Crowley the Painter in Cefalù and

the Origins of the Palermo Collection

by

Giuseppe Di Liberti

On 1 March 1920, at 11 bis rue de Neuville in Fontainebleau, Aleister Crowley consulted the I Ching to determine the spot of his future home. Living in Fontainebleau was too costly for Crowley, whose resources, at the time, had gone down to just several thousand pounds sterling inherited from two aunts. Ten days earlier, Leah Hirsig, the 'Scarlet Woman' who played a central role in his life, had given birth to Anne Léa, nicknamed Poupée. Crowley had also taken in Leah's first son, Hansi, as well as Ninette Shumway and her son Howard. Leah had met Ninette on the transatlantic crossing between New York and Europe and had hired her as governess. Thus, in March 1920, while Leah and Poupée were in London for a few weeks, the I Ching indicated the spot: it would be Sicily, more precisely Cefalù, a small town almost halfway between Palermo and Messina. A month later, Crowley, Ninette, Hansi and Howard left Fontainebleau. They went first to Naples and stayed at the Hôtel Métropole, where Crowley carried out a sex magic ritual for a 'successful and speedy arrival'. They arrived in Cefalù. Leah and the baby would join them two weeks later. After a first night spent in a tiny hotel (maybe the Hotel Barranco), in which Crowley did not wish to stay another night, in the morning a certain Don Giosué, owner of a spice bazaar, introduced himself to Crowley, telling him he had a villa to let. It consisted of a house, not particularly comfortable, in the heart of olive groves, in a district called Santa Barbara, opposite the cliff-face of Cefalù. Even if the villa did not correspond to the ideal temple he had dreamed of, Crowley was enthusiastic and by 2 April had already set himself up in Santa Barbara. He immediately named the villa the 'Abbey of Thelema' (an obvious reference to Rabelais's Gargantua et Pantagruel). On his calling cards and notepaper, in order to give his establishment a serious appearance and thereby attract new acolytes, Crowley had written 'Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum', even if the Abbey was sometimes called by its residents 'Horsel' (contraction of 'Whore's Cell').

Two weeks later, on 14 April, Crowley and Leah, using the names Sir Alastor de Kerval and the Countess Leah Harcourt, signed the rental contract for the villa owned by Baron Carlos La Calce.

The villa, with its thick whitewashed stone walls, comprised five small rooms that opened out into a larger central room. During the first months of his stay in Cefalù, Crowley dedicated himself to the transformation of the villa into an abbey. The central room became the Sancta Sanctorum of this new temple, where the small community celebrated their rites. On the floor, Crowley drew a magic circle and a pentagram. In the centre of the circle was placed an altar, alongside which was a copy of the stélé of Ankh-f-n-Khonsu, a copy of Liber Legis (the sacred text of Thelema) and ritual tools. Crowley also painted the walls and internal doors of the house. The subjects depicted often had a sexual connotation. This is particularly so in the case of the murals of the 'Room of Nightmares'. Crowley explained the function of this room in a text about the Abbey, in which he also gives this detailed description:

One of the rooms of the College has been decorated by the Lord Abbot, who is celebrated, not only as a Magician, but as a big-game hunter, poet, explorer, and painter, to carry out Spiritual Training. The principal features are three large walls painted in fresco, representing Earth, Hell, and Heaven, in a riot of colour and sensuous imagery. The purpose of these pictures is to enable people, by contemplation, to purify their minds. . . . The purpose of this room is to pass students of the Sacred Wisdom through the ordeal of contemplating every possible phantom which can assail the soul.

If, on the one hand, the images had a contemplative and liberating function for the Thelemites, on another hand the mere practice of painting took on the form of spiritual research for Crowley. This period spent in Cefalù was, in this sense, definitely the happiest. John Symonds wrote: 'During the spring evenings, the rays of the setting sun coming from beyond Palermo, he painted and looked down into the wine-coloured ocean. He was moved by the beauty of the world and observed that he could count on two hours' visual opera every night.' But painting played a role in this period in Crowley's life even during the most dramatic moments, such as the loss of his daughter Poupée. On 12 October, the day of his forty-fifth birthday, on returning from the hospital in Palermo where the little girl would die two days later, Crowley set to painting without a break.

His time in Sicily, particularly the summer of 1920, is among the most intense periods of production and experimentation for the English magician. As Kenneth Grant observed:

Aleister Crowley's stay in Cefalù was the peak and the crucial moment in his magical career, his stay in Cairo in 1904, where he received through Aiwass the strange text known at Liber L [sic], The Book of the Law, taking second place. In Cefalù, Crowley focused his creative energy day and night in the attempt to capture the intrinsic significance of Liber L and he definitely created a link with Aiwass who, from that moment, seemed even to supplant his daemon Adonai in his magical universe.

