City of the Beast, page 6
16
ST. MARY’S TERRACE, PADDINGTON: LIFE WITH ROSE
Obvious from the style
The few years after the Blythe Road confrontation were the most extraordinary of Crowley's life, spent largely abroad and burning through an inheritance. After visiting Mathers again in Paris, he then went to Mexico via New York, and his Victorian-Edwardian travels include Ceylon, Burma, India, Vietnam, Hong Kong (where he visited Elaine Simpson, now married, and found her using her Golden Dawn robes in a fancy dress contest), China, Japan, and Tangier. With Eckenstein he climbed Popocatepetl volcano in Mexico, where he rejoiced over the death of Queen Victoria, and he made two unsuccessful attempts on the Himalayan mountain Kanchenjunga, the second badly mishandled with four deaths and the ruin of his reputation in mountaineering circles.
He studied yoga, meditation and Buddhism with Allan Bennett, and magically he practised Abramelin magic, Enochian magic (after Dr John Dee's late renaissance attempts to communicate with angels in their own language), and published an edition of Mathers's manuscript of The Goetia.
In Scotland he met Rose Kelly, the unstable sister of his friend Sir Gerald Kelly the painter, and married her. While honeymooning in Cairo, travelling as Prince and Princess Chioia Khan (with Rose also known as Ouarda the Seer) he made contact with an entity named Aiwass, who dictated the text that became known as The Book of The Law, a Nietzschean screed that trampled on other religions in general and Christian values in particular (“With my Hawk's head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross”; “I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed and blind him”; “…I spit on your crapulous creeds.”) Crowley always insisted that he hadn't written it himself, taking dictation from a voice that seemed to be coming from behind his left shoulder while he wrote; it wasn't an ‘inspired’ or ‘automatic’ writing, coming from his unconscious, but the work of an external entity, a disembodied intelligence he variously identified with his Holy Guardian Angel, with Set, an Egyptian adversarial ‘bad’ god prefiguring Satan, and even straightforwardly with Satan himself. The 1904 revelations also involved a long-dead Egyptian priest, Ankh-f-n-Khonsu (whose stele – a painted plaque – was catalogued as item 666 in Cairo Museum), and whose reincarnation Crowley came to believe he was (“in the 26th Dynasty… I was Ankh-f-n-khonsu and brought about the Aeon of Osiris to replace that of Isis”.)
The Book of the Law became the foundation of Crowley's new religion, and he considered it the greatest event of his life. It combines the style of fin-de-siècle decadence – “To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof!” – with a belief that might is right, and the joy of strength: “The kings of the earth shall be Kings forever: the slaves shall serve”; “We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched and the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world.” It embodies the essence that British writer Cyril Connolly crystallised when he wrote that Crowley “bridges the gap between Wilde and Hitler.”
Crowley and Rose had a daughter born at Boleskine, Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley (Lilith for short), and continued to travel, but while journeying back through China alone – he'd sent Rose home separately with the infant – Crowley felt he didn't love them, and that they were a distraction from his destiny. Reaching Liverpool, he found that the baby had meanwhile died in Rangoon; Crowley's friend and early bibliographer Louis Duncombe-Jewell said the unfortunate child must have succumbed to “acute nomenclature”.
Crowley and Rose were unhappy, but in October 1906 they moved to 106 St. Mary's Mansions, an upmarket Victorian mansion block in St. Mary's Terrace, Paddington, and in December Rose had another daughter, Lola Zaza Crowley. Crowley loved Rose in his fashion and wrote pornographic poetry to amuse her, but their marriage was tense. He was unfaithful (Lola seems to have been named after his mistress);1 by his own account he kicked his mother-in-law downstairs and threw her out when she visited them here; and he continued to experiment alone with hashish and tincture of peyote (with characteristic introspection he was able to relate his mescaline colour visions to having earlier looked at an opal matrix in a jeweller's window on New Bond Street, possibly Hunt and Roskell at 156). He also continued his deferential magical association with George Cecil Jones, asking permission to take a vow of silence and being instructed more specifically to cut his arm with a razor whenever he unthinkingly answered a question. Rose thought this was ridiculous and hated it.
