ACTION MAGAZINE

New York City, New York

July 1953

(pages 11-15, 46-47)

The Strange Case of the Man Who Founded a Sex Cult.

Written by M. P. Moore

The most evil man who ever lived swayed

the destiny of the world by the reincarnation

of fantastic pagan sexual rites . . .

Adolph Hitler, at one time, would have given anything in his power to know The Great Beast, Aleister Crowley. An Englishman of brilliant mind and incredible sexual drives, Crowley was one of the world’s foremost authorities on black magic and the occult.

Indeed, Hitler would never have come to power in Germany if it had not been for this man. Martha Küntzel, a fervent disciple of Crowley, supported Hitler through his lean years, teaching him all she could of Crowleyana and forbidden black magic. Hitler felt that the Great Beast was a living God, and it was only after his rise to power that he transferred that tremendous love and admiration to himself. Even after he became a dictator, however, he continued to rely heavily on astrology and related magical studies, often resenting furiously the fact that he had not stayed long enough with the “Master” to imbue himself thoroughly in black arts.

In America, the impact of Crowley was strong enough to cause the face of the dollar bill to be changed. The Great Eye of Horus adorns the one dollar bill at the top of the pyramid. Horus’s Eye was the symbol of Crowley’s sex cult. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Roerich, a leader in the Golden Dawn, convinced countless famous Americans including an ex-vice president to take part in their secret meetings. Orgies of an inconceivable nature were performed in a temple on Fifth Avenue in the heart of New York and there are still, sub-rosa of course, such meetings going on in California.

What manner of man was Aleister Crowley, that austere British newspapers referred to him in headlines as, “The King of Depravity,” “The Man We’d Like To Hang” and “A Cannibal At Large?” Of what kind of person would a dignified English judge say, “I have been over forty years engaged in the administration of the law in one capacity or another. I thought that I knew of every conceivable form of wickedness. I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me. I have learned in this case that we can always learn something more if we live long enough. I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by this man who describes himself to you as the greatest living poet.”

We’ll begin this story in 1905 when The Great Beast told his followers, “I say to you today . . . To hell with Christianity, Rationalism, Buddhism, all the lumber of the centuries. I bring you a positive and a primeval fact, Magic by name; and with this I will build me a new Heaven and a new Earth. I want none of your faint approval or faint dispraise; I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution, anything, bad or good, but strong.”

At this time, Crowley had reached the age of 30 and was ready to devote all of his prodigious energy and talents to the devil-sex cult which he headed until the time of his death in 1947.

If this son of a well-to-do Scottish brewer had ever had love for others, there is no record of it. He was an avowed Satanist from the age of 20, when in a Stockholm hotel he had a mystical experience telling him he was the Anti-Christ, the Evil One himself.

He confidently predicted that “Crowleyanity” would supercede Christianity. “For from out of the depths of Crowley’s mind had come a very strange idea, one so old that men had forgotten about it. It told of the worship of the sun and of man’s organ of creation, and of sexual union as the highest form of religious consecration.” So we are informed by his literary executor and biographer, John Symonds, in a book just published.

Crowley believed he was “The Beast whose number was 666” referred to in The Book of Revelations. He also believed himself “The Greatest Living Poet” for most of his 72 years.

However that may be, he led an incredible life which was as wicked as it was fantastic. He was a mountaineer of repute. In his lifetime he knew most of the people in high places. He traveled everywhere and sinned more ingeniously and heartily than any other six men.

His two wives ended up in lunatic asylums. At least five of his concubines committed suicide.

The lesson he left to his followers shouts that the first law of life is:

“There is no law beyond do what thou wilt.”

There can be little doubt but that he did make contact with the rulers of the underworld and took his orders from them. The fiends who oppose good with calculated evil found a willing servant in the man who was baptized Edward Alexander, but who early dropped this label to suit his personal taste. “Aleister,” it should be noted, was only one of dozens of names he chose for himself.

For a clear understanding of this diabolist who mixed such a potent brew out of sex and magic, we need to know at least a little of his background.

