It was Rasputin, one of the greatest sorcerers in history, who really caused World War I — at least according to the plot of a hugely successful novel of 1935, “The Devil Rides Out.” Its author, Dennis Wheatley, was one of the most popular British authors of the 20th century, selling an estimated 50 million copies over his lifetime. And though his works spanned science fiction, spy fiction and historical fiction, it was his novels with occult themes, their covers blazoned with skulls, candles and seminaked women, that stuck in the public imagination.
“The Devil Rides Out” was the first of these, and saw Wheatley’s unlikely gang of heroes take on a satanist cabal. At one point, just after performing a daring rescue by driving his luxury car through a ritual gathering, the suave and worldly Duke de Richleau explains to his unsuspecting everyman companion Rex van Ryn that what they are searching for is a magical talisman that once belonged to the ancient Egyptian god of deserts, violence and foreigners — Set. If the artifact were to fall into the wrong hands, it could open a portal like that through which Rasputin had unleashed the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The duke later reveals that the talisman, which has passed in and out of the historical record for millennia, is none other than the phallus of Set’s brother, whom he murdered: Osiris, the god of fertility and the afterlife.
Wheatley’s plot might have been swashbuckling nonsense, but the book came prefaced with a note in which he claimed that his subject matter had a kernel of reality, insisting that his readers should not risk getting too well acquainted with the black arts. Wheatley, a conservative but also a libertine, did not believe in conventional religion, but he respected the power of magic for good or ill. And like many at the time, he saw Egypt as a source of such esoteric knowledge, a view that came with a large dose of Orientalist fantasy. Nor was he alone. Before writing “The Devil Rides Out,” he consulted various experts in the field, among them the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley and the more obscure magician Rollo Ahmed. Both of these men constructed striking public personas that baffled, amused and impressed contemporaries. And just like “The Devil Rides Out” itself, Egypt was a vital part of their backstories — though in very different ways.
Crowley was enamored of ancient Egyptian myth and full of the Orientalizing ideas and impulses of his day, waxing lyrical about what could be learned from Arab culture and the desert. Ahmed was a Black immigrant from British Guiana who appears to have drawn on claims of Egyptian heritage to make a living, in a climate of open racist discrimination but credulous romanticization of “the East.” While Crowley saw an imagined Egypt as a place to escape materialism and British social mores, for Ahmed it was a means of gaining acceptance and staying afloat in the society Crowley was fleeing.
In the second half of the 19th century, an interest in life after death, ancient wisdom and hidden psychic realms took hold across Europe and North America. The young Wheatley had been close to it personally. As a 9-year-old, staying with his school’s headmaster in Margate, he had seen a crouching man’s figure with a “round, white and horrible” face peering at him on a staircase before floating away. The household had made a song and dance of hunting for evidence of a burglar to pacify the boy, but years later a friend of the family explained to him that all the adults were, in fact, convinced that he had seen an elemental spirit, summoned by the regular seances they had in the house; his vision had frightened them into giving up the hobby.
Such activities were commonplace. In the 1840s, three sisters from Rochester, New York, became the first mediums to perform for a paying public. The ghostly knocks and raps that followed the Fox sisters kick-started the spiritualist movement as attempts to contact the dead and other presences took off on both sides of the Atlantic. By the time the sisters demonstrated, in 1888, that the performance was done by cracking toe joints, there was no way of putting the ectoplasm back in the tube. While spiritualism was taking off, the secret powers of the mind were also being probed across Britain in shows of mesmerism, as entranced participants recounted fantastical mental voyages.
As the century wore on, Victorians dabbled in doctrines like those of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, which promised access to the astral planes via Eastern wisdom. Organizations like the Society for Psychical Research sprang up and conducted field trips to investigate inexplicable phenomena, with a mixture of hopeful credulity and infuriated skepticism (while others, like the pioneering newspaper editor W.T. Stead, began to hunt down sensational ghost stories with moneymaking panache). Anthropologists and folklorists insistently claimed to have found the common elements and hidden meanings of myths and religious texts, and otherwise respectable middle-class professionals joined magical secret societies complete with hierarchies and arcane rituals.
What exactly people were looking for varied. For female mediums, it might be freedom from the narrow constraints of life as a 19th-century housewife; for believers spiraling into doubt, it might be scientific proof of life after death; and for aspiring magical adepts, it might be a fresh perspective on a world that seemed to be rushing headlong into a new era. Different denizens of this world didn’t always approve of each other’s activities. For the popular pioneer of ghost hunting Elliott O’Donnell, the deliberate summoning of ghosts by spiritualists (rather than happening upon them in the wild) was unchristian, unhealthy and riddled with fraud, while for many occultists the same activity was looked down on as lacking in sufficient purpose and control.
