Raising Hell (17 page)

But with Mathers’s increasingly authoritarian attitude, coupled with the admission of some unruly members (Aleister Crowley, most notably), the order gradually lost its strength and its original sense of mission. In Yeats’s opinion, it was the feud with Crowley (who once claimed to have unleashed forty-nine demons against Mathers) that brought about the ultimate dissolution. Yeats believed that Crowley had been directing a steady, magical current against Mathers for years, sapping his strength, unhinging his wits, and leading finally to his death in 1918.

THE GREAT BEAST

The Order of the Golden Dawn had no more celebrated convert—or, in the end, destructive renegade—than Aleister Crowley, the man who styled himself the Great Beast, after the
fearsome, horned creature described as arising from the sea in the Bible’s book of Revelation.

To make matters even worse, Crowley claimed it was his mother who first gave him the nickname.

It’s not hard to see where she came by it.

Raised in a wealthy and pious family (after making a fortune in the ale business, his father had become a preacher for the Plymouth Brethren), Crowley turned against organized religion—and Christianity in particular—at an early age. And he did it with a vengeance. His father died in 1886, when Crowley was eleven, and this seems to have put the nail in the coffin of his faith, as it were. Young Aleister, who’d been subject to daily Bible readings at home, turned toward the dark figures of Christian lore, toward Satan, “the Scarlet Woman,” and the beast whose number is 666. And his unholy devotion never again wavered.

After a more traditional education at Trinity College, Cambridge, Crowley turned to the Order of the Golden Dawn for the information he really sought. In 1898, he formally joined up, and dubbed himself Perdurabo, a title that meant “I will endure to the end.” Over the course of his life, Crowley would take on many more names and aliases—Count Vladimir Svareff, Prince Chioa Khan, Lord Boleskin—and use each one until he became bored with it or until it no longer proved of use. What all these titles were designed to do was make him sound more impressive, moneyed, and mysterious than he actually was.

At first, his membership in the order went reasonably well. He professed to be bowled over by an ancient text that the leader of the order, MacGregor Mathers, claimed to have translated. Entitled
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage,
"as delivered by Abraham the Jew unto his son Lamech,
A.D
. 1458,” it impressed Crowley as a manual of magic unlike any of the others he’d already perused and, generally, scorned. Among other things it suggested that a long period of purification must be undergone, in a far-off and secluded place, before the Holy Guardian Angel could be summoned and seen. Crowley scoured the Lake District and Scotland, looking for just the right
place, before alighting on Boleskin House, on the shores of Loch Ness.

There, he went about the elaborate rituals the book prescribed, but no matter how many times he tried to invoke the Guardian Angel, he was unsuccessful. By his own account, however, he did manage to conjure up a horde of demons. The entire house, Crowley complained, began to be haunted by strange, dark shapes, and his workroom, where he would spend hours writing down magical formulas, grew so dark, even in the middle of the sunniest day, that he had to keep the lights on around the clock. The groundskeeper lost his mind and tried to murder his own family. When all of this became too much even for Crowley, he took off for Mexico, where, in the hot, dry air, he concentrated on performing such feats of magic as making his own image disappear from a mirror.

Perhaps it was his failure to conjure the Guardian Angel that started his disenchantment, and later feud, with Mathers, but more than likely the break would have come, anyway. Crowley, a big man with a colossal ego and insatiable appetites for everything from drugs to sex, could never last long in anyone else’s organization. He charged Mathers with having lied to the members of the order and mocked him for his story of having met the Secret Chiefs in the Bois de Boulogne. What he met there, Crowley claimed, was nothing but a bunch of evil, mischievous spirits, who’d pulled the wool over his eyes. Crowley packed up his things, and his pretty but unbalanced wife, Rose (daughter of the vicar of Camberwell), and set off on a world tour of mountain climbing and spiritual seeking. (In his spare time, he wrote pornography, including one book for his wife, entitled
Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden.
)

In 1904, he stopped in Cairo, where he adopted a strange getup, including a bejeweled turban and silken robes, and traveled through the crowded streets with “two gorgeous runners to clear the way for my carriage.” But it was on a visit to Boulak (now the National) Museum that he claimed something very curious had occurred.

