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Harry Houdini, noted for his sensational escape acts and possibly the most famous magician of all time, is also one of the least appreciated heroes of recent history.

Not only did he use his personal secret service for the cause of debunking fraudulent mediums but also for exposing child trafficking operations operating between London and the USA.

And considering the many death threats Houdini received from powerful spiritualists from England to the USA and considering his powerful disruption of a desired new occult revival in the USA, it is likely that the story of Houdini’s accidental death at the age of 52 is more myth than reality.

In the following essay, Matthew Ehret details the not-so-public life and times of Harry Houdini.

By Matthew Ehret

In the last chapter of the series ‘Occult Tesla’, you were introduced to the figure of Sir William Crookes, Tesla’s mentor, Rosicrucian high priest and populariser of occultism who rose to the ranks of most powerful scientist of the British Empire when he was elected President of the British Royal Society in 1913.

In that location, the peculiar relationship between science and a global occult revival was examined and coordinated by the British Society for Psychical Research, which Crookes also led as President. Not only did this occult revival drive a re-organisation of the decaying British Empire, but aspired to establish a new world religion premised on demonology, spirit channelling, and a hybrid of Western gnosticism/hermeticism fused with Eastern mysticism as outlined by the Theosophist movement.

In this instalment, we will be introduced to the efforts to expose this new false world religion by analysing the life and efforts of one of the least appreciated heroes of recent history … Harry Houdini.

Who was the Real Houdini?

Born in Hungary in 1874, Erich Weiss and his family moved to the USA when he was only four years old and soon found himself inspired by the craft of stage magic, studying everything he could get his hands on. Erich and his brother showed immense skill at the craft and quickly rose in popularity, getting their first big break performing at the 1893 World Fair in Chicago.

By this time, he had changed his stage name to ‘Harry Houdini’ as a homage to a famous French illusionist named Robert Houdin whose work inspired Weiss.

In the groundbreaking 2006 biography ‘The Secret Life of Houdini’, which will be cited extensively throughout this essay, researchers William Kalush and Larry Sloman demonstrate that Houdini was recruited to the US Secret Service in around 1899 as he began touring the world with invitations to perform for presidents, royals and diplomats in courts across Europe and Russia.

In 1900, Houdini met with London spymaster William Melville (then head of Scotland Yard) who would become the co-founder of Britain’s MI6 in 1909. Starting at this time, Houdini began working with police, military leaders and detectives across the USA giving seminars on escaping from handcuffs, lock picking and other tricks used by criminals, and intelligence agents alike.

Magicians and Intelligence Operations

We know that magicians have wielded great influence since ancient times, and often through the use of scientific knowledge kept secret, these magi, priests and hierophants have managed to wield vast influence over superstitious elites and masses alike. This shouldn’t surprise any informed reader, as the art of managing perceptions – making the false appear true – has been the master key to all power dynamics in all times, so why should our “scientific” modern age be any different?

In Elizabethan England, John Dee – using the moniker agent “007″ – carried out espionage alongside his channeler Edward Kelley and set the stage for the Rosicrucian transformation of England from a nation to a global empire. Followers of Dee and occultist Sir Francis Bacon had established the British Royal Society which dealt principally in black magic rituals and alchemy even while Sir Isaac Newton played with numerology on behalf of ‘the Invisible College’ of sorcerers (see Part 1 of this series).

As we saw in Part 2 of this series, even the British Satanist Aleister Crowley worked for British intelligence and believed himself to be the reincarnation of John Dee’s skryer Edward Kelley – a demonologist, necromancer and alchemist. During World War 1, Crowley worked closely with William Wiseman, British Chief of the New York branch of MI5, as well as George Sylvester Viereck, Tesla’s friend and human vampire.

During World War II, Crowley worked closely with MI6’s own Sir Ian Fleming (whose James Bond was a composite of John Dee, and British occultist Sidney Reilley). Fleming’s character M (Bond’s handler) was modelled on the same William Melville who collaborated with Houdini after 1900.

In his 1917 book ‘Moonchild’, Crowley noted the fusion of intelligence operations and magic stating: “Investigation of spiritualism makes a capital training ground for secret service work, one soon gets up to all the tricks.”

