Aleister Crowley in America

by Tobias Churton

During autumn 1931, Smith engaged carpenters to assist in providing structure and accoutrements for a planned revival of the Gnostic Catholic Mass, the Thelemites’ contribution to Californian righteousness. Big things have small beginnings.

  With Regina and Jane’s vocal skills, Smith thought he could improve on local Liberal Catholic and Roman Catholic ritual work. To house the ritual, Smith and Regina acquired a lease on 1746 Winona Boulevard, Hollywood, on May 3, 1932. This would become a successful O.T.O. “profess house” for the next decade. Regina, a wonderful entertainer, held themed parties, such as “Walt Whitman’s birthday” and “Crowley nights” when the Beast attained spectral presence through his signed photograph, brought in as guest of honor.

  While Smith worked hard on turning an attic of thirty-six by eighteen feet into a temple, he was wary of coming out into the open with a revived O.T.O. initiation schedule lest it bring the Hearst newspapers snooping around, ever willing to manufacture a newsworthy scandal to keep the punters titillated. As fictional Hearst-like figure Charles Foster Kane responded in Citizen Kane to his Cuba correspondent’s telegram, “Could provide prose poems about scenery. STOP. There is no war in Cuba! STOP.”—“You provide the prose poems; I’ll provide the war.”

  In 1932, with Regina doing her own ritual based on Crowley’s Liber Astarte vel Berylli, she became convinced a revived O.T.O. program should be swiftly inaugurated. Jane informed imminent arrivals from Missouri, Max and the stunningly beautiful Leota Schneider, about forthcoming developments now the new temple was ready. Max and Leota, with son Roland, joined the Thelemic household on February 3, 1933. Max’s ability to make jewelery did little to help strained finances. The “profess house” was supposed to be run on quasi-monastic or communistic lines with pooling of resources, but as always happens when necessity is voluntary, volunteers are necessary.

  Natural portents presaged the first performance of the Gnostic Mass at 1746 Winona Boulevard. The Long Beach earthquake struck 6.4 on the Richter scale when it shook the vicinity on March 10, 1933, at 5:55 p.m. Nine days later, a Sunday, at noon, the first mass was performed, with Wilfred Smith as priest; Regina Kahl as priestess; Oliver Jacobi as deacon; with a congregation made up of Leota, Max, and Roland Schneider; Dr. George Liebling (1865–1946) and his wife, Alice; Olita Lunt Draper (1876–1945); Viola Morgan, John Bamber; Jane Wolfe; Mary K. Wolfe; and Jack Ross on organ. Jack Ross would be entrapped by a police antigay sting, and Harry Hay took up the ivories in his place with works by Satie, Richard Strauss, Wagner, Bax, and himself: a fine addition. A feast and ceremony of the Equinox followed the service at 5:43 p.m., when Frater VOVN (Smith) banged his new Zildjian gong, calling all present to sup a toast to the Master Therion, their absent friend.

  When Crowley saw the photographs of the temple, he declared himself “pleased beyond measure,” though he would be less impressed when he saw pictures of the principals in their costumes, Smith particularly. Crowley persistently misinterpreted things that were happening at 1746. For example, he thought that the hundred or so persons that might come to Regina’s social events also attended services. Things were aggravated considerably when Crowley let Max Schneider be his intermediary. Max began complaining regularly to Crowley about Smith, who had little initiative, it was true, but was honest and reliable. Eventually, poor Smith couldn’t do right for doing wrong as Crowley tried to micromanage from thousands of long miles away.

  One suspects Crowley might just have been suffering from envy at being stuck in a dreary, depression-hit Britain while his acolytes were in the sun. In England, Hollywood was seen as a place of pure (and impure) magic in the popular sense; Crowley, despite the fact he hadn’t been impressed by it in 1915, couldn’t help but feel the glamour was a bit cool by the time its rays reached him in London. He desperately wanted to be part of things, hence the urge to interfere. He wanted to be present at the party and hold the tiller. He knew what he could have contributed and thought that if he was nice to Schneider, Schneider would raise the funds to get him over there. Max’s description of Regina and Smith’s activities as “theatricals” raised Crowley’s hackles that Thelema was being sold low on account of amateurishness.

  Max’s hostility was not without cause. Smith, his roving eye ever circumnavigating the globe of his experience, had caught the attention of the lovely Leota, and they had sex magick together. There was of course supposed to be no jealousy in a Thelemic community. The Book of the Law made it plain that a wife, if it was her True Will, might depart husband and enjoy the love of a lover, husband likewise.

  Crowley resented the style in which Smith operated. There was something about Smith’s sex appetite that disgusted him. This might appear hypocritical. Part of it was Crowley’s childishly arrogant snobbery, which, combined with leonine pride, got the upper hand from time to time. Keen judge of caste that he was, Crowley mistook Smith’s hopeless grammar, lazy diction, and spelling as signs of plebeian origin. In fact, Smith came from the same kind of middle-class background as Crowley did; Smith just hadn’t been bothered much about schooling. However, if you were going to play the game of Love, in Crowley’s book, you did it artfully. Crowley felt the O.T.O. house would attract the reputation of being a “love cult,” something he abhorred (recall the Marian Dockerill booklet that linked Crowley’s name to a “love cult”; that is, religion or mysticism as an excuse for erotic gratification). In this, he was right, as we shall see.

  Leota Schneider had a sense of the magical; she called her rites with Smith “Unto thee Nuit,” a charming paraphrase from The Book of the Law. “Sing the rapturous love-song unto me! Burn to me perfumes! Wear to me jewels! Drink to me, for I love you! I love you!” demands the goddess of infinite space in Crowley’s revelation: give one’s all to the all (AL I:63).

  Not only did Crowley want Max to get him back to California, he also wanted them to use contacts to make a movie of the Gnostic mass, with movie stars as priest and priestess. Of this suggestion, Leota wrote in her diary, “VOVN [Smith] of course thinks this stupid, and he is right.”13

  These little windows into a more involved story give us some idea of the reality an esoteric family life, lived on a different principle to that of the ordinary nonesoteric world.

  There is a wonderful photograph by Paul Rose Freeman of an informal gathering at Winona Boulevard with Georgia Haitz, Oliver Jacobi, Regina Kahl, Wilfred T. Smith (looking like distinguished bank manager), some unknown sportif-looking guests, and Jane Wolfe in a long tartan dress. If this was “commune” life, communes might never have achieved such a bad name! They are smart, clean, tidy, genial, normal. In fact the spirit of the image is forward-looking, warm, and contented, a perhaps fleeting moment when the 1930s saw, unbeknown to itself, a relaxed group of loving people who’d fled quietly from the Wizard of Oz and found a comfortable, carpeted living room, pleasantly appointed in the glow of a Californian Christmas Eve. Where, one might ask, was the “force and fire” of Horus?—in their eyes and in their hearts.

  From September 21, 1935, the Minerval degree was worked at Hollywood’s only profess house. Smith and Regina obligated Max on August 8, giving him the first and second degrees in rough form. Smith aimed for twelve candidates but settled for seven. They were received into the Minerval degree in the desert about Playa del Rey (Doors, eat your heart out!), which made an intriguing return trip to the home of Thelema in America. A banquet followed initiation. Of those who passed through, many just passed through, transients. Some stuck.14

  After inception in September 1935, the Agape Lodge, the only functioning lodge in the world under Crowley’s direction, progressed steadily with regular study classes, degree conferrals, lectures. “OT.O. Parties” brought a weekly celebration of Crowley’s Gnostic mass. On May 17, 1936, mystic Paul Foster Case, founder of the Builders of the Adytum (which used to have the late Michael Baigent, coauthor of Holy Blood, Holy Grail as a member), attended mass at 1746 as a welcome visitor.

  Unfortunately, Max Schneider’s continual misinfor
mation to Crowley led to cessation of lodge activity on August 27, 1936. Dormancy ensued for three years. Crowley accused Smith of sexual transactions for money and pressured Schneider to arrange for a visit from the Beast to sort things out. Crowley was also keen to sort out AMORC as well, for he knew that Lewis’s only valid document was an O.T.O. diploma given him by Reuss; Lewis’s alleged Toulouse Rosicrucian charter was an obvious forgery. Lewis knew that the charter bases of all neo-Rosicrucian organizations were ultimately suspect, because existing organizations had no documented authority going back further than the mid-eighteenth century, though this was not a fact his members were made aware of. They were fed the story of an unbroken chain of tradition (ah! Tradition) going back to the temples of ancient Egypt. Lewis had made a link with the Martinists of Paris and Lyon. He also claimed to have made some kind of connection with the Rose-Croix from which Joséphin Péladan claimed authority for his Order of the Temple and the Graal. But that group had no charter base either to assert a link to supposed late medieval founder of the R+C Order, “Father CR.”*201

