Spies, Lies, and Satan's Demise:Aleister Crowley's Adventures In Espionage.

Heinrich Himmler, Fred West, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edward VIII's sexual preferences, Jewish mysticism, Rudolf Steiner, Hippocrates, gnosticism, Paul Robeson, Augustus John, bestiality, antisemitism, and anthroposophy. These were subjects that cropped up in the Q&A after last night's London Fortean Society talk, Aleister Crowley:The Spy Who Loved The Occult, at The Bell in Whitechapel and they should give you some idea of just how large an area of scholarship the world of Crowley is and just how many different influences he took from, and how much influence he had.

The Bell's not a big venue - by any stretch - but the Crowley talk had sold it out weeks in advance (that doesn't happen very often) and that was only right and proper because Richard McNeff (who has been studying, and writing about, Crowley since I was at junior school) not only knows his stuff (and, in a nod to Crowley, adds a few ideas of his own creation into the mix) but communicates it ably and enthusiastically. I almost forgot my bum was sore from sitting on a hard wooden bench.

When Aleister Crowley died, in Hastings on 1st December 1947, not only was there a new face in hell (see what I did there?) but there was also a new face in the annals of British eccentricity. But his scandalous cremation, some called it a 'black mass', aside, he soon began to drift into obscurity and even those who kept his flame alive, like the novelist John Symonds, professed they couldn't actually stand the man.

Symonds, who had commissioned Crowley to write for him in the past - as well as helped him inject himself with heroin, ended up becoming Crowley's literary executor and, in 1951, wrote The Great Beast:The Life of Aleister Crowley about him. Symonds may not have liked the man but he knew he made for great copy. The 1951 tome was far from his last on Crowley. He wrote at least four more.

McNeff told us that he'd known Symonds personally and that Symonds was horrified with the Crowley revival which began, more or less, with the great beast's inclusion on the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP. A decision made by John Lennon who also, apparently, wanted Adolf Hitler on the cover. Cover artist Peter Blake thought was pushing it a bit, twenty-two years after the end of World War II.

Some have claimed Crowley as the missing link between Adolf Hitler and Oscar Wilde (not a link I knew people had been looking for) and though Hitler's inclusion on the Beatles cover was nixed by Blake (though some claim the Fuhrer is still there, hidden behind Western actor Tom Mix's cowboy hat), Wilde still made the cut. What's more, and some people read too much into this, if you trace a line - on the cover - from Crowley to Lennon it cuts through Aldous Huxley and Dylan Thomas.

According to McNeff, 'Paul is Dead' conspiracy websites absolutely love this stuff but both Huxley and Thomas do reappear in this strange tale. It was Crowley, apocryphally - much in Crowley's life is apocryphal, who turned Huxley on to mescaline in Berlin in the 1930s (though, to be fair, Crowley gave a lot of people mescaline) and there are even regular suggestions that the Nazis themselves were using mescaline and flirting with the occult. Particularly Rudolf Hess who will crop up again later.

Crowley had become such a compelling, and intriguing, figure that he ended up featuring, under pseudonyms - which he fully encouraged, in books by Ian Fleming, Somerset Maugham, Anthony Powell, Dennis Wheatley. MR James, Christopher Isherwood, and Dylan Thomas. Thomas was, of course, primarily known as a poet but did release a couple of books of prose.

The minor poet Victor Neuburg, a devoted follower of Crowley who nevertheless had a love/hate relationship with him, was the first person to publish Dylan Thomas and, in McNeff's own fiction - not reality - and that line is a very blurred one it seems, also the one that let on that Crowley had been involved in a plot, in 1936, to avert Edward VIII's abdication. 

Maxwell Knight was a naturalist and broadcaster and also a spymaster (rumoured to be the inspiration for M in the James Bond stories) who ended up heading the MI5 department sourced with looking for homegrown traitors. Knight had, along with Dennis Wheatley, studied under Crowley.

