Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  He is a very wonderful being: an ordinary man like myself has no possible means of judging what his ultimate motive is.

  Looked at from known standards he is evil, but from a distance, in perspective, one may imagine he is taking this great karma for some definite end; he may be the Savior of the World.

  In any case 300 years from now he will be looked upon as one of the World’s geniuses.

  I should not care to have any part in his work myself. You have this to remember, however, that you are connected with a genuine Occult order, not a pseudo-occult one such as [Max] Heindel’s and others which are worthless.

  What has the Master Therion to say about this?

  C.S.J [Charles Stansfeld Jones]22

  On August 26, Crowley felt he had to pass on to Jones in Vancouver the outcome of events taking place in the O.T.O.’s South African outpost, led by accountant James T. Windram X°. Windram’s letter from “Baynards,” Innes Street, Observatory [astronomical telescope], Johannesburg, was addressed to “His Excellency Sir Stansfeld Jones X° O.T.O., Box 70, Vancouver.”

  We have had some difficulty in South Africa, one of the contributaries being the misfortunes of the London Lodge, which we who know very much deplore. Furthermore, the Swiss Manifesto was not well received in our Province [regarded as anti-Allied, German national, O.H.O. Theodor Reuss’s “Anational Manifesto” was, according to William Breeze, the real cause of the London raid]. In fact it became necessary for us to reply in the form of a Manifesto from this Grand Administration. I am enclosing you a copy herewith.23

  The South African O.T.O. did not like the anti-Allied tone of Reuss’s communication, which ranted on about the nationalistic sentiments of the Allies while pushing for an O.T.O. of “Gnostic Christians” unencumbered by patriotic considerations. South African brethren considered the statement premature while a good fight was being fought against a vicious German regime that would stop at nothing to secure its own victory.

  At 11:00 a.m. that day (August 26) Crowley began a magical operation with Anna Katherine Miller to secure the “Siddhi,” or magical power, of the enlightened, while at the same time harboring the thought that homosexual magick (XI°) might have been more effective. Despite Miss Miller’s insidious weakness for alcohol—which he warned her about repeatedly, citing bitter experience with his first wife, Rose—they had decided to live together in an apartment at 110th Street, in the Morningside District, on Central Park West. Crowley regarded his ordeal as over, and on August 28 began “quite cheerfully making plans for the ‘future’ which will probably never arrive.” He was ecstatic to be “living together in a room on Central Park West, where we can see nothing but trees!”24 Their apartment was close to the cathedral of St. John the Divine; Crowley must himself have felt like the “beloved disciple” with a book of revelation.

  On August 31, Crowley and Anna performed Opus XXVI to gain the power of the “Eight Siddhis,” which Crowley was convinced related to the eight letters of his O.T.O. title “Baphomet,” the “idol of the Templars.” On the same day he wrote, prosaically, to Wilkinson.

  I have just heard from Sheridan Bickers who wishes to be warmly remembered to you. His address is 1634 Vine Street, Hollywoood, LA, California.*152 He wants you to write.25

  SECRET SERVICE INTERVIEW

  According to Ellis Island records, Frederick Hall (aged 38), occupation “journalist,” and wife, Helen (aged 30), arrived at New York Harbor on board SS Orduña from Liverpool on September 1, 1917. According to the record, Hall’s destination was his mother-in-law, Mrs. E. V. Rowe’s, home at Bellport, Long Island. Four of the thirty names on the inventory were bound either for Washington’s British embassy or the British mission on Broadway; it looks like a British government charter voyage. The “British Government” footed the bill for Frederick Hall’s passage.

  Frederick Hall was most probably the man who interviewed Crowley, in apparently desultory fashion, in 1917 to ascertain his value to the British Secret Service. In his Confessions, Crowley gave Hall’s identity as “H . . . d,” but in the unabridged version the name is clearly “H . . . l,” while a handwritten note attached to the manuscript gives the name as “Hall.”

