"The Wickedest Man in the World": Aleister Crowley, Part 5

[“‘The Wickedest Man in the World’: Aleister Crowley” is nearly at an end; there’s only one more section to go.  But don’t take too big a sigh of relief because there’s lots more shenanigans to come in Parts 5, below, and 6.  Aleister Crowley was sort of a supernatural Energizer Bunny.  In addition, you never know where he’s gonna go next! 

[As I have in Parts 2 through 4, I suggest anyone coming along to Rick On Theater for the first time, not having read the first 4 installments of the Tale of The Great Beast, go back and pick up the beginning before trying to make head or tails of Part 5.  Little will make sense if you don’t.  So, saddle up—but make sure you have the reins well in hand and your feet firmly in the stirrups.  This horse takes some high jumps!]

On 28 October 1923, Theodor Reuss, the head of  Ordo Templi Orientis, had died in Munich.  Aleister Crowley, the leader of the British branch of the Order, claimed that Reuss had named him as the OTO leader’s successor.  Indeed, it seems from Crowley’s diaries that he’d already assumed that authority as early as 1921, after Reuss suffered a stroke. 

Upon Reuss’s passing, Crowley, with the support of several prominent members of the order, including Karl Germer (1885-1962), the German-born Grand Treasurer General of OTO and Crowley’s U.S. representative, and Martha Küntzel (1857-1942), a theosophical writer and staunch Thelemite and Crowley adept, proclaimed himself OTO’s Frater Superior and Outer Head of the Order (OHO), but was opposed by a counter claim by the head of the German branch, Heinrich Tränker (1880-1956), backed by other important brothers.  The result was that in 1925, the Order split apart. 

(By the end of World War II, the European branches has been disbanded or driven underground; the only operating temple was the Agape Lodge in Los Angeles.  After Crowley’s death in 1947, OTO ceased to call itself an international organization—so there was no longer an OHO, the international office—but it hung on with one surviving temple until 1949, when the Agape Lodge stopped holding regular meetings.  Nominally and legally, the Order still exists, however, and accepts initiates.)

The Great Beast, living in Paris, was in poor health, mostly due to his continuing abuse of heroin and cocaine (although his asthma also flared up again as well).  In 1928, he began writing what many feel is his magnum opus, Magick in Theory and Practice, published in 1929.  The book, the magus’s detailed descriptions of his various magical practices and the tools for conducting them, attracted little attention at the time, but it was eventually incorporated into Magick, Liber ABA, Book 4 as Part III.  (Part I, Mysticism, and Part II, Magick, were written in 1911 and published in Equinox in the winter of 1912-13; Part IV, ΘΕΛΗΜΑ [Thelema]—the Law, was first published in 1936 as Equinox of the Gods.)  The book, which took 25 years to complete, was first published as a single volume in 1969, 22 years after the author’s death.

In Paris in December 1928, Crowley met Nicaraguan-born Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar (1894-1955).  When the Sûreté Générale, France’s secret police, opened an inquiry (based on the complaint by a family member of one of the mystic’s retinue), the agency discovered that de Miramar didn’t have the proper papers to remain in France. 

An order of expulsion was issued by the French government in March 1929, and in May, the mystic was himself ordered to leave France because of his reputation as a drug-user and debaucher and suspicion that he was a German agent.  (If you’re keeping count, that’s two countries that have expelled The Beast: Italy and now France.)  But de Miramar also didn’t have the proper documents to return to England with Crowley, so on 16 August, The Beast and de Miramar were married in Leipzig, Germany, before the British consul.  Thus, Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar became the second Mrs. Aleister Crowley—and the magus’s new Scarlet Woman.

Immediately after the wedding, the newly-weds returned to England where Crowley saw the publication of his novel Moonchild (which included a character that may have been a parody of poet W. B. Yeats; see Part 1) and The Stratagem, a book of short stories.  Mandrake Press, a publishing firm founded in 1929 in which Crowley had an interest, contracted to publish the occultist’s Confessions in a limited edition of six volumes; however, the company went out of business in 1930 and couldn’t complete the series.  Mandrake’s co-founder, P. R. Stephenson (1901-65), nonetheless managed to co-write (with Israel Regardie, 1907-85, the occultist’s secretary during his sojourn in Paris) The Legend of Aleister Crowley (1930), an exegesis of the negative press coverage Crowley received. 

