Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  †17 Crowley’s friend and sometime guide, Frater Volo Noscere = George Cecil Jones (1873–1960).

  *18 Another ex-pupil of the Slade School of Art, Moina, or “Mina,” Mathers, née Bergson (1865–1928), sister of philosopher Henri Bergson.

  †19 Lucile Hill (?1867–1922) of Trenton, New Jersey, was understudy to soprano Susan Strong in the role of Venus in Tannhaüser, which opened on May 15, 1900, to run for seven performances through May, June, and July at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London. Lucile would play the role of Elizabeth in the same opera in the autumn. Tannhaüser inspired Crowley’s verse play of the same name, written in Mexico later in 1900. During the 1890s, soprano Lucile Hill had shared Alfred Kayne’s mansion at 358 West End Avenue and 77th Street, New York, with close friend contralto Attalie Claire Smith (stage name “Attalie Claire”), who married fashionable broker Alfred Kayne on September 15, 1892. Covering the wedding, the New York Times described Lucile Hill as “the prima donna of the Metropolitan Opera House Company,” recently returned from a Covent Garden engagement. Attalie and Lucile sang at lavish, lively parties at the mansion. In 1895, The Peterson Magazine praised Lucile as “one of the singers immensely popular within the theater and without, as she has a sunshiny, open-hearted and un-affected temperament that cheers and refreshes.” Readers were also informed that this “plump little person with a winsome, intelligent face, very youthful and with pretty, regular features” could be seen “daily cantering round the corner at Seventy-seventh Street and West End Avenue, on her way for a ride in the park, as she is an excellent horsewoman.” Attalie Claire’s marriage to Kayne went awry. By January 1899, the contralto was living with her and Kayne’s child in apartments at 74 Madison Avenue, the scene of a scandalous confrontation with her husband during divorce proceedings. Lucile Hill sang at London’s Albert Hall at the “Last Night of the Proms,” conducted by Sir Henry Wood on October 21, 1899, having sung on at least three other occasions during the Proms season. (See here for Crowley’s view of Lucile Hill).

  *20 Mrs. Harriette Dorothea Hunter (1868–1958), Soror Deo Date (D.D.), an associate of W. B. Yeats; and her husband Edmund Arthur Hunter (1866–1937), Frater Hora Et Semper (H.E.S.).

  †21 Marcus Worsley Blackden (1864–1934), Frater Ma Wahanu Thesi (M.W.T.): the Golden Dawn’s authority on Egyptian papyri and a notable GD rebel; and his sister Ada Mary Blackden (1872–1965).

  ‡22 Charles Henry Rosher (1858–1936), engineer-architect and writer, Frater Aequo Animo (A.A.), and Caroline Lily Rosher (b. 1856), the “Mrs Rosher” of Helwan Road, Wealdstone, who (according to Crowley) made members’ robes and nemysses for seventy-five shillings, given one’s tailor’s measurements.25 Charles Henry Rosher, relativeand correspondent of Freidrich Engels, had provided accommodation for Allan Bennett immediately before Bennett moved in to Crowley’s flat at Chancery Lane in 1899. Rosher’s son, Oscar-winning and many times Oscar-nominated cinematographer Charles Gladdish Rosher (1885–1974), shot two films featuring Hollywood character actress Jane Wolfe(1875–1958). Wolfe would become Crowley’s devoted follower after 1920 (correspondence began in 1918), by which time Jane had appeared in more than 100 films starting in 1910. Perhaps she felt encouraged to contact Crowley through cameraman Rosher, whose two films featuring Jane were the five-reeler The Plow Girl (directed by Robert Z. Leonardin 1916) and The Blacklist (directed by Cecil B. de Mille). Interestingly, both Charles Roshers had offered services to the Moroccan court of Abdul Aziz: the elder as court painter, the nephew as demonstrator of movie equipment. The Rosher-Engels connection perhaps played a part in Crowley’s visiting the Rosher house in south London in 1899.

