PINNACLES, PEAKS AND POETRY:
THE EARLY MOUNTAINEERING
PASSION OF ALEISTER CROWLEY
BY
BARRY VAN-ASTEN

 

The climber should never be frail,
Should thrive on a morsal of hash.
At cliffs he must not become pale
Nor tremble when glaciers crash.
He must carelessly knock out the ash
From his pipe while a terrible chunk
Of rock hurtles by like a flash, -
Or turn from the wall of the Monch.

[Ballade of Guideless Climbing. In Residence: The Don’s Guide to

Cambridge. Aleister Crowley. London. Elijah Johnson. 1904. p. 23]

 

 

There is such an emphasis placed on the occult endeavours of Aleister Crowley that one tends to overlook his mountaineering achievements, which were certainly impressive. In this article I wish to look at some of his early ascents during the eighteen-nineties in Wales, Scotland and the Lake District, where some of the finest climbing in Britain exists, before he progressed to the larger mountains in the Alps. Much of Crowley’s early poetry was influenced by his passion for climbing, if not directly, then by a romantic notion of the poet as a man of nature, beautiful and rugged, challenging the elements to endure whatever he encountered with gentlemanly conduct and spirit; his hero of course, was Shelley.

Here the green moss is my seat,
Beech is a canopy o’er me,
Calm and content the retreat;
Man, my worst foe, cannot bore me;
Life is a closed book behind – Shelley an
open before me.
 
Shelley’s own birds are above
Close to me (why should they fear me?)
May I believe it – that love
Brings his bright spirit so near me
That, should I whisper one word – Shelley’s
swift spirit would hear me.

[In the woods with Shelley. Mysteries: Lyrical and Dramatic.

 1898. Collected Works (1905), volume I, pp. 124-125] 

 

The discipline and endurance involved with mountaineering, the subtle strategy of chess and the ecstatic heights of poesy, gave Crowley a perfect grounding in magical technique and ability; the visionary process one encounters when scaling a rock face, the precise hand and footholds; the visual element of chess, seeing several moves ahead and being able to co-ordinate manoeuvres and captures as they evolve; and the exhilarating technical skills composing verse is parallel to the invocations and prayers one finds in old manuscripts and an essential ability in the composition of rituals. It is as if these early passions of Crowley were leading him, unknowingly at the time, towards the spiritual shores of his imagination and to the portal of the Golden Dawn.

The love of the mountains remained with Crowley throughout his life and he never forgot the ones that got away and escaped his grasp, as he was reminded in his Confessions (p. 616) – ‘the Coolin crack on Beachy Head (curse it!), the direct way up the Deep Ghyll Pillar (damn it!), the east face of the Dent Blanche (blast it!)’; of course there would be later expeditions with Oscar Eckenstein to Mexico in 1901 to climb Ixtaccihautl (around 17,250 feet) and Popocatapetl (around 17,800 feet), and to the Himalayas to climb K2 (Chogo Ri, 28,251 feet) in 1902 and Kenchenjunga (28,169 feet) in 1905, which were some of the most memorable and magical experiences for him, when man, alone or with his companions, defies the mountain gods and ascends to the glories of the pinnacles and the peaks.

Edward Alexander Crowley, son of Edward Crowley (1829-1887), The Grange, Redhill, Surrey, entered Malvern School in Worcestershire, in May 1891 and left the following Easter 1892, then during the summer term that year, on 12^th May, he entered Tonbridge School in Kent, but his stay there was short. (1)

After the death of his father, young Alick became more disruptive and rebellious against authority, especially the strict Plymouth Brethren in which he was raised. In the Confessions (p. 59) he says ‘for a year or two after my father’s death my mother did not seem to settle down; and during the holidays we either stayed with Bishop [his uncle, Tom Bond Bishop (1839-1920)] or wandered in hotels and hydros. I think she was afraid of bringing me up in London; but when my uncle moved to Streatham she compromised by taking a house in Polworth Road. I hated it, because there were bigger houses in the neighbourhood.’ We can see from this that Crowley had developed a snobbish attitude and we can see an example of his rebellious nature from the following newspaper article of May 1892, he soon had a brush with the law: ‘A Collegian’s Foolish Trick. At the Lambeth Police Court on Friday [29^th April] Edward Alexander Crowley, 16, described as a collegian, of Oak view, Polworth-road, Streatham Common, was charged with wilfully extinguishing a public street lamp at Greyhound-lane. The prisoner pleaded guilty. Mr. Biron: what made you do this foolish trick? Prisoner: I don’t know sir.’ Mr. Biron served sentence of ten shillings or seven days – he was fined ten shillings. (2)

 

THE FOTHERGILL CONUNDRUM

 

I believe I have discovered the identity of the Reverend Fothergill who tutored young Crowley around 1890 and whom Crowley had famously thrown from the rowing boat into a Scottish loch near Lairg while staying at Forsinard in the Sutherland Scottish Highlands. Crowley does not mention the forenames of the good Reverend Fothergill but says in his Confessions (pp. 71-72) that ‘on one occasion the Rev. Fothergill had taken me for the summer to a fishing centre near Lairg called Forsinard. We went fishing one day to a loch over the moors and in the course of some argument I threw his rod far into the water. He attacked me with fury, but I got a good hold and threw him after it. I then went off in the boat, but he caught me as I was pushing off, overturned the boat on top of me and tried to drown me. That night the gods still further favoured me, for a village girl named Belle MacKay found herself with nothing better to do than to roam with me amid the heather. We returned together quite openly and Fothergill threw up the sponge. He took me back to London the next morning. Breaking the journey at Carlisle, I repeated my victory with a buxom chambermaid.’ Looking at Crockford’s Clerical Directory for the year 1895, on page 476 there are four Reverend Fothergills – Rev. Clifford Douglas Fothergill of New Road, Ware; Rev. John Fothergill of Gravesend; Rev. Matthew Monkhouse Fothergill and Rev. Rowland John Fothergill (son of the above John Fothergill). The last two Fothergills: M. M. Fothergill, born in Wales in 1832 (and dying in 1913) spent most of his time in the United States and Canada (from 1857); his son, R. J. Fothergill, born around 1871 in Quebec, Canada also remained in Canada, making them easily dismissible. Rev. John Fothergill (1854-1914) born in Westmoreland and educated at King’s College, London; Queen’s College, Oxford and Queen’s College, Cambridge (ordained 1868, Salisbury and priest the following year) equally seemed the wrong candidate and I divined upon Reverend Clifford Douglas Fothergill (1866-1938) as a good proposition for further research. He was born in Keswick, Cumberland on 16^th May 1866, the second son of Thomas Rowland Fothergill (1839-1909) and Laura Julia Crawshay (1843-1920) who were married in Wales on 10^th April 1862. Clifford matriculated from Ayers House during Michaelemas term 1885 and migrated to Queen’s College, Cambridge (BA 1888, MA 1892) [Ridley Hall, Cambridge, 1891]; he was ordained deacon in Carlisle in 1892 and priest at St. Albans, Ware, in 1894 where he was curate in 1893. His other curacies include: St. Mary’s Church, Maryport, Cumberland 1892-4, Christ Church, Ware, Hertfordshire 1894-6, Stanwix, Carlisle, Cumberland 1901-3, Holy Trinity Church, Scarborough 1904-7, vicar of Drax, Selby, Yorkshire 1907-25 and vicar of Borrowdale and Minister at Grange, Cumberland 1931-8. In November 1895 he offered his services to the CMS [Church Missionary Society] and became the Principle of the CMS High School at Dera Ismail Khan in the Punjab, India from 1896-9. He married Eleanor Amelia Fergie (1864-1954) in Ormskirk, Lancashire on 13^th May 1896. I present the following evidence to support my claim that the Reverend Clifford Douglas Fothergill is indeed the Rev. Fothergill who tutored the young Aleister Crowley and accompanied him to Scotland: Clifford had experience of rowing as he rowed for the Queen’s College, Cambridge boat crew during the Lent term of 1889 [Cambridge University General Almanack and Register for the year 1889, p. 336]; he is mentioned in connection with ‘Forsinard, Rev. C. D. Fothergill’ [The Fifty-First (136^th) Annual Report of the Religious Tract Society, 1901, p. 290]; to distinguish that this is the same Rev. C. D. Fothergill he is also listed in the same periodical of 1893 (p. 313) for ‘Maryport’ and in 1897 (p. 329) for ‘Ware’ – Clifford was also a member of the British and Foreign Bible Society since 1895 and was appointed Assistant District Secretary of the North Western District in 1899 (Lancashire and Isle of Man) – he is mentioned specifically with ‘Lairg’ in a newspaper article which reads under Clerical: ‘Rev. C. Fothergill, Bracklock, Lairg’ [Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer. 17^th July 1920, p. 8]. He had an interest in fishing and wrote a letter to The Fishing Gazette [23^rd August 1930, p. 247] which mentions his ‘climbing’ – the letter is signed ‘C. D. Fothergill, Newtonhall Vicarage, Stocksfield, Northumberland’. Crowley says it was during the summer and Clifford suffered from hay fever and asthma during the summer months and had to retreat to higher elevations for his holidays – an article in the Whitehaven Advertiser and Cleator Moor and Egremont Observer [Saturday 20^th August 1892, p. 3] mentions the Reverend Fothergill having to leave Maryport after a short time there because of ill health and taking ‘a voyage to Japan for benefit of health’ – one wonders whether Crowley contributed to his condition! Also, ‘Reverend C D Fothergill, M.A., owing to an attack of hay fever and asthma, has had to take a holiday. He is at present in the Highlands’ [Selby Times, Friday 16^th June 1911, p. 4]; ‘Rev C D Fothergill, being away for a short holiday in Wales’ [Selby Times, Friday 20^th October 1911, p. 3]; also, ‘Rev C D Fothergill, M.A. is on holiday until the end of July, in the North of Scotland’ [Selby Times, Friday 6^th June 1913, p. 4] and as further proof, the following from The Record [Friday 4^th April 1902, p. 15] under the heading: ‘A Holiday Proposal – Sir, Could you possibly find a space for an inquiry whether any clergy, taking their holidays between June 16 and July 16, would care to join a Clergy Mountain Camp in the Lake District? Being a native of the district, and compelled by asthma to seek high elevations at that season, I propose “pitching at Esk House (the watershed of Borrowdale, Eskdale, and Wastdale), some 2,500 feet above sea level. To climbers, artists and fishermen seeking a bracing holiday nothing could more readily meet their needs. Scafell, Bowfell, the Langdale Pikes, Great Gable, the Pillar and the Steeple – some of the wildest rock-climbs in the British Isles – are all within easy reach. It is companionship I seek. Each would share expenses from the day of arrival, and take part in camp life. I will gladly give full plans proposed to any lover of wild scenery seeking a cheap form of holiday. (Rev.) C. D. Fothergill, Stanwix, Carlisle.’ I am quite content that Reverend Clifford Douglas Fothergill is indeed Crowley’s Reverend Fothergill – he died in Tunbridge Wells, Kent on Wednesday 26^th October 1938 aged 72. (3) The next tutor hired by Tom Bond Bishop to instruct young Crowley was Sheffield born James Archibald Douglas (1866-1930) of Merton College, Oxford, who matriculated there on 13^th October1883 (BA 1886, MA 1891). Douglas took Crowley to Torquay, Devon in the spring of 1891, first with the idea of riding bicycles there but at Guildford Crowley was too ill to ride further and they took the train; once there they stayed at 5, Cary Parade and Douglas taught the boy the finer points of smoking, drinking, racing, billiards, cards, and of course, women and a new world opened up to the boy and he lost no time in losing his virginity with a girl of the theatre in the first ten days of arriving at Torquay.

During September 1892, sixteen year old Alick and his mother Emily Bertha Crowley were holidaying on the Isle of Skye and staying at the Sligachan Hotel and young Alick struck up a conversation about fell walking and climbing with the surgeon Sir Joseph Lister (1827-1912) who was a keen walker and climber; no doubt the young Crowley talked about some of the Scottish climbs, such as Ben Ledi and Ben More, that he did the previous month in August while staying with his mother at Callander in Perthshire. (4) Lister, seeing his enthusiasm, introduced Crowley to some of his climber friends who were staying at the hotel, such as John Henry Gibson (1862-1898), a member of the Scottish Mountaineering Club who like many other mountaineers used the hotel as a hub for various ascents on the Black Cuillin range. The next day, Gibson and his fellow climbers took young Crowley up the Cuillin Munro peak, Sgurr nan Gillean (3,169 feet) via the Pinnacle route and the boy was entranced by the nature and spirit of climbing, the endurance of muscle against rock and the challenges, much like chess, of the routes proposed. Under the spell of the mountain gods (and no doubt the Gaelic names), Alick also climbed Sgurr a Ghreadaidh and Sgurr a Mhadaidh (3,012 feet) by himself, and Bruach na Frithe (3,143 feet), the Lota Corrie Route, Am Basteir (3,064 feet), and the Bloody Stone, a large boulder which marks the site of a battle in 1398 between the MacDonald and MacLeod clans.

