[On 20 January, I posted “Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Scientist” on Rick On Theater. It was supposed to be the first of three personality profiles I was planning to write for this blog; the second article was going to be this one, a biographical profile of occultist Aleister Crowley. I expected it would be about the same size as the Steiner profile, seven or eight pages of typescript. Man, was I wrong!
[I started working on “‘The
Wickedest Man in the World’: Aleister Crowley” in the middle of last January,
right after I finished “Rudolf Steiner”—and I didn’t compete it until the end
of September! Aside from some
intervening posts with short deadlines, I just had no idea how complicated and
involved Crowley’s life was—or how complex his ideas and philosophies are.
[As I say below, my introduction
to Aleister Crowley was pursuant to some research I was doing a couple of
decades ago. I was, however, focused on
just one small aspect of this multifarious man’s biography and ideas. I was surprised to find that I not only had
to cover much more territory than I imagined, but I had to make momentous
decisions about what to include and what to leave out. And before I even got to that decision, I had
to decipher what Crowley was saying and thinking—not writing or editing, but
just unpacking! I had to stop and look
up a lot of stuff.
[The result that starts
below, even as bare-bones as it is, is six parts. (I will be posting all six installments in a
row at three-day intervals.) I hope that
ROTters won’t find reading “Aleister Crowley”
as hard going as I did composing it. The
story of the famous—and infamous—occultist is an exceedingly strange tale and I
hope you will stick with it till the end.
I warn you, though: you may find some of what you will read hard to
believe. I assure you, however, that this
is not fiction. That is to say, most of it isn’t. See what you make of it—and of Aleister
Crowley, “the wickedest man in the world.”]
His mother, a fundamentalist Christian, called him “The
Beast,” and he reportedly reveled in the soubriquet. The press of his day labeled him “the
wickedest man in the world,” a title he adopted himself. He had followers, but he often seemed to
court the opprobrium of everyone else.
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was an occultist, a mystic, an esotericist, and a student of magic. He
was the most renowned magic practitioner and theoretician of the 20th century
and wrote numerous books about the subject.
Crowley was also a poet, sexual revolutionary, and general iconoclast
and influenced popular culture, including that of later generations.
He advocated ceremonial magic as a means of training the
will, and of constantly directing one’s thoughts to a given objective through
the trappings of the ritual. He founded
a religious philosophy known as Thelema, a mix of sex, spirituality, and
freedom, the chief precept of which is the sovereignty of individual will: “Do
what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
Thelema’s second commandment is “Love is the Law, love under will,”
making its appeal to the hippie counterculture of the 1960s intense.
My introduction to Crowley came though Leonardo Shapiro
(1947-96), the experimental stage director on whom I’ve written quite a bit for
Rick
On Theater. Shapiro was into magic—first, stage magic (that
is, prestidigitation or illusion) and then supernatural magic (thaumaturgy)—and
had read Crowley, especially when he was in New Mexico in the late 1960s, where
he used a Crowley incantation in his Halloween 1969 performance of W. B. Yeats’s
“The Second Coming” in Taos (see “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” posted on this blog
on 31 October 2009).
When I read in Shapiro’s notes (sent to me posthumously in
about 2003) that he’d been into Crowley, I had to find out who he was and what
he believed and wrote. (Crowley made a
distinction between magic, which is
legerdemain or sleight of hand, and magick,
which was Crowley’s word of “real” or paranormal magic. The latter spelling may show up in quotations
and book titles, but I’ll be using the standard form, which, unless I specify
otherwise, will refer to supernatural magic.)
Aleister Crowley (he liked to point out that his family name
rhymed with ‘holy’) was born in Warwickshire, England (the county that gave us
William Shakespeare), on 12 October 1875 as Edward Alexander Crowley. His mother, Emily Bertha Crowley (née Bishop,
1848-1917), and father, Edward Crowley (1829-87), were a wealthy couple and
members of the Exclusive Brethren of the Christian evangelical movement, known as
the Plymouth Brethren. The elder Edward
Crowley was trained as an engineer but owned a share of a profitable family
brewery. This made it possible for him
to retire before his son was born and eventually young Crowley, called Alick in
boyhood, would inherit his father’s wealth, £150,000 (valued at the 2019
equivalent of $6½ million, of which Aleister would receive one third when he
came of age), allowing him to indulge pretty much his every whim (which he did,
with abandon).
