White Stains

 

It is hard for us to fathom now that the knotty, verbose prose of Carlyle was once to the public taste. Similarly, it is hard to appreciate - from this cultural distance - that the florid lyricism of the verse of Charles Alginon Swinburne was once the preferred mode of English poetry. We can appreciate very well the genius and popularity of Keats, and sense something deeply enduring in his work and style, but Swinburne - bar a poem or two - is dated. 

 

So too is the verse of Swinburne's most ardent admirer, the occultist Aleister Crowley. He has appeared previously in these pages as a painter and as the conduit for his pseudo-Koranic Liber al Legis. He is primarily of interest to the present author because he was, amongst other things, a traveler and an orientalist. He was also a poet. His Hymn to Pan is his most celebrated poem; it has also been considered previously in these pages. See here.

 

We have previously ventured the view that Crowley was, by any calculation, a psychopath - but history, after all, is not only full of them but very often made by them. He was certainly of the high-functioning variety. A mountaineer, a chess master, a philosopher, a spy, a prophet; but above all, he thought of himself as a poet. Indeed, by his own estimation - entirely in character - he regarded himself as the best thing to happen to English verse since Milton. 

 

W. B. Yeats, his avowed enemy, once said that Crowley had written maybe six decent lines of verse in his life, but declined to nominate them. Yeats shared Crowley's occult interests, but was, of course, one of the great poets of modern English. Crowley was an imitator of Swinburne and is a poet of the second or third rank at best.

 

The admiration of Swinburne extended beyond his verse to Swinburne's life, or rather his posture in life. Crowley was irredeemably attracted to deviance and its aura of fame. Swinburne was a poet of the "decadent" school and kept himself notable by professing to have committed shocking outrages. He once claimed to have had sex with and then eaten a monkey. Oscar Wilde called his bluff; everybody knew Swinburne had not done half the things he said he had done. 

 

But this was enough for Crowley. In poetry, he adopted Swinburne as his model. By extension, he was also influenced by the French poets of decadence such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine. But largely he adopted the florid, lyrical and  very Victorian style of Swinburne. In painting, he turned to the contemporary style of German expressionism. His paintings are very modern. His Swinburnean verse, on the other hand, places him in another era. 

  

He is an odd figure in this regard. For a man who declared the birth of the new Aeon of Horus he was, in many ways, a man stuck in the nineteenth century. It is remarkable, for instance, that though he lived through the golden age of early cinema, and counted film actresses among his lovers and followers, and courted publicity at every turn, it seems that he never once appeared on film. He had no interest in such a newfangled medium. The extent to which he failed to step into the New Aeon is nowhere more fully on display than in his verse. Why could he not adapt to the poetry of modernism? His lover, Victor Neuburg, was the man who discovered Dylan Thomas. Crowley's poetry is painfully old-fashioned, and notable mainly because it is so obscene. 

Crowley's first publication set the tone for his literary career. Published in limited edition in the Netherlands under a pseudonym, and swiftly banned, it was a collection of erotic poems entitled White Stains. To this day it is widely regarded as the filthiest book of poetry in the English language. It must certainly be a contender. It is said that the original edition included genuine white stains supplied by the poet.

 

Crowley's lifelong taste for mischief, ruse and subterfuge are on display in this volume as much as his passion for decadence and debauchery. The work is presented as a cautionary study of the diseased mind of a certain 'George Archibald Bishop'. At the beginning is the warning:

 

The Editor hopes that Mental Pathologists, for whose
eyes alone this treatise is destined, will spare no precaution to prevent it falling into other hands.

 

 The collection follows a design. We are told in a lengthy introduction that the poems are in chronological sequence and document the decline of poor George Archibald Bishop, a fine Christian man, into the most appalling erotomania. The collection begins with an invocation to the Blessed Virgin Mary and ends with a poem celebrating homosexual necrophilia. Pure Crowley. 

