The Prince, the Magician & the Great Sahara Dust-up

n June of 1912, after what was her most spectacular winter season of entertaining in New York, Aimée Crocker Gouraud packed up her kids, her Buddahs and her French bulldogs, and in less than five weeks found a new home, marshalled a regiment of men to load in and install furnishings, and made all the necessary arrangements to set up camp in the 16th arrondissement, a fashionable quarter of Paris.

She paid a full $150,000 (five million today) for a fine residence on rue Alfred Dehodencq in the Passy-La Muette neighborhood only blocks away from the Bois de Boulogne, a public park extravaganza with lakes, botanical gardens (both English and French), the spectacular Longchamp racecourse, and Jardin Zoologique d’ Acclimatiation, a petting zoo and children’s amusement park which also featured families of Nubians, Bushmen, Zulus, Somalis, indigenous Sámi people from Norway and Sweden, and Inuits from Greenland who were “exhibited” in a human zoo section of the grounds.

Mrs. Gouraud told the press that she would live in Paris permanently. “I prefer the artistic atmosphere of Paris to the more commercial environments of New York or San Francisco,” she claimed.

Stepping inside her eccentric compound was like crashing into the secret treasure vault of a Baghdad caliph, who’d looted every royal palace on Earth. A Crusader in full armor ominously stood in readiness in the reception hall. A Peruvian sun god bumped elbows with both an Alaskan totem pole and a Malay war drum, inanimate guests at the world’s most confusing cocktail party. The walls were a chaotic roll call of machetes, dueling pistols, Zulu spears, Arabian scimitars, and cowboy spurs—plus glamour shots of theatrical starlets, Japanese prints, and artwork ranging from a Gauguin original, to an Adam Styka topless desert gypsy, to one of Raphael Kirchner’s delightfully scandalous opium princesses.

Her salon of guests included such celebrity regulars as Princesse Marie Eristoff-Kasak, the portrait painter and Aimée’s best friend in Paris; actresses Gaby Deslys, Claudia de Lamar and Gertrude Barrett; Sasha Vatichenko, who charmed the guests with dazzling performances on his tympanon; Genia Agarioff, the Russian dancer and opera singer; Señor Eduardo Garcia Mansilla, a diplomat, noted composer, and nephew of the famous Argentine dictator, President Rosas; and Wilson Mizner the American playwright, raconteur and scallywag—co-owner of Los Angeles’ famous Brown Derby restaurant—and most quotable party guest in the West.

Aimée’s lavish townhouse contained a little theater in which her libertine associate Edouard de Max performed. Called “the most beautiful man in Europe,” de Max was the reigning tragedian and monstre sacré of the Paris stage who often played opposite the great Sarah Bernhardt.

Other minglers prancing among Aimée’s Chinese idols and her incense and her exotic paintings and her serpents and her court of flatterers and sycophants were some noblemen—Prince Colonna de Lecca, a Corsican and dirt-poor poet known as the “Knight of the Sorrowful Visage”; Andre de Beckendorff, a Russian baron and cavalry officer from Petrograd; and his best friend, Moscow educated Alexander Miskinoff, son of a Russian official in the Tiflis Governorate in the Caucasus. Miskinoff declared his noble status by handing out business cards with his title of “Prince” to all the dinner guests.

“The Russians are adorable. They remind one of Americans. They are so natural. They are more like Californians than anyone we ever meet in Europe,” said Mme. Gouraud. Prince Miskinoff, who spoke no English and only pidgin French like Aimée, appeared frequently in her carriage on the Bois and at her side at studio dances. They talked of a trip around the world. The press soon jumped on the story announcing their engagement more than once—in Paris, in London and in New York. The heiress quickly refuted those claims.

The Angel and the Abyss

Another admirer who sashayed into the Queen of Bohemia’s castle would be the great wizard and hedonist Aleister Crowley, who would for the next dozen years be her de facto court magician performing spells and acting as her most trusted spiritual counselor.

The electro-magnetic Aleister stood out among Aimée’s stable of eligible suitors. The heiress, who had been a spiritual pilgrim since girlhood, was impressed by Crowley’s mystical backstory.

In Northern Africa in the 19 aughts, Aleister Crowley would cross two Rubicons along his fast-paced spiritual journey. The Crowley path to enlightenment—Thelema—hinges on two great initiatory crises. The first is attaining “Knowledge and Conversation” with one’s Holy Guardian Angel—Crowley’s term for the deepest, highest, truest self or an independent spirit guide. Communicating with one’s personal angel/higher self would become the fundamental task of every adept committed to “The Great Work.” One’s True Will, or one’s sacred destiny or path in life, could not be fully known in consciousness until the Holy Guardian Angel is contacted.

The second prerequisite event in the Thelemic journey is “Crossing the Abyss”—a profound, transformative, and perilous spiritual ordeal that culminates in the complete annihilation of the ego. Both are watershed events on the path to higher consciousness and spiritual enlightenment, symbolizing the transition from the phenomenal world of individual identity to a state of unity with the Divine.

Before his own ego-shattering double baptism by fire, Crowley had become well versed in the works of Lao-Tze, the Buddhist Canon, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Talmud, the Sacred Books of Egypt and the philosophy of many of the early Greeks. He read The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary by Christian mystic Karl von Eckhartshausen and became a member of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secretive Victorian occult group that attracted brilliant figures like Bram Stoker, W.B. Yeats and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

“I longed passionately for illumination…for perfect purity of life, for mastery of the secret forces of Nature,” wrote the ambitious magus in his memoirs.

Crowley’s Holy Guardian Angel was contacted in Egypt in 1904 during his honeymoon with first wife Rose. While in a trance, an entity calling himself Aiwass dictated what would become the central holy text of Thelema—Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law). Aiwass, through the channeller Crowley, delivered messages from Egyptian divinities Nuit, Hadit and Ra-Hoor-Khuit which, among other things, announced the beginning of a new era—the Æon of Horus.

Five years after contacting his angel, Crowley led his then lover and magical apprentice, Victor Neuburg, into the Algerian desert to explore the complex Enochian magical system developed by John Dee, the eminent Elizabethan mathematician and astrologer, and his clairvoyant Edward Kelley. Night after night, Neuburg recorded the unfolding pageant of otherworldly realms and supernatural beings observed in the “Aethyrs” by Crowley while he recited incantations and gazed into a topaz stone.

It was on the summit of Mount Da’leh Addin near the town of Bou Saada, that Crowley and his sidekick first wove explicit sex acts into subscribed magical practices, and it is within this crucible that two of Thelema’s most enduring figures emerged in their full initiatory force.

Foremost was Choronzon, the Enochian demon later revered as the “dweller in the Abyss,” the epitome of all disharmony and confusion. Choronzon represented dispersion: a terrifying chaos in which there was no center and no controlling consciousness. Defeating the dominating power of this devil in the desert had to be approached without any shred of ego. Choronzon’s annihilating pressure would absolutely destroy the unprepared but liberate the adept for enlightenment.

Beyond this ordeal rose the majestic and libidinous Babalon—the Mother of Abominations—who represented the divine feminine, liberation, and the female sexual impulse. She was both the “Great Mother” identified with the concept of Understanding, and a “sacred whore” because she is all-accepting and denies no one the chance for divine union.

Babalon appeared repeatedly in Crowley’s Algerian visions and was soon enthroned as a central Thelemic deity.

Babalon was a re-imagining of the Whore of Babylon character from the Book of Revelation, an apocalyptic and malevolent vision of evil, who appears as a woman clad in opulent scarlet garments and elaborate jewelry, sitting astride a seven-headed beast.

In Thelema, the aspirant must surrender to this scarlet goddess utterly, symbolically pour their blood into her Graal, and become a “Babe of the Abyss,” to be reborn as a Master and Saint in the City of the Pyramids, fully awakened to True Will and united with all existence.

Crossing the Abyss involves the final and irrevocable abandonment of the personal sense of self, that which seemingly secures one’s place in the worldly order of things as manifested by the ego. It marks the formal erasure of the boundaries between the conscious, the subconscious and the superconscious mind, an erasure that the true magician must invoke at will.

Aleister, who had long identified with The Beast in the Book of Revelation, remembered nothing of his experiences in Bou Saada, but when awareness gradually returned, he sensed at once that something within him had irrevocably shifted. “I knew who I was and all the events of my life; but I no longer made myself the center of their sphere… I did not exist… all things were as shadows sweeping across the still surface of a lake—their images had no meaning for the water, no power to stir its silence.” Crowley felt that he had ceremonially crossed the Abyss.

The magus soon became convinced that his mountaintop sex-magick rituals offered an unparalleled path to the highest forms of occult power, and he emerged as one of its most inventive and devoted practitioners. “I have insisted that sexual excitement is merely a degraded form of divine ecstasy. I have thus harnessed the wild horses of human passion to the chariot of the Spiritual Sun,” he wrote in his biography.

Four years into his experimenting with his Thelemic sex magick, the master magician would meet the heiress and widow Aimée Crocker Gouraud. When Crowley and Aimée met, it was he who became bewitched and spellbound.

The Heiress Takes a Groom

In December of 1913, The San Francisco Call reported that Aimée was playing the field engaging with five eligible men: de Max, the actor, Mansilla, the composer and Agaroff, the singer, plus two others—Melville Ellis and Jacques LeBaudy.

Ellis was a composer, performer, director, arranger, musician and fashion designer. When he arrived in New York, he quickly established himself as a musical comedy favorite. Ellis’ specialty was the pianologue. Melville would cart his piano around to film locations and play as filming was taking place for inspiration. He played piano for the filming of Cecil B. DeMille’s “Carmen.” Though Aimée loved show folk, Ellis was, in the end, not robust enough for her Tabasco taste.

Jacques LeBaudy, with a fleet of three boats, 400 hired soldiers and sixteen Hotchkiss guns, sailed to an area near Cape Juby on the Moroccan coast and proclaimed himself the “Emperor of the Sahara.” Aimée’s father-in-law Col. George Gouraud was named Jacques’ Governor General and tasked with organizing the empire’s new military establishment. Aimée, like the rest of the world, did not recognize him as Jacques I, Najin-al-Den, Emperor of the Sahara, or Commander of the Faithful, or King of Tarfaia, or Duke of Arleuf or Prince of Chal-Huin. And she definitely did not claim him as the next Mr. Aimée Crocker.

She didn’t marry any of these contestants.

The San Francisco Examiner announced an engagement on December 28, 1913. Aimée chose the one gentleman caller who spoke no English, Alexander Miskinoff.

The whimsical widow first met the Prince in the art studio of Princesse Eistoroff. Eistoroff was a fad and favorite of the aristocrats for portraying every subject as youthful, radiant, and brimming with life. Mrs. Gouraud, herself a devoted believer in the creed of eternal youth, soon became both confidante and enthusiastic champion of the painter-princess. The admiration naturally extended to include the young countryman Miskinoff, who was the embodiment of youth itself.

He became one of her whims.

When he consented to wear Japanese kimonos in public, she began to take him more seriously. She had waged a years-long crusade for Oriental attire in men. How could she resist her first true convert? For months, he played the role of her enchanted, well-groomed manservant amid the cafés and studios of Paris.

