Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  Crowley was called as first witness on his own behalf. The impression he made upon judge and jury could not have been less effective. On the basis of the trial transcript alone, one might conclude that Crowley was a canny and even—at times—an eloquent witness. But tone and presence worked severely against him, as they so often did in public contexts. The British novelist Anthony Powell was at that time employed as an editor by Duckworth, the publisher of Betty May’s Tiger-Woman. A victory by Crowley would have left Duckworth exposed to a subsequent legal salvo, and so Powell was sent to observe the Hamnett trial. Powell was sufficiently fascinated by Crowley to employ him as the model for the ominous Dr. Trelawney in Powell’s novel series, A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75). But as a witness, Crowley failed to impress Powell, who later observed that the Beast’s performance “was altogether futile. He seemed unable to make up his mind whether to attempt a fusillade of witty sallies in the manner of Wilde (a method to which Crowley’s musical-hall humour was not well adapted), or grovel before the judge, who had made plain from the start that he was not at all keen on magic or magicians. Crowley’s combination of facetiousness and humility could hardly have made a worse impression.”

  Under examination by his own counsel, Crowley did make some initial headway, quoting the two key salutations of The Book of the Law: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” and “Love is the law, love under will.” These, he cogently explained, meant devoting oneself earnestly to one’s true work on earth, which could be discovered through honest self-examination guided by the advice of wise men. When Eddy asked if all this had to do with Black Magic, Crowley replied: “My principles would forbid it, because Black Magic is suicidal.”

  As Powell noted, there was a distinct echo of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 libel action testimony in certain of Crowley’s sallies with opposing counsel. Irony upon irony, Crowley had been—in his Cambridge days—one of those who had pilloried Wilde. On the first day of trial, Hilbery astutely addressed the risible—to the court and jury—subject of Crowley’s magical names, one of which (the Greek Therion) the court reporter, as reflected below, had difficulty transcribing:

  Hilbery: Did you take to yourself the designation of “The Beast, 666”?

  Crowley: Yes.

  Hilbery: Did you call yourself the “Master Therium” [sic]?

  Crowley: Yes.

  Hilbery: What does “Therium” mean?

  Crowley: Great wild beast.

  Hilbery: Do these titles convey a fair expression of your practice and outlook on life?

  Crowley: “The Beast, 666” only means “sunlight.” You can call me “Little Sunshine.” (Laughter.)

  Was the laughter here in Crowley’s favor? The aging Beast was bald, stout, toothy, sallow, and eccentrically dressed, wearing an outdated top hat on his way to and from the daily court proceedings. The moniker “Little Sunshine” must have induced astonishment on the part of the jury and public onlookers.

  Further cross-examination by Hilbery established a vulnerable point—Crowley’s failure to prosecute libel actions against prior attacks, such as those by John Bull and the Sunday Express, that were far more venomous than anything authored by Hamnett. Crowley argued that he had lacked the funds to bring those actions, but the sense of selective opportunism was likely established with the jury. This impression was heightened by Hilbery’s quoting from an article Crowley had written for the London Sunday Dispatch in June 1933, in which he had boasted that “They have called me the worst man in the world.” In that same article, Crowley told (as he did, at greater length, in the Confessions) of his early experiments, in his Golden Dawn years, with black magic. Crowley was now fairly caught at his own game, played throughout his life, of simultaneously reviling and exulting in his own infamy.

  Day three of the trial went very badly. O’Connor took up the cross-examination of Crowley and challenged him to prove his powers by launching a magical attack against Hilbery then and there in the courtroom. Crowley declined with a statement that can be viewed as a shameless lie or, as Crowley would have conceived it, as the retrospective life vision of an Ipsissimus: “I have never done any harm to any human being.” O’Connor, who spoke in a broad Irish brogue that radiated incredulous humor, then urged Crowley to render himself invisible—a power claimed in his own writings. Crowley declined. By the Beast’s own definition of black magic in Magick—any use other than the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel—it could have been an instance of it to employ magic to evade a lawyer’s insult. But then, Crowley had stated in his Confessions that he had made himself invisible to evade detection after shooting an assailant in India. What was the real difference here? A skeptic would say—the presence of witnesses to call his bluff. A practitioner of magic could argue the wisdom of Crowley’s refusal by noting that the conditions upon which magic depends could not have been present in the courtroom. But Crowley did not so argue. If magic had its secrets, and Crowley had spent much of his life divulging them, this time he refused:

  O’Connor: You say that on one occasion you rendered yourself invisible. Would you like to do so now, for if you do not I shall denounce you as an imposter?

