Aleister Crowley (22 page)

But London at the outset of war was no place for the King of the Royal Art. Crowley was convinced that he could best serve England from abroad.
⁴⁸
In October, with £50, some books, a collection of Masonic charters, and high hopes—and preceded by some colorful press—Crowley boarded the ill-fated
Lusitania
and headed across the Atlantic to New York. The new world was ripe, he thought, for the new aeon, and he would bring it with him.

NEW YORK’S A LONELY TOWN WHEN YOU’RE THE ONLY
THELEMITE
AROUND

Crowley arrived in Manhattan in late October and took a room in a hotel at 40 West 36th Street. On his first stay in the Big Apple there had been a heat wave. Now winter was approaching in more ways than one. Middle age gripped him. He was broke and for the first time in his life faced real poverty. His left leg still troubled him, he had grown decidedly stout, and he was on his own. For all his hopes of success in the new world, Crowley didn’t really care for New York. “Call no man happy till he is dead,” he wrote at the start of his
Magical Record
, taking the ancient adage and adding his own touch: “or at least has left New York!”
¹

An VIII
⁰
opus on November 7, 1914, “
Babalon per mentis imaginem manu sinistra
” (Babalon imagined in the mind and with the left hand), was to attract a Scarlet Woman to share his magical bed.
²
It was not immediately successful and for the most part Crowley was reduced to using prostitutes. Elsie Edwards, an “obese Irish prostitute of
maternal Taurus type” cost him $3; she was unattractive and the opus was difficult, but he had to start somewhere.
³
Florence Galy was used to secure the attentions of Aimée Gouraud, a rich widow who had escaped him. She escaped Crowley again, even with Florence’s help (years later he finally seduced Aimée but her wealth was much needed now). Grace Harris aided in another operation aimed at wealth, as did the big Dutch prostitute Lea Dewey, and Margaret Pitcher, who had a “fine fat juicy Yoni.”
⁴
On other occasions Crowley resorted to variations of the VIII
⁰
. He would visualize the god Hermes sodomizing him, or merely focus intently on the god-form, while performing the opus.
⁵
How successful these operations were is debatable. There is a desperate air about them, with Crowley eager for any possible sign of effect.
⁶
Often enough under “Result” Crowley noted “Doubtful” and at times he questioned the efficacy of the operations entirely.
⁷
Crowley also pursued sex that had little to do with magick. On a single night at a Turkish bath he received the sacrament
per vas nefandum
from two strangers and
per os
from another, and soon after received it again. On this occasion he was invited by one stranger—a Mr. Finch—back home to dinner to meet his mother. Crowley set great store on his encounter with Mr. Finch and somehow believed that the proposed dinner signaled the start of his initiation to the grade of Magus.
⁸
He even performed a IX
⁰
work with Mamie, a “slender rather dark mulatto” of the “lowest prostitute type” in order to secure success. But the opus was a failure and Mr. Finch canceled the dinner.

Crowley had some success when he met the lawyer and bibliophile John Quinn, who bought some of Crowley’s books; in the
Magical Record
he says he received $500 for them, but it was most likely far less. Crowley was so hard up that when Quinn invited him to
Christmas dinner he was thankful and accepted. Years later he shouted “To the lions with them!” at young Christmas carolers before slamming his door in their faces, but at this time he was happy there was a Christian holy day to celebrate.
⁹
One of Quinn’s other guests was the painter John Butler Yeats, the father of Crowley’s old nemesis W. B. Yeats. Quinn himself did not think highly of Crowley. An intimate of Ezra Pound, Quinn found Crowley’s magick boring and his poetry third-rate, but his books were becoming collectable, although Crowley himself wouldn’t profit by their growing value as rarities.
¹⁰

More luck arrived when Crowley was asked to contribute to
Vanity Fair
. His description of a baseball game as seen by the Chinese poet Kwaw Li Ya (Crowley himself) impressed the editor, who commissioned more work. The astrologer Evangeline Adams also asked him to ghostwrite a book—Crowley claims the project failed because she wanted to cheat him; but more likely he quibbled over his fee. Leila Waddell turned up, too, and helped Crowley with magick; although they kept in touch, she would eventually move on. But by May 1915—not too long after his debacle with Mr. Finch—Crowley’s entreaties were answered. He was invited to dinner by a journalist friend and there met two women, Jane Foster and Helen Hollis, who he called the Cat and the Snake.

