Confessions of Aleister Crowley

572 Four. Shows sincerity averting murderous attacks. My attitude put an end to the libels. Five. My sincerity attracts sympathy and help. This was fulfilled by the adhesion of several new disciples. Six. "The rain has fallen and progress checked." Raoul's death put a stop to my regular work. Even the symbols for subordinate members of the Order forecast accurately their fortunes. For instance, Hammond had the 32nd hexagram, whose symbolism is that of a ram attempting more than he can do, becoming entangled with the obstacles, and finally being paralyzed. The description is marvellously accurate. He made fierce quick attempts to achieve his ends. They were baffled. He dashed himself against a wall, was enmeshed in the intrigues of my enemies, and found himself in the end neither able to go forward to victory, nor to extricate himself from the circumstances. He had committed himself to my interests irrevocably. {903} 94 In the following month, Betty arranged two lectures on the Law of Thelema in her house and brought a number of friends to seek my assistance. One such introduction proved pregnant with fate. A brilliant boy, just down from Oxford, where he had distinguished himself by his attainments in history, had long wished to meet me. For over two years, he had studied my magical writings with the utmost enthusiasm and intelligence. His character was extraordinary. He possessed every qualification for becoming a Magician of the first rank. I designed him from the first interview to be my magical heir. He possessed, of course, the defects of these qualities. His daring had made him reckless, and his insight contemptuous of phenomena. He had thus been notorious at Oxford as the leader of madcap escapades, in one of which, escaping from the proctors, he had taken a leap in the dark and landed on a spike which transfixed his thigh. He lay between life and death for some months and was still weak from the effects of the loss of blood. Even worse, perceiving the splendour of his soul, he refused to be daunted by its sheath, which led him to commit the fatal folly of marrying a girl whom he had met in a sordid and filthy drinking den in Soho, called the Harlequin, which was frequented by self-styled artists and their female parasites. One of these went by the name of Betty May. Born in a slum in the East End, she had become an artist's model of the most vicious kind. She had been married and divorced, remarried and widowed by the war. In her childhood an accident had damaged her brain permanently so that its functions were discontinuous, and she had not mended matters by taking to cocaine at the age of about twenty. After some years of addiction, she found herself using a quarter of an ounce or more daily. She suddenly took fright and cured herself by switching over, first to injections of morphia, and then to plain alcohol. She made no secret of this, and I admired her immensely for her frankness about it and her superb courage in curing herself. She was a charming child, tender and simple of soul. Yet with all that, Raoul should not have married her. It meant the sterilization of the genius of success in life. Already the evil effects were manifest. His university career was closed. The friends who might have helped him refused to succour a man who had deliberately cut himself off from decency. The mere fact of marriage, had his wife been a duke's daughter, disqualified him for most of the positions which otherwise might have been open. His parents were poor, self-made and at that only on the fringe of the middle {904}