Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  Crowley regards sacramentalism and the theory of transubstantiation as rational and effective. “It is also impossible to doubt that Catholics obtain real spiritual sustenance from the Host.”14

  The “end of the world” provides gratification for the revenge of the slaves; for the masters a cost-free way of suppressing efforts to “change the world.” Crowley reckons that it’s healthier, and more manly, to fight for your right!

  Crowley maintains that Shaw’s ignorance of the East makes him think, for example, that the visit of the “kings” (actually Magi) to Jesus’s cradle was obviously legendary, whereas Crowley says he has experienced similar things himself in the East and that the word king may there simply mean a local tribal leader or sheikh. Such men brought him gifts as he appeared to be a representative of the British government “in his own humble person.” Knowledge of the East is vital to understanding the stories in the Gospels. Much in the Bible is commonplace if you know where to go. Most importantly, Crowley maintains that every respectable yogi has his special rules of denial for followers, usually involving having no property, or giving up their coat, family, or whatnot, and loving one another as ministers of knowledge of God. Such rules are not intended as universal ethics but, for a specialist few, to concentrate the mind on the “kingdom of heaven,” the inner planes, or microcosm. Jesus conformed to this principle, knowing perfectly well that if everyone in the world abandoned nets, trade, finances, or families and homes, the world would dissolve into chaos. According to Luke, Jesus himself was funded by Joanna, the wife of Chuza, King Herod Antipas’s government minister. If Chuza had done what Jesus’s disciples were enjoined to do, there would have been nothing with which to buy the ass on which Jesus sat or pay for the room and victuals of the “last supper.” Judas was treasurer, concerned with how cash was spent. This evocation of Eastern customs, born of direct experience and understanding, constitutes one of Crowley’s most impressive arguments, as the world still grapples with the curious idea that socialism as a political creed has divine authority behind it. Crowley writes, “There are plenty of John the Baptists today in India. Take a dirty piece of cloth, a little turmeric, a lot of cowdung, and a pair of tongs; and you have him. He is a half crazy, half savage individual, brusque and violent in speech, impossible in manner, who practices all kinds of austerity, feeds on refuse, and is usually in a condition of more or less maniacal excitement produced by fasting, or the use of such drugs as opium or hashish, or both.”15 Every teacher has his particular secrets, usually received from a line of venerables before him. They are jealously guarded from those outside the band and communicated only to carefully chosen disciples. Crowley sees the activity of the Magus thus: “We now see Jesus in a totally different light. He is not only an orthodox revivalist, but a leader of what we should call nowadays a secret society.”16 Jesus was not a communist, and his injunctions were proper to one establishing a religious brotherhood. The empire’s need for a syncretic religion to unite disparate territories turned an esoteric narrative into a “religion for everyone,” whose very universality meant that most members would be judged to have failed from meeting the specialist standards embedded in the tradition but thrown wide open willy-nilly, without the original teacher’s guidance and discernment. “Jesus” would not have recognized himself in a modern, or indeed medieval, church.

  And what of “love your enemies”? “This is a fair statement of the ordinary rules for Hindu ascetics. The idea is that by becoming ahimsa, or ‘harmless’ . . . they will acquire immunity from the savagery of others. . . . The doctrine is not to be taken any further than this.”17

  Hellfire and damnation is intrinsic to the Gospels; there’s no getting around it, and the Billy Sundays of this world have abundant and unequivocal scriptural warrant for their most brimstone-ish threats. Except, have these passages of unforgiving punishment and annihilation not been removed from their original context, whatever that may once have been? Crowley offers biblical reference after biblical reference with a directness a Jehovah’s Witness would be proud of to make it clear that the modern preacher is quite right by his or her understanding to insist that “Jesus” was adamant that he was the sole and only route to salvation from coming catastrophe. There is no relativism in the apocalyptic narratives. It’s Jesus, or death. Take your pick. Crowley notes that uncompromising, insensitive extremism is frequently characteristic of small groups of religious enthusiasts in the East. A fearful people are easily enflamed. Many a guru has little care for the world; he’s given it up and he considers it as dust already. The “best of both worlds” is not his game.