To celebrate the taking of a fourth husband in an appropriately novel manner, Aimée quietly circulated word among her set that she would award $5,000 to a party planner who could conceive a form of social entertainment truly without precedent—something that would make a dinner, dance, reception, ball, or a wedding unmistakably unique. She confessed that her own once-boundless ingenuity in devising bizarre and unprecedented amusements—of which she easily held the world’s record—had at last run its course. Her offer was intended purely as a discreet benefaction to the young artistic protégés of Paris, and was to be kept in the strictest confidence among friends. It was not her plan to appeal to the public, for fear that she would be bombarded with letters for the rest of her life.

The story was soon leaked to the press. The Washington Post wrote of her predicament, “She has investigated the festive antics of the ‘Esquimaux’. Remote islands of the Pacific have been ransacked, and from them she has gleaned some bronze-skinned, undraped suggestions in human form. She has probed the underworlds of the cities of New York, San Francisco and Paris for novelties that have grown stale. She has breathed the perfume of the Orient, importing there from heathen customs, costumes, idols and strange ceremonies.”

Crocker’s parties were always well orchestrated international adventures.

The American Gastronom submitted a gleefully absurd dinner theater to lampoon high society—a fictional $2,500-a-plate banquet in a glass pavilion in Cannes, complete with costumed servants, crocodile-egg hors d’oeuvres served on an actual crocodile, turtle-borne soup tureens, and exotic (and ethically outrageous) dishes like monkey stew and Bengal tiger roast. The spectacle included Hottentots playing instruments and Sousa’s band performing to agitate the animals—an intentionally over-the-top send-up of upper-class excess. Meant as satire, the fanciful feast nonetheless found its way into the prestigious World’s Fair Menu and Recipe Book for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, alongside the world’s most illustrious historic menus.

Mrs. Gouraud gave the prize to a young art student from Georgia, whose vision was nothing less than an exquisitely contrived Sahara fête set within an imagined oasis. After the story broke, Aimée declared that the Egyptian garden party that the artist outlined would be the finest thing of its kind Paris has ever seen. The guests were to be attired in antique Egyptian fashion, and the dances were to be of the epoch. At intervals, whirling dervishes were to break the reverie with their spinning rites, while snake charmers coaxed their reptiles to the music of reed pipes. A small sphinx was to be built, and on the banks of a miniature Nile, crocodiles under the guard of the natives would bask in the silvery rays of the Eiffel Tower’s searchlight, while scores of herons, the sacred bird of the Nile, were to add gaiety to the majesty by fluttering their snowy wings.

Introducing her crowd to other cultures and peoples was not unlike the human/petting zoo concept at the Bois de Boulogne, though Aimée’s version promised a far more elaborate and interactive fantasy.

The idea appealed to Mrs. Gouraud’s love of the strange, the remote and the savage. It also captivated her neighbor, actress Gaby Desly, who lived directly behind Aimée on rue Henri de Bornier. Gaby cheerfully offered up her garden for what would become a joint entertainment.

Next came the procuring of half a dozen young crocodiles, and locating three snake charmers with their serpents. Aimée’s grand plan was to journey up the Nile, then set off on camelback somewhere near Khartoum, venturing into the wilder stretches of the interior. There, with the aid of lavish gifts, she intended to coax a dozen dancing dervishes—men and women alike—into forsaking their desert encampments and accompanying her to Paris. Her aim was to select the noblest specimens of desert manhood and womanhood.

Aimée brought her daughter Yvonne and son Gerald to Cairo with her prince to help gather up these accessories for her extravagant fête. She wanted to introduce Alex to her oldest daughter Gladys and her grandson Gerald who were then careening through Egypt accompanied by her beau, Arnold Ostertag.

Within the House of Gouraud, Melchior Siegfried Arnold Ostertag served amiably as a sort of court jester. Arnold was at the time a penniless Swiss dentist, who passed more of his time in an anesthetic bar on the heights of Montmartre then in providing painless dentistry.

Under Aimée’s influence, he would later reinvent himself spectacularly, founding the illustrious French jewelry house Ostertag during the Art Deco efflorescence—his intricate creations eventually rivaling those of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels.

Babalon and the Beast

While Aimée and Alex basked in their young romance and planned their nuptials, Crowley and Neuberg again embarked on a sexual/spiritual journey. This time in an apartment in Paris. Their first ritual opus took place on New Year’s Eve 1913. These sacred ceremonies or “workings,” which involved strong drug use and sex magick rituals, continued almost daily for six weeks and ended with Opus XXIV on February 12, 1914.

Crowley and Neuburg’s rituals were recorded in the “holy” book Liber CDXV – Opus Lutetianum or The Paris Working. This time instead of invoking Choronzon the Enochian demon and Babalon the sacred whore, they invoked the gods Mercury and Jupiter.

On Wednesday, February 11, 1914, during the 23rd working, Crowley received a message for Aimée Crocker Gouraud. Her supernatural command was to make a journey to the Holy House of Hathor at Dendera, Egypt, and offer the five jewels of the cow on her altar. Then the heiress was to go under the night stars in the desert and invoke the Egyptian goddess Nuit. Crowley’s desired result: establishment of Nuit cult.

Celestial mother Nuit bore the gods Horus, Osiris, Set, Isis, and Nephthys. She was the goddess of the overarching sky under which all life exists. Nuit was an interface, intimately connected to the cycles of nature in this world and the coordinates of the cosmic order. She was also the goddess of incubation who assisted devotees in the completion of all creative endeavors.

