Aleister Crowley (15 page)

Crowley was so troubled by his friend Pache’s death that he took solace in a Nepalese girl who predictably inspired him to song. “O kissable Tarshitering! / The wild bird calls its mate—and I” should give the reader some idea of his state of mind. He also went big-game hunting in Calcutta, a guest of the Maharajah of Moharbhanj. It was around this time that Crowley wrote the letter to Gerald Kelly, spelling out his need for “strong” stimulants. He was attracted to magic again and began paying astral visits to Elaine Simpson (Witkowski); he implies they made astral love, an erotic practice his older contemporary, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, found rather less delightful.
⁵⁵
A need to devote his life to spiritual purity possessed him, and to express this, Crowley again took to writing pornography, this time of a homosexual bent. He studied Persian and produced
The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz
(also known as the
Bagh-I-Muattar
), which Crowley claimed was a translation of a series of seventeenth-century
ghazals
(rhyming couplets and refrains) of a Sufi poet, Abdullah al Haji. It is, as one critic expresses it, a work of “decorous obscenity,” a kind of “anal ‘Song of Solomon.’”
⁵⁶
Crowley may have found his real poetic métier in this robustly perfumed
celebration of sodomy, but it remains, by that very fact, for restricted tastes.

Crowley’s need for strong experience was fulfilled one night in Calcutta when he found himself in the Culinga Bazaar during the feast of the Durga Puja. Leaving the main bazaar, he entered what seemed like a labyrinth of narrow streets. His jungle senses were sharp and the feeling that he was being followed was justified: out of the darkness six men in white robes appeared. Suddenly they grabbed him. Crowley was pressed against a wall, and hands riffled his pockets. He had the presence of mind to grab his Webley revolver and let loose a barrage. Two men fell and the others scattered. An angry crowd gathered and Crowley knew he had to move quickly. His practice in Mexico served him admirably and Crowley once again became invisible. He made his way back to his hotel and the next morning he visited a friend, Edward Thornton, with whom he had rowed on the Irrawaddy en route to visit Allan Bennett some years earlier. Thornton advised him to lay low. The next day the
Calcutta Standard
carried an article about the shooting; the police were offering a reward for any information about the European believed responsible. If Crowley had made himself invisible, my guess is he pulled it off because the threat of death—his assailants flashed a knife—or arrest forced him to make a greater effort than he had before, and the sheer concentration allowed him to move silently through the frenzied crowds. Or, perhaps equally as unlikely, the Secret Chiefs came to his rescue.

It was like Crowley to greet his wife and child with the remark that they had arrived just in time to see him hanged. A day after the incident, Rose and their daughter landed in Calcutta. Not enough that they had just traveled from gray Boleskine to India’s distant
shores, now they had to move on again, this time with a fugitive. Although Crowley had been studying Persian, Rose was tired of Omar Khayyam—he was all the rage back in Britain—and so, anything to please the wife, he decided they should go to China. The prospect of smoking opium clinched it.

The idea was to head for Rangoon to visit Bennett, whose monastery was nearby. Remembering the journey, in the
Confessions
Crowley remarks that he “wants everything that the world holds” and that he would “go to prison or the scaffold for the sake of the experience.”
⁵⁷
Given that he had just run away from these two “delicious horrors,” one suspects that his appetite was a tad less indiscriminate than he suggests. In Rangoon he left Rose and child in a hotel while he met with Bennett at his monastery. Crowley disagreed with Bennett about karma, holding that one’s progress depended on one’s own efforts, not grace, chance, or the actions of a previous life; yet as we’ve seen, his own notion of a “true will” is equally limiting. But Crowley was sufficiently impressed to take the idea of acquiring a Magical Memory, recollections of one’s past lives, seriously. This was a challenge Crowley took up in later life and that he expressed in
Liber Thisharb
(“Berashith,” or “creation,” backward), a text in how to review one’s life in reverse.
⁵⁸
Yet, paradoxically enough, Crowley’s mind was “hot on the trail of the future,” and the family soon found themselves heading up the Irrawaddy to Mandalay.
⁵⁹

At Bhamo they were held up by official red tape but after weeks of waiting for their passports, the Crowleys finally entered China, or rather made their way along the China/Burma border. He had been warned about the dangers of taking a woman, let alone a child, into these parts, but Crowley counted on an Englishman’s first line of defense—acting like a gentleman—to see them through. (This was
the time of the Boxer Rebellion.) And although there were physical dangers aplenty, Crowley decided to use the trek in order to confront perils of a more spiritual kind. It was time, he believed, to cross the Abyss.