Crowley and Houdini Go to the Movies

In 1917, as both Houdini and Crowley were operating in New York, we even find strange parallels as both men were creating film serials with the same director on the topic of magic. Of course, the treatment of the topic of magic was very different with Crowley promoting supernatural occultism in The ‘Mysteries of Myra’, while Houdini was exposing international conspiracies to suppress new inventions in ‘The Master Mystery’ series. ^[1]

In Houdini’s Master Mystery, a Justice Department agent named Quentin Locke (played by Houdini) infiltrates a corporation called ‘International Patents Inc’ run by powerful industrialists who use their vast fortunes to purchase inventions to keep them off the market and keep society locked into a dependency on out-dated (and monopolised) technologies. Within this 1918 film, Houdini created the first demonstration of an automaton robot used by villains.

The Master Mystery films were such a hit that Houdini was inspired to create his own production company called ‘The Houdini Picture Corporation’ in 1921 where he produced the 1921 film ‘The Man From the Beyond’ and the 1923 film ‘Haldane of the Secret Service’.

In Haldane of the Secret Service, Houdini created a composite character based on the very real Viscount Richard Burdon Haldane (1856-1928), a leading figure of the British Empire, Secretary of State under Lord Balfour’s government and the co-founder of Britain’s MI5 and MI6 in 1909 (along with William Melville). The main character of the film (played by Houdini) was a secret agent who infiltrates an organisation which murdered his father leading him to a satanic criminal headquarters masquerading as a Catholic monastery in the South of France.

Describing one of the main characters representing “the chief of the secret government police” for the film ‘The Marvelous Adventures of Harry Houdini’ (unfortunately never made), Houdini wrote: “such a man as would be selected by the brain force of a great nation, to have complete control of the secret service, in fact, a prototype of Flynn-suave, polished, a gentleman and silent as the Sphinx.” ^[2]

William James Flynn and the Patriotic Tradition of US Intelligence

Here Houdini was referring to the figure of William James Flynn (1867-1928), chief of New York’s Secret Service from 1912-1917, and director of the young Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) from 1917-1919 who led the anti-corruption purge of the New York City Police Department (“NYPD”) detective bureau from 1910-1911. ^[2.5]

In 1915, Flynn was responsible for locating the German agents operating in the USA around the figures of Crowley and Viereck, and it was Flynn who followed German diplomat Dr. Heinrich Albert and George Sylvester Viereck and acquired the evidence of Germany’s $25 million spent buying up spy networks across the USA during the war.

Historian Helibert von Felitzer notes of this sting operation:

Albert’s papers revealed the German ownership of the Bridgeport Projectile Company, the investments in American munitions, market-cornering efforts, investments in newspapers, bribes to American politicians, links of the Deutsche Bank representative, Hugo Schmidt, to the German operation, and payments of the German government to George Sylvester Viereck and the Fatherland.

As noted in Part 2 of this series, Viereck’s pro-German propaganda magazine ‘The Fatherland’ was edited by none other than Aleister Crowley.

Flowing from the success of this operation, Flynn tracked down the wireless radio communications station based in Long Island that had been transmitting signals to German intelligence – such as information leading to the sinking of the Lucitannia in 1915. Flynn’s interception of messages to the German high command provided the legal justification for the US government’s seizure and destruction of Tesla’s Long Island towers – both the Wardenclyff tower and the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island, NY – during the war (see Part 2 for that story).

When Flynn’s operatives, working alongside Franklin Roosevelt’s agents in US Naval Intelligence dismantled this Anglo-German network in New York, Tesla’s funding dried up and the wizard was forced into a short-term bankruptcy, although he continued living in five-star hotels without any trouble until his death.

The Sleepy Hollow Club

As Richard B. Spence notes in ‘Secret Agent 666’, one of Crowley’s leading contacts and paymasters in New York was a figure named John Quinn, an Anglo-American agent of a new private intelligence agency centred in the elite Sleepy Hollow Club of New York. The Sleepy Hollow Club was owned by William Rockefeller and featured the upper crust of America’s Brahmin families including the Vanderbilts, Morgans, Cabots, Lodges and Lowells, to name a few.

Senator Nelson Aldrich (father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller) was another leading member, as was President Wilson’s handler Edward Mandel House- both of whom played a key role in setting up both the Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) in 1913.

The Club’s permanent resident was a British agent named Claude Dansey who was tasked with establishing this parallel security agency outside of the influence of the US government.

