by Gary Lachman
18.Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, 378.
19.Baker, The Devil Is a Gentleman, 299–300.
20.Newman, The Tregerthen Horror, 82.
21.Leslie Frewin, Parnassus Near Piccadilly: The Café Royal Centenary Book (London: Leslie Frewin, 1965), 32.
22.Paul Newman’s The Tregerthen Horror, which I am indebted to here, is a gripping investigation into Crowley’s activities in Cornwall, and his link, if any, to the strange death of Katherine Foster at a “haunted cottage” near Zennor Carn in 1938.
23.Whatever Crowley’s real involvement with British Intelligence, it is undeniable that he knew people who were involved. For example, Crowley introduced Pat Doherty to James McAlpine, who worked for the Secret Intelligence Service. Before the outbreak of World War II, Pat and Ataturk traveled to Greece, where she met McAlpine again; he was stationed in the Balkans. They were later married in Palestine. McAlpine was killed and Pat moved to Cairo, where she found work as a cipher clerk for the Special Operations Executive before returning to England after the war.
24.Richard McNeff, “Crowley and the Spooks,” in Fortean Times 231 (January 2008).
25.Phil Baker, author of a definitive biography of Wheatley, doubts that Knight met Crowley. Knight claimed that he and Wheatley were initiated by Crowley and that they attended his “occult ceremonies.” But Crowley wasn’t performing ceremonies at this point, and as Baker says, “he wasn’t likely to initiate anyone into much more than the mysteries of a good lunch, and then only if they were paying.” Wheatley himself was not impressed with Crowley; at least he makes no mention of their lunch in his diaries, although, as Baker points out, he did exaggerate his acquaintance with Crowley, puffing up his credibility as an occultist. But then Wheatley, like Crowley—and Maxwell Knight—liked to tell a good tale. Crowley doesn’t mention the lunch, either—he was occupied with the Laughing Torso trial at the time—although Wheatley was later to get a lot of mileage in his “black magic” books out of everything he “learned” from the Great Beast. Baker, The Devil Is a Gentleman, 353.
26.Gary Lachman, “Britain’s High Priestess,” in Fortean Times 287 (May 2012).
27.http://www.100thmonkeypress.com/biblio/acrowley/books/england_stand_fast_1939/england_stand_fast_int_2.pdf.
28.http://www.historyextra.com/qa/v-victory.
29.One candidate proposed for the “bloke” at the BBC is Lance Sieveking, whose book The Psychology of Flying (1922) Crowley enjoyed and quoted from in The Diary of a Drug Fiend. Sieveking later became an important BBC radio and television producer. Sieveking met Crowley in Cassis—possibly during his time there with Gerald Yorke. They talked about Crowley’s Magick and Sieveking thought Crowley’s ears reminded him of an elephant’s (Lance Sieveking, The Eye of the Beholder [London: Hulton Press, 1957], 247–51). Paul Sieveking, Lance’s son and one of the founders of the Fortean Times, told me that his father was certainly not the bloke, and that he had no contact with Crowley after meeting him by accident on the Riviera in 1928.
30.An interesting account of the influences of Steiner’s ideas on Harris’s paintings can be found at http://www.parareligion.ch/dplanet/stephen/claas/olive_e.html.
31.Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1984), 22.
32.Ibid., 24.
33.See Robert M. Place, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2005).
34.Crowley, The Book of Thoth, 63.
35.Charles Richard Cammell, Aleister Crowley (London: New English Library, 1969), 80.
36.Ibid.
37.Ibid., 96.
38.Ibid., 104.
39.Ibid., 106.
40.Newman, The Tregerthen Horror, 82.
41.Cammell, Aleister Crowley, 105.
42.“A Gentleman of Hastings,” in Antony Clayton, Gary Lachman, Andy Sharp, et al, Netherwood: The Last Resort of Aleister Crowley (London: Accumulator Press, 2012), 173.
