I dedicate this book to Spiritual Artists
of sound and vision everywhere.
They know and understand.

ALEISTER CROWLEY

THE BEAST IN BERLIN

“Yet again, Tobias Churton shows a unique ability to combine an approachable writing style with scholarly research and the result is an authoritative book on Crowley, the artist, a person who deserves to be re-assessed rather than be relegated to the dustbin of history.”

SANDA MILLER, PH.D., RESEARCH FELLOW, HISTORY OF ART, SOUTHAMPTON SOLENT UNIVERSITY

“Tobias Churton has done it again! Exhaustively exploring the Beast’s sojourn through the kaleidoscope of cultural tumult that was the final years of the Weimar Republic, Churton’s astute eye and clarity of composition provide the lucky reader with a riveting view into what was a hotbed of sex, art, and politics. Churton’s gifts at conjuring a fascinating and profound study from myriad sources are in evidence as usual, painting an engaging portrait of the Magus of the Aeon and the milieu in which he moved.”

FRATER PUCK, ORDO TEMPLI ORIENTIS–U.S. GRAND LODGE AND HOST OF THELEMA NOW!

“Whether Quantum Magus, Berlin Artist, lover, or spy, Churton brings Crowley to life like no other biographer. He truly gets him . . . You don’t so much read this book as you live it, the noisome Beast in Berlin, our own beast within. Churton brings us the first serious and comprehensive study of Crowley’s remarkable Berlin period.”

STEPHEN J. KING (SHIVA X0), GRAND MASTER, ORDO TEMPLI ORIENTIS

“A remarkable account of Baphomet in Berlin, full of fascinating new information on Crowley’s decadence and discipline as a Berlin Boy as Germany spiraled down into its apocalyptic picnic. Tobias Churton has uncovered much that is new and marvelously expands on and clarifies that which was already known. A wonderful evocation of the darkness becoming visible—a truly Manichæan history.”

DAVID TIBET, FOUNDER OF CURRENT 93

“Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin is magic! Churton opens box after box of secrets in a dazzling display of research, erudition, and insight. Aleister Crowley is revealed in all his jaw-dropping splendor, plus warts. A genius forced to suffer fools, able to transcend misfortune, an adventurer in the worlds of art and war. His wisdom is both light and deep; the book is thrilling.”

VANILLA BEER, ARTIST

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Like many of us, this book is a child both of circumstance and mystery, its maturity the fruit of love and care demonstrated consistently by its close family and friends.

The immediate circumstance came in the form of a request from Fremantle-based fine art dealer and historian Robert Buratti to contribute to a catalogue designed to accompany his Aleister Crowley—The Nightmare Paintings (Palermo Collection) exhibition in Australia in 2012. Robert enabled me to fulfill my desire to uncover more of the truth behind Aleister Crowley’s October–November 1931 “Porza” exhibition, when seventy-three of Crowley’s original paintings were exposed to Berlin’s public amid the last lights—if not rites—of the revolutionary Weimar Republic. My study “Making an Exhibition of Himself: Aleister Crowley in Berlin 1930–2” ignited the fuse that exploded into Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin. However, as readers will discover in the final chapter, I would be staggered to discover that the authentic seed of this book had been planted many years before, when Berlin was a coarsely divided city.

Long before Robert Buratti’s kind invitation to think about Crowley the Artist, Heinz Reinhoffer (a Berlin resident since escaping from Trier in the 1970s) shared my interest in the links between Berlin, Crowley, and spiritual revolution. It was Heinz who first opened a door on Berlin for me in February 1983. That Berlin, like the great city of Crowley’s experience, has now all but vanished; Heinz, thankfully, has not. His pure, austere point of view on life is heartfelt, not always welcome, and not infrequently true. His soul with its special vision of nature lives in the foundations of this book.

Thanks to acquisitions editor Jon Graham at Inner Traditions, a long-forgotten seed swiftly germinated; friends gathered to help. William Breeze saw the point and warmly encouraged the project, providing rare unpublished material from the OTO archives. I had the feeling that this material had been preserved for just such a work as this, so many years in gestation. William Breeze read the manuscript, checking its accuracy without gainsaying the author’s interpretation of distant events and obscure motives.

Christopher McIntosh, a resident of Bremen, with his customary modesty and generosity, brought freely to the feast his expertise in German language, history, and esotericism. I am deeply grateful for Chris’s early comments on the scope of the book, for his help in researching “Alvo” von Alvensleben and the PORZA Association—and for his translation of Bertha Busch’s letter of forgiveness and censure to Karl Germer written in 1932: one of those moments when you stop to realize fully, in the course of a biographical work, that we are privileged to witness the authentic testimony of real people, whose feelings transcend the time in which they were first felt and communicated. Biographers do not have the last word; life does.

Writing this book has been a “time machine” experience. Parachute me into the Berlin of 1931, and I am sure I would have no difficulty finding exactly where to go, what to look out for, and where to get a decent—or indecent—bed for the night! Critical in giving me such a three-dimensional, vivid sense of the times and the city has been the guidance and patient assistance offered by Frank van Lamoen, now assistant curator of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Twenty-seven years ago, when we first met, there was no department of Hermetic Studies or Western Esotericism at Amsterdam University; there was Frank van Lamoen—and he worked for Joost Ritman, the “Guv’nor” of Hermetic-Gnostic-Rosicrucian book collecting and study at Mr. Ritman’s Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Bloemstraat, Amsterdam. Frank and I first met in Amsterdam in January 1986; I called him “brilliant” then. No dimming of his star has occurred in the years since. Marvelous it is that mutual professional interests in Modern Art and Esotericism have brought us together again on this beautiful project: raising the Titanic of the Berlin of 1930–32. It was Frank who rediscovered the pictorial genius of Albin Grau in the Saturn-Gnosis journal, and much else of value to this book.

England still secretes her remarkable men and women, or makes great men and women secrete themselves. Beneath the veneer of our “nation of shopkeepers” exists a different picture, a spiritual body joined by veins and arteries and muscles unseen and unvalued. The media reigns over us, and it is a hard rain. Occupying his own vital place in the spiritual organism is musician, poet, Akkadian and Coptic scholar, known to the world as David Tibet, a man of distinctive and very well-informed outlook who has long seen the spark of light in the “Old Sinner” (Crowley). I am deeply grateful for David’s permitting me to view his own collection of Crowley’s art and for allowing me to exhibit photo reproductions of the oroginals in this book. I cherish fond memories of his warm generosity when my family visited him in Hastings in October 2012, close to Crowley’s last billet on Earth.

I should like to thank the staff of the Warburg Institute (home of the “Yorke Collection” of Crowleyana) for their kind helpfulness over the years. Many thanks are also due to Crowley’s bibliographer Timothy d’Arch Smith; to Cis van Heertum; to Steffen Dix (for his exceptionally thoughtful help and expertise regarding Crowley and Hanni Jaeger’s relations with Portugal’s great poet, Fernando Pessoa); to Paul Feazey of the peerless LAShTAL “Aleister Crowley Appreciation Society” website; to Jim Parsons; to Vanilla Beer; and for the forbearance and understanding of my wife, Joanna, and daughter, Merovée, who have had to recognize that when Daddy is writing a book, he appears but a lodger among the family for whom he strives.

Finally, I want to express my deep gratitude, appreciation, and respect for the superb staff at Inner Traditions for their combined qualities of insight, vision, goodness, understanding, and for the professionalism that have always characterized our joint operations in trans-Atlantic communication. It has been a magnificent opportunity to join hands in a common enterprise of bookmaking and (hopefully) spiritual and artistic enlightenment: the great tradition that sparked another, more distant Renaissance.

SCALE - It is approximately 8km from the Lietzensee to Alexander Platz.
This map does not indicate every single street in central Berlin, or the routes of overhead S-Bahn trains, or railway stations.
Please note the modern street map of Berlin has changed considerably from Crowley's time. This is how it used to be.

Pension Medenwaldt, 40-41 K-Damm

Porza Galleries, Budapester Strasse 3

Lietzensee Wer 9, Karl and Cora Germer

1AWurzburger Str.; Crowlqr's studio with Hanni laeger

Franz-Strasse SBahn

Friedrichstrasse S-Bahn

Koch-Str. S-Bahn

Puttkamer Str. 15, The Mikado Club

Fasanen-Str. 9, The Savoy Hotel

Miinchner Hoforau, Am Anhalter Bahnhof, Yresemann Str.

Neumann-Nierendorl Galleries, Konigin-Augusta-Str.

Pension Sm'gnyplatz

Siechen's, Behrenstr..

Cafi Reimann, Schliiterstr.

Stockler's, 228-9 K-Damm

Lunte, Eislebener Str. 11

Horcher's restaurant, Martin-Luther-Str. 21

Cafe Hahnen, 1 Nollendorf Platz

Pension Mea, Wrnbergersk

Kleist Kasino; Kl&str. 15

Miirlcke's pastry house, Ranke Str.

Maenz. Corner Augsburgerstr. And Joachimstalerstr.

Alfred nechtheim, Bleibtreu Str. 15

Peter Supf, Mwl-Str. 15

Apartment of Crwrley and Bertha Buxh, Karlsruher Str. 2

'The World from Under' expo cellar; Magdeburger Str. 5

Jacques Krako's bank, Jiger Str.

Marcellus and Margo Schiffer, K-Damm 31

Bender's restaurant, Bleibtreustr. 33

Fritz, Gotz, editor: Vossische Zeitung; K-Damm 92

Christopher Isherwood; lean Ross; Nollendorfstr.1 7

Caf6 Dorian Gray; Biilow Str. 57

Silhouette Club: corner of Geisbergerstr. and Kulmbachstr.

New El Dorado Club: corner of Motz Str. and Kalckreuthstr.

FOREWORD

DEGENERATE BERLIN

Every man and every woman is a star

The Book of the Law I, 3

On Thursday 14 January 1932 Henri Zentgraaff, editor in chief of the Soerabaiasch Handelsblad, a Dutch-language newspaper in the Netherlands East Indies, informed his readers that the native population in the kampongs were being sold nude pictures. Of Western women, that was. They were of course passed off as artistic photographs—he was all too familiar with the usual pretexts. The same pretexts were used to import the latest German films featuring scantily dressed actresses. If these films were also shown to the natives, he feared, they would fast lose their respect for European culture. Wasn’t it bad enough that there were white women who went horseback riding in the village dressed in slight bathing costumes of a very light color? And on top of all that there was this brochure by a book dealer from Bandung, highly recommending the translation of an allegedly scientific work—which had appeared in Germany in 1928 under the title Kultur-und Sittengeschichte der Neuesten Zeit—a history of modern culture and manners. To show to full advantage the Geschlechtsleben und Erotik in der Gesellschaft der Gegenwart—sex life and eroticism in modern society, as the subtitle was—the work was illustrated with 322 images, 8 color plates, and 16 collotypes. Its author was a Berlin journalist writing under the pseudonym of Curt Moreck. A book like that had no place in the Netherlands East Indies, the colonial editor in chief exclaimed:

When the production of nude pictures of European women increases to such an extent that they are even hawked about in the kampongs, it only goes to show that something is seriously wrong with our culture, and especially: that in our modern times, significantly more than before, Western women have shed that delicate sense of shame and the modesty that once was their greatest ornament.

Zentgraaff felt it was unwise to excite the native male with pictures of Western women. He regarded the Indonesian population as exceptionally timid, until recently, at any rate: a nationalist movement was emerging, and Zentgraaff, who himself flirted with fascism, dreaded the libidinous seed of the revolution. The native population was welcome to benefit from the technological advances and products of a Protestant trading nation, but they should be made aware that the licentiousness paraded in the Kultur-und Sittengeschichte der Neuesten Zeit, in any language, was totally alien to its true moral character. The Dutch translation was published by W. Gorter Jr. in Haarlem and Bandung; in my copy some of the plates have been torn out.

Did Zentgraaff have a point? In a way he did. Konrad Haemmerling, alias Curt Moreck, outlined the latest fashions with obvious relish: from corseted wasp waists to transparent dresses and from garters to fashionable bathing suits that clearly showed the influence of American culture. The book was lavishly illustrated with nudes by modern “arrived” artists like Grosz, Van Dongen, and Degas, as well as with “Oh là là” drawings by lesser gods. What was so cunning about this work were the contemporary photographs that mocked high art and lent an air of ambiguity to the pictures: the long since forgotten Bulgarian film actress Iwa Wanja, posing as a topless pinup girl as if in a harem by Ingres, the Russian veil dancer Ilona Karolevna, the Orient as kitsch. Wouldn’t it strike the native Indonesian population as most peculiar that this was the sort of entertainment preferred by their Western masters? We are approaching the Entartetes (“Degenerate”) Berlin of Aleister Crowley, with nobody else to guide us but the dependable Curt Moreck. In 1931 he brought out a Baedeker*1 for Berlin’s night life: Führer durch das “ lasterhafte” Berlin—A Guide through “Depraved” Berlin—an illustrated guide describing a range of erotic pastimes that far surpassed anything Paris had to offer (see plate 24). The Berlin of the Weimar Republic was the sex capital of Europe, also for Aleister Crowley. But his ambition went beyond that: in line with his philosophy, the magus was interested in psychoanalysis, quantum physics, and the latest developments in the still young medium of film. He lived life to the full, Von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt,†2 but he was completely modern about everything he touched. Like paint tubes.

A while ago I showed a reproduction of one of Crowley’s Berlin paintings to an expert on modernist paintings in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and asked him to give his opinion about the work. I carefully kept the artist’s signature hidden from his view.

“Not bad at all!” he immediately responded, “expressionism . . . rather reminiscent of Kirchner’s paintings.” When I showed the expert Crowley’s signature, he added: “The way he signed the painting is the most naive thing about it.” The painting I had shown him was Mali und Igel from the collection of David Tibet, a double portrait of two lesbians who ran a sophisticated women-only club under the same name in Berlin (see plate 1). In the autumn of 1931 the work was shown in the Ausstellung Aleister Crowley, which had been organized by Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf together with PORZA, an artists’ society of European dimensions that had been founded with the intent to preserve the liberal cultural values that were already being marginalized in the crisis years of the 1920s. In a principally apolitical environment like this, the cosmopolitan magus felt at home.

Mali und Igel is listed under no. 34 in the small exhibition catalogue, unfortunately without any further technical details, while the painting itself is reproduced without number or title. Nor are the drawings indicated as such, which makes identification difficult. The catalogue list appears to have been compiled in a hurry, but the fascinating accompanying text by Karl Nierendorf is more than worth the while. Apparently the gallery owner first heard about Crowley via a Berlin painter and astrologer who showed him a clipping from the Berliner Tageblatt. Nierendorf said the following about Crowley:

. . . he has painted pictures, which come curiously close to Dix or Nolde, although he never saw any of their works. The reproductions show a grotesque mix of the fantastic and realism, images of deserts and high mountains, grimaces, masks, symbolical figures, everything painted in harsh colors and with a deliberate glaring colorfulness, similar to the style of the Düsseldorf painter of allegories Adalbert Trillhaase. It is impossible to judge these works by any formal artistic standard, but they are nevertheless remarkable as testimonies of the idiosyncratic world of a traveler, an English one at that, and they are far more interesting than many of the conveyor belt creations of the more experienced painter.*3

Nierendorf was obviously able to sense the power of Crowley’s work even from reproductions, which is saying something, as it is very likely that they were in black and white. When he got to know the artist personally after that decisive first impression, he was immediately struck by his “unmittelbares Verständnis,” his direct grasp, of the work of Dix, Nolde, Beckmann, Otto Mueller, Schmidt-Rottluff, and Scholz. Naturally Nierendorf also interpreted Crowley’s own work from this perspective:

Through their intense will and the primitiveness of their means, the paintings are decidedly closer to the work of German painters than to the rehash of the usual French recipes that is currently being served up on the other side of the Channel.*4

Crowley was an “Outsider,” Nierendorf wrote at the end of his text, which is otherwise devoid of English idiom. He was right. He was also right about Crowley’s work being beyond any professional artistic assessment.

In 1933 the books of Curt Moreck and those of many others were banned. The Führer Durch das “Lasterhafte” Berlin (see plate 24) had reached a dead end; Mali und Igel was closed by order of the Nazis. This also signaled the demise of Aleister Crowley’s career as an Expressionist in the boundlessly free world of Porza. His work was already entartete (“degenerate”) before the phrase had been coined, and he himself was lasterhaft (“depraved”) in the eyes of many.

What was going on in the years between the two World Wars is captured in the Werdegang (career history) of the Bauhaus, that cathedral of Modernism. In Weimar the movement was still a bastion of Expressionism, heavily influenced by the esoteric input of Johannes Itten and other disciples of Mazdaznan;†5 in Dessau it transformed into a utopian workplace in steel and glass for communist architecture students, only to end in an old telephone factory in Berlin-Steglitz, Hochburg des Faschismus, the stronghold of fascism.

Crowley of course came closest to the art of the early Bauhaus, which in the 1930s may already have been a little outmoded, even though there were critics who claimed that the grotesque in Expressionism had now become the reality of every day. Apart from all that, Crowley must have been attracted by the primitivism and the raw intensity, aside from the exotic motifs he found in the work of artists like Nolde. Having traveled widely, he had developed a global perspective on art.

As Nierendorf already noted, Crowley was not immediately familiar with the German Expressionists. He took his cue from the French Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin, probably because of the intensity of the latter’s uncommon use of colors, which anticipated the technique of the Fauves and the Expressionists. The spirit of Gauguin had come upon Crowley ten years before, when he was making the paintings for the Abbey of Thelema near Cefalù. Wasn’t Sicily his Tahiti? He had always regretted not having met Gauguin in person. The artist died in 1903, six months after Crowley had become acquainted with Rodin in Paris. I wonder if Crowley ever saw the fine painting that Gauguin had made in 1897 during a crisis that had brought him on the verge of suicide: D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? He would at any rate have grasped the gnostic significance of the title: we come from a higher spiritual world that defines our identity, a world we can communicate with, and this is both necessary and desirable whenever we humans are confronted with periodic upheavals in this world of ours. This dependency on contact with a higher intelligence precludes any influence on Crowley of Nietzsche’s vitalistic philosophy of will, even though Zarathustra’s poetic phrases are not alien to Crowley’s prose. The famous lines from The Book of the Law also apply to the artist: “Every man and every woman is a star.”

Having been written well before the philosophy of Andy Warhol, these lines must be taken to mean that a creative being has an unconscious soul that is susceptible to inspiration. “Love is the law, love under will.” It is the will that becomes visible on the canvas as a result of the artist’s gesture and which can be sensed from the impact of the work. This intensity is the spiritual in art. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” This has nothing to do with Die Triumph des Willens,*6 even though that production remains one of the best modernist documentary films in existence. Thelema is not the will of a dark collective legitimizing itself with an appeal to the masses. It is the will that follows the true self that is the ethical norm.

Crowley was by no means politically involved in Berlin, but he possessed a sharp eye and an exceptionally sound judgment. He was averse to Theosophy and rejected race theories, and he would not have felt comfortable with the followers of Mazdaznan in the Bauhaus. Genuine German civilization and Jewishness were synonymous to him. The magus was an expert of symbols, but he also savored a provocative joke, like a Salvador Dalí of occultism: any publicity is good publicity. Thus Norman Page in Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years (1998) writes that after Hitler seized power in 1933, “even Aleister Crowley . . . deemed it prudent to depart—despite his claim to have presented the National Socialists with the idea of using the swastika as their symbol, and thereby having presumably earned their undying gratitude.”†7

Far more sensible remarks about Crowley and the swastika can be found in this new book by Tobias Churton, which I heartily recommend to the reader. To my knowledge, no other entarteter Künstler (degenerate artist—a Nazi jibe) has been the subject of so many biographies, the last one of which is the magisterial Aleister Crowley: The Biography (2011), also by Tobias Churton, which for the first time weighs Crowley’s spiritual philosophy with regard to intention and achievement. Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin was conceived in chapter 24 of that biography. The reader can literally follow the Beast on his meanderings through the city: he can go watch a schreck film or plunge into the Mali und Igel club, even though they only allow women there. Of course he is keen to visit the Aleister Crowley exhibition, but he is too late. The show in the Porza exhibition room was a great success, the larger part of the works having been sold, apparently to a musician who prefers to remain anonymous. Rumor has it that this collector even wants to buy Crowley’s house, which would stand the magus in good stead as he still has debts. All of a sudden the reader sees a young woman at the Romanisches Café. She is twenty if she is a day. He suspects it is Hanni Jaeger, because he is reading this book. A daring dress she is wearing, but then she’s got it and she can flaunt it. And here is Meister Therion himself: la Belle et le Bête! How does he do it?

FRANK VAN LAMOEN

Frank van Lamoen is assistant curator of visual arts at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum. Together with Geurt Imanse and curator Frits Keers he organized the 1997 exhibition “Kazimir Malevich: drawings from the collection of the Khardzhiev-Chaga Art Foundation.” Van Lamoen is coauthor (with Geurt Imanse) of Russian Avant-Garde; The Khardzhiev Collection. Van Lamoen has also published articles on alchemy, Hermetic philosophy, and Jacob Böhme’s Dutch followers as well as compiling the first Dutch selection from the works of Giordano Bruno. He is a principal contributor to a quarter of a century of prestigious publications of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Amsterdam, including Jacob Böhmes Weg in die Welt.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

WHO’S WHO IN THE BEAST IN BERLIN

Alfred Adler (1870–1937)

A famous psychotherapist, practicing “Individual Psychology” in Vienna and Berlin.

Werner “Alvo” Konstantin August von Alvensleben (1889–1962) Aristocratic art patron, director of the pan-European PORZA Association.

Henry Bender (1876–1933)
German movie star and rotund comedian with his own restaurant, Bei Henry Bender, at Bleibtreustrasse 33.

Berlin

Derived from a word for “swamp” or “bear,” Berlin became the margrave of Brandenburg’s capital in the fifteenth century. After the newly founded German Empire took Berlin for its capital in 1871, the city, built on a plain dissected by canals, has grown rapidly, absorbing surrounding villages and suburbs. Berlin in 1930 is the most modern, progressive city on the planet.

Henri Birven (1883–1969)

A “pompous idiot,” according to Crowley, Berlin-based schoolteacher Birven publishes the Theosophical magazine Hain der Isis (Grove of Isis).

Frau Bertha Busch (1895–?)

Zürich-born socialist and divorcée Bertha (known as “Bill” or “the Red Angel”) is a Berlin-based businesswoman.

Max Brüning (1887–1968)

An artist famous for his Asian art collection and erotica, Brüning runs a salon for visiting artists at Nordstrasse 50, Berlin.

John Fillis Carré Carter (1882–1944)

Deputy assistant commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police (1922– 38), head of the Special Branch, Lt. Col. Carter, code-named “Nick,” is Crowley’s intelligence contact.

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)

Known to friends as “666” or “the Beast,” Warwickshire-born “Aleister” is the penname of Cambridge-educated Edward Alexander Crowley: poet, playwright, mountaineer, explorer, magician, psychologist, religious philosopher, and painter.

Astarte Lulu Crowley (1920–)

Daughter of Aleister Crowley and Ninette Fraux, born at her father’s experimental “Abbey” at Cefalù, Sicily, Astarte Lulu has been separated from him since dictator Mussolini expelled Crowley from Italy in April 1923.

Nancy Cunard (1896–1965)

Anglo-American poet, publisher, political activist: great-granddaughter of shipping magnate Samuel Cunard. Nancy’s Hours Press has been based in Paris since 1929.

Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar (1894–1955)

Crowley’s increasingly unstable “High Priestess of Voodoo.” Divorced from one Sanchez, Maria hails from Nicaragua. (Miramar is a town in Nicaragua’s León region.)

Otto Dix (1891–1969)

German painter associated with the “Expressionist” school of representational art.

Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

Father of relativity theory; director of Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (1914–32); professor at Berlin’s Humboldt University.

Hanns Heinz Ewers (1871–1943)

Onetime spy, screenwriter, novelist, and actor; author of Fundvogel, a novel about homosexuality.

Fanny (Peter)

A Berlin transvestite much liked by Crowley.

Alfred Flechtheim (1878–1937)

One of the world’s greatest collectors and dealers in modern art; clients include Paul Klee, George Grosz, and Pablo Picasso.

Ninette Shumway (née Fraux) (1895–1989)
A poor French migrant to America with her sister Hélène in 1911, she was a widowed mother when Crowley’s lover Leah Hirsig (1883–1975) met Ninette returning to France in 1919. Hélène took Ninette and Crowley’s daughter Lulu into her care in 1929.

Otto Gebhardi (1849–?)
Telegraph clerk, Theosophist, lover of Martha Küntzel; author of two articles, “The Magic Flute—A Modern Mystery” and “Goethe’s Faust” (1927).

Cora Eaton Germer (1873–1942)
Daughter of Clark Eaton and Ariadne Shook of Ulster County, New York, wealthy Cora married Karl Germer in 1929, lending Crowley $12,850 at 6 percent interest.

Karl Johannes Germer (1885–1962)
Crowley’s right-hand man, when sane.

Louis Gibarti
Soviet spy and right-hand man to Willi Münzenberg, the Communist International’s (Comintern’s) number 1 man in the West.

Edward Goldston (1892–1953)
Codirector of the Mandrake Press, Museum Street, London, formed in 1928 with P. R. Stephensen to publish radical works.

Albin Grau (1884–1971)
Producer of the horror movie Nosferatu (1922), Grau is leader (“Frater Pacitius”) of the “Rosicrucian” Pansophic Lodge of the Light Seeking Brethren, Orient Berlin (Grand Master: Heinrich Tränker).

Eugen Grosche (1888–1964)
Owner of Berlin esoteric bookshop Inveha, Grosche is secretary of the Pansophic Lodge of the Light Seeking Brethren, Orient Berlin.

Prof. Wander Johannes de Haas (1878–1960)
Low-temperature physicist from the University of Leiden.

Gerald Hamilton (ca.1888–1970)
Interned in WWI for anti-war intrigues, in late 1931 Hamilton is a Times correspondent linked to communist espionage.

Nina Hamnett (1890–1956)
So-called Queen of Bohemia, British artist Nina has been a friend of Aleister Crowley since a struggling art student in 1910.

Wilfrid Lewis Hanchant (1901–1978)
Curio dealer; editor of Arts and Crafts; author of The Newgate Garland; or Flowers of Hemp (1932), a collection concerned with slang and “canting phrases.”

Wyn Henderson
Aquila Press publisher, editor, hostess, friend of Nancy Cunard.

Oscar Hopfer (1895–?)
German artist from Weissendorf; illustrator for the Leipzig Thelema Verlag’s 1930 version of Crowley’s 777.

Gertrud Howe
Crowley’s lover and model; according to Crowley, a mulatto cousin of President Hoover.

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
Grandson of scientific “freethinker” Thomas Henry Huxley (1825– 1895), Huxley, a former obsessed lover of Nancy Cunard, is a novelist with serious scientific interests.

Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986)
Novelist friend of Jean Ross and Gerald Hamilton, a Berlin habitué since 1929.

Hanni Larissa Jaeger (1911–1932?)
Age nineteen, from Santa Barbara, California, artist and model Hanni Jaeger is a guest of Berlin artist and astrologer Hans Steiner.

Father Ronald Knox (1888–1957)
Classicist and Roman Catholic convert, Knox is Catholic Chaplain at Oxford when a university poetry society invites Crowley to talk in February 1930.

Paul George Konody (1872–1933)
London Daily Mail and Observer art critic; Konody encourages Crowley’s art exhibition plans.

Jacques Krako (1882–1944)
Son of Levi Krako and Susanna Steinhardt, Jacques owns the A & Co. banking house at Jägerstrasse 11, Berlin.

Arnoldo Krumm-Heller (1876–1949)
A Theosophist interested in alternative medicines, disciple of Bishop Clement of the Martinist Gnostic Church (under Joanny Bricaud), Krumm-Heller has founded his FRA (Fraternitas Rosicruciana Anti- qua) in 1927 in Mexico with a charter issued on 15 March 1908, appointing him Grand Representative General for Mexico of the Sovereign Sanctuary of the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraïm, signed by OTO founders, Theodor Reuss and Henry Klein..

Martha Küntzel (1857–1942)
Theosophist schoolteacher of Leipzig and translator of Crowley’s works into German.

Frederic Lekve (1904–1956)
First generation German of a Norwegian family, Lekve experienced enlightenment in 1929 that Thelema was for him.

Margo Lion (1899–1989)
Born in Istanbul, highly talented performer Margo Lion is married to painter, graphic designer, song lyricist, and humorist Peter Winter. In 1928 she enjoyed a hit record with girlfriend Marlene Dietrich, the risqué bisexual number “When the best friend is with the best girlfriend” (Wenn die beste Freundin mit der besten Freundin . . .).

Mali and Igel
A painting by Crowley of the girlfriend and owner of the all-women club Mali and Igel at Martin-Luther-Strasse 16: “Mali” is Elsa Conrad and “Igel” (“hedgehog”) is Elsa’s girlfriend (see plate 1).

Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932)
Guided as a youth by illiterate visionary and Christian pietist Alois Mailänder (1844–1905) at his Darmstadt Rosicrucian school (also attended by OTO “fathers” Franz Hartmann and Carl Kellner)—and in 1923 a member of Peithmann’s Gnostic Church of Eleusis—Meyrink is Germany’s leading writer of supernatural fiction: his Der Golem first appeared in serial form in Die Weissen Blätter (1913—14).

Karl Nierendorf (1889–1947)
Owner with brother Josef of the Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf GmbH established in 1926, moving, in November 1930, from Lützowstrasse 32 to Königin Augusta Strasse 22, until early 1932.

Emil Nolde (1867–1956)
One of the first and greatest of German Expressionists.

Dorothy Olsen (1892–1981?)
Born in Chicago, daughter of Norwegian immigrant Christian D. Olsen, Dorothy Olsen, five feet six inches tall with brown eyes and auburn hair, journeyed to Paris in 1924 and became Crowley’s “Scarlet Woman” as “Soror Astrid.”

Dr. Ernst Christian Heinrich Peithmann (1865–1943)
Publisher of a “Gnostic Catechism” (1904) and former member of onetime Theodor Reuss-associate, Peter Christoph Marten’s Neuen Gral- Orden (reformed in 1921 from Dr. P. Braun’s Gral-Orden or Order of the Holy Grail), Peithmann has founded the “Ancient Gnostic Church of Eleusis” to promote his sex-magical doctrines for the “liberation of the seed from servitude.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935)
Portuguese poet deeply interested in transcendent being, and in Aleister Crowley.

Walter Plantikow (1893–?)
Berlin-trained artist from Georgenberg, Bavaria, earning a living as an illustrator.

Israel Regardie (1907–1985)
Crowley’s young American secretary, based in England.

Léon Rosenfeld (1904–1974)
Belgian physicist who in 1932 published a demonstration that Dirac’s relativistic electron theory was equivalent to that of Heisenberg and Pauli.

Jean Ross (ca. 1911–1973)
Beautiful, liberated actress, dancer, singer, writer, journalist, and humorist; she part-inspired Isherwood’s character Sally Bowles.

Ernst Schertel (1884–1958)
Former student of history and philosophy, now devoted to ancient religion, naturism, sexual liberation, sado-masochism, occultism, and dance culture.

“Marcellus Schiffer” (Peter Winter 1892–1932)
Husband of performer Margo Lion, Schiffer is regarded as the best cabaret-musical composer in Germany.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976)
Possibly one of three German painters Karl Nierendorf believes can be classed alongside Crowley.

Georg Scholz (1890–1945)
Leader of the New Objectivity style of realism.

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961)
Quantum physicist and, since 1927, Max Planck’s successor at Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University.

Franz Seldte (1882–1947)
Founder (25 December 1918) and leader of paramilitary organization Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten.

Stephen Spender (1909–1995)
British poet; close friend of Christopher Isherwood.

Günther Stein (1900–1961)
Jewish journalist at the Berliner Tageblatt.

Hans Steiner (1891–1957)
Painter, stage designer, caricaturist, astrologer.

Percy Reginald Stephensen (1901–1965)
Australian graduate from Oxford and radical publisher, based in London.

John William Navin Sullivan (1886–1937)
Science correspondent for The Times, mathematician, and writer of popular science books, Sullivan is Crowley’s friend.

Peter Supf (1886–1961)
A kind of German Antoine de St.-Éxupéry: “aviator poet,” novelist, and correspondent of many writers, including Thomas Mann.

Major Robert Thompson (Robin) Thynne (d. 1936)
Mandrake Press director and Anthroposophy enthusiast.

Heinrich Tränker (1880–1956)
Holds a 1921 X° OTO Lodge charter from Theodor Reuss. Crowley’s opponent in Germany since 1925, Theosophical bookseller and former secretary to Franz Hartmann (1838–1912) in the latter’s Internationale Theosophische Verbrüderung (ITV, founded 1897)

Adalbert Trillhaase (1858–1936)
German exponent of “naive” outsider art: rough and instinctive in execution, with a private visual language, like Crowley.

Gräfin Ellen von Stauffenberg (1885–1975)
Auguste Lisbeth Ellen, Gräfin Schenk von Stauffenberg, of Charlottenburg, Berlin, married to Markward Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (1889–1975) since 1913.

John Maria Verweyen (1883–1945)
German philosopher, Freemason, and secretary general of the Theosophical Society German Section.

Hermann von Wedderkop (1875–1956)
Editor of highbrow journal Der Querschnitt (The Cross Section).

Heinz Worner (1910–2008)
Young, left-wing sculptor, earning a living as a plasterer, Heinz began as an apprentice stone sculptor in 1925, studying at Berlin’s School of Applied Arts in the evenings.

Gerald Joseph Yorke (1901–1983)
The son of landed Cambridge don and owner of Birmingham ceramics firm H. Pontifex Ltd., Vincent Wodehouse Yorke, Gerald, an outstanding Cambridge history graduate with powerful interests in Eastern religious philosophies, has been Crowley’s magical pupil since the end of 1927.

ONE

SCOOP!

The work in Germany is going very strong indeed. I always knew that was the country to understand me. [Kasimira] is teaching me German. I feel that I have much to do there one day. 1

ALEISTER CROWLEY TO KARL GERMER, 1928

An old lady in a tattered headscarf, her bulky body encased in a thick duffel coat, stands like stone in massive boots upon the cold granite setts of Friedrich-Wilhelm Platz. Coiled about her long-lost neck, a python of a scarf insulates her vanished sex. Eyes downcast, hands burrowing into her pockets, this poignant monument to the forced modesty of poverty stands silent guard to the U-Bahn underground station entrance, a mile and a half south of a more fashionable Berlin.

Over her shoulder is slung a large leather bag for change. Change. . . . It is Saturday afternoon. The month is May, the year 1930. She is selling papers. Around her little kiosk, the picture magazine Revue flutters in the chill: long girls’ legs dangle provocatively each side of the indifferent vendor, plying her paper street-trade with forgotten pride. Above the stockinged limbs and myths of pleasure, her top-selling newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt, cries for a pfennig: two editions a day, rolled out in streams and rushed across the city in publisher Rudolf Mosse’s pedal carts to dozens of kiosks like this one.

For the moment, the vendor grips her granite turf alone, but to the north of Friedrich-Wilhelm Platz, beneath the trees of the Tiergarten public park in central Berlin, passersby witness a grim demonstration. A crowd follows a coffin carried by play-acting mourners in flat “Lenin caps,” sure signs of committed comrades in the workers’ struggle. While the red flags of the German Communist Party (KPD) are tightly furled in ironic tribute to the “dead,” a big banner, held high on staffs, declares, “Workers—to the grave we carry forever the coalition” (Arbeiter—Zu Grabetragen wir für immer die Koalition), while the black coffin borne on workers’ shoulders bears one word, splashed across in white paint: Koalition. The Coalition of Chancellor Hermann Müller’s Social Democratic Party, Center Party, German Democratic Party, and German People’s Party has been dead since 27 March, seen off by the Great Depression and inter-party feuding. Succumbing to the political stench, poor Müller will himself be dead in a year, a bitter blow for the Social Democrats.

As the old newsvendor in Friedrich-Wilhelm Platz glances up from her frozen reverie to a fist bearing cash, yet another political rally draws to a close.

One hundred twenty miles northwest of Berlin stands the fine old city of Schwerin, where uniformed men close ranks around their charismatic speaker, mounted on a makeshift podium. This is the paramilitary Stahlhelm Group, or Bund der Frontsoldaten, soldier-veterans, led by chief and founder Franz Seldte, smart and disciplined on the outside, raging within.

Seldte despises the weakness of the Weimar Republic’s young democracy, inflicted, as he sees it, on a once great Empire through the corrupt machinery of the old guard: stay-at-home, armchair politicians who—Seldte declares unchallenged—betrayed their soldiers and their country when they ended the war in November 1918. Shame! Bring back the Emperor! The Stahlhelm rally, with its speeches, its shuffling boots, and its defiance in the late afternoon breeze and cold sunny glare, stirs the quiet of the beautiful old capital of Mecklenburg.

Belonging to a loose, anti-government coalition of right-wing parties called the Reichsausschuss, the Stahlhelm Group jostles for political influence with the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or “Nazi” Party) but cannot compete for votes. Having doubled their voting share in Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1929, the Nazis are standoffish toward the Reichsausschuss. Nazi propaganda chief Dr. Goebbels, based in Berlin under the archaic title gauleiter, considers these “fellow” nationalists rather bourgeois. Too close a public association, Goebbels insists, will compromise the Nazis’ revolutionary image. Hitler disdains to stand by Seldte on the rally platforms of the Reichsausschuss.*8

So, as the sun slips away over the stately amber houses and golden spires of Schwerin, and Seldte’s echoing, electrically amplified voice decries yet again the lack, as he sees it, of honor in the Reichstag’s political confusion, the old woman in Friedrich-Wilhelm Platz reaches into her bag of loose change to recompense a businessman as he takes hold of the Saturday evening edition of the Berliner Tageblatt, issue no. 207, 3 May 1930.

Stepping out of the kiosk’s shadow into the last, sharp shafts of setting sunlight, the man turns to the back page; his attention is caught by a fine drawing of a man. The businessman squints better to inspect the drawing: a large, noble head is cocked back as if suddenly inhaling. His eyes are closed in some intense mystical congress with an inner power rarely joined to a man in a suit.

This striking image of sober ecstasy by English artist Augustus John sits strangely above the weather forecast and the columns of stories of burglaries, bar fights, and bank heists. While the Sass Brothers are jailed for robbery, weekenders in search of a legal thrill can visit the new crocodile exhibition at the zoo. And for those in search of higher inspiration, Berlin’s brazen bustle is gently interrupted by a simple headline, and a not so simple story:

Fig. 1.1. Aleister Crowley by Augustus John (1878–1961) as reproduced in the pages of the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper (Abend-Ausgabe section, no. 207, 3 May 1930).

IN BERLIN TRAF EIN: ALEISTER CROWLEY

(Arriving in Berlin: Aleister Crowley)

The fifty-five-year-old lingers by us for a moment to prepare for an exhibition of his paintings taking place this autumn. Aleister Crowley is a painter from passion. He must be, since as a mountaineer his vision has inhaled moods of air and light remote from human eyes. Already the conqueror of Mexico’s highest peaks, Crowley twice attempted to subjugate the Himalayas. His last Himalayan expedition was in 1905 when he reached a height of 7,000 meters before a mutiny forced him back. He has committed his mountaineering exploits, his life’s confessions, his many adventures, his poetry (Crowley once lived as a yogi) to a series of books now appearing in England.

Crowley has already advised the recently assembled German Himalayan Expedition’s leader on how to tackle a specific glacier. Should the expedition follow that advice, Crowley told the interviewer, they should reach the summit, otherwise ruin awaits them: “The Germans have excellent prospects with this adventure.”

For the English public, gentleman-Bohemian Crowley is a controversial phenomenon. While some recognize a revolutionary philosopher, others see him as an artist-clown. That this climber of mountains, player of chess, poet-philosopher, and painter is one of the most remarkable of characters, however, no one will dispute. To us he offers a cross between Karl May and Schopenhauer.*9 Perhaps he is much more, perhaps less.

Back in Schwerin, 120 miles northwest of Friedrich-Wilhelm-Platz, the living, breathing subject of the Tageblatt article has arrived by car from Berlin, en route for Hamburg and London on business. Aleister Crowley’s anxious “fixer” and business associate Karl Germer is driving. Germer’s American wife, Cora, is in the passenger seat. The car draws up outside an elegant hotel in the city’s center. A handsome, four-story stone structure, ivory-rendered, the Niederlandische Hof harks back to the civilized grandeur of 1902: a neoclassical temple of sanity in a narrow boulevard of shady trees overlooking the Stör canal, tributary of the beautiful Schwerinsee, or Lake Schwerin.

The city’s name, Schwerin, will have jogged Crowley’s memory, jogged it back to five years of hardship endured in the United States during the 1914–18 war. As an Allied intelligence asset, Crowley had observed anti-Allied Americans (of German descent). Some simply clamored to keep the U.S. out of the war, others committed acts of subversion.

During the nineteenth century a large number of Schweriners had migrated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a significant number entering the brewing industry (today Milwaukee and Schwerin are sister cities). Here lies the background to Crowley’s otherwise mysterious reference to Milwaukee brewers in his 1919 essay “The Last Straw,” written to refute his enemies’ presumption that he was a pro-German traitor, rather than a spy on German agents, during World War One. Coincidentally, Crowley has just published part of the essay in a new book, The Legend of Aleister Crowley. The book is designed to break a booksellers’ boycott of his works in London. Discussions in Berlin have led Crowley to expect a German translation too.

They [Crowley’s enemies] wanted to get me . . . and confidently supposed [me] to be sitting in a luxurious suite at the Ritz-Carlton, quaffing beaker after beaker of champagne to the health of the Kaiser, as I conspired with the fanatical brewers of Milwaukee.

Were there not still fanatics in Schwerin? Writing up the day’s events in his diary, Crowley referred to the “rally of Stahlhelm” at Schwerin and “their chief, Seldte,” adding the single word comment: “Good.” This very likely refers to Crowley’s having met Franz Seldte at “X [ten o’clock] Niederlandische Hof.” Crowley was keen to know what was really happening in Germany, intelligence he could convey to Lt. Col. John Fillis Carré Carter, head of England’s “Special Branch” or police interface with MI5. Crowley enjoyed a discreet arrangement with Carter, code-named “Nick,” the full extent of which is now lost to us; it was never intended to enter recorded history. Carter’s code name, incidentally, derived from fictional detective “Nick Carter,” created for the dime novel The Old Detective’s Pupil in 1886. (Nick Carter Weekly was replaced by Detective Story Magazine in 1915.) Introduced to 666 by Crowley’s pupil Gerald Yorke in June 1929, the Canadian Carter from Halifax took a serious, not infre quently irritated, interest in Crowley’s kaleidoscope of activities; Crowley, most of the time, was happy to oblige the colossus of Scotland Yard.

Aleister Crowley had arrived in Berlin on 18 April, a fortnight before his night in Schwerin. Painter, caricaturist, and astrologer Hans Steiner had telephoned the Berliner Tageblatt on the 24th to alert reporters to a scoop: the appearance in Berlin of a man who only a year previously had made headlines across Europe with a mystery story concerning the French government’s refusal to renew “Sir Crowley’s” Parisian residence permit, effectively expelling the magus from France. There had been rumors of spying for the Germans, and much else. But rumor was all there was; the government declined to explain its refus de séjour.

The Tageblatt interview, probably conducted by bright young Jewish journalist Günther Stein, occurred four days after Steiner’s call. But had the Berliner Tageblatt’s intelligent copy got it right? Was Crowley a cross between Karl May and Schopenhauer? Was he a revolutionary or a fool-osopher? Who was this Aleister Crowley that so fascinated hardto-impress Berliners?

The Tageblatt offers a basic bio: Crowley is an explorer-adventurer, a chess player, a poet, a philosopher, an English gentleman, a bohemian (that is a free-spirited, free-thinking, artist-aesthete). He is a man about whom men differ. He fascinates some, repels others. Some he both fascinates and repels. He is an artist “from passion,” appealing to poets and ladies, revolutionaries and revue-bar habitués. He gives advice. He wants to help others to succeed. He writes books. He knows the world, and he moves in it. He appears fearless. But can he be taken seriously? He can clown it up. There is a hint of revolutionary about him, but what kind of revolution?

Journalist Günther Stein, himself a man longing for a revolution of the familiar kind, knows his Berlin audience well. He does not tell them about Crowley’s peculiar religious upbringing in a close-knit family of upper-middle-class Christian fundamentalists, a family undemonstratively superior to the unredeemed world without, clinging firmly to what is now dubbed “creationism” with outmoded theories about the absolute literalism of “God’s biblical word” and the blood-sacrifice practices of peoples long ago. Members of the exclusive Plymouth Brethren sect, Crowley’s parents would have regarded today’s biblical fundamentalists as lax, headed for damnation.

Fig. 1.2. Aleister Crowley, explorer

The journalist knows well that interest in his scoop will diminish should he so much as hint that Crowley has a religious or spiritual message, even one that transcends the logic of his Victorian parents. Berlin is too modern, too hard-realist, too revolutionary for such stuff. The journalist does mention in brackets that Crowley has lived as a yogi. This of course is colorful and fitting for an adventurer-explorer of the East. The journalist will also know that a yogi is a teacher of yoga (which means “union”), loosely suggesting the “mystic orient” in a pleasantly undefined way, something many people will know or feel from popular mythology, relatives’ interest in Theosophy or Freemasonry, or from films of desert sheikhs driven into ecstasies by human and more than human loves. Anyhow, a man who once lived as a yogi is unlikely to bore his audience with threats of imminent salvation-damnation. Indeed, yogis are notoriously short on words. Besides, as is assumed by practically all educated Berliners, Art is the repository of the soul; churches and synagogues are for the old, the settled down, the bourgeois: atrophied, formal extensions of officialdom into the numinous and legal basis for coming of age, baptisms, weddings, and funerals.

But Crowley himself would be the first to distance himself from what most people understand as the idea of having “a religious message.” Indeed, in conventional terms, Crowley offers no such thing. He is no evangelical, God forbid. He is not trying to inject religion into the material world. He does not want to be seen as a guru descending on the wicked world to hear his sweaty swami pfennig worth of repentance from sin. Far from it! Do what thou wilt is his watchword, and while it had for him profound meaning as well, it also meant pretty well what it seemed to say, as far as the world was concerned. Each was to follow his or her true will and not interfere with others’ right to do the same. In this context, the line could be expressed as “Lay off, bud! That’s a man or woman there; it’s their life! Get your own!”—a very suitable attitude for a Berlin that, frankly, already has much of this attitude pulsating through its veins. That’s why Crowley will find a home in Berlin. For him it is a place where the evolution of the “New Aeon” seems already visible, tangible, lickable. His system, Thelema (Greek for “Will”—the “True Will”), is the creed of the aeon.

Yes, the boy Crowley had been shaped by a boyhood in the closed Plymouth Brethren Christian sect, with little contact with non-church members or mainstream culture (Brethren dismissed Christmas as a pagan festival). And yes, things had got a lot worse for him when his beloved and admired father (a self-financing preacher) died suddenly when the boy was just twelve. The adolescent had come into the hands of a strict evangelical lower bourgeois bigot, Crowley’s uncle Tom Bishop, who, with Mother’s approval, had entrusted the lad to the “care” of the sadistic Rev. Champney at a Brethren school at Cambridge. But Crowley had been saved from the school, if not all his uncle’s burdensome ministrations, by his father’s brother, keen scientist and man of the world Jonathan Sparrow Crowley (1826–1888).

By the age of eighteen Crowley had come into his own perception of the world, a vigorous perception both romantic and rigorously scientific, in which he found himself much in intellectual league with other outstanding figures of the late Victorian and Edwardian era in science and the arts. Prime Minister Lord Salisbury recommended Crowley to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study for a diplomatic career.

All things told, however, Crowley had paid a price for his eventual liberation from Christian fundamentalism. First, he absorbed a vivid sense of religious authority, which however much his intellect rebelled against it, was nonetheless an aspect of the fabric of his deeper, motivating thought structure. This sense of a being or beings beyond this world having the right to say “I’m not asking you; I’m telling you” was reinforced by the authority structure of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in which, from 1898, he was trained as a magician; that is, a man who could get lesser intelligences to work for him and who could invoke higher intelligences as guides and way-clearers. His tutor in the order, Samuel Mathers (1854–1918), was full of the militaristic, “Prussian” attitude of absolute, compelling authority, something that annoyed Crowley’s comembers but in which Crowley found something to admire, something Nietzschean, beyond the moral fearfulness of the prevailing culture, a kind of nostalgia for the prophet of old, the one who sweeps away committees and regards democracy as a rootless fad. Furthermore, the Golden Dawn Order’s acceptance of the idea and existence of spiritualized overlords, called in poor English translation “Secret Chiefs” (derived from eighteenth-century German antecedents), who governed not only the order but also human destiny, sanctioned the basic attitude of divine authority he first imbibed from his Plymouth Brethren upbringing and father’s wisdom. In simple and even simplistic psychological terms, Crowley lost a father and gained new ones, eventually. His rebellion began with the death of his father; after that, to an extent, Crowley nursed a grievance against the bourgeois mediocrity and perennial stupidity that enveloped his life subsequently, and from which he tore himself away like a moon-crazed hare from its mother’s womb in a series of inner, and outer, struggles.

The second serious price Crowley had to pay for his liberation from stifling religious conformity was the effort itself. He generated a vast amount of excess liberating energy; it would be hard at times to retard the engine of revolt. He had a strong tendency to universalize his personal problems into visions of the Zeitgeist. That is to say, his personal tragedy was very much wrapped up in his mind with the perceived declension of the civilized world into materialism and dehumanized standardization of product. Crowley claimed to have no beef with Nature; Nature was as it should be. But Humanity was caught in a titanic spiritual struggle with its past. From the particulars of his own liberation, Crowley leaped, like Blake’s child of freedom and rebellion, Orc, into a vision of the universal liberation required by humankind to free itself from the “old aeon” of repressive religion, unscientific superstition, and political, sexual, and social oppression. His personal experience, he needed not too much persuading, was a microcosm of the “Gods’” dealings with our species; thus and in those terms, he became a living, if only occasional, “Thoth,” or Scribe of the Gods: a magus with a Word. The Gods dictated; he wrote: not at all far, we might observe, from his father’s point of view with regard to scripture. Thus Crowley’s magical order, the A A , insisted on classes of authority in order writings. Very few writings were in Class A: received material from sources beyond human rationality’s ability to create. Class A writings derived from superior intelligence, beyond ordinary Reason. The God’s-eye view as personal experience was the vision Crowley sought through progressive initiations, or uncoverings, of the depths and mystery of his being. At the core was, he supposed, a kind of super-id, a divine power of which the conscious fool-man was unconscious. Liberate the unknown power and human civilization could make its necessary strides into the fresh cosmic dispensation awaiting the awakened being of Man.

Needless to say, such a process would be attended by what Jonathan Swift would have called “some inconveniences”—inconveniences such as the First World War, the full liberation of women, and greater conflicts to come.

Having fully internalized this itinerary for himself and out of duty to his “Holy Guardian Angel,” Crowley’s link with ultimate reality, his “unconscious” if you like, he would become a Mercury, or wandering Fool, a childlike tool of the Gods, an invisible presence, a wind, a kind of secret chief: problematic for a man who enjoyed attracting attention. To the world he was young Aleister Crowley, naughty boy extraordinaire, clever, witty, brilliantly talented, brave, foolish, impulsive, and often ridiculous, ambitious, impossible, self-obsessed, keen on fame, but also incredibly modest, surprisingly spiritual, generous, and, frankly, very sexy to women who felt keenly the spiritual side of sex and the sexual side of the spirit.

Crowley had suffered for his prodigious talents and energies. As a poet-vandal against the panes of the bourgeois greenhouse, leaping onto the barricades before the mediocre behemoth, he had perhaps pushed too hard. Wishing to be known as The Beast 666 was a good joke for those in on the associations and the pose—and a good insulation from those whose attentions would waste his time—the title could nonetheless cause a lot of trouble from literal, unseeking, and insensitive minds, especially when enflamed by moral hypocrisy and un-Christ-like Christian zeal. The world that liked to think of itself as enlightened and progressive no longer employed the rack, red-hot pokers, and Inquisition, but it did have, and still does have, the press, which can torture and deprive good men and women of the respect of their fellows and their livelihoods in the name of . . . their shareholders.

Aleister Crowley had entered the bad books of the “moral guardians of society” expressed in the cheaper, mass-circulation papers. Once their owners knew Crowley could not or would not fight for his reputation in court (he was actively bisexual—then a crime), the gutter press went for the jugular, especially The Sunday Express (in 1922–23), John Bull (1920– 30), and, before the Great War, The Looking Glass (in 1910, owned by West de Wend Fenton before his imprisonment). Some of this muck was bound to stick, even on the continent, where Anglo-Saxon sexual hypocrisy was well recognized, if not as an excessive version of its own.

There had been another round of Crowley-bashing as an undesirable on the withdrawal of his permit to live in France in spring 1929, but the continental press did not share the kind of blinkered moral outrage that characterized the British rags. As for the Berliner Tageblatt story, Crowley was thrilled to see such an unusually fair and useful story. Moreover, its point of focus was Crowley as an artist. Something like recognition at last! For Crowley had always been an artist, but his conscious pursuance of the role in paint after his mother’s death in 1917 had been elsewhere greeted with indifference or hostility, as we shall see. But here was a German newspaper announcing, not taking sides at all, that this passionate man of kultur was going to exhibit in Berlin come the autumn.

Was Crowley something more or something less than a combination of Karl May and Arthur Schopenhauer? The question itself was so intriguing, it required no answer, but it did reveal a highbrow aspect to Crowley as well as a lowbrow one. Anyhow, Crowley had, as we shall discover, such a complex, unique psychology, with its ability to inhabit the highest heights and quite a few of the depths as well, that it is pointless to say precisely what Crowley was, since he could be so many things, and was so many things. There was only one thing he was not, perhaps: he was never dull. But children who are never dull and are very bright and energetic can be very exhausting, and this could be true of Crowley, who was so very often broke and, like Jesus, in regular need of followers to minister unto him of their substance. (Jesus was financed by Joanna, wife of Herod Antipas’s steward, Chuza,*10 but no one accuses Jesus of living off immoral earnings!) It is not true to say that Crowley alienated all his friends, but it is true to say that he exhausted many of them, as too much sun may exhaust the static bather.

So how can we describe the tough, portly, pipe-smoking fifty-five-year-old Crowley in the spring of 1930? Well, he was up for it. He was up for Berlin; he needed a new HQ, new contacts, new life; he needed to be at the center of contemporary life, plugged in to the vital energies of the planet.

Crowley was a man who refused to be old; he would embody his “New Aeon,” the Aeon of the Child Avenger and Conqueror, the Child in love with the Sun, the life force, whether he was loved for it or laughed at, feted or feared. Crowley was inspired by change, by movement, by freedom, by the challenge of the impossible. He’d have camped in the Tiergarten if he’d had to, like the businessmen toppled by the Great Crash he observed on the lower spokes of fortune’s wheel. Crowley could sleep rough, and live rough, though he was a natural in the company of the good things: good conversation, lively women who saw life as a poem, happy and playful always amid the grandeur of inimitable nature and inimitable art.

But why had he come to Berlin? What was his business?

TWO

SELLING ALEISTER CROWLEY

A series of meetings held in Berlin in late April 1930 give us clues to understanding Crowley’s purposes. On Wednesday the 23rd he made his way some 10 km northwest of the city center to the suburb of Tegel for a meeting with Theosophist publisher Henri Birven.

A Berlin philosophy graduate originally from Aachen, Birven had lectured on electrical engineering before WWI. From 1929 his Theosophical magazine Hain der Isis (Grove of Isis) included extracts from Crowley’s works by arrangement with Martha Küntzel, a Theosophist from Leipzig who translated Crowley’s writings. Hain der Isis was published from Birven’s home address at Schulstrasse 7, some 500 meters southwest of the Humboldt Oberschule in Hatzfeldallee, where he worked as a schoolteacher. Contributors also included The Golem author, Gustav Meyrink; Joanny Bricaud (1881–1934; Patriarch of the French-based “Universal Gnostic Church”); and neo-Gnostic patriarch E. C. H. Peithmann.

Turning up at Birven’s house, Crowley was initially put out to find what appeared to be a party going on. The Beast had expected to get down to business in private. Instead, he was introduced to Dr. Arnoldo Krumm-Heller, an earnest German mystic-doctor who had spent much of his life in Mexico and Paris, developing a strongly motivated passion for neo-Rosicrucian and neo-Gnostic philosophies, as well as an abiding interest in alternative medicine and the progress of Theosophy. Krumm-Heller had been looking forward to meeting the famous Beast 666, and Birven made himself look important by crossing his meeting with Krumm-Heller’s first Crowley encounter.

Also present at the meeting was commercial artist Walter Plantikow. Perhaps the idea was to acquaint Crowley with some knowledge of the Berlin art scene while putting Plantikow in the way of a job illustrating Crowley’s planned new German translations, though Plantikow’s métier was erotic art. Did Birven believe Crowley was a sex maniac? In any event, Crowley judged Plantikow’s work “good.”*11

When Crowley met him in April 1930, Plantikow, then living at Lütticher Strasse 2 (N65), had already illustrated Félicien Mallefille’s erotic Memoirs of the Nights of Don Juan. The idea of the meeting was probably to secure reasonably priced artists for Thelema Verlag texts.

Plantikow was still working in Berlin in the 1940s as an illustrator for Steinerverlag’s children’s illustrated historical adventure stories, such as German Storm Gibraltar by Wolfgang Hofmann. He also worked for the Steinerverlag’s War Library of German Youth series, sent as pamphlets, when the company exceeded paper quotas in 1943, to Hitler Youth leaders to inspire young people to war.

Crowley decided to take the party as a compliment and arranged a private dinner with Birven for later in the evening to discuss publishing issues and matters connected to Crowley’s desire to draw competing Theosophical societies under his Thelemic banner. When Crowley arrived for the planned dinner, however, he was enraged to find Birven had again muddied the waters by bringing with him young left-wing painter and sculptor Heinz Worner.†12

It was not Worner himself the Beast found objectionable (Crowley admired the artist’s draftsmanship) but Birven’s insufferably pompous manners combined with what Crowley took to be idiocy. Business was impossible to conduct. The impression given was that for some reason Birven was avoiding being exposed directly to Crowley’s thoughts and plans. Was Birven playing games with the Beast? Was he scared?

Fig. 2.1. Aleister Crowley, 1929. Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute.

In order to grasp Crowley’s intentions behind these first Berlin meetings we need to follow a long-standing, frequently tortuous Crowley promotion scheme.

On 29 December 1927, twenty-six-year-old Gerald Joseph Yorke introduced himself to Aleister Crowley at Le Bourget aerodrome, northeast Paris. In an era when most Britons could hardly afford a coach seat to Blackpool the swanky Yorke flew in by plane to imbibe the Master Therion’s wisdom. Four months later, Crowley wrote about his new discovery to friend and OTO Order “honorary treasurer,” Karl Germer:

The man in London [Yorke] is wealthy, and has A.1 connections. But he is young, and at present on an allowance. The best is that he is a businessman. We should get him to form a private company. The profits should be very good for capitalists, as all I want out of it is an assured income to be able to work with convenience and no worry. . . . This is the best news we’ve had in years.
    666¹

Having spent some weeks being trained in magical disciplines of concentration yoga, invocation, evocation, and “astral traveling,” the upper-class Yorke put his weight behind Crowley’s long-term schemes and established a publishing account dedicated to seeing his teacher’s seminal Book Four: Magick in Theory and Practice published and advertised—against the advice of Yorke’s father, landowner, businessman, and Cambridge don Vincent Yorke, as well as well-placed friends who took Crowley’s unenviable reputation at face value.

On 18 July 1928, buoyed by Yorke’s generosity, Crowley outlined plans for a publishing syndicate at the Hôtel du Château, Carry-le-Rouet on the Riviera. He dispatched them to Karl Germer in New York:

I have at last adequate arrangements to meet current expenses till the end of the year by means of a regular allowance. This will leave me free from anxiety, and able to attend to my real work. This will relieve you from all further responsibility for that period. All sums that you can spare should be sent to Mr. Yorke, to replace the publication fund which has been raided for the above purpose. You need not incur the expense of cabling; bank draft will serve.

We are engaged in forming a syndicate (or limited company) to exploit my works, both sacred and profane. You and others who have contributed to keep things going during this bad period will receive stock in the company for the amount. Please inform Mr. Yorke exactly how much you have advanced. I wish to include all you have spent since we first corresponded.

The details of the scheme may be outlined thus. (a) Capital—$50,000—proposed syndicate or limited company of five people with $10,000 each [including Crowley’s lady friend Kasimira Bass]. You might get C. E. [Cora Eaton, Germer’s wife-to-be] to promise to invest $10,000 in the company provided that the other $40,000 is subscribed elsewhere. On the other hand, pending the actual formation of the company, we should like the loan of $10,000 from C. E. [Cora Eaton] or elsewhere.²

This was a typically ambitious plan for a man who never needed much to convince him that this time “his boat” really had “come in.” Crowley was always conscious of the money Karl Germer and, in due course, Cora Eaton spent on his operation (“the Great Work”) and was always confident that, properly administered, his large stock of book assets, written and to be written, would yield golden dividends for all.

A further letter to Germer regarding the loan is interesting because we see that, already in 1928, Crowley had in mind the idea of establishing a G.H.Q. in Germany, though why Hamburg, is a minor mystery.

Just a line about this loan. (1) Yorke has $2000 in the bank to guar antee 6% interest: this only needs $600 per annum. (2) If necessary, you can add your own guarantee. Once the loan is made, G.H.Q. will need no further contributions from you. And you have been sending more than $600 a year. (3) We don’t need $10,000 in one lump sum. $5000 now and $5000 in 6 months (or by installments) would see us well through. (4) The capital can be secured by setting aside a large part of the Pickford stock [books in storage], with a further personal guarantee from Yorke for ultimate repayment in full. (Yorke is a rich man, but is at present on an allowance. When his father dies, he will have a very large capital.) (5) The immediate uses of the loan are (a) to secure me a living wage, so that I can create new assets for the company. (b) To start a new G.H.Q.—a furnished house, probably in Hamburg, till we are rich enough to buy a proper estate. (c) To publish such new work as seems unsuitable for a regular publisher.³

Within a year Crowley acquired something resembling a “regular publisher.” In 1927, the bright and very rebellious Australian Percy Reginald Stephensen graduated from Oxford University with a second-class degree and a vision of communist revolution. Stephensen went to work for the scandal-pocked Australian artist Norman Lindsay and his entrepreneurial son Jack, founders of the London-based Fanfrolico Press, founded it would appear, pour épater le bourgeois. Stephensen soon developed a particular desire to expose the hypocrisies of “clean up Britain” censor Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks, First Viscount Brentford (1865–1932), and the crusading bigot James Douglas, who had made Crowley’s life such a misery with his twisted and fallacious “exposures” in the Sunday Express in 1922 and 1923.

In 1928, having translated Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist, Stephensen craved more than Lindsay’s commitment to pure, shocking (preferably naked) artistic beauty and went into business with Edward “Teddy” Goldston as his codirector in a new publishing venture, the Mandrake Press. The Mandrake’s initial focus was the artistic and sexual revolt of D. H. Lawrence. It was Stephensen who was chiefly responsible for the early 1929 very risky, Lawrence-approved edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published with a “Florence” imprint after Lawrence’s death in 1930. Stephensen chimed in Mandrake’s equally provocative publication of The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence with a June 1929 exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings at the Warren Gallery. The show received the accolade of a police raid and confiscation of the “obscene” paintings, repatriated to Lawrence on condition they were not exhibited again.

Meanwhile, Crowley, freshly ejected from his habitual Parisian milieu, and doubtless impressed by such “New Aeon” fearlessness, appeared without appointment at Mandrake’s offices on Museum Street, Bloomsbury, with a massive quantity of typed sheets. An amused reading of what was in fact Crowley’s autobiography moved Stephensen to recognize an objective correlative for his declared direction in revolutionary fervor: the true revolutionary, Stephensen now believed, was possessed by “an uncompromising pugnacity in rebelliousness which marks Satan for our respect.”⁴ In Aleister Crowley, Stephensen had found his Nietzschean Superman, his Blakean Orc, his star writer. After a second meeting on 28 June 1929, Stephensen signed the Beast to the Mandrake Press with a £50 advance.

Flush with optimism, Crowley arranged a marriage—his own—with the lady he called his “High Priestess of Voodoo,” Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar in order to save from stateless isolation (in Belgium) this highly sexed, buxom daughter of a Nicaraguan landowner. Having signed a further four contracts and given Yorke power of attorney, Crowley left for Germany where, compounding his difficulties with what he later called “premature senility,” he married the hapless Maria on 16 August 1929 before Leipzig’s accommodating British consul.

Crowley’s life record now picks up another theme involved in his decision to go to Berlin in 1930. Crowley believed the gods intended him to take control of Annie Besant’s worldwide Theosophical Society. He recognized that the long-standing attempt by the Esoteric Branch of Annie Besant’s dominant Theosophical Society to foist Indian boy (now adult) Jiddu Krishnamurti on the world as the avatar of the Christ Principle and World Teacher (through their Order of the Star) was crumbling, as Crowley had long predicted. The now thirty-four-year-old sage Krishnamurti was breaking with Liberal Catholic Church Bishop Leadbeater and Besant’s entire Theosophical leadership.

Fig. 2.2. Mr. and Mrs. Crowley, 1929
(Crowley with his second wife, Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar). Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute.

On 3 August 1929, at the Order of the Star’s summer Star camp at Ommen in the eastern Netherlands, Krishnamurti dissolved the very order formed to announce and promote him, declaring as he resigned forever his Theosophical commission: “I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.” Was the magick of the Beast at work, an allegedly irresistible tide generated by the New Aeon of the Child’s solar principle?

Precisely three weeks after Krishnamurti’s stunning summer camp announcement, Crowley wrote from temporary digs in Georgian House off Regent Street, London, to Karl Germer:

In Berlin I think you should have long conferences with Birven, also with Baron Wedderkop of the Querschnitt. Berlin SW 68, Kochstr. 22-26. Our main objective must now be to get Krishnamurti to acknowledge the Law of Thelema, which he is already preaching in a diluted form. It might be well for you to see him on your way here, if he is still at Ommen. In any case, find out all about his attitude. The knowledge of Us may very likely have been kept from him. . . . So let us get the control of the T. S. [Theosophical Society] as quickly as may be!⁵

One feels a new pace, a magnetism drawing Crowley to Berlin. Von Wedderkop*13 was the editor of the most successful highbrow magazine in Germany, Der Querschnitt (The Cross Section). It regularly featured the finest writers in Europe, as well as ex-pat yanks like Hemingway. Its founder was the great Berlin art dealer and patron Alfred Flechtheim. Crowley chose well; he belonged in the magazine.

The reference to Birven is important. Crowley and Germer saw Birven as influential on German esoteric circles, a smart networker, someone to get firmly on the team. Crowley would chivvy Germer along even more on 11 September: “Go to Birven, dog him out, speak to him severely, and say I will stand no nonsense or discourtesy, and I don’t want his wheedling apologies either.”⁶

Six days later Crowley wrote again to Germer, telling him that Mandrake was “going ahead strong” and that he was “frightfully busy with new paintings.” Stephensen must already have suggested to Crowley that an art exhibition would serve the Mandrake cause well; perhaps Stephensen was hoping for another police raid, another revolutionary confrontation to reveal the oppressive nature of the established system of art censorship, as he saw it.

Stephensen’s problem would be getting Goldston to support a Crowley art exhibition. Teddy, after all, would be expected to stump up the cash, as he had for the publishing company. Even as Crowley painted new pictures to impress an increasingly unnerved Goldston with his artistic seriousness, Crowley was entertaining doubts about Goldston’s overall solvency and financial commitment. Perhaps Crowley was overemphasizing this doubt as a way of allaying any thought on Germer’s part that the Beast might give up on the little German syndicate Germer himself had organized, the Thelema Verlag, founded in March 1927 with Otto Gebhardi, Martha Küntzel, illustrator Oscar Hopfer, Crowley, and printing house owner Bernhard Sporn from Zeulenroda. Crowley wrote to Germer from Georgian House on 31 August 1929:

We have got to see Goldston’s cards. I’m wondering whether he’s doing all this on a shoestring. He must on no account suspect for a moment that we are unable to start a publishing business of our own, if the fit takes us. The general contract is not yet signed, and I’m not going to sign unless I find out that all is OK.

. . . I am trying to form a syndicate of $50,000 with the help of Gabriel Dee [a famous woman astrologer and friend of Crowley]. We have a financier interested already; he has invited us to his country house &c.

. . . I’m working like the devil. Two new big pictures (to encourage Goldston) &c. all the old stuff coming from Paris. Restorer, Framer &c. Goldston advances such expenses, but I repay out of profits. . . . I’m rather distracted by the multiplicity of affairs, but full of confidence.⁷

Those words about Goldston paying for the “stuff ” coming from Paris and the restoration costs would come to haunt Crowley. Goldston, he believed, had promised to support financially the London art effort. Crowley’s eventual disappointment would lead him to look to Berlin for artistic self-realization and artistic recognition.

In the meantime, Stephensen set up Crowley and Maria in Ivy Cottage, Knockholt, in Kent, in tune with the current nostrum that English artists connect with Nature through rustic charm and a backto-earth, healthy romanticism. Crowley entertained locals by singing lewd songs at the top of his voice (English “folk” music and song was all the rage among poets and composers at the time). In a rather Blakean way, it is said the “yokels” liked him and, unlike Goldston, were unafraid of the eccentric magician and artist. But with the publication of volume one of Crowley’s “Confessions,” Teddy Goldston began to vibrate with fears. Perhaps Crowley sensed the weakness and deliberately gave him a shot of the “demon Crowley” to draw out the scotoma. Stephensen recorded that Crowley “frightened hell out of ” Goldston. According to Stephensen, “several booksellers who were Freemasons approached Goldston and warned him of an awful fate that would be his if he continued to be associated with that BAD MAN, that wicked, wicked Aleister Crowley.”⁸ One suspects financial issues and the onset of the Great Depression had greater impact on Goldston’s anxiety.

It was not only Goldston who was getting “demon Crowley” willies, however. Birven was getting nervous too. He claimed contacts in Paris took the demon image seriously. Possibly paranoid, Birven felt Crowley was approaching him; publishing the Beast’s works was one thing, but actually dealing with the man . . . Birven protested to Germer that Crowley was a problem because he was open constantly to public attack, souring the reputation of any enterprise associated with him; spin-offs from this negativity would be ruinous to a German publishing venture. Furthermore, Birven claimed on some unspecified authority that Crowley’s refus de séjour nightmare of the previous year had been the product of a serious, possibly justified, secret opposition. On 16 September, Crowley asked Germer to scotch the nonsense:

I agree with all you say about Birven, but he must be handled very firmly. Why be bluffed by “facts and knowledge?” Their possession only shows how much time the man has wasted. But—I am not open to attack in public. You can’t get a responsible paper to print a word against me. Do make him see that this is so. (I quite agree about Martha Küntzel’s translations [of Crowley’s The Book of the Law and other works], on what you say. Let Birven take me as a serious scholar; that is all.)

My Confessions [autobiography] will finally quash all talk about me. But I want to get the details of the Paris blackmailers.⁹

Germer had informed Crowley of a recent conference with Birven where the intellectually high-and-mighty Birven condescended to reveal that he, Birven, believed he knew who was behind the refus affair. Furthermore, Birven had contacted many of his “prominent Paris friends,” who, after first agreeing to his association with Aleister Crowley, finally and positively said, “Crowley must be dropped.”

Crowley then took issue with the jibe that he himself had dropped his once devoted associate Norman Mudd. Crowley set the record straight, as he had experienced it:

To me he [Mudd] is just a religious maniac; it was he that said he was a traitor, appointed by the Gods to play Judas Iscariot to my Jesus! I never supposed Birven would think I “broke” with Mudd; he was not an equal. It would waste my time to explain my every action. A.C. [the ego “Aleister Crowley”] doesn’t matter at all, really; but A.C. must be upheld for the sake of the imbecile brethren.

Having got that off his chest, Crowley again insisted Germer see von Wedderkop before coming to London with some smaller canvases (about 14 inches by 16) and, if he did not mind, a big bottle of Vernis à retoucher. (“Vibert. You can get them at Robeson’s just at the corner of Piccadilly under the Ritz.”) Vernis à retoucher was not a bottle of fine wine but a retouching varnish necessary for the intoxication of art the law is hard pressed to suppress. Crowley then went to work on a big canvas.

On Black Friday (28 October 1929) the echo of New York’s Great Crash hammered a bad-luck nail right through the publishing operation and straight into Goldston’s febrile equilibrium. While Crowley advised Cora Eaton to “cut the painter altogether in New York” (i.e., quit the stock market) as he was convinced a “wild bull” in Wall Street would be followed by a serious slump (he was right), Goldston refused to fund the exhibition Stephensen had organized for November 1929, even though shipping of Crowley’s artwork from Paris to London had been arranged by Stephensen. Goldston went into freefall, cutting Stephensen’s salary and temporarily closing the Mandrake office.

Crowley was already thinking ahead. He knew in himself that to focus on the Mandrake situation would lead to the kind of paralysis that had hit both Goldston and the world’s financial markets. As far as Crowley was concerned, these were merely pangs of the New Aeon; he’d been expecting the crash for years. His priorities began to coalesce around Germany. He wrote to Germer, now living in Berlin, on 29 November 1929:

I wish you would get Birven to write at once the name of the man from whom Meyrink heard this nonsense. Yorke and I could then tackle him personally and put the fear of God into him.

I am glad to hear you are settled in your new place [in Berlin], and I hope that Cora will be very happy there. When do you start on your travels? I should like an idea of dates, so that I may not be writing to empty space, in case of emergency. Do attend to this Birven business and insist on getting that name.¹⁰

Birven was in the habit of keeping writer Gustav Meyrink informed about everything he knew of the continental esoteric scene. It is obvious from the letter that someone was bad-mouthing, slandering, or libeling Crowley. Nothing new, but Crowley was nonetheless fed up with it, willing to do his damnedest to smoke out the invisible opposition. As we have seen, Birven was putting it about that he knew who was really responsible for getting Crowley out of Paris.

In December, despite Goldston’s freeze-out, volume two of the Confessions was published and 3,000 unbound copies of Magick were transferred from Paris, while, in the hiatus, Stephensen tried to make up for the loss of Crowley’s London art exhibition with a new project to break the anti-Crowley boycott: a book written by himself called The Legend of Aleister Crowley, a sequenced compilation of cuttings from more than thirty years of magazine and newspaper reviews of Crowley’s published works. Because Stephensen had already renamed Crowley’s life story an “autohagiography”—the autobiography of a saint—it seemed consistent to present Crowley’s career as both medieval legend while drawing attention to the “myth,” or perversion of the truth, created by modern mass circulation newspapers.

Crowley would pick up on all this irony, being the chief author of it, and, responding to an invitation from an Oxford University poetry society, suggest his lecture focus on the legend of alchemist aristocrat Gilles de Rais (1404–1440), medieval child murderer extraordinaire (so it was alleged) but who, Crowley averred, just might have been misunderstood by a world devoid even of a primitive science, dominated by the Catholic Inquisition, quick to stifle any flicker of original thought or attempt at practical experiment. In other words, Crowley was, in 1930, being condemned according to the canons of the pre-enlightenment “Christian” fear complex.

It seemed that the new Black Death, the feared plague of medieval mass destruction, was now no more than a Black Friday when accountants’ figures changed and the bacillus of terror and annihilation was a capitalist’s trick that would make men and women cast themselves off the temples of mammon in despair.

Crowley had every right to despair of the human race, but he chose rather to look above the headlines and haul himself from the mud and murk of mass hysteria. From Knockholt, Kent, Crowley turned, on 6 December 1929, to Karl Germer’s own brand of automatic hysteria, content to employ a category well worked over by Germer’s revered alienist, Professor-Dr. Alfred Adler, the psychologist who was Freud’s equal and therefore not subject to his own patent concept, the inferiority complex.

Your last paragraph about Birven is very lamentable. Your inferiority complex must be destroyed. I don’t want to be in touch with anybody as low as Birven except through a man like you. . . . I cannot understand people lying down the way that you seem to do. If a man asked me what my profession was in that tone of voice, I should say that it was none of his business, and that at least I was not a whore’s bastard as he was. If he didn’t like that I would slap his face. Can you not understand that people take you at your own valuation, and if you whine and cringe, everyone walks over you? As a matter of fact, I think you are absolutely wrong about Birven. He always writes of you very politely and nicely. I have just had a postal card from him about Meyrink.¹¹

Meyrink had been interested in Crowley since at least the Beast’s 1925 Weida Conference appearance (south of Leipzig; see chapter 4). Crowley (via Birven) gave Meyrink an inscribed copy of his Moonchild, dedicated to “the author of The Golem, my favorite book of its kind, with my artistic homage.” Meyrink’s novel Walpurgis Night (1917) may have inspired Crowley’s painting of the same name.

Born Gustav Meyer in Vienna, the author of The Golem (1915) is now regarded as Germany’s leading writer of supernatural fiction. Voluble in opposition to WWI, Meyrink was denounced by nationalists and condemned by Nazis; aficionados ranked him alongside writer Hanns Heinz Ewers, whom Crowley knew. Apart from contributing to Birven’s Hain der Isis, Meyrink edited a series of books on the occult. He also translated Dickens, Kipling, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. In 1927 he converted to Mahayana Buddhism.

Meyrink made many occult contacts. In 1897, under the name “Dagobert,” he joined Leopold Engel’s short-lived Illuminati Order, based in Dresden. He also corresponded with Crowley’s old enemy, William Wynn Westcott, cofounder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and with Franz Hartmann, whose thinking inspired Reuss’s creation of the OTO.

For Stephensen, January and February 1930 marked Mandrake’s nadir. Relations with Goldston, exacerbated by the Depression, were at their lowest ebb. In 1926 Stephensen had been excited by the idea of a general strike leading to revolution, now he needed un-revolutionary sales and purely commercial liquidity. In need, so to speak, of Das Kapital, Stephensen believed Mandrake needed a buyer to survive. Experience is a great teacher, but her fees are very high.

Crowley read the wind and began transferring his exhibition ideas from London to Berlin. He wrote to Germer from Knockholt on 7 January:

Leipzig has just sent me a translation of Birven’s article on me. It seems to me very dignified. Would you mind making a few inquiries for me? The situation is very promising about the pictures, especially with my more recent work. . . . Quite conventional people like them, and expect immediate success. What I want to know is, first of all, what is the best time of year for exhibitions in Berlin? Secondly, can you get hold of a dealer—of course he must be a very high class man—who has either an agent in London with whom I can arrange, or who would be coming to London in the next month or two?

Let us hear a little more about yourself. Is the [Berlin] apartment as nice as you expected? And generally speaking, what is happening?¹²

Seeing the Goldston tantrum for what it was, Crowley, as ever, looked to the time when the fool would repent of his folly and sort himself out in the light of the True Will:

We [Crowley and Marie] are both working very hard at painting, which is coming along splendidly. Even Yorke condescended to like my recent work.

I have completely sidestepped the Goldston controversy for the moment, and am marking time. Stephensen has gone up to town today with instructions to deliver an ultimatum. There is no doubt but that we can put Goldston very badly in the cart if we want to, and if he can be got to see that fact he will probably climb down and be a good boy. From a business point of view, his actions are simply insane, and we are wondering whether he can be got at.¹³

Crowley’s mind was now dominated by two thoughts: Berlin and Art. Germer encouraged the dream and asked Crowley to send over a photographic résumé of his paintings and drawings. Crowley knew his old work was inadequate. He was now doing better work and would do better work still. He knew he had it in him, and he realized that the right place was not moldy, coal-stained old London but the new, chromium-plated Metropolis that was Berlin.

He wrote a fascinating letter to Karl Germer about his artistic approach and background on 9 January 1930:

Thanks very much about this man who paints [probably Hans Steiner]. I don’t think it would be much use sending photographs of the pictures. For one thing they are difficult of access. For another they are no longer at all representative.

You might explain, perhaps, that I am not like the majority of artists; who get into a groove and turn out pictures so much alike that when you have seen one you have seen them all. For example, if you saw some of the stuff I have done since you left England, you would never guess it was by me.

The French business [possibly a reference to Birven’s “Gnostic Church” contacts in Paris] ought to be easy if, as Birven says, I am known as the “Patriarch of Montparnasse!” It is true that I first went to Montparnasse in 1899, and settled down there in 1902. Since that date, I have lived constantly there; the only exceptions being when I was elsewhere. I was also an intimate friend of the greatest artists of my period. Rodin, Carrìere, Legros, Thaulow, &c. &c.*14

I hope we are going to get an exhibition in London at the end of June. You may say that Mr P. G. Konody who is probably the most celebrated art critic in England is very interested in my work, and is doing all he can to help me. You may also state that the work is very much liked by Mr Edgar of the Claridge Galleries, who, I hope, is going to give me a show.

My idea of having one in Berlin is that I have always had a feeling of appreciation for the German artistic consciousness, which appeals to me as being rational and based on solid sense, illuminated by intelligence. I don’t, of course, refer to the horrible bourgeois sentimental art, which is just as bad in one country as in another. But what is even more important is that the painter Leon Engers, who spent a long time in Berlin, and whose studio is 12 rue Victor Considérant, Paris, has always said that my work would be appreciated in Germany, and that I had not got any good chance anywhere else. I think that the best thing for me to do is to send over half a dozen pictures as different as possible, though this will give only a small idea of the variety.

I will see to this as soon as I have seen Yorke, which will be at the latest Monday night. By the way, there seems to be quite a possibility of the Mandrake trouble being put right in the course of the next few days.¹⁴

With Goldston in retreat, it was proposed that Karl Germer and Gerald Yorke buy the company and rename it the Thelema Bookshop and Publishing Co. Ltd., while establishing a syndicate dedicated to Crowley’s writings.

As it transpired, a paucity of capital left Mandrake restructured as a limited liability company, Goldston having sold out. Into the vacuum, Crowley’s supporters Yorke, Germer, Major Robert Thompson Thynne, and Thynne’s associate Major J. C. S. McAllan formed the Board of Directors of Mandrake Press, Ltd. Stephensen was manager while Crowley’s secretary, Israel Regardie, became bookkeeper. Crowley believed “outdoor man” Thynne had £10,000 “to buy the whole show.”

On 18 January Crowley wrote fulsomely from Oddenino’s Hotel—run by Mr. Oddenino, former manager of the Café Royal, on the corner of Glasshouse St. and Regent St.—to Germer about the outdoor man:

. . . he [Thynne] sees that I am the one asset of value, and will put all the necessary money into pushing me. He is winding up all his business in Plymouth and coming to London Monday week. So that all I need to do is to pay my bill here, and some £150 we owe at Knockholt, and I go down there and paint quietly till the papers are signed. Then I shall be a director of the new company, and meet all sets of important people (whom the new man, a Major Thynne, knows well) and the whole proposition will go big. They have put 14 books of mine—including Magick, 777, &c. &c.—on the programme already.¹⁵

Crowley had been in touch with New York Times correspondent in Moscow, Walter Duranty, an old friend from pre-war Paris days. Celebrated in his day, Duranty is now infamous for feeding stories back to his grateful employers that the Stalin-caused famine-genocide in the Ukraine and elsewhere in Russia was not as unspeakably terrible as it in fact was. Crowley wrote to Duranty concerning the spiritual situation in atheist, anti-orthodox, communist Russia: the workers’ paradise. Duranty replied that anything that might be called “spiritual” was simply not on the agenda in Moscow at the moment, and what Stalin did not promote, did not exist.

Crowley entertained an idea that since the Revolution had degraded Christianity in Russia with the idea that the faith was a hollow opiate fit only for socialism to replace it, Crowley’s Thelema psychospiritual system, based on scientific, demonstrable principles, would and should fill the gap. Crowley was convinced the “scientific ethics” of Thelema had the answer. Did it not offer “the aim of religion; the method of science”: just right for a revolutionary scientific workers’ state?

Crowley knew that without some kind of religion, all outward systems collapse from within. A modified system of exchange and economy does little to satisfy the soul. Crowley wanted to bring revolutionary Russia the catalyst of his magical presence; Lt. Col. Carter, meanwhile, wanted to know what was really going on there. He telephoned Crowley to find out if he knew anything about Dr. Rykoff ’s, the Soviet Prime Minister’s, falling out of favor with Stalin. Crowley had had a lot to do with Russia before the revolution and as an undergraduate believed his future diplomatic career would flourish there. As it was, he had enjoyed familiarity with Moscow’s consulate and on his 1913 visit had been treated as one of the boys by staff. What Crowley had not yet fully grasped was that for the time being Bolshevism was fulfilling the temporary conditions of an alternative religion with its materialist, but nonetheless apocalyptic, creed: the world was inevitably, communists believed, converging on universal, class-free paradisiac brotherhood. But of course, not everyone in the Supreme Soviet thought the same as Stalin, as Stalin was all too aware; Stalin’s infamous Purges were already “on the cards.”

Crowley’s letter from Oddenino’s indicates his hope that Birven would throw his weight behind a German publishing program and that the publicity surrounding his banned lecture—or what he called “the absurd affair about Oxford”—would show not only the folly of censorship but also reveal the nefarious and risible means employed to impose it. (In this case the censorship was Catholic inspired; the university’s RC chaplain, Father Ronald Knox, was behind the attempt to suppress Crowley’s lecture.)

May go to Berlin, and on to Moscow if certain things materialize. The Legend of Aleister Crowley has gone to press. You’ll have galleys about Wednesday. Make arrangements with Birven for a German edition—to add German cuttings such as “Der Lord als Cagliostro.” (Danke Schoen!) P.S. [on envelope]: Oxford University threatened anyone who attended my lecture with expulsion!! Now we’ve got ’em!¹⁶

Crowley’s attention was caught between two poles: how to deal with Goldston and new director Major Thynne on the one hand, and the progress of humankind on the other, while all the time he felt a pronounced hankering for the great city of Berlin, like a sailor longing for the sea. He wrote to Germer on 23 January:

Thynne is a very fine man. But that low thief Goldston is trying to cheat him. It may come to a criminal prosecution yet. . . . I am waiting to get arrangements with Thynne through. I might be able to come to Berlin personally.¹⁷

On 15 February, Crowley made his intentions known with regard to Birven: “If things go well this week, I may possibly come over to Berlin to see Birven and the others, and to arrange about the pictures.”¹⁸

Torn between the concerns of the new Mandrake syndicate and the thought of flourishing as an artist among sympathetic artists, Crowley was chomping at the bit.

Goldston swindled us out of £60 on the accounts. I may have to sue him and should probably want you as a witness. I think the much best plan will be if I can come to Berlin for a few days.¹⁹

Crowley complained of a dearth of painting materials down at the Kentish cottage then suddenly lost the urge to paint at all; his painting had gone “temporarily fut.” Fed up with the endless financial shenanigans, he consoled himself first with the news that the Spectator magazine had approached Mandrake for review copies of his memoirs, and second, by his expectation that Thynne was prepared to spend money on breaking the boycott and advertising Crowley generally: “I should not be surprised if we were swimming in money in a very short time,” he declared to Germer, ignoring what would have been obvious to any real businessman, that it was unlikely Thynne would go it alone.

