Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  Fortune and Crowley undoubtedly shared an enthusiasm for the revival of pagan ritual and practice. But there remains the question as to the extent to which Fortune, by the end of her life, assented to the truth of Thelema. Crowley, in effect, created this question by his claim, in letters written after Fortune’s death in January 1946, that Fortune had sworn him a kind of allegiance. To Agapé Lodge member Frederic Mellinger, he explained that “With her I had an arrangement by which she acknowledged my authority, but she was wisely, or rather prudently, most anxious to keep this fact secret from her own followers on account of the old nonsense which was knocked to pieces in Crowley v. Constable, and others. A great deal of difficult negotiation is necessary in order to pick up her following.” It is typical of Crowley to claim his 1934 legal defeat as a triumph on behalf of his name. As for the proposed negotiations with Fortune’s followers, Crowley never undertook them, and they remain unaccomplished to the present day. It is fair to say that most of those followers regarded him with distaste. This is exemplified by the viewpoint of Fielding and Collins, authors of a biography on Fortune: “Probably the best way to sum it up is to say that Crowley did not seem to know the difference between a whore and a priestess; and undoubtedly, Dion Fortune did.” Crowley’s claim that Fortune acknowledged his authority is rejected by virtually all of her present disciples.

  But Crowley had reason to assert what he did. A letter from Fortune to the Beast, dated March 14, 1945 (the period of her two Netherwood visits), confirms this. Fortune begins by describing the public cost to her of admiring Crowley’s writings:

  The acknowledgement I made in the introduction of The Mystical Qabalah [1935 book by Fortune] of my indebtedness to your work, which seemed to me to be no more than common literary honesty, has been used as a rod for my back by people who look on you as Antichrist. I am prepared to dig in my toes and stand up to trouble if I have got to, but I don’t take on a fight if I can help it nowadays because it wastes too much time. I am fully aware that there will come a time when I shall have to come out in the open and say: this is the law of the New Aeon, but I want to pick my time for that, because I propose to be in a strong strategic position when I do so, and if you give Mrs. Grundy (a stock figure of puritanical disapproval) advance information, I may not be properly entrenched when the inevitable blitz starts. Therefore I ask you not to mention my name at present.

  Fortune died less than a year later. She never took a public stance on behalf of Thelema, and her words to Crowley can be interpreted as agreement on basic principles—such as the primacy of individual will unfettered by Christian puritanism—rather than an acknowledgment of Crowley as Prophet. But those who would extol Fortune as the exemplar of white magic, and Crowley as the converse, are asserting a false opposition.

  The degree to which Crowley could influence other occult movements, while not converting them to a Thelemite focus, is exemplified in the case of Crowley’s relations with Gerald Gardner, widely regarded as the founder of the modern-day Witchcraft or Wicca movement. The dispute over the extent to which Gardner’s writings and rituals reflect a genuinely ancient historical tradition does not concern us here. It is enough to understand that Gardner, a widely traveled man who had served as a British customs officer in colonial Malaya, claimed to have been initiated into a British coven in 1939, and (after the repeal of the old Witchcraft Act in 1951, which had posed a threat to open practitioners) owned and operated a Museum of Witchcraft and Magic on the Isle of Man. In 1954, he published Witchcraft Today, a work that would ultimately spur widespread interest in both England and America.

  In the late 1940s, Gardner put forth a set of witchcraft rites known as the Book of Shadows. A controversy has raged over whether Crowley composed those rites for Gardner. (Ironically, Gardner himself fueled this controversy by declaring ambiguously, in his Witchcraft Today, that “The only man I can think of who could have invented the rites was the late Aleister Crowley.”) Certain facts stand out, however. Gardner paid at least one visit to Crowley at Netherwood; but the time of the first visit was not 1946, as some commentators have maintained, but rather May 1947, according to Crowley’s diary, which offers no details as to what was discussed between the two men. This was roughly six months before Crowley’s death, and for most of that time, Crowley was in a state of severe decline. The notion that he could have engaged in significant drafting of rituals for Gardner’s witchcraft movement is farfetched in the extreme. The further notion that Crowley was paid by Gardner to draft such rituals stems from confusion over the fact that Gardner did pay Crowley roughly £300 for O.T.O. dues and fees. There was issued an O.T.O. charter (in Gardner’s handwriting, but signed by Crowley) that entitled Gardner to establish an O.T.O. chapter, though Gardner never did so.

