Aleister Crowley in America Page 2

  I also wish to acknowledge the longstanding kindness and encouragement I have received from Geraldine and Bali at the Atlantis Bookshop, Bloomsbury, London: a veritable anchorage for the British fleet of Crowley’s aficionados and followers. Long may it thrive!

  It has been a magnificent privilege to make this intimate tour of the United States that existed from 1900 to the millennium, a period of bewildering, sometimes dazzling change, and some progress, and to show, in this centenary year of Britain and the United States’ first coming together as allies and brothers in arms against tyranny, that the spiritual magician and pioneer of scientific illuminism made such an enlightening contribution, even if unacknowledged, to the progress of Britain and America—a gift of insight still yet to unfold the fullness of its potential glory, in a life lived by others in a world to come.

  Finally, I should like to dedicate this book to my beloved wife, Joanna, and daughter, Merovée, who have had to suffer the exhausting process of this book’s composition close-to. What I owe, I cannot hope to repay, which makes me a denizen of that debtor’s prison, into whose cells I should recommend anyone to be liberated.

  TOBIAS CHURTON ENGLAND, APRIL 2017

  PART ONE

  THE ADVENTURE

  ONE

  A Special Relationship

  The fire of love no waters shall devour;

  The faith of friendship stands the shocks of time;

  Seal with your voice the triumph of this hour,

  Your glory to our glory and our power,

  Alliance of one tongue, one faith, one clime!

  Seal and clasp hands; and let the sea proclaim

  Friendship of righteous fame,

  And lordship of two worlds that time can never tame . . .

  And join our worlds in one amazing net

  Of empire and dominion, till aghast

  The lying Russian cloak his traitor head

  More close, since Spain has bled

  To wake in us the love that lay a century dead . . .

  Our children’s children shall unsheathe the sword

  Against the envy of some tyrant power:

  The leader of your people and our lord

  Shall join to wrest from slavery abhorred

  Some other race, a fair storm-ruined flower!

  O fair republic, lover and sweet friend,

  Your loyal hand extend,

  Let freedom, peace and faith grow stronger to the end!

  ALEISTER CROWLEY, FROM

  AN APPEAL TO THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC

  The year is 1899. Stirring stanzas fly from Aleister Crowley’s “Appeal to the American Republic.” In a twelve-page visionary pamphlet, the poet hails America’s recent triumph in the Spanish-American War and unfurls his desire for Anglo-American alliance: a new dawn for the world will depend upon it.

  Wrapped in red papers, emblazoned with a color-embossed crossing of Union Jack with Old Glory, Crowley’s outspoken optimism appeared, at the time, decidedly premature. It was, however, prophetic. Britain and America have indeed “unsheathed the sword” in allied opposition to “some tyrant power,” and they have done it in the name of peace, prosperity, and freedom since 1917, eighteen years after Crowley’s initial, fervent appeal.

  Victory over Spain changed America. Thanks to the war, the United States acquired Spain’s remaining possessions beyond Africa—the Philippines (for $20 million), Guam, Puerto Rico, and a protectorate over Cuba. Quite suddenly, the United States appeared to the world an empire. And Crowley envisioned a union of imperial might to embrace the world and nourish the babe of global freedom in the light of liberty. What revolutionary poet William Blake had dreamed of in his prophecy “America” in 1793, Crowley saw reentering the stage of the world as reality a little more than a century later.

  Crowley was not entirely alone in his enthusiasm. In England on May 13, 1898, shortly after Spain declared war on the United States over what she saw as American interference in Cuba, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain informed his Birmingham constituents that Britain could no longer stand in isolation, “envied by all and suspected by all.” Britain would have to make pacts. Critical of Russia for breaking peace pledges, Chamberlain favored pacts with Germany and with the United States. Denounced in St. Petersburg, derided in Germany, Chamberlain’s idea nonetheless found an appreciative audience among leading U.S. journalists. Appreciation still registered seven months later. On December 10, 1898, a day before the Treaty of Paris officially ended the Spanish-American War, another speech by Chamberlain to voters in the English Midlands received the New York Tribune’s qualified blessing.

