Epilogue

He was wasted in England. In Persia or India or Japan, millions would have followed him.

—Andrew Green ¹

His poetry undoubtedly ranks among the finest ever written.

—Hereward Carrington ²

Crowley’s story after death was as colorful as it was in life.

Karl Germer accepted Crowley’s nomination as Outer Head of the Order and took over OTO business. With the help of Yorke and Harris he sought high-ranking British members to identify the new X° for Ireland, Iona, and all the Britains. Symonds, whose address appeared in Olla as the order’s, acted as an administrative assistant to Germer but was not actually an OTO member. E. N. Fitzgerald had received the IX° from Crowley, but according to Germer, “He does not however know what it is about.” ³ Therefore the nod went—briefly—to Gerald Gardner, who had been chartered by Crowley to operate an OTO camp. But Gardner reported, “owing to ill health I so far haven’t been able to get anything going. I’ve had some people interested, but some of them were sent to Germany with the army of occupation, and others lived far away, and so nothing happened.” ⁴ And nothing ever would. Agape Lodge remained the only active OTO body under Germer. Since he never performed nor liked rituals, and discouraged the lodges from initiating new members, Agape struggled to endure. Germer instead focused on seeing Liber Aleph and Golden Twigs , which were in press at the time of Crowley’s death, to publication. The difficulty of conducting transatlantic business forced him to abandon the projects by November 1948.

Yorke pleaded with Germer, “Please do not send me Power of Attorney to act on your behalf.… It would not be honest for me having refused to have official business relations with him [Crowley] since at least 1932 to take them up after his death.” ⁵ Yorke, however, did spend his life keeping his vow to preserve Crowley’s papers, often purchasing them from creditors, forgotten storage facilities, solicitors, auction houses, and acquaintances. These materials he readily shared with Germer, who, possessing the bulk of Crowley’s papers, lent material to Yorke to copy. Both men believed that only a later generation would understand and appreciate Crowley’s literary legacy, and they hoped someday to store archival copies of all his papers on each continent. Yorke’s collection is currently kept at the Warburg Institute, part of the postgraduate School for Advanced Studies at the University of London, and is the world’s largest public archive of Crowleyana.

Frieda Harris, meanwhile, published a booklet commemorating Crowley’s funeral. Titled The Last Ritual , it contained the text of his funeral and boasted an original cover by Harris; she asked for a contribution of $1 per copy to defray printing costs. One year after his death she carried out another of Crowley’s last wishes by arranging a curry party in his honor. Held at 7:30 p.m. on December 1, the dinner party attracted about fourteen of AC’s acquaintances, who retired afterward to Yorke’s home for the evening.

Not all of Crowley’s acquaintances remained so loyal, however.

“Now that Crowley is safely dead, do you think his story can be told?” John Symonds voiced the question which typified the unfortunately common reaction to Crowley’s death. Symonds went on to write The Great Beast (1951), a sensational and critical portrayal of Crowley’s life. At least one publisher turned the book down for fear of libel, but London publishers Rider eventually bought it. Those loyal to AC saw it as a betrayal of trust, and Yorke’s catalog of the book’s inaccuracies is a lengthy and damning document. Nevertheless, the book remained the primary source of information on Crowley throughout the second half of the twentieth century; ironically, its sensational tone may well have contributed to Crowley’s enduring propularity.

Longtime student and friend J. G. Bayley pulled an equally remarkable about-face. Although he had joined the A A in 1910, visited Crowley regularly in his last years, and paid his respects at the funeral, he wrote Germer a surprising letter two years after Crowley’s death:

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Thanks for your letter of the 13th ulto. I don’t want to engage in any long rigmarole about Crowley.… I could go on reeling off dozens of other people who had despicable, abominable, criminal tricks played on them by that scoundrel.

Love is the law, love under will.

Yours Fraternally,
L.O.V. ⁶

Particularly ironic is the bracketing of his condemnation with Thelemic salutations and his A A motto.