De Miramar was an alcoholic (like Rose Kelly, Crowley’s first wife) and compulsive seductress.  Her relationship with the magus, both before and after their marriage, was tempestuous.  According to intimates of the Crowleys, she was adept at making “scenes” and even accused him and his friends of trying to poison her.  He, in turn, accused her of seducing or trying to seduce his friends and colleagues (including Regardie, which was true).  Within a year of their wedding, The Beast wrote to de Miramar in September 1930 that “you had better get a man who will stand for your secret drinking and your scandalous behavior. . . .  You should get a divorce.” 

In April 1930, Crowley moved to Berlin without de Miramar, who remained in London without means of support.  In 1932, she was committed to the Colney Hatch Mental Hospital in an outer borough of London (the same asylum as the occultist’s first wife) for alcoholism.  She was under the delusion, according to hospital records, that she was the daughter of the king and queen (King George V and Queen Mary at the time) and that she had married her brother, the Prince of Wales. 

That, of course, would have been Prince Edward, the future—and brief—King Edward VIII, the one who abdicated in 1936 in favor of the current queen’s father “for the woman I love”—not, incidentally, Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar, but an American divorcee called Wallis Warfield Simpson.  (Curiously, de Miramar’s psychiatrist at Colney Hatch, Dr. Alexander Cannon, 1896-1963, whose professional credentials were a bit questionable to say the least, also treated Prince Edward, around the period of his abdication in December 1936, for an undisclosed problem; Cannon’s specialty was the treatment of alcoholism, however.) 

There was never a divorce from de Miramar because Crowley feared a court-mandated financial settlement and he was bankrupt.  De Miramar remained at Colney Hatch (which in 1937 was renamed Friern Mental Hospital for the area of London in which it was located) until her death 23 years later.

In April 1930, Crowley took 19-year-old Berlin artist and model Hanni Larissa Jaeger (1911-32?) as his lover, magic partner, and Scarlet Woman, but the relationship was uneasy.  Jaeger became pregnant (and apparently miscarried), but the affair was brief and by August 1931, she was replaced by Bertha “Billie” Busch (1895-?); Crowley received word in 1932 that Jaeger had killed herself soon after the couple had split.  Busch and Crowley’s relationship was so violent they were reported to have actually assaulted one another. 

Affairs with Aleister Crowley were brief and messy, but marriage to him was downright perilous.

In Berlin, the occultist continued to meet prominent people, including author and philosopher Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), who was having psychedelic experiences as early as 1931 and even wrote an essay, Do What You Will (1929) in which Thelema and its Law get passing mention, and Alfred Adler (1870-1937), an eminent Austrian physician, psychotherapist, and psychologist whose theories took into account both metaphysical and spiritual influences.  Meanwhile, The Beast continued to have sexual relationships with both men and women.

In September 1930, The Beast took Jaeger to Lisbon, Portugal, to meet the poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), one of Crowley’s many correspondents since at least November 1929, and a strong believer in astrology, the occult, and mysticism.  Pessoa had translated, among many other English-language works, the mystic’s poem “Hymn To Pan” (1919) into Portuguese and his library contained a copy of Magick in Theory and Practice, which the poet had offered to translate as well.  (Pessoa had spent his youth in Durban in the British Colony of Natal, later part of the Union of South Africa.  In school there, Pessoa became fluent in English and developed an appreciation for English literature.) 

On their second day in Portugal, Crowley and Jaeger went to the seashore and performed rituals involving drugs and sex magic.  Then they walked west along the Atlantic coast to Cascals, about 20 miles and a six-hour hike, where they viewed the famous tourist sight, the Boca do Inferno (Hell’s Mouth), a rocky chasm where the waves crash into a cave with loud roars.  At their hotel in Cascals that night, the couple saw many visions—likely spurred by alcohol and more drugs—involving the Boca do Inferno.

On a night about a fortnight later, after a lot of drinking and intense invocations, Jaeger suddenly crashed.  She became hysterical, quarreled with Crowley, and threatened suicide.  The scene brought the hotel manager who ordered the couple to leave the hotel and the next morning, with Jaeger feeling somewhat better, they packed and moved to Monte Estoril, the next small town about two miles east along the coast.  While Crowley was registering at the new hotel, Jaeger snuck out and fled back to Lisbon. 

By the next evening, Jaeger hadn’t returned and the following morning, Crowley went back to Lisbon and went to Pessoa to tell him what had happened.  The next evening, however, he found Jaeger, but she told him she was going back to Germany.  The Beast was furious.  He tried to change his Scarlet Woman’s mind, even performing a magic ceremony to “reconstitute” their love, which apparently almost worked—but Jaeger’s desire to leave was stronger than the magus’s magic, and she left the next morning.

