Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin: Art, Sex, and Magick in the Weimar Republic

ONE

SCOOP!

The work in Germany is going very strong indeed. I always knew that was the country to understand me. [Kasimira] is teaching me German. I feel that I have much to do there one day. ¹

ALEISTER CROWLEY TO KARL GERMER, 1928

An old lady in a tattered headscarf, her bulky body encased in a thick duffel coat, stands like stone in massive boots upon the cold granite setts of Friedrich-Wilhelm Platz. Coiled about her long-lost neck, a python of a scarf insulates her vanished sex. Eyes downcast, hands burrowing into her pockets, this poignant monument to the forced modesty of poverty stands silent guard to the U-Bahn underground station entrance, a mile and a half south of a more fashionable Berlin.

Over her shoulder is slung a large leather bag for change. Change. . . . It is Saturday afternoon. The month is May, the year 1930. She is selling papers. Around her little kiosk, the picture magazine Revue flutters in the chill: long girls’ legs dangle provocatively each side of the indifferent vendor, plying her paper street-trade with forgotten pride. Above the stockinged limbs and myths of pleasure, her top-selling newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt, cries for a pfennig: two editions a day, rolled out in streams and rushed across the city in publisher Rudolf Mosse’s pedal carts to dozens of kiosks like this one.

For the moment, the vendor grips her granite turf alone, but to the north of Friedrich-Wilhelm Platz, beneath the trees of the Tiergarten public park in central Berlin, passersby witness a grim demonstration. A crowd follows a coffin carried by play-acting mourners in flat Lenin caps, sure signs of committed comrades in the workers’ struggle. While the red flags of the German Communist Party (KPD) are tightly furled in ironic tribute to the dead, a big banner, held high on staffs, declares, Workers—to the grave we carry forever the coalition (Arbeiter—Zu Grabetragen wir für immer die Koalition), while the black coffin borne on workers’ shoulders bears one word, splashed across in white paint: Koalition. The Coalition of Chancellor Hermann Müller’s Social Democratic Party, Center Party, German Democratic Party, and German People’s Party has been dead since 27 March, seen off by the Great Depression and inter-party feuding. Succumbing to the political stench, poor Müller will himself be dead in a year, a bitter blow for the Social Democrats.

As the old newsvendor in Friedrich-Wilhelm Platz glances up from her frozen reverie to a fist bearing cash, yet another political rally draws to a close.

One hundred twenty miles northwest of Berlin stands the fine old city of Schwerin, where uniformed men close ranks around their charismatic speaker, mounted on a makeshift podium. This is the paramilitary Stahlhelm Group, or Bund der Frontsoldaten, soldier-veterans, led by chief and founder Franz Seldte, smart and disciplined on the outside, raging within.

Seldte despises the weakness of the Weimar Republic’s young democracy, inflicted, as he sees it, on a once great Empire through the corrupt machinery of the old guard: stay-at-home, armchair politicians who—Seldte declares unchallenged—betrayed their soldiers and their country when they ended the war in November 1918. Shame! Bring back the Emperor! The Stahlhelm rally, with its speeches, its shuffling boots, and its defiance in the late afternoon breeze and cold sunny glare, stirs the quiet of the beautiful old capital of Mecklenburg.

Belonging to a loose, anti-government coalition of right-wing parties called the Reichsausschuss, the Stahlhelm Group jostles for political influence with the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party) but cannot compete for votes. Having doubled their voting share in Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1929, the Nazis are standoffish toward the Reichsausschuss. Nazi propaganda chief Dr. Goebbels, based in Berlin under the archaic title gauleiter, considers these fellow nationalists rather bourgeois. Too close a public association, Goebbels insists, will compromise the Nazis’ revolutionary image. Hitler disdains to stand by Seldte on the rally platforms of the Reichsausschuss.*8

So, as the sun slips away over the stately amber houses and golden spires of Schwerin, and Seldte’s echoing, electrically amplified voice decries yet again the lack, as he sees it, of honor in the Reichstag’s political confusion, the old woman in Friedrich-Wilhelm Platz reaches into her bag of loose change to recompense a businessman as he takes hold of the Saturday evening edition of the Berliner Tageblatt, issue no. 207, 3 May 1930.

Stepping out of the kiosk’s shadow into the last, sharp shafts of setting sunlight, the man turns to the back page; his attention is caught by a fine drawing of a man. The businessman squints better to inspect the drawing: a large, noble head is cocked back as if suddenly inhaling. His eyes are closed in some intense mystical congress with an inner power rarely joined to a man in a suit.

