I recently ended up in a discussion on a board where someone said they did not want to listen to anything Aleister Crowley had to say about anything because he was a drug addict and an antisemite. Okay, I think I will deal with the drug situation in another post. He definitely did do drugs and that was surprisingly common for the time in fact cocaine was often prescribed for toothache, but I was shocked by the antisemitic comment. I hadn’t heard that one before. So I decided to do a little bit of digging.
I wanted to see what he was really like. I don’t like people who have romanticised notions of the past or their heroes and I think he was quite clearly a fallible man. The last thing I want to be is the very sort of person I don’t like. Someone who holds a false view of the past and who sticks fervently to it.
What is antisemitism?
Firstly, what do antisemitic and antisemite mean? A person who is antisemitic is an antisemite. An antisemite is a person who is racist against Jewish people. In being racist, a person does not experience the individuals of a race, but often conflates them all as one people. A prejudgement they hold will often be applied to anyone else they meet who is of the same race. Often, when a person holds a prejudice they might not realise they are racist, but they might naturally not get on with a person of the race against which they hold prejudices as well as they would someone of their own race or a race against which they don’t hold the same prejudices. Racism often makes it fractionally harder for a person to associate positive attributes with an individual of a certain race in comparison to others. At the extreme end, racism can involve totally dehumanising someone of a certain race such that no guilt is felt when committing horrifying or painful acts on that person.
Hostility to the Jews was not new around the late 1800s and early 1900s when Crowley was raised. In fact, it was so prevalent and illogical that William Shakespeare tried to point it out in his Merchant of Venice in the famous speech of the Jewish character, Shylock. That would have probably been late 16th to early 17th century. Do you remember the famous speech:
If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
William Shakespear – The Merchant of Venice Act 3 Scene 1
Shylock is hurt and wants revenge and he is asked why should he a Jew take revenge on a Christian. He is fed up with his people being dehumanised and begins a long line of comparing the characteristics of the Jewish people to the characteristics of a human being to point out how it is illogical to dehumanise a Jew and expect him to act differently from another human being.
This did awaken some minds, but it was hardly the end of racism. In fact, the slave trade began soon after. It began with people of different races who could be easily dehumanized and treated like cattle. I just want to stop for a second and ask if you think this was okay then consider for a second, what if you were the race that was enslaved? Maybe you don’t think there is another race on earth that could possibly enslave you, in which case imagine aliens did it with far superior technology and intelligence. Would that be okay for you? If you really can’t empathise with a dehumanised slave for a second, this website is not for you. It’s for people with a superior intellect of whatever race.
A number of natural philosophers began to try and classify different races for their genetic advantages and disadvantages. Attempts were made to breed good qualities in their families. This is a practice called eugenics and if you think this was just the Nazis you’ve got a surprise coming! In the UK, attempts were made to encourage the breeding of good qualities such as high intelligence, height, sport-achievement and attempts to sterilise the mentally deficient or deformed. In the US, attempts were made to prevent deaf people, “feeble-minded” or “imbecilic” people from marrying, and sterilisation was undertaken for the mentally ill. Similar practices occurred with people of certain races, particularly race-related immigration. America attempted to encourage Nordic races to immigrate to the USA, but discouraged people from Southern Europe like Greeks for example.
Germany began and lost the First World War and then fell on hard times. A political attempt to give them a scapegoat encouraged Germans to believe that people of “inferior” races were to blame, particularly the Jews. Racist comments were frequently made about the Jews and they were often dehumanised. By the time of the Second World War, the Jews were so dehumanised in Nazi Germany that mass enslavement, sterilisation and murder was done without difficulty. Around 6,000,000 Jews were slaughtered for no reason other than their race. Throughout most of my life, there have been people alive who remember their loved ones who lost their lives during this mass genocide. Let’s remember that during the Second World War Aleister Crowley’s last pieces of work were created. These include the Thoth deck, The Book of Thoth and the posthumously published Magic Without Tears. He died very soon after the Second World War so, in my opinion, the atrocities committed during the Second World War did not have long to affect him and his opinion.
The allied countries won the war and decided to establish new rules in an attempt to prevent anything like this from happening again. Many Jewish people were led to establish a Jewish country where they would not experience the same persecution they experienced in other countries for coming up to 2000 years. They formed the modern country we know today as Israel.