So far, the evidence for Crowley being a spy was circumstantial at best and the American historian Richard B.Spence's 2008 book Secret Agent 666:Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult (the cover showing the sinking of the Lusitania - its second EIAPOE mention in two days, the event that brought the US into World War I) offers even more far fetched ideas about Crowley's level of involvement in espionage. 

Spence believed, or at least wrote, that Crowley had been recruited at Cambridge and spied on the Golden Dawn in the 1890s - even though he was, it seems - along with W.B. Yeats, a member of the Golden Dawn. Double agent? Who knows?

What seems more plausible, though still up for debate, is that, during World War I, Crowley worked as a pro-German provocateur in the United States, posing as an extreme Irish Republican. Again it is suggested he was working as a double agent trying to flush out those in America who were sympathetic to the German side and this seems more plausible when you consider that after the war, despite the fact he had called on the destruction of Britain - specifically his auntie's house where he was sometimes living, he was not even arrested. Lord Haw-Haw, William Joyce, - the most famous British Nazi propagandist - was not so lucky. He was hanged in Wandsworth prison in 1946.

Philip Baker, another Crowley expert in the audience and the speaker at the LFS's excellent 2022 Aleister Crowley, City of the Beast The London of Aleister Crowley talk, felt this was because Crowley was less a spy and more of a 'grass' McNeff, who has written two books about Crowley's links to MI5 and MI6, chose to ice a different cake. Though they disagreed incredibly amicably.

So McNeff continued. Between 1930 and 1932 he had it that Crowley was in Berlin spying for the Special Branch, in 1941 Crowley is said to have written a letter to Naval Intelligence offering to interrogate Rudolf Hess who was being held prisoner of war in Scotland after flying there in a (failed) attempt to negotiate Britain's exit from World War II), and also during the war Crowley took to dressing like Winston Churchill.

As well as talking like Winston Churchill and even smoking the same tobacco as Winston Churchill. He even went so far as to claim (almost certainly untruthfully) he invented the V For Victory symbol. But then Crowley also claimed to have given the Nazis the idea of the swastika symbol. Which tells you something about the man. He led a fascinating, hugely unconventional, life. He was erudite, learned, and could be funny and kind but he could also be mean, he could (and would often) lie, and there was no story he would not appropriate for his own ends. His motto was "do what thou wilt" and, despite all the contradictions in his life story, he seems to have lived by it.

To go back to the start of this blog and to give you further idea of just how enormous his influences were, and his influence was, the talk also took in Stalin, Bob Dylan, Jay-Z, Paulo Coelho, Kenneth Anger, L.Ron Hubbard, Joan Baez, Timothy Leary, Jimmy Page, Nikola Tesla, Jack Parsons, John Dee, Ozzy Osbourne (of course), Kim Philby, Malcolm Lowry, The Rolling Stones, Fernando Pessoa, Jimmy Page, and the Graham Bond Organisation.

Graham Bond believed that Crowley was his absent father. David Bowie, of course, cropped up (the lyrics of Quicksand - my favourite Bowie song - includes the lines "I'm closer to the Golden Dawn immersed in Crowley's uniform") and so did Alexandr Dugin, known as 'Putin's Rasputin'. Dugin takes a heavy influence from 'chaos magic' and has claimed he will use it to create an all out war that causes "the end of times". Part of his plan has been to corrupt Western democracies with misinformation and to persuade Putin to invade Ukraine (though Dugin's personal preference is said to be the death of ALL Ukrainians) so either his chaos magic is working or something else very worrying is afoot.

I'm not blaming Crowley for Dugin or Putin, and I'm not crediting him for Bowie or for Black Sabbath, but he seems an endlessly fascinating man and I know, with a degree of certainty, that this won't be the last time the LFS tackle him. Thanks to the London Fortean Society and David V. Barrett for hosting, thanks to The Bell in Whitechapel (not least because I didn't buy a single drink and survived purely on a bag of Mini Eggs), and thanks to Dewi, Jade, Michael, Paula, Steve, and Jackie for keeping me company. Another great evening with the LFS and one that I was glad didn't end with being asked if I'd like to participate in a sex magick human sacrifice.