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THE TIMES COLONIST Victoria, British Columbia, Canada 6 December 1952 (page 11)
LONDON WITH LID OFF.
Girls Worship Satan in Secret Temples.
Diabolical Rites Show Black Magic Exists in the Heart of London.
By Ex-Detective Superintendent Robert Fabian.
I know that black magic exists because I have seen it. The practice of diabolical sacrilegious rites in the heart of London is undoubtedly on the increase.
And the Satan worship which goes on today is a survival of the Dark Ages when witches were publicly burned on Tower Hill.
When Scotland Yard was asked to help the Finnish police to investigate an outbreak of black magic at Helsinki, which had resulted in more than 40 corpses being stolen from the mortuary and mutilated, the black magic books found on the culprits were discovered to have been printed in London.
And when Aleister Crowley (The Beast 666) died near Brighton the rites of Pan were solemnly used instead of a Christian funeral service.
The thirteenth day of December, the thirteenth day before Christmas, is a big day for evil men and women in London. They congregate at midnight in the secret temples of South Kensington, Paddington—and, I believe, Bloomsbury, too—men and women gather every full moon to worship Satan with ritual and sacrifice that would shame an African savage!
DANCING TO EVIL DRUMS.
Some firmly believe the world is a battle-ground between God and Satan, and if they declare themselves with the Devil, he will aid their success in life, and even a certain amount of comfort in Hell, with the chance of being reborn periodically as leaders of earthly wickedness.
Others—probably the majority—attend a Black Mass to get a cheap thrill. They have heard of obscene ceremonies—half-naked girl "priestesses," blood sacrifices of cats and goats, and unholy ritual dances to the rhythm of drums.
They do not realise—until it is too late—that in these temples of Satan, brain-stealing, herbal incenses and hypnotic devices are mercilessly used, until the man or girl who came just to stare and giggle may find themselves trapped.
On the files of Scotland Yard is one case of a girl, aged 21, who went with her mother to a lecture on Satanism. She was invited to a garden party at the house of a woman calling herself a "High Priestess," who persuaded the girl to sing a "magical invocation," in the process of which the girl was successfully hypnotised.
She did not return home for months. When, with the help of the Yard, her parents finally recovered her, the girl had been hypnotised and exposed to occult obscenities so persistently that she was almost insane.
It took two years to restore her mind.
There was no prosecution, because there was no evidence. The girl had been "willed" to forget how it had happened.
The door to black magic is through the back offices of certain London bookshops that specialise in volumes on the occult diabolism, alchemy. Satan worshippers also get their new victims among likely-looking students at lectures on spiritualism, necromancy, tribal rites.
TEMPLE WHERE SIN IS KING.
There is a house in Bayswater that consists of one-room flatlets. The landlord and his wife occupy the ground floor and basement. Each room has a covered wash-bowl, a rather dispirited bed, a slot-meter gas-fire, rickety table and two wooden chairs.
The landlord's wife dabbles in spiritualism, sometimes holds private séances. Her husband is an amateur herbalist. Their flatlets are seldom taken for more than a few days. They are too dingy and untended to be comfortable. Guests come and go.
Among them come and go the Satanists. Down in the cellar is a small door-way—probably at one time it was a fireplace. It leads to the cellars of the house whose walls adjoin it. The front door of this house faces upon an entirely different street. It is privately owned, and from its cellar, stairs go to an old-fashioned service lift-shaft, up which a spiral metal staircase ascends and stops at a sliding door, padded with black felt.
Beyond this door is a private Temple of Satanism.
DIVANS AND A FOUL IDOL.
Note how subtly the approach has been designed to be eerie and furtive. You go in at one house, down into the cellar, through the narrow hole in the wall, up twisting stairs through almost utter blackness, open a sliding black sound-proof door—and you are suddenly in a large room, sickly with odors from two tall brass braziers. The room is lit dimly by wick lamps that burn a dark green fat which smells abominable, and seems to have some stupefying power.
I think the acrid smell conceals the fact that the "temple" is probably densely sprayed with ether or chloroform.
At one end of the long room is an altar, exactly as in a small church—except that the altar candles are black wax, and the crucifix is head downwards.
There are no seats. Around the walls are low divans. Alongside each, burns a saucer of dried herbs. Symbols of wizardry are daubed on cloths that completely cover the walls. Pentagrams and sigils (supposed to be the magic signs of devils) are on the low ceiling.
On the left of this altar is a black African idol—the ju-ju, obviously, of some heathen fertility rite. It is nearly five feet high, squat, repulsive and burnished by the flesh of ecstatic worshippers.
The horrible cleverness of all this is that—at a cost of probably less than £300—the black magic disciples have set their stage to capture not merely the adolescent instinct that is in most of us for "secret societies"—but also the adult hunger for some strong religious impulse, and the immemorial superstitious fear of "devils."
The Black Mass—they call it "Mass of Saint Secaire"—is a close parody of the Holy Eucharist, with chants and responses fervently intoned in Latin. It is performed at midnight.
The priest wears only his canonical robes. His clerk is a woman—her dress outwardly an ordinary church garment, but altered in a fashion I do not intend to describe.
When the wafers and the wine (which has been adulterated with "magical drugs" like vervaine) have been consecrated, they are then blasphemed and defiled. The "worshippers" believe these filthy fragments, concealed in lockets or mixed with wax to make little images, possess the power to invoke a curse upon their enemies.
GIRLS BOUND TO ALTAR.
This ceremony of Black Mass is—compared with some—almost decorous. There is a witchcraft ritual in which young girls or susceptible boys are dedicated to Pan, that is indescribable.
It is followed by a "fertility ceremony;" involving the African idol.
There is also a "Rite of Abramelin"—supposedly to raise devils—that requires a girl to be bound to the replica of the church altar.
There are a growing number of "psychic circles" that begin with harmless spiritualism, and gradually seduce the more hysterical and neurotic members towards Satanism.
The difficulty of the police is that, in England, it has never been their duty to suppress religious sects. Nor can they easily get "spies" into the black magic orgies. For the initiates are cleverly taken, step by step, through various stages of ritual. Only by co-operating whole-heartedly in the early, trivial obscenities can they win their way into the more vile ceremonies.
Evidence from such witnesses could be made to seem dangerously like that of an "agent provocateur."
Watch the local newspapers. You may see the signs of witchcraft—reports of robberies of churches where coins in the poor-box are left untouched, but Holy Eucharist wafers and wine are stolen.
The more frantic disciples of Satanism believe that only an apostate priest can consecrate the bread and wine. Unless they can bribe some renegade to perform their travesty of a Mass, they steal the Holy Eucharist to defile in their private ceremonies.
They drive miles out into the country to make these thefts from lonely little churches. One was at Yarcombe, Devon, where the horrified vicar found actual remnants of a Black Mass in his church—black candles burned down, the amputated paw of a white kitten on the altar, the prayer book disfigured and 12 stone crosses turned upside down.
The serious view the Church takes may be judged from this—that such churches are always at once re-consecrated, just like new buildings.
So, if you have a friend who dabbles in the occult, and who offers, laughingly, to take you to see a ceremony of Black Mass performed—don’t go.
The laugh may be on you! It will be a Satanic chuckle. |