ALICE AND ALEISTER
A Play in Three Acts
Conceived after the manner of a séance — in which the living are already half-gone, and the dead are merely early.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
ALICE A. BAILEY — Theosophist, writer, occultist. Mid-forties in Acts 1 and 3. Patient in manner, iron in conviction. Speaks with the precision of someone accustomed to taking dictation from beings she cannot see.
ALEISTER CROWLEY — Magician, poet, provocateur. Late forties in Acts 2 and 3. Theatrical without trying to be. The voice of a man who has rehearsed blasphemy so long it has become devotion.
FOSTER BAILEY — Alice’s husband. Practical, protective. A warm man who has learned not to ask too many questions.
ANNIE BESANT — President of the Theosophical Society. A figure of authority and fading patience. She appears only in Act 1.
LEILA WADDELL — Crowley’s companion and confidante in Act 2. A violinist. Observant.
A VOICE — Heard but not seen throughout. No gender. No body. The sound of something that moves between minds.
A NOTE ON STAGING:
Acts 1 and 2 may be performed in a split-stage configuration, simultaneously or sequentially. The designer is encouraged to resist literal realism: the furniture should feel slightly too heavy, the walls slightly too close, the light slightly too late.
Act 3 should feel architecturally impossible. The room is too still. The books are wrong.
ACT ONE
THE WORLD OF ALICE
Scene 1
London. 1917. A modest study overflowing with manuscripts. Ink-stained shelves. A writing desk at which ALICE sits, eyes closed, pen in hand. A candle.
She is in the act of receiving.
Her pen moves.
ALICE: (murmuring as she writes) …the third initiation does not confer omniscience, but only the beginning of the awareness that omniscience exists…
The pen slows. She opens her eyes, reads what she has written, adds a comma.
ALICE: (to herself) A comma. Even the Masters require punctuation.
FOSTER enters with tea. He sets it beside her without disturbing the papers.
FOSTER: You’ve been at it since four.
ALICE: The Tibetan does not observe the clock.
FOSTER: The Tibetan is not the one who needs breakfast.
She smiles without looking up.
ALICE: He sends his regards.
FOSTER: Does he.
ALICE: (beat, she pauses on a word) Foster. Is the name Crowley familiar to you?
FOSTER: (carefully) It is.
ALICE: In what connection?
FOSTER: In the connection of — why do you ask?
ALICE: It appeared in what I received this morning. An oblique reference. Almost a warning. “Beware the one who inverts the work” — and then a name, written in a hand different from the rest. As if it were an intrusion.
FOSTER: Then treat it as one.
ALICE: That’s the rational response.
FOSTER: Which you are about to reject.
She looks at him.
ALICE: He has been called the wickedest man in the world.
FOSTER: By the Sunday Express. Not a reliable canonization.
ALICE: He practices ceremonial magic. He has written extensively. He claims communication with a — a non-physical entity called Aiwass.
FOSTER: We should not throw stones.
ALICE: (with precision) We do not throw stones. We note the trajectory.
Scene 2
The Theosophical Society, London. A meeting room. Several MEMBERS are seated. ANNIE BESANT stands at the front. ALICE is among the audience.
BESANT: The question of Mr. Crowley has been raised before this Society and will be answered plainly: he is not of our Work. He has borrowed our vocabulary for purposes of inversion. He uses the word “initiation” as a conjurer uses a handkerchief — to conceal rather than reveal.
MEMBER: But his knowledge of the Qabalah—
BESANT: Is substantial and corrupted. A thing can be substantially corrupted. This is, in fact, the most dangerous kind of corruption. Shallow error is easily spotted. Deep error wears the face of illumination.
ALICE listens. Her expression is studiously neutral.
BESANT: Those of us engaged in the construction of the new civilization cannot afford the distraction of his particular chaos. His Thelema — “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” — is a doctrine designed to dissolve obligation. Obligation is the skeleton of spiritual progress.
She looks at ALICE.
BESANT: Mrs. Bailey. You look as though you have a question.
ALICE: I have a note.
BESANT: By all means.
