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ATLANTA JOURNAL SUNDAY MAGAZINE Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. circa Mid to Late October 1919
POET-PAINTER WHO STUDIED MAGIC UNDER INDIAN SAVANTS VISITS ATLANTA.
Aleister Crowley, an Authority on Occultism, Outlines First Steps In How to Become a Magician.
By Angus Perkerson
You can be a magician.
In six months, by learning to breathe properly, you can take the first step toward levitation.
Why that means lifting your body from the ground without material assistance—such, for instance, as an elevator, or a rope, or a boot.
You can rise one foot, two feet, without any outside aid whatever.
You can learn to control your astral body, that misty affair which goes on journeys over the world while you are asleep. You are dreaming, for instance, of some far-off place, on the moon, or in Egypt, or maybe in Oskosk, Mich., and all the while your material body is snuggled in bed under a couple of army blankets, but meantime your astral self is visiting those distant spots. Yes, even the moon.
Aleister Crowley, who knows more about magic than any other white man alive, says you can do these magical things.
He says that magic really isn’t magic in the sense that it is a thing without laws.
It is a science, but the trouble is the
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You know—molecules pressing together; drop a pin and it disturbs the balance the balance of the whole universe—that sort of thing.
“Well,” added Mr. Crowley, “if you change the strain you change the tree. Maybe you turn it into a monkey, but probably not into an automobile, because that would take more energy than you could command.
It was disappointing. An automobile would have been much more desirable than a monkey. But then a monkey isn’t so bad. It might be a trained one. Maybe it could climb a pole.
“How do you do it?” It was an eager question. “Could you—“
He shook his head.
The explanation of it all is too abstruse for the uninitiated. That was the affect of his words. One must study and learn before one can understand.
Exasperating as it is, the recipe can’t be given here for changing saplings into Packards.
For a moment, Mr. Crowley felt the little lock of hair he has left on the top of his head, suggesting Mephistopheles, just as his knickerbockers do golf—he didn’t tell how to change even a scrub tree into a Ford, but he did give instructions in the first steps of “How to be a magician.”
This was on the porch of a farm house a few miles from Decatur.
The walls are decorated with original drawings by the best known artists in America; the back of the house is to the road and the front porch is to the woods; it has the effect of the usual cottage on the outside and a studio—a most attractively odd studio—on the inside.
But the prime consideration on the farm itself is cord wood now. Next year it will be cotton.
The farm is the home of Mr. and Mrs. William B. Seabrook, and Aleister Crowley—the most unusual Englishman in America—is their guest. While Mr. Seabrook was doing newspaper work in New York, being at that time head of one department of a big newspaper syndicate, he and Mr. Crowley became friends.
Recently Mr. and Mrs. Seabrook returned to Atlanta, changing from a studio in Greenwich Village to the farm house near Decatur.
For the moment it is hard to leave the farm to go back to the story of magic. There has never been such a contradiction before as this farm presents.
As far as the farming itself goes, the keynote is hard work—cotton and corn and cord wood. Art stuff has absolutely no place there. New York’s art colony is at the other end of the world.
But leave the farm and step into the farmhouse and there you see drawings by Tony and Sarg, by a dozen other artists of the biggest city, and you might imagine yourself near Washington square. Really no neat little cottage of four rooms was ever made more interesting, more original, more pleasing.
But to go back to the porch. As we sat there the outlook included a cord of oak wood that Mr. Crowley had helped cut, not by waving a wand, but by heaving an axe.
The only occult thing in sight was one of his paintings.
Reproductions of Four of Mr. Crowley’s Paintings
As a poet Mr. Crowley is given high place in the school to which Swinburne, Baudelaire and Verlaine belong.
As a painter, he is the sole member of a school to which no one but himself on the topside of the earth belongs.
A graduate of Cambridge university, England, a world traveler, a painter of “subconscious” pictures, a poet as classical in his verse as he is unclassified in his paintings, a member of the Indian magi, a man better acquainted with men of art and literature than any one else of this day, not excepting Frank Harris—that is Aleister Crowley.
Twice he has walked across the Sahara desert; many times across Broadway; he has led mountain-climbing expeditions into the most remote corners of the earth; he has been everywhere, done everything; except visit Georgia, and now he’s doing that.
“Any one who will work hard enough can learn the simple things about what you call magic,” he said, tilting back his chair and taking a glance at the cord wood. “Learn to do three things and everything is in your power. They are quite easy to state: “1. Learn to breathe properly. “2. Learn to sit absolutely still. “3. Learn to concentrate. That is, think of only one thing.