As Anton Chaitkin points out in ‘Hoover’s FBI and Anglo-American Dictatorship’, Dansey ran the agency from 1911-1914 from the Sleepy Hollow Club and Claude Dansey’s protege Ralph van Deman set up a shadowy military intelligence agency called ‘The Black Chamber’ in 1918 (which later became known as ‘The National Security Agency’ in 1930).

After World War I, Van Deman recommended Dansey for a Distinguished Service Medal “for guiding, planning and implementation of an American intelligence service.”

In 1909, Dansey, who had risen to prominence in the Boer War (working closely with Lord Milner and Churchill), became a founding deputy director of Britain’s new spy agency MI5 alongside Viscount Richard Burdon Haldane and William Melville.

The fact that Dansey created at least two American secret intelligence agencies while also serving as Deputy Director of the new British Secret Service (later to be known as MI5) should cause any thinking person to question who exactly has been running the USA over the past century.

During World War II, Dansey would be assigned to create another secretive agency dubbed “The Z organisation” that interfaced between British occult intelligence, Nazi occult networks, and once again included both Crowley and George Sylvester Viereck as active members. In the 1988 book ‘All the King’s Men’ historian Robert Marshall demonstrated that Dansey’s pseudo-private intelligence apparatus was behind the sabotage of several networks of French and Dutch anti-Nazi resistance fighters who believed they could trust British intelligence contacts.

The manager of the Sleepy Hollow Club was a powerful financier named Thomas Fortune Ryan who joined J.P. Morgan in financing Nikola Tesla’s towers before the war was launched.

It is interesting to note that William J. Flynn took the position of Director of the fledgling FBI from 1917-1919, where he found himself at odds with Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s tyrannical crackdown on civil liberties dubbed “the Palmer Raids.”

By 1920, Flynn, who had worked with Houdini on numerous occasions, was forced into early retirement, whereby the intelligence chief became a film producer of movies that exposed fraudulent mediums!

Where Does Houdini Fit In?

We know that Harry Houdini had close relations with both American, British and Russian patriots as well as dark forces in all three countries at the same time, so it is worth asking: what side of history did Houdini ultimately side with?

To piece together this important mystery, let’s begin with Houdini’s observations of magic itself.

In his 1920 expose ‘Miracle Mongers and their Methods’, Houdini stated:

My business has given me an intimate knowledge of stage illusions, together with many years of experience among show people of all types. My familiarity with the former, and what I have learned of the psychology of the latter, has placed me at a certain advantage in uncovering the natural explanation of feats that to the ignorant have seemed supernatural.

In his 1924 book ‘ A Magician Among Spirits’ he noted the power which the high priests and magi wielded over superstitious victims stating:

The ancients’ childish belief in demonology and witchcraft; the superstitions of the civilised and uncivilised, and those marvellous mysteries of past ages are all laughed at by the full grown sense of the present generation; yet we are asked, in all seriousness, by a few scientists and scholars, to accept as absolute truth such testimony as is built up by their pet mediums, which, so far, has been proven to be nothing beyond a more or less elaborate construction of fiction resting on the slenderest of foundations, or rather, absolutely no foundation.

Houdini’s decision to devote himself entirely to exposing the emergence of a new pagan spiritualism during the final six years of his life was extremely important considering Houdini had risen to the position of the world’s most famous magician and was also president of the Society of American Magicians (from 1917-1926).

As has been already stated in Part 10 of this series, the British Society for Psychical Research and especially the figure of its President Sir William Crookes (member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn alongside Crowley) represented the nerve centre organising a new post-Christian religion dubbed “spiritualism” based upon demonology, magic and all things paranormal.

In 1924, Harry Houdini took note of Sir Crooke’s strange incapacity to discern reality from fraud saying:

Professor Crookes, even after he was knighted, was of a vacillating mind and for some reason seemed to be deficient in rational methods of discovering the truth, or at least disinclined to put them in force outside of his particular line of science. Possibly, one of the convincing proofs to him may have been the “tricks” played on him by Annie Eva Fay.

In his 1924 book and throughout his active years as a debunker of paranormal fraudsters which he began in earnest in 1921 and continued until his untimely 1926 death, Houdini directly confronted leading figures of the British Empire’s occult underground including all leading figures running the British (and American) Societies for Psychical Research, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Hereward Carrington, Sir Oliver Lodge and many more.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Frenemy of Harry Houdini

By the end of World War I, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) had become a controller of America’s spiritualist movement and worked closely with Sir Lodge and William Crookes as manager of the British Society for Psychical Research. Like Sir Crookes, Doyle was also an intimate collaborator of Bram Stoker (vampire populariser, and member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) with whom he co-authored several short stories.