  Probably nobody has been more astonished than Mr. Chamberlain himself by the criticism which his speech, brimming over with good feeling for America, has excited in America; he is, in reality, the last man in England who wants a formal alliance with the United States, for, as Secretary of State for the Colonies he has Canada to deal with, and his own reputation to maintain as the greatest English Imperialist. He believes heartily in the closest possible fellowship between England and America and takes the statesmanlike view that both nations can admit Germany into the same sphere of good feeling and co-operation in commercial and maritime policies.

  This was the idea which he clearly expressed at Leicester, and Americans have no reason to hold him accountable for the inadvertent use of the word “alliance,” which was immediately translated into “understanding based on good feeling.” Mr. Chamberlain is a sincere and useful friend of America: probably there is no other leading Englishman who is equally outspoken in praising America or is so utterly indifferent to a foreign alliance in any quarter, so long as England can count upon American good will. His diplomacy can probably be summed up in words like these: “With Americans with us in heart, it matters not who may be with us or against us.”

  There was of course one Englishman who was working hard to become a “leading Englishman” and who would shortly appear even more outspoken in his desire for an alliance, and that was twenty-four-year-old poet, mountaineer, and magical enthusiast Aleister Crowley: like Chamberlain, a supporter, albeit a critical one, of Lord Salisbury’s Tory government.

  What perhaps is most striking about the coincidence of interests of Colonial Secretary Chamberlain and the firebrand poet recently down from university is that Edward Alexander Crowley—“Aleister” was his pen name—had entered Cambridge with every intention of assuming a career in Britain’s diplomatic service. Had all passed as intended, Crowley would probably have been knocking on Chamberlain’s door in search of preferment around the time the Tribune article appeared.

  1898: A DIPLOMAT MANQUÉ

  Crowley enjoyed many advantages. Not the least of them was a distinguished uncle: civil engineer, inventor, and patron of science Jonathan Sparrow Crowley (1826–1888). On the death of his first wife, Jonathan Crowley married his children’s governess, Anne Heginbottam, or Heginbotham (1840–1921), described in his nephew’s autobiography as “a lady of a distinguished Saxon family, who could trace her pedigree to the time of Edward the Confessor. Tall, thin, distinguished, and highly educated, she made an admirable chatelaine. Her personality appealed strongly to me, and she took that place in my affections which I could not give to my mother.*1 She became a prominent member of the Primrose League, and it was through her influence with Lord Salisbury and Lord Ritchie that I obtained my nomination for the Diplomatic Service.”1

  Taking its name from former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s favorite flower, the Primrose League was founded in 1883 by Lord Randolph Churchill and Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff to spread Conservative principles and provide the party with auxiliary support. Jonathan Crowley’s first cousin Florence Mary Crowley (1847–1927) was also a member. True to his family’s established tradition, Crowley was a lifelong “High Tory” patriot. As such, he was nominated for the diplomatic service by Robert Gascoyne Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury, Grandmaster of the Primrose League, three times prime minister (1885–1902); and by Sa
lisbury’s loyal cabinet member, Charles Thomson Ritchie (later 1st Baron Ritchie), former secretary of the Admiralty.

  Crowley’s replacement mother figure, Aunt Annie, actively supported Ritchie’s successful 1895 campaign for election as member of Parliament for Croydon, near London, home to Crowley’s Ales and two feisty women Conservatives, Anne and Florence Mary, familiar names to Croydon’s Conservative leadership, conscious of the power of a prominent, established family of Croydon brewers.

  That year 1895 also saw Anne Crowley’s talented, potentially high-flying nephew enter Trinity College, Cambridge—alma mater to Lord Salisbury’s three half brothers and ideal portal to a life of political and philosophical intrigue. That Lord Salisbury was on the lookout for young men of ability can hardly be doubted, and it is the prompting of this thought, together with the evidential presence of a series of espionage connections in Crowley’s later life, that encouraged Richard B. Spence, professor of history at the University of Idaho, to flesh out his theory that Crowley’s links to corridors of power led to recruitment at Cambridge into the secret service.2

  RECRUITED AT CAMBRIDGE?

