Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley (born Edward Alexander Crowley in Leamington, Warwickshire, in 1875; died at Netherwood, Hastings, on December 1, 1947) was the English author of The Book of the Law and, from 1921, the Outer Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis.¹ The UK National Archives holds a Board of Trade bankruptcy file for him dated 1935 (reference B 9/1250).² Richard Kaczynski's biography Perdurabo records that he began taking down the text of The Book of the Law, which he attributed to a discarnate entity called Aiwass, in Cairo in April 1904.³

The Ordo Templi Orientis

On April 21, 1912 the German Theodor Reuss issued a charter making Crowley National Grand Master X of the Ordo Templi Orientis for Great Britain and Ireland, to be run as the British section, the Mysteria Mystica Maxima.⁴ On November 27, 1921, at the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily, he revised the ritual of the Mark of the Beast and proclaimed himself Outer Head of the Order.⁵ In a letter of August 25, 1923 to the British Consul General at Tunis, Crowley wrote: "On April 13, Signor Benito Mussolini signed an order for my expulsion from Italy. No reason was assigned for this act, and no accusation of any kind brought against me."⁶ A United States District Court later found that he became Outer Head about 1921 and served until his death, that he wrote or rewrote much of the Order's ritual and doctrine, and that at his death he left his undisposed literary and tangible property to the Order.⁷

New York, 1914 to 1918

Crowley told the Bureau of Investigation in 1918 that he lived in England until the beginning of November 1914 and then came to the United States aboard the Lusitania.⁸ His own account of how he reached the pro-German weekly The Fatherland, as quoted in a Bureau report, was: "A man spoke to me on a 'bus, asking me if I wanted a square deal for Germany and Austria. I replied non-committally that I wanted a square deal for everybody. He asked me to call at the 'Fatherland' office. I did. I was there recognized by Viereck, who had once seen me in the office of the 'English Review'."⁹ George Sylvester Viereck was the editor. The Fatherland published "Honesty is the Best Policy" under Crowley's name on January 13, 1915 (pages 11 to 15), "England or Germany? Mr. Harris" on June 16, 1915, and "England on the Brink of Revolution" on July 21, 1915, whose headnote cites the New York Times of July 13 on his renunciation of allegiance at the Statue of Liberty. It published "Behind the Front" (part II) on January 5, 1916; "Leaves from a Lost Portfolio" on March 8, 1916, which its headnote presented as the report of an English Secret Service agent, cipher L. P. 33, Y., to Sir Edward Grey; "Lifting the Mask from England" on March 15, 1916; and "Delenda est Britannia" on January 3, 1917.¹⁰

On November 3, 1917 the English journalist H. Christopher Watts, who had supplied the British government with American intelligence, wrote to the Foreign Office that Viereck's monthly The International had carried contributions from Frank Harris "and a man named Aleister Crowley," that Crowley "is still working with Viereck," and that "now he is doing work on behalf of the German propaganda."¹¹

On July 17 and October 11, 1918, William Johnson, an assistant to the New York State Attorney General, examined Crowley at the Murray Hill Hotel and elsewhere about Viereck's circle and the Edward A. Rumley inquiry, and about "German propaganda that is carried on in the United States by German agents."¹² On September 23, 1918 Major James B. Ord of the Military Intelligence Division, resident officer at the United States Military Academy, reported that Crowley, who had been camping on Esopus Island in the Hudson River and had come to notice through his connection with the actress Madeline George, previously investigated by the Department of Justice as a suspected German spy, "was an employee of the British Government but at present in this country on official business of which the British Counsel [sic], New York City has full cognizance." The same report states that the New York Attorney General's office had found "that the British Government was fully aware of the fact that Crowley was connected with this German propaganda and had received money for writing anti-British articles," and that "it may be possible that Aleister Crowley is double crossing the British Government."¹³

In his statement of October 11, 1918, as summarized by Agent Frank X. O'Donnell of the Bureau of Investigation, Crowley said he had earlier tried to become associated with the British Secret Service, "detailing his dealings with Commodore Gaunt Guy Gaunt of the British Intelligence Office but admitted that he never succeeded in obtaining any official recognition." He described Reuss, the head of the Order, as an "out and out German" who had left England with the German ambassador and was reported to be running the Continental Times in Berlin, and said that the Order's funds were deposited with the Title Guarantee and Trust Company in New York and had come through the law firm of Lord, Day and Lord from the sale of his property in Scotland.¹⁴

On September 6, 1939 Crowley wrote a letter applying for employment, addressed to an unknown recipient, in which he stated that at the end of 1914 he had gone to New York, where he saw "Captain (later) Commodore Gaunt R.N.," to whom he "reported directly or indirectly until the Armistice"; that his work was to supply Viereck, Hugo Münsterberg and Count Johann von Bernstorff "with false information, and to wreck their propaganda by inducing them to commit psychological blunders"; that afterward he "was able to work directly for their Department of Justice, principally in discovering spy activities"; and that "In 1927 I began work for the Special Branch, this time to watch and report on Communist activities, especially in Berlin, where I lived almost continuously for three years." An undated draft memorandum enclosed with it states that he had pretended to be a "rebel Irishman," that he confided the secret only to Gaunt and the Hon. Everard Feilding, that Lieutenant Colonel John Carter, then head of the Special Branch, had investigated and vindicated his conduct after he was publicly attacked on his return, and that on the outbreak of the war in 1939 he offered his services to the Naval Intelligence Department, which refused.¹⁵