The future Aleister Crowley rejected his parents’
fundamentalism, even mainstream Christianity, freeing him, it seems, to
manifest a libertine lifestyle. (It was
this behavior that prompted Emily Crowley, who had a fraught relationship with
her son, to dub him The Beast, a reference in the Book of Revelation to the
devil.) The boy’s father had been a
devout practitioner of his Christian faith, even serving as an itinerant
preacher. He read a chapter of the Bible
to his family every morning. (Edward and
Emily Crowley also had a daughter, Grace Mary Elizabeth, who had died a few
hours after she was born in 1880.) The
elder Crowley died of cancer on 5 March 1887, when Alick was 11; young Crowley claimed
to have had a dream while at school in Cambridge on that very night foretelling
his father’s death.
After his dream was realized, Alick, who, despite Edward’s austere
parenting, had always admired his father, was never the same again. He blamed the Plymouth Brethren for his
father’s death because, despite recommendations by reputable physicians that he
have surgery, the Brethren rejected the advice in favor of prayer and
homeopathic treatment. Even at this
young age, because of his anger at the Brethren and his animosity toward his
mother, who had taken up her late husband’s religious devotion and become a
zealot even by Brethren standards, Crowley alienated himself from his family.
In 1883, before his father’s death, Alick had been sent at 8
years of age to an evangelical boarding school in Sussex, where, as an
exceptionally bright but physically awkward child (he was chubby and
non-athletic), he endured years of teasing and bullying. Needless to say, he hated the school and in
1885 he was transferred to a school in Cambridge run by a former Anglican
priest who’d become a member of the Plymouth Brethren.
Alec, as he began calling himself now, was happy at the new
school at first. He was very active in
schoolwork, writing his first poems, heavily influenced by Brethren hymns,
around 1886, for example, and making friends and winning awards for both religious
knowledge and academics. But after his
father’s death, he began to have disciplinary troubles. The headmaster was exceedingly strict, confronting
infractions by meting out punishments such as placement in “Coventry” and
caning. (Corporal punishment was common
in British schools in the 19th century.
“Coventry” was a form of ostracism in which the child being punished
couldn’t communicate with anyone at the school, student or teacher, nor they
with him. The boy would be separated
from everyone else at all times.)
Crowley labeled this headmaster a sadist, but by the practices of the
day, he seems to have been no more than excessively stern with the troubled and
misbehaving Alec. Around 1888, he was
removed from school once again after he developed a liver ailment.
Among Crowley’s misdeeds was his habit of pointing out
contradictions in the Bible to his religion teachers—not a practice, I’m sure
you’ll see, that was bound to ingratiate the boy with the school’s faculty and
headmaster. He also began indulging in a
lifestyle that contradicted the Christian morality in which he’d been raised by
smoking, masturbating, and, later, having sex with prostitutes from whom he
contracted venereal diseases (what today are labeled sexually transmitted
diseases, or STD’s). He had come to
detest as hypocritical the religiosity of the Brethren, including his mother’s
fanatical devotion; the rigid evangelism of her brother, his Uncle Tom Bond
Bishop (1839-1920); and the authoritarian harshness of his former headmaster.
Religion, at least as it was manifested by his circle of
evangelicals—and his mother’s fanaticism had restricted his access to any other
examples of religious practice—had become intolerable to Alec Crowley. He began to believe that it was wrong about
God, and if so, it must be wrong about sin, which he’d been brought up to
fear. He decided, therefore, to devote
himself to becoming a sinner—even the greatest sinner in the world!
After recovering from his illness, Crowley’s mother decided
to keep him at home and have him tutored.
Her brother would select the teachers—based largely on their religious
devotion more than their academic qualifications. Finding them all his intellectual inferiors,
young Crowley tormented them and one after another, they left. Meanwhile, Alec was engaging in a regimen of
physical rehabilitation and exercise which included rock climbing and fishing,
as well a traveling. (The climbing
eventually brought him to Scotland which would be an important influence on his
life.)
Soon Alec was well enough to return to school and between
1891 and 1895, Crowley attended several local colleges (which in England are
secondary schools more like prep schools).
During this period, Crowley increased his interests in playing chess,
writing and reading poetry, and climbing mountains. In this last pursuit, he climbed nearby
cliffs, then went to Europe and climbed in the Alps (notably, the Swiss peaks
of the Eiger, Jungfrau, and Wetterhorn, among others) and ultimately joined the
Scottish Mountaineering Club. He became
greatly enamored of Scottish culture and eventually bought an estate on the
shore of Loch Ness and took to wearing Highland garb. (This was probably the most conventional of
Crowley’s habit of dressing up, as he later wore more elaborate and extravagant
costumes.)
