Try to
remember the kind of September….
A look Back at Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis
By Marc Magisana
In the month of September, back in 1910, in foggy London town, an
announcement appeared in the primary ‘zine for British occultists,
Occult Review, selling tickets for a happening to be held the following
month. The ceremony/drama was to feature avant- garde music from a
stringed instrument and a tom - tom, ecstatic dancing and chants,
bizarre costumery, and free intoxicants. Can it be wondered that
the impresario of this proto-rock concert would come to be featured on
the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album?
The orchestrator was of course, good ol’ Uncle Al and his merry band of
acolytes featuring Leila Waddell on the fiddle and Victor Newburg as
the dancing fool. The event transpired in a hall over a period of
seven days, each night was designated an astrological sign and a color
(the audience was requested to don clothing of corresponding
colors). The notice was signed with only a letter “P” – I wonder
if this is a source of influence for Mr/Ms.. P. Orridge’s
cognomen?
The purported purpose of this magickal ceremony/drama par
excellence, The Rites of Eleusis – was altering the consciousness
of audience and participants. An unexpected magickal
outcome was hooking up Crowley to the O.T.O. via yellow journalism and
public trial.
The English upper classes had by this time become accustomed to hearing
about séances and spiritualists in the papers but the Rites went
beyond the pale and into the dark side. The scandal sheets were
scandalized. A reporter for the paper John Bull reported:
“An arm was placed around my neck and a
moustache pressed against my cheek…(there were) barbaric dances,
sensational interludes of melodrama, blasphemy, and erotic suggestion.”
A review in The Looking Glass described:
“ A dimly lighted room, heavy with incense….a
person with a red hood, supported
on
each side by a blue-chinned gentleman in a sort of Turkish bath
costume, who commenced to read some gibberish to which attendants made
responses at intervals…
“After awhile, a not unprepossessing lady
appeared, informed them that she was the Mother of Heaven, and asked if
she
could do anything for them…”
It was a dialectical Victorian Poetry Slam with dear Laylah, Leila,
Mother of Heaven and Scarlet Woman, she of the Maori descent, chronic
halitosis, Solomonic tattoo, and long dark tresses, that was half of
the inspiration for the Rites.
As Crowley recounted to the
newspaper The Bystander:
“I happened to have a few friends
in my room in the evening, among them LeilahWaddell. It struck me
that we might pass the time by a sort of artistic dialogue: I read a
piece of poetry from one of the great classics, and she replied with a
piece of music suggested by my reading. I retorted with another
poem; and the evening developed into a regular controversy…enthusiasm
took hold of us; so acutely that we were all intensely uplifted to the
point…of actual ecstasy”
Crowley neglected to mention in his report that the
ingestion of organic hallucinogens by the partipants may have
contributed to the ecstasies experienced. At a rite in August a
libation concocted thus: fruit juices, alcohol, peyote, and opiate
(morphine or possibly heroin) was passed around the group while Leilah
played free-form musick on her violin. As one of the audience
expressed “We were thrilled to our very bones.” Indeed!
Part of the source material for the Rites was derived from some of
Crowley’s more rubicund poetry, which owed much to Algernon Swinburne,
Crowley’s chief bardic influence. The Swinburne style, with
its emphasis on meter and rhyme and sensual imagery(at the
expense of clarity of meaning) was well-suited to the hypnotic effects
the Rites intended to evoke.
Rather like a Hitchcock film, the purpose of the Rites was to
produce a specific prearranged emotion in the audience. Kenneth
Anger and Saint Augustine have said movies and plays are evil in
how they manipulate our emotions and thoughts – but in Crowley’s
purpose –that manipulation could be a kind of evolutionary
reprogramming of our neural circuits.
It is of note, how often Crowley’s rites and rituals were intended as
“experiments’ – the method is science, aim: religion. This
religious/scientific aspect of a theatrical event is simpatico w/
Antonin Artaud’s alchemical theater – what he called “the double” of a
theatrical performance –rather like a string theory. While the
theaturgical event was experienced here, another theater was happening
on another plane so to speak, and astrally transforming the audience.
Part of the fuel used to jettison the audience into the nether worlds,
was music and in addition to the violin, it was decided to call upon
the rhythms of the tom - tom, which, as one of Crowley’s associates
claimed he had discovered by experiment, could result in proper English
ladies relinquishing themselves to “shameless masturbation”.
The controversy stirred up by the Rites in London, included a piece in
“The Looking Glass” stating that Crowley had engaged in homosexual acts
with one of his hangers on, a Mr. G.C. Jones, who promptly sued for
libel. Many of Crowley’s enemies and detractors came out to
testify at the trial, creating lots of publicity and Jones lost the
case.
The positive aspect of it was this was the vehicle by which Crowley
came to the notice of the O.T.O. The rest is history.
Publicity Photos from the Rites of Eleusis:
