Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  So mote it be!

  And this ceremony shalt serve also as a ceremonial assumption of the Curse of the Grade of a Magus 9° = 2▫ AA.

  It all sounds shocking, and was intended to shock, to reach into Crowley’s unconscious: a deliberate break with the past. How seriously Crowley took it all though, or even how much of the written text was enacted on the plane of action, or was to be taken as a paradox, is unknown. One might judge the man mad, and in a sense he was, but he had not lost his sense of humor, and that, we may say, is what kept him sane.

  Noting the result of the composition, the intended acquisition of a “familiar spirit,” he wrote that a girl from a village three miles away requested to be his secretary—and she looked toadlike! As is often with Crowley: serious message plus leg-pull with twinkle. A diary note in The Urn for August 11 suggests that he may have enacted the rite in purely symbolic terms on the plane of action. “It is rather amusing after Operation of July 17 that I have now a stenographer exactly like a frog to assist me in the ceremonial slaying of Jesus in the [George Bernard] Shaw article.” Writing to C. S. Jones later in the year he said he would have to close the letter as “the frog-elemental whom I invoked has arrived, and I must slay Shaw and the slave god.” The Shaw he had to “slay” referred to the preface of playwright George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, just published in New York by Brentano’s, a copy of which Crowley had taken to the cottage with him.

  Shaw’s play about a Christian slave of imperial Rome saved by a lion predictably captured Crowley’s interest, but when he read Shaw’s preface, he was astonished. Shaw made it his business to offer his opinion on the Gospels, concluding that Jesus was originally a prophet of socialism, and that the religion that followed him was largely the work of followers. Jesus, a socialist? Crowley wasn’t having that, and he started to tear into Shaw’s string of assumptions with his profound knowledge of the Bible, a great deal of which he knew in the King James version by heart.

  What began as an article soon became a full, book-length treatise on the predominant religion of the Western world, known in manuscript as Liber 888, which was never published in his lifetime. This is unfortunate as it is a remarkable, truly liberated study, sane, logical, amusing, clearly expressed, and often profound. It is Crowley’s considered view of Christianity, and it is important that we consider it.

  But before we do, an anecdote: one of Crowley’s. Many years ago I was going through his papers in the Warburg Institute and found a hurried note, pencil-written in Crowley’s handwriting. It recorded a brief interchange that took place when passing George Bernard Shaw by in the streets of London.

  CROWLEY: “Still posing as George Bernard Shaw?”

  SHAW: “But I am George Bernard Shaw!”

  CROWLEY: “Exactly.”

  Crowley knew his prey.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Crowley on Christ

  I believe in Charles Darwin Almighty, maker of Evolution; and in Ernst Haeckel, his only son our Lord Who for us men and for our salvation came down from Germany: who was conceived of Weissmann, born of Büchner, suffered under du Bois-Raymond, was printed, bound, and shelved: who was raised again into English (of sorts), ascended into the Pantheon of the Literary Guide and sitteth on the right hand of Edward Clodd: whence he shall come to judge the thick in the head.

  I believe in Charles Watts; the Rationalist Press Association; the annual dinner at the Trocadero Restaurant; the regularity of subscriptions, the resurrection in a sixpenny edition, and the Book-stall everlasting.

  AMEN.

  ALEISTER CROWLEY,

  “THE CONFESSION OF ST. JUDAS MCCABBAGE”1

  The quotation above appears on day eleven of “John St John,” Crowley’s diary of a magical retirement spent in Paris in 1908. Pregnant with witty commentaries on spiritual experiences he underwent in the City of Light, the above moment represents the tongue-in-cheek intellectual credo of a liberally disposed rationalist and scientific skeptic. But make no mistake, Crowley worked with a conception of God. For him, what we call God is man’s inmost ideal, “Adonai,” man’s innermost fire, and this spiritual center corresponds potentially, if not consciously, to every aspect of the universe. In theory one can attain “cosmic consciousness.”

