Supernatural (66 page)

On the face of it, the Golden Dawn should have been a wholly beneficial and healthy influence.
Unfortunately, too many of its leading figures were driven by the craving that has been the downfall of so many magicians: the will to power, not only over themselves but also over everyone else.
Gerald Yorke, a friend of Aleister Crowley, concluded that the story of the Golden Dawn showed that ‘the majority of those who attempt to tread the occult path of power become the victims of their creative imagination, inflate their egos, and fall’.
There was a great deal of infighting for the leadership of the Golden Dawn.
Dr Westcott saw himself as the leader, but MacGregor Mathers felt the position should rightly be his.
Mathers claimed to be in direct touch with the Secret Chiefs, semi-divine spirits, who dictated new rituals to him through his wife as a medium.
Then there was A.
E.
Waite, a learned American historian of magic.
His interests, however, were more mystical than magical, and he was not a very inspiring person.
Finally, there was Aleister Crowley, a remarkable and demonic magician whose career brought ruin to many others as well as himself.

Crowley was the son of a wealthy and puritanical brewer.
He was born in Leamington near Stratford-upon-Avon in 1875.
His birthplace gave him opportunity to remark with typical bombast and arrogance: ‘It is a strange coincidence that one small county [Leamington and Stratford are in Warwickshire] should have given England her two greatest poets—for one must not forget Shakespeare.’
It sounds like a joke, but in fact Crowley was convinced that he was a great poet.
However, though his verse shows considerable talent, he lacked the discipline and sense of language to be even a good poet.

Crowley was a spoiled child who developed an intense dislike of the Plymouth Brethren, the strict religious sect to which his father belonged.
He was also obsessed by sex.
His first of numerous seductions occurred with a young servant when he was 14 years old.
At university he wrote a great deal of poetry, which he published at his own expense.
He also developed an incurable desire that lasted all his life to shock respectable people.
In his late teens he discovered Mathers’ translation of a book called
The Kabbalah Unveiled,
as well as a work by A.
E.
Waite on ceremonial magic.
He quickly established contact with the Golden Dawn.

By the time Crowley entered the Golden Dawn in 1898, the struggle for its control had already been going on for some time.
In 1891 Mathers had returned from France to announce that he had met three of the Secret Chiefs in Paris, and had had various magical secrets imparted to him.
Dr Woodman died that year and for the next six years there was a certain amount of tension within the movement.
Dr Westcott resigned from the Order—apparently having been told by his superiors on the London Council that magic was not a suitable occupation for a respectable public official.
Mathers spent a great deal of time in Paris working on magical manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale, so the struggle for leadership of the movement continued.

In August 1899 Crowley rented a house in Boleskine, Scotland on the shores of Loch Ness, conferred on himself the title ‘Laird of Boleskine’, donned a kilt, and proceeded to practise the magic of Abrahamelin the Mage—a system which, he claimed, he had learned about in the writings of John Dee.

In December 1899, convinced that it was time he moved up to a higher grade in the Golden Dawn, Crowley went to London to demand initiation.
This was refused through the efforts of Yeats and various other senior members, who regarded him as an overgrown juvenile delinquent.
Crowley therefore went to Paris and persuaded Mathers to perform the necessary rituals.
He also took the opportunity to stir up trouble, convincing Mathers that he had a revolt on his hands.
Mathers sent him back to London with instructions to break into the Golden Dawn headquarters, and to put new locks on all the doors.
Yeats, Florence Farr, and the other London initiates were enraged.

The legal wrangle that ensued in 1901 broke up the original Golden Dawn thirteen years after it had been founded.
One group of members, under the leadership of A.
E.
Waite, managed to continue for another four years, still calling themselves the Golden Dawn.
Another group, including Yeats, Florence Farr, and the novelist Arthur Machen, was led until 1905 by Dr R.
W.
Felkin, who then founded a magical society called the Stella Matutina, or Morning Star.
Finally, in the 1920s, a talented young medium and occultist who called herself Dion Fortune founded the Society of the Inner Light, based on Golden Dawn rituals obtained from Mrs Mathers—Mathers himself having died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.

