The Beast 666 and the flavour of Ceylon 

During his two visits to Ceylon, the occult hedonist Aleister Crowley was inspired by ruins and remembered how much he despised humanity.

They seem musicians in an orchestra,
playing a nocturne by some oriental Chopin,
unconscious of disquieting realities.
– Aleister Crowley on the Ceylonese

In the early years of the 20th century, Ceylon was visited twice by the most infamous magician of modern times – Aleister Crowley, or the 'Great Beast 666', as he styled himself. As a magician, Crowley was in a direct line of descent from such luminaries as the Comte de Saint-Germain, Eliphas Levi and Madame Blavatsky. But he was also a poet, novelist, mountaineer, eccentric and bisexual womaniser. Yet throughout the account of his visits to the island, in 1901 and 1903, the generally outspoken Crowley conveys an ambivalent attitude towards Ceylon and its inhabitants, vacillating between racist abuse and romantic reverie. Take his description of Colombo, for example, from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley:

I love it and loathe it with nicely balanced enthusiasm. Its climate is chronic; its architecture is an unhappy accident; its natives are nasty; its English are exhausted and enervated. The riff raff of rascality endemic in all parts is here exceptionally repulsive. The high water mark of social tone, moral elevation, manners and refinement is attained by the Japanese ladies of pleasure.

Yet a few paragraphs later Crowley can be found likening Colombo to the crossroads of the civilised world:

But then, how rich, how soft, how peaceful is Colombo! One feels that one needs never do anything any more. It invites one to dream deliciously of deciduous joys. The palms, the flowers, the swooning song of the surf, the dim and delicate atmosphere heavy with sensuous scents, the idle irresponsible people, purring with placid pleasure; they seem musicians in an orchestra, playing a nocturne by some oriental Chopin unconscious of disquieting realities.

This confused opinion was one shared by many before Crowley, of course. It was perhaps best captured in Bishop Reginald Heber's hymn "Greenland's Icy Mountains", from 1819, which lavishes praise on the island while calling the people who inhabit it "vile". Like many visitors to Ceylon, Crowley could not resist commenting on the hymn, objecting to its acceptance of Ceylon as the penultimate. "But certainly every prospect is remarkably pleasing and, as far as I saw, every man is vile," he remarks in typically acerbic fashion, adding that "there seems to be something in the climate of the island that stupefies the finer parts of a man if he lives there too long." To Crowley, the flavour of Ceylon tea symbolised his feelings. At one point, he recalls pleading with a shopkeeper to procure him some Chinese tea. "It chanced that the owner of a neighbouring plantation was in the shop," Crowley writes. "He butted in, remarking superciliously that he could put in the Chinese flavour for me!" "Yes," replied Crowley, "but can you take out the Ceylon flavour?"

Although Crowley complained vehemently about the local populace, he was also extremely critical of the 'typical' colonial Englishman. "He has failed to convince himself of his superiority to mere created beings," Crowley observes, "so his airs of authority do not become him. He feels himself a bit of an upstart. Feeling his footing insecure, [he] dares not tolerate the native as he can in India." On his first trip to Ceylon, Crowley was robbed by a policeman, who subsequently escaped conviction on some technicality. The English magistrate told Crowley with sadistic pleasure that the man could have been flogged if convicted. "It was my first glimpse," he writes, "of the bestial instincts of the average respectable cultured Englishman."

The original animal
During a stay in Kandy, Crowley was permitted to be present at the annual inspection of the Sacred Tooth Relic. Subsequently, he witnessed the extravagant celebration of the Buddhist festival of Esala Perahera.

I was not impressed with the sanctity of the proceedings; but as a spectacle it is certainly gorgeous. The very wildness and lack of appropriateness add to its charm. The processions to which we are accustomed in Europe and America are all so cleverly thought out that the effect is merely to irritate. The Perahera is a gigantic jollification; they bring out all their elephants, dancers, monks, officials, drums, horns, torches – anything that makes a blaze or a noise, and let them all loose at once. The scene was wild and somewhat sinister. The darkness, the palms, the mountainous background, the silent lake below, the impenetrable canopy of space, studded with secretive and significant stars, formed a stupendous setting for the savage noise and blaze of the ceremony. One half saw huge shadowy shapes moving mysteriously in the torchlight, and the air vibrated violently with the jubilant rage of riotous religious excitement.

He goes on to suggest that the Perahera communicates a "sort of magnificent madness to the mind". Although he was not sure of the meaning of this madness, he "felt a tense, tremendous impulse to do something demonic. Yet, one had no idea what to do. It was almost a torture to feel so intensely, and desire so deliriously, such unintelligible irritation. Hours passed in this intoxicating excitement."