  Unfortunately for us, British evidence mounted in support of the theory is, where not ambiguous, mostly circumstantial. MI6 and MI5 archives are excluded from public access; responses to inquiries conform to standing policies: complete openness and candor are hardly to be expected, and data releases meet internal not external requirements. Further, neither MI5 nor MI6 existed at the time Crowley was at Cambridge, nor during Crowley’s early career.

  During the late Victorian and Edwardian periods up to 1909, Britain’s secret services were performed by numerous organizations, often ignorant of one another’s activities, and sometimes even existence, with little coordination among them. In the 1880s, for example, two intelligence bodies gathered evidence for Fenian (Irish republican) terror plots, both agencies getting in each other’s way, with one operating practically outside the law. Much was undertaken by word of mouth, without record. Military and Naval intelligence activities were distinct and frequently competitive. Home intelligence tended to come under the auspices of Scotland Yard and the “Special Branch” (originally established in the 1880s to counter Irish republican subversion), while foreign intelligence was usually gathered by embassy and consulate staff, operating through “friendly” contacts, agents, and assets, in independent loops, and in Imperial possessions by senior colonial policemen, not infrequently imported to Britain for special services involving delicate operations where native judicial scruple might obstruct effectiveness.

  Nevertheless, U.S. historian Spence’s requests for British documents established that so-called MI5 (home intelligence) and MI6 (foreign intelligence) had, or at various points in time had, files on Aleister Crowley. MI6 simply denied access, while MI5 denied existence of any such files, informing Spence, tellingly perhaps, that the absence of files may have been because “despite his [Crowley’s] bizarre antics the view may very well have been taken that Crowley did not represent a threat to security.” When in the course of research Spence discovered reference to a genuine MI5 file, he was informed, “Sadly, it was destroyed (we think) in the 1950s when large numbers of records which seemed at that point to have out-lived their usefulness were destroyed.”3

  Files listed in the British Foreign Office Correspondence Index, numbering three, including two related to Crowley’s 1914 to 1918 activities, were missing.

  In short, the case for Crowley’s intelligence work based on direct official British corroboration alone may passably be described as weak or inconclusive. However, the case has other significant evidential, not only circumstantial, supports not to be fairly dismissed.

  CROWLEY AND THE CARLISTS

  We know that young Crowley involved himself with “Carlist” and “Legitimist” politics, including armed subterfuges in 1899. In fact, a tangled web joins Crowley’s Carlist activities to the immediate consequences of Spain’s defeat by the United States, and it was to be that web of intrigue that stimulated Crowley’s first voyage to America in July 1900.

  On July 27, 1899, the New York Times published a surprising story that the former governor of Cuba, Don Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau (1838–1930), was suspected of plotting a coup d’état in Spain with the Carlists.

  The Carlists were a traditionalist faction that backed the claim of Don Carlos de Bourbon, the Duke of Madrid, to the Spanish throne. The story was especially surprising because before he assumed Cuba’s governorship in 1896, Weyler, with characteristic thoroughness, had actively suppressed several Carlist revolts in Spain. Indeed it was the transference of Weyler’s uncompromising zeal to Cuba that in part precipitated the Spanish-American War in the first place. Pushing for U.S. intervention in the Cuban revolt, William Randolph Hearst’s “yellow press” dubbed Weyler “the Butcher.” Before resigning as Cuba’s governor in 1897, Weyler had introduced “re-concentration,” a phrase soon to be modified into the now infamous “concentration camp” for separating insurgents from civilian support by incarcerating civilians in resettlements.

  Back in Spain, horrified by capitulation to America, Weyler sought national redemption. A headline in New York’s Sun newspaper (July 27, 1899) declared:

  WEYLER HINTS AT REVOLUTION

  It Might Accomplish, He Says, the Regeneration of Spain.

  Madrid July 26—In the course of the debate in the [Spanish] Senate today on the bill fixing the strength of the army, General Weyler made a remarkable speech, which is being interpreted as being an exhortation to the populace to combine with the army against the government. “Revolution might accomplish the regeneration of Spain. At any rate, revolution sometimes clears the political atmosphere. I will do all I can to uphold military discipline, but the situation is very grave and a revolt will probably break out.”