The civil rights movement really took flight in the USA. In 1870 Black people were given the right to vote and to be treated as equals, but particularly in Southern states this was met with hostility. Jim Crow laws were introduced to separate Black and White access to public resources. Black people were sent to different schools where they were not given the teaching required to pass the literacy tests required for voting. During the Second World War Rosevelt opened military jobs to Black people.
In 1955 Rosa Parks sat on a part of a bus, which was designated for black people, but after a white person was unable to get a seat, she was told to move. She refused and was arrested. This sparked a major movement of fighting for Civil Rights involving a Baptist Minister called Martin Luther King Junior.
In 1968 having stood for equal rights for black people Martin Luther King was assassinated on his hotel balcony. This caused riots and charged people for the fight for equality with power. Soon after some more of black people’s rights began to be recognised like the Equality House Act. But the fight still continues today.
These days, a lot of media presents itself as anti-racist. Making a comment which could be taken in a racist way, no matter the intent (which is normally racist anyway), could result in a person being considered and treated as a social pariah. A lot of right-wing people, do not believe they are racist because they do not participate in activities such as those that constituted the holocaust of the Jews, however, they will happily present a view which generalises an entire race without realising that it indicates racism. They are often met with hostility for doing so.
For more information on what is racist, please see this video called Why “I’m not racist” is only half of the story by Robin DiAngelo.
In this day and age, we are very quick to challenge racism. This means any comment, which shows an unconscious bias with regard to a particular race whether Jewish, Black, Asian, Arab or any other race, is met with challenges from peers. This also means that many people who hold racist views phrase themselves carefully today to avoid expressing a racist view. This is often done to hide racism, but also to avoid creating a culture where such comments are acceptable.
Many people today are still racist. That’s not our fault. We are born into a racist world, with an educational, vocational and economic system, which is racist. We learn to play by the rules of an inherently racist system and often subconsciously perpetuate a system, which is already heavily biased against certain races. It’s impossible to grow up completely unaffected by the representations of race in the media. The important thing is what we do with our prejudices as we go forward. Do we recognise them, accept that they are there and consciously put them aside when dealing with some of a particular race or do we deny we are racist, convince ourselves that our prejudices don’t exist and allow them to unconsciously affect our decision-making processes? You decide. No matter how much you associate racism with evil, and try not to recognise it in yourself, you won’t be able to completely eliminate it. The more we recognise its existence the easier it is to up-root and create a fairer society.
Who was Aleister Crowley?
Aleister Crowley was a flawed man. There’s no question about it. To begin with, he was born into an evangelical church family called the Plymouth Brethren and felt a strong love for his father who was a pastor, but who died when Crowley was 11. After his father’s death, he began to act out at school, smoking, having sex with prostitutes and contracting gonorrhoea. He was sent to study with a tutor and eventually renamed himself from Edward Alexander Crowley to Aleister Crowley before joining Cambridge University. He was a man of many interests including poetry, rock climbing and chess.
Aleister Crowley excelled at everything he put his mind to, chess, rock climbing, philosophy and English literature. He was a consistent upper second-class student and had begun to get firsts in his academics when he lost all interest and dropped out, studying the Occult instead. Following a few introductions, he was initiated into the secret society known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
It is believed that Crowley discovered he was bisexual in 1896 while on holiday in Stockholm. Crowley’s sexual freedom was met with dislike from the other members of the group. He saw it as a spiritual liberation from the expectations of others, but on the other hand, they believed he was trapped by his own sinful nature and a sign of immaturity. Within 6 months, he completed all the outer grades and was due to be admitted to the inner grades when William Wynn Westcott refused to do so stating something akin to “This is the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, not a disciplinary school for wayward boys”. Aleister Crowley published some sexual poetry in 1898 making him one of the first authors to publish homosexual poetry in the world.
Mathers initiated him privately away from the others in what was turning into a schism in the group, but Aleister Crowley decided it was required to initiate himself from then on and attempted a ritual called the Abramelin in the Scottish highlands to contact his own guardian angel.
He spent the next few years travelling the world, particularly the East practising Raja Yoga and learning about Buddhist meditation.
He married to spare a woman from an arranged marriage (the more I learn about Crowley, the more I like him). He went on a honeymoon in Paris and then Egypt when something happened.
