If you’re going through hell, keep going.
– Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill KG OM CH
TD DL FRS RA
F or me Ceremonial Magic, as a means to attainment, has in common with all other methods, Western or Eastern, one supreme object in view; and that is an identification with the Godhead; and it matters not if the Aspirant be Theist or Atheist, Pantheist or Autotheist, Christian or Jew, or whether he name the goal of his attainment God, Zeus, Christ, Matter, Nature, Spirit, Heaven, Reason, Nirvana, Asgard, No-Thing or No-God, so long as he has a goal in view, and a goal he is striving to attain. Without a goal, he is but a human ship without port or destination; and, without striving, work, or WILL to attain, he is but a human derelict, rudderless and mastless, tossed hither and thither by the billows of lunacy, eventually to sink beneath the black waters of madness and death.
I stand by a fence that leads into a field. There are perhaps a dozen goats with me. I tickle the neck of a young beast, before she yields to her friends.
Three more hours to go.
I have tried to see the world beyond fear, to revel and welcome darkness and to approach the world with love. But right now it’s high time that I scarletted my knuckles afresh in the mountain pass.
I sit and meditate one last time, knowing I must leave this place to muster my troops against a coming darkness for Humanity. I have to go to finish my life’s work and accept my crown as the true rebel of our age. The Orwellian Crackdown is nigh. Washington and London have not factored in the return of a god to stir the people to victory.
I shall return for the spirit of Cambridge in the twenties. I shall return to save the world. I shall return for revenge. For revolution. Glory or Bust.
I stand.
Two hours to go.
The horror in the East was now truly fermenting. We had all heard and even seen how viciousness had taken hold in those testing grounds of Spain, Portugal and Italy. It was even taking root in England.
My Whitehall chums and I acknowledged that we all bore a sliver of responsibility for having unleashed the virus, what with Rasputin, the Revolution and that damned Treaty of Versailles, but we would all now struggle to orchestrate its end.
By the time I left Boleskine after Violet’s birth in 1930 for the major mission of my life, the perversely named German Workers’ Party had become the NSDAP90 and he had been in charge for several years. Winston advised us all that soon he could be running the country. It was time to make my move and fulfil my destiny; well, perhaps not the destiny of my wild and ambitious dreams, but certainly that of my day job of double agent.
January 2nd, 1931
(I shall be back soon to dote on you, Violet, my love. I promise. Frog will be more than good to you. And I shall keep this world and myself safe. For you.)
I left Loch Ness. I travelled by train to King’s Cross, then onto the boat train and through to my final stop of Munich. I carried with me some volumes that I knew would impress Hühnerbein, and allow for a comfortable welcome in Bavaria. The books, which were all originals and had been given to me by MI-1 to tease and tempt them all, were on the Runes, Völkisch Magic and the Occult Reich. One was the priceless Codex Sangallensis that dated to the ninth century, written by the abbots of the Reichenau Abbey. This would make not only Hühnerbein drool, but would certainly prick up the ears of the Führer. After all, it was these very runes that had established the importance of the Germanic languages over Hebrew. This should do the trick.
I kept the tome in my possession when I first arrived, showed it to Hühnerbein at a suitable first convenience, and then kept it in a safe place well away from my luxury rooms at the Elmendorff Hotel. A covert colleague in MI-1 then stored it outside of the city, and I knew full well that my hotel accommodation had been scoured several times. I do not think even Hühnerbein would have been so daft as to take it while our relationship was sturdy, but he was adequately astute to want to know of its location, for in our business, alliances can shift so rapidly.
I honed my language further, improving upon the precise Bavarian I had modelled on Hühnerbein’s. I was often taken as a local of central Munich. I knew too that I would benefit from a harmless vocation for the sunlight hours, something to balance out the obsidian naughtiness of hooded midnight sex and drug ceremonies with clichéd pentagrams and theatrical squawking. It should be something that would allow for minimal mischief, but mischief all the same. (Why not? What was the effing point otherwise?) And I would soon identify that perfect German pastime for my daylight nosiness.
First, I had considered mountaineering, but it was so limiting to steep slopes and a tiny fraction of the population. Yoga was too liberal, poetry too rebellious and chess too Jewish.
Next I pondered painting, and studied the art of the Nazi party. But it was not just fucking appalling, but also truly banal and unreasonably mundane. I had hoped to stumble upon magnificent pieces, distorted, odd and abstract. However, the works of the gems of modern art, Otto Dix, Ernst Barlach, Franz Marc, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff or Oskar Schlemmer were all first discouraged and then, when soon after in 1933 the Nazis came to power, all banned. The truly distinguished, exciting and vital pieces were seen as degenerate, swiftly removed and destroyed. Degenerate. The bastards loved this word. Well, they had seen nothing yet. I was now in town.
What was puked up on canvasses instead was comically awful and perhaps purposefully so, for anything approaching decent would have exposed the Führer’s own laughable, gruesome and squalid efforts with a brush, for what they were. Such is the narcissist.
In the autumn of 1934, I found myself visiting Heidelberg for weeks at a time. It reminded me so much of Cambridge. Munich was important to me, so that I might witness the street brawls between Communist and Fascist. These were not polite Queensberry Rules scraps. These were the smashings of skulls, and leaving hungry and desperate fathers to die on concrete. These fuckers meant business. Heidelberg, however, was sedate and allowed for reading, yoga, hashish, meditation, ritual and ceremonies. And it was in the ancient libraries there with their haunting shafts of afternoon light and the burly and persistent stink of naphthalene from the mothballs that I found to be an aphrodisiac, that I stumbled on shelves that would reveal to me my almost-bespoke form of expression. It was a dying art of that time, but one I knew I could resurrect with great joy.
Freikörperkultur literally means ‘free body culture’, but what it really meant was removing all clothing and walking in a state of nudity in public, usually surrounded by my other most basic and most stimulating accomplice, nature. I championed that the Aryan body was nothing of which to be ashamed, but instead celebrated. For centuries, I explained, there had been no sexual connotation for most Germans in this practice. Hitler was confused by the liberal nature of the pastime on one hand, but celebrated the inherent implications of superiority of a lithe young lad or firm strutting lass in the altogether. I wrote dissertations on the recreation, how it intertwined with the Aryan, the Ahnenerbe91 and the Völkisch (or German People’s) Magic.