 

 

 

 

 

Probably the most well-known or notorious poem in the collection is 'With Dog and Dame: an October Idyll' (see above) the subject matter of which is plain from the title. It is representative. The obscene subject matter is described with intense, impassioned, but formal, Swinburnian lyric, complete with Swinburnian rhymes. We might not doubt that the lurid scenario has the poet aroused, but the turgid Victorian verse does little to stir the blood of a modern reader. It's not very successful as pornography. Above all, it is not memorable. We cannot help but remember what the poem is about but - as per Yeats - there is not a single memorable line in it."Creamy clouds of latticed light..." Uggh. "Bright children of love debonair..." Dreadful. Though lyric in form, there is no music.  The poet is entirely occupied with finding flowery ways to outrage. A low point in the collection must be the lines:

The burden of caught clap. How sore it is!
The burden of sad shameful suffering,
The bitter bastard of a bloody kiss.

The most modest poems are the most successful. In the shorter poems there is less opportunity for Crowley to drop alliterative clangers like the scatophilic "Dross of the dunghill's most detested dust". Here is a short poem:

 

Unlike Swinburne, many of Crowley's outrages were not idle boasts, and some of the poems in the collection resound with an unquestionable authenticity. According to one analysis, a feature of Crowley's psychopathology was a profound absence of projected imagination. He was pathologically literal. In his autohagiography he relates how, as a child, he was told that cats have nine lives, so he went out and killed one to see. Ordinary mortals, as Freud assured us, might have all manner of vile desires lurking in our darkest corners, but we have the good sense to leave them alone, or leave them as imaginings. Crowley seemed constitutionally unable to do this. 

 

But mainly, he hated Christianity. He once said (it is one of the better things he said) "I never hated God. But by God I hated the God of my enemies!" And for Crowley, enemy number one was his mother, and number two, his father, clergy, Plymouth Brethren, Puritans. Obscenity is never enough for Crowley. It has to be sweetened with blasphemy. 

 

In some ways White Stains sets out his life path. There is no magick in these poems. They were composed prior to his discovery of the occult. Yet his path is mapped out. He has the same fate as George Archibald Bishop. The fictitious introduction describes: "A general exaltation of Priapism at the expense, in particular, of Christianity..." Then at the very end are words that might almost have served as Crowley's own epithet:

 

 He might have been so great! He missed Heaven! Think kindly of him! 

 

The design of White Stains is for readers to lament that such a powerful poet, and upstanding Christian, as George Archibald Bishop should have lost his mind, succumbed to depravity, and fallen into the clutches of the Devil. Crowley fails to pull this off simply because the poetry cannot carry such weight. We are not left thinking that Bishop - or Crowley - was a poetic genius who went astray. There it is, though, in a nutshell. That is who and what Crowley wanted to be. 

 

A kinder appraisal of Crowley is that of Israel Regardie, at one time his secretary, who described him as a man utterly and fearlessly drunk on life. There is that. No other voice in English verse is as nearly Dionysean. Yet the passion is undone by the mischief as much as by the clunky rhymes.

The poems that seem most authentic are homoerotic. A couple of them have found a place in the canon of queer verse. The most notable and perhaps most autobiographical is 'A Ballad of Passive Paederasty'.  Crowley was, amongst other things, a masochist. In homosexual encounters, beginning at Cambridge, he enjoyed the pain and humiliation of the passive role. This might be a poem by any English public school boy. Later in life he claimed a preference for women, but he emerged from Cambridge as a devotee of "that love the Greeks deemed sacred." This brings us to what is arguably the high point - a very modest one - in White Stains, a verse in the aforementioned Ballad that lightens the whole affair with a touch of well-crafted humour: 

 

 

Crowley's one saving grace was his humour and the fact that that, while grappling with a planet-sized ego (as much as with his "gigantic charms") he didn't always take himself seriously. There are a few nice touches of self-mockery in White Stains that raise it above being merely an exercise in pornographic verse.

 

Harper McAlpine Black

 

Dating Cheops

 

Herodotus, the Father of Lies, gives us the classical account of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. We know that Herodotus spent time in Egypt, and it is a fair surmise that the stories he collected about the country and its extraordinary monuments were current there and not his own inventions. He may have been lacking in historical discernment and careless about facts, but Herodotus loved a good story which, very often, turned out to be true or at least based on truth. It is Herodotus who reports to us that the Great Pyramid was built by the pharaoh Cheops who was buried beneath it. This means the pyramid is a construction of the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom and gives it a date of approximately 2500 BC.

