Aleister Crowley (36 page)

Another scholar to visit Crowley was Richard Ellmann, who was writing a book about Yeats; he was interested in speaking with Crowley about his magical battle with his rival poet. Ellmann’s
Yeats: The
Man and the Masks
(1948) remains a classic biography of Crowley’s old nemesis. The poet and translator Michael Hamburger visited Crowley and was impressed by his “sheer physical stamina,” amazed that he was not only alive but “active and vigorous.”
⁷⁶
James Laver, curator at the Victorian and Albert Museum, and author of a book on Nostradamus, visited Crowley; he enjoyed the brandy that the Beast offered and noticed flecks of blood on his shirtsleeves. Crowley told Laver that “magic is something we do to ourselves,” explaining, however, that it is “more convenient to assume the objective existence of an Angel who gives us new knowledge than to allege that our invocation has awakened a supernatural power in ourselves,” a remark that contradicts what he always claimed was his key discovery, the reality of “discarnate intelligence.”
⁷⁷
Frederic Mellinger, a German actor who had emigrated to America and returned to postwar Germany, also visited Crowley; he had joined W. T. Smith’s Agape Lodge in 1940. He came bearing gifts and helped the Beast tidy his room.
⁷⁸

On a more magical note, Gerald Gardner, the modern exponent of witchcraft, and author of
Witchcraft Today
(1954), visited Crowley. Gardner found him a “frail, gentle, archdeaconish figure.” “Could this be the Great Beast who had once boasted so many followers; who had thundered his way through life?” Gardner wondered. Gardner was not sure about Crowley’s powers, but he believed Crowley believed in them, and that “this delusion enabled him to exploit many people.” Nevertheless Gardner was initiated into the O.T.O.; as it did with Grant and McMurtry, after Crowley’s death this led to some confusion. For a time he was saddled with being O.H.O., but Gardner did not really care for sex magick or the O.T.O. and soon abandoned it for his own predilections, which included scourging. Much has
been speculated about Crowley’s influence on Gardner’s Wicca; one apocryphal tale has Gardner paying Crowley £300 to write his
Book of Shadows
, the collection of writings making up the Wiccan liturgy. That Gardner borrowed material from Crowley is fairly clear, but that Crowley was initiated into a witch cult in 1900, as Gardner claimed, is rejected by most researchers. Gardner, like Crowley, was a self-mythologist and teller of tales, something true of many people interested in the occult.

One visit to Netherwood most likely did not take place. In 1919 Dion Fortune, the magical name of Violet Firth, was initiated into the Alpha and Omega, a Golden Dawn offshoot led by Moina Mathers. A rivalry between the two began and Fortune left to pursue her own path. By the 1930s, Fortune was one of the most respected modern occultists; her
The Mystical Qabalah
(1935) remains a classic introduction to the magical tradition, and she was also the author of several very readable works of occult fiction, one of which,
The Winged Bull
(1935), features the black magician Hugo Astley, based on Crowley. Crowley had seen her lecture in London in 1939, and recorded that she was “like a hippo with false teeth,” and her talk a “bubbling of tinned tomato soup.”
⁷⁹
Nevertheless, in 1942 they began corresponding, and continued to do so while Crowley was at Netherwood. Kenneth Grant relates that Fortune visited Crowley on two occasions while he was present, and on others after that; he also refers to her as “
the
magical Shakti of the new aeon”—Shakti being the consort of the god Shiva, meaning that she, Fortune, was Crowley’s magical partner. There is, however, no mention of Fortune’s visits in Crowley’s diaries; this is strange, as Crowley recorded anything of note in his journals. There was a considerable correspondence between Crowley and Fortune; much of this was, sadly, subsequently
destroyed. In one letter Fortune appears to accept Crowley’s new aeon, but reserves the right to announce this in her own time and asks Crowley to keep silent about it until then. This letter, however, is reproduced in Grant’s memoir, and its authenticity may be suspect.
⁸⁰
Crowley also told Frederic Mellinger that before her death in January 1946, Fortune had reached an “arrangement” with him, in which she acknowledged his authority, but was forced to keep silent because of “the old nonsense which was knocked to pieces in Crowley v. Constable.”
⁸¹
There is no evidence for this “arrangement” outside of Crowley’s account, and as we’ve seen, the only thing knocked to pieces in his libel trial was Crowley himself. Crowley, we know, often tried to take over other occult groups—he did this with the O.T.O., and we remember his attempt to get Annie Besant to recognize his supremacy—so this may be just another example of his esoteric imperialism. It is possible that Fortune, recognizing Crowley’s magical geniuses—she acknowledges his influence in
The Mystical Qabalah
—wanted to please him, and told him what he wanted to hear. She may have known that, like herself, he was not long for this world; by the time of her alleged visits she was diagnosed with leukemia. Grant himself said she had lost her vigor and was close to death.

