‘THE LESSER

ORACLES OF THE
GREAT BEAST’

Aleister Crowley, the Ouija Board, & the Yi King

by

MATTHEW LEVI STEVENS

WhollyBooks, 2017
www.whollybooks.wordpress.com
 A first version of Aleister Crowley & the Yi King was
written at the request of The Atlantis Bookshop, for
inclusion in a commemorative publication presented at
Crowleymass, Monday 1st December 2008.
A second version, expanded to include the material on
Aleister Crowley & the Ouija Board, was presented as a
Talk at The Occult Conference, Glastonbury, March 21st
2015.
*
This publication brings the full essay together in print for
the first time, and is dedicated to the memory of Gerald
Suster (1951-2001): Thelemite, Scholar, Gentleman –
and Friend.
Personally I like this method of taking the Oracle. It
gives you a chance for your Angel to communicate
directly through your fingertips.
GRADY McMURTRY, on the use of the Yi King

“Faugh!”
ALEISTER CROWLEY, on the subject of Spiritism
 7

As if any introduction is needed, Aleister Crowley

(1875-1947) – Frater Perdurabo, dubbed “the
Wickedest Man in the World” by the gutter press of the
day, self-proclaimed Magus, To Mega Therion, the Great
Beast 666, Baphomet, and Prophet of the New Aeon of
Horus – was, if nothing else, an explorer, in mind, body,
and spirit, and a seeker after new sensations, new
knowledge, and new insights. Unlike many of his
illustrious literary contemporaries in the Hermetic Order
of the Golden Dawn, whose idea of the ‘Mystic East’
might well have been an opium den-cum-knocking shop
behind a Chinese laundry in Whitechapel, the not-
inconsiderable inheritance that Crowley received at the
age of 21 enabled him to travel and explore extensively,
in the realms of the geographical as much as those of
sex, drugs, and occultism. He was also a fearless and
tireless explorer in realms of the spirit, although
generally contemptuous of simple-minded – and largely
Christian-inflected – popularist movements such as
Spiritualism, which experienced several waves of
popularity during his lifetime, with its coming-and-going
fads of automatism, ectoplasm, mediums, Ouija Boards,
and séances.
 8

The origins of the Ancient & Venerable Chinese Oracle

known variously as the Yi-jing or Yi King, or I-Ching or
Book of Changes, are shrouded in the mists of Time,
allegedly attributed to the Ancient Shamans of China
some 4,000 years ago. Developed by the legendary first
emperor, and later by the venerable philosopher
Confucius, the Yi King evolved into a sophisticated
system that has brought wisdom and guidance to
countless generations, both in the East and the West.
The Ouija Board, on the other hand, is in itself a
relatively recent arrival – originally introduced as little
more than a parlour game by an American entrepreneur
in 1890, it wasn’t until the turn of the century it even
acquired the name “Ouija” – originally, cashing in on
the vogue for all-things-Egyptian, it was suggested that it
was an Ancient word meaning “good luck,” but then it
was later revealed that it simply came from the French
and German for “yes” being put together: “oui” and
“ja.” It wasn’t until it was taken up by Spiritualist Pearl
Curran, around the First World War, that it took on more
‘otherworldly’ connotations. I’m sure everybody knows
the basic idea: a board with the letters of the alphabet,
also the numbers 0 to 9 and the words ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ for
good measure – and even if you haven’t dabbled
yourself, we’re all familiar with the basic premise, plot
device of many lurid horror movie and spooky story –
getting together around the board, with an upside down
shot-glass, or, if you want to be more authentic, a
planchette, to launch an inevitably ill-advised séance
with the careless words: “Is there anybody there?”
 9

The aforementioned planchette is where the connection

with Spiritualism really starts to come in. The marketing
suggested it was the invention of one “Monsieur
Planchette” but it is more likely that the word simply
derives from the French for “little plank.” It was
designed initially as a device to facilitate Automatic
Writing, which was all the rage with psychic explorers of
the late 19th Century – the roughly triangular (or
occasionally heart-shaped) device was mounted on small
ball-bearing wheels and adapted to hold a pen or pencil
that would enable the spirits to write messages while the
medium or mediums simply rested their hand or hands
upon it, and watched it glide across the page. A similar
process was instrumental in the Automatic Writing
sessions of psycho-archaeologist Frederick Bligh Bond
(1864-1945), in fact, which he was doing right here in
Glastonbury, and claimed as the source of the insights
prompting his surprisingly successful excavations. It was
inevitable that somebody would combine the two, Ouija
Board and planchette, sooner or later, with seemingly
spectacular results.
Sinister or silly as this may seem, there are more serious
precedents for the Talking Board, despite its somewhat
banal and commercial origins. The idea of devices of
some kind that enable contact with spirits – whether
disembodied elementals, or ghosts of the dead – is in fact
an old one. Long before the birth of Confucius, the
Chinese made use of a method of planchette-style
automatism called fuji to communicate with the spirits of
their ancestors. Similar methods were and still are used
 10

