Mr. Crowley has, since the War, often been attacked sporadically by the British gutter press for disloyalty to his country during the War. Being a very busy man, wholly engrossed with creative literary work, and having neither time nor money to spend on legal actions he has hitherto been compelled to disregard such slanders, awaiting a time when he can vindicate himself, fully and finally, in his Autobiography which he hopes to publish in the course of a year or so.8
Nothing untoward occurred on Crowley’s first weekend on Esopus Island, bar a dangerously late canoe trip, loaded down with Roddie Minor and a hoard of canned food, after Roddie, as Crowley complained in best Professor Higgins style, underestimated the distance between the neat, colonial-style bungalow of Staatsburg’s New York Central Railroad station*178 and the island. “The train was late, night was falling, the wind was getting up, and the rain beginning to skirmish.”9 It took some five hours to paddle 3 miles in appalling conditions, with Roddie cursing everything and the Beast especially. But when they got up in the morning, and the sun had dried the wet rocks, they looked at the creek and its lilies, and each other, and it felt very good.
With Roddie back for work in New York at the weekend’s end, Crowley began working on his own transliteration of the Tao-Te Ching. He was always very proud of “his” version, feeling that a true translation required more than linguistic skills; you had to understand the consciousness of the mind that composed the original and what the mere words pointed to. He may have shared the mentality of the work’s progenitor, but Crowley certainly lacked the linguistic skills to translate from the Chinese. The French Taoist initiate Matgioï suffered from no such deficit. Edmond Bailly’s Librairie de l’Art Indépendant had published Matgioï’s translation of the Chinese classic back in 1893, so Crowley was adding his strokes to quite well-trodden territory.
The same could not be said of another feature of his summer operations. Crowley got down to some serious sammasati. Determined to uncover once and for all his previous incarnations, he assumed a crosslegged yogic posture and practiced dhyana. Locals who saw him thought him mad or marvelous; farmers brought him eggs to eat, as would peasants feed a bhikku in Burma. On August 3 the Magus tried to enter trance but it was no use. “What’s wrong? If this goes on, I shall be eligible for membership in the TS,”*179 he quipped.
On August 8 he experienced a breakthrough. In the document called The Hermit of Oesopus Island,†180 he recorded how “the magical memory is the unveiling of the subconsciousness; therefore as I awaken it I find that episodes of my conscious life count less than things built into the unconscious.”
At 9:50 p.m. consciousness emerged of his infancy, then—most vividly—his birth, afterward the prenatal stage.
Next I found myself as Eliphas Lévi, dying, and then went through quite a number of scenes in that life, mostly unimportant, though I remember several episodes with my wife. (I can’t remember her name, though Crowley knows it well [sic]—Freudian forgetfulness, evidently) and the scenes of my taking various orders in Catholicism. . . . I don’t seem to remember much about Vintras;‡181 what I do get very vividly—in patches—is my dealings with the Illuminati. There was a tall man, very thin, very dark, clean-shaven, stern with a cruel smile, who was one of their chiefs in Paris. He was a man of “infamous character,” and very skillful in Magick. He had much to do with fathering the De Guaita-Huysmans crowd. He initiated me in a ceremony rather like Élus des Neuf, where one has to kill a traitor.*18210
On August 10, C. S. Jones joined Crowley on Esopus Island as newly appointed grand treasurer general (replacing George Macnie Cowie) and deputy grand master general. What he and Crowley did between Jones’s arrival and departure on August 16 is unknown as Jones later destroyed his magical record of the period.
THE REDHEAD STRIKES
Few of Crowley’s adventures in America, lurid or otherwise, quite match up to his encounter with redheaded, game-for-anything Madeleine George. The expression grand guignol hardly seems adequate.
It began amid the heat of August 19, 1918, when only a few astrologers were convinced the Great War would be over in less than three bloody months. The highly selective Confessions account starts in simple fashion. Crowley felt he had to leave the island for two days “on OTO business.”11 This involved him and Jones establishing bank accounts for receiving members’ payments. Crowley assured Jones that a few good patrons could achieve what was required, a stance that irritated Jones, who believed Crowley had intended to change the world through opening up the O.T.O. to humanity in the numerical sense. Jones did not approve of raising money from members to be used for the Beast’s personal financing. Surely the O.T.O.’s task was the liberation of humanity at large. The issue played on Jones’s mind, and on August 27 he wrote a letter of resignation from the O.T.O. that bemused Crowley and shocked Jones’s friend and O.T.O. brother Wilfred Talbot Smith. By February 1919, Jones had withdrawn his resignation, convinced again that the O.T.O. was good for the world’s needs.
