ALEISTER CROWLEY MI5

In 1977, the flagship of the English underground,  International Times, published a short story called ‘Sybarite among the Shadows’. I based the story on an aside I found in Sexuality, Magic and Perversion by Francis King concerning how Aleister Crowley provided Aldous Huxley with his first psychedelic experience in Berlin in the nineteen thirties. The thought of two such contrary characters in such a state and setting intrigued me. For added spice, I added some atmospherics concerning the influence of the German branch of Crowley’s magical order, the OTO, on the Nazis – such speculations being very much in vogue at the time. Victor Neuburg, poet and disciple of the Beast, acted as narrator.

The story caused something of a stir and the American drug magazine High Times contacted me with a view to publishing it. They assumed I was in possession of the lost diaries of Victor Neuburg. Sadly, I had to disabuse them of this notion. Some years later, I came across a thick paperback with the well-known photo of Aldous Huxley parting a torn curtain to symbolise the opening of doors of perception on the cover. It was titled Rapid Eye and advertised itself as an anthology of transgressive writings taken from the magazine of the same name I leafed through pieces by Derek Jarman and William Burroughs until I came across my own name misspelled at the top of a page and the Crowley/Huxley story beneath it. In fairness to the editor, the late Simon Dwyer, I was living on Ibiza at the time and he had tried to contact me when first publishing it in the magazine.

No such attempt was made in Russia where it was translated and posted online a decade later. Pan’s Asylum Camp, a website that describes the development of Thelema in Russia, lists the story as part of the collected works of Crowley, published in 1997. [1] According to the website, many Russian readers took the story to be true as did Micheal Howard — no relation I am assuming to the former leader of the Conservative Party, though the politician’s Transylvanian ancestry might suggest otherwise. In The Occult Conspiracy Howard relates how “Crowley had confided to the writer Aldous Huxley in 1938 when they met in Berlin that Hitler was a practising occultist. He also claimed that the OTO had helped the Nazis to gain power”. Such a notion persists. A recent coffee-table book, The Nazis and the Occult by Paul Roland, assumes the story to be a factual account written by Neuburg, quotes extensively from it, and uses one throwaway line attributed to Crowley to justify the claim that Hitler also used mescaline.

Crowley and Huxley did indeed spend time together in Berlin and Crowley used mescaline liberally for many years, famously spiking the audience during the Rites of Eleusis in 1910. Apart from King’s aside, however, evidence that he introduced Huxley to what was then called Anhalonium Lewinii is sketchy.[2] Nevertheless, through the alchemy of other writers, it seems my faction has transmuted into fact.

The idea of using Neuburg as the narrator of a longer work persisted. At first, I considered portraying the extraordinary events of his eight-year association with Crowley – the invocation of John Dee’s Angels of the Aethyrs at Bou Saada, the Paris Working etc. Then an approach from another angle sprang to mind: a reunion in the Thirties with Dylan Thomas as the link.

As poetry editor of the Sunday Referee, Neuburg had discovered the Welsh bard. Jean Overton Fuller’s The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg was the primary source for this but there were others, most of whom she lists in the excellent bibliography at the back of her book. There is a detailed portrait, for example, of both Crowley and Neuburg in Arthur Calder-Marshall’s long out of print The Magic of my Youth. Here Vicky appears without a halo: his eccentricity has edge. Rupert Croft-Cooke devotes a chapter to him in Glittering Pastures. In Laughing Torso, the memoirs of the painter Nina Hamnett, which Crowley sued her over, there is the story of the actor Ione de Forest and the bizarre ménage she formed with Vicky and the Beast, which culminated in her suicide. Hamnett does not name Neuburg but refers to him as the Poet throughout. 

In his limericks, letters and The Confessions, Crowley is predictably scathing about Neuburg, the disciple who reneged. More surprising is Dylan’s attitude. In Fuller’s book, uncharacteristically meek and sober, he gratefully laps up his mentor’s wisdom. In The Collected Letters, by contrast, he is full of scorn for “the Creative Lifers” as he dubs Vicky and his circle. “The creature himself – I must tell you one day if I haven’t told you before how Aleister Crowley turned Vicky into a camel – is a nineteenth-century crank with mental gangrene, lousier than ever before, a product of a Jewish nuts-factory, an Oscar tamed.” (To A.E. Trick – December 1934). 

