by Gary Lachman
Martha Küntzel’s home was raided and all her magical papers were confiscated. This must have baffled Martha. Years earlier, Crowley had told her that the first country to adopt The Book of the Law would become the leader of the world. In 1925 Martha sent Das Buch des Gesetzes to Hitler, and later believed that he based his ideas about National Socialism on it. Hitler, she believed, was her magical son, but there is no evidence that Hitler ever got the book or read it. Although Crowley fell out with Martha because of Hitler—the Brits would, he told her, knock the Führer for a loop—he also believed that Hitler had read The Book of the Law. A copy of Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks (1940), annotated by Crowley and available at the Warburg Institute, shows that Crowley believed much of Hitler’s “table talk” was thelemically inspired.17 Crowley himself tried to get the British and the Germans interested in thelema; he also, we’ve seen, tried to interest Stalin.18 It didn’t matter which nation adopted it; whichever one did would lead the New World Order. There are clear resonances between Crowley’s vision of a thelemic future and Hitler’s dark dreams, but this is not because Hitler was inspired by Crowley. Gerald Yorke annotated a copy of Mein Kampf (1925–26), showing its similarities to Crowley’s philosophy; Hitler wrote this while in prison after his failed “Beer Hall Putsch,” and most likely did not have a copy of Das Buch des Gesetzes on hand. But he didn’t need to. Both he and Crowley fantasized about some master race, lording it over the masses, and both were enamored of the abyss of irrationality that lay latent in the western soul, and wanted to release it.
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CROWLEY DRIFTED AROUND LONDON, an engaging dinner guest or a crashing bore, depending on your perspective. At one point he talked a young Cambridge student into letting him live rent free, in exchange for magical instruction. But they eventually argued over money and Crowley had to go. He was invited to lunch by the journalist Maurice Richardson, who then wrote an article, “Luncheon with Beast 666,” in which he portrayed Crowley as a heavy drinker and a “fearful bore”; Crowley, Richardson recorded, could down three triple absinthes, a bottle of burgundy, and some brandies without batting an eye, and needed half a pint of ether to get going in the morning.19 He also said that Crowley’s bald head resembled an “enormous penis.”20 Crowley later returned the favor and invited Richardson to lunch. Crowley provided an impressive spread and at the end Richardson felt sheepish about his article and apologized. Crowley asked that if he really felt that way, would he mind writing a brief apology? Richardson declined, saying he was too drunk to write. Crowley suggested that they have lunch again soon. Richardson then realized that if he had written the apology, Crowley could have used it as an admission that he had slandered him, and taken him to court. Even after his debacle with Nina Hamnett, Crowley still had the taste for litigation. After a party Crowley threw at the Café Royal, he excused himself to use the gents, then headed to Regent Street, where he caught a cab and sped away. He stiffed the restaurant £100 and was not welcome there again.21 He had a certain talent for burning bridges.
For the novelist Anthony Powell, who used Crowley as a character in one of his books, he was like a music hall comedian, keeping up a “steady flow of ponderous gags.” For the writer Arthur Calder-Marshall, who had invited Crowley to lecture to the Oxford Poetry Society, Crowley was “a shagged and sorry old gentleman trying to outstare me across a table.” Before their meeting Crowley had looked up Calder-Marshall in Who’s Who and saw that his family had money; he wondered if Arthur had too and invited him to stay the night. He was still hunting for Scarlet Women, but he was, understandably, losing his touch. One catch that escaped him was the Portuguese beauty and wealthy socialite Greta Sequeira, who was part of the Café Royal set. Crowley met her in 1936 and pursued her off and on; at one point in 1938 he journeyed to Cornwall in order to dine with her.22 She liked Crowley, but like many she cultivated him as an unusual acquaintance and rebuffed his advances. Greta became friends with Pat Doherty, and she also fell in love with Robin Thynne and was a follower of Rudolf Steiner. Many of the people who became involved with Crowley at this point had occult or esoteric interests outside the thelemic fold. Many felt that they could learn something from the Beast, but they also felt it was a good idea to keep a certain distance from him.
