THE DAILY NEWS

Perth, Western Australia, Australia

5 February 1930

(page 1)

BAN ON LECTURER.

Bluebeard’s Baby-Killing.

OXFORD SOCIETY’S ACT.

(Special to “The Daily News”)

Mr. Aleister Crowley's lecture to the Oxford Poetry Society on Gilles de Rais, the 15th century magician and original “Bluebeard,” has been cancelled.

His secretary [Israel Regardie], who stated that the authorities had banned Mr. Crowley, told a “Manchester Guardian” representative that he believed the trouble was due to a report that he was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the death in Sicily of his secretary, Mr. Raoul Loveday, an Oxford undergraduate. “Perhaps he was banned because Rais was said to have ritually murdered 800 children. A false accusation has been made that I have not only killed, but have eaten children.”

Mr. Stephenson [P.R. Stephensen], director of the Mandrake Press, and a Queensland Rhodes scholar, is publishing Mr. Crowley’s autobiography [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley].