Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

  Grady didn’t take the reins because a regularly paranoid Karl Germer had tried to keep him down, preventing him from founding new lodges in California. Grady got fed up with what was left of the O.T.O.

  Meanwhile the Aeon of the Crowned and Conquering Child showed itself most forcefully in the musical and artistic ecstasies of the mid- to late-1960s. Paul McCartney visited Timothy d’Arch Smith’s occult bookshop in St. John’s Wood. John Lennon started devouring books on Magick and insisted on Crowley’s being one of the faces of the “people we like” on the epoch-marking Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, an energized, enthusiastic epoch that spawned all kinds of remarkable musical offspring, from Pink Floyd, to Led Zeppelin (starring overt Crowley aficionado Jimmy Page), to early “Heavy Metal,” whose interest in dark, foreboding feelings sprang up in Birmingham (where I was born) with Black Sabbath, featuring John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne, writer of a famous song, “Mr. Crowley,” which is not about his head teacher.

  In 1968, Phyllis Seckler, trained by Jane Wolfe in the old Pasadena Church of Thelema, wrote a letter to Grady, calling on his authority to deal with the confusion and crisis of Crowley’s organizational legacy. The question had become, Will the real O.T.O. stand up? Marcelo Ramos Motta, claiming Germer’s authority, had his group, based in Brazil. In Switzerland, Hermann Josef Metzger had had his handful of members elect him O.T.O. head after Germer’s death. Kenneth Grant, who had been expelled by Germer after Germer had first given him permission to work a Camp in England in the fifties, had his own “O.T.O.” operating in and around Swingin’ London, while versions of Crowley’s work circulated with scant editorial control, or literary respect, generally creating an atmosphere around Crowley’s name very far from Crowley’s true intentions.

  Crowley wrote many times that “Do what thou wilt” did not mean “Do as thou wilt.” He maintained there was no place for “looseness” in Thelemic life. It was, he said, without irony, the “most austere ethical precept ever uttered,” for one has no right but to do one’s will. The true will is the will of “God” in every star. Noninterference in the true will of others is the cornerstone of the system. For the uninitiated it is an impossible ideal; for the initiated, it ain’t easy either! It’s a way of life, a march to a goal: “One Star in Sight” as Crowley’s helpful initiate’s poem puts it.

  Somebody had to seize the reins, and that somebody couldn’t be just anybody. In this respect, we should observe that in the Beast’s correspondence with McMurtry, who spent long evenings with Crowley when the former was stationed near London and Crowley lived in St. James’s (93 Jermyn Street), Crowley used the Latin Fidus Achates for McMurtry. It means trusted armour bearer and faithful friend of Aeneas. That was McMurtry’s classical role.

  Crowley groomed and positioned McMurtry as Germer’s likely successor, giving him unique authority to be used in case of emergency. Germer provoked such an emergency by failing to name his heir before he died in 1962.

  Heeding Phyllis Seckler’s call (Grady and Phyllis would later marry), McMurtry activated his powers in 1969 to revivify the O.T.O. internationally as caliph and acting O.H.O. On McMurtry’s death in 1985, he was succeeded in both offices by William Breeze, or Hymenaeus Beta (McMurtry had taken the name Hymenaeus Alpha, given him by Crowley). Hymenaeus was a god of wedding feasts and song in Greek mythology; also an opponent of Saint Paul at Ephesus.

  One of the first things Grady attempted to do was to find out what was going on in the minds of youth as the seventies kicked in. Grady had been the twenty-five-year-old youngster when Crowley entertained his nonstop talk in his rooms in Jermyn Street, London, 1944. He was now more than fifty and had spent a lot of time delving deeply into Sufi mysticism, or gnosis. There were young people at the time inspired by Sufi texts, for as many “hippies” traveled to Morocco as they did to Kathmandu. Crosby, Stills, and Nash wrote a song, “Marrakesh Express,” about the North African hippy trail. What Grady did not know about, with all his worldwide learning, was what all the fuss was about this drug L.S.D. (lysergic acid diethylamide), first synthesized chemically by Albert Hoffman of the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Corporation in the 1940s and derived from ergot fungus. Grady’s initiation into the 1960s began, in fact, with Crowley toward the end of World War II, but its culmination was spectacular and is best told as William Breeze told it to me in a Manhattan restaurant in 2012.