Crowley’s other requirement in returning to New York on August 19 might also pass under the “OTO business” rubric. He sought a sexual assistant, pursuant to which end he hastened to “old friend” Tony Sarg, this being Crowley’s sole reference to a remarkable artist and innovative puppeteer who occupied a studio in Times Square.*183
Times Square in 1918 was a considerably more spacious and stately affair than today. The Times Building resembled a thinner slice of the cake from which the Flatiron Building was cut; it dominated the crossways intersection, above the trolley cars and Broadway theater and Macy’s electrical signs. The sky passed un-scraped.
Anthony Frederick Sarg (1880–1942) was the son of Francis Charles Sarg, the German empire’s consul in Guatemala, where Sarg was born. His mother, Mary Elizabeth Parker, was English. Aged fourteen, Sarg entered Darmstadt military academy in Germany, eventually resigning his commission for a life in England in 1905, on condition that he return for periodic reservist duties.†184
In England, Sarg wooed American Bertha Eleanor McGowan, whom he met when she toured Germany. Marrying in her home town of Cincinatti, Ohio, in 1909, they returned to England until war broke out in 1914, when wife and children returned to Cincinatti, afterward to be joined by Sarg, who then settled his family in New York in 1915. Before leaving London’s East End—which fascinated him—he produced a postcard showing a German shopkeeper trying to de-Germanize his storefront in the face of local anti-German hysteria. It was a joke, but the background was serious, and threatening.
While developing a puppetry hobby into a business in 1917, Sarg’s witty illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines earned him a reputation in Gotham’s art community, which brought him to greater success after the war as movie animation pioneer, writer of children’s books, and puppeteer on the grand scale. It was Tony Sarg who pioneered the Macy’s Thanksgiving giant puppet and balloon figure parade that started in 1924 and continues to this day.
Back to Crowley, out for “skirt” in August 1918: he told Sarg he’d found his paradise on Esopus Island; that is, but for one fly in the ointment—he had no “Eve.” Sarg had the answer: “a girl game for any adventure. She has wonderful hair—orange-red curls, calculated to produce delirium tremens at a moment’s notice.” Sarg directed Crowley to the hotel where the incomparable Madeleine George resided. After frolics at the studio—with Sarg hilariously imitating Crowley wooing a girl to the delight of those present—Crowley left a note at Madeleine’s hotel, not expecting her to reply to his invitation to lunch at Esopus any convenient day.
Fig. 32.3. Tony Sarg, “the Father of Modern American Puppetry,” with some of his puppets for “Rip van Winkle” at the Assembly Theatre, 1929
Fig. 32.3. Tony Sarg, “the Father of Modern American Puppetry,” with some of his puppets for “Rip van Winkle” at the Assembly Theatre, 1929
What Crowley apparently did not know—and in this case, appearances may be deceptive—was that Madeleine George was of interest
to other parties, one official, one not. First: The unofficial interest. This apparently (that word again!) began after Crowley’s invitation from Sarg to meet his game friend.
In Crowley’s pal Bill Seabrook’s autobiography No Hiding Place (1942), written after a lifetime of trying to establish a respectable literary reputation in Greenwich Village, Seabrook states that Tony Sarg’s studio was where he first encountered a puppeteer (Sarg’s assistant) he calls “Deborah Luris,” presumably to protect her innocence, or his own. The lady taught him much about sex, and about himself.
Further details emerge in Emily Matchar’s The Zombie King, a recent short biography of Seabrook, the “man who introduced Zombies to America.” According to Matchar, it was after a long, drunken lunch with friends in New York that Seabrook entered Sarg’s studio, there to meet “Deborah Luris” and to be pulled like a moon to a planet by the girl’s sexual frankness and “broad animal face.” Seabrook wrote her a pained plea that she participate in kinky games. “Sure, why not?” replied “Luris.” “Come on up. But why be so solemn and self-conscious about it? It might be fun.” Seabrook confessed his feelings to first wife, Kate, who approved his buying locks and chains at Hammacher Schlemmer on 13th Street and 4th Avenue. Seabrook spent a delirious week in S&M fantasyville at Luris’s New York apartment. “When people uncork parallel or complimentary chimeric wish-fantasies, sparks generally fly. And so they did,” reflected Seabrook. The only trouble with Seabrook was an uncontrollable urge to embellish as many stories as possible with his fantasies, even having himself discover Crowley in Greenwich Village indulging in S&M sessions with Leah, blood from whipping scarring her slender back. Were it anyone but Seabrook telling the tales, you might credit it—but Seabrook was truly obsessed with sex and voodoo. Crowley undoubtedly found him a peculiarly amusing case for observation, and vice versa, with the emphasis on vice.
