Aleister Crowley by Gary Lachman Read Free Book Online Page B

so convinced Mathers of her genuineness that he allowed her access to some important Golden Dawn rituals. Mrs. Horos and her much younger husband, Frank Dutton Jackson, a defrocked priest, then sailed to South Africa, taking the Golden Dawn material with them. It was at this point that Crowley heard about them from Mathers, who now saw Mrs. Horos as a swindler—like Crowley, he was an inveterate paranoid, accusing practically everyone around him of theft. The Horoses returned to London in 1901 and started their own version of the Golden Dawn, as well as a College of Occult Science. It was there that the trouble started. Along with classes on magnetism, clairvoyance, mediumship, and thaumaturgy, the Horoses also practiced a kind of sex magick well in advance of Crowley. Eventually the Horoses were accused of the kind of sexual offenses that Crowley himself would attract years later, with unsuspecting virgins being ritually deflowered andother indecorous acts. The police became involved and in the end Mr. Horos was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and Mrs. Horos to seven, for rape and theft, among other offenses. There was some cause for this, but as in the case of Crowley, their real crime was more likely breaching Victorian morality. Nevertheless, the trial brought the real Golden Dawn into disrepute. 31
    Crowley began to suspect that the Secret Chiefs had abandoned Mathers, too. If that was the case, then he would have to look elsewhere for direction. It was too late to return to Boleskine and restart the Abramelin ritual. Yet again his Holy Guardian Angel would have to wait. In Paris Crowley met two initiates, members of the Order who were Mathers’s guests. They had just returned from Mexico and spoke highly of it. What was the point of sitting quietly in one place, even if that was precisely what Abramelin required? The New World beckoned. In late June 1900, Crowley sailed for New York, on his way south of the border.

THREE
    THE WORD OF THE AEON

     
    Crowley arrived in New York in early July during a heat wave. His departure from England may have had as much to do with the fact that the police wanted to speak with him about Laura Grahame’s gift as with the debacle on Blythe Road or the glowing reports about Mexico he had heard from Mathers’s guests. He lingered long enough in his hotel room to make disparaging and inaccurate remarks about the Statue of Liberty—in between taking cold baths—and after three sweltering days he boarded a train for Mexico. His first impressions of the country were equally morose. His fastidious tastes were repelled by the food, the poor hotel service, and the unfamiliar liquor. But he was fated to endure to the end and eventually acclimated himself. He took a house in Mexico City overlooking the Alameda, and a woman to tend his needs. Here he discovered that he was, in fact, spiritually at one with Mexico. That the natives’ hearts were set on “bull fighting, cock fighting, gambling and lechery” made him feel right at home. 1 He met an old man, Don Jesus Medina, a high-ranking Mason who was so impressed by Crowley’s Kabbalistic knowledge that he initiated Crowley to the highestMasonic degree in practically no time. Although some commentators suggest that Mathers’s guests provided an introduction to this master, there is about as much evidence for the real existence of Crowley’s Don Jesus as there is for Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan and so we must take this encounter with some grains of salt. 2 Crowley also inaugurated his own magical order, the Lamp of the Invisible Light, or L.I.L., the aim of which was to have a temple with an ever-burning flame. Crowley claims that some of the secrets of the L.I.L. came from his previous incarnation as Cagliostro, the eighteenth-century Italian magician.
    Crowley practiced his magic dutifully. He developed a method of inducing a trance via a kind of magical dance that produced a peculiar lucidity. He also developed the power of