Diaries indicate that in an attempt to impress his wife, he performed the Bornless Ritual to banish the Sylphs, but his wife could see nothing of what he was talking about. But then his wife began to be influenced by spirits and told him that the spirits were waiting for him. For 3 successive days, she instructed him to wait for the spirits and something came and dictated a 3-chapter book to him called the Book of the Law (or Liber Al vel Legis).
The Book of the Law resembled a combination of his mystical poetry, sexual views, moral views that supported the sexual views, prophecy and some stuff which just seems like meaningless drivel! But Crowley believed that the universe had called him and given him a purpose and began to publish secret occult material at a rate never seen before. He also combined esoteric teachings from the West with Eastern teachings he had explored in his time travelling the East. No-one had really combined these before like he had and he was intelligent enough to read about the foreign teachings in depth and develop an understanding unparalleled in most modern readers. He did more than anyone to break down the power of the occult establishment of the time making its teachings available to anyone who could afford to buy a publication.
I am always impressed with Crowley’s reading of the scriptures of the East because it should be easier to learn about today, but people don’t bother. They go around saying they are Daoist, but don’t know who Zhuangzi was, they haven’t read the Hua Hu Jing or Lie Zi’s writing and even their knowledge of the most common Daoist scripture, the Dao De Jing, is shakey at best. Aleister Crowley actually seemed to care more about learning what he could from spiritual teaching than impressing people with them, let’s just say he also loved to impress people. This was at a time when being of an alternative religion did nothing, but make you a social pariah.
During this time, Crowley was not afraid to appear evil or satanic. He had noted how he was treated with regard to his sexual “sins” and seemed to feel that these people were so afraid of the devil that they would run away from any sign of him. He believed that such fearful people had no place learning from him. They were too superstitious and afraid of magic. Crowley always wanted to impress people, but he was not afraid to be true to his nature, even if it were to turn someone away from him. He often saw in people just as “trapped by their sinful natures” as they accused him of, but that they had convinced themselves that their own sinful nature was but another virtue. Crowley revelled in his own “sinful” activity and often presented it far worse than it was, probably to scare people off. He even claimed to sacrifice babies (when he probably meant wanking to ejaculation).
Crowley initiated a gentleman called Gerald Gardner into the Ordo Templi Orientis, an organisation in which he had risen to the top. Shortly before he died, he quickly took Gerald Gardner to the 9th degree of the OTO. Then Gerald Gardner went on to create Wicca. He claimed that his rituals were ancient, but they had little content which was not taken from Aleister Crowley. In fact, Doreen Valiente commented about a good chunk of Wicca’s rituals being taken from Aleister Crowley’s Gnostic Mass and she replaced it with some of her own poetry.
Interests in secret Masonic Orders waned as interests in natural, pagan-based religion waxed and Gardner’s Wicca grew to be a dominant alternative religion in the UK. Many groups identified as pagan groups with little material regarding the practice of their pagan faith in ancient times and so used Wiccan-style rituals to celebrate their deity. Neo-druid orders while having a very different history also adopted Wiccan-style rituals, but later tried to distinguish themselves. Many groups ceased druid spiritual rituals altogether and replaced them with storytelling and arts because these were considered more consistent with early druid practice. The US estimates around 1 million pagans in the New Age community and a 2011 census in the UK has around 75,000 people claiming to be believers.
Attempts are made by many to discredit Aleister Crowley. They go back to when he was alive. In fact, newspapers refer to him as the Worst Man in the World and the Wickedest Man in the World (at a time while Adolf Hitler was in jail writing Mein Kempf). A woman, called Nina Hamnett wrote a book known as Laughing Torso about her bohemian life and accused Aleister Crowley of Black Magic, the sacrifice of one or more babies and the drinking of a cat’s blood. Much of this hate is really his own fault since he was so happy to encourage similar myths about himself including the nickname “the Beast 666”. But still today in a world where we know many of the stories to have been untrue, people like to perpetuate them and deny him his rightful place as the creator of the modern neo-pagan movement, which without him would be unrecognisable today.
Aleister Crowley wrote for Fatherland
In 1915-1916, during the First World War, Aleister Crowley wrote for a German newspaper in New York. In his 1929 book called Confessions, there is some suggestion that he was doing so undercover and sought to undermine German military efforts. There is in fact a WWI-era secret service file with details of Crowley’s existence in New York and his current contact suggesting he was actually a spy however all MI5 files are apparently unavailable and have possibly been destroyed. Also up until this point, he seemed to have had no particular connection to or interest in Ireland, but during this time he claimed to be Irish and a supporter of Irish Independence, which might have even been a cover. Since this Irish nationalism doesn’t really feature anywhere else I believe it is evidence of him trying to be undercover and have a relatable nationalist ideology that fits with what he is doing working for a German nationalist magazine.
