Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  On May 20, 1946, the day Crowley completed his last anthology of verse, called Olla, he received a letter about Jack Parsons sent by Louis Culling, member of the Pasadena church, to Karl Germer. Crowley called it an “appalling letter” in his diary. Parsons, Crowley was told, had gone on his own magical retirement in March in pursuit of something he called the “Babalon Working” with new chum and “seer” L. Ron Hubbard. The aim was to incarnate an astral deity, and not just any deity, Babalon herself, apparently into a lady by the name of artist Marjorie Cameron, a striking redhead who had turned up at the house immediately after Jack and Ron’s desert ceremony. Jack saw Marjorie as the fit receptacle in which Babalon might incarnate herself. The idea of course was central to Crowley’s fictional Simon Iff story Moonchild. It seemed to Crowley the two men were confusing magical fact with magical fiction, or was it science fiction? For, of course, Crowley’s rubric for the original Equinox series was “The Method of Science. The Aim of Religion”: a scientific religion and religious science. Crowley was warned that Jack’s sanity was in jeopardy. Crowley declared to Germer he became “fairly frantic” when considering “the idiocy of these goats.” Did it strike him that his own gambit with Smith might have encouraged such notions of gods mysteriously incarnating in California? This was the year of the atom bomb after all. Anything was possible. And still Crowley couldn’t get his carnal being to California, despite assistance from a friend in the S.I.S. in London. Was Hoover blocking procedures? If he was, he was doing a disservice to Parsons’s sanity.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t only Jack’s sanity that was at stake. Sara Northrup somehow got hold of a large chunk of Jack’s considerable savings he had invested in a buy-and-sell yacht business with Hubbard (Crowley was convinced the naive Parsons was being swindled), and Sara went off with Hubbard, becoming his wife until acrimonious divorce. Hubbard’s take on all this was that his contact with the Church of Thelema was undertaken for national security purposes as the Lodge, and Jack’s part in it, were under government suspicion, his actions thereby destroying a center of black magic: a no more than plausible narrative in the circum-stances. Opinion on whether Hubbard took more from the experience than Jack’s girlfriend is divided.

  Scholar of Western Esotericism Dorthe Refslund Christensen has written, “In the mid-forties, Hubbard was also very briefly in contact with Jack Parsons, the head of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) in Pasadena. However, trivialities apart, no specific influence from Crowley can be traced in Hubbard’s later teachings in terms of Scientology.”16

  On the other hand, scholar Hugh Urban in his paper “The Occult Roots of Scientology? L. Ron Hubbard, Aleister Crowley, and the Origins of a Controversial New Religion” has argued:

  In sum, it seems clear that Hubbard had a direct involvement in Parsons’s O.T.O. rituals and that there is a significant amount of Crowley’s influence in the early Scientology beliefs and practices of the 1950s. Not only did Hubbard and Crowley share a fundamental belief in the unlimited potential of the individual self, but they also used common techniques of exteriorization of the spirit from the physical body, and they ultimately shared a common goal of realizing the infinite, godlike power of the individual self. If we really look closely at the historical connections and the textual evidence, Crowley’s ideal of the individual will and the unlimited power of the magus does not seem very different from Hubbard’s goal of self-determinism and the realization of the infinite power of the thetan.17

  Thetan is a term coined by Hubbard to describe that aspect of the human being that is not conditioned by time, space, mass, or any material energy or dimension: the spiritual being, consistent with the gnostic concept of the pneuma or transmundane “spirit.”

  Urban does qualify his analysis by asserting that while one can theoretically posit a number of influences and creative stimuli of Crowley’s work on Hubbard’s developing thought, his central argument “is that Crowley’s work does indeed represent one important influence in Hubbard’s complex system—but only one influence, which was both mediated through Hubbard’s own creative religious imagination and combined with a vast array of other religious, scientific, and literary influences.”18

  Urban quotes from Hubbard’s own writings to show that Hubbard, regardless of the role Parsons attributed to Hubbard in the Babalon Workings, showed in one instance respect for Crowley’s works, referring to their author as his “very good friend.” The implication may be argued that Hubbard considered himself taking some of the ideas Crowley brought forth from ancient tradition in his generation a stage further. After all, Crowley had died in 1947; Hubbard delivered his lecture mentioning Crowley in December 1952. As Urban puts it, “Hubbard makes it clear in this discussion that he sees a direct continuity between Crowley’s magical ritual and the techniques of Scientology. Both are described here as practical techniques involving a specific “cycle of action” intended to produce a desired effect.

