[Well, we made it to the
final segment of “‘The Wickedest Man In The World’: Aleister Crowley.” When I was composing the post, I wondered if
I’d ever get here—and I wonder if you felt the same thing while you were
reading it. (As I’ve said from Part 2 on,
if you haven’t read the first five installments, I urge you to go back to 28 September
and start with Part 1. The sections were
posted at three-day intervals and I explain, define, and identify ideas, terms,
and people along the way that recur later.)
[This is not just the end of
my Crowley post, but the end of the occultist’s life. Part of what’s astonishing about the saga of
Aleister Crowley is the tortuous route by which he got to his end. As you’re about to see, The Beast didn’t straighten
out his path even as he arrived at the glide path to his final days.]
When the libel suit over Laughing
Torso ended (Part 5) and Aleister Crowley exited the courthouse, a 19-year-old
Cornish woman ran up to him and said, weeping, “This verdict is the wickedest
thing since the Crucifixion. Is there
anything I can do to help?” Deidre
Patricia Maureen Doherty offered to be the mother of the occultist’s child.
“Patsy” Doherty (1915-92) was the step-daughter of a French
peer: she was the daughter of Phyllis Marian Gotch (1882-1963) whose second
husband was André, Marquis de Verdières (b. c. 1892; d. ?). This made Doherty’s mother a marquise, a
title she used most of the rest of her life.
(Gotch divorced de Verdières in 1935 and married for the third time the
following year.) In March 1937, the
mystic wrote a poem entitled “To Deidre in Labour” and on 2 May, Doherty gave
birth to a son, Randall Gair Doherty (d. 2002), whom Crowley nicknamed
“Aleister Ataturk.”
The occultist considered the boy his son and heir and
Aleister Ataturk seems to have inherited (or assumed) The Beast’s idiosyncratic
ways, adopting several aliases, including Count Charles Edward D’Arquires. He never took to Crowley’s philosophical
beliefs, however, and wasn’t active in A∴A∴, the Ordo Templi Orientis, the
Lamp of Invisible Light, or any of his father’s societies. Young Ataturk went to school in Scotland and,
like his father, traveled widely (including extended sojourns in the United
States), but he considered West Cornwall, his mother’s birthplace, his real
home.
We’ve seen that The Beast wasn’t much of a husband in any
sense of the word, and he proved not to be much of a father, either. After Ataturk was born, Doherty returned with
him to West Cornwall. She kept in touch
with Crowley and she and Ataturk saw him in London from time to time. On 2 May 1947, Ataturk’s 10th birthday, they
came to Hastings, where the magus had moved, to visit him. Old, sick, and alone—The Beast was seven
months from his death—he was pleased for the three-day visit.
In 1936, the magus wrote Equinox
of the Gods, which contained a facsimile of the handwritten manuscript of The Book of the Law as dictated to him
by Aiwass, the messenger of Horus, in 1904 while he was in Egypt (see Part 2). It was published in September as volume 3,
number 3 of The Equinox. His first book in three years, Equinox of the Gods sold well enough
(for a change) to require a second printing.
The next year, the year his son was born and his then-current lover,
Patsy Doherty, left him for the Cornish coast, the mystic gave a series of
lectures on yoga in London. His expenses
were now being paid by OTO’s Agape Lodge in L.A.
In the waning years of Germany’s Weimar Republic, Adolf
Hitler, as head of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP, more
commonly known as the Nazi Party), the largest
party in the Reichstag (parliament), was appointed Chancellor (prime
minister) of the German Reich in January 1933.
Crowley’s friend Martha Küntzel (Part 5), who was also an ardent admirer
of Hitler, had sent Der Führer a copy of Crowley’s The Book of the Law.
Küntzler was popular among the German aristocracy and wielded some
influence in the country and she believed
that Hitler might convert to Thelema and convinced Crowley of this. The Beast was intrigued with Nazism and,
influenced by Küntzler, accepted her conviction. When the Nazis banned Thelema, abolished A∴A∴
and the German OTO, and imprisoned Karl Germer (Part 5), who’d emigrated to the
United States in 1926 but returned to Germany in 1935 when his U.S. visa
expired, Crowley attacked Hitler as a black magician.
