James Laver Diary Entry

Thursday, 27 March 1947

from

MUSEUM PIECE: or the Education of an Iconographer

Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964.

(pages 226-231)

I went to Hastings (it was towards the end of March, 1947), took a cab about four miles into the country and was set down as a small Regency house, now a private hotel. Crowley was called and came downstairs to greet me. I was shocked by his appearance. When I had met him at Gwen Otter's in the 'twenties he was still the Crowley of John's [Augustus John] first portrait. A large man he seemed, and rather bloated. Now he seemed to have shrunk both in height and girth and he wore a little straggly beard, like an old bonze. His face was the colour of grey mud. His clothes, a tweed coat, a double-breasted waistcoat and voluminous plus-fours of different material seemed to hang loosely about him. He greeted me with great courtesy, explained that, as he was 'on a diet', he could not lunch with me, but I was to come up to his room afterwards.

We went into a sitting room until lunch was ready and I tried to establish contact. I asked him about the third volume of his Confessions and he told me it was withdrawn on the eve of publication. Only two or three copies existed; he did not possess one himself and could not tell me where to find one. The fourth and fifth volumes, he said, existed only in manuscript—'deposited with trustworthy friends'. They carried the story 'up to Cefalu'.

After the meal I went up to Crowley's room, wondering if he had purposely chosen No. 13. I found him sitting on a divan bed with a little table before him. On another table was his luncheon—a boiled egg which he had not touched. He was drinking a glass of brandy and offered me some. It was excellent. He was in his shirt sleeves and the sleeves were marked with little spots of blood. A few books were on the shelves and on the mantle-piece. Above was his self-portrait in the Chinese manner. Two of his water colours of the Himalayas were on other walls; also a reproduction of John's new portrait. On a chest of drawers stood a painted Egyptian stele and on the little table before him a pile of books, an empty tin to serve as an ashtray, a pipe, several bottles of medicine and a small box containing a hypodermic syringe.

He gave me coffee and a cigarette. He himself smoked a pipe incessantly, only pausing to give himself an injection from time to time. He asked me about my interest in occultism. I said I thought the essence of Magic was summed up in Blake's phrase: 'Push imagination to the point of vision, and the trick is done.'

'Ah,' he said, 'you realise that Magic is something we do to ourselves. It is more convenient to assume the objective existence of an Angel who gives us new knowledge than to allege that our invocation has awakened a supernatural power in ourselves.'

I went on to discuss the power of the mind over the body, and remarked that, if we added to the power of suggestion the possibility of telepathic communication, a rational approach to magical phenomena became possible. Crowley declared that his own approach to Magic was completely rationalistic.

I mentioned certain recent examples of the stigmata, and Crowley told a curious story of one of his pupils, Elfrida Tyrell, who, growing alarmed by his teaching because it was not sufficiently Christian, was told to go away and, using meditations prescribed for her, to concentrate upon the crucifix. After a few days she implored him to go and see her and he found that she had the stigmata on her hands. They do not seem to have been actual wounds because he described them as 'rosy'.

Hardly pausing in his conversation he took up the syringe, dissolved a little scarlet pellet in the glass chamber, rolled back his sleeve and gave himself a piqure. The heroin injection seemed to give him new life. The muddy look in his face vanished, and the wonderful brown eyes glowed. From time to time he turned them upon me, and I began to understand the hypnotic fascination he must once have possessed.

Anxious to stimulate his memory, I brought up the names of several people known to have been interested in Magic. I mentioned MacGregor Mathers. I knew I was treading on dangerous ground. Probably we shall never know the full truth of Crowley's duel with MacGregor Mathers, Head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but it seems to have resulted in a complete victory for Crowley. He was admitted to the Order in 1898 when he was only an apprenti sorcier. 'In those days I was only bluffing,' said Crowley, and I refrained from asking him when the bluffing had stopped and the real Magic had begun.

His teacher had been the magician George Cecil Jones and he made such rapid progress that he was able to mix on terms of equality with such redoubtable occultists as Dr Woodhouse, Dr W. Wynn Westcott, Mathers, Florence Farr and the mysterious lady whose real name was Fräulein Sprengel but who called herself 'Sapiens Dominabitur Astris'. The mystery is made more opaque by Crowley's remark in his Confessions that there was a certain Madame Horos who pretended to be Fräulein Sprengel and 'deceived' Mathers. Whatever that may mean Crowley and Mathers soon became enemies, and when Crowley threatened to publish the rituals of the Order in the third number of The Equinox, due to appear in March, 1910, he was served with an injunction issued on behalf of Mathers. Crowley successfully appealed, and The Equinox duly appeared. After that, as may well be imagined, it was war. Eric Maclagan once told me that Crowley had blackmailed Mathers with such effect that the latter had to leave the country.

Crowley was also at war with the O.T.O. or Ordo Templi Orientis, and apropos of this conflict Crowley told me the following strange story. Once, he said, when he had just published a book (he would not tell me the name of the book—'that would cost you a hundred and fifty pounds') he was visited by three men who accused him of having violated the secret of the O.T.O. He denied it, and one of them, striding across the room, pulled down a book from the shelf, opening it and pointed to a certain passage. The men threatened him with the direst penalties unless he at once took the oath and became a member of the O.T.O. He agreed. The curious thing was that years afterwards—and there should, he said, be no possible illusion about this—he realised that there was a discrepancy in the dates. The threatening visit had actually taken place two years before the publication of the book. I could make nothing of this and to conceal my embarrassment asked him if the O.T.O. still existed. 'Of course,' he said, 'I am the Grand Master in England'.

Now, to my surprise, he spoke of MacGregor Mathers with respect; of Waite [A. E. Waite] with contempt (he called him 'pompous'). He implied that most modern occultists had simply borrowed from him (Crowley) without acknowledgement, but he excepted Dion Fortune, who had always admitted her debt. I mentioned Stanilas de Guaïta and he said he found his works incomprehensible. He told a story I couldn't understand of some woman who had taken one of his book to Germany. Hitler had got hold of it and had used its technique; but he had misunderstood it and so brought himself to disaster.

Feeling that the conversation was leaving reality behind, I asked him if he had known William Seabrook, the author of Magic in the Modern World. 'Yes,' he said, he had known him and had even stayed with him in a shack somewhere in America. Seabrooke stole all his material, particularly that used in The Magic Island. He had disgusting habits, even allowing his dog to lick his face. Crowley seemed particularly shocked by this. Seabrooke drank himself to death. He always travelled with a case-load of chains, being a masochist as well as a sadist.

We spoke of the Tarot and he seemed surprised that I knew so much about it without having read his book. I replied that I gad read Papus. 'Ah,' he said, 'my opposite number in France.' This was a bloomer; Papus has been dead for about fifty years. He produced The Book of Thoth, his own work on the Tarot, and allowed me (for a price) to take a copy away with me. It had elaborate coloured illustration, by Lady Harris [Frieda Harris]. 'I inspired them all,' said Crowley. 'I made her do some of them five times before I was satisfied.'

I had read enough in occultist literature to be able to talk the language. We spoke of the Body of Light and the methods of its projection, the vibration of God-names' the evocation by deosil circumambulation, the banishing by the same process widdershins, the consecration of the circle. At last Crowley growled, 'It seems to me that you know more than you have any right to know, without being one of us.'

Rather foolishly, I asked him if he was acquainted with the Chinese divining rods. He produced a set from a cigar box and spread them out on the bed. 'I must ask you not to touch them. They are full of my emanations. I use them every day.' I did not touch them. He saw me to the door with great courtesy, and I returned to London.