Vittoria Cremers

Born: circa 1859 in Pisa, Italy.

Died: Unknown.

Vittoria Cremers, born Vittoria Cassini, in Pisa, Italy, was the daughter of the Italian, Manrico Vittorio Cassini and his British wife, Agnes Elizabeth Rutherford. She was an Italian Theosophist.

Vittoria made her way to New York, where she was proprietor and editor of the Stage Gazette. Around February 1886 she married Russia’s Baron Louis Cremers, who was the son of a famous St. Petersburg banking family, the Rothschilds, with a net worth of $40 million. A couple of weeks after the wedding, she reportedly told her husband that she “could not possibly love any man.” It was at this time that he learned of her habit of going out on the town dressed as a man, and Crowley later reports that “She boasted of her virginity and of the intimacy of her relations with Mabel Collins (1851–1927), with whom she lived a long time.”

The Baron and Cremers soon separated, then divorced; Vittoria got a butch haircut and began answering simply to “Cremers.” Mabel Collins was a Theosophist and novelist whose novel The Blossom and the Fruit (1890) Crowley admired enough to include in the A∴A∴ reading list; he considered it “the best existing account of the Theosophic theories presented in dramatic form.” While Collins and Crowley never met, their mutual acquaintance Cremers doubtlessly saw parallels: Just as Crowley was editor of The Equinox, Collins was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's coeditor of the Theosophical periodical Lucifer. And just as Crowley claimed to scribe various “Holy Books” dictated by the Secret Chiefs, so too did Collins claim that her books Idyll of the White Lotus (1884), Light on the Path (1885), and Through the Gates of Gold (1887) were dictated by Koot Hoomi, one of the Masters or Mahatmas who guided Blavatsky. Cremers often repeated Collins’s claim to know the identity of Jack the Ripper, and Crowley preserved the claim in “Jack the Ripper.”

Cremers was a sincere but penniless seeker, transcribing 777 in New York’s Astor Library because she could not afford to purchase a copy. She wished to help “put the Order over,” as Crowley called it, so AC paid her passage to England and introduced her to his circle. Aged in her fifties, she had white hair and unhappy eyes. Her stern, square face, yellow and hard, reminded Crowley of wrinkled parchment. When she boasted of her undercover work against New York’s drug and prostitution rings, Crowley could more readily believe that she directed drug and prostitution traffic than fought it. “Crowley is one of three things,” she once said of her mentor. “He is either mad, or he is a blackguard, or he is the greatest adept.”