The Beast and the Buddha: Aleister Crowley’s 1901 Sojourn in Japan
After arriving in Yokohama — and in the midst of a passionate, poetry-inspiring love affair — the iconic English occultist came close to remaining in Japan to seek initiation as a Buddhist monk. What made him change his mind?
(Edited January 9, 2023. Please see acknowledgements at the end of the article.)
In the summer of 1901, the English occultist Aleister Crowley, age 25, stood before the Great Buddha at Kamakura. Having arrived in Yokohama just a few days before, he had crossed the Pacific from San Francisco via Honolulu and was in the midst of wrapping up a shipboard extramarital affair. He was also wrestling with a major life decision: Should he remain and live in Japan, or move on?
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) is a controversial figure of modern history. Known as (among other names) “the Beast 666,” he was a practitioner of the occult as well as a world traveler, mountaineer, poet, novelist, chess player, and reputedly a spy during the First World War. Popular perception of him has long been associated with sexual licentiousness, recreational drug use, and Satanism, especially since being dubbed “The Wickedest Man in the World” and “The King of Depravity” in press headlines nearly a century ago. More recently he has been praised as a genuine spiritual explorer: In Aleister Crowley: The Biography, Tobias Churton describes Crowley as “a major thinker, as significant as Freud or Jung,” whose accomplishments include the introduction of scientific and psychological elements into mysticism (pp. 7–8). In Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley, Richard Kaczynski calls him “one of the most remarkable and innovative figures of his century” (p. 558). Whatever one’s view of Crowley and his conduct, unless belief in the occult can be excluded as a significant cultural phenomenon, his influence is inescapable.
While much has been written of Crowley both during his lifetime and in the decades since his death, a relatively unexplored episode is his visit to Japan in the summer of 1901, which had such an impact upon him that he briefly considered staying permanently to seek initiation as a Buddhist monk. This was a crucial and defining moment in Crowley’s life, a crossroads on the path toward establishing his own spiritual worldview, including his foundation in 1904 of Thelema, a religious and philosophical movement in which adherents strive to comprehend their true will, or higher purpose in life, an effort encapsulated in Crowley’s iconic motto “Do What Thou Wilt Shall be the Whole of the Law.”
Though Crowley was critical of what he perceived as Japanese cultural flaws, ultimately Japan represented a spiritual temptation from which he turned away, convinced his destiny lay elsewhere.
A fateful meeting in Hawaii: The affair begins
On May 3, 1901, Aleister Crowley departed from San Francisco on the passenger ship Nippon Maru bound for Honolulu, having spent the previous year traveling in the United States and Mexico. He could well afford the trip: At 25, he was still flush with cash from an inheritance of £50,000, the equivalent of about £7 million (over US$9 million) today. His ultimate destination was Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), where he planned to meet his friend and spiritual mentor Allan Bennett (1872–1923), whom Crowley had first encountered in England through both men’s membership in the occult society The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Still relatively new to esotericism and finding his way, the young Crowley had found inspiration and guidance in Bennett, who was in Ceylon partly to have a climate remedy for his asthma, but also to more deeply explore Buddhism. Bennett would become one of the earliest Englishmen to be ordained a monk of Theravada Buddhism, the religion’s oldest existing doctrine. Considering Crowley’s admiration for Bennett, the latter’s example surely influenced Crowley in his own near-attempt at staying in Japan.
On May 9 the Nippon Maru arrived in Hawaii, where Crowley had ample time to enjoy the idyllic beauty of Waikiki Beach before setting off for Japan on the next leg of his journey later that month. While there, he had a fateful meeting which Crowley biographer Richard Kaczynski describes thus:
On May 10, he met Mary Alice Rogers (née Beaton) of Salt Lake City at his hotel. Of Scottish descent, she was ten years older than Crowley and married to a lawyer. She had come to Honolulu with her thirteen-year-old son, Blaine, to escape hay fever…Mary was one of the sweetest, most beautiful women Crowley had ever known. From the beginning, he calculated an affair and breakup with her to inspire his poetic muse; this premeditation is evident in his diaries where, early on, he begins referring to her as “Alice,” the pseudonym to which Crowley would ultimately address a series of love poems collectively titled Alice: An Adultery (1903). (From Perdurabo, pp. 90–91.)
