City of the Beast, page 4
The Hotel Cecil was a convenient if expensive base for writing and reading during this quiet but pivotal time in Crowley's life. It was the largest hotel in Europe, with 800 rooms (about three times larger than the nearby Savoy). Originally it stretched from the Strand down to the river – the riverside end was demolished to make way for Shell-Mex House – and the Strand frontage survives, now with shops in it. The grand entrance is still architecturally much as Crowley would have known it.
The Strand itself, now rather miscellaneous and characterless, was the great exciting thoroughfare of Victorian London (hence the title of the magazine The Strand, where Sherlock Holmes appeared; it had more theatres than any other street in London, and there was a popular Edwardian song, ‘Let's All Go Down the Strand’). At night it was also associated with public drunkenness, which shocked foreign visitors, and with other deviant behaviour: there were notices in several pub windows (not intended humorously) saying “Beware of Sods”, meaning sodomites. At number 417 was a decadent watering-hole, the oddly named Bun Shop, well-known to Smithers and the rest. Crowley was very familiar with the Strand – he describes an easy mountain climb by saying that even average climbers “could make as certain of strolling to the top as if it were the Strand” – and Crowley-related sites include the Savoy, Simpson's, the Tivoli Theatre, Dowie and Marshall bootmakers at 455, where he bought alpine and other boots (now a modern bank), Milliken and Lawley at 165, where he bought a skeleton, and unfortunately, the Royal Courts of Justice at number 60. As a man with romantic Jacobite leanings, he would also have known the statue of royal martyr Charles I, as celebrated in Lionel Johnson's poem ‘By the statue of King Charles at Charing Cross’ (this statue is the official centre of London, from where distances are measured).
In his novel Moonchild Crowley describes Charing Cross – the western end of the Strand and the train station – as the centre of London. London, he says, should have been painted by Goya: “The city is monstrous and misshapen; its mystery is not a brooding, but a conspiracy. And these truths are evident above all to one who recognizes that London's heart is Charing Cross.”
1 i.e. they both worked in industry; they were not pharmacists.
7
FARRINGDON ROAD: MYTHIC ORIGINS
Found on a bookstall
Jones and Baker agreed Crowley was a sincere aspirant after the mysteries, and that it was time to introduce him to what Jones later described as a “club”; a place to socialise and meet one's friends. This club was The Order of the Golden Dawn; probably the most influential magical order there has ever been. Although it had a fairly large membership it managed to be a discreet, semi-secret society, and unlike Theosophy it looked to the Western hermetic tradition rather than the East, giving its members a grounding in astral projection, Kabbalah, tarot, alchemy, visualisation, and ceremonial magic. It was quasi-Masonic but unlike conventional Masonic orders it admitted women on equal terms, and its members included W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, Arthur Machen, tea heiress Annie Horniman, actress Florence Farr, Oscar Wilde's wife Constance, and the writer Algernon Blackwood.
It was founded in 1888 by three men with Masonic backgrounds and esoteric, Rosicrucian interests: London coroner Dr William Wynn Westcott, who lived at 396 Camden Road;1 retired doctor Dr William Robert Woodman, who lived at 28 Greville Road, Maida Vale; and Samuel Liddell ‘MacGregor’ Mathers, who was effectively a professional occultist and relied on the support of patrons, notably Annie Horniman. He had lived in Great Percy Street, near King's Cross; and at Stent Lodge, Forest Hill, near the Horniman Museum (where W.B. Yeats visited him, as remembered in his 1901 essay ‘Magic’); but by the time Crowley knew him he and his wife Moina were based in Paris.
The Golden Dawn began with a manuscript, known as the Cipher Manuscript, that somehow came into the hands of Westcott in 1887; the best known version of the story says he got it from the Reverend A.F.A. Woodford, an elderly clergyman, who allegedly found it on the once legendary Farringdon Road pavement book market. This was a goldmine for old books and manuscripts, and hung on in very reduced form until 1994.2
More recent research suggests the Cipher Manuscript came to Westcott among the posthumous papers of Kenneth Mackenzie (1833-1886), an eminent Freemason, and that Mackenzie had written it himself (in which case the prime foundational site of the Golden Dawn might be considered Mackenzie's house out in Isleworth, the long-ago demolished 4 Wellington Villas on Wellington Road, now the A3603). Mackenzie was a man of considerable scholarship, whose works include a book on Burma and a well-respected encyclopaedia of Masonry (although his interests also included spiritualism and astrology: he had an astrological system for picking horse-race winners, and like Mathers he lived in near-poverty). He had met with the influential French occultist Eliphas Levi in Paris and, probably inspired by Levi, his magical pseudonym was Baphometus, after the alleged idol of the Templars.
