Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  *129 Yorke Collection, OS A2, Magical Diary, March 28, 1917–March 21, 1918.

  †130 Pirate Bridge; The Latest Development of Auction Bridge, with the Full Code of the Official Laws, R. F. Foster, Vanity Fair Publishing Co. (Condé Nast), New York, 1916; Robert Frederick Foster (1853–1945), U.S. authority on card games lived at 532 Monroe Street, Brooklyn, New York.

  ‡131 The building still serves as a hotel in New Orleans.

  *132 Probably AC’s relatives, the Bishops, at Titusville, Florida.

  †133 The Metropolitan Magazine, originally founded in 1895, focused on urban life in New York, including politics, literature, and theater. Theodore Roosevelt became a contributing editor in 1914 on a three-year contract at $25,000 per year, submitting articles critical of Woodrow Wilson, especially Wilson’s attempts to avoid entering the war; the government threatened to interfere with its postal status after critical articles continued to the end of the war.

  *134 This is probably an error for March 28.

  †135 Crowley’s joke on low-class Englishmen trying to adopt upper-class pronunciation of “Truth” with a self-conscious sense of virtue; cf: actor Robert Newton as the Scotland Yard detective in Michael Todd’s movie, Around the World in Eighty Days (1956).

  *136 Engers’s accommodation was a seventh-floor loft, which makes Engers a pioneer of the artist’s loft—lofts being illegal for residence. The building at 164 5th Avenue is happily still standing.

  *137 Crowley’s friendly leg-pull with the pun on “dumb” and Wilkinson’s middle name, “Umfreville”

  †138 Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), American novelist of the Naturalist school, author of Sister Carrie (1900), he worked as a journalist in Chicago and St. Louis, interviewing many famous figures. Greater fame came as author of An American Tragedy, about the perils of aspiration in 1925. He was sympathetic to the I.W.W. and Emma Goldman. A socialist and campaigner against censorship, his novel The Genius had been published in 1915.

  *139 Alchemical term for a solvent capable of dissolving anything, thought to be the devising of Paracelsus (1493–1541).

  *140 The area in Harlem concerned has been demolished and cleared into stark modernity.

  *141 Sullivan County is in upstate New York, west of Newburgh; possibly a reference to Sullivan County Jail at Monticello. Or, more innocently, Crowley was thinking of canoeing on the Hudson, which he did there in summer 1918.

  †142 A reference to The Sea Lady (1902), a novel by H. G. Wells in which a mermaid comes ashore in southern England to seduce a man of her fancy called “Chatteris.” In Wells’s Experiment in Autobiography, he said the story reflected his “craving for some lovelier experience than life has yet given me.”

  *143 Presumably a “sick” joke of Crowley’s, or one he’s heard.

  *144 Lisa La Giuffria in the novel is based on Mary d’Este, who had an affair with Crowley in 1912, afterward staying friends. Mary d’Este, or “Desti,” was mother of U.S. film director Preston Sturges.

  †145 The Ballad of Reading Gaol was written by Oscar Wilde in France after release from imprisonment for homosexual offences in May 1897. Louis Wilkinson wrote to Wilde while he was in prison.

  *146 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

  *147 In Petronius’s parody of Homer’s Odyssey in Satyrica, Gitōn, a character with cross-gender characteristics, who has a close male friend Encolpius, is trapped in a cave with a Cyclops. Crowley is indulging in a gay joke, and reflection of his working situation; Viereck was monstrously “one-eyed”; that is, narrow-minded.

  *148 Himself or Leon Engers; a friend had taken him to look at a Rembrandt original at the Metropolitan to encourage his new interest in painting.

  *149 Dr. O’Neill of 9, Duke’s Avenue, Chiswick, London W4.

  †150 A novel Freudian term!

  ‡151 Wilkinson, a Shakespeare expert, wrote an article about England’s greatest poet for the International.

  *152 Long since demolished and replaced by unappealing, faceless, characterless modernity.

  *153 According to Who’s Who in the British War Mission in the United States of America, 1918 (Edward J. Clode, New York, 1918, second edition), Frederick William Mordaunt Hall was born at Guildford, Surrey, England, “Nov. 1, 1878; educated under tutelage of father and at Godolphin College, London, etc.; journalist, came to U.S. in 1903; for five years on the New York Press and for seven years on the staff of the New York Herald; went to England and France in 1916 for the Admiralty and Foreign Office and remained there a year; author of ‘Some Naval Yarns’; was with the Admiralty, Foreign Office, and Department of Information, but actually joined Mission on Nov. 1, 1917, to assist Major Thwaites. 193, Madison Ave., New York, or c/o N. Y. Herald, and c/o Capt. A. C. B. Hall, Salisbury, England.”

