Witchcraft

from

WITCHCRAFT: ITS POWER IN THE WORLD TODAY

Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940

(pages 216 - 232)

It was through the late Frank Harris that I first met Aleister Crowley, around 1917, in New York, Harris had finished his Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde biographies, had not yet besmirched himself with My Life and Loves, and was editing Pearson's Magazine. He was living prosperously in one of the verandaed houses on Seventh Avenue, in a Greenwich Village which still had Theodore Drieser in a step-down on West 12th Street, Edna St. Vincent Millay in the same block, Sinclair Lewis in a duplex studio on Tenth Street, and Eugene O'Neill producing his plays in the Provincetown Playhouse, south of Washington Square. I had served for a while with the French on the Western Front, had been gassed at Verdun, had recovered enough to come home and start writing again. Aleister Crowley, a strange Englishman who had devoted a great part of his life to "white magic" and was accused ignorantly by his many enemies of practicing black magic too, was living at No. 1 University Place, to the utter terror of two conventional ladies from the South who had rented him the ground floor. He was a Cambridge man, a distinguished poet, was in many British anthologies, including the Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. He had been in the Himalayas as a mountain climber, was supposed to have studied Tibetan lore. In 1905, according to the Manchester Guardian, he had led an expedition to ascend Kinchinjunga, 100 miles southeast of Mount Everest. The party attacked the southern face of the mountain, above Yalung Glacier, but met with disaster. One climber and several porters were swept away by an avalanche. Crowley was either part Irish or an Irish sympathizer, and was denouncing England during the World War as a "vampire among nations." He was considered to be pro-German, and was for a while associated with George Sylvester Viereck on the Fatherland and International Monthly. These matters left me indifferent, and I was never then or subsequently concerned in any of them. I was wanting to meet Crowley because he was supposed to be an authority on medieval sorcery, and was pleased when Frank Harris arranged it.

We met for lunch at Mouquin's. Aleister Crowley was a strange, disturbing fellow, with a high pontifical manner mixed with a good deal of sly, monkeylike, and occasionally malicious humor. He wore an enormous star sapphire on the forefinger of his right hand, and had his head shaved just then in the manner of Erich von Stroheim. He later sprouted an American Indian warlock which curled slightly and made him somewhat resemble (with his round, smooth-shaven face and big round eyes) a nursery imp masquerading as Mephistopheles. The talk at that luncheon left me gasping. Frank Harris was one of the greatest conversationalists of this or any other century, and Crowley talked like Pain's Fireworks. No magic, black or white, was mentioned until the end of it, when Crowley said he'd heard I was interested in magic and invited me to call on him.

I telephoned late one morning, caught him at home, and went around before lunch. On entering the spacious living room, I was presented to a young lady by the name of Leah Hirsig. At least, as I subsequently learned, that was her name in the phone book, and in the cold world outside. Here in the nice, warm magician's castle, she was naked as a jaybird, and just as unconcerned as one. They were not nudists. It wasn't anything like that. I slowly gathered that Leah was a high priestess, and that she also occasionally turned into Astarte, Ashtoreth, and Isis. Since these are goddesses with a precedent dating back some hundreds of centuries, her lack of embarrassment became more easily understandable.

What remained surprising, however, until my host kindly explained it, was the one thing she did wear. She couldn't very well avoid wearing it, because it had been branded into her fair hide with the red-hot point of a Chinese sword: on her breast she wore a star, pointing to the pickle jar, as did young King William's. The Master Therion (who was Crowley) had done a neat, artistic job of it, and after you got over the first shock, it rather enhanced the charm of the high priestess.

