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As Related by James Cleugh (circa "summer in the thirties")
from
The Beast 666, The Life of Aleister Crowley The Pindar Press, 1997 (pages 512-514)
'Tous te kata chthonious sebe daimonas—'
The Beast interrupted me, holding up a podgy forefinger. Its ring sparkled coyly in the April sunlight pouring through the closed window out of Cadogan Square. A stone, set in the gilt circlet, might have been taken for a ruby at a distance of twelve feet.
"How could you translate daimonas?"
I screwed up my eyes in some astonishment.
" 'Earthly Powers', I suppose, in this context"
"Quite Wrong, dear boy," drawled the Master, in a variant of his tired clubman's tone. He gazed abstractedly at the ceiling. "Pythagorus is here invoking underground spirits, the minions of Pluto, otherwise the Devil, who raped Persephone."
"The why does the very next text read 'tous te goneis tima', 'honour thy father and thy mother', and so forth?" I demanded obstinately. "Bit of a contradiction, isn't it?"
"Not at all. He means that the first step to enlightenment is to respect Santanas, Christian before his time, as I told Wilamowitz when I was staying with him at Bad Ems in 1905. But that man's incorrigible. The whole purpose of our edition will be to show him up. Did I ever tell you how I writted him after our escape from Lhasa together?"
I grinned a little, shaking my head. It was really too suffocatingly hot, in that hermetically sealed semi-basement, to work.
"Well—"
The Great Beast's introductory monosyllable sounded like a centenarian with a broken leg moaning at the bottom of a lift-shaft. But just as this simile occurred to me a very different noise, a long buzz, harsh and peremptory as the sudden snarl of a miniature pavement-drill, overpowered the rest of my host's exordium. The buzz obvious came from the street-door.
I had jerked in my chair like a marionette. But the Master continued, as if he had heard nothing: "It took us a year to cross the Himalayas. We had nothing to eat except bacon and eggs which I obtained by magical means. Naturally, I charged him up for subsistence—"
The buzz sounded again. This time it went on steadily for quite half a minute, if not more.
"O Kong-tse," groaned the Beast, when it ceased, "O Khrishna, O Zoroaster, O divine and venerable Aretinus, O Fafnir, Moloch and Rhadamanthus—" I thought this trinity would look well on a brass plate in Chancery Lane— "I pray you, render incapable for ever of the joys of Ishtar this importune one, whoever he may be, were he no other than the blameless and deathless Thoth Himself—"
He rose, with deep reluctance, mumbling in Arabic, and shuffled out of the room. I could hear him opening the street-door and greeting unintelligibly, but not unsympathetically, the visitor, a male with a resounding, non-committal but equally unintelligible bass-baritone. Next moment the door of the room was flung open. A looming colossus, bowler-hatted, darkly and heavily moustached, somberly overcoated, booted to incredible dimensions, stood before me. I could hardly see the Master, a biggish old gentleman himself, behind this apparition.
Our host spoke in an exasperated but patient whine,
"Take a seat, my dear Bob, do. Help yourself to a cigar. Whisky on the sideboard. You must excuse us for a moment. We're just—ah, yes, this is a friend of mine, James Cleugh. Detective-Inspector Foulbrother."
I think that's what he said. But I couldn't quite catch the name. I nodded, without moving, to the inspector. He, for all response, merely treated me to an expressionless stare, like that of a drugged basilisk, out of ice-grey eyes. Then he turned aside and lowered himself, without the flicker of a nostril, into an armchair by the window. In this position his back was to the light, so that he immediately became relatively faceless. He did not remove either his black, shiny bowler, his black, thick overcoat or even his black, woolen gloves. I gazed, spellbound, at the solemn bulk of his vast, black boots.