No matter how much he believed in the Beast, Thynne would expect serious capital out of Yorke, and Karl Germer, but Crowley encouraged Germer to console his new wife, Cora, with the assurance that her Crowley investment was on the verge of redemption. Crowley’s debt to Cora was clear in his mind (she would never let up about it), but being without capital himself, he transferred his conscience on the matter to Yorke, telling him he was honor bound to repay a loan Cora had made to Mandrake in full, plus interest, from the £5,000 worth of shares in his father’s company Crowley now knew Yorke relied on. Crowley suggested Cora and Karl come to London to make Yorke pay up while encouraging Yorke to rebel against his father’s wishes as a primary magical test: one the Beast had himself passed to his own satisfaction when in pre-war days he had sunk his entire inherited fortune into the magical quest. The deeper irony of this position seemed to pass Crowley by; besides, he could rebut criticism with the notion that if everyone seized the opportunities of the moment, they would all be in sight of horizons of golden glory! Yorke’s father, Vincent, saw no such outcome, and when Cora suggested to him he should honor his son’s obligations or allow his son to honor them, Vincent Yorke dismissed Cora as a “harpy” and told Gerald flatly that if he chose to lavish his father’s gift upon Aleister Crowley he could expect his younger brother to inherit the family estate. As far as Crowley was concerned, this was nothing more than the old trap of the world working its way through to imprison the spirit of Man; Yorke, he insisted, was being bribed by his family: his spiritual integrity was at stake, and with it, the Great Work. Crowley had the genius; all Yorke and Germer had to do was provide the initial cash.

Fig. 2.3. Crowley’s note of receipt from Cora Germer of a total of $12,850, dated 16 October, 1931. Interest at 6 percent.

Somewhere along the way, everybody’s wires had got crossed.

On 22 October 1931, after Crowley had been in Berlin for a year without a break, he would remind Gerald Yorke that the compelling reason for going to Berlin in the first place was Germer’s promise of £2,000 for the reconstruction of Mandrake. But this promise must have been made after Crowley’s first visit in April 1930, belonging to the May–August 1930 period when Crowley was trying to get overall control of the company, because on the day the Berliner Tageblatt interviewed Crowley (28 April 1930), Karl Germer made his own application to the Thynne-dominated Mandrake—for £1,000!

And it was on that very day that Crowley received what he called an “amazingly insolent letter” from Henri Birven that put temporary pay to Crowley’s will to use Birven for the takeover of the Theosophical Society and the “roping in” of Krishnamurti to the Thelemic cause. On 30 April, Crowley responded to Birven’s “insolent” letter:

If a lighted cigarette is put into the mouth of a frog, he puffs and swells until he bursts. But does he think that he is the chosen vessel to bear the Light of the Hidden Wisdom? Perhaps.

I think that I can do you no better service than to deflate you of the self-importance which makes you ridiculous to all who know you. Your letter gives me the opportunity. But first let me deal with the facts about our interviews. I came out to see you in your suburb, the first of my business meetings in Berlin. I thought this was to be a private conference. But it was a large party. (I took this, however, as a compliment.) But we could not talk. Therefore, in order to talk in private, I asked you alone to a private dinner in Mr. Germer’s apartment. You arrived three quarters of an hour late, and brought, uninvited, a perfect stranger. Let me tell you plainly that this was a gross and intolerable breach of good manners—an absolute outrage on all conventions of decent behavior. So again we could not talk business.

The third time I tried to see you, you proposed that I should come to some vulgar noisy café; and (again!) you wished to bring along yet another stranger to prevent the possibility of our talking business! So much for that.

Your suggestion that I should ask your permission to come to Berlin is grotesque megalomania. The ex-Kaiser himself would have had less impudent presumption. You add to your absurdity when you have the insolence to complain that I accept Dr. Krumm Heller’s most agreeable invitation to his house without first conspiring with you! Let me tell you that I would travel a thousand miles to talk with a man of Dr. Krumm Heller’s ability, whereas there seems little object in visiting some others but to marvel at the ways of Nature. Dr. Krumm Heller is a Mason of the same rank as myself, and has done far more for the Cause than ever you have. You are not even an apprentice.

As to my general business methods, I have no time to waste on petty laborious intrigues such as delight you.

As to the letter of 358 [Crowley’s secretary Israel Regardie’s kabbalistic name-number], you were guilty of gross and quite inexcusable mistakes in your article [about Crowley in Birven’s Hain der Isis periodical], and you should be grateful to him, whatever his age, for having rapped you smartly over the knuckles.

Now then, hoping that I have recalled you to the road of modesty, I end by trusting that you will regain my esteem by apologizing for your abominably bad manners, and resolving for the future to obey my orders, without trying to think for yourself.

P.S. The dignity of the Publishing House which I represent—it is already over two whole weeks old—forbids me to condescend to visit you on its business.²⁰

We can safely say that Crowley’s hopes of getting Birven behind the The-lema publishing effort did not look too bright after this exchange of views. But there was a lot more to this conflict than a tiff over bad manners.

Birven reckoned he had a higher authority for holding Aleister Crowley, the Master Therion, at bay. In order to get an idea of what this shadowy authority was, we need to understand something about the German New Age movement of the 1920s and ’30s and what was Crowley’s part in it.

THREE

THE NEW AGE IN GERMANY

What would be a world without the magic power of love of beauty and harmony? How would a world look if made after a pattern furnished by modern science? A world in which the universal truth went unrecognized could be nothing else but a world full of maniacs and filled with hallucinations. In such a world art and poetry could not exist, justice would become a convenience, honesty be equivalent with imbecility, to be truthful would be to be foolish, and the idol of “self ” the only god worthy of any consideration.

FRANZ HARTMANN, M.D.,
MAGIC: WHITE AND BLACK

Apocalyptic undercurrents had long pulsated in the German-speaking territories united into the German Empire by Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck in 1871. During the Middle Ages, German monks made up for their ancestors’ relative lateness in being converted to Christianity by an intensity of mystical speculation that marked them out for genius and originality, not uncommonly informed by a strongly pantheistic nature mysticism, super-vivid visionary qualities, robust sense of reason, and absoluteness of approach to the individual spirit. The names of Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Seuse, and Johannes Tauler stand out from the nimbus of Germanic mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries whose dynamic essence was captured in the famous mid-fourteenth-century work the Theologia Germanica. This anonymous work asserted the possibility of a union of Man and God through a path of perfection; it was hugely influential on the thought of Martin Luther.

The Reformation period that followed in Luther’s wake saw, especially in Germany, the frequent interpenetration of divine or inner spiritual realms into the enlightened vision of ecstatics. God’s kingdom, the kingdom of the heavens, kept breaking, as it were, through the clouds of vision and the star-cloak of night to knock like thunder on the door of time and space. Welcomed by the determined prophet of apocalyptic judgment, the vision could tear away the bounds of earthly history and roll up the corrupted scroll of the un-spiritualized world and soul, revealing a new heaven and a new earth: a New Age of Holy Spirit. These future things were seen in the “here and now,” for time could be dissolved in the higher mind as it received the influx of the absolute God.

Alchemist mystics like Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605) declared Christ’s presence by the stream; in the pulsing life of field, flower, and farm; in the sod and in the stars; in the dew and in the blood. For Khunrath, Christ was the hidden Stone of the Philosophers, the pure tincture of transformation, resurrection, and ascension, present everywhere, yet unseen by the vegetable eyes of unredeemed humanity. God was immanent, but also coming, and, for the followers of Eckhart, living like a lighthouse in the individual, radiating through the very fibers of flesh, in the being of mind, in the word and voice. For medical doctor Paracelsus (1493–1541), gathering devoted followers in Germany throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Man’s body was a microcosm, a little universe, with the kingdom of the heavens reflected within its structure. Healing was a scientific miracle of alchemy and inner knowledge as well as hands-on practical observation, application, love, and care. The healthiest body was the spiritualized body; the true doctor was a priest. Look at an engraving of the evangelical knight of Ossig, Caspar Schwenckfeld (1490–1561), and see what I mean: even in old age, huge elliptical eyes that shine and blaze, illuminated by a divine fire the modern world sees now only in nuclear reactors and the roaring exhaust of Werner von Braun’s rocket children.

Those of us who know the post-war Germany of today can only wonder at what has been lost from these once crazed, illuminated lands of wonder and magic. We should not be surprised by the sterile, often neurotic order of post-war economic and political reconstruction. It all looks so clean and technical, with an enviable health insurance system to boot. The German people have been educated, re-educated, and educated again to be nervous at anything that goes beyond, or dares to claim to go beyond, the rational. Their democratic leaders share the nostrum that the terrible Nazi regime owed its initial success to people abandoning rationality and embracing nebulous ideas about master races and the “German Spirit,” myths of blood and earth, Wagner and all that. The solution is more rationalism. Germans have become suspicious of their own tendencies, like a former drunk eyeing a bottle of booze in the corner of his or her eye. Politicians of the Green movement advise representatives not to speak to press or public of spirituality in relation to Nature. Science is to be trusted as the repository of truth; art is for personal angst and decoration, democracy will save the people from totalitarianism and tyranny. It is conveniently obscured that the Nazis not only persecuted and murdered Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, communists, resistant church leaders, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with mental illnesses, children with severe infirmities, Slavs, democrats, and any number of political opponents; they also persecuted, imprisoned, and murdered Freemasons, Anthroposophists, astrologers, magicians, neo-Gnostics, Rosicrucians, and followers of Aleister Crowley. In fact, the Nazi experience has very little to say to us about the spiritual seriousness that had made the German-speaking world so impressive in the first place.

Rather, it may be observed that if we dare speak of national characteristics, then it has been a feature of the Germanic mentality to suffer from a surfeit of the rational principle, in this aspect: that there is an historic tendency to take the logic of accepted propositions to the absolute limit. Germans, it has been said, do things properly. That is, they are prepared to go all the way: both an evident virtue and evident vice.

In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries the German states witnessed a development of religious philosophy so extraordinarily thorough that intellectuals seemed to have practically exhausted the entire seam of religious ideas, and, sensing the mine’s demise, supposed that all that had been extracted was passé, blind, as many were, to the genuine gold secreted in the ore. Brazen intellectualism pressed on in the belief that a wholly new mine of nonreligious or “demythologized” thought could be created by effort of will, even if, as stated in the myth of Friedrich Nietzsche’s last illness, the effort of will itself sent the philosopher mad. The stillborn child turned out to be Nihilism combined with Existenzphilosophie, or “existentialism.” Man, Superman, was, in the words of Orson Welles, neither more nor less than a poor “forked radish.” At his core was no God, spirit, or supernatural essence, just an “id.” He was sol ipsis, nothing more than a self-reflecting self, only saved from oblivion by socialization and rational political economy. In 1985, Ulrich Horstmann’s Das Untier assessed Man as a “Monster” or “Beast,” an evolutionary deformation, whom time reveals as uncorrectable, despite idealists’ good intentions. Crowley might have had something more to say about the Beast’s potential.

It must have been the case that certain sensitive minds in the late Victorian, or shall we say, industrial-materialist, era saw what was clearly in the cards for civilization: namely, its destruction. Before the First World War demonstrated the realities of mass industrial conflict, underwritten by surplus capital, the product of the race for resources to furnish the furnaces with the raw materials of what was widely believed to be progress, even before the first trench had been dug, certain men and women wondered not perhaps how they might turn the clock back, but rather, stop the wretched clock from ticking altogether.

That is, they set out to abolish the inevitable.

What appeared to be inevitable was the conglomerating march of materialism, the doctrine that matter is reality, all of reality: reality is material; there is matter, or there is nothing. Regardless of the fact that advanced physics was already on the verge of destroying the solid, clockwork universe of the rational Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, that is to say, advanced physics no longer could conceive of matter as a solid base of being (the observing eye deceives and is deceived), the prevailing philosophy nonetheless presented a world of things, of objects; man was one of them. Invisibility (formerly an attribute of the divine) was simply the cloak of nonexistence. Reality was that which the senses revealed. Man was a nervous system. Mind was a kind of secretion of brain, the soul a phantom of that brain. Religion could be rationalized as socialism; religion was, anyway, idealistic, that is, unreal, a kind of residual decoration, an idea, even a superstition, something subjective, a matter of opinion.

Nevertheless, the optimist mind-set of the time did recognize a philosophically acceptable idealism, so long as sound practical consequences or utility could be demonstrated. For example, Man’s greatness lay in his realization of “Humanity,” not so much a transcendent ideal, but a product of an evolution of perception that was self-perpetuating and which constituted the good of the species. Ethics did not derive from “above” or from a world-transcending revelation but from a progressive refinement of aesthetics, of taste and sensitivity, of practical experience. Here, aesthetics met science halfway.

Now, one might consider that an awareness of such things might lead to a religious revival, and indeed the Christian churches did struggle to revive interest when it began to flag as Darwin’s star got bigger, along with the machines, but the current of materialism and of a faith in science and technology made conventional Christianity appear rather old, reactionary, and out of touch; at its worst: an oppression of lifeless sin-avoidance. The Mother of God was beginning to resemble an old maid. There were strong currents taking the educated away from the altar.

One of those currents was Theosophy.

One might have thought that Theosophy could have been a boon to the revival of religion. Indeed, a small number of orthodox or semiorthodox clergymen have thought just this, that in Theosophy’s interest in esotericism, its conviction of the reality of spiritual life could yet offer a philosophical enrichment and path to acceptance of orthodox religion. That, however, was not the essential attraction of Theosophy. Much of Theosophy’s congregation was, frankly, looking not just for spiritual security but something else. Not all the adherents of the new creed of Theosophy knew it, but what they and many others were looking for, consciously or not, was magic, something both orthodox and protesting churches had rejected before and during the Age of Reason. And while magic had been in on the birth of modern science, the child had bitten the hand that fed it and ultimately abandoned its shocked parent altogether.

Were religion and science to cease bickering for a moment, they could always find common cause by turning their venom on a perceived common enemy: Magic, the dear old hag that had mothered them both.

THEOSOPHY IN GERMANY

The first thing that surprises about the history of Theosophy in Germany is how relatively late it received official establishment. The Theosophical Society had been founded in New York in 1875 by the remarkable Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott for the purpose of uniting humankind about a, or rather the, perennial spiritual wisdom common, they believed, to the roots of all civilized and civilizing religions. All religions contained some truth, and that truth was one; it was Theosophy. Needless to say, this contention flew in the eye of the Catholic doctrine that denied salvation outside of the church. To add to the charge sheet, the TS also wished to encourage the exploration of as yet unknown or unexplored powers held to be latent in human beings, especially mediumship. Many theosophists were, and are, preoccupied with spiritualism—that is, séances and speaking spirits—and this crossover itself has created splinter groups with different ideas about heaven and hell and the destiny of the soul.

As we all know, along with the predominant Theosophical program went a respect for Indian philosophy and vocabulary common to Brahminical Hinduism and Buddhism. When the society moved to India in 1878, settling at Adyar, near Madras, the Indian content, not surprisingly, grew into something like a new orthodoxy of spiritual and psychological concepts, on the belief basis that Indian traditions had most faithfully preserved the most ancient traditions, what Martinists are wont to call “the Tradition,” itself (see my book The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians).

The Theosophical Society has been most successful in this regard, an influence extending well beyond its membership. Ideas of reincarnation, avatars, nirvana, Shambhala, and karma are now commonplaces of Western discourse, while the notion that India is an especially spiritual country has become a perennial belief of many young people wary of immersion-baptism in the Western industrial rat race. A proverbial “mystic-eastern” exoticism is at the very heart of the hippy tendency, such that the Western pilgrimage goal has for many shifted from Jerusalem to Kashmir, Nepal, and the Himalayas. Some poor souls doubtless imagine the Indian nuclear bomb to be somehow less dangerous than its Western parent.

While unofficial Theosophical societies existed in Germany before the end of the century, and notable German occultists such as Franz Hartmann, Carl Kellner, and Theodor Reuss had embraced the Theosophical impulse in Vienna, Paris, London, and (in Hartmann’s case) the United States and Adyar itself, Germany did not see its own “official” TS until 1902, when, in the presence of Annie Besant (already a dominant force in the society before becoming president in 1907), the remarkable Rudolf Steiner was elected the German Branch’s Secretary General in Berlin.

The gap between the society’s foundation in 1875 and its German establishment is even more surprising considering the significance given to Germany by the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London in 1888—the Golden Dawn itself stemming from secessions and scandals that beset the TS in 1884 and 1885, together with a determination to emphasize western esotericism over Indian philosophies.

In order to give the Golden Dawn the appearance of legitimate Rosicrucian authority, its cofounder William Wynn Westcott created a fictitious German origin for his order, a “Rosicrucian” Lodge based allegedly in Nuremberg, whose guiding light, “Anna Sprengel,” agreed to give her blessing to brethren in England because they were employing secret rituals allegedly of old German Rosicrucian, and indeed, higher, origin. Germany had a centuries-old caché where Rosicrucianism was concerned. However, Anna Sprengel’s name almost certainly comes from London.

The name “Anna” was probably taken from the recently deceased Anna Kingsford (who with Edward Maitland had founded the Hermetic Society out of a British Theosophical Society offshoot), while the “Sprengel” probably came from a German chemist based in London: Royal Society Fellow Hermann Sprengel; Sprengel invented a Mercury air pump. Mercury is the Latin form of Hermes, of course, and the pump employed a vacuum; there was nothing but mercurial trickery in the hollow name Anna Sprengel. A vacuum suggests absence, and Anna Sprengel was certainly absent from this world.*15

It is then significant that a story persists of Henri Birven, Franz Hartmann, and Gustav Meyrink hunting the streets of old Nuremberg in search of Anna Sprengel, true “founder” of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the significance lying in the fact that a group of German esotericists was relying on a fictitious English source for knowledge of allegedly German occult lodge activity!

The natural conclusion to draw is that German mystics and occultists who were not satisfied with the Theologia Germanica received their ideas about German Magic from abroad, whence Freemasonry derived: the dominant creative influence in the German New Age was coming from London and Paris.

There is of course a certain anachronism involved in using the term “New Age.” It meant different things to different people at the time, and has today been purloined as a journalist’s catchall for post-1960s popular esotericism. What I mean by “New Age” is a description of movements that expected an imminent or future shift in the Western paradigm of knowledge, from rationalist materialism toward higher spiritual realization of the nature of Man and the cosmos.

The real vein network of nineteenth- and twentieth-century “New Age” movements was Freemasonry, whether fringe Freemasonry or the minorities concerned with regular Freemasonry’s more esoteric adjuncts, such as the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, of which regular Freemason William Wynn Westcott was from 1892, Supreme Magnus. It is not surprising that a number of active Theosophists were not long in attempting to imitate the Masonic network and Lodge model with their own Lodges of Co-Freemasonry, which admitted men and women, and which have been, and which remain, conduits of spiritual philosophies in Masonic interpretation, to the chagrin of regular Freemasonry.

It was the influence of the many strands of esoteric Freemasonry that led in part to a combustible reaction among enthusiasts first inspired by Theosophy. The reaction involved questioning whether India and its remote Mahatmas ought to be regarded as primary, pristine sources of esoteric wisdom. Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland in London deviated early from the Indian emphasis. If esoteric wisdom of a spiritual nature was to be found in Christian Rosicrucianism, Hermetic philosophy, medieval magic, and even Freemasonry itself, as Helena Blavatsky herself believed, then had one really to look further than Western traditions for the “light that lighteth the world”? In spite of a prevailing, vulgar materialism, the spiritual light had long shone in the darkness of the Western world. One could look to the hills of Celtic lore for one’s salvation, or to the esoteric history of Britain—or Germany.

It comes then as no surprise to learn that Theodor Reuss, for example, who labored to foster a neo-Gnostic New Age mentality in Germany, Britain, and Switzerland, was initiated into a regular Masonic Lodge not in Berlin but in London, receiving his charter to establish sodalities of the Antient & Primitive Rite of Freemasonry from the Englishman “Manchester Mason” (demitted), John Yarker (1833– 1913), who also conferred on Aleister Crowley the 90° Rite of Misraim (Hebrew for Egypt), the 95° Rite of Memphis, and the 33° reduced rite of Memphis-Misraim in 1910.

Again, it is astonishing that the country that had claimed to have witnessed the greatest outpouring of esoteric knowledge and activity in the world had arrived at a point where it had to import its esotericism from outside. However, this was arguably one of the positive outcomes of the Theosophical impulse in Europe. As Madame Blavatsky had encouraged Indians to look with renewed respect upon their own shastras, so Englishmen, Germans, and Frenchmen could look again to their own hidden (viz: neglected and despised) spiritual and esoteric history and traditions, a disparate body of wisdom that curiously shared spiritual principles with many Eastern concepts. East and West were linked at the soul, for what Theosophy had inadvertently revealed was not so much that all religions were “true” but that the esoteric aspects and interpretations of all religions, expressing authentic spiritual knowledge, were essentially one. Aleister Crowley understood this perfectly, and Thelema was, in his eyes, the master synthesis for the times.

So it is not surprising that out of the Theosophical impulse came a refreshed interest in the ancient Gnostics, the esoteric branch, so to speak, of primitive Christianity, and a growing realization that the Gnostic impulse too had somehow carried on through the ages despite vigorous suppression and persecution. French Theosophists, in their turn, could look anew to the medieval Cathars and the Troubadours—and they did, and got into a right mess with the ensuing mélange of Rosicrucianism, Catholicism, Gnosticism, Hermetic philosophy, alchemy, Neoplatonism, and ancient Egyptian religion!

It was natural to suppose that the medium of continuity of ideas through history was something like, or even the same as, Freemasonry. Anyone who looked at regular Freemasonry in search of great esoteric wisdom would of course be disappointed, but other aspects of Freemasonry had developed since the middle of the eighteenth century, especially in Germany. Why Germany? Because of the Rosicrucians, of course.

Christopher McIntosh’s study The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason (1990) has demonstrated that alive, well, and sometimes kicking in the heart of the European Enlightenment was a vibrant tradition of Rosicrucian-Masonic initiation that involved many of the most brilliant minds of the period; Mozart’s name being just the tip of an iceberg of grossly misunderstood movements of enlightenment and counter-enlightenment, of science and suspicion of science, of social progress and reaction, of chivalry, high idealism, and gross deception.

To give the most relevant example, it was rumored that both the British Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the German Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of the Temple of the East, or Order of Oriental Templars) were linked by origin and authority to an eighteenth-century German initiatory order known as the Asiatic Brethren, an order that regarded itself as a true descendant of the imaginary Fraternity of the Rose Cross, believed to be behind the epoch-marking publication of the document known as the Fama Fraternitatis (Fame of the Fraternity) or first “Rosicrucian Manifesto” printed in the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel in 1614.

This so-called manifesto announced the existence of a secret fraternity dedicated to bringing the light of new knowledge, especially spiritual and esoteric knowledge, to Europe. Its founder was its hero, “Christian Rosenkreuz” (Christian Rose-Cross), who, according to the Fama, quit his mind-numbing monastery in Germany in the late fourteenth century for the East (“Damcar”; that is, Damar, in Arabia), where he found initiation and welcome from the wise before further enlightenment in Fez, and a return to invisibility in Europe. Around this fictitious legend, an entire movement, and indeed, religion, was born.

In 1781 Hans Heinrich von Ecker und Eckhoffen (1750–90) founded his Orden der Ritter und Brüder des Lichts (Order of the Knights and Brothers of the Light), which soon changed its name to Die Brüder Sankt Johannes des Evangelisten aus Asien in Europa (the brothers of St. John the Evangelist from Asia in Europe), or Asiatic Brethren, for short. The order’s founder was already a member of the Gold-und Rosenkreuzer Älteren Systems (The Gold and Rosicrucians of the Ancient Systems) with its ascending order of degrees and massive alchemical projects aimed at human perfection enhanced by supernatural powers, founded in 1777.

Eckhoffen’s Asiatic Brethren added a strong dose of Hebrew Kabbalah to his system that was, unlike the Gold-und Rosenkreuzer, open to Jews. Two Jewish men helped Eckhoffen refine the kabbalistic content of the order: Thomas von Schönfeld and Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld.

When Karl, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel (1744–1836) became the brethren’s Grand Master, he learned about invocation of celestial beings and the use of ascetic practices, symbolic ceremony, and prayer to awaken mystical faculties. There were concentration exercises and clairvoyance sessions attended by “phosphorous manifestations.”

The brethren were attacked by the Gold-und Rosenkreuzer and by regular Freemasons of rationalist outlooks. Emperor Joseph II of Austria passed a Freimaurerpatent in December 1785, restricting Freemasonry in general. The High Masonry of the brethren was suspended. In 1790, Eckhoffen died; Hirschfeld continued his work in a small number of lodges. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the golden era of Neo-Rosicrucianism had passed; religion and philosophy moved on, impatient with mystery.

The Theosophical Society did not come out of Germany, because the Rosicrucian movement in the German-speaking territories had effectively failed, or been crippled, at the end of the eighteenth century. The Napoleonic Wars, and ensuing social unrest, marked the inception of a new, considerably less romantic era.

But men and women continued to hunger for a rapprochement of religious feelings and scientific knowledge. Indeed, following its founding in 1875, it constituted the novelty of the Theosophical Society that it believed spiritual phenomena could be scientifically investigated; the promise of a scientific spirituality with respectable bases in the world of demonstrable reality encouraged seekers to look again at Germany’s golden, Rosicrucian past to see if their ancestors had been doing extraordinary things through a hidden science that could be successfully repeated. Purely materialist science, on the other hand, while logical, neat, and tidy for proud university professors, simply left sensitive men, women, and children outside of the ivory towers with no hope, no meaning, no real humanity, no magic.

And so it was that a number of Theosophy-inspired Germans, some the remnants in sensibility of the great German Pietist movement, some the children of romanticism, and some out of sheer curiosity, looked again at their discredited past and rediscovered something not only of the Rosicrucian movements of yesterday and of Hermetic Freemasonry but also found that the word “Theosophy” itself, meaning a descriptive, experimental approach to divine activity in the cosmos and in the soul, a kind of “divine science,” was in fact the word most strongly associated with that great German mystic-gnostic from Görlitz, Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), the Teutonic Theosopher whose works had made Isaac Newton think and which were frequently read alongside and conflated with the disparate Rosicrucian corpus.

What the German neo-Rosicrucians wanted, perhaps, was a leader.

ALEISTER CROWLEY MEETS THE GERMAN NEW AGE

Crowley’s first encounter with the German New Age came in the form of a certificate received from a German of remarkably colorful background.

Theodor Reuss (1855–1923) had lived a life in journalism, music hall performance, spying (as infiltrator of socialist and anarchist circles in London for the Prussian secret police), and as Leopold Engel’s partner in trying to reestablish Adam Weishaupt’s late-eighteenth century Illuminati Order in Germany. Today, however, Reuss is best known as co-father of Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and the man who involved Aleister Crowley in that nascent enterprise. The OTO’s elusive path to fruition has recently been uncovered in Richard Kaczynski’s Forgotten Templars: The Untold Origins of Ordo Templi Orientis (2012), revealing how the OTO emerged amid the worlds of “fringe” Masonry and unofficial Theosophical societies.

In 1883, Bavarian-born émigré Franz Hartmann quit his Colorado medical practice to assist Helena Blavatsky at TS headquarters, Adyar, India. The following year, German enthusiasm for the TS crystallized when Hamburg’s Dr Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden (1846-1916) became president of a 38-member Theosophische Societät Germania (TSG).

Just as the TSG was getting going, anti-Blavatsky scandals cut short Hartmann’s Theosophical honeymoon in India. In 1885, the “Coulomb affair” and Britain’s Society for Psychical Research’s “Hodgson Report” left Adyar’s TS leadership discredited for fraudulently fabricating correspondence with alleged “Hidden Masters.” While Hartmann accompanied Blavatsky back to Europe, leaving her in Munich in November 1885, TSG membership slumped in the scandals’ wake. Though the TSG closed in December 1886, its magazine Sphinx continued for a decade (Theodor Reuss would contribute an article on Pranatherapie in 1894).

In 1888, Hartmann joined Friedrich Echstein, Dr. Edmund Lang, and his remarkable wife Marie (1858–1934) in a Theosophical study group in Vienna. These meetings gave Rudolf Steiner his first taste of Theosophy and distaste for what Steiner considered Hartmann’s symbolic and subjective approach to spiritual knowledge.

Notwithstanding the young Steiner’s opinion, Hartmann, by 1889, had become the Theosophical Society’s dominant German apostle. Residing in Austria’s historic town of Hallein in the state of Salzburg, Hartmann encountered the wealthy chemical engineer, inventor, industrialist—and alchemist—Carl Kellner (1850–1905). The affable Kellner was busy constructing a chemical plant to benefit from Hallein’s ancient salt mines. Kellner spiced his scientific prowess with esoteric philosophy, which had seized his imagination after inheriting his grandfather’s papers concerning a secret Rosicrucian fraternity. Aged twenty-two, Kellner joined a Masonic Lodge in Hungary. Crowley informed Henri Birven in 1929 that Reuss regarded Kellner as thoroughly outstanding; Crowley himself never doubted Kellner was the OTO’s essential genius.

Kellner’s appreciation of Hartmann intensified in 1892 when, having observed by-products of Kellner’s chemical process at Hallein, Hartmann published his new treatment for respiratory diseases. Kellner found Hartmann’s transformation of industrial waste into “gold” both appealing and amusing; he backed Hartmann’s “inhalatoriums” where sufferers found relief through chemical inhalation. Hartmann doubtless considered himself a new Paracelsus (he wrote a little biography of the great Swiss spiritual reformer who pioneered iatrochemical medicine).

How tightly knit Germany’s New Age scene was becomes apparent when we note Dr. Hartmann’s patent LIGNOSULFIT inhalation equipment was marketed in Germany by Leipzig bookseller Heinrich Tränker (1880–1956). Tränker would become Head of the German OTO in 1923—and Crowley’s enemy after 1925.

Like Paracelsus, Kellner and Hartmann opened themselves to knowledge regardless of source. Punjabi yogi Bheema Sena Pratapa (b. ca.1872) visited Europe in summer 1896. Witnessing Pratapa’s demonstration of “yogic sleep,” Kellner and Hartmann invited him to Hallein, whereupon Kellner wrote a pioneering “Sketch” entitled YOGA, published in Munich. Extraordinary performances by Sufi fakir Soliman ben Aïssa of the Order of Saadi (b. Morocco ca.1865) also inspired the aspiring neo-Rosicrucians. Possibly trained within the Aïssâwa mystical brotherhood, ben Aïssa could pierce his body without pain or blood. Crowley would later claim he learned such skills from an Aïssâwa adept in Cairo in 1904; perhaps Crowley encountered ben Aïssa in Paris, as did several leading Theosophists and Martinists. In 1907, the Beast would meet another of Kellner and Hartmann’s guides, the fiery Kashmiri Brahmin Mahatma Sri Agamya Guru Paramahamsa (b.ca.1841) who taught Kellner the “Science of Breathing” (Pranayama). Like Kellner, Crowley would quit his (alleged) holiness’s presence, exasperated by the guru’s outrageous threats. More than a match for the swami’s pretensions, Crowley learnt hatha-yoga by himself.

In 1895, the American TS split. Unwilling to accommodate Blavatsky’s successors Henry Steel Olcott and Annie Besant, rebel William Quan Judge took 83 of the 88 US sections into secession. Despite Olcott’s revoking their charters, Hartmann supported Judge, and when Judge died in 1896, Hartmann supported Judge’s successor, Katherine Tingley (1847–1929).

On 29 August, Tingley’s independent TS inaugurated a German Section at a ceremony in Berlin. Theodor Reuss was elected the meeting’s chairman and Franz Hartmann became elected president of the Theosophischen Gesellschaft in Europa (Deutschland) or TGE(D). He proposed Reuss as the society’s vice president with the latter’s Illuminati partner Leopold Engel as treasurer. Invited to Hallein, members were addressed by Kellner. Kellner shared with Reuss his idea of an Academia Masonica for administering high-grade Masonry in Germany. Kellner, however, would not cooperate with Reuss until Reuss split with Engel in 1902.

On 19 December 1896, impresario Reuss organized a prestigious Christmas concert at the Grand Hotel de Rome on Berlin’s Unter den Linden, hosted, with emblems waving, by the TGE’s Gral-Loge (Grail Lodge). Reuss’s entrepreneurial skills had been honed in association with his colleague in high-grade (or “fringe”) Masonic enterprises, songwriter, music publisher, instrument dealer, and impresario, Henry Klein (1842–1913). Reuss and Klein probably met in 1886 after Reuss carried his Bayreuth-blooded baritone skills to English concerts of Wagner’s music organized by the Popular Wagner Concerts Society, of which Klein was secretary. Being, incidentally, members of the same German-speaking, London-based Lodge (“Pilgrim”), their “regular” Masonic identities enabled them to garner high-grade British Freemasons William Wynn Westcott’s and John Yarker’s services in importing charters into Germany to form an umbrella body administering high-grade (though from the United Grand Lodge of England’s point of view, “irregular”) rites, out of which rites—once the controversial “sex-magic” secret was added—the OTO grew.

Nine months after the Berlin concert, Hartmann, having concluded Tingley was a “pope” followed by slaves, resigned the TGE presidency, whereupon, (3 September 1897) he immediately founded the Internationale Theosophische Verbrüderung (the International Theosophical Brotherhood, or ITV). Despite TGE members Reuss and Engel declaring Hartmann’s secession “illegal,” the independent ITV (its German section based in Leipzig) flourished. In 1909 it launched its long-running journal, Theosophische Kultur, published by Tränker. Crowley’s German followers Martha Küntzel and Otto Gebhardi would contribute to it.

Hartmann wanted an organization permitting tolerant members to cooperate with other theosophical societies while resisting slavish following of “leaders” who turned open organizations into sects. When, after 1911, the Beast sought to “smite” Krishnamurti and the official TS-spearheaded “Coming World Teacher” movement—announcing Thelema via the incognito “World Teacher” in 1924—Crowley found himself identified in Hartmann’s negative category. Infamous declarations from The Book of the Law such as “the slaves shall serve” (AL II, 58) scarcely ameliorated relations with the ITV or other Theosophical societies, as we shall see.

In 1902 the “official” Adyar-based TS resurrected HübbeSchleiden’s unofficial TSG as the TS’s official German Section with Rudolf Steiner as Secretary. In the same year, John Yarker (1833–1913), bestowed upon Reuss, Hartmann and Klein charter authority to operate the Scottish Rite and the Rites of Memphis and Misraïm in Germany: rites attractive to Theosophists seeking high-grade Masonic bona fides. Discussions with Rudolf Steiner on such matters with Reuss in 1904 resulted, at Easter 1906, with Reuss’s chartering Steiner and TS Grand Secretary General Marie Sivers to form Mystica Aeterna, a Chapter and Grand Council of Adoptive Masonry (a form of the Rite of Misraïm open to women). The following year, Reuss and Klein appointed Steiner Acting Grand Master General of the Rite of Misraïm (90°) in Germany.

Steiner used this authority to establish his own esoteric school consisting of three departments, one being the Misraim-Dienst (“Misraim-Service”: an occult service Steiner believed offered by ancient Egyptian temples). These ties explain why Crowley always regarded Steiner as a fellow initiate, assuming his amity with the OTO; they also explain how the legend of Steiner’s being an OTO member came about. Nonetheless, it should be noted that Reuss and Klein’s 1907 certificate of appointment to Steiner was headed: “Memphis and Mizraim Rite of Masonry,” subtitled: “Order of Oriental Templars and Esoteric Rosicrucians.” The evolution of the “Oriental Templars” idea into a working order stems chiefly, however, from Reuss’s dealings with Aleister Crowley.

Reuss first introduced himself to the Beast in London in 1910, offering as a sign of recognition the OTO’s seventh degree, equivalent, Reuss insisted, to the 33° of the Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite. It was probably John Yarker who had put Reuss on to Crowley, for on 29 November that year, Yarker appointed Crowley Sovereign Grand Inspector General (33°) in the Ancient and Accepted Rite, recognizing Crowley’s 33° Scottish Rite initiation in Mexico in 1900. On 21 April 1912, Reuss, assured Crowley already understood the OTO’s ninth degree secret of “sexual magic,” issued a charter in the name of Aleister St. Edward Crowley, 33°, 90°, 95°, X° (OTO), making Crowley National Grand Master General for Great Britain and Ireland. Crowley was to head a British section in association with Reuss called the Mysteria Mystica Maxima acquiring the title: “Supreme and Holy King of Ireland, Iona and all the Britons within the sanctuary of the Gnosis.” With Reuss and Yarker’s approval (Yarker died in 1913), Crowley began transforming and compacting what he considered the cream of the Scottish, Memphis and Misraïm Rites into Reuss’s framework ten-degree OTO ritual system.

Since Crowley already had his own order, why did the OTO interest him? First, Reuss convinced the Beast that the OTO had potential access to the thought-world of Freemasonry worldwide. Second, Reuss claimed for the OTO a descent from the supposed late medieval Fraternity of German adept, Christian Rosenkreuz, and while a few suspected “Frater C.R.” of being a literary invention or “blind,” no one was sure. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn claimed “his” authority, but contact with authentic German Rosicrucian adepts had never been realized. Here, perhaps, was Crowley’s chance to make the link, involved, as he was, in superseding Mathers’ and Westcott’s broken order, to “regenerate the world, the little world my sister,” as The Book of the Law prophesied (Liber AL I, 53).

Third, Crowley was intrigued by the idea of a sex-magic secret being carried from medieval times to emerge in the sunshine of a new era. Like Reuss, Crowley was as familiar with a burgeoning literature advocating solar-phallicism (or sex sublimated in symbol) as being an origin of religion as he was with the alchemical formula of transcendence being the product of opposites united. Crowley saw this suppressed or distorted tradition’s fulfillment in the New Aeon, a spiritual age whose watchword “Thelema” would triumph. For those who shared the vision, planet Earth had entered the Aeon of Horus or solar era (pictured as the “crowned and conquering Child”), while the Aeon of Osiris (salvation from original sin through suffering and sorrow) had been surpassed. This “Equinox of the Gods” had been announced in April 1904 to Crowley when he received the three-chapter Book of the Law as from the dictation of an angelic voice identified by his wife Rose as “Aiwass.”

Crowley had little concern with Reuss’s treasured image of spiritual descendants of an imaginary body of medieval male Templars sharing secrets of a yogic sexual magic (transmitted from late antiquity) manifesting in the twentieth century as a new Gnostic Catholic Church. For Reuss the Oriental Templars’ great secret was that Jesus Christ and his “Beloved Disciple” had been practicing adepts; Jesus’s semen being held to manifest magical, sacramental power: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (John 6:56). Reuss consolidated the doctrine that consecrated sexual fluids constituted effective agents of magical, spiritual transformation through contacts established in Paris with French Gnostic Catholic Church clergy Jean Bricaud, Gérard Encausse and other Martinists when Reuss issued Encausse and his associates (including René Guénon) with a patent to administer the Rites of Memphis and Misraïm in 1908; it is believed that in return Reuss received “authority” as a legate or bishop of the Église Catholique Gnostique in Germany. Reuss’s belief that the OTO’s originators were Christian Gnostics did not sit altogether well with his rather general approval of The Book of the Law. Despite this potential disparity of outlook, all might have progressed quite nicely were it not for the inconvenient interruption of World War One.

Crowley and Reuss emerged from the war years with very different outlooks. Germany had been the instigator of unprecedented death and destruction, no matter how much provoked into asserting itself militarily it may have been by France, Russia, and Great Britain, as nationalists persisted in asserting. Crowley was not impressed by a number of documents Reuss sent to the few outposts of the OTO worldwide. An “Anational Circular” sent by Reuss in 1917 to the South African branch appeared distinctly anti-British to its recipients. In the United States, once America entered the war, Reuss’s material was regarded as anti-Allied.

After the war Reuss described the OTO as a body of New Gnostic Christians who rejected the anti-German, that is anti-brotherhood, betrayal of the Versailles Conference and looked for a transnational movement. Crowley did not attend Reuss’s international Freemasonry conference organized in Basle in 1920 for kindred fringe-Masonic representatives worldwide. Thinking about the invitation while in retirement in Cefalù, Sicily, the Beast wondered if he had it in him to combine such a collection of what he considered nonentities into a force.

But what really got Crowley’s goat was that while paying lip service to aspects of The Book of the Law, Reuss was obviously putting distance between himself and his supposed colleague. The reasons for this soon became apparent. Reuss was seeking financial support from AMORC-founder Harvey Spencer Lewis; Reuss offered Lewis an OTO diploma as an inducement to affiliation.

Crowley had met Lewis in New York in 1917 and, on inspection, had found his charter claims to Rosicrucian authority risible. Lewis wanted his own show—not the OTO. Lewis questioned Reuss about Crowley. What was a man with his reputation for anti-Christian pronouncements doing in Reuss’s order? That put Reuss in a quandary that initiated an irrevocable step. In 1921 he decided to provoke Crowley into splitting by insisting Crowley stop using the OTO in relation to his own order, the A A Reuss also insisted that OTO was not a Thelema agency and that the British OTO and its head should adhere to the OTO’s original Reussian and Gnostic Christian principles. Reuss further alienated Crowley by giving the Tenth Degree, or OTO Headship, first to German OTO member, bookseller, and Theosophist Heinrich Tränker, then to Arnoldo Krumm-Heller. Krumm-Heller used it as a basis for founding his FRA Rosicrucian Order in South America. To rub it in, Reuss gave the Tenth Degree to Crowley’s former disciple Charles Stansfeld Jones, who thus became OTO Head of the USA. This was intended to clarify to Lewis that Crowley had no U.S. jurisdiction. Crowley was convinced Reuss expected Jones to betray Crowley. But Lewis didn’t fancy Jones on “his” turf either.

In November 1921, Reuss wrote to Crowley to tell him to keep Thelemic doctrine out of the OTO and to pay attention to the OTO’s first three Masonic degrees. Crowley simply took Reuss’s letter as a statement of abdication and replied that as such, he, Crowley, accepted it in his favor and forthwith availed himself of the position of Outer Head of the Order. What Crowley meant by Reuss’s abdication was that Reuss by his actions and words manifestly did not count himself bound to any obligation to the secret chiefs, without whom no truly Rosicrucian order could be regarded as genuine. As he, Crowley, had not broken his obligations to serve the chiefs, he, Crowley, was therefore OHO, or Outer Head of the Order, and that, as far as he was concerned, was that.

For his part, Reuss informed Lewis that Crowley no longer acted with OTO authority, but Lewis was no longer interested in any kind of partnership with Reuss, except the formal amity of kindred fraternities. Besides, what Lewis had really wanted was a self-authenticating document to add to all his other paper bona fides; he could see he had got as much as he was going to get from Theodor Reuss, who clearly was after money, his money. Lewis had made his pile in advertising, not charity.

In 1923, Reuss died, penniless. Crowley was himself in deep problems with the fascist Italian government who had expelled him from his abbey at Cefalù, Sicily, allegedly for living in scandalous sexual liaison with two women while conducting rites of an allegedly shocking nature. The OTO situation had to take a backseat. It hardly mattered anyway since Crowley’s London OTO headquarters had been closed by the police on orders from the Home Office in 1917. Crowley was in a battle for survival, while his family languished in Cefalù unable to join him due to persistent bureaucratic opposition.

The issue of the OTO headship lapsed until 1924–25, when Heinrich Tränker, or “Frater Recnartus,” in Germany decided he wanted the matter of the succession properly settled so he could expand his own neo-Rosicrucian order, the Collegium Pansophicum, with the financial backing of his secretary, Frater Saturnus, that is, Karl Germer.

Tränker had read the word Pansophia in any number of old Rosicrucianist works, as well as in the writings of Arnoldo Krumm-Heller. It was originally a word brought to the fore by Czech genius Comenius (1592–1670) and referred to his educational method of teaching all subjects through their correspondences with each other. Comenius had been pro-Rosicrucian until he realized the fraternity was a literary fraud. According to Comenius, behind all the diffuse subjects of life was an “all wisdom” that underlay and united them, and, through progressive understanding of this, the student’s being would be united to high service of the light of God, dispensed by angels to the willing and sincere mind.

To settle the OTO headship question, Tränker asked Jones for his views. Jones accepted that Reuss had abdicated in Crowley’s favor; Crowley was OHO. Tränker toyed with the idea of giving the OTO over to Crowley’s unopposed headship. Tränker then read The Book of the Law, and was shocked. Its third chapter fulminated with daimonic rage at obstructions to the Aeon. “Damn them who pity!” it cried (AL, III, 18). Rather than a colorful criticism of the ineffectiveness of “do-gooders,” it sounded like the war cry of a barbarian horde! Likewise the image of an Egyptian hawk-headed god pecking “at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross” (AL III, 51) seemed abominably impious to the traditionally Christian, Rosicrucian sensibility. Of course, the “eyes” can represent the point of view, and Christians had been eating Jesus’s body whole for close on two millennia as a means of remembering him. Chapter 3 described the world’s religious scene as a confusion of “crapulous creeds” (AL III, 54). “Crapulous” means drunken: unable to stand up and focus, incoherent. Is this not the case?

But, after initial disgust, something occurred to Tränker; he said it was a spiritual enlightenment. The Book of the Law was, he now realized, a charter for nothing less than civilization.

Out of Tränker’s dreaming came the famous Weida Conference of 1925. It was typical of Crowley to turn its nightmarish qualities into what he chose to recall as a victory.

FOUR

KARL GERMER AND THE WEIDA CONFERENCE

Observe, please, that we can do together what neither of us can do separately.

ALEISTER CROWLEY,
LETTER TO KARL GERMER,
TUNIS, OCTOBER 1925

Hohenleuben is an old-fashioned little German town of steep tiled roofs that ripple down to the eves of cross-beamed, neatly rendered facades, some fifty miles south of Leipzig, in the region of Thuringia. Accessible by train, Hohenleuben’s surrounding countryside is fairly flat but fertile, and where there are forests, as there are near the lakes around the town, the lush greens and browns of oaks and sycamores soon transport the soul into sylvan fantasies dear to the volk enamored of “Der Wald.”

Hohenleuben is where the Weida Conference began, Weida being a town some four miles to the north, the home, in summer 1925, of Karl Germer. 666 and his entourage completed their conferring at Germer’s home in Weida rather than Hohenleuben, for reasons we shall soon discover.

Fig. 4.1. Karl Germer in his forties. Image courtesy of the OTO.

Hohenleuben was the town closest to the home of bibliophile and small-time publisher (from which beginnings Thelema Verlag sprouted) Heinrich Tränker. Before WWI, Tränker ran Leipzig’s Central Theosophical Bookshop; it went bust after the war. In 1921 Tränker somehow got Reuss to issue him a X° charter to run an OTO lodge in Germany (he had never met Reuss; the business was done by letter). Tränker initiated a number of people into the OTO before he and his wife Helen used it as a basis for launching a new “Rosicrucian” organization, with himself as Grand Master. The Berlin lodge, founded in 1924, was called the Pansophic Lodge of the Light Seeking Brethren, Orient Berlin. A sister lodge was established in Danzig.

Set in traditional Masonic fashion for the Summer Solstice (24 June) 1925, the conference was preceded by an exchange of letters between Heinrich Tränker and the World Teacher (incognito), Aleister Crowley. Tränker can have been in no doubt as to Crowley’s intentions, revealed quite transparently in his deposition to Tränker before the conference:

I received from Frater Achad [C. S. Jones X°] your [Tränker’s] nomination to the post of Frater Superior and O.H.O. If I accept, it is not that I do not feel any great unworthiness, but that I cannot decline in view of the Obligation laid upon me in Cairo Spring 1904 E.V. [era vulgari = common or “vulgar” era].

In view of the actual world-situation it seems to me urgent to take certain very definite steps, and of these some are of such importance that I desire earnestly to have the advice of the Elder Brothers in your neighborhood. I propose to take advantage of your kind offer of hospitality in May as you suggest, this to prepare matters for an International Conference of Grand Masters, and also one of selecting worthy persons without respect of official rank, even of workers beyond our own orders, to consider action on the lines which I shall indicate later in this letter. These Conferences should begin at the Summer Solstice. I wish to prepare you for my great incapacity for public affairs, as this will make it necessary for me to lean very heavily upon the Grand Masters.

a) I am extremely shy, and too often absorbed in abstract thought, to play the part of a leader in the ordinary sense. I have no gift of eloquence.

b) Despite wide experience of men and things in many countries and classes of society, I am an Innocent, that is, there is ever present to me the truth of every man, that he “is a star.” I am therefore always surprised when any one acts badly i.e: untruthfully to his real self. This makes any practical psychology a mockery.

c) Also, I cannot help assuming that the knowledge of all men is coterminous with my own; so that I expect obscure allusions to be at once understood, and leave large gaps in my train of thought, assuming that no man can fail to fill the lacunae. This makes me hard to understand; and judge ill the motives of other men, and (acting as I must do on my spiritual conception of values) mutual comprehension of practical matters is almost impossible.¹

Crowley then wrote the subtitle “The Impending Crisis” before crossing out the word “Impending.” The crisis of which Crowley was forewarned by “those who came to” him in 1904 was an imminent destruction of civilization, a collapse of the old order necessitating the compression of initiated wisdom into such a form as could be resurrected from the debris. This he had partly accomplished in his expensive periodical The Equinox, but there were things still to be done that his own self-will and tendencies had prevented him from accomplishing.

He went on to explain the necessity of spiritual laws and values for the world, something that science, of itself, could not ensure:

The discoveries of Science in the past century or so have been alike in this respect, that all are apart from Virtue. They can all equally be used by vulgar men, after by merely brutal men, at the discretion of vile and ignoble masters. The result has been as we see it. But through the O.T.O., we possess a form of energy far stronger and subtler than any yet known; and its virtue is this, that it cannot be employed successfully by men ignorant of spiritual laws and untrained by spiritual methods.

He outlined the need for a treasury:

The main object of instituting an important Treasury is after supplying current expenses, to arrange for the issue of extremely short and simple pamphlets in all countries and in all languages calling upon men to unite to establish the real spiritual revolution.

The only Word which can unite Mankind is “Do what thou wilt” for this asks no man to distort his personality to serve a fixed ideal of conduct. At the same time, the injunction is most austere; for it permits no man to go beyond the aim appointed by his nature.

The real opposition to the Law of Thelema lies just here. The base understand by instinct that this Law must destroy the whole machinery of the civilization which assumes that the greatest good of man is the possession of material means of enjoyment. The mistake of our brethren in the past seems to me that they thought it sufficient to despise base ideals as such. With the scorn was mingled a certain taint of fear, and they were therefore crushed by the Golden Calf in trying to pull it down. They should have cut it up and sold the pieces for bread and wine. St. Anthony was no less the salve of lust than Heliogablus. Parsifal didn’t accomplish the Redemption miracle until he had accepted Kundry as the servant of the Order.

It is clear from Crowley’s statement that Tränker, like Birven after him, was nervous about the source of 666’s authority to take control.

Let it be quite clear that I do not intend to live in obscurity. The answer to the question “By what authority doest thou these things?” [a question put to Jesus in the Gospels] The first cardinal virtue of the student of our art is intellectual honesty. At present there is no single outwardly working organization which can claim an authentic tradition which will stand the test of initial scholarship. [. . .] Those who chose me for the Cairo Working March and April 1904 gave absolute proof of their right to command me and indeed of their right to direct the whole course of humanity, but in this matter I understand that they were in some sense identical with those Chiefs referred to in the previous questions [about the Golden Dawn’s claims to come from German neo-Rosicrucian orders through “Fraulein Anna Sprengel,” allegedly of Nuremberg and prior to that from the “Unknown Superiors” of the Asiatic Brethren and the Fraternity of Christian Rosenkreuz] and that therefore they had chosen me to replace Mathers who had forfeited their confidence. That they had in fact by approaching me reforged the link with the masters broken at the death of Fraulein Sprengel [Crowley himself was unsure as to whether Anna Sprengel was a real person or not; perhaps he hoped Tränker knew].

Crowley developed the question of authority by turning it back on Tränker’s own authority to lead the German OTO and his Pansophia Rosicrucian activities. Crowley had hoped Tränker could have furnished a genuine link between the OTO, Pansophia, and the Great White Brotherhood, or supernal masters, who, Crowley was prepared to accept in principle, had given the Asiatic brethren their authority to act. Crowley, however, was never impressed by paper charters in themselves since, as he had discovered in the case of the Golden Dawn foundation documents, forgery was always possible. He shared Henry Ford’s view that history was mostly bunk as far as truth was concerned:

It is to be understood clearly that I have no need of any historical proofs for myself. For one thing I do not much believe in history in any case and for another the proofs which I possess of the authority of the A A and in a lesser degree of that tradition which the O.T.O. claim are entirely convincing. The point at issue is far different.

The order of which Crowley was compelled to serve was not one obsessed with itself but one that he was convinced addressed the real situation of the planet, which at the time was one of ever increasing anarchy exacerbated by the lack of a principle to which sufficient numbers could appeal or respect. Thelema, he believed, provided this. That is why he would insist that all esoteric orders of the White Brotherhood come under his Thelemic banner, the A A , lest they waste the historic opportunity and stumble on bickering among themselves in defiance of that fraternity they claimed as a primary principle of conduct.

Especially in India and China do we see the beginnings of the breakdown in the last twenty years. In view of the greatly increased facility of communications it is impossible to find a satisfactory magical formula of merely local application as could be done and as was done in the past. Any such attempt would be checkmated by criticism from outside, for example: Mohamed could not have ruled over his followers if he had to face the analysis of the Buddhists. It should then be clear to you that this formula of “Do what thou wilt” is the only one possible. It gives an absolutely binding moral sanction to each man individually, where he can always judge his conduct by an appeal to his true Will and he can also be guided by expert advice. Further, the justice of punishment can be rationally reestablished. It will be possible to construct a judicial system independent of all local variations in custom—a strictly mathematical law.

The progress of physics in the last century has shown us so many previously unknown and subtle forms of energy and even orders of energy that the mind of the world is opened to new dimensions on this plane, but there has [been no] new particle of evidence for the existence of any ultra-human intelligences with the single exception of The Book of the Law.

It is the Will first of all to establish the Law of Thelema to this end: I wish to obtain control of all existing movements [Crowley would also write to Annie Besant indicating his wish that she name him her successor to the Theosophical Society’s “Esoteric Section,” rather than the aged, and morally corrupt, Bishop Leadbeater]. This is possible despite the natural jealousies and other inhibitions because there is no single person elsewhere in the world posing as a leader who is really pure of himself [Crowley considered himself reborn in 1924]. They are all afraid of being found out, hence, incidentally, the universal fear of me as able and willing to expose falsehood wherever I find it.

This fear must be overcome by use of the Oedipus Complex of these unheroic persons. As soon as they see that it will be really much easier for them to knuckle under, which they will readily do as soon as convinced that the authority is genuine, it will be easy to collect the sheep into my fold and employ their united strength to accomplish the Great Work.

You see I chose always to look at things in a very brutal way for thus I am less likely to be deceived. The position is that the world is full of many robber chiefs. I must show them that it is to their advantage to unite themselves under a strong head who will preserve to each one his privileges, protect him against his neighbors and enable him to sleep in security. Those who do not agree but prefer to remain isolated must feel themselves in danger of being attacked and exterminated by a combination.

He who refuses to accept this Law so far as he understands what he is doing by that act is a slave who as the book says—shall serve. Such a one has no right beyond those of the lower animals because he has not dared to will.

Now then in these lodges we have to our hand a weapon of great power. You [Tränker] say that you have already something like 1000 members but if they were a million they would be no use if they are a mob. They must be prepared to accept discipline as in the army and I must know the exact capacity of each one.

The difficulty which I have always found most serious in training students who appeal to me for assistance is their lack of selfishness. They talk constantly of attainment but they do not really wish to get anywhere. Their interest in occult science is in fact a flight from reality; of such material nothing can be made, save hewers of wood and drawers of water. It is not only the Law of Thelema but ordinary common sense to assign each individual to his proper place in the system.

He had no doubt that the phenomenon of the Theosophical Society was vital and had played its part: “The planet has been thoroughly leavened by the mission of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. But from that work there has sprung a fruitful plant.” It would become obvious on closer examination, Crowley believed, that it was never the intention of the masters that Krishnamurti should lead the next evolutionary step (this was five years before Krishnamurti separated himself from the Theosophical Society). The acceptance of Thelema was the next step, and 666 had no doubt that such a new era would be resisted violently, but ultimately, vainly, since it was of the essence of evolution. Thelema was a scientific law of ethics. As for himself, Crowley simply found his position as Thelema’s prophet a nuisance, and he would insist on being kept out of sight as far as the order was concerned.

It is of the greatest importance that the rule of the Order with regard to the keeping secret the identity of the Frater Superior should be maintained severely. The necessity of employing a British interpreter [for the conference] demands that he be sworn specially to maintain silence on this point.

That interpreter turned out to be a man who would become Crowley’s friend for life, at the time Tränker’s own secretary and fund source, Karl Germer.

ARRIVAL AT HOHENLEUBEN

Crowley arrived by train from Paris—paid for by Germer—with probationer Frater Omnia Pro Veritate Norman Mudd (who would resign from the A A on 3 November 1925), Crowley’s ex–Scarlet Woman Leah Hirsig, and his new Scarlet Woman Dorothy Olsen: the women performing as Crowley’s secretaries. They made their way from the station to Tränker’s home, a one-time country inn isolated in a secluded valley. Germer (Frater Saturnus) made the introductions, interpreting as best he could.

Tränker’s team included Chair of the Berlin Pansophia Lodge Albin Grau (Master Pacitius), Grau’s Lodge Secretary Eugen Grosche (Frater Gregorius), Master of the Danzig Lodge, Otto Gebhardi (Frater Ich will), Gebhardi’s lover Martha Küntzel (Soror Ich will es), and Tränker’s wife, Helen.

Initial business was settled with some enthusiasm. Albin Grau, the remarkable producer, set designer, and artist behind the cult horror, or “schreck,” movie Nosferatu (directed by F. W. Murnau in 1922), shot a film of the conference, currently lost.

Radiating sweetness and light, Crowley made a big impression on Grau and Grosche, while Mudd and Leah Hirsig, to Germer’s chagrin, were playful, like a first flush of hippydom in the sun.

Everybody agreed that the Master Therion was OHO of the OTO and that his works should be made known to Germany. In fact, Tränker had already edited a few of Crowley’s works: Wege zum Sanktuarium (The Way to the Sanctuary) and Das Herz des Meisters (The Heart of the Master) for his journal Theosophical Culture (Theosophical Culture Publishing, Leipzig). Veteran Theosophist from the Madame Blavatsky days, schoolteacher Martha Küntzel would have the translation job and management of what would become the Thelema Verlags Gesellschaft from her home at Tiefe Strasse 4, Leipzig. Otto Wilhelm Barth of Munich was expected to undertake the printing, as he had previously for Tränker, while the books and pamphlets would be sold out of Barth’s bookshop, Asokthebu, in Munich, and from Eugen Grosche’s occult bookshop, Inveha, in Berlin W. 62.

So far, so good, but as dusk dampened proceedings, and discussions intensified, harmony faded. The sticking point appeared to be Crowley’s requirement that all Rosicrucian organizations, not just the OTO, accept the ultimate authority of Crowley’s order, the A A —sometimes understood as the “Silver Star,” Argentinum Astrum, symbolizing spiritual intuition—now in its sixteenth year of manifestation.

While Tränker had perhaps foreseen some kind of mutually beneficial relationship between his fledgling order and Crowley, and while he was also prepared to see The Book of the Law as an important testimony to spiritual activity on Earth, Tränker was not prepared to become the Master Therion’s satellite. For his part, Crowley wanted to make things as convenient as possible for all concerned, but he could not see how an organization based on self-proclaimed Rosicrucian principles could achieve anything fundamentally important in the world without accepting as a condition for success the unequivocal dispensations of the Secret Chiefs. The “Word of the Law” was Thelema, not Pansophia, which, as far as Crowley was concerned, was a word from the past that was already included in essence in the new Thelemic synthesis. Likewise, all esoteric bodies worth their salt must accept inclusion; it was a question of alignment with the New Aeon.

Perhaps Germer’s translation efforts were not getting the point over clearly enough.

Albin Grau and Eugen Grosche reluctantly agreed with Tränker. The argument for submission or even quasi-submission would have to be a point of variance; it could not be conceded. Would concession not give Crowley access to the Collegium Pansophicum’s assets? Tränker and the Berlin delegates were not prepared to submit their spiritual destinies to the man, or the prophet, Crowley; it was, they feared, asking too much and seemed at odds with the whole idea of free will. Crowley’s belief was that the “True Will,” which he represented, guaranteed free will since “thou hast no right but to do thy will” as The Book of the Law put it (I, 42). Grau and Grosche felt they could do theirs without becoming Crowley’s instruments. Of course, Crowley the gentleman saw their point, but he felt that he himself was already an instrument of the Secret Chiefs, and if the German orders wished to be protected by the formula of Thelema, then they should find their way somehow to recognizing the principle.

Before disagreement got out of hand, it was decided to take a break from the discussions and give everybody time to reflect on what had passed.

In 1956, Eugen Grosche, by then Grand Master Gregorius of the occult order the Fraternitas Saturni, left an account of something extraordinary he witnessed after the adjournment and which he specifically stated he wanted future generations to know about:

To recuperate from the intense discussions that took place during the day all the participants of the conference went for an evening walk in the quiet, secluded valley surrounded by deep forests. We walked in informal groups along the quiet paths, talking with one another. I myself joined up with Master Gebhardi and we hiked close behind the group of Master Therion. I noticed that Master Therion often behaved strangely during his walk. Sometimes he lifted his hand in a greeting fashion, sometimes he smiled sideways while looking at the ground. Sometimes he dodged sideways as if avoiding an obstruction. I asked Master Gebhardi about the meaning of all those extraordinary gestures and movements. I received from him this most surprising answer: “To greet the Master Therion who is an Initiate of the Astral Light, a great number of elementals from the realm of the dwarf and gnomes as well tree-spirits come running to see him. These beings are invisible to us but they are visible to the Master Therion and he is acknowledging their greetings.”

I must admit that at that time this explanation was met by me with disbelief. To my further questions Master Gebhardi explained to me: “An initiated Master can with a certain invocation of a tree-spirit contact all the elementals in the vicinity of circa 7 kilometers especially in such an ideal surrounding which we have here. The concerning tree-spirit sends out a call that an initiated Magus is here. You can be certain that right now we are surrounded by those beings of the elemental kingdom and that they accompany us. I can’t tell you more at this time because this secret knowledge belongs only into the hands of a Master, who has received the higher consecrations. You will probably receive the exact instructions later after you have received the grade of a Master. To see those beings only depends on the degree of sensibility of the person.”

Because I did not speak English, I refrained to speak with Master Therion personally about this strange experience, which interested me so much. Unfortunately, Master Therion did not speak German either.

A year later [1926], I received through his chancellor [Frater O.P.V. Norman Mudd] at the direction of Master Therion, among a number of important documents, the magical instructions for the invocation of elemental beings. I attempted this magical experiment in 1928 in a very secluded area on the island of Ruegen and I received confirmation by the appearing of two gnomes who heeded my call. For myself, I have no doubt about the existence of those elementals (see also the article in the January 1951 study-issue of the “Blaetter fuer angewandte okkult Lebenskunst” where invocation of the elemental beings is discussed without revealing the above mentioned very secret instructions).

Despite the curious, even enriching magical interlude, Grosche, Grau, and their friends of the Orient Berlin, would only discover how badly things had in fact gone a few weeks after the conference. Once Crowley had left Hohenleuben and Weida, Tränker submitted a request to the German Office of the State Attorney to expel Aleister Crowley from Germany. To say the least, the chasm between Therion and Recnartus was deeper than a disagreement over the application of Rosicrucian principle.

On hearing of Tränker’s gross violation of German hospitality, Albin Grau (Master Pacitius) insisted Recnartus abdicate from his Grand Mastership. When Tränker refused, it was agreed unanimously to dissolve the Pansophic Orient Lodge, Berlin, which was done with solemn ceremony. Grau now felt impelled to issue privately his own remarkable, inspired testament called the Buch der Nullstunde, or “Book of the Zero Hour.” While Crowley might have been delighted with its direct inspiration from The Book of the Law and its message or call to the “Knights of Thelema” to “Love is the Law: Love under control of the Will”; well, given the timing, it looked more like presumptuous competition. It did not go down very well with the Master Therion.

Grosche and two-thirds of the membership of the now dissolved Berlin lodge resolved to form a new order that, while remaining independent, would take inspiration from Aleister Crowley and declare its own watchword of Thelema (“Do what thou wilt is [not “shall be”] the whole of the Law. Love is the Law: compassionless love”), based partly on Grau’s veneration for Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea.

Named after Saturn, the astrological ruler of Aquarius (for the Aquarian Age), the order would embody a hard, saturnine austerity of nature and purpose. Pacitius (Grau) gave up all his lodge titles, refusing the invitation to head the new order, and left the Master’s Chair of the Fraternitas Saturni, Orient Berlin, to Eugen Grosche, who would lead it as Master Gregorius into the new Aquarian/Saturnian Age.

Despite the Fraternitas Saturni’s declining to enjoy more than friendly cooperation with the A A , Grosche remained highly respectful toward Crowley. In the order’s excellently produced periodical Saturn Gnosis—five issues between July 1928 and March 1930—there appeared not only unpublished writings by Crowley (copyright Thelema Verlag) but also advertisements for the German translations of Crowley’s books and pamphlets produced by Thelema Verlag after its establishment in Leipzig in 1927. Grau contributed fascinating, if mathematically obscure, articles on sacred geometry as well as remarkable artwork to the pages of Saturn Gnosis (see plates 14–23). Pursuing a career in commercial art, Grau moved to the Alpine village of Bayrischzell, which honors him to this day. The remarkable Grau died as a member of the Swiss OTO, based at Stein, in 1971.

Decades after his esoteric work with Grau, Grosche would realize that Crowley’s attempt to centralize the spiritual movements of the West had been well intentioned, failing only because of the conference participants’ lack of insight, belonging as they did to the Piscean Age, not yet ready for the New. There is little doubt then that Crowley’s turning up in Hohenleuben in 1925 shaped Germany’s esoteric future to a surprising extent. He would hope to garner the harvest on his return to Germany in 1930.

In the meantime, the Beast captured the hearts of Martha Küntzel and Karl Germer, both of whom left Heinrich Tränker’s orbit on being confronted with a straight choice between the Leipzig bookseller and the Master Therion. Both Karl and Martha would become devoted, loyal friends of the Beast. Tränker, on the other hand, would become a whirlpool of hatred toward Crowley; Henri Birven would, in due course, absorb a pervasive dose of Tränker’s ire for the Beast.

KARL GERMER

Germer was forty years old when he met his Master. Born in Elberfeld, northeast of Düsseldorf (Elberfeld was noted, coincidentally, for its German Plymouth brethren community), Germer studied for a time at the universities of Grenoble and the Sorbonne. Living in London between 1900 and 1904, Germer was employed as German rep—Berlin branch—for the UK’s Coventry-based arms manufacturer, A. P. Herbert, from 1912–14, representing Herbert’s in Eastern Germany and West Russia, while revisiting England in the period.

When World War One broke out in 1914 Germer joined the army, rose from the ranks to First Lieutenant (equivalent of Major) and adjutant, and served as machine gun officer in Belgium, France, Russia, and Serbia. He was awarded an Iron Cross (First Class) for courage on the Russian Front. Germer contributed to Prussian military intelligence and was wounded in battle twice. After the war, he became an entrepreneur.

Germer was already a Theosophist when he entered Tränker’s German OTO. Crowley liked the well-traveled, well-read, and well-informed Germer, though he always assumed the position of Germer’s teacher and analyst. For his part, Germer was always trying to teach Crowley what he thought was right and best and suffered not only from a “teachy” mentality but what Prof. Alfred Adler called an “inferiority complex”; this all made for sparks and regular conflagration over the twenty-two years of the men’s highly unusual relationship. That relationship was the lynchpin on which Crowley’s entire Berlin sojourn was based. It was Germer who made it all possible, and it was service of Crowley that gave Germer’s life its meaning, not a little excitement, and a trainload of angst.

Beginning in the summer of 1925, the relationship soon heated up. Crowley always said that anyone who got involved in his work had a devil of a time to begin with as every kind of test and pitfall would come the way of the aspirant. This was certainly true in Germer’s case.

Crowley’s presence and Tränker’s subsequent attack on Crowley convinced Germer that Tränker had been abusing his generosity from the beginning. Germer had been funding Tränker’s purposes, something Germer’s wife, Maria, could not ignore. When Tränker could see that Maria was threatening Germer’s support, it appears Tränker tried to denigrate Maria in Germer’s mind. And when it appeared Germer was siding with Crowley, Tränker undertook to get Crowley out of the country lest Crowley’s influence lose Tränker his till-then faithful assistant.

Once Crowley could see the whole scenario for what it was he urged Germer to take “the traitor Recnartus” to court and see him disgraced. The process began when Crowley wrote to Germer from Cassis in Provence, “a painter’s pet village, very cheap” in October 1925, a few months after the conference.²

Crowley was following The Book of the Law’s instruction: “Choose ye an island!” (III, 4). For kabbalistic reasons the Beast thought he might be able to make his new headquarters out of a house on one of the beautiful Hyeres Islands off the Provençal coast. In the meantime he urged Germer to exert “moral pressure” to “bring Grau & Co. into line by pointing out that Tränker will be exposed as a common swindler and probably prosecuted; and that they can’t afford, as men of the world, to be mixed up with him.”

Still looking for a suitable island with Scarlet Woman Dorothy Olsen, Crowley wrote amid glorious weather from the Tunisian coastal town of Gabes (70 km from Djerba Island, home of most of the country’s Jewish population), on 8 November 1925:

I sent you letters for Public Prosecutor’s re Tränker two days ago. Rush this through: we can go for our money later. The chief thing is to cut short his career for crime. Note that your evidence—as translator between me and him is all important. Don’t let your attitude “I hope (against hope) that I may have misunderstood” &c. &c. &c. stand in the way. Stick to the facts, and jail him!³

Crowley’s “Statement of the Relations between myself (Aleister Crowley) and Heinrich Tränker” has survived, and it deals the dirt on the Weida Conference.

Crowley begins with an apology for his limited German. While he could get the gist of books on subjects that interested him, he needed a dictionary to peruse a newspaper and, when speaking, a very slow delivery. This position was basic to communications with Tränker. He explained how the encounter with Tränker began:

In the autumn of 1924, my then representative in America wrote to me that he had got in touch with a man named Heinrich Tränker whom he believed to be the true representative of the ancient Rosicrucian Brotherhood, adding that he was certainly in the possession of a certain secret of science known to extremely few people. He regarded this latter fact as certifying Tränker to be a man of proven honesty and ability.

From the year 1898 I had myself been in touch with a body which claimed to derive its teachings from the Rosicrucians [the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn]; but the historic proofs have never been supplied. I wrote at once to Tränker, asking him if he could furnish this proof: and certain other information on kindred subjects. I received answers voluminous indeed but vague and evasive. I gathered however that the proof required was to be obtained at Tränker’s headquarters. From the correspondence which ensued, I obtained the following main impressions:

(1) That Tränker was a man of independent means and one who, if not actually wealthy, could have been so had he not devoted his fortune unselfishly to the good of the Order. (2) This Order, with an inner circle of a few but distinguished names, international in scope, was openly in Germany, under the title of Pansophia or the Lodges of the Pansophic Orient, or some near variant of this term.

(3) That Tränker was the supreme head of this Order in Germany for that he had over 1000 members working under him and pledged to support him in every way in his Work. (4) That Karl Germer who translated the correspondence between us was his paid secretary or acting as such. (5) That Tränker derived at least part of his authority from the late Theodor Reuss, known as Frater Merlin or Frater Peregrinus. (I had known Reuss and understood that he had left Germany in consequence of a scandal connected with his Order [accusations of mutual touching of sex organs in rites]. (It would be too much of a digression to discuss the rights and wrongs or this matter especially as my information on this matter is imperfect and of doubtful value.)

Only the last two of these assertions of Tränker proved in the end to have any basis in fact. He showed me documents signed by Reuss conferring upon him certain authority. This authority was formally valid for me because whatever may have been the merits or demerits of Reuss personally, he was undoubtedly the legitimate heir of persons eminent and worthy of all respect and he was certainly in possession of certain secrets. An analogous case would be that of a King of questionable kingliness, but who was without doubt the son of his father and the father of his son; and as such an authentic monarch.

(6) In the course of this correspondence Tränker invited me to assume leadership of the whole movement which he controlled. He invited me to his house as a guest for the summer. The main object of this was two-fold:

Firstly, various Brethren of the Order from many countries were to be invited to meet me there in order to acclaim me as the supreme authority on the planet. (This is explained and confirmed by Tränker’s published statements in Pansophia—nos. 3 and 7, o4 [sic], and by various private letters.)

The second object was to come to a closer agreement on various obscure points both of theory and practice and to work together at the issuing of my instructions as translated by Herrn Karl Germer. (This is explained and confirmed by the above mentioned nos. of Pansophia; the former promises and the latter publishes a varied selection of translations from my writings.) For various reasons these translations were not carefully examined after publication, for some months, when it appears that, after Germer had passed proof for the press, Tränker secretly altered them in all sorts of ways thereby completely destroying their value by misrepresenting my work.

This barefaced outrage on hospitality and literary honesty and decency seems to show that he clearly contemplated an early overt breach of faith in any event; as his trickery was bound to be discovered sooner or later and was inexcusable.

Section D

The hospitality of Heinrich Tränker was indeed of a singular kind. I personally would not have treated a dog as he treated me and my wife [Dorothy Olsen], both of us in poor health, after the first few weeks. In fact, immediately after the first publication of No. 4 or 7 of Pansophia his manner markedly changed. There was practically nothing for us to eat; while he and his wife devoured enormous meals secretly in the kitchen. On the question of motive I can only explain this conduct in one way. There was no quarrel of any kind, his manner was always that of deference and reverent affection, but he had succeeded in stealing as much of my work as he could and had no further object in making my life tolerable for me.

During this period, in the first few weeks of which he had treated me extremely well within the limits of his imagination which in that direction were not large, I had formulated certain proposals to which he agreed enthusiastically. Up to and including the time of what is here called the Hohenleuben Conference, there was no difference of opinion between us on any “but minute points” and these differences were commonly the result or misunderstanding owing to the language difficulty. Mr. Germer’s tactful translations usually removed these obstacles at once.

Section E

The increasing discomfort of life at Hohenleuben forced us to spend more and more of our time at Mr. Germer’s house near Weida. The events of what is called the Weida Conference are best explained by the following episodes from the correspondence which took place at the time. These should be studied in conjunction with statements of the various witnesses present. (choose passages from letters.) It will be seen from the above that my real conviction that Tränker was a common thief and swindler and therefore an impostor in his claim to represent the Brotherhood was first implanted in me by my observation of his treatment of Herr Hopfer. Cross-examination of Germer made it clear to me that Tränker had deliberately set himself to delude and defraud Germer.

I must add that Germer was a most unwilling witness and defended Tränker’s integrity with the greatest loyalty until the facts became too strong for him and his eyes were opened. But even after that his extraordinary nobility and generosity of character has hitherto prevented him from taking firm steps to recover the money stolen from him by means of false pretenses. This revelation led immediately to the disclosure of Tränker’s motive in the incidents to be recounted in the following section of this statement.

Section F

At the time of my arrival in Germany, Herr Germer was seeking a divorce from his wife [Maria]. They were, however, for convenience’s sake, both living in his house near Weida. On my first visit to Weida (fill in date) I caught a distant glimpse of Frau Germer in the garden. She was dressed in white and was walking swiftly into the woods beyond the front gate to call her mother to lunch. She gave an impression of remarkable grace, energy and buoyancy. I looked at Germer in the greatest surprise; he told me: “That is my wife.” I had been given to understand that she was a hopeless morphine addict and in an advanced stage of diabetes. It was evident that any such story was sheer nonsense. (I studied medicine at Cambridge and King’s College Hospital London, and have specialized in insanity and especially drugpneurosis [sic].) I asked Germer to present me to his wife saying that I was perfectly sure that their present quarrel was a lover’s tiff and that I could put things right between them in a few minutes. Germer replied evasively. I did not realise that he and his wife were not on speaking terms. Germer was very much impressed by this diagnosis of Morphinism and diabetes, quoting Tränker as his authority. Note that at that time I had some reason to suppose that any statement of Tränker’s was reliable. I subordinated my own superficial judgment to his supposed intimate knowledge and experience.

Nevertheless, on my return to Hohenleuben, I brought up the question, and expressed an earnest hope that an early reconciliation might be possible. Tränker opposed any such idea, dilating at some length on Frau Germer’s inveterate wickedness; but I certainly found it strange in the following weeks that he should return to the subject again and again without provocation. In Germer’s absence, he would frequently bring up the subject saying emphatically: “Frau Germer—morphinismus” with a knowing look, at the same time going through the motions of making hypodermic injections.

In this conduct there was nothing suspicious; because no bad motive was apparent, it seemed merely eccentric. But as soon as it became clear that Tränker’s only interest in Germer was to rob him of his last pfennig, the whole plan became abominably clear. Frau Germer, the woman of the world, the highly educated doctor of medicine, was just the one person that he had to fear as capable of protecting her husband from his fraud.

It will be seen from the varied incidents in the above statement that every action of Tränker becomes intelligible only on the hypothesis that he is a perfectly unscrupulous, a cunning, ignorant peasant who is exploiting rare odds and ends of recondite knowledge with intent to defraud.⁴

From a series of addresses on the Tunisian coast, Crowley tried to coordinate the activities of the Thuringian Theosophists and Thelemites: illustrator Oscar Hopfer in Weissendorf, near Triebes; Germer in Weida; the printer Bernhard Sporn in Zeulenroda; the Leipzig-based Martha Küntzel; the Berlin contingent of Grau and Grosche; and telegraph clerk and Pansophist Otto Gebhardi in Danzig.

Germer quickly filled the gap left by the chaotic Norman Mudd’s resignation of 3 November 1925. Showing himself Mudd’s superior in concerted action, Crowley became ever more dependent on him, even though Germer himself found it difficult to muster the kind of one-pointed, go-for-it energy Crowley persistently expected for getting Tränker, or any other obstructions, out of the picture. The problem was that Crowley was clear in his mind that Tränker was unlikely to recover his senses from the shock of being found out, whereas those still living in Germany had to deal with the reality of Tränker throwing his weight about, making threats, and insisting Grosche and Grau could not establish anything in Berlin or elsewhere without his authority.

Crowley asked Germer to try to straighten out Grau’s thinking about the polity of the A A (Grau was still deliberating on his and Grosche’s relations with Crowley’s Order): “Please tell Grau that there are no ‘inner secrets’ in the A A , for that ‘mystery is the enemy of truth’ (see A A Oaths and Tasks), all is clear, open and frank. Rub that in!”⁵

As ever, Crowley was not some kind of ruthless sadist with regard to his enemies. He saw things clearly, but always kept a way open for reconciliation, even when the culprit had been exposed as a scoundrel: “forgive them for they know not what they do” was his guide in such matters, though he might vent his spleen in vivid language to unload his frustration as in the following letter, where Crowley makes an effort to accommodate Germer’s self-doubting point of view:

As to my good will toward H.T. [Tränker], sorry, but there’s one thing I can’t stick. That is ill-treatment of any artist [referring to Tränker’s alleged threats to artist Oscar Hopfer, whom Tränker had not paid]. Ask Mme Strindberg! I’ll cut the swine’s liver out in cold blood—any one who cheats one of the chosen sons of God, the seed of Apollo. Mudd is wrong, though, if he thinks me unjust—me, with Sun and Venus in Libra! (prime Saturn sextile Uranus too!). So far I’ve been mostly prosecuting counsel. Enthrone me to judge the case, hearing both sides, and I’ll talk very differently!

For all that, I have heard yet no word of honest defense from H.T.—nothing but violence, bluff, abject mental confusion, and the whole psychology of an exposed rascal. If he had even tried to meet you fairly, I should never have attacked him in the strain that I have.

My theory about the Ordeal of the Abyss was a last effort to defend H.T. Can’t Mudd see that? The alternative is that he [Tränker] has been in the Abyss for years and my contact brought the issue to a head. Provided always that his aspiration was ever pure enough. And I think it was: for if he has some spiritual insight (when not blinded by self interest, hate, vanity &c.) and certain sporadic magical powers. (These don’t prove purity, but witness a kind of sincerity, at least.)⁶

Germer was clearly fed up to the back teeth with the situation in Weida and Hohenleuben and made plans to sell his house while mutually contemplating divorce from his wife, Maria. Germer planned to go to the United States but wanted to join Crowley in Tunis as much as Crowley wanted to confer with him and arrange publication plans for a number of books (such as the “Hag”) so that Germer could get U.S. publishers involved. Hopfer, who was working as an artist on a German edition of Crowley’s book of magical and symbolic correspondences, 777, also wanted to leave the troubled area. Crowley told Germer to tell Hopfer that he too was welcome to stay at the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, as he and Dorothy had sent Ninette Shumway—still living there—some money. Hopfer could contact art centers in Sicily and find a way to enroll with art schools in Italy. In order to facilitate Germer’s getting a visa to come through France to Tunis, Crowley wrote him a letter appointing him his secretary from December 1925.

Germer needed money. Crowley suggested he sue Tränker for slander regarding comments made about his wife’s alleged morphine addiction. Tränker himself had the cheek—Crowley called it a “dirty joke”—to charge Germer for conference hospitality, while all the time he had protested before witnesses that he, Tränker, would cover Germer’s hospitality costs at Weida! “If I had the money I would pay you,” Tränker had said repeatedly.

Meanwhile, Crowley wanted to know what Martha Küntzel was doing with “The Arraignment of Hermann Rudolf before the Court of Honor,” a literary indictment of Hermann Rudolf, ITV Theosophical leader in Leipzig, showing the grounds of the Thelemic opposition to Annie Besant’s Krishnamurti World Teacher campaign. Crowley had hoped it would be published in Germany and the States before Annie Besant’s upcoming British Theosophical Congress vote on Krishnamurti’s role in the late spring of 1926. But nothing seemed to get done properly. Martha Küntzel could not understand the constant opposition to Crowley’s plans, his sickness and poverty in Tunisia, the failure to get Thelema moving. Since Tränker was putting it about that Crowley had sent demons to work evil in communist Russia, Martha wondered whether it might be some Tränker-evoked spiritual bedevilment that was frustrating the work of the Gods. In spite of all, Crowley blithely persisted with his own World Teacher campaign.

Germer could not get a visa for Tunis and found himself, as part of his probationary training, at the abbey in Cefalù in January 1926, doing pranayama breathing exercises, though not very well, according to his teacher: “Remember that THE WHOLE OF Yoga is to stop thinking,” Crowley advised his probationer. As for Cefalù: “I fear you’ll find the Abbey in a dreadful state of lack of everything. And it was once so perfectly formal in every way!” (Crowley to Germer, 16 January 1926).

As 666 was still “at war” with Mussolini’s government, Crowley could not go to the Italian consul on Germer’s behalf. Crowley told Karl not to overdo it with his yoga; pranayama should be like athletics: nothing contrary to good principle.

Crowley and Dorothy were also attempting to get Crowley’s daughter Lulu, or “Lulette,” over to Tunis to stay with them at their comfortable new accommodation at La Marsa, but a number of Italian and French officials persistently obstructed any progress on the matter, despite Germer doing everything he could from his end.

Crowley’s mind was also on Berlin. Knowing that Albin Grau worked in the film industry, specializing in stylish horror movies, he asked Germer to take on another task:

Please translate The Testament of Magdalen Blair [Crowley’s short horror story]. I believe it will make a great “Schreckfilm” [horror movie]—you might write to Grau giving him a brief synopsis of it and stating you will send him the full story shortly. Mention that it gives a marvelous chance for the photographer [i.e., cameraman].⁷

This was a great idea. Crowley’s chiller could have made a stunning film.

In February, tiring of Sicily, Germer tried to enter Tunisia without a visa but was turned back. His last resort was to go to the Traffico Internazionale in Palermo with a false name and passport (there were three Germans working there) and to enter Tunisia from Tripoli, which was Italian Libya at the time, as a tourist. If he didn’t stay too long he could move freely in Tunisia since tourists were sacred.

Dorothy Olsen wrote to Karl on Crowley’s behalf on 11 February. Poor Martha in Leipzig was being overburdened by a bone-idle Mudd, and by Leah Hirsig and her new baby (born in Leipzig; father William George Barron having left her to it). Crowley thought the only solution was to get Mudd back to England and out of his business, and to get Leah back to America for her own good, so that Martha would have her hands free to continue the good work in Germany.

Jane Wolfe had crossed from the States to help AC and Dorothy with typing duties. Crowley hoped Germer would find success with publisher Putnam’s in New York with a new edition of The Equinox; Putnam’s had asked to see the autohagiography. There was also scope for republishing The Diary of a Drug Fiend in the States. Dorothy would try to help Germer with her family contacts. The letter also refers, interestingly, to a film scenario (presumably Magdalen Blair, though Crowley was also thinking of his play Mortadello: The Angel of Venice as a movie, a project that would take up so much of his time in Berlin in 1931–32): “If Grau would pay up for the scenario he seemed to want so badly, we could help Miss Küntzel and Ninette, besides having a little reserve.”⁸

Karl and Maria finally made it to La Marsa in late March. Crowley wrote to Martha Küntzel:

Seniat el Kitou,
rue Massicault, La Marsa,
Tunisia
March 25, 1926

Dear little sister,

93

Please make sure that Mudd has not stolen my copy of 777, which he persuaded Germer to let him keep in direct contradiction of my most precise instruction that he was to bring everything of my writing. If it is not with you, please raise every kind of hell!

I am enclosing an Essay on “Man.” Please translate and send to Grau as soon as you can.*16

The Germers finally arrived, and have been with us since Wednesday.

93 93/93

Fraternally,

      666

Karl stayed with Crowley until the end of May when he left for the United States. He had had ample time to see for himself the difficulties that enveloped Crowley’s life, from Ninette’s incorrigible promiscuity in Cefalù, to Dorothy’s unstable emotional states, to the constant frustration of trying to establish a spiritual current on a shoestring, in spite of Crowley’s exceptional will power, irrepressible optimism, and clarity of thought. Germer could have cut loose but did not.

Crowley, naturally, feared that Germer could all too easily go the way of Norman Mudd and Charles Stansfeld Jones by getting his mind too wrapped up in trying to interpret The Book of the Law for himself, and generally getting messed up with the strains on his ordinary ego that service in a spiritual cause plus material responsibilities promoted.