43.http://hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib77.html.
44.In the 1960s, the filmmaker Kenneth Anger formed an eleven-piece rock ensemble he called The Magick Powerhouse of Oz, to provide the music to his Crowleyan film Lucifer Rising. Eleven, we know, is a significant number for Crowley, symbolizing homosexual magick. See my essay “Kenneth Anger: The Crowned and Conquering Child” in the BFI box set of Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle (2009).
45.http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/hymn-to-lucifer/.
46.Brook, of course, went on to direct several important films, one of which was a version of Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979).
47.Wilson, Aleister Crowley, 150–51.
48.Oliver Marlow Wilkinson in Dark Dimensions, 102.
49.Symonds, The Great Beast, 450. For a fascinating history of Netherwood, see Netherwood: The Last Resort of Aleister Crowley, mentioned above, which I draw on for this section.
50.Netherwood, 70.
51.Kenneth Grant, Remembering Aleister Crowley (London: Skoob Books, 1991), v.
52.Ibid., 1.
53.Ibid., 27.
54.Ibid., 36.
55.Netherwood, 72–73.
56.Ibid., 20.
57.Ibid., 40 and Dave Evans, The History of British Magic After Crowley (Hidden Publishing, 2007), 289.
58.Evans, The History of British Magic After Crowley, 287.
59.There is no evidence that Crowley ever read or even knew about Lovecraft, but there is a possible reference to Lovecraft’s literary milieu in a letter of Crowley’s to Jane Wolfe. Referring to the sort of thing Jack Whiteside Parsons—who we encounter further on—read, Crowley called it “magazine trash.” Parsons was a science fiction fanatic and may have read Lovecraft’s stories in the pulps. See John Carter, Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2004), 102. Lovecraft was a confirmed materialist and although aware of the occult tradition—he mentions Eliphas Levi and theosophy in some stories—makes no mention of Crowley. After writing about Grant in Turn Off Your Mind, I received a warm letter from him—a rare communication, I was told by London occultists. Grant was also a champion of the occult artist Austin Osman Spare.
60.Kenneth Grant, Remembering Aleister Crowley, 41.
61.Heinlein’s most famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), one of the “must-reads” of the ’60s, was heavily influenced by Crowley. See Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 222–24.
62.Carter, Sex and Rockets, 106–7.
63.For a fuller account of the Babalon Working and Parsons and Hubbard’s association, see Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 221–33, and also Carter, above.
64.For more on Marjorie Cameron, see Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 229–32, and also Lachman, The Dedalus Book of the 1960s, 471–74.
65.Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 230–31.
66.Carter, Sex and Rockets, 149.
67.Ibid., 150.
68.Ibid., 155–56.
69.Netherwood, 145.
70.Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, 394.
71.Netherwood, 81.
72.Ibid., 122. Crowley even hoped that Orson Welles would use some of his work for a film; a Hollywood thelemite apparently had gotten some of Crowley’s writings to him (p. 114). Crowley evidently wasn’t aware that Welles was a skeptic about magic, a sensibility apparent in his Cagliostro biopic Black Magic (1949) in which Crowley’s previous incarnation is presented as a charlatan.
73.Ibid., 118–19.
74.E. M. Butler, Paper Boats: An Autobiography (London: Collins, 1959), 168.
75.Netherwood, 33.
76.Ibid., 157.
77.Ibid., 170.
78.Ibid., 144.
79.Ibid., 107.
80.Lachman, in Fortean Times 287 (May 2012).
81.Ibid., 111.
82.Ibid., 185–87. The text of Crowley’s letter has been reproduced in several places.
83.See note 23.
84.See note 3.
85.Symonds, The Great Beast, 450–54.
86.Netherwood, 151.
87.Symonds, The Great Beast, 9–10; http://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/nov/22/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1533818/John-Symonds.html.
88.Wilkinson, Seven Friends, 55.
89.Symonds, The Great Beast, 454.
