"The Wickedest Man In The World": Aleister Crowley, Part 4

[In the continuing, six-part saga of “‘The Wickedest Man in the World’: Aleister Crowley,” we’ve crossed the half-way mark.  Rather than coasting down the mountain of the infamous British occultist’s life, however, things are heating up.  Crowley’s life is getting more erratic, wilder, and more peripatetic as he runs from pillar to post.  His pursuit of magic and the paranormal is becoming more intense and wide-ranging.  If The Great Beast’s life weren’t so widely documented by so many chroniclers, you might conclude he was a close relative of Baron Munchausen!

[As I’ve advised since I posted Part 2 (1 October), I strongly recommend going back to the beginning of this series (28 September) and catching up before embarking on Part 4 below.  There are names, concepts, and terms that I identify, explain, and define when they first appear that recur all through my account of Crowley’s biography and it will be hard to follow what’s going on if you haven’t encountered them before. ]

In October 1915, Aleister Crowley took a trip to the West Coast of the U.S., visiting Detroit, Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, and the Grand Canyon.  His principal reason for the journey, though, was to visit Vancouver, the home of the North American headquarters of the Ordo Templi Orientis to talk about spreading word about Thelema in North America. 

The occultist returned to New York City and began practicing sex magic again.  He’d become acquainted with Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), a Ceylonese Tamil philosopher and metaphysician, as well as a historian and philosopher of Indian art, who was in New York with his British wife, Alice Richardson (1889-1958), who was there on tour as a performer of Indian music and song (under the stage name Ratan Devi).  Richardson became Crowley’s partner in the sex magic rituals and she became pregnant in April 1916.  The pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, which also ended the relationship with Crowley.  (Coomaraswamy divorced Richardson, his second wife, in 1919 or ’20.  Both remarried several years later.)

In June 1916, Crowley retreated to an acquaintance’s lakeside cabin in New Hampshire to meditate on his understanding of the occult and spiritualism.  While there, he composed several short stories based on The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer’s study of mythology and religion (published in several editions, and in increasing numbers of volumes, between 1890 and 1915), and a book of literary criticism entitled The Gospel According to Bernard Shaw (unpublished until 1974; originally called The Gospel According to Saint Bernard Shaw).  He also used a lot of drugs and performed a ritual after which he proclaimed himself “Master Therion.” 

Therion, the Greek word for ‘beast,’ appears in the Book of Revelation (originally written in Greek) associated with the devil.  Readers will remember that Aleister Crowley’s mother dubbed him “The Beast,” an epithet he’d adopted for himself.  In Revelation, the number 666 is the Sign of the Beast and Crowley took these numerals as his own symbol.  Master Therion is a pseudonym that Crowley used as the author of several of his books, including, among others, editions of Magick in Theory and Practice.

Following his New Hampshire retreat, Crowley moved to New Orleans, the U.S. city of which he was most fond, in December and then spent February 1917 in Florida with some Evangelical Christian relatives.  He returned to New York City in May and learned that his mother had died on 14 April at the age of 69.   He moved into the Manhattan studio of painter Leon Engers Kennedy (1891-1970), a member of A∴A∴, and slept on the artist’s sofa.  Kennedy painted Crowley’s portrait wearing his ceremonial robes, The Master Therion (1917-18); it appeared as the frontispiece of the Blue Equinox (volume 3, number 1 [1919] of The Equinox); the book, which had a blue cover, lays out the principles and aims of OTO and A∴A∴, both of which were under Crowley's control at the time.  It includes such topics as “The Law of Liberty,” The Gnostic Mass, and the magus’s “Hymn to Pan.” 

The Fatherland (Part 3) had folded in February 1917, but Crowley continued his association with George Sylvester Viereck.  The German agent had founded The International in 1912 and he appointed the British mystic a contributing editor of the literary journal, a position which the mystic used to promote Thelema.  The International ceased publication in May 1918, after which Crowley moved into the apartment of Roddie Minor (1884-1979), a married artists’ model living separately from her husband.  He paid Minor what for Crowley was the supreme compliment by declaring in his Confessions: “She was physically a magnificent animal, with a man’s brain . . . .”  (She had at least some training in pharmacology and chemistry, and had worked at one time in a pathology lab and at another in a perfumery plant.)

