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As Related by Patricia Crowther
THE DAY I MET ALEISTER CROWLEY Prediction Magazine, November 1970
During the war, my husband, a stage magician, spent his time entertaining the troops, both in Britain and overseas.
“While journeying to Inverness, he passed through Foyers and was able to visit Boleskine House, which had once belonged to Aleister Crowley, who had bought it because he believed it was ideally situated for a practitioner of AbraMelin Magick. Crowley always spelt his ‘Magick’ with a ‘k’ to distinguish it from that performed by conjurers.
The house was in a lonely spot overlooking Loch Ness. It was a bungalow type building where Crowley was supposed to have conjured up demons which he was unable to control As a result, his coachman, a teetotaller, had delirium tremens; a clairvoyant from London went back and became a prostitute; the housekeeper vanished and a workman, who was employed on the estate, went mad and tried to murder Crowley. Or so it was rumoured.
The occupier was pleased to show my husband round the house, though he had never heard of Crowley or his magick, and said there had been no uncanny happenings during the time he lived there. The man whom the papers had called ‘The Wickedest Man In the World’ was entirely forgotten when the British people were defending their country against a man who was more wicked than Crowley could ever have hoped to be. Some people who had known the ‘Master Therion’ believed he was dead, and were surprised when they listened to ‘Germany Calling’ on the radio and heard ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ declare that when the Nazis took over London, Aleister Crowley would perform a ‘Black Mass’ in Westminster Abbey.
My husband became interested in Crowley through reading his book on “Magick,” which came into his possession under rather strange circumstances. At one of the army camps where he was performing, a soldier was unpacking a crate of old books which had been collected by a church organisation for the lads in the forces. Having seen Arnold performing his conjuring act the previous night, the soldier handed him a book:
“This will be more useful to you than to us,” he said. ‘‘You may find some new tricks in it.”
“Thank you,” said Arnold, expecting it to contain some old card tricks. He was very surprised when he read the title—MAGICK IN THEORY AND PRACTICE by the Master Therion—Aleister Crowley.
To the soldier, Magick was either ‘sleight-of-hand’ or producing rabbits from hats; he had no idea he had just given away one of the famous volumes on ‘Ritual Magick’. Arnold wondered how such a book had come to be among those collected by church people; especially as it was an expensive book and hardly likely to be thrown away by anyone interested in the occult.
Although it was pretty hard going, my husband waded through it in his spare time. He wished he had met this man who called himself ‘The Great Beast’; was supposed to have practised Black Magic; had founded a monastery in Sicily (from which he was expelled when Mussolini came to power), and was dubbed by JOHN BULL as ‘The Wickedest Man In the World!’ Even if the stories told about him were untrue, Crowley must have been an extraordinary character.
After the war, my husband was performing his magical act at a private party, when a lady came up to him and said she knew a magician with a similar name to his. Arnold couldn’t recall another conjurer with the same name or anything like it, and told her so. “He isn’t a conjurer,” she said. “He does real magic and not illusions.”
It suddenly rang a bell.
‘‘You don’t mean Aleister Crowley?” he asked.
“That’s the name,” she beamed. “I just couldn’t remember it.”
‘‘Do you know him well?”
“Not really. But he was staying at a private hotel in Hastings when I was there last year.”
“Is he still there?”
“I presume so. I can give you the address and you can write to him and make an appointment to see him if you want to.”
Arnold said he would very much like to visit the old villain, so the lady wrote the address down on a piece of paper, and he wrote to Crowley the following day.
About a week later, he received a letter from ‘the Beast’ himself saying he would be delighted to receive us the following Thursday at 4 pm. The letter started with the quotation—‘Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole of The Law,’ and concluded with—‘Love Is The Law, Love Under Will.’
Arnold and I couldn’t wait to meet the old magician and, when the day came, we set off very early in the morning and drove down to Hastings, where Crowley was living in a large boarding house overlooking the sea. We parked the car and walked up the drive. I was very excited to be meeting the man of mystery who had scared so many people during his lifetime. I wondered if he had given up the ‘Serpent Kiss’ with which he was supposed to have greeted female acquaintances in his prime. It was said he used to take a lady’s hand and bite deeply into the flesh with two teeth which he had filed to points especially for this purpose.