When Crowley met Aimée Crocker, he was ascending a new summit on his spiritual climb breaking all previous altitude records. In early 1912 he published The Book of Lies, which biographer Lawrence Sutin called “his greatest success in merging his talents as poet, scholar, and magus.” That same year German Theosophist and occultist Theodor Reuss, author of Lingam-Yoni (1906), placed him at the head of the British branch of Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), an occult secret society, after Crowley displayed an impressive understanding of sex magick principles in his book. 

Reuss’s O.T.O. system consisted of seven pseudo-freemasonic degrees, designed to open the seven chakras, while the sex-magical VIIIth and IX degrees were awarded without any rituals. It was a curious fraternity stitched together from Masonic oaths, Rosicrucian symbols, Illuminati skulduggery, Golden Dawn invocations, Gnostic sacraments, and the voluptuous shadows of Tantric rituals. It was a theater of secrecy where women were not only permitted but courted as initiates, sibyls, enchantresses…

Reuss was at one time closely associated with  the Utopian/artist community in Monte Verità, Switzerland, which included such luminaries as Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Isadora Duncan, Paul Klee, Rudolf Steiner, and Max Weber. (He was ousted for hosting nightly orgies).

After receiving the 23rd Paris message, Crowley, asking for direction on whether he should go to Tunis for Aimée, yielded the answer, “Is not the Nile a beautiful water?” He set out on a journey to Tunis in March with a mission to groom the aggressively individualistic heiress for the benefit of the order, and of himself.

Crowley saw in Crocker not merely a worldly socialite but a potentially enlightened initiate capable of defeating the mighty devil in the desert and drinking from Babalon’s graal. Within a year she rose to the Ninth Degree of O.T.O., the highest rank open to a woman, entering the “Sovereign Sanctuary of the Gnosis” as Thrice Holy, Thrice Illuminated, Thrice Illustrious Soror Aimée Crocker Gouraud.

It was less a title than a libretto.

In this rarefied sphere Aimée encountered the full cabinet of occult indulgences then enthralling the Bohemian elite: astrology’s jeweled heavens, the Qabalah’s spiraling paths, automatic writing and its ghostly scrawls, lacquered tarot archetypes, Eastern meditation, Renaissance grimoires, astral travel, alchemy, and Hermetic lore. As co-proprietor of the “Estates and Goods of the Order,” she was less disciple than shareholder in the carnival of arcana, licensed not only to practice sordid rites in candlelit chapels, but to cultivate, in private boudoirs, the more silken lessons of Eros.

How different her cousins Charles Frederick and William Henry’s path. Both moved with stately gravity through the more sanctioned male only secret societies: the Masons, who adorned them both with their highest degree; and the Bohemian Club, where solemn robed figures still process through the redwood cathedral of the Grove. (A Daly City Masonic Lodge bears the Crocker name).

Aimée had no place in such temples of respectability. Instead she embraced the more mischievous role: that of snake charmer and sorceress on society’s margins, half priestess and half performer.

Crowley wanted Mrs. Gouraud not just as a member of the order or a ritual partner, but to be his “Scarlet Woman,” Babalon on earth, the counterpart to his Beast who would “represent Venus in the New Æon,” and would assist him in his spiritual sojourn.

The Scarlet Woman represented the empowered woman; the woman freed from the social stigmas of sex, on an equal footing with men; the woman freed from convention and able to accomplish her Will without restriction. Crowley wrote incantations to put Aimée under his spell and prayers to bend chance and sway desires.

For the next ten years, the Beast would propose to Crocker every time they met.

Desert Pirates

On March 9th of 1914, it was reported across America that Mrs. Gouraud was crossing the Sahara from Egypt with the objective to persuade several dervish chiefs to appear at her grand desert fête in Paris. But once she was far from civilization, her native convoy mutinied. Refusing their sudden demand for more money, she watched them disappear into the dunes, leaving her alone with her kids, her over-civilized Russian prince, and her interpreter with no protection from the semi-savage marauders of the region and the desert’s vast indifference.

Aimée was indeed then captured by a band of desert pirates, so the story goes, led by chief dervish Sango Tomo and held prisoner for three days. She attributed her eventual liberation to a charm that she wore representing Buddha which was stolen from a Hindu temple in the hills of India by a suitor. On the fourth day Sango Tomo noticed it. He believed it to be a powerful mystical talisman and immediately salaamed before the American heiress. When she perceived the unexpected effect of her mascot, Mrs. Gouraud pointed to the snakes tattooed on her forearm. The muscular dervish trembled, spread a fine rug on the sand, and bowed again and again before his fair captive, eager to undo any offense. Within an hour the heiress and her young family was not only released but also provided with an escort to the nearest center of civilization.

A meeting with Aleister Crowley was not reported in the newspapers or in their memoirs. A great drama did occur there, nonetheless, in Tunis, in the Sahara Desert. Daughter Yvonne told the press about it years later…

Marriage #4

A copy of the marriage record in St. Martin’s Registry, London, England, signed by Registrar Joseph P. Bond, indicated that on June 11, 1914, Aimée Crocker Gouraud, widow, aged 40, wed Alexander Miskinoff, aged 26.

The witnesses were Yvonne Gouraud, beautiful adopted daughter of the bride, and a friend, Amanda Gherson. Shown a copy of this record, the lady told the press, “The newspapers are always marrying me to somebody or other. Several times I have been guilty, but my legal name is still Gouraud.”

Aimée, it is true, would never annex the name of Miskinoff to her already much-hyphenated cognomen, but she was lying about marrying the young man. The heiress was also, incidentally, lying about her age as was her husband. She was 49 and he had actually just turned 30 days earlier. Once the cat was out of the bag, she hungered to show off her young husband at the casinos, pavilions, and theaters. Lavishly bedecked with pearls and diamonds and emeralds around her neck and Prince Miskinoff on her arm, Aimée was seen ringside at the Vélodrome d’Hiver watching Jack Johnson fight Frank Moran for the heavyweight championship of the world on June 28, 1914. Johnson won the 20-round fight on points.

