The Devil Rides Out (1968): A Cultic Crossroads of Satanic Spies
Spies Lie and Nazis Fly
There seems to be no shortage of connections between British Intelligence writers and the occult, and while I’ve examined a good deal of Ian Fleming, one of the more overtly Satanic writers we haven’t looked at is Dennis Wheatley. Wheatley was the son of a winemaking family who caused some stir early in his college days for creating his own campus “secret society.” Following his expulsion for this incident, Wheatley joined the military, fighting in World War I as a Royal Artillery Lieutenant, while focusing on military intelligence and covert operations in World War II in the London Controlling Section. After his war activities, Wheatley worked for British Intelligence and was introduced to Aleister Crowley, stating:
British Spy Dennis Wheatley. Image: Wikipedia.com
“The fact that I had read extensively
about ancient religions gave me some useful background, but I required
up-to-date information about occult circles in this country. My friend,
Tom Driburg, who then lived in a mews flat just behind us in Queen’s
Gate, proved most helpful. He introduced me to Aleister Crowley, the
Reverend Montague Summers and Rollo Ahmed.” (The Time Has Come: The Memoirs of Dennis Wheatley (Vol 3) 1919-1977: Drink and Ink, p. 131.)
However, there is more to the story concerning his relation to British Intelligence and MI5, as his personal site explains:
“Then in May 1940, following a chance
conversation between his wife and her passenger while she was a driver
for MI5, Wheatley was commissioned to write a series of papers on
various strategic aspects of the War. These ‘War Papers’ were read by
the King and the highest levels of the General Staff, and as a result in
December 1941 he was re-commissioned, becoming the only civilian to be
directly recruited onto the Joint Planning Staff. With the final rank of
Wing Commander, for the rest of the War Wheatley worked in Churchill’s
basement fortress as one of the country’s small handful of ‘Deception
Planners’ who were charged with developing ways to deceive the enemy of
the Allies real strategic intentions. Their top secret operations, which
included the plans to deceive the enemy about the true site of the
Normandy landings, were highly successful and saved countless lives.”
Wheatley’s wife also worked for MI5, yet these details do not easily emerge in research on the subject, though it is now known Wheatley was MI6, including writing anti-German and anti-Russian occult spy fiction.
To old dusty books one must go before the fuller picture emerges and we
see the connections to Fleming and Maxwell Knight, and the decision to
co-opt Aleister Crowley into MI5 work. In Anthony Masters’ book The Man Who Was M: The Real-Life Spymaster Who Inspired Ian Fleming, we read:
“Dennis and Joan Wheatley were constant
visitors to the flat, but Lois found she had little in common with
Knight’s and Wheatley’s all-absorbing interest in the occult, and in
particular, Aleister Crowley who was later to become an MI5 agent.
Wheatley had met Crowley through Tom Driberg, then a remarkable
journalist (and later a Labour Party MP) whom Knight was to use as an
agent inside the CPGB [Communist Party of Great Britain]. Crowley had
come to dinner with the Wheatleys many times and provided Dennis with
occult information for his books. Wheatley’s first opinion had been
that Crowley was interesting but harmless. Driberg, however, warned him
that Crowley had been responsible for running a community in Northern
Sicily where a number of children had been rumored to have disappeared
in connection with Satanic masses. He also told Wheatley that there had
been another alarming episode, this time in Paris, which was better
documented. In an attempt to raise the pagan god Pan, Crowley had spent
a night in an empty hotel room on the Left Bank, in company with one of
his followers, a man named MacAleister. In the morning they were both
found naked. MacAleister was dead and Crowley was crouched howling in a
corner, from where he was taken to an asylum. Four months later he was
released, but the cause of MacAleister’s death was never discovered.
This, anyway, was Driberg’s story and it fascinated both the Wheatleys
and Knight, although Crowley in the flesh remained a disappointment.
Knight met Crowley at the Wheatleys. He
was well-dressed and middle aged, with the voice and manner of an Oxford
don. He said his own grace, embroidering Rabelais’ (Do what you
like) ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,’ but
nevertheless Knight wondered how such racy legends had sprung up around
such a seemingly harmless, if eccentric, academic.
Knight told his nephew, Harry Smith, that
he and Dennis Wheatley went to Crowley’s occult ceremonies to research
black magic for Wheatley’s books. “They jointly applied to Crowley as
novices and he accepted them as pupils,” Smith told me. “But my uncle
stressed that his interest – and also Wheatley’s – was purely academic.”
