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As Related by Clifford Bax
from
SOME I KNEW WELL Phoenix House Limited, London, 1951. (pages 51-55)
I
When a newspaper called him 'The Wickedest Man in the World', Crowley must have been intensely gratified, for he felt that he was a genius and he so hungered for fame that, as it eluded him throughout his life, he welcomed notoriety. He may, in fact, have been a near-genius, for certainly he had a strong intellect and a powerful will-to-creation.
In the winter of 1904 I went to St Moritz in Switzerland, not so much for the sports as for the gaining of better health. Owing to Yeats' essay on Magic, I had begun to examine the subject, and for this reason had taken with me a History of the Rosicrucians. The fashionable visitors to the Kulm Hotel may not have noticed a 'hyper-aesthetical, super-poetical, out-of-the-way young man' who was then eighteen, but they were startled one evening by the appearance of a dark, formidable man who was then thirty-three. The new visitor wore a velvet coat with brilliant buckles. He smoked an enormous meerschaum pipe. The amusement of the others was equalled by Crowley's obvious distaste and contempt for them.
Presently the dinner-gong sounded, and I, laying the Rosicrucians face-downward in my wicker chair, went, as an early Tolstoyan, to eat a few lettuce-leaves and a snippet of cheese. My beverage, of course, was water. When I returned to the lounge and took up the Rosicrucians I saw with astonishment a magical symbol pencilled in the margin. Half an hour later I strolled into a vast ballroom. Scores of gilt chairs lined the walls, but two of them had been placed in the middle of the room and Aleister Crowley was lying across them on his stomach. On the floor in front of him lay a vellum-bound volume which proved to be one of his own works. 'It is,' he said, 'a treatise on ceremonial magic. You are interested in the Rosicrucians—and what do you suppose the morons in this hotel would make of that? But let me advise you. Don't read about magic. Experiment! Attempt the Great Work!'
The 'morons', I learned, called Crowley 'the poet' and me 'the minor poet'. Of course I was curious to learn something about so eccentric a man, and asked the receptionist who he might be. She said, 'He has signed the book as "Lord Lockey", but he wishes his title to be kept secret. He desires to be known as Mr Aleister Crowley from Scotland'. The other visitors very soon modified their amusement over Crowley's costume, for they discovered that he was by far the finest skater in the hotel. They also learned that he had a considerable reputation as a mountaineer, and that he was acquainted with several difficult oriental languages.
And every evening he and I played chess. At eighteen a chess-player should be almost at his best, and so it was with me; but I have never met so strong an opponent. If I won two games, Crowley must have won twelve. You could sense the power of his mind as he pondered a move. After one of his victories he told me that he would soon be founding a new world-religion. 'What is the date at this moment?' he asked abruptly. I told him. 'And,' he said, 'in a hundred years from this day the world will be sitting in the sunset of Crowley-anity.' He seemed to me a dangerous man, as indeed at on time he was, for he induced his disciples to experiment with drugs, and so, when he offered me a set of his works in exchange for my address, I contrived to get out of the bargain.
II
For several years I did not see him again but, like everybody else, I heard much about him: as, for instance, that he had founded Crowley-anity in a huge basement somewhere in Bloomsbury or Chelsea, and that a deep-tines Tibetan bell hung suspended from the roof. He would give it a tap, and the sound, with overtones, would continue for quite a minute. After this, having exhorted his disciples that 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law', he took up a wafer, cut himself, dipped the wafer in his blood, and then consumed it. When the ritual was over, he interviewed in a back room candidates for initiation in the new religion. 'What do you seek, my child?' he said to one pretty young woman. 'Wisdom,' she answered, a little dubiously. 'If you have thirty pounds,' replied the Master, 'you may attain wisdom. For that sum I will send you a complete set of my books': but the pretty young woman, an artist, had not three pounds in the world.
