Do What Thou Wilt Read online

  The boy seems to have despised from the first the absence of hierarchy among the Brethren, though at the same time they formed the most exclusive body on earth, being the only people that were going to heaven.[ … ] The Plymouth Brethren refused to take any part in politics. Among them, the peer and the peasant met theoretically as equals, so that the social system of England was simply ignored. The boy could not aspire to become prime minister or even king; he was already apart from and beyond all that. It will be seen that as soon as he arrived at an age where ambitions are compelled to assume concrete form, his position became extremely difficult. The earth was not big enough to hold him.

  The fervor of his convictions drove Edward—as it would his son—to self-publish spiritual tracts that could edify the “common man.” These tracts were issued in pamphlet from throughout the 1860s and were distributed by Edward himself. There is no resemblance in prose style between father and son; Edward was a staunchly pedestrian explicator of his creed. But there are surprising parallels between the father’s Brethren beliefs and Crowley’s magical creed of Thelema.

  Crowley was, for example, much reviled for his belief in the efficacy of blood sacrifice (there is a furious trail of legends that have the Beast taking human lives in pursuit of magical power). But in father Edward’s tract The Plymouth Brethren (So Called)/Who They Are—Their Creed—Mode of Worship, &c./Explained in A Letter to his Friends and Relations (1865), the concrete saving power of Christ’s sacrificial blood is stressed repeatedly. Those who would be saved must recognize that “there can be no remission of sins without the shedding of blood (Heb. ix. 22).[ … ] You may be hoping and doing, but if you are not trusting wholly and only to the blood of Jesus, all your efforts and hopes are worthless.” (Crowley cited this very same Biblical passage with approval in his Magick in Theory and Practice (1930.) As for those Christians still ensnared in the doctrinal delusions of the established churches, Edward saw that their fate would be to stray ever farther from the truth of Jesus, “waxing bolder and bolder against God until Antichrist himself shall be revealed, who shall oppose and exalt himself above all that is called God.” Note that the fury of father and son alike was directed at the Christian establishment of England; in this, Crowley was no rebel, but rather a faithful son.

  * * *

  Always recalcitrant in a secondary role (even that of a son), Crowley did try, now and then, to put his father in his place. Edward is dubbed “the younger” in the Confessions, though Crowley himself, named after his father (and hence the third in a line of Edwards), rightly deserves that epithet. The fact that Edward preached the Brethren ways while living off inherited shares of the family brewery was also a source of satire for Crowley. In the autobiographical preface to his poetic drama The World’s Tragedy (1910), Crowley parodies the typical Christian as an abstemious fop and hypocrite: “Wine? The great curse of our day, my dear sir.[ … ] Beer? Well, perhaps a little beer—for he has shares in a brewery.” But by the time he came to write the Confessions (in the early 1920s), even this inconsistency was forgiven, with Edward looking all the more kindly and enlightened for embracing it:

  He [Edward] said that abstainers were likely to rely on good works to get to heaven and thus fail to realize their need of Jesus. He preached one Sunday in the town hall [of Redhill], saying ‘I would rather preach to a thousand drunkards than a thousand T-totallers.’ They retorted by accusing him of being connected with ‘Crowley’s Ales’. He replied that he had been an abstainer for nineteen years, during which he had shares in a brewery. He had now ceased to abstain for some time, but all his money was in a waterworks.

  The contempt for good works unaccompanied by genuine faith was fiercely held by Edward Crowley the preacher. Indeed, Edward embraced, quite unawares, a paradoxical tenet first emphasized by the Gnostics—that a fulsome indulgence in sin could lead to the highest spiritual realizations. Crowley described his father’s stance this way: “In the case of the sinner, it was almost a hopeful sign that he should sin thoroughly. He was more likely to reach that conviction of sin which would show him his need for salvation.[ … ] It was the devil’s favourite trick to induce people to rely on their good character.” Edward could not have foreseen that within this doctrine lay the seed of a new faith that would, as promulgated by his son, abrogate sin altogether.

