Operation Capricorn
Of sylphs and secrets
There are sylphs drifting through the wet Wendover Woods, always staying just out of reach, as he wheezes bronchially after them. The young green leaves stipple the light which falls on the bluebells, cut with the arterial meanders of badger paths. The sylphs hover between the violet carpet and the canopy, turning around each other, calling and dancing. Their skin is beech bark silver-grey.
The lower coppices have been cut for the war effort, but the rising slopes of the Chiltern Hills are clothed with the beech, yew and boxwood of ancient England. Here the sylphs still flit. He stops to steady himself on his devil-headed stick, pushing it into the soft clay. Rather than climb to the uplands, he follows his companions into the ragpits. Where the chalk was once cut, young orchid spurs wetten with nectar. Lonely bone paths flow over the hillocks and hollows.
His lips begin to speak the prayer he still has by heart. The pronouncement which once lit up the King’s Chamber in Giza has the same frequency as today’s bluebell-carpeted woods,
Spirit of Life, spirit of wisdom whose breath giveth forth and withdraweth the form of all living things; Thou, before whom the life of beings is but a shadow which changeth, and a vapor which passeth; Thou who mountest upon the clouds, and who walketh upon the wings of the wind, Thou who breathes forth Thy breath, and endless space is peopled; Thou who drawest in Thy breath and all that cometh from Thee returneth unto Thee; ceaseless movement in eternal stability. Be Thou eternally blessed.
As he commences the second stanza ‘The changeless empire…’,1 the preoccupied sylphs dissolve back into their medium, and the satyr pauses, thwarted in his pursuit.
A gentleman’s three piece tweed is buttoned over his mosquito bones. The Savile Row suit is a silhouette his wracked lungs fail to inflate. The dirtied Jermyn Street shirt and silk tie only emphasise his scrawny neck. A welcome stab of hunger reminds him that breakfast of a boiled egg has been his only repast. An egg though, better than the scant London rations.
They will be serving lunch soon, and he has the menu as clearly as the elemental prayers composed in a previous incarnation. Sunday means steak and kidney pudding oozing out of suet, the soft boiled vegetables that were easier on his damned rotten teeth, and then to medicine.
It is always intravenous heroin from this point on, with his armpit the preferred injection site. The German bronchitis medicine is not available, and heroin the most effective treatment for the symptoms of his chronic condition. But the heroin itself has become debilitating, the doses are significant. It is not his first bout of addiction, but it will be his last. After the noonday hymn to the Sun, an afternoon is spent gouched out in his room.
Later he will rise and work through correspondence, perhaps compose another letter for Aleister Explains Everything.2 He dispatches this work with verve and wit, the mind still blazes. A bump of cocaine helps to write, a sniff of ether for travelling. But some days now, some weeks, he is sick and confined to his room, or, as the year turns, snugged up by the hearth in the bar, provoking the salamanders with a poker to renew their activity. His diary is written with a stiff whiskey and a pipe of perique that ferries him towards sleep. Room Eleven of The Bell in sleepy Aston-Clinton is hung with smoke and the Beast knocks out his pipe with three precise raps. Hailing Khephra, he goes once more to confront the rising smog of his now incessant nightmares.
The Führer deemed the Luftwaffe a failure. Germany burned and Blighty stood defiant. Methamphetamine and grandiosity consumed the tyrant, and a new fear arose: that the English and the Americans were coming. A cowed Göhring instigated Operation Steinbock and dutifully threw the young pilots into a sustained blitz on London from January through to May of 1944.
The ill-conceived action saw inexperienced bomber crews locked in searchlight beams and their kites punched through by lone night fighters. Either Bristol Beauforts or Mossies made the kills. It left the German army bereft of serious air cover when the Allies made their play in June and stormed the beaches of Normandy, one Grady McMurtry amongst them.
Steinbock is the mountain goat, Capricorn, and notable for Crowley as ruling Atu XV The Devil in his newly completed The Book of Thoth. Operation Capricorn saved Crowley from what became known as ‘the little blitz’ and the fresh hells that followed, with the Vengeance weapons, designed by Werner Von Braun, falling on London as the year edged towards autumn. We can thus place the events that occur at the Bell under the auspices of Capricorn. In this season the old goat was able to communicate his greatest secrets, those concealed in Atu XV, ear to mouth. It was the pinnacle of his teaching, the height of Western tantra over which his Devil presided.
