Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  But then, was not the “Urn” of the Sixth Aethyr suspended in air and made of “fixed mercury”?—mercury made solid, cold as a fish, to steal the life, or passion, of the lion. To fix, or secure into suspension, the “volatile”—the lively but unstable alchemical new creation—it must attain perfect balance: its “word” free. Was it then necessary to identify with the Urn itself, not with its contents? To bring the lion—or old self, the “father” or self-will—to symbolic ash? The Simonian Gnostics had identified the burning bush that confronted Moses with the absolute giving of the self in love. And had not the Paris Workings of January and February 1915 led a surprised Crowley to identify Christ with Mercury—with the serpents of transformation on either side of the Hermetic staff, like the two thieves (Mercury!) about the cross?

  Crowley still did not feel that he had cracked the mystery of the grade, though it might seem to be staring him in the face.

  One thing had become clear to him on the afternoon of July 12. He should no longer “degrade” himself by working at anything save “the one thing: to preach my Law, either directly or by Art. In short, no more Vanity Fair, no more Stuart X, no more Miss Adams.” He added the cryptic comment, “As Dante said to me at the National Arts Club, ‘Canst not thou go into the street, and starve?’”30

  Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was of course the great Italian poet who never stopped loving his ideal, Beatrice Portinari, even after her death at the age of twenty-four. He used to see her in the street, at a distance, and even though she married another, he knew her to be his “salvation,” image of purity, and incarnation of the Love spiritual of the troubadours, his guide, his staff through all levels of creation. Why the National Arts Club at 15 Gramercy Park, New York? That was where Jeanne Foster took him, a place Crowley associated with fake artists, hangers-on, poets of the nonideal, the socially acceptable, infinitely conformable, clubbable denizens of the mutual admiration society. He wrote about his reaction with a few strokes of “imagist” idiom for the January 1918 edition of the International, under the title “A Poetry Society—in Madagascar?”

  The Poetry Society. St. Vitus,

  St. Borborygmus, aid! The thin screams fell

  And rose like spasms in some hothouse hell

  Peopled by scraggier harpies than Cocytus.

  Dull dirty décolletées dilettante!

  I sickened to the soul; above the babble

  Of the cacophonous misshapen rabble,

  Rose like a cliff the awful form of Dante.

  Colossally contemptuous, in airy

  Stature the iron eyes of Alighieri

  Burn into mine; their razor lightnings carve

  My capon soul. “What dost thou here?” they said:

  “Art thou not even worthy to be dead?

  Canst thou not go into the street, and starve?”

  Better die in the streets than surrender Beatrice for the company of the fakes; for there are no art fakes, only fake artists. Crowley was not one of them.

  On July 15 he ignored the recent rainfall and lit a bonfire. While lighting it he felt inspired by Psalm 40. “I waited patiently upon IHVH; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. . . . He brought me up also out of the horrible pit, and out of the miry clay and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. . . . Thus,” he noted, “both rest and motion are assured.” Crowley too would pray while he waited. And that “miry clay”—was that not America, he wondered, as raindrops dripped from the trees about him, threatening his fire? There was hope. “And hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God.” Now maybe he would write a new psalm, or new something. And to his delight, the bonfire defied the rain and “went splendidly of itself from the start.”31

  The next day he wrote an excellent article—“Good Hunting.”32 Indeed it is a great relief to read a part-refreshed Crowley writing about something he really cares about: not German submarines, but Love, Death, theater, cult, and religion. It begins with a gentle swipe into the nature of tragedy and comedy; it’s all down to hunting. Our ancestors got their jollies and their sorrows from stalking wild beasts. And the humor was the rendering of the mighty into the foolish: the beast looked so grand, but we, we were watching with our flint-axes, and we had him! And everyone laughs because we’ve brought home dinner and the tribe is happy. What heroism! Worth a song!

  Every great drama is a hunt of some kind, whether comedic or tragic depends on whether you brought the meat or the “meat” took a liking to the hunter and was hungry. Oh dear, and then the tragedy: no food to eat, all tears!—while the tribe across the valley are laughing because their hunt was successful. It’s a fine analogy and it works. Crowley then goes on to discuss what happened to a culture where the humor of the god dressed up, and served to die—eaten by the grateful tribe—became a wail of sorrow, when the great hunt of life became the image of man’s existential failure. What if man were perennial victim? Always, for life hunts him, as does love and death and he cannot escape. Ah me! It’s Buddhism: everything is sorrow. And the man of grief, acquainted with sorrows. All dressed up, only to die: the cloak, the crown of thorns, the weeping women. Only through death can man live; to join in the death of the savior and expect naught from the world. And so Crowley takes us beyond the tragedy to his Thelemic solution, where Death is a joy of utter love in dissolution and life to be lived with fervor and laughter, for eternal life is. “Good Hunting” marked a new beginning, and it did not stop there.

  But first there was the business of burning up the karma. Crowley finally settled on something he felt he could do that, at least if anything went wrong, only he would know. He took a leaf, or rather a verse, out of the very first issue of The Equinox. There was a poem, very effective too, called “The Wizard Way” that also explores the great, and perhaps only, themes of Love and Death and hunting.

  He had crucified a toad

  In the basilisk abode

  Muttering the runes averse

  Mad with many a mocking curse.33

  Crowley doubtless had Revelation 6:13–14 in mind also.

  And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.

  Crowley was mad all right, mad desperate to rid himself of something inside him that was making assumption of the grade of Magus impossible: something in his past, in his upbringing, and what had made that upbringing possible—Christianity.

  Crowley had with him several volumes of J. G. Frazer’s interminable study in religious myth and anthropology, The Golden Bough. Frazer was keen to show that the core myth of the Christian faith—that is to say, what constitutes Christianity’s appeal to the subconscious mind—was an inheritance of remote antiquity concerning a god that must die and rise again, or a human figure who must be dressed as a god, slain, and eaten as a magical rite: the religious “substitute” who as an offering to the gods, or god, undergoes what would otherwise be coming to the tribe. To avoid pain, judgment, death, sickness, crop failure, or other baleful happenings, a magical “switch” is made where a figure is dressed like a king, is treated as a king, and then slain, either as a king-god or priest. It is basic magical substitution, of linking things by likeness or symbolic correspondence: “sympathetic magic.” Thus, a crown means “king.” So if you “take the crown,” you become the king. The magic is in the crown and must be guarded; kings are ultimately disposable (similarly, presidents in a republic). In ancient Jewish tradition, for example, a scapegoat takes on the sin of the people as part of atonement rituals. The story of Abraham all but slaying his son Isaac in Genesis suggests the hapless “goat” was formerly the favored son of the tribal leader, offered to secure the favorable will of the deity. The ramifications are endless.

  Frazer explored rites and traditions of primitive
cultures and found similar themes enacted as magical rites throughout the world. For Crowley, his scientific approach to mythology—impossible for our medieval ancestors—explained much of the misery he encountered when after his preacher father’s death in 1888 he was placed in the hands of religious maniacs whose “mania” was not particularly noticeable to mid-to-late era Victorians. Young Crowley, and his general culture, had by degrees fallen victim, so to speak, of the cult of the “dying God.” Thus salvation was bought through suffering and death, through identifying with the slain deity in symbol, and/or in a compensatory afterlife. When we add to this the realization that Crowley also had with him at Lake Pasquaney a copy of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s hot-off-the-press, cutting-edge Psychology of the Unconscious (1916), and that Crowley was also a “natural” empathizer with Nietzsche’s philosophy that the dying God was dead indeed, along with Nietzsche’s famous dictum, “the god on the cross is a curse on life,” and we can start to see where Crowley was coming from.