I also wrote to Whitehall.
The self-absorbed lout will before long listen to me at length, drool forming, for I know more on the topic than anyone else on the planet. I swear, Winston, old bean. I shall soon be his High Chief of Ritual, the Supernatural and the Metaphysical. When it comes to Lucifer, Adolf shall do precisely what I tell him to do.
If nakedness and nature were vital, then the final element of my mirepoix was youth. Naked rambling was not exclusively the preserve of the young, but it is more easily explained by its utter attractiveness. Yes, a more mature lady or gent was not overtly discouraged from participation, but their photographs would certainly not be regularly published for a wider audience. And yes, there were some frankly ghastly sights, but these types were really to be admired to the full in the eyes of this ever-grateful pervert.
And so, as I worked by night preaching and teaching the Occult, my portfolio grew during office hours with a clean and righteous bent. Freikörperkultur tapped into the German spirit and was a perfect pursuit for me. As I ogled their arse-cheeks, I knew of the potency of this next generation of lads and lasses for they would likely be the soldiers and wives in any second war.
I trumpeted and heralded the true joy of the body, while allowing for the golden and toned muscles and lithe torsos of young blond nymphs and future warriors to be revealed as a truly Aryan wonder. I was, of course, just goading the fine young things into the liberating purity of youthful coitus, the precise antithesis of the vulgarians in power.
While in private I pondered, and in well-coded missives to Dandylyon and Prudence, I wrote down my intentions.
Dearest of all Friends,
I might have cracked it.
My hope is to stir a few rebellious minds at least. Just a few will be worthwhile. Hundreds would be a victory, and thousands, a miracle. It is a near-impossible challenge in proportion with that blessed trench rebellion on Christmas Day 1914, but worth it if only for a single life to be corrected. Let the children walk, unencumbered by clothing.
Remember, my friends. I am, after all, a flâneur. My happiest times were once with Father in the Cotswolds and my best work as a writer has come from the exertions of a ten-hour stroll around London, Sicily or New York.
As you know, I was myself cursed with fleshy ankles, a toadish neck and a quite spectacular bosom, and will be delighted to announce this, with pride and in encouragement, to young boys and girls all over the land. This is not the message I am supposed to be spreading to the misshapen and flabby Unterjugend,92 but I shall continue to urge young Germans of all shapes and sizes. I even intend to point to the waddling and fleshy vastness of the gargantuan and elephantine Hermann Göring as an example. Such fair and seditious talk is taking other poor souls to their death and rapidly so. I am therefore being very clear to define my latitude to speak with such frankness. I may not have the official sanction of the Führer93 right now, but I certainly do have the support of perhaps an even more fearful ally in Satan, and this trumps all here. They are all so bloody gullible. It is a foolishness matched only by their bloodlust, hubris and ego.
Remain mischievous in my absence. I shall chat and chortle with you both in my dreams.
Yours, Beast
June 15th, 1935, Heidelberg
I became president of the F.K.K., and the editor of the association’s newsletter. In it, I openly lectured how I had suffered phlebitis and bodily ugliness as a child and this gave me even greater authority (than even that granted by Hitler) to encourage the youth to strip off their clothes for the good of Germany. The tone even carried echoes of Rasputin’s call-to-arms to fornicate for godliness, he would have applauded this so heartily.
The subliminal message of the F.K.K. was one of individual courage, but, by 1935, it was being deafened by the noise and the nastiness of the Nazi Youth movement. That month, I began to write for Occult magazines and the Naked Ramblers pamphlets. I received fan letters, some that even fawningly referenced my mad ramblings and essays in The Fatherland in New York two decades previously. More than anything, I was trusted and now seen as a German and, increasingly and quite conveniently, as a Nazi.
The library of ancient manuscripts I had brought were equally as pivotal as my reputation in piercing the most durable and robust protective circle. The books were the physical embodiment of the intrigue and mystique I brought. We inched closer and closer.
It was now time to cosy up to Adolf. He knew of my reputation within the Occult, and on June the twenty-eighth, 1935, I received an invitation to a small art gallery with a quite astounding temple beneath it, to consult on his and others’ I Ching, Chokmah and Tarot.
Adolf had invited Mussolini. I scared him senseless in private, once again with the invisible ink trick, more wild invocations and overdetailed talk of devil orgies with Rasputin. I then pulled cards for Hitler, and made faces of concern for his future. He twitched, and instead instructed us to speak in private.
‘Tell me of the Codex,’ was his first enquiry.
‘Ah yes, the Codex. She is a beauty.’
And these were the first words I spoke to Adolf Hitler as his friend. The next were, ‘But she is enjoyed even more with burned cannabis or a soaked gag of chloroform.’
He eyed me with suspicion, knowing that anything other than a future pal’s forthrightness and honesty would have ended in my death.
‘I mean it, Adolf. I enjoy the lot. I love laudanum, heroin and amphetamines. I adore morphine, analgesics, Benzedrine, opium, peyote, absinthe and mescal.’ As soon as I uttered his name, he knew I could not be so stupid as to be underhand or devious. A hefty chuckle and a manly hand around his untouched shoulder sealed our union. This fucker was already mine.
He paused and was about to answer, when we were interrupted. By her.
The Führer was too myopic, too self-centred to see that Eva Braun was widely attracted to me. In a clash of the Titans, his selfishness trumped his paranoia. She was a truly odd fish. I saw her put up with the most abysmal torment from the brute, agony that only magnified and cemented her feelings for him. He rarely touched her, I never saw him affectionate once.
