Page 51 - All About History - Issue 72-18

Aleister Crowley
mysticism), Crowley wanted to move faster
through the Order’s ranks than was permitted.
By now determined to explore the world of
the occult to its limit, in 1899 Crowley purchased
a Scottish mansion, Boleskine House, on the
shore of Loch Ness. Here he attempted the
exhausting Abramelin Operation, a six-month
ritual in which a disciple seeks to converse with a
personal guardian angel, invoking demonic spirits
at the same time.
The same year he published more poetry
collections, one of which, Jephthah, was a success.
Although Crowley made progress through the
various grades of the Order of the Golden Dawn,
he was unpopular in the group thanks to the
reputation he had gained from being a bisexual
sybarite, and he conflicted with members
including the poet WB Yeats. The Order’s London
lodge refused to allow him entry into its Second
Order, although Samuel Mathers did so after
Crowley visited him in Paris.
This caused a schism between Mathers and the
Order, which became irrevocable when Crowley
– on Mathers’ orders – attempted to storm and
occupy the Order’s temple building in Kensington.
The case went to court, and the Order won –
Crowley and Mathers were expelled.
However, Crowley was just getting started on
his bizarre journey, both physical and spiritual.
In 1900 he travelled to Mexico, where he settled
in Mexico City with a local mistress and worked
with Enochian magic. While there he was
initiated into the Freemasons, wrote poems
and a play and climbed mountains such as
Iztaccihuatl, Popocatepetl and Colima. He then
headed to San Francisco and Hawaii, enjoying an
affair with a married woman named Mary Rogers
on the ship for good measure. After stopovers in
Japan and Hong Kong, Crowley reached Sri Lanka
(then known as Ceylon), where he met Allan
Bennett, who had moved there to study Shaivism;
the latter decided to train as a Buddhist monk and
went to Burma. Crowley chose to to travel to India,
studing raja yoga, a variant of Hindu astrology. The
sheer amount of esoteric beliefs that Crowley had
absorbed by this point was prodigious. Still only in
his late 20s, his greatest period of activity – both
physical and mental – was upon him. In 1902 he
attempted to climb the mountain K2, which had
not yet been conquered at the time.
However, influenza, malaria and snow blindness
meant that his group only made it to 6,100 metres
before turning back.
Later that year he settled in Paris, where he
Crowley in the
gained a measure of local fame among the urban
ceremonial
intelligentsia. As a published poet, occult scholar garb of the
Order of the
and man of deviant sexual habits by the standard
Golden Dawn,
of the day, he was welcomed in fin-de-siècle an occult
organisation
Paris and became friends with the painter Gerald
Kelly and the author W Somerset Maugham. Art,
philosophy and his extraordinarily vivid lifestyle
coalesced for Crowley this year, making him one She took him to a nearby museum, containing
of the outstanding figures of his time – a view that a 7th-century BCE mortuary stele known as
he himself was quick to endorse. the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu. The exhibit’s
Another key moment in his personal evolution number was 666.
came in 1904. By then Crowley had returned to On 8, 9 and 10 April, for exactly one hour
Boleskine House, married Gerald’s sister Rose at noon on each day, Crowley – seated in his
– deeply distressing the Kelly family in doing so – apartment – was addressed by a disembodied
and travelled with her to Cairo, where the couple voice, identifying itself as Aiwass, the messenger
claimed to be a prince and princess for their own, of Horus. He claimed to have written down
arcane reasons. However, this was no simple Aiwass’ words verbatim, and soon after turned
pleasure trip. While in Cairo, Crowley underwent these words into a book, Liber L vel Legis, better
the most profound spiritual experience of his life. known as The Book of the Law.
On 18 March Rose – who had become delirious, The cornerstone of the book was the
in a form of hallucinatory trance – told Crowley statement “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole
that the Egyptian god Horus was waiting for of the Law”, which may have been controversial
him. Two days later, she announced, “The at the time but now resonates in the era of
Equinox of the Gods has come!” libertarianism. This, and the
Crowley’s concept of
vampirism differed
from that of Hollywood
horror films. To him,
vampires could
feed on mental
energy
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