  * * *

  The untimely death of Edward Crowley from cancer of the tongue on March 5, 1887, when he was forty-three and his son only eleven, shattered the boy and transformed his psyche and outlook. So great was his fear of losing his father that the change commenced with the very first diagnosis of his father’s disease in May 1886. “It is as if the event which occurred at the time created a new faculty in his mind. A new factor had arisen and its name was death.” By contrast, consider his chilled reaction to the death of his infant sister (Crowley’s only sibling who lived a mere five hours) in 1880, when Crowley was five: “The incident made a curious impression on him. He did not see why he should be disturbed so uselessly. He couldn’t do any good; the child was dead; it was none of his business.” Crowley summed up this difference in response through sanguine bravado: “This attitude continued through his life. He has never attended any funeral but that of his father, which he did not mind doing, as he felt himself to be the real centre of interest.”

  The boy’s attitude toward his schooling and religion was perceived to decline. In 1885, the year prior to the diagnosis, Crowley had been transferred by his father from the St. Leonard’s school to the Brethren-run Ebor School in Cambridge. It was in a spirit of adoration for his father that Crowley accepted this transfer: “Accordingly, he aimed at being the most devoted follower of Jesus in the school. He was not hypocritical in any sense.” Upon Edward’s death, however, there was a change so pervasive that even Crowley sounds a puzzled note: “It is impossible to suppose that the character of the school had completely changed between my father’s death and my return from the funeral. Yet before that I was completely happy and in sympathy with my surroundings. Not three weeks later, Ishmael was my middle name.” Three weeks after Edward’s death, Crowley committed a school offense for the first time. In classroom lessons, he probed at the inconsistencies of Biblical texts. An example recalled by Crowley: how could Christ have been in the grave for three days and three nights if he was crucified on Friday and rose again on Sunday? One might translate the query here more bluntly: How could death truly be evaded?

  Edward’s death proved that it could not. The tension became extreme. Trapped within the Brethren belief system and shattered within himself, Crowley was compelled (logically, as it were) to undergo an enantiodromia: to move to the opposite pole from Christ (his former ideal, by way of Edward) and to ally himself with the Adversary by mocking the transparent falsehoods of the Christian faith, such as the triumph over death:

  The apparent discrepancy [as to the three days] in the gospel narrative aroused no doubt in my mind as to the literal truth of either of the texts. Indeed, my falling away from grace was not occasioned by any intellectual qualms; I accepted the theology of the Plymouth Brethren. In fact, I could hardly conceive of the existence of people who might doubt it. I simply went over to Satan’s side; and to this hour I cannot tell why.

  For those who would use this passage to brand Crowley as a Satanist, any attempt at clarification will read as untoward apology. Simply stated, however, Crowley’s going over “to Satan’s side” is a description not of his enduring life viewpoint but rather of an adolescent grief that expressed itself in the most extreme form of rebellion open to him—impiety. But the defiant schoolboy saw himself as the paradoxical preserver of the faith. As Crowley later explained: “It seems as if I possessed a theology of my own which was, to all intents and purposes, Christianity. My satanism did not interfere with it at all; I was trying to take the view that the Christianity of hypocrisy and cruelty was not true Christianity. I did not hate God or Christ, but merely the God and Christ of the people whom I hated.”

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bsp; The rebellion against the Brethren—which included the tacit rejection of father Edward, who failed his son and the faith by dying—was the first emergence of Crowley the man. Note how the pain is expressed with impeccable logic and calm, even as it transfigures the voice of the Confessions and the life itself:

  Previous to the death of Edward Crowley, the recollections of his son, however vivid or detailed, appear to him strangely impersonal. In throwing back his mind to that period, he feels, although attention constantly elicits new facts, that he is investigating the behaviour of somebody else. It is only from this point that he begins to think of himself in the first person. From this point, however, he does so; and is able to continue this autohagiography in a more conventional style by speaking of himself as I.

