Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  The “Marie” in question was five feet six, gray-eyed, dark-brown-haired Marie Röhling (1891–1969), part of Greenwich Village’s left-wing scene, a lady of fair complexion, sincere conviction, and conceivably a source of intelligence for Crowley. An immigrant from Odessa, born Maria Eliasberg, or Elsburg, she became a U.S. citizen in 1913, marrying Herman Röhling of Chicago.*172 When Crowley met her, she was giving enthusiastic lectures under the name Marie or Maria Lavroff on change in Russia, having addressed representatives of 125 women’s organizations at a meeting of the League of Cook Country Clubs in Chicago on May 23, 1917. “The Russians have been forty years starting a real revolution, but when it came it was good,” she declared.4 She had no idea what was coming.

  Everyone took a day off from magick on Saturday, March 16, when Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations spurred more than three thousand Irish American women to march in fulsome bright smocks through New York’s streets bearing aloft the flags of the “Entente powers,” as the Tribune described them, including that of Great Britain. One suspects Crowley would have joined the throng to catch the authentic atmosphere of ex-pat Celtic fervor as the Tribune’s front page announced: “Kaiser’s Three Allies Seek Parley; Russia Ratifies Peace; Japan to Act.” Lower on page 1, more news of the socialist-anarchist International Workers of the World: “US Troops to Quell I.W.W. Riots.” It was reported in San Francisco on March 15 that troops were dispatched to Saint Mary’s, Idaho, where rioting between citizens and the I.W.W. had broken out. A two-hundred-strong crowd tried to extract I.W.W. man “Nelson” out of jail. Refusing them entry, the sherriff suffered a beating.

  German General Ludendorff, meanwhile, gloated that now the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had taken Russia out of the war, the “Teutons [were] now stronger than their Foes,” the byline adding, somewhat implausibly, that “Russia has become big German Farm,” while in Britain, “Peace Talk Sapping the Morale of the Nation Says Lloyd George”; and in France, “Paris Theatres Close to Reduce Air Raid Peril.” It was amid the dark horror of these raids that distressed French composer Claude Debussy died at the age of fifty-five on March 25.

  Charles Stansfeld Jones entered proceedings at West 9th Street on Sunday, March 17, having sold all his possessions in Canada to join his magical “father” in New York. Marie Lavroff (or Lavrova) was also in the temple. One of Jones’s first acts was to participate in an ether experiment. Experiencing an accelerated temporal sense, Jones reached a point where he could understand Achita’s being afraid of it. Crowley advised that it was the Ego that put the barrier up, it being unhappy at having it demolished at its expense. Typically, Crowley said that enjoyment would only come after experiencing the full strength of a thing. He also said the dangerous area in drug taking was reaching a point where one couldn’t tell whether the drug was friend or foe. Other insights occurred to the ether-heads, such as fear of death was simply fear of loss of consciousness; one opened one’s eyes on ether to see if one was still conscious. Sight was necessary to be sure one was conscious. Change of consciousness was a change in the rapidity of vibration. There was a distinction between unconsciousness and subconsciousness.

  Welcome to West 9th Street, Brother Jones!—or rather, Arctaeon, by which name he would soon be known for the remainder of the Amalantrah Working.

  After a few days of Marie being around, Roddie became jealous. Crowley had dubbed Mrs. Röhling “Olun,” which in Hebrew added to 156, the number of the Scarlet Woman. Roddie feared loss of territory. To put matters right, a magical operation was undertaken at midnight on March 22 whose Object was “Liberty” to all: for Crowley “to take vampires fearlessly”; for Olun, to destroy the “sin complex”; and for Achitha, to transcend her jealousy.5

  The title of chapter 109 of Liber Aleph suggests that Crowley did take vampire Olun fearlessly: “On his Woman Olun, and on the Ecstasy that Surpasses All.”

  “My Son, I am enflamed with Love. . . . It is Nuit herself invisibly that embraceth me, and enkindleth my Soul in Ecstasy. But this last Passion, that my Lady Olun hath brought unto me upon this last Day of the Winter of the Thirteenth Year of the Aeon, even as I wrote these Words unto thee, is a Mystery of Mysteries beyond all these. O my Son, thou knowest well the Perils and the Profit of our Path; continue thou therein. Olun!”