  This was by no means the first time Americans had been informed of moves to supplant the Spanish parliament (Cortes) with a “legitimate” monarch; that is, a monarch first in line by birth and blessed by “divine right.” While the Spanish government watched Weyler closely, the Chicago Tribune on August 28, 1898, headlined the SCHEMES OF THE CARLISTS and featured an interview with Lord Ashburnham, Don Carlos’s British representative and supporter of Legitimist politics throughout Europe. “My own idea,” Ashburnham informed the journalist, “is that there will not be a real war, but perhaps a little fighting here and there. . . . Don Carlos is the rightful heir to the throne. He believes himself called by the wishes, if not of an actual majority, at any rate of the best and most honorable portions of the Spanish people.” If successful, Don Carlos would not only reign, he would also govern; ministers of state would report to him, not to the Cortes; decisions of state would rest in the monarch under God. Such a polity was music to the ears of the Roman Catholic Church.

  In May 1898, in a speech to the Primrose League that was widely reported in the States and that angered many in Madrid, Lord Salisbury described Spain as a “moribund nation” and recommended that its government adopt a realistic acceptance of the United States’ role in the conflict; Salisbury believed that the United States’ growth was in Britain’s long-term interest. His position as regards a Spanish revolution was typically cautious. Informed of Lord Ashburnham’s Legitimist activism, Salisbury did not, as far as we know, directly interfere with the Catholic peer’s elaborate plans to send weapons and mercenary support to Don Carlos in Spain. However, with Spain and the United States on the brink of war, Salisbury did receive a confidential note from Britain’s ambassador in Madrid, Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff, concerning “very hostile currents which may overwhelm the dynasty and perhaps the monarchical institutions, in the event of any grave reverse.”4 An Austrian queen regent represented the “dynasty” while the crown prince—of a cadet branch of the Bourbons—was too young to ascend the throne. Pretender Don Carlos was the senior Bourbon and hence “legitimate” claimant.

  A possibility existed that should a Carlist coup fail, a victorious republican fact
ion might abolish monarchy altogether: a possible threat to monarchies across Europe. Judging from a letter of April 28, 1899, sent by Paul von Hatzfeldt (1831–1901), German ambassador to London, to Freidrich Holstein (1837–1909), éminence grise of the German Foreign Office, after von Hatzfeldt had met Lord Salisbury in person, Salisbury’s concerns about a Spanish revolution were influenced by the thought that if revolution did lead to the monarchy’s overthrow in favor of a Spanish republic then a weak Portugal was vulnerable to combined French-Spanish republicanism. There were other implications.

  In the unlikely event of pretender “Carlos VII” achieving his aims, Don Carlos’s claim to be “Charles XI,” legitimate Bourbon king of France, could, if pressed, substantially upset the continental status quo. Legitimists, after all, believed Queen Victoria and her Hanoverian predecessors were not Great Britain’s legitimate rulers, on account of the British Parliament having blocked a legitimate House of Stuart from succession to the throne for religio-political reasons back in 1701. In 1899, British Legitimists not only supported Don Carlos but had a Stuart pretender in line for the British throne as well. Supporters of the Stuarts were commonly called “Jacobites,” after the Latin Jacobus, or “James,” referring to James Francis Edward Stuart (1688–1766), “legitimate” pretender to the British throne. Aleister Crowley was a lifelong Jacobite sympathizer, though his views would mellow with maturity.

  The British government was aware of British Legitimist support for Don Carlos. Von Hatzfeldt informed Holstein in Berlin that he had the previous day received a visit from Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff. Britain’s ambassador to Spain conveyed his belief to the German ambassador that the syndicate, which had advanced Don Carlos £60,000, did not consist of business speculators accustomed to gambling on winners but rather “fanatical legitimists like Lord Ashburnham, who is still dreaming of a Stuart restoration, although there are no more Stuarts, and who every year places wreaths at the statue of Charles I [“martyred” by Oliver Cromwell in 1649].”5 The ambassador had his sources. Von Hatzfeldt agreed with the British ambassador, if only because Don Carlos could achieve little with the sum advanced.*2