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ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, England declared war on Germany. Much has been written about Crowley’s involvement in intelligence work during World War II.23 It is difficult to determine how much is true, how much is speculation, and how much is a good story. The standard report is that Tom Driberg, an MI5 spy who would turn Russian double agent, introduced Crowley to the pulp novelist Dennis Wheatley. Wheatley is practically unknown in America but in the UK he was a bestselling author of sensational thrillers, and his most famous work, The Devil Rides Out (1934), features a magician based on Crowley. Wheatley was friends with Maxwell Knight, a high-ranking British Intelligence officer; Knight is said to have been Driberg’s chief. Knight was fascinated with the occult but also had a professional interest in keeping an eye on various occult societies, and on Crowley in particular; he seems to have been an eccentric character himself, sharing his Pimlico flat with a baboon and a tame bear, which he took for walks along the King’s Road.24 It’s been said that Wheatley introduced Crowley to Knight, who considered using him as an operative, but there are doubts about this.25 Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, also worked in British Intelligence. He had an idea to use Crowley as a disinformation agent in order to capture one of the Nazi high command. The plan was to smuggle Crowley into Germany, where he would feed Rudolf Hess—one of the few top-ranking Nazis with a real interest in the occult—occult misinformation, and suggest that there were people in Britain ready to overthrow Churchill and make peace with Germany. Hess—ironically a follower of Rudolf Steiner, who was on the “hit list” of the early Nazi groups—was himself eager to broker a peace, but his sudden flight to Britain in May 1941 put an end to this plan (some accounts say that the plan worked and Hess’s flight was the result). Fleming then proposed that Crowley interrogate Hess in prison. Knight is said to have agreed but Fleming’s immediate superior rejected the idea. Fleming is supposed to have based Le Chiffre, the villain in Casino Royale (1953), the first James Bond novel, on Crowley, while “M,” Bond’s superior, is based on Knight.
Crowley is also said to have taken part in “occult warfare,” supposedly performing ceremonies in Ashdown Forest, with Winston Churchill no less, burning Nazi effigies to keep England safe from invasion, but this is surely legend. If true, however, he was not alone; during the Battle of Britain, Dion Fortune, probably the most important magician in England after Crowley, conducted rituals at the Bayswater headquarters of her Fraternity of Light—a late Golden Dawn offshoot—aimed at repelling the Luftwaffe.26 Crowley’s patriotism took center stage during the war years. He composed a rousing poem, “England, Stand Fast!” and liked to pose as Churchill, wrapped in a thick scarf, puffing on an enormous cigar.27 Crowley even claimed to have invented the “V for Victory” sign. Crowley had used the V in his occult work and intended to use it as the symbol for his proposed “Union of Men,” a magical association that would defend Britain. Crowley’s Union did not come together and the use of the V sign in World War II most likely originated with the former Belgian Minister of Justice and BBC broadcaster Victor Auguste de Laveleye, who the official BBC account credits with first using the “V for Victory” idea in January 1941.28 Crowley claimed that he passed the idea on to “a bloke” at the BBC before this and also to Churchill through his contacts at MI5, but there is no evidence of this.29 Crowley, however, had a penchant to claim credit for many things; he even suggested that Hitler got the idea for the swastika from him. If so, the Führer was not very grateful. During the Blitz, William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, like Crowley a pro-German English propagandist, suggested in a radio broadcast that rather than hold church services in Westminster Abbey in order to receive divine protection, Crowley should perform a Black Mass.