  §23 Edward William Berridge (1844–1920), Frater Resurgam, doctor, homeopath, writer, expounder of the principles of Thomas Lake Harris.

  ¶24 Alice Isabel Simpson (b. 1853), Soror Perseverantia et cura quies (P.E.C.Q.).

  \25 Miss Elaine Simpson, Soror Donorum Dei Dispensatio Fidelis (D.D.D.F.).

  *26 Procès des Templiers (“Trial of the Templars”), by Jules Michelet; 2 vols., 1841.

  *27 Karl von Eckartshausen’s The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, first published 1804. The “Sanctuary” was identified with the “Fraternity of the Rosy Cross” in sundry occult lore.

  *28 “[I]f R[ose] and I get as far as Cairo this winter, my name will go down with Bruce and Harris. For I will be avenged upon you by not putting you in the Papyrus. . . . do not let R[ose] leave England, perhaps for months, without seeing her mother . . . and believe me ‘God’s poet.’ [signed] AC [PS:] Great! Remember I have always bid you go high, piped when you danced, but refused to weep when you mourned unto me. My reward is your success. I have just done—yesterday—my great ‘Dialogue between an Indian Mystic and a British Sceptic.’ [Collected Works, vol. 2, essay titled “Time”] A most wearisome job! i.e.: to write. Nobody can ever read it.”1 The references to Bruce and Harris are to Scottish aristocrat and explorer James Bruce (1730–1794), who circa 1769 discovered the papyri of the “Bruce Codex” of Gnostic manuscripts in Egypt, and Anthony Charles Harris (1790–1869), discoverer of the “Harris Papyrus,” British Library, the longest papyrus manuscript from ancient Egypt, concerning the reign of Rameses III. It is surely interesting in view of the reception of The Book of the Law (April 1904) that Crowley had in his mind a year earlier the production of a historic papyrus linked to ancient Egypt, even if as in a jest as, apparently, here.

  *29 Quaker George Cadbury bought the reformist Daily News in 1901. Pacifist Cadbury opposed the Boer War. Carmen Saeculare is also markedly hostile to Britain’s campaign against the Boers in South Africa, regarding the war’s conduct as an abuse of imperial power, disproportionate given Britain’s overwhelming forces. The poem paints this as the venom of the unjust oppressor.

  *30 The Book of the Law is also referred to as Liber AL vel Legis and abbreviated in citations as AL.

  *31 Led by Victor-Émile Michelet; see my book Occult Paris.

  †32 Presumably the Golden Dawn, which, incidentally, recognized the Martinist Order.

  *33 See here.

  †34 There were fewer than eight hundred automobiles on the roads in Great Britain in 1900. Crowley went up to Trinity College, Cambridge with Charles Rolls (1877–1910), cofounder of Rolls-Royce. It is believed Rolls’s Peugeot Phaeton, purchased in Paris in 1896, was the first motorcar in Cambridge. This probably inspired Crowley’s own investment in the future; Rolls was an aristocrat, third son of 1st Baron Llangattock and Lady Llangattock, and Crowley would not like to have been outdone.

  *35 I am grateful to William Breeze for kindly sending me a photograph of Crowley’s annotations to Kelly’s copy of The Sword of Song (p. 37, lines 105–15). Mr Breeze’s perspicacity has been decisive in finally resolving a longstanding error concerning Susan Strong, who, as far as we know, had no relations with Crowley.

  *36 She may not have been a member while in Paris, though William Breeze has observed that she may have been initiated as a neophyte in Paris, and subsequently “Zelator” (1° = 10▫) in London, in Crowley and Kelly’s presence.

  †37 According to William Breeze, Lucile Hill had a husband in South Africa, which would account for her being referred to by Crowley as “Madame” in a letter to Kelly about her (see here), but as “Miss” in his Sword of Song annotation referring to her stage identity.