  Crowley goes through most of the parables, deciding which have value and which are just referential to accepting Jesus as sole leader. Some of his summaries are deadpan amusing, such as Luke 12:16–21: “Do not accumulate wealth, but live like ravens or lilies”; or Luke 16:1–12: The Unjust Steward. Moral: Sauve qui peut.*122

  “You cannot convince any Eastern by reason. The Eastern bows to authority. Proving anything to him is a waste of time. . . . Take the well-known case of John Nicholson, who so impressed the natives of the Punjab by his executive power that some of them turned him into a god, and worshipped him. He, being a particularly pious Christian, tried to beat it out of them; but the more he beat them, the more godlike he appeared.”18

  Shaw says it’s a waste of time to suggest that Christianity stands or falls by whether the miracles were true. On the contrary, asserts Crowley, Christianity is at stake. “Remove the miracles, remove the prophecies, and nothing is left but a little doctrine, much of it contradictory, as has already been shown, and in any case explicable in a dozen ways besides that which appeals to Mr. Shaw.”19

  Crowley found the idea of a “gentle” Jesus, a forgiving kind of person, a wish fantasm, unjustified by many texts, such as “I come not to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34–5) among others. Hellfire evangelists know their Bible better than many scholarly critics. Crowley had been raised to take the Bible text at face value. There’s nothing wrong with divine love, Crowley is saying, so long as you don’t confuse that elevated idea with Christianity as revealed in the Bible. Most aren’t worthy of it, and besides, should not the Father have loved his “only begotten Son” enough not to allow his enemies to string him up and nail him down? That is, if you take the accounts literally. The point is that you can construct the religion you prefer from the same texts, which only suggests the disparate origin of the material. Christianity is no less a composite creation than a scarecrow.

  Crowley observes that certain texts have very definite signs of being written for “an extremely specialized class of persons.”20 John contains definite signs of kabbalistic knowledge, as does Genesis. He sees it as the speculation of a Gnostic or an Essene. Many today would agree with him.

  Crowley sees no basis for respecting common beliefs or the beliefs of common minds. “The common incredulity or credulity of the ignorant and prejudiced classes is simply not worth discussion.” Shaw says, “Belief is literally a matter of taste; but only among people who are so intellectually inferior that they have never taught themselves to think. Credible is a silly word. It only means ‘consonant with the main content of our knowledge of the Universe.’ Hence any fact which when established requires an extension of that knowledge is antecedently incredible.”21

  A Crowleyan prophecy: “Mr. Shaw imagines the Bible to be out of date, as he imagines himself to be superseding Shakespeare. How the twenty-first century will laugh! No; The Bible is great literature—in parts; and will stand as such while Shakespeare stands.”22

  Another, and for us, last prophecy. Crowley demolishes socialism (“Equal Distribution”) in three paragraphs. “Happiness comes with pride in what you are, unhappiness with wanting to be something that you are not. The discontent in England is principally the result of the intense social snobbery which prevails in every circle.” Crowley predicts the failure of communism (a year before the Russian revolution even began!). Inventions re
quire risk-taking capitalists out for profit after a sacrificial investment of money; “This is another reason why humanity would stagnate under communism.”23

  Paul, Crowley surmises, was obsessed with sex, so much as to make a sin of it, instead of seeing it as a perfectly natural human appetite like eating and drinking. “Where there is congenital incapacity we almost always find fanaticism. . . . We do not find the average man of the world is in any way obsessed by sex. It is the abnormal people who talk, and talk, and talk about it in a way which is nauseating even though it be so pitiful!”24

  Crowley has no problem with the idea that “Jesus” was an adept in the skills of the thaumaturge. He refers to his correspondence with Professor Elihu Thomson, who had made him aware that all phenomena are ultimately to be subject to electrical laws. Therefore, the yogi was someone with understanding of the conditions by which one state may be combined with, or supersede, another.

