by Gary Lachman
In the winter of 1943, Crowley set down at 93 Jermyn Street, Mayfair, an apt address. He liked his landlady, but she soon troubled him about things like rent. Most of Crowley’s income came from America, either from Karl Germer or from the O.T.O. branch in Pasadena, California. In the late 1930s, W. T. Smith, an initiate of Frater Achad’s Vancouver lodge, settled in the Golden State and started his own group, called Agape Lodge, in Hollywood. Jane Wolfe, who had returned to America, helped Smith. In 1943 Grady McMurtry, a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant in the U.S. Army and initiate of the Agape Lodge, was stationed in England and visited Crowley often. McMurtry, like Crowley, played chess—the game was one of Crowley’s last pleasures—and over one match Crowley initiated McMurtry into the IX0 of the O.T.O., giving him, as mentioned earlier, the name Hymenaeus Alpha. (It was during a visit from McMurtry that Crowley bellowed “To the lions with them” at some Christmas carolers.) McMurtry contributed to The Book of Thoth’s publication; it appeared in 1944 in two hundred signed and numbered copies. They are now a rare collector’s item.
Crowley liked McMurtry and, ever in search of a magical heir—and concerned about the state of the O.T.O. after his and Germer’s deaths—Crowley gave McMurtry the rank of Sovereign Grand Inspector of the O.T.O. Crowley later authorized McMurtry to take control of the O.T.O. in the event of an emergency and declared him head of the society in the United States after Germer died. As usually happens with occult societies, following Germer’s death, a leadership battle for the O.T.O. ensued, and the controversy continued for some time.
Crowley by this time was taking a potent medley of drugs: between four and six grains of heroin a day—he soon worked his way up to ten—as well as Veronal, ethyl oxide, cocaine, and other pharmaceuticals. His intake was so great that at one point he was visited by the police because of his many prescriptions. His health was clearly fading. He had lost much weight; it is remarkable to see photographs of his wizened, gnarled figure and recall the bloated hedonist of yesterday. From the gourmand famous for his steaks and devilish curries Crowley was reduced to a meager diet of biscuits, boiled eggs, milk, and heroin, along with alcohol. Crowley’s drink intake remained considerable. One story—possibly apocryphal—tells of his hiding gin bottles in a friend’s toilet cistern during a two-week visit. He accompanied her to town each day while she shopped and surreptitiously charged a bottle to her account; he later stashed the empty in the cistern. After he left, someone remarked that the toilet was faulty and on inspecting it, fourteen empties were found.
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IN APRIL 1944, Crowley relocated to the Bell Inn at Aston Clinton, Buckinghamshire, leaving London for good. It was pleasant enough and he liked the food, but Crowley ultimately found the place boring. There was nothing to do and no one to talk to. He had visitors—Alice Upham, Nancy Cunard, McMurtry, who thought he was “almost at the end of the road”—but most of his days he was alone. His only distraction was work. Crowley had started corresponding with a student, Anne Macky, explaining his occult philosophy. He suggested other students join in and the correspondence grew into a kind of fireside introduction to the thelemic way of life. He originally entitled this Aleister Explains Everything but it has come down to us as Magick Without Tears, first published by Germer in 1954. Depending on your tastes it is either an unbuttoned entry into Crowley’s thought or a garrulous recycling of his earlier work. Colin Wilson suggests it is the best introduction to Crowley’s ideas. It displays Crowley’s “probing intellectual curiosity,” but, oddly, also one of his drawbacks, his incorrigible flippancy, which undermines his stature as a serious thinker.47
Crowley’s landlady at the Bell Inn didn’t care for him. He was a “phony” and “nuisance” who scared his nurse by asking her to sharpen a hatchet and who stole food from the kitchen; the image of a wraithlike Crowley in his green plus fours, silver buckles, mandarin beard, and Tibetan bangles creeping out of the larder with the sugar ration is, we must admit, charming (Crowley generally took six spoons of sugar with his tea and was very fond of sweets). She also complained that his room stank. Crowley asked friends to find another location and Louis Wilkinson passed the request on to his son. Oliver Wilkinson discovered that a fellow actor in a repertory theater did, in fact, run an “intellectual guest house” in Hastings. That a man who, as a boy, had been determined to kill Crowley because of the way he treated his mother should now find him a place to live says something about Crowley’s peculiar charisma; Wilkinson’s account is admirably balanced and even supplies examples of Crowley’s infrequent generosity.48 Most landlords considered the Beast a liability, but Vernon and Ellen Symonds, who ran the guesthouse, were delighted at having Crowley stay. In February 1945 Crowley moved into the aptly named Netherwood, on the Ridge, Hastings, and here he would die.