Now, this is before the time of Hitler and the significant rise of antisemitism in Germany, but does his work make any comments about Jews or Hebrews? Does that work indicate antisemitism? I decided to plough through his articles for the Fatherland in search of evidence of racism.
One of the two articles I could find is called Honesty is the Best Policy and it is meant to be a German propaganda article to discredit all allied countries. As such it is entirely meant to be prejudiced against certain countries, but predominantly white countries and the article is not intended to be against particular races. This was supposedly part of Aleister Crowley’s job while he was undercover for the Secret Service.
In Belgium-run Congo, it was common for a black slave to be killed and supposedly cannibalised if they failed to meet the rubber quota to show that they had taken action to punish the slaves for not working hard enough. The masters of the slaves were required to show the hands and/or feet cut-off as proof that they had needed to kill another slave. This meant that many of the quotas needed to be topped up with hands and/or feet. This was known as the red rubber system. Crowley writes as follows:
We have quite forgotten that the Belgian is the most cruel, mean, and cowardly cur in Europe, that we have demonstrated till all was blue against him as assassin, torturer, mutilator, and cannibal. We have dined in our thousands to acclaim his disgrace. We heard nothing but “Red Rubber;” of n*$$&#s with hands, and feet, and indeed all that was off-choppable, off-chopped; of rape, robbery, murder, anthropophagy [eating people], and so on, until even our sanest etymologists [people that study the origins of words] began to derive Belgium from Belial and Belphegor and other leading Lucifuges [Light fleers / demons] of the hierarchy of the Pit.
Aleister Crowley – The Fatherland – Honesty is the Best Policy Vol 1 No 23 Jan 13th
While he begins to paint all Belgians with a single brush and in doing so is essentially writing in a racist manner as per my definition above, he is actually bringing to light and reminding people of a more serious atrocity and dehumanisation. This however is not evidence of anti-semitism it is prejudice against Belgians and mentions the plight of black slaves in the Congo.
In the same article, he does mention the Jews, but it appears to be in defence of them against bigotry. He raises the concern about Russia that they seem to believe that their children will be stolen and ritually murdered by Jews.
“As to Russia, we have had nothing but whole-hearted abuse since 1850. Even their ridiculous fear of having their children stolen by Jews for the purposes of ritual murder—as they most fixedly believe”
Aleister Crowley – The Fatherland – Honesty is the Best Policy Vol 1 No 23 Jan 13th
He refers to the fear as ridiculous. He refers to it as peasant ignorance and suggests Russia passes it off as religious bigotry (which was considered acceptable at the time, prior to the heinous acts during the Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement. The belief however is far more significant than a mere bit of religious bigotry, because it associates Jews with nefarious purposes. Aleister Crowley seems to be bringing this to light and calling it ridiculous NOT perpetuating it. Again, this is not antisemitic if anything it is pro-semitic.
I was very disappointed when I reached the section about Japan because he refers to the Japanese using the dehumanising term “monkeys”. This feels very racist as it might refer to the appearance of members of the Asian race rather than their war efforts. While I have never come across someone in the modern day use the term monkey, I am aware that at one point it was considered a dehumanising slur for black people. Not Asians. I do not know how it was used at the time. I can’t speak to whether he was playing along as an undercover employee for her Secret Service or whether he is expressing genuine views that he actually holds. This is a man who has visited Japan briefly, so I would hope he had met and enjoyed the company of some Japanese people realized them to be human beings, people of value and at least not “monkeys”. There is no getting around this. Crowley wrote publically some very racist things. I cannot however immediately think of the views of many Americans at the time of Pearl Harbour and how these words prior to the Civil Rights movement would have been regarded. Also, the possibility that he attempted to make a fool of the German newspaper while writing for it because he supposedly was working for the Secret Service was a very real possibility. The man was friends with Ian Flemming, Roald Dahl, Maxwell Knight and Dennis Wheatly all of whom were prominent figures in the Secret Service during the Second World War.
