Aleister Crowley in America Read online

  ALEISTER

  CROWLEY

  –IN–

  AMERICA

  “Aleister Crowley in America focuses sharply and drills down into Crowley’s formative U.S. period, burgeoning with rich and surprising depth beyond what is possible in a life-spanning biography. This story deserves a book of its own, and Tobias Churton demonstrates here that the Beast is indeed in the details.”

  RICHARD KACZYNSKI, AUTHOR OF PERDURABO: THE LIFE OF ALEISTER CROWLEY

  “Churton has sifted through a mass of material—from long-neglected documents to the latest researches of contemporary Crowley scholars—to put together this comprehensive and intriguing study of the years the Beast spent in America. He brings fresh eyes to old controversies, such as the true nature of Crowley’s political activities during the First World War, and presents a work that anyone interested in the history of Crowley and his circle will read with enthusiasm.”

  KEITH RICHMOND, CO-OWNER OF WEISER ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS AND AUTHOR OF PROGRADIOR AND THE BEAST

  “This beautifully produced and richly documented history tracks and clarifies Crowley’s myriad experiences in America. Tobias Churton admirably sorts out fact from fantasy and shines an illuminating light on a misunderstood facet of Crowley’s career.”

  MITCH HOROWITZ, PEN AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR OF OCCULT AMERICA

  “Way beyond the standard Crowley hagiographies, Churton’s books always put the Great Beast in cultural context. This fascinating must-read is no exception; it’s an invaluable, well-researched, and highly entertaining insight into the great magician’s life, thoughts, and scandals during his American adventures.”

  CARL ABRAHAMSSON, AUTHOR OF OCCULTURE: THE UNSEEN FORCES THAT DRIVE CULTURE FORWARD AND REASONANCES AND EDITOR OF THE FENRIS WOLF

  “Magician Tobias Churton has successfully cast a spell, transforming his 750-page comprehensive scholarly tome into a gripping and obsessive page turner, leaving one wishing for more. Replete with new and exciting details and interpretations of Crowley’s time in the New World—and of the multiple denizens of his exciting and unique social circles—the book includes previously unpublished manuscripts, letters, and photographs. Churton furnishes the reader with a sensitive and intimate portrait that brings Crowley to life—as if we are invited to a convivial conversation or private dinner with the Magus himself. Truly an outstanding, enjoyable, and invaluable book!”

  JAMES WASSERMAN, AUTHOR OF TEMPLAR HERESY: A STORY OF GNOSTIC ILLUMINATION

  “Crowley had a great hunger for almost everything he ever thought of or saw. He was economical with the truth, with his own money, and with his loyalties, but—and it is a big but—the scope and scale of America thrilled him. The vitality of the big cities, the newness and esoteric searching of the West Coast made him delirious with a big, greedy joy. He loved the States for nearly thirty years, as it gave him a dedicated group of very clever people, like Jack Parsons, who practiced what he preached. Tobias Churton has uncovered fresh material on Crowley in biographically fresh territory and has once again written a very fine book.”

  GERALDINE BESKIN AND BALI BESKIN, OWNERS OF THE ATLANTIS BOOKSHOP, LONDON

  Contents

  Cover Image

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  Part One: The Adventure Chapter 1: A Special Relationship 1898: A DIPLOMAT MANQUÉ

  RECRUITED AT CAMBRIDGE?

  CROWLEY AND THE CARLISTS

  CROWLEY AND “MACGREGOR” MATHERS

  Chapter 2: The Song of the Sea

  Chapter 3: Out of the Frying Pan, into New York

  Chapter 4: The Eagle and the Snake: Mexico City THE TWO REPUBLICS

  Chapter 5: Chevalier O’Rourke and The Mexican Herald

  Chapter 6: The Mother’s Tragedy POST SCRIPT: THE LAST LAUGH

  Chapter 7: Return to New York 1906

  Chapter 8: Art in America JOHN QUINN

  Part Two: The Furnace Chapter 9: 1914

  Chapter 10: The Sinews of War GERMANS COME SHOPPING

  MEANWHILE IN LONDON . . .

