Aleister Crowley (35 page)

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N
ETHERWOOD—
a “large, somber, 19th-century mansion”—was not the usual guesthouse.
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Its owners had bohemian backgrounds, and their idea was to provide a pleasant atmosphere in which artists, writers, and other creative individuals could enjoy a relaxing weekend with good food, drink, and conversation. Among other guests were the philosopher C.E.M. Joad and the historian of science and author of
The Ascent of Man
(1973), Jacob Bronowski, both of whom were well known through the BBC radio show
The Brains Trust
.

As usual, Crowley knew how to make an entrance. A telegram preceding his arrival announced that “a consignment of frozen meat” was on its way. Meat was subject to war rationing, and the local postman sent a copy of the telegram to the Food Ministry, who sent people to inspect the shipment, due on February 1, 1945. When an
ambulance turned up that day and the Beast appeared with fifty or so parcels of books, it was clear he was the “frozen meat.”
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Crowley duly checked into room number 13. He looked old and frail, and his landlords thought him more vulnerable than menacing. One of the first things he did was top up his heroin supply—several doctors prescribed it for him—and one of his first visitors was Kenneth Grant. Grant, who was to become an influential occultist in his own right, came upon Crowley’s
Magick
in a bookshop in 1939 when he was fifteen.
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He was already passionate about the occult, and at eighteen he volunteered for the army, hoping to be sent to India, where he intended to find a guru. Grant’s grasp on reality was somewhat romantic; he never reached the subcontinent and left the service for obscure reasons in 1944. Grant tried to contact Crowley through his publishers; failing that, he asked Michael Houghton of the Atlantis Bookshop to help. Houghton refused, because, he said, Grant was “mentally unstable,” but Grant believed Houghton wanted to recruit him for his own magical society.
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Most likely Houghton was just miffed at Crowley. Crowley considered Houghton “the meanest thief alive” and made anti-Semitic remarks about him.
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Grant eventually met Crowley and, as had Israel Regardie, became his unpaid factotum. By spring 1945, Grant moved into a cottage on the grounds of Netherwood; one of his first missions was to get new needles for Crowley’s daily injections.
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Crowley’s heroin use caused some consternation. Once he left his works at the men’s room of the local chess club (he beat the local champ easily but his reputation precluded his joining); another time he upset McMurtry by excusing himself to take an injection, then squealing like “a stuck pig” from behind the bathroom door.
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Grant learned much from the master. He took lessons in ether-
fueled astral traveling and also in how to extract money from relatives, but his performance as a secretary left much to be desired.
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Grant was a dreamy, poetic soul—he wrote some effective occult fiction—and Crowley reprimanded him for his inability to “be content with the simplicity of reality and fact; you have to go off into a pipe dream”—something Grant’s detractors also point out, especially about his claim to having a blood connection to Crowley.
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But Crowley did see Grant as a potential successor, at least in the UK, regarding him as a “trained man to take care of the O.T.O.”
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This would lead to complications. Grant revised and added much to Crowley’s ideas—he was, for example, the first to link Crowley’s magick with the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, in his influential book
The Magical Revival
(1972)—and this earned him the enmity of Karl Germer, who excommunicated him.
⁵⁹
After Germer’s death, Grant declared himself O.H.O., but was challenged by Grady McMurtry, who eventually secured the title. Grant went on to form his own offshoot, the Typhonian Order. He died in 2011.

Grant’s apprenticeship with the Beast was short-lived; after only a few months, his parents compelled him to leave Crowley. They wished him to find more secure employment, but Crowley thought he was “giving up his real future.” Most likely Grant himself found Crowley’s demands endless, and no doubt wanted to pursue his own path.
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S
OME OF
C
ROWLEY’S LIF
E
at Netherwood sounds idyllic. After breakfast the Beast walked in the garden in his scarlet blazer and purple slippers and his landlord’s niece and nephew hid in the bushes and watched as he made his adoration to the sun. He spent much time in his room. He ate dinner there, would sleep during the day then stay
up reading and writing; his correspondence was voluminous. He scared the housekeeper when he told her he had seen her flying on a broomstick; she did not care for him and thought the sooner he died, the better. Another housekeeper complained that he used all the hot water. At a children’s birthday party he appeared in turban and sash with a jeweled dagger and many rings; but he performed no tricks and the kids were not impressed.