His disregard for many other white countries in the same article tends to suggest it is hardly racist, but Japan is almost homogenously a different race. So Crowley’s comments are easily applicable to the whole race, where they weren’t when he commented on other countries. This subtle difference might be lost on a pre-WWII and pre-civil rights author. His comment is as follows:
“And now we come to the treacherous monkeys of Japan, the thieves and pirates of the East. Who makes the shoddy imitations of European and American machinery, forges the names of famous firms, sticks at no meanness to steal trade? Who, under cover of alliance with England, fostered in China a boycott of all English goods?”
Aleister Crowley – The Fatherland – Honesty is the Best Policy Vol 1 No 23 Jan 13th
I can only comment that Aleister Crowley would not have had the education to actually tell him that this sort of comment is wrong. He was potentially repeating what he thought he wanted his audience/editor to hear. We might think “well, it’s bloody obvious, I can tell racism when I hear it”, forgetting that we have been raised in a very racism-conscious society as a result of our history with the Civil Rights movement and the atrocities of the Second World War. That stuff hadn’t happened yet back then and even despite that, Crowley was still aware of religious bigotry and some heinous racist crimes, for which he raises awareness. From an age so long ago, when we were so young that we cannot even remember it, we have been taught the importance of phrasing things so as to appear non-racist. Sadly, I don’t feel we have been taught enough about how to actually prevent racial prejudice from affecting our thinking or our actions. We aren’t taught to better promote unity as a society, but instead, we were taught to hide prejudices that are there. Crowley had no such upbringing and while undercover as a German propaganda journalist wrote a racist comment. Was he racist? Yes, probably. More than your average person today? Maybe. But in comparison to the average person of the day, I think he was not racist and more aware of the dangers of racist thinking than your average person.
In the same article, Aleister Crowley uses the following terms to refer to Black people. Warning these terms are unsavoury for many people, but there is no other way to convey the terms without saying. So look away if you don’t want to read them.
- Nigger
- Negro
- Nigroid
Again this would appear racist, but in the time that this was being written, these terms were considered the correct terms. He simply referred to the black people and the atrocities committed against them. He seemed to dislike the reliance on Black and Arabic people by the French Colonies and the use of Black Indians and Gurkas by England. He even makes reference to the Black Hole of Calcutta, which was a prison that was overseen by the British, in which conditions were often so camped that people often died of suffocation and heat exposure. This comment in people who knew about the prison might have associated in their mind a particularly horrifying “uncultured” prison and they might have associated it with Indian people, perpetuating a racist view but only in people who already had it. This is really hard to justify in a pre-holocaustal world and frankly, it really is an issue of penal reform rather than racism.
The passage takes a very dark turn when Aleister Crowley mentions that the allied troops are a mixture of all races, which had horrifying practices suggesting they have no culture. Suddenly lumping them together and associating them with evil practices actually perpetuates stereotypes, hate and fear. Crowley is guilty of that racism in these comments, there’s no question. There’s no antisemitism, but the following passage is hardly excusable. It is a racist passage. But why would he be slagging off the troups of his own allied country? Well perhaps once again we should consider this is an attempt to discredit the Germans by writing as one of them in their Newspaper. It does not excuse it, but maybe we should consider that he lived in a world where many of the missionaries to areas which weren’t predominantly white, through the 17th -19th centuries and their reports would have given extravagant tales to encourage investment in and donations to their missions. These missionaries often painted a picture to suggest other races were savages and that the white Christians were bringing them peace and intelligence. This was to encourage funding. It inspired an entire genre of explorer novels that continued this dark racist theme for over 200 years. Aleister Crowley having grown up surrounded by this media would have a world-view that would have been racist, just as we have a view coloured by what we see in our media. Also remember, he was undercover and trying to present a German viewpoint and also trying to undermine, sabotage and embarrass the Germans.
“The allied troops are black, brown, and yellow “heathens,” the very folks whom we have stopped from hook-swinging, suttee*, child-murder, human sacrifice and cannibal feast?”
[* suttee is the ancient Indian practice of wives cremating themselves alive on their husband’s funeral pyre. Though rare, there are stone monuments to women who participated in this practice across India.]