Crowley spent the next years constantly warning Germer not to spend his time in introspection or any kind of speculation. He should do the Work and not think of “Germer” at all; that was the only way. As for his sexual problems (Germer was unsure what promoted purity), Crowley gave him good, solid advice of a practical kind. The following is a typical Crowleyan reproach of a type that would be repeated regularly for another decade: “I think you are quite in danger of destroying your soul-integrity by your habits of introspection and brooding about yourself. What you lack is a skin and you have replaced this by armor, which does not fulfill the function of a skin and irritates the exposed nerves.”⁹

THELEMA VERLAG

On 15 March 1927, a syndicate of six finally combined to form the Leipzig Thelema Publishing Company (Leipzig Thelema Verlags Gesellschaft). The shareholders were Crowley (with three votes and 35 percent of profits), Martha Küntzel (three votes, 10 percent of profits), printer Bernhard Sporn of Zeulenroda (three votes, 15 percent), Oscar Hopfer of Weissendorf (one vote, 15 percent), Otto Gebhardi (one vote, 10 percent), and Karl Germer, then in Boston, with one vote and 15 percent of profits.

One of its first publications was Book 4, Part I, Mysticism (Buch 4. 1. Teil. Mystik; illustrated, 134 pages, 1927), which sold for 2 Reichsmarks (RM). Book 4, Part II, Magick (Buch 4, II, Teil. Magie, illustrated, 256 pages) cost 4 RM. Also published in 1927 was Martha’s translation of “Short Introductory Essays” (Kurze einfuehrende Aufsaetze). This selection of Crowley’s essays probably also contained Ein Bericht über die Grosse Weisse Bruderschaft (an Account of the Highly Illuminated Brotherhood; 1927, 51 pages).

In 1928, Thelema Verlag published the following books, printed by Sporn (Munich printer Barth had sided with Tränker): Wissenschaft und Buddhismus (Science and Buddhism, linocut, 80 pages, RM 1.40, translated by Küntzel); Die Botschaft des Meisters Therion (The Message of the Master Therion; linocut by O. Hopfer, 88 pages, RM 1.50; Tr. Germer & Küntzel); Die wache Welt: Eine Geschichte fuer Kinder und Saeuglinge (The Wake World: A Story for Children and Infants, illustrated, linocut, 68 pages, RM 1.50; Tr. Küntzel); Berashit (Berashith, linocut by O. Hopfer, 48 pages, RM 0.80; Tr. Küntzel), and Ein Kommentar zu H. P. Blavatsky’s “Stimmen der Stille” (The Voice of the Silence = Liber LXXI, including: Die beiden Pfade, The Two Paths, and Die sieben Tore, The Seven Gates; linocut by O. Hopfer, 152 pages, 4 RM).

In January 1927, Martha had been informed by the committee of the Leipzig-based Internationale Theosophische Verbrüderung (ITV, or International Theosophical Brotherhood, founded by Franz Hartmann in 1897) that she and her lover Otto Gebhardi should no longer consider themselves members of the society and were not to enter the brotherhood’s Leipzig headquarters. Clearly, there was apprehension in some quarters, to say the least, over what Martha and Otto had been and were doing.

Küntzel had spent the previous summer informing the 120 ITV members attending their summer school in Thuringia’s Bad Berka spa town that Crowley was coming and that they would be able to form their own judgments on meeting him. Küntzel had written to Crowley of her certainty that ITV president Hermann Rudolf (who had taken over from Hartmann in 1898) was a Crowley reader. Rudolf constantly iterated in speeches that it was the members’ “Will” that would help them to get on. Crowley indicated he would come over if contacted by three important members of the Theosophical Brotherhood. In January 1927, however, Leipzig’s governing ITV committee was rather listening to the persuasive Heinrich Tränker about what had occurred between him and his former colleagues in Theosophical Culture Publishing.

Martha and Otto’s split with the Theosophical committee clearly precipitated their commitment to a completely Thelemic publishing outfit and explains why TS founder Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence was enfolded into its publishing program. The aim was for Thelema to assume the mantle for the new phase of Theosophical development, lest it languish in the grip of Annie Besant and her conspiratorial colleagues across the world, gathered about Krishnamurti.

There was urgency in this. In June 1926, the English TS had rounded off its congress with a vote on Krishnamurti as the World Teacher with 600 in favor and only 3 against; one of the dissidents, Loftus Hare, wrote to Martha about how Annie Besant had turned his protest into a news story of a “great victory.”

Shortly before the TS vote for Krishnamurti, the constitution and solemn opening of Eugen Grosche’s Fraternitas Saturni took place on Saturday 2 May 1926 in Berlin. Grosche wrote to Crowley about the fratres’ new, secret lodge and how, by the use of cosmic glyphs, the fratres had succeeded in magically harmonizing the lodge with Saturnian intelligences. Since a similar conception, called the Lamp of Invisible Light (LIL for short), had been assembled in Mexico by Crowley and Don Jesus de Medina in 1900, the Beast would doubtless have been intrigued by Grosche’s practical approach to a genuinely magical lodge.

Grosche addressed Crowley again in 1927, outlining serious plans for magical education and training. He requested “highly honored Master” Crowley’s “benevolence and spiritual support,” the lodge having accepted “your spiritual Law, to which it has submitted in the spiritual sense.”

We cannot be entirely sure how Crowley regarded the establishment of the Fraternitas Saturni on a slightly adapted form of Thelemic principle, and without organizational submission to Crowley. These were serious matters, but Crowley was no Thelemic bigot. Besides, Grosche’s periodical, launched in 1928, gave vital publicity to Thelema Verlag’s publications, which were sold from Grosche’s shop, Inveha, in Berlin. In June 1929, Crowley would write to Germer: “Saturn-Gnosis is a periodical for which Grosche is apparently in the main responsible. It is exceedingly well gotten up.” This was high praise from Aleister Crowley (see Grau’s illustrations for Saturn-Gnosis in the plate section of this book).

In his letter to Crowley of 1927, Grosche explained that the lodge had recently invited “Sister Küntzel” to Berlin and that she had given a talk to the fraternity. Martha probably brought new copies of Book 4 because, as Grosche informed Crowley, Book 4 had just appeared in German and was now “a required work for every Lodge Brother”; their Lodges of Instruction were working through it chapter by chapter. Frater Gregorius, Master of the Chair, then told Crowley about Frater Recnartus (Tränker) and “Brother Barth from Munich.” They were both in Berlin, living in reduced circumstances, and trying to build new lives: “We do not have any connections of any kind with them either.” Crowley already knew from a letter written by Küntzel in August 1926 that Tränker had sold his house and library in Hohenleuben—and still not paid Hopfer, or Germer, what was their due. Martha had said she would try to get what was owed out of Tränker.

In October 1927, Küntzel informed Crowley that Grosche had written to tell her that Tränker, having heard he’d been ejected from the Berlin lodge as a “false Master,” had voiced “the usual threatenings” and issued a statement:

I call your attention to the fact that the lawful control, propagation and practice of the following Rituals and Orders in Germany and all the German speaking countries is under my Masonic jurisdiction and I shall denounce any unlawful practices of them with all the legal power at my command.

(Signed) Heinrich Tränker

pp. Collegium Pansophicum

H.G.M.G.

33° 90° 97° X° etc.

Summum Supremem Sanctuarum of the Old Scotch Rite of the Freemasons of Germany.

Swedenborg Ritual of Freemasonry.

Order of the Oriental Templars. Hermetic Order G.D.

The Rite of Mizraim. 90° Oriental Rite of Memphis. 97°

Ancient and Accepted Rite of Heredom.

Hermetic Brotherhood of Light.

Fraternitas Rosae Crucis.

New Gnostic Church.

New Order of the Illuminati.

General Pansophical School.

Pansophic Society &c. &c.

Crowley, by now well settled in Paris, simply regarded Tränker as a parrot of Crowley’s own Masonic dignities. Germer, meanwhile, was still in the United States where, in New York, he had met Cora Eaton, from an affluent family and blessed with an independent income. Crowley met her in Paris on 21 August 1927: “Had Cora Eaton to lunch and found her delightful.” Cora, as Germer’s second wife, would of course become a key player in Crowley’s Berlin sojourn some three years later, though as his (and Karl’s) financial dependence on her increased after 1928, Crowley would find Cora less delightful.

With the epiphany of Gerald Yorke in Paris on 29 December 1927, the cast that would shape Crowley’s Berlin sojourn began to emerge, especially when young Francis Israel Regardie arrived in Paris to work as Crowley’s secretary. Born in London to poor Jewish Russian immigrant parents (surname Regudy), Israel had been taken by his father Barnett (a cigar maker) and mother Phoebe along with his brother Jack and sisters Sarah and Kate to the United States in August 1921, settling in Washington. Ellis Island immigration records show thirteen-year-old Israel’s profession as “scholar.” And scholarship he pursued through Washington’s libraries, with a distinct interest in mystical philosophy and yoga that led him to Crowley’s Equinox magazine series. Regardie wrote to Crowley, who advised him to contact his agent in the United States.

Like Cora, Regardie met Karl Germer in New York. Germer and Regardie enjoyed meetings in New York and Washington, Regardie’s home; they got on well. Germer communicated to Regardie his great enthusiasm for the Master Therion, and Regardie got the message.

On the night before setting sail for France in October 1928, Regardie dined with Karl, Cora Eaton, Regardie’s “dampener” of a sister, and Dorothy Olsen, still interested, if not as involved as hitherto, in the Beast’s activities.

It would only remain for the curse of Heinrich Tränker to return to foreshadow proceedings, in the form of Henri Birven, to kick-start the Crowley-Berlin experience.

A Theosophist (or “Toshosophist” as Crowley called them) with what he considered elevated contacts, Henri Birven began sniffing about Martha Küntzel for information about Crowley in late 1928. His approach was to take it upon himself to advise Küntzel that she might not be in the best position to judge the worth of her beloved Therion. In a curious letter of 16 October 1928—written as Regardie was arriving in Paris—Birven told her that he “knew everything” Crowley had read to reach the Thelemic philosophy, thinking himself positively brilliant for having located the section on the Thelemites and the injunction “Fay ce que vouldras” (“Do what thou wilt”) in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532) and for showing his knowledge to Tränker and Barth in Berlin.

Birven made it plain from the letter’s start that he had been consulting Tränker closely about Crowley: “That Tränker is an antagonist of Therion today, cannot put out of the world the compromising fact that a man of his mettle was chosen to promote the Master’s work in Germany.” Birven claimed to be “an adherent of Thelema” and was willing to “disseminate his [Crowley’s] teachings” when he (Crowley) had come to Germany to hear the “earnest word” Birven had for him.

As a “P.S.” Birven asked Küntzel: “Why has Miss [Leah] Hirsig given up Therion? Tränker told me so some time ago, showing me letters from her, which I did not read.” He had already said in his letter that Tränker was the source of anti-Crowley calumnies doing the rounds.

Remarkably perhaps, Tränker’s creepy, patronizing letter did not rile the Beast.

Birven seems to be a darling old idiot. What he says about knowing all my works is, I think, absurd and I am sure he does not know their sources either. He thinks he knows everything, but at the same time he talks about a time when I was not acquainted with the works of Rabelais. It is true that there was such a time, but I was not then out of my teens.

He does not seem to know that St. Augustine said “Love and do what thou wilt.”

. . . On the other hand his general line of thought is quite fair in its way, but the whole thing is muddled. What Therion says and does is of no importance to anyone. The work has to be judged by its value and that can only be tested by experience.

You might tell him, if you think it desirable, that Miss Hirsig was excluded from communication with us because she allowed Mudd to make her his catspaw in a treacherous scheme which he had inaugurated.

Birven came back to Küntzel with more of Tränker’s calumnies: that Crowley’s was a teaching for drug maniacs; that the only two people in Germany ready to follow him were so old they had to shuffle along (a cruel reference to Martha herself and Otto Gebhardi); that he (Crowley) had sent demoniacal spirits against Russia, and that Crowley was wanted by the police in many states! In a letter of 12 November 1928, Küntzel addressed the “arrest on sight” myth directly:

When I called Therion’s attention to this a few months ago that Tränker had written at that time to the one Lodge still subordinate to him that Therion should be arrested the moment he set foot on German soil, he replied that I should not get excited over it. Tränker would become silent automatically when he arrived and keep [out] of his way. That was the sense of the answer—I do not know it literally. He counselled to forget all about Tränker. That this is not feasible is evident from Tränker’s actions.

. . . That the works of Therion will never reach the big masses goes without saying. They were not intended for them, but for those who are ready to become leaders of peoples, in recognition of the scope of the Law of Thelema; for the individual, and finally for the masses. If up to date there has not been a single scientist in Germany who is a believer in Therion; that is only because of the minute possibility of disseminating his works. In the first place those which have been translated are merely small things, and secondly, it takes a man of learning to show his colleagues the way. For that reason I was so glad of your cooperation.

Birven, from his height, accused Küntzel of sentimentality in her judgment of Therion, averring that she was incapable of coolly judging Therion’s works, or of understanding them. This jibe appears to have been mooted on the basis that Martha had asked for some help with translation from Birven; she paid an unpleasant price for it. To cap it all, Birven then became snooty about Grosche and Grau: “You [Birven] say at last you would consider it under your dignity to divide his ‘favor’ with Grau and Grosche. Therion has no favorites. He takes each one for what he is worth.”

True. Crowley had Birven’s number but recognized that Birven’s word went far in esoteric Germany and even beyond, and even he, like anybody else, might yet see the light when the darkness in his mind was dispersed by the truth. Nevertheless, Birven seemed, above all, to be the personal conduit of anything negative said or written anywhere about Aleister Crowley, and he chose to play devil’s advocate, perhaps because the devils were afraid to confront Crowley even indirectly as Birven did and would make a practice of doing. One might even begin to suspect that Birven was acting “in the pay” or at the will of other persons.

Regarding this suspicion, we may note that while Birven the professed admirer of Thelema was considering translating and adapting Crowley’s work for his Theosophist periodical, Hain der Isis (Grove of Isis; 28 issues; 1927–31), he was busy absorbing what French Jesuit-trained Catholic-turned-Muslim mystic René Guénon had to say about 666.

In October 1929, Guénon had taken issue with an article in the Paris-based, Catholic, anti-Masonic periodical the Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secrètes (RISS). The RISS liked to present Aleister Crowley as a dark force operating as a sinister master of any number of Masonic organizations dedicated to leading the faithful from salvation to Satan. Guénon demurred from this hysterical view on the grounds that, contrary to the hypothesis, Crowley was not really significant at all. As for Masonry, Crowley would not even be permitted entry at the lowest rank of the Craft.

It should be noted that Guénon’s article appeared in the French Martinist-inspired periodical, La Voile d’Isis (The Veil of Isis, October 1929), edited by Paul Chacornac. Guénon had been writing for Chacornac since 1925. Note the title. Henri Birven also wrote for La Voile d’Isis, and when he established his own Theosophical periodical, he borrowed the moniker, with a variant. Isis’s veil became a grove, or garden (Greek: kepos), the Hain der Isis. Birven was emulating a Parisian intellectual organ, but not just any old organ. Though Guénon was now a Sufi in spiritual orientation, until 1912 he had been very closely involved with Gérard Encausse, Martinism, occult Masonry, and had even been ordained a bishop of the French Gnostic Church. This was a kindred background to many leading Theosophists, including Birven’s backer in the Hain der Isis, Dr. Ernst Christian Heinrich Peithmann.

DR. PEITHMANN

Peithmann had a mutual contact with Birven: the German writer Gustav Meyrink. While Meyrink was now interested in Crowley, it had been Lutheran pastor Peithmann who had caught Meyrink’s attention in 1923.

In 1904, Peithmann had penned a “Gnostic Catechism” akin to Joanny Bricaud’s “Gnostic Catechism” (1907) and the 1899 “Catechism of the Gnostic Church Explained” of Louis-Sophrone Fugairon. As Sophronius, the latter would become Bricaud’s Gnostic Bishop of Prague.

Peithmann joined a Martinist Order of the Grail, founded in 1893, headed by Papus (Gérard Encausse). For Peithmann, the order lacked something. It lacked Peithmann’s idea of sexual magic. He wanted to infuse a Gnostic sexual magic into the tradition (the distinctive “Synarchist” concept), or rather back into the tradition, and to do so Peithmann founded his own Old Gnostic Church of Eleusis, which included sexual doctrines intended to generate spiritual freedom, as well as to make manifest the fruit of studies published 1903–9 on pre-Socratic philosophy and Gnostic heresiarchs of late antiquity.

Peithmann passed through Ellis Island, New York, on 20 June 1909 as Christian Peithmann, giving his age as forty-one, his profession as clergyman, his nearest relative, his wife Maria Auerbach of Südhemmern, and his destination (and previous home): Webster, South Dakota. In fact, he had first emigrated from the Minden region in 1898, receiving his doctorate from Minnesota University with a study of Kant.

In June 1927, Peithmann returned to the family town of Südhemmern (Minden-Lübbeck Kreis, North Rhine-Westphalia) with wife Luise Pagemann of Springfield, Illinois, after a long American sojourn in South Dakota.

As “Patriarch Basilides,” Peithmann would be visited by Birven’s associate, Arnoldo Krumm-Heller. Peithmann confirmed KrummHeller’s powers to create congregations and parishes granted in 1930 by what the latter called “the high dignities of the Ancient Gnostic Church” (probably James Ingall Wedgwood of the Theosophist-friendly Liberal Catholic Church).

Birven’s mixed, nervous response to Crowley reflects that of the leading Theosophists of the period. Crowley was hot stuff, perhaps too hot; he was dangerous and he had the TS in his sights, but Birven could not get over the startling contrast between everything he was being told about Crowley and the extraordinary and original mind he could not help but encounter in Crowley’s writings. It was as though Birven was constantly seeking permission to appreciate Crowley, even from Crowley himself. On 21 October 1929, Birven wrote to Crowley about Guénon’s article:

Guénon says, in a polemic with the Revue Int[ernationale] des Sociétés Secrètes (Voile d’Isis, October 1929), that if you were to present yourself at the least apprentice lodge, you would be turned away at the door with all the honours due to your rank. (!) This is idiotic, but it also proves that people do not know you.¹⁰

Crowley’s reply shows the relaxed contempt in which he held RISS propaganda:

Thank you for your letter of the 21st, which reached me this evening in the country [Kent]. Monsieur la Guenon’s monkeying around amuses me. What a wheeze!¹¹

Note that Crowley cut the acute accent from “Guénon.” In French une guenon is a female ape! Crowley’s apparent insouciance should not be misunderstood. A month after meeting Birven, Regardie wrote to Yorke that 666 appeared “anxious to get hold of that Froggy [French] magazine La Revue des Sciences [an error for “Sociétés”] Secrètes. Did you order it from Watkins [bookshop]?¹²

Crowley certainly was not obsessed by conspiracy theories (he was, and is, the star of so many!), but Birven was clearly thinking in that direction, though from what precise angle is unclear. Shortly before trying to elicit a response to Guénon’s attack on Crowley’s Masonic credentials—baseless from the point of view of a man, Guénon, who had long kept the society of Masons belonging to what the United Grand Lodge of England would call “irregular” orders—Birven had written to Crowley asking his opinion of a British periodical called The Patriot, which not only took cues from the RISS but itself embodied the anti-Jewish, anti-Masonic, anti-internationalist, anti-socialist position of Nesta Webster and her right-wing and Fascisti associates.

Crowley looked at The Patriot coolly from the psychological perspective and assessed it for Birven as “a ‘journal d’opinion’ of the basest class. It gets subscriptions and subsidies by playing on the fears and prejudices of people who see Jews and Bolsheviks everywhere; as in earlier days they saw witches, heretics or Jesuits.”¹³

In other words, if you believe that, or the RISS, you’ll believe anything. Grow up!

Three months after putting Birven right on that issue, Crowley had cause to set Germer’s mind similarly at ease. In the process, 666 made clear his attitude to “spying,” and those who might spy on him. Crowley’s outlook is refreshing:

You [Germer] then say that at a certain time “everybody thought that everybody was a spy around you, Marie, and thus, also, me.” I don’t know whom you mean by “everybody.” My own attitude to the business is simply demonstrated by the fact that I make rather a point of taking no precautions whatever against spying. I have nothing to conceal, because nothing can possibly go wrong. If things happen which people normally consider unpleasant it is simply another amusing incident in my career. All these things only have to be looked upon in perspective for their absurdity to become apparent.

The outstanding case in history is the Jesuits, who devoted the greatest intelligence and the most unscrupulous abuse of intrigue to their ends. They were beaten at every point by perfectly plain simple minded folks, who did not bother about them. The only mistake you can make with Jesuits is to take them seriously; by doing so, you go on their own dirty plane, where you are naturally beaten by their superior technique; and you have soiled your hands in the bargain.¹⁴

RETURN TO HOHENLEUBEN

It is April 1930, and we find ourselves with Aleister Crowley on his way to Berlin to see his friend of four and a half tumultuous years, Karl Johannes Germer. 666 had written to Karl from Oddenino’s: “Expect I’ll be coming to Bremen on the 17th. Will wire, phone or write at last moment. The Mandrake has broken out in a new place! Oh Lord, how long?”¹⁵

Come the 17th the Beast boarded the ship Bremen from Southampton to Bremerhaven, reaching Berlin at 9:18 p.m. on Friday 18 April. It was Good Friday. Crowley certainly knew what it was to nail himself and his works to the cross, but he had done it not for redemption from sin, but redemption from the idea of sin. No wonder the Jesuits were upset.

On the Sunday, Karl showed off his new car and drove Crowley and Marie to Leipzig where Mrs. Crowley was lodged for a week with the ever-faithful Martha Küntzel. Crowley witnessed a street battle with communists. The next day, presumably to make a point, Karl and the Beast drove south, back to Hohenleuben. It was now nearly five years since the Weida Conference.

They took lunch on what Crowley called the Field of Victory—presumably where 666 had been proclaimed OHO of the OTO—and met up again with Oscar Hopfer. Crowley bought the poor artist’s painted reproduction of the famous Stele of Revealing, the original having first been seen by the Beast in the spring of 1904 in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum: catalogue number 666.

Crowley’s diary then records that Tränker was “hunted for perjury.” There is no indication that Tränker was found, though he may well have been invited. Crowley’s prophecy that when he, the Beast, returned, Tränker would hide, was, it seems, fulfilled.

The Beast had, indeed, returned.

But to what?

FIVE

COSMOPOLIS—CITY OF THE FUTURE

Berlin was a Beast. At least, Otto Dix thought so. Not every artist in Berlin worked with a moral purpose, but Otto Dix did. His triptych City (painted 1927–28) shows Berlin as something passing reality by. The reality Dix focuses on, but which everyone in the triptych ignores, is a disabled soldier reduced to beggary: a hero of the Reich deposited like a turd on the street. In the first of the paintings the twisted veteran is surrounded, but not seen, by city lowlife, indifferent to the cripple. The central panel reveals an interior dominated by a curiously vacuous, two-dimensional jazz band intent on exciting abandoned female dancers to shake the fringes of their short, shiny dresses.

The third image shows the disabled soldier slumped for support against a cold marble art nouveau facade, his prosthetic legs removed. Garishly dressed, a procession of prostitutes pour past him, avoiding his sexless stumps. They are coming from, or going to, a show. The tart at the front’s dress is open, the blouse deliberately billowing. It is a huge vagina: a modern succubus.

The triptych, a format invented for altarpieces, should remind us of the Garden of Earthly Delights by Renaissance artist Hieronymous Bosch, with its starkly weird heaven and hell contrasts. Dix shows us earthly delights and earthly realities whose eternal message is drawn from the transient life of the city: “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36)

Not everyone saw that transience as morally suspect. While Irmgard Keun in The Artificial Silk Girl (1932) saw Berlin as “a whirl of life,” the common word for Berlin’s hectic convergence of street energies was Betrieb, understood as “bustle” or just “business.” Just business. That’s what made Berlin tick. Nothing personal; Dix understood. But then, the impersonal can be exhilarating. Think of the traffic. Think of a traffic jam in Potsdamer Platz: horses pulling milk carts compete for position with semi-convertible motor taxis, their rich customers open to the sun on the backseats while limousines with generous running boards jostle into the throng, anxious for starter’s orders. Shoppers sit tight in open-topped omnibuses below the eternal buzz of electricity, shooting through the cables like a junkie’s rush above the streets to power the lamps suspended above the pent-up need to hurry: hurry to the future just a dream away. The future would unjam in a moment.

Fig. 5.1. The Haus Vaterland pleasure palace on the Potsdamer Platz (right of center): five floors with twelve themed, electrically sophisticated, multinational restaurants and a variety house able to cater to 6,000 patrons in any hour, with neon bands pouring from a roof said to resemble a giant penis.

Fig. 5.2. A Tauentziengirl team. Often working the Tauentzienstraasse as identically dressed mother and daughter pairings, they were classified as Class Two Kontroll-Girls, known for flapper costumes, hats like bathing-caps, and fresh Berlin attitudes. Comparing them to “swamp lilies,” Curt Moreck admired the Tauentziengirls’ “ iridescent, demonic perversity.” (From Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon)

Since the birth of the German Empire, or Reich, in 1871, Berlin had exploded from a population of 800,000 to an incredible peak of 4.3 million when Crowley arrived in 1930. Whereas Old Berlin consisted of six boroughs, including Tiergarten, Wedding, and Kreuzberg, by the end of 1920 the city had incorporated no less than seven of the surrounding towns, including the poorer areas of Neukölln and Spandau, as well as the more fashionable Schöneberg and des reses of Charlottenburg, where Karl and Cora Germer had their apartment. Charlottenburg was part of the classy West End of chic flats and semi-palatial villas, many built to last in the classical modern style. The demarcation between the west and the old east end of Berlin was as marked as east and west London, though not as extreme a contrast as that between Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Harlem. As with Harlem in the 1930s, a great deal of the excitement happened in the east.

Berlin emerged from the catastrophe of World War One in a brittle and dejected state. Fear of the pot boiling over meant that the democratic revolution’s National Assembly of November 1918 was declared and gathered in nearby Weimar (hence the “Weimar Republic”) rather than at the Reichstag; Berlin was felt to be too volatile to ensure delegate safety. But once the new state had been declared, Berlin, as the republic’s capital, had to assert itself. This it did by the most thorough embrace of the concept of the “modern” the world had ever seen.

City architect Martin Wagner called his intentions-book Das Neue Berlin: Die Weltstadt Berlin. “Weltstadt” is usually translated as “cosmopolitan,” but it means literally “world city,” and while something of this image undoubtedly informed Fritz Lang’s famously futuristic Berlin-made movie Metropolis (1927), the word “Cosmopolis” might have served Lang better, for all the ambition that architects like Wagner put into their practical dreaming. After all, “metro” comes from the Greek for mother, indicating the “mother city” of a colony; cosmos can mean both the world, and the universe: a total world in which Man lives and dies. The cosmopolis of Berlin would draw dozens of brilliant satellites to itself, great and still famous names that made cosmopolitan Berlin in the 1920s a brief but unforgettable Golden Age.

Modernism dominated the new squares and rectangles of Martin Wagner’s “Neues Bauen” (new buildings). Sixties-like pamphlets abounded showing not so much a swinging lifestyle as a determinedly upwardly mobile one, if only just out of reach. In one of them, a tidy young couple gazes in wonder at Martin Wagner’s Wachsende Haus (Berlin, Deutsches Kunstbuchverlag, 1931). This ideal of the growing house, flexible and affordable housing, while innovative, felt natural to Wagner’s new Berlin. The 1932 Berlin summer show exhibited entries for the growing-house competition, houses easy to assemble and extend: prefabricated. There would be something disposable about the new, modern Berlin, as disposable as the last war’s broken hero.

But the brave new architects did not think the glass of the new could be smashed. Evolution guaranteed the right of the new to survive. In only thirty years the thought of Berlin’s architects had gone from the modern classical style, to the impetus for movement from the 1920s Futurists, and then to the ideal of a return to basic form with the minimal aesthetic of the Purists. Had the Nazis not taken over, Bruno Taut’s dream of a house of glass would have graced not only the bright new show-books that emanated from the business professionals of architecture but also would have towered to the heavens from the streets of Berlin.

While the November 1918 revolution marked the appearance of the famous Novembergruppe of painters, architecture too witnessed its own cultural bomb, the Work Council for Art (Arbeitsrat für Kunst), for which Taut was spokesman. He joined fellow architects Walter Gropius, Hermann Finsterlin, and Erich Mendelsohn in a utopian dream, a heaven of the imagination they would bring to the Earth to make it new. Was Taut being impossibly arrogant, or was he simply not kidding when he declared in his Arkitekturprogramm: “First of all, this construction will require a spiritual revolution.” A spiritual revolution was the one thing Berlin did not have, though Aleister Crowley intended one.

Despite Londoners’ amusement at the new glass “Shard” that has recently shot up the city skyline, there is nothing new under the sun, no matter how much it glistens. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed just as stunning a glass skyscraper for an office block next to the Freidrichstrasse S-Bahn station in 1921. To see his mock-up is to witness a visitation from above: a glass encounter of an architecturally alien kind. Gifted with the curse of hindsight, we can now recognize from the post-war American realization of van der Rohe’s dream of steel and glass prisms that, in Rainer Metzger’s fine phrase, “utopias disintegrate when they are implemented.”¹

When the no less utopian John Lennon took an architectural image for his song “Steel and Glass” in 1974, he used it to evoke something cold, exploitative, and imprisoning: reflecting, not absorbing the sun; the modern dystopia had no heart. Such a conclusion would have shocked Bauhaus cofounder Walter Gropius in 1919. A cornerstone of the Bauhaus creed was the questionable view that a revolution in form ran in step with a re-formation of society. Though Bauhaus had its headquarters in Dessau, it was arterially linked to Berlin, and in October 1932 the Bauhaus made the move to where it belonged. Tubular furniture went amazingly well with the new Berlin and its underground tubes and (in 1930) its shiny tube-like escalator that linked the underground (U-Bahn) with the overground (S-Bahn) station at Innsbrucker Platz, despite the discongruity of a contemporary photograph that just happened to frame the bright new escalator as two SA brownshirts in Sam-Browns momentarily ceased their strutting to let the motor of the modern bring them gently to the surface, like rats from a sewer. There had been no spiritual revolution to go with the change, though the Nazis promised an ersatz version of one, even as they rejected the internationalist cosmos of the cosmopolis.

It might have seemed that the Great War had been made for architecture, so neatly did it cut off culture from the old with the swift anesthetic of the new. The same thing would happen after WWII of course, when the Western world, without realizing it, imitated the process of post-WWI Berlin, even down to the window frames. Looking at Erich Mendelsohn’s enlarged and renovated facade for publisher Rudolf Mosse’s newspaper group on the corner of Jerusalemer Strasse and Schützenstrasse (1921–23) reminds this author of the new Birmingham that shot up almost before you’d noticed in the 1960s, where there was the same optimistic cry for a classless harmony set in reinforced concrete.

The modern world makes extraordinary demands to make itself extraordinary. The new Berlin, the city made self-conscious, the city that created itself in the process of its self-realization and idealization, this city had to be flexible like the growing house that it was. It had to be touch-sensitive to innovation, accommodating of cars, electricity, telephone, cinema, radio, cabaret, clubs, and cafés: a politicized population that needed entertainment as much as hard work. The city had become something like a factory, its streets conveyers, production lines.

For the first time books started to appear with critical theories into what it meant to live in the city; many of these texts stand as key insights into the modernist experience.

In 1931, Robert Seitz and Heinz Zucker edited an anthology on the subject (Um uns die Stadt: Eine Anthologie neuer Großstadtdichtung, Sieben-Stäbe Verlag, 1931) with a startling cover by Martin Weinberg that still looks impressively modern today. The writers drew special attention to the equation between business and free time “busyness,” the necessary fixes of distracting entertainment injected because life in the cosmopolis involved pressures unknown to the provinces. These things required understanding if the growing house was to grow and its population with it. What all this added up to was the uncomfortable fact that, in Rainer Metzger’s unhappy pun, the days were “filled but not fulfilling.” The new city was creating a spiritual void within itself, a beast of nothingness, a real city that passed reality by. And we see at once what should have been an opportunity for Aleister Crowley, for he of all people saw clearly that modernity itself creates the space and void that only the spiritual can ultimately fill. Crowley’s Berlin trajectory was spot-on, at least in theory.

But it was not only a spiritual void that threatened the stability of the cosmopolis. History held a buzz saw over the city’s iron neck. When the Weimar Republic had been founded, it had a novel (for Germany), democratically elected, lawmaking National Assembly, together with the paraphernalia of well-organized modern party politics. The country’s executive, administrative, and legal establishment, however, remained as it had been, while the lives of the aristocracy and the rich capitalists operated practically beyond democratic control. The powerbrokers could still look down and sneer, and did so. The structure was weak. Excessively volatile economic conditions, exacerbated by war-reparation debts as well as the ever-smarting damage to German pride, all rendered state and society vulnerable at the base. Nobody could be sure the republic was permanent. Progressives who saw the necessity of moving forward alienated conservatives who were against changes already made. And yet, such was the state of things, that everyone wanted change, of some sort.

The Kaiser had abdicated in 1918, but his sons were politically active; the royalist cause enjoyed dogged support. The absence of monarchy encouraged nostalgia for pre-war conditions. Germans had never had so many elections—national, regional, and local—and, as always when times are hard, too many elections breed resentment because they invariably prelude disappointments to come. It was not the case that Germany was simply torn between the extremes of communism and Nazism, as is often imagined. There was a very well-supported majority center: the Social Democrats who paid the mass unemployed their doles; the problem was that the extremes were so heavy at either end, so relentless in their destabilizing criticism and targeted lawlessness, that there was insufficient time to develop the necessary confidence in a young republic so sensitive to public opinion in the new age of mass media. Furthermore, there was no glamour to illuminate that image of the “young Republic.” Paul von Hindenburg, its president since 1925, was the son of a Prussian aristocrat. The old boy was eighty-two when Crowley arrived in April 1930.

Reflecting on the Berlin of 1920–33 in a piece for Magnum magazine in 1961, playwright Carl Zuckmeyer wrote: “The arts blossomed like a field awaiting the harvest. Hence the charm of the tragic genius that characterized the epoch and the works of many poets and artists cut off in their prime.” The brilliant theater producer–director Max Reinhardt was remembered as having said how much he loved the “taste of transience on the tongue” where every year might be the last before the onset of some as yet indefinable catastrophe, waiting in the wings. That old Germanic apocalypticism was still scratching at the door, albeit a chromium one.

Berlin bore the invisible stigmata of a kind of schizophrenia. On the one hand, if in its determination to look to the future at all costs it could ignore certain realities (like the real cost of the Great War); on the other hand, it never lost its sense of the underlying reality of the situation, its fragility, its passing show, the memory of the brandished guns and torn-up street cobbles of the Spartacist revolt of 1918.

Berlin was never a soft-focus city. It was “in your face.” This palpable sense of reality was what drove the fabulous avant-garde of the period, more fabulous when one considers the absence of state funding; art had to pay for itself according to the vagaries of supply and demand. If nothing else, this kept the artists in touch. The fruits of their perceptual vividness strike us today. The artists we remember (if not always enjoy) spoke with a raw truth that Aleister Crowley for one, appreciated greatly, coming from a country of which a German said: “The English are a great people. They can cope with everything, except reality.” Otto Dix, for one, forced the viewer to face reality even while so many of his characters, drawn from real life, looked the other way. A certain harsh cynicism, easily misunderstood, was simply part of the process of assimilating reality. This had long been Crowley’s own perceptual and expressive apparatus: to see things brutally, so that he might not be led astray by the pied piper of bourgeois narcolepsy. Why do we imagine the Good Samaritan smiled, or was a jolly fellow? He might have looked at the mugger’s victim on the Jericho road and cursed: “Shit! Not another poor bastard!” If we do not see this, much of Berlin’s greatest art’s power will pass us by. Only the Good Samaritan, who did not pass by, could say truthfully and cynically at once to the innkeeper trusted to exploit the victim’s misfortune: “All you need is Cash!”

Competing with the artists’ contest for the firmest possession of reality throve a simultaneous culture of determined superficiality, of cosmetic arts, of ambiguous surfaces. Erik Charell, a great impresario, offered a glittering stage spectacular of 150 girls (yes, 150!). Hermann Haller paraded more of the same. And not all of these girls resembled the Jerry Girls who displayed the longest lines of curvaceous, unencumbered legs outside of Hollywood at the Scala Theater in Martin Luther Strasse. Many of Charell’s girls wore ties, monocles, breeches, boots, riding jackets. They might sport short hair with side partings: not a Rhinemaiden in sight, but satanettes of sex.

What in 1880s Paris had been an esoteric cult of the androgyne in the works of occult-drenched symbolist writers and painters had become a broad, popular adult entertainment as well as popular disguise. Men’s and women’s roles were being openly redefined in social discourse, and dress or choice of dress reflected that, though not always in an obvious way. Sexual preference might appear to change with the season; ambiguity was cool. Aleister Crowley, who had seen everything, toyed with Berlin’s more vulgar displays of lesbianism, male homosexuality, transvestitism, probably a little amused by its being so forced at the specialist clubs and celebrated in cabaret; Old World repression had fostered subtlety and refined “in” humor. Sex for Crowley required little in the way of show, just an honest desire. Crowley was, anyway, bound to see manifest sexual experimentation as a sure and outward sign that the New Aeon was not simply a question of New Neon reflected in streaks down the wet streets of Friedrichstrasse after dark. This, however, was not quite a case of our contemporary outing of sexual identity in search of liberation; visual androgyny was as much camouflage as revelation. One kept one’s true sexual identity to oneself or confided it to the lover. But there was tolerance, not perhaps as generous as might appear: a cool indifference was also part of the cultivated Berliner’s armory. Sex, though, was around about and talked about and acted upon, because that’s what it was to be modern, wasn’t it?

Fig. 5.3. The Lawrence Tiller Girls. Precision dancers trained in London and New York: “outsize glamour and lewd pictorialism.”

When it came down to it, Berlin was a little short of that which to English visitors—such as homosexual poets W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, or Stephen Spender—seemed its most obvious characteristic, namely, liberation. People who fought to create a utopia had little use for the idea of personal liberation, though personal expression in the name of the Cause was a different matter. But the artists associated with the New Objectivity movement, for example, though divided, did share the basic idea of expression for the purposes of capturing an objective truth, or reflection of truth, true for all, not a subjective or personal revolution. Utopia was almost uniformly regarded as the product of social evolution and reorganization. People could very easily become the counters in the game, to be reorganized and understood for their own good. Even the individual psychology of Alfred Adler, with which Crowley found some common cause, linked healthy minds to social integration as a basic requirement. Individuals are realized through the capacities of societies to accept them. What Crowley might have had to offer in the name of Thelema was, as he himself expressed it, something arguably more fundamental: the identification of free will with destiny. And Crowley had no time for utopias since as the opium smoker knows, and Karl Marx failed to grasp, it does not take a bulldozer to enter heaven: a well-stacked pipe and the right frame of mind can do it. Or as Crowley himself said: a yogi gets more pleasure from moving his leg than a millionaire gets from a week in New York. It’s all relative; there is no stable objectivity. Crowley had sixties-consciousness before the sixties became conscious.

Anyhow, the city was creating a new social type immune to the sophistications of bygone eras. This was the conclusion of Siegfried Kracauer’s God’s-eye-view: The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany. It was not an enviable type. The world was getting duller as the masses were drilled into their new 9-to-5 routines. Their hands were clean but joy was drained from the days by a succession of mechanical performances. Everyone was interchangeable: names on payrolls might as well be numbers. Only the typewriters were permitted their atonal song; the girls, the new kind of girl, the office girl, was wedded to the office, bound by fashion and wrapped in roll upon roll of paper. Just business.

After the introduction of the Rentenmark in 1924, and the amelioration of post-war hyperinflation, prosperity could be envisaged as a future reward for knuckling down, if everyone pulled together. Drilled at work, the office girls were drilled in collective lunchtime exercises: healthy, happy children of the system.

But the work was alienating; deep loneliness could reign in a typewriting pool full of girls “just like you,” watched over by line upon line of Leitz file boxes: filled but not fulfilling. Kracauer saw the dance halls as the only palliative, the lose-yourself culture of the foxtrot, the shimmy, and the Charleston: a way to forget about the monotony of the day and the certain dullness of tomorrow. The cinema was a cold, silver kiss of romance. One could get involved but get out again for a few marks, while marriage promised another drudgery. For Kracauer, work and entertainment despised each other. Culture was a kind of dole, a compensation for the boredom of work. Kracauer, a man of the left, highlighted alienation because he believed the left could conquer it in a worker’s paradise.

Chubby poet Kurt Tucholsky was a New Objectivist. His detached analysis revealed the role of the evening’s jazz band as simply “a continuation of business, but using other tools” (see Peter Painter’s anthology, Jazz and Shimmy: Guide to the latest Dances, 1921).

Whoever was right, the masses were in Berlin; the masses were Berlin: millions of them. And they could be addressed as a mass, by the new mass media. Multiplied with the speed of light and squared, the masses equaled energy and they could be made to respond to waves: radio waves. In 1931, an estimated forty-eight out of every one hundred households possessed a radio. While Crowley described radio as the opium of the people, some generous souls saw radio’s capacity to take art beyond the small world of the avant-garde and, at the agreed price of a loss of depth and sophistication, radio could become a theater both popular and original for the benefit of thousands. Radio could also become the instrument of the state for mass compulsion and the rotting of thought to be replaced by a false security derived from surrendering to the mass media’s realm of collective identity. The mass media had its stars of course, distant and worshipped: people who only had to sign their names to bring joy to the faces of their fans, that is, fanatics. They brought joy to the surface where it was flattened by its superfice into “mass hysteria.”

And Crowley said: “Every man and every woman is a star.” And Crowley did not like the mass media. He believed newspapers rotted the brain, though when he did read one, he made a point of reading papers directly opposed to his own views. It made more sense to know what the enemy wanted people to think than to leave one’s own thinking unstirred. Crowley would not be the marketing man’s dream consumer whose dictum is: the greatest profit from the greatest number, and the individual can back off or go to hell.

Berlin was well served by newspapers, you might say. In 1929 there were about 2,633 magazines and newspapers available to the people of Berlin. Of this number, at least 147 were dailies. There were two big publishers, both Jewish owned, and of course despised by the Nazis. Ullstein & Co’s massive ruddy factory was situated in Tegel, but they also had large branches in the city, such as the one occupying the corner of Kochstrasse and Charlottenstrasse. Every day, little one-man, four-wheel pedal-cars queued up outside it to collect papers for distribution. On the sides was painted “B.Z. a. Mittag,” the hugely popular midday paper. The cars had white pneumatic tires with racing spokes and a crank chain pedaled by men wearing a uniform peaked cap. Luckily for their tired feet, knees, and calves, most of Berlin is built on a plain. In addition to its book publishing wing, Ullstein also published the Berliner Morgenpost, the Berliner Abendpost, the Vossische Zeitung, and the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, a popular picture magazine. Ullstein’s big rival was Rudolf Mosse, founded by philanthropist Rudolf Mosse (1843–1920). Mosse had served as representative of Berlin’s Jewish community. His company published Berlin am Morgen, Berliner Nachtausgabe, Scherl, and the paper that announced the arrival of Aleister Crowley, the Berliner Tageblatt, Mosse’s flagship daily.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Berlin gauleiter (Nazi-Reich region leader), never let the publishers forget that they were in the Nazi Party’s sights; their days were numbered: Nazi tolerance of Jewish intellectualism, he taunted, was coming to an end.

Other notable newspapers on sale about the city were the communist paper Die Rote Fahne, the socialist Vorwärts, Ossietzky’s highbrow Die Weltbühne, and the agitprop paper the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, set up by Willi Münzenberg, leading member of the KPD and Soviet agent. In 1930, the Nazis operated their own media distribution with mobile newspaper stands. A man in a white jacket, wearing a peaked cap, would stop his motorbike, pull out a collapsible rack, and sell at the side of the road the Nazis’ own papers, covered in images of Hitler, swastikas, and Nazi banners. The Nazi Party too had the masses in mind.

But it was the Social Democratic Party that really had the broad masses at heart. Social Democracy would cater for them. In doing so, the party was imitating the big stores. For as Bruno Taut was busy supervising Britz, the massive new horseshoe-shaped housing estate in Neukölln (1925–33), transplanting the people formerly confined in five-deep rows of dingy rented blocks with no light, the Karstadt company was erecting its awe-inspiring new cathedral to the mass-consumer culture on the Hermannplatz.

Completed in 1929, the Karstadt department store in Neukölln, with its massive art deco blocks and elongated windows set in brutal squared stone, was a staggering monument to aspirational consumerism. At night, a neon-illuminated flat-topped square spire summoned the faithful from on high to come, worship, and consume, like the Wizard’s facade in Oz. Shopping was a social democratic religion, for “all that a man hath he will give for his life.” The market, anyway, was free. The consumer paid with his life.

In 1930, Thomas Mann’s brother Heinrich came like a prophet to this mountain of the eternal Now. He came not to purchase but to read his own work: to give it to the people where the people wanted to be. Mann had written Professor Unrat, adapted for Josef von Sternberg’s groundbreaking film The Blue Angel (released a fortnight before Crowley’s arrival) in which Marlene Dietrich sang about “being geared for love from head to foot” (Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt) and did more for stockings and suspenders than a million marks of marketing ever could, both filling and fulfilling them.

Heinrich Mann came to the newly opened Karstadt, the biggest store in all Germany, and read the work of his personal being to the masses. Was this a pioneering example of pop art, as Metzger suggests? For Mann, by his act, brought highbrow unto lowbrow in living theater. Kracauer might not have approved; for him the mass experience had no need for such lecturing, or condescension. The mass society had its own power, its own mystery. Mass experiences were good experiences. When the masses showed increasing disinterest for art events, they were being true to themselves. Mass culture in the form of boxing, cinema going, popular music, and dancing was consistent with the real, demonstrable movement toward collectivity, social consciousness, and the pleasure of quantity. Hitler saw the point: safety in numbers. Lines and lines of units in uniform, consuming his rhetoric, wills surrendered. For Kracauer there was a perverse aesthetic liberation, presumably his own, that came from accepting that the age of the genius was yesterday’s news, that the idea of personal being was the detritus of former times that cared nothing for the greater number of poor and excluded, huddled masses. Personal identity meant loneliness and isolation. The individualist realm of the personal was synonymous with the alienation caused by capitalist exploitation: such was the twisted logic of the determinedly modern leftist. Come on! Kracauer and his friends were saying to the nobs of Charlottenburg as well as to the artists with their visions and crises: Join in! The masses know where they’re going! They know what they want!

But this 1920s and ’30s pop art had no root in a stable democracy, which, when administered by genius, may just have the flexibility to absorb all manner of follies. But Kracauer’s dream was doomed; losing self is suicide. Hitler would show everyone what losing the self in the collective could really mean.

SIX

GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT

When Crowley bade England good-bye in April 1930, Robert Graves’s autobiographical book, Good-Bye to All That (1929), was still being talked about. Graves’s book scraped moss from a grave to reveal a corrupt and hypocritical old school British society whose catastrophic descent into industrialized slaughter during the Great War left it deserving of only the curtest brush-off. Crowley would have agreed at the time; the New Aeon beckoned. To reach it, Crowley took the conventional, luxury route. The Lloyd-Hapag Line’s beautiful SS Bremen was the established liner for U.S.-German travel (picking up English and German passengers at Southampton). Passengers were encouraged to take the swift Hamburg-Berlin train and check into reserved accommodation at the German capital’s greatest hotel, the Adlon.

The Adlon was the place to see and be seen. Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, and the royal houses of the world came to the Adlon. It is likely then that Karl Germer had booked Crowley into the grand hotel, at least to start with. A photograph taken from the roof of the Adlon the previous year showed a Graf Zeppelin airship hovering over the mighty Brandenburg Gate. The famous Victory Column was close by, as was the Reichstag, seat of the Weimar Republic. In the distance were four church spires, now gone, and down below, at the entry into the graceful, linden tree–lined boulevard of the Unter den Linden, double- decker buses, taxis, and open-topped convertibles swirled about the Brandenburger Platz. Had we descended the hotel’s very grand staircase and headed out into the bustling street, we should have seen working men in big flat caps slapped on their heads like rolled dough, while other men marched down the clean streets in ankle length, double-breasted overcoats. The better-off men’s gangsterlike Fedora and felt Borsalino hats dwarfed heads. On the Unter den Linden’s corner, we could have seen a balloon seller surrounded by children in woolly pompom hats, while all the time the traffic flowed back and forth through the great Brandenburg Gate.

The Beast entered the smart boulevard of the Unter den Linden: footsteps and horse-steps and motor traffic humming and snorting. It was always going to be challenging for a man whose golden twenties and early thirties had been spent in a late-Victorian sunset and Edwardian dawn of feminine fabrics, shapely corsets, prominent busts, and bottom-emphasizing bustles to admire the fashions of 1930. Coming toward him, in the dappled light beneath the breezy trees, were ladies in hipless dresses cut to the knee, waistbands below the waists. Hipline shapeliness was out, in favor of looser liberties. The wealthier ladies sported prominent prints: a Zeppelin airship in the pale blue sky with clouds emblazoned across the bustless torso. V-necks suggested sex, but necklaces inhibited the plunge. Some dresses had narrow sleeves, some no sleeves at all. Practically every hat was a cloche, hugging the head like a bell, designed to reveal, not hide the face in mystery. Some caressed the ears like German army helmets, some were strictly brimless and looked like felt thimbles. Lips were soviet red. High heels clicked on the paving stones. There were women in sleek traveling dresses with pert hats set at an angle with eccentric combinations of birds set upon them (“birdbrained,” Crowley would have thought to himself). There were abstract black and white art deco designs on rich fabrics, worsted wool, others silk, dyed with bright, contrasting colors. There was no shortage of glamour on the Unter den Linden. Crowley himself looked bohemian in a light blue cotton suit with plus fours and brass buckles at the knee, his shirt collar open wide at the lapels, taking in the warm spring air as he strode through history.

Aleister Crowley took his first dinner in Berlin at Hiller’s, 62 Unter den Linden (north side). Carl Hiller’s old restaurant was smaller and more comfortable than most of the big restaurants on the Unter den Linden. Purchased in gold by Mainz-born wine merchant and entrepreneur Lorenz Adlon in 1912, Adlon had enlarged Hiller’s as a step toward acquiring the nearby corner site for the great Hotel Adlon at the Unter den Linden’s west end.

Having dined at Hiller’s, Crowley made his way to a place that for the next two years became a regular haunt, the Café König (King). The aim of Thelema was to train initiated “kings” so perhaps it was that association, as well as the fact that the König was a magnet for real chess enthusiasts, that attracted Crowley to it. Anyhow Crowley, a Cambridge University chess half-blue, was on form that April night. He thrashed local chess celebrity Herr Kohlmann not once, but twice. After the chess fest, we can trace fairly exactly Crowley’s movements as he sought an evening’s entertainment.

666 was heading for what had once been the old suburb of Friedrichstadt Süd, due south of the Unter den Linden, just north of Kreuzberg. Crowley would have heard about some interesting clubs operating off the main streets. Had he chosen to savor the world-famous S-bahn, or overhead railway, he would have walked south down Friedrichstrasse, off the Unter den Linden, and mounted the steps beneath the glass-latticed canopy of the Franzstrasse station. An imminent steam train would shake, roar, and rattle him two stops down via Friedrichstadt station to Kochstrasse. From Kochstrasse it was a short walk down the neon-splashed Freidrichstrasse, with its brightly lit shops, theaters, bars, restaurants, taxis taller than a man with huge round headlights, and around the first corner on the right to Puttkamer-strasse, his destination.

Had Crowley chosen to walk, as was usually his wont (and necessity), he would have strolled toward the Unter den Linden’s west end, just before Brandenburger Platz, and taken a left down Wilhelmstrasse to the south. He was now in the administrative heart of Weimar government, rather like Whitehall in London but less cramped. To his right and left he would have seen the classical modern facades of the Arts Academy, the Justice Ministry, the Reich Chancellery, the Reich Ministry for the Landwehr, and the Reich Work Ministry, which had plenty of work with Germany’s nearly four million unemployed. Crossing Leipziger Strasse, Zimmerstrasse, and Kochstrasse the scene changed from serious government to serious entertainment. The next left took Crowley into a narrow street, where at Puttkamer Strasse 15 stood the naughty Mikado Bar (1907–33).

Fig. 6.1. The Passage—between Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse—by day a synthesis of Byzantinism and pornography, by night a hangout for Doll-Boys and their customers. (From Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon)

Fifty-four-year-old Crowley was now in the bosom of the New Objectivity art and literature movement. Unlike Expressionism, with its strong moral, passionate tones, New Objectivity tended to objectify people, and life itself, so the more a person resembled an object, the better. But before we enter the Mikado, we should look around us and realize that between Kochstrasse and Jerusalemer Strasse throbbed the powerhouse of Berlin’s journalism (Crowley’s admired Baron Wedderkop worked in Kochstrasse for Der Querschnitt). Here was celebrated a kind of pop art of writing innovation. The period’s best texts were written for commercial papers. There was a free-access culture, a mingling of professionals with, well, anybody. Top writers covered sports events with all the intensity of a Schliemann in quest for the lost city of Troy.

The Expressionist era was indeed over, not that many non-German commentators on the period have noticed. A degree of calm entered German life with the arrival of the Rentenmark intermediate currency in 1924, and, along with Gustav Stresemann’s successful anti-inflationary policies, emerged a new mode of nonchalance and studied cool. Facing the world, the superfice of Berlin reflected urbanity, smartness, and a metropolitan please-yourself culture. The primary exponent in paint of this change was Christian Schad (1894–1982).

Schad’s portrait of Egon Erwin Kisch, the Roving Reporter (1928), shows the reporter, topless, complete with tattoos, sitting unmoved on top of a construction crane. This is ironic because Kisch was seen as a writer from “down below,” a man of the people, but perhaps the people were rising too. There’s no Expressionist moral frenzy here. Schad was satisfied to paint the superficial calm. He painted not just reflections of life, but works that reflected back those reflections. Schad stayed in the cool and, interestingly, was considered by the Nazis a great German artist. Schad brought his iced pen and indifferent ink to bear on the Mikado Club. It is an exceptionally cool appraisal of a faux-exotic place full of lust for people-objects.

In Schad’s reflection of it, the Mikado, subsisting beneath tacky Asian furnishings and Japanese lanterns, beads and pantomime pottery, opens its curtains (just) to a clientèle of women sitting at the table of an ugly fat man with a huge mustache with his back to us. Two women are dancing together, and what might be a male transvestite is having his/her face stroked by another woman who is looking at a man who is himself coolly appraising the female-looking dancers, behind whom a hand can just be seen touching a bare, female bottom in a curtain’s gap.

Fig. 6.2. Christian Schad (1894–1982), The Mikado Bar, Puttkamerstrasse 15. © 2014 Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg/ARS, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

They all look perfectly calm and at ease.

Just another night at the Mikado, Berlin’s oldest drag club.

Heterosexual tourists came to see the drag queens sauntering from the ladies’ room, covered in scent, while masculine-looking women chose to avail themselves of the men’s room, and, occasionally, each other.

Weekends offered a complete transvestite revue, so, since this was a Saturday, it is likely Crowley got to see it. He would just as likely have seen and heard Baron Sattergrün (known as “The Baroness”) playing piano and a violinist who played dance music and tango ballads. To add to the anything-goes mood, a detachment of four or five divas with low-cut dresses and rubber breasts toured the tables demanding men dance with them. Transvestite prostitutes had apartments nearby and offered services to intrigued heterosexuals.

Fig. 6.3. Herbert Charles “Jerome” Pollitt (1871–1942), Cambridge Footlights cross-dressing entertainer who became Crowley’s lover in 1898 and introduced Crowley to decadent artistic circles.

From out of this picture emerged one transvestite whom Crowley got to know as “Fanny,” but who was later revealed as “Peter.” Fanny and the Beast seem to have got on very well indeed, well enough for Crowley to inform Germer on a future occasion that he planned a trip to Berlin just to see Fanny again. They were pals, and Crowley almost certainly enjoyed sex with Fanny. These were by no means unfamiliar waters for the Beast. One of his signed photographs in the Warburg Institute shows himself in powder, rouge, and lipstick, self-labeled “The Lesbian Dandy.” He had long tinkered with the culture of androgyny. His first-known male lover, Herbert Jerome Pollitt (1871–1942), used to perform a cross-dressing dance routine as “Diane de Rougy” inspired by Parisian lesbian Liane de Pougy. There was nothing new under Crowley’s sun. The Beast was not faux-exotic; he was the real thing.

The contrast between his night at the Mikado and the following Wednesday’s visit to forty-seven-year-old Henri Birven’s home at Schulstrasse 7, Berlin-Tegel, only increased Crowley’s impatience with the “idiot” Birven. But the next day brought a distinct improvement.

Somebody, most likely Germer but perhaps one of the artists he’d met the previous day (Worner and Plantikow), introduced the Beast to painter, caricaturist, set designer, and astrologer Hans Steiner. That Thursday evening, at Steiner’s studio, Crowley encountered Hanni Larissa Jaeger.

From the pretty town of Bernau, 10 km northeast of Berlin, blond-haired, blue-eyed Hanni Jaeger was the daughter of Martha (1882– 1966) and Hermann Jaeger (1879–1961), a farmer and market gardener who emigrated to the United States in August 1923, settling in Santa Barbara, California. A year later he was joined by his wife and three daughters: Kaethe, Else, and the youngest, thirteen-year-old Hanni. They arrived on the Deutschland from Hamburg to New York on 3 August 1924. Hanni would return to Berlin at least twice. In 1930, at age nineteen, she was in Berlin as a guest of artist Hans Steiner, for whom she modeled, while improving her own painting.

Hanni and Steiner appeared to be in what we now call a relationship. Crowley fell in love with Hanni the moment he met her. He had to be careful, to a point, as he wished neither to offend Steiner, who that day rang the Berliner Tageblatt on his behalf, nor his wife, Maria, who was staying with Martha in Leipzig for the week.

Crowley could not get enough of Hanni. High on the cream of Berlin, the Gods had sent him a peach. He called at Steiner’s studio the next day; Hanni gave him a little picture as a present. The next day, a Saturday, Crowley eased the growing tension with an act of sex magick with a Polish woman called Werna. The aim: health. Consciousness of his age and well-being after encountering Hanni Jaeger doubtless played a part.

Karl Germer got himself a driving license and drove the Beast to Wannsee, the most visited pleasure lake in southwest Berlin. The next day Crowley was driven to the northwest, to the lakeside suburb of Heilegensee where Arnoldo Krumm-Heller dwelled in a neat house in a neat, shaded suburban street at Jaegerweg 10. One wonders if Crowley observed the coincidence: Jaeger-weg. The way of Jaeger. Was he to go Jaeger’s way? Hanni Jaeger? And Jaeger meant hunter. Who was hunting whom?

Crowley met Krumm-Heller at four o’clock (their second meeting) and arranged to meet again on 30 April.

Born in Salchendorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, Heinrich Arnold Krumm (Heller was his mother’s name) began the twentieth century as a Theosophist interested in alternative medicines, later training as a medical doctor in the Mexican army. A disciple of Bishop Clement of the Martinist Gnostic Church (under Joanny Bricaud), Krumm-Heller received from Theodor Reuss the fringe-Masonic 90th and 95th degrees of the Rites of Memphis and Mizraim in 1908. He also received from Reuss in 1921 an OTO charter (as did Heinrich Tränker and Charles Stansfeld Jones that year), on which basis Krumm-Heller founded his FRA (Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua) in 1927 in Mexico, inspired by Tränker’s Pansophia “Rosicrucian” fraternity and neo-Rosicrucianism in general.

Crowley played chess again in the evening, losing only one game. The next day (Monday 28 April), Karl officially applied for £1,000 from Mandrake, and Crowley did the Berliner Tageblatt interview, after which Crowley, Cora, and Karl headed for Leipzig to pick up Marie. As Crowley put it: “With my customary calm courage I let Karl drive. He did so for 30 km. before overturning us into a ditch.” Crowley even reported the pre-crash dialogue:

(1) “Ease her up!” [said Crowley] He [Germer] didn’t: so

(2) “Are you mad?” He was: so

(3) “Take care of the glass.”

(4) “Let me lower myself, so that you can get out” (or words to that effect: I had been thrown on top of him).¹

Reflecting on the crash to Germer the following month, Crowley believed the whole incident had been caused by Cora’s “screaming sex,” which made her incensed that Crowley was physically attracted to a young, virile woman full of sexual fervor and youthful energy while Cora and Karl languished in a largely sexless marriage.

Crowley also had his problems. Marie came up by train from Leipzig the next day and got drunk in secret—the first sign of Crowley’s first wife Rose’s decline into insanity. This led to another row; Marie then found references to Hanni while rifling through her husband’s diary. Crowley had only a meeting with Krumm-Heller for lunch at half-noon the following day to look forward to.

Latin American Rosicrucianism’s founder dined with the Beast at Peltzer’s, an expensive restaurant. Shopping at the same doubt-shop as Birven, Dr. Krumm-Heller was concerned about Paris lies concerning Crowley being taken up by two big conservative Catholic South American newspapers. He was worried about Crowley’s reputation: concerns doubtless amplified by Birven and the determinedly absent Heinrich Tränker. Krumm-Heller was particularly influenced by Birven’s nervousness over comments in the French pro-Catholic journal RISS, or “International Review of Secret Societies,” where René Guénon was dismissive of Crowley’s Masonic credentials. Familiar with Mexican politics, Krumm-Heller feared the RISS’s negative press spreading to the conservative Mexican paper El Nación, which supported the Catholic Church’s politically engaged Pax Romana movement: anti-Masonic and useful to fascist and reactionary government. Crowley suggested Major Thynne get on to the owner of El Nación and La Prensa in Paris.

Krumm-Heller was particularly concerned with getting ordained as a Gnostic bishop; he probably knew that René Guénon had been consecrated Gnostic Bishop of Alexandria as Tau Palingénius by Fabre Des Essarts, patriarch of the Gnostic Church between 1903 and 1910. Krumm-Heller intended to follow Crowley to London, hoping to meet Bishop C. W. Leadbeater of the Theosophy-oriented Liberal Catholic Church before consecration, or possibly recognition, as a Gnostic bishop by Dr. Peithmann, whose Gnostic episcopal name was Basilides. Krumm-Heller apparently dedicated his work Logos (Berlin, 1930) to Peithmann (as Basilius), along with Tränker and Aleister Crowley. “Basilius,” however, might refer to Patrice Genty (1883–1964), Tau “Basilide” (Basilides), bishop in the Église Gnostique de France. Succeeding Fabre des Essarts as patriarch of that church in 1921, Genty would eventually conjoin his Gnostic ministry to Joanny Bricaud’s Église Gnostique Universelle in 1927.

As regards Crowley’s plans for controlling the TS, Krumm-Heller, the living link between European and South American Rosicrucianism, deemed getting Krishnamurti’s support the number one priority if the neo-Rosicrucian factions were ever to split from Annie Besant’s Theosophical Society and back Thelema.

That night Crowley dined with Hanni Jaeger and Steiner, an occasion that probably afforded Marie’s first glimpse of her much younger rival. So we should not be surprised to find that Mr. and Mrs. Crowley’s sex magick that night was devoted to Juventuti: youth, or rejuvenation. Crowley’s comment: “P.S. This most certainly came off!”

Mayday was Marie’s birthday. Crowley and the Germers bought her birthday presents before taking lunch at the lakeside Nikolskoe log cabin guesthouse at Potsdam.

Crowley wrote satirical verse parodying the cosmetic, vainglorious nature of 1930s fashions; he was not impressed by craven attempts at youth by frumps who failed to obscure the “goat-reek of clammy arms” while giving vent to the “flapping udders” of the charmless “hippohipped” fashion addicts. He was probably registering the relative delights of his wife, the large, blowsy Marie, and the new, lively, talented, sexy Aeon-child, Hanni, for whom he had the hots.

Marie was returned to Leipzig the next day. Crowley dined at the Eden Grill on Budapester Strasse before taking in the “good whores” of nighttime Berlin.

On Saturday 3 May, Crowley, Cora, and Germer drove into beautiful Schwerin, where we first found them in chapter 1, drawing up outside the Hotel Niederlandische Hof, en route for the SS Europa and Southampton dock.

HELLO AGAIN TO ALL THAT

Crowley’s diary for early May 1930 stops on the day of disembarkation (7 May) before resuming, ten days later, with the words: “One hell of a week’s hard work!”²

It was a hell of a week, but we should never know why but for the miraculous survival of Crowley’s contemporary letters to Karl Germer. Thus we learn that Crowley’s encounter with the world-famous psychologist Alfred Adler, which took place in Vienna later in the summer, was not only a mutual exchange of admiration and essential ideas but also involved a commercial proposition.

Acting as Mandrake’s commissioning editor, Crowley wrote from the SS Europa to Germer:

Tell Adler we’ll pay him real money—a whole hill of it—for a psychoanalytic study of the ex-Kaiser; to show how his “individualpsychology-conditions-synthesis” made and lost the war &c. This is my private idea, by the way, and must be treated as confidential; that is, if he [Adler] rejects the offer, he is pledged to silence.³

Crowley would broach the subject of commissioning a book from Adler again on 14 May:

About Adler, you should write to him, recalling yourself to his mind. Ask him to write a book on [Kaiser] Wilhelm II from his “individual-analysis” point of view. This will appeal to him especially, as one of his chief doctrines is that he rejects the [Freudian] Oedipus-complex, and claims that everybody goes wrong because of the will to power.

I think that it will be safe to offer him £100 advance on royalties, if he can make the book, say, 80,000 words. If he only proposes to write a small brochure it would be perhaps £50. This would be repaid to us out of his royalties which I think we could tell him would be 15%.⁴

Crowley rounded off his fascinating book idea by expressing how he could “never be grateful enough for the gorgeous time” Karl had given him in Berlin: “Put my nerves back in good shape again, and given me full confidence to bring off miracles in London.”

Would miracles happen?

Now demolished, Langham Chambers stood just north of Regent Street’s crossing with Oxford Street. In May 1930, Langham Chambers hosted the Aquila Press’s last struggle for life as a small publisher, producing fine editions of contemporary and classic authors, such as John Rodker and Christopher Marlowe. Despite Wyn Henderson’s able management, Aquila was a Depression victim.

Crowley’s next letter to Germer was addressed from the Aquila Press Ltd, 2 & 3 Langham Chambers, London W1. As a location, Crowley was impressed. It was only a stone’s throw from his pre-war OTO headquarters at 31 Regent Street. Keen to garner lost time, Crowley wanted Thynne and the Mandrake syndicate to merge with Aquila, or buy it, a development troubling to Karl and Cora; first Mandrake, now Aquila: What was going on?

Sure enough, Crowley asked Karl to send £500 of a projected £1,000 investment for convenience in managing the merger. Meanwhile, Krumm-Heller, who was due to come over to London to meet Crowley and Gerald Yorke, had been pestering Germer over paying for Crowley’s lunch in Berlin. He was also fretting as to how he was expected to take Crowley’s Thelemic position as prophet of the Aeon. Germer wanted to know what Crowley intended for Krumm-Heller, deeply involved in his own neo-Rosicrucian order activities. Crowley explained in a letter of 10 May: “What we are doing is to try to get the law [of Thelema] accepted as a universal moral basis for action, and the more people proclaim it, and the more people put it into their rituals, the better we are pleased.” As for himself:

I do not attach any value to the position which I happen to hold with respect to the proclamation of this certain Law. It is simply a nuisance. But I have not got this personal point of view; and, as you know, the essence of High Initiation is to get rid of it [the personal, or egocentric point of view]. It simply spoils all good work, and I hope that you can get Krumm-Heller to see this. It is no use his “clinging to his life’s work,” because so far as it is a life-work it will die with him. What does not die is the essential principle in a work, which filters through the generations, constantly modified, and renewed, until it forms part of the sub-conscious of the race. The trouble with these critics [marginal note: “My worst crime is that I am a gentleman, & normally eat at Peltzer’s”] is that they cannot penetrate the depth of my mind. They cannot reach the simplicity which is in me, because of the ornaments.⁵

Not surprisingly, Birven soon entered the scenario: “A person like Birven is totally incapable of recognizing your superiority, and so treats you [Germer] as an inferior. It is his only protection. We can’t afford to worry about such matters. We go on with the Work, which is the only thing which counts; and whatever results does not matter. Birven incidentally seems to be the most complete idiot.”

A couple of days later Crowley received the Berliner Tageblatt with his interview in it. He thought it very good and ordered another half-dozen copies; it was his best press in years. The question was how to drum up some more.

Germer now asked who was to finance the article’s promised art exhibition. Crowley pointed to his original arrangement with Mandrake; they would pay for it, and he would refund costs out of profits: “The exhibition was originally designed, you remember, not for the profits to be made out of it directly, but as part of the general campaign to put me over, that is: the cost of the exhibition was really an advertising expense.”

Germer, in the meantime, had agreed in principle to advancing £500 as half of a £1,000 investment, but, according to Crowley, Thynne did not intend to pass the first tranche on to him lest Germer should in future decline to pay the balance. Eager to bag the money, Crowley, typically, requested Germer inform Thynne that he (Germer) would give the entire £1,000 to Crowley direct!

It is easy to see the difficulties doing business with Crowley. There was seldom a clear line between financing the Great Work and financing Crowley’s lifestyle and occasional luxuries. Crowley felt he had to swank it up when in London; his defense being that he provided the assets. He understood what marketing people now call positioning, but his position was not generally recognized.

Changing the game plan, Crowley told Germer to tell Cora that, having seen the balance sheets, acquisition of the Aquila was a better proposition than Mandrake!

Inevitably, the correspondence turned again to Birven’s and Krumm-Heller’s doubts, this time over Thelema’s supposed ethical licentiousness, the so-called Do as you like interpretation of Crowley’s ethic still touted by newspapers to this day.

I imagine that there are a great many things that are somewhat of a strain on Birven’s poor intelligence. In particular, if he thinks that the establishment of the Law of Thelema means that no one is to obey orders any more, he is an unspeakable ass, and you might point this out to him with your customary suavity.

It is no use our having people as supporters if they are going to misunderstand the doctrine to that point. I am not answering the letter [from Birven] myself. I think you should point out these matters to Krumm-Heller. If he imagines we are a set of crazy Anarchists, he will naturally become nervous. I think the most important thing to insist on about the Law of Thelema is its rigid code of discipline, its almost chess-like selection and concentration of energy.⁶

Crowley was annoyed with Birven over other matters too. He had seen a copy of Birven’s latest issue of Hain der Isis.

I wish you would make a sort of preliminary enquiry on behalf of the Mandrake, as to what they [Hain der Isis] mean by translating a chapter from my “Confessions” without my permission. I think it is very important to make that large 200-year-old publishing firm [sic] realize that Birven is a very dangerous man, and will get himself into trouble sooner or later. I do not despair of this imbecile; practically everyone who comes in contact with me has to go through these ordeals, and Birven has, after all, acted with great courage. Of course we made it very easy for him by presenting him with all the material, but even at that I admire his attitude. As soon as he is thoroughly humiliated he can come to the Mourner’s Bench, and go home a saved Soul.⁷

If Germer was feeling a trifle confused over the Beast’s shifting priorities and selective perfectionism, a letter of 16 May doubtless stoked the flames.

Germer had been trying to oversee a Thelema Verlag production of Crowley’s practical masterpiece of kabbalistic and other magical correspondences, 777. Oscar Hopfer had been engaged to provide illustrations on the basis of pay from profits. Where the book had been expected to be a printing job done by Sporn at Zeulenroda, Crowley now suggested Aquila publish it, “as it is a matter of really fine printing.” But that, said Crowley, with a hint, was a question of finance. Stephensen was willing to oversee it, according to Crowley—subject to finance of course. The Aquila-Mandrake merger needed more capital. There had been a suggestion of Yorke coming in with £1,000 and taking a directorship. Crowley then doubted whether it was necessary for Hopfer to execute the final illustrations for 777, based on drawings left at Knockholt. They could be done equally well in London. “However, that matter can wait.” One wonders if poor Hopfer thought so. Crowley seems to have realized his gaffe, and leant a protective arm over one of the sons of Apollo: “I think his [Hopfer’s] financial claim is very reasonable, but it will depend entirely on the financing of the book, which, of course, will cost a fortune to produce. The original arrangement with him was that he should get his payment as a royalty on the book. But if things go well I should like to let him have some extra or all of the balance due to him, as soon as we have settled the contract. In point of fact, I think that he ought to have much more than he asks, and I shall add to the 13,000 marks, a small royalty.” How generous of Crowley—his conscience was again debited to his colleagues’ accounts.

Crowley was now thinking of holding an exhibition at Langham Chambers’ reasonably sized gallery. He contacted Arts & Crafts editor and D. H. Lawrence “obscene” art exhibition supporter, Wilfrid Hanchant, to advise how to run a rented gallery for artists and promoters. Crowley hoped the gallery would subsidize the would-be Aquila-Mandrake project. Nevertheless, Germer was assured: “I have kept Berlin in the back of my mind [for the exhibition]. We have therefore selected sixteen pictures which includes a drawing by Augustus John of me, done at the same time as the other well-known one. I think in some ways it is even better. We have got a very good photographer [T. Maycock], but he said your instructions were out of date, and that he could do still better. As to the size, he is using whole plate, which is the largest size possible. I should think I would be able to send prints by Air Mail on Monday night.”

In the crack of a flashbulb, Crowley was soon in a jam over the Aquila, though you might think from his letter to Germer of 19 May that it was everybody else who had problems with Crowley’s latest dream.

Your [Germer’s] letter of May 16th reached me Saturday morning. I should certainly write to Adler at once. What we want is the contract. I don’t think you understand about the Mandrake and the Aquila. The Aquila is in no need of manuscripts or copyrights. My idea for Adler, for example, was to turn it over to Thynne at a price. Roughly speaking, there is a sort of unwritten friendly agreement; if manuscripts come the way of the Mandrake which they think would be unsuitable for them but would suit us, they will send them on and vice versa. The two presses cover such different fields that I cannot imagine any difficulty.

As I said in my last [letter], you should certainly come to London with Krumm Heller. Your advice will be very valuable, especially with regard to the reconstruction of the Aquila. At present we are so deep in that we have got to go on and win through, whether we like it or not. The only difficulty with Thynne is that he wants the Aquila so very much that he would like to swallow it wholesale. As we want to use this place for Headquarters, he cannot be allowed to do that. We must have a business arrangement with him, and I think you will be able to help me proposing one. He is quite a reasonable man once he has finished shooting off his mouth. I don’t think you should ask for expenses. It looks bad because you are in the position of one of the capitalists, but in any case it would be very foolish to bring Cora along, much as we should all like to see the dear girl. The reason is that we are going to have one hell of a time with all sorts of difficult conferences, and the last thing we want is the agreeable distraction which Cora’s presence would afford. We shall all be running after her and neglecting our business. It is with the sternest sense of renunciation that I pen these fatal words. The lawyers are still holding up the agreement, but that is rather a good thing, as I do not really want to sign before that cash arrives from New York. It won’t do to be short at the very start. However, my original backer is dining with me tonight, and I have engaged my pet siren to sing to him about the enormous profits to be made in this concern.

This is a true song, too. The business could easily have been made to pay before I ever came along; if, that is, they had made good use of the opportunities of the premises. The trouble was that the people were, as they said themselves, a family party. All the business was done by mail order, and all Mrs. Henderson’s really remarkable talents and her excellent social connections were simply wasted. She is very competent at routine, but at the same she should have as little of it to attend to as possible. I have got in a sales manager named Bang. He was 20 years or more with Heinemann’s and appears to be a German; another reason why I want you to come over is that you may talk to him. We want also to consult with Yorke and Mrs. Henderson about the general problems of the staff, and even the question of the office. If we have several hundred people coming in here every day to look at pictures, it is going to be hard to carry on the office routine.⁸

If this were a movie, we should expect Crowley’s voluble gush to fade as the picture dissolves to a padlock on the doors of the marvelous opportunity that was the Aquila Press, Langham Chambers. Nailed to the door, a paper “closed” sign blows off in a draft. A dissonant chord from Bernard Hermann completes the effect.

Crowley’s diary entry for 22 May begins with one of his statements of vast understatement, consistent with his advice that all events be taken simply as twists in a play: “A curious day. All sorts of little accidents.” One of the little accidents was the breakdown of the informal pact between the parliamentary Labor and Liberal Parties over electoral reform. This put British government in another quagmire while the economy plummeted. Another little accident was Wyn Henderson’s decision to quit the Aquila, quit London, and quit England to go to work for Nancy Cunard’s Paris-based Hours Press. Nancy had some of the finest avant-garde writers of the time under her belt, including Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett, and the Rue Guénegaud promised more fun than Regent Street. Crowley was not entirely blind to the facts: “This of course, reduces the alleged £1,300 stock to zero. Her [Wyn Henderson’s] good will, technique etc. were the only assets bar the lease.”

Still only a play?

Crowley reassured Germer that it was nonetheless worth his and Krumm-Heller’s coming to London the following week, especially as 666 had contacted “one of the best businessmen in the City, the financial expert of one of the great [banking] houses.” The businessman was one Lloyd, who, coincidentally, had been a Crowley disciple before the war. Lloyd was interested in taking up magical training again. Crowley insisted that everyone had gone too deep into the Mandrake-Aquila business to back out now.

We all here believe in you [Karl], and love you. You have never failed us; you are pretty well the most valuable person that we have, and you must not yield to these fits of depression. This (by the way) is one of the reasons I think you ought to have an open car. After doing a couple of hours at 50 mph with the wind blowing in your face the cobwebs disappear. [. . .] It is quite evident that Cora is a holy terror, and the only thing you really need to do is to manage not to let her upset you. Now please do not let us down. I expect you here on Tuesday without fail.⁹

Having moved from Oddenino’s to digs at Yeoman House, 31 Hay-market, Crowley met Lloyd on 26 May. They formulated a proposition whereby, subject to capital, Crowley would become the Langham Chambers lessee with the furniture at the accountant’s valuation of about £580. Crowley would establish an HQ, a new Magick Publishing Company, and a gallery for rent at £20 plus 15 percent commission on pictures sold. Crowley needed Germer’s £500 for which he would pay 10 percent interest, the first half-year in advance. Germer was assured this enterprise would duly reimburse all monies loaned by Cora to date.

Tuesday 27 May duly arrived, as did Germer and Krumm-Heller, at a party organized for them at Crowley’s digs after having lunched with Daily Mail and Observer art critic Paul George Konody. Crowley had discussed Konody’s writing an exhibition catalogue and a business proposition.

With Krumm-Heller in town, Crowley sought to involve him in outside organizing, that is, publicizing Thelema through his Theosophical, neo-Gnostic, and neo-Rosicrucian contacts and committing his energies to getting them united as, or at least behind, a genuine New Aeon body or federation. Crowley had no use for Krumm-Heller’s philosophical ideas.

Krumm-Heller had his own London agenda, however. He had been inquiring of Crowley, via Germer, whether Bishop Charles Webster Leadbeater of the Theosophist-friendly Liberal Catholic Church was in London. What Krumm-Heller probably did not let out was his desire for ordination as a Gnostic bishop; in theory, Leadbeater could do the honors. The suspected pedophile and “discoverer” of Krishnamurti was not, according to Crowley’s TS informant, in London (before 22 May), but he was on his way. Not that it mattered anyway, because Leadbeater was not seeing anybody, knocked sideways as he was by Krishnamurti’s renunciation of his Theosophical role the previous summer. According to Crowley’s information, “He [Leadbeater] had to be dragged off a platform some little while ago in Australia because he started raving, and I think it is only a matter of a few weeks before he is entirely out of it. They [the TS] are at least obliged to tell everybody that he is become much too holy to communicate with anyone except the Great Ones beyond the Range, and we know what that means.”¹⁰

The “Great Ones” of course refers laconically to the Theosophical belief in hidden Mahatmas in Shangri-La, Shambhala, or some other place in the Himalayas, or even beyond or below the physical mountains, from which spiritual direction allegedly derived; Crowley found the idea amusing (so much of it had been exposed as a sham), and concluded that Leadbeater was mad.

Claiming to be tired, Krumm-Heller, who took himself very seriously, left the welcoming party at 31 early. Crowley, Germer, Gerald Yorke, and Mandrake director Major McAllan went on to Konody’s for more liquid entertainment.

On Thursday 5 June, Crowley lunched with “Nick,” that is, Lt. Col. John Fillis Carré Carter, Head of Special Branch. Because we know Crowley sent confidential reports on both left and right wing political activity to Nick while in Berlin, it is reasonable to assume this meeting related to such activities.

Carter informed Yorke by letter on 11 June that he’d seen their mutual friend Crowley once or twice.¹¹

The letter also contained Regardie’s Co-Masonry initiation fee (£3.00).

Why should a very senior policeman assist the Beast’s secretary’s admission to Theosophical Freemasonry? Given Crowley’s observation of the Theosophical Society in the wake of Krishnamurti’s resignation—for which 666 took the spiritual credit—and given the fact that Carter also supplied Crowley with information regarding Krishnamurti’s whereabouts and funding, we may conclude that Britain’s security services were also concerned with a global movement not uncommonly linked to communism and Indian independence (new measures were enacted in India on 31 May to curb civil unrest after Mahatma Ghandi’s arrest on 5 March), a belief system that threatened established religion in Britain and the Empire. Crowley’s aborted plan to visit the Soviet Union was just as likely inspired by links between Theosophy and communism as well as by the advancement of Thelema (see the author’s Aleister Crowley—The Biography, 2012).

Yorke and Crowley were not seeing eye to eye on business: “Yorke niggling again, that one must cut one’s coat in accordance with one’s cloth; whereas the meanest tailor knows that one must cut one’s cloth in accordance with the size of the man.”¹²

Perhaps a perturbed Yorke endured some premonition of what else was coming. On 15 June, Marie returned prematurely from her Berlin stay with Cora Germer. From Crowley’s new London address, a cheap flat at 89 Park Mansions, he wrote to Germer, back in Berlin.

Marie just turned up. [. . .] Yorke and I discussed it all with Marie. He sees as I do that it is really a question of totally irreconcilable attitudes to life: The Master and the slave. Complicated by the language difficulty.

Marie denies having spoken ill of Cora to Grete [Karl’s sister]. Certainly she got to like Cora very much in Berlin, and is most grateful to her. Between you and me, Grete is a spiteful cat now and again. More, you must remember the envy that always possesses small souls when they see others who have what they would like to have themselves. Your lecture on Vaihinger [1852–1933; author of the Adler-influencing Philosophy of As If, 1911, on useful fictions] is very Freudian. Your argument is (as I have often told you) the very reason why you do not get on in the world. If you are always shrinking in fear from Fortune, she naturally disdains and kicks you.

Marie is not at all extravagant; on the contrary. And you should be the last person to talk, rushing through the world in your lordly automobile!

As if—

Well, we’d better forget the whole silly nonsense, and get on with the G.W. [Great Work] Everything promises well here, but I’ll know more when the “Legend” is out [P. R. Stephensen’s The Legend of Aleister Crowley, Mandrake Press, 1930, dispatched to reviewers in July]. What of Birven? Will send Krumm-Heller [OTO] rituals this week c/o you.¹³

Marie’s fate would fall into Yorke’s unwilling hands once Crowley returned to Berlin, an issue that would vex their relations for a long time. Yorke questioned whether Crowley’s dictum that “spiritual attainments are incompatible with bourgeois morality”¹⁴ covered leaving one’s wife to the assistance of others.

On 22 June, Crowley duly sent copies of the OTO rituals to Arnoldo Krumm-Heller with a covering letter addressed to “Thrice illuminated, thrice holy, and thrice illustrious brother: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

In sending you the four first rituals of the O.T.O., I feel that I must explain to you the circumstances in which they came into being. [Theodor] Reuss was in the habit of initiating people with the merest skeleton rituals boiled down from those of Continental Masonry. There was, to put it mildly, no order or decency in the proceeding. He realized that perfectly well, and it was one of the reasons for asking me to reconstruct the whole system of initiation.

I made a comparative study of numerous rituals to which I had access, and produced a series which were perfected up to and including the 6th degree (equivalent to the Kadosh) and these were worked in London with the greatest success.

I must here pause to point out that the fundamental and essential change which is necessary in any ritual with which I have anything to do is the complete renunciation of the cult of the slave-gods [orthodox monotheism, especially Christianity]. It is impossible for free men to acknowledge any system which is bound up with the fetishes of savages whose only motive for action is the fear born of their ignorance.

The accounts of the new rite made a great impression; and, in particular, attracted the attention of the Supreme Grand Council, Sovereign Grand Inspector General of the 33d and Last Degree of the Scottish Rite in the Valley of Detroit, Michigan. This Council deputed two Princes of the Royal Secret from the Consistory dependent from their jurisdiction to interview me in New York. It was of course impossible for me to deal with subordinates, and I refused to discuss the matter except with Sovereign Grand Inspectors General. I was thereupon invited to Detroit, and a series of conferences was held [1918–19]. A Supreme Grand Council of the 7th Degree of the O.T.O. was formally instituted. However, when it came to the considerations of the practical rituals to be worked, the General Council of the Scottish Rite could not see its way to tolerate them, on the ground that the symbolism in some places touched too nearly that of the orthodox Masonry of the Lodges.

While we are of course in no sense subordinate to the vulgar convivial Masonry of the Craft Lodges of England and North America, or to the political Masonry of Europe, we recognize in them what is of influence for good, especially as they have a tendency to militate against the foul sorcery of all Christian Rites. We are therefore anxious to avoid in any way appearing to infringe on what they consider their peculiar privileges. In order to meet these views, it was suggested that I should re-write the rituals in an entirely new symbolism which would in no way be considered as in competition with the accepted ritual of the Craft. I accomplished this task and produced the rituals which I now send you. But they were never put into operation because just at this moment the Supreme Council of Detroit was, from our point of view, eliminated from usefulness by a dissension which sprang up in itself on personal grounds, into which I need not enter. I am personally of the opinion, that it would be best to use these rituals despite the technical difficulty involved in training suitable people to operate them, and the constituting of a new superior organization, but think that the best policy is to act in such a way that we shall not be faced later on with unexpected opposition from quarters which should theoretically be friendly to us.

I shall be pleased to have your views on this matter at your earliest convenience, and subscribe myself, Thrice illuminated . . . etc.¹⁵

Crowley’s assessment of Krumm-Heller’s actual value to his schemes, and his view of Krumm-Heller personally, are contained in the following letter to Germer of which the above was an enclosure; Crowley claimed he had mislaid Krumm-Heller’s address. This letter helps us to see that Crowley understood well what Krumm-Heller was really after as regards Bishop Leadbeater. It also shows Crowley’s acute appreciation of Karl Germer’s character.

What you say about Leadbeater is very interesting. Of course, the whole business is a bore, and only very stupid people would have anything to do with it. If they want all this Christian nonsense, they had better get it from the genuine people instead of playing around with this cheap sham [the Liberal Catholic Church]. But Krumm-Heller acts after his kind. Anything which seems to him a little mysterious is meat for him. He has no understanding whatever of any real principles.

He has no comprehension of the incompatibility of acids and alkalis. As long as he can fool about in a robe with a lot of symbols adorning it he is happy. It is no use being angry with him or disgusted with him. He is like that, and we have got to use him as he is. There are many shallow people in the world, and he is no worse than the rest. He would gladly join both the Fascisti and the Communists at the same time if they had some appeal to his vanity.

