THE ARIZONA REPUBLICAN

Phoenix, Arizona, U.S.A.

16 January 1916

(page 4)

AN ESTIMATE OF WOMEN.

We would not ruffle the feelings of our women readers at this time and disturb their attunement to a Sabbath morning calm, but we have just come across something that we think they ought to know: the views of Aleister Crowley on women in general. We know little of Mr. Crowley, except that he is a rather rabid German sympathizer. We suspect that he is of Irish extraction, on one side, at least, but that is no reason why his expression of his view should not put him “in Dutch” with the women of every race and every land and of all time, or why they should not hate him even in German, and mingle with their prayers today a variant of Lissauer’s Hymn of Hate—Gott strafe Crowley.

In the current Independent Mr. Crowley has an article, “The Crime of Edith Cavell,” the English nurse who was executed in Belgium for assisting Belgian and British prisoners to escape. He compares her act with the crimes of Locusta, Canidia, Catherine de Medici and Brinvilliers, who he says must have “bowed them joyously to welcome her (Miss Cavell) to hell.” Mr. Crowley recalls Mordaunt, the fiendish son of the fiendish Milady in “Twenty Years After,” whose father plunged into the sea to rescue him from a death that he deserved ten thousand times and was stabbed by the viperine creature. The Mordaunt, as a monk, murdered the wounded man who had called him to confess him.

We introduce this seemingly irrelevant matter, and wander apparently widely, but our purpose is to whet the curiosity of our lady readers regarding the enormity of Crowley against them, and in order that they may prepare themselves for his general and wanton attack upon women. As to the crime of Miss Cavell, he thinks, of course, that she was properly punished and is well out of the way as are all noxious creatures. But she was, like a rattlesnake, not morally responsible. And the he adds:

“Women, with rare exceptions, are not (responsible). They are not soul, but only sex; they have no morals, only moods. It is useless to punish them and very difficult to guard against them. You can prevent a man from harming you, as a rule, because you know what he is going to do: you cannot so prevent a woman: because she does not know what she is going to do herself. It is this consideration and only this which prevents our ranking the actions of Edith Cavell as constitutionally one of the most loathsome and abominable crimes in the history of the planet.”

We would not say that Mr. Crowley is a woman hater, for a woman hater, aside from his single idiosyncrasy, may be a very estimable sort of person; he may not actually hate women, but only distrust them. But we think that Mr. Crowley is a brute and we apologize to all four-legged brutes for this classification of him.