The day of the big fight, a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo, triggering World War I. The allies—chiefly Russia, France and Britain—were pitted against the Central Powers—primarily Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Unrest in Europe prevented the carrying out of the colossal Egyptian fête scheme.

World War I sent Mrs. Gouraud and her betrothed to the safer shores of America until the European coast was clear. Aimée and her kids arrived in New York on September 11th, 1914. Gladys and Arnold arrived from Naples on October 17th. Aleister Crowley arrived on November 1st. Alexander Miskinoff, her groom of five months, arrived on the Cunard liner Transylvania on November 17th, ten days after the Oakland Tribune reported that Aimée was divorcing him to marry a pianist. She denied that a divorce was in the works and continued to deny that she was even married to the prince.

Ordo XXX

That fall Crowley began tracking his sexual operations in a diary, which he referred to as Rex de Arte Regia (The King on the Royal Art), in an effort to perfect the experimental techniques of sexual magick. He was chiefly testing the use of the potent energy of sexual arousal and orgasm as a tool for spiritual or magical pursuits. The underlying premise was that the high vibrational energy generated during climax can be channeled to influence the universe and bring about a desired outcome. This was his Gnosis, the royal road to the accomplishment of his Great Work.

Crowley was not only mastering the sex magick O.T.O. techniques brought forth by mentor Theodor Reuss, but was also experimenting with the erotic content of the ancient text of the Kama Sutra by Vātsyāyana, and the 15th-century Arabic sex manual, The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight, written by Umar ibn Muḥammad Nafzāwī.

The magician declared in his book Confessions, “the main reason for the violence and turmoil of the modern world lies in the repression of the sexual instinct; and conversely, the surest way to solve our contemporary problems lies in its liberation.”

The November 21st entry, Ordo VII, was performed with a black prostitute named Florence Galy, aged about 28-30. He invoked Lord Shaitan (the Egyptian Star god Set, who was also the god of Fire) for his assistance in having Aimée Gouraud become his Scarlet Woman. He believed that the operation was successful in molding circumstances already fluid.

In December, two more operations, Ordo XI and Ordo XII, with another prostitute named Grace Harris, led to notable compliments and cordial, positive reactions to Crowley from Aimée for his magnetism and his magic during a talk.

Ordo XIX and XXII with Dutch prostitute Lea Dewey also led to spontaneous ovations and overtures by Aimée Gouraud much to his pleasant surprise.

Finally on January 30, 1915 at 3:47 pm on a brilliantly fine, cold but exhilarating winter day, Opus XXX, was performed with T[hrice] H[oly] T[hrice] I[lluminated] T[hrice] I[llustrious] Soror Aimée Crocker Gouraud, initiate of the Sanctuary IX O.T.O.

Crowley wrote:

I had been wanting this particular partner since many months… The operation was undertaken most unexpectedly. It was very good, considering all. The Kteis of the T.H.T.I.T.I.S. is prehensile to an astonishing degree! The Elixir was pretty good, having a rare delicacy of flavour. Operation was not very orgiastic, the mind being in a confused state—I was afraid of going wrong in so important an Operation, etc. But on the whole excellent. I feel very well afterwards; so also the T.H.T.I.T.I.S. And I expect good results… (Gouraud) has a will like the Holy Phallos itself! And she kept concentrated on the sex force, I did ditto.

His objective was to have Aimée become his Scarlett Woman. Her objective was not recorded.

The McAlpin Hotel

The fairy tale love story of Aimée Crocker marrying a prince curdled.

On June 20, 1915, it was announced that Madame Gouraud had suddenly left the Hotel McAlpin, where she had a suit of five rooms for her children, her husband and a maid. The breaking up of the happy twelfth floor family was said to be for good and all time.

New York whispered that it was deception that ruined their short romance. Alexander Miskinoff, it was discovered, was no more royal than the bellhop. The only documentation that he submitted as evidence was a passport stamped Prince in red ink. His lifestyle itself—privileged laziness, late mornings, leisurely strolls, immaculate grooming—was offered up as further proof of his noble status. The Russian embassy delivered the final blow: the prince was pretend.

The story of No. 4 in Mrs. Crocker’s serial husband saga would largely be told during divorce proceedings. Miskinoff sued for cruel and inhuman treatment; Aimée countersued, accusing him of lying about his rank and courting a young girl—then only fifteen-years-old—before their June wedding and throughout their short marriage.

The New York Times reported the charges and countercharges to a captivated city, recording every detail of the trial down to the attire of the players: the princess overshadowed in mourning black and gold; the heavily perfumed prince was dashing in chocolate spats.

Aimée reported:

The prince said he did not love me, but merely married me for convenience and, to neglect and abuse me, spent all his time and devoted himself entirely to this young girl, for whom he openly declared most violent affection. He demanded a divorce, as he said he loved this young girl, and wanted to marry her. The girl, in turn, told me that she would take her life unless she was allowed to marry the prince.

Then came the shocking revelation—his alleged paramour was not some stage-door ingénue but Yvonne, Aimée’s own adopted daughter, who was discovered in baby-blue pajamas leaping into a closet as detectives burst into the prince’s suite.

The triangle was laid bare: the princess, jealous and volatile; the prince, claiming he was merely obeying his wife’s wish that he “save” the lovestruck child; and Yvonne, fluttering in her nightgown and slipping notes under his bedroom door. Pet names were found in the correspondences. The prince called Yvonne “Boutzou” which meant “Pussykins” or “Little Pussy.” Occasionally he referred to  her as “chic amie.”

