Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  Two days later he wrote the letter to Professor Bigelow about the ball lightning and his own “super-Masonic” order, sending Bigelow a pamphlet about it, presumably the one he’d been writing for Jones, then spent the next three days on the Shaw “article” with his frog-stenographer before heading again for Boston. Returning, he found the whole atmosphere at the cottage had changed, as if a banishing ritual had been performed there. Was it the beginning of a “New Current”? Would “The Girl” arrive?

  Someone fateful would arrive, but it would not be The Girl. In the meantime, Crowley wrote another tract for the O.T.O., inspired in some way by the Qur’an’s thirty-sixth sura, “Ya-Sin,” which begins, “By the Qur’an, full of Wisdom, / Thou art one of the Apostles, / On the Straight Way . . .” before writing to “Anna Wright and her Companions,” which is to say, the South African branch of the O.T.O, of which Anna and her husband were members.*124 He then devoted a four-day stint to the Shaw article, considering it “well started” on August 19 when he wrote to Professor Lindley Miller Keasbey (1867–1946), professor of institutional history at the University of Austin, Texas, described in the Confessions as “a charming and cultured man, but full of cranky notions about socialism, which he held with arrogant obstinacy.”8 Keasbey’s views on socialism would cost him his chair at Austin, while his treachery would cost him Crowley’s respect, but that was all to come. In the meantime, Keasbey tried to get a half-page, subversive article into Pearson’s Magazine, under Frank Harris’s socialist editorship. Harris’s colleagues did not understand it; the Washington censor did not understand it; he did not understand it: nobody understood it. So Harris took it. “What harm can it do?”

  August 21 marked the beginning of the tenth Chockmah day. On this day Crowley recorded “an amazing discovery,”9 which nobody can deny. Perhaps it resulted from a “wonderful” ether-flavored solo sex-magick act dedicated to promulgating Thelema while thinking of Doris Gomez and Myriam Deroxe on August 19.

  Around 3:40 a.m. on the 21st, Crowley saw the light. As we saw earlier, The Book of the Law had spoken of “one” that “cometh after” (AL III:47), referring possibly to Jones. Crowley now followed a series of cross-symbolic coincidences that by incremental force convinced him that Jones was the “child” predicted by The Book of the Law. The child of Crowley’s (symbolic) “bowels” (AL I:55–56) would appear “strangely,” and you can’t get stranger than his new magical son born from the Abyss as Master of the Temple as direct result of Therion’s magical sex with Jeanne Foster precisely nine months earlier! All that magical effort just had to have had an effect on the spiritual plane; the gods doubtless knew Hilarion was barren, even if Crowley had not. Crowley had expected a natural child, but a spiritual child was what the gods intended, or so it dawned on the Beast. “Expect him not from the East, nor from the West; for from no expected house cometh that child” (AL I:56). Indeed. No one would have expected this: a revelation that at last made triumphant sense of the relationship with Jeanne. The gods had made his conscious mind idealize her, even though she was not the ideal, so he might work holy magick upon her and establish conditions for the birth of a new Master of the Temple. What would a father not do for his son? Crowley wrote to Jones in August that, as the Beast succinctly put it, he had fucked Hilarion for him. Thus, Crowley’s relationship with Jeanne was not the emotional disaster it felt like, but a meaningful, even preternatural, act of the gods to further the Beast’s initiation. Did not Hilarion conform to the description of the Scarlet Woman in AL III:44? “But let her raise herself in pride! Let her follow me in my way! Let her work the work of wickedness! Let her kill her heart! Let her be loud and adulterous! Let her be covered with jewels, and rich garments, and let her be shameless before all men!” Yep, that’s how it’d felt.

  There doubtless exists psychoanalytic jargon for a leap of faith of this extremity, but adding more correspondents to the mystery, or lack of it, best be avoided, lest one perish “with the dogs of reason” (AL II:27). Crowley’s gods moved him in mysterious ways. If a virgin can conceive and bring forth a son, anything is possible, belief being dependent on predisposition. To give an idea of just one of the “proofs” that to Crowley’s mind supported his conclusion, he noted that the word divined for the equinox was Solomon.*125 Was not Solomon the child of David’s adultery?10 Thinking contrary to Nature as a Magus might well lead to conclusions as apparently outlandish as this. Crowley spent the rest of the day writing and thinking out the chronology of the Initiation to Magus, concluding, “The crises at the dawn of a Chokmah-day are amazing.”11 How true.

