Sinister if Gifted Buffoon
Commemorating the greater feast last month of one of the outstanding English novelists of the twentieth century, the Section Two reading group will be discussing and reading from the works of Anthony Powell (1905-2000) at our meeting on Monday evening 15th May. Join Caitlin in the lodge library at 8:00 for an examination of the cycle of twelve comic novels which chronicle English intellectual culture from 1914 through 1971 e.v. under the general title A Dance to the Music of Time (published 1951-1975). Thelemites will take a particular interest in two of the novels, the sixth and twelfth, upon which our group will probably concentrate. The Kindly Ones (1962) compares the opening of the first world war in 1914 e.v. with that of the second in 1939,and presents the figure of "Dr. Trelawney," a new age guru, thaumaturge, and long-haired health-nut, who incorporates impressions of Aleister Crowley,mixed with traits reminiscent of Arthur Machen, Gurdjieff, and Rudolph Steiner. We meet Trelawney first as "high priest, if not actually messiah" of a prophetic cult proclaiming a new law through their portentously oxymoronic ritual greeting formula, free-form calisthenics, and communal enthusiasm.Twenty-five years later we again get a detailed characterization of Trelawney,based even more directly upon reports of Crowley's retirement in a Bellevue residential hotel; rather dithering, asthmatic, and reliant upon drugs, but still inspired. In the cycle's final novel, Hearing Secret Harmonies, we see a revival of "Trelawneyism" during the late '60s e.v. in a group of ceremonial magicians whose leader claims to be a reincarnation of the old master. The story is notable for its sustained presentation of group ritual dynamics and the attractions of ceremonial interaction.
As a clever young boy from a military family a few years before Great War,Anthony Powell (pronounced "Pole") heard a story from his mother about her luncheon with "The Beast 666 incarnate." She had been traveling by rail to a party near London, and noticed a man boarding her train "whose appearance made her feel a sudden sense of extreme repulsion." When she disembarked she saw him again upon the platform, and soon enough her deepest fears were confirmed when it emerged that he had been invited to the same luncheon. It was of course Aleister Crowley, whose works were already known to Powell's father through a friendship with fellow army officer (later Major-General) J. F. C."Boney" Fuller. (The family library contained several of Crowley's books,including a set of the first ten Equinox issues.) But when asked "what he talked about at lunch, my mother simply replied: 'Horrors'" (Powell, Infants of the Spring, 1976, pp. 10-11).
Powell went to school with several of the great writers of his generation,including Eric Blair (George Orwell) and Cyril Connolly. Another of his school friends was Henry Yorke (known for his comic novels under the pseudonym Henry Green), who took over a family business manufacturing "sanitary fittings" (flush toilets) which his older brother Gerald Yorke had avoided in favor of travel and esoteric studies. As an editor with the London publisher Duckworth in the late '20s e.v. Powell worked on the book Tiger-Woman by Betty May, a celebrated artists' model and grande dame of cafe society, whose"writings" were recycled Sunday newspaper articles prepared with her paid cooperation by reporters to exploit her notoriety. When the book appeared in 1929, Crowley telephoned the Duckworth offices to invite its editor to lunch for a discussion of accusations made against the Abbey of Thelema (where Betty May's husband Raoul Loveday had died from drinking tainted water from a Cefalu stream). Taking the call, Powell found the "near-cockney accent" of the magus unappealing, and knowing that his ancestors had been among the dissenting sects of the Quakers and Plymouth Brethren, "wondered whether his cadences preserved the traditional 'snuffling' speech ascribed to the Roundheads." The restaurant was called Simpson's, in The Strand, and Crowley said Powell might recognize him "from the fact that I am not wearing a rose in my buttonhole."
Recalling his mother's dread as well as his childhood perusal of The Equinox, Powell was uncertain about the meeting, wondering "whether I should be met in the lobby by a thaumaturge in priestly robes, received with the ritual salutation: 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law'; if so,whether politeness required the correct response: 'Love is the Law, Love under Will.'" In fact the "big weary-looking man" who "rose from one of the seats and held out his hand" was "quietly, almost shabbily, dressed in a dark brown suit and grey Homburg hat." His figure seemed "intensely sinister" due to the"unusual formation of his bald and shaven skull." They dined on mutton, and Crowley had a glass of milk. After fully stating his case against the"inaccuracies and vulgarities of phrase" marring Tiger-Woman, Crowley expounded in general upon "the hard life of a mage, its difficulties and disappointments, especially in relation to the unkindness and backbiting of fellow magicians." They parted amicably, and Crowley took no further action against the Betty May book (though he unsuccessfully brought suit against a similar book by Nina Hamnett a couple years later).