Crowley then asked Germer to “Please cultivate Ewers. He is really the great man. Moonchild [Crowley’s novel, Mandrake Press, 1929] is perhaps the book which would appeal most to him.”

Crowley had known writer and actor Hanns Heinz Ewers in New York during WWI. Ewers’ story The Box of Counters had appeared in the Crowley-edited magazine The International (December 1917) when Crowley was employed by Ewers’ associate—and secret agent—George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962). Ewers was arrested in the United States in 1918 for spying and imprisoned until 1921, having spent the war as a German propaganda-subversion agent in the United States, Spain, and Mexico.

Crowley turned Germer’s attention to Alfred Adler:

I am glad you saw Adler, but I have heard nothing of it from Thynne [a book contract with Adler]. As long as he consents to write that book, I am happy. Now for your letter of the 19th. Marie did not quarrel with Grete [Germer’s sister] at all, and is very good friends with her. But your father was coming back to live with Grete, and so Marie thought she would come home.

I am really disheartened that you cannot understand the proper attitude toward life. You seem to think that the only plan is to take shelter from circumstances. You seem to think that it is wrong to adopt the attitude of arranging your circumstances to suit your own plans. This is the essential difference between the attitude of Master and slave. How can anyone hope to rise in the world if they assume that the pressure of circumstances upon them is inevitable and inexorable? You are really funny in your last sentence in your second paragraph. You say that Fortune has only favored you once or twice in ten or fifteen years, and you conclude “so she cannot disdain or kick me.” But, my poor friend, what you say means that she has disdained to kick you for ten or fifteen years, except once or twice when she was busy with somebody more important. There is a Latin proverb, which may be translated “Fortune favors the brave.” But it requires more than a purely passive courage. It requires the confidence of one who measures his Fate and is equal to it. I cannot understand how you fail to see that this policy of retiring into your shell like a snail at the approach of danger makes it impossible for you to proceed. How are you ever going to get on in the world without meeting proper people? And if you never go out to parties and give them, how can you get into connection with anyone that may be useful? You only acquire for yourself the reputation of a surly person.

I notice that you are never in this attitude at all when I am with you. It is not natural to you. It is your reaction to the association with unsympathetic people. If what I said about Grete refers to you, take it to yourself, and snap out of it! P.S. Your emetic of 20th just to hand. Will reply at once.¹⁶

Crowley was right to be concerned about Germer’s state of mind; it would get a lot worse. Crowley confided his concerns to his secretary, Israel Regardie (Frater E.N.L.): “There are two Germers. One you don’t know. A subconscious Qliphoth of Saturn and Virgo, the most loathsome fiend I have ever encountered. I could have exorcised it, but he hates to be cured: it is his deepest curse that he delights in his anguish and filth.” Crowley tried to balance his picture of Germer in another letter to Regardie: “Of course he’s not always bad, only every so often some trifle starts him on one of his manias, and he lectures angrily about the German spirit, or the price of soap, or the wickedness of the French. The ravings are incredible: and one cannot possibly tell what may switch on the current.”¹⁷

Crowley was also concerned over Regardie’s own fitness to cope with knowledge of heterosexual magick:

I think knowledge of the IX° has quite upset Frater E.N.L. [Regar-die] It is too much like a short cut, and is a very dangerous practice indeed for one untrained by long years of ceremonial. My success, and immunity, may well be due to the fact that I did not know it till after 14 years’ hard work.¹⁸

On 30 June, France pulled her troops out of the Rhineland, five years before the date stipulated at the Versailles Conference that had imposed measures against German rearmament after the war. Partly a response to German economic woes, it was hoped the pullout would remove the sting from extremist arguments that the Fatherland was being strangled by France and her Allies. On the same day Great Britain, not for the last time, recognized Iraqi independence. Crowley sniffed weakness everywhere, while powerful foes grew. On 10 July, communist armies in China united to attack Hankow. Communism looked increasingly belligerent. Pondering a world in crisis, Crowley’s thoughts colored his reply to Regardie’s request for greater momentum in his magical training. Perhaps Frater E.N.L. also suggested greater effort could be made with painting and poetry as propaganda for the times. Crowley’s answer, especially in view of how he would spend the next two years, is interesting.

I think I see clearly that it is all against the real need of the Time to try to do anything with Art and Literature. Even with Magic as generally I think we have to concentrate on one thing and one thing only—the Law of Thelema as the sole way out for the world, threat ened as it is by universal collapse, revolution, anarchy of all kinds. All I am is the Prophet as in The Book of the Law.

[. . .] So don’t be in such a hurry to appear as a Magus 9°=2°!! Good Lord, what a fool of myself I made by my own impatience to wear epaulettes!¹⁹

In spite of the critique of the historical value of artistic creations, Crowley was happy enough to send Karl four new watercolors to hang on his apartment walls on 5 July. Crowley would have sent oils but his apartment conditions made working with oils impossible. Crowley was dead tired from overwork and found the hot weather impossible. He confided to Karl that he hardly knew what to do with himself; everything was going wrong with the Langham Chambers project. As for Birven, Crowley decided he “should take no notice of Birven except to keep an eye on him and see that he does not misbehave further. My own plans are completely vague.”

Regarding literature, Mandrake was expected to publish Golden Twigs in a fortnight (it didn’t), while volume three of the Confessions was expected not too much later (that wasn’t published either, though Stephensen opined that it was Crowley who did not want his account of The Book of the Law in vol. 3 published, lest its appearance cause an international war). Crowley had great faith in the power of the pen. The main thing, 666 believed, was to bring off a regular coup d’état with The Legend. Crowley was trying to see the positive side, though with his powers of intuition he must have known the London publishing era was running swiftly to its end.

Regarding hopes for an art exhibition: “Konody is still cooperating. I have not had time to finish my current catalogue so he has not been able to write the foreword. I hope to do this in the next three or four days, and have things ready to show him on Thursday when I lunch with him.”²⁰

In fact, the art pulse was picking up, but the beat was coming from Berlin. Crowley wrote to Germer on 8 July from Park Mansions:

Please tell [Hans] Steiner how very grateful to him I am for the trouble he is taking on my behalf. If he wants to get rid of Hanni [Jaeger] I will take her on.

About 75 pictures were chosen for the London exhibition, and all these have been restored, where necessary, and framed. They are therefore ready to be shipped as soon as I can get them packed. They will come in three separate lots. Shall I send them direct to Hartsberg or to you? The catalogue has to be written in German by a German. It can hardly be begun until after you have selected the pictures, but I will arrange for Hanchant to make sure of the titles. I think everything should be done in Berlin and save correspondence. [. . .] I hope to see Hanchant tomorrow and will then let you know on what date approximately you may expect the pictures. All I feel sure of is that they are ready to start.

I may possibly roll over to Berlin about Aug. 7 for a day or two.²¹

As the July heat wore Crowley down, and the anxieties increased, he temporarily lost grip on the reality of events. One minute he believed everything with the Mandrake would be fine, the next, all looked grim. His flat lease would expire on 7 August. He fancied “running over” to Berlin to see Fanny for a week. And yes, Germer should send his—the Beast’s—“love to Hanni.” Crowley thought he should be very hopeful about things but instead was a “sick man and depressed,” with “no energy, physical or mental”: “I must get into real sunshine or go phut,” he wrote to Karl on 14 July.

Two days later, Crowley received excellent news from Berlin. Germer had contacted the remarkable Berlin modern art promoter and dealer Karl Nierendorf. Nierendorf wanted to see Crowley’s pictures. Enthusiastic, Crowley wrote straight back.

Very glad about Nierendorf. Shall send you the chosen 75 pictures, and he can choose and return rest for a London show. I, not Marie, painted in those figures. As to the little oil, I’m just as surprised as you! I think Marie’s best work excellent of its kind, but I must say I didn’t expect Berlin to like it. I’ll send over some of hers, and you can judge.

But, my dear man, don’t you see that all this proves what I have said all along till I’m tired, that NOBODY is any good at the valuation of Art. That is, any painter, however obviously bad, may suddenly be acclaimed as a master, and make a million dollars. I think the best bet is the original painter, the eccentric, one who can be fought about.

For example, to me Steiner is a great master, and Hanni little more than an amateur—with possibilities—and a good deal more than crazy. But for that reason Steiner must be accepted simply without controversy, while her work can make a fuss. Similarly, nobody will pay $10,000 for a photo of Cora, as was done for the snap of Ruth Snyder in the [electric] Chair! You’re a salesman! and can’t see the points about publicity values. [. . .]

About my attitude to money. Ask your banker what his is. Mine is identical.

This “art” stuff is all rot.

The position is that my work is a vast asset—very undeveloped. To exploit it needs capital—more and more—until I am established, and the money rolls in. We are now so far that we need thousands this year as against hundreds last year. That is not a bad sign but a good one. I always said that we needed £10,000 to put it across. If we had had that amount at once, we should be a paying concern now. (P.S. to this: Love to Cora. Explain.) As it is much money has been wasted by having to mark time. But I reckon that £6,000 now should enable us to turn the corner.

(Neither Leah nor Mudd had any money; Ninette [Shumway, née Fraux, mother of Crowley’s daughter Lulu] only a little, and she got the value of that in living without work for a number of years.) Your mathematics!! Large fortune less $10,000 = bankruptcy!!! People who sink oil wells “pour their money into a hole”—“it seems so senseless” &c. &c. They never see one penny back until the gush comes. But unless you sink deep enough, you get no gush; and you must arrange for distribution, repairing &c. as well as for derricks. Very busy looking for gush now! So tooly–oo!²²

On 24 July the patriotic jingo-rag John Bull expressed its profound concern with the state of the world by having another go at soft target Aleister Crowley, the “human beast.” Crowley wondered if he should take legal action against it. He decided to leave it alone until he could, at least, turn it around as useful publicity. He was up to his neck in Mandrake problems; Stephensen was quitting. There was a capital vacuum, though on the day of the John Bull attack he wrote to Germer, convinced Konody was “joining the Bond” and would “bring in a good deal of capital sooner or later.” Konody’s “pull in London” was, Crowley wrote, tremendous.

The Beast was also delighted to announce his acquisition of Times science correspondent J. W. N. Sullivan for the Great Work. Described as “the one great interpreter of advanced mathematical and scientific thought to ordinary intelligent people,” Sullivan had agreed to write a book on “The Psychology of Magick,” a serious study of Crowley’s work in that line. Crowley added, optimistically: “This will put us definitely on the map as a serious school of thought. So I hope to be in Berlin to meet Einstein and one or two other big men who are old friends of Sullivan (leaving by the Bremen or Europa Aug. 7). If fine, will you meet me at Bremen and drive up? I should be back in England about August 19 or 20 at the latest.”²³

Crowley was now considering a definitive break with Marie. Typically, even if jokingly, he tried to shift the blame, if there was blame, elsewhere: “Shall probably can M[arie]. Your [Germer’s] fault! You took my joking remark about Hanni seriously, and told her [Marie]. And she’s taken it seriously, and told me. So now I may take it seriously too!! Provided it doesn’t hurt Steiner. I wrote her [Hanni] that she must be decent to him. However, Allahu Akbar.”*17 ²⁴

Having dropped this bombshell, Crowley hoped to mollify Karl and Cora by informing them that while Yorke’s family situation was bad—Gerald’s father would not let him spend serious money on Thelema—Yorke was likely to marry a girl with £300,000—“So cheer up!”

As it turned out, Crowley quit the London mess earlier than expected. On 31 July, Marie got drunk at a farewell cocktail party and spent the day vomiting. Deciding to “up sticks,” Crowley sent a last note to Karl, thanking Cora for her nice letter and offer of an interlude that transpired to be a motoring holiday. He asked Karl to tell Cora he loved her. The Beast would arrive in Berlin on Saturday 2 August. Could they arrange something nice for Sunday, such as lunch by the lake at Wannsee, unless, like London, it was now raining every day? Crowley had no picture available for Steiner, as requested, but would do him one in Berlin, if Steiner would lend him the materials. And he wanted to draw Hanni Jaeger: “Get her for Sunday.”

Karl did just that, and on the Sunday he motored them all to the Ratskeller Hotel at 1 Markt, Rheinsburg, some 60 km northwest of Berlin. The party returned to Berlin on the Monday. Madly in love, Crowley took Hanni to a café called Hammischy at Potsdamer Strasse 12. The next day the party drove to the Nikolskoye, Potsdam, for lunch. The restaurant still operates in a striking replica of the Russian Royal Family’s log cabin built for Catherine the Great of Russia’s state visit to Potsdam. In the evening, Crowley enjoyed dinner with Hanni at the Eden on Budapester Strasse.

Karl, Cora, Hanni, and the Beast left Berlin on 13 August for a motoring holiday of Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria.

Arriving in Leipzig at 6:00 p.m. Crowley dined with Martha Küntzel: “Alone at last!” he confided to his diary, in French (Enfin seuls!) That night, Hanni and the Beast performed their fourth sex magical Working. Its purpose: “Health PAN, etc.” Goodness knows to what the “etcetera” referred; you would think Health and Pan covered everything.

The wild group then headed for Prague, former home to late-Renaissance magicians, cabalists, and stargazers, then to Vienna, where Crowley exchanged professional insights and philosophy with Alfred Adler, doubtless also discussing the projected book on the Kaiser’s mind.

The next day, a Sunday (17 August), Crowley met a mathematics professor called Wichowszky. Wichowszky promised to “boost 93 everywhere,” understanding Crowley’s “cosmic 93” at once.

Crowley noted reactions to him and Hanni: “All the world loves a lover is the stupidest proverb of all. Everybody goes insane with envy.” Feeling like a love-struck youth, though definitely not looking it, he was enjoying holy sex with Hanni every day.

After Vienna: Salzburg; Crowley disliked it intensely. Then it was Munich, where the weather turned hopelessly bad. Relief came in the form of “very good food indeed” served at Munich’s Preysing Palais where the party saw Fratellini, one of a French family of world-famous circus clowns.

After the laughter, the tears: Crowley observed the “Triumph of the Nag’s nearly murderous intrigue.” The Nag was Cora. She had “nagged Karl into a severe nervous breakdown with actual high fever—just to spoil the trip!” Leaving Munich the party motored on in good weather through Augsburg to Ulm, where they took a train to Frankfurt via Stuttgart, Heidelberg, and Darmstadt. They dined at the Carlton.

For additional entertainment, Crowley read Hanns Heinz Ewers’ Fundvogel: a “very good novel.” Fundvogel’s curious plot featured a sex-change operation, as well as heterosexual and homosexual desire. The author tried to combine earlier attitudes toward homosexuality with his new political beliefs as a member of the Nazi party; heterosexuality triumphed, but masking homosexuality made it acceptable. Crowley was interested.

Crowley wanted Ewers to translate his “Gnostic Mass” into German, possibly for a film, with Hanni Jaeger as the Priestess (31 October 1930). Hitler would employ Ewers to write a biography of Nazi hero Horst Wessell, whom Ewers had known, on which the film Hans Westmar, Eine von Vielen (One among Many, 1933) was based. Ewers, however, fell foul of the Nazis because he was homosexual and refused to embrace anti-Semitism. In 1934 his assets were seized and many of his works banned; Ewers died in poverty of tuberculosis.

On 23 August, Crowley and Hanni left Köln for Brussels. They caught the Ostende-Dover ferry and arrived in London at 11:06.

London is hellish. Every one as dead as when I left. Montgomery Evans back from Paris feeling worse. Thynne evidently avoiding me. [. . .] Inky [Percy Stephensen] hysterical, vomiting accusations against Thynne and McAllan. [. . .] I can’t work in this abyss.²⁵

In the sweltering dog days of late August, Crowley met writer Mary Butts (1890–1937), one-time probationer of the A A and descendant of William Blake’s patron, Thomas Butts (1757–1845), “prematurely aged and rotten—haggard and half crazy.” Her face, having once inspired the pencil of Jean Cocteau, was now a signal to quit.

The next day, 27 August 1930, the Mandrake Press ran out of money. Thynne would accuse Crowley of having dined out the capital at Oddenino’s. As usual in such cases, everyone blamed everyone else.

Crowley sent a note to Karl from the Langham Hotel:

Thynne has messed everything up. Mandrake may bust any moment. Yorke has messed everything up. My business in London urgently needs my absence.

With infinite pains I raised just enough money to get away. Monster [one of Crowley’s nicknames for Hanni] and I arrive c/o Thomas Cook & Sons, 52–54 Rua Aurea, Lisboa, Portugal, on Monday; and we’ll be lucky if we have £5 between us on landing. We got the baggage (by phone from Frankfurt) sent to Köln and got home—just, but only just. We are most grateful to the contriver. Please write me to Lisbon, and send some cash if humanly possible. Here all is HELL.²⁶

SEVEN

KINGS IN EXILE ARE ALWAYS BEGGARS

Once get me on my feet, and I will repay royally. But Kings in exile are always beggars! 1

ALEISTER CROWLEY TO KARL GERMER, 1930

As the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s Alcantara languished in fog behind a deadly reef off Vigo, Portugal, Crowley felt low. In spite of Hanni’s encouragement and loving ministrations he was beginning to wonder whether his usefulness to the Great Work had ended. Was it time to quit this incarnation? What his depressive feelings mostly boiled down to, however, was that he was not only practically broke, ill, fatigued, stressed, overweight, and suffering from a scalp problem, he was also in a bind that gnawed at what he called his human side.

First, the publishing business was as static as the Alcantara, and second, he was conscious of having left his wife behind again c/o Gerald Yorke. Yorke loathed the responsibility. While advising Germer to go to London to get his and Cora’s investment back from Yorke for another new Crowley publishing project, he strongly considered taking Hanni, his “Little Jade Princess,” around the world. That he was now feeling as pressured as he had long ago when he quit London in June 1900, voyaging to New York, then Mexico, then around the world, is evinced by his asking Karl to get Krumm-Heller to arrange introductions for him in Mexico via Lisbon’s office of Thomas Cook (travel agents). He also told Germer that Major McAllan had promised good contacts in Buenos Aires “besides the fratres in the Order we already know.”²

Crowley had less than £5. Hanni was subsisting on what she had herself, and on what her family sent her from California. Trying to be practical, Crowley thought Germer could get Berliner Tageblatt journalist Günther Stein to buy the German rights of a story he hoped to write about his and Hanni’s Portuguese adventure for syndication to the U.S. press through an agent called Gorman. The Beast reckoned it could be thrilling; Hanni could illustrate it. So he was already thinking of the trip’s publicity value in getting some push behind the first two volumes of his memoirs, before committing to his famous suicide stunt.

The choice of Lisbon as at least a preliminary destination was not random, however. Since at least November 1929, Crowley had been corresponding with Fernando Pessoa. While Pessoa is today Portugal’s acclaimed poet, he was at the time battling in himself with ideas of transcendence of space and time, and the power of the individual to access supernatural knowledge with the insights of divine genius. Pessoa had written to Mandrake, offering to translate Crowley’s Magick into Portuguese. Pessoa was well connected with Lisbon’s literary and journalistic world; Crowley had warmed to him.

At 3:45 in the afternoon of 2 September, the Alcantara finally tied up at Lisbon. Pessoa took them from the port to Lisbon’s Hotel de l’Europe. Crowley liked Pessoa—“a very nice man”—but found Lisbon loud and squalid. Fortunately, the Beast’s sense of humor was intact. On the day he heard of Oxford professor William Spooner’s death, a classic spoonerism emerged from the red-hot lips of the Little Jade Princess: “If you want to lock my cunt, you’d better lick the door.”³

The next day Beast and Monster moved seventeen miles west down the coast from Lisbon to Estoril to enjoy the port’s perfect beach. Glad to be out of the city, 666 opined: “The climate seems to be what the Riviera pretends to have, and hasn’t.” On 4 September, Crowley started a strict diet (no meat or alcohol) and went swimming. He got sunburned, and Hanni got sunstroke. Early next morning they commenced an Opus of sexual magick for their mutual health, but Hanni’s energy levels did not perk up until after the following day’s Sunday lunch with Pessoa. The poet was much enamored of Crowley’s “little blue flower of the Wood” (another soubriquet for Hanni). Crowley wrote to Karl:

I suppose you saw what we wrote to Cora. I thought the only chance was to keep putting it into her mind that she is a Star. Excite that flame, and it may burn up the clouds or miserliness and selfishness.

[. . .] About [Hans] Steiner [painter friend]. He is said to be very keen on the Great Work. Put him in touch with Yorke; but show him “One Star in Sight” [Crowley’s poem and guide for probationers] and explain that he must pass the Student examination and start a record, &c. Please give him the portrait of Monster [Hanni]; I wrote his name in the corner. It is rather hard work here, beginning the treatment; but at least I have recovered the Will to Live. I had rather got the idea that I could not be much more use to the Great Work, and had better cast about for a new vehicle. Your constant love (and the miracle of the Monster) have got me going again.⁴

That Crowley was subconsciously itching to get right away from everything is evident from a dream he had. He was on an immense ocean liner, like the White Star Line’s Megantic. It left the sea and went up a railroad into the woods, then passed by Crowley’s former estate at Boleskine, by Loch Ness! That this dream could have been inspired by the story of Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, who in the 1890s brought a thirty-ton steamship in pieces across an isthmus from one river into another, receives support from the dream’s continuation on 14 September. In part two the now Rio-bound liner left port, hit land, then descended steep mountain torrents into narrow canals. The Fitzcarrald story was behind Werner Herzog’s extraordinary movie Fitzcarraldo (1982); dreams can cross time.

On 9 September, Crowley went into Lisbon for lunch. He was introduced to Pessoa’s friend, esotericist Raul Leal (1886–1964). Leal had written to Crowley in January 1930 asking the “Master of the High Initiation” to initiate him. Into what?

Crowley did not like Leal; there was “something very definitely wrong about him.” After this remark, Crowley’s diary records: “At night Initiation.” Crowley scholar Marco Pasi has speculated on what might have taken place in the light of Leal’s recollection more than twenty years later that Pessoa introduced him to Crowley at Leal’s own apartment in the rua das Salgadeiras in Lisbon’s Bairro Alto district. Pasi also noticed how two days before the occasion Pessoa made a horary question regarding a situation involving four persons. While a prognosis concerning Crowley, Leal, Pessoa, and Hanni might be implied, the astrological question may be unrelated. There are other questions. Who was initiated? Leal might not have been involved at all. Pessoa’s papers contain an A A circular. Pessoa might have been initiated into the A A , since the A A involved personal training on a one-on-one basis.⁵

Fig. 7.1. Crowley (left) playing chess with Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon, September 1930. It looks like Hanni Jaeger is peering into the camera with an intriguing smile to the lower left of the standing woman. Image courtesy of The OTO.

Pasi’s treatment of the detail seems to imply something sexual having occurred, on the basis that the same day’s diary records that 666 and Hanni performed their twenty-second act of sex magick (“to start ‘emet’ [= ‘truth’ in Hebrew letters]”), and that the day after the initiation Pessoa wrote the following erotic poem inspired by Hanni:

She surprises just by being ,
She’s tall and dark blond .
It feels good just to imagin e
Her semi-mature body .
Her high breasts see m
(When she is lying down )
Two small mounds that emerg e
Without there being a dawn .
Her white arm and han d
Rest on her flank ,
Her palm spread over the ris e
Of its covered swelling .
It’s appealing like a boat .
There is something of a bud about it .
My God, when will I embark ?
Oh hunger, when will I eat? 6

However, Crowley’s reference to the Opus is consistent with previous entries for Workings with Hanni alone. Furthermore, the reference to “emet” may well be a pun on “emetic,” that is, a means of inducing a vomiting cure for sickness, possibly connected with the fact that the magick was performed by anal intercourse. Crowley had described one of Germer’s letters to him as an “emetic”—emetics came in little envelopes!

Alternatively, the magick’s aim may have been to induce clairvoyance for astral traveling purposes, because the next day, after an oral sex session, Anu-Hanni experienced her first astral vision. She saw clearly but was both unable to hear anything or know “how to deal with the visions yet.”⁷ Hanni saw her astral body as “Our Lady Nuit,” that is, the Body of Stars: space.

As if by way of celebration, Crowley painted Hanni in her glory the next day in watercolors. The painting shows her bobbed hair surrounded by a golden nimbus or aura with Japan’s Mount Fuji as background.*18

At two minutes past midnight on Friday 12th, Hanni and the Beast woke up completely to paint, the cause being the previous day’s Opus 23 for “Health, Strength and Energy.” They then walked along the coast to Cascais and to a rocky chasm known as the Boca do Inferno, or mouth of hell, into which the Atlantic smashed, roared, and lapped about in foaming waves.

Crowley found Cascais very interesting, with its fort, market, and other attractions. It was a resort frequented by royalty and other European intriguers: one of the reasons why Richard B. Spence in his book Secret Agent 666 (2008) wondered whether Crowley might have spied there. Now we have the missing diaries for September 1930—thanks to Marco Pasi’s publication of them from an unnamed source (see the bibliography)—a spying scenario appears unlikely. Crowley’s entry for the day simply makes a note of the local fish, a flat silvery thing like the blade of a broad sword.

Hanni went down with a fit of melancholy, the first serious sign of a condition that would overwhelm their relationship.

Opus 24 the following day was dedicated to bringing forth Hanni’s art. Crowley wrote that it was the best magick he could remember in his whole life. He compared her face to Clapham Junction, presumably because of its extremely lined character in the throes of ecstasy rather than a purely surrealist statement. Hanni broke down, sobbing hysterically. This seemed to clear her mind to the extent of declaring a desire to be of some use to the world. Crowley probably saw this as a sign of her True Will emerging into consciousness.

On Sunday 14th, they painted and bathed. The calm was interrupted by what Crowley called “crazy mail.”

Given the context, it probably involved disapproval of Marie’s condition, back in England. He confided to his diary: “It seems as if the Gods were forcing me into an idea. We are up against it, and the only practical way out is intensely repulsive to my human side—as it would not be were I not so insanely in love for the first time! And the last! I appeal to Her purity [= natural functions functioning naturally]: should we adopt the plan proposed in jest for several days past?”⁸

The question was addressed to his Yi Khing divination sticks and resulted in hexagram XLVI, Shang: “one of the best hexagrams in the Yi—God damn it!” What this appeared to portend was one of Crowley’s famous gags. To distract attention from his problems, and to generate both publicity for his memoirs and sympathy from those who would judge him for dropping Marie (he’d decided on divorce), Crowley had been toying with the idea of a suicide stunt to be pulled off with Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa could utilize journalistic contacts to get Crowley back into the press as a hot story. If Crowley could raise cash, he could pay for a divorce, reignite the publishing program by selling existing copies of his books, and raise his profile generally: all in all, a fairly desperate gamble. He wrote to Karl:

No word from Yorke, or Regardie, or Thynne. It’s rotten their letting me down like this. BUT—the Gods had a plan to force me to face a moral problem of the most hateful character. They did this also to enable me to answer your query.

Again and again I have been faced with a decision, and the answer has always been that I must free myself from all attachments of whatever kind, and subordinate my feelings wholly to the G.W. [Great Work]. I write this, then, in great anguish of spirit, but with Authority, such as I did not feel it right to use before.⁹

Germer had more on his mind than 666. In a street near the Brandenburg Gate, a stationary bus served as a political hoarding, with a huge poster draped across it: Einer für Alle—Alle für Ihn! (One for All—All for Him!). The “Him” was a huge picture of President Hindenburg. President Hindenburg enjoyed widespread support; the question was which party would dominate the Reichstag.

A Social Democrat (SPD) demonstration in Berlin’s Pleasure Garden in Dahlem, in the Steglitz-Zehlendorf district, was focused on Reichstag president Paul Löbe with his short, spiky hair, glasses, silk-trimmed jacket, and high collar, speaking from a box on a temporary stage, surrounded by earnest men carrying flags and banners. One of the banners bore the SPD logo in a monogram scroll and the words BEZIRKSVERBAND BERLIN (Berlin District Association) embroidered upon it.

About a mile northeast of the Brandenburg Gate, a huge poster was draped from the balconies of the massive KPD headquarters at the Karl-Liebnecht House in Bülowplatz. It read simply: “FOR A FREE SOCIALIST GERMANY.” The volatile nature of the struggle is illustrated by the fact that less than three years later the Nazis renamed the square the Horst-Wessel-Platz, after their alleged martyr. Since 1969 it has been called the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, after the communist martyr.

The elections were closing, with the national count due the next day, Monday the 15th. That day in Portugal, Crowley received bad news from Yorke in London. With power of attorney over Crowley’s bank account balance of some £70, Yorke refused Crowley any of it; instead, he doled it out as a weekly allowance to Marie, penniless in London.

There was bad news from Germany too. The Berliner Tageblatt’s headline “Brüning hat das Wort” announced SPD chancellor Heinrich Brüning’s victory in the elections. Unfortunately, the vote deprived the chancellor of his coalition partners in favor of a massive increase in communist and Nazi votes, exploiting the discontent over unemployment resulting from Brüning’s anti-Depression austerity measures. While the Social Democrats were in the clear with 8.3 million votes, the Nazis were now the second biggest party with 6.5 million votes, ahead of the KPD with 4.5 million.

Crowley went bathing with Hanni. They found coins—she, one scudo; the Beast, fifty centimes. He took this not as an ironic insult but as a sign the “Gods can send us cash from the most improbable sources”; perhaps the Gods liked him being poor. Hanni’s spirits sank further. By the next day, her depressions had become alarming. She was having intimations of a breakdown. Small things would set her off. Hanni was lying, fabricating false “magic” stories, and doing compulsive things like locking her suitcase a dozen times in a couple of hours.

Analyzing her condition, Crowley realized that should the fits increase in frequency, or suffer aggravation from stress and melancholy introspections, Hanni could lose herself in a pathological condition. Crowley reckoned she had lived in the underworld too long. I think this means he thought she had been burying her true nature for a considerable time and was now becoming overwhelmed by her own shadow, prey to subconscious forces at war with her suppressed, tinder-dry conscious states. Crowley knew his presence could induce psychological crises in people in such conditions, because he could quickly become an object toward which the unconscious leaped to constellate its contents; hence the “demon Crowley” syndrome.

Hanni’s temper tantrums were also noisome to the hotel. Crowley departed for the Hotel Miramar Monte Estoril to book rooms.

Hanni left for Lisbon.

The Beast tried to kill time at Estoril’s casino but hated it, dismissing gambling as dull, related to masochism. Missing Hanni badly, he returned to Lisbon, probably on the bus, to the Hotel de l’Europe, where he joined up with Pessoa. Having alerted the Second Commandante of Lisbon’s Policia to Hanni’s disappearance, Pessoa and the Beast explored Lisbon by night, finding “all necessary details,” more likely referring to bordellos than Hanni’s whereabouts. Worrying like the devil, Crowley wrote in a stew to his secretary, Israel Regardie:

Yorke is deliberately trying once more to murder me. I suspend him from all his functions. Please take possession of all documents, books, pictures &c. in his possession. Sue him instantly—via Kerman [lawyer]—if he refuses. [Yorke’s note: “I handed all the diaries &c. over to Kerman, from whom I bought them on AC’s death in 1947.”]¹⁰

The Monster finally showed up—at 6:00 p.m. the next day. She was leaving for Bremen. To pay for the voyage, she’d spun a yarn about Crowley and her destitution to Lisbon’s American consul, Lawrence S. Armstrong (1895–1952): “She fooled the most wooden idiot (and cad) I have met for years, one Armstrong, USA battery dude to the top of his bent.”¹¹

That night—she was leaving on the morrow—the couple performed sexual magick for the reconsecration of love. It is noteworthy that when Crowley conveyed the change of plan to Karl the next day, pride demanded that it was he (Crowley) who had sent her off to Bremen!

S. America is off. I must come back at once. So wire me £20 to pay bills here and expenses of journey. Yorke & Co. seem to be letting me down altogether. I will see Frau Ital when I reach Berlin: also Prof. Verweyen [Secretary General of the TS German Section; see Dramatis Personae]. The imporant news is that Pessoa has a capitalist who wants to put £3,000 into “Aleister Crowley Ltd.” Send him at once your version of the prospectus I left with you. Address: Apartado 147, Lissabon [sic]. Of course, the £2,000 of Cora’s is to go to the same fund. How often do I have to tell you that the only thing required to bring back the bacon is to have me so well known that everything I do is a little fortune [AC understood “celebrity economics”]. As in the case of Bernard Shaw &c. Pessoa understands this well. What we need is an American Jew for publicity manager. As soon as I get your £20 I shall come to Berlin (by the way, Monster got badly obsessed—all sorts of pathological nonsense—I sent her off to Bremen this morning. Look out for trouble your end—but don’t ask for it! Act warily!).¹²

Crowley took himself off for the day to Sintra, about twelve miles northwest of Lisbon up winding lines and hairpin bends in the hills. Sintra’s crown was a magical castle in the clouds, set in lush, lambent greenery; Crowley was much impressed. His intention was to play chess with Eduardo M. Pellen. Pellen would become President of the Portuguese Chess Federation in 1936. Pellen won the first game, but Crowley beat him the second and third games. Crowley wrote to Marie about getting a divorce.

On the Sunday, dejected and doubtless wishing to annoy Hanni, he decided to activate the suicide plan. He would, as he put it, “utilize the local scenery.” First he carved his and Hanni’s name in lovers’ tryst fashion on a tree near the Boca do Inferno rocky outcrop on the coast, then played with a pun. “Boca do Inferno” means the Mouth of Hell. As far as he and Hanni’s oral sex sessions were concerned, the Monster had the “Mouth of Hell”: truly hot stuff likely to explode a dormant volcano! He wrote a suicide note, recorded in his diary as: “I cannot live without you. The other ‘Boca do Inferno’ will get me—it won’t be as hot as yours. Hjsos! [the apparently cryptic ‘Hjsos’ meaning: hanni jaeger, s.o.s.: save our souls!] Tu Li Yu.”

He presumably did not deposit the suicide note straightaway, if indeed he ever did, for on the Monday he was back in Lisbon for an all-night tour of the “highest (= the lowest) quarter.” His companion in filth was the hotel porter, “an intelligent and traveled Swiss from St Gall.”¹³

Crowley tried to get in the swing of bordello life but found the effort absurd before hitting the sack at 9:00 a.m. the next morning. Hanni radio-telegraphed from Berlin: “93/93/93 ANU.” “93,” the Greek kabalistic value of “thelema” (will) and “agape” (love) in this message context means: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will.”

It was time to go home: back to the Monster, back to Berlin. The question was: Did he dare take the Sud-Express train through France? He thought he might be arrested on account of the refus de séjour affair of 1929. Crowley dared, leaving Lisbon on Tuesday 23 September at 11:30 a.m., hitting the French frontier at 7:00 p.m. Avoiding French cops at the Gare d’Orsay, Crowley alighted at Paris Austerlitz at 7:25 p.m. on the Wednesday. He got a taxi to the restaurant Lapérouse, having visited it only once since the war: “Yet they all recognized me with joy!”¹⁴ Here was a touching, belated testament to Crowley’s pre-war Paris reputation. Crowley was saddened only to hear that old acquaintance, American painter Thomas Alexander Harrison (1853–1930), was terminally ill.

Having been recognized, 666 felt apprehensive about being seen at the Gare du Nord, but at 10:55 p.m. he departed for Berlin unhindered. It was the last time he would see Paris in his life.

Crowley crossed the French-German border at Aachen at 7:00 a.m. Thursday morning. He had 700 francs left (about $28 U.S.). On Friday 26th Anu phoned before coming round to Germer’s flat in Charlottenburg in the afternoon. Reunited, the Beast and his Anu collected their luggage. They moved into the Pension Medenwaldt at 40–41 Kurfürstendamm, central Berlin’s main boulevard running west from the Kaiser Wilhelm church to the Bahnhof Halensee. Opus 28 that night was a “perfect harmony of union: The Fixation of the Infinite Desire.” Crowley thought they should get married “pretty damn quick.”¹⁵

Having spent the following afternoon sealed in bliss of oral and anal sex, Anu and 666 joined the Germers for a trip to the Mikado. There was a “free fight of drunks, but not much Panic Comedy.” Cora was the life and soul of the party, for once. Crowley and Hanni were in a love cloud: “we have quite lost our minds.” They spent the next afternoon in a sexual magick Opus for “Love”: “we can’t think at all,” Crowley wrote in his diary, astonished by the intensity of their togetherness.

From Estoril, Crowley had written to Alfred Adler, via Karl, asking that his book Magick be enclosed as a present to Adler. The outcome was another happy meeting with Adler on the 27th at the Savoy on Fasanenstrasse, which intersects the Kurfürstendamm at its east end. Again, Crowley was very impressed by Adler: “He is really a great man on A A lines,” meaning that Crowley and Adler agreed on fundamentals. After meeting in Vienna the previous month, Crowley had noted how they shared “a love of humanity without individual preferences”; the need for a “true scientific method” in ascertaining life’s meaning; and held a common idea of teleology and “the relation of the ego to [the] cosmos.”¹⁶

The next day, Crowley performed a great Opus of ceremonial magic (plus accessories) for Anu; the ceremony involved the consecration of a $5 gold piece as a talisman to bring financial fortune.

And so, with October’s arrival, a summer of madness and magick might seem to have been over, as Crowley embarked on his uninterrupted twenty-one-month-long sojourn in Berlin. But that would be to forget about the Great Suicide Stunt.

THE STUNT HITS THE FAN

On 1 October, Lt. Col. Carter of Special Branch alerted Gerald Yorke to a frantic communication from Marie Crowley. She had read of her husband’s disappearance in Portugal in the papers, probably in the Empire News, in which the following appeared at the end of September 1930:

FAMOUS MYSTIC OR HIS DOUBLE?
Message Pinned To Mouth of Cave: Vanished Couple

A mysterious note pinned to the entrance to a cave known as Hell’s Mouth, 20 miles from Lisbon, and the disappearance of a beautiful girl figure in the mysterious case of a man believed to be Aleister Crowley, the notorious English mystic, who is well known in London and Paris.

Special to Empire News

The mystery of the disappearance in Portugal of a man giving the name of Aleister Crowley deepens every day.

The real Aleister Crowley is known as an author and a poet, and also a kind of mystic and magician. He has been much criticized, and has been described by some of his critics as “the worst man in England.” The French police ordered him to leave France last year.

A man purporting to be Aleister Crowley recently turned up in a hotel at Estoril, near Lisbon, accompanied by a beautiful young German girl, who gave the name of Miss Hanni Jaeger.

One night there was a terrible scene in the hotel, the lady having hysterics and threatening to kill herself. Both were requested by the hotel management to leave the next day.

The Passport

Since then both the supposed Aleister Crowley and the fascinating Hanni Jaeger have disappeared from the public view, although the police have tried to find out what has become of them.

They discovered that a man with a passport bearing Crowley’s name and description actually crossed the Portuguese frontier.

Yet, a few days later, further discoveries caused the mystery to deepen. The missing man is believed to have been seen, still on Portuguese territory. Nothing so far has been heard of the lady, who is presumed to be still in Portugal. What was added to the mystery is the discovery of a letter, said to be from Crowley, and addressed to Hanni Jaeger.

Pinned to Rock

It was found pinned to a rock at the entrance to a cave, known as Hell’s Mouth, twenty miles from Lisbon. It said:—Year 14. Sun in the Scales L.G.P. I cannot live without thee. The other Mouth of Hell will catch me. It will not be as hot as thine. Hisos. Tu Li Yu. What all this means nobody can guess. Are there two Crowley’s, one genuine and one an impostor? Enquiry at some of the real Aleister Crowley’s favorite resorts in London reveals that he has not been seen at them for some time, and is presumed to be out of the country.

Is the mystical letter a fake or a practical joke put up by someone who has borrowed Crowley’s name for the occasion?

A Portuguese gentleman named Senhor Fernando Pessoa has made a statement to the effect that last year he had some correspondence with the real Crowley on literary matters, and that on September 2 he met a man, representing himself to be Aleister Crowley, who arrived at Lisbon on the steamship Alcantara, with the object of spending some time on the Portuguese coast. This man was accompanied by a Miss Hanni Larissa Jaeger. The couple went first to a hotel in Lisbon, and then to Estoril.

Hysterics

“On September 18, I received a letter from Crowley,” stated Senhor Pessoa, “saying that Miss Jaeger had a terrible attack of hysterics, and had disappeared, leaving merely two lines in pencil, that she was going to return.

“On September 23 he told me that he was going again to Sintra, which had enchanted him, and that he would spend some days there. He authorized me to receive his correspondence, forwarded to Cook’s Agency, so that I could get some books intended for me. He did not leave me any instructions concerning the rest of his correspondence.

“After this I swear that I saw Crowley twice, on September 24—once in the Rossio Street, and once on the Cais de Sodre, entering the English tobacco shop.

“Nevertheless, the police state that he crossed the frontier on September 23. Did he actually cross, or did he both cross and return?”

Carter reassured Marie. Only that morning he had received a card from Crowley in Berlin. Judging from extant communications, the card might have illuminated the political situation. Adolf Hitler had been barred from sitting in the Reichstag as he was an Austrian citizen; shares in the Bourse fell as the world registered that the Jew- and Bolshevik-denouncing Nazis were now Germany’s largest party after the Social Democrats.

The day Carter wrote to Yorke, Crowley received a wire from Pessoa:

Letter cigarette case identified Crowley’s discovered evening 25th place coast Mouth Hell police investigating doubt suicide though nothing definite ascertained.

Portuguese journalist Augusto Ferreira Gomes, investigating the case of the missing Crowley, had “found” Crowley’s suicide note along with a cigarette box close to the Boca do Inferno. Gomes decided to interview a man who had been seen with Crowley, one Fernando Pessoa. Was it mere chance that Gomes was a Crowley admirer, as well as being a friend of Pessoa? Gomes’s interviews show both he and Pessoa were in on the stunt.

Pessoa informed the journalist that he did not know what “L.G.P.” could mean, but presumed it was the girl’s mystic name. (It was an acronym for “Little Green Pig,” one of AC’s soubriquets for Hanni!) “Hjsos” (written as “Hisos” in the papers) was, Pessoa suggested, a magic word! The best of it was when Pessoa declared that “Tu Li Yu” was a Chinese sage from three thousand years before Christ, who had been, Crowley informed him, one of his previous incarnations! In fact of course, “tu li yu” (tuli-oo) is simply a familiar farewell, like “ta-ta.” What looked like “Year 14” was actually in Crowley’s Thelemic dating system: I4, where “I” means 1904 (the date of The Book of the Law), added to “22” (the number of tarot trumps and paths on the kabbalistic Tree of Life). The additional “4” simply brings the increment to the vulgar, or common year (era vulgari), 1930.

Pessoa added a few more lies to the journalist’s by now intriguing picture. Pessoa certainly saw more of Crowley than this, but truth was not the point:

Crowley remained in Lisbon at the Hotel de l’Europe from the 18th. Until the 23rd (except Sunday 21st, when he went to play chess at Sintra). It was during his stay in Lisbon that I spoke more often with him. On the 22nd he told me, and on the 23rd. He repeated it, that he was going again to Sintra, which he was charmed with, and that he would stay there several days. He said goodbye to me, at half past ten in the morning of the 23rd, at the door of Café Arcada, in Terreiro do Paco. I never again spoke to him. I think I saw him again. On the 24th, coming from Estrella, in the tram that comes down the Avenida, I saw Crowley, or his phantom, turn the corner of Café La Gare to Rua Primeiro de Dezembro. On the same day, in crossing Praça Duque da Terceira, I saw Crowley, or his phantom, enter, with another man, the Tabacaria Ingleza.¹⁷

It might appear Pessoa’s attraction to the stunt lay in its artistic potential; the feeling is one of participating in a kind of surrealist reality event, with a touch of Dada: playing with the vulgar press through an ironic resort to esoteric words and categories that in fact originate in vulgar meanings familiar to journalism now rendered superficially meaningless. The story then provides a “transplacement” of magical for vulgar values; the “disappearance” of Crowley becomes a mystery of the invisibility of the spiritual in modern life. And of course, there was the pure leg-pulling side. Crowley’s response to the news scam oscillated.

Crowley seized on the opportunity to use the story as a way of exposing fraudulent mediumship! Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had died in July. Spiritualist mediums claimed to be in touch with the spirit of the man who in his lifetime had favored Eusepia Palladino, a spiritualist medium exposed by Crowley’s friend Everard Feilding and other members of the Society for Psychical Research. Crowley wired Major Thynne, using Hanni’s name:

Master Therion’s suicide confirmed stop Urgently request you obtain message from him through medium who contacted Doyle stop Utmost distress Hanni Jaeger¹⁸

On 4 October, Crowley had Germer wire Thynne: “Please act instantly energetically on Jaeger telegram Germer.”

Yorke, the spoiler, wired Germer back: “Tell 666 there are two of them They both bounce (as balls!)” Yorke thought he was being smart, exposing as “balls” what he thought was a leg-pull on him. Crowley wired back: “Go ahead Plan is to expose fraud.”¹⁹

Crowley showed Yorke’s dismissive wire to his friend John Navin Sullivan, the Times science correspondent and author who that week was visiting Berlin with Aldous Huxley. Crowley dispatched a card forthwith to Yorke with the following P.S.:

Sullivan says “bounce” means “cheat”—But this doesn’t make sense. The whole plan is to get a Message from the Mighty Dead, preferably pointing out the horrors that follow suicide. Then in good time we make the British Public laugh. —666²⁰

Israel Regardie went ahead with Crowley’s idea and put together a press release, describing his visit to Alfred Vout Peters, the medium who had claimed contact with Conan Doyle “on the other side.” According to Regardie, Peters’s spirit guide related how the passed-over Crowley “proceeded to describe some peculiar crater, funnel-shaped, (this does seem like a description of the ‘Boca do Inferno’) into which Mr C had been violently pushed by enemies, presumably of Roman Catholic persuasion or with Free Masonic connections.”

Regardie sent his draft to Crowley on 15 October. Reading it in Berlin, Crowley added in frustration, “—But no books!” Germer apparently had bought more than a thousand copies, but they were still in Paris! He had the publicity, but nothing to sell an intrigued public, momentarily diverted from the onward march of Hitler and the panic in the markets that resulted from the German crisis.

Crowley replied to Regardie on the 17th:

Couldn’t tell you about suicide beforehand because it was impromptu. Done for another purpose altogether, and developed by circumstances. But it has been good practice. We’ll stage a multiple murder or something really jolly when we get the time.²¹

In Portugal, meanwhile, the story appeared as “O Mistério da Boca do Inferno” in the magazine Noticias Ilustrado, founded by Pessoa’s writer and artist friends. Crowley received his copy on the 13th.

On 17 October, Nobel Prize–winning author Thomas Mann read out “An Appeal to Reason,” his response to the election results of 15 September. The Berliner Tageblatt published it the next day. Mann warned Germany of a wave of primitive mass democracy, pseudospiritual fodder for the workers, coarseness, vulgarity, imminent barbarism. This was a wave set to engulf the world, energized by confused, intoxicating, superficial, and tempting impressions entering people’s lives like an asphyxiating flood through the mass media. Truth was choking. Culture, spirit, art, and ideas were cast aside in favor of mass sporting events attended by honored guests: anything to drown thought and eliminate the promptings of conscience. Nemesis, Mann warned, followed hubris; a tragic logic was now in train to which people were deaf and blind. The workers’ eyes must be opened to see that, for all their faults, the Social Democrats were the only guarantee of a free Germany. If reason was lost, Germany was lost.

As Mann’s speech appeared in the Tageblatt, Crowley was still trying to make something of his story in Berlin. He rang Tageblatt journalist Günther Stein to discuss possibilities, but whichever way you twisted the narrative (he even played with the idea of there being two Crowleys, one straight, one wild!), the story was pretty feeble compared to Mann’s “Appeal to Reason.” The British popular press might have enjoyed a laugh in a depression period, but the brazen Hell’s Mouth cunnilingual pun-stunt really wasn’t the best way to attract attention in Berlin; the timing was all wrong.

On 29 October a communist with political connections called Dr. Dusberg contacted Crowley for pictures of Hanni, apparently for an issue of Détective (a French crime-mystery magazine published by Gallimard). A blast of the Hell’s Mouth story did appear in Détéctive on 30 October, featuring photos of Crowley and Hanni (the magazine had a 250,000 circulation, well justifying Crowley’s hopes for supportive publicity). Perhaps Dusberg’s inquiry was connected with a follow-up issue, perhaps not. In fact, the Détective issue marked the last of the story’s broad media impact, though a few syndicated ripples would lap the distant shores of the U.S. Midwestern Press in 1931; Crowley spoke to a Miss Schutz working for the Chicago Tribune on the day Dusberg inquired about pictures. He also met a movie producer called Ostwald on that day; this was probably Richard Oswald (1880–1963), a prolific commercial Austrian producer-director working in Berlin.

Crowley saw a copy of Détective on 6 November. His comment: “a goodish story,” which when all is considered, is probably the best gloss one could put on this curious episode, though the stunt did prove that you can create something that could run from practically nothing.

More serious business was at hand.

EIGHT

QUANTUM MAGUS

David Bradshaw’s paper “The Best of Companions: J. W. N. Sullivan, Aldous Huxley, and the New Physics” has shown that it was Crowley’s friend, popular science writer J. W. N. Sullivan, who most influenced the novelist Aldous Huxley’s mind in the direction of a synthesis of mystical idealism and the “New Physics.”

Huxley and Sullivan became friends in Florence in early 1924. Huxley was attracted to Sullivan’s idea that “at the back of the mystery of the scientific universe is the mystery of man’s mind.”¹

Huxley even based aspects of characters in his Little Mexican (short stories, 1924), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928) on Sullivan, as Huxley advanced from the superficial observations of London’s bohemia of his novel Antic Hay (1923, where aspects of Nancy Cunard appear as Myra Viveash) toward deeper currents in contemporary culture.

The year 1924 also marked the year Sullivan became acquainted with Albert Einstein in Berlin. Einstein’s effect on Sullivan was immense; Sullivan felt like a student again. By the end of the year Sullivan was asserting that Einstein was fundamentally changing the way men of science and reason approached the universe. Einstein, he believed, had made the universe once more a safe place for mystics; gone was the Victorian universe of an endless series of billiard balls; mind itself had become an issue once more. In vulgar language, the Einsteinian universe appeared to have, or even be, a mind of its own, which imaginative human language could only access through symbolism on a par with mathematics or music.

Sullivan popularized the idea of a universe fit for metaphysicians, and the train he started up still runs, often to the chagrin of numerous anti-mystical physicists.

As it turned out, Huxley distanced himself somewhat from the enthusiasms of Sullivan as the decade wore on, especially after reacquainting himself with D. H. Lawrence, but in 1930, Huxley and Sullivan came together again to compile a series of “Interviews with Great Scientists” to be published by The Observer in February 1931 (reprinted in Sullivan’s Contemporary Mind: Some Modern Answers, 1934). They headed to Berlin in search of those answers.

Sullivan had first met Crowley in 1921, introduced by artist Nina Hamnett. Crowley valued Sullivan’s scientific knowledge and openness to mysticism, which, after all, was a pillar of Crowley’s much-misunderstood Magick. Mysticism was seen by Crowley as the means of raising the mind to the level of discourse with higher intelligence, whether that was considered abstractly as otherwise inaccessible aspects of human mind, or as entities in themselves. Crowley and Sullivan shared the outlook that the universe conformed to some extent to the manner of mind approaching it. The universe accessible to scientific instruments was still subject to ordinary human perception and was still therefore a creation of mind, as were the scientific instruments. Breakthroughs occurred when human intelligence was answered by a like intelligibility perceived in the universe, that is to say, when a formula appeared to work. Against the naive view of magic, Crowley, practically alone, saw that in its highest phases Magick was essentially scientific, even if sometimes dealing with little-known or unknown laws of nature. Crowley believed in the unity of nature and was against any distinction of occult and scientific knowledge; he believed in rigorous, skeptical experiment.

Crowley had fully grasped the ambiguity of the mind-matter distinction, along with Schrödinger and Max Planck. That is, while the mind could be seen as a manifestation of the brain, the brain could equally be seen as a manifestation of mind: a notable conclusion of the Hermetic philosophy of late antiquity (see the Poimandres of Hermes Trismegistus). The world was material through and through when perceived that way; equally, there was no perfectly solid matter. Things appeared to exist insofar as a force was applied to the universe of the smallest particle that made “it” vibrate for a moment and appear on limiting sensing organs or equipment. In magick, Crowley called the phenomena of the universe the “play of Nuit,” or infinite space in embrace with motion.

A look at Crowley’s “autohagiography” reveals in the first instance its dedication “To Three Friends,” the first of whom, J. W. N. Sullivan, “suggested this booklet,” and second, the influence of a Crowley-Sullivan discourse in its prelude:

“Every man and every woman is a star.” What can we know about a star? By the telescope, a faint phantasm of its optical value. By the spectroscope, a hint of its composition. By the telescope, and our mathematics, its course. In this last case we may legitimately argue from the known to the unknown: by our measure of the brief visible curve, we can calculate whence it has come and whither it will go. Experience justifies our assumptions. . . .

Nothing can ever be created or destroyed; and therefore the “life” of any individual must be comparable to that brief visible curve, and the object of writing it to divine by the proper measurements the remainder of its career.

Clearly, Crowley’s mind was one that was of interest to Huxley and Sullivan, even if impossible to sell as scientific to the level of vulgar newspaper discourse, even The Observer.

On the day Hanni quit Lisbon and the Beast, a letter from The Observer’s offices at 22 Tudor St. EC4, winged its way to Crowley’s London postal address. Sullivan, who sent it, obviously thought Crowley still in London, for he asked his old friend to look out for a visit from him and Aldous Huxley in five days time. Crowley, back in Berlin, received another belated letter from Sullivan on 2 October: Sullivan and Huxley would be in Berlin that night.

The next day, Crowley couldn’t locate Sullivan. To find him, Crowley wired Einstein—then inhabiting a central Berlin loft apartment—eventually finding Sullivan through the good offices of physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), author of the eponymous “Schrödinger’s Cat” hypothetical experiment, and creator of the famous quantum mechanical wave function equation. That Crowley could wire Einstein and use Schrödinger as a useful contact says something about the character of Berlin at the time, and Crowley’s real place in it.

Crowley’s knowledge of Einstein may not have been confined to science and philosophy (Schrödinger also had mystical, philosophical interests). Einstein was seriously involved with the League Against Imperialism, a spin-off from the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (IAH), ostensibly formed to help the Soviet Union survive a severe famine in 1923 but which in fact owed its launch to Comintern agent and KPD delegate Willi Münzenberg, whose right-hand man was Soviet OGPU agent Louis Gibarti, who would dine with Crowley in late 1931. The IAH project initiated a process to garner intellectual and activist support for anticolonialism, and, after 1929, antiwar movements whose beneficiary was communist Russia.

For some reason, Karl was very nervous that day and drove his car right into a standing car by a sidewalk! Crowley survived again to dine with Sullivan and Huxley, probably on the Unter den Linden, where, on the corner of Freidrichstrasse, they could all have seen, if not exactly marveled at, the newly installed first illuminated advertising column in Berlin: a small example of technology reaching Berlin ahead of the rest. What Huxley and Sullivan did marvel at was Hanni, “a miracle of loveliness” as Crowley put it. Crowley took the party to the Mikado drag club for a taste of Berlin’s nightlife at the Observer’s expense.

Crowley found the thirty-six-year-old Aldous Huxley exceptionally charming and believed he had raised Huxley from his usual apathy. Not surprisingly, it has been speculated whether Huxley’s doubtless intellectually intense time with Crowley might have planted seeds in his mind that would sprout years later in Huxley’s book about his mescaline experiences, The Doors of Perception (1954), a key work of the 1960s psychedelic revolution. A pioneer, Crowley had been experimenting with mescaline since early in the century. His scientific insights illuminated his understanding of the nature of perception and the phenomenal universe.

Crowley spent the evening of Saturday 4 October with Huxley and Sullivan in Berlin-Kreuzberg, at the Münchner Hofbrau. The establishment consisted of a long hall, rather like a converted chapel, braced by low wooden panels and punctuated by a number of ogee-style and perpendicular latticed windows of various sizes set into whitewashed plaster. Above the long lines of tables for six, covered with neat tablecloths, carafes, and cutlery, was a large circular lantern ceiling that admitted sunlight from above. At night, huge bulbs suspended from the fifteen-foot-diameter circle’s ridged frame joined similar bulbs suspended from octagonal, medieval-looking chandeliers to illuminate what resembled a monastic refectory or austere Bavarian bierhaus. Crowley had its number straightaway, describing it as “one of those large mediocre places which delight the grossness of Sullivan. He was gloomy drunk on iced beer, and sick after a vast goulash and more iced beer.”²

Fig. 8.1. The Münchner Hofbrau, Kreuzberg, where Crowley drank with Aldous Huxley and J. W. N. Sullivan on Saturday, 4 October 1930.

Crowley found Huxley improved on acquaintance. Hanni and the Beast left him, very tired, at 1:00 a.m. on Sunday. The party reconvened the next day with Crowley spending all day with Huxley. Hanni was ill while Sullivan suffered from a bad hangover. It was perhaps on this day that Sullivan put a questionnaire to Crowley, asking him his incentive; the humanistic importance of his work, and a couple of subsidiary questions, such as whether he believed life on Earth was accidental or resulted from a scheme, and whether Crowley believed anything of an individual survived death. A final question asked whether current systems of incentives to bring out the best in man were fit for purpose. Crowley could see no such system.

As to the other questions, Crowley said his work’s significance lay in acquiring new methods of research. As for life’s being accidental or not, Crowley said it was a play of Nuit: “Every man is a process of Love under Will.” Regarding survival of a man after death (save in the memory of friends and so on), Crowley refused to speculate since the question depended on what was meant by “survival.”

For Crowley, consciousness was a record of experience of a point in the infinitude of space from which meaning occurred through relation to other points through expansion of that point. All points were identical unless there was a third point to rally on. Crowley was advocating something like scientist-magus Giordano Bruno’s sixteenth-century “synthesis of infinite relativity” wherein an infinite universe can expand its coordinates directly relative to every other part of the universe. Essentially, all parts are the same but motion generates identity or self-consciousness. This is what Crowley meant when he said to Sullivan “every phenomenon ought to be an orgasm of its kind.”³ Now this may have been too strong a dose for Observer readers in 1931, for Crowley was not included as one of the great men of science in the newspaper series, though he was interviewed as one by Huxley and Sullivan. In return, Crowley painted their portraits (catalogue nos. 23 and 55, respectively, in Crowley’s 1931 exhibition; currently lost, as far as I know).

Crowley’s mind had been driven by conversation with the philosopher and the mathematician to consider Einstein’s theories. The Book of the Law has been recognized as a prophecy of relativity (“Every man and every woman is a star”), and Crowley had enjoyed visionary access to an Einsteinian universe, of sorts, but he was not entirely bowled over by Einstein’s “Space-Time Continuum”:

I reach the Great Circle. Einstein denies Newton’s Absolute Space; yet his equations postulate the phenomenon of the Universe as inherent qualities of a kind of Space which postulates the Newtonian by deviating from it. What is the real meaning of his Space-Time Continuum? Only a simplification of the mode in which phenomena present themselves to human sense-organs (via measuring appliances). This then is merely one way of apprehending the real. Another point is that as soon as a tensor reaches perfection, it becomes an identical equation. [Tensors: geometrical objects that describe numerical relations between vectors, scalars, and other tensors.]

But since an identical equation is always ultimately meaningless, how is it that there should be a side to it of which each detail is measurably significant? See my work on Platitude. Analogy of a picture. When the canvas is wholly covered with lines it is meaningless. Then why are some partial coverings significant and others not? Is it significant that (as in a tensor equation) one can always get some sort of likeness to man if one starts with two squares (however deformed or relatively placed) for the pelvis and thorax?⁴

Einstein’s development from Euclidean or Newtonian space as three dimensions with time as a fourth dimension, to a conception of space involving time for calculation purposes, because time values changed relative to an object’s velocity in relation to the observer, was striking to Crowley since he believed the principles of the cosmos to be space and motion, though he had wondered whether time was a kind of dimension of space. However, he was not convinced that Einstein’s new continuum represented absolute reality, however useful it was to calculations. It still all depended on the limitations of the perceiver or of measuring equipment. Crowley believed that every statement exhibited the limitations of its maker’s consciousness. Magick meant for him the acquisition of new intelligence and expanding levels of perception. His quiet analytical criticism of Einstein was simply that it was not quite the mystical breakthrough Sullivan imagined but a refinement of, or reaction to, Newtonian science.

It would not be going too far to call Crowley a Quantum Magus. Newton believed that the original religion was the original science, and Crowley’s view of Magick was not at all dissimilar, and Crowley, like Newton, looked forward to a kind of revival or revivification of an ancient conception, long since distorted. Religion had simply argued about the nature or reality of the Mind or Force behind forces, and science split from religion over whether Nature simply served as directed from above: that is to say, a question of authority and the status of human intelligence.

What Einstein and Schrödinger and Planck and others were thinking was whether the former “above” was now comprehensible as Mind, and therefore intelligibility, in the universe, so that Man held an instant of a universal, dynamic consciousness. Crowley’s view was that the New Physicists were simply reviving the initiated magical view of the universe, reaching by mathematics what could be reached by yoga, just as psychology was reviving magical conceptions that could be reached by magical prayer. Magick was science that science had not yet subjected to rational understanding: an unlikely possibility since magick depended on levels of mind superior to, or outside of, human rational constraints, but not beyond experience.

Crowley found himself in familiar territory when he contemplated the famous “Uncertainty Principle” (1927) identified with Heisenberg and Schrödinger and essential to quantum mechanics in the New Physics. The Uncertainty Principle asserts that the more certain we are of a subatomic particle’s position, the less certain we are of its momentum. The principle involves the idea that any single particle’s energy is co-inherently linked to the energy levels of every other particle in the universe: the smaller the particle, the less predictability.

While there is a universal inter-compensation of pressures on all particles, quantum effects are not visible to ordinary perception. This is the context in which we should understand Crowley’s words in the prelude to his autohagiography that “Nothing can ever be created or destroyed.” In religious terms, while everything is subject to change, God’s creation is eternal, unlimited by time and space, but for perception’s sake: eternal life.

It ought to tell us something about the effect of Crowley on Huxley’s mind that the magus obtained willingly from Huxley the precise details of his birth so that Crowley could produce an astrological figure. Crowley wrote to his secretary, Regardie, in London:

Please send a copy of Clouds without Water [Crowley’s 1909 poetry book] to Aldous Huxley Esq., Athenaeum Club, Pall Mall (with prospectuses &c.) with my compliments—we had a gorgeous three days with him in Berlin. Also please set up a figure for him. Godalming, 4 A.M. July 26 [18]’94.

I’m sure you will do your best to help establish a “Crowley Bureau” with its own capital, staff, publicity men &c. The whole responsibility for A A business now falls on you. Damned good for you at your tender age to have to deal with assorted lunatics. Consult me only if in real doubt. I want you to acquire initiative and get the habit of authority.

93

666⁵

A letter and two cards have survived from Huxley to Crowley. On Athenaeum Club stationery from 19 December 1932, Huxley wrote to say his son’s flu had prevented his presence at the club when Crowley called, and that being “a very slow worker” he was unable to consider the “extraneous work” that Crowley was offering.

A postcard sent from Panama in April 1933 was its own reason why Huxley could not accept Crowley’s “kind invitation,” while a third undated postcard, from Gorguette, Sanary-sur-Mer in Provence, also had to reject a kind invitation “for geographical reasons which I’m not yet far enough advanced in the Black Arts to nullify! Yours, Aldous Huxley.” Huxley was in the Gorguette area in 1932 when he wrote Brave New World. Huxley left Sanary finally in 1936.

Fig. 8.2. A postcard to Crowley from Aldous Huxley

“NICK” CARTER AND THE CASE OF THE REAPPEARING WIFE

On 20 November 1931, Lt. Col. Carter would write to Gerald Yorke, saying that he was “choked off ” with Crowley on account of the “Spanish-Portuguese episode.”⁶

So choked off was Carter that he hadn’t bothered to reply to Crowley’s latest offer of a business deal! What the head of Special Branch did not admit was how deeply he had offended Crowley by interfering, along with Gerald Yorke, with his marital affairs, while Yorke himself may have been instrumental, along with Carter, in Hélène Fraux’s removal of her niece, Crowley’s daughter Lulu, from Lulu’s mother, Ninette, in France to the United States, without Crowley’s knowledge. Carter also avoided his own responsibility. In 1929 it had been Carter who advised Crowley that if he wanted to free Marie from limbo in Belgium and bring her to England, he would have to marry her.

Carter’s “choked off ” trouble went back to October of the previous year (1930).

Crowley was stone broke. On 20 October he pawned his watch while Cora urged Hanni to go out charing. The Beast wrote to Regardie:

I have had a dreadful month I can tell you. What with the German crisis and the World markets, there has not been a penny to spare for constructive work of any kind . . . we have been undergoing all kinds of privations; in particular myself, because I live only the life of the Spirit, so that if I cannot work, or if I feel that the cause is hopeless I perish. It makes me physically ill. [. . .] But Eagles [women] have ministered unto me—alas! that it should not suffice the soul. It is a poor consolation that my prophecies are being fulfilled.⁷

Crowley was flabbergasted by what Regardie next had to tell him, noting in his diary for 23 October: “[Regardie] writes that Yorke, who urged me to go to Lisbon, tried to get Marie to have me arrested!! apparently for going there! This incident is quite incredible, or would be if I did not know Yorke.” (Note added to transcript by G. J. Yorke: “Both incorrect. G. J. Y.”)

On 21 October, Carter addressed a letter to “Dear Crowley c/o Karl Gemer [sic] Lietzensee Ofer [sic; should be “Ufer”] 9, Berlin, Charlottenburg,” urging Crowley to return from the continent to his wife “or you will be getting yourself into serious trouble probably.” Crowley scribbled on it: “The impudence of the lunatic!”⁸

On 24 October, Crowley confided to his diary: “Mysterious and sinister letter from Carter. Answered it—badly—after 3 goes.”⁹

The previous day, Crowley explained to Regardie how to deal with sexual inhibitions. He also made clear what his attitude was to Marie.

23 October, Berlin,
I know only one sure way of overcoming inhibitions. “Live dangerously!” Keep on forcing yourself to do the things you fear, and presently the nerves get used to it.

[. . .] Meanwhile, reassure Marie of my continued affection. But her good sense must show her that it is impossible for us ever to live together again. Martha Küntzel (tell her!) found a letter she [Marie] wrote about her only true love being Karl Germer! Others were mentioned [including Hanchant]. I came fourth—rather like Ananias! I shall send her money when I can get it. At present I’m living on pure charity—and everything pawned at that! [. . .] Keep Marie friendly and as cheerful as may be. Ask her to write to me. [. . .] If she did commit adultery with him [Yorke], let her own up. Point out that I never tell lies. I am not virtuous—but IT DOESN’T PAY!¹⁰

On the 26th, Crowley was worried: “Shall I answer Carter further? If so, in what sense?” The next day:

Wired and wrote Carter.

Anu had another attack of melancholy worse than before, or she was merely naughty. She started to make a scandal in the Pension [probably the Medenwaldt on the Kurfürstendamm]. I’m very sorry for her, but I do begin to think the game not worth the candle. P.S. Test I was as mad as hell! I think the public interest in crimes passionels is envy. The dull brutes wish that they could feel like that.¹¹

As if Crowley was not under enough pressure, Yorke now weighed in with his advice. His effort had clearly been coordinated with Carter.

Please do not forget that if you persist in giving her [Marie] nothing at all, you run a grave risk eventually of going to prison for it. Do have the decency to “come clean” and put the wretched woman out of her suspense either by writing and telling her to go to hell, or else by sending money. To write and say you want to and then to send nothing—which is what you have done since October 25 is distinctly mean—to put it mildly.¹²

Crowley turned the other cheek, offered to help Marie when he could, and got on with establishing himself as an artist in Berlin.

NINE

AN OLD MASTER

He certainly was an artist and had due respect, and wonder for the things of the senses (and they are many!) 1

NANCY CUNARD

Aleister Crowley’s life as a Berlin artist properly began on 1 October 1930 when he met leading modern art dealer and patron Karl Nierendorf.

Saw Nierendorf, a very nice man, who suggested (without being told) that the thing to do was to put me over as a Personality.²

What Nierendorf meant was that the emphasis of any exhibition of Crowley’s art should be related directly to the outstanding characteristics of the man who created the paintings, of whose essence the works were an expression. Crowley was not seeking recognition as an innovator of artistic style; his work was too idiosyncratic, too varied for that.

It is telling that in Nierendorf ’s assessment of Crowley in the Berlin exhibition catalogue (1931) he used the untranslated English word “Outsider” of Crowley: “a very vital, energetic Outsider, a man of elementary, compelling power is behind these pictures.” An “Outsider” was understood as one who did not belong to a set, party, or group. Apparently anachronistic in 1931, its usage may be traced to 1907 (well before Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider, 1956), where it denoted a person isolated from conventional society. The word can also mean a dark horse or newcomer. Crowley was presented as being an outsider to conventional artistic circles. This was not strictly true, however, as we shall discover.

Crowley would have relished the word, understanding it as capturing his self-image as the Beast, the “Wanderer of the Waste.” His autohagiography’s proper title was The Spirit of Solitude, an awesome conception to the Germanic artistic sensibility.

Nierendorf recognized that Crowley was very different from British artists in general. For that, he was grateful. Crowley was neither follower nor pale imitator of French tastes as were so many British artists. Furthermore, Crowley already had an instinctive grasp of the essences of contemporary German art. Nierendorf wrote in his introduction to Crowley’s exhibition catalogue:

I noticed his immediate appreciation of Dix, Nolde, Beckmann, Otto Müller, Schmidt-Rottluff and Scholz. He saw works of these painters for the first time and his intuitive judgment was absolutely sound and at the same time of an unassumingness which indifferent viewers of artworks never show. In later conversations he also showed himself to be restrained, completely free of pretense, and without any over-sensitivity in the face of critical objections to his pictures.

Was Crowley also a pioneer British artistic presence in Berlin?

In many respects, he was. Poet W. H. Auden visited Berlin, partly for political reasons, in 1928. He returned in ’29. Writer Christopher Isherwood spent a few weeks with Auden that year. Stephen Spender joined Isherwood in Berlin in 1929 in search of sexual and social liberties. Isherwood and Spender would go out on the town with Crowley in 1931, the year performer and writer Jean Ross, and journalist Gerald Hamilton, would move to Berlin; Crowley knew both of them.

As for painters, it is significant that in the Galerie Nierendorf ’s current list of the fifty most important artists to have exhibited between 1920 and 2004, there is not one British artist; Crowley should be on the list but was unable to gain a proper foothold in the art scene after 1932 due to the Nazi takeover; his place in the Nierendorf Gallery story has been forgotten.

The only British painters I have been able to locate who had any presence at all in Berlin in the period were, with one exception, those who exhibited at the Vier Nationen Ausstellung (Four Nations Exhibition) at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, in 1926. They were Mark Gertler (1891– 1939), Henry Lamb (1883–1960), William Nicholson (1872–1949), Glyn Warren Philpot (1884–1937), Duncan Grant (1885–1978), Walter Sickert (1860–1942), and Paul Nash (1889–1946). As far as I know, none of these artists made Berlin their home or exhibited in Berlin independently, and none seems to have excited significant German interest.

Francis Bacon (1909–1992) stayed two months in Berlin in 1927 at the Hotel Adlon, the first month of which he spent with the wealthy racehorse owner and friend of his father, Harcourt-Smith. Bacon then went to Paris. He returned to Berlin in 1930 and met Stephen Spender. Bacon did not exhibit in Berlin.

Crowley appears to be the only British painter of the time who exhibited independently in Berlin and who caught the German imagination in the process.

Crowley was fortunate indeed to attract the critical and promotional eye of Karl Nierendorf in 1930.

Karl Nierendorf had begun dealing in modern art in 1920 when he mounted exhibitions in Cologne with his brother Josef. In 1923, they established the Galerie Nierendorf in Düsseldorf—where Karl met Otto Dix in 1921—and took over J. B. Neumann’s Graphische Kabinett in Berlin. The brothers ran the Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf GmbH under that name from 1926 until 1933.

It was Nierendorf who published Otto Dix’s Der Krieg (The War) in 1924, a brilliant fifty-piece portfolio of etchings that graphically confronted a collective denial of the Great War’s trauma in Germany. Here was no political rhetoric about the glorious boys in uniform being stabbed in the back by politicians at home. The war was shown as it was: mud, madness, mutilation, fatality, and futility.

In 1925, sensitive to the newest waves, Nierendorf mounted the “New Objectivity” exhibition in Mannheim.

In November 1930—a month after meeting Crowley—Nierendorf ’s Berlin gallery “for contemporary artists” moved from Lützowstrasse 32 to Königin Augusta Strasse 22, on the corner with Mathäikirchstrasse, where it remained until the beginning of 1932. Within a few months of the move, the gallery had mounted exhibitions of painter Werner Scholz (1898–1982) and of sculptor Joachim Karsch (1897–1945). Karsch’s wife, Meta, would leave her husband for Karl’s brother, Joseph Nierendorf. Exhibitions of still life and landscape painter George Mosson (1851–1933) and of Expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884– 1976) soon followed.

For Nierendorf, art was religion because art exhibited the spiritual life of the artist, and the living existence of this demonstrable life of the spirit afforded hope and faith in life amid the cruelty of the world. The task of the promoter then was to stir sensitivity to the spiritual life, the personal within that the dictator (or Freudian “anal-sadist”) seeks to annihilate. Nierendorf performed this work amid continual money problems, vulgar criticism, and ever-present debts. While long-suffering Nierendorf ’s exhibitions frequently stirred the arts press, depressed conditions often meant practically nothing was sold, which meant hardship for himself and his artists. It could be very tough introducing people to the new; before the work acquired financial value, many artists would never be valued.

9.1. Joachim Karsch exhibition at the Neumann-Nierendorf Gallery, Königin Augusta Strasse 22, Berlin, January 1931.

Nierendorf offered Crowley a one-man guide to Berlin’s modern art.

MODERN ART IN BERLIN

The major characteristic of art in Berlin until the midtwenties was a commitment to reality. Expressionism, launched around 1910, carried on after the war as if the war was something Art had foreseen. That the Great War seemed to confirm the urgent moral concerns of Expressionists finds a certain resonance with Crowley’s own views on the war; that it was the result of moral failure and corruption for sure, but at the same time it was an inevitable struggle, a vain explosion of resistance to an oncoming truth. For Crowley that truth was Thelema, a spiritual and scientific revolution in ethics. For Crowley, art would either signify New Aeon awareness or indicate resistance to it. Insofar as art is a spiritual pursuit, Crowley was confident that genuine artists would express the true will of the times, and, just as inevitably, fall foul of the philistines. The genuine artist was an unconscious Thelemite.

In some respects, Expressionism lent itself to Crowley’s philosophical and artistic concerns. While in 1919 Crowley had called himself, off the cuff, a “subconscious impressionist,” the label is practically identical to saying he was, in many of his works, a “magical expressionist.” There is something primitive and elemental in Expressionism’s urge to mold inner dimensions of perception into a visual concreteness that mere ectoplasm could not match, though in the process, the results could bear a somewhat ghostly ring about them.

Journalist and promoter Ivan Narodny, whom Crowley knew, said of Crowley’s artist friend Robert Winthrop Chanler (1872–1930) that Chanler’s artistic theory was magical. Before temples existed, primitive sorcerers formed concrete symbols, figures, and talismanic objects to express intangible spirit presences. Art was the wand of prehistoric religion; the cave was the first artist’s studio. Few places in 1930 expressed this idea so concretely as Hans Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus in Friedrichstrasse (1919): a veritable cave of stalactites suspended in plaster from the ceiling with seating below for over 5,000 ready to suspend disbelief in the theatrical productions of the great Max Reinhardt, who in 1935, free of Nazi opposition (Max was an Austrian Jew), would direct Hollywood’s magical Midsummer Night’s Dream that so captivated the eight-year-old Crowley disciple to be—and boy movie extra—Kenneth Anger.

Expressionism breathed through Paul Wegener’s horror film The Golem (1920; adapted from Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel), as well as director Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). That Crow-ley-fan producer Albin Grau and director F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu was drenched with Expressionist sensibility goes without saying. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis of 1927 was also a succession of by then unfashionable Expressionist tropes: unfashionable because around 1924–25 Expressionism was pushed out by a cooler, slicker, urban style: New Objectivity. There was still despair within the New Objectivity but the works of Max Beckmann (1884–1950) and Christian Schad, for example, were removed from expression of feeling. “Things happened.” You didn’t have to hear the scream; you could paint the emergence of bone from skin; pain was an image. A year before Crowley’s arrival in Berlin, left-winger Kurt Tucholsky’s “Ideal and Reality” expressed the cool realism, now established:

We dreamed of a republic
And now we have one!
You wanted a tall, thin one
And got a short, fat one—
C’est la vie!

Before the slick, however, had come the kick.

Taking the November 1918 revolution as a clarion, a group of artists formed the Novembergruppe; Otto Dix joined this professional organization, as did KPD member Rudolf Schlichter. In the year Dix met Nierendorf (1921), one of Dix’s paintings, and one of Schlichter’s, were excluded for impropriety from Berlin’s annual exhibition. Dix and Schlichter formed a Dadaist opposition, joined by Hannah Höch (who had worked in the handicraft department of Ullstein Verlag) and George Grosz (an Expressionist until 1919). Both the Dadists and the Novembergruppe shared utopian hopes for a life with “more to it than this.” A revolution could put things right, awaken spirit and conscience, love and justice.

If Expressionism was characterized by passionate language, fire-forged from a coven of feelings rendered red-hot and visible as image and thought, Dada renounced language. While Expressionism showed angry gods of truth and falsehood tearing through the city with images sparked off the anvil of reality, Dada showed the city as meaningless signs, a collage of abortive letters and hopeless juxtapositions. A denial of order, cocking a snook at form and meaning, Dada mocked the pretense of knowledge; all the culture in the world had not prevented the war’s carnage, nor could it stop it once it had started. If the war had left a shattered mirror, why not embrace the random pieces? Provocation became its own justification.

Berlin Dada began on 17 November 1918 when “Oberdada” (President of the Earth) Johannes Baader rose up in Berlin’s cathedral to shout out: “We don’t give a toss about Jesus Christ!” This could have been Crowley, though Crowley’s curse could be his subtlety. Baader was removed from God’s house, happy, for the echo remained.

Dada favored attention-grabbing spectacle, the spontaneous event that made other events look absurd, pointless. Self-assertion, going outside of proprieties altogether would expose a void. For Dada’s opponents, it created one. “Good,” said Dada, “then we’ve created something!” The limitations of willingly producing more nonsense than sense in favor of an aesthetic of pure volatility soon became apparent. Was not art supposed to provide meaning and have some value? Dada did not value itself and so stood, or fell, as an anti-art for no reason. But it juiced up the revolutionary atmosphere, if not the revolutionary reality.

Berlin born and raised, George Grosz favored reality. He would replace Dada’s meaninglessness with unadorned, uninhibited perception. Tucholsky declared Grosz the artist who “taught us to see.” What Grosz called attention to can be found in Das Gesicht der herrshenden Klasse (The Countenance of the Ruling Class): 57 blunt, political drawings.

Grosz showed the all-too-visible, invisible truth of the twisted heathen carnival that constituted power in Germany. “Pillars of society” like the military, the millionaire, and the magistrate were presented by Grosz’s clear pen as gross, heartless, cynical, sucking the life and fat from the land, whose money ensured poverty, whose power ensured oppression. Not surprisingly, Grosz was a KPD member and, like Otto Dix, part of the communist Rote Gruppe of artists. They wanted an end to state corruption, the black market, and the great bugbear: bourgeois society. To a degree, some of these concerns were shared by Crowley, for whom spiritual attainments were, he believed, incompatible with bourgeois morality. Crowley believed you could be respectable, or respected, but not both. He had no trouble convincing passionate communists he was all for a revolution. But Crowley valued spiritual attainments, not proletarian abandonments, and his ideal society would be run by “kings” of the spirit, not joyless commissars. Nevertheless, Crowley could well concur with a revolutionary spirit that perceived the official clergy’s fake piety sealed in pact with the upper classes, even though dominant society held little or nothing sacred, knowing the price of everything, but the true value of nothing.

In his Berlin studio, meanwhile, Dix turned contemporaries into characters of a personal, impersonal, true drama, while Grosz drew what at first sight appeared to be caricatures but on inspection revealed the stark reality of his contemporaries: the slobbering and the smirking were real. For this reason, Grosz has been numbered among the “Verists.” As Rainer Metzger has observed, Verism was propaganda that turned truth into an –ism, and Verists could be divided into a left wing whose works represented their vision of the real and a classicist, right-wing content with surface impression: the reflection of reality without reflection, or reflecting upon its meaning. Both wings came under the movement title Neue Sachlichkeit: New Objectivity.

New Objectivity also embraced cinema, a remarkable example being Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), a staggering montage of verité images of twenties Berlin that I had the privilege of seeing projected at the great Waldbühne outdoor theater in Freidrichshain-Kreuzberg, with full orchestral accompaniment, in the summer of 1987.

Three miles south of the Waldbühne stand the remains of the old UFA Berlin film studios—not to be confused with the bigger UFA studio complex at Babelsberg, southwest of Berlin, near Potsdam. Now called the International Cultural Center, the old UFA (Universum Film AG) site in Viktoriastrasse, Tempelhof-Schöneberg district, was where, in 1930, director Robert Siodmak (1900–1973) won a prized UFA contract on the strength of his independent New Objectivity movie, Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday). The film showed ordinary Berliners enjoying their spare time their own way. Characterized by easy naturalism, cinemagoers warmed to it; they were “in the picture.” Aided by now celebrated filmmakers Fred Zinnemann, Edgar Ulmer, and Billy Wilder, Siodmak is famous today for Hollywood film noir innovation. In 1930 Siodmak’s first film for UFA was an experimental study of real life, with a script by first-timer Emerich Pressburger (of Powell and Pressburger fame). The film was Abschied (Farewell), based on the idea of making screen time equal real time, and was set in a seedy Berlin boardinghouse. Two years earlier, Press-burger had been sleeping rough on Berlin’s park benches until Ullstein Publishing’s BZ am Mittag took his first story, Am Reisen (Traveling): the beginning of the road to The Red Shoes. Crowley would also go to Ullstein to sell short stories.

It was Berlin, under the New Objectivity spell, that would see one of the first and best books to theorize about cinema, Rudolf Arnheim’s Film als Kunst (Film as Art, 1932), in which Arnheim wrote: “words are not necessary to convey deep, spiritual meaning, but pictures and sounds are capable of doing it alone.” Arnheim devalued “talkies”; they were merely “filmed theater.” Crowley agreed, remarking at one point that where he and his friends once bemoaned the sight of silent films’ subtitles (with the dialogue), talkies were all subtitles. Artists evoke, not explain.

Which brings us to the ideal New Objectivity object: the photograph, the reality of the reflection. Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897–1966) was key to photography’s new self-consciousness. Employed by the Chicago Tribune in the early 1920s, Renger-Patzsch turned his photographs into books, and thereby Art. His second book’s title sounded like a child’s wish: Die Welt ist schön (The World Is Beautiful), with 100 photographs, published and introduced by Carl Georg Heise, Munich, Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1928.

The camera was a virgin and the world was cool.

Some of the observations of Die Welt ist schön seem to presage the vacuous, arty writing we got used to in 1960s and 1970s photography books. What was there to say, anyway, when the picture “said it all”? Well, you could say this: “To use photography as a means to create photographs that can exist through their own photographic qualities.” Read it a few times and you will either lose any sense or see this as a testimony to photographic modernism. A photograph needs no artistic movement or painting style to give it status or meaning. It is simply realistic. The world is beautiful; the camera reflects what it sees, impartially, objectively. The world is not beautiful; the photograph is real, and may be beautiful. Photographs provide evidence; evidence of what is evident through them. Little wonder that the photographer was destined to be anti-hero of the 1960s, smoothly wedding art and commerce in seamless embrace (see Antonioni’s movie, Blow-Up, 1966).

New Objectivity dominated when Crowley came to Berlin. Crowley’s work was really outside of it. He was caustic about fashion. As regards the movement’s left wing, his instincts told him that an atheist communist revolution did not see reality deeply enough. Even though Crowley understood the need for God was relative to the sense of helplessness, he was really more reformer than abolitionist. Every man and every woman was a star, each orbit unique, not to be coerced from without into collectivity.

By contrast, encouraged by communist dogma to shun the indulgence of individualist pieties, the Rote Gruppe looked to reality for reality. That is, in the words of Viktor Shklovsky, theorist of Russian Constructivism: “The aim of art is to awaken our sensitivity to things; to really see them and not merely to recognize them.” This objectivist doctrine inspired Rote Gruppe member Erwin Piscator in his proletarian theater experimentation, as well, of course, Bertolt Brecht’s Theory of Epic Theater (“Realism does not consist in reproducing reality, but in showing how things really are”). For Crowley, the sociological interpretation of reality was inadequate and misleading. A world of objects was just a legacy of nineteenth-century materialism, whence communism had sprung.

In 1928, Bertolt Brecht and co-composer Kurt Weill put materialist New Objectivity theory into practice with their highly influential musical play The Threepenny Opera, made into French and German language movie versions by G. W. Pabst. Pabst’s movie was being shot, cut, and post-dubbed in Berlin while Crowley was discussing art with Nierendorf in the autumn of 1930, and Crowley would come to know one of its stars, as we shall see.

The idea of Piscator and Brecht’s theater was that the presentation of reality would lead to revolution; the theory required identification with the oppressed, possibly the theory’s chief weakness. The cooler right-wing Objectivists, on the other hand, favored detachment, and detachment requires little incentive to become indifference. Anyway, the new mass cultures, as we have seen, were fast moving away from art as something venerable or instructive. Raw sport was idealized as iconographic beauty. The new gallery was the sportshalle and the playing field with its “beautiful” games. Art was life with no frame: the feeling of people rushing by in the street, light music, heady romances, the movies; back to nature, nudity, ecstasy. The Greeks had shown the way. This street-narcotic, miniskirt bliss would return after WWII in 1964 with composers Tony Hatch, James Cauty, and Bill Drummond’s song “Downtown,” the original recording featuring Aleister Crowley aficionado Jimmy Page’s guitar. Petula Clark sang out to the world that “When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go downtown. Listen to the music of the traffic in the city, linger on the sidewalk where the neon lights are pretty. . . . You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares.” The same spirit could be enjoyed from an office girl’s walk down the Kurfürstendamm on a sunny morning. Who at such a moment would want to hear about capitalist alienation and the dictatorship of the proletariat?

Maybe the Nazis were right . . . was not the German “Spirit” a natural spirit that made the people one flesh? Ein volk, ein reich, ein führer . . . where all the lights are bright . . .

Nazism had power to tempt.

Crowley saw only too well what was happening, and his frustration with art would grow. He could see that the Nazis were catching the underlying wind of the times, the desire for an oblivion paved by a cult of the superficial. What could an art show achieve?