He continued his climbing the following year during April and May 1893 in Snowdonia and then during June and September that year, in the Lake District with his tutor, Dr. Frederick Augustine Robinson (1870-1906) of Christ’s Church, Cambridge, who is the ‘brother of the Dean of Westminster’ (5); they were staying at a farm in Langdale and Crowley ‘heard from the natives of the celebrated twenty-four hours’ walk’ which consisted of climbing the four highest fells in the Lake District – Scafell Pike (3,209 feet), Helvellyn (3,117 feet), Skiddaw (3,054 feet) and Saddleback (2,848 feet). He says in his Confessions (p. 88) that he ‘conceived of a minor ridge walk and set out one morning at dawn from Langdale, climbed the Langdale Pikes, and followed the crest of the fells to Scafell Pikes. Then I crossed to Scafell by the Broad Stand; and seeing the Deep Ghyll pinnacle, climbed that on my way to the summit of Scafell. It was a terrifically hot day over Lingmell and down into the valley to climb the screes of Great Gable. My attention was attracted by the Great Napes Needle and I climbed that. Thence I took the easiest way – the Needle ridge, or a gully, I forget which – to the summit of the mountain. I had become almost insane from heat, thirst and exhaustion; I could no longer walk, but crawled on hands and knees down to Sty Head Tarn, whose waters revived me to some extent. I struggled on homewards and reached the top of Rossett Ghyll Pass shortly after nightfall. There was a bright moon, but I had a terrible time picking my way down the path. I must have become a little light-headed from exhaustion and there was a Dantesque quality in the long climb among the blinding white patches of light and the jetty shadows. At the bottom of the pass I met a small rescue party who had just started out to look for me, and reached home about eleven o’clock. It was, in its way, a remarkable performance for a boy.’ The climb is recorded in the Wastdale Climbing Book of Monday 19^th June 1893 where he says ‘starting from Langdale 3.30 a.m. Scawfell Pike was reached via Great End, Ill Crag & Broad Crag 8.0 a.m. Thence I went to Scawfell by the Broad Stand & did the D. G. Pillar en route from Scafell to Great Napes Needle via Lingmell, climbed the Needle & proceeded to Great Gable, on the top I got sunstroke* & was unconscious two hours after which I crawled back to Langdale 10.30 p.m. I was alone from Scawfell!!! E. Aleister Crowley, p.s. Weather almost overpoweringly hot all the way. June 19 1893 E.A.C.’ Crowley adds this humorous note concerning the sunstroke: ‘*It was I that got it, though the lion annotator seems to be suffering from its effects.’

On a following wet morning he was climbing Scafell to tackle some of the gullies and on reaching the Grass Traverse he ‘heard voices in the mist above me, and a few minutes later a powerful man with red whiskers and a rope about his shoulders came towards me from the cliff.’ (p. 89) The man was the Lakeland farmer and pioneer Fell walker, John Wilson Robinson (1853-1907), a member of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club who showed him some climbs. Robinson was climbing with Owen Glynn Jones (1867-1899), a notable climber who quarrelled with Robinson over his choice of climbing Steep Ghyll which would have been a foolhardy endeavour as there are no handholds and it was wet and icy, and so they parted; Crowley disagreed with Jones’s manner of climbing and considered Jones a self-publicist. Jones was to die in a climbing accident in Switzerland on Dent Blanch in 1899 aged 31. (6)

Robinson asked Crowley whether he had done any climbing in Wales and Crowley said yes, mentioning ‘one particular place, the Devil’s Kitchen or Twll Du, which I had climbed by taking off my boots’ he says in the Confessions (p. 90); apparently it was supposed to be un-climbable and Owen Jones had even failed to scale it and promptly accused Crowley of lying – ‘I have always failed to see that it is necessary to make a fuss about one’s climbs.’ Jones had subsequently boasted of having the first ascent of Kern Knotts Chimney, but failed to ascend the top pitch without assistance; Crowley attempted it and ‘found that by wedging a stone into a convenient crack, and thus starting a foot higher up, I could get to the top, and did so. I recorded this in the Climbers’ Book; and the following day a man named H. V. Reade, possibly in a sceptical mood, followed in my footsteps. He found my wedged stone, contemptuously threw it away, climbed the pitch without it, and recorded the feat. That was a double blow to Mr. Jones. It was no longer a convincing argument that if he couldn’t do a thing it couldn’t be done.’ (p. 91)

Of his climb of the Mickledoor Chimney and ‘it had been the ambition of every climber to start from the exact top of the ridge. This was called the direct climb of Mickledoor; and nobody had done it. That seemed to be a shame, so I did it. This time the fat was in the fire. My good faith was openly challenged in the smoking-room [of the Wastwater Hotel which also boasted a billiard room]. I shrugged my shoulders, but offered to repeat the climb the following day before witnesses – which I accordingly did.’ (p. 91)

He also recalls meeting a climber named Corry (Confessions. p. 154) and they went climbing together on Scafell. This was Robert Corry (1872-1935), a member of the Scottish Mountaineering Club and the Alpine Club who was staying in Wastdale; Crowley says he was the ‘ideal athlete and had gone through a course of Sandow; but had little experience of climbing at that time. I took him up the North Climb of Mickledoor. There is one place where, while hunting for holds, one supports oneself by an arm stretched at full length into a crack. The arm is supported by the rock and the hand grasps a hold as satisfactory as a sword hilt. The inconceivable happened; Corry fell off and had to be replevined by the rope. I was amazed, but said nothing. We continued the climb and, reaching the top of the Broad Stand, took off the rope. By way of exercise, I suggested climbing a short, precipitous pitch above a sloping slab. There was no possible danger, it was within the powers of a child of six; but Corry came off again. I was standing on the slab and caught him by the collar as he passed on his way to destruction.
After that, we put on the rope again and returned by descending, I think, Mickledoor Chimney. On the way down to Wastdale, he was strangely silent and embarrassed, but finally he made up his mind to ask me about it.
‘Do you mind if I feel your arm?’ he said. ‘It must be a marvel.’
I complied and he nearly fainted with surprise. My muscles were in quantity and quality like those of an early Victorian young lady. He showed me his own arm. There could not have been a finer piece of anatomy for manly strength. He could not understand how, with everything in his favour, he had been unable to maintain his grip on the best holds in Westmorland.’

 

A SPRING SNOWSTORM IN WASTDALE

On rocky mountain bare
Of grass, and meadows fair,
Angels their trumpets blow upon the night.
While o’er the shrinking dale
The insatiable gale
Roars with unconquered and impassive might.
Their robes of snow they rend,
And their deep voices blend
With tempest, like that angry Amphirite,
Her hair blown wild and loose
On windy Syracuse,
Lashing the waves with words of wrath, a
terror of bright light.
 
Here the thick snowflakes fall,
Till mountain in their pall,
And stream beneath their curtain are embraced;
They drive and beat and hiss,
Till their cold maiden kiss
Touches the lake’s intolerable waste,
 And from the wave is born
A maiden like the morn,
In sudden foam, an Aphrodite chaste,
Clean as the cold wind blown
From each abyss of stone,
Where the north whirlpool rushes down with
wreckage interlaced.
 
Here on the bank I stand
In this grey barren land
Of winter, and the doubtful glint of spring
If on the hills there glow
Through the thick mist of snow
Sunshine from westward in the evening;
While in a dell appear
Violets and snowdrops clear,
Buds of the larch, and swallows on the wing,
Ere once again the storm
Lofty and multiform
Close the bright glimpse of summer and the
hope of everything.
 
Silence her throne assumes,
Stars mount the sky, and looms
The misty monarch of the dale on high:
About the silver feet
I worship, as is meet,
The warrior God that fixed the curved sky,
Rent the cavernous earth,
Moulded in awful birth
The terror of the cloudy canopy,
And tore from underground
The lake’s immense profound,
And clad the mountains now with this faint
snow embroidery.
 
Now the white flakes decrease.
Wastwater lies in peace,
Kissed by the breezes where the wind once bit;
Gable alone doth stand,
A Pyramid more grand
Than Pharaoh’s pride exalted, or the wit
Of magian shepherds built
Who sought his land and spilt
Blood of ten million slaves to conquer it.
Clad in sparse robes of white
The mountain beckons Night
Her tracery of azure with the cold moon-rays
to knit.
 
Armoured with secret might
I stand on earth upright,
Strong in the power of Him who welded earth,
Barred in the sky with steel,
And breathed upon the wheel
Of this vast scheme of stars, and made Him mirth
In the poor dreams of us
Who strive mysterious
To pierce the bands of sense, and break the girth
Of our own mind’s desire,
Till He relume the fire
Lost at our fall, not kindled fresh till that
diviner birth.

[Songs of the Spirit [1898]. Aleister Crowley Collected Works, volume I. 1905. pp. 43-44]

 

AT EASTBOURNE

 

Discovering that boarding school life was not conducive to the young Crowley, he left Tonbridge in the summer of 1893 and boarded with a private tutor and Plymouth Brother at 4, Sussex Gardens in Eastbourne, named Lambert while during the day he studied and assisted in the Chemistry Laboratory under Professor Robert Edward Hughes, M.A., B.Sc. (1865-1924) at Eastbourne College.

In November 1893 he became a member of the Eastbourne Chess Club and before long was secretary of the club. On the evening of Friday 3^rd November he played in a club match game between Eastbourne and Hailsham at the George Hotel and again in the Eastbourne Chess Club Handicap Tournament in January 1894 against William Coupe (7). Crowley, under the pseudonym Ta Dhuibh (Gaelic – ‘the dark one’) began a regular chess column in the Eastbourne Gazette every Wednesday under the title ‘Chess Notes’, the first one appearing on Wednesday 31^st January 1894 and the final one on Wednesday 25^th April that year.

Crowley won his game against John Berriman Campion Coles (Hailsham) on Friday 26^th January (8) and Eastbourne lost to Lewes in February; Crowley won his March game against R. F. Tyhurst in the Eastbourne v Uckfield tournament, Crowley writing in his chess column: ‘We have won great glory, my men’ before penning a triumphant limerick:

 

‘There was a smart chess club at Eastbourne,
Whose glory and honour increased, borne
On pinions cherubic
They conquered so ubiq-
Uitously, those players of Eastbourne.’ (9)

 

He played his game in the Eastbourne Club Championship on Friday 9^th March 1894 and again on Wednesday 21^st March against Hastings, playing C. M. Wilson (10); then Eastbourne won against Lewes towards the end of March, Crowley playing against J. Waterfall (11). Crowley then played against the young Hector William Shoosmith in the Eastbourne v Brighton McArthur Cup on Saturday 31^st March and on Friday 13^th April the club had a visit from Joseph Henry Blackburne who gave demonstrations in ‘simultaneous display’ of seven games, one against Crowley. (12)

Crowley was chosen to represent the county of Sussex in a match against North London at the Queen’s Hotel, the ‘headquarters of the Hastings and St. Leonards Club’ on Saturday 19^th May, playing against H. H. Symons (13).

Crowley’s first visit to Beachy Head was on Wednesday 4^th April 1894 with his 2^nd cousin and playmate from his childhood, Gregor Grant (14); they were both members of the Cuchullin Club, a rock climbing club in which Gregor Grant, of Tower House, Bexley, Kent, was President – quite how many members there were in the club is unknown and it may have just been the two of them. They explored the area and ‘upper portion of the cliff lying between Monkey island and the Devil’s Chimney, and to this portion we have since kept.’ They reached the Grass Traverse which runs along the Devil’s Chimney; they beheld ‘Etheldreda’s Pinnacle, with the cliff, here fissured with the magnificent “Cuillin crack”’ which ‘attracted our notice, affording a walk to the top. This cleft forms the top of “Etheldreda’s walk,” so called, I believe, after a lady who never walked there. It extends downwards and round Etheldreda’s pinnacle to the foot of Grant’s Chimney.’ They encountered the ‘two chimneys, side by side, and since named Castor and Pollux’ and they began to climb the North Pillar (Castor). Crowley reached the ridge and ‘my friend refused to follow, but as he was roped I put on sudden pressure, and he – well – changed his mind. When he reached the ridge I went on for the N. face.’ Crowley says that ‘the whole climb, however, requires a method of climbing which may be described as a chemical combination of the writhe, the squirm, and the slither. This indeed applies to all difficult chalk.’ The summit, he recalled, consisted of a ‘big square block, which rocked and swayed under me as I sat upon it.’

