Also I met a man who may help much.”11 This may refer to Crowley’s meeting financier Otto Kahn in the first half of 1916 with respect to getting in touch with British Intelligence in New York (see here), or it may perhaps be a reference to Crowley’s taking on one “Stuart X” as a client.

  The Confessions has Crowley returning from California to resume a life of “anchorless tossing” whose only new feature was “my affair with Stuart X.” Henry Stuart Clifford, a man with outspoken views on social economy, needed Crowley’s help in organizing his panacea for social ills. This transpired to be A Prophet in His Own Country, by one “Stuart X.” Even Crowley’s written introduction could not save the self-published work (Washington, 1916) from obscurity. Business with Stuart X would take Crowley to Washington where he also met establishment sculptor Paul Wayland Bartlett and London Times correspondent and British intelligence informant, Arthur Willert.

  Toward January’s end he chatted up one “Laylah,” a “small plump” African American girl who was a servant at the “house.”12 Which house, or indeed exactly where Crowley was billeted at the time, I know not. A sexual rite with her for “Money” Crowley described as “complete failure,” though he thought the week “less awful” for having borrowed $50.

  February opened with a rite for “magical Courage”—that is, “To live up to the Formula of my Grade”—with Rita. He felt it worked immediately.13 On February 4, Rita availed her services again for “Spiritual insight, especially into [the] Formula of my Grade.”14 Crowley grappled with antinomies between The Book of the Law, based, he believed, on natural law, and ethics of “loving and trusting” and “living in the sunlight” (the Aeon of Horus?), an unenviable dilemma. “Is a Magus to live ‘contrary to nature’ or not? Really, I have little doubt that the appalling character of His job is due to this metaphysical antinomy.”15 Crowley could be completely rational but was aware that the “spiritual mind” looked down on the workings of reason. His logic could be most peculiar as a result. Crowley’s mind was not as other minds.

  His conscious mind was still idealizing Jeanne Robert Foster at the end of February when he tried one last time a forlorn Object with Laylah: power over Hilarion. “Failure, I suppose” he noted, adding that it worked the “wrong way round, but Laylah hated LXXVI [Jeanne].”16Jeanne had the power. There may be a reference here to the “dagger incident” recounted in the previous chapter, which could make Laylah, not Rita, the girl in tears sent around to threaten Jeanne, whom Jeanne told to go to the devil.

  Crowley wrote to John Quinn from 25 West 44th Street on March 1, 1916, about a propective business idea, sixteen days before John Butler Yeats’s letter to Quinn complaining about Crowley’s threatening Jeanne Robert Foster with a dagger (see here). Quinn first replied to Crowley on the tenth, before receiving Yeats’s letter of alarm about Crowley.

  Dear Mr Crowley,

  I received yours of March 1st. I have been so dreadfully driven that I have not had a chance to acknowledge your letter before.

  Could you conveniently drop in to see me at my office tomorrow, Saturday 11th, at say four o’clock so that we can talk the matter over? When I know a little more of the facts I can exp
ress myself a little more definitely. If Saturday afternoon is not convenient, Monday afternoon at the same time will be all right.

  Yours very truly,

  John Quinn17

  On the same day that John Butler Yeats wrote to Quinn about the dagger incident (March 16), Quinn wrote again to Crowley about the latter’s scheme.

  Dear Mr Crowley,

  Referring to yours of March 1, stating that you were in touch with some people who were thinking of starting a high-class paper and that “you are spoken of for editor” and referring to your call, I beg to say that I have been thinking the matter over and feel that I do not care to endorse or give an opinion about the matter, the details of which I do not know. You need no certificate from me as to your literary ability or standing as a writer. Neither do you require any certificate from me as to your critical ability, or your ability, with proper financial backing, to associate writers of ability with you in the magazine. But there are so many factors connected with making such a thing a success, the financial thing, the personal thing, the kind of magazine to be produced, its style, the nature of the business end, so many things that I know nothing whatever about, that I must be excused from expressing my opinion as to whether you would make any such magazine a success.

  Yours very truly,

  John Quinn18

  By the end of March, Crowley had accepted the inevitable. An operation with a prostitute called Carter “to replace LXXVI” (Hilarion)19 was, as far as the Magus was concerned, a great success, because on April 15, 1916, Alice Ethel Coomaraswamy (née Richardson) entered his life in a most resounding fashion, an encounter preceded three days earlier by sex magick with another regular “assistant” of the period Gerda Maria von Kothek.