Crowley could now concentrate on his Great Magical Retirement. “I was thus able to enter into direct communication with the realities of existence instead of conducting them by means of symbolic gestures.”4 He intended to go “all out” to penetrate the mysteries of the Grade of Magus. But first, he had to face a most unexpected new self who emerged through his veins, biceps, and mind.
In New York he had taken six “doses” of the “Elixir of Life and the Universal Medicine”: his designation for preparations emanating from the Juventutem alchemical operations. “And then the fun began!”5
To his utter amazement, Crowley found himself erupting with physical energy. He had always enjoyed impressive physical flexibility and power of endurance, but had never been physically strong in the “arm-wrestling” or heavy-lifting sense. Now he found himself wielding an axe like a Viking stalking the forest that lined the lakeside, making short work of felling a tree and trimming a twenty-two-foot log. Stories quickly spread among locals of the “hermit with superhuman strength.”6 Such was his activity that Evangeline Adams dispatched to him an indignant letter after neighbors complained that he’d dammed the lake and obstructed traffic! He might have cursed the lake, but he never dammed it. He just made a port to tie up his canoe, which he used to explore the lake and its islands and for fishing and reading. Not only was the man’s body affected by what he considered the action of the magick, but his mind also changed. He felt like a boy again, all action, all vivid hope, with intellectual pursuits a bore, and reading a drag. He made a contemporary note on July 6 concerning a transformation that lasted some three weeks.
The Juventus experiment must be regarded as absurdly successful. I have all the symptoms of sixteen and even earlier—great physical restlessness and appetite for hard, athletic work—also the vague aspirations and heedlessness of time—utter disinclination for mental work, too, as at that age. Further, I seem to have created in my aura all the conditions of my own youth. I spend the day playing at camping out; I sail a canoe, I explore islands, I build breakwaters &c &c. I am living almost entirely on milk, yet I have no tendency to get fat, have indeed got much thinner. But the mental lassitude and devil-may-careishness is very marked indeed. Writing letters is a bore. I have also quite the boy’s sex feeling. I think it is well I did only six operations, or I might have wanted a wet-nurse and a toy train!7
He had been “playing with fire” and learned a life lesson, for what comes up must come down. But before he did, Crowley spiced up the physical with the psychedelic.
DR. CROWLEY THE NIGHT-TRIPPER
His next conflagration was purely symbolic, though entirely natural. Three days before the Battle of the Somme was launched in northern France with more than thirty thousand British, German, and French troops killed or wounded in a single day of hell, American holidaymakers wandered balmily about Pasquaney, and Aleister Crowley took two hundred drops of peyote in a chocolate base preparation and proceeded to “trip” his way more or less gently through the summer’s evening. It was June 28, 1916.
As the clarity and burgeoning energy of the Lophophora cactus’s active ingredient began to transform Crowley’s powers of vision into the resonantly magical realm, he gazed, and gazed profoundly, at a great tree he had cut down. Every part of it glowed with significance: a crystalline focus linked directly, indissolubly to the poet’s vigorous inner fire, the invisible fire of spiritual perception that heals the rift between subject and object. The sight of the log, no, the log itself, opened in his mind as the peyote cactus wave opened doors of perception.
The fork of the tree: Was it not truly marvelous, “like unto the thighs of a Goddess”? He lifted the thighs onto a stone: elemental. And was there not another trunk, also with a fork, but smaller: A divine Phallus, longing for its purpose? This he placed between the thighs, and then by “magick art,” the one that made primordial man free, the gift from heaven of man’s red fire, he enflamed “this giant copulation.”8 Oh what a deep, blood red that was, the feathered ash of volcanic creation, the shimmering, glittering red of the Scarlet Woman alive in lustful knowledge. One might think of Jim Morrison’s prophetic wish uttered over half a century later: “We need great, golden copulations.”9 Did it take two world wars and the fear of a third to make this little step in the United States?
As the flames kissed and caressed the glowing symbol in the warm, close, intimate evening, “the Phallus became as the head of a great serpent, even the eye and ear marked aright, and he visibly taking pleasure in his kisses to that mighty Vulva. Last he fell exhausted, and the head being burnt through, I did erect the shaft against that mighty Love; then they glowed and flamed right gleefully together; even unto this hour.” The hour was 10:30 p.m. Soon the stars’ silver life: the web of heaven.
