The Stargate Conspiracy (40 page)

A few days later, in the Cairo Museum, Rose — who had never visited it before - confidently led her husband through the halls to stand before one particular exhibit, a rather unremarkable Twenty-Sixth-Dynasty painted wooden stele showing an Egyptian priest standing before Horus in his form of Ra-Hoor-Khuit (a variation of Ra-Horakhti, who is closely associated with the Sphinx). This has been known ever since in the occult world as the Stele of Revealing. Crowley was impressed by the synchronicity of the exhibit’s number — 666, the number of the Great Beast of Revelation, which also happened to be Crowley’s own proud alter ego, thanks to an overliteral interpretation of the Bible by his religious-maniac mother. (When we saw the stele in April 1998, we were amused to note that, although it is now exhibit 9422, the original 1904 label, bearing the number 666 in a beautiful but faded copperplate hand, has been laid beside it in the display case. Could there be Crowleyite sympathisers on the staff of the Cairo Museum?)

This led Crowley, somewhat reluctantly, to take his wife’s words seriously. He duly carried out the magickal ritual - now known simply as the Cairo Working — which turned out to be a pivotal moment not only in his own bizarre career, but also in the whole history of modern occultism. As a result of this working, he came into contact with an entity called Aiwass (sometimes, for magickal reasons, spelt Aiwaz) who, over the course of three days — 8-10 April 1904 — ‘dictated’ to Crowley what has become his ‘gospel’,
The Book of the Law.
It has been said that, without this book, it is unlikely that Crowley would have achieved his present lofty status among the new
fin de siècle
occultists. As his biographer and literary executor John Symonds writes, somewhat mischievously: ‘Without the Law of Thelema [which is embodied in the Book], he would just have been a minor magician like Éliphas Lévi or MacGregor Mathers.’
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The purpose of the Book and the task for which Crowley had been chosen was the announcement of the advent of the Aeon of Horus, a new age that succeeded the Aeon of Osiris, when patriarchal religions based on dying and rising gods, such as Christianity, held sway. That, in turn, had succeeded the much longer era of Isis, when goddess-based spirituality was predominant (and when, if many modern anthropologists are right, the whole notion of paternity was far from being understood or accepted).

Clearly, the ushering in of a new aeon — of Horus, the Child — is no minor task, perhaps especially when the wild and difficult characteristics of children are taken into consideration. Whereas the features of motherhood and fatherhood are, by and large, relatively easy to recognise, those of newborns and youngsters are more fluid and elusive. Children are spontaneous, excitable, inquisitive and consumed by the excitement of living in the here and now, but they are also volatile and contradictory, capable of emotional excess. Their spontaneity can be exhilarating, but once the moment has past one is left facing a future for which no provision has been made. If there is such a thing as the Aeon of the Child, then those of us who live in the era of its birth should realise that we are in for a very bumpy ride.

Another characteristic of children is the natural psychic ability that seems to come as part of the human ‘package’, only to fall away dramatically as the reality consensus — the shared, unspoken belief that the paranormal is only good for science fiction and ghost stories but has no basis in fact — begins to corrode their heightened sensitivity. As parapsychologist Dr Ernesto Spinelli has demonstrated, the younger the child the more psychic he or she is. It is as if children really do come into the world ‘trailing clouds of glory’, as William Wordsworth so memorably put it, retaining memories of another realm in which the power of the mind holds sway. Paranormal abilities are a double-edged sword, however. The psychic aspect of the new Age of Horus is potentially worrying, for Crowley said that The Book of the Law effectively opened up communications with ‘discarnate intelligences’ and that: ‘I have opened up communication with one such intelligence; or, rather, have been selected by him to receive the first message from a new order of beings.’
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Crowley was a bombast, who rejoiced in notoriety and whose descriptions of his many magickal workings were suspiciously colourful. One of his favourite, quasi-Wildean, aphorisms was ‘Always tell the truth, but lead so improbable a life that no one will ever believe you’. But was Crowley telling the truth about opening up communication with ‘a new order of beings’? Even if he believed it himself, had it really happened?

