The Mysteries of Filth:

Aleister Crowley and the Theology of Transgression

A Night of Coprophagy

Aleister Crowley is infamous for his obscene, transgressive acts. Many of

the horrors attributed to him are false; many more are true. Perhaps the most
1
viscerally disgusting to the everyday man is Crowley’s “coprophagous habit.”
John Symonds, Crowley’s literary executor and thus the biographer with the
most access to unpublished papers and materials, claims that this habit was
“revealed in [Crowley’s] first published work, Aceldama, 1898, [and] remained
2
with him to the end of his life.”

While Symond’s moralizing tone has been recognised and examined by

contemporary scholars3 (particularly Marco Pasi, in his article.), his judgements
have been extremely influential, and encapsulate the popular view of Crowley's
life and work. In particular, Symonds expresses much horror at what he sees as
Crowley’s sexual deviance, and at his treatment of his friends and partners; his
judgements of Crowley’s actions are so severe and visceral, one almost wonders
why, if the subject disgusted him so much, he chose to write the book. This
horrified moralizing, particularly as it relates to Crowley’s perversity and his
abusiveness towards his sexual and magical partners, remains an oft-touted
trope in the occult milieu. By the same token, Symond’s work has propagated a
popular blindness towards to level of premeditation and art that went into
Crowley’s cruelest and craziest acts.

1
John Symonds, ​The King of the Shadow Realm​ (London: Duckworth, 1989), viii.
2
Ibid., viii.
3
See Marco Pasi, “The Neverendingly Told Story: Recent Biographies of Aleister
Crowley” ​ Aries, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2003.
1
 It is easy to regard Crowley’s fascination with coprophagy as being ‘mere’
perversity, or the result of a libido that needed increasingly transgressive stimuli
in order to function. However, this paper will argue that Crowley’s coprophagy is
a neglected and fruitful area in which to explore his ideas about ritual, identity,
physicality, human limits and will.

The consumption of various bodily substances occupied Crowley’s

imagination throughout his life; his early books of poetry are filled with
descriptions of syphilitc cunnulingus,4 while the infamous ​Scented Garden of
Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz (​ 1910) waxes poetic on the excretive joys of pathic
love.

By exploring the appearance of ideas relating to coprophagy in his

publications, we can begin to approach precisely what Crowley was doing when
he engaged with coprophagy imaginatively, philosophically, and practically. For,
there is no evidence that Crowley made any habit out of coprophagy. Although
the idea of the ultimate taboo fascinated him, there is only one recorded instance
of his consuming human feces. This took place at the Abbey of Thelema at Cefalù
in Sicily, some time in July 1920. The night began, Symonds tells us, with Crowley
5
and Leah Hirsig smoking opium and leading each other through visions of small
6 7
dark figures and Tibetan mandalas in ‘La Chambre des Cauchemars’. This was
followed by some sadomasochistic games and a “sex act which began at 5.20 and
8
lasted ‘a bare half-hour.’” Crowley then describes how, at 6.30 a.m.,9 Leah
“discovered the physical cowardice and dread of pain which I had sunk so deep
by means of daring death-mountains, wild beasts, poison, and disease,” and

4
Particularly ​White Stains ​(1898) and Aceldama.
5
The Great Beast’s Scarlet Woman and magical partner from 1918-1924.
6
Symonds, 264-265.
7
The Chamber of Nightmares, which served as Crowley and Leah’s bedroom.
8
Symonds, 267.
9
Notations of the time an act or event took place appear common throughout Crowley’s
diaries. They introduce a level of artifice to the acts and accounts; Crowley’s constant
awareness of timing suggests the importance of both art and accuracy in his magical
work.
2
burnt him repeatedly with a lighted cigarette until he “tightened lip and thrust
10
my breast against it.”

That the act of coprophagy took place within a sadomasochistic context is

the first clue to understanding its manifold implications. To begin with, one must
be aware of Crowley’s enjoyment throughout his life of passive sodomy. In ​The
Scented Garden ​he claims that the “pleasure of the pathic” is one of two pleasures
11
“a man can afford to a man… which a woman cannot give him.” Pathic as a noun
means the passive partner in homosexual anal intercourse; as an adjective it can
mean both passive and suffering. Georges Bataille’s innovative work on taboo
and sensuality, first published as​ L’Erotisme​ in French in 1957, can provide some
interesting philosophical insight into Crowley’s transgressive eroticism. Bataille
claims “the lover strips the beloved of her identity no less than the blood-stained
priest his human or animal victim… she loses the firm barrier that once
12
separated her from others and made her impenetrable.” An act of sexual
violence, whether unsolicited or actively sought, “deprives the creature of its
limited particularity and bestows on it the limitless, infinite nature of sacred
13
things.” Through pathic anal intercourse and masochistic experiences, and
particularly in coprophagy, one can experience oneself as being unlimited;
having the line between self and other systematically crossed belies the sense of
discontinuity the civilized world so intensely promotes.

