Back in England after the Chogo Ri expedition, Crowley acquired c wife under unusual circumstances. Her name was Rose Kelly, anc remarkably, given Crowley's anti-Christian sentiment, she was the vicar of Camberwell's daughter. She had told Crowley that she wac about to be married against her will, so without thinking he suggested that she marry him instead. Afterwards Crowley realizec he loved her passionately.
When the English summer of 1903 began to wane, the newly-wedc embarked on what Crowley euphemistically termed a "hypertrophiec honeymoon." As he explains: "We pretended to ourselves that we were going big-game shooting in Ceylon and to pay a visit tc Allan (Bennett) in Rangoon, but the real object was to adorn the celebration of our love by setting it in a thousand suave and sparkling backgrounds." The mystery is why Crowley chose Ceylon for his honeymoon, having already experienced, by his account, a chequered visit there only two years previously.
En route to Ceylon the love-birds stopped off in Cairo, where, as Crowley puts it, "the extravagances of our passion suggested our spending a night together in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid". He had brought along some principal invocations, and on reading them he claims there appeared an astral light. When they reached Colombo, Rose decided she might be pregnant. Although this revelation curtailed their honeymoon, they nevertheless travelled to Hambantota via Galle by stagecoach and bullock cart in December 1903 to partake in some big game hunting. Crowley insists that it was not his intention to inflict chronicles of slaughter on his readers, yet he does spend paragraphs in analyzing the temperament and psychology of buffalo, sambhur, leopard and elephant. He also describes the incidentals of the shoot, such as his fury at the sub-standard cartridges he had purchased in Colombo, and how an elephant he was tracking killed a dipsomaniac Frenchman.
In addition Crowley claims his headman swindled him outrageously, but that there was no remedy. However, as he concludes, "There is no remedy for anything in Ceylon. The whole island is an infamy. It is impossible to get twelve Singalese to agree on any subject whatever, so a majority decision determines the verdict of a jury of seven!".
Although he did tend to complain vehemently about the local populace, he was also extremely critical of the typical colonial Englishman. "He has failed to convince himself of his superiority to mere created beings; so his airs of authority do not become him. He feels himself a bit of an upstart", observes Crowley. "Feeling his footing insecure, (he) dares not tolerate the nature as he can in India." The result, he felt, was that, "The Singalese government is inclined to be snappish."
On his first trip to Ceylon he had been robbed by a policeman, who had escaped conviction on some technicality. The English magistrate had told Crowley with obvious sadistic pleasure that the man could have been flogged if convicted. "It was my first glimpse of the bestial instincts of the average respectable cultured Englishman", he writes. On another occasion he had dined with a forest officer up country who had no conversation and seemed to have lost all interest in life. "He had become part of the jungle," observes Crowley. "This psychology is common to all but men of rare intelligence and energy."
During their hunting trip, Crowley and his wife stayed in bungalow near the shores of an unspecified tank. One day they went out in a boat so that Crowley could shoot some fruit bats which frequented the trees at the edge of the tank. He wanted their pelts in order to make a hat for Rose and a waistcoat for himself. A wounded bat fell onto Rose and frightened her badly, for it took Crowley some half a minute to detach its claws from her. "I thought nothing of the matter," he writes, "but it is possibl that her condition aggravated the impression."
That night Crowley was awakened by what he thought were the screams of a dying bat in the room. He called out to Rose, but there was no answer. On lighting a candle he found her hanging on to the overhead frame of the four-poster bed, squealing in a hideous manner. Crowley tried to pull her down but she clung to the frame and refused to respond to his voice. "When I got her down at last", he recounts, "she clawed and scratched and bit and spat and squealed, exactly as the dying bat had done to her."
Crowley comments that "It was the finest case of obsession that I had ever had the good fortune to observe. Of course it is easy to explain that in her hypersensitive condition the incident had reproduced itself in a dream. She had identified herself with the assailant and mimicked his behaviour. But surely it is much simpler to say that the spirit of the bat entered her".
At the conclusion of their hunting trip the Crowleys returned to Colombo and stayed at the Galle Face Hotel. While having lunch one day at the Grand Oriental Hotel, Crowley witnessed the arrival in the island of a Scottish delegation sent to vindicate the honour of Major General Sir Hector MacDonald, who had blown his brains out in a Paris Hotel rather than face charges of sexual irregularity levelled against him by the British Army in Ceylon. MacDonald had become Commander of British troops in the colony in 1902 during the Governorship of another soldier, Sir Joseph West Ridgeway. However he quickly fell from grace when his penchant for native boys was brought to light. According to Crowley the court martial was the revenge of a "Ceylon Big Bug", whom MacDonald had apparently order off the field at some big function when he had appeared in mufti.
It is curious that Crowley not only knew MacDonald but had had lunch with him in Paris just days before his death. Crowley remarks that "he seemed unnaturally relieved; but his conversation showed that he was suffering acute mental distress". The very next morning Crowley was astonished to read in the New York Herald what he considered to be "an outrageously outspoken account of the affair". It was soon afterwards that MacDonald committed suicide. Crowley relates how MacDonald's pockets were found to be full of obscene photographs at the time of his death. "Was his motive to convey some subtly offensive insult to the puritans whose prurience had destroyed him?" Crowley muses.