Crowley shrugged off the separation and went on with his trip.  He took a train to Cintra (now spelled ‘Sintra’), about 18 miles northwest, inland from Lisbon, a beautiful tourist draw lauded by poets like Lord Byron and Robert Southey.  (It was from Cintra that Crowley wrote the letter to de Miramar suggesting a divorce.)  The next day, 21 September, the mystic walked back to Boca do Inferno, about 12 miles south, and listened to the waves crashing against the rocks.  He was struck with an idea.

Crowley decided “to do a suicide stunt to annoy Hanni.”  He sought Pessoa’s help and left a note on the shore near Hell’s Mouth, weighted down with his cigarette case so the wind wouldn’t blow it away.  It read: “I cannot live without you.  The other ‘Boca do Inferno’ will get me . . . .”

He then returned to Berlin, leaving Pessoa to take care of the details.  The poet got the story of the occultist’s mysterious disappearance planted in Lisbon newspapers from which it was picked up by papers across Europe, including ones in Paris and London.  A certain newspaper man named Augusto Ferreira Gomes (1892-1953), who just happened to be a good friend of Pessoa’s and an admirer of Crowley’s, was wandering around Hell’s Mouth and came upon the magus’s cri de coeur. 

Crowley reappeared in Berlin about three weeks later for the opening of an exhibition of his art at the Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf.  On 10 October 1931, he attended the vernissage for the exhibit of his paintings.  Few of the works, which aligned with the German Expressionism of the period, sold but the reviews were mostly positive.  Ausstellung Aleister Crowley (11 October-5 November) included 73 allegorical representations, scenes of places he’d visited, portraits of members of his entourage and his Scarlet Women, and renderings of some prominent acquaintances like Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society; science writer and literary journalist J. W. N. Sullivan; and Aldous Huxley.  

By the time of the Neumann-Nierendorf exhibit, Crowley had moved on from Hanni Jaeger, who’d left the magus, to Billie Busch.  She was a Zürich-born, 36-year-old divorcee, an active socialist who considered herself a businesswoman.  The Great Beast found in her his most arousing sexual partner, raving about her in various explicit statements; he made her his new Scarlet Woman.  In late October, Busch suffered heavy menstrual bleeding and painful cramps; when a doctor was called, he diagnosed the incident as a miscarriage. 

The relationship, often violent, continued on an increasingly rocky basis in London after June 1932 when Crowley returned to England.  Busch began frequenting pubs by January 1933, her health, both psychological and physical, deteriorating, and she entered Grosvenor Hospital for Women, a gynecological hospital.  Busch gradually began to fade from the scene and eventually ran off with a former middle-weight boxing champion, who was reported to have forced her into street prostitution. 

In January 1932, while still in Berlin, Crowley became friendly with Gerald Hamilton (1890-1970), a British memoirist, critic, internationalist, and communist, who became the mystic’s lodger.  (While sharing Crowley’s residence, Hamilton was witness to many of his landlord and Busch’s brawls, including one in which Busch stabbed The Beast in the shoulder badly enough to cause him to bleed profusely.)  Through Hamilton, Crowley met many of Berlin’s far-left personalities, and it was again put out that Crowley was following instructions from British intelligence to observe and report on the communist movement on the continent. 

Crowley was reported to have kept London informed of Hamilton’s activities for the Comintern (Communist International, the Soviet organization that advocated world communism) while Hamilton was busy spying on everyone else, both for the Soviets and, it seems, for the British.  The two men were well suited to one another, for “the wickedest man in the world” was a perfect match for “the wickedest man in Europe,” as Hamilton was dubbed.

In London in July 1933, Crowley met Evelyn Pearl Brooksmith (1899-1967), a 34-year-old widow who became his last Scarlet Women.  Like so many of her predecessors, Pearl Brooksmith, as she preferred to be called, was a heavy drinker.  (I don’t know if most of Crowley’s women companions were boozers when he met them or if they became alcoholics after they began liaisons with the occultist.  If the former, it may have been the key for The Beast to entice them into his bizarre world.  The latter is certainly a possibility given his treatment of the women who came under his sway.) 

In May 1936, Crowley recorded that Brooksmith had frequent visions and because of their extraordinary psychic connection, the mystic reported that he experienced clairvoyance.  Crowley also reported, however, that Brooksmith exhibited signs of insanity.  She had violent tantrums whenever The Beast had a relationship with other women.  According to Crowley, the main purpose of his relationship with Brooksmith was to produce an heir for the magus.  The couple actively tried, but had no success.

