Post #583

During this period, Crowley worked for, or was connected to, many individuals working for British and US intelligence agencies, as well as many secret societies and freemasons. The factual extent of this history remains uncertain and understudied. One problem is that in order to answer this question, certain secret military and governmental files must be made available, while, at the moment, only a select few have come to light. This problem highlights a third angle in the 'conspiracism and esotericism joined at the hip' triangle that I am introducing here, namely, the overlapping layers of conspiracy theory, esoteric groups, and covert military intelligence. Crowley claimed that he infiltrated the German-sponsored periodicals in New York that aimed to keep America out of the war: The Fatherland and The International (Spence, 2000, 2008). Crowley himself declared that he had written pro-German articles that were psychologically intended to undermine the German image in the eyes of Americans and bolster the image of the United Kingdom (Crowley, 1989, p. 758; Pasi, 2014, p. 46). A problem with this narrative is that Crowley did not assert this until long after the war, and with usual jocularity and two-sided wit, making it hard to know if he was telling the truth, being ironic, downright lying, or else saving face in the eyes of the British government (Pasi, 2014, pp. 44–47). Churton’s interlocutor is historian Richard Spence, whose 2008 book Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult made a definitive argument that Crowley had indeed been employed by the Directorate of Military Intelligence Section 5 (MI5) during this time, even linking Crowley’s activities to the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, the main event that drew America into the war. While Spence offers myriad pieces of mostly circumstantial evidence, his key piece is a US Army Military Intelligence Division (MID) report from September 1918, currently held in the National Archives [et cetera, et cetera] Aaron French - Esoteric Nationalism and Conspiracism in WWI // Religious Dimensions of Conspiracy Theories: Comparing and Connecting Old and New Trends (2023), p. 117 References, TWIMC: Crowley, A. (1989) The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography. London: Arkana. Pasi, M. (2014) Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics. Durham: Acumen. Spence, R. (2000) ‘Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley and British Intelligence in America, 1914–1918’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 13(3), pp. 359–371. Spence, R. (2008) Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult. Port Townsend: Feral House.