She loved to nude sunbathe at every opportunity, and I, as the head of the F.K.K., could only encourage such behaviour in my proximity. She so wanted to find passion, I remember her saying to me that she yearned to be a sexy corpse. I thought it an odd thing for a young girl to say, but that was between her two very genuine suicide attempts in 1932 (she shot herself in the neck, but missed her jugular) and in 1935 with sleeping pills. The second time was after Hitler had made her stand away from the dining table as he ate, as was usual, and he said loudly to Albert Speer across the table, ‘A highly intelligent man should always take a primitive and stupid woman.’ Eva was neither of those things. He just was exhibiting all the hallmarks of a quite silly boy.
I would one day become melancholic when I thought of her leaving those orgies in the bunker as the Russians neared, and young boys, in short and shat pants, hung from the power lines outside, as women and children pulled flesh from lame and live horses as shells exploded, just so she could see that marvel called daylight one more time.
If I could see her one last time, it would be to relive the twinkling nights when she filled her veins with cocaine, boot-polished her face and gave the most marvellous (and quite remarkably well-measured and perfectly timed, given her racing veins) renditions of Al Jolson’s ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie’ and ‘The Spaniard That Blighted My Life’.
She was always most happy at Der Berghof when he was away, though, oddly, his absence hurt her so. We spent many afternoons by the Königssee at the bottom of the mountain. At the chalet, she could at least be with those Alsatian dogs of his. Her master’s hounds truly adored Eva and seemed supremely transfixed by her bouquet. I must admit that I sensed a previous (sexual) frisson, so fawning were they, and so mismatched were his and her libidos. There also was no chance of her canine lovers telling, though their attention to her every move did offer a clue to the keen-eyed.
Eva always maintained to him that she found me intimidating, though we always laughed as true friends, and she always denied to him that she and I were even that close.94
I admit, with manliness, that the day that monster stopped breathing, I sat and thought of her at length. That poor and bullied child. I think she deserved far better.
I studied well T. E. Lawrence, and noted his Twenty-Seven Articles in dealing with the Arabs. They seemed particularly relevant here in Germany, especially his final insight.
27. The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them. Keep always on your guard; never say an unnecessary thing: watch yourself and your companions all the time: hear all that passes, search out what is going on beneath the surface, read their characters, discover their tastes and their weaknesses and keep everything you find out to yourself. Bury yourself in Arab circles, have no interests and no ideas except the work in hand, so that your brain is saturated with one thing only, and you realise your part deeply enough to avoid the little slips that would counteract the painful work of weeks. Your success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it.
This advice seemed to serve me well.
Again, as with Winston and Rasputin, I simply shall not regurgitate old tales of that monster, but I shall note just one sliver of his personality and then one tale about him and me.
And I shall mention them both as I do not believe they have been revealed. I know the latter has not.
After a lengthy Tarot session at the Berghof, he spoke to me on the terrace as we sipped lemonade and sat in quite uncomfortable chairs. I recall that mine had at least one wobbly leg that might be tested by my broadening waistline, a bit of a bay window by now. It was the summer solstice of 1937, almost a year after his Olympics in Berlin. When (somewhat) relaxed (for his twitching from too much speed and from Parkinson’s was now almost persistent), he spoke in the broad Austrian of his youth for some odd reason, and he sounded like a halfwit farmer, excited by some rural oddity or another.
‘You know, Aleister, what upsets me more than anything is being blamed for something that I have not done. I do not care about that for which I am responsible.’
I knew this latter part to be thoroughly true. The psychotic sociopath is able to justify most things. He was, however, not of my school of thought that said if one is going to get blamed for something, then one may as well do it.
‘I see that you are different,’ he said. ‘I have seen you shrug your shoulders and chuckle along while they speak ill of you. This would send me into a rage.’
He certainly would not have been able to execute a life-long exercise of absolute restraint such as that of a Scarlet Pimpernel.
‘Do you remember last year at the Games? They say I snubbed the American Negro. But I did no such thing. I waved at him. I fucking waved at him, Aleister.’
At this moment, Adolf began to cry; slowly and softly at first, but then he soon crescendo’d into a shrill pitch of self-pity.
What was remarkable was that I later discovered this to be absolutely and utterly true. Even Owens later acknowledged that Hitler had gestured, quite politely, in fact. There was even the hint of a smile, though, as I shall soon reveal, this smile was often misunderstood and had quite unintended consequences. Owens revealed how this had happened after the heats on the first day.
But then Adolf had missed days two, three and four after an amphetamine bender.
It took him a good two minutes to complete the next three sentences, so distraught was he.
‘Lewald95 asked me if I would shake hands with all the winners or no one at all. Uniformity was only polite, he said. I told him for the sake of ease, I would shake the hands of none of them.’
When he finally stopped wailing, Adolf sniffed, wiped snot from his moustache, and then blubbered some more. ‘It is the damned hypocrisy of those pious Americans. That fine athlete won four gold medals, and the only head of state to publicly blank him was Roosevelt.’
This was true.
‘And do you know what else, Aleister? The bastards never even invited him to the White House with the other winners. They made him enter the Waldorf Astoria hotel for the winners’ banquets through the service elevator. God Bless America. But I had waved at him. I had smiled at him! I had even fucking smiled at him, Aleister! This is so unfair!’
I said nothing. What could I say?
And that was that. I would laugh later in my chambers.
Perhaps this final tale is of more interest and intrigue to the broader audience accustomed to tittle-tattle, especially one familiar with that marvellous concept so beautifully encapsulated by that skilled sister of ours, the German language. That concept is Schadenfreude.
After a banquet in Heidelberg in the summer of ’39, we strolled on the lawns of the university and smoked reefers.
‘Adolf. I think it would be a marvellous idea for you to have the seat of the Reich in Oxford.’
‘Oh, yes. I was there in ’12. After my time in Liverpool, you know.’
He was politely obsessed with the English. I told him to never have his air force bomb her. It was not so much Oxford I cared for, but Winston was supremely concerned about the munitions, plane and tank factories in the neighbouring town of Cowley. The city of Oxford would one day escape all air barrages and there would be no loose shot on a spire or a library or a lawn. My reputation, his yearning for the Occult and his Anglo obsession fired his interest in me. As we walked back into the lordly hall, we saw that most English of things, a billiard table.
