General-Major John Frederick Charles Fuller died 51 years ago today at Cornwall. Not unlike Jack Parsons, he bears the unique distinction of major achievements recognized by mainstream society and the occult community. He distinguished himself in the British military both in service and as a theorist and wrote extensively on innovative tactics of warfare that were unfortunately overlooked by Great Britain and deployed to great success by the Germans during World War II. He was also a founder member of Aleister Crowley’s magical order the A.’.A.’. – basically at the same time as he was a respected and powerful figure in the military.
According to Britannica:
“Commissioned into the British Army in 1899, Fuller saw service in the South African War and was a staff officer in France during World War I. As chief of staff of the British tank corps from December 1916, he planned the surprise attack of 381 tanks at the Battle of Cambrai on November 20, 1917; this was the first massed tank assault in the history of warfare. After the war he launched a crusade for the mechanization and modernization of the British army. Chief instructor of Camberly Staff College from 1923, he became military assistant to the chief of the imperial general staff in 1926. He was promoted to major general in 1930 and retired three years later to devote himself entirely to writing.
“Throughout the interwar period, Fuller wrote voluminously, his most notable works being Tanks in the Great War (1920), The Reformation of War (1923), On Future Warfare (1928), and Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier (1936). His lectures (Field Service Regulations III, 1937) were adopted for study by the general staffs of the German, Soviet, and Czechoslovak armies. But in glorifying the tank as an almost independent and irresistible land battleship, Fuller was considered extreme, and his emphasis on the armoured offensive alienated English military tacticians who were still imbued with the defensive doctrines of World War I.”
Read the entire piece here: https://www.britannica.com/biography/J-F-C-Fuller
Meanwhile, Wikipedia notes:
Fuller had an occultist side that oddly mixed with his military side. He was an early disciple of English poet and magician Aleister Crowley, and was very familiar with his and other forms of magick and mysticism. While serving in the First Oxfordshire Light Infantry he had entered and won a contest to write the best review of Crowley’s poetic works, after which it turned out that he was the only entrant. This essay was later published in book form in 1907 as The Star in the West. After this he became an enthusiastic supporter of Crowley, joining his magical order, the A∴A∴., within which he became a leading member, editing order documents and its journal, The Equinox. During this period he wrote The Treasure House of Images, edited early sections of Crowley’s magical autobiography The Temple of Solomon the King and produced highly regarded paintings dealing with A∴A∴ teachings: these paintings have been used in recent years as the covers of the journal’s revival, The Equinox, Volume IV.[21][22]
After the Jones vs. The Looking Glass case, in which a great deal was made of Aleister Crowley’s bisexuality (although Crowley himself was not a party to the case), Fuller became worried that his association with Crowley might be a hindrance to his career. Crowley writes in chapter 67 of his book, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley:
…to my breathless amazement he fired pointblank at my head a document in which he agreed to continue his co-operation on condition that I refrain from mentioning his name in public or private under penalty of paying him a hundred pounds for each such offence. I sat down and poured in a broadside at close quarters.
“My dear man,” I said in effect, “do recover your sense of proportion, to say nothing of your sense of humour. Your contribution, indeed! I can do in two days what takes you six months, and my real reason for ever printing your work at all is my friendship for you. I wanted to give you a leg up the literary ladder. I have taken endless pain to teach you the first principles of writing. When I met you, you were not so much as a fifth-rate journalist, and now you can write quite good prose with no more than my blue pencil through two out of every three adjectives, and five out of every six commas. Another three years with me and I will make you a master, but please don’t think that either I or the Work depend on you, any more than J.P. Morgan depends on his favourite clerk.”[23]
After this, contact between the two men faded rapidly. The front pages of the 1913 issues of the Equinox (Volume 1, nos. 9 and 10), which gave general directions to A∴A∴ members, included a notice on the subject of Fuller, who was described as a “former Probationer”;[24] the notice disparaged Fuller’s magical accomplishments and warned A∴A∴ members to accept no magical training from him. However, Fuller continued to be fascinated with occult subjects and in later years he would write about topics such as the Qabalah and yoga.
read the entire article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._F._C._Fuller
