Crowley & Huxley: A trip in Berlin?
RICHARD C McNEFF wonders if psychedelic experiments were on the menu when Aldous met Aleister on a 1930 visit to the German capital.
In 1977 International Times published ‘Sybarite among the Shadows’, a short story I had written based on Aleister Crowley initiating Aldous Huxley into the use of mescaline in Berlin in the 1930s. 1 For good measure, I spiced things up with a reference to Hitler using the drug. The story went on to be widely circulated, often without my knowledge. A doctored version appeared in Russia, and it was cited and quoted in books on conspiracy theory and occult Nazism, invariably presented as being true. 2
The story was based on a couple of lines I had found in a book by Francis King called Sexuality, Magic and Perversion. So widespread had the idea become that the Huxley Estate felt impelled to deny it: “There is no evidence to support Francis King’s assertion that Aleister Crowley introduced Huxley to mescalin [sic] in Berlin in the 1920s [sic].” 3
Despite this, Huxley’s alleged psychedelic encounter with the Beast has taken on the dimensions of an urban legend, and a quick perusal online will find it cited as fact on several websites, including those hosting the burgeoning number of academic books and papers devoted to Crowley. So, what did happen? Two recent, meticulously researched works by Tobias Churton 4 and Patrick Everitt 5 help provide an answer. Both offer tantalising evidence that if conscious expansion did not actually take place in practice, it was almost definitely explored in theory.
From the 1890s on Crowley had been interested in finding a “pharmaceutical, electrical or surgical method of inducing Samadhi”, as he put it in The Confessions. Of all the drugs he experimented with, the psychoactive alkaloids extracted from the peyote cactus most closely fitted the bill. The active component is mescaline, known when Crowley started using it as Ahalonium lewinii. Other members of Crowley’s magical order, the Golden Dawn, also experimented with it, notably Yeats and Maud Gonne. Yeats was impressed and found peyote more conducive to the production of visions than hashish, though he did not like the effect on his breathing. 6
Crowley went on to become something of a proselytiser for the drug. In the debate that raged in the 1960s between those who believed in the wholesale distribution of psychedelics, led by Timothy Leary, and those, like Huxley, who advocated confining their use to a circle of adepts, Crowley would probably have
Crowley found that Huxley “improved on acquaintance”
belonged to the former camp. In his Rites of Eleusis, held at the Caxton Hall in 1910, the paying audience were given a drink spiced with mescaline. The hapless – or happy – spectators were then entertained with magical ceremonies, poetry, dance, incense, and music. Between 1913 and 1917 Crowley hosted “Anhalonium parties” in London and New York in which he gave peyote to many figures from occult and literary circles, including the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield and the American writer Theodore Dreiser. According to the account left by Crowley’s friend Louis Wilkinson, the Beast decided
Dreiser merited three times the usual dose. Displaying great bravado, Dreiser drank this down in one gulp. He then had second thoughts and enquired if there was a doctor in the neighbourhood. Crowley was not sure, but reassured Dreiser that there was a very good undertaker nearby. 7 Wilkinson himself saw visions in bright colours and found the drug “surprising and exciting” but the fact it made him sick afterwards restricted his use of it.
Crowley described Thelema, his belief system, as having the “aim of religion; the method of science” and he kept detailed records of hundreds of experiments with peyote which in 1919 he advertised would appear in a forthcoming issue of his journal, The Equinox, along with an explanatory essay titled “The Cactus”. It was never published, apparently destroyed by British Customs in the 1920s. Crowley got the fluid extract of peyote from the American company Parke-Davis. He was actually
given a tour of their “wonderful chemical works” in Detroit in 1915, where they made up a batch of the drug customised to his specifications. By 1920 they had stopped producing. However, peyote buttons, protrusions cut from the top of the cactus where the mescaline is concentrated, can in a dried form maintain their potency for decades.
On Thursday 2 October 1930, Huxley visited Berlin with the popular science writer JWN. Sullivan. This was at the behest of the Observer for which they were compiling a series of “Interviews with Great Scientists”. Sullivan was a friend of Crowley, who was also in Berlin, focusing on his career as a painter. Crowley found out they were arriving and the next day wired Einstein, who was then residing in a central Berlin loft apartment, in order to track them down. He eventually located them via the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, celebrated for his contribution to quantum theory and the “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment. Strange company indeed for a magician to be keeping!
Crowley dined with Sullivan and Huxley that night and then took them to the Mikado drag club to sample the local nightlife. The Beast got on well with Huxley and believed he had roused the latter from his usual apathy. Crowley spent the evening of the next day with the visitors in a beer hall, finding Huxley “charming” and that he “improved on acquaintance”. Sullivan drank too much iced beer and had a bad hangover on the Sunday, which Crowley spent with him and Huxley. The Beast was interviewed for the great men of science series, but it was not used, probably because such views as “every phenomenon ought to be an orgasm of its kind” 8 were a little too advanced, even for Observer readers of the period. The Beast painted the portraits of both men, which have been lost.
After their visit Crowley wrote to his secretary Israel Regardie, who was in London. He described the three days he had spent with Huxley as “gorgeous” and asked Regardie to set up a figure for
the horoscope he was making for Huxley, who had supplied the time and place of his birth. He also asked Regardie to send Huxley some of his poetry.
The book was called Clouds without Water and was published in 1909 when Crowley was experimenting with both hashish and peyote. It contains two references to cannabis and associates the drug with astral projection. Interestingly, in the letter and two cards that have survived from Huxley to Crowley there is a joke about astral projection, a magical practice that Crowley linked with both drugs. In an undated postcard from Provence, Huxley refuses an invitation from Crowley “for geographical reasons which I’m not yet far enough advanced in the Black Arts to nullify!” This suggests to Patrick Everitt that the two writers may have discussed Crowley’s early experiments with both drugs and, by extension, consciousness expansion. 9 An intriguing anecdote in Churton’s book lends support to this. A few months after Huxley and Sullivan’s visit, Karl Germer, the Beast’s German associate, wrote to “Crowley’s recently dismissed treasurer, Gerald Yorke, in London, suggesting Yorke persuade Aldous Huxley to return to Berlin to give a promotional talk
about Crowley’s consciousnessexpanding work”. 10
The first known instance of Aldous Huxley taking mescaline was on 5 May 1953, when he was 59. The following year he brought out The Doors of Perception, which elaborated on the experience. Crowley had died in 1947. In 1954 his reputation was probably at its lowest ebb. John Symonds’s biography, The Great Beast, had appeared in 1951. While Symonds was instrumental in bringing Crowley back into the public arena, the biographer’s personal distaste for his subject, which he expressed in person to me, did little to mitigate the facile popular image of the Beast as a sex-and-drug-crazed Satanist. Hardly the right ally for Huxley’s controversial advocacy of psychedelics as legitimate facilitators of mystical states with profound potential benefits for science, art and religion, his own use famously extending to the two injections of LSD-25 he received on his deathbed. Even if the Beast had supplied him with peyote during the three “gorgeous” days, it is hard to believe Huxley would have publicised the fact. Unless new evidence emerges, there probably was no trip in Berlin. Nevertheless, there were very likely to have been exchanges which helped seed Huxley’s later exploration of the psychedelic realms in which the Beast was a seasoned traveller. If so, Huxley and Crowley’s encounter represents a milestone in the history of entheogens and their impact on our times. RICHARD C McNEFF is the author of two works of fiction, Aleister Crowley MI5 and
The Dream of Boris, as well as the memoir With Barry Flanagan: Travels through Time and Spain.