This striking image of sober ecstasy by English artist Augustus John sits strangely above the weather forecast and the columns of stories of burglaries, bar fights, and bank heists. While the Sass Brothers are jailed for robbery, weekenders in search of a legal thrill can visit the new crocodile exhibition at the zoo. And for those in search of higher inspiration, Berlin’s brazen bustle is gently interrupted by a simple headline, and a not so simple story:

Fig. 1.1. Aleister Crowley by Augustus John (1878–1961) as reproduced in the pages of the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper (Abend-Ausgabe section, no. 207, 3 May 1930).

IN BERLIN TRAF EIN: ALEISTER CROWLEY

(Arriving in Berlin: Aleister Crowley)

The fifty-five-year-old lingers by us for a moment to prepare for an exhibition of his paintings taking place this autumn. Aleister Crowley is a painter from passion. He must be, since as a mountaineer his vision has inhaled moods of air and light remote from human eyes. Already the conqueror of Mexico’s highest peaks, Crowley twice attempted to subjugate the Himalayas. His last Himalayan expedition was in 1905 when he reached a height of 7,000 meters before a mutiny forced him back. He has committed his mountaineering exploits, his life’s confessions, his many adventures, his poetry (Crowley once lived as a yogi) to a series of books now appearing in England.

Crowley has already advised the recently assembled German Himalayan Expedition’s leader on how to tackle a specific glacier. Should the expedition follow that advice, Crowley told the interviewer, they should reach the summit, otherwise ruin awaits them: The Germans have excellent prospects with this adventure.

For the English public, gentleman-Bohemian Crowley is a controversial phenomenon. While some recognize a revolutionary philosopher, others see him as an artist-clown. That this climber of mountains, player of chess, poet-philosopher, and painter is one of the most remarkable of characters, however, no one will dispute. To us he offers a cross between Karl May and Schopenhauer.*9 Perhaps he is much more, perhaps less.

Back in Schwerin, 120 miles northwest of Friedrich-Wilhelm-Platz, the living, breathing subject of the Tageblatt article has arrived by car from Berlin, en route for Hamburg and London on business. Aleister Crowley’s anxious fixer and business associate Karl Germer is driving. Germer’s American wife, Cora, is in the passenger seat. The car draws up outside an elegant hotel in the city’s center. A handsome, four-story stone structure, ivory-rendered, the Niederlandische Hof harks back to the civilized grandeur of 1902: a neoclassical temple of sanity in a narrow boulevard of shady trees overlooking the Stör canal, tributary of the beautiful Schwerinsee, or Lake Schwerin.

The city’s name, Schwerin, will have jogged Crowley’s memory, jogged it back to five years of hardship endured in the United States during the 1914–18 war. As an Allied intelligence asset, Crowley had observed anti-Allied Americans (of German descent). Some simply clamored to keep the U.S. out of the war, others committed acts of subversion.

During the nineteenth century a large number of Schweriners had migrated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a significant number entering the brewing industry (today Milwaukee and Schwerin are sister cities). Here lies the background to Crowley’s otherwise mysterious reference to Milwaukee brewers in his 1919 essay The Last Straw, written to refute his enemies’ presumption that he was a pro-German traitor, rather than a spy on German agents, during World War One. Coincidentally, Crowley has just published part of the essay in a new book, The Legend of Aleister Crowley. The book is designed to break a booksellers’ boycott of his works in London. Discussions in Berlin have led Crowley to expect a German translation too.

They [Crowley’s enemies] wanted to get me . . . and confidently supposed [me] to be sitting in a luxurious suite at the Ritz-Carlton, quaffing beaker after beaker of champagne to the health of the Kaiser, as I conspired with the fanatical brewers of Milwaukee.

Were there not still fanatics in Schwerin? Writing up the day’s events in his diary, Crowley referred to the rally of Stahlhelm at Schwerin and their chief, Seldte, adding the single word comment: Good. This very likely refers to Crowley’s having met Franz Seldte at X [ten o’clock] Niederlandische Hof. Crowley was keen to know what was really happening in Germany, intelligence he could convey to Lt. Col. John Fillis Carré Carter, head of England’s Special Branch or police interface with MI5. Crowley enjoyed a discreet arrangement with Carter, code-named Nick, the full extent of which is now lost to us; it was never intended to enter recorded history. Carter’s code name, incidentally, derived from fictional detective Nick Carter, created for the dime novel The Old Detective’s Pupil in 1886. (Nick Carter Weekly was replaced by Detective Story Magazine in 1915.) Introduced to 666 by Crowley’s pupil Gerald Yorke in June 1929, the Canadian Carter from Halifax took a serious, not infre quently irritated, interest in Crowley’s kaleidoscope of activities; Crowley, most of the time, was happy to oblige the colossus of Scotland Yard.