  It was of course a feature of red revolutionary fervor in its first, heady, and most illusory dawn to believe sexual repression would go the way of capitalist exploitation amid the converging joys of communism, so we may presume that Marie felt she was giving her all for the promised parousia of the workers’ state. On March 24, Olun gave the Beast a magical hand job for “Sowing the seed of the Law.”

  As John Lennon once wrote, parodying the parable of the Sower, “Some fell on the stony ground, and some fell on the waistcoat.”

  MEETING LEAH HIRSIG

  Crowley’s Confessions describes his first meeting with the woman who, famously, would in due course come to assume Scarlet Woman status for more than five years. Leah Hirsig (1883–1975)—one of eight siblings of a Swiss German mother who had quit Switzerland for the States to avoid a drunken husband—first appeared in Crowley’s life in the spring of 1918 accompanying her much older sister, Marie (or Marianne) Magdelena Hirsig. According to Marianne’s account (written under her married name, Marian Dockerill), Crowley’s studio happenings had led to a stream of intrigued persons wishing to meet the latest luminary of Greenwich Village bohemian life. Crowley’s account is that on the evening concerned he could not let the sisters into the studio as he was “in an important conference with an antique, but sprightly German lady.”6 This was Elsa Lincke, and we may be right in thinking the date was Tuesday, March 26, for in the Amalantrah record, Soror Bazedon began an astral journey in search of Amalantrah at 5:15 p.m. that day. She met a being called “Amalaftan,” who would guide her to the wizard.

  Leaving Elsa in his studio, Crowley was struck by Leah’s slim, boyish figure, wedgelike face, poignant sadness, and “sublime simplicity”: a romantic whitewash. He began to kiss her. She responded warmly, their kissing only interrupted by occasional breaks to answer the older sister’s questions. What, one wonders, could such questions have been.

  Marian Dockerill’s own account was very different. It first appeared serialized in the New York Journal on March 13, 1926, and then as a popular booklet on cheap paper, as My Life in a Love Cult, A Warning to Young Girls, My True Life Story by Marian Dockerill, High Priestess of Oom, price fifty cents (1928). The bulk of the booklet dwelled on Marian’s initiation into the ways of love and eventually into more formal initiation into a tantric society run by freelance religious philosopher Pierre Arnold Bernard (1875–1955), known popularly as the “Omnipotent Oom,” who started with a clinic in San Francisco for yoga and hypnosis and moved on to attract young women to self-realization through tantra, while enjoying the path to his own ends, and acquiring a reputation as a scholar of Eastern religion.

  Marian’s treatment of Crowley is as a type that young women should especially avoid. She says the first occasion she met the “evil” Crowley, the “Antichrist,” worshipper of “Satan,” she had obtained an introduction to his studio in Greenwich Village from a clairvoyant lover of hers. Other women were present when the sisters arrived.

  Arms folded, eyebrows pinched, Crowley fastens his eyes on her virgin ingenue sister. Leah refuses to leave with her elder sister, spending the night being joyously violated by the older letch, her personality transformed by morning into that of Crowley’s very willing sex slave and lapdog.7 By the time the story came out, Crowley’s reputation had already been ruined by “sinister revelations” not only in the Sunday Express and John Bull papers in the United Kingdom but also in innumerable U.S. papers picking up on alleged scandals connected with Crowley’s business in Detroit in 1919 and other salacious exposés, invented by imaginative journalists catering for cheap thrills. One more was grist to the mill.

  Fig. 31.1. My Life in a Love Cult, A Warning to Young Girls, My True Li
fe Story by Marian Dockerill, High Priestess of Oom, 1928

  In fact, not only did Marian Dockerill get the place where Leah first met Crowley wrong (Washington Square rather than West 9th Street), she did not mention her having met Crowley before. Through psychic investigator Hereward Carrington, Crowley had been invited to lecture under the auspices of fraudulent psychic demonstrator Christian P. Christiansen. It turned out that Leah’s older sister, Marianne (later Marian Dockerill), who was in the audience, was Carrington’s “intimate friend,”8 which Crowley learned after the lecture when they talked. According to Crowley, he chatted with her on two or three occasions afterward, meeting by chance. By the time Marianne’s, or rather, Marian Dockerill’s, doom-laden account was published, her sister Leah’s time with Crowley had ended with her returning to a Bronx teaching post; Leah’s devotion to the Beast, and his to the ex–Scarlet Woman, a long-spent force.

