Still in Richmond, in May 1940 Crowley moved to number 15, The Green, an eighteenth-century house with a fanlight over the door. The so-called Phoney War – the slow start – had run from September to May, but now things stepped up, with Germany moving on Belgium, Holland and France.
Crowley had already dreamed of Hitler in the late Thirties: “Elaborate dream about Hitler & cigars & Magick & my horse Sultan. I was running Germany for him.” Another night, “I had several long talks with Hitler a very tall man… he was pleased & impressed: ordered all my books translated & made official in Germany. Later, a dusky night in a city. A man in gold-braid went round a corner, saw several horsemen, similarly gorgeous, one fired the first shot of the war.”
In waking reality he had had some political hopes for Hitler and the cause of Thelema, and in May 1936 he met a man identified only as “Slippery Joe” in the Café Royal bar to have lunch and talk about “93 as base for Nazi New Order”. Also in 1936 he asked his old First World War associate Viereck – now promoting National Socialism in America – to use any influence he might have with Hitler to bring The Book of the Law to his attention as a “philosophical basis for Nazi principles.” Crowley was convinced he had influenced Hitler, probably through his German disciple Martha Küntzel. It is unlikely, but the correspondences are still remarkable. Küntzel saw Hitler and Thelema as one, and Crowley noted “astonishing” similarities between Hitler's thinking and The Book of the Law (also noticed by Gerald Yorke). Watching British propaganda, Crowley was impressed for what its makers would have seen as all the wrong reasons: “Saw show of cartoons lampooning Mein Kampf, with appropriate quotations. Taken in these selected doses, what a masterpiece! And how patent & profound a debt he owes to AL!” 1
He felt the same way when he read Hitler Speaks, a 1939 book by Herman Rauschning, and annotated it enthusiastically (“true”; “yes”; “all very sound”; “excellent”; “For ‘German people’ read ‘Thelemites’”). When Rauschning's Hitler says “After all these centuries of whining about the protection of the poor and lowly, it is about time we decided to protect the strong against the inferior” he wrote in the margin “Yes!”
Despite all that, at the onset of war he wrote to Martha Küntzel saying Britain would “knock Hitler for a six” and that Germany owed any high culture it had to Jews. Although he was capable of intense casual anti-Semitism, as we have seen with Michael Houghton at Atlantis, he had no interest in any systematic absurdities about an Aryan master race (“Nordic Aryan nonsense”).
Nor did he like Hitler's “demoniac foaming-at-the-mouth expression”, and he said the trouble with Hitler was that he didn't understand “the rights of the individual”. Above all Nazism, or National Socialism, was too collective for Crowley, and instead he wished Germany had been able to restore the Hohenzollern monarchy.
From now on Crowley was a loud and publicity-seeking patriot, trying to interest the British government in Thelema, writing songs and verses for Britain and France, and claiming to have invented the ‘V for Victory’ sign (more usually credited to Victor de Laveleye, an anti-Nazi Belgian who broadcast for the BBC; Crowley also claimed to have invented the Nazi use of the swastika, having allegedly suggested it to Ludendorff2 around 1925). Nevertheless, one of his most interesting and far-reaching comments comes when he explained to Germer why, in his anti-Nazi propaganda writing, he was still unable to attack Hitler by name: going back to the old Golden Dawn idea of trans-human ‘Secret Chiefs’ (of whom he thought Aiwass was one) he writes that he couldn't attack “a man who may be, for all I know, working directly under one of my own chiefs!”
With his asthma in particular, for which he had started using heroin again, along with heavy drinking and gargantuan eating, Crowley's health was bad and he was not ageing well. At one point he congratulates himself on walking from Richmond Green to Richmond Bridge, which is no great distance. But Charles Cammell remembers his excitement during a bombing raid, when they saw a German bomber shot down in flames by anti-aircraft guns.
Here was a man who had been gasping his life away all through the night; and now at the crack of dawn he ran downstairs two steps at a time, and was shouting Hooray! And waving his arms skyward in a passion of boyish excitement and jubilation. No trace of asthma; it was gone to whence it came. Crowley was twenty-one again…