(Readers will have observed, I imagine, that almost all of the magus’s issue miscarried or died in infancy; most of those who lived beyond that died in childhood.  Not being a doctor of any kind, I can only guess that Crowley’s and his lovers’ wild activities, heavy drug use, and consumption of alcohol made conception and successful birth fraught with physiological obstacles.) 

By December 1933, Brooksmith’s hallucinations had become so intense that Crowley began to distance himself from her (something the magus was prone to do).  Finally, Brooksmith was consigned to a mental hospital, a fate she shared with several other Crowley female companions. 

In May 1933, the occultist won his first libel suit, against a London bookseller for falsely labeling the mystic’s first novel, Diary of a Drug Fiend (published in 1922), “indecent.”  The suit garnered the plaintiff £50 damages with costs (worth about $4,500 in 2019).  Always impecunious, his success suggested to him that this was a viable way to make some money.  Thus Crowley began instigating a series of libel suits. 

His next target was Nina Hamnett (1890-1956), a Welsh artist and author who was actually a friend of Crowley’s.  He decided that she’d written disparaging of him in her memoir, Laughing Torso, which came out in 1932.  The occultist claimed that the bestselling tale of Hamnett’s flamboyant life in the U.K. and the U.S. included allegations that he practiced black magic, to which The Great Beast objected. 

He sued Constable & Co., the publisher, but the conduct of the suit only added to Crowley’s financial distress and, in April 1934, the trial began.  The defense produced several of The Beast’s other writings which, read in court, appeared blatantly obscene and strongly suggested the practice of the dark arts.  Crowley’s attorney protested that Hamnett’s passage in Laughing Torso was “indecent, vulgar, and ignorant.”

What Hamnett had actually written, of the time spent at the Abbey of Thelema, was:

He was supposed to practise Black Magic there, and one day a baby was said to have disappeared mysteriously.  There was also a goat there.  This all pointed to Black Magic, so people said, and the inhabitants of the village were frightened of him.

Crowley’s defense asserted, “No child disappeared mysteriously, and the only goat on the premises was kept for its milk.” 

Alongside the literary evidence that Constable & Co.’s counsel presented, the attorney produced witnesses such as Betty May (1893-1979?), the widow of Raoul Loveday, who had died in Cefalù (Part 4).  The defense attorney also cross-examined Crowley, getting the occultist to admit to, among other things, his many labels and soubriquets: “the worst man in the world,” “The Beast 666,” and “Master Therion.”  Crowley’s defense could not enlist a single witness to testify in his behalf.

On the fourth day of the trial, the judge halted the proceedings and, delivering the speech about the “blasphemous and abominable stuff” that went on at the Abbey I quoted earlier (Part 4), turned to the jury and asked if they still “want the case to go on.”  (I have never heard of an instance in which the trial judge interrupted the testimony to ask if the jury wanted to continue.  I doubt it would be permitted in a U.S. court, but perhaps in England in the 1930s, it was acceptable practice.)

The jury consulted among themselves and ultimately pronounced a verdict for the defendants, publisher Constable & Co. and author Hamnett.  The judge entered a judgment for all defendants and The Beast was ordered to pay court costs of £846 (about $74,000 in 2019).  The day was Friday, the 13th of April, 1934. 

That was really the slightest of the repercussions of Crowley v. Constable & Co. Limited, and Others.  Having exposed himself to public scrutiny, the occultist was haled into Bankruptcy Court by his creditors.  The court determined that Crowley owed a little under £4,700 (about $410,000 today) with assets of £15,000 ($1.3 million); the £15,000, however, represented a debt Crowley claimed was owed him and was not tangible so the court determined his debts were greater than his tangible assets (which were essentially nil) and, therefore, declared in February 1935 that he was bankrupt. 

During the hearing, The Great Beast testified that he possessed no household furniture.  It was also determined that for several years, he’d been spending three times his income.  Among whatever else of which Crowley’s creditors could get hold, they seized his unpublished manuscripts—left unprinted because of the financial collapse of his own publishing firm, Mandrake.  This all was, of course, the outcome he’d feared would result from a divorce proceeding with Maria de Miramar and why he eschewed it. 

[Okay, you’re almost at the end now.  I hope you’ve managed to stay on top of this wild ride and that you’ll come back in three days for Part 6, the conclusion to my profile of “The Wickedest Man in the World.”  Trust me: there are still some surprises to come.]