Life at the Abbey and the training of the Thelemites was organised rigorously. Moreover, rules were so severe that even Crowley reflected with irony on the impossibility of respecting them completely, even if the training of disciples was for him the central mandate of the Abbey. The day was punctuated by a series of ritual moments. From waking, while the 'Law' was announced ('So what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law'), all responding 'Love is the Law, Love under Will'), all main activities, work, meals and obviously prayers (above all addressed to the sun), were organised in a ritual manner.

Nevertheless, it should be remembered that during the three years spent in Cefalù—from April 1920 to April 1923—Crowley was often absent from the Abbey. He frequently went to Palermo, to amuse himself and also to stock up on heroin, cocaine and opium. In June 1920 he left for Tunis to meet Jane Wolfe, a Hollywood actress fascinated by the magician's magical doctrines, but who ultimately missed their assignation. Crowley painted a portrait of the actress and participated in two rituals led by the Arab magician Mohammed Tsaida. In February and March 1921 Crowley went to Paris, visiting there again in February 1922 before finally passing through London, only returning in June to Cefalù, where he finished editing his novel The Diary of a Drug Fiend.

The life and the residents of the Abbey could only arouse the curiosity of the inhabitants of Cefalù. The Thelemites only went to the village to buy provisions, but clearly the habits of the community—such as the echoes of orgiastic rituals, the corporal punishments meted out on the beach of Kalura, the frequent arrival of new residents from abroad—could only stimulate the imagination of a population made up for the most part by fishermen and shepherds. In 1923 Crowley was removed from Italian territory by a decree from Mussolini, and it is understandable, aside from suspicions of espionage, that it was offences against public morality that preoccupied the Fascist authorities.

Rare were the people among the inhabitants of Cefalù who could approach the Abbey and establish friendly relations or intellectual exchange with Crowley's community, Paolo Cicero, a young painter who at the time worked in Cefalù, was without doubt one of these people.

Born in 1885 in Castelbuono, a small village of the Madonie, the mountainous region that extends behind Cefalù, he moved to Palermo in 1911 to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti. The first years of the century were for the Sicilian city a veritable golden age, characterised by great artistic vitality. Two notable personalities are Ernesto Basile, architect and major figure in Sicilian art nouveau, and Francesco Lo Jacono, indubitably the most significant Sicilian painter at the turn of the twentieth century. Cicero attended the Academia while Basile was its director and Lo Jacono taught painting there. This latter was for Cicero his technical reference point throughout the whole of his artistic career. During this period he travelled widely through Italy, up to the moment when he was called up as an army officer and obliged to leave for Albania, where he remained in his post from the end of 1915 to 1919. Returning to Sicily, he re-enrolled at the Academia, graduating in sculpture in 1921. That same year, he won a teaching post at the Regio Istituto di Disegno Professionale in Cefalù, a vocational drawing school. Thus he found himself in the small Sicilian town during the same time Crowley created and developed his Abbey. From time to time, Cicero received important commissions. At this time, for example, he went to the island of Corfu to execute a series of frescos. Cicero was a curious and anxious person: he spent his free time riding his motorcycle around the Sicilian coast and travelled a great deal, seeking to understand what was being created in Italian artistic avant-gardes.

It is valid to think that Cicero could have been approached by the English magician, perhaps through curiosity rather than a specific esoteric interest, and perhaps also because of their shared artistic activity. After all, Cicero enjoyed a certain prestige in the town of Cefalù as a teacher and artist, and it is more than probable that Crowley made contact with him when he was looking to get hold of the necessary supplies for painting. It could well be that Cicero supplied the magician with fine art products from Palermo, which seems to be confirmed by an analysis of the materials Crowley used. What is certain is that the paintings that form the Palermo Collection were at some time acquired by Cicero, doubtless when the small Abbey community collapsed into terrible penury and misery, following Crowley's deportation.

Ninette, who stayed at the Abbey up to 1927, was obliged finally through need, in order to survive, to sell the bulk of the furniture and objects left behind by Crowley. It is through the exchange of material aid that Cicero must have salvaged the paintings. Cicero died in August 1932, and having no children, left all of his goods to his wife. Among his possessions was a crate containing sheets and paintings making up the Palermo Collection, wrapped up in old newspapers. Neither Cicero's wife nor the person who was her heir after her death were interested in the contents of the crate, which remained unsuspected and unknown up to the moment when it came into the possession of its current owner. This latter, on studying the contents of the crate as part of his research into Cicero, discovered the paintings.

In 2006 Professor Riccardo Mazzarino of the Academia de Belle Arti de Palermo carried out a painstaking restoration of the works. This restoration consisted specifically of removing a significant layer of dust and strengthening the paintings which were highly fragile for two reasons: the uneven quality of the pigments used (Crowley did not hesitate to use paints without oil at times, such as certain whites for grounds) and the poor conditions in which they were stored. Apparently Cicero, shortly after having acquired the painting, removed the canvases from their mounts in order to roll them up for storage in the crate. He left them to the mercy of passing time, dust and humidity. Was this to remove himself from this dark side of the human soul of which these works once again speak to us today?

[Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies, Issue #3, Fulgur Esoterica, pp 38-9, Spring 2013.]