Rose was unhappy and drinking heavily – leading to a spell in a Leicestershire sanatorium for alcoholics – and on the weekend of 23-24 March 1907 Crowley moved out. While living there he also wrote the ‘Proem’ to his play The World's Tragedy (the tragedy is Christianity), leading to his inscrutable reference to it a couple of years later as something “which was written long ago when I lived, as will be obvious from the style, in Paddington.”
1 Actress and beauty Vera Snepp, known in her later career as Vera Neville; Crowley called her Lola, and her name is entwined in his poetry around this time.
17
WARWICK ROAD, WEST KENSINGTON
Pure prestidigitation
After a brief spell in Chancery Lane, Crowley moved alone to rooms on the fourth floor of 60 Jermyn Street, a good address associated with restaurants and gentlemen's retailing – shirtmakers, shoemakers, scent, barbering – just south of Piccadilly and on the edge of clubland. Number 60 itself has a quietly magnificent doorway. He would have a life-long association with Jermyn Street, handy for Piccadilly, Regent St, Bond St, Whineray, and the Café Royal; there were also Turkish baths at number 76, and he later used the Savoy Turkish Baths at number 92 (opened 1910). He would return to Jermyn Street in 1942 for his last London address.
Crowley went to Tangier in 1907 with his student the Earl of Tankerville (a paranoid cocaine user or ‘coke fiend’ whom he'd met at Whineray's: Crowley calls him “the Earl of Coke and Crankum”) and on his return he found Rose's bill for 150 bottles of whisky in five months. Rose's unhappiness was made worse by knowledge of Crowley's infidelities, including the birth of an illegitimate son with a girl he had met in Soho named Jenny Zwee, who worked as a milliner in Burlington Arcade.
Nevertheless from February 1908 they made one last attempt to live together again at 21 Warwick Road, West Kensington. Crowley's library-study was in the ground floor room at the front, overlooking the main road, with the dining room and kitchen in the basement, and Crowley recounts his surprise at the speed and stealth with which Rose could nip downstairs and surreptitiously throw back a glass of whisky: “It was an act of prestidigitation and nothing else.”
By June he was writing to her doctor, a W. Murray Leslie of 74 Cadogan Place, that
life with Rose is intolerable while she locks me out of the house, insults her own guests at my table, uses foul language to servants, reels up Bond Street charging into passers-by, goes from crisis to crisis of hysteria, tells people wild and impossible lies about me etc etc etc ad nauseam… Rose is subject to insane delusions. I will not live in a house alone with her and a drunken ex-Piccadilly prostitute (called a servant, God knows why…)
This same servant would later testify in court that Crowley hit Rose, and entertained a short, dark, heavily jewelled woman overnight while Rose was absent, and in 1909 they divorced.
18
VICTORIA STREET: CROWLEY’S FLAT, & TEMPLE OF THE ASTRUM ARGENTEUM
The most sinister atmosphere
Crowley continued his magical work with George Cecil Jones, and while staying with him in Surrey achieved the crowning of the Abramelin system, contact with his Holy Guardian Angel. Jones now insisted that Crowley, having ascended the Outer Order in the Great Queen Street days, and then been initiated into the Second Order by Mathers in Paris (and ascended through that to his own satisfaction), had now jumped from the Second Order – becoming a “Babe of the Abyss” and crossing it – to the mysterious Third Order. He was now a Magister Templi, a Master of the Temple, required to put all worldly things behind him including his dead child, and vowing to interpret everything that happened to him as the direct dealing of god with his soul.
A further responsibility of a Magister Templi was to found a temple, and this was what Jones was inspiring Crowley to do, but they needed a third man. This was Captain – later to be Major-General – J.F.C. Fuller, an admirer of Crowley's writing. Crowley had offered a £100 prize for the best essay on his work, which Fuller had won (he was the only entrant). Crowley then managed not to produce the prize money, but Fuller's admiration was undimmed, and the two men had met (with Rose) at the Hotel Cecil. Fuller was a steely intellect and a visionary of warfare, particularly tank combat and blitzkrieg tactics. He would attend German manoeuvres as a guest in 1935, and was one of only two Englishmen invited to Hitler's fiftieth birthday celebrations in 1939. Meanwhile he wrote books on yoga and the Kabbalah.