  Nietzsche had seen a culture haunted by the specter of nihilism, brought about through decline in authority of religious dogma; Crowley also. Crowley understood that our species is psychologically and essentially disposed to be religious and that nihilism is a disease of the intellect subject to reason, tending to afflict students withdrawn from nature into the cloistered mind, or the acutely depressed. Alternative “rational” faiths may be embraced—socialism, for example (for humankind feels the need to believe in something)—or the complete reaction: fundamentalism; that is, denial of any crisis in religious authority whatsoever.

  Crowley had had more than enough of fundamentalism. It had rendered his mother’s point of view absurd and was shored up by outmoded beliefs about the universe, laced with aggressive, or suppressed-aggressive, philistinism. Because we now know that the sun does not die at night, or have to be resurrected in the morning by prayer (thanksgiving), it followed that spiritual religion should take a step forward with evolution of thought. He believed the passing of “aeons” simply marked a stage in awareness and ability and used the analogy of a child going from the stage of sucking to the evolved stage of eating. His syncretic system of Thelema offered, he believed, recovered principles required to mark this evolution. It did not mean an absolute destruction of what preceded it, but rather a fresh point of view, an enlarged picture appropriate to the mind enlightened by new knowledge. It marked a return to the perceived ancient principle of the Magi, that religion and science were one and the same. For Crowley, magick was an ancient fact; a, or even the way of life offering a path of initiation into truth according to capacity, optimistically and generously, but not foolishly defined.

  Crowley believed in sacramentalism, in symbolic acts manifesting willed intention. He believed in the hidden power of sex. Why did Christian culture not? It was the effect of the dying God. Sex was linked to death, the price of sin. Crowley shared Blake’s view that the figure familiarly known as Jesus was a spiritual liberator, a Magus extraordinaire with a transformative “word” and with a spiritual conception too far ahead of his time to be tolerated and that his followers split between those who could deal with it, and those who tried to make of “it” something in accord with the old formula (of the dying God), or with other existing or nascent rites of late antiquity. This split manifested in the Encratite movement that identified sex as evil and which “came over” the church, so that by the late third century “real” Christians were those who eschewed sex, and even women altogether, and those who were not committed to the doctrine should fear the flames of hell. The distinction made for bigotry and widespread misery. Furthermore, knowledge (science) came to be regarded with suspicion, and its subject, Nature, despised.

  Putting an elevated conception of sex back in to first Rosicrucianism and then the culture generally was central to Crowley’s aim. He understood that for this to happen a profound psychological scotoma operating deep in the world’s subconscious would have to be overcome. Such was the import of the New Aeon, and he believed the death throes of the old Aeon would be extremely violent in both West and East should spiritual evolution be resisted. He did not have to look far to see the evidence. As I write, the BBC is broadcasting “celebrations” of the centenary of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. What happened is still discussed in terms of “sacrifice”; the soldiers “died for us that we might live.” The dying God is still very much with us, there, and among the suicide bombers who would rather die and kill that they might “live” after their murderous “self-sacrifice.”

  First, Crowley would have to deal with the residuum of the old Aeon in himself, for he had been born and raised before the formal announcement of the Aeon had been made to him in April 1904 in Cairo, when he heard and wrote down the text of The Book of the Law. We might today consider his ritual as either insane or perhaps as personal therapy, like the classic “reject your father” Freudian routines to help neurotic or melancholic people come out from the shadows of past pains, long buried or haunting.

  STAUROS BATRACHOU

  Crowley dignified his strange operation with the Greek title above, meaning “the Cross of the Frog” (Liber LXX)—though a toad also sufficed. The idea was to identify the creature with the dying God and then to slay it: a prophetic act of magic. The trouble, as I see it, was a certain logical inconsistency. On the principle applied, that symbolically killing the atonement-earning Crucified would clear the way for new life, then it would appear the means to effect the new dispensation or cleansing of karma would itself be an application of the dying God principle, the very principle the rite intended to overthrow! Crowley probably saw the parody as sympathetic magic in reverse: to destroy like with like.