  On August 23 he wrote the letter to Elihu Thomson (see here) asking if Crowley’s own electrical theory about the ball lightning was “quite mad.” At 7:35 p.m. he undertook an extensive experiment with ethanol, mescaline, diethyl ether, hashish, and cocaine, which is a lot of eggs to put in one basket. His ensuing state of mind convinced him of the relativity of consciousness; everything was dependent on state of mind.

  I have been sucking up to the vapour of Ether for a few moments, and all common things are touched with beauty. So, too, with opium and cocaine, calm, peace, happiness, without special object, result from a few minutes of those drugs. What clearer proof that all depends on state of mind, that it is foolish to alter externals. A million spent on objets d’art would not have made this room as beautiful as it is just now—and there is not one beautiful thing in it, except myself. Man is only a little lower than the angels; one step, and all glory is ours!12

  After taking more ether around 8:00 p.m. he became particularly active and fidgety, deciding after observing a train of logic that led him to write notes for an article on yoga, it would be a beautiful article. Oh God! he cried, another beautiful thing! He was at it on September 13, writing about pratyahara (the fifth of Pantajali’s eight stages of ashtanga yoga, denoting withdrawal of the senses) when he realized succinctly, “What people miss is that a yogin can get as much fun out of swinging his leg as a Western millionaire out of his first season in New York. This ought to be worked up for propaganda purposes.”13 He meant O.T.O., not German propaganda!

  He analyzed his own state of mind, noting that ether states, like all drug-induced states, are ephemeral. They represent an instability, with time flying fast in the case of ether. He came that August night, however, to a vision that remained with him all his life and that he would call the “Star Sponge Vision.” Perhaps it was the kind of thing that inspired Beethoven to write his 9th Symphony. It helped Crowley write everything he would ever write.

  THE STAR SPONGE VISION

  It came in stages, like Christmas to Iowa by Wells Fargo. He lost consciousness of everything but a universal space with occasional bright points. “Nothingness with twinkles,” he said. Concentrating, the void diminished in significance and the space appeared ablaze, the radiating points neither confused nor obscured. It was the essential structure of the universe. “But what twinkles!” he added, as might have occurred to the speechless “Bowman” in the penultimate sequence of Kubrick’s 2001.

  The next stage led Crowley to envision the blazing points as the stars of the heavens, identified as ideas, and souls, among other things. Each star was linked to every other star by a ray of light. That is, in the realm of thought, every thought carried a special relation with every other thought, and each relation a thought in itself, as each ray from star to star was itself a star. Because he could see clearly an infinite series, then the vision should have been experienced as one homogeneous blaze of light, but it was not so. Distinctions were in no way obscure. The points were clear.

  The next stage brought him to see that the whole was perfectly organized, with some stars more brilliant than others but no less in relation to the whole. The vision offered psychological insights, such as how a person might confuse himself with a teapot (an object close to an idea of himself), or why it was that platitudes seemed dull, even though they contained the whole history of logical thought on a subject extended through series. One
recalls Paul McCartney’s anecdote of smoking marijuana in a Manhattan hotel room in 1964 and being brought via remarkable leaps to what seemed a profound revelation of truth, which was eagerly written down for its import, only to be disappointed on “returning to earth” to find the phrase “There are seven steps.” Of course, to an alchemist, that would mean a great deal.

