Gall Wasps and Whitewash

Anger at the Abbey of Thelema

It takes three thick coats to cover the murals and three days to dry, even in the Sicilian heat of late summer. The work is completed in ill-temper, over the arsenic greens, the staring eyes, the flamboyant script, the cocks and cunts, the room of nightmares. Holy water is splashed on the floors, windows and doors. A cement screed is hastily poured over the temple circle. The Villa Santa Barbara, named after the saint of explosives, was exorcised by the villagers, priest and fascist police who united to erase the episode which marred the reputation of the seaside town.¹ They acted under the orders of distant Rome, which had recently fallen to the Blackshirts.² Arte degenerate, not Roman art but a filthy and foreign diabolism, could not be allowed to flourish, even at the fringes of the Patria.

Mr Crowley and his menagerie left only ghosts behind. Even the corpse of poor Raoul Loveday, the blue-eyed beloved of tiger woman Betty May, was exhumed from the unhallowed ground in the shadow of Lion Rock, and freighted back to London.

Cefalù drowsed on through the war and aftermath, unaware that as the whitewash hardened it formed a protective crust over the works, painted by the Great Beast and his acolytes in their rented villa of obscene mysteries. The Abbey was abandoned in 1923, its secrets concealed for the next 37 years.

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Anger, for once in his life, rose with Ra. He would take a coffee at the harbour where the young men worked on the boats, then slip like a lizard back into the deserted Abbey. Stripped to the waist and wearing thick black rubber gloves he poured diluted acid on the walls and scraped off the veils of paint. The Abbey of Thelema was now owned by two brothers, a communist and a fascist, with a wall built through the middle. The opportunist Anger had broken in, and was soon disturbed by workmen sent by the fascist brother who promptly destroyed a whole series of images as they set about their own repairs. The news of the discovered demonic murals was relayed, and Anger promptly locked out. The communist brother thought differently, and over three glorious months, an entire autumn, the acolyte was admitted to do his work in one half of the disputed building. Of course he filmed it. Of course that film is lost. Only Anger saw those remarkable colours bloom back through the blank walls.

Some evenings he would go into town and watch silent comedies, accompanied by a rinky dink piano, just like Crowley did. Or he would sit in the doorway of the Abbey with a bottle of wine and watch the bats and stars come out. The local residents were not so enthused, and a black cat was decapitated and left on the Abbey steps as both a warning and a curse upon the new resident.³ That same night of ill-omen the sexologist Kinsey arrived, accompanied by the photographer and climber Fosco Maraini. He captures them in the Abbey: Anger with lantern in hand, Kinsey in dickie bow and grey suit. Anger is the light-bearer, the hermit, his face almost entirely cowled in darkness.⁴ The beams from his lantern light Kinsey, and fill his emphatic gesturing hands. There is a third point of attention in the composition, a photograph of Crowley himself presides over the scene. Kinsey is lost deep in Crowley’s hypnotic stare, all judgement suspended, his hands held a heart’s width apart. Crowley is lent a body by the shadow of an unseen other, and made present in the room, a ghost in the house of ghosts.

Kinsey, having studied gall wasps with a maddening exactitude, applied himself to the new field of sexology in the same manner. Kinsey and Anger had first met at a screening of the younger man’s homoerotic sailor film, Fireworks. Here was an expression of a burgeoning artistic and creative sexuality; not the banality of porn, a genre which Anger always despised. Kinsey recognised the coming future in the work of the auteur, with homosexuality emerging from the shadows of conservative America. Anger immediately sold him the print, hot off the projector and into a can. The purchase cost $100 and was the first acquisition of many, bestowing Anger immortality in the Kinsey Institute and the annals of human sexuality. Kinsey was a valuable patron and authority figure for the twenty-year-old Anger who would introduce him to his artistic friends and the data-rich seam of the LA leather underground. Anger was invited in turn to Bloomington Indiana, and filmed masturbating for science in the secret attic room by Kinsey’s one-armed cameraman. He took an exact ten minutes to reach his climax. In Italy, once the Abbey was documented and shot, the two would tour brothels and cruising spots together. It was to be Kinsey’s final expedition, he died the next year at the age of 62.