But probably Crowley’s favorite visitor was his son, Ataturk, who turned up with his mother on May 15, 1947, a few months before Crowley’s death. Crowley had last seen them ten years earlier, during a holiday in Cornwall. Ataturk was now ten. Crowley was moved by his son’s and Pat’s sudden appearance—he told a correspondent that he had “given them up for dead”—and he wrote Ataturk a letter, spelling out what he expected of him and giving him advice. It is a touching if bizarre document. Like every other letter Crowley wrote, he prefaced it with the Law. Crowley tells Ataturk how happy he is to
see him, and assures him that from now on he will watch over his career. He is very happy that Ataturk is learning to read. That Ataturk was ten, and that Pat was a follower of Rudolf Steiner, suggests that Steiner’s ideas about reading—that it shouldn’t be taught until after the age of seven—may have had something to do with Ataturk’s late start. Crowley informs Ataturk of his supposed ancestry—the de Quérouaille line—and insists that he be “high-minded, generous, noble” and never lie. He urges Ataturk to learn Latin: it is his destiny to become an educated gentleman. He should also learn chess, and read the Bible and Shakespeare; through these he can develop good style in writing. Grammar, syntax, and logic are indispensable. Crowley closes as his “affectionate father,” after reminding Ataturk that “Love is the law, love under will.”
⁸²

It would not be a usual letter if it were written during Crowley’s own childhood and if Ataturk had not had two stepfathers during the last decade. During the war, Pat had married James McAlpine, an army officer who worked for British Intelligence. After he died on a mission, Pat married again, and she also had several “open” relationships.
⁸³
But for a ten-year-old who did not remember his father—he was only a year old when Crowley last saw him—it seems an odd missive. How much Ataturk followed his father’s advice is unclear, but his subsequent career was, like that of his father’s, checkered.
⁸⁴

Yet undoubtedly the most important visitor to Netherwood was John Symonds, whose biography of Crowley, more than anything else, saved him from oblivion. Clifford Bax broke the ice, and Symonds headed to Netherwood with the astrologer Rupert Gleadow. Bax himself first met Crowley in 1904 at the age of eighteen, over a chess match in St. Moritz, not long after Crowley’s revelation in Cairo. Bax had an interest in theosophy and later, edited a magazine,
The Golden Hind
, with the occult artist Austin Osman Spare. Symonds knew of Victor Neuburg—indeed, he lived in his flat—and wanted to do an article on Neuburg’s guru. His first impression of the aged Beast on May 3, 1946, was not positive. Crowley had a pained, puzzled expression, a fussy voice, a skull-like head, and seemed utterly exhausted. He also exuded a peculiar odor, Abramelin oil mixed with old age and possibly ether, and had a strange air of remoteness, of being far removed from human concerns. On being told that Gleadow was an astrologer, Crowley remarked that astrology was only “a fraction of one per cent” true. They spoke about the end of the world, and Crowley delivered an impromptu lecture, ending in his own revelation about the new aeon of “force and fire.” What struck Symonds most was Crowley’s heroin intake; he was, Symonds says, taking enough—eleven grains—to “kill a roomful of people.”
⁸⁵
But Crowley must have thought well of Symonds. He made him one of his literary executors—Louis Wilkinson was the other—a decision
thelemites
have regretted ever since.

Symonds, as noted, took a critical view of Crowley and his book is anathema to the Beast’s followers. Most biographies subsequent to
The Great Beast
(1951) are a response to it, attempts at rectifying Symonds’s tongue-in-cheek account. This is fair, but it has to be admitted, I think, that Symonds’s remains the best written account of Crowley’s life. It is by far the most readable. Symonds is biased, yes; he didn’t like the Beast and admitted that he “hoped to make a name and fortune over Crowley.”
⁸⁶
But this is what any writer hopes when he has found a good story. Symonds himself was surprised at the reaction to his book, and was appalled that by the 1960s, the “love generation” had taken Crowley up as a hero—he was, himself, much more conservative and health-minded than his subject, and he did
not like the hippies.
⁸⁷
But without his first, however flawed, account, most likely neither the hippies nor anyone else would have known of Crowley at all. And perhaps neither would we.