  Crowley sees how the existence of empires encourages universalist faiths based on syncretism. It happened in the Roman period with the emergence of Christianity and he sees Britain’s presence in India has brought about a universalist syncretic religious awareness, known as Theosophy, transplanted to Europe and America. Crowley himself was trying to distill the best quintessence of the Theosophical achievement and subject it to experiment on scientific lines, allowing for discoveries of new knowledge, bound to appear incredible until established.

  And this is the fundamental position of Crowley on Christ; that is, that the knowledge that became available to the Roman Empire, derived from Eastern sources, was consistent with its time sufficiently to be taken for adaption but in the process was itself adapted by the ignorance of the time. So long as the cosmography of the ancient world persisted, Christianity could travel on the same knowledge train as natural philosophy. Crowley’s point is that the train has now exceeded its travel companion, leading to a religious deficit. That new religious perspective will necessarily take in the timeless elements of ancient spirituality but will incorporate the pristine of the past into the vision of the future. What “Jesus” is thought to have accomplished may be achieved in principle today. The time has come, he declares, for a fresh religious vision in tune with science on all planes.

  Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. (John 14:12)

  And, it should be noted, in terms of comparative religious symbolism in its historical context, “Jesus” was understood in late ancient Egypt as “Horus,” anyway, the rising god of the sun; as Isis, like Mary, was the Mother of the god. “Hail the sun of righteousness!” And does not Christmas celebrate the “crowned and conquering Child,” reborn annually in the stable of the world?

  “Love, and do what you will.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Nothingnesswith Twinkles

  For some reason Crowley took a train from Bristol some 93 miles south to the stately city of Boston, Massachusetts, for the long weekend of July 22 to 23. There he found “Mercury on the spot,”1 which is to say he had thirty dollars stolen. Perhaps in ironic tribute to the kleptomanic god, the victim from outta town performed the IX° to the “Glory of Hermes” on the Sunday night with French-Canadian prostitute Marie Roussel. Marie, he noted, bore striking resemblance in face, form, and manner to risqué pianist, actor, dancer, and choreographer Maud Allan (1873–1956), whom he had met in late 1914.

  You have doubtless seen Maud’s exotic, sexy image on the psychedelic posters and albums dedicated to the first great American music festival, which is to say International Pop Festival held at Monterey in the Summer of Love (1967). She is the monochrome beauty whose near nudity is draped in pearls and silks, with hair like Louise Brooks’s, hips like Isis’s, and a come-on like Mata Hari’s. Ever fascinated by Oscar Wilde, Crowley, like most of the Western world who could afford it, had seen a great deal of Maud Allan in Wilde’s hit play Salome, with a shocking dance of the seven veils, which went truly beyond the veil, unveiling in the process the erotic fantasies of men and women of the age, Crowley being one of them. The English Lord Chamberlain had banned Wilde’s play in 1892, but the 1908 London production ran for two years, breaking box-office records. At one performance women constituted 90 percent of the audience. Word must have gotten out that Maud was bisexual, another fascination for Crowley, who had an affair with Maud, spoiled only, according to his diary,*123 by her “self-worship.” He dedicated a poem to her, praising “the zephyrs of her feet”; “For all her body is the Soul of Spring.”

  Fig. 24.1. Maud Allan (1873–1956)

  Unfortunately, in 1916, a rumored affair between Maud and Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith’s wife, Margot, got Tory MP and obsessive moral watchdog Noel Pemberton Billing sniffing into upper-class artistic goings-on that resulted in a prurient article published in 1918 in American-born antihomosexuality campaigner Harold Spencer’s paper Imperialist. It alleged that a Berlin-backed secret society had infiltrated Britain using homosexual debauchery to destroy the war effort. Hearing of a private performance of Salome, Billing targeted Maud Allan directly, accusing her and many others of membership in the “Cult of the Clitoris.” Billing’s outrageous, trumped-up perjuries and libels nevertheless convinced a prejudiced jury that Maud had no grounds for a libel case, and, in June 1918, Billing was acquitted amid triumphant applause. Maud never danced publicly again; she died in a Los Angeles nursing home on October 7, 1956. This was the kind of thing that Crowley was up against, and still is.