Powell did not meet the Beast again tête-à-tête (although he attended the Hamnett trial, deciding that "Crowley's combination of facetiousness and humility could hardly have made a worse impression"), but Duckworth was approached the following year with a book offer in Crowley's handwriting,claiming to be from "the beautiful German girl for whose love the infamous Aleister Crowley committed suicide" (based upon a stunt Crowley pulled off in Portugal to impress scarlet woman Hanni Jaeger, which briefly fooled several European newspapers). Crowley was offering to write his own sensationalized confessional best-seller in the character of another girl "ruined" by love for him, "the story of our elopement" to be entitled My Hymen, for "an advance of £500 and a 15% royalty." It seems a pity that Duckworth passed up what might have been a fascinating contribution to the topic of Thelemic feminism, but instead it was determined to commission a book called War and Western Civilization from "Boney" Fuller.
Though their "acquaintance remained unrenewed" Crowley shared a London neighborhood with Powell's family briefly during the '30s, and was recalled as a pedestrian whose "tall figure would from time to time stride past the Children's Hospital just opposite our flat. Hatless, heavily bespectacled, he was dressed in green plus-fours, as for golf. Some days, too, a large bald skull could be seen, highlighted over a table, through the window of a Great Ormond Street ground-floor room, where Crowley was playing chess with a friend." Powell found it easy to be critical of the Beast's ritualistic presentation and various personal eccentricities, and he especially noticed the "ring of the old-time music-hall comedian" keeping up a "steady flow of ponderous gags delivered in the rasping intonation" of Crowley's voice. But in this same vein Powell rather enjoyed Crowley's comic verse, and remained interested in his personality in the roles of magus and religious leader. He saw clearly the possibilities behind "Crowley's moments of thaumaturgical majesty of demeanour," however much of the "buffoon" there might have seemed to be in his style (Powell, Messengers of Day, 1978, pages 79-85 & 152).
Crowley Classics
This installment of Crowley's serialized account of the 1905 e.v.Kangchenjunga expedition is reprinted from Vanity Fair (London: 20 October1909), page 503
On the Kinchin Lay:
The Glacier
by Aleister Crowley
On Tuesday, August 22nd, the Doctor and I went up the right bank of the glacier to a small grassy spur jutting from one of the buttresses of Jannu,1where we established our Camp I. The last hour was over moraine as bad as only virgin Himalayan moraine can be. On the 24th we went on to Camp II, a mere ledge under an overhanging rock; the road was good, save for some shortpassages, where we were obliged to take to the moraine.
The 25th was a more eventful day, for, having carefully pointed out to the Doctor and Reymond, who had joined us at Camp II, the route to be followed, I thought I was safe in going ahead and finding a good spot for a camp. I did so, by a large square boulder, which I solemnly climbed, and proposed to call Pioneer Boulder, in delicate compliment to Sir Martin Conway's Pioneer Peak.The points of analogy are salient; nobody ever saw it before nor probably will ever see it again. There is, however, this point of difference, that I certainly saw it at the time, and there is no doubt whatever that it is thereto be seen. It is open to anyone who has been on the Baltoro Glacier to doubt the existence of Pioneer Peak.
Well, at Pioneer Boulder I waited all day, while the Doctor led his coolies in a circular direction round the head of the valley, letting them camp at the foot of the ridge (Pioneer Ridge), so that I had to run down and join them, in a mood to ice-axe the lot. I said little, however, having to bewail the fact that the rearguard was already becoming slack in the matter of sending supplies up. The Doctor's excuse for stopping on his ridiculous glacier was the rumour that I had broken my leg on the moraine.
It may yet take generations to teach people that mountain accidents are always the results of incompetence. A man who breaks his leg on a moraine is only fit to walk up Ludgate Hill between steady guides. On the 26th we went slowly up to the Pioneer Boulder, Camp III.