Aleister Crowley had arrived in Berlin on 18 April, a fortnight before his night in Schwerin. Painter, caricaturist, and astrologer Hans Steiner had telephoned the Berliner Tageblatt on the 24th to alert reporters to a scoop: the appearance in Berlin of a man who only a year previously had made headlines across Europe with a mystery story concerning the French government’s refusal to renew Sir Crowley’s Parisian residence permit, effectively expelling the magus from France. There had been rumors of spying for the Germans, and much else. But rumor was all there was; the government declined to explain its refus de séjour.

The Tageblatt interview, probably conducted by bright young Jewish journalist Günther Stein, occurred four days after Steiner’s call. But had the Berliner Tageblatt’s intelligent copy got it right? Was Crowley a cross between Karl May and Schopenhauer? Was he a revolutionary or a fool-osopher? Who was this Aleister Crowley that so fascinated hardto-impress Berliners?

The Tageblatt offers a basic bio: Crowley is an explorer-adventurer, a chess player, a poet, a philosopher, an English gentleman, a bohemian (that is a free-spirited, free-thinking, artist-aesthete). He is a man about whom men differ. He fascinates some, repels others. Some he both fascinates and repels. He is an artist from passion, appealing to poets and ladies, revolutionaries and revue-bar habitués. He gives advice. He wants to help others to succeed. He writes books. He knows the world, and he moves in it. He appears fearless. But can he be taken seriously? He can clown it up. There is a hint of revolutionary about him, but what kind of revolution?

Journalist Günther Stein, himself a man longing for a revolution of the familiar kind, knows his Berlin audience well. He does not tell them about Crowley’s peculiar religious upbringing in a close-knit family of upper-middle-class Christian fundamentalists, a family undemonstratively superior to the unredeemed world without, clinging firmly to what is now dubbed creationism with outmoded theories about the absolute literalism of God’s biblical word and the blood-sacrifice practices of peoples long ago. Members of the exclusive Plymouth Brethren sect, Crowley’s parents would have regarded today’s biblical fundamentalists as lax, headed for damnation.

Fig. 1.2. Aleister Crowley, explorer

The journalist knows well that interest in his scoop will diminish should he so much as hint that Crowley has a religious or spiritual message, even one that transcends the logic of his Victorian parents. Berlin is too modern, too hard-realist, too revolutionary for such stuff. The journalist does mention in brackets that Crowley has lived as a yogi. This of course is colorful and fitting for an adventurer-explorer of the East. The journalist will also know that a yogi is a teacher of yoga (which means union), loosely suggesting the mystic orient in a pleasantly undefined way, something many people will know or feel from popular mythology, relatives’ interest in Theosophy or Freemasonry, or from films of desert sheikhs driven into ecstasies by human and more than human loves. Anyhow, a man who once lived as a yogi is unlikely to bore his audience with threats of imminent salvation-damnation. Indeed, yogis are notoriously short on words. Besides, as is assumed by practically all educated Berliners, Art is the repository of the soul; churches and synagogues are for the old, the settled down, the bourgeois: atrophied, formal extensions of officialdom into the numinous and legal basis for coming of age, baptisms, weddings, and funerals.

But Crowley himself would be the first to distance himself from what most people understand as the idea of having a religious message. Indeed, in conventional terms, Crowley offers no such thing. He is no evangelical, God forbid. He is not trying to inject religion into the material world. He does not want to be seen as a guru descending on the wicked world to hear his sweaty swami pfennig worth of repentance from sin. Far from it! Do what thou wilt is his watchword, and while it had for him profound meaning as well, it also meant pretty well what it seemed to say, as far as the world was concerned. Each was to follow his or her true will and not interfere with others’ right to do the same. In this context, the line could be expressed as Lay off, bud! That’s a man or woman there; it’s their life! Get your own!—a very suitable attitude for a Berlin that, frankly, already has much of this attitude pulsating through its veins. That’s why Crowley will find a home in Berlin. For him it is a place where the evolution of the New Aeon seems already visible, tangible, lickable. His system, Thelema (Greek for Will—the True Will), is the creed of the aeon.

