Aleister Crowley and Political Reality
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.