In May 1934 the popular novelist Dennis Wheatley was researching his black magic thriller The Devil Rides Out, so he contacted Crowley and invited him to lunch at the Hungaria Restaurant. The go-between was their mutual friend Tom Driberg, discreetly referred to in Wheatley's accounts as “Member of Parliament Z”. Wheatley used aspects of Crowley to create his villain Mocata, a Satanic but oddly precious occultist with a shaven head and hypnotic eyes, as well as borrowing magical jargon such as “Ipsissimus”.
The Hungaria was at 16 Lower Regent Street, just south of Piccadilly Circus, and the site later became the Japanese department store Mitsukoshi. When Mitsukoshi itself went the way of all flesh, around 2015, and the site was refurbished again, the old Hungaria lettering was suddenly back from the dead and briefly exposed as a ghost frontage.
Soon after their meeting Crowley gave Wheatley a customised copy of Magick in Theory and Practice. Where the title page read “Published for Subscribers Only 1929”, Crowley altered it to “This unique copy… Published for Dennis Wheatley only 1934 e.v.” [era vulgaris], added a photograph of himself captioned “The Beast 666” and inscribed the book to Wheatley “in memory of that sublime Hungarian banquet.”
At the back he drew a diagram of the Kabbalah, with a squiggle representing the Babe of the Abyss,1 and wrote in the inside cover “Recommendations to the Intelligent Reader humbly proffered.”
Read introduction very thoroughly indeed.
Skate lightly at first reading over chapters (e.g. like Chap V) which go off the deep end over the Holy Qabalah. But go back to them studiously after getting Appendix V by heart.
Study – early in the process – Appendix II, to get our Aim and Method.
He then advised the intelligent reader to “Study Liber XV pp.345 etc” – those pages are his ‘Gnostic Catholic Mass’ – “with a view to putting on this ritual in London as it is done in Hollywood. Amen” and “Read ‘Hymn to Pan’ aloud at midnight when alone with INTENTION to get HIM.”