  At the time, Crowley considered his vision the samadhi of the ether state, perhaps the ultimate samadhi, union with essence or being of the cosmos. He also thought the images too physical, it was “the old resolution of Splendour into Bliss.”14 In a fragment held among Crowley’s papers at the Warburg Institute titled “Platitudes,” Crowley recognized the “Star-Sponge vision” as being the nervous system, considered as a microcosm. This insight might inspire the neurologist. For the mystic, the vision bears the character of Hermetic prophet Giordano Bruno’s sixteenth-century vision of the “infinite Universe.” Bruno (1548–1600) understood the universe as a synthesis of infinite relativity, and that seems a reasonable account of what Crowley became aware of under considerable chemical stimulus, while more soldiers were led up to the front lines on the Western Front to substitute the ones no longer visible.

  Hard work continued. On August 27, Crowley felt “fagged out.” After more work on Shaw, and “reading Frazer’s Dying God,”15 he took four “Myriam Deroxe pills” but got very little but some “considerations” as to what his “Cross of the Frog” might have been all about. It is even possible, given the vagueness of the diary entry, that he was considering either composing it, rewriting it, or perhaps putting it into action. It should not be presumed that Crowley ever crucified a frog in literal terms. One rather suspects the composition of Liber LXX was a psychological exercise, but you never know.

  For the next fortnight, Crowley moved on to writing the individual stories that make up the collection Golden Twigs, obviously inspired by Frazer’s Golden Bough, and based on mythology and folklore. In 1930 he would dedicate the works to “Dr. Sir J.G. Frazer Master of the Gods,” and to the memories of “Merlin” (Theodor Reuss, O.T.O. Frater Superior) and, surprisingly, to D. H. Lawrence, who died in March of that year.16

  On August 30, 1916, he wrote “The Priest of Nemi” (published in the International in April 1918 and later retitled “The King of the Wood”). The next day he worked on Shaw and most of The Mass of St Sécaire, whose fourth chapter has an atmospheric scene set in a ruined church, somewhat inspired by recent imaginings, or perhaps, acts. Obviously suggested by accounts of Black Masses and with more than a whiff of the curious services of the infamous Abbé Boullan (1824–1893) and his female assistant, Crowley calls it a “hideous rite.”

  There were two lights upon the altar, candles of black wax, both on the north side of what served for crucifix.

  This was a live toad nailed to a scarlet cross. Around it was wrapped a strip of linen, torn from one of Captain Larue’s shirts by a bribed laundress. For incense a stick of yellow sulphur smouldered on charcoal.17

  The priest baptizes the frog in the name of Larue; as the frog dies, so might Larue. The author is clearly describing bad goings-on, it should be noted, and the wicked rite literally “brings the house down” on “the abominable celebrants” when at the stroke of midnight

  the whole chapel was ablaze with globes of fire, and the storm shook the walls of the chapel with whirling rage. A rotten beam came crashing from the roof.

  “Come away!” said the priest, unshaken, “there is danger here.” But at that instant the storm died down; the electricity of the air discharged itself finally to earth; the stars shone out again.18

  Crowley managed to get Liber LXX, the ball lightning, and even a hint of the star-sponge vision into one scene of fictional perversity. He used what came to hand, the sign of a good artist and a constrained being. His pen had become a knife shaping works of beauty.

  On September 1 he finished the story above and also the Shaw “article,” now of book length, before penning “The Burning of Melcarth,” “The Oracle of the Corycian Cave,” “The Stone of Cybele,” “The God of Ibreez,” “The Old Man of the Peepul-tree,” and “The Hearth”; all done by 9:30 p.m. the night of September 14. And that was Golden Twigs. Not bad for a summer “retirement.”

  To add to the literary halo around Crowley’s phallic forelock, the now-controversial German American journalist, satirist, scholar, and literary critic of the Smart Set, H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) published Crowley’s short story “The Stratagem.”19 First published in the English Review in June 1914, no less a genius than Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) had praised it as the best short story he had read, to Crowley’s proud delight.

  After starting what became “The Stone of Cybele” on September 6, Crowley made another experiment with ether. It brought him insight into the difference between the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel and other interior illuminations. He literally “saw” the difference (with eight exclamation marks).

  The former gives proof to the man as man of a celestial hierarchy; it relieves him of his main fear—materialism itself. Hence mysticism is no good to convince people—in comparison with magick. You must argue with the man you are arguing with; mysticism is like making him drunk.