Snooker, of course, enthralled him. So I challenged him to a game and our duelling was underway. Not only was he chronically colour-blind, but he was packed with his own military’s MDMA, which they were generously developing as a truth serum. We agreed upon a wager. I won so very easily.
The details of his forfeit to me were mine to deliver to him within the week. He suspected quite rightly that I was a gentleman and would be fair, not too demanding or spiteful. And fair, I was. For I also asked him what my forfeit to him would have been had I lost the game, and when he said to me, ‘It would have been a day spent together at the zoo with me.’
I pondered and then said to him, ‘Let’s do it anyway.’
And so, I woke and I bathed. I shaved and I parted my hair in preparation for a day at the Münchner Tiergarten96 with the Führer of the Third Reich. It was July the eighteenth, just six weeks before the invasion of Poland, and angular rain was persistently falling in the Bavarian heat.
I had a very simple goal: to find his weakness, and to inform him quite subtly that I had found his weakness. As with that Italian Fat Head, I aimed to plant a seed that would lead to his ultimate destruction over time, and the moment when it all began would be our choice.
In the rooms where he would soon arrive, I took a breakfast of three soft-boiled eggs with buttered toast and Rangoon satsuma marmalade, strong Himalayan tea and injudiciously sugared grapefruit. I left adequate signs of my very English ways, for these still charmed Johnny Foreigner and reminded them all too subtly just who was the boss around there. Especially the Führer. He made no secret of his admiration for us. He knew that we, all once his kind of Teutonic tribes, the Angles and Saxons, were the Germanic spirit made good. Adolf, for that was what I now always called him in private, knew this. In public, I refrained from using any moniker, for it then left him room to appear to remain superior to his lackeys, while offering a sense of mystique to this strange Wiccan of an English man; unholy, potent and in his ear. And if I had done away with the boiled eggs, the suspicious, the narrow-eyed and the twitchy might have seen someone trying too hard.
He appeared at the door of my grandiose and noble chambers early, a bit giddy in his shuffling and manner. Something seemed different about him; several things in fact. He wore an English tweed trouser that resembled my own preferred cloth, and beneath the hem, his shoes showed all the signs of having been fitted with lifts to the precise point where our eyes were level. His moustache had been subtly cut back, as if it was in the early stages of a full-on retreat, and his hair was parted like mine. Did I smell my own bespoke cassoulette of lemony cologne and Bohemian Dewberry soap on him? He now even carried a pipe with the precise curvature of my own, and his matches were Swan Vestas, the ubiquitous match of my homeland. He studied my movements, I knew this. He used some of my English lexicon, even though we spoke predominantly in German. When I showed him a copy of The Times, with his face on the front page, I heard him whisper (my own favoured refrain), ‘Oh goody,’ as he moved with stealth and purpose on the darkened walnut floorboards, as if over-rehearsing a Brechtian play. He walked to the lengthy, heavy scarlet curtains to check if the rain was relenting through the imposing arched windows that looked out with a gentle arrogance over Munich. He was deep in thought, fallible with a proclivity to boyish self-pity. ‘Oh goody,’ he tried again, this time even more softly. I found it hard to believe that he acted like this with anyone else.
‘Adolf,’ I said.
He turned and looked at me, in the eye, but he seemed to use the opportunity to assess and regard, once again, his man, the angle of my posture, the tilt of my head, how I looked marginally down my nose and fractionally from the left, and the slight breath I left between using his name and my measured, deliberate and authorial speech patterns.
‘The rain is expected until mid-morning. Superior sorts as we always meet in a downpour. It shall always remain our secret. I say we use this opportunity to get soaked, as the plebs cower from nature. They would benefit from a good drenching, remove the stench and all that.’
Adolf was so revered and dreaded, he had forgotten what it was like to be spoken to as an equal. From time to time, there were even several reminders of my being his better, though I was smart enough to keep this unspoken as is required. Satan was a fine and generous ally against him, and even better when he (Satan) didn’t exist, and therefore needed not be feared by me. The Old Lad offered such leverage like that, like stories of the bogeyman to witless children at dusk. And this was how I saw Adolf. But children still needed to be feared. As both a rampant paedophobe and the greatest champion of youth, I was well aware of their potential and their perils, for they valued life so little, while finding instant and total forgiveness so simple. I continued.
‘I do love the zoo so. Do you know that I could spend all summer in the butterfly house, but I would just find myself plotting how to free them all,’ I said, ‘They should be liberated. Just like my boys and girls in the F.K.K.’
He seemed initially truly baffled by my love of butterflies, but soon nodded and bellowed, throwing his head back, ‘Yes!’
‘I am glad you agree. One’s love of butterflies is always such a fair barometer of character, I find,’ I said.
‘We have much to learn from them. You are right, Aleister. We all need our living space, yes. But this is too obvious. What I admire most of them is they only mate with their own colour. Red and red, white and white, yellow and yellow. They are most discerning, most tasteful.’
I chuckled to myself, for I knew him better than he believed. I knew he was also obsessed with the precise and perfect symmetry offered by a butterfly, which according to his physician, Theodor Morell – a long-time plant from MI-1 – was rooted in the inferiority complex that any quarter shilling of a psychiatrist was able to trace back to the asymmetry and the lonesome testicle rattling around in his own misshapen and under-functioning scrotum.
‘Not as discerning as I, Herr Führer,’ a term which I used almost mockingly as I pulled out a large personally rolled cigarette, stuffed with quality cannabis. I smiled, and he smiled back at me, though this was a rare occurrence, for he knew that his face contorted with apparently painful discomfort as he grinned. He was quite conscious of the consummate horror he produced. It was such an unnerving countenance when it lent itself to pleasure, that I would rather have witnessed his unfurled and pre-eminent rage, so perturbing and soul-sapping his joy appeared to be. He had that most rare ability to bring more misery to a chat with his smile than with his anger and disdain. I thought long and hard, but was unable to recall any other soul I had ever met with this deformed and unholy gift. I considered how this might have affected him. Had this led him to his path of death, murder and destruction? The angle and menace of his ecstasy became only more disturbing as we smoked and became quite high. Also, I did not need to spike him with any of the high-grade sodium pentothal I carried perpetually, for his hubris and elevated state urged him to spill all, other than the obvious forbidden sexual confessions, to me.
