Aleister Crowley & the Yi King.

The origins of the Ancient & Venerable Chinese Oracle known variously as the
Yi-jing or Yi King, or I-Ching or Book of Changes are shrouded in the mists of
Time, allegedly attributed to the Ancient Shamans of China some 4,000 years
ago. Developed by the legendary first emperor of China and later by the
venerable philosopher Confucius, it was later evolved into a sophisticated system
that has brought wisdom and guidance to generations both in the East and the
West.

As if any introduction is needed, Aleister Crowley was, if nothing else, an

explorer – in mind, body, and spirit – and a seeker after new sensations, new
knowledge, and new insights. Unlike many of his illustrious literary and Golden
Dawn contemporaries, whose idea of the ‘Mystic East’ might well have been an
opium den-cum-knocking shop behind a Chinese laundry in Whitechapel, the not
inconsiderable inheritance that the young Crowley received at the age of 21
enabled him to travel and explore extensively, in the realm of the geographical
as much as it did in those of sex, drugs, and occultism. However, it is beyond the
brief of this essay to outline either an extensive history of the Chinese Oracle, or
for that matter yet another biographical study of “the Wickedest Man in the
World”. What I propose instead is to attempt an outline of the intersection and
overlap between the two.

Quite when and how The Great Beast made the acquaintance of the I-Ching
(or Yi King as was his preferred usage, and the one I will stick to hereafter
unless directly quoting another source) is unsure: despite the almost exhaustive
description of his spiritual studies en route to joining the Golden Dawn given in
his Confessions, and the (some would say libellous) extent of the descriptions
of his investiture into that Order published in The Equinox, nowhere does he
make clear when or how he came into contact with the Oracle. The most likely
explanation is that his interest dates from a visit to San Francisco’s China Town
in 1900. However, even though his Confessions enthuses about his visit there,
and then goes on to describe in some detail his journey via Honolulu to
Yokohama to Shanghai, to eventually catch up with his former Golden Dawn-
sponsor now turned Buddhist monk Allan Bennett in Ceylon – including much
discussion of Buddhism, and his practices of yoga and asana with Bennett –
there is still no reference to the Oracle. Then, in 1905-06, he embarked on his
“walk across China”, an odyssey that that took him from the Burmese border
across the Yunnan Province and ending in Shanghai (all the time attempting to
complete the perilous Abramelin Working that he had unwisely left unfinished
after his start at Boleskine House, overlooking Loch Ness... )

At the end of the following year, December 13th, 1907, Crowley penned Liber
Trigrammaton XXVII, synthesizing the Chinese duality of Yin/Yang
(represented by the solid and broken lines of the Yi King) with the Tao
(represented in this system by a dot), resulting in a series of 27 trigrams for
which he wrote brief commentary texts. (As a measure of Crowley’s assessment
of the value of this work, he considered it on a par with the Stanzas of Dzyan –
the supposed sacred received texts upon which Blavatsky’s epic The Secret
Doctrine, the cornerstone of her Theosophical Movement, was a comment.)
Indeed, for Crowley the last months of 1907 were a period of heightened
creativity & reception of ‘inspired’ texts: Oct 30th Liber VII; Nov 3rd Liber Cordis
Cincti Serpente; Nov 25th Liber LXVI Stellae Rubae; Dec 3rd Liber
Arcanorum sub figura CCXXXI; Dec 11th & 12th Liber Porta Lucis; Dec 13th
Liber Tau, Liber Trigrammaton XXVII; and then “finally that Winter” Liber
DCCCXIII vel Ararita: in short, most of the Holy Books of Thelema – and all
of them detailing forms of Initiation or Oracle. Later, during his retirement on
Aesopus Island in the Hudson River, New York in 1918 he produced rhyming
versions of the Daodejing (Tao Teh King) and Ge Yuan’s Qingjingjing (Khing
Kang King); but most of his written material that relates specifically to the Yi
King was produced during his time at Cefalu in the 1920s.

Too few people are aware that Crowley produced his own unique version of the
Yi King, yet he himself believed that one of his greatest achievements was the
identification of the trigrams with the sephiroth of the Qabalistic Tree of Life.
Indeed, in his own surprisingly and perhaps uncharacteristically terse
introduction to his edition, he states:

“The Yi King is mathematical and philosophical in form. Its structure is cognate

with that of the Qabalah; the actual apparatus is simple, and five minutes is
sufficient to obtain a fairly detailed answer to any but the most obscure
question.”

