Two days after this celebration, the journalist Maurice Richardson came to lunch at Crowley’s invitation. Richardson had included a faintly slighting reference to Crowley in a book review, and Crowley had written to suggest a meeting, using this banter as bait: “Perhaps in future before you pass animadversions on my character you will take the trouble to make my acquaintance.” If it was Crowley’s hope to win Richardson over, he failed. Richardson later produced a stinging essay, “Luncheon with Beast 666,” in which he averred of Crowley “that when you got used to his eccentricities, and so long as you were not impressed by his mystical pretensions, he was apt to become a fearful bore. He had no capacity for selection, no notion of when to stop. How sinister was he? Obviously he would con a mug, pluck a pigeon.” It is striking that Louis Wilkinson seconded Richardson’s complaint as to the Beast’s lack of a “capacity for selection.” Wilkinson admired the best of Crowley’s poetry but deplored its unevenness. The explanation offered by Wilkinson:
Vanity was his handicap. He was too sure of his genius to criticize or revise adequately his own work.[ … ] His poetry could be very bad as well as very good. He could write mere imitative pieces, he could write superbly, with an exultant vigour entirely his own, but he never seemed to know whether he was doing the one or the other.
A measure of his vanity—or prophetic dedication, if you will—was that Crowley still yearned to play a role upon the world’s stage. In certain of his dreams, his ambitions took on the form of gratifying fantasies. In February 1938, for example, he recorded an “Elaborate dream about Hitler & cigars & Magick & my horse Sultan. I was running Germany for him.” In a diary entry later that month, Crowley consciously dismissed the Nazi ideology: “Fascism must always fail because it creates the discontent which it is designed to suppress.” But a fascism purified by Thelema, a rule of the true rulers—that fantasy could not be banished. Over a year later, in June 1939, there was a similar dream: “I had several long talks with Hitler a very tall man. Forget subjects, but he was pleased and impressed: ordered all my books translated & made official in Germany. Later, a dusk night in a city. A man in gold-braid went round a corner, saw several horsemen, similarly gorgeous, one fired the first shot of the war.”
The first shot of the war was fired some two months after this dream. Crowley, who had been predicting a world conflagration, noted simply in his diary for September 1, 1939: “Germany attacked Poland.” By September 6, Crowley had composed a poem, “England, Stand Fast!” that was issued as a pamphlet on September 23. For all his dreams of serving Hitler, it was his patriot voice that spoke forth here:
England, stand fast! Stand fast against the foe!
They struck the first blow: we shall strike the last.
Peace at the price of Freedom? We say No.
England, stand fast!
Once the war began, the Beast was passionate in his support of the British cause. If imitation be the sincerest flattery, then Crowley paid great homage to Winston Churchill—named Prime Minister in 1940—by posing for photographs in which, clad in bowler hat with scarf, cigar, and contemplative scowl, he struck a striking resemblance to Churchill himself. Crowley also claimed to have originated the popular ‘V for victory’ hand gesture employed by Churchill. According to Crowley, the letter ‘V’ was suited to the task of bringing victory due to its numerous esoteric correspondences. Crowley’s claims have never been accepted; David Ritchie of the British Broadcasting Corporation is widely credited as having suggested it to Churchill.
Plainly, the Beast yearned to play a role of prominence in the war effort. A week after the German invasion of Poland, Crowley wrote the Naval Intelligence Department (N.I.D.) offering his services. The N.I.D. never offered a position. But Crowley was a figure of interest to certain members of the British intelligence community, including Maxwell Knight, the head of Department B5(b), the British counterespionage unit within M.I.5, during World War Two. Knight had been introduced to Crowley in the mid-1930s by Dennis Wheatley, the popular British horror novelist. According to Anthony Masters, the biographer of Maxwell Knight, both Knight and Wheatley attended rituals led by Crowley for the purpose of background research for Wheatley’s books. Indeed, Crowley served as the principal model for at least one of Wheatley’s black-magical villains, Mocata in The Devil Rides Out (1934). Knight’s nephew, Harry Smith, stated that the two men had “jointly applied to Crowley as novices and he accepted them as pupils. But my uncle stressed that his interest—and also Wheatley’s—was purely academic.” Knight and Wheatley were apparently not the only members of British intelligence to study with Crowley. One scholar has noted “the fascinating accounts given of witchcraft soirees held by Mr. Aleister Crowley. M.I.5 agents who attended these festivities disguised as witches and wizards, wrote long memoranda about the corruption of goat’s blood.” Just where Crowley could have obtained goat’s blood in London is not specified, nor are the alleged memoranda quoted.
