As Related by Tom Driberg

from

RULING PASSIONS

Stein and Day, 1978

(pages 82 - 86)

Sometimes it seemed as if life were offering an endless vista of bizarre or stimulating surprises. I do not know how it came about—perhaps in consequence of 'Homage to Beethoven', which was noticed in the Sunday Times as well as the Cherwell—but one day, to my astonishment, I received an invitation to lunch in London at the Eiffel Tower restaurant (now the White Tower) with Aleister Crowley. I hesitated, but accepted: such an invitation was too piquant to refuse; but, as the date of the luncheon drew near, I became more and more nervous about keeping the appointment. Crowley was widely regarded as a sensationally sinister figure, and the wildest stories about him were circulated: many of these were exaggerated, some may have been spread by himself to frighten those in the strange, closed, credulous world of occultism who had crossed him. The Sunday Express had denounced him as 'the worst man in the world'/ He claimed to practise magic (which he spelled 'magick'). He said it was 'white' magic; others said 'black'. Some years before he had organised performances of the Elusinian mysteries in the incongruously staid surroundings of the Caxton Hall. It was alleged that he lured well-known women to these orgies, drugged them until they participated, and then had them photographed for blackmailing purposes. The cakes that he distributed, as a kind of unholy communion, contained wheat, honey, hashish, and female menses. Quite recently an Oxford undergraduate named Raoul Loveday had died 'in mysterious circumstances' when staying at Crowley's 'temple of Thelema' [Abbey of Thelema] at Cefalu in Sicily. (Crowley said that he had died after drinking the local water; Loveday's wife Betty May, an artists' model, in a book called Tiger Woman, attributed his death to physical and mental revulsion at the midnight ceremonies in which he was required to sacrifice cats.) There were also more creditable items in Crowley's record: at Cambridge he had been a competent poet, in the Swinburnian manner; he still played chess masterfully at the Gambit in the City; in his youth he had also been an accomplished mountaineer. Indeed, he claimed to have learned wisdom from the 'secret masters' in Tibet. This wisdom may have included certain formulae for sexual potency; for, though he was bisexual. I was to observe over the years that, ugly as he was, he could exercise a compelling fascination over women, particularly elderly women with a fair amount of money. He used heroin freely, saying that he was its master not its victim; his novel. The Diary of a Drug Fiend, had just been banned.

In short, as I say, nothing could have induced me to cut that lunch-date—but I was keeping my fingers crossed. Crowley was already there when I got to the Eiffel Tower. He stood up, stout, bald and middle-aged, in a well-cut plus-four suit of green hand-woven tweed, and greeted me. Then, as we sat down, he said, in a rather high, cracked, donnish voice: 'Pardon me while I invoke the Moon.' There may have been some special reason for the brief muttering which followed. It was not his usual grace, which, like the versicle and response which he and his followers used instead of 'Good morning', or at the start of any enterprise, ran: 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law'—'Love is the law, love under will'. This exchange, with its echoes of St Augustine and Rabelais, seemed harmless, even admirable. Crowley expressed it in another way when he said that the essence of this teaching was that you should 'discover your own true will and do it'.

We did not on this occasion go into these deeper matters. I asked him whether at this time he was performing any magical ceremonies in London. He took this opportunity to explain that they were very expensive to set up—the pentacle must be just so, et cetera, or it could be dangerous. All the same, a lot of rubbish had been written about his magic. Magic was simply 'the art of causing change to occur in conformity with will'. It operated in quite everyday ways: when you used the telephone it was magic, or would have been thought so a century ago.

After this I saw Crowley from time to time. I suppose that he had hoped that, because I was at Christ Church, I was rich; he may have been a little disappointed that this was not so, for he wanted to get some magical ceremonies going again, and also to go to America to tackle the Rosicrucians who, he alleged, had 'stolen' some property from him in California. One day he wrote to tell me that he had found a reference to myself in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The actual quote was: 'From no expected house shall this child come'—and 'what house,' asked Crowley, 'could be more unexpected than Aedes Christi? (Christ Church—'the House'). It was often hard to tell if he were serious or joking, as when, soon after this, he told me that he had decided to nominate me as his successor as World Teacher. He had assumed this role some years earlier, and dated all his letters from the year and day of his epiphany. However, I heard of one other man to whom Crowley had made the same offer, and I hope that he, rather than I, has inherited the burdensome legacy.