Until he came up with his own rhymed version, or ‘mnemonic paraphrase’, of

the judgments and line texts of the Yi, Crowley would have relied on the
nineteenth century translation made by James Legge, which appeared as part of
the Sacred Books of the East series, and it is from this that Crowley retained
the lifelong habit of referring to the Oracle as the Yi King, or the Yi for short.
(Interestingly, Crowley’s personal copy of the book survives, and the notes are
often more revealing of the Beast’s thoughts than the more formal commentary:
its limitations occasioned not only Crowley’s rhymed version but also notes of
exasperation in the margins of his copy. On the title page, he has amended the
author’s name to read “Wood N’ Legge”!)

There is no doubting Crowley’s personal faith in the Yi: looking at the published
editions of his diaries, such as The Magical Record of the Beast 666 (edited
by Symonds & Grant from Crowley’s diaries for 1914-1920, and including the
sex-magickal record Rex De Arte Regia), he appears to have consulted it
almost daily for a period of several years. In fact he took a number of crucial
decisions in his life based on his interpretation of the Yi’s advice, including the
situating of his infamous Abbey of Thelema at Cefalu in Sicily. Indeed, when
the local police attempted to evict the members of the ‘College of the Holy
Ghost’ on orders from Mussolini’s Fascist regime, it was again the Yi’s Hexagram
XVIII, Ku, which was read to mean “Cross the water – an uncivilized country; a
country in which the family is more important than the state” that lead Crowley
to Tunisia, where he was to keep the journals that were published in as The
Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley (Tunisia 1923) edited by Stephen
Skinner. In October 2007, Crowley’s Royal Court Diary for 1928 turned up at a
Bloomsbury Book Auction’s sale in New York, and an informant gave me an
interesting description of some of its contents, with particular reference to the Yi
King and its baring on Crowley’s often tempestuous love-life:

‘...A major concern for much of the year was his relationship with Kasimira
Bass. The affair seems to have gone well for the first half of the year, with many
notes of prolonged love-making, of initiating her into various mysteries of his
‘magick’... so that by June he was consulting the Yi about the possibility of
marriage, but in July things deteriorated rapidly and on November 3rd he writes:
“Kasimira bolted. The Lord hath given & the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be
the name of the Lord.” Then, Nov 8th the name of Marie Therese de Miramar “A
creole Cuban-born in Nicaragua to change the luck” appears, and by the 14th
Crowley writes of consecrating their partnership and noting that “She has
absolutely the right ideas of Magick & knows some Voudoo.” Nov 19th: “She is
marvellous beyond words, but excites me too much, so that I cannot prolong..!”
At the end of the day, neither romance nor passion influenced the decision:
Crowley had to marry de Miramar to get her into the country, ignoring the Yi’s
warning of May 13th (Hexagram XX, Kwan) “a rash act”, huffing to himself “I
know that!” They were married in August 1929, but separated in 1930.’

As the 1930s progressed, Crowley became ever more absorbed with the Yi
King: he sought its advice throughout the Autumn of 1933 about his attempted
libel trial over Nina Hamnet’s depiction of him in her ‘colourful’ memoir,
Laughing Torso; and then things got more serious the following year with the
publication of Betty May’s Tiger Woman, in which her lurid account of the time
spent at Cefalu portrayed Crowley as a monstrous degenerate, responsible for
the death of her unfortunate young husband, Raoul Loveday, the whole thing
blown up into the “Black Magic libel case”. From the start of 1937, Crowley
sought diversion by absorbing himself more and more in the study of the Yi King.
It is interesting to think about his meeting with the young man Lawrence Miles,
who would eventually become known as Shri Gurudev Mahendranath: in his
own account, The Londinium Temple Strain (which can be found at:
www.mahendranath.org/londinium.mhtml) he describes how he met ‘The Magus’
at Chancery Lane High Court, after the Nina Hamnett case, and that they struck
up a kind of friendship:

“The Mage invited me to visit him in his Jermyn Street flat, and these visits
became more and more numerous. The press which had slandered him at every
opportunity never once expressed any of his ideals or teachings. Thus when I
had opportunities to meet him, he revealed a vast store of knowledge on a
variety of subjects. I not only realized that the much libelled Aleister Crowley
was probably the most far out and advanced thinker at the time, but as well as
being a natural born magician, he possessed a knowledge of both yoga and the I
Ching which was superior to that of any other European. During our
conversations in London, he reached a conclusion and advised me to seek more
knowledge of yoga and the I Ching; these, he felt, would help people to contact
their Guardian Spirit more easily. In relation to higher yoga his judgment was
sound, for meditation is undoubtedly an important key. With the I Ching, the
position still needs understanding, but I do think it may be there...”