On June 28 Grady McMurtry appears to Crowley as a serge blue apparition, set in an oval of plutonic blue light. He stands to attention, and the men salute one another. It is a worrying development; Grady, formally of California’s Agape Lodge and a frequent visitor to Jermyn Street, is being blooded. It is a month until Crowley hears back, with great relief, that Grady lives. The deliverance from shadow resolves him to write and make clear Grady’s position in the order as ‘the proper man to take charge of affairs when the time is right’, and again as his ‘Fidus Achates, Alter ego, Caliph & so on’. It is a commission Grady properly botches.
The year passes with enough visitors to relieve the boredom, notable amongst them the poetess Nancy Cunard, stacked with ivory bangles, severe with kohl, stimulating in discourse. And suave Louis Wilkinson, an Archangel of omnivorous appetites, the novelist destined to orate at his funeral.3 There are letters exchanged with Dion Fortune, Karl Germer, David Curwen, and a promising new correspondent whom he agrees to meet with in December.
Crowley dresses for his expected visitor in his favourite plus fours, the ones with silver buckles at the knee. His customary Ankh-af-na-Khonsu ring is accessorised with a silver Thoth brooch pinned to his tie. He is sweet with Abramelin oil and awaits the cab, due any moment, from Aylesbury station.
Out of the snow comes a serious young Kenneth Grant, pinched and pale with the cold. He fumbles with the coins to pay the driver, removes his soft leather gloves. He then gets his first glimpse of Guru, who graciously emerges to greet him. The day is monochrome, the air burns in Crowley’s lungs. Flurries whip up and along the London Road. True to form, he intones, ‘Do what thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law’. Kenneth is led through the bar of the coaching inn and up to the confines of room eleven – the number of the qliphoth and unbalanced forces. His fortune is cast with a clacking of six flat tortoise shell strips. The trigram produced is Lin, XIX, great progress and success. Crowley opens his Yi King and reads the entry approvingly aloud,
LIN: Great; here’s progress and success to firm
correctness; but – more trouble at the term!Now with thy comrade firmly force the pace!
Advance with him – alliance wins the race.
Be cautious, or advance may lead thee astray.
Go forward only in the noblest way.
Great rulers need great wisdom every day.
Honest, magnanimous, woo fortune’s ray.
The augury is good. Crowley then guesses his rising sign, Cancer. Perhaps he is the one to carry the tradition?4 When the horoscope is set up, Crowley calls it ‘unusual’ yet there are no stelliums, the outer planets are as expected. Kenneth’s sun is in Gemini. The stability of Saturn in Libra is promising; given the ambitions Crowley nurtures for a trained man to run the stagnant English OTO. There is no hint in the stars of the fantastical obsessions that Grant will pursue in the coming decades. It is a secret planet, Isis, unknown to Crowley’s calculations, that will dominate his chart.
Crowley then fixes the aspirant with his eye and addresses him, ‘I have divined the number and spelling of your name.’ He pauses and allows each Hebrew letter to vibrate, ‘Ayin, Shin, Yod, Kaph – OShIK.’ As he pronounces the name he visualises in violet light the symbol Kenneth had brought from deep in his dream cave, and projects it into the aspirant’s ajna chakra. He pauses, ‘Whose number is 400.’ Crowley is pleased with the tally. Twenty by twenty, a multiple of Kenneth’s current age. In his dictionary of gematria, 777, the entry for 400 reads: ‘to use Magic, witchcraft.’ It is an enumeration of the Hebrew כּישוף from a primitive root, meaning ‘to incant.’ And Kenneth was indeed fated to be an incanter, an utterer of unspeakable things in unknown tongues.
Then Grady crashes through the door, sees this Bela Lugosi looking fellow and bowls right on in. He is an ebullient 25, five years older than Grant, and back from the Ardennes, the sharp end of the shooting war. He is in olive drab and officer cap, vital behind wire-rimmed glasses, full of stories and shouts and questions – surely they should all have a brandy? He has a bottle, and Crowley is delighted to see him. Even with the bonhomie, the focus is on communicating technical magical instructions.