I think her real name may be open to question, as different Crowley biographers use different names for her (as will be detailed below), though there is a consensus that her maiden name was Beaton and her married surname was Rogers. For now, I will refer to her as “Alice,” the name used for her in the title of Crowley’s poetry volume.
Kaczynski also notes that Crowley persuaded Alice (or Mary) to accompany him to Japan. Together they boarded the America Maru bound for Yokohama. Their relationship lasted fifty days, if Crowley’s poem titles (from “The First Day” to “The Fiftieth Day,” among others) reflect the reality. It’s a good round number, which seems a bit contrived, adding credence to Kaczynski’s view that the whole thing was at least partly intended as a poetic inspiration. Crowley describes his lover’s intense, conflicting emotions at having an extramarital affair in a post-Victorian milieu, for example in “The Eighteenth Day:”
She grew most fearful, starting at slight noise;
As knowing that the sting of shame was hers
Worse than a guilty love administers
Since our pure shame unworthily destroys
The love of all she had, her girls and boys,
Her home, their lives: and yet my whisper stirs
Into live flame her passion, and deters
Her fear from spurning all the day’s due joys.
“The Sixth Day” and “The Seventh Day” contain descriptions contradicting Crowley’s popular image as a “black magician.” In “The Sixth Day,” he begins using — but then rejects — magic of a decidedly sinister type to have Alice share his bed, and to that end creates “a hideous talisman of lust” with the orison written “backwards, as a bad magician must.” He then has second thoughts:
By these vile tricks, abominable spells,
I drew foul horrors from many hells —
Though I had fathomed Fate; though I had seen
Chastity charm-proof arm the sea-gray eyes
And sweet clean body of my spirit’s queen,
Where nothing dwells that God did not devise.
In “The Seventh Day,” therefore, Crowley declares that he “burnt the wicked pantacle,” and “The Eighth Day” sees him attempt to win Alice’s love through poetry, “a fair shaft of verses” shot “from Cupid’s bow” in his quest to “fling love through the chaste girdle’s girth.” It apparently worked.
Crowley in Japan: The end of the affair and the decision at Kamakura
On June 16, 1901 the America Maru arrived in Yokohama, where Crowley and Alice checked into the Maples Hotel and Sanitorium. (A condominium now occupies the site.) Known as Yamate, or the Bluff, this area of Yokohama had been a place of residence for Western traders and diplomats since the 1860s, and had established Western-style services and amenities even before Tokyo, so it was perhaps the obvious place for Crowley to stay as he made excursions into Tokyo and Kamakura.
By this time, the short-lived romance had begun to deteriorate as Crowley lost interest in his lover (a pattern repeated with other women throughout his adult life), though both of them must have known the relationship couldn’t last. Alice departed Yokohama on June 29. Crowley later depicted their parting in “The Fiftieth Day:”
So the last kiss passed like a poison-pain,
Knowing we might not ever kiss again.
Mad tears fell fast: “Next year!” in cruel distress
We sobbed, and stretched our arms out, and despaired,
And — parted. Out the brute-side of truth flared;
“Thank God I’ve finished with that foolishness!”
An element of Crowley’s increasing distance from Alice was likely an intensified preoccupation with matters of the spirit, kindled by his proximity to Kamakura, a major center of Buddhism with many sites of pilgrimage. Yet his feelings for her still lingered: In Aleister Crowley: The Biography, Tobias Churton notes that shortly before Alice’s departure Crowley was “troubled, torn between the Above and Below” (p. 72).
The Above won out, and it was during this sojourn that Crowley considered a fateful choice: Should he remain in Japan as a monk? In The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Crowley describes Buddhist monasticism as the easier path, and one which he needed to abandon in order to find his true destiny. His fateful decision comes as he stands before the Great Buddha, or Daibutsu, of the Buddhist temple Kōtoku-in in Kamakura.
