Aleister Crowley in America Read online

  O’Rourke, who is a wealthy Scotch-Irishman, owning vast estates in different parts of the old country, will stay in Mexico until further orders.

  Mexico would never see the Chevalier O’Rourke or Baron von Eckenstein ever again. One wonders if they were missed, and if so, by whom.

  Was Crowley a secret agent in Mexico?

  Assessing Spence’s theory regarding Crowley’s alleged employment as a British government agent undermining Legitimist politics, and even facilitating oil deals with the Mexican government, two possibilities present themselves. Crowley’s Legitimism, while sincere, also offered access to secret information of interest to Britain’s secret services, and he may then have played a role in Mexico on behalf of those services. The second possibility is that he was engaged at some level in covert Legitimist activity, to which he was, at least initially, committed, in a manner indifferent to British government interests.

  Regarding the first possibility, it ought to come as no surprise that there is bound to be a level of intelligence activity regarding which regular intelligence officers may be uninformed, and while such suppositions may invite ridicule as mere fuel for fictional fantasies, who could seriously deny the usefulness to power of such undertakings? Crowley could keep a secret. He could also keep his word of loyalty, to the highest cause of which he was aware. In respect of which, it is significant that when in May 1891 a teenage Crowley entered Malvern College, Worcestershire, and joined the Cadet Corps of the 1st Worcestershire Royal Artillery Volunteers, he made an oath of loyalty to the British crown. Curiously deleted by editors John Symonds and Kenneth Grant from their published version of Crowley’s Confessions, Crowley’s original account shows that despite fierce criticisms of much of British government and society, Crowley always recalled his first oath of loyalty to the crown: “every time I perform an act in support of my original oath, I strengthen the link [to England].”9

  He made other oaths too. On March 17, 1900, he had formulated an oath regarding the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin, submitting himself “utterly to the Will of the Divine.”

  To despise utterly the things and the opinions of this world lest they hinder me in doing this.

  To use my powers only to the Spiritual Well-being of all with whom I may be brought into contact.

  To give no place to evil: and to make eternal war against the Forces of Evil: even until they be redeemed unto the Light.

  To conquer the temptations.

  To banish the illusions.

  To put my whole trust in the Only and Omnipotent Lord God: as it is written “Blessed are they that put their trust in Him.”

  To uplift the Cross of Sacrifice and Suffering: and to cause my Light to shine before men that they may glorify my Father which is in Heaven.10

  The whole tenor of Crowley’s comments on the subject of loyalty are consistent from the time of the outbreak of World War I to the end of his life; that is, that while he maintained a position as an abrasive, unsparing and prophetic critic of what he regarded as the follies of his country, he was essentially and instinctively loyal to Britain and strove for her ultimate welfare. One suspects this position arose out of earlier conflicts in his mind, and it would appear that his experience in Mexico was determinative in this regard.

  Crowley in 1900 may have been involved with some sort of covert activity in Mexico, but in a manner indifferent to British government interest. It is possible that as a “bigoted Legitimist,” as he described himself with hindsight, he was in 1900 to 1901 still operating in loose association with Mathers and his Legitimist colleagues’ dream of a Legitimist revolution in Spain and elsewhere (despite that dream’s dismal failure in 1899), though it must also be said that the possibility of a Crowley engaged in Legitimist politics does not necessarily preclude the other possibility, that he also felt called to serve a paradoxically superior service.

  Until we are graced with hard evidence for Spence’s hypothesis of Crowley’s employment as a pro-government agent insinuating himself into Legitimist politics, my own conclusion must be that Crowley went to Mexico initially with some matter in mind related to Mathers’s Legitimist activities. The idea of going had, he stated in Confessions, occurred to him only after meeting colleagues of Mathers’s in Paris, just returned from Mexico. Once in Mexico, and acquainted with the facts on the ground, I suggest his thinking on the subject, and his attitude to Mathers himself, evolved significantly, quite possibly after discussing hard realities with Medina, who could easily have shown him what was involved in terms of Legitimist usefulness to Catholic political intentions. I suspect Medina either positively or negatively assisted Crowley to “see the light” on this matter and remove from his eyes some of the scales of his historical romanticism. Crowley’s subsequent activities suggest strongly a determination to eschew politics and to explore more deeply magic (including Buddhism and raja yoga with Allan Bennett), poetry, and mountaineering as principal lines of activity. As far as fading enthusiasm for Legitimism goes, one discerns signs of a young romantic giving all for the “impossible dream,” only to see the raw windmills behind the dream. Crowley-Quixote was an “impossible dream” kind of person, which explains something of his attraction, but the world is a cold knife, and heaven, warm flesh.