Crowley used S&M throughout his life; he both found it pleasurable, and
potent magically; for, for Crowley, these two things were always deeply
connected; sensation, and effective magic. There are multiple places throughout
his work he can be found explicitly theorising on the theological and practical
implications of Sado-masochistic ritual and play. Thus, describing the 1914

10
Aleister Crowley, quoted in Symonds, 267. Symonds rarely notes from which source
he is quoting.
11
Aleister Crowley, ​The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz​ (Paris:
Probsthain & Company, 1910), 26.
12
Georges Bataille, ​Erotism: Death & Sensuality,​ trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco:
City Lights, 1986), 90.
13
Ibid., 90.
3
“Paris working,” enacted with his lover Victor Neuburg, Crowley states that it
was revealed that “the essence of the operation is the freeing of the elemental
spirit of an animal soul. This may be done by death, or by complete exhaustion
either through pleasure or through pain. In this death-like trance the spirit
becomes free to wander, and is united to the invoked god.”14 238 Speaking in
1913 of another lover, the Hungarian Anny Ringler, whom Crowley met while in
Moscow, he stated
“Terms such as sadism and masochism have no valid application in a
loving sexual encounter in which pain is a voluntarily given and
received medium of genuine pleasure: the proof of the pudding is in
the eating; my relations with Anny must be judged by their fruits;
happiness, inspiration, spirituality romantic idealism.”15

Crucial to sadomasochistic acts is the awareness of both parties that it is

all ultimately a game. Crowley did not give himself up entirely in as much as he
had given permission for these actions to take place. Symonds states that
Crowley
had taken a vow of Holy Obedience to [Leah]; he would do whatever she
commanded him to do; but there is no evidence in what happened that
summer night that he was obeying ​her​ commands. And he is far too
interested in his own thoughts and feelings to tell us how she reacted to
the events recorded, and in which she played a vital part. He put words
into her mouth but they do not ring true: he was carried away by his own
16
rhetoric and by his desire for a strong stimulus….

Symonds complains that Crowley does not record Leah’s reaction to the
evening’s exploits, as if angry that her part was ignored; however it is Symonds
who refuses to recognize Leah’s role (and dehumanizing her in the process) by
claiming Crowley to be the sole initiator. While it may be true that Crowley did
not give himself up entirely to the ministrations of his partner, it was Leah who
took the sadistic role. She clearly had a taste for the more visceral of life’s

14
Symonds, 268.
15
Symonds, 231
16
Symonds, 267.
4
pleasures, and seems to have relished these sadistic aspects of her role as Scarlet
Woman and Crowley’s lover. In fact, Crowley claims at times to have been
frightened by her sadism and her appetites, and she was the longest serving of
his Scarlet Women. With regards to Crowley’s rhetoric, or rather the words he
puts in Leah’s mouth, they appear to be precisely the words of a Scarlet Woman.
Leah was powerful and passionate about the magical aspects of her role; she was
clearly playing a part, but that does not mean she didn’t embrace the part she
had to play.

‘High Priest!’ she cried, ‘I crave the Eucharist!’ Then as I tricked: ‘Not so!’
Her eyes flamed; her voice thrilled. ‘Doubt not thyself! In sooth thou art
High Priest; thy God and thou and I are One in Three. Thou hast
performed thy miracle of the Mass, all this is very God, God of Our
Godhead, Our own Substance, as on the Paten it gleams. My faith suffices; I
will eat; to the last crumb. I will consume it. Doubtest thou? That is hunger
– thou shalt devour this Body of God, yea, save one morsel for my own
greed’s pleasure. Yet even that will I make honey for thee that to thy meat
17
thou mayest add sweet – Fall to!’

“On the paten,” Symonds elaborates, “on this Crowlian altar in the Abbey of Do
What Thou Wilt gleamed Leah’s turd. Crowley needed perverse stimuli; he could
18
not restrain himself. Unconscious forces were playing with him.” Again I am
immediately inclined to question Symonds’ interpretation. Why precisely does
he think that it is Crowley who is in control, who demands ‘perverse stimuli’? It is
Leah who is the dominant partner in this scenario. She had only recently
recovered from a serious bout of dysentery; might she not have wanted Crowley
to suffer as she had?

The question of Leah’s role and experience in this ritual problematizes the
normalization of the male subject in esoteric discourse. One of the greatest
problems facing any scholar of Crowley today is the overwhelming tendency to
victimize the Great Beast’s partners and associates, a habit engaged in by
thelemites and scholars alike. In particular, the question of whether Crowley
should have treated Leah better at the end of their relationship, or whether his

17
Crowley, quoted in Symonds, 267.
18
Symonds, 267.
5
attitude towards her should be characterised as ‘abusive’, strips the latter of her
agency. Treating Leah as a victim we are wont to forget this powerful woman
lived a life of her own choosing; she may have have suffered, but she was neither
an innocent, nor a victim. Apart from this general, sexist attribution of power, the
characterisation of Leah as a victim willfully ignores the fact that Leah and
Crowley were engaged in a magical relationship which consciously and
ritualistically manipulated normal power relations, forms of subjectivity and
approaches to the self/other divide.

Symonds suggests that the motivation for this coprophagic act was Crowley’s
uncontrollable and perverse sexuality. Already we can see that such a view is
exceedingly simplistic in this context, placing all agency in Crowley hands
neglecting to engage with the way Crowley was inspired through work with his
female partners, as well as the fact that he devoted much of his life to working
out his philosophy and Law through sexual magical acts.