  Crowley’s idea of pantheism recurred to him on the eleventh day of his Parisian retirement, after practicing raja yoga and reflecting on paintings by Raphael and Fra Angelico. He noted the “grossness of the Theistic conception” revealed in even great painters’ attempts to express divine being in anthropomorphic images, concluding, “How infinitely subtler and nobler is the contemplation of

  The Utmost God

  Hid i’ th’ middle o’ matter.2

  Crowley recognized this “Utmost God” in the traditions of Jesus’s spiritual teaching, but agreed with G. B. Shaw that whatever the founder taught originally, or what he meant by it, followers had twisted it, being in various degrees unenlightened or insufficiently initiated as to essentials, symbols, and subtleties. In his masterwork Magick, Crowley repeated the idea, adding the critical pearl of gnosis (liberating spiritual knowledge).

  It [Thelema] is the Law that Jesus Christ, or rather the Gnostic tradition of which the Christ legend is a degradation, attempted to teach; but nearly every word he said was misinterpreted and garbled by his enemies, particularly by those who called themselves his disciples. In any case the Aeon was not ready for a Law of Freedom.3

  The world was not ready. Now, he believed, it was.

  The “will” that should “be done” was understood by Crowley as the “True Will,” inmost core of every Star. “Do that, and no other shall say nay” (AL I:43). In his complex testament The World’s Tragedy (1910), Crowley charged the Protestant reformation with rendering the Christian tradition even more unpalatable than Roman Catholic medievalism, with paper doctrines of biblical inerrancy, justification by faith alone, forensic atonement, predestination, puritanical sex phobia, all-masculine God images, materialist notions of the Holy Spirit, heaven and hell, and, above all, its intolerant apocalyptic hysteria, tied to what Crowley called the “sin complex,” that “there is no health in us,” combined with negativity toward much science, sense, and indifference in the face of Nature. His argument was not with whoever began the movement.

  I therefore hold the legendary Jesus in no wise responsible for the trouble: it began with Luther, perhaps, and went on with Wesley: but no matter!—what I am trying to get at is the religion which makes England to-day a hell for any man who cares at all for freedom. That religion they call Christianity; the devil they honour they call God. I accept these definitions, as a poet must do, if he is to be at all intelligible to his age, and it is their God and their religion that I hate and will destroy.4

  It has suited Crowley’s enemies to ignore the all-important qualifications adumbrated above, even when they have cared to consult the relevant texts. However, Crowley was more aware than most that every repressive doctrine had its source in a biblical text. The Bible excused doing horrible things. Therefore, people concluded that God was horrible, and one had best do things one was told because, if not, “God” might be more horrible still! Writing of his youthful attitudes, Crowley wrote in Confessions:

  I was trying to take the view that the Christianity of hypocrisy and cruelty was not true Christianity. I did not hate God or Christ, but merely the God and Christ of the people whom I hated. It was only when the development of my logical faculties supplied the demonstration that I was compelled to set myself in opposition to the Bible itself. It does not matter that the literature is sometimes magnificent and that in isolated passages the philosophy and ethics are admirable. The sum of the matter is that Judaism is a savage, and Christianity a fiendish, superstition.5

  Every sect used the “sacred scripture” to justify its position like opponents in sport consulting the rulebook. And that is exactly what Crowley perceived in George Bernard Shaw’s attempt to distill from the Gospels a message of socialist brothe
rhood and sharing out of “common wealth.” That is why his book’s original title was “The Gospel according to St. Bernard Shaw.” Shaw used the texts to serve his own purpose, like everyone else, and Crowley made it his task to show that by that token he could not only demonstrate that Shaw was hopelessly wrong about Jesus, but that everything liberal interpreters felt unpleasant about the more puritanical or fear-inducing forms of “hellfire Christianity” could be justified in the Bible and had no business being diluted to suit taste. Hence, Crowley insisted that the Bible, like all scriptures, should be regarded as a product of its time in the light of scientific, objective historical scholarship and variant interpretations presented in as balanced and unemotional a way as possible. He expected the time would soon come when scriptures were studied as one might other historically inherited literature, inspiring in parts for some, no doubt, but without the heavy hand of unimpeachable (that is, unimpeached) authority.

  As for himself, he took from scripture what made sense to him or accorded with, or illuminated, his spiritual experience and gave the “other fella” the liberty to do the same. However, on one thing he was personally sure: the fundamental formula of Christianity as practiced for the past two thousand years was ripe for evolutionary transformation in a new landscape, and he believed he had the key, take it or not.

