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The History of British Magic After Crowley

Kenneth Grant, Amado Crowley, Chaos Magic, Satanism, Lovecraft, The Left Hand Path, Blasphemy and Magical Morality

Dave Evans

2007

HIDDEN PUBLISHING

Tbis First Edition 2 0 0 7 Published by Hidden Publishing

Dave Evans, 1962The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. N o parr o f this publication (apart from brief quotations) may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without prior permission of publishers.

IS B N 978-0-95552 3 7 -0 .-0

ТЪе History o f British Magic After Crowley

Preface

T h i s weighty book presents a study o f some related elements of modern magical history and practice in Britain since 1947, the year of Aleister Crowley's death. I give a historical underpinning o f the major figures in early 20th Century magic (Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, Gerald Gardner etc), followed by an overview of the current state of aca­ demic research in general, and o f history in particular, in this subject. The book then concentrates on four major areas: the morality underly­ ing the ‘Left Hand Path of magic (also sometimes erroneously known a s‘Black Magic'), the life and work of Amado Crowley (the self-claimed son of Aleister), the life and work o f Kenneth Grant (a pupil of Aleister Crowley, and I also examine his work using the novels o f the American author H P Lovecraft and his association with Austin Osman Spare), and the modern emergence o f Chaos Magic, a relatively new and ahistorical, post-modernist-inspired practice, based in part o f the works of Crowley, Grant and Spare. I touch on the phenomenon o f W icca lightly sometimes because it is something that has been already researched by others to a good state (and modern magic has not). Although this is a historical study based on textual research (including internet sources and many unpublished materials), the relatively few years since the period started meant many of those involved are still alive, which allowed for communications and in some cases actual meetings with some very influential figures in the subject area. Those who com­ municated included (in no particular order) Lionel Snell (aka Ramsey' Dukes), Phil Hine, Andrew Chumbley, Dave Lee, Peter Carroll, Kenneth Grant and Amado Crowley; plus a host of other magicians and academ­ ics from all over the world, many of who are included in my acknowl­ edgments pages. Thus ‘interview’ methods that are not strictly historical were used at times (hell. I'll admit it, a lot of it was just totally fascinat­ ing unstructured conversations), and the suitability of several academic methods for investigation of the subject in general is examined. Various fact-narrative problems are identified, investigated and dis­ cussed, since magicians appear to be often prone to self-mythologising, with scant regard to what is accepted,fact, especially concerning Amado.

Dave Evans

Grant and Chaos magicians in general, which can cause headaches for academics who are trying to verify anything. The work is a'pioneer piece’ so far as academia is concerned, since it dis­ cusses several previously unstudied areas of British magic, particularly with regards to the historical examinations of Grant, Chaos magic and Amado Crowley, and as such it should provide both an interesting read and useful source materials for other researchers and interested pagansmagicians alike. This is a book version of my Doctoral dissertation in History, but it has been changed somewhat here and there (and expanded in many places) to make it more accessible to any reader who has a basic knowledge of the world of magic. This is an academic book in structure, there are footnotes, an index, an extensive bibliography and more. Some of that sometimes upsets people who want a light read. This is not light reading (it is not a light subject!), but I do hope it is accessible material. The reaction to my research happening at all within British academia was ‘amazing’, both in terms o f being amazingly positive and amazingly resistant, and this book (and the thesis that birthed it) are in some ways simply a testament to powers o f attrition - on many occasions it was nearly abandoned due to seemingly unsurmountable obstacles being put in the way. I am most grateful to the various folk who provided ladders, digging machinery or other possible solutions at the time. I

am both an academic and a magician. To openly admit that in print

carries a slight future career risk. There are many effects on the reflexive academic, who has their own memes and their own personal fictions to : deal with, in researching a subject they are intimately involved with on a personal level. Studying a subject such as magic has several levels o f shock’ to overcome, (potentially, depending on the individual academic and the society from which they come) which have been dealt with here. Going beyond the intrinsic prejudices of morality and blasphemy in order to study this subject is important in a nominally Christian society where the last W itchcraft Law was repealed only a little over 50 years ago, and the last executions for Witchcraft were only a few centuries ago. , It is also research in which one meets with unusual and bizarre claims and counter-claims, involving often-fictional matters, all under the guise o f attempting to produce an objective piece of writing about history! To add to the reflexive matters that I personally experienced, and unusually

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

for most academics out there doing research with living people I’m sure, I was variously threatened with cursing, physical harm and legal action with regard to my researches on (ironically) the person o f my subjects whose tale stands up to academic scrutiny by far the least, and I had either a most amusing coincidence or a representative o f the great god Cthulhu come to pay me a visit when I was probably working along the right lines with Kenneth Grant’s material. It has also to be said that in the process of this work I have been blessed with the kind o f ‘luck’ (or the universe/Gods/Demons smiling on this endeavour, and/or magical currents being harnessed in my favour, which­ ever the reader wishes to believe) that money simply could not buy and that the 'magical talisman’ of a huge sheaf of academic credentials could ever guarantee happening. Since many of these instances, such as'being in the right place at precisely the right time’ to be invited to visit wonder­ ful and unique private collections have been on the explicit understanding that their existence, contents and location remain private I have often had to cite them as such, while still retaining a coherent set of references. It has been quite a ride. I hope the reader enjoys this book as much as I have enjoyed working on it, and please "allow yourselves to be amazed, or you will miss a lot” ^

Dave Evans Oxford 12th October 2006 (CrowleyMass)

Ramsey Dukes, Blast! (Electronic Book), El-Cheapo/TM TS, London, 200i, p 224

Dave Evans

Grant and Chaos magicians in general, which can cause headaches for academics who are trying to verify anything. The work is a pioneer piece’ so far as academia is concerned, since it dis­ cusses several previously unstudied areas o f British magic, particularly with regards to the historical examinations o f Grant, Chaos magic and Amado Crowley, and as such it should provide both an interesting read and useful source materials for other researchers and interested pagansmagicians alike. This is a book version of my Doctoral dissertation in History, but it has been changed somewhat here and there (and expanded in many places) to make it more accessible to any reader who has a basic knowledge of the world of magic. This is an academic book in structure, there are footnotes, an index, an extensive bibliography and more. Some o f that sometimes upsets people who want a light read. This is not light reading (it is not a light subject!), but I do hope it is accessible material. The reaction to my research happening at all within British academia was 'amazing both in terms o f being amazingly positive and amazingly resistant, and this book (and the thesis that birthed it) are in some ways simply a testament to powers of attrition - on many occasions it was nearly abandoned due to seemingly unsurmountable obstacles being put in the way. I am most grateful to the various folk who provided ladders, digging machinery or other possible solutions at the time. I am both an academic and a magiciam To openly admit that in print carries a slight future career risk. There are many effects on the reflexive academic, who has their own memes and their own personal fictions to deal with, in researching a subject they are intimately involved with on a personal level. Studying a subject such as magic has several levels o f shock’ to overcome, (potentially, depending on the individual academic and the society from which they come) which have been dealt with here. Going beyond the intrinsic prejudices o f morality and blasphemy in order to study this subject is important in a nominally Christian society where the last W itchcraft Law was repealed only a little over 50 years ago, and the last executions for W itchcraft were only a few centuries ago. It is also research in which one meets with unusual and bizarre claims and counter-claims, involving often-fictional matters, all under the guise o f attempting to produce an objective piece of writing about history! To add to the reflexive matters that I personally experienced, and unusually

The History o f British Magic Afler Crowley

for most academics out there' doing research with living people I’m sure, I was variously threatened with cursing, physical harm and legal action with regard to my researches on (ironically) the person of my subjects whose tale stands up to academic scrutiny by far the least, and I had either a most amusing coincidence or a representative o f the great god Cthulhu come to pay me a visit when I was probably working along the right lines with Kenneth Grant’s material It has also to be said that in the process of this work I have been blessed with the kind of'luck’ (or the universe/Gods/Demons smiling on this endeavour, and/or magical currents being harnessed in my favour, which­ ever the reader wishes to believe) that money simply could not buy and that the 'magical talisman’ of a huge sheaf o f academic credentials could ever guarantee happening. Since many o f these instances, such as'being in the right place at precisely the right time’ to be invited to visit wonder­ ful and unique private collections have been on the explicit understanding that their existence, contents and location remain private I have often had to cite them as such, while still retaining a coherent set of references. It has been quite a ride. I hope the reader enjoys this book as much as I have enjoyed working on it, and please “allow yourselves to be amazed, or you will miss a lot” ‘

Dave Evans Oxford 12th October 2006 (CrowleyMass)

Ό

r^ ..1 ----

Daue Evans

Dedication and Acknowledgements A PhD thesis or book, although written by one person must of neces­ sity be a collaborative endeavour with ones research participants, friends and colleagues. The advent of the Internet means that such participation and friendship can be rapid, and extended worldwide, thus I am indebted to a great many people (whom often I have not yet met in person) for one or more of their gracious encouragement, support, feedback, hospitality, selfless sharing of knowledge, historical resources, opinions, their stimu­ lating conversations, sofas to sleep on at night while spending days con­ sulting their book collections, or just plain generosity of spirit for their support in the alchemical and lengthy process that has been the research for and preparation of this monstrous text. For various reasons several o f them are indicated here with pseudonyms (which is not always indicated below by single quotation marks or italics), or not named at all, which is often the case where I have been granted honoured access to very private book and document archives whose owners-custodians desire them to remain un-identified and unpubli­ cised. M y deepest apologies go to anyone who is not mentioned and who should be. Equally, some other persons have not been mentioned here since their actions have been profoundly damaging and-or obstructive to my work and general life in the extreme. Those not named for each reason will themselves know who they are, and which group they come under, in any case. Since just about nobody ever reads this part of books anyhow, I can openly say here that many of the more obstructive and spiteful persons are deserving o f damage of monumental proportions, and I look forward to hearing about them receiving just that. Some already have, in ways that are nothing to do with me. It is often likely that when researching reasonably modern history in a lengthy study period that some of one’s more aged research contacts may die. I was half-expecting one or two o f the elders’ to perhaps not be around by the time I finished the process (which has taken nearly five years), but the three kind and inspiring folk who did actually die were tragically before their time, one considerably younger than me, and one had a virtually identical age to mine.

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

In no inferred order o f importance, chronology or alphabet those I can mention with deep gratitude are: Ronald H utton (whose wisdom, guid­ ance and kind friendship has been a continual inspiration), Lionel Snell "and family”, Melvyn Willin, Alison Butler, Francis Breakspear (who has been more like a brother than he knows), Amy Hale (a true star), Phil Hine, Owen Davies, ‘Joel Biroco', the marvellous Dave Green, Sabina Magliocco, Robert Wallis, Justin Woodman, Bill Redwood, Geoffrey Samuel, Susan Johnston Graf, Neil Inglis, Bradley Skene, M att Lee, Ralf Tegtmeier, Peter J Carroll, the late Jhonn Balance, M r Len Bloom­ field; who was a huge inspiration without knowing it (hello Royal!), the many contributors to the Journal for the Academic Study o f Magic and the associated electronic forum, Robert Ansell, Snoo Wilson, the quite fabulous Katherine at OccultEbooks, the late Andrew Chumbley, Clive Barker, the always on time Kate Hoolu, Vanessa Chambers, the eternal international fraternity that is the B4Massiv, Tamsin Kilner, Dave Lee, Julian Vayne, Greg Humphries, Kenneth Grant, Michael Staley, Clive Harper, Ben Fernee and Jonathan Davies (both of whose separate kindnesses were simply wonderful at a time of great trouble), the late Martin Booth, Les Normands, participants in numerous pagan 'moots) conferences and events around the British Isles from 2 0 0 0 -2 0 0 6 , Willy Fiorucci, Professor Hoffman, Robert Turner, the late Gerald Suster for bequeathing to me a superb route map, my LJ Tribe for helping keep me sane, Virginia Dare, Jaq Hawkins, Philippe Pissier, Graham King and the knowledgeable and kind staff of the Museum o f W itchcraft, Corn­ wall, whose company I miss hugely, Fortean Times, M ark Pilkington, Marco Pasi, W outer Hanegraaf, Terry Waite C BE, William Ryan and staff of the Warburg Institute, London, Gavin Semple and all at Fulgur, Hannah Sanders, Christina Harrington at Treadwells, Teresa Cherfas & colleagues at Mentorn Television Ltd, London, Mogg Morgan, Robert Anton Wilson, Michael Duffy, The Dunns- without whose unquestion­ ing generosity of spirit this work would have been impossible to start, and indeed finish (the cyclical nature of events was not lost on me!), anyone I know who appreciates the entire meaning encoded in "Yeah, You Do!", Axxxxx, heretics, chaotic explorers, innovators and psychonauts everywhere (you know who you are), Devon & Cornwall Police, Tony Looker, the librarians o f Philadelphia, Bristol, Exeter and M an­ chester (John Rylands) Universities (among very many others), whoever invented‘Red Bull) Alobar', creative Kaos in general, the Great God Pan, numerous contributors to the Wyrdglow, AOSgallery, Lovecraft Schol­ ars and Zeelist e-groups (among many others), the invigorating company

Dave Evans

and demonstrated joyful wisdom of Si Trance, the Inner and Un-Nameable Head of the Syncretic Order of the Golden Giraffe, Joy Paton, Kate, David & Conor Meharry, the Pastafarian Movement and my late father, Tom, who would have simply loved watching this process unfold, and in some cases simply unravel. Some of those named above have been most helpful in reading drafts and suggesting improvements, modifications and clarifications to this text, many of which I took on board. Any remaining errors, misunderstand­ ings or confusion are thus mine alone. W ithout the shining and magickal example set by the luminously beauti­ ful Lizard Queen of Transylvania on 29 th and 30th March 2 0 0 6 e.v., this hunk of print simply would not be here. Long story. The original research for the thesis was supported financially by the award of a three-year subsistence grant from the University of Bristol, for which I remain extremely grateful, as this work would have been simply impossible otherwise. This production is brought to you by the letter W and a squiggly shaped sigil that looks a little like a cat. O r maybe a salamander.

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

Referencing Conventions, Date Formats, Indexing and Glossary: W o r k s cited are given in full as a chapter footnote on first mention, for example: Ronald Hutton, The triumph o f the Moon, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, p 14

and then in a recognisable brief form subsequently, such as Hutton Triumph, p 137

A full author-alphabetical bibliography and name-topic index is supplied towards the end of the book, as is a glossary of some terms which may be unfamiliar to some readers. Dates are given in British format, for example 11-8-2 0 0 3 is the Eleventh of August, not November the Eighth, 2003. Spelling is in U K English except for where certain quotes are reproduced verbatim. Web addresses referred to in this book may change and does not guaran­ tee that content will remain accurate or appropriate.

10

Dave Evans

Contents "You're researching the history of w hat?...” .......... .

.1 5

British Magic, or Magic in Britain?....................

.1 6

Definitions;..............................................................

.1 7

How do we K N O W that we know?.........................

.22

Science, Religion and M agic......... ......................

.2 3

Spelling............................................... ........ .............

.2 4

History, Heritage and Influence.........................

.2 4

Modern Researches........ ........ ........................ .

..27

Memetics and Information Transfer................

,.35

Freelancers................. ............... ...... ........................

..36

Research on the Cutting Edge, or out on a Limb..

.3 8

Birth of the J S M ................... .................................

.3 9

Interdisciplinary W ork............................. ............

.41

Aleister Crowley...................... ....... ......................

.4 3

Austin Osman Spare.......................................

.45

Gerald Gardner...................................................... .

.48

Historical Approach: Methods and O utlets............

,.50

From the Horse’s M outh........................................

.51

Search for the Right Tools.......... ....................... .

,.52

Reflexivity: Magician-as-Academic.....................

.5 6

H ow many U K occultists?............................................................. .

..70

The Occult Census................... ..................................................

,.72

National Census on'R eligion ................................... ..............

..74

Table 1, Minority Neo Pagan 2 0 0 1 National Census ....

..76

Spoofing Data: Jedi Knights........................................... ....... .

..7 9

Magical Group Membership Figures.................................

,.80

W here we go n ext........... ................................... ....... ................

,.81

Pushing the boundaries - Blashemy, Inversion and Morality..

....83

Roots of Blasphemy and Inversion.........................................

....84

“Trying to catch an eel with a handful o f b u tter"......... .

....88

Inversion and Carnival................................................................

....89

Daring to Speak O ut - Blasphemy prosecutions in modern tim es.

....9 4

Daring N ot to Speak........... ...... ......................... ........ ................ ......

....96

Genesis (P O ) and Revelations.............. зЬопг the One God..

....99

..102

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

I

11

All Magic is Evil?.................................................. ......................................................................... 103 The Devil has the best Tunes........................ ................................................... ................. 103 Legal Eagles................................................................ ...........................................................,.1 0 7

Morality and Montague Summers.................................... ........................................................109

Black M a s s ........................................................................................................................................ 112

Moral Philosophy Ί 0 Γ ........................................................ ....................... ............................... 116

Philosophy of M orality.................. ................................................... ....... ................ ........ ........ 118

Spirit Vs. Machine................................................................. ......................„....................... ....... 131

Fall and Rise o f the Magicians..................................... ..............................................................139

Approaching End Tim es?..................................... ........................ ....................................... .....148

Morality within M agick.......................

152

Cognition and Philosophy of E vil....................................................................................153

Laughing in the Face of G o d ............................................................. ........................ ................ 160

Hurling Curses: combat morality ....................................................

163

Figure 1, A Malefic Piece o f Image M a g ic ................................ ................................. ..165

Othering and Continuum of Evil........ .............. ....................................................................... 175

W hich hand? W hich path?.............................................................................

177

Dennis W heatley and the L H P .................................................... ................................ ............189

H ead East: Orientalism /Colonialism.......................................................................................194

"I've no absolute morals, but some pragmatic standards” ..................................................2 0 4

W h at today's Magi say about the L H P ....................................................................................20 8 Figure 2, A d-H oc Left-H and Path questionnaire....................................................... 21 0

Further Down the Left-H and P ath ..................................................

22 2

Amado Crowley - Critical examinations of magico-religious self-fashioning,............ 229 A m ad o .............................................................. Birth o f a Legend.......................................................................

23 0 .2 3 6

Dave Evans

12

N am ing..

..239

Coming O u t.

,.239

Amado’s Publications.

..243

Amado's Knowledge of'Father'..

..246

Temporal Glitches.

..247

Language Problem s.

...249

The Followers of S t Amado..

..250

Author, A uthor!...

..251

Hunting Amado’s Real Name .

..255

How many Amados?...

..259

Amado and Anti-Thelema..

,.260

W here is Amado’s evidence?..

..262

Charlatans, Magicians and Amado..

..265

The Magical System .

..266

Fishing for pupils.

..268

Once in a Lifetime

..271

Will the real Amado please stand up?.

..275

Am a-D o, or Ama-Don’t ? .

,.279

Kenneth Grant and the Magical revival -Trafficking with an “onslaught of compulsive Early Life and Crowley.......... ............................................................................................... 285 G rant Family Relations..................................................................... ................................... 2 8 9

G rant and Austin Spare. Mrs. Pat(t)erson and other conundrums.

..293 ...299

Grant's Publications not ju st“books about Magick; these books are Magick”

Grant’s Magical System., "Knowledge... channelled rather than researched” .

"Kenneth Grant is one hell of a meanass occultist”

..306

..312 ,.314

..324

IS

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

A Dialect o f Dreamers- Grant, Lovecraft and 'fiction' in magic......................................330 Brief biography o f H P Lovecraft ........................................... ..........................................330 The literary legacy of Lovecraft.......................................................................................... 33 4 Magicians and Lovecraft................................... ...... ....................... .................. ............... ..335 The Dread Necronomicon................................................................................................... 336 Science and G rant........................................................................................... ....................... 343

Lovecraft-related magic after Grant........................................................................................... 345 Messages from the Elder Gods?........................................... ....................... ......................348 Lovecraft readers are not all magicians............................................................................. 349

'In the Irrational and Unknown Direction -Problems in historical researches in Chaos M agicS............................................................................. ............... ................................................. 351 Chaos H istory .............................................................. ........................................................ 35 4 Figure 3 : the Chaos star symbol used by magicians................................................... 35 7 Chaos Magic G roups............................................................................. ...............................358 Philosophies o f Chaos............................................................................................................3 6 0

Academic Methodology in Chaos..............................................

363

Q : W ho goes there? A: W ho asks'who goes there?’ ......... .................................. ....... 370 Multiple M aps............................................................

371

The Church of Satan ......................... ....................... .................................................................. .3 7 4

Chaos Magical Pedigree.................................. ....................... ...... ...................... ...... ...... ...........376 Chaos Parallels................. ....... ...... .......................................................................... ............380 Masks and Facades..........

380

Cult Fiction................................................

383

Chaos Spirals (out of control?)................................................................................................... 388

Chaos Academica.................................................................................................................

...389

"W h at flows into you from the myth.......is not truth but reality” ................ ................. 391 This is the dawning o f the age o f........................................................................................3 9 9

Appendix A ; Glossary.............................................. ........................... ........................ ............... 40 2

Bibliography..............................

Index.....................................

405

..4 2 4

Х4

Dave Evans

A bout the A uthor Dave Evans was awarded his PhD by Bristol University, U K in 2006, having previously studied Aleister Crowley and the History of W itch ­ craft at Master s level, and done research work with Spiritual Healers for a Psychology degree thesis, all of this done as a mature student, having spent most o f his adult life at 'the day job’ and practicing magic since his early twenties. H e is currently a travelling freelance researcher.

ii; The History o f British Magic After Crowley

^*Yo\xte researching the history of "You know that no-one’s going to believe you if you write this subject up hon­ estly” said the magician. "No-one believed a lot o f the political shenanigans that went on in the past, and which probably still d o... er, some folk think we never landed on the Moon and that Elvis is alive... so I'm just going to try to write it up as objectively as I can, and they can judge itfrom there” I replied, with a broad smile

T h is book is a social history of some important developments in the modern magical subculture in Britain following the death of the highly influential British magician Aleister Crowley in 1947. Crowley was perhaps the most significant public magical figure in Britain, if not the world, during his lifetime (1 8 7 5 -1 9 4 7 ), and arguably ever since, and he taught a notable coterie of apprentice magicians and published numer­ ous books and periodicals, albeit often in small print runs. Since his death the importance o f his considerable literary output and methods has become magnified, and broadcast to a wider audience by the continuing post-war development of cheaper printing and mass distribution methods, and latterly via the Internet. Thus many groups and individuals have taken on elements of his magical teachings and his works have more students (and detractors) now in the 21st Century than was possible at any time during his life. The total, all-encompassing and definitive history o f such an intricate topic cannot be the content of even this thick book, since within the given date and place constraint, the subject is of such breadth and depth that my time available for research precluded a complete and comprehen­

W: li:

sive overview. There was also the matter of the original word limit for the thesis on which this book is based as a containing factor, although this re-write for book publication has had many additions plus some altera­ tions to remove some academic jargon, to make it more attractive to a broader range o f readers. This then is more accurately portrayed, after taking a deep breath, as A partial history o f some elements o f the philosophies and magical Сопу ceive o f themselves in relation to the people they write about” In other disciplines reflexivity is very much a necessity, for example modern anthropologists are apparently now all-but required in their work to directly interact on a participant level with their research pop­ ulation, even if that means becoming a nominal member o f the 'Tribe or neo Tribe (the latter o f which is described below). The current aca­ demic anthropologist and magician Dr. Justin W oodman, for example, in researching his thesis on modern magic, took this expectation to the logical extreme and actually joined a magical group. The Haunters o f the

Dark, formed in order to study the process ®. In the study o f history, personal involvement and reflexivity has been generally seen as rather less important, and was usually wrongly con­ signed to the domain of "self-indulgence” the error o f which assumption is highlighted by Ronald Hutton

since often 'a participant involve-

ment'-style methodology has been impossible on any practical level. For a 21st Century academic to actually become their research subject, in this field being perhaps a 16th Century witch (or equally an accuset or judge of a witch) is out of the question since the study subjects are all long dead and the reality of their day-to-day activities is quite occluded by the progress of the intervening centuries. Thus reflexivity becomes to an extent irrelevant on a face-to-face level, but any inherent disdain, lea· or love for the subject will still have an effect on the direction the resea rih goes, and the written conclusions made. W ith researching the history of more modern magic, however, this area is much more immediate and important since I have living research partici­ pants with whom I can interact and report on, and I could thus behau(or be perceived by them as behaving) with charitable neutrality, dismiss,\ e superiority or some other attitude, depending on my own mindset. Thus there is some room here to necessarily disclose my own reflexive location within the research.

68 Russell T McCutcheon (Ed.) The insider-outsider problem in the study of religion, London., Cassell, 1999 p 289, in Letcher, Role of the Bard, p i i 69 Woodman, Modernity, Selfhood, and the Demonic, pre-press disc copy kindly sup­ plied to me by Justin, 2004 70

Hutton, Witches, Druids, p 259

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

ί·;/

&( 1 haw been interested in the occult since I was a child o f nine, and have ·;.■ ..рЛп an active practitioner o f various forms o f magic since I was 20 (I 42 when I completed the bulk o f the research), thus in a few places J? · iseqf methodology is bordering on the auto-ethnographic, since I am perpbced within the subject, and have been so for over half of my and for virtually all of my adult life. By contrast I have only been an ■..'academic postgraduate researcher for a few years. To not categorically state my position here would be disingenuous, and ■;/. by impla.ition that omission, if exposed’ only later, may indicate that I t-

had 'something to hide' in some way, both within the lines o f this book

ί ’.-ιμό in my wider academic life. The fear o f professional ostracism and pethaps a subsequently more limited career path in future academic work - is snil .1 teal one (and I do not have a job in academia as I sit here editing dbe original thesis into this book form), but one that is easing over time I as studies of this area increase in both frequency and disciplinary spread, sod as more and more academic-magicians are seen to not be 'dangerous iSBiaric.s with wild ideas that could damage the academy’s reputation’. I . , firmly believe that'honesty is the best policy’ in any case. "Ihe presuj’position that I am a Christian Westerner who actually could 'go native i.·. j I.-io rather demeaning. It is demeaning to both myself, and to sit ot those .ic.tdemics in the U K and in many cultures around the world

Ж S¥lio->e reliciiM is not Christianity. They stoically manage to perform outSb.'iding tese.irch in their various fields regardless of any assumed reli■gious'hardii.ip’. Although underpinned by a philosophy that is either nominalli ( hristian dualist or atheistic. Western science is not in itself

ΛQirisf.i'i entity, and as such should not be'missionary’ in its outlook. In any c.i.s.· Tiuch of our scientific methodology ultimately comes from icarned suurces that arose within a notional Arabian-Muslim world' 'not a CЬм^rian one. The use of Arabia' here is not intended to be pejotative, bu- merely to denote the larger historical Arabic-speaking Muslim world fioui which much of modern Western science emerged, without becoming sidetracked into a lengthy discussion of the early modern bietor) i'‘ science. In an) i.se, as the academic archaeologist and shamanic practitioner Robert Wallis points out, when studying new spiritual components that are witli n our own culture, we are already native, so there is nowhere to 71 Si ·' for example: Ed Ingram, It was Islam chat did it. Philosophy Now, 23,18-20,1999, or an, iiiodcrn textbook o f the History o f Science.

59

60

Dave Evans

actually go’

The implicit fear of 'going native’ is that one will aescer.i

into irreconcilable and simplistic ’savagery’. This is a notion derived least in part from the novel of Joseph Conrad, Heart o f Darkness, ог'сн nally published in 1902 and written at the time when Britain still ha| an empire, and which explores the alleged perceived inherent savagery ■ be found within all men, but in particular the African native. Floweve as a privileged white European male I find that lOO-year old, and in i

case originally published as fictional, notion both insulting to me (and ’savages’) and massively racist to us all. The white man is as capable being inherently savage as anyone else. In any case, they are certainly not ’primitive or ’savage) as the terminol< of ’going native’ would imply. As Andrew Letcher (another who is ■ academic - that rare creature the double-PhO - and magical practitione admirably points out, academia and occultism are in some ways on sir paths when this methodology and ’insider’ background combine; since "scholars... are concerned with the... physical ’doing’ of ritu al..® (and) research is performed (by)... challenging the traditional ironcast divisions between the world of the scholar and the world of the ’ informant” The insider view can provide a nuanced understanding that is simp beyond the outsider. If this view is well managed, avoiding the ten tation to provide self-indulgent commentary over supplying pertinert data and using rigorous methodology this insider knowledge is a usen resource, not a liability. If anything, the entirely ’scholarly’ detachme that would be required of a harder ’scientific’ subject would be rnore'^ a liability in this area o f research, where it is vital to at least engage witl if not actually experience the subject matter in order to have any hope ( properly understanding it. I would equate this to attempting to write with authority about mon cars while always being based solidly on the pavement, never sitting in a car or learning to drive. Understanding the mindset, passion ar enthusiasm o f the practitioners, if not the minutiae of their magic theories and practices is important, providing that any researcher is iiq simply ’playing at wizards) or making a polite pretence at involveme 72

Wallis, Sociopolitics o f Ecstasy, Introduction, p 3

73

Letcher, Role o f the Bard, p 5

jh e History o f British Magic After Crowley

ifijl'tine sake of the feelings of their research subjects, but that they take seriously. Not taking the process, the magicians and their #^ei3enoe.s seriously is perhaps the biggest crime the modern academic 'Ы

j I·

Е

fii

;an commit. If we can open up a sensitive and sensible

et.tftf communication to the world in which magicians live and work,

In^ttn-tble a two-way dialogue, on an equal and respected footing, the iq^ernhi>tpiical study (and in other disciplines) will come on in leaps >ii4d'ouni.is, to the benefit o f all concerned.

f|lt fc periljps .,ppropriate to give some personal examples here of how

k-ion iedge' informs such research. ·’* SSjirtSiipjrion within magical rituals requires compliance with tacit and

I

^OB-complcx, and in some cases contradictory codes of conduct, plus prior knowletige. So that the reader might have some idea o f the

j^rijsd пашгс of being a magical insider, two examples are necessary. ,йОй5Г exampiu would be that many magical groups utilise the compass w iipaeirsto physicall) mark out their magical circle, and to these points are

^ Iftcfibcd one of tlic four magical elements’ o f Earth, Air, Fire and Water. E m niy expci.ences lean attest that quite which element is ascribed to __4iiifli comp -ss point can vary considerably between groups and individit! is in some ways a defining lingua franca for that particular group, ■" d t a:i. of practice. Failure to know beforehand which point marries ‘I 'up with which element wiffcw that particular group can lead to one being tfltated t o .. gre.iter or lesser extent as an outsider, and on occasions mar^aKsid vs rbin ritual and within post-ritual socialising. At one eve it in Summer 2003, attended by around 30 persons, I was ir . ite

rually 'open one of the quarters, a ceremonial process whereby

diieieievunt ascribed elemental force for each cardinal compass direction (is verb.illy addressed in suitable respectful tones and invited to attend and ’■ >pr{side over the imminent magical proceedings. After the ritual the quar-

ft e t i .ire then‘closed’ in a similar ritual manner, by bidding the elemental . 'iin Ldepa’ t. w rh thanks. This process can be seen metaphorically as the

y. opening and closing brackets to a mathematical equation, the ritual itself b within th.ose brackets being the numbers and symbols of the ‘equation, i f fe pr*ciicc this process is usually performed with four persons, one Й)' jOfeftir.g (.md later closing) one quarter each. Despite having performed '■ tl * r·· B" Ш Ш

ict with that group on previous occasions, I had to refuse

61

Dave Evans

62

the invitation, I freely admitted that I was unable to recall the 'quar­ ters' system of this particular group accurately, and do as asked, as I had for some months been personally practicing a magical system which was based on a cosmology of thirds, nor quarters, and had successfully 're-programmed' my magical practice to suit this system

'The notion

of a system based around a triplicity and not a quaternary method is a new idea within magic, and as such perhaps quite 'heretical' to those habituated to the much more common 'quartered' system. This resulted in some unspoken suspicion (and later huddled mutterings) towards me by some present, both for the presumed heresy and for having forgotten a method that they may hold sacrosanct, or at least very dear. That is an example where it didn't go quite right.... As Andy Letcher remarks "ritual involves more involved social processes than those revealed during the process itself” Conversely, much as I have found when travelling in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Egypt as a tourist, any attempt to communicate in the'home language is welcomed (however clumsy and inarticulate my attempts may actually be) and facilitates an entree to areas that might be otherwise closed. One such example is my halting speech in Arabic to a taxi driver, which became a decreasingly stilted conversation over the course of a journey, followed by an invitation to a meal with his family in his home village, enabling me to see a side of Egyptian rural culture that would not otherwise have presented itself to a more reserved tourist. Similarly, when researching in the pagan world, some open expression of commu­ nal or shared knowledge or experience can lead to invitations to events, introductions to other people and-or disclosure o f material which may not have been disclosed to someone presenting themselves purely as an academic, with no 'insider' knowledge or commonality o f experiences. The language example is relevant here. In studying psycholinguistics, aca­ demics have recognised a phenomena called 'code-switchingj whereby social groups o f mixed-tongue bilingual and monolingual people tend to mediate the language in which they are conversing relevant to the subject matter, and subjects which are more private or in some way more ‘privileged’ than others may be suddenly taken away from the realm of a common language interaction within the whole group to a more exclu­ sive language, perhaps one that only a few of the bilinguals and none of 74 Adamai Philotinus (Lionel Snell), The Good T he Bad T he Funny, London, T M T S , 2003 75

Letcher, Role o f the Bard, p 10

Г' The History o f British Magic After Crowley

63

'■■dhemop.olinguals speak, in the process creating an in-group and an out­ group Simply by the choice of words in use

I have seen this occur

’-withjii .icademic groups where the use of lengthy Latin quotes (indicat•tflg я duFering early education, having studied Latin at school or not) ■droppec into conversation can divide the group, and I believe that the ' same li.ippens within magical discussion. In all cases, the insider view is a privil

* pi'sition, since one is taken along with the discussion when the

code Is switched', (whatever the actual code is) unlike an outsider who would PC totally excluded. A so.

!, and more positive' example or participant observation is that

iti 20 > I was on several occasions a participant at neo-pagan rituals ■celebr.,n:ig the nature of the Horned God, a magical figure ascribed in va' .o IS cultures to mythical and powerful part-man part-animal oaturo spr.r creatures. The costume for this involved the manufacture o f a .snoiir-shaped helmet, covered with ‘fake fur'

and with two real

S iS ^ n t le r s fitted to the outside. W hen worn this gave the effect of a stags I’L k: on a human body; precisely the kind of animal-man figure often ajsoLiated with divinity in numerous historical artefacts, perhaps most notably on the various magical depictions on the Danish Gunde.Trap Cauldron, a beautiful item unearthed in the late 19th Century and bflifved to pre-date Christianity by at least a century. The horned figure in general is thought to represent Cernunnos, a pagan deity similar to the !■ ■. s l · . o r Раи Ih-o Horned Helmet and I took part in some 8 different rituals that summer. Some o f these were very public, such as two at the Glastonbury Music and Arts Festival in Somerset, some to large gatherings of pagans, and in the autumn o f that year a ‘handfasting) a neo-pagan wedding (which while being intensely meaningful to participants has no status under UK law), within which the horned figure was particularly appro­ priate, not least because the wonderful setting was a Welsh Oak forest by moonlight, precisely the kind of terrain in which a real stag would thrive, 7^ bor«ui ^L.)demic overview o f the subject see articles within Peter Auer (Ed.), Lan^ guags, and Identity, London., Routicdge, 1998 77 This was both a practical and ethical choice, deer skin had not been available anyway, hat if so It would have been uncomfortable and heavy to wear for the required lengths o f time, the helmet weighed some ten pounds in any case, and deer skin acquired from the death of an animal rather than antlers which are naturally shed might have upset any vegctaiian 01 \ egan members o f the magical group. This indicates how one has to tread carefully with varying sensibilities! ! #5

For further information on the Cauldron see any book of Norse Myth and History

64

Dave Evans

and with wedding ceremonies to some extent being concerned with cel­ ebrating fertility, the symbolism of the stag was most apt. A t two o f these occasions I appeared from the undergrowth 'by surprise (actually a well-rehearsed and choreographed act done on cue, arranged beforehand with the ritual organiser, but unbeknownst to the vast major­ ity o f those later present at the ritual) and recited a series o f invocatory, ^ poetic statements that had previously been produced ‘semi-clairvoyantly, the nature o f which process need not occupy the reader here, and which neatly summed up the magical concept o f the ritual being performed. ; During the first two lines of the recitation, and from then onwards, my being was filled with what I can only describe as a hugely powerful divine presence. The effect was most noticeable to those persons standing close by, who hearing the power and a ‘special nature’with which the words were being delivered compared to my normal speaking voice, were alerted to some

-.3

magical effect occurring. I finished the recital and stood by while the rest Щ of the ritual was conducted, including the passing round and communal, Д eating of a shared symbolic cake, but attempting to suppress my hysteri­ cal laughter within the helmet, since the successful invocationary experi­ ence, while not new to me, had been immensely strong, and incredibly enjoyable. In the case of the Horned God it is also highly sexual. I was unable to hold a ‘sensible conversation with anyone after the ritual for ’ some 9 0 minutes, during which time I was swept along on a tide of total joy. It was over three hours later that I felt mentally ‘safe’ to drive my car home. Language is often unable to convey the depths of such religious experiences, but I can find commonality between my feelings then and the written experiences o f both Christian Saints and occultists. A watching historian who had neither insider knowledge nor experientr of ritual (or of a successful invocation of a divinity) might have viewt\i the event in a completely different way, to the effect that ‘someone in . stupid plastic-furred stag costume lurched out o f the bushes like a clow read some disjointed poetry very loudly, and laughed a lot... then they all ate cake’. 'Ibis is not to criticise the outsider perspective, but merely to say there is so much more going on internally and subjectively in ritual, which is often very hard to historicise from outside. The ‘bonding’ nature of the

1I

65

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

(:!?фвгвп«| in those group events had significant effects on the open-ness ^■';^.1мЬ«Х1иепс discussions on naagic with those who had witnessed my ffivocationary experience, and had thus received proof’ that I was serious te^'dboat magic, as well as academic work. *5' Comparing ritual performance with theatrical performance, as the outmay often have recourse to do, usually having no other referent,

‘^ ■ 04^ ел unproductive for the academic; an explanatory fiction) since it ;^;ltseeiy describes one intangible action with another

In the case of

flSa^cal ritual it can also be profoundly insulting to the participants, since '

jtimpKc.·. there is a play-acting or ‘sham’ element to their actions.

^ As a slight digression, 1 have stated, with some candour and possibly dii risk o'· academic ridicule, the experience within the Horned Helmet. Ihere is less career risk here than may be assumed, since being currently dance resi’archer I have no tenure-track position to risk by being ||\·ιΟΒΐ aiivl honc.^г. However future employee-position jobs in academia й" пгяу be .-.lighth more difficult to find, being a ‘self-outed’ magician. Since

^ I-would nor wish to work for any organisation that did not want to i'itniploy агл one on the grounds of holding any particular (and completely belief, then the act of self-disclosure is actually saving my time in A the long run. №

Ш ! any case r ··, is the researcher Andy Letcher, himself an academic and r' !i-0gicai practitioner writes: "irrelevant to the scholar whether those nar; rjriwes! e.ftr back to a tangible event or not” W h at is important is that 'Jie n ч-'г re-tells them as if they happened, and then acts accordingly, ■^is

the important angle for historians of magic, since those actions

till·;: retelling, and belief in them) did happen in a form that can be .'■‘feiitoi iCKsed, while the absolute verification of such things as the presence ' ot ■■ ?■.

h- F:·"

' ncc of non-human entities encountered in rituals cannot. ■own perspective as a practitioner I can merely assume that the

I'^t.iences 1 have had many times during diverse rituals were broadly i an a^ u s to those which many ritual participants and diverse religious ΐ , visionaries have experienced over time, and which I have read descrip‘У fkms of, but that cannot be proven, historically, to have occurred. As ' ■Wallis remarks. rf

Lfttlicr, Role of the Bard, p lo

tpi86

66

Dave Evans

“in effect, it doesn’t matter how close anthropologists get ...(to involvement in the subject material) so long as their findings express the level o f insight and constructive, critical evaluation that one's асаdemic peers require for outstanding scholarship" I would wish to add that the same requirement is true for historians and4 any other researcher. As Letcher valuably points out, our various spirit "experience is subjective and cannot be assessed or measured, it forms:

invisible currency” But it is a currency nonetheless, and if it cannot be counted in a scientiik Щ form that is meaningful to academics, then it can at least be ack.nowK,,| edged to be present, and to have value rather than be ignored completely'и even if as Letcher again writes:“within ... alternative spiritualities, thett;| is a predisposition to entertain beliefs about the world which would be 3 considered fanciful by the mainstream”

It is the presence of the belief

and the effects on the individual and on the world o f holding thar belief,· not it’s likelihood of being accurate (judgment o f which is always reflex·^ ive in any case), which is concerned in the recording the history of magic, since academia simply does not have the requisite tools to measure » verify the existence of internal religious experiences as such. Many beliefs outside of magic are also fanciful when examined with з Λ truly scientific rational mind. All religions, for example. However despite being‘within’ the subject to that extent, the specific areas! ^ have researched here are, for the most part, areas where I am'slightly without by being not a formal member of any of the occult groups described heit'3 (even if I have been at times, or perhaps still am philosophically oi merii- j odologically aligned in some or other way to one or more of them), си· ·£ a pupil of any of the individuals mentioned. This might be seen as akiti ■ to a Christian historical researcher working on areas of the histor)· of the Church, or the history of various Christian groups of which he or she has ■ some or other level of knowledge, but no direct practical involvement.

8i

Wallis, Sociopoiitics o f Ecstasy, Incroductioni, p 4

8a Letcher, Role o f the Bard, p 206, emphasis original 83

Ibid, p 210

ί ο; History o f British Magic After Crowley

Г

ί ^ϊίβι moved hill io make some further specific clarifications. My chap-

Kenneth ( i; ant (which were published in edited form as a journal f itticle a few yc.1 s ago) have, apparently, led to some speculation among iw n Hxulr^rs tIam am em berofhisTyphonianO TO . Mydenoueί ilynt of Amado Crowley has equally led to some speculation that I am a libiiejnlwof the'Caliphate' O T O (who are inimical to Amado); with the J b^eciSEcd implications o f academic bias towards one of other of those ί

l|tosps. i i )it) not, and have never been a member o f either group. Being a member Чb^i&'th would, doctrinely, be close to as hard as being both a Muslim and } lil^rtMian .simultaneously, in any case.

I

We sliould also beware o f making any moral judgments of the practihere; as the sociologist Doug Ezzy points out: "we are not above

' fc' 0· Olid the I tl СГЗ we study, for the social processes that bind them ( $ilid us too" ®’. To this end, some chapters to follow needfully address in ' gwai depth the social processes of morality, both in general, and morality .H'irbin magical practice> which is a foundation o f how moral judgements, I iaid thus oKei! 'nnial reflexive stances regarding magic are formed, and j

aigtte diat those moral stances on magic still permeate academic atti-

j ^u ies TOSTiidi i in the area, and the wider culture in which we live. I» / *nconunop with ,\ndy Letcher

mentioned above, my methodological

ripeskkm is "going native in reverse” since prior to commencing academic any discipline) as a mature student, as I mentioned above, I had vVijeco involved in the practice o f various forms of magic for over 20 years. ДА&0 in complete agreement with Letcher, I regard this as a positive advanv*^gcwith only a few handicaps, since first-hand experience of magical -;4ίΐίΐΪ3ΐ is vitally important in order to even attempt to understand modern Vwigical history and practice. I feel that to attempt to study magic without ’

a slight grounding in the practices and beliefs would be to provide

'*9&£setiwitli semantic, theoretical and cognitive hurdles which might not '(pfliy prove insurmountable in preparing an ‘initiated’ thesis, but the mis'Understandings whii.h could occur within the process without some level Virf’instder’ knowledge, and without access to the doors that are opened

44

E^iugbizy review o f Susan Greenwood, Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld,

i6, p 42 i , fc

I ев hci. Hole of the Bard, p i6

67

Dave Evans

68

to card-carrying occultists'

could lead to a gross distortion of f.ut, if ί

not complete misunderstanding and generate such enmity that fuffit|| researchers might encounter great hostility as a result.

