Read Online Aleister Crowley by Gary Lachman - Free Book Online Page A

the long lost and central Arcanum” of the “divine philosophers.” 14 Although filled with Buddhist ideas, Crowley’s movement away from Buddhism is clear. He rejects Buddha’s silence regarding the question of how existence began and asserts the “absoluteness of the Qabalistic Zero.” Crowley uses arcane mathematics to arrive at an idea of a positive nothingness about which we can nevertheless make no concrete statement. 15 Before creation this positive nothingness neither existed nor didn’t exist—“the idea of existencewas just as much unformulated as that of toasted cheese,” one of Crowley’s more memorable insights—but it was out of this pregnant Nothing that the universe emerged. Crowley’s remark that “There is not and could not be any cause” sits well with contemporary ideas about cosmogony, as voiced by Stephen Hawking; in
The Grand Design
(2010), Hawking declared that “spontaneous creation” was all that was necessary to get things going, the universe beginning in a “quantum fluctuation in a pre-existing vacuum,” having no need of a creator. Crowley here is trying to grasp the ungraspable, the realm of being beyond the Supernals. His argument may not convince us, but the gist is clear. He is making his way to the Abyss.
    But before he reached those depths he would scale some heights. At 28,251 feet, K2 towers less than a thousand feet below Mount Everest. Crowley would no doubt have preferred to attempt Everest, but at that time it was off-limits to Europeans. K2, however, is a more dangerous climb and has acquired the nickname of the “Savage Mountain”; this element of risk must have piqued Crowley’s interest. It was first surveyed in 1856 and is known as K2 because it is the second peak of the Karakorum Range; Chogo Ri is a kind of nickname and simply means “big mountain.” Crowley and Eckenstein’s expedition was the first to attempt this titan, and it was not until 1954 that its summit was reached. Although ultimately unsuccessful—they got as far as 21,407 feet before turning back—Crowley and Eckenstein did set some records, including the longest time spent at such altitude (sixty-eight days). Given the treacherous conditions and the lack of modern gear—they had, for example, no oxygen tanks—that the expedition got as far as it did is remarkable, and Crowley rightly felt proud of this climb.
    Eckenstein was the expedition’s leader and he had gathered a fewother climbers. In Delhi Crowley met up with Guy Knowles, a young Cambridge man with no climbing experience; J. Jacot Guillarmod, a Swiss doctor and mountaineer; and two Austrian rock climbers, Heinrich Pfannl and Victor Wessely. Typically, Crowley has nothing good to say about any of them; Crowley was second in command and everyone had to sign an agreement pledging total obedience to Eckenstein. Crowley countermanded this obedience just before the true climb began, when he refused to jettison the bundle of poetry books he had brought with him. Eckenstein argued they would weigh him down but Crowley could not abandon Milton, so Eckenstein gave way. Although Crowley claimed that he paid the bulk of the expedition’s expenses, Symonds reports that Knowles rejected this and claimed that Crowley didn’t spend a cent. 16 That Crowley had ill will toward his companions did not bode well for the trek, and things got off to a bad start when Eckenstein was detained for three weeks by the authorities at Rawalpindi. No clear reason was given but most likely he was suspected of being a German spy.
    This, however, was the least of their worries. Crowley did not get on well with the natives, and some of the “racial arrogance” he criticized in the Japanese appeared when he felt obliged to beat the leader of their drivers with his belt. Crowley claimed this was necessary in order to win the coolies’ respect. “The first business of any traveler in any part of the world is to establish his moral superiority,” he tells