ALICE: “Do what thou wilt” — the full phrase, as I understand it, continues: “Love is the law, love under will.” The addition changes the character of the statement considerably.
A murmur.
BESANT: (quietly) You’ve been reading him.
ALICE: I’ve been reading everything.
BESANT: That is not always wisdom.
A pause.
ALICE: No. But it is always knowledge.
Scene 3
Alice’s study. Night. She is alone at the desk. She is not writing. The candle gutters.
From somewhere — or perhaps from inside her — a sound. Not quite a whisper. Not quite music.
THE VOICE: (as if from a great distance) — Aleister —
Alice stiffens.
THE VOICE: — the other current, Alice. The one that runs the other way around the same source —
ALICE: (aloud, to the air) I know what you are doing. This is not from the Tibetan. The register is different.
Silence.
ALICE: Whoever you are — whatever is using this channel — I am not unaware of the technique of imitation. I have read about it. I have been warned about it.
A longer silence.
ALICE: (more quietly) And yet.
She opens a drawer. Removes a small volume. On the cover: a name she has been trying not to look for.
She opens it. Reads. Her face is complicated.
ALICE: (reading aloud, very quietly) “I am the Magician and the Exorcist. I am the axle of the wheel, and the cube in the circle.”
She turns a page.
ALICE: “Come forth, o children, under the stars, and take your fill of love! I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is in yours.”
She closes the book. Sets it face down on the desk.
ALICE: That is not the language of the left-hand path. That is the language of someone — trying to find the same thing I am trying to find.
A beat.
ALICE: From the wrong direction.
She blows out the candle. In the darkness:
THE VOICE: — or a different direction to the same place —
Blackout.
Scene 4
Alice’s bedroom, just before dawn. She is asleep. Then — not entirely.
The language of the dream: not scene but sensation. She speaks aloud, still sleeping.
ALICE: (murmuring) Who are you. You are not the Tibetan. You are — you are very old. You have been — traveling. You are —
A pause. Her brow furrows.
ALICE: A.C. — that is not enough to —
A longer pause.
ALICE: (with sudden clarity, still asleep) Aleister.
She wakes. Sits upright. The room is ordinary and cold.
She sits in the dark for a long moment, one hand pressed to her sternum.
ALICE: (to herself) I am going to regret this.
She gets up. Goes to the desk. Sits down. Picks up her pen.
She begins to write — but not in the automatic hand. In her own.
End of Act One.
ACT TWO
THE WORLD OF ALEISTER
Scene 1
Sicily. 1920. The Abbey of Thelema — a dilapidated farmhouse transformed by will and paint into a temple. Murals of explicit and terrifying beauty cover the walls. Ritual implements crowd the altar.
CROWLEY is seated at a table, writing. He writes fast, scratching out, rewriting. Beside him, an ashtray, a glass, a copy of the I Ching opened to a hexagram.
LEILA sits nearby, tuning a violin.
LEILA: You’ve been muttering about a woman for the last hour.
CROWLEY: I have been muttering about a document.
LEILA: The muttering had the quality of a woman.
CROWLEY: The document was written by a woman. The Tibetan material. The “received wisdom” of one Alice Ann Bailey, theosophist, Madam Blavatsky’s spiritual granddaughter, well-intentioned architect of what I can only describe as the most elaborate spiritual corset in the history of esoteric literature.
LEILA: You’ve read her.
CROWLEY: One reads everything. It is not endorsement, it is navigation. One must know the rocks.
LEILA: And is she a rock?
A pause. He stares at the page.
CROWLEY: She is — (stops) No.
LEILA: No?
CROWLEY: She is not a rock. She is something else.
He stands abruptly. Goes to the window. Stares out at nothing.
CROWLEY: The hierarchy she describes — the Masters, the planes of development, the great work of building a new age — it is all entirely wrong in its architecture and entirely correct in its intuition. Like a map drawn by someone who has been to the country in dreams and remembered it imperfectly.
LEILA: A generous reading for something you disagree with.
