In fact, Crowley’s actions on returning to England offer clear indication of his priorities. Crossing England without hindrance, he spent a jolly old-fashioned Christmas with old port, brandy, roast beef, and plum pudding with his favorite aunt Annie in Croydon (she who had been interviewed by Scotland Yard as to her nephew’s whereabouts) and brought the new year of 1920 in with meetings with old friends like Chelsea hostess Gwendoline Otter, Mary d’Este, Everard Feilding—through whom Crowley still hoped his contribution to the war effort might get him a “government job”4—and with Raymond Radclyffe, whose war loan concerns probably launched the Beast to America in 1914 in the first place. Crowley would write to Radclyffe from Tunis after the 1922 publication of Diary of a Drug Fiend.
My dear Radclyffe,
I have just received a copy of the review you were kind enough to write in the N.W. [a favorable review in the New Witness] about my D.F. [Diary of a Drug Fiend] It gave me the greatest pleasure and encouragement at a time of the greatest distress and anxiety. Believe me I shall never forget the constant kindness which you have shown me. Your faith in my genius has done more than perhaps you imagine to help me plug along.
I am just back from ten weeks in the desert. Peace encompassed my Soul and light informed it.5
Crowley met the distinguished Everard Feilding in Paris on January 11 and cautiously sought his help. We do not know what, if anything, came of the meeting. Crowley hoped the public ambiguity of his position as regards Germany could be of use to the government, that is, he could attract attention of Britain’s enemies who thought him Britain’s enemy too. That is the reason he gave for not publishing an account of his service to the Allied cause (“The Last Straw”), stimulated by intense outrage at John Bull ’s story “Another Traitor Trounced—Career and Condemnation of the notorious Aleister Crowley,” published in England the day before meeting Feilding.
It might strike those who thought there was something in gossip concerning Crowley’s notoriety to see that his thinking time during the period before and after leaving America was devoted to what in one document he called “the Problem during this Aeon, of the government and guidance of mankind.” He made notes on the problem of the state of the world after World War I and what could be done. This was the work of the Magus.
The need of a “Brain” or Ruach*199 for the planet
Analysis of the need: Excessive intercomplication
Magickal Kingship the only solution
Its real service to “the people”
Crowley further elaborates on the above:
1. General loss of sanity—and wisdom. “Planet” is for the first time in recorded history, to all intents and purposes, brainless.
2. . . . It is quite clear that another general war in the near future would throw all the Western nations into anarchy, chaos, and reversion to savagery. On the other hand, the world is quite clearly heading for such a war, and no power at present in force can avert it.6
Crowley’s reputation worsened considerably from 1922 to 1923 and, it could be argued, is still out of line with the evidence.
Cecil Frederick Russell, who came to Crowley with a plaintive desire for initiation in 1918, learned everything he could about him and his teachings, became an intimate at 63 Washington Square, and visited him at Cefalù, Sicily, where Crowley established himself in 1920, eventually sold out his friendship with the Beast. Never one to miss a trick, Russell decided to beat Bill Seabrook to the post by selling his own story to Morrill Goddard, Sunday editor of the lowbrow New York American Journal. Having established his version of the Beast’s teachings in Chicago, calling it the “Choronzon Club,” Russell contacted Goddard, on September 25, 1922, and filled a long letter with all he knew about Crowley and his friends. He offered eight articles, spilling the beans on Crowley’s homosexuality, naming names, and all for $100 per article.7 As far as I am aware, Goddard disdained to publish, per-haps concerned at the implications for slander and libel suits based on of character assassinations coming from a single related source.
It is noteworthy that Russell chose a lowbrow publication to disgorge the contents of his poisoned pen, for that has been the principal mode of information transport on Crowley ever since. As Crowley himself observed, no highbrow journal in his lifetime ever dipped to the gutter level and condemned him or his ideas outright. However, the lowbrow story is the one that got about and over course of time established itself as the universal legacy of Crowley’s life. Tried by gutter press, more responsible journals have been loth to pick up anything serious about the real man. The result has been that he has been artificially severed from his place in the continuum of cultural and philosophical history, an eternal “outsider,” condemned in absentia.