Germer was arrested in Leipzig by the Gestapo in February
1935 and imprisoned in Berlin. He was
allowed to write and work, despite the fact that he’d been arrested for his
religious beliefs and for teaching Thelema.
Because Germer’s wife was a U.S. citizen, the Germans decided he
deserved harsher treatment and he was transferred to a concentration camp. His wife urged the U.S. government and its
diplomatic representatives in Berlin to apply for Germer’s release, but the
German government kept moving him from one camp to another, even transferring
him to French control after the occupation of France. Finally, in February 1941, having been issued
a new U.S. visa as the spouse of a citizen, Germer returned to the United
States. There, he continued to raise
funds for Crowley and support the occultist’s activities.
Küntzel had fallen under Hitler’s spell as soon as he gained
prominence as the leader of National Socialism; as early as 1926, she asserted
that Hitler was her “magical son,” or pupil.
Crowley had told Küntzel in 1925 that the first country to adopt The Book of the Law as its official
principles would become the world’s leading nation. This prompted Küntzel to send the Führer a
copy of her translation of the book, believing that he was the country’s rising
leader and that Crowley was the prophet of National Socialism.
She saw in Nazism the application of Thelemic tenets and
believed, without any evidence, that Crowley was the spiritual father of Hitler
and National Socialism. Of course, Der
Fuhrer didn’t see things Küntzel’s way and outlawed not only Thelema, A∴A∴,
and OTO, but all occult orders and banned their books and writings. The Gestapo brought Küntzel in for
interrogation in 1937 and seized all her papers concerning Thelema, A∴A∴,
and OTO.
Still, Küntzel never relinquished her devotion to Nazism,
but Crowley, who’d harbored a fantasy in the ’30s of serving Hitler and even
acting as the Führer’s behind-the-throne deputy, running Germany on the
Reichskanzler’s behalf, reversed his support for Hitler upon the arrest of
Germer and the abolition of the occult orders.
His copy of Hitler Speaks, the
British title for the 1940 translation of Gespräche mit Hitler (Conversations with Hitler; U.S.
title: Voice of Destruction) by Hermann Rauschning (1887-1982), a former
Nazi who’d turned against the Party in 1934, was heavily annotated with
comments on the corollaries between the Führer’s ideas and his own. (Rauschning’s book was a popular seller when
it came out, even abroad, but subsequent scholarship has cast severe doubt on
its credibility.)
Crowley even
believed that Hitler had plagiarized many of the magus’s concepts, though
Hitler had written Mein Kampf (published in 1925-26) starting in 1923,
some years before Küntzel had translated any of Crowley’s writings into
German. There were unconfirmed reports
that Crowley tried to contact Hitler several times during World War II. There’s no evidence, however, that either he
or Küntzel had ever met or spoken with Der Führer. Any correspondence between
Hitler’s National Socialism and Crowley’s various philosophies, rather than
demonstrating that The Beast had influenced Der Führer, indicated how Crowley’s
beliefs aligned with Nazi doctrine.
After he became
disillusioned with Hitler and Nazism, Crowley began writing harshly against the
German leader and his Party. Some Crowley commentators say this reversal
was because the occultist saw them for what they really were, but I suspect a
significant motivator for it was the fact that Hitler had rejected Crowley. (Crowley wasn’t in Germany during this
period, but he was effectively banned by the Führer’s decree against occultists
and occult organizations. So that makes
three countries that excluded The Great Beast from their territories.)
When the Second
World War broke out in Europe in September 1939, Aleister Crowley offered his
services to the intelligence branch of the British Admiralty. The Naval Intelligence Division turned him
down—despite his association with several figures in the British intelligence field
such as Dennis Wheatley (1897-1977),
prolific writer of thrillers and occult novels whose Gregory Sallust series was
an inspirations for Fleming’s James Bond stories; Roald Dahl (1916-90), a writer,
fighter pilot, and RAF intelligence officer in Washington, D.C., reporting to
Winston Churchill; Ian Fleming (1908-64),
after the war the popular author of the Bond spy novels; and Maxwell Knight (1900-68),
a spymaster reputedly the model for the James Bond character “M,” Agent 007’s
superior.