‘I should tell you that my chemists are working on some remarkable drugs that you and I should try. I intend to have my soldiers use them, they will be unstoppable.’
Many years before, I had passed through that juvenile stage whereby all conversations were viewed through the prism and frame of a narcotic. It was documented in The Diary of a Drug Fiend. I was now a gentleman of stature, but entered into this boyish excitement for I knew full well that this was my route to, if not manipulating and controlling, then at least nudging and misdirecting Adolf.
‘I would love to try them. What are they?’
‘We have one, it is a form of amphetamine.97 Soldiers can fight like supermen for a week on it without sleep.’
‘Oooh! I should love to try it. That sounds quite delicious. When might I have some? This stuff might be most useful in a ritual I have planned for the spring. The spirits can be so domineering, so to be fearless is the true path to tethering them to our Will,’ I told him. He believed it all.
I was already pondering the possibilities for sex magick, though I knew any overt mention of this would only rile him, for such was his weak spot. I was more oblique in its reference, just to remind him of my might over him.
‘This might be useful for so much of my work,’ I said with a raised eyebrow and as if as an inadvertent afterthought. In truth, it was just a prompting from my own beastly groin.
‘They have also developed something I know you will find of interest, Aleister. We call it D-IX (D9), it will win us Europe one day. Maybe the world.’
‘Oh goody, do tell.’
‘It is the same methamphetamine, but mixed with morphine.98 The results are miraculous. I can send a determined man to sea in a tin can, no larger than your bed there. He will power on for days on its potency while the morphine calms him precisely enough to not be concerned of his claustrophobia or his suicide mission. He will ram a hole in the side of a ship and find certain and immediate death.’
I had to hand it to him. For someone who was now ridiculously high on the most potent cannabis in this land of starving junkies, zombies and speed freaks, Adolf was remarkably single-minded in his desire to discuss mass destruction and new ways to fill his creaking and aching veins with more vigorous and persuasive stimulants. Meanwhile, this lordly bullet-headed and fat-thumbed English pervert was simply thrilled beyond words at the prospect of the leverage these new stashes would allow him to bugger, sodomise and perform frenzied analingus upon thousands of twitching lovers. But Adolf here wanted to send a man out in a sardine can to the Atlantic to die. I was disturbed by this, yes, but far more, I was comforted by my own highly evolved state with its proclivity to raw lust and tender-to-rough mass coupling. I knew my way held the moral high ground, though the bar with Adolf was clearly very fucking low.
We exchanged the lit reefer with its delicious tang and kick. ‘You are a genius and an inspiration,’ I said.
He was boyish as he tried not to blush at my compliment, though he was unaware that he only inspired me to be utterly different to him in all ways. The words allowed me to say this without a hint of guilt or mendacity. I held his eye, as I told him. He checked from pupil to pupil to gauge me. He was emboldened by the firmness of my stare. He dropped his gaze first, and gulped.99
I said to him, ‘We should wander around the zoo, while the rain keeps the morons at bay.’
We stood, smoked some more and then turned to leave. He watched how I rose, inhaled and comported myself, while his observations of me were made all the more obvious by his puddled state. I would have slaughtered him, but Dandylyon, the sly puss, was of the opinion that if I had, then a more dangerous and more calculated politician would have taken over. I was at least able to witness and modify and redirect and stupefy this fucker’s idiocy. Another man would not have thrown out the nuclear scientists for being Jewish. Then we would all have been in trouble.
And so, an un-slaughtered Führer and I, we rusticated into the persistence of the Munich morning drizzle. Of course, he had no idea of the games, courtesy of an unruly mob of lads and lasses en accomplices, I had laid on to fiddle with his mind on that day. While maintaining the show of my being a good friend of his, I intended for him to finish this day slightly more hollow than how he began it through plumes of spicy weed smoke in my vast hotel chambers overlooking that ceremonious and courtly metropolis. It was a minor segment in my role to undermine the balance and cohesion of this perilous muttonhead of demi-genius Will.
He wore a raincoat with an almost comically erect and tall collar that, along with the oversized hat much the fashion in those days, managed to disguise his identity. The lifts in his shoes aided this too, as did his silence for now. No one, other than his driver and I, knew the Führer was there at the gates of the zoo. The place appeared deserted, other than caged nature and an elderly lady in the cash booth, with a supremely unfrowned brow, the voice of a sergeant major and an eye-patch lifted to her forehead. I eyed her with admiration as she asked for sixty pfennigs, and momentarily pondered her story, but now was not the time to engage unnecessarily.
He was a hypocrite. A huge fucking hypocrite.
As Adolf and I picnicked under a vast awning by the elephants, I thought to myself that this man wanted the Fatherland to believe he was an animal-loving, non-smoking, vegetarian teetotaller. And yet I got to see him chug on reefers, devour lamb sausages raw and inject himself with a ferocity and regularity that I had never seen in another human being. Even his much-vaunted German shepherd dogs up there in his mountain Berghof disliked and mistrusted him.
He intermittently voiced his anger at Goring’s morphine addiction, yet I now believed this may only have been out of envy and his own perverse and persistent wish to be different, yet accepted. Drug addiction, he thought, was his terrain. I had, of course, chatted with his Dr Morell, and it was quite likely that he had never been sober for a full day in five years.
We sat and then reposed for an hour, relaxed on our elbows, as we shared a love of the elements and the sensations on that day, one that I had meticulously and mischievously prepared for in several ways. First, I had had a lad spike many of the beasts throughout the paddocks, cages and houses with aphrodisiacs and Spanish fly.100 Adolf’s dislike of anything sexual had a parallel in Benito’s fear of coitus. What was it with these people?