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NETHERWOOD—a “large, somber, 19th-century mansion”—was not the usual guesthouse.49 Its owners had bohemian backgrounds, and their idea was to provide a pleasant atmosphere in which artists, writers, and other creative individuals could enjoy a relaxing weekend with good food, drink, and conversation. Among other guests were the philosopher C.E.M. Joad and the historian of science and author of The Ascent of Man (1973), Jacob Bronowski, both of whom were well known through the BBC radio show The Brains Trust.
As usual, Crowley knew how to make an entrance. A telegram preceding his arrival announced that “a consignment of frozen meat” was on its way. Meat was subject to war rationing, and the local postman sent a copy of the telegram to the Food Ministry, who sent people to inspect the shipment, due on February 1, 1945. When an ambulance turned up that day and the Beast appeared with fifty or so parcels of books, it was clear he was the “frozen meat.”50 Crowley duly checked into room number 13. He looked old and frail, and his landlords thought him more vulnerable than menacing. One of the first things he did was top up his heroin supply—several doctors prescribed it for him—and one of his first visitors was Kenneth Grant. Grant, who was to become an influential occultist in his own right, came upon Crowley’s Magick in a bookshop in 1939 when he was fifteen.51 He was already passionate about the occult, and at eighteen he volunteered for the army, hoping to be sent to India, where he intended to find a guru. Grant’s grasp on reality was somewhat romantic; he never reached the subcontinent and left the service for obscure reasons in 1944. Grant tried to contact Crowley through his publishers; failing that, he asked Michael Houghton of the Atlantis Bookshop to help. Houghton refused, because, he said, Grant was “mentally unstable,” but Grant believed Houghton wanted to recruit him for his own magical society.52 Most likely Houghton was just miffed at Crowley. Crowley considered Houghton “the meanest thief alive” and made anti-Semitic remarks about him.53
Grant eventually met Crowley and, as had Israel Regardie, became his unpaid factotum. By spring 1945, Grant moved into a cottage on the grounds of Netherwood; one of his first missions was to get new needles for Crowley’s daily injections.54 Crowley’s heroin use caused some consternation. Once he left his works at the men’s room of the local chess club (he beat the local champ easily but his reputation precluded his joining); another time he upset McMurtry by excusing himself to take an injection, then squealing like “a stuck pig” from behind the bathroom door.55
Grant learned much from the master. He took lessons in ether-fueled astral traveling and also in how to extract money from relatives, but his performance as a secretary left much to be desired.56 Grant was a dreamy, poetic soul—he wrote some effective occult fiction—and Crowley reprimanded him for his inability to “be content with the simplicity of reality and fact; you have to go off into a pipe dream”—something Grant’s detractors also point out, especially about his claim to having a blood connection to Crowley.57 But Crowley did see Grant as a potential successor, at least in the UK, regarding him as a “trained man to take care of the O.T.O.”58 This would lead to complications. Grant revised and added much to Crowley’s ideas—he was, for example, the first to link Crowley’s magick wi
th the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, in his influential book The Magical Revival (1972)—and this earned him the enmity of Karl Germer, who excommunicated him.59 After Germer’s death, Grant declared himself O.H.O., but was challenged by Grady McMurtry, who eventually secured the title. Grant went on to form his own offshoot, the Typhonian Order. He died in 2011.
Grant’s apprenticeship with the Beast was short-lived; after only a few months, his parents compelled him to leave Crowley. They wished him to find more secure employment, but Crowley thought he was “giving up his real future.” Most likely Grant himself found Crowley’s demands endless, and no doubt wanted to pursue his own path.60
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SOME OF CROWLEY’S LIFE at Netherwood sounds idyllic. After breakfast the Beast walked in the garden in his scarlet blazer and purple slippers and his landlord’s niece and nephew hid in the bushes and watched as he made his adoration to the sun. He spent much time in his room. He ate dinner there, would sleep during the day then stay up reading and writing; his correspondence was voluminous. He scared the housekeeper when he told her he had seen her flying on a broomstick; she did not care for him and thought the sooner he died, the better. Another housekeeper complained that he used all the hot water. At a children’s birthday party he appeared in turban and sash with a jeweled dagger and many rings; but he performed no tricks and the kids were not impressed.
