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  Mathers had much learning but little scholarship, much imagination and imperfect taste, but if he made some absurd statement, some incredible claim, some hackneyed joke, we would half consciously change claim, statement or joke, as though he were a figure in a play of our composition.[ … ] in body and in voice at least he was perfect; so might Faust have looked in his changeless aged youth.[ … ] Once when I met him in the street in his Highland clothes, with several knives in his stocking, he said, “When I am dressed like this I feel like a walking flame,” and I think that everything he did was but an attempt to feel like a walking flame. Yet at heart he was, I think, gentle, and perhaps even a little timid.

  According to Yeats, Mathers would sometimes spit blood during his magical practices, “lived under some great strain” and was prone to drinking, on occasion, excessive quantities of brandy, “though not to drunkenness.” Crowley, once he broke with Mathers, would term him a drunk outright.

  For all his extravagances, Mathers had retained the trust of his patron, Westcott, who appointed him one of the Three Secret Chiefs who would oversee the Golden Dawn. Mathers was to draw up, on the basis of the Cypher MS., suitable rituals for the five grades of the Outer Order: Neophyte, Zelator, Practicus, Theoricus, Philosophus. Each grade was based upon one of the sephiroth of the kabbalistic Tree of Life, with attributions extending on to astrology, alchemy, Tarot, Hebrew god names and angelic realms, and the symbolism of the Egyptian divine panoply. Passage through these grades, as authorized by the Secret Chiefs, would ready the aspirant for a further initiation into the Second Order, that of the Ordo Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis (Ruby Rose and Golden Cross; commonly abbreviated to R.R. et A.C.), the domain of practical magic, divination, and directed astral travel. Beyond was the Third Order, the three grades that reflected the Three Supernal Sephiroth of the Tree of Life, the realms of the Secret Chiefs as to whom Westcott, Mathers, and Woodman were mere reflections, as it were. Never in the course of the Golden Dawn were these three latter grades—Magister Templi, Magus, and Ipsissimus—bestowed. These were the grades that Crowley, in the decades to come, would claim by way of initiatory rituals of his own devising.

  In 1888, the initial year of recruitment, fifty-one members were enrolled in the Golden Dawn. Within three years, the ranks of Golden Dawn initiates had swelled to 126, 48 of whom were women. Yeats was initiated in March 1890, taking as his magical motto—emblematic of the new self of the initiate—Demon Est Deus Inversus (The Devil is the converse of God), which embodied the Gnostic teaching that the alleged Devil of the Bible was in fact the source of true godly wisdom in this occluded would; in all likelihood, Yeats had first encountered this motto in Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, in which it served as a chapter heading. (It was just such a viewpoint that would contribute to Crowley’s later branding as a Satanist.)

  The clamor for more magic led to the creation by Mathers, in 1891, of rituals for the Second Order which had thus far existed in name only. Mathers would claim, as his source of inspiration, a mysterious adept named Frater Lux e Tenebris (Light and Darkness), whose real-life identity (if he indeed existed) has never been ascertained. Mathers was thus asserting a link—beyond the ken of even Westcott—to the ultimate Secret Chiefs. Indeed, Mathers now flourished in many respects. In 1890, he married Mina (who later called herself, in good Celtic fashion, Moina) Bergson, the sister of the renowned French philosopher Henri Bergson. Mina—as to whose ethereal beauty Yeats attested—was devoted to her husband and applied her considerable artistic gifts to the creation of ritual decor. Through the financial support of Annie Horniman, the first Golden Dawn member to be initiated into the Second Order, in December 1891—the couple moved to Paris in 1892, where Mathers established his own temple. London operations were left to Westcott to oversee.