Crowley’s “friend” Bill Seabrook added fuel to the flames in 1923. We have already seen his account of Crowley and Engers in “Astounding Secrets of the Devil-Worshippers’ Mystic Love Cult” published on April 8, 1923, in the United States (see here). That was only chapter 2 of a series of twelve. The timing could not have been worse.
In February 1923, Crowley’s pupil, Oxford graduate and magical enthusiast Frederick Charles (“Raoul”) Loveday, died after accidentally drinking bacteria-laden stream water, despite Crowley’s warning not to touch it. This event initiated a storm of headlines and articles that ran through the Sunday Express and John Bull like a fever from March to May, with John Bull coining the phrase “the wickedest man in the world” (March 24, 1923), taking Crowley’s nickname, “the Beast,” at face value as indicating an immoral cannibal. Such was the persistent clamor that, on April 23, Crowley was served a deportation order from Italian soil at Palermo, by order of fascist dictator Mussolini, already anxious about Freemasons, spies, and foreign journalists in Italy.
Leaving his family (Leah and Crowley’s daughter Astarte Lulu, Leah’s son Hansi, Ninette Fraux, and her son Howard) behind, expecting to be vindicated and reunited with them, a penniless, persecuted Crowley crossed the Mediterranean for Tunis. There he began a long process of appeals for a fair hearing that never came. It is interesting with regard to the legacy issue how Crowley tried to deal with his reputation as propounded by William B. Seabrook’s twelve sensationalist articles.
On August 1, 1923, Crowley, financially sustained by AA brother Norman Mudd, wrote from the Tunisia Palace Hotel to U.S. tour promoter Arnold Shaw, proposing a lecture tour of the USA.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law
It’s been a long time since you heard of me. Like Byron, I woke up and found myself famous. What contracts do you propose to offer me? Any arrangement would include prepayment* of the travelling expenses of myself and a secretary and a substantial guarantee of the tour.
I think I had better leave it to you to feel the pulse of the public with regard to the actual subjects of the lectures. As you know, I am familiar with every branch of Occult Science, and can suit myself to any conceivable audience.
Love is the law, love under will.
*In case you do not know how famous I am, I refer you to the recent SERIES of 12 double-page feature stories by William B. Seabrook of the International Feature Syndicate which have attained publicity as wide as their statements are fabulous [meaning = fables; nonsense]. I am quite sure that the wild and woolly will put down any imaginable percentage of their dirty dollars to see and hear in the flesh the original of so many sensational falsehoods. In fact I do not propose to accept any figure notably inferior to that of my dear friend Powys [John Cowper Powys], to whom please give my love when you next see him.8
It is interesting to see Crowley trying to turn the awful publicity around by capitalizing on the notoriety while desiring to put the record straight as to the truth of what he stood for. He also wrote to New York agent Major J. B. Pond, who had handled Winston Churchill’s public tour arrangements when Crowley was in New York the first time in 1900.
Crowley then turned his attention to the “culprit,” Bill Seabrook, who, having probably first moo
ted his intended piece as a respectful one, had persuaded Crowley to lend him materials, only for Crowley to see the results whipped into the general tempest of anti-Crowley “revelations.”
Dear Bill,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Lots of talk about you here.
Question is—have you played a straight hand?
You must have made a great deal of money in the serial; and you must pay me 50%.
You cried “Trust me,” and I trusted you. I haven’t had a cent from you bar the $50 necessary to collect and mail you the material.
(You have not returned it either; do so at once.)9
That Crowley was able to rise above his troubles and accept them in stoic spirit was always a remarkable feature of his iron tenacity in the face of calumny after calumny, and the results of his own follies. This comes through clearly in a letter of the same period he sent to the author James Branch Cabell (1879–1958), whose novel Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919) contained lines from Crowley’s Gnostic Mass and was a book Crowley himself hugely admired. Cabell’s book had led to an obscenity trial, so he was writing to a fellow sufferer who told things as they appeared to him to be.
