What a greasy spoon in West London tells us about the threat of nuclear war

All-day diners feasting on the full English, the cheese omelette or the celebrated sausage sandwich (£3.80) at George’s Café, at 36 Blythe Road, Hammersmith, probably don’t realise they are dining at an address which is pivotal in global cultural history. So pivotal, in fact, that it might just tell us whether human civilisation is about to be extinguished in a nuclear holocaust.

A claim like that needs fleshing out. Here it is. Some 120 years ago, 36 Blythe Road was living a very different life to that of a humdrum suburban greasy spoon: it was the headquarters and archival nerve centre of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a fin de siècle mystical cult / sect / Kabbalistic Groucho Club, founded in 1888 by William Woodman, William Westcott and Samuel MacGregor Mathers. The sect was conceived after Mathers supposedly acquired a remarkable cache of ancient, occult ‘cipher documents’ – handed over by Hungarian Rosicrucians. Other origin stories say Mathers simply bought the historic papers from an itinerant bookseller in Holborn who then promptly disappeared.

Whatever their provenance, the sacred volumes contained a wealth of arcane and esoteric learning: on astral travelling, tarot cards, geomancy, magical entities, even the invocation of demons. The founders then wove together the papers to form a codebook and bible for their proposed new Order, and consequently set out to recruit members.

It wasn’t hard. Late Victorian London was a society roiled by religious doubts, dreams and Darwinism, and soon the Golden Dawn had dozens of ‘adepts’. Among them was Oscar Wilde’s wife Constance, socialite and Irish rebel Maud Gonne, and Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. With this success, the Golden Dawn also amassed money: enough of it to acquire apartments or houses which they turned into ‘temples’ for initiates. Most of these were in central London.

Through war and redevelopment, nearly all of these buildings have been swept away, and there is perhaps just one significant temple still standing. Yet it is also the most important of all (and should surely be listed). This building is 36 Blythe Road. As the Order developed through the 1890s, Blythe Road became a kind of international headquarters, housing the crucial archives and frequented by the more senior and renowned members. Whoever possessed Blythe Road was in possession of the rules of the Order.

Which brings us to the infamous Battle of Blythe Road of 1900. The rebel in this cause, trying to seize control of the Order, was Aleister Crowley. A wealthy son of Plymouth Brethren, Crowley – 24 at the time – was already notorious for his exotic lifestyle: an openly bisexual sadomasochist fond of prostitutes, he had a flat in Chancery Lane where he would take drugs during intense magical rites, and where he would feed dead birds and human blood to a skeleton he kept in the wardrobe. Yet he was also highly intelligent and deeply serious about his magical pursuits. And he was seriously at war with the Golden Dawn.

And so, on the mild morning of 19 April, dressed in a kilt and sporran, adorned with a Crusader’s cross on his chest and wearing a large black mask of Osiris (the Egyptian god), Aleister Crowley marched down Blythe Road, intent on seizing the temple: complete with its crucial library and panoplies of power. Cowering inside the headquarters were three ‘white magicians’, led by the Irish poet (and eventual Nobel Laureate) W.B. Yeats. Alongside them was a police constable, whose bemusement it is possible to sense 122 years later.

Battle commenced. Crowley attempted to force his way in, physically and incorporeally. However, by the use of spells, chants, invocations, clever astral projections and a locked door, Yeats and co. rebuffed the usurper.

Defeated yet defiant, Crowley took his revenge by setting up his own sects with his own ideas. When he wasn’t getting a goat to copulate with his mistress, or becoming a heroin addict in New York, or lethally poisoning his best friend with cat’s blood, he developed and explored new theories of Sex Magic and Chaos Magic. By the 1920s the Daily Mail was calling him ‘the wickedest man in the world’.

Crowley died in a nursing home in Hastings in 1947. But Crowley the legend is far from dead: his life and thoughts have gone on to influence, intellectually and aesthetically, a multitude of writers, musicians, and philosophers, from David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page to Timothy Leary, L. Ron Hubbard, and Portuguese national poet Fernando Pessoa (an epistolary friend). You can see Crowley on the iconic cover of the Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He is a character in novels by Hemingway, Maugham and Isherwood. His name is given to the roguish demon in the TV series Good Omens (written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman).

And this is where Russia comes in. One of Crowley’s more recent disciples is Alexander Dugin, a Russian philosopher. Here is a video of a young Dugin quoting Crowley’s chants. Here is an account by a Muscovite writer and filmmaker of Dugin’s neo-Nazi, quasi-Satanist Crowleyana: ‘I remember accidentally attending a lecture by Dugin on “angelic entities” in the late 1990s. It was an absolutely unbearable exercise in transcendental sophistry, dealing mainly with the image of Lucifer… and featuring extensive quotations from Aleister Crowley.’

This matters because Dugin is a prominent figure in Putin’s Strange New Russia. For example, The Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugin’s 1997 treatise – which advocates a Russian-dominated Eurasia stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok (as well as Brexit, a dismantled China, a politically roiled America and a wholly subjugated Ukraine) – is widely read in Russian universities. Dugin is said by some to be close to Putin himself. During his recent rant about the annexation of the four Ukrainian provinces, Putin alleged that the West is ‘killing our philosophers’. This bizarre comment likely referred to the violent recent death, in a car bomb, of Dugin’s daughter Darya (allegedly at the hand of Ukrainian spies).

So Alexander Dugin is important and Alexander Dugin is also, via Crowley, horribly enamoured of the concept of the end time: i.e. with a final burning of the world in a chaotic fire. Here’s another quote from Loshak in his essay on Dugin and Crowley: ‘In 2011… youth under the leadership of Dugin staged the occult mystery play Finis Mundi (The End of the World)… Darya Dugin, by the way, played the role of a sacrificial victim who voluntarily self-immolates in order to save Russia. As the girl is burning, a man’s voice proclaims, “Cross yourself with fire, Rus! Burn up in the fire and save your diamond from the black furnace!”. Dugin is obsessed with the idea of bringing the world to a purgatory apocalypse, after which the Great Eurasian Empire of the End will be born. And he has quite consistently pursued this goal.’

And there you have it. Vladimir Putin is apparently swayed by the ideas of a ‘philosopher’ who consciously desires a burning Armageddon, as this should lead to a new world dominated by a Final New Russia: the Empire of the End. All of which sounds like we are possibly headed for ‘the black furnace’ of nuclear war – and a truly fitting culmination of Crowleyan Chaos Magick. 

And this Armageddon was, in quite important ways, birthed on 19 April 1900, in a strange occult battle on Blythe Road, Hammersmith. In which case, the sausage-sandwich eaters of George’s Café probably need to get a wriggle on if they fancy another helping.