|
Aimée Crocker Gouraud
Born: 5 December 1864. Died: 7 February 1941.
Aimée Crocker Gouraud was an American heiress, princess, Bohemian, mystic and author best known for her adventures in the Far East, for her extravagant parties in San Francisco, New York and Paris and for her collections of husbands and lovers, adopted children, Buddhas, pearls, tattoos and snakes.
Aleister Crowley began a relentless pursuit of Aimée Crocker in the early 1910s, when she was in her early fifties. Their journey would last some ten years and be among the longest relationships in both of their lives.
Aimée’s father, Edwin Crocker, was the chief legal counsel for the Central Pacific Railroad and was one of its principal investors along with Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford and brother Charles Crocker. Together they built the western portion of the world’s first Transcontinental Railroad. Edwin served briefly as a California Chief Justice. Aimée’s mother is known for founding Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, the longest continuously operating art museum in the West with, for a time, the largest private collection in the country.
Aimée Crocker was the sixth child in a family of four girls, two boys, and a half sister. Three of the children would die young. Like Crowley, Aimée came from money, hers being by far the bigger fortune. She was a bequeathed a cool $10 million in 1875 (250 million in 2013 dollars), when her father “E.B” died.
Aimée hit the national stage in 1883, when traveling to Los Angeles on her honeymoon with first husband, Porter Ashe. The train, riding on Uncle Charlie’s newly built Sunset Route, broke loose at the summit of a hill in Tehachapi, killing 21 people and seriously injuring another 12. Charles Crocker and the other builders of the line were lambasted by the press. Aimée lived to tell the tale, and a life of scandal was set in motion.
Not long after the birth of their daughter Gladys (aka Alma) Aimée’s marriage collapsed. Porter plunged into a score of speculations, none of which proved successful. He spent a small fortune on his racing studs, and then sold off many of them to settle gambling debts. Porter became the patron of prize-fighters, and began to dance attendance upon the latest favorite of the ballet or the comic opera. Aimee Crocker His friendships with actresses Lillie Langtry and Lotta Crabtree were the source of much gossip. Aimée was herself seen everywhere at fashionable entertainments, not with her husband, but with some young cavalier.
The breakup of Aimée’s first marriage became a national scandal. Porter and his brother, Sydney, kidnapped daughter Gladys in Los Angeles, while Aimée and her mother attended a wedding. Charges and countercharges made daily news during the custody battle, and courthouse proceedings attracted a crowd of hundreds. In spite of Porter’s reputation as a notorious gambler, in spite of his kidnapping charge and a weapons charge, and in spite of the Crocker millions, the little girl’s mother would not be awarded custody. Aimée, it seems, had the worse reputation. Porter left the courthouse with the child. Gladys was later adopted by Aimée’s mother.
After the public humiliation of losing her child to her scoundrel husband, Aimée decided to leave little Gladys in the care of her mother and go on an extended tour of the Far East, stopping first in Hawaii. King Kalukaua was so enamored with Aimée that he gave her one of his islands and an official title: Princess Palaikalani—Bliss of Heaven. She found an occasional traveling companion in her second husband, Henry Mansfield Gillig. Gillig was a Commodore, a prestidigitator, and a respected amateur opera singer.
Crocker’s travels around the globe and investigations into world cultures and religions rivaled Aleister Crowley’s and took place fifteen years before the great magician. In her autobiography, And I’d Do It Again, Crocker chronicles many hair-raising and titillating adventures while living in the Far East sometimes with Gillig and sometimes traveling alone including: a blood curdling escape from headhunters in Borneo, a poisoning in Hong Kong; a murder attempt by knife-throwing servants in Shanghai; three weeks in the harem of Bhurlana (Aimée claimed to be the first English speaking woman who had ever seen the inside of a harem); a search for Kaivalya (Liberation) at the cave of the Great Yogin Bhojaveda in Poona; and two bizarre sensual experiences, one with an Indian boa constrictor, and another with a Chinese violin in the House of the Ivory Panels. When she returned to New York after living off and on in “the Orient” for 10 years sporting tattoos, wearing snakes around her neck at parties and declaring her love for the Buddha, she became a national eccentric whose every move made headlines.
During her marriage to Gillig, Aimée had several affairs with powerful Asian men, which were tastefully and poetically chronicled in her memoirs.
Aimée met her third husband, the true love of her life Jackson Gouraud, at a Buddhist colony that she organized (said to be the first in Manhattan) and settled somewhat. Gouraud was a musical author who gave to Broadway the Ragtime melodies “Keep Your Eye on Your Friend, Mr. Johnson,” “She’s a ’Spectable Married Colored Lady,” “I’se Workin’—I’se Hustlin,” “He’s My Soft Shell Crab on Toast,” and “My Jetney Queen.” He set the town singing with the broadly comic number-one hit of his song writing career, “Waldorf-Hyphen-Astoria.” The Gourauds lived in glamorous Oriental themed homes in Manhattan and on Long Island. They also had tattoos of each other’s initials inscribed inside coiling snakes.
