Aleister Crowley liked Mexico, as that passage from chapter 77 of his Confessions shows. He encountered it as a young man in 1900, when he was 24 and went to climb volcanoes there. He also practised magick, and established his first order, the Lamp of the Invisible Light, or L.I.L. These letters also form the name of the highest of the Enochian Aethyrs. Working with a Mexican Freemason, Jesus Medina, he set up a temple that had a perpetually burning light at its centre, and zodiacal and planetary talismans around the light. He and Medina lost touch, and presumably the L.I.L. dissolved. But even in his middle years, Crowley felt the idea at the core of the order to be a good one.
But at this point, he had not had his Ceylon awakening, not was he close to receiving the Book of the Law, let alone his later mystical attainments. He was a young man with money, out to scale the heights.
“Mexico proved a glorious galloping ground for my Pegasus. The magnificent mountain air, the splendour of the sun, the flamboyant beauty of the flowers, the intoxicating intimacy of leaping, fearless love which flamed in every face made my mind a racing rhythm of rapture.” He also caught malaria, and repaired to the grandiose splendours of the Hotel Iturbide to recover. A paradox he encountered was that while his magical efforts were fruitful, they left him dissatisfied. He wanted more than a vivid invocation of a spirit could yield. But persisting, he found results came. and made his first discoveries about what he later came to know as the word of the Aeon, Abrahadabra. Possibly when he wrote the Confessions he was retrojecting his later efforts, but he does say he broke the ‘code’ of this word in Mexico.
However, it was climbing partner Oscar Eckenstein who gave him the profoundest teaching he had yet had. Discerning that Crowley’s dissatisfaction with himself came from an inability to concentrate. The exigencies of mountain climbing had taught Eckenstein the necessity of mental focus as a means of survival, and he proceeded to instruct Crowley in a series of techniques that today are basic in any mystery school. Crowley learned to hold images in his mind, and to make them move at will, then to imagine various sensory impressions vividly. Eckenstein had no time for magick, but in the clear mountain air of Mexico, he gave Crowley a training that stood him in good stead for a lifetime.
It is odd that Crowley makes no mention of the antiquities or the old gods of Mexico. Nowhere in his writings do I find any mention of Quetzalcoatl, or Tlaloc, the god of rain. He seems to have lived wholly in the present during his time there, and at one point spent 67 hours straight writing an epic poem, without realising how time had passed. Malaria notwithstanding, he left much the richer for his time in Mexico.
The nation of today is far more populous, and no-one can see any more through the ‘clear air’ of Mexico City to the snow-capped mountains in the distance. Yet there are still ancient sites that awe the modern mind, mountain vistas that charm and excite the eye, and places where an unexpected peace stops the churning mind in its irritating tracks.
The Mexican spirit, Crowley concluded, “is brave and buoyant; it has not been poisoned by hypocrisy and the struggle for life.” That is, and probably was, a gross over-simplification. The struggle for life is always harsh, and for poorer Mexicans today, as harsh as it gets. Still, Crowley discerned something vital and honest in the Mexican character that is still present today. It may be callous of me, but like Crowley, I find a virtue in Mexico’s failure to participate in North American materialism.