 

This dating was assumed but unconfirmed until the modern era. By the time colonial scholars stopped the looting and degradation of Egyptian antiquities the pyramid had been stripped of anything dateable, and the entire building was free of any identifying inscriptions. This was until Howard Vyse - later a member of British parliament and notorious for his "gun powder archeology" - blasted his way into the upper structures of the so-called King's Chamber in 1835 and there uncovered an array of ancient graffiti or "quarry marks" on stones. One such item of graffiti contains the cartouche of pharaoh Cheops (Khufu) in an inscription that reads "the gang, Companions of Khufu..." It was the first, and to date, only confirmation of Herodotus' account and is the whole basis for dating the pyramid to that pharaoh's reign; we have hard physical evidence to support a written report which itself records a story that the Egyptians themselves would tell. Accordingly, all subsequent studies of the pyramid, and in fact the whole time line of modern Egyptology, rides on this piece of evidence. 

 

 

 

But it is not beyond dispute. There remain many who question the date, as well as whether Cheops was involved and whether or not the pyramid was built as his tomb, or any tomb. Letters from Vyse's fellow archaeologist, the Italian Giovanni Caviglia, raise questions about Vyse's integrity with Caviglia claiming that Vyse was so intent on making a famous discovery he tricked Caviglia so that he, Vyse, could take the glory. It has been suggested that perhaps Vyse - running out of time and money - forged the graffiti marks in his quest for fame. This view has especially been promoted by those who would like the time frame of ancient Egypt and the pyramids to be different than what has now become the settled orthodoxy. There is an alternative school of thought that would have the pyramids of Giza much, much earlier but Vyse's graffiti, confirming Herodotus, stands in the way. They think that it is simply too good to be true that, in a vast building completely devoid of all other inscriptions, Vyse discovered the one name supplied by Herodotus - it was like finding Cheop's signature on the building. "Cheops was here!" 

 

The skepticism about Vyse's "quarry marks" is so rife in certain quarters that of recent times some amateur archeologists violated security and stole flakes of the red paint in which the graffiti was written with the intention of having it tested. They acted, they said, out of frustration, because the Egyptian authorities refused to conduct such tests. You cannot date stone. That is the problem. You can only conduct carbon dating - approximate as it is - on organic materials. since the paint is an organic material, it can be dated. This seems never to have been done. Without such tests can we really be sure that the graffiti is contemporary with the building's construction? It seems sloppy science to build the whole edifice of modern Egyptology on a date determined by a single piece of graffiti. The graffiti confirms Herodotus, but can we confirm the graffiti? 

 

 

This problem is underlined by another curious discovery. A man named Dixon who uncovered and opened an "air shaft" from the Queen's Chamber in the nineteenth century reports that he found three objects among the rubble in the air shaft - a stone ball, a metal hook and a piece of cedar wood. Since these items were in a concealed shaft we can be certain that they had been there since ancient times, or at last since the shaft was sealed and hidden. The ball and hook are curious, but the piece of wood is important because it is organic and can be dated. Dixon sent these items back to England. Today, the ball and hook survive but the piece of wood has disappeared. It was last seen in the archives of the University of Edinburgh. Strangely, it has also dropped out of many accounts of the Dixon relics which typically mention the ball and hook but not the wood. (Readers can see the relevant wikipedia articles as evidence of this.) The piece of wood is gone and it is as if it never existed. There goes another chance to obtain a scientific dating of the pyramid. 