Another breakthrough with regard to the Yi King, is that according to

Perdurabo by Richard Kaczynski, on June 7th 1937 Crowley recovered his own
personal set of Oracle sticks. Now it was this particular matter of “Crowley’s I-
Ching sticks” that had first aroused my personal interest: I remembered as a
youth reading an entry for January 12th, 1920 in The Magical Record of the
Beast 666 in which Crowley had remarked “I had invoked Aiwaz to manipulate
the Sticks*” – but what had intrigued me the most was the relevant footnote:
“*The six lines of the hexagrams of the Yi King. Crowley used six equal strips of
tortoise-shell, on one side of which was a broken line, on the other an unbroken
line.” It would be some years before I would read anything more on the subject:
in the early 1980s, I was sent a photocopy of an article entitled On Knowing
Aleister Crowley Personally from the O.T.O. Newsletter, which for the main
part seemed to consist of reminiscences by Grady McMurtry about being
“overpaid, oversexed, and over here” during WWII, but did contain the following
paragraph that I think warrants quoting in full:

“...He was in the progress of taking an oracle from the I Ching. It was the one
time I saw him using his I Ching sticks (which I was able to recover from the
library after the court order decreeing that his library belonged to the O.T.O.
under my conservatorship). They look like this. [There was a sketch in the
original, I think.] The blank side is the male (Yang, energy) side. The divided side
(looks like red nail polish to me) is the female (Yin, receptive) side. By my ruler
they are less than an 8th of an inch in thickness, but slightly more than a 16th
thick. They either were mahogany or teak or stained dark to look so... The way
Crowley used them was to shuffle them (with his eyes closed) then take them
one at a time and, holding each one upright with his right forefinger (eyes still
closed), get a signal and lay it down either right or left. First stick down is the
bottom line. You can also get moving lines this way. If one of the sticks wants to
move when you lay it down, just shove it right or left as indicated. Personally I
like this method of taking the Oracle. It gives you a chance for your Angel to
communicate directly through your fingertips.”

(It is perhaps a sad afterword to this – particularly baring in mind Grady’s words
about the court-order decreeing that “the O.T.O.” and Crowley’s library should
be under his “conservatorship” – to read in An Epistle on Aleister Crowley’s
I-Ching Sticks by J. Edward Cornelius that:

“Grady McMurtry always carried Crowley’s I-Ching sticks in a small pouched

[sic] attached to his belt by leather straps. It is with great regret that I learned
that the original sticks were accidentally lost one summer night while Grady was
partying on a beach near San Francisco.”

Ah well, as The Master Therion remarked himself in one of his magical journals:
“The Lord hath given & the Lord hath taken away.”)

As a last word on Crowley’s Yi sticks, browsing through Kenneth Grant’s

touching memoir Remembering Aleister Crowley, there is a comment
towards the end where he explains how it was Crowley’s practice to ‘send out’ on
the first days of Spring and Autumn the Word, Oracle, and Omen of the Equinox:

“In his earlier years, Crowley obtained the Word with the help of Sexual Magick.
How he received it in his last years, I do not know. The Oracle, on the other
hand, was obtained by opening at random The Book of the Law... The Omen
was derived from the Chinese Book of Changes (Yi King). His method was to
empty his mind and then to manipulate six flat pieces of tortoise-shell,
approximately 1” by 5” in size. As the pieces fell they formed a figure, or
hexagram, which Crowley then accepted as the Omen for the coming six
months. As his diaries show, they were sometimes remarkably accurate.”