The bells ring at St Michael’s and All Angels for evening service, able to resound now that the threat of invasion has passed. Kenneth dashes to catch the six o’clock train, which runs with dropped shutters back to London Paddington. He is a little giddy with drink. Crowley has charmed and impressed as a teacher, and though Grady runs hot, he writes and confides his Aossic symbol to him in the new year. Grady dismisses is as ‘a bit too ornamental, or oriental for my style.’ It is a brief exchange between two very different brothers. Despite their shared interest in both Lovecraft and Love Under Will, Kenneth soon ceases replying to Grady’s effusive letters. For his part, Grady intuits that Kenneth wants to be acknowledged ‘as a genius.’5
Fog bound in London, Grady is unable to dispatch to the front and so returns to the Bell for three successive visits. He bounces in on the 20th with cigars, and unexpectedly again on the 22nd at 2 o’clock as the peasoupers persist. After tiffin and chess, Crowley emphatically states that he gave ‘more solid instructions in IX° than I ever gave before to any one.’ If there was a secret, Grady was the man to get it – galloping on at Crowley for hours at a time, pushing and probing, tirelessly responding to the tests his master sets. That sliver of time, the day after solstice, and between three and five forty-five at the very latest, was when Grady was given the Ninth Degree.6 There is no-one else Crowley taught the oral component; the majority of ninths only ever knew the formula as ‘fuck and make a wish’.7 Grady got the lot.
He returns for Christmas Day and flaming plum pudding, slips the old goat a five pound note and rattles back to London the same afternoon. Crowley is sad to see him go. Though letters pass back and forth, Grady is owned by Uncle Sam, and a wide ocean is soon set between them, and then the wider domain of death itself.
In January the Red Cross ambulance arrives, and Crowley is gently escorted to the door by the landlord and his wife, Gerard and Daphne Hughes. The driver steadies him by the arm, and sits him up in the front seat. A wisp of a man, stricken with pleurisy, he has deteriorated markedly during the stay. Mornings are the worst, so he prepared a vein and got a journey’s worth of H into him. His bags of books safely loaded up, he is all set for Netherwood Hastings and jokes that he is a consignment of frozen meat. Louis Wilkinson has brokered the deal with the eccentric guesthouse that will keep him in chess opponents and privacy for his final act. As the ambulance departs, young Michael darts out and waves from between his parent’s legs. Crowley does not see the gesture, and gently nods off. The sylphs slip silent between the barren winter trees and watch England’s last great magician pass by.
To be continued.
The prayer concludes thus:
We praise Thee and we bless Thee in the changless empire of created light,
of shades, of reflections, and of images, and we aspire without cessation unto Thy immutable and imperishable brilliance. Let the ray of Thine intelligence and the warmth of Thy love penetrate even unto us, then that which is volatile shall be fixed, the shadow shall be a body, the spirit of Air shall be a soul, the dream shall be a thought. And no longer shall we be swept away by the tempest, but we shall hold the bridles of the winged steeds of dawn, and we shall direct the course of the evening breeze to fly before Thee. O Spirit of spirits! O eternal Soul of souls! O imperishable breath of life, O creative sigh! O mouth which breathes forth and withdraws the life of all beings, in the flux and reflux of Thine eternal word which is the Divine ocean of movement and of truth.
Amen.
A text that becomes Magick Without Tears.
They called him the Archangel when he studied at St John’s; readers of my forthcoming Lucifer: Praxis will know of whom they speak.
Cancer indicates The Chariot and the bearer of the Grail.
Red Flame 12, In the Name of the Beast: 88.
This is confirmed the next year in a letter dated April 11, 1945.
All other ninths are reliant on three key ‘secret’ documents, repeatedly published and now widely circulated online. The only lineage with the complete secret, as far as Grady remembered it, is the A∴A∴ of Jerry Cornelius.
“Bela Lugosi looking fellow” what great prose, and what another wonderful piece of writing, I’m hooked on this series! The I Ching prophecy in hindsight is very apt.
Thank you Peter ... waiting for each episode to drop ... I'm in awe, what cooking!