Aleister Crowley (3 page)

His actual lineage, although not as exalted, was not particularly humble, although Crowley always felt some need to claim an aristocratic background. He was born into a family of Plymouth Brethren, a sect of extreme Christian fundamentalism that was founded in the late 1820s. The Plymouth Brethren believed in the literal truth of the Bible and had a dour view of life. Not only did the “apocalyptic-minded Plymouth Brethren” anticipate “the imminent end of the world with smug satisfaction,” they also considered Christmas a pagan holiday and refused to celebrate it.
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The family started each day by reading aloud a chapter from the Bible; the servants, too, joined in
and Crowley’s own impressive familiarity with Scripture no doubt stems from this practice. Crowley’s parents eagerly anticipated the coming Day of Judgment, when everyone except the members of their flock would be chastised with hellfire—much like the readers of today’s popular
Left Behind
series of apocalyptic novels. Crowley’s own literalism, and his belief in a coming apocalypse—the world, he later claimed, was destroyed by fire on March 21, 1904—may have its roots in his family’s beliefs, and it is not too difficult to see in Crowley’s later ministry both a reversal and an emulation of the creed in which he was raised.

Crowley’s father, Edward, came from a wealthy brewing family; having inherited a fortune, he was a “gentleman of leisure,” with no need to work. Crowley tells us his father was an engineer, but that he never practiced his profession. Crowley’s grandfather had made a fortune in beer and the proceeds had precipitated to his son. In the mid–nineteenth century, Crowley Alehouses could be found dotted around the country. At them one could order beer, sandwiches, and bread and cheese. They were popular lunching places that offered an alternative to the less salubrious public houses, and the income that allowed Crowley’s father—and soon enough Crowley himself—ample leisure was founded on the appetites and thirsts of clerks and other office workers. Crowley was embarrassed by the source of the wealth he enjoyed as a boy and that he quickly ran through as a young man, and he makes no mention of it in his
Confessions
. Like his son, Crowley’s father used his leisure for the serious purpose of religion; he became a popular and successful proselytizer for the Plymouth Brethren cause, evangelizing across the countryside, often bringing his son on these recruitment drives. Also like his son, Edward Crowley was a prolific writer, producing pamphlets on the
resurrection, the “end times,” and other similar topics. Crowley caught the proselytizing fever early on. He accepted the creed of his parents wholesale, and could not imagine anyone so wicked as to reject it. Again, it has not escaped the attention of people writing on Crowley that father and son shared an interest in intoxicating substances and spirituality, although Crowley exceeded his father in both concerns, and for a time Crowley’s father was a teetotaler, exercising an abstinence Crowley himself rarely displayed.

Crowley thought of his father as a hero and as a friend and there is a suggestion that he exaggerated his importance in the Plymouth Brethren.
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Crowley speaks of him as being a “magnificently eloquent” preacher, yet in an early work,
The World’s Tragedy
, in which he sums up his youth as a “Boyhood in Hell,” Crowley parodies him.
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As one writer suggests, Crowley’s father seems to have possessed a high degree of vitality and dominance—he was a forceful personality who could impose himself on others, much as Crowley himself did—and this made up, in Crowley’s mind, for his narrow-mindedness and intolerance. No such equivocation informs Crowley’s view of his mother, whom he describes as a “brainless bigot of the most narrow, logical and inhuman type.”
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Crowley may have hero-worshipped his father, but the real emotional knot was with his mother.

