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A Lecture on Aleister Crowley
by
I first met Aleister Crowley in 1928 when I joined his order the A∴A∴ or Silver Star. Four years later I resigned from this order but remained friendly with Crowley until his death, for I was very fond of him. I possess the originals or in copies his diaries from 1920 to the day of his death, thousands of his letters, a huge mass of unpublished material and over 100 published items. I can therefore answer with some claim to authority any questions you like to ask about his life or work.
To me, Crowley besides being a friend was a man of enormous interest, because he had actually practiced what so many people talk about without understanding, magic and yoga. His life falls into three periods: from leaving Cambridge to 1912 he was mainly interested in the traditional magic of the West, which from 1905 he taught in his order the A∴A∴. From 1912 to his death in 1947 he gave up ritual magic as too cumbersome and restricted himself to sexual magic, while from 1917 he devoted himself to trying to establish a new religion, which he called Thelema. He claimed that it had been dictated to him in the form of The Book of the Law by a "praeter-human intelligence" called Aiwass as the result of a series of invocations in 1904.
Now I do not propose to talk about his Thelemic religion of "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," but Aleister Crowley cannot be understood unless it is realised that he thought he was the Messiah or Messenger of a new world religion which was to supersede Christianity and last for two thousand years. Although he did his best to persuade Stalin, Hitler and the British Government to adopt Thelema as a state religion, he did not succeed. Moreover as very few people indeed have even heard of it, he must be classified as a false Messiah. As such he was a fascinating man to meet.
Nor will I talk of his sexual magic, describing what you do and why, since it is not suited for a public talk. The technique has largely been forgotten in the West, but it is still practiced by at least one sect in Tibet and by the Tantric Vamacharis in India. Briefly you sleep with a woman, regarding the act as one of worship, never to be performed merely for the pleasure of it, but only to be used as an act of worship or to bring about some change in the spiritual, mental or material worlds. Of all possible techniques it is the easiest to use or abuse.
Now lets get down to ritual magic which, as practiced today, is a survival of pre-Christian religion. Crowley learned his magic from an English Hermetic and Rosicrucian order called the Golden Dawn. It was founded in 1888 by three high grade masons from a set of skeleton rituals of Continental origin, and by charter from a Fraulein Sprengel in Germany. The best known members were W.B. Yeats, the poet, the writer Arthur Machen, A. E. Waite who wrote extensively on Alchemy, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, MacGregor Mathers who wrote on magic and the Qabalah, Florence Farr Emery—an actress who played some part in the emotional life of Bernard Shaw—Peck the City Astronomer for Edinburgh, and, or so Crowley once said—Sir William Crookes. When Crowley joined in 1896 there were some 200 members of whom at least 30 practiced ritual magic in five lodges or temples. I have a complete set of their rituals, lectures and official papers up to and including the grade of 5º=6o.
Crowley taught this system in his branch of the Golden Dawn which he founded in 1905 and called the A∴A∴ or Silver Star, superimposing some elementary practices of yoga which he learned from Allan Bennett, a member of the Golden Dawn who, tiring of magic, studied yoga under Sri Parananda, an ex-solicitor general of Ceylon, before turning Buddhist.
Crowley himself defined magic as the art of causing change to occur in accordance with will. This, in my opinion, is far too wide a definition. Magic, however, does divide conveniently into two parts, theurgia which deals with the invocation of gods, angels and the like: and goetia which consists in ordering about spirits of grades below that of the angels. The one is usually called white, the other black magic. In fact goetia is only black if you use it for selfish ends, or if you treat the spirits concerned as if they were gods or angels, praying to them instead of ordering them about.
Crowley classified magic under six heads. The first, Invocation, is theurgic. After enflaming yourself with prayer, you worship, consume the consecrated sacrifice or water, and then communicate with or become inspired by a Being or Force from one of the ten orders which in various systems form an intermediate hierarchy between God and man. In Christianity they are called Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, Virtues, Archangels and Intelligences in that descending order.
The five remaining types are goetic. They consist of evocation, in which a particular spirit is bound in matter; divination in which a spirit is made to control the hand or brain of the magician or his medium; necromancy, a perversion of which usually occurs in spiritualist séances; and works of fascination, which consist of distracting the attention or disturbing the judgement of the person whom you wish to influence, deceive or destroy.
It would take me too long to describe and explain a full ritual invocation. There is however a short cut which I once followed in Crowley's presence to find out for myself if it works. I chose as my object the personified idea of Thoth, Lord of the Words of God, reading the appropriate portion of the ritual from Budge's translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. In the first section you describe the God with the words "I am He" etc. As you recite them you imagine the God standing in front of you. In the second section you bring life to the figure that you have set up in your mind's eye by remaining silent and listening in your imagination to it repeating the words back to you: "I am He" etc.
It needs considerable training in some of the elementary exercises of yoga before an ordinary man like myself can do this effectively. You then address and worship the God that you have either built up from within you or brought down from the spiritual plane to that of thought and dream.
Finally you transfer your consciousness to the figure in your mind's eye, and as the God you answer "I am He" etc. If successful you then become possessed by the God and generally lose consciousness.