Aleister Crowley – The Fatherland – Honesty is the Best Policy Vol 1 No 23 Jan 13th
While the magazine wasn’t well read this could have contributed to the fears and hate associated with people of other races, by some of its readers. This is the issue with a racist comment even when there isn’t a person of that race around. Not only does it express a form of latent racism that is there, it also encourages other people with racist views to feel okay about them and not attempt to challenge their own thinking and reevaluate their views. While this is a moral standpoint that we are particularly concerned about today, the action of perpetuating such beliefs associated with other races was not a major concern at the time. Society had only seen progression through race relations and was slowly getting better. There was no fear about the potential horrors that could occur, if racism was allowed to run riot. Today, we are very concerned about allowing racist comments to be allowed to run free, but Crowley grew up in a time when this just was not a concern. I don’t know if his views would have been affected by confirmation bias when he met the odd person who wasn’t particularly cultured in Ceylon and Burma or wherever, but he returned to the Western world with learning he had picked up in his travels. He felt that there was a hidden knowledge in Raja Yoga that white culture did not have. He felt there was something that he needed to learn from the Theravada Buddhists of Burma, so he studied under some meditation teachers. I find it hard to reconcile this with the idea that he viewed all the non-white races he mentioned as savages with no culture. I therefore think that this was done as part of a cover to meet the expectations of his editor or his audience. It might have even been done to embarrass the Germans and undermine their efforts while appearing to support them.
I conclude that some of the comments made while writing for the Fatherland were definitely racist, for example, calling the Japanese, “monkeys”. He was clearly raised in a white culture, taught that white people were superior and that other cultures were savages by a wide range of media as was anyone at the time. I imagine that he could have easily been brought up to believe that people of other races were savages, but then he travelled. In the process of travelling at a young age, he was able to meet many people who left enough of an impression on him that when he returned to the West he quite openly expressed that White culture was missing some mystical information that was found in Eastern cultures. He held a lot of respect for cultures, which he then classified as uncultured while undercover working for a German magazine during the First World War. I am pretty sure those comments were made as part of a cover. At some point, I will read Richard Spence’s book and decide what the evidence is that he was undercover. Even with a lack of evidence, it might just indicate he was a good spy! In all the writing that he did for a German, nationalist magazine he did not make a single antisemitic comment.
I find it difficult to conclude that Aleister Crowley was a bad person. He is a product of his time and he is pretty worldly in comparison to the average person of his time. I remember when I was VERY young I was taught by a family member that people of a certain race were more likely to steal and that if you stared at people of particular race that they could turn violent and attack you. Luckily, through my schooling, I studied alongside people of all sorts of races and learned that we are all just human beings. I also identify with the “other” and so people that seemed “other” in some way or another intrigued me so I interacted with them and soon realised that we’re all just human beings, both complicated and simple in very similar ways. I don’t hold the racist beliefs I was taught as a child, but I worry that if I had not been given the opportunity to unlearn those things then I could have been quite a racist. That being so, I cannot blame anyone for thinking something racist. It just is the things they are taught by their upbringing and the media representation around them. What I can do is blame them, if they are met with the challenges against racism in the modern day, that if they don’t reevaluate their beliefs and then they contribute to the problem. Crowley however was not given this opportunity and so to classify him as racist and dismiss him without seeing how he would have responded to the Second World War and Civil Rights Movement really fails to see what sort of person he truly is. It is often as easy to forget what teaching we have had access too in the same way it is easy for white people to recognise they have bias on their side in the Systemically racist cultures we live in.
Crowley and Victor Neuberg
Victor Neuberg came into contact with Aleister Crowley when he was 25 years old and Crowley was 31. The two bonded over poetry and Neuberg quickly became Crowley’s submissive sexual partner for sex magic, BDSM and the two shared love. Crowley suggests in later writing that he could easily replace the women in his life, but his love for men lasted and it is entirely possible that Victor Neuberg was in many ways a replacement for his first true love Herbert Charles Pollitt, a love that went unrequited. He wrote that Neuberg was one of 4 men in his life that he loved.
Crowley did not get on with Victor Neuberg’s family. I mean who would like the man they imagined had led their poor, innocent, impressionable and artistic boy into sinful, diabolical, homosexual ways?
