Aleister Crowley in England

“Aleister Crowley in England, by scholar Tobias Churton, is a very precious and fascinating work, covering the last fifteen years of the Beast in his native England. It throws considerable light on his final period, not well known and as full of crazy events as his early days. A must-have.”

Autorentext

Tobias Churton is an authority on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism. Appointed Honorary Fellow of Exeter University in 2005, he holds a master’s degree in Theology from Brasenose College, Oxford, and is the author of many books, including three previous books on Aleister Crowley--Aleister Crowley in America, Aleister Crowley in India, and Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin. He lives in the heart of England.

Klappentext

A detailed examination of the last 15 years of Crowley’s life

Zusammenfassung
A detailed examination of the last 15 years of Crowley’s life

• Reveals Crowley’s sex magick relations in London and his contacts with important figures, including Dion Fortune, Gerald Gardner, Jack Parsons, Dylan Thomas, and black equality activist Nancy Cunard

• Explores Crowley’s nick-of-time escape from the Nazi takeover in Germany and offers extensive confirmation of Crowley’s work for British intelligence

• Examines the development of Crowley’s later publications and his articles in reaction to the Nazi Gestapo actively persecuting his followers in Germany

After an extraordinary life of magical workings, occult fame, and artistic pursuits around the globe, Aleister Crowley was forced to spend the last fifteen years of his life in his native England, nearly penniless. Much less examined than his early years, this final period of the Beast’s life was just as filled with sex magick, espionage, romance, transatlantic conflict, and extreme behavior.

Drawing on previously unpublished diaries and letters, Tobias Churton provides the first detailed treatment of the final years of Crowley’s life, from 1932 to 1947. He opens with Crowley’s nick-of-time escape from the Nazi takeover in Germany and his return home to England, flat broke. Churton offers extensive confirmation of Crowley’s work as a secret operative for MI5 and explores how Crowley saw World War II as the turning point for the “New Aeon.” He examines Crowley’s notorious 1934 London trial, which resulted in his bankruptcy, and shares inside stories of Crowley’s relations with Californian O.T.O. followers, including rocket-fuel specialist Jack Parsons, and his attempt to take over H. Spencer Lewis’s Rosicrucian Order. The author reveals Crowley’s sex magick relations in London and his contacts with spiritual leaders of the time, including Dion Fortune and Wicca founder Gerald Gardner. He examines Crowley’s dealings with artists such as Dylan Thomas, Alfred Hitchcock, Augustus John, Peter Warlock, and Peter Brooks and dispels the accusations that Crowley was racist, exploring his work with lifelong friend, black equality activist Nancy Cunard.

Churton also examines the development of Crowley’s later publications such as Magick without Tears as well as his articles in reaction to the Nazi Gestapo who was actively persecuting his remaining followers in Germany. Presenting an intimate and compelling study of Crowley in middle and old age, Churton shows how the Beast still wields a wand-like power to delight and astonish.

Leseprobe
From Chapter 2. Never dull where Crowley is.

Vacating Jermyn Street’s Cavendish Hotel on 6 July for a flat at 27 Albemarle St., Mayfair, Crowley informed Louis Umfreville Wilkinson that he’d appreciate a call any morning before 10. Friendly since 1912, Crowley commiserated with Louis over second wife Annie’s death: “Dreadfully sorry to hear of your loss. My own first wife [Rose] died in February, but as I had not seen her for over 20 years, Time had spun gossamer over the wound.”(2)

A few weeks later, writer-performer Jean Ross (1911-1973) surprised Crowley in Hatchett’s coffee house, Mayfair--he’d last seen her in Berlin when her friend Christopher Isherwood joined Crowley on a jaunt round Kreuzburg’s gay bars. Isherwood twisted Jean into the very different “Sally Bowles” in Goodbye to Berlin, inspiration for Cabaret. Fervently anti-Nazi, Jean would soon join the Communist Party. Crowley met another communist sympathizer on 4 August, calling on Mrs. Paul Robeson at 19 Buckingham Street, near Charing Cross Station, to interest her husband in Mortadello, a play he’d sent to film directors G.W. Pabst and Max Reinhardt. Mrs. Robeson complimented Mortadello’s elegant verse drama but regretted that very quality limited its appeal to modern cinema audiences.

Crowley painted his predicament brightly for Germer’s benefit on 25 August:

I am speaking on “The Philosophy of Magick” at a lunch to 600 people on September 15: so hope to do big business. [Christina Foyle of Foyles Bookshop invited Crowley to address her famous Literary Lunch.]

Yorke is intractable so far. I may have to sue him. Can you send me copies of any letters from or to him showing negligence and mismanagement? E.g. his sending the whole of the pictures when we only wanted 75. ... As soon as he finds he can’t sneak off with our £3000 he’ll propose a reasonable settlement, & take credit to himself for his noble conduct. Oh, very English!

His cowardice is revolting. If he had only stuck to his guns, we should all be in clover. Even as it is, things are looking up all round.

I do wish you’d write a really nice letter to Mrs. Busch. It is the only point at issue between us. ... After all, you had nothing but great kindness from her.(3)

Crowley explored every avenue to survive in Britain’s capital, save that of closing ranks with the “white-collar wage slave,” a slight unkindly applied to current O.T.O. “heir” Wilfrid T. Smith in Hollywood, clerk for the Southern California Gas Company.

On 31 August Crowley met Daily Express gossip columnist Tom Driberg for lunch at the Café Royal, Piccadilly Circus. Driberg (1905-1976) first wrote to Crowley at Cefalù requesting advice on useful drugs to assist his Oxford examinations! Not surprisingly, Driberg left university without a degree, but not before co-founding the university’s communist party. Actively homosexual, Driberg became a regular lunch partner, noting the Beast’s eccentric schemes in his new gossip column “These Names Make News.”

Crowley’s artistic interests brought him to composer Leonard Constant Lambert’s studio on 3 September. Recently appointed Vic-Wells Ballet’s composer and music director, Lambert (1905-1951) introduced Crowley to illustrator Joan Hassall (1906-1988) who four days later showed Crowley his old friend Nina Hamnett’s autobiography Laughing Torso. “Abominable libels,” Crowley declared when Nina’s flippant Cefalù narrative mentioned that a baby was said to have disappeared there. Crowley and Leah Hirsig’s baby daughter Poupée died tragically at Cefalù in 1920. Having just served a writ on Gerald Yorke for a supposed £40,000 he would have made had Yorke not been his Trustee (6 September), Crowley called on lawyer Isidore Kerman about Laughing Torso. Nina’s publishers Constable & Co. were notified: an offended Crowley intended to sue.

After a successful speech on 15 September at Foyle’s literary luncheon, Crowley spent the next night getting drunk with Laurence and Pam Felkin.*

[Son of Dr. Robert William Felkin (1853-1926)--Frater *Finem Respice (&l…