In October 1917, Minor became The Beast’s latest Scarlet Woman and his partner in rituals he named the “Amalantrah Workings,” through which they claimed to have made contact in January 1918 with an interdimensional being (the term at that time for what we call today an “extraterrestrial”) he called Lam.  Crowley explained that lam is Tibetan for ‘way’ or ‘path.’  (He also defined lama, the title for some Tibetan Buddhist priests, as ‘one who goes.’  I can’t confirm Crowley’s translations of the Tibetan words, though at least ‘path’ as a meaning for lam seems likely.)

Crowley, however, produced a drawing he said was a portrait of Lam, which served as the frontispiece to the occultist’s commentary in the Blue Equinox on Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence (1889), a putative translation of fragments from a sacred book Blavatsky encountered during her studies in the East.  (Blavatsky, 1831-91, a Russian occultist and philosopher, was a founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875; see my profile of Rudolf Steiner, 20 January.)  The magus never discussed the contact with Lam further and, over the summer of 1918, the relationship with Minor ended by mutual agreement.

In July 1918, Crowley took another “magickal retirement,” this time 85 miles north of New York City on an uninhabited island in the Hudson River.  He spent 40 days and 40 nights—yes, that’s what I said: the biblical span of time fraught with portent—on Esopus Island (which he spelled ‘Oesopus’ for numeroligical or Kabbalistic reasons) making a translation of the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese book of Taoist religion and philosophy.  He also scampered over the island painting Thelemic slogans like “do what thou wilt” and “every man and every woman is a star” in red paint on rock outcroppings.

Esopus Island is off the shore at approximately Staatsburg, New York, in Dutchess County on the east side of the Hudson.  It’s part of the town of Hyde Park (the birthplace of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, future Governor of New York State and President of the United States, who was Assistant Secretary of the Navy at the time of Crowley’s camping retreat on Esopus) and part of what’s now the Margaret Lewis Norrie State Park (established in 1934).  The only way onto the island is by boat, private or, today, hired in Staatsburg (now there are tours) and the island lies about 1,200 feet off the eastern shore (a little over a fifth of a mile).  At 1,500 feet long and 120 feet wide, Esopus Island is only a little more than four acres (a little over three American football fields, or about 2½ city blocks) of wooded and cliff-filled land (with a few structures from when it was private land). 

Crowley was still in dire financial straits in 1918, especially with the collapse of The Fatherland and The International—not to mention his tendency to treat himself very well.  Several generous friends staked him for this retreat, among them Roddie Minor, with whom he was still on friendly terms, and journalist William Seabrook (1884-1945) of nearby Rhinebeck, New York, who’s remembered for introducing the Western world to the term “zombie” in The Magic Island (1929), his account of a stay in Haiti studying voodoo. 

Crowley’s backers bought him a canoe and a tent, and gave him cash to buy food.  Later, they discovered that he hadn’t bought any food at all but spent the money on buckets of red paint, brushes, and rock-climbing gear.  When asked how he expected to feed himself on Esopus, he declared he’d be “fed by ravens,” which some have interpreted to mean local residents would provide him sustenance.  And they did!  Minor apparently paid the island a few visits to bring the mystic food and drink, but most of his provender came from local farmers. 

In 1918, Esopus Island was not a tourist destination so it was largely deserted when the occultist spent his month-and-a-half there.  It wasn’t legal to camp on the island until after it had become part of a New York State park, but I haven’t been able to determine when that was—before or after 1918.  Norrie State Park wasn’t created until 1934, but New York had state parks as early as 1885 (Niagara Falls), so Esopus Island may have been state parkland in 1918, just under a different name.  I deduce that the island was parkland since Crowley’s residence there was well known in the area and he attracted a lot of attention, but no scrutiny by state or county law authorities.  If The Hermit of Esopus Island had been breaking the law so openly, I imagine a cop would have rowed over and rousted him.

