The Crowley Defender

Peter Levenda & the Art of Thelemic Doublethink

Excerpts from The Vice of Kings: How Fabians, Occultism & the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse (as well as other tidbits).

(Original artwork for The Liminalist 11.5: The Individuation Chamber)

I am posting this in light of my recent Higherside Chat with Greg Carlwood, as an example of calling out the agents amongst us.

Circles of Denial

(From Chapter 27, “Circles of Denial: Checking in with the Experts”)

“What is being reported by these patients is a variously integrated mix of kabbalistic teachings . . . ceremonial magick, sex magick, brainwashing techniques, a peculiar brand of theosophy that emphasizes blood and death rites in the core rituals of its system of worship, and an organizational and secrecy structure patterned much along the lines of secret societies . . . An extensive reading and integration of many occult source documents over the course of considerable time is required in order to reconstruct the basic tenets and practices with which nearly every SCS [satanic cult survivor] seems readily familiar.” —George B. Greaves, “Alternate Hypotheses Regarding Claims of Satanic Cult Activity”

While I was working on Vice of Kings, I had exchanges with a couple of Crowley researchers. I emailed Hugh B. Urban with a quote from his Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism¹ and the question: how far beyond do you think Crowley went in his deliberate acts of transgression? Urban replied with the following:

For his time, at least, I would say quite far indeed. In some ways, his acts of transgression were more extreme and antinomian than Hindu Tantric acts of transgression typically are (since the latter don’t include acts such as sodomy, etc). His drug use was of course infamous, and on at least one occasion he consumed human excrement. On the other hand, however, I don’t know of any reports of him performing human sacrifice, which is perhaps the most extreme rite in left hand forms of Tantra.

I replied:

I am still seeking a Crowley scholar willing to look into the evidence that Crowley sexually abused children, possibly infants. Those I have asked or read so far seem inclined to avoid the question entirely, which of course is the norm around child sexual abuse.

I included a link to my piece on Crowley and Alfred Kinsey, as well as a passage referring to Crowley’s boast of rape. Urban did not respond for several weeks:

The connections you’re exploring are intriguing. I’m not really working on Crowley at the moment, so I would suggest you contact others who are more active in that area now—Marco Pasi is the first that comes to mind, and then maybe Gordan Djurdjevic. Good luck.

Sometime before this, in January 2016, before I began work on the Crowley section of the book, I emailed Peter Levenda (who has written and spoken about Crowley on countless occasions) to ask if he was aware of any evidence of Crowley’s involvement in child sexual abuse.

Levenda’s response was superficially thoughtful but, I thought, rather dismissive. It included these lines (quoted with Levenda’s permission): “I know members of the OTO (and have known many since the 1970s) and one could not accuse any of them of pedophilia or using children for sexual rituals. If there was even the whiff of that, you can be sure I would have followed it up.”

In response, I sent him Crowley’s diary entry, from 12 August, 1920, as reprinted in The Magickal Record of the Beast 666 (edited by John Symmonds and Kenneth Grant), in which Crowley wrote about his “Scarlet woman”:

Her breasts itch with lust of Incest. She hath given Her two-year bastard boy to Her lewd lover’s whim of sodomy, hath taught him speech and act, things infinitely abhorred, with Her own beastly carcass. She hath tongued Her five-month girl, and asked its father to deflower it. She hath wished Her Beast to rape Her rotten old mother—so far is woman clean of Her! Then Her blood is grown icy hard and cold with hate; and her eyes gleam as Her ears ring with a chime of wedding bells, dirty words, or vibrate, cat-gut fashion, to the thin shrieks of a young child that Her Beast-God-Slave-Mate is torturing for Her pleasure—ay! and his own, since of Her Cup he drank, and of Her soul he breathed. (1972, p. 251-2.)

The Levenda Defense

“This attitude is, of course, characteristic of that vast class of moral cowards, whose only remedy for evil is to remove the occasion . . . . We of Thelema pursue a policy exactly contrary. We resist temptations through the moral strength and the enlightening experience which comes of making a series of systematic experiments with divers iniquities.” —Crowley, Confessions, p. 866

Levenda did not reply, and I left it at that. In late June, while working on this chapter, I sent him a reminder. There followed over a period of two days a rapid-fire exchange of emails, the net result of which was that I temporarily abandoned the work. The total of our exchange came in at around ten thousand words, so I’m not going to reproduce it here (it can be found at my old website).

On the surface what transpired was a prickly debate between two researchers who do not agree, with one researcher (Levenda) trying to steer another away from some “erroneous” assumptions, and the other, me, resisting that effort and becoming increasingly argumentative. And in fact, I had written to Levenda to get him on the record as an example of a Crowley scholar who was resistant to my “thesis” (that Crowley was complicit with child sexual abuse). What I got was a lot more than I bargained for. Levenda’s second response included the following:

Scholarly examination of the evidence has to take into account the actual evidence first, and if scholars cannot find evidence of sexual abuse of children it is probably because it is not there to be found. . . . We have an enormous record of AC’s sexual rituals, almost tedious in their attention to explicit detail. In that case, why would we expect that he would suddenly become coy and neglect to detail for us his sexual conquest of minors?. . . What is the Kabbalistic correspondence for sexual acts with children? What is the Golden Dawn context? There isn’t any. . . . All of his workings—at Cefalù, in North Africa, etc.—were based on GD rituals. Liber AL itself is written using GD imagery, for instance. You can’t understand AC without understanding the GD, as I have written and proven already. His magical diaries are replete with references that only make sense to someone deeply familiar with GD terminology.