Crowley turned seventy-two in October 1947. One of his last visitors was Louis Wilkinson, who noted a certain pathos in his old friend. Crowley noted it, too, and apologized to Louis; “I am sorry,” he said, “you have wasted your time in visiting a log.” It was clear to Wilkinson that Crowley’s powers were failing. It was also clear that Crowley knew his life had been, if not a failure, something less than a success. He had not done what he wanted to do; at best, only part of it, and he had acquired infamy rather than fame. There was something in this unspoken admission that, Wilkinson said, made Crowley lovable: the Beast revealed himself as a man, a troubled one, who had no chance left to put things right.
⁸⁸

Much has been written about Crowley’s final days. There are conflicting reports about who was with him, what happened, and what his last words were. The most famous account is that, with tears running down his cheeks, he told Frieda Harris, “I am perplexed,” and drifted off.
⁸⁹
But this is now considered apocryphal. Another account has it that Lady Harris was not with him and that his last words were “Sometimes I hate myself.”
⁹⁰
Another account has someone on the floor below him hearing him pace—as was his wont—and then hearing a sudden crash. When he rushed to Crowley’s room, the Beast was dead.
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There is a persistent story that, as Crowley’s body lay quiet, someone stole his gold watch.
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According to Pat Doherty, who was at Netherwood when Crowley died, there was no deathbed contrition, no confessions, no regrets. Crowley died happily and peacefully and, as a good occult story should have it, a gust of wind kicked up and thunder boomed as he gave up the ghost.
⁹³
Crowley’s life was a
complicated mix of truth, half-truth, bad press, and a good yarn, and there is no reason why his death shouldn’t have been, too.

Edward Alexander Crowley died on December 1, 1947, of myocardial degeneration and chronic bronchitis, exasperated by chronic heroin use—at least according to his death certificate. Although he once again made the papers—this time the international press was sure he was dead—the local
Hastings & St. Leonard Observer
got a few things wrong. He was not seventy-three, and his last work was not titled
60 Years of Song
. This hardly warranted litigation, but Crowley, had he known, could not have been chided for remarking, “Damned papers—they never got it right.” Among his effects, an Abramelin talisman, stained with menstrual blood and semen, was discovered in his wallet.
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The way to the Abyss had opened, and Nuit had taken back her own.

THE BEAST GOES ON

Aleister Crowley’s remains were cremated at Brighton Cemetery on December 5, 1947. Reports of the attendees at his memorial service differ, but we can be sure that a small group was there, and that among them numbered Gerald Yorke; Frieda Harris; John Symonds; Patricia MacAlpine and Crowley’s son, Ataturk; Kenneth Grant and his wife, Steffi; and also the poet Kenneth Hopkins, a friend of Louis Wilkinson’s; as well as Wilkinson himself.
¹
If Crowley alone was not enough to make the occasion something out of the ordinary, Wilkinson made sure the day would be remembered. Gerald Yorke was originally asked to read some of Crowley’s work, but at the last minute the task fell to Wilkinson. Crowley, we’ve seen, often thought about his death, or, perhaps more accurately, about the services surrounding his death. Like many egotistic Romantics, he fantasized about lavish memorials and fantastic burials—Crowley, we know, wanted to be remembered for centuries. In his last days he put together a collection of his works that he called
The Last Ritual
,
and it was to the sound of this that he wanted to exit this dreary plane. Wilkinson had some reputation as a public speaker and in his fine voice, and after the inevitable declamation of the Law, he read
extracts from
The Book of the Law
—he spared the mourners the proposed full text—as well as some of Crowley’s poems and passages from his Gnostic Mass. Most unusual, at least for the crematorium chapel’s attendants, was Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan,” a celebration of madness and Dionysian excess, which remains his most effective work. As Wilkinson intoned “Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!” the small group chanted back “Io Pan!” Following his reading Wilkinson reminded the mourners that “Love is the law, love under will.” Patricia then placed some red roses on the coffin, and the body of the Great Beast made its way to the flames. On the way back to Netherwood, or so the story goes, a thunderstorm blew up and lightning flared. “That’s just what Crowley would have liked!” Louis Wilkinson announced in the cab.
²
It was only after reading newspaper reports of the service that the Brighton city council—again, so the story goes—declared it would take steps to assure its taxpayers that such a scene would never happen again, at least not in Brighton.