In answer to our knocking, a maidservant opened the door and invited us in. She asked us to take a seat in a square hall which was surrounded by a balcony, while she ran up the stairs and disappeared into a room that overlooked the hall. In a few minutes she was back and told us that Mr. Crowley would receive us at four o’clock. It was then three-thirty, so we sat and waited expectantly.
Finally. the grandfather clock began to chime the awaited hour and, on the last stroke, the door which the servant had entered opened and the Master Therion made his entrance in real theatrical style. He stood for some moments surveying us with his hypnotic eyes. Then he spoke:
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” “Love is the law, love under will,’’ answered Arnold.
This seemed to please the old gentleman and a smile lit up his pallid face.
I had seen photographs of Crowley in his prime—a tall, portly man with a shaven head and magnetic eyes that looked through you as he talked. Joan Grant, author of THE WINGED PHARAOH, who met Crowley in her childhood days, described him as a big fat toad. The person who came out of the bed-room was a small wizened old man with a goatee beard. He wore an old fashioned Norfolk suit and reminded us of a miniature version of Bernard Shaw. The ‘Great Beast’ looked more like a retired country parson than a Black Magician.
He signed for us to mount the stairs and enter his room and as we approached, he put forward a long white, tapering hand; several of his fingers were crowned with large ‘magick’ rings. I put out my hand to shake his; he lifted it to his lips and planted a kiss on it. For a moment, I shuddered as I thought of the ‘Serpent Kiss’ but Crowley had either given up the custom, or his ‘Dracula’ teeth had fallen out with old age. Taking a seat at his desk he indicated two chairs for us and then rang for tea.
He was entirely different from the Crowley I had read about. There was no ‘Scarlet Woman’ to wait upon him, only a little servant-girl. The Master Therion was broke and living on charity from admirers in this country and America; yet behind this sympathetic mask was the Crowley of old. He had lost everything, but his stately dignity remained.
He handed round cigarettes from a gold case and began to talk. He said he had no idea that anyone was interested in magick these days, and explained that he no longer needed magical tools and other trappings of the art as he could now contact the ‘Masters’ direct.
“If only England had listened to me, I could have helped them during the war,’’ he said, but he didn’t add in what way. He talked about himself and his work like a master talking to his disciples, and seemed to accept me as a kind of ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’
We talked about witchcraft and, although Crowley had a great knowledge of the subject, he wasn’t very interested in it. He said it was really a woman’s cult and, as the rites had to be conducted by the High Priestess, it wasn’t suitable for him, as he wasn’t the type to be bossed about by a woman. He preferred to leave witchcraft to females as it was intended to be.
He talked a great deal about magick and, like many modem occultists, said the general public wouldn’t believe anything they couldn’t prove. This could never be done with magick, as it depended upon a peculiar excitation which strongly objected to test conditions. It is such a natural process that its phenomena never excites surprise, so one has to make hundreds of experiments to exclude coincidence.
For example, if you want a certain
article, you use a talisman that is specially made to
produce that article. Within a short time a shopkeeper will
offer you that particular item. If it happens once, it
proves nothing , but if it happens every time—that is proof.
Yet this can never be done under test conditions.
He said the reason why so many would-be magicians were unsuccessful was because their urge to get things done was not strong enough. They think they want something, but know it won’t affect them very much if they don’t get it. This attitude towards Magick is useless; one must be intent and continually work to achieve one’s object. Their magic is too ‘milk and watery’ and they are really only playing at being magicians. They love to dress up and use the paraphernalia of the magician which, in itself, is as much use as a load of junk on a rag-and-bone man’s barrow. Where magic is concerned, reading is for children; a magician must experiment continually.
On the subject of ‘Black Magic’ he had this to Say—Magick is colourless and could be used for good or ill, providing the magician was properly trained and had the power to get things going, but he didn’t really think that anyone who had gone through the strenuous training of a magician would be interested in working evil—he would have risen above such petty things. The Press called all magic ‘black’ as that way it had more sensational value.