For Kamakura, calmly certain of its soul-searching accents, called to me to abide in the security of its shadow, there to toil even as the Buddha had done, that I might come to the perfect Illumination…(Confessions, p. 228.)
This is unsurprising, as the young Crowley was surely searching for inspiration in the development of his mystical worldview. Even the casual visitor to Kamakura is deeply impressed by its ancient shrines and temples, its ambiance of spirituality and history. For someone with Crowley’s esoteric leanings, it must have had an exceptional impact.
But he instead decides upon a more difficult path, one he must forge independently, yet with the guidance of what he sees as esoteric spiritual forces:
I inquired as to the possibility of settling down in one of the neighbouring monasteries; but somehow my instinct opposed my intention. The Inmost knew that my destiny lay elsewhere. The Lords of Initiation cared nothing for my poetic fancies and my romantic ideals. They had ordained that I should pass through every kind of hardship at the hands of nature, suffer all sorrow and shame that life can inflict. Their messenger must be tested by every ordeal — not by those that he himself might choose…
…I turned then sadly from Daibutsu, as I had turned from love, ambition and ease, my spirit silently acquiescing in the arcane arbitrament of the mysterious daimon who drove me darkly onward; how I knew not, whither I knew not… (Confessions, p. 228.)
One may infer that much of this was hindsight from the perspective of nearly three decades later: At the time Confessions was published, Crowley had already been condemned in the press as a demented monster, a situation he surely viewed as part of the ordeals “the Lords of Initiation” had decided he must endure. Whatever the case may be, his decision in Kamakura was crucial.
Embracing Buddhist monastic life in Japan would have meant turning away from the path leading to the founding of Thelema, which Crowley came to see as “not merely a new religion, but a new cosmology, a new philosophy, a new ethics” with a scope “so vast that it is impossible to even hint at the universality of its application” (Confessions, p. 399). Placing himself within the organizational hierarchy and doctrinal discipline of a Buddhist temple would have ruled out developing a doctrine meant to transcend all previous doctrines, Buddhism included. (Might Crowley have been refused a request to be initiated? Perhaps, but in Confessions he doesn’t make clear what the response to his inquiries were.)
Crowley also came to see his love affair with Alice as a central element in this decision, beyond serving as the inspiration to pen Alice: An Adultery. He considered Alice to have been placed in his path by occult forces to confirm his resolve to attain enlightenment (and thus the establishment of Thelema), stating that despite his deep and intense love for her, “she had not seduced me from my service. I knew — and They who put her on my path knew also — that I was immune” (Confessions, p. 229). To Crowley, both his romantic, carnal desire for Alice and his spiritual desire for monastic life in Japan existed so that he could transcend them. (This is not to say Crowley became celibate; far from it, as “sex magick” would later become a standard Crowleyan practice. Rather, he did not consider his sexual or romantic proclivities to be a danger to his spiritual resolve.)
Crowley remained until July 12, when he left Yokohama aboard the Hong Kong Maru. He would never visit Japan again.
He stopped in Shanghai and Hong Kong before arriving in Ceylon on August 6, greeted by his friend Allan Bennett, now known as “the Bhikku Ananda Metteya, an aspiring Buddhist monk” (Kaczynski, p. 93).
Richard Kaczynski notes (via email): “There’s a break in Crowley’s 1901 diaries, with his Alice diary ending on July 4 with the entry ‘Finished the Fifty Days’ Sonnets. Also wrote the fake introduction.’”
I believe the “fake introduction” Crowley refers to (pp. i-xii of Alice) includes a key element of symbolism in the form of duality.