Reports by Agent O'Donnell of July 8 to 19, 1919 (case 365985, radical activities, opened after an anonymous letter forwarded on June 6, 1919) reproduce a confidential report from the "British Secret Service Bureau" dated July 8, 1919. It states that he had "claimed to be on a British Mission," that "He has never been in the army," that "His claim has also been that he joined up with Viereck in order to obtain information for the British government. This is of course absurd," and that in July 1915 he, Leila Waddell and others went to the Statue of Liberty, described themselves as the "Secret Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic," and he tore up his passport and renounced allegiance to the "alien tyrant." A further extract from a British file in the New York Attorney General's papers, reported July 18, 1919, states: "Crowley has never had anything whatever to do with any British official in this country. His offers of service have always been rejected, and he has been regarded as a harmless neurotic."¹⁶ A memorandum for J. Edgar Hoover dated January 7, 1920, signed T. E. Haynes, summarizes the file and quotes a letter that Crowley wrote to J. W. Norwood of the International Magian Society in Louisville: "I was employed by the Secret Service, my main object being to bring America into the War, my main method to get the Germans to make asses of themselves by increasing their frightfulness until even the Americans kicked." It adds that British Military Intelligence denied that he was a member of the British Mission and stated that he would be detained if he returned to England.¹⁷

Richard B. Spence, a historian at the University of Idaho, argued in Secret Agent 666 (Feral House, 2008) that Crowley's claim to have served British intelligence was "true after all, at least to some degree," citing the Ord report; in the University of Idaho's summary of his research, Spence describes the essays as parody that followed "precisely the wishes of Admiral Hall, chief of British Naval Intelligence."¹⁸

Berlin, 1927 to 1930

In the 1939 letter Crowley stated that he worked for the Special Branch from 1927, watching Communists in Berlin.¹⁵

The Ordo Templi Orientis in California

From 1930 Crowley corresponded with Wilfred Talbot Smith, whose Hollywood household became Agape Lodge in 1935. In April 1943 he wrote to Smith that "your complete unfitness for your position is most clearly indicated by your attitude to the F.B.I.," that Smith should have "welcomed the investigators in the warmest way" and told them that the Law of Thelema should be accepted officially, and that "You want the great political leaders, great industrialists and people of that sort, the kind of persons who does not subscribe $835 in a year, but half a million dollars in a day." In the same letter he told Smith that his Tenth Degree was "purely an honorary degree conferred for the convenience of running the Lodges in my absence."¹⁹ Smith had written to Crowley on February 3, 1943 that "We have been harried by the FBI thrice lately."²⁰

On November 3, 1943 Crowley wrote to Smith: "You were kicked out ignominiously... It is not Germers wise and temperate letters, but your own erotomaniac antics, that have (very naturally) made the F.B.I. wonder what is going on."²¹ The Timeline records that in 1943 the lodge in Pasadena "is visited by the F.B.I. after they are told it is a house of subversive 'Sex Perversion'."²² Crowley's letter of October 19, 1943 to Jack Parsons states that Smith "was ignominiously kicked out" and asks Parsons to take the leadership in California.²³ On March 15, 1946 he wrote to Parsons quoting Eliphas Levi on the Magus's love of "such things."²⁴ The Parsons correspondence about L. Ron Hubbard and the Babalon Working, including Crowley's cable "SUSPECT RON PLAYING CONFIDENCE TRICK JACK EVIDENTLY WEAK FOOL OBVIOUS VICTIM PROWLING SWINDLERS," is set out on the Parsons page.²⁵

A Federal Bureau of Investigation letter from the Oklahoma City office of March 31, 1944 (file 100-189320-2, "Church of Thelma, also known as Oriena Templus Orientus, O.T.O.," security matter G) records an informant's statement that "Orders for the activities of this organization are received from Sir. Aleister Crowley, London, England," and that a German alien named in the redacted text as Karl Germer was "organizing for the Order" in New York.²⁶

Succession

In 1943 and 1944 Crowley, in London and at Aston Clinton, corresponded with Grady McMurtry, a United States Army ordnance officer. In a letter of November 19, 1943 he explained the name Hymenaeus Alpha: "the whole show adds up to 777." On September 28, 1944 he wrote that he hoped McMurtry would prefer any plan for his career "as any Fidus Achates, alter ego, Caliph, + so on," and on November 2, 1944 that Karl Germer "is of course the natural Caliph" but "can only be a stopgap, because of his age; I have to look for his successor," adding that "your actual life, or 'blooding,' is the sort of initiation which I regard as the first essential for a Caliph."²⁷ Crowley died on December 1, 1947 at Netherwood, Hastings; the register entry gives the cause as myocardial degeneration and chronic bronchitis, with "chronic heroin addict" entered beside them.²⁸ Karl Germer then became Outer Head.²⁹ In 1955 Germer expelled Kenneth Grant from the Order and revoked his charter for a London camp.³⁰

Litigation over the estate

In Ordo Templi Orientis v. Motta, tried in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California before Judge Charles A. Legge from May 13 to 17, 1985, the court found that the plaintiff Order was a continuation of the organization established by Crowley, that Marcelo Motta was not its Outer Head, that the defendants "do not own or have the right to use any of the copyrights or publications of Aleister Crowley," and that McMurtry owned the 25 percent interest in Magick Without Tears that Crowley had assigned to him.⁷