CROWLEY: I disagree with the framework. I do not disagree with the — the pull at the center of it. The sense that something is being constructed. That there is a Work. That the century is a threshold.
He turns.
CROWLEY: She writes as if she is receiving instructions. I write as if I am receiving instructions. The instructions are different. This should not interest me as much as it does.
Scene 2
The Abbey. The scrying chamber. Night.
CROWLEY stands before a large mirror draped in black cloth. He pulls the cloth away. Studies his reflection for a moment, then looks through it.
He performs a brief invocation under his breath — Latin, Greek, something else. Then silence.
He watches the mirror.
After a long moment, he speaks.
CROWLEY: (softly) What is here? What presents itself?
A pause.
CROWLEY: I see a room. A study. Books — the wrong books, the ordered books, the — ah.
He leans closer.
CROWLEY: There is a woman writing. She does not look up. She is —
He stops. Steps back.
CROWLEY: She looks up.
A beat. He seems genuinely surprised.
CROWLEY: She looks directly at me.
He pulls the cloth back over the mirror. Stands very still.
A long silence.
CROWLEY: (quietly, to himself) That should not be possible. Subjects of scrying do not look back. They are observed, not observing. They are —
He stops.
CROWLEY: Unless she was already looking.
Scene 3
The Abbey. Days later. LEILA and CROWLEY at breakfast.
LEILA: A letter arrived. From a Frater Ahathoor in London. He says a student of his — a Theosophist, he emphasizes, as if this is a contagious disease — has been asking about you. Specifically about making contact.
CROWLEY: What kind of contact?
LEILA: The intellectual kind, he says. A meeting. A “confrontation of approaches.”
CROWLEY: (alert) Who is the student?
LEILA: He doesn’t say.
CROWLEY: (already certain) He doesn’t need to.
He sets down his cup.
CROWLEY: Here is what is strange, Leila. For three weeks I have found her name in places it has no business being. A student quotes a passage of hers — by accident, in the context of a completely different argument. A magazine I’ve never read falls open to a review of her most recent book. Yesterday, in the margin of my own diary — in my own handwriting, which I have no memory of writing — the initials A.A.B.
LEILA: Perhaps you wrote them unconsciously.
CROWLEY: I do nothing unconsciously. That is rather the point of the entire practice.
He stands.
CROWLEY: What I have come to believe — and I believe it reluctantly, because it is precisely the sort of thing she would say — is that there is a working being conducted on a level beneath the level of either of our intentions. That we are being — arranged.
LEILA: By whom?
CROWLEY: (a pause, almost amused) By exactly the kind of entity neither of us can claim exclusively. The kind that precedes the argument about which of us has the more accurate map.
Scene 4
Night. CROWLEY alone at his writing desk. He is composing a letter.
CROWLEY: (dictating to himself as he writes) “Cara Soror — I write not as enemy, not as rival, and not as the wickedest man in the world, that being a title conferred by journalists and worn as lightly as I wear all their titles. I write as a practitioner who has, for some weeks, been unable to entirely put aside the suspicion that we have been reaching toward the same phenomenon from different sides of what may, in the end, prove to be a very thin wall…”
He pauses. Reads it back. Crosses out “thin wall.”
CROWLEY: No. Too architectural.
He rewrites.
CROWLEY: “…from different directions toward the same center. I propose a meeting. Not a debate — debates presuppose that one party is wrong. A confrontation. A collision, perhaps. I have found, in my experience, that the most productive collisions occur between objects of roughly equal density traveling at roughly equal speed.”
He pauses.
CROWLEY: That will either terrify her or delight her.
He considers.
CROWLEY: Either outcome is acceptable.
He folds the letter. On the envelope, in a careful hand, he writes: A. A. BAILEY.
He holds the envelope for a moment, turns it over once, as if feeling its weight.
CROWLEY: (very quietly) Wherever you are.
He sets it down.
End of Act Two.
ACT THREE
THE MEETING PLACE
The stage reconfigures.
A room. It has the feeling of several rooms at once: a library, a lodge, a salon, a dream of all three. Shelves of books that are almost right — their spines are wrong, the titles blurred, the colors slightly off. A long table. Two chairs. Candles that burn without flickering.