The duality of self in Crowley’s Alice: An Adultery; factual & nonfactual elements in the introduction
In the introduction to Alice: An Adultery, Crowley devises a motif of duality of the self (the self here being Crowley). The Crowley who is the introduction’s first-person narrator is a visitor to Japan. He visits a house party in Yokohama and encounters Alice’s former lover, the unnamed “other” Crowley, who lies in a back room near death (by what malady is not mentioned; we may infer a broken heart). Thus Crowley’s love for Alice (or rather Mary), personified, remains in Japan and “dies” after being greeted by the aspect of Crowley who has decided to leave Japan and move on with his life. Handing the “editor” Crowley the manuscript, the dying Crowley says “Edit it as if it were your own” (which it is). He then ignores the editor/narrator Crowley, turning his attention to a small Buddhist image to which he begins chanting in a low voice, an apparent reference to Crowley’s abandoned ambition to remain in Japan as a monk. The narrator Crowley states, “I left him to his peace.” (See Alice, pp. viii-ix.) That Crowley wrote the introduction in such a manner shows that both his affair with Alice and his idea of pursuing Buddhist monastic life in Japan had a profound impact on his life.
Crowley notes the address of the party as “№ 29” in Yokohama, which is an actual address, but I could find no evidence of any residents at the real Bluff № 29 resembling Crowley’s description, even allowing for artistic license or exaggeration. He describes the house as presided over by an intoxicated “dirty old Irish hostess” who acts as “a Japanese Mrs. Warren,” an allusion to Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1894), George Bernard Shaw’s play about a brothel madam and former prostitute. Based upon information and documents provided to me by Ms. Yoko Shirakawa of the NPO Yokohama Yamate Archives, I found that in 1901, the real Bluff Lot № 29 was the address of one F.G. Woodruff, a British food consignment business owner who had lived in Yokohama since 1869. A digitalized copy of the magazine Yokohama Citizen’s Graph (Japanese: Yokohama Shimin Gurafu; № 41, pp. 90–91), commemorating the 1909 semicentennial of Yokohama Port, describes Woodruff as “…one of the most well-known people in Yokohama, as he is a consignment seller and has contact with most people living in Yokohama…” (translated from Japanese). So perhaps Crowley met him in 1901, but I can find no record of such an encounter, so maybe he just chose Lot № 29 at random as he strolled by it. Or perhaps — if Crowley chose the address deliberately — he thought it would be humorous to fictionally place a brothel owner under the roof of a pillar of the community type such as Woodruff. (Lot № 29 is currently the location of a home built in 1950.)
Crowley also begins the introduction with the heading “Yokohama, April, 1901,” but in fact he arrived in June of 1901. Beyond simply artistic license, Crowley apparently did this to “camouflage” the situation out of consideration for Alice. Kaczynski told me he believes as much (via email):
Crowley was careful to obscure “Alice’s” identity. Even his Confessions (1929) — nearly thirty years later — upholds the secret. Pretty decent in a tell-all from someone considered by some to be a philandering cad. He only mentions her name in print twice, in innocuous dedications: Once in The Argonauts (1904), from which the dedication was removed when reprinted in The Works of Aleister Crowley; and again in Orpheus: A Lyrical Legend (1905), in which it reads: “To Mary Beaton, whom I lament.” This suggests he may have had some enduring feelings for her.
More information on Crowley’s “Alice:” What’s in a name?
It seems beyond doubt that the woman listed as “Mrs. L.R. Rogers” on the passenger manifests published in The Japan Weekly Mail was Crowley’s “Alice.” She has been variously referred to as Alice Mary Rogers (Churton, Aleister Crowley: The Biography, p. 71), Mary Alice Rogers (Kaczynski, Perduarbo, p. 90), Mary Beaton (Crowley, dedications in The Argonauts, 1904, and Orpheus: A Lyrical Legend, 1905; Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, p. 87), and just plain Alice (Crowley, Alice: An Adultery, 1903).
Mr. Colin McLeod of Brisbane, Australia, after doing some research on the matter, was kind enough to bring to my attention the obituary of Alice’s husband, Lindsay R. Rogers. If the article is accurate, it seems “Alice” was not precisely a pseudonym. From the Salt Lake Tribune, March 8, 1935:
Lindsay R. Rogers, prominent Salt Lake City attorney and former law partner of Judge Tillman D. Johnson, died in Fresno, Cal., Sunday, according to word received here by Judge Johnson Thursday. He was 69 years old. … The two surviving [children] are Blaine Rogers and Miss Helen Rogers, both of Fresno. His wife, Mrs. Alice Beaton Rogers, whom he married in Ogden in 1888, died in 1930.