(pg. 90-1)
On Her Majesty’s Satanic Request The links become clear: It is Wheatley, Knight and Ian Fleming who would be the chief architects of the ruse to coopt Crowley for the purpose of luring Nazi Rudolph Hess to parachute into Scotland. Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett only mentions this briefly in passing, leaving out Crowley:
“At the same time he [Fleming] maintained
contact with several other friends in the broad field of deception,
including Ellic Howe, who had worked for the printer James Shand and now
specialized in counterfeit German documents; Dennis Wheatley, an
occasional dinner guest who worked for the London Controlling Section
masterminding deception projects; and Louis de Wohl, and astrologer who
was used by the NID to chart the exact moments when Hitler might be open
to ruses and feints.” (Ian Fleming, pg. 134).
Rudolph Hess reportedly parachuting into Scotland.
“Ian Fleming, then in the Department of
Naval Intelligence, was fascinated by Knight’s mysterious persona, and
was to involve him in an extraordinary adventure whose components – The
Link [a supposed pro-Hitler underground in the UK], Aleister Crowley
and Hess – were to make an explosive mixture. Years later, when Fleming
wrote the first of his James Bond books, he used an amalgam Knight and
his own superior, Rear-Admiral John Godfrey, as the model for M, Bond’s
boss.” (The Man Who Was M, pg. 157)
In fact, this curious episode of the tale of luring Hess through
Crowley was apparently seeded in a predictive programming form (or the
idea was nabbed therefrom) in Ian’s brother, Peter Fleming’s novel, The Flying Visit, penned soon before Hess’ flight. Fleming scholar Craig Cabell comments on this fantastical story:
“SOE and NID were closely associated with
each other at the time of Hess’ flight and Fleming would have learned
very quickly about Hess (because he saw much intelligence from various
sources). We know for certain that Fleming tracked down Aleister
Crowley for advice concerning Hess’s interrogation, which prompted
Crowley to write to the DNI. But why would Fleming do that? Crowley
had been dubbed the wickedest man in the world, a master of the Black
Mass, who once apparently summoned Pan and was left a jibbering wreck.
Although still a master of the Occult and Astrology during the Second
World War, Crowley was more content to write propaganda poems than
summoning up ancient demons; bit he did write to Godfrey, the sealed
letter covered in occultist symbols. The letter read:
Sir:
If it is true that Herr Hess is much
influenced by astrology and magick, my services might be of use to the
Department in case he should not be willing to do what you wish. I have
the honour to be, sir,
Your obedient Servant,
Aleister Crowley” (Ian Fleming’s Secret War, pg. 46)
Author Peter Levenda comments on this association as well, in his Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult:
Richard B. Spence’s work on the topic.
“His [Crowley’s] utility to MI5 during his
Berlin days, when he spied on German communists, was not forgotten.
Further, he had been cultivated by Dennis Wheatley, who found the occult
fascinating…Knight was the prototype for Ian Fleming’s character “M”:
The intelligence chief whom we always see in the movies giving Sean
Connery or Roger Moore his dangerous, “license to kill” assignment.
