In 1936 I was a whoremonger, dishonest, a black magician.… Now I am a clown, vile, and have a swelled head. Personally, I cannot take these criticisms too seriously because I do not take myself too seriously because the accusations are so positively stupid and false.… You seem so often to be responsible for the continual disturbances. Just as we are trying our hardest to get out a small monthly publication of dignity and quality which we hope will please you, got a quotation on it, figured how we can squeeze it into our expenses, you let fly another charge of buckshot or tell somebody else to. I say, “Hell, what’s the use!”, write a few strongly worded letters, throw them in the fire, clench my teeth, and make another effort. Oh, yes, feeble if you will: We are not all A.C.s.5
Crowley responded by criticizing Smith for sending lodge reports irregularly and for lacking the proper stature to act as priest in the Gnostic Mass. AC, who sought a Hollywood production of the rite, imagined someone with more stage presence. “I do not think that in 20 years or more you contributed more than £150 at the very outside.”6 This accusation was completely false, and ignited an angry spate of hostility between them. “Wherever Smith was,” Crowley complained, “there was a ferment about A objecting to B sleeping with C because D wanted E to sleep with F and so on through the alphabet about six times round. In the early days in California, the only letters I ever got were asking me to settle all sorts of rather dirty complications.”7
Yet another problem arose that spring when the FBI scrutinized Jack Parsons’s OTO membership. Because he worked on classified projects for the government, his ties to a group “alleged to have been involved in immoral activities”8 concerned them. Parsons explained that the Church of Thelema, which he had joined three years previously, was a small fraternity modeled after England’s Order of Oriental Templars. Their ideologies, he assured them, opposed communism and fascism, and agreed entirely with the war effort. “We are entirely tolerant and concerned with the brotherhood of all mankind, and dedicated to individual freedom and liberty.” The investigators searched the lodge with Smith’s permission, including his correspondence with AC, and found nothing subversive.
Crowley pushed on with Olla for the first months of 1943, hoping for its ceremonial publication on the spring equinox. When informed in February that Chiswick couldn’t possibly have an entire book ready by then, AC decided, “Fine, we’ll do The City of God instead. It will save me a lot of immediate cash.”9 It would also make a nice companion to “The Fun of the Fair.” So, Churchill prepared a new set of photo proofs, and on March 13, Crowley finished the dedication and preface. By then, however, it was too late to set up and print The City of God by the equinox; they were already quite busy with the tarot book. Anxious to release the book on an auspicious date, Crowley took the delays ungraciously. “Chiswick Press calmly announces ‘City’ not ready ’till Wednesday next!” he noted in his journal for April 15, 1943. “What bastards of bastards!”10 The book finally appeared on April 20, in a format uniform with the gray paper covers of Fun of the Fair and in a limited edition of two hundred. From there, he continued with other book projects.
Crowley from The City of God (1943). (photo credit 22.1)
While revising his text for the small tarot cards that summer, the solution to his problems with Smith occurred to him: it was, in a word, apotheosis. W. T. Smith was not a man but a god. AC decided that Smith’s astrological chart indicated a latent deity within him, and that realizing his divinity would require a protracted Great Magical Retirement, during which time he could have contact with nobody but Germer. While Smith retired to the desert to live in a shack, meditating until the god within him spoke, Parsons would take charge of Agape Lodge. Crowley sent these instructions to Smith as “Liber Apotheosis” and telegrammed instructions to Agape Lodge that Smith was off limits under threat of expulsion. Proud of his scheme to dump Smith and appoint young Jack Parsons as the new lodge master, Crowley bragged to Max Schneider, “I had Machiavelli under my pillow and dreamed it.”11
Smith recognized “Apotheosis” as an inelegant plan to depose him yet had no choice but to comply. Frater 132 withdrew to the desert on June 3, bringing the letters Crowley had sent him over the years. At age fifty-eight—having devoted the last thirty-seven years of his life to seeking occult wisdom, twenty-nine years after helping Achad found the original Agape Lodge in Vancouver—he finally gave up. On August 13, Wilfred T. Smith left the desert for the mundane world.12
Having moved to Piccadilly Circus under the assumption that the bombings in London had stopped, Old Crow was dismayed when they resumed that spring. By summer they got so bad that Hamilton left the city. Lord Evan Tredegar, an MI5 acquaintance and student of magick who was pouring his wealth into properly outfitting a temple, invited AC to stay with him. On June 17, 1943, having sent “Apotheosis” to California, he left for Tredegar Park. The lord was working on his own tarot book, and the occultists passed time comparing notes. Of his host, Crowley wrote, “He’s one of the very few people I know who can throw a party,” and “Tredegar owns 121,000 acres in S. Wales (mostly coal) and whole streets in London (mostly bombed).”13 During his stay, AC also befriended Cordelia Sutherland (1894–1980). Born Emily Cordelia Landers, she married John J. Sutherland at Middlesex in 1926 and worked for the past fourteen years as Tredegar’s housekeeper, secretary, and manager.14 Being released when Tredegar sold his country home, she began a long correspondence with AC, occasionally sending powdered chocolate and plover’s eggs his way. After staying for two weeks in Tredegar’s best room, Crowley returned to London to continue his tarot work.
