Miscellaneous difficulties haunted Crowley for the first couple of months of 1941. Lawyers contacted him demanding past rent; a difficult new secretary, Sophia Burt, appeared on the scene. Tooth decay threatened to turn into an abscess and improved only temporarily with tincture of iodine. Insomnia forced him to take Luminal, and the police fined him for turning on his lights on sleepless nights during the blackout.
Around this time, Crowley contributed his expertise in magick to the war effort. If the Nazis could wield crushing power through the ancient symbol of the swastika, then England could certainly use more powerful magick to win the war. Hence a magical antidote to the swastika became his quest. Crowley’s first suggestion was the poem “Thumbs Up!” The corresponding gesture, popular among pilots, was phallic, and Crowley wished to publish the poem with an equally phallic pantacle on the cover. However, he desired a more potent symbol. “How can I put it over pictorially or graphically?” he pondered. “I want positive ritual affirmation, like Liber Resh, ‘saying will,’ and so on.”44
Soon afterward, he found this even more potent formula “to bring victory … [and] a way to put it across.”45 Crowley decided on the letter V: in Hebrew, vav is phallic in both image and meaning; it literally meant “nail,” and Crowley thought this symbolized the nails in Hitler’s coffin. Furthermore, V suggested AC’s Magister Templi motto, V.V.V.V.V. And, according to the GD formula of LVX, V also designated the Egyptian deities of Apophis and Typhon; these deities suggested the tarot card “The Devil,” appropriate since the V also symbolizes a pair of horns. The V for Apophis sign occurred in the Adeptus Minor (5°=6°) ritual, which is appropriate since V is the number five in the Roman numeral system but six in gematria. It also suggested the famous “Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”). But most importantly, Crowley recognized “V for Victory.” “Seabrook should be thrilled,” he wrote, “in view of his story about ‘Wow!’ ”46
Although “V for Victory” has been attributed to BBC broadcasts by Victor de Lavaleye or David Ritchie, Crowley maintained he invented the gesture as a magical counterattack to the Nazi swastika; then, using his MI5 connections, he suggested it to NID and had it accepted by Churchill. As he wrote to Yorke,
The V sign. My object is to disclaim connection with my B.B.C. friend. The plate in Eqx I 3 and to face p 374 of Magick is entitled “The Signs of the Grades,” caption to photographs “The L.V.X. signs.” Each photo is marked L - Isis mourning, the Swastika. V - Apophis, the Trident. X -Osiris risen - the Pentagram. Dates at least from the ’80s GD, but I have “Squatter’s Right” as first to publish it.47
Since Crowley demonstrates his primacy in publishing the V-sign, the second part of his claim—his intelligence connections—are of interest. He was on casual and friendly terms with high-ranking naval officers, and the Director of Naval Intelligence had personally requested Crowley to apply to him. Shortly after developing this scheme, AC began meeting with Major Penny of the Air Ministry, presumably about putting it over. In various letters at this time he refers to anonymously “sneaking” his idea past the BBC.48
On March 14, Crowley cast a general hexagram for the day as he usually did. “Ta Yu,” the fourteenth hexagram, was his oracle. It denoted “great happenings.” When his mail arrived, Crowley sorted through the day’s parcels and came upon one that made him stop cold. The handwriting was distinctly familiar. The corners of his face curled up into a tremendous smile. Karl had written. “Great Happenings/Havings indeed,” he wrote in his diary. “A letter from Germer, who is safe after all. The happiest evening of my life! Even the birth of little Ataturk is not in the same class, for that I expected. This is a stirring/stunning joy!” Germer had been liberated from a French concentration camp on February 18 when Cora obtained a nonquota visa for him through the President’s Committee for Refugees. Germer sailed for America on March 31, and applied for his U.S. citizenship papers the following month.
Although he escaped physically unscathed, Germer carried the psychological scars of persecution in the form of paranoia. “Since 1942,” he wrote, “every one of my telephones is tapped. The house in which we lived in New York was wired. Microphones had been installed in the walls. We left NY. But in this house it is the same.”49 His suspicions became so intense that the Germers never spoke in their own home.
Crowley was nevertheless overjoyed that his dear friend was alive. On May 5 he appointed Germer Grand Secretary General of OTO, and on July 19 appointed him as Crowley’s representative in the United States. Germer was also Crowley’s chosen successor.