We rose from our blanket and our lunch of foie gras (proving that he was really selfish and approved of animal cruelty), champagne (suggesting that he was a hopeless addict), and boiled cauliflower (confirming that he possessed no taste). We started to stroll, as pals. As we arrived, the monkeys’ rate of intimacy and self-pollution now bordered on preternatural. I thought of Ancient Rome, and already I sensed his discomfort. I wondered if he eyed with envy (as I did) the impressive shade (almost angry in its arousal) of the monkey’s deeply marooned appendage. I was less enamoured by its unbecoming spikiness, possibly capable of taking out an eye.
As we meandered along the route, it seemed that even the geese and the ponies in the zoo were unimpressed with Adolf’s ungenuine advances for company and friendship. His aura bristled with a vile and flaming burgundy outline. The Shetland preferred to sniff the root of his friend’s leathery undercarriage. The geese huddled. One chimp seemed to be choking on his own vomit as he, perhaps, sensed Adolf’s contempt for life. Another seemed to weep for him, and that monkey was a tenderer mammal than I. I would have killed the horrid fucker, this uncouth sourpuss, right there and then if I had thought it would have helped. He sashayed like a cunt towards the macabre qualities of the demi-monde, while revealing to the trained eye that some part of him had perhaps once desperately reached out to the light and to decency, but that doomed attempt for redemption had been quite viciously squashed.101
As the animals conspired with The Beast and ignored and shunned Adolf, I asked him if he wished to see a motion picture, knowing that the path of least resistance would have meant an exit from the zoo and its lustful air of passion. And away from the perceptive animals, he might have once again enjoyed the anonymity that his disguise and the rain may have afforded him elsewhere.
‘Yes, let us do that. We should leave now,’ he said, as a small but determined pony attempted to climb aboard a leggy lady horse, the apes formed a circle of vast and shameless enjoyment, while birds fluttered for their obligatory three-second stint and then retired, thin-eyed and seemingly under some smallish cloud of guilt and self-reproach. The poor lonesome male tiger lurched around his enclosure unable to deflate himself with a partner, and yet, sadly, he remained without the manual dexterity of the fevered and industrious chimp. Nature could be so cruel.
We strolled along the streets of the city, as the rain ceased and warm sunshine was felt intermittently.
There were whistles and wolf calls from ladies and lads in my direction. I heard cries of ‘das Biest’102 from well-placed allies and from many impromptu ones too, such was the fun to be found in chirpy and friendly strangers. This both impressed and miffed Adolf, I could sense it. He was the supposed leader of this land. In my company, he was solid in not allowing his anger to be shown, though his fury was towards them. As far as I was concerned, this made him admire me even more.
We arrived at the TheaterKino just off the Bavariaplatz. We again managed anonymity, as I paid a tall African gent. I wondered how this lad had survived in this land to this point. He laughed a formidable welcome to me, and I sensed it was the power he possessed in his infectious roar and shrieking mirth, as well as that in the hands of a giant that had shone fortune upon him to that day. I did not engage as I ordinarily would have, for in those very seconds, this angel required maximum protection through minimum fuss.
Once inside, my chiselling of Adolf’s spirit continued, as we silently observed the mischief of the projectionist – one of our lads – who quite wickedly played a series of pornographic trailers of girthy boys, and then added similar interstitials of proudly hung chaps and scrotums with two large balls, in the main feature of Vom Winde Verweht.103 I knew Adolf was lustful and eyeing Gable, so this really was now bordering on bullying. I pondered on how Prudence might have described him with one of her fine euphemisms. ‘A man with specific mannerisms’, ‘he was born with the caul’ or perhaps, ‘a son of the moon’, who ‘rides the carousel’.
I still had my two main courses of psychological warfare to come as we rose at the end of the picture. My penultimate treat as we walked back to the hotel required my conspiring pals once more. The act we were to enjoy would soon spread around the land, just as unholy visions of Rasputin, a goat-headed man and me had once tortured Il Duce in Italy, the islands and North-East Africa.
The first weapon that I employed was a pastime that was, at that time, unfortunately missing from our culture, and one that I suspected would cut further at his spirit. Der Exhibitionist104 – if done in the right way, unthreatening, fun, gallant, celebratory and heroic – represented the true rebel and flighty boldness of the human spirit, and was the antithesis of his thin-lipped meanness.
The stroll from the TheaterKino to the Hotel Elmendorff was approximately two miles, and followed a marvellous route for a late summer afternoon. The rain had gone, but my companion kept his collar high and his hat low, as we swept past outdoor cafés and restaurants, redolent gardens that were pungent and balmy, precise hedges and imposing military statues on broad Bavarian boulevards.
We turned the corner by the park, when from the seclusion of the seven-foot sunflowers, stepped forward a gentleman. He was deliberate as he pulled the cord of his macintosh and allowed the tied garment to fall open, revealing total nakedness beneath. He looked down at the impressive sight, and then lifted his head to illuminate a broad beam from his handsome Mediterranean face. His stomach was flat, youthful, lean, while he had removed the majority of the length of his lower lawn to exaggerate the longevity of his shaft. He purred the first verse of ‘Deutschland über alles’, while framing his tool with his fractionally small hands and atop his slight and slim thighs. He then raised his left hand to his temple, and gestured a farewell, withdrawing, with an intrepid and bantam step, into the lanky stems of the flowerbeds. I did not turn to look at Adolf. I did not need to. I had cut to his core.
Over that summer, Der Exhibitionist was witnessed around Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna, and then in small villages, university campuses and market towns. I arranged for a series of flashers (friends of Dibdin’s through his network at UFA Films in Berlin), until it seemed to catch on and any old jack was doing it. I was sturdy in not discriminating, for a number of actresses and lady friends of mine also obliged me and a grateful and intrigued populace.
Der Exhibitionist was soon reputed to gesture in to his victims with a friendly welcome, and to invite them to smoke on a special spicy and tangy cigarette of delicious hashish or (on stiller days) to inhale swiftly a lengthy fingernail-full of face-paralysing white powder, as his raincoat remained open, thus allowing all to get a better view of his much-debated controversy close up.
