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SUNDAY EXPRESS London, England 26 November 1922
Black Record of Aleister Crowley. Preying on the Debased. His Abbey. Profligacy and Vice in Sicily.
ALEISTER CROWLEY.
The “Sunday Express” last week demanded the suppression of a book, “The Diary of a Drug Fiend,” written by a person called Aleister Crowley.
“At the baser and more bestial horrors of the book it is impossible to hint,” wrote Mr James Douglas.
The publishers state that it is their intention to push sales of this pernicious work.
The “Sunday Express” was determined that the public should be protected, and made the fullest investigation into the career of the author.
These investigations have produced the most astonishing revelations.
The man Aleister Crowley is the organiser for pagan orgies. He engaged in pro-German propaganda during the war.
He published obscene attacks on the King.
He made a dramatic renunciation of his British birth right. He proclaimed himself “King of Ireland.”
He stole money from a woman.
He now conducts an “Abbey [of Thelema]” in Sicily.
He was in London a month ago, unknown to anyone except his small circle of intimates.
This is the man whose latest work is a deliberate symposium of obscenity, blasphemy, and indecency.
MAN OF MANY NAMES.
His picture was painted in 1911 by Augustus John, and this year by Jacob Kramer. The latter picture is now on exhibition in London, entitled, “The Beast 666”—which is how the artist saw him.
The “Sunday Express” in reiterating its demand for the withdrawal from circulation of this volume, feels certain that these revelations will induce the publishers—a firm of high repute—to reconsider their decision.
The following is the full life history and record of this sinister author:—
Aleister—formerly Alistair—Crowley was a notorious character in London before the war. He had several aliases which he used on various occasions, including A. E. Crawley, Count von Zonaref, Alastair McGregor, and Earl of Middlesex.
He was, according to his own statement, born at Leamington on October 12, 1875, and is reported to be the son of a Kentish brewer. He is further stated to have studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1896.
“ISIS WORSHIP.”
Crowley is an author and journalist by profession, and a poet, in spite of the morbidity and perversity of his work, of undoubted accomplishment. His underground activities are less avowable. He came under the notice of the police in 1900, when he stole £200 from a widow with whom he cohabitated; the woman, however, refused to prosecute. According to his own statement, Crowley was exploring in Kashmir in 1902 under the auspices of the Australian Government.
He reappeared in 1903, when he married at Strathpeffer a young widow, Mrs Skerrat, formerly Miss Rose Kelly; he then called himself McGregor of Boleskine. After this Crowley went to Paris, where he celebrated what he called “Isis Worship”. His wife divorced him, and he subsequently married a violinist named Leila Waddell.
The unclean forms of occultism, pursued as a means of making money, have been Crowley’s chief interest from his early days. He has made various unsuccessful efforts to get recognised by the English Freemasons. He organised an association known as the A.A. (Atlantean Adepts.), and later became a member of a Rosicrucian Society, known as the O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis).
His adepts begin every letter and conversation with the greeting, “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the Law” (evidently suggested by Rabelais’ “Fay ce que voudrais”), and end up, “Love is the law, Love under will.”
In 1910 Crowley was holding meetings at the Caxton Hall to witness the performance of the “Rites of Eleusis”; he cultivated an immoral society for the worship of the god Pan; and he organised every kind of evil rite including the “Cult of the Beetle” and the Black Mass.
A PRO-GERMAN.
The outbreak of war put an end to Crowley’s activities in England. In November 1914 Crowley went to the United States, where he entered into close relations with the pro-German propagandists. He edited the New York “International”, a German propagandist paper run by the notorious George Sylvester Viereck, and published, among other things, an obscene attack on the King and a glorification of the Kaiser. Crowley ran occultism as a side line, and seems to have been known as the “Purple Priest.” Later on he publicly destroyed his British passport before the Statue of Liberty, declared in favour of the Irish Republican cause, and made a theatrical declaration of “war” on England. According to another version of this story he proclaimed himself at the same time “King of Ireland.”
---AND REVOLUTIONARY.
During his stay in America Crowley was associated with a body known as the “Secret Revolutionary Committee,” which was working for the establishment of an Irish Republic. He is known also as the writer of a defeatist manifesto circulated in France in 1915.
Crowley arrived in France at the beginning of 1920, and subsequently went to Cefalu, Sicily. Here he was head of a community of kindred spirits established at the Villa Santa Barbara, re-named by them “Ad Spiritum Sanctum.” Free sexual intercourse seems to have been one of their tenets.
HIS BOOKS.
Crowley came back to London this year, and settled himself in Chelsea. He goes about garbed usually in a tartan kilt and wearing a black glengarry cap.
Crowley is the author of numerous books, both in verse and prose. Some of these works have typical titles, such as “Alice—An Adultery,” “Jezebel,” “The God Hater [sic],” “Rosa Inferni.” At one time he was running a bulky magazine called the “Equinox,” addressed to his adepts and embellished with cabalistic signs and photographs from the nude in very doubtful taste.
His portrait was painted in 1911 by Augustus John.
CROWLEY’S LAST LONDON VISIT. “UNSPEAKABLY VILE” PICTURES.
The “Sunday Express” is able to give the following details of his recent visit to London. Shortly after his arrival he wrote to his wife of an old acquaintance of his, asking if he might call, and mentioning that the people with whom he was staying in Chelsea were “most uncultured and unsympathetic.”
In this way he secured an invitation to the house of a woman who was not at all aware of the character of her guest.