  “Explain me the riddle of this man.” Indeed.

  SIX

  The Mother’s Tragedy

  HERE, in the home of a friend,

  Here, in the mists of a lie,

  The pageant moves on to the desolate end

  Under a sultry sky.

  Noon is upon us, and Night,

  Spreading her wings unto flight,

  Visits the lands that lie far in the West,

  Where the bright East is at peace on her breast:

  Opposite quarters unite.

  Soon is the nightfall of Destiny here;

  Nature’s must pass as her hour is gone by.

  Only another than she is too near,

  Gloom in the sky.

  THE SPIRIT OF TRAGEDY’S OPENING LINES;

  THE MOTHER’S TRAGEDY, 1899

  After a depressing experience of brutish materialism in vice-ridden El Paso, followed by a casual act of grisly mutilation in Juarez across the Rio Grande, Aleister Crowley climbed aboard the Southern Pacific Railroad train at El Paso station, Texas, on April 24, 1900. Bound north-west for California, the locomotive roared and puffed its way across the Texas border into New Mexico, then on through Arizona and California for a day before reaching a piston-screeching halt at San Francisco station at Townsend Street and 3rd.

  Pale as a hacienda, the colonial station with its graceful, roomy arches, and cupolas looked back to the West Coast’s Spanish past. Crowley probably didn’t take it in properly. Suffering from a bad cold and acute stomachache, close to vomiting all day, he twice resorted to an opium grain for relief. The dust and heat of the long journey had got to him, probably the food too.

  Judging by Thursday’s edition of the San Francisco Call, Crowley arrived to find a city agog over the imminent arrival of President McKinley and his wife. Amid scenes of wild enthusiasm, America’s first couple toured a visibly grateful country. The Call announced with something akin to reverence that the president had chosen to reside in friend Henry T. Scott’s house in the city, on the corner of Clay and Laguna Streets, for six days in May, during which time San Francisco would be the effective seat of American government: a moment in Frisco’s history so proudly anticipated that the Southern Pacific was cutting ticket prices to help people come into the city from out-lying areas to witness the celebrations. It all resembled a gilded epiphany of royalty. Typically, Crowley did not regard the fervor worth mentioning: all so swiftly passing, headlines trodden in the puddles of time.

  Apart from the paper’s doubtless staggering news that women from the Ohio Society were planning a banquet for the visitors, the other headline of the day—Terror Holds Full Sway in Cape Colony—exclaimed an unlikely story that the British could lose South Africa because of draconia
n arrests and alleged intimidation of Dutch settlers, with four Cape Colony newspaper editors being arrested and a campaign of espionage and internment camps with families guarded by armed troops under military justice. The report somewhat echoed Chevalier O’Rourke’s apparently prophetic assessment of “terror” in the previous September’s Two Republics in Mexico. Meanwhile, the Cuban Constitutional Convention requested a reluctant U.S. administration to grant the island its independence.

  When Crowley returned to San Francisco in 1915 he noted how much he missed the vivid character and multifarious architecture of the pre-earthquake city, but at his first visit he felt unimpressed by its whirl of pleasure seeking and “frenzied money-making.” Indeed, San Francisco in 1901 must have been fairly traumatic after the laid-back tempo of Mexico under the “Porfiriato.”

  A stroll or streetcar ride northeast up old Market Street from its intersection at Hyde, Grove, and 8th Streets would eventually have taken him past the newly constructed Call Building: no straight-up, break-your-neck-to-see-the-top, steel and glass shard this, but a stately “skyscraper” of pride and shapeliness—the tallest office building in the west, as luxuriantly apportioned as a dowager at a deb’s ball. New buildings of commanding size were well into construction amid the plethora of four-story Victorian shops and offices in brick, wood, and stone.