His followers in America sent him supplies, delicacies unavailable in Britain, but not all was well in California. In 1939 Jack Whiteside Parsons, a founder of the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory, joined the Agape Lodge. Soon Parsons was corresponding with the Beast, addressing him as “Most Beloved Father” and signing his letters “Thy son, John.” Jack encouraged his wife, Helen, to do what she wilt; she did, and turned her affections toward W. T. Smith. Parsons was not troubled; he found a willing replacement in Helen’s sister Betty. When Parsons informed Crowley of this development, the Beast was concerned that Smith was turning the O.T.O. into just another “love cult,” and he arranged for Smith to abdicate his leadership in favor of Parsons. Parsons, who showed keen magical promise, took control and moved the lodge’s Hollywood temple to his mansion on South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena. Things went well until the arrival of L. Ron Hubbard, then a pulp science-fiction writer on his way to inventing Dianetics and the more successful Scientology. Hubbard claimed that Naval Intelligence had sent him to Pasadena to break up a dangerous black magic ring. Parsons, after all, was a real-life rocket scientist—there is in fact a crater on the moon named after him; appropriately it is on the dark side—but Hubbard had more likely heard about the “free love” parties given at Parsons’ mansion and thought to check them out. Parsons was a sci-fi fan—he knew the writer Robert Heinlein—and word of his Pasadena occult house parties no doubt got around at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society meetings that he attended.61
One of the first things Hubbard did was to attract and secure Betty’s attentions. Parsons, of course, was beyond jealousy, but he was coming under Hubbard’s spell, too. He told Crowley that Hubbard was “the most thelemic person I have ever met”; Hubbard had much natural magical ability and was, Parsons believed, in contact with his Holy Guardian Angel.62 Parsons did not let his being cuckolded interfere with the supreme ritual he had in mind, and in which he asked Hubbard to participate. Like Crowley, Parsons wanted to create a magical child, and to do so he needed his own Scarlet Woman. Parsons used the O.T.O. VIII0 method of magical masturbation—perhaps making a virtue of necessity—and with Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto hammering in the background, threw himself into a trance, while Hubbard related events on the Astral Plane.63 After many inconclusive attempts, Parsons succeeded. Returning with Hubbard from the Mojave Desert, Parsons discovered that his Scarlet Woman had turned up, in the form of Marjorie Cameron, who was later to star in Kenneth Anger’s thelemic masterpiece, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954).64
Marjorie had the red hair, green eyes, and intelligence Parsons was looking for, but it was her imperious manner that sold him; Parsons, like Crowley, enjoyed being dominated. His relationship with Hubbard suggests this; around the time Marjorie showed up, Parsons had given a considerable sum to Hubbard and Betty, as an investment in a business deal. Hubbard and Betty made off with the money, which Parsons never saw again.65 It’s been said that Hubbard learned everything he knew from Crowley, and there is reason to believe this is true.
When Parsons told Crowley about Marjorie, the Beast was pleased. He had, in fact, been working to bring about this very meeting; Crowley told Parsons that “for some little time past I have been endeavoring to intervene personally on your behalf.”66 With Marjorie on board, what Parsons called the Babalon Working began in earnest. After three days of IX0 exertions—often on a sheet smeared with menstrual blood and with Hubbard scrying in the background—Parsons believed they had achieved success. Parsons wrote Crowley a wild, incoherent letter, speaking of the “most important, devastating experience” of his life. The Beast wasn’t impressed. He wrote that he hadn’t “the slightest idea” what Parsons could mean, and complained to Germer that Parsons, or Hubbard, or “somebody is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.”67 And when Crowley learned of Hubbard’s swindle, he told Germer that Hubbard was clearly playing a confidence trick, and that Parsons was a weak fool, losing both his money and his girl.68 Parsons eventually broke with Hubbard, Betty, Crowley, and the O.T.O.; in his last letters he calls Crowley “Dear Aleister,” a strange echo of Leah Hirsig’s epistolary detachment. Parsons continued his own magick, changed his name to Belarion Armiluss Al Dajjal Antichrist, and increasingly slipped into dissociative states. On June 17, 1952, he blew himself up in what was apparently an accident in his chemical laboratory.
