Oriental Grotesques

 

 

In his autobiography, I Still Haven't Unpacked Yet, the maverick writer and broadcaster William Holt recalled visiting Aleister Crowley at his 93 Jermyn Street flat. There he also met Frieda, Lady Harris who was at that time working with Crowley on the Book of Thoth tarot deck. Whilst Frieda sketched, Crowley showed Holt some of his own "hideous pictures". Holt wrote that a "particularly unpleasant one was of an oriental with a grotesquely misshapen head - a product of Crowley's imagination, for Nature could not have produced such a freak to live".

Crowley produced several 'oriental grotesques', the most well-known being the drawing 'The Way', popularly known today as the portrait of Lam. This was first shown at the 1919 'Dead Souls' exhibition in New York. But that exhibition also included a work in oils titled 'Ko-Hsuen', a portrait of the 3^rd century Chinese philosopher whom Crowley had recently discovered he was the reincarnation of.

Crowley painted a Chinese figure on the cover of his copy of Legge's translation of the ancient oracle the Yijing or 'Yi King' as he knew it. Around the time that he started regularly consulting the Yi again in the mid-1930s, Crowley also painted a watercolour called 'The Chinese Sage'. Grant describes this painting and a strange event associated with it in his Hecate's Fountain, publishing the picture as part of the cover design of his Against the Light esoteric novel.

Another well-known oriental grotesque by Crowley is a pen and ink drawing titled 'Kwaw'. Kwaw Li Ya was a Chinese phonetic transliteration of Crowley's surname. Dated 1935, this caricature of himself as a Daoist philosopher - complete with Fu Manchu-style moustache - was used by Symonds for the cover of the first edition of his biography The Great Beast.

 

 

All of these 'oriental' grotesques have, to use Holt's description, 'mishappen' heads. The picture seen by Holt could have been any one of them. But, in response to Holt's inquiry about it, "That?" replied Crowley, "He is my guru". 

When Crowley made a gift of 'The Way' to Kenneth Grant, he noted in his diary that he had given him "the Lama". And, when the drawing was first published in so-called Blue Equinox in 1919, the caption makes a specific reference to the Tibetan term 'lama' which Crowley thought meant 'He who Goeth'. The Tibetans use the term 'lama' to translate the Sanskrit 'guru'. If Crowley knew this, it seems likely therefore that it was the portrait of Lam that Holt actually saw.

Despite Crowley's reported claim to have drawn Lam 'from life', I agree with Holt that this oriental 'guru' was the product of the artist's imagination. It is my contention here that rather than being a portrait of Lam, Amalantrah, Aiwass or any other entity with whom Crowley had contact, it is an idealized figure drawn from Crowley's own interest in and experience of the 'Mystic East' and the popular imagery associated with it at the time.

Today, Tibetan Buddhist communities can be found in almost every major Western city, often clustered around a charismatic Tibetan teacher, usually an exiled lama. The present Dalai Lama enjoys a popularity and reputation unparalleled among the world's other religious leaders, even among non-Buddhists. This situation was very different at the beginning of the 20^th century. Tibet was then a closed kingdom; Lhasa rather than Peking was the 'forbidden city'. In 1903, Britain dispatched the Younghusband Expedition to forcibly establish relations with the court of the then 13^th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama fled first into Mongolia and then into exile in China. Later he would spend a short period of exile in British India after an Imperial Chinese invasion of Tibet. 

When Crowley visited Yunnan in 1906, he found that:

The general weakening of [Chinese] imperial authority led to the outbreak of raids on the part of the Buddhist lamas who lived in remote serais perched upon the inaccessible crags of the mountains bordering Tibet. Bands of these monks swept down from their fastnesses to indulge in orgies of rapine, rape, murder of cannibalism.

Crowley also heard a chilling tale from the aptly-named plant hunter George Forrest. He had based his expedition at a Catholic mission that had remarkable success in converting the local ethnic Tibetan community. When news arrived that 'the lamas were on the war path' the entire mission was evacuated. Forrest became separated from the group but his life was saved by the directions given by the ghost of Father Bernard, an elderly priest who had not escaped the marauding 'lamas'.

 In 1919, the year that Crowley exhibited his drawing of a 'lama' in New York, Sax Rohmer published The Golden Scorpion, a 'yellow peril' genre novel with a plot-line that followed his highly successful Fu Manchu mysteries. A sumptuously decorated oriental divan beneath a sordid opium den run by a former imperial mandarin is the lair of Fo Hi, the Golden Scorpion himself. Fo Hi's greatest weapon is his Will, over which he has total control, and uses its sheer force to command the submission of others. Those who resist are condemned to the 'feast of a thousand ants', a pit into which the unfortunate victims are thrown smeared with honey to be consumed by voracious driver ants. In the final chapter, like the tale of the scorpion ringed with fire, Fo Hi chooses self-immolation rather than capture.