What is not generally known is that “M” was also introduced to Aleister
Crowley–by Dennis Wheatley–and was quite friendly with the Magus….here
is Maxwell Knight, “M” after all, accepting a kind of occult initiation
into from Aleister Crowley and becoming his pupil! Himmler was obsessed
by the idea that British Intelligence was being a Rosicrucian Order and
that occult adepts were in charge of MI5. How would he have reacted if
he had known the formidable Maxwell Knight, head of Department B5(b),
the countersubversion section of MI5, was a disciple of Aleister
Crowley? And that Dennis Wheatley – he of the occult novels favored by
Goering – was also a student of Crowley’s and simultaneously working for
Churchill’s planning staff? (pg. 231-3. See also For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond by Ben MacIntyre, pg. 88)
I’ve noted many times the connection of Crowley to various villians, including LeChiffre in Casino Royale,
but as we shall see, the influence in the British Psy Op Department
extends beyond Fleming to Wheatley, as we shall see: “One of the last
photographs of Rudolf Hess in Spandau has him pictured with detailed
maps of the moon. These are printed on the wall of his cell directly
above his bed. Also the character of LeChiffre in the James Bond novel Casino Royale is based physically on Aleister Crowley; just as the evil occultist in Dennis Wheatley’s Devil Rides Out
is based upon Crowley.” (Ibid., pg. 48-9) Indeed, not only was this
the beginning of Fleming’s inspirations for 007 and the fictional occult
tales of Duc de Richleau
in Wheatley’s novels, but is in fact the same circles that
would produce the OSS in 1942, later to become the CIA in 1947. The
curious convergence of espionage, Hollywood, the occult and high
finance become manifest. Cabell continues:
“It was May 25 1941 wen Fleming and
Godfrey stepped off the flying boat at LaGuardia, New York. They were
there to observe U.S. port security alongside William Stephenson’s
British Security Coordination (BSC), who worked out of New York. There
was of course more to the trip than that. The gentleman form the NID
were overtly there to assist Stephenson in developing a security sector
in America that would benefit both US and UK interests. Godfrey was
keen to make William Donovan head of the new security force. Donovan
was senior partner in a law firm but during the Great War he had worked
as a private intelligence gatherer for J.P. Morgan, so he was a known,
albeit unused, officer. Fleming had tried to coax Donovan into
Operation Goldeneye, but Godfrey had him personally marked for the U.S.”
(pg. 53)
William Stephenson, aka Intrepid, with Wild Bill Donovan.
“Donovan was helped to prepare his
submissions to Roosevelt by Stephenson and the SIS officers attached to
his staff. Two senior British Intelligence officers, Admiral John
Godfrey and his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming
(later of James Bond fame), crossed the Atlantic to work on the
campaign…There is no doubt what the British were hoping to achieve, as
the reports that Stephenson sent to Menzies make clear. He wrote that,
at first, Donovan was not at all certain he wanted the job of directing
‘the new agency we envisage’ (emphasis added). When Donovan’s
appointment was announced, Stephenson wrote that Donovan was accusing
him of having intrigued and driven him into the job. Stephenson then
expressed his relief that ‘our’ man was in a position of such importance
to ‘our’ efforts. Major Desmond Morton of the Industrial Intelligence
Center was even blunter: ‘…to all intents and purposes US security is
being run for them at the president’s request by the British. It is of
course essential that this fact should not be known in view of the
furious uproar it would cause if known to the isolationists.” (pg.
217-8)
The Devil Rides Out (1968) Onto Film 
Film poster with alternate title, “The Devil’s Bride.” In this case, the Eye is definitely a Satanic reference.
“His films are characterised by a blend of
fairy-tale, myth and sexuality. They may have drawn heavily on
Christian themes, and there is usually a hero who defeats the powers of
darkness by a combination of faith in God and reason, in contrast to
other characters, who are either blindly superstitious or bound by a
cold, godless rationalism (as noted by critic Paul Leggett in Terence Fisher: Horror, Myth and Religion, 2001).”
The figure of Christopher Lee is also relevant, given his own claims of involvement in the Special Operations Executive,
including even whispers he was an assassin: “I was attached to the SAS
from time to time but we are forbidden – former, present, or future –
to discuss any specific operations. Let’s just say I was in Special
Forces and leave it at that. People can read in to that what they like,”
he stated. However, there is some matter of dispute as to Lee’s claims, including the idea they may have been exaggerated or made up. Similar to the story of Chuck Barris, the Gong Show Host who purportedly worked side jobs as a CIA hitman as portrayed in the 2002 film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Count Dooku may have been serving out the Imperial Palpatinian death notices in real life.What is also curious about Lee are his comments on the occult, in which an old interview shows his knowledge and fascination, as well as his personal copy of Anton LaVey’s book, signed by the founder of the rather theatrical Church of Satan. LaVey’s connections and associations with Hollywood, including Sammy Davis, Jr. and Jayne Mansfield are well known and need not be rehearsed, but the interview certainly provides a window into Lee’s views on the matter. Lee also later bade curious investigators an emphatic warning in an interview just prior to his death, assuring the dark forces of the occult will induce madness, as well as loss of soul.
Is that Penrose tiling?
“If I pledge my soul to you, can I play Blofeld?”
or
“Baphomet? Yuck, how about bath-omet?”
or
“Baphomet? Yuck, how about bath-omet?”
“Did you guys see the new Jay-Z video? Praised be our Illuminated brutha…”
Count Dooku slumber parties are a trip…
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