Levenda dismissed my citing the Liber Al prescriptions of child sacrifice by writing: “those verses (and the whole of AL) have been subjected to all sorts of deconstruction and explication, and you would have to show me that you were aware of those arguments and could refute them.”

He offered his own experience as evidence, claiming to have spent extensive time among “occultists, Thelemites, satanists, witches, neo-Nazis, magicians, and even Republicans,” to have “witnessed all sorts of mayhem, from sexual promiscuity to drug abuse to threats of violence, etc.,” and “never seen any hint of pedophilia in any of the groups I have known, nor in connection with any individual person I have known.”²

The day after composing this chapter, I received an email from Marco Pasi, the Crowley scholar whom both Urban and Levenda had recommended I contact. In a very different response to Levenda’s, Pasi’s email began with these lines:

The question you ask is very interesting indeed. I am not aware of any scholarly (actually even non-scholarly) research on the subject. And I agree there are probably interesting things to say about it. I have read your online piece. In relation to Crowley, the key period for the topic is surely the Cefalù period (1920-1923).

Pretzeled Logic

The exchange with Levenda left me feeling psychologically “handled”—just as if I’d been the target of a sophisticated attempt to neutralize all my efforts to get to the truth about Crowley and the occult. Whether or not Levenda, with his Jesuit training, was intentionally trying to derail me in my investigations, or whether he was simply trying to help me see some of the flaws in my arguments, the effect was the same. I was stopped in my tracks. Rightly or not, I felt I had been subjected to what Raimond Gaita calls “illegitimate persuasion.”

So far, none of Crowley’s defenders (including those who claim not to be, like Levenda) have explained why they believe someone bidding for spiritual power through social and moral transgression would draw the line at anything at all; or why they insist that, when Liber Al says “take strange drugs” it means it literally (just as Crowley followed it literally), but when it says “sacrifice cattle little and big, after a child,” or “the best blood is that of a child,” it is using occultic code known only to the few, and that only the ignorant would mistake it for an actual prescription.

Anyone stupid enough to take these passages literally, according to Levenda, Duquette, and a legion of Crowley apologists, can’t blame Crowley or Thelemic doctrine, only themselves for not having done the proper reading.

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While I don’t wish to argue that a written text should be held responsible for the actions people commit upon reading it, to argue that a prescription for child sacrifice is not a prescription for child sacrifice—no matter how it looks—indicates the sort of doublethink and pretzeled logic that uncouples occult beliefs from any sort of accountability at all.

When the so-called “circumstantial” evidence is this overwhelming, isn’t the onus of proof on those who, like Levenda, insist there’s nothing to see here? Isn’t it up to them to show exactly why this evidence doesn’t count as evidence, and not simply dismiss our concerns with a condescending remark about how we haven’t read enough of the apologias or attended enough O.T.O. meetings?

Regarding Levenda’s insistence that there are no direct—or even coded—references to “pedophilia” in occult tracts, this may be missing the point, but if such are desired, they certainly exist. Crowley’s most recent biographer Richard Kaczynski mentions how two children are listed as a central part of Crowley’s Gnostic Mass; he places “children” in inverted commas, however, as if to deflect any fears the reader might have that this instruction would ever be taken literally.

The only reason I can think that it wouldn’t be taken literally, however, is that it would be illegal to do so, which is also a good reason to insist that it is meant “metaphorically.” The onus is then on Kaczynski, Levenda, or whoever, to explain why this is so—or how they can be sure that it is.³

Alex Sanders

There is at least one person who claimed to have been sexually abused as a child by Crowley, though tellingly, his allegations were less in the nature of a complaint than a boast. This was the English occultist Alex Sanders, the founder of Alexandrian Wicca. (Sanders also introduced Sharon Tate to witchcraft when he was hired as a consultant for Tate’s first film in 1967, The Eye of the Devil. The film is about ritual sacrifice.)

Sanders’ “well known bi-sexuality [sic],” is even attributed to his early encounter with Crowley. In 1978, in an interview with Jack Pleasant, Sanders claimed to have been introduced to Crowley by his grandmother, Mary Biddy, when he was only ten. Sanders was initiated as a witch, he claimed, at aged seven, by Biddy, “whom he had chanced on standing naked in the kitchen in a circle drawn on the floor.” At ten, Biddy took him to London to meet Crowley.

“She left me with Crowley for the night and he carried out some of his sex magic with me,” said Alex. “It wasn’t a very nice experience. To me, as a young boy, he was just a horrible, smelly, old man. Before I left he tattooed his ‘mark of the beast’ on my hand. It’s still there. It hardly turned me off sex though. At one time when I was still in London with my second wife, Maxine, I also had two mistresses and nine male lovers.” (Pleasant, 2004.)

Sanders also referred to this meeting, in more sanguine terms, when he was asked by Stewart Farrar how he had come by a ring that once belonged to the famous 19^th century French occultist Eliphas Levi. Sanders said it had been given to him by a magician his grandmother had introduced him to at the age of ten, called “Mr. Alexander.” Sanders later realized it had been Crowley.⁴

(Behind the Paywall: Crowley, incest, & the Star Sapphire Ritual, “Simon” & The Gates of the Necronomicon, the smoking gun of occultism-endorsed child sex, Levenda’s open Intelligence affiliations)