It was at this time, too, that he shed his childhood
name. In 1895, he began studies in
philosophy at Trinity College of Cambridge University. (He later switched to English literature.) Starting a new stage in his life, now an
adult (and, now of age, inheritor of his share of his father’s estate, the
modern equivalent of over $2 million), Crowley was dissatisfied with his given
names. He didn’t like the sound of “Alick” and “Alec”
was too boyish; he rejected all the nicknames and diminutives of both Edward
and Alexander, and ultimately settled on Aleister, the Scottish Gaelic form of
Alexander.
The new name satisfied his “romantic ideals” and “Aleister Crowley”
had a favorable poetic scansion for predicting future fame. (I won’t go into this, but it’s a sort of
poetic numerology.) I suspect it also
immensely gratified his ego, being a self-chosen name that was unconnected to
his family and would have stood out because of its rarity and Crowley’s
idiosyncratic spelling. (The spelling is
nearly unique to Crowley. The usual
Anglicized form is Alistair, from the
Gaelic Alasdair.)
Though he devoted himself to the study of literature and,
especially, poetry, publishing many of his own verses in student journals,
Crowley spent much of his time at Cambridge in personal pursuits. He practiced chess for two hours a day and
became head of the chess club; he traveled to the continent to pursue his
interest in mountain climbing, becoming known in the mountaineering community
for his exploits. Crowley also
maintained an active sex life, mostly consorting with female prostitutes—from
one of whom he contracted syphilis.
In December 1897, however, Crowley met Herbert Charles
Pollitt (also known as Jerome Pollitt; 1871-1942), who had left Cambridge with
his masters degree in 1896. Pollitt had
been president of the university’s Footlights Dramatic Club and had become
quite famous as a female impersonator (his stage name was Diane de Rougy). Pollitt was also a devotee of Decadent art
and literature, a movement that celebrated perversion and vulgarity and promoted
the superiority of human creativity over logic and nature. The Decadents and their followers abandoned
their craft and values for the sake of pleasure.
Pollitt attracted Crowley partly because of his air of
freedom and unfetteredness in comparison with Crowley’s abstemious upbringing
at the hands of his father and the Plymouth Brethren. It’s also fair to add that Pollitt was an
eye-catching man—and made a beautiful woman when in drag. Pollitt and Crowley began a sexual
relationship and lived together as a couple, even though homosexuality was
illegal in England at the time (and remained so until 1967). Indeed, that may have been part of the
attraction of the relationship for Crowley.
In any case, it opened him to recognizing his own bisexuality. Crowley’s father had sternly warned him
against homosexuality at the time he went off to boarding school and young Alec
had been accused of sodomy by the headmaster of the Brethren school in
Cambridge, but he’d never really come to grips with his own sexual proclivities
until Pollitt came into his life.
At this same time, Crowley traveled to St. Petersburg,
Russia, ostensibly to study the language in preparation, he said, for a career
in diplomacy. Some biographers of
Crowley speculate, however, that he went to Russia on behalf of the British
secret service and that he’d been recruited as a spy while at Cambridge. (Though this rumor persisted throughout
Crowley’s life, I don’t believe there was ever any proof of its veracity. It was common practice, however, for future
agents of MI5 and MI6 to be spotted, vetted, and recruited while at Cambridge
and Oxford Universities. If you want the
best of the best, you go where they are—especially when they’re young and
idealistic. So the scenario isn’t beyond
credibility—except perhaps for the matter of Crowley’s lifestyle, which would
have been anathema to either the diplomatic or secret services. ROTters
will recall that I had connections to both in the 1960s and ’70s.)
At the end of the previous year, 1896, Crowley had what he
considered his first mystical experience.
He’d been ill briefly and was in Stockholm during the Christmas holiday
when he suddenly awoke one night with the revelation that he possessed a magical
power to call forth the “immanent deity.”
(Some biographers and chroniclers of Crowley’s life and thought
interpret this report as a covert description of a homosexual encounter, but
others, perhaps more astutely, assert that Crowley had his mystical experience
because of the sexual act.) This seems
key to Crowley’s development as an occultist.
An immanent deity (as explained to me by my friend Kirk
Woodward, who’s made a serious study of theology) is a god who pervades the
material world and all creation. This is
in contrast to the Judeo-Christian God who is “transcendent,” in that He or She
created the material universe, but isn’t part of it, remaining above or beyond
the created world. Occultists and
mystics, among other believers, conceive of a deity who inhabits the fabric of
the material universe.
