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A
Case of Wanderlust
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Place Cairo
Year 1904
Event Crowley was
an inveterate seeker who wandered far from post-Victorian
England. Egypt and the Orient were especially important
in his quest for the magical merger of body and spirit.
Honeymooning in Cairo in 1904, Crowley and his bride were
walking outside the National Museum when Rose suddenly
began mumbling confusedly about the ancient Egyptian god
Horus. She led her husband into the museum to an antique
tablet that bore the god’s image. As it happened
the tablet’s exhibit number was 666, the number the
Bible ascribes to the Beast. Crowley took this happenstance
to be prophetic of his special fate, a notion bolstered
over the next month by the purported first appearance
of Aiwas, his guardian angel.
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By Crowley’s
account, it was then that Aiwas began dictating
the Book of the Law, containing the sacred injunction,
Do what Thou wilt. The angel also enjoined his mortal
charge to “take wine and drugs”, advice
the Beast chose to follow enthusiastically to a
bad end.Crowley returned to England, but not for
long. The next year, he went east again, to the
Himalayas to climb the world’s third-highest
mountain, Kangchenjunga. It was a disastrous expedition.
A fellow mountaineer later said that Crowley, who
insisted on leading the trek, took impossible approaches
and treated the portersbrutally. For instance, he
expected them to walk barefoot over ice. They deserted
in droves, and several disenchanted climbers took
some of the remaining porters and headed back to
camp. When six of the party fell down a slope in
an accident, Crowley refused to go to their rescue.
Four died. Crowley then deserted the expedition
himself and absconded with the money that had been
earmarked to pay its bills.
For Crowley, who outraged every standard of civilized
behaviour, it was the start of complete social ostracism
at home. No matter. Home was never where he wanted
to be. |
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Place
Morocco
Year 1907
Event
Banished from the Golden Dawn, Crowley borrowed
its rituals and in 1907 set up a splinter
group, the Silver Star, or Argentinum Astrum
(AA). It was on his travels two years later
with an early AA acolyte, a worshipful youth
by the name of Victor Neuburg, that Crowley
had the revelation that sex could be a means
to magic. The event occurred on a mountaintop
in Morocco.
In 1920, Crowley took up residence in a rundown
farmhouse in Cefalu, Sicily, bringing along
with him two mistresses and their three children
one of whom was Crowley’s daughter. Crowley
called this AA sanctuary the Abbey of Thelema.
Outwardly, a day at the abbey was almost monastic,
featuring much ritual chanting and ceremony.
But sex, enhanced by a cornucopia of drugs,
dominated the scene.
New disciples soon joined the party. They
included an American actress, Jane Wolfe,
about whom Crowley had fantasized wildly.
But when she proved to be a tough-looking
woman about his own age, he exiled her for
a month to a tent located near the farmhouse.
(Perhaps she was not too put off by the move;
she found the farmhouse squalid and referred
to one of Crowley’s mistresses as “filth
personified.”)
In late 1922, Crowley received two more visitors
Raoul Loveday and his wife, Betty May, an
artist’s model. Betty May, who had seen
a bit of the world, was appalled by the Crowley
menage. But the ingenuous Loveday became the
Beast’s devoted disciple. Already in
fragile health, possibly from dysentery and
hepatitis, Loveday collapsed and died shortly
after a ceremony in which a cat had been sacrificed
and its blood drunk. In the ensuing scandal,
amid rumors that human infants as well as
animals had been killed, the Italian government
moved to expel Crowley from Sicily. |
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