At the end of October a gray and withered Crowley answered a knock on the door of his 93 Jermyn Street apartment. Standing before him was a young American army captain with round glasses, a mustache, and a smirk. “News from the front indeed!” Crowley remarked.15 Grady McMurtry—along with the rest of his ROTC class—had been called to active duty in February 1942. Since the Italian government had surrendered to the Allies on September 3, 1943, McMurtry was on leave from the 1803rd and decided to visit the master. During his visits in the following weeks—when he and AC generally talked late into the night—he met Yorke, Harris, and Wilkinson. Although his visits only numbered about six in all, he endeared himself greatly to AC, loaning him £50 and buying copies of his books. He was young yet level-headed, a breath of reason amidst the California madness. Crowley seized the opportunity to advance him to the IX°, skipping the II° through the VIII°. As a IX° member, Grady needed a magical motto but uncertain about a fitting one, he deferred to AC. Agonizing over the matter, Crowley came up with the Greek motto “Hymenaeus Alpha,” which added up to the mystical number 777.
At this time, Crowley offered McMurtry a fifty percent share of the tarot book in exchange for a $200 investment. AC figured he could defray the prohibitive cost of publishing Olla by having Chiswick buy an extra-large stock of paper for the tarot book at a better discount and use the surplus to print Olla. By the end of March 1944, McMurtry accepted the offer.
Grady Louis McMurtry (1918–1985). (photo credit 22.2)
As 1943 drew to a close, AC’s projects became even more ambitious and consuming. Besides Olla and the tarot he encouraged his friends to ask him for letters of instruction on remedial points of magick; these he hoped to collect and publish under the working title of Aleister Explains Everything. Questions posed to Crowley ranged from “Do angels cut themselves shaving?” to “Why accept so revolting a book as Liber AL?” Its writing filled most of the months to follow and would take years to complete.
Early in 1944 some metaphysical literature distributed by Dr. William Bernard Crow (1895–1976) caught his attention. Crow was a lecturer in biology for several colleges, the latest being South West Essex Technical College. Educated at the University of London, he was a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, Linnean Society, and Zoological Society of London.16 He wrote extensively not only on biology but also on many occult topics17 and was a contributor to the Occult R
eview.18 He was also connected with various spiritual groups like the Institute for Cosmic Studies and the Ancient Orthodox Catholic Church; on June 13, 1943, he was consecrated bishop as Mar Basilius Abdullah III, enabling him to act as autocephalous head of his own church, the Order of the Holy Wisdom or Ekklesia Agiae Sophiae. The purpose of this church was to teach the “Orthodox Catholic Faith” to occultists in their own vernacular. According to one of his fliers, the church incorporated the traditions of the Hindus, kabbalists, gnostics, Zoroastrians, Rosicrucians, Druids, Buddhists and Sufis.