■’

This kind o f distortion could create immense friction, discord and d istrust ’> o f academics within the rnagical subculture, such that future researchcrt'': (whether insiders or not) might have increased difficulty in gaining privi-;.. leged access in future. An example would be Dr. Joanne Pearson, w< in the 1990s, who when performing her doctoral research encountei hesitant comments from her research interview subjects o f the nai “you're not going to do another Tanya (Lurhmann) on us are you?” * I have been far luckier than Jo, in that I have largely been received treated by magicians in my researches with a generosity, kindness open-ness that I found both touching and heart-warming, and a man which is itself an object lesson to academia in how to behave tow. other people. This is perhaps due to the additional passage o f time Lurhmann allowing wounds to heal somewhat, due to the areas ( subject and geographical) in which I researched being somewhat ent to Dr. Pearson's, or that my informants had either simply not Lurhmann's book, or if they had they simply did not care about her. latter point is important. As academics we often assume that anyone out there actually gives a damn about what we write, and this is not the ci.ii 100% of the time. Being both academic and occultist however made writing a thesis whidi . ΐ serves the purpose of examination for a Doctoral qualification often d;t- T'' ficult, since having been an 'insider' for so long it was hard not to uncor.sciously assume a certain knowledge base in my primary readership for the thesis, who are academics in History, and thus inadvertently skit over some areas which require some further explanation. The readers ( the book will be a different crowd to an extent, and for the most would have hopefully ‘g ot it' much more easily; to this end I have trie to edit out some of the more 'hand-holding' gentle explanatory areas i the thesis from this book version. In any case, I provide a short glossa which can be found here as Appendix 1. W hile it is true that, as the sociologist Doug Ezzy wtites: "all work mundane and alternate, are socially constructed... shaped by the soda 86

A term o f convenience. Very few occult groups have a formal membership card per s

87

Hutton. Witches, Druids,

d

261

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

b.K'kgroiitid I't rill- magician"

not all of them communicate with each

other ten iK\ well, ί trust that I have overcome this hurdle satisfactorily.

’

o f r

5

r /» i» n w r» f> H .

7

T f i. n Л .

69

Dave Evans

70

How many UK occultists?

j

B efo re going on in more detail it would be very useful to give some context ^

to the book as regards the actual numbers of people who might be cur-' rently involved in magic in Britain, since hard numerical facts are in short;; supply, and speculation is much more common. It is usually pretty wild so' far as numbers are concerned. I have heard it said

ί

that one very small Cornish village has 13 difter·

ent secret traditional covens o f witches in operation, which would that there are 13 x l 3 people involved (13 being the traditional’ numb the major problem of the interpretation of self-labelling,

siftce any term cannot be assumed to translate equally across individuals cktkQsing

Ιόγ example it is only since the 1960s or so that Druidry

become overtly neo pagan, having formerly been for the most part hnisfcc

y ( Christian" and some Druid groups still are that in many

rjsipects , so it is possible that much older Druids may not be performngthc sa;ue ii lagico-religious acts as younger ones, despite sharing the , since) it helps the government if it can reply on its oppificnts to cone out onto the streets... once they are on the street they i;,ui he shoe" ‘®.

Spoofing Data: Jedi Knights SO!^ of the re.spondents to the Census in Scotland perhaps rather unwisely give tbe.i· religion as 'cannabis', a drug that is still illegal. Such ^elf-ider. ;!;ii.ation to ,■crime, with an address provided, would seem to be rctUess .’-ci, or perhaps indicates an entirely spurious response (includluime .ii'.e. addiess) on their forms, so it is possible that some data other c.cegories .ire also spurious, and that this is better concealed.

Ш

f 1.4 also

^^pruWem

rov perhaps the first time in the National Census figures, l ib e r a t e and orchestrated mass spoofing.

m the Census being issued there was an online campaign for fans ^ ^ K p r Wars -Чlence—fiction films

to respond to the religion ques-

tfiVft-rhit tliey were .■· ‘Jedi Knight’, which was a group of mystical warri­ ors irt

filnts, wh.o were possessed of special magical powers, similar to

those tile, d for Zen Buddhists. It was rumoured that if enough people |4i8

k. ··

Dukes, preface to Liz Angerford & Ambrose Lea. Thundersqueak, EirS, London , 2001, p iii

Aserics of phenomenally successful motion pictures from 1977 onwards, (Director l.iMas) whn h were among the highest-ever grossing at the box office and have merchandise industry since then. See Star Wars Official Website

79

δΟ

81

. ' t History o f British Magic After Crowley

Dave Evans

gave that answer then the British Government would be obliged to i

id rhrougl', five successive grades over a period o f time would be

it an official and recognised religion, which is a nonsense, but a lOP

iii^J '5 ti.nes, thus distorting the figures. The informant also believes tfesfigure includes all enrolled members over a considerable period

ling meme. And a meme that spread well. The National Statistics re states that "the number of people who stated Jedi was 3 9 0 ,0 0 0 d '7 'ct

fat?, so tltat many of the 4 0 0 0 or so will have died or left the group.

cent of the p o p u l a t i o n ) a figure ironically probably far in excess, I'v

n b-'iiig .in insider in the О Т О and having full access to memHP records I cannot confirm or deny this claim, only report it with

perhaps threefold, of the total number of revealed adherents of all an4i any particular strand of real’ neo paganism or magic in the UK.

teik. li! any case I havie no wish to ignite OTO -related flame wars, so tiut^ !t diis point merely call the claim uncorroborated.

It was also in excess of those in extant and mainstream religic ns vdib self-identified as Jewish, Sikh, Buddhist, Church of England, l^onu.i

inй,^hзDβ magic group the Illuminates o f Thanateros were only pre-

Catholic or Methodist (although many other members of the latter tb;ce

giaflidte say their international membership figures are "smaller than the •1"

types would probably have responded under the umbrella of 'ChristiaiH it is not suggested here that figures for these religions are actually so Iw J

m

group had over 8 0 0 0 members in 1 9 8 7

Snumbrr is now well in excess of 1 1 ,0 0 0

as they might appear, which highlights another problem in '.nterpretii^'j*

Ά

Λ

umbrella. The figure is again worldwide. The magician Amado •claims to have many thousands of students (again worldwide),

themselves on an official form as Jedi than as some form o f named, and'fl more recognisable neo pagan creed. This may also be because some nee

and it is likely that

since the F O I is in part an

, group, with many smaller, keenly recruiting groups gathering

these figures). However it is possible that given the magical nature of thr'a Jedi in the films, some neo pagans may have been far happier labellii^’a

'Iht Fellowship o f Isis (F O I), another international pagan-

f'aswfll be seen in a later chapter, that claim is one o f many he makes iseemingly little foundation.

pagans are often keen to assimilate any new magical referents rliar appeati* in modern culture, and the Jedi Knights have many special magical-lilct* powers.

can be seen that membership of magical groups in Britain is based S minority group of perhaps at most some tens of thousands

Magical Group Membership Figures

people апи that probably at the low end o f 'tens o f..., rather than hundreds of thousands, and certainly not millions. In many cases,

Moving away from the census figures, so far as other named magii

^ discussing pardeular groups within magic, the numbers involved

groups are concerned their own claimed numbers o f members are usual

'fill smaller, down to hundreds, or dozens in some cases, but their

relatively small by comparison to those o f more formal organised n

within the history o f modern magic (and wider culture) is still

gions. For example the 'Caliphate' Ordo Templi Orientis, an organfsatii

nt, usually via the Internet or publication routes instead o f direct

based on the teachings of Aleister Crowley, state they have over }

'«perience.

members worldwide of which around two thirds were in the USA

I

they claim to be active in 58 countries “ h My О Т О contact in the

Where we go n e x t

was sadly unable to provide a breakdown o f those figures to give sol U K membership numbers.

g discussed the underlying rationale behind this research, includ.defining some terms, making a statement on reflexivity, describing

An anonymous informant also tells me that he believes the О Т О to ‘cooking the books’ and the figure includes all members who have achi progress into a higher grade in the organisation; thus a member 110 U K National Statistics website, comment for ethnicity www.statistics.gov.uk/cr·-· susaooi/profiles/commentaries/ethnicity.asp 111

О Т О website, www.oto-usa.org/member.html

eciectK methodology in use, and examining the numbers involved I'^inagic, I will now outline the areas researched. As mentioned, a close ewminanon of untlerlying morality is required. This is followed by a jn ■ U1

Davf 1 te, L'K Section Head for the lO T, personal communication, 20-4-2004 \Jlii tents.com database (Online) www.adherents.com/Na/Na_282.html ‘Rhil Hine website www.ohilhine.orff.uk/writinffs/ess olivia.html

82

Dave Evans

discussion of magical morality relevant to a post-Crowleyan m a ^ environment, to put subsequent discussions into a cultural a n d : context. Following this I then discuss ‘A mado Crowleyl who claims to be Alcisteriiij son and magical heir (a claim which is pretty much shown to be false); and Kenneth Grant, who was a pupil of Aleister's, still runs a order based on Crowleyan themes, was a literary executor after Crowle^j died, and is a most important and arguably central figure in pos· -(’’•ow/ leyan literature. This gives a useful comparison of two directions in which Aleister Crowleys magical legacy has been taken since his death. Смг.г was also a close friend of Austin Spare and has spent over foui dcv.idcj publishing and analysing Spares work, which task continues to date then move on to cover G rants work with the occult themes which believes are to be found in the work of the American horror novelist Lovecraft, which leads in to a discussion o f the use o f fiction and beliet\ shifting within magic. ; This is a particular tool in the new and still-developing, eclectic field of’’ Chaos magic, which itself draws heavily on the work o f Aleister Crowley and Austin Spare, and a brief history o f this strand o f magic is given,* with the caveat that since it is so novel and current, any attempt at h№ toricising it is bound to be overtaken by events. My conclusion di.scusses the role of academia in the study o f magic and suggests ways in whichthe future study of this area might benefit from a more cross-discijiliiiary, approach. '

Hit History o f British Magic After Crowley

Pushing the boundaries Blasphemy, Inversion and Morality

i jficrional character Harry Taylor is used in a pulp’ occult novel to valid point that: ,ι'ΜίΜΠίί Ί . have begged with pomp and ritual fo r the intervention ^dmr.f p I onjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls

ence of the previous centuries in which this atmosphere developed, and

■the lie,’.!. For all who do these things are an abomination to the

the wider European influences. This includes examinations of the pob-

■ORD, .ind because of these abominations the LO R D your God

lems of defining blasphemy at all, and whether magic is actually Ы.ь'.'Ьс-

rives the; ii our from before you".

mous, details of modern blasphemy prosecutions and similar offii i.i! and media sanctions against persons or groups who were perceived to be so, and, to the surprise of myself, and probably many readers, the complelt*

absence o f any successful prosecutions fo r blasphemy against British in the 20th century. I also discuss the role of carnivalesque' and inversionary beh.iviour,

being in any way a Bible scholar I consulted several different 'mainani' ser.sions of the Bible

finding the quote virtually identical in

version, apart from that some versions substitute ‘detestations' for ain.it!ons’ in ;hc final line of the quote. ■er rl'c ove: all message seems clear; that the practice of magic or

Christian Church's attitude to magic as a whole, wider attitudes ro

ft :s boili sinful and a blasphemy against God, providing that

sexuality and Satanism, the emergence of the modern 'Green' mo

.lern (oi Lurrent) practices called that are actually equivalent to

in the spiritual re-awakening in Britain, the consequent'mor.fl im

hientioned in the Bible.

tive^ the historical use of 'Satanic' labelling as a social/moral panic t.ofi«a rather delicious, and of course the pagans had no power to prevesTihei film's re-release in any case. However, despite Sanders’ failing to keep up his pretence of the m.iS6fot j the entire filming, I have witnessed a rather more serious mock C лtiiiic 1 'Black-ish' mass performed to a fuller extent in 2 004. 'Ihis wa·! iepc

ad-hoc in a magical setting by a serious and committed o> i ultist .ιπ3[ΐ can attest to the very powerful emotions the ritual can r.

im·, even

greatly lapsed (and never-Catholic or entirely committed at :lut) ( .№ tian-by-birth, and now something-else sensibility. Due to the highly sensitive nature of this event I am honou· -bourj^ a person and ethically-bound as a researcher to reveal specii·.». details^ neither location nor participants, since to do so might allow them I identified. The Mass took place in a room in southern England. The roont decked out with some overtly Christian religious imagery (including’jj feet square brightly-coloured hand-painted banner of 'Christ cru which had been specially made for the occasion), all of this erected ί room that was otherwise mostly used as a 'conventional' magical i The event comprised a truncated version o f the Latin Catholic with some English passages spoken too, performed by a male figurt'i Priestly garb (black ecclesiastical robe, white dog collar, a pseudosiastical purple sash-scarf draped over their shoulders, wearing a ( and holding a rosary), who performed the 'consecration' of host and t to backing music o f some ethereal Gregorian chants

and who i

matically controlled the ritual consumption of the sacrament (oral!]ia in the standard Christian Mass) by those present. The 'Priest (in fact an experienced ritual magician) stayed 'in i for some time, this being o f a stereotypical ‘kindly elderly Irish (who was named for inversionary/punning purposes, Fa(r)ther 2i6 While a Christian source, Gregorian Chanting is a common musical hackgrouii^ for 'New Age' practices, since the plainsong is beautiful, relaxing and gives an acn of sanctity and antiquity. The use in the fake Mass was thus doubly inappropriate, я to the inversionary effect.

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

and language. Then the mass moved on to what was ^sed to be

very lengthy sermon on the nature of sin (to the utter

^rqatton or one person present, who believed the remark), but Ib tbi'1 endi\ very abruptly with an aphorism from the magician erfc^^fey about sin: “the word of Sin is restriction, do what thou №;a!D;d muih ribald laughter, since the cross-context of a Catholic, ' t . imi I tion a restrictive and ascetic service which culminated irur.iging sir was a beautiful piece of inversion. ■dbe SaniU" s’ filmed mass finale, which was seemingly on the spur inJT'Twnt, or due to his boredom, this mass was obviously planned dhus, as . ■■] added psychodramatic shock for magical purposes. Siililfig const. I rated host and the un-used wine was deliberately aod cmpio) cd in a sexual magical rite shortly thereafter. ' i о be I

sidered that since the Black Mass is such an emotion-

1 Φ Ι concept, for an occultist to talk about it at all may be a case of r|.iijd noi teality. For example the spoof Satanist Hugo L'Estrange i.;buur man) matters which would be horrific to a member of the derg)',-(.md tbe many occultists) but which did not actually happen. Despsie the ev.r.nple, the Black Mass performed by occultists as an actual kuisphfptotis mxkery o f the Christian God seems to be rare. Often rituals may iWolve some similar imagery, but largely they are about something else cilitirrfy, o‘f en a psychodramatic performance, for to have any impact, a Bl.vdk Mass needs to be performed by those who are in some respects n, even if they are heretical. For many magicians Christianity is gless. dius a Black Mass is equally meaningless - it would be like •cgct.irians to see if they prefer Beef to Lamb and expecting to t .my use.nii responses.

I

If one ps.-udo‘Black Mass’ that I have witnessed I have seen hunot othe- m.igical rituals that are far-removed from re-enactments or

^ii|(31er:cs of i hurch services, and I have concluded that black masses are ^ ■

Corni’.on than fundamentalist Christians would wish to believe, ' more common than th e‘never’ that (equally fundamentalist)

Rapoiogisis would also have us believe. Most black masses of the .1 И are e.vposed in newspapers are, it seems, purely theatrical shows ЖНог some kind of lurid entertainment purposes, by actors nor and at a very lucrative financial return for those putting on the roa p.n'iiig audience.

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Moral Philosophy *1 0 1 * A lth o u g h this book is concerned with events in magic.il cird(s it Britain after the death of Crowley right after the Second World' the philosophical and historical roots of those relevant current·; that are an essential underpinning to post-Crowleyan matters.; older, and derive from (philosophically and geographically) a fas| secular and religious society than just Britain. Since magic does поЯ in a vacuum, the broader moral environment in which magic h.:s over time has had a particular and definite influence on the di:ci.r;onsin* which magic, or at least some magicS' discussed herein have e\o!'.vii. Thus it is necessary to outline and understand those influences,, deviate from a strictly historical stance in order to explain die philosophies and other factors, including a general decline in the j ability to perform moral analysis at all, as secularisation expanded, i the historian Alex Owens sees as both a symptom o f ‘disenchant, with the world, and a gateway for new forms o f non-Christian . such as occultism As the occultist and author Dion Fortune (Violet Firth, 1890-19 wrote in one of her novels in the nineteen-thirties" in these mace days... folk had given up believing in spiritual evil even more rhon than they had ceased to believe in spiritual good”

this being ]

a reflection of a growing secularisation following the end of the W orld War, and into the immediately pre-World W ar Two years. After an overview o f that phenomena I will then examine the notions o f 'evil' both within society and that often adhere to the ] historical perception o f magic, before moving on to detailed disc the historical moral stances of various individuals and groups withutl occult world in the following sections. W hile the 20th Century did indeed see individual and mass act*! could be described as evil (for example the regimes o f Stalin, Hider,·! Amin, Pol Pot, Pinochet etc) and individuals who were noted for:

217 Owens, P la c e o f E n c h a n t m e n t , lo-ii 218 Dion Fortune, T h e G o a t F o o d G o d , Northampton, Aquarian, io*»o p гдт 1936

|S?5V History o f British Magic After Crowley

it is perhaps more likely that such matters have simply le more krown, more discussed, and thus more ‘in consciousness’ pevents from earlier centuries, which might have been equally ,

were merely less publicised in the growing mass media. Had of Caligula or Attila the H un ever been captured on cine kis m.iy have bee;. rather different.

■

v : / " jcliilticBT of evil .мс barbarism has a chequered past, so far as history lilpS'^phy ft concerned. Mass populaces, or at least the political . that wish to be voted back into office fo r subsequent terms by mass , have always liked their opponents to have tidy and simplistic -evil distinctions hung about them. One of the ulti-

3ns for humanity has been the problem of defining evil (and, !,^od). In the early-modern period in Europe (and in the minds iiihe ‘the Reverend' Montague Summers in the 20th century), jefgood and evil was, so far as the Christian Church (and thus 'die rime) was concerned, carved in stone, inviolate, dualistic ithout need o f interpretation or analysis. There were god-fearing

.18Л1 d there were those who were evil heathens. .were n tder the control of, and/or in league with Satan, and/ ui as such were liable to prosecution and possible

ftiiis sucli .1-·. Lionel Snell see the matter as far more complex mind cries to contemplate one-ness it always rushes to find the or limits; but give it a boundary, however simple and it can to and fro happily, playing cosmic tennis. Tell yourself that the ,

.

; is a battle between Good and Evil, or a tissue of positive and charges, ai'd the mind is happy... consciousness just cannot On unity; iinality is the minimum ‘atom’ of consciousness”

Я В

and Ambrose Lea, T h u n d er s q u e a k , El-Cheapo/The Mouse Thar (Dukes, R. Ed), p 157-8

117

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Dave Evans

Philosophy of Morality H o w ev er, why did the Christian God allow evil to flourish? Fontaine neatly sums up the philosophical conundrums for Ch ity, which, “having developed the idea of an all-powerful and Ьсй God" was left with the notions of suffering, natural disaster andi unexplained philosophical glitches, whereby "either God was unable to prevent evil and was therefore not < otent, or did not wish to do so, and was thus responsible fi>rl existence o f evil. The figure of Satan, as adversary to God and i senting the sum o f all evil, seemed to offer a solution to this ]

So, having the figure o f Satan was all well and good as an invisiWe goat, but this concept made humanity less powerful, since they thrall on the one hand to a non-corporeal Devil (with whom thi^j not engage), yet they were attempting to do a non-corporeal Сскй on earth coo, and thus had no-one physically on hand to blame but selves for any failure. So it was thus necessary for tlierc to I people upon which to wreak some holy revenge for their perceίν.'.bii's being stolen by Satanists... were not only effective

i ’^e.tsutes, but also provided a constant source of revenue for :|i. ip the form or baptism fees. N o Christian mother would, ;oi riiese diabolical kidnappings, refrain from getting her iv bapriaed, post haste” was somerimcs seen as an aid in all things, however icBvt.ll and, it seems, remarkably unfair to others of his flock, if As .1 young girl rl'.e novelist Antonia W hite was at a Convent approximately ldvl9, preparing for a hockey match against OiM^'ent, Site wrote "we are all going to do penances all day so It seems unlikely that an omnipotent God would be i 6 1 cii^ift'clie winner of a school sporting contest, let alone intervene, 1^’ .so ir .1 conre.st within the Christian religion. The immoral:ting a (jod to d.o so is also something worthy of note. Satanic groups who regularly met to celebrate abominable |s,.n МГ ■.

trn period P R tool in the Church's war against

gi .er

I e Fontaine writes, lurid and cautionary tales

|g| Ш ^

jc,jiUiecrings in wliich demons and Satan himself participated «ivllich siauglucred babies were consumed in a feast and ... af^x in whii I'l .ill normal restraints, including those prohibit?i^‘. Ji picted as a demon in First World W ar era cartoons live;' r.i ii.itional politics the demonisation of one candidate

J

iff has been .■regular practice, such as in the run-up to the U K eiCenons ot 1997 when Tony Blair, the Labour party’s potenMftie Minister was portrayed as a red-eyed, leering, dangerous Φ billboards paid for by his opponents. As it transpired v-V.is S'u I e-sful in the election in anv case: ironicallv σοίησ on

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The original anti-Blair poster campaign was heavily criticised o' 'bund leaders for “irresponsible use of satanic imagery”

Their lommeii

prompts the obvious question as to what would the respon

о

Satanic imagery be? ‘Responsible use’ of Satanic motifs might include their regulai use& commercial purposes. As the modern Satanist LaVey remarked, 1 he D e i. “could appear in everything from food products to sports team without consternation. As long as one believed in God, it was por all right to entertain Satan for fun”

One example of this v.ould

the very successful English football team Manchester United, v. ho been known as‘The Red Devils’ for decades, based on the home trident-bearing red demonic figure which adorns the club's bad^ As is often the case when writing about magic, serendipitous, sytichr. nicitous and emphatic events can occur. A matter of hours after writi, the above paragraph I came across a quite remarkable advertising he ing very near to where I then lived, a simply huge advertisement for ί Television’s coverage of the imminent new football season, slic three Manchester United players in bright red team shirts, celebr the scoring of a goal, in front of thousands of their adoring fans.' headline of the poster was “D E V IL S W O R S H IP ” writ large for al see (the hoarding was placed on a very busy road junction). Ret to the site very shortly afterwards with a camera to take a picture of t billboard for the thesis, I was confronted with an advertisement for a i instead. It is oft remarked that the Twentieth Century was perhaps the brutal and evil in history. W hile there are many pro - and con ments on the matter, as mentioned above it is at least possible that i the increase of historical reporting, and the increase of information' modern mass media, that merely makes it appear so. This was allied ( a dramatic increase in both literacy rates and the increasing av: ity of various vehicles for reading the information (such as nev spapw^’. magazines, books), or viewing via film and television. For e.x.unplcj highpoint of the eco-activism movement coincided with the \ ;

235 Guardian Website, 22-7-2002 hccp://media.guardian.co.uk/advercising/story/o,7492,758599,oo.html 236

LaVey, Satan Speaks!, p II

TI'C History o f British Magic After Crowley

ЧУлг’·) lifmoii'.r itioii of how destructive technology could be

123

and it

was ч|’,от#п о 1 primetime television to boot, which previous wars had ■.·' . n. M.

g ·· lages of the events of World W ar Two had scarcely

ayI'd in colour, for example, and it is only in very recent years rsigniiicant quantity of colour footage of that war has surfaced: 'Very little was shown to a large British audience at the time. ;dso bf realised that the ubiquity that has become the Internet, as the information Superhighway' in some circles, during the last or -o, could also explain this sentiment, since news is now truly and universal, rather than slow and limited only to those actively to !.nd things out, such as by having a daily newspaper delivered. 'r,cT. .1 multiplicity of news sources are available to the passive ЛчгЬош the need to even leave the house. Ti’o technological advances of the century just finished have o f course allowed evil' ,xts such as mass-murder to become far easier to perform, in a pr.!i r:i „1 sense; since one person armed with a machine gun or a un. kill far more rapidly and efficiently than the same individual ii’iiu n d rcd

u'.irs before using a mere bow and a bag of arrows ever

■to hi.s son (who was in the British armed services) soon after 'ЛШес! rotccs’ invasion of Normandy in 1944, the academic and ?iRR lolkicn bemoaned the onrush of technology over spirit "our no: only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil” Ihci uin::.il his'oi i.in Meredith Veldman believes that Tolkien's fictional ·\. the Ring tales, read in the context of an accelerating

.

mdusui.ii .ind military world, asked the important moral and practi­ cal qiiesrio’ : 'l-.ow lan humanity cope with the rings of power it has created''

.

’{he.se we:e imlceJ dangerous and unsettling times, with world war still iresl·. I'.i the memoty, and Europe artificially divided between compet­ ing. anU newly hostile cultures who had until shortly before been allies, and wi'.o \\e: c i'v tht n all intensively ensconced in demonising the other parries. Ιό 11ο\4;η: the first use of nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945, Mered.ili Veldman, Fantasy, The Bomb and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest Ciir ί «mbridge University Press, 1 9 9 4 , p 2 4 4 JRRTolk II \ ‘ u'cinV tldm a.n,Fantasy,TheBom b,p 8 g ,fn S9 , Fantasy, The Bomb, p m

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in 1954 N A T O announced plans to deal with any Soviet ag towards Europe or America with nuclear weapons, and tlic US publicly tested such bombs at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, and the I Missile crisis of the early 1960s had the Americans and Russians I the world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. The occultist Kenneth Grant (1 9 2 4 - ) believes that the unique andi ally earth-shaking power o f the first nuclear tests in the ninetccn- fo opened a'magical' door to allow ingress to earth for non-human e from other dimensions

Legally, another 'door' was opened Ш i I

period, with the repeal o f the U K ’s last remaining law specifically a witchcraft, in 1951. Atomic bombs were for the first time deliverable by effective long-i missile rather than directly from more vulnerable and slow ait craft;; the Russian deployment o f their Sputnik spacecraft in 1 9 5 7 took thei race into space

until then only the province of the peaceful as

mer, astrologer and believers in U FO s. Tbe Americans also made i space, and were ultimately the first to put a man on the moon, of the advances in rocket technology that allowed this to happen ; ally came from the research work of Jack Parsons (1 9 1 4 -1 9 5 2 ), a I respected propulsion engineer as well as being a pupil o f Crowley. There is not space here to cover Parsons in derail, nor real scope my title, as he was not a British magician. The reader is directed to

Sex and Rockets, Los Angeles, and www.babalon.net as a taster. Kenneth Grant believes, with a series of magical rituals that Parsons formed in the American desert in January 1946, in a similar fas'hion the nuclear tests mentioned above, he also opened a magical door, 'something' flew in; this ritual cycle being correlated closely in both raphy and time to the first modern sightings of U F O s

In the 1'

flight into space (based in part of Jack Parsons' engineering discoverii^ and journeys towards the moon also gave the world the first distant tographic images o f a green and seemingly very alone. Earth taken froth'if far-off spaceship.

--“Я ·

These were, to an audience becoming used, and perhaps almo.sr blasi 240

Grant, Mauve Zone, p 13

241

Veldman, Fantasy, The Bomb, p 123

242

Grant, Mauve Zone, p 13

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

125

sing post-war technological wonder, both beautiful and unsetone magician described them “the first group photos of Homo . and thi. 1 hotographs, or at least their symbolic implication, that [ stuck on the one rock and have to learn to live together better, liot oi peoi'ie in tears” photoyi

ic boost to the notion o f a ‘world community’ helped

ISpiritual revivrf o f a kind, w ith‘green issues coming to the fore. ^JN«wia|| Meredith Veldman contends that the annual lengthy to Aldermase*n C N D protest marches (usually taking several I to iomplcte) became a magical, ritualised expression, “a physical cat .■* and a spiritual revival”, bringing to mind the Canterbury Tales,

I

iiarthers quite unself-consciously referring to it as a “pilgrimage” /eldroan also highlights this post-war atomised culture in which

ri^isb working ,iad middle-class saw, (and, she argues that they themselus in a similar fashion to Tolkien’s mythologising o f

IdfeEarch. escape fiom a culture where monolithic social structures, and ;ir.g N'l'w World O rder appeared to deny the prospect of indi-

■ ■

я:ч; rln eaten the very survival of entire nations under the thrall fuckbv ■'.111 tear weapons, but where individual approaches could, in e .феси1 I ircumstances, and with effort, flourish

Indeed, magi-

positive benefit in such fictional works, since removal o f the Йиой from daily tabloid events can be magically useful” the object of

bjT*r od of abstention is not so much to prove how irrelevant the jourifcsrk phantasies are, as to prove how much they owe their relevance to plf ifernission to allow them to take part in our lives. Reading Tolkien is

I

tSiCaptSCchan to read novels o f the New York slums because Tolkien's microcosm... (is) with the fan whenever he closes his eyes...

iH'ltSreasthe New York slums are hundreds o f miles away”

I

also describes the occasionally carnivalesque inversions that during the protest marches: “direct action became a synonym disobedience, but for many o f the middle-class men and women the experience o f parading down public streets in the

UV'*' Λ

Viridnun,

The Bomb, p z ii

Fn iK is Вгсйк&ре llid pi-m-ide everything the heart desired, be that luxury goods for the '(..foirngei isses or mass-produced items for the workers, and the machinJi:,erji,and b\ implication the operatives, would be at work 24 hours a d ay- da) s a week, with scant notice taken of formerly holy days. John .-■fl-fiaiskin. (1 8 1 9 -1900), the English author and advocate of social reform warned that mechanical processes inherent in industrialised society

p dtreatened to turn humans into machines, and thus eliminate the spiritual a^ect of society for good, destroying notions of human society in the ;i .,---------------:

>7*

IhiJ, p 300-1

, >i9 see hrip://cn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Chcrnohyl_m^the_popular__consciousness 2^^' Thomas Cariyie, Selected writings, London, Penguin, 1971, p 277 in Veldman, f .1»,; I V. The Bomb, p 15, emphasis original. ζ·*ί

V'eidman. Fantasy, The Bomb, p 307

133

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process. H e saw society depending on a community o f spirit, nor a < muniry of financial wealth and material goods; and his writings immensely influential in the early Labour Party Я : In parallel with these developments in industry, rationalist ph loso« phies took over as a dominant intellectual paradigm instead of rh cally-based beliefs; with the intellect supervening G ods word and was the future prospect o f a true democracy, albeit one devoid of spirituality. Moving into the mid-20th Century, “by the end of W orld War II, i people regarded the idea of the devil (as a personified being) as a sfflv superstition’",

whilst still retaining some more ephemeral conccptsjo'

human personification of good and evil. W ith the approaching Nuriri' berg Trials for war crimes of the leading evil’ Nazis after the Secctea World W ar this issue was often in the forefront of media attention. ΊΙ',ε historian Meredith Veldman believes that in 1945, after the cessation o' hostilities (and the horrors) of World W ar Two, Britain became a far less important economic and military power, and the ongoing emasciil; of the British Empire from that time perhaps created a cultural space i which a new spirituality could slowly appear. As the literary theorists Rivkin and Ryan write: the British Empire: English was “cast in a new light (towards the end o f E m pire)... no 1 could it present itself as a repository o f good values or o f appropria style if these values were connected... to imperial violence, or if that s could be shown to be the result of a history o f the forced displacei ·■nt. of peoples with smaller (or no) guns" In 1944 the UK's Education Act was passed by Parliament, one clausec which made both a daily act of collective worship and Religious tion classes mandatory in schools

The Act was, at the time, a cc

mise between the divergent wishes of the Catholic and Protestant Chu for education, but in more recent years a considerable proportion 282

Ibid, p 19-20

283 Jeffrey Russell, The Historical Satan, in James Richardson ei al (Eds.), The SataAism scare, New York, Aldine, 1991, p 49, in La Fontaine, Satanism, Athlone History of Witchcraft, p 89 284 Rivkin 8c Ryan, English without shadows, literature on a grand scale, in Rh kin Hi Ryan, Literary Theory, p 852 285 British Humanist Association website www.humanism.org.uk/site/cms/content ViewArticle.asp?article=i266

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

>have moved towards a non-denominational and thus fundamen, (from the original Christian) daily worship act, in a gesture ation of all faiths other than Christian in the growing more f multi-cultural society o f Britain, or they have simply failed to ade' provide the daily worship aspect at all.

I tecenr report based on the regular national schools inspection lou tb y O FS T E D , the Office for Standards in Education) it was that "approaching half of schools are judged poor at fosteral development, and a declining number, around one-third in , are judged good” ‘1?Вгм1п was no longer a world leader in one or more o f industry and passing territorial possession then perhaps we could lead the

■

mo 'al, spiritual stance?

As it transpired, the answer was

Vs, the rovelist and critic JB Priestley (1 8 9 4 -1 9 8 4 ) writing in 1 9 5 7 said

I jl^^eiic.ed rl'.e war high in the worlds regard. W e could have taken over I

leadership, spoken and acted for what remained o f its con-

■■

but we chose to act otherwise” ^'crisis of 1956 saw Britain invading Egypt in a move that was

eitely unpopular both within the country and internationally (echoed Irecendy in the 2003 Iraq Invasion and ongoing occupation), which ,?1*4 m

ge among those who optimistically still considered Britain

ibeieeknig the moral high ground in world leadership. Almost simul-

E |

Moudy rltL Soviet Union invaded Hungary, polarising thought about il|gid evil in international relations, and reducing the membership dbcrCom'.'.'.unist Party in Britain by 20%, many o f them later moving Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (C N D ) as a vehicle

111'i making protest 289

was formed in Britain in 1958, being an umbrella organisation for jner of political persuasions and religious outlooks, the abiding

1 being to protest against nuclear weapons. In the early years it was |df“respectable and apolitical middle-class mothers joined with IIMSO website·' O F ST E D Review o f Secondary Schools in England, Section 4.2 «f^arrhive official-documents.co.uk/documenc/ofsted/seced/review.hcm 'Tjito

■

Veldm Ш, Fantasy, T h e B o m b , p 3-4 Boynton Priestley, Britain and the Nuclear Bombs, in Veldman, F an tasy , T h e

l,pi32 ViMman, FftntAiV. T h e B o m b, d 12 1-2

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136

perennial protesters, Gandhian pacifists, Labour Leftists and i munists"

and by 1959 it had 4 0 -5 0 ,0 0 0 members. During i

1970s and early 1980s, with the hotly-disputed deplc\

irt i

j

generation of American nuclear Cruise missiles in the I 'K the tr.e ship (and non-members attending protest marches) mse consu I was a C N D supporter at the time, and the largest rally 1 atcejii· London in the early 1980s) had approximately 150,000 people [ far more than were ever registered C N D members at th.ir titnr. iV bership now stands at around 32,000 W ithin C N D in the 1980s there was a smaller, and e;1рНс% group. Pagans Against Nukes, whose acronym PA N nearly rcflettedl nature god' angle from which they were protesting. They used c®[ a quarterly magazine. The Pipes o f Pan, but this organisar:on no»· i to have disappeared. Despite their growing mass-market appeal as fantasy aurlnirs,\tliii] contends that the elitist outlook of Tolkien and Lewis on the j o f technology over spirituality (and their often detached 'Ivory-Towered' tenured academics) conspired to mean that ncii: could truly participate in the fabricated and insulting (ro their i spiritual souls) modern material world

so instead they ere

erary 'underground' where they could live happily, detached contemporaries

Tolkien regarded fantasy to be "not a Ic

higher form of a rt.... and... the most potent" if one could be: believe in a coherently constructed fantasy world

Lewis and*

were (politically) also traditional 'One-Nation Conservatives,: a strict hierarchical class system

which stance autom-arically

their spiritual hopes for mankind to a Christian solution, thusij chy involving God, clergy and laity. Tbis apparent post-war decline of a recognisable moral imp not purely a British phenomenon, and the roots o f the matter f back in time. The French art historian Jean Pierrot ident iMes the cuii 290

Ibid, p 125

291 VeWman, Tbe Bomb, p 115-7, and C N D Press Office, pt мпа 1со фя. cation, 19th August 2004. 292

Veldman, Fantasy, The Bomb, p 91

293

Ibid, p 94

294

Ibid, p 46

295

Ibid, p 92

Ihr Нысгу rk magazine partially based on the occult was launched, „became a most influential and best-selling title: Man, Myth and c, with a talented editorial board

and with occult specialists such

li Grant Supplying several articles. ' ti’c clt'i non of the conservative government o f Margaret Thatcher and the ensuing 18 years of conservative rule, British life was influenced by a political re-modeling o f society that revolved

Lionel Snell uses a number o f pseudonyms, which are disclosed here with permisincluding Ramsey Dukes, Hugo L'Estrange, Liz Angerford, Ambrose Lea, Adamai

Lemuel Johnstone Johnstone, SSO TBM E. p 103 The Mati, Myth and Magic editorial board comprised Richard Cavendish, Isabel ^*'Swheflend, Mary llreckon and Frank Smyth plus various consultant contributors. Man, (periodical) London, Purnell, 1970-1972

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144

around the creation and maintenance of a consumerist model, i n ■ lei with advances in technology which was reflected in more and products being made available to the consumer with the means to 1 them, and more and more complex weapons being made available to ( military and more powerful machinery and chemicals being made able to various industrial and agricultural concerns. This created a technocracy in opposition to a theocracy, in v.lflch ϊΙί·ν of life’s problems could be solved by science and technology

if oriyij

enough money were to be thrown at those problems. Resistance to i model was an area that was tailor-made to magico-religious appro.n that emphasised (and increased) the power of the individual ,.·.·.:ι1ι Chaos magic, as examined in later chapters), and the role of natur^jj spirits and magic, not science. Ironically it might have been prccisel^)| that consumerist, expansive, free-trade ‘Greed is good' society (and tbat-S Prime Minister, in Margaret Thatcher) so hated if not actively cursei ; by many eco-friendly occultists that actually allowed for the explosiotf'» of a revival of interest in magic, since an avalanche o f occult books (eveft'| if they were critical of the political status quo o f the time, as many we«^; and commodities became much more freely available in the marketplace^ under this consumerist and individualist model. •s*

It also affected individual moralities. The religious studies specialiitt Andy Letcher describes one (un-named) woman in a magical group this period who justified an adulterous affair on the grounds thar "ir what the universe wanted’) bur he cites this attitude instead as a гейегаевл of the Thatcherite‘me, me, me’ culture

It is perhaps also not coinei*;.·'

dence that the individualist and self-empowering school of Chaos magit' appeared and blossomed in this period, with figureheads st b ч Peter Carroll, Charles Brewster and Ray Sherwin, followed later by Phil Hini, Dave Lee and many others, as will be discussed later. Despite the fall of Thatcher herself in 1990, subsequent ‘socialist’ governments in the U K since 1997, and several per ‘boom and bust’ economics during the period, this financial pa has largely remained, as has the relative ease of occult book publ A recent development has been the company Lightning Souin· similar companies), whose rationale allows for virtually financial 3 11

Veldman, Fantasy, The Bomb, p 4-5

312

Letcher, Role of the Bard, D 42

■ nd ‘

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

tree Do Ir Vourseir publication and distribution of small print runs at p! .lcs that .11 c not prohibitive, allowing for many more ‘minority’ titles to арпейг (inci id mg this book!). The ease of supply of magical commodi•Ufh ЯЧ

;nse, ritual tools and candles has also grown hugely in the

last IS years llic increasing availability of public internet access since the early 1990s a.'.kr the same consumer-led model has allowed worldwide occult textual material to become available in Britain, increasing the informatioa volume available to the magical revival almost exponentially. During this entire post-war period the gradual increase of both leisure time and ihsposable income had allowed people of most classes the opportunity, the spare finances and the facilities within which to study and practice magk, something that within the context of a 6- or 7-day working week, lo4Htr life expectancy, poorer housing and poor wages simply could not luvi been part of the life o f an average industrial worker o f a century 'гч'Ёвгс'” . an accumulation of very similar comments derived from my various inrm.il interviews and conversations with occultists like myself, many I'tlf whom were in their forties and fifties at the turn of the 20th-21st enturies, there seems to be a cohesive thread of replies to my questions ■',ief rlie ilkii.e; ‘what tempted them into exploring magic?’ This was, in any c.i.4es, some form of, if not outright rebellion, then a concerted and . e ·.-. .

. desire to drastically diverge from the values, beliefs, standards

d nch.-viour o f their parent’s generation. On first hearing this seems to ?:;Ье an impetus to move completely away from their parents’ generation

% moaning the loss of empire, the re-telling of war stories and generally y^oking b.ickwards in recent history. The urge was to do something else ntirely, something that was o f an individual level, such as the exploration I.' per.son.il belief systems and in some cases longing for some kind of den age which was not located in either recent history, or perhaps even .'■pr. e.irth .it all, rather than engaging in macro- matters such as cognitively i: .. ■■.

:h the just-lost Empire and being in awe o f the recent heroic

peeds of massive Armies. ,·/Π’ι!41.·! not to say that they have completely renounced the material world, ,φο!· I'.ive neither interest nor involvement in society, history or politics (or ч1 \ V i (^auiJohnson, (Ed.), 20th Century Britain, Economic, Social and Cultural Change, Harlow, Longman, 1994, chapters 3, 5 -7 ,16-19, 22, 24 8C 26 for detailed background to this aaSL U lt/Iu

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indeed huge admiration for the sacrifices of the World W ar Two gi iera« ’-· tion, without which todays freedoms simply would not exist

ratM

that their priorities are intrinsically different from those of the preceding generation. Veldman sees the fantasy works of Tolkien and CS Lewis, two men who survived involvement in the First W orld War, as impo· catalysts and templates for this kind of belief which gained popularity after the Second World W ar; since they both in their own ways empha­ sised the individual’s role, and aspects of the role of nature in spiritual life. Veldman sees the huge volume o f sales of titles by both authors among Britain's middle-classes in the post-war period as being a histo'·cal indicator of both a need for a life-affirming fantasy, and as a blueprim for how a moral world could be made - the latter being an early philo­ sophical impetus for the ‘Green ecology movement and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament It is too simplistic a conclusion to say that the generation that won the ‘ Second World W ar subsequently had children who capitalised so mas* i sively on the intellectual freedoms that followed that they all but turned their backs on the environment in which those freedoms arose, but u is an idea that has some mileage for further study. W hile this is solely my ; opinion formed from talking to several dozen occultists, and as suth is ' not to be treated as ‘gospel truth', but rather one tendency that has been i identified, it should be further researched on a larger scale in future if we are to ever fully understand the underpinning to this historical j gression into the later 20th Century popularity of occultism and ot ‘fringe' spiritualities. W h at is more certain is that the illusory spiritual Golden Age, so beloved o f the romantic protesters and fantasy authors was, as Veldman decides^ “not only ahistorical, but escapist and elitist", since despite any modera wish to a return to such a golden past age, mediaeval peasants were con­ siderably less possessed of individual agency (and had a far lower life expectancy) than even the most oppressed factory hands were in cither t 1850 or 1950, and a simpler life was actually a harder life

Veldman

also convincingly argues that a non-nuclear society, as striven for by ; C N D was as much a fantasy as anything written by Lewis or 'lolkien, with their common strand o f idealised worlds drawing on past, often j 314 And one o f my other historical projects involves work with D-Day veterans, t»nc of whom has become a dear friend... 315

Veldman, F an tasy , T h e B o m b , p 6

316

Ib id , p 3 0 9 - 1 0

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

-;i!»diaeval, pastoral templates

Veldman contends that many C N D

±;inmbers believed that "banning the bomb marked a beginning in the of this spiritually better Britain” cl'sarraament, like the advent of a new Golden Age, never hap'ppivd. and bt' a supremely ironic twist I wrote the majority o f this ’'suction of the book in 2 0 0 4 from a house situated within 50 0 yards of ■;ЛЬс ffii^yor dock facility for Britain’s still nuclear-equipped and active sub'iiarine fleet. V·.

lU J, p }о,;-6 1Ш . D 1 16

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Dave Evans

Approaching End Times?

F r o m the early 1990s onwards media attention on the genei.il brojj area o f ‘the unexplained’ gained ground with successful T V progr.iiiin’es such as The X Files

The X-Files started on British TV' in 199J(

ran until 2002, with regular repeats of the nine completed series,] motion picture and numerous spin-off books and merch.mdise.

I

process o f 'acculturation to the high weird’ accelerated during the

1990s when a series of doom-laden films and books such .is BkifJ

Child, The M atrix and End o f Days

exacerbated the pre-mS

tension, the imminent ‘2000th birthday of Christ’ perhaps he a predicted occult-related apocalypse in an increasingly de-sjc world, with the Devil returning to take control. In Bless the Child i a scenario where a ‘chosen’ child has to be sacrificed at a particular i in time that has astrological significance, and depending on whet happens the world is saved or damned. The evil protagonist in runs a pseudo-religious cult with many similarities to L. Ron I It Cult of Scientology, has a murderous assistant who is the very ir Crowley, has books such as LaVey’s the Satanic Bible on his shelv whose philosophical motto is ‘do what you will, and will wh.it yeu' ( which is painfully similar to Crowley’s ‘Do W h at Thou W ilt’. O r conversely, viewed from the 1990s the year 2 0 0 0 may have heralded Second Coming o f Christ instead o f the Devil; but with either ouo being pretty much a ‘no-win bloodbath’ for the sinners and non ers. At the same time, other authors’ and film-makers' work encoi popular interest in ‘consuming’ magic if not actually practicing ir, i ing the best-selling Harry Potter novels by JK Rowling about .■\o'.ing attending a school for wizards, and the hit T V series Buffy the \αηψκ

Slayer

which had a huge supernatural and magical theme 'Ihe tem-'S teen

witch’ series Bujfy the Vampire Slayer ran on British T V from 1997-200.