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CROWLEY’S LAST MAJOR WORK was The Book of Thoth (1944), his essay on the tarot. Crowley’s artist collaborator on this project was Lady Frieda Harris, a friend of Greta Sequeira’s and the wife of the Liberal politician Percy Harris. Crowley was introduced to Lady Harris in 1937 by the writer Clifford Bax, after he had asked Bax if he knew an artist who could put his ideas on canvas. Harris, an eccentric social butterfly, was—like Robin Thynne, Pat Doherty, and Greta Sequeira—a follower of Rudolf Steiner. She took lessons in Steiner’s “projective geometry” from Olive Whicher and George Adams, authors of the classic The Plant Between Sun and Earth (1952), and incorporated Steiner’s ideas into her work.30
Frieda was only two years younger than Crowley and so did not become his lover. But she was interested in the occult and looked to him as a teacher; she also provided him with a stipend during their collaboration, although at one point Crowley got into a legal dispute with her—it had become something of a habit with him. Crowley worked her hard, and many of the paintings had to be done several times to receive his approval; the entire project took some seven years. For thelemites it is the last word on the tarot, but many non-Crowleyites find it too powerful, or too full of Crowley’s predilections. As with everything else from his hand, it is full of thelemic ideas. Crowley includes passages from The Vision and the Voice and The Book of the Law in his text and reverses the order of some cards in order to meet the requirements of the new aeon. This liberty, Crowley argues, is sanctioned by the Secret Chiefs. According to him, they wish to “put forward certain particular aspects of the Universe; to establish certain doctrines; to declare certain modes of working, proper to the existing political situations.”31 Crowley, being “charged with the guardianship of the human race,” has the authority to “modify” the pack when he deems appropriate.32
Crowley’s central belief, that the tarot originated in Egypt and that it is based on Kabbalah’s Tree of Life—an idea originating in Paris with Court de Gébelin in 1781—is rejected by most modern historians.33 But this hardly matters; whatever the real origin of the tarot, Crowley’s Thoth deck exerts an unmistakable power. And Crowley’s text—in equal parts lucid, convoluted, and turgid—has an equally mesmeric force. At times it reminds me of Jung’s early work Symbols of Transformation (1912), the book that ended his friendship with Freud. Both works have a tendency to lose themselves in their wealth of illustrations and allusions, until the reader has forgotten what set off a particular spiral of interpretation. But this may be unimportant; one is irresistibly carried along by the flow of Crowley’s occult erudition. The Fool, for example, takes us from the formula of Tetragrammaton to the Green Man, to the Holy Ghost, to Percivale, to the Egyptian god Set, to Hoor-Pa-Kraat, and so on to Baphomet. It is at times a striking but also baffling exposition. The idea is to learn how to see the world as Crowley does. Every idea, every symbol, he tells us, contains its contradictory meaning. “One must,” he says, “keep in mind the bivalence of every symbol. Insistence upon either one or the other of the contradictory attributes . . . is simply a mark of spiritual incapacity.”34 We are, of course, in a kind of dream world, where the strictures of logic do not apply.
Crowley’s work on the tarot kept him going through the Blitz. Just before the bombs fell he moved to Richmond, a leafy suburb of London. Here he enjoyed the company of Charles Cammell; like Israel Regardie, Cammell was appalled by Symonds’s book and wrote his own biography of Crowley in reply. Cammell did not think much of thelema or magick—as noted, he threw his copy of The Book of the Law into the fire—but he appreciated Crowley as a poet and man of the world. He felt that while thelema looked good on paper, “it loses significance in the limelight of the philosopher’s application thereof to his own life.”35 Cammell also believed that Crowley’s troubles started because he broke his Abramelin oath to use his powers only for good, and he made the interesting observation that John Dee had received a similar message from a “spiritual creature” as Crowley had from Aiwass: “Do that which most pleaseth you.”36
Cammell had met Crowley in 1936 and won his friendship by surviving one of Crowley’s fiery curries. Like Gurdjieff and Jung, Crowley was a good cook; the Warburg collection even includes some of his recipes. Crowley enjoyed feeding guests blazing dishes and watching them sweat. When Cammell washed down a pyrotechnical repast with hefty swallows of vodka and then asked for more, the Beast was undone. In Richmond Crowley lived on Petersham Road, near the Thames, and Cammell introduced him to Ralph Shirley, the editor of The Occult Review, and Montague Summers, the popular writer on witchcraft. Summers had followed Crowley’s career, collecting press cuttings and magazine articles about him; Crowley, he thought, was “one of the few original and really interesting men of our age.”37 Cammell says that Crowley was living with a black woman on Petersham Road, and this may be one reason why he had to leave. Cammell found him a new flat on the Green, in the center of town, close to Cammell’s own flat. Crowley’s sex life was winding down. Alice Upham was Crowley’s last recorded lover; as with the other women in his life, their relationship was rocky. He had other lovers, too, but the long orgy was drawing to an end. On June 18, 1941, for the first time Crowley recorded that he failed to raise an erection. His last recorded opus was an act of cunnilingus with Alice at a flat in Hanover Square in October that year. He was sixty-six.