  “Major Norman Graham Thwaites, M.C., O.B.E.; born Birmingham, England June 24, 1872; educated St. Lawrence College, Kent, England; Hamburg Gymnasium, Germany, Spain, etc.; engaged in journalism in U.S.A., Germany, France, Italy, etc. ; traveled in Egypt, South Africa, and so forth, served through Boer War, 1900–1902, South African Light Horse; joined Westminster Dragoons, 1902; appointed to 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards at outbreak of European War; mentioned in despatches; wounded at Messines; awarded Military Cross; detailed for special service, 1916; appointed O.B.E., June 7, 1918. Joined Mission 1916; appointed to take charge New York Office of British Military Attaché 1917; military control officer, 1918. [Based at:]—44, Whitehall St., New York City, and Cambridge Park, Durdham Downs, Bristol, England.”

  †154 Established in 1917, the central office of the British War Mission in New York was based at 120, Broadway, Suite 2147, with responsibilities for recruitment, military intelligence, war supplies, foodstuffs, and shipping. The Washington office was in the Munsey Building, Pennsylvania Avenue.

  *155 Roddie and Louis were divorced on account of Louis Zimm’s adultery at his cottage at Woodstock; see, “Artist took Cottage but Not for Wife,” Milwaukee Journal, Friday, June 20, 1919.

  *156 Published in 2002 as The General Principles of Astrology.

  *157 The Sixty was a basement bar-restaurant with space for dancing, also known as Louis’s or Louie’s. Opened by Louis Holladay in 1915, Doris Gomez was a regular participant in its liberal, bohemian scene. It appears in the Simon Iff story The Biter Bit as a favored lunchtime venue.1

  *158 Translated by Crowley

  †159 Crowley kept in touch with Helen Westley long after the end of their affair in 1915.

  Crowley wrote to her from Tunis August 30, 1923.3 I turn from singing your praises—in my Autobiography where you receive your due as the “Serpent Officer” in one of the most important stages of the initiation I underwent in America, to recall myself to you in my character as a budding dramatist. You remember how much you like my Three Wishes and how it was impossible because it would take only an hour and 20 minutes to play. Since then I have worked on it to expand it to due length and hope to have it finished before the end of the year. In which case I shall send it along.

  But I am sure that you remember also that I consistently maintain your right divine as the one tragic actress in America worth the name and how I deplored and stormed every time that you were cast for any lesser role. Crowley then described the plot, which was set in the Siberian-Japanese War.

  *160 James T. Shotwell (1874–1965), professor of history, Columbia University and Barnard College; author of A Study in the History of the Eucharist, 1905; hundreds of Encyclopaedia Britannica articles; and the book series Records of Civilization. Shotwell was to be deeply involved in the League of Nations covenant and UN charter. Buried in Woodstock Artists cemetery, his gravestone bears a full-size Templar sword, suggesting the neo-Masonic Order of Knights Templar.

  *161 Pantruel has a lovely, fairytale quality about it, similar to Titurel, the Grail King of Wolfram von Escenbach’s thirteenth-century romance. Pantruel is also like “Pantagruel” of Rabelais’s “Gargantua and Pantagruel,” where
the Abbey of Thelema is described—without the ag of course. The astral setting is rather reminiscent of engravings in Michael Maier’s alchemical emblem book, Atalanta Fugiens (1617).

  †162 The names in these visions often seem like dream-woven anagrams of other words or ideas, as if overheard from another room and imaginatively recomposed. Thus Ab-ul Diz sounds like sultan of Morocco Abdulaziz (deposed in 1908). Amalantrah sounds like an anagram of “Allah Mantra.” And because Roddie was a chemist, we may consider its resonance with amyl nitrate, first synthesized by French chemist Antoine Balard in 1844, with properties later found conducive to relieving angina pectoris and afterward to facilitating anal sex. Yet these names (and we might include “Aiwass” among them) also have an inherent integrity as magical words, familiar sounding yet uncannily otherworldly, from another place, or time, which would be an apt description of the astral plane itself. It’s not easy to create such names in an ordinary state of mind. Such need conjuring.