Two months later, on Wednesday 4^th July, Crowley and Grant climbed the Devil’s Chimney, descending from the cliff to Pisgah, where Grant remained while Crowley descended the ridge to Jordan, then using his axe, he made the chalk less unstable which had fallen away in his hands and made his way to the summit, the Tooth, before rejoining Grant on Pisgah. A week later on Wednesday 11^th July, Crowley is by himself, reconnoitring new climbs and awaiting his cousin to join him in the ensuing week. Crowley ascends Etheldreda’s Walk, and ‘discovered Grant’s Chimney towering some 200 feet above.’ He climbed up the Devils’ Chimney and reaches Pisgah Summit. On Friday 13^th July – cousin Gregor now with him – they make an attempt up Etheldreda’s Pinnacle with Grant leading and after the summit, they ‘made a new variation by way of the Pollux chimney.’ Following lunch at the Beachy Head Hotel, they ascend a route up to Pisgah Summit and then the Tooth; Crowley wedged into the Gash: ‘five times I tried to cross the Gash, but with no decent handhold it is hardly to be expected that one can pull one’s self up to a vertical wall. One chance, however, remained. I scooped a hole out of the E. face, inserted my chin, and hauled. I had not shaved for a day or two, so was practically enjoying the advantages of Mummery spikes!’(15) Crowley conquered the Needle but Grant had to remain on the Tooth as the Needle cannot hold two climbers – Grant, had to ‘console himself by hoisting the Union Jack, which we left to wave triumphantly over the scene of our victory.’ (16)

Following this, Crowley travelled with his Plymouth Brethren tutor, Monsieur Lambert (17), to the Tyrol in Austria and Crowley made his first Alpine ascents with climbing brothers, A. E. Maylard and M. W. Maylard, without guides (18). They climbed the Schotterhorn (9,744 feet), almost to the summit, but severe snow prevented them, and the Verlain Spitze (11,631 feet, by a gully in the Rosen wand; descent over Angelus Scharte and the N. W. ridge); then Crowley made several ascents by himself, guideless, from Sulden – Monte Cevedale (12,365 feet), Sulden Spitzse (11,076 feet), Tschengglser (4,101 feet), Hochwand (8,921 feet), Konig Spitze (12,635 feet), Thurweise Spitze (11,982 feet), Ortler Spitze (12,812 feet), Eisse Spitze (10,597 feet, from the N. W.); in August 1894 he climbed with guides, Michael Ortler and J. J. Thoni, of Tratoi, and traversed the Ortler peak, ‘ascending by the Hintere Grat and descending over Stickle Pleiss. Mr. Crowley also accomplished a variation of the Hintere Grat route, by the rock-ridge at the base of the Grat.’ (19)

In his Confessions (p. 101) he says he ‘arrived in Sulden with a deep reverence for the Alpine guide, and hastened to engage Joseph Pingerra, who was supposed to be the best in the valley.’ Crowley learns that in the Tyrol it is customary ‘to go two on a rope instead of three’ but generally he finds the guides lacking in the simplest climbing skills and unwilling to detour from their proposed routes. ‘I engaged two other guides and started for the Konigspitze, spending the night in a hut. In the morning the guides were drunk and unwilling to start, making absurd excuses about the weather. I had not sufficient self-confidence to tackle the Konigspitze by myself; but I dismissed them, made a solitary ascent of the Eisseespitze, and thought the matter over. I was utterly disgusted and decided to learn ice and snowcraft by myself, as I had with rocks.

A few days later I went out alone and made the first ascent of the Ortler by the Hintere Grat. The mountain had previously been climbed on this side; but the ridge had not been followed with the conscientiousness which was the rule in England. It took me six and a half hours to reach the summit.’

While Crowley was traversing the peaks in the Alps, an article appeared in The Eastbourne Gazette under the title ‘Foolhardy Climbers’ – ‘insensate folly takes various forms’ began the correspondent, ‘Censor’, who went on to say that ‘I notice in the window of Mr. Gibbs (chemist, Terminus-road), some notable photographs, showing two foolhardy individuals on the pinnacle at Beachy Head, one being at the summit in a position involving the greatest possible peril. I believe one of the persons referred to is a young gentleman (Mr. Crowley), who is of a very adventurous turn, and has fluttered the Volscians (chess players) in Corioli (their club room). He has contributed some chess notes to the Gazette from time to time.’ The concerned correspondent then goes on to condemn ‘foolhardy climbing at Beachy Head’ before ending on a note of distress for the damage done to the white chalk cliffs by ‘climbers hacking away at it with their pick-axes.’ (20)

Crowley makes a stand against the article and writes from the Hotel Sulden in the Tyrol, Austria on Monday 27^th August, saying that he should ‘like to defend myself and my brother mountaineers from the sweeping condemnation.’ He then goes on to expound the beauty and difficulty of chalk climbing, adding that ‘the photographs in Mr. Gibbs’ window may appear to the uninitiated as representing perilous positions – to the mountaineer they are by no means of such a character.’ He then tackles the correspondent on the subject of damage to the chalk, saying ‘the suggestion that the cliffs are marred by our “pick-axes,” as our weapons are quaintly mistermed, is surely rather grotesque, if not puerile.’ In conclusion, he adds, ‘I regret that others should have been made so anxious – as I believe, unnecessarily – also that others should have been led to imitate my climbs without suitable precautions. Mountaineering undertaken lightly, and without a serious conception of the responsibility incurred, is alike insane and criminal. Trusting you will afford me space for this defence and warning, I remain, sir, yours very sincerely, E. Aleister Crowley.’ (21)

Crowley returned to Eastbourne with Gregor Grant and on Monday 1^st October 1894 they made an unsuccessful attempt upon the as yet unclimbed chimney, Cuillin Crack. It was the most difficult climb for Crowley on Beachy Head and ‘after incredible exertion it yielded, and then I got a leg and an arm jammed, and managed to wriggle up about 60 feet higher. At this point the rope and my strength were alike exhausted, some four hours, without any sort of rest, having already passed. Foothold and handhold there were none that could be relied upon to support Grant’s additional weight, if any pressure were to be put on the rope. There was nothing for it but to let down a rope from above, or to descend with ignominy and much toil. So Grant sped away to invoke the assistance of the coastguard, and meanwhile I sat wedged in a most uncomfortable position, at the bottom of the second break, up to which I had struggled while waiting Grant’s return. Presently a rope was let down from above, so that by tying my own length of sixty feet to it I could scramble to the top, climbing for the most part, but receiving now and then aid that was more “moral” than any description of it as such.’ (pp. 293-294)

In the latter half of 1894, Crowley fell out of favour with the Lamberts and came to physical blows with the senior tutor. He says in his Confessions (pp. 105-106) that his ‘residence at Eastbourne broke up very suddenly. During the whole of my adolescence I had taken the romantic point of view of love; and I found that the universal practice was for elder people to interfere in the affairs of their juniors. Two people could not decide to marry without rousing a hurricane. There was never any exception. Engagements were always being made and broken on unintelligible religious grounds. The family of the Lamberts was no exception to this. The eldest daughter [Clara Lambert] was an acid old maid in the late twenties; the youngest [Amelia Lambert] was a hysterical monster of suppression. The middle girl [Isabelle Lambert] was beautiful, voluptuous and normal. She was not sufficiently intelligent to revolt openly against her family; but her human instincts told her that something was wrong and that she had better get out of it. She was in love with a quite suitable young man and engaged to him on probation. The question was whether he would or wouldn’t join the Plymouth Brethren. Naturally, the more he saw of them the less he liked them and he ultimately made up his mind to stand by the church of his fathers. On announcing this desolating decision he was overwhelmed with abuse and thrown out of the house. His fiancée was forbidden to communicate with him in any way, and to all intents and purposes imprisoned. I offered to arrange for correspondence with a view to an early elopement. But I couldn’t stand the continuous abuse and ill-treatment which was the portion of the unfortunate girl. The family literally foamed at the mouth on every opportunity. Meals were a poisoned whirlwind. She was constantly reduced to tears and perhaps the happiest time she had was when she was actually being beaten. I ought to have conducted my intrigues with greater patience, no doubt, but it got on my nerves too much. One morning at breakfast I said about a millionth part of what I thought and the family started screaming. It was as if they had been attacked by collective mania. Everything was thrown at me; they went for me with claws and fists. They were too blind with rage to know what they were doing. I simply knocked their heads together and walked out of the house. When I thought the atmosphere had had time to dissipate I returned with the intention of carrying out a rescue for the distressed damsel. They were too much scared to oppose me and I begged her to come away at once and go to her ex-fiance’s family. But she could not summon up courage to do it. The opportunity went by; and later in the afternoon my Uncle Tom, summoned by telegram, came to fetch me away from the accursed spot.’

He returned to Streatham with his Uncle Tom Bond Bishop.

In late September of 1894, Crowley ‘enrolled as a non-matriculated student of King’s College, in the University of London, reading Medicine and Natural Sciences.’ At the university he attended lectures by Sir William Ramsay (1852-1916), Professor of General Chemistry and his assistant, John Norman Collie (1859-1942), who was also an excellent climber. (22)

Also in September 1894 Crowley applied for membership of the Scottish Mountaineering Club, proposed by Ernest Maylard and seconded by Norman Collie. On Friday 7^th December 1894 at a special meeting of the Scottish Mountaineering Club, in Glasgow, Crowley was elected a member of the club. (23)

In early 1895, Crowley living at 7, Polworth Road, Streatham, occupies his time with chess and skating. One incident concerning the latter, he recalls in his Confessions (p. 117): ‘Some nameless pompier had sluiced I do not know how many acres of canvas with a representation of Niagara. They built a pavilion to house it. One was supposed to be standing on Goat Island – in fact, one was rather the goat – and one walked round a vast gallery and inspected each segment of the waterfall in turn. (24) In due course everyone had seen it and the question was what to do with the building. They turned it into a palais de glace with real ice. I, always keen on skating, bought a ticket for the season. The convention was for the ordinary skater to swing round the outside, while the experts performed their evolutions in the centre. At the time I was bent on learning the outside forward loop, which involves raising the unemployed leg very high until you discover the knack. Absorbed in this labour I failed to observe the Duke of Orleans, (25) a glaring girl on either arm. He swerved, swanking, out of the ruck and collided with me. We both sat down very hard, but I on the point of his skate to the detriment of my prized perineum. Being then a perfect young fool, as I am now a perfect old one, I supposed it incumbent on my race and caste to pretend not to be hurt, so I forced myself to go on skating despite agony so great that I could hardly bite back the tears, until I thought I had done enough for honour and felt free to slip away. I was engaged that night to a committee meeting of the Climbing Club at the rooms of H. V. Reade in Jermyn Street. (26) I managed somehow to sit through the meeting, the matter being made worse by my insane bashfulness which prevented me asking my host to let me use his bedroom. We proceeded to a restaurant to dinner, but there I broke down and excused myself.

The rest of the evening’s entertainment remains a mystery. I have a vague memory of being stretched on the seat of a railway carriage and I learned later that I had reached home, some six miles from London, soaked to the skin. I suppose I must have wandered about in the rain for an indefinite period, in pain too great to know what I was doing except to try to be brave. The blow had set up cystitis which kept me in bed for the next three weeks. The inflammation gradually disappeared after spreading to the prostate gland and the urethra. Nor was that the end of the trouble. The urethritis caused a discharge which proved very refactory to treatment and ultimately determined a triple stricture for which I am being treated at the moment of dictating this paragraph more than a quarter of a century after the accident. The moral is, of course, to avoid the Bourbons, though, as the duke is reported to be dying at the present moment, it is quite possible that his physician is shaking his head wisely and saying, ‘Ah, Your Highness, this is what comes from getting mixed up with people like Aleister Crowley!...’’ (27)

His cystitis is perhaps the illness which prevented him from attending the Scottish Mountaineering Club’s Easter Meet at Fort William from Thursday 11^th April to Tuesday 16^th April 1895 in which members, such as Norman Collie and Morris Travers, ascended the summit of Ben Nevis via a first ascent of Castle Ridge on Saturday 13^th April. Also during 1895 he applied to join the Alpine Club, he was proposed by Norman Collie and Martin Conway but he was rejected and he held an everlasting grudge against the club.

Also during this period the Oscar Wilde case, which began on Saturday 2^nd March 1895, was much in the public interest and no doubt Crowley would have seen the persecution of a poet and playwright as some cause celebre, but he is strangely silent and no doubt keeps his opinions to himself, perhaps recognising something of his own nature which will later flourish when he goes up to Cambridge later that year. The following court libel trial of Wednesday 3^rd April – Friday 5^th April sees Wilde drop his charges and he was arrested the same day due to the evidence against him. On Friday 26^th April Wilde’s first criminal trial for gross indecency opened at the Old Bailey and on Wednesday 22^nd May his retrial began which resulted in his conviction on Saturday 25^th May 1895 with a sentence of two years in prison with hard labour, a cruel injustice.

Following the furore of the case, in the summer of 1895, Crowley travelled to the Bernese Oberland and made several impressive climbs, such as the Eiger (North wall), the Monch in August and the Jungfrau, Wetterhorn, and Trift, Dent Blanche, Matterhorn. All guideless. His feat earned him a mention in the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal: ‘Mr. E. A. Crowley, besides minor expeditions, some of them solitary, crossed the Eigerjoch and Jungfraujoch without guides; also the Wetterlucke, Monchjoche, Beichgrat, and Petersgrat more than once. He traversed the Monch from Wengern Alp to the Bergli Hut, climbed the Eiger, the Jungfrau from the Roththat, the Tschingelhorn, and all but completed an ascent of Jungfrau by the difficult Schneehorn route (twenty-one hours out in bad weather). (28)

He says of it in his Confessions (p. 102) that he ‘went to the Liitle Scheideck. My first exploit was a solitary ascent of the Eiger. I started late and on the final ridge caught up with a ‘strong’ party of English with guides, the principle Herr being a charming clergyman from Japan, the Rev. Walter Weston. The guides were more or less drunk and frightened. They were trying to make some excuse for turning back; but shame stimulated their courage when I came up and we proceeded to the summit. We all went down together’. He also says he ‘we went up the Jungfrau by the Scheehorn-Silberhorn route, I leading up and descending last. But it was the same old story. The man [Crowley’s porter] couldn’t stand on a snow slope. I was constantly having to misuse valuable time in saving his worthless life.’

 

CAMBRIDGE

 

While climbing in the Alps Crowley received a telegram from his mother and his uncle, Tom Bond Bishop, requesting him to return home to sit for the entrance examinations for Trinity College, Cambridge, which were in a week’s time. Having returned home and sat for the examinations, Crowley matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge on Tuesday 1^st October 1895. In his first year he rented rooms at 16, St. John’s Street, Cambridge. The following year he became President of the Cambridge University Chess Club which held their meetings every Thursday evening at 8 p.m. at the Hoop Hotel, Bridge Street. (29)

Crowley’s mother, Emily Bertha, must have moved from Oak view, 7, Polworth Road, Streatham, sometime prior to Aleister matriculating at Trinity College as his admission to the college gives the address: Coriena Creach, Rutford Road, Streatham, London. (30) No doubt this is a corruption of the spelling Coire-Na-Creiche (Gaelic) which translates as the ‘corrie of the spoil’; one can assume Aleister Crowley named the residence after being impressed by Coire-Na-Crieche in the Cuillins on Skye where he and his mother were staying in 1892, the place commemorates a clan battle between the Macleods and the MacDonalds in 1601.