There sat the ‘Great Beast’ whose way of life was supposed to have shocked the world; who was said to have sacrificed babies in his Black Magic rites; who had spent an inheritance of some £30,000 dabbling in Magic; there he sat, in a small bedroom of a seaside boarding-house, happy to find people who would listen to his theories and glad to know he wasn’t forgotten altogether.
He was a drug addict and a hypodermic syringe lay on the dressing-table; a few of his weird paintings hung on the wall, and the only remaining article from his magical paraphernalia was the ‘Stele of Revealing’, which stood on a chest of drawers. He had been called a liar, charlatan, fraud and what-have-you, yet his books on magick are continually being reprinted and will go down in history with the greatest works on that subject.
If you read anything about him or any of his books, you will realise that he had a wonderful sense of humour. A person who is so gifted cannot be evil. Hitler, whom most people will admit was an evil man, had no sense of humour at all. The two things just don’t go together. When one journalist wrote that Crowley ate babies in his Black Magic ceremonies, Crowley replied that he only ate the very best kind. He told me that he had visited his old publishers after the war, and asked what had happened to Aleister Crowley. “If he ever returned to England , they’d hang him!” was the reply. Crowley told the man he was quite right.
Another writer claimed that Crowley went into Watkins’ Occult Bookshop and made all the books vanish from the shelves. The owner knew nothing about the incident and neither did Crowley. His name was always news and a good meal ticket for many journalists, who invented things if the news wasn’t sensational enough. If the papers had left him alone, Crowley would have died unknown.
Before we left him, Crowley presented me with an autographed copy of his book of poems called OLLA and invited us to join him in his adoration to the setting sun. We followed him into the garden and all stood facing the west. The magician raised his arms and began to chant:
“Hail unto Thee who art Tum in Thy setting, even unto Thee who art Tum in Thy joy, who travelleth over the Heavens in Thy bark at the down-going of the Sun. Tahuti standeth in his splendour at the prow and Ra-Hoor abideth at the helm. Hail to Thee from the abodes of day!” Going back to London, I thought of the Cowley I had met. I realised he must have mellowed with age but I could only describe him as an ‘old English gentleman.’ Was he ever so bad as he was painted? I very much doubt it. He certainly loved publicity and enjoyed being in the limelight. Perhaps he was like the old American showman P. T. Barnum, who didn’t mind what people said about him so long as they kept his name in front of the public.
No one can deny that he was a great poet and his knowledge of Magick and other occult subjects was fantastic. His sex life was no worse than that of many of today’s promiscuous society and if he were still alive he would no doubt have a large following. I also believe that his magick worked, because someone always seemed to turn up and help him when he was financially embarrassed. He loved his children and one with such instincts cannot be wholly bad. Unfortunately, most of them died young, so he dedicated his life to his work.
It is said that Crowley made a will in 1931 and asked his executors to see he was buried in Westminster Abbey (another example of his sense of humour), but during the last years of his life he made his final decision. He asked Louis Wilkinson (Louis Marlow, the novelist), who had been his friend for many years, to read Crowley’s HYMN TO PAN, THE BOOK OF THE LAW, and Collects and Anthem from his GNOSTIC MASS, at his cremation. This occurred on Friday afternoon, the 6th December, 1947. Some twenty people were present, and as the coffin passed through the curtains, the HYMN TO PAN was recited:
The Great Beast Come. Lo! Pan, Pan, Pan. I am borne to death on the horn of the unicorn.
The Gnostic Mass Requiem brought forth many protests, and the chairman of the committee responsible said, “We shall take all necessary steps to prevent such an incident occurring again.”
I cannot understand why anyone should try to prevent a person being cremated according to his beliefs. It certainly won’t be necessary for the chairman to take the necessary steps he mentioned, as there will never be another Aleister Crowley.
He was right when he said very few people were interested in Magick in 1947. Even the Press barely mentioned his death. It was all a ‘flash in the pan.’ Few people, at that time remembered Aleister Crowley and his so-called ‘Black Magic.’ The man who hoped to start a new religion called ‘Crowleyanity’ had gone for ever. |