Ш

with regular repeats since, and the Harry Potter series of books and·

Ih e History o f British Magic After Crowley

14S

r films aboiii .i young boy training to be a wizard are ongoing since the author, JK Rowling, a multi-millionairess. 1999 the southern half o f Britain fell under the shadow o f a : edipse, л greatly-heralded once in a lifetime' event (unless one ivels bugr dist.irces

since the last U K eclipse had been in 1927,

^rhe next \m!1 ro t be until 2090. It had substantial pseudo-magical or atious Muportance applied to it since it was so close to the millenrhe fd'pse occurred at 11.11 am on 11th August, which was ^letoacrit.iliv and magically interesting to some. Crowley’s magical I ! as a very significant number: for example, "my number is [ their tiumbers who are of us” hat dilute any visual magical effect, despite astronomers having to predict the exact moment and duration of the eclipse for advance by the exact scientific process of complex (but clock­ workJ celestial mechanics, the untrustworthy vagaries o f precisely foref ijhe weather, using that same kind o f science, and then only a day e, prevented thousands from seeing the actual event, but many {under the spell of the huge and eerie swathe o f chill darkness that {across the«ountry. As did the crows in the deeply cloudy Cornish

I witnessed the event, the birds dropping suddenly from

the

К» them, ‘night suddenly fell’ in the middle of the day. Such a iSsW v'emorst ration o f the magic o f nature had a profound effect on gsh conscio' '.m ss, even if only ‘o n the day’ for some witnesses. l}e{№i>ei of the pullennium was heralded by fear of a the Millennium , tyotri'tial tii-linological meltdown and worldwide disruption and i^ter, a$ -nany computers were expected to fail at the moment when сф щ ст.’’. clocks which read 2 3 .5 9 .5 9 ,3 1 .1 2 .9 9 changed to 00.00.00, ШЙО.апЛ the computers ‘thinking it was 1900’, a time in which they i]Sot been programmed to work, would all freeze, with planes falling ' sky in much the same way the crows had fallen on eclipse day, tractors going critical and all cities grinding to a halt since the

i relied so much on comouters. In general it didn't haooen

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same way that organised religion became something not to be tri&i as the early modern period gave way to the modern. Thac the pteti global chaos did not occur being in parr due to some major rep. vention works beforehand does not matter a jot to the n ■.) -.''.ivrrs, s a prophets utterance that does not come true (regardI€^^ ei why makes that prophet an easy target for ridicule and mistrus: ui ri.riireJ Another example of science apparently failing to work wlrie :hc i cycles continued regardless seemed an apposite point in wind’ ro< the fabled 21st Century. This date was when it had long b« . ■ that myriad technological wonders would be at our fingertips, but | never quite were, as the magician and occult philosopher l.,onel, wrote: “I have seen pictures of tomorrows cities in pre-war books^^ one travels by car, they all... fly to w ork... come the 1950s id clear that the transport industry had let us down...we grewi that dream and turned to Dan Dare in the Eagle comic .stripл could speak to his wrist T V and be in immediate contact withi o f his crew... we grew up believing that instant walkie talkie > communications were coming any day.... the IT industry has I to deliver just as the aircraft industry did...Bullshit. Tlie samc.'e promises we heard in 1960” I am still waiting for the Jet Pack, which I was promised as a child l would be using to get to work when I was an adult. Despite the global horror in the face of this potential numer^ magical disaster at the turn o f the millennium, little actually wei in the techno-apocalyptic fashion that had been feared. Magica^ similar fashion to the passing of Crowley, Fortune and Sumi immediate postwar years, around the turn o f the millennium tant elderly occult figures died, Doreen Valiente late in 1999 ai Farrar early in 2000. Valiente and Farrar had both gradually become part o f the old guard' o f post-war modern witchcraft, and their passing ii. marked both the end of one chapter and the beginning of somerhi suddenly providing magical practitioners with ‘new’ dc.id eldett, 324 Ramsey Dukes, Technology Future Shock, www.occulcebooks.ciun/essays. nolo p 19

354

Ramsey Dukes, preface to Angerford 8C Lea, Thundersqueak, p iv

Ж

-I

The History o f British Magic Afier Crowley

161

I in a humorous form in order to defuse the likely outcry which iwould li.ivc been had his views been perhaps offered as a serious’ ш^шпе col n m, or even as practical suggestions for magical working. й | '^ тр 1е T Estrange’ talks of reciting The Lord’s Prayer backwards on rh^tswfio .bi.bphemy, for sure) as a means to evoke Satan, in the context of j^vidiiig a vital "religious broadcasting’’ service

I asked Lionel

die nature of the original magazine columns (since republished i oniitic .ucil le and electronic book form ^^) had upset anyone in the •fraternity: yi|Wchad) very little mail response ...in (Aquarian) Arrow - 1 made 'Ίνάηίευρ my.self... (but)., it really suited the readership. Many people they only bought Arrow for the column! I did get one person

1 took it seriously and asked to be introduced to a Satanic order. ^

a spoof response which was a recommendation to contact

^ focal Pentecostal Church - pointing out that they were very para„bout their cover being blown so he would have to go along their public facade for at least a year before they introduced him ijlf 'innc: Satanic elite’ - but I never sent it off because I’d decided it Would have to go out on notepaper from The Bell Inn at Aston ('hi’.ron ' . and I never got there in rime. The Hermetic Journal was .1 Jiherent matter, far more precious. It (the Satanist’s Diary) only jan to o;'.c edition there ... it met a lot of shock reactions’’ j.'\ corrosrondent complained, apparently in all sincerity, that having such Di.iry in the Hermetic Journal was "like pissing in a church”

This

ay Ii.ive been an isolated view, as it seems the diary had other occultists jc-ss;:!!:

to how much levity was involved, with ‘Hugo’ writing to me

4 uw * i * range, I'm walking backwards to Xmas (Online) www.occultebooks, I·>'nykugo ^xmas .hem

__ _______ , Tbe He/lgaie Cbronicles, (E-book), London, El-Chcapo, 2000, from originals printed in various magazine columns in theigSos. L

A former lodging o f Aleister Crowley, T h e B ell In n is still a public house. The first S atan ist’s D ia r y column appeared in this magazine, and was not repeated 'Hugo L'Estrange', personal communication, 26-6-2002 'ЙШегапге, H e lk a t e C hron icles, p 5

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“years later (under my Veal' name) I met someone at sor u event and we discovered an interest in alchemy and Tt>c Journal came up and the guy said 'you know there was .ihvays thing that puzzled me about that mag, one issue contaiiii'a a р ;л ’4 by a Satanist and it never happened again - did you hear аЬоий I’ve always wondered what was behind it and whether it w ь ioi ~cS ’’ 361

^6i

Hugo L'Estrangc, personal communication. 2б'6-2002

Ih e History o f British Magic After Crowley

- m

163

urses: combat morality

i

ftiftf-ofti spoofing o n ‘pure evil’ characters, occultists are, like their ^fotehe.'.is the early'modern witches, not above general day-to.-igainst others, and other magicians, with instances being jdbnifno:).

igician Kenneth Grant described H P Lovecraft’s fictional inbrsteis '■lie Sho^oths

as real enough creatures to use in magic,

secs rhem as being collections o f an interstitial (that is ‘between hi.s|jiviTat.,ii world and the magical realm’) bubbly jelly dike material in the a.iwary magician can be trapped

and he partially describes

ii tn.igu.al method for making this happen to rival magicians where I’d,*^·. Ihis perhaps indicates that he has practical knowledge of the iii'.ieofsucharite. intaKo claimed in the m id-1970s that he was on the receiving end of ftialefic magic from Gerald Gardner twenty years before (the r of mov-iern witchcraft was by this time long dead, so could not Bfiti rim contradict the tale, once it was published).

Grant alleges

' (jard'.'.ci took exception to his ‘poaching’ of a young witch, called "ia'aw.i} nom Gardner's witch coven to Grant’s own magical group,

i

ittot G .rJncr employed the magician and artist Austin Osman Spare a magical talisman for ‘recovery of stolen property’, that ‘prop)fc;ng'Ci.M'.da! with Spare being unaware (at that time) that the was to be worked against his very good friend Grant. tabsm.m had the claimed effect of sending an unearthly bird of preyentity to attack ‘Clanda) whilst in the middle of a ritual, and caused distress and disturbance including, Grant alleges, the entity being to leave large claw marks on the outside of a frosty window i lowever it did not have the desired effect of returning ‘Clanda’ to ®ffice Grant writes that she was killed in a shipwreck not long

Shoggoths were around 15'feec in dtamecer, comprised o f amorphous bubbling jelly, pioAiiril Phillips Lovecraft, At the Mountains o f Madness and other tales o f terror, New ■ 'll&S&biUantine, 1991. Original 1936

^ ■A

Grant, Nigfotiide, p 159

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Dave Evans

afterwards

Since her earthly name is not certain, verifying ·

she died then, and if so the exact manner of her death, cannot be ^ by checking any maritime casualty lists from the 1950s, so char tale i remain as picturesque and academically unsupported. The modern witch and ritual magician Alex Sanders (1 9 2 6 Ί 9 8 8 ) | licly stabbed a poppet' (an effigy, or doll used for magical purposes j symbol o f the intended human target of the spell) o f the artist and i cian Charles Pace (a one-time associate of Aleister Crowley and Au Spare) on television, on the Simon Dee Show in 1 9 7 0

The rather 1

motion picture documentary Legend o f the Witches also shows Sa and his coven preparing a poppet and using it to send a death This may however have been a piece o f performance rather than any routinely carried out as real magical work by his coven, as some of t actions o f Sanders in the film appear to be purely for theatrical than for magical reasons. As mentioned earlier, the film Legend oft

Witches, released in 1970, achieved a minimal cinema release and: not been seen by a large audience in many years until a D V D of the f was released in summer 2005. Sanders had numerous pupils inctu Kevin Carlyon (now a prominent public witch who regularly appeaisi the U K media), but they fell out at one point in the early 1980s andi newspaper interview of the time Carlyon threatened to curse Sanders'^ During 2002, while researching for this thesis-to-book I wr..s thre with magical attack by Amado Crowley’ who wrote “I am ga me 'f anyi) else is. I don’t mind a modern trial by combat on the astral I asked some valid questions which were deemed impertinent Ьщ (and the findings of which are discussed in a later chapter), this dd Amado having written in the previous year that "curses mainly happ books and films’’

365

Kenneth Grant,

I m a g e s a n d O r a c le s o f A u s tin O s m a n S p a r e ,

London, Muller,

p 30-33 366 From Hecate's Cauldron website, www.hecatescauldron.org/ VaIientee%2oon%2oGardner.hcm T h e S im o n D e e S h o w on London Weekend TeIcvTN:v>n . ran for only a few months in 1970, see Television Heaven website www.teIeviiionhtriK.iJ.’ co.uk/deetime.htm 367 Museum o f Witchcraft, The Alex Sanders Archive. The Museums cuttings coHw tion includes an ongoing news story from the H a s t in g s G a z e t t e during Spring 1983 wheft Carlyon threatened Sanders. 368 Amado Crowley, posting to weborama discussion forum (On-Line) 3-7-2002 The' forum is currently not accessible online. 369

___________ _.

, £хса//Ьнг, (Electronic Book). 2001. D 77

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

165

ks of rlii·; nature are not confined to within magical communities, •oprietor of the excellent Museum of W itchcraft in Cornwall, Mr. n Кп.ь;. -uftSIthe establishment as an educational resource, and |merous displays of artefacts, plus an extensive and breathtaking ιΊί^ΓΐΙ^for che ’.’.ii' of researchers. In the early period of his ownership of heitec-.iiv., in rlu· late 1990s, he received regular threats from funda£t Clui-srians who objected to the very existence of the museum, rlii'.si’ threats (which were always in the form of anonymous iconv.iii’.cdaperceived death threat (see figure 1, below, which says ■tbit’betrom"tl:iink about it- tomorrow may never comej and a picture ‘ hi{5,-ia.keii from a newspaper article about the museum). As Graham IMOtf^OUt si-th techniques are virtually identical to the ‘poppets' (othvise, know I' ,14'voodoo dolls' sic), a means of ‘image magic' that can, [d iscossed

.1 Hive, be used in some forms of cursing (and o f which the

. >'im In', .i display cabinet of several splendid historical examples). . wpjJd be p.-ecisely the malefic use of magic that the fundamentalists Id sbhor, ai V . u - they were employing exactly the same techniques to llicr their own 1. use, despite seemingly doubly-damning themselves ; process, by using magic of any kind, let alone ‘evil' magic

The"'

Director

T O Jt.i.w.«кГ-Жу JL .J"L.JLr “8

♦

J I T GOD IL\IS'ED IHI.M ON АСТ5'Жз9-40 1 PTF ти ттэтт n W РЛ 1 Ί -tlЛ 1 Д 1 ,К и D A x . ft J

MaV

rAvi'f'n

A MiU'i. Piece o f Image Magic sent anonymously to the Museum o f Witchcraft's owner, ktn i< now on display in the museum as an example o f the continued bigotry and Intolerance regarding the occult. Image copyright Museum o f Witchcraft, © 2 0 0 4

^яшпат Kina'. ronvftMari^n. Tiilv :

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Dave Evans

Sometimes apparent negative actions by magicians against other nag cians, or by or against other persons are far from easy to interpret; assign to any given moral duality of simply good’ or'bad'. 1 offer examples that in some ways defy easy categorisation: One Wiccan High Priest to whom I spoke

i

i

told me of a large ( 'batit!

magic ritual that his coven was formally invited to participate m danti| | the mid 1990s, as a part of an attempt ‘to create a spirit of fraremfr| I among various disparate occultists in that area of the country. Out\> ir^V ί it was a very ceremonial and elaborate working, with much of the courei'i and most of the ritual trappings being in common with their own W'icae I beliefs and practices. This familiarity of setting and content pur considerably at their ease, but the equally familiar shared ‘Cakes and i segment of proceedings

was very different, in that (a) it was held

at the start of the ritual, which is unusual for W icca, where it usu comes at the end, and (b) unbeknownst to the W iccans the ale cont substantial quantities o f the powerful hallucinogenic drug LSD, started to take effect on all present within about 2 0 minutes of the' starting. It is not clear from his description whether this was a malicious piecet deliberate ‘mental terrorism' against the Wiccans, a practical joke, oi i sincere attempt to share a deep'entheogenic’ experience. Perhaps to 31as*i trate the dogmatic black-white thinking which Chaos magic rails againiii^ this W iccan and his group will now have nothing to do with anythirgoi anyone else in the chaos field at all, based on one experience with л limited number (less than five) of chaos magicians in one area of tl'4·· U K . This is akin to always avoiding all breeds of dog forever aftr one dog had bitten you; which although a common piece of behav oar»l conditioning, is poor reasoning here, given the eclectic and syiuiot^ methods of chaos magic, which are discussed further in a later chapeeij'^ which imply that most Chaos magicians have very little in common widfi one another in any case. This stance is also despite some of the WiccaH^f involved having experienced a truly memorable, positive and per-onafij

U

:ТЬе History o f British Magic After Crowley

ful psychedelic-entheogenic experience during the ritual, and

example is of pagan road protesters. Ecological protesters who pagans have often used the public belief in all magic as being

1 aid their cause. The protestors aim to hinder and-or prevent new ['building through ecologically-important sites, especially forests, I diey were moved to physically occupy (and use their own bodies i barriiT (Ч construction machinery) for long periods o f time in the Ϊ of preventing the destruction of the forests (with varying success, (always with immense publicity for their ecological cause). y.used the common perception o f magical symbols to assist in their ists. "penrajrams, symbols associated with both W itchcraft and lisir. in the popu lar im agination, were daubed on machinery ... 'as'to frighten workers and stop them working”

Similarly, some

Htclics in Devon buried a ritual magic wand somewhere on an intended JicA •oad Site, making their act known to the road-builders, but not the i- 1 ■at.i'.'i of the wand. The intent was that whoever unearthed it; likely a road-building worker would be cursed'. This caused some i.ii uiiease among some protesters, it seeming to be an act of black

1C. bur there was regular “placing of skulls and pentagrams” intended jvoke psychological fear, rather than to cause actual harm” in the cono n L iO W S

Ш,

■( ■ A.i«al|sb.ort example is using the way that “exchange of money is a form •I itrg

i-ansfer which has very powerful associations... an old wart-

nners trick is to 'buy' warts off a sufferer and transfer them someetc else llie Poll Tax curse is a blank cheque where the user signs

Λm. с.кка1 persona, writes in appropriate sigils instead of money, '['.lystlu irgeted authority a problem'which will disrupt the implemtOt.ir.on ,,or -he Tax)” hectmrer- of any'evil' or'wrong' in the motivations for the actions of fnad ni ore.qters. the chao.s maaic erroun. the mavical cheoue-writer

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Dave Evans

supposedly simple and dualistic'black and white' labeling of .my; The chaos magicians many have wanted to give the Wiccans a ■ ful entheogenic experience, it could have been a practical joke, or i have been ‘psychic terrorism! The road protesters may have been i to protect the environment at the expense of scaring a few peoplij ί may have been magical terrorism. The cheque-writers were usingi own perceived magical abilities to influence a political system they! as inherently unfair, or they may have Just been trying to greedily/i their own money. The fundamentalist Christians may have been i to convert him or otherwise persuade Mr. King to close his mi or they may really have been threatening violence by an uncor unwitting magical act. W h at I hope has been made clear here is that human acts and tions are considerably more complex than can ever be accounted i such a simplistic and dualistic choice as merely ‘g ood’ or 'evil', at the! of rimes. Modern psychology has taken a different tack on the problem of c o f 'right and wrong, with the respected social psychologist lilior i concluding that most people have internal incentives to vindicate i behaviour, opinions and character; hence they continually indulge i internal dialogue of self-justification of their behaviour, as bo;:igi ble and coherent in the circumstances. If the behaviour is seci; intemaliy as incoherent this leads to 'cognitive dissonance! This is a ч- '.n ,i! iaittot of self-justification, and was proposed by another respected psyclv Leon Festinger

in which "two cognitions are dissonant ■!. шгч

these two cognitions alone, the opposite of one follows fru-r ibo i because the occurrence of cognitive dissonance is unpleasant, pec| motivated to reduce it”

In other words, it is extremely uncomfd

psychologically, to attempt to balance two opposite beliefs .;i'.d y.vet equal credence; something has to give. This is accomplished by one or both of the psychologically, not purely logically, incon.sbre-.tcffl^

■■■¥

tions to harmonise them. This change may create a stare that is still completely illog;4.ii

objective observer, but is psychologically comfortable for the iidiv>a· ual making the cognitive change. In more plain (and oversimped^, 376 Leon Festinger, A Press, 1957 377

Festinzer.

T h e o r y o f C o g n itiv e D is s o n a n c e ,

C o o n it iv e D is s o n a n c e ,

d

174

Stanford, Stanfoid L'ln c:sit)·'

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

volves lying to oneself. I ArniJ^fove’ s dissonance related to morality in some depth. As a start-

'Щ

for morality, we always wish to believe that we are good and

we are not!). As an example of the problem of dissonance, ArtM^n t ’cc·; the fixed two-response choice of cheating in an exam, viz, ' i l t r i I’.im: or we do not. Social conditioning expects us both to not It also to do well in our exams. Thus dissonance potentially arises

fichever choice we make, and how we self-justify it. If we cheat Еч!о; к· wrong.If we do not cheat, and fare poorly on the exam we wroi’g; probably for not revising hard enough, which will be |ional mental cosh with which to bear ourselves, once the results ^ex.im .ill' published. :ai example o f this is given by Phil Hine:"in popular Occultism, is pretty definitely seen a s‘Black Magick except of course when justify your reasons for doing it - like the Wiccans who once ted to Magically attack me because I was plugging 'the Left-Hand у iii Vagait Χι'ΐνί” ’ ^®. Another magical example comes from Hine again. After ^ing derails of an un-named ‘white magician who had enlisted his

magii^bdp to return an errant romantic partner who had taken up with a th;nd party (which aid Hine refused to provide) he remarks that “what is alsoiatttesring here is that the‘white magician approached me with a view to ^ fa im win back his girlfriend through magical means - something ,4>ne might consider to be ethically questionable. But in this case, he beca-ase of course, he was the 'good guy’ in this scenario’’ .point a cognitive consonance would be ’don’t throw a malefic spell’, у penpir do not do this is the point of this example: instead of not the following cognitive process and internal dialogue (or similar) engaged:

Cursing isn’t proven absolutely to be bad or dangerous. . A spell to remove person X from the clutches of person Y and bring them back to me is a ‘good’ act, since I am a good' person. H in c i 0 »j C u rs in g , (Online) www.philhine.org.uk/writings/ess_cursing.html a pre»ent«ttion at U K A O S Conference, 1992

Ш

H i n e , B b c k m a g ic a n d th e

biiUhD«html

left-hand path, (Online) www.philhine.org.uk/

169

170

Dave Evans

• People I admire have used such spells in the past (allo’wing oneself to be swayed by peer pressure and conformity). • I still love person X , thus my actions are justified.

t

• Blame is laid onto others (especially gossipmongers) for driving person X away, rather than ones own behavioui. ii— This mental process allows for minimising the importance of the curse®· itself, and accentuating the positive aspects of the self, being on the '•■orJ.'jj high ground^ fighting against lying gossips. The cognitive pleasure anticipated in the intended result, being a rose-1 tinted return to a romantic state that might have once existed (but prob­ ably did not), helps to conspire to reduce the dissonance. In; time,

Ы

with repetition of the above kind of thought processes "beliefs become. internalised when they appear to be correct”,

and the holder of those ·

beliefs often cannot be persuaded otherwise even by concerted artempa^.H' by others who might be more objective. The above might seem nonsensical at first, but Festinger disti)iguisliei between actual rationality and the process o f rationalising in humans; ■ "we...are motivated not so much to be right, rather...to believe wc are right”

As the American chaos magician Jerome Plotkin elegantly and

succinctly puts it: "Man is the only creature on Earth capable of 1) ing to himself (and believing it)” These motivations may be concordant, but often they seem poatveiy ' maladaptive, such as in the above example drawing back a partner ·№Ηο' obviously does not wish to be in your life, since they left in the first' instance, probably opening one up to heartbreak and misery for a second 'ΐ time with the same person. However dissonance reduction strategies ίί have an ego-protective function: they m ake us fe e l happier thar \\t .’ч· right; or good, since:" dissonance is most powerful in situations ir wlinb the self-concept is threatened”

Hine, who has some considerable

380

Elliot Aronson, The Social Animal, New York, Freeman, 1992, p iy j

381

Leon Festinger, in Aronson, Social Animal, p 177

382 p 16

Jerome Elliot Plotkin, AntiTlluminati, Old Mountain Press, Faj^etteville NC . ;e .

a8a

Aronson. Social Animal, n 202

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

;?*taining in psychology

seems to be aware of this cognitive model,

writes: "magicians do curse, and occasionally, it even works. The real distinction appears to be a moral one - if thine enemy curses, iks. because he's a ‘black’ magician. If you curse, it’s because of necessary ^'dkumscances.’’ ■•iJissonance can have a snowball, or exponential effect; once a commitNflienr to a particular idea or ideal is made; an escalation of self-justificaresults; even if this commitment results in further, bigger commitl,Rlents. In the above example it could turn into an escalating magical war. VAwison circs an actual war: the continued bombing o f Vietnam by the Government in the 1970s, despite considerable contrary evidence of Aks usefulness. Tbis continued because the self-justification among the .‘c'ans and generals was that the process had been started and any ^raiation or retreat would cause international loss of face: since “inevita. ыь··. makes the heart grow fonder’)

i.e. once a situation is (or seems to

lOg'-Tuvly) permanent, the psyche takes steps to adjust perceptions vSUfi ixT..!'. lOur to maximise the mental-emotional comfort o f that situ'stlim. It is likely that the political rationalising o f the current conflict in and .Afghanistan has fallen into the same kind of deep psychologi­ cal-semantic hole. .'\r example might also be a healing ritual that fails in the intent, i.e. to p'-ake the patient recover, after which those who attempted the healing пму well enter a mindset where the patient’s increasing illness is seen as 'kionic, pre-ordained, the will of the Gods, or otherwise in the control higher powers, and not to be intervened in further by mortals, who h.'iie 'done all they can) and thus feel more comfortable with the ‘failed’ oi.(tome (unlike the patient, probably). №$sonance effects are maximised when accountability for one’s own .^actions is high, and those actions may have negative outcomes. It seems VAai attitudes can be softened towards a behaviour by temptation to ’■•'iieiualiy act immorally; however temperament is stiffened by temptaup to the point jMst before the act is committed (especially if the Ш

··“ ..........

r / iU Phil Hiiie, personal communication, 12th August 2004, told me chat "I have a B.Sc ’ Hi ns’i m Bch.i' ioural Sciences and completed a three-year Diploma in Occupational *' 1tu apj (its .u'lV a degree)...! worked for a while as a trainee Psychiatric Nurse and did sevetalstints m both mental health & general medicine as a student O.T." .•i-

Phil I iine, On Cursing, (Online)

171

Dave Evans

172

potential short-term rewards are high); as Aronson says: “ people wbo

almost decide to live in glass houses are frequently the ones who are prone to throw stones"

Much of our behaviour in this respect scj^ntt

linked to self-justification, and much of that is, objectively, insuffiuefti; for example, the phenomenon of the ‘little white lie'. Hine writes: “Ле idea of the existence o f ‘black magicians’ supports the reality of these who would call themselves ‘white magicians’. Underlying this belief is the dualism o f ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ famiiur from cowboy films... - that some people only do good in their lives, whilit some people dedicate themselves entirely to evil. This is a rather nairtm view of looking at the world. The idea of ‘black magic’ also implies hat there are some magical methods which are inherently bad, and if one employs them, one is therefore, a ‘black magician'.”

It is quite , p jw

erful label to throw at someone....

*

The modern anthropologist Sabina Magliocco describes from her anthro­ pological researches of neo pagan groups that:‘‘the expression is a slur.m that it indicates a magician who disregards the basic ethics of the magiui community: “harm none,’’ and the law of threefold return” Amado Crowley states, “There are two faces to magic. They are called Black and White, and they both work, but in different ways. So as not© tempt you into making foolish experiments, none of the magical re_ipts in this book are either accurate or complete”

Rather disingenuou^

there is nothing in that book, his Lewd Ghosts that could be construed as a magical ritual and even more disingenuously, elsewhere Amado say? there are no rituals in any of his books “there are no rituals in the pub lished books, apart from a description of things my father did when I ntf in tow. The three books about Aleister are autobiographical cum гети niscences. They are nor meant to be treatises on Occultism or anything like that.”

Amado is discussed in a later chapter, where many moit of

his inconsistencies are examined. The American magician and author Michael Bertiaux, using the terms universe A and universe В for the occult worlds on either side of a 387

Ibid, p 194^ emphasis added

388

Phil Hine, Black ma^ic and the left-hand path, (Online)

389

Sabina Magliocco, personal communication, 17-8-2004.

390

Amado Crowley, Lewd Ghosts, Diamond, Guildford, 1994, p x

Я01

Amado Crowlev. oostincf to weborama discussion forum (On-Line) 7-7-2002

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

173

‘'■emceptuai magical abyss (we are in Universe A) comments on evil: does not exist in Universe A’, and in Universe‘B’ it does not exist. §(H0weveT when there is a relationship between the two universes, there fels.A possibility of evil coming into the world, into Universe A '. That is magicians who work along the lines of seeking contact with UnijiJUSse’B’ are sometimes in a situation where they convey the impression ί,ΐί· being'Black Magicians’ or else of being'dangerously evil’ o r ‘perverse ;?aed unnatural”’ 392 nilre succinctly. The chaos magician Peter Carroll wrote: “out of ϊϊ ·Ϊ5βκ»

arise the two prime forces of existence... the light power and the

Ij& k ... these twin forces lie at the root of all mystic quests and all forms

Λ

'■^’magical and mundane action... They are the basic spiritual principles ^ th e universe... adherents o f one will always call the other black” PbitH me argues that this is largely not the case, and instead such labelImg is often used for purely pagan-political or social purposes: ‘tfaoie who accuse others of being ‘black magicians’ are actually expressing their disapproval of something that person has done,

at has been rumoured to have done. Accusing someone of being a 'black magician’ is, in some sections of the occult subculture, similar to accusing someone of being a ‘Communist’ in 1950’s America” and 'someone will always brand you a ‘Black Magician) specially if you start asking too many awkward questions" , *Hine adds the important point that ‘black magic’ is a powerful negative Stereotype, and can be employed merely to denigrate, rather than accurttely describe:

‘ like many other aspects of occultism, what is termed to b e ‘black magic' depends very much on who is doing the defining... a Chris-

ПЗП might argue that whatever pagans and magicians might say, all magic.d practices a re ‘black) It is more common however, for those who expound the reality of ‘black magic’ to define it in terms of that which they disapprove of. For example Gareth Knight, in his book

I:

»,1

KfiiMcth Granr, N ig h tsid e o f E d en , Skoob, London, 1994, p 251

1‘f

l*t tf r j Carroll, L ib e r N u ll & P sychon au t, York Beach, Maine. Weiser. 1987, p 96, added

394

11>ne, B lack m agic a n d the left-h a n d p ath ,

1Л*

I l»«p.

Touched hv Fire. r> дт

'i ·?:

Dave Evans

174

A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism (1 9 7 6 ) states unequivocally th at:‘Homosexuality, like the use of drugs, is one of the techniques·! o f black magic'” This is precisely the kind o f catch-all reasoning employed by fundamen­ talist Christians in their polemics against occultism which drag in aS’·; o f rock music, the practice o f yoga etc as evidence o f the influence Satan, as given in example in a previous chapter. It is also highly unlikdly 'ф that very many occult authors would make such a generalised and homo»'T phobic statement in the early 21st Century, compared to the mid-l970i'^ when homophobia was more socially prevalent and perhaps more accept* _; able when expressed in the mainstream.

•jnfi

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l·"·The History o f British Magic After Crowley

r '·

i

■' Othering and Continuum of Evil here is also a perceived continuum of supposed evil’ within those ,;?n!ierc>red in occultism. This was elaborated on at a public lecture in ?002

Lionel Snell:

" "sor.’.e would say we live in a secular age and that interest in things ■'· ^if.rnal is a minority fringe thing...but when you consider estab-

I’.'.ent figures into religion you realise that is not so". ;:^ is would be a given, when one regularly witnesses media coverage of .'-Heads of State and politicians publicly attending Church services, for -■•example, however Snell continued: ‘ ■ "but such people would agree that there is a loony fringe - those interested in the occult... but when you consider the broad sweep of Anthroposophists, Theosophists, Alice Baileyites, New Agers etc you realise it is hardly just a loony fringe, it includes many respected establishment figures.” :This too is a given, with some members o f the Royal Family in the U K as Prince Charles advocating New Age elements, including alterna■Ctivc medicine and various Ecological causes

Snell continued:

"...but such people would agree that there is a loony fringe - namely ■, those who claim to be into magic... now get a group of magicians together - including the Inner Light people, the W E Butler and '. Gareth Knight lot etc - and they too seem fairly normal. But they '

would agree that there really is a loony fringe - i.e. those that follow

. the dangerous Aieister Crowley... get a group o f Thelemites (Crowlc\a.is· together and you do have some odd people, but not much more than any other minority clique - but they do admit that there S a re dangers, particularly in the sort of uncontrolled sorcery practiced ЩЬу Austin Spare... get a group of Spare admirers together and it en clu d e s lovers of his art as well as his magic, and they might well ^^7 For just one example H R H Prince Charles initiated the Foundation for Integrated ^№rdiciile in 1996, and lobbied the government to allocate £10 million to fund a five-year ^^search program into the effects of alternative medicine in 2000. Reuters News Item V . on C N N www.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/aIternative/11/29/health.britain.

17S

Dave Evans

176

warn you ofF Chaos Magicians, who have done so much со discredit the m an... get a group of Chaos magicians together and they will say ‘please don't confuse us with Satanists’” Quite whom the Satanists would warn against is unclear, hut it is probe4| ably Christians. O thering’ is a powerful tool, however one i h.ir is misun^;.^ derstood, as the historian Michael Foldy wrote in 1997: "otherness only signifies difference without quantifying it, and, in many cases, without explaining why difference, in and of itself, is ' ’· necessarily bad... stigmatising someone as 'other' implies that vjt' know practically nothing about them ... the real threat o f the ‘other’ is the threat of our own ignorance, which is projected outwards" Along with this continuum o f 'otherness', there is an important matter of decreasing numbers as one moves along the continuum oudined by SneS above. My introductory chapters gave some idea o f the numbers involved in magic in Britain, and within that small and finite number, the much smaller probable proportion of those individuals involved in such i-eat ' as Satanism and‘black magic', as compared t o ‘white magic'and broader/^ neopaganisms.

J

As has been indicated above, rather than using such value-laden terms as black or white magic some occultists have in the last 120 tears tM.-i so subscribed to the somewhat more liberating terminology o·' Ri^p-V· Hand, and Left-H and Path magics (often referred to as R H P ,uid LbBP;'4 respectively). Much like the political divisions of Right-Wing ,md Left' W ing being originally simply a locator of precisely where certain politic i. groups during the French Revolution used to sit in their assembly build­ ing, R H P and L H P magics were originally intended as a simi '.ir. and li-st value-laden label than Black and White, merely indicating two diffr irj; but morally-equivalent approaches to the subject, which I examine now

398 AU quotes in this section are from Lionel Snell, personal communication 3 ^ 2004/ -S· which he very kindly transcribed for me from his own notes used for a talk at Wa:.ki!.4 Bookshop, London, April 2002 ЯОО

Foldv. Oscar Wilde, о idd. emnha.sis oriainal

177

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

Which hand? Which path? li-f,

H

fpwwver useful ic would be to have maintained this moral equivalence, ‘ ji.hiiCivjMintervenes here, with the left-hand side having long been ascribed ncg.itive, with dextrous being a right-handed term and sinistrous, 'iwnu- lu\ illj sinister, being left-handed. A minority o f people are left|pli.t;u.ed, perhaps less than 10%

although the right-handed hegemony

\£)-'.ie;l·.. ig that was taught’, often forcibly, in British schools in the j;h;tarlic; 20:1'. Century. ί|ί;

'..ire t.i rlier, a ‘lefty, told me of having his left hand tied down to his

jlQ'jx.ii T. sihool in the 1920s to force him to write right-handed, for

I

||||tlf|ipk. In adult life he reverted to being left-handed and continued

|||i||i'|ork, write, eat and play several sports left-sided with considerable 4 'HiiCes-i.

h h 'lh d ^^esign of many such everyday things as computer keyboards, scisί*'!;ίί!ΐίη; and can-openers continue to favour right-handers. ‘Left-handed’ |,.)O:pialso be a derogatory slang term for a homosexual,‘left-footer' for a j-.::; Crtlrolic in a Protestant society, and in folklore if one spills salt then

*1 nc's thrown over the left shoulder to counter the Devil

A quote

|;' from Classical Greek period regarding the hero (and later God of medijl) one and healing) Asclepius indicates an early left-right distinction, with ii' die left being the ‘darker) more baleful side, but (importantly) this being iV.habnccd within the one person: j , . ’ “and after he (Asclepius) had become a surgeon, bringing that art to si. great perfection, he not only saved men from death, but even raised them up from the dead. H e received from Athena blood from the ’ , veins of the Gorgon. H e used blood from the left side for plagues of mankind, and he used that from the right side for healing and to ^ '''

raise up men from the dead” 4M

St jn lc/ Coren, e t a l . L a t e r a l p r e f e r e n c e s a n d h u m a n b e h a v io r , New York, Springercited here jackic.frecsheU.org/woh/cest_stacs.hcm indicates 5 % strong lefthandedness with 3ί2% ambidextrous to some extent and 72% strongly right-handed.

, V t r f a g . 19 8 Ϊ»

A fascinating resource for left-handed matters is the Anything Left Handed website vftrw.anythingIcfc-handed.co.uk/lefty_myths.hcml

" 40Д

Apullodorus, Bibl.iii. 10, 3, 8-9. 1 am very grateful to Andrew Chumbley for finding fb» reference and having the kindness to share it with me. Andrew died very shortly after А *Л а

r n ^ r ttlr tra »

n r r}·»/» r m f r i i ' n l l t / лт г\чп гг

·»-»

I

I

■I

Dave Evans

178

Although the Greek notion o f the left side as negative' predates it, the inversion, especially with regards to food seems to be an echo of Carnivalesque behaviour in early-modern Europe discussed in the pre*·.; vious chapter, the specific use o f L efi-H an d Path as a descriptive terni^ within occultism derives from the practice of Varna marga, literally ‘dw | left-hand way’ in Sanskrit. This is a pre-modern Tantric ocuilt sysfHft;V^ derived from Hinduism that involves the practitioner in the system­ atic breaking o f various Hindu societal taboos involving diet (such »'',j the consumption of flesh, wine and grain) and ritual sexual intercourse,.,^ which on occasion occurs in graveyards and similar settings, to remind’’ the participants of the continuing cycle of life and death. The name of the left hand path seems to derive from this practice being ;: linked to the left hand side of the face of Shiva, the Hindu god of c'estruction

in this case the destruction being of the societal controls ol rhe .*

individual. Conversely the right hand way in Tantra is of a form that is

i

much more familiar in theme to wider secular Western audiences, being ·| comprised of quiescent, devotional and 'surrender' methods such as yoga,'· s meditation, asceticism and 'monkish' withdrawal from the sensory and aesthetic pleasures o f the mundane world. The Varna marga breaking of food taboos is of much less relevance » modern Westerners than to the original Hindus whose religious and social upbringing would have very strongly reinforced strict (Ίι··.)'·ν con* -straints. The Left Hand path is more often a term of convenii—.to ; i thtj W est rather than of literal adherence to the original Varna marga, whieffi would not seem remotely transgressive to the majority of Wesron’cr·; who were used to eating meat and drinking alcohol as a norm.al part of life. Considering the diet within magic is relevant, however. Tire mode magician Lionel Snell wrote that "the current fusion of Paganism and Magic means that most Magicians feel very close to the animal world and J actively oppose animal sacrifice to the point of being strictly vi-ver.i’· лй' However he is ‘not a vegetarian and I try to accept some conscious responsibility for creatures and vegetables killed to feed me. The death is consecrated by my intention to cook well rather than create junk food.,. I could always skip a meal, and so am not eating to live but for ple.isurc... joy 403

Kacon Shuai (Mogg Morgan), Sexual Magick, Oxford, Mandrake, 1994, p vn ju ч

404

Johnstone. SSO TBM E.

d

40

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

179

■/iis precious. Therefore I endeavour wherever possible to cook like an artist, it ave my plate clean and generally conduct my life as the sort of i i '‘devated being that I might myself choose to be eaten by” get4 ralisation o f ‘most Magicians' is not supported by any figures, :from jonsfilting the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Occult Census

(discussed

r) a figure of 33% vegetarian and 4% Vegan was found among their : respondents, which is far higher than the average for the country, . wlierc vegetarianism is apparently practiced by only around 10% o f the population ■Oin&us, one

Even allowing for the regional skewings in that

much more tempted to believe this figure.

Il'itbis also brings up the matter of animal sacrifice, another popular allegaoften brought against occultists by the gutter press and rabid fundat.iiisT groups. This is a digression that could easily turn into another . on its own, however a few quotes should give a taste of a few magiузйяк musings on the subject. Ithell Colquhoun w rote:‘‘another school of ^ЙМШуЬс ·η.lintains that any rite involving bloodshed is ‘black’. ..yet every ' ‘t h ’gion has uemanded blood sacrifice in one form or another, and some iCi!. do Does the magician, if he uses such rites, act more inhumanely th.u the sportsman, the butcher or the vivisector?” ‘'®*. LaVey wrote that icgarding either human and animal sacrifice‘‘Satanists could not perform bi.tli sacrifices (because) Man, the animal, is the godhead... therefore, the S.:ranist holds these beings in a sacred regard”

O n a slightly different

Johnstone (Snell) w rote‘‘blood sacrifice plays a very minor role in iiwdcrn Magic- there is nothing even remotely approaching the massive glo'ijal slaughter of turkeys for the Christmas ritual, or other world reli­ gious sacrifices”

Some practitioners are open in their admission of

■rternal 'checks and balances', without them being moralistic codes per se, within their practice: the magician Peter Carroll writing that Ml»· ' I iT

been used in the past to create fear or terror... blood sac-

'ifice IS most effective and most easily controlled by the use of one’s own blood. .1 however, the power to control blood sacrifice usually ,es Ibid, p M. Emphasis added. Having had the great pleasure o f eating at Mr. Snell’s гкЫе! can concur with the artistry comment. Sorccrc t's Apprentice, Occult Census, p 24 497

The l^Ks Vegetarian and Vegan Foundation website www.vegetarian.org.uk/

49β

Colquhoun, Living Stones, p 174-5

^

La\ cv. Satanic Bible, p 82 ϊηΙηιςΓοη#*. .^.^OTRMF,. n со

180

Dave Evans

brings with it the wisdom to avoid it in favour of other mediods"’**. There is also a left-right, good-evil split that is apparent in some views o* the arcane Hebrew mystical system, the Cabbala. The spelling' vaties 11 Cabala, Cabbala, Cabballa, Caballa, Kaballa, Qabalah, Quabilah in it is not assumed that my choice of spelling is the definitive and correa version, and this arcane knowledge has been known since before the singer Madonna first bestrode the planet and then discovered the Cabbala.This^ system is visually displayed as a threefold tree’ structure, with a middle pillar and branches on the left and right, all of which hold spl·

sephira to which are ascribed particular properties or qualities. The left hand side of the tree, particularly the sephira Geburah as rl ciple of severity, is perceived to be a source of evil whereas the ■'gl-.r han.i: side, such as the sephira Chesed represents goodness. However tlu· psr-j war magician Kenneth Grant (1924- ), discussed at length in ili.iutito come, has experimented extensively with the ‘averse tree, in ννΙ,ΐι,Ι'. die mirror image, or the 'other side of the tree entirely' is what is perceivedi many magical observers as dark and evil As the modern archaeologist Robert Wallis points out, some mythology, especially within The Mahinogion, (which is a source _ magical inspiration for many Celtic magical groups) has elements ■ challenging taboos, particularly dietary ones over the consumption of ЙЯЙ flesh of taboo animals

which is akin to the dietary transgressions t

are used in Tantra. There is not space here to posit some means by which any commonality''’ could be historically supported between Celtic myth andTanttic у

■.■

which I suspect would be a task involving great speculation and 1;· by many factual and geographical gaps. In any case, on the devi '.опгч’г^ of these concepts the Hindus seem to have been there first, since Tantra predates both Cabbala and The Mahinogion by some centur:es, e-.-er if the presence o f a 'taboo challenging’ element in the magical riru..! o* at.·, given society may have derived from much later sources. It is important to note that within the early Hindu culture there was etfi 4 11

Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonautfp 40

412 Grant, Nightside, p 1-2 writes:" the negative, or averse side o f the Tree lus been k e p c ' out o f sight and sedulously ignored... it is futile and false to imagine a coin with i»ne side · only" ДТ1

W a l l i s . S o r i n n o l i r i c s o f F.r.sra.sv. Τ 3ΐίέ*.«;!ηχ r r in . W v r d W o H e n . n δ.

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

mstirtction between the two paths; they were simply seen as two ΪΟ attain the same transcendent goal, that being religious union tfa Bodily waste here included nail and hair clippings, but specifically f’.ccci and urine. This was written in the days when chamber pots’ (kept under the bed at night, to be dealt with after use by one’s servants) rathe" rhari flushing toilets were in almost universal use in upper-class houses. Fortune wrote in 1929 that merely reading about the L H P is"calailatc«l to make the flesh creep”, and that involvement in it is akin to drug .iddiction

She was also very harsh and dogmatic on the employme ’.r of

‘eastern methods of occultism by Westerners, criticising Blavatslu. fot her "Tartar blood” which so obviously influenced her “affinities . the light of Asia”

■irh

and thus fuelled her desire for the introdutrion of

these methods to the West. Fortune also criticised the transferciM of occult methods in any international direction, since Western magical iai»® tiation often includes elements of surprise and threat within tho ntual re-enactment of various mythic scenarios, and this would be equally inappropriate for other races, since “the Hindu dies readily from shock” (with Fortune giving no justification for this incredibly racist statement), and, more generally, due to racial differences the Eastern guru can give the Westerner "little practical help in matters of ethics” So far as Fortune’s allegations of a homosexual conspiracy go, Crowley certainly was an active and often promiscuous bisexual for most of his life. Charles W Leadbeater (1 8 4 7 or 1 8 5 4-1934; the birth date is uncertain and open to debate) was a leading light in the Theosophy Movement of the early 20th Century

until his career was damaged by several (seem­

ingly accurate) scandals about his sexual predilection for very young boys Crowley, never one to shy away from attacking any perceived defea or weakness in those he disliked (even if the attacked ‘sins’ of his victim were in some cases those he also practiced, and in the case of Leadbeater, it being an attack on someone who had reviewed his books favourably).