Nierendorf calmed Crowley’s apprehensions. Nierendorf believed in art and the artist. After all, Crowley had magnificent artistic bona fides; art had been part of his life since . . . well, when had it not been? Even his mother, Emily, had painted watercolors. Mother had Crowley, but he never had her; he was bound to be an artist.

THE ARTIST IN THE BEAST

Emily Bertha Crowley died in Eastbourne, England, on 14 April 1917 while her only son was far away at her half-brother William’s son’s citrus farm in Titusville, Florida. Crowley was back in New York when the news reached him, anticipated by a dream two days earlier that left him extremely distressed. He had never got close to his mother, but her actual death left him feeling helpless and lonely. So much of his attitude had conspired to goad her religious rectitude; what was the point now?

It was I think Emily’s death that initiated an unexpected development in the poet, for by the end of 1918 Aleister Crowley was painting with a will. We can but guess as to whether he had pondered his mother’s now vanished, sensual, artistic side, or whether he recalled a painting she had made of Lawrence and Birdie Bishop’s Florida farm on a visit long ago. Was it that, without thinking at all, Crowley took on the mantle of his unfulfilled mother’s unfulfilled talent and found in it, through his endurance of countless empty days and nights in America, a link to her and to his, seldom plummeted, deepest feelings? Crowley was a master of words, but there are some feelings words cannot express.

The earliest photograph of Crowley painting was taken at Decatur, Georgia. His idiosyncratic little tuft of hair, an erection on his shaven head, looks like an additional brush atop his bulky, muscular frame. His weary face encapsulates the spirit of solitude that was his.

In some respects it is surprising it took Crowley so long to pick up pallet, easel, and brush. He had been introduced to decadent artistic circles when, in 1897, he had become undergraduate lover to Trinity College Cambridge graduate Herbert Charles Pollitt (1871–1942), known as “Jerome,” a connoisseur, dancer, and actor for whom Pollitt’s close friend Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98) had designed a personalized book plate in 1895–96, while contributing his famed artwork for the Yellow Book magazine.

When Crowley published his own decadent poetry book White Stains (1898), he followed Beardsley’s example and employed the services of principal decadent publisher, Leonard Smithers (1861–1907). Smithers found an Amsterdam printer for Crowley’s outrageous verses.

In his last year at Cambridge (1898), Crowley became close friends with Gerald Festus Kelly (1879–1972), a young man who knew he wanted to paint. Crowley was impressed by Kelly’s artistic seriousness and through all his worldwide travels of 1900–1902 kept in touch as the younger man graduated from Cambridge and, inspired by James McNeill Whistler, went to Paris to become an artist—a career that in Crowley’s view ground to a halt in 1930 when Kelly accepted election as a Fellow of the Royal Academy, London, with all the respectability that position could muster, including being the British Royal Family’s favorite artist. Having become respectable, Kelly lost Crowley’s respect absolutely.

But it had not always been like that. In early November 1902, fresh in body but feverish in spirit after an audacious but failed attempt on K2 in the Karakorams, Crowley entered Montparnasse, Paris—the first time since 1899. He had not seen Kelly since 1900.

Fig. 9.2. Pollitt’s bookplate, designed for him by his friend, the artist Aubrey Beardsley (1878–98) aesthete and art nouveau innovator.

Gerald Kelly introduced Crowley to his circle of artistic friends at Le Chat Blanc, 93 Rue d’Odessa, near the Montparnasse railway station. The Montparnasse district, on the south bank of the Seine, with its bohemian cafés and “apaches” (street roughs of both sexes) would become Crowley’s artistic lodestone until 1929 when the French state was persuaded the “Patriarch of Montparnasse” was a nuisance to its interests. As Crowley explained in his 9 January 1930 letter to Karl Germer, it was in Montparnasse that he was introduced to Auguste Rodin (1840–1917).

Crowley publicly championed the cause of Auguste Rodin’s controversial sculpture Balzac. Crowley and Rodin collaborated on a book combining Rodin’s watercolors with Crowley’s sonnets of reflection on the sculptor, the poet’s French assisted by Marcel Schwob, the Jewish writer who helped Wilde put his English-forbidden Salome into French.

Crowley also claimed personal familiarity with Alphonse Legros (1837–1911), Frits Thaulow (1847–1906), Eugène Carrière (1849– 1906), and other great artists of his period.

Legros became Slade Professor, Chair of Fine Art at University College, London, in 1876 (resigned 1892). He was mentor to the Abbey Theater, Dublin’s, founder Annie Horniman at the Slade in 1882 before she joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890. Legros maintained his English connections, and it is notable that Crowley was very friendly with a number of brilliant Slade students. Augustus John, who executed at least three portraits of Crowley, won the Slade prize for his Moses and the Brazen Serpent in 1898. Sculptress Kathleen Bruce (1878–1947) studied at the Slade 1900–1902 before going to Paris to enroll at the Académie Colarossi. She returned to London in 1906 and became Crowley’s lover while acquainting herself with Max Beerbohm, George Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, and Captain Robert Falcon Scott, whom she married.

Frits Thaulow was a distinguished Norwegian artist, mainly working on impressionist landscapes. He moved to Paris in 1892, but preferred provincial subjects. The National Gallery of Norway possesses thirty-seven of Thaulow’s works. It is significant that most of the artists Crowley knew saw themselves as defiers of convention in pursuit of authentic vision at the expense of academic constraints. Rodin, in particular, suffered the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” in this regard. And so would Crowley, still a philistine’s target.

Crowley gave the impression in his Confessions that he had not seriously studied art until he looked deeply into Velásquez’s Las Meninas at the Prado in 1908. Las Meninas, he wrote:

certainly taught me to know the one thing that I care to learn about painting: that the subject of a picture is merely an excuse for arranging forms and colours in such a way as to express the inmost self of the artist.

He seems to have become aware that visual art is a language every bit as powerful as poetry; they derive from the same source: the unconscious. Crowley would write that “poetry is the geyser of the unconscious,” and he applied the same theory to art. It was not the artist’s job to reproduce nature but to paint the Will, the authentic voice of Man. Any technique acquired was simply a means to this end.

Plate 1. Aleister Crowley, Mali and Igel, 1931; oil on linen. (Image courtesy of David Tibet; Ordo Templi Orientis)

Plate 2. Aleister Crowley, Portrait of Gertrud Howe (dated 1932; probably executed 1931); oil on linen. (Image courtesy of David Tibet; Ordo Templi Orientis)

Plate 3. Aleister Crowley, A Tree and Bathers on Rocks (dated 1932; probably executed 16 May 1931); oil on linen. (Image courtesy of David Tibet; Ordo Templi Orientis)

Plate 4. Aleister Crowley, Hanni Jaeger (1931); pencil and crayon. Dedicated “to Hanni AC” [Aleister Crowley]. (Image courtesy of Ordo Templi Orientis)

Plate 5. Aleister Crowley, Cora Germer; crayon. (Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute [Yorke Collection]; Ordo Templi Orientis)

Plate 6. Aleister Crowley, The Holy Family; crayon. (Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute [Yorke Collection]; Ordo Templi Orientis)

Plate 7. Aleister Crowley, Laura Brown (photograph; original lost, dated 1920); oil. (Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute [Yorke Collection]; Ordo Templi Orientis)

Plate 8. Aleister Crowley, Gerald Yorke (1930); pen and ink (Private Collection). (photo: Tobias Churton)

Plate 9. Max Brüning, Aleister Crowley smiling with Bertha Busch. (Image courtesy of Kunstfreunde)

Plate 10. Original cover for Crowley’s exhibition catalogue, October–November 1931, Porza Galleries, Budapester Strasse 3, Berlin. (Image courtesy of David Tibet)

Plate 11. Original exhibition invitation card, or ticket, to Crowley’s 1931 Berlin exhibition. (Image courtesy of David Tibet)

Plate 12. Max Brüning (1887-1968), Aleister Crowley (signed by the sitter); pen and ink wash (Private Collection). (Image courtesy of Kunstfreunde)

Plate 13. Aleister Crowley, pen and ink design symbolizing harmonious union of opposites. (Image courtesy of David Tibet)

Plate 14. Title page of Saturn Gnosis magazine, printed by Bernhard Sporn of Zeulenroda (printer for Thelema Verlag), July 1928.

Plate 15. Albin Grau, Magical Saturn-Glyph from Saturn Gnosis, 1928.

Plate 16. Albin Grau, Sign to the First Gate from Saturn Gnosis, 1928.

Plate 17. Albin Grau, Sign to the Third Gate from Saturn Gnosis, 1928.

Plate 18. Albin Grau, Sign to the Sixth Gate from Saturn Gnosis, 1928.

Plate 19. Albin Grau, Sign to the Ninth Gate from Saturn Gnosis, 1928.

Plate 20. Albin Grau, Vision of Cheops: The Golden Chamber from Saturn Gnosis, 1928.

Plate 21. Albin Grau, Atlantis from Saturn Gnosis, 1928.

Plate 22. Albin Grau, Portrait of Magician Henry Cornelius Agrippa from Saturn Gnosis, 1928.

Plate 23. Albin Grau, Portrait of Eliphas Lévi (“Professor of Transcendental Magic,” believed by Crowley to be his previous incarnation) from Saturn Gnosis, 1928.

Plate 24. Curt Moreck’s Führer Durch das “Lasterhafte” Berlin (Leipzig, Verlag moderner Stadtführer, 1931): a guide to Berlin’s “wicked” or “decadent” sexual underground.

Plate 25. Ruth Margarete Roellig’s Berlins Lesbische Frauen (Leipzig, Bruno Gebauer Verlag, 1928): a guide to Berlin’s lesbians, with an introduction by sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. (Image from Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon)

Plate 26. George Grosz, Down with Liebknecht (1919), an ironic reference to Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919), who founded the German Communist Party with Rosa Luxemburg and who, after participation in Berlin’s Spartacist uprising, was tortured with Luxemburg in Berlin’s Eden Hotel before being murdered in January 1919 by order of the commander of militia remnants of the German Imperial Army (Freikorps).

Plate 27. A “Half- Silk” working the Potsdamerplatz in 1926. “Half- Silks” (literally “half-baked”) were amateur prostitutes supplementing incomes as office clerks, secretaries, and shop girls working, mostly, Friday nights; their numbers ran into tens of thousands. (Image from Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon)

Plate 28. Albert Birkle (1900–1986), Waiting at the Bridge, 1931: a not dispassionate view of Berlin’s Kietz, or prostitute underworld. (© 2014 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

Plate 29. Berlin-born Jeanne Mammen (1890–1976): At the Bar (Salvation Army Girls), 1926. During the Weimar Republic’s hyperinflation period, the American Salvation Army provided relief. Lesbian subculture borrowed the name ironically to describe prostitutes catering for lesbians. Heavily made up, twirling long cigarette holders, and more popularly known as “Hot Whores,” they could be found looking bored in lesbianfriendly bars. (© 2014 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

Plate 30. Vala Moro (ca. 1920s–30s), Young Newlyweds. Moro was an Austrian-born artist of erotica; she was also a dancer. (Image from Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon)

Plate 31. Jeanne Mammen, Masked Ball, 1928. (© 2014 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)

Plate 32. Cartoon in humor paper Lustige Blätter (Merry Browsing), 1932. Left figure: “Careful, I’m not a man!” Right figure: “That’s OK, I’m not a woman.” (Image from Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon)

The year 1908 saw one of the first of Crowley’s marriages of visual art with literature when he executed the superb, ahead-of-its-time cover to his poetry and story collection, Konx Om Pax (Light In Extension). The title is the design; it is both words and image. Legend has it that he was high on cannabis when he executed the maze-like lettering that seems to presage 1960s artist Bridget Riley and art nouveau–inspired psychedelia, but if that is true, he should be respected for his ability to keep his lines straight and uniform when the design required it. The overall effect is mesmerizing and shows what he could bring out of the bag when he felt like it. In the meantime, he would be content to encourage other artists where he could (such as Nina Hamnett 1890– 1956), while from 1909 giving opportunities in his magazine series The Equinox for the artistic skills of Major J. F. C. Fuller (1878–1966; later Major-General) and Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) to manifest their variable genius. Crowley simply wasn’t pushy about getting his latent skills noticed. He may have had a sense of unworthiness about art until, as I have suggested, the shock of his mother’s death began to unblock the artistic clot.

Judging from Crowley’s clear and witty essay “Art in America”—written for The English Review in 1913—America needed Art badly, and knew it. But genius was rare. Crowley made a case for Walt Whit-man (“Being without Form”—and Art needs to marry both), but as for American painting, despite the grand, even biblical vistas of American landscape, it was practically all derivative. Perhaps this emboldened Crowley, inspired by his friendships with New York–based painters Leon Engers (1890–1970) and Robert Winthrop Chanler (1872–1930), to compensate for the absence of genius by offering his own at a modest rate.

Interviewed at his Greenwich Village studio by a Syracuse Herald journalist for an article about his art published on 9 March 1919 (“Artist Paints Dead Souls But Refuses to Be Classed with Futurist’s School”), Crowley claimed to have got into painting after assuming the editorship of the magazine The International (summer 1917–summer 1918). Excited by the challenge of designing covers, he lost interest, he said, in the editing, and decided the Spirits wanted him to be an artist. Crowley had been reading and writing about artist and poet William Blake (1757–1827) and spoke like him: a fellow “Mental Traveler.” Crowley codesigned, but the covers’ execution belonged to Dutch artist Leon Engers and the eccentric humorist Helen Woljeska (author of A Smart Woman and A Woman’s Confessional, New York, 1905).

When The International was bought and Crowley lost his job, he turned his apartment at 1 University Place on Washington Square’s north side into a studio. His friends Hearst journalist William Seabrook (1884–1945) and wife Kate observed Crowley’s first halting steps as a painter. They were not encouraging. He did not mix his paints, just splurged the colors on straight from the tube. His color sense was wild, and his draftsmanship appalling. Crowley sensed the deficit in technique and went to the Metropolitan to look at a Rembrandt. William Breeze reckons it was Old Woman Cutting Her Nails that really got him going. It sounds about right for Crowley’s taste for the grotesque and the real.

Humble in the face of the task before him, Crowley started practicing his drawing and mixing his paints. His early style had something of the Expressionist about it. There was the casual approach to caricature and satire where portraits were concerned, and a kind of inner wildness. He was an Outsider, looking into the crazy world and seeing its unconsciousness of its own absurdity. The recently discovered Ladies of the Liberal Club is a striking example of his strong satirical style, a style he also aimed at the jugular of American popular poet, diluted mystic, and positive thinker Ella Wheeler Wilcox in Ella Wheeler Wilcox and the Swami.

Crowley told the Syracuse Herald journalist that he was a “subconscious impressionist” before qualifying this with tongue-in-cheek: “You can call me an Old Master” (Crowley had attained the grade of Magus in the Golden Dawn system in 1916, and he was not as young as he used to be).

What did he mean by “subconscious impressionist”? It was partly a description of technique. To let the subconscious enter the world he would, he said, approach a canvas with no prior ideas and let the brush do the walking in the manner of automatic writing. The brush had to be, in a sense, possessed by something the conscious mind would only interfere with. This mode of composition had been much experimented with by Austin Osman Spare and deemed appropriate for a spiritual art. Spare painted and drew “elementals” in a Blakean manner. Crowley did not stick with the method for long and found his own way toward his own style and range of styles. He did not want to be an open house for spirits but expected the canvas to be possessed by his own.

He populated a canvas with a cavalcade of “dead hats” evoked from the dream of a reclining woman. Crowley told his interviewer that this was surely a normal thing for ladies to do as they dispensed with the old and put on the new. The idea has a marvelous, cheeky, and definitely proto-surrealist ring about it. Sadly, “A Dream of Dead Hats” can only be seen in terrible black and white reproduction (cat. no. P-50, AC Art; Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas).

Crowley’s first significant work attracted a lot of positive attention from the Greenwich Village art crowd. In January 1919 the Beast moved to the epicenter of New York intellectual bohemianism, taking a larger studio at 63 Washington Square South. There he got to know intimately Swiss-born Leah Hirsig (1883–1975), a Bronx schoolteacher. She suggested he paint her as a dead soul, perhaps taking her sardonic cue from Crowley’s dead hats. Crowley painted a triptych of Dead Souls and invited his friends to witness his creation. Chanler was particularly impressed. Crowley had painted a magical painting, and we see some familiar motifs Chanler would recognize from his own creations: exotic birds, for example. Crowley liked to paint Negresses. He painted dead souls around the central figure, based on Leah. He said that the dead souls had comprised a living soul. This was his gift to the disaffected, existentially depressed Leah, who found in Crowley her absolute guru and love object. I hope critics will not abuse me for noting that the central figure of the now lost work (only seen in a famous photograph) has something of Francis Bacon’s post–World War Two portraits about it: a meaningful, and haunting, distortion where inner turmoil has combined with paint to wipe the ordinary from the sitter’s face.

Crowley had created a work of Art.

Having produced a body of work, he would have to exhibit. Crowley’s art appeared in public for the first time in 1919 at Greenwich Village’s Liberal Club, above a restaurant run by anarchist couple Polly Holladay and Hippolyte Havel on MacDougal Street. Having briefly impressed members of New York’s artistic community, disgusted complaints of anti-Christian blasphemy soon closed the exhibition. The painting that really upset the club’s guardians of public religion and morality was Crowley’s extant work (in two versions) titled May Morn. This jolly composition showed a kind of restrained Bacchic revel going on by Pan-possessed figures dancing around a tree from which an old hag has been hung. A nice little hallucinogenic mushroom (Amanita muscaria) has popped up, as they do after a storm. The joy is the arrival of the New Aeon: “There is no God; there is no guilt; Love is the law: Do what thou wilt.” When it was discovered that the old hag represented the demise of Christianity, the club committee was persuaded by outraged members to curtail the satanic blasphemy of the satanic artist who called himself the Beast 666.

If Crowley had been willing to do anything for an artistic career, fame, and fortune, he would have changed his title and said he was an agnostic positivist of the fashionable type. He didn’t, and that’s why his paintings are so rare today.

That year, Chanler painted Crowley as he appeared to him: a vast dome of a head, a serious look on his face with sensual lips. With his dark bow tie, black suit, and broad shoulders he looks like the ideal director of an ideal CIA in a far from ideal world. You wouldn’t get past this guy very easily! Crowley has presence.

The following year, Crowley began his experimental New Aeon community at the Villa Santa Barbara, Cefalù, in Sicily. Until his expulsion by order of Mussolini three years later, Crowley painted and painted. The contents of a recently revealed, forgotten crateful of Crowley’s Cefalù paintings, formerly owned by Cefalù art teacher Paolo Cicero (1885–1932), were exhibited in the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2008. This Palermo Collection toured Australia in 2012–13 under the auspices of Robert Buratti’s Buratti Fine Art (see the catalogue Aleister Crowley, The Nightmare Paintings, 2012).

Apart from some interesting early studies for tarot cards, the collection contains some gems. Cock and Snake (1920) shows Crowley’s imagination and color sense concentrated under strong compositional discipline. Landscape with Coral & Jade Pagodas (1921) allows us into an enticing astral setting, clearly inspired by feelings evoked from years spent in the Far East, but otherworldly nonetheless. An exotic bird with wings like a red cape sits on a naked woman’s shoulder as she picks flowers.

The Bastards on the Mountain, or The Tourists (1920) has a disconcerting combination of Crowleyan grotesquerie and otherworldly super-vivid faces. It is by no means obvious that the three dominant figures are referred to in the titles. The central figure, a bearded man reminiscent of a Mongolian or Siberian shaman, has a dangerous, toothy smile and a direct wide-eyed but enlightened look that goes straight through the viewer. He holds a severed head (the tourist?) suspended from a stick of candy. His middle finger is both phallic-yogic and an unmistakable “up your ass” gesture. A swooping eagle is a familiar Crowleyan motif, a sign of magical virility and untrammeled imagination.

There are powerful and beautiful landscapes to admire in the collection, as well as a remarkably and explosively psychedelic (anachronistic, I know, but technically correct) self-portrait, possibly to embody the tarot Trump: The Sun, painted in December 1920. 666’s inner spiritual energy radiates from the head like colored auras seen after entheogen ingestion. It is as though the figure of Chanler’s portrait of Crowley had removed his suit, only to explode into another dimension: the logos of the Man.

However, the Cefalù years are, where painting is concerned, best known for the Villa Santa Barbara itself. Crowley painted all of the interiors, including doors and shutters, himself. One room, the Chambre des Cauchemars, or “Nightmare Chamber,” was designed to confront the resident with subconscious material of a sexual and demonic character therapeutically designed to uninhibit repressed psychic material. There are large, grotesque faces like the Hindu goddess Kali, Time as devourer of Time, and of Men. She is “black to the blind,” like Isis, the mother of the divine Child.

Behind the frescoes of Cefalù lurked the spirit of Paul Gauguin, as is well known. Crowley felt quite tormented by the Gauguin who bade respectable civilization farewell and went to Tahiti to paint his hut from top to bottom: another artist who eschewed academicism and painted his Will. Crowley was amazed he hadn’t met Gauguin personally. (“He died in 1903, May 8, eleven months before the First day of the writing of The Book of the Law. Just six months after I had met Rodin.”) To make up for it, Gauguin was consecrated a Gnostic saint in Crowley’s OTO Gnostic Ecclesia.

Crowley felt his villa painting was a “sort of religious-magical rite, like the Egyptian embalmers.” Crowley left a typed account (in purple) of the painting of the Horsel or Whore’s Hell. He meant by the title precisely what Gauguin meant when he titled works inspired by the Polynesian phrase Te Furaru, such as: “Here We Make Love (Te Faruru) from Fragrance (Noa Noa).” In Gnostic symbolism, the “whore” is Wisdom: She who offers Herself to all.

I gladly offer my body to his [Gauguin’s] Manes [soul of the deceased], if he need a vehicle of flesh for new expression. I could never have done quite that for any other spirit—I have been faithful to my own genius.

Crowley’s references to Beardsley are instructive:

I feel very specially that I should consecrate my house to him [Gauguin], not to Beardsley, a quite inferior type deriving from pifflers like Burne-Jones [Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98)], and the over-elaborate school of Japanese, while he [Beardsley] sniveled and recanted disgustingly when his health gave way.

Crowley discussed with himself how best to approach the house:

The Harmony will be found by making the whole house a perfect expression of myself; the style will be the Common Factor. [. . .] There is no reason for crying Contradiction when one compares one part of me, fighting my way up the glazed rocks of the Meije in a hurricane with another, smoking opium between my Negro lover and my monied mistress, in my Charvet pyjamas. My soul shall sing a thousand songs which are one song; my house shall be my mirror. [. . .]

There would be no fun in creating dead things; the whole point of the game is that one’s work lives and moves independently of one’s conscious mind. It is not amusing to turn out objects according to a pattern, as any factory hand will tell you. My paintings are never what I wished to make them: they fight for themselves against my hand. I can’t even correct what I see to be real errors, as often as not. The finished work always surprises me. [. . .]

Art is God’s way of discovering his own mysteries, the most enthralling, most tireless of pleasures.

We are all, each one of us sovereign and unique, parts of God; but we are not rubber-stamp signatures of the Ineffable Name. We are God’s poems, due to inspiration his children, begotten in his love-madness; and we should not be of Him and His nature if we were not ourselves capable of inspiration and of ecstacy, free to soar and to swoop, being of the blood of the Eagle, fearless and proud, of the bone of the lion; royal, His heirs, with the right to create our chief privilege. If we were still-born, we should rot, and He would have lost his labour. [. . .] And “Blasphemy” which is the Indignation of the Created at his Creator, is the Proof that the created is a live and independent Being, fulfilling the true purposes of that Creator. Therefore, of all acts, Blasphemy is the most pleasing to God.

This is Crowley’s unequivocal answer to the outraged ladies of the Liberal Club.

Sadly, very little of Crowley’s work on the villa survives. Kenneth Anger visited in the 1950s and removed whitewash from the villa walls, revealing the scope of Crowley’s work (he made a film of the exercise). Unfortunately time, decay, and vandalism have now ruined most of the work, and it is unlikely that remedial work of the kind lavished on da Vinci’s Last Supper in Milan will be afforded Crowley’s creation.

In 1921, on one of his escapes from Cefalù to Paris, Crowley bumped into his old friend artist Nina Hamnett, whom he had helped when she was at the London School of Art around 1910 (he commissioned a screen from her for The Equinox offices in Victoria). It was Nina who introduced Crowley to J. W. N. Sullivan.

In her book Laughing Torso (1932) she described how Crowley painted “the most fantastic pictures in very bright colors.” She found one very interesting: a foot and a half wide, nine inches high, depicting a man on a white horse chasing a lion. She compared it to “Douanier” Rousseau: “it had a great deal of life and action.” Nina wanted to buy it but couldn’t afford it. Crowley gave her a painting of a purple Negress, a yellow and red spotted handkerchief around her head. Painted on mahogany, the composition included a purple rhinoceros tangled amid Asian vegetation. Nina praised its “quite beautiful color.” Nina got on very well with Crowley and Leah Hirsig and might have accepted their invitation to Cefalù but for the fact she did not “care for the type of person who clung to Crowley. They seemed so very inferior to him and so dull and boring that I could never understand how he could put up with them.” Nina did not realize that 666 had vowed to guide anyone who came to him desiring to find their True Will.

Between 1924 and 1929, Crowley was mostly in Paris, frequenting the circles of Man Ray, Nancy Cunard, and other artists and writers. A number of works from the period survive, including a few painted in North Africa in good condition. Other painted works of his early years are either in private collections or survive only in very poor photographic reproductions at the Warburg Institute in London and the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.

In 1924, the great Argentinian painter Xul Solar visited a spiritually reborn Crowley. He painted Crowley’s portrait as “My Magus” (Muy Mago Krowley Alistör). It is a tribute to Crowley to consider for a moment the fellow artists for whom the Beast sat. Apart from Oscar Augustin Alejandro Schulz Solari (Xul Solar), we have the names of Augustus John, Kathleen Bruce, Leon Engers, Max Brüning, Robert Winthrop Chanler, and Frieda, Lady Harris: they all put their names to images of the Beast.

Paintings executed during his mystical-magical travels in North Africa and elsewhere should have been exhibited in November 1929 at the Mandrake Publishing offices, Museum Street, London. Mandrake had recently risked police arrest for involvement in displaying “obscene” artwork by D. H. Lawrence. Edward Goldston chickened out of the exhibition, partly for reasons of cost, and partly for fear of Crowley’s reputation for disturbing phenomena.

Karl Nierendorf, by contrast, understood that “disturbance” was a feature of Art’s armory. If Crowley’s work disturbed him, he knew he was in the presence not only of a Personality but also an Artist.

TEN

HANNI JAEGER, SAVE OUR SOULS

1 OCTOBER 1930

Having launched his association with Karl Nierendorf, the Beast hastened back up the Budapester-Strasse toward the great Kurfürstendamm, to Hanni Jaeger at the Pension Medenwaldt.

For all its towering Romanesque magnificence, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial church failed to compete with the spectacle below. In his orange knickerbocker suit, Crowley stood out like a toadstool. Only the traffic seemed indifferent. Beneath plane trees extending westward, it rumbled and revved, stopping and starting at suspended traffic lights with brand-new gongs: their once familiar signal chimes a memory.

Amid the cloud of pedestrians, Crowley wove a serpent’s track through taxis flashed with New York–style checkered strip, Mercedes limousines, Dusenbergs, Rolls Royces, horse-drawn carts, and buses blazoned with advertisements to the boulevard’s north side.

The sole challenge to the Beast’s momentum arose from a cream-colored, mini-box-office, temporarily obscured by the conical roof of a newspaper kiosk. Flat-topped with three layers of diminishing eaves, this curious office-box was Max Reinhardt’s playhouse bridgehead on the streets: a gateway to dreams. A placard beneath each eave was neatly lettered in black: REINHARDTBÜHNEN; DEUTSCHES THEATER KOMÖDIE, KAMMERSPEILE; BERLINER THEATER; TAGESKARTEN.

No tickets were necessary for the Kurfürstendamm’s free street promenade; viewers could watch in comfort from the sides. To the Beast’s right, in the shade of leaves turning to October gold, a lateafternoon’s sharp, dappled light illuminated a Kurfürstendamm street café, vibrant in a world of its own.

On the café terrace, enclosed by a low hedge and fence, ladies in fur-trimmed coats, décolletage bound in white scarves against a chilling breeze, gathered around oblong tables covered in bright white cloths and coffee cups. Young men in short, stylish overcoats with wide lapels and cuffs, sporting slim ties or dickey-bows leaned back as far as possible on collapsible chairs of slatted wood. Stern men in long black leather coats with greased back hair smoked cigars. Fashionable steel-rimmed sunglasses beneath huge homburgs and fedoras with wide silk hatbands obscured insecure identities. A few female heads wrapped in tight, patterned headscarves à la Nancy Cunard bobbed about the terrace, while most women, young and old, sported cloche bonnets like felt thimbles, setting off at an angle, faces framed by short haircuts with curls at the sides. In the little world of the café terrace were many worlds buffeted by the reality without. In the evening, electric light would be cast from street lanterns with tuberlike bulbs mounted on cast-iron stands, molded with art nouveau mermaids and shells.

At 10:15 p.m. that night, a stone’s throw from the café, Hanni Jaeger and Aleister Crowley performed Opus 31, a continuation of a great sexual magick rite for Anu begun on 29 September with considerable ceremonial accessories. In the midst of the magick, the candle went “vigorously widdershins!” History does not record whether other curious phenomena unsettled the Kurfürstendamm that night.

With Huxley and Sullivan back in London, Crowley and Hanni’s attention turned to finding an artist’s studio. They might better have heeded twelfth-century troubadour Raimon de Miraval’s advice that “two artists in one house is too many”—and Miraval’s house was a castle, not a Berlin garret!

On 6 October, Crowley called on artist Hans Steiner. Steiner appears to have enjoyed a guardianship role over Hanni, respected by Crowley and perhaps established to give the nineteen-year-old’s parents a measure of reassurance regarding their daughter’s safety, so far from home in Santa Barbara, California.

Crowley and Hanni were madly in love. Unfortunately, Crowley was already somewhat mad, from the bourgeois perspective, while Hanni’s family, Crowley was given to believe, suffered a history of mental instability. Like many girls of her age, Hanni had problems with her father putting unbearable pressures on her. She was unusually courageous but not well in her mind, as Crowley had already discovered in Portugal. Nevertheless, he had bragged he was the world’s greatest living psychologist, and doubtless did not do what more sensible men might have done, and “run a mile.” Likewise, Hanni’s own position in relation to the eccentric fifty-four-year-old might have suggested returning to the Beast was not her safest option. It never seems to have occurred to Crowley that he might not have been what she needed; but when did lovers see sense?

The problem was that Hanni was remarkably intelligent, as can be seen from a surviving report and touching photograph from her Santa Barbara high school yearbook of 1927. Her scholarship, French language, oratory, and knowledge of Shakespeare were all highlighted, as was her “outlook”: “Art School.” Her personal motto perhaps characterized her relations with Crowley: “What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.”

Fig. 10.1. Hanni Jaeger in high school, 1927

A weak mind can do itself little harm, a strong mind can endanger itself: “Stupidity has saved many a man from going mad,” as Emeric Pressburger observed in his screenplay for Stairway to Heaven (“The Archers,” 1946; original title: “A Matter of Life and Death”).

Opus 35 was performed on 9 October to find a studio. This worked. Perspicacious Anu found one that was “A.1.” The next day, Cora insisted the couple move to the Pension Savignyplatz, at the end of Knesebeckstrasse, intersecting the Kurfürstendamm toward its eastern end, adjacent to a noisy S-bahn. Crowley found it miserably cold and uncomfortable and not, as Cora believed, cheaper, though the people, Crowley noted, were very nice.

That night, desperate for a decent meal, the couple pledged a talismanic coin for 20 marks so they could dine at Siechen’s, a magnificent five-story former beer palace from the 1880s turned upper-class restaurant, just south of the Unter den Linden on Behrenstrasse. They returned to it the next night for a farewell dinner. The Germers were off to London to try to unravel Mandrake, Gerald Yorke and Cora’s £1,000. To Crowley’s relief the Germers offered, in their absence, their posh apartment by the shaded waters of the Lietzensee in Charlottenburg, about a mile west of Savignyplatz.

The Germers were en route for London when Crowley wrote to Karl on the Sunday:

Monster found a very good studio for 150 m[arks]. in the Würtz burger Platz. Has been inhabited by genuine artists—not the dirty Bohemian kind. Only snags are five flights of stairs and no steam heat. But we can’t have everything. In all other ways it’s ideal. But may not be free till 25th: not quite sure. It is very restful here [in Lietzensee Ufer 9]: we are really happy to feel that we may reason ably reckon on one week of peace.—

Cora will be delighted to hear that Monster burnt the chops!

P.S. Would you mind bringing back with you my hats (in your hatbox!) and the small square yellow grip. Regardie has these.¹

Hanni and the Beast moved into Lietzensee Ufer 9 on 12 October, at precisely the same time as Hitler and his NSDAP Party leadership finalized plans for outrages at the Reichstag’s opening the next day.

Monday 13 October 1930: a date for the history books.

Anticipating trouble, officials removed inkpots from Reichstag desks lest the 107 Nazis and 77 Communists taking their seats use them as projectiles. Police were stationed within and without. Communists eschewed their uniforms (illegal in the streets). Nazis did not, entering as a block at the last moment. Elderly moderates were startled by what resembled a coup. Nazis jumped up to salute Dr. Goebbels while Communists chanted: “Down with him!”

Outside, huge crowds shouted “Germany Awake!” and “Heil Hitler!” An attempt was made to rush the Reichstag. Police made a baton charge and mounted police rode among the crowds. There was stone throwing and shouting before crowds were dispersed into the Tiergarten after nearly a hundred arrests.

Meanwhile, taking advantage of police concentration around the Reichstag, Nazi supporters attacked Jewish-owned shops, cafés, and hotels. There was serious rioting in Leipziger Strasse, a shopping center only 600 meters south of Seichen’s restaurant, where 666 and Hanni had dined the night before. Driven back from the Reichstag, organized groups from 20 to 200 streamed through the streets, shouting: “Down with the Jews!” Wertheim’s Emporium and Tletz’s Warehouse had their frontages smashed. Shopkeepers turned off their lights and shuttered their windows. Motorcars were set upon, their windows broken until a large force of police was withdrawn from the Reichstag to clear the streets. Some forty arrests were made.

Four days later, writer Thomas Mann made his Appeal to Reason.

On the day of the riots, Crowley was a mile away, suffering from neuralgia, engrossed in reports of his suicide story from Lisbon.

History records what it wants; the press records what excites. Crowley’s diary made no mention of what the world’s press deemed the most important event of the time—serving the Nazi cause in doing so. It was exactly what Hitler wanted, the government made unstable because the world thought it so: images of a movement: the people’s voice allegedly at the end of its tether with social democracy. Most people were plainly uninvolved with the day’s well-organized chaos and barbarity: a lesson the media never learns. It might have been better for the world if its denizens had opened the papers to read about two people in love in Berlin, trying to establish themselves as painters.

Two days after the riots, Hanni Jaeger wrote to Karl Germer in London:

Dr Krumm Heller urges you to see Peithmann on your return journey. If Regardie has gotten any action on a medium, please rush the story to incorporate to the article.

666 sends his best love to both of you.

We have been very happy these days, free from care, and we have found a very nice studio.

 ANU ²

Known to intimates as “Patriarch Basilides,” Ernst Christian Heinrich Peithmann was a Lutheran, neo-Gnostic Church founder, recently visited by Krumm-Heller. Krumm-Heller, as we have seen, wanted his Gnostic episcopacy—probably ordained by Liberal Catholic Bishop Wedgwood—ratified. Peithmann held to a neo-Gnostic sexual gnosis similar to Reuss’s and may have been sympathetic to Crowley, but probably felt the competition. Peithmann was a supporter of Birven’s Hain der Isis magazine. He was someone about whom Birven kept author Gustav Meyrink informed. Krumm-Heller possibly considered Peithmann useful in assisting Crowley’s plans to control the Theosophical Society, a consummation Germer devoutly wished but regarding which Krumm-Heller’s own motives remain unclear. Furthermore, it seems perfectly possible that Peithmann was the person agitating against Crowley referred to in shadowy sentences by Birven.

That Crowley had written to Germer from Lisbon a month earlier agreeing to meet Professor Verweyen in Berlin is also significant.

Professor John Maria Verweyen was a German philosopher and Freemason who became secretary general of the Theosophical Society German Section in 1928, a position formerly held by Rudolf Steiner after the TS German branch was founded in October 1902. Steiner held the position until Annie Besant, TS president from 1907, barred him from the society in 1913 for refusing to cooperate with her Star in the East program for presenting the boy Krishnamurti (1895–1986), code-named Alcyone, as the World Teacher—a program Crowley opposed consistently for some thirty years.

In 1928 Theosophist bishop James Ingall Wedgwood (1883–1951) consecrated Verweyen a priest of the Liberal Catholic Church.

Founded in 1916 by Wedgwood and Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934), the church took its apostolic succession from the Dutch Old Catholic Church, whose British foundation was dissolved in 1915. It was Leadbeater who had “discovered” Krishnamurti at Adyar, India, in 1909.

In 1930 Hädecke of Stuttgart published Verweyen’s The New Man and His Goals: Human Issues of the Present and Future. Verweyen was also a member of the German Cultural Community for the Care of Astrology, along with M. Erich Angle, Dr. Artur Heinz Strauss, The-odor Lessing, and Dr. Wilhelm Monfang. Verweyen returned to the Roman Catholic Church in 1936.

Krumm-Heller sought bishop status from Wedgwood in London in the summer of 1930. It is likely Krumm-Heller’s interest in getting Germer and Crowley into contact with Peithmann and Verweyen was related to Birven’s perpetual nitpicking and behind the back undermining of fellow Theosophists’ confidence in Crowley. This seems especially probable in view of Crowley’s diary note about Krumm-Heller the very day Anu wrote to Germer about Peithmann: “Dr. Krumm-Heller called. He explained his attitude satisfactorily. But there is something which rings false.”³

Crowley’s deeper feelings were far removed from Theosophical politics. On the 15th he made a “pretty pretty” crayon drawing of Anu—probably not the one we know today, dated 1931. He was experiencing a shared love with Hanni, different from anything he had ever known. Despite all the worry and sense of imminent disaster, he was giving himself wholly to love and was serenely happy in it. Before Hanni, he said, his love affairs had always been deflated by the smallest annoyance.

On the 17th he saw communist journalist Günther Stein, perhaps to discuss the suicide story, perhaps political matters (the next day Crowley wrote to his old disciple, the military strategist Major General J. F. C. Fuller, about Hitler). Stein began to take an interest in Hanni, whether paternal or amorous is unclear, perhaps both. Crowley made an I Ching divination on “Soror Anu” and concluded she urgently needed to be under “good and firm guidance” so she could “herself govern her life” and not stand in her own way. He made another divination on the 18th: “Hanni Larissa Jaeger—child of Earth!” Anu was “the Pure Woman in difficult circumstances; must never accept her own limitations. Hence she does the only right thing in seeking the Magical Path.”

Hanni had another melancholy fit before fleeing the next day: “I am nearly insane with loving her, and feeling my powerlessness to help her as I want to—.”⁴

Returning for Sunday lunch, the Monster was paranoid about people stealing her sketches—then took some of Crowley’s. Was this a case of “What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine”? Crowley called Stein and his wife the next day, probably about Hanni. Anu phoned and the couple moved back to the Pension Medenwaldt on the Kurfürstendamm; the Germers were back from London.

Anu began to suffer again, first from a clogged colon for which she refused an enema, then from kidney trouble. Anal sex with Crowley would have done neither condition any good, if indeed buggery was not a contributory factor to Hanni’s condition. They discussed whether she should try to make money with her drawings. They also discussed writing to her mother, presumably for money; perhaps they had fallen out, and this was affecting her. The I Ching counseled: “Do nothing. Sit tight.”

On the 25th Crowley saw the studio Anu had chosen, at 1A Würzburger Strasse, half a mile south of the Budapester Strasse; he approved. They moved in on 31st October and “gradually sank into the atmosphere.” The quality of their sexual magick increased beyond estimation: “each one surpasses all.” And Carter chose this time to warn the Beast of trouble if he did not return to care for Marie!

Crowley had other ideas. On 1 November he meditated on whether he should get screenwriter Hanns Heinz Ewers to translate his Gnostic Mass into German and “put it on here” (Berlin) with Hanni playing the priestess. Unfortunately, after speculating further on “whether Anu is quite definitely insane, as her family history and her behavior suggest,” Günther Stein phoned: “Miss Jaeger will not be home tonight.” Stein rang again the next day; he was watching over Hanni in hospital. Crowley visited Anu at a private nursing home on the 4th: “Poor sweet baby; it is dreadful to see her suffer.”⁵

Crowley agreed with Stein about the case. Visiting her again the next day, Hanni switched from sweetness to nastiness in an instant; she was in awful pain. Dismayed, Crowley tramped off to the Mikado where he tried to bury his anguish by flirting with Fanny.

On 7 November, Crowley finally moved out of the Medenwaldt and into the studio. Hanni joined him. She tried skrying with a shew-stone, a practice Crowley had perfected over thirty years. The stone, usually set in a cross, acted as a kind of screen onto which the “opened” or “entered” unconscious projected images and sounds. Hanni couldn’t get the hang of clairaudience, but she did see something: an eye in a blue circle looked at her. A head looked up, one eye covered. It questioned her. There was a reference to the “9th Aethyr of white stone.” A small man blew a horn toward the sky. Two people in black carried a dead thing. There was a city with white buildings. A black snake above gold below went to water on the left. There were landscapes with white square buildings and white flowers. The face appeared again; below it was a Chinese mask that rose and covered “his” face. A man with a horn appeared. She could hold the image for many minutes but could get neither names nor speech. Later she saw a devilish-looking woman.

Recovered from fatigue, Anu joined the Beast in Magick two days later. First they performed a sex magick Opus so intense Crowley screamed for two minutes. Then, without robes or magical weapons, Crowley performed the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, tracing an imaginary fiery pentagram about the room, invoking the Names of God, as well as his favorite “Bornless One” invocation of “Thou who art I beyond all I am” from an ancient Coptic Gnostic manuscript. Having forgotten half the words, 666 had to read. Conclusion: “not too bad, for result.”

Judging from Hanni’s explanation of her running away, she was suffering symptoms of anorexia nervosa. She claimed an aversion to food. She thought Crowley, upset at the prospect, would reject her feelings about this. She claimed to have had a very bad experience as a waitress that sparked off the neurosis. Crowley wasn’t sure if she wasn’t making it up. On the 11th he invoked his Holy Guardian Angel to help Hanni. She could hear him from the next room and felt energized, while he imagined her as a goddess in a lotus shrine.

Hanni’s mood swings intensified, however. Crowley referred to an irresponsible “dichotomania,” that is, the attraction to ideas different to one another being used as extremes for comparison of one thing and another. The general attraction to “right brain” and “left brain” theory is an example of dichotomania.

The next day, the Monster received five dollars from America. Crowley got to see some of her earlier work (possibly sent from the United States): “Much of it is very good. I like the child-simplicity.” “These,” declared Crowley, interestingly, “are pictures of the Aeon of Horus.” Does this make Hanni Jaeger the first “flower child,” blooming in the incipient shadow of Nazism? Hanni painted a picture Crowley considered well in advance of previous work.

About this time, Karl Germer started having strong feelings about Hanni, which he could not deal with. He and Cora had not been reassured by their trip to London and started to resent the Beast and the Monster’s happiness at their expense. They had offered a basic living allowance on the basis of an imminent exhibition. Every day wore on them, and Germer took his frustrations out first on Crowley, then on Hanni. On 16 November, Hanni showed the Beast a drawing she’d made of Karl masturbating into a toilet. She claimed he’d made her look on, lest he curtail his support. Again, the truth of the incident was doubtful.

Winter was coming on; wild snowstorms blanketed the city—and the couple was short of coal. Crowley sat for Anu. They would play chess or go for walks when the blizzards calmed down. Coming home they would have long sex sessions, though Anu was finding her anus was hurting. On the 22nd she had another attack, with massive mood swings from depression to erotomania. She knew she could turn the Beast on at will, and she knew how. She was hallucinating, or was pretending to, saying things like: “I don’t want you to go away behind the tree” while lying down indoors.

Not surprisingly, Crowley suffered the next day from his worst asthma attack since 1924, a condition that would intensify to near fatal levels back in England.

The Love Magick sessions continued to new heights of ecstasy interspersed with improvements in Crowley’s drawing with Indian ink; he did a bust of Anu she liked very much.

Karl and Cora kept up the pressure. Cora wasn’t past “lying like a parson,” declaring she’d received a message from the Mahatmas not to put up any money, then faked her costings to get Karl more riled than he was. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Karl received a letter from Yorke on the 28th telling him how his father, Vincent, called Karl’s wife a harpy for troubling his son and himself about £1,000 owed. The Germers concluded “harpy” was Gerald Yorke’s moniker for Cora! A letter from Crowley to Karl offers insight into what had passed between Yorke and the Germers:

I answer your letter in writing—it is so wrong.

I do not despise money. I only say it must not be weighed against the G[reat].W[ork]. and I want lots of it for the G.W. But for nothing else.

I buy expensive things because they are cheapest—as most people know.

Your facts are wrong about my credit, which is good. Otherwise, how do I obtain it?

I do not make false statements; so I can have no “dupes.” I agree about Thynne and the Mandrake.

Please quote a case of my interfering with a business plan. An actual case.

If you are not convinced by reason it follows that you are not reasonable.

I want you to do things in your own way. But I must furnish the ideas.

I have been pleading for order and system for these 5 years.

I do not want you to do things against your own nature. I want your true nature to triumph over your inhibitions.

Thynne is a shuffling liar. He took over my contracts from the old firm, failed to keep them, begged me to alter them. I agreed as a favor to him, and he tried to cheat me. I offered to let him out of publishing one book if he agreed to “immediate publication” of another. He wanted to strike out “immediate” and said I had agreed on the phone to do so, which was a lie. I wrote at once to correct this. Field Roscoe [lawyer] should have told you. (See his last letter to me; it implies a contract.)

It is so difficult to grasp the conditions of success. I wish Cora would cooperate actively. I’m sure her brain would help a lot.

As I said before, I got the shares (£500) for you. This was Yorke’s suggestion, to allow me to spend the case on various urgent matters. You have the shares you wanted, so you have no kick.

The shares are formally voted to you—so Yorke said.

Certainly Thynne can outwit you—not because of his facts, but because he is wily, plausible, and unscrupulous.⁶

Anu’s health plummeted again. On 1 December kidney pain left her groaning all night; she was averse to food. Beast and Monster performed Opus 59 to heal her kidney. She was much better the next day.

By 4 December, Crowley was depressed, believing Yorke’s “treachery and folly” and Thynne’s “knavery” had now blocked the “Great Work” for “a long while at best.” He looked “to the Gods for some new startling development.”

The next day—5 December—Dr. Goebbels and 300 Nazis entered the Mozartsaal cinema on the Nollendorfplatz (half a mile south of the Budapester Strasse’s east end in Schöneberg) to wreck the German première of Lewis Milestone’s anti-war movie, All Quiet on the Western Front, with smoke bombs and paper bags filled with sneezing powder, despite a conspicuous police presence intended to discourage NSDAP trouble.

Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, on which the movie was based, contained pronounced New Objectivity elements. A man’s dying, for example, was described unemotionally thus: “The skeleton is working its way to the surface,” while the conclusion preserved German culture’s dominant tone of the late twenties and early thirties: “And so we live out a closed, hard existence of extreme superficiality.”

The Nazis were not bothered about the subtleties. To them the movie subverted their narrative that the German army’s war was glorious, certain victory curtailed only by political betrayal at home. All Quiet on the Western Front maintained that war is futile madness because it means people murdering people just like ourselves for worthless gains, while those with the most to gain avoid the worst of what they have created: everybody loses; well, nearly everybody. All men are brothers and violence is futile. Nazi racists loathed all of this as well as the very idea of Americans playing German soldiers in a film produced by a Jew (Carl Laemmle Jr.). Nazi supporters were encouraged to spit on Remarque’s Berlin house when their train passed it.

Carl von Ossietzky, editor in chief of Die Weltbühne (The World Stage), the top magazine for left-wing intellectuals, wrote of the Nazi disturbances at the cinema: “Fascism has won its first victory since 14 September [the Reichstag elections]. Today it was a film, tomorrow it will be something else.” Von Ossietzky, who would serve time in Nazi concentration camps, was convinced, despite his pacifism, that the only way to deal with those who intended “the death of all culture” was “a heavy truncheon.”

Drastically reducing unemployment would have helped too. The Nazis’ paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA), the brown-shirted Storm-troopers rank and file, was largely constituted of high school teenagers, the unemployed, and the unemployable: their given task was to politicize the streets.

The streets told a story. Had you walked into Leipziger Platz in December 1930, close to where the worst of the October rioting took place, you would, likely as not, have seen professor of music R. Metz, standing alone, selling homemade postcards to earn his daily crust. An old man with white hair and glasses wearing a silk bow tie, with a silk-collared overcoat to keep the cold at bay, the unemployed professor made a genuinely pathetic sight, offering cards next to rubbish in the gutter.

There were now five million unemployed in Germany.

On the day Nazi youths in eastern Berlin rioted against All Quiet on the Western Front (8 December), while SPD paramilitary Reichsbanner members demonstrated in favor of it in and around Berlin, Crowley described himself as penniless and powerless. Even his own daughter, Lulu, it seemed, was either dead or had been kidnapped. No one, as far as he knew, was aware of what had happened to her. Her mother, Ninette, could not be reached at her last address, and the trail had gone cold. He tried to take solace in the fact that for the first time in eleven years he had a studio—but then he had no materials to paint with! “In the whole sky’s round is no light except love of Anu—and this pays royally for all.”⁷

They got down to hard work at art. The following day, a Tuesday, was wonderful as a result, but he was troubled by nightmares.

On the Wednesday, while Crowley deliberated over whether to retain the studio, Art raised riots and ructions in Paris. Paris’s Prefect of Police agreed to have Salvador Dalì and Luis Buñuel’s sexually charged surrealist-anarchic movie L’Age d’Or withdrawn after it was re-reviewed in the wake of cinema riots by the right-wing Ligue des Patriotes. Condemned by fascists and rightists as a work of corruption, the movie put Art back on the barricades. Nancy Cunard got hold of a copy of the banned movie and brought it to London for an illegal showing in Wardour Street. Crowley should have been there.

The day after the Parisian police censorship, Crowley pinned Karl down on the matter of stumping up for oils so he could paint properly. Karl, “an utterly unimaginable shit,” caved in only after stiff resistance: a small victory for Art unreported in the press.

On 12 December, Crowley began a “square picture” of a mulatto. This soon became Mulatto-Gods-the Ethnologist and may be the Mulatto Girl (Mulattenmaedchen) numbered 57 in the Berlin catalogue. On the 14th he was painting hard at mountain scenes, but felt it was getting too easy, or too boring, reflecting that: “Painting, like golf, is an old man’s game.” The harder he worked, the more he seemed to notice Hanni was not pulling her weight: an inevitable result of sharing a studio, which is a bit like sharing a towel—the other person always leaves it wetter than you do.

She can never do a thing, or even say “I’ll do it.” It’s always “I’ll smoke another cigarette, and then I’ll do it.”

She suffers from a fundamental lack of vitality—due doubtless to her original ovarian trouble—and this vitiates her whole conduct and attitude. This tacked on to her abiding horror of going insane like the bulk of her family.⁸

He felt his main aim had reached a defile, and entertained intuitive doubts about the likelihood of an early 1931 Nierendorf-backed exhibition. An I Ching divination: “Change” (Ko, hexagram 49), suggested delays.

After silly arguments over food, Hanni walked out again, this time with two visiting coeds, presumably old school friends, from California, or as Crowley called it, “Californicatra.”

On Christmas Eve, Anu appeared to Crowley several times in a dream, and once, almost physically, on waking. This had happened before. Crowley concluded that her “astral,” or astral body—the means of traveling in subconscious or conceivably superconscious worlds, according to magical doctrine—was “certainly very loose.” A loose astral is often associated with borderline mental states: difficulties connected to ordinary reality. Miserable without the actual Anu, Crowley tried to force himself to paint. He dreamed of Anu with dyed red hair, gray inside, pale yellow at the tips. She was in a brothel.

On Boxing Day afternoon, Crowley went out to the fashionable Café Reimann on Schluterstrasse (off the Kurfürstendamm), a gay and lesbian venue, painted by Jeanne Mammen (1890–1976) for Curt Moreck’s Guide to Immoral Berlin (1931). Because the café attracted young artists, it is likely Crowley went there hoping to find Anu. He found an actress instead, Anna Mabre, and took her number. (Café Reimann was central to the SA’s violent coordinated attack on Jewish individuals in and around the Kurfürstendamm on 12 September 1931, witnessed by Herr Reimann and other battered victims.)

At 6:00 p.m. Crowley entered the fabulous four-story Romanisches Café, a haven for artists and the intelligentsia. Completed in monumental neo-Romanesque fashion in 1899, the café occupied a corner of the beautiful Budapester Strasse.

Outside, the terrace’s deck chairs were stacked in the dark against a small rosebush hedge border below the establishment’s glass and metal canopy. Electric light was reflected through the great windows into the shadows and dance of headlamps upon the square, unglazed tiles in the cold. Inside, the rooms were of an immense height. Below Chinese lanterns, suspended above marble tables both square and round, sat men and women, some alone reading large newspapers, others doing business, some in groups conversing intensely. By huge mirrors stretching from panels to ceiling, cast-iron decorated coat and hat stands stood at attention, fat with winter clothes. Those looking high up for inspiration would see art nouveau floral bosses in lines along the ceiling in Moorish style. The front windows were half latticed with stained glass at the top, mute in the lightless winter night.

Targeted by Nazis for violence as early as 1927, unknown artists continued to establish first contacts at the Romanisches while established figures gathered behind psychological walls. Crowley’s art status fit neither category. He was not exactly unknown, nor was he an established artist. Crowley would, however, have attracted a few cool, even nervous, glances. Before the cream of the crop departed under Nazi pressure, the Romanisches played host to Bertolt Brecht, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Erich Maria Remarque, Billy Wilder, and many another luminaries of the German art scene.

Anu had been sitting at the Romanisches since 2:00 p.m. She’d bought Crowley a Christmas present, which, she said, the waiter had either lost or stolen; Crowley nearly broke down. They talked. He then took her to Siechen’s for a good dinner.

Fig. 10.2. The Romanisches Café, artistic hub and occasional Crowleyan haunt in central Berlin

Back in the studio, Anu ate everything she could find and told Crowley her intentions. She would give up eating, prostitute herself to get cash and cigarettes and brandy, then hire a room with gas and a hot bath to open her veins in. Crowley remarked that she was crazy enough to mean this. She then went off in a rage after Crowley refused to show her his diary. She returned at a quarter past midnight. Crowley advised she sleep in her own room. He brought her a heater. She sobbed that he didn’t love her anymore and told him to take the heater away. Crowley stayed up with her most of the night, bringing her a hot water bottle and the heater, which she accepted, while sobbing.

The next day she “was her true wonderful self of utter beauty and charm.”

Was she pregnant?

Increasingly constrained, the Beast entered 1931 quietly. On 2 January, Günther Stein phoned to say his wife was accompanying Anu to the doctor’s. Crowley was relieved. The Steins arrived at the studio with Anu the next day. They offered to take care of the “poor kid” for a fortnight; maybe it would help.

Crowley suffered a bout of misogyny. He rang Anna Mabre up for a date. Meeting her on the 4th, having found no comfort in painting or chess, he realized he couldn’t “stick her”: “Practically all women should be chloroformed at 35,” he wrote. He didn’t mean it, of course, and went back to playing chess.

Trials of a traveled philosopher: No 1. In Berlin all the whores look like “respectable women”; in New York all the “respectable women” look like whores. Reflection: they’re all whores, anyhow.⁹

On 6 January, Hanni showed up with flowers and smoked eel, then took away most of her things; she was living five minutes east of the studio. Crowley collapsed with fever, intensified by worsening diarrhea. He hoped he was purging himself of Anu, but Anu was back on the 11th to look after him, but made a mess of it, when she and a Frau Ital, described by Germer as an “adventuress,” brought in a doctor of her own volition: a friend of hers for whom she was doing a favor. The doctor transpired to be Dr. Erich Leschke (1887–1933), a notable professor of biology at the University of Berlin.

This is the story as related by Crowley to a medical association, by way of complaint:

I am physically healthy, but I have been suffering since some days from a feverish cold with coughing. I sent for Dr. Weidling, an excellent practitioner, who caused instant ease, and assured me, that I would recover completely after one or two nights of good sleep. This proved correct.

On January 11 in the evening I was sound asleep, when a stranger was shown mysteriously into my room. This had been caused by two ladies who were caring for me at the time, and among whose qualities none could count intellectual gifts.

He seated himself at my bed and said he had to examine me. I realized at once that this was a comedy, arranged by the two ladies to pass the evening. He played about with the stethoscope and declared on no better basis than this, that I “had pneumonia and a very weak heart.” I entered into the spirit of the game, and cautioned him not to overlook also Syphilis and gonorrhoea; and the remaining diseases. Then he looked at my eyes, and I called his attention to a slight irregularity of my pupils (a mechanical defect from 1907 is responsible for this). This brought him to my reflexes, of whose examination he seemed to have no idea, for example, he let me lie on my bed with crossed legs—and I told him that it was my locomotor ataxia which prevented me from walking even one yard.

Then I got bored, sat upright, and waited for the next phase of the joke. He took my medicine bottles and began criticizing the prescription. He said, still quite serious about his ridiculous diagnosis: What method shall we adopt?

I: Well, to be quite frank with you, I cannot see what you are doing in my Studio.

He: This lady phoned me that you were delirious and I came to treat you.

I: Well, as you very well know, I am already under treatment, and I am not delirious on the first point of medical etiquette; also, a glance at those two ladies should instruct you how much weight you can give to their medical views. And the fastest way to terminate what could bring you into a disagreeable situation is to leave this studio as quickly as possible.

He: Will I then have to ask you for my fees or that lady?

I: It will go beyond your power to address yourself to me—(and the poor child was fumbling her poor little purse hoping to find perhaps a few marks)—if you take one penny from that poor girl, who can hardly pay her rent or pay for her food, I shall chase you marked and howling through Berlin.

He: I am Professor of the greatest Universities and world-famous. I . . .

I: Get out!

He appeared to consider this as a hint that his presence was no longer desired and he left.¹⁰

Leschke insisted the penniless Hanni had promised to pay him. Crowley accused the doctor of extortion and took the matter to a medical association.

A few days later, Anu left again. Crowley wrote to Hans Steiner to tell him he was now declining “further responsibility for Anu.”

Karl’s birthday was 22 January. After working hard in extreme cold between bouts of diarrhea, Crowley and the Germers went for a great dinner at the Eden Grill on Budapester Strasse. While they clunked glasses, the NSDAP hosted a rally some two miles to the east, at the Saalbau Hall in Berlin-Friedrichshain. The Nazis had invited members of the SPD Reichsbanner and the KPD; it was another setup. Dr. Goebbels sat on a podium while Walter Ullbricht, the KPD’s Reichstag leader, stood up and made a speech. The moment he’d finished the place erupted in violence. Serious riots left about 100 people injured: another propaganda coup for Goebbels; the Nazis looked like tough guys, with more support from the poor, allegedly betrayed by communists and social democrats alike.

In another world, but really very close, Crowley returned to his studio at 11:20 p.m. Anu phoned from Wolf ’s clinic in great distress insisting she come around that night. She arrived, very ill, at ten past midnight.

As gray midwinter enclosed him in its pauper miseries, Crowley tried vainly to force himself to paint. Feeling a constant urge to transcend his own limitations, he reflected on the essence of what modern art ought to do, gaining a premonition of how such art would be condemned by extreme reactionary opinion in Germany, and why. He noted on 27 January how “primitive fear” makes the “WALL” into a sacred object. Crowley related the insight to the word “debauch,” denying its negative connotation. As far as Crowley was concerned, “debauch” simply meant “to go out of doors” and was identical in German, Ausschweiffung: “It is the fear of all activity that lies behind Philistinism.” The Nazis appealed to primitive fears, subconsciously active in the bourgeoisie, obvious in the lower classes. Art would have to Get Out There! His intuition touches on a very tangible “sacred object,” whose erection in Berlin in 1961 the DDR commanded, ironically, to preserve East Germany from fascism. Relics from the sacred object’s fall in 1989 are now treasured.

Crowley and Anu dined happily at Stöckler’s restaurant at Kurfürstendamm 228–9 on 2 February. Crowley reckoned it the best place he’d found: “It has imagination and is not gross.” A two-level restaurant lit by simple chandeliers with plain lampshades, Stöckler’s featured clear lacquered light oak architraves that separated rooms girded by round arched mahogany panels. Above them, bottles of wine were stacked on shelves. After dinner, Beast and Monster played hide and seek in the courtyard before he chased her at full speed “all the way down the Kurfürstendamm.” Back at the studio: another magick Opus (no. 73).

The brief respite from stress was short lived. Karl turned up the next day, “always blithering about the ‘German Spirit’”:

By this he means the psychology of a shop-boy in Leipzig whose breath stank so much worse than his father’s 10-pfennig cigars that he has had to spend his life masturbating into a W.C.¹¹

To which rancid description Crowley added the Latin cry: Sic semper tyrannis! (“Thus always the tyrants!”)¹²

A week later, Karl was back with more complaints: this time about traces of semen on his black satin, attributed to “Hanni last August.” Crowley’s comment: “I replied with the Mild Wisdom of the Sages: Since when, pray, have Cunts been water tight?”¹³

Fig. 10.3. Stöckler’s restaurant at Kurfürstendamm 228–9, where the Beast and Anu dined and played on 2 February 1931

But Germer was not always the boor he appeared. On 8 February, he had an inspired idea. He wrote to Crowley’s recently dismissed treasurer, Gerald Yorke, in London, suggesting Yorke persuade Aldous Huxley to return to Berlin to give a promotional talk about Crowley’s consciousness-expanding work, under the aegis of the international PORZA Association.

PORZA shared artistic interests with the Nierendorf Art Galleries. The Huxley idea fell on stony ground, but the PORZA idea would bear fruit—and needed to, for three days later, Karl Nierendorf and Hans Steiner called on Crowley in the evening to announce all exhibition plans had been “wrecked”; Nierendorf was practically broke. “What,” Crowley asked the I Ching, “is to be done about the pictures?” Answer: “Education” (a role, as we shall see, PORZA embraced). Crowley wondered what Nierendorf ’s real motive was. Hexagram Yu, suggesting Harmony, reassured him.

The next day, Nierendorf reassured the frustrated Crowley. There were, he said, “only three living painters to be classed with” him. Crowley “could get RM [Reichsmarks] 25,000 per picture IF . . .” That was about £1,225 sterling, a figure Crowley considered fine. Revitalized by Nierendorf ’s personal encouragement, he took time to visit a Berlin gallery housing “bad examples of Great Masters e.g. Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Matisse.”¹⁴

As for the three living painters to be classed with Crowley, Nierendorf may have had in mind three—now universally recognized—Expressionist masters whose work he was promoting: Emil Nolde (1867–1956) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976) being, I suspect, the first two. It may be no coincidence that after having been shown works by these men, Crowley’s Berlin exhibition would include Gypsy Girl (cat. no. 59, begun 16 March 1931) and Papuan Woman (cat. no. 33). Nolde painted his Gypsy Girl in 1920–21 in a style not dissimilar to Crowley’s portraiture (MoMA, New York), and Papuan Head in 1914, again in a kindred “primitive” style to Crowley’s (MoMA, New York).

Certainly no unbiased observer would find anything amiss were Crowley’s best paintings exhibited alongside those by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, whose paintings were exhibited in the Nazis’ 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition and who, in 1941, was forbidden to paint absolutely.

Three possible candidates vie for Nierendorf ’s third painter to be compared to Crowley. Georg Scholz and Otto Dix both shared something of Crowley’s corrosive sarcasm and black humor.

Nierendorf ’s 1931 Crowley exhibition catalogue notes refer to the “Naïve” oeuvre of Erfurt-born Adalbert Trillhaase (1858–1936), possibly the third comparable artist in Nierendorf ’s assessment of Crowley’s place among his peers in modern art. Nierendorf ’s authoritative observations must make us re-think Crowley’s artistic significance.

Fig. 10.4. Nierendorf ’s “The World from Below” cellar exhibition, September 1931. The painting on the far right is The Family of Adalbert Trillhaase (1923) by Adalbert Trillhaase, now in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany. Nierendorf compared Crowley’s work to Trillhaase’s.

Spurred on by Nierendorf and brushing off Steiner’s “wild tales of the insane Birven” over drinks at the Romanisches, Crowley painted “desperately hard.” He enjoyed a new self-confidence, and he knew where it came from. It was Nierendorf. Nierendorf had inculcated the very thing of which the false legend of Crowley has always maintained he suffered a surfeit.

Aleister Crowley was about to produce the best paintings of his life, becoming the only Magus in history with a name worthy of the annals of Art.

ELEVEN

THOROUGHLY MODERN MAGUS

I particularly ask you to notice that none of the mystics of the Middle Ages—even handicapped as they were by the sense or sin—ever suggested anything of the sort as is covered by such terms as Vampirism and Hypnotism. The important thing is to keep your own mind serene and pure; a constant flame of aspiration to the Highest. Do not allow any thoughts of evil to contaminate this flame.

It follows that you should shun the company or people who believe in anything of the sort. By allowing them to stick to you, you are leaving a gap in the defenses or your aura. You might find it very effective, when anyone starts such a subject to rise and make the Banishing ritual of the Pentagram, using divine names in an incomprehensible tongue. See how quickly that will turn the tables on them! Meditate on this, and what is more, act on it. 1

CROWLEY TO GERMER, 16 DECEMBER 1946

Magick can be a very personal thing and those who embark upon its journey to wholeness must often find their own way. Aleister Crowley had to learn by persistent, painstaking experiment and by its fruit: intuition. Nature’s laws are absolute but our apprehension of them changes with experience. Even how a given law affects a given individual is proportionate to innumerable variables involved. In a closed room, a sheet of paper does not fall to the earth with the same velocity as a hobnail boot, though the laws that govern their relative velocity are uniform. An object’s weight depends upon the force acting upon it. As William Blake observed: “A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees.”

Aleister Crowley’s theory of magick involves all actions that are willed by human beings in nature, from potato growing to blowing the nose, from acquiring energy to facilitating essential business. Crowley’s magick is fundamentally scientific, supposing the uniformity of all nature, however subtle; it is not supernatural or miraculous, though emotional responses to phenomena might suggest such. Holy Magick is concerned with the True Will, or, if you prefer, “God’s Will,” as the essential dynamic of each individual Star. Crowley’s True Will was to establish the Law of Thelema. Everything 666 did of a magical nature was related to that end.

As 1931 warmed up, Crowley left many elementary records of magical Works performed, mostly joyously, with Hanni Jaeger, Louise Zschaetzsch, Hanni Richter, Gertrud Howe, Sonia Kurzinski, Magda Becher, Renate Gottschied, Katherine Nelidova (Kasha), Lutte (or “Lissi”), Bobbie, Pola Henckels, Bertha Busch, a man called Erik, and possibly another man called Hermann. It was a remarkably busy summer, even by Crowley’s remarkable experience.

What are we to understand by “sexual magick”? What was going on?

THE NINTH DEGREE (IX°)

Crowley’s experiments with sex for magical purposes began in 1912. What he would learn was encoded into the principles and practices of the “ninth degree” of the OTO’s religious and magical system, laid down in Liber Agape, in the supplementary De Arte Magica (ca. 1914) and other treatises containing much elaboration of principle but scant nuts-and-bolts guidance. By the end of his life he could express the matter succinctly, as in this letter to John Symonds:

The close connection of sexual energy with the higher nervous centers makes the sexual act definitely magical. It is therefore a sacrament which can and should be used in the Great Work. The act being creative, ecstatic and active, its vice consists in treating it as sentimental, emotional, passive.²

Grady L. McMurtry, a U.S. Army lieutenant based in France, about to engage with the 1944 German Ardennes offensive, or Battle of the Bulge, was another recipient of Crowley’s tips concerning the IX°. Crowley wrote to him from digs at the Bell Inn, Aston Clinton, Buckinghamshire on 21 November 1944. A recruit from Pasadena, California, McMurtry would become OHO of the OTO in 1971, succeeding Karl Germer (d. 1962) as Crowley wished (though not as soon as he wished).

Now about the IX°. The theory is simple, and I think I told you enough at 93 [Jermyn Street, London] for you to work on. Just in case:

You prepare the Medicine by mixing the two ingredients, with your mind concentrated. I trust that the above will have confirmed rather than instructed. If any point is in doubt, let me know.

I will send you a copy of De Arte Magica under separate cover. [. . .] This book gives you a lot of extra hints, and is besides a good springboard for your own research. You may discover all sorts of new things for yourself; the one thing that never alters is the formula [the tetragrammaton or Hebrew “Name of God”: yod, he, vau, he].

The tetragrammaton formula not only reveals the essence of the high magick in principle but underlies the fact that ninth-degree magick is by its nature sacred, that is, it is a sacrament: the taking of a thing common in nature and raising it to its highest source and controlling, hidden principle; the making of something apparently inert into a thing of radiant power. The spiritual power may then act upon the creation. Priests do it with bread and wine in Catholic rites; Thelemites do it with the creative act of love, and the language is often similar, though the Thelemite has recognized that the Catholic imposition of the sense of sin regarding sexuality has relegated to the gutter something fit for the altar.

The tetragrammaton formula works as follows, though it is not something everyone will grasp, at least not straightaway. Its background is an ancient Gnostic formula for the redemption of spirit from the grip of lower elements of creation toward its restitution in “God,” the All-Father. The sacrament enacts a universal process: the reestablishment of the heavenly order of which the lower creation is ignorant (ego-bound).

We begin with yod, the first letter of God’s “name.” It represents the primal Father’s self-begetting. The second letter, he, is the Great Mother, or Wisdom, “married” to the Father. From this “fertilization” comes vau, the Son and heir of creation. Finally, the daughter he is produced, both twin sister and daughter of vau, the Son. The Son’s mission is to redeem the sister-daughter by making her his bride, setting her on his mother’s throne. Only the embrace of the daughter can reawaken the primal power of the “old” Father. In the relations of the Son and the Daughter, Man, who is male and female, finds the highest call: the “Great Work,” or return of the fallen creation to the source of being. The twins re-enter the womb of the Mother. The operation is symbolized in the word “ARARITA,” seven letters related to the hexagram and its center (all four elements in harmony), derived from the notariqon of the Hebrew: Achad Rosh Achdotho Rosh Ichudo Temurato Achad, meaning: “One is His Beginning: One is His Individuality: His Permutation is One.” The Climax is One.

We can now begin to translate this Great Myth into the magical sacrament, recognizing that magical acts performed apparently on the level of matter (in kabbalistic terms, “Assiah”) register on higher levels of reality (Yetzirah, the formative or angelic plane; and possibly Briah, the creative or archangelic plane).

The IX° operation concerns itself with the elixir of life. As Crowley put it above: “mix the ingredients.” The ingredients are ejaculated semen (“white bread”) and secreted vaginal fluids (“wine”). In alchemical terms, the male ingredient is the “lion,” the female, the “eagle of the gluten,” the latter acting as solvent for the former. These living substances on the organic plane are understood as the living seed of the parents. They represent and indeed contain the deepest essence of the selves and wills of the parents. As a sacrament, the elixir is a daughter-son, twin child, male-female Holy Spirit of the Gnostic Mass: one with the parents.

The elixir represents a sacrifice (a loss or “death” for sacred purposes) and is an actual sacrifice (a giving up of self). While the ninth degree actually involves a possible “sacrifice” (in the sense of avoiding) a fertilized egg, or hypothetical human child, since the ingredients are not directed to that purpose, the essential sacrifice is spiritual, sacrificing oneself spiritually. A spiritual “child” has been created from the act. This child is of “perfect innocence and high intelligence,” that is, he is the fruit of the magician’s perfect understanding, without “lust of result,” consistent with the True Will.

Spiritual combined with physical orgasm involves momentary death or detachment from the ego (“the world and its god”): the male magician pours “all that he is and all that he has” into the symbolic Cup of Babalon, a reflection of Nuit, or infinite space. The cup image refers to the cup in which the blood of the saints (witnesses to God) is mingled in the Book of Revelation. Gnostics understand the “Whore” as synonymous with Mother-Wisdom, who offers herself freely to all, whose possession is “better than rubies” (Proverbs 8:11–17). Crowley believed early Christian fanatics and their followers were insufficiently initiated to comprehend astral visions, so furthered lurid apocalyptic scenarios in the minds of impressionable persons, exacerbated by violently oppressive political conditions.

Crowley believed it was possibly a gross misunderstanding of this child sacrifice concept that led in late antiquity to Christians being accused of cannibalism by their enemies, as well as similar accusations being leveled at mystical Jews in Eastern Europe in modern times.

Now all of this gives us some idea of the theory, what of the practice? Crowley’s practice seems to have been peculiar to himself. For example, in a classic magic rite, a circle might be inscribed and archangels and the Names of God called upon to protect its integrity. There might be invocations and gestures employing magical implements and appropriate dress. Details concerning these can be found in Crowley’s magisterial Book Four, Magick in Theory and Practice (ed. Hymenaeus Beta, Weiser, 2004, see especially chapters 12, 14, 20, and the Star Sapphire ritual). However, Crowley held that after many years of banishing of alien entities and cleansing of the spirit of the magician, the magus spent his whole life “in the circle,” so he could decide when certain ritual precautions and invocations were necessary. By 1931, Crowley had learned to internalize much of the ceremonial process so that his partner might, in some cases, never have realized she, or he, was involved in an act of sacred magick. We know from Crowley’s diary that he did use candles occasionally and sometimes did invocatory rites, though mostly without equipment or special dress, save magic rings and a magic bell, though his wand would leave his trousers when called upon.

Key factors are as follows:

The object of the Work must be concentrated in the mind as a rushing flame. “Enflame thyself with prayer” is the watchword. Crowley recommended sanyama on the object, that is, according to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, a combination of dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation), and samadhi (union). By-products from these disciplines could be curious phenomena and flashes of supernal insight. Concentration must, however, be accompanied by intense ecstasy, joy, enthusiasm, good old-fashioned lust. Stimulants to “Energized Enthusiasm” might help, but nothing is to be eaten within three hours of the operation. Willingness to lose self in the divinity of the other, who should be thought of as a Goddess (or God, from the woman’s point of view) is vital, in tune with tantric theory. If the will diverts from the aim, all is vain, so bodily weakness and the mind’s tendency to wander must be overcome. Training is vital.

Operations should be carried out when the time feels intuitively right. On the other hand, times when extreme repugnance to performance was acute Crowley also found to be excellent. If the woman has entered her second day of menstruation, Crowley considered this a propitious fortune, consistent with alchemists who “preferred the red tincture to the white.”

Though the operation takes place essentially on the Yetziratic Plane, attempts to do things impossible to Nature are blasphemous. God works within His Laws. Sexual magick, if it works, may do so by the “child” of the operation enlivening tendencies already latent in a situation, by acting upon a supposed dimension where action is fluid, where the spiritual aspect of things or people is susceptible to subtle force. Everything is of God and “of His own do we give Him.”

It doesn’t matter if the other party is unaware of what’s happening, but if the partner is an adept, he or she must will the same object. The best female partners, Crowley believed, were those who really loved sex and could raise the necessary enthusiasm and abandonment so that ordinary consciousness was transcended. Hot or cold was always better than lukewarm. Voluptuous lustfulness in a woman was best by far; gross types were better than fine. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” as Blake maintained. As a gentleman, Crowley would never proceed if he thought there was any chance that his Work would be rejected.

The operation comes under the alchemical formula: Solve et Coagula. The first part, Solve is the concentration of will and power. Coagula is tricky. It involves the astral being or thought-form or bud will being nourished and directed in the making of a magical link on the astral plane between it and the aim of the operation (on the Magical Link see Book Four, chapter 14). If you cannot work out how this is done, you have no right being entrusted with the secret.

The elixir is to be consumed through mucous membrane (mouth usually, especially in case of illness), or it might be smeared on an object to give it talismanic power (as 666 and Hanni did with the coin), or connected to the object of the operation (if you wanted to increase your crops you might put the elixir on a specimen plant, having that plant first properly consecrated). In the latter case, the magical link would be the force of nature responsible for producing the result required. Crowley taught his pupils that consummation of the elixir was not always strictly necessary but was advisable in practice to complete the chain of people involved in the operation, and to reabsorb the energy.

In spite of the theory of the elixir involving male and female union, Crowley believed that sexual magick with a sympathetic man could, for him anyway (he was naturally bisexual), intensify the maintenance of the will, without the distraction of the lustful indulgences required by women who invest more significance in the bodily act than men usually do. He was not comfortable with being the passive partner in such operations. Operations not involving the male and female generative organs were called XI° (eleventh) degree operations, the tenth being the gestation of a human child, though normally confined to the symbolic appointment or “birth” of a head of the OTO.

The aim of ninth-degree magick is to assist one to do one’s True Will: not what we want so much as what we genuinely need, and because we know this, want it, will it with all our hearts, our minds, and our strength. For the reason that sexual magick concerns the True Will, the secret cannot be violated or abused by the Black Brother who is governed by ego and is therefore unbalanced. The result would be what is called schizophrenia, or what Catholics and others call hell.

There are clues in all sacred texts. “The conscious mind is enmity against God” is one; “all your righteousness is as filthy rags” is another. In 1940, in an era of wartime blackouts, Crowley wrote the following to Karl Germer:

I too have used some unorthodox methods and got good results. I feel sure that the crux of the Opus is to get the “higher planes” to interest themselves in the work. Spiritual purity is difficult to define. One important attitude is a long habit of using all one’s energies in the service of the True Will.

For me at least it is best to send inhibitions and the critical faculties to sleep. For this some ritual is useful: I mean, to “go places” and get somewhat “lit up” before diving into the “black-out.” If this is combined with hunting and conquest, so much the better.³

For those wishing to try this at home, it should be observed that the prerequisite for the magick of the ninth degree is the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel and the attendant discovery of the True Will. These conceptions and their Gnostic mythology mean very little outside of the context of disciplined initiation. Crowley endeavored to make the path easier, but could never make it easy. Any fool can copy an image of a tree, but it takes years to establish the roots that give that image its stability and life.

And . . . a parting word from Crowley for those who instinctively loathe what appear to be sexual novelties:

It’s against Nature! Howled the germinating Hydra when he/she heard about the new sexual process of reproduction.⁴

TWELVE

THE LAST SUMMER OF FREEDOM

Spurred on by Nierendorf, Crowley painted “desperately hard—with some of the self-confidence he [Nierendorf] inculcated.” On 23 February, he got Miriam, from Timbuktu, to model. The result: Timbuktu—Maedchen (no. 67 in Crowley’s 1931 catalogue).

After a two-hour painting session with Miriam on the 24th, the Beast and Anu attempted a magical sex Opus (no. 85), but it didn’t “come together,” so they quit the Würzburger Strasse studio for the Pschorrbrau café-restaurant in Potsdamer Platz, about a mile northeast, for oysters and Leberknödel (liver dumplings). It’s likely they took the U-bahn, as Würzburger Strasse is just off Augsburger Strasse; a U-bahn train would reach Potsdamer Platz in minutes. Emerging from the “Untegrundbahn” at night was a dizzying experience. At the top of the stairs, a square arch of steel bestrode the entrance like a portico to Valhalla. One might have expected bats from hell or the Niebelungen to pour forth from cavernous depths beneath.

But no, it was the Beast and the Monster on the pale, flat bricks of the pedestrian-only center, hit by the hectic rush, surge, and flash of traffic and neon signs clashing for attention: PIXAVON; Hildebrand schokolade kakao; Pschorr-Haus in radiant Sütterlin-script; Nur Schlichte in old Gothic. A policeman in a thick, belted overcoat and shiny black helmet like an overturned flowerpot with a broad high peak pulled himself up a ladder some twenty feet to the ultra-modern steel and glass cabin of the traffic control tower. Like a hollow lighthouse it beamed across the Platz from above its huge illuminated clock.

Berlin was always on time, and traffic jams were orderly. From the tower, you could see serpentine tramlines weaving around the Platz like creatures on the Nazca Plains. Single-decked trams rattled past circular kiosks bearing theater information. Bright cream double-decker buses, flanked by homebound cyclists, flashed their advertisements to all points north, south, east, and west: Chlorodont (toothpaste) and Berlin raucht Juno; “Berlin smokes Juno cigarettes” with no intention of giving up.

In a few months, work would start on Erich Mendelsohn’s futuristic nine-story, glass and steel Columbus Haus on the demolished ruins of the Grand Hotel Bellevue at the north exit to Freidrich-Ebert-Strasse: a premium-rent office block that would have looked brand-new in 1970. Potsdamer Platz was the most modern square on Earth.

And Crowley was a modern painter. Ever ready to draw general axioms from his activities, Crowley concluded, after painting Miriam for a couple of days: “Old-style painters—Gerald Kelly and Co.—still like naughty schoolboys copying out painfully 30000 lines of Vergil.”¹

On the 28th Anu broke down, realizing she was truly ill. Henri, a gay dancer friend of Crowley’s, contacted friend Dr. Klopper. Klopper performed a minor operation on Anu on 4 March. It seemed to go all right; Crowley took Anu to recuperate at the Diakonessenhaus Ebenezer at Paulsenstrasse 5 in Steglitz, a handsome Methodist Episcopalian establishment that combined a health sanatorium with training for deaconesses.

The next day, Crowley had a “Venia Slonbeshager” pose for him: probably a transcription error for “Wilma von Boeselager” as later that day (5 March), the diary records: “Vilma at Lunte’s great form with Karl and Henri.”²

Lunte was a cheap artist’s pub at Eislebener Strasse 11, in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, known to the homosexual world as a pickup joint. “Lunte” means a fox brush, or tail, and had a phallic connotation in gay slang. Lunte’s was a short walk from Crowley and Hanni’s studio.

The 5th of March was also the day Crowley met twenty-eight-yearold Louise Zschaetzsch, a lady from Rhinish Alsace now living at Wielandstrasse 17, off the Kurfürstendamm. Dinner at Traube’s, on the 7th, was followed by painting; she posed. Crowley was now painting madly one picture after another and began to feel cheap: “Fagged on at finishing pictures—put away 12 ‘approximately done.’ 5 remain. Working desperately on them—can’t stop—can’t go on—can’t sleep.”³

Taking advantage of an Anu-free studio, Crowley entertained a Dr. Presfelder, taking his number: probably someone Crowley picked up locally. The next day (11 March) the Beast collected Hanni from the sanatorium. She wanted her own studio: “Doctors be damned!” she cried, as Crowley brought her home in heavy snow. In the morning she worked herself up into a rage and stormed out into a blizzard, returning in great pain. Dr. Klopper arrived after dinner with Henri and Louise.

In the morning, the “fool bitch” Anu left again. Though Crowley felt he was painting great stuff again, he missed her badly. Then Karl let him down over subletting the Lietzensee Ufer 9 apartment. Crowley divined harpy Cora’s influence: “The only difficulty about Cora is how to get rid of the body. Nobody would miss her!”⁴

Louise posed for Carnival on 14 March (no. 37 in the 1931 catalogue): “Masturbated her and licked her cunt: she comes very wonderfully. Then went and ate Stuffed Tomatoes because I love my marvelous Anu—.”⁵

Crowley began Gypsy Girl on 16 March, first studying her without pencil or brush (see chapter 10’s comparison to Nolde): “The Gipsy girl was really scared of me—took refuge with the Lady Char (not in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha as was right!) and all because I didn’t whip out pencil and paper, and work like a bloody student!!!! (P.S. But it’s a damn good panel. [1931 cat. no. 59])”⁶

After a “bloody awful day” with no work done on 17 March, Crowley took Louise to a bad dinner at the nearby Tientsin restaurant on Kantstrasse, the first Chinese restaurant in Berlin (founded in 1923 by the Chinese embassy’s former chef). Efforts to raise magical enthusiasm with Louise afterward were desultory; mutual masturbation proved very boring: “hardly even a bud-will.” The proposed aim—“to get out of the rut”—hardly got out of the rut. By 1:00 a.m. Crowley was “damnably depressed,” though later in the day, Louise cheered him up and showed him a perfect studio at Kurfürstenstrasse 126. He started a big square self-portrait: a head on a crazy background, which he completed in “damned sardonic” style the next day.⁷

Semi-satisfied, Crowley went out on the prowl to Puttkamer Strasse, some two miles east away in Kreuzberg. His verdict: “N.G.” (No Good). What he sought may be inferred from his comment: “Girls wiping windows with dusters to attract is a new one on me!” He was probably looking for Fanny at the Mikado Club at Puttkamer Strasse 15. He went back for dinner with his lunte between his legs, then submitted to oral sex with Louise.

But the work was paying off. Nierendorf arrived to inspect on the 20th; he liked Crowley’s new paintings immensely. Elevated, Crowley dined with Louise on the 22nd at Otto Horcher’s intimate nine-table gourmet establishment at Martin Luther Strasse 21. Horcher’s kidneys flambé failed to impress: “bad and pretentious” was Crowley’s verdict, which is interesting, since the restaurant would become popular with the Nazi High Command later in the decade.

Crowley then went to the Schubert Saal (Schubert Hall) to see a “superb” show called Morphin. The Schubert Saal regularly hosted Russian cabaret and songs. Henri danced “the Lotus dance” but appeared tired and discontented.

Tues. 24 [March 1931]. With some (insignificant) assistance from Karl [Germer] and another vulgarian, I packed all the pictures for show in 3 boxes marked S, Single-handed! Older or less photogenic ditto in 3 cases marked O. I will next pack pictures to be framed for show in a box marked F. Posters can be stored loose at Karl’s Café Hahnen [= “Cocks”] (Good: one of the best in Berlin. 1 Nollendorf Platz [a little south of Kurfürstenstrasse]. Only faults: a little too big, and music [Crowley hated “background music,” calling it “the opium of the people”]).

Louise joined him in the evening, but the shine was wearing off; he could find neither love nor rhythm with Louise. Comparison with Anu was too vivid for things to settle down, despite a number of magick Works of an oral character. The Beast mixed his drinks and lusted after Fanny. A search for Fanny the following night revealed: “She was fucking somebody else.” He was still thinking of Fanny when he joined Karl, Cora, and Louise at Voodoo’s Bar, a drag club, on 28 March. Crowley’s appraisal: “comic dirt.”

The Hanni-Crowley studio experiment finally collapsed on April Fool’s Day. Anu began slipping from the forefront of the Beast’s life as Germer strutted about like a demented Prussian peacock “helping” Crowley move from Würzburger Strasse to temporary digs at Karl’s apartment.

