THE NEWS

Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

5 February 1930

(page 7)

LECTURE ON BLUEBEARD.

Oxford Authorities Object.

(SPECIAL TO "THE NEWS")

LONDON, February 4.

A lecture which Mr. Aleister Crowley proposed to give before the Poetry Society on Gilles de Rais (fifteenth century magician and original Bluebeard) has been cancelled as the authorities objected.

Mr. Crowley stated 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 the lecture was banned," he added, "because Rais said that he ritually murdered 800 children and because of a false accusation that I not only killed but had eaten children.

Mr. Stephenson [P.R. Stephensen], a director of the Mandrake Press and a Queensland Rhodes Scholar is publishing the autogiography [sic] [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley] of Crowley.