His followers in America sent him supplies, delicacies unavailable in Britain, but not all was well in California. In 1939 Jack Whiteside Parsons, a founder of the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory, joined the Agape Lodge. Soon Parsons was corresponding with the Beast, addressing him as “Most Beloved Father” and signing his letters “Thy son, John.” Jack encouraged his wife, Helen, to do what she wilt; she did, and turned her affections toward W. T. Smith. Parsons was not troubled; he found a willing replacement in Helen’s sister Betty. When Parsons informed Crowley of this development, the Beast was concerned that Smith was turning the O.T.O. into just another “love cult,” and he arranged for Smith to abdicate his leadership in favor of Parsons. Parsons, who showed keen magical promise, took control and moved the lodge’s Hollywood temple to his mansion on South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena. Things went well until the arrival of L. Ron Hubbard, then a pulp science-fiction writer on his way to inventing Dianetics and the more successful Scientology. Hubbard claimed that Naval Intelligence had sent him to Pasadena to break up a dangerous black magic ring. Parsons, after all, was a real-life rocket scientist—there is in fact a crater on the moon named after him; appropriately it is on the dark side—but Hubbard had more likely heard about the “free love” parties given at Parsons’
mansion and thought to check them out. Parsons was a sci-fi fan—he knew the writer Robert Heinlein—and word of his Pasadena occult house parties no doubt got around at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society meetings that he attended.
⁶¹

One of the first things Hubbard did was to attract and secure Betty’s attentions. Parsons, of course, was beyond jealousy, but he was coming under Hubbard’s spell, too. He told Crowley that Hubbard was “the most thelemic person I have ever met”; Hubbard had much natural magical ability and was, Parsons believed, in contact with his Holy Guardian Angel.
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Parsons did not let his being cuckolded interfere with the supreme ritual he had in mind, and in which he asked Hubbard to participate. Like Crowley, Parsons wanted to create a magical child, and to do so he needed his own Scarlet Woman. Parsons used the O.T.O. VIII
⁰
method of magical masturbation—perhaps making a virtue of necessity—and with Prokofiev’s
Violin Concerto
hammering in the background, threw himself into a trance, while Hubbard related events on the Astral Plane.
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After many inconclusive attempts, Parsons succeeded. Returning with Hubbard from the Mojave Desert, Parsons discovered that his Scarlet Woman had turned up, in the form of Marjorie Cameron, who was later to star in Kenneth Anger’s
thelemic
masterpiece,
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
(1954).
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Marjorie had the red hair, green eyes, and intelligence Parsons was looking for, but it was her imperious manner that sold him; Parsons, like Crowley, enjoyed being dominated. His relationship with Hubbard suggests this; around the time Marjorie showed up, Parsons had given a considerable sum to Hubbard and Betty, as an investment in a business deal. Hubbard and Betty made off with the
money, which Parsons never saw again.
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It’s been said that Hubbard learned everything he knew from Crowley, and there is reason to believe this is true.

When Parsons told Crowley about Marjorie, the Beast was pleased. He had, in fact, been working to bring about this very meeting; Crowley told Parsons that “for some little time past I have been endeavoring to intervene personally on your behalf.”
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With Marjorie on board, what Parsons called the Babalon Working began in earnest. After three days of IX
⁰
exertions—often on a sheet smeared with menstrual blood and with Hubbard scrying in the background—Parsons believed they had achieved success. Parsons wrote Crowley a wild, incoherent letter, speaking of the “most important, devastating experience” of his life. The Beast wasn’t impressed. He wrote that he hadn’t “the slightest idea” what Parsons could mean, and complained to Germer that Parsons, or Hubbard, or “somebody is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.”
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And when Crowley learned of Hubbard’s swindle, he told Germer that Hubbard was clearly playing a confidence trick, and that Parsons was a weak fool, losing both his money and his girl.
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Parsons eventually broke with Hubbard, Betty, Crowley, and the O.T.O.; in his last letters he calls Crowley “Dear Aleister,” a strange echo of Leah Hirsig’s epistolary detachment. Parsons continued his own magick, changed his name to Belarion Armiluss Al Dajjal Antichrist, and increasingly slipped into dissociative states. On June 17, 1952, he blew himself up in what was apparently an accident in his chemical laboratory.