  As the cable car trundled steadily past the awnings to the right of the Emporium Department store—a mecca for ladies in long, dark dresses, buttoned to the chin—the view up the very straight and very wide street was yanked into perspective by the tall, thin tower of the Ferry Building, a guiding sentinel or pharos in central vision at the far end of a sea of crisscrossing traffic, its huge clock reminding everyone that time is money and that Market Street, like everything else, had a definitive, unavoidable end. A scattering of the latest motorcars wove and chugged their way in the sun around pedestrians and tramlines, impertinently overtaking horse-drawn carts and city water wagons unhindered by traffic restrictions, even U-turning in the middle of the bustling street as men in bowlers and dark suits took their chances dodging the ever-moving surge of a street scored with tram rails, horses’ hooves, and grinding wooden wheels. And behind it all, the wheels of fortune, of fortunes made and lost every hour, ticking away in tune with the Ferry Building’s clock and the port’s swift exchange of Pacific stock.

  Crowley made his way to his favorite part of San Francisco—Chinatown—where the solitary traveler lit joss sticks in “their temple,” and had his fortune read by “Wong Gong.” Crowley dutifully noted Wong’s prognostication in his red Mexican notebook purchased from Al Libro Mayor (“The Ledger”), owned by Swiss editor, printer, and picture-postcard maker, Juan Kaiser Schwab (1858–1916), San Luis Potosi 16. But for the business stamp in the notebook we should never have suspected Crowley ever visited San Luis Potosi, north of Guanajuato Province.

  What past and future did Gong perceive and foresee?

  Good family.

  Quick learner.

  Only one or two brothers and sisters [Crowley had a sister who died in infancy].

  From 1 to 5 all right.

  5 to 10 sickness.

  10 to 15 good studies.

  15–17 much loved by girl.

  15–20 everything very good.

  20–25 great aunt died.

  Age right.

  I make much and spend much money.

  Everything all right.

  25, 26, 27 be careful.

  28 change till 34 I marry.

  35 to 40 all right make much money.

  41–60 best time in my life. Very happy &c.

  61–67 all right.

  68 bad obstacle to pass but if I do, live to 75.

  3 kids only once married. Rich wife.

  Better luck in 1st 6 months of year & in 7th 15 days of month. Lots of good friends.1

  Not bad, Wong, but wrong after 35. What the oracle did not impart was that the previous month city doctors had detected bubonic plague in Chinatown, which the authorities refused to do anything about; a quarantine, it was whispered, would damage trade: plague only killed people, after all, and mostly Chinamen. Despite unknowingly gambling with his life, and seeing some unpleasant sights—the corpse of a cocaine addict turned his stomach—Crowley felt drawn to the old Chinatown and its inhabitants, which was fortunate as he was heading toward their homelands.

  I realized instantly their [the Chinese] spiritual superiority to the Anglo-Saxon, and my own deep-seated affinity to their point of view. The Chinaman is not obsessed by the delusion that the profits and pleasures of life are really valuable. A man must really be a very dull brute if, attaining all his ambition, he finds satisfaction. The Eastern, from Lao Tsu and the Buddha to Zoroaster and Ecclesiastes, feels in his very bones the futility of earthly existence. It is the first postulate of his philosophy.2

  It would be interesting to voice that view in Chinatown today.

  Crowley stayed in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel for nine days, during which time he began his epic poem, Orpheus. As he wrote, he became aware how much his ideas had changed and were still changing on many fronts. Among these changes we may include his attitude toward Legitimist politics.

  Fig. 6.1. The Palace Hotel, San Francisco, circa 1880

  On April 26, Crowley wrote on Palace Hotel stationery to Gerard Kelly in an ecstasy of feverish composition, heightened by his solitariness on the Pacific’s cusp:

  Dear Gerald,

  I am Aleister Crowley c/o Arnhold & Karberg, Hong Kong, China [he would pick up Gerald’s reply there].*51 I am going to write Orpheus to be all lyrics.