421 1930

Dion Fortune, P s y c h ic

S e lf'D e fe n c e ,

Northampton, Thorsons, 1970, p 67. Original

422 ______________ , S(J«e O c c u ltis m , Northampton, Thorsons, 1968, p 1 1 7 , 119. Original 1929 423

Ib id ,

p 161

424

Ib id ,

p 164» 167

425

Blavatsky Study Centre website blavatskyarchives.eom/Ieadbeaterbib.htm#Liie

426

Peter Washington, M a d a m e B l a v a t s k y ’s B a b o o n : T h e o s o p h y London, Seeker 6C Warburg, 1993, p 117-8

W estern G u ru ,

a n d th e e m e r g e n c e o f th t'

Ρ·:

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

185

wrote a scurrilous sexual limerick about him 'Ihe hCi\i of such ideas may have originated in the publicity storm fol­

i

lowing the arrest of Oscar Wilde. Following Wildes trials for immorality and indecency with young men in 1895, the moral panic o f predatory boii'.osexuals metaphorically 'feeding on 'innocent young boys’ spread ■vn- wider society into occultism in the early part of the 20th century, \rficre to some extent the notion remains. As the modern magician and author I’hil Hine perceptively wrote: by the end of the Nineteenth Century there were two 'identities’ based on Gender preference - two categories o f person: Heterosex­ ual (normal) and Homosexual (Deviant). These became mutually exclusive absolutes - one was either normal, or not, in these term s... as a great deal of what passes for modern occult literature emerged at the end of the Nineteenth Century, it’s really of no surprise that occult writers took on board the prevailing social mores of their age, especially when it came to regarding attitudes to sexuality” Ihis appears to be based upon the Leadbeater incidents, and: “the resulting furore not only damaged the 'Iheosophical movement as a whole, but also gave rise to the rumours that there existed groups of ‘Black Magicians’ who obtained occult power by psychically vampirizing young boys” Writing about the notion o f sexual vampirism with youngsters in a magical setting means that I must again refer the reader to matters of abuse. As mentioned in the previous chapter there is not scope within this book to delve deeply into the ‘Satanic Ritual Abuse’ scare in Britain in fhe latter part of the 20th Century, however the reader is directed to die recent works of La Fontaine and Medway for further information, and 't can all be seen as a probably paranoid re-phrasing o f this huge misd ection deriving in part from the Wilde trials ^ "The holy Theosophist, Leadbeater, at a battue, who said to the head beater: 'your pr»ck . 11 crazy- to suck, but Fm lazy-just fuck your five fingers instead, beater” Crowley, Selected P o e m s , p 200 (28

Hine, B r e e d in g

(29

Ibid

130

L ' Fontaine, Satanism, Athlone History of Witchcraft, and Medway, Lure of the

D e v ils

■

Dave Evans

186

The historian Michael Foldy believes that more tolerant attitudes same-sex relationships largely prevailed from the early-modern perioi ^i onwards in Britain, and that it was the Oscar Wilde trials in I W

and",'!

their aftermath, which allowed (or encouraged, with newspapei '■’■.eda assistance) a public outrage that rapidly created a societal system of i r e erance towards such acts. The biographer and literary historian Ш и Reade believes that there was "a discernible wave of homosexu.il

.Lu)

ture, beginning around 1850 and closing shortly after the W ilde trials vf

1895"

and perhaps actually being destroyed by the consequences oi

the trial, and that before then there were many instances of an archetypal ^ Englishman “passing through hom osexual and religious crises” fro'rjjj 1 8 5 0-1900

432

The proceedings of the various Wilde trials were deliberately not pub­ lished in the Court Session papers (publication was usual with all other trials, unless State secrets were involved) on the grounds that the details; were “unfit for publication”, thus leaving room for outrageous public spec-' ulation and overblown hyperbole about what was actually being offered as evidence in court

Nowadays the cut and thrust of pretty mucti »

every sexual act would of course be reported in the press, due (apart front salaciousness being a major selling point) to perhaps a decrease in desire to hold back such details, or because many people can imagine worse in any case. Lord Alfred Douglas, W ildes lover, wrote after Wildes convic­ tion that his prosecution was motivated by hypocritical moral fundamen­ talists among Members o f Parliament, who he called “maniacs of virme", '4 who were motivated to punish one prominent homosexual in 01 der to save many others, who were allegedly in positions of power. The press of the time, as often today, operated on the principle or ' more lurid and disgusting the story, the more newspapers were sole... 1 their primary function... was not to stimulate thought, but to .ii-.n-iSey’' and entertain their readership” (regardless of any fabrications used the rale) and “public scandals meant increased circulation.... this in represented increased revenues and increased power to represent public ,1* n t r in m n - 435

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

writes that"heterosexisrn is ‘institutionalised’ in popular and pro­ fessional discourses and codified in civil and ecclesiastical laws. In effect, ¥j ‘ilctcroscxism’ legitimises and authorizes the use of various means to ,·' testrain and suppress a minority group” js'^fWdy also sees heterosexism as an evolving entity over time, culture and ^ ^ ^ ra p h y , with the state o f heterosexism in Britain prior to W ildes as being one of confusion and sympathy for 'those poor queer folk) i ^ .a h rapidly mutated into anger, intolerance and persecution after the 'tcpon.-.ge of Wildes trials

Foldy describes the change o f perspective

on lion-iosexuality during the nineteenth century, from it being seen as a sin, a lack of willpower and a debauched crime, to becoming a third sex. ' rhi' sexual invert, whose inclinations and behaviour were biologically detoruvned and manifestly 'other'”, and whose behaviour was increas­ ingly being pathologised, by being given medical terms (such as a form of .

mental ;|lress} and psychological labels (such as perversion). Ihe fear of ‘otherness’ was translated into fear of a dangerous unknown Ш1 гу, and it was in the‘‘spectacle of the W ilde trials (where)... one can see die public face o f homophobia and the structures of a revitalized, more j^gressivc, and more intolerant heterosexism emerge for the first time within a thoroughly 'modern' context”

The prevailing medical-scien-

dfic theories of human development posited a battle between progress and degeneration, and it was to degeneration that decadence was linked. 'Ihis could be seen as “the .. .process of the physical and mental deterioratKSiof the human species... presented ...o ften ... in the racial language of (he imperial nation-state (i.e. the degeneration o f the“English Race”)”

T h e ‘homophobic moral panic which followed the W ilde trials can be seen to have represented a host o f fears which incorporated the various thriMcs ostensibly posed by a ‘new’, dangerous and suddenly very visible L.iregory of persons... to an 'organic' social body that perceived itself as snuggling for its own survival in an increasingly hostile and unpredict­ able w orld ” and “all of rhp forre^ aenerallv ■ac < - f i m t n a l r \ r

т

Dave Evans

acts o f subversion such as Wildes, which contested the hegemotljr the dominant moral values... were viewed by many as socjally regrtb'' sive and labelled‘degenerate’” ’'‘‘b This was particularly true o f‘‘the sacra^ lized performance of the sodomitical act was intended sinmltaneoiuiy' to ‘negate’ the constraints symbolized by God, religion and i ivilizatio?i and to glorify man’s ‘natural’ impulses for brutality, lust and physical sa^ isfaction”

which is relevant when one considers the pseudon

correspondent to the Star newspaper (and quite probably a friend Wilde’s) who made the point that if Wilde had sexually ruined the liw^. o f several young girls, instead of penetrating young men, he would nevK' have appeared in court. There is also a political history element. A t the time of the Wilde rrbji the ruling Liberal Government had become moribund and ineffecnvit and Foldy contends that this and the assorted other social probleius as economic depression, industrial unrest, military tensions overse.as lowing General Gordon’s disastrous defeat at Khartoum, the clamottE;* for Home Rule for Ireland, the campaign for Female voting (and thiib; a greatly increased and frightening, largely unpredictable electarate if came about) etc., led those in power to pick one problem and attempt address it vigorously, in the hope of gaining some kind of control. Immorality, and in particular same-sex immorality was the pro chosen, since “the ‘normal’ was predictable, and hence, from the Spoint of view, easier to manipulate and control”

An establish

figure who wrote to a large extent about othering, social pathology state control, and hugely influenced the social perception ol :1ί · Left-! Hand Path via the pages of his novels is Dennis Wheatley, who to next.

441

Ibid, p 74

442

Ibid, p 1 2 4

44

Я

Ibid. D ггд'Яо, in 2. and 142

-1

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

189

Dennis Wheatley and the LHP к- anti-occult, racist and highly salacious fictional works of the best3; ,p|!i!:gauthor Dennis Wheatley (1 8 9 7 -1 9 7 7 ) and the later horror-thriller Ip A p K c d upon his writings have considerably helped to reinforce this

Tjrje^itive Vii' tv of the L H P and its adherents, in a similar way to the work

i

.•difDior. ГоItune.

||'fof ex.iinple in Wheatleys fifth novel The Devil Rides Out (first published ii!955, the members of a black magical, Left-Hand Path group headed by | “·ίν.·Ιΐϊ'·3«εΓ called Mocata, (based in many respects on Aleister Crowley, i\ivlloni WlKatley had met several times) include a Negro who is “a ‘bad Jjipwk’ ifcvcr I saw one” (as described by one of the book’s heroes), an .! Mandarin Chinese‘‘whose slit eyes betrayed a cold, merciless

ij.'iwtliff,.. one-armed Eurasian, a ‘‘fat, oily-looking Babu" (a hugely derogii'

>4^ of the time for an Indian) and a hare-lipped German Conflict (1941)

In

Ιί'ϊ' · l ' ‘ ΤΙλ L)'der of the Left-Hand Path... has its adepts... the W ay o f

! g

'U Dii'.iiess is perpetuated in the horrible Voodoo cult which had its tpiyms in M.ulagascar and has held Africa, the Dark Continent, in

-

' r centuries and spread with the slave trade to the W est

i , bitUs.. nost of the black man’s Magic is crude stuff b u t... among li!\ Λb ;tc^. 11' ough it is generally the wealthy and intellectual... to whom

'f;·

.

t'.: Д]:ак

also made to Nazism's alleged involvement with the Left-Hand In The Satanist, (1960), a Satanic group have as their hench-

i nun a sinister Indian

and the racism and anti-communism contin-

j'.-Bes:"Blacks, browns, yellows take our money with one hand and aircraft, Uiiks. j.uns from the Kremlin with the other”'’'*^. A group o f Satanists «rested in Butain comprised:

Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out, London, Heron, 1972, p 5 ,10 , i i , 25. Original 1935 '445

..... .. ___________ , Strange Conjl/ci, London, Hutchinson, 1966, p 12-13, Original

·' «94т L''· 4 4 6 ____ ___________ , The Satanist, London, Century, 1988, p 78, Original i960 r

Thid. n i TT

Dave Evans

190

“a strangler... a bank-note forger... a Czech secret agent... a publisher ( o f ) ... more poisonous literature than Communist H .Q itself... the rest of them are ... mostly rich people and well-known...who have been paying lat cheques... to one o f the biggest sources of the funds used to sabotage British industry" thus being a collection of both ‘low-lifes’, other nationalities and unpat*’ riotic higher-class people. In Wheatley's novel They Used Dark Foreei, (1 9 6 4 ) the villain was a Satanist who had "chosen to follow the LeftH and Path, because in no other way could I achieve my desires"

This

kind of blanket-labelling condemnation seems eerily reminiscent of the generalised xenophobic media storm generated after the indecency trials of Oscar W ilde in 1895, when the newspapers of the time called Wild& aesthetic, decadent artistic philosophy a

“French and pagan plague

which has infested the healthy fields of British life"

and as the Iii.sto-

rian Michael Foldy writes “since England and France had been ‘natural’ enemies for centuries,

.

and since it was well known that France had always been a hotbed of vice, permissiveness and radical ideas, Wilde’s ‘cult was viewed as unpatriotic if not treacherous”

S

The French were also Catholic, of course, thus under suspicion from a Protestant England to begin with, and in a useful twist o f fote (or deliber­ ate manipulation of court process) for the media, Wilde was found guilty on May 25th, the Queen’s birthday, at that time still a day for expressions ' of patriotic fervour. In the latter half of the nineteenth century much pioneering medical and psychiatric work was carried out, across Europe, in an attempt to medicalise and categorise deviancy and degeneracy in its many form.s. .\s Foldy writes, these included the "chronically sick, the mentally ill, the criminals, the sexually deviant, the politically malcontent, and even the chronically poor"

"’Ihe

‘degenerate’ label was used so often in popular discourse ... that an 448

Ib id ,

449

_________________, T h e y

p 392-3

450

Foldy, O s c a r W i l d e , p 142-3, emphasis added,/« 69

451

Ib id ,

452

/bid, p 73-4

p 53

u se d D a r k F o r c e s ,

Hurchinson, 1964, p 158

■

The History o f British Magic Afler Crowley

щ

mm

к i·

f, ; miwr I'Ίο cross-linkage of negative associations occurred. I f a person ntmaged to fa ll into any one o f the . . . categories, he was often, by ’ association, suspected o f fittin g them a lT'453 '' f'liAich is much the technique used by Wheatley in his novels, that of '.-iOaching every possible sin) deformity, defect o f character or disease of to any scapegoat, thus the adherent o f the Left-H and Path, under |:;;i^eatlcy, commits an encyclopaedic range o f religious, moral, political criminal offences, is physically unpleasant to the eye, has a disease morality that is possibly contagious in some manner and is usually \4№t British', or at least not a patriot. This view is o f course not solely ?'Wbeatlcy's. After the second W orld W ar the feeling in Britain against rfie Germans and the Communists was strong, for example die milieary strategist and war historian Major-General John F C Fuller (who . Ы once been a disciple o f Crowley's) wrote, in the depths of the Cold ■'-Wirin 1954 that

!j\ 'Kii.ssi., lus never belonged to Europe; her civilisation owes nothing ' ■to Latin culture... (they are) the spearhead of the Asiatic threat to ί

i’urope"” '.

*-As well .IS warning against communism, Wheatley wrote (and para­ ph· . -c the same sentiment many times in introducing his books) that Ί

h.’u c never assisted at, or participated in, any ceremony con­

nected with Magic - Black or W h ite... I feel that it is only right to ngc

:he reader) most strongly, to refrain from being drawn into

the practice... to do so would bring them into dangers of a very real ui'd concrete nature”

В

Pc:

lally I believe that Wheatley is not telling the entire truth here as

tfgai J.s

b is

occult involvement, and he is ripe for a really good biography

vrift -lYsc.ircher to discover more. I do not believe that he was an active и' long-ЧIm magician, but there are things'between the lines’ in his ram-

I'.ing 3-voi'.ime autobiography that gently hint at his having had some • «Si

Πτιίρ 74, emphasis added.

' 4'*! lohii EC Fuller, D e c is iv e ■i'·. '■'■ii’ inal 1954.

b a ttle s o j th e W e s t e r n W o r l d ,

V.

z,

London, Paladin, 1970, p

45- i^· .ms Wheatley, author's note to a collection o f four magical novels ( T h e D e v il Sid. · O ut, T h e H a u n t in g o f T o b y J a g g , G a t e w a y to H e ll a n d T o th e D e v il a D a u g h t e r ) , Lon-

iftfeHeraemann/Octopus, 1977 (orieinals 10 3 5 ,104S, 1053. lovo).

191

Dave Evans

192

fairly catastrophic magical accident while ‘dabbling’ or experimenting some point in his youth. This may have completely turned him ag the subject, and could explain his anti-occult vehemence in later ycars.-'^i It should be remembered that as a hugely best-selling popular aud the writings of Wheatley had magnitudes more readers in wider cu (and in the case of his films, viewers o f the ideas therein) than those i Blavatsky, Waite, Fortune, Crowley or any other occultists combined-is.S 1972, after nearly 4 0 years of publishing (including this period having been interrupted by a world war) Wheatley wrote o f having sold ■ quite astonishing figure of 3 0 million books.

It is perhaps ironic, giwijt'y

his anti-occult stance, that from the privileged standpoint of a rich. famous author that Wheatley was editor of a series o f books, Ί be Леяй(^>,

Wheatley Library o f the Occult, a project intended to republish older, Its#^ famous and considerably more factually-accurate occult materials diM;, his own, by trading on his name and reputation. In 1 9 7 4 this includediT« collection of Blavatsky’s journal articles, and in W heatley’s introduction·,! to that volume he praises her for the tireless work in "garnering ... immemorial wisdom o f the East” This positive comment jars somewhat with the explicit racism in hisi*? novels. However it is possible in his old age that with the wider politiffli'j machinations such as avoidance of making Race (and espenaiiv imfl№;>2 gration) an electoral issue in the 1970s prior to the final entry into 0;·:η·.1ν'ί law of the much-strengthened third Race Relations Act in 1976

whid; I

afforded considerably improved legal protection against discrimin.inor for non-native-born Britons, Wheatley was making a conscious if beUri·.··. effort to conform to a more moderate stance. This view is supported b; some reasonably benign praise of Native American spirituality in his %

Irish Witch, first published in 1973. However the Native A;nericans the book were historical, from the 19th Century, rather than aintempCiiij^ rary, and the main positive Native character is one who has convertts^ff Christianity as well as maintaining some elements of his faith o-' Wheatley remains highly critical of all other non-English and Вага^ Д protagonists in this book, of course 456

W heatley, D e v il R id e s O u t, p xii

457

W heatley, Introduction to Blavatsky, S tu d ie s in O c c u ltis m , p 9

458

Tony Kushner, Immigration and race relations in postwar British society, in 2 · C e n t u r y B r it a in , E c o n o m ic , S o c ia l a n d C u lt u r a l C h a n g e , p 418

459

Dennis W heatley, T h e I r is h W it c h , London, Arrow, 1975, p 94-5,108-9, J46'7aml

T C i- O

Ο η ’ί τ ί η ο ! Τ η -7 -ϊ

В, ^

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

1975 cbe magician Kenneth Grant (1 9 2 4 -), a former pupil of Crowley Austin Spare (see subsequent chapters for a discussion on M r

^ 1л т‘, published Cults o f the Shadow, an attempt to restore a coherent less judgmental view of the LH P. Based on decades of research and pi'rfitiL.il work by his magical group, the Typhonian О Т О , it represented a.', .nit'ortant step away from the stereotypes promulgated by Blavatsky, Foi time. Wheatley, et a l W hile rooting Western L H P practice firmly in the philosophical principles of taboo-challenge from the vama marga of antiquity, Grant is quite frank in his books, that the L H P in his psycho-

■

version of the practice is both a progression from the original . and that it can be dangerous for the dabbler: “one reaches heaven

^ the very things which may lead to hell”

but he rates the methods as

i-iafid (along with mastery of the R H P ) to create a balanced magician.

hf

. Ш 4Х

'

U'-· ■>

Lv

К

Grant. C.ults o f the Shadow. London. Muiier. Ι 07ς. о :

193

Dave Evans

194

Head East: Orientalism/ Colonialism X en o p h o b ia in the published excesses of Fortune, Wheatley and o-hcs give impetus to the notion that the Varna marga has been selectively а*1|| rurally appropriated to give the L H P in the W est some kind of c. ..ч'егously exotic glamour, in much the same way that Eastern spiritualities y|| general were so widely popular in the nineteen-sixties, in some respe for the duration of the rite, rather like an ingredient in a recipe . (bat is used, eaten and then forgotten about. Much as, for example, flour ’й'а vital ingredient to make bread, but the flour is not worshipped’ but amply employed to achieve a result, so any deities’ employed are used as 'RmIs to an end (whatever that intended end might actually be). My own magical practice once (well quite often actually, but this one irstai',4· IS for the anecdote) came up for censure from others in the fii'o p 'g. ' community, since I wished to run a group ritual for my own 8i.,gkal wedding employing the symbolism of a horned deity analogous

I

to ont o! ihe central deities of modern Wicca, but in a slightly different fo'-n. 1 V.,s told in no uncertain terms that what I was doing was pure

,1

evi! Ironically the speaker of that comment, apparently a very know!edceable and experienced witch for whose practice I had previously a very good deal of respect, habitually sported a badge declaring, "Celebrate Diversity’’. Apparently this celebration only goes up to a point (the point

. ΐ» '

■

being It which that rather obnoxious person ceases to be diverse them-

'етф! "Si-I:

sdves, presumably...) With that same de-sacralising 'move to metaphor’ the associated conseni'lv-neality concepts of good and evil are also completely removed from, .^substantially diluted, or blended together in chaos magic, since there are I'.o inherent codes of moral checks and balances that might appear in any other religious belief, such as previously known Commandments or Teaits .illegedly derived from a Deity. The stage is wide open, with no

TCes As the modern occult philosopher Lionel Snell wrore; “what reli(gioui people fear about Magic is that it embraces Evil as well as Good ... It (m.igic) is not advocating Evil but simply more prepared to recogjhise ks place within creation”

It would appear that magic was never

so dear-cut anyway: the eminent modern chaos magician Peter Carroll ’isovidiiig one useful perspective: "White Magic leans more coward the acquisition of wisdom and a general feeling of faith in the universe. The Black form is concerned more with the acquisition of power and is reflective of a basic faith in

The end results are likely tobe not dissimilar,for the paths meet inawayimpossible todescribe" oneself.

479

Johnstone, SSO TBM E., p 146 rs W

T

K h .n

Щ•I

Dave Evans

202

There is also perhaps some small level of one or more o f personal a ^ dizement, useful P R notoriety or fiscal advantage (perhaps fromij sales) to be gained in trading on a reputation for evil among the broffl world. The modern magician and author Phil Hine describes how, ing nineteen-eighties “chaos magic began to acquire a sinister' reputation...many peop| associated chaos with anarchy' and other negative associations, ar ... some Chaos magic publications were hyped as being'blasphemani sinister and dangerous' in a way that they were not, which proved s the same to be an attractive glamour for those who required ®чс1|||| boost to the ego” to which the totally pragmatic Lionel Snell adds: “when has moderad| ever sold booksi’'"*®b Indeed, and that was part of the rationale for incfe ing the word Satan in this book title. I wonder if it worked? This matter brings us back to the ‘continuum of evil' highlighted b f Snell, above. In the late 1960s Anton LaVey pointed out that “hunlua beings are not all benign or loving. Just because the Satanist admits be a., capable of both love and hate, he is considered hateful"

H e castigated

occultists who make any division between white and black: “there is no difference between‘W hite and‘Black’ magic, except in the smug hypacrisy, guilt-ridden righteousness and self-deceit of the W hite magician himself” who LaVey sees as posing as an altruist: “no one on Earth ever pursued occult studies... without ego gratifications and personal power ‘ as a goal” Occultists themselves are quick to offer alternatives to this, with Si writing that: “the direction o f Magic is not towards Good, nor tow: Truth, but rather towards Wholeness. A Wholeness in which Bad Untruth also have their part”

The American magician and follower

of Crowley, Jack Parsons (1 9 1 4 -1 9 5 2 ), expressed a similar view in 1950: “we must have it all out, the fear and the disgust, the hatred and cow­ ardice, and the beauty, tenderness and courage as well, and balance all

480

Hinc, Oven Ready Chaos, p lo

481

Angerford & Lea, T hundersqueak, p 6

482

LaVey, Satanic Bible, p 58, emphasis original

483

Ibid, p lo i

484.

lohnstone. SSO TBM E.. n тал

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

Then we can get the truth"

203

The need for balance is a quality often

fejjtiarked upon in practical magic texts. One of the modern founders of i magic, Peter Carroll wrote: “a natural inclination toward the darker ! of magic is as good a point as any from which to begin the ultimate and half this book (Liber Null) is devoted to the black arts” by derivation, half o f his book must also be devoted to white magic... and hi continues: “high magic recognizes the dualistic condition” (e.g. a w^dsjivhere happiness cannot exist without sorrow, and the same is true Ш И opposite subjective states- such as hot-cold; dry-wet, up-down w^chfcan only be defined by reference to their polar opposites) “but does net care whether life is bittersweet or sweet and sour; rather it seeks to : atliiive any arbitrary perceptual perspective at will” Tfei modern magician, artist and author Jan Fries added to this in 1992 ine discussion of creating art for magical purposes: ‘“automatic drawing gives your inner self a chance to get rid of «pressed materials... some of your drawings will seem terrible, (Ш:к, evil or disgusting... A rt gives you the chance to come to terms Hiith...the demons that you’ve raised. Can you learn to look at them fethout fear or loathing.^ People who seek only beauty and harmony Wtstrict themselves more than they can know. I f you give body to your horrors you may heal y ourself

ian extension to this, the magician and author Phil Hine identifies aitive-emotional-behavioural constructs as discrete entities - Per("Л а! Demons if you will”

which both reifies demons and consigns

to the realm of psychology; thus interaction with these demons becomes neither'black magic nor psychotherapy.

C o r r e s p o n d e n c e b e tw e e n J a c k P a r s o n s a n d h is ‘e l e m e n t a l M a r j o r i e C a m e r o n . (On■ ) Cameron, M & Hymenaus Beta, Eds). 1989, letter of 27-1-1950, emphasis added. See ir.bablon.net

: '^ 8

486

Carroll, L i b e r

487

I b id ,

488 Fries, personality. лЙЛ

N u ll,

p7

p 17 V is u a l M a g ic k ,

p 40; Emphasis added. ‘Demons' here meaning aspects of

P k ll Win I

1 AVICr^nrA

207

208

Dave Evans

W hat today^s Magi say about the LH P As the anthropologist Richard Sutcliffe remarks, most dissemination of information and debate within the magical subculture occurs "largely on a one-to-one basis or through a variety of magazines which hequcntiy. have a life span of between one and two years"

rather than through any

large hierarchical structure or (within magic) a 'mass media’ campaign. Thus it is likely that it will only be through surveys o f this nature (and then a quickly-following meta-survey of that data) that a more accuraw. wider modern picture could be assembled. W hile this is perhaps on the borders between a social study and research­ ing ‘immediate history' I felt it important to examine how, or indeed IF, those historical views o f the L H P previously discussed were still in use in the present. These e-groups had (at that time) memberships totaling 910, which added to my 30 known correspondents gave a theoretical maximum possible audience for the survey o f 9 4 0 persons. Alrhou^-'.i the groups surveyed had that many members ‘o n the books’ it cannot be assumed that all group members read my emailed questionnaire, and there is likely to be an overlap of memberships between groups, with many people belonging to more than one group (while not making more than one response to the questions). In addition some groups are open to browsing by non-members, so the actual response rate of a few dozen, although seeming to be pooi, \i.is possibly one percent of those who might have read the mail, wliiJi .K)a limited opportunity sample from ‘a stranger’ that asked rather tentious questions is a pretty reasonable and encouraging resporse small fractions of a percent being not uncommon tallies among

. ■

surveys that I have seen run on other subjects. N ot all of the membership will have been in the U K , since even the 'regional’-based e-groups have members who are expatriates, who use the 507 Richard Sutcliffe, Left-Hand Path Ritual Magick, in Graham Harvey ( harlotte Hardman (Eds.) Pagan Pathways, London, Thorsons, 1996, p 109. Original 199$. 1'A^uid add now that the Internet has had a hugely important role in allowing more communica­ tion in the magical world.

;

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

grouji.v to keep in touch with occult friends in that locale, for example,

numbers or proportions o f those who are not resident in Britain is 4. ftot known, and since this book is about Britain it might give some slight

^liiurring of matters, assuming that perhaps 'foreign magicians might ?^-'lview the LH P hugely differently from'home grown British ones, but this f·' xxKiid not be avoided, and in any case the responses from known ‘foreignweie actually o f use to illustrate some points. *.■ h should also be remarked that at least one of the respondents was an Americ-m magician who has been resident in Britain for some years, so that further blurs the matter o f exclusively studying ‘British magic) as discussed in the introduction, since to exclude foreign-born nationals who live in this country and practice magic here would smack of racism. The full text of the survey appears in figure 2, below, and was deliberately df«!i;:;cd as having a few open questions, allowing as brief or verbose

j'bv cts as the respondents wished.

I

In my PhD chapters on the historical development of modern (1945 onwai Js) magic I'm confronted with the slight problem that no-one agrees on exactly what the‘Left-Hand Path’ actually MEANS anymore, either philosophically or practically.... some of you are authors have written about this in published works and-or on the net, which I have hopcftilly already quoted in proper context, but I wonder if you have the rime to Mswer the following, in as much length or brevity as you wish. I am attempting to identify some core characteristics of the terminology, so far as current magicians are concerned, to contrast to some of the older ’book' definitions, which may or may not have been written by practicing occultists (there is a pretty laughable series of comments on the LH P by the novelist Dennis Wheatley, for example)— or which may have been modified over time as the practice of magic evolves. You can be quoted in my thesis as under your real name, a pseudonym, a magical name, initials (either your own or made up initials) or as “an anonymous magician” as )OUwish; if you don’t indicate otherwise I will cite you as the forename and surname that I have for you, or the name with which you sign your email. I’m also copying this request to several e-groups, which some of you may be members of as well as being individually emailed this by me, so please only respond once! If you don’t know me either in real life or from .my previous e-contact I would appreciate it if you make clear your gender if you are remaining anonymous (or if your email name does not necessarily make this clear), as I would expect there is some mileage to

209

210

Dave Evans

b e had fro m com parison s o f m ale an d fem ale answ ers to th e m atter. You m ay also state your age in years i f you w ish, as I suspect th a t w ill prtwide a n o th er factor for analysing th e results, b u t statin g b o th age and gender are entirely optional. S in ce I am interested in

individual beliefs and defi­

nition s, n o con ferring please! T h e re is n o"righ t" answer, in th is insunce, o th e r th a n your ow n tru th s, th an k s in advance fo r any help you can give.

For those who read this on an e-group, please respond to me O l’FLIST, to avoid cluttering up the e-group, thankyou Qu 1: In you r o w n w ords, h o w w ould y o u d efine th e L e ft-H a n d Path? Qu 2: Conversely, w h at d oes th e te rm R ig h t H a n d P a th m ean to you? Qu 2a: Y ou m ay answ er th a t th ere is little d istin ctio n b etw een th e two, in w h ich case, w hy (in you r o p in io n ) is th at?

Qu 3: D o you co n sid er y o u rself a L e ft-H a n d P a th m ag ician - under you r o w n d efinition?

Qu 4: I f you d o n o t th in k y o u rself to b e o n th e L H P , have you evei been called a L H P m ag ician (o r som e sim ilar d istin ctio n ) by others? In w hich case, ( i f you k n o w ) w h at k in d o f d efin itio n w ere th ey using? And w hy d id th ey give you th a t label?

Qu 5 : D o e s th e L H P have any stig m a in th e m agical g ro u p (s) or en v iro n m en t(s) you in h ab it? I f so, w hy? I f n o t, w hy not?

Qu 6 : H a v e yo u ever received any u n w anted a tte n tio n fro m legal or offi­ cial b o d ies fo r p articip atio n in, o r p ro m o tio n o f w h at you believe was perceived by th e m to b e L H P M a g ic (k )? S in c e th is is obviou sly a d if­ ficu lt and h ig h ly sensitive area I w ill tre a t all replies to th is qu ery with u tm o st con fid en tiality as requ ired , i f you w ish to give m e any details. Equally, sam e q u estio n for w h at w as perceived to b e R H P m agic?

■I A n y an ecd otes p e tta in in g d irectly to L H P experiences w h ich m igh t be o f use to m e are also m o st w elcom e.

Figure 2 , Ad-Hoc Ь ф -Н ап 4 Path questionnaire sent out to Internet recipients in August 20 )·?

F r o m p re v io u s e x p e r ie n c e o f a s k in g o c c u ltis ts la rg e r n u m b e r s o f closed ur fix e d -r e s p o n s e q u e s tio n s I h a d fo u n d t h a t th e y te n d to b o r e easily, w l idi o f t e n sk e w s re s u lts, a n d I w is h e d t o a v o id t h is in o r d e r to g a in s o m e useful, i f s h o r t, c o m m e n t s . I n m y B S c . th e s is , p u b lis h e d in e - b o o k a s

Healing 1мп-

guage, I p e r fo r m e d a m in d n u m b in g 'm u ltip le re p e a t-m e a s u r e s ' testing q u e s tio n n a ir e e x e rc is e w ith s p ir itu a l h e a le rs, m a n y o f w h o m w ci c o ccu lt­ is ts to o , a n d th in g s b e c a m e v ery te d io u s , th u s t h e c h a n g e h e r e to allow a m o r e flu id a p p r o a c h .

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

' This Ikiidity worked well, with several respondents ignoring the formal question-answer format response entirely and instead using the ques-

■ fions as prompts to provide me with some beautifully succinct summa­ ries of their own experiences and philosophies on the matter. The dis' cussion (of the general matter, not the responses I received, which were I'-oadcast) spread, with considerable value gained, to the Journal fo r '■.Jh.· Academic Study o f Magic discussion e-list, comprising at that time pilot

'>.!ot:nd a hundred academics and magical practitioners (including some prop!·: who were both) and where appropriate some relevant responses Saken from there are included below. The responses of occultists to the .■Survey were, as expected, varied but informative, with many mentioning rile \'ama marga origin, but often taking their own interpretation consid■Ч.мЫу further, and in several different philosophical directions. Fi'i e «cample,'Joel Biroco’ a male (former) occultist who is over 4 0 years » d s a id the L H P is"the Varma M ar^of Tantra... many who use the term -■L! IP may not think this way though, and probably use it as a synonym ШГ satanism.........it is a way that goes against convention and consensus” It should be remarked here that although Satanism is probably by definition on the LH P, not all L H P is Satanism in precisely the same way that all Feta is cheese, but not all cheese is Feta. Dave Lee, an over-40 male magician told me: “RHP believes literally in the myths of salvation by conformity to die conventional view. The L H P practitioner sees that the myths are metaphors for illumination. The L H P is always to some degree in opposition to the conventional received wisdom about the world... :R H P b e l i e v itself”

e s in

a myth; L H P knows the P O W E R of belief

An anonymous female magician aged 4 6 told me that in her direct expei-'ence the L H P is "a strenuous, engaging path that requires commitment Л) one's goals” and it is "anything that does not rely upon Llewellyn books” Llewellyn are a large American publishers largely known for their occult output which comprises titles on astrology, W icca, contact with angels, new age... and similar subjects which are for the most part in no 'Joel Biroco', personal communication, 17-8-2004 ^

Dave Lee, personal communication, 5-10-2004 A nonvm on.4 fe m a le m a a ir ia n . дЛ. n e r« o n a l rn m m n n ir a r m n

211

Dat/e Evans

212

way within the L H P

This response is especially interesting in thi.i ;t

identifies the perception of a publishing bias to particular named areas o f magic. Llewellyn do in fact handle some sex magic titles and other bo iks that may be more LHP-orientated, but these seem to be very much in •he minority of their output. The magician 'PB', male, age unknown, wrote, in common with Joel Biroco, above that “at the most charitable, they (L H P methods) can be understood as reinterpretations or ‘recontexmalisations’ o f the I lindu Tantric concepts; more soberly, they are to be understood as misin' terpretations of them”

‘Corax’, a 36-year old male magician told m e,';

that the Left-H and Path is “the search for a very personal form of tran­ scendence... allied to...tan tra in that it is deliberately taboo breaking...it carries a generally negative connotation... ”

Corax continued, with a

very useful piece of personal, experiential insight that "due to my own training in theology... (and) my studies o f eastern religions I ... understand the possible spiritual benefits of taboo­ breaking behaviour; which is often harder to deal with intellectu­ ally, when you encounter it within your own world view; seeing and understanding it elsewhere enables you to see that the principle is sound.” The late academic, author and modern magical practitioner o f the ‘Sab­ batic Craft'Andrew Chumbley (1 9 6 7 -2 0 0 4 ), then aged 36, told me: “In scholarly term s... (L H P and R H P ) are theoretical constructs... which - via a metaphor o f cheirality (hands) - are ... used... to dis­ tinguish between differing forms and interpretative levels of magical practice... they have become 'loaded terms’ which may be consid­ ered collations o f assorted polarised associations: good/bad, black/ white... symbolic/literal, diurnal/nocturnal ...all of which are adapt­ able in the personal worldview of an occultist and thus without definitive objectivity’) which again is an important point, the term L H P is never a universal

511

LieweUyn Publishers website www.llewellyn.com/

512

PB', posting to JS M e-list, 19-8-2004

513

'Corax', personal communication, 23-08-2004

< тд

fhid

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

'referent, but contingent upon personal beliefs and memes. Andrew continued: “as constructs’ one can only cite differing instances o f their use. 'ITie use of the terms waxes and wanes in popular use, ultimately prese." ciftg a dualistic mode of thinking that implicitly begs for resolutior .>

I.ee’s comments were in some way aligned to this view: .... (L H P 'R H P ) distinction is only of limited use these days,

and the territory is very confusing. Take, for instance, the philosophy of ‘do your will and fuck the world’ ... exemplified by mainstream views typical of...scientific materialist individualism. T V dramas ■·

.ire protagonists who are amoral ultra-consumerists, a deeply

. I'lii'entional position" Λ,ν wt’i 1as an academic perspective, Andrew Chumbley provided me with

.1 p:.ig:natic magical interpretation that was echoed in some respects by oihc- 'espondents, that the two methods are best used in tandem, not ■opposition or mutual exclusion: "LI IP /R H P describe the magical forms ... under the auspices of one’s opposing but mutually complementary hands, literally... both are deemed differing means to potentially identical ends, thougli symbolically the right hand governs benefic method and the left malefic... we are each a body with two hands, and though one hand may not know well the deeds of the other, both serve one master 517 The‘sabbatic craft’ mentioned is Andrew’s version o f a synthesis o f witch­ craft and the methods of Austin Osman Spare, who is discussed else­ where in this book. Andrew also provided a quote from one o f his very limited print-run privately published practical magical books from 1997 on the personal challenges of the L H P method: “it is deemed needful for the Seeker to cast himself into the battle­ ground of attainment - to wilfully enter situations o f adversity and therein confront all and aught which will necessitate the honing of

-

? 15

Andrew Chumbley, personal communication, 19-8-2004,

5 (6

Dave Lee, persona! communication, 5-10-2004, emphasis added

TU:J

213

Dave Evans

214

intent... the practitioner consciously draws himself into that which conflicts with the direction and nature of his intent. Embracing greater and greater circumstances of adversity the practitioner is forced to exert himself to greater and greater degrees in discipline"

This concurs in some respects with the arbitrary acts performed to 1 the hold of human limitations’ remark o f Peter Carroll above, which ntay ' perhaps link in with Chumbley having been a former member of the. Illuminates of Thanateros, a magical group founded by Carroll An eminent elder Wiccan, John Belham-Payne gave a similarly balanced Д view of the matter, writing: “the left hand path is but another magical J direction... to most people the Left hand path means to follow an evil, black arts route. For me magic is magic. It is both positive and negative and it all depends upon the aim of the work needed” ‘Jaq Hawkins^ a female chaos magician and author, who is over 4 0 years o f age, sent me an extract from the first drafts of a forthcoming book, j which to an extent continue the themes given by Andrew Chumbley and others: “in modern context the opposition of this duality (L H P -R H P ) is outmoded and obsolete. The universe is not constrained by blacMand white definitions, and the world of magic has long since .wak­ ened to the integration of various aspects of reality" Jaq also wrote some warnings on the risks of rebellion and transgre purely for the sake of it rather than for conscious magical reasons: ' who completely rebel against their conditioning can become re-condi­ tioned into behaviours which are diametrically opposite to their f.iinini; and become just as constraining as the original programming” eating that taboos to be challenged must be selected with wisdom, simply because they are taboos, since:

J 518 Ihi(i, with quote provided by Andrew Chumbley from his own (and rare) Dracoi hui Gritnoire (Private Edition, Xoanon, 1997), no page number given. 519

Andrew Chumbley, conversation, December 2003.

520

John Beiham-Payne, personal communication, 24'8-2004

521

Jaq Hawkins, personal communication, 27-8-2004

^22

Jhid

I

ί

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

*ihose who try to impress with blacker-than-black versions of the LI IP are just as enslaved by their self-made prisons as the extreme RHP" 54 Robert Taylor, a 44-year old magician who was a member of the Magical

01 del run by Kenneth Grant, the Typhonian О Т О (see chapters 5 and 6) gave an eloquent and very useful analysis: “L H P or R H P ... derive from аЛкii-nc practices and have little relevance to the way I practice magick . today ..the magick that I do certainly derives from, and follows the tradi­

tion of, the LHP, but in my understanding of it the terms are no longer aj^licable”” ''.

■

Robert further explained his position with a historical reference: “the tradition we follow was developed from rites of the Kaula tra­ dition in medieval India”

and this relates to Grants own defini­

tions for the L H P in his Cults o f the Shadow, discussed earlier in this th.iprer.

. 'Claire a female occultist, age not given, wrote: S

“the left hand path ... is the more difficult path as the liberation that can come with it can be allied with a perceived destruction which results from breaking conditionings and taboos.” ■‘ - She also made the crucial pragmatic magical point that her definitions and beliefs in this area are "not academic, but it works for m e!... (it is) ''■«vypersonal take on it from a gut level... despite perhaps academic accuin other words a definition and subsequent philosophy need ίέ little or no regard for academic credence, so long as it 'works' for the individual practitioner. - - ТЬе magician and author Mogg Morgan wrote: # “LH P for me tends to signify a more freeform libertarian approach. RHP for me means the post war...occult establishment in denial jjj

' d c t l 5^^

!!)/(!. My thanks to Ja q for permission to use her pre-publication comments.

Robert Taylor, personal communication, 17-8-2004

525 ftW 'СЫге', personal communication, 17-8-2004 Tkid

215

Dave Evans

216

about magic”. H e added: "perhaps paradoxically my self image is as a follower o f the middle way - which you can only find ...i f you know both sides o f the path” which is in considerable accord with Robert Taylor, above, possibly inftftf enced to some extent since Mogg was also a member of Kenned; (. jt ant' Typhonian О Т О in the late 1970s and early 1980s

'Gra;i

b

Paradox’, a 23-year old male magician and academic wrote that: "L H P is a concept used to describe practices which deal direc with the taboos, fears, strictures... within any given society... while the original concept comes from the Hindu tradition, I find myself turning to that definition rather than Western Esoteric definitions which involve value judgements o f negativity or selfish’ acts” with the latter point being important that magicians would ra thcr i hoose a definition that had some spiritual value than one that was entirely nega­ tive. ‘Grandfather Paradox’ also made the point covered by others in the responses that paths are not exclusive: "the L H P /R H P distinction is an arbitrary...dualistic tool used to isolate and teach certain /techniques/ for working with the Other. Magick is not inherently Path-based... to state that one is a LH P or R H P magician...inherently precludes one from using the ocher path... the (L H P -R H P distinction) ...is ...a tool for those not directly using techniques, to highlight practical differences” Again, similarly to the late Andrew Chumbley’s response^ the point is nude that L H P -R H P is at least as much an academic construct or a piece of analjTic shorthand as something асшаЦу used by magicians themselves in theii prac­ tices. "ГЬе magician'PBI male, age unknown, made the pragmatic point tliat: “L H P (is)... a useful term for non-religious, chthonic and ^ oisd c.. magick (as opposed to R H P wfoich is basicaUy religious, ‘heaven’ andlight oner rated ... generally moralistic and socially collectivist in the most obnoxious ways)” 532

528

Mogg Morgan, personal communication, 20'8-2004

5 2 9

__________, personal communication, 23-9-2004

530

'Grandfather Paradox', personal communication, 20-8-2004

531

ibid

ίο Ί

* P R ’ T> rvci-tnnr егл

H i « r t i c « i n n 1ί«ι·

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

He also said that it is not "sin ister or scary... just that it is about working with the deeper levels of the unconscious, primal instincts and sometimes repressed mate­ rial, and so is basically orientated towards the self rather than any

\‘.\y. rhy causes... of course the true RHP, with its social and ethical elements is very important too, but rarely exists outside of the sancti­ monious, self righteous, fascists that make up R H P traditions these days''” 3.

