Magicians

Trying to puzzle of the history of the ritual magic movement of the nineteenth century is tricky. The trail is complicated both by the casual attitude towards literal truth held by some of the principal players, and by the nature of the secret societies that contributed, directly or indirectly, to the magical tradition.

We'll start with one of these, the "Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia", founded in 1865 by several high-ranking British Freemasons. The name is an allusion to the "Rosicrucian Society", a supposed hidden society of adepts dating back to the Middle Ages; the SRIA claimed to be linked with the Rosicrucians via the initiation of one its founders into the German "Order of the Gold and Rosy Cross". (For more on the origins of Masonry and Rosicrucians, see the Timeline in the Appendix.)

The SRIA's stated purpose was to "search out the Great Secrets of Nature", by studying Western mystical philosophies such as cabala (Jewish mysticism) and the Hermetic tradition of alchemy (which is more about self-transformation than about transmuting lead into gold). Among SRIA's members were William Wynn Westcott and his protegee, Samuel Liddel -- who later used the name, and became better known as, MacGregor Mathers.

About twenty years later, Westcott and Mathers became part of another group with a similar mission, the Hermetic Society in Britain. This was founded by a British mystic named Anna Kingsford, who had been president of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society. But Kingford encountered political friction within that group. She was a devout Christian whose interests lay more in the Western traditions than in the Eastern philosophies then being emphasized by Blavatsky and Olcott. (But she was definitely not hostile to Buddhism -- she worked to have a play based on The Light of Asia produced in London.)

So in 1884, she and Edward Maitland founded this new group, to futher study the mystical side of Christianity, as well as cabala and the "Greek mysteries and the Hermetic Gnosis". Westcott and Mathers were closely involved with this society, and presented lectures during its final series of meetings.

Kingsford fell gravely ill at the end of 1886, bringing to an end the activities of the Hermetic Society. In 1887, Westcott and Mathers, along with William R. Woodman and Alphonsus F.A. Woodward, started to organize a new group: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn was formally chartered on March 1, 1888, just a week after the death of Anna Kingsford.

Five years later, upon the death of Blavatsky, Mathers claimed to have been contacted by her "Secret Chiefs", and authorized by them to create an inner order to the Golden Dawn, which he called the Rosy Cross.

And here is where things get interesting.

All the groups mentioned so far -- the SRIA, the Hermetic Society, and the original Golden Dawn -- were strictly philosophical societies, dedicated to spiritual development through the study of mystical teachings. But initiates into the Rosy Cross were permitted to perform actual ritual magic.

What is this ritual magic? According to Ronald Hutton, historian extraordinaire of the witchcraft revival, prior to the nineteenth century learned ritual magic "promised to give the operator control of ... forces, which ... placed superhuman powers at the disposal of the magician: demons, angels, or the hidden names of God. Those powers were still, however, expected to be used for practical ends...the classic grimoire is designed for somebody who is impoverished, embittered, and (above all) very lonely." As Hutton puts it, "Traditional scholarly magic was at basis an elaborate way of ringing for room service."

What Mathers and Westcott -- building on work by the author Eliphas Levi -- did, was combine the Hermetic goal of spiritual development with this operative high magic. The spirits or deities were invoked not for practical ends, not for wealth or worldly power, but instead to allow the magician to become spiritually empowered -- to experience a unity with the divine forces involved.

For the Golden Dawn, those divine forces were rather Christian in appearance. For example, initiates to the inner order were tied to a cross and had the stigmata (wounds of the Crucifixion) traced on them; while the "Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram", designed by Mathers and taught to novices as a daily practice, involved a recitation of part of the Lord's Prayer in Hebrew and the invocation of angels.

However, Mathers came out of the Theosophical tradition that held that the same basic truths lie behind all religions: in his words, "whatever the errors, corruption, or mistakes in any particular form of religion, all are based on and descended from the acknowledgment of Supreme Divine Powers." Additionally, the Golden Dawn arose in the context of the revival of the classic Pagan deities brought about by the Romantics. Thus in among the Christian imagery both the Great God Pan and the Goddess, in the form of Isis, also made their appearance: Pan as the "Goat of Mendes", and the Goddess under the syncretized identity "Isis-Urania", after whom the Golden Dawn's first temple was named.

Mathers' Golden Dawn work made another important contribution to the theory of magic. While they were by no means materialists, they did understand that the spirits invoked in ritual magic could be understood as psychological rather than supernatural in nature. As Mathers and Crowley wrote in a preface to their version of The Lesser Key of Solomon:

...What is the cause of my illusion of seeing a spirit in the triangle of Art?

Every smatterer, every expert in psychology, will answer: "That cause lies in your brain."

...

The spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain.

...

If, then, I say, with Solomon:

"The Spirit Cimieries teaches logic," what I mean is:

"Those portions of my brain which subserve the logical faculty may be stimulated and developed by following out the processes called 'The Invocation of Cimieries.'"

...

...There is no effect which is truly and necessarily miraculous.

Our Ceremonial Magic fines down, then, to a series of minute, though of course empirical, physiological experiments, and whoso, will carry them through intelligently need not fear the result.