The same year of the legal problems the Golden Dawn had received another blow in the form of a sudden spate of unwelcome publicity.
It happened when a couple of confidence tricksters who called themselves Mr and Mrs Horos were accused of raping a 16-year-old girl.
Mrs Horos had learned that it was supposed to have been Fräulein Sprengel who had given the Golden Dawn its charter.
She went to Paris and introduced herself to Mathers as Fräulein Sprengel.
Oddly enough, Mathers was taken in—which could argue that he was not at that time aware that Fräulein Sprengel had been invented by Westcott.
Mathers soon became suspicious of the couple, whereupon Mrs Horos and her husband stole some of the rituals of the Golden Dawn and fled to London.
There they launched into a career of confidence trickery based on a mixture of spurious occultism, extortion, and sex.
When charged with their crimes they claimed to be leaders of the Golden Dawn.
As a consequence, many of the most intimate secrets of the order were made public and sensationalised by the press.
The publicity, combined with the power struggles within it, sealed the fate of the Golden Dawn.

Crowley had decided to get away before the Horos scandal broke.
Late in 1900 he had gone to Mexico, where he studied the Cabala, practiced yoga, and—according to his own account—finally became a true magician.
When he returned to Paris in 1902 he tried to persuade Mathers to take up yoga.
Mathers declined, and their relation became several degrees colder.
Eventually it turned into hatred, with Mathers and Crowley pronouncing magical curses on one another.
Crowley claimed that his curses were actually responsible for the death of Mathers.

Back in England, Crowley married Rose Kelly, and they travelled to Ceylon and Egypt.
They called themselves the Prince and Princess Chioa Khan.
In Cairo, Crowley performed various rituals with the intention of invoking the Egyptian god Horus.
On April 8, 1904, he received instructions from his wife, who had taken to uttering strange messages while in a trancelike state, to go into a room he had furnished as a temple.
Suddenly he heard a disembodied voice ordering him to write.
What Crowley wrote was an odd document called
The Book of the Law,
which became the cornerstone of his later teaching.
He claimed that it was dictated by Aiwass, one of the Secret Chiefs.
Its basic teaching was expressed in the phrase: ‘Do what you will.’

In 1905 Crowley went to the Himalayas to attempt the climb of Kanchenjunga, third highest mountain in the world.
During the climb he quarrelled with the rest of the team and, when they were buried in an avalanche, made no attempt to help them.
Several were killed.
He deserted his wife and baby in India where the baby died of typhoid.
Rose later became an alcoholic, and died insane.
In a magazine called
The Equinox
Crowley began to publish the secret rituals of the Golden Dawn.
Mathers took him to court for this, but lost his case.

In 1912 Crowley received a communication from another magical organization, the Order of the Temple of the Orient, reproaching him for publishing its secrets.
Puzzled by the accusation, Crowley went to see Theodor Reuss, one of the O.T.O.’s leaders.
It appeared that the secret in question was something called sex magic.
It arose from the system of yoga known as Tantra, which attempts to use the power of sexual energy to fuel the drive toward higher consciousness.
The O.T.O.
had, it seems, developed its own form of Tantric techniques.
Crowley was fascinated, and promptly availed himself of Reuss’s permission to set up an English branch of the O.T.O.
Magical ritual performed by Crowley often involved sex magic—with his disciple Victor Neuberg it was an act of sodomy.
Sex magic remained one of Crowley’s central enthusiasms for the rest of his life—though addiction to heroin and cocaine lessened his sex drive in later years.

In the United States during World War I Crowley had an endless series of mistresses, each of whom he liked to call the ‘Scarlet Woman’.
He undoubtedly had an exceptional sexual appetite, but it must also be said that he genuinely believed that sex magic heightened his self-awareness, and enabled him to tap increasing profound levels of consciousness.
At all events during this period Crowley steadily developed a kind of hypnotic power that it is as difficult to account for as it is to describe.
William Seabrook, an American writer on the occult, witnessed the use of this power one day when he and Crowley were walking on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Crowley began to follow a complete stranger who was walking along the sidewalk.
Crowley followed a few yards behind, keeping in perfect step with him.
Suddenly, Crowley allowed his knees to buckle, and dropped momentarily to the ground.
At exactly the same moment, the man he was following collapsed in precisely the same manner.

