Conspirituality

No Man Is An Island

In 1918, Aleister Crowley came to Esopus Island in the Hudson Valley, a small rocky streak of land in the Hudson, still uninhabited and officially off-limits. Coast Guard markers are sunk into the rock at the southern end. Visitors have left carvings in stone and painted graffiti, but one searches in vain for traces of Crowley or his campsite.

There are no wartime reports of Aleister Crowley ever being in Esopus Island, not even in the official Hudson Valley records. He simply vanished from America during the summer of 1918 and did not turn up in England again until the next season.

Did Crowley initiate a current of revolutionary psychedelic use at Esopus Island, New York? Did he formulate the seed of an Egregor? He may have been among the first intelligentsia to systematically experiment with their ritual use in North America.

Aleister Crowley was 42 the summer he haunted the Hudson Valley shores, swaying and chanting his 'purifications' of ancient pagan ritual in the moth-swirling smoke around his Esopus Island campfire. His bullet-like head was shaved except for a phallic forelock and an irregular and untended growth of new beard. He often wore a robe-like shirt, climbing shoes, shorts and scarlet tassels on his golf socks. 'Magically' he was still approaching the height of his powers. In terms of fashion-sense, he was digging his own moats. (Alexander)

Since coming to America in 1914, Crowley had taken such occasional retirements from his New York City base to Lake Pasquaney in New Hampshire and to the tip of Long Island. He was consistently broke at the time, writing an astrology book with Evangeline Adams that never saw print and selling articles to Vanity Fair magazine. If this latter connection seems unlikely, it was also so to the Beast, who wrote of its editor, Frank Crowninshield; "He treated me, through some inexplicable misunderstanding, as a human being and asked me to write for him." A good deal of controversy was to arise from the fact that he was also at the time contributing to the pro-German paper The Fatherland, a service which his detractors considered treasonable and which he was forced to defend with no little exacerbation ever afterward.

It is difficult today to understand how AC's ludicrous and obvious satires were taken to be seriously pro-German but Crowley-haters could seemingly read traitor into his words with the ease of natural reflex.

Many years later, British intelligence expert Richard Deacon would cite evidence that Crowley was trying to aid the Allied cause (and was in fact in touch with the American Department of Justice) but at the time of his upstate adventure there was a wartime concern about strangers to contend with and the question of his political allegiance was a factor not to be ignored. .” (Gary Alexander, Crowley in the Valley)

His trademark libertarian sayings rang out from the cliffs: EVERY MAN AND WOMAN IS A STAR! It expresses a sacred and sublime nature exists in every human being which is to be respected. DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW, a vital principle of his philosophy, a declaration of rights for that inward star. Everyone has the right to live, not as an outlaw, but by his or her own internal integrity and self-determinism. To do less is to remain a slave, much like Plato implied, suggesting “Know Thyself.”