Confessions of Aleister Crowley

501 Early in January, I received a visit from the lady hereafter called the Ape of Thoth and her elder sister. The chain of circumstances antecedent is strangely tenuous. I had brought a letter of introduction, from England, to Hereward Carrington from my friend the Hon. Everard Feilding. Through Carrington, it came about that I was asked to lecture under the auspices of a particularly transparent charlatan named Christiansen, who worked the sealed letter swindle with a crudity that paid a very poor compliment to his audience. Among my hearers was only one bearing even a remote resemblance to the human species, an old lady painted to resemble the cover of a popular magazine. I went to talk to her after the lecture and found she was an intimate friend of dear Hereward's. I saw no more of her except by accident for a few minutes' chat on two or three occasions. One evening in the spring of 1918, I was surprised by her calling with her youngest sister. I could not ask them into the studio, being engaged in an important conference with an antique, but sprightly German lady who boasted of having introduced cabarets into America, and had abandoned worldly pleasures for spiritual joys. She had been entangled in the toils of one of the charlatans who worked the Rosicrucian racket, merrily disdainful of criticism based on his elementary blunders in Latin and his total ignorance of the history of the Order which he claimed to rule. The old lady was simple- minded, sincere and earnest. I did not grudge the labour of trying to get her to use common sense, but as almost invariable in America, and heartbreakingly common even in Europe, the task was beyond my powers. {791} Just as extreme hunger makes a man shovel down anything that looks like food, so the ache of the soul for truth makes it swallow whatever promises. The poor old woman was so pathetically eager to find a Master, that she would not banish the phantasm. I proved in a dozen different ways that the man was a foul liar. That was easy enough. His claims were grotesquely absurd. For instance, he said that I don't know how many knights of England and France --- the most improbable people --- were Rosicrucians. He said the Order was founded by one of the early Egyptian kings and professed to have documentary evidence of an unbroken hierarchy of initiates since then. He called the Order Rosae Crucis and translated it Rosy Cross. He said that in Toulouse the Order possessed a vast temple with fabulous magnificent appointments, an assertion disprovable merely by consulting Baedeker. He said that Rockefeller had given him nine hundred thousand dollars and at the same time sent round the hat with an eloquent plea for the smallest contributions. He professed to be a learned Egyptologist and classical scholar on terms of intimacy with the most exalted personages. Yet, as in the case of Peter, his speech betrayed him. He was a good chap at heart, a genuine lover of truth, by no means altogether ignorant of Magick, and a great fool to put up all this bluff instead of relying on his really good qualities. But her faith in him was built on the rock of her wish that his nonsense was true, and because he stood between her and blank despair. To return, I went out to excuse myself to my visitors. The "little sister" reminded me of Solomon's friend, for she had no breasts. She was tall and strangely thin, with luminous eyes, a wedge-like face, a poignant sadness and a sublime simplicity. She radiated an indefinable sweetness. Without wasting time on words, I began to kiss her. It was sheer instinct. She shared it and equalled my ardour. We continued with occasional interruptions, such as politeness required, to answer her sister in the rare intervals when she got out of breath. They went away after a while and I saw them no more until this equally unexpected call in January. They wanted my advice about finding an apartment in the village (a geographically vague section in this part of New York is called "Greenwich Village"). She wished to be near the New York University, having begun a course of lectures on law, being sick of her job as a teacher in Public School No. 40, the Bronx, which meant telling lies to an amorphous mob of adolescent Hebrew huskies, the only consolation being the certainty that no one would notice the nonsense she was obliged, by the city, to grind out. While we talked, I took off her clothes and asked her to come and pose for me when she felt inclined. I proposed, half in joke, to solve her problem by taking her as a lodger. They drifted out