As we already know, his father was a brewer. His mother is described as “a rather common woman.” But Aleister was full of pretensions and laid claim to distinguished ancestors without the slightest proof. Papa and Mama belonged to a religious sect called Plymouth Brethren. Dad quite the brewery after he made his fortune and set out to convert the world to belief in the literal truth of the Bible. He condemned Roman Catholics and Protestants alike and was as fanatical in his orthodox beliefs as his son became in the service of Satan.

When Edward Crowley, the wealthy retired brewer, took his unwilling son on jaunts about the English countryside with the idea of converting the simple country folk to his own special brand of religious belief, he knew little what he was doing to the impressionable boy. Sin and salvation were the two poles of his universe as long as Aleister lived in his father’s house.

That he was of an experimental turn from an early age is shown by this little item. He wanted to find out if it was really true that a cat has nine lives so—

“I caught a cat, and having administered a large dose of arsenic, I chloroformed it, hanged it above the gas jet, stabbed it, cut its throat, smashed its skull, and, when it had been pretty thoroughly burnt, drowned it and threw it out the window that the fall might remove the ninth life. The operation was successful.”

Crowley spent all his busy life in search of magical powers such as those reputed to be the secrets of Hindu yogis and Tibetan monks. That he did in fact attain certain occult powers which made it possible for him to circumvent laws of physics is very possible.

From the beginning of time there has been a legend that there are secret MASTERS on the earth gifted with superior insight into the occult. If Crowley wasn’t one of these, it appears that he succeeded in making contact with very potent members among this select group.

In November, 1898, as Brother Perdurabo, he became a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He was then 23, Arthur Machen was a member, as was the Irish poet William B. Yeats. The occult wisdom so carefully nurtured by this organization gave Crowley for the first time the right to call himself a magician. Now he was instructed in the formulas for making contact with the Secret Chiefs—The big moguls of his spirit world.

He learned that to be a truly powerful magician is no easy thing. It requires great self discipline. So much so that few have the stamina to become really adept. But those few rule the universe. They do it without ever being suspected.

Second most important member of the order was a man four years older than Crowley, Allan Bennett by name. When Crowley found that Bennett was living in poverty he invited him to share his quarters. Bennett, a drug addict himself, taught Crowley the dubious pleasures of opium, morphine and cocaine. Brother Bennett was a chemist and convinced his willing pupil that there was a drug “whose use will open the gates of the world behind the veil of matter.”

Crowley set about to discover this drug. It was during this period that he returned to his apartment after dinner with a fellow magician to find everything in confusion, a host of Satanic visitors having taken over.

“And then the fun began,” he wrote in his diary. “Round and round the big library tramped the devils all the evening, and endless procession; 316 of them we counted . . . It was the most awesome and ghastly experience I have known.”

From an early age he was tortured by sexual passion. He got relief at every opportunity and came to have a low regard for women. To his way of thinking, an accommodating woman should be delivered regularly at the back door like milk or the daily paper. A not uncommon sequel was that, by his own declaration, he had clap at 16 and syphilis at 22. He had a strong constitution and the money to pay for treatment, so he survived them without serious damage.

Perhaps because he had money, or because he was interesting in himself and had been everywhere—or maybe it was because he was a Satanist—he met just about everyone of importance in the literary and art world of half a century ago.

A young painter named Gerald Kelly looked Crowley up after discovering one of his early long poems in a bookstore. He is now Sir Gerald Kelly, President of the Royal Academy. When they met, Crowley was a student at Cambridge, a good looking young fellow who affected the mannerisms of the aesthete—floppy tie, silk shirts, rings with semi-precious stones. Not long after, Gerald’s sister, Rose [Rose Kelly], got herself into a pickle. Her mother asked the brother to straighten out his sister’s affairs. It seems she was engaged to two men and both, independently, announced their intention of a visit to claim her at the same time.

Crowley came to the rescue by eloping with the girl to Scotland where they could be married without such annoyances as delays caused by the publication of the banns.

When the young Satanist married Rose Kelly he may have thought he was doing it to get the girl out of a jam. It was probably the most unselfish and disinterested act of his life. But it turned out to be anything but the casual affair Aleister was counting on.