Then I obeyed. My mouth burned; my throat choked; my belly retched; my

blood fled wither who knows, and my skin sweated. She stood above me,
hideous in contempt… She ate the Body of God, and with Her soul’s
compulsion made me eat. But in my mouth that lied when it sneered ‘​Ecce
Corpus’​ it turned back to its first nature; my doubt black-clouded God’s
sun-face.19 My teeth grew rotten, my tongue ulcered; raw was my throat,
spasm-torn my belly; and all my Doubt of that which to Her teeth was
moonlight, and to her tongue ambrosia; to her throat nectar, in Her Belly
the One God of whose Pure Body She should fresh Her Blood. So with my
body shuddering, retching, fainting, and convulsed; with my mind
tempest, my heart crater, my will earthquake, I obeyed Her lash.

“In view of what he did,” Symonds states, “I suppose this is the only way to write
20
about it, although the rhetoric is overdone.” Crowley could have described this
evening far more remotely or crudely, as indeed he does in ‘Leah Sublime’
(written shortly before the coprophagic event) with its infamous line “soak me in
cunt, Cognac and cocaine;” far from this, the coprophagic sacrament is described

19
It is important to note that Doubt was traditionally considered the greatest Christian
sin, and the only one which was unforgivable.
20
Ibid., 268.
6
using explicitly biblical language, reminiscent of both Revelations and the Song of
Songs.

Symonds states this passage is evidence that Crowley needed perverse stimuli;
he could not restrain himself. Unconscious forces were playing with him. While
Symond’s moralizing tone has been recognised and examined by contemporary
scholars, his judgements have been extremely influential, and encapsulate the
popular view of Crowley's life and work. In particular, Symonds expresses much
horror at what he sees as Crowley’s sexual deviance, and at his treatment of his
friends and partners; his judgements of Crowley’s actions are so severe and
visceral, one almost wonders why, if the subject disgusted him so much, he chose
to write the book. This horrified moralizing, particularly as it relates to Crowley’s
perversity and his abusiveness towards his sexual and magical partners, remains
an oft-touted trope in the occult milieu. By the same token, Symond’s work has
propagated a popular blindness towards the level of premeditation and art that
went into Crowley’s cruelest and craziest acts.

Crowley’s rhetoric is a clear indication that something more than sexual

perversity is being explored. I will return to the question of what Crowley was
exploring shortly; first, I would like to consider some of the antecedent events
that may have influenced this coprophagic act.

The Children

Crowley had clearly been interested in the transgressive potentials of

excrement for some time. His early poem collections are filled with images of
feces and other bodily productions. At Cefalù it was Crowley’s aim to explore and
push the boundaries of the Rabelaisian formula ‘Do What Thou Wilt’; it is thus
unsurprising that it would be at this point he would put his coprophagic ideas
into practice. However, Crowley’s time at Cefalù was also marked by the
presence of several young children and of much sickness and disease, and it is
worth considering what influence these facts may have had in Crowley’s

7
experiments with dirt and excreta. In the lead-up up to July 1920 Crowley had
been sharing the abbey with two young children, Hansi (Leah’s son to a previous
lover) and Howard (Ninette Shumway’s son to her deceased husband), as well as
his sick infant daughter Anne Leah, nicknamed Poupée.

In his magical record for the 15th June Crowley writes “it is now 5 months
since I have lived with mothers and children! Mother-love! The all but unique,
the wholly predominant theme of their relations is the quality and quantity of
excrement deposited by the ‘innocent babes’. Innocent enough! But is this stuff of
poesy?” Disgust at excrement, human or otherwise, is not an instinctual reaction.
Left to its own devices, a child will happily play in a pile of such; Freud notes that
the control of and disgust at excrement is the first taboo we learn. Bataille makes
the point well. He is talking in the following passage about rotting human flesh
(something Crowley also fantasized about consuming, most notably in the poem
‘Necrophilia’ in ​White Stains)​ , however his words apply equally to excrement.

We imagine that it is the stink of excrement that makes us feel sick. But
would it stink if we had not thought it was disgusting in the first place?
We do not take long to forget what trouble we go to to pass on to our
children the aversions that make us what we are, which make us human
beings to begin with. Our children do not spontaneously have our
reactions… we have to teach them by pantomime or failing that, by
21
violence, that curious aberration called disgust…

We find this understanding of the inessential nature of disgust in ​The Scented

Garden,​ where Crowley complains, with regards to pederasty, that “to-day no
man can bring forward either the population nonsense or the heresy nonsense,
so he brings up his dinner instead, under the equally absurd delusion that the
22
process is physically dirty.” It is not unlikely that noticing one of the children
playing in dirt or excrement might have enforced for Crowley what seemed to
him to be the arbitrary nature of yet another taboo, and motivated his decision to
experiment with his own limits during his night of coprophagy.

21
Bataille, 58.
22
Crowley, ​The Scented Garden​, 32.
8
Sickness

It is clear that Crowley​ ​saw and experienced a huge amount of sickness

throughout his life (due in no small part to his prodigious unprotected sex acts
and multiple drug addictions). At times he seems to have revelled in the
unhealthy, viewing this as another aspect of his transgression of social norms,
and wearing sickness as a badge of pride. His time at Cefalù in particular was
marked by ill health both for him and for many of those who joined him there.