Crowley suffered all the complaints of old age—diarrhea, constipation, insomnia, and general decrepitude—and on one occasion he congratulated himself on being able to get to his barber, bookshop,
and printer all by bus and all in one day; he also recorded the embarrassment of needing to urinate but not getting home in time.
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But his main concern was seeing his unpublished work to print; he had eight books in mind and wanted at least two per year to appear. He would be disappointed.
Olla: An Anthology of Sixty Years of Song
(1946) was the last of his books published in his lifetime. It sported a cover portrait by Frieda Harris and a frontispiece by his old friend the artist Augustus John; Harris’s portrait shows Crowley as a kind of Oriental sage, but John’s has a look of surprise, even dismay.
Olla
is Crowley’s testament to poetry and is not for all tastes. Crowley himself had no patience with modern poetry; T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
(1922)—which, ironically, incorporates much occult erudition—“nauseated” him.
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(Some of Crowley’s more recent biographers have tried to relaunch him as a modernist, but there is no evidence for that.) Of other works that did not see print until after his death,
Liber Aleph: The Book of Wisdom and Folly
was finally published in 1961. Frieda Harris relates that Crowley kept £500 of O.T.O. donations under his bed, reserved solely for publishing his work; he wouldn’t touch it, and finally did only after Harris convinced him that it was all right to do so.
⁷¹

Crowley enjoyed the cinema; at one point he wanted to see
The Wizard of Oz
but was disappointed when told it was a children’s story. He told a correspondent that it had nothing to do with his
Liber Oz
but that he wouldn’t change the title of his book “because some filthy Jew in Hollywood chose to pinch the word.”
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(Apparently he was unaware of the success of L. Frank Baum, a theosophist.) But his main source of diversion was his guests. Many people came to see the Beast in his last lair; for a full account the reader should look to
Netherwood: The Last Resort of Aleister Crowley
, which recounts Crowley’s
last days in detail. On December 16, 1945, David Curwen, a furrier and alchemist, was the last person Crowley initiated into the IX
⁰
O.T.O.; Louis Wilkinson, who was initiated himself only the day before, attended. Curwen bought the two-year subscription that Crowley demanded, but was disappointed; he received no new knowledge or introductions to other members. He eventually broke with Crowley; he felt he had been taken in, but was also unhappy that Jews couldn’t be full O.T.O. members.
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Curwen later drifted toward Kenneth Grant and became involved with Grant’s own occult operations.

Crowley’s first visitor of 1946 was the Cambridge scholar E. M. Butler, who arrived on New Year’s Day. She was researching her book
The Myth of the Magus
(1948). Butler’s impressions were not positive. She found Crowley “a seedy figure in light tweed knickerbockers” whose “grating voice” intoned the Law. Crowley was “disintegrating,” “surrounded by an aura of physical corruption.” He was “more repulsive” than she had expected, and his voice—pedantic, pretentious, fretful, scratchy—was the worst thing about him.
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She thought
thelema
“insane,” and Crowley’s room squalid and airless, like something out of Kafka. The only danger she felt was that of “prolonged boredom mixed with repugnance and pity.” But Crowley was ecstatic that a scholar had come to speak to him; Butler had spent a long day and had asked many questions and he had answered at length. Butler, he recorded, spoke to him with “sympathy, consideration and understanding”; her visit was a “dream of joy.” “If all days could be like this!”
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In the end, Butler merely name-checks Crowley in her book.