Rose Kelly was a beautiful and passionate woman. Within 24 hours of consummation of the marriage, the husband was madly in love with his wife. As an avowed diabolist who made it his business to cultivate the Devil, anything so normal must have made him feel uncomfortable.

The money he had inherited from his father made it possible for him to introduce his bride to all manner of unconventional living and to travel where they wanted. Together they explored the secret by-paths and alleys of the mystical and the occult—in India, Egypt, Tibet, China and around the globe.

Crowley was not noted for constancy in his sexual attachment. But his first wife, Rose, somehow managed to keep him in a fervor. In his own words, life with Rose until she brought him in contact for the first time with his own guardian angel, whose name was Aiwass, was “an uninterrupted sexual debauch.”

While in Cairo, and under most extraordinary circumstances, Rose convinced Aleister that he should cultivate the Egyptian God Horus. He now called Rose: Ouarda the Seer”—Ouarda being Arabic for Rose. With a bowl of bull’s blood and a sword on the altar, Aleister supplicated Horus—the falcon-headed avenger among the ancient gods of Egypt.

In his private temple at Cairo and with the help of Ouarda he met Aiwass, an Egyptian mystic, from whom he learned that a new epoch was dawning for mankind. Aleister Crowley was to initiate it.

In three daily sessions Aiwass dictated The Book of the Law. The book is of such a nature that you can know its meaning only if you can interpret its symbols, which Crowley did for the world in two works, each of which was much sexier than The Book. To the uninitiated, the latter boils down to three rules.

1. Do what you want to.

2. Every man and woman is a star—that is, immortal.

3. The only sin is restriction—the inhibition of one’s “true will,”

The book prophesied World War I as a necessary step in the breaking up of the civilization of that time.

To be strong and sensual was a major command.

The Third chapter of The Book of the Law gives detailed instructions for making Cakes of Light “to breed lust and the power of lust at the eating thereof.”

“For perfume, mix meal and honey and wormwood and thick leavings of red wine; and then oil of Abra-Melin and olive oil and afterwards smooth down with fresh rich blood.”

     I

n the feverish years they lived together, Rose bore Aleister two daughters, the first of which died in infancy. How many illegitimate children he fathered is not known.

Rose Crowley was officially declared insane by the courts of Britain in 1911. She was drinking heavily long before the climax was reached. Aleister at one point notes that, on his return from Tangiers, in five months Rose had run up a bill with a single grocer for 150 bottles of whiskey, or one a day.

It was September when the court declared Rose to be a lunatic. Aleister must have been of tough stuff, for it was only the next month that one of many love affairs developed with a companion of the famous Isadora Duncan—Mary d'Este-Sturges. They met in the Savoy Hotel of London.

“A boisterous party was in progress. The dander’s life-long friend was celebrating her birthday. This lady, a magnificent specimen of mingled Irish and Italian blood, possessed a most powerful personality and terrific magnetism which instantly attracted my own. We forgot everything. I sat on the floor like a Chinese god, exchanging electricity with her.” What he exchanged with her later is well documented. But it would become overly repetitious if we were to try to report all the man’s adventured in sex.

Among peculiar habits he had acquired by this time was that of giving women the “Serpent’s Kiss.”

Perhaps least colorful in his life were the years Crowley spent in America. Certainly there were none more dishonorable. He came here shortly after the outbreak of World War I. Cut off from his European sources of income, he went to work on The Fatherland, a German propaganda sheet published by Geo. Sylvester Viereck.

In America, Crowley found once again that there is always a type of woman willing to pay for initiation into secret orders—especially if they are of a sexual nature.

His period in America is obscure as to activities. But it included one mistress after another—among others a fat negress whom he described as “very passionate.”

During most of his stay here he lived in Greenwich Village in New York, where he took up painting. He also took up Leah Faesi [Leah Hirsig], whom he consecrated in ritual as his first “Scarlet Woman, the companion of The Beast.” He branded her with the “Mark of the Beast” on her breast, using a Japanese dagger.