  It also does not seem to have occurred to him that his sufferings as a youth and afterward had made him what he was, for good and ill. Could he have risen to the grade without the attendant pains? Again, Crowley would doubtless answer that having trod the path, what had contributed to that end, was burned up and done with; none need follow it. Besides, he felt a necessity to undergo a deliberate mental shakedown, to bring forth his essential, not conditioned nature, and this peculiar act had the power of being at once absurd and, further in character with the grade, contrary to existing nature (the “curse” theme).

  So, on July 17, 1916, while the four-day Battle of Bazentin Ridge drew to a close with nearly ten thousand casualties suffered by the British Fourth Army, Crowley composed “the ceremonies proper to the obtaining a familiar spirit of a Mercurial nature, as described in the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine, from a frog or toad,”34 and in particular the ceremony of the assumption of the curse of the grade of Magus.

  According to the document, ceremonies would begin about 2:00 a.m. with “the Mystery of Conception” with Crowley representing a snake, because frogs are the proper food of snakes. A frog was to be caught in silence and the will affirmed to continue. “The Mystery of Birth,” at about 6:00 a.m., involved keeping the frog in an ark or chest (representing the “virgin’s womb”) until noon, when the “Mystery of Baptism” called for the chief officer to approach the chest with gold, and frankincense and myrrh if possible, releasing the frog to a quilt covered by a net and intoning words of baptism in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and, sprinkling water, naming it Jesus of Nazareth. “The Mystery of Worship,” on paper at least, involved visiting the frog, asking it to perform miracles while offering words of worship, yet secretly carving a cross to crucify it.

  Then we come to the psychological guts of the mystery, the so-called Mystery of Trial slated for 9:00 p.m.

  Night being fallen, arrest the frog, accuse him of blasphemy, sedition, and so forth in these words: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Lo, Jesus of Nazareth, thou art taken in my snare. All my life long thou hast plagued me and affronted me. In thy name—with all other free souls in Christendom—have been tortured in my boyhood; all delights have been forbidden unto me; all that I had has been taken from me, and that which is owed to me
they pay not—in thy name. Now, at last, I have thee; the Slave-God is in the power of the Lord of Freedom. Thine hour is come; as I blot thee out from this earth, so surely shall the eclipse pass; and the Light, Life, Love, and Liberty be once more the Law of Earth. Give thou place to me, O Jesus; thine aeon is passed; the Age of Horus is arisen by the Magick of the Master, the Great Beast that is a Man; and his number is six hundred and three score and six. Love is the law, love under will.

  [A pause.]

  I, TΟ MEΓA ΘHPIΟN (“To Mega Therion” = The Great Wild Beast], therefore condemn thee, Jesus the slave-god, to be mocked and spat upon and scourged and then crucified.35

  Execution of sentence would follow. The victim was then to be mocked.

  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. I, the Great Beast, slaying thee, Jesus of Nazareth, the slave-god, under the form of this creature of frogs, do bless this creature in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. And I assume unto myself and take into my service the elemental spirit of this frog, to be about me as a lying spirit, to go forth upon the earth as a guardian to me in my Work for Man; that men may speak of my piety and of my gentleness and of all virtues and bring to me love and service and all material things soever whereof I may stand in need. And this shall be its reward, to stand beside me and hear the Truth that I utter, the false-hood whereof shall deceive men. Love is the law, love under will.

  Then shalt thou stab the frog to the heart with the Dagger of Art, saying: Into my hands I receive thy spirit.

  The unequivocal blasphemy was to be completed at 9:45 p.m. with “the Mystery of Resurrection and Ascension.”

  Presently thou shalt take down the frog from the cross and divide it into two parts; the legs shalt thou cook and eat as a sacrament to confirm thy compact with the frog; and the rest shalt thou burn utterly with fire, to consume finally the aeon of the accursed one.