On the 27th, I awoke at 3 a.m., and by stupendous efforts got off the men by six o'clock. The Doctor strongly opposed me, urging that the men should be allowed to warm themselves thoroughly before starting; in other words, to goat about 11 o'clock, when it is too hot, and the snow too soft, to make any progress worth speaking of. We went on to the glacier ice at once, and soon began to mount the actual slopes of this ridgelet of Kinchinjunga. The men were much afraid of falling, but a short exhibition of glissading on my part soon convinced them there was nothing to fear. Unfortunately, both the Doctor and Reymond were a little out of sorts, and contributed by their evident fear of the perfectly easy slope to the demoralization of the coolies. However, we at last reached Camp IV by a somewhat nasty slope of rock. The camp itself is perched on a little ledge, and is highly inconvenient. The next day we were obliged to rest, the Doctor being very ill. In the afternoon Pache arrived unexpectedly, and without orders. It was becoming increasingly evident that my comrades were too ignorant to understand that any instructions I gave were for the good of all, and they consequently began the practice of finding ingenious excuses for disobedience. Immediate result: one of Pache's men went off somewhere on his own account, fell, and was killed.
On the 29th the Doctor recovered, went down to find the body, and sent up Pache's valise and some food. Pache had left his coolies half an hour from the camp, and they had, of course, run away. Nobody here will agree with me that strong measures should be taken to prevent the dastardly crime of desertion, nor back me up in any way.
With Pache and Reymond I went up the slopes to Camp V, on the next edge of the little ridge. Reymond works well, but is always annoyed that I will not go first. It is not laziness on my part, though I am as lazy as any man ever was, but the necessity of getting the coolies to go, which they will never do unless authority is behind.
On the 30th we rested and starved, and Pache shivered, no valise nor petroleum having arrived. I spent the morning screwing our shovels to the spikes provided for them, the first occasion on which I have been able to keep on making original spades without protest from dummy. Not a sign of any relief party. Oh, if only I could be in the rear guard! But, unfortunately,there is nobody who can choose the route but myself, and to give orders, instructions, or explanations is becoming sheer waste of breath or paper. Nothing short of the eloquence of Sir Boyle Roche plus the aptitudes of his bird would have set things straight. Camp V, where I write this, is some 20,000 feet high, as near as I can judge.
On the 31st the men whom I had sent down to try to get some food returned,having partially succeeded, and I immediately took some of them to make a way up the slopes of the ridge of the little Subyichany peak (which I may call for the moment Peak Y), under which I am sitting. From this ridge I hope to force a passage to the ridge of Kinchinjunga, or to the column visible from Darjeeling. These slopes proved excessively bad after a while, the snow lying thin or hard blue ice at an angle of 50 degrees or more. Easy enough for me with my claws; difficult or impossible for the men. The leader in fact who was unroped, fell but, supporting him, I caught and held him safely. But the shock of the fall shook his nerves, and he began to untie himself from the rope. A sharp tap brought him to his senses, and probably saved his life; the only occasion on which I have had to strike a man. I insisted on continuing the ascent for the sake of moral; but, finding things grew worse, went back before nightfall. The men, however, all went down during the night, with wonderful stories of how they had all been swept away by an avalanche, and how the "Bara Sahib" had beaten them with axes and long sticks, and was going to shoot them, and how -- But is there any limit to the Tibetan imagination?
On the 1st September I renewed the assault with the four men left me, and after a good deal of trouble, Reymond, Pache, and Salama got up the worst of the ice slopes. Again disregarding the instructions I had given, they went on with the rope out of sight and call, so that I was left sitting four hours on the slope, unable to get my three loaded men either up or down. The Doctor and De Righi arrived at Camp V, the latter full of petty personal pique, and not in the least ashamed of his failure to supply our camp with food; on the contrary, resolved to desert us, though, in the generosity of his heart, he actually offered to leave us our servants! I descended to Camp V, having with great difficulty induced the Doctor to send up a rope and a man to help down my poor coolies.
On the safe arrival of all at camp - it was later in the day, about 5 o'clock - I especially warned De Righi and Pache, neither of whom knew anything about mountains, of the folly of attempting to descend to Camp III at that time with the Doctor, who, I assured them, at the best to be benighted on the mountain. But the Doctor was in great form, and insisted on taking down every man, except Salama and my personal servant, Bahadar Singh, thus leaving me perfectly helpless. My last words to him were that I should descend in the morning en route for Darjeeling, and to Pache that I hoped I should see again,but did not expect to. Ignorant or careless of the commonest precautions for securing the safety of the men, they started off, and I turned into my tent with the gloomiest anticipations - justified in half an hour by frantic cries for help and a shout from below that all save the Doctor and De Righi had fallen and were dead.