in temples in Taiwan, where mediums known as chi

shengs work either alone or in pairs, sitting before a
large tray of white sand, holding in their hands a v-
shaped writing tool. After appropriate prayers, their
hands begin to shake and the implement allegedly starts
writing out messages in the sand. In Greece, circa 540
B.C., the philosopher Pythagoras was said to use a
special ‘talking table’ on wheels. With hands placed
upon the table it would move toward different signs and
symbols, and Pythagoras or his pupil Philolaus would
then interpret the message to the waiting audience as
being divine revelations, supposedly from an unseen
world. There are references to similar practices in
Ancient Rome: the Emperor Valens had a trio of men
executed who had been trying to determine the name of
his successor by use of a pendulum hung over a dish
with the letters of the alphabet around the rim – and even
some tribes of Native American Indians used a spirit
board which they called a squdilatc to help locate
missing people and objects, or receive messages from
the spirit-world.
At first glance, the notorious magus Aleister Crowley
might seem an unlikely candidate for the Ouija. He
summed up his attitude to what he called “Spiritism”
with the single exclamation “Faugh!” and his distaste
for what he considered the parlour games of the
uninitiated is quite clear:
Suppose a perfect stranger came into your office
and proceeded to give orders to your staff.
Suppose a strange woman walked into your
 11

drawing room and insisted on being hostess. You

would be troubled by this. Yet, people sit down
and offer the use of their brains and hands
(which are, after all, more important than offices
and drawing rooms) to any stray intelligence that
may be wandering about. People use the Ouija
Board without taking the slightest precautions.
What is not so well known is that in private Crowley in
fact advocated the use of the Ouija Board, at least by
trained adepts, conveying quite a different attitude to
followers such as Jane Wolfe, and especially Charles
Stansfeld Jones.
Jane Wolfe (1875-1958), a Hollywood actress in the
days of the silent screen, went to Cefalu from 1920 to
1923 after she and Crowley had pursued each other long
distance via a two-year correspondence, from which
apparently she was half expecting a spiritual master and
half expecting a lover. Thelemic scholar J. Edward
Cornelius, to whose work I was introduced by the late
Gerald Suster (of whom more later), wrote a detailed
examination of Aleister Crowley and the Ouija Board in
his short book of the same name, to which I am greatly
indebted. Cornelius writes that Jane Wolfe regularly
used the Ouija Board, and that “She credits some of her
greatest spiritual communications to use of this
implement” – but I have to admit, my researches have
turned up little of any use. I’m sure that Mr. Cornelius
has had the benefit of access to unpublished papers, but
all that I have been able to find is a reference in her
Cefalu diaries to having “opened battle” via the Ouija
 12

Board and Automatic Writing to defend herself from

‘psychic attack’ of a decidedly sexual nature. She would
wake from unwelcome wet-dreams with the lingering
feeling of penetration, usually occurring in the aftermath
of her monthly period. Wolfe was eventually able to first
identify the oppressing entity as one “John Myers,” then
presumably fend off his unwelcome astral advances,
which apparently left her facing the stark choice of a
sanitarium or marriage – at least according to the doctor
that she consulted!
As for C. S. Jones (1886-1950), better known by his
magickal name, Frater Achad, he was an English
accountant who had joined the Argenteum Astrum after
first reading The Equinox in 1909. His career later took
him to British Columbia, where he became Crowley’s
A.'.A.'. and O.T.O. rep for Canada. Among other things
he is remembered for esoteric writings about Qabala, the
Holy Grail, the Egyptian revival, and his work
anticipating the controversial Future Aeon of Maat. His
magickal record, A Master of the Temple, impressed
Crowley enough that he published it in The Equinox, and
for quite a while The Great Beast considered Achad his
magickal Son & Heir. Most of all, it was felt that his
actions in taking the Oath of the Abyss had enabled
Crowley to advance to the grade of Magus. What we are
concerned with here, however, is the discussion that
Jones & Crowley had about the subject of the Ouija,
which is frequently mentioned in their unpublished
letters, also in passing Jones’s 1923 work, Crystal Vision
through Crystal Gazing, in which he notes that in
 13

