"The Wickedest Man in the World": Aleister Crowley, Part 3

[Below is “‘The Wickedest Man in the World’: Aleister Crowley, Part 3,” the continuation of my six-part profile of the infamous British occultist and magician of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  I hope you’ve been following along closely, because this ride is about to start getting bumpy.  (If you’ve just joined the series, I strongly recommend going back to Parts 1 and 2, posted on 28 September and 1 October, before embarking on the third installment.  As hard as it will be to follow Crowley’s life as it is, starting in medias res will be all but impossible.)

[Some significant developments in  the concepts and practices of the magus’s thinking begin to appear in this section and events depicted below will have repercussion in coming episodes. ]

Aleister Crowley and George Cecil Jones (see Part 1) used both A∴A∴ and the Ordo Templi Orientis, the British branch of which Crowley became leader, as a way to promulgate Thelema (Part 2),.  The self-proclaimed prophet of the Aeon of Horus traveled widely to promote Thelema, establishing centers in Britain, continental Europe, Australia, and North America—including several cities in the United States, where he spent a great deal of time.  In 1920, he founded the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily; the religious commune was named after l’Abbaye de Thélème in François Rabelais’s satire The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (c. 1532-64).  (Rabelais, who lived between 1483 or 1494 and 1553, was a French monk, scholar, and writer and the source of many of Thelema’s precepts, including its fundamental law: “Do what thou wilt” is a translation of Rabelais’s “fay çe que vouldras”—Fais ce que tu veux in modern French—the rule at the Abbaye in Gargantua and Pantagruel.)

Crowley’s beliefs, especially as incorporated in Thelema, have been influences on several modern religious or spiritual movements.  These include Wicca, Neopaganism, Setianism (the worship of Set, the ancient Egyptian god of chaos, disorder, and violence), chaos magic, and Satanism.  A few scholars have also posited that Crowley and Thelema were influences on L. Ron Hubbard (1911-86) and Scientology, but this is disputed by many others.  (Hubbard was close to John Whiteside "Jack" Parsons, 1914-52, an avid member of OTO and a Thelemite in whose Pasadena mansion he lived for a time; they collaborated in 1946 on the “Babalon Working,” a sex magic ritual.)

With all his extravagance, world-spanning travel, and self-publication of his writings, Crowley had run through his inheritance of $2+ million in a dozen years.  Having never taken a regular job nor made more than a token income from his published works, Crowley went to work for George Montagu Bennett (1852-1931), 17th Earl of Tankerville, to safeguard the earl from witchcraft.  Crowley attributed Lord Tankerville’s fear to paranoia caused by his use of cocaine.  (Something of a character anyway, Bennett had worked in the U.S. as a ranch hand, sang gospel songs at revival meetings—he was nicknamed “The Singing Earl” in the press—rode in rodeos, and painted miniatures that hung in the Royal Academy.)  Crowley offered to teach him how to protect himself against magic and Bennett wholeheartedly agreed.  Later, Crowley began to take on private pupils to whom he taught the practices of magic and the occult.

Crowley continued to write and publish his poetry and also turned to writing horror stories because he saw that they sold well.  He also composed Liber 777 (published anonymously in 1909), a collection of his papers on magic and Kabbalism.  In November 1907, Crowley made his first really big move as an occultist: he and Jones, with the help of J. F. C. Fuller (the author of the 1907 laudatory essay on Crowley’s writing; see Part 2), founded A∴A∴ as a successor to Golden Dawn (Part 1).  They used Golden Dawn as the model for their new rites and added a Thelemic foundation.  In March 1909, Crowley launched The Equinox as the official organ of A∴A∴, subtitling the publication The Review of Scientific Illuminism. 

Troubled by Rose’s growing alcoholism, Crowley, dissolved his marriage in November 1909.  In order not to cast aspersions on Rose, Crowley allowed her to divorce him on the grounds of his own infidelity, for which he supplied evidence.  (Adultery was one of the few grounds for divorce in Britain at the time, though the laws of Scotland varied somewhat from those of England and Wales.)  Rose, who was given custody of their infant daughter, Lola, continued to live at Boleskine, as the couple remained friends.  Rose’s alcoholism deepened until in September 1911, she was institutionalized.