Ancient Egypt was at the heart of the mass interest in magic. As the historian of Egyptology David Gange has pointed out, it “played a fundamental role in the rise of occultism from the 1870s onwards.” While Blavatsky was later associated with India, for example, she was initially inspired by Egypt and her first major work was titled “Isis Unveiled.” The connection of Egypt and magic was hardly new. A body of texts known as the Hermetica had been central to the occult tradition alongside alchemy and the Jewish mystical tradition of kabbalah since the Renaissance. The Hermetica had supposedly been written by Hermes Trismegistus — a mythical deity combining elements of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian Thoth. It was assumed that the writings had passed down some real ancient Egyptian knowledge via Hellenized Egyptian priests. The Hermetica provided the name of the period’s most famous occult society, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which was steeped in Egyptian references, added to a foundation of freemasonry and Rosicrucianism (a Western esoteric tradition dating to the 17th century). During the order’s initiation ritual, for example, neophytes were introduced to the secret ancient Egyptian words “khabs am pekht,” translated as “light in extension.” For some, their syncretism also linked to the more familiar Judeo-Christian tradition. As Gange recounts, the founding member who constructed the initiation ritual, Samuel MacGregor Mathers, saw Egypt’s wisdom as having been passed from angels to Abraham and thence to Egyptian priests — Moses then encountered it, which explained how the secrets of kabbalah became encoded in the Hebrew Bible. It was the Golden Dawn that Crowley joined in November 1898.
Crowley visited Egypt several times, not least because his extensive travels took him via the Suez Canal (he spent much time away from England, whether mountaineering in the Himalayas, exploring the Far East, founding his community of followers in Sicily or finding the right places to either acquire drugs or recover from his addictions). On a leg of their honeymoon in 1903, he had spent a night with his wife Rose inside the Great Pyramid of Giza and had shown off by performing the “bornless ritual,” a ceremonial invocation of a nameless deity lying beyond birth and death, which had genuine Graeco-Egyptian roots and which Mathers had introduced to the Golden Dawn.
But the most famous of their visits to Cairo occurred a year later. On this occasion, after the same ritual was performed, Rose seemed to become inspired and told Crowley that “they” were waiting for him. Crowley later confirmed that this was a reference to the god Horus by questioning and testing Rose in various ways — she recognized the god on a museum exhibit that then became known as “the stele of revealing.” In his Cairo hotel room, Crowley proceeded to found a whole new religion, writing “The Book of the Law,” a work that he claimed was dictated by a guardian angel figure called Aiwass, but which conveyed the words of the ancient Egyptian deities Nuit, Hadit and Ra-Hoor-Khuit, most famously: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
This book was the inauguration of Crowley’s new religion of Thelema, and this maxim marked the beginning of a new era he termed the Aeon of Horus — named after the child of Osiris whose role in ancient myth is restoring order after his father’s usurpation by Set.
Crowley was slow to fully pursue Thelema, but a turning point was to come five years later, when he journeyed into the Algerian desert with a young protege named Victor Neuberg, not long after his divorce from Rose. In mundane terms, after journeying to a remote spot, Crowley and Neuberg engaged in magical rituals and enacted what appears to have been a rape fantasy of Crowley’s — Neuberg sodomizing him while channeling Pan, the goatlike Greek god of the wild. Yet the expedition and the intricate ceremony, which involved both men becoming possessed, was psychologically exhausting and left a lasting impact on Crowley. It may have been a novel sexual experience for him, and the fusing of sex and magic was henceforth to become part of his practice.
The entire episode is strikingly described by the historian Alex Owen in his history of the period’s occultism, “The Place of Enchantment.” In Owen’s view, this moment in the desert was not just key for Crowley’s magic, but reveals the central aspect of the period’s magic as a whole, which was primarily about understanding and changing oneself. An esoteric tradition that had long been about human perfection and wholeness came to have new meanings in a rapidly changing society where people were searching for new ways of being, particularly with regard to gender, and where they increasingly saw the mind as fractured into light and dark elements. The ritual with Neuberg involved Crowley coming close to the abyss of total self-dissolution, erasing the line between the conscious and unconscious self and experiencing the collapse of all barriers between his conventional and magical personas. Crowley appears to have been confronted with the split between his life as a bourgeois Englishman struggling with social constraint and that as a fearless magician, “the Beast,” making contact with demons, and to have had some kind of epiphany and/or breakdown.
As Owen explains, it is not a coincidence that this happened in North Africa. Crowley was enamored of Bedouin culture, of drinking coffee and smoking tobacco and hashish with the men in the more inaccessible villages he passed through, claiming that his heart belonged to their way of life. As well as Egypt and Algeria, he made multiple visits to Tunisia and Morocco.