  Returning to the Adams Cottage on July 24, he spent the next day swimming before indulging, though very tired, in four “Myriam Deroxe pills.” You may recall beautiful actress Myriam from San Francisco. She devised a drug recipe: one centigram (cg) morphia, one cg opium, one cg Sparteine. Result: “Nothing!”2 But at least he had Myriam on his mind. Thinking of her on August 3, he performed an “orgiastic” autoerotic sex-magick act dedicated to “yoni,”3 regarding its successful fulfillment in a IX° with Marie Roussel, performed when back in Boston for the weekend of Saturday, August 12, whose own “object” was success with the Shaw article. Crowley then had magical sex with a man on the Sunday and Monday described in Rex as “sheer joy.”4 “Never dull where Crowley is,” friends used to say in London.

  Before returning to Boston, Crowley showed that he hadn’t entirely given up work for Miss Adams, for he spent all day of July 26 working on what he called the “Adams Cryptogram,” meaning, I think, that he was hidden in a writing she would publish as her own. He then went on to carve a phallic fetish that could serve as a dildo, single or double; Crowley’s sex aid would be worth quite a bit to someone today.

  On July 28, he took another peyote trip (400 chocolate-based drops of Anhalonium lewinii) at 5:50 p.m. The effects seemed to wear off by 7:35, but he noticed some unusual mental effects later on, such as analyzing trivial matters, or finding simple acts pleasurable, or when thinking of things that normally caused distress, dismissing them “like Jesus, with a jest.”5 He wrote letters easily enough though took “silly personal pride” in, say, his Greek knowledge, or his height, seeing himself as regards the Shaw work as “the ripe scholar and theologian, half patriarch and half don!!!” He didn’t realize it, but that’s what he might have been, had it not been for his coming into a fortune at twenty-one and, of course, being chosen by the gods to herald the Aeon and be its Word.

  On July 29, his worst fears about Ananda Coomaraswamy’s “care” for Alice Ethel came to fruition when he heard she had miscarried their child on July 12 while crossing to England. This, incidentally perhaps, was the very day the globe of fire had appeared in his room and touched his hand. Crowley calmed himself by carving and painting fetishes, gazing occasionally into the fire on which he cooked his meals in the open, coming to see the knife not as an instrument for harming but rather for creating. This was not as platitudinous as one might think, for he had in mind the vision of the Magus of the Tarot in the third
Aethyr: “On his feet hath he the scythes and swords and sickles; daggers; knives; every sharp thing—a millionfold, and all in one.” He noted, “I have just realized (after some days woodcarving) that the use of a knife is to fashion shapeless things into beauty. This then is the task of a Magus.”6 Not being of the grade when he had the original vision, he could not see it.

  And so he passed the first weeks of August: canoeing and swimming, trying unsuccessfully to tame a thrush that entered the cottage, failing to kill a snake, and writing instructions on sexual doctrines and promoting Thelema for new Master of the Temple Jones (“Parzifal”). Amid lightning and booming thunder, and a close, horrible atmosphere, he became morose on the night of August 6, thinking of Leila Waddell, the “Mother of Heaven” as “the only thing I have of value.” In something like denial over Jeanne, he decided that he “idealized and loved Leila and Rose [first wife] for themselves.” It was “romantic” love that made him sing.7 Ironically, he had spent the whole day editing The Golden Rose, the still unpublished anthology of poetry dedicated solely to the love of himself and Jeanne Robert Foster. Taking wine to help things along, he took 400 drops of a new mescaline preparation, but nothing came of it but a sense of “well-being.”