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THE SUNDAY EXPRESS London, England 15 September 1957 (page 6)
A Strange Bright Light Brought Faith to a Cynic
The Beast Aleister Crowley
This is a story of evil and faith. It begins in Oxford in the ‘twenties, when fashionable young men threw out God and filled the void with Freud. It ends just a few months ago with a miracle in a big Victorian house in Surrey.
It is the story of three remarkable men: the Author, the Beast, and the Saint.
Let us examine THE AUTHOR first.
He is the man who lives in that Surrey house. His name: Arthur Calder-Marshall.
Fortune
Calder-Marshall’s books have always pleased the critics. But none of them had ever quite got into the headlines until six years back. That was when Arthur—in a book called The Magic of My Youth—first wrote about his visit to the Beast.
THE BEAST? Well, he of course was Aleister Crowley, the only authentic Beast that the British Isles ever produced.
Look back over his career.
The Beast inherited a fortune from his pious parents and, having spent it in a lifetime of Black Magic and gross living, died at St. Leonards in 1947 leaving £18 0s. 6d.
The Beast, under the impression that he was the monster mentioned in Revelations, gave himself the full title “The Beast 666.”
The Beast set up his own abbey, in Sicily, where one of his disciples died of enteric fever after being forced to drink the blood of a sacrificed cat.
The Beast would often greet women with a “serpent’s kiss” with teeth, some said, specially filed for the purpose.
Hypnotism
The Beast, in other words, was really rather beastly. But in the ‘twenties his reputation fascinated young Arthur Calder-Marshall.
At Oxford undergraduate Arthur, just for the fun of it, had already gone in for a little innocent Witchcraft. He had already held Black Mattins in his college rooms. He was avid to meet the Beast.
He met him. The Beast invited him to the cottage which he had rented in Kent.
There, in a room dotted with homely knick-knacks, brass warming pans, and chintz-covered chairs, Arthur suddenly realized that the Beast was trying to hypnotise him into taking the place of the disciple who had died in Sicily.
Arthur was now certain that the Beast was the genuine article. But somehow the magic was not strong enough. The plump Beast’s eyes—noted Arthur—were “trying desperately to shine, like the bulb of a torch whose battery is fading.” Arthur successfully escaped.
He gave up his interest in magic. He settled down—a confirmed free-thinker.
And that was how Arthur Calder-Marshall would have gone on, if it hadn’t been for the Saint.
Message
THE SAINT arrived with a phone call.
It was summer 1955. A publisher rang Calder-Marshall. A big American firm company—he said—had seen cuttings about a man called Woods who was Jellicoe’s signals officer at Jutland. Among his signals Woods had somehow received a message from God.
Converted he took Holy Orders when he retired as an admiral—and he had just died after years spent as a priest in Whitechapel.
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