After his divorce, Crowley went to Algeria with Victor Neuburg (Part 2) and, traveling in the desert, recited the Quran every day.  The two occultists also practiced Enochian magic, a form of ceremonial magic dating back to the 16th century.  They also performed a sex magic ritual, including calling forth demons.  They kept a record of their magic activities and their success which Crowley published in The Equinox.  The invocations performed by Crowley and Neuburg involved blood sacrifice (the ritual slaughter of animals or, sometimes, humans, believed by Satanists to intensify the power of incantations), which Crowley considered a critical turning point in his magic career. 

When the travelers returned to London in January 1910, Crowley found that Samuel Mathers (Parts 1 and 2) had brought suit against him for publishing Golden Dawn secrets in The Equinox.  The court sided with Crowley and the publicity generated by the trial spread Crowley’s fame more widely.  He was sensationalized in the press as a worshiper of Satan and a practitioner of human sacrifice, and though he denied both, he reveled in the titillating reputation.  The notoriety also attracted more members to A∴A∴.

(As we’ve seen, Crowley did use blood sacrifice in his magic rituals, but it was animal blood.  The rumors that he used human blood or sacrificed humans were untrue, though the mystic let them circulate.  His claim that he didn’t worship Satan was predicated on the fact that he had abjured Christianity, the source of the belief in Satan.  He did, however, use Satanic images in his writings and pronouncements.  His mother had dubbed him “The Beast,” an epithet he adopted for himself, even using the numbers “666,” the symbol for the Beast or the Devil in the Book of Revelation, to refer to himself.  He was also known to have sent “anti-Christmas cards” to his friends.  In other words, although Crowley didn’t identify himself as a Satanist and didn’t worship Satan or summon the devil, he liked to have people think he could and that he might.)

With the increased attention, Crowley decided to expand his teachings—and add a larger measure of showmanship to his public presentations—to appeal to his new audience.  He created the Rites of Artemis as a public performance of magic during which A∴A∴ members portrayed various deities.  At the first presentation of the rites in June, at A∴A∴ headquarters at 124 Victoria Street in central London, participants were served a punch spiked with peyote to “enhance” the magical experience. 

Journalists attended the event and filed mostly positive reports.  Encouraged by this reception, in October and November 1910, Crowley decided to give another such performance, the Rites of Eleusis, at Caxton Hall, a popular venue for public events, both political and cultural, in the City of Westminster in central London with a capacity of 700 people.  The press was less kind to this performance, with one writer calling Crowley “one of the most blasphemous and cold-blooded villains of modern times” in The Looking Glass, a monthly London political newspaper.  Attendance for the series of performances, which included the Rites of Artemis under its new title, the Rites of Luna, dwindled, reducing Crowley to selling tickets for individual performances rather than the whole series, just to cover costs.  Far from attracting more A∴A∴ members, the new coverage drove away members and alienated Crowley’s partners. 

The same writer who’d disparaged Crowley as a blasphemous villain, West de Wend-Fenton (dates unknown), editor of Looking Glass, also implied that Crowley and Jones were involved in a homosexual relationship and Jones sued Wend-Fenton for libel in April 1911 but lost the case.  Jones had relied on Crowley’s testimony in his suit, but in November 1910, Crowley and Neuburg returned to Algeria for more “magic workings”; the two returned to London in January 1911, but neither side called Crowley to testify (probably in fear of what he might say).  Fuller, who’d helped Crowley and Jones found A∴A∴, broke with Crowley. 

The Equinox continued publishing, bringing out several books of literature under its imprint, and Crowley continued to write prolifically, publishing works of many different types, including many on magic and mysticism.  He completed the last two Holy Books of Thelema in 1911 and he designated Mary Desti (1871-1931), whom he met in Paris, as the new Scarlet Woman.  Based on Desti’s utterances while in a trance, Crowley composed the two-volume Magick, Liber ABA, Book 4 (1911-12); it was at this time that Crowley began distinguishing between magick, his spelling of the word for supernatural magic, and magic, by which he meant stage magic or the art of illusion.  (I’ll continue to use the standard spelling since all references here will be to supernatural magic.)  Crowley believed that Ab-ul-Diz, one of Thelema’s Secret Chiefs, was speaking through Desti, telling Crowley to write Book 4.

