With Germer, he was more candid: “Apparently he … is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts.”73 In the midst of escalating problems with Agape Lodge, Crowley gave McMurtry the following document:
This is to authorize Frater Hymenaeus Alpha (Capt. Grady L. McMurtry) to take charge of the whole work of the Order in California to reform the Organization in pursuance of his report of January 25, ’46 e.v. subject to the approval of Frater Saturnus (Karl J. Germer). This authorization is to be used only in emergency.74
He followed this letter with another stating, “These presents are to appoint Frater Hymenaeus Alpha, Grady Louis McMurtry IX° O.T.O., as Our representative in the United States of America and his authority is to be considered as Ours, subject to the approval, revision, or veto of Our Viceroy, Karl Johannes Germer IX° O.T.O.”75 These documents assured Crowley that if everything in Pasadena crashed, McMurtry was empowered to step in and put it back together. “I think it is best to leave as much in your hands as possible,” Crowley told him, “as you are more or less on the spot and appear to be full of youth and energy as ever.”76
The time soon arrived for Allied Enterprises to purchase its first yacht, and Jack agreed that Ron and Betty would take $10,000 of his money to the East Coast, buy the boat, and sail it back to California. Unbeknownst to Parsons, Hubbard had asked the Chief of Naval Personnel for permission to sail to South America and China; he had no intention of returning. After a couple of weeks passed with no word from his partners, Parsons deduced this for himself. Not to be taken in, Jack took a train to Miami and discovered that Allied Enterprises had purchased three boats in all: a yacht plus two schooners that they bought on mortgages exceeding $12,000. He tracked down the schooners but could find no trace of Ron or Betty.
Several days later, a phone call from Howard Bond’s Yacht Harbor informed Parsons that Ron and Betty’s yacht had sailed at 5 o’clock earlier that afternoon. It was now 8 p.m. and he could do little about the situation. So he evoked Bartzabel, the spirit of Mars, to stop his dishonest partners. As if in response, a squall struck the yacht off the coast, tearing off its sails and forcing it back to port, where Parsons had them arrested. The Circuit Court of Dade County, Florida, slapped them with a restraining order that prevented their selling the boats or leaving Miami until the courts settled the charges. At this time, Jack wrote despondently to his “Dear Father” at Netherwood:
Here I am in Miami pursuing the children of my folly. I have them well tied up. They cannot move without going to jail. However, most of the money has already been dissipated. I will be lucky to salvage $3,000 to $5,000.77
On July 11, Hubbard and Northrup agreed to a deal drawn up by Parsons’s lawyer: Jack got the yacht and one of the schooners. Ron and Betty kept the other schooner, split his legal costs, and signed a promissory note of $2,900. Parsons returned to Pasadena, feeling fleeced but having salvaged as much as he possibly could. Hubbard would later claim that he was working undercover for the FBI to break up an immoral secret society.
Jack Parsons (1914–1952). (photo credit 22.4)
Lilliput magazine wanted Aleister Crowley to contribute an article to their June issue and sent their assistant editor, John Symonds (1914–2006), to meet with him on Friday, May 3. Symonds was born on March 12, 1914, in Battersea, London, to a single mother, Lithuanian Jewish immigrant Lily Sapzells, who ran a boarding house in Margate. He was estranged from his father, architect and antiques expert Robert Wemyss Symonds, who had married and refused to acknowledge John as his son. Spending his spare time in the British Museum reading room, Symonds’s first job was as a journalist for the Picture Post, where he befriended Dylan Thomas and poet-novelist Stephen Spender, whom Crowley had met back in 1931. During the war he was exempted from military service and edited Lilliput magazine; in 1946 he completed his first novel, the gothic fantasy William Waste.78 Clifford Bax had encouraged him to visit Crowley, saying, “He will die soon and then you would have lost your chance.” Symonds—living at 84 Boundary Road, Hampstead, the very house where Victor Neuburg had died in 1940—already had an interest in AC. So he and astrologer Rupert Gleadow (1909–1974) journeyed to Netherwood. Crowley greeted them in the drawing room with his customary “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” As Symonds and Gleadow checked him out, AC incited them by stating his disbelief in astrology. At one point, he examined his small, bony arm and explained that he needed an injection of heroin. “Do you mind?” he asked.