Crowley was probably the first modern Westerner to actually regularly divine
using the Yi. In my researches for this article, any attempts to try and pin down
Crowley’s nearest mystical and magical contemporaries with regard to the
Oracle were evasive, to say the least. In his book Soul Flight, Donald Tyson
states - “There is little doubt that members of the Golden Dawn employed the I-
Ching hexagrams as astral portals” – I presume in much the same way that we
know that they made use of the tattvas, but as he does not indicate which
members or when, he is of little real help. A Golden Dawn website describes the
colourful and forceful founder-member Florence Farr as - “Quite adept at the
Enochian System and the I-Ching, but it was skrying in the Spirit Vision that was
her forte...” – but again, without a date or a source this is of little help. Both
Crowley himself and his later student Dr. Israel Regardie could be described as
“...members of the Golden Dawn [who] employed the I-Ching hexagrams as
astral portals”, but that is by no means the same as saying that they were
actually introduced to the Oracle or such practices by the venerable and
Hermetic Order itself. As for the nearest other ‘fellow traveller’, Madame
Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society – coincidentally founded the year of
Crowley’s birth – there seems to be little in her otherwise encyclopaedic works to
suggest an interest in or even an awareness of anything further Eastern of origin
than India or Tibet...

Whether Aleister Crowley was or was not the first contemporary thinker and
explorer of comparative religions and key synthesizers of what he would now
doubtless shudder to think of as “the New Age” to make use of and explore the I-
Ching, he may well still have a more important place in the history of the Yi here
in the West. The former “Wickedest Man in the World” was rediscovered by the
Hippy generation of the 1960s, his shaven head scowling down from among the
grand and groovy on the cover of The Beatles ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’, just as the I-
Ching itself was being rediscovered and the Ancient and Venerable Oracle
popularised amidst the heady atmosphere of incense and peppermints. In the
popular consciousness, or perhaps ‘unconsciousness’, that was fuelled by sex ‘n’
drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll, that has gone on unwittingly or not to nurture the
‘Occulture’ of today, the Great Beast’s “Do what Thou wilt shall be the whole of
the Law” probably didn’t seem that different to “Do your own thing, man” - even
if your average drop-out of drugs, deviancy & diabolism has no more idea now
than then of the Divine nature of that “Will” that Crowley championed, as much
as he fought against it as well all his life...
 Maybe the two aren’t so different after all, and maybe the Great Cosmic Wheel
is ready for just one more turn as the children of the Children of the Sixties
decide it’s time to choose just whose Love and Will they want to base their Law
on.

May they choose their Oracles with care this time.

Bibliography & Reference:

‘A Magic Life: The Life of Aleister Crowley’ by Martin BOOTH (2000)

‘The Secret Doctrine’ by H.P. BLAVATSKY (1888)

‘The Essential Golden Dawn’ by Chic & Sandra Tabatha CICERO (2003)

‘An Epistle on Aleister Crowley’s I-Ching Sticks’ by J. Edward CORNELIUS (most

likely available at the web-address:
www.cornelius93.com/EpistleCrowleysICHING.html)

‘The Confessions: An Autohagiography’ by Aleister CROWLEY (1929; revised

1969)
‘The Equinox’ edited by Aleister CROWLEY (1909-1913; 1919; 1939; 1944)

‘The Holy Books of Thelema’ by Aleister CROWLEY (collected 1983)

‘Aleister Crowley & The Hidden God’ by Kenneth GRANT (1973)

‘Cults of the Shadow’ by Kenneth GRANT (1975)

‘The Magical Revival’ by Kenneth GRANT (1972)

‘Remembering Aleister Crowley’ by Kenneth GRANT (1991)

‘Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley’ by Richard KACZYNSKI (2002)

‘The Magical World of Aleister Crowley’ by Francis KING (1987)

‘The Londinium Temple Strain’ by Shri Gurudev MAHENDRANATH (currently

available at the web-address: www.mahendranath.org/londinium.mhtm)

‘On Knowing Aleister Crowley Personally’ by Grady McMURTRY (originally

published in the O.T.O. Newsletter, Berkeley, CA; online at:
www.geocities.com/athens/acropolis/1896/knowingac.html)

‘The Eye in the Triangle’ by Israel REGARDIE (1970)

‘The Golden Dawn: A Complete Course In Practical Ceremonial Magic’ by Israel

REGARDIE (1989)

‘The Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley (Tunisia 1923)’ ed. by Stephen SKINNER
(2003)

‘The Great Beast’ by John SYMONDS (1952)

‘The Magical Record of The Beast 666’ ed. by John SYMONDS & Kenneth GRANT
(1972)

‘Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley’ by Lawrence SUTIN (2000)

‘Soul Flight’ by Donald TYSON (2007)