Crowley comments that MacDonald was "a great simple lion-hearted man with the spirit of a child; with all his experience in the army, he still took the word honour seriously, and the open scandal of the accusation had struck down his standard". At the time, of course, this was a scandal of sizeable proportions. Indeed the sordid details of this Victorian melodrama can be found in several accounts, such as John Montgomery's
Toll for the Brave: The Traqedy of Sir Hector MacDonald (1963), K.J.E. Macleod's A Victim of Fate (1978), and Trevo Royle's Death before Dishonour: The True Story of Fighting Men (1982).
Crowley made himself known to the members of the MacDonald delegation and they poured out their hearts to him. It seems they were already discouraged about their mission, for the prosecution had the affidavits of seventy-seven witnesses. "Ah Well", said Crowley, "You don't know much about Ceylon. If there were seven times seventy-seven, I wouldn't swing a cat on their dying oaths. The more unanimous they are, the more it is certain that they have been bribed to lie".
Colombo was beginning to get to Crowley. He quotes from his diary, which reads: "Colombo more ald more loathsome. Went up to Kandy". As far as he was concerned, the worst thing about Colombo was the appearance of two English ladies - a mother and her daughter - at the Galle Face Hotel. "They would have seemed extravagant at Monte Carlo; in Ceylon the heavily painted faces, the over-tended dyed false hair, the garish flashy dresses, the loud harsh foolish gabble, the insolent ogling were an outrage." Even though he was devoted to Rose, Crowley suspected that the intensity of his repulsion for the daughter meant that he actually wanted to bed her, and was annoyed by the fact that he was already in love.
Crowley spent just two days in Kandy during which he wrote the play, Why Jesus Wept, an allegory of the corrupting influence of society. "The title is a direct allusion to the ladies in question," he states. The folowing passage from the conclusion to the play will give an indication of its tenor:
I much prefer - that is mere I
Solitude to society.
And that is why I sit and spoil
So much clean paper with such toil
By Kandy Lake in far Ceylon.
I have my old pyjamas on:
I shake my soles from Britain's dust;
I shall not go there till I must;
And when I must! - I hold my nose.
Farewell, you filthy-minded peoplel
I know a stable from a steeple.
Why Jesus Wept is dedicated to, among others, Christ, G.K. Chesterton - and Prince Jinawaravansa. A member of the Siamese Royal Family, Prince Jinawaravansa spent time as a Buddhist monk in Galle, where Crowley met him. Crowley considered Prince Jinawaravansa to be a man of great spiritual attainment, as he did Ponnambalam Ramanathan - Shri Parananda. However, even here Crowley's ambivalence seeps through, for elsewehre in his autobiography he writes of Ramanathan that "despite his great spiritual experience, (he) had not succeeded in snapping the shackles of dogma, and whosa practice seemed in some respects at variance with his principles".
By this time Rose felt certain she was pregnant. Crowley had intended to go to Rangoon to see Allen Bennett before returning to England for the confinement, but destiny seemed to have other plans for him. "Throughout my life I have repeatedly found that destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler," he comments. "Physical ability and moral determination count for nothing", So on 28,Januaryl 1904 the Crowleys left Colombo for Aden and Port Said, for they intended to "see a little of the season" in Cairo.
In fact Crowley was on the brink of what he claimed was the only event in his life that made it worth living, for while he was in Cairo his holy Guardian Angel, Aiwass, appeared to him in his flat and commanded him to take down a message for mankind. Aiwass came on three occasions and each time dictated a chapter of what is known as the Law. The heart of Crowley's magic is derived from this work; it is the text behind his magic and philosophy, which he summed up in the phrase, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
On his return to Europe in the spring of 1904 Crowley wrote to MacGregor Mathers informing him that the Secret Chiefs had appointed him head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Needless to say, a reply was not forthcoming. In 1905 Crowley led a disastrous climbing expedition to Kanchenjunga that added to his notoriety because he deserted his comrades on the mountain. As a magician, however, he had made considerable advances, because in 1909 he attained the powerful grade of Master of the Temple.
And what of Rose? During these years she bore Crowley a daughter, travelled with her husband to far- flung places, including Rangoon to see Allan Bennett, and slipped into chronic alcoholism, a condition which led to an eventual separation and divorce from the man who saw so much in her. Writing of Rose, Crowley displays unusual tenderness: "She was like a character in a romantic novel, a Helen of Troy or a Cleopatra; yet wkile more passionate, unhurtful. She was essentially a good woman."
Crowley wrote a poem about her at Hambantota, called Rosa Mundi, which Oscar Eckenstein thought the greatest love lyric ln the English language. Crowley tells how he weaved the facets of their love into "a glowing taspestry of rapture". It was a new rhythm, a new rime. With typical immodesty he concludes: "It marked a notable advance on any previous work for sustained sublimity".
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