Fuller lived at 80 Overstrand Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea, and after they fell out Crowley lampooned him as “The Bismarck of Battersea” (where after “abyss after abyss” of Hell, we reach “The ledge labelled ‘Battersea’, supreme word of malignity in the tongue of the pit”). But for now he was the great Crowley enthusiast, publishing his prize essay as The Star in the West (1907) and coining the word “Crowleyanity” for the new religion he hoped would supplant Christianity. This was the man Jones and Crowley needed: the three of them became the founding members of a new magical order, the discreetly named A∴A∴ (generally thought to mean the Argenteum Astrum or Silver Star).
Compared to the Golden Dawn's mixture of artistic talent and Masonic-mystical burghers, the A∴A∴ was less high-minded: esoteric historian R.A. Gilbert describes the A∴A∴ members as “self-centred moral pygmies”, and overall they were less distinguished. Along with just a couple of higher-powered magical members, notably Fuller and Charles Stansfeld Jones, members included novelist Ethel Archer, salonist Gwen Otter, poet Victor Neuburg, psychic researcher Everard Feilding, model Nina Hamnett, and the palmist Cheiro.
Crowley had a short spell living in Coram Street, Holborn, but in the early days of the A∴A∴ he took a flat, five flights up at 124 Victoria Street, which also served as the A∴A∴ temple. It was next door to the Victoria Palace Theatre (on the theatre's left; or on the right, if you're looking from the road) and only demolished recently.1
A∴A∴ members would dance around an altar in the flat, which Gwen Otter described as having “the most sinister atmosphere I have ever known”. One night, as Crowley tells it, there was dancing with the room dimly lit and heavy with incense, when several participants felt an extra person was present; “there was one too many.” The spell was broken when someone grabbed for the light: “No stranger was to be seen… We all agreed about the appearance of the visitor. We had all been impressed with the same feeling that he did not belong to the human species.” In the best traditions of occult fiction, the identity of this visitor is not spelled out.
There is a fictionalised description of Victoria Street in Ethel Archer's 1932 novel The Hieroglyph, based on Crowley as she'd known him around 1910: “A room, she reflected, betrays the character of its owner and occupant, and this was far from being a common one… the semi-ecclesiastical austerity side by side with evidences of strange perversity and barbarity.” The bare floor is painted black, with a leopard skin rug before the fireplace. A large stuffed crocodile grins from the corner of the room. From the ceiling hangs a “wonderful silver lamp or censer” and above the mantelpiece is a Byzantine crucifix, while on the mantelpiece itself are several images of Buddha, together with Chinese and Egyptian gods. On the wall is a scarlet silk hanging embroidered with gold letters, “the spoil of a Tibetan temple.” On the bookshelves are first editions of Verlaine, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Wilde, with some Rodin busts on top of the bookcases, and on the wall beside the fireplace are “drawings by Beardsley and Osman Spare.”
1 I remember its final days, with a charity shop and then a betting shop in the ground floor; in Crowley's time it housed a branch of Lyons Cafes.
19
HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN: NORTHAM’S ROBE MAKERS
Fitted for the infernal rites
Members of the Argenteum Astrum needed ceremonial robes, which could be obtained from the firm of W. Northam at 9 Henrietta Street. These were available in different ranks, from Probationer at five pounds and Neophyte at six pounds, through to Magister Templi at fifty pounds (around £5000 today; so even the Neophyte robe would be around £600).
Northam's advertisement was clearly written by Crowley himself, with mysteries of which Northam's knew nothing. The Dominus Liminis robe, for example, was “fitted for the infernal rites of Sol, which must never be celebrated”; “The Babe of the Abyss has no robe”; and the Magister Templi robe was fitted for “the supernal rites of Luna, and for those rites of Babylon and the Graal. But this robe should be worn by no man, because of that which is written, ‘Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine.’”
