"The Wickedest Man in the World": Aleister Crowley, Part 2

[Welcome back to Rick On Theater for Part 2 of “‘The Wickedest Man in the World’: Aleister Crowley,” which picks up right where I left off with Part 1.  (If you haven’t read the first section of this profile, I strongly recommend going back to 28 September and catching up before going on to Part 2.  Crowley’s life and philosophies are very complex and I’ve introduced names, terms, and ideas in Part 1 that will be confusing if you haven’t read the explanations I provided.) 

[I won’t précis Part 2 for you, but I will note that in this section I try to explain Thelema, Crowley’s spiritual belief system.  You may also notice that, while Part 1 is relatively straightforward (for anything to do with Crowley’s life), Part 2 gets more twisty.  As a warning, I will tell you now that Crowley’s story gets increasingly tortuous as it unfolds—so start getting used to that.  Crowley’s life and thoughts are a virtual rollercoaster ride.]

In April 1901, after nine months in Mexico, Aleister Crowley sailed for Asia via a two-week stay in San Francisco (April-May), stopping in Honolulu (May), Japan, and Hong Kong (then a British colony since 1842).  En route to Japan, he had an affair with a married woman ten years his senior, Mary Alice Rogers (dates unknown) of Salt Lake City, whom he’d met in Honolulu.  The affair was over by the time they reached Hong Kong in May, but Crowley immortalized it in Alice: An Adultery (1903).  From his writings, it’s clear that Crowley had planned the end of the relationship from the moment he met Rogers, apparently to give him material for his poetry.  The pattern of meeting, a short-lived but passionate romance, and a quick break-up became typical of Crowley’s love life.

Crowley sailed for Japan and Hong Kong and finally, in August, Ceylon (a British colony from 1815 to 1948, now called Sri Lanka), where he spent some time.  In December, he went on to tour India and study raja yoga in Madura in order to achieve a spiritual state (dhyana).  He continued to write poetry through this time, publishing The Sword of Song in 1904. 

The occultist contracted malaria while in India and was laid up to recover in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in January 1902 and Rangoon (Yangon), the capital of Burma (Myanmar) until 2006, in January and February.  (Both India and Burma were also British colonies at the time of Crowley’s visits.  India was under the control of the British East India Company, a proxy for the British Crown, from 1793 to 1857, when rule shifted directly to the British government until India’s independence in 1947.  Burma was under British rule from 1886 until independence in 1948.) 

Together with some mountaineering friends, Crowley scaled several peaks on the subcontinent, including an unsuccessful attempt at K2, the second highest mountain in the world after Mount Everest.  (Also known as Mount Godwin-Austen, the Himalayan peak was not successfully climbed until 1954.)  Compounding Crowley’s bout of malaria, he also became afflicted with the flu and snow blindness.

Crowley returned to Europe in 1902, landing in Paris in November.  Through his friend, the painter and portraitist Gerald Kelly (1879-1972; he would later become Crowley’s brother-in-law), he was introduced to the Parisian art scene.  He wrote a series of poems on the work of sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) which were later published as Rodin in Rime (1907). 

Another in this milieu was the writer W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), who met Crowley and used the occultist as the model for the title character of his 1908 novel, The Magician.  In the novel, Oliver Haddo, a caricature of Crowley, tries to create life; Crowley criticized the book in Vanity Fair, a British weekly magazine, under the pseudonym of Oliver Haddo and accused Maugham of plagiarizing a number of other books (including H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, 1896, and A. E. Waite’s translation of Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual, 1854-56, by Éliphas Lévi).  The novelist claimed in his autobiography that he never read the review but quipped, “I daresay it was a pretty piece of vituperation, but probably, like his poems, intolerably verbose.”

Crowley returned to Boleskin House in April 1903 and in August, he entered into a marriage of convenience with Gerald Kelly’s sister, Rose Edith Kelly (1874-1932), to spare her from making a marriage arranged by her family.  They went on a honeymoon trip to Paris, Naples, Cairo, Ceylon, and China.  The arrangement angered the Kellys and strained Crowley’s friendship with Gerald (which eventually recovered), but Crowley apparently fell in love with his wife on that extended honeymoon, publishing in 1906 a collection of poems called Rosa Mundi and other Love Songs.  (Rosa Mundi is Latin for “Rose of the World.”)

