[ … ]
5. Man has the right to kill those who would thwart those rights.
“the slaves shall serve.” AL II:58
“Love is the law, love under will.”
AL I:57
Harris’s objections made no impress upon the Beast, who received precious little response to Liber Oz in any event. The silence of his contemporaries did not diminish his ardor. In a missive to Yorke, Crowley explained that “the revival of true Aristocracy” had been “my deepest idea all my life.[ … ] We must first of all have a sound physical stock to pick out rulers from.” Where did the right to kill fit in? A hint comes from a 1941 diary entry in which Crowley observed that, in a Thelemic society, “the problem is not how to boss the herd, which is automatic, or to thwart the unworthy, who are ejected into impotence; but how to prevent emulation developing into warfare.” It was competition between rulers and aspirants that posed, for Crowley, the most likely cases of justified homicide. Should punishment be meted if a murderer acts in accord with his True Will? Crowley never clarified that scenario—the exact obverse of the “insanity defense,” as it would rest on ultimate self-realization.
In May 1942, Crowley moved from his West End location to a more central and cosmopolitan flat in Hamilton House, 140 Piccadilly. It proved to be an auspicious summer for the Crowley-Harris collaboration, as they succeeded in staging two exhibitions for the Tarot paintings—at the Berkeley Galleries at 20 Davies Street in July, and at the Royal Society of Painters of Water Colours in August. Their key concern was to fund publication both of the Tarot deck and of The Book of Thoth. Robert Cecil, a writer and scholar who befriended Crowley during the war, held out the hope that T. S. Eliot, who served as an editor at Faber and Faber, might be approached with the manuscript. There is no evidence that this occurred. Eliot’s response would have been a fascinating one. We do know, however, what Crowley thought of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which draws from “The Hanged Man” trump and other Tarot symbolism. After reading that poem in the spring of 1942, Crowley pronounced himself “nauseated and ineffably contemptuous [ … ] Note: modern ‘school’ of ‘poetry’ the much-beslavered ‘observation’ is all sniffing sexual privies. They never get away from it; and they see only the sordid dirty side of it.” A similar criticism, equally reductive, could easily be raised against certain of Crowley’s works. There was a blinding bitterness in the isolation he felt as a poet.
Yet he persisted. In the summer of 1942, Crowley issued, in pamphlet form, a poem written in French and entitled “La Gauloise, Song of the French.” Its express purpose was to inspire the French resistance effort; Crowley sent out some 1000 copies, including one to the French government-in-exile headed by General Charles De Gaulle. An aide of De Gaulle responded, in late May, with a brief and formal letter expressing thanks; there was also a positive feature piece in July in the London Star. Crowley attempted to go further by having an Agapé Lodge member—Roy Leffingwell—compose music for the poem. The two subsequently worked on a new national anthem for America—an example of Crowley’s astonishing naïveté. During these same war years, Crowley did not move to California—as he had been invited to do by devoted Agapé Lodge members—largely because of the potential for denial of entry by American authorities. How could a man so suspect have hoped to persuade a nation to change its anthem—an act charged with the utmost political symbolism? Anthems aside, Crowley was sufficiently fascinated with the possibilities of sound recording that he paid at least two visits to Levy’s Sound Studios on New Bond Street to record on wax cylinders—in his reedy, plaintive voice—his “Hymn to Pan” and the Calls (in English and Enochian) of the First and Second Aethyrs; a handful of other recordings, presumably done at the same locale, also survive from this period.
Crowley pursued yet another artistic avenue at this time. Long a frustrated playwright, he was at last given a chance to consult on a theatrical project. The young Peter Brook, who would become one of the most eminent directors in postwar Britain, was staging an October 1942 production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus at the Torch Theatre in Oxford. Brook, impressed with the eloquence of Crowley’s writings on magic, wrote to the Beast for suggestions on staging the conjuring scenes. Crowley attended at least two rehearsals. On opening night, the Beast pronounced: “All considered, an A1 performance—it held the audience.”