  Frederick Hall joined Norman G. Thwaites and William Wiseman of MI1c at 44 Whitehall, east of Battery Park and south of Wall Street.*153

  According to Spence, Wiseman’s papers show that Hall was assigned to “general work,” connected to informants in the press and intelligence bodies.26 Crowley described his interview with Hall in Confessions thus:

  There was a Temporary Gentleman named H . . . d in the British Military Mission†154 with whom I had such dealings as is possible with the half-witted. He thought that he detected hostility in my attitude towards him, whereas it was merely the University Manner. It was this poor thing whom our secret service sent to interview me. I told him that I could find out exactly what the Germans were doing in America. I also told him that I had the absolute confidence, years old, of a man high in the German secret service [Reuss]—that I could go to Germany in the character of an Irish patriot and report on the conditions of the country. (There was desperate need of accurate information as to Germany’s resources at this period.) He said, with the air of one detected in the act of adultery by sixteen separate sleuths, to say nothing of being doomed by the Black Hand, “But how do I know that you won’t go straight to Viereck and tell him I have been to see you?”!!! I am loath to record accents of human speech so eloquent of mental undevelopment. I said to him, “What harm would that do? How would that save Bloody Bill from his predestined doom?” He did not know the answer to that. But then, he did not know the answer to anything else.27

  Crowley had answers, if anyone would but hear him. In September’s International, Crowley gave his opinion on the Irish situation in an article called “Sinn Fein,”28 attributed to “Sheamus O’Brien.” One cannot help wishing it had been absorbed fully long before the “Troubles” enveloped the province in 1969.

  Whenever and wherever Irish and English meet as equals they are the best of friends. Their natures are opposite, but they fit delightfully, better I think, than any two other races in the world. It has been England’s salvation that she has always had Normans or Celts for her real rulers. There is hardly a “Sassenach” in the government today. Yet no government has proved capable of dealing with the Irish Question, for the perfectly sensible reason that its simplicity has been misunderstood. Even Irishmen have misunderstood it.

  . . . Yet the question was and is perfectly simple. All Irish protests, whatever their appearance, meant one thing and one thing only: “Get off my face!”

  I have no patience with the Sinn Feiner who is out of temper, and regards the English as monsters and devils. They are the most charming people in the world, and merely become monsters and devils when they try to deal with Ireland.

  The British rule in India has been a miracle of beneficence, under the most appalling difficulties of climate, race, language, and religion. I have spent long enough in India to know that. But India is not Ireland; for some uncanny reason, England always does the wrong thing at the wrong time.

  . . . Even pro-Ally Americans were shocked into indignation by the appalling tactlessness of murdering the revolutionists of Easter 1916; and when, not content with hanging Sir Roger Casement, who was, at the very worst an unbalanced crank of impractical idealisms, they proceeded to defile his memory by circulating in secret, so that no one could challenge and refute it—an alleged diary attributing to him just that very vice for which their own gang at Dublin Castle, the men who stole the Crown Jewels, were notorious we simply concluded that the last trace of reason or of common sense had left the authorities for ever.

  . . . The moment we are an independent republic like Canada or Australia or the South African Union there can be no further grievance. “We may fight among ourselves?” Well, that’s our business, not yours. (Besides, it’s a pleasure.)

  Until that day of Freedom we can do nothing but fi
ght for it. We have had seven centuries of England on our face, and we are desperate. We will use every means; all’s fair in love and war.

  . . . Free Ireland will see—with one glance at the map—that she can have only one friend, one ally—England. We are intertwined with the English quite inextricably. The attempt to revive Gaelic is quite on a par with the German reaction towards Gothic type—does any sane Sinn Feiner expect his American cousins to learn Erse?

  . . . Get off my face! Let me get up, and I’ll fight side by side with you. I’ll lead your armies to victory, as in the past; I’ll replace your dummy officers with men of brains. I have imagination, courage, wisdom—everything you lack—and it’s all at your service. But I can do nothing while you’re standing on my face.29

  It was not all politics, thank God; September’s International launched “The Scrutinies of Simon Iff” upon an unsuspecting world, with his first adventure in detection, The Big Game, which, like many of the Iff stories, would make entertaining TV, with the incomparable Anthony Hopkins as Iff.