There is much more in this vein to several correspondents. Dylan loathes Vicky’s view of poetry, in which all must be sweetness and light. “Word tinkling” he calls it. Neuburg told Fuller that he had read some of Crowley’s poems to Dylan. He did not like them. Neuburg’s book of poems, The Triumph of Pan, is still in print but likewise is of a style that has little appeal to modern tastes.

Originally published with the same title as the short story, Aleister Crowley MI5 takes place during the course of June 11^th, 1936, the date of the opening of the Surrealist Exhibition in London. It begins with a flustered Dylan visiting Neuburg at his home in Swiss Cottage. In a Soho pub the previous evening a sinister stranger had mimicked Dylan’s doodling. The stranger then approached and revealed he had drawn the same picture as the poet before introducing himself as the Beast. 

The story of Dylan, Crowley, and the doodle is not my invention. Constantine Fitzgibbon relates the incident in his Life of Dylan Thomas. In fact, after the publication of the novel in 2004 I heard from Geraldine Baskin of Atlantis Books someone who was actually present and could corroborate the incident firsthand. I found several references to Crowley in Dylan’s letters. Both were integral members of a bohemian scene that flourished in Fitzrovia and Soho and had several friends in common, including the painter Augustus John. Just as Somerset Maugham, Anthony Powell and Ian Fleming had done so, Dylan even based a character on the Beast. In The Death of the King’s Canary, a posthumously published satire the Welshman composed with John Davenport, there is a sinister marijuana-smoking magician called Great Raven. The code is not difficult to crack. Nina Hamnett appears as Sylvia Bacon – to his friends, the Beast was “Crow”.

Dylan and Neuburg embark on an adventure, whose settings include the Surrealist Exhibition, the Café Royal, the Fitzroy Tavern, and the Gargoyle Club. They encounter Augustus John, Tom Driberg, gossip-columnist, spy , Labour MP and at one time Crowley’s magical heir, along with other well-known members of the London demi-monde, such as “the tiger woman” Betty May. The narrative connects each to Crowley, as did life.

Reunited with the Beast, Neuburg becomes involved in a plot hatched by Crowley and MI5 to avert the Abdication. There is a growing abundance of evidence linking Crowley to the Secret Service, explored most recently in Secret Agent 666 by Richard B.Spence. Spence also goes into some detail about the Beast’s use of mescaline as a kind of truth drug, anticipating the CIA in this respect. In addition, Neuburg and Crowley employ again the magic they have used in an attempt to exorcise the consequences of their earlier Workings, which have played havoc with Vicky’s life.

According to Fuller, Neuburg, a formidable seer, was put in a triangle in 1910 and possessed by the god Mars. He predicted there would be two wars within the next five years, one centred on Turkey and the other on Germany. The result would be the destruction of both nations. My novel contends that Mars still inhabits Neuburg:  the book opens with him in an armchair undergoing a vision of war. In 2002, Marc Aitken made a short film called Do Angels Cut Themselves Shaving – a quote from Magick without Tears. This commences with Neuburg in his armchair also experiencing martial visions. It ends with a reunion with Crowley. Marc and I were working completely independently of each other. Coincidence, some might say. Yet if the hypotheses of magic hold true there is a numinous architecture, which we glimpse, and sense we are here more fully to behold.

As a somewhat tongue-in-cheek illustration of this, I am grateful to the eagle-eyed contributor to Iamaphoney, a Beatles blogspot, who recently spotted that if you draw a line from the photo of Crowley to that of Lennon on the cover of Sergeant Pepper, it intersects first Huxley and then Dylan Thomas, mirroring my short story and novel.[3]The sixties ley line then crosses Tom Mix’s hat, behind which reputedly Hitler is lurking alongside Oscar Wilde.[4] Cyril Connolly of course memorably described Crowley, “the Picasso of the occult”, as the missing link between the two.

For further information see: www.mandrake.uk.net/richardmcneff