THE BIRMINGHAM NEWS

Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.A.

12 October 1924

(page 67)

Hounded by the “Black 12”

for Her Father’s Secrets.

How Rasputin’s Daughter Fled the Bolsheviki

Only to Fall at Last Beneath the Sinister Threats

of Paris’s “Devil Worshippers.”

Maria Gregorievna, beautiful and mysterious, daughter of the terrible Rasputin and believed by many people to have inherited her father’s secret and perhaps diabolical powers, has escaped from the persecutions of the Bolshevists in Siberia—only to suffer a worse persecution here in civilized Paris.

[ . . . ]

By getting Maria Gregorievna into their toils they hoped to be able to wield a power like that of her father, though they seem to have reckoned wrongly, for she sincerely declares that she never had anything to do with his machinations and knows nothing about them.

For awhile it was believed that the notorious and brilliant Aleister Crowley, high priest and leader of a cult of his own, which certain journalists have sought to identify with the Devil-Worshippers, and who is now in Paris, was involved in the efforts to persuade Maria Gregorievna to disclose Rasputin’s secrets, but a fair investigation proved that Crowley had been ill; also that on recovery he had been engaged in writing a huge autobiography, and that he had nothing to do either with the so-called “Black Twelve” or with any of the efforts to extort secrets from Rasputin’s daughter.

She herself has been leading an exemplary and highly respectable life ever since she came to Paris, and bitterly regrets that the notoriety which attached to her father’s name has caused her to be hounded by an organization in which she has no interest, beyond that of fear.

The efforts of various journalists to connect Aleister Crowley with the cult of the Devil Worshipper had their inception in a series of vitriolic attacks published against him two years ago in the London Daily and Sunday Express.

Crowley, at the time was the head and high priest of a colony in Cefalu, Sicily, called the College of the Holy Spirit [Abbey of Thelema]. Strange and fantastic rites were practiced there, and Crowley claimed to possess powers and secrets which bordered on what is generally known as magic. Subsequent investigations have shown, however that neither he nor his cult were in any way connected with the Devil Worshippers and that his own religion had its origin rather in a sort of combination of pure paganism and a deification of humanity. Two phrases from his creed were, “Every man and woman is a star,” and “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

The London Express, badly overshot the mark in its attacks. A young Oxford man by the name of Loveday [Raoul Loveday] died in the colony, and the London paper made sweeping accusations which were completely overturned when legal evidence was submitted to show that the young man died of a perfectly natural ailment which he might have contracted anywhere.

Then the paper charged that Crowley had been convicted and served a jail sentence in the United States for white slavery. Aleister Crowley had a sensational and exciting career in America, at times being acclaimed a brilliant genius by leading American publications, and at other times being denounced as a dangerous charlatan, but the story about his being arrested was an absolute fabrication. At no time was he ever accused of such a crime. As he has just succeeded in exploding those charges, in an elaborately documented public letter [An Open Letter to Lord Beaverbrook] addressed to Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Express, and signed by Norman Mudd, a distinguished Cambridge University scholar and lecturer. Paris is quite prepared to believe him when he says he has nothing whatever to do with the Devil Worshippers of the “Black Twelve,” or the persecution of Maria Gregorievna.

As a matter of fact, the police have certain information which leads them to believe that the ringleaders of that gang are Russians now living in Paris, and who were perhaps associated with Rasputin during his lifetime in the old Czarist days in St. Petersburg.

[ . . . ]