In 1942, C. S. Jones—the once-beloved Frater Achad—was teaching kabbalah and magick to Under the Volcano (1947) author Malcolm Lowry (1909–1957). Jones sought to mend his fences with Crowley, who saw no way his erstwhile magical son could compensate for what he regarded as twenty years of egoism and insanity. Thus Jones sought to build his own magical universe on the ashes of his former master. On April 8, 1948—four months after Crowley’s death, and forty-four years to the day after Crowley received The Book of the Law —“An Open Letter from Frater Achad” announced that the 2,160-year reign of the Aeon of Horus had ended prematurely, replaced by the Aeon of Maat, the daughter, of which Achad was the chosen prophet. ⁷ Despite his lifelong love of Thelema and ceremonial magic, Jones reportedly embraced Catholicism on his deathbed. ⁸

As Agape Lodge fell into abeyance, Jack Parsons sold his mansion to a developer, took the Oath of the Abyss in 1949, and wrote to Germer in mid-1952:

No doubt you will be delighted to hear from an adept who has undertaken the operation of his H.G.A. in accord with our traditions.

The operation began auspiciously with a chromatic display of psychosomatic symptoms, and progressed rapidly to acute psychosis. The operator has alternated satisfactorily between manic hysteria and depressing melancholy stupor on approximately 40 cycles, and satisfactory progress has been maintained in social ostracism, economic collapses and mental disassociation. ⁹

On Friday, June 20, 1952, Parsons was working alone in his coach-house laboratory when, at 5:08 p.m., an explosion blew out the doors and walls of the stable, reducing the building to rubble. The police soon found Ruth Virginia Parsons at the home of an invalid friend, notifying her of her son’s death. After the officers left, Mrs. Parsons sat down and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, her handicapped friend helpless to do anything but watch while Mrs. Parsons slipped into death.

An inquest later determined that, as experienced as Parsons was in handling explosives, it was an accident. The press later reported evidence to the contrary, but authorities never followed up; thus it is the belief of many, his widow Cameron included, that he was murdered. ¹⁰ Given the way Parsons died, a passage from his Book of Babalon sounds eerily prophetic:

And in that day my work will be accomplished, and I shall be blown away upon the Breath of the Father, even as it is prophesied. And thus I labour lonely and outcast and abominable, an he-goat upon the muck heaps of the world.…

Meanwhile in England, Kenneth Grant had continued to study Crowley’s doctrines, and applied for a charter to operate the first three degrees of OTO. Germer granted this until 1955, when Grant announced the formation of the New Isis Lodge of OTO. He claimed to have contacted an intelligence from a trans-Plutonian planet and received secret instructions to reorganize OTO; instructions that were secret, Grant claimed, even to the OHO. Germer repudiated the manifesto and, when Grant persisted in this direction, expelled him on July 20, 1955:

NOTIFICATION OF EXPULSION

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

You are notified that the very small and limited authority I gave you at one time to establish a Camp of O.T.O. in the valley of London is withdrawn, and I formally expel you from membership in the Ordo Templi Orientis.

Love is the law, love under will.

Saturnus
Karl Germer X° and Frater
Superior of O.T.O. ¹¹

Undeterred, Grant continued working his version of magick, drawing not only from Crowley but also from Eastern tantra and the work of his friend, artist Austin Spare. ¹² He also published a series of articles, monographs, and books on these subjects from the 1950s until the present day. ¹³

Germer had one other student worth mentioning, the Brazilian Marcelo Ramos Motta (1931–1987). Germer admitted him into OTO and A A , and together they published Crowley’s Liber Aleph (1961). Although Germer had released Magick without Tears in mimeographed form seven years earlier, Liber Aleph represented a fine typeset edition of one of Crowley’s masterpieces. Germer died shortly thereafter in 1962. He named no successor, and his widow notified few of his passing, leaving OTO leaderless.