Raymond hastily set out to render what help he could, though it was perfectly out of the question to render effective aid. Had the Doctor possessed the common humanity or common sense to leave me a proper complement of men at Camp V instead of doing his utmost to destroy my influence, I should have been in a position to send help. As it was, I could do nothing more than send out Reymond on the forlorn hope. Not that I was over-anxious in the circumstances to render help. A mountain "accident" of the sort is one of the things for which I have no sympathy whatever.
It was night, and the finest and loveliest sunset I had ever seen in these parts; the tiny pale crescent of Astait glimmering over the mighty twin peak of Jannu,2 the clouds lying over the low highlands of Nepal, while the mighty masses of ice and rock behind me, lit by the last reflection of the day, stood up reproachfully, like lovers, detached as if they knew that I could do no more.
Tomorrow I hope to go down and find out how things stand; but in no case shall I consent to continue a journey in which the most necessary orders are construed as brutal tyrannies, and in which the lives of the men as dear to me as my own are wantonly sacrificed to stupidity, obstinacy, and ignorance.
Notes:
1. Probably not Jannu throughout. Rare glimpses and a faulty map make certainty impossible for the moment. [A.C.]
2. More probably this great peak is unnamed, Jannu lying further to the S.W. [A.C.]
from the Grady Project:
This passage has been selected from Grady's 1954 thesis The Millennial Glow: Myth and Magic in the Marxist Ethic. Note that the elipses in the quotations are Grady's own.
in "The Universe of the New Tribalism"
by Grady Louis McMurtry
It is the struggle of opposites in the thesis-antithesis monad that eventuates in a "will" or "spontaneity" or "development" that may be coerced into producing rye from wheat or, on the macroscopic scale, into producing the Act of the Revolution. The Act of History is supposedly brought about by the inner contradictions of economic materialism, but the Act of Revolution is brought about by the conflict of Bourgeoisie and Proletariat allowing the Leader and his charisma group-party cadre to take theory or consciousness to the mindless masses and so, by the use of this theory as a definitional creative-coercive word, seek to alter the course of nature. Or as Cassiere says:
. . . the magic word . . . does not describe things or relations of things;
it tries to produce effects and to change the course of nature. This
cannot be done without an elaborate magical art. The magician, or sorcerer
is alone able to govern the magic word. But in his hands it becomes a most
powerful weapon. Nothing can resist its force.1
Magic has thus been seen as Developmental Essence and as Definitional. We will now view the epistemology of the world of magic as completely
Protean
. . . the practice of magic requires a human coercer.
Richard Chase
. . . soul knows and is a cause of motion . . .
Aristotle
We have said that the world of magic is the world of mind, that magic is the enveloping of the universe by the mind of the magician, and that magic is the coercion of the world to the will of the magician. While all this is true, only the first statement describes the world of magic per se, because the other two statements make or imply a distinction between the knowing and the known, and in the world of magic that which known is that which is known. Consider why this must be so.
. . . before there were naturalists to explain the mechanism of plants andAnd Burke, speaking of the definition of a substance in terms of ancestral cause, says:
animals, to reason out the chain of cause and effect in the behavior of
other things in our world, man's only yardstick of normality was humanity:
what he knew in himself and in his own experience was human and normal;
deviations from the normal were extra-human and thus potentially
superhuman. Therefore . . . the human came to address the extra-human in
terms of human intercourse.2
Notes:
Under the head of "tribal" definition would fall any variant of the idea
of biological descent, with the substance of the offspring being derived
from the substance of the parents or family. . . . The Latin word natura,
like its Greek equivalent physis, has a root signifying to become, to grow,
to be born. And the Aristotelian genus is originally not a logical, but a
biological, concept. We can discern the tribal pattern behind the notion,
so characteristic of Greek nationalism, that like causes like or that like
recognizes like, as with Democritus' theory of perception.3
1. Cassiere, The Myth of the State, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), pp. 282-3.
2. John A, Wilson, "Egypt: The Nature of the Universe," in Frankfort, et al., The Intellectual
Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1946), pp. 40-1.
3. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), pp. 26-7.