Sir Doyle had become enamoured with Theosophy and spiritualism in the 1880s, becoming a leading propagandist for the British Empire where he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette alongside such leading lights of the empire as Lord Milner, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Henry Cust, Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant.

After creating his character Sherlock Holmes in 1887, Sir Doyle worked closely with Winston Churchill, Claude Dansey and Lord Alfred Milner in South Africa during the Boer War, where Doyle won his knighthood in 1902 for his defense of the British Empire’s genocidal foreign policy. Doyle’s fellow imperial writer Sir Rudyard Kipling also won his knighthood at the same time and for the same reasons. The Pall Mall Gazette, founded in 1865, became the principal mouthpiece for the Cecil Rhodes/Arthur Balfour roundtable group and interfaced closely with the Fabian Society starting in 1885.

In 1912, Sir Doyle found himself deploying trickery to service the “new imperial science” by overseeing an operation that included a Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin centred in Piltdown, England which professed to “discover” the remains of a proto-human skeleton dubbed “The Piltdown Man.” Proven years later to have been a hoax (fusing a dyed human skull with a monkey jaw and carved teeth), the aim of this operation was to fill in the non-existent missing link in fossil records which had embarrassed Darwinists since Thomas Huxley launched the X Club in 1865.

Before and during World War 1, both Doyle and Kipling once again joined H.G. Wells and Henry Cust in the powerful War Propaganda Bureau overseen by Lords Northcliff and Beaverbrook, where the team of imperial creatives put their talents to work generating propaganda to build support for war among British subjects while transforming the image of Germans from cultured neighbours into baby-killing huns.

The British Propaganda Bureau deployed a myriad of techniques of psychological warfare in order to manipulate the minds of the masses towards geopolitical ends desired by the Empire.

After watching Houdini perform a sequence of magic tricks, including mind reading, aparitionism, and levitation, Doyle became enthralled with the magician, believing Houdini to be a practitioner of the dark arts. Despite Houdini’s consistent admissions that every magic trick he performed could be explained using reason, Doyle continued to promote his belief that Houdini was secretly working with spirits.

Don’t Believe Your Senses

Like Sir Crookes, Doyle was a true believer who seemed immune from any attempts to use reason to cast doubt on any paranormal claims, especially photographic evidence of fairies.

At one point, Harry Houdini had asked Doyle to see his collection of spirit photographs (a practice popularised by Sir Crookes in the 1850s), to which Doyle responded:

They are too precious to have lying around… but I have something far more precious – two photos, one of a goblin, the other of four fairies in a Yorkshire wood. A fake! you will say. No, sir, I think not. However, all inquiry will be made. these I am not allowed to send. The fairies are about eight inches high. In one there is a single goblin dancing. In the other four beautiful, luminous creatures. Yes, it is a revelation.

Doyle was so inspired by those fairy pictures, that he even wrote a book called ‘The Coming of the Fairies’ in 1922 promoting these incredible pieces of evidence of a spirit realm beyond.

When the 18-year-old girl who took the fairy pictures (Elsie Wright) admitted to making them using a cutout of a fairy from a popular British children’s book (featuring some of Doyle’s own stories), it created a major embarrassment for Sir Arthur’s credibility and the study of “spirit photographs” more generally.

In ‘A Magician Among Spirits’, Houdini outlined many techniques used by spirit photographers promoted by Doyle saying: 

There are various methods of producing spirit photographs. One is to have a table prepared so that a developing pan is placed where an x-ray penetrates to the negative. This produces a “spirit light.” Another is to fix the flash and it is astonishing what these things look like. You get forms and frequently recognise faces in the splotches … A simple method is to have something concealed in the hand and hold it over the lens instead of a cap, and still another is to get the camera out of focus and snap it secretly, then when the regular exposure is made there is an additional hay something on the plate.

Houdini was renowned for not only debunking fraudsters, but reproducing every single trick including spirit photography, which Houdini mastered in a short time, including his own spirit photographs, telepathy, and aparitionism (making objects appear out of thin air- a technique used by Madame Blavatsky and defended by theosophists to this day).