Fortunately, the late 1960s era of flower power, psychedelics, free love and Transcendental Meditation made Crowley fashionable. He appeared on the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) album cover and in the pages of Robert Heinlein’s science fiction classic Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and quickly became a pop-culture icon. Regrettably, Crowley’s popularity also attracted the attention of some ignoble peers. When Anton LaVey founded his Church of Satan in 1966, he cited Crowley as an influence; thus, even though AC rejected Satanists and black magicians, the media again categorized him as both. Similarly, after a group of admirers known as the Solar Lodge locked one of their boys, Anthony Gibbons, in a wooden box in the Southern California desert—his punishment for playing with matches and burning down their compound—the press linked Crowley’s name to the incident. ¹⁴

McMurtry had been out of touch with his fellow Agape Lodge members, but when he learned of Germer’s death and the sad state of OTO, he knew something needed to be done. Remembering that Crowley had named him Caliph and had given him authority to assume control or restart OTO in an emergency, McMurtry declared the situation an emergency and resuscitated the order. He gathered the surviving members of Agape Lodge to legally incorporate OTO in the 1970s and quickly established initiations, lodges, and camps worldwide. ¹⁵

Because of the unresolved issue of Germer’s OTO successor, two other people claimed the mantle of OHO. Kenneth Grant, despite his expulsion from OTO in 1955, began calling himself the OHO when he and Symonds coedited The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1969). He argued control not by succession but by virtue of having that magical spark of inspiration that he believed Germer lacked. Much as Crowley had claimed that Mathers had lost contact with the Secret Chiefs, so did Grant claim that heirship of Thelema had passed over Germer to him. Of all OHO contenders, he made the greatest effort to expand and build upon Crowley’s work rather than confine himself to the letter of the law. During the 1970s he was one of a handful of people editing material by Crowley and Austin Spare, and he was practically alone in offering new contributions to the literature of magick. While his system differs considerably from Crowley’s, he gets high marks for originality. Indeed, Henrik Bogdan called him “the perhaps most original and prolific author of the post-modern occultist genre,” while Martin P. Starr described Grant’s work as “fashioned out of the stuff of dreams.” ¹⁶ However, his manner of exegesis—relying on complex numerologies, webs of symbolism, and coded language—is difficult for the beginner, and his later books are progressively more bizarre. ¹⁷ His works nevertheless remain in demand.

Motta, learning of Germer’s death, believed it appropriate to single-handedly organize a convocation of IX° members to elect a new OHO. His dedication to the task came off as belligerence, however, and he quickly alienated the American OTO members who were closest to Germer. When this happened, Motta proclaimed himself OHO, convinced he was entitled to a percentage of Crowley’s book sales. He began publishing volume five of The Equinox , in its pages attacking everyone who ever published or wrote anything about Crowley. His position became increasingly extreme and his opinions so vehement that he alienated most of his followers, and his organization, the Society Ordo Templi Orientis, dwindled in size by 1984 to four members.

A 1985 lawsuit between McMurtry and Motta resulted in the OTO headed by McMurtry—descended from the only chartered organization in operation at Crowley’s death and throughout Germer’s reign—being recognized as owner of Crowley’s copyrights. (A similar ruling was made in the United Kingdom in 2002.) McMurtry died shortly before the 1985 ruling—and Motta shortly thereafter—and the remaining members of OTO met to elect the next Caliph and OHO, per McMurtry’s wishes. Over the years, OTO has made great strides in preserving and publishing authoritative versions of Crowley’s existing works, many of which have been out of print or unpublished, and have amassed a sizable archive based on Germer’s surviving papers. It has also won several libel cases, demonstrating that it would not tolerate the abuse that typified Crowley’s life. Today the organization claims over three thousand members worldwide.

