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As Related by Eliza M. Butler
from
PAPER BOATS: An Autobiography Collins, St. James's Place, London, 1959. (pages 166 - 177)
Two of the books on magic hatched out in Manchester appeared whilst I was in Cambridge, and the third; dealing with the multitudinous Fausts was lying in the C.U.P. offices for more than a year before I was superannuated, another reason why magic and the Cambridge Chair remain indissolubly connected in my mind. Then Cambridge itself, steeped in its own immemorial magic, was full of memories of the vanished magic of youth; whilst magic of a still more potent kind was present in George Ryland's rooms at King's, incomparable among colleges. I have never either before or since attended such enchanting parties as he is famed for giving. I have never heard better or more fascinating conversation, never eaten better food or drunk better wine and never, with the single exception of I. B. H., had a better friend.
Meanwhile there was I, probably less fit than ever for the sort of post I held, sitting on all kinds of Boards, giving my lectures and supervisions, examining for the Tripos, getting as usual a great deal of stimulus from the students and giving far too little, and trying to hold my own with the members of my department, younger far and abler than I. I was attached to Newnham College as a professorial Fellow, and lodged in a house at its gates which rejoiced in the name of The Pightle. Here I felt light-hearted enough and often light-headed too; for with the end of the war the barrier cutting England off from the Continent was down, and the horizon seemed to stretch almost to infinity. Yet even so, suffering as I was from the 'professorial irresponsibility' which the Fellows of Newnham deprecated so much, I took a very long time pondering the question: should the Schröder Professor of German, or should she not, travel down to Hastings in order to interview the Beast (666), that magician of international ill-renown, Alesteir (sic) Crowley, now dubbed Old Crow?
I knew more about Mrs. Baynes bête noire now than when she had tried to enlighten us at Monte Verità. I had read all the biographical and autobiographical accounts then available as well as his spate of early Swinburnian and Satanic verse, his novels, his ritual texts, including The Equinox of the Gods, and his Magick in Theory and Practice, which I had found more readable than most such productions. Horrifying details of his antics on the island of Cefalu and his general depravity had also reached my ears; but my studies in the occult had me case-hardened to that kind of thing; and I allowed a large part to exaggeration, at which Crowley himself was obviously past-master. On the other hand, he had made quite a stir in his own day as the prophet of a new religion whose scarifying doctrines were to be found in The Book of the Law, dictated to him in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid by the spirit Aiwas (? I Was). His ritual productions, superbly produced, I believe at his own expense, were written in a turgid, bombastic, quasi-apocalyptic style; and they as well as the book on magic showed intellectual power. He might be all that his enemies claimed (he could hardly be worse); but he was a living embodiment of a perdurable tradition, a self-styled magus, whom it was surely incumbent on me to see in the flesh, since I was attempting to delineate the type. Amongst other things I wanted to know if he laid claim to any or all of the stock features present to a greater or lesser degree in the lives of most of the legendary and historical magicians. I was encouraged in this scheme by a personal friend of Crowley's whom I met in Cambridge. Himself a shrewd and likeable man, he liked and admired Old Crow with some reservations and thought that there was substance in his claims. He told me that the magician was breaking up, and that it was now or never; for he was still completely compos mentis and would be delighted to open up to anyone who was interested. He gave me his address, a private hotel called Netherwood on the Ridge near Hastings and wrote to prepare the way. After some correspondence, perfectly amiable and sensible on the old sorcerer's side, I decided to go down to Hastings and see what I could learn.
I set off from London on January 1, 1946 in some apprehension. It had suddenly turned icily cold and the sky was black and louring. I tried to steady my mind in the train by reading a Report on the Duties and Stipends of Cambridge University Teaching Officers, but it was a bad choice; for I could not help feeling as the engine gathered speed that it was no part of such duties to spend a day with Old Crow, and that my stipend might well be in jeopardy. So I put away the Report and turned to David-Neel, With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet. This entirely failed to grip me, and I was becoming a prey to nerves when I caught a sight of the sea in one of its magnificent uproars. 'The sea doth wash all the world's ills away', I quoted, making up my mind to get down to the shore before the day was over. Hastings was even more cuttingly cold than London, and the station was like an ice-box. I remembered mal à propos that any contact with the devil induces a deathly chill; and 'absit omen' I muttered as I vainly waited for the car which Crowley said he had ordered to meet me. In the end I was forced to share the one and only taxi with an army officer who got out just before me and, very dishonourably, left me to pay the whole fare. Feeling that I had come to Crookland, I dismounted unwillingly at Netherwood.