Arriving in Cairo in February 1904, Crowley and his bride claimed to be a prince and princess.  He rented an apartment and took Rose to Giza to spend the night in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid.  There Crowley read an incantation from an ancient Greek rendering of an Egyptian magic papyrus.  He began reading by candlelight, but as he read with some difficulty, the chamber became infused with an “astral light” that obviated the candles and Crowley found himself able to read easily without hunching over the text.  (This is all according to Crowley’s own account, of course, since there were no witnesses other than Rose.) 

Crowley spent his time in Cairo studying Islamic mysticism and Arabic and he assembled a temple room in the apartment where he invoked ancient Egyptian gods.  Rose frequently experienced deliriums (she suffered from alcoholism, which her husband believed she inherited from her mother and which would become increasingly severe over the years of the marriage) and in March 1904 declared that “they”—which she later identified as the Egyptian god Horus, the falcon-headed god of kingship and the sky—“are waiting for you.” 

In April, Crowley claimed to have heard the voice of Horus’ messenger who dictated to him over three days what would become The Book of the Law, published officially in 1909.  The Book of the Law is the principal sacred text of Crowley’s religion, Thelema, and Crowley reported that the messenger, Aiwass or Hoor-Paar-Kraat, told him that humankind was entering a new aeon, the divisions of human history according to Thelemic belief, and that he would be the new prophet.  In the Aeon of Horus, Aiwass declared, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”  According to Crowley, he sent the typescript to several occultists but otherwise, he put it aside and ignored it for some years. 

(All of Crowley’s books on Thelema, magic, and the occult—as distinguished from his poetry, novels, plays, and so on—have long, complex, and idiosyncratic Latin titles, sometimes with words in Greek, Hebrew, and other languages and alphabets.  They all include the word Liber, Latin for ‘Book,’ and at one point late in Crowley’s life, they all acquired a number, written in Roman numerals.  The official title of The Book of the Law is Liber CCXX: Liber AL vel Legis sub Figura CCXX; I won’t attempt to unpack that for you as it’s far too esoteric and convoluted and there’s an even longer, more complex “technical” title, as there are for most of the Thelemic volumes.  I’ll just use the more common English titles, which there are for most of Crowley’s output.)

I’ll try to describe the Thelemic belief system, but if you’ve picked up anything about Aleister Crowley so far it’s probably that his concepts are abstruse and complex.  My explanation, when I get to it, will be simplistic, I’m afraid, and superficial.  Aside from the fundamental complexity of Thelema, I frankly have a hard time understanding some of it at all.  In addition to Crowley’s own books, which are extremely dense and, as Somerset Maugham observed, verbose, and others by Crowley adepts and followers, there are many published commentaries on and interpretations of Thelema and Crowley’s other ideas, including many on the ’Net.)

The Crowleys returned to Boleskine around early May 1905.  On 28 July, Rose Crowley gave birth to the couple’s first child, daughter Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith.  At about the same time, Crowley’s friendship with Samuel Mathers, the head of Golden Dawn (see Part 1), disintegrated when Crowley accused Mathers of using black magic against him after the Laird of Boleskine’s hunting dogs mysteriously died and a servant assaulted Rose.  Crowley invoked Beelzebub to combat Mathers.  (In Christianity, Beelzebub is often used as an alternative name for the devil, but among demonologists, he is one of the seven princes of Hell.)  Meanwhile, the occultist, who was a prolific writer and had already published many books, became displeased with his current publisher. 

Crowley’s writings had always garnered strong critical attention, not always positive, but forceful; his books, however, didn’t sell well, some only a few copies.  So he founded his own publishing company, the Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth, a parody of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (a Christian charity based in London and founded in 1698 to increase awareness of the Christian faith), and launched a competition for the best essay on his work for a prize of £100 (about $4,500 today); Crowley was nothing if not a self-promoter. 

The winning essay, “A Star in the West” (published in 1907), was written by Captain John Frederick Charles Fuller (1878-1966), a British army officer and something of an acolyte of Crowley’s.  His entry was apparently the only one and in it, Fuller wrote: “It has taken 100,000,000 years to produce Aleister Crowley.  The world has indeed laboured, and has at last brought forth a man.”  He praised Crowley as England’s greatest living poet.  SPRT’s first publication was Crowley's Collected Works (1905-07). 

After his unsuccessful attempt to climb K2 in 1902, Crowley decided that Kanchenjunga, near Darjeeling, India, which still hadn’t been conquered, was ripe for climbing.  The third-tallest mountain in the world, Kanchenjunga had the reputation as the world’s most treacherous peak; it wasn’t climbed successfully until 1955.  Crowley gathered a group of mountaineering friends and in August 1905, he and his small band of climbers and porters began their ascent. 