  The magical cults of the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries in the Middle East were fascinating. The only modern work that has any-thing to do with them is a trifle wild in spots, but is a fascinating work in itself, and that’s the work of Aleister Crowley—the late Aleister Crowley—my very good friend. And he did himself a splendid piece of aesthetics built around those magical cults. It’s very interesting reading to get a hold of a copy of a book—quite rare, but it can be obtained. The Master Therion. T-h-e-r-i-o-n . . . He signs himself “The Beast.”

  “The Mark of the Beast, 666.” Very, very something or other.

  . . . Crowley exhumed a lot of the data from these old magic cults. And he, as a matter of fact, handles cause and effect quite a bit. Cause and effect is handled according to a ritual. . . . And that ritual is what you do in order to accomplish this or how you have to go through and how many motions you have to make to come into the ownership of that . . . each ritual is a cycle of some sort or other . . .19

  Now, a magician—getting back to cause and effect and Aleister’s work—a magician postulates what his goal will be before he starts to accomplish what he’s doing. . . . And the magician was very ritualistic and he would very carefully postulate what effect he was trying to achieve before he would be cause for that effect.20

  Urban quotes from a work attributed to Hubbard called “Affirmations” that Urban regards as involving some kind of channeled contact with a feminine spiritual guide in Hubbard’s life called “your Guardian,” showing kinship with Crowley’s essential idea of the Holy Guardian Angel. Of course it can be argued that since both Crowley’s system and Hubbard’s developed system seem deeply rooted in gnostic tradition whence the conception of the spiritual bride beyond time and space derives, with both systems presented in terms of scientific method, it is inevitable that one should be able to locate parallels of philosophic substance, if not of nomenclature.*203

  Had Crowley been able to get to the United States of America in time, of course, history may have turned out very differently.

  In 1946, with Sara off with L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Parsons married military veteran and aspiring artist Marjorie Cameron (1922–1995), whose “Louise Brooks turned psychedelic” visage would appear alongside Anaïs Nin in Kenneth Anger’s remarkable film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954).

  Parsons decided to be rid of 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue. The last time Smith saw the house was January 12, 1947, when he went to look at the old place and pick up anything Parsons may have left of significance. Sadly, he found discarded accoutrements he had hand fashioned for the temple of the New Aeon. Soon after, the house was demolished.

  “The sun went out. I heard at noon to day Crowley died.”22 So wrote Wilfred Smith in his diary on December 14, a fortnight after Aleister Crowley died of bronchitis and heart failure in Hastings, England. Smith was heartsick. He wished he could have done more to advance Thelema in his life. He was not optimistic about the future, knowing Karl Germer had been named as his successor by Crowley in his will. In this he w
as right. Germer was in no state of mind to think positively or strategically about the O.T.O.’s future.

  The Beast did eventually come back to America. Crowley’s executors dispatched Crowley’s ashes to Germer’s care. He buried them near a tree in his house in the Hamptons, New Jersey. When Karl and wife, Sascha, decided to move to California and be closer to the surviving band of faithful Thelemites, Germer tried to find the ashes but could not. Many years before, Crowley had written:

  Bury me in a nameless grave,

  I came from God, the world to save,

  I brought them wisdom from above:

  Worship, and Liberty, and Love.

  They slew me for I did disparage therefore,

  Religion, law, and marriage.

  So be my grave without a name,

  That earth may swallow up my shame!

  It was American soil that swallowed Crowley’s “shame.”

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE BEAST IN AMERICA?

  First, the Antichrist. In September 1948, poor Jack was stripped of his security clearance, and a career that would lead posthumously to his name being given to a crater on the moon, crashed. He had to take menial jobs and lost most of his friends. At Halloween, in search of supernatural guidance, Parsons returned to the pursuit of “Our Lady Babalon.” In a vision, Parsons was granted a name, should he, that is, survive crossing the Abyss: BELARION ARMILUSS AL DAJJAL, ANTICHRIST. On December 28, 1948, Parsons took the Oath of a Master of the Temple, equivalent in his own mind to the “Oath of Antichrist” in the presence of the one Parsons called “the Unknown God,” Frater 132 (Wilfred T. Smith).

