THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

16 April 1934

(page 6)

VOODOO AND OTHER CULTS.

“Post-War” minds in all countries have been aberrant into a thousand forms of the grotesque; and whether they are in search of new philosophies, or only new perversions, is not readily determined by ordinary persons, contented with the conventions made “classic” by acceptance through many centuries.

Australia in this regard is a place of regular respectability. Nobody in this country founds a Society to worship either Saxon deities or the aboriginal debbil-debbil. The gospel of “Nackt-Kultur” perished here almost as soon as it was proclaimed.

The later novels of Compton Mackenzie could not have been written in Australia; and, among our few “modernist” poets, the one modernist quality which they conspicuously possess is merely their resolute incomprehensibility.

Apostles of contemporary cults (whether in religion, in art, or simply in vice) would therefore say that Australia is crude; but there is another way of looking at it. It may be that the Australians remain too healthy to suffer from atavisms.

It would be difficult to find any Australian so lacking in the sanity of disinfectant humor as to establish a Temple for devil-worship, with the rite of drinking a cat’s blood. Voodoo is an interesting subject of study for ethnologists and psychologists; but to get a thrill out of practising it seems a ridiculous rather than unholy desire.

Nearly all the people who call themselves “Now” have the habit of harking a long way back in order to prove their newness. Thus, the Neo-Pagans in Germany revert to Thor, and for the origins of Neo-Satanism you may consult the novels of James Branch Cabell. Indeed, Cabell revives the story of black-magic with such relish that often he seems to be at heart more a Satanist than a satirist.

Such “revelations” as in the lawsuit, brought by the poet Aleister Crowley against the authoress Nina Hamnett, appear to Australian readers to be utterly remote from reality; but groups of people in Europe are actually living those blow-fly lives with proselytes or enemies to write best-seller novels about them.

If it be barbarian to lack specialties of perversion, revived from the Dark Ages or from Imperial Rome, Australia need not mind.

On the whole we would prefer our Mr. Cresswell O’Reilly to their Aleister Crowley.