He did attract some interest, or at least speculation, in what he might be doing over there, given his recent activities in New York City and the rumors, which he’d encouraged, of espionage activities—for one side in the Great War, in which the United States was now engaged, or the other.  Was he watching the movement of troops by trains that ran south along the east side of the Hudson?  But he was too far from the tracks to see anything but flashing lights through the trees, in full leaf in July and August.  Maybe passing submarines sailing under the Hudson?  Too absurd to believe.  Besides, if the magus were spying on someone, who’d he report to and how?  Smoke signals or carrier pigeon?  Ridiculous!

Aside from climbing the cliffs and graffitiing the rocks, which attracted the attention of people across the Hudson, the mystic spent most of his days sitting motionlessly in the lotus position on the island’s shore directly in view of the east bank of the river.  He drew curious visitors, who brought him fresh food and other commodities (including drugs). 

Indeed, Crowley did report later that he had some significant visitors on the island.  In his camp, he encountered Ge Xuan, a 2nd- and 3rd-century Chinese Taoist and alchemist; Mohammed; Martin Luther; Pope Alexander VI, the “Borgia Pope” from 1492 to 1503; “Christian Rosenkreutz,” the legendary, possibly allegorical, founder of the Rosicrucians (a spiritual movement which arose in Europe in the early 17th century); Alessandro Cagliostro, an 18th-century Italian adventurer and self-proclaimed magician; Adam Weishaupt, an 18th- and 19th-century German philosopher and founder of the Illuminati (a short-lived secret society of free-thinkers and those professing intellectual enlightenment founded in Bavaria in 1776); and Eliphas Levi, a 19th-century French occult author and ceremonial magician; among others who Crowley claimed were his past selves. 

Crowley returned to New York City at the end of August 1918 and settled in Greenwich Village.  He tried his hand at painting and exhibited his work at the Liberal Club (“a Meeting Place for Those Interested in New Ideas”) at 133 MacDougal Street in the Village; frequenters included Sherwood Anderson, novelist and short story writer; Theodore Dreiser, novelist and journalist; Max Eastman, poet, political activist, and writer on literature, philosophy, and society; Emma Goldman, anarchist, political activist, and writer; Sinclair Lewis, novelist, short-story writer, and playwright; Jack London, novelist, journalist, and social activist; Margaret Sanger, birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse; John Reed, journalist, poet, and socialist activist; Upton Sinclair, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer; and Lincoln Steffens, investigative journalist—all leading liberals, radicals, and anti-establishment thinkers.  The paintings attracted the attention of the New York World.

The mystic painted several portraits of Leah Hirsig (1883-1975), a Swiss-born teacher at a public high school in the Bronx who, with her older sister, was a student of the occult.  (She requested that he paint her as a “dead soul.”)  In January 1919, he took her as his lover and new Scarlet Woman.  With Hirsig, whom The Beast found to be an ideal magical partner, at his side (and with the financial backing of some Freemasons), he restarted The Equinox in March 1919 with the Blue Equinox.

World War I had ended in November 1918 (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month), and after a climbing vacation in Montauk, New York, on the far eastern end of Long Island in the summer of 1919, Crowley returned to London in December, virtually destitute.  His activities in New York in behalf of the German war effort got him labeled a traitor in the press, particularly in the popular Sunday tabloid John Bull, described as “highly patriotic” in its coverage.  Friends and supporters, knowing his claims of intelligence work for the British government, urged him to sue, but Crowley declined. 

He suffered from asthma attacks in 1919 so a doctor prescribed heroin to relieve the symptoms, but The Great Beast began taking more than the prescribed medical dose and became addicted.  In January 1920, the occultist moved to Paris with Leah Hirsig and their infant daughter, Anne Leah, nicknamed “Poupée” (b. 26 January 1920; poupée is French for ‘doll’); they were joined by Ninette Shumway (1894-1989), a Frenchwoman whose passport listed her as a widow living in the U.S. (Sudbury, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston) and employed as a governess; she was 25 at the time of the move to Paris, 11 years Hirsig’s junior.

