A detailed examination of the last 15 years of Crowley’s life

• Reveals Crowley’s sex magick relations in London and his contacts with important figures, including Dion Fortune, Gerald Gardner, Jack Parsons, Dylan Thomas, and black equality activist Nancy Cunard

• Explores Crowley’s nick-of-time escape from the Nazi takeover in Germany and offers extensive confirmation of Crowley’s work for British intelligence

• Examines the development of Crowley’s later publications and his articles in reaction to the Nazi Gestapo actively persecuting his followers in Germany

After an extraordinary life of magical workings, occult fame, and artistic pursuits around the globe, Aleister Crowley was forced to spend the last fifteen years of his life in his native England, nearly penniless. Much less examined than his early years, this final period of the Beast’s life was just as filled with sex magick, espionage, romance, transatlantic conflict, and extreme behavior.

Drawing on previously unpublished diaries and letters, Tobias Churton provides the first detailed treatment of the final years of Crowley’s life, from 1932 to 1947. He opens with Crowley’s nick-of-time escape from the Nazi takeover in Germany and his return home to England, flat broke. Churton offers extensive confirmation of Crowley’s work as a secret operative for MI5 and explores how Crowley saw World War II as the turning point for the “New Aeon.” He examines Crowley’s notorious 1934 London trial, which resulted in his bankruptcy, and shares inside stories of Crowley’s relations with Californian O.T.O. followers, including rocket-fuel specialist Jack Parsons, and his attempt to take over H. Spencer Lewis’s Rosicrucian Order. The author reveals Crowley’s sex magick relations in London and his contacts with spiritual leaders of the time, including Dion Fortune and Wicca founder Gerald Gardner. He examines Crowley’s dealings with artists such as Dylan Thomas, Alfred Hitchcock, Augustus John, Peter Warlock, and Peter Brooks and dispels the accusations that Crowley was racist, exploring his work with lifelong friend, black equality activist Nancy Cunard.

Churton also examines the development of Crowley’s later publications such as Magick without Tears as well as his articles in reaction to the Nazi Gestapo who was actively persecuting his remaining followers in Germany. Presenting an intimate and compelling study of Crowley in middle and old age, Churton shows how the Beast still wields a wand-like power to delight and astonish.

Britain’s leading scholar of Western Esotericism, Tobias Churton is an authority on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism. Appointed Honorary Fellow of Exeter University in 2005, he holds a master’s degree in Theology from Brasenose College, Oxford, and is the author of many books, including Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin. He lives in the heart of England.

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION
He Never Sold Out

PART ONE
Pre-War 1932-1939

ONE
Never Dull Where Crowley Is

TWO
Potted Sex Appeal

THREE
Justice Swift The Trial

FOUR
Unbelievable Terror A.M.O.R.C. Round One

FIVE
Bar 666

SIX
Living in a Turkish Bath A.M.O.R.C. Again

SEVEN
Seriously on the Path Hitler and Germany According to
Protective Prisoner No. 303 Cornwall--August 1938

EIGHT
Khing Kang King Return of the Goetic Gourmet Qingjing Jing

PART TWO WAR

NINE
Happy Dust

TEN
What Crowley Does this Year, England Does Next Torquay--Great Magical Retirement?

ELEVEN
Robed as a Warrior Rudolf Hess

TWELVE
In the Hour of Battle Winston Plus Cigar “Defeatist Activities of Really Serious Groups” Cambridge Spy

THIRTEEN
I Dreamed Time

FOURTEEN
Monstrous Worlds The Duke Street-King Street Bomb The Bell A New Gnostic Church--Almost The Book of Thoth Nancy Cunard

PART THREE
RETIREMENT

FIFTEEN
Death Is King Netherwood The Chinese Ambassadress

SIXTEEN
Eddies of Obsidian Babalon Now!

SEVENTEEN
The Universe

Chronology 1875 to 1932: Crowley’s Life before He Returned to England

Notes

Bibliography

Index