That May, Crowley had another manuscript and prospectus ready for the printer: his interpretation of the Chinese classic King Khang King. It resulted in a slim edition, with Crowley inscribing each of the specially bound copies with a different drawing, rendering each one unique.
In June, Crowley continued working on the tarot. When he found himself without a secretary, Lady Harris herself visited AC and took dictation so the Great Work could proceed. She continued until mid-July, when he finished the forty numbered and sixteen court cards of the tarot’s minor arcana. That August, AC began making headway on the twenty-two major arcana cards.
In America, Agape Lodge continued to grow. New members included Brother Floyd E. Wade and Sister Margaret Arnold. The senior members busied themselves with their new property: Roy Leffingwell’s Rancho Royal, on fifty desert acres in California’s Rainbow Valley. Roy Edward Leffingwell (1886–1952) was a professional composer who, during the 1930s, had hosted morning radio shows on Los Angeles stations KECA, KPAC, KFI, and KIEV.21 Born November 30, 1886, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he had worked in various cities before settling in the Los Angeles area in the early 1920s.22 He took his Minerval initiation into OTO on February 24, 1938, became an AA probationer on September 23, 1938,23 and would in Crowley’s lifetime ultimately advance to the IX° in OTO. His wife, Reea, would join OTO some eighteen months after him.
Smith, Kahl, and the Leffingwells—Roy, Reea, and their son—took a two-day pilgrimage at the end of August to the property, which they renamed Agape Valley. Although Smith wanted to consecrate the land to the Great Work, the only ritual he knew was the Gnostic Mass. So, with no paraphernalia, they improvised: a circle of small stones constituted the temple, and a large rock became the altar. An old army overcoat that they found on the land became Smith’s robe; a wreath of leaves became his crown, and a stick his lance. Leffingwell acted as Deacon, using a water glass for the chalice and a cracked dinner plate for the paten. Kahl was Priestess. They lit some dry leaves for incense and did the ritual, Smith adding his benediction, “Be this valley and the hills, the earth thereof and the water, the air and the fire, consecrated to the Great Work and the establishment of the Law of Thelema.”24 The ceremony was especially potent for the small group. As Leffingwell recalled,
Wilfred so intense, so reverent, so impressed with the solemnity of the ritual that it literally tore him apart. Regina couldn’t go through her love chant due to emotional choke up. Wilfred, in an old army overcoat and some ridiculous leaves on his bald head, looking, acting, feeling every inch the Priest. The finest rendition of the Mass I ever saw.25
Life in Britain changed drastically as the Nazis continued their invasions and persecutions. The British prepared for the worst by blacking out their windows at night with screens and blankets to make houses difficult for bombers to spot. Tension ran high, and Crowley wrote Küntzel disparagingly about Germany:
Over there you have no idea of what the world is thinking. As for the ravings about the Jews, they are simply unintelligible. Almost the whole of life in Germany above brutality, stupidity and cruelty, servility, and blood-thirst was Jewish. Germans are far below Jews, generally speaking, as monkeys below men; but I have always been fond of monkeys and don’t want to offend them by comparing any German to one.26
Britain, he warned, would “knock Hitler for a six.” He never heard from her again; Küntzel reportedly died of old age in Germany in December 1941.27
On August 31 women and children evacuated London; it would be nearly three weeks before he learned that Deirdre and Ataturk were safe in Yugoslavia. The day after the evacuation, September 1, Germany invaded Poland with the result that Britain and France declared war. The next day, Crowley noted in his diary, “First air raid (perhaps). No noises here.”
In a flurry of patriotism, Crowley composed a poem in honor of his homeland and sent it to the printer. The four-page card England, Stand Fast! appeared, courtesy of OTO, at 10:50 p.m. on September 23, the autumnal equinox. On October 8, the day the Third Reich annexed western Poland, Crowley sent copies of his poem to the BBC and others to whip up patriotism.