  In 1939 the local press tried to link what Smith had incorporated as the “Church of Thelema” with a serial killer’s attack at a school. Police swarmed on Winona Boulevard. A Herald-Express reporter attended a Gnostic mass the day after the police swoop; Regina gave a warm, straightforward account of the church, legally founded, in the context of a European crisis where freedom of religious expression was being extirpated by fascist dictators. God forbid that such could occur in happy California! While yellow journalists referred to the group as “the Purple Cult,” Smith and the brethren participated in a radio recording, including a decent waxing of the Gnostic mass, due to be aired on Friday, March 3, 1939. However, the school where the attack took place was concerned at the effect of more publicity and begged that in the light of the fuss now dying down it would hurt the school to issue a rebuttal of claims of links between homicide and the alleged cult. There was also the likelihood that the Hearst press was ready to go to the level of linking faked nude photos mixed in with images of 1746 and its members. Smith bought the discs made of the service from the radio station for $20. More momentous events were to come, as war began in Europe and U-boats again targeted shipping in the Atlantic. In 1940, Crowley experienced the full force of Hitler’s Luftwaffe as bomb after bomb hit London while Californians enjoyed beach life.

  To give the Thelemites credit, they arranged for a U.S. printing of Crowley’s literary and symbolic “Pantacle to Win the War” called Thumbs Up! On September 12, 1941, three months before the United States entered World War II, Crowley’s representative in New York, Karl Germer, read a telegram from 666: “Inform everybody Aleister invented V-sign for Victory.”†202 Germer and the Californian Thelemites would soon ensure that a special U.S. edition of Thumbs Up! appeared in 1942. To it was appended a typed note, indicating that Crowley’s V-campaign had now reached America.

  This American reprint of Aleister Crowley’s Thumbs Up! was made possible by the generosity and enthusiasm of a few of his many friends on this side of the Atlantic, as a contribution to the V for Victory campaign.

  To follow the example of the English edition, a limited number of copies have been made available “for Free Distribution among the Soldiers and Workers of the Forces of Freedom.” Contributions to the printing of a much larger edition may be sent to:

  V

  P.O. Box 24

  Hollywood, Calif.

  One of the technical contributors to the war for freedom was rocket engineer Jack Parsons. In March 1941, 1746 Winona Boulevard witnessed his initiation and that of his wife, Helen Parsons. Jack’s epiphany proved a seismic jolt to the Hollywood Thelemites.

  A major figure in U.S. rocket research history, John Whiteside Parsons’s life (1914–1952) would make a fascinating American biographical movie, especially as his great interest in science fiction now flourishes to the extent where fiction and fact meet in the computers, or through the computers, of millions around the world.15

  JACK PARSONS: ROCKET MAN

  Estranged from a family suffering the faded glory of former wealth (lost in the 1929 crash), Parsons took his scientific brilliance and love of rockets to a paid post at Caltech in 1939. A founder of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation, Jack pioneered liquid-and solid-fuel rocket engines and invented the first castable, composite rocket propellent. Born in Chicago in 1910, Jack’s wife, Helen, née Cowley, was Olga Helena Cowley’s daughter. In July 1922, Olga remarried and moved from Chicago to Pasadena in Southern California with husband, Burton Ashley Northrup. From that marriage Helen Parsons acquired two attractive half sisters, Sara and Nancy. As Martin Starr observes, the profess house always provided a welcome home to bohemians and sexual outsiders, and Jack, who attended a Communist Party reading group once or twice (he never joined the C.P.), loved radical movements; he wanted society reformed. In this atmosphere, it is not altogether surprising that dashingly handsome Jack would find himself involved with Helen’s half sister Sara, a beauty.