“Not at all,” Symonds answered. “Can I help?”
Smirking, Crowley related the squeamish reaction of a visiting army officer—most likely either McMurtry or Mellinger—when he went to the bathroom to inject himself. “I left the bedroom door open, and from behind the bathroom door I bent down to the keyhole and began to squeal like a stuck pig. When I came out, I found my poor friend had almost fainted.”79
Their visit ended with Crowley asking him, “Do you play chess?”
“No,” answered Symonds. “I don’t, but I know how to.”
“I wish I did,” he deadpanned. “I’ve been trying to learn for the last sixty years,” then presented each of them with a copy of the blue paper-covered Book of the Law published by the Church of Thelema.
Shortly thereafter, Lilliput received his story “The Young Man and the Post Office” (printed as “How to Tell an Englishman from an American”).80
His publication plans forged ahead, with Lady Harris designing a cover for Olla, which was due out that summer. Crowley realized this plan was optimistic and, receiving the proofs on June 6, knew its publication date would be later than anticipated. He nevertheless proceeded with other projects. “My main object in this revived burst of activity is to get my principal works published somehow—anyhow—so as to have them in a definite form while I still encumber this planet,” Crowley explained to John Symonds,81 who had offered to help however he could. Although Symonds preferred Magick without Tears, AC wanted the long-completed Liber Aleph to be his next book in print, with a Christmas release date every bit as tentative as that for Olla.82
His worsening eyesight, however, interrupted the Great Work. As far back as April, he had complained to McMurtry, “My eyes are really bothering me so much that I feel totally unable to deal with your letter as I should like.”83 Glasses did not help. A London optician, Dr. McGowan, diagnosed him with amblyopia or “lazy eye,” and insisted Crowley quit smoking “immediately and forever” in order to save his vision. That noon, Crowley ceremonially renounced tobacco. Although optical and dental problems continued to plague Crowley, his vision had improved so much by July 20 that he “Decided to risk half a pipe at 6 p.m. chiefly to make sure that this did not bring about an immediate relapse.”84 By September, Crowley happily noted, “Eyes quite o.k. so far, despite moderate resumption of smoking.”85
When Augustus John did Crowley’s portrait that summer, it was the first time he had seen the mage in decades. Frankly, the sight of his shrunken friend, with vacant eyes staring out of his wrinkled, gray head, frightened John; only his sharp mind retained its youthful vigor. “A glorious sketch!” Crowley congratulated the artist, who offered to help Crowley by arranging for collotyping by Chiswick Press himself.
He gave the Olla proofs a final inspection, setting its publication date for December 22. He printed fifty prospectuses and on December 11 sold the first copy. On December 22, 1946, at 10:54 a.m., the moment of the winter solstice, Olla: An Anthology of Sixty Years of Song was officially published in an edition of five hundred copies. The book listed Symonds’s 121 Adelaide Road address as OTO’s place of publication. “I think of it as a unique publication,” Crowley remarked. “I doubt whether anyone else can boast—if it is a boast—of 60 years of song.”86 The Occult Review concurred, devoting four pages to reviewing what would be the last book he would publish. In his review, Nicholas Sylvester introduced Crowley as “one of the foremost, as well as one of the most logical, investigators in the fie
ld” of magic, and said of Olla, “This collection of poems is the work of a great occultist and a great poet,” predicting “it may well prove that he will be remembered in the future as a poet of outstanding genius and ability.”87
Crowley continued making regular payments to his Hastings printer, who promised to have page proofs of Liber Aleph ready by the end of May.