Through my old friends at the Maximus de Paris Rouge, I soon sourced a troupe of rebellious circus and travelling theatre types in the Shakespearean Players’ vein. For me, they appeared in parks and biergartens performing Die Geschichte des Goldenen Exhibitionists.105
It wasn’t clear now whether life was imitating art or vice versa. Theirs became a popular and perpetually sold-out stage story of an unloved king who was driven to suicide by a popular flasher who appeared to ladies, gents, military types, surgeons and a well-known editor, whose thrice weekly updates revealed the grubby secrets of the unloved royal. This heavily maquillage’d cast exposed the impolite sexual proclivities, the meanness to animals, the financial misdoings, the overtaxing of the poor, the incest, the plotting, the drug habit, the impotence and the abundant inadequacies of the monarch.
Before that summer was over, Der Exhibitionist would be handing out gold coins, as then our fine ladies (Die Exhib-itionistinen) began to show their vitals to lonely and shy types, spreading joy across the land, even sometimes with swift sexual favour to those never in receipt of that kind of fortune, as the raincoat became the fashion item of the day. I bought shares in them and made a killing.
I even took to the raincoat myself some nights, for, as I shall always maintain, it remained one of The Great Pastimes.
We stood still for thirty seconds or so, long after the gent had disappeared into the bushes. Adolf was fucking livid, I knew. He was unable to speak. Perhaps it was the fury of not being able to lift his mask of anonymity. Was it that he wished to slaughter this man for having shown his mighty weapon to the Führer, believing it to be a stranger? (Adolf would have been even more furious were he to have known that it had been a targeted and deliberate attack upon him.) Was it that such horrors were happening in his Germany?
But I brought him out of his haze.
‘So, let us discuss the forfeit from our wager?’
‘Go ahead, Aleister. I am intrigued.’ These six words took perhaps a minute and a half to exit his mouth. He was close to tears, and his fury would not subside even with the distraction of my question. His proclivity to anger was otherworldly.
‘This is my price and your own forfeit for having risked playing snooker with an Englishman.’ I attempted to make light. ‘We shall take four decks of unmolested playing cards. Your uninterrupted company for five days is required. We shall remain on the top floor of the Hotel Elmendorff, with narcotics adequate to blind with permanence the most seasoned and thick-thighed players.’
I did not reveal that there would also be a painted whore of pleasing and hermaphroditic proportions, and a bouquet of further forfeits to be won. Or lost.
He nodded. Adolf had no choice.
And so our day at the zoo as hidden strangers twisted and turned into an evening, and then several days, nights, dusks and dawns of debauchery and muckiness, and my final twist of the knife into his inevitable fate.
And so I gave Hitler the first taste of his own new strain of amphetamines, upon which he later would become viciously dependent. Sage historians now concur that this addiction was at the root of most of his appalling military decisions. Like the inflamed youth who flails and chases the chess game, thus making his cause all the more improbable, his now rash instructions to his chiefs of staff would instigate the accelerated crumbling of the Third Reich.
We played cards, and with each hand the loser ingested piles of powder and puffed on strong hashish. The winner, usually I, joined in voluntarily.
Of course, with the minimal knowledge of a Magic Circle beginner and someone who had observed Prudence for decades with her seamless bait-and-switch trickery, I seemed to win each hand. When he could take no more powder, he was obliged to remove an article of clothing. I lost the odd round just to keep him interested and enthused. When he was given potentially winning cards, I still produced a royal flush, and I tipped him to the edge.
He was now as naked as when his cursed mother had pushed him out.
He now had a royal flush, but I turned over four aces. Blind.
This made him seethe, of course, but his elevated anger was now hugely and comically magnified by the quite remarkable belittling effects of that wondrous drug on the gent’s vitals. The consequences were always quite unfair, and enough to turn any saint to frowns of viciousness and gruesome acts of misjudged plunder.
Another vast shaft of well-chopped white powder sent the remnants of his already-meagre lad receding into his wild pubis.106 That this retreat was happening within a yard’s radius of my own smug old chap of an adequately manly dimension played on his seized mind. Power is an aphrodisiac, but I was the Master and he had cultivated this pathetic crush on me, allowing this game and his shame to flourish.
When the strong cannabis and the mescal beans began to hit us, we both giggled, albeit he to a vastly girlier shrill. He seemed not to care, as, his legs akimbo’d, he slumped into his high-backed chair. His minuscule pink undercarriage, now resembling the genitals of a slightly bulbous lady, went missing in the messy growth, and bade a final farewell.
His high-pitched girl-squawk was all quite comically at odds with his five days of manly facial growth that had forced his doormat of a moustache107 to expose flecks of a rusty ginger and to droop, curl and turn under like Nosferatu’s toenails. His loud, but quite hollow assertions that he would soon be the ruler of the world seemed utterly absurd. And it was still only the first night of five.
After this most private of benders, I informed MI-1 that I would now, at their direction and discretion, accelerate the seedling growths of his insanity, prod his paranoia and precipitate the abysmal decisions that will change the direction of the war. With a note from me, he would soon abort Operation Sea Lion (1940) – the planned invasion of Britain – then he would expel those sub-standard Jewish nuclear scientists in the same year, and would then give the go-ahead to trigger Operation Barbarossa, the disastrous attack on Stalin and Russia in 1941.
And so after this lengthy jag and long after my departure from his unattractive shores, Adolf would never be the same again. One might have also reasonably synchronised each call of his infamous and disastrous governance thereafter to the arrival at his mountain chalet or in his Berlin HQ of a regular photograph from me and of him with the hermaphrodite whore. What a true and game starlet he/she had been. Each time this happened, we, in SW1, would spark and prod what had, up until that moment, been, for him, a lost memory of a five-day binge with the real moulder of the twentieth century; This Great and Pimpernelling Beast.
*
The rest (or some of it) you may know for it is reasonably well documented.