After that first visit, I got them both pretty well, and over a long period of time. Crowley had a cult, with followers and disciples. He never tried to make me a member of it. He accepted me as a sort of apprentice fellow-sorcerer, and I attended numbers of their ceremonies. They were Holy Grail stuff, mostly. Some of the invocations were quite beautiful, and Leah made a splendid combination of high priestess and goddess. The ceremonial part of Crowley's A. A. and O. T. O. is neither here nor there for purposes of this book. There are hundreds of such cults, mostly harmless and generally tiresome when you've seen much of them. What interested me in Aleister Crowley was the same thing, finally, that had me interested in the African witch-doctors and later in Gurdjieff. Behind the mumbo jumbo, whether in spite of or because of the mumbo jumbo, Aleister Crowley too had power. Whether it was a kind of power worth having, or a kind that can ever—in anybody's hands—have any profound effect upon the world, or whether he always used it honestly, are questions outside any point I'm trying to make, and which I don't pretend to answer.^[1]

I propose instead to recount a number of happenings of which I had close personal knowledge. They will cast some light on my assertion that he had power, and may cast a little light too on why I write good-humoredly about him. During the years in America, he was part pontifical and part monkey, part primate and part primate, if any man ever was. I recall that one summer our Master Therion gathered his followers around him, announced that his planets were in such and such conjunction, and that the time had come for him to go into a forty-day retirement in the "wilderness" for prayer and mystical meditation. It was hot as hell in New York, and my own idea was that he simply wanted to go to the country. He happened to be out of cash at the moment, and fasting for forty days and nights was not included in the program. We decided to stake him to a camping trip, up the Hudson River—got him a canoe, a tent, supplied him with some money and a list of American canned goods, provisions which he was going to buy next day. These, with the canoe and tent, were to go aboard the Albany day boat, and we were going down to see him off next morning. When we got there, he was pleased as Punch, looking very important supervising the embarkment of the provisions. The "provisions" looked suspicious, and since we'd paid for them, we decided to inspect them. They consisted of fifty gallons of red paint, three big house-painter's brushes, and a heavy coil of rope. We investigated further. He hadn't bought so mush as a can of beans or a loaf of bread. He's blown every cent for the red paint. He had nothing in his pockets except the ticket for the trip up the river.

"What are you going to eat, for crying out loud?" we asked, and he replied, in his heaviest pontifical manner. "My children, I am going to Esopus Island, and I will be fed as Elijah was fed by the ravens."

"Are you coming back in a chariot of fire, or in a Black Maria?" we yelled as the boat pulled out, and he waved good-bye with a grin.

Upstate New York farmers are a hard bunch for anybody to make monkeys out of, or to play the monkey with—but neighboring farmers fed Aleister Crowley for the whole forty days—and at the end of the forty days all the summer excursionists going up and down the river saw painted on the cliffs south of Kingston two enormous legends:

EVERY MAN AND WOMAN IS A STAR!

DO WHAT THOU WILT

SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW.

He had rigged himself a sling, and painted, we were told, from sunrise to sundown. Thereafter, he had sat cross-legged, on the ground in front of his tent, while neighbors, whether regarding him as a mighty prophet or a harmless crank, had brought him eggs and milk, occasional sweet corn. Frequently, when they chanced to pass next morning, he would still be sitting like an idol, with the eggs and milk untouched. They said he ate sparingly, once in every twenty-four hours, and that it was a mystery when he slept—unless he slept while sitting like a Buddha in the lotus posture. He never made any effort to commercialize or cash in on, or gain credit for, the two legends painted on the rock. He had wanted to paint them there—and that was that.

A.C. came back to New York in September, sunburned, lean, fit, and in a fine good humor. Acquaintances who were not among his converts said he was crazy as a loon. I thought so, but recalled that the Lord Gautama had sat thus under a tree for eleven years. It was crazy in the age of motor cars and airplanes, I agreed, but it was something.

One day after he had returned to New York, I invited him to the grillroom of the Plaza, for lunch, where he regaled himself with whitebait, steak tartare, creamcake, topped off with a Napoleon brandy—then lighted a Belinda perfecto.

I said, "what did you get out of it, beyond cleaning out your colon and taking weight off your belly?"

"I have gained greater power."

"What kind of power?" I asked.

Perhaps," he replied, "I can show you."

"If it's done in the dark," I said, "or behind curtains, or with spooks, I wouldn't believe it."

"It's a bright, sunshiny day," he said, as if dropping the subject (or was he?). "Suppose we stroll in the park in the sunshine."

I said, "I'd like to stop at Brentano's. Suppose we stroll down Fifth Avenue instead."

