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Evangeline Adams' Cottage
Lake
Pasquaney
Newfound Lake is nestled amongst the
picturesque mountains of northern New Hampshire, in what is
called the Lakes Region. Covering 4,451 acres—an area 2.5 x
6 miles—it is the third largest lake in New Hampshire. It
was, on occasion, known by its Native American name, Pasquaney
(“the place where birch-bark for canoes is found”) into the
early 1910s, when R.W. Musgrove attempted to revive its
aboriginal name in A Guide to Pasquaney Lake (or Newfound
Lake) and the Towns upon Its Borders (Bristol, NH: Musgrove,
1910). Although Crowley appears to have been a convert in
referring to the lake by this name, few others followed
suit leading to a great deal of confusion about where
exactly Crowley stayed when he was in New Hampshire.
As Crowley describes it in his
Simon Iff story “The
Pasquaney Puzzle”:
“Lake Pasquaney lies among the mountains
of New Hampshire. It is about 17 miles in circumference.
Bristol, the nearest railway station, a town of 1200
inhabitants, is some three miles from the lower end. The
lake contains several islands, and its shores are dotted
with summer villas, mostly of the long hut type, though here
and there is a more pretentious structure, or a cluster of
boarding-houses. Bristol is about three hours from Boston,
so the lake is a favourite summer resort, even for
week-enders. Automobile parties pass frequently, but keep
mostly to the road on the east shore, that on the west being
very rough. The scenery is said by Europeans who know both
to compare with Scotland or Switzerland without too serious
disadvantage.”
Evangeline Adams' cottage was located in the village of Hebron,
NH, ten miles north of Bristol. According to Musgrove,
“Hebron village is situated very pleasantly on a plain near
the northwest shore of the lake. It contains a church, town
hall, schoolhouse, a store, and several dwellings” (p. 32).
All of these still stand there today, as if the intervening
century never happened. Indeed, Musgrove noted that the
population at the time of his writing was 214, and the
figure has not quite tripled to six hundred today. In his
short story “Every Precaution,” Crowley characterized the
town, “There the air is sweet and pure and keen, the people
are simple and honest and highminded. The climate is
perfect; every power of nature seems joined in gentle
conspiracy to make life what it surely should be”
Between 1913 and 1918, Evangeline Adams owned the
Jonathan K. Pike House, which was built around 1803 as a
parsonage for the village church next door. Around 1915,
Adams added a free-standing, gable-roofed, one and a half
story study to the property. This is the cottage where
Crowley stayed during the summer of 1916. As he described
it,
“It was of wood, built round a chimney stack and
fireplace of brick. The main room faced the lake; and on the
other side of the stack were a bedroom which I did not use
and the kitchen” (The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, 813).
Although Crowley
refers to the dwelling as “a cottage on the shores of Lake Pasquaney
in New Hampshire”, it
really isn’t on the shore. The town Common, North Shore
Road, the schoolhouse, and a stand of trees all lie between
the lake and the House of the Juggler. Indeed, Crowley
clarifies this fact a few pages later in his Confessions
when he writes that the distance between the cottage and
“the water's edge . . . was barely a hundred and fifty yards in
all”. The actual distance may be a little
greater than that, but this gives the general idea. Today,
as it surely did back then, the house sits nestled between
the church and the town store/post office on one side, and
the town library and a tax preparer’s office on the other.
See the
26 July 1916 letter from Crowley to William Sturgis
Bigelow for a diagram of the cottage floor-plan and
surrounding area.
The following description of Adam's
Cottage was originally shared by Dr. Richard Kaczynski:
Aleister Crowley stayed at astrologer
Evangeline Adams's cottage on Newfound Lake during the summer of 1916. It was
here that Crowley:
— Worked on his ill-fated collaboration with Adams, which
she ultimately published in 1927 under her own name as Astrology: Your Place among the Stars and
Astrology: Your
Place in the Sun.
— Wrote
De Thaumaturgia (Liber 633),
Khabs am Pekht
(Liber 300), and
The Gospel According to St. Bernard Shaw
(Liber 888).
Recognized his ongoing initiation into the
9º=2o grade of
Magus . . . thus prompting him to refer to the cottage as “the
House of the Juggler” in Liber 300.
— Experienced his so-called “Star Sponge Vision,” wherein
he realized that Stars exist not as independent points of
light but in an interconnected web. See Crowley’s
description in his commentary on AL I:51, where he calls it
“a vision of a peculiar character which has been of cardinal
importance in my interior life.” Crowley also discusses this in
the sixth of his
Eight Lectures on Yoga.
— Had a rare encounter with ball lightning, about which
he corresponded with William Sturgis Bigelow and Professor Elihu Thomson.
(26
July 1916 letter,
7 August 1916 letter,
8 August 1916 letter,
14 August 1916 letter)
— Invented the card game Pirate Bridge, which briefly
became the next big craze in bridge.
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