  On one of his visits to Crowley—probably a later one as Crowley had apparently by then formulated his plan that Grady act as Caliph to his Prophet after his death—the 1960s came up.

  Crowley told Grady that he would know his work was to begin when he saw young people living in tents and dressing in oriental garb.

  When Grady moved back to the Bay Area to investigate the robbery of the O.T.O. Archive from Sascha Germer, he was an instructor at Georgetown University working at the U.S. Department of Labor. Clean cut, black horn-rims, military bearing and speech patterns, crease in the trousers, and shined shoes. When he arrived in the Haight he was an alien—and they had wall hangings and dressed in loose oriental clothing, which took him back to what Crowley had said.

  He had not tried L.S.D. but had heard about it and asked his host, Chuck (one of the Level Press people, with Llee Heflin) if he could take some. He was given a tab, which he took, and sat and waited. Time passed, and he got impatient when nothing happened, so he asked for more, remarking that he was a large man. So they gave him another tab. And left the bag on the table. After more time passed, with nothing happening, he got impatient again and without asking anyone, shook out the content of the bag and swallowed the lot. Grady said the bag had many more L.S.D. tabs plus at least one hit of S.T.P. [streetname for synthetic hallucinogen 2, 5-Dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine] that he didn’t know about. He took all of them. He later recalled eleven tabs total according to one person who heard the story from him [Bill Heidrick].

  One of his hosts came in and noticed that he was on the floor writhing around. No doubt the empty baggie was noticed as well. It seems that Grady was trying without much success to take off his clothes. Whether they helped him change or not, I’m not sure, but it was suggested that they take him down to the Pacific (reportedly the area where Playland used to be) for a walk, “set and setting” and all that, where he could cool out.

  The Pacific is deceptively named—pacific at times but given to sudden freak waves of some size. Grady was walking along the beach, with his friend tagging along nearby, when a huge wave came in and covered him, and the undertow dragging him out to sea. His friend looked for him, walking down the beach, calling his name, with no results, and after some time had passed another big wave came in and deposited Grady on the beach, blue from cold and not breathing. An ambulance was called and he was taken to hospital. He was admitted dead on arrival, taken to the basement morgue and put on an exam slab with his toe tag filled out.

  An unknown amount of time later, he woke up alone in the morgue on the slab—peaking on who knows how many micrograms of acid. If there had been ten tabs and they were Orange Sunshine or similar, then maybe 3500 micrograms—about three times the typical max dose of a very experienced L.S.D. user, the threshold being about 80 micrograms and the typical dose being about 350. Plus he apparently took S.T.P., a rare psychedelic, and one in which the trip lasts for several days.

  But however the experience ended in the hospital—probably he was given thorazine and so on—he suffered terrible after-effects from this, including memory loss, profound personality change, and a complete overnight change in appearance—the hair and beard of course grew to give the Grady we know. He struggled with depression and made at least one suicide attempt in the months following this. His marriage [to Phyllis]—not good to start with—disintegrated. But the Grady who had arrived from Washington, D.C., would have gotten precisely nowhere in rebuilding the O.T.O. It is only because Grady underwent his transformation that he succeeded in reaching and relating to the young people in the new counterculture, the people who made
the O.T.O. renaissance a reality. Grady had had a very powerful ego structure and a strong personality to match—even Crowley would be left exhausted by his company after a few hours, and the few recorded accounts of his early meetings with some of the young people out there were not encouraging—to them he was an old guy with old books but sort of without a clue as to what was going on. That changed, and he became a countercultural icon in his way.