 

The question of dating is an acute one for some people because, to them, the standard chronology does not make sense. In particular they are confounded by the archeaological record that seems to suggest that the enormous sophistication of the Great Pyramid emerged out of nowhere in the Fourth Dynasty. They have trouble believing that the Old Kingdom Egyptians went from adobe huts to pyramid-building in a remarkably short space of time. Moreover, the Egyptian's own records - preserved in stone - relate an entirely different chronology, notably claiming that there was a civilization earlier than their own. Their lists of pharaohs extend back much further than has been confirmed by archaeology. This fact has given rise to a small industry of theory and speculation - ranging from considered to crack-pot - at odds with mainstream Egyptology. Perhaps most notable has been the work of John Anthony West, whose 'Magical Egypt' series has advanced what he calls a 'symbolist' reading of ancient Egypt. West posits that the monuments of Giza are far older than the Fourth Dynasty and were not built by Cheops. Herodotus may be right that Cheops had himself buried beneath the Great Pyramid, but, West maintains, the pyramid was not built for that purpose. Indeed, he questions whether it was any sort of tomb at all. He thinks the idea that a mummy was interred in the structure and its spirit somehow wafted up to the heavens through the so-called "air shafts" is an archaeologist's fantasy. He thinks it was built earlier, and for entirely different but unknown reasons.  

Much depends, therefore, upon Vyse's graffiti. If it is authentic - and can be explained in no other way - then it confirms the Herodotean narrative and conventional Egyptology stands on solid ground. If it can be shown to be a forgery, or explained some other way, then all bets are off. The curiosities, contradictions, mysteries, conundrums and riddles of the Great Pyramid abound and hardly fit comfortably into any time line. And whenever it was built, we are still at a loss to give a convincing and agreed account of just how it was built. Egyptology of any ilk is a hotch-potch of educated guesses. 

For what it is worth, the present author - a big fan of Herodotus - likes nothing more than seeing the Father of Lies proven correct yet again. For that reason alone he is not suspicious of a piece of graffiti that matches what Herodotus relates. Herodotus' storytelling style of historiography is as likely to preserve true tales as it is exaggerations and fancies. It is far from inconceivable that the story of Cheops and the pyramid he collected in Egypt preserves a true tradition handed down among the Egyptians since Old Kingdom times. Perhaps other details in Herodotus' account are accurate as well? It is worth noting, though - as skeptics have - that he describes Cheops being buried beneath the pyramid on an artificial island amidst a subterranean stream diverted from the Nile. This plainly fanciful description conforms in no way to anything so far found beneath the Great Pyramid, 'secret' and 'hidden' chambers notwithstanding. 

On the face of it, it is hard to deny the Vyse discovery. For a start, Vyse would have been utterly incapable of forging hieroglyphs. He had the cartouche copied and sent to London to one of only a very small number of scholars who could at that time read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Vyse had no idea what it said until it was decyphered. As for his integrity, he made a lengthy rebuttal to the allegations of his Italian companion and seems to have come out smelling of roses. Gunpowder archeology yes, but there is no basis for depicting him as a charlatan. Even more, the actual location of the graffiti in the upper chambers above the King's Chamber would seem to make it physically impossible for Vyse to be guilty of such a fabrication. Carbon dating of the red paint would be nice, but even without it the weight of evidence is that the "quarry marks" are both ancient and authentic. Matching them to Herodotus, the natural conclusion is that the pyramid was built by Cheops. There might be some other explanation for the markings, but the natural conclusion is plain. 

We do have reason to be cautious. When a stash of old scrolls were discovered near the Dead Sea after the Second World War, scholars immediately matched the discovery to a text in Pliny the Elder who reported a community of the Essene sect near there. On the basis of that match between text and artifact scholars excitedly declared the scrolls to be the lost library of the Essenes. For decades, scholars studied the Essene books and the Essene rituals. As it happens, all of this was almost certainly wrong. The Dead Sea Scrolls are not the lost library of the Essenes. The connection between text and artifact was misleading. It is quite possible that we are somehow being misled by the apparent congruence of the account of Herodotus and the discovery of Howard Vyse. It is, after all, very slender evidence - a scribble on a rock and hearsay from the Father of Lies. You would hope our knowledge of the Great Pyramid might rest upon a firmer foundation than that. It is surprising how many 'facts' of history actually rest upon much less. For now, though, the connection seems solid. Somehow we must explain the manifold mysteries of the Great Pyramid within that time frame and attributed to that pharaoh.


Harper McAlpine Black