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The Place of Enchantment

The University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

In late 1909, two Englishmen, scions of the comfortable middle classes, undertook a journey to Algiers. Aleister Crowley, later to be dubbed "the wickedest man in the world," was in his early thirties; his companion, Victor Neuburg, had only recently graduated from Cambridge. The stated purpose of the trip was pleasure. Crowley, widely traveled and an experienced mountaineer and big-game hunter, loved North Africa and had personal reasons for wanting to be out of England. Neuburg probably had little say in the matter. Junior in years, dreamy and mystical by nature, and in awe of a man whom he both loved and admired, Neuburg was inclined to acquiesce without demur in Crowley's various projects. There was, however, another highly significant factor in Neuburg's quiescence. He was Crowley's chela, a novice initiate of the Magical Order of the Silver Star, which Crowley had founded two years earlier. As such, Neuburg had taken a vow of obedience to Crowley as his Master and affectionately dubbed "holy guru," and had already learned that in much that related to his life, Crowley's word was now law.

It was at Crowley's instigation that the two men began to make their way, first by tram and then by foot, into the North African desert to the southwest of Algiers; and it was Crowley's decision to perform there a series of magical ceremonies that prefigured his elaboration of the techniques of sex magic, or, as he was later to call it, Magick. In this case, the ceremonies combined the performance of advanced ritual magic with homosexual acts. It is this episode in the desert-sublime and terrifying as an experience, profound in its effects, and illuminating in what it reveals of the engagement of advanced magical practice with personal selfhood-that constitutes the focus of this chapter.

The Crowley life story is almost the stuff of Victorian melodrama: the good man gone bad, betrayer of women and men alike, corrupter of innocence, dark angel and self-proclaimed Antichrist. Viewed differently, Crowley assumes tragic-heroic status. This was a gifted man born into privilege who scorned convention and ultimately destroyed himself in his relentless search for impossible truths. In the magical world that he made his own, the name Aleister Crowley evokes admiration, even reverence. Offshoots of Crowley's Magical Order and practitioners of his Magick are to be found throughout the Western world. Just the same-from his early days in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to the present day-Crowley has been denounced by magicians as everything ranging from an evil genius to a magical fraud. His contemporaries excoriated him as rumors of his escapades reached a wider public through reported court cases and salacious articles in the general press.

Nevertheless, however Crowley is viewed, his magical odyssey is deeply instructive of the potentialities of the psychologized magic of the fin de siècle, and illustrative of its dangers. Not least, Crowley's magical practice epitomized the ease with which the high aspirations of an Order such as the Golden Dawn could metamorphose into those so-called black arts against which occultists such as Madame Blavatsky railed. At an individual level, as seems to have happened with Crowley, undisciplined psychologized magic in the hands of the ill-prepared could lead to personal disintegration. At all events, what happened in the desert might be said to have destroyed the lives of two men. It certainly crystallized the moment at which Crowley let go of what was known and could be anticipated magically, and for good or ill embraced both a lived and a magical modus operandi in which there are no safeguards and no guarantees.

The episode that forms the focus of this chapter marks the point at which Crowley crossed the Rubicon in a number of senses, but the experiment was not straightforwardly self-serving, as much of his magical work was to become. Nor did it represent simply the indulgence of an exoticized and outlawed sexuality. What happened in the desert was the result of a serious, if misguided, attempt to access and explore a centuries-old magical system, and it represented an intense personal investment in the pursuit of magical knowledge. In the following discussion the event itself is deconstructed with a view to presenting both a microanalysis of a magical rite performed in a specific context, and a focused discussion of the relationship between psychologized magic and the exploration of subjectivity. The chapter therefore sets out to examine the meaning and significance of a particular magical work performed in a colonial context against a backdrop of fin-de-siècle "decadence," while also getting at its immediate experiential dimensions. The episode itself provides a rare glimpse of interiorized magic in the making, although that was certainly not Crowley's intention in either his subsequent veiled allusions to the performance of the rite or his documentation of its magical effects. Furthermore, in situating the discussion within the conceptual framework implied by the term subjectivity I am stepping outside both the magical episteme and the liberal-humanist conception of self upon which Crowley (in 1909 at least) depended. I am instead relying on a particular theoretical formulation of selfhood that underscores its contingency. The poststructuralist concept of subjectivity is suggestive of a self that is both stable and unstable, knowable and unknowable, constructed and unique. The central purpose of the chapter, however, is to present an analysis of a pivotal magical experience, elucidating its complexities, and arguing for it in terms of an ultimate self-realization that exposed the limitations of a unified sense of self upon which experiential self-identity depends.