  At first, selected members of the Outer Order were invited by the Secret Chiefs to enter the Second Order. But the selectivity declined over the years. By the end of 1897—the year prior to Crowley’s arrival—there had been a total of 323 Outer Order initiations, with 97 subsequent initiations into the Second Order. This impressive growth entailed severe growing pains. In 1896, due to what Mathers perceived to be a growing insubordination within the Second Order (in particular, the withdrawal of financial support by Horniman), Mathers sent to all Second Order members a manifesto demanding that they each send him “a written statement of voluntary submission.” Mathers insisted that he was entitled to such obedience, given his unique link to the Secret Chiefs. He cited the enormous strain that this link had cost him, including the loss of blood Yeats had observed. Mathers was a martyr to the cause of the Second Order, yet would insist upon a price for his sacrifice: “But unless the Chiefs are willing to give me the Knowledge, I cannot obtain it for you:—neither will I give it to you unless I know that the Order is being worked conformably with their wishes and instructions.”

  The manifesto succeeded. Virtually all Second Order members complied with its terms; Horniman alone was formally expelled. Mathers carried on through the contributions of other members. But there were many who, while compliant, remained skeptical. Once, Yeats wrote, he confronted Mathers: “I said, ‘How do you know you are not hallucinated?’ He said, ‘The other night I followed one of these strangers [Chiefs] down that passage’, pointing to a narrow passage from the garden to the street, ‘and fell over the milk boy. The boy said, ‘It is too bad to be fallen over by two of you.’” Yeats concluded that the “break-up” of Mathers “had begun.”

  There was one further barrier to Mathers’s unquestioned leadership status, and that was the presence of Westcott. That presence was removed in March 1897, when the London officials who administered Westcott’s work as a coroner were somehow informed of his extensive connections with a secret occult society. Westcott, to keep his position, resigned. It was the suspicion of many, including—later—Crowley, that Mathers had engineered this dilemma. The result, at any rate, was clear: Mathers was now the undisputed head of the Golden Dawn.

  * * *

  By December 1898, Crowley had passed the requisite written examination for initiation into the Zelator 1°=10□ grade, the kabbalistic symbolism of which revolved around the spiritual element of Earth. He took the grades of Theoricus 2°=9□ (Air) and Practicus 3°=7□ (Water) in January and February of 1899, became a Philosophus in May 1899, and later boasted of his “rapid” progress through the Outer Order. In truth, given the relative ease of passage through the lower grades, his progress was merely punctual. But the abundance of rote learning began to grate on Crowley. In retrospect, he conceded that “my intellectual snobbery was shallow and stupid. It is vitally necessary to drill the aspirant in the groundwork.” The Second Order now became the vital capstone to be attained with all possible speed. But there was a required interval of seven months between the Philosophus grade and Second Order initiation, which further required a special invitation from Mathers.

  During this period, Jones and Baker had been teaching their young pupil astral vision techniques. Crowley kept a diary record of eighteen astral visions conducted from November 1898 to New Year’s Day 1899. (This diary confirms that, even as he practiced his astral technique, the newly initiated Neophyte was still attending Christian family prayer sessions.) A decade later, Crowley would offer (through the words of his acolyte, Fuller) this defense for his early visions—and for visionary reality as a whole: “A true vision is to awakenment as awakenment is to a dream; and a perfectly clear co-ordinate vision is so nearly perfect a Reality that words cannot be found in which to translate it, yet it must not be forgotten that its truth ceases on the return of the seer to the Material plane.”

  But the perfection of these visions could not quell troubling memories of the past. Thoughts of his Cambridge lover Pollitt were haunting Crowley. Significantly, he chose the hours between ten and eleven P.M. on New Year’s Eve 1899 as the time for an “Operation” in which, as his private diary discloses, he sought “to destroy a shell, i.e. to exorcise my Qliphoth
[base emotions] about P——[Pollitt] and so either to cure or kill, as alive or dead respectively.” The need for a vision that could “cure or kill” was based upon the guilty sense that Crowley’s own “evil persona” had caused Pollitt to sin. Crowley’s discomfort with his homosexual nature was at the root of this guilt, hence the perplexed ambivalence in his description of his feelings for Pollitt as either “alive or dead.”