(Desti, also known as Mary D’Este and Mary Dempsey, was a much-married, Canadian-born American bohemian, owner of a cosmetics company and a New York City studio that sold art, perfume, and clothes.  She was a close friend of interpretive dancer Isadora Duncan, 1877/78-1927, and the mother of Hollywood screenwriter and film director Preston Sturges, 1898-1959.  Crowley, Desti’s lover in 1911 and ’12, is reported to have called Sturges, aged 13 to 14 at the time, “The Brat” and “The Rogue.”  Because of Crowley’s weird look and strange behavior, Sturges detested him.  Later, the writer-director would say: “I realize my mother and I were lucky to escape with our lives.  If I had been a little older, he might not have escaped with his.”) 

In 1912, Crowley published The Book of Lies under the pseudonym Frater Perdurabo, his magical name from Golden Dawn.  One of the occultist’s biographers called the book of mysticism Crowley’s “greatest success in merging his talents as poet, scholar, and magus.”  German occultist Theodor Reuss (1855-1923), co-founder of Ordo Templi Orientis, accused Crowley of having revealed secrets of OTO in the book, but the author convinced him that the overlaps were coincidental and the two followers of the occult became friends and Crowley joined OTO. 

Reuss appointed Crowley head of the British branch of OTO, which Crowley renamed the Mysteria Mystica Maxima (MMM), and the mystic adopted the magical name of Baphomet and was proclaimed “X° [10th degree] Supreme Rex and Sovereign Grand Master General of Ireland, Iona, and all the Britons.”  (Iona is a tiny Scottish island in the Inner Hebrides west of the larger island of Mull.  I can only surmise that it’s a stand-in for Scotland.)

OTO rituals had been largely based on Freemasonry and, with Reuss’s acquiescence, Crowley revised many of them along Thelemic lines.  This turned out to be controversial among MMM members, but Crowley also began promoting MMM—which he also used to recruit new adherents to Thelema.  Further, OTO emphasized sexual magic and this attracted Crowley.  The new leader of MMM devised a magical practice involving anal sex and made it part of the program for OTO members entering higher degrees.

In March 1913, Crowley assembled a violin ensemble called the Ragged Ragtime Girls under the direction of Australian violinist Leila Waddell (1880-1932), who’d become his lover and Scarlet Woman of Thelema three years earlier.  They played a series of Ragtime dance-music concerts in London and on the music hall circuit in Great Britain.  Then that summer, the septet went to Moscow, where Crowley continued to write plays and poetry and the Gnostic Mass, the Thelemic ritual that became an important part of OTO liturgy (Part 2). 

The same rumors arose that Crowley’s real purpose for traveling to Moscow, arguably an odd decision for the impresario of a music-hall act he was trying to make popular in Britain, was to spy on the revolutionary elements active in the city for British intelligence.  (The Russian Revolution of 1905, which was defeated by the Tsar’s forces in 1907, left behind an atmosphere of unrest and disaffection.  It also spurred the growth of Bolshevism as a political movement, setting the scene for the October Revolution of 1917.  In 1913, Russia was also only a year away from Germany’s declaration of war against the Russian Empire, the formal start of World War I.)

Crowley and Neuburg traveled to Paris in January 1914 and settled into an apartment there.  Crowley became involved in the controversy surrounding Oscar Wilde’s tomb in the Père Lachaise Cemetary designed and carved by American-born British sculptor Jacob Epstein (1880-1959).  The sculptor’s work was shocking European tastes both for its open and often explicit sexuality and its turn away from the classic Greek and Roman models of British and American sculpture to images and styles found in Indian and ancient Egyptian art.  Centered on a flying angel many thought was inspired by the Assyrian winged bulls in the British Museum, the image featured testicles that critics and the public found outsized. 

The tomb was covered by a tarpaulin and at the unveiling in August, the angel’s testes were covered by a bronze butterfly.  Crowley was engaged to perform the unveiling ceremony, but Epstein refused to appear.   Crowley surreptitiously removed the sculpture’s covering and some weeks later in London, strolled into the Café Royal, where the sculptor happened to be dining, and approached Epstein.  Crowley was wearing the bronze butterfly in the same location it had been mounted on the carved angel and he approached Epstein to reveal that his sculpture was now on display the way he had intended.  Crowley’s act garnered him some measure of respect in the London art world for his bold support for artistic freedom.

In Paris, Crowley and Neuburg performed the “Paris Working” together, during which they invoked the gods Mercury and Jupiter.  This was an intense, seven-week ritual that involved heavy use of drugs and acts of sex magic in 13 separate workings.  Indeed, as a result of the working, Crowley decided that from then on he’d devote himself to sexual magic rather than ceremonial.  He was also inspired to write Liber Agapé, his treatise on sexual magic, in September 1914.  Following the Paris Working, Neuburg began to distance himself from Crowley for reasons that remain unclear.  He informed Crowley that he would no longer continue as the magus’s disciple and this revelation resulted in an argument during which Crowley ritually cursed his one-time lover and acolyte. 