The climbers reached an estimated height of 21,300 feet (and perhaps higher), three-quarters of the mountain’s height, when the group was forced to turn back because of the threat of avalanche and returned to a lower camp.  They seem to have tried again, reaching perhaps 25,000 feet (almost 90% of the way up) before being forced to abandon the climb.  Several climbers and porters began a descent, against the advice of Crowley, who thought it was too dangerous, and one climber and a number of porters were killed in an avalanche.  Crowley was commonly blamed for the deaths by the mountaineering community.

After the failed attempt at Kanchenjunga, Crowley met his family in Calcutta in November and he engaged in some big-game hunting and composed the homoerotic story The Scented Garden (1910).  Just before Rose and Lilith arrived, however, Crowley had been set upon in a dark street by thugs and, while defending himself, had shot one of the men to death.  

Forced to leave India, he and his family traveled through southern Asia, covering southern China, Burma, and Annam (a province of French Indochina that’s now southern Vietnam).  The same sources that alleged that Crowley was working as a British intelligence agent (see Part 1) assert that his trip to China was a mission to gather information on China’s opium trade and during his travels, Crowley smoked opium.  He also continued to practice magic and spiritualism, daily reciting incantations and invocations of spirits.

Rose, who was pregnant, and Lilith departed for Europe in March 1906 while Crowley went on to Shanghai and Japan before sailing for Canada.  From Canada, he traveled to New York City before returning to the United Kingdom in June.  When he arrived home, he was devastated to learn that Lilith had died of typhoid in Rangoon.  Crowley blamed his daughter’s death on Rose’s persistent alcoholism, convincing himself that his wife had been too drunk to sterilize the baby’s bottle properly and fed their daughter with a contaminated nipple. 

Once again, the stress in Crowley’s life—aided, no doubt, by his profligate lifestyle, which he led like the proverbial double-ended candle, and his use of drugs in his magic practices—brought on ill health and he underwent a number of operations, including several surgeries on his right eye, all of them unsuccessful.  In addition, he developed neuralgia (pain that radiates along a nerve) and throat ulcers.

The occultist’s second child, daughter Lola Zaza, was born in September 1906 (though some sources say February 1907, but if Rose was already pregnant in March 1906, the baby would have had to be born by December at the latest).  Lola was a sickly baby who many feared would not survive infancy.  (Lola Crowley, who lived until 1990, was named for actress Vera Neville, 1888-1953, nicknamed “Lola,” who was Crowley’s mistress at the time.  The actress was 18 when little Lola was born, and Crowley was 31.) 

Crowley, assisted by George Cecil Jones (the man who’d introduced Crowley to Golden Dawn in 1897; see Part 1), continued to practice magic rituals, claiming to have been able to achieve samadhi, a trance-like state common to many Indian religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, among others) which Crowley asserted allowed him to unite with the deity.  The ritual required him to use hashish heavily and he published an essay in 1909 called “The Psychology of Hashish” extoling the benefits of the drug as an aid to mysticism.  (The essay was written under the name “Oliver Haddo,” the character in Maugham’s The Magician that was a parody of Crowley and which the mystic used as one of his several pseudonyms.)

“Hashish” was published in volume 2, number 2 of The Equinox, a series of books issued by A∴A∴, Crowley’s mystical order, started with Jones in 1907.  A∴A∴—the full name is shrouded in secrecy—promoted a combination of ancient Buddhism, vedantic yoga, ceremonial magic, and Kabbalism (Jewish mysticism).  Both A∴A∴ and The Equinox continued past Crowley’s death in 1947.  

Crowley was accompanied in this venture by Victor Neuburg (1883-1940), a Jewish poet and mystic whom Crowley had met in 1907.  According to Crowley, Neuburg was able to materialize the spirits they called up in visible form, whereas Crowley alone only managed to make them appear as hazy, shadowy mists.  Neuburg, Crowley found, wasn’t disciplined enough to do this on his own, but with Crowley’s help, the apparitions would remain in their presence in distinct form until the men got too tired to maintain the vision.  (Once again, remember that no one was present to attest to this experience except Crowley and Neuburg, both of whom, aside from any ulterior motives for their reports, had been using hash heavily.  Among its other effects, smoking hashish, like marijuana—they are essentially the same drug in different forms—can cause an enhancement and intensification of both visual and auditory perception.)  Neuburg became Crowley’s closest disciple and the two became sexual partners, even engaging in sadomasochism.