relationship to scrying “the case of the Ouija Board

applies equally to the Crystal.” Jones also made the
significant comparison of the roughly triangular-shaped
planchette used for Automatic Writing, or in conjunction
with the Ouija Board, with the traditional Triangle of the
Art used in Solomonic magic for the containment of
Spirits that have been conjured by the magician from the
safety of his magic circle. As Crowley had observed in
Magick In Theory and Practice:
You invoke a God into a Circle. You evoke a
Spirit into the Triangle.
In 1917, Achad experimented with the board as a means
of summoning, rather than the usual Spirits of the Dead,
the Angels of the famed Enochian system of Dr. John
Dee and Edward Kelley. Crowley himself had first
encountered this system during his time in the Golden
Dawn, and had worked it extensively with his lover and
disciple, the poet Victor Neuburg, scrying the Aethyrs as
they traversed the desert of Algeria (as recorded in The
Vision and the Voice.) Jones shared his discoveries with
his guru, of course, and Crowley replied:
Your Ouija Board experiment is rather fun. You
see how very satisfactory it is, but I believe things
improve greatly with practice. I think you should
keep to one angel, and make the magical
preparations more elaborate.
Over the years, both became so fascinated by the board
that they even talked about marketing their own design.
 14

Their discussions came to a head in a letter, dated

February 21, 1919, in which Crowley, ever the hustler,
told Jones:
Re: Ouija Board. I offer you the basis of ten
percent of my net profit. You are, if you accept
this, responsible for the legal protection of the
ideas, and the marketing of the copyright
designs. I trust that this may be satisfactory to
you. I hope to let you have the material in the
course of a week.
In March, Crowley wrote to Achad to inform him “I'll
think up another name for Ouija.” But their business
venture never came to fruition and Crowley’s design,
along with his new name for the board, is sadly lost to
posterity.
What has come down to us, however, is The Master
Therion’s instructions for what he saw as the correct use
of the Ouija Board as an instrument of magickal inquiry.
In the same year that Frater Achad began his
experiments, Crowley penned a short article, The Ouija
Board – A Note, for the German-owned paper The
International, which he was writing for in New York, in
which he sets out his position clearly and simply:
There is, however, a good way of using this
instrument to get what you want, and that is to
perform the whole operation in a consecrated
circle, so that undesirable aliens cannot interfere
with it. You should then employ the proper
 15

magical invocation in order to get into your

circle just the one spirit you want. It is
comparatively easy to do this. A few simple
instructions are all that is necessary, and I shall
be pleased to give these, free of charge, to
anyone who cares to apply.
The basic message is that if you consider the planchette
as analogous to the Triangle of Art that traditionally
accompanies the magic circle as a locus for the evocation
of Spirits, you place the Ouija Board and its planchette at
the centre of a circle of protection, perform an
appropriate cleansing – such as the Lesser Banishing
Ritual of the Pentagram, or one of Crowley’s Thelemic
variants – then proceed to invoke specific named
entities. These entities can then be tested by questioning
and examination, constrained to answer via the medium
of the planchette and board. If one wanted to follow in
Achad and Crowley’s footsteps and use the Ouija as a
means of engaging the Enochian Angels, I would
suggest also warding your ritual working space with the
Elemental Watchtowers at each of the four quarters –
then proceeding with the appropriate Calls or Keys, as
correspond to the level of being you wish to
communicate with, obviously starting with Earth of
Earth – and then working your way up, as it were.
[ This at least is the version that was outlined to me by
Gerald Suster in London in the late 1980s, based on his
discussions with Israel Regardie, and examination of the
Crowley-Achad correspondence, and that I understood
to be the basis of his own practise in this area. ]
 16

As for The Great Beast and The Book of Changes, quite

when and how The Master Therion made the
acquaintance of the I-Ching (or Yi King as was his
preferred usage, and the one I will stick to hereafter
unless directly quoting another source) is unsure: despite
the almost exhaustive description of his spiritual studies
en route to joining the Golden Dawn given in his
Confessions, and the (some would say libellous) extent
of the descriptions of his investiture into that Order
published in The Equinox, nowhere does he make clear
when or how he came into contact with the Oracle.
The most likely explanation is that his interest dates
from a visit to San Francisco’s China Town in 1900.
However, even though the Confessions enthuse about his
visit there, going on to describe in some detail his
journey via Honolulu to Yokohama to Shanghai,
eventually catching up with his former Golden-Dawn-
mentor-now-turned-Buddhist-monk, Allan Bennett, in
Ceylon – including much discussion of Buddhism, and
his practices of yoga and asana with Bennett – there is
still no reference to the Oracle.
Then, in 1905-06, Crowley embarked on his “walk
across China” – an odyssey that that took him from the
Burmese border across the Yunnan Province and ended
in Shanghai (all the time attempting to complete the
perilous Abramelin Working he had unwisely left
unfinished after his start at Boleskine House,
overlooking Loch Ness.)
 17