Yvonne went to stay with Baroness Beckendorf, better known in New York under her stage name of Gertrude Barrett, at her apartment at the Peters Stuyvesant, on Riverside Drive. The Prince, took a furnished room in a house a few blocks away. He spent much of his time at the Beckendorf apartment and about town with Yvonne, who spoke fluent French and was acting as his interpreter.

Yvonne told the press that she didn’t know anything about the separation and denied any kind of romantic involvement or interest in Alex.

Miskinoff would prove by a packet of letters and other evidence that he became engaged to the foster-daughter at his wife’s request. It was on the day war was declared, when the threesome was in Lucerne, Switzerland, that Aimée told Miskinoff, “If you’re in love with Yvonne I will be perfectly happy to divorce you and see you take Yvonne.”

The false prince admitted his love for Yvonne and told Aimée how he had knocked a revolver from the girl’s hands when she tried to kill herself because of her impossible love for the nobleman. Later he became engaged to his wife’s foster daughter “because it was the will of his wife that he marry Yvonne to save her life.”

Mme. Gouraud then made the radical decision to send the false prince and Yvonne to Edgemere, Long Island to test their love. They were to remain there until he could either conquer his infatuation for the young girl or decide to divorce his wife and marry Yvonne.

In what the courts referred to as the “Honey Darling Letters” Aimée wrote of the pain and anguish she suffered through her “noble and heroic sublimity” in giving her foster child to the Prince “to love and cherish forever,” when her own heart yearned for his youthful affections.

It was Miskinoff who sued for divorce in November 1915. In his complaint the prince charged that his wife possessed a desire to live a disorderly and tempestuous cabaret life unbecoming to the marriage state and the dignity of a family.

Miskinoff also revealed in court that Mrs. Gouraud tried to persuade him to join a cult (O.T.O.) where “spirit dominated over matter” and where they dance in lively costumes, nearly nude. Alex put his foot down and refused to become what he referred to as an “Adamite.”

The most curious allegation to come up in the divorce hearing was that a baby girl was born as an issue of the marriage on April 11, 1915. Miskinoff didn’t want money from the heiress, he asked the court to grant him custody of the child, or at least permission to see the child occasionally. “I love my wife, and still think she is a splendid woman. I will forgive her if she will return to me and bring the child. I am a father and have all the feelings of a father. I want my child, so I have gone to the law to get her.”

At the end of March 1915, Aimée had disappeared without a trace. Two weeks later the prince received a letter in her handwriting, which told about the birth of a daughter, and asked him to come immediately. He adored the baby girl and was overjoyed. He described in court lovely Sunday strolls in Central Park and the christening at the McAlpin Hotel.

But the Bohemian heiress, aged fifty, calmly testified that the baby, who she named Yolanda Vera, was adopted. When Aimée was in Miss Alston’s House for Private Patients on West Sixty-First she was merely suffering from a nervous breakdown. The court agreed. The “baby princess” was a myth, and the prince had no “courtesy right” to the child or the fortune.

On March 2, 1916, the couple was legally separated. An embittered Miskinoff remarked that his wife “looked like three lemons.” Efforts at reconciliation failed. The affair with Yvonne continued and on October 25th the Miskinoffs got an absolute divorce.

He later told reporters that he was honored to have been married to Aimée, even so briefly. “To know Madame counterbalances much sacrifice. To have been her husband has been the supreme pleasure of my life.” Miskinoff announced that he was going home to Russia to fight for his country, and if he couldn’t reach Russia he would enlist in the French Foreign Legion to join an aviation esquadrille.

Tunis

Yvonne, the apex of that triangle of human affections, who had greater powers to cast a spell than her dynamic mother, the enigmatic prince and the mesmerizing magician, granted an interview a couple of years later. She reminisced about the month-long trip to Spain and North Africa with Queen Aimée and her court: Prince Alexander, foster brother Reginald, half-sister Gladys, nephew Gerald and the court jester Arnold before the wedding. It was a joyous journey and all were very happy.

“It was in Tunis that the trouble first came. The prince loved me, and in the first night when we rode together out across the blue desert under the moon he began wooing me,” reported Yvonne.

The affair with the wanna-be prince and the heiress’s pubescent daughter began there on the sands of the Sahara, with Crowley looming. And Horus and Nuit. And Choronzon, the Enochian demon, and Babalon the sacred whore…

“A Russian may not be able to manage his own country, but he can make love! Give him a setting as romantic as the Sahara at night, the shadowy little cafés in the Arab town, the high window of European hotels overlooking barbaric, colorful Africa, and he could win any girl’s heart,” said the wistful Yvonne, “One does not think of duty or parents in such times.”

While struggling with a forbidden romance, Yvonne was also chasing a dream of becoming an actress in the theater. When asked if she was in love with the prince she said:

Well, I was very fond of him and knew he was sincerely in love with me, but does a girl ever know whether she is completely in love with an attentive lover? She longs to reward his adoration with the love he pines for, but she finds it hard to tell whether that longing is or is not love… I don’t know whether we will marry or not. He is such a gentleman and so attentive and attractive, but I sometimes think my career couldn’t possibly stand marriage. If I marry anyone it will be the prince, but perhaps no one. My artistic future is more important.

In addition to adopting a baby to win back Miskinoff’s love, Aimée strategically introduced her daughter to heartthrob Rudolph Valentino hoping to undermine her feelings for Alex.

Yvonne and Miskinoff were engaged as a romantic couple for several years, but she would never marry him. Or Valentino, though family lore says that he proposed. Aimée forgave the transgressed young woman and returned to her role of doting mother. The heiress enjoyed lifting the pulchritudinous girl from poverty to the full grandeur and extravagance of her own style of living. She did make a small splash as a showgirl in Broadway revues. After entertaining some wealthy suitors, she married, raised three sons, settled in Paris, befriended Dalí, and lived the long, glittering life her fairy godmother had promised.

