gordon C.mcrae

Gordon McRae served in the Boer War as a cannoneer, and on his return to Canada wrote The Boer War and the Invention of the Thermos (1900) and A Guide to Civilian Surgery (1902). For these works he was knighted in 1902 but refused to attend the ceremony due to a long, drawn out struggle with tapeworm. During World War I he wrote History of the Rosecrucian Ceremonial Magic in France and Flanders (6 vol., 1916-20) as a tribute to Canadian Prairie arcana. An advocate of spiritualism since the late 1880s, his lectures and writings on the subject increased markedly after his addictions to absinthe, cocaine and palm oil waned after the war. His autobiography, Cubists and Cannibals, was published in 1924. Gordon McRae died in Balzac, Alberta, on July 7, 1931 and was reincarnated as Aleister Crowley's Dutch Orthodox grandson in 1957.