According to
records, Crowley’s name came up several times as a possible asset for an
intelligence operation, but his notoriety and the fact that he was already
suspected in Germany of being a British spy, always meant that the notion was
ultimately rejected. He did, however,
contend that he devised the “V” hand sign that Churchill made famous as a
symbol of “victory,” though no record exists to support The Beast’s claim. The BBC has always been credited with
suggesting this gesture to Churchill.
By 1940, the occultist’s asthma had returned, but his
German-made medication was no longer available in Britain and he returned to
using heroin as a remedy, reviving his addiction. During the London Blitz, the German bombing
campaign against Britain in 1940 and ’41, Crowley decamped for Torquay, a
seashore resort town on the English Riviera, the southern Devon coast of the
English Channel. He was briefly
hospitalized there for his asthma before returning to London.
In October 1943, Crowley was visited in London by a young
U.S. Army captain, Grady L. McMurtry (1918-85), who was stationed in England
between September 1943 and the middle of 1944.
McMurtry, who’d lived in California, site of the Agape Lodge, was a
Thelemite and, since 1941, a member of OTO.
An officer of the Ordnance Department—the military logistics branch that
procured and supplied weapons and munitions to the army’s combat
forces—McMurtry saw combat in Normandy on D-Day (June 1944) and in the
liberations of France (June-September 1944) and Belgium (September 1944), and
he took part in the occupation of Germany (from June 1945). The young officer had decided to take the
opportunity of being in London to call on the master and Crowley was so taken
with the 25-year-old that he advanced McMurtry from the I° of OTO directly to
the IX°, skipping all the levels in between.
McMurtry became the magus’s personal pupil and Crowley
proclaimed him the successor to Karl Germer—who’d already been designated The
Beast’s immediate follower as the Frater Superior of the Order. (When Crowley died in December 1947, Germer
became the leader of OTO until his own death in October 1962. Because of internal strife and internecine
disputes, McMurtry, who’d been designated Crowley’s representative in the U.S.
when he returned to California in April 1946, didn’t invoke Crowley’s authority
until 1969, when he took charge of the remains of OTO and strove to effect its
revival until his death in July 1985.)
The magus’s major piece of work of his last years was The Book of Thoth, a volume on the tarot
deck of divination cards. (The origins
and meanings of the tarot are hazy and too complex to go into here. Suffice it to say that the cards appeared
around the middle of the 15th century in various parts of Europe for playing
games. They became associated with the
occult when at the end of the 18th century, they began to be used to predict
the future.) The book was accompanied by
a set of the cards, designed by artist Frieda Harris (1877-1962), whom Crowley
met in 1938.
Crowley conceived of the project at that time and went in
search of an artist to design the cards.
He was introduced to Harris, a member of the Co-Masons, a branch of
Freemasonry open to women. She was also
a follower of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy (see my profile on Steiner,
referenced in Parts 2 and 4). The
occultist began instructing Harris (whose husband, Percy Harris, was a member
of parliament for the Liberal Party; after he was made a baronet in 1932, his
wife called herself Lady Frieda Harris) in the philosophies of his orders and
other occult lore.
In their collaboration on the Thoth tarot deck, which became
one of the most popular tarot decks worldwide, Crowley provided written
descriptions of the cards and rough sketches and Harris created the final designs
based on her readings of the magus’s books and other writings and her study of
the tenets of A∴A∴, OTO, and Thelema. (Thoth, readers will recall, is the ancient
Egyptian god of, among other things, wisdom and magic; see Part 1.) The tarot project was intended to take six
months, but it ran from 1938 until 1943; though the book was published in 1944 (in
The Equinox, volume 3, number 5),
neither Crowley nor Harris lived to see the cards published in 1969 (by
OTO). Crowley’s designs, which started
out to be traditional, if updated, tarot depictions, ultimately incorporated,
at Harris’s urging, images from his own philosophies, and such diverse fields
as science, philosophy, and various occult beliefs.