At the end of the following year, December 13th, 1907,

Crowley penned Liber Trigrammaton XXVII,
synthesizing the Chinese duality of Yin-Yang
(represented by the solid and broken lines of the Yi
King) with the Tao (represented in this system by a dot),
resulting in a series of 27 trigrams, for which he wrote
brief commentary texts. (As a measure of Crowley’s
assessment of the value of this work, he considered it on
a par with the Stanzas of Dzyan – the supposed sacred
‘received texts’ upon which H. P. Blavatsky’s epic The
Secret Doctrine, cornerstone of her Theosophical
Movement, was a comment.)
Indeed, for Crowley the last months of 1907 were a
period of heightened creativity & reception of such
‘inspired’ texts: Oct 30th Liber VII; Nov 3rd Liber
Cordis Cincti Serpente; Nov 25th Liber LXVI Stellae
Rubae; Dec 3rd Liber Arcanorum sub figura CCXXXI;
Dec 11th & 12th Liber Porta Lucis; Dec 13th Liber Tau,
the aforementioned Liber Trigrammaton XXVII; and then
“finally that Winter” Liber DCCCXIII vel Ararita: in
short, most of the Holy Books of Thelema – and all of
them detailing either forms of Initiation or Oracle.
Later, during his retirement on Aesopus Island in the
Hudson River, New York, in 1918 Crowley produced
rhyming versions of the Daodejing (Tao Teh King) and
Ge Yuan’s Qingjingjing (Khing Kang King); but most of
his written material that relates specifically to the Yi
King was produced during his time at Cefalu in the
1920s.
 18

Too few people are aware that Crowley produced his

own unique version of the Yi King, yet he himself
believed that one of his greatest achievements was the
identification of the trigrams with the sephiroth of the
Qabalistic Tree of Life. Indeed, in his own surprisingly
and perhaps uncharacteristically terse introduction to his
own edition, he states:
The Yi King is mathematical and philosophical in
form. Its structure is cognate with that of the
Qabalah; the actual apparatus is simple, and five
minutes is sufficient to obtain a fairly detailed
answer to any but the most obscure question.
Until he came up with his own rhymed version, or
“mnemonic paraphrase”, of the judgments and line texts
of the Yi, Crowley had relied on the nineteenth century
translation made by James Legge, which appeared as
part of the Sacred Books of the East series, and it is from
this that Crowley retained the lifelong habit of referring
to the Oracle as the Yi King, or the Yi for short.
(Interestingly, Crowley’s personal copy of the book
survives, and the notes are often more revealing of the
Beast’s thoughts than the more formal commentary: its
limitations occasioned not only Crowley’s rhymed
version but also notes of exasperation in the margins of
his copy. On the title page, he has amended the author’s
name to read “Wood N’ Legge”!)
There is no doubting Crowley’s personal faith in the Yi:
looking at the published editions of his diaries, such as
The Magical Record of the Beast 666 (edited by
 19

Symonds & Grant from Crowley’s diaries for 1914-

1920, and including the sex-magickal record, Rex De
Arte Regia), he appears to have consulted it almost daily
for a period of several years. In fact he took a number of
crucial decisions in his life based on his interpretation of
the Yi’s advice, including the situating of his infamous
Abbey of Thelema at Cefalu in Sicily. Indeed, when the
local police attempted to evict the members of his
‘College of the Holy Ghost’ on orders from Mussolini’s
Fascist regime, it was again the Yi’s Hexagram XVIII,
Ku, which was read to mean “Cross the water – an
uncivilized country; a country in which the family is
more important than the state” that lead Crowley to
Tunisia, where he was to keep the journals that were
published in as The Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley
(Tunisia 1923), edited by Stephen Skinner. In October
2007, Crowley’s Royal Court Diary for 1928 turned up
at a Bloomsbury Book Auction’s sale in New York, and
an informant gave me an interesting description of some
of its contents, with particular reference to the Yi King
and its bearing on Crowley’s often tempestuous love-
life:
. . . A major concern for much of the year was his
relationship with Kasimira Bass. The affair
seems to have gone well for the first half of the
year, with many notes of prolonged love-making,
of initiating her into various mysteries of his
‘magick’ . . . so that by June he was consulting
the Yi about the possibility of marriage, but in
July things deteriorated rapidly and on
 20