The cipher was not difficult to read, and Westcott recognised that it was based on an artificial alphabet found in Johann Trithemius's Polygraphiae, first published in 1518. It contained skeletal rituals with a Masonic flavour for something called the Golden Dawn, so Westcott asked Mathers – who had a genius for such things – to flesh them out into workable rituals. They also invited Woodman to be the third chief, and in 1888 the three of them had the business up and running.
Westcott apparently found a further leaf of old paper in the manuscript, which mentioned a high-ranking German adept, a Fraulein Sprengel; members of her order took magical mottoes as their names, and Sprengel was Soror Sapiens Dominabitur Astris. There was even an address where she could be reached. Westcott wrote, and in due course received a series of letters from her secretary, a Frater In Utroque Fidelis, establishing the GD's heritage as the British branch of a long-established continental occult order. By June 1890 she had authorised a charter, establishing an Isis-Urania Temple No.3 of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – but then, sadly, a letter in different handwriting, from a Frater Ex Uno Disce Omnes, announced that she had died, so further enquiries were unfortunately impossible.
No one now believes this story, and on various grounds – bad German, for one – it is considered to be a hoax: a magnificently fertile hoax, almost certainly by Westcott himself, building on Mackenzie's manuscript. Nevertheless, it is the version of the story that Crowley himself knew and told (“a cipher manuscript was found on a bookstall by a Dr Woodman, a colleague in magical study of Dr W. Wynn Westcott”), giving the whole business a material origin, a solid bricks-and-mortar reference (“there is nothing dishonest about the Farringdon Road, except its inhabitants”). And so the Farringdon Road holds its place in the foundational myth of the Golden Dawn.
The Golden Dawn has been described as W.B. Yeats’ “church and university”, and much the same could be said of Crowley. Yeats also said that although some of the Golden Dawn material was “obvious and melodramatic”, and in this it “resembled Masonic rituals”, there was “much that I thought beautiful and profound.” And Arthur Machen writes “it was a stumer – or stumed – to use a very old English word…3 Its originators must have had some knowledge of Freemasonry; but, so ingeniously was this occult fraud ‘put upon the market’ that, to the best of my belief, the flotation remains a mystery to this day. But what an entertaining mystery; and, after all, it did nobody any harm.”
1 Crowley calls it Hampden Road in Moonchild, where Westcott is Vesquit.
2 I can dimly remember it reduced to one man, the great George Jeffery, whose grandfather had been there back in the 1880s. Jeffery was admirably philosophical when he made the newspapers after selling a £42,000 book for £20.
3 i.e. a forgery, or forged; the word stumer was also used for dud cheques well into the 1920s.
8
GREAT QUEEN STREET: THE GOLDEN DAWN
Enter the Secret Chiefs
Crowley took his impending initiation into the Golden Dawn very seriously; he asked Baker if anyone had died during the ritual. It came around on 18 November 1898, in Mark Masons’ Hall, 64-65 Great Queen Street, Covent Garden.1 The vast Masonic edifice that now stands there, dominating the street in its strangely inconspicuous way, only dates from 1927-33. The previous building that Crowley knew was completed in 1869: part of the façade survives together with the ‘Tavern’ portion, both now part of the Connaught Rooms, where the banqueting rooms from the 1869 building are now the Grand Hall.
Cowley was initiated as a Neophyte of the Isis-Urania Temple, taking the name Perdurabo (“I shall endure”) but he found it an anti-climax. Having sworn the aspirant to Masonic-style secrecy, whereby the slightest breach of his oath would incur “a deadly and hostile current of will, set in motion by the Greatly Honoured Chiefs of the Second Order, by the which I should fall slain or paralysed, as if blasted by the lightning flash”, they then entrusted him with the Hebrew alphabet, the names of the planets and their attribution to days of the week, and some very basic Kabbalah. This, he thought, was fourth-form schoolboy stuff.