  Crowley: You can ask me to do anything you like, but it will not alter the truth.

  When this grilling came to an end, Germer took the stand for his brief, inconsequential stint as Crowley’s character witness. Hilbery then opened the case for the defense by calling to the stand Betty May—now Betty Sedgwick—who recounted her dire tales of Crowley’s Abbey at Cefalù. Sedgwick’s testimony continued on into the fourth and final day of the trial, when it emerged that Crowley had received letters stolen from Sedgwick by an intermediary in June 1933. Those letters were being used by Eddy in an ill-conceived effort to impeach Sedgwick as a “bought” witness out to extract money from Hamnett’s counsel for alleged expenses in connection with her court appearance. This attempt at impeachment rebounded badly against Crowley, once the facts came out. In a subsequent criminal trial—some two months after the libel action, in July 1934—Crowley was found guilty of feloniously receiving the letters and was bound over for two years (the equivalent of probation) and compelled to pay a £50 fine.

  As for the libel action, it was concluded on that fourth day. Mr. Justice Swift gave his own summing up to the jury:

  I have been over forty years engaged in the administration of law in one capacity or another. I thought I knew of every conceivable form of wickedness. I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at some time or another before me. I have learnt in this case that we can always learn something more if we live long enough. I have never heard such dreadful and horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by a man who describes himself to you as the greatest living poet.

  It is doubtful if the jury needed Swift’s impassioned words to reach its own unanimous decision in favor of Hamnett and Constable. Crowley’s public demeanor in the face of this verdict was altogether remarkable. An anonymous journalist for the Sunday Express offered this brief portrait:

  Friday the 13th was an unlucky day for magician ALEISTER CROWLEY.

  At luncheon interval ambled off from Law Courts to his hotel, hatless but in orthodox black coat, made a hearty meal of pilaf de langoustes and a glass of milk.

  After jury’s verdict against him in his libel case seemed unperturbed, quoted to me Kipling’s “If”—

  ‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

  ‘And treat those two impostors just the same…’

  Crowley will almost certainly appeal.

  As part of the verdict, Crowley was judged liable for the defendants’ costs; these he never paid, finding shelter in bankruptcy court the following year. He did indeed appeal; arguments were heard on November 7, 1934, but to no avail.

  Crowley’s diary entry for April 13, the day the trial ended, is suitably perplexing: “Case violated by collapse of Swift & Nina. General joy—the consternation of C
onstable & Co. & co.” Was this denial? A joke? A perception of the verdict as adjudged on higher planes? That Crowley felt genuinely good-humored over his loss is doubtful in the extreme. A diary entry over three years later—on October 19, 1937, the day Crowley learned of the death of Mr. Justice Swift—makes clear that anger had lingered, and also provides a clue as to what had buoyed him on that day of defeat. “The drunken blackguard Swift is dead. N.B. the sot’s swinish injustice gave me the best thing that ever happened: Deidre and Ataturk!”

  The reference here is to what had happened as Crowley exited the courthouse on the day of his defeat. A nineteen-year-old woman, Patricia MacAlpine, whom Crowley came to call Deidre, approached him, expressed her outrage at the unjust verdict, and offered to bear Crowley’s child. Deidre already had two illegitimate children; her willingness to have another with a man nearly forty years her senior who could not provide for her or the child is a wonder that Crowley himself never sought to explain. But some nine months later, a son, his first, was born to him—Aleister Ataturk, the Beast named him, though the filial nickname he employed in his diaries was “the Christ Child,” a title both humorous and sincere in terms of the spiritual hopes he held for his son. Crowley left the boy’s upbringing to Deidre, whom he saw only occasionally—an arrangement that suited them both. Deidre was never consecrated as a Scarlet Woman and maintained her own independence, going on to have a fourth child by another man.