Indeed for Raoul Loveday, a 23 year old Oxford undergraduate and the
third husband of infamous socialite Betty May, the Abbey meant death. Loveday
died in 1923 at the Abbey; in his biography of Crowley Kaczynski convincingly
argues that his death was caused by enteritis, the result of his drinking from a
contaminated mountain spring; Betty May, however, claimed that Loveday’s
illness was the result of him consuming a quantity of cats blood, as part of one of
Crowley’s rituals. She sold this story to the Sunday Express on her return to
London, and Crowley’s subsequent infamy would lead to his expulsion from Italy
the next year.

Towards the end of May 1920 Leah fell ill with a fever; Crowley described her
remarks in this condition as quite delirious, said that she vomited, had diarrhea.
Diagnosis: dysentery. Three days later, while the Beast was writing poetry in the
middle of the night, Alostrael’s illness reached the acute stage. For an hour she
23
screamed horribly. Unable to bear the screaming, Crowley “gave her an eighth
24
of a grain of heroin under the tongue.” Later that night he glimpsed her
reposed in bed through the temple door, and sketched ‘Leah with enteritis’; her
illness seems not to have made Crowley cease work, or turn away in disgust, but
rather inspired him and stimulated his creativity. After Leah had recovered
Crowley travelled to Tunis, where he spent a few days searching for Jane Wolfe,

23
Symonds, 259.
24
Ibid., 259.
9
an ageing Hollywood actress and potential disciple whom he was supposed to
meet there, as well as engaging in sexual magic acts with Mohammed Tsaida.
Crowley grew sick as a result of this tryst, although he refused to recognize the
cause, ascribing it to a perverted spiritual affinity:
24 June.​ A most unpleasant day of severe illness. I think I may have been
poisoned by reading Conan Doyle. My nose-tip got inflamed; my bowels
hideously loose and their excrements dark and stinking like his [Conan
25
Doyle’s] soul.

Crowley appears to revel in his symptoms, imaginatively engaging with them and
describing them with glee. Crowley returned to the Abbey at Cefalù shortly after
this incident. His diary entry for 28 June reads

5.25 p.m. to 5.15 a.m. Against all principles, and in breach of two
promises, I have sat up all night in the snows [cocaine], writing a poem to
Leah. 7.00 a.m. I think I’ll collect all my filth in one poem and mark it Leah
26
in plain figures.

‘All my filth’ is quite a potent statement considering the amount of filth and
excrement he had seen (and expressed) in the past months. The poem in
question is ‘Leah Sublime’, which Symonds claims is “the very opposite of
27
sublime;” however the word sublime suggests an awe, or even horror,28 that
elevates one’s thoughts. In this philosophical sense the poem can indeed be
characterized as sublime.

What is most significant about this series of events is the relationship between
illness and coprophagy in Crowley’s mind – an association reminiscent of the
syphilitic cunnulingis so prominent in the 1898 poetry collection ​White Stains​.
Crowley does not seem to be disgusted by Leah’s disease, despite the unpleasant
29 30
symptoms; rather he is “moved by her luminous eyes,” and sketches her.

25
Crowley, quoted in Symonds, 261.
26
Ibid., 261.
27
Symonds, 261.
28
See ​A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
by ​Edmund Burke, 1757.
29
Ibid., 260.
10
Crowley had clearly overcome much of the learnt disgust at excremental things;
that he might attempt to overcome the final, more instinctual levels of this taboo
is natural.
It is worth noting in relation to this Crowley’s preference for gaunt, even
emaciated women. He describes his beloved Scarlet Woman thus:

… so I pierced through the painted ape’s face, the live Death of her loose
skin on her grim skeleton, and came to a great Goddess, strange, perverse,
hungry, implacable, and offered up my Soul… I must love even Her mask,
the painted simper, the lewd doll-monkey face, the haggard
shamelessness of her flat breast… the insolence of Death pushing through
31
flesh’s flimsy curtain…
This passage suggests that in loving such a woman Crowley was testing the
in-bred disgust for the diseased and near death. Not for him was the voluptuous
mother-goddess; Crowley’s Holy Whore was loose skinned, syphilitic, and thin.
Crowley had no problem with Leah appearing, even in public, filthy and
unwashed. Symonds claims that the above passage “may be the language of
32
poetry, but it is not the language of truth.” Yet the evidence suggests this to
have been a genuine preference on Crowley’s part; none of his mistresses are
described as full-bodied or healthy. Further, he does not emphasize their
waifishness, fashionable figure, or any of the complimentary terms applied to
thin women. It is the sickness that interests him. He seems to have been
exclusively drawn to women already on the path of decline.33 This is a
fundamentally transgressive approach to sexuality, rejecting all the usual values
by which a woman is judged, which ultimately can be reduced to fertility. It is
not, in fact, a transgression of mere social taboo, but of a more instinctual, animal
aversion. To love a disgusting woman, to love her, moreover, precisely for her

30
Ibid., 259.
31
Crowley, quoted in Symonds, 263.
32
Symonds, 263.
33
It is interesting to consider this in relation to the charges levelled at Crowley that he
psychologically damaged his Scarlet Women. It has been noted that those he chose were
predisposed to alcoholism and mental illness, however it is rarely articulated that
Crowley was drawn to such women precisely ​because​ they were unwell, and that,
further, there was a ​theological​ reason for this (over and above any personal or aesthetic
one).
11
sickness and her filth, suggests that Crowley had managed to detach his sexuality
very thoroughly from his animal instincts.