Yes, the boy Crowley had been shaped by a boyhood in the closed Plymouth Brethren Christian sect, with little contact with non-church members or mainstream culture (Brethren dismissed Christmas as a pagan festival). And yes, things had got a lot worse for him when his beloved and admired father (a self-financing preacher) died suddenly when the boy was just twelve. The adolescent had come into the hands of a strict evangelical lower bourgeois bigot, Crowley’s uncle Tom Bishop, who, with Mother’s approval, had entrusted the lad to the care of the sadistic Rev. Champney at a Brethren school at Cambridge. But Crowley had been saved from the school, if not all his uncle’s burdensome ministrations, by his father’s brother, keen scientist and man of the world Jonathan Sparrow Crowley (1826–1888).

By the age of eighteen Crowley had come into his own perception of the world, a vigorous perception both romantic and rigorously scientific, in which he found himself much in intellectual league with other outstanding figures of the late Victorian and Edwardian era in science and the arts. Prime Minister Lord Salisbury recommended Crowley to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study for a diplomatic career.

All things told, however, Crowley had paid a price for his eventual liberation from Christian fundamentalism. First, he absorbed a vivid sense of religious authority, which however much his intellect rebelled against it, was nonetheless an aspect of the fabric of his deeper, motivating thought structure. This sense of a being or beings beyond this world having the right to say "I’m not asking you; I’m telling you was reinforced by the authority structure of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in which, from 1898, he was trained as a magician; that is, a man who could get lesser intelligences to work for him and who could invoke higher intelligences as guides and way-clearers. His tutor in the order, Samuel Mathers (1854–1918), was full of the militaristic, Prussian attitude of absolute, compelling authority, something that annoyed Crowley’s comembers but in which Crowley found something to admire, something Nietzschean, beyond the moral fearfulness of the prevailing culture, a kind of nostalgia for the prophet of old, the one who sweeps away committees and regards democracy as a rootless fad. Furthermore, the Golden Dawn Order’s acceptance of the idea and existence of spiritualized overlords, called in poor English translation Secret Chiefs" (derived from eighteenth-century German antecedents), who governed not only the order but also human destiny, sanctioned the basic attitude of divine authority he first imbibed from his Plymouth Brethren upbringing and father’s wisdom. In simple and even simplistic psychological terms, Crowley lost a father and gained new ones, eventually. His rebellion began with the death of his father; after that, to an extent, Crowley nursed a grievance against the bourgeois mediocrity and perennial stupidity that enveloped his life subsequently, and from which he tore himself away like a moon-crazed hare from its mother’s womb in a series of inner, and outer, struggles.

The second serious price Crowley had to pay for his liberation from stifling religious conformity was the effort itself. He generated a vast amount of excess liberating energy; it would be hard at times to retard the engine of revolt. He had a strong tendency to universalize his personal problems into visions of the Zeitgeist. That is to say, his personal tragedy was very much wrapped up in his mind with the perceived declension of the civilized world into materialism and dehumanized standardization of product. Crowley claimed to have no beef with Nature; Nature was as it should be. But Humanity was caught in a titanic spiritual struggle with its past. From the particulars of his own liberation, Crowley leaped, like Blake’s child of freedom and rebellion, Orc, into a vision of the universal liberation required by humankind to free itself from the old aeon of repressive religion, unscientific superstition, and political, sexual, and social oppression. His personal experience, he needed not too much persuading, was a microcosm of the Gods’ dealings with our species; thus and in those terms, he became a living, if only occasional, Thoth, or Scribe of the Gods: a magus with a Word. The Gods dictated; he wrote: not at all far, we might observe, from his father’s point of view with regard to scripture. Thus Crowley’s magical order, the A A , insisted on classes of authority in order writings. Very few writings were in Class A: received material from sources beyond human rationality’s ability to create. Class A writings derived from superior intelligence, beyond ordinary Reason. The God’s-eye view as personal experience was the vision Crowley sought through progressive initiations, or uncoverings, of the depths and mystery of his being. At the core was, he supposed, a kind of super-id, a divine power of which the conscious fool-man was unconscious. Liberate the unknown power and human civilization could make its necessary strides into the fresh cosmic dispensation awaiting the awakened being of Man.