The Making of a Magician

Aleister Crowley was born in 1875 to Edward and Emily Crowley, Plymouth Brethren of the strictest kind. He was baptized Edward Alexander, known in the family as Alick, and only later (in his ardent Celtic phase) changed his name to Aleister. The Crowley money had been made in the brewery trade, but the senior Edward Crowley had little to do with the business and lived a gentleman's existence. He was a gifted and devoted preacher, and his son adored and sought to emulate him. Conversely, and significantly, the youthful Alick had no time for his mother, whom he despised and remembered treating virtually like a servant. At the age of eight, and in accordance with the dictates of his social class, Alick was sent away to school, where he continued in a pious vein. In 1887, however, his father died, and an immediate change was wrought in the boy. He began to hate his school, and while continuing to accept the theology of the Brethren quite "simply went over to Satan's side."

In his Confessions Crowley states that he could not understand the reason for this sudden identification with the forces of evil. It is possible that his claim that from the age of twelve he sought Satan's path with a passion previously reserved for the God of his father might have been a convenient authorial fiction. On the other hand, it is not difficult to speculate on the possible reasons for a switch of allegiance-the death of a father who was synonymous in the boy's mind with Christ, if not God; the fallibility of the idea of an all-powerful and just God; and so on. Crowley, perceptive and witty about the foibles of others, could apparently display an astonishing lack of insight when it came to himself. Perhaps this is why he failed to make more of the fact that it was his mother who first referred to him as "the beast," a name he was to make his own. It was she, possibly in the wake of an adolescent episode involving Crowley and a family maid, who "believed that I was actually Anti-christ of the Apocalypse." Whatever the reasons, in a boyhood suffused with biblical imagery, Crowley seems to have made an early identification with Satan and a further connection between Satan and sexuality. This was ultimately to be worked out in the Magick of his adult years.

In 1895 Crowley finally overcame family opposition and went up to Cambridge University. Cambridge was a final liberation from the stultifying religious atmosphere of his home, and he gave himself over to the three proscribed joys of sex, smoking, and literature. Already adept in Latin and Greek, Crowley abandoned work for the moral science tripos and spent his time in an intensive study of English literature supplemented by French literature and the classics. It was at Cambridge that he first read Richard Burton's Arabian Nights and began to acquire an extensive library, including valuable first editions. Crowley adopted a luxurious lifestyle, but he was also reading voraciously, won distinction in the game of chess, and began to write and publish verse. Like other young men of his class, he sought amours with working-class girls in Cambridge. He found these encounters intoxicating, but beneath the surface his attitude towards the female sex was ambivalent. Crowley later espoused liberated views on the subject of women, recognizing female sexuality and denouncing the sexual double standard (in favor of mutual sexual abandonment). There remained, however, an undercurrent of fear, resentment, and contempt. His tendency to throw himself into passionate romantic entanglements with women was paralleled by an equal facility for discarding them when his needs altered or attention wandered. This single-minded ruthlessness was a feature of his personality and affected both women and men, but it nevertheless remains the case that Crowley left behind a trail of devastation when it came to the women in his life. Alcoholism, insanity, and suicide followed in his wake, and the suggestion that he deliberately sought out "border-line [unbalanced] women" because they could better access the astral plane remains highly questionable.