Emily Crowley, née Bishop, was raised in Devon and Somerset, and her Asian appearance led to her being called the “little Chinese girl,” a fact that may have helped shape her son’s later predilection for exotic women. She had an artistic bent and painted watercolors, but was very strict and seemed to lack a sense of humor, especially about herself. Although research has shown that until her death in 1917, Crowley was in many ways a dutiful son—at least he wrote her regularly—his remarks about her are uniformly critical. On one
occasion during an excursion to Beachy Head—a chalk headland on England’s south coast that became one of Crowley’s favorite climbing spots—he had a premonition that she was in danger and saved her from falling off a cliff. He described this act as a “regrettable incident of impulsive humanitarianism,” an extravagance that in later life he avoided.
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But along with emphasizing his dislike of his mother—he was, he says, physically repelled by her—Crowley’s act of heroism points out that Crowley was a natural psychic; at least he had an access to information that we would call “paranormal.” This “natural magic” appeared in later years when he dreamed of his mother’s death. In his diary for May 6, 1917, he wrote that “Had news of my mother’s act death. Two nights before news had dreamed that she was dead.”
¹⁸
Crowley experienced a similar dream before his father’s death. In the diary note about his mother, he says that this dream also came two nights before his father’s death, but in the
Confessions
he writes that it came on the same night. Edward Crowley died on March 5, 1887. Crowley writes, “On the night of March 5th, the boy—away at school—dreamed that his father was dead.”
¹⁹
Crowley remarks that he had many times dreamed that his mother was dead; given his feeling toward her, this is understandable. But the dream he had directly before her death shared with the dream he had about his father a peculiar character, a quality “entirely different from anything he had known.”
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This suggests that although we may question the
philosophy
of magick that Crowley developed in later years, it seems clear that he had some natural predilection for it, something he shared with his contemporary C. G. Jung, who also dreamed of his parents’ deaths.
²¹

Edward Crowley died when his son was eleven—strangely, the same age Madame Blavatsky was when her mother died. It was then that the embryo of the later Wickedest Man in the World began to stir.
Until then young Alick—he hated the name—was a model child and extremely well behaved. “The mind of the child was almost abnormally normal,” Crowley tells us. Yet he did have some curious traits. The Bible was the only book available to him, and he became fascinated with the Book of Revelations, feeling solidarity with the Dragon, the False Prophet, and, predictably, the Beast and the Scarlet Woman; the antinomian sensibility that informed his later philosophy took root early. He also developed a taste for descriptions of torture and suffering, and speaks of a “congenital masochism”; he admits that the “fantasy of desiring to be hurt” has persisted into his adult years.
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In his later magical life, Crowley wallowed in the notion of being mistreated by women, a desire that reached an apex during his time in Sicily, and may have been some compensatory mechanism for the explicit low estimate he had of the sex. Crowley emphasizes the masochistic element in his makeup, but he had a sadistic streak as well. Reading of the Indian Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, Crowley imagined himself as Nana Sahib, a rebel who took part in massacring British troops and civilians. Sahib’s “proud, fierce, cruel, sensual profile” was his ideal of beauty—here Crowley is reminiscent of the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima—and he imagined becoming his ally.
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He wanted to “share in torturing prisoners,” but also to “suffer at his hands.” A cousin who played with Crowley shared this fantasy and asked him to “be cruel to me.”
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Crowley’s “aristocratic” leanings took shape also when, at six, the family moved to Redhill, in Surrey. Here he played games in which he and his playmates—like him, other Plymouth Brethren children who were taught by tutors—hid in order to ambush the children from the local school, whom they called cads. Here also began Crowley’s penchant for playacting; he pretended to be famous people of the moment, a taste for adopting alter egos that lasted throughout his life.

Young Alick, for all his sadomasochistic fantasies, may have been abnormally normal, but with the death of his father from cancer of the tongue—a tragic affliction for a preacher—something changed. The transformation began at the funeral. The family had moved to Southampton in order to be near a clinic that offered Count Mattei’s “electro-homeopathy.”
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Edward and his Brethren had decided that it was God’s will that he should receive this treatment and not have the operation that the eminent surgeon Sir James Paget had advised.
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Crowley was by this time attending a school run by Plymouth Brethren. Practically on his return to school from the funeral, he misbehaved. Exactly what he did is unclear. His punishment was mitigated because of the bereavement but Crowley himself knew he had passed a boundary. It was “the first symptom of a complete reversal of his attitude to life.”
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Nothing like this had happened before, but it happened quite a bit from then on.