As I see this applied to Crowley and his occultism—and I’m
jumping ahead a few years in the development of his thinking—if there’s an
immanent deity who exists within the material world, and Crowley and his
followers/colleagues can summon this deity/spirit, then they can control the
material world at their will—hence, perform magic/miracles. These are
things Crowley and his adepts actually claimed to know about and be able to
do. (This all gets tied up with Satan; the spirits the occultist reported
that he called up to do his bidding were demons.)
Crowley and his followers may have been charlatans and
poseurs or they may have been sincere, but they actually lived by these beliefs.
This wasn’t J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien, or George R. R. Martin
creating a fictional universe. These folks were living
in Warwickshire, Sussex, Cambridge, and London!
However vague, the mystic event, which Crowley reported
occurred again a year later in Amsterdam, changed the direction of his
life. He gave up the prospect of a
diplomatic career and reduced his interests in chess and mountaineering to
pastimes he enjoyed merely for recreation.
He decided to devote his life to the occult.
At Christmas 1897, walking the streets of Amsterdam, Crowley
had a “crisis of faith.” For one thing,
he’d been contemplating mortality and decided that a life in diplomacy would
not provide him with any substantial renown.
(Remember that Crowley chose his first name in part because “Aleister
Crowley” had the requisite poetic meter to presage fame.) Success as a great poet might make him famous
in his lifetime, but he concluded that such fame wouldn’t last long after his
death. He found no answers to his
dilemma in either God or Jesus, and so he turned his back on the faith of his
upbringing and turned to the only alternative he knew: the devil.
Seeking more information, Crowley came upon a newly
published book in 1898, The Book of Black
Magic and of Pacts by Arthur Edward (A. E.) Waite (1857-1942). It turned out to be a collection of books on
magic from the Middle Ages. It also
introduced Crowley to the notion of an alternative route to spiritual truth of
which he’d never heard in his sheltered life.
He wrote to Waite for additional information and the author
responded. Waite recommended that
Crowley read the recent translation of a book by German mystic Karl von
Eckartshausen (1752-1813), The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary (1802; tr.
1896).
Crowley complied and spent his Easter holiday with Pollitt
climbing and reading. Pollitt, who
didn’t share Crowley’s passion for either mountaineering or mysticism, saw that
the two were drifting apart. Indeed,
this divergence of interests did soon scuttle the relationship. Crowley ended his affair with Pollitt in the
summer of 1898, though he later recorded that he regretted doing so for the
rest of his life.
After publishing several books of poetry, including White Stains, a collection of Decadent
erotic poems that Crowley had issued without his name by an underground
publisher who had it printed in Amsterdam because the author feared it wouldn’t
pass the British government censors, Crowley left Cambridge in July 1897
without taking a degree. (Some of the
poems included in White Stains were “A
Ballad of Passive Paederasty” and “Necrophilia.” The publisher was Leonard Charles Smithers,
1861-1907, who also published Decadent writer and artist Aubrey Beardsley and poet
and playwright Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900.
Wilde had been released in May 1897 from two years’ incarceration at
hard labor in Reading Gaol for sodomy
and “gross indecency.”)
The next month, Crowley met Julian L. Baker (1873-1958),
with whom he shared an interest in alchemy (a subject to which Crowley’d been
introduced by Waite), while on a climbing holiday in Zermatt, Switzerland (site
of the famous Matterhorn alp). Back in
London, Baker introduced Crowley to his brother-in-law, George Cecil Jones
(1873-1960), a member of the occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn. (Hermeticism is a mostly medieval
philosophy that traces its origins back to the writings of Hermes Trismegistus,
attributed author of 2nd-century C.E. mystical, religious, philosophical,
astrological, and alchemical texts and identified by mystics and alchemists
with Thoth, the ibis- or baboon-headed Egyptian god of wisdom, writing,
hieroglyphs, science, magic, art, judgment, and the dead. The tenets of the Hermetic tradition are too
complex to describe here; curious readers are encouraged to look it up on their
own.)
Crowley became a member of Golden Dawn in November 1897 and took
the magical name “Frater Perdurabo,” which he translated as “I shall endure to
the end.” It was the practice of most
mystical orders for initiates to choose and adopt magical names, a kind of
alias, both as a symbol of their start to a new life within the order and as
protection against persecution and rejection by their families and associates. Often, the magical name had numerological or
gematric (a Kabbalistic form of numerology) significance.