The Theology of Coprophagy

As noted above Symonds argues that Crowley’s interest in coprophagy is

motivated purely by his sexual perversity. This argument is sufficiently
important to Symonds that it appears as a constant motif throughout ​The King of
the Shadow Realm​. He first makes this point in the preface, claiming that the
Great Beast “went to fantastic lengths to be stimulated. He was not turned on by
music… or paintings or literature or any other ordinary things; he needed
perverse stimuli – human excreta, menstrual blood and especially drugs – to
34
make the message come through.” As demonstrated above Crowley’s approach
to coprophagy was far more complex than this. For Crowley feces were not
simply animal matter; such a substance was capable of carrying messages, and
had a magical and theological potency. This is demonstrated in his diary entry for
29 June: “12.15 a.m. Locust shit on my table: pal of John Baptist: pal of Jane. He
35
wished to say she would come by the next boat….”

In ​The Scented Garden​ Crowley creates an extended analogy between the

sodomite and the magician. Undoubtedly sodomy was something that interested
Crowley on a sexual level, and which he practiced throughout his life; however in
The Scented Garden​ pederasty is also used on a symbolic level, as a literary device
and an image, in order to explore metaphysical truths. The book thus represents
an early example of how Crowley might engage physically and emotionally with
transgressive practices which were at the same time symbolic. It is an example of
how the physical and metaphysical could intertwine as he worked through the
implications of his philosophy as well as his magical theory and practice.

34
Ibid., viii.
35
Crowley, quoted in Symonds, 262.
12
 In… Christianity and Buddhism terror and nausea are a prelude to busts
of burning spiritual activity… ecstasy begins where horror is sloughed off.
A sense of union with the irresistible powers that bear all things before
them is frequently more acute in those religions where the pangs of terror
36
and nausea are felt most deeply.

Although Crowley identified himself with the Beast of Revelations, taking pride
in calling himself the Great Beast 666, it is precisely when he is at his most
transgressive that he shows the greatest resemblance to the saint of traditional
religion. Mary Douglas, in her influential anthropological work ​Purity and Danger
(first published 1966), notes, “St Catherine of Sienna, when she felt revulsion
from the wounds she was tending, is said to have bitterly reproached herself.
Sound hygiene was incompatible with charity, so she deliberately drank a bowl
37
of pus.” The self-proscribed magical ordeals that were Crowley’s focus in the
summer of 1920 were motivated by a similar impulse, and were designed to
have a similar effect. Bataille notes that “the underlying affinity between sanctity
and transgression has never ceased to be felt. Even in the eyes of believers, the
libertine is nearer to the saint than the man without desire.” As flagellation,
starvation and the dark night of the soul are the mystic’s prelude to the
experience of God, so Crowley’s experiences at Cefalù, including the proliferous
sickness, his coprophagy, the affair with the goat, his daughter’s death, and the
extreme financial trouble he found himself in, were the prelude to his attaining
the grade Ipsissimus (the highest possible Grade in the Great White Brotherhood
38
of Light) and experiencing Samadhi. There is a relationship between the lowest
physical degradation and the highest spiritual attainment. The horror must be
experienced that one may rise above it; indeed the horrific and nauseating are
the most potent ways of accessing the divine. Crowley himself saw the process as
parallel to psychoanalysis. Crowley and Leah’s bedroom at the abbey, and the
location of much of the magical work undertaken there, including the
coprophagic experiment, was called La Chambre des Cauchemars. The walls of

36
Bataille, 69.
37
Mary Douglas, ​Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
(London: Routledge, 1966), 7.
38
Symonds, 281.
13
the room had been painted by Crowley in brightly coloured murals of explicit
and excessive sexual acts.39 Crowley gives a description of the chamber and its
paintings in an unpublished manuscript entitled “paintings in the Chambre des
Cauchemars.” This essay begins as a sort of tourist’s guide to the abbey, followed
by a catalogue of its paintings. Of the room, he says

Those who have come successfully through the trial say that
they have become immunized from all possible infection by those
ideas of evil which interfere between the soul and its divine Self…
they have attained permanent mastery of their minds. The process is
similar to that of “Psycho-analysis”; it releases the subject from fear
40
of reality and the phantasms and neuroses thereby caused...

The experiments in the chamber were thus an attempt to free his soul of all the
last vestiges of fears and inhibitions – the ones he had “sunk so deep,” for he
believed that only through this process could one actualize the divine self.
Hirsig’s diary from June 9th 1924 is of particular interest here:41

Ideas connected with convention and complex. To get at

people's "conventions" trouble I suggest two main lines:
1 for the simple—ask the question "What troubles you
most in life."
2 for the more complex animal—Force him with a list of all
the crimes? possible and ask him to mention the one that he
thinks worst "wicked" or "disgusting" or some such term.

The experiments in the chamber were an attempt by Crowley to free his soul of
all the last vestiges of fears and inhibitions – the ones he had “sunk so deep,” to
quote the beast; the mysteries of filth and the coprophagous sacrament suggests

39
These murals were whitewashed after Crowley’s expulsion from italy, and portions of
them were painstakingly uncovered by filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who was the first to
revisit the Abbey in 1955.
40
Crowley, quoted in Lawrence Sutin, ​Do What Thou Wilt: a Life of Aleister Crowley​ (New
York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2000), 282.
41
Hirsig’s diary has so far not been published in entirety, and her description of the
night of coprophagy itself
14
precisely what that was - that he had located his ‘final complex’ in this act which
had fascinated him since his youth, and which causes the most potent disgust
reaction of all our taboos.