At this time, too, Crowley claimed to have been contacted again by Aiwass, the messenger of Horus who’d dictated The Book of the Law to him in Egypt in 1904.  Aiwass  dictated two more texts in October and November 1907 which were included among The Holy Books of Thelema.  Crowley also wrote down several more Thelemic texts during those months, all of them allegedly dictated by supernatural sources.  In June 1909, Crowley rediscovered The Book of the Law at Boleskine, where he had secreted it, and now decided Thelema was “objective truth.”

Thelema, Crowley’s belief system, can be described as a religion (variously modified as “new,” “mystery,” “pagan,” “magic,” or “syncretic,” depending on who’s doing the describing) or a spiritual philosophy—though I think Crowley himself considered it a religion.  The name is a classical Greek word (θέλημα), which appears in the New Testament, that means ‘will.’  It’s derived from the verb thelo (θέλω), meaning ‘to decide,’ which also has the meaning of ‘to desire,’ including in the sexual sense.  In the Greek Bible, thelema is used to mean “God’s will,” the divine will that mortals are commanded to carry out; but it also carries the sense of the will of sexual desire.

Though Crowley composed The Book of the Law, the central text of Thelema, in 1904, it wasn’t published until 1909 and it was at that time, after Crowley began publishing the other Holy Books of Thelema, that the mystic truly launched Thelema as a complete system of beliefs and ritual.  According to one analyst, Crowley asserted in his autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), that his aim was “to bring oriental wisdom to Europe and to restore paganism in a purer form.” 

Aside from not being clear about what he meant by “paganism,” much of Crowley’s exegesis on Thelema is often incohesive because it’s a pastiche of dozens of exotic and obscure sources, including ancient Egyptian theological myths; Eastern religions and philosophies like Buddhism and Hinduism; movements such as Western esotericism (a belief in a philosophy that can only be understood by a select few who have special knowledge, a doctrine shared by Rudolf Steiner, whose profile I published on Rick On Theater on 20 January), Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Rosicrucianism, and Kabbalism; practices such as ceremonial magic, medieval conjury, yoga, alchemy, astrology, and tarot divination; esoteric orders like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), a society based in Germany which Crowley joined in 1912, among many other influences. 

To form his Thelemic system, Crowley borrowed liberally from Golden Dawn—though he reinterpreted much of what he appropriated and then took it further—as well as Freemasonry and other orders, especially for Thelemic rites and rituals, including ceremonial garb.  (Crowley’s ceremonial dress was also based on a fanciful version of ancient Egyptian attire as if he were prepared to appear in a Franco Zeffirelli production of Giuseppe Verdi’s 1871 opera Aida or Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra.)

Crowley’s fundamental belief was that the 20th century was the dawn of the Aeon of Horus, a new age for humankind in which people would have more control over their own fates (through the practice of magic) than they did in the previous age of the Aeon of Osiris, dominated by paternalistic religions like Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the earlier maternalistic Aeon of Isis, centered on goddess-worship.  Crowley believed he was the prophet of the new aeon, as he’d been told by Aiwass when that messenger of Horus dictated The Book of the Law to him in 1904, and that Thelema was the right religion for the Aeon of Horus. 

The principal deities of Thelema are Nuit, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit, adapted from the ancient Egyptian pantheon.  (They are the main speakers, respectively, of Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of The Book of the Law.)  Nuit (pronounced noot) is the goddess of the night sky and the stars.  She’s most often shown as a naked woman whose body is covered with stars and is the Great Mother, the source of everything. 

Nuit’s male counterpart, Hadit, is described in The Book of the Law as “the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star.”  He’s the center of all things, depicted as a point at the center of the circle that is Nuit, and represents each Thelemite’s inner self. 

The third member of the Thelemic trinity, Ra-Hoor-Khuit (pronounced ra-hor-akhti), is an aspect of Horus and says in Chapter 3 of The Book of the Law: “Now let it be first understood that I am a god of War and of Vengeance.”  He’s called the Lord of the Aeon and, since the sky (of which Horus is god) contains the sun and the moon, Ra-Hoor-Khuit is also associated with Ra, the god of the sun.

The central tenet of Thelema is that every person has his or her own True Will that each must determine—via the practice of Thelema, of course—and pursue.  The individual’s True Will aligns with the Cosmic Will that permeates the universe.  (This would be the domain of the “immanent deity” I tried to explain earlier; see Part 1.) 