On Friday 25^th October 1895, Crowley and his cousin, Gregor Grant read a paper entitled ‘On Peak and Pinnacle’ at the Sidcup Literary and Scientific Society held at the Public Hall. (31)

Crowley attended the very wet Scottish Mountaineering Club’s Easter Meet of 1896 from Thursday 2^nd to Monday 6^th April at Fort William; he was one of 32 members (32) and following this he went climbing at Wastdale Head with Norman Collie and John Wilson Robinson.

Crowley’s aunt Ada Jane Bishop died aged 54 on Thursday 18^th June 1896, at Glenorme, Polworth Road, Streatham, where she lived with her brother, Tom Bond Bishop. (33) Aleister attended the funeral in Lambeth on Tuesday 23^rd June, and as he says in his Confessions (p. 58), his mother ‘refused to enter the church during the service and waited outside in the rain, only rejoining the procession when the corpse repassed those accursed portals on its way to the cemetery. She stood by the grave while the parson read the service. It was apparently the architectural diabolism to which she most objected.’ Just two months later, Aleister’s maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Bishop (born Elizabeth Cole in 1809) died on Tuesday 4^th August 1896 in Wandsworth and she is also buried in Lambeth three days later on Friday 7^th August.

At the end of the Easter term which ended on Wednesday 24^th June 1896, Crowley travelled to the Bernese Oberland with Morris William Travers (1872-1961) making their first guideless ascent of the Monch (13,480 feet) on Tuesday 14^th July. Crowley would have become acquainted with Morris Travers, an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at King’s College, the University of London who worked with Sir William Ramsay and was a friend of fellow scientist and climber, Professor Collie. (34)

Crowley went on to climb Aiguille de la Za (12,034 feet) alone, and they both climbed Aiguilles Rouge d’Arolla (11,962 feet) and the Vuibez Seracs (between 9-11,000 feet). With a companion, he ascended the Trifthorn (12,231 feet) and made a new descent down the North-West face.

The Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal recorded that: ‘Mr. E. A. Crowley, among minor ascents, made a traverse of the Trifthorn, with descent of N. W. face (not given in Conway, and may be new – with a companion); the Aiguille de la Za (alone); the Vuibez Seracs – an ice-fall which has probably not been passed before without taking to the rocks; Aiguille Rouges d’Arolla traversed (climbing every gendarme on south peak – party benighted on ridge). All guideless.’ (35)

Concerning the first descent of the Trifthorn via the West face with a nameless ‘companion’, Crowley says in his Confessions (pp. 130-131) that ‘it was early in the season of ‘96’ and that he met an English climber in the train up to Zermatt ‘whom I will call Arthur Ellis’ which may or may not have been his name. He says that he was ‘anxious to do guideless work and we agreed to try a few mountains together. We made some minor expeditions and he proved highly competent. One day we climbed the Trifthorn by the ordinary route, with the idea of attempting the traverse. As I was going down last, he was carrying the rucksack with our provisions. We made several attempts to find away down the Zinalface; but always the slopes steepened until it became evident that they pitched over, and we had to retrace our steps. Ellis, however, was very annoyed at my caution and wanted to glissade, which was a proposal about as reasonable as jumping off the Eiffel Tower. Presently he made an excuse for taking off the rope and retired behind a rock while I sat down and lit my pipe. I was aroused by a hail. Ellis was three or four hundred feet down the slope! He urged me once more to glissade. He said he had invented a new method of exercising this art, which was to hold the axe by the shaft and use the pick as a brake. It was downright insanity; and took me absolutely by surprise, as previously he had been a sound and careful climber. I could do nothing to restrain him: I tried to humour him and suggested that he should ‘come up to where I was and start fair’. But he wasn’t taking any and let himself go. A few seconds later he was performing cartwheels and then disappeared over the edge. The angle was such that I could not see where he had fallen. I hastily climbed a convenient rock pinnacle. Then I saw him. He was lying, spreadeagled, in the Bergschrund, with his blood staining the snow; which by the way, ought not to have been there, and would not have been but for the continuous bad weather.’ Crowley had to find his way down ‘a face which had never previously been climbed. However, I discovered a route which took me to the glacier in about five hours. At one point I was obliged to lower myself down by the rope; and, as I could not unhitch it, I was thrown more than ever on my own resources after that. On several occasions I was obliged to make some very risky jumps, so that I might have been cut off if I had found a passage beyond my powers.

I must admit feeling considerable disgust at seeing Ellis making his way over the glacier as if nothing had happened. He had fallen some eight hundred feet, the last three hundred sheer drop. I was utterly exhausted and badly in need of food. It was all I could do to catch up to him. The only damage he had suffered was a trifling cut on one leg!’ they made their way to the hut as night began to fall, wading through ‘soft snow up to our waists.’ They had to break into the hut as it was locked and ‘break into the provision room in order to get fuel and the like.’ In the hut, Crowley threw his wet coat on the table over which his Alpine lamp hung with its candle and Crowley, exhausted, lay down in the straw too tired to go to bed. As sleep overtook him he forgot to turn out the lamp and the candle dropped from the lamp and burnt his coat ‘to cinders’.

‘Luckily, the next morning the guardian of the hut came up. I borrowed his coat and went down to Evolena, where my baggage had been sent. Ellis was not fit to be moved and I arranged to come up two days later and fetch him. At [the Hotel in] Evolena I got a change of clothes and sent up the guide’s coat by a porter.’ The next day outside the Hotel just before dinner, Crowley saw the dishevelled form of Arthur Ellis coming down, he had been walking since dawn, over the glacier and cutting steps all the way – he had apparently ‘cut his way down the mule path’. Crowley decided not to climb again with Ellis and he left the hotel in Evolena on Friday 28^th August 1896. Crowley adds a few more details in an article published in Vanity Fair – ‘Vain Tale, with a Madman on the Alps’ [24^th June 1908, p. 823] saying that he and Ellis ‘accordingly left Zermatt, and spent a comfortable night in the Frift-hut. The next morning we started in fairly decent weather, and reached Triftjoch in good time, and without putting on the rope. We breakfasted, and turned up the easy rocks of the south ridge of the Trifthorn. They were in bad condition, and the description of the ridge in Conway [‘The Alps from End to End’ by Willaim Martin Conway. 1895] led us to choose a route which turned out very troublesome. It was two o’clock before we stood on the summit and shook hands over our first peak.’ They made their decent down the north ridge, putting on the rope with Ellis leading. Following the glissading accident, Crowley, seeing that Ellis is still alive, tells him to ‘drink a few drops’ [of brandy] and ‘make some soup, and wait till I came down to him.’ At the hut they ‘went up-stairs to the “bedrooms,” I was in an inner room – I believe dedicated to the fair sex. But I was too tired for problem plays. I hung the lantern on a nail over the table, on which I flung my sopping clothes; pulled down all the rugs in the place from their rope, rolled myself in them, and lay down, only to see if it was comfortable.’ Intending to turn out the lantern, Crowley is overwhelmed with sleep and wakes the next morning ‘much refreshed’ to find his clothes burnt ‘by the unextinguished candle. I swore and came down to breakfast.’ Crowley borrowed a coat and shirt from the ‘guardian’ of the hut who ‘appeared from the abyss’ and rushes off to Evolena, Ellis deciding to stay another day at the hut. The next morning Ellis does not appear at the hotel, ‘lunch followed a game of chess, and a short, a very short, stroll. No Ellis. At tea we began to get alarmed. I dressed for dinner, however, and wandered out with my friends to taste the evening air. I should explain that to dress for dinner means to put on a tie!’ As they are outside the hotel, Ellis comes towards them, ‘footsore and weary’ with his axe and it appears Ellis had started to climb down at 3 a.m. a climb which should take no more than three hours, but he had been climbing for fifteen hours [this would make the time of the encounter with Ellis around 6 p.m.], cutting steps all the way down. They then went in for dinner and ‘Bullock and I turned a cold and glassy gaze on one and other’ – this would be Herbert Somerset Bullock (1871-1963), of Corpus Christ College, Cambridge (1889-1892), the son of the Rev. Charles Bullock; H. S. Bullock, member of the Alpine Club (1897) was also, like Crowley, an excellent chess player and played for Cambridge. The end of the story reveals a mystery concerning Ellis: ‘I had left Ellis before adjusting our accounts – he remained in my debt to a small amount. On arrival in England I found a letter from him, with the amount owing, and a wish to meet me, and chat over the events of the season! I replied cordially, asking him to dine at my club to meet Travers, with whom I had once climbed. He replied, accepting. The night arrived, and with it Travers, but Ellis was not there. From that day to this I have neither seen him, nor heard of him, save that one vague rumour once come to my ears of his having been seen somewhere in Switzerland.’ This incident occurred before Crowley was to join his friends, Morris Travers and his younger brother, at Arolla.

In the Confessions (pp. 127-128) he says ‘Travers joined me for a short time in August. We began by making the first guideless traverse of the Monch. We started for the Guggi hut within two or three hours of his arrival, he having come straight through from London without breaking the journey. We started the next morning very early and made great speed up the lower slopes in our enthusiasm. Travers became extremely mountain sick. It was obvious that the barometric pressure had nothing to do with it; he was simply upset from the fatigue of the journey, the change to course food and the sudden call upon his full physical strength when out of training.’ He goes on to say that ‘Travers and I wandered about the Oberland for a week without going below the snow-line. His mountain sickness soon disappeared, but he became badly sunburnt.’ Concerning the Vuibez Seracs he says that they ‘constituted one of the most interesting ice climbs that I have ever done…’; ‘We set out the following morning, reaching the obstacle without any difficulty, which gave us a poor idea of the capacity of the mighty men of valour [members of the Alpine Club who had recently attempted it]. But we could not be surprised at their failure to negotiate the obstacle. We found ourselves standing on a knife-edge separated from the over-hanging wall by a crevasse so broad that we could only just reach it with our axes. Travers held me on the rope while I leant across and cut a ledge in the wall which could be used for his hands. Having anchored him to his brother lower down, I lowered him cautiously so that he was able to lean across with his hands on the ledge, thus forming a bridge. I then climbed, in my crampons, on to his shoulders and stood there for forty minutes while I cut hand and foot holds in the overhanging ice. Trusting myself to these, Travers was hastily pulled back to the vertical by his brother. In this position I was able to support my weight on his uplifted axe-head sufficiently to allow me to use one hand. In this way I cut fresh hand holds in the overhanging wall and ultimately pulled myself over the edge. There was still some step-cutting to be done before I got to a sufficiently good place to pull up the others. I have never seen the performance of Travers equalled on any occasion. Hastings himself could hardly have been more strong, steady and enduring, to say nothing of the qualities required to allow a man to stand on his head and shoulders with sharp spikes!’ (p. 129) The climbers then found that there were many ‘tangled pinnacles of ice’ to encounter before reaching the top.

 

It was three o’ the morn and the night was outworn;
We broke fast on Maggi* and Cotton**,
We said Cecil’s jest was a jibe of the best,
And of Morris’s yarns – “that’s a hot ‘un.” (36)

 

*Maggi: a brand of instant soup invented by Julius Maggi in Switzerland in 1884 which was popular with climbers.

**Cotton: John Cotton of Edinburgh, (18^th cent.) famous brand of pipe tobacco. The poem mentions Morris [Travers] and Cecil, whom I believe to be Morris’s younger brother Henry Cecil Travers (1876-1958) (37).

 

A DESCENT OF THE MONCH
JULY 14, 1896.

 

An island of the mist. White companies
Of clouds thronged wondrously against the hills,
And in the east a darkening of the winds
That held awhile their breath for very rage,
Too wild for aught but vaporous quivering
Of melting fleeces, while the sudden sun
Fled to his home. Afar the Matterhorn
Reared a gaunt pinnacle athwart the bank,
Where towered behind it one vast pillar of cloud
To thrice its height. Behold the ice-clad dome
On which we stood, all weary of the way,
And marked the east awaken into scorn,
And rush upon us. Then we set our teeth
To force a dangerous passage, and essayed
The steep slope not in vain. We pushed our way
Slowly and careworn down the icy ridge,
Hewing with ponderous strokes the riven ice
In little flakes and chips, and now again
Encountered strange and fearsome sentinels,
Gray pinnacles of lightening-riven rock
Fashioned of fire and night. We clomb adown
Fantastic cliffs of gnarled stone, and saw
The vivid lightening flare in purple robes
Of flame along the ridge, and even heard
Its terrible crackle, ‘mid the sullen roar
Of answering thunder. Now the driven hail
Beat on our faces, while we strove to fling
Aloft the axe of forged steel, encased
In glittering ice, and smite unceasingly
On the unyielding slope of ice, as black
As those most imminent ghosts of Satan’s frown
That shut us out from heaven, while the snow
Froze on our cheeks. Thus then we gained the field
Where precipice and overwhelming rock,
Avalanche, crag, leap through the dazzled air
To pile their mass in one Lethean plain
Of undulations of rolled billowy snow
Rent, seamed, and scarred with wound on jagged wound,
Blue-rushing to the vague expanse below
Of the unknown secrecies of mountain song.
Dragging behind us beautiful weary limbs,
We turned snow-blinded eyes towards the pass*
That shot a jasper wall above the mist
Into the lightening-kindled firmament,
Behind whose battlements a shelter** lay,
Rude-built of pine, whose parents in the storm
Of some vast avalanche were swept away
Into the valley. Thither we hastened on,
And there, as night stretched out a broken wing
Torn by the thunder and the bitter strife
Of warring flames and tempest’s wrath, we came
And flung ourselves within, and laid us down
At last to sleep; and Sleep, a veined shape
Of naked stateliness, came down to us,
And tenderly stooped down, and kissed our brows.
 