Brook’s interest in Crowley reflected the status the Beast had achieved as the foremost occult expert—or bogeyman, depending on one’s viewpoint—in England. There were those who fantasized as to the nature and extent of Crowley’s powers, or feared him outright. Crowley, for his part, knew well how to create what might be called “stage effects.” The poet Dylan Thomas was one of those who believed in the Beast’s powers. Thomas had, during the period of Crowley’s libel action, enjoyed an affair with one of its chief witnesses, Betty May. May almost certainly warned Thomas about Crowley, for the young poet harbored a fear that the Beast played upon to fine effect. Constantine Fitzgibbon, Thomas’s friend and biographer, reported that, in the early 1940s in London, Thomas “was sitting with my former wife Theodora in the Swiss, doodling as he frequently did when in a bad mood. The cause of his bad mood that evening was the presence, at the far end of the pub, of Crowley. When Crowley walked across and placed in front of Dylan a duplicate of his doodle, Dylan was extremely frightened. He insisted that Theodora and he leave the pub immediately, without waiting for the man they were supposed to meet.” Assuming this to be true, it can, of course, be explained as a mere conjurer’s trick; a confederate could have stolen a glance at the doodle and reported its shape to Crowley. The more important point is that Crowley, conscious of appearances and fond of frightening susceptible souls—especially lauded modern poets—may well have pulled the prank to augment his legendary status.
During the winter of 1943, ensconsced in his 93 Jermyn Street flat, Crowley enjoyed the rare comfort of being admired—early on—by his landlady, Miss Manning, who would later name a room on the premises after the Beast, in which she conducted séances. Their relations palled as her tolerance of his irregular rent payments declined. Miss Manning would later report an episode so atypical of Crowley that one must view it with great skepticism: during a German bombing raid, while the tenants and proprietess of 93 Jermyn Street were huddled in the kitchen, the Beast proceeded—at his own suggestion—to read in devout manner the Twenty-third Psalm of the Bible to the group. This was, according to Miss Manning, an evident reversion to the Christian faith of Crowley’s childhood. Crowley never wrote of this experience, if it indeed occurred.
Shortly after moving in, Crowley did experience a striking realization as to the impact upon his psyche of sexual dotage: “I note that when I have been for any long time free from the sexual impulse a whole group of ideas becomes ‘obscene’, ‘disgusting’, ‘revolting’ & so on. This group includes contemplation of Yoni (not Lingam so much), disease, accident, the spectacle of meat, the ideas of war, pain of the physical order and so on. I conclude that humanitarianism, pacifism—all such feelings—are functions of sexual weakness, atrophy, or the like. This thesis can be developed very far.” For Crowley, sexuality was the essential life energy, and its decline necessarily debilitated the kingly temperament required by the Thelemic life. This debilitation included, by his own argument, puritanical squeamishness—which Crowley had never succeeded in uprooting.
The Beast was posed with a different set of difficulties—stemming from what he viewed as a vile overabundance of sexuality—by the founding Master of Agapé Lodge, Wilfred Talbot Smith, Frater 132 (the gematria sum of his magical name, Velle Omnia Velle Nihil) and, as O.T.O. Grand Master of the United States, Ramaka X°. Crowley had maintained amicable relations with Smith—at a distance, through correspondence—for over a decade. But in early 1943, letters from a number of Agapé Lodge members seemed, to Crowley, to point to a crisis in leadership. A key disruption had occurred: Smith had seduced Helen Parsons, the wife of a fellow Lodge member, John Whites
ide (Jack) Parsons, Frater 210. Parsons was a brilliant scientist without a college degree. He was part of the experimental rocket research group attached to the California Institute of Technology, and would later become a co-founder of Aerojet Corporation. Parsons’s work in solid fuel research was deemed, by Professor Theodore von Karman of Caltech, to have “made possible such outstanding rockets as the Polaris and the Minuteman.” In 1972, twenty years after his death, the International Astronomical Union named a lunar crater “Parsons” in his honor.