When Crowley sent him comments in early February, a correspondence ensued. Crow was a serious and knowledgeable student of the occult, was curious about Crowley’s Memphis-Mizraim lineage, and wished to work the Gnostic Mass. Before long, Crow’s advisor, Hugh George de Willmott Newman (b. 1905), also known as the Archbishop Mar Georgius I, Metropolitan of Glastonbury in the Catholicate of the West,19 contacted Crowley to negotiate an authorization. The EGC and Gnostic Mass were particularly sacred to Crowley, and he felt Crow out carefully before granting anything. Crowley was amused by these episcopi vagantes, or wandering bishops: Crow reportedly kept a statue of Buddha that he called St. Jehosaphat.20 Newman, meanwhile, signed his name with numerous titles and initials.
The Beast yawned elaborately. Mottoes and titles had long since failed to impress him, ever since he filled pages of The Equinox with all the titles conferred upon him after the Mathers lawsuit. Masonic authority and succession, another of their concerns, were subjects that bored Crowley even more. He nevertheless strived to set them on the right path. About the EGC, Crowley said, “I never wrote any rituals of ordination and such things, and I am certainly not going to start at my time of life. The people in America go on perfectly well without anything of the sort.”21 Regarding the Mass, he advised, “Keep one eye fixed firm on Hollywood. You mustn’t have a Priest with a squeak or a drone or a drawling, and you mustn’t cast some frightful hag as the Virgin Harlot. The furniture, robes, etc. may at first be severely plain, but as pestilence is the pretentious, the theatrical or the tawdry.”22
Crow pursued this for a while, distributing flyers to drum up interest in the Mass, but he and Newman eventually parted. In Crowley’s mind the doctor had a ways to go. “You are quite wrong in thinking that The Wizard of Oz has anything to do with me,” he told Crow. “That was the title of a film which I did not see, but I could not change the title of my book because … Hollywood chose to pinch the word.”23 To be fair, L. Frank Baum’s (1856–1919) The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, on which the movie is based, came out in 1900, the year of the GD revolt against Mathers and over forty years before Crowley penned Liber Oz. Ironically, a few years later the film came to Hastings while Crowley was living at Netherwood House; AC very much wanted to see it, only to be told by the proprietress, “It wouldn’t interest you at all, it’s a children’s thing.”24
The year 1944 started off with a bang as intense air raids frequently shook Crowley’s abode. As he wrote to Louis Wilkinson, “My nerves just went with a bang.”25 His diaries record many episodes, including the following:
Blast knocked house about quite a little. Other tenants behaved very well (i.e., they go to the kitchen & huddle, & ‘make cheerful talk’: They cannot bear to be alone: it comforts them to hold each others’ hands! They depressed me almost more than the company of such people normally does).26
Shortly after he received an eviction notice on February 16, a bomb landed 250 yards southwest of 93 Jermyn, leveling most of King and Duke streets. Ducking outside to look, Crowley stepped into a hailstorm of rubble and shrapnel. When he sought shelter indoors and started upstairs, an explosion blew the lock off the door and knocked him over.
Although Crowley tried fairly successfully to maintain a normal lifestyle, the constant raids took their toll. Driven north of London on April 8, he took a room at the famous Bell Inn at Aston Clinton, Buckinghamshire. It was a stately seventeenth century country hotel with twenty rooms, huge bathtubs, a large open fire, and a talented cook; Crowley however felt far from his friends, bored, and lonely.
That spring he prepared an eight-page prospectus for the tarot book, officially dubbed The Book of Thoth, and began selling subscriptions in May. He enthusiastically claimed “These cards, with the explanatory Essay, are destined to be the Atlas and Practical manual of all Magick for the next 2,000 years.”27 He found takers in McMurtry, Sutherland, Tredegar, and Bayley as well as E. N. Fitzgerald, Dion Fortune, and others. Yorke even contributed £100 toward publication costs. These prospectuses were the source of some concern after they were mailed, owing to wartime rationing. As AC wrote:
it seems that I may have technically infringed one of those fool regulations about sending out prospectuses free of charge, but luckily The Book of Thoth is No 5 of Vol III of The Equinox, which constitutes it a periodical and therefore not subject to the paper control at all. Of course it is very trivial and technical: but considering how I have been framed up in the past, and how many wolves are out after my blood, I must confess to more than a little apprehension.28
Crowley needn’t have worried, as his publication appeared without incident.