Yolanda Vera, the foundling briefly passed off as a dynastic heir, died tragically in 1920.

Miskinoff didn’t fight in the French Foreign Legion. He sold off some valuables and opened up a dry cleaning business.

Crowley struggled with periods of drug addiction, abject poverty, and tumultuous relationships, but remained committed to honing his radically eclectic Thelemic practices. Any available technique, be that magic, sex and drugs, or meditation and yoga, were included in his system if they produced desirable states of ecstasy, spiritual insights or vivid experiences on the astral planes. Increasingly, Crowley seems to have lost a clear sense of the distinction between the enlightened magical self, which can access the unconscious at will and acknowledges no limits, and the man Aleister Crowley, who still had to function in the world. Crowley, in spite of his episodes of horrifying despair, published comprehensive studies on everything from astrology and tarot to tantric sex and yoga, I Ching and Sufism, as well as the Kabbala and numerology.

Oscar winning writer and director Preston Sturges was the son of one of Crowley’s Scarlet Women, Mary Desti. He wrote about the complex configuration that was the Beast:

[He was] the practitioner and staunch defender of every form of vice historically known to man, generally accepted as one of the most depraved, vicious, and revolting humbugs who ever escaped from a nightmare or a lunatic asylum, universally despised and enthusiastically expelled from every country he ever tried to live in. Mr. Crowley nevertheless was considered by my mother to be not only the epitome of charm and good manners, but also the possessor of one of the very few genius-bathed brains she had been privileged to observe at work during her entire lifetime.

The Soul of the Desert

Crowley wrote an essay while in Tunisia during the Miskinoff affair that would soon shock the world titled “The Soul of the Desert.”

The discourse unfolds as a lyrical portrayal of the desert as a harsh but purifying crucible that forces the soul into extreme isolation, monotony and anguish. The desert, he conveys, has the power to strip a man of everything that he has and is. Removed from the trivialities of “civilized surroundings” the ego is exposed and the soul becomes conscious of its exile from the Divine.

In the essay, Crowley wrote what seemed to be a cautionary message to Aimée herself:

All the spices wherewith we are wont to season the dish to our depraved palates, Maxim’s, St. Margaret’s, automobile rides, the Divorce Court, these are unwholesome pleasures. They are not love. Nor is love the exaltation of emotions, sentiment, follies. The stage door is not love (nor is the stile in Lovers’ Lane)…

Aimée did wrestle with demons stirred up in the Sahara desert. She would call the Miskinoff debacle/betrayal the most trying experience in her life. It was an insurmountable predicament. She certainly couldn’t damn the other players in the triangle as a spokesperson for chastity and fidelity. By the time she was Yvonne’s age, she would have two love affairs under her teenage belt.

Aimée had reached a stage in life where her wiles were no longer reliable. Clever conniving couldn’t keep Alex and her daughter apart. Emotional blackmail efforts proved unsuccessful. Madame Gouraud was hit by the stark desert reality that her youthful days were behind her, her sex appeal was diminishing, and her fortunes could no longer give her everything she desired. To some in Society, she had become a laughing stock.

Crowley’s essay let the acolyte know that intense spiritual experiences and a deep process of introspection would be catalyzed in the stark arena of the Sahara desert. Archetypal universal forces would be revealed in their pure, naked, sometimes terrifying forms. He wrote, “Yet despite this, the spring leaps unexpected from the sand, and no simoon can stifle, nor even evaporate it; nor can the immense sterility of the desert conquer life. There is only one lesson to learn, peace; only one comment upon the lesson, thanksgiving.”

Passing through this inner void and relinquishing the illusion of a separate self, the soul, Crowley promised, would dissolve into an ecstatic union with the Divine. Worldly troubles would no longer affect one’s true self. Gone forever would be the limiting and limited understanding of the ego as the finite center of the universe.

Letters exchanged between Aimée and the Beast suggest that she kept the magician as a friend and spiritual advisor for at least another decade. She would become a close friend of Crowley’s most famous Scarlet Women, Leah Hirsig. Why she didn’t accept his marriage proposals or to become his Scarlet Woman—the Babalon to his Beast—is a mystery. They seemed a perfect match. There was a reciprocal attraction. They clearly belonged to the same spiritual–intellectual tribe. Both were ardent seekers of esoteric knowledge and fierce individualists. Both had lost their fathers before reaching their teens. Both possessed a keen appetite for celebrity and notoriety. Both maintained long and intricate histories of lovers—relationships that did not always proceed in tidy succession, but at times overlapped. Each was well traveled. Each was drawn to the science of energy flow, practiced an eroticized spirituality, and regarded the mystical union of the Self with the Divine as life’s highest and most urgent work.

The heiress from Sacramento certainly wasn’t offended by his libertine creed “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the Law, Love under Will.”

Crowley cherished his self-appointed role  as the Establishment’s chief bogeyman. Aimée’s dissent was both obvious, with her tattoos and snakes and wild dresses, and at the same time gentile. Her occult experiences were a thrilling pursuit, a search for peak experience and very serious work. They were, on the other hand, also a form of slumming: a deliberate descent into society’s shadowlands (one of her favorite pastimes). Though she held missionaries in contempt, Crocker’s ambitions were never rooted in countercultural religious revolt. She was not an angry revolutionary. She was, instead, a gregarious and magnanimous presence, a light-hearted hostess with a generous spirit.

Crocker required no coronation from Crowley. She was already empowered, already on equal footing with men. Convention had long ceased to bind her, and she pursued her Will without impediment. Why be a counterpart in Crowley’s kingdom?