A new magical current was sweeping into AC’s life. Ideas formed in his mind, and the I Ching encouraged him to pursue them; so on March 16 he announced to Louis Wilkinson, “I’m starting an Abbey of Thelema.”50 After twenty years, Crowley’s desire for a Thelemic community endured. The next day he looked at accommodations in Barton Brow, just outside Torquay and thirty miles from Plymouth; on the 18th, he rented a house as his new Abbey.
Once settled in, Crowley resumed work on his war poetry, completing “Thumbs Up!,” his national anthem of free England, on April 9. He kept long hours, one time working twenty hours in one day and giving himself an asthma attack. He began taking digitalis for his overworked heart.
The Abbey maintained but a vague existence, with Crowley and Grace M. Horner (whom Crowley dubbed Charis, Greek for “grace”) signing the following proclamation on April 20:
We, the undersigned members of the Abbey of Thelema at Barton Brow Barton Cross, declare ourselves completely satisfied with the conduct & conditions thereof during the passage of the Sun through Aries.51
Despite his satisfaction, Crowley wanted more. He wrote to Wilkinson, “The Abbey is a bit stagnant: I do wish you would find a couple of suitable people, or a single man, to join.”52
In the same letter, written two days after air raids destroyed Britain’s House of Commons, Crowley described the wartime conditions at Barton Brow:
Raids over here almost every night; this house is constantly shaken.… They went for it last night, there was also a dogfight, complete with crash, right over these moors. There is more accident than most people suppose. Twice, close to me, people have been killed by bombs jettisoned in despair from limping ’planes.
In the end, however, lack of finances doomed the Abbey.
A new current of growth also infused the Agape Lodge in California, with new members including rocket scientist Jack Parsons and, most recently, college student Grady McMurtry.
John Whiteside Parsons (1914–1952) was born with the forename Marvel but known as “Jack” to his friends. Standing six-foot-two, he was an eccentric and handsome young scientist developing explosives at the California Institute of Technology under a government contract. Born in Los Angeles to a wealthy and well-connected family, Parsons had grown up in a Pasadena mansion and was captivated from an early age by images of rockets in science fiction pulp magazines like Amazing Stories. He began launching homemade rockets from his back yard in the 1920s and later worked for the Hercules Powder Company, manufacturers of various explosives. By the 1930s he was part of a rag-tag group of people performing rocketry experiments at Caltech. Parsons—together with his colleagues, who were disparagingly nicknamed the “Suicide Squad”—effectively established rocketry as a science, founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL),53 developed solid rocket fuels, and invented jet-assisted takeoff (JATO). Parsons also had a long-standing interest in the occult. He attended events at Agape Lodge as early as 1939, and with his wife, Helen (1910–2003),54 was initiated on February 15, 1941. Taking the motto “Thelema Obtentum Procedero Amoris Nuptiae,” his devotion to the Great Work made W. T. Smith remark to Crowley, “I think I have at long last a really excellent man.”55
Grady Louis McMurtry (1918–1985) met Parsons at a meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society,56 where Parsons struck up a conversation with him on science fiction, poetry, and magick. McMurtry was initiated into Agape Lodge shortly thereafter
on June 13, 1941. Born in Big Cabin, Oklahoma, to an alcoholic mother and a father who was repeatedly imprisoned for bank robbery, McMurtry was raised by his maternal grandfather and other relatives, relocating frequently throughout childhood to various parts of Oklahoma and the Midwest. He attended Valley Center High School in Kansas, graduating in 1937. He enrolled in the ROTC and began studying engineering at Pasadena Junior College. Months before joining Agape Lodge, he had quit school without taking a degree. Although he lacked a plan for what to do next, he shared Parsons’s enthusiasm for poetry and Thelema.57
With the Lodge now burgeoning, the members planned fund-raising to bring Crowley to America, where he could live out his last years in southern California’s comfortable climate, surrounded by students and supporters. On May 6, Smith went to the U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization to sponsor Crowley’s visit.