  Following the death of Edward in 1887, Emily Crowley moved with her son from Redhill, Surrey, to the then Thistle Grove (now Drayton Gardens) section of London, where her brother, Tom Bond Bishop, resided. Edward’s estate was sufficient to provide financially for his family. But the Victorian ethos required a paterfamilias; Bishop thus came to act in Emily’s stead as Crowley’s guardian as to matters of schooling and preparation for manhood. This state of affairs could not have been less to the boy’s liking. Crowley deemed Bishop “a ruthless, petty tyrant; and it was into this den of bitter slavery that I was suddenly hurled from my position of fresh air, freedom and heirship.”

  But it was not at home, but rather at the Ebor School in Cambridge, that Crowley underwent an agony of the soul that would set him apart—once and for all, one may conclude in retrospect—from his English peers. Upon no institution or person did Crowley pile the coals of hatred with more vehemence than upon the Ebor School and its headmaster, the Reverend H. d’Arcy Champney, a former Anglican priest who had converted to the Brethren. Consider a mere portion of Crowley’s paean of rage (entitled “A Boyhood in Hell”) against the Ebor School:

  May God bite into the bones of men the pain of that hell on earth (I have prayed often) that by them, it may be sowed with salt, accursed for ever! May the maiden that passes it be barren and the pregnant woman that beholdeth it abort! May the birds of the air refuse to fly over it! May it stand as a curse, as a fear, as an hate, among men! May the wicked dwell therein!

  The style is that of the Biblical prophets. The King James cadence is a constant in Crowley’s rhetorical flights, whether fiery or magisterially calm.

  But this rage toward Champney and his school arose only after Edward’s passing. It is tempting to conclude that the boy’s grief transformed a perfectly ordinary public school (a private school in American usage) into a horrific psychic crucible. But the charges made by Crowley against the Ebor School and Champney parallel, in all fundamental details, criticisms raised against English public schools by respected historians of the era.

  Champney, like other British schoolmasters of the era, was extremely concerned over two potential actions: homosexual contact and solitary masturbation. To Victorian educators and physicians, the latter was every bit as disgraceful as the former. An understanding of the governing sexual beliefs of the era is essential, as it illuminates the surprising linkage between Victorian theory on the physical and spiritual primacy of semen and the sexual magick of Crowley’s mature works. Just as in matters of religion, so too in his stress upon sex, Crowley was as much of his age as he was in opposition to it.

  Consider certain fundamentals of Victorian sexology. The emission of semen, in and of itself, was viewed as a serious threat to the health of males of all ages. William Acton, a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons and a prolific writer on sexual issues, was unwavering as to the absence of any appropriate role for sex within childhood or adolescence: “In a state of health no sexual impression should ever affect a child’s mind or body. All its vital energy should be employed in building up the growing frame, in storing up external impressions, and educating the brain to receive them.” Even fully mature males were warned of the dangers of excessive intercourse within the bonds of marriage; sex outside of marriage was, of course, unthinkable. As a delicate adjunct to these warnings, it was stressed that women little desired sex aside from its necessary role in procreation. As an inevitable side effect, prostitution was rife within Victorian society, formally condemned but tacitly condoned as a necessary measure for proper gentlemen, albeit an unseemly influence on the morals of young women of the lower classes.

  These viewpoints most certainly left their mark on the young Crowley, who imbibed from the public school atmosphere of sexual watchfulness and suspicion a lingering puritanism. To a certain degree, sex never lost its sense of naughtiness for him. Further, Crowley largely accepted the notion, implicitly embodied in Victorian sexology, of women as secondary social beings in terms of intellect and sensibility. And finally, Crowley acquiesced in the Victorian notions of sperm as the “vital energy” of life and virility as the hallmark of manly well-being; his later borrowings from Indian Tantrism only reinforced these emphases. Where Crowley ultimately differed was in his willingness to spend that “vital energy” liberally.