Three days after the declaration of war, AC contacted England’s Naval Intelligence Division (NID) offering to serve his war-torn homeland:
Sir,
I have the honour to apply for employment. At the end of 1914, being incapable of active service owing to phlebitis, I went to New York, where I saw Captain (later Commodore) Gaunt, R.N., to whom I reported directly or indirectly until the Armistice. My work was to get in touch with the most important leaders of German opinion in the United States, especially George Sylvester Viereck, Professor Hugo Münsterberg, and Graf von Vernstorff, to supply them with false information and to wreck their propaganda by inducing them to commit psychological blunders: all with the object of inducing the United States to enter the war on our side. As soon as they did so, I was able to report directly for their Department of Justice, principally in discovering spy activities.
In 1927, I began work for the Special Branch, this time to watch and report on Communist activities, especially in Berlin, where I lived almost continuously for three years.
With regard to my qualifications, I speak several languages, though none of them very well except French. But I have spent many years in the study of psychology, especially morbid psychology. In particular, I have a sympathetic understanding of Americans, so that they do not feel for me that distrust and aversion which is the lot of so many English. My reputation as a writer in America is very considerable, and I have maintained for the last 25 years close connection with several of the most important leaders of thought in that country.
I have also great sympathetic understanding of Eastern modes of thought, whether of the Mohammedean, Hindu or Chinese type; it was in fact at one time proposed that I should be detailed to counteract the influence of Gandhi over his co-religionists; but this came to nothing, as the situation was cleared up otherwise.
Your obedient servant,
Aleister Crowley28
The mention of Gandhi is most interesting, as reference to this proposed activity turns up nowhere else. Two days later, Crowley completed an NID application. When they declined to hire him, Crowley attributed it to his advanced age of sixty-four.29 Nevertheless, AC passed several bits of information to the NID, which gratefully thanked him. He claimed to have met with the NID and suggested a magical gesture that opposed the Nazi swastika: V for Victory (more on this will follow). He also suggested air-dropping magical English propaganda to demoralize the Germans.
Over the years he had met several agents of Britain’s counterintelligence. Guy Knowles, who’d accompanied him on the K2 expedition, was an MI6 agent. Tom Driberg, who was also an agent, had introduced Crowley to two others: horror writer Dennis Wheatley (1897–1977),30 to whom Crowley inscribed a copy of Mortadello in May 1934 and who would join MI5 in 1943; and his wife, Joan, whom Crowley remembered from Foyle luncheons as wearing silly hats. Dennis Wheatley was close friends with Maxwell Knight, who met Crowley at the Wheatley’s and described him as “a well-dressed, middle-aged eccentric with the manner of an Oxford don.”
James Bond creator Ian Fleming (1908–1964) was also an MI5 agent acquainted with Crowley—probably through Knight, who was the model of the Bond character M. Fleming tried unsuccessfully to convince his superiors to use the Enochian alphabet as a code for planting bogus information. And when England planned to capture Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess (1894–1987), by setting him up with a bogus British astrologer, Fleming and Knight both cast Crowley in the role; unfortunately, AC was too familiar to the Germans, so they used an unknown. After Hess was captured, Fleming urged his superiors to let Crowley interview him, convinced that the Nazis based their activities on occult knowledge that only a master would know how to extract. Unfortunately, Fleming’s superiors nixed the plan.
Another agent of Crowley’s acquaintance was Second Viscount and Fourth Baron Tredegar, Lord Evan Frederick Morgan (1893–1949), an e
ccentric Welsh dilettante: a poet, painter, musician, occultist, and collector of objects d’art.31 As part of MI8, the Radio Security Service,32 he and Wing-Commander (later Right Honourable Sir) George Stanley Waller (b. 1911) launched a disastrous response to Nazi spy pigeons. Their plan—for the Royal Air Force to drop hundreds of pigeons along the south coast of England to confuse the enemy—bombed when the jets’ slipstreams sucked up the birds and defeathered them. Tredegar was ultimately arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London for treason because he took his date to his office and divulged details of his work; ultimately MI5 intervened to arrange his release.
Tredegar’s arrest typified MI5 security. All agents took oaths of secrecy and were expected to describe their jobs as “work in a rather dull department in the war office.” Even today MI5 is secretive of its World War II activities. Thus, although he assisted MI5 agents, little is known about the exact services Crowley provided the government.