Amidst frequent air raids, Lady Harris planned an exhibition of the tarot paintings at the Nicholson and Venn galleries in Oxford. That May, inspecting her budget and proposed show catalog, Crowley objected vehemently:
I never saw such horror. No title, no lay-out, no word of what the show was about. Utterly obscure, full of bad grammar & misspelling, ill-typed, single-spaced, full of italics a full meal for 6 hungry printers! Pages & pages (20 typescript—over 6,000 words!!) of complete obfuscation. No hint of what terms like Tetragrammaton, Sephiroth & their kind may mean. She had also sent The Juggler—the one trump that must be done again, & in any case very unsuitable indeed for wrapper—to be reproduced very expensively so that printing & paper must be cheap!!! I have no memory of so black a rage as has consumed me for the last 5 hours. All this though I had long ago prepared a proper catalogue, approved by Louis Wilkinson & other sensible people who understand such things; clear, modest, cheap to produce.58
Frieda responded with a letter asking Crowley to avoid Oxford during the exhibition, lest his reputation prejudice and frighten off potential supporters, and allow her to pass off the cards as her own work:
The opposition against you in Oxford is very strong. My business is to get money to publish those cards if possible and this is nearly impossible in the present war conditions. I have been successful through using what influence I possess in getting at people with money to come and see the Exhibition. This is using my social position fully. If they suspected that the cards were inspired by the Arch Magician of Black Magic (what do they mean?) they would withdraw their patronage. I have had this conveyed to me politely and impolitely. Therefore if you come to the Private View or show up in any prominence this attempt to launch the cards is doomed and all the work and money lost. Can you be so large-minded and detached as to keep away until the thing is launched?59
Oxford was, after all, the campus that banned his Gilles de Rais lecture a decade earlier. The day of the exhibition, Crowley telegrammed a wry answer: HEARTIEST ACQUIESCENCE APPROVAL THERION.
It was just as well, because a quick series of moves—seven in two weeks—had upset his life. As an undischarged bankrupt and the “Wickedest Man in the World,” Crowley had difficulty locating a landlord. He remained philosophical about it all, anticipating his move to California. He simply put his things into storage. “Burnt my boats magically,” he wrote in his diary, “by deciding to discard anything not wanted for Rainbow Valley in the Palomar Mountains.”60
By June 7, in the middle of the tarot exhibition, he grew agitated. He had received no word from Frieda whether the show was a success or failure, and finally wired her two days later. While awaiting her reply, he happened by Michael Houghton’s Atlantis Bookshop. There in the window was a postcard from Frieda Harris noting that the show was “Cancelled owing to war.” The postmark, Crowley noted indignantly, was June 3. Yet she never informed him. Crowley went to Oxford himself to get to the bottom of this, but found nothing more than “a scared and hostile youth in dull desolation” who “refused all information.”61 Returning empty-handed, Crowley found Frieda’s reply telegram awaiting him. It offered little by way of information, but a June 16 visit from her clarified everything: when Crowley’s involvement in the tarot project became known, Nicholson and Venn canceled the show with no warning. Harris quickly rented the largest room at the Randolph Hotel down the street, exhibiting the cards there and attracting “so many people that I had to leave the gallery open at night in Oxford to allow the undergraduates to look at them.”62
That June, Crowley went to Whiteley’s, his storage company, and instructed them to sell all his possessions except for his books and papers. “Why?” he explained, “Because I must either die or get to California.… In neither case shall I need furniture and other perishable goods.”63 Shortly thereafter, in new accommodations at 14 Lassall Gardens, he prepared his next book—the anti-Nazi pentagram—for the printer. On June 22, the fateful day Germany invaded Russia, he officially named it Thumbs Up! The next day, he took it to Apex Printing for publication.
When the proofs of Thumbs Up! arrived on July 1, Crowley was busy seeking a new home and courting the press with “England, Stand Fast!” “I think the poem by Aleister Crowley is vigorous and certainly patriotic,” wrote Beverly Baxter of Allied Newspapers Ltd. “At the same time, there is very little space in newspapers, and there is practically no chance of a poem being printed.”64 It was the same all around. Driberg, whom AC considered a shoo-in with the Daily Express, replied, “But how do I know if the government wants England to stand fast?” And H. L. Mencken told Crowley, “I daren’t show it to an American editor. He’d die of laughing.”65 Nevertheless, Crowley also wrote of Thumbs Up! at this time, “So far, good and enthusiastic response; e.g., C. E. M. Joad, John Cooper Powys, Louis Wilkinson, Harold Mortlake, and other more or less prominent people. Navy quite thrilled!” and later “Thumbs Up! has extracted praise and thanksgiving from U.S. Embassy, Naval blokes, Joad, John Cooper Powys, Ralph Straus and so on. Joad specially nice about it. I’m encouraged.”66 Thus AC took on other projects: having Sun Engraving make blocks of Frieda’s tarot cards; looking for a composer to render his songs into French; and meeting with the U.S. consul about obtaining a passport for his pilgrimage to California.