Parsons was plainly a most promising disciple for Crowley. Smith’s behavior seemed to jeopardize that relationship, though Parsons had rebounded by commencing an affair with his wife’s sister, Sarah Elizabeth (known as Betty). Crowley would not tolerate Smith’s lustful interference. Further, there was a pattern of sexual aggression in Smith that Crowley believed to have tainted the reputation of the O.T.O. Indeed, scandalous rumors had led to an F.B.I. investigation of Agapé Lodge; no charges resulted, but Crowley was unsettled nonetheless. Many have condemned Crowley as a hypocrite for objecting to Smith’s promiscuities when his own life was rife with them. But in a letter to Smith, Crowley pointed to a key difference—what today we would call sexual harassment, practiced by Smith through the threat of occult disfavor. Crowley, for all his brutal treatment of his lovers, never resorted to offering attainment in exchange for erotic compliance. His indignation here is genuine:
Your attempts to seduce newly initiated women by telling them that you were now in a position to order them to sleep with you, were acts of despicable blackguardism. What grosser violation of the Law of Thelema can one imagine? Not to mention that by English law you might, if successful, have been found guilty of rape, and I should have heartily approved a sentence of penal servitude.
In May 1943, the Beast composed a treatise, entitled Liber Apotheosis, that prescribed a corrective ritual. Smith was to commence a Great Magical Retirement on the isolated grounds of the then O.T.O. headquarters at Rancho Royal, outside Los Angeles. By the time Smith received Liber Apotheosis in October 1943, Crowley had already designated Parsons as the new Master of Agapé Lodge. Smith soon assented both to his loss of leadership and to the solitary retirement. Judging from his morosely repentant letters to Crowley, that retirement induced no apotheosis, but rather an overwhelming sense of failure. In any event, Crowley’s interest in Smith was at an end.
Parsons, whom Crowley hoped would right the ship, now became the source of a new set of difficulties. In a September 1943 letter, Parsons tendered his resignation to Crowley, condemned the character of many of his fellow Lodge members, and accused Crowley of pomposity and blundering leadership, particularly in the choice of Karl Germer as his second in command. Germer had—after a host of travails in Europe (including the interment camp experience described in Chapter 10)—established himself in New York City and there served as O.T.O. Grand Treasurer General, with special responsibility for raising funds (primarily from Agapé Lodge members) and transmitting those funds promptly to Crowley. Crowley, in his October 1943 reply, answered the younger man’s attacks (Parsons was then twenty-nine) with a salvo of patient rebukes:
With regard to bungling, you are not in a position to judge; for one thing anything I do is done with an eye on centuries to come. The immediate results of any action are no test of it from my point of view.[ … ]
I don’t know what you mean by pompous; I suppose you get this from my writings, but if you mean my literary writings, I suspect you don’t understand their inner meaning in many cases. If you read the suspected passage carefully, you will probably find that there is a little laugh somewhere. I wish therefore that you would realize that my universe is very much larger than yours.[ … ] Some time ago I thought of writing a book on internationally famous people with whom I had been intimate. The number ran to over 80. Am I wrong to suppose that you never met such people?
Take another point: have you visited the monuments of antiquity; have you seen the majority of the great paintings and sculptures? Have you discussed all sorts of intimate matters with natives of every civilized quarter of the globe? Perhaps more than any of the above in importance, have you made your way alone in parts of the earth never before trodden by any human foot—perhaps in hostile and nearly always inhospitable country? You may think it pompous of me to mention these matters, but the fact is that they don’t matter unless you think they don’t matter.
The point that I am trying to get you to realize is that any statement or action of mine is enormously modified by my having had these experiences.
The letter succeeded in persuading Parsons to continue as Master of the Lodge through the war.
Meanwhile, a new personage from California was attracting Crowley’s attention as a potential future leader for the O.T.O. Grady Louis McMurtry, age twenty-five, was a lieutenant in the United States Army. Some three years earlier, he had made contact with the Agapé Lodge, primarily through Parsons, with whom McMurtry shared an interest in science fiction. Stationed in England in the autumn of 1943, McMurtry paid a call upon Crowley at 93 Jermyn Street. The two men met frequently through the end of the war and remained in correspondence for the remaining years of Crowley’s life. McMurtry and Crowley often played chess while sharing brandy and pipefuls of perique tobacco. Over one of these games, Crowley abruptly pronounced McMurtry as worthy of the IX° Degree of the O.T.O., which was thereupon bestowed.