Normally when a sponsor commissions an artist to create
something, the sponsor pays, or otherwise compensates, the artist for her
work. In the case of Aleister Crowley,
constantly broke in his last years, and Frieda Harris, she paid him a monthly
stipend—and he got his and Harris’s friend Greta Valentine, a London socialite,
to put him up at her house on the luxurious and prestigious Hyde Park Crescent. Harris used her contacts in British society
to find the magus financing, publication for the cards and the book,
exhibitions for the tarot paintings, and a published catalogue of the
project. Harris insisted on remaining
largely anonymous (she got credit as “artist-executant” in The Book of Thoth and Crowley praised her lavishly in the
introduction) and the agreement with Crowley entitled her to the short end of a
66-33 split of the proceeds of the work.
Though her commitment to the occult was minimal, Harris
became devoted to Crowley and remained so for the rest of his life. The Beast’s relationship with his mother was
fraught, but aside from her, Harris was probably the woman with whom Crowley
had his strongest, longest-lasting, and most platonic connection of his life. Harris’s letters to Crowley were fond and
compassionate—though his to her were largely pleas for money. Just shy of 60 when they met, Harris was one
of the few real friends Crowley, a man who usually made enemies, had,
especially among women.
In April 1944, the magus moved briefly to a village in
Buckinghamshire, about 40 miles northwest of London. Then in January 1945, he moved again, and for
the last time, to Hastings, Sussex, 55 miles southeast of the capital on the
Channel coast. There he moved into an
old Victorian mansion on a wooded four-acre plot converted into a boarding
house called Netherwood. In March 1945,
Crowley hired a young student of the occult, Kenneth Grant (1924-2011) to act
as his secretary and assistant. Living
in poverty, the magus couldn’t pay Grant in money so he traded the young man’s
services for instruction in magic, and Grant moved into a cottage on the grounds
of Netherwood.
Grant had been studying the occult since he was 14 and
joined the British Army at 18 in 1942, though he never saw overseas duty. (He was invalided out of the service for an
unspecified medical condition in 1944.)
His efforts to contact Crowley, whose writings he’d read, were quite
persistent, finally resulting in his obtaining the new address of the master’s
publisher and sending them a letter to forward to Crowley. He and the magus first met in December 1944
when Crowley was living in Buckinghamshire; then they met briefly several more
times and exchanged letters. When Grant
moved to Hastings, he lived in the Netherwood cottage for several months and
looked after Crowley’s correspondence and other needs; in exchange, he read
freely in the magus’s extensive library of occult materials and performed
ceremonial magic with the master.
Crowley initiated Grant into OTO directly to an advanced
level and even contemplated training Grant to look after the British OTO when
Crowley no longer could. Dispute this
seemingly close relationship between master and student, the two men argued and
Crowley, as he often did, became annoyed with his disciple when he didn’t agree
with The Beast unquestioningly. After a
row, Crowley shouted abuses at the young man and in May 1945, Grant announced
he would be leaving Netherwood to return to London. Grant and Crowley continued to correspond and
Grant occasionally looked after some of Crowley’s affairs in London, but the
two never saw one another again. Grant
attended Crowley’s funeral, however, and in 1970, he started his own occult
order, the Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis (later renamed the Typhonian Order).
Many of The Beast’s associates came to call on him in his
final months at Netherwood. His last
mistress, Patsy Doherty, and his son Ataturk, visited for his last few months,
arriving at Netherwood that summer.
Frieda Harris came and sketched the magus on his deathbed; she also paid
for a private nurse as Crowley had no funds to hire one. The Beast’s condition worsened rapidly and on
1 December 1947, at the age of 72, Aleister (né Edward Alexander) Crowley died
of cardiomyopathy and chronic bronchitis, complicated by pleurisy. On 5 December, his remains were cremated in
Brighton at a private ceremony.
Crowley’s ashes were shipped to Karl Germer, who had been unable to
visit Crowley or attend the funeral because he was denied a British visa, and
the inheritor of the magus’s leadership of OTO buried the cremains in his
Hampton, New Jersey, garden.
The Brighton service consisted of reading from The Book of the Law, Magick, the Gnostic Mass, and other of
Crowley’s writings, including “Hymn to Pan.”
