“It is infinitely dark, dull, damp, depressing, dirty, drear, dead and decomposing in this hideous hell-hole,” he wrote of the Bell Inn when the bombings and loneliness became too much,37 and he asked Louis Wilkinson to help him find a new home. It turned out that his son, Oliver, knew E. C. Vernon Symonds through the Hastings Court Players. Symonds was an ex-alcoholic, actor, and playwright who in 1930 wrote The Legend of Abd-El-Krim.38 He and his wife Kathleen, who went by the name “Johnny,” had turned a gloomy Victorian mansion into an “intellectual guest house” named Netherwood. They tempted various luminaries to come for a visit and offer a talk to the other guests in exchange for a free room and meals. Some of their speakers included philosopher and broadcaster C. E. M. Joad (1891–1953), geneticist and evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), aristocrat and communist Edith Hajós Bone (1889–1975), and mathematician and biologist Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974). In addition, a young Julian Bream (b. 1933) occasionally played classical guitar for the guests.39
Surrounded by four wooded acres and located on the Ridge, the highest point of Hastings at an elevation of five hundred feet, it offered panoramic views of the town, the sea, and Crowley’s childhood haunt, Beachy Head. It was the perfect place for an aging magician to retire, with Symonds’s house rules reading:
Guests are requested not to tease the Ghosts.
Guests are requested to be as quiet as possible while dying of fright.
Breakfast will be served at 9 a.m. to the survivors of the Night.
The Hastings Borough Cemetery is five minutes walk away (ten minutes if carrying body), but it is only one minute as the Ghost flies.
Guests are requested not to dig graves on lawns, but to make full use of newly filled graves under trees.
Guests are requested not to remove corpses from graves or to cut down bodies from trees.
The Office has a certain amount of used clothing for sale, the property of guests who have no longer any use for earthly raiment.40
Also staying at Netherwood House was world-famed chess champion Edward Mackenzie Jackson (1867–1959), eleven-time winner of the Hastings Chess Club Championship.41 There was also another skilled player named Kirk.
In advance of his arrival, Crowley reputedly telegrammed Netherwood House to expect a consignment of frozen meat. This rather perplexed the Symondses, who had placed no such order. All became clear when Crowley arrived on the appointed day in an ambulance. bearing his belongings, He insisted on having room number 13.42 He moved in on January 17, 1945, lining his small room with his books and paintings. In gratitude, he sent a box of cigars to Oliver. When Oliver smoked them all before realizing they were the world’s most expensive cigars, Crowley sent him a second box.
Netherwood House, The Ridge, Hastings, where Crowley spent his last years. (photo credit 22.3)
Kenneth Grant (b. 1924) had a dream in 1939 of a powerful magical symbol and its associated name, spelled variously A’ashik, Oshik, or Aossic. Becoming a young student of magick three years later, he adopted the emblem and nomen. He had tried in vain to reach Crowley through the address given in Magick, which was over a decade old at the time. Then, when The Book of Thoth appeared in 1944, Michael Houghton refused to give him AC’s current address, fearing young Grant to be “mentally unstable”;43 Grant presumed that Houghton merely wanted to recruit him into his own Society of Hidden Masters.44 He persevered and finally tracked down Crowley at the Bell Inn, where he first visited and met the master in late 1944. During these years, Grant had, volunteered for the army at age eighteen and by age twenty was invalided from service for an unspecified medical condition.45
Through the winter of 1945, Grant sent letters and books to Crowley. Thus when Crowley decided at the end of February that he needed a secretary, this eager young student, as Regardie before him, seemed the logical choice. What Grant lacked in secretarial skills he made up for in exuberance. “I made a bargain with Symonds,” Crowley wrote. “It’s supposed to cost me £1.0.0 a week to have him here.”46 Accepting the offer, Grant arranged to join Crowley on March 9. On the appointed day he wired Crowley that he had been delayed and would arrive on Sunday, March 11. He finally appeared on March 12.