  *163 After the war Crowley would often think that he had part-flunked his experience with Aiwass in Cairo in 1904 by not returning to Egypt either to “abstruct” the “Stele of Revealing” or to receive a message about the essence of the New Aeon connected with the symbol of the “egg.” But he never did return to Egypt.

  *164 Now the Stephen Schwartzman building (New York Public Library Humanities & Social Sciences Library). Blavatsky quoted from Bjerregaard in her Secret Doctrine.

  *165 Faith Baldwin (1893–1978) contributed poems to the International, later becoming a popular romance novelist, writing American Family (1935).

  *166 In the transcript the name was crossed out and replaced by initials, possibly an indication of Crowley’s discomfort as regards his great love.

  †167 Possibly Maurice Ricker, who came to New York from Iowa in 1918. In 1912, Ricker corresponded with Theodore Roosevelt about that year’s Republican Convention. He was cameraman with the University of Iowa’s Barbados-Antigua botanical and geological scientific expedition. A pioneer in the development of movies using sound and color, after his retirement Ricker continued to work in “moving pictures” as a member of both the National Press Club and the New York Electrical Society. Ricker came to Manhattan in 1918 with wife and daughter, Helen, who became a popular novel and screenplay writer under the name Elswyth Thane. Returning from an expedition to the Antilles he settled into a Brooklyn flat and worked for the government.

  ‡168 Elsa Lowensohn Lincke, born in Germany in 1864; emigrated to the United States in 1886, resident of New York in 1904, naturalized in 1914. According to the 1910 census, she was married to a theater singer but lived alone with a servant. She inherited $500,000 in 1923. She became an A∴A∴ probationer on February 3, 1919. Her Arabic motto was “No Truth but Truth.” A musician, Mrs. Elsa Lincke reputedly introduced cabaret to the United States. Crowley called her “antique but sprightly” in his Confessions, a woman who “abandoned worldly pleasures for spiritual joys.” He believed her being “simple minded sincere and earnest” accounted for her having taken an interest in Harvey Spencer Lewis’s AMORC, regarded by Crowley as a Rosicrucian organization only in name, spuriously supported by a fake charter. He considered Lewis a talented occultist whose fault lay only in skewing the truth of his authority for the sake of the business but was otherwise sincere. Elsa gave Crowley money for the Great Work.

  §169 Dorothy Troxel (1896–1986), musician; she held an associate of music degree from Dana School in her native Warren, Ohio. Thirty years later, she was a geographic names specialist with the Army Map Service and began a five-year project: the first Mongolian-English dictionary. When Mussolini ordered the Beast out of Sicily in April 1923, John Bull in England followed up with the famous article “A Man We’d Like to Hang” (May 16, 1923). Dorothy Troxel sent money to Crowley, c/o Norman Mudd, to stave off ruin, writing to Crowley from 211 Olive Street, Warren, Ohio, on June 3, 1923, “Dear Mr Crowley, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Your letter came the day after I wrote. I don’t know how to express my sympathy. It is wonderful to see you so calm and cool after this foul attack.”7

  *170 AYVAS = איואס; samekh = 60; aleph = 1; vav = 6; yod = 10; aleph = 1. OYVZ = עיוז; zayin = 7; vav = 6; yod = 10; ayin = 70.

  *171 Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet; its number is 1: “One” being Jones’s motto as Neophyte in the A∴A∴.

  *172 Marie changed her name from Röhling, or Roehling, to “Rolling” “around the time she became a Jungian analyst” (Breeze, The Drug and Other Stories, 648).

  *173 “Satan, take pity on my long misery!” from Charles Baudelaire’s “Litanies of Satan” in Fleurs du Mal, 1857, translated by Crowley, 1943.

  *174 Russell left an autobiographical account of his own occult and mathematical innovations, and his experience of Crowley, in Znuz Is Znees, filling four self-published volumes between 1969 and 1982.

  *175 The Murray Hill Hotel was demolished in 1947 to make way for an office block at 100 Park Avenue.