The overall look was a cloak with a hood, in red. One was sold at Sotheby's in 1996,1 and illustrated in the catalogue: it is red, with a Rosicrucian cross embroidered in gold and coloured thread on the chest and the Eye of Osiris in a starry triangle on the hood. More can be seen in Crowley's painting Four Red Monks Carrying a Black Goat Across the Snows to Nowhere.
Jean La Fontaine, in her debunking of the 1990s ‘Satanic abuse’ scares, Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England, makes the point that hooded robe outfits are now associated in popular culture with the Black Mass: “This is the garb of devil worshippers, as described in horror stories by Dennis Wheatley…”
This is largely true, and it is no disrespect to La Fontaine's sound and important study to acknowledge that although such spurious “Dennis Wheatley outfits” are overwhelmingly fictional, they have existed – we need look no further than the Argenteum Astrum.
1 Sotheby's, London, English Literature and History, 16-17 December 1996, lot 342. This particular one was taken by Crowley's lawyer when he was unable to pay a legal bill, and survived a stint in a children's dressing-up box.
20
SOUTH AUDLEY STREET: SHOWDOWN WITH GURU PARAMAHAMSA
Child of a pig
Crowley was still searching for teachers and gurus, and a man called T.C. Crawford had recently written a book entitled A Real Mahatma: A Personal Study, published in 1906 by the oriental booksellers Luzac, opposite the British Museum. This was about Mahatma Sri Agamya Guru Paramahamsa, then visiting Britain. In November 1906 Crowley sent him a note, “If you are the one I seek this will suffice”, and they met. Crowley's first impressions were very favourable, but he became disenchanted, and by the time he read the Mahatma's own book, Sri Brahma Dara: “Shower from the Highest” (Luzac, 1905) he noted errors.
The guru held court at 7 Margaret Street and 60 South Audley Street, and it was here that relations worsened, until on Sunday 13 October 1907 they had a row: “a far from silent interview with Mahatma at the weekly meeting” as Crowley called it in his diary (‘silent interviews’ being part of the guru's practice). The guru was a famously ferocious and angry man, and consequently known as the Tiger Mahatma.
Crowley knew another ferocious man, Captain Fuller, who also had a good working knowledge of yoga – he went on to publish a book on it in 1933, cross referencing it with kabbalistic and magical ideas1 – and was not impressed by the Mahatma's writings. Crowley asked him to go along to a Sunday meeting, which he did on the 17 November, listening with disdain until the guru shouted “You pig-faced man! You dirty fellow, you come here to take away my disciples. Crowley send this pig-one, eh?” Fuller walked calmly to the door and let himself out, pausing only to put his head back round the door again and say in Hindi “Shut up! You are the child of a pig!”
“Fuller at 60,” Crowley wrote in his diary: “M[ahatma] threatens to murder him.” Fuller wrote the episode up in The Equinox, with an eye to comic effect, as ‘Half Hours with Famous Mahatmas’ by “Sam Hardy” (‘samadhi’). As for the guru, he came to grief the following year, when he was arrested for indecently assaulting two female disciples at his new headquarters in Goldhurst Road, Hampstead, and sentenced to four months hard labour.
1 Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, Yoga: A Study of the Mystical Philosophy of the Brahmins and Buddhists (Rider and Co, 1933)
21
BRUTON STREET: AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE
An artist
Also in the autumn of 1907, a young visionary artist named Austin Osman Spare was becoming the enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world, and he had a show, ‘Black and White Drawings by Austin Osman Spare’, at the Bruton Galleries. “His management of line has not been equalled since the days of Aubrey Beardsley,” wrote a critic: “his inventive faculty is stupendous and terrifying in its creative flow of impossible horrors.” The Observer went further: “Mr. Spare's art is abnormal, unhealthy, wildly fantastic and unintelligible, and altogether of a kind which will make the family man hesitate to take his wife or daughter to the gallery.”
