THE ALEXANDRA AND OTAGO GAZETTE

Otago, New Zealand

16 April 1924

(page 7)

“BLACK MASSES.”

IN SICILIAN CASTLE.

MORE DEVIL WORSHIP.

During the last two years one American college boy has committed suicide by leaping from a cliff into the sea and another, scarcely older, in in an American insane asylum as a result of visits to a Sicilian castle where weird and unnameable rites are alleged to be practised by the "Rosicrucian" cult founded in England before the war.

The Rosicrucian cult is an ancient faith founded on a belief in the healing virtues of blood on a cross.

It is a mystical cult based on a perversion of Christian doctrines.

Some years before the war it was resurrected in London by a young English poet, Allister [sic] Crowley, whom some compared to Swinburne.

Crowley was exposed on several occasions in London, and came to Paris, where police are said to have raided his home and stopped a celebration of "Black Mass," which was going on.

The original Black Mass was founded by insane monks in a German monastery. They built an altar and held services in the regular ritual, but with words "Our Lord, the Devil," substituted for the Deity.

The atrocious cult spread and degenerates for centuries have elaborated on it until now the celebration of the Black Mass is forbidden in every civilized country because of the practices which form part of the ceremony.

Allister Crowley, a handsome man with a silky beard, left Paris, and, being immensely rich, purchased a castle in Sicily.

It is in this castle that Crowley is still alleged to carry on the Rosicrucian cult, to the celebration of which he is said to have added the Black Mass.

Word of lurid parties held in the castle reached Paris when an American woman, well known in the Latin Quarter and in Greenwich Village and who is now in New York, told some of her intimate friends of things she had seen during a visit to the castle.

The incredibility of her tale led to considerable skepticism, but since then some of the facts have been confirmed.

The American woman said that included in house parties at the castle were several Americans comparatively well known in Paris and London, and also one or two sensation-seeking youngsters from American society who had scarcely left college.

In 1920 an American boy, she states, jumped into the sea, but was rescued by a fisherman. The American consult at Palermo arranged for his passage home. He is now said to be under restraint, hopelessly insane. The affair was easily hushed up by the Sicilian authorities and the boy's parents.

A few months later another American is said to have committed suicide by jumping from the high cliff on which the castle is built. This was also hushed up.

These amazing revelations come a few days after the deaths of Baron Jacques d'Adelsward, originator of the modern version of the Black Mass, under suspicious circumstances at Capri.