  11:50 [p.m.]. I now see why the Buddha said: “Don’t fight error; preach the Good Law!” Too much error to fight! Dissipating energies! Even Christianity is hardly worth fighting; so many atheists are shocked if one does! Therefore: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. And nothing else.20

  The next day he got a letter from Myriam, now in New York, about the “Myriam Deroxe” pills, presumably as to their ineffectiveness. Perhaps the drug fiend had further advice, for in the evening, in thick, hot weather, Crowley tried solo sex magick, thinking of Myriam, for the “promulgation of the Law,” using heroin and ether. The next morning he suffered from diarrhea and headache, spending the day half asleep. One suspects Myriam was made of different stuff than her country correspondent.

  Crowley finished his Golden Twigs just in time for the voluble Keasbey’s arrival on September 15; he stayed for four days and talked practically nonstop. If Crowley had a head of steam to let off, so did Keasbey. Crowley wrote for him a tract, Liber 161, The Law of Thelema, and made tentative plans for going to Texas to establish an O.T.O. lodge at Austin. Keasbey was, however, in increasingly poor odor with university colleagues. But Crowley was almost always optimistic. Having been a candidate for the presidency of the university in 1915, Keasbey would soon be dismissed and a date for going to Austin set with Crowley for November 4 was junked after much prevarication on Keasbey’s side.

  Exhausted from six weeks’ writing, comfort came to Lake Pasquaney in the form of Gerda Maria von Kothek, whose ministrations helped him to relax a bit and consider the status of semen in the formulation of the Word of the Magus and “in the mouth of the victim.”21 On September 23 he got into Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, soon concluding that he could apply some of Jung’s theories to obtain samadhi. He performed a dozen sex-magick operations with Gerda—mostly for wealth—before returning to New York on October 17. His fascinating article “Mystics and Their Little Ways” could be read in Vanity Fair that month, followed in November by “The Attainment of Happiness.”

  The former article is full of pithy wisdom. “Every mystic of any account is really a solitary who, thinking to bring all men to his own perfection, merely succeeds in founding a new cult, or religion.” For those who ask what mysticism is, the answer is “really quite simple. It is merely a State of Mind in which all phenomena are regarded as pure illusion. The only reality is what is called by one mystic the pleroma; by another Isvara, or Parabrahman, or perusa; by a third, God; by a fourth, the Pure Soul; by a fifth, Being, or the Absolute—and so on, more or less indefinitely.” So there you are.22 Crowley also suggests that those seeking further enlightenment consult his Book of Lies (1912), which is easy to read, but not to understand. “The Attainment of Happiness” is like the second par
t of the latter and is no less forthright. “The Saviour’s instructions to his disciples to ‘take no thought for the morrow,’ to ‘abandon father and mother and all other things,’ ‘not to have two cloaks,’ ‘not to resist evil,’ are merely the ordinary rules of every eastern and western mystic. The disciple must have nothing whatever to turn his mind to duality, or to divert his mind from concentration.”23 Needless to say, unhappiness comes from duality; mysticism cures the problem. Result: happiness. So why don’t we?

  TWENTY-FIVE

  New Orleans—and Bust

  In December 1916, with his “Improvement on Psychoanalysis” gracing the pages of Vanity Fair, Crowley was preoccupied with pecuniary matters, especially with winter advancing, and as far as we can tell, the end of Evangeline Adams’s generosity with respect to her property in New Hampshire. None of this anxiety enters into his article, however, which is a brief but significant introduction to the public of the world of Carl Jung of Zurich.

  Crowley has read carefully and seen that where Freud derives will from sex, Jung derives sex from will, which is a bonus for the magical tradition. Nevertheless, Crowley is not uncritical of Jung and applies his razor carefully to Jung’s tendency to see everything in terms of unconscious symbols to the exclusion of other dimensions of experience and causation. One might say this is the pot calling the kettle black, but it is satisfying to read of Jung before he became lauded as one of those intellectual heroes of the twentieth century who must always be right, even when wrong. Crowley addressed his critique gently, but on equal terms.