In addition to Perdurabo in Golden Dawn, Crowley, for
example, was also known as “Mega Therion” (“The Great Beast” in Greek) in
Thelema, “Baphomet” (the name of a deity which medieval Christians imagined
that pagans, the Knights Templar, and, sometimes, Muslims worshipped) in the Ordo Templi
Orientis (“Order of the Temple of the East” or “Order of Oriental Templars”),
and in A∴A∴ as “V.V.V.V.V.” (the initials of his motto for his grade of Master of the Temple, Vi Ver Vniversum Vivus Vici, Latin for “By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe”).
All of Crowley’s brothers and sisters in the various orders which he
joined or started also took magical names or mottoes, and the occultist assigned
his “Scarlet Women,” the earthly emissaries of the Thelemic deities who
are sorts of sex goddesses-cum-earth mothers, magical names as well. The men were all “Frater” (Brother) So-and-So
and the women “Soror” (Sister) Such-and-Such.
(I won’t use these magical names, though many Crowley biographers do,
because, frankly, remembering who they are and keeping them all straight gets
confusing. Besides, in addition to the
reasons for their use that I stated earlier, I think the prime rationale was an
affectation that was part of the play-acting and showmanship of these
practices, like the costumes they devised and their use of languages like
Hebrew, ancient Greek, Latin, and ancient Egyptian—which were also the sources
of most of the names and mottoes the members concocted.)
The same biographers who posited that Crowley had gone to Russia
on a mission for British intelligence assert that he joined Golden Dawn to keep
tabs on the organization’s leader, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854-1918). (The rationale for this was apparently
political, but of a nature that would require a lengthy explanation to be
comprehensible to a 21st-century readership.
It had to do with the 18th-century succession to the Spanish throne. Go figure.)
Moving into a sumptuous apartment in London, Crowley
brought in a senior member of Golden Dawn, Allan Bennett (1872-1923), to live
with him as his private magic tutor.
Bennett taught Crowley about ceremonial magic (magic in which the
practitioner uses specific rituals and invocations to call upon the spirit
world) and the use of drugs in magic rituals.
Together, they conducted the ritual of the Goetia, the summoning of
demons, until Bennett left England to study Buddhism in South Asia.
In November 1899, Crowley bought the Scottish manor Boleskine
House on the shores of Loch Ness and proclaimed himself the “Laird of
Boleskine.” (The Scottish Highlands have
long been a place associated with mystery and supernatural happenings, largely
because of its mountainous and mist-shrouded terrain, its isolation, and its
sparse population. The famed Loch Ness
Monster, however, did not become popularized until 1933.)
Crowley published several more books in the years 1898 and
’99, including a play, Jephthah (1899), considered a critical
success. Crowley’s other books achieved
mixed critical reception. Meanwhile,
Crowley climbed the ranks of membership in Golden Dawn even though his
bisexuality and the dissolute lifestyle he openly practiced made him unpopular
in the Order. One member with whom he
especially feuded was the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), a
devotee of Irish legends and the occult.
Yeats thought Crowley was demented and immoral and Crowley accused Yeats
of being jealous of his poetic gifts. Crowley
is said to have accused Yeats of using black magic against him and the Irish poet
may have been the model for a character in Crowley’s roman à clef,
Moonchild (1929). Yeats helped oust
Crowley from Golden Dawn.
The London temple of Golden Dawn refused to promote Crowley
from the Outer Order to its Second Order in 1899, so Crowley went directly to
Samuel Mathers, who initiated Crowley in Paris in 1900. This finalized a rift between Mathers and the
London branch of the Order and he and Crowley were isolated from the rest of
Golden Dawn, which subsequently splintered into a bunch of spinoffs around 1901.
In June 1900, Crowley traveled to Mexico, with stops in the
United States en route in July. In
Mexico. he continued his experiments in ceremonial magic and claimed to have
become a Freemason during his sojourn there.
Around November, he founded his own occult order, the Lamp of Invisible
Light (LIL) in Guanajuato.
He was drawn to Mexico and settled in Mexico City, where he even
fell in love with a Mexican woman. He
published several more poems in Oracles
(1905) and wrote a play, Tannhäuser: A
Story of All Time. (1902), the tale of a knight’s descent into various
worlds based on Richard Wagner’s 1845 opera.
He also climbed some local peaks, including the active volcano Popocatepetl,
before leaving Mexico for the Far East.
[Well, there’s the beginning
of this strange journey. I hope you’re still
with me—it gets stranger as we go along, believe me. I’ll be posting Part 2 on Rick On Theater in three days, and I hope you’ll come back to see where “‘The Wickedest
Man in the World’: Aleister Crowley” will take you next. Hint: I try to explain the occultist’s
religion, Thelema, in the second part.]
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