  CAP IN HAND, TO THE SAVAGES FOR COWRIES

  Chapter 11: My Egg Was Addled WHAT THE PAPERS SAID

  Chapter 12: Lower into the Water

  Chapter 13: The Magick of a New York Christmas: World War I Style JOHN O’HARA COSGRAVE, EVANGELINE ADAMS, AND FRANK CROWNINSHIELD

  Chapter 14: Toward the Fatherland INTO THE DARK LAIR

  GETTING IN WITH THE GERMANS

  MÜNSTERBERG

  Chapter 15: Getting Hotter PHILADELPHIA: CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE

  THE LUSITANIA

  Chapter 16: Jeanne THE STATUE OF LIBERTY STUNT

  NORMAL SERVICE RESUMES

  Chapter 17: The Wrong Thing at the Right Time

  Chapter 18: The Way West VANCOUVER

  Chapter 19: California Welcomes the World SAN FRANCISCO

  CREATE IN ME A CLEAN BEAST, O GOD

  Chapter 20: Replacement Therapy THE SPYING GAME

  Chapter 21: The Owl and the Monkey Went to Sea PHILADELPHIA

  THE ELIXIR OF LIFE

  Chapter 22: Aleister Crowley’s Psychedelic Summer DR. CROWLEY THE NIGHT-TRIPPER

  ANOTHER CROWLEY, ANOTHER PLACE

  THE BOOK T

  THE BALL OF FIRE

  STAUROS BATRACHOU

  Chapter 23: Crowley on Christ SHAW TAKES A PASTING

  Chapter 24: Nothingness with Twinkles THE STAR SPONGE VISION

  Chapter 25: New Orleans—and Bust

  Chapter 26: The Butterfly Net

  Chapter 27: Suffer the Little Children THE AFFIDAVIT

  Chapter 28: The International SECRET SERVICE INTERVIEW

  Chapter 29: Enter the Camel

  Chapter 30: It’s All in the Egg AMALANTRAH

  ENTER SAMUEL AIWAZ JACOBS

  Chapter 31: Unholy Holiness at 64a West Ninth Street MEETING LEAH HIRSIG

  EVA TANGUAY

  Chapter 32: Island THE REDHEAD STRIKES

  VISIONS

  THE BLUE EQUINOX

  Part Three: Escape Chapter 33: Genius Row THELEMA IN DETROIT

  Chapter 34: Summer in Montauk—and a Thousand Years Ago

  Chapter 35: End Game

  Chapter 36: Legacy THE O.T.O. IN AMERICA

  THE CHURCH OF THELEMA

  JACK PARSONS: ROCKET MAN

  L. RON HUBBARD

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE BEAST IN AMERICA?

  EK-STASIS

  Appendix 1: (Simeon) Leon Engers (Kennedy) (1891–1970) by Frank van Lamoen, Assistant Curator, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

  Appendix 2: Sale Catalog from the Auction of the John Quinn Collection A NOTE BY JOHN QUINN

  ALEISTER CROWLEY [CATALOGUE SUMMARY; AUTHOR UNKNOWN, POSSIBLY QUINN, POSSIBLY JEANNE ROBERT FOSTER.]

  Footnotes

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company

  Books of Related Interest

  Copyright & Permissions

  Index

  THE MASTER THERION by Frater T. A. T. K. T. A. (Leon Engers Kennedy). “The Master is represented in His holy meditation. About Him flames the Aura corresponding to that particular Trance as directly observed by the artist, who possesses the Power of True Vision.” From the frontispiece to The (“Blue”) Equinox, Vol. III, No. I; Universal Publishing Company, Detroit, March, 1919

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  It was, I think, the late Gerald Suster who dubbed Aleister Crowley “the Winston Churchill of Magick.” Near contemporaries, Churchill and Crowley had more in common than has been fairly recognized. One of those shared features is the sheer weight of information available conce
rning their respective careers and the high degree of controversy about aspects of each of their activities.