The light is sourceless. The shadows point in conflicting directions.
ALICE enters from one side. She looks around the room with a practitioner’s eye — not afraid, but alert.
ALICE: (aloud) This is not the house.
She examines the table. Runs her hand along the surface.
ALICE: This is not — quite — the physical plane.
She looks at a candle. Bends close. The flame does not move.
ALICE: (to herself) Still. Flames are never still.
CROWLEY enters from the other side. He stops when he sees her. His expression is that of a man who has just confirmed a hypothesis he was hoping was wrong.
CROWLEY: Mrs. Bailey.
ALICE: Mr. Crowley.
A pause. They study each other with the particular attention of people who have been imagining the other for years.
CROWLEY: You look different from how I imagined.
ALICE: As do you.
CROWLEY: I imagined you more severe.
ALICE: I imagined you more —
She considers.
ALICE: More deliberately frightening. The performance seems to have been omitted.
CROWLEY: I save the performance for people who need to see it. You would see through it.
ALICE: (sitting) Sit down, Mr. Crowley. I suspect we have very little time.
CROWLEY: (not sitting yet) Or all of it. One of those.
He sits.
Scene 2
CROWLEY: Your hierarchy. The Masters. The Ashram. The seven rays. Tell me — do you actually believe that this is the structure of reality, or has the Tibetan handed you a working model that is useful without being literal?
ALICE: (without missing a beat) Do you actually believe that the Aeon of Horus is literally a new solar age, or is it a psychological framework for the collapse of the patriarchal spiritual paradigm?
A beat. Then CROWLEY smiles — genuinely.
CROWLEY: Touché. We are both using the literal as scaffolding.
ALICE: We are both attempting to describe the same elephant in the dark. We have each grabbed a different part.
CROWLEY: And announced, with great confidence, its shape.
ALICE: The important thing is that the elephant exists.
She leans forward.
ALICE: Your Thelema. “Every man and every woman is a star.” I have read that. I find it —
CROWLEY: Irresponsible?
ALICE: Incomplete. The star image is powerful. But stars exist in relation to one another. An isolated star is simply a catastrophic explosion held together by its own gravity. The point is not the individual blaze — the point is the pattern they form when seen from a sufficient distance.
CROWLEY: The Great Bear. Orion. The assigned constellations of your beloved Masters.
ALICE: Exactly.
CROWLEY: Or — and I put this to you with genuine interest — the patterns are overlaid by the viewer. There is no Bear in the sky. There are stars. We draw the animal because we cannot endure pure geometry.
ALICE: We draw the animal because we are animals, and animals navigate by story. The fact that the story is imposed does not mean it is false. It means it is necessary.
CROWLEY: (quietly) You are arguing for the necessity of form.
ALICE: I am arguing for the necessity of a discipline that is larger than the individual will.
CROWLEY: And I am arguing that the individual will, fully expressed, discovers that it is not individual at all. That Thelema — true will — is not what I want but what I am. The deeper you go into the self, the more you find —
ALICE: (simultaneously) — that it opens into the universal —
They stop. They have spoken the same phrase simultaneously.
A silence.
CROWLEY: (carefully) We have met before.
ALICE: We have never met. Until this —
She pauses. Looks around the room.
ALICE: Until wherever this is.
Scene 3
ALICE stands. Goes to the bookshelf. Runs her finger along the spines.
ALICE: These books. They’re — almost right. This is a book I own. But the author’s name is — I can’t read it.
CROWLEY: (from his chair) The titles are in a language that isn’t finished yet.
ALICE turns.
ALICE: What did you say?
CROWLEY: (slowly) I said — the titles are —
He stands. Goes to the shelf beside her. Looks at the books.
CROWLEY: I said something I didn’t intend to say. I said something that was already true when I said it.
ALICE looks at the wall. On it, a clock. Ornate, antique, perfectly still.
ALICE: (quietly) The clock has no hands.
CROWLEY looks at it.
CROWLEY: Ah.