*The Monchjoch.
**The Berglihuute.

[Mysteries: Lyrical and Dramatic [1898]. Aleister Crowley Collected Works, volume I, 1905. p. 102]

 

He recalls his ascent of the Aiguilles Rouge with Morris Travers and his younger brother in the Confessions (pp. 133-134) when they made a conscious decision to climb ‘every pinnacle accurately’ and hadn’t planned for the ‘breakdown of the younger Travers from fatigue.’ He says that a ‘bitterly cold wind was blowing from the north-west, so that we could not pass the night on the ridge or on that side of it. We had to find shelter on the eastern face. It was too dark to get down the cliffs, even if young Travers had been equal to the effort, and they were very steep. There was not even a reasonable ledge.

However, we found a chimney where the boy could rest in moderate comfort and there was a sort of shelf which accommodated his brother. As for me, the best repose I could find was to wedge myself across the chimney with one foot, my back against a steep patch of snow; the warmth of my body melted this and the water trickled down. As my knickerbockers had been torn to pieces on the rock, there was a certain degree of discomfort connected with my night’s rest and the strain on my leg somehow damaged the knee joint, which used continually to give trouble for years afterwards. But I was so tired that I went to sleep with my pipe in my mouth. It is extraordinary that I did not fall – the pipe did.’

Crowley returned to Cambridge for the Michaelmas term which began on Thursday 1^st October 1896. A few days later, on Monday12^th October, Crowley turned 21 and came into his inheritance, a small fortune of around £45,000.

 

STOCKHOLM

 

When term ended on Saturday 19^th December 1896, Crowley travelled to Stockholm, no doubt intending to enjoy his new found wealth, and stayed at the Grand Hotel; on Tuesday 29^th December he had been ice-skating for three hours and began to feel tired; he attempted a skating manoeuvre, quite badly and falls on the ice. A man stepped forward to assist him and Crowley, who had been feeling lonely, is glad to hear the English tongue. The man introduces himself as James L. Dickson and Crowley felt a strange attraction towards him. They dined together that night and the following night, Wednesday 30^th December, Crowley dined with him and on the following day, New Year’s Eve, Thursday 31^st December, after Crowley had dined with Dickson, the latter seduced Crowley, who did not resist this new, strong and ‘sinful’ experience. At midnight, Crowley became ‘awakened to the knowledge’ as he says in his Confessions (pp. 123-124) ‘that I possessed a magical means of becoming conscious of and satisfying a part of my nature which had up to that moment concealed itself from me. It was an experience of horror and pain, combined with a certain ghostly terror, yet at the same time it was the key to the purest and holiest spiritual ecstasy that exists.’ He goes on to say that (p. 124) that it was an ‘isolated experience, not repeated until exactly twelve months later, to the minute.’ The experience came as a sudden revelation to Crowley and he speaks about it in his poem ‘At Stockholm’ addressed to ‘J. L. D.’:

 

We could not speak, although the sudden glow
Of passion mantling to the crimson cheek
 
Of either, told our tale of love, although
We could not speak.
 
What need of language, barren and false and bleak,
While our white arms could link each other so,
And found red lips their partner’s mutely seek?
 
What time for language, when our kisses flow
Eloquent, warm, as words are cold and weak?
 
Or now – Ah! sweetheart, even were it so
We could not speak.

 
Also the poem- ‘To J. L.D.’:
 
At last, so long desired, so long delayed,
The step is taken, and the threshold past;
I am within the palace I have prayed
At last.
 
Like scudding winds, when skies are overcast,
Came the soft breath of Love, that might not fade.
O Love, whose magic whispers bind me fast.
 
O Love, who hast the kiss of Love betrayed,
Hide my poor blush beneath thy pinions vast,
Since thou hast come, nor left me more a maid,
At last. (38)

 

Crowley was then in Copenhagen where he wrote the beautiful poem, ‘Astray in her Paths’ (January 1897) in which he gives poetic wings to his recent revelation of a new passionate love, that of man with man, and elevates it beyond mortal love itself – ‘… because we love, / are not of earth, but, as the immortals, stand / with eyes immutable; our souls are fed / on a strange new nepenthe from the cup / of the vast firmament. Nor do we dream, / nor think we aught of the transient world, / but are absorbed in our own deity’. Crowley reaches a sublime and tender beauty, an honesty which only youth can prevail upon –

 

But now I turn to thee, whose eyes
Blaze on me with such look as flesh and blood
May never see and live; for so it burns
Into the innest being of the spirit
And stains its vital essence with a brand
Of fire that shall not change; and shuddering I
Gaze back, spirit to spirit, with the like
Insatiable desire, that never quenched,
Nor lessened by sublime satiety,
But rather crescent, hotter with the flame
Of its own burning, that consumes it not,
Because it is the pure white flame of God.
I shudder, holding thee to me: thy gaze
Is still on me; a thousand years have passed,
And yet a thousand thousand; years they are
As men count years, and yet we stand and gaze
With touching hands and lips immutable
As mortals stand a moment; …
The universe is One: One Soul, One Spirit,
One Flame, One infinite God, One infinite Love.

 [Mysteries: Lyrical and Dramatic. 1898. Collected Works, volume I, pp.119-120]

 

Crowley would have returned to Cambridge for the Lent term which began on Friday 8^th January 1897. The Easter term ended on Thursday 24^th June 1897, and Crowley went to St Petersburg to learn Russian for the Diplomatic service which he had chosen as a career – he did not get very far in the language – and on his return he broke his journey at Berlin to attend a chess conference, this was the Berlin Chess Tournament held at the Architektenhaus in Berlin from Monday 13^th September to Tuesday 4^th October 1897 (39) and he says he was immediately ‘seized with what may justly be described as a mystical experience’; he saw the futility of chess masters and knew that he was destined for greater things – ‘I perceived with praetor-natural lucidity that I had not alighted on this planet with the object of playing chess.’ (Confessions. p. 140)

In 1897, ‘Mr. E. Aleister Crowley ascended the Pic Coolidge, and crossed the Breche de la Meije in the Dauphine, and afterwards proceeded to Arolla, traversed without guides the Aig.de la Za (descending the rock face) and Mont Collon (by N. N. E. arête, descent by W. face).’ (40) He is staying at the Hotel Mont Collon with Morris Travers and his cousin Gregor Grant. Of the Breche de la Meije, he recalls in his Confessions (p. 137) that he was crossing the Meije ‘with a porter. About half way down the rocky slopes (we had taken off the rope) I stopped for a few minutes for personal reasons, never imagining that the boy would get himself into trouble. When I got up he had disappeared. I shouted and he replied. I then saw that he had done an incredibly rash action. By going on, entirely out of the way, he had crossed a narrow gully which was being constantly swept by ice from a hanging glacier. I could not leave him alone on the mountain and I could not ask him to risk his life by returning. There was nothing for it but to repeat his indiscretion. The only way across the gully was a steep slab, polished by ice and constantly bombarded. I had to rush it, at the gravest risk of slipping on the one hand and being smashed on the other.’

Gregor Grant joined him as he says in his Confessions (p. 133) he ‘took his cousin Gregor, who by this time was married and had discovered that his life was not worth keeping [he married in March 1899, so Crowley must be mistaken here]. We made the second ascent of the north-north-east ridge of Mont Collon. It is a long and severe climb. The conditions were very bad and Gregor was quite unequal to this class of climbing, so that I had to pull him up most of the way. We were very late on the mountain in consequence. I had no idea of the best way down, but decided to try the short and precipitous route which leads to the level glacier above the Vuibez Seracs… we got down the steep part, safely enough, just before dark.

We took off the rope to descend some slopes covered with loose rock. As I sat down to coil the rope I realised that I was completely exhausted, though mentally rather than physically. My brain played me a curious trick. Gregor had reached a patch of broken rocks at the bottom of the slope and I followed him slowly. Suddenly I saw a troll, one of those funny little dwarfs with pointed caps and formidable beards that one sees pictured in German fairy stories and on beer mugs (Heinzelmannchen appears to be the official name). This creature was hopping about the rocks in a very jovial way. He appeared quite real in every respect. For instance, he was not transparent. But it never occurred to me to believe in him. I put him down to cerebral fatigue. The apparition only lasted for a few minutes. He was gone before I rejoined my cousin.

It would, of course, have been madness to attempt to cross the glacier that night, the snow being very deep and soft, so we managed as best we could to keep warm. I did not sleep very much – it was my first night out. In the morning we ran across the frozen snow to the little pass which leads down to the valley. We had hardly crossed it when we met a rescue party sent up by the dear old hotel keeper, Anzevui, [Jean Anzevui (1835-1926) hotelier of Hotel Mont Collon] who had a curious personal affection for me as the bad boy of the valley who was always making things interesting. Our descent had been watched through glasses; and they had come to the conclusion that we must have met with an accident, because our route down the mountain was an original variation on the regular way and supposed to be impossible. We had, in fact, met with one exceedingly bad pitch where I was glad of the hitched rope.’ They returned to their hotel on the evening of Thursday 26^th August 1897.

 

POLLITT

 

During the Michaelmas term which began in October 1897, Crowley becomes ill and was ‘forced to meditate upon the fact of mortality’ – ‘I had never given myself wholly to chess, mountaineering or even to poetry. Now, for the first time, I felt myself prepared to expend my resources of every kind to attain my purpose.’ (p.125) Later that term Crowley became acquainted with Herbert Charles Jerome Pollitt (1871-1942) who had been up at Trinity College in 1889, and the two soon became lovers.

Crowley, in the flush of a new passion for Pollitt, is also consumed by an increasing crisis of his faith, he still clings to certain beliefs that were instilled into him by his father and the Plymouth Brethren, yet there is an overwhelming desire to pursue the esoteric arts; it is the Vision of Universal Sorrow which has been growing within him since his revelation in Berlin, that he was created for something more than just playing chess, climbing mountains and writing poetry. Since entering Trinity College and experiencing real freedom from the constraints and restrictions of Christianity, he feels there is a lack of substance and purpose to that freedom which has become meaningless. That December, on Tuesday 7^th, he visits the house of his Professor friend, Dr. Charles George Lamb (1867-1941), the Cambridge lecturer and engineer who entered the university in 1891. That wild and windy night in December must have had considerable effect upon Crowley, who poured out his heartfelt feelings to Professor Lamb concerning his spiritual dilemma. In the introduction to his poem Aceldama (1898) he writes rather vaguely of the encounter, saying ‘how the grave old Professor wondered at my ravings! I had called at his house, for he was a valued friend of mine, and I felt strange thoughts and emotions shake within me. Ah! how I raved! I called to him to trample me, he would not. We passed together into the stormy night. I was on horseback, how I galloped round him in my phrenzy, till he became the prey of a real physical fear! How I shrieked out I know not what strange words! And the poor good old man tried all he could to calm me; he thought I was mad! The fool! I was in the death struggle with self: God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours. God conquered – now I have only one doubt left – which of the twain was God?’

Michaelmas term ended on Sunday 19^th December 1897, and Crowley went to Amsterdam and he wrote romantic homoerotic poetry in a little red notebook he purchased there (41).

 

He who seduced me first I could not forget.
I hardly loved him but desired to taste
A new strong sin. My sorrow does not fret
That sore. But thou, whose sudden arms embraced
 
My shrinking body, and who brought a blush
Into my cheeks, and turned my veins to fire,
Thou, who didst whelm me with the eager rush
Of the enormous floods of thy desire,
Thine are the kisses that devour me yet,
Thine the high heaven whose loss is death to me,
Thine all the barbed arrows of regret,
Thine on whose arms I yearn to be
In my deep heart thy name is writ alone,
Men shall decipher – when they split the stone.

 

On Thursday 23^rd December 1897, while in Amsterdam, he is on the threshold of one of the greatest spiritual conflicts of his life, for he has been walking the streets all day and watching the sun pass overhead and ‘fade away / to other streets, and other passengers, / see him take pleasure where the heathen pray,’. Crowley is tired and weary and his mind is in torment. The day has been long and there is a frost sparkling along the streets as he wound his way towards the docks; from the darkness of his inner sorrow he holds his silver crucifix in his fingers and contemplates ‘the wound / stabbed in the flanks of my dear silver Christ.’ Crowley feels the loneliness of Christ at the hour of death- he puts the crucifix to his mouth and kisses the ‘silver lips’ as if in farewell, for ever. He puts the crucifix away and his ‘feet must go / some journey of despair.’ He has come through the dark night of his soul which probably began with that memorable night at the home of Professor Lamb to find that which he had known all along; and he must walk and ‘know never more the day and night apart, / know not where frost has laid his iron hand /save only that it fastens on my heart; / save only that it grips with icy fire / these veins no fire of hell could satiate; / save only that it quenches this desire. / Let me out beyond the city gate.’ [The Goad. Songs of the Spirit. 1898. Collected Works volume I, p. 30]

Two days later, on Saturday 25^th December 1897, still in Amsterdam, he wrote the poem ‘The Nativity’ (also contained in the Amsterdam Notebook under the title ‘Xmas’). In the poem we find the Virgin Mary at Bethlehem, in labour, and ‘each spasm is a holocaust’, and thrice she has ‘cursed the name of God’ and thrice she has ‘prayed that she may die’ until ‘she is delivered of the Christ’ [Oracles.1905. Collected Works, volume II, pp. 14-15]

In Amsterdam, Crowley realises that he is in love with Jerome and the two write furiously to each other. On Crowley’s return he met Pollitt at the Queen’s Hotel, Birmingham on Friday 31^st December 1897, New Year’s Eve, exactly a year after he had been seduced by James L. Dickson, and the seduction repeated itself almost to the minute when Pollitt and Crowley became lovers.

