Aleister Crowley (30 page)

Leah arrived from Cefalù in late March. She was not happy with the Beast. He had left her and Mudd destitute and had ignored their pleas for help. Indeed, Crowley’s missives to Mudd were vitriolic. Mudd had had the temerity to suggest that their current crises arose because Crowley was avoiding the obligations given him by
The Book of the Law
. Typically, Crowley turned on Mudd; that he considered him “less than a mollusk” suggests his level of vituperation.
¹⁴
When Mudd, who was still in love with Leah, told Crowley it was his destiny to marry her, Crowley replied that Mudd could best fulfill his magical tasks by getting a job, saving money, insuring himself—with Crowley as beneficiary—and committing suicide. This was, alas, a joke that would soon be in earnest.
¹⁵

On May 1 the understanding proprietors of the Hôtel de Blois sold the place. The new owner was less
thelemically
inclined and Crowley
and Leah were booted out. Crowley promptly cursed him and the hotel allegedly soon went bust. Crowley had had two nose operations earlier in the year—sniffing heroin and cocaine daily had ravaged his sinuses—and his doctor had advised entering a nursing home. The next best thing was Chelles-sur-Marne, a quiet village on the outskirts of Paris. Here they stayed at the inn Au Cadran Bleu and passed a quiet summer. Crowley continued to dictate his
Confessions
and passed on his occult wisdom to Alexander Xul Zolar. Then the inevitable happened.

Dorothy Olsen was American, thirty-two, and neurotic. She was also seeking magical instruction and was willing to pay for it. She was touring Europe and in August 1924 found her way to Crowley’s door. She was attractive, blond, and full of life. Leah, at forty-one, was haggard, weary, and looking it. The Secret Chiefs, it seemed, had plans for Dorothy. They did not include Leah. Dorothy was quickly initiated into the A.
^.
. A.
^.
. and christened Soror Astrid. Soon after, and much to Leah’s dismay, Crowley announced that in their wisdom the Secret Chiefs had decreed that he and Dorothy should take a magical retirement—alone. The unthinkable had occurred. Leah was no longer the Scarlet Woman.

After a romp in Paris, on September 23 Crowley and his new consort headed for Marseilles from where they crossed the Mediterranean to Tunis. Crowley informed Leah that he did not know when he would see her again. His only remark about her reaction was the terse note that she had collapsed.
¹⁶
Leah was abandoned again, and again was penniless. She was also ill and addicted. This, sadly, was not the only blow. A telegram from Ninette informed her that her sister Alma had gained custody of Hansi and was taking him to America.
¹⁷
Leah tried to regain custody but the American embassy
would not help. To make matters worse, she was thrown out of her hotel; her belongings littered the street, although her sympathetic landlady gave her a chair to sit on. Norman Mudd returned from London and shared her misery; the two tramped through Paris, starving, dressed in rags. Together these
thelemic
orphans united and, ignoring Crowley’s admonitions, magically married in a ritual Leah had devised. To earn a crust the former Scarlet Woman and Whore of Babalon was reduced to washing dishes at a Montparnasse café. Mudd pawned what he could and importuned his parents for money. Leah prostituted herself to make ends meet; sex was business now, not magick. Her letters to Crowley were ignored, her pleas for help unanswered; the only words she heard from the Beast were complaints. The curse of Aiwass, it seems, had struck again. Or was it Aiwass’s curse? Both Mudd and Leah’s main concern was that Crowley was ignoring his responsibilities as the word of the aeon. Unbelievably, they were still believers, for a time.

Crowley meanwhile enjoyed the Tunisian sun and, inspired by Soror Astrid, he again took to poetry. On the voyage from France, he composed a manifesto entitled
To Man
. It later formed a part of
The Heart of the Master
(1925), a kind of spiritual autobiography.
To Man
was aimed at dissuading the theosophist Annie Besant from proclaiming her and Bishop Charles Leadbeater’s protégé, Jiddu Krishnamurti, as the long-awaited World Teacher, the avatar of the new age who would lead mankind out of chaos. That role, clearly, belonged to the Master Therion. Crowley needn’t have worried; Krishnamurti declined the position in 1929.
¹⁸
Crowley’s other literary activity was composing begging letters, mostly aimed at Dorothy’s family. While Leah and Mudd starved and struggled, Crowley used the money he got to fashion a magical jewel for his new flame’s
forehead. He also journeyed through the desert and enjoyed a feast laid out by a sheik who—so Crowley said—recognized him as a Secret Chief. He also performed important opera, mostly with Dorothy but sometimes XI
⁰
. By this time Leah had achieved a certain distance from and irony about the Beast, answering his letters—which only contained magical instructions, never offers of help—using his initials, “A.C.,” and not “Beautiful Big Lion” as she once had.

