Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  In fact, the man was still watching him. Crowley makes light of what must have been a difficult conversation, for the watcher was Major James B. Ord, M.I.D.’s resident officer at West Point, keeping an eye on the Lower Hudson Valley.18 What Crowley’s account does not tell us is that Ord reported to M.I.D. (Military Intelligence Department) in Washington that Crowley interested his office on account of his connection to Madeleine George. This suggests intelligence had intercepted Madeleine’s telegram (at the post office where the watchful girl worked?), or Crowley had reported Madeleine’s imminent arrival to the Department of Justice. Ord inquired about Crowley with New York’s Bureau of Investigation in the person of Charles de Woody, from which Ord was apprised that Crowley worked for British Intelligence, that he had been investigated and cleared by Attorney General Becker.

  Fig. 32.5. Major James B. Ord, M.I.D.’s resident officer at West Point, investigated Crowley at Esopus Island in connection with Madeleine George. Watch Report, headed “Headquarters, United States Military Academy, West Point, New York”; September 23, 1918. (National Archive)

  As can be seen from the last line of the following Watch Report, headed “Headquarters, United States Military Academy, West Point, New York,” Ord, taught to be cautious, was not at this point totally reassured about Crowley’s loyalties, a doubt that resurfaced after J. Edgar Hoover assumed control of the Bureau of Investigation in August 1919.

  16. Aleister Crowley—English subject. Previous correspondence: [handwritten: “None”]

  Subject has been camping on Esopus Island, Hudson River and was brought to attention of this office by subject’s connections with Madeline George, an actress of New York City who had formerly been investigated by the Department of Justice on charges of being a German spy. It was determined that Aleister Crowley was an employee of the British Government but at present in this country on official business of which the British Counsel [sic], New York City has full cognizance. However, he has been formerly investigated by the Attorney General Becker’s office in connection with the activities of George Verick [sic], and the propaganda in New York City. It was found that the British Government was fully aware of the fact that Crowley was connected with this German propaganda and had received money for writing anti-British articles. This case has been turned over to the N.Y. State Attorney General’s Office, for such action as he may deem advisable. In view of the information which has been gathered within the past two months [August–September] it may be possible that Aleister Crowley is double crossing the British Government. However, the case has not been completed as yet.19

  Spence considers it likely that Becker’s men had primed Crowley to outwit Madeleine George and seduce secrets from her. This Spence deduces from Madeleine’s discovering Crowley’s gun hidden in his bed-clothes. She allegedly threw it into the bushes, fearing he was going to lead a “squad of secret-service men” back to the island, presumably to arrest her. Because Crowley nowhere else suggested any connection between the girl and espionage, this detail does seem an odd giveaway, it is true. Even his conversation with the major on Hyde Park station mentioned nothing about Madeleine in Crowley’s telling, so he obviously knew more than he chose to relate.

  Crowley plays the whole Madeleine incident for laughs, with a plug about how he helped the intelligence services with his observational skills. Crowley says her arrival at the station—short, sturdy, trimly tailored with round smiling face framed in a “pyrotechnic” display of hair—outdid any description of her by Sarg (or anyone else?). She sounds like Crowley’s ideal, Jeanne Foster. Crowley relates a comedic tale of Madeleine playing hard to get, her phony excuse of seeing her brother, incumbent at Staatsburg (!) frustrated by the canoe’s springing a leak, and their only being saved by two boys pulling in the sinking canoe. When, after protestations, Crowley agreed to get the boys to take her back to the mainland; she said, “No.” She had come, and she would stay. And she “swooned” into his embrace. The diary record tells us that in an operation dedicated to “Constructive Magical Energy” that embrace unfolded its majesty at 5:20 a.m. on Sunday, September 1, followed by another the next day.