“Learn those three things and you can perform the tricks of magic. You can accomplish levitation. You can raise your physical body off the ground. You can control your astral body. But beyond these tricks—these little things—you will accomplish the greater things of being wiser, happier, more capable.
“I began to study magic when I was a boy. I continued to study it in India by living as one of the people. I have sate at the gate of an Indian village in nothing but a loin cloth, seeking for knowledge.
“From my long experience, I can assure you that the people there knew things of which this part of the world doesn’t dream—things we should learn, that we must learn if we are to develop.
“The trick of levitation, of raising the body from the ground without any help, of just hanging in midair, can be learned easily. Watch.”
He breathed in very slowly, breathed out, then breathed in again.
“Fill your lungs full,” he directed. Breathe out for twenty seconds. Breathe in for ten seconds. Hold it for thirty seconds. Learn to do that properly, and in six months time you can take the first steps toward levitation. First a slight perspiration will break out over the body, then the body will become rigid, then it will rise a little way from the floor and sink back again—something like the way a frog hops—and finally, if you proceed far enough absolute levitation, suspension of the body in the air, will be accomplished.
“Such things are done in India. They can be done here. But the real thing is that magic gives you control of all your powers.
“That.” He added, “is the end of the first lesson.”
And it was enough. Too much magic is a strain on the mind even in the Arabian Nights,” and when you meet it on the highway just beyond Decatur it begins to flabbergast you.
As a change from supernatural to everyday things Mr. Crowley showed some of his paintings, but it wasn’t such a change at that. As he explained recently in the New York Evening World, he is, in the way of painting, a “subconscious impressionist.”
When he came to New York in 1915, he established a radical magazine in Greenwich Village called the “International.” But he couldn’t find any artist who could draw the sort of covers he wanted.
“I got so disgusted I decided to draw the covers myself,” he said. “I’d never studied art and never painted a picture in my life. But I got so interested in the work that I decided to give up the editorship of the magazine and to go in for art.
“Whatever you do, don’t call me a futurist or a cubist. My art really is subconscious or automatic. I’ll tell you why. When I found I couldn’t paint a portrait, I didn’t decide to go abroad and study for thirty or forty years.
“Instead, I walked up to a blank canvas one day and, standing very close to it, I placed the wet brush before it and shut my eyes. I had no preconceived idea of what I was going to paint. My hand simply moved automatically over the canvas.
“I don’t know how long I worked in that subconscious way, but you can imagine my astonishment when I found that I had painted a likeness of a friend whom I hadn’t seen in many years. It was that person’s dead soul I had painted. I have it here around my studio somewhere.
He was referring to the painting.
But this article was wrong in leaving the impression that Mr. Crowley paints only dead souls. Reference to some of his pictures printed here will prove that.
One is entitled, “Two Fish Playing at Sunset.” Another, not printed, is termed, “Bolshevik Girl With a Wart Admiring Trotzky.” All deal with similarly interesting subjects, and all are treated with similar unconventionality.
But painting is the least of Mr. Crowley’s efforts. Poetry is the most important.
The Daily Chronicle, an English publication, said of him: “Here is a master voice in song, and none the less masterly because of its being entirely unknown.”
Altogether Mr. Crowley has printed something like forty volumes.
In a thick book of over 300 pages [The Star in the West], devoted entirely to a critical estimate of Crowley’s writings, Captain J.F.C. Fuller says:
“On surveying his work, two essential facts grip our understanding: First, the super-abundance of his genius; and, second, the diversity of his form. His poetry is his own, and he gives it to us as it is written without respect of persons or opinions, for his masters have been the greatest of our race. In these poems we find a preponderance of Swinburne, Blake, Browning, Keats, Shelley and Rossetti.”
In addition to poetry, painting, magic and those two walks across the Sahara, here are some other achievements of Mr. Crowley.
He has climbed all the mountains that are worth climbing in the Alps, in north Wales, on the mainland of Scotland, in Mexico.
In 1902 he was second in command of an expedition in India to climb the second highest mountain in the world. Bad weather prevented him from reaching the summit, but a record was broken for the length of time spent by the party on a mountain glacier.
He traveled over India and Burma shooting big game, and returned to Europe by way of Egypt, taking a studio in Paris.
He spent a good deal of time in north Africa, taking advantage of the opportunity to take two walks across the Sahara.
Subsequently he traveled in France, England, Russia, Germany and Sweden. He went everywhere except to Georgia. Now he is here.
Certainly Atlanta has never had a more unusual visitor. |