"Anywhere you like," he replied.

We strolled. The Avenue was crowded. "On a block where it thins out a bit," said he, "I'll show you."

"Show me what?"

He replied majestically, "I will show you."

The crowd looked thinner ahead of us in front of the Public Library, and as we crossed Forty-second Street, A.C. touched me lightly on the elbow and put his fingers to his lips. Ahead of us was strolling a tall, prosperous-looking gentleman of leisure, and Crowley, silent as a cat, fell into step immediately behind him. Their footfalls began to synchronize, and then I observed that Crowley, who generally held himself pompously erect and had a tendency to strut, had dropped his shoulders, thrust his head forward a little, like the man's in front, had begun to swing his arms in perfect synchronization—now so perfect that he was like a moving shadow or astral ghost of the other.

As we neared the end of the block, A.C., in taking a step forward, let both his knees buckle suddenly under him, so that he dropped, caught himself on his haunches, and was immediately erect again, strolling.

The man in front of us fell as if his legs had been shot out from under him . . . and was sprawling. We helped him up, as a crowd gathered. He was unhurt. There was no banana peel. With his hand on somebody's shoulder, he looked at the soles of his shoes. They were dry. He brushed himself off, regained his hat, tried his legs tentatively, thanked us, and strolled on.

I think I know all the answers. The easiest one is that the gentleman was a stooge. The only trouble with it is that I was the one who had suggested strolling down the Avenue, and I had been at A.C.'s side ever since. The gentleman, if a stooge, however, could have been loitering outside the Plaza, waiting for a signal. Identification of him and affidavits from him wouldn't have helped at all, since he might always have been lying. The hell of all this stuff is that something of that sort is always the easiest answer.

Another answer is that the gentleman, without being conscious of it, heard the faint sound of Crowley's catlike footfalls, mingled in perfect synchronization with his own, unconsciously identified the rhythm with his own rhythm, and fell when the rhythm was violently broken. There are a number of variations of that answer, splitting hairs a bit, but still leaving the phenomenon in the field of the sensory. Still another answer is that Crowley possessed supernormal powers, was generating and sending out supernormal and supersensory emanations. I think I know all the answers—but I'm not satisfied with any of them.

One following summer—it was around 1920—I invited A.C. to spend July and August with me on a farm near Atlanta. We got to talking one night about the Trappist monks, about their vows of silence, etc., and he suggested that we try an interesting variant. He proposed that for a week we limit all verbal communication and all conversation to one prearranged monosyllable. We experimented with several, tried various animal monosyllables, including urr, woof, moo, baa, and finally decided upon "wow."

We stuck to this for the whole week. Katie [Kate Seabrook] was amused and tolerant, visitors wondered whether we'd gone crazy, while Shep and Vonie, our two Negro servants, were convinced we'd either joined or were founding a branch of some new religion. We learned in the first couple of days, or believed we did, a good deal about the manner in which animals communicate with each other. We were both surprised how much, by mere change in intonation, volume, etc., we could communicate. After we'd become pretty good, or thought we had, in "Pass the butter," "I don't care for any more," "Would you like to take a walk?", "That's a pretty girl!", "It's a fine morning," "yes," "no," "maybe," "I like it," "I don't like it," "the hell with it," "Isn't it wonderful?" and elementary things of that sort—it chanced that one night Shep brought me a gallon of moonshine corn.

A.C. and I sat up that night, drank most of it, and held a long, deep philosophic conversation, in terms of "wow," until the wee small hours, when Katie finally made us shut up and go to bed. She still insists that we simply got drunk and sat and barked at each other all night, but A.C. and I felt the talk had been profound and illuminating.

It was at any rate profitable, for I later wrote a fantasy on what might happen if human language were abolished, and sold it to H.L. Mencken. It is entitled "Wow," and has appeared in a number of anthologies.

A.C. subsequently went to Sicily, taking his high priestess Leah with him, bought the equivalent of an old monastery and grounds in the hills near Cefalù, outside Palermo, gathered some disciples from England and America, and founded there his College of the Holy Ghost.