  Aside from the obvious Egyptian Book of the Dead theme of all this, it changed Grady fundamentally. Where before his letters to Yorke were written in clipped, military staccato, businesslike in his way, they changed to rambling missives loaded with countercultural slang and mystical references. Yorke became alarmed and suggested politely that Grady should take it easy with the drug experimentation.

  Crowley’s rather vague prophecy carried quite a sting. But he rose to the occasion, as you British probably still say!

  Fortunately, Grady McMurtry’s experiment did not lead him—as it has a number of abusers of the ambiguous drug—into “looseness,” as Crowley called undisciplined, un-Thelemic behavior. Many did, and do, get themselves in a frightful mess by “looseness.” The brain is already a pharmacopoeia of psychedelic compounds. Poisoning it is not the same as freeing the Spirit. Sermon over.

  Well, my sermon anyway. The Beast has one more for us.

  When we talk about the Legacy of the Beast in America, we shall do well, I think, to heed some of his own prognostications, heralded here with a paraphrase of a line from John Lennon’s song “Mind Games” (1973):

  Fig. 36.4. Grady Louis McMurtry (1918–1985)

  Faith in the future out of the now

  The year 1936 was an interesting one for the Beast. While Agape Lodge tottered on the edge of a three-year period of relative dormancy, George Sylvester Viereck had lunch with Crowley in London. They hadn’t seen each other since the end of the war that did not end all wars. At lunch, Viereck agreed to sign an affidavit maintaining that Crowley had not been in trouble with American justice authorities during the war. Doubtless Crowley’s request was in connection with acquiring a visa to return to the States. Viereck also volunteered to Crowley that after the war he had made friends with British Naval Intelligence chiefs, and they told Viereck that Crowley had been working for them during the war. Crowley does not record whether Viereck was surprised to learn this.26

  In mid-September of the same year, foreseeing inevitable conflict with Hitler, Crowley worked on a document called “Proofs of the Scientific Solution of the Problems of Government.” This he wrote under the pseudonym the Comte de Fénix.*204 He wanted followers to know what might yet be expected of the Aeon of Horus, for The Book of the Law’s notorious third chapter seemed to delineate a complete and terrible break-down of civilized values and religious conventions. He puts forward what is perhaps his essential legacy: a vision of the present and of the future, even though the path to that future will involve many hard pills to swallow.

  The third chapter of the Book is difficult to understand, and may be very repugnant to many people born before the date of the book (April, 1904). It tells us the characteristics of the Period on which we are now entered. Superficially, they appear appalling. We see some of them already with terrifying clarity. But fear not!

  It explains that certain vast “stars” (or aggregates of experience) may be described as Gods. One of these is in charge of the destinies of this planet for periods of 2,000 years. In the history of the world, as far as we know accurately, are three such Gods: Isis, the mother, when the universe was conceived as simple nourishment drawn directly from her; this period is marked by matriarchal government.

  Next, beginning 500 BC, Osiris, the father, when the universe was imagined as catastrophic, love, death, resurrection, as the method by which experience was built up; this corresponds to patriarchal systems.

  Now, Horus, the child, in which we come to perceive events as a continual growth partaking in its elements of both these methods, and not to be overcome by circumstance. This present period involves the recognition of the individual as the unit of society.

  We realize ourselves as explained in the first paragraphs of this essay. Every event, including death, is only one more accretion to our experience, freely willed by ourselves from the beginning and therefore also predestined.

  This “God,” Horus, has a technical title: Heru-Ra-Ha, a combination of twin gods, Ra-Hoor-Khuit and Hoor-Paar-Kraat. The meaning of this doctrine must be studied in Magick [Crowley’s book]. (He is symbolized as a Hawk-Headed God enthroned.)

  He rules the present period of 2,000 years, beginning in 1904. Everywhere his government is taking root. Observe for yourselves the decay of the sense of sin, the growth of innocence and irresponsibility, the strange modifications of the reproductive instinct with a tendency to become bi-sexual or epicene, the childlike confidence in progress combined with nightmare fear of catastrophe, against which we are yet half unwilling to take precautions.