November 3rd he writes: “Kasimira bolted. The

Lord hath given & the Lord hath taken away.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Then, Nov 8th the name of Marie Therese de
Miramar “A creole Cuban-born in Nicaragua to
change the luck” appears, and by the 14th
Crowley writes of consecrating their partnership
and noting that “She has absolutely the right
ideas of Magick & knows some Voudoo.”
Nov 19th: “She is marvellous beyond words, but
excites me too much, so that I cannot prolong..!”
At the end of the day, neither romance nor
passion influenced the decision: Crowley had to
marry de Miramar to get her into the country,
ignoring the Yi’s warning of May 13th
(Hexagram XX, Kwan) “a rash act”, huffing to
himself “I know that!” They were married in
August 1929, but separated in 1930.
As the 1930s progressed, Crowley became ever more
absorbed with the Yi King: he sought its advice
throughout the Autumn of 1933 about his attempted libel
trial over Nina Hamnet’s depiction of him in her
memoir, Laughing Torso; then things got even more
serious the following year with the publication of Betty
May’s Tiger Woman, in which her lurid account of the
time spent at Cefalu portrayed Crowley as a monstrous
degenerate, responsible for the death of her unfortunate
young husband, Raoul Loveday, the whole thing blown
up into the “Black Magic libel case.”
 21

From the start of 1937, Crowley sought diversion by

absorbing himself more and more in the study of the Yi
King. It is interesting to think about his meeting with the
young Englishman, Lawrence Miles (1911-1991), who
would later become better known as Shri Gurudev
Mahendranath, founder of the International Nath Order
and transmitter of the Uttara Kaula lineage that would
result in AMOOKOS, among other things.
In his The Londinium Temple Strain (which can be read
online at: www.mahendranath.org/londinium.mhtml),
Miles describes meeting “The Mage” Crowley at
Chancery Lane High Court, during the proceedings of
the Nina Hamnett case, and how they struck up a kind of
friendship:
The Mage invited me to visit him in his Jermyn
Street flat, and these visits became more and
more numerous. The press which had slandered
him at every opportunity never once expressed
any of his ideals or teachings. Thus when I had
opportunities to meet him, he revealed a vast
store of knowledge on a variety of subjects. I not
only realized that the much libelled Aleister
Crowley was probably the most far out and
advanced thinker at the time, but as well as being
a natural born magician, he possessed a
knowledge of both yoga and the I Ching which
was superior to that of any other European.
 22

During our conversations in London, he reached

a conclusion and advised me to seek more
knowledge of yoga and the I Ching; these, he felt,
would help people to contact their Guardian
Spirit more easily.
In relation to higher yoga his judgment was
sound, for meditation is undoubtedly an
important key. With the I Ching, the position still
needs understanding, but I do think it may be
there . . .
According to Perdurabo – Richard Kaczynski’s near-
definitive biography of The Great Beast – on June 7th
1937, Crowley recovered his own personal set of Oracle
sticks.
In The Magical Record of the Beast 666, Crowley
remarks in an entry for January 12th 1920:
I had invoked Aiwaz to manipulate the Sticks*
But what is most intriguing is the relevant footnote:
*The six lines of the hexagrams of the Yi King.
Crowley used six equal strips of tortoise-shell, on
one side of which was a broken line, on the other
an unbroken line.
 23

From the diary of Aleister Crowley for 9th November

1940:
At 5am I woke suddenly from deep sleep with this
way of arranging the Yi clear and perfect in my
mind: a way of showing the fourfold Temurah of
each hexagram by (1) turning it upside down (2)
changing each line in these two figures in a
single design.
On that freezing November morning, as the skies above
93 Jermyn Street resounded with the Battle of Britain,
Crowley got out of bed and cut a crude set of cardboard
discs on which he scribbled, in pencil, his arrangement
of the 64 hexagrams of the Yi King, the so-called Coins
of Ko Yuen, which now reside in the Warburg Institute.
 24

II

In 1986, the U.K. publisher Crucible brought out a slim

volume of writings by the Elizabethan magus &
polymath, Dr. John Dee. Having been intrigued by Dee
since I was a schoolboy, of course I bought it at once.
The collection was described as having been “Selected
and Introduced” by one Gerald Suster, and I found his
commentary to be informative, intelligent, and thought-
provoking. Of particular interest were the two
Appendices on the subject of Enochian Magic, which
Mr. Suster wrote about with an insight that suggested a
more than theoretical knowledge of the Arte Magical, so
I decided to write to him, c/o the publisher. To my
surprise and delight, he replied, and we began an
occasional correspondence.
Gerald Suster (1951-2001) was the author of a number
of supernatural-themed thrillers, but also several non-
fiction occult works, including The Legacy of the Beast,
a study of Crowley’s influence, what is probably still the
definitive book on Israel Regardie (1907-1985),
Crowley’s Apprentice, and my personal favourite, The
Truth About The Tarot; but all of this was still in the
future at that point.
 25