When James Laver (1899–1975)—art historian, museum curator, and author of books on many subjects, including a recent one on the prophet Nostradamus88—accepted Crowley’s invitation and visited him at Netherwood on March 27, he found the Mage sickly. He was on a special diet and left his boiled egg uneaten in favor of brandy and perique. Blood dotted his shirt sleeves, and only an injection of heroin cleared his dull eyes and perked him up. During their conversations on magick, Crowley made the insightful comment, “Ah, you realize that magick is something we do to ourselves. But it is more convenient to assume the objective existence of an angel who gives us new knowledge than to allege that our invocation has awakened a supernormal power in ourselves.”89 In his diary, Crowley recorded the day, “Most delightful interview, A.C. at his best.”90
Arnold Crowther (1909–1974) was another in the carnival of visitors who—in the tradition of Symonds, Butler, and Laver—came to Netherwood to see the quickly decaying mage, Aleister Crowley. Crowther was neither a disciple nor detractor; and, although he was a magician, it was not in the same manner as the Beast. His magic was sleight of hand, and he only knew of Crowley through the media and a discarded copy of Magick in Theory and Practice that had been given to him during one of his World War II performances for the army. He was also a ventriloquist, puppeteer, and puppet-maker who entertained the like of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret at Buckingham Palace.91 When, after one of his shows, someone asked him, “Are you that awful man?,” he realized the similarity between the names Arnold Crowther and Aleister Crowley. His curiosity piqued, he arranged to visit on May 1. He brought with him his friend Gerald Brousseau Gardner (1884–1964), a retired civil servant fascinated by magic and witchcraft. In later years, Crowther would become inolved in Gardner’s revival of paganism.
Gardner was born near Liverpool to a middle-class family, proprietors of the United Kingdom’s oldest hardwood importers, Joseph Gardner & Sons. He spent much of his life living abroad in exotic locations like the Canary Islands, Ceylon, Borneo, and Malaya. The cultures to which he was exposed—particularly their magical practices and their weaponry—fascinated him. Becoming an amateur anthropologist, he published a book on Keris and Other Malay Weapons in 1936.92 That same year, at age fifty-two, he retired and settled back in England. Here, he joined the Folkore Society and contributed to its journal, and also became involved in groups based on Rosicrucianism and witchcraft.93
May 1, 1947, was the first of four visits for Gardner, who got along well with Crowley. Beast admitted him into OTO as Brother Scire (“To know”), advancing him to VII° and authorizing him to get OTO going again in England. “We are getting a Camp of Minerval started during the summer if plans go as at present arranged,” Crowley reported excitedly to Germer.94 Alas, Gardner never used his charter, explaining, “I tried to start an order, but I got ill and had to leave the country.”95
Two years later, Gardner would publish the novel High Magic’s Aid through Atlantis Bookshop. Since the eighteenth-century Witchcraft Act made the practice of witchcraft illegal, the title page bore as a pseudonym a garbled version of Gardner’s OTO motto: Scire O.T.O. 4°=7°. Although it was a novel, its description of a witch cult intrigued his readers. “A.C. read part of the MS, and highly approved,” Gardner reported. “He wanted me to put the witch part in full.”96 The book was, in fact, a springboard for introducing witchcraft to the world. Gardner, according to apocryphal reports, had paid Crowley $1,500, or £300, to write a pagan grimoire—the Book of Shadows—for his witchcraft revival;97 however, no record of such an arrangement exists in Crowley’s letters or diaries. The truth, according to long-time friend and student Doreen Valiente, is that Gardner borrowed liberally from various works, including Leland’s Gospel of the Witches98 and the works of his friend AC.99
Gardnerian witchcraft, particularly its early forms, clearly draws heavily from Crowley. The symbolic great rite comes from OTO’s VI° ritual; the pagan catchphrase “Perfect love and perfect trust” is drawn from “The Revival of Magick,” and the Wiccan III° initiation—the highest in the Craft—is essentially a Gnostic Mass. And, for all its evocative beauty, the Charge of the Goddess is largely a paraphrase of The Book of the Law. Even Gardner himself, in a cagey way, admits the lineage of his witchcraft movement: in his second book, Witchcraft Today, he writes:
The great question which people ask is: “How do you know the cult is old?”… The only man I can think of who could have invented the rites was the late Aleister Crowley. When I met him he was most interested to hear that I was a member, and said he had been inside when he was very young, but would not say whether he had rewritten anything or not.… There are indeed certain expressions and certain words which smack of Crowley.100
Gardner’s relationship with Crowley has become quite a fish story over the years, but the simplest account is still the accepted truth: Gardner met Crowley through Arnold Crowther; they met four times in all; Crowley gave Gardner authority, which he valued but never used, to operate an OTO body; and Gardner was so impressed with Crowley’s writings that he borrowed sections when developing the rituals for his coven.101
“A miracle has just happened,” AC wrote excitedly to E. N. Fitzgerald. “The girl Pat and Aleister Ataturk, who I had long since given up for dead, are in London. She phoned me last night. I am delirious with joy. They come here Thursday.”102 Pat and Aleister Ataturk, who just turned ten on May 2, came out from Cornwall to visit Crowley for three days in the middle of May. The visit pleased AC, who, old and lonely, missed his family. He was so happy to see them that on May 22 Crowley instructed members of OTO to ensure Ataturk’s care and education after his father died. He also seized the opportunity to write his son a fatherly letter while he still had the chance. His advice provides great insight into Crowley’s mind, and is quoted in full:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
My dear son,
This is the first letter that your father has ever written to you, so you can imagine that it will be very important, and you should keep it and lay it by your heart.