Whatever Knight’s views on magic, his respect for Crowley was genuine—a telling indication that, in British intelligence circles, Crowley was not regarded as a traitor for his World War One activities. Once World War Two began, Crowley continued to enjoy access to Knight. Masters recorded that “Crowley had put up some of his own mad-cap ideas about helping the war effort to Wheatley and Knight. These included a project that involved the dropping of occult literature on the Germans, but neither Wheatley nor Knight felt this would have any practical application.”
But the Beast was almost utilized by the N.I.D. in connection with an occult disinformation plot targeted at Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who was both an ardent believer in astrology and highly skeptical of the long-term military prospects for the Reich. The plot was devised largely by Ian Fleming (later the creator of James Bond, then a Commander in the N.I.D.) and approved by Knight. In brief, it called for the infiltration of Hess’s circle by means of an M.I.5 planted astrologer who would convey, through a faked horoscope, the falsehood that a pro-German circle existed in Britain that could, with the aid of Hess, topple the Churchill government and conduct peace negotiations with Germany.
At first, it was envisaged that Crowley could play a role in contacting Hess in Germany. Knight had Crowley “in mind for some time as a potential M.I.5 agent, but because of his eccentric personality he was considered just a little too much larger than life to be successful. Yet here was a top Nazi leader who believed in the occult and here was Crowley, the artful perpetrator of occult practices.” But there was a serious snag—one that reveals a further twist in the tangled relations between Crowley and Gerald Hamilton. According to historian Richard Deacon, Crowley was a known intelligence suspect to the Germans as far back as the early 1930s. “The German Intelligence Service certainly knew all about Crowley’s ventures in espionage for Crowley lived in Berlin with another notorious spy, Gerald Hamilton. Crowley was spying on Hamilton for M.I.5 and Hamilton was almost certainly spying on Crowley for the Germans.” Recall that Hamilton had claimed that he was spying on Crowley for the British. Curioser and curioser.
It was decided that Crowley could assist, in England, in preparing the initial astrological “bait” for Hess. This plan was rendered moot, however, by one of the most bizarre incidents of the war—the secretive flight to Scotland by Hess in May 1941. Hess parachuted to British soil in hopes of commencing independent negotiations on Germany’s behalf that would end the war. Fleming proposed that Crowley would be an ideal interrogator on the key question of the extent of the influence of astrology upon various Nazi leaders. Crowley assented eagerly, but was ultimately rebuffed. As Donald McCormick, an associate of Fleming during this period, later recalled, “it never came off and the very idea must have horrified the Admiralty! But there was an exchange of letters on the subject. Ian also had a theory that Enochian could be used as a code and was a perfect code for using when one wanted to ‘plant’ bogus evidence in the right place.” As a constructor of codes in the angelic Enochian language, there could hardl
y have been a more qualified expert in Britain than Crowley; one wonders if the Beast had first suggested the idea to Fleming. It was never pursued, but Fleming did not forget the Beast. In his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), the villain, “Le Chiffre,” is modeled in part on Crowley. Maxwell Knight, in turn, served as the principal inspiration for “M.,” Bond’s chief.