Crowley suffered all the complaints of old age—diarrhea, constipation, insomnia, and general decrepitude—and on one occasion he congratulated himself on being able to get to his barber, bookshop, and printer all by bus and all in one day; he also recorded the embarrassment of needing to urinate but not getting home in time.69 But his main concern was seeing his unpublished work to print; he had eight books in mind and wanted at least two per year to appear. He would be disappointed. Olla: An Anthology of Sixty Years of Song (1946) was the last of his books published in his lifetime. It sported a cover portrait by Frieda Harris and a frontispiece by his old friend the artist Augustus John; Harris’s portrait shows Crowley as a kind of Oriental sage, but John’s has a look of surprise, even dismay. Olla is Crowley’s testament to poetry and is not for all tastes. Crowley himself had no patience with modern poetry; T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922)—which, ironically, incorporates much occult erudition—“nauseated” him.70 (Some of Crowley’s more recent biographers have tried to relaunch him as a modernist, but there is no evidence for that.) Of other works that did not see print until after his death, Liber Aleph: The Book of Wisdom and Folly was finally published in 1961. Frieda Harris relates that Crowley kept £500 of O.T.O. donations under his bed, reserved solely for publishing his work; he wouldn’t touch it, and finally did only after Harris convinced him that it was all right to do so.71
Crowley enjoyed the cinema; at one point he wanted to see The Wizard of Oz but was disappointed when told it was a children’s story. He told a correspondent that it had nothing to do with his Liber Oz but that he wouldn’t change the title of his book “because some filthy Jew in Hollywood chose to pinch the word.”72 (Apparently he was unaware of the success of L. Frank Baum, a theosophist.) But his main source of diversion was his guests. Many people came to see the Beast in his last lair; for a full account the reader should look to Netherwood: The Last Resort of Aleister Crowley, which recounts Crowley’s last days in detail. On December 16, 1945, David Curwen, a furrier and alchemist, was the last person Crowley initiated into the IX0 O.T.O.; Louis Wilkinson, who was initiated himself only the day before, attended. Curwen bought the two-year subscription that Crowley demanded, but was disa
ppointed; he received no new knowledge or introductions to other members. He eventually broke with Crowley; he felt he had been taken in, but was also unhappy that Jews couldn’t be full O.T.O. members.73 Curwen later drifted toward Kenneth Grant and became involved with Grant’s own occult operations.
Crowley’s first visitor of 1946 was the Cambridge scholar E. M. Butler, who arrived on New Year’s Day. She was researching her book The Myth of the Magus (1948). Butler’s impressions were not positive. She found Crowley “a seedy figure in light tweed knickerbockers” whose “grating voice” intoned the Law. Crowley was “disintegrating,” “surrounded by an aura of physical corruption.” He was “more repulsive” than she had expected, and his voice—pedantic, pretentious, fretful, scratchy—was the worst thing about him.74 She thought thelema “insane,” and Crowley’s room squalid and airless, like something out of Kafka. The only danger she felt was that of “prolonged boredom mixed with repugnance and pity.” But Crowley was ecstatic that a scholar had come to speak to him; Butler had spent a long day and had asked many questions and he had answered at length. Butler, he recorded, spoke to him with “sympathy, consideration and understanding”; her visit was a “dream of joy.” “If all days could be like this!”75 In the end, Butler merely name-checks Crowley in her book.
Another scholar to visit Crowley was Richard Ellmann, who was writing a book about Yeats; he was interested in speaking with Crowley about his magical battle with his rival poet. Ellmann’s Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948) remains a classic biography of Crowley’s old nemesis. The poet and translator Michael Hamburger visited Crowley and was impressed by his “sheer physical stamina,” amazed that he was not only alive but “active and vigorous.”76 James Laver, curator at the Victorian and Albert Museum, and author of a book on Nostradamus, visited Crowley; he enjoyed the brandy that the Beast offered and noticed flecks of blood on his shirtsleeves. Crowley told Laver that “magic is something we do to ourselves,” explaining, however, that it is “more convenient to assume the objective existence of an Angel who gives us new knowledge than to allege that our invocation has awakened a supernatural power in ourselves,” a remark that contradicts what he always claimed was his key discovery, the reality of “discarnate intelligence.”77 Frederic Mellinger, a German actor who had emigrated to America and returned to postwar Germany, also visited Crowley; he had joined W. T. Smith’s Agape Lodge in 1940. He came bearing gifts and helped the Beast tidy his room.78