I disregarded the more fantastic rumours about Crowley's misdeeds—as that his infant child by one of his mistresses ('an unblemished male') had been found floating down a river with his heart cut out. But I thought disconcerting the fate of one of his followers, a dim, grey little man called Norman Mudd, who used to come up to one at parties and say 'You won't remember me—my name is Mudd.' Because he differed from Crowley on some point of doctrine or ritual, Crowley called him a 'traitor' and cursed him in a way that he must have found alarming—prophesying that he would die 'by water and the rope'. Some years later, in Paris, I read in the Continental Daily Mail a small news-item to the effect than an English visitor to Portugal, Mr N. Mudd, had been found drowned in the sea, with a rope round his neck.

One of Crowley's more impressive claims was that he was the Great Beast foretold in the Book of Revelations, whose number was 666. So his followers familiarly called him 'Beast'. He also described himself as 'Sir' Aleister Crowley. When I asked him about this, he explained that he was a Knight of the Holy Ghost, but that I need not put the title on letters to him, as the order was 'not recognised in England'.

Some years after I had left Oxford, when I was working on the Daily Express, a man named Cosmo ('The Great Cosmo', a music-hall illusionist) got in touch with me and said that he had acquired from the landlady of his room in North London a trunk once left there by Crowley, either as payment in lieu of rent or in the course of a 'moonlight flit'. In this trunk he had found some letters from me to Crowley: did I want them? I went along to see Cosmo. The letters were not 'compromising', but I relieved him of them. He also let me have something more interesting—a small square volume, bound in red morocco and encased in baroque silver which must once have held a missal or a breviary: this contained Crowley's manuscript diary, recording his daily magical and sexual doings, for the period covering Loveday's death at Cefalu and Mussolini's subsequent expulsion of Crowley from Italy. (He set up another 'temple' in Tunis.) It contained a number of pages bearing what may be called oaths of allegiance, signed in Crowley's presence by various devotees. To my surprise, one of the signatures was that of J.W.N. Sullivan, one of the most distinguished mathematicians of the century. In another case, that of Augustine Booth-Clibborn [Arthur Booth-Clibborn], there was no signature. Instead, Crowley had written at the bottom of the page: 'He was plotting treachery, but he feared terribly.' The first page of the diary, written in Crowley's hand, bore titles he had bestowed on himself, some of them in Greek: ΤΟ ΜΕΓΑ ΘΗΡΙΟΝ (The Great Beast), ΛΟΓΟΕ 'ΑΙΩΝΟΣ (The Eternal Word), and 'The Wanderer of the Waste'.

I was not seeing much of Crowley now, but one evening he invited me to dinner—a curry dinner, cooked by himself at a fine house up the Thames lent to him by a friend and admirer of his, Lady Harris [Frieda Harris]. (She was the wife of Sir Percy Harris, then the Liberal Chief Whip and known in Parliament as 'the housemaid', for, being the most boring speaker in the House, he had an unfailing knack of emptying the chamber. She was also an accomplished artist, painting under the name of Jesus Chutney; under Crowley's instruction, she was working out a new set of designs for the Tarot cards.) The curry was excellent, and was accompanied by a bottle of Moët and Chandon's champagne. Then Crowley did what he had often done before: he drew the little diagram known as the pentacle, used for telling fortunes by the ancient Egyptians, and asked me to stare into the central space between the lines and tell him what I could see. I had never before seen, or pretended to see, anything; but now I recalled the little manuscript diary—which he did not know that I had—and began, in a trance-like voice, to describe it: the shining baroque silver, a monstrance with a Host on one side of it, the red leather, the writing inside which I could not quite read . . . I had never seen Crowley so staggered: he leaned forward in desperate eagerness. 'Go on,' he said, 'go on!' But the vision faded. 'Try again,' he pleaded. 'No,' I said. 'I can't see anything more . . . though perhaps if we had another bottle of Moët . . . ?' This was, I fear, rather a mean trick to play on the old boy: I excused it to myself by reflecting that it had given him such obvious amazed delight to see one of his own bits of magic actually coming true. I always half-meant to give him the diary back, and I made it available from time to time to people writing books about him. (I no longer have it.) But years passed without my seeing him, and one day I read that he had died at Hastings. He was given a proper occultist's send-off at the municipal crematorium in Brighton; the service included the recital of his Hymn to Pan; the town council passed a resolution deploring the whole thing and saying that it must never happen again.