Found in the Peter Haining Archive, two letters that raise objections to the author’s views on Black Magic expressed in his Witchcraft and Black Magic (1971). Both emanate from distinctly offbeat sources. Here is the first letter. The second may feature in a later Jot.
The first letter ( dated only May 30th) was sent by someone called August Vironeem on behalf of ‘ the Directors ‘ of an American ‘Thelemic ‘ group ‘ described by Vironeem as an ‘ offshoot of Aleister Crowley’s ‘Initiatory lodge in England known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn ‘. Objecting to Haining’s section on Crowley as ‘ totally eroneous ‘, the writer goes on to repudiate ‘ with a high degree of certainty ‘ the Great Beast’s association with Black Magic:
'neither Crowley, not any of his disciples, partisans, sympathisers, nor modern day devotees do have, or have ever had, anything thing at all to do with black magic, ( and here , I must firmly state that Manson’s Solar Lodge of the O/T/O and other perversions do not bear upon Crolwey. Had he been alive today He’d have been nasueated by such groups.'
Vironeem ends by maintaining that although Crowley had his faults, he also had his ‘ moments of genius’; he then invites Haining to ‘take a quick look at’ Crowley’s ten volume set of The Equinox.
Your present Jotter is not really qualified to comment on Crowley or his philosophy, but most of his apologists have strongly denied that their hero practiced Black Magic. Indeed, the Crowley Wikipedia entry tends to suggest that his cult of Thelema was a much more intellectually nuanced philosophy than his simple-minded critics would have us believe. To me as a tyro it seems to be a philosophy that centres on a world view of extreme individualism, containing aspects of anarchism, and showing the influence of William Blake.
It appears that someone with the name August Vironeem actually exists and very probably did have connections with Thelema. Today, in Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, lives August Vironeem, aged 65. According to the records, someone with this name was born in 1951 in New York. And as the present HQ of the International College of Thelema is in Sacramento, CA, it seems possible that our Mr Vironeem became an early follower of Crowley, then by his early twenties had moved to California to take a leading role in the‘ offshoot‘ of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn that eventually ended up as the International College of Thelema. This is all speculation, but the facts are suggestive...[R.M.Healey]
I have known August Vironeem since the late 1960’s. And his reason for moving to Ca, rested more on the death of his father, Johannes Vironeem MD, than on his interests in studying occultism. August grew up in College Point, Queens where his family indulged his seeking of knowledge and buying every book in a well known but now defunct mystical bookstore in Manhattan. I had, had made the rubber stamp that was used by him to make the stationary that appears in your note. His is a very bright person who is well versed in several languages including Estonian, and Estonia is also the country that his parents came from, and that most of his family traditions stem from. His father was gassed during WW1, and during WW2 gained wealth as a medical doctor in Germany.
The move to Ca. was his mother’s efforts to stabilize his environment, and to help him get a foothold in the motion picture industry. The family was reasonably well off, and more so after selling many properties that his father had acquired when they initially moved to Queens. I had lost touch with him after his move, but he had a small group of similarly minded peoples in and around College Point, including, Herbert Wolfertz, Harrand Widdoff, and Robert Lusk
I knew August well. We had a partnership in a very small independent film company (Templar Productions, Inc) in New York. We made a few films and were trying to put together a couple of feature films.
We met as a result of our shared interest and passion for Crowley. I always admired August’s collection of books (his Thelma Private Library) and his terrific knowledge of – for lack of a better term – occult sciences.
When our company and ultimately our friendship eventually dissolved, I lost track of him. I tried to find him to retrieve some of my films but he had already moved out of his College Point home (which has an amazing backstory in itself. Once the internet came about I tried to find him again but never found him. This article made me curious again and maybe I will reopen my search one last time. We are about a year apart so he should be around 74 now. Hopefully still alive and studying or maybe even making movies. I hope I can catch up with him sometime.