For Crowley, the excesses and abysses into which he plunged himself
served in particular one key process; the mastery of mind over matter. Crowley
wished to free himself from natural physiological reactions to physical matter, to
prove that his will was stronger than his animal self. Crowley, the paradigmatic
figure of libertine excess, was in fact pursuing the ascetic ideal. “Thou strives
ever; even in thy yielding thou strives to yield and lo! Thou yieldest not. Go thou
unto the outermost places and subdue all things, subdue thy fear and thy disgust.
42
Then – yield!” Crowley felt himself flawed by the sense of sin and disgust so did
all he could to evoke these feelings that he might overcome them (mirroring
Catherine of Siena's puss-filled cup six centuries before). He thus describes how
playing Leah’s lesbian slave “revolted even my own body, and made me free
43
forever of my preference for matter, made me Pure Spirit.” The summer’s
magical ordeals were Crowley’s experiments with different ways of bringing to
the surface that which had been repressed, laying bare the most insidious of his
negative emotions, the deepest of his hidden weaknesses. They also represented
his attempts to cross the line of the animal, and prove his will stronger than his
own physicality; to uncover the places where instinct and physiology were still
stronger than his theology, faith or will. Although Crowley is popularly
portrayed as the poster-boy of physical excess, his description of the coprophagic
act does not suggest a celebration of the physical world but a refusal to
acknowledge its power and further shows a resentment of humanity as a
physiological existence.

42
Crowley, ​The Book of the Heart Girt with a Serpent,​ quoted in Sutin, 287. This mystery
is related to the active passivity of the grail cup, the “outermost places” being the locale
of Babalon.
43
Crowley, quoted in Sutin 283​.
15
 This is perhaps unsurprising considering the dualism inherent in
neo-platonism and gnosticism, which claims men are created by a divine spark
dwelling in a fleshy body, and from which all western occult traditions have
developed. In fact, this this ambivalence can be found across the Occult Revival,
from the Theosophical Revival and the work of Dion Fortune. to the “wickedest
man in the world.”

Crowley understood that the thin air at high altitudes imposed physical
restrictions upon the mountaineer; however he refused to accept that
coprophagy similarly imposes physiological conditions upon the body (nor did
he accept that willpower alone was rarely enough to overcome a heroin
addiction). Although disgust at feces is a learnt/taught reaction, it is not an
arbitrary one, and when one does force oneself to break this taboo there will be
physiological consequences.

Crowley believed that it was his doubt and his spiritual failure that caused
the coprophagic act, about which he had fantasized so lengthily and waxed so
eloquently, to remain so horrific. He refused to recognize the naturalness – and
practical necessity – of the physiological reaction to coprophagy. He conceived of
the coprophagic act as a sacrament; thus the consuming of feces would be an
outward sign of his elevated inward grace. In his ​Magical Record of the Beast,​ in
an entry for 5 July 1920, Crowley declares “In my Mass the Host is of excrement,
44
that I can consume in awe and adoration.” It would be easy to declare such
statements simply the ultimate form of sacrilege, but Crowley’s concept of the
excremental host has far more significance than this. It is not, in fact, a matter of
​ he Gnostic Mass’ claim​ t​ hat
taboo or sacrilege, but the taking to its logical end​ T
‘There is no part of me that is not of the gods.’ The Eucharistic host is the body of
god; excrement may bear this title as much as any other physical thing. Thus we
can understand Crowley’s frustration when his non-divinity was proven; he was

44
Crowley, quoted in Symonds, 284.
16
unable to understand why that which appeared to be ambrosia to Leah’s tongue
burnt and ulcerated his. It could only be through the failure of his will.

In this context it is interesting to consider Crowley’s classification of the

majority of sexual acts that he engaged in at this period (and indeed throughout
his life) as sex magic. While Crowley’s often-grotesque sex life, seemingly ruled
only by his own impulses, would at first glance suggest that he had accepted
himself as an animal, this is far from the case. Sex magic had to have an outside
object, or else it would be merely sex. The object of much of his sexual magic was
simply to establish the Law of Do What Thou Wilt, a suspiciously circular
argument. In considering all his sexual acts to be acts of sex magic, even if they
were with prostitutes who had no awareness of what was taking place, Crowley
was demanding that sex was, for him, always more than purely animal, and was
45
thus effectively refusing his animal nature. “The Body’s curse/ Is bitter” he
complains in an early poem; one must wonder if here was an effect of his
Plymouth Brethren upbringing that Crowley was never able to break free from.