A small dark man, announcing himself as the manager, greeted me in the hall; and as we were exchanging banalities a seedy figure in light tweed knickerbockers materialised on the stairs and a grating voice was heard to utter: 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law'. 'In that case', was my unspoken comment, 'I'm for the next train back', whilst Crowley added more rationally as he took another step down: 'And a Happy New Year to you, Miss Butler'. He did look old, far older than his seventy-two years. Not that he was very much lined, but he seemed to be disintegrating and to be surrounded by an aura of physical corruption. He had thick eye-glasses, a perpetual tear in the corner of one eye and a flattish yellow face. Altogether he was more repulsive than I had expected, and his voice was the ugliest thing about him: thin, fretful, scratchy—a pedantic voice and a pretentious manner. This was my first lightning impression. I had no time for more; pleading the necessity of an immediate injection for asthma, he retreated hurriedly upstairs, and it devolved upon the manager to take me in to lunch. He had been a music-hall artiste in the past, and small-talk on those lines was progressing smoothly when Old Crow made a sudden unwelcome appearance, saying that he felt better now and would come down to coffee. This he did, bearing a bottle of fine old cognac which I was delighted to see, but I would far rather have enjoyed it tête-à-tête with the manager.
Crowley now began to instruct me in the Law, quoting grandiloquently from his own works. They sounded next door to insane in that commonplace little dining-room. Heads were turned and necks were craned all round us. The manager, evidently inured to this kind of thing, remained impassive; but I kept on wondering wildly how Old Crow had ever got into Netherwood. The name might have attracted him; but what kind of pressure had been brought to bear upon the management before he had been allowed to darken its doors? I was riveted by the look of outraged virtue on the face of an angular female with beads and the mottled complexion of her companion who seemed on the verge of apoplexy. They appeared to be meditating instant flight from Netherwood and I longed to join them; for I knew the Crowley patter off by heart and was already in the last stages of boredom when I followed the magus and the brandy-bottle up to his room. Netherwood was a nice, clean, cheerful little place; and I daresay that originally the rather small bed-sitting room occupied by Old Crow was as banal and unhygienic as everything else; but the impress of his personality had combined with the messiness of his habits to produce the same kind of effect which Titoretti's studio makes in The Trial. The same squalor, airlessness and indefinable atmosphere of pollution—it would need a Kafka to describe it. There was a battered writing-table, some half-empty bookshelves, a frowsty-looking tumbled bed, a cracked wash-basin; and all of them hanging crookedly from the discoloured walls, some very disturbing pictures: violently clashing colours, leering faces, one of an otherwise lovely woman with a diabolical squint, and various designs indicative of delirium tremens. 'All my own work', said the magician rather proudly, motioning me to a seat facing one of the worst of them. I surreptitiously crossed my fingers before I say down, then I took out my note-book and began to cross-examine the artist. He was obviously flagging by three o'clock and in need of another shot. So I proposed that I should take my night-case over the road to the room booked for me at another guest-house called Chellows, then go down to the sea and return for tea. For some reason Crowley's own eyes began to turn inward at the mention of the sea; and we had a bit of a tussle; but finally he rang down to the manager to order me a taxi, the Ridge being miles away from Hastings. I began to wonder if he had countermanded the order, when, after inspecting my room at Chellows, no taxi was to be seen. 'Crowley's Cars Never Come', I chanted angrily but accurately, for at that moment the taxi appeared.
'Icing conditions on the road', said the driver cheerfully; 'there'll be a blizzard before nightfall, mark my words, which will cut off the Ridge for days'.