  Perhaps Crowley’s basic problem in America, especially after his attainment of the grade of Magus made of him a kind of occasional preacher of Thelema, was that he probably underestimated the depth of America’s fundamental conservatism. The place might appear to change with bewildering rapidity, fads and fancies, political, architectural, and economic, even philosophical and artistic enthusiasms might rise, shine, and sink again, but underneath it all has pulsed the historic faith that carried many of the earliest migrants to the continent in the first place: the “rock of ages.” The “pilgrims” wished to worship freely in the way they wanted, and in peace, if possible. The country might have become a welter of different, sometimes competing sects; there might be the odd charismatic prophet, pied piper, nutcase, or an inexplicable event suggesting magic or miracle or spirits or ghosts, but underneath was always a bedrock of Christianity and the God of Jewish faith in some form or other. Hypocrisy, lip service, face saving was as endemic to the social polity in America as most other places. Conformity to the norm was the norm. One nation under God, and for most—even most Freemasons—that meant the God of the Bible, old and/or new testaments. Without the “one God” there was unlikely to be—so ran, and runs, the patrician fear—the “one people.” Note, for example, how practically every time an element of the historical republican mythos appears in an American movie, such as the figure of Theodore Roosevelt, or the White House, Abraham Lincoln, or the stars and stripes, and so on, the music always sounds religious, with deep cadences, codas, and harmonic tones redolent of biblical patriarchs. The “city on a hill” is Zion, and Arizona doubles as the Holy Land.

  If Thelema was ever going to make any serious headway in America, beyond the interest or devotion of a relatively small minority of born esotericists or bohemian artists, it would have to make some kind of positive gesture to the historic faith of the vast majority of the shifting population. Crowley, however, utterly tolerant of other people’s beliefs as he was, could never present his synthetic cultus as a variant on Christianity, or even himself as a reformer or evolver of the faith. He had a personal antipathy to the word Christianity, derived from youthful mistreatments, while historically and philosophically he had decided, like many academics, that Christianity was anyway heading for the cataract as an ethical and ecclesiastical system, and in this conviction, he was, to say the least, premature or arguably wrong. Having always the uncompromising mentality of the committed artist (and prophet!), there was simply too much esoteric and intellectual challenge in his system, besides which, Crowley’s personal enthusiasm for the enlightened, mystical paganism of late antiquity with its easiness with sexuality in religious contexts was simply too scary in appearance to secure respect in people who wanted to be good, comfortable, and saved. Crowley imagined people wanted public rites of corn and wine and a celebration of seasons, fertility, and things natural in a religious context; he might better have addressed the Native Americans, who at least would have grasped the pantheism, if not the Latin. America was heading toward Prohibition, not “Do what thou wilt,” and of course it goes without saying that had Crowley’s dynamic bisexuality become common knowledge, his cause would have been finished by force of prejudice regardless of anything else.

  None of this means, of course, that Crowley was misguided as to issues of truth in his case, but he was spitting in the wind if he thought his reception in America might be an improvement over that in England where religious convictions were concerned.

  In the light of all this it is important, as well as very interesting, to get a glimpse into his mind on the subject of the Christian faith and tradition, and his hothouse effort to respond to G. B. Shaw in the summer of 1916 near Bristol, New Hampshire, allows us to do precisely that.

  SHAW TAKES A PASTING

  Whatever problems Crowley might have been undergoing where neschamah (the spiritual mind) was concerned, his ruach, or rational mind, was ticking over with the calm precision of a Swiss timepiece balanced on the hood of a Rolls Royce. His arguments are crisp, clear, erudite, and thoroughly modern in the best sense.