Needless to say, such a process would be attended by what Jonathan Swift would have called some inconveniences—inconveniences such as the First World War, the full liberation of women, and greater conflicts to come.

Having fully internalized this itinerary for himself and out of duty to his Holy Guardian Angel, Crowley’s link with ultimate reality, his unconscious if you like, he would become a Mercury, or wandering Fool, a childlike tool of the Gods, an invisible presence, a wind, a kind of secret chief: problematic for a man who enjoyed attracting attention. To the world he was young Aleister Crowley, naughty boy extraordinaire, clever, witty, brilliantly talented, brave, foolish, impulsive, and often ridiculous, ambitious, impossible, self-obsessed, keen on fame, but also incredibly modest, surprisingly spiritual, generous, and, frankly, very sexy to women who felt keenly the spiritual side of sex and the sexual side of the spirit.

Crowley had suffered for his prodigious talents and energies. As a poet-vandal against the panes of the bourgeois greenhouse, leaping onto the barricades before the mediocre behemoth, he had perhaps pushed too hard. Wishing to be known as The Beast 666 was a good joke for those in on the associations and the pose—and a good insulation from those whose attentions would waste his time—the title could nonetheless cause a lot of trouble from literal, unseeking, and insensitive minds, especially when enflamed by moral hypocrisy and un-Christ-like Christian zeal. The world that liked to think of itself as enlightened and progressive no longer employed the rack, red-hot pokers, and Inquisition, but it did have, and still does have, the press, which can torture and deprive good men and women of the respect of their fellows and their livelihoods in the name of . . . their shareholders.

Aleister Crowley had entered the bad books of the moral guardians of society expressed in the cheaper, mass-circulation papers. Once their owners knew Crowley could not or would not fight for his reputation in court (he was actively bisexual—then a crime), the gutter press went for the jugular, especially The Sunday Express (in 1922–23), John Bull (1920– 30), and, before the Great War, The Looking Glass (in 1910, owned by West de Wend Fenton before his imprisonment). Some of this muck was bound to stick, even on the continent, where Anglo-Saxon sexual hypocrisy was well recognized, if not as an excessive version of its own.

There had been another round of Crowley-bashing as an undesirable on the withdrawal of his permit to live in France in spring 1929, but the continental press did not share the kind of blinkered moral outrage that characterized the British rags. As for the Berliner Tageblatt story, Crowley was thrilled to see such an unusually fair and useful story. Moreover, its point of focus was Crowley as an artist. Something like recognition at last! For Crowley had always been an artist, but his conscious pursuance of the role in paint after his mother’s death in 1917 had been elsewhere greeted with indifference or hostility, as we shall see. But here was a German newspaper announcing, not taking sides at all, that this passionate man of kultur was going to exhibit in Berlin come the autumn.

Was Crowley something more or something less than a combination of Karl May and Arthur Schopenhauer? The question itself was so intriguing, it required no answer, but it did reveal a highbrow aspect to Crowley as well as a lowbrow one. Anyhow, Crowley had, as we shall discover, such a complex, unique psychology, with its ability to inhabit the highest heights and quite a few of the depths as well, that it is pointless to say precisely what Crowley was, since he could be so many things, and was so many things. There was only one thing he was not, perhaps: he was never dull. But children who are never dull and are very bright and energetic can be very exhausting, and this could be true of Crowley, who was so very often broke and, like Jesus, in regular need of followers to minister unto him of their substance. (Jesus was financed by Joanna, wife of Herod Antipas’s steward, Chuza,*10 but no one accuses Jesus of living off immoral earnings!) It is not true to say that Crowley alienated all his friends, but it is true to say that he exhausted many of them, as too much sun may exhaust the static bather.

So how can we describe the tough, portly, pipe-smoking fifty-five-year-old Crowley in the spring of 1930? Well, he was up for it. He was up for Berlin; he needed a new HQ, new contacts, new life; he needed to be at the center of contemporary life, plugged in to the vital energies of the planet.

Crowley was a man who refused to be old; he would embody his New Aeon, the Aeon of the Child Avenger and Conqueror, the Child in love with the Sun, the life force, whether he was loved for it or laughed at, feted or feared. Crowley was inspired by change, by movement, by freedom, by the challenge of the impossible. He’d have camped in the Tiergarten if he’d had to, like the businessmen toppled by the Great Crash he observed on the lower spokes of fortune’s wheel. Crowley could sleep rough, and live rough, though he was a natural in the company of the good things: good conversation, lively women who saw life as a poem, happy and playful always amid the grandeur of inimitable nature and inimitable art.