Then I realized the date today: it is June 28, 2016.
He awoke, a century ago, early Thursday morning, took breakfast at five, and found that he was still in the mood, as was the previous evening’s creation. “The great copulation is still glowing red, the Phallus almost eaten through below the glans, yet still erect and joyous.”10 All senses of color intensified, the idea lived and breathed like flesh to the spark of touch. Crowley had found his symbol for all he stood for: Man, erect and joyous, giving all for all to give; a mighty hot love for the god and the goddess. For Crowley, incarnate cock of the gods, the suppression of Man’s True Will was the cause of the orgy of blood in Europe. Misdirected energy of love became violence: passions thwarted, hatred born. He was in the war, but not of it. And that part of him that was in it, even independently of himself, was about to bite back at him with a vengeance.
ANOTHER CROWLEY, ANOTHER PLACE
The trouble with being a legend is that the legend has a life of its own. Such is the life of the star on Earth.
“I enclose for your notice a long article in the Rheinisch-Westfalische Zeitung of 29 June,” began a letter about propaganda in the neutral Netherlands dispatched on June 30 to Consul General Ernest Maxse (1863–1943) at Rotterdam’s British consulate, Calandstraat 24, by the British Daily Mail’s new correspondent in Holland, Charles Tower. “It is inconceivable,” wrote Tower, “that Crowley should have been permitted to come to London. . . . He has also had in past years a fairly odiferous moral reputation.”
By July 11 the letter had reached the foreign office, where one official wrote to another, “I have seen one or more of the Crowley articles, in the Continental Times I think. As the HO [home office] had a copy of 9117 [filing code for internal Crowley enquiries] perhaps they would also like a copy of Mr. Towers’s reminiscences of Crowley’s savoury [sic] past.”11 The official suggested getting details from the home office. “Some spicey [sic] past history in the hands of Captain Gaunt might be used to show up this renegade to the American public. We should also like to find out if there is any truth in the story of his visit to London.”
According to journalist and author Roger Hutchinson, who investigated relevant files, the home office received a letter on July 18 from Foreign Office Minister Thomas Wodehouse Legh, the 2nd Baron Newton, saying that Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey had instructed him to send Towers’s letter for the “confidential information” of Mr. Secretary Samuel (Home Secretary, Herbert Louis, 1st Viscount Samuel). “Sir Edward Grey would be glad to be placed in possession of any facts in regard to the past history of Mr. Crowley which may be in the possession of the police.” The home secretary duly put New Scotland Yard on the job.
On August 26, Detective Inspector Herbert Fitch informed his superintendent that “it appears that the alleged visit by Crowley is merely a piece of bluff on his part to obtain money and cheap notoriety.” Superintendent P. Quinn then sent their full report on Crowley up to 1916. It contained the story (inaccurately stated) of the “widow’s £200,”*118 as well as police observation of the Rites of Eleusis public performances of 1910. We also learn from it that in April 1914 “information was received by the police that Crowley was committing certain acts of indecency in
the presence of females, in a room occupied by him at 2, The Avenue Studios, 76 Fulham Road, where he was visited by a woman named Waddell.” There was “a kind of service at which incense had been burnt.” The report also mentions a letter of complaint to the director of prosecutions from a Parisian correspondent over an issue of Crowley’s “magazine” The Equinox. As the book was priced over five shillings, no action was taken (an intriguing detail—you wouldn’t want the servants reading it!).
Quinn continued the somewhat vacuous report with a letter from the Mayfair, 174 Bond Street, saying a representative of theirs had returned from New York where Crowley “was not doing very much work in New York, but was closely associated with a woman of the fortune telling class [Evangeline Adams].” The report proceeded from this devastating revelation to the Statue of Liberty incident of July 1915.