I was in Africa again when the unfortunate episode of the young Oxford poet and the cat occurred, but I have closer knowledge of another drama which concerned a moderately well-known American actress who has had roles on Broadway and in Hollywood. The story contains nothing to anybody's discredit—on the contrary!—and she lent me her diary covering the entire Cefalù period, with permission to quote from it, but requested that I leave her name out.

She had been suffering, as out best actresses do sometimes; from an unrequited passion for Horace Liveright, Jed Harris, Max Eastman, Max Bodenheim, or some other intellectual homme fatale of the speakeasy epoch; from too much bathtub gin, despondency, and a couple of other depressant which I believe included veronal. She had met Aleister Crowley, suffered also from a curiosity about the occult, and as an alternative to suicide had gone over to become one of his disciples for the summer.

What happened after she had matriculated in the College of the Holy Ghost and taken up her residence in the Abbey of Thelema wasn't anything that she'd expected.

On a small isolated promontory within the abbey grounds, and overlooking the sea, the Master Therion set up the Sicilian equivalent of a pup tent—a shepherd's shelter, a thatched lean-to on poles, not much larger than the wardrobe trunk she'd brought across the ocean. Behind it, he dug a small lime pit to serve as a latrine. Her entire wardrobe and camp equipment was to consist of a burnoose to cover her nakedness when she got cold at night, or if it rained. It was a voluminous, coarse woolen robe with a cowl. No bed, no chair, no bunk, no straw, no blanket, no pillow—no toilet articles, no books, no cards, no games. She would have, said the Master Therion, the sun, moon, stars, sky, sea, the universe to read and play with. She was to stay up on that rock alone for a month. No one was to go up except a little boy who would come quietly to deposit a coarse loaf of bread, a bunch of grapes, and a jug of water each night while she was sleeping. She told the Master Therion he was crazy. He told her there was a boat touching next day at Palermo, and that there was her unpacked trunk, and there was the open door, and there was a telephone—but that when the boat sailed north, she'd be sitting up there naked on the rock, watching it disappear.

And for a month!

What an outrageous trick, you say? Let's look at it a minute. Its horrors combined a perfectly balanced frugal diet, a rest cure, sun baths, a fresh air cure, a sojourn by the seaside overlooking one of the most beautiful bays on earth. She undertook to try it, and did. I have neglected to mention that at the end of seven days, pencil and paper were to be sent up to her by the little boy, so that she could begin keeping a diary. The diary was interesting for many reasons. The progressive steps it shows are perhaps the most interesting thing in it:

During the first days, she was nervous, uncomfortable, angry, and resentful, but determined to stick it out. Then, for a while, she was just as nervous, but less uncomfortable, no longer angry and resentful, but beginning to be bored.

Then for a number of days, she was "calm, but bored."

It was boredom and not the hardship and discomfort, which she no longer felt, that tempted her when nineteen days had passed to give it up.

She stuck it out, and during the last ten days experienced "perfect calm, deep joy, renewal of strength and courage." As she put it, she had "let go of herself" in New York, and had "gotten hold of herself again," there on the rock. Also, what with the limited diet, self-imposed calisthenics, sun and air, she had "lost sixteen pounds in the right places" which doubtless partially accounted for her "deep joy."

She came down off the rock, remained in the colony for the summer, studied principally self-control and the drawing on her inner resources and reserve force, went back to Broadway, and resumed her career.

The methods of the Master Therion had savored of spectacular baloney, but I doubt whether Bill Brown, the late Muldoon, or their most orthodox and expensive prototypes patronized by wealthy ladies could have done a better job.

Following the death of the young Oxford poet and athlete Raoul (Frederick Charles) Loveday, after he had sacrificed a cat on the altar of the cult at Cefalù and drunk a cup of its blood, the young man's widow, Betty May Loveday, former model, raised a tremendous hullabaloo with the help of the British press, and in the spring of 1923, Aleister Crowley was expelled from Italian territory by the Fascisti. He raised a counter-hullabaloo with libel suits, but was granted no damages. Those who have read the Daily Mail, daily express, or Telegraph may sense a belief on my part that "the devil is not always as black as he is painted," or if not that, a desire on my part to whitewash him a bit.