  Champney and the Ebor School employed fearsome punitive measures against those who transgressed—or who were believed, through malicious talebearing, to have transgressed—against the bounds of propriety. Here is Crowley’s central tale of injustice at the hands of Champney:

  [A] boy named Glascott, with insane taint, told Mr. Champney that he had visited me (twelve years old) at my mother’s house during the holidays—true so far, he had—and found me lying drunk at the bottom of the stairs. My mother was never asked about this; nor was I told of it. I was put into “Coventry”, i.e. no master nor boy might speak to me, or I to them. I was fed on bread and water; during play hours I worked solitary round and round the playground. I was expected to ‘confess’ the crime of which I was not only innocent, but unaccused.

  The punishment, which I believe criminal authorities would consider severe on a poisoner, went on for a term and a half. I was, at last, threatened with expulsion for my refusal to ‘confess’, and so dreadful a picture of the horrors of expulsion did they paint me—the guilty wretch, shunned by his fellows, slinks on through life to a dishonoured grave, etc.—that I actually chose to endure my tortures and to thank my oppressor.

  Physically, I broke down. The strain and the misery affected my kidneys; and I had to leave school altogether for two years.

  Corporal punishment was a frequently employed means of discipline at the Ebor School, as it was in public schools throughout England. J. R. de S. Honey, an authority on Victorian public schools, explains the psychological framework of the repeated and severe canings of the backs and buttocks of errant young boys: “Victorian prep schools and public schools must have been a paradise for sadistically-inclined masters and boys.[ … ] So regularly was recourse had to corporal punishment in Victorian schools, and so great the zeal which was expected of the performer, that its exercise must have accommodated a wide spectrum of motives and feelings.[ … ] It was presumably the predilections of such products of English schools which helped to fasten upon sado-masochistic practices, at least across the Channel, the nickname le vice anglais.”

  Crowley acknowledged, in the Confessions, that as a child he had a streak of “congenital masochism” that revealed itself in fantasies of physical agony; a particular favorite was to imagine himself, while in such agony, as the Beast of the Book of Revelation. It is with this background of brutality in mind that one can approach, with a modicum of comprehension—if not sympathy—one of the most appalling incidents in the Confessions. At roughly age fourteen, shortly after he left the Ebor School, Crowley committed the cold-blooded murder of a cat:

  I had been told ‘A cat has nine lives.’ I deduced that it must be practically impossible to kill a cat. As usual, I became full of ambition to perform the feat.[ … ] I therefore caught a cat, and having administered a large dose of arsenic I chloroformed it, hanged it above the gas jet, stabbed it, cut his throat, smashed its skull and, wh
en it had been pretty thoroughly burnt, drowned it and threw it out of the window that the fall might remove the ninth life. In fact, the operation was successful; I had killed the cat. I remember that all the time I was genuinely sorry for the animal; I simply forced myself to carry out the experiment in the interest of pure science.

  One of the strangest aspects of this ghastly passage is the absence of any acknowledgment that the violence was satisfying to the boy. Many children have tormented animals; those readers who have their own experiences to recall may judge for themselves the plausibility of Crowley’s account.

  The ultimate withdrawal of Crowley from the Ebor School, at age thirteen, came about through the intervention of his hated paterfamilias, Bishop, who decided that the accusations made against his young ward were preposterous. Bishop also recognized the physical deterioration of the boy, who was suffering from albuminuria (a urinary disorder), as well as from flaring asthma attacks. The diagnosing physician feared that Crowley would not live to manhood. Bishop brought the boy home. For the next two years, Crowley had private tutors.

  As a final parting shot at the Ebor headmaster, Crowley alleges in the Confessions that, shortly after his departure, the “insanity” of Champney “became patent” and his school was terminated. Neither of these jibes are correct. Champney remained as headmaster until 1900 (some twelve years after Crowley’s departure), with the school thereafter continuing its existence for some years in the new location of Bexhill. The retrospective fury which Crowley levels at Champney was due, in part, to his adolescent failure to have bested his nemesis. As Crowley conceded, with a note of grudging respect: “The battle between myself and the school was conducted on the magical plane, so to speak. It was as if I had made wax figures of the most inoffensive sort, that yet were recognized by the spiritual instinct of Champney as idols or instruments of witchcraft. I was punished with absolute injustice and stupidity, yet at the same time the mystical apprehension of Champney made no mistake.”