90.Netherwood, 195.
91.Ibid.
92.Symonds, The Great Beast, 454.
93.Netherwood, 195.
94.Kenneth Grant relates that Crowley kept a copy of My Life in a Love Cult: A Warning to All Young Girls (1928) by Marion Dockerill, who was Alma Hirsig, Leah’s sister, in a trunk under his bed, but it is unclear if, at the time of his death, it was still there. (Grant, Remembering Aleister Crowley, 55). Alma had, for a time, been a devotee of Oom the Omnipotent—Pierre Arnold Bernard—who also taught a kind of sex magick. She later thought better of this and wrote an exposé, http://omnipotentoom.com/archives/838.
ELEVEN: THE BEAST GOES ON
1.Tim Weinberg, “The Last Ritual,” in Fortean Times 231 (January 2008), 56–57, an article about the “legends” surrounding Crowley’s cremation.
2.Quoted in Rodney Davies, “The Last Days of the Great Beast, Aleister Crowley at Hastings,” http://www.21stcenturyradio.com/articles/03/1001231.html.
3.Daily Express, December 4, 1947.
4.Clayton, Lachman, Sharp, et al, Netherwood, 201; and Weinberg, “The Last Ritual.”
5.Wilson, Aleister Crowley, 9.
6.The transcript of my lecture is available in Here to Go: Art, Counter-Culture and the Esoteric (Stockholm: Edda Publishing, 2012). See also Rebecca Fitzgibbon, “Celluloid Occultist,” in Fortean Times 231 (January 2008), 50–53.
7.“That Old Black Magic,” by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer (1942). “That old black magic has me in its spell / That old black magic that you weave so well . . .”
8.Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Signet Books, 1957), 196.
9.Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 356.
10.http://www.beatlesinterviews.org/db1980.jlpb.beatles.html. Earlier I mentioned Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everybody Is a Star” as a song possibly informed with some Crowleyan motifs; the same may be so of Lennon’s “Instant Karma” (1970); “We all shine on / Like the moon, and the stars, and the sun.”
11.Hit Parade, October 1976, 14; Musician Special Collector’s Edition, 1988, 12.
12.International Times no. 10 (October 5–20, 1967).
13.Paul Devereux, The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia (London: Arkana, 1997), 14.
14.Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 302–9.
15.Ibid., 271.
16.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gY3dSqs68A.
17.Timothy Leary, Confessions of a Hope Fiend (New York: Bantam Books, 1973), 288.
18.William Burroughs Jr., Crawdaddy, June 1975 in Very Seventies: A Cultural History of the 1970s, eds. Peter Knobler and Greg Mitchell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 120–27.
19.Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 385–86.
20.Valentine, New York Rocker, 226–28.
21.In Timothy White, Rock Lives: Profiles and Interviews (London: Henry Holt & Co., 1990), 584. Oddly, the album Sacred Space was a kind of posthumous meeting between Crowley and Gurdjieff. It was produced by the guitarist Robert Fripp, who had been a student of J. G. Bennett, one of Gurdjieff’s most important followers.
22.http://www.angelfire.com/ga3/thelema/crowley/flexipop666.htm.
23.Sandy Robertson, The Aleister Crowley Scrapbook (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1994), 117.
24.For more on the Process Church of the Final Judgment, as well as Burroughs and Brion Gysin, see Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind, 261–78 and 103–6.
25.Ibid., 387–90.
26.Loosely based on Dick’s stories “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” and “Adjustment Team.”
27.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2312632/Introducing-Satanic-sex-cult-thats-snaring-stars-Peaches-Geldof.html and http://ac2012.com/2010/11/24/thanks-kevin-jonas/.
28.http://buttaflyytulsa.com/2011/04/17/creepy-passion-for-crowley-fashion/.
29.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KImMZQiX9I&feature=channel.
30.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJNfg8UyFeg.