  When I began writing my own biography of Crowley (Aleister Crowley: The Biography) in 2008, I was very conscious of the late Martin Gilbert’s bulky, eight-volume Churchill biography—all of which, I’m happy to say, I had read long before with relish. As in Churchill’s biographical case, a single volume was really inadequate to the purpose, given the growing extent of serious Crowley studies, and I ran into trouble over length with the original publishers. This led to agonizing delays in publication, only resolved at last by the involvement of a new publisher. If my subsequent study, Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin (2014), has not proved that the days of single-volume biographies of Crowley’s life are over, then this book certainly should. Feeling the weight of this tome, I cling for encouragement to the fact that the book that turned me on to Crowley in the first place, back in 1978, was Crowley’s “autohagiography,” known generally as the Confessions. Nine hundred sixty pages in length, and all contained in a single handsome volume, it still only took Crowley’s life story—as he chose to tell it—up to 1922, with twenty-five years left unaccounted for. If, as some would believe, Crowley’s life is not worth taking seriously, then it would not be worth writing about at all. Such might, in my view, only be fairly said of some of his detractors.

  This, the first properly researched account of Aleister Crowley’s extensive and quite fascinating adventures in America, has been rendered even more challenging an exercise by the appearance in 2008 of Professor Richard B. Spence’s Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence, and the Occult. Spence’s hypothesis that Crowley was an intelligence agent, or at least asset, for much of his mature life, has truly thrown the cat among the pigeons of Crowley studies and forced open-minded scholars to look much more closely at many lacunae regarding Crowley’s activities and motives. I have had to deal with the many questions raised by Spence’s hypothesis head on, and with thoroughness, as the picture changes very quickly as the kaleidoscope of extant evidence is viewed from different angles. There is mystery.

  Furthermore, there has long existed the extremely vexed question of whether Aleister Crowley was a traitor to his country of birth during the period 1914 to 1917. This has proved itself a supremely difficult issue to wrestle with due to the fact that intelligence services that might have inherited key documentation apparently do not consider the questions involved worth investigating in the public arena, for such is, understandably, not those organizations’ purpose. Reluctance inherent to these systems is partly reinforced by the nature of Crowley’s popular reputation, particularly in Great Britain, and partly because the question hinges on the aforesaid theory regarding Crowley’s alleged intelligence role, a difficult matter to be sure. Documents declassified and released in the United States tell a nuanced, if still complex, story to that which has become a more or less official spectrum of views in Great Britain.

  Added to Spence’s speculative intelligence scenarios, recent discoveries regarding Crowley’s activities in Mexico in 1900 to 1901 raise similar questions to those pertinent to his World War I record. These I have also had to examine carefully and have reached my own conclusions on the issue, given the evidence currently available. All of these issues are critical to assessing Aleister Crowley’s personal integrity, something he insisted on with great vigor in his Confessions, and an attribute vital in a spiritual teacher, which Crowley claimed to be. It would be hard to find in the annals of human history a figure combining spiritual teaching with so many other large-scale commitments, and yet, to whom personally, all these activities amounted to a predominant conception of service to the future of humanity. Crowley undoubtedly presents posterity with a great riddle, and this book does more than attempt to solve it.