  Plainly, Crowley’s influence upon Gardner’s Book of Shadows was substantial, for the simple reason that Gardner himself drew liberally from Crowley’s writings (in particular, Magick) to flesh out those rituals, which Gardner publicly claimed to have received from the coven that had initiated him. Wiccan historian Aidan Kelly has confirmed that Gardner “borrowed wholesale from Crowley.” Doreen Valiente, who became a High Priestess in Gardner’s rituals, later suggested to Gardner, in the aftermath of his success with Witchcraft Today, that the revival of the Old Religion of Witchcraft would be hampered by any seeming connection with Crowley. Gardner agreed and authorized Valiente to rewrite the Book of Shadows: “I accepted the challenge [ … ] cutting out the Crowleyanity as much as I could.”

  Gardner, however, raised a further mystery concerning Crowley’s connection with witchcraft. We have previously examined, in connection with Crowley’s relations with Montague Summers, the possibility that Crowley was somehow involved with a British coven in his earlier years. Gardner reported that, during his visits with Crowley, the Beast had confided to him that “he had been inside when he was very young.” Later, to author J. L. Bracelin, Gardner recalled Crowley saying that he had declined to pursue witchcraft seriously because he “refused to be bossed around by any damn woman.” To add to the welter of possibilities here, Valiente has recorded the testimony of an anonymous male source who claimed knowledge of Crowley’s brief membership in a coven circa 1899–1900; his Golden Dawn mentor Allan Bennett was also, according to this source, a member. Allegedly, while Bennett voluntarily broke off, Crowley was expelled by the priestess of the coven, who regarded him (in the words of this source) as “a dirty-minded, evilly-disposed, vicious little monster!” If such was the case—and it seems most doubtful—small wonder that Crowley bore a lasting resentment.

  To this day, the issue of Crowley’s relationship to Wicca can raise hackles amongst its adherents. There is, however, beyond question, a remarkable similarity between Crowley’s Thelema and the Wiccan Creed: “An ye harm none, do what ye will.”

  * * *

  To arrive at a just appreciation of Crowley remains difficult; it was all the more so in the final span of Crowley’s life. This is borne out by the memoir testimony of E. M. Butler, a Cambridge professor then conducting research for her book, The Myth of the Magus. Butler thought it appropriate to arrange an interview with the man who claimed to be a living exemplar of that myth. She had read several of Crowley’s works and realized that his was a formidable intellect. But the reputation of the Beast had preceded him, and Butler was full of trepidation en route to Hastings on January 1, 1946: “I tried to steady my mind in the train by reading a Report on the Duties and Stipends of Cambridge University Teaching Officers, but it was a bad choice; for I could not help feeling as the engine gathered speed that it was no part of such duties to spend a day with Old Crow, and that my stipend might well be in jeopardy.”

  The meeting lived up to, or down to, her expectations. Crowley greeted her in the front hall of Netherwood. He seemed, to her, older than his seventy-two years, not so much wrinkled as decomposing. He wore thick spectacles, his face was yellow, “and his voice was the ugliest thing about him: thin, fretful, scratchy—a pedant
ic voice and a pretentious manner.” He excused himself shortly thereafter to administer, privately, an injection for his asthma. The interview took place in Crowley’s bed-sitting room. Butler avowed that “it would need a Kafka to describe it. There was a battered writing-table, some half-empty bookshelves, a frowsy-looking, tumbled bed, a cracked wash-basin; and all of them hanging crookedly from the discoloured walls, some very disturbing pictures: violently clashing colours, leering faces, one of the otherwise lovely woman with a diabolical squint, and various designs indicative of delirium tremens. ‘All my own work,’ said the magician rather proudly, motioning me to a seat facing one of the worst of them.”