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For the Thelemites, the Abbey was the first utopia founded on the Book of the Law, the new dispensation for mankind. For the sexologist Kinsey, the Abbey was a unique visual record of sex and desire between the two world wars. Crowley had insisted that the images were not intended to shock, but to undo the preconceptions of his students whilst scaring away the dilettantes. The demons crawling up to observe the bed in the room of nightmares, the congress of lesbians, the coupling of women and goats, all should be viewed with a steady mind. His stated aim was to purify the emotions and thereby ‘give the sub-conscious will a chance to express itself clearly.’⁵ He insisted that, ‘The sexual instinct thus freed from its bonds will no more be liable to assume monstrous shapes. Perversion will become as rare as the freaks in a dime museum.’⁶ The only condition Crowley sets for sexual liberation is that every act is to be considered a sacrament undertaken freely by sovereign individuals. By his account, the Law of Thelema had solved the sexual problem, and if we only read his Confessions, Cefalù appears an idyll.

I do not believe that Confessions provides an honest assessment of what took place at the Abbey, or an accurate account of human nature. Crowley showed no evidence of transcending the perverse, but hung limply in its jaws, and often sick, often absent from the community, on the see-saw of cocaine and heroin addiction, disconsolate from mourning the deaths of a child and then a disciple. Though we tend to think of the Abbey in terms of free love and free will, it was an experiment in transgression, methodical mutual abasement and the destruction of morality.

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The method Crowley applied to sex went hand in hand with his approach to drugs: The Thelemite would equally master these appetites by making of them a holy sacrament. He sets this out in his prospectus for monied addicts, Diary of a Drug Fiend, a truly terrible novel smashed out in a month at Cefalù. The idealised community headed by King Lamus (Crowley) effects a cure on Peter Pendragon and Louise Laleham, who were on the verge of suicide as a result of their untrammelled consumption. Lamus insists that the real danger of drugs is that they allow you to dodge spiritual and intellectual development. He takes a Paracelsian position, that everything in nature can be used for our benefit, if only we use it wisely. A little bump of cocaine overcomes inertia; conversely, a distracted mind can be calmed by a pinch of heroin. In this manner, drugs and sex are made an adjunct to the will.

Yet the free availability of drugs at the Abbey did not render them unattractive. The sparkling snows were impervious to even the Will of the Beast, who slunk off to Paris to cure his dependency, detailed with great honesty in Liber XVIII: The Fountain of Hyacinth. He was so sure that he would die in the process that he writes his will on the flyleaf, leaving everything to Leah who languished back in Cefalù. If the Master himself applied the theorem and failed so spectacularly, what hope was there for ordinary mortals? His example has destroyed countless followers.

Crowley’s radical proposition – that there are no poisons and no perversions – is disastrously wrong. Physical addiction to opiates and cocaine is not solved by mindful dosing or ritual framing. Human sexuality is not a rainbow of beautiful possibilities, but contains many dark and destructive potentials. As sexologists observe, perversions (which we now politely call paraphilias) cluster. Crowley had a full hand of such perversities, and those that he lacked, he hankered after and stimulated by describing them in verse and prose. Kinsey was intrigued by such a catalogue, but not a believer in the man or his philosophy; though his detractors insinuate otherwise and use the connection to disparage his research in its entirety.

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Thelemites have been quick to call out the lies printed in the press about the goings on in Cefalù, but act as apologists for the toxic relationship of Leah Hirsig and Aleister Crowley. As Scarlet Woman, she has been claimed by feminists, but Leah, the Swiss-American sadomasochist, is not a role model to emulate. It would be apt to say that her dead soul brought out the worst in Crowley. She encouraged his excesses, in part as a bulwark against the threat of his other mistresses and rivals for affection in the discordant community, and in part for her own selfish erotic pleasure. Her authority is better described as contingent on Crowley, rather than proximal.⁷ The vision of Babalon in the Cefalù period is purely satanic, and modelled on the pathologies of the sublime Leah herself, acting in concert with Crowley’s predilection for the abject. Debasement does not lead to the discovery of human potential and liberated female power. The grotesque, the ugly and the obscene were the lopsided virtues rhymed by the schoolboy Crowley into a poetry that revels in shit and piss. He would in due course abandon Leah, as he abandoned all his used up lovers.

Crowley, like Kinsey, was a scientific man, and made exacting records of his sexual experiments. The bloated entry of August 12 1920, in The Magical Record of the Beast 666, tells of an extended debauch sustained on a diet of cocaine, ether, heroin, milk and biscuits. While Leah is lost in unrousable sleep, Crowley praises her love of evil, which he recounts in a series of erotic reveries, including this passage:

She hath given Her two year bastard boy to Her lewd lover’s whim of sodomy, hath taught him speech and act, things infinitely abhorred, with Her own beastly caress. She hath tongued Her five-month girl and asked its father to deflower it.

