Aleister Crowley (27 page)

I say it was Crowley’s success, but it was really Freud’s, and, as Crowley had said about the best magick, Crowley himself didn’t know how he pulled it off.
²⁸
In essence, Crowley told Bennett that his “Real Self” was his unconscious mind. This, in reality, was his Holy Guardian Angel and the source of his true will, and he was cut off from it because he repressed its promptings out of society’s demands. This seems to contradict the idea that the Holy Guardian Angel, at least in the case of Aiwass, is an “extra-human intelligence,” but perhaps Crowley was making things easy for Bennett. Crowley explained this as they walked to the beach for a swim. Bennett was electrified with the insight and promptly tore off his clothes and dashed into the sea; Bennett was in his midfifties and for him to sprint like a young goat, as Crowley says, was unusual. As Crowley and the others swam, Bennett splashed about, filled with a sense of tremendous new knowledge. Later Bennett asked Crowley to repeat what he said. Crowley couldn’t remember but Bennett insisted, and Crowley traced over his remarks until he found the “winning shot.”

What Crowley told Bennett was essentially Freud’s central idea: that we repress our natural instincts and desires because society demands we do, and because of this, we are neurotic. What we need to do, Crowley told Bennett, is to listen to our unconscious—our true will—and follow its desires. Failing to do so leads to sickness and dissatisfaction; the title of Freud’s book
Civilization and Its Discontents
says it all. William Blake had said it with characteristic brevity well before either Crowley or Freud: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” and “He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.” Crowley’s desires were never unacted but Bennett, it seems, had spent most of life repressing his. Bennett was so shaken by Crowley’s remarks that, according to Crowley, he entered a trance that lasted three days. Bennett’s own account suggests something more spectacular—Symonds quotes it at length—but, as in the case of Jane Wolfe, in essence Crowley had turned Bennett’s mind toward the knowledge that he was something
more
than just his conscious mind, that there was a whole other part of himself—perhaps the larger part—that he was ignoring. It should be noted that Crowley’s (and Freud’s and Blake’s) insight is, of course, true, but is not the whole truth, and that the answer is not to simply abandon the conscious mind in favor of the unconscious, which Crowley invariably did, but to bring the two together, so that they support, rather than oppose, each other. (This was Jung’s central idea.) Crowley’s advice amounted to the 1960s dictum to “Let it all hang out” or today’s “Just do it,” and for Frank Bennett, a hardworking, highly disciplined, “self-made man,” relaxing and allowing the unconscious to open up
was
salutary. But as Crowley’s own life shows, letting the unconscious rip is not always fruitful. Yet Crowley triggered a positive reaction in Bennett and he was grateful. “I will spend the rest of my life in spreading his teaching,” Bennett wrote. “For he alone led me to the knowledge of my real subconscious self . . .”
²⁹
Whether we like it or not, for all his shortcomings, Crowley did have a positive effect on some people, and whatever we may think of
thelema
, Crowley’s message did produce some beneficial results.

This, however, was not the case with other visitors. Ninette’s
sister Mimi, her twin, was inclined to join in the activities (only her prudish upbringing prevented her) but her elder sister, Helen, was appalled and complained to the British Consul in Palermo about alleged illegal goings-on. The police investigated but found nothing incriminating. Two writers Crowley had met in Paris, Mary Butts and Cecil Maitland, also disapproved of what they tasted of
thelema
. Mary Butts was a friend of Nina Hamnett’s. She was a novelist of merit and had a serious interest in the occult. She claimed that she went to Cefalù because she was interested in reaching the Fourth Dimension, an objective inspired by her reading Ouspensky.
³⁰
She found life at the abbey hard; there was little food, privacy, or free time, and the idea that her diary was open to all comers repelled her. The absence of toilets was also a drawback. At first she believed “the Beast to be a technical expert of the highest order,” and like Crowley she and her lover Maitland used hashish to facilitate astral travel; at the abbey they also added heroin to their intake. But soon she found the abbey a “sham” and Crowley a “fanatic.”
³¹
That Crowley used children in his sexual rituals—to what extent is unclear—disturbed her, and it may have been this that appalled Ninette’s sister Helen.

Crowley did not care for Mary. That she suggested how to transform the abbey into a “miniature university” put him off—women, we recall, were not supposed to have ideas—but the real problem was Maitland.
³²
Crowley perpetually sought a reliable successor—or at least magical heir—and had so far struck out. Maitland seemed a likely candidate. Like Neuburg, Maitland was talented and brilliant but, as Crowley noted, he lacked real will, and Crowley no doubt believed Butts was responsible for this. On their arrival in late June 1921, Maitland and Crowley went for a swim, and Crowley did his best to drown his guest. Maitland escaped onto some sharp rocks,
cutting himself badly in the process. Crowley may have been testing his capacity for domination à la Neuberg. The next day Maitland played a prominent role in the ceremony of the Cakes of Light, the recipe for which can be found in
The Book of the Law
. Maitland baptized a cock, christening it Peter Paul, while Leah, recapping Salome’s dance, demanded the bird’s head on a platter. The decapitated fowl’s blood was added to the ingredients.
³³
Meal is said to be the cakes’ main ingredient, but in Crowley’s Mass “the host is of excrement,” which the participants consume in adoration.
³⁴
Mary Butts found the offering unacceptable and remarked that on her arrival at the abbey, Crowley offered her “a goat’s turd on a plate.”
³⁵
Mary had a sense of humor equal to Crowley’s. During a ritual in which a goat was intended to copulate with Alostrael, the reluctant animal demurred, but was sacrificed anyway, its blood splattering the Scarlet Woman’s back. Leah, confused (and most likely drugged), asked Mary, “What should I do now?” and Mary replied, “I’d have a bath if I were you.”
³⁶
It seems this episode finally put Mary off Crowley.