  Consider the outcrop of dictatorships, only possible when moral growth is in its earliest stages, and the prevalence of infantile cults like Communism, Fascism, Pacifism, Health Crazes, Occultism in nearly all its forms, religions sentimentalized to the point of practical extinction.

  Consider the popularity of the cinema, the wireless, the football pools and guessing competitions, all devices for soothing fractious infants, no seed of purpose in them.

  Consider sport, the babyish enthusiasms and rages which it excites, whole nations disturbed by disputes between boys.

  Consider war, the atrocities which occur daily and leave us unmoved and hardly worried.

  We are children.

  THE NEXT STEP

  Democracy dodders. Ferocious Fascism, cackling Communism, equally frauds, cavort crazily all over the globe. They are hemming us in. They are the abortive births of the Child.

  Above us today hangs a danger never yet paralleled in history. We suppress the individual in more and more ways. We think in terms of the herd. War no longer kills soldiers; it kills all indiscriminately. Every new measure of the most democratic and autocratic governments is Communistic in essence. It is always restriction. We are all treated as imbecile children. Dora,*205 the Shops Act, the Motoring Laws, Sunday suffocation, the Censorship—they won’t trust us to cross the roads at will.

  Fascism is like Communism, and dishonest into the bargain. The dictators suppress all art, literature, theater, music, news, that does not meet their requirements; yet the world only moves by the light of genius. The herd will be destroyed in mass.

  The establishment of the Law of Thelema is the only way to pre serve individual liberty and to assure the future of the race.

  In the words of the famous paradox of Comte de Fénix—the absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will.

  That latter point posits a spiritual revolution in the essence of government that we have yet to see turned into a practical political program. Crowley’s essential interest and legacy is his vital assertion of human liberty. He believed in Man. Most of us only think we do; “Man” is not the same as the political phrase “the People,” which in practice means a num-ber of votes for “the people” who rule. Man is a spiritual concept.

  Perhaps it turns out that the religions have been wrong to fear the Beast. Rather perhaps, they should embrace him, and in finding their other half, may find themselves. For, from that point of view vouchsafed to those above the abyss of confused, baseless egoism and earthbound thinking, the serpent is the messiah; the Scarlet Woman is the woman clothed with the sun; and the Beast is the lamb, led to Hermetic transformation.

  We do have somewhere to go, and it is better. If, that is, we choose, like the Comte de Fénix, to rise from the flames in love.

  The fire of love no waters shall devour;

  The faith of friendship stands the shocks of time;

  Seal with our voice the triumph of this hour,

  Your glory to our glory and ou
r power,

  Alliance of one tongue, one faith, one clime!

  Seal and clasp hands; and let the sea proclaim

  Friendship of righteous fame,

  And lordship of two worlds that time can never tame.27

  APPENDIX ONE

  (Simeon) Leon Engers (Kennedy) (1891–1970)

  by Frank van Lamoen, Assistant Curator, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

  The following are the notes created by Frank van Lamoen documenting his research into the life of Leon Engers.

  1843

  Dec. 7, 1843: Levie Salomon Engers, a Jewish baker (Winschoten 1822– Groningen 1903), marries Betje Izak Schwab (Groningen 1816–1876). The couple had nine children, Mozes (born 1858) being the youngest.

  1858

  Sept. 29, 1858: Father of Leon, Mozes Engers, born in Winschoten (later profession: controleur graanladingen = inspector of corn shipments).

  Fig. A1.1. Leon S. Engers, Director, School of Art, Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois; from circa 1955

  1867

  March 31, 1867: Mother, Paula Schwabacher, born in Odessa, daughter of a German rabbi, Simon Leon (Shimon Aryeh/Simeon Löb) Schwabacher (Oberndorf 1819–Odessa 1888).

  Leon is named after his grandfather. (The Schwabacher family is difficult to trace, because the rabbi lived in several German places before moving to Odessa. Descendants of Paula’s brothers, Leon’s cousins, migrated to the United States.)