  *176 According to previously unpublished, declassified New York Bureau of Investigation reports, filed by agent Frank X. O’Donnell when investigating allegations of “Radical Activities” on Crowley’s part (principally in July 1919), Crowley “appeared before Mr. William Johnson, Assistant to the Attorney General of the State of New York on two occasions. The first on July 17th, 1918 and the second on October 11th 1918. The earlier examination involved a questioning of Crowley as to his possible knowledge of matters involved in the investigations of Edward A. Rumley.” In July 1919 a Mr. Simon of the New York State attorney general’s office gave O’Donnell a copy of the examination transcripts that has not apparently survived. O’Donnell, however, makes the point that the second “examination” of Crowley on October 11 covered much the same ground as the first but was more developed. O’Donnell provided a summary of the second examination in his July 30, 1919, report, which we shall examine presently, in context (see here).

  *177 An advertisement in the February 1915 New York telephone directory describes the Hotel Brevoort and the Café Lafayette as “the Two French Hotels of New York”; proprietor: R. Orteig. This would chime in with Crowley’s love of French cooking.

  *178 Now long gone for want of passengers.

  *179 Theosophical Society; Crowley considered the society amateurish, inadequate, undiscriminating, saturated with gullibility. He dismissed many of its assertions as “Toshosophy.”

  †180 Though Oesopus sounds classical—and Crowley liked it as such—the word is properly spelt Esopus and was the name of a Lenape (Delaware) Native American tribe of upstate New York, particularly the Catskills.

  ‡181 Pierre Eugène Michel Vintras (1805–1875), led a heterodox religious community divided at his death by Abbé Joseph-Antoine Boullan (1824–1894) who seduced followers with sexual rites. Lévi saw Vintras’s “bleeding hosts” as demonic; Martinist Stanislas de Guaita accused Boullan of Satanism. Huysmans defended Boullan. See my Occult Paris (2016).

  *182 One of the chevalier degrees in the Rite of Memphis; see Jacques-Etienne Marconis de Nègre, Le sanctuaire de Memphis, ou Hermès.

  *183 Crowley knew Sarg from London, where Sarg had been staff cartoonist on “What’s On,” edited by J. D. Beresford, later (1922) Crowley’s commissioning editor at Collins, publishers.

  †184 While Sarg’s military career might suggest to the suspicious that his unique position fitted him for intelligence work, there is no evidence to serve as a basis for investigation.

  *185 In 1930 the current twenty-one-story brick apartment building replaced the more stately three-story buildings familiar to Crowley in 1918.

  †186 NYU’s University Hall was built on the site in 1998.

  *187 See my Occult Paris (2016).

  *188 Helen does not appear in Crowley’s Confessions or in his surviving American diaries. We owe knowledge of her identity to William Breeze, who noticed her name mentioned several times in a later diary and her appearance in the Yorke Collection’s “L
over’s List,” mistranscribed as “Helen Bruce Hollis.” Gerald Yorke accidentally compounded the problem of her identity in a catalog of his manuscripts. This led to biographers constantly confusing Hollis with Crowley’s earlier lover, Helen Westley.

  *189 I am very grateful to William Breeze for sharing with me his original research into the identity of Helen Hollis.

  *190 The demolition of the delightful three-story, red-brick houses of “Genius Row” on Washington Square South initiated one of the first major popular building preservation conflicts in Greenwich Village’s history. Developer Anthony Campagna bought and leveled the row to build a high-rise apartment block, though eventually sold the property to New York University. The site now supports the modernist edifice known as the university’s Kimmel Center, 60 Washington Square South. Is imagination the only way to retrieve what has been lost?

  *191 Crowley might have sketched out the ideas, but his principal artist was Helen Woljeska, who also contributed short stories for the International and who, according to Crowley’s telephone list, lived at 99 Claremont Avenue, Manhattan, with a Morningside number (4102).11

  *192 Bertha (or Bonita) Almira Bruce (1888–?) married Albert Ryerson in 1919, a marriage, according to William Breeze, either “of convenience, or of such serious inconvenience it ended very quickly; it was never registered” (The Drug and Other Stories, 649). “Soror Almeira” became Crowley’s fifth Scarlet Woman. She is described as “a splendid child” in Crowley’s short story Colonel Pacton’s Brother (The Drug, 544). Because no photograph is extant, and we know nothing of her life after 1941, the description of her in the story is, as Breeze remarks, especially valuable.

  *193 Percy Reginald Stephensen found the invitation and response among Crowley’s papers in 1930 when working on a fair assessment of Crowley’s career to support the Mandrake Press’s publishing program of Crowley’s books.