ATDTDA 719

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          719 13 - "Aren't Chunxton Crescent aware of how
         simply teeming with Bolshies Vienna is these days?"
         - the assumption is that, if they knew, the
         TWIT would come down solidly against the
         Bolshies (after all, they own all that railroad stock)

My undestanding is that the Occult and Cryptography really got rolling 
with John Dee. Just the other day Thelma, my Ceremonial Magician 
of a niece-by marriage, was complaining about how hard it was to utter
 the Enochian names John Dee had cooked up on account of them 
having been so devilishly encrypted.

As regards gemetria and spying, Pynchon is exact:

     "Of course not, it's in code, isn't it, said Bevis. 
"Fiendish code, I might add. Right off I noticed it 
uses both Old and New Style alphabets---quite pleased 
with myself until twigging that each letter in this alphabet 
also has it's own numerical value, what was known among 
ancient Jewish students of the Torah as 'gematria.' So, as if 
there wasn't quite enough threat to the old mental balance already, 
the message must now be taken also as a series of digits, wherewith 
readers may discover in the text at hand certain hidden messages by adding 
together the number-values of the letters in a group, substituting other groups 
of the same value, so generatting another, covert message. Furthermore this 
particular gematria doesn't stop at simple addition."

     "Oh, dear. What else?"

     "Raising to powers, calculating logarithms, converting strings of 
characters to terms of a series and finding the limits they 
converge to, and---I say Latewood, if you could see 
the look on your face. . .  ."

     "Feel free, please. As there's little enough 
hysterical giggling out here, why we must 
snatch it wheree'er find it, mustn't we."

     "Not to mention field-coefficients, 
eigen values, metric tensors----"
AtD 799

Crowley was into spying and counter-intelligence, making hysterical 
pro-Greman rantings during World War One:

     The OTO was founded between 1895 and 1900 by a pair of 
     powerful Freemasons, Karl Kellner and Theodor Reuss. 
     Politically, the order was right-wing in the extreme, proposing 
     the creation of a pan-German world based on pagan spiritual 
     beliefs. Kellner died in 1905, and Reuss, a former spy for the 
     Prussian Secret Service, assumed the office of high caliph. 
     While living in London, Reuss spied on German socialist 
     expatriates. In 1912 he made the acquaintance of Aleister 
     Crowley, and appointed him head of the OTO's British chapter. 
     But The Beast's political loyalties have always been an open 
     question.

     While living in the States, he wrote pro-German diatribes for two 
     fascist publications, The Fatherland and The Internationalist. After 
     WW II, there were calls for his head. But Crowley offered that his 
     pro-German stance was a ruse of MI6, the military intelligence 
     division in the UK.

http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/hambone/oto.html