  Interviews with Amalantrah continued into April, the questions increasingly banal. It might have seemed that it was not possible to go shopping without Amalantrah’s auguries for success or failure. Reading the record, one gets the feeling that Roddie in particular was getting bored and irritated with the exercise.

  Then, Crowley struck another reef. On April 9, he dispatched a standard letter to everyone concerned with the International.

  Dear Sir,

  I am just writing this note to announce that Dr. L. M. Keasbey is now proprietor and editor of the International and I am sure he will maintain the high standing to which you have become accustomed. . . .9

  Lindley M. Keasbey, the man who had let Crowley down over the proposed O.T.O. lodge in Texas, the radical who had lost his academic chair for his left-wing antiwar stance, the man who had left Crowley languishing in New Orleans, had come to manifest in this world as editor and proprietor of a literary magazine. Crowley’s assurances of the International’s continued high standing were as worthless as Keasbey’s that Crowley could go on contributing. In fact, Keasbey would accept nothing from Crowley and, disregarding all advice, wrecked the magazine after one issue. This gave Crowley much pleasure to reflect on in later years. He might better have wept at the loss of the only conventional job he ever had. The last April issue of the International was a particularly good one, with interesting contributions from a wide selection of writers. It could have gone places, and the Beast with it.

  On April 17, Gerda von Kothek turned up for a rare “orgiastic” operation with the Beast dedicated to spreading the Law. Three days later, Crowley had a last stab at getting from Amalantrah the meaning of the “making the lion very dead indeed” dream, now more than three years past, yet still unexplained. Having taken 1cc of hashish with Jones, Roddie obtained from the wizard a vision of the Hebrew letter Reish crowned with flowers. This was supposed to mean that the Elixir must “die in the cucurbite.”10 Crowley thought of John’s Gospel (12:24): “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” Crowley still couldn’t grasp the idea, which to me at least, sounds akin to early Simonian Gnostic practices, as reported in book VI of Church Father Hippolytus’s Refutation of All Heresies.11 In these there is much emphasis on the tree that is consumed by fire. The idea of fiery consummation would fit well with what followed from Amalantrah. When Therion asked, “What shall we do to improve our technique in charging talismans?” The response was the image of a burning tree. Following is Hippolytus reporting, without realizing it, on Gnostic sex practices in the second century CE (Refutatio VI, 4).

  [T]he super-celestial [fire], is a treasure, as it were a large tree, just such a one as in a dream was seen by Nebuchadnezzar, out of which all flesh is nourished. And the manifest portion of the fire he regards as the stem, the branches, the leaves, [and] the external rind which overlaps them. All these [appendages], he says, of the Great Tree being kindled, are made to disappear by reason of the blaze of the all-devouring fire. The fruit, however, of the tree, when it is fully grown, and has received its own form, is deposited in a granary, not (flung) into the fire. For, he says, the fruit has been produced for the purpose of being laid in the storehouse, whereas the chaff that it may be delivered over to the fire. [Now the chaff] is stem, [and is] generated not for its own sake, but for that of the fruit.

  Behind the visible creation is a hidden, secret fire, protean or indefinite—in the sense also of undefined, limitless, and undefinable. Gnostics claiming derivation from Jesus’s contemporary, Simon Magus, likened the fire to a tree. When the body or rind is burned away by its all-devouring fire, what remains is the fruit of spirit, the fire invisible to the uninitiated.

  The lusts of the flesh are consumed by the fire in the supreme rite, revealing the essence of the Great Tree wherein God speaks to the holy (the burning bush of Moses, according to Simon). That an actual spiritual-sexual rite is being alluded to by allegorical means becomes clearer when we read what Hippolytus next has to say about Simon’s justification, a quotation from scripture.