'Don't say that', I implored him. 'I've got to get back to London tomorrow by an early train'. There was panic in my voice, and he heard it.
'Never fear, I'll get you to the station, come what may', he promised; and he did so, though there was a bit of a blizzard that night.
That promise and the sight and sound of the sea, together with great gulps of a most purifying wind blowing at gale force, stiffened my morale. It was difficult to believe, as I watched the great waves racing each other on to the beach that Netherwood, Old Crow and his squalid room had any real existence. However there they all were in situ when I returned for tea and caviare upstairs, followed by another inquisition on my part which lasted until six. By that time Crowley was more than ready for another shot, and I was dying for a breather. This took the form of a happy interlude in the sitting-room downstairs talking about clothing coupons with some pleasant and ordinary young women who were knitting jumpers. They were all agog to find out who and what I was and what possible connection there could be between me and the magus; indeed one of them was just nerving herself to ask when a stricken silence fell, and there looking like corruption incarnate, stood Alesteir Crowley in the doorway. Dutifully I rose and climbed the stairs, entered that unsavoury apartment and went on asking questions and listening to magniloquent answers. I had dinner downstairs alone with the manager, who became quite fantastically eloquent on the subject of crops and manures, and coffee and port upstairs with the magician who indulged in even more fantastic language about magic and the occult. Wrapped in a black coat with a black cat at his heels, he accompanied me as far as Chellows at 9.30 p.m., and I was off next morning before he was up. But what was my horror when I went to pay for my meals at Netherwood to be told by the manager that Old Crow had come tottering downstairs three times the night before, insisting that I was his guest. This was hospitality which I felt unable to accept, and so I informed the manager, who looked mulish.
'He'd find out somehow', he muttered when I suggested that some subterfuge might be used, and I couldn't budge him from that. It was a ton's weight off my mind when I learnt from the man who had sent me that in reality all Crowley's bills were paid for by friends and that even the fine old cognac he had regaled me with hadn't cost him a sou.
I began by detesting, loathing and abominating Old Crow, not so much on ethical as on aesthetic grounds. He was so oppressive too and such a crashing bore, being egocentric and one-track-minded. At first I despaired of getting any sense out of him; but by sticking to the technique of question and answer, I penetrated behind the crumbling facade to something real and even interesting. His belief in magic and his own magical powers was obviously genuine, and he was quite as obviously no fool. Yet there he sat, a wreck among the ruins, living or rather dying in penury on the charity of friends, speaking of himself in all seriousness as an 'instrument of Higher Beings who control human destiny'. In order to prove this, he offered to make himself invisible on the spot; and nothing would have been a greater relief; but I felt that I must keep him under eye whilst questioning him about the stock features to be found in his life.
1. Did he claim a supernatural or mysterious birth? This, said Crowley, was covered by his previous existences, to which I shall return.
2. Was there any tradition of portents surrounding his infancy? Non whatsoever.
3. Had any perils menaced his childhood? None that he knew of, unless I cared to count a narrow shave from a falling trunk when he was about six years old.
4. Had he undergone any kind of initiation? Certainly. Into The Golden Dawn as a young man. (Yeats [William Butler Yeats] was a fellow-member of this society, and Crowley spoke harshly of Yeats, saying that he was dirty and repulsive to look at and not a poet; criticisms which at the time of making them all applied to the critic). There was also the initiation into the ultimate mystery of life in the Great Pyramid. This was therefore well represented; as was also:
5. A period of far-flung wanderings in search of occult knowledge. Mexico, India, Ceylon and Burma as well as Egypt figured on his list; and Crowley declared that he had been recognised as a Holy Man throughout India and had been permitted to sacrifice a black goat to Kali in the great temple at Madura.
6. Had he ever undergone a contest of any sort with a rival magus or magician? Never. There was no one in the present age of his magical status to render such a contest necessary or even possible.
7. But had he never had to face a trial or some sort of persecution engineered by his rivals? (He had fought several libel-actions, I knew, and had been severely manhandled by the Press after the affair at Cefalu.) Crowley admitted rather unwillingly that agents of the Black Lodge had sometimes attempted to thwart him; but they had never succeeded; and indeed how could they, considering who he was, whereas they were all either dipsomaniacs or perverts?