My best guess is that her real name was Alice Rogers (née Beaton), and the newspaper used her maiden name as a middle name. Assuming Crowley wanted to hide her identity, using “Alice” by itself in the poetry volume wouldn’t have given it away (as Alice, then as now, was not a rare name). For the same reason, it seems reasonable to speculate that in Crowley’s poetry dedications to her, the “Mary” in “Mary Beaton” was either her middle name or a complete pseudonym.
While it is conceivable that the obituary refers to different persons than those mentioned by Crowley, that would mean an additional Mrs. L.R Rogers with the given name Alice who was married to a lawyer in Utah and had a son named Blaine. It seems much more likely that the Mrs. Alice Beaton Rogers noted in the obituary and the Alice with whom Crowley went to Japan are one and the same person.
Crowley’s impression of Japan (and America)
Crowley spent twenty-six days in Japan and saw Yokohama, Tokyo, and Kamakura. What was his impression? And why did he ultimately decide not to stay? In a letter to his friend and future brother-in-law Gerald Kelly (quoted in Tobias Churton’s Aleister Crowley: The Biography, p. 73), Crowley wrote that “Japan is a fraud of the basest sort.” What did he mean by that? Fraudulent in what way? I emailed Churton to ask his opinion, and his reply included the following speculation:
There is no evidence in Crowley’s writings or diaries to give definitive answers…I can only imagine he found a certain artificiality in the visual culture, and a sense that the religion and customs had been formalized to such a degree that they carried little sincere understanding of how they had been formed and for what they were intended.
It’s plausible that Crowley formed this opinion of Japan, though as Churton points out, it is hard to know for sure. While Crowley makes no specific mention of anything he perceives as “fraudulent,” there is also the somewhat dismissive — some might say bigoted — attitude he expresses in Confessions:
I saw comparatively little of Japan. I did not understand the people at all and therefore did not like them very much. Their aristocracy was somehow at odds with mine. I resented their racial arrogance. I compared them unfavourably with the Chinese. Like the English, they possess the insular qualities and defects. They are not Asiatic, exactly as we are not European. (Confessions, p. 227.)
Even as Crowley expresses antipathy toward the Japanese, he also believes there is a kind of kinship, in that he sees Japan as a sort of Eastern version of Britain. Taking the view that both are natives of island nations having no common ground with their neighboring continents, the perceived inability of the Englishman and the Japanese to get along is because they are too much alike.
And yet, that Crowley would seriously consider staying in Japan indicates a strong and favorable impression, if only that of monastic life in Kamakura. In the same book in which he expresses dislike for the Japanese, he also describes his sadness at abandoning his intention to remain in the country. There is nuance and paradox here, and to place it in context, it should be noted that Crowley was hard to please in assessing locales and peoples generally.
In Confessions he derides, for example, the “ghastly monotony of the wilderness” in Canada, adding that “the manners of the people are crude and offensive” (502). As for the US, he calls Chicago “the forlorn outpost of civilized man,” and the American of the West one who “goes about his ant-like work with hurrying intentness…Nobody reads, nobody thinks” (769). His caveat is that at least the West Coast, “in touch with the Pacific archipelago and Asia, has caught a little of their culture” (769). In a similar vein, in the introduction to Alice: An Adultery, the following exchange occurs at the party in Yokohama between Crowley’s aforementioned dual alter-egos: the “editor” to whom the poems were entrusted (who narrates in the first person) and Alice’s former lover.
“Here I lie,” he said, “east of all things. All my life I have been travelling eastward, and now there is no further east to go.”
“There is America,” I said. I had to say something.
“Where the disappearance of man has followed that of manners: the exit of God has not wished to lag behind that of grammar. I have no use for American men, and only one use for American women.”
“Of a truth,” I said, “the continent is accursed — a very limbo.”
“It is the counterfoil of evolution,” said the man wearily. There was a silence. (Alice, p. vi.)