Aleister Crowley stands as one of the most remarkable and innovative figures of his century: a man of fervent belief, he devoted his life and squandered his fortune seeking a glimpse of spiritual truth and sharing that vision with anyone willing to listen. Tragically, he spent his last years discredited, impoverished, and far from his family and friends in London. Yet he was ultimately successful in a way few people are: despite adverse or indifferent responses to his message, Crowley never doubted the correctness of his vision or his role as its advocate. Thus he lived every moment of his life based on his convictions regardless of their personal cost, whether to his fortune, friendships, or reputation. The best summation of the man may be by Crowley himself:

I wish therefore that you would realize that my universe is very much larger than yours.… Some time ago I thought of writing a book on internationally famous people with whom I had been intimate. The number ran to over 80. Am I wrong to suppose that you never met such people?

Take another point: have you visited the monuments of antiquity; have you seen the majority of the great paintings and sculptures? Have you discussed all sorts of intimate matters with natives of every civilized quarter of the globe? Perhaps more than any of the above in importance, have you made your way alone in parts of the earth never before trodden by any human foot—perhaps in hostile and nearly always inhospitable country? You may think it pompous of me to mention these matters, but the fact is that they don’t matter unless you think they don’t matter.

The point that I am trying to get you to realize is that any statement or action of mine is enormously modified by my having had these experiences. ¹⁸

Perhaps immodest, the contentions in this letter are nevertheless accurate.

Crowley’s substantive merit bears explanation, as much of what made him innovative actually anticipated many things that are commonplace today. The emphasis here will be on magick for two reasons: first, Crowley’s other accomplishments have been discussed earlier in this text. Also, magick is the avenue through which most people first encounter Crowley.

As a practical system, magick introduced many innovations to the Masonic and Rosicrucian traditions from which Crowley borrowed. Most notable is its syncretic quality. While magical traditions have often been eclectic (see Pike’s Morals and Dogma [1871] or Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled [1877] for examples), ¹⁹ Crowley was much broader and more systematic.

Consider the Eastern mystical traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Crowley’s magical alma mater, the GD, offered only minor nods toward these paths: its technique of moon breathing was borrowed from the hatha yoga practice of pranayama and the belief in the body’s subtle energy channels, or nadis . Likewise, the system of tattva visions is adapted from the Hindu system of five elements (tattvas) . The likely source for both teachings is Prasad’s book Nature’s Finer Forces , ²⁰ which was very influential on the GD founders. After the 1900 disintegration of the London temple, Crowley’s own travels to the East gave him a far better grasp of the indigenous spiritual traditions of India and China. By the time The Equinox I(4) (1910) and the first part of Book Four (1911) appeared, Crowley had seamlessly integrated a broad range of yogic, divinatory, and meditative techniques into his teachings. To appreciate how innovative this was, note that Legge’s translation of the I Ching first appeared in 1882, ²¹ and when Allan Bennett returned to London in 1908 as the Buddhist monk Ananda Metteya, he was considered the first Buddhist missionary to England.

Crowley’s syncretism didn’t end with Eastern mysticism. A glance at the recommended reading list from “One Star in Sight” reveals the extent to which he integrated disparate perspectives. It covers classics of Hinduism (Upanishads, Bhagavad-Gita, Hathayoga Pradipika), Buddhism (Dhammapada), Taoism (Tao Teh King), gnosticism (Pistis Sophia, The Divine Pymander) , Zoroastrianism (The Oracles of Zoroaster) , Pythagoreanism (The Golden Verses of Pythagoras) , Christian mysticism (The Spiritual Guide of Molinos) , Jewish mysticism (Kabbala Denudata) , alchemy (Scrutinium Chymicum) , mythology (The Golden Ass) , psychology (Varieties of Religious Experience) , and anthropology (The Golden Bough) . Nor did he shun the rationalism of the great philosophers, encouraging students to study the likes of George Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753), David Hume (1711–1776), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