My last three features (a last scene, a violent or mysterious death and a resurrection and-or an ascension) were naturally not mentioned, and as far as I know they have not appeared in the Crowley legend. I was struck by his modesty in denying points 2 and 3, and by the pride shown in rejecting 6 and playing down 7. Except where his enemies' vices were concerned, he sis not seem, consciously at least, to be romancing. He had taken to magic originally, he told me, because he was in a 'blue funk' at the notion of death; and his search for the elixir of life had led to a short spell of monkeying with the black art. But from the days of The Golden Dawn onwards he had, according to himself, kept to the Right-Hand Path and had attained its very summit as the inspired priest and prophet of a new religion. Like many another adept, he was probably unable to distinguish between Right and Left; for his spectacular, sensational and too often scandalous career had been conditioned, he stoutly maintained by blinding visions of beauty, glory and truth. Partly no doubt to impress me but mainly to gratify himself, he proceeded to illustrate this by reading in that flat and rusty voice a high-flown apocalyptic passage from one of his books about his own sublimity and power. But he broke down half-way through and began to weep. 'It was a revelation of love', he whispered, wiping his eyes; and then, almost ecstatically: 'Magic is not a way of life, it is the way of life'. Poor Old Crow. It was a way of life which had led to drug addiction.
In order to take his mind off his inglorious present (and my own mind too), I began to question him about his previous incarnations; and here again, whether he were telling the objective truth or not, I did not feel that he was inventing. He said that he remembered a good many former lives, some of them vaguely, all of them episodically, but some incidents very vividly, such as that time thousands of years ago in China when he had abused magic by applying it to personal ends, a sin for which he had suffered grievously in later lives; for it is the sin against the Holy Ghost of magic. He was still expiating it about five hundred years later in a lamasery in Tibet. Very much in the background and possibly on trial, he had listened to the great Chiefs, as he called them, instructing the magi of the future. One was to go forth as Merlin, another as Mohammed, and a third as Christian Rosencreutz. I exclaimed at the name of Merlin, whereupon Crowley smiled and told me that he had met and recognised the Welsh bard in his twentieth-century incarnation and that they had exchanged confidences. He refused to give me the man's name however, saying that he was under an oath not to reveal it. This induced a certain scepticism which did not noticeably decrease while listening to picturesque reminiscences of wild rides across the desert when Old Crow was an Arab lad some time in the thirteenth century. On the other hand his claim to have been Edward Kelly (and he would have gone to the stake for that) had plausibility in its favour; and paradoxically was all the more convincing because Crowley frankly owned that he could not remember a single incident in that very obscure life, and only knew what he had found in books; yet he was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had lived it. This was a bitter disappointment for me, since Kelly was one of my 'heroes'; and it was all the more exasperating because there certainly was a good deal of similarity between them; both he and Crowley when under spiritual dictation preached the same kind of lurid gospel in the same menacing manner and in the same apocalyptic style. A close kinship was arguable between them and-or their controls. However, Crowley's memory was a blank on that subject and also on his life as the French magus Eliphas Lévi, although he vividly remembered the shock of his death in that incarnation; for it was the first death he remembered experiencing; whereas when he came to die as Cagliostro (which he remembered later than Lévi's although it occurred eighty years earlier) he was completely unafraid.
'Even beforehand in the dungeons of San Leo?' I asked, remembering what had been reported of Cagliostro's terror then.
'I did not die in San Leo', he answered rather crossly, as if he were tired of correcting that error.
'How did you manage to escape?' I enquired; for that would have been well worth knowing.