Nor did the membership impress him: instead of the Sanctuary of Saints they were “an abject assemblage of nonentities… as vulgar and commonplace as any other set of average people.” Crowley was not the first person to be struck by this: Maud Gonne, the beautiful and aristocratic Irish woman adored by Yeats, thought they were “the very essence of British middle-class dullness”. Talking to Baker and Jones, they saw his point of view, but told him not to be too hasty. This was only the Outer Order, and he hadn't yet seen the Second Order.
The Golden Dawn was divided into eleven grades in three Orders. Members of the Outer Order were largely restricted to theory, and after Neophyte the grades went up through Zelator, Theoricus, Practicus, and Philosophus.
From Philosophus one could proceed to the Second Order. After the theory of the Outer Order, members of the more secretive Second Order were instructed in the actual practice of ceremonial and ritual magic, and Mathers named it the Ordo Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis (the Order of the Rose of Ruby and Cross of Gold) or the R.R. et A.C. for short: this had three further grades, Adeptus Minor, Adeptus Major, and Adeptus Exemptus. Between 1894-96 the R.R. et A.C. Second Order met at 62 Oakley Square, a rather gloomy location north of Euston (not far from Westcott's house) and by the time of Crowley's initiation Second Order activities were held at 36 Blythe Road, Hammersmith.
The Second Order was ruled by three Adeptus Exemptus chiefs: Mathers, Westcott, and the non-existent Anna Sprengel. Above the Second Order, across the ‘Abyss’, were three further theoretical grades of Magister Templi, Magus, and Ipsissimus, but these were almost super-human beings. Ultimately the authority came from the Secret Chiefs, who existed largely on the astral plane and only interfered in human affairs occasionally, somewhat like the Hidden Masters of Theosophy.
1 There has been confusion about where this was, since Mark Masons’ Hall is not a building as such, but a Masonic use of a building. It is now at 86 St. James's Street, and shortly before that it was at 40 Upper Brook Street. In her 1938 memoirs, Maud Gonne seems to remember it in its Golden Dawn days on Euston Road; she may be thinking of Oakley Square.
9
BARROW ROAD, STREATHAM: LODGING OF ALLAN BENNETT
A mean, grim horror
One day in the spring of 1899, “at some ceremony or other” in Great Queen Street, Crowley became aware of what he felt was great spiritual and magical force emanating from another Golden Dawn member. This was Allan Bennett (Frater Iehi Aour: ‘Let There Be Light’), a gaunt-looking man in his twenties with dark hair and striking eyes, who was held in awe by other Golden Dawn members – as a practical magician he was second only to Mathers, who had informally adopted him.
“Little Brother,” he said to Crowley, “You have been meddling with the Goetia” (a magical grimoire).1 Crowley claimed innocence, but Bennett wasn't convinced: “In that case,” he said, “the Goetia has been meddling with you.”
Next day Crowley sought Bennett out, and found him in south London at what he described as a squalid tenement (“a tiny tenement in Southwark or Lambeth – I forget which. It was a mean, grim horror”). The word tenement suggests slummy redbrick flats in several storeys, but it was a suburban house at 24 Barrow Road, Streatham, not so far from Crowley's own childhood house at Polworth Road. Bennett was lodging there with Charles Rosher (Frater Aequi Animo) and his wife Lily. Rosher – not to be confused with Charles Rosher the cinematographer and cameraman, who was his son – had travelled the world as an adventurer, “invented a patent water-closet and been court painter to the Sultan of Morocco”, and he also wrote terrible poetry. “If his talents had been less varied,” says Crowley, “he might have made a success of almost anything.”
Crowley made Bennett an offer: if he would teach Crowley magic, he could come and lodge with him in Holborn.
1 The Goetia, or Lesser Key of Solomon is a magical textbook for trafficking with demons, but the word Goetia is applied more generally to mean low magic and demonology, dealing and dabbling with low malignant forces, as opposed to the higher magic of theurgy or Theurgia.
10
CHANCERY LANE
Semi-solid shadows
When Crowley became serious about the Golden Dawn, he left the Hotel Cecil and took rooms at 67-69 Chancery Lane, within ‘New Stone Buildings’ towards the north western corner with High Holborn.