Yet she still was at his beck and call. In March 1925, Leah dropped her dishes and headed to Marseilles, en route to Tunis. After an arduous winter in Europe (spent mostly in Paris), the Big Lion and little Dorothy had returned to Tunis where they discovered that Dorothy was pregnant. Leah was required to help. And not only with the pregnancy. Dorothy was causing trouble. Her health was bad—she was not used to the drugs that invariably accompanied Crowley’s magick—and she was giving the Beast a hard time, so hard that he was compelled to give her a black eye, shattering her cheekbone in the process. She returned fire, scratching Crowley’s face as he slept. But it was a false alarm. Dorothy miscarried and Crowley and she headed for France. Leah remained in Tunis.

It was a kind of closure. There, again in poverty, again abandoned, Leah regained something of her own self, her own will. Eventually she renounced Crowley, both the man and the magician; her addiction to him she labeled “A.C.–itis” and she got over it. From Switzerland in 1929 she circulated a letter disclaiming her role as the Scarlet Woman. Crowley had by then forgotten her but he was disturbed enough to tell his followers to avoid her like the plague, yet he still asked her to provide evidence that Mudd had stolen some of his property; people were always stealing from him. In desperation the luckless mathematician had sold some of Crowley’s books and
kept a pittance as a commission. She refused. Mudd, too, eventually renounced Crowley, and for a time thought of himself as the new World Teacher. And, as if in fulfillment of Crowley’s sardonic advice that he commit suicide, Mudd met his end in 1934 by drowning himself off the Isle of Guernsey. He filled his trousers with stones, tied them off with bicycle clips, and walked into the sea.
¹⁹
Leah’s end was not so tragic. According to Symonds, she eventually returned to America where she again took up teaching; she died in 1951.

—

O
NE
OF
C
ROWLEY
’
S
FIXATIONS
was a prophecy in
The Book of the Law
concerning a “rich man from the west” who would solve all of his financial problems. In the summer of 1925 he seemed to have turned up. After Theodore Reuss suffered a stroke in 1922, Crowley was determined to become the head of the O.T.O. The two had fallen out in 1921, but Crowley claimed that before Reuss died in 1923, he appointed him O.H.O.—Outer Head of the Order. Crowley offered no proof of this and the German members were not happy with his leadership. To fill the gap, Heinrich Tränker, otherwise known as Frater Recnartus, who led a group known as Pansophia, was made temporary head of the order.
²⁰
In 1924, Tränker had a vision in which he saw Crowley as the World Teacher and he invited the Beast to an O.T.O. convention held in Hohenleuben, a small town in Thuringia near the Czech border, to discuss his possible leadership. Crowley, Dorothy, Leah, and Mudd had their fares paid by Karl Germer (Frater Saturnus), a well-heeled and well-educated member. Germer also paid off Crowley’s debts in Paris. He was to become one of Crowley’s main benefactors for the rest of his life. The rich man had arrived. Germer told Crowley that he was sexually confused and had never
reached satisfaction with a woman. He fantasied himself as a hermaphrodite and had no understanding of magick. Crowley, of course, soon sorted that out.

Crowley sent a copy of
The Book of the Law
ahead of the conference, to be translated into German. This proved a mistake. We’ve seen how some O.T.O. members reacted to his rewriting of their rituals. Tränker read
Das Buch des Gesetzes
and was appalled. Other members agreed: it was demonically inspired. Albin Grau, an artist and the production designer for F. W. Murnau’s classic vampire film
Nosferatu
(1922)—Grau introduced much occult symbolism into the film—believed that Crowley’s philosophy presaged a “primitive world order” suggesting the “blackest days of Atlantis.”
²¹
But then Tränker had a second vision in which he saw that Crowley’s book encapsulated the idea of “civilization,” a curious assessment indeed. He then supported him, although relations between the two remained tense. The conference split into pro- and anti-Crowley camps, but at the end Crowley’s position as O.H.O. was secure. Leah and Mudd also benefited by the journey. The elderly Martha Küntzel, a theosophist who had known Madame Blavatsky, allowed them to live with her for a time in Leipzig; it was here that Leah gave birth to a boy she had by William George Barron, a disciple who stayed around long enough to get her pregnant. It was after this meeting that Leah and Mudd gradually came to terms with Crowley’s fickleness. Küntzel herself became a fanatical Hitlerite and fell out with Crowley over this.