Virgin Guardian of the Sangraal

So far I have emphasized the un-selfing aim of Crowley’s magical work with
excrement; however there is another level of theological implication to be
analysed – that Leah Hirsig, in her role as Babalon, who plays the active role in
the coprophagic rite. I have explored Crowley’s crossing the abyss above - but we
must understand that crucial to the un-selfing action of this rite is that it is only
through Babalon’s agency that a candidate, in this case Crowley, is able to cross
the Abyss and achieve an understanding of the universe from an egoless point of
view.46

Taking the opposite perspective from that of Symonds, in the night of

coprophagy we can see Hirsig wholly immersed in her role of Babalon; far from
Hirsig being the victim of Crowley’s perversion, the ritual rested on the crux of

45
Poem IV of ‘The Initiation’, ​Clouds Without Water​, 120.
46
Djurjevic, 58,
17
her performing the role of Babalon perfectly, assisting the acolyte Crowley in
‘getting over’ the most basic, ‘baby-stages’ of social conditioning. It is Leah as
Babalon who is the active agent - and, as we noted above, it is she who is able to
eat that which is filth to Crowley.

As Djurdjevic argues in “​Our Lady Babalon and Her Cup of Fornications:

Approaches to a Thelemic Goddess,”​ Babalon has no limits; She is literally
incontinent.“Babalon is referred to as a Harlot and as such she stands in stark
opposition to the symbol of Virgin Mary in Christianity, who is here considered
as representative of the formula of shutting oneself up, expressed through her
continence” 58 In opposition to this, Babalon accepts all, is open to all (hence the
epithet Holy Whore); there are no lines between herself and other, there are no
stops to her flows in and out – she eats and excretes, consumes and births, in a
never ending cycle. Leah’s experience of dysentery would thus likely have been a
powerful part of her own mystical development. At the very least, we know that
Leah’s illness had a very powerful effect on Crowley. thus appeared to Crowley as
confirmation of her role as babalon. Babalon shitting is thus a highly loaded
symbolic act – a ritual emphasising the lack of boundaries, the transient,
transitioning-subject.

Hirsig’s magical name was Alostrael, meaning “Virgin Guardian of the Sangraaal.”
within thelemic cosmology the grail is the symbol of the secret of sexual magic,
the consumption of sexual fluids. In the context we have been exploring here,
faeces can arguably be understood as a sexual fluid; thus this magical act fits
neatly into the theological schema of thelema. further, it can be understood as
the logical end of the magical explorations of filth at the Abbey; nothing else
would have done but to discover the one taboo that cannot be broken.

In Retrospect

On 24 July 1920 Jane Wolfe arrived at the abbey of Thelema; “it was
physically filthy, and as the day wore on, I became aware of the foul miasma

18
 47
enveloping the place; it steamed to high heaven. I could not breathe.” Wolfe
later broached the topic to Norman Mudd, another of Crowley’s disciples, “who
48
explained that Crowley was experimenting with the ‘mystery of filth.’” Perhaps
Crowley had truly convinced himself that this was another transgressive
experiment; however it clearly had physical consequences. Throughout this
experimental period Crowley and Leah’s daughter was suffering an unknown
illness, from which the infant subsequently died. Crowley was distraught at this
development. He blamed the children’s nurse (and his mistress) Ninette,
claiming that it had been her evil intentions that had killed the child; much in the
same way as he had blamed Conan Doyle for his earlier sickness. He believed the
offence to be one of spiritual impurity, and did not see it as having a physical
cause. Sutin suggests that Crowley’s quick forgiveness of Ninette for this
49
dramatic offence may have been motivated by practical need. I am inclined to
wonder whether Crowley might have on some level been aware of the part the
filthy abbey may have had to play in the infant’s demise, although in his pride he
would never admit it. Crowley rarely admitted his failures in his contemporary
writing. His records of the night of coprophagy are ceremonial and imaginative.
However in his subsequent warnings to others we are able to see that Crowley
did in fact recognize the negative effects of his actions. Symonds records that on
the day following the night of coprophagy, “after a long sleep, Crowley said that
his throat and tongue were still sore, and that Leah was ‘unwell’, and that Hansi
50
had a fever.” Four years later, on 23 September 1924, he wrote to Norman
Mudd
I am extremely anxious that my diaries should be preserved. They contain
the results of years of research undertaken at the most serious peril to
health and reason. They are in their present form quite unintelligible to
any but students trained in a particular way. I can assure you that when
worked over and the results given to the world the intimate knowledge of
the human constitution disclosed will prove of immense value in social
51
progress.

47
Crowley, quoted in Symonds, 284.
48
Information attributed to Thelemic historian Phyllis Seckler in Sutin, 287.
49
Sutin, 285.
50
Symonds, 268.
51
Crowley, quoted in Symonds, 268
19
What intimate knowledge did Crowley discover? The evidence suggests that
some of it, at least, was that one can eat feces, and survive, but that such an act is
inadvisable because it has a severely negative effect upon the health. This
conclusion is supported by an entry in Crowley’s diary regarding his German
lover Hanni Jaeger: “Anu has been playing a very foolish sexual game all the
week. This A.M. she insisted on my using her as a W.C. in spite of the warnings I
have given her as to the appalling results of such behavior. She will soon be
52
taught by punishment.” Crowley’s interest in and experimentation with
coprophagy is certainly one of the more colorful aspects of his career. While
Symonds’ assessment of this interest as being simply another aspect of Crowley’s
perverse eroticism is a huge simplification, it is clear that experimenting with
coprophagy is not the wisest of ideas, and even the Great Beast himself seems to
have ultimately recognized this.