It would be too anticlimactic if no mysteries surrounded the Beast’s departure. One story, told by James Laver, has it that in his last days, Crowley’s doctor threatened to cut off his heroin supply. Crowley told him that if he did, he, Crowley, would die, and that he would take him with him. Dr. William Brown Thomson, Crowley’s physician, did indeed die twenty-four hours after Crowley’s death; the official report blamed his death on natural causes, and it is most unlikely Dr. Thomson interfered with Crowley’s heroin use. Yet inevitably the tabloids made much of his demise; the
Daily Express
ran a headline “Crowley Doctor Dies: Magician Put Curse On Him.”
³

Another more poignant mystery is where Crowley’s ashes ended up. Crowley had asked that his ashes be preserved along with his seal ring in a casket and entrusted to the Grand Treasurer of the O.T.O.,
The urn containing Crowley’s ashes was sent to Karl Germer in America. Germer informed curious correspondents that Crowley’s ashes had been buried at the foot of the largest pine tree on his property in Hampton, New Jersey; being a Jerseyite, I was surprised to hear this. But a later story emerged. In this version, discussing with his wife, Sascha, the question of what to do with Crowley’s ashes, Germer was surprised when Sascha, never a
thelemite
, suddenly grabbed the urn and smashed it against a tree. One version of the story has her saying, “There, this is now the Aleister Crowley tree,” but in another the ashes were simply blown by the wind. This last version strikes me as most apt. There is some poetic justice in the fact that a man who was a wanderer of the waste in life should also drift here and there in death. One almost wants to say “no rest for the wicked,” and certainly not for the wickedest. No gravestone or memorial marks Crowley’s passing, and I am not sure if the Aleister Crowley tree—as Germer is said to have called it—is still standing.
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A year after Crowley’s death, a group of his friends gathered at an Indian restaurant in North London to remember his passing. Appropriately, chiles were piled on and strong spices applied. Crowley had asked as much, and we can feel the cold hand of his wraith reaching out from New Jersey, urging his comrades on to greater helpings. But for the larger world, Crowley’s death meant that he was no longer in the public eye or mind. Facing post–World War II austerity, Britons had more to occupy themselves with than the dubious career of the Wickedest Man in the World, and with time his memory faded.

In 1951 some of the old morbid fascination returned when Charles Richard Cammell’s
Aleister Crowley: The Man, the Mage, the Poet
appeared, but it was left to the odious—at least to
thelemic
eyes—John Symonds to really bring back the Beast.
The Great Beast
was published in the same year as Cammell’s more friendly work. It has to be said, though, that considered simply as a book, Symonds’s work is more of a success. Whatever you may think of Crowley, Symonds’s is a more readable, more memorable work than Cammell’s apologetic memoir, for all its virtues. The fact that Cammell’s appreciation of Crowley’s poetry at times rivals J.F.C. Fuller’s places his book, I think, beyond most average readers; if people remembered Crowley at all, they did because of the tabloids, not his poetry. Symonds’s strategy was simple: give Crowley enough rope, and he would hang himself. In practice this meant to present Crowley as he wanted to be seen, with his biographer keeping his tongue firmly in his cheek, only emitting a hint of disapproval every now and then. The effect is, on the whole, hilarious, a neatly done send-up, even with knowing the omissions and inaccuracies that pepper the book. But although Symonds took argument with Crowley, the fact that the book was about Crowley at all was enough to make it verboten
.
Colin Wilson tells the story of a friend who, soon after Symonds’s book was published, asked a local library if they intended to stock it. He was told indignantly that nothing “would induce them to spend the rate-payers’ money on such vicious rubbish,” a sentiment with which some
thelemites
might agree. The library even declined to get the book through an interlibrary loan, such was Crowley’s reputation.
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Symonds wrote other books, including a biography of Madame Blavatsky, to whom he is somewhat more kind, and novels, but, as he admitted, he aimed to make his name with Crowley, and he did. In 1958
The Great Beast
was followed by
The Magick of Aleister Crowley
, and from then until his death in 2006 Symonds brought out new,
expanded, and revised editions of his controversial but highly entertaining life of the Beast. Whatever we may think of Symonds, he more than anyone else is responsible for keeping Crowley’s name alive.