But why had he come to Berlin? What was his business?

TWO

SELLING ALEISTER CROWLEY

A series of meetings held in Berlin in late April 1930 give us clues to understanding Crowley’s purposes. On Wednesday the 23rd he made his way some 10 km northwest of the city center to the suburb of Tegel for a meeting with Theosophist publisher Henri Birven.

A Berlin philosophy graduate originally from Aachen, Birven had lectured on electrical engineering before WWI. From 1929 his Theosophical magazine Hain der Isis (Grove of Isis) included extracts from Crowley’s works by arrangement with Martha Küntzel, a Theosophist from Leipzig who translated Crowley’s writings. Hain der Isis was published from Birven’s home address at Schulstrasse 7, some 500 meters southwest of the Humboldt Oberschule in Hatzfeldallee, where he worked as a schoolteacher. Contributors also included The Golem author, Gustav Meyrink; Joanny Bricaud (1881–1934; Patriarch of the French-based Universal Gnostic Church); and neo-Gnostic patriarch E. C. H. Peithmann.

Turning up at Birven’s house, Crowley was initially put out to find what appeared to be a party going on. The Beast had expected to get down to business in private. Instead, he was introduced to Dr. Arnoldo Krumm-Heller, an earnest German mystic-doctor who had spent much of his life in Mexico and Paris, developing a strongly motivated passion for neo-Rosicrucian and neo-Gnostic philosophies, as well as an abiding interest in alternative medicine and the progress of Theosophy. Krumm-Heller had been looking forward to meeting the famous Beast 666, and Birven made himself look important by crossing his meeting with Krumm-Heller’s first Crowley encounter.

Also present at the meeting was commercial artist Walter Plantikow. Perhaps the idea was to acquaint Crowley with some knowledge of the Berlin art scene while putting Plantikow in the way of a job illustrating Crowley’s planned new German translations, though Plantikow’s métier was erotic art. Did Birven believe Crowley was a sex maniac? In any event, Crowley judged Plantikow’s work good.*11

When Crowley met him in April 1930, Plantikow, then living at Lütticher Strasse 2 (N65), had already illustrated Félicien Mallefille’s erotic Memoirs of the Nights of Don Juan. The idea of the meeting was probably to secure reasonably priced artists for Thelema Verlag texts.

Plantikow was still working in Berlin in the 1940s as an illustrator for Steinerverlag’s children’s illustrated historical adventure stories, such as German Storm Gibraltar by Wolfgang Hofmann. He also worked for the Steinerverlag’s War Library of German Youth series, sent as pamphlets, when the company exceeded paper quotas in 1943, to Hitler Youth leaders to inspire young people to war.

Crowley decided to take the party as a compliment and arranged a private dinner with Birven for later in the evening to discuss publishing issues and matters connected to Crowley’s desire to draw competing Theosophical societies under his Thelemic banner. When Crowley arrived for the planned dinner, however, he was enraged to find Birven had again muddied the waters by bringing with him young left-wing painter and sculptor Heinz Worner.†12

It was not Worner himself the Beast found objectionable (Crowley admired the artist’s draftsmanship) but Birven’s insufferably pompous manners combined with what Crowley took to be idiocy. Business was impossible to conduct. The impression given was that for some reason Birven was avoiding being exposed directly to Crowley’s thoughts and plans. Was Birven playing games with the Beast? Was he scared?

Fig. 2.1. Aleister Crowley, 1929. Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute.

In order to grasp Crowley’s intentions behind these first Berlin meetings we need to follow a long-standing, frequently tortuous Crowley promotion scheme.

On 29 December 1927, twenty-six-year-old Gerald Joseph Yorke introduced himself to Aleister Crowley at Le Bourget aerodrome, northeast Paris. In an era when most Britons could hardly afford a coach seat to Blackpool the swanky Yorke flew in by plane to imbibe the Master Therion’s wisdom. Four months later, Crowley wrote about his new discovery to friend and OTO Order honorary treasurer, Karl Germer:

The man in London [Yorke] is wealthy, and has A.1 connections. But he is young, and at present on an allowance. The best is that he is a businessman. We should get him to form a private company. The profits should be very good for capitalists, as all I want out of it is an assured income to be able to work with convenience and no worry. . . . This is the best news we’ve had in years.