In light of the above, it is interesting to consider that the real-life counterpart of “Alice,” the inspiration for Alice: An Adultery, was American. Having attained the “one use” mentioned above, perhaps Crowley was expressing bitterness at love lost, stated more explicitly in Confessions:
Alice had broken my boy’s heart; she had taught me what women were worth. For her I had surrendered my single-minded devotion to my spiritual Quest; I had sold my soul to the devil for sixpence, and the coin was counterfeit. (p. 228.)
On the point of Crowley’s view of America: To be fair, he also had some nice things to say, albeit in the context of global power politics (as with Japan, as we shall see below). One example is his 1899 poem “An Appeal to the American Republic,” which praises the nation’s ascendant world power. It’s a far cry from Mark Twain’s caustic condemnation of American imperialism in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901). (For more on Crowley’s views regarding the US, see Tobias Churton’s book Aleister Crowley in America.)
Crowley’s critique of Japan in Confessions, then, was far from unique among his views of the places he visited. As with America, Crowley would later express unreserved admiration for Japan (or more precisely, for Japanese military prowess) in a poem titled “Banzai!” composed in the wake of Japan’s victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). (Published in 1907 in The Works of Aleister Crowley, Vol. III.) In one stanza (p. 101), the courageous charge of Japanese soldiers is compared to the grace of antelopes:
Then the officer’s voice
Caught in his throat for joy.
Like birds in spring that rejoice,
Clearly and softly the boy
Whispered: “Now, let us charge!”
Then leaping o’er trench and mound,
They rise as a single man;
They bound like antelopes over the ground
For the glory of Japan.
An inevitable choice?
Aleister Crowley’s journey to and short stay in Japan was a turning point with an outsize impact on the subsequent course of his life and work. Had he chosen to remain in the country to seek initiation as a monk in Kamakura, would it have only been a delay upon his path to founding a new religion, being branded “a man we’d like to hang” in the press, and remaining a significant influence on popular culture decades after his death?
We’ll never know for sure, but I believe that if he had stayed, he would have soon quit the monastery, seen a bit more of Japan, and then continued on his travels. A determination to fully live in this world was integral to the spiritual worldview he was, at 25, beginning to reach toward. As Crowley himself would later write in his Confessions (p. 866):
Sin must follow temptation. Righteousness is only possible in the absence of an alternative. We of Thelema pursue a policy exactly contrary. We resist temptations through the moral strength and the enlightening experience which comes of making a series of systematic experiments with divers iniquities. A few trials soon teach us that wrongdoing does not pay.
While Aleister Crowley’s decision itself was perhaps inevitable, was there any reason that it had to have been made in Japan as he stood before the Great Buddha of Kamakura? Crowley, for his part, might insist that there are no coincidences, and Japan as the site of this turning point (and his affair with Alice) had been ordained by “the Lords of Initiation.” Whatever the case may be, a monastic lifestyle would not have suited him. It took a 50-day love affair and a day trip to Kamakura for him to figure that out.
***************
For providing information and insights contributing to the completion of this article, the author would like to express his sincere gratitude to Tobias Churton and Richard Kaczynski, scholars of esotericism and biographers of Aleister Crowley; and to Yoko Shirakawa of the NPO Yokohama Yamate Archives. Thanks also go to Colin Mcleod, whose research provided important information and sources on Crowley’s stay in Japan and about Mrs. L.R. Rogers (aka Alice), resulting in revisions to the article. Special thanks to Shiho Nishinouchi for research assistance.
About me:
I was born in New York and live in Kanagawa, Japan. In my debut novel The Spirit Phone, Aleister Crowley and Nikola Tesla confront the enigma of Thomas Edison’s phone to contact with the dead. The Spirit Phone was published by BHC Press in November 2022, with the ebook edition reaching #16 in the Barnes & Noble Bestseller Rankings in April 2023. The audiobook of The Spirit Phone won a 2023 Voice Arts Award for the narrator, 2-time Emmy winner Daniel Penz.
My short fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Suspense Magazine, Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast, Ragazine, and The Stray Branch. I’ve written articles for Kyoto Journal, PopMatters, The Japan Times, Japan Today, Rain Taxi, and Metropolis. I’m an associate professor of English at Showa Women’s University in Tokyo. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
