Aleister Crowley (18 page)

Neuburg’s training included some less magical aspects. Crowley made him sleep naked for ten days in the cold on a bed of gorse, a torment that Jean Overton Fuller, Neuburg’s biographer, believed led to the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. Neuburg kept a meticulous record of his work, and when Crowley discovered that Neuburg had been dallying with the Qlipoth—astral “shells” and “husks” known as spiritual “harlots”—he gave him thirty-two whacks with a gorse switch and drew blood, although why astral harlots should offend Crowley isn’t clear. Neuburg’s arms were soon covered in razor
scars, the result of practicing the stern discipline of
Liber Jogurum
, which penalizes every use of the word
I
with a sharp slash. Crowley also beat Neuburg’s buttocks with stinging nettles and subjected him to verbal abuse, making anti-Semitic remarks and berating him for his Jewishness. Gorse and nettles were acceptable, but Neuburg drew the line at racial slurs. “My Guru is unnecessarily rude and brutal,” Neuburg wrote in his magical diary, “merely to amuse himself and pass the time away . . . It seems to me that unnecessary and brutal rudeness is a prerogative of a cad of the lowest type. It is the very limit of meanness to grouse at a man because of his race . . . It is ungenerous also to abuse one’s position as a Guru: it is like striking an inferior who will be ruined if he retaliates . . . ”
²⁵
Gurdjieff, too, could sling verbal abuse with the best. Fritz Peters recounts seeing him rage at A. R. Orage so badly that Orage, a large and accomplished man, emerged from Gurdjieff’s browbeating “withered and crumpled.”
²⁶
But Gurdjieff never sank to racial insult.

At Boleskine Neuburg met Rose who, he later told a friend, was drunk most of the time. Crowley estimated her minimal intake at a bottle of whiskey a day. He placed Lola Zaza in his mother-in-law’s care and told Rose she would not get her back until she dried out. Her doctor said the only hope was for her to enter a clinic. Rose refused, so Crowley asked for a divorce; he had no trouble providing the necessary evidence of infidelity. Oddly the two continued to live together for a time even after the divorce, but on November 24, 1909, their marriage was over. Two years later Rose was interred in an asylum for alcoholic dementia. When she was released some years later, she married her doctor; but her cure was temporary and she eventually died of liver failure in 1932. Gerald Kelly had long detested Crowley’s treatment of his sister and their parents, and Crowley himself
was jealous of Kelly’s success; he soon became a royally appointed portrait painter and Crowley predictably chalked up Kelly’s rise to lack of talent and a taste for respectability. Although Crowley tried to maintain custody of his daughter, Lola Zaza eventually rejected him and also disappeared from his life.

—

D
URING
N
EUBURG
’
S
ORDEAL
in Boleskine, Crowley accidentally “found” the manuscript of
The Book of the Law
, mysteriously mislaid some years back. He took this as confirmation that a new current had started for him. One sign of this was the publication of Crowley’s occult magazine
The Equinox: The Review of Scientific Illuminism
. Between 1909 and 1913, ten bulky volumes emerged—at the spring and autumn equinoxes, hence the title—and there was nothing quite like them.
The Equinox
is generally considered Crowley’s magical legacy. The first issue appeared on March 21, 1909. A hodgepodge of magical instruction, poetry, essays, reviews, and mystical text the size of a telephone directory, most of
The Equinox
was written by Crowley under his own name or various pseudonyms; Neuburg and Captain Fuller contributed, too. Allan Bennett contributed, and Crowley drew in the occult artist and fin de siècle enfant terrible Austin Osman Spare. Spare joined the A.
^.
.A.
^.
. but had a falling-out with Crowley and did not stay long.
²⁷
Crowley also attracted some outside names, among others, the fantasist Lord Dunsany—a major influence on H. P. Lovecraft—and the literary “buccaneer” Frank Harris, remembered today as the author of the sexually explicit
My Life and Loves
(1931). Harris would remain a friend of Crowley’s for some years, the two sharing a knack for notoriety and living on their wits.