Elsewhere, Crowley admits that in writing his autobiography he was significantly influenced by Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious (1916). It is therefore not surprising that the mass psychological state induced by the spectacle of the Perahera was of special interest to him. "One can understand perfectly the popular enthusiasm," he states,

It was the release of the subconscious desires of the original animal. To a civilized mind, accordingly, the impression was charged with a certain disquietude partaking of the nature of terror without understanding why; one felt the presence of forces which appal because one feels their power, recognizes their existence in oneself. They are the things one has tried to forget and persuade oneself that they are in fact forgotten. They are the voices of ancestral appetite.

Crowley also visited Dambulla, 150 km northeast of Colombo, with its massive cave-temple complex. "One of the most extraordinary works of human skill, energy and enthusiasm in the world", Crowley said of the site, although he complained about the "thick coats of gamboge", or deep-yellow resin, which he felt concealed the "delicacy of the modelling". The ancient rock fortress of Sigiriya he found "startling". He ended up hanging about the place for a few days in order to circumnavigate the base of the rock and try find a way up, but instead found the scheme impractical because of the surrounding thick jungle. That he was unable to ascend Sigiriya seems extraordinary given his noted prowess as a mountaineer, and the fact that since the first recorded ascent, in 1853, some half-dozen Europeans had achieved this feat. Moreover, the Public Works Department had erected a permanent ladder for the final part of the ascent of the rock in 1894, and the Commissioner of Archaeology, H C P Bell, had undertaken considerable excavations at the base, in the process clearing much of the jungle thereabouts. Perhaps Crowley, then a seemingly sprightly 26 years old, had simply needed a few days of rest?

The last stop was the ancient capital of Anuradhapura. Crowley was clearly impressed, gushing that the ruins were "incomparably greater as monuments than even those of Egypt." This was high praise indeed from Crowley. He continued:

They are not so sympathetic spiritually; they lack the appeal of geometry and aesthetics which makes the land of Khem [ie, Egypt] my spiritual fatherland. But one has to grant the gargantuan grandeur of the old Singalese civilisation. Their idea, even of so pedestrian a project as a tank, was simply colossal. They thought in acres where others think in square yards.

Hypertrophied honeymoon
Crowley was a type who showed tremendous initial enthusiasm for things, but whose interest often quickly waned. As he confesses, "I was fed up with marvels." So, he travelled onwards from Ceylon to South India, where he bumped into Colonel Henry Steel Olcott on a train. Olcott, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society along with Helena Petrovna, went on to become a Buddhist, and was responsible for a renaissance of the spiritual practice in Ceylon. "The psychological change from Ceylon is very sudden, startling and complete," Crowley observes about the change in environment. "What is there about an Island which differentiates it so absolutely from the adjoining mainland? No amount of similarity of race, customs and culture gets rid of insularity."

Back in England, Crowley 'acquired' a wife under unusual circumstances. Her name was Rose Kelly and – remarkably, given Crowley's anti-Christian sentiment – she was the daughter of the vicar of the parish of Camberwell, London. She told Crowley that she was about to be married against her will, so without thinking he suggested that she marry him instead. Afterwards, Crowley realised that he loved her passionately. When the English summer of 1903 began to wane, the newlyweds embarked on what Crowley euphemistically terms a "hypertrophied honeymoon". As he explains, "We pretended to ourselves that we were going big-game shooting in Ceylon … but the real object was to adorn the celebration of our love by setting it in a thousand suave and sparkling backgrounds." The mystery is why Crowley chose Ceylon for his honeymoon, having already experienced, by his own account, a chequered visit there only two years earlier.

Upon their arrival into Colombo, Rose decided that she might be pregnant. Although this untimely revelation inevitably curtailed their honeymoon, the couple nonetheless travelled to the southeastern coastal village of Hambantota via Galle, by stagecoach and bullock cart. Interestingly, despite what was originally meant to be a ruse, the two evidently went in order to partake in some big-game hunting. Crowley insists that it was not his intention to inflict chronicles of slaughter on his readers, yet he does spend many paragraphs in analysing the temperament and psychology of the buffalo, sambar, leopard and elephant. He also describes the incidentals of the shoot, such as his fury at the sub-standard cartridges he had purchased in Colombo, and how an elephant he was tracking killed a dipsomaniac Frenchman. In addition, Crowley claims his headman swindled him outrageously, but that there was no remedy for the situation. His conclusion from the whole experience is that "there is no remedy for anything in Ceylon. The whole island is an infamy. It is impossible to get twelve Sinhalese to agree on any subject whatever, so a majority decision determines the verdict of a jury of seven!"