At the time I first wrote to him, Gerald had not long

come back from America, where he had consolidated his
friendship and studies with Regardie, and written most
of the notes that would later result in his book. His reply
to my initial letter combined a certain schoolmasterly
formality (he was, in fact, a teacher by profession, at a
fee-paying boy’s school) with a surprising warmth and
generosity, which evolved into an actual friendship after
I moved to London later that year. His occasional moot,
The Society, upstairs at The Plough in Museum Street,
was one of the focal points for gatherings of the ‘occult
scene’ of the time – along with The Atlantis Bookshop’s
Talking Stick – in which Wiccans, Thelemites of both
Typhonian and Caliphate affiliation, and the new-kids-
on-the-block of Chaos Magic, all came together in an
occasionally challenging but nonetheless lively and
close-knit sense of community.
Although Gerald could be pedantic – the schoolteacher
in him again! – and it is fair to say that his liking for
drink inevitably took its toll over time, particularly after
he was cruelly set up by people he thought he could trust
to be ‘outed’ by the News of the World, with the result
that he lost the job he really loved amongst lurid tabloid
headlines of the “Master at top school is black magic
weirdo” variety – I think most people who knew him
would remember Gerald for his passion for magick,
especially all-things Crowley and Thelema, and the
generosity with which he would encourage newcomers
(again, no doubt the teacher in him.) At his best, Gerald
 26

was truly a gentleman, scholar, and Thelemite, and that

is why this Talk is dedicated to his memory.
Back in those heady pre-internet daze, information was a
much more rare commodity – everything wasn’t just a
click-or-two of the mouse away – and it is staggering to
look back and think of the sheer volume of actual
correspondence that went on, with people generously
photocopying articles, sometimes even whole books, and
in several copies, to send around their friends or else
circulate in instant D.I.Y. fanzine format! It may have
lacked a lot in quality – and certainly the legitimacy was
highly questionable, to put it mildly – but it did get the
material out there. There was a whole grass-roots cottage
industry of cassette-tapes, fanzines, and T-shirts in the
aftermath of Punk, and this no doubt influenced the
emerging Occulture as well. Certainly my first exposure
to an awful lot of rare Crowley and Spare-related
material was down to a combination of the generosity of
individuals like Gerald, and the efforts of small-press
outlets like Genesis P-Orridge’s Temple ov Psychick
Youth, or Ray Sherwin’s The New Equinox magazine
and Chris Bray’s shop, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Gerald had clearly made a lot of contacts in the Thelemic
community while he had been in the States working with
Dr. Regardie, and from time-to-time he would send me
material he thought I would find of interest. One such
was a photocopy of an article entitled On Knowing
Aleister Crowley Personally from the O.T.O. Newsletter,
which for the main part seemed to consist of
reminiscences by Grady McMurtry about being
 27

“overpaid, oversexed, and over here” (as the saying

about U.S. Servicemen stationed overseas goes) during
WWII.
Now, for those who don’t know, Grady Louis McMurtry
(1918-1985) was a young American Army Lieutenant
stationed in London at the height of World War II, who
had been in touch with the Agape Lodge of the O.T.O. in
California. Having met the infamous rocket-pioneer and
would-be Antichrist, Jack Parsons, through a shared love
of Science Fiction, Grady had attended the Gnostic Mass
and realised that in Thelema he had found whatever it
was he was looking for. He would later be appointed
Crowley’s special envoy to take care of things in the
States – Caliph to The Beast’s Prophet, hence the later
designation ‘Caliphate’ O.T.O., once Grady had assumed
the title Hymenaeus Alpha as Outer Head of the Order –
but that is another story for another day . . .
Let us return to the day before Halloween, 1943, and
young Lieutenant McMurtry tracks down Crowley at 93
Jermyn Street – just off Piccadilly Circus in London’s
West End, about which the American servicemen used to
joke that if you could put a roof over the Dilly you’d
have the largest whorehouse in the Western World! The
story goes that in response to his knocking, the door
slowly opened, and there stood Aleister Crowley, The
Great Beast 666, the Wickedest Man in the World,
already a little stooped and wheezy from asthma, who
asked “Yes?” To which Grady replied, “I am Lieutenant
McMurtry”, eliciting Crowley’s response of “Well, come
in dear chap!” Years later, when asked, “How could a
 28

Company Commander in the Invasion of Normandy have

also been an associate of Aleister Crowley in London in
the 40’s?” Grady would answer that once, after having
sex with a Japanese prostitute near Piccadilly Circus,
over the customary post-coital cigarette he had asked the
inevitable question “How did a nice girl like you get
mixed up in a lousy racket like this?” To which she
replied, “Oh, just lucky, I guess!” Thereafter, Grady
would explain that this was how he had managed to meet
Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast: “Just lucky, I guess!”
Grady’s reminiscence contained the following, which I
think warrants quoting in full:
. . . He was in the progress of taking an oracle
from the I Ching. It was the one time I saw him
using his I Ching sticks (which I was able to
recover from the library after the court order
decreeing that his library belonged to the O.T.O.
under my conservatorship). The blank side is the
male (Yang, energy) side. The divided side (looks
like red nail polish to me) is the female (Yin,
receptive) side. By my ruler they are less than an
8th of an inch in thickness, but slightly more than
a 16th thick. They either were mahogany or teak
or stained dark to look so . . . The way Crowley
used them was to shuffle them (with his eyes
closed) then take them one at a time and, holding
each one upright with his right forefinger (eyes
still closed), get a signal and lay it down either
right or left. First stick down is the bottom line.
You can also get moving lines this way. If one of
 29

