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THE SAN DIEGO UNION San Diego, California, U.S.A. 7 March 1926 (pages 95-96)
CONFESSIONS OF A “HIGH PRIESTESS.”
AMERICA’S NOTORIOUS “LOVE CULTS.” Chapter I
BY
By the Queen of New York’s Society “Bee Harem” and Sister of Aleister Crowley’s “Scarlet Soul” Girl, Who Reveals the Inner Secrets of Weird Rites Practiced by Cranks, Clairvoyants and the Dupes the World Over Including Fresh Facts on Dowieism, the Omnipotent Oom’s Colony of Bluebloods, Charles Garland’s “April Farm” and the Black Mass Mystics of Europe.
"THE BEAST OF APOCALYPSE." Aleister Crowley, Poet, “Prophet” and Devil-Worshipper, Secrets of Whose Cult Mrs. Dockerill Will Reveal.
From time to time—usually through the police or courts—fragmentary stories come to light of weird, mysterious “love cults,” astounding pagan orgies, secret rites and societies, devil worship, fantastic religions, occult Oriental temples.
People know, of course, that such groups do exist.
But the real, amazing truth has never come out in its totality.
Not only in the city of New York—a hotbed of such practices—but scattered throughout practically all of the states of the union and in all the capitals of Europe, secret societies and organizations flourish today, usually using the impudent word “religion,” devoted not only to free love, but to the revival and actual practice of all the diabolical and fearful rites of ancient paganism, medieval witchcraft and black magic.
Side by side with them flourish less sinister but equally fantastic “new thought” societies, spiritist and clairvoyant cults, crank colonies.
Not all of them are evil. Their leaders include every type from pure, misguided idealists to neurotic monsters—from priests who teach the harmless, even noble, doctrines of genuine Yoga and Buddha and Brahma—to evil men of supernormal powers who have really learned and practice the dangerous “magic” of the Orient without having absorbed with it the sheer nobility of their teachers.
They include harmless “cracked” saints who love humanity, and scoundrels, blackmailers, thieves, murderers and appalling fiends.
I have set for myself in these articles no less a task than to tell the truth about them all.
Who am I to dare such a task? How have I learned such secrets? What weight will my words carry?
I propose to establish my identity and authority at the outset—keeping back nothing.
I propose to make of this not only a record, but a real confession.
I myself have been intimately associated with most of the events and people I propose to describe. I shall admit things about myself, for the sake of frank truth, that few women would have the courage to admit. But I have been schooled as few women in all this world.
I am going to tell you, later in this chapter, the amazing inside story of Dr. W. R. C. Latson and his “Bee Harem” love cult on fashionable Riverside Drive. How can I tell the inside story? Out with it! I was, for a time, the “queen” of that harem.
I am going to tell you things that have never been told of the brilliant, notorious, internationally famous Aleister Crowley, whose drug orgies, devil worship and pagan rites stirred New York and London as nothing else has done in this generation. What right and authority have I for that? Only that Lea Hirsig [Leah Hirsig], the famous “Dead Soul,” “Scarlet Girl” and high priestess of his cult, is—my own sister!
SAVED FROM DEVIL WORSHIPPERS. Precocious Little Hansie, Son of Lea Hirsig, “Scarlet Soul” Girl, Whom Aleister Crowley, the Black Magic Mystic, Branded—Shown Here with His Aunt, the Author of These Revelations.
I was born Marian Hirsig. I saw my sister Lea, a quiet school teacher in the Bronx, succumb to the weird fascination of Crowley, “The Beast of the Apocalypse.” I was with her on the first night she ever visited his big studio, at No. I University Place, in Greenwich Village. I was there on many successive nights. I helped bandage her wounds after he had branded on her chest with a red-hot dagger the circle and the star that marked her forever as his chattel. It was to my house in New York that her little boy, Hansie, was brought from Crowley’s “Holy Abbey of Theleme,” [Abbey of Thelema] in Sicily. NOW do you think I have the right to speak?
Let us go further back to scenes less sinister. . . .
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