  When not in the office, having to work in tandem with assistant editor Joseph Bernard Rethy and overseer Viereck, early September was devoted to magical operations with the “Dog Anubis” to uncovering the “Siddhi,” or spiritual gifts, suitable for Baphomet, whose eight letters, Crowley was convinced, indicated eight appropriate siddhis consistent with his grade, beginning and ending with spiritual knowledge (gnana); pranayama, or “levitation” (breath control); power to destroy; power to create; transformations; expansion to nuit (the infinitely great); contraction to hadit (the infinitely small). Crowley’s thought processes are always fascinating, whether or not on drugs. On September 3 he inhaled ethyl ether to analyze thoughts. He noted that ether made the body glow, but after sexual magick, the glow stopped above the muladhara chakra, situated at the spine’s base and activating between perineum and coccyx. Crowley reckoned the spherical glow, which not being nervous in origin, did not branch, constituted an argument for “auras.” “It is love that opens the gates of the heavens, will that shuts those of the hells.”

  I got this as a flash of cosmic memory. As a rational corollary, I got: Love is the power to say “yes”; will the power to say “no.” Cheap epigram leading to heresy; beware!

  My 9° = 2▫ consciousness is now quite fixed in the depths.

  There is a point in evolution where all the different lines of argument run together with a rush. I was identifying the eye of a potato with the Eye of Horus, when all the other eyes joined in the dance! This always happens as the consciousness expands, becomes erectile or enthusiastic, in the course of any general resolution of propositions.

  Asked by Anubis, my dog-headed concubine, to say something else beautiful about love, I replied: “Ill-temper is a disagreeable quality, but it never gave anybody the clap.”30

  Crowley’s love for Anna Katherine Miller was not lasting. Anna introduced Crowley to her friend, bohemian chemist Roddie Minor (1884–1979). Born at Lawrenceville, Georgia, artistically cropped-haired Roddie was married to sculptor Bruno Louis Zimm, designer of the Slocum disaster monument and other works in Washington, D.C.*155 Crowley saw Roddie’s potential for Scarlet Womanhood and did not take too much time about it.

  Attending on broad-shouldered, full-lipped Roddie to succumb to his charms, Beast and Dog gave their all to “success to Kennedy’s psychochromes” on September 18. True to his word, the Beast did what he could to drum up enthusiasm for Leon Engers’s visionary paintings in abstract spiritual identity—painting the auras, or “souls,” of his sitters in relation to their ordinary appearance, as he saw it. Crowley wrote to Louis Wilkinson on October 1 about his portrait by Engers, required for the exhibition Crowley was arranging on the artist’s behalf.

  Dear Ghost,

  . . . I wish you would write to Kennedy and arrange to give him at least one more sitting. He is a little shy about writing to you. . . . but a picture is a picture, and in the interest of art, which after all does exist, this one ought to be finished.

  Very truly yours,

  A.C.31

  Wilkinson was already doing what he could for Crowley, submitting a superb article, “Shakespeare: Rebel, Aristocrat and Pessimist,” for November’s International (11, no. 11) to a distinguished issue, under Crowley’s precise editorial policy.

  September drew to its autumnal close, and “Change” was on the mind of the Magus. With no new Chokmah day due until November 3, Crowley felt the signs nonetheless. Despite a cold, and liver chill, he confidently pondered, between coughs, the advantages of the master’s mind where change was concerned. “Every phenomenon is a Change; all Change is interesting as such; therefore the Universe is Joy. But the Idealist, with his Fixed God, is always disappointed. The Masters of Truth are the only happy men, though they constantly observe what men stupidly call Sorrow.”32

  Anna’s idealism had its place. In the early hours of the twenty-eighth she performed her penultimate magical operation. Object: Roddie Minor’s body. Party to the operation, one wonders whether the Pennsylvanian Dutch girl was also party to its Object.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Enter the Camel

  Roddie tried her luck with the Beast, and they duly experimented on October 1, 1917. He described her as “Matron,” a “big muscular sensual type.”1 The IX° was appropriately dedicated to Aphrodite, eternal mother of sex, and the passage of rite was what Crowley nicknamed “the Eye of Hoor,” the anus: a preferred orifice in Crowley’s case, and, of course, a more than adequate contraceptive. More vigorous rites followed, including a particularly orgiastic session on Crowley’s forty-second birthday (October 12), with the aid of cocaine and brandy. This tied in nicely with the lead article in October’s International, which just happened to be “Cocaine.” Never one to adhere to the “safety first” principle, Crowley, following an erudite discussion on the means humanity customarily employs to discover “happiness,” concludes cocaine to be an almost universal elixir—that is, tongue in cheek, not on line.