The Jackson Gourauds became well known Broadway “First Nighters” attending all of the opening nights of the biggest plays at the grandest theaters. Aimée befriended all of the Broadway greats of the time including Anna Held, David Belasco, John Drew, and the Barrymore family. Eventually Aimée would be invited to play herself on Broadway at the grand opening of the Folies Bergère Theater in Rennold Wolf’s vaudeville “profane satire” piece “Hell,” with music by Irving Berlin.
Around this time Aimée began hosting lavish parties that got a lot of press. She threw a Robinson Crusoe themed party in Parisian treetops in 1905. At a country circus bash at the Hippodrome, then the largest theater in New York, she appeared as a dairy maid and arrived on the back of an elephant. Another memorable appearance was as Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress, in a costume party in Paris, and yet another gala that she hosted had her pet boa constrictor, Kaa, as the guest of honor.
After Jackson died of an acute attack of tonsillitis, Aimée was hospitalized in Paris. She returned to her public to promote a book of short stories, “arabesques” as her published called them, entitled Moon Madness and Other Fantasies which drew not from her imagination but from her ten years living in foreign lands as a native. She also changed the spelling of her named from Amy to Aimée and moved her children to an estate in Paris dubbed “The House of Fantasy.” Aimée would live for the next 27 years in the City of Light throwing sensational and neurotic parties and housing young artists and exiled Russian nobles.
Aleister Crowley was powerfully drawn to Mrs. Gouraud. There was certainly enough common ground to form a mutual attraction. Crowley, like Aimée, was unabashedly unconventional, and made it his calling to investigate the warnings from the establishment about the dangers of temptation and the terrible consequences of sin. He was independently wealthy, a seeker of esoteric knowledge and a fierce individualist. Both had an appetite for celebrity. Both had a long string of lovers. These love partners in both cases did not necessarily serve consecutive terms, but occasionally overlapped. Both Crowley and Crocker were well-traveled students of Hatha Yoga and Buddhism. Both would be interested in the science of energy flow and would consider mystical union of the Self with the Divine, life’s most important work.
Aleister was also some 11 years younger than her at the time, a big plus for Gilded Age America’s favorite cougar.
Both Crocker and Crowley identified strongly with the Bohemians of their time—although they didn’t always hold to all of their values, such as their disdain for property. Crowley tried very hard to integrate himself into their number with limited success. He certainly fit to a certain extent because of his bisexuality, decadent poetry, and rejection of Protestant-inspired values. However, because Crowley came from money and never fully rejected that world, he could perhaps be better thought of as a Dandy, which were akin to the Bohemians but did not live in abject poverty, chose to bathe regularly, and enjoyed being in the limelight. Just as Bohemians and Dandies often intermingled, so too did Crowley walk in both worlds.
Aimée Crocker never objected when the press referred to her as an occultist. At that time it meant that she was a Bohemian and that she followed esoteric, arcane Eastern religions, then mysterious to all of Christendom. In her autobiography Crocker would mention her involvement with Hatha Yoga and the great influence that the classic Hathapradipika by Swami Svatmarama Jogindra had in shaping her philosophies. This 15th century text consists of four chapters which include information about asanas, pranayama, chakras, kundalini, bandhas, kriyas, shakti, nadis and mudras among other topics. These teachings, now quite common and tame, was to the turn of the century observer, as bizarre as the illustrations tattooed on her feminine frame. Crocker wasn’t merely out on a limb, she was a circus freak.
Aimée Crocker was a IXth degree initiate of O.T.O, or a member of the “Sovereign Sanctuary of the Gnosis.” probably in the early 1910s and 20s. She would at that stage be exposed to all the occult staples that were at the time the playthings of the Bohemian upper crust—astrology, the Qabalah, automatic writing and psychography, tarot, Eastern religion and meditation, Renaissance grimoires, astral travel, alchemy and Hermeticism.
O.T.O. was a fraternal and religious group that allowed, even encouraged women members, unlike the Freemasons, a fraternity that would welcome and honor her cousin Will with its highest degree, and the Bohemians (of the San Francisco Bohemian Club), who welcomed many male relatives and her first two husbands Porter Ashe and Harry Gillig. (A bust of William H. Crocker still stands in Bohemian Grove and a Masonic Lodge is named after him in Daly City, California.)
In the fall of 1913, Crowley would dedicate a poem to Aimée Crocker Gouraud and four others in the fall 1913 edition of The Equinox “The Disciples.”
In December 1913, in Paris, Crowley would engage an associate, Victor B. Neuburg, in a series of magick operations referred to as “The Paris Working.” The first ritual took place on New Year’s Eve 1914. In a period of seven weeks, Crowley and Neuburg performed a total of twenty four rituals.