  The diary describes Madeleine as married, redheaded, small, well formed, with Sol on cusp of Leo, with probably Scorpio or Sagittarius rising. The Elixir was “rather thin.” Crowley says that during her stay (he says he took her back to Central Park on Tuesday, September 3) he cracked the flashing-lights mystery, caused, he ascertained on investigation, by a passing train on the west shore whose funnel glowed where the wood thinned out. On the second night he noticed after 10:00 p.m. two men in a boat with a “shapeless heap” in the stern, which could have been cargo or a man. Using muffled oars, the business was likely secret. Next day he found his revolver missing, and suspicions grew when he and the boys saw a strange man just after dark disappear into the trees.

  Crowley says that he called on the “colonel” (he doesn’t say where) to report his findings, as promised. He learned of fresh suspicions that the Germans might be sending a pocket submarine up the Hudson, which seemed unlikely, but fears were high. According to Crowley he returned to find that one of the boys had discovered the missing gun, whereupon Madeleine admitted to having found it earlier in the tent and, being afraid of it, had thrown it into the brushwood. The implication here is that Crowley had told her he was going to see an intelligence officer about the mysterious lights and other odd happenings, and this made her scared of being found near a weapon, lest she be arrested. The slant is different to that which Spence puts on the account, but it is clever of Crowley to tell it in this apparently innocuous way. He perhaps had his own reasons for not directly implicating Madeleine in espionage, if, that is, he ever suspected she was involved. Certainly the Confessions account cannot be taken at face value.

  Crowley’s coda to “the joke” (as he typically described the events) came after his “retirement” ended on September 9. Back in New York, the “secret service, unaware of my relation with the colonel, got wind of the rumours about the mysterious hermit and sent two men to investigate.” According to Crowley, they found a desolate island and “no more illuminating clues to crime than the words ‘Madeleine’ and ‘Do what thou wilt’ on the rocks.”20 One rather suspects that the mysterious figures in the boat and the one darting into the trees were of like provenance—hence the “joke.” Had Crowley somehow outwitted someone? The suggestion of confusion between Department of Justice, B.I. agents, and M.I.D. persists.

  VISIONS

  Before Crowley left Esopus Island, he experienced further inner-plane revelations. On September 5 at 5:00 p.m. he experienced what he called the Vision of Jupiter. As it is now impossible to be sure of what happened, or even how to interpret the experience—an experience the mystic himself could not account for—we have no alternative but to leave the spare account in his own words.

  The meditation of this afternoon resulted in an initiation so stupendous that I dare not hint at its Word. It is the supreme secret of a Magus, and it is so awful that I tremble even now—two hours later and more—2:20 p.m. was the time—as I write concerning it. In a single instant I had the Key to the whole of the Chinese wisdom. In the light—momentary glimpse as it was—of this truth, all systems of religion and philosophy became absolutely puerile. Even the Law [of Thelema] appears no more than a curious incident. I remain absolutely bewildered, blinded, knowing what blasting image lies in this shrine. It baffles me to understand how my brother Magi, knowing this, ever went on.

  I had only one foreshadowing of this Vision of Jupiter—for so I may call it!—and that was a samadhi which momentarily interrupted my concentration of sammasati. This can only be described vaguely by saying that I obtained a reconciliation of two contraries of which “There is a discrimination between good and evil” is one.

  This experience has shaken me utterly; it has been a terrible struggle to force myself to this record. The secret comes along the path of aleph to Chokmah. I could write it plainly in a few words of one sy
llable, and most people would not even notice it. But it has might to hurl every Master of the Temple into the Abyss, and to fling every adept of the Rose Cross down to the Qliphoth. No wonder One said that the Book T was in ashes in the Urn of a Magus! I can’t see at all how it will affect me at present. Even the Way of the Tao looks idiotic—but then of course that’s what it is! So I suppose that’s it, all right. And its freedom, in an utterly fascinating and appalling sense, is beyond my fiercest conception.21