One of his best friends in America was William Seabrook, another Satanist and writer, to whom he was introduced by Frank Harris, biographer of Oscar Wilde.

For the five years he was in this country he lived in opulence, though income from regular employment was trifling. He returned to Europe in 1919 and soon sent for his mistress—The Scarlet Woman, who had also been dubbed “The Ape of Thoth.”

She bore him a child in 1920, while sharing his house with still another woman, Ninette Shumway, who had also been consecrated as a “Scarlet Woman.”

Back in Europe, Beast 666 now set about the serious business of establishing a permanent physical base from which he should rule his kingdom.

It was no simple thing to decide where to set up the archetypal new community for the new epoch of man in which DO WHAT THOU WILT should be the supreme law. Should it be Nice, Capri? Where? Crowley finally settled for Cefalu. The Sacred Abbey of Thelema was to be established there.

“And my house is going to be the Whore’s Hell,” he wrote in his diary, “a secret place of the quenchless fires of Lust and the eternal torment of Love.”

A chapel was dedicated to Satan. And he made it plain that, “the Abbey was not a place where orgies could be held. It was where Orgies were performed.” And such rites were to reform the universe!

The establishment for this was a vacant villa half a mile from Cefalu, a fishing village on the northern shore of Sicily. The lease was signed by Sir Alastor de Kerval and the Contessa Lea Falkland. These were the names the two became known by while on the island.

“We are high on the neck of the peninsula and can see west to Palermo, east over the sea, north to the mighty rock of Cephaloedium and behind us to the south rise hills, green with trees and grass. My garden is full of flowers and promise of fruit.”

His biographer adds:

“Crowley was elated, and in the twilight of his first day at Cefalu his act of sex-magic with Sister Cypris (Miss Shumway) had for its object: ‘Salutation to the gods and goddesses of the place! May they grant us abundance of all good things, and inspire me to the creation of Beauty.’ ”

Walls of the Abbey were painted by Crowley with startling pictures of the sexual act in every conceivable position.

When the sun entered the sign of Taurus one year, Crowley decided an act of sex magic was called for, in which both his concubines were to participate. Opium and alcohol were there too. The two Scarlet Women exhibited even more primitive stuff. It was well after midnight before Crowley had pacified jealousy.

At the Abbey, “Drugs were available for all and the brandy bottle for the baby,” Symonds reports. Visitors were mainly rambling bohemians from Paris, London or New York. Passing Sicilian peasants hastily crossed themselves and sought the shortest way home.

Crowley knew the danger of drugs. In that knowledge he regarded them as only for gods, poets and great geniuses such as himself. But he came to know the awful torment they cause their victims.

Sicilian authorities finally caught up with the visiting Satanist. He was kicked out of the country in 1923. That was followed in 1929 by expulsion from France, which was noted in newspapers all over the world. By this time he was known as “The Wickedest Man In The World.”

August 16, 1929, he married Maria Teresa Ferari de Miramer [Maria de Miramar]—whom he had met on his return to Paris, a lady from Nicaragua. Among other names he had given to her was “Old Nile.” She was his current Scarlet Woman and he married her in order to get her past the British immigration authorities.

Now at the height of his fame, or notoriety, in England, he was something to look at when he entered a bistro—with little forelock, piercing eyes, outlandish clothes, a pervasive odor of the sex-appeal ointment which he regularly massaged into his skin, small feminine hands and strange rings on his fingers. No wonder there was a hush and expectancy until he was seated.

Before he died, Crowley’s daily intake of heroin rose to as much as 11 grains—enough to kill a room full of strong men. Average dose for the addict is about 1/8th grain. He had no compunctions about taking his shot in the arm before visitors.

The Satanist and Master Magician died in a boarding house December 1, 1947. Doctors called it heart degeneration and chronic bronchitis.

One of his disciples, Sister Tzaba [Frieda Harris], was holding his hand when that ancient and abused heart quit pumping. She witnessed the tears which flowed down his shrunken, white cheeks and heard him confess with his last breath: “I am perplexed . . .”

This was the end of the man who was going to set mankind on a new path, with a fresh set of directions to guide it through a new epoch.