  Butler was correct in surmising that the Beast was hoping for a favorable mention in The Myth of the Magus, which was published in 1948, just months after his death. It would have been a welcome coup to receive, at long last, recognition from a member of the faculty of his alma mater. But that was not to be; he was barely mentioned in that work, and witheringly dismissed as a failed Satanist in her subsequent book, Ritual Magic (1949). In interview, Butler found Crowley forthcoming and intelligent; but she was also helplessly revulsed by him. “Yet there he sat, a wreck among ruins, living or rather dying in penury on the charity of friends, speaking of himself in all seriousness as an ‘instrument of Higher Beings who control human destiny.’ In order to prove this, he offered to make himself invisible on the spot; and nothing would have been a greater relief; but I felt that I must keep him under my eye whilst questioning him [ … ]” At one point, Crowley read to Butler from one of his works (unnamed by her, but describing one of his past visions), then broke into tears: “‘It was a revelation of love,’ he whispered, wiping his eyes; and then, almost ecstatically: ‘Magic is not a way of life, it is the way of life.’ Poor old Crow. It was a way of life that had led to drug addiction.”

  Crowley’s encounters with Fortune, Gardner, and Butler were all, in their varied ways, efforts to extend the outward influence of Thelema. But he faced an equally difficult challenge within, minding the magical affairs of the Agapé Lodge in far-flung California. Jack Parsons, the Master of the Lodge, had entered into a new phase of magical exploration, the roots of which lay in the events of the summer of 1945, when Parsons met and befriended L. Ron Hubbard, who would go on, some years later, to found the Church of Scientology. In August 1945, however, Hubbard was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, from which he would be mustered out in December. Parsons and Hubbard shared interests in science fiction and magic, and Parsons was so taken with his new acquaintance that he invited Hubbard to move into the mansion owned by Parsons—and converted by him into a rooming house—on South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena. In that mansion, Parsons reserved two rooms for the conduct of the Gnostic Mass and other O.T.O. rituals. Parsons was convinced that Hubbard had remarkable magical potential, and he soon divulged to Hubbard the knowledge of certain O.T.O. rituals which should have, by the vows Parsons had taken, remained secret. The intimacies increased when Hubbard and Parsons’s wife Betty commenced a passionate affair. The couple had been practicing an open marriage at Parsons’s insistence, as a matter of Thelemic liberty. In fact, while Parsons was wracked with jealousy by this affair, he stood up rather nobly to the strain, which ended in Hubbard supplanting Parsons altogether as Betty’s lover. For his part, Hubbard later denied that he had any sincere interest in the magic practiced by Parsons. In a statement issued by the Church of Scientology and printed in the London Sunday Times in December 1969, it was asserted that “Hubbard broke up black magic in America” by bringing a halt to a dangerous situation:

  Dr. Jack Parsons of Pasadena, California, was America’s number one solid fuel rocket expert. He was involved with the infamous English black magician Aleister Crowley … [whose organization] … had savage and bestial rites. Dr. Parsons was head of the American branch … which had paying guests who were the U.S.A. nuclear physicists working at Cal Tech. Certain agencies objected to nuclear physicists being housed under the same roof.

  L. Ron Hubbard was … sent in to handle the situation. He went to live at the house and investigated the black magic rites and the general situation and found them very bad.

  Parsons wrote to Crowley in England about Hubbard. Crowley, “The Beast 666,” evidently detected an enemy and warned Parsons. This is all proven by the correspondence unearthed by the Sunday Times. Hubbard’s mission was successful far beyond anyone’s expectations. The house was torn down. Hubbard rescued a girl they were using. The black magic group was dispersed and destroyed and has never recovered.

  The correspondence alluded to between Parsons and Crowley does include warnings by the Beast about Hubbard. Events at the Agapé Lodge seemed generally troubling, based on the correspondence Crowley had received from Parsons and other members. In January 1946, Parsons commenced what he termed the “Babalon Working”—a series of rituals conducted by Parsons with the aim of obtaining for himself the “magical partner” he needed. His textual inspiration was the O.T.O. VIII° ritual instructions by Crowley, entitled De Nuptiis Secretis Deorum cum Hominibus (On the Secret Marriages of Gods with Men). This ritual is described by Kenneth Grant as containing “methods of evoking an Elemental, or familiar spirit.[ … ] On being appropriated by a human organism, the elemental finally becomes absorbed in the immortal principle in man.” Specifically, Parsons sought an air elemental and so employed the Call for the Enochian Air Tablet. He also consecrated a talisman with his own semen.