Given Crowley’s extravagant sexual imagination, his enthusiasts have grounds to handwave this away. Yet with the documented evidence of coprophilia, urolagnia and even attempted bestiality at the Abbey, would Crowley have drawn the line at Leah’s challenge to engage in pedophilia? Was he not the Beast? Was she not the Great Whore?

Certainly Crowley, stinking of ether and denied sleep by the white powder, was telling himself a dirty story to stimulate his flagging libido. But in his spiritual exercises, he strove to go beyond morality; and Leah pushed him further in that direction than anyone else could. Crowley was fastidious in his transgressions, as scientific in mindset as Kinsey himself.⁸ Though such abuse violates the fundamental law of Thelema, the will of the sovereign individual, we cannot ignore his testimony, of an appalling desire cradled between the two of them as an obscene flame. Crowley and Leah had torn up the rules of behaviour for themselves and others, drowning in a misery of squalor, addiction and near constant dysentery. The liberation did not come. In their respective diaries they seem as bound to their perversities as the moral are to their restrictions.

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Like the Thelemites, Kinsey revealed a concealed world of sexuality beneath the veneer of straight society. Reading Kinsey’s groundbreaking Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male enabled Jack Parsons to positively interrogate and come to terms with his own bisexual impulses. I note that Agape Lodge, under Wilfred T. Smith and Jack Parsons, was criticised by Crowley for libertinage, but it witnessed none of the grotesque abuses that occurred at Cefalù.

But when we clean off the white wash, we cannot predict what will be revealed. The monsters are not all projections of our neuroses, nor are they simply misunderstood virtues. Repression has a safeguarding purpose for the vulnerable, women and children. Homosexuality is not the only denied desire, and not all kink is consensual. The impulse to violate a dehumanised and objectified other is not a form of radical undoing, but a pathological sickness.

Kinsey’s fall was guaranteed by the inclusion of data from pedophiles, which he tabulated and printed as if he was observing and cataloguing gall wasps. He became logically numb to the purpose of morality, as Crowley had before him, gradually conditioned into accepting the unacceptable – and it rightfully stung him. When he proposed homosexuality as existing on a spectrum for all males, he was exposing a truth but propagating a lie. His samples were not representative, the collection methods flawed, the conclusions dubious. Like the Abbey, it was not human sexuality writ large, rather the magnification of the extreme ends of the spectrum. However, for outliers, such as Anger, this was part of a journey to self-acceptance, to confronting the face of their desire and creating a positive gay identity. But the overwriting of heterosexuality with homosexual norms has been the grave error of our times, one in which Crowley, Anger and Kinsey all played their part. As our Western societies grapple with the hangover from the permissive sixties, the overreach of woke identity politics, and demographic collapse, my concern is that the reaction will be to whitewash the walls again.

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I have made pilgrimage to this nettle-bedded house of ghosts and broken tiles. Since Anger, pilgrims have smashed off the plaster and taken away fragments of the nightmare to cherish. For all that I have written here, I remember the great swell of emotion as I knelt by the stele in the temple room. It was not only the murals that moved me, but that visitors had written on every other available surface. What remains standing now is supported by ink and longing. The desire that sustains the Abbey is the impulse towards freedom, not the following of Crowley’s flawed programme.

1. To the contrary, Crowley suggests the villagers raised a petition against their expulsion, and that they were liked in the area as eccentrics. It seems more probable that some enjoyed the antics of the artists, but that the Catholic majority did not.

2. Crowley wrote a series of poems, Songs for Italy, which castigate and curse Mussolini as a socialist rat. The work includes this epigram on the Blackshirts:

How practical to wear a shirt
Whose colour will not show the dirt!
How excellent a point of art
To wear a shirt to match my heart!
Helpful its hue for those who lurk
At night, with knives to do their work!

3. The same thing happened to Cecil Williamson at Bourton-on-the-Water in response to his opening of a witchcraft museum.

4. The Hermit, Atu IX in Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, is the mystery of the secret seed.

5. Quoted in Richard Kaczynski’s Perdurabo, 285.

6. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley,.851

7. The position of Manon Hedenborg-White, which I politely disagree with.

8. We can observe this behaviour in Crowley from his youth, when he carefully tortured a cat to death to deprive it of all nine lives.