By the early 1920s Crowley, who was suffering from asthma, was almost permanently in debt.
A legacy of $12,000 enabled him to move to a small farmhouse in Cefalu, Italy.
He called it the Abbey of Thelema, which means ‘Do what you will’, began to practise magic, and invited disciples to join him.
He provided apparently limitless quantities of drugs for anyone who wished to use them, and attractive women devotees were expected to help Crowley practise his sex magic.
Even with the legacy, however, the money problem remained pressing.
Crowley wrote a novel called
Diary of a Drug Fiend
and started his
Confessions,
which he called his hagiography (the biography of a saint).
He announced that the earth had now passed beyond Christianity and had entered the new epoch of Crowleyanity.
But when one of his disciples died after sacrificing a cat and drinking its blood, the resulting newspaper scandal drove Crowley out of Sicily.

The British press denounced him as ‘the wickedest man in the world’ and, although he loved the publicity, he soon discovered that his notoriety made publishers shy away from his books.
He deserted his disciples, one of whom committed suicide, and married again.
His second wife, like the first, became insane.
Hoping to make money, he sued the English sculptress Nina Hamnett for calling him a black magician.
But when witnesses described Crowley’s magic, the judge stopped the case, declaring he had never heard such ‘dreadful, horrible, blasphemous, and abominable stuff.

By the outbreak of World War II Crowley had added alcoholism to his drug-addiction even though his daily intake of heroin at the time would have killed a dozen ordinary men.
Every now and again he found rich disciples to support him until, inevitably, they lost patience with him.
He retired to a rooming house near Hastings in southern England, and died there in December 1947 at the age of 72.
John Symonds, a writer who had met him in his last years, later wrote his biography—a hilarious but often disturbing book.
Other friends, notably Richard Cammell and Israel Regardie, wrote more sober and admiring accounts of his career.
But it was not until the magical revival that began in the mid-1960s that Crowley’s reputation began to rise again.
Nowadays more than a dozen of his books are in print, and a new generation ardently practises the magic rituals described in them.
The Beast has finally achieved the fame he craved.
Nonetheless, and fortunately, the great age of Crowleyanity seems as far away as ever.

Occult powers seem to be a matter of national temperament.
Second sight and telepathy come naturally to the Irish.
The Germans seem to produce more gifted astrologers than other nations.
The Dutch have produced two of the most gifted clairvoyants of this century: Croiset and Hurkos.
Russia tends to produce mages—men or women who impress by their spiritual authority; no other nation has a spiritual equivalent of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky or even of Rozanov, Merezhkovsky, Soloviev, Fedorov, Berdyaev, Shestov.
Certainly no other nation has come near to producing anyone like Madame Blavatsky, Grigory Rasputin or George Gurdjieff.
Each is completely unique.

Grigory Rasputin’s body was taken from the frozen river Neva, in Petrograd, on January 1, 1917.
He had been murdered three days before, and was one of the most notorious figures in Russia.
Now that he was dead, he would become a legend all over the world—a symbol of evil, cunning, and lust.
If ever you see a magazine story entitled ‘Rasputin, the Mad Monk’, you can be sure it will be full of lurid details of how Rasputin spent his days in drunken carousing, his nights in sexual debauchery; how he deceived the czar and czarina into thinking he was a miracle worker; how he was the evil genius who brought about the Russian Revolution and the downfall of the Romanov dynasty.
It is all untrue.
Yet it makes such a good story that there is little chance that Rasputin will ever receive justice.
The truth about him is that he really was a miracle worker and a man of strange powers.
He was certainly no saint—very few magicians are—and tales of his heavy drinking and sexual prowess are undoubtedly based on fact.
But he was no diabolical schemer.

Rasputin was born in the village of Pokrovskoe in 1870.
His father was a fairly well-to-do peasant.
As a young man, Rasputin had a reputation for wildness until he visited a monastery and spent four months there in prayer and meditation.
For the remainder of his life, he was obsessed by religion.
He married at 19 and became a prosperous carter.
Then the call came again; he left his family and took to the road as a kind of wandering monk.
When eventually he returned, he was a changed man, exuding an extraordinarily powerful magnetism.
The young people of his village were fascinated by him.
He converted one room in his house into a church, and it was always full.
The local priest became envious of his following, however, and Rasputin was forced to leave home again.