  And this, he [Simon] says, is what has been written in Scripture: “For the vineyard of the Lord of Sabaoth is the house of Israel, and the man of Judah is His beloved plant.” [Isaiah 5:7 paraphrase] . . . it has been proved, he says, that there is not any other tree but that man. But concerning the secretion and dissolution of this [tree], Scripture, he says, has spoken sufficiently. And as regards instruction for those who have been fashioned after the image [of him], that statement is enough which is made [in Scripture], that “all flesh is grass, and all the glory of flesh, as it were, a flower of grass. The grass withereth, and its flower falleth; but the word of the Lord abideth forever.” The word of the Lord, he says, is that word which is produced in the mouth, and a Logos, but nowhere else exists there a place of generation. (Refutatio VI, 5)

  The last cryptic sentence of the quotation above refers, we can be fairly sure, to the vagina of the priestess, understood as the mystic yoni: the place of generation where the Logos, that is the Word, becomes flesh and vice versa. The body dissolves in the fire of supernal orgasm, bringing forth the pure fire secreted within the fire: God. That the plant is expressed in the phallus is clear enough. The secret is contained in the words “the secretion and dissolution of this [tree].” At the height of passionate fire, the plant withers, but its engendered virtue “liveth forever”; that is, the seed partakes of the substance of eternity: the new seed also has within it the hidden fire. This is a formula for the magical energizing of sexual fluids. Now perhaps we can understand better the famous injunction in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas that If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you: spiritual orgasm is salvation; suppression of the seed is death. That plant that does not bring forth fruit unto the Lord will be swallowed up in its external fire.

  Perhaps Crowley was confusing the meaning of sexual magick with issues of technique. Crowley asked Amalantrah how to “kill the sphinx” (or lion). The reply: “Make fast the chains.” The chains bind the ship at the pier, preventing its being carried away by the waves. Further visions elicited from Crowley the question of whether the seed should grow cold in the cucurbite, and if so, for how long? Was it until “creation takes place?” How many seconds or minutes? The symbol of Taurus suggested six minutes, but one feels they were barking up the wrong tree.

  Curiously, the following morning Crowley dictated to Arctaeon a vision of the mind as a kind of spider’s web with ganglions glowing: an image with which we are all familiar from advertisements for headache pills with electrical impulses in the brain shown as “live wires.” Things got stranger in the evening when there was debate with Amalantrah about who “Achita” really was. Was she the same as Roddie? Was she a lesbian? No, she was not, said Roddie/Achita. Could Achita stay all the time as Achita, the astral being, and not return to Roddie? Roddie replied as Achita that Roddie Minor was only earth, working and living. Achita “is spirit.” Achita was just one of many functions in Roddie Minor.

  Further interviews
with Amalantrah brought into question whether Therion’s questions were not prejudicing possible avenues of knowledge. On Saturday, April 27, at 10:08 p.m., the question turned back to the egg. Was not the egg a symbol “of some new knowledge”? asked Therion.12 Achita replied, “Don’t ask questions too fast. Sow the wild oats; go into the . . . into the Mother—to be born again.” To which Arctaeon interjected, “I think you’re both getting off the trolly.” And so might we. On the other hand, Roddie seemed to be getting a kind of vision of the Earth as a redeemed being, a mother, feminine energy: the essence of the egg. There is even a hint of the planet as we have now seen her from outer space, as she was seeing her from inner space. The egg appears in a lotus flower, suggesting the rejuvenation of the powers of Earth. Indeed, it all begins to sound, with benefit of hindsight of course, like the ecological spiritual revolution that has been struggling to find definitive form for the past half century or so. “Going into the Mother to be born again, you get a New Life, and then the Earth is covered with wonderful flowers, and bees come to the flowers to get honey to store, and the honey is stored elixir. I see a hill very steep. . . . Mother standing . . . washing child. I don’t know if she’s to save it or go after it or what. Lotus flower on Water again.” Arctaeon asks, “How does this apply to breaking the egg?” No, says Achita, “the egg is in the lotus flower.” The “egg” seems to be a symbol combining feminine energy rejuvenating Earth and vice versa. Crowley, as so often, is impatient, especially when the subject goes off his chief interest, which is the “Mass of the Holy Ghost.” He then asked the wizard if they might try using a Ouija board to obtain the new knowledge. He might better have listened more to Roddie. Perhaps the Beast simply wasn’t expecting a vision of the ecological “green” or “flower-power” awareness, Earth-consciousness revolution. Arguably, he was still fighting a war with Queen Victoria, as well as playing John the Baptist to the New Aeon, announcing the fiery harvest.