    666¹

Having spent some weeks being trained in magical disciplines of concentration yoga, invocation, evocation, and astral traveling, the upper-class Yorke put his weight behind Crowley’s long-term schemes and established a publishing account dedicated to seeing his teacher’s seminal Book Four: Magick in Theory and Practice published and advertised—against the advice of Yorke’s father, landowner, businessman, and Cambridge don Vincent Yorke, as well as well-placed friends who took Crowley’s unenviable reputation at face value.

On 18 July 1928, buoyed by Yorke’s generosity, Crowley outlined plans for a publishing syndicate at the Hôtel du Château, Carry-le-Rouet on the Riviera. He dispatched them to Karl Germer in New York:

I have at last adequate arrangements to meet current expenses till the end of the year by means of a regular allowance. This will leave me free from anxiety, and able to attend to my real work. This will relieve you from all further responsibility for that period. All sums that you can spare should be sent to Mr. Yorke, to replace the publication fund which has been raided for the above purpose. You need not incur the expense of cabling; bank draft will serve.

We are engaged in forming a syndicate (or limited company) to exploit my works, both sacred and profane. You and others who have contributed to keep things going during this bad period will receive stock in the company for the amount. Please inform Mr. Yorke exactly how much you have advanced. I wish to include all you have spent since we first corresponded.

The details of the scheme may be outlined thus. (a) Capital—$50,000—proposed syndicate or limited company of five people with $10,000 each [including Crowley’s lady friend Kasimira Bass]. You might get C. E. [Cora Eaton, Germer’s wife-to-be] to promise to invest $10,000 in the company provided that the other $40,000 is subscribed elsewhere. On the other hand, pending the actual formation of the company, we should like the loan of $10,000 from C. E. [Cora Eaton] or elsewhere.²

This was a typically ambitious plan for a man who never needed much to convince him that this time his boat really had come in. Crowley was always conscious of the money Karl Germer and, in due course, Cora Eaton spent on his operation (the Great Work) and was always confident that, properly administered, his large stock of book assets, written and to be written, would yield golden dividends for all.

A further letter to Germer regarding the loan is interesting because we see that, already in 1928, Crowley had in mind the idea of establishing a G.H.Q. in Germany, though why Hamburg, is a minor mystery.

Just a line about this loan. (1) Yorke has $2000 in the bank to guar antee 6% interest: this only needs $600 per annum. (2) If necessary, you can add your own guarantee. Once the loan is made, G.H.Q. will need no further contributions from you. And you have been sending more than $600 a year. (3) We don’t need $10,000 in one lump sum. $5000 now and $5000 in 6 months (or by installments) would see us well through. (4) The capital can be secured by setting aside a large part of the Pickford stock [books in storage], with a further personal guarantee from Yorke for ultimate repayment in full. (Yorke is a rich man, but is at present on an allowance. When his father dies, he will have a very large capital.) (5) The immediate uses of the loan are (a) to secure me a living wage, so that I can create new assets for the company. (b) To start a new G.H.Q.—a furnished house, probably in Hamburg, till we are rich enough to buy a proper estate. (c) To publish such new work as seems unsuitable for a regular publisher.³

Within a year Crowley acquired something resembling a regular publisher. In 1927, the bright and very rebellious Australian Percy Reginald Stephensen graduated from Oxford University with a second-class degree and a vision of communist revolution. Stephensen went to work for the scandal-pocked Australian artist Norman Lindsay and his entrepreneurial son Jack, founders of the London-based Fanfrolico Press, founded it would appear, pour épater le bourgeois. Stephensen soon developed a particular desire to expose the hypocrisies of clean up Britain censor Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks, First Viscount Brentford (1865–1932), and the crusading bigot James Douglas, who had made Crowley’s life such a misery with his twisted and fallacious exposures in the Sunday Express in 1922 and 1923.

In 1928, having translated Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist, Stephensen craved more than Lindsay’s commitment to pure, shocking (preferably naked) artistic beauty and went into business with Edward Teddy Goldston as his codirector in a new publishing venture, the Mandrake Press. The Mandrake’s initial focus was the artistic and sexual revolt of D. H. Lawrence. It was Stephensen who was chiefly responsible for the early 1929 very risky, Lawrence-approved edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published with a Florence imprint after Lawrence’s death in 1930. Stephensen chimed in Mandrake’s equally provocative publication of The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence with a June 1929 exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings at the Warren Gallery. The show received the accolade of a police raid and confiscation of the obscene paintings, repatriated to Lawrence on condition they were not exhibited again.