Some of the legends about Crowley were not credible. Did he hang his wife by her heels in a cupboard? Did he drape her bedroom with black curtains when she thought herself to be pregnant, and did he do so in the queer hope of having begotten a black baby? We do know that he started an 'Abbey of Thelema' in some part of Sicily, and that its basic rule was 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law'; but the phrase can be misleading, for what he really meant was, 'When you have willed a deed, execute it'. A painter-friend of mine visited Sicily, and I asked him to find out what Crowley was doing. While he waited on the railway platform at Palermo, on his return journey, he met a Sicilian acquaintance, and asked him, 'Is it true that Crowley when performing his ceremony places four naked girls at the points of the compass?' The Sicilian shouted to a porter at the other end of the platform, 'E vero che'l Signor Caroli . . .' etc. 'Si, si,' shouted the porter. There was also a wild rumour that Signor Caroli had killed a young Englishman who had joined his Abbey. Years later Meum Stewart and Leslie Blanche, that brilliant artist, told me that their education was far from finished until they met the Worst Man in the World: so, naturally, I invited him and them to dinner, at the Royal Automobile Club. At the last moment, as it were, Lady (Frieda) Harris joined us. In order to excite Crowley, I introduce Mrs Blanche as 'la Comtesse de Roussy de Sales', but he was not deceived, and out of that meeting came the fine collaboration in The Tarot Cards, of Crowley and Lady Harris. It was on this occasion that Meum Stewart, in her direct manner, asked the magician about the death of the luckless young man. Crowley, quite unabashed, told us that the man had run into a spiked railing at Oxford or Cambridge, after a happy evening, and had so severely injured himself that, as Crowley said, 'I could not save him, and indeed when he came to my Abbey I had a mountain of trouble with the Sicilian police about his death'.
It may not even be true that he named his son 'Mustapha' because the mother, hoping for a daughter, had exclaimed, 'I must 'ave 'er': but Crowley had humour and wit, and the tale is well in character. I last saw him when he invited me to lunch, and certainly he provided the most delicious curry, cooked by himself, which I have ever tasted. At one time he published an occasional magazine, and in one issue there was a picture of a woman violinist as The Queen of Heaven. At the curry-lunch I asked him, 'What has happened to the Queen of Heaven?' He answered, 'Year and name , please,' and it seemed obvious that the title was not permanent—perhaps even annual?
At the end of his disappointing career, he took rooms in Hastings, partly because Hastings is our metropolis of chess; and when he was approaching death, which he would not have feared at all, he said to Louis Wilkinson, 'This is a good world to leave'. We are mistaken if we think of Crowley as a mere mountebank. If his verse, powerfully influenced by Swinburne and Browning, had been acclaimed, he would not have courted notoriety, as when, during a season of the passionate Sicilian Players, he advertised outside the theatre, 'Read Aleister Crowley! He writes as the Sicilians act!'
To those of us who cannot understand his book about the Tarot, or his many excursions into the occult, he may still seem likely to leave a name as a satirical epigrammatist.
DAVID AND GOLIATH Humiliating astronomer! I am 'the merest midge', you say; And yet you find me, honoured sir, Puzzling about the Milky Way.
We 'midges' on our midget sphere May photograph and, after, scan A comet in its fierce career . . . What comet photographs a man?
As Related by Clifford Bax
from
THE MAGIC OF ALEISTER CROWLEY Frederick Muller Ltd., London, 1958. (pages 78-79)
[St. Moritz in Switzerland, Winter 1904/1905]
A powerful man, with black magnetic eyes, walked up to me. He wore a velvet coat with ermine lapels, a coloured waistcoat, silk knee-breeches, and black silk stockings. He smoked a colossal meerschaum . . . Every evening we played chess together and to play chess with a man is to realize the voltage of his intellect. A strong and imaginative mind directed the pieces that opposed me. Moreover, he was an expert skater, an expert mountaineer; and in conversation he exhibited a wide knowledge of literature, of occultism, and of Oriental peoples. I am certain, too, that with a part of his personality he did believe in his Messianic mission. On the eve of my return to England, after we had played the last of our chess-games, he exhorted me to devote myself to the study and practice of magic. I understood that he would instruct me. "Most good of you," I stammered, "but really, you know—perhaps I am not quite ready. I must read a little more first," "Reading," he answered, "is for infants. Men must experiment. Seize what the gods have offered. Reject me, and you will become indistinguishable from all these idiots around us." He paused, and then asked abruptly, "What is the date?", "January 23rd," I answered. "What is the year—according to the Christian calendar?" "Nineteen hundred and five." "Exactly," said Crowley, "and in a thousand years from this moment, the world will be sitting in the sunset of Crowletyanity." |