The search for one’s True Will is Thelema’s Great Work and is the special knowledge upon which Crowley’s form of esotericism is founded: anyone who doesn’t recognize his or her True Will cannot be a Thelemite (that’s what an adherent to Thelema is called) and won’t have control of his or her destiny.  Non-Thelemites will forever be constrained and bound in servitude to the wills of others, fighting for what they’ve been denied rather than acting virtuously, in line with the Cosmic Will (which some commentators have likened to the divine will of Judeo-Christianity).

“Do what thou wilt,” the fundamental law of Thelema, is not really a license to behave hedonistically, Crowley insisted.  He explained that it was never intended to be a dictate to fulfill everyday desires, but to demand that followers pursue their higher calling by realizing their purest True Will, the individual component of the Cosmic Will.  Of course, that’s not what many adepts thought, especially the later 20th-century followers, such as the counterculture youth of the 1960s, who cherry-picked Crowley’s writings for their own purposes. 

I’m not convinced, given Crowley’s own licentious lifestyle, that his official explanation is the same as his original intention.  It sounds a lot like a retroactive redefinition to me.  The same is true of the correlating phrase to the Law of Thelema, “Love is the Law, love under will.”  Crowley asserted that in Thelema, “love” refers to harmony, the relationship every Thelemite establishes with the universe when interacting according to his or her True Will.  Perhaps he believed that, but many followers—especially later ones—took it as a call for free love.

Magic, which Crowley defined in Magick in Theory and Practice, Part III of Magick (Book 4), as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,” was central to Crowley’s beliefs and, needless to say, became focal in Thelema.  Though some Thelemites pursue magic as a way to achieve personal goals, such as wealth, love, or success, it is through the practice of magic, Crowley asserted, that Thelemites discover their True Wills, their divine or true natures.  This is accomplished by communicating with each Thelemite’s Holy Guardian Angel (HGA), his or her personal spirit, who will guide the Thelemite throughout his or her life. 

The HGA will lead the Thelemite from the world of experience and substance to the world of essence and spirit that is beyond phenomenal understanding.  (Crowley doesn’t use the term, but this sounds like what other belief systems call the enlightened state or nirvana.  The big difference, of course, is that most other forms of achieving enlightenment, such as Buddhism or Jainism, do so through meditation or prayer, while Thelemites are supposed to achieve this state through the practice of magic.)

Of greatest importance to Crowley, it seems, was sexual magic—sex acts intended to accomplish magical results—and it became significant in his religion as well.  He defined three forms of sex magic—autoerotic/masturbatory, homosexual, and heterosexual—and admonished Thelemites that they should not suppress their true sexual identities (remembering that homosexual acts were illegal in Britain and most other countries during Crowley’s lifetime), which is part of their True Wills.  The sexual act, Crowley believed, is a way for Thelemites to focus their wills.

(At this point, I should remind readers that what Crowley deemed his first mystical experience in 1896—examined in Part 1—was considered by some to have been merely his rhetorical cover for a homosexual episode.  I remarked that others who saw his description of the mystical experience as the result of the sexual act were probably more accurate.  Though Crowley hadn’t adopted the concept in 1896, this may have been the precursor to his commitment to sexual magic.)

Sex in Thelema is considered a sacrament.  The principal religious ceremony of Thelema is the Gnostic Mass, at the center of which is the taking of the eucharist.  In Thelema, this consists of drinking a goblet of wine and eating the Cake of Light, a wafer containing honey, oil, certain plant liquids, and either menstrual blood or a mixture of semen and vaginal fluids.  (The Gnostic Mass otherwise resembles the Roman Catholic rite and that of the Russian Orthodox Church; Crowley wrote the mass, The Canon of the Mass according to the Gnostic Catholic Church, in 1913 while he was in Moscow.  Note that ‘Catholic’ here means ‘universal,’ not ‘Roman Catholic.’)  Crowley thought it was important for Thelemites to practice some form of the eucharistic ritual daily.

[I hope you could follow my explication of Thelema; it will be a prominent part of the rest of Crowley’s biography.  (If anyone feels she or he needs more information about Crowley’s religion, I can tell you that there are lots of websites that delve into it at varying levels.  You could start with the Wikipedia page on Thelema and branch out from there.)  As I warned readers above, the belief system is not an easy concept to decipher, and I did simplify it considerably to make it easier to comprehend.  A number of Crowley’s ideas are hard to unpack, as you’ll see; Thelema is only the most significant one.

[I’ll be posting Part 3 of “‘The Wickedest Man in the World’” in three days, and I hope you’ll all come back for the continuation.  (A reminder: this post comprises six installments altogether.  I’ll be posting them in a row every three days.)]