Taking a break on the 2nd, Karl motored Crowley fifty miles southwest to Wittenberg in Saxen-Anhalt, putting up at the Klosterhof Hotel, probably in Schloss-strasse, Coswig, a few miles outside the city. Crowley’s comments on Wittenberg are interesting. The “admirable” city was a “worthy memorial” to the Protestant reformers Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), “who won us our first freedom.” He meant freedom from the Catholic Inquisition and the Roman stranglehold on religion. The next day he dropped in to church, praising the preacher for “A.1. gestures and diction,” but was surprised to see the congregation sitting to sing, as if it were not proper! He was thinking of his father, Edward Crowley, also a preacher. Believers in Crowley as a cartoon “Satanist” should note this.

Fed up with Germer, Crowley caught the train back to Berlin, heading for the König Café on the Unter den Linden, where he won two marks at chess. It’s not clear where he slept, but on Saturday 4th he met a girl named Hanni Richter. They went to a discreet dive on the Mittelstrasse, a block north of the Unter den Linden, and played awhile. It transpired that Ms. Richter’s parents had killed themselves when she was twenty-two.

He slept at the Germers’, ill but loath to summon a doctor lest it delay his hosts’ departure. Before they left on the Sunday, Crowley received from the criminal police a summons to court Tuesday morning.

The Germers left, and Crowley and Hanni Richter performed Opus 2 for “Sex energy &c.” This worked “A.1.” A girl named Else Lyon was attracted at the Romanisches in the evening. Crowley introduced her to Henri, who was suspicious. Else brought her “whore” back to the apartment with her and tried to play “the strange game,” presumably dangling for a lesbo-hetero seduction. Crowley threw them out. He loathed salaciousness, calling it “filth.” He then “licked Hanni [Richter’s] cunt and arse hole quite a lot, between sneezes.” He had a cold in the nose, exacerbated by suspicions of a resurgence of Helen and Heinrich Tränker’s anti-Crowley campaign of 1925 when they tried to get him expelled from Germany.

Come Tuesday, Louise interpreted. It transpired the court summons dated back to the Frau Ital–Hanni Jaeger–Professor Leschke incident. Crowley composed his affidavit:

In answer to your letter [summons] of March 21 I give my statement as a witness as follows:

Frau Stolpe or Ital is in my opinion an adventuress, who tried to exploit the youth and inexperience, as well as distress of Miss Jaeger. It is therefore well possible that she might have induced Miss Jaeger, against all common sense, to agree to pay the fee of Dr. Leschke. I myself would, of course, have been responsible for the payment of the fee, if I had not with sharpness thrown Dr. Leschke out of my studio, because of his unfair and insolent attempt to exclude my own physician, in this arrogant way. I on my part had to consider him as an impostor, for his diagnosis was pneumonia, of which there was no trace, also he did not even take my temperature, I cannot swear what Miss Jaeger did not say to Frau Stolpe, especially so as she talked to her in my absence and moreover in German, a language which I often do not understand.

However, I can swear that Frau Ital explained to me as well as to Miss Jaeger immediately after the expulsion of Dr. Leschke—that Dr. L. was a friend of hers and that he would not demand a fee in any way.

Up to the moment that I heard of the suit against Miss Jaeger, I had considered the whole matter with the doctor as merely a silly joke.⁸

The testimony was submitted to the local district court the next day.

On 9 April, after an Opus for “Sex energy” with Ms. Richter, followed by fatigue and flu symptoms, fulfillment came in the form of the “most beautiful” nineteen-year-old Gertrud Howe. A mulatto, born in Berlin, “charming” Gertrud was apparently a cousin of President Herbert Hoover. The 1939 Berlin phone book lists a “Gertrud Howe” as a film actress dwelling at Lietzenburger Strasse 22–23, just south of Kurfürstendamm’s U-bahn.

Crowley got into painting Conscientious Nude (probably no. 48: Denkerin or Female Thinker in the 1931 catalogue). Having finished it, the Beast took Gertrud for lunch and afterward enjoyed an exciting Opus.

On 11 April, Hanni Richter posed, but Crowley’s cold made drawing impossible. In the evening, he played chess with Louise: “a really hopeless idiot and quite unteachable. Liable to burst into tears if she loses a pawn—oh God! These damned feminine women are the limit.”⁹

When the Beast pointed out that Anu, for all her faults, had both brains and beauty, Louise—what a surprise!—“took it amiss.” Exploding into a violent rage, she left him “forever.” Crowley added: “As usual.”

The next morning, Louise wandered around the little Lietzensee lake by the Germers’ apartment, hoping the Beast would catch sight of her aching heart through the window, but Crowley had already moved to a cheap, though accommodating, Pension, the Mea, on Dörnbergerstrasse. You won’t find it today. Dörnbergerstrasse existed about a hundred yards from Lützowplatz (north) in an easterly direction along Lützowstrasse to the first break in modern buildings. Where now lies a carpark, the Pension Mea used to stand. There did Crowley perform art and sex magick with Hanni Richter and Gertrud Howe.

Crowley’s suspicions about Helen Tränker were justified. The “foul slut” turned up at the police on 13 April, insisting the Beast be deported. Karl defended him with “fine energy” and was even persuaded to pay for Dr. Weidling as Crowley felt so ill. Weidling would inexpertly cut six polypi from his nose; the condition recurred six months later.

Biding his sore nose, Crowley played chess with Louise for a week until Gertrud sat for him on 20 April, a session followed by sexual magick. The next day the magick was repeated for energy, this time with Hanni Richter. The result was a “violent” attack of painting that continued to the next day: a portrait of Louise called Monna Louisa (no. 49 in the 1931 catalogue). Crowley was unnerved by Louise’s wanting to buy a picture from him; he felt obsessive claws, though she could be tender and thoughtful too.

Out of the blue, Anu phoned. They met for an hour on the 25th. It was sad. Steiner had already conveyed rumors Hanni was peddling in drugs, or giving 10 RM blow jobs. As far as Crowley could determine, Anu was “working in some cabaret”: a depressive thought.

Louise started involving herself in his business. She helped draw up a memo for Karl, indicating a publicity program that included personal approaches to Max Reinhardt, one “Ostwald” (possibly Austrian film director-producer Richard Oswald, who was working in Berlin), film director G. W. Pabst, and any likely publishers. Using Crowley’s paintings for cigarette ads was also suggested, along with selling his sex memories and printing his more sexually oriented works such as Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden (1904) and the homosexual Baghi-muattar (1910). A contract between Crowley, Karl, and Louise was suggested, as well as a request to “Make Nierendorf give reasonable guarantees that [the] exhibition will be properly conducted.”¹⁰

Further discussions took place on the 26th when Karl drove the Beast, Louise, and Cora to the lakeside Bad Saarow spa-resort, southeast of Berlin. Cora started moaning about money as soon as the car started. Over a roast beef lunch, unwilling to tolerate Cora’s insulting Israel Regardie (in his absence), Crowley “laid her out,” presumably with a hard slap.

Having cleared up the mess with the Germers, he got on with drawing Gertrud (two good sketches) but found her sexual technique as unsympathetic as Louise’s. He continued painting Gertrud until the month’s end. His diary is unclear as to whether his “best picture yet” was a portrait of Gertrud or a “very strange obscene Walpurgis-Nacht” that might have included Gertrud. On Mayday he performed sex magick with her to produce “an even better picture.” These sessions may have produced the Portrait of Gertrud Howe that has survived in a private collection (possibly Portrait: no. 35 in the 1931 catalogue).

According to Crowley’s diary, 2 May was his most “delightful day in months”: probably intended sardonically, but one cannot be certain. Anu came to lunch at Halmer’s. Apparently under the impression she was Anita Berber, Anu sported a new style: “Idiot!” observed Crowley, with reason.

Priestess of Debauchery Anita Berber (1899–1929), immortalized in a painting by Otto Dix, had been the most outrageous cabaret dancer of them all. She began dancing nude in 1919, was androgynous in appearance with a short bob hairstyle, often dyed red, was bisexual, challenged taboos, and was addicted to cocaine, opium, morphine, ether, and alcohol. She was buried in a pauper’s grave in Neukölln in 1929. Crowley would have got on all right with Anita, no doubt, but he hated the thought of Anu heading in the same direction. Taking his “sweetie” to the Wiener Café in Potsdamer Platz, who should walk in but Germer and Louise to discuss business! Germer left in a huff and Crowley couldn’t get out of taking Louise to dinner. All poor Louise got for her trouble was a “snapper” on the nose. Crowley slapped or punched her. Undeterred, she was, perhaps, an emotional masochist; the cause is unclear.

On Sunday 3 May the Beast performed an Opus with Hanni Richter for Anu. The “Elixir” was “A1.” Then it was back to the brushes. The following week he finished Mulatto with Toadstool (possibly no. 57: Mulattenmaedchen in the 1931 catalogue), then tried to paint a landscape: “Trying hard and getting nowhere. (P.S. Had to put figures in.)”¹¹

On 6 May, Crowley’s ironic cynicism was back: “A marvelous day.” He made Hanni Richter cry (by being ordinarily decent to her); he made Hanni Jaeger cry (by proving to her she loved him and ought to bear their child); he made Louise Zschaetzsch cry “by sincere sadistic work (for Hanni Jaeger’s sake).” Then he wrote some extremely rude comic-song lyrics:

It doesn’t matter, my Hanni
That you are a whore and a thief
You’ve got a miraculous cunnie
Not a mere chunk of beef.
And if I can’t fix it to fuck you
I’ d rather not fuck at all
But have Fanny puncture my podex
After the ball.

On 8 May, after sex magick with Hanni Richter for energy, Crowley felt for no reason everything was “utterly rotten.” The Elixir had been “extremely strong and as fishy as the Quintessence of all fishiness.” The next day he sent Ms. Richter out with a $20 gold piece to change, plus a note to the cashier of the Eden Hotel on Budapester Strasse. When Hanni Richter failed to show up, he called at her given address of 12 Kurfürstenstrasse the next day. She wasn’t there. He went to the police but found no satisfaction. That was the last the Beast ever saw of his $20, or of Hanni Richter.

On 12 May, Crowley had lunch at Hiller’s with Grace Winifred Pailthorpe (1882–1971), author of What We Put in Prison and in Preventive and Rescue Homes (London, Williams & Norgate Ltd, 1932). A surgeon in WWI, Pailthorpe became a psychoanalyst, establishing herself at 71 Harley Street, London, in 1922. She started the world’s first institution for the treatment of delinquency, with illustrious vice presidents Adler, Jung, and Freud. In 1935 she would begin studying automatic writing and painting, both of great interest to the Beast, especially as at one time he had described The Book of the Law as an example of automatic writing, a description he later rejected.¹²

That they lunched at Hiller’s restaurant at 55 Unter den Linden almost certainly means Ms. Pailthorpe was staying at the Hotel Adlon, which was usual for respectable visitors. We know the price of the (to Crowley) disappointing lunch, because Crowley sent his accounts to Germer to prove he wasn’t wasting money.

Dear Karl, You are always being surprised at expenses, as if there was a mystery. Look at these items of extras since May 1.

Medicine | RM | 30 (about) |
Louise 4 dinners | RM | 30 |
shoes |  | 45 |
Pailthorpe (lunch) |  | 17 |
belt |  | 13.50 |
Althofer do |  | 16 |
|  | 151. 50. |

That is why RM 120 doesn’t fill the hole! There would have been no hole, but for loss of $20 [Hanni Richter’s theft] & non-arrival of £5 = RM 120.¹³

The “Althofer do” was a night out with the Germers and Ms. Pailthorpe. Crowley’s comment on the restaurant: “they’re all alike. But the Baked Pike was A1.” Crowley and Louise took Ms. Pailthorpe to dinner on 15 May, followed by a trip to the Mikado. Unfortunately, it was dull; Crowley reckoned they’d come too early. But Crowley’s spirits picked up, and he found himself on great conversational form at Lunte’s until late. Ms. Pailthorpe was a broad-minded lady.

As an expert on delinquency one wonders if she offered any advice about poor Hanni Jaeger, because that morning Anu had rung to tell the Beast she was to be prosecuted for perjury after her statements in Lisbon the previous September to the U.S. consul by which she obtained her return fare to Germany. Crowley went with her to the U.S. embassy to help sort things out: her minority would probably protect her in German law.

The next day, Anu’s “hard boiled” pretenses collapsed and she cried, and Crowley with her. He painted a touchingly innocent oil: A Tree and Bathers on Rocks, “a long narrow canvas.” Full of May-time spirit, it has survived in a private collection. Its sparkling tree motif appears in other Crowley works, such as that painted on 17 May: “a superb picture—tree in storm at sea—the love between myself and Hanni Jaeger” (possibly 1931 cat. no. 60: Sturm und Drang). Is this a tree of knowledge? Serpents are comfortable frequenters of Crowley’s work. In Gnosticism, the serpent offers precious knowledge. Crowley would need it.

BLUNDERSTORM

Germer was becoming increasingly furious. In a Berlin full of denunciations, Krumm-Heller, Hans Steiner, and Martha Küntzel all told Germer that Birven was denouncing him and Crowley. Opposed by Birven, Laeschke, and Helen Tränker, Germer insisted Crowley obtain legal redress against Birven. Crowley contacted the U.S. embassy’s lawyer, a man called Wuth. Wuth suggested a 500 RM retainer. Germer accepted, amid increasingly vicious ravings.

Crowley’s response? He embarked on a “summer of love.”

On 19 May after a date with Anu, Crowley met a man called Walter at the Herkules gay bar. Having dined at Hakman’s the Beast met Ellen, Countess von Stauffenberg, then enjoyed “the best fuck I’ve had in six months” with a prostitute at Lloyd’s. He tried to persuade himself he was indifferent to Anu provided he could have “the Cunt of the Countess.” But when it came to lunch with Gräfin Ellen von Stauffenberg in Charlottenburg on the 23rd, neither the seagulls’ eggs and smoked flounder nor the countess herself could keep him awake. He was bored. She would make him pay for the sexual snub.

Countess Ellen’s husband was Markward Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (1889–1975), whom she married in 1913. They were relatives of the patrician German hero and anti-Nazi martyr Claus Phillip Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (1907–1944).

Seething from Karl’s refusal to stump up the 500 RM, Crowley went to Gerhard Voigt’s gay club, Kleist Kasino, at Kleiststrasse 15, a half mile south of his Pension, and told a man called Herbert “that his sentiments appealed” to his “delicacy.”¹⁴

Crowley stopped for a minute to see if he wasn’t being libeled in bestselling novelist Warwick Deepings’s Exiles (1930). Deeping (1877– 1950), a one-time fellow student at Trinity, Cambridge, included a character called Oscar Slade, loosely based on Crowley, in his short story collection. Slade’s motto “Do as you please” elicited Crowley’s comment: “I am quite satisfied that my name is indelibly associated with ‘Do what thou wilt.’ Ergo, I have done my job.”¹⁵

Crowley was tempted to let himself off the hook of his prophetic obligations and let rip as the heat increased with the days. He had just met Sonia Kurzinski, who, he thought, “whips.” Then he met Erik: “Yes, I could, by Cripes!”

Nerves in tatters from Germer’s verbal torture, he got up at 4:30 a.m. on the 25th and painted a panel: The Fourth of July in Hell. He described the next day as “one of the greatest days I ever had.” Sonia Kurzinski rang up. Anu phoned. A woman he’d met at Miericke’s pastry house rang; they met at 5, but she was too tired. He had Louise for dinner, then flirted with Erik at the Herkules, where he fell spontaneously in love with the blond, beautiful, twenty-three-year-old cloakroom girl, Magda Becher, from Czluchów, Poland. They had their first kiss at a quarter past midnight. After a sleep, Crowley awoke to find Magda wouldn’t look at him, Anu was unpleasant, and both Erik and Gertrud canceled lunch appointments. But he did get Englishman Charles Lincoln’s phone number; Lincoln would borrow some books, which he returned on 15 June.

The next day, a date at Kroll’s Opera restaurant in the Tiergarten with “Kutte” (German for “frock”) was a washout, but in the evening, he met Renate Gottsched. They had magical sex. Crowley’s comment: “Ahebah.” The Hebrew AHBH: “love,” like ACHAD, “unity,” is numbered 13 according to kabbalist gematria. Renate became the subject of a “pure portrait” (Renate Gottsched, 1931 cat. no. 51), whose execution left the artist “really satisfied at last.”¹⁶

On a lovely warm day, Crowley went swimming at the beautiful Sacrower Lake, southwest of Berlin, near Potsdam. He spent the evening and the next day (30 May) scouting for men and women he “didn’t really want.” Erik was supposed to come for dinner but didn’t, so Crowley took a girl called Palli Palyk for dinner, but realized she was after money. A superb thunderstorm saved him from boredom and he “learnt a lot of German.”

The dark current vanished on 2 June when he ran into Renate Gottschied on the Kurfürstendamm. A bonus arrived in the shape of Katherine (Kasha) Nelidova of Düsseldorfer Strasse 69. Nelidova wanted a romantic friendship; Crowley wanted a friendly amour (“a much rarer bird”). Both, he wrote: “as keen as mustard to fuck me.”

After a first-rate Japanese dinner of eel and sake, he went to the Kleist Kasino and afterward had magical sex with one “Hermann” “for Magda Becher.”

On 4 June, after a frustrating evening with Kasha (a recipient of Crowley’s infamous “serpent’s kiss” love bite), he met Frau Ermi von Roy, who he thought might make a good picture, then a girl called Lutte (or Lissi) who lived on Lutherstrasse: “a good coarse type.” He had hopes that Erik Mainz of Leonhardtstrasse in Charlottenburg “might be the one to ring the bell,” and there was always Sonia “a pickled miniature” who was to ring in the morning. They all turned up in the evening, and he met Hermann again twice “by accident.”

The next day had its share of miracles. Posting a letter to Magda, he found her on the corner by the letterbox! They had lunch together, and Crowley sought an oracle from The Book of the Law, plunging his magic ring into the text without forethought. It landed on 1, 59: “My incense is of resinous woods & gums; and there is no blood therein: because of my hair the trees of Eternity.” “Amen!” exclaimed the Beast.

He went out to find Bobby (or Bobbie). Too tired to enter the Kleist Kasino, he found him outside. They shared a pleasant hour or two at the Café Adler on Freidrichstrasse, in Kreuzberg. Then he got Austrian Phillip Scheffelmann’s phone number. Phillip was staying at the Pension Sauerland at Kurfürstendamm 75.

The summer’s burgeoning blur swept Crowley up like straw in a hurricane of fleeting romance.

On 6 June, he had magical sex for energy with Lissi. It was “A.1” times three! Then it was a perfect dinner with Bobbie. They had magical sex too. Purpose: “the Work I name not.” On the 7th he went to the Strandbad Wannsee, the open air Lido on the Wannsee’s eastern shore, southwest of the city center. Here the Beast embraced what he called real pagan life, including an Opus with Lissi for what purpose he could not recall. The day may have inspired his painting Wannsee (1931 cat. no. 73), for Wannsee in the summer was a very exciting and sexy resort for Berliners aching to get out of the city and their clothes.

Had you walked about a warm beach at Wannsee in summer 1931, you would have seen a lake filled with sailboats, bounded by shady trees and grassy banks, as well as strands or beaches filled with women, children, older men fully dressed in hats, and towels filled with sand. Little girls with bobbed hair trotted around their families. Older girls in one-piece woolen vest and shorts bathing costumes, striped at bust and calf, belted at the waist with headscarves, waded into the cool waters to a floating ice cream parlor, a canopied punt with the word “EIS” (Ice) painted on the side. In a more secluded spot could be found a group of young women, also in swimsuits, still wearing high heels, jazz dancing with each other to a wind-up gramophone on a grassy bank, surrounded by collapsible stools, a picnic table and tidy tablecloth, plates and sandwiches, beside their tent.

On 8 June, Hans Steiner called to see Crowley’s new pictures. He liked them. But neither Steiner’s enthusiasm, nor Kasha’s romantic interest, nor even XI° magick with Bobbie, could erase the fact that, “deliberately or no,” Germer had “washed out all” Crowley’s “ambition to paint, or anything else.” Germer, he wrote, was like a “castrated hog snorting in a rose-garden,” adding, humorously: “The last straw that breaks the camel’s back probably thinks itself a giant eucalyptus.”¹⁷

After a tour that took in Kleist Kasino, Lunte, and Maenz, Pola Henckels of Güntzelstrasse (south of Hohenzollerndamm) duly appeared as the latest flame: the gods were kind. The next day Crowley began hanging pictures—though where is not clear—and was visited by Kasha’s brother-in-law, “a kind of Mason”; Crowley thought it might lead somewhere. In the evening he met Pola again at Maenz.

Run by Anne Maenz near Crowley’s old studio, on the corner of Augsburger Strasse corner and Joachimsthaler Strasse, Maenz was a small pub with scrubbed tables. Billiards was played in the back room. The archetypal warm, tolerant landlady, Anne, or Mother Maenz, always had a sympathetic ear for her regulars. Jürgen Schebera’s Damals im Romanischen Café (1988) relates how one evening at Maenz, Werner Krauss (1884–1959) tried to cadge some cash from fellow actor, movie star Emil Jannings (1884–1950): “Emil, can you lend me ten marks?” “Oh, Werner,” wailed Jannings, “try somewhere else. You know, when I recently lent you twenty and you couldn’t pay back on time, you were within a hair of having our friendship back. So choose, what’s it to be: the ten marks or my friendship?” Krauss replied: “Ten marks, please.”

Apart from Jannings, who had recently starred with Marlene Dietrich in the hit movie The Blue Angel (1930), Mother Maenz had also looked after Ernst Lubitsch—who had gone to Hollywood as a producer—and the great star Conrad Veidt (1893–1943; see Korda’s The Thief of Baghdad), who lived at Salzburger 5, Schöneberg.

At 9:00 p.m. on 13 June, Crowley was at Maenz, admiring “Madame Maentz [sic].” He commented to Pola that even though she was old and fat, etc., “everything about her” was “right,” concluding: “That comes from Spiritual Grace.” Asking Pola if she understood, Pola replied: “You mean, she drinks?” Crowley’s summary: “This is true Dionysian-Panic fun.”

There was plenty more to come. After not quite getting a sexual love thing going with Pola the next day—they “would live to fuck another day”—Crowley returned to the Sacrower See with Nelidova for a lakeside snooze, then went back “to studio” (which studio is not clear from the diary record) before dining with Pola at the Togo Kwan. They then performed their Opus 1 for “Sex-energy etc.”

Such energy was not in short supply the next day when he had magical oral sex with Bobbie three times. His sex appeal ran high. Before the day was out, he’d had a drink with Pola and got the address and phone number of Dr. Elfi Niendorf of Nürnberger Strasse 23 (a couple of blocks east of Maenz). He took her to Lunte on the 16th for a good time.

Financially, Crowley was feeling the pinch. He pawned his Knights Templar ring on the 18th, and his 33° Scottish Rite Eagle jewel the following day, after having called on Dr. Hans Joseph at Ühlandstrasse 161 (running south of Kurfürstendamm). “At last,” Crowley noted, he’d met someone who was “doing well!” Someone who had known better times but was still holding on to his wealth and position through the gathering storm was famed art dealer Alfred Flechtheim. Crowley visited him that afternoon.

FLECHTHEIM

Few men in Germany had done as much for modern art as the Jewish dealer, Alfred Flechtheim (1878–1937), occupied a fine house at Bleibtreustrasse 15, between the east end of Kurfürstendamm and Kantstrasse to the north. Crowley was elated to see the “finest collection of modern masters I have seen anywhere!”¹⁸

Flechtheim was proud of Picasso’s telling him that while there was genius among painters, art required genius art dealers. Flechtheim collected and sold works by Cézanne, Braque, Monet, Matisse, van Gogh, Redon, and—among many other modern masters—Crowley’s hero, Paul Gauguin. Flechtheim’s clients included Paul Klee, George Grosz, and Pablo Picasso.

Otto Dix painted The Art Dealer Alfred Flechtheim 1926, an unflattering portrait of a man who had put Expressionism and Cubism on the global map with moe than 150 exhibitions that brought him under the hateful eye of the Nazis, who considered his modern artists degenerates.

When Crowley visited, Flechtheim’s business was suffering from the Depression, forcing him temporarily to curtail large exhibitions. Perhaps Flechtheim put in a good word for Crowley with PORZA director, Werner Alvo von Alvensleben, who was in town, for the week following Crowley’s visit marked a watershed in hopes for a Berlin exhibition.

Calling to peruse on 22 June, Nierendorf liked most of Crowley’s new pictures very much. Three days later, out of bed the Degenerate crawled and pawned another ring in time for a 6:00 p.m. appointment with von Alvensleben “and others.”

In any event, nobody came but Dr. Elfi Niendorf. Von Alvensleben did show up the day following, annoyingly during one of Germer’s “scenes.” Crowley had been coughing all night for lack of money to buy medicine; Germer jeered and lectured.

Von Alvensleben inspected Crowley’s paintings: “He [von Alvensleben] likes my work even better than Nierendorf does, I think.”¹⁹

Crowley had scored; von Alvensleben mattered.

Extant fragmentary references to Crowley’s 1931 exhibition tend to credit Nierendorf exclusively, some even suggesting that Porza was a Neumann-Nierendorf gallery name. On the contrary, it was Werner Alvo von Alvensleben who would actually house the exhibition and publish the catalogue at PORZA’s German headquarters’ exhibition rooms, Budapester Strasse 3.

Sadly, the Porza site is now an access road to a recently erected Europa Center. To get an idea of Porza’s vanished grandeur, look to Dorrwand’s elegant furniture gallery at No. 5, Porza’s former neighbor and survivor of both war and post-war reconstruction.

Researching von Alvensleben’s life reveals how much he and Crowley the artist had in common.

WERNER ALVO KONSTANTIN AUGUST VON ALVENSLEBEN

Alvo von Alvensleben was born to a noble Prussian family at Kassel in 1889. Studying law and economics in Geneva, Munich, Berlin, and Marburg he collapsed from tuberculosis before his final exams, spending eight years recovering in Switzerland. Unfit for military service in World War One, he worked for the Red Cross in Hessen. After the war, Alvo craved the free life of a painter. Inheriting a fortune from Generals Gustav and Konstantin von Alvensleben Eichenbarlaben, he had exhibitions and published his poetry.

In 1923, in the Swiss village of Porza, Alvo shared his social and artistic visions with Arthur Bryks (b. 1894, Poland), a painter, and Swiss-Italian sculptor Mario Bernasconi (1889–1963). Between 1927 and 1929, the PORZA Association grew from a dream into an international movement to help intellectually independent, creative people, establishing nonprofit offices and galleries across Europe (the Paris gallery was represented by industrial designer Jacques Vienot, 1893–1959, for Porza’s last exhibition in 1939, before the Nazis invaded). It is significant that Werner von Alvensleben chose New Objectivity photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch to be Porza’s German representative in photography in 1930 (Renger-Patzsch mss, Getty Research Library, Los Angeles).

Fig. 12.1. Werner “Alvo” von Alvensleben (1889–1962) in old age: founder of the pre-war PORZA Association and supporter of the art of Aleister Crowley

Crowley was certainly intellectually independent and creative, and fitted the Porza brief very well.

A week after von Alvensleben’s visit, Crowley went to UFA (3 July), probably UFA’s extensive film studios at Babelsburg, since he was in the vicinity, enjoying a three-day swimming break with Pola Henckels at the Anglerheim Inn by the Glindowersee, west of Potsdam. He returned to Berlin on the 4th feeling better: the result perhaps of two consecutive sex magick operations for health with Pola at the Anglerheim. A third Opus for health was conducted in Berlin, but this time with Lissi: a great performer, according to 666.

Another trip to the Anglerheim and more sex magick with Pola and Lissi were temporarily interrupted by the collapse of the Danat-Bank on 13 July. The next day, crowds of shareholders and bewildered customers gathered outside shuttered banks. Many feared the German economy would go into freefall as an international banking crisis erupted. Berlin’s stock market was closed and panic ensued; the Germers lost money. On Friday 17 July Crowley saw the New Moon. It was dark red with the lower lip half hidden in gray cloud. Conclusion: “Expect trouble!”

During the small hours of the 18th, Crowley was burgled of his shewstone and Tibetan Bell. It is clear from Crowley’s tone that these thefts meant more to him than another international crisis. He knew the New Aeon’s infancy would have its ups and downs. The Beast’s summer of love was not going to end because of a blip in international capital supply. On the 22nd Great Britain, the United States, and France renewed credits for Germany for three months to ease the financial crisis, but Germany’s currency fell and unemployment rose steeply.

On the day of the burglary, Crowley heard his wife, Marie, had been admitted insane to the Colney Hatch Mental Asylum, near Hatfield; she would die there in 1955. Crowley visited the hospital when he returned to England, but the consultant advised him to leave her alone as she was living an illusory life as a member of the Royal Family.

One of the great novels of the time was Alfred Döblin’s Alexander-Platz, Berlin: The Story of Franz Biberkopf (1929). The book raised a working-class unemployed man’s love problems to epic status in the gritty context of invisible poverty around the Alexander-Platz, notorious for its streetwalkers. Crowley had something in common with the hapless but lovable Biberkopf. He was a stroller, enjoying forensic contact with the world behind the surface impression. Crowley walked miles and miles that summer. Shortly after an Opus with Lissi “to get back on the Great Work,” reinforced by another per vas nefandum*19 ²⁰ with Pola dedicated to the same purpose, Crowley, feeling in “great form,” strolled out with Pola to the Alexander Platz.

In 1931, the Alexander Platz represented a massive circular clearance of the old to make way for the new. A maze of tramlines slithered over a central reservation, while cars and buses circulated beneath New Objectivity, squared windows and oblong casements, repeated without adornment in clean rows and lines under flat roofs. Some of the modernity came from austere stone facades fronting older structures. Oversized adverts added to the cosmetic character of the space. The U-bahn entrance consisted of rolled steel curved over to form a proscenium, topped by a mighty big, plain “U.” Two glass towers flanked the Am Alexander Platz S-bahn as its trains pounded over the rail bridge that spanned the main entrance onto the street like a Roman imperial aqueduct.

From the pavement, Crowley and Pola would have seen their reflections in the great glass frontage of a kitchen appliance shop, and neon signs everywhere, dormant in daytime: Loeser & Wolff; RIPPA; ADLER; Café Braun. There were circular telephone kiosks, the most modern, and thrusting shop canopies, beckoning with the message for the new surface consumer: Everything new is right under your nose! Compared to Dickensian London, Alexander Platz was on another planet.

And it was in this vicinity on 22 July 1931 that Crowley met celebrated writer Peter Supf of Mittelstrasse 15 (parallel with the Unter den Linden, up Schadowstrasse). Supf would become Crowley’s regular drinking and dining companion. It was probably Supf who introduced Crowley to the pleasant surroundings of Berlin Humboldt University’s inter-university Club Union in Schadowstrasse.

Peter Supf’s writing career had begun after wartime service as a fighter pilot. A kind of German Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Supf in 1919 had published innovative poems describing the psychology and aesthetics of the flying experience, following up with more poems, adventure fiction, and aviation books such as Airman’s World—a Book about Flying (published in English in 1933): all familiar territory to Crowley, an acquaintance of British air ace and German POW Lance Sieveking (1896–1972). Sieveking had sought magical guidance from Crowley in 1928. His book on flying had inspired the airborne passages in Crowley’s popular novel The Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922).

In the context of Crowley’s activities as a British Intelligence asset, Supf may have been significant. Correspondent of many writers, including Thomas Mann, Supf contributed to arguments for justifying German rearmament. In 1939, Im Deutschen Verlag, Berlin, would publish Supf ’s Luftwaffe schlägt zu! Der Luftkrieg in Polen, propaganda to encourage Luftwaffe recruitment for Nazi Germany.

Crowley’s notes on their first lunch meeting (24 July) are interesting. He noted that Supf had spent a year at Oriel College, Oxford, and that Supf was an “idealist” who wanted a Franco-German rapprochement. This was a view shared in more determined form by writer, dramatist, lawyer, diplomat, and anti-Hitler resistance hero Gebhard Werner von der Schulenberg (1881–1958), who, well ahead of his time, believed in a future European confederation of pooled sovereignties to promote peaceful progress: ideas influenced by Austrian Peace Movement pioneer, Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914).

On 14 August, after the Countess von Stauffenberg made more complaints against Crowley, Crowley questioned whether he should attend, or have to attend, the Berlin Praesidium (police headquarters). He then noted: “Schulenberg very nice and intelligent.” As is common in the diaries, there is more to these notes than meets the eye; Crowley kept from his diaries anything substantial that could implicate him in spying or political intrigues: something the countess seems to have accused him of.

Crowley made a memo to himself to send Supf samples of German translations of his work. By themselves, these notes are insufficient to prove Crowley had an intelligence angle on Supf; cultivating Supf ’s intellect may simply have resulted from Supf ’s willingness to pass on Crowley’s play Mortadello (1912) to a film producer at UFA.

On 25 July, Crowley went for a last, lazy week at the Anglerheim with Pola. Amid cold and wind interspersed with sunbathing, fishing, and swimming, Crowley contemplated the agony that Karl Germer had become. The thought of his having been worn down beyond resilience elicited a furious asthma attack. Long forest walks re-awoke his old sense of direction. By the week’s end, even his “power of Qabalah” had returned.

Back in Berlin on 1 August, he performed Opus 15 with Pola: a rededication of himself to his prophetic mission. This had, Crowley believed, an immediate result. It marked the end of Crowley’s summer of love and the start of Exhibition Road.

THIRTEEN

TOWARD THE EXHIBITION

Crowley awaited signs of a “New Current” attendant on rededication to the prophetic mission. Since “the Lord” helps them that help themselves, Crowley wrote from Germer’s Lietzensee apartment on 2 August to the Trustees of the EA Crowley Settlement c/o Dennes & Co, 22 Chancery Lane, London,

I much regret the necessity of making this application to you. The facts are as follows:

My daughter is young and strong, and, I understand, is making a good income in her chosen profession [Lola Zaza (1906–1990), a nursery governess, second daughter from first wife, Rose (1874–1932)].

She has a home in case of need, and wealthy relatives to whom she could apply in any emergency.

I have been constantly ill, and for various reasons am unable at present to earn my living in any way whatever. Due to the bankruptcy of a London Publishing Company with whom I had a number of highly promising contracts, my income and my prospects from that source have been cut off entirely; and now the news just reaches me that a book concern in New York which had been handling my work has gone bankrupt. An exhibition of my pictures has been arranged with one of the finest galleries in Berlin to open October 5, 1931, highly heralded by some of the leading artists. Now it is to be feared that the financial result due to the sudden economic catastrophe in this country will be nil, and that all the expenses will be wasted. I am now entirely destitute save for the good will of friends in Germany, and these friends are themselves financially embarrassed owing to the terrible conditions prevailing here now.

I am sure that my daughter could not but regret if her continued acceptance of that part of the income which you have allowed her should result in the premature determination of the Trust. I am therefore applying to you to pay me the whole of the income while the present acute situation lasts. I shall, of course, notify you as soon as matters mend. As the situation is intensely critical and demands immediate relief, I would appreciate an early decision.¹

The next day, Crowley exclaimed thanks to his “Holy Guardian Angel”: “Aiwass I adore Thee!” The expected sign occurred at 12:30 when the Beast got himself picked up by Frau Bertha Busch on the Unter den Linden. Seeing the stranger sizing him up, Crowley stopped by a travel agent to give her a chance. She approached: “Where are you going for your next trip?” Having just called on English visitors Mrs. Gray and a Miss Russell at the Hotels Adlon and Bristol, Crowley replied he was on a trip to the König Café for bacon and eggs.

Invited to join Peter Supf and the Beast for dinner on the 5th, Crowley learned that Zürich-born Frau Busch, known as Bill or Billie, was thirty-six years old, divorced from a husband who wouldn’t pay her alimony, was an active socialist who had known Crowley’s old friend Frank Harris (1856–1931), editor of the U.S. socialist Pearson’s Magazine, during Harris’s 1922 Berlin promotion of his notorious book, My Life and Loves, was well connected, considered herself “purely a business woman,” and had worked in German screen star Henry Bender’s clubs.

The next day he learned she was one of the most sexually stimulating partners he had ever known or would ever know: “Oh my God!” and “Quelle femme!” was all he could utter after four uninterrupted hours of sex magick for the Great Work—and things got better and better after that. They were crazy about each other.

As the Beast’s love life inflated considerably with the libidinous Bill, he took a night off for a “crack” (great drinking-talk session) with Peter Supf on the 10th. Having dictated a scenario for a movie version of Mortadello a week later, Crowley and Bill got Supf to forward it to a top man in Max Reinhardt’s organization, after a night’s fun at the Taverne. Trying to get into movies was now a motif of Crowley’s artistic life.

Earlier that day (28 August) Germer started raging and screaming again, simply because Crowley asked him to ascertain whether von Alvensleben was in Berlin. Crowley reckoned the Iron Cross–decorated Germer was too scared to phone! “The girl might ask who was calling!! (Etc., etc.) And he dare not come here lest he see Frau Kreutzer!”² Frau Kreutzer was Russian landlady of the Pension Mea that Crowley believed had the makings of a “young brothel,” a view shared by the Gräfin Ellen von Stauffenberg, still miffed with Crowley. She had the police raid it four days later.

Crowley pawned more possessions and gave Billie 10 RM. “God help us all!” he added, before setting off to find a flat he could share with Bill, while Frau Kreutzer made a “song and dance” about Billie’s staying the night.

Life had become a farce.

In the wee hours of 3 September, Pola Henckels, Billie, Peter Supf, and another man joined Crowley at Maenz. Crowley took a ringside seat to watch Pola win a few rounds over Bill, but Bill knocked her out at 3:30 a.m.: a drinking contest or just a match of wits? No matter: Billie was the One.

Bill and Beast must both have felt a bit raw when, on Friday 4 September, they met Karl Nierendorf to discuss the upcoming exhibition. Germer had a private conference with Nierendorf and Werner von Alvensleben about the same matter. Delighted to meet cultured aristocrat von Alvensleben, Germer was mollified. Consulting Cora the next day, he promised to pay off Billie’s debts as well as the first month’s rent for a new studio. Meanwhile, a Dr. Munich failed to make a date he’d made with Crowley the previous day. Crowley seemed to have a thing about male doctors in 1931.

On Monday the 7th, with an exhibition now a certainty, Crowley began choosing pictures. He even took tea with Cora and Billie at the Eden Hotel, Budapester Strasse 18, across the boulevard from the PORZA offices, heading west. We may assume the unlikely trio finalized payment for the new studio, because the following day Crowley and Billie agreed with Frau Christe Mattner to rent at Karlsruher Strasse 2, intersecting Kurfürstendamm’s west end.

Having chosen the pictures, what of the frames? “The Lord God Almighty Germer will (if you please!) condescend to select the frames for my pictures HIMSELF.”³

With the apartment contract signed, Crowley worked up a list of invitees. He wanted faithful OTO stalwart, retired schoolteacher Fraulein Martha Küntzel to come, offering to pay her fare from Leipzig, but Germer dissuaded her. Frau Busch worked on her contacts: “I am purely a business woman,” she wrote to Cora on 11 August, “and any lady of the Berlin society [sic] can prove it, that all take me for a very capable person and are willing to join me and I do think I can conquer Berlin in the rush. . . . My only motto is to make money—and I shall.”⁴

Having pawned a watch for RM 110, Bill and the Beast moved in while Germer started “messing up the Catalogue.” Crowley and Bill made an inventory and a list of addresses to which to send it, including Albert Einstein’s.

THE WORLD FROM BELOW

On Saturday 19 September, Crowley inspected Porza’s exhibition rooms, meeting up with Nierendorf and Hans Steiner. Crowley’s comment: “They seem to be making a good job of it.” Crowley’s exhibition was set to run from 11 October to 5 November.

To attend that Porza meeting, Nierendorf took a break from his latest exclusive exhibition, launched six days earlier with a modest wine party (one little barrel on a table). Nierendorf ’s exhibition, “Die Welt von Unten,” the World from Below manifested, appropriately, in a rented cellar at Magdeburger Strasse 5 (roughly where Kluckstrasse now runs, north of Kurfürstenstrasse), about a third of a mile east of Porza. The cellar was situated close to the canal on the old junction with Königin Augusta Strasse (now Reichpietschufer), near the Reichswehr Ministry (now demolished). The main Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf stood at Königin Augusta Strasse 22, on the corner of Matthai Kirch Strasse (now gone), 200 meters to the east of the bridge junction with Magdeburger Strasse.⁵ (Mistaking Nierendorf ’s gallery address is another error common to references to Crowley’s exhibition.)

Nierendorf ’s powerful, rough-and-ready cellar exhibition featured works by Dix, Grosz, Masereel, Scholz, Beckmann, Fuhr, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, among others: all degenerates together. Paul Westheim’s review of “Die Welt von Unten” in Das Kunstblatt declared, poignantly: “It may be a sign of the times that art flees under the earth . . . a cellar . . . five steps of a stair under, in which Nierendorf offers the homeless art a shelter.”

Fig. 13.1. Karl Nierendorf and an unidentified woman hang masks and Otto Dix’s Abschied von Hamburg (now in the Gunzenhauser Museum, Chemnitz) for the exhibition “Die Welt von Unten” (The World from Below), at a rented cellar, Magdeburger Strasse 5, immediately before Crowley’s exhibit on Budapester Strasse.

Westheim’s vision of Nierendorf ’s “homeless asylum” under the asphalt, in the guts of Berlin, is powerful: the Art “Protests against a world order that is the opposite of order.” Westheim remarked that most of the artwork exhibited in “Die Welt von Unten” was a decade or more old, but “what appeared to be an exaggeration ten years ago, seems to fit the situation nowadays.”⁶

A few amazing photographs of Nierendorf ’s cellar exhibition have survived. They show not only a kind of daring, prescient 1980s “punk/ alternativen” aesthetic (into which Crowley would have fitted), but also the impoverished character of Berlin’s last hour of freedom before the hideous jackboot goose-stepped through the canvas of a generation’s best dreams.

On 21 September, with Billie in pain from gynecological problems, and after “working with her to get addresses of possible people to interest in [the] exhibition,” the Bank of England went “kaput!” Great Britain abandoned the gold standard. Serious depreciation followed a run on sterling, and the U.S. banks went into crisis. Crowley’s luck could be truly awful, and this was a severe case. The Germers and Yorke must have heaved.

Fig. 13.2. 13 September 1931: hard-times launch party for the “Die Welt von Unten” exhibition, Magdeburger Strasse 5. Note U.S. sculptor Alexander Calder’s “ kinetic mobile.” Calder (1898–1976) exhibited at the Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf, Lutzowstr 32, 1–15 April 1929.

Crowley wrote to Germer on 2 October:

The Dawn-Meditation this morning: this is the result. I think it imperative that you cable [New York] for the $1000 that you say is still available. This sum is far too small to be of use other than as cash to carry on; and carefully handled, it would take us to Dec. 31. I see only two chances of actually making money.

I have some fairly good connections already, in several matters; and I may find either a capitalist or a purchaser for such things as Mortadello. The Exhibition should bring me other new people.

Frau Busch has, as you know, numerous wealthy friends, who are personally interested in her welfare. But, since her husband stopped paying her alimony—it is net yet clear why—she has had to get rid of all her things little by little. E.g. she has a fur coat worth RM 2000, in pawn, for RM 200.

We need absolutely about RM 600–700 to get back her valuables and mine; for until she is properly dressed she cannot approach her old friends personally, as she must do if she is to get them to help. You know well that rich people won’t assist seriously with large sums if you give the impression of being down and out. So she has had to confine herself to casual talks on the phone. I hope you will go a long walk—we walked out to Nikolassee yesterday, and lunched for 66 pfennigs!—think this out carefully, and then act with the utmost promptitude.⁷

Crowley wasn’t kidding about the interest in his work. On the day he wrote the above letter, Crowley and Bill were guests of Dr. and Frau Bertling at film star Henry Bender’s restaurant (Bender knew Bill from when he was manager of one of her clubs). Bertling gave helpful addresses and contacts and invited Crowley’s team to meet “all the Pen Club people—publishers, editors &c.” the following week.⁸

While Crowley savored having a new “Babalon” by his side—Bill had been consecrated, with oath, as the Beast’s Scarlet Woman on 30 September—Nierendorf ’s health began to buckle under exhibition pressures, financial straits, critical opposition to the art he loved, and peaking emotional, physical, and nervous strain. From 4 October to 4 November, Nierendorf suffered acute inflammation of the veins and had to spend three weeks in bed: weeks in which his name was up as copresenter, with PORZA, of Aleister Crowley.⁹

Nierendorf ’s enforced absence, if indeed he was absent, might have had an effect on Crowley’s exhibition. Nevertheless, the dealer’s suffering was in marked contrast to a Beast undisturbed by world events whose most profound causes he believed he understood. Crowley awoke “full of energy and youth” on 6 October, to be greeted with a phone call from Frau von Alvensleben, anxious about Germer’s “insanity.” Germer’s mental condition can hardly have passed Nierendorf by either; Germer was supposed to be contributing to the show’s expenses.

Crowley called on von Alvensleben the next day and arranged for Germer’s worsening condition. Meanwhile, the Scarlet Woman took a call from Jacques Krako. Crowley asked himself how Krako could finance the “Great Work”—presumably anticipating Germer’s demise.

The son of Levi Krako and Susanna Steinhardt, Jacques was born at Gladbach Rheydt (now Mönchengladbach), Düsseldorf, in Germany’s Rhine province. Private banker Krako had bought Jägerstrasse 11, Berlin, for his A & Co. banking house in 1920. The investment doubtless concerned A.C. Ltd., Crowley’s latest company idea, discussed with a contact of Bill’s called Richter on 30 September.

The next day, anxious to resolve the Germer situation, action was delayed by a New York Times correspondent. Having been interviewed and photographed with two of his artworks, Crowley consulted Dr. Bertling about Germer. Bertling told him psychologist Alfred Adler was in town. Crowley borrowed RM 50 from Bertling, then called in at Porza on business.

“Germer was there,” noted Crowley in his diary, as if a dreaded gong had struck. Unwilling to accept Bill as “Scarlet Woman” (Germer thought her too common), Germer insulted her publicly. When Crowley refused Germer his hand, the apoplectic Prussian stormed out to tell von Alvensleben and Steiner he would not pay up!

What an auspicious beginning to the enterprise! Unruffled, Crowley sought Cora. Cora insisted Karl would “go on with [the] Show.” Crowley secured an appointment with Dr. Adler for 2:00 p.m. the next day.

Crowley awoke on the Friday to an utterly mad letter from Germer, accusing him of suffering from an inferiority complex (Adler’s “invention”), berating Crowley as crazy to expect respect be shown to “street walkers” like Bill:

. . . . Then all your cravings for victory! My God! Victory demands the constant food of new victories. So there remains no time for the Great Work. All this Brocken of your little piled up victories only forces you to come down some day into the little silent valley of defeat, perhaps to make ready for the Third Aethyr? What I sometimes suppose is that at the root, is a very deep-seated inferiority complex in you which demand constant compensation, overcompensation. But, of course, your terrible over-eagerness comes in, your impatience, or what you so arrogantly style YOUR GREAT CREATIVE POWER!

Then your women! Have by all means all the physical and spiritual relations with them you like. But get rid of this habit of squeezing them into our relations. And demanding my worship. None of the women you have had these years was any good, except (perhaps!) Dorothy. And the Monster, if you had not spoiled her and created a frightful mess, where these could and ought to have been quadrupular cooperation. The present one [Bill] is the lowest of all of them, a street walker of the coarsest and most vulgar type and soul. [Crowley added to the manuscript: “Germer insulted and worried her, almost daily, till she couldn’t stick it any more. I warned him before that I would not stand no more insults to other people from him. And this to a good woman who had forgiven his previous vileness, and made herself ill trying to help him and make him comfortable.”]

I shall worship the right woman, when she comes. But I am afraid you will have to wait some more years before the prophecies [in The Book of the Law] can be fulfilled.

PS . . . I have a notion that you have learned much in these last years. But your essential nature has remained unchanged. It is not congenital with you. [&c. &c.]¹⁰

In 1930, Crowley had observed how “the Inferiority Complex, like America and Australia, did very little harm until it was discovered.” Fed up to the back teeth, the Beast headed for Düsseldorfer Strasse 36 (due south of Bleibtreustrasse, across Kurfürstendamm and Lietzenburger Strasse) to see the famous Dr. Adler, residing with a Dr. Guttmann.

Adler listened before suggesting the case be addressed to Dr. Weidling, whom Crowley knew from Hanni Jaeger’s breakdowns. Crowley took some of his books to Porza before going out to spend the evening with highly talented celebrities, Margo and Marcellus Schiffer at Kurfürstendamm 31 (the east end near Budapester Strasse).

Crowley’s relationship with the Schiffers would permeate his life for the next six months. The Schiffers rode high on Berlin art’s cutting edge.

MARCELLUS AND MARGO SCHIFFER

Painter, graphic designer, song lyricist, and humorist, Jewish Berliner Marcellus Schiffer’s real name was Peter Winter (1892–1932). Teaming up with Russian composer Mischa Spoliansky, the duo had created fresh, sparkling shows blending elements of Cabaret with Revue to pioneer the German musical, most notably “It’s in the Air” (Es liegt in der Luft, 1928). “It’s in the Air” featured the wondrously gifted French performer Margo Lion (1899–1989) singing the risqué bisexual number “When the Best Friend is with the Best Girlfriend” (Wenn die beste Freundin mit der besten Freundin . . .). Margo sang it as a duet with girlfriend Marlene Dietrich, and they had a hit record (you can hear them on YouTube). Margo had met and fallen in love with Peter in Paris in the early 1920s.

Crowley’s chief interest in the Schiffers, other than the joy of good company, was publishing and movies. Margo had appeared in ten pictures by 1931, the year that saw her shine as Pirate Jenny in G. W. Pabst’s French language film version of The Threepenny Opera, written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Crowley’s imminent exhibition provided the best opportunity for introducing the multitalented Crowley to the multitalented couple.

The day before the show (10 October), Crowley entered Porza at 11:00 a.m. to find that Germer had, unexpectedly, delivered his share of Thelema Verlag booklets. Karl was on target one minute, wildly off the next. While one of the Schiffers talked to Bill at Porza, Crowley dropped in on the Germers: “both perfectly insane.” Crowley noted how he himself remained calm and polite and “took no notice” when Karl thrust his face into Crowley’s saying he wanted to murder the Beast and his Scarlet Woman!

Later, very nervously, Bill and the Beast performed Opus 42 to bring success to the show. Crowley noted that they were “slow to start and quick to finish,” adding: “Oh for a quiet life!”¹¹

Fig. 13.3. Margo Lion and Marcellus Schiffer; they befriended Crowley in Berlin in 1931.

FOURTEEN

PORZA!

And so the Big Day arrived: Sunday 11 October 1931. Ever optimistic, Crowley sent a quick, diplomatic note to the Germers:

Silly of me, I forgot to mention last night that the people who are coming to dine with us on Monday [the Schiffers] want to see what has already been done. So could you lend me a set of the Thelema Verlag booklets?

It would of course be as well that we should be able to give them something to eat, and that we should pay the electric light bill; so please do what you can. These are real business people—I know them as friends of Engers’ brother-in-law [Leon Engers, Paris-based painter and long-standing OTO member] and waste no time. We may least get a provisional agreement signed within 24 hours.

P.S. Please ring up at once when you get this.

P.S. after the show. The von Alvenslebens are making an evening party for me—hope [Albert] Einstein will come. I want to preach the Law.

Also bright young journalist will introduce film magnates. You have to rush ammunition up to us front line trenches! Do sink everything but the Great Work! Nothing else ought to count for one minute. No matter how badly one is wounded, one ought to fight to the last cartridge, and then use the butt. It is the last shot that wins the battle.¹

Porza’s doors opened, and so did the minds of some who read the catalogue. Its cover announced the joint enterprise in capitals:

GALLERIE NEUMANN-NIERENDORF BERLIN W35 UND PORZA AUSTELLUNG ALEISTER CROWLEY

Beneath, visitors saw a photograph, probably taken in North Africa, of Crowley in a bernous, wearing a loose turban, looking (otherwise) completely normal.

VOM 11.OKTOBER BIS 5.NOVEMBER 1931 IN DEN AUSSTELLUNGSRAUMEN DER PORZA, LANDESZENTRALE FUR DEUTSCHLAND [German Head Office] E.V. [nonprofit association designation], BERLIN 62, BUDAPESTER STRASSE 3

The exhibition was a joint venture, and, thanks to von Alvensleben, an economical one. Karl Nierendorf may have been unable to attend personally on account of his inflamed veins and general condition; this would obviously have disappointed Crowley. If not physically present, Nierendorf was present in his catalogue comments: fulsome in recognition of Crowley’s essential superiority to much British art, which, according to Nierendorf, was dominated by safe, behind-the-times imitations and variations of styles emanating chiefly from Paris, whether impressionistic, abstract, futuristic, cubist, or surreal. Crowley’s pictures, on the other hand, were truly his. An untypical Englishman, Crowley was both appreciable and intellectually respectable to informed Berlin observers. Nierendorf composed a powerful endorsement of the artist:

I first heard about Crowley from a Berlin painter and astrologer [Hans Steiner] who claimed to be a connoisseur of many horoscopes with a special eye for unusual people. He showed me the Berliner Tageblatt’s article on Crowley the globetrotter, mountaineer, adventurer and poet. A printed portrait [by Augustus John] showed a moderate, urbane-boned head with a calm expression, concentrated, at ease. Hard to believe that this man wandered huge distances as a Tibetan monk, or that he had expended thousands on luxury Egyptian hotels. [. . .] His books are revelations open only to insiders of the highest grades and [. . .] he has painted pictures that come close to approaching the strangeness of Dix and Nolde, although he had never seen anything by these artists.

Reproductions showed a grotesque mixture of fantasy and realism, representations of deserts and high mountains, faces, masks, symbolic figures, all of them colorful, of a brutal hardness, comparable in style to the Düsseldorf painter and worker of allegories, Adalbert Trillhaase. From a formal point of view such artistic works are not to be assessed at all, but as documents of their maker’s own strange world, especially from an Englishman, they are more remarkable than the products of the churning of the experienced painter.

Freed from all novelistic legends, the outline of Crowley’s life may be described as follows:

Crowley is 56 years old. He was educated in England, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was destined for a diplomatic career. As a young man he had the ambition to be invincible at chess, and a passion for climbing inaccessible mountains. In 1894 he went full speed to the Alps. In 1900 he arrived in Mexico, achieving unsurpassed altitude records. In 1901, he traveled the South Seas, Japan, China, Ceylon, India.

The following year he led an expedition to the Himalayan Chogo Ri, the second highest mountain in the world. The next year he spent in Ceylon with big-game hunts (elephant, lion, tiger), and in 1905, he headed a Himalayan expedition to Kanchenjunga. Then came the era of the great walks, usually disguised as a monk, and under great hardship, from Rangoon by China to Shanghai. Later he made a pilgrimage through North Africa, crossed the Sahara Desert and explored Spain. Between these trips were months of literary work in Scotland and London. In 1913 he lived in Mexico [should be Russia]; during the war in New York; since 1919, mostly in Sicily, Tunis, Algeria, Paris.

An impressive series of solid-bound books exists, including novels and dramas:

Aceldama (1898), The Star and the Garter (1903), Alice, of Adultery (1903), The Sword of Song (1904), Orpheus (1905), Clouds Without Water (1909), The Winged Beetle (1910), The World’s Tragedy (1910), Sir Palamedes (1914), Tannhäuser (1902), Mortadello (1912), Household Gods (1914), Berashith (1903), Konx Om Pax (1907), 777 (1907), The Equinox, nos. I–X (1909–1913), Scented Garden of Abdullah (1910), The Book of Lies (1913), The Equinox Vol III (1919), Magick, Moonchild, The Confessions (2 volumes were published).

The information comes from a friend of Crowley, who later confirmed its accuracy.

One day, a notice appeared that Crowley was planning an exhibition of his paintings in Berlin. Anyway, I was suddenly warned by all sorts of people about the secret powers of this “black magician.” Anonymous telephone calls advised I was taking the highest risk; any connection with Crowley was to be strictly avoided. Someone looked at me and implored me to avoid being ensnared beyond resistance. I was told parties were asked to use their influence to save me. It turned out that Crowley has enemy campaigners, who view him as the archetype of evil, of every outrage of which man is capable. A complete, comprehensive book exists about the horrors, orgies, and heresies. Among other things, during a Himalayan expedition, he allegedly killed and ate his coolie!

Similarly excessive are the claims of worshipers: initiated into the mysteries of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, holder of the maximum degrees possible in a global Lodge, a perfected one, to whom nothing is foreign, a poet of unparalleled importance, etc. After all that excited to and fro, Crowley in person seemed [. . .] a powerful, almost clumsy-looking man of phlegmatic calm, more like a jovial English country gentleman than a daemonically inspired visionary.

It seems the devil worshipers rather look more like so many of our self-assured, middle-class industrial and commercial princes, ecclesiastical and secular dignitaries in the same service. But these gentlemen’s negligible artistic achievements are so far away that I immediately apologized to Crowley after I noticed his immediate appreciation of Dix, Nolde, Beckmann, Otto Mueller, Schmidt-Rottluff, and Scholz. He saw works of these painters for the first time and his intuitive judgment was absolutely sound and at the same time of an unassumingness which indifferent viewers of artworks never show. In later conversations he also showed himself to be restrained, completely free of pretense, and without any over- sensitivity in the face of critical objections to his pictures.

By contrast to people of similar reputation (like Rudolf Steiner, whose works look like an actor’s or the world famous Miss Annie Besant with her lion’s head and clergyman’s pathos, or her official “world savior” Krishnamurti: a child sentenced to a fine kitsch entertainment) Crowley seems almost sedately bourgeois. However, I have never spoken with him about anything other than questions of art and the legends of friend and foe I have neither verified nor observed.

The Porza is proud to include in its international program a personality as engaging as Crowley’s.

The interest shown in the exhibition is certainly stimulating and stronger than other attempts to show off English art. The pictures are related by the intensity of their will, and in the primitiveness of execution are closer to German artists than the usual infusion according to the usual French recipe, which today is mixed across the channel. That this man comes from the land of strict convention, from Cambridge, a man who at 56 years emerges completely unbroken as a painter, after it appeared he would spend his life amid mountains, oceans, deserts, a man to be considered a fanatical amateur in the literal and largest sense, is certainly very surprising.

The critical evaluation of his pictures is not my business. An enormously vivid and eager Outsider, a real man of elementary, instinctive power is behind them.

KN

That is high praise of an order barely accessed by English-speaking critical opinion. Fellow artists have often been impressed, but artists seldom write reviews. Journalists write for journals; artists make art.

For twenty-six days of 1931, while Crowley used Porza as a kind of temporary base of operations, the world had the chance to look inside Aleister Crowley’s imagination. It would be marvelous to be able to show you what visitors saw, or thought they saw. Tragically, it appears that of the seventy-three works exhibited, few are extant. The whereabouts of the majority of works exhibited we shall assess in due course. As things stand, my information is that of the seventy-three works, eight had previously been intended to adorn the Mandrake office “exhibition” in November 1929. They are The Holy Family, The Gate of the Desert, Mont Blanc, Petersburg, Fishing Boat (apparently “Fishing Boat in Japan” at Mandrake), Laura Brown, Fontainebleau, and The Red Turban.²

The whereabouts of only two of these images is known, one being a copy. Laura Brown exists as a black-and-white photograph in the Yorke Collection (NS74, p. 156): a head and shoulders portrait of a black American prostitute in a white blouse. Numbered 14, a typed, cheeky caption informs us that Laura is grinning “in the most subtle and knowing manner at her audience,” with lips cosmetically crimson, “proud of the unusual amount of kinky hair piled high on head” and her sumptuous white silk blouse with “collar and front in Robin’s egg blue.”

The picture has a story behind it. On 13 June 1915 Crowley performed an afternoon act of sex magick for energy with “mulatto wench” Laura. He described her as “very vile, horrible and fascinating.” According to Crowley’s diary Rex de Arte Regia (“The King on the Royal Art,” Opus LXVII), it proved an “astonishing success,” resulting in a “burst of energy that I have not had the like of since I landed in New York. Poetry, dress-designing, magazine-conceiving, regular work, etc., all in a bunch.”

The Yorke Collection in London appears to have the original of The Holy Family. It can also be seen (along with ninety other Crowley photographic reproductions of originals in various media) at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

The Holy Family is a work in black crayon depicting two alarming- looking women, though one might be male or androgynous. The lascivious-looking mother figure (?), possibly of African origin, wears a plain headscarf over long hair. We see only heads and shoulders.

They smile rather sinisterly, even deliriously, over what looks like a disturbingly mature, very round-faced “baby,” possibly in a cradle. The other head, seen from the front, grins ecstatically, as if bobbing, at the viewer: Crowley’s point of view, perhaps. He/she looks like one of Crowley’s more Secret Chief–like self-portraits. The “baby” also has bulbously rounded, Crowleyan, Asian, and all-knowing characteristics. The figures are framed by what appears to be an overarching, diamond-encrusted tree trunk and branch that makes the dense-grained, heavy image resemble an unsettling wave. The background consists of those curious Crowleyan phallic or poppy-like cupolas that emerge out of serrated mountains, perhaps like an otherworldly city seen in an astral vision, with Himalayan peaks in the distance. The image is satirical, as is the title. The hint is of a perverted Christmas crib scene, but we cannot be sure. Crowley’s sardonicism and peculiar vision is startling. Its disconcerting, black-humorous elements would definitely upset Mrs. Grundy, but she wouldn’t like Otto Dix either.

The Yorke Collection also has a black-and-white photographic copy of the oil painting The Mekong Valley (NS 74, p. 161), possibly the In the Mekong Valley, exhibited at Porza (cat. no. 7). Numbered 4, it includes Crowley’s typed caption:

This is a “Lake Orgy.” The artist used lakes as a medium and the result is a brilliant transparency. But that is not all—for the mountains above the blue water tower into the vivid sky. They give one a feeling of tremendous height and infinite extent.

The same collection also includes a black-and-white photographic copy of an oval-framed oil, Lea Hirsig (NS 74, p. 165), which may also be the work of that name exhibited at Porza. A head and shoulders portrait, Lea, in what might be a leopard-skin wrap, looks gaunt and grim, hair solidly bobbed, gazing away from the artist.

Only seven other works from the Berlin catalogue have definitely been seen publicly since 1931. The Harry Ransom Center has a photograph of Lion-Hunt (Porza cat. no. 16), while a work titled Camille L’Apache (Camille the Apache; Porza cat. no. 29) may possibly be identified with a photographic image at the Harry Ransom Center: Camille Frojens (Martinique) (Harrry Ransom Center, Crowley Collection no. P-80), though it may be noted the Yorke Collection has a crayon portrait titled Lea an Apache, from 1919 (NS 74, p. 152).

The head and shoulders image of Camille Frojens (Martinique) depicts a proud but sensitive and attentive mood expressed by a large-eyed “Martiniquaise,” dressed in a suit and tie with a cropped, center-parted man’s haircut. Bisexuality is inherent to the image and in Crowley’s soubriquet “Apache,” a name given to vicious Parisian gangs in the late nineteenth century: running loose and dangerous. One feels Crowley liked this woman and expressed something of her soul.

The 1998 April 7–18 London October Gallery exhibition “An Old Master—the Art of Aleister Crowley”³ revealed the following five works to the public: Norman Mudd (in two similar versions), Mali and Igel, Man with Cigarette, Stromboli, and The Dwarf Iuggert (possibly a typo for The Dwarf from Touggourt).⁴

There are interesting things we can say about some of the five Porza works exhibited in London in 1998.

The title of the powerful, dramatically colored Mali and Igel (Porza cat. no. 34) alerts us to an alarming, true story about what happened in the Berlin Crowley knew during his sojourn and what befell it shortly after.

MALI AND IGEL

The title Mali and Igel seems surreal. “Igel” is German for hedgehog, but the title is not one of Crowley’s conceits. Mali and Igel was, in fact, a remarkable women-only club, situated at Martin-Luther-Strasse 16, which ran north-south, south of Kurfürstenstrasse, within sight and clanking, roaring sound of the ultra-modern overhead S-Bahn train system between Wittenberg Platz and Nollendorf Platz.

The Mali and Igel club’s main door always sported a sign saying “Closed for Private Party”; entry was by reservation, with numbers limited to sixty. Among the exclusive throng were women intellectuals, artists, singers, actresses, and performers. Farther up the street, the Scala Theater at No. 22 hosted a bi-annual (no pun intended), sell out, women-only ball, in association with the six-hundred-member Club Bijou of the West. The thriving free-woman, bisexual, and lesbian scene would not survive the Nazis.

One of the two portraits of the tragic mathematics professor Norman Mudd (1889–1934), sometime acolyte of the Beast, exhibited at the October Gallery, London, 1998 (“Frater O.P.V.” cat. nos. 8 and 9), may be the Norman Mudd numbered 30 in the Porza catalogue. I asked British abstract expressionist painter Vanilla Beer (b. 1950) to assess Crowley’s treatment:

Figs. 14.1 a and b. The Mali and Igel exclusive ladies club, Lutherstrasse 16. (From Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon)

Fig. 14.2. Lesbian sculptor Renée Sintenis (1888–1965) and her Studebaker. In 1931, Sintenis was one of the few women artists appointed to the Prussian Academy of Art, where she taught until forced out by the Nazis in 1934.

Aleister Crowley’s drawing of Norman Mudd is a beguiling study, full of what seems to me to be light-hearted humour. (Never having seen the original sitter it’s hard to tell.) The balance of eye, nostril and mouth packed into a shadow strip leave the ear as the central motif of the study, making the image about listening—and the ear itself looks like a dancing figure. AC has taken care to draw the hair as a continuation of the shirt pattern, a witty touch, uniting artificial and natural matter. The naïf element lies in the neck alone; had AC pushed the collar and backbone to continue the line of the shirt front, so that the diagonal line begun above the corner of the paper on the left continued to slightly above half way up on the right, the picture would be a marvellous portrait. He allows it to jar, to prevent the aesthetic from clouding his message. It shows what an uncompromising man he must have been—to have this ability and to refuse it a successful, traditionally acceptable outcome.

Critical studies of the remaining works exhibited at Porza October– November 1931 must wait until the works are recovered for view, if they are recoverable. At present, we can only guess what we have missed by not seeing the following titles (I exclude artworks already mentioned in this book; Porza catalogue numbers are in parentheses): HP Blavatsky (1), Marie (3), Negress (4), South-East Asia (5), The World an Opal (8), Montigny-sur-Loing (9), Tunis (ensemble) (11), El-Oued (12), Sunset in the West (13), On the Coast of Japan (15), [untitled] (17), Elise Dream (18), The Maiden (19), Girlfriends (21), Ella Bürgin and Her Work (22),⁵Swiss Girl (24), My Dream (25), The Procuress (28), Anna (31), Expectation (32), Portrait (35), Gift (36), Sketch (39), The Poong-jye (40), The Widow (41), Innocence (43), The Old Man (44), Odalisk (45, a woman), Mona Lisa (49), Wife with Lizard (50), The Barca (53), Maidens in Sessel (56), Radio City (58), Ackerstrasse (61), The Hills of Skye (63), The Holy City of the Sahara (64), Djerba (66), Coloured Sketch (68), Don Quixotes (69), The Gletscher Glacier (70), Rhythms (71), and Interval (72).

We have missed Crowley’s image of the world, a world that to him was decidedly curious, but always inviting. Much is folly, sometimes misbegotten, abortive, but always of an ambiguous beauty, whose darker side Crowley also embraces, for, unlike many mystics, he is a scientist, though for him nature is a continuum, not an object. He will not separate the created from the spirit that animates it, and he knows the creation is full of rot, and Man largely beneath it. Unlike surrealists, he does not delve into the unconscious to paint pictures of his dreams. He lets the unconscious loose: easy because he is so in touch with it. The Unconscious becomes the Perceiver, or if you like: the True Will paints, and is painted. Crowley will write: “Poetry is the geyser of the unconscious.”⁶

As Carl Jung also tells us, Gnostics know that what you do not bring forth from within you, will destroy you. Perceiving evil in “degenerate” Crowley, his detractors may comfortably avoid seeing the evil in themselves.

We can now step outside of Porza’s exhibition rooms on Budapester Strasse and follow the artist and his Scarlet Woman, Bill, home up the Kurfürstendamm to Karlsruher Strasse 2. There Crowley will receive a call from the Times Berlin correspondent Gerald Hamilton (1888–1970).*20

Although a communist, Hamilton will become Crowley’s friend, even as the Beast spied on him.

While, according to Crowley’s diary, Germer was now “calmly determined to go permanently insane,” Beast and Bill persisted with Opus 44 on Monday for “Big business with real business people.” They dined with the Schiffers that night. Bill met up again with Marcellus Schiffer at Porza on 13 October, while Crowley fulfilled an appointment with Hamilton and “his boy” (probably Christopher Isherwood; Hamilton was homosexual). Crowley then returned to Porza where he met “two dear old ladies,” friends of Martha Küntzel, eliciting Crowley’s comment: “Devotion is the one asset of life.” Crowley must have insisted Martha herself come to the show, for the following Saturday she stayed with 666 and the Scarlet Woman at Karlsruherstrasse, where, unfortunately: “we had to waste all our time discussing what ought to be done about poor Karl.”⁷

The next day Crowley had a long conference with Marcellus Schiffer. Crowley’s effort to establish himself as an original visual artist made a step into films, or shows, a natural one since he could also write drama, lyrics, ritual, and fictional adventure. Discussions, however, were frustrating. Crowley persisted.

Ex-treasurer and sometime pupil Gerald Yorke (1901–1983) came over from England to see Crowley’s Porza show. On 19 October, having witnessed the “totally insane” Germer, Yorke put aside doubts about funding the Beast from the E. A. Crowley Trust established for Lola Zaza Crowley and recommended trustee George Cecil Jones forward £50 from it as Crowley’s need was so great.

Yorke went for a “Golden October” stroll in the woods (probably the Tiergarten) with Crowley and Bill: “We were just three happy children,” commented Crowley in his diary.

A conference was held with the Schiffers at a café on the 21st, and later with Jacques Krako “and one Otto” at Bender’s. Nerves shattered, Bill demanded a post-dinner session at Maenz.

Germer drove Yorke to Hamburg for the ferry home on the 23rd. Crowley hoped he would get there alive! After Yorke’s departure, Crowley met regularly with the Schiffers, sometimes at the restaurant of famous German movie actor and comedian, Henry Bender (1867– 1933). Henry had opened Bender’s in 1929, at Bleibtreustrasse 33, close to Alfred Flechtheim’s home and two (then) still intact synagogues. Bender’s was popular with artistic people.

On the 26th Bill was bleeding, painfully. The doctor diagnosed a miscarriage. Crowley was “utterly crushed by sorrow and anxiety” and found he could not forgive Germer for not apologizing to Bill in writing for continually insulting her.

Three weeks after the launch, Crowley had another meeting with potential backer Jacques Krako at Porza, following a walk through the Tiergarten where Crowley observed six lugubrious businessmen camping out on the ruins of the old city walls: signs of the times.

The following day (2 November), Crowley and Bill called at artist Max Brüning’s studio at Nordstrasse 50, well known as a salon for visiting artists. A stylish draftsman, Brüning (1887–1968) had a penchant for dramatic compositions and mildly erotic subjects. Crowley assessed him as a “sort of inferior Dix or Rops, with a studio imitating well enough an Oriental junkshop. [Brüning possessed an outstanding collection of Asian art.] He gave us lots of bad cognac.”⁸

Brüning executed a strong charcoal and crayon portrait of Crowley smoking a pipe, probably playing chess with Brüning’s guest, Ernst Schertel (1884–1958), whose chess skills Crowley praised as “really brilliant.”

Schertel should have had much to discuss with Crowley. A student of history and philosophy at Jena, he had been inspired by meetings with esoteric poet Stefan Georg (1868–1933). Georg would have a great personal influence on Claus von Stauffenberg’s mystical and poetic idea of a “Secret Germany” that must destroy Hitler and redeem Germany’s bartered soul.⁹

Schertel’s novel The Sin of the Eternal, or This Is My Body (1918) launched a literary career that took in ancient religion, naturism, sexual liberation, sado-masochism, occultism, and dance culture. He wrote a history of Magic (1923), campaigned for abolition of sexual censorship, the virtue of flagellation, and erotic liberty in general. He was imprisoned by the Nazis for seven months in 1937 and deprived of his university doctorate. Other than praise for chess, Crowley’s first opinion of a man who had long embraced the thelemic principle “The word of Sin is Restriction” (AL 1,41) was blunt: Schertel “writes vaguely on Magic—bad novel with sham sex-appeal.”¹⁰

It is interesting that Crowley was being invited to places where sexual liberation was a major interest, probably in a cinematic as well as purely artistic context. (The groundbreaking Czech-Austrian film Ekstase starring Hedy Kiesler [later “Lamarr”] would be shot the following year.) Schertel had corresponded with Sigmund Freud to promote his campaign to abolish censorship laws: healthy psychology involved guiltless attitudes to sexuality.

Returning home high on cognac, Bill had a jealous fit over “three cheap whores” at Brüning’s and Crowley “strangled her,” presumably taking inspiration from Schertel’s Flagellation as a Literary Motif (4 vols. 1929–32). Perhaps Brüning had been Bill’s idea all along.

The next day Crowley began clocking up regular cinema attendances with the now classic Berlin–Alexanderplatz, whose anti-hero, Franz Biberkopf, suffered every indignity of unemployment, poverty, and frustrated love in Depression-hit Berlin. Crowley’s review: “a medium good film.” The movie’s opening gives a marvelous, dizzying view of the intense bustle, traffic, and frenetic new construction on the Kurfürstendamm in 1931 as Biberkopf encounters modern Berlin after being released from prison.

Crowley spent the evening before the exhibition’s closure with the Schiffers, joined by Henry Bender at Maenz at 9:00 p.m. Bender’s film Kyritz-Pyritz (U.S. title: Errant Husbands) was on German release; Bender played Anton Piepenberg alongside costars Max Adalbert and Hansi Arnstaedt in Carl Heinz Wolff ’s comedy. Rotund with a big face, Bender looked rather like Crowley; perhaps that’s why the Schiffers first brought him to the Beast’s attention—or was it Bill?

The following day, the exhibition closed; the artist dined again with the Schiffers, at Bender’s (as they would again on 3 December). Crowley and Bill got food poisoning from Bender’s fish. This did not deter them from visiting Bender’s again, or from seeing Henry on 21 December as Hugo Kunkel in another Bender movie vehicle, Ein ausgekochter Junge (A Crafty Youth, 1931), about a magician who mesmerizes a young couple. Jacques Krako gave Crowley his birth details for a horoscope. Crowley also made an I Ching divination: “General symbol for Krako. Sun. 41. Seems he can do everything for us to his own great advantage.”¹¹

Bill observed how children in Germany played with fireworks (the exhibition had closed the previous day on the 5th: Guy Fawkes Night in England), without knowing anything about Guy Fawkes. She opined that Guy Fawkes Night was simply an excuse for Nature Worship, with the fireworks as imitation meteors perhaps. Crowley thought it the most interesting observation he’d heard in years; it still is.

On 9 November, Crowley collected some pictures and books from Porza and had Brüning to dinner: “May be a good man if he listens to sense.”¹²

A letter dated 29 November was written by Aleister Crowley on Karlsruher Strasse 2 notepaper to Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon. The letter explains much about what had happened at Porza. Crowley drew a huge St. Andrew’s cross, next to which he wrote “St Andrew’s Day” (actually 30 November, but perhaps the emphasis was on continental magical customs associated with the night before), before addressing his fellow Adept:

Carissime Frater

93

Haggis!

I had hoped you would follow up your letter of October 5. Your “Descent into the Maelstrom” has lasted long enough.

No rectified horoscope from you; and I do so want to know if I am going into a pauper lunatic asylum—as my wife did in the middle of July.

“I’ve got a new girl now.”

But the prospect is indeed black after Dec. 31—at latest.

[Saturnus = Germer] buggering my R♂ and my R and ♀—to and fro—to and fro!*21

I would send you a catalogue of the Exhibition—completely ruined by the sexual insanity of a man who thought he was helping [Karl]—if I had an adequate envelope.

I’ll try to pawn something, and buy one!

93 93/93 Fraternally 666¹³

All the Beast could do was to try to pick up the pieces.

FIFTEEN

HOPE OF HARVEST

Things are going so well—Mrs. B[usch] saw Dr. Goertz yesterday; I am to see him today, and if he will agree to “discover” me, the trick is won, for Krako would immediately come in. But, even so, we cannot get all our people “under one hat” and rush them into signing an agreement. But given full rest from daily worry till December 31, I feel positive that we shall by then have matters so far advanced that we shall be able to draw funds. In which case you will not be forgotten.

There is always also the chance of selling Mortadello—though [Max] Reinhardt is not the man to engage himself to spend millions of marks on such a big production without careful thought. Again, Schiffers think of buying out the Thelema Verlag. And there is the general question of selling my translation rights in Germany in a lump. Etc./Etc.

Now do please see that it is to your own interest to keep us going. If we smash now, it would take years—at the best—to pick up the pieces. This is the last real chance, but it is a good one. I agree with you that Yorke ought to do everything; but if he won’t, we can’t make him, and there is no time left to argue.¹

Thus did the Beast write to Cora Germer on 13 November, three days after again having had to pawn his 33° Masonic Eagle. Crowley addressed Cora because Germer was temporarily estranged over a legal dispute arising from the exhibition. On 7 November, Crowley’s lawyer, Albert M. Oppenheimer CBE, had written Karl over specifics. Germer sent Oppenheimer two documents and a receipt for £50 sterling two days later. Relations between Germer and the Beast would now go from bad to worse.

“Dr. Goertz” was journalist Fritz Goetz (or “Götz”), editor for Ullstein Publishing’s Berliner Morgenpost and Vossische (“Foxy”) Zeitung. Goetz lived at Kurfürstendamm 92, close to the Schiffers and next door to Kurt Mühsam (Kurfürstendamm 94/5), movie section editor of Ullstein’s other big daily, B-Z Am Mittag (Mühsam died in London on the 17th; Goetz may have been deputizing in Mühsam’s absence).

Crowley met Goetz “of B-Z A.M.” on Friday 13th, after consulting the I Ching as to what line to take: “[hexagram] 10 Lü. The tiger. Be normal and modest: don’t bluff. Be cautious but resolute [. . .] aim to create a new world.”²

A successful approach, Goetz immediately introduced Crowley to British-born Montague “Monty” Jacobs (1875–1945), literary editor and theater critic of the Vossische Zeitung’s arts feuilleton (section), at the massive art deco sandstone Ullsteinhaus that dominated Berlin Tempelhof. It was Monty Jacobs who had accepted Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front for serialization between 10 November and 9 December 1928, backed by Franz Ullstein and the biggest advertising campaign ever witnessed by German publishing. Crowley was trawling the right waters, at last. Jacobs agreed to take Crowley’s short stories if Crowley was willing to write them. Crowley celebrated his modest success with the Schiffers and Gerald Hamilton in the evening. Crowley thought about writing a book about Berlin with Hamilton.

The next day, Crowley wrote to Gerald Yorke to enthuse him with the new vista:

The plan is to put me over in Germany as they did for Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris, and Oscar Wilde. Then and only then, the English will follow. We want G.H.Q. [General Headquarters] here, to arrange translations, promote productions of plays and films &c.

There is no prejudice at all against me here; yesterday Ullstein—very big publisher—asked me for a series of short stories. [Max] Reinhardt’s chief man is reading Mortadello without giving a single thought to my atrocious views on Sublapsarianism. There is really a great hope here. We shall have got much further had adequate supplies been available.³

Crowley then observed the Scarlet Woman and Frau Schiffer (Margo Lion) translating the “Berlin Manifesto” (possibly connected with the October-founding of the SPD-breakaway Sozialistische Arbeiter Partei, or Socialist Workers Party). Then they went to see the thrilling Berge in Flammen (Mountains in Flames), described by Crowley as “a really fine mountain war film.” Speaking from experience, he recognized both a good story and the fact that experienced mountaineers stood behind the film’s scintillating black-and-white photography. He probably relived old times.

On 17 November, Crowley was back at Brüning’s, this time with the Schiffers. He then took one or both of the Schiffers to Miericke’s chocolate and pastry café on Rankestrasse, which runs roughly parallel to Joachimstaler Strasse off the Kurfürstendamm. The Beast turned on his most majestically assuring charm.

On 3 December, Crowley had tea with Hamilton, afterward going to Bender’s with the Schiffers. He then supped at Maenz with Peter Supf and Pola Henckels. Perhaps it was having caught wind of the Beast’s seeing Pola again that motivated Bill’s mad, drunken attack on Crowley on 6 December. She plugged him with a kitchen knife, at home, then, as Crowley put it, “became violent.” The Beast was very nearly killed, and Hamilton nearly threw up at the thought of all the blood spilt, a reaction 666 attributed to Hamilton’s “pacifism” (i.e., political weakness), while attributing Bill’s attempt at murder to premenstrual tension, feeling sorry for her.

Four days later, Crowley went to see producer Erich Pommer and director Erik Charell’s brilliant musical Der Kongress Tanzt (The Congress Dances), a UFA film set during the Congress of Vienna (1815). Crowley considered it a very good film, remarking that some people saw it as “Royalist Propaganda.”

Royalists wanted a return to the monarchy of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had abdicated in 1918. Many Royalists were sympathetic to Hitler, insofar as he appeared to share their cause. The Kaiser’s sons August Wilhelm and Oscar even joined the NSDAP in 1930, taken in by Hitler’s deceptive maneuvering.

Der Kongress Tanzt contains a breathtaking, almost endless, uninterrupted tracking shot of a coach and horses trip through town and countryside to palace, while the pretty heroine sings gaily: a bravura shot that not only confirmed Charell’s reputation as “the German Ziegfeld” but which also distinguished him for daring visual élan a decade before Welles’s Citizen Kane. The legendary stage director-producer Charell (1894–1970) could have taken German cinema to the skies but for Nazi interference chopping his career.

Such talents as Charell’s and Pommer’s, combined with the Royalist and nostalgic vogue, were seized on by the Beast: “These,” he wrote, “are the people to do Mortadello.”⁴

Crowley’s 1912 play Mortadello, or The Angel of Venice had a Shakespearian feel for language (written with great skill mostly in the Alexandrine meter), lots of comedy twists, and a sumptuous historical setting, with characters like “gay lady” Countess Lucrezia Sanzio, Count Cesare Mortadello, “bravo” Orlando, “a negro of the Tunisian Sudan,” three other counts, two countesses, a princess, the old Doge, and a bevy of courtesans, nuns, and Venetian ladies.

Der Kongress Tanzt is also notable from Crowley’s standpoint in that it starred another Crowley look-alike, Otto Wallburg, as Bibikoff, adjutant to Czar Alexander.

A diary entry regarding a café conference with the Schiffers and Jacques Krako of 21 October refers to “one Otto at Herr Bender’s.” That this Otto might have been Bender’s fellow actor Otto Wallburg would naturally seem a long shot were it not the case that Crowley was seeing films starring people he was being introduced to, or who might be interested in his movie idea. Crowley saw Wochenend im Paradies (Weekend in Paradise) on 23 November, praising it highly: “an excellent comic film.” It starred Otto Wallburg. On 29 November, Crowley went to see Wer nimmt die Liebe Ernst? (Who Takes Love Seriously?): “a gorgeous film.” It too starred Otto Wallburg. One wonders if Crowley had Wallburg in mind for the part of Mortadello, described in the play’s preface as “stout, tall, and pompous” and about forty years of age. Wallburg (1899–1944) also worked for Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater.

A letter of Crowley to Yorke of 12 December brings together the politicized Royalists and the movies in his schemes:

I think the government is riding for a fall. This is where we get a chance with Mortadello; the Royalists want films of this type as propaganda for the “good old days” of brilliant uniforms &c &c.⁵

It can hardly be coincidence that the day he wrote the letter Crowley met producer-director Carl Heinz Wolff, possibly at Maenz, where the Beast went to meet Pola Henckels after Bill got drunk and aggressive. The diary entry reads with characteristic insouciance: “Dr Heinz Wolf [sic] of [Erich] Pommer around.”

Carl Heinz Wolff (1884–1942) would have been a fair choice as director-producer for a Crowley project. He had gained early success in 1917 with a series of Sherlock Holmes films (including The Serpent Ring). Crowley’s own sleuth Simon Iff, based on himself, first appeared that year in the New York magazine The International. Wolff had directed Henry Bender in 1931 in the aforementioned Kyritz-Pyritz, and also in So’n Windhund! (Aw Greyhound!), which featured the great Max Adalbert. Wolff also directed Adalbert in Hussar Love in 1932, a romantic comedy about ladies and hussars in glittering uniforms that attempted to cash in on the wistful, nostalgic vogue Crowley was advocating and German audiences were flocking to see.

This then is an apt moment to examine Crowley and the Weimar movie extravaganza.

THE GREAT CROWLEY MOVIE CONNECTION

That Aleister Crowley should have his place in movie history is not surprising when one considers that movies emerged from the magic of the camera obscura with not a little chemistry involved. The whole concept of animation is fundamentally Hermetic. To give soul (anima) to otherwise lifeless objects was described in the Graeco-Egyptian Hermetica as a principal art of the Egyptian priest-magicians; the infusing of divine life into statues by magical projection earned the Hermetica the criticism of idolatry, a rebuke aimed with puritan venom at the moving pictures and their celluloid-preserved stars. Many today still can’t tell the difference between an icon and a common image.

It is natural then to begin our maze tour with Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), starring Conrad Veidt (a Maenz regular) and produced by the ubiquitous Erich Pommer with Rudolf Meinert. The story focuses on a somnambulist who emerges from a coffinlike cabinet preserved by Dr. Caligari when summoned to do his master’s bidding. The theme of animation of something dead or dormant is strong, a theme that also features heavily in Crowley’s admired Gustav Meyrink’s novel The Golem. Meyrink of course contributed to Henri Birven’s Hain der Isis while his novel influenced Paul Wegener’s second attempt at the same story in which a clay figure is brought to life by a sixteenth-century rabbi’s magic. Directed by Wegener and Carl Boese, The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920, Union Film for UFA), was written by Wegener with Dutch writer Henrik Galeen.

And with Henrik Galeen we hit authentic Crowleyan territory, for Galeen was the screenwriter of Albin Grau’s astonishing schreck film, Nosferatu (1922), which for many of its fans beats Dracula at its own game. Grau, the Pansophist who would write his own Thelemainspired text, who would make the only known film with Crowley in it, and die in the bosom of the independent Swiss OTO, was Nosferatu’s painstaking art director and producer (Prana Film was his company, bankrupted thanks to a plagiarism lawsuit brought by Bram Stoker’s widow). In Nosferatu, the creature’s pale, flickering life is only kept alive by the blood of his victims: another dark comment on the moving image perhaps.