Crowley was once more disappointed in his hopes of serving British intelligence. But his patriotism remained intact. Shortly before the outbreak of war, Crowley had moved to 57 Petersham Road, Richmond, which served as his primary residence through the summer of 1940. German bombing raids were frequent in the vicinity, which strained the Beast’s nerves and intensified his asthmatic difficulties. But he also found the raids exhilarating. Cammell recalled a night spent with Crowley during a German air attack. British antiaircraft guns had hit a German bomber that was plummeting to earth in flames. Cammell wrote:
Here was a man who had been gasping his life away all through the night; and now at the crack of dawn he ran downstairs two steps at a time, and was shouting Hooray! And waving his arms skyward in a passion of boyish excitement and jubilation. No trace of asthma: it was gone to whence it came. Crowley was twenty-one again.[ … ]
As dawn broke we drank our stirrup-cup—or “night-cap”—the toast, damnation to the Dictators! I went home for a few hours’ sleep. Crowley, his asthma cured by that blazing bomber, slept like a child.
This summer of 1940 was the apex of the friendship between Cammell and Crowley; Montague Summers was a neighbor and occasional companion as well. Relations with Cammell ended the following year, when Crowley refused to pay Cammell’s wife, Iona, for a large quantity of tweed cloth (handwoven by herself) he had agreed to purchase. Writing of this in a veiled manner (Cammell did not wish to name his wife as Crowley’s victim), Cammell offered an epitaph for this—and many other—of the Beast’s lost friendships:
I did my best to arrange matters; to persuade him to act honourably or at least reasonably and courteously. It was useless. As was his wont when challenged, he became defiant. In some such way he lost so many of his best friends: George Cecil Jones, Eckenstein, Mathers, Allan Bennett, General Fuller, Sir Gerald Kelly, Victor Neuburg. They were, each in turn, compelled to break with Crowley, even as I was. I saw him only once again—in London, after the war. We did not speak.
Crowley’s relationships with his female lovers during this period—chief of whom was one Alice Upham—were equally stormy. None of them held his heart, and none could alleviate—for all the sexual workings devoted to “Health” during this period—the mounting weakness caused by his asthma. Crowley had continued his heroin use through the 1930s. But in the war years, the dosages and dependence heightened still more to subdue the intensified asthma attacks. He also took luminal to combat recurrent insomnia.
In September 1940, Crowley resolved to leave Richmond and its bombing raids for the relative tranquility of Torquay. He found lodgings at The Gardens, Middle Warberry Road, where he stayed some six months. In the grip of age and illness, Crowley longed for companionship; he was no longer, at heart, Alastor the Wanderer of the Wastes. A letter to Yorke, both a friend and a failed disciple, reflected his present isolation and unease:
I wish you had always understood me; I could have worked out the details with you. But there was a time when you distrusted me entirely: a lot of it my own fault. Is it too late to get together heart and soul? “Trust not a stranger; fail not of an heir.” I feel so lonely, like a frightened child. So much to do and my physical instrument untrusty!
However “untrusty” he may have felt, the Beast continued on the prowl—largely futile—for women during this autumn of 1940. The hunger was reflected in this entry for October 9: “Nerves on edge for lack of cunt.” The number of workings dropped off rather sharply in the second half of this year. On December 22, a solitary Crowley ejaculated onto a rosebud which he sent to Alice Upham. If there was a magical goal in mind, Crowley did not record it. At the end of his diary for the year, Crowley penned, as was his fashion in his later years, an obscene ditty, this time concerning a boy named “Anthony.” But the days of male lovers were over. This was purely a fantasy, one in which sexual and political power were blended in rousing lines:
They gave me command of the Navy
I sailed up the Shore of Berlin
Stick it out! Was the signal I gave: I
Hear Anthony say “Stick it in!”
Triumphant military power wielded as an open homosexual—it was Crowley’s private vision of victory, one he dared not share with the British public as he had “England, Stand Fast!”
Though Crowley found no real wartime role, his presence was certainly noted by the enemy. William Joyce (“Lord Haw Haw”), a British traitor who broadcast gibing propaganda for the Nazis and was hanged after the war, suggested in one broadcast that, as a National Prayer Day held in March 1941 had not availed the British cause, why not have Aleister Crowley conduct a Black Mass in Westminster Abbey? Crowley drew no rancor from his Torquay neighbors as a result of Joyce’s remarks. He created friction by mundane means: credit problems with the local grocer, insistent demands for back rent from his landlord. In March 1941, he moved to Barton Brow, a house just outside Torquay.