Using ether as an aid, Crowley taught Grant astral projection until he could obtain similar, although less spectacular, results without drugs.47 He was a good student, and Crowley saw great promise in him. “I am trying to get him to look after me and my work,” he wrote to Louis Wilkinson. “A definite gift from the Gods.”48 Grant, however, was far from home and pining for his lady love; in addition, as he recalls, “I was unable ever to acquire a practical approach to mundane affairs … which so exasperated Crowley.”49 Thus, AC’s patience for Grant wore thin. When Grant disingenuously tried convincing his employer to return to London, Crowley mused, “The murderer’s puzzle, how to get rid of the body, has been on my nerves for the last two days.”50 Two weeks later, Crowley’s tongue sharpened and, during an argument with Grant, he blurted, “You are the most consummate BORE that the world has yet known. And this at 20!”51 Later, however, Crowley reflected, “I feel that I may have treated him too severely.”52
On April 11, Crowley certified McMurtry a IX° member of OTO and owner of twenty-five percent of the copyright of “Aleister Explains Everything,” now officially Magick without Tears. A greater honor fell on him when Crowley expressed his umbrage over the situation in California and the contradictory accounts he received by mail. “I may be the world’s greatest magician, but I need some facts to go on!”
“Well,” Grady suggested, “you know me, and I know them. When I get home, I’ll survey the situation and write you a report.” Crowley thereupon appointed him Sovereign Grand Inspector General of the Order.53
The months that followed were tumultuous: President Roosevelt died on April 12 during his fourth term in office, Russian troops entered Berlin eight days later, Mussolini was assassinated on April 28, and Hitler committed suicide shortly thereafter. The Allies announced victory in Europe on May 8.
Days after Hitler was announced dead, AC gave Grant the sketch that had accompanied his commentary on “The Voice of the Silence” in the blue Equinox. Then, on May 14, Grant announced that he was returning to London. This angered Crowley, but also came as a bit of a relief.
In London he had been A1; here he broke down altogether. Memory went west; you couldn’t trust him to do anything; he would leave me with the impression that he had done it when he had shelved it or forgotten altogether. Then, silly things like signing & posting letters that should have come to me fair-copied for revision & signature. He got worse every week.54
After returning to London, Grant helped AC oversee business there. May 16, the day of Grant’s departure, would be the last time he would see Crowley alive. That June, AC complained to Wilkinson that he was still “dog-tired trying to clean up after Grant!”55
It was difficult for Crowley to fault him for wanting to be with his love. Looking back over his own romantic conquests, Crowley listed eighty names he could recall and saw how devoid of true love most of them were. “Henceforth,” he solemnly vowed, “I, Perdurabo, whose benign bum now permits him to stroll the streets of Hastings, shall never fail to tip my hat to every courting couple I encounter.”56
During the goings-on with Grant and McMurtry, the Occult Review published a six-page appreciation of AC titled “Aleister Crowley, Poet and Occultist.” Its author, Frederick Henry Amphlett Micklewright (1908–1992), was an Anglican priest (1935) and fellow of the Royal Historical Society who had been educated at Oxford and the Anglican theological college Ripon Hall. Interested in unusual forms of religion, he contributed a series of articles to the Occult Review during the 1940s; his article on Crowley was quite laudatory:
It is not always the case that the poems of occultists are essential to an understanding of their work. But Aleister Crowley is fundamentally an artist. He is a creative personality, expressing his individuality in terms of rhythm. His sense of the rhyth
mic, which ultimately implies the sense of a fundamental beauty, is aptly expressed whether in prose or in verse; his art is a necessary entrance to an understanding of his occultism.57
Crowley might have missed the article had W. B. Crow not asked if he’d seen the latest issue. Crowley responded, “I have not seen a copy of the Occult Review, unless by accident, since [Ralph] Shirley left it [in 1925]. I did not know that it printed anything serious at all nowadays.”58 Even so, it appears from his diary that AC did not see the article until 1946. He was very pleased, writing to Crow that Amphlett Micklewright “has done a supreme thing; he has shown a coherent and consistent pattern in my work from first to last.… He has shown me what I didn’t know about myself.”59 He told his student Frederick Mellinger that it was the “best thing that’s happened to me in 100 years!”60
The world would never be the same after July 16, 1945. That day, the first atomic bomb test occurred in New Mexico; weeks later on August 6, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Crowley pondered if this was the war engine mentioned in The Book of the Law, writing to Louis Wilkinson, “The ‘Atomic Bomb’ is interesting, not only because of Liber AL III.7–8, but because one of the men who were working on it was for some time at the Abbey in Cefalù.”61 After the second bomb fell on Nagasaki, AC left a cryptic entry in his diary:
O.T.O. Ophidian vibrations. Non-filterable virus. X-ray dermatitis. “Galloping cancer.” Amrita. NUITh Nitrogen Uranium Iodine (& sea-life) Theriumm = New Atom 666. Atomic No.: 93. H A D 6 plus 5 A D = He.62
A cold, black sky scowled at the world on New Year’s Day 1946. Professor E. M. Butler looked out her train window at the turbulent sea, too nervous to prepare to interview Aleister Crowley for her book The Myth of the Magus. Crowley’s reputation was as enormous as it was sinister, and she feared the inclement weather was somehow wound up with his evil.