Mary wrote while at the abbey, and in
Diary of a Drug Fiend
Crowley depicts her as “a fat, bold, red-headed slut” and “white maggot” whose writing was “the most deplorable dreary drivel that had ever been printed.”
³⁷
He no doubt enjoyed that alliterative assault but it would rebound on him disastrously. Mary and Cecil left the abbey in September in ill health, bringing with them a heroin habit. Crowley, however, was not through with them. The following year, Leah visited the two in Paris. She said that if they didn’t give Crowley money, they would come to harm. Maitland handed her a hundred francs but evidently this was insufficient, and Leah cursed them. Two days later he took an overdose of Veronal, by accident or design or magick is unknown.
³⁸

Yet all this should not have troubled the Beast. By 1921 he had reached the apex of his magical career. He was appalled by the enormity of the decision and feared it would require some “insane act to prove his power to act without attachment.” What was left to do in this department is unclear; Crowley had been acting without attachment for some time now. He gathered his forces and faced his last challenge as an impossibilist. Crowley had reached the top of the Tree of Life. He was ready to become an Ipsissimus, 10
⁰
= 1
, entering Kether, the first
sephiroth
emerging from the positive nothingness of the
Ain Soph Aur
. What this was to free him from is, again, unclear. He was already beyond good and evil, right and wrong, and other such dualities and had achieved an unruffled indifference to everything around him. No matter. He would invoke Insanity itself—even though he had already invoked it more than once. At 9:34 in the evening, Crowley became a god. “As a God goes, I go,” he noted.
³⁹
Although Crowley swore to keep silent about this unthinkable achievement, the Scarlet Woman, of course, was not so bound.

Reflecting on his attainment, Crowley noted that he had exposed himself to the full gamut of experience, to disease, accident, violence, to dirty and disgusting debauches, to eating excrement and human flesh—which seems to add substance to the claims that he, at some point, cannibalized someone.
⁴⁰
But this amounted, he said, to a morality the severity of which surpassed any other because it was absolutely free from any code of conduct.
⁴¹

One thing the Ipsissimus found it difficult to be unattached to was heroin. He started taking it on his return to England in 1919, first for his asthma, then for pleasure, and then because if he didn’t, he suffered withdrawal; he suffered similarly from cocaine. He was also very short of cash. In early 1922, after a visit to Paris with Leah—it
was then that she hit up Mary and Cecil—Crowley retreated to a hotel in Fontainebleau and tried to kick the habit. He went there to beat the “storm fiend,” but also to get away from Leah; a distance was growing between them. He had been taking three grains of heroin a day, sometimes four or five, not to mention other drugs, and his health suffered. He still believed he could free himself of the addiction, but confessed that he had “erred in going too far” and that the “worship has become forced.” To admit that Aiwass’s command to take strange drugs had been precipitate would undermine his whole life, but Crowley realized he needed help. He met with a Dr. Edmund Gros, who suggested Luminal and a sanitarium, but Crowley insisted on administering his own treatment; anything else would have been admitting defeat. His notebooks from this time are filled with the frequency, amount, and effects of the heroin he was taking, as well as the horrors of trying to avoid it, with much wishful thinking about how he could beat it; Crowley’s chronicle of his addiction may be his most lasting literary contribution. Crowley uncovered the dodges he worked to get past the guards at the gates of indulgence, but life without heroin was hell. He needed it to get up and he needed it to get to sleep. He needed it, period.

Another meeting with Leah in Paris proved depressing. He loved her, but that love was a curse. She, too, was addicted and she was exhausted from the rigors of her office. But perhaps with another Scarlet Woman . . . ? Back in Fontainebleau he asked Aiwass for direction. A young man, Augustine Booth-Clibborn, arrived at his door. He was interested in magick and Crowley expounded
thelema
to him exhaustively. Booth-Clibborn, Crowley explained, was to extract substantial sums from his parents, then head to Cefalù, where he would be initiated into his new life.
⁴²
But when Crowley drew up his
pledge, Booth-Clibborn, alarmed at Crowley’s repeated requests for money, declined. Crowley cursed Booth-Clibborn.

—

C
ROWLEY
AND
L
EAH
DECID
ED
to go to London. Both of them needed a break from the Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum, and Crowley thought he could drum up some much-needed money there. But Crowley, who had been wearing his magical robes most days at the abbey, realized he hadn’t a thing for the trip. In Paris he reclaimed some clothes he had left at a cleaners in 1914—it was magical they were still there—and dressed in Highland gear (it was all he had), with his face painted and no more than £10 to his name, the Ipsissimus and his consort made their way to cross the Channel.

Near Boulogne he was mistaken for Gerard Lee Bevan, a financier wanted for embezzlement. The police removed his glengarry cap and black frizzy wig and believed they had caught their man. Crowley took it as a joke. He was a famous poet and explorer and to prove it, he produced a photograph of himself in J. Jacot Guillarmod’s book on the Chogo Ri expedition—one time Crowley was thankful for the odious Swiss. In England he tried to retrieve copies of his books held by the Chiswick Press, who claimed he owed a considerable sum in storage fees. The new owners were not sympathetic—Crowley claimed he had paid his bill—and Crowley had to cut his substantial losses. He tried to meet Captain Fuller at the War Office but his old champion avoided him. He met with Gerald Kelly, hoping for a handout but also to discuss his daughter Lola Zaza, who, Kelly informed him, was turning out like her father. They did not, it appears, discuss Rose. The apple does not fall far from the tree and Crowley was glad to hear that at fifteen, Lola was unmanageable,
ill tempered, and conceited. She, however, was not glad to see her father.