  One might only add that Jupiter is the largest planet in our system. Perhaps one might imagine waking up one morning with the sudden realization of this monster planet moving inexorably closer toward us, obliterating all in a nihilistic path, then monstrous as its annihilating darkness eneveloped our atmosphere: an ultra nightmare, for sure, but Crowley does not describe his vision as such, which suggests that his vision was of the annihilation of a thought, thought-relation, or process, rather than a discomposure of the cosmos. The description remains fatally fascinating, and if it did affect his future framework of mental reference, one can only suggest that Crowley, from this point on, was not completely human in mind, as we might understand the term, and that too is a nightmare to contemplate. However, the next day seems to have been business as usual, as he got down to sammasati, recalling, if that is the right verb, a life as Sir Edward Kelley, ambitious scryer of John Dee and discoverer, or inventor, of the aethyrs that meant so much to Crowley the Magus. According to his experience, Kelley was not, as he’d thought, Welsh, but Irish, his family having come to Wales from Ireland on some smuggling business. Well, all these incarnations seem like shaves off Crowley’s personality, deep interests, and darker fantasies: components of his psychological makeup.

  On November 28 he recalled an incarnation before Edward Kelley, in which he performed the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage. This seems less than likely historically, because the book is generally supposed to have been an eighteenth-century work based largely on a seventeenth-century original. Kelley was born in 1555, though the book of magic Crowley knew by that name was falsely dated to the fifteenth century, as was the Fama Fraternitatis, the foundation text of Roisicrucianism.

  Marius de Aquilis was the name of his pre-Kelly incarnation, this time an Italian, proud of “my” Roman blood. Marius was in an Order akin to the Jesuits, his Holy Guardian Angel at odds with an ambitious nature, yet otherwise without suspicion that “Jehovah & Co” might not be what they seemed. He did have a touch of illumination, though, connecting Jehovah with Jupiter, on account of Roman birth. Nobility also forced him back from black magic; Marius was a “Rosicrucian,” possessing, like the fifteenth-century tomb of “Christian Rosenkreuz” (alleged founder of the Order), an ever-burning lamp and a wand, the lamp spherical, of filigree gold and probably silver, its light emanating from an incandescent center.

  THE BLUE EQUINOX

  Crowley returned to New York from Esopus Island on September 9, 1918, without any real sense of direction. The Amalantrah seed had fallen on stony ground with none of the participants wishing to take on roles allotted them by the wizard, who, by the end of the Working had appeared contradictory, or else his intuitive mouthpiece had confused the message.

  Practically the only thing he could think of doing was to get on with a new volume of The Equinox, the “Review of Scientific Illuminism” last seen in September 1913. Crowley accounted for the five-year hiatus by saying that it was a five-year volume of silence, to follow magically ten equinoxes of speech: nothing to do with lack of funds, apparently. The fact was that Crowley had written an enormous amount since the last issue and wished to get some of it “out” as a way of extending the magical force of the Law throughout the world, for which purpose he had joined Madeleine’s hand to his blessed phallus at 11:05 a.m. on September 2 in a magickal rite.

  In the meantime he demonstrated to Bill Seabrook on returning to Fifth Avenue what he meant when he told the journalist that his respite on Esopus Island had increased his magical power. Crowley fell into step behind a man, and at a particular moment, fell to his haunches, at which second the man in front toppled to the pavement. Picking himself up he looked about him for whatever object he felt he must have slipped on. Seabrook was reasonably impressed.

  Having parted from Roddie, the Beast needed somewhere new to live and found a large single-roomed apartment studio at 1 University Place, on the corner of Washington Square North and Waverley Place, close to the Seabrooks, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Robert Winthrop Chanler, and Louis Umfreville Wilkinson, among many other bright stars of the village.*185 Having only one room, Crowley camouflaged the bed with a large screen he had made. This he painted with images of the three Hindu principles of Sun, Moon, and Fire. As the bed was still visible, he obtained another screen and waited for inspiration as to how to fill its three sections. Crowley’s favorite resorts at the time were the six-story Brevoort Hotel on 5th Avenue and 8th Street, the Hotel Lafayette at 30 East 9th Street on the southeast corner of University Place (a magnet for the artist-literary crowd and lovers of French cooking), and Luchow’s Restaurant, 110 East 14th Street at Irving Place, East Village—not, as it sounds, a Chinese restaurant but a broad three-story neoclassical German restaurant founded by August “Gus” Lüchow (pronounced “Lukov”). The umlaut went in 1917 when America entered the war, causing the “Chinese” confusion. Luchow’s was popular with musicians and entertainers.†186