Crowley’s change in his attitude did not mean a rejection of the Plymouth Brethren belief. It merely meant that he had changed sides. Crowley supporters point out that it is inaccurate to speak of him as a Satanist, yet Crowley himself is no help in this matter. Trying to understand the reversal that had taken place in him, Crowley said, “I simply went over to Satan’s side; and to this hour I cannot tell why.”
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From wanting to emulate Jesus and to “lead a life of holiness,” Crowley now felt “passionately eager to serve my new master.” “I was anxious to distinguish myself by committing sin.”
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An incident that occurred at this time suggests a connection. As any intelligent young boy would, Crowley asked one of his instructors how Jesus could have spent three days and three nights in his tomb, when he was crucified on a Friday and resurrected on a Sunday. Surely it should be only two nights? His teacher couldn’t answer
and admitted that it had never been explained. Crowley decided that he would do it. This decision, he said, is “very characteristic.” He has, he says, no interest in doing what has already been done, but “tell me of an alleged impossibility; and . . . I am out to do it.”
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This is an example of Crowley’s literalism, a dogged persistence that in some ways is admirable but in others tedious. “I have always been singularly thorough in anything I take up,” he tells us, and he gives us an example: His father had a favorite sermon on the word
but
. Crowley went through the whole Bible, “page by page, enclosing this word, wherever it occurred, with an oblong of ink.”
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This shows his tendency to go to inordinate lengths to prove a point, a tenacity that made him such a bad enemy. Crowley could hold a grudge for years. Remembering the ill treatment he had received at Ebor School in Cambridge nearly a half century earlier, he wrote in his
Confessions
that soon after he left, the headmaster, Rev. H. d’Arcy Champney, went insane and the school closed down. Neither recollection was accurate but Crowley enjoyed vilifying his enemies; pages of his
Confessions
are dedicated to this type of revenge. This manic persistence appeared in gruesome detail when, at fourteen, deciding to prove whether or not a cat really had nine lives, Crowley submitted one to arsenic, chloroform, hanging, gassing, stabbing, slashing, smashing, burning, and drowning, before finally throwing it out a window. The stupidity is numbing but it shows the autistic exactitude that Crowley often displayed.

The idea of doing the impossible informed the new dispensation that had changed his life. No petty sin would do for him. He wanted the ultimate sin. This was known as the sin against the Holy Ghost. No one knew exactly what this was, but it was unforgivable, the worst you could do, and it was for precisely that reason that Crowley
pursued it. He must, he said, discover this sin and “do it very thoroughly.”
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It was the work of a lifetime.

Crowley’s adolescent “revaluation of values” seemed to set in motion a world that turned against young Alick. At Ebor School in Cambridge, snitching was rewarded, and Crowley was accused of being found drunk at home at the bottom of the stairs. Neither Crowley nor his mother was asked about this. It was untrue, but the headmaster simply accepted the accusation and Crowley was “sent to Coventry”—that is, everyone ignored him. No explanation was given. This, combined with a bread-and-water diet and inordinate physical exercise, continued for a term and a half. Crowley’s health suffered and he had to be removed. The doctor advised travel in the open air and instruction by a tutor. Crowley enjoyed hiking, mountain climbing, and fishing in Wales and Scotland; this therapeutic outdoors life laid the foundation for his later mountaineering and world travels.

By this time his mother had moved to London, to be near her brother, Tom Bishop, who became Crowley’s guardian. Tom Bond Bishop, another Plymouth Brethren fanatic, was in every way as narrow-minded and intolerant as his sister, and Crowley loathed him from the start. What Crowley hated most about Uncle Tom was his “invulnerable cocksureness.” “He
knew
that he was
right
on every point.”
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Crowley had become a keen climber and he asked Uncle Tom what a climber should do if another he was roped to fell, and he could not save him, and could save himself only by cutting the rope. Uncle Tom insisted that God would never allow such a thing to happen.