Jane was a poet, and Crowley felt an immediate attraction to her. She was his “ideal incarnate,” “beautiful beyond my dearest dream”; Helen, an actress, also “glittered with the loveliness of lust.”
¹¹
Crowley later claimed that Jane Foster broke his heart and it was with her that he set his highest hopes on fathering a “magical son,” a goal that for a time he believed he had achieved.
¹²
As with Mary D’Este, Crowley and Jane exchanged energies, and the next day, Jane told Crowley
she was about to leave her husband—a much older man—and that they should lose no time in getting married. Crowley claims that even then he knew she was a fraud, but that he fought down this intuition out of love. Jane had to leave New York for a month. Crowley took this as a test. He thought the Secret Chiefs had sent both women to put him through an ordeal, although his love for his ideal didn’t prevent him from performing further opera with prostitutes. When she returned, they became lovers, but Jane tormented Crowley, saying that she detested the physical side of love; she may, however, have only detested receiving Crowley’s love by his preferred method
per vas nefandum
. When she left town again, Crowley was desperate, and to relieve his anguish he spent time with the Snake. She may have gotten more than she bargained for. One of Crowley’s more peculiar habits was bestowing what he called the Serpent’s Kiss. He had “unusually pointed canines” and he would take a bit of flesh between them and suddenly snap, leaving “two neat indentations.” Often he drew blood: the heiress Nancy Cunard claimed she got blood poisoning from one of Crowley’s love bites. Apparently the Snake was aroused by Crowley’s bite, and a twelve-hour orgy ensued, at the end of which Crowley woke into “pure love” and had a vision of a diamondlike cube.
¹³

Crowley’s desire to have a son was sincere, but Jane was not the woman to bear him one. She had difficulty conceiving and had already suffered a stillbirth. Over the autumnal equinox of 1915, Sister Hilarion (Jane’s magical name) and Crowley carried out several magical opera aimed at fathering his heir, and Crowley was disappointed when they failed; predictably, he blamed her. In October Crowley joined Jane and her elderly husband on a tour of America; his passage was most likely covered by Jane’s cuckolded spouse. In Detroit
Crowley visited the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical laboratories, where he topped up his supply of anhalonium. As in London, in New York Crowley was known for dosing people, and on one occasion he got the novelist Theodore Dreiser very stoned.
¹⁴
In Chicago he met the Buddhist scholar Paul Carus, and in Vancouver, the O.T.O. member Charles Stansfeld Jones. Jones—or Frater Achad—was originally from London and had joined the A.
^.
.A.
^.
. in 1909, brought in by Captain Fuller. Jones later emigrated to British Columbia, where he set up an O.T.O. lodge that would play a large part in Crowley’s later fortunes.
¹⁵

The group headed south to Seattle and San Francisco, then Los Angeles, where Crowley was dismayed at the “cinema crowd of cocaine-crazed, sexual lunatics, and the swarming maggots of near-occultists.”
¹⁶
At Point Loma near San Diego he tried to meet Katherine Tingley, the head of the American section of the Theosophical Society. He wanted to propose an alliance, but his reputation preceded him and she declined a meeting. By the time the trio returned to New York, Jane had had her fill of love and will with the Great Beast and dumped him. For his part he had grasped the truth of her falseness and was compelled to “slay her.”
¹⁷
This meant that he had to destroy the ideal of her he had created. His means of demolition was a prostitute, yet something important had come of the trip.