The Lent term began in January 1898 and Crowley moved from his rooms at 35, Sidney Street to 14, Trinity Street and during the Easter term that year he and Jerome were quite inseparable; their relationship lasted six months. (42) Crowley had several of his poems published in the Cambridge magazine Granta, such as: ‘Ballade of the Mutability of Human Affairs’ (26^th February 1898, p.223), ‘Ballade of Bad Verses’ (30^th April 1898, p. 271) and ‘A Sonnet of Spring Fashions’ (21^st May 1898, p. 236).

Crowley must be mistaken when he says that he and Pollitt are at Wastdale Head in July 1898 as during that month he is climbing in the Alps, and even Crowley can’t be in two places at once! The Visitor Book of the Wastwater Hotel records Crowley, as staying there from Monday 14^th March to Monday 18^th April. He says that he and Pollitt, walked over the fells together but Crowley could ‘never persuade him to do any rock climbing.’ Pollitt’s name is not recorded in the Wastwater Hotel visitor book so it is likely he was staying at his parent’s home in Kendal, Thorny Hills, 7, Kent Terrace and travelled the thirty-five miles to Wastdale; his father, Charles Pollitt, is the owner of the Westmorland Gazette. Crowley hints in his ‘Not the Life of Sir Roger Bloxam’ that Crowley went to ‘the Lake where Hippolytus [Pollitt] had his palace’. Crowley was reading The Cloud upon the Sanctuary by Karl von Eckhartshausen (1752-1803) and he ‘appealed with the whole force of my will to the adepts of the Hidden Church to prepare me as a postulant for their august company.’ (Confessions. p. 148) During that vacation Crowley met the climber Oscar Eckenstein (1859-1921) who was staying at the Wastwater Hotel from Friday 1^st – Friday 29^th April and they ‘did a few climbs together’ and ‘made a sort of provisional agreement to undertake an expedition to the Himalayas when occasion offered.’ (p. 151) Eckenstein’s friend and fellow climber, the mechanical engineer, Lucien Alphonse Legros (1865-1933) was also staying at the hotel from Thursday 7^th – Wednesday 20^th April and on Crowley’s final day before checking out on the 18^th April, he and Crowley famously entered their Y-Boulder guide (Legros supplying the numbered diagram) with their 22 routes upon the boulder, which is about a mile away from the hotel in Mosedale, in the visitor’s book. (43)

It must be during this Easter stay at Wastdale that he writes his Epilogue to his poem The Tale of Archaise (1898) which was published in January 1899 and is included in his Collected Works of 1905 (volume I, pp. 27-28) – it was written ‘in Hollow Stones, Scawfell’ and begins:

 

‘Blind the iron pinnacles edge the twilight;
Blind and black the ghylls of the mountain clefted,
Crag and snow-clad slope in a distant vision
Rise as before me.
 
Here (it seems) my feet by a tiny torrent
Press the moss with a glad delight of being:
Here my eyes lookup to the riven mountain
Split by the thunder.
 
Rent and rifted, shattered of wind and lightning,
Smitten, scarred, and stricken of sun and tempest,
Seamed with wounds, like adamant, shod with iron,
Torn by the earthquake.’

 

The poem culminates in dramatic mood, as – ‘Darkness falls like dewfall about the hillsides; / Night is upon me.

 

Now to me remain in the doubtful twilight
Stretches bare of flower, but touched with whispers,
Grey with huddled rocks, and a space of woodland,
Pine trees and poplar.
 
Now a stream to ford and a stile to clamber;
Last the inn, a book, and a quiet corner…
Fresh as Spring, there kisses me on the forehead
Sleep, like a sister.’

 

Crowley was back in Cambridge to finish his final May term (he left without taking his degree) before secretly setting off for Maidenhead and checking into the Bear Hotel to write his tragic poem ‘Jezebel’. He had made up his mind to end the relationship with Pollitt and pursue the spiritual quest of the Hidden Masters. In his Confessions (pp. 148-149) he says of his sojourn in Maidenhead that ‘I only told one person – in strictest confidence – where I was going; but Pollitt found out that person and forced him to tell my secret. He walked into the room shortly after dinner, to my surprise and rage – for when I am writing a poem I would show Azrael himself the door!’ Crowley explains that he has chosen to devote his life to religion and that there was no place for him in his life anymore and they parted never to meet again. He regretted his decision for the rest of his life.

 

To die amid the blossoms of the frost
On far fair heights; to sleep the quiet sleep
Of dead men underneath the snowy steep
Of many mountains; ever to have lost
These cares and these distrusts; to lie alone,
Watched by the distant eagle’s drowsy wing,
Stars and grey summits, and the winds that sing
Slow dirges in eternal monotone.
 
Such is my soul’s desire, being weary of
This vain eternity of sleepless dreams
That is my life; what there still may be
In other worlds, the hope of other love
Than this that floods my veins with poisonous streams,
And wastes with wan desire the soul of me.

[Jezebel: and Other Tragic Poems. 1899. Epilogue. Collected Works, volume I, p. 135]

 

 

A SPIRITUAL AWAKENING

 

Following this great tragedy, Crowley sets off for an excursion in the Alps and while in Paris, he reconsiders his feelings for Pollitt and decides to write a letter of apology to him which he posts from the Gare de Lyon; either the letter goes astray and Pollitt does not receive it or he does and fails to act on it, whichever, the finest and noblest friendship of Crowley’s life is terminated.

Crowley, who has not felt in the best of health all summer, went to Zermatt to rest and read Mathers’ volume ‘The Kabbalah Unveiled’. He was staying at the Hotel Monte Rosa in Zermatt during July and August 1898 and one night in the local beer hall was talking about alchemy to an assembled party of climbers, one of whom was there during August, was the analytical and consulting chemist, Julian Levett Baker (1873-1958) who ‘took me aside’ he says in Confessions (p. 164) ‘when the group broke up and walked back to the hotel with me.’ Baker was staying at the same hotel – ‘He was himself a real practical alchemist – I don’t know whether he had been fooled by my magpie display of erudition. He may simply have deduced that a boy, however vain and foolish, who had taken so much pains to read up the subject, might have a really honest interest after all; and he took me seriously.’ Crowley believes this may be the Master he called for during Easter at Wastdale Head or may be able to put him in contact with one. ‘That night I resolved to renew my acquaintance with Baker in the morning and tackle him seriously about the intricate question which lay close about my heart.’ But the next morning Crowley wakes late for breakfast to find Baker has already checked out of the hotel and Crowley sets about furiously telegraphing for him ‘all over the valley. He was located at the Gorner Grat. I sped up the mountain to find him. Again he had gone. I rushed back. In vain I hunted him through the hotels and at the railway station. At last I got a report that an Englishman corresponding to his description had started to walk down the valley to Brigue. I hurled myself headlong in pursuit. This time I was rewarded. I caught up with him some ten miles below Zermatt. I told him of my search for the Secret Sanctuary of the Saints and convinced him of my desperate earnestness. He hinted that he knew of an Assembly which might be that for which I was looking… I got him to promise to meet me in London. He added, ‘I will introduce you to a man who is much more of a Magician than I am.’ (pp. 164-165)

Crowley wrote a dedicatory poem to J. L. Baker in his volume of poems Songs of the Spirit (1898), also in the Collected Works (volume I. p. 29), its second verse reads:

 

‘Thine was the forehead mild and grave
That shone throughout the azure nave
Where Monte Rosa’s silence gave
The starry organ’s measured sound.
Where for an altar stood the bare
Mass of Mont Cervin*, towering there;
And angels dwelt upon the stair,
And all the mountains were aware that stood around.’

*The Matterhorn.

 

Also at the Hotel Monte Rosa were Oscar Eckenstein during August 1898 and his climbing companion, Guy Knowles (1879-1959), of Trinity College, Cambridge, from July-August and they climbed the Weisshorn, Lyskamm, Dent Blanche and the Matterhorn; Guy would later, in 1902, along with Eckenstein and Crowley, attempt to make the first ascent of the world’s second highest mountain in the Himalayas, K2.

The Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal says that in July 1898, ‘Mr. E. Aleister Crowley was camping with friends above the snow-line during the whole month of July in very indifferent weather. The tents were pitched below the Dent Blanche, beside the Schonbuhl Glacier, at a height of 11,500 feet.’ (44) In his Confessions (p. 155) Crowley says: ‘We [Crowley and Eckenstein] arranged to spend the summer in a tent on the Schonbuhl glacier under the Dent Blanche, primarily with the idea of fitting me for the Himalayan expedition, and secondly with that of climbing the east face of the Dent Blanche by a new route which he had previously attempted with Zurbriggen [Matthias Zurbriggen (1856-1917)].’

One incident that occurred that climbing season in the Alps was the death of four people that August who ‘died while climbing near Arolla in Switzerland’. Crowley says in his Confessions (p. 99) that he, Morris Travers and his younger brother [Ernest Frank Travers], decided to try the ascent of the Petite Dent de Veisivi [10,466 feet] ‘by the gap facing Arolla’ – ‘the local guides, however, unanimously denied that this route had ever been done. The rocks below the gap, they said, were overhanging and were impossible. We decided to test these statements, ascended the mountain by the ordinary way and came down by the route in question. The rocks do overhang, but the holds are so good that the climb is quite easy.’ Crowley discussed the route with the son of the climber John Hopkinson, saying that there ‘was no difficulty or danger for a responsible party.’ Professor John Hopkinson F.R.S. (1840-1898) was staying with his family at the Hotel du Mont Collon in Arolla and Professor Hopkinson’ started from Arolla on Saturday morning [27^th August], with his son [18 year old John Gustave Robinson] and two daughters [Alice Robinson, 23, and Lina Evelyn Robinson 19], to ascend the Petite Dent de Veisivi, one of the striking points dominating Evolina, in the Val d’Herens, running south from the Rhone Valley at Sion. The ascent is not considered a very dangerous one, and the party went without guides. Nothing having been seen of them on Saturday night, search parties were organised, and the melancholy discovery was made that a catastrophe had occurred, the dead bodies of Dr. Hopkinson and his three children being found roped together, but terribly mutilated, at the foot of the highest cliffs.’ (45) Crowley adds in his Confessions that the ‘widow [Evelyn Hopkinson] begged Travers, who was a member of the rescue party (I had left the valley), to allow her to take a last look at her husband’ but ‘all the remains had been brought down in one sack; no one could tell what was whose.’ Morris Travers, was staying at the same hotel as the Hopkinson party, the Hotel du Mont Collon in Arolla and he, with local guides such as Pierre Maitre and other climbers staying in Arolla, found the bodies the next day, Sunday 28^th August; the bodies were removed on Monday 29^th August. Crowley wrote his poem, ‘Elegy’ for Hopkinson [Mysteries: Lyrical and Dramatic.1898, see Collected Works, volume I, p. 127] in which he says it was a ‘year of barren summer, when the wind / blew from the south unlooked-for snow, / they year when Collon, desolate and blind, / gloomed on the vale below,’ and ends with the final verses:

The mountains that you loved have taken you,
And we who love you will not weep.
Shall we begrudge? Your last look saw sky blue;
You will be glad to sleep.
 
Your pure names (thine renowned, yours with fresh youth
And full of promise) shall be kept
Still in our hearts for monuments of truth,
As if you had not slept.

 

 

THE GOLDEN DAWN

 

On his return from Switzerland Crowley resides at the Hotel Cecil in London and writes his poem ‘Jephtah’ (published July 1899) and most of the poems in that volume and then rents a flat at 67 and 69 Chancery Lane in London. Julian Baker kept his word and met Crowley and introduced him to George Cecil Jones (1873-1953) – the secret assembly turned out to be the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn magical society in which Baker had been initiated into on Saturday 16^th June 1894, and Jones on Friday 12^th July 1895. Crowley was initiated into the Order on Friday 18^th November 1898 at the Isis-Urania Temple, Mark Mason’s Hall, Great Queen Street, London.

That December Crowley is seemingly still bitter over Pollitt and on Wednesday 28^th December, the night of the ‘eclipse’ he writes two sonnets ‘to the author of the phrase: “I am not a gentleman and I have no friends.”’  The first, beginning hurtfully – ‘Self-damned, the leprous moisture of thy veins / sickens the sunshine, and thine haggard eyes, / bleared with their own corrupting infamies, / glare through the charnel-house of earthly pains,’ and ends rather venomously – ‘self-damned on earth, live out thy tortured days, / that men may look upon thy face, and see / how vile a thing of woman born may be. / Then, we are done with thee; go, go thy ways / to other hells, thou damned of God hereafter, / ‘mid men’s contempt and hate and pitiless laughter.’  It is really quite spiteful and childish of Crowley and shows to what extent he was hurt by the severing of the relationship by his own hand, for the pain stayed with him for the rest of his life. The second sonnet is just as relentless in its bitter anger, condemning him to hell, ‘without a friend, thy eternal place / sweats through the painting of thy harlot’s face.’ Crowley appends a note to the sonnets, saying ‘the virulence of these sonnets is excusable when it is known that their aim was to destroy the influence in Cambridge of a man who headed in that University a movement parallel to that which at Oxford was associated with Oscar Wilde. They had their effect.’ [Mysteries: Lyrical and Dramatic. 1898. Collected Works, volume I, pp. 115-116]

Not long after this, around January 1899, Crowley meets the distinguished magician, Allan Bennett at one of the ceremonies of the Golden Dawn and after Crowley pays a visit to him, seeing he is in financial difficulty and living in squalor, he invites him to stay with him at his flat and Bennett teaches Crowley the subtle art of evocation and astral travel.