Eliza Marian Butler (1885–1959) was the third of seven Anglo-Irish children to Theobald Fitzwalter Butler (1845–1914) and Catherine Elizabeth Barraclough (d. 1946). Educated at Newnham College (Cambridge) and Bonn University, she became a lecturer at her alma mater in 1914, where she would remain for much of her career, writing books on language and literature, especially German. From 1936 she was professor of German at Manchester University, but returned to Cambridge in 1945, where she remained until her 1951 retirement. She would be Professor Emeritus at Cambridge and receive an honorary doctorate in literature from Oxford in 1958.63
She was surprised to arrive at Hastings to find not the Prince of Darkness but a polite and friendly scarecrow of a septuagenarian. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” he greeted her. “And a Happy New Year to you, Miss Butler.” After Crowley’s lunchtime discussion of Thelema failed to impress her, they retired to his room for cognac and the interview. She did it in two sessions: from lunch until high tea, then again that evening.
Butler had a structuralist model of the myth of the magus, much as Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) had developed the traditional pattern of the hero myth. According to her research, great magi usually claimed a supernatural birth, with a childhood surrounded by portents and perils, and so on. Crowley denied these traits but admitted having undergone initiations. He cited the GD and his contact with Aiwass as instances of these. When Butler asked about a period of questing to distant lands for occult knowledge, Crowley listed his voyages to Mexico, India, Ceylon, Burma, Egypt, and China.
“Have you had a contest with a rival magician?” she asked him.
“Never,” he answered proudly. “I have no rival.”
When asked about having blinding visions of beauty, glory, and truth, Crowley readily agreed. He took up The Book of the Law and read:
Behold! the rituals of the old time are black. Let the evil ones be cast away; let the good be purged by the prophet! Then shall this Knowledge go aright. I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star. I am Life and the giver of Life, yet therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death. I am the Magician and the Exorcist.
When Butler looked up from her note-taking, she saw him crying. Wiping his eyes with his hand, he whispered, “It was a revelation of love.”
Crowley was a gentleman, escorting her back to her hotel and paying for her meals at Netherwood; he would later send her Frieda Harris’s “Punch and Judy” sketches as a gift. Butler nevertheless sneaked away from Netherwood early the next morning, shuddering as if she had just vacated a shunned house; she later confessed to Yorke that the Beast had frightened her. His statement “Magic is not a way of life, it is the way of life” echoed menacingly in her head, and she wrote only a couple of sentences about him in The Myth of the Magus.
Ironically, AC described their meeting in an entirely different light: “Professor Butler of Newnham came … and talked (and made me talk) with such sympathy, consideration, and understanding that the day was a dream of joy!”64 It was a pleasant change from his incessant sickness and chronic depression.
He spent the next months correcting Olla, sending the finished proofs to Guys on March 25. When he wrote his old friend Augustus John to request a sketch for the book, the artist gladly obliged and planned to visit that summer. “So glad to hear you keep signing ‘do what thou wilt,’ ” he wrote. “How right you are.”65 With that settled, Crowley took up one other project: prodding Wilkinson to edit a popular edition of The Book of the Law and its comment.