The crowning achievement of this cross-cultural approach is the correspondences collected in 777 (1909). Although built on the notes of his GD mentors Mathers and Bennett, Crowley expanded the contents considerably. Similarly, Crowley’s summation of his lifelong study in a new interpretation of the tarot resulted in a deck that remains unchallenged as the deepest ever produced. In laying out the parallels between all systems of symbolism, Crowley prefigured the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) ²² and Joseph Campbell’s (1904–1987) elaboration of the myth cycle of the hero. ²³ He also anticipated the eclecticism that is part and parcel of the so-called New Age or alternative religion movement, in which as much as ten percent of the population participates. ²⁴

Given the quantity of information available today on the world’s esoteric traditions, Crowley’s reading list does show its age. At its time, however, it was so innovative as to invite ridicule—which the yellow press obligingly supplied. Indeed, subsequent secret societies (such as Dion Fortune’s Fraternity of the Inner Light and W. E. Butler’s Servants of the Light) are overshadowed by the enormity of Crowley’s intellectual achievement in crafting an all-inclusive system of attainment.

While these syncretistic tendencies provided an inviting field day for intellectuals, Crowley’s approach was also notable for its pragmatism. As Yeats discovered to his dismay, the synthesis promised by the TS was purely intellectual; its extreme discomfort with practical work (i.e. magic) was what ultimately drove Yeats to switch his allegiance to the GD. Crowley likewise stripped away the window dressing to get at the heart of various teachings, extracting the practical tools for enlightenment. Crowley and George Cecil Jones’s distillation of the GD initiation rituals into “Liber Pyramidos” is but one example of this approach. Refreshingly, Crowley—unlike most gurus—challenged his students to disbelieve him, to experiment and discover for themselves those formulae and practices that worked best for them.

Another innovation was Crowley’s attempt to apply the rigors of the scientific method to a decidedly nonscientific pursuit. From the beginning, The Equinox described its contents as “The method of science, the aim of religion.” As scientists kept lab notes, Crowley advocated keeping a magical record to facilitate tracking the success of magical rituals and the conditions under which they were conducted. Likewise, replication was emphasized in order to establish which methods were most successful. The structured practices and curriculum of the A A also provided uniformity among his students’ experiments, facilitating replication among different practitioners. Finally, in 1929, his magnum opus provided an operational definition of magick as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” ²⁵ What he proposed didn’t completely incorporate the methods of empirical science, but it was a bold step in that direction.

So far, this discussion has focused on Crowley’s innovations as the proponent of a method of spiritual attainment—a method applicable to the practices of any faith. But Crowley was also the prophet of the belief system he called Thelema. While the presence of a revealed holy text gives Thelema the outward appearance of a religion, its principles are more like a philosophy or spiritual perspective that, like Buddhism, can overlay any particular creed. Indeed, the central principle of Thelema—which directs each person to discover the specific role he or she plays in the cosmic scheme—is compatible with any religious belief (although other portions of Liber AL admittedly could be a more challenging fit).

An inviting trait of Thelema is its nonconformity. The epigram “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” is a statement of moral relativism. Depending on one’s True Will, what’s right for one person may not be right for another. It exhorts Thelemites to celebrate their individuality (and the individuality of others). At its core, it rejects the orthodoxy and schism that dominated young Crowley’s childhood. ²⁶ Partly because its roots lie in secret societies, and partly because it presupposes a motive for enlightenment among its adherents, Thelema does not engage in the distasteful strong-arm proselytizing that is the bane of faiths that encourage testifying and conversion.

Given all his merits and innovations, the natural question is, why wasn’t Crowley more successful than his contemporaries? Crowley’s life story is peppered with the names of mystics and spiritual philosophers who achieved greater renown both during their lifetimes and since their deaths: the TS (H. P. Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Charles W. Leadbeater), Anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner), the Fourth Way (G. I. Gurdjieff, A. R. Orage), AMORC (H. Spencer Lewis), and Scientology (L. Ron Hubbard). Why, then, was Crowley so obscure, so misunderstood? There are several reasons.

First, Crowley’s books were expensive productions printed in small quantities with limited distribution. Even though he priced his works at cost to enhance their affordability, his choice of lavish papers and bindings kept them out of reach for most. Indeed, his audience was largely limited to the affluent (who could afford the books) and the persistent (who would go to the trouble of finding his works).

