Stranger Than We Can Imagine (10 page)

When you look at the information received by Crowley, Yeats and Jung it does look remarkably like the work of Crowley, Yeats and Jung. The sources of those communications do not seem to be entirely external, unless non-human entities make contact with mankind in order to do sarcastic impersonations of their psyches. Why such beings would have such a weird sense of humour is a question as yet unanswered.

The book Crowley believed he was transcribing is generally known as
The Book of the Law
because its proper title,
Liber AL vel Legis, sub figura CCXX, as delivered by XCIII=418 to DCLXVI
, is less snappy. It consists of three chapters, each written over the course of an hour, during three days in a hotel room in Cairo. The text is powerful, unsettling and, in places, frightening. The words are short and blunt.
This gives the book an insistent, staccato tone, especially when read out loud. The monosyllabic style is evident in its most famous line: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’

Crowley had arrived in the hot, bustling streets of Cairo with his wife Rose in February 1904. The ancient city of mosques and citadels was then undergoing a period of growth and modernisation, and parts of downtown Cairo had been rebuilt in a Parisian style. These wide elegant boulevards with gas lighting stood in stark contrast to the narrow twisting streets and crowded markets of the rest of the city.

This was the peak of the colonial period and Cairo, which was then administered by the British, was regarded as a great prize. Wealthy European travellers were drawn by the romance of the place and the desire to explore the Giza pyramids, the only one of the seven wonders of the ancient world still standing. The purpose of Crowley’s visit was to study local religion, play golf and to walk around wearing a jewelled turban, silk robes and a golden coat pretending to be a Persian prince. It was unexpected, therefore, when Rose announced she was channelling strange gnomic information regarding the god Horus, and that Horus was eager to have a word with her husband.

It was all the more surprising because Rose had no interest in Egyptian religion. In order to test her knowledge Crowley took her to the Boulak Museum and challenged her to locate an image of Horus. Rose walked past a number of obvious representations of this deity and headed upstairs. There she immediately pointed to a small display case in the distance and cried, ‘There he is!’ The pair approached the case and found an otherwise unremarkable wooden stele from the twenty-sixth dynasty. The stele did indeed depict Horus, in the form of Ra Hoor Khuit. It was part of an exhibit that had been numbered 666 by the museum.

This struck Crowley as hugely significant. The number 666 was important for him, and he referred to himself as ‘The Beast 666’. So when Rose announced that she had some instructions for Aleister, he followed them to the letter.

Crowley was ordered to arrange their drawing room into a sparse temple and enter it for one hour, starting at noon exactly, on the following three days. There he was to write down exactly what he heard. On each of the three days he sat at a writing table and transcribed the words he heard from an English voice with a neutral accent that sounded like it came from behind him. The voice was of ‘deep timbre, musical and expressive, its tones solemn, voluptuous, tender, fierce, or aught else as suited the moods of the message’. This was the voice of Aiwass, an entity who acted as a minister for Horus. On each of the three days he transcribed one chapter of
The Book of the Law
.

As far as Crowley was concerned,
The Book of the Law
marked a new stage in humanity’s spiritual evolution. Mankind was entering a period which he called the Aeon of Horus. The previous era, the Aeon of Osiris, was patriarchal in character and echoed the imperial age. You were expected to understand your place in the hierarchy and obey your superiors. The Aeon of Horus, in contrast, was described as being like a child: wild, spontaneous and self-centred. It would be a time when the exercise of individual will was paramount because, as Aiwass dictated, ‘There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.’

Crowley was announcing a new, replacement omphalos. It was one which would come to define the twentieth century: the individual. When the bonds of hierarchy were shattered, you were left with the multiple perspectives of a host of separate individuals. In the philosophy of individualism the self is the focus and is granted precedence over wider society.

Support for individualism had been slowly building for centuries. You can trace its roots back to the Renaissance or the English Civil War. It was boosted by the Enlightenment and can be found in the work of writers such as François Rabelais or the Marquis de Sade. But few people had been willing to take it to its logical conclusion.

Crowley was moving beyond the tradition of Christianity he was raised in. Christianity, like imperialism, was a system of subservience to a higher Lord. This Lord protected and saved his followers,
but he also threatened them with judgement and punishment if they did not behave in the manner he dictated. It was a spiritual mirror to the political system: as above, so below. It is no coincidence that Western kings and emperors, from the Holy Roman Empire onwards, went to such lengths to impose that particular religion. Seen in this context, the end of the imperial world was always going to impact the Western world’s spiritual models.

Crowley’s religion, which he called Thelema, was a product of this new era. Thelema was very different to Christianity in that it did not demand the bending of the knee to anyone. In the words of
The Book of the Law
, ‘Every man and every woman is a star.’

In declaring the primacy of the individual, Crowley was also reducing the importance of the social groups that a person belonged to or identified with. Individualism was, by definition, isolating. Focusing on the individual inevitably meant that the focus shifted away from wider social connections, and everything outside the individual became categorised as separate and different. For those who self-identified as being one of the good guys, it became tempting to view this external other as bad. This isolating aspect of individualism was something Crowley understood completely. ‘I am alone,’ he wrote, ‘there is no God where I am.’

The importance of individualism found particularly fertile soil in the United States, which as we have noted was always uncomfortable with the rigid hierarchy of empire. You can see how deeply individualism is ingrained in the American psyche by the unwillingness of American town planners to embrace European-style motoring roundabouts. Roundabouts are faster, cause fewer accidents and save fuel in comparison to traffic-light junctions, but they are viewed as being suspiciously un-American. As Dan Neil, the motoring correspondent at the
Wall Street Journal
, has noted, ‘This is a culture predicated on freedom and individualism, where spontaneous cooperation is difficult and regimentation is resisted … Behind the wheel, we’re less likely to abide by an orderly pattern of merging that, though faster for the group, may require an individual to slow down or, God forbid, yield.’

