Aleister Crowley and Political Reality

Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult (2008) 
Richard B. Spence
 
Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (2014)
Marco Pasi

In Lobster, the premier journal of para-politics in the UK, I argued that more latitude should be given to historians when dealing with the shadowy world of espionage. I had an interest as someone initially trained as a historian, who had participated in a range of political projects and who often had had to deal with cases of political manipulation damaging the reputation of persons who were clients or friends of mine. The 'truth' about the grey world between official record and unrecorded action is generally handled in one of two ways. Professional historians will rely solely on the records available and refuse to speculate on what might be missing. This might mean that no lies are told but it might also mean that interpretations of events are incomplete or that we see historians unwittingly write the narrative of the victors, those who could edit the truth in advance. History might thus often result in ideological group-think.

On the other hand, the alternative seemed to be worse - a world of rank a priori speculation that resulted in conspiracy theories of varying levels of absurdity. My concern was that the range and neurosis of so much conspiracy theory de-legitimated genuine explorations of 'scheming'. The use of power or information to effect change in secret and over the heads of the public or those with a right to share in that power or information was a reality that required investigation. I argued that we neeeded to accept as legitimate a 'third way' in investigative research into the history of espionage, cultural manipulation and covert operations. This would allow more speculation as to motives and connections but would ensure that the speculation was clearly announced and referenced as far as it could be well in advance. In return for adopting a 'most reasonable hypothesis' that might call on actual conspiratorial experience (which I am afraid to admit I had) to challenge the often-aggressive arrogance of the academic official historian, the para-political historian might show humility when facts genuinely indicated that the 'conspiratorial' or 'speculative' interpretation held little inherent likeliness. 

Richard B. Spence's Secret Agent 666 might be regarded as a test case in whether a third way is possible. I still think it is possible but Spence's book has not quite cracked it even if it is a brave attempt to do so. The subject matter is precisely the sort that lends itself to this sort of thinking. The general hypothesis is that Aleister Crowley, the controversial British occultist with exceptional connections in the mid-reaches of the British establishment, operated for the British intelligence community in its relatively early days as an agent or asset, not on the official list but certainly in that strange grey area also inhabited by adventurers such as Sidney Reilly and Lincoln Trebitsch. By definition, intelligence-gathering, covert propaganda and occultism are only partially recorded and all are subject to 'editing after the fact'. There is little doubt that Crowley was a victim or perhaps beneficiary of this process throughout and after his life.

Spence who adopts a sound historical approach where there is documentation available (I have no reason to believe that he has been involved in either fabrication or been duped) makes a strong case that, indeed, Crowley was an asset for the British intelligence community and that the high point of his involvement was almost certainly during the effort to drive the US into the First World War. He also makes a less certain case but a reasonable one that Crowley remained an asset for a considerable time afterwards even if his exact status and value remain obscure. For the detail, you have to read the book but it has two flaws which arise in part from lack of discipline in adopting the 'third way'. The first flaw is lack of context (which admittedly may have required a book at least a third larger). Publishers today are constantly driving writers to cut rather than expand.

The second flaw is lack of clear delineation (for the general reader) between the rational analysis of known facts and reasonable surmise where the facts are 'gaps'. There is a consistent problem surrounding loss of official records about Crowley and many facts are ambiguous in their meaning. This is no excuse for the 'official' historian to ignore this 'fact-in-itself' but nor is it an excuse for baroque speculation without a clearer assessment of the probabilities of various possible scenarios. The lack of official records on Crowley in so many contexts suggest a degree of weeding out that, in itself, suggests something was being undertaken. It tends to confirm that he had a role and that the role was awkward and embarrassing in some respect but what that role might actually have been cannot be surmised from the gaps alone.