On December 7, Crowley returned to his literary pursuits and prepared another manuscript. On the 11th, he sent Temperance: A Tract for the Times, a collection of five poems, to Apex Printing Service. One hundred copies of the book were officially released on December 22 at 6:06 p.m., with copies sold, as with his other recent titles, through BCM/ANKH.
New hardships marked the beginning of 1940. On January 8, England began rationing bacon, butter, and sugar. Deirdre, meanwhile, was still in Yugoslavia, seriously ill with septicemia, while Ataturk recovered from the flu; after their recovery they would leave Europe altogether and seek solace with Pat’s grandmother in Jerusalem. When Germany invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France in May, Germer wrote to Crowley that he expected immediate arrest. This is, in fact, what happened: he was apprehended in Belgium, where he was reputedly trying to revive magick, and sent to a French concentration camp.
Crowley himself hardly fared better. Late that spring, AC began suffering debilitating attacks of asthma that kept him up at night and forced him to cancel and postpone work. His usual medications were no longer helping to relieve the symptoms. As his diaries record:
Wednesday June 12. Really bad attack of asthma.
Friday June 14. Inflamed throat still bad. Asthma much worse.
Saturday June 15. Throat—shade better. Asthma very bad indeed.
Sunday June 16. Throat better: asthma very much worse. Almost continuous.
Monday June 17. Throat still improves: asthma still bad.
Wednesday June 19. Asthma all day.
Thursday June 20. Asthma still v bad.
And so it continued until July 19, when his doctor, C. H. Cranshaw, prescribed heroin. The dosage, between a sixth and a quarter of a gram (a standard medical dosage), was Crowley’s first since he kicked the habit in the mid-1920s. Hence, he recorded in his diary, “I’m quite dopy!” It is worth noting that, contrary to popular belief that Crowley was a lifelong addict, his first use of heroin was in 1919 at age forty-four. At that time, the drug was legal and his physician had prescribed it for asthma. An addiction naturally developed, but Crowley tried repeatedly—and ultimately successfully—to cure himself. His 1925 diary is the last time he mentions heroin; and P. R. Stephensen attested that, between 1929 and 1930, Crowley took no drugs at all.33 Now, at age sixty-four, he received another heroin prescription for his asthma. It was twenty years since his first prescription and was again for purely medical reasons.
Beginning with this 1940 reintroduction to the drug, Crowley took his first step toward renewed heroin dependency. Given his age and the state of his health, it was simpler for Crowley to register himself with the government and medicate himself as his asthma warranted. On July 23, 1940, his diary expressed his caution: “Another very bad night. Used 2 tablets heroin: but oh! such lots of Asthmosana.”34
The Battle of Britain began in July, with ninety German bombers shot down over England. Although outnumbered and overpowered, the British air force scored a major victory in this air battle. Germany responded with the Blitz. Air-raid and all-clear sirens filled Crowley’s days that August, and explosions vigorously shook his home in Richmond. Initially infrequent, the raids soon escalated to multiple daily occurrences. Crowley first tried to intellectualize the raids rather than feel threatened, writing to Montgomery Evans:
The raids last summer were exciting, not alarming. There was nothing one could do about it, so I slept quietly through everything. But they were so interesting—guessing what any particular noise might mean and (sometimes) spectacular that they made it difficult to concentrate on Work, and I just had to finish the tarot book.35
After a full day of air raids on September 18, however, Crowley wrote in his diary, “11:35. Great air fuss, but not much fun! Too near here.” Five minutes later, an explosion went off nearby, its echoes resounding for a full minute. At this time, Crowley wrote Evans, “Had a certain bomb fallen 20 yards further west, I should have not got your letter of Sept. 25, but London would have been a more wholesome place.…”36
The strain of worsening asthma and bombings wracked Crowley’s body. One night, AC’s landlord phoned Cammell, stammering, “Mr. Crowley is very ill, and I’m worried. With his breathing the way it is, I don’t think his heart will hold out through the night. He’s asking for you; could you come?” What Cammell found shocked him: illness had withered Crowley’s stout and portly frame into to a wiry skeleton; that night, sleeplessly straining for air, he looked jaundiced and mummified. His eyes were like embers, bloodshot from hours of congestion. And when occasional words of gratitude or humor wheezed from his weary lungs, Cammell cringed. Meanwhile, a stream of German bombers flew overhead. Although England had only a few antiaircraft guns, a huge one at the nearby railway fired continuously. As explosions shook Crowley’s home, Cammell pondered how simply death could snatch these two old men.
