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  Crowley had found Mathers’s story difficult to believe, given his knowledge of Bennett as one inclined neither to possession by demons nor to violence. According to Bennett (again, as filtered through Crowley), the facts were indeed quite different. The argument had been over the god Shiva, to whose worship Bennett had been drawn even prior to departing from England. The Hindu belief which appealed to the austere Bennett, for whom existence was marked by pain and suffering, was that Shiva would someday open his eye and wreak destruction on the universe. Mathers found this belief appalling. When Bennett sought to resolve the argument by assuming the yogic position of Padmasana and chanting, as mantra, the name “Shiva” again and again, Mathers became distraught. First he left the room to take to drink, then he returned and drew a pistol and threatened to kill Bennett if he would not be silent. Bennett, rapt in yogic concentration, continued his chant, and Mathers never pulled the trigger.

  The differences between the two accounts led Crowley to conclude that Mathers had lied and was “thus disposed of” in terms of his claims to linkage with the Secret Chiefs. But the choice of this one episode as a litmus test of Mathers’s integrity suffers from a sense of arbitrariness. Beyond this, there are two more concrete objections. The first stems from Crowley’s retelling of the dispute: If the chanting Bennett was oblivious to Mathers, how did he recall, for Crowley’s benefit some years later, Mathers’s having left the room for drink and then returning with a pistol? The second is that Bennett, unlike Crowley, was unlikely to have told a story that emphasized Mathers’s fondness for liquor and his tawdry fear of death. Crowley’s implication, in the Confessions, that he and Bennett were now in agreement on Mathers’s fallen state, is almost certainly false. Bennett continued to regard himself as a kind of son to Mathers; in a 1902 publication, he listed himself as “Allan Bennett MacGregor,” still employing the surname of Mathers’s chosen clan.

  Mathers, the human link to the Secret Chiefs, occupied precisely the lofty spiritual position that Crowley himself had yearned to hold since adolescence, when he had rued the lack of hierarchy within the Plymouth Brethren that had held back (in the boy’s eyes) his father. But his break with Mathers was, in 1901, not yet complete. Not until Crowley felt confident that he had forged his own links with the Secret Chiefs would he formally forsake Mathers.

  After roughly a week of studying with Ramanathan, Crowley suggested that he and Bennett rent living quarters in Kandy, in the center of Ceylon, where the two of them could renew the intensive and independent modes of research that had served them in London two years before. Bennett assented, willing to give up his tutorial post due to his resolve to leave behind his Shaivite studies and become a Buddhist monk. By early 1902, Bennett would move to Burma to study Theravada Buddhism in a monastic sangha (community), a remarkable step for an Englishman of that time. Bennett’s willingness to postpone that step for some months so as to tutor Crowley in yoga may properly be seen as a testimony to their friendship.

  The furnished bungalow they rented in Kandy, nestled in the hills with a view of a lake and temple below, was a fitting setting for the study of yoga. Native servants, whom Crowley described as “sleepy and sinister,” attended to the practical needs of the two men. Crowley’s diaries detail a rigorous meditational practice for some six weeks. There are two surviving notebooks from the period. One, entitled in Hebrew Sefer HaAin (The Book of Nothing), features an invocation to Shiva on its opening page and is, in essence, a student notebook in which Crowley transcribed the fundamental terms of Hindu yogic philosophy and practice. The second diary, entitled The Writings of Truth, appears in different form (edited and enlarged upon) in The Temple of Solomon the King, published in The Equinox roughly a decade later. In his introductory invocation, Crowley termed himself, amongst other lowly epithets, “the Insect that crawls on Terra” and beseeched the aid of the goddess Bhavani, protectress of worthy students, to guide him in his yogic practice. There is a tone of regret as to past lowly magical pursuits:

  He taketh up the Pen of the Ready Writer, to record those Mysterious Happenings which came unto Him in His search for Himself.

  And the Beginning is of Spells & of Conjurations and of Evocations of the Evil Ones: Things Unlawful to write of, dangerous even to think of: wherefore they are not here written. But he beginneth with his Sojourning in the Isle of Lanka [Ceylon, now Sri Lanka]: the time of his dwelling with Maitrananda Swami [Bennett]. Wherefore, O Bhavani, bring Thou all unto the Proper End! To Thee be Glory.