Seabrook’s reputation for excess earned him a painful snub from Theodore Dreiser in the village—one that, typically, drove Seabrook to drink—Dreiser dismissing Seabrook as a “yellow journalist”; that is, a hack, with a facility for niche yarns of lurid-as-possible supernatural sensationalism enmired in sex crime.
Fig. 32.4. Ward Greene (1893–1956)
One of Seabrook’s friends in Atlanta, and Decatur—where the Seabrooks had a farm—was fellow Hearst-man Ward Greene (1893–1956). Author of The Lady and the Tramp, Greene would be a pallbearer at Hearst’s funeral in 1951. Ride the Nightmare (1930), one of Greene’s novels, was based on Seabrook’s colorful life, with “Jake Perry” standing in for Seabrook. In the novel, Jake inherits a masochistic playmate called “Justine” from “Bellerophon Cawdor,” who stands for—that’s right—Aleister Crowley. In Seabrook’s Witchcraft (Its Power in the World Today) (1940) he calls his fellow sex/psychic experimenter in New York “Justine.” Paul Pipkin’s The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook: A Romance of Many Worlds refers to Seabrook’s second wife, Marjorie (née) Worthington’s, reminiscences of life at Sanay, where Seabrook was drying out in the South of France in 1933. Marjorie remembered Ward Greene visiting them and mentioned a redheaded gypsy cook at Les Roseaux (their home) and a redhead called . . . Madeleine.
Back to Crowley on Tuesday, August 20, 1918: Below the Tribune’s headline U.S. WILL WIN THE WAR IN 1919, Says [General] MARCH ran the story, FIGHT ON HEARST PAPERS HAS BEGUN, with 1,200 newsdealers in Brooklyn refusing to handle Hearst papers due to Hearst’s trying to fix the market in his favor by pressuring dealers not to sell other publishers’ papers unless they sold his as well. In Petrograd, Bolsheviks initiated a reign of terror, with an estimated thirty thousand middle-class Russians arrested in a week. New York’s 7:00 a.m. temperature was around 65°F with humidity at 73 percent: sticky conditions for Crowley and Roddie’s IX° operation that morning for “Magic Power.”
Next day, Crowley was back on Esopus Island. Having taken the train and alighted at either Hyde Park or Staatsburg, he visited a local store to buy about four cans of red paint. Marrying his artistic soul to his will to spread the Law, Crowley paddled across to the island, where he suspended himself over the smooth rock of its clifflike banks (about a man’s height) and painted the words DO WHAT THOU WILT boldly for the edification and wonder of regular passing riverboat passengers. This he did on the island’s western and eastern sides; the message was unavoidable. If he could have afforded electrical bulbs on Times Square for the same purpose, he would have done that too. The remaining paint he splashed onto a tree by his tent, spelling out MADELEINE, which word also adorned a nearby rock: the first graffiti-magick since maybe the imprisoned Templars’ carved symbols on their prison walls at Chinon, France, in 1307. Crowley then returned to his sammasati trances in search of previous incarnations.
Meanwhile, back in New York, Attorney General Becker’s men were also hot for “Madeline” (sic), though not in Crowley’s red-paint sense. Whether they had already acquainted Crowley with their interest is unknown; such would make logical sense of what was about to ensue, but all secret service records are permeated with irreducibly crooked elements. Becker accessed a Bureau of Investigation report dated April 23, 1918, describing Madeline George as a petite brunette “aspiring actress,” twice divorced. One husband complained that she was “very erratic and an adventuress,” capable of just about anything.12 According to Spence, Madeline had recently attracted British Intelligence concern for having entertained a number of officers in a Montreal hotel room. While the picture emerged of a Mata Hari in contact with arrested German agent Baroness von Sedlitz and suspected agent Edward Rumley,13 no evidence has emerged that she was spying for anyone.