[The preface in question is probably the work of Crowley.]

This idea is much like Buddhist teachings, especially in Zen, that tell us that there are no powers outside of ourselves to search for -- and yet recommend meditations and rituals devoted to a whole host of Bodhisattvas and deities. As Nyogen Senzaki explained a ritual of reciting sutras before a painting of the Bodhisattva Manjusri, "A true Mahayanist [Mahayana Buddhist] never worships anything but his own true inner self. The recitation is an expression of our prajna, perfect understanding, and nothing else."

So this was this system into which Allan Bennett and Aleister Crowley were initiated in the 1890s: magical practice used as a tool for spiritual development, and compatible with religious beliefs of all sorts.

Bennett (who some sources allege was Mather's foster son) explored many spiritual paths before coming to the Golden Dawn: Hindu literature and the practice of yoga, as well as Spiritualism, Theosophy, the Western mystical traditions, and psychology. He discovered Buddhism in 1880 when he read Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia.

He joined the Theosophical Society in 1893, and was initiated into the Golden Dawn in 1894. Here he gained a reputation as "the one Magician in who could do really big-time stuff", in Crowley's words.

In 1900, driven both by an interest in Eastern mysticism and by a need to seek warmer climes to treat his severe asthma, Bennett went to Ceylon. Crowley paid his way -- with money he obtained from an old love interest under questionable pretenses -- hoping that Bennett would help spread Western occultism in the East. But things turned out the other way around, and Bennett took strongly to Buddhism. In late 1901, finding the Buddhism in Ceylon lacking, he traveled on to Burma to take ordination as a bhikku, and a few years later engaged in Buddhist missionary work to England.

(Regarding the state of Buddhism in Ceylon, remember that it had only recently begun to recover from the wounds of centuries of colonialism -- Sinhalese bhikkus had even abandoned meditation. Dharmapala had also found Ceylon's Buddhism wanting and had finally received guidance from a Burmese teacher.)

But before he left for Burma, Bennett was joined in Ceylon for a few months by his friend and student, Aleister Crowley.

Crowley remains one of the most perplexing figures in the history of ritual magic and of the introduction of Eastern philosophy to the West. His influence on occultism is unmatched, and he was a dedicated investigator of matters spiritual who wrote some wonderfully clear texts on magic, yoga, and on philosophy. Yet he was also a self-pitying classist sexist asshole of the first rank, whose collection of mental health issues could have kept a small team of expert therapists busy.

His father died while he was very young, and he was raised by his mother and his uncle in the fanatical Christianity of the Plymouth Brethren. He had no affection for his mother, whom he regarded as a "a brainless bigot of the most narrow, logical and inhuman type". His uncle he hated with a white-hot passion: in Crowley's assessment, "No more cruel fanatic, no meaner villain, ever walked this earth." He learned their faith forward and backward -- and loathed it. When his exasperated mother called him "a beast", he took it to heart and delightedly identified himself with the Beast of the Book of Revelation, the Anti-Christ.

A demonstration of how disturbed a child he became is given in his "autohagiography", The Confessions of Aleister Crowley:

There is one amazing incident; at the age of fourteen as near as I can remember. I must premise that I have always been exceptionally tenderhearted, except to tyrants, for whom I think no tortures bad enough. In particular, I am uniformly kind to animals; no question of cruelty or sadism arises in the incident which I am about to narrate.

I had been told "A cat has nine lives." I deduced that it must be practically impossible to kill a cat. As usual, I became full of ambition to perform the feat. (Observe that I took my information unquestioningly au pied de la lettre.) Perhaps through some analogy with the story of Hercules and the hydra, I got it into my head that the nine lives of the cat must be taken more or less simultaneously. I therefore caught a cat, and having administered a large dose of arsenic I chloroformed it, hanged it above the gas jet, stabbed it, cut its throat, smashed its skull and, when it had been pretty thoroughly burnt, drowned it and threw it out of the window that the fall might remove the ninth life. In fact, the operation was successful; I had killed the cat. I remember that all the time I was genuinely sorry for the animal; I simply forced myself to carry out the experiment in the interest of pure science.

Note the way in which he disassociates himself from his cruelty in relating this incident -- it is an important symptom he exhibited repeatedly.

Crowley was initiated into the Golden Dawn in 1898. Shortly thereafter, he invited Bennett (who was then in dire financial straits) to share a flat with him. They lived together for about eighteen months, and Bennett became Crowley's mentor in occultism -- and probably also in Hinduism and Buddhism -- as Crowley moved quickly up the initiated ranks of the Order.

Bennett's mentorship was of immense importance to Crowley. In his Confessions, he wrote, "I did not fully realize the colossal stature of that sacred spirit; but I was instantly aware that this man could teach me more in a month than anyone else in five years." Confessions is dedicated in part to Bennett, with the notation, "who did what he could". More, his admiration for Bennett is proved by the negative: he was one of the very few people against whom Crowley never spewed his vitriol.