A brilliant explosion filled the sky with a light visible even through the blackout curtains. A screeching sound followed, and Cammell, his vigil interrupted, knew a bomber had been hit. Dashing down the rickety stairs and out the front door, he watched its flaming wreckage strike the Twickenham bank, until the cheer “Hooray!” startled him. Cammell turned to see that Old Crow had dashed down the stairs two at a time behind him. The Crowley who hovered on the brink of death now hopped about, waving his arms in the air. The friends watched day break over the wreck’s yellow and mauve flames, then went inside and drank a toast.37
His doctor put it simply: get out of London or die of heart failure. With the I Ching’s advice, Crowley decided to stay in Torquay until the stressful bombings stopped. Setting out on the fall equinox, he arrived September 25. Crowley called the town “my ancestral temple,”38 for it was here, fifty years ago, that his tutor Archibald Douglas taught him the facts of life, and here that Alec discovered the awful mysteries of love and sex in the open country air. “Torquay is anything but gray and shapeless,” he enthused upon arrival. “It is astonishingly beautiful. Flowers bloom afresh daily in my garden, and the woods, the hills, the harbour and the sea are just a constant benediction. This morning, one of the loveliest dawns I have seen anywhere in the world.”39 Ironically, Crowley’s nurse here was a Plymouth sister.
Yorke sent Crowley a secretary named Mrs. Martin so he could continue his work, and by October 23 he finished his descriptions of the twenty-two major tarot cards. “Polished off the last bit of the blasted tarot book and took it to be typed,” he wrote in his diary. “Later, discovered that I still have to do the other fifty-six cards. SHIT.” It would be a year and a half before Crowley was finished, writing to Yorke:
Anyway, nearly killing myself in the process I finished the Court and small cards. They needed what was practically rewriting in parts, as I have found identities between certain cards and (a) the Yi (b) the Geomantic figures. This is exceedingly important from the point of view of official science, as it demonstrates beyond doubt that these independent systems reach the same conclusions, and therefore that they all represent a reality in Nature, not an arbitrary
set of artificial conventions. I assure you that one day this will be the corner-stone of the scientific acceptance of the fact of Magick.40
While science and magick are no nearer an intersection today than they were then, Crowley rightly assesses the importance of his work. Just as Magick in Theory and Practice was the first modern textbook on magick—standing today as the definitive text of its kind—so would the Book of Thoth (as it would be named, after the Egyptian god of magic) be a quantum leap in the tarot’s conceptualization. It would be the crystallization of everything Crowley had learned over the course of an entire lifetime’s study and practice of magick.
For the moment, however, Crowley became sick for three months with acute lobar pneumonia. His asthma machine, which gave him little relief nowadays, broke down, and he received an injection of atropine to dry up his bronchial secretions. Then, on December 14, he swallowed a tooth; this was the beginning of dental problems for him.
As he recovered, Crowley resurrected his interest in chess. He had recently attended London’s chess club, facing seasoned players like M. A. Sutherland;41 but in Torquay’s chess clubs he easily beat all comers. One incident epitomized for Crowley the club’s mentality: they had been discussing Lord Haw-Haw, the Anglo-American who broadcast anti-British propaganda from within Germany (and who would be tried and executed for treason after the war) when one person responded, “Isn’t that the fellow in the Tower?” Crowley wrote in his diary,42 “When I told the ignorant bastards that he was William Joyce, one said ‘Isn’t that the fellow that wrote the dirty book?’ ”43 Ironically, within the year, AC would find himself the subject of one of Haw-Haw’s attacks.
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