;■ , Matt Lee, a 36-year old magician and academic expressed his reluctance at making any definition, before writing that the L H P is about: "an emphas.s on (a) personal responsibility, rather than reliance on external P codes (such as the Rede) (b) a female or feminine source of majik (c) ’ ■ the importance of sexual gnosis and ecstatic-shamanic procedures (d) improvisation and experiment”

'T h e Rede’ that M att mentions is a

\\ .i c:m variation on th e‘harm none’ principle, as discussed above. M att give 'cveral caveats similarly to several correspondents above "distinctions are external... generally ill-founded and is the result of a modern development... in majik....derivation from the Varna marga is probably historically accurate but of little relevance to those with an interest in the ‘indigenous’ (Celtic, Shamanic, W itchcraft tradi­ tions) rather than Indian/Indo... the L H P /R H P split is one side of a wider split between the more organised and text based majiks as .ig.mst the more shamanic and intuitive majiks” Again the role of texts and books is raised here, as by the anonymous . correspondent above who cited Llewellyn as a specifically not L H P pubii^er, as is the notion of a functional system coming above historical ■■ accuracy in importance to the magicians actually using the systems, as ·■, was given above by ‘Claire’. C\'. die question of the stigma of, and any encountered interference in LHP activities several interesting factors emerged, and many wide vari­ ations of experience were highlighted. 'Vlad Kiosk’ a 35-year old male wrote:

Ibid Matt Lee, personal communication, 18-8-2004

Ibid

217

Dave Evans

218

“I done believe it (the L H P ) does have any stigma...the in.'gir.ii groups and environments that I inhabit (a re )... broadly postmo.icrn ' and open-minded. This seems to mean that either other indivi.uials ' haven’t read much Blavatsky, Fortune, Wheatley et al. or that Mich views are taken with a pinch of salt” The notion that Blavatsky’s definitions might be ‘dying of old age' af^| only around a century of existence is important in this book, as t I'igblights the fluid evolution of magic when compared to older, more t^tablished religious practices, where lengthy continuity of theoretical undefpinnings, definitions and seminal texts is a much more common factor. Ш ‘Kiosk’ continued; “many members and officers of the Pagan Federation...find it very difficult to conceive of magical approaches other than theit ownthey were very confused by chaos magic...” M att Lee wrote: ”on the wider pagan community that is ‘unorganised ...there may occasionally be some antagonism”

The ‘stigma’ of the

L H P as seen by‘Corax’ is that “in moots SC casual conversation, it has a .. negative connotation; seen as evil or selfish, or immoral... (but) In covea work it does not have any negative connotation, as we woukl seeouf,’j practice as ... fundamentally L H P ”

■'

Although those respondents indicate that any historical damage done by the skewed perspective given to the L H P by Blavatsky is gradually ^, fading, one anonymous female correspondent told m e“L H P is I'cvilcd by (ϊ ? the local pagan scene. I believe that it is because o f ignorance and fi .n . By way of illustration she told a most disturbing tale: “I showed around (a named L H P magical book, related to Luciferian elements of Witchcraft) at a local m oot...it was well received... things were different at the next m oot... several men apparentlythought that the sexually suggestive illustrations therein were n'dicarive of loose morals on my parr... I was followed around and pliysically assaulted ... a man had brought soft porn especially to sl'ow 536

‘Vlad Kiosk’, Personal communicacion, 24-8-2004

$37

Ibid

$38

Matt Lee, personal communication, 18-8-2004

^20

‘Corax’. oersonal commnnicarion. 22-о8-аоод

i

The History o f British Magic After Crawley

v );

'I'C 1 d my gracious comments trying to deflect it... werent strong

«10

h,,. I was called a demonologist... I returned the following

mo til... (almost) everyone simply avoided me with a vengeance... I nevtr returned” ;,'(Όπ a similar tack, and in line with the remarks b y ‘Joel Biroco’ above, Rol'etr Taylor wrote: “rlu term L H P has been... ‘‘hijacked” ... as a term denoting ‘satanisml This principally seems to derive from American sources... e ^ ristian ity is so desperately and obsessively forced upon the Amer^|кйп people that it is only natural for an ‘equal and opposite reaction’ take place. Hence, many alternative practices seem to have been fflfcjwn eogcther into a melting-pot and poured out under the single ‘ . name of ‘satanism’”. ‘ Rebel’s magical mentor Kenneth Grant was caught up in an attempted ргсчч sung' regarding‘black magic scandals’ in the London of the early M'W3l)s i^sec later chapter) so the matter is obviously ‘close to home’, pj'Sflbert confnued: ”} have no interest in’satanism’. .. the term seems to be a cheap ...popuition... used for shock value more than any real mystical or mag[purpose... The equation of the term L H P to ‘satanism’ and‘black‘ ick (and its converse R H P being therefore equated w ith‘g ood’. .. magick) has therefore led me to avoid using them (as terms)” *‘‘4 ■These responses highlight the hugely judgmental attitude that some researchers find prevalent in society, (as described by the modern soci^ktllem to name 5 important female magicians (as opposed to witches, when ^emale participation and power is more equal with, if not superior '

the male) in the modern time, and no-one (of over 50 such conver>аыо's) has been able to name more than three, and usually the same three :;ames (Dion Fortune, Jaq Hawkins, Leah Hirsig). However the same question for naming male magicians can lead to an exhaustive list fiisttn W o od m an , no.^rinam .SA.^M dici-uccir.··» lici

225

226

Dave Evans

o f names. Fortune died in 1946 and Hirsig left the public magicai -.ct. after splitting with Crowley, and opinions vary on her lifespans but she seemed to have 'dropped oifthe radar’ in the mid 1920s. That only lea· one modern magician, Jaq Hawkins (a pseudonym), a charming acul helpful current writer and practitioner of chaos magic, and who is ironi- . i cally for a book on British magic, an American ex-patriate. Although a democracy o f any form did not arguably arrive in Britain until the success o f the W omens suffrage movement in 1928, it was a constant lure and goad for this process o f what was touted as a potential freedom from the enslavement of feudalism, religion and class

As the novelist . ■

Antonia W hite wrote o f the early years o f the 20th Century, so far as Christianity (in this case her Catholic Nuns in her Convent Schools) was concerned ‘"womens votes are unnecessary. O ur Lady (the Virgin Mary) had no vote and did not want one”

Sexism was (and arguably

in some areas still is) rife not just in spirituality. The halls of academia , from which Tolkien and Lewis’ tenures sprang while they wrote their material, were completely male-dominated

and by 1 9 6 0 only 1

of

Oxbridge undergraduates, the British academic elite, were women Magically the process is one of slow change. As Claire Fennel and Ray Sherwin wrote "the extent to which many occult writers objectify women and the strength of their stereotypes reveal them to be only slightly removed from even the most classically Virgin/whore complexed ( .rho· lie...it is not for us to say what the role of women in magick sl-.ouid be... we ... leave individual women to define their own roles, (the Ihc' lemic) ‘Every man and woman IS a star

к rather than (the Biblical)

a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness, I permit no wom.m to teach or have authority over men; she is to keep silent' Class-wise, magic was in the 19th Century very much for the learned

557

Veldman, Faf^tasy, The Bomb, p lo -ii

558 Antonia White, Frost in May, London, Virago, 1978 (Original 1933), p 132 in John Hodgson, The Search for the Self: Childhood in Autobiography and Fiction since 1940, Shef­ field, Sheffield Academic Press, 1993, p 68 559

Veldman, Fantasy, The Bomb, p 45

560

Ibid, p 44

561

Aleister Crowley, Liber A l

562

I Tim .2 :11-12

563

Claire Fennel θί Ray Sherwin, Womans role in Magick? Chaos Internatiotu

41, 39

i, p

T

г

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

г .

227

ditc. and ir is only in the last thirty or forty years that is has entered the mainstream with practice across classes, perhaps due to the cheapening and wider availability o f books and increased leisure time for all. That

larger analysis however is a sociological question as much as an historicd one, and a cross-disciplinary study of class and gender roles within modern magic is long overdue. I look forward to reading it as and when

it appears. i f . Despite these problems, even where historical study in a subject is difficult it is better to attempt to research than to ignore the subject entirely, .(·-■ and it is my hope that history can learn from the approaches of the other ic. disciplines employed here in order to be able to examine the subject ■ further. Uso, for the historian of modern magic this particular area, being plastic Ж ipfd peopled by those whom many in the outside world would consider

S Ψ dark, dangerous, socially deviant - if not outright criminal, and, in wl-.-itever way, perverse’ types, provides a rich area for research, if often Nscr w’th challenging difficulties of definition, interpretation and an ' lingo r,r evolution and re-invention of the methods used for study. .

Λ

I' individual I have on a few occasions been shocked by some of what

■. fe..4 occurred in rituals that I have witnessed, which is precisely the point the L H P ; transgression is ongoing and evolving, and if rituals become . mr;.

nd 'tame then much of their magical effect is lost. The (late)

■ -nagician and musician 'Jhonn Balance' (sic) of the magically-inspired rock band Coil gave an instance of this in an interview"! personally may transgressed even the transgressive mindset, for instance when ing about eating human afterbirth”

\ As И·'' Hine writes, "the word 'never' of itself invokes too many possibiLni's

which invokes a closing and succinct word on the flexible

•norail· inherent in the Left-Hand Path from Lionel Snell who wrote what has become a transcendent maxim for L H P magicians, that "what ίο ne people call hypocrisy, I call freedom of spirit”

implying that even

‘ thi. 'rules’ of the Left Hand Path are themselves there to be transgressed, this the academic historicising of the process will always be a challenge, . end there are many instances of occultists (mis-)appropriating

• . rl.c eputation of the highly influential, well-travelled and claimed entity' ui'ir. (.tee, the British occultist Aleister Crowley (1 8 7 5 -1 9 4 7 ), since his

Ol.·:!' A s previously mentioned, Aleister Crowley is perhaps the most f.;:.u4's Western occultist of the 20th, or any other Century. H e studied Ч

many spiritual teachers around the world, eventually synthesis­

ing his own system of magic from a broad spectrum of world teachings ■ (tanging from Buddhism to Egyptology to Ceremonial magic), and as i. such he is often cited as a teacher or major influence by modern occultists on a wide variety of different paths. His many books remain best sellers in the field and numerous extant magical Orders and individuals follow Idrie4S S h a h . T b e

N f;w Y o r k . D o iih lp fla v . тоб д. n

229

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Dave Evans

his philosophy and practice his methods. These are in a large part based upon his Book o j the Law, a text which was supposedly dictated to him by a spirit called Aiwass in Egypt in April 1904, following a magical ricuai performed within one o f the pyramids. Among those who have claimed genetic, magical an d /or psychic links . with Aleister since his death are Victor Norris, variously a Satanist, mititaria dealer, fascist agitator and owner of a sex contacts agency who also claimed familial relationship with the leading occultist Dion Fortune (1 8 9 0 Ί 9 4 6 )

Alex Crowley (name changed by deed poll) a 1990s '

child-murderer with mental problems

and T. Casey Brennan who'-^l

also believed himself to have been also involved in various CIA mindcontrol experiments and the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963

.

There are many more examples o f varying claimed linkage with Aleister ‘ Crowley, most of them with little or no apparent factual foundation.

Amado One exceptional example of this appropriation of Aleister's name : j reputation will be examined in some chapters that follow. His pen name is Amado Crowley' and he claims consistently and unequivocally the paternal relationship "I am the biological son of Aleister Crowley' that he was taught his magic by Aleister (thus portraying a heady baiaha comprising both claimed hereditary authority and learned power), that Aleister's spirit still takes him over and talks through him on occasions, and that he is backed by the Gods

There is considerable doubt over the

former two claims, which are examined in this piece: the third and fourth claims are a matter outside of the scope of a piece of historical research; as the cultural and religious analyst Paul Heelas rightly remarks, in sacii areas "the academic simply does not have the tools to assess the cl: im"' In any case, to be making these important claims makes Amado 'iniqi.c in the field, and thus justifies a close academic examination of his clairs and his work.

568

Anon. Golem's Gossip! Lamp ofThoth, 4,1 , p 9.

569 Jeevan Vasagar 8c Nick Hopkins, Mentally ill stalker gets life for killing boy, Ci tan (Online), 13-2-2001. www.guard,ian.co.uk/uk_news/story/o,3604,437263,00.html 570

Konformist (Online) www.konformist.com/mkkafe/tcasey/ccasey.htm

571

Amado Crowley, Quest Magic, Guildford, Diamond, 1997, p i

572

_________________, Riddles, p 174

573

Paul Heelas, The New A^e Movement, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996, p 6

■

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

231

Ihefe are echoes in Amados work of the varieties of idealised history writing (or perhaps re-writing) and the pursuit of antiquarian studies rliat became very popular in the 18th century. Fantasised re-tellings of historical events on stage were extremely common and in demand, with :he historian Meredith Veldman detailing how in the London of 1820 iherevrere no less than 5 different versions of Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott’s iJealised and romantic view of the mediaeval world, playing at theatres This may be paralleled in some ways to the present when the recent

Ij/rd of the Rings trilogy of films had such massive appeal

and it is my

lOntention that Amados books and presence fulfils a similar function :d an audience, be they readers or students attending in person at his ihisses, who require a romanticised view of magic. Despite the doubts over his pedigree, Amado allegedly heads a long•tinning magical Order, and has published a number of books and audiocapes over the past 30 years. In this chapter I refer to Amado Crowley' .'.nd Aleister Crowley by their forenames only, to prevent needless rep­ etition of the surname. References t o ‘Crowleyan’ (and'Thelemite’; per^ffling to the magico-religious cult of Jhelem a founded by Crowley ienior: which is still followed by several occult groups and many indi­ viduals today) mean deriving from Aleister. Since Amadoanity’ sounds |:iumsy and would not be the term of choice by Amado himself, I refer to |A.mad0s system’ where necessary, ■Mei.ster Crowley was perhaps the most significant figure in Western magic in the 20th century, and his influences continue to affect a very wide range of contemporary magical thought and practice. Amado believes himself to be both an occult master and the one true exponent Ills father's doctrines, and this view is expounded and expanded upon in a large number of books, audiotapes and various electronic media. N o other self-proclaimed child of Aleister has formed a seemingly notewor­ thy magical order or claimed to have been involved in teaching occultism for remotely as long as this, or with so many publications or claimed followers; thus Amado is a significant figure for study. However he is not lU-i-pari'oring Aleister; Amado's take on Aleister’s methods is controversial, •■nuing counter to ‘orthodox’ Thdema. Proponents of orthodox Thdema -74

Velilman, Fantasy, The Bomb, p 17

7i DirCk ied by Peterjackson, the trilogy of films (The F e llo w s h ip o f the Ring, The Two fowet*: The Return of the King) based on Tolkeins novels were immensely popular in the ««fly 21st Century, with the final film of the trilogy winning an unprecedented i i AcadA w ards in 'УППЛ w w w 1лгИ/>Сгк: an, while drawing on the meditation methods o f Yoga, ceremonial magic a ad a hierarchical Order structure loosely derived from Freemasonr}·. Aleister’s methods have a central motif of the philosophical p’· ■i ;'lts of pragmatically seeking personal responsibility and autonomy, which · Aleister called ‘finding the True W ill’. This is the prime aim of ad of his magic; leading to the formation of an individual who is in full under­ standing of their role and place in the universe, and in direct and total ■ control of their own life. This aim is seen by Thelemites as the opposite of the surrender of the will to that of (one or other) God, and making one’s role in the world and control of it subject to the intercession of, and interpretation by, an intermediary such as a Priest, which is common in organised religions such as Christianity. Similarly to Aleister's rationale, Amado employs an eclectic mix of magical methods drawn from several centuries of Eurasian m,i,"cai techniques and Eastern methods such as Yoga, meditation and Tai ( 'hi. but the focus is drastically different from Aleister’s, as Amado appi irs to use no extant Thelemic rituals whatsoever. H e does however include some positive use of Christian tenets such as redemption and atonement. This runs absolutely counter to Aleister’s philosophy o f the individual being utterly responsible for their own actions, and their conseijuences, rather than holding out for some nebulous possibility of Divine lorgivcness implicit in those Christian ideas. Amado is also keen on the notion o f him being a Guru and his pupils being absolute devotees to him. Holding these notions makes it impossible for Amado’s philosophy to be called Thelemic, since the True Will, the central focus o f Thelema, is being utterly subjugated here to an all-powerful leader. Amado also claims, controversially, that Aleister’s own published holy book’ The Book o f the Law , which forms the cornerstone o f Thelemic belief and practice is a fraud; deliberately perpetrated by Aleister as a smokescreen for Amado, he being the sole holder of the one true Crowleyan holy text. The Book o f Desolation, allegedly given to him by Aleister in secret and which has never been published. Amado claims (without offering any proof) to have a large following, both in millions of readers and thousands o f personal students having worked within his m.igical group, which has been in existence for over three decades. If either or

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

bod claims could be proven, this would make him one o f the most sigmScant and important magical teachers in the world. Ic » important to place Amado within the larger context o f modern IMsKern occultism. The history o f the Western magical tradition is a ooiivoluted interweaving of methods, claimed histories and some note«τςίίττΗρ personalities. Aleister was trained in the very late 19th Century Within the Hermetic Order o f the Golden Dawn, a quasi-Masonic magical aroup whose members included numerous artists and writers, including fee poet W’B Yeats. After internal political strife caused the Order to rigmenr, ( Tuwley travelled the world, gaining great insight into world ■iligious practices and joining or forming numerous magical orders. osr significant of these was his membership of the Ordo Templi )rientis, an extant large European and American group who were prac-

!he

uing r:i ualised sexual magic; which was much to Aleister’s taste, since le had been developing his own system of sexual magic for some years. Sieister eventually became head of this Order and brought the О Т О f e f s more into line, philosophically, with the content of his Book o f the

Law. Meanwhile, sprouting from the academic research o f the EgyptologistSjrncd-Folklorist Margaret Murray (mentioned earlier) and the great «thusiasm of Gerald Gardner, (the retired plantation manager who «turned to England after many years working in the Far East, also menkined above) a revival, or at least a re-creation of witchcraft commenced ft the late 1940s and early 1950s. This was coincident with the final emaining W itchcraft Law being removed from the U K statute books Q1951. Gardner started to run a series of covens, employing an eclectic nix of material drawn from Murray’s researches, Crowley, О Т О mateial

constructed Druidic rituals and Co-M asonic sources (among

«hers) with a smattering of nudity and sado-masochism (these being jardner’s own personal tastes), and he was largely responsible for popuarising a nature-worship based pagan Witchcraft, called W icca, in the Ж and America. ^ I c x Sanders, who was a performing psychic and creative scholar o f magic, and much more o f a showman chan even the self-publicist Gardner, came to notice in the mid 1960s, after Gardner’s death, with his own brand af Wicca. Understanding the needs o f the print media for sensational

233

Dave Evans

234

stories, Sanders was also extremely good at using the then rel;.; i·. ■ . .cr outlet of television to promote himself and his ideas. Thus 'Лч· e Were two strands of Witchcraft, Gardnerian and Alexandrian, which.. i:l ougb competing (and often mutually hostile) were largely similar in philffl^J phy and technique, although Sanders' version also drew hea' 1; on the, kind of ceremonial magic in use by the Order o f the Golden Down seventy years previously. In true ‘scrambling for an occult pedigree’ style, Sanders also claimed, ‘ that when he was a child he met Aleister Crowley, and Aleister tattooed Sanders’ thumb as a memento

a claim which seems to be entirely false,

but makes for an attractive magical pedigree. As discussed in the introduction, in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a cultural occult revival of sorts, with Aleister being adopted into pop' culture, appearin on the cover of a record by the Beatles, and several o f his major wc were republished. Magic in general became more popular than it been in over 50 years, with a diverse choice of paths for anyone scckiag occult knowledge, tanging from Eastern gurus to magic to Yoga to UFO Cults to W icca, and an explosion of publishing on the subject, much of if hastily written and un-researched sensationalised material. It is at this point, in 1971 that Amado emerged, and he stands out as a composite character, taking a little from each available path of the time. W hile he relies on the Aleister Crowley connection for much o f his iniiial impact he is certainly not any kind of ‘c ard-carrying Thelemirc) since from his expressed knowledge it seems unlikely that Amado luis ever - .I been an О Т О member of any kind, nor performed any of their iiruals. W hile Amado claims to be Aleister’s son it may appear surprising that 1m has not called his own order the О Т О , however the American OT'O has ·,·ί^ in the last 2 0 years stringently maintained legal protection o f their naiiw. They regularly initiate courttoom disputes with anyone attempting to cash in on their trademark, which is now lucrative as they hold copyright to many of Aleister’s written works, and have expanded their operations into over a dozen countries. In any case, as the author, publisher and influential Thelemic magician Mogg Morgan said “Thelemic magick isn't an hereditary trad(ition)" ‘’•', so Amado’s claim is, on that level, meaningless. Perhaps as a sign of son* 4 576

Tony Looker, conversation. Summer 2003

^77

Moffff Morc^an. oersonal communication. t6-8-2002-

The History o f British Magic After Crawley

235

fasfr.irion or sour grapes at being blocked from this avenue of exploita­ tion of the Crowley name by the О ТО , Amado maintains, while giving

■10 fou.’d.uion to his remark, that'a large part of American occultism ... h.is links with organised crime”

and he condemns “many established

' oi.i ult 01 £.■.lisations" as "exploitative museum keepers"

which is prob-

pbly a bitter dig at the large finances generated by the О Т О publishing ^PUri’: in tl-.e'r regular reproductions of new’ or at least rare Crowley texts their archives.

V

Ar.’. ido is also not a standard' modern-day W itch either, in that he

.appears to be running a large magical order, and not a 'coven structure (aiid which is not organised on the often quasi-Masonic lines that many tnag.eal Orders follow). Although his ritual methods (see below) are in

a Ь e;clate ai'v particular thread, which often leads to contradictory com­ ments bcioming lost in the weave and weft of the story. However with c.ircful and very slow reading many contradictions become apparent; to gnejusc a few examples: Amado insists that Aleister has "no stigma” on the continent nowadays, it being purely a U K phenomenon

(the latter

O' which is itself arguable as he has many British admirers), but within a '

598 Cyril Balderson, Guinea Pigs website Manager, personal communication, 27-42^04. Mr Balderson wrote: there are "two books, both called M c h i d o e s A r m y , one by Peter

Ά ilums and Ted Harrison, and the most recent one by Edward Bishop. Both give a full ' list of all Guinea Pigs... neither includes the name L.Standish nor the name L.Walker/’ Tl··* Walker link is discussed later, www.queenvic.demon.co.uk/gpig.htm ,q t

Davis, F ic t io n , p 3 A m a d o C rn w le v .

n Ti fn

Mi

Dave Evans

242

page, Aleister is still "damned by the Vatican”

Amado cites no оШсЫ

Papal statement in support o f this claim. Amado maintains"! have never tried to exploit my name”®®^and "I don’t boast about my relationship”

but one book jacket

mentions the link :·;

three times in a few sentences and (elsewhere) he boasts’Aleisre Г rowicy lives on in me, and ... (I have) his authority, approval and

**

and "as Magicians go. I'm a good one. It runs in the fam ily"

howv. ■49

, Website, www.amado-crowley.ncc

650 ubi

, Amazon.co.uk, email, 14-11-2002

Plea For Friendship, p 5

Dave Evans

252

realm in which Amado is a besc-selling author is not an occult огс. .'■'d is under another name or names, if indeed there is any truth in tl

.

at all. H is website forum did not publicise the software problem January 2 003, which I take to mean that they did not have suffici*':-.; ^.ics to justify the notice There is also some confusion regarding the value of the Crowley surname in occult publishing. Amado says that Aleister s “name can almost make cheques sign themselves” although he writes elsewhere “I haven’t made penny” from exploiting the name. If true, this perhaps indicates unusual remuneration arrangements from publishing contracts, or his self-finanj^^ ing the books as ‘vanity publications’

but given the relatively small

market for such titles compared to best-selling general novels, Ainado’i alleged millions of sales, if actual and not merely another empty boast, are probably in other fields, and under other names. H e claims authorship o f novels and technical works, yet in 1991, after presumably retiring as an eminent (and thus by derivation, published) .’.,i psychologist and writing his first book about Aleister he said he was "not a professional writer”

but twenty years earlier he was claiming ΐ

to be “a writer and would be slightly well-known" was claiming to be a "playwright and a novelist”

More recently he ’ ( It is unlikely his high

sales (if they exist) have come from professional psychological texts, since these are seldom million-selling titles

the overall world market for

even the most best-selling general undergraduate teaching texts, shared among the very many authors in the field being below 6 0 0 ,0 0 0 sale* p .a .

Such books demonstrate thoroughly scientific, parsimonious,

rigorous styles, with coherence, attention to detail and marshalled facts. Amado displays none o f these qualities in either esoteric text or personal communication. 652 Steve Ronan, Cthonios Books, personal communication, i2-2-2003 and Admin posting to Amado Crowiey N et Forum www.amado-crowiey.net/forum/vicwthread, php?tid=2i 653

Secrets,

654

Amado Crowley, Secreii, p 12

655

МММ

656

Amado Crowley, Alba, p 20.

657 Han Ismail, Marketing Executive, Hodder Sc Stoughton Academic Publishers/ personal communication, i4-8-2002, said he would be "amazed if a heavy weight psychoI- 1 ogy title sold a million". 658 Martin Skinner, Psychology Textbooks: Creating the Subject. Paradigm, 16, Mav ιοος. ЮпИпе) W4.ed.uiuc.edu/facuitv/westburv/Paradiffm/skinner.htmi

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

‘

Amacios books, published under the Diamond or Twicen imprint, are liistributed by a separate, and un-related commercial warehousing and ■ distribution company: such outsourcing being very common in smaller publisliing ventures

The website for Twicen ^ had a blank page with

·’ ЛОinformation on it as of 10 April 2 004, and, when checked on the same cate, Twicen was not registered as a company in the U K with the official 'egister at Companies House “ k Neither was Diamond Books, Amado’s „ . 'luin publisher, registered as a company. This is not to be seen as a sign of ci.piicity, since it is not a legal obligation for small British businesses to K '^ is te r as a company until they reach a certain financial turnover

;

\ However the computer company that runs Diamond, Transym Сотри■/ t f Services is registered (as Company 1723514, specialising in software ,■ toasultancy and supply, incorporated as a company on 1 6 - 5 Ί 9 8 3 ) , and t«,i> fin.mcial reports purchased from Companies House indicates that f|';i-|l|)r the last year in which accounts were available, 20 0 2 ) the company was: .r.ning at a small turnover of around £ 1 1 ,0 0 0 pa and a very heavy afte; tax operating loss of around £ 2 7 ,0 0 0 pa, with accumulating and viinib'-Iy l.v'ge losses over the previous years. U c two directors (both with the surname Anthony, so Transym is preM.niably a family firm) are reported as agreeing to their accountants’ romment that "although the Balance Sheet discloses that the liabilities oi the company exceed its assets the directors have confirmed that they will continue to make finance available to the company for the foreseejp'jHe future”

which appears to be a standard accountancy phrase. I

lp*|pesume that their bookselling arm is included within these figures, since ■ Diaiiiond Books are not listed as a separate company, and if so, from the ■ werali company turnover, and losses involved, it must be assumed that Diamond are not selling anywhere near the quantity o f books that would n,:ke Amado a major author within occultism, and this has been the case for some years, since the losses are accumulating, and you would expect books to be priced in such a way that they made a profit. A share«·ΐ9

Niche Logistics Ltd Website www.niche-iogistics.com/

('^‘0

Twicen Website www.twicen.net

I ξ, j66f 6m #

Companies House website ws2info.companieshouse.gov.uk/ Ibid www.companieshouse.gov.uk/infoAndGuide/faq/fulIList.shtml

6fr 1 Current Appointments Report for T R A N S Y M C O M P U T E R S E R V IC E S LIM ITED (compiled 16/04/2004), and Transym Computer Services Report and Financial ^Catement for the Year ended 31 May 2002, acquired from Companies House Website, see

253

254

Dave Evans

holder list was not available to see if any of the suspected earthly .’.cnes of Amado, or those of any known pupils was listed. So how do we rliip.k know what Amados real name is? Read on...

T h e H isto ry

o f British

M a g ic

After Crowley

Hunting Amadous Real Name alth ough Amados possible earthly name can be re-assembled from a dost reading of his several books as Andrew Standish’, the staunch Thefed' itc writer and journalist (and now the late) Gerald Suster claimed to have discovered that Amado' is a retired psychology teacher from South­ ampton Polytechnic called Mike

Altlwugh Amado brushes this aside as "unpleasant rumours to do with a iei turer in Hampshire” he does tell how he was a university lecturer (loc.irion not given), eminent psychologist and "a chief examiner for a ijational award”

Award unspecified: it is implied it is psychological,

but i.ould equally be in Cycling Proficiency, Grigami or Cookery. N ot to denigrate any of those disciplines, but they would not strengthen Anudos claims. Southampton Polytechnic is now called Southampton City f 'oilege and their website confirms that it is neither a University nor

has a I'^yhology department, ;ЩA;... . e he claims a clinical psychology doctoral training and practice i tl’.e fherapeutic techniques he describes are confrontational, judgmental B®** and extremely odd, and do not fit neatly or coherently onto a general .-.Lbeina of psychological medicine in Britain during the time when /\in.ido claims to have been practicing it. Amado gives no dates, although f accepting the claimed 1930’s birth, plus the duration o f secondary eduι..ηο.-,. National Service

and graduate studies, this indicates that his

;Lc".:peutic practice could have commenced no earlier than 1957. Ih is , is ‘.'.:>.ed on the standard 3 years military service plus undergraduate and di'i rural degrees taking at least 6 years. How ever the asylums Amado describes resemble the 1930s ‘Bedlams) ■to: 1950s institutions, where chemical control of psychosis was almost д | 1^64 Cc

Suster, review o f Secreii, p 154 -Amado Crowley, personal communication, 30-7-2002: and www.southampton-dty,

i l l Д^ 6

i-AmadoCrowley, Secrets, p 7

6(" __ ______________ , Lewd Gbosfs, p 6; Liber L mczs 3, The Amethystine cycle, p 3; and eU» vheic. if·'·

Ibid, p 7, 9 ibid, p

'i i t .

II,

and Amado's Admin, personal communication, 14-8-2002. Amado claims

md N ariona! Servicp hprwepn .ςΓΚοοΙ and nn»v«»rsirv R iddli»« n

255

256

Dave Evans

universal

yet Amado only gives one mention of a medical drag

used, so perhaps his account is simply a plagiarism of older, more tionalised books about the Lunatic Asylum system, rather than remotely autobiographical. If, as it appears, he has clumsily borro’ such tales to felsify an identity wherein he was building the notion that he was an eminent psychologist, and he uses this professional position to give authority to his written wisdom in occult matters, then this ,-g.titi must cast huge doubt on his other claims. In addition, even allowing for either of the two possible forename s,'‘ther| is no reference to an Andrew or Michael Standish” in the membi-ship lists of the Royal College of Psychiatrists

The history of psychologi­

cal medicine is confusing, various bodies offering certification from 18S0 onwards, with the Royal College of Physicians offering a Diploma 1954 until the early 1970s, but prior to 1971 it was not necessary to obtain any qualification to practice as a psychiatrist or psychotherapist so any absence of record is not conclusive refutation of Amado’s cLii-'t in this respect. Unfortunately the UK's Online Doctorial Theses catalogue

only covers

from 197 0 onwards, so it was impossible to search online for Amado’s PhD, as his alleged career daces from before then. Searching rhi m4i prehensive Psychinfo

у

psychological publications database for Andrew-

or-Michael Standish showed nothing. Psychinfo is the standard, compre­ hensive and authoritative international database o f published articles and books in psychology from 1872 to the present, and for an important psy­ chologist to not be represented on that database would be unthinkable. A 'surname only’ search showed several publications. Omitting female authors and publications before or after Amado’s likely career dates (also omitting much of the lengthy thought processes which led to other nega­ tive searches) left one: a Barry Standish, with a very few published papers from 1982 to 1991 on mental health (Amado’s claimed area). However 670 David Hcaly, T h e S u s p e n d e d London^ Faber 8C Faber, 1990, p 65 671

R e v o lu t io n : p s y c h ia t r y a n d p s y c h o t h e r a p y r e -e v a lu a te d ,

Royal College o f Psychiatrists' Archivist, personal communication, 28-2-2003.

672 I b i d , 9-8-2002, and Chief Librarian, British Medical Association, personal com­ munication, 8-8-2002 673 British Library Document Supply (Online) www.bl.uk/services/document/articles.html 674

B a t h I n fo r m a t io n D a t a S e r v ic e s

(Online) www.bids.ac.uk

,

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

257

his writing style does not reflect Amadds, and Barry has not published any books at all, so I do not believe that he is Amado. A failure to have published numerous articles or books on the subject would create a major doubt that Amado was ever anything approaching an eminent psychologist'. Regarding Amado’s various claims (see above) to be a novelist and play­ wright in his books, a search of both the British Library Catalogue and tbt online booksellers Amazon and Abe (the latter specialise in second­ hand and out-of-print titles) for either Andrew or Michael Standish revealed no titles for this claimed high-selling author. How odd.

A search by surname only showed numerous titles by a 'Buck L . Stand:sli, published from 1963-1990, many being about the American W ild W'cs: (novels such as Durango K id and Custer M eadow). Much as his critjCs might wish confirmation of Amado as ‘cowboy author’, in the derogatory sense

‘Buck’ is one of 30 pseudonyms o f Lauran Paine, a

w! .rer in many fields, who was born in 1916

To further detract from

any likekhood of Paine also being Amado, Paine’s 1970s lurid book on occultism fails to mention Aleister at all

So it seems that Amado, if

he is telling the truth about his surname, is neither a published author nor

lywrighr under any known names.

& n d ish is a town in Lancashire, U K , and so it may just be a whimsical dloae of pen name taken on Amado’s travels. In e.iriy 2004, Amado kindly sent me some emailed drafts of some arti­ cles 4 'at he was trying to have published. These were Microsoft W ord d

' nents, and by examining the ‘file properties’ option in that software,

tl

iidicated that the pieces were written on a computer owned or used

■ by oi'c Michael Walker. Since Gerald Suster wrote that Amado’s real ■ n.cnc was Mike this gave the hint that they may be the same person

(assi ming for now that it was not simply a copy o f the W O R D software

1 copied illegally and originally owned by a Michael Walker). Assuming t!'·.·.: rhv. piece was written on his own computer, and does not derive ■■ from a disk pirated from someone of that name, of course. .'-5 Definition: 'Cowboy; someone who does a shoddy job... to make a quick profit'. I' oemtl-ury D iction ary o f C on tem p orary Slang, (Tony Thorne, Editor), Bloomsbury, Lon• an 1991, p m ' 76 ‘i, 5:077

Internet Pseudonym Index (Online) www.trussel.com/books/pseud_p.htm Lauran Paine. Witches in fact and Fantasy.

T .n n d on .

N pw P .n olish

T ibraru

τη-,τ

258

D ave Evans

The file properties show considerable time spent editing the picct. ■ ther than someone briefly using a borrowed computer to perhaps perform some last-minute polishing. It may then be reasonable to assume that Amado is actually called Michael (Mike) Walker in earthly life. On this assumption a repeat trawl-search o f psychologists and authors was made, using the same tools as described above as was previously done for the name Andrew (or Michael) Standish. I found several permutations of ‘Michael Walker’ among the published psychological fraternity, but none based in the U K throughout the time when Amado was actively recruit­ ing and giving talks to his magical groups in this country, none with publication careers covering the expected period, and none in Amado's claimed clinical psychological area, thus the further extensive details of my fruitless and time-consuming searching for a ‘hit’ are omitted heic.

A search of books on ABE.com and Amazon websites found many Michael Walkers who were published in numerous fields, including anglers, agricultural experts, and the memoirs of a New York Policeman. There were some novels as spin-offs for a BBC Television medical drama but, tellingly, nothing that would imply a famous playwright, millionselling novelist or an academic psychologist. A Mike Walker was the author of numerous English-Language teaching materials publii hod b> the respected educational publishers Longman, and a Mike Walker was also found to be a radio playwright for the BBC. If this was the -..imc Walker, and Walker is Amado this might give credence to him ; ■ having millions of readers since Longman books are very widely ii->ed i:i schools and in E S O L (English as a SecOnd Language) teaching envi­ ronments all around the world, although this claim, made as Amado, is phrased disingenuously in the extreme, as it implies that his huge reader­ ship numbers are in a magical field. Assuming that Amado’s surname might be Walker and that some of h:s claims discussed above may be true, some repeat enquiries were mad^i using this surname. They were all fruitless, for example there was no Ц] Walker (i.e. Amado’s stepfather, if his name were not Standish) ■·. :1чwartime register of the Guinea Pigs Club, as discussed above. Some of the playwright Mike Walker’s work shows some stylistic and contextual parallels with Amado's writing, so I located and emailed this Mike Walker (who as born in 1946) to introduce myself and discuss the matter. H e was fascinated by my theory, and said he had a few acquairtt-

if'· Vi·-

The History oj British Magic After Crowley

Ь *

-i

anccb who were ‘into the occult, but he totally denied that he was Amado

f.

a denial that I must take at face value, concluding, on current evidence

P.

that Αιη,κίο is quite possibly A “Mike Walker”, but not T H A T Mike W'Jker, and without more time to research this angle the trail has been left at thar point, with my being very happy that with best use of all the energy available in the time I have falsified many of the claims Amado makes, ami as yet supported none.

How many Amados? With such ‘biblical’ degrees of contradiction in a relatively small number of published words (for example such as his story of how he was named by .\ eister in person when he was a small child, or by mail with Aleister ^ in g d e a d and Amado at age eighteen; depending on which texts are read), tliei'c is a possibility that although a human being of a certain appearance I called Amado' gives lectures, the books may instead be compiled by a fluid committee of ‘hack’ ghost writers. These persons are perhaps not in detailed communication with each other, since surely a professional writing te.im working very closely and doing even half-hearted research would not make multiple fundamental internal errors o f contradiction and external errors of fact? If such a team exists its work may have been lobbied together by untalented writers, so far as preserving continuity ' is concerned. There is some credence to this view from Amado’s third and final book specifically about Aleister, Wrath of... which heavily uses common expletives, whereas none of the previous books use such lan­ guage. Such multiple authorship would of course cast major doubt both on rl le entire claimed history of Amado, and the motives for publication, the latter of which might then be seen as purely for financial gain, or pc-Imps as some kind of literary or magical joke, by a cabal of writers. I have considered the possibility that this is an ‘inside job’and that Amado is a character created as a joke by a group of Chaos magicians, but my immediate feeling is that if chat were so, the jape would have been done so much better and more stylishly than it has been.

^ i i c £ \Vallcfir. nf^r.^nnal rn m rm in irarm n e

259

D ave Evans

260

Amado and Anti-Thelema A s id e from his very debatable paternal parentage, perhaps Amadoi^ second most outrageous, contentious claim among occultists is tha^. "Aleister Crowley wrote The Book O f The L a w ... as a red herring” ^ ■i he Book o f the Law is considered to be a Holy Book by his adherents, and if i forms the cornerstone to Aleisters creed of Thelema. Allegedly dictated to Aleister by a non-human entity in 1904, it comprises three complex and gnomic chapters describing the evolution of mankind, a means of magical self-realisation and an account of mankind's relation to the Gods of past, present and future epochs (called Aeons in the book). "Λ ε next about the imminent God of the current Aeon, Homs, makes some со npelling and arguably prescient predictions about the coming events of the': 20th century: Horus being a god of war. Much effort has been expended by scholars and philosophers of the occult, including Aleister himself, ift interpreting the book, for which there is not scope here to discuss. The larger part of Aleister's magical system (and its subsequent develop­ ments) and writings after 1910 are concerned with understanding the short dictated text

and it has a 'biblical' import among Thelemites,

who would find it unthinkable that it was all a sham. However, according to Amado, Aleister’s most central Holy text is allegedly a hastily-con­ cocted fraud to mask the existence of a vitally-important ancient magic.il grimoire, the Book o f Desolation, This, Amado says, was discovered by Aleister, in an archaeological, rather than a magical manner

but was

never mentioned in any o f Aleister's extensive works, and Amado claims to now possess this book but has never published it. In more recent communications with Amado the publication appears to be a 'work in progress’ but since the book is of a massive size (thousands o f pages, he says) and the work involved in interpretation and rewriting for a modern audience is very taxing, and Amado says he has "been at it for fifty years, at least” it may be some time before any of it appears in public, although given the size it is possible it may be published as a setie^ of books 679

________________

, Q u est,

p 232

680

Aleister Crowley, T h e B o o k o f th e L a w

681

Amado Crowley, Secret^, p

682

................................. , various personal communications November-December 200reoi

their content and date range, since they cover the period in which .\;".i.lo claims to have been present. Aleister s diaries neither describe the i ■ dinary events claimed by Amado, nor any visits by such a 'spi.ciai son’ while very mundane life events such as having an attack of dia'Чюеа wen·· recorded This is most unfortunate for Amado's credibility, although he i.!:rc:-iy ) claimed about one incident, “(Aleister s) diary does not mention the visit.' Neither does it mention many other things"

684

Amado Crowley,

685

_________ _________, L e w d G h o s t s , p 134

S ec r e ts,

and he says th a t. Meister

p5

686

Booth,

687

Martin Booth, personal communication, 16-8-2002

688

Sotheby and Co, A u c t io n

689

Janine Chapman, Q u e s t f o r D i o n F o r t u n e , York Beach, Weiser, 1993, p 154-5

690

Amado Crowley, Riddles, p 38 ,17 1

C r o w le y : c o lle c t e d p o e m s ,

and M a ^ ic k

c a t a lo g u e

L ife

5/6-7-1971» p 38, Lot 233, Emphasis added.

691

Hutton,

692

Amado Crowley, W r a t h , p 140, emphasis added

T r iu m p h ,

p 208-9

The History o f British Magic Afier Crowley

’^'«quц■ed him to be a secret, thus he is not mentioned in Aleister s will

The convenience of these comments for Amado's narrative should not be underestimated, meaning that anyone of a certain age can make the tanie claims; however Aleister's own specific instructions for the keeping ;A»fa magical diary insist a detailed record be kept of everything, of which technique Amado is aware

Thus it seems most likely that Amado is

'absent from Aleister’s diaries simply because he was absent from events.

In much the same way the authors of the legal papers that the historian Natalie Zemon Davis worked on had “a corpse to explain and their texts bad ‘wounds’ in them ... gaps in the argument”

this diary problem is a

^ etajor injury to the corpse, and Amado fails to plug the wound. A,'Davis is an important referent here, as she has done considerable work

\ with ‘Pardon Tales’ - the often incredible stories told by defendants .'(barged with very serious crimes such as murder, to 16th Century French courts to give reason and alternative meaning to their actions, in the hope

or fst.i;'’ ag punishment, or at least reducing any sentence handed down. Davis work is a superb example of the interpretative difficulties inher­ ent 1.1 \orking with individual, self-referential and personally motivated M ^ rical accounts. :Onerx,! mple of this is a marvellous fabricated story given by one defend;.anr, who was (he said) among a group of men out singing, playing bagBipes and good-naturedly carousing in order to encourage the giving of graditional gifts of food and drink from the occupants of various villages ®uring the celebrations of New Year’s Eve. The group were carrying Bstaves and pitchforks, but apparently only to aid them in vaulting ditches •.treams, and to deter any unruly feral dogs they encountered. The i ' i'lK··; w ere

attacked by a group of local "rowdies” and, reluctantly and after

vonsiderable attempts at pacifying by speech, they were forced to defend / tl'rm selves, and one man died. The defendant fled the region, despite, •Чип his version of the tale, his obvious innocence of nothing more than

•'.isrified self-defence after an unprovoked attack. Ihe all ernative view from this account might be that a rough band of .itmed, noisy and threatening drunks were causing such a nuisance in

6si _______ 694 ______________ Davis, Fiction, p 47

, Riddles, p ii Lucis 6, p 5

263

264

Dave Evans

forcibly extorting food and drink from householders that an

attempt;·,

was made to expel them from one village, and the confrontation turneiii violent.

Davis' study gives useful commentary on the v; 'w ’g indi-

vidual perceptions of truth, and the embroidering of stories w : !■.i ompeU' < ling supportive details as compared to mote objective and likely i ut«n. /j o f fact, and so provides a useful overview of the mechanisms of d .■pliciiy·''^ and charlatanry in any field. However with such historically remote accounts, and with all p.irticipants long deceased we can never know how much is objective i.it· and' how much is embroidered; by the plaintiff for reasons of self-preset v.-tiort in the eyes of the Law, or by the relatives of the injured party for leabO of desiring a hefty sentence in revenge. In Amado's narrative, since rlie is a large corpus of published material, diaries, and some still living wit­ nesses, there is considerably more scope for deconstruction and academic analysis, as will be seen below. In many cases there is found a much more parsimonious and credible explanation of various matters than those that Amado attaches to them.