  One final aftermath of the trial is the stuff of legend rather than of fact: When Nina Hamnett died in 1956, it was rumored that she had committed suicide due to the lingering effect of a curse cast upon her by Crowley, himself nine years dead. There is evidence that, quite to the contrary, Hamnett had the good sense not to take Crowley’s suit too seriously. There survives a copy of Laughing Torso in which Hamnett penned, on the flyleaf, a playful drawing of the Beast with this caption: “Aleister Crowley who started & finished the fun & games at the Law Courts in 1934.”

  * * *

  At the insistence of forty-eight listed creditors—including assorted landlords and tradesmen who had lodged or done business with the Beast since his return to London in 1932—Crowley entered into involuntary bankruptcy proceedings in February 1935. His total debts came to some £4695, and his assets—aside from the ill-founded claim against Yorke, discussed earlier—were nil. Small trust payments, donations from disciples, sporadic gifts from Yorke and other friends, rare sums from the few souls who came to him seeking magical healing and the Elixir of Life—these were the tenuous means of maintaining a frayed gentility that befitted a Prophet awaiting his Aeon.

  As for his Scarlet Woman, Brooksmith underwent a menopausal hysterectomy in January 1936. It was part of a general decline in her well-being that would, some years later, necessitate psychiatric treatment. In May 1936, Crowley recorded that Brooksmith was suffering from “almost constant hallucinations” and “showing serious symptoms of insanity.” Crowley had, for months, borne up to the strain of nursing her; Brooksmith, of course, had done the same for him. But the Beast was restive. Loyalty alone in a Scarlet Woman was not enough; a sexual current capable of fueling the highest magical states was essential. Here, Brooksmith was falling far short. By the end of May, a caustic Crowley observation foreshadowed the end for this Scarlet Woman (the last of his lovers to be so designated): “Pearl’s devotion to me like that of a penguin to her egg: so exclusive that she is too stupid to defend the position.”

  When Yorke returned to London in 1936, he resumed his duties as Crowley’s trustee and, on his own, supplied the Beast with cash gifts now and then. But Yorke had drawn a definite line. As he later wrote, “for the rest of my life I refused to have any financial or other business connection with the old sinner.” Henceforth, Crowley would pursue his publishing plans primarily through funding from his one loyal contingent—the O.T.O. Agapé Lodge in Los Angeles. Crowley corresponded prolifically with Wilfred T. Smith and a number of other Agapé Lodge members until the end of his life. In many respects, he was better suited to long-distance leadership, composing penetrating letters on magical practice and conduct, while facilitating—by his absence—the growth of a small but distinct American Thelemic offshoot, one that has continued to the present day.

  These setbacks in his personal and financial affairs failed to diminish Crowley’s zeal on behalf of Thelema. The evidence is clear that he attempted to capture the attention both of His Majesty’s Government and of the Führer’s Reich. Crowley’s fascination with the latter had to do, in part, with epistolary urgings by his German-based supporter Martha Küntzel. In the late 1920s, Küntzel tried to place a copy of the German translation of the Book in the hands of Adolf Hitler, then a mere aspirant to power. Crowley later asserted (in annotations, made during the war years 1942–44, to his copy of the book Hitler Speaks, a compendium of the Führer’s table talk of the 1930s by Hermann Rauschning) that Küntzel had succeeded in so doing: “She had been told in 1925 by the Master Therion [Crowley] that the nation which first accepted the Book of the Law, officially, would thereby become the leading nation in the world. She accordingly supplied Hitler with a copy of her translation of the Book, and other such parts of the extensive commentary on that Book by the Master Therion (which she was engaged in translating) as seemed to her of topical importance. His replies, at present inaccessible, and many passages in this volume Hitler Speaks, show clearly how far he profited by her teaching, and wherein his interpretations erred.”