After Bennett went to Ceylon, Crowley visited him for several months and joined his studies of Yoga, Vedanta, and Buddhism. For a while Crowley enthusiastically embraced Buddhism -- in a 1902 article "Berashith" he stated "I confidently and deliberately take my refuge in the Triple Gem", and he repeated this allegiance in his 1903 "Science and Buddhism". (Taking refuge in the "Triple Gem" of the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha is the formal ritual means of declaring one's self a Buddhist.)

But by 1904 Crowley had begun to move away from Buddhism. Some of his arguments remind me of Zen's deliberate blasphemies, intended to bring the student away from reliance on external salvation. Given his later unfavorable comparison of the Buddhism he encountered to the Taoism of Lao Tzu, I sometimes wonder what would have happened had Crowley met Zen rather than Theravada -- a wounded Theravada, at that.

If when visiting Kamakura on his way to Ceylon, he had followed up on an impulse to settle for a while in one of the monasteries there, we might have a quite different tale.

But beyond his objections to what he saw as hollow practice among Buddhists he saw, his move away from Buddhism followed shortly after the writing of The Book of the Law, an event central to Crowley's life and the origin of his system Thelema.

In April 1904, Crowley "channeled" a "being" named Aiwass, and wrote down a text called The Book of the Law (or Liber AL vel Legis). The Book is written from a perspective of vicious and hostile strength: for example, "Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched & the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world."

At first Crowley rejected the "message" he received: "The fact of the matter was that I resented The Book of the Law with my whole soul. For one thing, it knocked my Buddhism completely on the head." But it maintained a hold on him.

From his training in the Golden Dawn system, Crowley had learned that the spirits that appear in magical rituals are aspects of the magician's own mind. But he was never able to understand Aiwass in this way. For many years he claimed that Aiwass was one of the Secret Chiefs that Blavatsky and Mathers claimed to be agents of; later, he identified Aiwass as his "Holy Guardian Angel" (a reference to the magical practices of Abramelin the Mage).

This inability to understand Aiwass as a fragment of his own personality, this disassociation from cruel attitudes, is the same symptom that we saw when he related the story of killing the cat as a teenager. It lies at the root of Crowley's tragic failure. Illuminated visions and mystical experiences are of no use if they are not built on that firm foundation proscribed by the Delphic Oracle millennia ago: Know Thyself.

At first Crowley didn't attach too much importance to the Aiwass experience. In different circumstances, maybe it could have been the start of a "healing crisis" that brought about an integration of Crowley's damaged personality. But that was not to be.

In 1905 Crowley -- a skilled mountaineer -- took part in a disastrous attempt at scaling Kangchenjunga that resulted in five deaths. In early 1906 while traveling across China he began intense long-term magical work, his "Augoeidies" ritual, which placed a great strain on his mental energies. Upon returning to England in June he learned that while he had been at this, his daughter had died of typhoid. He blamed his wife; she subsequently slipped deeper into alcoholism, and they divorced in 1909.

The stress during these years had to have been enormous.

We saw Crowley above claiming refuge in the Triple Gem: the Buddha, the enlightened or divine nature within all beings; the Dharma, the wisdom teachings; and the Sangha, the supportive community of seekers. He was indeed learned in many teachings, and pursued the divine with great zeal. But Crowley had no Sangha to turn to for support. The Golden Dawn organization had fragmented before Crowley was initiated into the inner order. Bennett had gone to Asia, and they saw each other only a few times after that. He was estranged from Mathers. He did keep some contact with his original sponsor in the Golden Dawn, George Cecil Jones, and they did some work together. But it was clearly not enough.

To put it bluntly: Crowley lost his grip on consensual reality. Always a fractured personality, he seized on the Book of the Law and came to believe that he had been specially anointed by the rulers of the world, the Secret Chiefs: that he "was the chosen prophet of the Masters, the instrument fit to interpret their idea and work their will." He was "the Prophet chosen to proclaim the Law which will determine the destinies of this planet for an epoch," he was "in a class which contains only seven other names in the whole of human history".

You don't need to be a psychiatrist to looks at those assertions and declare that Crowley had gone off the rails.

But that doesn't mean his work is valueless -- crazy wisdom is great. But we have to be careful to distinguish crazy wisdom from just plain crazy: and with Crowley, the closer something is to the specifics of Thelma and Aiwass, the more likely it is to be plain crazy rather than wise crazy.

An example of the wise crazy is that even as he lost himself in Thelema, Crowley could see a Pagan nature religion coming. In a 1914 letter to his friend George Jones, he wrote:

...the time is just ripe for a natural religion. People like rites and ceremonies, and they are tired of hypothetical gods. Insist on the real benefits of the sun, the Mother-Force, the Father-Force, and so on; and show them that by celebrating these benefits worthily the worshippers unite themselves more fully with the current of life. Let the religion be Joy, but with a worthy and dignified sorrow in death itself; and treat death as an ordeal, an initiation....In short be the founder of a new and greater Pagan cult.

Crowley knew that he would not be the one to bring this Paganism about. He was here suggesting that Jones take it up. But instead the person who would play the key role was a much younger man, who was then in Malaya working on a rubber plantation and befriending the natives and the primitive tribes of the jungle: Gerald Gardner.