The central character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel
The Great Gatsby
is James Gatz, who grows up dirt-poor in a shack in North Dakota and changes his name to Jay Gatsby at the age of seventeen in an attempt to leave behind his roots. While serving in the First World War he meets Daisy Buchanan, a debutante from the opposite end of the social scale. Gatsby refuses to accept the social gulf between them and, through an act of individual will and the proceeds from illegal bootlegging, reinvents himself as a wealthy and admired member of the Long Island elite.

Throughout the novel Gatsby stares at a green light across the bay from his home, which marks the Buchanans’ estate and the idealised, upper-class society it represents. He fixates on this light, turns it into his own private omphalos, and devotes his life to reaching it. It is this yearning to reach, and to deny the right of any social structure to prevent him from becoming what he wants to be, that is at the heart of his character. Gatsby refuses to ‘know his place’ or to allow anyone else to determine his goals. His dreams, ultimately, are not sufficient to overcome his background, but his dedication to becoming a ‘self-made man’ still marks him out as great. His spiritual centre, like Crowley’s, rests in his individual will.

The most influential proponent of the argument in favour of taking a fundamentalist approach to personal liberty was probably the Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand. Rand was born Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum in St Petersburg in 1905. Her childhood was affluent and her father, a successful Jewish businessman, owned both a pharmacy and the building it was in. But when she was twelve years old, Rand’s happy childhood was overturned by the October Revolution of 1917. Her father’s property was confiscated and her teenage years became a time of uncertainty, desperation and poverty. This left her with a deep hatred of communism, socialism or any type of collectivist ideas. All these, she felt, were excuses to steal from those who earned and deserved their wealth.

After a move to America and a failed attempt to make a living as a
screenwriter, she wrote a novella called
Anthem. Anthem
describes a dystopian totalitarian future where the word ‘I’ was banned and had been replaced by ‘we’. The hero of her novel, who is initially named Equality 7-2521 but who later calls himself Prometheus, vows to fight this collectivist tyranny. ‘I am done with the monster of “We,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame,’ he says. ‘And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: “I”.’ Equality 7-2521 makes this declaration fully aware of the isolating nature of individualism: ‘I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire. For in the temple of his spirit, each man is alone.’

Ayn Rand did not believe that concern for the wellbeing of others should limit personal liberty. With her striking short black hair, cold piercing gaze and ever-present cigarettes, she quickly attracted a dedicated following. Her individualist philosophy, which she named Objectivism, promoted what she called ‘the virtue of selfishness’. Like Crowley, she viewed her mission as the establishment of a new, post-Christian morality. She made this clear in a 1959 CBS television interview with Mike Wallace, who put it to her that ‘You are out to destroy almost every edifice of the contemporary American way of life, our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, our rule by majority will. Other reviews have said you scorn churches and the concept of God. Are these accurate criticisms?’ Rand’s response was ‘Yes. I am the creator of a new code of morality.’

Crowley, who was by then retired and living in a boarding house in Hastings, Sussex, was a fan. As he wrote in a 1947 letter, a few months before his death, ‘[Rand’s novel]
The Fountainhead
is one of the finest books I have ever read, and my friends in America insist on recognising me in the main character.’ In turn, Rand’s philosophy would inspire Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of
Satan. LaVey was the author of
The Satanic Bible
, the most influential text in contemporary Satanism, which has sold over a million copies. LaVey’s Satanism was more goat-based than Objectivism, but he readily admitted that his religion was just ‘Ayn Rand, with trappings’.

As well as Satanists, Rand also has admirers in the right-wing American Christian and business communities. Ronald Reagan was an admirer. Alan Greenspan, who would spend nineteen years as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a member of her inner circle. The Republican Congressman Paul Ryan said in 2005 that ‘I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We start with [her longest and last novel]
Atlas Shrugged
.’

This overlap between Rand’s admirers and Christian America can be hard to understand, but its roots may lie in the difference between American and European Christianity. During the twentieth century, church attendance declined dramatically across Europe, both in the Protestant north and the Catholic south. Going to church went from being the regular practice of the majority of the population to an unusual, niche interest for a small and ageing minority. European Christianity had always been the spiritual mirror of the restricting, hierarchical imperial system, so its twentieth-century decline at the epicentre of imperialism’s collapse isn’t surprising.

American Christianity was different. It had evolved in a culture of largely European immigrants who possessed both the proactive spirit which caused them to journey to the other side of the world in search of a better life, and also a dislike of the constricting, controlling power structures of post-industrial revolution Europe. American Christianity had, by necessity, evolved into a faith that was more understanding about the desire for individual freedom. While the idea that a Christian could approve of Ayn Rand appears baffling in Europe, and remains suspicious to the majority of American Christians, there nevertheless exists a section of the
American Christian community which can move from the Bible to
Atlas Shrugged
without a problem. Yet ‘the virtue of selfishness’ is clearly a different philosophy to ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’.

Towards the end of Crowley’s life he boiled down the philosophy of his religion Thelema into a clear, simple one-page document, known as
Liber OZ
. It consists of five short paragraphs, and begins: ‘Man has the right to live by his own law – to live in the way that he wills to do: to work as he will: to play as he will: to rest as he will: to die when and how he will.’ All this sounds highly appealing. Crowley’s philosophy remains attractive as he runs through the next three paragraphs, which detail man’s right to eat, drink, dwell, move, think, speak, write, draw, dress and love as he will.