One Member's Opinion
Ebony Anpu and the Hawk andJackal System: a personal interpretation
part ten (conclusion):
The Tesseract
by Nathan W. Bjorge
Ebony called his most important ritual innovation the Tesseract, and was fond of comparing its working to the Merkabah (or "chariot") mysticism of Judaism in late antiquity. By this I think he meant to equate the visualizations of his Tesseract to the Imaginal construction of the chariot of a god. In the Tesseract's case the chariot is the universe inclusive of Macrocosm and Microcosm, and the charioteer is the Holy Guardian Angel. The Chariot in the Tarot corresponds to the letter Cheth, which spelt in full adds to 418 -- the number of the great work completed.
The meditations involved in the Tesseract are therefore the visualizations of the creation of the universe. By acting during the ritual as the creating god, the magician attempts to realize her own deific nature. There are 22 steps to the working, each linked to one of the Tarot trumps. The conception is that the trumps in Tarot represent spirit to the four elements of the small cards. By using spirit, spirit sets the rest of the elements in the four worlds in place automatically, as it were. An orator calls out each of the Hebrew letters in turn, while presenting their correspondences as a free form story. These correspondences, forming a full balanced set of 22, are the components of the new universe being built. Simultaneously with the litany of correspondences the participants visualize the geometrical construction of a Tesseract, a four dimensional cube. The Tesseract is built up gradually from a point to a line, to a cube, to the Tesseract itself.
These are the visualizations as the letters are called out by the orator:
1. Aleph - macrocosm, which collapses to -
2. Beth - a single point
3. Gimel - second point next to the first
4. Daleth - the line composed of these two points
5. Heh - a second line
6. Vav - a third line
7. Zain - a fourth line
8. Cheth - the square composed of the four lines
9. Teth - a second square
10. Yod - a third square
11. Kaph - a fourth square
12. Lamed - a fifth square
13. Mem - a sixth square
14. Nun - the cube composed of the six squares
15. Samekh - a second cube
16. Ayin - a third cube
17. Peh - a fourth cube
18. Tzaddi - a fifth cube
19. Qoph - a sixth cube
20. Resh - a seventh cube
21. Shin - an eighth cube
22. Tav - the Tesseract composed of the eight cubes
Ebony wrote: "As the Tesseract is being performed by the Orator, all present concentrate their minds on the symbols being recited, and the dimensional progression building. When the last letter Tau is stated at the end, the letter that represents this Tesseract folded, the persons present shift their point of view from the Universe that they were in, to another parallel universe that thy have now arrived in. This 'jump' is spoken of repeatedly in the Dialogs" (Multidimensional Magick, page 3).
Ebony liked to describe the phenomenon of the "jump" as a movement into a parallel timestream, but it can also be seen as a realignment of the same universe, with all the paradoxes that either description entails. The experience is the same in either case. The limits of the universe seem to collapse into the space of the working. Over several minutes or hours, depending on the strength of the working, one's sense of outside reality begins to re-solidify. Often details of the new universe are discovered to be different from that of the old.
The intention of this magical shifting of the universe is to so realign the matrix of one's point of view such that one's true will can be more effectively actualized. Indeed, without this intention the Tesseract can degenerate into the worst kind of vulgar magic. Ebony repeatedly warned that one should not consciously attempt to shape or direct the realignment of the universe that occurs during the jump, instead allowing the universe to be re- created by one's HGA (automatically, as it were) in accordance with one's True Will. Failure to take this seriously can result in the greatest danger to the Tesseract magician. One's karma cannot be circumvented, and will invariably remanifest in the new universe.
This month is the first anniversary of Ebony's greater feast, and so it is appropriate that this article completes the full outline of the Hawk and Jackal system. Concurrently, this series will be entering a period of silence, possibly to emerge again with speech in some new forum or format in the future. If any of the readers of this newsletter have any stories, memories, materials, or questions, I would love to hear from you. Balaam93@hotmail.com In the meantime . . .
Primary Sources
We conclude the second half of Grady's letter to Crowley, dated 6th November, 1943 e.v., and begun in the TLC of March 2000 e.v. Experience with the ladies added a little maturity in time, and likely he wouldn't have written point #7 quite as he did if he was a bit less virginal at the time. Still, it's interesting to see the ideas of those days, in this closing glimpse of the conversations between Grady and A.C.
At the end, Grady mentions two poems, possibly included with the letter. We resume with the continuation of point 4:
