Encountering
Aleister Crowley

The Yogic Quest

By Richard Boyle
From the Sunday Times

World famous magician Aleister Crowley's life was drastically changed when he visited Ceylon in 1901. In this, the first of a three part series Richard Boyle writes on Crowley;s extraordinary experiences here...

In the early years of the twentieth century, Ceylon was visited twice by the most famous and infamous magician of modern times Aleister Crowley, or the "Great Beast 666" as he called himself. As a magician, Crowley was in direct line of descent from such luminaries as Cagliostro, the Comte de Saint Germain, Eliphas Levi, and Madame Blavatsky. But he was also a poet, novelist, mountaineer, eccentric and womanizer. It is of interest that Crowley the womanizer came into abrasive contact, some years after his visit to Ceylon, with one of the island's greatest sons, the savant Ananda Coomaraswamy.

Crowley was born in 1875, a year significant to occultists as it was the year that Madame Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society and that Eliphas Levi died. Crowley's father was a successful brewer, yet who spent much time traversing the English countryside preaching the doctrines of the Christian sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. After he died, the younger Crowley grew up to detest the faith in which he had been brought up and, without knowing why, went over to the side of Satan.

He was educated at Malvern and Tonbridge, and later at Trinity College, Cambridge. However, as his biographer John Symonds has pointed out, "his real seat of learning" was the magical society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the leading light of which was a man of considerable potential, MacGregor Mathers. The Golden Dawn taught and practised ceremonial magic, as opposed to magic which used aids such as drugs and sex. Its constitution was not derived from its governing body, but from superior intelligences called Secret Chiefs. Mathers claimed to have met the Secret Chiefs one night in Paris.

Crowley joined the Golden Dawn in 1898 taking the title of Perdurabo (I will endure to the end). As he was ambitious it was not surprising that he quarrelled with not only Mathers, but also with the rank and file, including W.B. Yeats, whom he accused of being jealous of his superior talent as a poet. In the end Crowley was virtually expelled from the Order. He retaliated by denying that Mathers had met the Secret Chiefs. His greatest need was to make his own link with the Secret Chiefs. Without such a link he remained a negligible force.

One person in the Golden Dawn who Crowley did like and respect was Allan Bennett, a very effective practitioner of magic. Bennett had studied the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures as well, not only as a scholar, but with the insight that comes from inborn sympathetic understanding", as Crowley writes in his autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. Unfortunately Bennett was a chronic asthmatic and Crowley came to the conclusion that his friend would die unless he went to live in a warmer climate. Crowley procured £100 from his current mistress which paid for Bennett's passage to Ceylon and saved for humanity one of the most valuable lives of our generation, as he claims.

The reason why Crowley first travelled to Ceylon in 1901 was a curious one. He was still pre- occupied with the question of whether or not Mathers had authority over the Golden Dawn. "I could think of only one way of putting him to the test", explains Crowley. "It concerned an episode at which Allan Bennett was present. Allan, and he alone, could confirm the account which Mathers had given me. If he did so, Mathers was vindicated; if not, it was fatal to his claims. It seems absurd to travel 8,000 miles to ask one question, but that was what I did."

The outspoken Crowley conveys an ambivalent, slightly Schizophrenic attitude towards Ceylon throughout his account of the island and its inhabitants, vacillating between racist abuse and romantic reverie. Take his description of Colombo, for example: "I love it and loathe it with nicely balanced enthusiasm. Its climate is chronic; its architecture is an unhappy accident; its natives are nasty; its English are exhausted and enervated. The riff raff of rascality endemic in all parts is here exceptionally repulsive. The high water mark of social tone, moral elevation, manners and refinement is attained by the Japanese ladies of pleasure."

A few paragraphs later Crowley continues: "But then, how rich, how soft, how peaceful is Colombo! One feels that one needs never do anything any more. It invites one to dream deliciously of deciduous joys. The palms, the flowers, the swooning song of the surf, the dim and delicate atmosphere heavy with sensuous scents, the idle irresponsible people, purring with placid pleasure; they seem musicians in an orchestra, playing a nocturne by some oriental Chopin unconscious of disquieting realities." Crowley also suggests that Colombo is "the place where four winds meet",, the cross roads of the civilized world.

Crowley soon met up with Allan Bennett. By this time, several years after he had arrived in Ceylon, Bennett had been through various adventures. Already at heart a Buddhist, he initially resisted the urge to take up the Yellow Robe because, according to Crowley, he was "disappointed by the degeneracy of the Singalese bhikkhus." Instead he had been engaged by Ponnambalam Ramanathan, then Solicitor General, as a private tutor to his younger sons. Ramanathan was of course a man of profound religious knowledge; a yogi and commentator on the gospels of Matthew and John. From him Bennett learnt a great deal about the theory and practice of Yoga.

When Crowley asked Bennett the vital question he had travelled so far to hear the answer to, he must have been relieved, for it was obvious from Bennett's reply that Mathers had been at fault. From that time onwards both men dismissed from their minds the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It was back to first principles. Crowley proposed that Bennett obtain leave from Ramanathan and that they go to live in Kandy and devote themselves to Yoga. Bennett accepted without hesitation and they rented a bungalow called Marlborough which overlooked the temple and lake. There they devoted themselves with "diabolical determination and saintly simplicity to the search for a spiritual solution to the material muddle.'

At the time Bennett was 18, he had accidentally discovered the state of Shivadarshana, in which the universe, having been perceived in its totality, is then annihilated. It seems his sole objective in life was regaining that state. Crowley comments that Ramanathan "showed him a rational practical method of achieving this". During their retirement at Kandy, Bennett taught Crowley the principles of Yoga. Crowley witnessed some extraordinary sights. One day Bennett entered Pranayama and the mysterious forces generated by this state of consciousness had thrown him across the room, so that he came to rest upside down in a corner, like an overturned Buddha image. On another occasion, Bennett demonstrated how he could prevent leeches from biting him by adopting certain breathing exercises.

During their stay in Kandy, Crowley and Bennett had the privilege of being present at the annual inspection of the Tooth Relic and the good fortune of witnessing the Esala Perahera. Crowley, predictably, was not impressed by the holiness of the Perahera, but its spectacle certainly had an effect on him: "The scene was wild and somewhat sinister. The darkness, the palms, the mountainous background, the silent lake below, the impenetrable canopy of space, studded with secretive and significant stars, formed a stupendous setting for the savage noise and blaze of the ceremony."

Crowley goes on to suggest that the Perahera communicates a "sort of magnificent madness to the mind". Although he was not sure of the meaning of this madness, he "felt a tense, tremendous impulse to do something demoniac". He admits, "it was almost a torture to feel so intensely, and desire so deliriously, such unintelligible irritation. Hours passed in this intoxicating excitement."

Crowley admits that in writing his autobiography he was much influenced by Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious. So it is not surprising that the mass psychological state induced by the spectacle of the Perahera was of special interest to him. "One can understand perfectly the popular enthusiasm," he states. "It was the release of the subconscious desires of the original animal." But that was not all, for he continues: "The whole of Eastern ceremonies, from the evolution of dancing girls to the austerities of ascetics, have all been devised with the intention of inducing the right medium for the right sort of subconscious to arise, move and appear."

A few months later, Crowley claims to have attained the state of Dhyana. Curiously, though, he did not feel encouraged to proceed any further for another two years, and "the immediate current being thus exhausted, we decided to go on a pilgrimage to the ruined sacred cities of Buddhism". Crowley embarked on this journey in a worldly frame of mind, admitting that his interests were in "aesthetic, historical and ethnological matters, and in incidents of travel amid new scenes". For Bennett, however, this was a real pilgrimage, because he had become more and more convinced that he ought to take the Yellow Robe. In fact he was ordained later on in Rangoon, and became the founder of the Buddhist Sangha in the West.

While he was in Kandy, Crowley had signed an agreement with the climber Oscar Eckenstein to make an attempt on Chogo Ri the following year: at that time all the great peaks in the Himalayas were unconquered. In preparation for the climb Crowley had begun to grow a beard and on the visit to the ruined cities he was often mistaken by the local inhabitants for a Boer prisoner of war.

Crowley considered Dambulla "ne of the most extraordinary works of human skill, energy and enthusiasm in the world", although he complained bitterly about the "thick coats of gamboge" he felt concealed the "delicacy of the modeling". Sigiriya he found "startling". He hung about the place for a few days in order to circumnavigate the base of the rock and find a way up, but found the scheme impractical because of the surrounding thick jungle.

That he was unable to ascend Sigiriya seems extraordinary, given his prowess as a mountaineer and the fact that since the first recorded ascent in 1853 some half dozen Europeans had achieved this feat. Moreover, the Public Works Department had erected a permanent ladder for the final part of the ascent of the rock in 1894, and H.C.P Bell had undertaken considerable excavations at the base and had cleared much of the jungle thereabouts.

The last stop of this pilgrimage was Anuradhapura, whose ruins Crowley thought "incomparably greater as monuments than even those of Egypt. They are not so sympathetic spiritually; they lack the appeal of geometry and aesthetics which makes the land of Khem my spiritual fatherland. But one has to grant the gargantuan grandeur of the old Singalese civilization. Their idea, even of so pedestrian a project as a tank, was simply colossal. They thought in acres where others think in square yards."

Crowley was one of those people who show tremendous initial enthusiasm for things, but whose interest often wanes thereafter. As he confesses, "I was fed up with marvels". So he travelled alone to South India, where he bumped into Colonel Olcott on a train. "The psychological change from Ceylon is very sudden, startling and complete," he observes. "What is there about an Island which differentiates it so absolutely from the adjoining mainland? No amount of similarity of race, customs and culture gets rid of insularity."

Like many visitors to Ceylon, Crowley could not resist commenting on the reference to the island in Bishop Herber's hymn, "Greenland's Icy Mountains. Crowley objected to accepting Ceylon as the penultimate, "But certainly every prospect is remarkably pleasing and, as far as I saw, every man is vile", he remarks in typically acerbic fashion. "There seems to be something in the climate of the island that stupefies the finer parts of a man if he lives there too long."

To Crowley, the flavour of Ceylon tea, so pleasing to so many, somehow seemed to symbolize what he felt. He remembers how he once pleaded with a shopkeeper to procure him some Chinese tea. "It chanced that the owner of a neighbouring plantation was in the shop. He butted in, remarking superciliously that he could put in the Chinese flavour for me! "Yes," replied Crowley, "but can you take out the Ceylon flavour?

Romancing with Rose

Back in England after the Chogo Ri expedition, Crowley acquired c wife under unusual circumstances. Her name was Rose Kelly, anc remarkably, given Crowley's anti-Christian sentiment, she was the vicar of Camberwell's daughter. She had told Crowley that she wac about to be married against her will, so without thinking he suggested that she marry him instead. Afterwards Crowley realizec he loved her passionately.

When the English summer of 1903 began to wane, the newly-wedc embarked on what Crowley euphemistically termed a "hypertrophiec honeymoon." As he explains: "We pretended to ourselves that we were going big-game shooting in Ceylon and to pay a visit tc Allan (Bennett) in Rangoon, but the real object was to adorn the celebration of our love by setting it in a thousand suave and sparkling backgrounds." The mystery is why Crowley chose Ceylon for his honeymoon, having already experienced, by his account, a chequered visit there only two years previously.

En route to Ceylon the love-birds stopped off in Cairo, where, as Crowley puts it, "the extravagances of our passion suggested our spending a night together in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid". He had brought along some principal invocations, and on reading them he claims there appeared an astral light. When they reached Colombo, Rose decided she might be pregnant. Although this revelation curtailed their honeymoon, they nevertheless travelled to Hambantota via Galle by stagecoach and bullock cart in December 1903 to partake in some big game hunting. Crowley insists that it was not his intention to inflict chronicles of slaughter on his readers, yet he does spend paragraphs in analyzing the temperament and psychology of buffalo, sambhur, leopard and elephant. He also describes the incidentals of the shoot, such as his fury at the sub-standard cartridges he had purchased in Colombo, and how an elephant he was tracking killed a dipsomaniac Frenchman.

In addition Crowley claims his headman swindled him outrageously, but that there was no remedy. However, as he concludes, "There is no remedy for anything in Ceylon. The whole island is an infamy. It is impossible to get twelve Singalese to agree on any subject whatever, so a majority decision determines the verdict of a jury of seven!".

Although he did tend to complain vehemently about the local populace, he was also extremely critical of the typical colonial Englishman. "He has failed to convince himself of his superiority to mere created beings; so his airs of authority do not become him. He feels himself a bit of an upstart", observes Crowley. "Feeling his footing insecure, (he) dares not tolerate the nature as he can in India." The result, he felt, was that, "The Singalese government is inclined to be snappish."

On his first trip to Ceylon he had been robbed by a policeman, who had escaped conviction on some technicality. The English magistrate had told Crowley with obvious sadistic pleasure that the man could have been flogged if convicted. "It was my first glimpse of the bestial instincts of the average respectable cultured Englishman", he writes. On another occasion he had dined with a forest officer up country who had no conversation and seemed to have lost all interest in life. "He had become part of the jungle," observes Crowley. "This psychology is common to all but men of rare intelligence and energy."

During their hunting trip, Crowley and his wife stayed in bungalow near the shores of an unspecified tank. One day they went out in a boat so that Crowley could shoot some fruit bats which frequented the trees at the edge of the tank. He wanted their pelts in order to make a hat for Rose and a waistcoat for himself. A wounded bat fell onto Rose and frightened her badly, for it took Crowley some half a minute to detach its claws from her. "I thought nothing of the matter," he writes, "but it is possibl that her condition aggravated the impression."

That night Crowley was awakened by what he thought were the screams of a dying bat in the room. He called out to Rose, but there was no answer. On lighting a candle he found her hanging on to the overhead frame of the four-poster bed, squealing in a hideous manner. Crowley tried to pull her down but she clung to the frame and refused to respond to his voice. "When I got her down at last", he recounts, "she clawed and scratched and bit and spat and squealed, exactly as the dying bat had done to her."

Crowley comments that "It was the finest case of obsession that I had ever had the good fortune to observe. Of course it is easy to explain that in her hypersensitive condition the incident had reproduced itself in a dream. She had identified herself with the assailant and mimicked his behaviour. But surely it is much simpler to say that the spirit of the bat entered her".

At the conclusion of their hunting trip the Crowleys returned to Colombo and stayed at the Galle Face Hotel. While having lunch one day at the Grand Oriental Hotel, Crowley witnessed the arrival in the island of a Scottish delegation sent to vindicate the honour of Major General Sir Hector MacDonald, who had blown his brains out in a Paris Hotel rather than face charges of sexual irregularity levelled against him by the British Army in Ceylon. MacDonald had become Commander of British troops in the colony in 1902 during the Governorship of another soldier, Sir Joseph West Ridgeway. However he quickly fell from grace when his penchant for native boys was brought to light. According to Crowley the court martial was the revenge of a "Ceylon Big Bug", whom MacDonald had apparently order off the field at some big function when he had appeared in mufti.

It is curious that Crowley not only knew MacDonald but had had lunch with him in Paris just days before his death. Crowley remarks that "he seemed unnaturally relieved; but his conversation showed that he was suffering acute mental distress". The very next morning Crowley was astonished to read in the New York Herald what he considered to be "an outrageously outspoken account of the affair". It was soon afterwards that MacDonald committed suicide. Crowley relates how MacDonald's pockets were found to be full of obscene photographs at the time of his death. "Was his motive to convey some subtly offensive insult to the puritans whose prurience had destroyed him?" Crowley muses.

Crowley comments that MacDonald was "a great simple lion-hearted man with the spirit of a child; with all his experience in the army, he still took the word honour seriously, and the open scandal of the accusation had struck down his standard". At the time, of course, this was a scandal of sizeable proportions. Indeed the sordid details of this Victorian melodrama can be found in several accounts, such as John Montgomery's

Toll for the Brave: The Traqedy of Sir Hector MacDonald (1963), K.J.E. Macleod's A Victim of Fate (1978), and Trevo Royle's Death before Dishonour: The True Story of Fighting Men (1982).

Crowley made himself known to the members of the MacDonald delegation and they poured out their hearts to him. It seems they were already discouraged about their mission, for the prosecution had the affidavits of seventy-seven witnesses. "Ah Well", said Crowley, "You don't know much about Ceylon. If there were seven times seventy-seven, I wouldn't swing a cat on their dying oaths. The more unanimous they are, the more it is certain that they have been bribed to lie".

Colombo was beginning to get to Crowley. He quotes from his diary, which reads: "Colombo more ald more loathsome. Went up to Kandy". As far as he was concerned, the worst thing about Colombo was the appearance of two English ladies - a mother and her daughter - at the Galle Face Hotel. "They would have seemed extravagant at Monte Carlo; in Ceylon the heavily painted faces, the over-tended dyed false hair, the garish flashy dresses, the loud harsh foolish gabble, the insolent ogling were an outrage." Even though he was devoted to Rose, Crowley suspected that the intensity of his repulsion for the daughter meant that he actually wanted to bed her, and was annoyed by the fact that he was already in love.

Crowley spent just two days in Kandy during which he wrote the play, Why Jesus Wept, an allegory of the corrupting influence of society. "The title is a direct allusion to the ladies in question," he states. The folowing passage from the conclusion to the play will give an indication of its tenor:

I much prefer - that is mere I

Solitude to society.

And that is why I sit and spoil

So much clean paper with such toil

By Kandy Lake in far Ceylon.

I have my old pyjamas on:

I shake my soles from Britain's dust;

I shall not go there till I must;

And when I must! - I hold my nose.

Farewell, you filthy-minded peoplel

I know a stable from a steeple.

Why Jesus Wept is dedicated to, among others, Christ, G.K. Chesterton - and Prince Jinawaravansa. A member of the Siamese Royal Family, Prince Jinawaravansa spent time as a Buddhist monk in Galle, where Crowley met him. Crowley considered Prince Jinawaravansa to be a man of great spiritual attainment, as he did Ponnambalam Ramanathan - Shri Parananda. However, even here Crowley's ambivalence seeps through, for elsewehre in his autobiography he writes of Ramanathan that "despite his great spiritual experience, (he) had not succeeded in snapping the shackles of dogma, and whosa practice seemed in some respects at variance with his principles".

By this time Rose felt certain she was pregnant. Crowley had intended to go to Rangoon to see Allen Bennett before returning to England for the confinement, but destiny seemed to have other plans for him. "Throughout my life I have repeatedly found that destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler," he comments. "Physical ability and moral determination count for nothing", So on 28,Januaryl 1904 the Crowleys left Colombo for Aden and Port Said, for they intended to "see a little of the season" in Cairo.

In fact Crowley was on the brink of what he claimed was the only event in his life that made it worth living, for while he was in Cairo his holy Guardian Angel, Aiwass, appeared to him in his flat and commanded him to take down a message for mankind. Aiwass came on three occasions and each time dictated a chapter of what is known as the Law. The heart of Crowley's magic is derived from this work; it is the text behind his magic and philosophy, which he summed up in the phrase, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law

On his return to Europe in the spring of 1904 Crowley wrote to MacGregor Mathers informing him that the Secret Chiefs had appointed him head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Needless to say, a reply was not forthcoming. In 1905 Crowley led a disastrous climbing expedition to Kanchenjunga that added to his notoriety because he deserted his comrades on the mountain. As a magician, however, he had made considerable advances, because in 1909 he attained the powerful grade of Master of the Temple.

And what of Rose? During these years she bore Crowley a daughter, travelled with her husband to far- flung places, including Rangoon to see Allan Bennett, and slipped into chronic alcoholism, a condition which led to an eventual separation and divorce from the man who saw so much in her. Writing of Rose, Crowley displays unusual tenderness: "She was like a character in a romantic novel, a Helen of Troy or a Cleopatra; yet wkile more passionate, unhurtful. She was essentially a good woman."

Crowley wrote a poem about her at Hambantota, called Rosa Mundi, which Oscar Eckenstein thought the greatest love lyric ln the English language. Crowley tells how he weaved the facets of their love into "a glowing taspestry of rapture". It was a new rhythm, a new rime. With typical immodesty he concludes: "It marked a notable advance on any previous work for sustained sublimity".

The riddle that was Crowley

In this concluding instalment of the three part series, Encountering Aleister Crowley by Richard Boyle, Crowley meets the debonair sholar Ananda Coomaraswamy

At the start of the First World War, when Crowley discovered that he was unable to serve his country because of phlebitis in his leg, he accepted an invitation to go to New York. With only £50 in his pocket, and disadvantaged by the fact that nobody knew him, things did not go too well at first. Writing was one of the few ways he could earn some money, but initially nobody wanted to look at his work. Crowley admits that he was 'nearly down and out' when he was introduced to Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair. Soon afterwards, however, Crowley became a regular contributor to this magazine, writing on subjects as diverse as baseball and haiku poetry.

It was in New York during 1916 that Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy made a memorable appearance in Crowley's life. These two remarkable men were dissimilar in many ways - Coomaraswamy's scholarly and institution oriented approach contrasted starkly with Crowley's eccentricity and anti establishment attitude. Yet they had certain things in common. Both were around 40 at the time, and both tended to dress in a flamboyant manner. More importantly, the tall, handsome, debonair Coomaraswamy was, like Crowley, a keen admirer and collector of the opposite sex.

Although Crowley was not handsome, his physical appearance, especially his hypnotic eyes, made a strong and sometimes long-lasting impression on most people, especially women. But he made an impact on men, too. For instance, he had taken Richard Burton's advice that a star sapphire was universally venerated by Moslems, and on one of his visits to Ceylon had purchased 'a very large and fine specimen of this gemstone and made it into a ring with a gold band of two interlaced serpents'. Once he stopped a violent quarrel among Arabs by drawing occult signs in the air with this magic ring while intoning in Arabic from the Koran.

Crowley had one underlying problem with Coomaraswamy: the fact that he was Eurasian. Crowley disliked Eurasians in general, confessing that they got on his nerves, and even describing them as 'anaemic abortions'. At one point in his autobiography, after recounting an unfortunate incident with a Eurasian in Burma, Crowley digresses in order to malign Eurasians in more detail. He states: 'Even the highest class Eurasians such as Ananda Koomaraswamy suffer acutely from the shame of being considered outcast.'

For some unexplained reason, Crowley consistently spells Coomaraswamy with a K, although the name appears correctly in the index. Did Crowley perhaps change the spelling to avoid having the same initials as the man he ended up referring to as The Worm?

Coomaraswamy was then married to his second wife, Ratan Devi, who was a musician from Yorkshire. He had recently arrived in New York after a spell in India and, according to Crowley, 'introduced himself to me, knowing my reputation on Asiatic religions and Magick'. Coomaraswamy wanted to launch Ratan Devi's career in New York, and asked Crowley for his advice. Crowley invited the couple to dinner at his apartment so that Ratan Devi might perform part of her repertoire of Indian Songs.

He was impressed, for he describes her as possessing 'a strange seductive beauty and charm, but above all an ear so accurate and a voice so perfectly trained, that she was able to sing Indian music, which is characterized by half and quarter tones imperceptible to European ears'. Crowley introduced the Coomaraswamys to several influential people and wrote a prose poem about Ratan Devi's singing for Vanity Fair. Soon afterwards the singer made a successful debut, for which Crowley largely took credit, claiming that he had 'taught her how to let her genius loose at the critical moment'.

It was predictable that Crowley and Ratan Devi should fall in love. According to Crowley it was a situation that suited Coomaraswamy perfectly. 'The high cost of living was bad enough without having to pay for one's wife's dinner,' writes Crowley. 'All he asked was that I should introduce him to a girl who would be his mistress while costing him nothing. I was only too happy to oblige as I happened to know a girl with a fancy for weird adventures'.

There was even a suggestion of divorce, but when Ratan Devi's career began to blossom, Coomaraswamy apparently changed his mind. After that the relationship began to develop complications, especially when Ratan Devi became pregnant. Coomaraswamy persuaded her to go to England for the confinement against Crowley's will. The voyage caused a miscarriage which is what Crowley suspected Coomaraswamy wanted to happen.

When Ratan Devi returned to America, Crowley was in New Orleans and she wrote daily imploring him to go back to her. Crowley would only do so under one condition: that she make a clean break from Coomaraswamv and the past. This she was reluctant to do, for as Crowley explains, "Her unhappy temperament kept her at war with herself. She wouldn't burn her bridges. I maintained firm correctness and it all came to nothing'.

This is not the end of the saga, however. When writing of his relationship with Ratan Devi some years later, Crowley admitted that 'my heart is still not wholly healed'. Nevertheless, soon after their relationship had foundered, he had relieved himself of some of the pain in a calculated act of revenge. Crowley had invented the character of a detective named Simon Iff, whose method of discovering the solution to a crime was 'to calculate the mental and moral energies of the people concerned'. The adventures of this detective were published as a series titled "The Scrutinies of Simon Iff" in a little- known New York periodical, The International: a liberal magazine of literature, international politics, philosophy and drama. Crowley was the contributing editor of this publication.

According to Crowley, he used his convoluted and colourful relationship with the Coomaraswamys, exact in every detail, as the background for the fifth Simon Iff story called "Not Good Enough", which was published in The International in January 1918. Crowley made one superficial change. Coomaraswamy became Haramzada Swami; Haramzada being the Hindustani word for bastard. 'The publication of this tale came as a slight shock to the self-complacency of the scoundrel,' gloats Crowley.

It is of interest that the bibliophile H.A.I. Goonetileke, while he was in America in 1973 as a Senior Specialist Fellow of the John D. Rockefellor III Fund, undertook some research at the New York Public Library. Goonetileke made a request to see The International, but when the relevant volume was produced for his perusal, he found that the issue with the damning narrative was missing from the sequence. Fortunately he was able to acquire a precious photocopy through the Library of Congress. The question is, was the magazine deliberately excised by someone? And if so, by whom?

Before closing the chapter - in both a literal and metaphorical sense - Crowley could not resist taking one last swipe at Coomaraswamy. He claims that the mistress Coomaraswamy was preoccupied with at the time had made a revealing confession to Ratan Devi. The mistress had told how she had been ordered by Coomaraswamy to copy out a number of poems from Crowley's Collected Works and hawk them to a publisher. When Ratan Devi told Crowley of this deed, he wrote immediately to the firm concerned a letter he described as 'the last word in savage contempt'. Crowley's parting barb sums up his attitude: 'So ended my adventures with these fascinating freaks.'

There is, however, one further reference to things Ceylonese in Crowley's autobiography. While in New York Crowley was recommended by a friend 'a Singalese joint on 8th Avenue where they made real curry'. Crowley was a Westerner who had a passion for curry. For instance, of the variety he sampled in Singapore he writes: 'They sting like serpents, stimulate like strychnine; they are subtle and sensual like Chinese courtesans, sublime and sacred, like Cambodian carvings'. Crowley began to frequent this restaurant where he met yet another of his many mistresses - a girl he called The Dog because she appears in one of his poems as the "Dog headed Hermes or Anubis".

Crowley had not neglected his magical activities in America; During his affair with Ratan Devi he assumed the exalted Grade of Magus. He was then ready to proclaim his word, thelema, or do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, which is suppose to usher in the New Aeon of Liberty. At the end of the First World War, Crowley briefly returned to England before travelling to Sicily with several new mistresses. At Cefalu he rented a villa, consecrated a temple to the New Aeon in one of the rooms and painted on the front door DO WHAT THOU WILT.

Crowley's objective was to create a world centre for the study of occultism, but in the end few availed themselves of the opportunity of going to Cefalu. (One who did, Cecil Maitland, had the distinction of falling off a ship in Colombo harbour). Addicted to heroin, and suffering from lack of impetus, life suddenly started to look bleak for Crowley. His spirits were revived with the commission of a novel, the infamous Diary of a Drug Fiend, published in 1922. However, after the novel appeared there was an attack on Crowley and his creed in the Picture Post, and he had the ignominy of being expelled from his own "abbey". But by then Crowley was unconcerned. He had uttered his word, and it remained only for him to publish his magnum opus, Magick in Theory and Practice.

Crowley, about whom it was once said that 'he behaved as if the world was only an exhalation of his own being', died in 1947. How does one judge a man who on the one hand exhibited a high degree of intelligence, unfettered thinking and originality of vision, while on the other demonstrated a fascination for depravity, cruelty and exploitation?

There is no doubt that Aleister Crowley was a riddle of immense proportions. Arthur Gauntlett, who analyzed Crowley's character from his horoscope considered him to be 'one of the most enigmatic personalities of our times'. John Symonds, one of Crowley's biographers, believes that the answer to the riddle of the man lies in do what thou wilt: 'The many roles which Crowley chose for himself show that he had taken this precept literally. He did not make any distinction between one thing and another; he was not restricted that is to say he was not contained within any particular border.'

This border hopping was probably the source of Crowley's greatest merit, which, Symonds writes, 'was to make the bridge between Tantrism and the Western esoteric tradition and thus bring together Western and Eastern magical techniques. He lived through the night, not the day.'

Interest in Crowley and his ideas was rekindled in the late 1960s with the advent of the youth revolution and the quest for alternative thinking. Even the Beatles, who were then at the apogee of their collective career, made public their admiration for him. In a composite photograph of "People we like" that decorates the sleeve of the seminal album Sqt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Crowley stands between an unnamed Indian mystic and Mae West. Who knows whether he would have approved of this positioning.