Aleister Crowley Read Online Free PDF Page A

spiritual nature with miraculous powers—supermen—who clandestinely watch over humanity and guide it in its evolution. Blavatsky always insisted that her Masters were actual men who had developed their dormant powers, not beings from another dimension, as Crowley and others would claim. 12 But whoever the Secret Chiefs were, at this point, the only person they were speaking to was the head of the order, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. By 1898 Woodman had died and Westcott had been forced to leave the order. Some papers Westcott left in a hansom cab that spoke of his magical pursuits came to theattention of his superiors at the London Coroner’s office, and they explained that if he wished to keep his job, he would have to give up magic. This left Mathers in sole command. Like George Cecil Jones, Mathers (Deo Duce Comite Ferro
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“God My Guide, My Companion a Sword”) had a fiery temperament and his dictatorial leadership style and later favoring of Crowley eventually led to a schism in the order. He claimed that in 1892 he had made direct contact with the Secret Chiefs and that this conferred on him sole authority. His account of the experience is worth noting. Mathers wrote that “I can only compare it to the continued effect of that usually experienced momentarily by any person close to whom a flash of lightning passes during a violent storm; coupled with a difficulty in respiration similar to the half-strangling effect produced by ether.” 13
    Mathers had been the curator of the prestigious Horniman Museum in South London, but an argument with Frederick J. Horniman, his boss, led to his dismissal. Annie Horniman, Frederick’s daughter and a Golden Dawn initiate, gave Mathers a pension of £443 a year and with this he went to Paris, where he haunted the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. Mathers claimed that while walking through the Bois de Boulogne, a large park on the western edge of the city, he met three Secret Chiefs who told him that he was their representative and sole channel of authority for the Golden Dawn. This claim, coupled with the fact that Mathers was leading the order from a different city, led to great dissatisfaction with his leadership. Crowley’s appearance acted as a catalyst and in little more than a year the order fractured.
    Like Crowley, Mathers was an eccentric character, mixing an obsession with magic with another passion, military history. Like Crowley, he was a vivid fantasist. Mathers joined a volunteer infantrygroup and was photographed in a lieutenant’s uniform. Mathers didn’t have that rank but the photograph was a means of supporting his self-image as an officer. Mathers adopted
MacGregor
as a name in the middle of the Celtic craze that led Crowley to join the Celtic Church. Mathers was photographed in Highland regalia, but he had no Scottish blood. He was born in London’s East End in 1854, the son of a clerk; he never set foot in Scotland until 1897, and then only to inspect a Golden Dawn branch in Edinburgh. He also called himself the “Count of Glenstrae,” showing a taste for unwarranted titles that Crowley would soon also display.
    In 1887 Mathers met Moina Bergson, sister of the philosopher Henri Bergson, in the British Museum, and they soon married. Moina was an art student at the Slade School; she was also psychic and Mathers often used her powers when he needed to contact the Secret Chiefs. Crowley, too, employed female seers when he needed to contact the higher planes. As with Mathers, it was Crowley’s wife who provided a direct line to the Secret Chiefs. Yeats, who met Mathers in the early 1890s, called him a “figure of romance.” Once, Yeats met Mathers when he was wearing Highland dress and had knives stuck into his stockings. He told the poet, “When I’m dressed like this I feel like a walking flame.” 14 Much of the Golden Dawn magic, as well as Crowley’s, has to do with what is called the “assumption of the god form,” when the magician