THE BROOKLYN CITIZEN

Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.

27 January 1924

(page 15)

Aleister Crowley, Mystic,

Describes Eva Tanquay.

Eva Tanquay—incarnation of the restless amusement energy and explosive projection of personality so dear to the music hall—will headline once again at the Orpheum Theatre this coming week. Eva is back in Keith vaudeville and in her inquiet, her agitated art, her violent originalities are more pronounced than ever. She has richened her unique methods, intensified her amazing bizarrerie in choice of material and, withal, and not least important, has regained her girlhood silhouette and bidden all evidence of care and tense years in vaudeville to be gone from her so expressive face.

Aleister Crowley, mystic, diabolist, cabalist, astrologer, and conferee with the shades of Paracelcus, Count Cagliostro and Rene, the Florentine poisoner to Marie De Medici, saw Eva Tanquay before going to Europe and was kindled to an ecstasy that Arthur Machen might envy. Crowley, who revives ancient cults and murmurs the incantations of the priests of Ishtar and Thammuz, saw in Miss Tanquay the incarnation of the Dionysiac ideal and wrote, in part”

“Eva Tanquay! It is the name which echoed in the universe when the sons of the morning sang together and shouted for joy, and the stars cried aloud in their courses! I have no words to hymn for glory, nay, nor if I were Shelley and Swinburne and myself in one—I must write of her in cold prose, for any art of mine would be but a challenge. I rather make my passive and still, that her divine radiance may be free to illumine the theme. Voco! Per nomen nefandum voco. Te voco! Eva veni!

“Eva Tanquay is the soul of America as its most desperate eagle-flight. Her spirit is tense and quivering, like the violin of Paganini in its agony, or like an arrow of Artemis—it is my soul that she hath pierced!”