McMurtry accepted Crowley both as a Prophet and as a remarkable eccentric. One striking episode is described by McMurtry’s biographer, J. Edward Cornelius, who quotes from the former’s memoirs:
Christmas 1943 was cold, one of those typically snowy English winter days which found Grady at Crowley’s apartment at 93 Jermyn Street enjoying a nice dinner. Afterwards, as they were sitting talking and playing chess, there came “a raucous noise at the door.” Crowley looked up saying “I wonder what in the world that is?” He slowly got up out of his chair and walked toward the door. As he opened it he found four young English boys engaging in the British festivity of caroling on Christmas Day. It is the custom to continue caroling until one is given money for their services. Crowley, not amused, did what most of us have probably always wanted to do. He slammed the door in their faces, screaming at the top of his lungs “To the lions with them! To the lions with them!” Not surprisingly, that day the kids went away without being paid. Grady said, “That’s the Aleister Crowley I knew.”
It is just possible that Crowley was playing the Dickensian role of Scrooge to the hilt for his young American visitor.
McMurtry contributed to the ongoing funding effort that led, at last, to the publication of The Book of Thoth on March 21, 1944, as the Sun moved into Aries. Its release in straitened wartime Britain was itself a remarkable achievement on Crowley’s part. There were the typical billing disputes with the Chiswick Press, which printed the 200 signed and numbered copies of Thoth. But Crowley was determined that the book would serve as the capstone of his career. With justification, his prospectus boasted: “The Book has been nobly produced; no other consideration was allowed to weigh.” Printed on prewar “mould-made paper” and bound “in genuine native-tanned and native-dyed Morocco from the Niger,” Thoth featured eight color reproductions of Harris’s paintings, ninety black-and-white illustrations and a text by “The Master Therion”—Crowley’s magical name as a Magus. Yet Thoth, an elegant and probing work, is uninsistent as to Thelema. Those themes are present, but they do not intrude upon the larger framework of the text, which seeks to harmonize the esoteric wisdoms of the East and the West, as Crowley understood them. He subtly reconfigured the Tarot deck to reflect the Universe as viewed by the Magus—a Universe in which, for all the conflagrations foretold by the Book, an encompassing unity reigns.
Numerous occult thinkers before Crowley, most notably the eighteenth-century scholar Antoine Court de Gebelin, held that the Tarot deck was a pictorial text—the Book of Thoth, Court de Gebelin termed it—that preserved the wisdom of ancient Egyp
t. By retaining that title, Crowley paid due homage to Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and magic; at the same time, Crowley dismissed the importance of supposed Tarot lineages, Egyptian or otherwise: “The origin of the Tarot is quite irrelevant, even if it were certain. It must stand or fall as a system on its own merits.” By the Beast’s ahistorical criteria, the proof of any interpretation of the Tarot deck lay in its practical use: “Each card is, in a sense, a living being; and its relations with its neighbours are what one might call diplomatic. It is for the student to build these living stones into his living Temple.”
The depth of Thoth reveals itself in the precision of Crowley’s prose. His account of the Crowley–Harris Devil trump design, for example, conveys a forcible impress upon the mind of a reader who recognizes that active imagination is essential to magical practice, and who further rejects identification of the pagan horned god with Evil:
This card represents creative energy in its most material form; in the Zodiac, Capricornus occupies the Zenith. It is the most exalted of the signs; it is the goat leaping with lust upon the summits of earth. The sign is ruled by Saturn, who makes for selfhood and perpetuity. In this sign, Mars is exalted, showing in its best form the fiery, material energy of creation. The card represents Pan Pangenetor, the All-Begetter. It is the Tree of Life as seen against a background of the exquisitely tenuous, complex, and fantastic forms of madness, the divine madness of spring, already foreseen in the meditative madness of winter; for the Sun turns northward upon entering this sign. The roots of the Tree are made transparent, in order to show the innumerable leapings of the sap; before it stands the Himalayan goat, with an eye in the center of its forehead, representing the god Pan upon the highest and most secret mountains of the earth. His creative energy is veiled in the symbol of the Wand of the Chief Adept, crowned with the winged globe and the twin serpents of Horus and Osiris.
Do What Thou Wilt Page 53