Conclusion: “I have never tasted anything to match the ShT which she gave
me before She went away”

Crowley published ​The Book of Lies​ in 1912, a compendium of mystical puzzles,

word games and poetry presented in 93 chapters. chapter 87, is called “Mandarin
Meals;” it reads:

52
Sutin, 356; Sutin provides no date for this quote, but Crowley’s affair with
Jaeger took place in the mid-1930s.
20
The “gnostic talisman” spoken of is a sigil of the magical formula “ShT.” In his
diary entry for 22nd June 1920 Crowley states “It becomes ever clearer that the
ShT god is Shin Teth, Fire, Spirit, Lion, Sun…. Set, Satan, Sad, Sud, Sax, Had, are all
ShT.” This formula is thus connected with the Fire Qadosh (the thelemic
equivalent of the Holy Spirit) and with baphomet, as well as with satan and set.
The first two exist in a state of flux or in-between-ness; the latter are aspects of
the godhead which have traditionally been deemed negative. This chapter
appears to put forth the idea that the worst bits of the gods are still better than
the best bits of man. But while this appears deeply unthelemic and traditionally
christian, it hides a further level of reversal; for ShT is in turn an aspect of the
formula LAShTAL; it is the bridge between LA and AL; the revealer of illusion.
for, ultimately, each of these divine formulae are images, constructs, which we
use to wrangle with the idea of the divine; and indeed crowley makes it very
clear in the lead up to the coprophagic act that all these are, ultimately, illusion.
Now ideas of human waste and of taboo - particularly in their boundary-crossing
and ambivalent natures, connect potently with the ShT gods - Set, for instance, is
known as the “Eater of Dung.” It is thus possible to understand the coprophagous
act as being the final magical end of a thought experiment that had been going on
a long time.

It was an attempt to prove in practice the idea Crowley had expounded in ​Liber
Ararita​, written 1907-1908, of the ultimate illusion of all divine constructs; in
fact of all symbolic constructs. Whether ‘positive’ - bearded father gods and holy
mothers - or ‘negative’ - devils and painted apes -​ Liber Ararita​ argues these are
all only unreal images of the ultimate two-in-one, which is beyond image or
description.

Bataille claims “the lover strips the beloved of her identity no less than
the blood-stained priest his human or animal victim… she loses the firm barrier
53
that once separated her from others and made her impenetrable.” An act of

53
​Georges Bataille, ​Erotism: Death & Sensuality​, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco:
City Lights, 1986), 90.
21
sexual violence, whether unsolicited or actively sought, “deprives the creature of
its limited particularity and bestows on it the limitless, infinite nature of sacred
54
things.” Through masochistic experiences, and particularly in coprophagy, one
can experience oneself as being unlimited; having the line between self and other
systematically crossed belies the sense of discontinuity the civilized world so
intensely promotes.

For human civilization has made a habit of propagating the myth of the bounded
individual - that we are all in some way self-contained units: monads. It is this
self-containedness and uniqueness that is problematized by sex and procreation,
by eating and by excreting. These boundary-breaking actions, actions we do
every single day, remind us of the fundamental contradiction of humanity: that
we feel ourselves to be inescapably individual, but are an indefinable part of a
mass of physicality and excretion. It is thus that these things are so often the
subject to law and taboo; however, we simultaneously understand that the lines
of purity and taboo are arbitrary - the arbiters of moral value are arbitrary.

If we understand divinity to be structurally opposed to so-called ‘civilized’

humanity - might even go so far as to day the unbounded self is our
understanding of the divine - we can come to understand why these
boundary-actions are some of the most potent ways to experience or encounter
divinity.

Crowley understood this; and this understanding underpins his entire system of
magic. Crowley’s theology is one of flux and fluid: it is about substance and
meaning, boundaries and dissolution, it is about what goes in, what comes out,
where do they go - how can we manipulate the stop and flow? Where do we find
the limits of self and not-self? What is the other? It is about searching for
knowledge and meaning in the abject, the unmeaning. Coprophagy was the
logical end of this line of questioning, the inevitable crown of Crowley’s lifelong
fascination with edges. Like Peter Singer, Immanuel Kant and every other good

54
Ibid., 90.
22
ethicist, Crowley knew that if he was to proclaim a moral imperative, he must
follow it to its logical end. Crowley declared in​ Liber XV​ “There is no part of me
that is not of the gods;” taken to its logical end, this means that human waste, too,
is godly.

Bibliography

Bataille, Georges. ​Erotism: Death & Sensuality.​ Translated by Mary Dalwood. San
Francisco: City Lights, 1986.

Crowley, Aleister. ​Clouds Without Water​. London: privately published, 1909.

​ ublished
Crowley, Aleister. ​The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz. P
under the pseudonym Major Lutiy. Paris: Probsthain & Company, 1910

Crowley, Aleister. ​White Stains​. Originally published in Amsterdam, 1898 under

pseudonym George Archibald Bishop. Republished London: Duckworth,
1973.

Douglas, Mary. ​Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo​. London: Routledge, 1966.

Pasi, Marco. “The Neverendingly Told Story: Recent Biographies of Aleister

Crowley.” ​Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism​ 3:2 (2003):
224-245.

Sutin, Lawrence. ​Do What Thou Wilt: a Life of Aleister Crowley.​ New York: St
Martin’s Griffin, 2000.

23
Symonds, John. ​The King of the Shadow Realm: Aleister Crowley, his Life and
Magic​. London: Duckworth, 1989.

24