  In The Writings of Truth notebook, there is a gap between September 13 and 19. In the later Temple of Solomon the King, it is recorded that during this period Crowley was “called away for a few days on business (or in disgust?) to Colombo.” He returned to Kandy on September 20 resolved to work on pranayama (control of the prana life force by breathing techniques) and to forsake “these follies of poetry and Vamacharya (‘debauchery,’ i.e. normal life) and health and vain things.” The reference to vamacharya is most important, as it documents his first known foray into ritual sexual magic. This Sanskrit term refers to a Hindu tantric practice of sexual intercourse that could—if the spiritual aspirations of the participants were untainted by lust—reenact the cosmic coupling and union of Shiva and Sakti (Bhavani). In tantric tradition, vamachara is the “left-hand path” that involves physical intercourse with a woman (vama) as partner, while the “right-hand path” of dakshinachara enacts a symbolic intercourse. There is, in this tradition, no moral judgment attached to the use of “left” and “right,” although Western interpreters have frequently interposed a negative connotation to “left” that is native to their own, but not Hindu, cultures. As scholars Ajit Mookerjee and Madhu Khanna have observed of vamachara: “According to tantra, those who are unable to cut the three knots of ‘shame, hate and fear’ are not worthy of being initiated into the path. The fundamental principle of the left-hand path is that spiritual progress cannot be achieved by falsely shunning our desires and passions but by sublimating those very aspects which make one fall, as a means of liberation.” In September 1901, Crowley had not yet cut the three knots. Whatever he had done under the name of vamachara had induced a sense of “disgust” and “debauchery”—a decline into “normal life.” He returned with relief to the isolated practice of yoga.

  Yet the question of sex remained a vexing one for Crowley. Note that in the quotation from Temple above, “health” is included as one of the follies Crowley had pursued in Colombo. It was Crowley’s belief that sexual release was essential to good health. One of the eight basic “limbs” (teachings) of the yogic philosophy is yama (control), which includes five basic vows of abstinence that are intended to free the consciousness of the aspirant toward a full dedication to yoga alone. One of these five vows is sexual continence. Crowley could not accept this as an inherently necessary condition for yogic attainment. As he later put it: “One of my principal inhibitions during this period was due to the apparent antinomy between the normal satisfaction of bodily appetites and the obvious conditions of success. I did not solve this completely until my attainment of the Grade of Master of the Temple in 1909, when at last I realized that every thought, word and act might be pressed into the service of the soul, more, that it must be if the soul were ever to be free.”

  Crowley would come, in his later writings on yoga—Book 4 (Part 1) (1912–13) and Eight Lectures on Yoga (1939)—to make distinctly original contributions to the study and interpretation of yoga in the West. His joustings with the vows required by yama are amongst these. As he wrote in Book 4 (the boldfacing is Crowley’s own), “let the student decide for himself what form of life, what moral code, will least tend to excite his mind; but once he has formulated it, let him stick to it, avoiding opportunism; and let him be careful to take no credit for what he does or refrains from doing—it is a purely practical code, of no value in itself.” In Eight Lectures on Yoga, Crowley insisted that the vows of yama were necessarily linked to the culture of one’s own native land:

>   [O]ne’s real country—that is, the conditions—in which one happens to be born is the only one in which yama and niyama [virtue] can be practiced. You cannot dodge your karma. You have got to earn the right to devote yourself to Yoga proper by arranging for that devotion to be a necessary step in the fulfillment of your True Will.[ … ] Woe to that seven months’ abortion who thinks to take advantage of the accidents of [Western] birth and, mocking the call of duty, sneaks off to stare at a blank wall in China!

  Crowley himself, of course, went to Ceylon to learn his yoga. But his later warnings to students often contained tacit acknowledgments of his own past illusions.