It was well-worth noting that I first conned and then delivered to a field south of Glasgow, Hitler’s henchman Rudolf Hess on May the tenth, 1941. Winston saw this as my gift to him, quite rightly so. He urged and begged me to leave. It was now far too dangerous, he implored. Any night I might have been slaughtered in my bed, or in any of my waking minutes, dragged off to have my throat slit, be shot or shipped to a camp.
I stayed for six more weeks until the day he turned on Stalin at my prompting. This was June the twenty-second, and, if the Battle of Britain ensured the war would not be lost, then this was the day that made sure the war would be won by the Allies.
I then relented, for I now knew it was time to eff awff.
One of our lads, embedded there at an airstrip near Heidelberg for this very eventuality, got me into a Messerschmitt. And home we flew, with the lads and lasses at station command cheering us in, as once again the English Mountaineering Club purred their appreciation, and walked around all evening in those fizzing and ecstatic St James clubs, just smiling, saying naught, to others of a similar stripe. They knew their top boy was safe and about to land, as the Messerschmitt was guided and waved in, and onto an undulating, but so very welcome, Scottish cow pasture, with my daughter there to run to the aircraft and bellow with laughter. I wept. And I wept. I was home.
I had used magick on both sides of the North Sea, but now retrenched to help Winston, like a marauding white queen that had nabbed two rooks, a bishop, and three pawns, sweeping nonchalantly back to her own back ranks.
The final victory and VE Day were still four years away, but my days in Germany were over.
For the record, Winston’s famous V-for-Victory sign was all my work. It is all there in black and white in my book Thumbs Up! A Pentagram – A Pentacle to Win the War (Mandrake Press).
I saw the now-famous gesture as a reworking, a magical antidote to the swastika. I considered the use of the letter V in Hebrew – vav is phallic, literally meaning nail, though I considered this more one for Hitler’s coffin than a metaphor for a penis. It has been interpreted both ways, and if the cap fits …
The V-sign was easily gestured by every soul on that stubborn island, boys with pudding-bowl cuts to the grubby-thumbed defiant ones, sifting through the rubble of bomb sites, pilots flying home and relieved lads pulling into port from icy seas. It was also the precise reverse of Winston’s relayed message to me from that English seaman who had delivered us to the base of a puffing Mount Etna on Sicily in 1920. He would see the symmetry. Let’s face it. We were all just telling Adolf to fuck off.
Mission accomplished.
I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.
– Aleister Crowley
90 National Socialists, Nazis.
91 A sect, an established body that promoted the concept of the Aryan, and spoke of the proximity of nature and German purity and beauty to those Wagnerian spirits. The Aryan myth represented Germans as humanity’s gateway to the heavens, but it was based on the gibberish of an old friend of mine, the pivotal mystic, Madame Helena Blavatsky, as well as those perverse early Nazi fantasists at the Thule Society, who mentally and possibly physically masturbated over Wagner’s Die Nibelungen, and how it dramatised myths and propelled them into the warped consciousness of a willing mob. In truth, the Germans had no physical or architectural or literary signs of their ancient greatness. They were not the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians or Romans. They were all in mud huts. There were no remnants of their greatness, other than some obscure reference in Tacitus, when he wrote of the blue eyes and blond hair of a race lost to the seas with Atlantis. A desperate Hitler took this and clung to it, vaunting it much as the precise evidence of a Germanic superman, and thus justifying his own land grabs. It was the last refuge of the frantic, madcap and rash. As Darwin once put it quite marvellously, ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.’
92 The less than perfect youth.
93 Years later, when I told him to, he allowed me to chair the first naturist Olympic Games in Thielle, Switzerland in August 1939.
94 Nope, I fucked her. Even with the boot polish on that covered almost all of her.
95 The head of the organising committee.
96 Munich Zoo.
97 Pervitin – crystal methamphetamine, later sold widely across the Reich – was soon to be pivotal in the blitzkrieg, for it would keep panzer tank crews awake and itching for violence for perhaps six days at a time. This would also be used in North Africa under Rommel, audacious military manoeuvres executed by soldiers who simply did not care if they lived or died. The British would respond with their own use of Benzedrine, and finally, when on a level playing field, would crush the Germans at El Alamein in 1942. We would then be victorious in Africa and able to control the flow of oil from the Middle East through the stronghold of Suez. Pervitin would prove to be so potent that there would be thousands upon thousands of tales of German soldiers advancing on the Russian front, unaware of their own frostbite until the moment that a foot fell off.
98 This was D-IX or D9 – a morphine-based analgesic and performance enhancer. The aim was to use D-IX to redefine the limits of human endurance. Pharmacologist Gerhard Orzechowski and a group of other researchers had been commissioned in Kiel to develop this drug, and develop a formula which contained in each pill, 5 mg of Eukodal (oxycodone), 5 mg of cocaine and 3 mg of Pervitin. German researchers would soon find that equipment-laden test subjects, such as inmates from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, could march in a circle for up to ninety kilometres per day without rest while carrying a twenty-kilogram backpack.
99 The British would soon try to poison Hitler, but the only way to bypass the food tasters, who would have died from arsenic or strychnine, was instead to use the female sex hormone, oestrogen. It was colourless and tasteless, and their hope had been to turn him into a benign housewife. It was a noble effort, but no amount of femininity would have tempered this sore-headed grouch.
100 A green beetle called the Lytta vesicatoria, the digestion of which offers vast sexual energy.
101 Imagine the guilt of the poor and well-meaning art teacher who, quite rightly, failed Adolf and unleashed the Austrian’s ire upon the world.
102 The Beast.
103 Gone with the Wind.
104 The flasher, clichéd raincoat and an unashamed sharing of the beauty of the human form, very much in the vein of the Freikörperkultur. I was about to introduce a new twist on this classic art form.
105 The Tale of the Golden Flasher.
106 Adolf suffered from a rare condition called penile hypospadias in which the urethra opened on the underside of the penis. He also had a micro-penis.
107 Rotzbremse or snot brake. What a fine language German is; misunderstood, slandered and libelled like me. She, similarly, is robust and cares not.