Crowley enjoyed the bombings. Cammell records that one evening a German bomber hit by antiaircraft fire came crashing down. Cammell rushed out of his door and so did Crowley, waving his hands and shouting “Hooray!”38 But soon the Blitz proved too much and Crowley left London for Torquay in Devon—Cammell paid his fare—where apparently he developed a reputation for propositioning the local ladies. But his health suffered and at one point Lady Harris found him half-dead from pneumonia; someone had even made arrangements for a coffin. Lady Harris found a doctor and nursed him back to health.39 Another time when Crowley was again near death, Cammell rushed to his bedside. Cammell and Crowley’s nurse both insist that Crowley had died, and the doctor asked Cammell to make the necessary arrangements. But the next day Crowley had revived; the Devil, the nurse said, had called him back from the dead.40 (For what it’s worth, Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, and Jung suffered similar resurrections.) While in Torquay, Crowley investigated Barton Cross, near Plymouth, as a potential site for a new abbey, but like many of these projects, it didn’t materialize. Crowley eventually broke with Cammell over money. Crowley asked Cammell’s wife to purchase some fabric for him; when she asked to be reimbursed, he refused, as usual making up some excuse. “Money,” Cammell notes, “never meant anything to him,” and “when challenged, he became defiant.”41 Cammell then joined the ranks of people who truly liked Crowley, but who the Beast invariably drove away.
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WHEN THE BLITZ was over Crowley returned to London, where he moved from room to room. Lodgings in the bombed-out capital were scarce, but at one point Crowley helped the heiress Nancy Cunard find a flat. Later her landlord named a room after Crowley and used it to hold séances. In June 1941, an exhibition of Lady Harris’s tarot paintings was scheduled for an Oxford gallery, but it was cancelled because of Crowley’s connection. Another exhibition was arranged, but Harris felt it politic not to mention Crowley in the brochure. Understandably, Crowley was miffed, but with his reputation, it was difficult securing backers for a show. Harris also disapproved of his pamphlet Liber Oz, written in New York during World War I and now brought out as a broadside. It states his political stance with strident brevity, and its libertarian ideas are not far removed from those of Ayn Rand. Crowley, in fact, was a fan of Rand’s; in his last days he spoke highly of The Fountainhead, remarking that his American friends recognized him in the protagonist, Howard Roark.42 “Man has the right to live by his own law,” Crowley declares. He has the right to work, play, rest, die, and love as he will, and he has the right “to kill those who would thwart these rights.”43 The essence of these “rights of man” is the same as C
rowley’s earliest desire to “let me go my own way,” the adolescent need to “do what I want to do” without interference.44 Like the oft-quoted line from his poem “Hymn to Lucifer”—“The Key of Joy is Disobedience”—Crowley’s “rights of man” remind us that Crowley never grew up.45 This is one of the truly remarkable things about him. Crowley swallowed enough experience to fill a dozen lives yet he emerges from it all exactly as he began. He remains a colossal example of arrested development.
At this time Crowley was known to wander around Fitzrovia, reeking of ether, happy to relate his exploits for a drink. On one occasion in early 1942 he frightened the poet Dylan Thomas with a demonstration of mind reading. At the French House—a famous watering hole—he handed Thomas some paper, asked him to draw something, and then left. Shortly after Crowley presented Thomas with an exact copy of his handiwork. Thomas, a Welshman, knew second sight when he saw it and ran from the place. A young Peter Brook, later a prestigious filmmaker and stage director, saw a copy of Magick in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road and was intrigued enough to write to its author. Brook met Crowley at his flat in Hamilton House, Piccadilly, where he found him “elderly, green-tweeded and courteous.” Brook later persuaded Crowley to hide in his bedroom in Oxford; during the party that followed he manifested the aged magician to his fellow undergraduates’ delight. In 1944 Brook directed a production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus; Crowley was his “occult advisor.”46 Although slowing down, Crowley remained active: he wrote a poem for the French Resistance, made wax recordings of readings of the “Hymn to Pan” and the first two calls of the Enochian aethyrs—his voice is rather high and sibilant—and even thought about composing a new national anthem for America.