In July 1899 there appeared an article in the Pall Mall Gazette concerning the fatalities at Beachy Head (‘the fourth since Easter’) in which Aleister Crowley was interviewed. The Gazette representative found Crowley, ‘of the Scottish Mountaineering Club, who is described in Messrs. W. P. H. Smith and H. C. Hart’s “Climbing in the British Isles” as the authority on Beachy Head, the possibilities of which as a climbing resort he was the first to develop… preparing for Switzerland and the Tyrol, where he proposes to attempt some hitherto maiden peaks and very ready to dilate on the subject of Beachy Head and its unnecessarily long record of fatalities, having climbed there so recently as the week after Whitsuntide, when two persons net death upon its treacherous chalk.’ Crowley compares the difficulties of Beachy Head ‘with more ambitious mountaineering’ and ‘affords everything you get in the Alps.’ He blames climbers for not knowing the rudiments of climbing, especially on chalk and goes on to boast that ‘there are no more than twenty men in England who know the rudiments of climbing’, presumably including himself among them. he then goes on to name the ‘principle climbers who have done the Head’ as ‘Mr. H. S. Bullock, of the Climbers’ Club, Mr. Walter Weston, the Rev. A. C. Downer, and Mr. J. S. New, who helped me to make a map of the Head.’ Asked what precautions may prevent further fatalities, he suggests that ‘the only preventative measure I can recommend is that notice-boards should be erected at places where the descent appears easy; and that instead of these boards bearing merely a vague warning, they should contain particulars of the numbers of persons who have been actually killed there.’ He concludes by saying ‘failing this, I suppose, tourists and trippers will continue to meet with violent deaths there, or at best to be rescued in their hundreds by the local coastguardsmen.’ (46)

The climbing in the Alps the article refers to was Crowley and Oscar Eckenstein’s alpine training at high altitude at Montanvers in the Mont Blanc massif. Also climbing in the region was the climber Dr. Tom George Longstaff (1875-1964), who was later on the 1922 Mount Everest expedition, who recalled in his autobiography, This my voyage’ [New York. Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1950] that on Thursday 24^th August 1899, Eckenstein and Crowley gave him an ‘introduction of ice-claws, crampons, amongst British mountaineers; he [Eckenstein] even claimed that their use made the regulation ice-axe unnecessary.’ (p. 23)

They climbed the Aiguille du Geant and Crowley made a solo first climb of the Mer de Glace; he says in his Confessions (p. 215) that Eckenstein feeling unwell was unable to climb with him so ‘I had arranged to go with Longstaff and his two guides over the Col du Geant. Not feeling very fit myself, I thought I would start an hour ahead of the others. Having inspected the ice fall, I found a way straight up. When I was about half way through the seracs, I heard Longstaff’s guides yelling blue murder. I had taken the ‘wrong’ way. Their route involved a detour of a mile or more. I took no notice of their friendly anxiety and reached the top a long way in advance. When they arrived, they explained that what I had done was impossible. To carry on the joke, when we got back I offered a hundred and fifty francs to any party that would repeat the climb by my route. Nobody did so.’  Crowley composed a poem as he crossed the Col du Geant by himself before meeting up with Longstaff and his guides – The Mountain Christ: ‘Strange! how a certain fear possesses me / alone amid their crag-bound solitude.’ The poem reflects Crowley’s soul at the time, in spiritual torment and torn between the angelic and the demonic – ‘Yea! For the worship of my secret song / vibrates through every chasm of the world: / its sound is caught by angels, and made strong!’ and ends in triumphant vision:

 

O visionary valley of my Soul!
When shall thy beauty, even thine, be made
Aspure and mighty as these hills that roll
In mist and sun and shade?
O thou! the Highest! make my will as thine,
My consciousness, the consciousness divine!

[The Temple of the Holy Ghost. 1901. Collected Works, volume I, pp. 205-206]

 

Longstaff said of Crowley that he was ‘a poet and later a notorious master of Black Magic. At that time, as Laird of Boleskine, he chose to wear full Highland dress, complete with eagle’s feather, on all occasions. But he was a fine climber, if an unconventional one. I have seen him go up the dangerous and difficult right (true) side of the great ice fall of the Mer de Glace below the Geant alone, just for a promenade. Probably the first and perhaps the only time this mad, dangerous and difficult route had been taken.’ (p. 24)

In November 1899, Crowley purchased his Scottish home by Loch Ness, Boleskine House where he retired to that December to prepare for the Operation of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin. His life from that moment onwards would be a whirlwind of enchantment, romance and evocations, but always in his heart were the mountains and the song of poetry; once he had cast off the shadow of his boyhood, restricted by the Brethren’s tight grip, he became Alastor, the spirit of solitude, the wanderer in the waste.

 

 

Oh! heavenly frozen fountains!
O! Nature! vastly grand!
Come! sing upon the mountains
The song of Freedom’s land!

[The Alps. In Residence. Aleister Crowley.1904. p. 48] 

 

 

 

NOTES:

 