6 g6

Jbifi,

p

6q

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

265

ml· Charlatans, Magicians and Amado k P -lvegarding d the veracity and

I

credibility of the leading occult figures of

i’ any century, the modern occult philosopher Lionel Snell makes the imptMГ.1 It point “is there a single name that is untainted by the smell of chailiuiiry?... I defy anyone to find a stainless steel saint among occult leaders’ . Snell goes on to analyse the function of trickery and duplicity

b-' in occultism: “in terms o f sheer numbers, the majority of mankind probayi .Ibly subscribes to some religion that insists that the world is an illusion... might you not find out more about the nature of an illusion by foL·

bwing those who deal with illusions?"

e.g. charlatans. H e adds that

'die history if not the literature, of occultism was too full of accounts of diose who had dedicated their lives to the search for a master, and had |:b ended at the feet o f some egotistical junky"®*. ■Siicil concludes that duplicity plays an intrinsic and simply vital part in the teaching of magic; on the one hand by creating a sense of disbelief,

oi

Jed beliefs beyond the norm (i.e. in the case of Amado that one

is being ta u ^ t by a direct descendant and pupil of a very famous magi­ cian) it performs the function of creating an environment in which magic can happen more easily, and on the other hand it establishes a scenario for a potential test of faith at a later dare, as Snell continues: “when you discowr your favourite guru has feet of clay, the natural reaction is either to Λ ;;y the evidence, or to desert your guru in anger or contempt” . Aleister's former pupil, secretary and magical writer Kenneth Grant (who is discussed in following Chapters) does not go so far as to say Amado fraud; however Grant is himself a writer of convoluted, complex occult books, rarely making unequivocal statements, and he uses fictional sources (such as the supernatural horror novels of H P Lovecraft) as ref-

tx&icc material for his own occult theories, and confusingly calls one of ius novels ‘quasi-autobiographical’. One of Grant’s more recent books; fimtb Ar. ■' (2003) very briefly comments on Amado’s books in the midst f г d:»

discussion of the hoax and trickster element in magic

RaiTivSey Dukes, The Charlatan and the Magus, in B la s t!, p 203-236, p 208 [b iii,

p 212-3

Ramsey Dukes, B la s t!, p 17 I b id ,

p 210

K e n n e th O r a n r . T b e "Ninth A rrh. ϊ,η η Η η η . . S r a r f i r , » . ■ э п т n w

ί

of interpretive history: Aleister had a magical system, does Amado hait ■ one?' (and if so, does it compare to Aleister’s?). Aleister’s magic \\. s inter*, nally coherent, with a detailed and structured set of rituals for definid purposes, and was either based on a new source; such as The Heok

the Law, demonstrative of great creativity and occult scholarship in use of existing sources, or profoundly inventive and novel. By comp.;: iso:l·'·, some of Amado’s magical rituals seem largely derivative, being urawn unchanged from (at the latest) early'19th Century published 'cunning folk' material that can be found in Barrett’s Magus

which ilatcs from

1801 and is widely available in cheap reprint, and is itself a compendium o f earlier materials, such as collecting dew, exposing water to the mooa love magic, employing apples, herbs, plaited coloured strings, the evil eye, and addressing requests to ‘Lady’ —who could be Mary of the Cathuiks, since a lot of cunning craft derives from using Christian elements wirhin magical practice. Tihere is one working in Amado’s books involving moonlit sexual con­ gress with an oak tree

and two other folkloric rituals requiring another

man’s semen. None o f this is remotely Thelemic. Owen Davies’ recent study o f ‘cunning folk’ magic from the 15rh to early 20th Centuries includes examples of early-modern and more recent herb­ alism

and love magic

Modern (20th Century) witchcraft books by

various practitioners, which themselves pillage older sources, also cover herbalism, cords, love magic, collecting dew, reflecting the moon in 702

Francis Barrett, The Magus, London, i8oi, numerous reprints since

703

Amado Crowley, £лсй//Ь«г, p 97

. re:

704 Owen Davies, Cunning Folk, p 1 0 2 , 1 1 0 Ί Ι Ι , 192, (one ‘bible' of Herbalism, Culpep­ per's Herball, having been in print since 1653)

70s

Davies. Cunning Folk,

ό

xi. 2

The History o f British Magic Afier Crowley

'aaddiviiurion via apples

267

Gerald Gardner, the 1950s witchcraft reviv-

(wlio knew Aleister), describes cords as a witch's working tool, and \iie mentions love magic

The reflection o f the moon in water is high-

as a mystical tool by the early anthropologist Frazer, writing in ; itbc 1920s

and the early-modern esoteric scholar Agrippa mentioned

" 'Ac magical influence o f rays from stars and planets in 1531 'Magical belief involving the evil eye is also of considerable antiquity, Sworthy’s 1950's study of the Evil Eye analyses examples from Ancient onwards, and gives many from the early-modern period

W hile

yOv/φ Davies is a modern and currently respected academic, the far earlier ^-Witcrs Elworthy and Frazer are perhaps less accepted as verifiable sources j»ow. In their writings, and in the case of the magical practitioner sources ^'jBKntioncd above it is not so important whether these techniques were A.scmally historically in use at the times claimed, indeed some, including ■the Gardner and Frazer references, are rather contentious for historical or other reasons (Gardner appears to have had a considerable talent for ?■, j invrnr.,in, inflation and confabulation at times; very similar to Amado’s, ■ ’ *or example his use o f the media to promote witchcraft, employing young

girls who were not witches, in diaphanous robes to dance suggestively ibr photographers ^“ ), however the point being made is that all of their mentions m print predate Amado’s published methods, in some cases by many centuries. .'\s yet 1 can find nothing in Amado’s published methods that is not a redinique already mentioned in detail elsewhere, and thus something which could be researched by any author and recycled. There is neither aovelty nor apparent talent in Amado for invention in magical techl·, 'nique, whereas his ability to crafr a tall story is undoubted, as has been 'described above.

iA'

;o6

e.g DoretnValiem e, An A B C of Witchcraft past and present,London, H ile, ig 7 j.

Ϊ 07

Cicr.ild В Gardner, Witchcraft Today, Thame, I-H- 0 , 1999, p 113-4 ,12 4 , original

1954 lo t lames Frazer, The Golden Bough: a study in Magic and Religion, Macmillan, London, f j · I. p f i i , original 1922 - ,

Cornclms Agrippa, D e O c c u lta P h iio s o p h ia , 1, Chapter 33, (original 1510) in Peter ixwell-Stuart, T h e O c c u lt in E a r l y - M o d e r n E u r o p e : a d o c u m e n t a r y h is to r y , London, Macmillans 1999, p 71 'I

- . Frederick Elworthy, i . 1 .',cw York, 1958. 7П

T h e E v il E y e : T h e o r ig in s a n d p r a c t ic e s o f s u p e r s titio n .

MacMil-

Gerald Gardner to Cecil Williamson, unpublished letter in Museum o f Witchcraft

268

Dave Evans

Amado's system also co-opts standard yogic posture, Tai-Chi-esque * dance, Wiccan-like wording, the use o f poppets (dolls used in ‘imags·^ magic as a symbol o f the human target o f the spell), and other extant nominally W iccan techniques such as ritual sharing o f food

which,

if performed before an averagely-experienced Pagan observer who was ‘J ignorant o f their supposed author, would probably be judged as extremely derivative and ‘broad church' basic pagan ceremony, and nw'.'d Crowleyan at all. Odd, then, that Amado dismisses W icca as “little more than peasant magic”

when" I have students who are W iccans”^^'',andhis methods Uft

large sections o f the same type o f W iccan rituals virtually unchanged. This might partially explain why someone with such an apparendy“:j dubious claimed heredity is still able to run a successful magical group;· he is co-opting 'tried and tested’ methods from other successhil grouj^ and magical orders, and simply reprising them in slightly new packag-' ing, rather than producing entirely novel and unfamiliar material. This fi-'.'S' in much the same way that a fast-food entrepreneur looking to succeed would most likely start up a new take-away business in a British cowb/* High Street as a burger bar or chip-shop than a Vegan Nepalese Sushi Bar.

Fishing for pupils Amado seems unsure as to how he actually acquires followers, writing chat "a genuine (magical) Order needs no publicity”

but A··;

himself advertises for his magical group, with one potential pupil say-.g; "I'd replied to an ad in Time Out, which sought applicants for an oci.iilt (j' group”

(caught by Amado). Time Out is not an occult magazine bi.t t

general London events and culture guide. Amado has advertised for some years on an‘o ccult contacts’website, o‘ :he‘ kind which is much more aligned to people finding dates with poteivia!

712

Amado 777, RaH Tungol

713

Amado Crowieyj Л/Ья, p 119

714

_______________ »Plea For Friendship, p 2

715

__________________ , A B e g in n e r s g u id e to O c c u ltis m , (On-Line), 1999, section i '

716

Tonv Looker, oersonal communication. ч0'8-2002.

269

The History o f British Magic Afier Crowley

pMr.aiiiu j'.."cners than seeking magical teachers

multiply the con-

fiirthcr he criticises the kind o f magazine that is the very location fbis own adverts: “when a would-be student is wavering between me a small·ad in ‘Time Out' ... I am not flattered” ™. Amado also has 1fj’tl in "teaching... at weekly meetings o f a group’ ”

but his own

l^toups work (or at least have worked for many years) in precisely that '; Wty, wicli oni: ex-pupil telling me o f his once-a-week experiences: “I met in 1 9 7 8 -7 9 ...it was a study group for Amado’s writings...”™

Amado. basic approach to exciting interest and recruiting acolytes is not < iintque. Carlos Castaneda’s story notably parallels that o f Amado. Casi; Infflcda was an anthropology postgraduate student based in America; he ) ^egedly discovered some powerful Mexican folk magicians and his best, · filing books about his special initiations with them made him fomous

I i ' i(5:jsiderably more so than Amado). Castaneda’s tale, like Amado’s, has ;

contested birth dates, numerous factual and narrative-time-to-

i -'cak'ndar-time’ conflicts and convenient amnesia towards difficult quesi noni 'g. His experiences are derivative of already-published sources and ’ ' Ч .iitd uorbing new (except unlikely or impossible detail, of the kind never Fwfn^sed by numerous other researchers in the same field) to a corpus of knowledge about his subject area.

I

{i П егч гл bers of followers vary, but like Amado, despite conclusive refu-

У

f b^lirought to earth again by mere 12-gauge conclusive proofs of fic-

у

: ttonei'iing’’

*.i.utons, ( ’.istaneda has such a reputation among his converts as not to Others who have made outrageous magical claims have,

■occ sionally later apologised; one Vaughan Purvis issuing a public letter '

to explain that his previous claimed authority (in print) to run a named ^toical order was not the truth but "a product of my own self-delusion”

Ihere ISalso a fascinating reflection of Amado in Sigmund Freud, creator 717 Advertisement, F e llo w s h ip o f th e S p h in x C o n t a c t A n n o u n c e m e n t s (Website), most advertisements being pagan personals', such as: “female...searching for Contacts in OxNHid . ' rather than ‘Guru, seeks disciples' www.sorcerers-apprentice.co.uk/fotsads.htm "ϊί

Amado Crowley, A l b a , p 129

" 19

___

~ΐύ

Dave Lee, personal communication, 1-3-2003

i;._________ , W r a t h , p 90

"ii Richard de Miile, C a s t a n e d a s j o u r n e y : th e p o w e r a n d th e a lle g o r y , London, Sphere, ' /78, p 29, M, 202, 201, 83, 50, 76 and 204.12-Gauge is a shotgun. V4ui?ban Purvis. Dublic aooloffv letter, insert to S o th is . 1.4. i 0 7 fi;

D ave Evans

270

o f psychoanalysis. Freuds published autobiography is considerably oon^i| trary to established fact, his theories were incomplete; oft-protnis«i^ proofs never appeared and his work is not suppotted by any established·'.' science, in the same way that Amado has no positive independent rcfer·^^ ent among any other names’ in occultism. W hen challenged on aspects'| o f his work, Freud had convenient memoty lapses, often apne.’hiig и ■; antiquity to bolster his validity, or appropriating the ideas o^ othew),, unacknowledged. Any expressed criticism is seen as 'tran-.44encc’* symptom of mental illness (under flawed Freudian psycholoi-'

r least}';’

and thus all opponents are automatically pathologised, becor.·.·:’;.. uttcd)^·*·:! invalidated as critics. His claimed "thousands of cures” are impossibift^i given the very lengthy and fulFtime nature of individual therapy and htt ^ Messianic state of mind was due to long-term use of Herculean quanti-ϋ'ί ties o f cocaine 723 Excluding drug use, which he decries, this can all be overlaid on Amadai7 who bases his authority on several grandiose claims, which we meifc'· mortals would have great trouble in overcoming: 1. Being the son and pupil of pethaps the most influential magician in the modern period (or indeed any period) and having thousands o f pupils/selling millions of books 2. Being the one true psychic channel of Aleister Crowley today 3. As a professional psychologist being thus both profoundly sane and an irrefutable expert on human behaviour, mind and sexuality 4. Being sole guardian of Aleister Crowley's only true and ancient magical book, all others being nonsense

723

Elizabeth M Thornton, "Frtud a n d C o c a i n e , T h e F r e u d ia n F a lla c y , London, Blond

6c Biggs, 1983, p 2,9-10, 264, 292, 279, 278, 312, 7-8 and 4. Freud s dosage was immensely

higher than that required today to qualify for serious addiction status. Grandiosity, dis' torted sex drives and paranoia are symptoms o f addiction. Liz Thorntons truly fahnlous book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Freud, scientific process or the nariiri» o f r h a r la r a n r v .

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

5.

271

As a Master himself, being; "backed by the mandate of the gods" ™

Once in a Lifetime Aieiscr- ( Vowley made some dazzling, amazing claims, but these were 6fron V III. since he appears to have led an extraordinary life, filled with Й\1‘па.ч· and bizarre events. By contrast, Amado’s claims seem to be basid Ijigely on fantasy. A danger of Amado’s stories is that they will drcnlare.. rtract embellishments ftom verified history and thus give the linpiessioii that it all happened exactly as described, and contaminate the -•acELal material already present in the public domain, 'This process has .\lrx.,dy started: Amado gives an account of a major magical ritual with Alti ■>rer performed at a megalithic site, the Men an Tol stones in rural Gor:nvall in 1943, with concurrent dramatic effects on the same day at a iecrer US Military research base across the Atlantic Ocean at Montauk

, Τ λο А

пч

rican authors first published the Montauk story in 1992, which

isfii'undcd in the paranormal and 'conspiracy theory’ genres, to do with US Cover nment secret wartime military experiments with 'other dimen-

siupi (with no Aleister Crowley referents), and Amado only described the alleged Cornish ritual afterwards; presumably having read the Ameri­ can book and seen a new bandwagon to jump upon. Amado added no

new verifiable detail, but in subsequent Montauk-related books by the same authors

, Amado's account (and his claimed lineage; thus magical

and historical authority) is included by them, both as accepted hard fact and as independent verification for their own unusual theories. This acceptance of Amado’s story as fact is spreading: for example the his­ torian Malcolm Gaskill mentions a wartime magical ritual in Ashdown Forest in Sussex as factual

a claimed event that Amado describes as

being conducted by Aleister in order to tempt Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess to lice to Britain. However the claimed witness that Gaskill cites. AiTwdo Crowley, F r e q u e n t ly

724

■Ц

A s k e d Q u e s tio n s ,

(Online) 2003. www.amado-crowley.

nec

725

______________ _ W r a t h , final chapter _____

736 l*rcsion В Nichols 8c Peter Moon, УЬгк, Sky Books, 1999, Original 1992 ^

7

New

_____________ _ P y r a m id s o f M o n t a u k : e x p io r a t io n s in c o n s c io u sn e s s, New York, Sky

Books, 1995» p 177-8 Ml

T h e M o n t a u k P r o je c t : e x p e r im e n t s in tim e .

Gaskill,

H e llis h N e ll,

p 28Q

272

Dave Evans

Cecil Williamson, wrote elsewhere (in circumstances where knowing Aleister would actually have been very useful), that he had never met the man and knew little about him. Thus if this is true he could nor have been at the alleged event at Ashdown, since Aleister was allegedly there An article in the paranormal and folklore magazine Fortean J imes n 2 0 0 4 cited Amados tale of this same event as fact, admittedly with con­ siderable reluctance over using it as source material

that matter being

something which I highlighted in a subsequent letter that was published in the magazine. Amado and Williamson presumably had some kind o f contact since ш his private library there is a book by Amado warmly inscribed to Cecil, and it is possible that they cooked up some marvellous tales between them, or had a session of one-upmanship on swapping anecdotes, Cecil being well-known for his ability to spin a good magical yarn, with abso­ lute and verifiable truth often not being his prime ingredient The Cornish-based occultist, author and artist Ithell Colquhoun wrote in 1952 about Aleisters travels in Cornwall and claimed he had only visited the county once. This was a ten day period spent at Mousehole and Penzance in August 1938, with Colquhoun concluding, from exam­ ining Aleisters diaries of the period, that 'there is no hint... that he carried out any magical ceremonies”

while on holiday there, instead he

seems to have spent the time relaxing, sunbathing, swimming, visiting the theatre, writing sexual limericks

and dining with friends. Since war

was obviously looming in Europe this was perhaps Aleister pragmatically taking in some sun, fine wine, gourmet food and culture before the

;·

happened. The diaries for August 1943 indicate that Aleister was very ill for di 729 "In one way I couldn't care less about M yself ioo% ignorant of most of his ups and downs..... I know nothing of his work" Cecil Williamson, Letter to Gerald Yorke, 7-8-1952, held by Warburg Institute, Yorke Collection, Folder Y C 1E E 2, pages ^4750. The lace Mr. Williamson presumably had met Amado, since in his private library there is a book by Amado warmly inscribed to Cecil (Museum of Witchcraft Library) 730

Gordon Rutter, Magic goes to war, F o r t e a n T i m e s , 185, 2004, 50

731

Conversation with Graham King, June 2005

732

Colquhoun, L iv in g S to n e s , p 169-177 covers Aleisters pre-war visit to Cornwall m

detail

733 From the Yorke Collection, Warburg Institute: On a card approx 6 inches by 5, bearing the address of the Lobster Pot Hotel in Mousehole, Cornwall (Telephone numbei Mousehole 46) At Newlyn a furious filly Cried: Christ! I have frigged myself scilly I canr

TiVUi* r

! ΤΊ1 m arrv гЬяг b n a a er Bod illv iundated^

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

period when Amado alleges they travelled to Cornwall for the ritual (and tMere is no mention o f travelling anywhere on those dates, let alone an arduous and indirect train journey across almost the entire country). Having visited the site myself I cannot envisage how an old and ill man, as Aleister was then, could remotely have walked from the road to the megalirhic stones across that rough terrain. N or can I see how someone who in the war years (and afterwards) was struggling even for basic foodStulls

could afford the outlay for a lengthy journey of this nature, even

if permission to travel there could have been acquired. fcddition, with the invasion of Europe approaching and troops and equipment being amassed, much of that part o f Cornwall was a large and very secure tented U S Army camp, and freedom o f travel in the area ftir non-local civilians would have been unlikely. In July 1943 2 4 0 ,0 0 0 US tioops were billeted in the southern U K , and by January 1 9 4 4 this . Ы r sen to 9 3 0 ,0 0 0

Many o f these would have been encamped in

d;.· \\ est Country, since this is where they embarked from for the N orm dy invasion in June 1944, after using the coastline and moor land for , tiAin.! ig for the landings. Magically and geographically speaking, the gunsight' arrangement of the

I

sto.nes (two uprights with a holed stone between them) points approxiinatelv 2 4 7 degrees West, and the magician on site would assume this

!', lias ■.'.’leaning. Taking that compass bearing from Cornwall and extending ■.^^es Montauk on a North Atlantic map by a considerable distance.

\VI'..'!', including curvature of the earth factors, which would bend the further south in reality (i.e. if one were actually sailing a ship or flying ;■ p'.me along that bearing), and that misses America entirely. N ot just I . Montauk, not just misses that part of the U S coast, but it misses rhe entire country.

The Men an Tol monument has no local or regional folklore associated with Montauk, it is considered much more to be a place for healing ■various minor illnesses. Looking a the site in a practical magical frame of mind ::he immediate assumption is that the stones point at something’ 734 Yorke Collection, Microfilm lo, Roll 3 has a letter from Crowley to Professor EM Butler dated 18-12-1945 asking her if she could bring staples such as “eggs, milk, sugar, butter" on a forthcoming visit. Times were obviously hard. -j·,

[ulian Humphrys, M o n t y s M e n : T h e B r it is h S o ld ie r a n d th e D - D a y C a m p a ig n , Lon-

«sirfftil. N a rin n a l A rtTiv K/fni#>nm ίλλ ,ι

n

tt

273

274

Dave Evans

very specifically, since there are front and back markers on each sice of' the ring (perhaps these mark a significant seasonal sunset point). This is not any piece of supportable academic conclusion making, as thi vaguely Leyline-related thinking behind it is still often relegated ro V'anit science’ in many quarters (although Astro-archaeology, the inve-,!

ct т

of alignments of stones with celestial objects, is gaining some

£

respect in recent years). It does perhaps serve well as a metaphor fiir Amado's general accuracy, though, in that not only has something r.,a been close to what is intended, it has literally 'missed the target'

r

,s

case an entire country) by a staggering magnitude. Also Aleister noted with concern in a letter to his friend and administri* tor Gerald Yorke in 1945 that he had heard no news o f Deidre McAipinc. the mother of his actual son Ataturk, “since S ep t'4 2 ... whose last known address was in Newiyn, Cornwall’’

One would think that had he trav­

elled all the way to the Men an Tol stones in August 1943 that he would have certainly made the few miles diversion in order to pay a visit oi ык after McAlpine’s whereabouts and the health o f his son in wartime Corn­ wall’s port towns were in range of the danger from German bombers, and ^ at that point he had not heard from her for nearly a year. Depeiuling on his mode of travel (had that been possible at all under wartime restric'

4

tions) it is probable that he would have passed through Penzaric-Ncwiyij in any case, thus the diversion would have been miniscule. The other numerous logistical, logical and factual problems wi: h .Amado's account of this alleged event would make an extra chapter here on their own, and hopefully this aspect is likely to be a lengthy article foi a WestCountry occult magazine in the future.

'7 7 6

W a rb n ra Tnsrifiiri^. YorWi^ Г!о11747

Amado Crowley, posting to weborama discussion forum (On-Line) 13-6-2002

•‘;748

18-6-2002 “OBA”, personal communication. i8-^-20oa

277

Dave Evans

278

“my incredible story has no solid evidence to back it up... the key,

though, is not w hether I am right, but w hether I am sincere. People ■ who doubt my story should not therefore assume I am a liar. To quote Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you in the bowels o f Christ, thnk it possible you may be mistaken" Since Amado seems to here be moving to a stance of appearing sincere | rather than beingjactually correct, perhaps he realises that his imposture it untenable forever, and is preparing the ground for some gradual rctrai* _ tions o f his story. The irony of Amado, who relies upon his allege i ''ΐπίϊ father for much o f his magical authority, invoking Cromwell (1 5 9 ^ ' 1658) the British historical figure who actually ended the Divin K.ght o f Kings to rule in England, is simply sublime. It is also rathei ι·οακ that Amado told me at the time that this article, on the subject ol truth,··! was unpublished, but I later found that virtually the same piece (but for about five words extra) had appeared in Greenmantle magazine some two | years before On a functional level, the popular claimed psychic and psychokinetic Uri Geller "did not become famous for providing an amusing evenings diversion: he became famous for opening a crack in the publ-'ci -.ceseof reality”

While Amado is far from as famous as Geller, it is likely :1’..ίΐ

he performs a similar role to his pupils - by encouraging them ro he is the son of Aleister, and thus that some intangible, but c and worthwhile Crowleyan essence, or baraka is being transmiuowl ;';.з Amado to them, it is possible that their beliefs in the efficacy of rbi magical practices are given a kick-start which they would not о;Ьс-'л;ч· have, and that from innocently believing such a fraudulent basis г1ч’\ ..uperforming real magic (however that problematic term might actn.:!lv re defined). As the modern magician Phil Hine pragmatically re:: “what matters is the results ... not the authenticity’ of the system 753

Belief is perhaps on a continuum, also. There is considerable art:.· in a knowing falsehood and fakery entering into the reality of so;·.. pagans, for considered purposes. A BBC Television adaptation o- ( ’S 750

Amado Crowley, 20 Questions- article submitted to L a m p o f T h o t h , p i, emp*ha

added

751

G r e c r m a n t lc , Samhain

752

Dukes, B la s t!, p 217

2002, p 3-7

753

Hine, O v e n R e a d y C h a o s , d 10

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

("jUwis' mystical Narnia stories in 1988

m

279

involved the building of a stone

(of real stone, rather than merely a transient televisual prop made plaster or foam) for a filming location in a field near the T V Studios Bangor. N orth Wales. Subsequently the stone circle was left, adjacent children's public play area, this presumably being cheaper than having

:tbc sire demolished and re-instated as grassland. i-8y day the circle was simply another place for the children to indulge ; 4n make-believe, but at night various individuals and neo pagan groups regularly used it as a setting for magical rituals. I witnessed this myself :'-; _whcn 1 w.is .m undergraduate at Bangor University from 1 9 9 6 -1 9 9 9 ; the ^concerned was one I regularly passed by at night. The immediate fSographic.il area contained a number of far older and more 'authenti-

i ’-taliy sacred' pagan sites for potential rituals, including more historicallywrified ancient stone circles and burial mounds, wild and scenic mouncains. lakes, waterfalls, rivers etc. Could it be that the site of the filmed depiction of the slaying and resurrection of Lewis' Lion-hero (and ersatz Christ figure) Aslan was thus a 'special' place in the eyes of those neo У p,ig Ker leth Grants own books prior to 2 0 0 3 ’s Ninth Arch, which would unusual given the alleged vital importance of Phineas and the Gri■' re throughout Grants life. Hieri ISone other, unconnected, and perhaps teasing aside, given Grant's iendt.’iy to occupy the often-difficult territory between hard fact and fc'possibi c fiction (which is discussed later), which may be purely coinciι ΐ ;'dental .md nothing to do with him. Phineas Nigellus (of which a rough ΤΓ.·.' i ., Ion from that Latin would be Phineas Black) is the ex-Headmas-·;

ter of r i l e school for wizards in the extremely popular fictional series of

Harry Potter magical books written by children's' author JK Rowling, which wel l· mentioned earlier Althougl: there have been other secretaries, other pupils and other •■claimed relations of Aleister Crowley, as discussed in the previous

iiy Chapter about Amado Crowley, no-one has coherently claimed to be all ^ ιϊ

Grant, Against the Light, p x am most grateful to Marco Pasi, personal communication, 4-10-2003

For example J K Rowling, Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, London, ;"'Bioomsburv. 200ч

Dave Evans

292

three. As if being Crowleys secretary, pupil and claimed relative is not enough kudos for one occultist to bear, and the latter being a detail that would have been a boon to the publicity for Grants earlier books, hail it been mentioned, Grant has other claims to magical family members. To further enhance his occult image. Grant weaves into his narrative another claimed ancestor who was allegedly executed in 1588 as a wixh This was one Margaret Wyard from Bury S t Edmunds, wliosc histor­ ical existence, on the dates given by Grant, is still debatable. I’rom exam­ ining Francis Hutchinson’s An Historical essay concerning \\'исЬсгф, 1720, which details very many trials. Despite Wyard and Hutchinson being both from the same town, Hutchinson fails to mention het, thus I suspect that at least the 1588 date Grant gives is incorrect, if nor the entire tale. Hutchinson does have an Elizabeth Weed, but she was hangixi in 1646 in a different geographical area. There is a Wyard in East Anglia mentioned in C L'Estrange Ewen, Witch hunting and witch trials, 1929, ' 'ibut the century is similarly wrong for the Grant account to refer to this actual woman The collage endpapers o f Grant, Remembering Aleister Crowley show з letter addressed to Grant at Ford Wyard Ltd in London, which I believe was his family firm. In any case, witchcraft accusations in early-modern times often had very little to do with practice of anything magical, so this claim is of limited use in academically substantiating any occult blood­ line’ for Kenneth Grant, regardless of the probably irresolvable argument whether such magical abfiities ( i f this Wyard actually existed, and had such powers) are o f hereditary nature, which is outside the scope of a historical study in any case. In any case, witchcraft accusations in earlymodern times often had very little to do with practice of anything magical' under our own conception o f the term, or anything which bears any com­ parison to what modern Wiccans do. For the current academic reasoning behind this see those titles mentioned earlier in the section covering the demolition o f Margaret Murray’s thesis on witchcraft, especially Cohn.

804

Grant, Against the Light, p x-xii

805 Francis Hutchinson, An Historical essay concerning Witchcraft, two sermons, Lon­ don, R. Knaplock, 1720, and C L'Estrange Ewen, Witch hunting and witch trials: the tndtcl· mentsfor witchcraftfrom the records of iS73 Assizes held for the home circuit A.D. 1559Ί73Λ,

T.nndon. К .е о я п Paul. Trench. Trubner. 1020.

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

Grant and Austin Spare nnerh Grants life intersected with another very real and docu|nts all tu: unchecked since Grant worked directly with Crowleys lirer;i'-\ c xecufu'-. on editing and re-producing several of the Beast’s major books. H e also wrote his own pieces for publication, and apart from mj^lla* neous articles and essays this currently extends to over a docoii, usu hefty books. The modern academic Henrik Bogdan sees him as'‘pcrh3^y (the) most original and prolific English author o f the jiosr-modeta? occultist genre” G rants occult publications are as follows: The Carfax Monographs · a limited print run of only 100 sets o f illustrated short articles on ticular aspects o f magic published in a series of ten instalments betweee^i^ 1959 and 1963. A set o f the original monographs was parr of a dispiajrTi of important magical books at a prestigious Magic Exhibition at the+^t University of Texas in 1995

The ‘King of the Witches’ Alex Sanderi;,i

apparently also owned a full set and knew Grant well in the London. magical scene o f the 1960s

These were reprinted in one slim volume

as Hidden Lore in 1989 and a new version is due in 2006. The Magical Revival (1972, reprinted 1991) was Grant’s first main.scream * occult book to be published in an appreciable number of coplt■^ -iij '

875 Nema (Margaret Ingalls), M a a t M agick: a guide to self-imtiation, York Beach, Weiser, 1995, p 218 876 Henrik Bogdan, K enneth Grant A bibliography'from 1948, Academia Esoteru j Press, Gothenburg, 2003, p viii 877 University ofTexas Website, History of Magic exhibition,July lo-December 8 , 1995 www.lcvity.com/alchemy/texas_ex.html 878 "G ” (Anon. An initiate o f Sanders’), telephone conversation, September 2002 Similarly to Grant, Sanders made several claims chat appear counter-factual and this сш

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

j,-However as discussed previously, Summers is now largely seen as a fanta}.ysi^t ftf poseur

Just as Grant seems almost fixated on seeing significant

^^^ibalistic li irks in every cat and every piece of horror fiction. Summers l^fiws just as insistent that malefic witches lurked behind every hedgerow f>jaed Satan crouched in every shadow. ‘-(Those are areas in which Grant may perhaps have been aware o f his his.lOrical errors, or the reliance on (academically) dubious source materials,

jrowever in a tale of a magical ritual in 1949, (first published in 1977) 'V G ran t makes a huge and knowing factual error in detailing the fates of various of those who took part. This was apparently an aborted group d tual

which short-circuited) resulting in unfortunate consequences to

participants, including some mysterious deaths almost immediately afeerwards and “Gardner was himself not long in following suit”

(^'However, Gerald Gardner died in 1964

and Grant must certainly

ί"ί· be aware that he lived for at least five more years after the ritual in 1949, flnee the two men were in contact by letter at various points after the ritual

and it was in 1954 that Grant claims to have personally introduced

Г !" '■'■·“ to Austin Spare

This would appear to be a knowing distor­

tion of facts, with possibly the only matter in question being whether iitLt. of five or fifteen years later after 1949 constitutes 'not long’ when w riting

jV- ί was

:'n terms of a human lifespan.

able to proffer this question (among several others regarding his

|‘/.!тй}гк) to Mr Grant by letter in 2 0 0 2 . Having outlined the problem with

C' ibe physical death date I made the suggestion that his talk of Gardn4 tr's death 'soon afterwards’ might be a symbolic comment, in that this /f was around the date when Gardner withdrew from the О Т О arena and j^' KJOkon his role within the revival or recreation o f the modern witchcraft S’· tnovement, which could be seen as a 'death’ so far as O TO -style magick 'w as

concerned.

i-ivVif Gr.mt replied kindly and patiently, citing the complexity of my Muestions as a whole (some of which were, I believed, simple yes-no gnatters) needing "a book, no less, to meaningfully explicate the queries” invoked his understandable unwillingness to breach confidence to d'arch Smith, B o o k s o f the B east, p 37-46

‘t

7 938 ш ея»

Grant, N ig h tsid e o f E d e n , p 124 (Skoob 1994 edition, original 1977) l iutron, Tri«mpfo, p 205 G ra n r. X ns

S n e a k s !. η η ι π ί ί Γ ο ι ι . ς m e n r i n n s i n г п г г л ч п о п И е п г е . n R f i- o r r

317

Dave Evans

318

provide me with excerpts from “confidential correspondence over the years, some of which would still leave questions incompletely explatneiT, From this I concluded that M r Grant did not mean a simple, physical death being involved, and the question was one or both of too diffb uit. or inappropriate, for me to examine further as I may be unequipped to recognise, let alone understand any answer that I might uncover. Perhaps the Gardner tale and other apparent manipulations o f historical data t& an example o f the writer Martin Starrs view that Grant “recych s ideas and refits them to his real science o f the universe, which is unconslrainei

Ц

by the limits o f academ ic knowledge" W hile Grant makes errors that can be highlighted with reference to history, his many other magical theories described in his books .ire sup­ ported by the results o f ritual and trance experiment and detailed cab­ balistic exegesis. The use o f cabbala (which is spelt in various ways by occultists) is complex, but can be roughly summarised as being char all words and phrases have a coded magical numerical value, based on the schema of the Hebrew cabbala. Words with the same value have a magical kink, and thus magical importance, and this link can be found, and utilized by the magician. There is a considerable literature of the use of cabbala and nur.jeioiog', (also known as Gematria) in magic, but Grants own use of ( .

i.·.

has been frowned upon from many quarters, including expert C .ib-'jlists who considered his methods to be dubious, Crowley said “do quit that nonsense mock Qabalah" legitimate"

which Grant defended as “perfectly

His methods include using variant spellings of the word

under analysis until a numerical significance is hit upon, inconsistencies o f approach to suit his agenda and allowing near-misses on numeration, a number one off' the target score being considered still significant- a number preceding or succeeding a given number partakes of its influ­ ences, as an echo partakes of its source"

However another anonymous

critic rails against the practice: “this one-more-one-less thing is NC>T gematria. It is not qabalah. It is the product of a mind so loaded wit^ Knowledge that it is tripping over itself in its mad flight to prove that iti 930

Kenneth Grant, personal con^munication, 17-7-2002

931 Martin Starr, Foreword to Bogdan, K en n eth G ra n t A bibliography, p vi. Emphasis added. 932 933

934

Grant, R em em b erin g A le ister C row ley, Crowley to Grant, 1-6-1945 p 39 G r a n t. N in th A rch . D fid. in 4.

T h e H is t o r y o f B r itis h M a g ic A ft e r C r o w le y

ii is die supreme mind of the universe”

Since that criticism was made

J·' Grant has relaxed the required accuracy of cabbalistic ‘hits' on any given Ч number still further by employing the ‘umbrella eifecq where; ‘‘numbers ‘immediately adjacent to eachother...are affected by mutual ‘radiation’ which diminishes in intensity as the numbers become more distant from

fy one another”

thus allowing for some occult credence still to be given

V to cabbala which doesn’t quite add up by a few or even several digits. Perhaps a more serious complaint by his anonymous critic, if true, is that , . 'Grant bases so much upon his inane brand o f Gematria while many o f

kis simple addition calculations are incorrect” The magician and author (and Crowley’s former secretary, as mentioned above) Israel Regardie made a more general comment on the practice !, in the 1970s “it makes little difference ... whether one uses the tradiu'on.il F lebrew system of gematria or numerology, or the more modern S0'i..;l!i4l Pythagorean numerology. The only criterion is consistency!' a consistency which Grant does not appear to demonstrate in his own take on Cabbala, since the ‘radiations’ technique is a recent change to his ■■ rrediods. It should however be remarked that there are many forms of the cabbalistic process, and none of them is an absolute science, it might ЛС.M ’cn as more akin to wine appreciation, in that there are many differi-.ir 'Virhods and apparent differences in accuracy between practitioners, and difference does not necessarily equate to deficiency. '· it is p^)^sible however that these outside critics have missed the point: ) , Bill Seibert, a former Typhonian О Т О initiate, who worked with Grant 5. in the 1.970s, remarked more recently: “do not try to verify Uncle Kenny’s !’ C^balah. It ju st does not work that way. You can hurt your head trying, last look for the connection he is trying to make 8C use it as a jumping off point for meditation... do not fuss over things which do not seem to add

■ up properly"

Again, this may be magically efficacious to the practi­

tioner, as Grant says “correspondences may appear dubious in their gross

i)?5

Prater M .E.D Review o f Nighcside o f Eden, Online

936

Grant, Ninth Arch, p 176/и 26

937 Prater M .E.D Review o f Outer Gateways, Online, emphasis original, although the author does not give enough detail for his claims about incorrect maths to be checked. 938 Israel Regardie How to make and use talismans, Wellingborough, Aquarian 1972, p 23; Emphasis added 939 Alobar (Bill Seibert), Posting to Wyrdglow discussion group. Online, 22-7-2003. Emphasis added. I am grateful for kind permission to quote his remarks made on a private ^-lisr.

319

320

D av e E vans

aspects, but their astral linkages are firm"

however this apparently

selective rule bending is academically very awkward to reconcile. Neither of ritual or cabbala, although common and acceptable occult techniques would be considered as valid academic methods of research in any case, although accepting as historical fact that the practitionea

believed in both the veracity of techniques and their results would be a valid academic approach. Aside from Cabbalistic workings. Grants more general tales of magical life are often rather lurid, seemingly without com­ plete justification, and imply a tendency to exaggerate and-or make wild claims, aside from the 'many deaths after ritual’ element discussed above. The artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, a former member of his N« his working group, wrote that Kenneth Grant "makes the (Magical Order of the) Inner Light set-up sound more exciting that any impression of it which I received, ”

and Gerald Suster wrote, in general that "it is dif­

ficult to take Mr. Grant’s claims seriously”

Grant himself tries to give

some degree of clarification about the reality of his writings: “by fantasy is here meant the fantastic or ‘impossible’”

and, in more detail:

»

"terms such as vampirism, cannibalism, death, sleep etc., connote operations applicable not to terrestrial levels, but to alien dimensions ... confusion arises principally from an interpretation in mundane terms of concepts not relating to mundane dimensions. This leads

^

VfX ■

certainly to ludicrous and sometimes dangerous results” the former implies that much of it is outside the realm of earthly verifica­

Ш

tion or mundane description, making academic enquiry painful and all ШШ& but impossible to complete. The latter point is that the effects of sup-^ posed fictionality in magic can be totally real to those who believe in it, and subsequent practical magical mistakes made with ‘fiction can thus be dangerous, leading to one becoming a casualty, as the author Alan Moore (mentioned above) has so elegantly and beautifully named, in W i 2Mrd

o f Oz-esque terminology "Yellow Brick Roadkill” 940

Moore provide.s a

Grant, Ninth Arch, p 109

941 Ithell Colquhoun, Sword o f W isdom : M acG regor M athers and the G olden Dawn, London, Spearman, 1975, p 189 942 Gerald Suster, T h e Legacy o f the Beast: the life, work and influence o f A leister Crowley London, W H Allen, 1988, p 216 943

Grant, H ecate’s Fountain, p 221

944

Ibid , p 197

04< >

Moore, K aos, 14.

d i6i

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

useful cultural-literary analysis of Grant, seeing all of his books as being “an apparent deliberate blurring of the line between describing Separate Reality and writing Magic Fiction, if there ever really was a line to blur” 946 Miciiael Bertiaux, one of Grants magickal collaborators adds a further darifying remark: “rfiere is the cosmic world o f the imagination, and that is what we are talking about when we discuss our magical creations and discoveries... tl'.eri· ;s the world of archetypal images... which is'between the world of .«nsc-perception and the world of the abstract essences of ideas in the mind of God” so in other words, very little of this material may happen ‘really, on earth, as iiwcitten', even if it is presented as such. Regardless of the earthly reality Jsi4ct, it appears that among magical practitioners both the risks and rewards of such a magical approach are regarded as commensurately greater than other, ‘safer’ occult practices, Moore writing that Grant’s books “despite, or possibly because of their forays into dementia, have more genuine occult power than works produced by m ore convention­

ally coherent authors”

Although controversial in many ways within

occbltism, perhaps Grant's most frowned-upon quality is his insistence on citing H P Lovecraft and other authors, these being nominally fictional writers, as presenting highly relevant occult 'facts) and his then perform­ ing rituals to contact Lovecraftian entities, which is discussed further in the next chapter. Grant’s accounts o f various seemingly incredible rituals are in many respects reminiscent o f the unearthly referents sometimes described in early-modern accounts of the alleged Witches’ Sabbat. An impor­ tant difference here is not one of content, but o f context. Many histori­ cal witch-trial transcripts were very often written by hostile, clerically biased scribes, during (or closely following) intimidation or torture of die accused; and adhering to an ecclesiastical agenda of seeing the Devil ever-present in the world. Grant’s accounts are his own, freely written, albeit perhaps some time after the event in some cases, and electively pub­

lished in a country where his activities are not outside the law. ' 946

Ibid, p 156

947 Michael Bertiaux, La Couleuvre Noire Course,. Section G G , z, 2, in Grant, Hecates Fountain, p 197 ЛДЙ

Μ ο Ο Γ ί»

nnt

1A

Γ» t A t

Р т п Ь о в 1 « o A A t^ A

321

322

D a v e E vans

To an extent, modern academics looking into occultism are in a siirilarly difficult interpretative position to the early-modern judiciarywlii·!' examining such claims. The modern academic Carlo Ginzburg I'j's-. cusses the legal problems inherent with trying witches who claimed rehave been to the witches Sabbat (especially when they make a seeniii'.giy, impossible, or magical claim, such as having_/?otv« there, for example' .md perhaps consorted with the Devil. A major consideration in Law .t the., time was whether this act had been physical, or imaginal, but Ginzburg-', concludes, “even if the sabbat had been a purely mental phenomenon · (and this cannot be proved) its importance for the historian wo be diminished"

■-t щ

In the same way, Grants accounts of ritual are important, whethe'· rlie)' really' happened on earth’ or as now seems more likely, on some '.isual plane' since the imagery has since been written, printed and cirail.ired,) thus entering the consciousness of and influencing a great many ' чч.,.кists, who will themselves have developed their own ideas as to what plane of existence such events occurred on. The historian Malcolm Gaskili remarks on the academic problems inherent in exploring “alternative and contrasting definitions of what too often we confidently call the truth" and the manner in which cultural boundaries and memes often determine truth, at least as much as perception and historical record within that cultural group is concerned. Grant himself remarked in correspond­ ence, "I am very exact in matters o f occultism and would not make any statement I could not substantiate either historically or magically which appears to give equal weight to either discipline, and thus eitlier view o f what is‘real’. It also implies that the two disciplines are nor mutu­ ally conducive, in his eyes. In any case, such magical writing satisfies needs that are, as the moJerB academics Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark write, “not necessarily the same to ... believers and to observers (particularly historians)”

It is

only 4 0 years ago rhat the nature o f W itchcraft as based on the scad cmic researches o f Margaret Murray, discussed earlier, was largely accepted as 949 Carlo Ginzburg (John & Anne Tedeschi, Trans.) Tbe Nigbi Battles, W itchcraft an d A grarian cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, p xiv Emphasis added 950

Gaskili, H ellish Nell, p 2

951 Grant to Cecil Williamson, 25-6-1951, Mus. o f Witchcraft Archive. Empfiasis added. Benfft Ankarloo

Stuart Clark. A thlone History o f W itchcraft and M aoic. n vii

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

I’-ird hisroric.il fact. As discussed in the introduction, these notions have UV.Vbeen almost comprehensively dismantled as fundamentally flawed; Ц Mid Murray seen, post mortem, as guilty of deliberately selective and if'^tgenda-driven use o f materials when a broader brush approach would f? have prevented that theory ever emerging. The whole o f her work in that lidd h IS been consigned to the fringes o f academic belief, but still informs

p nianv Wiccan-based 'histories’ of age-old traditions still practiced today.

C'

same fate will probably befall many of today's academic constructions

i ; ef die world in various disciplines as new material comes to light and new |l' «searcher.4, and new methods of research arise. It should not be forgotlen :h.« . J1 academic‘truth’ is only contingent on new discoveries, and that ■i'· hmv!.4i,'ht is often the platform from which major ridicule is heaped on past I ' riieories which at the time seemed rational and coherent. Whether material ΐ ■flescnbed by Grant‘happened’or not in the materialist, earthly, historicallysupportable sense becomes almost immaterial to the effects on his readers,

C and in any case, as Paul Heeks points out, “the academic study of religion must ren ain neutral in regard to ultimate truth” such as this. fcually, what may seem ludicrous today may be only awaiting one discov­ ery tomorrow to make it mainstream and accepted fact. An example of Д va\ flexible academic discipline might be the science of biology, which has to continually re-write itself, with new varieties of pknts and animals iseing discovered almost every week. If we still have so much to learn about -die ir habitants of our home planet. Grant’s adherents might argue that no one c. n unequivocally say that in (for example) two hundred years time diere will not be contact with technologically advanced entities from an solar-system planet, who resemble the entities Grant claims to have c afhckec with. It would be better still, for Grant’s adherents, if these entities have in their o\ui history of what we call the 20th Century some detailed records of rhc.r attempts to telepathically contact beings on any planets closer to our sj.'. Such a discovery would largely vindicate some of Grant’s wilder claims, if ’’bat eventuality, however unlikely, does not arise over rime. Grant’s work .n the preservation of, and expansion on Crowley, Spare etc will still be seen bv li:s supporters as vital to help germinate a seed which they believe will ^timately represent a new phase of growth in human consciousness Hcelas, Tbe New Age McJpemeHi, p 6, Emphasis original 9

,

Stephen Sennitt and Gareth Hewitson-May, preface to D a r k D o ctrin es, T h e N o x

mmkmmhalfiav. Ni^'w W n r id . Пппгя.чг^г.

toot,

n i

323

324

Dave Evans

"Kenneth Grant is one hell meanass occultist” D esp ice a tendency to write profusely while revealing little of his .ct.i.·.'· ’ methods, Grant has consistently excited considerable interest occult writers and practitioners, however two Crowley biogranhcs (Colin Wilson and Roger Hutchinson

inexcusably fail to mcrtiy

Grant at a ll However Wilson has subsequently written, briefly,. .·Όα: Grant and says that he was aware of him 20 years before his Crowley' biography was published for example

while other Crowley biographers (Booth

only mention him in passing, as a. post mortem i-ditoi of

Crowleys works. Perhaps surprisingly, there has as yet been no published biogr.ipliy (or autobiography) of Grant either written by an occultist or acade mic, and it is only very recently that Dr. Henrik Bogdans brief bibliography of Grant

was published. This may relate to him being, according to Colin

Wilson, apparently “obsessively secretive about his personal life, icfusing to release biographical details ... (he) prefers to live the life of a schtdar and recluse"

A rare published interview provides a rather stilted glance

at the man, being conducted by an anonymous interviewer, for a maga­ zine friendly to Grant (being run by his publisher at the time) and only gives what appears to be a truncated discussion A clue to his reasons for secrecy might be gleaned from his own w ritin g about Crowley, who “sedulously fostered the legends that grew arouncB his name. First a mist, then a fog of vilification, calumny and spite envel-''' oped him ... (which act) did have but a single aim; that of weeding out the magically competent from the inept”

in other words, if this .ippl

955 Herman Skelder, "Laughing stock" danger of worshipping strange entities, K.] jj P 35- 37. p 36 956

Colin Wilson A le is t e r

957

Wilson, Tentacles across time, Sfeoob E s o t e r ic a

958

Booth, M a g i c k

959

Bogdan,

960

Wilson, Tentacles across time, S k o o b

961

Anon, Interview with Kenneth Grant, S k o o b

Qfio.