Meanwhile, Crowley, freshly ejected from his habitual Parisian milieu, and doubtless impressed by such New Aeon fearlessness, appeared without appointment at Mandrake’s offices on Museum Street, Bloomsbury, with a massive quantity of typed sheets. An amused reading of what was in fact Crowley’s autobiography moved Stephensen to recognize an objective correlative for his declared direction in revolutionary fervor: the true revolutionary, Stephensen now believed, was possessed by an uncompromising pugnacity in rebelliousness which marks Satan for our respect.⁴ In Aleister Crowley, Stephensen had found his Nietzschean Superman, his Blakean Orc, his star writer. After a second meeting on 28 June 1929, Stephensen signed the Beast to the Mandrake Press with a £50 advance.

Flush with optimism, Crowley arranged a marriage—his own—with the lady he called his High Priestess of Voodoo, Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar in order to save from stateless isolation (in Belgium) this highly sexed, buxom daughter of a Nicaraguan landowner. Having signed a further four contracts and given Yorke power of attorney, Crowley left for Germany where, compounding his difficulties with what he later called premature senility, he married the hapless Maria on 16 August 1929 before Leipzig’s accommodating British consul.

Crowley’s life record now picks up another theme involved in his decision to go to Berlin in 1930. Crowley believed the gods intended him to take control of Annie Besant’s worldwide Theosophical Society. He recognized that the long-standing attempt by the Esoteric Branch of Annie Besant’s dominant Theosophical Society to foist Indian boy (now adult) Jiddu Krishnamurti on the world as the avatar of the Christ Principle and World Teacher (through their Order of the Star) was crumbling, as Crowley had long predicted. The now thirty-four-year-old sage Krishnamurti was breaking with Liberal Catholic Church Bishop Leadbeater and Besant’s entire Theosophical leadership.

Fig. 2.2. Mr. and Mrs. Crowley, 1929

(Crowley with his second wife, Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar). Image courtesy of the Warburg Institute.

On 3 August 1929, at the Order of the Star’s summer Star camp at Ommen in the eastern Netherlands, Krishnamurti dissolved the very order formed to announce and promote him, declaring as he resigned forever his Theosophical commission: I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. Was the magick of the Beast at work, an allegedly irresistible tide generated by the New Aeon of the Child’s solar principle?

Precisely three weeks after Krishnamurti’s stunning summer camp announcement, Crowley wrote from temporary digs in Georgian House off Regent Street, London, to Karl Germer:

In Berlin I think you should have long conferences with Birven, also with Baron Wedderkop of the Querschnitt. Berlin SW 68, Kochstr. 22-26. Our main objective must now be to get Krishnamurti to acknowledge the Law of Thelema, which he is already preaching in a diluted form. It might be well for you to see him on your way here, if he is still at Ommen. In any case, find out all about his attitude. The knowledge of Us may very likely have been kept from him. . . . So let us get the control of the T. S. [Theosophical Society] as quickly as may be!⁵

One feels a new pace, a magnetism drawing Crowley to Berlin. Von Wedderkop*13 was the editor of the most successful highbrow magazine in Germany, Der Querschnitt (The Cross Section). It regularly featured the finest writers in Europe, as well as ex-pat yanks like Hemingway. Its founder was the great Berlin art dealer and patron Alfred Flechtheim. Crowley chose well; he belonged in the magazine.

The reference to Birven is important. Crowley and Germer saw Birven as influential on German esoteric circles, a smart networker, someone to get firmly on the team. Crowley would chivvy Germer along even more on 11 September: "Go to Birven, dog him out, speak to him severely, and say I will stand no nonsense or discourtesy, and I don’t want his wheedling apologies either."⁶

Six days later Crowley wrote again to Germer, telling him that Mandrake was going ahead strong and that he was frightfully busy with new paintings. Stephensen must already have suggested to Crowley that an art exhibition would serve the Mandrake cause well; perhaps Stephensen was hoping for another police raid, another revolutionary confrontation to reveal the oppressive nature of the established system of art censorship, as he saw it.

Stephensen’s problem would be getting Goldston to support a Crowley art exhibition. Teddy, after all, would be expected to stump