It was also after this meeting that Dorothy’s position as Scarlet Woman crumbled. The two returned again to Tunis, where Crowley wrote his enigmatic “Comment” on
The Book of the Law
, which states that the “study of this Book is forbidden” and that those who discuss
it are to be “shunned . . . as centers of pestilence.” That Crowley did both goes without saying. One reader of these reflections was Crowley’s friend and biographer Charles Richard Cammell, whose son, Donald Cammell, directed the dark hippie film
Performance
(1970), starring Mick Jagger.
²²
Crowley advised that “it is wise to destroy” the book “after the first reading.” Cammell, appalled by
The Book of the Law
, threw his inscribed copy into the fire. One of Dorothy’s last services to Crowley was to write to Henry Ford, explaining that his opposition to organized labor was in keeping with the ideals of
thelema
.
By October 1926, she was history. Like Rose, she eventually became an alcoholic. Reports are that she drank herself to death in 1930.

Back in Paris and free of Dorothy, Crowley used Karl Germer’s money to live in the style he was accustomed to, taking a flat at 55 avenue de Suffren. Germer tolerated Crowley’s profligacy, but his wife was less forbearing. She wrote to the Beast complaining that the money she had given him was spent on “expensive cigars, cognac, cocktails, taxis, dinners, . . . anything you desired at the moment,” and suggested that “God Almighty himself” would not have been as arrogant.
²³
Crowley ran through potential Scarlet Women, candidates his rigorous screening process soon eliminated. At one point he claimed to be juggling six white and three black mistresses. One in particular, Margaret Binetti, he became engaged to, but jettisoned in February 1927, burning a Jupiter talisman that, he claimed, protected her. He also had the occasional XI
⁰
encounter. He was past fifty, drug addled, ill, overweight, bald—he had given up wearing wigs and had settled into his shaven-head look—his teeth were bad and his breath reeked of ether; it was one of Leah’s few complaints about his personal hygiene. Yet he was still able to attract women.

He was also able to attract men. One was Tom Driberg, a
homosexual and communist who later became a prominent Labour Party Member of Parliament. Driberg was known to haunt public lavatories and in later years he became friends with the notorious Kray Brothers, Swinging London’s criminal elite; according to the psychologist Anthony Storr, he was the only person he ever met whom he could truly call evil.
²⁴
While at Oxford in 1926, Driberg wrote to Crowley after reading
The Diary of a Drug Fiend
, and during a visit to London, Crowley met him for lunch at the Tour Eiffel restaurant in Fitzrovia, Crowley’s stomping ground in later years. Driberg never became a disciple, but he did support Crowley and at some point acquired one of his diaries, which he later sold to Jimmy Page for a princely sum. Ironically, Driberg became a journalist for the
Daily Express
—a Beaverbrook paper—and in later years it emerged that he had for many years been a Russian spy. Whether he had XI
⁰
relations with Crowley is unclear.

A less disreputable acolyte was Israel Regardie. Regardie first wrote to Crowley after reading
Book Four
. He was born in London in 1907 to an East End Jewish family; they moved to the States in 1920. Regardie’s search for occult wisdom began at fifteen, when he read Blavatsky’s
Secret Doctrine
.
At eighteen, after hearing a lecture about Crowley’s ideas, he wrote to him again, and the Beast advised contacting Karl Germer, who was then living in New York City. Germer sold Regardie a set of the
Equinox
and the two became friends. In 1928 Crowley accepted Regardie’s offer to come to Paris and be his unpaid personal secretary. Regardie told his parents that he would study art in France, but he told his sister that he would really study magick. She took one look at the
Equinox
,
was shocked by what she read, and tried to prevent his getting a French visa. It was too late,
although the French authorities assured her they would look into the matter.