ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
July 19
Aleister Crowley: Forty Days on Esopus Island
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Picture a bald, sunburned Englishman
paddling a canoe up the Hudson River with fifty gallons of bright red paint, a
climbing rope, and not one scrap of food. Friends had staked him to the canoe,
a tent, and enough cash for a modest camping trip. He spent the money on paint
instead. When they asked, reasonably, what he intended to eat for the next
month and a half, he told them the ravens would feed him. On July 19, 1918,
Aleister Crowley beached that canoe on a narrow, uninhabited spit of granite in
the middle of the Hudson called Esopus Island, and stayed there, by most
accounts, for forty days and forty nights—a span he chose, without much
subtlety, to echo Christ’s forty days in the wilderness.
The Prophet in America
By the summer of 1918, Crowley had
been living hand to mouth in the United States for four years, having crossed
the Atlantic in 1914 just as the First World War broke out. He’d spent much of
that time writing pro-German propaganda for a New York paper called The
Fatherland—work he later insisted was actually an elaborate act of sabotage
from inside the German cause. By 1918 he was broke and between magical
partners, having recently ended a series of sex-magic workings with his lover
Roddie Minor known as the “Amalantrah Working”
(the same operation that had produced Crowley’s now-notorious sketch of an
entity called “Lam,” later published as the frontispiece to his commentary on
Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence).
With that chapter closed and no clear next step, Crowley judged himself in
need, as he saw it, of a serious magical retirement. Esopus Island, roughly
eighty-five miles north of Manhattan and reachable only by boat, offered
exactly the kind of total isolation the Working required.
Crowley spent part of his forty days
suspended from ropes against the island’s eastern granite cliffs, painting
large red inscriptions drawn from the central declarations of Thelema, among
them “Do What Thou Wilt” and “Every Man and Every Woman Is a Star,” where they
would be visible to boat traffic on the river below. He spelled the island’s
name “Oesopus” throughout his own writings on the retreat (likely for the
numerological value of the extra vowel). The inscriptions endured on the rock
for years before weather and ice eventually wore them away; the island itself,
now part of Margaret Lewis Norrie State
Park, still draws the occasional Thelema practitioner willing to
paddle out and see the bare cliff face where they once stood.
Past Lives and a Translation of Lao Tzu
Crowley’s stated purpose for the
retreat was less theatrical than the paint suggests: he intended, primarily, to
work on a translation of the Tao Te Ching,
the foundational text of Taoism, which he would eventually publish as The Tao Teh King. Working from Legge’s
English rendering rather than the Chinese original, Crowley shaped Lao Tzu’s
philosophy into something startlingly compatible with his own doctrine of
Thelema, and the translation remains, whatever one makes of its liberties, one
of the more genuinely thoughtful pieces of writing he produced in this period.
Alongside the translation work, Crowley later claimed to have experienced vivid
recollections of several past lives during his weeks of isolation and fasting; by
his own account, he had previously been the legendary Taoist sage Ge Xuan, the
Renaissance pope Alexander VI, the eighteenth-century adventurer and alchemist
Alessandro Cagliostro, and the French occultist Éliphas Lévi. His Tao Teh
King fared rather better with posterity than his past-life claims; decades
later, the Chinese scholar Hellmut Wilhelm acknowledged the
seriousness of Crowley’s engagement with Taoist thought, even while noting,
accurately, that a man with no Chinese was always going to be interpreting
Legge’s translation rather than Lao Tzu’s original.
Crowley emerged from Esopus Island in late August 1918 and, before the year was out, moved to Greenwich Village, where Leah Hirsig soon became his next Scarlet Woman. Much of the material and momentum from the retreat fed directly into the next major publication of his career: The Equinox, Volume III, Number I, published in 1919 and known ever since as The Blue Equinox, which consolidated the workings and doctrine of both the A∴A∴ and the O.T.O. under Crowley’s leadership.
But history is often stranger than
fiction: the island sits within the town of Hyde Park, birthplace of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, who in the summer of 1918 was serving as Assistant Secretary
of the Navy roughly a mile from where England’s legendary occultist was
painting Thelemic slogans on the rocks and waiting for ravens. Nothing suggests
the two men were ever aware of each other’s proximity, but the Hudson Valley
has rarely hosted two more differently ambitious residents in the same season.
God, I love New York.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today’s “Daily
Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult
Reads... In honor of Crowley and the doctrine that came out of forty
days in the Hudson...
By
Aleister Crowley | Red Wheel/Weiser
The book that gathered up the loose
threads of the Esopus Island retreat and turned them into doctrine deserves the
closing spot today. First published in Detroit in 1919 as The Equinox,
Volume III, Number I, The Blue Equinox opens with Crowley’s “Hymn to
Pan” before laying out, in unusually systematic form, the history, principles,
and reading lists of both the O.T.O. and the A∴A∴ under his
leadership—including The Law of Liberty and the full text of the Gnostic Mass.
It is, in other words, Crowley at his most organized: a prophet who had just
spent forty days alone with red paint and a translation of Lao Tzu, coming back
to civilization and immediately setting about building institutions to carry
the work forward. Our thanks to Red Wheel/Weiser for keeping this foundational
text in print for the next generation of students working through the same
questions Crowley brought back from that rock in the Hudson.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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