Rather than use a whitewash brush on the Master Therion, since he has always insisted he was a white magician anyway, I suggest that the old schoolbook adage de gustibus non disputandum may have a bearing on the cat. I have eaten cat in Naples and caterpillars on the Ivory Coast. I have also eaten stewed young man. I have drunk the sacrificial blood of goats and bulls at voodoo altars, and have seen my surpliced betters drinking from a cup on the greatest altar of all, a liquid which people wiser and better than I am assure me has been miraculously changed into the blood of a man who once became a god. I have also seen my aunt from Hawkinsville, Georgia, kneeling before one of these same greatest altars and eating a substance which she believed to be a part of the body of a man. The greatest and noblest of the Greeks habitually sacrificed birds, beasts, more rarely their daughters, and consulted the steaming entrails. So that if Aleister Crowley and his disciple Raoul Loveday, founding a new religion, chose to assassinate a stray cat and imbibe its life-blood, it seems to me that it was nobody's business unless the Italian S.P.C.A. chose to intervene. And if it made Raoul sick afterward, it seems to me, similarly, that it was his own private misfortune.

One can hardly have expected, however, so detached an attitude on the part of his beautiful young model-widow. She was known as the "Tiger-Woman," and so titled the book she wrote about herself in 1929 for Duckworth. As an amateur psychoanalyst, I suspect that Betty May was subconsciously thinking "a tiger is also a cat. Maybe I'd better get out of here while the going's good." At any rate, she ran away, and here's what she tells us in Tiger-Woman about the other cat—and about he young husband's untimely demise:

The ceremony opened with the solemn entrance of the Mystic clad in the gorgeous robes of a Grand Master of the order of Freemasons. After he had seated himself on the throne before the brazier with the charcoal fire, around which hung the sacrificial knives and swords, the other members of the cult took their places on the triangular stools at the points of the star. They dressed as a rule in robes like those in which I first saw Leah, with the cowls drawn down over their faces, and only their eyes visible through the narrow eye-slits. Clouds of incense hung about the room everywhere. When all were assembled, the Mystic rose from his seat, and taking one of the swords from the side of the brazier, held it pointing towards the altar while he intones an invocation in a language with which I was not familiar. From hearing it every day, however, the sounds remain fixed in my memory.

"Artay I was Malcooth—Vegabular,

Vegadura, ee-ar-la—ah moon."

The last was a high-pitched note in contrast with the rest of the chant. Following this, he walked over to Raoul, rested the point of the sword on his forehead, and uttered a further rigmarole, finishing up with a loud shriek of "Adonis," which was the name by which my husband was known in the abbey. Then he went through the identical performance in front of Leah, except that to begin with he stood silently in front of her for a full minute, breathing deeply the while—breathing in the soul of his priestess, as Raoul explained it to me afterwards.

These preliminary invocations done, the Mystic proceeded to execute a variety of ecstatic dances. This was both impressive and ludicrous. He lashed himself into an absolute frenzy, brandishing his sword, and dancing and leaping about in the magic circle. His eyes blazed. The words he chanted had a compelling monotonous and exotic rhythm, and his eyes were alight with fanatical enthusiasm. Every Friday night there was a special invocation to Pan, in which, as is shown by the hymn for these occasions, the doctrine of the cult became manifest. It was written in English, and I will quote the first few lines,

"Thrill with lissom lust of the light,

O Man, my Man;

Come careening out of the night

To me, to me;

Come with Apollo in bridal dress—"

On the evening of the sacrifice everybody took their accustomed position, except that for this occasion Raoul, as he was to be the executioner, changed places with the Mystic. The cat was brought out and placed, still in the sack, on the altar. The opening of the rite was the same as the [ceremony of] Pentagram, which I have already described. The air was thick with incense. Raoul recited the invocation, and walked with upraised sword towards Leah and the others and placed its point on their brows while he uttered the usual formula. I sat outside the magic circle and watched the gruesome performance.