'I was never there', was the answer; and he went on to assure me that it was a 'false Cagliostro' who had been seized and condemned by the Roman inquisition. In the meantime he had eluded pursuit, but had fallen very ill and had been carried in a litter over the Pyrenees from France into Spain. The police or the soldiers, he was not sure which, were after him; but even so there came a moment when he was too ill to be carried any farther. The litter was laid down in a charcoal burner's hut, and he just remembered losing consciousness in a dreamy and pleasant way. I was just going to ask Crowley if the 'false Cagliostro' was Giuseppe Balsamo when he got abruptly to his feet and muttering something about his asthma, handed me a pamphlet to read and left the room. He was absent about a quarter of an hour, time enough for me to master the contents of the pamphlet which consisted of a printed list of his enemies couples with dire prophecies of the fate awaiting them for having molested him. It was about twenty years old, and a good many of the names were annotated in pencil with the date and manner of their violent deaths or suicides. I stared at it in amazement,
'Did you know', I asked Crowley when he returned, 'that in his Lettre au peuple anglais Cagliostro made a similar list and annotated it in the same fashion?'
'No', he said, 'but what of it?'
'Well, it rather goes to prove your claim to have been Cagliostro', I replied lamely. Personally I had been impressed by this coincidence; and as Cagliostro's pamphlet was extremely rare and almost impossible to procure, I was ready to believe that Crowley had not seen it. But once more he refused to rise. Coincidences proved nothing, he said; he disliked and distrusted them. Besides, he was in no need of proof. He knew. And he knew too that all those who thought, or spoke, or planned, or did evil against him were severely punished.
Although I was against rather than for Old Crow, I felt in no worse danger from him that the discomfort of prolonged boredom mixed with repugnance and pity. It was all a great strain, and I was thankful to se the last of him outside Chellows; thankful to be alone, thankful to find a hot-water bottle in my bed; thankful that I had provided myself with a promising-looking thriller and thankful that there was a bedside lamp to read it by. But the old magician clung to me still, or at least I imagined so; for he seemed to be interfering between me and my thriller, fretfully and feebly trying to distract my attention from it and focus it upon himself. I thought I knew what he wanted. It was obvious during our interviews and became still clearer later, that he was hoping for a big write-up in The Myth of the Magus. I had said nothing to lead him to expect it; but before I had met him in the flesh, I had been uncertain whether or not he would rate a final chapter in that book. After having seen him and heard him talk, I decided that he would de a sad anti-climax to Rasputin, and I left him out altogether. Admittedly I had seen him in his decline, and he may come to legendary fame; but historically, let alone personally, he did not quite make the grade. However naturally enough that was not his own opinion; and he kept on writing letters which began 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' and ended with 'Love is the law, love under will', staking out his claim. I began to dread the sight of his handwriting on an envelope, and the sight of his face on a post-card (one of them was his portrait by Augustus John) was always unsettling; but not nearly so much so as his proposal to pay me a visit in Cambridge where, as an undergraduate at Trinity, he was rumoured to have celebrated the Black Mass. His appearance in The Pightle would, I felt, be disastrous; but happily for me he was not fit to travel, and I was never called upon to produce him in the Newnham College Combination Room. Partly in my relief at this let-off and partly because in an obscure way I felt that I owed him something, I decided on a gesture of which, however, he was to remain unaware. Why not quote from one of his rituals in my inaugural lecture? I was not giving any references for any of my quotations, so that he could be slipped in anonymously with the rest. It was a formidable occasion for me, and a sly little private joke like this might help me through it. Or so I thought until the evening before when it suddenly assumed the guise of a joke in the worst possible taste fraught with evil consequences. I skipped the quotation next day and went round to the Cambridge University Press to ask that it should be deleted. Unfortunately the proofs were already with the printer; but no evil consequences had to be faced, for hardly a soul bought the lecture which has now been pulped and no one has ever asked me where the quotation came from:
Behold! the rituals of the old time are black. Let the evil ones be cast away; let the good be purged by the prophet! Then shall this Knowledge go aright. I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star. I am Life and the giver of Life, yet therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death. I am the Magician and the Exorcist.
Clap-trap? Undoubtedly. But it occurred in the passage which moved Old Crow to tears in that gruesome room at Netherwood, which was why I chose it. He died in 1947 before The Myth of the Magus and Ritual Magic came out. His name was just mentioned in the first; and he was cavalierly treated in the second. I have been blamed for this; but somehow, one way and another, I could not take him seriously. |