The Equinox
was published out of the A.
^.
.A.
^.
. headquarters, a fifth-
floor walkup at 124 Victoria Street, not far from Buckingham Palace. Here Crowley conducted magical drug parties featuring hashish but also anhalonium, a form of peyote whose most well-known derivative is mescaline; Crowley was engaging in something like Ken Kesey’s “Trips Festival” or Timothy Leary’s acid sessions some years in advance. Some biographers suggest Crowley introduced peyote’s effects to Europe (and perpetuate the myth that he turned Aldous Huxley on to it in Berlin in the 1920s; he didn’t) but the psychologist Havelock Ellis wrote about his mescaline experience in 1898, a decade earlier. (Ellis passed some on to Yeats, who, as mentioned, preferred hashish.
²⁸
) Membership grew and soon Crowley could count the psychic investigator Everard Fielding, Naval Commander G. M. Marston, the poet Meredith Starr (Herbert Close), the well-to-do George Raffalovitch, and others as devotees. Crowley described a scene at his temple when “the god came to us in human form . . . and remained with us . . . for the best part of an hour, only vanishing when we were physically exhausted by the ecstasy of intimate contact with his divine person.”
²⁹
(Symonds suggests that this “intimate contact” was in some way sexual.)

On another occasion, after dancing around the altar, everyone was convinced they were being visited by something that “did not belong to the human species” and were terrified until someone switched on the light and “no stranger was to be seen.”
³⁰
One visitor to Crowley’s temple was the novelist Ethel Archer, who had published some poetry in
The Equinox
. After being admitted to a dimly lit, empty room, where people sat on cushions, she and her husband drank some beverage and then watched Neuburg dance while music played and Crowley recited poetry. She later attributed the “lively” feeling that lasted the week after the performance more to the
beverage than to the ritual, and would fictionalize her experience in her novel
The Hieroglyph
(1932).
³¹
Crowley’s temple also received some press. A reporter for the
Daily Sketch
attended a performance of one of Crowley’s rituals at the Silver Star HQ. After climbing the “interminable stairs” he was met by a brother robed in white and carrying a sword. He entered a dark room, lit only by a dim red light. Other men in white, red, or black robes were stationed around the room. Incense filled the air. After someone recited the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, and the temple was purified with water, Crowley, robed in black, led a procession around the altar. A “Cup of Libation,” supposedly peyote and opium mixed with fruit juice, was passed around several times. The Greater Ritual of the Hexagram was performed, and Crowley read his poetry. Then Neuburg danced the “dance of Syrinx and Pan in honor of our lady Artemis.” Toward the end a new acolyte, the Australian Leila Waddell, played the violin, until Crowley declared the temple closed.
³²

The reporter had seen an early performance of Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis, a public ritual that gave Crowley the fame he had been seeking since his Cambridge years but which also inaugurated the infamy that would last the rest of his life.

—

N
EUBURG
EDITED
THE
SECOND
ISS
UE
of
The Equinox
, which appeared on September 21, practically single-handedly, and Brother V.V.V.V.V. decided that he and his
chela
deserved a holiday—technically speaking, a magical retirement. Crowley’s coffers were running low and it is unclear if he, or Neuburg, whose parents were well off, paid; Neuburg often gave Crowley his own money, and Jean Overton Fuller reports that at one point Crowley sent Neuburg’s
parents a letter demanding £500 if they wanted to see their son again.
³³
With his divorce proceedings under way, Crowley and his student headed across the Mediterranean to North Africa. They arrived in Algiers on November 17 and from there took a tram to Arba, where they continued south on foot through the desert to Aumale. In a cheap hotel Crowley again heard what he thought was the voice of Aiwass. He broke out into a sweat. “Call me,” it said. Never one to hesitate, Crowley did.