As a result, the book is entertaining enough but far too dense for the general reader. The general reader is led either to be dismissive of something that is, overall, imperfectly explained or to be far too credulous. The appropriate response lies somewhere inbetween. The more specialist interested reader is either obliged to suspend judgement because he needs a more rigorous historian to sift through Spence's research and weed out speculation (because life is just too short) or he must commit considerable time to redrafting the text mentally to work out what the acceptable probabilities are. My 'take' on the hypothesis is that, although the core thesis might well be correct, Crowley's role has been exaggerated and that some major 'achievements' (including an alleged role in the sinking of the Lusitania) remain firmly in the query basket. Bluntly, Crowley was a minor figure, like, say, Hanfstaengl in Hitler's court, rather than a major figure at the heart of twentieth century history.

It might be useful just to take one example of how 'honest speculation' goes too far right at the beginning - although such speculation is rife throughout the book and not always stupidly so. Sometimes the speculation is highly suggestive and, despite lack of hard evidence, just 'sounds right'.  In particular, there does seem to be a close relationship between secret society occultism, sexual dissidence, espionage and agit-prop. Whether this is because a personality type, the hyper-fantasist with a touch of psychopathy, is attracted to this milieu must remain a matter of judgement.  If Reilly and Trebitsch appear at one end of the story, Dennis Wheatley, Ian Fleming and the particularly unpleasant Sefton Delmer (an early proponent, it seems, of suicide bombing) are at the other ... such crows will flock together at the fringes of a war effort or in response to paranoid fear of some demonic enemy. It does not mean that they are as important as they think they are except perhaps as dangerous disruptors of sound policy. We suspect the psychological operations of the combatants on all sides of the current Ukraine conflict are rotten with such crows.

The example to be given is on Page 36 where Spence notes that Crowley's occult club and secret order, the A:A founded in 1907, had military members (though that was never going to be unlikely in a late imperial partially-militarised establishment). One was Captain Fuller, one of the founders of the British Tank Corps and an admirer of Crowley and later of Hitler (although make no assumptions from this).  Another was Commander Guy Montagu Marston of the Royal Navy. What we know of Marston is that he was a navigation officer (Spence does his home work to correct Crowley himself on his status) and that he operated against slave traders and rebels in West Africa in the 1890s. There is some speculative stuff that need not detain us but he was clearly part of Crowley's 'set' - his secluded estate in Dorset was the scene of a "working" in 1910 which allegedly resulted in prophecy of war subsequently fulfilled. He was also having an affair with a cousin, Daisy Bevan, married to Edwyn Bevan, brother of two other Bevans who would later have dealings with Crowley. All this tells us is that we have a relatively young and prosperous Edwardian establishment milieu interested in magic and bonking.

However, Spence makes one of the 'could have' leaps that mars the book. Marston 'could have' (we are advised) provided an indirect link between Crowley and the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Division [NID] and then he goes riffing off to link this with later Crowleian shenanigans in Mexico and the First World War. He then switches tack to suggest that Crowley might have been involved in a conspiracy centred on sexual blackmail. Then he suggests that closeness to Marston might have been useful in dealings with German intelligence. There is no evidence for any of this even if it introduces many of the major themes in subsequent chapters. Much later on page 66, Spence cheekily assumes that the pre-war connection with Marston and others 'probably' was the basis of his alleged special relationship with NID in 1915.

Apart from a brief mention in the strange case of Gerard Lee Bevan in 1922, Marston drops out of the story but not before one more suggestive link, the right wing fantasist Nesta Webster, author of the infamous Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (1923) appears. She just happens to be a sister of the Bevans! Again, the evidence is of an occultist neurotic right wing, close to being fascistic, network that is cross-linked to wartime British propaganda circles and to post-war militarism but nothing has been demonstrated that, through Marston, Crowley actually was a member of anything introduced through him. It is a case of 'could have', that is all. The connection is suggestive but too much weight is placed on it. 

I have not mentioned the interest of modern occultists. I suspect that this book will add little to a religious or cultural re-evaluation of Crowley. I am not sure that it has much to tell the Thelemite spiritual community. All in all, a useful book for the researched information but to be taken with a pinch of salt on interpretation. 