Crowley certainly came to believe that his spirit communicator Aiwass was one of the Secret Chiefs, a group of discarnate entities who directed the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn - a highly respected magickal order of which he was a member, and that this contact with Aiwass bestowed authority on him over its membership. According to the leading authority on Crowley, Kenneth Grant, Aiwass was ‘an occult intelligence of incalculable power’.
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The notion of Secret Chiefs or Hidden Masters ran throughout nineteenth-century occultism, and is generally understood to be a convenient device whereby the leaders of various orders assumed authority by alleging they had received it from a higher source to which they alone had access, including the Unknown Superiors of some of the Neo-Templar groups of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Hidden Masters of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s highly influential movement of Theosophy and Saint-Yves’s Masters of Agartha. Often, as in Blavatsky’s case, the Hidden Masters were said to be spiritually advanced human beings who lived in remote parts of the world, such as the mountain fastnesses of Tibet. (Interestingly, the Secret Chiefs of the Golden Dawn appeared astrally as hawks,
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reminding us of Saul Paul Sirag and Ray Stanford’s experience with Spectra.)

Despite the potential for acclaim in his contact with Aiwass and
The Book of the Law,
Crowley had a great aversion to both. He came to believe that Aiwass was merely a manifestation arising from the depths of his own subconscious mind, and said: ‘I was setting my whole strength against the Secret Chiefs. I was trying to forget the whole business.’
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But Crowley was not allowed to forget it. Bizarre synchronicities and weird phenomena continually pushed
The Book of the Law
under his nose, together with a series of unexplained setbacks in his career. Only when he returned to promoting the Book did the obstacles melt away, so reluctantly he came to accept that he had no option but to do the Secret Chiefs’ bidding.

Crowley’s subsequent career centres around two magical orders, the Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of the Oriental Templars, or OTO) — now somewhat notorious for its sexual rituals — and the less well-known Argenteum Astrum, or A∴A∴ (‘Silver Star’). This was the Third Order of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Only the highest initiates were admitted, and they were believed to be in direct contact with the Secret Chiefs. The Golden Dawn itself fragmented around 1900, largely because of a power struggle between Crowley himself and the head of the Order, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854 — 1918), but the A∴A∴ survived independently under Crowley’s control. The ‘Silver Star’ of the order’s name is Sirius, which holds a central place in its magickal philosophy, because the Secret Chiefs - the discarnate entities believed to govern the order — were somehow connected with Sirius. This would have extraordinary influence in shaping the prehistory of the Nine.

The OTO also resulted in the coming together of certain influential bedfellows. Founded in 1895 by the Austrian Karl Kellner, it was taken over after his death in 1905 by Theodore Reuss, after which it expanded rapidly. Crowley joined in 1911, and Reuss began to incorporate the teachings of
The Book of the Law
into the OTO’s rituals. When Reuss died in 1922, he nominated Crowley as his successor, but many German members refused to accept him as their leader, leading to a bitter schism and a decline in Germany even before its termination by the Nazis. With either extraordinary foresight or remarkable happenchance, Crowley moved to California, mecca of the weird and wonderful, and was so successful in building up the membership that, in the words of Francis King, ‘for the next ten years [until Crowley’s death in 1947] California was the main centre of OTO activity’.
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In California the OTO and the A∴A∴ underwent significant developments. As they both fell under Crowley’s influence, they were closely interlinked, but the OTO always attracted more attention because of its emphasis on sex magick (Crowley always insisted on the ‘k’). We believe that this was a deliberate move by him and his followers to keep the focus away from the A∴A∴, which was in fact the more important of the two orders.

