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How I Was Banned at Oxford
Actually I was not banned. I was merely the object of an underground manoeuvre which had nothing whatever to do with the University authorities.
I had been invited by the Oxford University Poetry Society to deliver a lecture on "Gilles de Rais", the medieval magician who is supposed to have sacrificed 800 children in the course of magical and alchemical experiments. On account of this legend, he is often confused with the fabulous figure of Bluebeard. Actually, very little is known about Gilles de Rais, except that he was a gentleman of good family, a brave soldier, and a comrade of Joan of Arc. He is also known to have frequented the society of learned men, and to have been accused of the same crimes as Joan of Arc by the same people who accused her.
Nowadays, Joan of Arc's stock has gone up to the point of canonisation, but Gilles de Rais is still a household word for monstrous vices and crimes. I do not wish to make a saint of Gilles de Rais, lest Bernard Shaw should be moved to write another play on the lines of Saint Joan, but I intended to point out to the Oxford University Poetry Society that the story of his having sacrificed 800 children is rather improbable, if only because it must have been a little difficult to carry out abductions and murders on such wholesale principles.
Gilles de Rais was the lord of a district whose population could not have been very extensive, and even in that age of slavery, dirt, disease, debauchery, poverty and ignorance which seems to Mr. G.K. Chesterton the one ideal state of society, I must presume that parents could look after their children better than to allow any "magician" to kidnap 800 of them.
I must presume that the stories circulated about Gilles de Rais are very similar in origin to those which have been circulated about my humble self. Even in this enlightened 20th century, there are people who believe that students of magick are guilty of every kind of un-nameable abomination. Actually, the magician merely tries to apply scientific methods to religious problems. The Church naturally resents this heresy, as, if people thought scientifically about religion, the authority of the Church would be gone. Science is not concerned with belief but with experiment. It was considered blasphemous and indecent even until quite recently to dissect dead bodies in the interests of medical knowledge.
I can only suppose that Gilles de Rais was a scientific man many hundreds of years ahead of his time, and that the allegations of crime against him are as fantastic as those which have been made against myself. The weapon of slander used against pioneers of research is the first resort of people who are terrified of new developments in knowledge. Weak minded people take a special sickly delight in imagining horrors such as candles made of infant's fat and cannibalism as a method of economising on the butcher's bill. All the popular stories of black magick have their beginnings in the superstitious minds of people who are naturally morbid. The more "religious" people are, the more they believe in black magick.
It was somebody of this kind who whispered to the committee of the Poetry Society at Oxford that I was a bad man, and that the undergraduates would certainly be punished by the University authorities for inviting me to Oxford. This was a piece of impertinence, because the University authorities have not said anything of the kind. However, the plot failed. The meeting was cancelled, and I did not deliver my lecture. Instead, I had the lecture printed, and sold on the streets of Oxford to hundreds of students who would have had no desire to know what it was all about, but for the silly manoeuvre which had tried to gag me. The good people seem to have forgotten the existence of the printing press!
From:
The Mandrake Press 41 Museum Street London WC1
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