  Fig. 36.2. Happy Times: Jack Whiteside Parsons (1914–1952) and Sara Northrup (1924–1997)

  With America fully committed to war against the Axis powers, and rocket research a military necessity, Jack and Helen found a superb three-story Californian mansion at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue, on Pasadena’s “Milllionaires’ Row.” It had sixteen rooms, five bedrooms, a wine cellar, and a huge basement. Jack and Helen took out a two-year lease on June 1, 1942. Jane and Smith had their doubts, but Smith backed Parsons’s boundless enthusiasm with his retirement savings of $1,200, and the Church of Thelema moved in on June 9, 1942, shortly after the United States defeated the Japanese by force and fire at the Battle of Midway in the Pacific. June 9 was also Wilfred Smith’s fifty-seventh birthday, and he would live with Helen Parsons, as Jack would live conjugally with Sara Elizabeth Bruce Northrup (1924–1997), Soror Cassap of the O.T.O.

  Paranoia was in the air. It first emanated from the East Coast, where Crowley’s representative Karl Germer, only freed from incarceration by the Nazis thanks to his American wife, Sascha’s, intervention (the Gestapo accused Germer of disseminating the works of “High Freemason Crowley”), was subjected to F.B.I. observation. The internal security investigation began in 1941 when J. Edgar Hoover was considering Crowley’s visa application to return to the United States. Hoover was suspicious of Crowley’s World War I record of espionage and was suspicious of Crowley in general, hardly surprising given the press he’d received for twenty years and the information the old B.I. had provided him. Unfortunately, suspicions were compounded in Germer’s case by a letter sent to the F.B.I. from an acquaintance of Germer’s divorced second wife, Cora. The letter declared Germer a pro-Nazi admirer of Hitler. That was sufficient for Hoover to order agents to search Germer’s New York apartment, which happened on March 3, 1942, an event Germer never really recovered from. On top of everything Germer had suffered over the years for Thelema, the invasion by U.S. agents of his private space in his country of refuge made him exceedingly nervous, retiring, insular, and even more suspicious than he was already.

  As if that was not bad enough, a letter of September 7, 1942, signed “A Real Soldier” was received by the Pasadena Police Department. The letter alleged “Sex Perversion” and the teaching of “Survival of the Fittest” (a Nazi doctrine allegedly) as sine qua non at 1003 S. Orange Grove Avenue. Pasadena Police pounced and interviewed Jack Parsons. The interview was shared with Army Intelligence. The F.B.I. showed up on January 16, 1943. Helen reckoned the agents’ questions were stupid. Smith patiently showed them around the building. Calling the object of their search the “Church of Thelma” the investigation concluded that there was no subversion of the United States in evidence at the location, though it might be a religion or possibly a “love-cult,” but the point was made that Jack’s involvement reflected poorly on his character.

  Crowley too would begin to have his doubts about handsome Jack’s charact
er, while his view of Smith hit a new low in 1945 when Crowley basically turned against him. In an oblique attack, Crowley reckoned Smith had some kind of profound ego problem, ever refusing to see that his judgment might not always be as right as he thought it was. Crowley wanted to knock him off his secure perch, a cruel thing, but that didn’t bother him. Crowley was under the impression Smith’s alleged weakness would wreck the lodge. His method was fairly perverse. He wrote in all apparent seriousness that it was now revealed to him what he had hitherto failed to see, that is, that W. T. Smith was in fact the incarnation of a god, and not just any god! Such things, wrote Crowley, were of great magnitude and rarity in the initiatic history of the species, and it was now incumbent on Smith to make a Great Magical Retirement until through protracted meditation and self-analysis he discovered exactly who the god in question might be, and what his message for mankind was. Until such time as he could solve the riddle of his being, the other members of the lodge were to eschew his company, bar necessities.

  Smith didn’t find this funny at all. He had given his life to Thelema and never could see why Crowley did not like him addressing his letters “Dear Aleister.” Poor Smith left 1003 in the spring of 1945, finding accommodation at 1801 Tamarind, Hollywood, where he settled in great misery of mind with Helen Parsons and Kwen, his son. Crowley was dis-interested from then on.

  L. RON HUBBARD

  Into the vacuum he had left at 1003, strange things were afoot. Jack shared his enthusiasm for the latest developments in science and psychology in the milieu of creative science fiction, a milieu frequented by Lafayette Ron Hubbard (1911–1986), born in Tilden, Nebraska, son of naval officer Harry Ross and teacher Ledora May Hubbard. Hubbard shared with Parsons an interest in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction, edited by John W. Campbell Jr., who would become a supporter of Hubbard’s innovations in psychology as they appeared in the late 1940s, culminating in Hubbard’s Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950).