His wife, who knew nothing of Egyptian mythology, was wandering through the museum halls in a daze, muttering the name “Horus.” When Crowley asked what she was talking about, she pointed at an ancient stele and said, “There—there he is.” It was an image of the falcon-headed Horus, the Egyptian sun god, and when Crowley examined it more closely, he saw to his astonishment that it also bore a number—666. The Number of the Beast. He knew then that he was nearing his mystical revelation.

And it came a short time later. At noon one day, his Holy Guardian Angel, which introduced itself as Aiwass, appeared in his Cairo flat. Ordering Crowley to sit and take down every word it spoke, it held forth in a musical voice for the next hour, dictating what would become the opening chapter of Crowley’s
The Book of the Law.
Twice more it appeared to him, explaining that it came as a “messenger from the forces ruling the earth at present,” and when it was done dictating, Crowley had in his hands the central text in which his philosophy was expressed. Its single most important tenet, the concept around which Crowley’s life was to thereafter revolve, was this: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

In brief,
The Book of the Law
argued that up until that time the history of the world had been divided into two eons—the eon of Isis, in which woman dominated, and the eon of Osiris, in which man held sway. But now, in 1904, Crowley declared that the age of Horus, the child, had begun, and that this would be the age of the will (
thelema
), the age in which man was finally able to express his innermost self, unrestrained by the dictates of the church and secular state. “Be strong, O man!” he rhapsodized, “lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture; fear not that any god shall deny thee for this.” Crowley certainly had no fear.

He embarked upon a notorious career of magic and sexual sadism, first in Europe and then, with the outbreak of World War I, in America. He shaved his large head and filed his two canine teeth to a sharp point; when he met his female disciples, he would bite them on the wrist or neck, bestowing what he
called the serpent’s kiss. He also founded what he called the Argenteum Astrum (Silver Star), which he said was the Inner Order of the Great White Brotherhood; the Outer Order was the Golden Dawn he’d left behind.

In 1916, he took upon himself the grade of magus, or master magician. As he was to declare in his autobiography, success in magic “depends upon one’s ability to awaken the creative genius which is the inalienable heirloom of every son of man, but which few indeed are able to assimilate to their conscious existence, or even, in ninety nine cases out of a hundred, to detect . . . even the crudest Magick eludes consciousness altogether, so that when one is able to do it, one does it without conscious comprehension, very much as one makes a good stroke at cricket or billiards. One cannot give an intellectual explanation of the rough working involved. . . . Magick in this sense is an art rather than a science.” And it was an art, in short, that required its practitioners to suspend rational thought and replace it with a kind of unfettered will.

After the war, he wound up in a rented villa in Cefalu, Sicily, where he founded what he hoped would be a magnet for occultists from all over the world. He painted DO WHAT THOU WILT on the front door, drew demons all over the walls of his studio, and even consecrated a temple to the new religion inside. But few came to worship there. Instead, Crowley spent his days addicted to heroin, abusing his several mistresses, and writing, on commission from a British publisher,
The Diary of a Drug Fiend.
The sensation caused by publication of the book led to his being thrown out of the villa altogether. Later in his life, somewhat recovered, he finally composed his veritable last testament,
Magick in Theory and Practice.
Crowley, the Great Beast of the Apocalypse, died of natural causes at the age of seventy-two, on December 5, 1947. His “Hymn to Pan,” a flagrantly sexual poem, was read aloud at the funeral service, and the Brighton Council was so scandalized by the incident that it immediately put measures in place to make sure no such thing ever happened again.

DION FORTUNE

Although she was to found her own order later in life—a group known as the Fraternity of the Inner Light—Dion Fortune first embraced the unseen world through the teachings of the Golden Dawn.

She joined because she believed herself to be the victim of a sustained psychic attack.