Crowley had with him a magical notebook in which he had copied out the Enochian “keys” of Dr. John Dee, with which he had experimented while in Mexico. Enochian magic is a rarity within the Western occult tradition. Although the language taught to Dee by his scryer Edward Kelly—who received it from the angel Madimi—seems gibberish (
“Madariatza das perifa Liil cabisa micalazoda . . .”
), it also seems to have its own grammar and syntax, which suggests that it is not mere nonsense. Dee and Kelly received nineteen “keys,” and the nineteenth allows the magician access to thirty “aires” or “aethyrs,” what we would call altered states of consciousness. While in Mexico Crowley had begun his exploration of these “aethyrs” backward, in keeping with Enochian tradition (Kelly had received the Enochian alphabet in this way), starting with the thirtieth and twenty-ninth. His lack of appropriate initiation prevented him from continuing, but now that he had advanced magically, he intended to investigate the rest. He tells us he had no idea that he had packed this particular notebook, but as with the missing manuscript of
The Book of the Law
, this may have been a case of “accidentally on purpose.”
³⁴
The result of Crowley and Neuburg’s Enochian adventures was recounted in a text Crowley called
The Vision and the Voice
, which subsequently appeared in
The Equinox
and which he ranked second only
to
The Book of the Law
in importance; much of the doctrine and pantheon of
thelema
emerged from these visions. It is a sometimes-disturbing account of strange visions, angels, demons, cosmic cubes, Qlipoth,
weird landscapes, magical watchtowers, and mystical initiations in the City of the Pyramids under the Night of Pan, and it is Crowley’s attempt to advance himself as a mystic seer. How successful he was is debatable, but it was after this ordeal that Crowley formally accepted the rank of Magister of the Temple, which placed him in the company of the Secret Chiefs.
³⁵

The idea was to walk out into the desert and, at appropriate spots, “call” the voice that Crowley had heard in the hovel in Aumale, using the Enochian “key” and entering the different “aethyrs.”
³⁶
They averaged about one a day. Crowley and Neuburg made an unusual pair as they tramped under the African sun. Crowley’s athletic frame was turning stout and his head was shaved. He was thirty-four, robed in black, a pistol stuck into his sash, and he carried a large vermilion Calvary Cross made of six squares with a huge golden topaz set in the middle. The topaz served as Crowley’s “shew stone,” the equivalent of the crystal ball used by Dee and Kelly. Crowley would intone the “key,” peer into the topaz, and the visions would come. Neuburg’s head was also shaved, except for two tufts on either side, dyed red and twisted to look like horns. He was not so much Crowley’s student at this point, but something more like his demonic “familiar.” At twenty-six, thin, his spine slightly curved and his lips bulging, Neuburg seemed to fit the part, and one wonders what the locals made of them. In contrast to Dee and Kelly, Crowley himself acted as scryer and Neuburg as scribe, a reversal of roles suggested by Crowley’s belief that he was Kelly in a previous life. The association is apt; Kelly, too, had a very bad reputation, and at one point
convinced the often malleable Dee that the angels required them to swap wives.
³⁷

It was not easy work. On December 3 the two climbed Mount Dal’leh Addin, near Bou-Saâda, intent on entering the fourteenth aethyr. But something was wrong and all Crowley saw was darkness. Deciding it was a washout, they scrambled down but suddenly Crowley heard a command to perform a magical ritual on the mountaintop. They scrambled back up, built a circle of stones, and erected an altar upon which Crowley “sacrificed himself.”
³⁸
This euphemism camouflages the magical sodomy dedicated to Pan that took place, with Crowley as the passive partner. Every particle of his personality, he said, was consumed. (Crowley often remarks that his ego is obliterated or destroyed after some magical act.) Crowley remarks that certain “conceptions of conduct” were inimical to his initiation, and had to be eradicated. One assumes he means some hesitation about his homosexuality. As he had been a practicing bisexual for some time by then, it is difficult to understand why he needed this lesson, or how humiliating something he had been quite familiar with could be.

Crowley repeated the experience of insanity he had in 1905. “All things had become alike; all impressions were indistinguishable.” This is Crowley’s favorite state of mind. It is Aiwass’s command to “let there be no difference made . . . between any one thing & and any other thing.” It is the lesson of the Abyss. Back in Bou-Saâda he again experienced an episode of dissociation, which he again interpreted as a mystical initiation. “I did not merely admit that I did not exist, and that all my ideas were illusions . . . It seemed incredible that I should ever have fancied that I or anything else had any bearing on each other. All things were alike as shadows seeping across the
still surface of a lake . . . ”
³⁹
It’s not an exaggeration to say that this is not altogether different from states of mind associated with schizophrenia.