  On February 23, 1946, after a long and often discouraging series of ritual workings, Parsons wrote triumphantly to Crowley: “I have my elemental! She turned up one night after the conclusion of the Operation, and has been with me since, although she goes back to New York next week. She has red hair and slant green eyes as specified. If she returns she will be dedicated as I am dedicated! All or nothing—I have no other terms. She is an artist, strong minded and determined, with strong masculine characteristics and a fanatical independence…” The elemental was named Marjorie Cameron, and she was indeed a remarkable woman, who would make her own mark as a student of magic, performance artist, and actress in films by Kenneth Anger. She became Parsons’s magical partner in a series of further workings, recorded by Parsons in his Book of Babalon, designed to produce the physical birth of a moonchild who would incarnate, in human form, the spirit of the goddess Babalon—the feminine aspect of the New Aeon. (This process of magical incarnation was, it will be recalled, the focus of Crowley’s novel, Moonchild.) In these workings, Parsons served as a scribe and astral seer through which the invoked Babalon issued her instructions.

  Crowley, in a March 27, 1946, letter to Parsons, warned the younger man of the potential dangers of the work he was pursuing:

  I am particularly interested in what you have written to me about the Elemental, because for some little while past I have been endeavouring to intervene personally in this matter on your behalf. I would however have you recall (Eliphas) Levi’s aphorism “the love of the Magus for such beings is insensate and may destroy him.”

  It seems to me that there is a danger of your sensitiveness upsetting your balance. Any experience that comes your way you have a tendency to over-estimate.[ … ]

  At the same time, your being as sensitive as you are, it behooves you to be more on your guard than would be the case with the majority of people.

  But it was too late. Parsons had, in early March, already achieved, through an IX° sexual working with Cameron, “direct touch with One who is most Holy and Beautiful as mentioned in The Book of the Law. I cannot write the name at present. First instructions were received direct through Ron [Hubbard], the seer. I have followed them to the letter. There was a desire for incarnation. I do not yet know the vehicle, but it will come to me bringing a secret sign. I am to act as instructor guardian for nine months; then it will be loosed on the world. That is all I can say now…” Parsons believed that the birth of this child (whose physical mother he did not yet know) could lead to the fulfillment of The Book of
the Law—the arising of the leader who would bring Thelemic freedom to the world. In the messages he was receiving from Babalon, Parsons now perceived material that could become an as-yet-unwritten fourth chapter of the Book.

  All of this was too much for Crowley, who was not prone to accept competing prophecies. To Parsons, in April 1946, he wrote in a patronizing tone: “You have got me completely puzzled by your remarks about the elemental [ … ] I thought I had a most morbid imagination, as good as any man’s, but it seems I have not. I cannot form the slightest idea what you can possibly mean.” That same day, Crowley wrote to Germer to complain that “Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.”

  There is no evidence that Parsons ever believed that he had located his moonchild. But in the summer of 1946, matters came to a head on a distinctly human plane. Parsons, Hubbard, and Betty formed a partnership called “Allied Enterprises”; the plan was that they would jointly purchase yachts on the East Coast, then sail them to California and sell them there for a profit. Parsons put up nearly the entirety of his savings, but the partnership soon declined into acrimonious chaos. In July, Parsons filed a suit against Hubbard and Betty, which led to a settlement later that month. The couple then passed out of Parsons’s life.

  Parsons would break with Crowley as well, as the younger man would not accept the Beast’s view of the Babalon Workings as a failure. By 1949, two years after Crowley’s death, Parsons’s magical operations with Babalon had culminated in The Book of Antichrist, a brief treatise divided into two sections—“The Black Pilgrimage” and “The Manifesto of the Antichrist.” In the former, Parsons cataloged his sufferings in the cause of Magick and cataloged the prior incarnations he could recall, including that of Cagliostro, the eighteenth-century magus whom Crowley also claimed as a past life. The concluding “Manifesto” declared that Parsons—now Belarion the Antichrist—would overturn “the Black Brotherhood called Christianity” and would “bring all men to the law of the Beast 666, and in His law I shall conquer the world.” In an analogy to Christian history (that Parsons did not make), Parsons would become Paul to Crowley’s Christ. As for the awaited incarnation of Babalon, the “Manifesto” declared that she would manifest herself within seven years.