In California in the years immediately after the Second World War and following Crowley’s death in England in 1947, there was a new emphasis in the philosophy of the orders. It began to be associated with extraterrestrials, rather than ‘traditional’ occult entities such as angels, demons or spirit guides. The major figure in this development was Charles Stansfeld Jones (1886 — 1950), Crowley’s leading disciple, whom he described as ‘my magickal son’. Jones, whose magickal name was Frater Achad, was the head of the OTO Lodge in Vancouver and was also prominent in the A∴ A∴, having been initiated in 1916. According to Kenneth Grant: ‘
The Book of the Law
issued from a praeterhuman Intelligence that used Crowley as a focus for its influence.’ But he goes on: ‘Aiwaz is therefore the
type
of extra-terrestrial Intelligence such as we may expect to come into conscious contact with, as the aeon develops.’
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And elsewhere, Grant writes in terms strikingly reminiscent of Tom and the Nine: ‘Aiwass is the link, the corridor through which the Impulse was transmitted from the source of extra-terrestrial consciousness.’
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Under the powerful influence of Charles Stansfeld Jones, the idea of Crowley’s guides being extraterrestrial rapidly took hold in California. One of the initiates of Jones’s Vancouver lodge, Wilfred T. Smith, established an OTO lodge in Pasadena, California in 1930. Their temple on Mount Palomar subsequently became the site of the Mount Palomar Observatory, which was involved in George Adamski’s controversial ‘classic’ UFO contact story in the 1950s.

Like Paris in the 1890s, in the postwar years California was a veritable hotbed of occult beliefs and practices. The great melting pot of humanity drawn into it also included the rocket scientist John (Jack) Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard, later the founder of the Church of Scientology.

Parsons, who has a crater on the Moon named after him, was a pioneer in developing rocket fuels. He and his wife Helen joined the Californian OTO in 1939, and he soon rose through the ranks, becoming head of the branch in 1944, being described by some as Crowley’s successor. In 1949 he spoke of ‘crossing the Abyss’ - a term meaning entering the A∴A∴ — and described himself as Master of the Temple (the first of the three grades of the A∴A∴).
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At the same time, during the Second World War, he was working on classified military projects, developing prototype rockets. In 1944 the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was established in Pasadena as a development of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, for which he had worked during the war, and he was one of its early members. (Ironically, JPL now controls space probes such as those sent to Mars.) Parsons died on 18 June 1952 in an explosion in his laboratory, although it is still a matter of debate as to whether it was an accident or suicide. It may be that dark forces had a hand in his death. As Grant says:

Obviously, contact with nonhuman intelligences can turn very nasty. It is not enough to communicate with them. They must be controlled, or kept in their place, which has not happened with the Nine, who are virtually worshipped by their followers. Perhaps the suicide of Don Elkins — and the near-suicide of Bobby Home — were only too similar to the fiery death of occultist Jack Parsons.

Parsons was one of those curiously common individuals who may excel in pioneering scientific work or be involved in intelligence operations, but who is, at the same time, also deeply committed to occult beliefs and practices. Crowley himself was repeatedly accused of working for various intelligence agencies, and it seems that was the case (what is less easy to ascertain is whose side he was on). Hard-headed scientist Jack Parsons was one of those who believed most passionately in an extraterrestrial element in Crowley’s magick. When the flying saucer craze began in 1947, Parsons stated that the discs would, in some way, help to convert the world to Crowley’s magickal religion.
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As things turned out, he would have a hand in helping to create quite another belief system. Parsons met L. Ron Hubbard in August 1945 and introduced him to the OTO, after which the two collaborated in magickal rituals together, although Hubbard would later claim that he only joined the order as part of an infiltration exercise by the Office of Naval Intelligence.
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Even if true, this would be very telling about the intimate association of occult groups and intelligence agencies at that time.

Hubbard had been an admirer of Crowley since coming across a copy of
The Book of the Law
in the Library of Congress as a teenager. Whatever may be claimed for his past associations by his followers now - after all, few contemporary public figures care to be known as former friends of Aleister Crowley — in a lecture in Philadelphia in 1952 Hubbard referred to the ‘Great Beast’ as ‘my very good friend’.
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