He stood in a Victorian tradition of romanticizing both the desert and its inhabitants: A 1914 text on the “Soul of the Desert” shows how he associated the supposed simplicity and starkness of life in that environment with the death of the ego that was seen as vital to the practice of magic by so many who attempted it.
Relevant too is the way that Western Orientalism imagined the Ottoman world in homoerotic terms. Since boyhood, Crowley had idolized one of the men who had fed such associations — Richard Burton, the translator and adventurer who had famously disguised himself to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, which was forbidden to non-Muslims. Burton had been quite public in his interest in homosexuality around the world, and had written a lengthy essay accompanying his translation of what he titled the “Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night,” that expounded his theory of the “Sotadic zone” — a swath running across the Mediterranean, through the Middle East and Far East and fanning out to take in the Americas, in which forms of homosexuality had been culturally ingrained. More local and empirically grounded was the awareness of figures like Oscar Wilde, by the end of the 19th century, that in Algiers they could procure the sexual favors of young men.
Whether in their spiritual or sexual habits, Crowley’s Orientalist mindset conceived of societies beyond his own as a foil or symbol that could help in forming a new wholeness for a disenchanted West, while the actual freedom and power he experienced while traveling allowed for experiments in selfhood. When Crowley sought to jettison his ego and approach the abyss, he was still carrying a lot of cultural baggage.
Like Crowley, Rollo Ahmed was an occultist, author and lecturer. Not only did both advise Wheatley, the two men were acquainted: They met in the late 1920s and at one point Ahmed helped Crowley find lodgings in London. And like Crowley, Ahmed’s magic was also bolstered by a connection to Egypt.
After the success of “The Devil Rides Out,” Wheatley’s publisher asked him for a nonfiction book on the occult. Wheatley demurred but recommended Ahmed, leading to the publication of “The Black Art” in 1936, a summary of various tales of sorcery through the ages for which Wheatley wrote an introduction. Ahmed was, he wrote, “a member of that ancient race which possessed by far the greatest and longest enduring civilisation of all known antiquity—the Egyptians.” Though the wisdom of that time had not all survived, he wrote, “such portions of it as still remain have been handed down through countless generations to the few, such as Rollo Ahmed, who are its heirs to-day.” Ahmed had, Wheatley explained, been taken to the West Indies as a child, which was the home of his mother, and in the 1968 edition of the same work, Wheatley added specifically that Ahmed’s father had been Egyptian.
For those who have sought to uncover Ahmed’s life, this story has been taken with a pinch of salt. On their reading, the evidence suggests that Ahmed, whose official name was Abdul Said Ahmed, was born in British Guiana, casting at least some doubt on what Wheatley wrote. And part of the reason Ahmed might have played up his Egyptian credentials (or allowed Wheatley to do so) is obvious — as Wheatley’s biographer Phil Baker pointed out, although Ahmed “was to all intents and purposes West Indian,” his claim to be Egyptian “increased Wheatley’s respect for him.” Ahmed’s Egyptianness tapped into the preconceptions of Wheatley and his audience about arcane knowledge and opened doors that might otherwise have remained fast.
That avenues were frequently closed to Ahmed seems evident. In 1937, he published the semiautobiographical novel “I Rise: The Life Story of a Negro,” which he declared was based on personal experience. It tells the story of a young immigrant to the U.K. from British Guiana, who arrives in Liverpool looking for work as a dancer. He finds it impossible to rent a room except at vastly inflated prices, and is told there is no work for him, even loading on the docks, in explicitly racist terms. The young man, whose father practiced voodoo and who sent him off to England with a charm to carry, meets a Black onetime chemist who has been forced out of business thanks to accusations of procuring an abortion, and is introduced to herbalism. He takes to selling “lucky African beans” on market stalls, helped by his theatrical talents. Christopher Josiffe, a researcher who is largely responsible for piecing together what we know of Ahmed’s life, has outlined the similarity of this account to the experiences of other Black figures in Britain at the time, who turned to peddling patent medicines or selling herbs as “crocusers,” playing on exoticism as part of a salesman’s persona. S. I. Martin, an author and speaker who focuses on raising awareness of Black British history and conducted a project on Ahmed based in Hastings, told New Lines that “as a Black man, Ahmed would have found greater acceptance during the period by putting himself forward as Egyptian.”