  There were, in these training days, peaks of realization as well. The Writings of Truth tells of two days—October 1 and 2, 1901—in which Crowley claimed to have reached the high yogic state of dhyana. Definitions of this state are inadequate and provisional. Crowley, in Book 4, quotes the great Hindu philosopher Patanjali, who classified the three highest states of yogic consciousness (dhyana being the penultimate): “Dharana is holding the mind on to some particular object. An unbroken flow of knowledge in that subject is Dhyana. When that, giving up all forms, reflects only the meaning, it is Samadhi.” On October 1, after reciting mantras and practicing pranayama for much of the day, Crowley experienced a vision in which the central metaphor of his magical training emerged, ever so briefly, as an overwhelming fact of consciousness:

  After some eight hours of this discipline arose The Golden Dawn.

  While meditating, suddenly I became conscious of a shoreless space of darkness and a glow of crimson athwart. Deepening and brightening scarred by dull bars of slate-blue cloud arose the Dawn of Dawns, In splendour not of earth & its mean sun, blood-red, rayless, adamant, it rose, it rose! Carried out of myself, I asked not “Who is the witness?” absorbed utterly in contemplation of so stupendous and so marvellous a fact. For here was no doubt, no change, no wavering: infinitely more real than ought “physical” is the Golden Dawn of this Internal Sun!

  The surprising aftermath of these two days was an immediate decline in Crowley’s desire to practice yoga. It was as though dhyana was a mountain peak that he had scaled; once the peak was conquered, the desire to explore other mountains in the range—including the higher summit of samadhi—abruptly abated. It would be two years before Crowley again practiced yoga with any degree of seriousness; and that briefly renewed enthusiasm of 1903 would prove to be an aberration. Fundamentally, most of what Crowley knew firsthand of yoga came from his six weeks with Bennett in Ceylon. Yet it cannot be gainsaid that Crowley was a remarkably gifted student and that he made the most of his limited training. If he failed to continue a rigorous yogic training, he certainly did succeed in forging an original theoretical synthesis between yoga and magic, arguing cogently that both aimed, ultimately, at the identical goal of samadhi—the obliteration of self through union (“yoga” means “union” in Sanskrit) with the universe.

  * * *

  Having tested himself, to his satisfaction, in yoga, Crowley now turned to an analogous challenge on the physical plane—the assault on K2 or Chogo Ri. It was an odd sidenote to his yogic training that Crowley had decided, in August, not to go on with the expedition, but had been encouraged to do so by Bennett. As a result, Crowley wired Eckenstein on August 23 confirming his commitment to a spring 1902 expedition. According to Crowley, he entrusted £500 to Eckenstein on this date for expedition expenses, and another £500 some weeks later in case of emergency. This would have been a considerable financial outlay; but, as we shall see, Crowley’s claims to have bankrolled the Chogo Ri expedition would later be challenged by other members of the expedition.

  Nonetheless, the seriousness of his commitment is beyond question. Crowley was to arrive in India first, in early 1902, to make basic supply arrangements. In early November, he and Bennett parted ways. Bennett embarked by boat to Burma to the east, where, in the coastal city of Akyab, he would take residence in a Buddhist monastery, the Lamma Sayadaw Kyoung. Crowley voyaged west to India, there to begin travels that would eventually dovetail with the Chogo Ri expedition. Once arrived, he spent some weeks journeying through the southern Indian provinces. In Madura, Crowley donned a loincloth and took up a posture—with begging bowl—outside a nearby village. By his account, the locals were aware that he was an Englishman, but were impressed nonetheless by his knowledge of yoga. One Indian in particular befriended Crowley and put in a good word for him with the local temple authorities, who allowed him access to secret shrines at which he sacrificed a goat to Bhavani. This adventure delighted Crowley.