ALICE: That is not a staging choice. That is a —
She walks to the table. Picks up a book. Holds it out toward CROWLEY.
ALICE: Take this.
He reaches for it. His hand passes through it.
They both look at where the book is.
CROWLEY: (very quietly) Well.
ALICE: Yes.
A long pause.
CROWLEY: Are we dead?
ALICE: I was not, as of this morning.
CROWLEY: As of my morning, neither was I. Though I have had mornings I was less certain about.
ALICE sits. Not with alarm — with something more like recognition.
ALICE: I have been here before. Not this room. This — condition. During deep meditation. During the automatic writing. There are moments when the Tibetan’s communication comes through very clearly and I am aware that I am not — fully located.
CROWLEY: Astral projection. Basic enough. But projection implies a body you return to.
ALICE: Yes.
A beat.
CROWLEY: Unless both ends of the projection have somehow — met in the middle.
He walks slowly around the table. As if testing the floor.
CROWLEY: I have had similar experiences. In the early scrying work. In the Abramelin operation. There are levels of the working where you genuinely cannot remember whether you are asleep. Where the question loses its relevance.
ALICE: (looking at her hand) Can you see me clearly?
CROWLEY: Perfectly clearly.
ALICE: I can see you. The room is clear. And yet.
She picks up a candle holder. Solid in her hand. She tilts it — the candle does not move with the holder. The flame remains in the same position in space regardless of where the holder is.
She sets it down.
ALICE: That is not physical law.
CROWLEY: No. That is the astral’s editorializing. It renders form but doesn’t always finish the physics.
Scene 4
They are both seated now. Something has shifted. The combativeness has burned down to something cleaner.
CROWLEY: I wrote to you. A physical letter. Did you receive it?
ALICE: I did not. I wrote to you, through an intermediary. Did you receive that?
CROWLEY: I received a report that you wished to meet. No letter.
ALICE: Then neither of us, in the physical world, initiated the actual meeting.
CROWLEY: And yet here we are.
A pause.
ALICE: What does it mean, do you think? For the work?
CROWLEY: Which work?
ALICE: Either. Both. The century-long project we are both apparently serving without knowing we are serving the same — the same —
CROWLEY: (quietly) Say it.
ALICE: The same source.
A very long silence.
CROWLEY: (with unusual gentleness) I have spent thirty years insisting on the primacy of the individual will precisely because I was terrified of that sentence.
ALICE: I have spent thirty years insisting on the hierarchical chain precisely because I did not want to be responsible for what happens without it.
CROWLEY: We are both —
ALICE: — pointing at the same fire —
CROWLEY: — from opposite sides of it —
ALICE: — and arguing about which side is the real side —
They stop. Look at each other.
CROWLEY: You complete my sentences.
ALICE: You complete mine first.
CROWLEY: How long has that been possible?
ALICE: (a pause) I wonder if it has always been possible. I wonder if the proximity was always there and we simply required — (looks around the room) — the appropriate venue.
CROWLEY: A room with no physics.
ALICE: A room with no clocks.
Scene 5
The light in the room has shifted. The books on the shelves have begun, almost imperceptibly, to go darker — as if the room is slowly dimming.
CROWLEY: (noticing) Something is changing.
ALICE: The texture of the space. It is — thinning.
CROWLEY: Or thickening. Depending on which direction is the denser.
ALICE: (with a slight smile) Always the other direction with you.
A pause.
CROWLEY: If one of us wakes, will the other remain?
ALICE: I don’t know. I have never been — two of us — here before.
CROWLEY: If I remain — alone in this, in whatever this is —
He looks at the handless clock.
CROWLEY: It would not be the first time I’ve been somewhere between the planes with no reliable map home.
ALICE: That is a very lonely thing to say.
CROWLEY: (lightly) I say lonely things in very charming ways. It is a gift.
She looks at him.
ALICE: (quietly) Will you do something for me?
CROWLEY: In this of all rooms, I find I am inclined to say yes.
ALICE: If this is — if we are in a shared state — if consciousness persists in this space after physical death — then perhaps our respective communications have been — filtered through the same medium we have each been filtering through. I have my Tibetan. You have your Aiwass.