In his final year at Cambridge, at the age of twenty-three, Crowley met and fell in love with Jerome Pollitt. Pollitt was ten years his senior, a close friend of Aubrey Beardsley's, and a talented female impersonator and dancer who had performed as Diane de Rougy in tribute to the actress Liane de Pougy. In spite of the cautionary tone of Crowley's account of the affair, and his insistence that his sexual life remained intensely heterosexual, he conceded that their relationship was "that ideal intimacy which the Greeks considered the greatest glory of manhood and the most precious prize of life." Later he immortalized Pollitt in The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist, also a tribute of sorts to Richard Burton's translated work The Perfumed Garden. Crowley's collection of poems are a blend of Persian mysticism and the glorification of homosexual love, written in the style of ghazals by an imaginary seventeenth-century poet. They are supposedly translated into English by an Anglo-Indian, Major Lutiy, helped by an anonymous "editor," and are then discussed by an equally fictitious clergyman. The collection, however, is typically Crowley-esque: both spoof and serious, learned in its own way while designed to amuse. Beginning "As I placed the rigid pen of my thought within the inkstand of my imagination, I tasted the bliss of Allah," the poet Abdullah El Haji, the El Qahar of the ghazals, praises the "podex" of his lover, Habib. More notable than the explicit meaning of the verses are the hidden references to Pollitt and to Crowley himself. In the closing sections of the book, the name of Herbert Charles Jerome Pollitt is spelled out in the first letter of each line, to be followed (but in reverse order) by that of Aleister Crowley.

But Crowley's relationship with Pollitt, while intense, was not the sole source of meaning or diversion in his life. Pollitt introduced Crowley to the "decadent" movement, and in Crowley's words made a poet out of him; but he had little sympathy with the younger man's growing occult interests and did not share his passion for mountaineering. During the Cambridge vacations Crowley went climbing in the Alps, achieving a lone ascent of the Eiger, and began to read widely on esoteric subjects. Inspired by the apparent allusion to a Hidden Church in A. E. Waite's Book of Black Magic and of Pacts, Crowley wrote to Waite requesting further information. Waite responded by recommending that Crowley read the occult classic The Cloud upon the Sanctuary by Councillor von Eckartshausen, which had recently been translated by Isabelle de Steiger; the book duly accompanied him on a climbing and walking holiday during the Easter vacation of 1898. Crowley discovered that Eckartshausen indeed elaborated on Waite's theme, describing a Secret Sanctuary and a hidden community of saintly beings who possessed the keys to the mysteries of the universe. From that moment, Crowley determined to find and enter into communication with this "mysterious brotherhood": "I longed passionately for illumination ... for perfect purity of life, for mastery of the secret forces of nature."

Crowley perceived his aspirations as religious-certainly his preoccupation at the time with the origin of evil and the nature of Satan suggested they might be-but from the outset there was also the issue of power and control. Magic, like mountaineering, was in some respects the perfect answer to the desire for "mastery" of the forces (secret or otherwise) of nature, and he now gave himself over to his magical studies. Pollitt was rapidly seen as inimical to these researches, and Crowley ended the relationship shortly after going down from Cambridge in the early summer of 1898. Crowley was later to recognize this as an "imbecile" mistake, and it remained a cause of permanent regret.

In 1898, however, he was utterly focused, "white-hot," on his several ambitions: climbing, poetry, and the pursuit of magical knowledge. Now a wealthy young man in his own right, he was free to pursue his interests, and several meetings that year were to further them. At Easter he had met Oscar Eckenstein, one of the finest mountaineers in England and a man whom Crowley deeply admired. Eckenstein taught him a great deal about mental discipline and they went on to climb together in major expeditions. About the same time he met Gerald Kelly, a painter who was later to be elected to the Royal Academy and his future brother-in-law. Kelly, unlike Eckenstein, shared Crowley's interest in magic, and was to travel along that path in Crowley's company. A chance meeting that summer, however, was possibly the most auspicious. By this time Crowley had advanced to Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers's Kabbalah Unveiled, and was disposed to brag about his occult knowledge. One evening in Zermatt, while taking a respite from climbing, he met and conversed with an analytical chemist named Julian L. Baker, a man who clearly knew more than Crowley about the occult.

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Place of Enchantment by Alex Owen Copyright © 2004 by University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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