  It was customary for Crowley to divine a word of magical guidance at each equinox, an idea gleaned I believe from a French Masonic practice. According to the Confessions the equinoctial word that autumn was eleven, which had magical associations. In retrospect, and with hindsight, Crowley noted “eleven” as the season’s keynote, insofar as the armistice that ended World War I was signed at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, the eleventh month.22 French astrologer F. C. Barlet had already informed leading Martinist Victor-Émile Michelet in July 1918 of the war’s imminent end after October and before the end of the year.*187

  At the end of the first week in October, as the autumn leaves fell, Charles Stansfeld Jones became convinced that he’d fulfilled his “sonship” by dis-covering, as he thought, the “secret key” of The Book of the Law. This, he claimed, was the word AL, the Semitic expression for a divinity, its number 31. The number corresponded to another key number of the book. The Greek Thelēma and Agapē (“Will” and “Love”) were 93 each; there were three chapters to the book, and three times 31 is 93: a “supernal triad” to be found at the head of the Tree of Life. Jones kept his discovery to himself until November. When at last the Beast heard of it, he appeared delighted. Here was another vindication of Jones’s sonship and the validity of Crowley’s teaching methods. Crowley revised this opinion several times when he observed Jones taking too much on himself and claiming grades higher than “Master of the Temple.” He would send Jones a corrective letter on December 28, 1923.

  The word AL exists in the [sic] Book of the Law, you [Jones] did not “produce” it and I did not receive it from you. It was pointed out to me by you which is a totally different matter. The writer [presumably Jones] asserts that I have proclaimed AL to be the Key of the Work but this is not the case. So far as I attach any meaning to the phrase “the Key of the Work” the Word would be Abrahadabra, a word which I “produced” myself by a train of Qabalistic reasoning in Mexico City in 1900 e.v. [era vulgari = “vulgar,” or “common,” era]. That I produced the Word and Aiwass “accepted” it gives me no claim to be superior to Aiwass. On the contrary, I am profoundly honoured that he deigned to confirm my research by adopting it in the Book of the Law. See Chapter 1, verse 20, where it is called the Key of the Rituals.

  . . . The Word AL is one of the three combinations which make up the Number of the Word of the Law. It is nowhere indicated in the Book that the discoverer of the “Key of it all” (one of the 4 Keys, incidentally) is entitled to any grade soever as such.

  It is true, by the way, that there is a certain intimat
e connection between what the writing of the letter calls my higher self and Aiwass, but this does not clash with the vitally important fact that he is an independent intelligence whether incarnate or no. I look to him alone for my instructions.23

  In the meantime Crowley had more mundane business to see to. Summoned back to Attorney General Becker’s office on Park Avenue on October 11, Crowley spoke to Becker himself. A “delightful evening” was passed, as Crowley related, telling the attorney general about his time in the Staatsburg–Hyde Park district. Crowley’s account suggests that there had indeed been confusion and overlap between the Justice Department’s B.I. agents and M.I.D. officers, though Becker’s account indicates only that he asked Crowley about “German propaganda.”24 This limitation seems a little unlikely given the flap around Crowley and Madeleine George. One might presume that was just one of the subjects discussed. Crowley informed Becker about O.T.O. outer head Theodor Reuss’s January 22, 1917, “Anational Manifesto,” which had so upset South African members and about which Windram had written to Crowley and Jones. Crowley said it was likely that Reuss was a well-connected Prussian spy and had probably visited the United States during the war, of which he had informed the Bureau previously.25 Crowley insisted Reuss’s circular constituted German propaganda.26 At the Sixty-sixth Congress U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Judiciary, concerned with brewing and liquor interests and German Bolshevik propaganda, Becker testified that while “Aleister Crowley and his organization may be classified as a dubious proposition,” Crowley had not been a German tool, and his group was a “pacifist affair.”27