  It is extremely painful to find oneself obliged to begin by a direct attack upon Mr. Shaw’s logic. “The record that Jesus said certain things is not invalidated by a demonstration that Confucius said them before him.” This is perfectly true, but it is a valid reason for talking about Confucius rather than about Jesus. [Shaw:] “It is the doctrine and not the man that matters.” In this case the doctrine should be argued on first principles. It is entirely beside the question as to whether Jesus ever existed, and it is therefore a rhetorical trick to associate the life of Christ with any such argument.”6

  Crowley writes as the man who studied classics and philosophy at Cambridge. This occasionally leads him astray. For example, with regard to the doctrine of Jesus’s divine parentage, Crowley makes the valid point about Hellenistic culture in the Roman Empire: “We are face to face with the fact that it was an invariable custom to honour any distinguished man by attributing divine parentage to him.”7 True, outside of Jewish culture, but plain blasphemous in an authentic Jewish context, unless Crowley was taking the view that Jesus’s being literal “son of God” was a belief foisted on legend by Gentiles. Crowley did not have the advantage of seeing the Dead Sea Scrolls from which he could have discerned that the messiah’s “sonship” of God was symbolic of the chosen king anointed, in analogous sense to the Christian belief that God is “Father” of all mankind. When Jews heard Isaiah’s messianic prophecy that a virgin would conceive and bear a son, they did not hear it—as do most Christians at Christmas—that “a virgin will conceive and bear God’s son.” Crowley is of course sound in stressing the cultural norms operating at the time of the Gospels’ composition. This he correctly brings to bear on the question of the “miracles” of Jesus: “The whole question of miracles depends, as will be later demonstrated, upon the psychology of the people among whom they are performed.”8

  Space obviously does not permit a full rehearsal of the enlightening discussion between the minds of Shaw and Crowley, so I shall list Crowley’s dominant points.

  Crowley shares a contemporary scholarly opinion that “Jesus Christ” is a “convenient title” on which has been hung the sayings and doings of a number of people, as David is credited with the collection of Hebrew songs we call the Psalms.9

  Shaw says, “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, is a sniveling invention, with no warrant in the Gospels.” On the contrary, says Crowley, read Matthew 11:29, or Matthew 21:5. The King “cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting on an ass”; “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5)10 This method Crowley uses again and again, persistently kn
ocking Shaw down with eloquent, superior knowledge of precise Bible texts.

  Crowley accepts the figure “Jesus” as an avatar. “He was playing a part, and he naturally accepted its limitiations.”11 “Jesus” makes perfect sense to students of Hindu religious philosophy and practice. “I and my Father are one,” for example, is a straightforward description of samadhi.

  Most people do not have a developed critical faculty and therefore fail to see contradictions in the texts.

  Crowley sees the arrest, trial, and passion of Jesus as plainly a magical ritual to give effectiveness to “god eating,” the partaking in the powers of a god, or God. People have always preferred to let the god, or a substitute, do the suffering for them. Being saved “by the blood” is a plain example of god eating, a magical sacrament to imbibe the virtue of divine power. The story of Jesus has been constructed consciously or otherwise around the lineaments of ancient magical ritual, with appropriate prophecies attached. This is how working cults operate.

  The “sin complex” is appropriate to a slave cult, or to people who have been enslaved mentally, physically, or both. “In the dark ages, every calamity was attributed by the priests to sin; and as such calamities were frequent, the spirit of the people was broken.” “The whole idea of sin and redemption is a direct metaphysical creation of the slave spirit.”12

  “When people are prosperous they do not want a Redeemer.”13 To “prosperous” Crowley should have added “youthful and healthy.” The old rich person may be most concerned about the hereafter as well as what is left behind. Besides, the canonical Gospels’ Jesus makes the very point that to ignore salvation for the sake of the world of time and space, and for the riches of the world etc., is to cling to sand, rather than spiritual rock. Crowley understood this (he held to spiritual values), but his Nietzschean “slave spirit” argument and realism ran away with him. Furthermore, prosperity can bring with it an unaccountable, perhaps atavistic realization that it “may not last,” inviting guilt (Crowley’s “sin complex”) and a desire to avert disaster by making “offerings” (such as passing a law to help homeless or unemployed folk). Crowley tends to lump all guilt into his sin complex. Is guilt always unjustified? Yes, if you’re doing your True Will, says Crowley! But there’s the rub. We are today more generally aware than many in 1916 of the irrational and debilitating nature of much guilt. Crowley’s position should be seen in this context, where the churches reiterated the biblical view that “none is righteous; no not one,” with its corollary: eternal damnation for sinners. He was operating in a world where many people were ashamed of their own genitalia and fearful of their own “sinful desires.” A lot of what Crowley has to say is simply modern psychology, somewhat ahead of its time.