  *38 The proofs would probably have been those for The Mother’s Tragedy, which was so long that Kegan Paul suggested dividing it into two; the second part being The Soul of Osiris, published in 1901 and generously reviewed.

  †39 Doubtless referring to Legitimist politics. But see chapter 4, The Two Republics where we see a fascinating reassertion of Crowley’s role in “politics.”

  ‡40 The Latin poet Ovid was exiled by Emperor Augustus to Tomis (now Constanta, Romania), where Latin was hardly spoken (hence “barbarian”) in 8 CE for obscure reasons connected with a “Carmen” (note!—in the context of Carmen Saeculare), a hymn or poem, “et error” (some personal indis
cretion), possibly the famous Ars Amatoria, on the subject of love. Crowley clearly felt his views and conduct made him unacceptable in his native land and saw himself at the time as being in exile, thus comparable to Ovid, and writing his own “Carmen” to justify that exile. It is then possible to argue that Crowley was in America for what he at least was prepared to see as political reasons. This view may become more apparent and intelligible in the next chapter.

  §41 Probable reading of scrawled word; a colorful mixed metaphor. An “octoroon” used to be understood as a person one-eighth black by descent.

  ¶42 Crowley had great faith in Kelly as an artist before Kelly achieved success. See chapter 2, note 1.

  *43 Sagittarius.

  *44 The issue of oil in the Royal Navy was still being debated in 1913 by the Royal Commission on Fuel and Engines when Admiral of the Fleet 1st Lord Fisher wrote in August of that year to Winston Spencer Churchill concerning the evidence given by Lord Cowdray (formerly known as Weetman Pearson) to the latter commission on supplying the navy with oil. Pearson had an interest in Mexican oil in 1901. Officially speaking, the Navy did not; the date is too early.

  *45 “Will Climb Popo. Adventurous Party to Start on the Difficult Trip.” (Mexican Herald, December 27, 1900.) “A man from Texas was also among the applicants for a berth in the excursion, but not until evening did Mr. Bowdle strike a [unreadable], when everybody’s friend, the Chevalier O’Rourke, of Europe, presented himself for admission.”

  *46 Referring to the Mexican Central Railway connecting Mexico City with El Paso, Texas.

  †47 “Orouke” is a clerk’s error for “O’Rourke.” Aleister Crowley arrived under this extraordinary name in Mexico from the outset, choosing to announce “his” arrival from Paris to someone or persons unknown.

  *48 According to William Breeze’s notes for The Drug and Other Stories (p. 627), this was one of many aliases of psychic con-artist Anne O’delia Salomon (1849–?), known as Mme. Laura Horos and Soror S.V.A. in G.D. circles and variously as Mrs. Joseph H. Diss Debar née Editha Loleta Landsfeldt Montez, Anna O’Delia Salomon Messant, Swami Vive Ananda, and Marie Louise de la Commune. Her last husband and accomplice was Frank Dutton Jackson (1866–1948), known to the G.D. as Theodore Horos or Frater M.S.R. In 1901 a sex scandal saw them imprisoned until 1906, the ructions of which brought bad publicity onto the G.D., described in John Mulholland’s Beware Familiar Spirits (New York, London, Scribner’s, 1938).

  *49 Crowley offered a very brief account of his wartime motives and activities in an article, “THEY CALLED ME A RENEGADE,” published in British newspaper the Empire News, Sunday, December 17, 1933. Crowley made the point that he had never been arrested in his life and had even visited Scotland Yard after the war to ask the police if they had anything against him (at which they “simply laughed at the idea”) and had lived in Britain subsequently “without hurt or hindrance.” An edited version of “The Last Straw” appeared in Symonds and Grant’s abridged version of Confessions in 1969.

  *50 Hovey undertook a series of climbs practically identical to those followed by Crowley and Eckenstein in 1900; his photographs give one a sense of what was really involved. One suspects that somebody in the American colony had taken notice of Crowley’s adventurous itinerary and caught on to its tourist potential.