  Crowley thus viewed Küntzel as having conveyed the truth of Thelema to Hitler, whom both Crowley and Germer regarded as her “magical son.” But Küntzel had, in an earlier letter to Crowley, explicitly denied such a link to Hitler, and implicitly rejected any direct connection between Hitler and the Book, aside from the natural similarities of similar minds:

  You are perfectly right when you say I can’t think politically. I never cared for politics except during the [First World] War and then since the time of Hitler’s rising, though late enough, as it was when I began to see that Hindenburg was too old to give the helm of the Reich the necessary turn. And then it began to dawn on me how much of Hitler’s thoughts were as if they had been taken from the Law of Thelema. I became his fervent admirer and am so now, and will be to my end. I have ever so often owned to this firm conviction that the close identity of Hitler’s ideas with what the Book teaches endowed me with the strength necessary for my work.[ … ] But Germer’s letter amused me greatly. Isn’t it a lark to hear him bring forth his ‘theory’ about Hitler’s “magic birth”!

  Note that Küntzel places the time of her first intense attachment to Hitler as the early 1930s; for it was on January 30, 1933 that the aging Paul von Hindenburg, President of the German Republic, named Hitler Chancellor. Crowley’s indication of 1925 as the approximate time of her initial contacts with Hitler is therefore highly dubious. Küntzel’s observation that it was “as if” Hitler had borrowed from Thelema would seem, in itself, to preclude the truth of any direct contact on her own part with the Führer.

  Why, then, did Crowley persist—both privately, and in the manuscript of Magick Without Tears, written in 1944 and published posthumously—in the belief that he had influenced Hitler? Was it a case of vanity, or the deliberate construction of a mythos for future Thelemites? Or had Küntzel actually told him—in communications other than the letter above—of contacts with Hitler? The latter alternative seems most unlikely. There is still further reason for doubt that any such contact occurred. Yorke later recalled (presumably on the basis of Crowley’s statements to him on this subject) that a copy of the Book had been given to Hitler “when in prison at Nuremburg.” Hitler was imprisoned, as a result of his role in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, for nine months spanning the years 1923–24; Germer’s German translation of the Book was issued in 1925.

  The 1924 publication of Mein Kampf establishes beyond question that Hitler had, early on, fashioned a rhetoric of hatred, violence and power as ultimate justification that owed nothin
g to Crowley. Nonetheless, Crowley was convinced to the contrary. His marginal notes to Hitler Speaks are replete with what he saw as unmistakable parallels to the Book (or Liber AL). One of Hitler’s remarks particularly fascinated Crowley: “Our revolution is not merely a political and social revolution; we are at the outset of a tremendous revolution in moral ideas and in men’s spiritual orientation.” Crowley’s glowing response: “AL, the whole book.” But the Beast made no comments whatsoever aside Hitler’s long harangue against the Jews, and showed, in his response to certain other passages, that he held serious reservations concerning the means Hitler was willing to employ. For example, Hitler described the primary duty of great historical personages (such as himself): “Their supreme, their only purpose in all they do must be to maintain their power.” Crowley’s judgment: “But this is dangerously near the Left Hand Path.” As to the necessity for race-based politics, Hitler declared: “The ‘nation’ is a political expedient of democracy and liberalism. We have to get rid of this false conception and set in its place the conception of race, which has not yet been politically used up.” Crowley replied: “This only means Race Wars. The master class is above all these distinctions.” But Crowley had no difficulty with the concept of a dictatorial rule by this “master class.” He penned a resounding “Yes!” next to this statement by Hitler: “After all these centuries of whining about the protection of the poor and lowly, it is about time we decided to protect the strong against the inferior.” Crowley, however, denied that race was a valid criterion for “master class” membership. Only the Law of Thelema — implemented by a nation—could ensure proper selection.