Nosferatu’s director was Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888–1931). Alfred Hitchcock was at UFA’s Babelsburg studios in 1924, working as assistant director on an Anglo-German production (The Blackguard) when the great Murnau was making his technically innovative masterpiece Der Letzte Mann (U.S.: The Last Laugh) with Emil Jannings (another Maenz regular). Hitchcock watched closely the master, Murnau. The Last Laugh had no subtitles: the images moved the story; the story moved the images. One thinks immediately of Crowley’s 1931 bewailing of “the mystery of the Talkies”: “The trouble with the silent screen was the subtitles. We wanted to suppress them. Now the dialogue is unlimited subtitles!”⁶

Hitchcock tried to put the emphasis back on the visual medium, thanks to Murnau who told him at UFA: “What you see on the set doesn’t matter; all that matters is what you see on the screen.” UFA Berlin was to Hitchcock what Hamburg was to the Beatles.

Perhaps the most famous movie to come out of UFA Babels-burg was Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), produced by Erich Pommer. Metropolis also featured a visual theme of perverse animation from lifeless matter; in this instance the “scientific” creation of a robotic doppelganger of virginal heroine Maria, played by Brigitte Helm; technocratic science is equated with black magic against the proletariat, whose heroine is perversely condemned to the flames as a witch.

Returning to Jewish writer Henrik Galeen (1881–1949), in 1928 Galeen directed Alraune (Mandrake [!]), a silent schreck film starring Paul Wegener as a professor who inseminates a prostitute with the seed of a hanged murderer! The chilling story came from Crowley’s admired horror and fantasy master, Hanns Heinz Ewers. Remade as a talkie in 1930, Alraune featured the same stunning actress, Brigitte Helm, in the lead role, and none other than Henry Bender as the innkeeper! The director was Richard Oswald, who Crowley, possibly on the strength of this movie, had been trying to contact with his projects.

In 1929, Galeen went to England to direct the British film After the Verdict. The script girl was Alma Reville. Alma would become . . . Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock. (Crowley’s diary reveals he met up with “Hitchcock” in London several times in autumn 1932.)

In 1906, Galeen had worked as an assistant to Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater. In 1935 the Jewish Reinhardt would perforce bring Berlin theatrical and cinematic magic to Hollywood with his glittering production of A Midsummer Nights Dream. A little extra in that film was Kenneth Wilbur Anglemeyer (b. 1927; he played the Changeling). Touched by movie magic, and the works of Aleister Crowley, the beautiful boy would grow up to become independent visionary filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Crowley’s influence is explicit in many, if not all, of Anger’s films; Anger is also a collector of Crowley’s artwork.

Back in Berlin in 1926, Paul Wegener received a summons from MGM to the Victorine Studios, Nice. There a Hollywood film crew was working for Irishman Rex Ingram (1892–1950), director of the hit movie Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). The movie Wegener signed up for was based on W. S. Somerset-Maugham’s novel, The Magician. Maugham’s novel twisted an encounter with Crowley in 1903 into a horror story (Maugham was a friend of Crowley’s brotherin-law, Gerald Kelly).

A magician, Oliver Haddo (played by Wegener) uses hypnotism to lure a beautiful girl from her decent lover into his evil clutches. It’s a fun, sometimes grand movie in many ways if you can get to see it, but a little stilted and melodramatic, even for its time. Michael Powell, of Powell & Pressburger fame, makes a comic appearance in spectacles, and there is a fine “Panic” dance number. In fact, young Powell worked for Ingram so long as Ingram received Hollywood finance. When the money ran out, Powell returned to dismally cold England, and worked as stills photographer for . . . Alfred Hitchcock. Powell reckoned The Magician would have been better with the real Aleister Crowley in it; they met on the Riviera in the twenties, and Powell retained a soft spot for the real Magician.

Kenneth Anger has defined cinema as “an evil medium,” a notion present in artist R. B. Kitaj’s painting Kenneth Anger and Michael Powell, and in Powell’s cult schreck film, Peeping Tom (1960), written by code-maker Leo Marks.

Of course, we should hardly know Powell were it not for Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian of Jewish heritage, who came to Berlin with nothing save his talent and the will to make his fortune, beginning his career with a short story, “Am Reisen,” for Ullstein’s B-Z Am Mittag, in 1928 (sound familiar?). We have already noted Pressburger’s employment under Erich Pommer as a UFA contract writer and his introduction to Robert Siodmak. At UFA, Pressburger also worked with actor, writer, and director Reinhold Schünzel. Schünzel played Tiger Brown in G. W. Pabst’s film The Threepenny Opera, the French version of which featured Margo Lion or, as Crowley called her, “Frau Schiffer”! And one should not forget Pressburger’s close friend in those Berlin years, Erich Kästner, who wrote the hugely successful Berlin-based novel, Emil and the Detectives (1929), turned into a movie in 1931 with a script by Kästner and Billy Wilder, who would direct Marilyn Monroe in the sardonic Some Like It Hot twenty-eight years later.

Pressburger helped Kästner write a script—I’d Rather Have Cod Liver Oil—for influential German director-to-be Max Ophüls. Dann schon lieber Libertran (1931) became Ophüls’ first film. And all this time Kästner believed he was “keeping poetry alive in Germany,” and Berlin in particular, against the grain of the times and the New Objectivity: a passion he could easily have shared with Aleister Crowley, and one that Pressburger carried to England, thence to the world through coproductions with Michael Powell like The Red Shoes and Stairway to Heaven: real movie magic.

Alas, despite his near irrepressible optimism, Crowley’s health was stymied by poverty and anxiety. On Christmas Eve, he was very ill all day with asthma, the disease that would plague him for much of the rest of his life. A card headed “EDEN HOTEL BERLIN W, VIS-ÀVIS VOM ZOO [Zoologische Garten Bahnhof]. BUDAPESTER STRASSE Nr.18” was addressed to Gerald Yorke: “We have NOT got the £50—Do for God’s sake make Dennes send it.”⁷

Dennes was the lawyer handling Crowley’s Trust Fund. The £50 would not arrive until 1 February; Gerald Hamilton brought it by hand from London, years later mistakenly believing it was a payment from Lt. Col. Carter for Crowley’s spying on him.

Christmas Day 1931 brought relief in the form of a big dinner with Karl Germer, Gerald Hamilton, and Karl’s new friend, Hedy Nevermann.*22 Crowley and Bill “both went after Hedy.” The occasion was further enlivened by the arrival of W. H. Auden’s close friend, novelist Christopher Isherwood, and Isherwood’s friend, poet Stephen Spender (1909–25), for a pub crawl. In 1939 Crowley would refer to the “pansy poetastry of W. H. Auden.”

Fig. 15.1. Hard-drinking boy bar, the Cosy-Corner at Zossener Strasse 7, Kreuzberg (From Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon)

Isherwood was living at Fraulein Thurau’s boardinghouse at Nollendorfstrasse 17.

The pub crawl took the party to Kreuzberg (about a mile east of Nollendorfstrasse) to a favorite boy bar of Isherwood’s, the Cosy Corner at Zossener Strasse 7 (intersecting Gneisenaustrasse). Considering its reputation, the Cosy Corner looked unpretentious. It had a few photos of boxers and racing cars pinned above the bar and a plain room warmed by a big stove, so warm indeed that the rent boys took their leather jackets off and sat with their sleeves rolled up, shirts unbuttoned to the navel. According to Isherwood’s recollection, seeing one of the “boys” so deported at the bar, Crowley thought it an amusing twist on the gay-erotic to plunge his nails into the fellow’s chest. This went down badly. Isherwood got Crowley to stump up some cash and the party retreated outside. As usual, Crowley didn’t let the incident get him down and soon he was having great fun with the boys at Charley’s in Besselstrasse, before getting well sauced at the Johanniter Keller, and afterward at the Friedrichskeller café, Friedrichstrasse, in Berlin’s theater district.

On New Year’s Eve, Crowley graced a homosexual ball at Zelter Strasse 2 (now Rietzestrasse, running parallel to Greilstrasse in the poor Prenzlauer Berg district to the northeast of central Berlin; once close to the now vanished Bahnhof Prenzlauer Allee). Crowley didn’t like the ball. He found it “frightfully dull, pretentious, and grotesque.”⁸

He escaped at 11:30 p.m. to catch Bill in Charlottenburg, before catching a taxi to Schloss Bellevue in the north of the Grosser Tiergarten for a walk under the “supreme loveliness” of the stars to bring in the New Year beneath the canopy of Nuit.

It was now 1932, and the clock was ticking fast for freedom in Germany.

SIXTEEN

SPYING

On Sunday 15 November 1931, Crowley’s cinematic ambitions coalesced strangely with Berlin street politics. The day was Totensonntag—“Dead Sunday” or “Eternity Sunday”—established in 1816 as a holy day for Lutheran churches to remember the dead, especially Prussian war dead. Philipp Nicolai’s “Awake, the Voice Calls Us” was sung. That chant now rang with all the hoarse insistence of a summons to resistance by Royalists eager to restore the Hohenzollern monarchy that had collapsed with Germany’s bitter surrender in 1918.

The venue for the anti-republican demo was the Gethsemanekirche, a red brick church at Stargarder Strasse 77, Berlin north. Intended at its dedication by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1893 as a bulwark against socialism, communism, and atheism, it was now a shelter for radical pro-republican socialist groups. When Royalists crowded the Gethsemanekirche, the act was deliberately, politically provocative. The war dead would indeed be remembered—Germany, they exclaimed, had been betrayed!

A strikingly modern ticket to Crowley’s Porza exhibition survives at London’s Warburg Institute. On its reverse is a secret, handwritten note, signed “666” to “Nick”—Lt. Col. Carter, Head of Special Branch, London—about the “Dead Sunday” clash:

The Hitler-Hindenburg crowd want to bring them [the Hohenzollerns] back. They will be in power probably before Christmas. But that will mean French intervention, also revolution ending in anarchy with a probable attempt of the Soviets to capture the country. It means the smash all round . . .¹

Believing Hitler would back Hohenzollern restoration the ex-Kaiser had permitted sons August Wilhelm and Oskar to join the NSDAP in 1930. Hitler played the Hohenzollerns along. As the art show ticket demonstrates, Crowley foresaw the end of the Weimar Republic.

Precisely how Lt. Col. Carter saw Crowley’s intelligence role in Berlin is unknown, but surviving evidence permits us to call Crowley an intelligence asset, and since he disguised his activities we may call him a spy, though not one employed by British security services for money; Crowley served his country for the hell of it.

At the outbreak of WWII in September 1939 Crowley did apply formally for Naval Intelligence Department employment. Outlining past services, he summarized his intelligence work for the Allies in the United States during WWI when he infiltrated the New York–based German Propaganda Kabinett, a committee of agents and diplomats that included George Sylvester Viereck, Professor Hugo Münsterburg (Harvard University), Berlin’s ambassador to the United States, Graf Johann von Bernstorff, and military attaché Franz von Papen (indicted for sabotage in the U.S. in 1916). Crowley’s secret effort aimed “to supply them with false information and to wreck their propaganda by inducing them to make psychological blunders: all with the object of inducing the U.S. to enter war on our side.” Crowley also referred to his work for Colonel Carter, easy for the NID to validate: “In 1927 I began work for the Special Branch, this time to work and report on Communist activities, especially in Berlin, where I lived almost continuously for three years.” Crowley gave the name of Privy Counsellor and Parliamentary Liberal Party Leader, Sir Percy Harris, 1st Baronet, as one of four personal references. The director of naval intelligence invited Crowley for an interview on 10 September 1939.²

Predictably, British security services have not yet deemed it in their interest to acknowledge any intelligence role for Aleister Crowley. Evidence for Crowley’s secret activities is understandably sparse but not insignificant. His diaries offer clues, but Crowley was living in Germany, his records vulnerable to confiscation. He had been publicly suspected of being a spy (for Germany!) when permission to reside in France was rescinded in 1929.

The case for Crowley’s spying has been called “impossibly flimsy” (The Telegraph, London, 7 September 2011), so we begin with the flimsiest evidence of all: a dream of 26 November 1931.

Dream. I was made Prime Minister (and Foreign Sec[retar]y.). But the King was Wilhelm II. And the place was Paris. I walked up the Boulevard with Ramsay Macdonald [British Prime Minister 1929– 35] and discussed policy—warning him that he had (some months before) got Carter after him!³

Ramsay Macdonald was the first British Labor Party Prime Minister. His party was full of communist sympathizers. In 1924 the famous “Zinoviev Letter,” a forged, allegedly Soviet instruction to activate civil war in Great Britain through socialist networks, beefed up conservative opposition to Macdonald’s election as Labor PM but did not prevent it. At the time, Lt. Col. Carter, late of the Imperial General Staff, was deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, the interface with British home security services (MI5). Before his highly distinguished army career in WWI, Carter had served with the Indian Police in Burma.

The chief threats to security in Great Britain under his watch were communism and renegade Irish Republicanism. Between 1928–31, Carter became concerned with possible Soviet funding of IRA “Irregulars” and corresponded with David Neligan, head of the Irish Free State’s Garda Special Branch, on the subject.⁴

Foreign exploitation of the IRA was familiar territory to Crowley, who had enjoyed inside knowledge of the 1914–15 plot of von Bernstorff and Sir Roger Casement to activate pro-German rebellion in Ireland. Crowley and Bill’s paying lodger, Gerald Hamilton, had been interned during WWI for his opposition to the war. Hamilton had also been associated with Casement (who was executed); Churchill would intern Hamilton in Brixton jail briefly in WWII for his vocal opposition to war, and for his intrigues with the Roman Catholic Church to that end through contacts in neutral Dublin and elsewhere.

In early January 1932 Crowley worked with Hamilton on a book about Berlin. Crowley enjoyed ample opportunity for regular conversations with Hamilton, whose autobiography (p. 56ff.) revealed his ignorance at the time of Crowley’s intentions:

. . . the gift of £50 given to Crowley by the British Government to report on my activities in Berlin. I naturally never knew of this until after Crowley’s death, when his literary executor [John Symonds] and another close friend [Gerald Yorke] gave me proof. What is piquant in this matter is that on one of my journeys to London, Gerald Yorke asked me to take some English money back to Berlin and to give it to Crowley [1 February 1932]. This I did. The amount entrusted to me was the very £50 in cash that my host had earned by writing a report upon my very harmless activities [Hamilton was mistaken about the money; it came from the Crowley Trust].

On 26 January 1932, Crowley had written to Yorke about maintaining his cover so as to get the best out of Hamilton, highlighting the risks involved in his double life:

. . . If he [Hamilton] should learn that I am as I was born [an English High Tory patriot], my usefulness would be over; and if he should even suspect that I have any relations with N [“Nick” = Carter] beyond pulling his leg, there would be work for you within a week or two with that embalmer. So please avoid discussing my politics, or, if forced to do so, say that you regard me as at least 80% a Bolshevik. [Note added by Yorke: “AC was informing against Hamilton (who had communist connections) to Carter.”] Do please take this most seriously, and be as cautious as you know how.

I hear that Annie Besant is in senile dementia, and moribund. She may die any day now. It is most urgent that I should be instantly and widely proclaimed as HP.B.[Blavatsky]’s legitimate successor. As to my reputation, I’m the Silent Martyr. Jesuit calumny is the shining token of my Mission.

Throw yourself into this wholeheartedly, and we come right out of the Big End of the Horn—with Nick [Carter] and all England too!—in two shakes of a rat’s whiskers.

[. . .] You can talk freely to Hamilton about my mission with the Law of Thelema; he can help with broadcasting the Proclamation. Only avoid politics like poison. He thinks that I want to use the T[heosophical].S[ociety]. to help Communism. Encourage that idea.⁵

On 8 February, Martha Küntzel sent her German version of a (now lost) “excellent pamphlet proclaiming me in B[erlin].” This pamphlet testified to Crowley’s wish to be recognized as Madame Blavatsky’s successor; it also helped to convince Hamilton that Crowley was using Theosophy and Thelema to support communism.

It is telling that when Crowley referred to Hamilton’s being made “quite ill” on 15 December 1931 at the thought of all the blood after Bill stabbed the Beast, Crowley attributed the reaction to Hamilton’s “complex—homosexuality and pacifism etc.”

The key word is “pacifism.” Many if not most European communists were pacifists because they believed wars between nation-states divided workers who ought to constitute a global communist brotherhood. But the word “pacifist” was also controversial in the Communist International (Comintern) organization. And this brings us to key evidence for Crowley’s secret activities.

Sun[day] 14. [February 1932] [. . .] Gibarti of I.A.H. to dinner. V[ery]. nice man and v[ery]. clever.⁶

“I.A.H.” refers to the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (IAH), formed in 1923 ostensibly to aid famine victims in the Soviet Union by KPD Reichstag deputy Willi Münzenberg, the Comintern’s No. 1 man in the west (though French communists regarded Münzenberg suspiciously). Moscow-funded, the IAH launched anti-war associations, newspapers, publishing companies, and even a film studio. The chief beneficiary was Soviet Russia.

The Hungarian Louis Gibarti (real name Laszlo Dobos) was a Soviet agent (OGPU) whose foreign propaganda assignments included the IAH anti-colonialist spin-off, the League Against Imperialism (LIA, f. 1927), supported in its Berlin base by Albert Einstein and intellectual activists throughout the world. Gibarti was Münzenberg’s right-hand man.

Comintern (1919–43) aimed at global communism but was divided between revolutionary leftists and reformists on its right. Lenin condemned centrists as social pacifists, a term aimed at Ramsay Macdonald for opposing the war while voting for war credits, because labor politicians found it impolitic to appear disloyal to the country. Crowley’s diary jibe suggested Hamilton’s “pacifism” was primarily aesthetic, a fear of blood, and therefore of women’s natural function, self-justified in terms of communist principle. For Crowley, it was simply cowardice mixed with aesthetics.

Comintern’s Executive 9th Plenum initiated a “Third Period” in 1928, dedicated to militant destruction of moderate left-wing parties, dubbed “social fascists”: a step up from “social pacifists.” Such activities certainly alerted Ramsay Macdonald to the threat of a “danger within” the Labor Party. Membership of the LAI became proscribed for labor parliamentary candidates. Carter had every reason to pass on information Crowley gained to MI5 home security concerns, as well as MI6, dealing with foreign intelligence. That this almost certainly occurred is evinced by an important MI5 to S.I.S. note, cited by intelligence commentator Richard Spence, stating that Gibarti had recently been in contact with Aleister Crowley.*23

Contact with Gibarti may have given Crowley some inkling as to NKVD and KGB forerunner OGPU’s strategy, though his note regarding Gibarti’s being very clever suggests he didn’t get much out of him. It is possible Crowley’s contact with Gibarti came through Hamilton, though Gibarti was already in close contact with Albert Einstein. What personal contact Crowley had with Einstein, if any, is currently unknown (see Sullivan and Huxley’s visit in October 1930).

When the LAI was founded in Brussels in 1927, Einstein sent an emphatic letter of support, but the LAI had fissures from its inception, and in 1928 Moscow willed that anyone not committed to global communist revolution should be progressively discouraged from participation. Bourgeois scruples had no place in a world in which capitalism was evidently close to collapse. Einstein favored global socialism but had scruples about Soviet Russia’s dominance of such a world. A Zionist, he wanted a national homeland for the Jewish people within a British mandate and therefore found himself at odds with LAI advocacy of an Arab liberation from British and French imperialism that denied Jews a nonviolent return to Palestine.

When the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism and for National Independence, based at Friedrichstrasse 24, Berlin SW48, held their conference in Berlin from 30 May to 2 June 1931, their long list of resolutions threatened British interests.

On 23 March 1931, Indian socialist revolutionary heroes Bhagat Singh and Rajguru Sukhdev had been hanged in India for involvement with the revenge murder of British officer John Saunders. The Berlin conference made the following resolutions on 2 June 1931:

The session of the Executive Committee of the League against Imperialism honors the memory of the heroic Indian revolutionaries, Bhagat Singh and his comrades who have been murdered by British imperialism whilst fighting for the independence of India. The followers of these heroic martyrs must line up in the revolutionary front for the overthrow of imperialism and the independence of India. However, this struggle cannot be won by the heroic acts of individual heroes, but only by the conscious mass action of the workers and peasants, and the revolutionary youth.

The so-called “Labor” Government under the leadership of MacDonald uses every possible method of oppression against the Indian national-revolutionary struggle for freedom. It bombs Indian villages slaughtering men, women and children, it arrests and hangs Indian revolutionary leaders, it sends punitive expeditions to Burma to exterminate the native revolutionaries, it sends British warships up the Chinese rivers to bombard the Chinese revolutionary forces. MacDonald’s government is doing its best to drown the revolutionary struggle of the Egyptian and Arabian peoples in blood.

Having served in the Indian Staff Corps from 1900, and having been seconded to the Indian Police in Burma in 1905, Lt. Col. Carter had a deep knowledge and interest in Indian revolutionary movements; he would certainly have had an interest in what passed in Berlin that summer under the LAI banner.

On the day the resolutions were passed, Crowley went to the Britzergarten lake in Buckow, Berlin south, for a swim with Karl Germer. The previous two days he was in the city.

It is worth observing an abiding shame that Crowley’s records are perennially relegated to what is mistakenly regarded as the side province of esoteric scholarship when there is so much that ought to interest historians in general; the fact is that esotericism is frequently sidelined by ill-informed or prejudiced persons as beneath their interest.

What follows is admittedly speculative, but may prove useful to future scholars. An intriguing diary entry for 27 June records Crowley making an impulse visit to “Mieresch.” Given frequent transcription errors and misspellings of the name in the diary transcripts, this is almost certainly a typo for Miericke, the chocolate cake and pastry café in Ranke Strasse, near the Kurfürstendamm. Here Crowley “found Lindmann [sic]” and “preached [the] Good Law” (Thelema): “for example, we don’t want more soldiers who kill the strong, but more doctors, who kill the weak.”⁷

The name and context suggest Winston Churchill’s chief scientific advisor, Professor Frederick Alexander Lindemann (1886–1957), Oxford professor of experimental philosophy. Crowley’s comments suggest a conversational background of German rearmament, a Crowleyan comic twist on pacifism and speculative eugenics. Eugenics is a subject Lindemann has been much criticized for supporting. Lindemann, who had studied physics at Berlin, apparently wanted a world run by a small number of highly intelligent aristocrats. Science could help render the workers as contented in their operations as worker bees in a hive. Crowley might have sympathized with some of this drift, but would have been against interfering with nature to the extent of denying that every man and every woman is a star. Crowley once called his ideal abbey of Thelema an “aristocratic communism” (this for the “kings” of Thelema); aspects of each other’s attitude would have appealed to the other, and, besides, if it was this Lindemann, Crowley recorded that he had a preaching job to do!

The possibility of Lindemann’s being in Berlin at this moment makes good sense. In April–May Einstein had been Lindemann’s guest in Oxford where Lindemann presented his old colleague with an honorary degree. Einstein had since returned to his summer cabin at Caputh, near Potsdam, where he liked to spend the high summer, out of his loft apartment in nearby Berlin. By coincidence, three days after the meeting at Miericke, Crowley was at the Anglerheim Inn, Glindow, only two miles by direct road from Einstein’s residence at Caputh, both locations southwest of Potsdam.

The Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have a rare letter from Lindemann to Einstein dated 30 June 1931, the very day Crowley went to Glindow.⁸

It is the only Lindemann-Einstein letter the Archive has from the period.

There are other intriguing coincidences. Not long after, in 1932, Lindemann and Winston Churchill chose to drive around Germany together to observe the country rearming. The Jewish Lindemann had close contacts in Germany; he used them to establish networks for rescuing Jewish scientists from Nazi clutches. Crowley met Peter Supf (with his interest in air rearmament) on 21 July after another trip to the Anglerheim Inn with Pola.

Crowley’s diaries do not afford much more in the way of clues for clandestine activities. On 19 June he made himself “invisible”—a Crowleyan concentration/attention-deflecting trick—three times; for what purpose we know not.

He cultivated a well-placed Dr. Bertling, first at the Schloss Bar on 6 August 1931, and later on in the day at the German University Club in Schadowstrasse, off the Unter den Linden, near the Reichstag. The next day he records lunching at the “Berlin University Club within Deutsche Gesellschaft”: good places for meeting academics like Lindemann.

On 13 August he rang Dr. Bertling, and then: “Police starting again (about Dr B[ertling] as a spy).” The next day, Bill phoned to say the Countess von Stauffenberg was complaining about him. He wondered if this meant a trip to the police headquarters: “the Praesidium”; followed by the blithe remark: “Schulenberg v[ery] nice and intelligent,”⁹ which we have looked at before with reference to Gebhard Werner von der Schulenberg, writer and diplomat. Crowley then complained of nervous exhaustion.

On 28 October, during the Porza exhibition, Crowley made a peculiar entry in his diary, as yet undeciphered: “Shall I now write X re 3—5+20 leaders? 21 [I Ching hexagram] Shih Ho. I should get the job O.K. but have to clear out suddenly at the crisis.”¹⁰

ETHEL MANNIN

One labor politician who suffered as a result of Ramsay Macdonald’s official proscription of the LAI for party candidates was former diplomat and aristocratic communist Reginald Bridgman (1884–1968). Bridgman had to surrender a hard-won parliamentary seat because of his LIA involvement. It was Bridgman who had led the British parliamentary delegation to the league’s Brussels founding in 1927. He was British LAI secretary (from 1933) and was expelled from the Labor Party until the league’s dissolution (1937). Bridgman was greatly interested in the radical activities of Ethel Mannin (1900–1984).

Fig. 16.1. Ethel Mannin (1900– 1984), left-wing activist; she met Crowley in Berlin in 1932.

Crowley met Ethel Mannin (1900–1984) in Berlin on 27 January 1932.

Author of Confessions and Impressions (1930), novelist Ethel was an interesting, stylish personality and left-wing activist who in later years would move from Communist Party sympathies into anarchist modes of thought. A fan of famous sexologist Norman Haire’s (whom Crowley would also contact in Berlin), Ethel was living in Berlin, concerned at the developing crisis. Being a leftist, and, like Hamilton, of Irish heritage, she probably knew Gerald, or had come to know him in Berlin. Crowley took her address (Oak Cottage, Burghley Road, Wimbledon).

Reggie Bridgman met Mannin with Lord Berwick at London’s Savoy Grillroom on 6 May 1931: “impressed by [her] revolutionary conviction and Anglo-Saxon type.”¹¹ Having decided to study Mannin’s successful play, Lord Berwick and Bridgman hoped to meet her again, but she returned to Germany in June 1931 (shortly after the LAI conference resolutions) as “the situation there is critical, class issue is acute as is number of unemployed,” as Bridgman put it to Lord Berwick. In another letter (1 July 1931), Bridgman sent Berwick Mannin’s book with the caveat that she would not return to Britain soon because the European situation was so “interesting” and she did not “anticipate improvement in economic situation.” Ethel Mannin was moving in the same radical circles as Nancy Cunard, committed to colonial revolution, circles in which Crowley would involve himself more closely on returning to Great Britain.

It is possible that Crowley already knew Ethel Mannin from attendance at Gwendoline Otter’s salon parties after the war. Ethel Mannin left a description of the salon, recalling a lithograph of Augustus John’s portrait of Aleister Crowley on the wall, opposite the fireplace. A photograph of Epstein’s tomb of Oscar Wilde sat on the mantelpiece.

A genial, bohemian, and eccentric hostess, a survivor of fin de siècle aestheticism, Gwen held salon parties with her brother Frank during the Edwardian era and on, in faded glory, into the 1920s at 1 Ralston Street, Chelsea, London. Young actresses and literary figures were especially welcome (Evelyn Waugh would attend). Crowley attended in 1930, having known Gwen for years.

There was a shake-up of British security services in 1931. Counter-subversion work was transferred from the Special Branch and S.I.S. to MI5 control, under Major General Sir George Waldegrave Vernon Kell, highly experienced in Indian revolutionary subversion.

The shake-up, and its implications for Lt. Col. Carter, probably explains a letter of 25 March 1932 from Carter to Yorke. In the letter, Carter told Yorke that he had given up his confidential job two months previously—and was now with the Chief Constable’s office, Paddington. He asked Yorke to request Crowley to stop sending his long letters (volunteering information about communist activities “etc.” in Berlin). Carter then added, significantly: “I’m afraid to write again to A.C. for if I am not wrong the German Police will be looking at his letters and keeping him under surveillance, and if they twig a letter from me to him there may be considerable trouble for him and perhaps for all.”¹²

Things were getting hot for Aleister Crowley in Berlin. Carter’s “flap” may also have echoed a news report from Paris Mardi on 23 February (nine days after Crowley’s meeting with Gibarti). The French paper reported that the “chief of German counter-espionage,” Ferdinand von Bredow, had come to Paris to deal with Aleister Crowley, who had been “compromised.” The paper’s assumption was that Crowley was a German agent; Crowley did not have long to go in Berlin.

On 25 February, Hitler was granted German citizenship and allowed to sit in the Reichstag.

How did 666 cope with all of this?

Crowley always believed resistance could be overcome; that was the point of Magick. Detecting cynicism in Yorke’s general attitude, he wrote to him around this time:

The Devil always cheats you.

[. . .] Look at yourself clearly with the eyes of a God, who smiles at your background—Live wholly to the Spirit, and you can face Life and Death as cheerfully as I do.¹³

SEVENTEEN

LAST ORDERS

Initiation is never what you think it is going to be: if it were, you would already be initiated. 1

ALEISTER CROWLEY, JANUARY 1932

On New Year’s Day 1932 Crowley noted the arrival of the celebrated Jewish gynecologist and sexologist Dr. Norman Haire (1892–1952). Haire had come to consult with world-renowned sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935). Hirschfeld’s campaign against anti-homosexual laws, begun in 1897, attempted to transform the lives of German lesbians and gay men. After the 1918 revolution, the Prussian state government offered Hirschfeld a mansion for his work. Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science gave candid advice on all sexual matters, organized discussions, and produced helpful publications. Hirschfeld hoped for a permanent sexual revolution; the Nazis would stop it in its tracks.

While in Berlin Haire kept close to developments in British medicine. On 9 January he responded to a British Medical Journal article about a pregnancy that had occurred after insertion of a contraceptive Gräfenberg ring: the same Ernsy Gräfenberg dignified by association with the “G,” or “Gräfenberg,” spot. Crowley’s own New Aeon research into every sexual avenue had advanced considerably since 1898 when he responded to Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis with his decadent book White Stains, but while Crowley’s reputation had suffered badly, Haire’s had bloomed. When Haire attended the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Gynäkologie congress in Frankfurt in June 1931 he was not condemned as a force for moral disintegration.

Crowley would receive a nice note from Norman Haire, agreeing to a meeting, on 27 January.

Relations with Karl were not so nice. Separated temporarily from Cora, Germer “blew in” on Crowley with Hedy Nevermann on 2 January, suggesting to his host that he and Hedy move in “while Hedy went out to make money on the streets for him.”²

Crowley warned Hedy and ceased communicating with Karl. Having expected Bill to cook dinner (Hamilton noted what a brilliant cook Bill was), and being disappointed—Bill was feeling poorly with an inflamed ovary—Karl retaliated. Crowley recorded how the “most filthy masturbating pimp Karl Germer,” formerly a contented recipient of Bill’s cooking skills, sent “a most foul letter of abuse.” Crowley determined to prosecute. On 7 January, the slandered Bill contacted her lawyer, Dr. Feld.

On 22 January, Gerald Hamilton moved into Karlsruher Strasse 2, which move probably explains Christopher Isherwood’s coming to tea two days later: an appointment that piqued Hamilton to opine that Crowley kept “open house”; Crowley’s riposte: “Seems to me more like maison close [a brothel].”

A few days after taking tea with Isherwood, Crowley met Ethel Mannin while Hamilton left for London, where he would meet up with Gerald Yorke. Hamilton returned with the precious £50 on 1 February, along with a “perfectly crazy letter” from Yorke, accusing Bill and the Beast “of taking morphia &c.” Crowley attributed this to “Germer’s poison.”

JEAN ROSS

Jean Ross was a young, highly talented writer and entertainer. Having first met her on 30 November 1931, Crowley dined with Jean on 3 February. Jean is best known today for having inspired Isherwood’s fictional character “divinely decadent” Sally Bowles in his short novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The Sally Bowles of the novel, John van Druten’s play and film adaption I am a Camera, and the theater and movie musical Cabaret (played by Liza Minnelli in the 1972 movie version) was very different from the beautiful, liberated actress, dancer, singer, writer, journalist, and humorist Jean Ross. Excelling at everything she did, Jean hardly resembled the flighty Sally of the fiction. In fact, Jean felt undervalued by the identification. Sally Bowles was, she believed, colored by Isherwood’s inability to assess independence in a woman, confusing personal freedom with diminished feminine vir-tue—an error Crowley would never have made.

Contact came through Isherwood and anti-imperialist Gerald Hamilton; horrified by fascism, Jean Ross was a Communist Party member. This commitment may also have been an aspect of Crowley’s interest in her, but only an aspect, for Jean was an artist. She had played Anitra in Max Reinhardt’s 1928 production of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the Deutsches Theater, and worked as a journalist and writer of film scenarios. They probably discussed Mortadello, among other things. Jean was useful as well as attractive.

Crowley’s diary transcript gives Jean’s address as 1a “Bourmerstrasse,” Wilmersdorf. This is probably a typo for Bülow Strasse, which, though near Wilmersdorf, is actually in Schöneberg, just around the corner from Isherwood’s Nollendorfstrasse 17 address (No. 1 Bülow Strasse was on the corner with Maassenstrasse, opposite Nollendorf Platz S-bahn station). However, Gerald Hamilton’s account states that Jean Ross was living at Fraülein Thurau’s apartments, Nollendorfstrasse 17, when Isherwood moved in in December 1930, apartments immortalized in Isherwood’s Farewell to Berlin and in the musical Cabaret as the eccentric house of Fraülein Schneider.

Gerald Hamilton’s book The Way It Was with Me (1969) describes his first visit there; Jean was in the bath. She called him in for a chat while she soaked herself; gay Gerald preferred to wait outside.

It is possible Jean had since moved out or that the Bülowstrasse address was a place of work, for the street had more than its share of clubs and cabarets, including several of the most famous lesbian clubs of the period, according to lesbian writer Ruth Roellig’s 1928 guidebook, Berlin’s Lesbische Frauen (The Lesbians of Berlin), a book for which Magnus Hirschfeld, Norman Haire’s colleague, wrote the preface.

At Bülowstrasse 57 stood the Café Dorian Gray, a mixed club. Some days were reserved for men, others for women. Wednesday nights catered to sado-masochists. Fridays were “élite days” for ladies where dancing was interspersed with stage shows. Nights had themes like the improbable “Bavarian alpine festival,” probably ironical as Bavarian culture is generally inimical to north Germans.

Crowley wouldn’t have been admitted to collar and tie lesbian Lotte Hahn’s the Violetta at Bülowstrasse 37, but four hundred women members were.

Also on Bülowstrasse stood the Café O La La and the Hohenzollern Café. The former dressed up its bar staff as French maids while the latter had a homely atmosphere for long-standing couples.

Turning off Bülowstrasse brought you to Nollendorferstrasse’s continuation as Schwerinstrasse. There the Topkellar opened its doors to people seeking sex, danger, and bohemianism—not that its doors were easy to find. Visitors entered a second yard and passed through three gates before ascending a narrow staircase. Flamboyant owner Gypsy-Lotte was happy with straight men joining the fun to maintain profits and a reputation for excess, though Monday nights were women-only. English travel agents Cook’s organized midnight buses to transport thrill seekers from top hotels to the Topkellar.

On 4 February 1932, Krumm-Heller called on Crowley with the visionary novelist and occult writer Albert Christian Georg Schultz. Schultz called himself “Peryt Shou” (1873–1953). Crowley would meet Shou and Krumm-Heller again on the 11th. Schultz was someone Crowley should perhaps have cultivated for he was not only interesting in himself, with an eclectic system of neo-pagan constituents constellating his mysticism, but was also influential on other German occultists, including cofounder of the Thule Society, Walter Nauhaus, an associate of Rudolf von Sebottendorf, Turkish Freemasonry advocate and German Workers Party founder. Sebottendorf’s party was effectively hijacked and rebranded by Adolf Hitler as the NSDAP in Sebottendorf’s forced absence.

Fig. 17.1. The Topkellar, Schwerinstrasse 13 (From Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon)

Painter and poet Schultz wished to awaken a peculiarly Germanic cosmic mysticism. He believed that the Norse myths contained in the twelfth-century Icelandic Edda texts offered keys to the “coming age” compatible with Christian mysticism, equating the “Wuotan-Christ” who hung on the tree nine nights to gain his knowledge of the runes with Jesus. At least at the time he met Crowley, Shou’s ideas were not exclusively Germanic in the hostile nationalistic sense. Shou, a skillful astrologer, believed in individuals’ potential to align themselves with appropriate stellar “radiations”: the kind of thing that really puts the wind up evangelicals of “pure science” or science as a belief system. Shou visited Egypt on a number of occasions; he was greatly inspired by ancient Egyptian religion. Superficially perhaps, he had quite a lot in common with Crowley, and it is curious that in many people’s minds Crowley today stands for a similar sort of Theosophical, neo-pagan, and astrosophical synthesis as Schultz advocated. People who want that type of Crowley might look to Peryt Shou instead. Crowley himself did not cultivate the connection, any more than he took anything but a passing interest in Grosche’s Fraternitas Saturni or Krumm-Heller’s South American neo-Rosicrucianism. As far as Crowley was concerned, Thelema was the hinge on which swung the door to the spiritual future. He was irritated or amused by Theosophy’s multifarious spin-offs that flattered the vanity of their progenitors (he was not blind to the fact that the same charge could be leveled at himself). Crowley’s approach was scientific and rationalist, even though the material to which he applied this approach was anything but. His earliest and most abiding philosophical insight was that the forces discovered by science, such as Newton’s gravity, did not exist solely of and for themselves. They explained the universe as “fact” but not as “why”; mind and consciousness could not be severed from knowledge of the cosmos. This was a hotly debated scientific issue of the time, as we shall see.

By way of contrast, Crowley had tea with “Christopher” (Isherwood) on 5 February (the diary’s use of Christian name alone suggests Crowley must have liked him) in the company of Fanny, whose real name, we discover, was Peter. One wonders if Crowley showed Isherwood a pamphlet proclaiming 666 in Berlin (as prophet of the Aeon), received that day from Martha Küntzel in Leipzig. One suspects not; Crowley only discussed esoteric matters when the interlocutor expressed genuine desire for knowledge. Isherwood, as he himself confessed, was a “camera,” reflecting what he saw, an English New Objectivist. He would reflect in later years that perhaps the essence of Crowley’s enigma was that really, Crowley did not believe in anything at all, not even, perhaps, himself. This is what comes from being a camera. Isherwood could not envision that Crowley’s extreme skepticism was the door to his system.

Nevertheless, Isherwood must have been a welcome tonic, a relief from Karl Germer’s insanity. On 10 February Germer sent a blackmail postcard from Leipzig. According to the Beast, Germer had forged Crowley’s name on a document and stolen a registered letter addressed to him, c/o: Germer. Karl wanted his filthy letter of 4 January about Bill returned. That was now with the court. Crowley wrote to the district court in Leipzig in an effort to retrieve the improperly retained letter. Germer would deny all knowledge of the stolen letter.

Unable to afford the rent for the Karlsruherstrasse flat after Hamilton left for Prague on 29 February, Crowley and Bill moved into the Pension d’Este at 29 Kurfürstendamm on 2 March. A week later, Martha Küntzel wrote to Gerald Yorke (who arrived in Berlin on the 11th) about Karl’s condition:

A.C. will be very pleased to see you in Berlin again. This affair with Karl is also telling on his nerves, I think, and no wonder. I have been wondering long ago [sic] how he [AC] could stand the way Germer talked to him, or wrote to him. I suppose his never having been put in his right place encouraged him to think his letters were not read at all, so that he might say anything he liked to hurt A.C. and that’s when he overdid it.

I spoke to Dr Krumm-Heller some days ago, and he told me that he had twice offered him [Germer] a job that would have given him plenty of money. He refused and preferred to live and give! From his wife’s money, which was not a source that could run for ever. He was always busy in some way but he never worked!

He was, what we call in German a “schoolmaster,” who always seems to see before him people who need his teachings.³

Before Yorke left on 17 March he agreed to raise £500 so Crowley could pay his bills and get on with a revived campaign, in the event of Annie Besant’s demise. Crowley was premature; Annie had another eighteen months to live. Besides, an ever-increasing number of Germans were seeking salvation from another prophet. On 10 April, Paul von Hindenburg won the presidency against Hitler only after a second ballot secured a majority. A fortnight later, the Nazis took the lead in four state elections. In the Prussian state parliament, NSDAP seats rose from 6 to 162.

Crowley found a flat bei Gertrud Schonhenner at Sybelstrasse 68, which runs a block north, parallel to the Kurfürstendamm. He and Bill moved in—just—on 31 March. The previous day, in the early hours, after a fracas at Maenz, Crowley got his taste of Germany’s “coming age.” He was beaten up by a gang of ruffians in the Kurfürstendamm: “I fought like a demon, but was overwhelmed by numbers.”⁴

The assailants could have been SA brownshirts, but Crowley does not say, though “gang of ruffians” would sum them up. Bill was unharmed, but Crowley spent the day, very sore, in bed. Yorke rang: he couldn’t raise any cash.

It was now a year since Hanni Jaeger and the Beast moved into their studio and the need for money was more acute than ever.

Hamilton returned from Brussels. Perhaps he had been to the LAI secretariat in that city. Hamilton records meeting British traitor Guy Burgess in Brussels after he and Christopher Isherwood quit Berlin for Brussels in 1933. Recruited by Comintern that year, Cambridge graduate Burgess joined British Intelligence. Sympathy or support for the Soviet Union had become common among intellectuals, especially with fascism on the rise. The Comintern, Burgess believed, was more civilized than Stalin and his secret police.

Another intellectual Marxist, though hardly known as one, was young Belgian nuclear physicist Prof. Léon Rosenfeld (1904–74).

Three weeks after Crowley dined with Comintern agent Louis Gibarti, the Beast dined with Rosenfeld. The venue may have been the Clubhaus des Union-Clubs, or Humboldt University’s interuniversity club at Schadowstrasse 9, just off the Unter den Linden, close to the university and the Reichstag. Crowley had been introduced to the handsome club (designed by August Orth in 1880; now destroyed) shortly after meeting Peter Supf the previous summer. It was where university men from around Europe could meet in comfort. Crowley, a member of Trinity College, Cambridge, enjoyed its facilities.

The meetings with Rosenfeld, and later with Dutch low temperature physicist Wander Johannes de Haas (1878–1960), are intriguing. Did conversation involve the physics of the universe, politics, or both? Certainly, such contacts chimed in with Crowley’s earlier connection with Erwin Schrödinger and Einstein.

Léon Rosenfeld’s significance in the revolutionary development of Heisenberg’s, Schrödinger’s, and others’ ideas about quantum mechanics is well known. In 1932 Rosenfeld published a demonstration that Paul Dirac’s relativistic electron theory was equivalent to that of Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli.

In 1932, Rosenfeld was collaborating, on and off, with the great Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, as was physicist Felix Bloch (1905–83), who like Rosenfeld had studied in Zurich and was also Jewish. According to Bloch, who left Copenhagen in the spring, quantum physicists were in lively communication with Berlin and meeting quite frequently at colloquia in that city.⁵

DISCOVERY OF THE NEUTRON

The critical scientific event of spring 1932 was English physicist James Chadwick’s announcement on 27 February that he had discovered the neutron: the discovery that made nuclear fission possible. The neutron, having no electric charge, can penetrate an atomic nucleus: the basis of the nuclear chain reaction. Curiously, Chadwick (1891–1974) had made the discovery by bombarding beryllium (Be) with alpha particles while observing emitted radiation. Beryllium is the primary element of emerald crystals, and it is the case that the arch text of alchemical transmutation was traditionally inscribed on an “emerald tablet” (giving the text its name), which declares: “That which is below is like that which is above, to work the miracle of the one thing.” Isaac Newton’s translation of The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus is in the King’s College Library, Cambridge.

In April 1932, Cambridge physicists transmuted lithium atoms into helium atoms. Heisenberg, who had mystical tendencies, would have been amused by the “emerald tablet” coincidence; Rosenfeld would probably have not.

Anyhow, the neutron discovery was itself a bomb. Felix Bloch remembered Niels Bohr getting very excited about the discovery. Thirty-two years later, Bloch recalled Bohr in Berlin in the “early summer of 1932” telling him about it, after Bloch had moved to Leipzig, where Heisenberg was likewise fired up by the potential of the neutron discovery.

In an interview with Rosenfeld conducted in 1968, the interviewer asked him if he recalled Bohr’s Easter (7–13 April 1932) conference on nuclear physics at Copenhagen to which Chadwick was invited but could not attend.⁶

Rosenfeld, surprisingly, admitted that “most probably” he was not there. He had no recollection of it; he had “other interests.” According to Crowley’s diary, the reason is clear; Rosenfeld, like Bloch, was in Berlin.

Whether Rosenfeld’s Marxism went much further than reading at this time is unknown, but his thinking was not entirely dominated by quantum mechanics. A 1934 scientific invitation to Leningrad and its environs interested him greatly, even as his scientific colleague George Gamow (1904–68) was desperate to leave the Soviet Union with his wife. Even Rosenfeld’s conception of the principle of complementarity in quantum physics has been shown to be consistent with, even inspired by, his understanding of Marxist dialectical materialism.⁷

Rosenfeld was always critical of early and subsequent tendencies in quantum physics and among “hangers-on” to confuse planes and suggest mystical epistemologies could be justified by the new science. Nevertheless, Rosenfeld’s “materialism” allowed for the necessity of incorporating mind and consciousness into scientific knowledge. That is to say, science allows us to communicate rationally about the universe of which we are a part, but that does not mean the scientist is outside the universe and able to see it “as it is” in an ideal objectivity.

Crowley, who believed that intelligence is acquired from greater consciousness (all statements exhibit limitations of consciousness), would have found much in common with Rosenfeld here. Such a deep philosophical interest as Rosenfeld evinced would have made for a most interesting conversation with Crowley, whose own magical system has a factor of dialectical materialism about it, including his famous “0=2” formula and the symbolic figures of “Nuit” (infinite space) and “Hadit” (that which inhabits space, including motion). Universal centrism and infinite relativity are also components of the New Aeon universe. It should be remembered that Crowley was himself interested in going to Moscow to demonstrate how Soviet communism was incomplete without Thelema. And Crowley of course was at least conversant with higher mathematics. I think he would have been more interested in Rosenfeld than Peryt Shou.

A postscript. Two words from Crowley’s diary for 9 April 1932: “Rosenfeld’s exposé.” Was Rosenfeld “exposed,” or did Rosenfeld “expose” something to him? No mysticism, please.

And still no money from Yorke. After one big loan effort on Crowley’s behalf, Yorke finally threw in the towel and told Crowley that if he wanted a loan, he could come to London and organize it himself (27 May).

Crowley did not want to leave Berlin. Something had to come from all his efforts. On 2 May he received a call from a Jocelyn Walker, apparently in a position to publish books. The diary records this person’s interest in a “Sullivan book.” Given that Crowley’s friend JWN Sullivan would publish a book called Contemporary Mind in 1934, based on interviews with scientists conducted with Aldous Huxley, the book in question very likely dealt with relations between science and magick, a topic Crowley had discussed with Sullivan with a book in mind and one which he was probably prepared to discuss with physicists and psychologists whom he encountered.⁸ A book on the metaphysics of science might have been something he discussed with Rosenfeld.

Crowley obviously hoped to get some investment from the Walkers as he made several I Ching divinations on how best to approach the wealthy “Walker”*24 and went out with Walker’s family to a succession of expensive bars and clubs. Starting on 18 April at Johnny’s Night Club; the next night involved “excellent dancing” at the Biguine, near Motzstrasse in north Schöneberg; the 19th saw the party at the Silhouette Club, followed by the Eldorado. The Resi: the “strangest vulgar place” was the chosen entertainment venue for 20 April.

The Silhouette, near the Biguine, had silver lettering in rococo style above its door on the corner of Geisbergstrasse and Kulmbachstrasse, between Schöneberg and Charlottenburg. Cross-dressing in both sexes was encouraged. Visiting film stars, wealthy aristocracy, and cabaret artists rubbed shoulders with men and women in smart suits, smoking jackets, and sequined gowns, all mixing in a haze of blue cigarette and brown cigar smoke. A smaller room off the bar had a carpeted dance floor and a small orchestra. Drag acts punctuated dance sessions. It was in the Silhouette that Marlene Dietrich told composer Friedrich Höllander in 1929 that she’d been cast for the movie The Blue Angel, before ordering so much champagne the club could have bathed in it. In March 1932, Marlene was starring in a Hollywood film, X27, which Crowley saw; his comment: “Oh my Gawd!” but Bill was a big Marlene fan, and the movie was a birthday treat for her.

The Silhouette had about a year to run before the Nazis closed it.

Fig. 17.2a and b. The new Eldorado club in 192 8

Fig. 17.3. The Eldorado’s transformation into a Nazi headquarters, 1933 (From United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

The Eldorado stood at the corner of Motzstrasse and Kalckreuthstrasse, with a bright art deco sign in capitals above a painted hoarding of happy glamorous people and the statement: “HERE IT’S REAL!” What was real was its reputation. Frequented by welcome transvestites and transsexuals, customers could buy “chips.” These were not for gambling but used as exchange for dances with thrill-sating “performers” while a jazz band in evening suits played, that is until Hermann Goering ordered the club’s raid and closure in 1933. Its new owners made it their headquarters: Nazi headquarters.

The “Resi” that Crowley disliked was much bigger than the Eldorado. Perhaps that’s why it didn’t appeal: a big open space where a thousand people could dance with a glass ceiling, properly named the Residenz-Kasino at Blumenstrasse 10, by the Alexander Platz. One hundred mirrored globes were suspended above the dancers. Crowley would have hated this as kitsch and intrusive: the globes even opened and closed with the rhythm of the dance orchestra! The club’s innovation was a system of two hundred telephones (imitated in the movie Cabaret’s Kit Kat Klub) so guests could indulge in anonymous flirting and assignations. Its delights were topped by a system of pneumatic tubes for delivering presents (a choice of 135 items!). Curiously, the Resi survived the 1933 Nazi crackdown; perhaps its glitzy grossness appealed, or was it the lack of open homosexuality?

Fig. 17.4. Famed interior of the Resi (Residenz-Casino): another technically sophisticated club whose gadgetry and interior phone system connecting tables and waiter service added up to tasteless overkill. Its interior was punctuated by mirrored balls that opened like orchids as lights dimmed. The Resi survived into the Nazi era; its table-phone system inspired the Kit-Kat Club facilities in the movie Cabaret (1972). Crowley disliked the Resi.

Fig. 17.5. Transvestites at the new Eldorado (Photo by Marshall Jon Fisher)

The Walkers left on 21 April, just as Gerald Yorke turned up, for the last time. They went to the gay-friendly Voodoo’s Bar (specializing in transvestites) and to the Johanther, “where desperate bourgeois drank coffee.” Crowley did not consider himself one of them. Crowley wanted Yorke to approach Walker. He tried to, but only annoyed Walker who sensed he was being “touched” for cash.

On Sunday 8 May Crowley heard that his first wife, Rose, had died on 11 February. The once beloved “Ouarda,” Rosa Mundi, the woman who had carried the sublime message of the New Aeon from the Gods, the beautiful woman married on a whim in 1903, was dead. It must have seemed a portent, though there was a silver lining for the Beast. Trustee of the E. A. Crowley Trust, George Cecil Jones, who the previous year had resisted sending Crowley any of Lola Zaza’s trust money, changed his tune. He wrote to Yorke at 49 Oxford Mansions, W.1 about the “Crowley Settlement Trust” on 5 May, informing Yorke that “some income” would “accrue to Lola Crowley, now that her mother has died.” Mrs. Gormley had been entitled to £230 yearly, so that “if we get an S.O.S. from A.C. that he really is down and out, as you feared we might get in the near future, we shall be in the happy position of being able to provide him with the whole of the income of the Crowley Trust without leaving Lola stranded.”⁹

This move might have accounted for the £125 Yorke cabled him on 11 April. Unfortunately, he had RM 600 of debts to pay. Bill’s fur coat had been pawned a week before the money arrived. More items entered the pawnshop in May. By June, not only the financial situation was impossible, politically, the drama of the Weimar Republic had reached its final act before Hitler’s ascendancy in 1933.

On 31 May, President of the Republic Paul von Hindenburg invited Franz von Papen to succeed Heinrich Brüning as chancellor and form a government—a desperate effort to forestall Hitler’s advance. On 1st June, von Papen excluded the Nazis from his new cabinet.

If there was any truth in the French paper’s linking Crowley to Ferdinand von Bredow, Crowley’s days in Berlin were numbered, for von Papen was a rival of von Bredow’s friend, General Kurt von Schleicher (appointed chancellor after von Papen failed to form a government in November 1932). The SS would execute von Bredow in 1934. Von Schleicher, who had met Hitler secretly, considered himself Germany’s required “strong man” and thought he could exploit, then destroy, Hitler. Hitler had von Schleicher murdered in 1934.

Had Crowley’s name come to von Papen’s attention, he would probably have recalled something of Crowley’s clandestine Propaganda Kabinett work in the United States. If he found cause to suspect Crowley had colluded with either von Bredow or von Schleicher—and was in Berlin—it would be dangerous for Crowley.

Significantly, on the day Franz von Papen sat for the first time with his new cabinet (June 1, 1932), Crowley appointed his devoted U.S.– based follower, Wilfrid Talbot Smith of 1746 Winona Boulevard, Hollywood, California, as Frater Superior and OHO of the OTO in the event of his death.

On 2 June, Crowley’s phone was cut off. The next day he went to the Nicolasee Lake, southwest of Berlin, to catch the sun for 20 pfennigs. He walked home, a distance of some ten miles, to save money. The next day, Hamilton went on one of his mysterious journeys, to Stockholm, diplomatic link location with the Soviet Union. And something rather odd happened.

On Saturday 4 June, Rosenfeld brought someone to meet Crowley: professor of physics and meteorology at the University of Leiden, Wander Johannes de Haas (1878–1960). De Haas was one of the most important low-temperature physicists of the first half of the twentieth century. Crowley’s note: “Rosenfeld brought Prof. Haas, a gentleman, a scholar, and an Initiate!!!” The latter most likely meant that de Haas was a member of a Masonic or fringe Masonic order known to Crowley, or one who had simply grasped the significance of Thelema to science.

What de Haas is better known for is his work with Albert Einstein (1913–15) as Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at Berlin’s Physikalisch Technische Reichsanstalt. There, together with Einstein, he worked on the phenomenon still known as the Einstein–De Haas effect.

De Haas*25 participated in the Solvay Congresses of 1921 and 1930, received the Rumford Medal from the Royal Society of London, and was an honorary member of the Societé Française de Physique.

What might have come from such meetings had history taken a different path is meat for speculation. But time had run out. While Chancellor Brüning had banned the Nazi SA and the SS, von Papen had them reinstated on 15 June. Three days later, Crowley began packing his bags and raising cash to get back to England. Bill had been sent on in advance to London.

On Monday 20 June the Beast left Berlin. He took the train to Köln, arriving at 7:03 p.m. He rang up Walker, who said: “Come out right now.” Crowley did. They talked until 2:00 a.m., and the Walkers insisted he stay with them. Since he was driven to Köln on 22 June, the Walkers must have been living outside the city.

Crowley caught the ferry from Ostend and arrived in Dover at 7:45 p.m. He reached London at 9:20 p.m., where he was reunited with Bill and they performed Opus 132, for “Love.”

EIGHTEEN

LOST TIME

Radio is the opium of the people.

ALEISTER CROWLEY, 1932

It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio. . . . It is our dearest wish that science, industry, and the intellectual leadership of German radio from now on will follow a new path, at the end of which stands our common, great goal: One People, one Reich, one will, and a glorious German future!

JOSEPH GOEBBELS, REICH MINISTER
FOR NAZI PROPAGANDA, 18 AUGUST 1933

On 9 July 1932, the Allies, intending to ease Germany’s economic crisis, agreed in Switzerland to suspend Germany’s war debt payments. On the 26th, German war minister Kurt von Schleicher announced Germany’s readiness to rearm. Five days later, following a general election, the Nazis became the biggest party in the Reichstag, though still without an overall majority.

Despite increased power, Hitler refused to serve as vice chancellor under Chancellor Franz von Papen (13 August). On the 30th, Nazi Hermann Goering was elected Reichstag president. Losing its grip, the government planned direct presidential rule in the state of Prussia on 14 October. Unable to form a government, Franz von Papen resigned as chancellor three days later. In November, President Hindenburg suggested Hitler could become chancellor if he would combine with other parties; Hitler refused. On 6 November, federal elections showed voters had second thoughts. Nazis lost seats to the German National People’s Party (DNVP, or nationalist conservatives) and the KPD.

Nationalist General Kurt von Schleicher became chancellor on 2 December. To stoke up fears that the government had lost control and the country needed saving, the NSDAP (Nazis) increased violent demonstrations, confronted with force by the KPD. On 28 January 1933, von Schleicher resigned as chancellor. Two days later, on 30 January 1933, an anguished President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany.

Within weeks, gay clubs in Berlin were closed.

On 5 May, Hitler proposed “Eugenic Laws” to forbid Jewish and “Aryan” marriages and to begin sterilization of “undesirable types.” A sterilization program aimed at the disabled was initiated in Berlin on 25 July. A month later, it was confirmed that Nazis were transporting selected Jews to concentration camps.

On 14 October 1933, Germany left the League of Nations.

And the rest also is history . . .

Shortly before Crowley finally left Berlin, Gerald Hamilton wrote to Karl Germer from a hotel at Sellin auf Rügen (a northeast German island resort on the Baltic).

It is a long time since I have seen Mr. Crowley and I do not wish to mix in his affairs at all. He has, however, written, asking me to convey a message to you, which I am ready to do, in view of the importance he attaches to the matter. I cannot, however, act as a permanent intermediary, having really neither desire, nor leisure for such work. I feel sure you will understand this. The message is this:

He has been trying for a long time, to make Yorke get £1000 out of the family business to pay off Mrs. Cora Germer. Now Yorke’s father wants him to put all his capital into trustee’s hands [sic]. This might prevent his ever paying off the amount. Mr. Crowley feels that if you would write to Yorke at once, possibly threaten him with an injunction, this would have great effect. Crowley would also feel obliged if you would transfer all his pictures in storage into his name. [my italics]

I give you the message as it was given to me and repeat that the matter does not concern me and I have no interest in it at all. It would have been simpler for Mr. Crowley to write to you direct, but this he does not wish to do, at any rate at the present moment.¹

Crowley did write from London to Cora Germer in New York on 9 August to request she send him power of attorney to pressure Yorke into surrendering funds for her; Karl had already sent Crowley his power of attorney through an intermediary.

The effort was vain. Unwilling to face down his father’s ire over money, tired of Crowley’s criticism, and unable to reconcile himself to The Book of the Law, Yorke planned to quit the Thelemic enterprise. In September he would head for China for the foreseeable future. The Beast needed all the friends he could get and added to his letter to Cora: “What a pity that Karl wrote that vile letter and messed up things so badly!”²

In a heartfelt letter of 6 December to Germer, Bertha Busch wrote from London’s Langham Hotel, indicating a preparedness to forgive Karl his vileness, so long as he quickly remunerated her Berlin lawyer, Dr. Feld.

I have received your letter. It took a while for you to recognize me, and what’s more, you forced me despite my poverty to throw out 150 Marks. You say that it was about the cause. If it’s about the cause then one must at least be loyal to the Master. Who are A.C.’s friends? I am the only one who stands by him, my life is not easy. It is an endless struggle—not just for the work, but because I have to assert myself. My position is difficult—but if I leave A.C. in the lurch then he has no one else. There is Gerald Yorke—good intentions—but when it comes down to it he is a big coward. Regardie [Israel Regardie, AC’s secretary]—a great hanger-on—but if one demands even the simplest thing of him he lets you down. Deborah Hogg—very enthusiastic, but tries to undo everything around A.C. and myself. I sit there and smile. I know better what lies behind the mask of friendship. Many other good friends are there, but I have the feeling that no one is there who would stand by him in need. If I could believe what it says in the Bible I would have to say that Jesus had more loyal friends than A.C.

I don’t see him as a god—but as a human being there is none better. He works hard. He is always uniformly nice to me whatever cares he has and I would have to be the worst kind of person if I too were to abandon him.

You say I have learnt a lot—the only thing I have learnt is that most people are false. Loyalty is something I learnt as a child, it’s in my peasant blood.

I had four difficult weeks in Berlin. I felt like a deer hunted by a pack of hounds. Everything was against us and his life’s work was almost destroyed—but in the end I won. Only I am very worried that I won’t be able to keep my word to Dr. Feld. I owe him 160 Marks and have to pay it back as quickly as possible—I have no idea how. I am looking for an apartment. A.C. needs a home where he can rest and eat. When I have arranged that again I hope that his work is also not in vain. I hope that the libel actions go through—that’s the doorway to success—If it weren’t for these eternal money worries and he could have a few months to work in peace—then I would have no anxiety. The press won’t write against him any more. Gradually people are coming to realize that the stories are impossible. I have been through the most bitter time with him—and I hope that (the) gods will allow me to see success.

Even if an outward separation should be necessary no one can separate us—and I believe A.C. thinks the same way. Write to A.C. care of Dennes & Co., 22 Chancery Lane. A little encouragement helps a lot.

Best greetings, your B. Busch³

Crowley followed Bill’s letter up with his own, sent c/o his lawyers, Dennes & Co, on Christmas Eve:

Glad you [Germer] are seeing some light. My first and last comment on the insult is that to write as you did of any woman is blackguardly; to write as you did to the man who loved her was mere criminal lunacy. You should pay the RM150 [sic] to Dr Feld, if necessary by installments; but at least write to him that you will pay, as, owing to a mistake, some of my most valuable MSS are still in danger of seizure [my italics].⁴

Crowley was anxious about endangered property still in Berlin.

LOST PAINTINGS

Nierendorf and Porza exhibited seventy-three of Crowley’s paintings in Berlin in October–November 1931. We do not know if any were sold at the time. The pictures disappeared from view until Hamilton’s letter to Germer of 8 June 1932, whence it appears they were in storage, apparently in Germer’s name.

The next we hear of them is in a letter from Crowley to Germer of 1 May 1933, three months after Hitler became chancellor. Germer had sent Crowley Hitler’s horoscope; Crowley agreed with Germer’s assessment that it was a “horror” but felt that “Saturn in M.C. will do the trick.”

I am afraid I am in no shape to deal with MSS. in Paris or anywhere. At the moment the weather is shocking, though it might clear up in one of a dozen ways. That I’m alive at all after Yorke’s treachery and flight is a miracle. All is lost but honor—and courage—Perdurabo! [“I will endure”: Crowley’s magical motto]

I should be glad to hear of you—your news and doings and prospects. It would be very good of you to get the enclosed letters with translations to Dr Feld (Frau Busch’s lawyer in Berlin) and Knauer. (The latter has all the books, pictures, and MSS. bar the few I brought here with me.)⁵

“Knauer” refers to Gustav Knauer’s warehouse in East Berlin; Knauer specialized in art transport and warehousing. The company’s importance to art is illuminated by Martin Cruz Smith’s account of Malevich’s lost paintings in his novel Red Square, a story confirmed by Stedelijk assistant curator Frank van Lamoen. In 1951, curators from the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, tried to find fifteen of Malevich’s paintings, condemned by the Nazis as degenerate. After his 1927 Berlin exhibition, Knauer crated Malevich’s paintings for storage at Hanover’s Provinzialmuseum, awaiting Malevich’s instructions.

Returned to Berlin, but condemned as degenerate in 1933, the original Knauer crates returned to the museum and were hidden in the cellar. They were still there in 1935. Fearing danger, Hanover’s museum contacted Berlin architect Hugo Häring (1882–1958), who hid the paintings at his house at Biberach. The question for the curators in 1951 was whether the paintings were still at the Knauer warehouse, or in Hanover. Traced to Häring, they were loaned to the Stedelijk in 1956, and sold by Häring’s widow in 1958.

Such a satisfactory ending has not to date occurred in the case of Aleister Crowley’s no less “degenerate” work.

Crowley wrote to Germer on 14 June 1933:

Please tell me what Knauer wants. You might see him and come to some arrangement as you were good enough to suggest. We can hardly do anything with my stuff under present circumstances but hang on grimly.⁶

Crowley wrote to Germer from 40 Cambridge Terrace, London W2 on 11 September 1933:

I have certainly some of the “missing” stuff here: so don’t worry Schoenheimer. Frau Busch brought a good deal over here last October. Probably the Stele [Hopfer’s copy of Cairo’s Egyptian Museum’s so-called “Stele of Revealing,” or exhibit No. “666”]. I hope to be sure next week. (I am not in touch with her at the moment. But I have some stuff and a hotel has more!)⁷

How much of the “missing” stuff refers to manuscripts, and how much (if anything) to paintings is unknown.

Certainly, some of Crowley’s paintings were in Germany in 1936–37. This we know thanks to Crowley’s correspondence and conversation with Norwegian-German follower Frederic Lekve. In 1936 Lekve met Martha Küntzel, who tutored him on Thelema and presumably informed Lekve about six crates of extant artworks. He wrote to Crowley about them.

According to Crowley’s diary for 24 August 1937, Martha told him of Lekve’s trouble with the Gestapo; papers were confiscated: disquieting news confirmed by I Ching divination. Nevertheless, Lekve got to London where Crowley dined with him at the Café Royal, describing Lekve as “very rich and intelligent”:

He [Lekve] has been raided: all books and MSS. stolen: even my pictures of [the] Sahara destroyed!⁸

The next day Crowley consulted the I Ching to see if Lekve would be “killed in war within next four years.” 666 then divined the “future of the Nazi regime.” The hexagram was no. 28, Ta Kuo: “The weak beam.” The regime would not last. On 29 September, Martha sent Crowley “very bad news.” Lekve was being called back to Germany.

Since the Gestapo also questioned Martha Küntzel there is an outside possibility that the Gestapo purloined Crowley’s pictures (if indeed they were in Martha’s care in Leipzig), but there is no evidence for this.

According to William Breeze, the largest surviving cache of Crowley’s paintings was stored with other possessions at Crowley’s death in 1947. They were shipped to Karl Germer, Crowley’s successor as OTO head, in the United States. After Karl’s second wife, Sascha, died in 1975 over twenty-five pictures, in excellent condition, were held for the OTO by Phyllis Seckler (1917–2004), pupil and friend of OTO member Jane Wolfe, and wife (separated) of post-1971 OTO head Grady McMurtry.

When Phyllis tired of the paintings taking up garage space, original Church of Thelema member Helen Parsons Smith (1910–2003) offered to take them in. According to Breeze, Smith chose to sell Crowley’s artworks to collector Jimmy Page in the early 1980s, without Grady McMurtry, the head of the OTO’s knowledge. Jimmy Page holds the copyright to the paintings he bought.

It may be hoped that the possibility of bringing more of Crowley’s Porza exhibits and many other lost works to light will increase with the accomplishment of a complete catalogue raisonné of the art of Aleister Crowley. The author would very much like to spearhead a major “Porza 2” exhibition, reassembling as many of Crowley’s Berlin exhibition works as have survived. Such vital work can only increase the growing recognition of Aleister Crowley as a significant twentieth-century artist, a recognition for which Karl Nierendorf and Werner Alvo von Alvensleben paved courageously a largely untrodden path.

NINETEEN

LOST PEOPLE

You can still find people today who say things like: “Whatever else you might say, Hitler sorted out Germany’s problems.” The human mind is strange, and it is obvious that Adolf Hitler still fascinates some people to the extent that ordinary human reasoning, straightforward observation, and sensibility to others are suspended.

Something of the kind seems to have afflicted poor Martha Küntzel in her dotage. She was seventy-eight when she wrote to her “Great Brother” (Crowley) from Leipzig on 19 November 1935 to ask him why he appeared to have cut her dead. Reading her letter, the reasons for Crowley’s dismay are obvious:

Now, I earnestly beg you to let me know what is wrong with me that you cut me dead as you do. I really do not deserve such a punishment.

As to my second letter to the St. P. [Geheimen Staatspolitzei, “Secret State Police,” or Gestapo], I sent them the first Chapter of Confessions III and the Appendix [volume III in typescript (and German translation) deals with the Cairo Working, and the appendix gives the account of Liber Legis titled “Genesis Libri AL,” published in English in Book IV, part 4], both of which are written so that they will be able to follow. They could not have learnt anything through Krumm-Heller’s answers as he was evidently so frightened out of his wits—if he has any at all, which I begin to doubt—that he tried to back out of any knowledge of The Book of the Law.

About that ominous verse I wrote and explained as I told you, adding that they would be able to see how nearly impossible it was to understand Liber Legis in the MSS I enclosed, and quoted that verse from the Book: “There is a great danger in me, for who does not understand these runes will make a great miss.” Thus far, for they would not know what to do with the rest.

You know from my letter that they [the Gestapo] had also expressed their astonishment as to my being such a staunch National Socialist [Nazi] and yet in connection with you. To that I answered also. To the quotation of the above verse I added that I myself was firmly convinced of that Book’s immeasurable value, but that I was afraid that it would be left to the coming generation to understand it fully which will be better prepared in their minds; “for if it is containing the leading Law for the new Æon,” I continued, it can reveal itself only gradually with the development of the True Will of the people. Thereto the beginning has been started by the “Führer.” Any great revolution of mind develops from a germ-cell in which the very first beginnings are being born, grow and, in the course of time, may become a world-moving Work that will raise all mankind to a higher level, a higher stage of evolution. Such a germ cell were the “Seven” of the NS [National Socialist] movement. Their energy was Adolf Hitler, the man chosen by Providence, because he was the Only one who possessed the qualities for this Great Work; he was born for it.

In the same way the Master Therion [Crowley] has been chosen by Providence to proclaim a Law which has for its aim the spiritual awaking [sic] of mankind, because he was the proper human instrument for Providence at the turn of the Æon. Do you understand now why I can be NS [National Socialist] with my whole soul, and yet be in connection with Therion from whom I first heard this Law of Liberty? And whose works are only aiming at the spiritual awakening and revival of mankind, at their freeing themselves from the slavery of an alien will and anything else alien to their inner being?¹

Crowley often wondered why so many of his most promising followers fell by the wayside, but the case of Martha Küntzel was unusual even in his broad experience of human folly. The idea of her sending his works to the Gestapo for their enlightenment must have left him more than unusually breathless. Only nine months before, the Gestapo had arrested Karl Germer.

Astonished by Martha’s insisting on replies to evermore fanatical letters, Crowley cut the painter on 10 May 1939:

I have your letters of March 28th and April 25th and 1st May, and I can make sense out of none of them.

[. . .] You make fun of Roosevelt, but Roosevelt can send four thousand bombers over Germany within the first week of the war which we are now expecting to begin about the third week in June. Over there you have no idea what the world at large is thinking. [. . .]

As for the ravings about the Jews, they are simply unintelligible. Almost the whole of life in Germany above brutality, stupidity and cruelty, servility and bloodthirst, was Jewish. Germans are as far below Jews, generally speaking, as monkeys below man; but I have always been fond of monkeys and I do not want to offend them by comparing any German to one.

These remarks, stated in comparatively direct language, are intended to express the general feeling of people outside Germany. There will be no second Versailles—there will be Armageddon. The Hun must be wiped out. The Hun will be wiped out.

I hear that you have a number of “Thelema Buecher.” If you have, will you send them to: M. Van De Graaf-Dopere, 53, Rue Malibran, Bruxelles [a Belgian esoteric bookshop].²

According to Frederic Lekve, Martha died on 8 December 1942 at a convalescent home for retired teachers at Bad Blankenburg, southwest of Leipzig in Thuringia. She was eighty-five, and senile.

BEFORE HITLER WAS, I AM

Martha Küntzel seemed to want two messiahs; as far as Crowley was concerned there could be as many prophets as might emerge, and many of them, likely as not, would be mad; but there was only one “prophet of the lovely Star” and that was the Beast. Unfortunately, in making his case he used a striking phrase that folk who do not read carefully what is in front of them take as a messianic conflation of Crowley and Hitler. The phrase appeared in a popular newspaper article about Crowley’s life (Sunday Dispatch, 18 June 1933), after six months of Hitler’s chancellorship when Hitler and his party’s so-called Aryan swastika symbol were much in the news.

At birth I [Crowley] had three of the distinguishing marks of a Buddha. I was tongue-tied, I had a characteristic membrane which necessitated an operation, and over the centre of my heart I had four hairs curling from left to right in the exact form of a Swastika.

Before Hitler was, I am.

It will be noted that the context is Crowley’s claim to infant characteristics of an enlightened one (Buddha). Before Hitler, that was the context in which Hindus, Theosophists, and orientalists understood the Sanskrit word “svastika.” Variously translated, its etymology coalesces around the idea of a symbol of health or auspiciousness: “good being.” Like the old pentagram, which was also a symbol for health, these things are distorted by those whose respect or capacity for truth is limited.

What Crowley was saying was: “you know this symbol from Hitler, but its true meaning goes back before him, and will go on after him.” There are subtleties too. He speaks of Hitler already in the past tense and himself in the present, but no ordinary present. There is another layer. The “I am” is undoubtedly biblical, having to do with the “I am the way, the truth, and the life” style of statement found in the Gospel of John, a work which Crowley understood as something of a treatise on raja yoga (“I and my Father are one” = Samadhi). The Greek of, say, “I am the Door” is the emphatic egō eimi: I, I AM, the idea of the essential “I” is doubled for force. In the context of “Before Hitler was, I am” then, the essential being of “the man Crowley” is eternal and divine: the “I AM,” not to be confused with the transitory “ego.” Finding the True God in the being of the individual, or, better, through the being of the individual is what spiritual initiation is all about, and what Crowley taught to his students as “the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.” And yes, there is the jibe too: “don’t waste your time and life on Adolf, who is a passing thing, find the eternal Self, so that you too can say, and understand: ‘Before Hitler was, I am.’”

Crowley was thinking of an antidote to the Hitler hysteria that was spreading like a contagion through the world at that time, finding adherents in otherwise civilized countries. And one last point: Crowley did not believe in Theosophical root races or theories of master races; he took individuals as he found them and recommended each master himself, whatever their “nationality.” Putting faith in some theory about old “Aryans” was no way forward. There never was an Aryan race; it was a Sanskrit word for “high born,” aristocrats. The theory of an Aryan race was born in innocence in the mind of an English scholar in Calcutta in the nineteenth century, so Hitler, in his ignorance, thought the swastika symbolized Aryan Man.³ Hitler did not have a noble bone in his body. How easily people are deceived, when they want to be!

Crowley made his thoughts on Hitler very clear throughout the thirties to Karl Germer, who, like all Germans, was profoundly unsettled and confused by what was happening. A fortnight after the newspaper article appeared Crowley wrote to Germer:

No one in England has any illusion about H[itler]. “Mad Dog” is a complete description. There must be any amount of secret discontent in every class, and this may lead to civil war. If not, if he succeeds in forging a one-pointed weapon, this can only lead to foreign war. There is no other policy in sight, even as a dream! And now he’s definitely antagonized the Pope—Quem Deus vult perdere—[dementat prius; “Those whom God wills to destroy, are first made mad”].⁴

A week later:

What we object to [in Hitlerism] is the attempt to destroy the individual will, the imposition of the uniform. E.G. [For example] I quite agree that marriage is a useful institution; but it becomes a vile offence if people are to be bullied into it. [. . .] I detest oppression. [. . .] But I base most of my objection on H[itler]’s demoniac foaming-at-the-mouth expression. I like people who smoke and drink; if they scream and swear instead, I bar them.⁵

Crowley’s comments a few days after the famous Munich Chamberlain-Hitler “Peace in our time” deal of 29 September 1938 show a mature and well-informed grasp of the reality of the international situation and of its future:

I do not think it is peace at all, and I do not see the slightest reason for altering my view on Hitler. I do not recall any historical event which would justify us in supposing that Hitler’s work would be in any way permanent. My view is that he is driven from one desperate adventure to another by the necessity of continually demonstrating to the un-thinking section of the German people, that he is a great and successful man.

Of course, I have always considered him a prophet in the Old Testament sense of the word, a more or less inspired madman who brings about the things that he prophecies, or desires, by exciting mass hysteria. These tactics are successful in these latter days of education, which has robbed men of the power to think for themselves. The Independence of the Press which was in the early days a safe-guard, is now completely destroyed, and sober opinion has hardly any chance to express itself at all.⁶

Germer replied that, despite his outrages to civilized behavior—of which he had the worst possible personal experience—Hitler had still righted some old territorial wrongs and unreasonable post-war impositions long ignored. Crowley would have none of it:

Your long letter was so sane, and revealed such depth of thought with such nobility of character that I was overjoyed. I sent it on to [Sir] Percy Harris [“Chief Whip” of the Parliamentary Liberal Party], who was much impressed.

But you are all wrong. H[itler]. is making slaves to rule slaves. There is no room for any star in his system. His cosmos is based on the false unity of the “State” which is like Daath, not on the [Sephirotic] Tree [of Life] at all. He denies individual supremacy of Godhead, and he and his will crash. So shall I, unless I can take the “r” out of crash within a day or two.⁷

Crowley looked at events from a far higher perspective:

I don’t think you understand my point of view about the political situation.

The whole thing is a function of the New Aeon. All these ala-rums and excursions are the birth throes. And I don’t think that you are right either in supposing that Hitler has done Germany any good. I think that, on the contrary, he has run Germany right into the earth. He has destroyed all the cash and credit that remained, and has thoroughly alarmed France, England, and America.

You talk about Versailles [the 1919 Versailles peace treaty imposed heavy war reparations and territorial losses on Germany] as if it had ever existed; but it never did. From the day it was signed all sensible men realized that the terms were impossible. The treaty created a great deal of sympathy, and you were just beginning to get out of the mess, thanks to people like [chancellors] Stresemann and Brüning, when the Brown Shirts [Nazi “SA”] overthrew the Reich. What we absurdly call the “Cabinet” [British council of ministers] is meeting today and is bound to initiate decisive action, which will certainly mean rearmament. Our old umbrella merchant [“umbrella man” was a nickname for Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain] will probably try a lot more of his nonsense, but in the end it will mean a speed up in armaments everywhere, with the final crash liable to arrive at any moment. I think we are partly at the mercy of lunatics and partly at the mercy of accidents. [U.S. President] Roosevelt and Lloyd George made good speeches.⁸

Before Hitler drew the world into a war that would leave Germany flattened, he had already wasted the culture of the country.

The fate of Karl Germer was in some respects not untypical. In 1933, Cora Germer went to the United States while Karl moved to England. When the British Home Office refused to extend his temporary visa, he returned to Leipzig to visit a relative in early 1935. He was arrested and handcuffed by the Gestapo without explanation on 2 February. His first week spent in a Berlin prison with the lowest criminals culminated in five hours of fierce interrogation. Not until the 18th did he know his “crime,” which, it transpired, was that he had been in touch with “High-Grade” Freemasons abroad; in particular, “highgrade Freemason Crowley.” He was specifically accused of disseminating Crowley’s teachings. Karl was taken to Columbia House, a Berlin concentration camp, and subjected to atrocious treatment by SS guards while in solitary confinement for four and a half months, forbidden to read. From strict solitary confinement, he was put on “Rigorous Arrest” for complaining about a guard. The punishment: eight days on bread and water and hard boards. On 30 April he was accused of operating a web of agents and having a factory for making false passports.

Germer was in Columbia House when it was filled with homosexuals and transvestites imprisoned after the “Night of the Long Knives” when, to please the German army, Hitler murdered political rivals and destroyed Ernst Rohm’s SA in June–July 1935.

After an intervention by the U.S. consul, Germer was sent to Esterwegen concentration camp, constructed on bogs near the Dutch border, described as “one of the worst camps in Nazi Germany.”⁹ There he encountered “unbelievable terror” among the twelve hundred prisoners. He was detailed to work in the latrines with four others, including Dr. Leber, Socialist member of the Reichstag accused of being a “race polluter,” and a Jehovah’s Witness (a forbidden religion). Accused of obstinately refusing to tell the truth, his treatment worsened. The SS demanded he admit to being a Freemason; he was not.

Thanks to Cora’s efforts, he saw Berlin’s U.S. consul and thereafter escaped into Belgium in October 1935. With a Belgian refugee passport he entered England. Continual visa nightmares blighted Germer’s next five years. He worked successfully for an engineering firm in Ireland but the German ambassador to Dublin objected to his being in Ireland; the government refused him an Irish resident’s visa. Much of his work necessitated business in Belgium. When the Germans invaded Belgium on 10 May 1940, the Belgians arrested Germer then handed him to the French who put him in a concentration camp. His treatment in French concentration camps involved atrocities highlighted in U.S. newspapers. Germer noted that the camps contained many Jews who, to begin with, were ready and willing to fight for France against Germany, until a dose of French treatment turned the prisoners—many of them women and children—against their “hosts.” Germer was lucky to get out alive. He did so on 1 February 1941, thanks to Cora. He left the French hell for New York. He stayed in the United States for the rest of his life, a life deeply troubled by the fact that J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI persistently sought (but did not find) evidence that Germer was a Nazi sympathizer and spy, and that his religious philosophy was immoral.

Not everyone who had participated in Crowley’s Berlin experience lived to see the worst.

The disturbed young artist Hanni Jaeger, aged 21, muse of at least two poets and several artists, boarded the St. Louis in Hamburg on 22 November 1931 and arrived in New York on 3 December. Her home address on the passengers list was that of her parents: 1940 Laguna Street, Santa Barbara, California. According to the US City Directories, she still lived at this address in 1932. Hanni may have returned to Berlin in 1932. My best information is that she went to Portugal that year and soon after took her own life.*26 She left a genuine suicide note. It has not survived. Apparently Hanni was suffering beyond endurance psychological miseries that in her severe depression she attributed to her father’s oppressiveness. Crowley I think had recognized that she belonged in a different era.

Despite Peter Winter’s being the Weimar Republic’s most in-demand cabaret composer (as Marcellus Schiffer), he suffered from a chronic depression exacerbated by the gathering Nazi storm that threatened his, and so many others’ life’s work (Peter was Jewish). He took an overdose of sleeping tablets in 1932.

Crowley had respect for three psychologists: the early Freud, Carl Jung, and Vienna-based Alfred Adler. Adler impressed Crowley greatly; he had “common sense.” In 1934, the Austrian Nazis overthrew the Austrian Republic and abolished educational reform, which included Adler’s clinics that provided child guidance, on account of Adler’s Jewish heritage (despite conversion to Roman Catholicism). In 1934 he and his wife officially left Austria for a professorship at the Long Island School of Medicine.

Tormented by the Nazis, who despised the art he loved, Karl Nierendorf left Germany in 1936 to establish a gallery in New York, popular with émigré artists. His brother Joseph stayed with the Berlin gallery until 1939 when he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and the business closed. Dying intestate in 1947, Karl’s estate was confiscated because Nierendorf had only German heirs. The Guggenheim thus acquired the estate in 1948 for $72,000. It included more than a hundred fifty works by Paul Klee.

And what of Nierendorf ’s clients?

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s paintings were “exhibited” in the Nazis’ 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition. In 1941 he was forbidden to paint absolutely. Georg Scholz’s works were also condemned at the Nazi exhibition-pillory. Otto Dix, who shared something of Crowley’s corrosive sarcasm and black humor, was declared a Degenerate Artist after the Nazis’ ascendancy, dismissed from his Dresden Academy teaching post, and, like Scholz, forbidden to paint in 1939.

To be called “Degenerate” by the Nazis must surely be a badge of honor. Adalbert Trillhaase, whose work Nierendorf compared favorably to Crowley’s, received the honor in his turn. Nazi dismissals of “degenerate art” must make us rethink what we understand by low British journals’ persistent description of Crowley as degenerate.

Otto Dix painted The Art Dealer Alfred Flechtheim 1926, an unflattering portrait of a man who had put Expressionism and Cubism on the global map with more than a hundred fifty exhibitions that brought him under the hateful eye of the Nazis. Forced to divorce his wife (for her own sake) and flee Germany in 1933, Flechtheim was pilloried as “The Jew,” “the head manager” of Degenerate Art at the Nazis’ 1938 Düsseldorf Degenerate Art exhibition.

Stolen by Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, significant numbers of Flechtheim’s and his clients’ works came eventually into the possession of New York’s MoMA, a direct result of the Nazi-backed “fence” system operated, under duress, by Flechtheim’s former exhibition manager, Curt Valentin. Valentin established a New York gallery that sent profits to Germany in exchange for “Degenerate Art” to sell. Flechtheim died broke in London in 1937. Attempts by his and George Grosz’s families to obtain reparation from museums have so far failed.¹⁰

Between 1927 and 1929, the PORZA Association grew from a dream into an international movement to help intellectually independent, creative people, establishing nonprofit offices and galleries across Europe (the Paris gallery was represented by industrial designer Jacques Vienot, 1893–1959, for Porza’s last exhibition in 1939, before the Nazis invaded France in 1940).

With a brief like that, it is not surprising von Alvensleben came under Nazi scrutiny, even as inflation depressed his fortune. They seized Alvo’s mother’s home in Darmstadt. Stored at a depot, his furniture, library, archives, and images would be destroyed by an American bomb during World War Two. Perhaps some of Crowley’s lost Berlin paintings were obliterated there.

Alvo took Swiss nationality. Fortunes dwindling, he eventually moved with his wife, the Baroness Gisela von Bothmer (1893–1982), to a rented house and plot in Torricella, Italy. There they raised a large, happy family by selling berries, flowers, and vegetables. Kindly, handsome gentleman Alvo died in Bioggio on the Swiss side of the border with Italy in 1962.

Another man who did not dismiss Crowley was Monty Jacobs, son of the English merchant Henry Jacobs and his wife, Laura Solomon. Jacobs offered a short-story avenue for Crowley with publishers Ullstein after Crowley’s exhibition in November 1931. When the Nazis took power in 1933, Jacobs was forced from his position as literary editor but allowed to work as a journalist on the Vossische Zeitung until March 1934 when the paper was banned; after that, work was hard to come by. At the end of 1938 Jacobs migrated with his family via great hardships through Switzerland to England. He taught at the University of Birmingham and was about to work for the Foreign Office on German re-education when he died in London on 29 December 1945, aged nearly seventy.

Jacobs’ colleague Fritz Götz was deported to the Dachau concentration camp near Munich in 1933. He managed to flee to France. In 1938 he migrated to Palestine. Götz died in Tel Aviv in 1957.

Ullstein, the Jewish-owned publisher that had employed Jacobs and Götz, and which had done so much to foster civilization, charity, and tolerance in Berlin, was “Aryanized” in 1934.

The Berliner Tageblatt had been founded by Jewish philanthropist Rudolf Mosse. Mosse’s daughter married Hans Lachmann, who was running the empire when the Nazis came to power. Goebbels had his eye on the Berliner Tageblatt, accusing it of “Jewish intellectualism” for criticizing the NSDAP. Hans Lachmann-Mosse dismissed Jewish editor in chief Theodor Wolff, who fled by plane to the Austrian Tyrol. The Nazis took the paper over in 1933 but allowed it to forego Nazi propaganda in order to give foreigners the impression of a “free press.” Where did that leave Günther Stein, sometime friend of Crowley and Hanni? Nazi persecution of Jews led him to migrate to England where he wrote books on China and Japan, and was China correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and Christian Science Monitor. In the 1950s there were reports that Stein had worked for the Soviet “Sorge” spy ring during the 1930s and 1940s.

