One night in 1912 a moustachioed German called Theodor Reuss came calling at 124 Victoria Street, the headquarters of the A∴A∴, and accused Crowley of publishing the central secret of his own organisation the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Order of the Temple of the Orient. Reuss (1855-1923) was a dedicated Freemason, initiated into a German-speaking London lodge in 1876, and Crowley already knew him slightly through Masonic circles. He was a singer by profession (he had performed in Wagner productions in Germany, and sung Mozart in London) as well as a journalist with a shady interest in politics; he had joined the Socialist League, but worked as an informer for the Prussian police.1
Reuss picked up a copy of Crowley's Book of Lies, and pointed out a passage that could be taken to refer to magical sex, probably the one beginning “Let the adept be armed with his Magick Rood” [i.e. phallus] and “provided with his Mystic Rose” [i.e. vagina]. Crowley said he was unconscious of any such meaning, but conceded that with a sudden shock (“one of the greatest shocks of my life”) it all fell into place.
Notionally founded by a German Freemason and industrialist named Carl Kellner, together with a German Rosicrucian and Theosophist named Franz Hartmann, and Reuss, the O.T.O. were exponents of sex magic. This was supposedly from the mystic orient2 but also drew on the writing of two Americans, the spiritualist and mystic Thomas Lake Harris (1823-1906), whose works were already known and controversial in Golden Dawn circles, and more particularly Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875), whose own work legitimised itself with the idea of the East, this time the Holy Land: “One night – it was in far-off Jerusalem or Bethlehem, I really forget which – I made love to and was loved by, a dusky maiden of Arabic blood. I of her and that experience learned – not directly, but by suggestion – the fundamental principle of the White Magic of Love.”
Reuss and Crowley talked, and the upshot was that Reuss, “Supreme and Holy King of Germany”, chartered Crowley to become head of the O.T.O. in Britain, and its British offshoot the Mysteria Mystica Maxima. In this capacity Crowley adopted the name of Baphomet, the alleged idol of the original Templars, and was now “Supreme and Holy King of Ireland, Ionia, and all the Britains within the Sanctuary of the Gnosis.”
To further that Gnosis, Crowley took third-floor offices at 93 Regent Street, an address that pleased him. Within the murky prisms of numerology 93 is the number of Will (as in “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”, the keynote of his new religion) and Love (as in “Love is the Law, Love Under Will”, its companion dictum). In later years he would sign off letters with “93/93”.
The office was largely run by a man named George Cowie, Grand Treasurer General of the Mysteria Mystica Maxima, and a woman called Mary Davies, and Cowie has left a cheerful picture of it in his letters to Crowley: “There could hardly be a nicer set of people. All Mary's friends, and all really paying. They are not cranks or even spiritualists, but all sorts…”; “They do love swank! Officers now have Templar cloaks…”
All this went on happily enough until it was raided by the police in June 1917. This was not because they disapproved of magic but because Crowley had been writing pro-German propaganda in America. They found little of interest, but they did manage to arrest Mary Davies (a “motherly old fool” and tea-leaf reader, as Crowley describes her) for fraudulent fortune telling. The whole incident would be farcical but for the distress it caused George Cowie. A deaf-mute from Edinburgh, who worked as picture editor for the publishing firm of Nelson, Cowie had a near-nervous breakdown after the raid.
Cowie and Crowley had already disagreed over Germany and the war (Crowley accused him of being anti-German, and believing allied propaganda), but Cowie tried to keep a rather touching faith for as long as possible. The revelation, after the raid, of what Crowley had been writing in America was “a severe shock” – but “you could not have meant that use to be made of your stuff.”