  In my research into these and many other questions concerning Crowley’s exciting, multifaceted career (alive and dead, present and absent) in America throughout the twentieth century, I am, above all, indebted to the marvelous assistance afforded me by the international head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, William Breeze, who has time and again demonstrated unfailing willingness to bring to my attention rare documentation, his exacting knowledge base, and experienced insight into all matters Crowleyan, without which this book would have been barely a shadow of what it is; indeed, without his help the project would not have been worth the effort expended on its composition. William Breeze has been kind and generous enough even to acquaint me with information he has gathered for his yet unpublished, unexpurgated edition of Crowley’s complete autobiography, as well as his edited transcripts of Crowley’s unpublished diaries, and much else, while throughout I have enjoyed complete freedom of interpretation and exposition. It was William Breeze who pointed me in the direction of the John Quinn Papers deposited in the professional care of the New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division. Thanks to the provisions of that great institution I have been able to study authentic material that has led to a far greater, scholarly appreciation of the sometimes difficult and always intriguing relationship that developed between a most remarkable lawyer and generous, enlightened collector, John Quinn, and Aleister Crowley. The John Quinn Papers also shed much-needed light on the complex relations that existed between Quinn and John Butler Yeats, the latter’s son, William Butler Yeats, and the no less remarkable Jeanne Robert Foster (1879–1970), whose almost incredible life would stand as a monument to tenacity, profound dedication, and applied creative intelligence and artistic imagination, without any mention of the fact of her being, for a season (1915–1916), Crowley’s “Scarlet Woman,” as he chose to see her. Exploring Jeanne Robert Foster’s life with the aid of Richard Londraville’s moving biography of Jeanne, Dear Yeats, Dear Pound, Dear Ford, and the Foster-Murphy papers (also held in the care of the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division) has been one of the brighter highlights of researching this book; I learned so much and, like all who had the good fortune to come to know her, found Jeanne Robert Foster an inspiring figure. It is arguable that Aleister Crowley never quite got over their broken relationship, while Jeanne herself went on to greater heights.

  A proper assessment of Crowley’s disinformation strategy worked through the pages of German New York–based propaganda magazine The Fatherland from 1915 to 1916 has been expedited thanks to the professional website provisions of the Digital Library, Villanova University, Falvey Memorial Library, who have digitized the once obscure issues of the German Propaganda Kabinett’s principal public outlet in America during World War I. Likewise, the Library of Congress’s website devoted to “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers,” made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities, has proved an invaluable resource for tracing the day-to-day news stories that dominated American popular thinking during the period under study.

  I must express particular gratitude for the kindness shown to me by Crowley biographer Richard Kaczynski, who has shared with me, his fellow laborer in the vineyard, revealing and important researches into Crowley’s correspondence with noted scientists William Sturgis Bigelow (1850–1926) and Professor Elihu Thomson (1853–1937), made available to him through the good graces and kind consideration of Charles Greifenstein and Earle Spamer of the American Philosophical Society. I am also thankful for Richard Kaczynski’s sharing of his work on Crowley’s relationship with Albert W. Ryerson and the Freemasons of Detroit in 1918–1921.

  While writing this book, I was delighted to be informed by Messrs. Breeze and Kaczynski of historical researcher Colin Campbell’s discovery of the original cottage where Crowley experienced his “psychedelic” summer of 1916 near Bristol, New Hampshire, by Newfound Lake (known locally as Lake Pasquaney). That has corrected a longstanding misapprehension regarding the site of Crowley’s experience of the “ball of fire” and the place where Crowley wrote his detailed assessment of Christianity, The Gospel according to St. Bernard Shaw. I am most grateful for Colin’s kind corr
espondence with me on the subject, as well as his provision of photographs of the site as it is today, the property of the O’Connor family. I should also like to express my thanks to James Wasserman, who kindly provided me with photographs by Gregory von Seewald of Esopus Island, where James Wasserman followed Crowley in making this remarkable island in the Hudson the site of a holiday campsite.

  My gratitude to Frank van Lamoen, assistant curator at the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam, knows no bounds. It was he who, stimulated by this study, decided to form the best chronology ever undertaken of the life of artist Leon Engers Kennedy. It is included as an appendix to this book as accurate information on Engers’s life is extremely hard to come by and is of great interest to enthusiasts of Crowley’s life, not least of whom is Richard Kaczynski, who has given talks on the life of an artist who was a friend of Crowley for many years, even providing Crowley with digs in New York during a very hard time endured during late winter to summer 1917, when Crowley was often ill and at a very low ebb both in health and in fortune.

  Enormous appreciation and myriad thanks are properly due to the staff at Inner Traditions International: to Jon Graham, whose faith in this project ensured its execution; to Mindy Branstetter, who has been stalwart and always considerate in her dealings with me over the vastness of the editing process; to Jeanie Levitan for all her help and kindly guidance on finding the right format for the material; and to all at ITI for their artistry, care, and professionalism.