  While in Madura, Crowley wrote—on November 16 and 17, 1901—the first drafts of two lengthy poems that would be included in the verse and essay volume The Sword of Song (1904). Subtitled The Book of the Beast, it was dedicated to Bennett under his new Buddhist name, taken on upon admission as a bhikkhu (monk) to the monastery at Akyab, of Ananda Metteyya (Metteyya, or Maitreya, is the title of the future-coming Buddha). The poems “Ascension Day” and “Pentecost” constitute an assault upon the intellectual and spiritual integrity of Christian teachings. The poet’s Christian mother loves him, yet regards him as the Beast or False Prophet—“And by all sorts of monkey tricks/ Adds up my name to Six Six Six.” But he takes on the title of Beast of Revelation with pride—“I will deserve it if I can;/ It is the number of a Man.”—for it connotes a liberated existence that goes beyond dead ritual, faith mongering and sin consciousness. But Crowley takes care to specify that it is the husk of exoteric dogma in Christianity (and in all organized religions) that earns his hatred, and not the mystical teachings of Christ:

  “But why revile”

  (You urge me) “in that vicious style

  The very faith whose truths you seem

  (Elsewhere) to hold, to hymn supreme

  In your own soul?” Perhaps you know

  How mystic doctrines melt the snow

  Of any faith: redeem it to

  A fountain of reviving dew.

  So I with Christ: but few receive

  The Qabalistic Balm, believe

  Nothing—and choose to know instead.

  But, to that terror vague and dread,

  External worship; all my life—

  War to the knife! War to the knife!

  Still resolved to visit Bennett in Burma, Crowley found a new companion to accompany him on the trip—a fellow Englishman named Edward Thornton. On January 21, 1902, they embarked by ship for Rangoon, the first step of the journey to Akyab. En route, a new perplexity arose. This time the issue was not sex, but rather the irreducible fact of earthly suffering—the first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. Shortly after their arrival in Burma, Crowley saw, outside a pagoda, the anguishing sight of a boy aged roughly fourteen who suffered from hydrocephalus: “An enormous head, horrifyingly inane, surmounted a shrivelled body, too feeble even to support it.” The impact of this drew Crowley more closely than ever before to the vision of universe offered by the Buddha.

  After a brief hunting expedition in the Arakan Hills, Crowley and Thornton returned to Rangoon along the Irrawaddy River by way of a hired boat. This slow southern descent proved a respite from the sense of suffering—indeed, it was one of the joyous interludes of Crowley’s life, one which he would remember on into old age. As the boat plowed ahead at a leisurely pace, he potted freely at game birds and fauna with his rifle, viewed the beauties of the tropical countryside and the Burmese villages, and experienced—during a night on which the dugout was moored to a teak tree—a most vivid sexual encounter, while still fully awake, with the Burmese elemental spirit (Nat) of that tree. As he avowed in the Confessions: “It was a woman vigorous and intense, of passion and purity so marvellous that she abides with me after these many years as few indeed of her human colleagues. I passed a sleepless night in a continuous sublimity of love.”

  Shortly thereafter, he and Thornton parted. By February 14 Crowley reached Akyab and reunited with Bennett, who, as Bhikkhu Ananda Sasanajotika
Metteyya, had won a worshipful devotion on the part of certain Burmese locals who would visit the monastery and bow before him. During Crowley’s roughly week-long visit, they discussed the possibilities for the greater dissemination of Buddhist teachings in Europe. For both men—who three years before had studied together as Perdurabo and Iehi Aour—the appeal and importance of magic had faded. For Metteyya, this drift from magic would be a permanent one. In 1903, he founded, in Burma, the International Buddhist Society, from which he issued the influential journal Buddhism. In 1908, he led the first Buddhist mission to England. As for Crowley, this attraction to Buddhism—sincere as it was—would scarcely outlast the year.

  While visiting Bennett, Crowley plunged again into his poetry, composing the dramatic monologue “Ahab,” in the voice of the Biblical king who had flagrantly abandoned the religion of Jahveh (published in Ahab and Other Poems (1903)). While Crowley wrote, his old friend Bennett meditated in a nearby hut. When the visit came to an end, the two men parted warmly. There is a diary entry for March 2—some two weeks later—in which Crowley records a dream in which he and Bennett were reunited, fulfilling Crowley’s presentiment that this would occur—“and so making my death in N. India possible.” Such was the respect and love Crowley felt for Bennett both as friend and teacher. As for “N. India,” that was the site of Chogo Ri, or K2. If Crowley was afraid of what he would face there, he had good reason to be. K2 remains one of the most formidable mountaineering challenges in the world. The Eckenstein-Crowley expedition of 1902 was the first attempt upon it; not until 1954 would it finally be scaled.