First of all, let me tell you how intensely happy your reappearance has made me. I feel that I must devote a great deal of my time to watching over your career. I was very pleased to hear that you had decided to learn to read, and that, of course, means learning to write. A word of warning about this. In these last years, children have been taught to write script, as they call it, which is a very bad thing. You must write in such a way that it impresses your personality on the reader.
On top of that, I wanted to tell you something about yourself. One of your Ancestors was Duke of a place called La Querouaille in Brittany, and he came over to England with the Duke of Richmond, who was the original heir to the English throne, to help him turn out the usurper, known to history as Richard III. Since then, our family has made its mark on the world on several occasions, though never anything very brilliant. Now, I want you to take this very seriously. I want you to be very proud of yourself for belonging to such a family. Owing to the French Revolution and various other catastrophes, the Dukedom is no longer in existence legally, but morally it is so, and I want you to learn to behave as a Duke would behave. You must be high-minded, generous, noble, and, above all, without fear. For that last reason, you must never tell a lie, for to do so shows that you are afraid of the person to whom you tell it, and I want you to be afraid of nobody. I think that is all about now.
Now with regard to your education. I want particularly to insist on learning Latin, and I will give you my reasons. Firstly, anyone who knows Latin gains a greater command of and understanding of the English la
nguage than he would otherwise possess. He will be able to reason out for himself the meanings of words with which he is unfamiliar. Secondly, if you are well-grounded in Latin, you are halfway to a knowledge of French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, for all these languages, as well as English, are derived from Latin. Thirdly, the most important of all, much of the unconscious part of your mind has been formed by the writing of Latin and Greek authors. This implies that you should also learn a certain amount of Greek. One of the wisest men of olden time gave this instruction to his pupils: “Know thyself,” and learning Latin helps you to do this for the reason I have already explained above. I regard this as very important indeed. There are a great many people going about today who tell you that Latin is no use to you in the ordinary affairs of life, and that is quite true if you are going to be some commonplace person like a tradesman or a bank clerk. But you are a gentleman, and if you want to be an educated gentlemen, you must know Latin.
There is another matter that I want to put before you. It will be a very good plan if you learn to play chess. For one thing, it is a very good training for the mind, and, for another, it is the only game, of all the games worth playing, which lasts you throughout your life. You can get as much pleasure out of it when you are 60 as when you are 20.
I think that is all I have to say to you today, and I shall expect you to manage somehow to write me an answer. You see, much of the time we shall not be able to communicate face to face, and there will be a good many questions that you will want to ask me, which you cannot do unless you write good English.
That reminds me. There is one more point that I want to impress to you. The best models of English writings are Shakespeare and the Old Testament, especially the Book of Job, the Psalms and Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. It will be a very good thing for you to commit as much as you can both of these books and of the best plays of Shakespeare to memory, so that they form the foundation of your style. In writing English, the most important quality that you can acquire is style. That makes all the difference to anyone who reads what you write, whether you use the best phrases in the best way. You will have to devote some time to grammar and syntax, and also to logic. Logic is the science and the art of using words, and it teaches you to think correctly without making blunders in reasoning, which nowadays everyone is liable to do just because they have not got the training which I am proposing to give you.
Perdurabo Page 78