  With Marjorie’s encouragement, Parsons clawed his way back. After a thorough investigation in the midst of McCarthyite anti-communist hysteria, a federal hearing found Parsons innocent of communist subversion; Parsons declared himself an “individualist.” He was picked up by the Hughes Corporation, which recognized his immense scientific, rather than occult, value. Unfortunately, an offer to work in Israel led to precipitous accusations of spying for the Israeli state when he borrowed his classified papers to attach them to a CV he was preparing for the Israelis. His contact was in fact with the American-based Technion Society that provided support for technical innovation in Israel. Cleared of accusations of espionage, there was now so much dark innuendo and occult strangeness on his record that in January 1952 he was excluded officially from working on classified projects. A perceived risk of Parsons being careless with documentation was deemed a liability.

  Parsons went back to making explosives and pyrotechnics for the film industry in his own laboratory on South Orange Grove Avenue. On June 17, 1952, while packed and loaded up to move to Baja, Mexico, where Jack had a job at an explosive plant (an interim move preparatory to moving to Israel) and with Marjorie out shopping for groceries, an accident with fulminate of mercury caused an explosion that left Parsons mutilated and dying in the wreckage of the lab. He died soon after. Hearing the news, his mother, Ruth, committed suicide on the spot: a tragic end. At Parsons’s funeral gathered most of the survivors of the Agape Lodge: Smith, Helen Parsons, Jane Wolfe, Ray and Mildred Burlingame, daughter Laylah, Phyllis Seckler and her children, Paul, Lisa, and Stella, Georgia Schneider, Ed Forman, Louis Culling, and Helen’s sister Sara, who had now left Hubbard and become Mrs. Miles Hollister. Helen and Sara became reconciled at the service.

  Fig. 36.3. After the blast at Jack Parson’s Pasadena laboratory, June 17, 1952

  KENNETH ANGER

  In the early 1950s a fresh face appeared on America’s Thelemite canvas. Young filmmaker Kenneth Anger, born in Santa Monica, California, in 1927, traveled in 1955 to what was left of Crowley’s villa at Cefalù, Sicily, in the company of sexologist Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956), famous for his two reports on the sexual life of American males and females (1948, 1953). A film was shot of Anger uncovering some of Crowley’s floor-to-ceiling artwork. A fine photograph appeared of the handsome Anger holding before him the dislodged door to the Abbey of Thelema with the words DO WHAT THOU WILT still visible against the grain. Jenny Nicholson wrote an illustrated article about the visit for Picture Post (November 16, 1955). Kinsey commented on his reaction to the paintings revealed by Anger in terms of his own central interest.

  The amazing thing is that Crowley lived a life that would not normally have been tolerated in the most primitive parts of darkest Africa. He thought he could get away with blatant sex practices and in fact he did get away with them for many years.23

  Kinsey did not live to see the “swinging sixties,” but the sixties certainly saw the influence that Aleister Crowley had on artist of film Kenneth Anger. In a unique body of filmed work, Anger has defied commercial tropes and made movies the way Symbolist and early Surrealist artists painted pictures. The influence of Thelema is sometimes subtle, sometimes quite direct, but the solar-phallic energy that infuses Anger’s often homoerotic work is undeniable, working on a dream level that awakens unconscious imagery and experience. Crowley wrote that poetry was the geyser of the soul, an idea given full visual flourish in a work like Lucifer Rising, a version of which I had the good fortune to see at a special showing in King’s Cross, London, in 1982, where images of volcanic eruption crosscut with a narrative that combines the emergence of Lilith (played by Marianne Faithful), Egyptian pyramids, Isis, and Osiris, the latter played very forcefully by Crowley’s friend Charles Cammell’s son, Donald, also a filmmaker of great distinction. Stèle 666 of the Priest Ankh-f-n-Khonsu so dear to Crowley as inspiring the events around the reception of The Book of the Law has an honored part in the film, and a photo of Crowley is garlanded, while a genuine sense of magick pervades this very beautiful film experience.