Crowley’s chapters in the
Confessions
about his “walk across China” are filled with sufficient local color and detail to make a readable and informative travelogue, marred only by his racist remarks and frequent need to exert his “moral superiority.” Crowley’s determination to show his porters who was boss led to increasing friction. On one occasion his Chinese interpreter rode off on Crowley’s pony, which was much better than his own horse. Crowley does not tell us what prompted this “theft” but we can imagine how Crowley’s “moral superiority” might affect his moral “inferiors.” Crowley pulled this particular inferior into a thorn bush and as the rest of the coolies marched past, Crowley struck him with his whip. Later, at Manhao, where Crowley was supposed to pay the coolies, he devised a plan to “get his own back.” When Rose and the child were safely on the boat, Crowley paid the head man, deducting a considerable sum as a fine. As the coolies became enraged, Crowley ordered the boatman to cast off, pointing his rifle at him as an incentive. The coolies shouted as their moral superior moved downstream, pleased with showing his inferiors their place by docking their pay.

But these incidents were nothing compared to the struggle going on within Crowley’s soul. His real aim in this apparently pointless and dangerous excursion was to answer such questions as “Who am I?” and “What is my purpose in existence?”—queries he believed he could not pursue in less demanding circumstances. Crowley said that these months—from November 1905 to February 1906—were the most important period of his life, “so far as my personal attitude
toward myself and the universe was concerned.” If so, he began it by realizing he was insane. He saw everything as disconnected, unintelligible, meaningless. He wrote in his diary for November 19, “I realize in myself the perfect impossibility of reason . . . I wish to go from A to B; and I am not only a cripple, but there is no such thing as space. I have to keep an appointment at midnight, and not only has my watch stopped, but there is no such thing as time.”
⁶⁰
Crowley concludes that from the date of this entry until the beginning of February the following year, he was “intellectually insane.”
⁶¹
Of course this put his wife and baby daughter in danger, but what could he do? He was facing the Abyss.

Crowley had arrived at a conclusion that the philosopher Immanuel Kant had reached more than a century earlier in his classic
The Critique of Pure Reason
: that reason can be used to support antithetical arguments, and is of little use in grappling with the central mysteries of existence. Yet Crowley’s sense of the “perfect impossibility of reason” was as much rooted in his aimless, dizzying life as it was in his metaphysical ponderings. He had been rushing across the planet for the last four years, plunging in and out of poetry, magic, Buddhism, mountaineering, sex, pornography, drugs, marriage, and much else impulsively, burning up a fortune in the process. He himself admitted that his mind was “the most infernally active on the globe,” which is another way of saying that he couldn’t keep it fixed
on one thing—the lesson that Eckenstein and Allan Bennett tried to teach him.
⁶²
It is not surprising that, as the steamship took him and his family up the Irrawaddy, he saw the river and everything around him as a jumble of “disconnected phenomena.”
⁶³
The most disconnected phenomenon was himself.

Crowley saw his insanity as a stage in the process of making
contact with his Holy Guardian Angel. Crowley decided that he would continue the Abramelin operation there and then, on horseback in some remote part of Asia. He had to quell the reasoning intellect in order to allow the higher mind to communicate with him; in Kabbalah this is called the Neschamah. Crowley was faced with the question of how he was to do this. Everything he needed to work the Abramelin magic was back in Boleskine. Crowley reflected that he had two choices. He could travel in his astral body back to Boleskine and perform the operation there; he had already made several astral visits to Elaine Simpson and so had sufficient practice in projecting his consciousness out of his body. Or he could create an
imaginal
temple—not an imaginary one—
in his mind
.
⁶⁴
This is one of Crowley’s great magical successes and reminds us that for all his flaws as a human being, Crowley took magic seriously
and was actually very good at it. Using Mathers’s
Goetia
and “The Bornless Ritual” devised by Bennett (based on an ancient Egyptian text), Crowley visualized his temple inwardly and invoked what he called the
Augoeides
,
or “body of light,” crying out his invocations in the Asian wilderness.
Augoeides
is a Greek term meaning the “dawn light.” It was used by the neo-Platonic philosopher-magician Iamblichus and also by Madame Blavatsky. It is understood in different ways, but in a general sense we can think of it as a “higher self.”