The report went by Home Office Under Secretary of State to the foreign office on September 13, 1916, for Sir Edward Grey’s information. A minister named Newton added a note on September 14: “Send a copy to Captain Gaunt (by bag) for such use as he may be able to make of the information at any suitable opportunity. Truly the Germans are unfortunate in their selection of British subjects to further their propagandist ends!” He added, “Should not A. Crowley be notified to the Passport Department, permit Office, &c., in case he should attempt to come here, or having got here, to leave again?” “MWK” also added to the “Confidential” report: “If it goes to Captain Gaunt (as I think it should) he must be cautioned not to give his source of information in any way. I think we can trust his discretion and certainly inform Passport and Permit authorities as suggested.”
Thirty-four years later, Gaunt informed Crowley’s coexecutor John Symonds that he “went over to London and had a long talk with Basil Thomson at Scotland Yard and I preached ‘Let him [Crowley] alone, I have got a complete line on him and also the Fatherland.’”12 He obviously remembered the report but not the facts. He should doubtless have said that he had a line through Crowley on the Fatherland, but there were doubtless aspects of Gaunt’s knowledge and activities unknown to us. He certainly never used any of the report to blacken Crowley in the latter’s lifetime, which he had good reason for doing had it not become reasonably clear that Crowley had his uses.
All this to-ing and fro-ing of paperwork took place in London while Crowley underwent his Great Magical Retirement in Bristol, New Hampshire. In early July he was having weird dreams, often with horrific elements. He might have had a good “trip” in his conscious mind, but his unconscious was throwing up all kinds of material, from the optimistic to the sadistic. The dreams were as colorful as occasional hallucinatory effects of mescaline, and perhaps there was a relation between them and his taking Anhalonium lewinii (as the peyote cactus was still called). His imagination was certainly more colorful than usual.
On July 3, Crowley concluded the Magus initiation was “utterly unlike all others. For one thing, it takes up one’s whole life. One is puzzled; because Chokmah is Masloth, right away from [the] planets.”13 Crowley was reflecting on the planetary and tarotic attributions of the Qabalist’s Tree of Life glyph as understood by the Golden Dawn.
“Masloth” refers to the sphere of influence of Chokmah—or Hokmah, Hebrew for “wisdom.” Hokmah is the second sephira, the second divine emanation after Kether, the “crown,” in God’s Self-projection. On the Tree of Life, Hokmah is the sephira corresponding to the grade of Magus: the direct source of the Magus’s wisdom. Luminous Hokmah radiates, and the sphere of Hokmah’s influence is in Masloth, the “Heaven of Assiah” (recall Christ’s dictum “the kingdom of heaven is nigh and within you”). In Qabalistic theory, Assiah is the sphere of action: the material world, on which the Magus may, through Wisdom, effect his will. Masloth is the zodiac, the starry heaven, wherein Masloth disposes the forms of things derived from God’s Wisdom. Thus Masloth is, as Crowley noted, “right away from the planets.” Hokmah’s sphere of influence went beyond the ordinary determinants of his conscious mind.
Crowley had in mind his visionary experience with “The Cry of the Sixth Aethyr which is called MAZ” that took place at Ben-S’Rour, Algeria, on December 10, 1909. Between 7:40 and 9:40 p.m., he had “entered” consciousness of that particular inner-plane aethyr and been granted advanced knowledge pertaining to the grade of Magus (see Liber 418), though at the time he was insufficiently adept to grasp its import.14 Now that he was being initiated, he found its implications dizzying.
On July 4 an insight came to him that helped to make sense of the topsyturvy world he’d experienced since arriving in New York in 1914. By gematria, Chokmah (or “Hokmah”) is 73. He decided a “Chokmah” day was 73 Earth days, so counted multiples of 73 to work out essential stages in the initiation. This insight came parallel to his calling the key women involved by animal titles. Thus, from leaving England to meeting the Cat and Snake “Officers” (a preliminary silence and solitude) was three times 73 days. The Cat Officer was with him three times 73 days. He was essentially alone for one Chockmah day before meeting the Monkey, who had, to date, been with him one Chokmah day. Funnily enough, the days do work out more or less in the main, and his magical progress up to Leah Hirsig’s taking her place in his life can be so measured up to a point, as long as one does not want absolute precision or mind a few anomalies. One has a sense of Crowley’s acute inner disorientation in this matter and the concrete will to find the way through it.
