Confessions of Aleister Crowley

102 So much for Buer. As for the lady, she came to see me some time later and I saw that I was myself acting selfishly in setting my spiritual welfare above her happiness. She had made a generous gesture; I could do no less. She agreed not to stand in the way of my performing the Operation of Abra-Melin, but begged me to give her a living memory of our love. I agreed and the sequel will be told in its place. During this time, magical phenomena were of constant occurrence. I had two temples in my flat; one white, the walls being lined with six huge mirrors, each six feet by eight; the other black1, a mere cupboard, in which stood an altar supported by the figure of a Negro standing on his hands. The presiding genius of this place was a human skeleton, which I fed from time to time with blood, small birds and the like. The idea was to give it life, but I never got further than causing the bones to become covered with a viscous slime2. In The Equinox, vol. I, no. 1 is a story, "At the Fork of the Roads", which is in every detail a true account of one episode of this period. Will Bute is W. B, Yeats3, Hypatia Gay is Althoea Gyles, the publisher is Leonard Smithers. The demons connected with Abra-Melin do not wait to be evoked; they come unsought. One night Jones and I went out to dinner. I noticed on leaving the white temple that the latch of its Yale lock had not caught. Accordingly, I pulled the door to and tested it. As we went out, we noticed semi- solid shadows on the stairs; the whole atmosphere was vibrating with the forces which we had been using. (We were trying to condense them into sensible images.) When we came back, nothing had been disturbed in the flat; but the temple door was wide open, the furniture disarranged and some of the symbols flung about in the room. We restored order and then observed that semi- materialized beings were marching around the main room in almost unending procession. When I finally left the flat for Scotland, it was found that the mirrors were too big to take out except by way of the black temple. This had, or course, been completely dismantled before the workmen arrived. But the atmosphere remained and two of them were put out of action for several hours. It was almost a weekly experience, by the way, to hear of casual callers fainting or being seized with dizziness, cramp or apoplexy on the stair case. It was a long time before those rooms were re-let. People felt {182} 1. Iehi Aour never had anything to do with this; and I but little: the object of establishing it was probably to satisfy my instinct about equilibrium. 2. WEH Note: In an action Crowley brought for libel in 1934, he testified under oath on the particulars of this set of temples; see "The Magical Link", Sept./Oct. 1988, a members' publication of O.T.O., for an excerpt of the trial transcript. On the point of feeding skeletons, mine likes beer. Crowley had an aversion to beer and probably never tried it. I just pore a little on a fossil dinosaur bone at her feet now and then, and she firms up nicely. They also like jewelry. 3. The identification is conjectural, depending solely on the admissions of Miss Gyles. instinctively the presence of something uncanny. Similarly, later on, when I gave up my rooms in Victoria Street, a pushing charlatan thought to better himself by taking them. With this object he went to see them. A few seconds later he was leaping headlong down the five flights of stairs, screaming in terror. He had just sufficient genuine sensitiveness to feel the forces, without possessing the knowledge, courage and will required to turn them to account, or even to endure their impact. 22 Apart from my daily work, my chief preoccupation was to prepare for the Operation of the Sacred Magick.