Marco Pasi took some two decades to write his relatively short Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics. What started off as a dissertation in an area of maximal obscurity (the politics of esoterism) has become a little more important in recent years with the renaissance of the Far Right. Pasi is writing a corrective. Crowley's involvement and interest in politics (except as means to ends related to his religious ambitions) was actually very small and intermittent - and unstable. This has not stopped Crowley being adopted by elements in the neo-fascist European Right, almost certainly through the different magical interest of Evola and the flummery of Rightist occultism.  This New New Right (since the New Right tends to neo-conservative extreme radical individualism) goes beyond even populism to revive the 'political soldier' model of the 1970s and to seek revolution.

Regardless of the extremities of Russian propaganda, it is to be found in the Ukraine and lurking in competition with more obvious traditionalist excesses and nostalgia for a Nazi-led Europe. Paganism, occultism, esotericism - all the mish-mash of thought found in a rootless bourgeoisie who know, as we all do, that something is wrong but who are incapable of thinking through what is to be done! Pasi does us the service of going back to the man, asking what he was in his own time and what his purposes were, and then placing any politics to be found there in that context. The answer is not good for latter day extremist acolytes. 

First of all, Crowley was either a conventional man of his time or (in his second phase) a pragmatist and an opportunist. His conventionalities were the Tory attitudes of his generation and his class alongside periodic rebellions that had him dabbling in romantic political games that attracted many well-fed esotericists. If anything, though never a materialist, his anti-traditionalism and commitment to religion being justified in scientific terms by results pushes him into the progressive camp, if kicking and screaming. Alleged flirtations with Mussolini, Hitler and Sovietism were nothing more than naive attempts to get his religion in front of the masses by whatever was to hand in the conditions of the time. In fact, there is so little to say about his politics in the long run that Pasi effectively 'pads out' the tale with extended essays on Crowley's relationship with Pessoa and on Evola.

Neither essay really tells us much about Crowley but I have no complaints. Pasi's scholarly discipline is exemplary and we learn important detail about what really matters - the culture of the era. In that context, the book is a valuable monograph that shows just how the decaying upper middle classes interconnected on nonsensical beliefs and intellectual fads - from jacobitism to pseudo-communism. In fact, for all his faults, Crowley comes out of this not too badly if you stick to the image of someone who stuck to his last on core anti-Christian, libertarian and more conventional conservative elitist values. That odd mix means that there is no way that he can be seen as part of today's traditionalist revival - Thelema is definitely not a primordialist religion but a revolutionary new religion. It also means that it is intrinsically anti-totalitarian and closer to what Nietzsche might have seen as a transvaluation of values (though I doubt the philosopher would have been impressed with Crowley by any means).

One can see why this old roue flirted with systems like scientific socialism, national socialism and fascism as an intrinsic libertarian anti-democrat but also why each flirtation lasted for such little time. He thought these systems could bring spiritual liberty to the masses (not to be confused with political liberty), only to find quite quickly, as Evola did, that the practitioners of these secular forces were practical men of brute power.  What is more interesting throughout this book is the peculiar culture of pre-war and interwar esotericism and the underground of ridiculous theory that seemed to be finding fertile ground again a decade ago but which has since gone into abeyance again.

My own view is that few understood Nietzsche at that time except in the most simple of terms because he was asking far too much in terms of free thought yet Crowley probably made most progress in a half-baked way. I am not and will never be a Thelemite - a cure as bad as the disease - but I will always admire Crowley, for all his irresponsibilities and narcissism, for asking the right questions. The right questions were ones of liberating the individual self from the trammels of inherited forms, re-invention if you like. He came (as Pasi notes) to see this as a mission - hence his political dabbling. The message remains liberatory even if he is as misused in the practice as was Nietzsche whose role in triggering his thought may have been under-estimated. They were both men before their time.

The book is highly recommended not only as an intelligent evaluation of the man - more measured than the assessments of acolytes and critics - but as providing insights into a period of Western cultural confusion. Pasi does not engage much with his influence after Evola (who seems not really to have been influenced!). But the notes are excellent in every respect and his judgments strike me as sound at every point. We have had good works appearing now on traditionalism and on the esoteric cultural environment as well as on the post-war Right but it is good to see some facts on Crowley laid out before further abuses of the evidence and the man take place.