The tendency to cross planes from occult symbolism to events on Earth is not at all illicit in magick, which is, after all, based on the Hermetic principle “As above, so below,” but there is every danger of being carried away, as Crowley knew only too well. Nevertheless, one suspects this cross-symbol multiverse of multiplying multiple correspondences, encouraged by Qabalah, and the tendency of the mind to connect meaningful series, reached a point where skepticism might have been applied more assiduously when it came to Crowley’s receiving on July 11 another message from accountant C. S. Jones (formerly “Frater Nemo” = No one) in Vancouver. This time the Magus cottoned on to what Jones had hinted at earlier when Crowley had “a blind fit on” arriving at Bristol. Jones’s message came as another signal.
During the fortnight after the peyote trip Crowley had reflected deeply on the vision of the Sixth Aethyr. His conclusion: “A Magus must burn up the whole of his karma. As a Master of the Temple he is all-Receptiveness; as a Magus all-Activity. True, he pours out Himself in a certain mould or form according to His Original Nature. But this Nature has been masked by karma. This is symbolized in Liber 418 by the burning of the Book T. to ashes.”15Liber 418 is the record of Crowley’s access to the thirty aethyrs, first in Mexico in 1900, afterward in the Algerian desert in 1909, culminating in his own emergence from the Abyss as Master of the Temple.
It is interesting that at the moment of receiving Jones’s news of successful emergence from the Abyss as 8° = 3▫, Crowley decides the event “removes a bar to my full grade of 9° = 2▫.” Crowley wasn’t likely to tolerate his bright pupil from doing anything but following him!
The Book of the Law had spoken of “one” that “cometh after” (AL III: 47). This “one” would discover the “Key of it all,” and Jones’s probationer’s motto was “Achad,” meaning “One.” So was Achad the one coming after the Beast? If Jones came after, he was following, and you can’t follow something that is not ahead. Naturally, Crowley was ahead of the process, though proud of Jones’s achievement with Crowley’s method.
THE BOOK T
Crowley’s problems with assuming the grade cannot be grasped without attention to the “Cry of the Sixth Aethyr,” which, out of context, appears incomprehensible gibberish.
The message from the consciousness pertaining to the aethyr introduced its audience to the “Three Schools of Magick” (white, yellow, and black). These were, symbolically, the three Magi who followed the star to the birthplace of the Child. The Black School is that of pure skepticism. “For the Black Brothers lift not up their h
eads thus far into the Holy Chokmah, for they were all drowned in the great flood, which is Binah [sephira of Understanding], before the true vine could be planted on the holy hill of Zion. . . . And although I be truth, yet do they call me rightly the God of Lies, for speech is twofold, and truth is one.”16
“None shall pass by me except he slay me, and this is the curse, that, having slain me, he must take my office and become the maker of illusions, the great deceiver, the setter of snares, he who baffleth even them that have understanding. For I stand on every path and turn them aside from the truth by my words, and by my magick acts.” Moses, Buddha, Lao-tzu, Krishna, and Jesus and Osiris and Mohammed “all attained to the grade of Magus, and therefore were they bound with the curse of Thoth. But, being guardians of the truth, they have taught nothing but falsehood, except unto such as understood; for the truth may not pass the Gate of the Abyss.”17
Crowley’s ideas about his karma being burned up and the ash placed in an urn came from a statement from the Sixth Aethyr. “Now I perceive the Temple that is the heart of this Aethyr, it is an Urn, suspended in the air, without support, above the center of a well. . . . But the Urn is the wonderful thing in all of this; it is made of fixed Mercury; and within it are the ashes of the Book Tarot [“T”] which hath been utterly consumed.”
Crowley found this corresponded to the following sentence in one of his “Holy Books,” Liber 156 (verse 16). “Nor shall the aeon itself avail thee in this; for from the dust shall a white ash be prepared by Hermes the Invisible.” He concluded that the ash was the past karma of the Magus, for “Tarot” is the lore of destiny. Crowley found a symbolic parallel in the Acts of the Apostles account of Paul and Barnabas being recognized as Jupiter and Mercury (Acts 14:12; 19:19). This he took for Kether and Hokmah visiting—that is, inspiring—Ephesus, City of Diana (“Vesta,” the Virgin), corresponding to the third sephira, Binah (Understanding), followed by the worshippers burning their books on magick.
Aleister Crowley in America Page 44