By this time, Crowley was nearly broke.  In June 1914, he met George MacNie Cowie (1861-1948), a model of rectitude and propriety who’d become a member of OTO in 1912.  Crowley appointed Cowie, an avid follower of Crowley’s writings, Grand Treasurer General of MMM, the British branch of OTO, which Crowley determined would serve as a kind of insurance fund for MMM members who made financial contributions to the organization.  In May, the magus had transferred the title to Boleskine, which he’d mortgaged in 1913, to MMM and put the estate up for lease, assigning the rental income to MMM. 

Cowie was to manage the Scottish property and oversee Crowley’s publications—and he was to provide Crowley with funds whenever he needed them.  Because, however, the books and articles earned almost nothing and Boleskine brought in very little, Cowie supplemented Crowley’s payments from his own funds.  As we’ll see, Crowley relied all of his life, after running through his inheritance, on the generosity and loyalty of friends and supporters.  Sometimes this largesse wasn’t entirely voluntary.  The magus contributed little to his own maintenance—aside from his publications and magic performances earning little, we recall that he never held a real job of any kind.  Someone, however, always came to his financial rescue.

Nonetheless, Crowley went to Switzerland for mountain climbing in the Alps in July, just before the start of World War I in Europe (28 July 1914).  In September, he suffered an attack of phlebitis, a painful inflammation of a vein, usually in the legs.  Though he was almost 40, he offered his services to several government agencies, including the military, to help the British war effort; he was rejected because of the phlebitis (and probably his age) as well as his unsavory reputation.

The inflammation incapacitated him until October, when he left for New York City.  He sailed on 24 October on the Cunard Line’s RMS [Royal Mail Ship] Lusitania, which was later (7 May 1915) sunk by a German U-boat on a Liverpool-bound run.  (Because over 90% of the victims were U.S. citizens, sentiment in the United States mounted for a declaration of war with the German Empire and two years later, on 6 April 1917, Congress voted in favor of President Woodrow Wilson’s request, bringing the U.S. into World War I on the side of the Allies.)

The U.S., however, was still officially neutral in 1914, so instead of staying in the U.K. and finding voluntary ways of serving his country, Crowley sailed for non-combatant territory.  Arriving in New York City, Crowley declared himself to be of Irish descent and a supporter of Irish independence.  What’s more, he espoused the German cause in the war and became involved in pro-German endeavors, including working for German operative George Sylvester Viereck (1884-1962) as a propagandist in The Fatherland, a weekly periodical dedicated to keeping the U.S. neutral in the war. 

In later years, Crowley was roundly condemned as a traitor for these actions, but the constant rumors of Crowley’s association with the British secret service returned.  By his own account, the infamous mystic was acting as a double agent for British intelligence, infiltrating and destabilizing the Axis propaganda and espionage network in New York.  He pointed out that his writings for The Fatherland were so hyperbolic that no one but those already committed to the German-Austro-Hungarian cause could take them seriously.  His ultimate purpose, he claimed, was keeping the United States firmly, if unofficially, in the Allied camp.

Crowley’s critics didn’t accept his protestations entirely, noting that only a few of his articles in The Fatherland and other outlets were actually absurd.  The rest, they maintained, were perfectly credible to New York City’s large German-speaking community.  Among the infamous mystic’s pieces was one, “The New Parsifal” (published in January 1915 in The Open Court, a monthly magazine devoted to reconciling religion and science), in which Crowley compared Kaiser Wilhelm II to Jesus (“an emperor with the intelligence . . . to realize himself as the Messiah”) in a putative effort to boost the Axis cause.  In the essay, Crowley invoked Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and German mythological figures, as well as Julius Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon, and referred to the Allies as “All-lies.”  He beckoned the Kaiser with “Hail Savior of the World” and addressed him in Latin with “Hail, Wilhelm, king, emperor!”

On 3 July 1915 (the day before Independence Day), he performed a publicity stunt by declaring Irish independence before the Statue of Liberty. Crowley’s proclamation of the Irish Republic was accompanied on the violin by Leila Waddell, the leader of Crowley’s Ragged Ragtime Girls, whose family had emigrated to Australia from Ireland.  Eight other self-proclaimed Irish patriots formed the rest of the secret Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic.  Crowley read the Committee’s statement (which he’d written), tore up his British passport (“this safe conduct of the enslaver of my people”), and then read the Declaration of Independence of Ireland. 

