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JOHN BULL London, England 30 August 1924 (page 9)
A Human Beast Returns.
We have sad so many things about Aleister Crowley, the Beast, the past-master of every form of esoteric vice, that we should have thought he would hide his diminished head in some obscure foreign city, and shun the shores of the native land he has disgraced.
We entirely under-estimated the shamelessness and audacity of the Beast. He is once more in this country, once more haunting the West End of London, and, we need not doubt, once more seeking fresh victims to waylay and plunder.
How did he get into this country? In the circles of the vicious and depraved that he frequents, stories are going round that he got here on a false passport; and that he had the impudence to pose as a well-known British peer.
The Home Office should certainly look into this, for it is a serious responsibility to allow a degenerate like Crowley into this country. We can inform the authorities that he is at present staying in a hotel in the Tottenham Court Road district, and they ought to have no difficulty in tracing him.
Crowley is a notorious perverter of youth and innocence. He organises indecent revels for men and women, and even brings children into his shameless orgies. A young Oxford graduate died in the Abbey at Cephalu, under mysterious circumstances. His wife subsequently fell under Crowley’s influence, and she has been quite unable to shake it off.
It is probable that Crowley will meet, while he is London, that equally notable pervert who calls himself Dr. Ramanandah Ommah, who has a fine house in Kensington Gardens which he pollutes by his presence and practices. Some years ago this nasty Persian impostor was sent to jail for an offence against a young boy. He is apparently incorrigible. He contrives to frequent the society of young boys, and we have a series of complaints of his vicious conduct. He is assisted in his home by a woman named Sister Monica, who, when the Prince (as he was called) was in jail for eighteen months, gave out that he had gone home to Persia or India to settle his affairs. She met him when he came out of jail and escorted him to Kensington Gardens, where he now carries on a boarding-house.
So notorious is his predilection for the society of young boys that the neighbours chalked on the pavement outside the house the legend: “The Abode of Love,” and the Prince actually went to the police about it. They did not offer him much sympathy. They knew too much.
Crowley uses women, because they are financially useful to him. So does the Prince. He is interested in a business called Cernoline, Ltd., of 21, Golden Square, Piccadilly. It deals in cosmetics and things like that, and he obtained control of it by imposing on a woman. Cernoline, Ltd., is not registered at Somerset House, which is an offence; so that the police can get in touch with the preposterous Prince on this score if on no other.
With men like Crowley and Ommah in the West End of London, the possibilities of luring unsuspecting people into compromising positions are greatly enhanced.
When he was last here, Crowley used to give lectures on “Free Love” in the house of a titled woman in the West End. His slogan was “Love whom you will, when you will and how you will,” and it was his speciality to explain the inferiority of sexual love as known to ordinary and normal people to the system he had invented and recommended.
Crowley likes especially to cultivate the society of young men from the Universities. To them he talks of art and of the ways of the ancient Roman and Greek philosophers and especially of the school of the hedonists, or those who believe that the highest good in life is to be obtained in the pursuit of pleasure.
One of the side-lines of the Crowley philosophy is the sale of drugs. He professes to be able to teach people how to use drugs without harm, drugs which deaden moral sensibility, inflame the passions, and heighten the pleasures that are offered in the Crowley school Of vice-culture.
The police can get on his track in this way, and that should form an adequate excuse for coping with him.
Neither Ramanandah Ommah nor Crowley are wanted in this country, and in the interests of common decency and public policy it ought to be made impossible for them to exercise their baleful influence here and stain the reputation of London by arranging for profitable abominations that would disgrace a monkey-house. |