1. Malvern Register, 1897.p. 253. [House: Huntingdon, Class: Shell, Lower 5^th] His address is recorded as Oak View, Polworth Road, Streatham. Tonbridge School Register, 1820-1893. (1893). p. 273. Crowley had accommodation in the historic (1732) Ferox Hall boarding house.
2. Streatham News. Saturday 7^th May 1892. p. 5; also the Star (London), Friday 29^th April 1892. p. 3 and the Norwood Review and Crystal Palace Reporter. Saturday 7^th May 1892. p. 5.
3. See also the ‘CMS Extracts from the Annual Letters of the Missionaries for the year 1897’. Part VI. London. 1898. Rev. Fothergill’s letter gives a detailed account of his missionary and teaching accomplishments in the Punjab, pp. 278-280. It is worth mentioning two of Clifford’s brothers: Claude Francis Fothergill (1878-1955) of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (October1898), BA 1901, {Medicine, BC 1906, MB 1907], Lieutenant in the Great War (R.A.M.C.) and Leslie Francis Fothergill (1880-1903) of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (October 1899), BA 1902, Guy’s Hospital; he died of typhoid in London on 8^th December 1903.
4. Newspaper visitor lists have Mrs. Crowley of Streatham and her son, and Gregor Grant, of Bexley Heath, Kent, staying in Callandar from 6^th August 1892 to the end of August, possibly staying at Craigmore guest house [Callander Advertiser, Saturday 6^th August 1892, p 1; Saturday 13^th August, p. 1, Saturday 20^th August, p. 1], this would have been several months after young Crowley’s first appearance in court at Lambeth on Friday 29^th April 1892 and entering Tonbridge in May. The previous year, Crowley was with his mother at Ilfracombe, Devon from the 8^th to the end of August, staying at the Royal Clarence Hotel [Ilfracombe Chronicle, Saturday 8^th August, p. 5, Saturday 22^nd August 1891, p. 6, Saturday 22^nd August, p. 6, Saturday 29^th August, p. 6]
5. Crowley’s tutor Dr. Frederick Augustine Robinson, born Liverpool in 1870 and matriculating at Christ’s Church, Cambridge in 1893, is the son of Reverend George Robinson (1819-1881) and Henrietta Cecilia Forbes (1826-1919) who were married in 1854. Crowley does not name him in his Confessions but does say he ‘is the brother of the Dean of Westminster’ who was Rev. Joseph Armitage Robinson (1858-1933), Dean of Westminster from 1902-1911. He says of Frederick A. Robinson, after his tutoring ended, that he ‘invited me over to his mother’s house at Maze Hill [Greenwich] to spend the night, and did his best to live up to the reputation of the cloth. I did not allow him to succeed, not because I could see no sin in it, but because I thought it was a trap to betray me to my family.’ [Confessions. p. 72] Crowley goes a little further in his volume The World’s Tragedy (1910), saying how the Dean may ‘still be ignorant of how that brother Fred (one of my tutors) attempted to seduce me in his own mother’s house at Maze Hill. This came a little later; and I knew exactly what he was doing, as it happened. I let him go as far as he did, with the deliberate intention of making sure on that point.’
6. Around 1890-91 when Crowley was 15 years old he was staying in Wales with his tutor at Llyn Idwal Farm in Snowdonia where he was laid up in bed with measles; he was much taken by the gloomy prospect of Llyn Idwal Lake and the Twll Ddu nearby. It was here, suffering in bed, that he wrote his early poem ‘The Balloon’ (see Olla, pp. 28-29). Richard Kaczynsky notes in his Perdurabo – The Life of Aleister Crowley (2002) [revised and expanded edition, 2010, p. 573, footnote 125] that his ‘application to the Scottish Mountaineering Club records ascents as early as summer 1890, for Ben Vane (3,002 feet), Ben Cruachan (3,694 feet) and the highest mountain in the British Isles, Ben Nevis 94,402 feet). Likewise, in August, the month prior to meeting Lister at Skye, Crowley had also climbed the following Scottish peaks: Ben Ledi (2,884 feet), Ben A’an (1,488 feet), Ben Vorlich (Loch Earn, 3,232 feet), Ben More (Crianlarich, 3,852 feet), Ben Lawers (3,983 feet), Ben Lui (3,707 feet), Ben Oss (3,376 feet), and Beinn Dubhchraig (3,209 feet)’. [footnote 130] – April/May 1893 climbs in Snowdonia: ‘Tryfan (3,002 feet), GlyderFach (3,261 feet), Glyder Fawr (3,278 feet), Y Garn (Glyderau) (3,107 feet), Foel Grach (3,202 feet), the Craig Yr Ysfa ridge, Carnedd Dafydd (3,425 feet), Carnedd Llewelyn (3,491 feet), Yr Elen (3,156 feet), Pen yr Helgi Du (2,733 feet), Y Lliwedd (2,946 feet), the Twill Ddu cliff of Colqwen y Geifr, and the highest mountain in Wales, Snowdon (3,560 feet). That June (and laterthat September) 1893 he visited the Lake District for the following Cumbrian ascents: Helvellyn (3,117 feet), Dollywagon Pike (2,815 feet), Harrison Stickle (2,415 feet), Stickle Pike (1,230 feet), Thunacar Knott (2,372 feet), High WhiteStones (High Raise, Langdale) (2,500 feet), Sergeant Man (2,415 feet), Skiddaw (3,054 feet), Helvellyn Lower Man (3,035 feet), Bowfell (2,959 feet), Great End (2,986 feet), Ill Crag (3,068 feet), Broad Crag (3,064 feet), Scafell Pike (3,209 feet), ScaFell (3,163 feet), Pillar (2,927 feet), Great Gable (2,949 feet), Pike o’ Blisko (2,313 feet), Crinkle Crags (2,818 feet), ShelterCrags (2,673 feet), Bowfell (2,959 feet), Hanging Knott (2,828 feet), Rossett Crag 92,136 feet) and Pavey Ark (2,288 feet).’ Kaczynsky gives a note of thanks to ‘Clint Warren, Scottish Mountaineering Club archivist Robin Campbell, and William Breeze for Crowley’s SMC application.’
7. Eastbourne Gazette, Wednesday 24^th January 1894. p. 3. Crowley also had several chess problems printed in periodicals: The Albany Evening Journal (1893) – 7^th January, 28^th January, 11^th February, 18^th March, 19^th August, and in The Field – 5^th August 1893.
8. Eastbourne Gazette, Wednesday 31^st January 1894.p. 7.
9. Eastbourne Gazette, Wednesday 7^th March 1894. p. 3.
10. Eastbourne Gazette, Wednesday 21^st March 1894. p. 2.
11. Eastbourne Gazette, Wednesday 28^th March 1894.p. 3.
12. Eastbourne Gazette, Wednesday 18^th April 1894. p. 3.
13. Eastbourne Gazette, Wednesday 30^th May 1894. p.7.
14. George Ferguson Gregor Grant, Crowley’s 2^nd cousin, born in Calcutta on 12^th February 1869 (Christened there on 5^th September 1869) who was the son of George Gregor Grant (1839-11908), a watchmaker [1901 census] who married Emily Bertha Crowley’s [Aleister’s mother] cousin, Jessie Kate Cole (1839-1885) in Calcutta on 6^th December 1865. G. F. Gregor Grant worked as a clerk in the custom’s office and was a member of the Royal Photographic Society [elected 1894, Fellow 1895] and Hon. Sec. of the Exchange Postal Negative Club, and the Scottish Mountaineering Club; he married Alice Gertrude Nettleton (born 18^th April 1877), daughter of William Nettleton (1845-1921) a brewer, and Mary Ann Jane Hall, at the Emmanuel Church, Streatham Common on 18^th March 1899. George and Alice had two sons: Garrow Gregor Grant, born 20^th October 1900, and Fergus Colesworthy Gregor Grant, born 12^th November 1906.Garrow, an architect, married Joan Adeline Wilson Collins in 1931 in Tonbridge and later, Captain Garrow Gregor Grant, who enlisted in the Royal Engineers on 8^th January 1940 was captured as a prisoner of war in Singapore on 15^th February 1942 (and sent to Changi prison camp, Singapore); after liberation from Japan he arrived in Liverpool on 27^th October 1945. He died in Tonbridge, Kent in 1973. Fergus, also an architect, married Helen Mary Stephanie Hill in 1945 and died in Tunbridge Wells in 1984. George Ferguson Gregor Grant died in Tonbridge on 22^nd October 1939 and his wife, Alice Gertrude grant died there in 1969. Addresses connected to G. F. Gregor Grant are: Tower House, Bexley Heath, Kent; ‘Aviemore’, Lucien Road, Tooting Bec Common, London; 1, Woodbury Road Mansions, Tunbridge Wells; 3, Grove Hill Gardens, Tunbridge Wells.
15. Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal. Volume III, Number 17. May 1895. Chalk Climbing on Beachy Head by E. A. Crowley pp. 288-294 (p. 293). ‘Mummery spikes’ refers to the climber, Albert Frederick Mummery (1855-1895), celebrated Alpine mountaineer who died attempting to climb Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas.
16. The photograph of Crowley and Grant upon the Needle and the Tooth was taken by Sidney Gibb, son of Joseph Gibbs of ‘Gibbs and Son’, chemist, 53d Terminus Road, Eastbourne, ‘who dared the most awful perils in his attempt to depict us.’ Two photographs accompany the article. SMCJ. III. 17. May 1895. p. 293.
17. Monsieur Justin Auguste Lambert (1832-1908) and Catherine Amalie Lassing (1835-1915) – Swiss born Monsieur Justin Lambert married Catherine at St. Giles, London in 1861 and they had the following children: Emile Auguste Theodore Lambert (1862-1931), Auguste Emmanuel Lambert (1866-1951), James Rudolf Paul Lambert (1868-1906), Clara Amalie Lambert (1872-1953), Isabelle Lambert (1873-1953) and Amelia Mary Lambert, born 1875. Monsieur J. A. Lambert was Assistant Master of Trinity College, Eastbourne and Senior Master of the Junior School, teaching Modern Languages. He died in Eastbourne on 12^th May 1908, aged 75.
18. Dr. Alfred Ernest Maylard (1854-1947), surgeon, and Martin William Maylard (1856-1914), both born in Kent to Alfred Martin Maylard (1831-1872) and Ellen Mira French (1835-1915).
19. The Alpine Journal. Volume XVII, Number CXXVIII (128). May 1895. Alpine Notes, p. 451.
20. Eastbourne Gazette, Wednesday 1^st August 1894. p. 3.
21. Eastbourne Gazette, Wednesday 5^th September 1894. p. 2.
22. see A Magick Life by Martin Booth. London. Coronet Books. 2001. pp. 43-44.
23. Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal. Volume III, Number 16. January 1895. p. 228.
24. Niagara Hall, 20-25, York Street, Westminster, with its depiction of Niagara in winter opened on Saturday 5^th January 1895 and was later, in January, converted into an ice rink.
25. Duke of Orleans – Louis Phillippe Robert (1869-1926), born in England where the family had been in exile, succeeded his father, the count of Paris in 1894 and became head of the Royal family of France; his mother was the Spanish Infanta, Louise of Montpensier. Louis Phillippe was one of six children – one brother and four sisters – his eldest sister, Princess Amelia, married the King of Portugal. Prince Phillippe, the Duke of Orleans was the ‘pretender’ to the French throne from 1894 until his death and known to his followers as King Phillippe VIII.
26. Herbert Vincent Reade (1870-1929), the well-known climbing enthusiast  who held meetings with fellow climbers in his rooms at 73, Jermyn Street, London, prior to forming the Climbing Club in 1898.
27. The Duke of Orleans died of pneumonia in Palermo, Sicily, on Sunday 28^th March 1926.
28. Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal. Volume IV, Number 19. January 1896. Notes and Queries, p. 61. Heights in feet: Wetterlucke, 10,436 feet; Petersgrat, 10,505 feet; Eiger, 13,015 feet; Jungfrau, 13,642 feet.
29. Some records of Crowley’s chess matches at the time are: Friday 27^th March at 2 p.m. at the British Chess Club, 37, King Street, Covent Garden, London, an annual Inter-University match between Oxford and Cambridge in which Crowley won his game against H. N. Robbins (Corpus), who exceeded his time limit [The Cambridge Review, volume xvil, number 429, Thursday 30^th April 1896, p. 281]; 23^rd January 1897, Cambridge University Chess Club (C.U.C.C.) v Metropolitan and Crowley won against A. M. Fox [The Cambridge Review. Thursday 28^th January 1897, volume xviii, number 448, p. 190] and Friday 2^nd April 1897 (2-6 p.m.) at the British Chess Club where Captains of the respected Clubs, Crowley lost to E. G. Spencer-Churchill (Magdalen) [The Book of Blues, ed. Ogier Rysden. London. F. E. Robinson & Co. 1900. p. 68]
30. Alumni Cantabridgienses, Admissions to Trinity College, Cambridge. 1913. p. 1030. There is an article which mentions Mrs. Emily B. Crowley, of ‘Coire Na Creiche, Rutford Road, Streatham’ in the Daily Telegraph & Courier (London), Saturday 17^th March 1897. p. 8.
31. Official Year Book of the Scientific & Learned Societies of Great Britain and Ireland. London. 1896. p.37.
32. Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal. Volume IV, Number 19. January 1896. pp. 129-132.
33. The Standard. Saturday 20^th June 1896. p. 1. see also Crowley’s poem ‘In Memoriam A. J. B.’ Songs of the Spirit [1898] in The Collected Woks of Aleister Crowley, volume I. 1905. p. 31.
34. Dr. Morris William Travers, D.Sc., F.R.S. (1872-1961) was elected a member of the Scottish Mountaineering Club at a Special General Meeting in Glasgow on Wednesday 2^nd December 1896 and published several scientific volumes: An Experimental Study of Gasses. London. Macmillan and Co. Ltd. 1901; Some Compounds of Boron, Oxygen, and Hydrogen. London. H. K. Lewis & Co. 1916, and A Life of Sir William Ramsay. London. Edward Arnold Ltd. 1956. He also published many papers in scientific periodicals such as: On the state in which Helium exists in Minerals. Nature, volume 71, number 1837, 12^th January 1905, pp. 248-249; The Condensation of Helium. Nature, volume 77, number 2009, 30^th April 1908, pp. 606-607, and The Control of Scientific and Industrial Research. Nature, volume 104, number 2623, 5^th February 1920, pp. 597-598.
35. Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal. Volume IV, Number 22. January 1897. p. 242, ‘Excursions’.
36. The Traverse of the Aiguilles Rouges (poem). In Residence: The Don’s Guide to Cambridge. Aleister Crowley. Cambridge. Elijah Johnson. 1904. pp. 56-58 (p. 57).
37. Morris Travers had four younger brothers: a) Harold Paget Travers (1873-1947), Solicitor [preliminary Law examinations May 1891, finals in June 1897]; Major in the Army; he married Ethel Mary Clunn on 23^rd June 1907; b) Henry Cecil Travers (1876-1958), Blundell’s School, Tiverton (like his older brother, Morris); Institution of Civil Engineers (student February 1894, passed examination in 1898; Mechanical Engineering at the Faculty of Arts, Law and Science, University College, London, 1894-1895); in the Army: Royal Artillery; married Julia Elisabeth Robson at St. Asaph, Wales in 1904; c) Dr. Ernest Frank Travers M.D. (1878-1961), medical student, St. Barts (1906);in the 1920’and 30’s was a divisional police surgeon; he married Edith Mary Kinross (1881-1975), the daughter of the Scottish composer, John Kinross (1848-1890) in Kingston in 1907; d) Wilfred Irwin Travers (1883-1954), OBE, Lt.-Col. (Royal Engineers); Uppingham School (May 1897), architect ARIBA (1906, FRIBA 1917);married Vera Patty Helsham McCausland in Wareham, Dorset in 1919. The Travis parental family home was 2, Phillimore Gardens, Kensington, London.
38. ‘At Stockholm’ (p. 41) and ‘To J. L. D.’ (p. 66), in White Stains [Leonard Smithers. Amsterdam] (1898). See also Crowley’s Not the Life and Adventures of Roger Bloxam’ (1916-17).
39. The Berlin Chess Tournament held at the Architektenhaus in Berlin gathered twenty of the world’s best chess masters; the winner was Rudolf Charousek (1873-1900) (Hungary) and the runners up were: 2^nd – Carl August Walbrodt (1871-1902) (Germany), 3^rd – Joseph Henry Blackburne (1841-1924) (England) and 4^th – David Janowski (1868-1927) (Poland/France).
40. Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal. Volume V, Number 25. January 1898. p. 40, ‘Excursions’. Pic Coolidge (12,385 feet), Breche de la Meije (11,014 feet), Aiguille de la Za (12,034 feet), Mont Collon (11,932 feet).
41. The Amsterdam Notebook. 1898 (Crowley writes in pencil): 8 sonnets: ‘Love me or leave me’, ‘Your love is light’, ‘To pass through the pale streets’, I, who am dying for thy kiss’, ‘He, who seduced me first’, ‘A sailor’s kiss is branded’, ‘Did you speak truly?’ and ‘The old, dark evening’; there are also 6 rondels and songs, one of which is ‘The Red lips of the Octopus’.
42. Crowley terminated the relationship with Pollitt at the Bear Hotel, Maidenhead, where he had gone to write his poem ‘Jezebel’; Pollitt had followed him there and no doubt some scene played out and Crowley called an end to the greatest and noblest friendship he had ever encountered.
43. The 22 routes vary from the ‘Easy Way’, to the ‘The Right Slab’, ‘The South Arete, one leg each side all the way’, ‘The Overhang Arete’, ‘The Left Crack. You must not use the jammed stone’, ‘Between the Cracks, ‘The Right Crack’, ‘The North Corner’, ‘The Left Undercut, not using the Right Crack’, ‘The Right Undercut, keeping the edge’, ‘The North Corner on the face’, ‘The Steeple Ridge from the N. E.’, ‘The Left Slab not using the edge’, ‘The Easy Crack’, ‘The Middle Slab’, etc. Also staying at the Wastwater Hotel that Easter 1898 climbing season was the Manchester mountaineer and surgeon, Joseph Collier (1855-1905) who was there from Wednesday 6^th – Monday 11^th April; Owen Glynne Jones (1867-1899), who was there for the Easter weekend, Saturday 30^th March and civil servant, William Jones Williams (1863-1949) who was at the hotel from Saturday 9^th March – Monday 11^th April and climbed and helped survey local gullies with O. G. Jones; they explored Scafell on Monday 11^th April, descended Deep Ghyll and did a new route up Scafell Pinnacle. An interesting volume of the period is Owen Glynne Jones’s ‘Rock Climbing in the English Lake District. Cumberland. G P Abraham and Sons. 1897 [2^nd ed. 1900]
44. Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal. Volume v, Number 28. January 1899.p. 195, ‘Excursions 1898’.
45. Nature. Volume 58, Number 1505. 1^st September 1898, pp. 419-420. Professor Hopkinson, F.R.S. of Trinity College, Cambridge (1867) was a physicist and electrical engineer of King’s College, London and a member of the Alpine Club. The Alpine Journal of November 1898 says that ‘a few days before the accident she’ [Miss Alice Hopkinson] was ‘with her father and brother, without a guide’ and ‘had made the ascent of the Aiguille de la Za on the Arolla side, over the rocks all the way.’ The ‘party left the hotel at 7.30 on the morning of August 27 to climb the Petite Dent de Veisivi… the four were on one rope, the son leading, then the younger daughter, then Mr. Hopkinson, and lastly the elder daughter. A large stone was found lying on the body of the leader, and Dr. Hopkinson’s hand was grasping the rope in a way which suggests that he was trying to check the fall of one or both of those in front. The bodies had fallen about 500ft., and it was clear that death had been instantaneous in every case.’… ‘The bodies were found at daybreak on the 28^th by Mr. G. T. Walker and Mr. M. Travers, who with Pierre Maitre and other guides, were searching the foot of the rocks.’ The bodies were watched over them all day and night until the inquiry was held and the bodies were removed ‘early in the morning of Monday, August 29, and the bodies were then brought down to Satarma.’[The Alpine Journal. Volume xix, Number cxlii (142). November 1898. 'Alpine Accidents in 1898’, pp. 266-267]
46. The Pall Mall Gazette: The Fatalities at Beachy Head, an Interview with Mr. Aleister Crowley. Saturday 8^th July 1899. p. 3. The four climbers he mentions are: Henry Somerset Bullock (1871-1963) of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and member of the Alpine Club from 1897-1921; Rev. Walter Weston (1860-1940 of Clare College, Cambridge; Rev. Arthur Cleveland Downer (1847-1943) of Brasenose College, Oxford, poet and author [‘Mountaineering Ballads’. 1905] and J. S. New, of whom Crowley says in his Confessions (p. 97) that he ‘found a new climbing companion on Beach Head in a man named J. S. New. We worked out the possible climbs systematically and made a large-scale map of the cliff.’ The reference to Crowley in ‘Climbers of the British Isles’ [volume I: England] by Walter Parry Haskett Smith and Henry Chichester Hart (London. Longmans Green and Co. 1894) says in the section on Beachy Head (pp. 5-6) that ‘there is a dangerous-looking pinnacle, which was climbed (by dint of cutting a step or two) in April 1894, by Mr. E. A. Crowley.’ The same interview given in the Pall Mall Gazette also appeared in the Eastbourne Chronicle, Saturday 15^th July 1899, p.6.