  *51 Having left the GD in April 1900, Alice Isabel Simpson found an eligible husband for daughter Elaine3 (Soror Fidelis) in German Paul Harry Witkowski, working in Hong Kong for Arnhold, Karberg & Co., an agent in the Far East for several European and American shipping and insurance companies, with a large property portfolio and branches in China, London, and New York. In Hong Kong the business enjoyed a seat on the board of directors of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. Witkowski occupied that seat from 1899 to 1901 while a more senior colleague vacationed in Europe. Elaine married Witkowski on June 12, 1900, at Saint Saviour’s Paddington, then left for Hong Kong where she gave birth to her first child at the end of June 1901.

  *52 Crowley was always curiously close to the pulse of history, even with the ships he sailed on. Laid down at C. S. Swan & Hunter’s yard at Newcastle on Tyne, England, and launched on September 24, 1898, the 6,070-ton America Maru passenger cargo ship was placed four months later with its crew of 128 on the Oriental Steamship Company’s Trans-Pacific route between Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Kobe, Yokohama, Honolulu, and San Francisco. Not only was the America Maru critical to the Honolulu plague events, but from June to August 1900 she had served in the Boxer Rebellion in China, and when after the September 1901 peace treaty between the Chinese empress and the colonial powers was signed, and the revolution against the Qing Dynasty led by Sun Yat-sen, first president of Nationalist China, failed, Sun would go into exile to Yokohama aboard the America Maru. Requisitioned on February 4, 1904, by the Imperial Japanese Navy, she was attached to the Combined Fleet’s Yokosuka Naval District and helped to defeat the Russian fleet in 1905.

  *53 I should include William Breeze’s observation that the possibility exists that the review may have been the work of Crowley himself, masochistically garnering attention by self-parody and an invitation for curiosity to investigate a work purportedly wicked.

  *54 A most interesting application from Crowley’s esoteric grade as a “Master of the Temple,” Magister Templi 8° = 3▫, that insisted the adept adopt this attitude as an imperative injunction.

  *55 Elbert Hubbard, writer, artist, publisher, philosopher, socialist, and anarchist, and his wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, died on May 7, 1915, when a German submarine torpedoed RMS Lusitania.

  *56 Michael Brenner (1889–1969).

  *57 Journalist’s errors: Crowley was in the Far East in July 1901. Crowley was not a permanent resident of Paris in 1914; the magic rites with Neuburg took place in a hotel suite.

  *58 See appendix 2 for the very extensive collection Quinn had acquired of Crowley’s books and manuscripts.

  *59 Possibly Fanny Bullock Workmen, who achieved the women’s altitude record in 1912, but more likely mountaineer and diplomat Guy Bullock (1887–1956), elected to the Alpine Club in 1919, and who in 1913 was posted to the British consulate in New Orleans to deal with refugees from the Mexican Revolution. Guy Bullock would participate in the 1921 assault on Everest.

  *60 See pages 375–76.

  *61 Crowley sent the following letter to Leon Engers Kennedy:

  First—how grateful I am for your sympathy and help!

  Next—I am having pictures and drawings sent up at once from Cefalù. But you know how long that often takes. . . .

  Third . . . The Paris ‘Telegram’ (only evening paper in English here) is for sale 800,000 fr[ancs].

  Frank Harris (oldest and cleverest journalist alive) wants it. Cohen, the owner, promised to let him take it on and pay off in installments. But before this could be put through, people got at Cohen and put him against F.H. as a pro-German: Cohen then demanded 100,000 fr. Down. And the rest as before. . . .

  Harris thinks Cohen would compromise on about £1200 cash down, and wants £800 more to get it going. This looks to me like the very thing for your brother-in-law, it should suit him down to the ground to control an organ in English in Paris, with an old hand like FH (with his sympathetic views too!) in charge.