One of Aleister Crowley’s biographers portrayed Aimée as “wealthy prey who escaped.”

After a decade of relative seclusion, Crocker reemerged into tabloid mania by marrying yet another Russian prince—this one younger than the last. Her nerve restored, she mounted the matrimonial bucking bronco once more. It was a history/character rewrite effort that, in the end, offered her little more than a true noble title and a few seasons of man troubles.

After years of rejection, Crowley grew bitter. To confidants, he derided Mrs. Gouraud as a “selfish debauchee.” While back in Tunisia in 1923, after Crowley was expelled from Italy and denounced as “The Wickedest Man in the World” by the press, Aimée would appear as a character in an “abominable” nightmare that woke the Beast to tearing and cold sweats.

 

Selected Sources:

“$5000 for a New Thrill,” The Washington Post, Jan 25, 1914.

“Aimée Gouraud leaves Sanatorium,” Sacramento Bee, Apr 19, 1915, p2.

Alex Owen, “The Sorcerer and His Apprentice: Aleister Crowley and the Magical Exploration of Edwardian Subjectivity, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 99-133.

Aleister Crowley, The Soul of the Desert, Thelema Publication, June 1, 1974.

Aleister Crowley; John Symonds (editor); Kenneth Grant (editor), The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography, (Penguin Books, 1989)

Aleister Crowley; John Symonds (editor); Kenneth Grant (editor), The Magical Record of the Beast 666, The Diaries of Aleister Crowley 1914-1920, (London: Duckworth, 1979).

“American Woman Will Cross Sahara Desert,” The San Diego Sun, Mar 9, 1914, p5.

“Amy Crocker is Still Spectacular,” Oakland Tribune, Apr 5, 1914.

“Amy’s Latest Romance with Russian Count,” Oakland Tribune, Nov 7, 1914, p7.

“Baby is not Hers, Says Princess, In Reply to Husband’s Charges,” The Washington Post, Feb 18, 1916

“Be Bride Four Times! Never! But Former Miss Crocker Will,” San Francisco Call, Dec 31, 1913, p1.

“Blue Pajama Famed Prince to Sell Out,” Oakland Tribune, Apr 24, 1919.

“Clothe Like Adam Never Said Prince,” New York NY Press, Feb 19, 1916.

“Denies She’s Princess,” The Washington Post, Feb 17, 1915, p7.

“Egyptian Desert Fete in Naughty Paris a Startler,” Buffalo, NY Courier, Jan 11, 1914.

“Egyptian Scene Takes Prize for Novel Affair,” The Morning Press, Jan 11, 1914, p9

“Fair Runaway Returns to Paris,” Oakland Tribune, May 5, 1912, p3.

“Former Amy Crocker Will Wed a Prince,” San Francisco Examiner, Dec 28, 1913, p1.

“Gouraud-Miskinoff Parting Stirs N.Y.,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jun 20, 1915, p44.

Henry N. Hall, “Master Magician Reveals Weird Supernatural Rites,” Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, Dec 20, 1914.

“Herbert Temple, “Ringside Scenes Resemble Those of Grand Opera House,” The Courier, Jun 28, 1914

“Honey Darling Letters Shown in Gouraud Suit,” The Evening World, Feb 21, 1916, p1,2.

“J. Keeley, “Shall I Marry the Prince?” San Francisco Chronicle, Mar 31, 1918.

“Life Wife Loved Bored Prince,” New York Tribune, Feb 22, 1916.

“Love for Daughter of Wife is Denied by Russian Prince,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb 22, 1916.

M. Pasi, “Aleister Crowley and Islam,” In M. Sedgwick, & F. Piraino (Eds.), Esoteric Transfers and Constructions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (pp. 151-193). (Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities). Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61788-2_8.

Manon Hedenoborg White, The Eloquent Blood: The Goddess Babalon and the Construction of Femininities, (Oxford University Press: November 11, 2019).

“Mrs. Gouraud Buys Residence in Paris,” San Francisco Examiner, Jun 9, 1912.

“Mrs. Gouraud Captive of an Arab. Held Prisoner for Three Days,” San Francisco Examiner, Mar 29, 1914.

“Mrs. Gouraud Ill, Seeks New Home; So Does Prince,” New York Tribune, Jun 1o, 1915.

“Mrs. Gouraud Sued by Fourth Husband,” The New York Times, Dec 5, 1915.

“Prince Says His Wife was Cruel,” The Washington Herald, Dec 5, 1915.

“Prince, Wealth Gone, Henceforth Will Dye to Live,” San Diego Union, Dec 7, 1916, p10.

“Princess No Longer,” The Washington Post, Mar 2, 1916, p2.

“Princess Wins Her Divorce,” The Mellette County Pioneer, Nov 9, 1916.

Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Life of Aleister Crowley, (North Atlantic Books, Aug 10, 2010).

“Royal Love Secrets of America’s Most Beautiful Baroness,” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug 26, 1922.

“Russian Noble is Shy About his Real Name,” San Francisco Examiner, Nov 18, 1914, p1.

“Seeking Joy, Finds Danger,” Washington Herald, Mar 29, 1914, p6.

“The Chase for Titles,” Washington Times, Mar 8, 1908, p30.

“The Latest Caprice of the Whimsical Mrs. Gouraud,” The San Francisco Examiner, Jan 25, 1914.

Tracy W. Tupman, M.A., “Theatre Magick: Aleister Crowley and the Rites of Eleausis,” Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University, 2003.

“Yvonne Gouraud, 16, Quits Mother. May Wed Prince, Broadway Hears,” New York Tribune, Jun 28, 1915.