the sticks wants to move when you lay it down,

just shove it right or left as indicated. Personally
I like this method of taking the Oracle. It gives
you a chance for your Angel to communicate
directly through your fingertips.
It is perhaps a sad afterword to this – particularly bearing
in mind Grady’s words about the court-order decreeing
that “the O.T.O.” and Crowley’s library should be under
his “conservatorship” – to read in An Epistle on Aleister
Crowley’s I-Ching Sticks by J. Edward Cornelius that:
Grady McMurtry always carried Crowley’s I-
Ching sticks in a small pouched [sic] attached to
his belt by leather straps. It is with great regret
that I learned that the original sticks were
accidentally lost one summer night while Grady
was partying on a beach near San Francisco.
Ah well, as The Master Therion remarked himself in one
of his magical journals:
. . . The Lord hath given & the Lord hath taken
away.
In addition to Lawrence Miles and Grady McMurtry,
another young man who had sought out Crowley towards
the end of his life for guidance was one Kenneth Grant
(1924-2011.) By his own admission something of a
bookish, dreamy youth, fascinated by magic and
mysticism, Grant had experienced astral projection and,
at the age of 15, what he felt were spontaneous contacts
from a being calling itself Aushik or Aossic, which he
 30

would later identify as his Holy Guardian Angel. He had

come across Magick In Theory and Practice by The
Master Therion in the Charing Cross Road bookshop,
Zwemmer’s, and, feeling here might be a key to
understanding – or even controlling – his experiences,
had prevailed upon Michael Houghton of The Atlantis
Bookshop to put him in touch with the author. Houghton
declined, however – the reasons for which being unclear,
as there are at least two conflicting versions – but what is
a matter of record is that the young Kenneth Grant,
shortly after writing to Aleister Crowley in 1944,
became for a while an informal assistant-cum-secretary
to the aged Magus upon forsaking Blitz-battered London
for the peace and quiet and (relative) safety of a lodging
house on the South Coast. It was at ‘Netherwood’ in
Hastings, where The Great Beast would end his days just
three short years later, that Grant would become
apprenticed to Crowley’s Magick in earnest, be initiated
into the Ordo Templi Orientis, meet the likes of Dion
Fortune, Gerald Gardner, and Lady Frieda Harris, and
also become aware of Crowley’s still extensive network
of correspondence with occultists overseas – such as
Karl Germer and Eugen Grosche in Germany, and Jane
Wolfe, W. T. Smith, and Jack Parsons in America. For a
while it even seems that the ageing Beast was grooming
young Grant to be a possible successor, referring to him
as a “Gift from the Gods”, and noting in his diary:
. . . value of Grant. If I die or go to the USA,
there must be a trained man to take care of the
English OTO.
 31

But even at this early stage, Grant’s propensity for

daydreaming and otherworldliness bewildered and
frustrated the older man, who – after all – was looking
for practical, day-to-day assistance first, and to train an
heir-apparent second.
After Crowley’s death, Grant would continue to
associate for a while with Dr. Gerald Gardner (1884-
1964) – the founder of Modern Wicca, who was also a
member of the O.T.O., with a charter to set up an
encampment, although there is no evidence that he ever
put it to use – and form what would be far more
influential friendships with the enigmatic artist-occultist,
Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956), and Crowley’s former
correspondent, the alchemist and Tantric, David Curwen
(1893-1984), who would share key insights into the Left
Hand Path of the Vama Marg, which Grant felt
complemented and even completed The Beast’s own
sex-magickal researches.
In the Spring of 1955, Grant would set up a Working
Group of his own called the New Isis Lodge. This would
lead to a falling out with Karl Germer (1885-1962) – the
nominal Head of the O.T.O. on Crowley’s passing – who
felt that Grant had exceeded his authority. There were
also personality clashes because the New Isis Lodge had
issued a manifesto in conjunction with the former
Grandmaster of the German Fraternitas Saturni, Eugen
Grosche (1888-1964), with whom Germer had fallen out
over what he saw as Grosche’s misrepresentation of
Thelema – the net result being Grant’s expulsion from
the Order. This he would disregard, however,
 32