Ahmed experienced serious financial precarity, and from 1930 onward had a growing young family to support alongside his partner, Theodora Le Breton, who was also connected with the occult, working as a medium. He was convicted of fraud on three occasions, two in the early 1930s. One incident saw him take successive sums of money from a farmer on Jersey who wanted help lifting a curse placed by a neighbor. His correspondence with Wheatley includes requests for money as well as for the references that he needed to secure accommodation. He engaged in much self-promotion, including his short-lived involvement in the affair of Gef the talking mongoose, a retiring supernatural creature who lived in the farmhouse of a family on the Isle of Man (a case chronicled in a book by Josiffe and recently depicted on film with Simon Pegg playing the parapsychologist Nandor Fodor).
Yet Ahmed’s dealings do not demonstrate that he was primarily a fraudster. As Josiffe has noted, Crowley himself was not above taking money on false pretenses, and it hardly meant he regarded his occult practices as a mere deception. Ahmed’s writings give a view of magic that goes beyond what was needed to entertain readers and speak of a profound moral struggle. At the end of “The Black Art,” Ahmed asked, “What, therefore, is the force of evil with which most of us, consciously or unconsciously, wage continuous warfare?” His answer was that “our own Lower Nature,” no longer fitted for modern society, is suppressed and returns as nightmares and moral lapses, “according to psychologists.” And in addition to “this undesirable double,” wrote Ahmed, “though possibly including it, there is an intangible force, vibration or current of evil, eternally emanating from man’s perversions of his gifts and misuses of the knowledge and wisdom to which he has attained.” Ahmed wrote that it was humanity’s own darker thoughts that fed “foul shapes of elemental beings that grow … upon the lower mental planes. These are the ‘Demons’ of the astral world.” After over 200 pages of sensationalist accounts of werewolves and necromancers, Ahmed was making the case not only that magic was primarily about self-development, but that it was the darker side of the human mind itself that produced the beings that black magic invoked. The lesson was that all “disease, cruelty, torment and injustice” was a result of humanity failing to observe “the Divine Law,” and that the thoughts that could, over time, make demons “objective” would have to fall away as humanity “struggles towards the Light.”
Ahmed appears to have been caught between the public desire to read about the supernatural and horrific, and an understanding of the esoteric as fundamentally about the nature of being and the ability to do good. This moral dimension was also central in a statement he gave late in life to Peter Haining, reproduced in the latter’s “The Anatomy of Witchcraft.” Ahmed described how, in the wake of “The Black Art,” he had experienced many requests for magical assistance and had spent much time in London and Brighton with Crowley and his circle, experiencing the corrosive power of their worldview in a way that unnerved him: “Imperceptibly, but surely, the poison of evil seeps into the character — and one cannot associate with those to whom ‘Do What Thou Will Shall Be The Whole Of The Law’ is actual doctrine, without becoming seriously affected.” He insisted that he had turned his back on the influence of Thelema in time and was devoted to rooting out black magic by any means necessary. However much Ahmed was dramatizing what had occurred, there was a vital difference between Crowley’s embrace of instinct and later even of defilement as a means of finding a new kind of self, and Ahmed’s statement that the darker side of human nature might ultimately be conquered.
In the end, then, Ahmed regarded Crowley as a kind of opponent, despite their shared status as magicians and their shared sources of inspiration. The contrast between them reveals other forms of difference and similarity to us now. Crowley, whose travels around the globe fed his own colonial-era ideas of other societies, blew through his inherited fortune and died penniless. Ahmed traded on his skills, and the Egyptian heritage he may or may not have really had, to make his own way in the metropole and in the world of magic, both contending with and sometimes accepting the racial prejudices of his era. Wheatley was later quite scathing about Crowley, whom he had evidently disliked. Ahmed, on the other hand, he only ever wrote about with respect. Yet it would be an easy and dull exercise to recount some of the many racial caricatures with which Wheatley populated his novels. And in “The Devil Rides Out,” Osiris is described as a “fair-haired, light-skinned man, alien to the Egyptian race, who became their King,” ruling them with “great intelligence,” only later mythologized as a deity. It is a white interloper who really brings civilization to the Nile.
For Ahmed, Crowley and their audiences, ancient Egypt was a point of origin for magical traditions. The period’s craze for understanding the occult came clad in priestly robes and headdresses and accompanied by a heavy dose of romantic Orientalism. Yet this shouldn’t be allowed to mask a complexity that lay behind the pursuit of such knowledge. Crowley and Ahmed thought in terms of how magic might change us as people, not just whether one could commune with hidden beings. And the different ways they did this are curiously echoed in the different things Egypt meant to them. For Crowley, who wanted to escape into the desert, into drugs, into the stream of consciousness of ancient gods, magic would break down existing moral imperatives. For Ahmed, who wanted above all to arrive and to build a new life, and who found that an Egyptian past worked to his advantage, the goal, however difficult, was to keep trying to realize the moral code that his contemporaries professed.
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