Ki»nni»rh f l r a n r . A lpt.ired, simply for that, regardless o f the caveats discussed above such №·!·,ι· numerous potential and actual problems inherent in Grant’s interfcecation of the works of the enigmatic, dyslexic, slippery, multi-faceted ftnd absent-minded Austin Spare, his seeming leading role in the creation O' rransmission of an expanding fable around ‘Mrs. Pa(t)terson the great •wItch mother) (regardless of how her surname is spelt), and his cryptic ^ι}mments on the equally unfathomable Aleister Crojvley. To this should also be added the interpretation problems added by Grant’s own idiosyncrasies of cabbalistic method, his historical re-intery e ' - on and the worrying (to the academic) width of what he consid-

Шт$ to be valid and authoritative source materials and the withholding or .1 great deal of detail about his actual practical methods. However, I'lrte l:ow Grant will be eventually assessed is a moot point; anywhere rciweeii Magus and maniac, depending upon each viewers’ perspective.

974

Moore, K a o s , 14, p 155

975

Dave Lee, W h at is magick for? Ν ολ,

9T6

Stephen Sennitt, Editorial, N o x , 2 , 1986, p 3 M o n r i* .

K an< . ТЛ.. n T c c

s

p

p 13, 'Great Man being Crowley

327

328

Dave Evans

and the clarifying or revelatory effect of any texts which might emerge after his death. To a large extent, the question of sanity or sanctity is not an area t b t a n be approached academically' as Paul Heelas remarks, “if people saytdiey are Enlightened... the academic simply does not have the tools to assess the claim"

Regardless of what Grant may or may not be, his influence

has been immense, and his magickal systems are in use across a broad range of occult disciplines. Although now an old man, his story is far from over. Grant has his two rare volumes of poetry due for republication in the near future, plu* i new third volume of poems on the way. His earlier magical works are also being revised and reprinted in the near future. In view of the quasi-autobiographical' label he applies to one of his earlier novels, one wonders how much, and which elements, of any future novels and poetry raig^t be actually based on Grant’s life. Hopefully these forthcoming writiijj^ will provide some clarification in this matter, in the same way his earlier novels have been commented on in his subsequent factual works. His books are initially written using the same kind of manual typewriter he has been using for 50 years

which must slow down the writing

process considerably, compared to using a computer; which some occult­ ists will regret, and his critics no doubt celebrate as it limits his output. There is also an element of the writing process being protracted as, in the possibly apocryphal words of one initiate, who once asked Kenneth how the writing of one of his early titles was progressing, received the reply “slowly, it needs to get some more slime into it”

this being a reference.

to the Tunnels of Set- Lovecraftian angle of much of his text.

·

Despite heated discussion and divided opinions about his veracity and methods. Grant continues to consistently provide highly stimulating, contentious and unusual fare for magicians to both read and work with. His corpus remains a convoluted and multidisciplinary challenge to аса demies, covering as it does. Cabbala, Hebrew, Sanskrit, history, magic(k), voodoo, mediumship, astronomy, astrology, Tantra, Eastern and Western philosophies, literature (including what was once published as 'pulp fiction’), linguistics, etymology, Egyptology, folklore, zoology, ‘Ufology 978

Heelas, N e w A g e M ov em en t, p 6

979

Mogg Morgan, personal communication, Autumn 2002

980

Lionel Snell, conversation, ΐ 7 Ί θ '2 θ θ ί , reportinc the words of Vivianne Tones.

Щ

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

akhctiny, religious studies and conspiracy theory to name but some. To fiirchi|r add to the task of interpretation, much of this is provided in a far from straightforward, and often seemingly counterfactual manner, with tidbits of sometimes paradoxical information about various events being spread often across several books; requiring painstaking reconstruction to gain a clear (er) picture.

Ш In вфгтагу, regardless of any truth’ in his works. Grant, like Amado Croi^ey, might be seen to be providing a vital service. In a post-modern socic^ where comparative ’truths’ compete with eachother and there haps no absolute truth, with a social situation where people need

■just as some need to believe in a God, or conversely that there

ISno God, or that friendly aliens orbit the planet in spaceships, that ‘f ieIwna^l characters are somehow ‘real’, or a thousand other viewpoints. Now that my purely academic thesis is being converted into a more main­

stream book I can add some of my personal take here, and that is that I amix the small crowd that believe M r Grant probably saved magic from 'disaf rearing into obscurity after Crowley died, and that Grant’s works are magical in and of themselves. So far as academic research is con­ cerned Grant is very difficult, but on a personal level I have the deepest of

respect for what he has achieved. W hen I recently had to make a painful economic choice of selling 99% of my extremely valuable magical library irwas the full set of Grant books that hurt the most to say goodbye to.

As Malcolm Gaskill points out: “it will never be proven that God and the Devil are scholastic fictions... sheer desire to imagine an enchanted universe would inevitably be indulged in, and the idea would catch on” Grant, in writing about magic, provides magic in huge doses for those who wish to believe, and gives any number of detailedjumping-off points for those occultists with the will to experiment. On* of those jumping-off points is examined in the next chapter; how Grant’s work with the creatures described in the novelist H P Lovecraft’s faocAs has led to some fascinating magical developments.

eAr« ftaskilL HelUih Nell, n ^бл.

329

330

D ave Evans

A Dialect of Dreamers Grant, Lovecraft and ‘fiction in magic

T h is section will examine the influence of the novelist H P I ovecraft on modern magic, including his promotion by Kenneth Grant, who was discussed earlier. The writings o f the American novelist Lovecraft have become very important and influential in some areas of modern ma^c. As the magician Stephen Sennitt wrote: "the Lovecrafrian C :‘v_..hu

t

Mythos entities are masks o f chaos, abstractions indicating thai tl.L i i r j which conceived of them was struggling to form equations which *ou._ describe the experiences he was undergoing. Lovecrafts dreams were haunted by cosmic scenarios he found personally difficult to relate t. so much so that unlike Blavatsky, Von Liebenfels and many other «лmological literalists, he presented his ideas in fictional form...althou2·' his conceptions had a strange validity for the times in which he iiveC they were not acceptable as 'realities’ to his rational, sceptical mind” In these, and literary spheres, Lovecraft’s name is often abbreviated for convenience to his initials; H P L . In order to appreciate and unde'sunU his influence on magic it is first necessary to describe Lovecraft’s life wiii work.

Brief biography of H P Lovecraft

^

"

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1 8 9 0 -1 9 3 7 ) was the only child o f an An’' '! can couple of British ancestry. His father was a travelling salesm.in wiw died when Howard was young, and the boy was brought up subsequenrlv in an almost entirely female household (his mother and two aunts), wit5, his main male role model being his grandfather, and a ma|oi topic f”· interest being his grandfather’s extensive library. H P L was a child proiiipv (and in his teenage years he wrote a precocious astronomy column for I; о local newspaper ^®^) with an impressive knowledge o f classical de^’'·'; was particularly erudite about ancient Egypt and he loved the paintings of the Russian artist, explorer, archaeologist and antiquarian Nicholas' Roerich (1 8 7 4 -1 9 4 7 ), who had travelled extensively in the kind of exc:: Sennitt, L ib er K oth, p 12 983 Frank Bellknap Long, H ow ard Phillips Lovecraft: D ream er on the Ni^ht Side, Sauk r,V,r cA rnne Г» ■■

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

mg foreign lands of which H P L could only read about , !ii

I

331

H e married

1924 .md moved to New York City, but could not abide the hustle and sile of the city, and returned to his quiet hermitry and childhood home vn of Providence, Rhode Island in 1926, at which point his marriage s also effectively over, a divorce following rapidly on the grounds of

: his-desertion. Lovecraft spent the rest o f his life eking out a small living as a ghostwriter for other authors and from producing his own stories, die income from this work being supplemented by a dwindling small inheritance American magazine Weird Tales was the first to publish work by L, they also produced writings by Tennessee Williams (1 9 1 1 -1 9 8 3 ) , perhaps one o f the finest playwrights, poets and all-round writers ever produced by America, and were not alone in the U S magazine world of that period in publishing an eclectic mixture of authors, from pulp’ to the (later) highly respectable

including Robert Bloch (1 9 1 7 -1 9 9 4 ),

who subsequently wrote the novel Psycho

(filmed in 1960 by Alfred

Hitihcock, which became one of the earliest and most influential psythological horror films), Robert E Howard (1 9 0 6 -1 9 3 6 ), inventor o f the ‘Con:.·’, ihe Barbarian’ character, and Ray Bradbury (1 9 2 0 - )

a leading

stienie l.ction writer. H P L wrote prolifically for Weird Tales for 15 years, almost exclusively .4)1 the

while also earning money from writing revisions

orks of other authors, and a ghostwriting project for the famous

JllusioIΊ^t and escapologist H arry Houdini

(1 8 7 4 -1 9 2 6 ). In literary

cinlcs H P L met a young L Ron Hubbard (1911- 1986), whose fiction was also published in Weird Tales, and Lovecraft regarded Hubbard as ’’most extraordinary” in a positive way

Hubbard was later involved

with Crowleyan ritual work in partnership with the scientist and magi­ cian Jack Parsons (who is mentioned in several places in this book), and lie eventually founded the controversial cult, The Church o f Scientology. 984 Jhtd, p 99-100. For further information on Roerich see the Roerich Museum Web­ site www.roerich.org/ and John McCannon, Shamanic motifs in Fin-de-Siecle Russian ^rt, the case o f Nicholas Roerich,/. Academic Study of Ma^ic, 2, p 300-332 98$

Long, Dreamer on the Night Side, p 14 -18

986 Ibid, P 1^7 987

Ibtd , p 136

988

Robert Bloch, Psycho, New York, Simon Sc Schuster, 1959

989

Long, Dreamer on the Night Side, p 128

990

Ibid, p 139

991

Ibid,p 114-5

w92

Ibid,

D I9 0 -I

332

D a v e E vans

See Carter, Sex and Rockets, and Scientology website www.^Lieiirology ; org for further information. It should be pointed out that Scientolop i now strenuously denies the Crowley link and can be most litigious oa the matter. By the standards of his day (and ours) H P L was pretty eccentric, la company he loved to play roles, including that of ancient Roman) bid Gentleman', ‘loyal British subject and 'rustic farmer'. H e had the con-,· viction that he was 'born old' and addressed his contemporaries as'l· grandchildren'. One of his habits was to engage in long treks purely to · look at various pieces of exterior architecture that interested him, includ ing private houses, at night, presumably to avoid having to talk to s t^ f t gets. H e referred to himself in third person a lot, and once n к rlu'diL.illjjr^. tried out over 50 fountain pens in a shop to find one that u.',·. i-x.K-:iy· ■, right. On the occasion of applying for a job he submitted a highly i

i

and negative resume, and in any case so far as any prospective emi'lnu-r... was concerned H P L was an appalling timekeeper, and was very poor at _ such simple practical tasks as crossing the road

t 's

H P L showed obvious delight in having a n ‘allergic reaction' (actually a , swollen hand) from accidentally bumping into an Egyptian artefact in a museum

which he saw as a doom-laden recognition o f him by some

inherent antiquated supernatural entity residing in the object (a piece .· o f tomb stone) o f "a kinship... instantly recognised and resented. If i had lingered longer... the slumbering malignancy activated by my pres*^ ence might not have been content with merely an attack on my hsnd* A more pragmatic view might be that since H P L was rarher fragile in general health, for example being completely immobilised by cold ■ weather

this was merely a bruise, which had it been caused by impaa ,

with a mundane object such as kitchen sink or street lamp pole v о ild have merited no further mention. Despite the pantheon of cosmic-sized terror and dark occult forces that he created in his books, Lovecraft thought occultism was nonsense when used other than as a plot device. H e saw ghosts and spirits as "an absolute absurdity", and was at heart a rationalist materialist, not a mystic; he much 993

Long, D ream er on the Night Side, p 84,46,31,38,163, 67, 77,70, 42

994

Ibid, p

995

Ibid, p 74

nc\f\

TUifi о σ τ

7 3 -4

S

ш j;

333

The History о / British Magic After Crowley

f P: jjreferrfd the hard science of Einstein and Darwin to even the pseudoΐ.;, science of Freud

In a letter to his local newspaper about popular

I -misconceptions of his writings (in this case his astronomy column) he remarked,

„ ‘it is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate 'v knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. N o sooner do we deem ourselves ‘

free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would set aside all the intellectual progress o f years, and plunge us back into the darkness o f mediaeval

■. disbelief" «5*. i l,ovecr;ift knew o f Crowley, and regarded him in the negative: in a letter to the poet Emil Petaja of 6th March 1935, Lovecraft wrote: "in the 1890's the fashionable decadents liked to pretend that they belonged to all sorts of diabolic Black Mass cults, 8C possessed all !

sorts of frightful occult information. T h e only specim en o f this group still active is the rather over-advertised Aleister Crowley" Although some elements of H PL s works and remarks appear racist in the 21st Century, comparatively, and o f his time he was probably not esperacist, having married a Jewish woman and being anti-Hitler, even

I before the advent of World W ar Two, which occurred after H P L had idied

His close friend James Morton (1 8 7 0 -1 9 4 1 ) was a pioneer of

tl;e e.nly Negro Rights movement in the 1920s, long before such rights S ecam e enshrined in U S Law some decades later

However the

mouiin academic and H P L aficionado Justin W oodman recently wrote , in this context that 'of their time racists' especially when they publish and such wot '< is influential, can still be highly damaging to the cause of racial equality :n the present day

997

Ih id , p 6 г , 196, 95, 209-11

998 HP Lovecraft, letter to T h e Providence Evening News, 5 September 1914, repro­ duced at the H P Lovecraft Archive Website Selected Letters Volume V, (August Derleth, Ed.), Sauk City, Wis-

runsiii. Arkham House, 1976, p 120 1000

Long, D ream er on the Night Side, p 227-231

1001

Ibid, p 52

ТП 01

W o o d m a n , le tt e r to

F o rtea n T im e s , т о т . ю о л . о 7 б

334

Dave Evans

H P L died in 1937 from cancer and kidney disease. From this h'ler biog­ raphy of an unusual, and in many ways feeble and unimpressive person, who was certainly out of his time’ in many ways, it might appear odd that he has such a significance anywhere, let alone in magic

However

his works have been hugely influential, as will now be discussed. ^

i

The literary legacy of Lovecraft The Arkham House publishing company was formed after H P L died r promote his work, and that of several other important horror .lud fantasy authors

H P L became a source o f great fascination and fan-wor^^'

among American college students

and commencing shortly

'

World W ar Two his output was the topic of considerable literary discus* sion in French academic circles

This has been speculated as being

due to U S troops leaving behind copies of Weird Tales as they advanced across Europe in 1944-5, feeding the literary interest o f a French nation that had been occupied by the Nazis for several years and which might have been suffering a dearth of new literature, whatever the perccivfel quality. A rumour I have heard independently from several magicians, but faaVe been unable to substantiate. It is a Meme. Equally, the explosion of cheap paperbacks published in the 1950s onwards might have fuelled H P li popularity. In terms of his influence measured by circulation, rhe le.iditig Lovecraft scholar Joshi notes that by the 1970s around 1 jmllion paper­ back editions of H PL s works had been printed It is H P I i creation of the collective work now known as Cthulhu \ Ethos which sets him apart from other horror writers of his (or any other) time so far as magic is concerned. Lovecraft created a detailed and hugely coherent pantheon of ‘Elder Gods' who were excluded from e.iith, and a unique cosmology; with these Old Ones banished to beyond the stars, but waiting to return. The terrible god Cthulhu was high in the p.intlicoti. and was usually depicted as an amorphous creature with mai'v tnir.ieles, 1003 For an authoritative recent biography see S T Joshi, Λ D ream er and A Visionary; H . P. Lovecraft in His Tim e, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2001 1004

Long, D ream er on the N ight Side, p 149-50

Ϊ005

ib id , p 4

1006

Ibid , p S '7

1007 S. T. Joshi, Introduction to H.P. Lovecraft 8c W. Conover, Lovecraft at Last, York. CoDoer Square Press, 2002, d xi-xvi

l

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

335

g an octopus or squid in some respects, and he-she-it was below the ocean. Occasionally, 'when the stars were right' (a refto both astronomy and astrology), the Old Ones were able to gain temporary ingress to this world, often with the aid of earth-bound iiperers and devotees, using secret or hidden magical lore to evoke these |шег Gods.

II

As the modern academic and magician Justin W oodman writes: “such knowledge - a body of 'forbidden'or'blasphemous'lore detail­ ing both the monstrous antediluvian world of the Old Ones, and their eventual, apocalyptic return - forms a thematic cornerstone o f the Cthulhu mythos: one which undermines anthropocentric assump­ tions that 'man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone” This ingress was usually one with hugely unpleasant results for humanity, since H PL was not often one to write a reassuring or otherwise formu­ laic 'happy ending with the forces o f good being ultimately victorious. HPLs Mythos became rapidly popular, with a small coterie of authors surrounding H P L , and adding to the Mythos with stories of their own. Ihese included Robert Bloch (mentioned above), Clark Ashton Smith (1883-1961) and Frank Bellknap Long (1901- 1994)

Since Love-

crafts death dozens o f other writers have also taken on the Mythos style and it is estimated that nearly a thousand Mythbs tales have been pub­ lished (many of them quite execrable) ICScreator,

so the Mythos has long outlived

and has expanded to almost'biblical' proportions so far as the

number of words in print is concerned.

Magicians and Lovecraft The modern American magician Bill Siebert (aka 'Alobar' among other pseudonyms, and who was discussed with regard to Kenneth Grant in the previous chapter) wrote in 1989 that''fiction seems to be the most

J0 0 8 Justin Woodman, Alien Selves: Modernity and the Social Diagnostics of the Demonic in “Lovecraftian Magick”, J . A cadem ic Study o f M agic, 2, 2004, p 16, quoting H.P. lovecraft, ‘The Dunwich Horror in H. P. Lovecraft, T h e Dunwich H orror an d Others, Wisconsin, Arkham House, 1984, p 170, original 1928

1009

Long, D ream er on the Nightside, р23-4

тлю

HP Loverrafr Archive fOnlinel

336

D av e Evans

universal dialect amongst dreamers”

within which he includes mag·'

dans, since much of his magical work is carried out in dream-, or i '' il planes. In common with many'real life' magicians who have, or ciaini possess'a special magical bookl such as Amado Crowley's Book o f I ’ ' i i

tion, Kenneth Grant's family Grimoire etc, Lovecraft's stories conraiiud references to a dread magical tome. The Necronomicon, which was sajd to have such powers as to send the reader insane, and to allow ingress of

A

the Old Gods back to earth if one actually worked the rituals described therein. It was HPLis friend Frank Bellknap Long who claimed to have inve '.ttu the notion of an English translation of the Necronomicon, allegedly by John Dee in the 17th Century, in the original version of Long's story

The Space Eaters

published in 1928. This 'dread book' became the

focus of considerable interest and speculation in the occult community, and dozens of alleged print versions have emerged in recent decades.

»

The Dread Necronomicon Kenneth Grant claims that many of his magical discoveries and eirlyicomparative work on Crowley's Liber A L and Lovecraftian entities were actually the catalyst for the appearance of contemporary published' u.i sions of what was claimed to be the infamous Necronomicon include the 'Hay'

and 'Simon'

II e,t

versions, both of wliich G . ii:

cites, although in various places he mentions the 'actual' NecroKc·,·. ici, meaning the original ancient tome, as a fiction. W hen I had the ϋι^-ΜΟ' to put some written questions to him he declined to comment on the seeming discrepancy, although he did remark that to answer any of my questions would require him to write several more books, which .is hf was then approaching 80 years old and still writing a considerable q м tity, was too much of an effort

lo ii

B ill S ie b e r t , Q u a r t z c r y s t a ls a n d s e x m a g ic k t e c h n iq u e s ,

Cerem onial M agick,

Cincinnati Jou rn al o f

7 ,1 9 8 9 , p 5 2 - 5 7 , p 5 4 / n . S i e b e r t , m e n t i o n e d in a p r e v i o u s c h a p t e r , h a s

a lso b e e n k n o w n a s A io b a r G re y w a ik e r a n d P ra te r P V N

D ream er on the Night Side,

1012

Lon g,

1013

G ra n t,

1014

T h e 'H a y '

1015

T h e 'S i m o n '

I0l6

K e n n e t h G r a n t , n e r s o n a l r o m m n m V a r i o n . τ'7-'7-'7.ο η ·?.

Hecate's Fountain, p Necronomicon,

p 24

iii

L o n d o n , S k o o b , 1 9 9 2 , O r ig in a l 1 978

Necronomicon,

N e w Y o rk , A von , 1978

J

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

Howev'cr this would seem to be at least a partially tautological argument, since if Grants printed magical output really did to some extent inspire d » content o f modern books claiming to be The Necronomicon, then he can hardly also claim these same modern books as external and objective supporting evidence o f his own beliefs and experiences. This is much

die same kind of tautology that arose with his tales o f Mrs. Patterson, which were returned to him in a ‘Chinese Whisper', as discussed in the previous chapter.

In the late 1970s, Herman Slater, the owner o f the influential New York occult supplies and bookshop Magickal Childe, and the motivating force behind the fake ‘Simon’ Necronomicon was, according to an associate, Alan Cabal, "savvy enough to sell leftover chicken bones as human finger bones to wannabe necromancers, so he surely knew that the market for genuine’ Necronomicon could be huge—with the right packaging... the Necronomicon was a team effort... the design and layout were the wo^'k of Jim Wasserman of the О Т О ... the text was modeled on the Wiccan Book o f Shadows and the Goetia, a grimoire of doubtful authenticity itself, dating from the late Middle Ages” b 19o0, the Avon publishing house released the paperback version of the

Necro·,lomicon, which remains in print and has been selling very stead■ly ever since

a feat that few ‘real’ magic books have ever managed,

LaVe\'s Satanic Bible being one of the few other exceptions. Alan Cabal, writing of the nominal ‘author’ of the Avon book said that on occasions; “Simon refused to attend a book signing... (I was recruited to) imper· him and forge his signature”

thus with some delicious irony,

Somi owners of the 'fake' signed grimoire also do not have the 'real' signatu'c of the author. The iiiagician and author Joel Biroco comments on some aspects of the 'Simo! ί version of the Necronomicon, discussing how it is quite likely that perceived magical results of a dark and disturbing nature may occur when using the spells in the book, as he believes that many of the spells are stolen pijicemeal from ‘real’ and extant ancient curses in ancient Sumerian magic. ^7

Alan Cabal, The doom that came to Chelsea, New York Press, Vol. i6, 23 (Online)

i i

Ib id

■ tsio

Ibid

337

Dave Evans

338

but gives no primary sources for this belief 1020 Since space here does not permit coverage o f the many claimed Мест·' χ

nomicons, the reader is advised to consult the excellent piece of investiga-' don by H arm s and Gonce, cited below. On the modern published ver­ sions o f The Necronomicon, Phil Hine wrote, “what price this forbiddee knowledge? About £ 4 .5 0 in paperback actually. Ridiculous!”^'''’·*. He sub­ sequently published a version of his own Lovecraftian magical grimoire in which he wrote “there are several published necronomicons, but none of them for me do justice to that sense o f an utterly blasphemous tome' which sends you insane after a thorough reading” The -nomicon suffix appears to have gained popularity in artistic and. magical circles to denote something dark, weird and interesting, for example the Imagonomocon website, which is a collective of artists depicting “monstrous creatures and infernal sorcerers”

1 he inilucn-

tial Swiss artist H R Giger ( 1 9 4 0 - ) has produced art books and a tarot .’i deck bearing the Necronomicon name However two American researchers, Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Gonce recently produced a lengthy examination of these alleged Necro­

nomicons, concluding that the book itself is simply a literary fiction, and the diverse and numerous more recently published versions claimi ng to be such a book are without exception fraudulent

In this respect, fraudi^

lent means that they are not the centuries-old writings of Abdul А1Ь(Щ

azed, the purported Arabic author as named in the Cthulhu Mythos, {ЬЩ which was also a childhood name H P L used in play) but mo c ччеш creations. From talking to various magicians who employ L owm 'tian magic, some of the books apparently have magical value, howevc- ,-cspiic being 'fakes’. As has been a major point of this book, belief over fact is a major m.igii.!' factor, and if the magician believes in a concept strongly enough, \cm ;ч' 1020

Joel Biroco, K a o s 14, p 67- 74, p 82-85

1021

Hine, Nox, 6, p 41

1022 Phil Hine, The Pseudonomicon, Irvine, California, Dagon Productions, Original 1994, emphasis original 1023

Imagonomicon Website www.imagonomicon.com/e_index.html

1024

H R Giger website www.hrgiger.com/bio.htm

1025 Daniel Harms & John Wisdom Gonce, The Necronomicon Files, revise York Beach. Weiser. 2 0 0 Я (огЫпа 1 i q q 8 ) .

p6

‘ditioi

Щ Ш' Ш

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

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Щ iTi'.plo} I'd as a magical tool. The magician Kenneth Grant, discussed in p e previous chapter highlighted the fictional writings of Lovecraft in the Wc 1950s or early 60s as o f “quite exceptional interest”

to the magi-

tian, in their description of unearthly entities, the Old Gods, inimical to humanity who would one day return to rule earth. Grant seems to have been the first occultist to ditectly address, and work with, the Lovecraft­ ian element in magic, although one o f Lovecraft s clients for ghostwriting, one William Lumley, told H P L in the 1930s that he felt the creatures in the Mythos were real. This is addressed briefly in one of Lovecraft’s ictrer to his friend Clark Ashton Smith, dated 3rd October 1933: “1 le is surely an unique survival from the earths mystical childliood .i.I've told you about his claims of extensive travel in China, W-ual, and all sorts of mysterious and forbidden places, and his air • familiarity with such works as the arcana of Paracelsus, Hertnes TV snifegistus, Albertus Magnus, Appolonius of Tyana, Eibon, von Jup':;, and Abdul Alhazred. H e says he has witnessed monstrous fifties in deserted cities...has written and collaborated on powerful ^rdramas, has conversed with incredibly wise and monstrously ancient ■ v.ii-.irds in remote Asiatic fastnesses... including the donning o f a wl'.ce robe!... his own sorceries, I judge, are o f a somewhat modest kind; though he has had very strange and marvellous results from clay images and from certain cryptical incantations... W e may think were writing fiction, and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite o f our­ selves - serving unwittingly as mouthpieces of... Cthulhu and other pleasant Outside gentry” late Andrew Chumbley (an academic researcher and member of "tint's magical group the Typhonian О Т О from 1 9 9 3 -1 9 9 9 ) told me b t Grant saw the Lovecraftian squid-like entity Cthulhu, who waits ftder the sea, and which is, in the words of H P L s novels ‘not dead but J f i . ning) as a metaphor for the human subconscious mind

and

Michael Staley, Grant's colleague in the Typhonian О Т О has written

•oj6

Grant, H idden Lore, 1989, original 1959-1963. No page numbering,

w»7 Lovecraft, Selected Letters Volume IV, p 270-271. William Lumley was one of HPLs tiyision clients. Lovecraft’s revised version of Lumley’s tale 'The Diary of Alonzo Typer’ apt^ears in H.P. Lovecraft, T h e H orror in the M useum, Sauk City, Wisconsin, Arkham House, 1989· My gratitude goes to Justin Woodman for pointing out this letter and as­ sociated details to me, and for very usefully commenting on a draft of my HPL chapters. τ π ίβ

A n H r ^ w GhnmK!»>

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Dave Evans

that in his opinion by extra-terrestriar Grant means, as did Lovt'ir.i^',.··» simply‘beyond human consciousness’

As mentioned in the previoitt-ii

chapter, Grant is, in some quarters of the occult world, highh respecrci^^^ for example Nema, an American occultist writing in 1995 ,s.';d,"ua!!’Ki H P L , Mr. Grant is a conscious adept and priest of the eldritch, daric" " In some respects Grant can be seen as a Lovecraftian figure in liis publ.t к image - that of a reclusive and hermit-like learned scholar, spending much of his time writing in solitude and dealing with very Jifficalt occult concepts. Grant expanded hugely upon the relevance of I II^L» magic in his subsequent books, and continues to do so; di’spire hang met with mockery and great skepticism from some quarters. 1 or ex.)nijde the author Colin Wilson (1931- ), who had himself previously wnrfiift some Lovecraftian fiction, and had been involved in the creation ol л r.ijkf

Necronomicon

remarked: “I was inclined to suspect that tiraiic liad

invented his idea (the Lovecraft connection) as a gimmick u> .ippt-.il ta a new audience”

It seems not to have merely been a cynical раже·

of marketing, judging by the detailed magical analyses and anecdotes

^

Lovecraftian contacts that Grant provides, at length, in his many bocfa«. Grant at least appears to take the mattet very seriously indeed.

'|

H e is not alone, however. "ТЬе modern magician Phil Hine wrote in 1994,. j o f the attraction o f H P L to occultists, "there is something very i ояшtic about H P Lovecraft. The same romance that brings people towards magic by reading Dennis Wheatley” "Ihe founder o f the Church o f Satan, Anton LaVey’s, The Satanic published in 1 9 7 2 comprises instructions for rituals employing a pan*. theon of dark god-forms from around the world, and it draws considerably on H P I i entities, including three specific and detailed'Lovecraftian rituals, although at least two of these were not actually written by I iVesi

1029

Michael Staley, The Mysteries o f Lam, in Theietnic M agick X C , p 53-71. p 54

1030 'Nema', M a a t M agick: a guide to selfdnitiation, York Beach, Weiser, 1995 p 209, Emphasis added. 1031 Wilsons Lovecraftian fiction is ‘The Return o f the Lloigor', in Tales of t h ( гЬм/Ьк M ythos, (August Derleth, Ed.), Sauk City, Wisconsin, Arkham House, 1969, and his collaboration in producing the fake ‘Hay Necronom icon o f 1978 is discussed in Cjonce and Harms, Necronomicon Files, p 51 1032

Wilson, Tentacles across time, S koob Esoterica Anthology, i, p 13 -15 , p 13

10^3

Hine, Pseudonomicon.

d

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341

However LaVey regarded Love-

^taft .1.1 a'convincing and thoroughly terrifying” author

with the hints

.1 t- I content given in H P I i work being “often identical to actual certtBomcs anc nomenclature” of the occult, (but LaVey gives no examples • ‘tojastify this belief ; Ifce AmerK.in LaVey, born in 1930 had once been a friend of Mythos ^.lUrhoi Clai к Ashton Smith, and his favoured reading from a very young i^c h.,d bei a Weird Tales, the magazine in which Lovecrafts work was i 4moM a permanent fixture, as mentioned above; so it is possible that

,*· HPL liad yeatly influenced LaVey from childhood. ar.y case the S atan -H PL link is one that is still promoted for fiscal Jutposes. llie influential Leeds-based magical supplies shop Sorcerers

’'Affrenticc sent me a book-advertising flyer in 2004, promoting books frjhv ai'd about La Vey, and a version of the Necronomicon (which they the underpinning of Satanic philosophy) which said "get your *'hards on rlic books they’re trying to ban... politicians and members of Lsrnblishment want information on Satanism banned... act now... ■](.iiid buji· the books) before they become forbidden!”

Despite the

Stofte of urgency and warning, in my researches for the Blasphemy chapter ,.'f fijund no mention o f specific impending legal action to ban either any rofLaVcy’s books or any modern edition o f The Necronomicon. querying the S A they told me that the flyer was one that was a little ‘ did (being sent among a lager package of advertisements, since I have been on their mailing list for some years) and although the threat was no; imminent, they considered it likely at some point, based on the coni , timiing fundamentalist Christian attitudes shown by some activists, as "eJicmplified by the late Geoffrey Dickens M P

(who had also been

instrumental in the early moralising attacks on Genesis P Orridge and his M ow’'Wreckers o f Civilisation”, as mentioned in a previous chapter). in any case the Lovecraftian idea has taken hold within occultism, to an extent greatly changed the form in which modern occultism ID H

S e e L a V e y , S a t a n ic R it u a ls , a n d E r i k D a v i s , C a l l i n g C c h u l h u , L o v e c r a f t s M a g i c k

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T e c h g n o s i s w e b s i t e w w w . t e c h g n o s i s .c o m / l o v e c r a f t . h t m l

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lobn Dennis, of Sorcerers Aoorentice. oer^onal communication. 10-11-2004

342

D ave Evans

Λ

manifests. The modern author and occultist Alan Moore belii.u.s fhat “without Grant’s insistence that the works of H P Lovecraft reprts- ntcJ valid channels of magical information, much of the furnitui'c aiid !.ιΐ\1- * scape o f our modern magic systems, Chaos magic for example, woni^be utterly unrecognisable”

This latter point is examined below.

However the matter is not totally one of approval of Grant. One of rbe

a

founders (of one form, at least) of Chaos Magic, Peter Carroll dis.ivrecvli instead mocking Grant’s “wacky mixture of Lovecraftian adolesceii t nigl’.r··' mare and sex souped up with demonic naughtiness” that the magician should “N O T wake the Elder Gods”

and ;idvisiag this cesp;te

Carroll allowing some H PL-like imagery in his own work, the ill .str,itions (by Andrew David) accompanying his Liber Null being part lulaily Lovecraftian, showing an apparently ‘tentacled’ magician. Anothn that's magician Phil Hine, subsequently the author of a Lovecraftian m.igu.)! manual himself, advised in 1986 that"prior to attempting ... (a jM'ticir* lar Lovecraftian-type ritual) it is helpful to steep oneself in the C I’lilhu-' mythos tales and the ramblings of K. Grant”

;

xi

The occultist Peter Sanderson contended in 2002 that althougli ntua's f a Lovecraftian flavour may well attract magical responses from .m apyar ent non-human entity, it is unlikely that ‘real) truly Lovecraftian en: · eare contacted by magicians, since to do so, given their totally anti-hup’ii and pathological nature (as described in gruesome and lengthy deta ' b' H P L in his novels) would entail instant insanity or death for the msgi dan who successfully evoked them. As Sanderson sarcastically remarlg: “that vibrating sound isn’t the arrival of a wandering evil from be\ ond :Ье stars... it’s Howard Philip (...Lovecraft) spinning in his Rhock lbi.'.u grave”

Phil Hine echoes the cynicism of Sanderson to sonv :\'··ιιΐ

when he writes: “the Great Old Ones are not particularly inteiisU’. ir. humanity... what use is something that thinks humans are at best ii>o4i! insects?”

however despite this caveat Hine does consider the ^-acrice

o f 'Lovecraftian magic to be a useful one for the developmer·· 1039

Moore, Beyond our Ken, Kaos 14, p 159

1040

Peter Carroll, Letters, Nox, 6,1988, p 19

'

1 0 4 1 ____________ , Advice we would have given ourselves at the start o f our in liu al work, Templum website www.templum.demon.co.uk/doc%2520files/A%2520Word%a5M to%2520the%252oWise%2520.html0Ce=74i3 1042

Phil Hine, Experiments in dark lore, Nox 3,1986, 29-зо, Emphasis added

1043

Peter J Sanderson, The call o f the Cchuihu "mythos", K aos 14, p 46

..

104 4

Hine. P.cribcd in 1991 by a modern magician DM MitchelT'replete with ioomorphic symbols and totems of a direct and primeval sort”

which

-■is .1 phrase worthy of Kenneth Grant's elegant prose. ■Ihe very un-individuated nature of the entities in Lovecraft is an intrinpart of their subjective horror to the individual

and this lack of

^piidividuation might allow the magical practice, as the Religious Studies scl'.ol.i;· Paul Heelas writes, to "express beliefs and values which exemplify iteep seated cultural trajectories”

Similarly to the negative connota-

uo is of the Left Hand Path, discussed above, this perceived 'evil' may , be one of the reasons why some occultists have shunned the notion of ir'·'using it. However this notion of subjective evil is neatly philosophically '

.is$es.sed by two modern American magicians, Christopher Hyatt (who is also a psychologist) and Lon Milo DuQuette: -

"Evil is an 'externalization and 'objectification of something fearful, horrifying, or different. Evil can be a label for something as simple as .. p> son or an object that frustrates us. Evil is pain... the enemy... rht Gods of other m en... the night terrors... the overwhelming feeling of falling apart. Yet all these images are non-sense. Evil like

,

other ideas exists because we as humans exist. Nature knows not 1 1*. 3 Phil Hine, The physics of evocation- a Mythos perspective, Dark Doctrines. The I ttholo^y, New World, Doncaster, 1991, p 45-59, p 45 ,«ic \

D.M Mitchell, the nature o f the beast, Dark Doctrines, p 35- 42, p 41

и 5·;

L e e ,‘Memories o i я sorcerer ,J. Academic Study of Magic, i, p 112-3

.

M.,,,, До,,

Л

346

Dave Evans

Evil, neither Good, nor for that matter Law. These are creatio > of the human mind, explanations’ which help us quiet the 'terrors in the night’. The human mind requires the belief in ’its' idea of oi\ii'r' for the sole purpose of the human mind. Thus, the nature of cvi! is the human mind” Another magician, Frank Ripel, claimed in the m id '1980s to not or ! be descended of a direct hereditary lineage from the Magician-I’no'rt of Atlantis, but to have published the text of a grimoire called

1>яи-

thenerom, a book which he says is 4 ,0 0 0 years old, and the original source from which the Necronomicon was written. This marvellous magical piece of one-upmanship over Kenneth Grant appears to come to nothing however when examining the text, which seems little more than slightly rehashed extant OTO -related rituals, with some yoga and Enochun magic thrown in, plus numerous clumsily-paraphrased passages whidi appear to be plagiarisms from Crowley's Book o f the Law has subsequently claimed to be the antichrist

Mr. Rjp«

which seems excieiviol.

odd for someone whose previously claimed lineage massively preda'cc the emergence of Christianity. Since his own website

is in Italian,

which I do not speak, I was unable to find any clarification of his i\Gtcnomical beliefs. By contrast, Phil Hine’s Pseudonomicon from 1994 (republished by New Falcon Press in 2005) is a short booklet examining the Mythos, and pro· viding some practical suggestions for magically working with it, rather than making grandiose claims. Hine writes that "it is generally accepted by experienced magicians that working with the Cthulhu Mythos is dan* gerous”

but “each God brings its own madness ... madness is some­

thing that we still fear- the great taboo”

and "states of fear, reurosis

and borderline paranoia can occur regularly”

but this must be dc,■;i:

with, since “real magic is wild” 1057 Lon Milo DuQuette 6c Christopher Hyatt, Crowley's Illu stra ted G o etia, Las Veg. New Falcon, p lo -ii

1058

Frank G Ripel, T h e M a g ic o f A tlan tis. S a u th en erom ; the rea l sou rce o f th e N ecro·

n om icon , Pance, Ljubljana, Amaliecti Press, 1985 1059

Chaser Website www.chaser.com.au/shite/wm9.htm+ripel+antichrist6«:hi-en

1060

Frank G Ripel website www.frankripel.org/

1061

Hine, P seu d on om icon , disclaimer on flyleaf

1062

Ib id ,

p 4

1063

Ib id ,

p 15

1064

Ib id ,

p 7

к

347

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

ι-, f',' «-

! experimental Lovecraftian ritual group called the Haunters o f the D ark ))

was created in London in 1999, one o f whose members was sic anthropology PhD student and magician, Justin W oodman

I is discussed in my introduction as one o f the modern academics in the field of researching magic). H e writes "the focus o f the ► w i$riot... upon worship o f the Old Ones, but identification with

1 as ayatars of a post-human metamorphosis”

This would appear

totally in accord with the beliefs expressed by Kenneth Grant as : magical rationale behind contact with such entities, whom Grant las "beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than we can conceive of as hum an... the one and only chance for md to advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with i beings” Although subjectively dangerous and demonic entities were being .iiidresseu in H O D rituals. W oodman writes “the ambivalent character of the cc'vonic...did not represent a source of absolute ontological evil, but was mnstituted as a form of alien otherness'”

and this somewhat

amhivalL-nt attitude to the transcending of good and evil provides a useful td'.o of the attitudes expressed by some of my questionnaire respondents rl'.e Left Hand path chapter. It also follows a sentiment given in the anonymous editorial of the internal Order newsletter of the Typhonians Hi 1989, which said: ' :n recent times the psychological, sociological and political aspects ot magick... have received a great deal of attention. These aspects, ■ though of interest on their own levels, are very limiting, however, in that they are restricted to the sphere of the solely hum an... the essence of magik (sic) is way beyond such limitations” As to whether it is conventionally 'evil'; the modern British Satanist Gavin Baddeley sees Grant’s work with H PL s concepts as "partly tradinonal grimoire, partly disturbing self-psychoanalytic tract, partly surreal

io6-5 This is a pseudonym that, like the group's real name, makes reference to a term ised in Lovccrafc's Cthulhu mythos (in this case, the title of a story), 1066 Woodman, ‘Modernity, Selfhood, and the Demonic,' unpublished thesis extract, t'npiiasis added to Worship. 1067

Kenneth Grant, introducing The Ninth Arch, W atkin s R eview , 5, 2003, p 49 Woodman, Alien Selves, J . Academic Si«dy o/Magic, 2, 2004, p 14

π»ΐιώ

Khab.s. TTT. Ί. Winter Solstice io8o. 02

Dave Evans

348

nightm are fiction”

On this point of are they evil-or-jus- hen? in

1992 the magician and author Stephen Sennitt likened the image^^ jured by Grant'ian ritual to those images encountered in ρ·.\·ι hedrlu. drug use, in that they are so alien to

normal' human сог.м-чаи.г·.»

as to automatically cause xenophobic, if not overtly fearful, :r Sennitt believes this to be based on centuries of repression of rli;·, aspect o f human experience by organised religion, so the images de.f.: \\i:li in ‘ Lovecraftian magic thus appear demonic purely by social cor.turioniiigi: when in Sennitt’s worldview they are a more accurately a primiA.ii .isuccfiLi of natural and normal human psychic evolution

‘Rob’ (;; p.scu^ ·

nym), a member o f the H O D seemed to distil this outlook into p

' d ^

terms: "the negative emotional responses seem to occur because of uufyi' own conditioned fear of stepping beyond the construct wc mishike ηυϊ',ίί empirical ‘reality’"

Messages from the Elder Gods? W hen researching this, and my earlier chapters on Kenneth Grant I had in quick succession to re-read all nine books in the three Typhonian TrSe- \

gies, plus his novels, and some o f Austin Spare’s works. Trying to rapidly | read such overtly magical material in an ‘academic’ frame of min d, sudi as ■ taking notes and identifying useful quotes is intensive work, but 1 made some progress and had a considerable quantity o f notes typed up when! realised that I had not been outside for some days and apart from h.iving ; largely ran out of things to cook, I dearly needed to get some fresh air.· On leaving the building I saw that three paces away from my from d txjf, lying in the middle o f the road, was a dead squid. I laughed out loud at the sky, in very much the maniacal fashion of a doomed hero in a Lovecraftian novel who, despite his best efforts to save himself and his colleagues, is about to be consumed or torn to pieces by demonic entities from beyond the stars. 'The rational explanation for th^'j presence o f this symbolic representative o f the tentacled god Cthulhu h that I lived at the time within 30 0 yards of the sea, at a place that was j popular with night-fishermen, and the squid had probably just fallen from someone's bait box on their way to or from the fishing grounds. 1070 Gavin Baddeiey, L u c ifer R isin g: sin, d ev il w orship a n d r o c k ’n’roll, London, Ph xus. 1999, p 107, Emphasis added 1071 Stephen Sennitt, M on strou s cults: a study o f th e p r im o r d ia l G n osis, Doncjsrcr, Nev^ World, 1992, p 78-80 Τ Λ 7 ·?.

\ V o n d m a n . A li# » n .4 ί»ίν#^ς n 4 T . < » m n K a « i«

^

к* ·

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

349

i However it is extremely odd that it had fallen out right outside my front 3ildoor and not someone else's (I lived part-way down a long street) and s^.Aat it had remained there long enough for me to see it, without being ■f., whisked away as a free meal by the voracious flocks of seagulls who lived on the local rooftops. W hen I returned from a brief shopping trip Sthe squid had gone, either snapped up by a hungry gull, or dematerialI ' aed by agents o f Cthulhu, having done its work by impinging on my '·'■ consciousness. 1 A magician such as Kenneth Grant would probably treat the reality of the keyboard, textbook and pen and the reality of a magically materi­ alising symbolic squid equally. As an academic I cannot, however as a magician I hugely enjoyed the cosmic exclamation mark' that I was given. Postmodern philosophy stresses the “metaphoric and slippery nature of hinguage over the modernist, objective, factual.... (where) meaning is not possessed by a word, an action or an object as much as it is the product of a scries of relationships”

and it is perhaps in this spirit that the

phtiionenon should be appreciated, neither ignored nor completely arrepted, but that series of relationships be explored.