Crowley’s intention was to start a Thelemite community and after consulting the I Ching, the 2500-year-old Chinese book of divination (also known as The Book of Changes), he and Hirsig leased (under the names Sir Alastor de Kerval and Contessa Lea Harcourt) from the Baron Carlo La Calce (dates unknown) the old Villa Santa Barbara in the small fishing village of Cefalù, Italy, on the northern shore of the island of Sicily in April 1920.  He called the derelict pile the Abbey of Thelema (after l’Abbaye de Thélème in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel; see Part 3) and the ménage à trois moved in on 2 April with the women’s children, Hansi (the 2½-year-old son of Hirsig and her former husband, Edward), Howard (Shumway’s three-year-old son with her late husband, Howard), and three-month-old Poupée. 

(Poupée died in October 1920 at nine months of age; Shumway gave birth to Astarte Lulu Panthea in November.  Shumway had another daughter in May 1923, but her paternity is uncertain.  Crowley accepted her as his child and named her Isabella Isis Selene Hecate Artemis Diana Hera Jane, called Mimi, but Shumway was also sleeping with Baron La Calce, the Abbey’s landlord, at the time.)

Taking as the only rule in the one-story farmhouse facing the Mediterranean sea Crowley’s variation on Rabelais’s Abbaye, “Do what thou wilt,” the Abbey of Thelema was opened as a sanctuary for Thelemites.  The main room, displaying a magic circle painted in red with the sign of the major Thelemic gods, was used for ceremonies.  The Beast’s bedroom, labeled by himself as “La Chambre des Cauchemars” (“The Chamber of Nightmares”) was entirely hand-painted by the Prophet of Thelema with erotic frescos in a sort of faux-Roman style, hermaphroditic goblins, and vividly colored monsters.  This private room was used for nocturnal rites involving drugs and often sex. 

Crowley and his little band of Thelemites wore ceremonial robes and performed rites for Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun, and occasionally the Gnostic Mass (Part 2).  The magus also held classes for the children, but what he taught them is debatable (not to mention dubious). The Thelemites used the rest of the time to pursue their private interests, which for Crowley included painting, working on the Holy Books of Thelema, and maintaining a voluminous correspondence.  He also traveled to Palermo, the island’s capital 40 miles west along the Mediterranean coast, to buy supplies for the Abbey and patronize young male hookers.  Because his heroin addiction had gotten stronger, he also bought drugs, including cocaine, which he was using in increasing quantities as well.

The magus thought that adepts would come to learn magic and Thelemic ritual from him for a fee and participate in magic workings, including sexual magic.  Several prominent people did come, the most famous of them being Jane Wolfe (1875-1958), an actress from the Pennsylvania Dutch country who’d become one of silent film’s best known character actresses.  Wolfe retired from filmmaking in 1920 when, after several years of corresponding with Crowley, she picked up and moved to Cefalù in 1920, living at the Abbey until it closed.  She was initiated into A∴A∴ and served as the mystic’s secretary.  Even after returning to California, Wolfe remained an adept of Thelema, spreading the word about the religion and teaching its precepts to others.

Since there were no house rules except “Do what thou wilt,” there were no assigned or voluntary household chores or behavioral guidelines.  Children who lived or visited in the Abbey were free to ramble about at will, witnessing the rituals, including the sex magic acts.  Stray cats and dogs wandered freely over the property and even through the house.  The place soon became filthy and, along with the rituals which included ingesting strange—and unregulated—substances, unhealthy. 

The death of Leah Hirsig’s daughter, Poupée, was unofficially attributed to the unsanitary environment.  Then a young Thelemite, Raoul Loveday (born Frederick Charles Loveday in Rangoon, Burma, in 1900), came with his wife to study with the master in November 1922.  The daily life at the Abbey, Loveday’s wife recorded, meant drinking water from a polluted stream and Loveday performed many ceremonies under The Great Beast’s tutelage, some requiring drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat.  (Crowley, unsurprisingly, denied there was a cat or the drinking of any blood.)  Raoul Loveday fell ill in early February 1923, and on 16 February, the 23-year-old died in the occultist’s room.  He’d been diagnosed with acute enteritis, an infection of the bowel caused by consuming contaminated food or drink.

In October 1922, Benito Mussolini had become prime minister of Italy and, as Duce (Leader) of the National Fascist Party, ushered in the right-wing, authoritarian government of the country.  Stories in John Bull about The Beast and his band of Thelemites in Cefalù openly using drugs and staging debaucheries in filth and squalor (it was in one of these exposés that the tabloid labeled Crowley “the wickedest man in the world”) were picked up by papers across Europe and in North America. 