The few reporters present couldn’t make sense of the funeral and
described the rite as a “Black Mass.”
When it was also reported that the physician who’d attended The Beast
had himself died at 58 within 24 hours of Crowley’s passing, talk of a curse
began to circulate.
OTO, A∴A∴, and Thelema all still exist to
one extent or another, with various contemporary organizations claiming
Aleister Crowley’s original orders as their origins and progenitors. The Great Beast still has influence in
today’s pop culture as well, inspiring (to a certain extent) rock groups like
Led Zeppelin, Ozzy Osbourne, and the Beatles. (His face appears on the Beatles’ 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
album cover and Osbourne released a song in 1980 called “Mr. Crowley.”) Last June, I saw a new play, Dave Malloy’s
one-act a capella opera Octet (see my ROT report posted 10 June) in which Crowley gets a passing
mention.
In 2005, the WB network started airing a series called Supernatural
(still running, now on the CW network). It’s about two brothers who seek
out and kill supernatural monsters—sort of a Route 66 with demons
and vampires or Kolchak on the road. In an early season, the show introduced a
character named Fergus Crowley, designated the King of Hell (he was killed off
several seasons later). The writers named the character after Aleister Crowley,
though that’s never mentioned on the show (and everyone pronounces the name to
rhyme with ‘jowly,’ not ‘holy’).
It’s hard to believe in the 21st century that Aleister
Crowley could have the influence on European culture that he did. In his lifetime, the newspapers were full of
stories about him, some apocryphal and others accurate—but his name was spread
widely. His reputation was also widely
known, from London, across Europe to Asia and North Africa and west to North
America. He may have made enemies
wherever he went, but he also had devoted followers. He may have had few real friends, but
supporters came to his aid when he ran out of money—even if he did little to
support himself. This remained true to
the end of Crowley’s life even though many who gravitated to the mystic
suffered terrible fates—abandonment, poverty, madness, and even suicide.
It’s even harder to fathom that his influence would continue
to echo down to the present day, especially among young people. (My friend Leo Shapiro, from whom, indirectly,
I learned about the occultist, was only 23 when he was reading Crowley in Taos,
New Mexico, in 1969. Dave Malloy was 46
when Octet opened Off-Broadway in
2019.) The character of “Crowley”
appeared on Supernatural a little
less than 10 years ago. His books are
still in print and for sale at Barnes & Noble and on Amazon and people
still visit the ruin of the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù (that film on the
subject was released less than a dozen
years ago). I don’t know how seriously
anyone takes Crowley and his concepts, but he and they are still out there.
The magus’s life may read like fantasy fiction—and much of
it may well have been invented or embellished by Crowley himself—but he was,
nevertheless, real. He may have been the
world’s greatest charlatan and fabulist, or he may have been a self-deluded true
believer. The record’s there, but it doesn’t
settle that question. Readers will just
have to judge for themselves.
[Trying to winnow Crowley’s
bio down to a manageable length and keep it digestible was exceedingly
hard. I said that I’d simplified my
explanation of Thelema when I came to it, but the truth is that I simplified everything. I
left out details that I decided were less significant than others, and I
skipped many of the occultist’s many acquaintances who came and went with
little effect on the progress of his life.
In several cases, I referred to people merely as “a friend” or “a supporter”
without ever giving their names. Heaven
knows, there are so many I did identify that it’s hard to keep track of them as
it is. The magus’s life was more
peripatetic than I related as well—I omitted some of his travels and
destinations to keep things clear for readers.
[Obviously, my decisions were
based solely on my own reading of the circumstances and I’m sure some will
disagree with my choices. That’s the
breaks, I’m afraid. There are dozens,
even scores of books on Crowley—and if you include the books on his
philosophical and magical beliefs, the number increases into the hundreds, I’m
sure. The fact is that none of the books
covers exactly the same ground, so if I assembled all the different incidents,
events, personalities, and concepts in an effort to be comprehensive, this
wouldn’t be a 6-part blog post. It’d be
a multi-volume set of tomes! I just hope
I didn’t simplify the tale that was Aleister Crowley’s life and work so much
that it seems ordinary.]