Born Violet Mary Firth in 1891, she was raised in a Christian Science family, where her marked propensity for daydreaming and deep thought was a subject of some concern; even then, she seemed to show less interest in the material world than the immaterial. So it was perhaps no great surprise that her life should take its most important turn when at the age of twenty she first perceived herself to be the target of a kind of mental curse.

At the time, she was working in an educational institution, where she unintentionally antagonized the principal, a cold and arrogant woman who was known for her highly developed skills in yoga. That woman, Fortune would later come to believe, had twisted the yogic energies into something malign and aimed their destructive force at her. The power of the assault left Fortune physically devastated and mentally drained, but it also pointed her toward her true vocation.

“It was this experience which led me to take up the study of analytical psychology, and subsequently of occultism,” she wrote. Trained as a psychologist, an area in which she wrote several other books, she soon decided there was more to the mind than the accepted theories of the time could account for, and she went looking for the rest of the equation in more controversial places—most notably, in the occult practices of the Order of the Golden Dawn. It was only after her initiation into the group that she felt that the damage done to her by that malevolent principal was finally repaired. And she was determined to help others who found themselves under the same kind of attack.

In a book she titled
Psychic Self-Defense
(1930), she laid out some of the best methods for fending off the evil influences. “Sunlight is exceedingly valuable,” she wrote, “because it strengthens the aura and makes it much more resistant.” But trips into the countryside, presumably to get far away from the malign forces, weren’t necessarily recommended because “elemental forces are much more potent away from towns, and if he [the target] is threatened by an uprush of atavistic forces, he had better cling to the haunts of men. The sea, too, is an elemental force that is best avoided for water is an element intimately associated with psychism.” Where did she recommend going? “The best place is an inland spa. Games, physical training, massage, anything that improves the bodily condition, are invaluable, but long solitary walks should be avoided. . . .”

She became not only a famed practitioner of many occult practices, including scrying, astral travel, and the Cabbala, but a kind of psychic physician to others who got into trouble on the etheric plane. In one case she recounted, a clumsy magician tried to employ a magic square, but did it wrong. Every night thereafter, he suffered nightmares and unexplained anxiety. Finally, one night, he actually caught sight of the creature now tormenting him: “Its eyes were closed and it was bearded,” Fortune relates, “with long flowing hair. It seemed a blind force slowly waking to activity.” On a subsequent night, he saw a long red snake slinking out from beneath his bed, and in terror he leapt out of the window. When the blind creature next appeared, the hair on its head had turned, Medusa-like, into a nest of writhing serpents.

Fortune contended that the actual forces of evil in the world had created evil intelligences, entities that had “probably originated through the workings of Black Magic, which took the essential evil essence and organized it for purposes of its own.” The presence of these creatures could be detected by sinister sounds, pungent odors, and flickering balls of lights; their effects on humans could range from hallucinations to physical decay.

And even she herself could be tempted to employ them for nefarious purposes. Once, she recalls, as she was lying on her bed thinking about a woman who had done her an injury, and feeling increasingly angry and vengeful, “there came to my mind the thought of casting off all restraint and going berserk. The ancient Nordic myths rose before me, and I thought of Fenris, the Wolf-horror of the North. Immediately I felt a curious drawing-out sensation from my solar plexus, and there materialized beside me on the bed a large wolf. . . . I could distinctly feel its back pressing against me as it lay beside me. . . . I knew nothing of the art of making elementals at that time, but had accidentally stumbled upon the right method—the brooding highly charged with emotion, the invocation of the appropriate natural force, and the condition between sleeping and waking in which the etheric double readily extrudes.”

The question now was what to do with the unintended wolf. Summoning up all her courage, Fortune ordered it to get off the bed—which it did. Changing into more of a dog shape, it disappeared through the corner of the room. But Fortune knew the creature was still loose in the world, carrying that explosive psychic charge aimed at the woman who had angered her. She quickly asked her mentor—most probably Aleister Crowley—what she should do; after all, she didn’t really want to cause the woman serious harm. Her teacher’s advice was to reabsorb the creature, which she could do only by forgiving the woman and defusing, as it were, the ticking bomb.