On Wednesday, February 11, 1914, during the 23rd working, Crowley received a message for Aimée Crocker Gouraud at 3.18 am:
Crowley equated this Egyptian Goddess of the Night Sky with the Qabalistic concept of Ain Soph Aur, the “Limitless Light: the Godhead, prior to Its Self-Manifestation.” Nuit is the main speaker in the first chapter of The Book of the Law. Being at one with Nuit was equated with a certain state of being that the Buddhists call Nirvana, a state of being free from suffering, or in Hindu philosophy, Moksha, or the union with the Supreme Being. Aimée preferred the yoga term “Kaivalya” or absolute true consciousness.
Aimée did not make the journey to the desert at night and she did not establish a Nuit cult.
On 30 January of 1916, after years of persistent pursuit, but before the separation papers were signed by Aimée and her fourth husband, she succumbed to Aleister’s wily advances. He chronicled an experimental coupling with her on that date in his journal. Crowley wrote that her technique was “astonishing,” and recorded that she “has a Will like the Holy Phallos itself.” Another “working” took place in March of 1922 according to another entry in his journal. How often they worked together in between is unknown.
Crowley wanted Mrs. Gouraud not just as a partner, but to be his “Scarlet Woman,” who would “represent Venus in the New Aeon” and would assist him in his spiritual sojourn. The Scarlet Woman, also known as Babalon, held the office of the true mistress and counterpart to Crowley’s own identification as The Great Beast. The Scarlet Woman’s oath was to be loud and adulterous. She was the Mother of Harlots, a sacred whore because she denies no one.
In the twenties, the idea of finding his Scarlet Woman became a veritable obsession with him. In a letter to a friend dated July 1923, he wrote:
He further wrote, “She should be my concubine for form’s sake, but bust up society on her own, acting as Binah to my Chokmah (the creator god and goddess in the Kabbalah).” Babalon also represented the empowered woman; the woman freed from the social stigmas of sex, on an equal footing with men; the woman freed from convention and able to accomplish her Will without restriction.
Aimée Gouraud was brought up in several correspondences with associates. Her age was a concern. Crowley came up with prayers and incantations to put the wealthy middle aged heiress under his spell. He wrote to her directly with the hopes that she would acquiesce and take the helm as Co-creator of his Kingdom. So potent was Crowley’s attraction for Aimée that one of Crowley’s most cherished Scarlet Women, Leah Hirsig, revealed that the legendary magician proposed marriage to Mrs. Gouraud nearly every time he saw or wrote her for ten years.
Aimée, however, demanded absolute adoration and devotion from her partners, for the duration of her choosing, not the other way around. She didn’t become a Crowley disciple. She didn’t acquiesce to be his woman, Scarlet or otherwise. Crocker didn’t need to be coronated by Crowley. She was already empowered and on equal footing with men. She already was freed from convention and able to accomplish her Will without restriction. Why be a counterpart in Crowley’s kingdom? It was a fascinating place but complicated by its hierarchy, initiations and structure; enlightening yes, but at the same time serious, hidden, secret and dark.
Crocker chose instead to be Colorful Queen of the Mystical Empire of Bohemia. In this light and graceful fairyland, there may be self-indulgence, thoughtlessness, vanity and procrastination, but these faults tended to go hand-in-hand with generosity, love and charity. Her Gospel of the Moment religion was welcoming and open rather than secretive.
Crowley cherished his role as chief boogieman to the Establishment. Aimée’s dissent was both obvious, with her tattoos and snakes and wild dresses, and at the same time gentile. Her occult experiences were a thrilling pursuit, a search for peak experience and very serious work. They were, on the other hand, also a form of slumming, an excursion into the shadows of society (one of her favorite past times). Crocker’s primary aim was not counterculture protest. She was not a revolutionary out to attack the moral and religious values of her time. She was courageously enjoying and exploring all that life had to offer.
While Crowley was espousing a form of libertinism based upon the rule of “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” Aimée’s motto was “Love the one you’re with.” It was this purely Bohemian philosophy that would place many individuals under Aimée Crocker’s spell…even the “King of Incantations” himself. As Aimée was not able to fit the bill in the devotion department, she was later ruled out as a candidate to be his Scarlet Woman. Crowley bitterly called Mrs. Gouraud a “selfish debauchee.”
One of Aleister Crowley’s biographers portrayed Aimée as “wealthy prey who escaped.”
They did remain friends and “associates” being, at times, members of each other’s inner circle. In December of 1923, a message was relayed through Crowley’s protégé Norman Mudd to any interested parties that if they need to contact the magician, “It will be possible to find Crowley pretty easily during all the summer of 1924 through almost any one of the following persons: I give them in order of probable utility. . .” Aimée’s home at 20 rue Vineuse in Paris is the sixth of six addresses given. In their correspondences he referred to her both as “chum” and “My Dearest Aimée.” In his latter days, when Crowley squandered his fortune, he wrote her hoping to squat at her place when she was away. . .
Aimée, however, never acknowledged their association. She didn’t mention her affair with him in her memoirs. She never disclosed her “work” with the O.T.O. to the press or in her biography. Was it the only regret of the woman who championed the idea of living without regrets?
Earlier in 1923, in Tunisia, Aimée would appear as a character in an “abominable” nightmare that woke the Wickedest Man in the World to tearing and cold sweats. |
|