On October 12, 1915, his fortieth birthday, in a railway carriage heading back East, Crowley accepted that he had passed into the grade of Magus, the most exalted yet, as it is identified with the “word of the aeon.” In recognition of this he took the name To Mega Therion (Greek for the “Great Beast”). In the summer of 1916, while on a magical retirement in New Hampshire, he formally ratified his grade by crucifying a frog he had baptized as Jesus of Nazareth in a ritual
that Francis King describes as “sheer black magic” and “thoroughly sadistic.”
¹⁸
Crowley went through a mock trial where the unfortunate amphibian was charged with blasphemy and scourged. The frog as Jesus had “plagued and affronted” Crowley all his life and now the “slave god” was in the hands of the “Lord of Freedom.” He was not merciful. Once again Crowley was hitting back at his Plymouth Brethren upbringing, something a less retarded personality would have jettisoned long before. After nailing the beast to his handmade cross, Crowley put it out of its misery by stabbing it with his magick dagger. He then cooked and ate its legs and burned the rest to ashes.

—

I
N
EARLY
1915,
Crowley was on a bus heading up Fifth Avenue. He was reading an article about himself sent to him by a London press-cutting service, when a stranger sitting behind him asked if he was in favor of a “square deal” for Germany and Austria. America had yet to enter World War I and it was still uncertain if it would side with the Entente or the Central Powers. Ever alert to twists of fate and eager for new opportunities, Crowley said he was. The man—one “O’Brien,” although it’s possible he never existed—gave Crowley his card and suggested he call at his office. When Crowley arrived at the office of
The Fatherland
, O’Brien was not there, but he was surprised to discover George Sylvester Viereck, a German-American poet whom Crowley knew in London from the
English Review
. Crowley describes Viereck as capable of “awakening an instructive repulsion in most people”; nevertheless, Crowley liked him.
¹⁹
He liked Viereck even more when he offered him a job.
The Fatherland
was a pro-German newspaper that aimed to muster American support for Germany against the British. There were many German immigrants in America and sympathies
with Germany were high. Crowley’s job, in a nutshell, was to write pro-German, anti-British propaganda. Crowley accepted, and in order to clinch the offer, he even expressed strong pro-Irish sympathies; Ireland was about to rebel against English rule and would receive German help. He even claimed he was Irish himself. He wasn’t and he never set foot there, but naturally that didn’t matter.

From 1915 to 1917 Crowley wrote for
The Fatherland
as well as another journal Viereck published,
The International
. Much has been written about this questionable period in his career, not least of all by Crowley himself. Long sections of the
Confessions
are devoted to explaining it. Crowley justified his actions by saying that he quickly realized that
The Fatherland
—subtitled
Fair Play for Germany and Austria-Hungary
—was the center for German propaganda in America, and that Viereck, for all his sterling qualities, could not be the mastermind behind the operation, which also included espionage. Crowley maintains that he was a British patriot, and that the “undercover” work he was about to embark on was either tacitly condoned or explicitly organized by British Intelligence. The responsibility for the German operation, he felt, fell to Professor Hugo Münsterberg, a German psychology professor at Harvard University, with whom Crowley had, he claimed, crossed swords intellectually. Münsterberg, a friend of the philosopher and psychologist William James, was outspokenly pro-German in the lead-up to World War I and was, in fact, at one point suspected of being a spy. Most of Münsterberg’s work, however, was aimed at dismantling the stereotypes that Germans and Americans had about each other, in the interests of better relations between the two nations. Like many academics, he was concerned that war would hamper the progress of knowledge, which knows no national boundaries. Crowley communicated with Sir Guy
Gaunt, head of Naval Intelligence, about his “plan,” but Gaunt had no interest in it, and regarded
The Fatherland
as relatively harmless and insignificant. Regarding Crowley’s ostensible “undercover” work, Gaunt summed it up as an expression of his “frantic desire for advertisement,” and estimated Crowley himself as a “small-time traitor.”
²⁰