  Crowley did not record his success or failure in curing or killing these feelings, and it is unclear whether he had any other male lovers during this period. With women, however, Crowley was highly active. Despite the urging by the Chiefs that sexuality be kept out of relations between Golden Dawn members, Crowley had a particularly impassioned affair with Elaine Simpson, who had been initiated into the Second Order. There has been speculation by scholars that the resistance within the R.R. et A.C. membership to Crowley’s being granted an invitation to join the Second Order was due to his “sexual peculiarities” or to an “impending homosexual scandal.” The specifics behind these charges will be explored shortly. It is, however, certain that Crowley had created a disagreeable reputation for himself. Blessed with a fortune, little practical acumen, and still less tact, he had wasted little time in establishing himself as a daunting, even frightening figure within the occult milieu of fin de siècle London.

  In late 1898, Crowley moved from his rooms at the posh Hotel Cecil to the luxurious flat procured for him by his lawyer at 67 and 69 Chancery Lane. It was here that Crowley would undertake the intensive private studies in magic that accompanied his formal progress through the Outer Order grades. Crowley designed and fitted two rooms as temples for the practice of white and black magic, respectively. The dominant decor of the white temple was six large mirrors, six by eight feet, that covered the walls; the black temple, a smaller, cupboard-sized room, featured an altar in the shape of an agile young black man in Eastern garb—a coolie figure to the eyes of the British Empire—standing on his hands and balancing a flat table surface on his feet. Within this black temple stood a human skeleton which, Crowley tells us in his Confessions, he “fed from time to time with blood, small birds and the like. The idea was to give it life, but I never got further than causing the bones to become covered with a viscous slime.” Crowley is here enjoying the frisson of revulsion he knew would be created in readers, while also mocking his own youthful follies. But there was indeed a genuine conflict within him at this time between the paths of white and black magic. This shows itself in Crowley’s account of his first meeting with a man who would supplant Jones and Mathers alike as a magical influence upon Crowley: Allan Bennett.

  Bennett, four years older than Crowley, had entered the Golden Dawn in 1894 and was initiated into the Second Order in 1895. He was utterly devoted to Mathers, whom, Bennett declared, “I reverence more than any man.” Bennett took on the use of the MacGregor clan surname favored by Mathers and was even “adopted” by Mathers during this period, though this would seem to refer to a magical rather than a legal relationship. Bennett was one of the most luminous minds to be trained in the Golden Dawn framework. Amongst his other studies, he helped Mathers with the work of compiling the Book of Correspondences, a tabular grouping of esoteric symbols from around the world which Crowley later expanded into Liber 777.

  Bennett made a precarious living as an analytical chemist (by remarkable coincidence, the same profession as Jones and Baker); but his career was hampered by spasmodic asthma. The drugs Bennett took for this condition were drawn from the standard legal pharmacopoeia of the time. Crowley described the treatment: “His cycle of life was to take opium for about a month, when the effect wore off, so that he had to inject morphine. After a month of this he switched to cocaine, which he took until he began to ‘see things’ and was then reduced to chloroform.” Bennett thus developed remarkable tolerance levels. One friend recalled that Bennett “went on to experiment with poisons until once he took a tremendous overdose which would have instantly killed another man but which left him quite unharmed.”

  The setting for the first meeting between Crowley and Bennett was a Golden Dawn ritual ceremony. Crowley had heard of Bennett—whose magical name was Iehi Aour (Hebrew: Let there be light)—by way of his formidable reputation as a magician. Now, during the disrobing that followed the ceremony, Crowley was startled by an immediate challenge from the man himself:

  To my amazement he came straight to me, looked into my eyes, and said in penetrating and, as it seemed, even menacing tones: ‘Little brother, you have been meddling with the Goetia!’ (Goetia means ‘howling’; but is the technical word employed to cover all the operations of that Magick which deals with gross, malignant or unenlightened forces.) I told him, rather timidly, that I had not been doing anything of the sort. ‘In that case,’ he returned, ‘the Goetia has been meddling with you.’ The conversation went no further. I returned home in a somewhat chastened spirit; and, having found out where Iehi Aour lived, I determined to call on him the following day.

  Bennett’s intimation here is confirmed by Crowley’s own testimony as to the black magic temple in his Chancery Lane flat. But he was careful to specify that “Iehi Aour never had anything to do with this; and I but little: the object of establishing it was probably to satisfy my instinct about equilibrium.”