In addition, most of Crowley’s books are written for what may be termed “hard-core” students. Like any specialist literature, Crowley’s was difficult for the layperson to approach. His most widely available book, Magick in Theory and Practice , refers so often to The Equinox or even to unpublished works that it is a daunting read to anyone who isn’t familiar with his entire corpus. It’s not that Crowley was incapable of writing for a wider audience—see The Revival of Magick and Other Essays for proof—but that his books of magick were written for a specialized audience.

Finally, Crowley was the victim of his own unfortunate choice of terminology. However justifiable his reason for adopting terms like “magick,” “the Great Beast,” and “Thelema,” the effect was to put people off. The word “magic” suffered from such negative connotations and confusion with stage magic and trickery that Crowley adopted the spelling “magick” to distinguish what he was talking about. But even with the k, “magick” produced a knee-jerk association with medieval demonology. Consider the times: séances and spiritualists were all the rage, and Harry Houdini was busy exposing frauds and charlatans. ²⁷ In this climate, Crowley’s rituals were popularly perceived as spiritualism. They were, in fact, often mistakenly called séances, and thereby classed alongside the fakes and pretenders against which he railed.

Calling himself “the Great Beast” didn’t help. Despite what AC believed this figure from Revelation represented—a solar icon for the Magus of a New Aeon—most people connected it with the devil. The situation is akin to the similarly unfortunate choice among modern Pagans and Wiccans to reclaim the terms witch and witchcraft . Argue as they may (like Crowley) that the terms mean something other than the popular or consensual definitions, centuries of preconceptions are not easily overturned. Thus today’s witches perpetually complain about the portrayal of witchcraft in books, movies and television just as Thelemites face a similar uphill battle in convincing the man on the street that the Great Beast Aleister Crowley was not a devil-worshipper.

In a similar way, Crowley’s very message invited misunderstanding. By naming his philosophy after the Greek word for will, thelema , Crowley (or Aiwass, if you prefer) guaranteed the term would be received with confusion by a good number of people. This could be clarified by referencing the primary principle of Thelema: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” This same confused person could understandably conclude Thelema to be a libertarian creed, and would become only more confused to be told “ ‘Do what thou wilt’ doesn’t mean ‘Do what you like.’ ” Indeed, so much of The Book of the Law ’s meaning lies not in its literal interpretation but in the highly codified meaning of its words that one is tempted to call it a stylistic forebear of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939)—although Joyce never met or read AC. ²⁸

Combined, these factors—small and expensive print runs, high expectations for his audience’s reading level, and the adoption of unsettling or confusing terminology—helped guarantee his circle was confined to a small but devoted group of admirers.

Crowley’s admirers have grown steadily in number since the 1970s, and it’s easy to see why. He was a fascinating mix of audacity and titillation, mystery and discovery, eccentricity and substance; a misfit in his own time but a forebear of social changes that would not occur until well after his death. Half a century before Timothy Leary told the flower children to “Tune in, turn on, drop out,” AC had experimented with drugs as an adjunct to consciousness expansion. By the time the Beatles had discovered meditation as a consciousness-altering alternative to drugs, Frater Perdurabo had already been there too. When the birth control pill sexually liberated a generation, they found Beast had kept a light on in the window. And before the 1980s were dubbed the “Me Generation,” the prophet To Mega Therion had made a religion out of individuality. Rock music offers a prime example of AC’s persistent presence in our culture, as he has been embraced by psychedelic rock in the 1960s, hard rock in the 1970s, heavy metal in the 1980s, goth and industrial music in the 1990s, and progressive metal in the twenty-first century. In our jaded modern age, magick offers an opportunity for adventure and discovery in the only uncharted domain that doesn’t require a space shuttle: the spirit. Crowley may be gone, but look around: the spirit of Frater Perdurabo endures.