The Master droned on, about Wilamoqitz and a dud cheque. But I couldn't listen. That black invader of our studious retreat seemed a phantom, tremendously solid as he looked, or like some portentous cloud, sullen harbinger of apocalypse, scarcely human flesh and blood. Could the Beast by any chance, simply have materlised this equivocal vision, in order to change the subject from Pythagorus? Or had he actually conjured up the Devil in person this time, as he had so often laughingly promised me he would, so as to 'convince the last of my sceptics?' After all, he had called the fellow Bob. Robert—Robert le Diable? I really wondered. The permanently stale atmosphere of the room had certainly grown quite stifling in the last few seconds. The very sunlight was paling. Did I smell brimstone? I suddenly found myself longing to fling up the window and yell for a cab.
But the Master saved me the trouble.
"—had a fatal stroke the same night," he concluded, with a long, genuinely amused chuckle. Then he yawned, "I think we'll call it a day, James, if you don't mind. Come back tomorrow at ten tomorrow morning. And do remember me to that charming girlfriend of yours."
He held out a limp hand. I got up obediently, though I was now not quite sure I didn't want to stay and see if Detective-Inspector Foulbrother lived up to his name by bursting into flames or just told us a few stories about his experiences at Scotland Yard. However, I had to accept my dismissal.
"Right you are, Aleister, I'll be back at ten a.m. than." I hesitated, glancing at the dimly lit riddle in the armchair. "Good-bye."
I might just as well have addressed a statue. No one moved or spoke. Our host was again gazing blandly at the ceiling. I left the room with rather poorly acted nonchalance. Next morning, at ten o'clock precisely, I descended the steps leading to the door of the semi-basement, noting without much surprise that the window-curtains were still drawn. Aleister often slept late.
But there was no answer to any of three prolonged buzzes I administered to the bell. A subsequent series of telephone calls proved equally ineffective. Neither I not anyone else in London saw the Master again for some five years.
As Related by James Cleugh (circa "1934")
from
The Beast 666, The Life of Aleister Crowley The Pindar Press, 1997 (pages 514-515)
I [John Symonds] met James Cleugh at the British Museum at 12.30 p.m. [on 25 January 1962] and had lunch with him. Afterwards we went to Bertaux's in Soho for coffee and cakes. He told me of a meeting with Crowley during 1934. He'd recently met the Beast through the Aquila Press, to whom Crowley had offered his Confessions [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley]. Crowley telephoned Cleugh to ask him if he could borrow his flat for the afternoon as he had an important piece of writing to do and he had to smoke his pipe at the same time which one could not of course do in the reading-room of the British Museum. Cleugh and his 18-year-old-girlfriend, Monica, let Crowley in and went out for the day. On their return at 9 p.m. they found the place was in disorder. "Not," said Cleugh, "the usual untidy writer's disorder; it was something different from that." "What was it exactly?" I asked. "Well," said Cleugh, "He must have gone out and picked up one of those five-shilling tarts who stand in a mackintosh in Tottenhan Court Road, given her an aperient he doubtless called a magical potion, and so bedazzled and bedevilled her that she did what he wanted her to do. Anyhow," said Cleugh in conclusion, "the sheets on the bed were covered in shit. . . ." Monica, who up till then had said she liked Mr. Crowley, "Oh, I do like Mr. Crowley!" was so appalled by the mess and the stink that she broke out with "Oh, I don't like Mr. Crowley! I said that Crowley certainly had coprophiliac fantasies; they are recorded in his journal. And he would like his girlfriends' arseholes, but did he go further? I was inclined to think that he did but had no proof of it. Cleugh said that when the whore asked for the lavatory, Crowley replied: "Lavatory? Oh, there is no need to go there. . . ." And Cleugh, imitating his old friend the Beast, whom he said he was thankful for having known, with whom he played chess and translated the Golden Verses of Pythagorus, pulled the lapels of his jacket wide open, thrust his face forward and said, "Use me." He added, "I suppose the whore scraped the stuff off the sheets as best she could—Crowley wouldn't have bothered." |