Although The Book of Thoth gives a publication date on the spring equinox of 1944, Crowley was still signing the unbound sheets that August; indeed, he arranged with legendary bookbinders Sangorski and Sutcliffe to bind the books as orders arrived; hence not all copies were bound at the same time. Nevertheless, the signed and numbered edition did appear that year. In November, Crowley expressed delight at the initial sales of the book: “To my amazement I have sold over fifty copies of The Book of Thoth. If you had told me six months ago I would have said, in my most optimistic mood, that I could get rid of a dozen.”29 It was a spectacular book, with eleven copies bound in half morocco leather and the rest in quarter-leather, gilt-samped with the OTO logo and seal of Ankh-f-n-Khonsu on the spine. It was printed on mold-made paper, which was not only elegant but also exempt from wartime paper restrictions. The book contained nine color plates of the cards, technical appendices, and a bibliographic note (by Crowley but attributed to Martha Küntzel). Authorship was attributed to “The Master Therion,” with Frieda Harris listed as artist executant. Crowley inscribed her copy,
To my dearest Sister TzBA 93,
My admired accomplice in the perpetration of this atrocity.…
To Mega Therion 66630
The book has since become the definitive work on the tarot and has enjoyed many reprintings. Although test printings of several cards were made at this time, the deck was was not printed in either collaborator’s lifetime despite repeated attempts. The first color edition was produced by Llewellyn in 1971.31
The fall of 1944 was also notable not for anything that Crowley accomplished but for a fascinating glimpse of what could have been. The American OTO members were still hoping to import Old Crow to California, and a new twist developed: Jean Schneider was working as a housekeeper for film director Orson Welles (1915–1985). She sent AC the book for Citizen Kane; although the 1941 film—which Welles wrote, directed, and performed in—is considered by many the best movie ever made, it was a financial failure in its theatrical release. Schneider hinted that Welles was interested in magick. In December she sent the telegram GAVE ORSON WELLES MORTADELLO. Crowley must have been excited, as this was the play he had been shopping around to producers for years. He also asked her to give him “Across the Gulf” and The Three Wishes to consider for screenplays.32 Alas, no movie deals were forthcoming.
During his last visit, McMurtry accompanied Crowley on a drive along the Seine up to the cathedral town of Chartres. AC had already called him “the most serious and intelligent of the younger lot.… This singles you out as the proper man to take charge of affairs when the time is ripe. It is supremely important that you should understand fully the 9th degree.…”33 Now—having participated in the Invasion of Normandy and the liberation of France and Belgium—McMurtry was again visiting. As they drove, they disc
ussed the future of OTO, Crowley spoke for the first time of the office of Caliph. Denoting the successor to a prophet in Islam, such a position exists in none of the official OTO documents, its charter, the blue Equinox, or anywhere else. Thus, when Crowley later referred to the Caliphate in an October 16 letter to McMurtry, the puzzled serviceman replied, “As for the Caliphate, I remember no concrete proposal—just a vague reference once.”34 Crowley responded at length:
“The Caliphate.” You must realize that no matter how closely we may see eye-to-eye on any objective subject, I have to think on totally different premises where the Order is concerned. One of the (startlingly few) commands given to me was this: “Trust not a stranger: fail not of an heir.” This has been the very devil for me. Frater Saturnus is of course the natural Caliph; but there are many details concerning the actual policy or working which 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.…
But—now here is where you have missed my point altogether—I do not think of you as lying on a grassy hillside with a lot of dear sweet lovely 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 an actual fact to-day.35
Just as Crowley left behind a son and a publishing program, he also planned a line of succession. He gave McMurtry “more solid instruction in IX° than I ever gave before to any one.”36 He was grooming McMurtry for bigger things.
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