  Give it to no matter whom. Choose me the last losel on the earth; let him suffer all the tortures of disease; take hope, take faith, take love away from him. Then look, see the back of that worn hand, its skin discolored and wrinkled, perhaps inflamed with agonizing eczema, perhaps putrid with some malignant sore. He places on it that shimmering snow, a few grains only, a little pile of starry dust. The wasted arm is slowly raised to the head that is little more than a skull; the feeble breath draws in that radiant powder. Now we must wait. One minute—perhaps five minutes.

  Then happens the miracle of miracles, as sure as death, and yet as masterful as life; a thing more miraculous, because so sudden, so apart from the usual course of evolution. Natura non facit saltum—nature never makes a leap. True—therefore this miracle is a thing as it were against nature. The melancholy vanishes; the eyes shine; the wan mouth smiles. Almost manly vigor returns, or seems to return. At least faith, hope, and love throng very eagerly to the dance; all that was lost is found.

  The man is happy.2

  Fig. 29.1. The “Cocaine” issue: The International, under Crowley’s editorship October 1917

  A face-saving editorial note indicated Viereck’s demurral from some of Crowley’s colorful views but praised its detailed examination of the psychology associated with the drug. Crowley’s answer to the prohibitionist who argues that cocaine is the drug of choice for criminals, giving them Dutch courage, he notes the argument insists that the drug progressively destroys the criminal’s ability to function successfully. On this basis, Crowley suggests free cocaine for criminals in particular! He takes the view that the drug addict unable to deal with the drug’s pitfalls was a familiar social type who would fail at everything and a type hardly, in such condition, worth preserving. As things turned out, Crowley would himself have to face his own psychological addiction to the drug. In the early 1920s an obsession with the drug would cause considerable anguish, though he was able, in the end, to leave it behind, but the path to full re
alization of the uselessness of drugs, which came to him in 1924, was far from straightforward.

  Crowley had imbibed a kind of moral imperative from Darwinian-influenced thought, the one familiar to us as the “survival of the fittest.” He wrapped his idea of the masters’ plan for humanity up in a combination of “spiritual evolution” and biological evolution, so adaption to extremes was regarded as a benefit to the species, on the principle of Jenner’s inoculation practice. Sufficient of the “bad” makes us better. There is some truth in this, scientific and moral, but there is a borderline. John Quinn observed when hearing Frank Harris’s justification for German militarism that civilization and its moral progress is intended to ameliorate, at least, or better correct, the tendencies of nature, including “survival of the fittest,” which may not be for us to judge: because we may none of us be fit to do so. Would medicine have progressed if all sick people were abandoned completely at the sight of imperfection? Crowley himself was never slow in seeing a doctor, or recommending science. In his own dealings with people, he wavered on this point. The problem is simply that Darwin’s interpretation of natural selection across species makes an atrocious basis for moral and spiritual teaching. Crowley attempted to abandon dualism, and was convinced that he had. It was a symptom of the “zeitgeist,” which he believed he embodied.

  Pooling resources, Crowley and Roddie moved in together at a studio at 64a West 9th Street, a couple of blocks from Washington Square, Greenwich Village, and a little more than half a mile south of Madison Square Park, where there was now a life-size mock-up of a U.S. battleship, replete with guns, dominating the square, with registration and medical offices where young men queued up to play their patriotic part in the Allied struggle against Germany.

  Working in the pathological laboratory of a famous doctor, and afterward for a cosmetic firm as chemist and pharmacist in Brooklyn, Roddie’s financial contribution was probably the larger, but Crowley’s character and peculiar status brought her into some of the best parties of Greenwich Village’s burgeoning art set. Eccentric painter and interior designer, Robert Winthrop Chanler would invite the Beast to parties, as Crowley started trying his hand at his own occult-inspired paintings. If Engers or “Kennedy” could do auras, Crowley would go one, two, three better with an abrahadabra and a wave of the brush, he would paint the forms of spirits themselves and get right inside the psyche and dreamscape of individuals. He even experimented with automatic painting, letting the unconscious move the brush, but he moved quickly on to definite conceptions, strange galleries of a unique character’s bizarre worldview.