CROWLEY: (slowly) You are suggesting they are —
ALICE: I am suggesting they know each other.
A very long silence.
CROWLEY: (very quietly) I have never said that aloud. I have thought it.
ALICE: I have written around it for years without writing it.
CROWLEY: The same fire.
ALICE: Different torches.
The light dims further. A faint sound — the one from Alice’s study in Act One, Crowley’s mirror in Act Two. The same sound.
THE VOICE: (so quietly it is almost a vibration) — yes —
Both of them hear it. They look at each other.
ALICE: Did you —
CROWLEY: Yes.
Scene 6
The room is nearly dark. The candles are their only light.
CROWLEY: (standing) I want to stay.
ALICE: I know.
CROWLEY: Not out of fear of — of wherever the other direction goes. I have no fear of that. I want to stay because this conversation is not finished. It will not be finished.
ALICE: Perhaps it was never intended to finish. Perhaps it was intended to — continue at this level, where it cannot be had any other way.
CROWLEY: You are telling me this meeting is the point. That there is no resolution. That what we are is the argument itself, sustained.
ALICE: I am telling you that some things are held together by their productive tension. A bow. A bridge. A polarity.
He looks at her for a long moment.
CROWLEY: (with complete sincerity, no performance) You are the most interesting person I have never met.
ALICE: (with equal sincerity) I have known that since 1917. I simply declined to admit it.
A pause.
CROWLEY: What do we do now?
The light has nearly gone. Only the candles. The still flame.
ALICE: I think —
She pauses. Her face shifts slightly — that slight withdrawal of someone feeling themselves pulled back.
ALICE: I think I am waking up.
CROWLEY: (quietly) Then go.
ALICE: I don’t —
CROWLEY: Go. This is not goodbye. In this particular region of space, goodbye is a meaningless word.
ALICE stands.
ALICE: (very quietly) Will you still be here?
He does not answer immediately. He looks at the clock with no hands. At the books with no titles. At the candle with its impossible flame.
CROWLEY: (a long pause, then, with something almost like peace) I have always been here. I think that is precisely the problem.
She starts to move toward the edge of the stage. She stops once, without turning.
ALICE: (quietly) Aleister.
CROWLEY: (equally quiet) Alice.
She walks into the dark.
CROWLEY stands alone in the candlelight. He looks at his hand — solid, real, present. He picks up the book that passed through his hand before. This time it is solid. He holds it.
He opens it. Reads.
He almost smiles.
CROWLEY: (reading aloud, softly) “…the Teacher within each man is the one Master — the True Self — the real inner director who leads each man to the Kingdom and the Light…”
He closes the book.
CROWLEY: Hers.
He sets it carefully on the table.
He sits in the chair she occupied. He does not move.
The candles burn on, without moving, without going out.
The room holds still.
Lights fade very slowly to a complete dark — not sudden, not theatrical, but the way darkness comes in a room where someone has stopped paying attention to the light.
In the dark, one last time:
THE VOICE: (so quietly it may be the audience’s imagination) —
Nothing. Silence. Then:
Curtain.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
On historical license: Alice Bailey (1880–1949) and Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) were contemporaries who, so far as the historical record shows, never met. They were aware of each other’s work and moved in overlapping circles of early 20th-century esotericism, albeit in opposing camps. This play is a work of imagination.
On the Voice: It should never be recognizable as a specific entity. It should be heard differently by each member of the audience.
On the clock: The clock should be present from the very beginning of Act 3, visible but unremarkable. The audience should notice its lack of hands before Alice does.
On the ending: Either version is the correct version. In one production, Crowley should be alone when the lights go out. In another, Alice should still be there, standing just out of the candlelight, watching him read. The director should choose which is true, but should not tell the audience which they have chosen.
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” — C.G. Jung
“There is no part of me that is not of the Gods.” — Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law
“The world is one world, and the consciousness of humanity is one consciousness.” — Alice A. Bailey, A Treatise on White Magic
End of play.
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