Aleister Crowley

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Book: Read Aleister Crowley for Free Online
Authors: Gary Lachman
place, which suggests either very small demons or a very large flat.
    Bennett took a number of drugs to help with his asthma—opium, morphine, cocaine, and chloroform—and it was with Bennett that Crowley first began to experiment with drugs. Bennett had a biting contempt for the body, and his health, always frail, was worsening. He needed to get to a warmer climate. Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was the place, as there he could also enter the path of the
bhikkhu
, a Buddhist monk—Bennett was losing his interest in magic and was increasingly drawn to the Buddhist path. Crowley had inherited a fortune, but magical etiquette prevented him from simply paying Bennett’s fare. Crowley says he could not pay
Bennett for his instructions, only give him room and board, yet why he couldn’t lend him the money is unclear. Crowley and Jones attempted to evoke the spirit of Buer, a demon of the Goetia, who deals with health, but were only partially successful. Then Crowley had an idea.
    Initiation hadn’t dampened Crowley’s need for sex. He was having an affair with one initiate, Elaine Simpson (Soror Semper Fidelis

“Always Faithful”), and had proposed marriage to Susan Strong, an American opera singer he had met in Paris (she performed in one of Mathers’s Egyptian rites), but his proposal soon fizzled out. He was also enjoying himself with a “seductive siren” whose husband was a colonel in India; her name was Lilian Horniblow but she was known as Laura Grahame. 17 Crowley says he struggled to overcome his passion for her, but he more likely simply tired of her and broke it off. After Buer made a partial appearance, his siren wrote to him again, begging him to come to her hotel. Crowley saw a connection. Hevisited Laura, and she begged him to come back to her. Crowley was noncommittal, but he offered her a chance to do something good for someone other than herself. He asked for a hundred pounds—a considerable sum then. He offered her no reason why, but said it wasn’t for him and that he had a private reason for not using his own money. His siren gave him the money, or possibly a ruby ring to sell—the accounts are unclear. He gave the cash to Bennett, and Frater Iehi Aour
made ready for warmer climes. 18
    Crowley implies that Bennett’s benefactor later agreed to end their affair if he slept with her again—the inference is that he impregnated her (she asked for “a living memory of our love”) and she let him go to perform the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. 19 The “gift” that saved Bennett’s life would come back to haunt Crowley. His siren later thought better of her generosity and asked that it be returned; it is unclear if it was a gift or a loan. Either way, Crowley had no intention of returning anything and vindicated himself with rationalizations. Crowley was later accused of stealing a hundred pounds. Charges were not brought against him—he did not actually steal the money—but the mud stuck and would turn up years later during the anti-Crowley tabloid campaign.
    Crowley decided that Chancery Lane was no place to meet his Holy Guardian Angel. He needed somewhere more secluded for so serious an assignation. The fact that his flat was under police observation because of suspected homosexual activity may have been a prompt—it was still illegal then—as may have been the rent, or perhaps he didn’t want to face the demons he had conjured without Frater Iehi Aour’s
help. 20 (After he left, the magical atmosphere, he said, remained tense and the landlord had difficulty renting the place.) In any case, he searched high and low and in August 1899found what he was looking for. Boleskine was a long, low building on the southeast rise overlooking Loch Ness, halfway between Inverfarigaig and Foyers in Scotland; years later, Jimmy Page bought the place, and today it remains a site of
thelemic
pilgrimage. 21 At the time Crowley moved in, the Loch Ness monster was yet to appear—the first sighting was in

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