Two new amours emerged in this spring—Mildred Churt, and a woman whom Crowley referred to as “Charis” [Greek for “Grace”] and “X.” Her full name was Grace M. Pennel, and she was the sole cosignatory, with Crowley, of an April 20 entry in his diary specifying them as “members of the Abbey of Thelema at Barton Brow.” As for Alice Upham, she became, in the latter half of 1941, the last recorded lover of the Beast, who—surprisingly—was stoic as to his loss of the energy central to his Magick. On June 18, he was unable to achieve an erection after having birched Upham—a standard component of their foreplay; the planned opus could not be fulfilled. Four months later, on October 21—Crowley was by now back in London, in a service flat at 10 Hanover Square in the West End—a temporary solution had been found. Crowley noted dourly: “Alice here for Cunnilingus. The ‘last infirmity of a noble mind’.” There is no evidence of any sexual activity by Crowley after this.
But Crowley was fortunate to have one woman who would remain an emotional and economic support through his final years. Frieda Lady Harris was never romantically involved with the Beast, but she collaborated with him on the last great work of his life: the writing of The Book of Thoth and (Harris’s task) the pictorial creation of a new Tarot deck design—one replete with lust and force, the couplings and breakings of the Thelemic universe, in which the One is always manifested in Duality. The “Thoth deck” (or “Crowley deck”) remains one of the most influential Tarot versions to be produced in this century. Harris was no mere passive collaborator. Crowley provided the initial written explanations and rough sketches. But she would then barrage him with further questions of her own. In some cases, at Crowley’s urging, she painted eight different versions of a single card.
Crowley and Harris first met in 1937. She was sixty years old and married to Sir Percy Harris, a baronet and Parliamentary whip for the Liberal Party. Their marriage was not particularly happy, and Harris had taken on at least one lover. But she aspired to spiritual development and believed in Crowley as a teacher, receiving from him the name Soror Tzaba. Harris never became an unwavering Thelemite. But she was a sincere and forthright student, admirably frank in her letters to the Beast as to her views on Tarot design and proper publicity for the project. Their formal collaboration began in the summer of 1938 and would occupy much of their energies through early 1944. Harris also helped to support Crowley, giving him £2 weekly during this period. As for Sir Percy Harris, he tolerated his wife’s devotion to the Beast but gave no credence to Thelema—a frustration to Crowley, who further disliked Sir Percy for being Jewish.
Frieda Harris became more than an artistic collaborator. In many respects, she filled the void left by the absence of a Scarlet Woman or even a stable lover, acc
ompanying Crowley to social occasions and tending to his health. Cammell recalled that, while Crowley lived in Torquay, “she had come to his call, and found him stricken by pneumonia, only half-conscious. She met a man at his door, who was going out to order the coffin. By night she sought for doctor, nurse, and the necessities of existence. At that time she had saved Crowley’s life.”
Harris and Crowley endured frictions and frustrations, including the abrupt cancellation—in June 1941—of a proposed exhibition of Harris’s Tarot paintings in an Oxford gallery. Opposition to Crowley, not to Harris, was the cause of the difficulty, and this made Harris publicly cautious, though her loyalty to Crowley remained intact. Still, Harris pleaded with Crowley to refrain from his plan to issue Liber Oz in late 1941 in the form of postcards and broadsides. (“Oz” is Crowley’s transcription of the Hebrew word for goat.) Liber Oz, first composed by Crowley during World War One to serve as part of an O.T.O. ritual, is written almost entirely in monosyllabalic words. Crowley blended, in its brief compass, quotations from the Book with pithy, cadenced declarations. The first and fifth of these show where Crowley stood and why Harris feared public outrage:
1. Man has the right to live by his own law—
to live in the way that he wills to do:
to work as he will:
to play as he will:
to rest as he will:
to die when and how he will.
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