Lovecraft readers are not all magicians As mentioned above, many more people read and collect books on magic than are actually practicing magicians. Similarly, although H PLs work iias certainly been of great influence to some modern magicians, his con­ tinual high book sale figures must not be interpreted as indicative of a

s 1-1 ratio of those occultists using his methods, since Lovecraft is a very • fepular author among armchair horror aficionados. There are also H P L fens, often the younger ones, that read and use the books as a template fo·· rl'.e characters and settings of diverting 'role-playing games’ (often .ii'b-evtated to R P G ) such as The Call o f Cthulhu

However there

. I'.i.'.y i’e occasional crossover: the horror and fantasy author Neil Gaiman I pab of a Literature convention in England in 1983 where a panel was con ened to field audience questions about Lovecraft. Most of these were •actual, historical or general literary style queries, but Gaiman writes that “* tlvi, elderly gentleman... asked the panel whether they had given ni.cl' thought to his own theory: that the Great Qld O nes... had simply u sed

ΐά73

poor H P L to talk to the world, to foster belief in themselves, prior McCutcheon, The insider-outsider problem, p 9, in Letcher, Role o f the Bard, p 13 G a llin fT P r h iil b i i

w w w г«»-гКстплс1'c amusing tales and actions to impart a deeper message; for example: In one such story the Sufi Nasruddin is a magistrate who in his first case agrees with both the plaintiff and the defendant. W hen the court clerk obiecrs that both cannot be right, Nasruddin says:‘T believe you are right.’’ ! lere we are able to see the paradox clearly. In our conditioning, we sec chc'.gs as right or wrong, black or white. Linear thinking does not allow one t^ think holistically. Our minds wrestle in the dark dens of log.ii and lose the gist of life. Nasruddin was blessed with an open mind to carry the message of freedom. H e was chosen as a Sufi teacher beca.ise he co.;id make people laugh, and his humour was sharp enough to c . с'ч even rfie most rigidly conditioned mind. www.lifepositive.com/Spir: u^)rld ;cligions/sufism/nasruddin-mulla.asp

■I

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

Bibliography г

S iiK e this book deals primarily with occultists who were alive during

the 20th century, and many of whom are still alive and publishing in the ίϊ 21st Century, almost everything cited could arguably be regarded as a .primary source. Hence no distinction is made here between primary and secondary sources, they are simply listed alphabetically, with the exclu­ sion o f personal correspondence and conversations (which are only men­ tioned in footnotes).

This book has drawn heavily on both original and republished material that appears on the Internet, the latter of which can be a volatile source. Tbose Internet references that appear below may not be in existence by the time this book is published, but the persistent 'Googler' should be a l s to locate websites with the same information, if necessary. W here preference is cited as (E-book) this refers to an online or disk source where a manuscript has been rendered by the seller/provider (many ebooks are provided free of charge, through philanthropy or piracy) into an'Electronic Book’ or'Portable Data Format’ file (P D F ) which is suitfli'.'i· for reading on a computer screen, and/or for printing and home binding by the purchaser to create a more ‘conventional’ physical book if they so desire. lids home manufacture process on occasion allows for some variation in ige layout and thus page numbers cited may differ in other home-printed letsions of the same electronic sources. Indeed, some electronic books do ■IOChave page numbering at all, where this occurs it is mentioned. |OriginaI’ refers to the first-known publication date, and this does not l^^tessarily imply that publisher and location details given for the later edition were the same for the earlier date. W here a writer is published imdci one or more pseudonyms the citation is given here as printed in publication, and the pseudonym will have been mentioned in the pliiain text, if known.

405

.Я Dave Evans

406

Adherents database (Online) w ww .adherents.com/Na/Na_282.htn AeutherLumina (Online) www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/listing.html Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia, (original 1510) in Peter G M.utwel· ^w, Stuart, T h e O c c u lt in E a r ly - M o d e r n E u r o p e ; a D o c u m e n t a r y H is to r y , London. Ian, 1999 M arc Almond, T a in te d life : th e a u to b io g r a p h y , London, Pan, 1999

ΐ

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_________________________ , Posting to Wyrdglow discussion group, 22-7-2003 Bengt Ankarloo 8c Stuart Clark, Introduction to T h e A t h lo n e H is t o r y o j W itcb crafi4 0 i M a g i c in E u r o p e , V o lu m e 6 : T h e T w e n tie th C e n tu r y , London, Athlone, 1999

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■

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■ ■

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Dennis Wheatley, author's note to a collection of four magical novels ( T h e D

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T?je S a ta n is t, London, Century, 1988, Original 1960 _, T h e tim e h a s c o m e . .. t h e m e m o ir s : (3 vols), Hutchison, London, 1977-9. _, T h e y U sed D a r k F o rc es, London, Hutchinson, 1964 \Vikipedia website en.wikipedia.org/wiki jg^ecil Williamson, Letter to Gerald Yorke, 7-8 -1 9 5 2 , Warburg Institute, Yorke Collec‘ 'non,YC lE E 2 ,p 3 4 7 -5 0 ftf" ■______________ , letter to Robert Anseli, 18-2-1987, Museum of Witchcraft

Aivhive, W 3 6 7 _______ __________ , Museum of W itchcraft Archive, Williamson General Correspond­ ence Pile Colin Wilson, A le is t e r C r o w le y : th e n a tu r e o f th e B e a s t, Wellingborough, Aquarian, 1987 ___________ , Tentacles across time. S h o o k E s o t e r ic a A n th o lo g y , 1, London, Skoob, 1 9 9 5 ,p l3 -1 5 _,'Tlie return o f the Lloigor’, in T a le s o f th e C th u lh u M y th o s , (August Dcileth, Ed.), Sauk City, Wisconsin, Arkham House, 1969 Robert Anton Wilson 8c Robert Shea, Illu m in a tu s i London, Sphere, 1980, Original 475 i ^ e r t Anton Wilson, C o s m ic T r ig g e r, London, Abacus, 1977 Щ Burton H Wolfe, Introduction to LaVey, S a ta n ic B ib le Justin Woodman,'Modernity, Selfhood, and the Demonic: Anthropological PerspecS # ? e s on "Chaos Magick"in the United Kingdom’, unpublished PhD thesis, 2003 _______________ ' Alien Selves: Modernity and the Social Diagnostics of the Demons: in“Lovecraftian Magick", J. A c a d e m ic S tu d y o f M a g ic , 2, 2004, p 13-47 ______ __________ , letter to Fortean Times, 191, 2004, p 76 Worcester County Records, Quarter Session Rolls, in Thomas, R e lig io n a n d D e c lin e , p

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423

D ave Evans

424

Index Abbey O f Thelema 95 Abdul Alliarazed 338 Abrameiin 129 Africa 3 0 ,1 8 9 ,2 9 7 ,3 7 9 Agrippa 2 6 7 ,4Ш Aiwass 230 Albion 205 A khem y

1 30,162, 306, 329,421

Alcohol 4 3 ,1 5 6 ,1 7 8 ,2 0 5 ,2 9 6 ,3 0 5 Aldermaston 125 Alexandrian wirchcrafr 2 3 4 -5 ,2 8 1 Almond,Marc 1 0 5 ,1 9 7 .4 0 6 Amin, Idi 116 Amnesty Inremarional 104 Anal intercourse 206 Anarchy 1 5 3 ,2 0 2 ,3 7 2 Anathema of Zos 47

Astro-archaeology 274 Astrology 162,21 1 ,3 2 8 , m

Ataturk, son of Aleistcr C'lowlcy 274 Ateh 312 Athena 177 Atlantis 3 4 ,3 1 6 ,3 4 6 ,4 1 9 Atlantis Bookshop 286 Arrila the Hun 117 Australia 52, 356 Austria 358 Azande 30,411 Babalon 1 2 4 ,2 8 2 ,2 8 4 ,3 8 1 .3 8 8 117,418 Backwards masking 104 Baddeley, Gavin 347, 348 406 Bailey, Alice 175 Bakhtin, Mikhail 8 7 ,9 0 -1 .4 0 6 Balance, Jhonn 7 ,4 8 ,2 2 7 Balfour, Arthur 131 Balfour, Eve 131

Angerford Qc Lea (see also Lionel Snell) 125, 1 6 0 ,1 9 8 - 9 , 2 0 2 ,2 2 1 -3 ,2 2 7 , 355, 360, 365^6, 3 7 1 -2 , 3 7 7 -3 7 8 ,4 0 1

Baphomet 381

Anglican Church 140

Baraka 2 2 9 ,2 3 0 .2 7 8 ,2 7 9

Animal sacrifice 1 7 8 -9

Bardon, Franz 20

Bangor 4 1 ,2 7 9 ,4 1 1

Bengt Ankarloo 107, 3 2 2 ,4 0 6 ,4 1 5

Barrett, Francis 266

Anthroposophy 132

Bath 2 5 6 ,3 9 5 ,4 0 6

Antichrist 3 4 6 ,4 0 8

Barman 386

AOS ; See Spare, Austin Osman

Baudrillard,Jean 389

Appolonius ofTyana 339

BBC - British Broadcasting ( 2 7 8 -9 ,4 0 6

Aquarian Arrow 160, 3 7 2 ,4 0 6

364 ?9J

Astronomy 3 2 8 ,3 3 0 ,3 3 3

м ’ 97.. 5л.

Archaeology 2 7 ,2 7 4 , 363, 398

Beatles 1 0 4 -5 ,2 3 4 ,4 0 7

Archetypes 344, 380

Bedlam 255

Argentum Astrum 297

Belham-Payne,John 214

Arkham House 330, 333-5, 339-40,406, 4 1 6 ,4 2 3

Beilknap Long, Frank 330,3 3 5 -6 ,^ )6

Bell Inn, Aston Clinton 161

Aronson, Eliot 168-72, 406

Bennett, Allan 275

Arts and Crafts Movement 128

Bertiaux, Michael 172, 321,406

Asatru 75-6,151

Bible 4 3 ,8 5 .8 8 ,9 5 ,1 1 3 ,1 5 7 ,3 8 5 .4 0 6

Asclepius 177

Biroco, Joel 7 ,2 1 1 -1 2 ,2 1 9 , 300,337,338, 354, 357, 388

Ashdown Forest 2 7 1 ,4 1 4 Ashton Smith, Clark 335, 3 3 9 ,341

Bisexuality 1 4 2 ,1 8 4 ,2 4 6

Aslan 1 3 3 ,2 7 9

Black Magic 1 2 0 ,1 5 2 -4 ,1 6 7 ,1 :. 3.1 6 1 8 2 ,1 8 3 ,1 9 5 , 2 0 3 ,2 1 9 ,2 2 2 ,3 2 5 , 372,415, 422

Astral plane 322

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

SaikVlass 8 9 ,1 1 2 - 1 1 5 ,3 3 3

Black Magidan 9 6 ,17 2 -3 ,18 3 ,19 7 ,2 0 4

Buddhism 3 3 ,8 0 ,12 0 ,18 1,19 5 ,2 2 9 ,2 9 7 , 364,370,382,404

B!atk4c4)d, Algernon 3 14

Bully the Vampire Slayer 148

Sam Jinny 38,407

Burroughs, William S 156

Blair, Гопу 12 1,2 0 0

Butler, Alison 7 ,3 1,3 9

Ian 344,407

Butler, W E 175

«aiphemy 4 ,8 4 ,8 5-9 9 ,10 2 ,10 6 -9 ,15 1, Ш .358

Butterfly Effect 379

Blavatsky, H P 18 1-2 ,18 4 ,19 2 -3 ,19 5 -6 , 218,220-2, 316 ,3 3 0 ,4 0 7 ,4 12,4 22

Cabal Heraclitus 357

Bless the Child 148

Call of Cthulhu (game) 349

Bloch, Robert 3 3 1,3 3 5 ,4 0 7

Cambridge 13 0 ,36 7 ,4 16 ,4 18 ,4 2 2

Bfcmd Sacrifice 179

Cambridgeshire 86

Bogdan, Henrik 306, 3 11,3 2 4 ,4 0 7

Cameron, Marjorie 203,295,418

Boguraz, Waldemar 19,407

Cannabis 79

Book of Desolation 232,26 0,336 ,39 5

Canterbury Tales 125

Book of Lies 280,361,409

Cantu, David 300,407

•look of Pleasure 47 ,2 9 9 ,30 3,4 12

Carfax Monographs 30 6 ,313

iio of Satyrs 47

Carlyle, Thomas 133,408

Bo к of the Law 4 4 ,110 ,14 1,2 3 0 ,2 3 2 -3 , Ш -L 266,346,399,409

Carlyon, Kevin 164

"oo·. of the Spider 310

Cabal, Alan 337,407

Caliguh 1 1 7

Carnival 8 4 ,8 9 -9 1,12 5 ,17 8 ,2 0 6 ,22 2

Becth, Martin 7 ,4 4 ,9 4 ,10 6 ,110 ,12 1, 262, 29C 124,407,409

Carroll, Peter J 3 ,14 4 ,16 0 ,17 3 ,17 9 ,2 0 1, 203,206,214, 342,355-7,361, 364, 369, 372, 378-9,382,386,388,408

Bo·' nan, Marion 78,407

Castaneda, Carlos 26 9 ,353,4 17

Bi, Scout Movement 128

Catholic 1 6 ,7 4 ,8 0 ,9 1,10 6 ,11-5 ,13 4 ,17 7 , 190 ,19 9,226 ,249 ,383

'|bdbury, Ray 331 6 Jney, Anthony 88,407

Cavendish, Richard 34,143,408

1· =v. Christopher 308

Celtic 2 6 ,7 6 ,7 8 ,18 0 ,2 17

‘ eak·.; ear, Francis 7 ,10 5 ,12 5 ,12 8 ,15 5 , 15a 407

Ceremonial Magic 4 6 ,139 ,18 3, 229,232, 234, 370, 376

Brtathwork 376,402

Cernunnos 63

iiTCc^'ll, Mary 143

Chambers, Vanessa 7, 20, 38

Brci -Ut, Loreen, 52

Channel 4 10 0 ,10 1,19 9 ,4 0 8

Bre ian,T. Casey 230

Channelling 383

Bn·' fer, Charles 144

Chaos International 12 1,15 4 ,2 2 6 ,3 5 8 , 365, 381

B'.-ol 7 ,8 ,3 1,3 9 ,2 4 6 ,3 5 7 ,4 19 JnsrolC.H .A .O .S. Temple 357 yirirish Empire 13 4 ,19 4 Bridsb Film Institute 1 1 3 British Humanist Association 134,407 itish Library Document Supply 256,407

Chaotes 351, 362, 364-72, 376,386 Chaucer 10 1 Chernobyl 1 3 2 ,1 3 3 Chesterton, G K 128 China 44,339,404

Bririsli Museum 316

Chinese 3 5 ,5 1,18 9 ,3 0 2 ,3 14 , 3 16 ,337

Bromsgrove 87

Choronzon 2 75,38 1,38 6

425

Dave Evans

426 Christopherson, Peter liX)

Chumbley, Andrew 3 ,7 ,7 1 ,17 7 ,2 1 2 - 1 4 , 216,339,408 Church of Chaos 356 Church of England 80

ChurchofSaran 92,105,158,197, 340, 374-375 C IA 230 Cinderella 237 Circle of Chaos 358

376,379,380-2,386, 388, 39' 409,410-23

· · -rfn

Crowley Amado 3 ,4 ,1 7 ,2 1 ,3 6 .55,W, 8 1- 2 ,10 3 - 4 ,13 1,14 2 ,16 4 .17 ‘ 1 237,239-42,246-52,235,260 262 266-7li 2 76 -8 4 ,2 8 9 ,2 9 1,316 125 329,316.377,385, 393-97,409 _ Crowley Gary 277 Crowthcr, Patricia 281 Cruise missiles 136

Clanda 163

Cthulhu 5,330,334-^ ^3^ 2, 39 3,4 10 ,4 19 ,4 2 3

Claridge Gallery 95

Cunning Folk 32,266^ 410

Clark, Stuart 80-91,107, 322,406,408, 4 15 ,4 2 2

Cursing 5, 8 6 ,113 ,15 5 ,16 4 -5 ,16 9 ^ 1 39 2 ,4 13 Щ

Clifton College 130

Curwen, David 288

CND

d'Arch Smith, Timothy 110 ,2 ^ ' 4 1 '

12 5 ,13 5 - 6 ,14 6 ,14 7

Cocaine 270

Dali, Salvador 316

Cognitive Dissonance 16 8 -7 0 ,4 11

Dan Dare 150

Cohn, Norman 29,408

Darwinism 325-6

Coil 48 ,9 8 ,9 9 ,10 0 ,227,421

Davies, Owen 7, 32,266 7, Ш)

Colonialism 10 5 ,19 4

Dawkins, Richard 35- 6, 410

Colquhoun, Ithell 15 2 ,15 4 ,17 9 ,2 7 2 , 320, 408 Communist 1 2 1 ,1 3 - 6 ,1 7 3 ,1 9 0 ,1 9 1 Companies House 253,395,408,422 Conrad,Joseph 60,408 Conservative (political) 10 0 ,12 0 ,13 1,14 0 , 14 3 ,15 2 One-Nation Conservative 136 Contraceptive Pill 14 0 ,14 2 Cornish, Helen 38 Cornwall 7 ,113 ,14 9 ,15 2 ,16 5 ,2 0 5 ,2 7 1- 4 , 408 Count Basie 316 Covens 28, 70,233 Cradle of Filth 105-6,409 Cromwell, Oliver 278 Crow, VWUiam В 34,409 Crowley, Aleister 3 ,15 -6 ,2 0 - 1,2 5 ,3 1,3 4 , 36 ,4 1-50 ,8 0 ,8 2,8 4 ,9 0 ,9 4 -5,10 3-6 ,110 , 1 1 5 - 6 ,12 1,12 4 ,12 9 ,13 9 ,14 1- 2 ,14 8 - 5 2 , 15 7 ,16 1,16 4 ,17 5 ,18 3 .18 9 ,19 1- 3 ,19 6 ,2 0 2 , 204,221,226 ,229 ,230 -4,237,239 , 241-3, 246-9,260-1,270-1,275-6,280,282-300, 30 6 -8 ,311, 313-8, 320, 324-7, 331, 333, 336, 344, 346, 352, 354, 361, 364, 369-70, 374,

^

/ ·;^

.

^ 8 'jj 'n

Decadent 13 7 Dee, John 50. 315,336 , 37 4 ,38 1,4J0 419 Dee, Simon 164 de Miramar, Maria 239 Demon 118 -9 ,130 ,2 0 3.2 2 9 ,5 52 , 40 8,418,422 Derlech,August 333,34 0,416 ,423

W< "

Deuteronomy 84 Devil 3 1 ,8 4 ,1 0 3 ,1 10 ,11 8 ,1 2 0 - 2 ,1 ^ 4 7 7 , 18 9 ,2 0 0 ,3 14 ,3 2 1,3 2 2 ,3 2 9 ,'’ 3 . : Devon 7 ,16 7 ,2 0 5 ,2 5 1 Diabolism 2 9 ,8 5 ,10 7 ,4 19 Diamond Books 250,253 Diana (deity) 28 Dickens, Charles 285 Dickens, Geoffrey M P 341 Disenchantment 1 1 6 Dispatches (T V ) 100 Divine Right of Kings 278 D N A 35,238 Douglas, Alfred 186 Douglas Cole, George 128 Do You Believe in Magic? (T V ) 199

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

l>ncula 316,386

Festinger, Leon 16 8 ,17 0 ,4 11

D’Ugs 3 3 ,4 3 ,7 9 ,14 0 -1,15 6 -7 ,16 6 ,17 4 , 184,222,256,270,326,348, 381

Fleming, Ian 12 1,4 16 ,4 18

Dmidr) 2 7 ,3 8 ,7 5 -7 ,15 1,2 3 3 ,3 6 3 , 371, 3'76,380,389,407,412,414,420

Foldy, Michael 9 1-2 ,13 7 ,17 6 ,18 6 -8 ,19 0 , 3 7 3 .4 11

Dakes, Ramsey 3 ,5 ,7 9 ,1 1 8 ,1 2 1 ,1 4 3 ,1 5 0 , 154,16 1,19 8 ,2 0 0 ,2 2 1,2 6 5 ,276, 353, 381, 3S6.4 10 ,4 14 ,4 15 ; See also Snell, Lionel

Form 47

Focus of Life 47

Fortean Times 7 ,272, 333. 385,419,423

DaQiiette, Lon Milo 345-6,410

Fortune, Dion 4 1 ,4 3 ,1 1 6 ,1 3 9 ,1 5 0 - 1 , 18 3-4 ,18 9 ,19 2 -5 ,2 18 ,2 2 2,2 2 5-6 ,2 30 ,2 6 2 , 4 0 8 .4 11

Dyslexia 46,294,298,305,327

Foundation for Integrated Medicine 175

Earth Inferno 47,420

France 2 5,6 2 ,137 ,19 0 ,2 36 ,2 37 -8

Eclipse 149

Frazer, JG 2 6 7 ,4 11

Ecobgy 8 4 ,12 5 ,12 9 ,13 1- 3 ,14 6

Freemasonry 23,27 ,4 6 ,139 ,2 0 0 ,2 32 -3, 235,403

Dunr..,., Helen 20

EJltation Act 134 figypt 24-6,28,44,6 2,135,154,229-30, 232,267,311, 328,330, 332,343, 384, 385-6, 4^99

Freud, Sigmund 26 9-70 ,333,34 3,38 0 ,4 11 Fries, Jan 160,203,295, 353,354, 377,382, 4 11

Eibein, Albert 333,382

Fuller, John FC 1 2 1 , 1 9 1 , 1 9 6 , 4 1 1

laderGods 334,342,348

Gaiinan, Neil 349 -50,411

EIli:;, 1 tivelock 92

Gardner, Gerald 3 ,3 6 ,4 7 - 9 ,13 9 ,14 1,15 5 , 16 3,2 3 3 .2 35 ,2 6 7 ,2 8 1,2 8 4 ,3 0 4 ,3 17 ,3 2 7 , 3 9 3 ,4 11,4 13

worthy, F 2 6 7 ,4 11 EiBStgency Medical Service 241 acyelopaedia Britannica 2 8 ,4 17 End of Days 148 Enochian 315,3 4 6 ,3 7 4 OD t See Esoteric Order of Dagon Fajuinox 47,356,374,409 i_Eris 381 hSOL 258 Esoreiic Order of Dagon 345 Essex 86-7,250

Gardnerian Witchcraft 13 9 ,14 1,2 3 4 -5 ,2 8 1 GaskilL Malcolm 2 0 ,2 7 1,3 2 2 ,3 2 9 ,4 11 Gay News 97-8 Geller,Uri 16 ,14 2 ,2 7 8 Gematria 318 General Gordon 188 Gerkowska, Nadine 366,412 Gibson, Marion 2 8 ,30 ,4 12 Gibson, William 359 ,4 12

Lther (drug) 287

Gideon Bible 1 1 3

Ethiopia 13 2

Giger.H R 338 ,4 12

Eton 367

Gilbert, RA 10 4 ,4 12

Evans, Dave 4 1 ,7 1, 3 13 ,3 9 5 ,4 11 : Evans-Pritchard, Edward 2 7 ,2 9 -3 0 ,4 11

Ginzburg, Carlo 32 2 ,4 12 Glastonbury 63

Evil Eye 2 6 7 ,4 11

Going Native 60,67

Ezay, Douglas 6 7-8 ,4 11

Golden Daw n: See Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Fairbum, Nicholas 100 Farr, Fbrence 107,275 Farrar, Stuart 150

Golden Hind 47,420 Gonce.John Wisdom 338

Fellowship of Isis 8 1,2 50

Goodrich-Clarke, Nicholas 18 1,18 2 ,4 0 7 , 4 12

Fennel, Claire 226

Gorgon 177

427

428

D av e E vans

Grant, Gregor Fergus 289

Helios Books 130

Grant, Kenneth 17 ,2 1,33-4 ,4 0 ,4 5-8 ,55 , 6 7 ,8 2 ,9 5 ,110 ,12 4 ,14 2 ,14 3 ,16 3 -4 ,17 3 , 18 0 ,19 3 ,19 5,2 15-6 ,2 19 ,2 4 5 ,2 6 5 -6 ,2 7 5 -6 , 283-94.297-99, 3 0 1-11, 318,320 ,324 ,326 , 330, 335-6, 339, 343,345-50,383,386,39394, 397,403,406-7,409,412,414,420-21

Hellfire Club 105

Grant, Steffi 290,293-94,296,304,309,412 Great Beast 95 Greek Orthodox 74 Green; See Ecology Green, David 4 3,2 19 ,2 2 2 Greenmancle magazine 278 Greenpeace 10 4 ,13 2 Green Shirts 128 Greenwood, Susan 3 1 ,6 7 ,4 1 1 ,4 1 3 Grimoire Grantiano 291 Grimoire of Clan Grant 290 Guinea Pig Club 2 4 0 -1,2 5 8 ,4 13 Gundestrup Cauldron 63 Gurdjieff, G I 261 Hamilton, Malcolm 33 Hamnett, Nina 96 ,413 Hampshire 49,250,255 Handfasring 63 Hannibal Lecter 386 Hardman, Charlotte 75,78,208,407,420, 421

■I

Herbalism 266

Hermetic Journal 16 1 Hermetic Order of the Golden 2 5 ..,, 27, 3 1,4 2 ,4 4 ,10 7 ,12 6 ,18 1-3 ,2 2 1. 7 '; 27-6,29 0,316,320, 374,408,412.417, Herne 63 Heroin 45 Hertfordshire 158 Hesekon, Philip 36 ,413 Hess, Rudolf 271 Hickory, Dickory, Dock 386 High Wycombe 105 Hinduism 2 6 ,17 8 ,18 0 -2 ,18 i. 195,212, 2 16 Hine, Phil 3 ,7 ,3 1,8 1,14 4 ,15 5 ,15 6 .15 7 . 16 0 ,16 7 ,16 9 ,17 1- 3 ,18 3 ,18 5 195 197^8. 202-6,223,227,250, J'O 77b 281 И1 m 340,342, 345-6,351, 353-4, 361, 363-6,36972,376-8, 382-5, 388, 389, 396.413 Hirsig, Leah 225 Hitchcock, Alfred 331 Hitler.Adolf 116 ,2 7 1,2 7 5 ,2 7 / , 333 ПЗ Hobbes, Tliomas 153 Holy Guardian A n ^ l 130 Homophobia 17 4 ,18 7

Hargreave,John 128-9

Homo sapiens 125

Harm None Principle 157 -8 ,2 0 4 ,217 ,2 23, 402

Homosexual 9 6 ,9 8 ,1 1 0 ,1 7 7 ,1 8 3 ,1 8 1 Ш 197,206

Harms, Daniel 338 ,4 13

Homosexuality 8 4 ,9 6 ,18 3,18 6 -7 ,20(i. 222,246

Harry Potter 14 8 ,19 5 ,2 9 1,3 9 6 ,4 19 Harvey, Graham 75,78,208,407,420-21 Hashish 157 Hassan I Sabbah 156 Haunters of the Dark 58, 347

'Щ

Hermes Trism^istus ϊ39

Hoolu, Kate 250 Horned God 63,64 Horsley, Richard 8 5 ,12 0 ,4 14 Horus 260,399 Houdini, Harry 331

Hawkins, Jaq 7, 214,225-6 ,302,352, 35-5, 365,367, 370-1, 379,388,413

Houghton, Michael 286

Hawkwind 357

Howard, Robert E 33 1

Healy, David 256, 4 13

H R H Prince Charles 175

Heathenism 75

Hubbard, L Ron 14 8 ,3 3 1

Hebrew 2 5 ,12 1,18 0 ,3 18 -9 ,3 2 8

Human Sacrifices 108

Heelas, Paul 77,230.323, 328, 343, 345, 4 13

Hungary 135 Hutchinson, Francis 292

^

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

ШТиггоп, Ronald 28, 32,49, 58 ,73,19 7, В 393,414

Kennedy, John F 230

g

Khabs (magazine) 347,422

Hyart, Christopher 345, 346,410

Щ IChmg 364 Ϊ I

niuminates of Thanateros 8 1,2 0 5 ,2 14 ,2 2 0 , 250, 354, 356-9, 361-2, 367, 371, 376-8, 388, ' H4-5

Й lm.ige Magic 165, 268 8 . India 44 ,215,286 ,293,326 ^^nduna Jones 195 1i . ■

tion 18 4 ,2 8 1,3 7 1,3 8 7 -8 ,4 17

Khartoum 188 Kibbo Kift 128-9 ,143,376, 415 Kilner, Tamsin 32 King Francis 34,239 ,415 King Graham 7 ,1 1 3 ,1 6 5 ,2 7 2 King of die Witches 48,306 Kirkup,James 96,98 Kittredgc, George Lyman 2 9 ,4 15

Inveidon 8 3 - 4 ,8 9 -9 2 ,10 7 ,112 ,114 ,15 1, lf0,178,20 5

Knight, Gareth 1 3 0 ,1 7 3 ,1 7 5

Inrocation 19 ,4 6 ,3 8 1,4 0 2 ,4 17

Knight, Maxwell 1 2 1

ЮТ ; See Illuminates of Thanateros

Kremlin 189

Iiaq 1 2 0 - 1 ,1 3 5 ,1 7 1

L.O.O.N 140, 355, 359, 360,362,386,399, 416

■

nd 188

k s 18 1,3 8 5,4 16 t.lslam 5 9 ,10 2 ,12 0 ,4 14 Щ]га1у 25,62,95 K fl. 123,358

. ise

286

Ц Jarman; Derek 9 8 ,10 1

LEstrange, Hugo 1 1 5 ,1 4 3 ,1 5 4 ,1 6 1 - 2 ,3 8 1 , 415 L'Estrange Ewen, C 292 Labour (political) 12 1,1 3 4 ,1 3 6 ,1 4 0 ,1 5 2 - 3 , 223 La Fontaine, Jean 1 0 7 ,1 0 9 ,1 1 2 ,11 8 - 9 ,1 2 1, 13 4 ,18 5 ,3 7 3 ,3 7 5 ,4 15 ,4 19

j .■ ■ might 79

Lam 275, 340, 344,407,421

jci

JennmgS, Pete 205

Lamp of Hioth 230,277-8,377, 381,406, 409,417

lew 5 7 ,8 0 ,9 1,12 0 -1,2 2 3 , 326, 333,370

Lao Tzu 302

ih 95,160

Join le, Lemuel 2 3 ,11 8 ,1 4 3 ,1 5 3 ,3 8 1 , S" 400,414: See also Snell, Lionel Jimcs, Rebecca 5 2 ,4 14 loufral for the Academic Study of Magic 7, 38,39,211,29 5,393,39 8,39 9 JSM Ю, 3 9 -4 0 ,19 6 ,2 12 ,2 16 ,2 19 ; See p'iblJpu rn aJ for the Academic Study of Magic v'Jhdasm 33 ". Juiias Priest 104

Latin 6 3 ,9 8 ,114 ,2 4 9 ,2 7 9 ,2 9 1,3 5 5 LaVey, Anton Szandor 9 2 ,112 -3 ,119 -2 2 , 14 8 ,15 4 ,15 8 ,17 9 ,19 8 ,2 0 2 ,2 0 5 , 337,340-1, 373-5,37 7,4 15 ,4 2 3 Law of Threefold Return 15 5 ,17 2 Leadbeater, C W 183-5 Leamington 18 1 Leary, Timothy 33,10 2 , 364,415 Led Zeppelin 104

К le^nski, Richard 286,290,307-8,415

Lee, Dave 3,7, 8 1,14 4 ,2 11,2 13 ,2 2 0 ,2 6 9 , 32 7,357,358 ,376 ,4 0 8 ,4 15

K Ji 184,195

Lee, Matt 7 ,2 4 ,2 1-8 ,2 2 0 ,2 2 2 ,2 9 5 ,4 15

Jung, Carl 2 3,38 0 ,4 15

,

Key of Solomon 352

' ' Kaos 388 Karma 204,286,402 a Kathenotheism 364 I ' К,шЬ 2 15 К enan, David 10 0 -1,4 15 Kcllev, Edward 3 15

Leeds 7 2 ,34 1, 356,377,420 Leesing Margaret 316 Left-Hand Path 15 2 ,16 9 ,17 2 -3 ,17 6 ,17 8 , 18 3,18 8 -9 ,19 1,19 7,2 0 4 -5 ,2 0 7-10 ,22 2 , 224,227, 307, 325, 345, 354 ,392,421 Legend of the Witches 164

429

430

D av e E vans

Lemuria 316

Man, Myth and Magic 143.240.409.41$^.-"· ' ‘·lii'

Letcher, Andy 38,58,60,62,65-7,75,77-8, 8 9 ,9 1.14 0 ,14 4 ,16 7 ,3 4 9 ,3 6 3 , 389 ,4 11-3, 417,420

Manchester 3 2 ,12 2 ,4 10

Letchford, Frank 293-6,298, ЗШ, 301,303, 4 16 ,4 19

Mandrake of Oxford 3 9 ,7 1 Marsh Black, Phineas 289-91. 394 Marwick, Arthur 5 1

Lewis, C S 126-8,146,200,278-9, 391, 395-7,416

Marx Brothers 386

Leyline 274

Mather, Cotton 299

L H P 17 6 ,18 1-2 ,18 4 ,18 9 ,19 3 -5 ,19 7 ,19 8 , 204-27; See also Left-Hand Path

The Matrix (movie) 148

-S i

Hi

Marxism 128,396

McAlpine, Deidre 274

Libel 44,95-7

McCutcheon, Russell 58, 349

Liber A1 44 ,2 2 6 ; See also Book of the Law

Mclndoe, Archibald 241

Liberal (political) 188

Mecca 143

Liber Oz 12 1

Mediawatch 9 7 ,4 17

..M

i

Lightning Source 144

Meditation 178 ,2 32 ,2 35. 319,404

'i l l

Lilly.John 14 1

Mediumship 248, 328.402

~ЦУ|!| i

Lincoln Order of Neuromancers; See L.

Medmenham 105

0.0,N Llewellyn 2 1 1- 2 ,2 1 7 ,4 1 6 Lloyd, Christopher 22 Lord's Prayer 16 1, 221 Lord Nelson 301 Lord of the Rings 12 7 ,2 3 1,3 9 7 ,4 16

Medway, Gareth 10 8 ,4 17

j i

Megson, Neil 99 Meme 35-6 ,5 3,78 ,8 0 ,133, J 57 387, 399-7 Men an Tol (Megalith) 271. 273-4 Methodist 74,80 Mexico 269

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips 3,7, 82,163, 207,265,284-5,291, 30 -16 ,32 1, 329-50, 357, 374-5, 383, 393-4, 398,406,410-1, 415-6

Millennium Bug 149

LSD 3 3 ,14 1 ,1 6 6

Mira 343

Lucifer 113 ,3 4 8 ,4 0 6

Monroe, Marilyn 247

Mickey Mouse 386 Middle earth 12 5 ,12 7

Luciferianism 15 1

Montauk 2 7 1,2 7 3 ,3 7 7 ,4 17

Lugosi, Bela 316

Monty Python 98

Lumiey, William 339,416

Moorcock, Michael 356,3 ’ ,

Lurhmann, Tanya 31,4 0 ,6 8 ,36 7 ,4 16 Lutheran 383,406

Moore, Alan 284,286,31 4 17

Mabinogion 180

Moot 402

Machen, Arthur 3 1 1 ,3 1 4

Motal Panic 8 4 ,18 5 ,18

Madagascar 189

Morgan, Mogg 7 1,15 4 , I i·- 19“ 20'· 6. 2 15 ,2 16 ,2 3 4 ,3 2 8 ,4 11,4 17 ,4 2 0

Madonna 180 Magical Practice and Belief (conference) 39 Magic Circle 20 Magickal Childe 337 Magic Roundabout 386 Magliocco, Sabina 172 Maleficium 8 6 ,10 7 ,16 3

20 " 7 342.

2

Mormonism 325-6 Morton, James 333 Mother Teresa 15 1 Mousehole 272 Muchembled, Robert 31 Muller, Max 364 Murray, Margaret 27-8,49, To, 233 2''"

The History o f British Magic After Crowley

363,399

^

leum of Witchcraft 7 ,4 8 ,113 ,16 4 -5 , 7 ,2 7 2 ,27 6 ,4 12 ,4 19 ,4 2 3 ^ •:^ im 5 7 ,5 9 ,6 7 ,10 2 ,12 0 ,15 1,2 2 9 ,3 2 6 , [, Benito 44,95 'Myth car. Margaret 292 X files ,he 148 Years, William Butler 220 Yoga 10 5 ,17 4 ,17 8 ,2 3 2 ,2 3 4 -5 ,3 4 6 Yoi ke CIcrald 13 0 ,2 3 8 ,2 7 2 ,2 7 4 ,4 10 ,4 2 3 Yoihc Collection 9 5,238,272-4,410 ,423 Yoilssliiie 200 ,250,356,419

Buddhists 79

435

Aleister Crowley and the 20th Century synthesis of Magick “Strange distant Gods that are not dead todaj'"

by Dave Evans B o th a p ro fessio n al acad em ic research er and p ra ctisin g m ag ician , П

l>n Ivans }

delves in to m o d ern h isto ry to p resen t a serio u s, b u t accessible and iaSLinatli^ w ork , b ased o n research w ork d o n e fo r a M a s te r o f A rts degree on the liistory an d lite ra tu re o f B ritis h m ag ic, fo cu ssin g esp ecially o n A le iste r Crow lev

T o p ics covered inclu d e A le iste r C ro w ley an d T h e le m a , D en n is K e n n e th G r a n t, J a c k P a rso n s, T o m D rib e rg , th e B ritis h spying communis^-' A u stin O sm a n S p a re, G e ra ld G a rd n e r an d o th ers.

B e in g a u sefu l bio g rap h y o f C row ley, plus m o re, th is accessib le and divei se ЬосЯс ca n b e co n sid ered a p req u el of, an d a seed fo r th e a u th o r s larger suhsequrttt volu m e

17зе History o f British M agic A fter Crowley.

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ш

ISBN 9 7 8 Ό '9 5 5 5 2 3 7 '2 '4

published by Hidden Publishing,

original e-book published by el-cheapo books For more details, go to W W W .O C C U L T E B O O K S .C O M

Kaostar! Modern Chaos Cunning Craft

by Francis Breakspear i. Mighty oaks from little acorns do grow... this book of practical ‘Results ; ■ M.igick' sprang from a brief conversation about cunning folk, the European E pillage sorcerers of old, and how they might do their work today. ll'.c cunning man or woman of history would have travelled around their local I: ^ea performing the craft with probably a bag full of herbs, some pins, a flint у and linder to make fire, some ready-made charms, a knife and a weighty book Г Or (wo (about anything) with which to impress the illiterate. By comparison ;i die modern chaos magician cunner would be likely to have a groovy backpack i.' to i.irry various problem-solving tools in, like a cellphone, a cigarette lighter, a . Swiss Army knife, a packet of some painkilling drug, a bag of a quite different . ■ herbs Ibr ingestion in various ways, a disk of some computer software, various · .d.irk-Iooking sorcerous books and probably some weird and discordant spooky ' j sounds on their mp3 player to impress the musically illiterate... But the underlying magic is not be so different across the centuries; being based around the usual and enduring human motivations of sex and love, power and pride, prejudice, envy, revenge, curses and health. Much of the content and methods given in this book are not so much immoral as completely amoral; the practitioner being left to their own devices and choices as to how they use it, radter than any overwrought and baleful prescription to only use it for “good” (whatever that is) taking no account of circumstance. Among many other things you wiO learn in this book how to change traffic lights to Green, how to use a cellphone and a compact disc to send a spell, a fabulous new sourcemethod of making magic squares, and a great deal about cursing and healing methods. This is some real results magic, shorn of a lot of the ethical dogma.... and for adults. ,'ί Ibis book is timely, in that there has existed for some time a need for balance in { the expression of what magic is about, balance with the overarching fluffiness • and 'do-anything-as-long-as-it-is-white-light' of modern paganism. i 'Harm None’ Wiccans will hate this- indeed, one who saw the initial manuscript called it‘simply monstrous! and left. i

IS B N 9 7 8 -0 -9 5 5 5 2 3 7 -1 -7

:

produced by K 4 0 5 T 4 R Publications |published by Hidden Publishing

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ТЬе Journal for the Academic Study of Magic (JSM)

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A multidisciplinary; peer-reviewed print publication, coveting al! of magic, witchcraft, paganism etc; all geographical regions and .Л historical periods.

Щ Щ

Issue 1

■:

Alison Butler - Beyond Attribution: The Importance o f Barrett's Magus ♦ John C' D.iy * Sludov over Philistia: A review of the Cult o f Dagsn ♦ Joyce G o ^ n - A History of Ocheincvi’Tafot and Playing Cards from Early Modem Europe ♦ Dave Green - Opposites Atti .itf magu d identity and social uncertainty ♦ Mart Lee -'Memories of a sorcerer’: notes on GiIIcs Dcleuft' Felix Guattari, Austin Osman Spare and Anomalous Sorceries. * Ilaria Serra - 1 e Sneghe Son ' Tornate: The Reappearance o f Streghe in Italian American Queer Writings * D*· in i Wcibel ' Controlling Chance, Creating Chance: Magical Thinking in Religious Pilgrim i^e

Issue 2 Justin Woodman - Alien Selves: Modernity and the Social Diagnostics of the I Jemoiiir in Lovecraftian Magick'» Dave Green - Wishful Thinlcing Notes towards a psyi lioan ilytn socint' , '.i ogy of Pagan magic · Vanessa Chambers - A Shell with my Name on it: The Reliance on the Supernatural During the First World War . Morgan Luck - Tlie Metaphysical Relationship between Magic and Miracles .Jason Semmens - Demonic Possession, and Spiiiruil I Iciliiigii Nineteenth-Century Devon . Andria Filipovic and Anne M. Rader - Human Bodi in Souibefa Slavic Folk Sorcery . Lionel Snell - Four Glasses O f Water . Amy Hale - The land Neat ihc Dark Cornish Sea * Dave Evans - Kenneth Grant and the Magickal revival · Aaion Cliesit - Magic through the Linguistic Lenses of Greek mdgos, Indo-European *mag(h)- Sanskrit ■ and Pharaonic Egyptian heka . Joyce Froome - Tlie symbolism of the pierced he . · iuhn h i Cannon - Shamanic Motifs in Fin-de-Siecle Russian Art: Tlie Case of Nicholas Ro. rich

Issue 3 Hannah Sanders - Buffy and Beyond: Language and Resistance in Contempoi .n \ i nage Witchcraft ♦ Amy Lee - A Language of Her Own: Witchery as a New Language oi ^ Identity* Dave Green - Creative Revolution: Bergsonisms and Modern Magic * ·, Hayes - Discovering the Witch's Teat: Magical Praaices, Medical Superstitions in ' i lie Witch of Ed­ monton ♦ Penny Lowery - The Re-enchantment of the Medical: An examinai ion ol m igical ele­ ments in healing. ♦ Jonathan Marshall - Apparitions, Ghosts, Fairies, Demons ш.1 Wild Evenrt* Virtuality in Early Modem. Britain ♦ Kate Laity - Living the Mystery: Sacred I am i Ί ovlay · Research Articles: David Geall - Ά half-choked meep o f cosmic fear'Is there < s o t m t ь у т Ь о ! ism in H.P.Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath? ♦ Susan Gorman · Bocoining a Sorcerer: Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Quartier Mozart and the Magic of Deleuzian and rv to present a serious, hut accessib le and fascinating work, based on his recent and unique Phi), on developm ents in British m agic after Aleister ( ’row ley died. NtU Just the result o f extensive book-research, this project invohed attending rituals and hax iiig m eetings with som e quite remarkable men and women, who are examined and given a voice in these pages, som e o f them for the (irst time. Topics covered include A leister C row ley and fhelem a. how man_\ magicians there actually are in Britain, the claim s o f Am ado C row lex to be Aleister's son, the work o f Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Cirant and the I x phonian О ТО , Blasphem y, C haos M agick, Gerald (iardner, Ramsey Dukes, Alex Sanders, H P L ov ecraft, Satanism , Cursing, the Ixft-H and Path, creating the Journal for the A cad em ic Study o f M agic, plus the work o f Ronald Hutton. Dennis W heatley, Dion Fortune, HP Blax atsky and others, all meshed into a broader philosophical, cognitive-psychological and moral-history framework o f the broader Twentieth Century. Not Just a book about the history o f m agic, this research places magicians and their work into the broader society that we all live in, and shows how that m agic has alw ays been a part o f our culture.

The History of British Magick After Crowley

Kenneth Grant, Amado Crowley, Chaos Magic, Satanism, Lovecra Tlie Left Hand Path, Blasphemy and Magical Morality