  I should want to come in as Assistant Editor. . . . I really believe this scheme would appeal to your Bank: you need nothing so badly as an English voice here. F.H. and I could frighten the life out of the opposition which is sure to be very bitter.

  Now then get a move on, Sir Lionel!

  Remember me to [picture of a duck or other bird: Kitty née Reilly, Engers’s wife]6

  *62 I am grateful to William Breeze for passing on to me his discoveries about Feilding’s uncle’s and Marston’s intelligence roles. Everard Feilding’s own intelligence role during the war, a matter of record, is well established.

  *63 The Royal Earlswood Hospital, Redhill, Surrey, was the first specialized environment for people with learning disabilit
ies (called “idiots” at the time), formerly sent to workhouses or mental asylums. Crowley lived in Redhill as a boy.

  *64 Captain (later Major-General) J. F. C. Fuller, A∴A∴ member and author of The Star in the West, a eulogy of Crowley’s philosophy.

  †65 Oddenino’s Imperial Restaurant, Grill Room, 60–62 Regent Street, London.

  *66 Crowley’s divorce from Rose had been decreed finally on January 10, 1910; the reference to “engagement” probably concerns Leila Waddell, to whom Crowley informed J. F. C. Fuller that year he had become engaged; see Chapter 8.

  *67 33 Avenue Studios, 76, Fulham Road (Sydney Close), South Kensington SW3.

  *68 William Breeze has furnished the author with meticulously sourced information concerning this polymath, barrister, physician, professor, encyclopedia and journal editor, Masonic leader, bishop—and very possibly, spy. Born July 27, 1879, in Falmouth, Cornwall, Maitland Ambrose Trevelyan Raynes’s father was civil engineer Thomas Raynes of Moseley, Birmingham, his English mother, Charlotte Trevelyan (née Simmonds) Raynes. Educated at Lancing College, Felsted School, and South African College, Cape Town, Raynes also studied at St. Augustine’s College, Ramsgate, a Roman Catholic missionary college, and did graduate study at Keble College, Oxford, from 1899 to 1901. Called to the bar at the Middle Temple on April 3, 1902, he first visited New York in 1905, stating his profession as barrister, though there’s no evidence that he practiced. On the editorial staff of Encyclopedia Brittanica from 1902 to 1905, in 1905 Raynes founded a newspaper in Nairobi, The Leader, which he edited and managed from 1905 to 1906. Editor for The New Standard Dictionary from 1910 to 1913, National Geographic Magazine from 1913 to 1914, and The New International Encyclopedia from 1914 to 1915, Raynes became foreign editor of The Literary Digest in 1914.

  His 1913 arrival in New York shows he was then a journalist living in Washington, D.C. He appears in a New York City directory for 1916 at 113 East 28th Street. Though not a member, he contributed an article to the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1917. In 1918, Raynes was master of Adelphic Lodge No. 348, New York, which lodge formed links to the Metropolitan College of the Societas Rosicruciana in America, founded by George Winslow Plummer. Registering for the American draft in 1918, as resident of 340 Waverly Place, Greenwich Village, he was employed as an editor for Funk and Wagnall’s. Suspiciously (from the intelligence point of view), in 1918/1919 Raynes lied about his father’s birthplace (claiming he was American-born) to obtain American citizenship, enlisted or was drafted into the U.S. Army as a private, to serve as a financial assistant for the Inter-Allied Rhineland Commission, the postwar occupation administration in Coblenz. Raynes may have been a British intelligence agent or asset working in Washington, D.C., New York, and postwar Germany. In the Simon Iff story “What’s in a Name?” Crowley resorts to fiction to recount his own arrival in New York in 1914, when he may have been traveling with the fore-knowledge of British Naval Intelligence. Met at the dock on arrival in New York by “Keynes Aloysius Wimble” (i.e., Raynes), Iff is immediately taken to a country estate.