Tunisia Palace Hotel, Tunis
4 September 1923
Dear Mr Cabell,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
It never struck me how strange an animal I am till these memoirs supplied a Magical Mirror.*200 The truth is far stranger than fiction, as somebody once had the perspicacity to remark. I concur—in the face of Bill Seabrook’s long serial of sensational sob-stuff in your Sunday papers:—“Astounding Secrets of the Devil-Worshippers’ Mystic Love Cult.” What fools these mortals be!
Yours ever in the service of ΣΟΦΙÎ' [Sophia = Wisdom]
Love is the law, love under will. Aleister Crowley
P.S. I am really eager that you should understand my point of view, and eventually wake up the world to the superb destiny which lies beneath the superficial sorrow and futility which form the tragedy of your Epic. You mustn’t leave mankind paralyzed by the apparent impossibility of attainment. A.C.10
Aleister Crowley had little choice but to tolerate low brow publicity, thinking he could turn it around to serve the cause. He was wrong. On the other hand, it did mean that in the future recruits to Thelema really did have to have minds of their own to penetrate the dirty smoke screen, intuiting that there really was something going on à la Crowley. And these people—being individuals—came, and still come, from all classes of strivers on this planet, despite carps that they might better belong to another one.
THE O.T.O. IN AMERICA
Crowley’s second American legacy must be the O.T.O. Ah! You could write a good long book about the survival of Crowley’s O.T.O. in the United States—and indeed there are two very good works on the subject to which I can refer you with confidence, though neither tell the complete story. Martin P. Starr’s The Unknown God: W. T. Smith and the Thelemites takes a sympathetic but no less rigorous interest in long-suffering Englishman Wilfred Talbot Smith (1885–1957), Jones’s deputy in Vancouver, who oversaw a long and troubled—indeed often painful—history of devotion to the Beast and his teachings in California, even when Crowley turned his back on him. Starr’s detailed study ends with Smith’s death in 1957, when the O.T.O. was headed by Crowley’s successor and old friend Karl Germer. Germer died in 1962 without naming a new outer head of the Order.
How the North American O.T.O. emerged from the long hiatus between that time and the assumption of headship according to Crowley’s principles of the extraordinary Major Grady Louis McMurtry (1918–1985) between 1969 and 1971, when under McMurtry’s aegis a freshly legal O.T.O. began performing initiations again, is told from the point of view of personal memoir in James Wasserman’s In the Center of the Fire: A Memoir of the Occult 1966–1989. Wasserman’s is one of the most important memoirs of the 1960s and post-’60s American spiritual awakening, with the expected “adult dose” of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. According to prevailing folk wisdom of course, if he had been there, he shouldn’t have been able to remember it! Ever wondered why the Gospels are so short? As a survivor, Wasserman tells an inspiring story of not always inspiring happenings: heroes, heroines, heroin, wives, lovers, bums—you name it!
THE CHURCH OF THELEMA
By 1922, O.T.O. lodge work in Vancouver had come to a standstill. Smith missed Jones, who couldn’t afford to get himself out of Chicago or his burgeoning interest in the latest esoteric scam, the “U.B.” (or Universal Brotherhood) that mangled brains with absurd language and wanton neologisms; Jones should have known better but was laboring under many delusions, chief of which was that he had gained superior insights to Crowley’s. Meanwhile, Outer Head of the Order Theodor Reuss, trying to undermine Crowley, sent Jones a charter granting Jones rights as head of the O.T.O. in North America. This was intended by Reuss to curry favor with AMORC founder H. Spencer Lewis with whom Reuss hoped to form a financially advantageous alliance. Lewis didn’t trust Crowley—Crowley knew Lewis’s weak spots.
