THE RECORDER

Port Pirie, South Australia, Australia

5 February 1930

(page 2)

A Lecture Banned

On Original Bluebeard.

LONDON, Tuesday.

Prof. Aleister Crowley's lecture at the Oxford Poetry Society on Gilles de Rais, a 15th Century magician, and the original Bluebeard has been cancelled by the secretary, who stated that the authorities had banned it. Prof. Crowley told "The Guardian" that he believed the trouble to be due to a report that he was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the death in Sicily of his secretary, Raoul Loveday, an Oxford undergraduate. "Perhaps it was banned because Rais was said to have ritually murdered 800 children. A false accusation has been made that he had not only killed, but had eaten children."

Mr. Stephenson [P.R. Stephensen], Director of the Mandrake Press, and a Queensland Rhodes Scholar, is publishing Prof. Crowley's autobiography [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley].