Confessions of Aleister Crowley

100 people are necessarily narrow in this one respect. They may know how all sorts of people treat them, but they cannot know, except at second hand, how those same people treat others. To return to Allan Bennett. I found him staying with V. H. Frater Aequo Animo1 in a tiny tenement in Southwark or Lambeth --- I forget which. It was a mean, grim horror. AE. A., whose name was Charles Rosher, was a widely travelled Jack-of-all-trades. He had invented a patent water-closet and been court painter to the Sultan of Morocco. He wrote some of the worst poetry I have ever read. He was a jolly-all-round sportsman with an excellent heart and the cheery courage which comes from knocking about the world, and being knocked about by it. If his talents had been less varied, he might have made a success of almost anything. {179} 1. I ultimately conjectured: Equi Animo: "with the soul of a horse". 21 Allan Bennett was four years older than myself. His father, an engineer, had died when he was a boy; his mother had brought him up as a strict Catholic. He suffered acutely from spasmodic asthma. His cycle of life was to take opium for about a month, when the effect wore off, so that he had to inject morphine. After a month of this he had to switch to cocaine, which he took till he began to "see things" and was then reduced to chloroform. I have seen him in bed for a week, only recovering consciousness sufficiently to reach for the bottle and sponge. Asthma being a sthenic disease, he was then too weak to have it any more, so he would gradually convalesce until, after a few weeks of freedom, the spasms would begin once more and he would be forced to renew the cycle of drugs1. No doubt, this constant suffering affected his attitude to life. He revolted against being an animal; he regarded the pleasures of living (and above all, those of physical love) as diabolical illusions devised by the enemy of mankind in order to trick souls into accepting the curse of existence. I cannot forbear quoting one most remarkable incident. When he was about sixteen, the conversation in the laboratory where he was working turned upon childbirth. What he heard disgusted him. He became furiously angry and said that children were brought to earth by angels. The other students laughed at him and tried in vain to convince him. He maintained their theory to be a bestial blasphemy. The next day one of the boys turned up with an illustrated manual of obstetrics. He could no longer doubt the facts. But his reaction was this: "Did the Omnipotent God whom he had been taught to worship devise so revolting and degrading a method of perpetuating the species? Then this God must be a devil, delighting in loathsomeness." To him the existence of God was disproved from that moment. He had, however, already some experience of an unseen world. As a little boy, having overheard some gossip among superstitious servants, he had gone into the back garden and invoked the devil by reciting the Lord's Prayer backwards. Something happened which frightened him. Having now rejected Catholicism, he took up Magick and at once attained extraordinary success. He used to carry a "lustre" --- a long glass prism with a neck and a pointed knob such as adorned old- fashioned chandeliers. He used this as a wand. One day, a party of theosophists were chatting sceptically about the power of the "blasting rod". Allan promptly produced his and blasted one of them. It took fourteen hours to restore the incredulous individual to the use of his mind and his muscles. 1. WEH Note: The modern reader should not be too much disturbed by this catalogue of patently illegal drugs. They were all legal until well into the 20th century. This approach to asthma was still followed in the last quarter of the 20th century, with various dangerous medications prescribed in rotation by physicians for the patient to the point of sequential toxic reaction. Crowley himself became afflicted with the disorder, almost "the Magician's disease" for its frequency among those