On August 28, 1922, Lewis calumniated Crowley. In a Q&A session, attended by Ruby Jones, Lewis was asked if AMORC had anything to do with the O.T.O., bearing in mind the Hearst papers’ attack on it. Lewis replied, “If you mean that filthy, immoral outfit run by Crowley and Jones etc., etc.”11 Ruby stuck up for the O.T.O. and told Lewis he was objectionable. Needless to say, while Reuss’s move to “get Crowley out of America” did not make Lewis look any more kindly on Reuss and the O.T.O., it did give Jones reason to take himself seriously, rendering him even more prone to imagine himself inspired.
All this made Smith very worried. Added to worries about Jones and the U.B., Smith now heard C. F. Russell had stepped beyond the bonds of brotherhood. Crowley wrote to Smith about the problem on March 14, 1922: “Russell is a really dangerous lunatic capable of murder.”12 On April 21, Smith, having quit British Columbia, found employment as adjuster in the South California Gas Company’s Customer Department, which company employed Smith for some twenty years.
Reuss died on October 28, 1923, while Crowley waxed and waned in North Africa. Both Jones and neo-Rosicrucian German bookseller Heinrich Tränker had received X° charters from Reuss, making them O.T.O. heads. They both agreed to accept Crowley’s claim that Reuss made him successor as O.H.O. What Crowley in himself meant by that was that Reuss had made Crowley take control of the Order, by Reuss’s hostile attitude to Thelema, not by grant! Crowley had an ambivalent attitude to titles, and when it came to it, Excalibur belonged to the one the stone yielded to.
Fig. 36.1. Aleister Crowley at large, 1929
Despite Jones’s support from Chicago over the O.T.O. headship, relations worsened between them over interpretations of Thelema and the magical tradition generally, with Crowley thinking that Jones was actually insane. In 1925 they ceased communicating, a hiatus lasting until 1936, when there was a brief rapprochement.
Smith, in California, kept in touch with Crowley and Jones, remaining devoted to the Thelemic gospel and hoping things might yet improve. In 1930, they did. Smith met Regina Agnes Kahl (1891–1945), a striking and approachable bisexual opera singer and voice coach. Smith was smitten and Regina—predictably nicknamed “Vagina” by Crowley—let her last lesbian lover go to devote herself to Smith, who charmed her in his simplicity, a simplicity that ever irritated Crowley, who always liked a rather military but intellectually subtle style in his deputies. Regina had a dramatic impact on Smith’s confidence, who felt a failure in all sorts of ways.
Smith had left his wife, Kath, though was still close to son, Kwen, and, looking back on hopeful days in Vancouver, missed Jones and smarted under Crowley’s distance management. For his part, 666 found Smith’s letters too chatty, domestic, and full of sentimental sob stuff about who was sleeping with whom; Crowley felt his California dream could end up a Theosophical (“Toshosophical”) soft-drinks party, with a bit of a talk about Vivekananda fo
llowed by a chance of romance with the latest arrival! Being so far away, the Beast never fully grasped that this was California, and the disciplined English style didn’t make much sense in the heat and the breeze. Smith got on doing his best, and he was very fond of the ladies: for him that rebellion against sexual conformity was what a lot of Thelema was about. He couldn’t stand the sex-hating hypocritical religion of his childhood. And with Regina around, he got the sexual aspect of things going in good stride. Even courageous Thelema devotee and Cefalù veteran Jane Wolfe joined in a sex-magical threesome with Smith and Regina.
Born Sarah Jane Wolfe, Soror Estai (1875–1958) was a mainstay of the Thelemic presence in America, a rock. Introduced to Crowley’s work by none other than Betty and Sheridan Bickers, she wrote to the Beast in 1918 when earning good money as a Hollywood actress, playing Mary Pickford’s mother in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917—you can see it on YouTube). But as roles dried up, especially after the advent of the Talkie, Jane came to feel blacklisted for her religious affiliation. The Equinox was associated with what brought down the artistically restrictive Hays Code on Hollywood’s delirious head.
Aleister Crowley in America Page 69
