2. The Suppression of Why
For three days, refrain from asking why. For example, if you find you have missed a call from your parents, you might immediately start hypothesizing about what they wanted. When that happens, try to push the thought away gently. If you don’t manage to do that, find a good reason to cancel the explanation you just gave. For example: Mum cannot be calling to say she is ill, because you saw her yesterday and she was fine. Do not look for alternative explanations; just cancel the ones your mind is instinctively producing.
You will probably find that you are reaching out for explanations all the time: you tell yourself that there is a traffic jam because people can’t drive, that you didn’t like the film because of the main actor. Just refuse to engage with that part of your mind, temporarily.
If you have the opportunity, take a marker pen with you, and every time you notice yourself thinking in terms of causes or explanations, make a small mark on your arm. How many marks do you have by the end of the day?
3. The Estrangement Gambit
This is a very simple meditation. Pick a time to do it every day, for three days in a row: it is probably easier in the morning or the evening, but that depends on you. Whatever time you choose, stick to it.
For five minutes, look at your hand. Just this. Set a timer, so you won’t have to worry about keeping track of time. You will get bored, you will feel silly, you will grasp for some metaphysical enlightenment. Do not worry about these thoughts – just keep looking at your hand. When I say ‘looking’, I mean physically looking. What colour is your hand? What signs can you see on it? Is it different today compared to yesterday? What is it about it that you never noticed before? What kind of questions does it make you ask?
Keep your Book of Wonder and your pen close at hand. For this exercise in particular, and for other meditations we are going to do, it is crucial to take notes as soon as the meditation finishes.
The Second Key
The Shadow
If you get into definitions, the world starts ending
In the year 1900, William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley went into (magical) battle. Yeats was thirty-five, Crowley ten years his junior. They were both members of the same group of magicians, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
The Golden Dawn had nothing to do with the modern Greek far-right movement with a similar name. It was a coterie of intellectuals and bohemians, based on some ancient ciphered documents that would turn out to be utterly fake. The Order’s mastermind, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, was a magician from Hackney, London, well-educated and for the most part self-taught, who faked a Highland heritage as well. To be sure, when I say ‘magician’ here, I am referring to individuals who were very different from the illusionists we met in the last chapter: these men and women were occultists.
Yeats and Crowley met through their common acquaintances in the occult scene, but they were never friends. Crowley was (among other things) a poet, convinced he was destined for greatness, and when the chance arose for him to show his verses to the famous W. B. Yeats, he jumped at it. Yeats, however, was not impressed – and Crowley was offended. The younger man decided that Yeats must be jealous of his talent; for his part, Yeats thought that Crowley had embraced black magic.
Other troubles were brewing elsewhere within the Order. Years earlier MacGregor Mathers had moved to Paris; now people in London were casting doubt on the authenticity of the ciphered documents and, consequently, on Mathers’ moral standing. It didn’t help matters that Mathers had taken to the young, brazen Crowley, while almost everybody else wanted nothing to do with him. A perfect storm was in the offing.
By now, Yeats was convinced that Crowley was sticking pins into wax images of his enemies, a grave act of magical aggression. Crowley would say, years later, that Yeats in turn was attacking him and his London house, where ‘weird and terrible figures were often seen’.1 Yeats himself would admit to lesser magical mischief: some magicians in his circle used their psychic powers to convince one of Crowley’s lovers to dump him – for her own safety, of course.
Things came to a head when Mathers, in Paris, promoted Crowley to a higher rank within the Order, but the London branch of the Order refused to give Crowley some documents he was now entitled to. The London magicians were spurning Mathers’ authority. Rebellion was afoot, England was lost! But Mathers and Crowley would not go down without a fight.
Thus the Battle of Blythe Road began. A set of rooms at the top of a shop at 36 Blythe Road, Hammersmith, paid for by the actress and occultist Florence Farr, was the ‘Temple’ where Yeats and his friends met. On 17 April 1900 Crowley surreptitiously changed the locks, making access impossible. Florence Farr called a police constable, who wasn’t quite sure what to do with these feuding magicians. The landlord was nowhere to be seen, so the constable decided not to do anything at all and said he couldn’t help. The premises remained locked. Crowley had drawn the first blood.
The battle rumbled on. On 19 April, Yeats and another member of the Order, E. A. Hunter, finally managed to get hold of the landlord, who decreed that since Farr was paying the rent, as far as he was concerned the place was hers. Satisfied, the constable allowed Farr and her cronies to force the locks open.
Crowley had big plans for the day: he would judge the rebels in a way befitting a magical Order. He donned full Highland dress (in deference to MacGregor Mathers’ made-up ancestry), a dagger and a mask (to make it clear that he was acting as an impersonal bringer of justice), and marched over to the Temple, where Yeats was waiting for him. No great magical showdown was forthcoming, however: landlord and constable kept calm and carried on in the face of this black-masked, tartan-clad apparition, and simply refused to let him in. The kilted and sporraned Crowley was obliged to retreat.
Undeterred, he brought the battle to court, where it quickly became clear he didn’t have a case. Crowley ended up paying £5 in legal costs and that was that. Not with a bang but with a whimper, the Battle of Blythe Road was over.
*
There is more to this story than comedy gold. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was created in 1888, the year Jack the Ripper became a celebrity. Wonder, ineffable and aimless, was being crushed under the weight of big business, rapid technological advancements, and a news cycle quicker than the world had ever seen. Wonder thrives in conditions of ambiguity, and this was a time of growing certainties.
While the usual suspects – poets and artists, mostly – mourned the disappearance of wonder, society at large celebrated it. Indulging in wonder was increasingly considered to be a waste of time. The age of dreamers was over; this was the age of the doers. In Oxford parlance, the hearties run the Empire, with no place left for the aesthetes.
And yet Victorian London, the city at the heart of this revolution, was a hotbed of magical orders, battling wizards, and strange rituals conducted in suburban homes. You had factories and banks, yes, but you also had Crowley, a Cambridge-educated fellow, donning an Osiris mask in Hammersmith. Up to that moment, magic had all but disappeared from British life,2 but then, when one would least expect to see it, up it popped in London: all of a sudden people were making up ‘ancient’ magical documents, performing rituals, conjuring spirits.
The players of the occult underground were a sharp bunch, and they weren’t (all, or exclusively) crooks. Crowley’s persona as a vaudeville villain was just one of his many faces: he was also an excellent mountaineer and chess player, an erudite conversationalist, a good poet (at times) and a sincere mystic. Among other things, Yeats wrote a whole book on the existence of fairies. As for the Golden Dawn, with all its squabbles, it was a socially radical group in which women and men met as equals, in an age when women did not yet have the right to vote.