THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN

London, England

4 February 1930

(page 10)

TIMID OXFORD

As is only fitting, Oxford undergraduates are more adventurous than Oxford dons. The Oxford Poetry Society, a typically worthy undergraduate club, decided to venture on strange fields by listening to a lecture by Mr. Aleister Crowley on Gilles de Rais, a fifteenth-century magician known to history as the companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc and children as the celebrated Bluebeard. The dons, however, took alarm, and so Mr. Crowley has had to stay behind in Kent, leaving, one imagines, his inquiring young disciples to the less exciting delights of a paper on Wordsworth, or, perhaps, even on the metrical basis of Alexander Pope's verse, But perhaps the young men were not really so much adventurous as foolhardy, for, according to Mr. Crowley's statement to a reporter. Gilles de Rais seems to have been a man of whom the worst might be believed. Mr. Crowley, however, seems to think that possibly the ban on his lecture may have been caused not so much by the horror of the tale he had to tell as by a possible confusion in the Vice Chancellor's mind between the lecturer and the subject of his lecture, for he tells us: "The accusation that I have not only killed but eaten children is one of the many false statements that have been circulated about me." The story he had to tell was gruesome enough. De Rais was accused of having killed 800 children in ritual murder, and all that can be said in his defence is that the ecclesiastical court which tried and excommunicated him knew of only 140 cases. Perhaps, however, after all, Mr. Crowley was only proposing to talk about Rais as the patron and part-author of the "Mystère de la Passion," or the "Mystery of Orleans." In that case it would be a pity to deprive the young men of so much erudition.