Good versus evil: Downplayed, or overplayed?

[The Saucepan Man]

I believe that one of the Inklings (Thomas?) belonged to another organisation that Crowley briefly was involved in. That's as far as the association went.

I thought as much. I did a google search on "Crowley and Inklings" and could find nothing to connect them, save that this Inkling Handbook has a reference to Crowley. Oh, and apparently there's some novel which has the heroic Inklings taking on the despicable Crowley.

Crowley is certainly a notorious figure and was most definately an occultist (a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) and a practitioner in mysticism, so (even though I do not believe some of the more ludicrous and extreme claims about him) I would have been surprised if he had ever been on anything approaching talking terms with Tolkien.