During their hunting trip, Crowley and his wife stayed in a bungalow near the shores of an unspecified tank. One day, they went out in a boat so that Crowley could shoot some of the fruit bats frequenting the trees at the edge of the tank. A wounded bat fell on Rose and frightened her badly, for it took Crowley some time to detach its claws from her. That night, Crowley was awakened by what he thought were the screams of a dying bat in the room. He called out to Rose, but there was no answer. On lighting a candle, he found her hanging on to the overhead frame of the four-poster bed, squealing in a hideous manner. Crowley tried to pull her down, but she clung to the frame and refused to respond to his calls. "When I got her down at last," he recounts,

she clawed and scratched and bit and spat and squealed, exactly as the dying bat had done to her. It was the finest case of obsession that I had ever had the good fortune to observe. Of course it is easy to explain that in her hypersensitive condition the incident had reproduced itself in a dream. She had identified herself with the assailant and mimicked his behaviour. But surely it is much simpler to say that the spirit of the bat entered her.

At the conclusion of their hunting trip, the couple returned to Colombo, where they happened to witness a bit of history. While having lunch one day at the Grand Oriental Hotel, Crowley witnessed the arrival onto the island of a Scottish delegation sent to vindicate the honour of Major General Sir Hector MacDonald, who had committed suicide in a Paris hotel rather than face the charges of 'sexual irregularity' that had been levelled against him by the British Army in Ceylon. MacDonald had become commander of British troops in the colony in 1902, during the governorship of another soldier, Sir Joseph West Ridgeway. The commander, however, quickly fell from grace when his penchant for native boys was brought to light. According to Crowley, the court martial was the revenge of a "Ceylon Big Bug", whom MacDonald had apparently ordered off the field at some big function when he had appeared in mufti, or civilian dress.

The Times of Ceylon carried this piece of imagined gossip:

Do you really mean to say that, besides yourself, three ladies (all up-country ones, too) were the only ones who went to see our new General arrive? … Then, dear, you know we heard a whispered rumour that he does not like ladies, and possibly may have been pleasantly surprised he had dropped on a spicy little Isle where ladies were few and far between.

Crowley not only knew MacDonald, but had also had lunch with him in Paris just days before his death. He remarked that the former "seemed unnaturally relieved; but his conversation showed that he was suffering acute mental distress." The very next morning, Crowley was astonished to read in the New York Herald what he considered to be "an outrageously outspoken account of the affair". It was soon afterwards that MacDonald committed suicide. Crowley relates how MacDonald's pockets were found to be full of obscene photographs at the time of his death. "Was his motive to convey some subtly offensive insult to the puritans whose prurience had destroyed him?" muses Crowley.

In Crowley's view, MacDonald was "a great simple lion-hearted man with the spirit of a child; with all his experience in the army, he still took the word honour seriously, and the open scandal of the accusation had struck down his standard." At the time, of course, this was a scandal of sizeable proportions. The sordid details of this Victorian melodrama can be found in several accounts. Crowley made himself known to the members of the MacDonald delegation, and they poured their hearts out to him. It seems they were already discouraged about their mission, for the prosecution had the affidavits of 77 witnesses. "Ah, well", said Crowley, "you don't know much about Ceylon. If there were seven times 77, I wouldn't swing a cat on their dying oaths. The more unanimous they are, the more it is certain that they have been bribed to lie."

Solitude to society
By this time, Colombo was beginning to get to Crowley, and so he "went up to Kandy". As far as he was concerned, the worst thing about Colombo was the appearance of two English ladies – a mother and daughter – at the hotel at which they were staying. "They would have seemed extravagant at Monte Carlo," he seethes. "In Ceylon the heavily painted faces, the over-tended dyed false hair, the garish flashy dresses, the loud harsh foolish gabble, the insolent ogling were an outrage."

Crowley spent just two days in Kandy, during which he wrote a play, "Why Jesus Wept", an allegory of the corrupting influence of society. "The title is a direct allusion to the ladies in question," he states. The following passage from the conclusion to the play gives an indication of its tenor:

I much prefer – that is mere I
Solitude to society.
And that is why I sit and spoil
So much clean paper with such toil
By Kandy Lake in far Ceylon.
I have my old pyjamas on:
I shake my soles from Britain's dust;
I shall not go there till I must;
And when I must! – I hold my nose.
Farewell, you filthy-minded people!
I know a stable from a steeple.

"Why Jesus Wept" is dedicated to Christ, G K Chesterton, and Prince Jinawaravansa. A member of the Siamese royal family, Jinawaravansa spent time as a Buddhist monk in Galle, where Crowley met him. Crowley considered him a man of great spiritual attainment, as he did Solicitor-General Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan. However, even here Crowley's ambivalence seeps through, for elsewhere in the autobiography he writes of Ramanathan that "despite his great spiritual experience, [he] had not succeeded in snapping the shackles of dogma, and whose practice seemed in some respects at variance with his principles."

By this time, Rose felt certain she was pregnant. Crowley had intended to go to Rangoon before returning to England, but, as he wrote, "Throughout my life I have repeatedly found that destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler. Physical ability and moral determination count for nothing." So on 28 January 1904, the Crowleys left Colombo for Aden and Port Said.