INDEX
Please note: Crowley’s books are indexed by their titles, followed by (AC). Books by other authors are indexed under the authors’ names.
A...A... (Argentium Astrum; Silver Star), 4–6, 146–47, 154–56, 165, 169, 174, 184, 186, 266, 280, 287, 349n1, 353n12, 363n36
Abraham of Worms, 353n15
Abramelin the Mage, 4, 7, 68, 69, 72–74, 77, 80, 83, 89, 94, 97, 98, 121–22, 133, 138, 143, 232, 295, 313, 315, 353n15
Aceldama (AC), 46–47, 49, 50, 54, 57, 166
Acéphale, 357n37
Adams, Evangeline, 192, 204
Agape Lodge, 298, 304, 309
Agnostic Journal, 140, 148
Ahmed, Rollo, 284–85; The Black Arts, 284
Alice (AC), 86
Alpha and Omega, 310
Ambergris (AC), 47
Anger, Kenneth, 5, 10, 161, 224, 305, 321–22, 325, 327–28, 332–33, 343–44, 373n44
Ankh-F-N-Khnosu, 120
Archer, Ethel, 155–56; The Hieroglyph, 156
Argentium Astrum, see A...A...
Arnott, Jake, 322
Augustine, Saint, 117
Baker, Julian, 52–53, 58, 59, 61, 75
Baker, Phil, 372n25
Bamford, Christopher, 177
Bangs, Lester, 332
Barrie, J. M., Peter Pan, 148
Barritt, Brian, The Road to Excess, 329
Barron, William George, 262
Barzun, Jacques, 119
Bass, Kasimira, 265, 267
Bataille, Georges, 13, 119, 185, 357n37
Baudelaire, Charles, 18
Baum, L. Frank, 307
Bax, Clifford, 143, 293, 312–13
Beardsley, Aubrey, 45, 117
Beatles, 11, 97, 325–27
Beaton, Mary, 86
Beats, 120, 324, 325, 332
Beausoleil, Bobby, 328, 333
Becker, Ernest, 40; The Denial of Death, 8
Bell, Clive, 96
Bennett, Allan, 61, 68–72, 76, 84, 86–90, 103, 129, 130, 132, 133, 143, 154, 167, 169, 173, 243, 355n12
Bennett, Arnold, 96, 121
Bennett, Frank, 232–34
Bennett, J. G., 276n21
Beresford, J. D., 240, 281
Bergier, Jacques, The Morning of the Magicians, 320–21, 335
Bergson, Henri, 64
Berlioz, Hector, 323
Bernard, Pierre Arnold, 275n94
Berridge, Dr., 168
Besant, Annie, 43, 259, 311
Bible, 22, 28, 30, 57, 106, 107, 113, 225, 312, 340; Genesis, 37, 90; Gospels, 114, 117; Luke, 56; Revelations, 26, 32, 336
Bickers, Betty, 242, 244
Binetti, Margaret, 263
Bishop, Tom, 29–32, 36, 41
Blackwood, Algernon, 147
Blake, Peter, 326, 327
Blake, William, 117, 141, 234; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 330
Blavatsky, Helena, 11, 25, 55, 59–60, 79, 86, 107–8, 133, 151, 176, 179, 262, 296, 319, 353n12, 359n6; Isis Unveiled, 62; Secret Doctrine, 264
Boer War, 140
Bond, Graham, 331, 337
Book Four (AC), 88, 172–73, 264, 268, 361n8
Book of the Heart Girt with a Serpent, The (AC), 145, 146
Book of the High Magick Art, The (AC), 184
Book of Lapis Lazuli, The (AC), 145, 146
Book of the Law, The (AC), 9, 105–8, 111–14, 118, 120, 135, 137, 140, 154, 157–58, 179, 203, 224, 225, 236, 247, 254, 257, 261–63, 286–88, 293, 294, 317, 356n17, 364n47; German translation of, 262, 288