The Irish Declaration of Independence included a declaration of war against England, but members of the Committee in Ireland acknowledged that there was no intention of waging an active war on England as the demonstration was meant as a propaganda act in furtherance of the Committee’s efforts to enlist the sympathies and support of Americans and Irish immigrants in the United States.  In Ireland, the Committee was engaged in a campaign to dissuade Irishmen from joining the British Army.

The New York Times of 13 July reported that as Crowley’s craft made its way back up the Hudson, the crews of German ships that had been interned on the Hoboken waterfront along the western bank cheered and a German tug steamed over to escort the Irishmen’s boat back to its home pier.  The report, however, also noted that French and English sailors aboard other ships in the Hudson also cheered the little boat flying the green banner with the golden harp.  (The Irish tricolor didn’t come into common use until the 1916 Irish rebellion.)  The Irish republicans asserted that they weren’t in support of the German cause in the Great War, but that they saw Germany as a means of weakening England’s ability to oppress the Irish

It throws some pertinent light on this event that Crowley’s ceremony, which started at dawn, took place not on Bedloe’s Island (the name of Liberty Island before 1956) but on a boat in New York Harbor off the island’s shore.  That wasn’t what Crowley had intended—he planned to deliver his speech and read the Declaration at the base of the statue.  The members of the Committee who’d been in charge of arranging the details of the ritual had overlooked one small but important provision: no one had secured permission from the federal government to land on the island so when the boat flying the Irish flag docked at the island’s pier, the security guard refused to let Crowley’s band of Irish patriots set foot on the “land of liberty,” according to the Times.

Crowley claimed that these were among his attempts to ridicule the support for Germany and Austro-Hungary in the view of the U.S. public, but his detractors continued to denounce him.  There were even allegations that the British magus had encouraged the German Navy to attack the Lusitania, the liner on which he had arrived in New York, because, he purportedly argued, it would keep the U.S. neutral.  Crowley asserted that his real aim was to bring the U.S. into the war as an Ally, but aside from the cold-bloodedness of the purportive scheme, it’s hard to fathom how the destruction of a passenger liner with U.S. passengers on board, could be construed to assure the neutrality of the United States.

That Crowley was ever an operative of British intelligence, despite his infamous and high-profile reputation, seems unlikely to me—unless the British secret service was in reality the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.  (The incident at Bedloe’s Island is an indication of his unsuitability as an agent.)  It seems, however, that neither the British government nor Viereck actually trusted Crowley.  The would-be spy was completely devoid of the necessary self-discipline required of a secret agent and Viereck, who may have met Crowley before in the U.K., even thought the English writer was a British spy and had tried to sell him out to the British. 

I suspect that the persistent rumors of his enlistment by the British secret service were started and maintained by Crowley himself, a manifestation of his egotism that urged him to make himself seem a more prominent player on the British and world stages than he really was.  His once-held dream of a career in diplomacy, an unlikely goal given his proclivities, was part of the same impulse.  (However ridiculous it may seem to us now, many Crowley biographers and commentators have felt that his belief in the occult and his powers was sincere.  I wonder, though, if a large part at least, the part that was prominent and public such as his exotic garb, the public performances, his explicit writings on his exploits weren’t all ways he devised to accrue the kind of fame and notoriety that other paths had denied him.  After all, this was the man who, in his youth, had changed his name to increase his chances to achieve renown and declared his intention to become the greatest sinner in the world.  See Part 1.)

To defray his expenses in New York, the impecunious Crowley earned money by writing for Vanity Fair, the American society magazine, and freelanced for astrologer Evangeline Adams (1868-1932), a noted and successful consultant and author.  (Crowley ghost-wrote several of Adams’s books on astrology and Adams was a significant contributor to Crowley’s 1915 General Principles of Astrology.)  At the same time, he continued to practice sex magic, which, according to his diaries, he pursued with masturbation, female prostitutes, and men who were patrons of Turkish baths (a common meeting place for gay men as early as the 19th and early 20th centuries). 

[That’s Part 3.  Come back in three days for the next installment of “‘The Wickedest Man in the World.’”  If you think this man was strange at this midpoint . . . you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!  I hope you’ll join me for Part 4.]