Crowley had fitted this flat out with two temples, one for white magic and one for black: the white magic room was lined with eight-foot mirrors, and the one for black magic – in a sort of cupboard – had “an altar supported by the figure of Negro standing on his hands… the presiding genius of this place was a human skeleton,1 which I 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.” (This was done “with the idea of creating a material and living demon servant”.)
Bennett's words about the Goetia may have startled Crowley, because he had been dabbling with Goetia and more specifically with the magic of Abramelin (a system for contacting one's Holy Guardian Angel, from a manuscript Mathers had found in the Bibliothèque Nationale; Mathers's edition of the book had just been published by Watkins in 1898). As well as the HGA it involves subsidiary demons, and it has a bad reputation in magical circles. One night, says Crowley, he and Jones were working on magic and went out to eat: coming back, they saw a black cat on the stairs (“not a real cat, either”) and opened the door to find the temple – or cupboard – door open and the altar upset. More than that, “Round and round the big library tramped the devils all the evening, an endless procession; 316 of them we counted, described, named, and put down in a book. It was the most awesome and ghastly experience I had known.”
Or in a variant account, “As we went out, we noticed semi-solid shadows on the stairs; the whole atmosphere was vibrating with the forces which we had been using. (We were trying to condense them into sensible images.) When we came back… the temple door was wide open, the furniture disarranged and some of the symbols flung about in the room. We restored order and then observed that semi-materialised beings were marching around the main room in almost unending procession.” It is possible that Bennett knew what Crowley had been dabbling with not because evil was showing in his face, or aura, but because Jones had told him; they knew each other.
Bennett was another chemist (he worked for the firm of Dr Bernard Dyer, Analytical and Consulting Chemist, at 17 Great Tower Street EC3). Crowley got to know Bennett at Chancery Lane and found him to be one of the most remarkable men he had ever met. He had been brought up a Catholic by his mother, who had died slowly from ulcerated tuberculosis of the throat when Bennett was about ten, contributing to his horror of the flesh. Bennett later abandoned the occult for Buddhism, becoming an important early British Buddhist, but for now his passion was magic, and he taught it to Crowley, going through the invocation of gods, the evocation of spirits and demons, and the consecration of talismans. As Crowley puts it, at Chancery Lane “We made talismans that got on the job, and stayed on the job.”
1 The presiding genius had been purchased for £5 (about £500 today) from the firm of Milliken and Lawley at 165 Strand.
11
STAFFORD STREET, MAYFAIR: LOWE’S CHEMIST
Exploring the pharmacopeia
Bennett was crucified by asthma, which had no remedy. Asthma cigarettes – or even normal cigarettes – were the nearest thing to relief, together with opiates to calm the breathing. Crowley remembers Bennett's regime:
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 had to switch to cocaine, which he took till he began to “see things” and was then reduced to chloroform. I have seen him in bed for a week, only recovering consciousness sufficiently to reach for the bottle and sponge.
Ether may also have figured. Bennett was interested in drugs not just for his health but for psycho-spiritual voyaging, visions, and what he called “clairvoyance”, for which he used the herb dittany as an incense .
Bennett talked of wanting to find a Holy Grail of drugs, a drug that would “open the gates of the World behind the Veil of Matter”, and Crowley refers to them both “exploring the pharmacopoeia for the means of grace.” When they did this they followed what he later calls “The old Chancery Lane rule: begin with half the minimum dose of the Pharmacopeia, and if nothing happens within the expected time, double the dose. If you go on long enough, something is nearly sure to happen!”
Drugs were more freely available from chemists before the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act, and Crowley's favourite was Lowe's at 8 Stafford Street, off Bond Street. He makes it sound almost like a salon: “My favourite rendezvous was a little chemist's shop in Stafford Street, managed by a man named E.P. Whineray, one of the most remarkable and fascinating men that I have ever met… He knew all the secrets of London… I used to haunt his shop and learned from him about London.” These secrets (“People of all ranks, from the courtier and the cabinet minister, to the coachman and the courtesan, made him their father confessor”) must have involved drug use and even drug addiction: “He understood human frailty in every detail and not only forgave it, but loved men for their weaknesses.”