After Helen jilted him in 1945, Jack Parsons transferred his affections to her sister, Sara Elizabeth Northrup (1924–1997). Known as Betty, she was a student at the University of Southern California, although she soon dropped out and moved in with Jack, becoming his partner in sex magick rituals.
In August of 1945, L. Ron Hubbard appeared on the scene. He had not yet written on Scientology, for which he is best known; at this time he was known simply as a science fiction writer and naval lieutenant. Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (1911–1986) was born in Tilden, Nebraska, to a military family and moved around a lot as a child. He attended George Washington University but, more interested in contributing to the school newspaper and literary journals, he left after two years without taking a degree. During the 1930s he published several novels and dozens of short stories in pulp magazines like Astounding Science Fiction and Unknown Worlds, becoming well-known in the science fiction and fantasy communities. He had entered the navy in 1941 and served for four years. When science fiction illustrator Lou Goldstone, a frequent visitor to the mansion on Orange Grove, introduced him to Agape Lodge, Parsons, a fan of science fiction, befriended Hubbard. Together with Betty, they soon founded the company “Allied Enterprises” to buy yachts on the east coast and sail them to California, where they could be resold at a profit.66
Their friendship became strained, however, when Hubbard, although married, began sleeping with Betty. As Parsons described:
About three months ago I met Ron … a writer and explorer of whom I had known for some time.… He is a gentleman; he has red hair, green eyes, is honest and intelligent, and we have become great friends. He moved in with me about two months ago, and although Betty and I are still friendly, she has transferred her sexual affections to Ron.
Although Ron has no formal training in magick, he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field. From some of his experiences I deduce that he is in direct touch with some higher intelligence, possibly his guardian angel. Ron appears to have some sort of highly developed astral vision. He described his angel as a beautiful winged woman with red hair, whom he calls the Empress, and who has guided him through his life, and saved him many times.67
Twice jilted, Parsons began on January 4, 1946, a series of rituals known as the Babalon Working. He wished to summon an air elemental and thereby cause Babalon to be born in this world. The workings involved a variety of systems, including the Enochian tablet of air, the invoking ritual of the pentagram and the Augoeides. In the Mojave Desert on January 18, while conducting another o
f the rituals with Hubbard, Parsons watched the setting sun and declared flatly, “It is done.” Returning to Agape Lodge, Parsons found a new visitor there: Marjorie Cameron. He concluded his ritual had been a success.
Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel (1922–1995) was born on April 22, 1922, in Belle Plaine, Iowa.68 She was the first of four children to a churchgoing family whose father, Hill L. Cameron (1902–1962), was a railroad worker.69 After graduating from Davenport High School in 1940—finding her artistic and mystical bent at odds with her small-town community—she enlisted in the Navy, where she worked in a photographic unit and drew maps. During the war she learned that her brother James, a tail-gunner, had been injured in action and rushed back home to Iowa to be by his side; declared AWOL, she was confined to base from the time of her return until her honorable discharge in 1945. From there she, along with her family, resettled in Pasadena. No longer a map-drawer, she began working as a fashion illustrator. Shortly thereafter she met Jack Parsons.70
For the next nine days, Parsons performed a series of invocations of Babalon, for which Hubbard acted as scribe. Shortly thereafter, on February 28, Parsons was back in the Mojave Desert, where he received The Book of Babalon, ostensibly the fourth chapter to The Book of the Law. When Cameron became pregnant, Parsons concluded she would give birth to Babalon.
Describing his success to Crowley, Parsons attributed his devastating success to “the IX° working with the girl who answered my elemental summons.… I have been in direct touch with One who is most Holy and Beautiful, mentioned in The Book of the Law.”71 AC’s reply was lukewarm:
I am particularly interested in what you have written to me about the elemental, because for some little time past I have been endeavoring to intervene personally in this matter on your behalf. I would however have you recall Lévi’s aphorism: ‘The love of the Magus for such things is insensate and destroys him.’72
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