Sir Osbert Sitwell, not long after the Second World War, wrote the following anectdote in a book of memoirs called Noble Essences; he does not mention a certain name, which am sure was that of Aleister Crowley, who, though he had died by the time the book appeared, may have been alive at the time of its writing. "[Edmund] Gosse told me how Yeats had described to him an unusual adventure. The poet, it appeared, had been walking down Bond Street when he met a friend, whom he liked, but whose conduct he could not approve, and who on this occasion was accompanied by an uncommon spiritual extension of his personality, for after they had spoken, Yeats noticed that behind the sinner trailed six small green elephants; to those in the psychic know, a sure sign of moral obliquity.
"Gosse, confronting the psychic with the matter-of-fact, had said to Yeats, “Well, I don’t think it’s fair to let a thing like that put you against a man!”
For my part, I don’t know that there is much psychic difference between a man who, so to speak, exudes little green elephants, and a man who sees them.
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Among other members of the Golden Dawn were, as I have said, William Butler Yeats; also affiliated were the writers Arthur Machen, A.E. Waite, Algernon Blackwood, and Sax Rohmer, the biographer of Dr. Fu Manchu. Crowley zipped up the ladder of the lower and middle degrees without difficulty; then he felt he was ready for the higher ones. Yeats now bore the interesting title of Adeptus Exemplus and Imperator; he refused Crowley the degree applied for, allegedly on the grounds that he was already practicing magic and making invocations, something not permitted to the lower and middle degrees. Perhaps this was the explanation of the six small green elephants. Crowley had no difficulty in discerning Yeats’s real reasons for refusing promotion: Yeats was jealous of Crowley, jealous of him as a magician . . . and jealous of him as a poet. . . . According to Crowley, that is. No one ever accused Crowley of false modesty.
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There is a story that Crowley, when he returned to force Yeats out, was wearing a kilt and a black mask. Stories like that are often told about Crowley. “Yeats burned all the Golden Dawn papers in his possession.” “Crowley put a formal curse on Yeats.” “In letters written during these fateful few weeks, Yeats refers to Crowley twice as an ‘unspeakable person’ [and] three times as an ‘unspeakably mad person’ . . .” Of course this did not stop him from speaking about him, and he even wrote to the famous Lady Gregory, his, Yeats’s patroness in the Celtic Revival, saying that “it will give . . . Crowley, a person of unspeakable life, the means to carry on a mystical society, which will give him the control of the consciences of many.” Which it did indeed.
Was Crowley the “rough beast . . . [which] slouches toward Bethlehem,” in Yeats’s best-known poem? Perhaps he was. Perhaps.