Also, Crowley was not above using typical Jewish slurs with regard to Neuberg, but he actually loved Neuberg dearly. This would indicate anti-semitism because he is using the words, but we don’t really know how the two felt about those words. I have actually met up with a friend who faced bullying and harassment at work when a colleague called them a ponce. I next saw them 6 months later when they wanted to go to a fetish nightclub and have a guy force them to lick his boots. While he was doing this he asked his dom to call him “faggot”. So the private interaction between the two and how Crowley treated him was part of their relationship. Did he think of all Jews in the same way? We don’t know and we can’t know. Remember again that these expressions were not considered as taboo as it is these days. This should indicate that he was anti-semitic, but then how could he claim to be in love with Neuberg, unless he never was and Neuberg just reminded him of Pollitt with whom Crowey had been passive? Another large question that thumps around my mind is “Were Crowley’s opinions of the Jews any better or worse than those he held of Christians?” He had low opinions of both. Were they related to religion or race?
Crowley and Martha Kuntzel
Kuntzel was one of the main translators of Thelemic passages into German. During the Second World War, she grew enamoured with Adolf Hitler and attempted to get him to accept the word of Thelema. She forwarded to Crowley a false book concerning Hitler’s views. Crowley believed it showed similarities between Hitler’s philosophy and Thelema and Crowley was enamoured by Hitler until he discovered it was fake. Soon after, Crowley came to the conclusion that there were too many stark contrasts between Nazi ideology and Thelema and the two could not be reconciled.
In 1939 (the beginning of WWII), in response to some anti-semitic comments made by Martha Kuntzel, Crowley wrote to her saying that everything happening in Germany was brutal, stupid and cruel. Also, the only cultured people in Germany were the Jews. The Jews were like humans in a country of monkeys.
So when he first received a document about Hitler’s views he agreed with some information in it. Without reading it myself and seeing what exactly Crowley agreed with and what he did not I cannot conclude that he was anti-semitic or that he supported a war effort with such horrifying crimes. I can however note that he seems to be defending the Jewish people, calling them cultured and humanising them, which is a stark contrast to the actions of antisemites.
Conclusion
Everyone is a little bit racist, sometimes. While we sit there and point the finger saying someone else is racist that doesn’t prevent us from being affected by racial profiles and prejudices that we grew up around. Often I come across people complaining about the racism they perceived and I have known many white people to deny it was racist. So many white people refuse to even consider that they might be racist. In fact, someone said to me that there were black people in our class so they had exactly the same opportunity as us. Not paying attention to who the teachers felt most comfortable talking to about their children’s performance, not considering who was more likely to be hired and what grades people were expected to get. The very act of pointing at someone else and saying they’re racist and so I am not going to listen to anything they have to say often indicates a person who lacks empathy. And guess what? That lack of empathy often directly correlates with racism and other forms of prejudice.
Was Crowley racist? Yes. So am I! Was Crowley trying to prevent the known racial injustice of the day? Yes. So am I. Did Crowley grow up learning about the atrocities of the Second World War to inform his views? No. Did Crowley grow up learning about the Civil Rights Movement? No, it hadn’t happened yet. Did Crowley say the wrong things? Yes! Were some of his views Antisemitic? Yes, definitely! He was also anti-Christian. Was he likely to meet and listen to people of other races? Yes, much more so than the average person from the UK.
Can we throw out all of Crowley’s spiritual contributions to the Western Occult Tradition because sometimes he said the odd comment that could be taken to be antisemitic? No, not really. Just because he was not the pinnacle of contemporary equality and even if he were cancelled on modern-day Twitter, Crowley was no worse than the average person of his day. If you’re looking for an angel you’re looking in the wrong place. Moses was a murderer, Noah was found naked and drunk, and Buddha was guilty of one of the biggest crimes of the modern day being extremely privileged and boasting in front of poor people about how he threw it all away. Crowley does not show modern-day morals when it comes to antisemitism because he is not a modern-day person. If he lived in the modern-day then he would be judged by modern-day standards and perhaps get cancelled or maybe not, who knows? Unfortunately, many people want to disregard him as the sourcework of the modern occult, but they never seem to be able to provide a good alternative. If you’re looking for an alternative person to use instead, I can promise you, even if it is not in their writing, if they lived during the early 1900s, they almost definitely had such views and almost definitely did drugs.
Crowley’s inherent racism can easily be separated from his spiritual views. If you’re not capable of making that separation then you must not be capable of separating yourself from the racist views you were exposed to as a child and well you’re going to perpetuate racism and any forms of antisemitism you come across. So if you’re quick to point the finger and throw out Crowley then well, I am sorry to say this, but you’re the problem. If you have spotted any other evidence I should consider please consider using the contact me form so I can add it to the above. Thank you for reading.