Aleister Crowley by Gary Lachman Read Free Book Online

groups—there were by then others in other parts of the country—but they were increasingly unhappy with his long-distance dictatorship. Baker had confided in Crowley that he believed Mathers was behaving badly and that he was weary of his leadership. 25 Mathers had appointed Florence Farr as his representative in London. She did her best but by the time Crowley had appeared, she had had enough. She offered Mathers her resignation and suggested closing down the temple. Mathers was not keen on the idea and refused. He needed Isis-Urania to provide new recruits for the Second Order; without them it would wither. Now it seemed that in order to prevent that from happening, fate had presented a recruit on his doorstep.
    Mathers received from Frater Perdurabo the oaths of obedience and secrecy, and it was done. Crowley was initiated and had entered the beauty of Tiphereth. He took the magical name Parzival, the “pure fool” of the Grail legend. He had passed through the portal and was now an Adeptus Minor 5 0 = 6, a member of the second order, whatever the mediocrities in London thought. He quickly discovered that they did not think much. When Crowley arrived at 36 Blythe Road, Hammersmith, the Golden Dauns then office, soon after his initiation, and asked for the rituals pertinent to his new grade, theorder’s secretary, a Miss Cracknell, flatly refused. The Isis-Urania Temple did not, she said, recognize his initiation. This was tantamount to saying they no longer recognized Mathers’s authority. Crowley returned to Paris to inform his chief (and seems to have brought Laura Grahame along as some kind of reward for helping Bennett). Mathers was furious, but was also concerned that the renegades might look to regroup with his old colleague Westcott as a leader. After all, Westcott had made contact with the mysterious Fraulein Sprengel and started it all. Mathers retaliated with a thunderbolt. On February 16 he wrote to Florence Farr and told her in no uncertain terms that Westcott had “NEVER been at
any time
either in personal or written communication with the Secret Chiefs of the Order” and that Westcott had “
either himself forged
or
procured to be forged
” the alleged correspondence with Anna Sprengel. 26 Every atom of magical knowledge the order possessed came from him alone. Until then he had kept secret about this for the sake of the order but events forced his hand. No cipher manuscript had been found. No contact had been made. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had, it seems, been built on a lie. It was only through Mathers that any real contact with the Secret Chiefs had been established and it was only through him that the Golden Dawn could have any real existence. For his part Westcott asserted the genuineness of the Sprengel letters.
    Crowley did not realize that this made his own initiation doubtful. If there was no Fraulein Sprengel, why should Mathers’s own account of the Secret Chiefs be believed? Such queries escaped him. He granted Mathers the kind of exceptional status he generally reserved for himself. His master—so Mathers had become—could not be judged by “conventional codes and canons.” “Ordinary morality isonly for ordinary people,” and neither Mathers nor his new acolyte were ordinary. 27 It was time for action. Crowley put aside Abramelin once again and offered Mathers his full support. Crowley drew up a plan of attack. This included a test of loyalty and oath of obedience that reads like something out of a Stalinist show trial. 28 Those loyal would be reprimanded and forced to show their allegiance; those not would be lowered in grade or simply cast out. The delight Crowley took at the prospect of some magical skirmish at which he could confront the loathsome mediocrities is evident in the note about it he made in his diary. He addressed himself as “I, Perdurabo, the Temporary Envoy Plenipotentiary of Deo Duce Comite Ferro, & thus the Third from the Secret Chiefs of the