On July 28, Crowley received an irate letter from Cammell. A month earlier his wife, Ionia, had sent samples of her handmade tweeds to AC, who promptly sold them to his various acquaintances and kept the money. Ionia sought remuneration, and although Crowley laughed it off at first, the matter became a bone of contention that tore a rift in their friendship. Although Cammell continued to admire Crowley’s talent as a poet, his unfriendly behavior mystified him. Standing by his wife, Cammell decided honor prohibited their friendship. They would never speak again.
The notorious fascist and Nazi propaganda broadcaster William Joyce (1906–1946),67 known as Lord Haw-Haw, attacked Crowley during one of his broadcasts, chiding that England ought to replace its prayer intercessions with Crowley conducting a Black Mass at Westminster Abbey. AC, who felt his character had been tarnished enough, worried that the attack would undermine his V-Sign campaign. “Thanks to Lord Haw-Haw, it is now quite generally known that I invented this campaign,” Crowley bemoaned. “Of course, I am denying strenuously that I ever had anything to do about it, as the bloke who slipped it over on the idiots at the BBC would get into the most hellish trouble if it were found out that he knows me.”68
On August 17, Crowley sent his newly revised Thumbs Up! manuscript to Chiswick Press. He had asked Frieda to draw the cover, but notes in his diary: “FH wouldn’t draw any V cover, sent me a nice tie instead.”69 She ultimately relented and provided the artwork of Crowley’s “Mark of the Beast” magical sigil. Although Chiswick Press turned out an advance copy of Thumbs Up! within three days, it also demanded advance payment before delivering the completed job. Crowley fumed, “I told them they could sell the edition for waste paper and I would get another printer.”70 They allowed him to pick up the finished product a day later.
Crowley’s “Mark of the Beast” from Thumbs Up! (photo
credit 21.1)
Even as the book appeared, he was designing its reprint. As Yorke suggested, he dropped the magical “mumbo-jumbo” and his name; its eight pages would have no cover, its title page simply reading “Thumbs Up! Five poems by the author of the V-Sign for free distribution among the soldiers and workers of the soldiers of freedom.”71 This edition would arrive on September 19.
Response to the book was apparently positive, for Crowley wrote ebulliently to Yorke, “Navy quite thrilled. If I can get really big success, it will put me in a position to ask for an interview with Winston to put up to him the 2nd half of my V plan. This might be the war engine in AL iii.7–8.”72 The interview never came to pass, leaving us to ponder what Crowley had in mind.
At the end of August, AC and Yorke took a brief foray into the past to the poet’s forty-year-old haunts at Cambridge. Visiting Trinity Chapel—something he never did as a student—he exorcized one of his ghosts by mounting the high altar and proclaiming, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” The visit was wonderful and Yorke’s company delightful.
Reminiscing concluded, Crowley returned to work. When his lover, Alice Upham, suggested he send a copy of Thumbs Up! to Charles de Gaulle, AC, although he liked the idea, remarked, “OK, but I had better write a poem in French for Free France.”73 This he wrote the following day.
Crowley turned sixty-six that October. Since sixty-six was the sum of the numbers from one to eleven, and eleven was such a significant number in his magick, he wanted something more special than the presents and letters he received from Pearl, Frieda, Alice, Karl. and former student J. G. Bayley. So, taking The Book of the Law in hand, he rededicated his life to the Great Work. Sliding the book back onto the shelf, Frieda’s rejected tarot card for the Aeon slipped down from the shelf overhead. Picturing the Stele of Revealing, the card symbolized the beginning of the Aeon of Horus and was as good an omen as Crowley had ever seen.
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