Presently, when much of the ceremony had been gone through, I saw Raoul take a kukri [Gurkha knife] from its place by the brazier and approach the altar, on which was the squirming sack. He untied it, drew forth the struggling and terrified Mischette by the scruff of the neck, and held her with his left hand at arm's length above his head. In his right he held the kukri with its point towards the brazier. The Mystic stilled Mischette's struggles by applying a dab of ether to her nose. All was now ready for the sacrificial invocation, which Raoul had written specially for the occasion, and which he now had to recite in the fatiguing posture that I have described.

It was a long invocation, and before it was half done I could see his left arm quiver with the strain. As he approached the point where the killing was to take place Leah stepped down from her triangular stool, and taking a bowl from the altar, held it underneath Mischette to catch the blood, none of which is supposed to be lost. At last the moment had arrived. I saw him lift back the kukri, and then closed my eyes till it should be over. . . . Then swaying slightly, he laid the carcass on the altar. This done his resources were exhausted, and the Mystic had to take over the conducting of the ceremony.

Having concluded the invocation, he took the bowl containing the blood, uttered some consecratory formula over it and handed it to Leah, who was standing by. Together they approached Raoul. The Mystic then flung back the cowl from Raoul's face, and dipping a finger in the blood, traced the sign of the Pentagram on his white glistening forehead, and so to all the others, himself last.

The final rite . . . now alone remained to be performed. . . . The Mystic took a small silver cup, into which he scooped some of the blood from the bowl and handed it to my husband, who drained it to the dregs.

For a time I was convinced that Raoul had been poisoned by the blood of Mischette. But when he got steadily worse and a doctor was summoned I found out that he was suffering from enteric, a not uncommon disease in those parts.

It is quite understandable, if you know the British, that the reported pentagrammed shindigs of these two British gentlemen, one of whom was a Cambridge honor man and the other an Oxonian, were somewhat shocking to the learned judges who heard the libel suits brought by the Master Therion, and who concurred fervidly with the juries which refused to grant Mr. Crowley so much as a farthing in damages.

Quoting from The Times (London( of April 14, 1934, "His Lordship, in directing the jury, said that he had never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous, and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man who describes himself as the greatest living poet."

Said Mr. Justice Swift on the same day, from the bench, "I have been more than forty years engaged in the administration of the law in one capacity or another. I thought I knew of every conceivable form of wickedness. I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me. I have learned in this case that you can always learn something more if you live long enough."

Mr. Crowley got no satisfaction from the courts, but had the subsequent fun of predicting the present world war, and of suggesting that if the courts and British public had been more sympathetic to him, the catastrophe might have been averted. According to the Daily Express of December 23, 1937, portions of a prophetic book of Aleister Crowley's "were read at Cleopatra's Needle, at 6:22 A.M., as the sun entered Capricornus, by an Englishman, a Jew, a Negro and a Malayan. There was a short speech by Crowley as Priest of the Princes. He proclaimed the law of Thelema, and handed copies to the white, red, brown, black and yellow representatives. He stated that he had published three times, and that each time war broke out nine months later; that 'the might of this magick burst out and caused a catastrophe to civilization.' He said that if everybody would do what he told them, the catastrophe could be averted."

He missed it a little bit on his timing. But it came. War, as Nostradamus knew, is always a safe bet for prophets. Old Nostradamus, who was a great medieval magician in St. Rémy, wrote a book of prophecy, Centuries, which has recently been reprinted in a popular edition and has become again a best seller in Paris.

I am possibly too casual, but feel that the British in general, apart from Nina Hamnett's treatment of him in Laughing Torso, have been a bit heavy in their attitude toward the Master Therion. If he had been an American, I can't help feeling that we'd have had more fun with him. As a matter of fact we did, while he was over here. I saw him last in Paris in 1933. We lunched, on his invitation, at Foyot's. He was still having a good deal of fun with the world.

1—Aleister Crowley himself has written a hundred or more volumes on both points. At least ten books have been written about him, including a literary biography called Star in the West by Major General J.F.C. Fuller, who years later became one of the only two Englishmen invited to Hitler's fiftieth birthday dinner. The British Press, in particular the Daily Express, Daily Mail, and Daily Telegraph, have published tons of stuff about Crowley and his magic, mostly denunciatory.