"The Wickedest Man In The World": Aleister Crowley, Part 6

[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.

Crowley took the occasion to write his first (and reportedly only) letter to his son.  Full of “fatherly” advice à la Aleister Crowley and some family “history,” it was a strange letter to write to a 10-year-old boy.  (The text of the letter is available on line on many sites.  Two are “Scarlet Woman – Babalon,” Forever and a day, https://www.foreverandaday.biz/Pages_info/AleisterWomen.html, under “Deirdre Patricia MacAlpine  nee Doherty”; and “Aleister MacAlpine: Ataturk Crowley: Randall Gair: Count Charles Edward D'Arquires (1937-2002),” artcornwall.org, http://www.artcornwall.org/features/Aleister_Crowley_Ataturk_McAlpine.htm, at the bottom of the page.)

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.]