As we have seen, the Nazis hated many things. Among their objects of hate were Theosophists and Anthroposophists. Readers may recall Dr. Ernst Christian Heinrich Peithmann, known in neo-Gnostic circles as Patriarch Basilides. On 10 March 1933, having fallen foul of the Nazis, Peithmann fled back to Webster, South Dakota, where he had previously emigrated. In 1934, according to South Dakota’s Hutchinson Herald, “Rev. E. C. H. Peithmann” participated in the revival of the Webster Knight of Pythias Lodge in that state. Devoted to chivalrous ideals, the knights of Pythias had, in 1864, become the first fraternal organization to receive a charter under an Act of the United States Congress.

A very different fate awaited John Maria Verweyen, German philosopher, Freemason, and, from 1928, Secretary General of the Theosophical Society German Section, a position formerly held by Rudolf Steiner after the German branch of the Theosophical Society was founded in October 1902.

Verweyen returned to the Roman Catholic Church in 1936 after witnessing the canonization of martyr St. Thomas More in Rome.

Verweyen became an outspoken resistor of Nazi ideologies, particularly their savage anti-Semitism. The Gestapo monitored him. Nazis seized his books after publication, books like Back to Christ, The Life and Mysteries, and Homecoming.

On 27 August 1941 Verweyen was arrested during one of his lecture tours and imprisoned in Berlin without charge. On 23 May 1942 he was transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he offered pastoral care and taught foreign languages to the Polish, Ukrainian, French, Dutch, and Yugoslav prisoners. His contemplative faith brought comfort to prisoners.

In 1945 the camp was evacuated and prisoners were force-marched 300 miles to Bergen-Belsen death camp. Verweyen had been giving his bread to fellow prisoners and was emaciated but insisted on accompanying prisoners. On arrival the commandant told them they had come to die, as they were useless for work. Verweyen was put into a typhus-infected prison block. Sick victims had ropes tied around their arms so that when they died they could be dragged to the ovens. Twenty days before British troops liberated the camp on 15 April 1945, Verweyen succumbed to typhus. John Maria Verweyen is a Nazi-resisting hero of faith.

Look again at Crowley’s painting Mali and Igel from the Porza exhibition. Mali and Igel, you will recall, was a thriving free-woman, bisexual, and lesbian club. It would not survive the Nazis. Claudia Schoppmann has tried to discover what happened to Mali and Igel.¹¹

“Mali” was club owner Elsa Conrad’s nickname. The “hedgehog” was her girlfriend. She had a crewcut. Denounced as a lesbian by a lodger in 1937, Elsa was arrested and sent to Moringen women’s camp in Prussia where she was also accused of concealing that she was half Jewish, of having an affair with Rudolf Hess, and of listening to the BBC. After a year in Moringen, the Gestapo considered what to do with her. The “hedgehog,” who was not Jewish, appealed for Elsa’s release. Elsa’s detention only ended on condition that she and the “hedgehog” immediately emigrate. Mali and Igel took a boat to Nairobi during the anti-Jewish Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 when synagogues and Jewish businesses were torched and smashed all over Germany. Ninety-one Jews were killed and thirty thousand were sent to concentration camps.

Berlin’s synagogues were erased from maps.

Mechthild Grossmann played “Elsa Konrad” in the German film Nowhere in Africa, which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002.

After a café conference with the Schiffers with Jacques Krako on 21 October 1931, Crowley mentioned meeting “one Otto at Herr Bender’s.” This possible reference to Bender’s fellow actor Otto Wallburg (1889–1944) might seem a long shot were it not the case that Crowley was seeing films starring people he was being introduced to. He saw Wallburg in Wer nimmt die Liebe Ernst? (Who Takes Love Seriously?), Der Kongress Tanzt (The Congress Dances), and Wochenend im Para-dies (Weekend in Paradise).

After the Nazis took over UFA and canceled Otto’s contract, Wallburg escaped Germany to work in Jewish cabaret in Amsterdam. Arrested when the Germans invaded Holland, Otto Wallburg was sent to Auschwitz Berkenau, Poland, where he was murdered in the gas chamber on 29 October 1944.

And Jacques Krako of A & Co., independent banker of Jägerstrasse 11, Berlin, since 1920, a man interested in Crowley’s business potential at the time of the Porza exhibition. Forced because of his Jewish blood to leave Germany for Amsterdam, he, like Wallburg, was arrested there and transported to Auschwitz.

Aged sixty-two, Jacques Zhak Krako was murdered at Auschwitz on 11 October 1944. Jacques Krako was one of about 1.3 million people murdered at Auschwitz by gassing, starvation, and physical and mental abuse. About 90 percent of the victims were Jewish.

TWENTY

REBIRTH—THE SPIRIT CAN RETURN

A funny thing happened on the way to the end of this book. I blew the dust off my old diaries of Berlin sojourns during the 1980s and early 1990s. Therein I was astonished to find this long-forgotten entry from the second week of July 1987, over a quarter of a century ago:

Woke up this morning finally about midday [at Alt Moabit apartments; formerly an SS brothel]. Slowly into action—changing cash at Zoologische Garten—seeing Heinz [friend and host, Heinz Reinhoffer]. Spent a truly superb afternoon sitting outside café by Morgenweld [Kreuzberg sci-fi/fantasy bookshop run by Heinz] reading The Widow’s Son (“Illuminatus II”—Robert Anton Wilson) full of P2 Banco Ambrosiana Weishaupt eighteenth-century conspiracy, Blood & Grail &c &c., while the Sky went dark and a TERRIFIC sturm [storm] grew up—fantastic lightning, cataclysmic thunder, heavy rain. Very exhilarating in conjunction with rich Beaujolais!

On way back [to Alt Moabit] with Heinz, we went via Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin in this amazing tropical greyness—so conducive to dreaming. I said that the people running the show [DDR–communist East Germany] must be insane &c. [I was looking directly at the No Man’s Land between the Walls dividing two Berlins]. I said no surrealist could envision such a thing—that communist governments are the most corrupt, vile, selfish, especially mean bastards on Earth.

Heinz said he’d seen a cartoon that showed East German tanks going into Moscow to stop the [Gorbachev] “revolution”!! Terrific stuff to think about at Friedrichstrasse [S-bahn station marking border of east and west]. We thought Gorbachev’s life must be in real danger [in August 1991 Russian President Gorbachev was kidnapped in an abortive coup].

Walking back from the S-bahn to Moabit down a wide, empty tree-lined street, once the center of Berlin, my head was filled with images from The Double-Headed Eagle [Lutz Becker’s 1973 documentary about Hitler’s rise to power]—Buster Keaton in 1920s Berlin; the maze of overhead trains; the working girls in musicals getting up smiling, singing for “ein richtig Mann”! while all the time, through the dreaming, Hitler rises to cast a pall over all. Amazing images to imagine within a stone’s-throw of the Reichstag on one side and the SS brothel of Moabit on the other.

We talked of Crowley in Berlin, his exhibition, obsession with a German art student Hanni [Jaeger] who killed herself (another “borderline” case?), his psychedelic art expo. Talked about this seventy-year-old man [Mr Schikowski] who runs the famous occult bookshop we’re visiting tomorrow—to see him.

Did he meet Crowley? Surely there’s a book in this subject—Crowley in Berlin. Could be very exciting book indeed with interviews with “survivors,” pictures, legacy &c &c. Very exciting.

I hope you can imagine what a shock it was for me to read this entry after twenty-six years! I had no idea the seed for this book had been planted so long ago. And in precisely the right place too. Amazing.

There was some deep juxtapositioning going on in my imagination to bring together so many elements into a late afternoon’s conversation. I had no conscious thought of the prophecy of Ezekiel 14:21, for example, about the “noisome beast” stalking the ruins of Jerusalem after God’s “sore judgments” on the Great City:

For thus saith the Lord GOD; How much more when I send my four sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence, to cut off from it man and beast?

No Man’s Land . . . Aleister Crowley, the self-proclaimed “wanderer of the waste.”

I think now, recollecting in tranquillity, that I was envisioning, as I gazed into the “belly of the beast” that was the mind-set and circumstances that walled Berlin in twain in 1961, that there had always been another choice. There had been at least one man, thirty years before the Wall went up, with an alternative message to the prophetic extremes of National Socialism, or “fascism” on the one hand, and “international socialism,” or communism on the other.

It is a strange thing that though we have now seen Crowley really present in the Berlin of 1930–32, have we not also seen a “man apart,” someone who doesn’t quite fit in: somehow above it all, even oddly timeless? He is there, all right, super vivid in the streets and clubs, in the places of the poor and the powerful, but he seems rather alien too, sometimes almost a cutout: “a noisome beast” from another world perhaps, a “kerux” or herald of something awful to come, and something greater too. Conventional history ignores esotericism and has long since airbrushed Crowley out of the picture: it’s all been Isherwood, cabaret, and Hitler—until now.

Berlin came back of course. You can’t keep a great city like that down forever; even though it came back in two mismatched parts and the wounds are not all healed. And Berlin came back in so many other ways. The extraordinary modernity of Weimar Berlin, though crushed, obliterated, scattered; it returned to the world. Its amazing art and cinema, so free, so heavy, so ahead of its time, so intense, contradictory, and above all, intelligent and real: much of it returned in the 1950s and ’60s and beyond with film noir, “neo-realism,” the pop-art explosion, New Wave, and the punk aesthetic that seemed so utterly at home in Berlin when I first stayed there in 1983.

The steel and glass modernity, the Bauhaus principles: all of that took Manhattan and the four corners of the world. The cellar music with the political message, the sexual liberties, the dark humor . . . just think of the 1950s film-musical; think of The Doors and the pre-fame Beatles. It took the German experience to make them, of course.

Even the New Objectivity is now on everyone’s lips. That whole thing about “being cool”; well, you can see they’d got there long ago in Berlin, and with all the consequences: a coolness that can turn very cold and indifferent, merely reflective, heartless, fearful of looking inside, abstracted from reality; passing by on the other side, like the tarts in Dix’s picture, ignoring the crippled vet: like “global-culture” advertising. Superfice for philosophy and technology for religion: all clean lines, matching opacities. Yes, we can see all this today reborn. And the power of sport, and the media, and the powerbrokers trying to appear “men and women of the people,” cheering on the games before heading back to gated enclaves.

And the post-war housing ideas; blocks for the poor, spaced apart in rows and horseshoes, the “expanding homes” for the aspiring middle class. . . . Yes, it’s all there, living among us: the beast in Berlin is our own beast.

And when we think of the gay scene that throve in Berlin: it thrives across the “free world,” and is again perhaps the first lighthouse of liberty for all. We know that when gays are picked on, other freedoms will go too. If you can’t be free to be the person you’re born to be, what kind of freedom are we talking about?

Yes, look around and you will see a shard or two from the shattered Berlin of the Weimar period.

But again, is Aleister Crowley still outside? Ever outside: the noisome beast?

It might be observed that Crowley was quite right in a letter of the period to Regardie to suggest that it was not the time to communicate via painting and literature, that it was better simply to state, and state again: “Do what thou wilt.” In spite of Crowley’s extraordinary efforts, his amazing flowering as an original artist in the one place with the eyes to see, the Porza exhibition, as far as we can tell, did very little for him at the time, and the art world has conveniently forgotten the event ever took place, so filled is that scene with predictable variations on established opinion: a veritable inquisition of soft-speaking, hardheaded defenders of the Art Faith: exponents of an “art history” so easy to learn, so ultimately tedious.

There can be very little doubt that had the politics of Germany been very different, Crowley might be known today primarily as an artist, and—who knows?—even a screenwriter. But then, had the politics been different, it might not have mattered.

Crowley was an artist. Nierendorf and von Alvensleben and Crowley’s true friends knew it. It has been taken away from him, like practically everything else he ever owned or could justly lay claim to, but it is so. One is tempted to agree with Bertha Busch’s letter to Germer. She did not see him as a god, but as a man—and as such, she knew no better. And he had all the loyal friends great men can usually expect. And all the great vices that great men will have: too great for the “politically correct” who loathe anything greater than themselves: which leaves much room for loathing.

So, should the Beast have got up on his soapbox and declared the Law for all?

The trouble was partly that Crowley was a reluctant prophet, and he had left it rather late in the day, given the volume of the Nazi and communist rants. As he would say, the role of prophet of the New Aeon was simply an office, and for him personally, “simply a nuisance.” Something amazing had happened to him in Cairo in 1904 and he had to live with it. His Holy Guardian Angel, Aiwass, had become a lodger in his life—but Aiwass would disappear from time to time and not come home, even when called.

Crowley rejected the idea of a religious party, or political cult following. In his Konx Om Pax (1907), he had written:

It’s only too easy to form a cult,
To cry a crusade with “Deus Vult” . . .
A pinch of Bible, a gallon of gas,
And I, or any otherguess ass,
Could bring to our mystical Moonlight Mass
Those empty-headed Athenians.

The “following” wasn’t worth the effort, but every so often he felt it was incumbent on him to declare the Law, and people came, though few for long. Is it surprising? Did he want them? The message of The-lema was one, principally, of self-reliance and “mind your own business”; find your “God” and live. “Every man and every woman is a star.” It was fundamentally individualistic, the very essence of individualism, and it is always surprising to individualists just how quick individuals are to throw away their individuality into a collective movement; it takes the weight off the shoulders! The point is that most people do not know what “being an individual” means. The first thing is: you may not be very popular, if “being true to yourself ” is your watchword. Individuals don’t go round putting their arms round each other and hugging and kissing at the drop of a hat. Authenticity and sincerity count far more. An individual works things out for himself or herself and does not fall for propaganda, lest he fall prey to his—or her—own.

Anyhow, Thelema was and is a message for those who are looking for it, or know it already. To the end of his days, Crowley believed that the transformation of the Thelemic principle into a workable political system was a gargantuan task. I’m sure Crowley himself would endorse the idea that it would not have done for him to mount a podium in the Botanical Gardens of Berlin University and call for votes for The-lema! Thelema is a magical principle, best practiced by the individual for the individual. It is not for Thelemites to thrust Thelema on the “masses,” because to the Thelemite, who is not selling anything, there are no “masses.” Every man and every woman is a star.

Had the broad mass of voters in 1932–33 looked to themselves, removing faith and trust from the “Big Claimers”—Hitler and Communist Utopia—they might have come to the sensible conclusion that politically, they were better off with something that gave them some measure of personal freedom—as Thomas Mann maintained. Had the Social Democratic center held, and held its nerve, and had there not been so much duplicity from misguided army figures such as von Schleicher, Germany, and the world, could have avoided the worst. At least for long enough for a realignment. I suspect Crowley would like to have seen a socially more liberal, conservative centrist party that commanded respect, but few conservatives in Germany at the time could speak to the people sincerely in common cause. Bizarrely, one of the chief attractions of Hitler was his perceived “sincerity,” he seemed to put Germany first. People could not see, or chose not to see, that “his” Germany was simply not theirs. Foolish men and women thought they could manipulate Hitler and get rid of him when the time came.

I think Crowley knew his time had not come. The odds against him were massive. It would take a war, perhaps, to remove them. He did what he could, with a few pfennigs here and there. What is Art in the face of force, or massed ignorance?

There are three other points to consider in understanding why Crowley simply could not market Thelema politically.

First, Crowley was seeking the unity of the world’s esoteric organizations around Thelema. The theory went like this: from organized spiritual undercurrents working in accordance with truth, society would eventually acquire the “message” via the collective subconscious. That is to say, Crowley understood Thelema as an evolutionary inevitability; it expressed the True Will of the species at its root. As in individual initiation, before direct communication with the True Will is enjoyed, the ego must pass through the ordeal of the Abyss. The ego of the “Old Aeon” likewise had to be surrendered, or destroyed, that a higher unity might be achieved: the work of centuries.

In point of fact, when we look at the last seventy years or so, we can see much Thelemic consciousness becoming accepted as the norm. Change does not have to be labeled “Thelemic” to be so; therein subsists the subtlety of spiritual revolution, as opposed to the violent, material fantasy kind that appeals to insecure youth with little to lose. In the UK, for example, the 1944 Butler Education Act enshrined the idea that state education be directed to bringing forth the authentic talents of the pupil. We have seen in countries where this principle has not been enacted protracted stress and dissolution. The Soviet Union fell apart over people’s inability to obtain what they willed under the communist system, as well as from the strength of the will of the West, which embodied a common will to freedom. That Crowley appeared on the Sgt. Pepper LP cover has had enough said about it. Crowley wasn’t a hippy, but there was certainly something of the “Aeon of the Child” about that false, or perhaps first, brief dawn that was the best of the 1960s counter culture, and the valuable elements go on, refining themselves with experience. Sometimes it’s difficult to explain Thelema to people because they simply recognize it as “common sense,” not as a novelty. That is what Crowley wanted: the assumption that the True Will knows best.

Perhaps we can really only see the “True Will” when freedoms that allow its expression are taken away. If we don’t want to live under another’s boot, we are going to have to do better than that!

Spiritual freedom has seen Western religions buckle among the educated, at least. It is notable that the Roman Catholic Church has decided to invest its immediate future with its largest number of nominal adherents on the “might is right” principle; that is to say, it seeks its support from what it calls “the poor”: no individual Godheads here. When the poor get richer, as in Ireland, the Roman Church will probably switch to mysticism to keep itself in the frame. In the Middle and Far East, some of the attraction of medieval jihadism—with modern weapons made elsewhere—is the sense that old-fashioned faith (redefined by fundamentalists) is somehow threatened. The vacuum left by the collapse of Arab socialism-communism has temporarily been filled with this fear. It is encouraged by perceived oppression.

Crowley, of course, will always appear as a kind of apocalyptic monster to those who are frightened they will lose out in the change. One always hates what one has wronged. But you can’t defeat, only frustrate, the collective unconscious.

The second factor in seeing why Crowley did not set up political shop in Berlin, or anywhere else, is the nature of democracy itself. I don’t think Crowley would have argued too much with Churchill’s pragmatic view that the best argument for democracy is that it can stand as a defense against tyranny. Churchill also knew that democracies are quicker to war than other forms of government, monarchies particularly, on account of the collective wealth that democracies may tap into, and the automatic pugnaciousness of the mob. Hitler came to power via a free ballot.

Crowley knew perfectly well that democracies generally entail being “led” by persons inferior to the best the society could offer, on account of party favoritism, marketing factors, and cynicism regarding the system itself. It is also the case that great issues are settled by a search for truth, not voted on by force of numbers. The majority is frequently wrong on any issue outside of its immediate experience. What we have are elected oligarchies, sometimes elected dictatorships, subject to “the will of the people,” which can mean merely what is fashionable or what ignorance, money, or fear may dictate. The press rules, or influences unduly, but it has to tame its readers first. As Jim Morrison lamented: “We are ruled by TV.”

The very idea of initiation presupposes a view on the quality of the “uninitiated.” If initiation represents a leap in self-knowledge and capacity for responsibility, what can be said for the quality of judgment of the “uninitiated?” You cannot allow political systems, of any kind, to dominate every aspect of life. Government is useful and necessary, but it is not God, and its capacity for oppression must be sensibly resisted in a positive spirit wherever possible. Where the democracy in question recognizes the sovereign right of the individual to be individual, and where the individual recognizes that sovereignty (“under will”) in others, then the system can be creative. I think of the late medieval wisdom attributed to Nicolas of Cusa: “God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere, circumference nowhere.” From a political point of view, the sovereignty of the system should lie always with that individual center “that is everywhere.” A democracy built on this principle has some guard against its own tyranny.

So, who makes the decisions? Circumstances generally dictate; after that, common sense is a good guide. Thelema would not be Thelema if it were enforced upon people: Do what thou wilt. It is hard to imagine a majority voting for it as such!

The third factor concerning why Crowley could not erect Thelema as a political alternative in Berlin in 1930–32 goes back to some of the origins of the phrase: “Do what thou wilt.” It was François Rabelais (1483–1553) who coined the phrase in his satirical fantasy Gargantua and Pantagruel. It is worth noting that the Abbey of Thelema in which Rabelais’s Thelemites practiced their joyous freedoms was a gated community.

Crowley did not envisage a demos, or popular will, advocating Thelemic principles directly. Thelemic disciplines of openness and self-knowledge have little appeal for the rump of humankind, which is more easily satisfied with price reductions, doles, copious distracting entertainments, and the immediate satisfaction of material desires of the usual kinds, whether earned or given. Thelema proper was for the “kings” of humankind, those dedicated to mastering themselves with knowledge of spiritual values. They would rule the “many and the known.” Crowley’s system then was not democratic in essence, and turkeys don’t vote for Christmas! But before the “automatic rebel” in the reader starts crying out “Facist!” it is worth understanding the point at issue here. The Thelemic principle is dedicated to every man and every woman realizing their “stellar” or divine nature, not to suppressing that knowledge. Crowley envisaged most people would just want “looking after” in a generous, but not foolish, spirit, so that as the generations passed, more of the sense of participation would emerge and aspiring persons could be raised through genuinely higher education.

One thing Gerald Yorke claimed to dislike in The Book of the Law was the phrase “the slaves shall serve” (AL II, 58). Obviously, after WWII and what we know of Hitler and Stalin and their “inhuman” forced mass-labor programs, the phrase sticks in the gizzard, but it was first voiced in very different, rather idealistic times. Crowley, when pressed on the phrase, gave the innocuous example of college “scouts”: men at Oxford and Cambridge Universities who helped tidy the rooms and do harmless, useful services for students dedicated to study. Undertaking the Thelemic challenge was, Crowley suggested, like deciding to attend a university. Crowley understood “slaves” to mean, in general, people whose circumstances require them to work at the will of others for money (or livelihood), and whose motivation for working is not the work itself; people content with conditions of employment. He also was aware that there are a lot of “servile” people by nature who would much prefer being ordered around than ordering themselves around. There will always be those who want to serve, and the best thing for them is to have a good “master,” or employer, and a good master or mistress knows how to respect his or her servants. Democratic representation is simply necessary to protect workers from abuse, but persons equipped to concentrate on such issues are not necessarily in a position to see the “Bigger Picture”—and frankly, most people would probably rather not see too much of what is done on their behalf.

There’s no point jumping to conclusions. Crowley never worked out how to make Thelema into a practical system of government and, to my knowledge, nobody else has. I don’t even know if such a thing is practically possible, necessary, or even desirable. We must hope the future governance of our species involves wise and generous adaption to the facts of life, but people’s ordinary behavior seldom makes us damp in the eye when we hear the cry for “Humanity!” that so inspired our ancestors in the nineteenth century. We rather feel we’ve seen enough of Humanity to last a millennium!

It is strange that I see myself again that afternoon in stormy, sultry Berlin, July 1987. West Berlin had become a haven of freedom, especially for young people, and the old residents who had no wish to move. Paradoxically, the military rule of Berlin, after WWII and the Cold War after it, ensured that Berlin demonstrated exemplary, more than exemplary, freedom to the communist east, while retaining within it near audible echoes of its greater past. Thus it was for me during the 1980s that Berlin was a place that seemed utterly ripe for Crowley to stalk through. There were many people grappling with their True Wills in those days. Berlin surrounded by walls, and tank traps, and machine gun posts, was the freest place on Earth. I must say that when I came back shortly after the fall of the Wall, the busy ingress of wide-eyed East Germans seeking material goods and obvious (to us) liberties, was not heartening—the spiritual and ethical deficit of communism appeared forgotten. I felt the place was, as far as I was concerned, “finished.”

For those of us who find the attempt to impose a theocracy repellent and backward looking, it seemed then as it seems now that the only practical—if hardly ideal—choice between fascism and communism is “capitalism plus free expression” or rather, “popular capitalism” with centrist liberal social policies. But capitalism, popular or otherwise, as an end in itself, is blind to spiritual values, and to a great deal of reality, never mind its interminable tastelessness. The abiding question is: where does authority lie?

I am not sure that dear old Adler was far wrong when he maintained that the individual realizes himself or herself sanely through relationships with others, and that these relationships constitute “society.” I think that the extremes of nationalism (sacrifice of self for nation-state), communism (absorption of self in collective), and individualism (self only matters) are, frankly, all extremes that push natures too far from Nature, though it takes strong doses of individualism to realize the importance of the individual! It is also clear that religion may function as any one of these extremes with the same consequences of intolerance and permanent conflict.

I think of the solo musician, singing to him or herself. Not very inspiring: a stage many go through as we “find ourselves” and try to match our skills up against our heroes and heroines, and compensate with ego for that we cannot attain. How about this as an antidote: “It’s fun with other people!” Yes, we can join a band, and contribute something of ourselves, and play for others, who give something of themselves, and for a few blissful seconds, know that sense of unity that is fulfilling without being self-denying. We know that we can only have the cream of this kind of experience in the freest possible society. How to make it freer without becoming subject to the forces that protect freedom is a challenge for our time. I suppose so long as we are led to believe there is always an “evil empire” popping up somewhere (as, frankly, dualism suggests there may always be), progress will be slow and may be reversed. There is a dualism in everything. It will never be all right, because the all-right requires its opposite to define itself. And we’ll be very unhappy indeed if we think after this “next one,” things will be perfectly great again. Things are great already, could we but see it. I stood in Berlin looking at the No Man’s Land that split the two postwar Berlins. And I never felt freer!

Go to Berlin today, and the government has moved in. The Reichstag is back in business and all the boring types have most of the best flats and the nicest cars—and it’s dull. Clean and tidy—a bureaucrat’s dream—but most (though not all) of the new architecture is dull, dull, dull: a dullness happily obscured by the many trees that “color-up” the city streets. Nevertheless, depression must be rampant. There’s something missing in modern Berlin. I wonder what it is.

I rather doubt if Thelema should ever stoop to become a political organization at all. Crowley called it a scientific system of ethics. If it is, it is simply something we should expect all our politicians (and especially ourselves) to understand and respect whatever party they get their checks from, but obviously, given current conditions, this may be more than any sane person has a right to expect.

I cannot help but feel that we have still a long way to go before the great city is truly free of, that is with, the Beast who stalks the ruins of great, but misplaced, hopes, and whose laughter is that of the God who judges our follies through our own self-destructiveness.

FOOTNOTES

*1. [Karl Baedeker, a German publisher, pioneered the business of travel guides in 1827 (Baedeker’s Great Britain), but other guides are often referred to as Baedekers as well. —Ed.]

†2. “I am, from head to toe, ready for love”—the original title for the song “Falling in Love Again (Can’t help it)” by Friedrich Hollände made famous by Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s movie The Blue Angel (1930).

*3. Karl Nierendorf: “. . . er habe Bilder gemalt, die merkwürdig nahe an Dix oder Nolde heran kämen, obschon er von diesen Künstlern nie etwas gesehen habe. Reproduktionen zeigten ein groteskes Gemisch von Phantastik und Realismus, Darstellungen von Wüsten und Hochgebirgen, Fratzen, Masken, symbolischen Gestalten, alles farbig von brutaler Härte und einer beabsichtigten grellen Buntheit, ähnlich dem Stil des Düsseldorfer Bilder und Allegorienmalers Adalbert Trillhaase. Von einem formal künstlerischen Geschichtspunkte aus sind derartige Arbeiten garnicht zu beurteilen, aber doch merkwürdig als Dokumenten der eigenen Welt eines Weltfahrers, besonders eines Engländers und beachtenswerter als manche Erzeuchnisse vom laufenden Band des routinierten Kunstmalers.”

*4. Karl Nierendorf: “Die Bilder sind durch die Intensität ihres Wollens und die Primitivität der Mittel eher mit deutschen Künstlern verwandt als mit dem Aufguß nach den üblichen französischen Rezepten, der heute jenseits des Kanals gemixt wird.”

†5. Mazdaznan is a religious and health movement founded by Otto Hanisch at the end of the nineteenth century advocating body culture, vegetarianism, and breathing exercises.

*6. The Triumph of the Will (1935), a film made by Leni Riefenstahl about the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg.

†7. This statement alleging that Crowley himself claimed to have given the NSDAP their symbol should not, on any account, be taken at face value. Hitler adopted the swastika symbol in 1920, long before Crowley’s German adventures. See chapter 19 of this book: “Before Hitler Was, I am.”

*8. Seldte hoped the Stahlhelm could fill a leadership gap for a national conservative movement. With Alfred Hugenberg and Adolf Hitler, he helped create the “Harzburger Front” in 1931, an alliance against Heinrich Brüning’s government, wishing to lead the National Socialists to government with Hitler as Labor minster. An attempt to make the Kampffront “Schwarz-Weiß-Rot” (Black-White-Red Combat Front), a vehicle for this effort, failed and in 1933 he joined the Nazi Party, the Stahlhelm absorbed by the S.A. Seldte disliked working with Hitler. Hitler, wanting to quit government in 1935, refused. U.S. forces arrested Seldte in 1945; he died at Fürth military hospital, before trial.

*9. Karl May (1842–1912) was a writer of adventure novels set in imaginatively conceived distant places, such as the “Wild West.” In later life, May actually visited faraway places such as Egypt and Sumatra, and his outlook and writing changed. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), author of The World as Will and Idea, was a major German philosopher influenced by “Indian sages” toward a transcendent idealism of his own, which in its turn, influenced Einstein, Schrödinger, Wittgenstein, Jung, Freud, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Wagner—and, via Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley.

*10. Luke 8:3

*11. According to Eugene Burt’s Dictionary of Erotic Artists (2010), Plantikow, born in Georgenberg, Bavaria, in 1893, studied at the Berlin Academy.

†12. A young sculptor with skills in Art Nouveau mythical themes who became a communist (KPD) in December 1931; Worner fled to London in 1939.

*13. Von Wedderkop was a German writer, translator, and editor of the journal. In 1907 he had met Alfred Flechtheim, the founder of Der Querschnitt (The Cross Section). Von Wedderkop helped the evolution of the journal from 1921 from its origins as Flechtheim’s Gallery News into the leading German Zeitgeist-making magazine of the 1920s, open to the avant-garde (Picasso, Chagall, etc.) as well as heroes of boxing. Der Querschnitt published every famous author of the time from Mann, Proust, Pound, Joyce, to Hemingway. It was ironically elitist with artistic photos of male and female nudes garnished. Von Wedderkop displayed an enthusiasm for Mussolini that led Jewish publisher Ullstein to remove him to side and sub-editorial duties until he left the magazine in 1931. He also wrote Wedderkop’s Guidebooks: “What is not in Baedecker is,” with a notable edition on Paris in 1929. Under Ullsteinhaus, the magazine could boast twenty thousand readers between 1920–29. The journal was closed by the Nazis in 1936.

*14. Auguste Rodin (1840–1917); Eugène Carrìere (1849–1906); Alphonse Legros (1837– 1911); Frits Thaulow (1847–1906).

*15. See “‘Fräulein Sprengel’ and the Origins of the Golden Dawn: A Surprising Discovery” by Dr. Christopher McIntosh (Aries, 2011), where McIntosh proves definitively that the signatory of the “Sprengel” letters was male and that the correspondence was a forgery. “If Sprengel was a man, then Westcott was lying in saying that he/she was a woman. If she was a woman then the correspondence is false. So it was not only a forgery, but a mind-bogglingly inept one.”¹

*16. This would eventually appear in Saturn Gnosis issue 1, pp. 48–51: Der Mensch; from the unpublished writings, copyright Thelema Verlag, 1928.

*17. “Allah is greater” or “Allah is greatest.”

*18. This painting appears to be No. 14 from the “Old Master” exhibition of Crowley’s paintings at the October Gallery, London, 1998.

*19. Per vas nefandum means “by the unmentionable vessel,” anal intercourse; Crowley’s comment: “The best ever—oh how superior is the Eye of Horus [anus] to the Mouth of Isis [vagina]!” Diary, Monday 20 July 1931.

*20. Gerald Hamilton was the model for Mr. Norris in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin novel, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935).

*21. Regarding the St. Andrew’s cross: In Germany, Austria, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania the eve before St. Andrew’s Day is held good for magical divinations related to future fertility. Possibly the saltire cross referred to the way Crowley felt about his own predicament: crucified.

*22. In Aleister Crowley, The Biography I mistakenly suggested Crowley’s diary references to “Hedy” referred to movie actress Hedy (Hedwig) Kiesler—“Hedy Lamarr”—who was studying acting with Max Reinhardt in Berlin at the time. According to UK National Archives (cat. ref. PRO/HO396/65/212), Hedwig Nevermann (b. 1899, Neustettin) sought asylum from Germany in London’s Jewish Community in the late 1930s; exempted from internment as an enemy alien (German) in 1939. A Hedwig Ottilie Nevermann died in London, 1969.

*23. Referred to in Agent 666 by Richard Spence (2008): UK National Archives, KV2/774 [MI5 file on Wilhelm Münzenberg], note to SIS, ca. 1933. Spence spotted a notable change in Crowley’s MI5 dossier number. In 1916, Crowley’s file no. 2573 was labeled “P.F.” (Personal File); by 1933 it had become a “P.P.,” that is, “Peace Propaganda” or subversive pacifist activity file. P.P. files came under MI5 section G-1, run by Victor Ferguson, keeping an eye on communists and fellow travelers.

*24. I cannot trace this Walker who arrived in Berlin with family members in mid-April. Walker had a son and heir called Fred with a “perfectly charming” wife called Faly. Crowley’s note that “Kenneth Gregg married F’s [Fred’s?] sister” might indicate a familial link with “Imagist” poet Frances Gregg of Philadelphia (1885–1941), who had married Crowley’s English literary friend he met in Washington, Louis Wilkinson (1881–1966). An obscure diary reference of 3 March to “Prince Hotel P. P. Hiram Abif v. satisfactory so far” might suggest a cheeky link to descendants of the liquor magnate Hiram Walker (1816–99), founder of Walkerville, Canada, near Detroit; the next day records: “The wife of the new-rich had a mis-limousine” (YC NS 20, 4 March 1932); while German address records of the period record a Jocelyn Walker resident at Hahnenstr. (?) 25, Köln, tel. exchange “Hansa” and at “Kilmarnock” (tel. exchange “Zeppelin”). The “Kilmarnock” name might refer to Scottish distilleries owned by Hiram Walker’s descendants. Zeppelin airships were made in Köln to the southeast of the city. On 21 June, Crowley’s diary mentions a Donald as part of the family near Köln, and they appear to have practiced some astral traveling magick.

*25. In 1939, de Haas advised the Dutch government to buy quantities of uranium oxide that came on the market that year. The uranium oxide remained hidden in a Delft lab until, after the war, it became the foundation of a cooperative Norwegian-Dutch nuclear energy project. De Haas’s freedom of movement during the war came with cooperation with Cellastic, an organization that worked for the Germans. This freedom enabled his escape to England. Investigated for his earlier cooperation with German science, he was temporarily suspended until resuming his chair of experimental physics at Leiden until retirement in 1948.

*26. Santa Barbara cemetery records show Hanni’s parents and sister Kate are buried there; no trace of Hanni’s grave exists. Crowley scholar Marco Pasi has been researching Hanni Jaeger’s destiny; his findings should be published soon.

ENDNOTES

Note to Reader: The following abbreviations appear in the references.

Crowley-Germer Letters 1925–1947, OTO Archive = CGOTO followed by the number of the letter and the date.

Yorke Collection = YC followed by NS, EE, or D and the number of the item to distinguish the various files in the collection.

Chapter One. SCOOP!

1. Letters 129, 137: Aleister Crowley to Karl Germer; OTO Archives; 19 March 1928; 31 May 1928. Kasmiria was Kasimira Bass, Crowley’s then lover, in Paris.

Chapter Two. Selling Aleister Crowley

1. Crowley-Germer Letters 1925–1947, OTO Archive; CGOTO 134, 26 April 1928.

2. CGOTO 142, 18 July 1928.

3. CGOTO 143, 24 July 1928.

4. London Aphrodite 6, Fanfrolico Press periodical, 1929, 421–32.

5. CGOTO 203, 24 August 1929.

6. CGOTO 210, Georgian House, 11 September 1929.

7. CGOTO 207, 31 August 1929.

8. Stephensen letter to Gerald Yorke, Dec. 12, 1953, Stephensen Collection, quoted in The Legend of Aleister Crowley by Stephensen and Crowley, 34.

9. CGOTO 211, 16 September 1929.

10. CGOTO 219, 29 November 1929.

11. CGOTO 224, 6 December 1929.

12. CGOTO 225, Knockholt, 7 January 1930.

13. CGOTO Knockholt, 7 January 1930.

14. CGOTO 227, Knockholt, 9 January 1930.

15. CGOTO 229, 18 January 1930.

16. CGOTO 230, Oddenino’s, no date.

17. CGOTO 231, Knockholt, 23 January 1930.

18. CGOTO 236, Knockholt, 15 February 1930.

19. CGOTO 237, Knockholt, 19 February 1930.

20. CGOTO 245, Draft of a letter to Birven (typed and translated by KG and sent on 30 April 1930).

Chapter Three. The New Age in Germany

1. Email from McIntosh to the author; 2 March 2013.

Chapter Four. Karl Germer and the Weida Conference

1. YC, N.S.12.

2. CGOTO 13, 14, October 1925.

3. CGOTO 17, 8 November 1925.

4. CGOTO 64, November 1925.

5. CGOTO 19, November 18 1925.

6. CGOTO 19, November 18 1925.

7. CGOTO 40, January 27 1926.

8. CGOTO 46, February 11 1926.

9. CGOTO 80, October 18 1926.

10. YC, NS 116, quoted in Pasi, Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics, ch. 5.

11. YC, NS 24.

12. YC, D 12, 20 May 1930.

13. YC, mss. II, 24; 8 October 1929.

14. CGOTO 227 Knockholt, 9 January 1930.

15. “Lord, how long?” See Psalm 6:2; Habakkuk 1:2; Psalm 13.

Chapter Five. Cosmopolis—City of the Future

1. Metzger, Berlin in the Twenties, 133.

Chapter Six. Good-Bye to All That

1. YC, NS 20, diary 29 April 1930.

2. YC, NS 20, diary 17 May 1930.

3. CGOTO 246, 6–7 May 1930.

4. CGOTO 254, 14 May 1930.

5. CGOTO 251, 10 May 1930.

6. CGOTO 152, 12 May 1930.

7. CGOTO 255, Aquila Press, 16 May 1930.

8. CGOTO 256, 19 May 1930.

9. CGOTO 257, 22 May 1930.

10. CGOTO 256, 22 May 1930.

11. YC, EE 2.

12. YC, NS 20, diary, Friday 13 June 1930.

13. CGOTO 260, 15 June 1930.

14. YC, NS 20, diary, 28 June, 1930.

15. CGOTO 262, 22 June 1930.

16. CGOTO 263, 22 June 1930.

17. YC, NS 117.

18. YC, NS 20, diary, 9 July 1930.

19. YC, NS 117, AC to Regardie, 26 July 1930.

20. CGOTO 267, 89 Park Mansions SW1, 5 July 1930.

21. CGOTO 269, 8 July 1930.

22. CGOTO 272, 16 July 1930.

23. CGOTO 274, 24 July 1930.

24. CGOTO 275, 29 July 1930.

25. YC, NS 20, diary Monday 25 August 1930.

26. CGOTO 277, undated note.

Chapter Seven. Kings in Exile Are Always Beggars

1. CGOTO 283, Crowley to Germer, c/o Agencia Cook, Lisbon, 14 September 1930.

2. CGOTO 279, 31 August 1930.

3. Diary, ed. Marco Pasi: 2 September 1930, “September 1930, Lisbon: Aleister Crowley’s lost diary of his Portuguese trip”; pdf on web: academia.edu.

4. CGOTO 280, Lisbon, 5 September 1930.

5. Ibid., 260–61.

6. I am grateful to Steffen Dix, author of Pessoa: Boca do Inferno (Fischer, 2013) for the translation from Portuguese.

7. Diary, ed. Marco Pasi: “September 1930, Lisbon: Aleister Crowley’s lost diary of his Portuguese trip”; pdf on web: academia.edu.

8. Diary, ed. Marco Pasi: 13 September 1930 in “September 1930, Lisbon: Aleister Crowley’s lost diary of his Portuguese trip”; pdf on web: academia .edu.

9. CGOTO 283, c/o Agencia Cook, Lisboa, 14 September 1930.

10. YC, NS 117.

11. Diary, ed. Marco Pasi: 19 September 1930, “September 1930, Lisbon: Aleister Crowley’s lost diary of his Portuguese trip”; pdf on web: academia.edu.

12. CGOTO 284, “Lisbonne,” Sept. 19, 1930.

13. Diary, ed. Marco Pasi: 22 September 1930, “September 1930, Lisbon: Aleister Crowley’s lost diary of his Portuguese trip”; pdf on web: academia.edu.

14. Lost Diary, 24 September 1930.

15. Lost Diary, 26 September 1930.

16. YC, NS 20, Diary, August 1930.

17. For the Portuguese side of the Crowley-Pessoa episode, consult: José Manuel Anes, Fernando Pessoa e os Mundos Esotéricos (Esquilo Editores, Lisboa, 2004); and Vítor Manuel Adrião, Mistérios Iniciáticos do Rei do Mundo—Historia Oculta de Portugal (Madras Editora Ltda, São Paulo, 2002). There is an informative treatment of the issue on the LAShTAL “AC Appreciation Society” website.

18. YC, NS 117, Diary, Friday 3 October 1930.

19. YC, NS 117, Diary, Saturday 4 October 1930.

20. YC, EE 2.

21. YC, NS 117, AC to Israel Regardie, 17 October 1930.

Chapter Eight. Quantum Magus

1. From Sullivan’s article, “Art and Science” (Times Literary Supplement, 10 Jan. 1924). See David Bradshaw, “The Best of Companions: J. W. N. Sullivan, Aldous Huxley, and the New Physics” (The Review of English Studies, 1996), 361.

2. YC, NS 20, Diary 4 October 1930.

3. YC, NS 18, “Questions put to E. A. C. by J. W. N. Sullivan.”

4. YC, NS 20, diary, Thursday 9 October 1930.

5. YC, NS 20, diary, Thursday 9 October 1930.

6. YC, EE 2.

7. YC, NS 117.

8. YC, EE 2.

9. YC, NS 20, diary, Friday 24 October 1930.

10. YC, NS 117.

11. YC, NS 20, diary, Monday 27 October 1930.

12. YC, NS 117.

Chapter Nine. An Old Master

1. YC, Folder 96, Letter to John Symonds, 1950.

2. YC, NS 20, diary 1, October 1930.

Chapter Ten. Hanni Jaeger, Save Our Souls

1. CGOTO 289, Berlin-Lietzensee Ufer 9, Sunday [12 October 1930].

2. CGOTO 288, Berlin, 15 October 1930.

3. YC, NS 20, diary, Wednesday 15 October 1930

4. YC, NS 20, diary, Saturday 18 October 1930.

5. YC, NS 20, diary Monday 3 November 1930.

6. CGOTO 291, Berlin, undated (probably November 1930).

7. YC, NS 20, diary, Monday 8 December 1930.

8. YC, NS 20, diary Wednesday 17 December 1930.

9. YC, NS 20, diary, Sunday 4 January 1931.

10. CGOTO 292, 13 January 1931.

11. YC, NS 20, diary, Tuesday 3 February 1931.

12. Ibid.

13. YC, NS 20, diary, 9 February 1931.

14. YC, NS 20, diary, 12 February 1931.

Chapter Eleven. Thoroughly Modern Magus

1. CGOTO 716, Hastings, 16 December 1946.

2. YC, D 9 Letter to John Symonds, ca.1946.

3. CGOTO 757, 57 Petersham Road, Richmond, Surrey, 15 January 1940.

4. YC, NS 20, diary, 21 March 1932.

Chapter Twelve. The Last Summer of Freedom

1. YC, NS 20, diary, 27 February 1931.

2. YC, NS 20, Thursday, 5 March 1931.

3. YC, NS 20, Sunday, 8 March 1931.

4. YC, NS 20, 12 March 1931.

5. YC, NS 20, 14 March 1931.

6. YC, NS 20, 16 March 1931.

7. YC, NS 20, 17–18 March 1931.

8. CGOTO 306, 7 April 1931.

9. YC, NS, 20 Saturday, 11 April 1931.

10. GCOTO 294, undated.

11. YC, NS 20, 5 May 1931.

12. See Rosemont, Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, 105–12.

13. CGOTO 307, 12 May 1931.

14. YC, NS 20, 24 May 1931.

15. YC, NS 20, 26 May 1931.

16. YC, NS 20, 3 June 1931.

17. YC, NS 20, diary, 10–11 June 1931.

18. YC, NS 20, diary, 19 June.

19. YC, NS 20, diary, Friday, 26 June 1931.

20. YC, NS 20.

Chapter Thirteen. Toward the Exhibition

1. GCOTO 297, 2 August 1931.

2. YC, NS 20, 28 August 1931.

3. YC, NS 20, diary, 9 September 1931.

4. CGOTO 298, 11 August 1931.

5. Walter-Ris, Kunstleidenschaft im Dienst der Moderne: chapter 4, page 164.

6. Das Kunstblatt 15 (1931) no. 10, p. 300 (editor/reviewer: Paul Westheim). Incidentally, Crowley’s friend Hans Steiner is supposed to have painted a portrait of critic Paul Westheim ca. 1925. I am grateful to Frank van Lamoen, Assistant Curator, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, for kindly providing information on Westheim and on Nierendorf ’s September 1931 Expressionist exhibition.

7. CGOTO 301, 2 October 1931.

8. CGOTO 301, 4 October 1931.

9. Walter-Ris, Die Geschichte der Galerie Nierendorf, chapter 5, page 179.

10. YC, D 4 (Correspondence, undated).

11. YC, NS 20, diary, Saturday 10 October 1931.

Chapter Fourteen. Porza!

1. CGOTO 302, 11 October 1931.

2. Cat. nos. Porza 1931: 2 (P-83 Ransom; YC, NS74, p. 150); 6; 10; 14; 46; 54 (YC, NS74, p.156, “No. 14”); 42; 65, respectively.

3. See Beta, An Old Master, The Art of Aleister Crowley.

4. Porza cat. no. followed by “October Gallery” cat. no. in brackets: 30 (8 or 9); 34 (22, but missing from the catalogue brochure); 38 (7); 52 (10, but wrongly called “Mt.Etna,” which is not an island, as is Stromboli, as depicted); 62 (11), respectively. The Porza catalogue has three images of Leah Hirsig: Portrait of Leah Hirsig (20); Leah Hirsig (26); and Lea La Goulue (27). Any of these could be identified with two works from the October 1998 exhibition: Alostrael 31-666-31 (cat. no. 2) and Ether (no. 3). “La Goulue” means “The Glutton” and was the nickname of a French cancan dancer, Louise Weber (d. 1929). But it could have been AC’s humor to call the emaciated image of Lea in crayon, Alostrael: “Lea the Glutton.”

5. There is a moody portrait “Ella Buergin,” no. P-78 in the Harry Ransom Center (Aleister Crowley Collection), University of Texas at Austin.

6. Crowley, The City of God, A Rhapsody; OTO, 1943.

7. YC, NS 20, diary, 17 October 1931.

8. YC, NS 20, 2 November 1931.

9. viz: Baigent and Leigh, Secret Germany.

10. YC, NS 20, diary, 2 November 1931.

11. YC, NS 20, diary, 6 November 1931.

12. YC, NS 20, diary, 9 November 1931.

13. I am indebted to Pessoa scholar Steffen Dix for drawing this letter to my attention.

Chapter Fifteen. Hope of Harvest

1. CGOTO 310, 13 November 1931.

2. YC, NS 20, diary, 13 November 1931.

3. YC, D 4 correspondence, 14 November 1931.

4. YC, NS 20, 10 December 1931.

5. YC, D 4, correspondence, Saturday 12 December 1931.

6. YC, NS 20, diary, 4 November 1931.

7. YC, D 4 correspondence.

8. YC, NS 20, 31 December 1931.

Chapter Sixteen. Spying

1. YC, D 4.

2. YC, EE 2. See Churton, Aleister Crowley, the Biography, ch. 26.

3. YC, NS 20, diary, 26 November 1931.

4. National Library of Ireland, Collection List No. 166, Eoin O’Duffy Papers (MSS 48,280–48,320); (Accession No. 5694); MS 48,285 /3; MS 48,285 /4: Documents relating to the IRA’s connection with the Soviet Union including: “Deciphered copy of document found in dump near Rathfarnham, 10/6/31”: letter to “C.S.,” 3 Oct. 1925 (1 p.), attaching report about Billy Aherne (IRA’s O/C in Britain)’s meeting with Mr. X (Soviet agent) in Berlin, 30 Sept. 1925 (1 p.). Typescript letter to Colonel David Neligan, head of Garda Special Branch, from J. McBride, relating to the arrests and sentencing of Irregulars in London, 2 April 1928 (1 p.). Correspondence between Colonel David Neligan and Colonel John F. C. Carter, Assistant Commissioner of the Special Branch of the London Metropolitan Police, about the connections between the Irregulars that were sentenced in London, William Aherne, and the Soviets, 13 June 1928 & June 1928 (2 pp.). Pamphlet Russian Banks and Communist Funds: Report of an enquiry into certain transactions of the Bank for Russian Trade, Ltd., and the Moscow Narodny Bank, Ltd. (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1928) (58 pp.). Gardaí report “Financial aid to Irregulars from Soviet sources” addressed to the Commissioner (Eoin O’Duffy), 9 July 1931 (3 pp.) 4 items.

5. YC, D 4 correspondence.

6. YC, NS 20, diary, 14 February 1932.

7. YC, NS 20, diary, 27 June 1931.

8. Archival Call No. 16–362.

9. YC, NS 20, diary, Friday, 14 August 1931.

10. YC, NS 20, diary, Wednesday, 28 October 1931.

11. Letters of Reggie Bridgman 1930–32. www.search.shropshirehistory.org.uk/collections/getrecord (accessed 9/4/13).

12. YC, EE 2.

13. YC, D 4, correspondence, “1932.”

Chapter Seventeen. Last Orders

1. YC, NS 20, diary, 8 January 1932.

2. YC, NS 20, 2 January 1932.

3. YC, EE 2.

4. YC, NS 20, diary, 30 March 1932.

5. See “Interview with Felix Bloch by Thomas S. Kuhn in Palo Alto, California, May 14, 1964”; Niels Bohr Library and Archives with the Center for the History of Physics, American Institute of Physics.

6. “Interview with Dr. Léon Rosenfeld By Charles Weiner at Copenhagen September 3, 1968”; Niels Bohr Library and Archives with the Center for the History of Physics; American Institute of Physics.

7. See Anja Skaar Jacobsen’s thoroughly fascinating thesis: “Léon Rosenfeld’s Marxist defense of complementarity” on the World Wide Web.

8. YC, NS 20.

9. YC, EE 2.

Chapter Eighteen. Lost Time

1. CGOTO 312, 8 June 1932.

2. CGOTO 314, 9 August 1932.

3. CGOTO 317. I am grateful to Christopher Mcintosh for kindly translating this letter from the German.

4. CGOTO 318, 24 December 1932.

5. CGOTO 321, 1 May 1933.

6. CGOTO 322, 14 June 1933.

7. CG, OTO 326, 11 September 1933.

8. YC, NS 20, Saturday, 25 August 1937.

Chapter Nineteen. Lost People

1. OTO Küntzel letters.

2. OTO Küntzel letters.

3. The English scholar was Sir William Jones (1746–94). On 2 February 1786, Jones demonstrated to members of the Asiatick Society of Bengal that striking similarities between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit could be explained in terms of kinship. He then extended this supposed language family, calling it “Hamitic” (after Noah’s son, Ham, though other scholars preferred “Japhetic”). Probably the first appearance of the English “Aryan” was in Jones’s 1794 translation of the Laws of Manu (an Indian legal text), where arya is a marker of high caste, meaning, roughly, “noble.” In 1819, Friedrich Schlegel found the word attractive, suggesting its German form was Ehre, that is, “honor” and so what would become a dishonorable mythologizing of science began its long career, entering its unconsciously ominous phase when scholars began to contrast an Hamitic “race” with a “Semitic” race (from Noah’s son, Shem). (See Stefan Arvidsson’s excellent study Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, 17–22).

4. CGOTO 323, 2 July 1933.

5. CGOTO 324, 11 July 1933.

6. CGOTO 446, 5 October 1938.

7. CGOTO 447, 15 October 1938.

8. CGOTO 448, 27 October 1938.

9. Karl wrote a 65,000 word account: “Protective Prisoner No. 303”; Outline by Karl Germer. The manuscript is still unpublished.

10. See ARTnews Dec. 2011 “MOMA’s Problematic Provenances,” Will D. Cohan (re: Grosz).

11. www.lespress.de/0498/texte0498/csch.html (accessed 9/4/13).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arvidsson, Stefan. Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Baigent, Michael, and Richard Leigh. Secret Germany. London: Arrow, 2006.

Beta, Hymenaeus, ed. An Old Master, The Art of Aleister Crowley. With contributions by Martin P. Starr and Karl Nierendorf. Ordo Templi Orientis International, 1998.

Bogdan, Henrik, and Martin. P. Starr, eds. Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism. With contributions by Henrik Bogdan, Tobias Churton, Gordan Djurdjevic, Asbjørn Dyrendal, Robert A. Gilbert, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Ronald Hutton, Massimo Introvigne, Richard Kaczynski, Alex Owen, Marco Pasi, Keith Richmond, Matthew D. Rogers, Martin P. Starr, Hugh B. Urban. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Buratti, Robert, ed., The Nightmare Paintings, Aleister Crowley, Works from the Palermo Collection. With contributions by Robert Buratti, William Breeze, Tobias Churton, Stephen J. King, Guiseppe Di Liberti, Marco Pasi. Perth, Aus.: Buratti Fine Art Pty Ltd., 2012.

Calder-Marshall, Arthur. The Magic of My Youth. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1951.

Christie, Ian. Arrows of Desire, The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Press-burger. London: Waterstone, 1985.

Churton, Tobias. Aleister Crowley, The Biography. London: Watkins, 2012.

Crowley, Aleister. Art in America. Oxford: Golden Dawn Publications, 1987.

———. The Book of Lies. New York: Weiser, 1991.

———. The City of God, A Rhapsody. Ordo Templi Orientis International, 1943.

———. The Drug and Other Stories. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2010.

———. Eight Lectures on Yoga. Phoenix, Az.: Falcon Press, 1987.

———. Magick without Tears. Introduction by Israel Regardie. Phoenix, Az.: Falcon Press, 1983.

———. Moonchild, A Prologue. New York: Weiser, 1991.

———. The Revival of Magick and other Essays, Oriflamme 2. Edited by Hymenaeus Beta and Richard Kaczynski. Tempe, Az.: New Falcon/OTO International, 1998.

———. Thelema, The Holy Books of Thelema. New York: Weiser, 1989.

———. The Works of Aleister Crowley, with Portraits, 3 vols. Des Plaines, Ill.: Yogi Publication Society (undated).

Crowley, Aleister, and contributors. The Equinox, The Review of Scientific Illuminism. Vol. 1, nos. 1-10, 1908–12.

Crowley, Aleister, and David Curwen. Brother Curwen, Brother Crowley, A Correspondence. Edited and Introduction by Henrik Bogdan. Foreword by Tony Matthews. York Beach, Maine: The Teitan Press, 2010.

Crowley, Aleister and Louis Wilkinson. The Law Is for All. Edited by Hymenaeus Beta. Tempe, Ariz.: New Falcon Publications, 2002.

Crowley, Aleister, with Mary Desti and Leila Waddell. Magick Liber ABA, Book Four, Parts 1–4. Edited by Hymenaeus Beta. New York: Weiser, 2004.

Crowley, Aleister, and John Symonds. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. Edited by Kenneth Grant. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.

D’Arch Smith, Timothy. The Books of the Beast. Cambridge: Mandrake, 1991.

Hamilton, Gerald. The Way It Was With Me. London: Leslie Frewin, 1969.

Hamnett, Nina. Laughing Torso. London: Virago, 1984.

Kaczynski, Richard. Forgotten Templars: The Untold Origins of Ordo Templi Orientis. United States: published for the a -00uthor, 2012.

Keun, Irmgard. The Artificial Silk Girl. Translated by Basil Creighton. London: Chatto & Windus, 1933.

Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Edited, translated, and Introduction by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Metzger, Rainer. Berlin in the Twenties. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2007.

Pasi, Marco. Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics. London: Equinox Publishing, 2012.

———. “September 1930, Lisbon: Aleister Crowley’s Lost Diary of his Portuguese Trip.”

Pasi, Marco, and Patricio Ferrari. “Fernando Pessoa and Aleister Crowley: New Discoveries and Analysis of the Documents in the Gerald Yorke Collection.”

Pessoa, Plural. A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies, 1. A Joint Publication of Brown University, Utrecht University, and Universidad de Los Andes, 2012.

Rabelais, François. The Heroic Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Vol. 1. London: J. M. Dent & Son, 1929.

Rosemont, Penelope. Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Sieveking, Lance. The Eye of the Beholder. London: Hulton Press, 1957.

Spence, Richard B. Secret Agent 666, Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult. Port Townsend, Wash.: Feral House, 2008.

Starr, Martin P. The Unknown God, W. T. Smith and the Thelemites. Bolingbrook: Teitan Press, 2003.

Stephensen, P. R., and Aleister Crowley. The Legend of Aleister Crowley, a Study of the Facts. Introduction by Stephen J. King. Enmore, NSW, Aus.: Helios Books (Ordo Templi Orientis), 2007.

Walter-Ris, Anja. Kunstleidenschaft im Dienst der Moderne: Die Geschichte der Galerie Nierendorf Berlin/New York 1920–1995. Zurich: Zurich InterPublishers, 2003.

Yorke, Gerald, Keith Richmond, David Tibet, Timothy d’Arch Smith, and Clive Harper. Aleister Crowley, The Golden Dawn and Buddhism, Reminiscences and Writings of Gerald Yorke. York Beach, Maine: The Teitan Press, 2011.

OTHER BOOKS BY TOBIAS CHURTON

Jerusalem! The Real Life of William Blake (2014)

The Mysteries of John the Baptist (2012)

The Babylon Gene (novel) (2012)

Aleister Crowley: The Biography (2011)

The Missing Family of Jesus (2010)

The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians (2009)

Freemasonry: The Reality (2007)

The Magus of Freemasonry:
The Mysterious Life of Elias Ashmole (2006)

Gnostic Philosophy (2005)

The Golden Builders:
Alchemists, Rosicrucians, and the First Free Masons (2004)

The Gnostics (1987)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tobias Churton is a filmmaker and the founding editor of the magazine Freemasonry Today. He studied theology at Oxford University and created the award-winning documentary series and accompanying book The Gnostics, as well as several other films on Christian doctrine, mysticism, and magical folklore. He lives in England.

ABOUT INNER TRADITIONS • BEAR & COMPANY

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Copyright © 2014 by Tobias Churton

Copyright © 2014 by Ordo Templi Orientis for all material by Aleister Crowley

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Churton, Tobias, 1960–

Aleister Crowley : the Beast in Berlin : art, sex, and magick in the Weimar Republic / Tobias Churton ; Introduction by Frank van Lamoen.

        pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

print ISBN: 978-1-62055-256-8

ebook ISBN: 978-1-62055-257-5

1. Crowley, Aleister, 1875-1947—Travel—Germany—Berlin. 2. Occultists—England—Biography. 3. Magicians—England—Biography. 4. Artists—England—Biography. 5. Berlin (Germany)—Intellectual life—20th century. 6. Art—Germany—Berlin—History—20th century. 7. Art and society—Germany—Berlin—20th century. 8. Germany)—Social conditions—1918–1933. 9. Magic—Germany—Berlin. I. Title.

BF1598.C7C58 2014

130.92—dc23

[B]

2013038783

Artwork in figs. 5.2, 6.1, 14.1a and b, 15.1, 17.1, and plates 25, 27, 30, and 32 used with permission from Adam Parfrey from the book Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin by Mel Gordon, Feral House Publishing, Fort Townsend, Washington

To send correspondence to the author of this book, mail a first-class letter to the author c/o Inner Traditions r Bear & Company, One Park Street, Rochester, VT 05767, and we will forward the communication, or contact the author directly at www.tobiaschurton.com.

INDEX

All page number refer to the print edition of this title.

Page numbers in italics refer to images.

Adler, Alfred, xxi, 27–28, 74, 108,
        124–25, 139–40, 160–61, 266–68, 346, 363
Adlon Hotel, 114–15
After the Verdict, 292
Ahebah, 249
Alexander Platz, 256–57
All Quiet on the Western Front, 216, 217
Alraune, 292
Alvensleben, Werner “Alvo” Konstantin
        August von, xxi, 254–56, 255, 266,
        270–81
Anger, Kenneth, 201–2, 293
Anglemeyer, Kenneth Wilbur, 293
Anthroposophists, 349
Aquila, 130–31
Argentinum Astrum, 3, 69, 152–53
Armstrong, Lawrence S., 158
Arnheim, Rudolf, 188–89
Arnstaedt, Hansi, 284
Artificial Silk Girl, The, 99
Aryan race, 341
astral traveling, 17, 153–54
Auden, W. H., 108, 181
Auerbach, Maria, 94

Baader, Johannes, 186
Bacon, Francis, 182
Barth, Otto Wilhelm, 69
Bauhaus, xiii–xiv, 103, 355
Beardsley, 200
Becher, Magda, 249
Beckmann, Max, 185
Bender, Henry, xxi, 260, 282, 284, 292
Berber, Anita, 245
Berge in Flammen, 288
Berlin, xxi, 98–106, 142–43, 237–38
    arrival of Crowley in, 4–13
    masses in, 108–13
    modern art in, 184–91
    rebirth of, 354–64
Berliner Tageblatt, 1–2, 3, 4–9, 125–27,
        166–67, 348
Bernasconi, Mario, 254–55
Bernstorff, Johann von, 298, 299–300
Bertling (Doctor), 265–66, 306
Besant, Annie, 20, 52, 82, 301, 316–17
Birkle, Albert, pl.28
Birven, Henri, xxi, 14–15, 22, 24–25,
        29, 36–37, 90–93, 94–95, 120–21, 127–29
Bishop, Tom, 9
Black Death, 27
Black Friday, 25–26
Blake, William, 196
Blavatsky, Helena, 46–47, 50–51, 67, 301
Bloch, Felix, 319
Boese, Carl, 291
Bohr, Niels, 318, 319
Book Four: Magick in Theory and
        Practice, 17, 233–35
Book of the Law, The, 54, 56, 57, 59,
        66–67, 69, 70, 141, 173–74, 361–62
Bosch, Hieronymous, 98–99
bourgeois, 3
Box of Counters, The, 138
Bradshaw, David, 168
Brandenburger Platz, 116–17
Brecht, Bertolt, 190–91, 268
Bredow, Ferdinand von, 308–9
Breeze, William, 196, 335–36
Bricaud, Jean, 56
Bricaud, Joanny, 14, 94, 124
Bridgman, Reginald, 306–8
Brüning, Max, xxii, pl.9, pl.12, 282–83
Bryks, Arthur, 254
Buratti, Robert, 199
Busch, Bertha “Billie,” xxii, 260–62,
        263, 267–68, 282–84, 286, 288,
        311, 331–33
Butts, Mary, 147

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 291
Café Dorian Gray, 313
Camille Frojens, 277
Camille L’Apache, 276–77
Carter, John Fillis Carré “Nick,” xxii, 6,
        6–7, 134–35, 177–79, 298–99, 304, 308
Casement, Roger, 299–300
Chadwick, James, 318–20
Chanler, Robert Winthrop, 185, 195
Charell, Erik, 107, 288
chess, 116, 122, 159, 244, 283
Churton, Tobias, xv
Cicero, Paolo, 199
Citizen Kane, 289
Clark, Petula, 190–91
Comenius, 59
Comintern, 302
Confessions, 26–27
Conrad, Elsa, 350
Conscientious Nude, 243
consciousness, 173
Cora Germer, pl.5
cosmic 93, 146
creationism, 7–8
Crowley, Aleister, xxii
    arrival at Hohenleuben, 68–73, 97
    arrival in Berlin, 4–13
    as an artist, 191–203, 356–58
    conflation with Hitler, 340–44
    disappearance of, 161–67
    German New Age movement and, 50–59
    health of, 221–23
    letters of, 125–27, 130–33, 155–56,
        157–58, 177–78, 200–201, 235–36,
        265, 287–88, 341–44
    lost paintings, 333–36
    movie connection of, 290–96
    Nierendorf and, 180–84
    pictured, 4, 8, 16, 21
    Porza show and, 270–85
    promotion of, 17–37
    as Quantum Magus, 174–77
    spying in Berlin, 297–309
    summer of love, 248–53
    Thelemic consciousness and, 358–64
    toward the exhibition, 259–69
    visit to Germany (1930), 114–24
Crowley, Astarte Lulu, xxii, 217
Crowley, Edward, 241
Crowley, Emily Bertha, 191–92
Crowley, Marie, 124, 135, 139, 144–45,
        156, 161, 163, 177–79, 256
Crowley, Rose, 325–26
Cunard, Nancy, xxii, 132, 307–8
Cup of Babalon, 232

Dadaists, 186–87
dance halls, 109
Das Neue Berlin: Die Weltstadt Berlin, 101–2
Dead Souls, 197
Dead Sunday, 297–98
De Arte Magica, 229–30
democracy, 359–60
Der Kongress Tanzt, 288–89
Der Krieg, 182–83
Der Letzte Mann, 292
Der Querschnitt, 22
dharana, 233
dhyana, 233
Diary of a Drug Fiend, The, 257–58
Dietrich, Marlene, 112, 321
Dirac, Paul, 318
divination, 155, 211–12, 218, 320–21, 335
Dix, Otto, xxii, 98–99, 106, 182–83,
        186, 187, 346–47
Döblin, Alfred, 256
Doors of Perception, The, 172
Dörnbergerstrasse, 243–44
Douglas, James, 19
Down with Liebknecht, pl.26
dualism, 364
Duranty, Walter, 32

Eaton, Cora, 18, 26, 90. See also Germer,
        Cora Eaton
Echstein, Friedrich, 51
Eckhart, Meister, 39
Eckhoffen, Hans Heinrich von Ecker
        und, 48–49
Einstein, Albert, xxiii, 168, 171, 173–75,
        262, 305
Eldorado, 322–23, 323–24
elixir of life, 231–36
Emil and the Detective, 294
Encausse, Gérard, 56, 94
Engel, Leopold, 28
Engers, Leon, 195
Equinox, The, 63
Eugenic Laws, 330
Ewers, Hanns Heinz, xxiii, 138–39,
        146–47, 212
Exhibition, pl.11, 259–69
existentialism, 41
Expressionism, 184–85

Fanfrolico Press, 19
Fanny (Peter), xxiii, 120, 142, 240, 241
Finsterlin, Hermann, 102–3
Fitzcarrald, Carlos Fermín, 151
Flechtheim, Alfred, xxiii, 22, 253–54
Ford, Henry, 65
Fourth of July in Hell, The, 249
France, 56
Fraternitas Saturni, 70, 87–88
Freemasonry, 8, 46, 47, 134
Freud, Sigmund, 283, 346
Friedrichstrasse, 116–17, 117
Friedrich-Wiljelm Platz, 1–2
Fuller, J. F. C., 195
Fundvogel, 146–47

Galeen, Henrik, 291, 292–93
Gamow, George, 319
Garden of Earthly Delights, 98–99
Gauguin, Paul, xiv, 200
Gebhardi, Otto, xxiii, 23, 53, 68, 86
Gerald Yorke, pl.8
German Storm Gibraltar, 15
Germany
    overview of New Age, 38–43
    Theosophy in, 43–50
    See also Berlin
Germer, Cora Eaton, xxiii, pl.5, 34–35,
        122–23, 135, 146, 244–45, 267, 286–87
Germer, Karl Johannes, xxiii, 5, 17–18,
        21–23, 24–26, 29–31, 61, 83–85,
        86, 90, 121–22, 125–27, 138–39,
        140, 155–56, 214–15, 235–36,
        265, 341–45
Gertler, Mark, 182
Gibarti, Louis, xxiii, 302–3, 317–18
“Gnostic Catechism,” 94
Gnostic Mass, 212
Gnostics, 47, 281
Goebbels, Joseph, 111, 223
Goetz, Fritz, 287
Golden Dawn, 44–45
Golden Twigs, 141
Goldston, Edward, xxiv, 19, 23–24,
        29–30
Golem, The, 185, 291
Gomes, Augusto Ferreira, 163–64
Good-Bye to All That, 114
Goodbye to Berlin, 312
Götz, Fritz, 348
Gräfenberg, Ernsy, 310–11
Grau, Albin, xxiv, pl.14–23, 68, 69–73,
        80–81, 185
Graves, Robert, 114
Great Britain, 56, 140
Great Depression, 24, 28
Great White Brotherhood, 64–65
Great Work, 66, 266
Gropius, Walter, 102–3
Grosche, Eugen, xxiv, 68, 69–73, 88
Grosses Schauspielhaus, 185
Grosz, George, pl.26, 186, 187
G spot, 310–11
Guénon, René, 93, 95–96, 123
Guide to Immoral Berlin, 219
Guy Fawkes Night, 284
Gypsy Girl, 239
Haas, Wander Johannes de, xxiv, 318, 327–28
Haddo, Oliver, 293
Haemmerling, Konrad, x–xi
Hain der Isis, 93, 128–29, 209, 291
Haire, Norman, 310–11
Haller, Hermann, 107
Hamilton, Gerald, xxiv, 181–82, 281,
        294–95, 300, 311, 312, 330–31
Hamnett, Nina, xxiv, 169, 202
Hanchant, Wilfrid Lewis, xxiv
Hanni Jaegar, pl.4
Hare, Loftus, 87
Häring, Hugo, 334
Harris, Frank, 260
Harris, Percy, 298
Harrison, Thomas Alexander, 160
Harry Ransom collection, 276–77
Hartmann, Franz, 44, 45, 50–52, 53–54
Haus Vaterland pleasure palace, 99
healing, 39–40
Henckels, Pola, 251, 255, 256, 257, 260, 290
Henderson, Wyn, xxiv, 132
Herbert, A. P., 73
Hermann, 250
Hermann, Bernard, 132
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 10
Hiller’s (restaurant), 116, 246–47
Himalayas, 4–5, 44
Hindenburg, Paul von, 105, 326–27
Hirschfield, Ephraim Joseph, 49
Hirschfield, Magnus, 310–11
Hirsig, Leah, 68, 84
Hitler, Adolf, 163, 208–9, 298, 329–30,
        336, 340–44
Höch, Hannah, 186
Hofmann, Wolfgang, 15
Hohenleuben, 60–61, 68–73, 97
Holy Family, The, pl.6, 275–76
Holy Guardian Angel, 11
homosexuality, 146–47
Hopfer, Oscar, xxiv, 80, 86, 129
Horstmann, Ulrich, 41
Howe, Gertrud, xxiv, 243, 245
Humanity, 11
Hussar Love, 290
Huxley, Aldous, xxv, 165, 168, 171–72, 176–77

Ibsen, Henrik, 312
I Ching, 211, 218, 320–21, 335
“Ideal and Reality,” 185
inferiority complex, 267–68
Ingram, Rex, 293
inhibitions, 178–79
International, The, 138
International Arbeiterhilfe (I.A.H.), 301–2
intuition, 229
invocations, 233–35
Isherwood, Christopher, xxv, 108, 181,
        295–96, 312, 315–16, 317
Itten, Johannes, xiii
Ivy Cottage, 24

Jacobs, Montague “Monty,” 287, 348
Jaeger, Hanni, xvi, xxv, 121, 124, 145,
        146, 150–51, 153–54, 157–59, 167,
        171, 173, 345–46
    finding a studio, 205–6, 207–8
    melancholy of, 211, 213–14, 220
    pictured, 206
    relationship with Crowley, 206–7,
        210–11, 241–43, 246, 247–48
Jannings, Emil, 252, 292
Jesus Christ, 56
John, August, 3–4, 4
John Bull, 144
Jones, Charles Stansfeld, 57–58
Jones, George Cecil, 325–26
Joseph, Hans, 253
Joseph II, Emperor, 49
Joynson-Hicks, William, 19
Judge, William Quan, 52
Jung, Carl, 281, 346

Karlstadt department store, 111–12
Karolevna, Ilona, x–xi
Karsch, Joachim, 183, 183
Kasha, 250, 251
Kashmir, 44
Kästner, Erich, 294
Kell, George Waldegrave, 308
Kellner, Carl, 44, 51–52, 53
Kelly, Gerald Festus, 192–93
Keun, Irmgard, 99
Khunrath, Heinrich, 39
Kingsford, Anna, 45, 46
Kisch, Egon Erwin, 118
Kleist Kasino, 248–49, 251
Knauer, Gustav, 334
Knox, Ronald, xxv, 33
Konody, Paul George, xxv
Konx Om Pax, 195, 356–57
Kracauer, Siegfried, 109, 112–13
Krako, Jacques, xxv, 266, 282, 289, 350–51
Krishnamurti, 20, 36, 67, 87, 134, 274
Krumm-Heller, Arnoldo, xxv, 14–15, 57,
        59, 94, 121–24, 133–34, 136–38,
        209, 313–14
Küntzel, Martha, xxv, 14, 23, 53, 68, 80,
        86–87, 88–89, 90–92, 146, 262,
        281, 301, 335, 336–39
Lachmann-Mosse, Hans, 348
Lamb, Henry, 182
Lamoen, Frank van, 334
Lamp of Invisible Light (LIL), 87–88
Lang, Edmund, 51
Lang, Fritz, 101–2, 185, 292
Langham Chambers project, 141
Las Meninas, 194
Laughing Torso, 202
Laura Brown, pl.7, 275
Lawrence, D. H., 130, 169
Lawrence Tiller Girls, 107
Leadbeater, Bishop, 66, 133–34, 138
League Against Imperialism (LAI),
        302–3, 306
Lea Hirsig, 276
Leal, Raul, 152
Legend of Aleister Crowley, The, 6, 27
Legros, Alphonse, 194
Leipzig Thelema Publishing Company, 86–93
Lekve, Frederic, xxvi, 335, 339
Lennon, John, 103
Leschke, Erich, 221
Lewis, Harvey Spencer, 57
Liber Agape, 229–30
liberation, 108
Lindemann, Frederick Alexander, 305
Lindsay, Norman, 19
Lion, Margo, xxvi
Lion-Hunt, 276–77
Lisbon, 150–51, 152
Löbe, Paul, 156
Lyon, Elise, 242

Macdonald, Ramsay, 298, 302, 306
Maenz, Anne, 252
Magician, The, 293
magick, 174–76, 228–29
Magick, 26–27, 169
Magick Publishing Company, 133
Magnum, 105–6
Mainz, Erik, 250
Maitland, Edward, 46
Mali und Igel, xi–xii, xxvi, pl.1,
        277–78, 278, 350
Mallefille, Félicien, 15
Mammen, Jeanne, pl.29, pl.31,
        218–19
Mandrake, 28–29, 31, 34, 36, 127–28,
        141–42, 147–48
Mann, Ethel, 306–8, 307
Mann, Heinrich, 112
Mann, Thomas, 166–67, 208, 257,
        357–58
Masked Ball, pl.31
masses, 109–10
materialism, 10–11, 319
Mattner, Christe, 262
Max Brüning, pl.9, pl.12
May, Karl, 13
McMurtry, Grady L., 230, 336
Mekong Valley, The, 276
Memoirs of the Nights of Don Juan, 15
Mendelsohn, Erich, 102–3, 104
Mercury, 45
Metropolis, 102, 185, 292
Metzger, Rainer, 187–88
Meyrink, Gustav, xxvi, 14, 26, 28, 45,
        94, 185, 291
Midsummer Nights Dream, A, 293
Mieresch, 304–5
Mikado Club, 118–20, 119
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 6
Miramar, Maria Teresa Ferrari de, xxii, 20, 21
modern art, in Berlin, 184–91, 253–54
modernism, 102
Moonchild, 138
Moreck, Curt, x, pl.24, 218–19. See also
        Haemmerling, Konrad
Moro, Vala, pl.30
Morrison, Jim, 360
Mortadello, 286, 289
Mosse, Rudolf, 104, 111, 348
Mosson, George, 183
Mudd, Norman, 25, 71, 80, 84–85, 278–80
Mühsam, Kurt, 287
Mulatto Girl, 217, 218
Mulatto with Toadstool, 245
Müller, Hermann, 2
Münchner Hofbrau, 172–73, 172
Münsterburg, Hugo, 298
Münzenberg, Willi, 171, 302
Murnau, F. W., 185, 291–92
mysticism, 169–70

Napoleonic Wars, 49
Narodny, Ivan, 185
Nash, Paul, 182
Nature, 11, 40, 363
Nauhaus, Walter, 313–14
Nazis, 28, 40, 105, 111, 191, 208–9,
        216–17, 223, 329–30, 337–47, 349–50
Neligan, David, 298
Nepal, 44
neutron, discovery of, 318–20
Nevermann, Hedy, 311
New Age in Germany, 13, 21, 26
    Crowley and, 50–59
    overview of, 38–43
New Objectivity, 117–18, 185–86, 188–
        91, 255, 355
newspapers, 110–11
Nicholas of Cusa, 360
Nicholson, William, 182
Niendorf, Elfi, 253–54
Nierendorf, Karl, xii–xiii, xxvi, 143,
        180–84, 226–27, 226, 240, 262–
        63, 266, 271–72, 346
Nihilism, 41
Ninth Degree, 229–36
Nolde, Emil, xxvi, 225
Nosferatu, 185, 291–92
NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), 3
nude photographs, ix–xi
Nuit, 173, 320

Olcott, Henry Steel, 52
Olsen, Dorothy, xxvi–xxvii, 68, 75, 84
Ophüls, Max, 294
Oppenheimer, Albert M., 287
Opus 2, 242
Opus 15, 258
Opus 23, 154
Opus 24, 154
Opus 35, 207
Opus 42, 269
Opus 44, 281
Opus 59, 215
Opus 85, 237
Opus 132, 328
Order of Saadi, 52
Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), 50,
        55–59, 64–65, 136–38
Oriental Templars, 56
Ossietzky, Carl von, 216
Oswald, Richard, 292

Pabst, G. W., 190, 294
pacifism, 301
Page, Jimmy, 336
Page, Norman, xv
Paintings of D. H. Lawrence, The, 20
Palyk, Palli, 250
Pansophia, 59, 77–78
Pansophic Lodge, 61, 64–65
Papen, Franz von, 298, 326–27, 328, 330
Paracelsus, 39, 52
Pasi, Marco, 152
Patanjali, 233
Patriot, The, 96
Pauli, Wolfgang, 318
Peeping Tom, 293
Peithmann, Ernst Christian Heinrich,
        xxvii, 14, 94–96, 123, 209, 349
Pellen, Eduardo M., 159
Pessoa, Fernando, xxvii, 151, 152–53,
        152, 162–65, 284–85
Philpot, Glyn Warren, 182
photographs, 189
Piepenberg, Anton, 284
Pietists, 50
Piscator, Erwin, 190–91
Planck, Max, 169–70, 175
Plantikov, Walter, xxvii, 15
Plymouth Brethren Christians, 9
Poelzig, Hans, 185
Pollitt, Herbert Charles “Jerome,” 120, 192
Pommer, Erich, 288
Portrait of Gertrud Howe, pl.2
PORZA Association, 225, 254–55,
        262–64, 347–48
Porza show, 270–85
Potsdamer Platz, 237–38, 245
Powell, Michael, 293–94
Pressburger, Emeric, 207, 293–94
publishing syndicate plan, 17–19

Quantum Magus, 174–77

Rabelais, François, 361
race theories, xv
radio, 110
Rais, Gilles de, 27
reality, 42, 106
Reason, 11, 40–41
Red Shoes, The, 294
Reformation, 39
Regardie, Israel, xxvii, 31, 89–90, 140,
        157–58, 166, 177–78, 332
Reich, 101
Reichsausschuss, 3
Reinhardt, Max, 106, 292–93
relativity, 174
religion, 42–43
Remarque, Erich Maria, 216
Renger-Patzsch, Albert, 255
Rentenmark, 109
Residenz-Kasino (Resi), 323–25, 324
Reuss, Theodor, 44, 46–47, 50, 52–53,
        54–55, 122
Revue, 1
Rhineland, 140
Richter, Hanni, 241–43, 245–46
Rodin, Auguste, 193
Roellig, Ruth, pl.25, 313
Rohe, Ludwig Mies van der, 103
Roman Catholic Church, 359
Rosenfeld, Léon, xxvii, 317–18
Rosenkreuz, Christian, 48
Rosicrucians, 45, 47–50, 59, 122
Ross, Jean, xxvii, 181–82, 311–13
Roving Reporter, 118
Royalists, 297
Russia, 32–33, 56
Ruttmann, Walter, 188–89

Sacrower Lake, 249–50
Salaried Masses, The, 109
samadhi, 233
Sanzio, Lucrezia, 289
Saturn Gnosis, pl.14–23, 73
Schad, Christian, 118, 119, 185
Schebera, Jürgen, 252
Scheffelmann, Phillip, 250
Schertel, Ernst, xxvii, 283
Schiffer, Marcellus (Peter Winter), xxvii,
        268–69, 269, 270, 281–82, 346
Schiffer, Margo, 268–69, 269, 270
Schleicher, Kurt von, 329–30
Schlichter, Rudolf, 186
Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl, xxviii, 183,
        225–26, 346–47
Scholz, Georg, xxviii
Schönfeld, Thomas von, 49
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 13
Schoppmann, Claudia, 350
Schrödinger, Erwin, xxviii, 171, 175
Schulenberg, Gebhard Werner von der,
        258
Schultz, Albert Christian Georg, 313–15
Schünzel, Reinhold, 294
Schwenckfeld, Caspar, 40
Schwerin (city), 5–6
Schwob, Marcel, 193
science, 40
Scotland Yard, 7
Seckler, Phyllis, 336
Secret Chiefs, 10
Seitz, Robert, 104
Seldte, Franz, xxviii, 2–3
Seuse, Heinrich, 39
sex and sexuality, 107–8, 115, 124, 146–
        47, 158–59, 211–12, 252
sex-magic secrets, 55–56
Shklovsky, Viktor, 190
Shumway, Ninette (Fraux), xxiii
Sieveking, Lance, 257–58
Silhouette, 321–22
Singh, Bhagat, 303–4
Sin of the Eternal, or This Is My Body, 283
Sintenis, Renée, 279
Siodak, Robert, 188
Sivers, Marie, 54
Slade, Oscar, 249
Smith, Helen Parsons, 336
Smith, Martin Cruz, 334
Smith, Wilfrid Talbot, 327
Social Democrats, 105, 111–13, 156, 167, 358
Solar, Xul, 202–3
Some Like It Hot, 294
Space-Time Continuum, 174
Spare, Austin Osman, 195, 197
Spence, Richard B., 154, 302–3
Spender, Stephen, xxviii, 108, 181, 295
Spoliansky, Mischa, 268
Sporn, Bernhard, 80, 86
Sprengel, Anna, 45
Stahlhelm Group, 2–3
Stairway to Heaven, 294
Stalin, Joseph, 33
Stauffenberg, Gräfin Ellen von, xxix, 248
Stein, Günther, xxviii, 7–8, 150,
        211–12, 348–49
Steiner, Hans, xxviii, 7, 206, 251, 262
Steiner, Rudolf, 44, 51, 54, 210–11
Stephensen, Percy Reginald, xxviii,
        19–20, 23–24
Stöckler’s restaurant, 224, 224
subconscious impressionism, 196–97
Sud-Express train, 159–60
suicide plan, 159, 161–67
Sukhdev, Rajguru, 303–4
Sullivan, John William Navin, xxviii,
        144, 168–72, 202, 320
Summer Solstice, 61–62
Sunday Express, 19
Supf, Peter, xxviii, 257–58, 260, 288,
        305–6, 317
swastikas, xv
Swift, Jonathan, 11
Symonds, John, 230

Tauentziengirl team, 100
Tauler, Johannes, 39
Taut, Bruno, 102–3
tetragrammaton formula, 230–31
Thaulow, Frits, 194
Thelema, 9, 32, 47, 56, 63, 67–68, 184,
        357, 358–64
Theologica Germanica, 39, 45
Theosophical Society, 8, 15, 20, 42–50,
        67, 209–10, 349
Thoth, 11
Threepenny Opera, The, 294
Thule Society, 313–14
Thynne, Robert Thompson (Robin),
        xxviii, 31–34, 147–48, 165
Tibet, David, xi
Tingley, Katherine, 52
Tränker, Heinrich, xxix, 52, 57–59,
        61–62, 68–70, 71–72, 75–77, 82, 90–91
Tränker, Helen, 244
treasury, need for, 63–64
Tree and Bathers on Rocks, A, pl.3
Trillhaase, Adalbert, xxix, 226, 272, 347
True Will, 70, 229, 235, 358, 359
Tucholsky, Kurt, 109, 185

Ulmer, Edgar, 188
“Uncertainty Principle,” 175
Unter den Linden, 115–17, 117
utopia, 108–9

Verists, 187–88
Verlag, Thelema, 23, 72–73, 86–93, 129
Versailles Conference, 140
Verweyen, John Maria, xxix, 209–10, 349–50
Vienot, Jacques, 347
Viereck, George Sylvester, 138–39
Voodoo’s Bar, 325

Wagner, Martin, 101–2
Wagner Concerts Society, 53
Waiting at the Bridge, pl.28
Wallburg, Otto, 289–90, 350–51
Wanja, Iwa, x
Warhol, Andy, xiv–xv
Way It Was with Me, The, 312
Wedderkop, Hermann von, xxix, 22
Wegener, Paul, 185, 291, 292, 293
Weida Conference, 60–68
Weill, Kurt, 190, 268
Weimar Republic, 2–3, 101, 105, 298
Weinberg, Martin, 104
Weine, Robert, 291
Weishaupt, Adam, 50
Wessell, Horst, 147
Westcott, William Wynn, 45, 46, 53
Westheim, Paul, 263
Whistler, James McNeill, 192
White Stains, 192
Whitman, Walt, 195
Wiene, Robert, 185
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 196
Wilder, Billy, 188
Wilhelm, August, 298
Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 289, 297
Wittenberg, 241
Wolfe, Jane, 84, 336
Wolff, Carl Heinz, 284, 290
Woljeska, Helen, 196
World from Below, 262–66, 263, 264
Worner, Heinz, xxix, 15

Yarker, John, 47, 53, 55
Yoga Sutras, 233
Yorke, Gerald Joseph, xxix, pl.8, 17,
        34–35, 89–90, 134, 149, 165–66,
        177, 214–15, 265, 282, 287–88,
        300–301, 316–17, 320, 331
Yorke Collection, 275–76
Young Newlyweds, pl.30
youth, 124

Zeitgeist, 10–11
Zentgraaff, Henri, ix–x
Zinnemann, Fred, 188–89
Zschaetzsch, Louise, 239, 246
Zucker, Heinz, 104
Zuckmeyer, Carl, 105–6

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