Fo Hi is an early form of romanization of the Chinese Fu Hsi or Fuxi, the name of inventor/discoverer of the eight trigrams upon which the Yi King is based. However, in The Golden Scorpion, the identity of Fo Hi is concealed. Ordinarily, he wears a fully enveloping cowl with only holes for his eyes cut in the hood. Even when this was removed and Fo Hi was 'arrayed in a rich mandarin robe' he wears a 'grotesque green veil which obscured his features' but through which shone his brilliant cat-like eyes.

Fo Hi's unusual garb sounds remarkably reminiscent of the robes worn during part of The Rites of Eleusis publicly performed at Caxton Hall in 1910. Around that time, Rohmer was a young investigative journalist based in London with an interest in the occult. According to his widow, Rohmer was at one time a member of an off-shoot of the Order of the Golden Dawn. He certainly published a short history of magic under the title 'The Romance of Sorcery' in 1914. Whether they ever met is not known but Rohmer must have known of Crowley by reputation. In the relatively small literary circles in which they both moved and Rohmer's success with Fu Manchu, it seems very likely that Crowley had heard of him.

According to another story told by his widow, Rohmer received the inspiration for his Fu Manchu character by occult means; through the Ouija board. Asking how he might best earn a living as a writer and journalist, the planchette spelt out the word 'Chinaman'. Judged simply by its popularity at the time, Rohmer's famous creation seems to have touched something deep within the Western imagination. Crowley was evidently influenced by it, whether consciously or unconsciously.

As if he himself rather than Rohmer had received the Ouija board's answer, in 1915 Crowley assumed the guise of Kwaw Li Ya, an exiled professor from Peking University and fanatical supporter of the last emperor of the Manchu dynasty, donning full mandarin regalia for photographs in Vanity Fair.

It may seem ridiculous to us today that a European should pose as a Chinese but in fact Crowley wasn't alone in attempting this trick. The true identity of the world famous stage magician Chung Ling Soo was not revealed until his bullet-catching act went seriously wrong and he was shot dead on stage on 23^rd March 1918 at the Wood Green Empire, a theatre in London. His death caused a sensation when it emerged that 'Chung Ling Soo' was in fact American-born William Ellsworth Robinson (1861-1918). Originally a stage-hand, Robinson adapted both the name and act of a real Chinese magician, Ching Ling Foo (1854-1922), achieving fame in London in 1905. Robinson maintained the pretence by only ever appearing in Chinese dress and refusing to speak except through an interpreter, and with the bemused collusion of the Chinese community!

Crowley freely admitted that he loved dressing up in exotic costumes, even assuming the identity of 'Chiao Khan' in Cairo in 1904 for that express purpose. Curiously and many years later, during the 1930s, Crowley famously posed as a 'Laughing Buddha' in a photograph captioned by Symonds and others as 'Fo Hi'. However, Crowley's assumption of this guise dates back as far as his New York days. In an unpublished piece entitled 'Chance?' written whilst in America, Crowley tells us that:

On my honour, I don't know if he is a Chinaman or not. He is by long odds the most curious man in New York...

Squatted on a great divan almost hidden among cushions and dressed in an enormous robe of the most brilliant blue with golden symbols embroidered all over it:

He is entirely bald, although still young. His face reminded me a little of the great Napoleon, but more of Ho Tai, that smiling god with the huge abdomen whose image one sees in all the Chinese shops…

Ho Tai, Japanese Hotei, was a popular representation of a jovial tenth century Chinese Buddhist monk who was identified with the Maitreya or Future Buddha. It is also the image seen on the altar in Henry Camp's photograph of Charles Stansfeld Jones in his favourite yoga asana published in the Blue Equinox in 1919.

Crowley's 'Fo Hi' like Rohmer's 'Golden Scorpion' was not an entirely benevolent god:

His eyes… are amazing. They glint unutterable Evil, the joy of a Devil gloating over the souls that he has lured to Damnation. Yet there is no cruelty in his smile, one would say that even Eternal Punishment seems to him but one more Joke.

Compare this description with the first appearance of Rohmer's arch-villain in The Mystery of Doctor Fu Manchu (1913):

Of the face I despair of writing convincingly. It was that of an archangel of evil, and it was wholly dominated by the most uncanny eyes that ever reflected a human soul, for they were narrow and long, very slightly oblique, and of a brilliant green.