But he was not solely responsible. The odd sea change Crowley underwent, transforming him from a scurrilous knave into a spiritual liberator, began, oddly enough, in France. In 1960 a book appeared that almost singlehandedly triggered what’s been called “the occult revival of the 1960s,” the history of which I chart in
Turn Off Your Mind
. There had been a slow buildup of interest in the occult through the late 1940s and ’50s, with the rise of public interest in flying saucers and other “weird” concerns; Immanuel Velikovsky’s
Worlds in Collision
(1950), which linked biblical accounts of the flood to the Earth’s close shave with a comet, and T. Lobsang Rampa’s doubtful account of his life as a Tibetan yogi,
The Third Eye
(1956), had both been big sellers. But it was the appearance of
Le Matin Des Magiciens
(1960) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier
that really triggered the return of magic. The book is a heady, often mind-numbing jumble of strange, new, and unusual ideas that took the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism by storm. It rambled from alchemy to UFO to Gurdjieff to ancient civilizations to mutants to occult Nazis to higher consciousness and then some—rather like Charles Fort’s books of the 1920s and ’30s, although much better written. It became a huge bestseller and when it was translated into English in 1963 as
The Morning of the Magicians
(
The Dawn of Magic
in the UK), it was a bestseller, too. And amid its mysterious thicket of “all things occultly marvelous”—in the historian Theodore Roszak’s words—was Crowley and the Golden Dawn. Never mind that what
the authors had to say about Crowley, the Golden Dawn, and much else was often inaccurate. The book is full of mistakes and unsupported assertions—such as that Gurdjieff was responsible for the Nazi use of the swastika. What was important was that they were talking about magic and the occult at all. They knew that the time had come for a change from the black-and-white world of political commitment,
la nausée
and being
engagé
, to something much more colorful, dazzling, and exciting. Crowley had spoken about the new age of the “crowned and conquering child.” With
The Morning of the Magicians
the newborn seemed to be waking up.

In his own lifetime Crowley had been an influence on popular culture. Somerset Maugham, we’ve seen, had used him as a model for a black magician, and Maugham’s novel
The Magician
(1908)
was turned into a film in 1926. Crowley has also been suggested as the model for the cult leader in Edgar G. Ulmer’s occult deco horror film
The Black Cat
(1934), starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; it’s unclear if Crowley ever saw it or knew he was being cast in the role of a sadistic Satanist, but most likely he would have approved. Crowley, in fact, served as a model for more than one cinematic mage. In a talk I gave in London and in Trondheim, Norway, I looked at those films already mentioned as well as a few other classic black magic films from the 1950s and ’60s that featured a magician based on Crowley.
Night of the Demon
(1957),
The Devil Rides Out
(1968), and
The Dunwich Horror
(1970)—which is an early entry in the Crowley–H. P. Lovecraft connection mythos—all feature Crowleyan elements, and Crowley’s influence isn’t limited to B-movie shockers. As mentioned, the avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger was profoundly influenced by Crowley—his whole oeuvre, we can say, is
thelemic
through and
through—as was the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose
The Holy Mountain
(1973) often shared top billing with Anger’s films at midnight movie offerings.
⁶

Mention of
The Devil Rides Out
, based on Dennis Wheatley’s novel published in 1934, reminds us that Crowley was also an influence on literature, or at least fiction. We’ve already mentioned Maugham. A list of writers who used Crowley in some way would include, among others, M. R. James (his “Casting the Runes” inspired Jacques Tourneur’s
Night of the Demon
, mentioned
above; the magician Karswell is based on Crowley), Dion Fortune, Colin Wilson, Anthony Powell, James Blish, Robert Heinlein (whose
Stranger in a Strange Land
[1961] employs large helpings of Crowley’s philosophy), and, perhaps most recently, Jake Arnott, whose
The Devil’s Paintbrush
(2009) focuses more on Crowley’s homosexuality than his magick. Crowley led such a supersized life that it would be surprising if he hadn’t been taken up by novelists, always on the lookout for striking characters. There are more sightings of the Beast in the pages of fiction, pulp or better, but this should suffice.

But the area of popular culture in which Crowley has had the most impact surely must be music. It took some time, but by the mid-1960s, the occult revival had reached the burgeoning “youth culture,” which was itself on its way to becoming a serious rival to the mainstream, what became known as the “counterculture.” Popular music has always had some connection to the “dark side.” The myth of the early-twentieth-century bluesman Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil in return for success—a bad bargain, as Johnson didn’t see it—is paradigmatic, and by then the link between music and the devil was already longstanding. The nineteenth-century violinist Niccolo Paganini, like Johnson, was supposed to have sold his
soul to the devil, as was also said of the eighteenth-century composer Giuseppe Tartini, famous for his “Devil’s Trill” (1713). The violin itself is considered the “Devil’s instrument,” and Igor Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” (1918) relates the parable of a soldier who gives his violin to the devil in exchange for worldly success. Hector Berlioz’s
Symphonie Fantastique
(1830) is famous for its musical depiction of a witches’ Sabbath. Music has always had an element of danger associated with it because of its ability to subvert the conscious mind and reach directly into the unconscious; Plato, we know, famously banned most music, except for a few bland modes, from his utopian Republic. Thomas Mann’s cautionary novel
Doctor Faustus
(1947) blends the archetypal tale of the magician who sells his soul to the devil, with the tragic life of a brilliant but unbalanced composer (based on the philosopher Nietzsche). That old black magic, it’s true, has had many in its spell.
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