Crowley’s Golden Dawn training in visualization, as well as the exercises Eckenstein gave him, helped him to employ what the Renaissance Hermeticists called “the art of memory,” a method of vividly visualizing an entire “inner” environment, that is as “real” as an outer one.
⁶⁵
On a less elevated plane, Crowley’s ability to play three games of chess simultaneously while blindfolded also helped.
⁶⁶
Crowley believed he was successful and that on that trek across
China—somewhere between Tengyueh and Talifu—he had crossed the Abyss and achieved the Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel. In magical circles there is some controversy about this, as there is about whether or not Aiwass should be identified with Crowley’s H.G.A.; Crowley himself was unsure about this. One Abyss he certainly did enter was when his pony threw him over a forty-foot cliff. This served as a kind of shock, what his contemporary Gurdjieff would have called an “alarm clock.” The fall could have—should have—killed him. Why was he spared? Crowley faced the question that confronted him ever since Cambridge, when he flirted with becoming an ambassador or chess champion: what should I
do
with myself? His inability to answer this caused a kind of psychic breakdown, and Crowley went through a patch of dissociation, which he, however, took as a newfound freedom.

“The effect of my ordeal,” he said, “had been to remove all forces soever which had impinged on my normal direction.” Invoking Isaac Newton, Crowley felt that his “star had been diverted from its proper orbit by . . . the attraction of other heavenly bodies. Their influence had been removed. For the first time in my life I was really free. I had no personality left. . . . I found myself in the middle of China [actually somewhere on its border with Burma] with a wife and child. I was no longer influenced by love for them, no longer interested in protecting them as I had been; but there was a man, Aleister Crowley, husband and father . . . and it was
his
business to give them his undivided love, care and protection.”
⁶⁷
Crowley was no longer Crowley the man, but Crowley the Babe in the Abyss. For him, Crowley the man with a wife and child was but one more phenomenon. But if he was no longer the “man, Aleister Crowley,” and was no longer interested in protecting his family,
what
was he? Crowley arrived at the
conclusion that he existed in the world for one purpose: to teach his fellow men how to contact their own Holy Guardian Angels, or, as he would more pithily put it, to discover their “true wills.”

—

B
Y
M
ARCH
1906
the walk across China was over. Crowley’s first step in his new career was to separate from Rose and his daughter. At Hanoi they boarded a ship for Hong Kong. He had thought of sailing down the Yang-tse, but was now inspired with the idea of making another assault on Kangchenjunga. At Hong Kong he explained to Rose that she and Nuit would travel home via India (she was to retrieve their luggage in Calcutta), while he would go the opposite route and reach Boleskine via New York, where he would drum up support for his new expedition. In the
Confessions
Crowley casually says that “we decided that Rose should return” via India, but it’s doubtful that Rose had much say in the matter. What Rose also didn’t know was that Crowley intended to visit Elaine Simpson, who now lived in Shanghai. He spent several days with her performing magic and smoking opium. Elaine served as his seeress and he told her about Aiwass and
The Book of the Law
. He was still a halfhearted Buddhist and Aiwass’s insistence that existence was pure joy—“leaping laughter and delicious languor”—grated on his perception of existence as sorrow. But the reluctant Messiah was encouraged in his new work by Soror Semper Fidelis, although her encouragement did not go as far as to sleep with him. Aiwass, not happy about this, told Crowley he should break with her but also sleep with her. Yet when Aiwass realized that Elaine would remain faithful to her husband, he told Crowley to move on. Reluctantly he did. He crossed the Pacific to Vancouver, where he boarded a train to New York. From there he
crossed the Atlantic to England. When he arrived in Liverpool, he received the news that Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith had died of typhus in Rangoon. The man Crowley would no longer have to protect his baby girl. The fact that he had abandoned her and her mother in Hong Kong, of course, had nothing to do with her death. It was, he determined, Rose’s fault. He had already recognized her growing alcoholism and most likely in a drunken stupor Rose had failed to clean the nipple of Nuit’s bottle and it had become infected. The man Crowley was stricken by the news. But there was one less pull on his star’s orbit and now he could move that much more freely into the void.