Jane Chéron

Born: Unknown.

Died: Unknown.

Jane Chéron was an artist's model who first met Crowley sometime in Paris in 1910. She married the English journalist Walter Duranty. She and Duranty assisted Crowley in The Paris Working. They appear in Crowley's Moonchild. Chéron is "zizi" and Duranty is "her English journalist." Crowley described Chéron in his book The Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922): "She was a brilliant brunette with a flashing smile and eyes with pupils like pin-points. She was a mass of charming contradictions. The nose and mouth suggested more than a trace of Semitic blood, but the wedge-shaped contour of the face betokened some very opposite strain. Her cheeks were hollow, and crow's feet marred the corners of her eyes. Dark purple rims suggested sensual indulgence pushed to the point of weariness. Though her hair was luxuriant, the eyebrows were almost non-existent. She had penciled fine black arches above them."

Crowley penned for her Three Poems for Jane Chéron who he refers to by her nickname "Jaja". He published these poems in The Equinox, Vol. I, No. 6.

Chapter 82 from Crowley's Book of Lies titled "Bortsch" is dedicated: "This poem, inspired by Jane Chéron, is as simple as it is elegant."

                                    Bortsch

Witch-moon that turnest all the streams to blood,

I take this hazel rod, and stand, and swear

An Oath—beneath this blasted Oak and bare

That rears its agony above the flood

Whose swollen mask mutters an atheist's prayer.

What oath may stand the shock of this offence:

"There is no I, no joy, no permanence"?

Witch-moon of blood, eternal ebb and flow

Of baffled birth, in death still lurks a change;

And all the leopards in thy woods that range,

And all the vampires in their boughs that glow,

Brooding on blood-thirst—these are not so strange

And fierce as life's unfailing shower. These die,

Yet time rebears them through eternity.

Hear then the Oath, witch-moon of blood, dread moon!

Let all thy stryges and thy ghouls attend!

He that endureth even to the end

Hath sworn that Love's own corpse shall lie at noon

Even in the coffin of its hopes, and spend

All the force won by its old woe and stress

In now annihilating Nothingness.

This chapter is called Imperial Purple

and A Punic War.