  Anger was of great interest to Crowley’s leading British followers when he visited London and showed his films at the ICA cinema. And because it is well known that Anger’s purity of intention and visual panache has influenced American filmmakers both “experimental” and commercial, such as Martin Scorsese, then we must also say that part of the legacy of the Beast in America may be sought in cinema.

  After Parsons’s death, the remainder of the 1950s passed with intermittent rancor between Smith and Germer, as one might expect, while Gerald Yorke in England proceeded to assemble Crowley’s literary remains, while John Symonds used that work for his own purposes and succeeded in damning the Beast’s legacy while at the same time bringing the Beast’s name to a far wider audience than hitherto.

  Germer favored Brazilian student, the very troubled Marcelo Motta (1931–1986), and insisted Crowley had had no time for Smith, that all his involvement with the O.T.O. was futile, but like so many arguments in the extended Thelemite family, nothing was ever quite absolute and forever, though when Germer and Smith finally met in person in June 1956, neither predictably had a good word to say about the other afterward.

  The “Unknown God” died on April 27, 1957, and was cremated at the Grandview Memorial Park in Glendale. Motta’s response to Smith’s death showed what a troubled individual he really was: “Good riddance, and let him make a step forward in the next!”24

  EK-STASIS

  Our word ecstasy comes from two Greek words. Put together they mean to come from a static position, to make a shift, and by extension, to “come out of oneself.” When we see young people who are too introspective for their own good, we might suggest they need to “come out of themselves a bit more.” That is really the very good aspect of the 1960s. Many people came out of themselves, they moved from static positions. The whole thing was about movement, movin’ and groovin’, if you like. Eldridge Cleaver famously opined that the blacks gave the whites back their bodies. There’s some literal truth in that: all that shaking about, far from the disciplines of Western dance—I don’t just mean the jiggling about in discotheques that passed for dancing in the late sixties and seventies, but Fred Astaire, and West Side Story, and Bob Fosse, and the idea of dance as “revival,” something linked to the spirit. Crowley had said of his Rites of Eleusis in 1910
that the rites aimed at inducing ecstasy; he was laughed at, or feared, but he was well ahead of the game. The buttons went very high up in 1910. And of course, come 1965, it was the hemlines that rose as the buttons came undone.

  Crowley seems to have foreseen something of the kind, as we find in an important letter he wrote to Major Grady McMurtry on November 2, 1944. A “legacy” of Jack Parsons, having been introduced to the Pasadena lodge before he joined the army, McMurtry was also a legacy of Crowley’s, intended for future service, as this remarkable letter demonstrates. At the time it was written, Crowley was recuperating from the “buzz-bomb” raids on London at a Buckinghamshire Inn, and Maj. McMurtry was on perilous active service in northern France, shortly before the famous “Battle of the Bulge,” hence the use of the English hunting term blooding about McMurtry’s qualification to be O.T.O. Head or “Caliph” (i.e., successor to the prophet of Thelema), after Germer.

  Frater Saturnus [Germer] is of course the natural Caliph; but there are many details concerning the actual policy or working which would hit his blind spots. In any case, he can only be a stopgap, because of his age; I have to look for his successor. It has been hell; so many have come up with amazing promise, only to go on the rocks. . . . I do not think of you as lying on a grassy hillside with a lot of dear sweet woolly lambs, capering to your flute! On the contrary. Your actual life, or “blooding,” is the sort of initiation which I regard as the first essential for a Caliph. For—say 20 years hence—the Outer Head of the Order must, among other things, have had the experience of war as it is in actual fact today. 1965 e.v. should be a critical period in the development of the Child Horus!25

  As indeed it was! How extraordinarily perceptive of the Beast! And World War II and Korean War veteran Major Grady McMurtry (retd.) might have seized the reins at the moment the psychedelic sixties began. For 1965 was the year the Beatles’ proto-psychedelic Rubber Soul got under the skin of Brian Wilson; the year Mary Quant invented the miniskirt; the year John Lennon and George Harrison first took LSD; the year Jimmy Page was offered Eric Clapton’s job in the Yardbirds; the year of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, and Bringing It All Back Home; the Stones’s 19th Nervous Breakdown; the year the Pink Floyd Sound began; the year Sir Winston Churchill died—need I go on? Surely not. You get the idea.