  You wait! Bye-bye

  A.C.

  His gory body down the stream was sent

  Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore.

  What a finale!

  Chorus of universal Nature 41 pp.

  Soliloquy of Muse herself.

  Death-song of Orpheus

  Chorus of . . . making hideous roar 350pp.

  Dialogue of swift Hebrus & Lesbian shore

  Climax—mystical marriage of Orpheus to Sappho—served hot with fuck sauce

  And what a Hell scene I can write! You wait. I’m mad with delight.4

  On Monday April 29, Crowley awoke to widespread storms. The Call reported that “farmers rejoice over goodly rain,” which dampened nobody’s enthusiasm, for Mr. and Mrs. McKinley were in the best of health. Little did McKinley know, amid the hysteria of admirers, that he had only four more months to live before fateful assassination brought grief to a poorly Mrs. McKinley and shock to a bereaved nation.

  The next day, Crowley was still hard at his new epic poem, writing ecstatically to Kelly on Palace Hotel notepaper.

  I’ve written 80 pages of Orpheus. All lyrics all Nature. Some is I know good. I have written very fast: most difficult metres—double rhymes and four or five words rhyming and that sort of thing. I never seem to hesitate. On Sunday I was a nervous wreck.

  Comic opera (sure the mark!) cured me. . . .

  I have bought a most marvelous ivory Buddha am sitting before it now with joss-sticks burning. . . .

  Going to McGovern-Gardner fight tonight and sail for Sandwich Islands [old British name for Hawaii] Friday. Christ! I wish you were here.5

  The above letter was undated, but we can date it precisely because Crowley informs his distant friend that he’s off to see the “McGovern-Gardner fight tonight.” This was the biggest contest in America that night of Tuesday, April 30, 1901. The pugilists’ struggle was announced thus on April 25 in the Indianapolis Journal:

  Unscrupulous managers and fighters have done much recently to bring pugilism into bad repute with the public. There is more money in the business for fighters who are on the square than for men who engage in fake contests, but the latter class kill the sport. McGovern’s coming fight in San Francisco will determine whether the sport is dead or alive on the Pacific coast. Should there be the least sign of a fake about the bout it is very probable that boxing contests wil
l be a thing of the past in that part of the country, but should McGovern prove that it had nothing to do with Gans laying down in Chicago and put up a fast exhibition in San Francisco the sport will be revived.6

  “Terrible Terry” McGovern had fought Oscar Gardner on March 9, 1900, but the result was disputed, leading to the San Francisco rematch at the Mechanics Pavilion, a massive indoor arena known as the “Madison Square Garden of the West” built in brick in 1882 to seat nearly eleven thousand on Larkin, Grove, Polk, and Hayes Streets, lost to fire in 1906. The fight had come to San Francisco because the State of New York had temporarily banned professional prizefights: this fact alone would have ensured Crowley’s presence; he hated prohibitions. Above an oval photographic portrait of mustachioed referee Harry Corbett, wearing a smart, fabric-rich suit and cravat, the San Francisco Call headline warmed up readers for the Main Event.

  HARRY CORBETT IS SELECTED TO REFEREE THE BIG BATTLE

  Terry McGovern and Oscar Gardner Are in Fine Fettle and Ready for Their Fistic Engagement This Evening—The Boxers Meet Before the Camera and Exchange Warm and Hearty Greetings

  McGovern made the first lead: “Hello, Oscar,” he said.—Gardner came back with the same greeting and the honors were easy.

  “I never saw you looking so fine, Oscar,” said Terry with a side step that brought him closer to Gardner. They both led with their rights and warmly shook hands. In reply to Gardner’s polite query about his health, McGovern said he was “finer than silk.”

  Both donned ring costumes and took up fighting positions before the camera.—They eyed each other narrowly and chaffed each other somewhat, but withheld fighting for another time.

  Gardner and McGovern later called on the club’s physician, Dr. W. C. Fidenmuller, and underwent a physical examination. Both men were found to be in splendid fettle and capable of making a fast battle.

  The following is what Crowley saw that night, according to Charles “Charley” White’s article on Wednesday, May 1, in the San Francisco Call.