Although Lam's curiously shaped head has been a focus of much attention, it was the long narrow eyes that seem to have fascinated Kenneth Grant. In Hecate's Fountain, he wrote:

Merely to gaze into the eyes of this entity is to invite a potent contact. There follows an immediate sensation of lightness, of weightlessness, and then a sensation of falling. One's initial reaction is to resist being sucked into the vortex of an infernal astral funnel. All of which confirms the opinion of those who consider Lam to be something, or someone, not of this earth.

In my own opinion, we do not have to look far beyond the China and Tibet of the popular Western imagination of the early 20^th century, both places of magic and mystery, to find the strange oriental figure that Crowley drew.

In the original novel, The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu, the Chinese mastermind's nemesis, Nayland Smith, asks Dr Petrie to:

Imagine a person … with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect with all the resources of science past and present… Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr Fu Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.

This could just as easily be a description of the 'lama' Lam. But rather than the 'yellow peril incarnate', Crowley's drawing is an embodiment of another strand of the myth of the Orient; the mystical East. It encompassed the 'Tibet' where Blavatsky claimed to have lived for seven years and received the mysterious 'Stanza of Dzyan' from the hands of the high initiates who closely guarded this secret wisdom. It was also the land of 'magic and mystery' that drew the intrepid Alexandria David-Neel (1868-1969) to Tibet during the 1920s.

But it was China, not the Himalayas, which captured Crowley's imagination. "Look eastward!" he cries in his Confessions:

    There lies China; there is the only civilization that has looked time in the face without a  blush;  an atheism with good manners. There broods the old wise man, he who has conquered life without the aid of death…

He admits that his vision of vast, silent, majestic China was a 'cloud of amusing phantasies, Romance and adventure'. Even Yunnan was not China 'proper' but the wildest and remotest of her provinces:

As in a hashish dream, arose the highlands of China, provinces all but unknown to civilized Chinese themselves. There, primrose to purple, was the promise of undreamed-of tribes of men, strangely tattooed and dressed, with awful customs and mysterious rites, beyond imagination and yet brutally actual…

Crowley says that "went towards China, my veins bursting with some colossal bliss that I had never yet experienced". He later concluded that "My spiritual self is at home in China". I believe that 'The Way' is a portrait of that spiritual self, the brooding 'old wise man', one of the oriental 'grotesques' worn as masks by the inscrutable Kwaw Li Ya.

Dr Fu Manchu himself did not attempt to acquire a mask until 1932. In Rohmer's novel of that year, The Mask of Fu Manchu, it was that of the 'Veiled Prophet', El Mokanna. In the film starring Boris Karloff of the same year and title, it was the mask of Genghis Khan. In both, Fu Manchu attempts to use the mask to attract and unite the hordes of Central Asia to his cause.

This is exactly what Crowley was attempting to do in New York with his various Chinese persona. Anticipating Fu Manchu, in 1919 'Kwaw' emerges from the haze of the opium visions of the Amalantrah Working and returned from his magical retirement on Esopus Island wearing borrowed yellow silken robes of the Sage Ko Yuen (or Ko Hsuan) and bearing the "Key to the whole of the Chinese wisdom". It was around the same time that he first writes of his ambition to establish an Abbey of Thelema where the 'guru' would assemble his circle of devoted chelas. Appropriately enough, the location of that Abbey would be discovered through the agency of that other 'yellow mage', the Yi King. The rest, as they say, is history.

Kenneth Grant accorded Lam the title of 'Lama of Leng', linking it with the 'abominable plateau' of Lovecraftian fiction which he locates 'between China and Tibet'. In 'Images of the Mystery' I have explored how the golden threads of myth spun by Blavatsky and Crowley were rewoven by Grant into the 'Cult of Lam'. Today, however, the Mekon has replaced the Mekong and the face reflected in the magical 'Kwaw Loon' speculum has I think become so distorted as to be unrecognisable by Crowley himself. The uncompanioned "high priest not to be described which wears a yellow silken mask over its face" and haunts the remote prehistoric monastery of Leng (Lovecraft: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath) now really does pray to 'Other Gods'.  

Time, I think, to lift that veil and reveal the face of the 'old wise man' behind it. Time also to reappraise 'The Way' along with the whole body of work bequeathed by 'Ko Yuen' and return it to the intricately carved 'oriental' frame in which it first appeared in 1919. This is not to devalue it, but to better appreciate it in its original context.

Further reading: 'Sinister Shades in Yellow', Alistair Coombs, Starfire Vol. 1, No. 3

Gary Dickinson