Some years later, the judge in a libel suit which Crowley brought against a former friend who wrote in a book an account of what she’d witnessed in Cefalù declared:

I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me.  I have learnt in this case that we can always learn something more if we live long enough.  I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by [Crowley] . . . .

This commotion about the strange foreigner and his disorderly conduct caused Il Duce to expel Crowley from Italy in April 1923 on the grounds of moral turpitude and close the Abbey of Thelema. 

(The villa is still standing, though it is an abandoned ruin, crumbling and overgrown with vegetation.  It’s still an attraction for the curious and modern-day devotees of Crowley and Thelema.  Several photographers and videographers from the mid-20th century to today have recorded the former Abbey of Thelema’s deteriorated state, showing some of the paintings and inscriptions the Thelemite prophet and his followers left behind—along with more contemporary graffiti.  Many of the videos and photos are on line, almost as eerie as pictures of sunken ships beneath the sea.  On 1 December 2007 (the 60th anniversary of Crowley’s death), ATAP Productions released Abbey of Thelema, a non-documentary film that purports to tell the “actual facts and events” of the Cefalù commune as written by Vincent Jennings, b. 1955, and directed by Jennings and J. Grimm.  Mike Ketcher played Aleister Crowley.)

Crowley and Hirsig traveled to Tunis in May 1923 where the occultist, still in the grasp of heroin addiction, tried again unsuccessfully to give up the drug.  He began writing The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, which he called his ‘autohagiography.’  (A hagiography is the biography of a saint or a person of highly developed spirituality.  One questions whether a person worthy of such a description would compose such a life story.  The word carries the connotation of being respectful and reverent, perhaps uncritically so, even aggrandizing.)  The Confessions would cover the magus’s life only up to the middle or late 1920s; the first two sections were published separately in 1929.  The remainder wasn’t published until 1969, 22 years after the author’s death.

In Tunis, Crowley hired Mohammed ben Brahim, variously described as “a Tunisian youth,” “a black male,” and “a Negro boy,” as a servant for both personal and magical purposes.  In November 1923, Crowley went on a “magickal retirement” in Nefta, the spiritual home of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam; there he performed sexual magic with ben Brahim in the presence of Hirsig. 

In January 1924, the magus returned to France with Hirsig, traveling to Nice where he had a series of operations on his nasal cavity to repair the damage caused by his excessive use of cocaine.  Still destitute, The Beast moved on to Paris where he took on a wealthy student, Argentinian painter, sculptor, writer, and inventor of imaginary languages Xul Solar (adopted name of Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari, 1887-1963), and met Chicagoan Dorothy Olsen (1892-1981) in August, while she was traveling in Europe.  The magus’s relationship with Hirsig was becoming strained, and she renounced her title as Scarlet Woman in September.  Crowley immediately named Olsen his new Scarlet Woman and together, he and Olsen returned to Tunisia in early 1925, leaving Hirsig in Paris 

Crowley and Olsen took a “magickal retirement” in Nefta; while there, the magus wrote “To Man” (later known as “The Mediterranean Manifesto”), a one-page proclamation of the Law of  Thelema.  (“To Man” was later incorporated in The Heart of the Master, written in 1925 and published in 1938.)  Olsen became pregnant in March 1925, and Hirsig was summoned to care for her.  The baby, a daughter, miscarried, after which Crowley took Olsen back to France.  Hirsig soon distanced herself from The Beast, who then denounced her.  She lived in Paris for some years before returning to the United States.  Olsen stayed with Crowley, but their affair was like a rollercoaster ride and she left him for a time in 1926, only to return briefly, leaving him in October 1926 to go back to the U.S. 

[We’re more than half through my account of the life of Aleister Crowley and I hope you’re following the twisty and turny saga so far.  Please come back to Rick On Theater in three days for Part 5, the penultimate chapter.  Crowley’s life is heating up, but there are still more outrageous incidents to come.  When you get back on this ride, be sure to fasten your seatbelt!]