Not being trained in visualisation or clair-audience I could not of course perform the ritual properly. Even so I found it a potent technique for working myself up—presumably by auto-suggestion—into a state of mind bordering on those that are observable in certain lunatic asylums, or of which certain mystics speak.
Now for my only Goetic experience with Crowley. A young Jew called Regardie [Israel Regardie] and I were staying with Crowley in Paris in 1929. With Crowley was his mistress [Maria de Miramar], later his second wife, a somewhat stout Nicaraguan lady whom we called "Old Mother Nile." She happened to mention after dinner that in her youth she used to dance to the Devil round a bonfire. So we decided to try her out. We cleared the centre of the room, stirred up the fire, robed and lit Abramelin incense of storax, olibanum, lignum aloes and I think dragon's blood. Crowley began with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. This is a short ceremony that should precede all magical work, as it helps to concentrate the mind, and—so to speak—clear the air.
You start with a short Hebrew prayer touching certain parts of your body and identifying them with that particular aspect of the Deity that you name at the time. You thus identify yourself with God, and as a result can recite the words of power and acquire thereby authority to summon the four Archangels to protect your circle. That at any rate is the theory.
ATEH (to Thee—touching the forehead) MALKUT (the Kingdom—touching breast) VE-GEBURAH (and the Power—touching right shoulder) VE-GEDULAH (and the Glory—touching left shoulder), le-OLAHM (to the Ages) AMEN. You then make with your wand the banishing sign of the pentagram of Air in the East, and vibrate the name IHVH (Jehovah), carry your wand (or sword) round to the south tracing part of a circle in the air as you go, and vibrate ADNI (Adonai), then AHIH (Eheieh) in the West and AGLA in the North, and complete the circle which you started to make in the last. Return to the centre, stretch out both arms so that with your body they form a cross, face East and say: "Before me Raphael, behind me Gabriel, on my right hand Michael, on my left hand Auriel." They are the four Archangels and you see them in your mind's eye or with spirit vision standing foursquare with wings outstretched the tips touching, outside the circle. You continue: "For about me flames the pentagram"—and you imagine the four pentagrams that you have traced flaming in the air. "And in the column stands the six-rayed star." Here you imagine a golden hexagram above your head in a column of silver light stretching up to Infinity, to God. You then close by repeating the opening prayer ATEH MALKUTH (To Thee the Kingdom) etc.
Incidentally, if you are a conscientious magician, you should repeat this short ceremony every night before sleeping and before your morning and evening meditation. It does develop the mind well, especially your powers of visualisation, because when you do the whole thing in your mind's eye, you will find it particularly difficult to see Gabriel behind you at the same time as the other three in front and at the sides. It is an effective ceremony, but remember that it is not Christian, and as a Christian you should never attempt to become God—if you do, like Lucifer you will fall.
To return to the actual experiment. Crowley, Regardie and I then seated ourselves in the easiest of the meditational postures of Yoga, and started to chant an Egyptian mantra or prayer from Stele 666 [Stélé of Revealing]
Unity uttermost showed. I adore the might of Thy breath, Supreme and terrible God, Who makest the gods of death To tremble before Thee:— I, I adore Thee.
Madame de Miramar began dancing slowly and rather cumbrously, for she was a heavy woman. She approached the coal fire and began passing her hands and feet through the flames, then to hold them in the flames. Unfortunately being in a robe without pockets I had not my stop watch on me, and so could not check whether in fact she held them stationary in the flames for an abnormal length of time without getting burned, She seemed to, but a room full of the smoke or incense and lit only by a fire, is not conducive to accurate observation, especially if one is chanting at the time. Suddenly she gave a cry and fell senseless on the floor. Just before she did so I sensed a Being, Presence, or Force behind my right shoulder and outside the circle. I could not see anything there. Later I asked Regardie if he had sensed anything, he said yes, and when I asked him where, he pointed to the same part of the room in which I had felt it to be. It gave me the impression of something alive and apart from myself, with an atmosphere or will power stronger than mine and alien to me. For a moment I had to concentrate on a symbol in my mind to retain complete control. It proved to me personally that by means of ritual magic you can feel the presence in a definite place in a room of a spirit, demon, intelligence force, or concentrated emotion—call it what you will—which appears to have an independent existence, and to be stronger and more alive than anything which one has previously imagined.
My time is up, so I will now play you a gramophone record of Crowley chanting the first of the 19 Calls or Keys from the Enochian system of Dr. John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's astrologer. It is in what is called the Angelic language, and is the preliminary Call asking the various Angels to "open the mysteries of their creation." You then follow up with the particular Call of the Angel in whom or with which you are interested. Crowley used this system with success to obtain a connected series of visions in the Sahara in 1909. He had with him a great golden topaz on which was engraved a Greek Cross of five squares charged with a Rose of forty-nine petals, and set in a Calvary Cross of wood of six squares and painted vermilion. Holding this in his hand he would recite the first call, just as you will hear it in a moment, then the appropriate one for the vision concerned. After assuring himself that the forces invoked were in fact present, he made the topaz play a part much the same as the looking glass through which Alice walked. He then described what he saw and heard and Victor Neuburg, who was with him at the time, wrote it down. Ladies and gentlemen,—Aleister Crowley. (Play the record)
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