considering his authorisation to have come from

Crowley himself and also his own ‘Inner Planes’
contacts, and thus began the parting of the ways between
what would become known as ‘Caliphate’ and
‘Typhonian’ O.T.O.s.
Many years later, Grant would write a touching memoir
of his time with the ageing magus, entitled simply
Remembering Aleister Crowley. There is a comment
towards the end where he explains how it was Crowley’s
practice to send out on the first days of Spring and
Autumn, the Word, Oracle, and Omen of the Equinox:
In his earlier years, Crowley obtained the Word
with the help of Sexual Magick. How he received
it in his last years, I do not know. The Oracle, on
the other hand, was obtained by opening at
random The Book of the Law . . .
The Omen was derived from the Chinese Book of
Changes (Yi King). His method was to empty his
mind and then to manipulate six flat pieces of
tortoise-shell, approximately 1” by 5” in size. As
the pieces fell they formed a figure, or hexagram,
which Crowley then accepted as the Omen for the
coming six months. As his diaries show, they
were sometimes remarkably accurate.
James Legge’s much-maligned translation of the I-Ching
as Volume 16 in The Sacred Books of the East series
came out in 1899, and it would be a full fifty years
before another significant version would appear, the
 33

translation by noted Sinologist Richard Wilhelm, with an

introduction by Carl Gustav Jung. That would not be for
almost three years after Crowley’s death, and probably it
is fair to say that he was the first modern Westerner to
actually divine using the Yi King on a regular basis. In
my researches for the original article that this Talk is
based on, and further research to add to it for this
Conference, any attempts to try and pin down Crowley’s
nearest mystical and magical contemporaries with regard
to the Oracle were elusive, to say the least. In his book
Soul Flight, Donald Tyson states:
There is little doubt that members of the Golden
Dawn employed the I-Ching hexagrams as astral
portals.
I presume in much the same way that we know that they
made use of the Hindu elemental tattvas, which is all
very well, but as he does not indicate which members or
when, this is of little real help. A biographical entry from
a Golden Dawn website, which can be read online at
http://www.golden-dawn.org/bioffarr.html, describes
founder-member Florence Farr as:
Quite adept at the Enochian System and the I-
Ching, but it was skrying in the Spirit Vision that
was her forte . . .
But again, without a date or a source, this is of little help.
Both Crowley himself and his later student Dr. Israel
Regardie could be described as:
 34

members of the Golden Dawn [who] employed

the I-Ching hexagrams as astral portals
But that is by no means the same as saying that they
were actually introduced to the Oracle or such practices
by the venerable and Hermetic Order itself.
As for the nearest other fellow traveller, Madame
Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society – coincidentally
founded the year of Crowley’s birth – there seems to be
little in her otherwise encyclopaedic works to suggest an
interest in or even an awareness of anything further
Eastern of origin than India or Tibet . . .
Whether Aleister Crowley was or was not the first
contemporary thinker and explorer of comparative
religions and key synthesizers of what he would now
doubtless shudder to think of as ‘the New Age’ to make
use of and explore the I-Ching, he may well still have a
more important place in the history of the Yi here in the
West.
The former “Wickedest Man in the World” was
rediscovered by the Hippy generation of the 1960s, his
shaven head scowling down from among the grand and
groovy on the cover of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band, just as the I-Ching itself was being
rediscovered and the Ancient and Venerable Oracle
popularised amidst the heady atmosphere of incense and
peppermints. In the consciousness revolution fuelled by
sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll that has gone on to nurture
the Occulture of today, the Great Beast’s “Do what Thou
 35

wilt shall be the whole of the Law” probably didn’t seem

that different to “Do your own thing, man” – even if
your average drop-out of drugs, deviancy & diabolism
has no more idea now than then of the Divine nature of
that ‘Will’ that Crowley championed, as much as he
fought against it as well all his life . . . Maybe the two
aren’t so different after all, and maybe the Great Cosmic
Wheel is ready for just one more turn as the children of
the Children of the Sixties decide it’s time to choose just
whose Love and Will they want to base their Law on.
May they choose their Oracles with care this time.
It is reported that the original Chinese philosopher and
sage, Confucius, remarked regarding the Yi King that if
he had could be allowed another fifty years of life, he
would spend it studying the Oracle . . . One wonders
whether Crowley felt similarly, for towards the end of
his life, even as he struggled to have his Tarot-
masterpiece, The Book of Thoth, completed, he still
recorded that he considered his reconciliation of the
hexagrams of the Yi with the Qabalistic Tree of Life as
one of his real achievements. Perhaps with the help of
the Ouija Board techniques he proposed, it might be
possible to determine what course his researches have
taken in the great beyond . . . ?
Thank You.

Matthew Levi Stevens.

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