DREADFUL VICES.
“I thought,” she said to a “Sunday Express” representative in her home in a fashionable quarter, “that Crowley was simply expounding a theory based on the necessity of one’s knowing oneself well. Even now, I do not understand all his ideas, but I realized how objectionable they must be by a series of pictures he put up in his room. Unspeakable vile things, depicting antique orgies and dreadful vices. He gave a couple of lectures in my house, but I was out on both occasions. He sent out his invitations in the name of ‘The Master Therion.’
“Young Jacob Kramer, a very clever Russian artist, met Crowley here. We asked him to do a portrait of him. He consented, until he had a conversation with Crowley, which so revolted him that he refused for a long time to have any further dealings with him. Finally we persuaded him, and Kramer, in one sitting, completed the picture which is now being exhibited at the Groupil Galleries under the title of ‘The Beast 666.’
“THE BEAST 666.”—Mr. Jacob Kramer’s picture of Aleister Crowley, the author, now being exhibited at the Groupil Gallery.
“Kramer, I must add, declares that he paints purely by the senses, and this picture is Crowley as he sees him.
A HURRIED DEPARTURE.
“Crowley is not only vicious; he is also—shall I say, careless in money matters. He borrowed money from me while he was staying here. It was a sum heavy enough to embarrass me, and he gave me a promissory note, and also undertook to repay me before his departure. But he did not do so.
“I went away for a few days; the man’s presence made my own home intolerable to me. In my absence he had an intimation through some source that the police authorities knew of his presence. He at once packed up and went. I understand that he stayed a few nights at a Turkish bath establishment in the West End before leaving the country.”
BESTIAL ORGIES IN SICILY. CAKES OF GOAT’S BLOOD AND HONEY.
The story of the bestial orgies conducted by Aleister Crowley in Sicily sounds like the ravings of a criminal lunatic, made mad by his own depravity, and was related yesterday to a “Sunday Express” representative by a woman [Betty May] who has just returned from this place to London.
The orgies are carried on as mystic religious rites in an old farmhouse near the village of Cefalu, in Sicily.
The main room of the house is windowless, with a flagged stone floor. On the floor is painted a great orange circle, lined with pale yellow. Inside the circle are interlaced black triangles. The room is lighted by candles.
BURNT INCENSE.
A tripod, upheld by three little fauns, burns incense made of burnt goats’ blood and honey. In a cupboard are heaps of little cakes, all made of goats’ blood, honey, and grain, some raw, and some baked. The raw ones, gone bad, fill the room with their stench.
In this room are carried on unspeakable orgies, impossible of description. Suffice it to say that they are horrible beyond the misgivings of decent people.
Many women come to Cefalu, all with money, for whatever else Crowley may demand of them, money is his primary need. It takes money to supply him with the drugs he uses incessantly, the hasheesh, cocaine, heroin, opium, morphine, every drug known from the Orient to the Occident.
WOMEN VICTIMS.
Three women he keeps there permanently for his orgies. All of them he brought from America two or three years ago. One is a French-American governess [Ninette Shumway], one an ex-schoolmistress [Leah Hirsig], and one a cinema actress from Los Angeles [Jane Wolfe].
Whenever he needs money, and cannot get it from fresh victims, he sends them on the streets of Palermo on Naples to earn it for him. He served once a prison sentence in America on procuring young girls for a similar purpose.
The French-American governess has two children (of which he is the father), who live in the midst of this debauchery. The children of the schoolmistress by him are dead.
Crowley himself, a clever talker, with no little personal magnetism, spends his time smoking opium in a room which is really a gallery of obscene pictures gathered from all over the world.
He bases his “religion” on a few texts gleaned from Pythagoras, which he quotes persuasively when trying to attack a new victim.
But the real facts of his system are much simpler than that. They go down to the lowest depths that human depravity can reach.
PREVIOUS BOOKS. “BLASPHEMY, FILTH, AND NONSENSE.”
What is the literary record of Mr. Crowley?
Mr. Aleister Crowley is the author of a number of books, many of them printed privately. His work, considered as a whole, is a blend of blasphemy, filth, and nonsense. The nonsense is flavoured with mysticism. A very small knowledge of pathology enables one to label him as a well-known type.
As an example of his ideas, one may take the dedication to “Why Jesus Wept”: “To any unborn child, who may learn by the study of this drama to avow the good and choose the evil, i.e. be judged by Western or Christian standards.”
REVOLTING POEMS.
The numerous allusions to a kind of vague Buddhistic mysticism are clothed in sensuality. Most of the poems are pornographic, many of them revolting, and all of them the product of a diseased mind and a debased character.
In the middle of a long poem called “Alice: an Adultery,” there appears this notice: “The editor regrets that he is unable to publish this verse.” The titles of his books are, for the most part, either biblical or sexual: “Jephthah,” “Jezebel,” “Aceldama,” “The Honourable Adulterers.”
Through all his work runs a loathing of Christianity, and he pays Mr. G. K. Chesterton the compliment of a personal attack on him, as one of the last champions of that outworn creed.
He has written on ceremonial magic and on the state known as “Ecstasy,” which relieved one from the dullness and monotony of a normal life. “My misses is pregnant with mad moons and suns,” he writes in one place.
All the time he is obsessed with sex and sexual images.
A large number of his books are printed privately—some of them in Paris. They are either incomprehensible or disgusting—generally both. His language is the language of a pervert, and his ideas are negligible. |