Crowley’s subconscious was often out of synch with recorded history. When he undertook to live “in the past once more” on the late afternoon of August 22, he experienced “his” death as magician and High Freemason Cagliostro (1743–1795) on the high wooded slopes, he was sure, of the Pyrenees. Crowley had nothing to contribute to the mystery of Cagliostro’s birth, generally supposed to have been that of Giuseppe Balsamo in Palermo. Condemned by the Inquisition as a Freemason, Cagliostro, as he styled himself, died tragically at the Fortress of San Leo on the border of Marche and Romagna, Italy. Crowley believed he got his “Secret Society ideas” from Cagliostro, who took them to the French court to spread a Law. Crowley did think he’d solved one mystery around the Masonic magician.14
After Cagliostro’s death a seal was found showing a serpent, pierced with an arrow, holding an apple in its mouth with the acronym “L.P.D.” (described in Lévi’s History of Magic). Crowley took the acronym as Laus Priapo Deo—“Praise to the god Priapus”—which you can take or leave. Crowley took it to mean his Law, as Cagliostro, was phallicism—the cross as sun-phallus-god: creative self-giving in ecstasy. Crowley had already taken the L.P.D. acronym as monogram for his Order of the L.I.L., founded in Mexico City in 1900–1901 with Don Jesús Medina. In trance, Crowley experienced “a kind of profess-house, some ten years or nearly before my death. It was kept by a disciple, a man of thirty or forty, with a dark brown beard, pointed. He procured young girls for me; I used these in some experiments to make the Elixir of Life & Youth.”15
Crowley’s Cagliostro was Crowley’s Cagliostro.
At 5:10 p.m. on August 25 the Beast returned to “memories” experienced the previous evening of an incarnation prior to the Sicilian phallicist: one Heinrich von (or van) Dorn apparently hanged himself between twenty-six and twenty-eight after a life of futile black magic. Before that incarnation, the being who became Crowley was known as “Father Ivan,” born around 1650, a Russian librarian in a castle of military monks, possibly in southern Poland or the Balkans. Sent by noble parents for an education in Germany, he habitually invoked “the Devil” (Crowley’s quotation marks). Ivan “had a round face—rather like Otto Kahn—ashen hair and a moustache, a pale and ruddy skin, gray eyes, small even teeth, a short well-shaped body.”16 He believed his “favourite page” and magical disciple, one Stephen Otto, was now Crowley’s admired
novelist James Branch Cabell (1879–1958), which sounds like wishful thinking.
He’d have to settle for Madeleine George for the time being. According to the Confessions, no sooner had Crowley painted Madeleine’s name on a tree than a man appeared in a boat from the mainland carrying a telegram alerting him to the lady’s imminent appearance at Hyde Park station. Madeleine must in fact have arrived some time between the twenty-sixth and Saturday, the thirty-first of August, with the latter date most likely as Crowley had magical sex with her very early on September 1. She hadn’t come for the fishing.
Hyde Park railroad station has been preserved, a few miles down the Hudson from Esopus Island, sited adjacent to the river: a simple, single story, oblong, mottled brick structure with a first course of stone supporting a sloping tiled roof and pleasant wooden-framed canopy with Edwardian-era gables. It sets you up for the pleasant Old World charm of the area. Crowley describes himself pacing the low platform waiting for the New York Central Railroad train.
I noticed a tall, distinguished, military-looking man, who seemed to be eyeing me strangely. He finally made up his mind to speak. “Are you Mr. Crowley?” he said. In my surprise I nearly forgot to say, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” We then got into conversation.17
Crowley says the man introduced himself as running “Intelligence” in Dachers County, New York, whereupon Crowley confided to him that he was working for the Department of Justice, on the lookout for suspicious incidents: a somewhat unlikely first exchange. The man asked Crowley to report anything of the kind to him also. The man then told Crowley that he—Crowley—had had all Staatsburg “on the grill,” with folk wondering who the man was who spent hours stock still. Such reports had brought the “colonel” to the scene as part of his inquiries. Only the watchful eye of a girl at the post office had identified him. She had spotted the gold tassles on his golf stockings! The man said he had had Crowley watched and found nothing wrong (“of course,” adds Crowley) but had been amazed when New York informed him that he was working for the Department of Justice. He then confided to Crowley that there had been sinister rumors about spies in the vicinity. Crowley says he doubted the necessity for his interlocutor’s labor, but the man told Crowley of strange lights on the west shore at night, suggesting signaling, especially as troops were carried to New York by night train; spies might signal troop estimates. Crowley promised to keep watch.
Aleister Crowley in America Page 60
