Whether owing to this disturbing experience, or because, as Crowley declared, he had "imprudently attracted to himself forces of evil too great and terrible for him to withstand, presumably Abramelin demons," Mathers' reason began to totter. This then was the situation at the time of his rupture with the Order, and the dramatic incident referred to was the sudden appearance of Crowley in London, who, whether acting as Mathers' envoy or on his own initiative, broke into the premises of the Order, with a black mask over his face, a plaid shawl thrown over his shoulders, an enormous gold (or gilt) cross on his breast, and a dagger at his side, for the purpose of taking over possession. This attempt was baffled with the prosaic aid of the police and Crowley was expelled from the Order. Eventually, however, he succeeded in obtaining possession of some of the rituals and other documents of the Golden Dawn, which he proceeded to publish in the organ of a new Order of his own. This magazine, containing a mixture of debased Cabalism and vulgar blasphemies, interspersed with panegyrics on haschish--for Crowley combined with sexual perversion an addiction to drugs--which might appear to express only the ravings of a maniac. But eccentricity has often provided the best cloak for dark designs, and the outbreak of war proved that there was a method in the madness of the man whom the authorities persisted in regarding merely as an irresponsible degenerate of a non-political kind. To quote the press report of his exploits after this date: In November 1914 Crowley went to the United States, where he entered into close relations with the pro-German propagandists. He edited the New York _International_, a German propagandist paper run by the notorious George Silvester Viereck, and published, among other things, an obscene attack on the King and a glorification of the Kaiser. Crowley ran occultism as a side-line, and seems to have been known as the "Purple Priest." Later on he publicly destroyed his British passport before the Statute of Liberty, declared in favour of the Irish Republican cause, and made a theatrical declaration of "war" on England.... During his stay in America Crowley was associated with a body known as the "Secret Revolutionary Committee" which was working for the establishment of an Irish Republic. He is known also as the writer of a defeatest manifesto circulated in France in 1915. But to return to the Golden Dawn. In 1903 a split occurred in the Order. A.E. Waite, an early member of it, seceded from it with a number of other members and carried off with him the name of "Golden Dawn," also the vault and other property of the Order. The original Order then took the name of "Stella Matutina," with Dr. Felkin as Chief.