  Crowley found in Bennett an inspiration to work in white magic. The purpose of calling upon Bennett the next day was to invite him to take up lodgings in Crowley’s own Chancery Lane flat, to which Bennett—who had been living in a grubby shared tenement—consented. Finances were a matter as to which both men were acutely sensitive. Two years earlier, when Bennett had been badly strapped for funds, a friend had suggested that he approach Mathers for a loan; Bennett refused out of his conviction that relations with his teacher “should be connected wholly with matters occult.” Crowley, in like manner, sought to establish a relationship without financial taint. Thus he offered Bennett hospitality but was careful “never to go beyond the strict letter of the word.” That is, Crowley wished to avoid giving cash directly to Bennett, as it would have violated the “point of honour” that one ought not to be paid for the teaching of occult wisdom. This point of honor, taken to the extreme that Crowley did, would soon cost him dearly.

  There was, from the outset, more than a shared interest in the occult to draw them together. Their backgrounds were strikingly similar: Both had endured unhappy childhoods that included the early death of a father. Both had rejected the intensive Christian piety (Bennett’s mother was a devout Catholic) in which they had been raised. And both suffered from asthma, although Bennett’s was the far worse case. Crowley’s portrait of Bennett is haunting: “Allan Bennett was tall, but his sickness had already produced a stoop. His head, crowned with a shock of wild black hair, was intensely noble; the brows, both wide and lofty, overhung indomitable piercing eyes.” Crowley believed that, due to his illness, Bennett “regarded the pleasures of living (and, above all, those of physical love) as diabolical illusions devised by the enemy of mankind in order to trick souls into accepting the curse of existence.” This had led Bennett into extensive readings of Buddhist texts. Sexual asceticism was not a viewpoint that Crowley could share, but coming as it did from a Buddhist as opposed to a Christian perspective, Crowley could more easily respect it in Bennett. In this regard, speculation that Bennett and Crowley became lovers must be rejected; it would have been vastly out of character for Bennett, and a confidant of Crowley’s later years, Gerald Yorke, denied flatly that such was the case.

  Together in the Chancery Lane flat, they devoted themselves to intensive studies in ceremonial magic. Crowley records this instance of Bennett’s magical powers—and impatience with scoffers: Bennett had constructed a magic wand out of a long “lustre” or glass prism. “One day, a party of theosophists were chatting skeptically about the power of the ‘blasting rod’ [wand]. Allan promptly produced his and blasted one of them. It took fourteen hours to restore the incredulous individual to the use of his min
d and his muscles.” Bennett, like Baker and Jones before him, introduced Crowley to teachings beyond his formal Golden Dawn grade. During 1899, Crowley copied out Second Order rituals that were almost certainly provided to him by Bennett, who would, by the end of the year, see fit to bequeath all of his magical notebooks to Crowley. Bennett’s respect for his pupil must have been considerable for him to have breached the rule set by Mathers.

  The explorations undertaken by Bennett and Crowley went beyond the confines of Second Order magic to take in the possibilities of alternative consciousness by means of drugs. It must be understood that the social atmosphere and legal consequences of drug experimentation in that period were entirely different from our own. There was already a strong nineteenth-century tradition of using drugs as a means to explore the human mind; Baudelaire, in his Les Paradis Artificiel, is the most remarkable writer in a lineage that extends from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas DeQuincey through the nineties to British poet James Thompson, author of The City of Dreadful Night, who was addicted to opium in the form of laudanum, as had been Coleridge and DeQuincey. Laudanum was one of the most frequently taken drugs in England throughout the nineteenth century, readily available in a variety of patent-name preparations as a cure for stomach ailments, a pacifier of the child labor force that worked the factories, and a means to increase the productivity of adult laborers by controlling the diarrhea that stemmed from the appalling sanitation conditions of the slums. Cocaine, cannabis and other consciousness-altering drugs were not as frequently used as laudanum, but they were perfectly legal at this time (the first Dangerous Drugs Act was passed in England in 1920) and obtainable by anyone interested, as Bennett and Crowley certainly were. They experimented avidly in hopes of attaining the Elixir Vitae of the Alchemists: Crowley’s rueful summation: “Like Huckleberry Finn’s prayer, nuffin’ come of it.”