As Related by Viola Bankes

from

WHY NOT?

Jarrolds, 1934

He had neither the powerful compelling features of a magician nor the strong and nervous hands of a poet. His hands were unusually small and well-kept, and reminded me of a delicate bird's claws; rapacious, perhaps, but not masterful. His voice, which I had imagined would be sonorous, was light and rather high for a man. In his eyes, however, lay the answer to the riddle. There was no doubt that this man, with his colossal will-power and deep occult knowledge, could dominate a weaker and untrained will to the extent that is called magnetism, and could, if he wished, obtain absolute mastery over the mind and body of his subject. . . . In repose, the eyes held the sleepy reserve of the Oriental, but when he opened them wide and deliberately fastened them on another person, that person could scarce fail to feel the thrill of magnetism that emanated from their green depths.

In her highly entertaining book of reminiscences, “Why Not?” Mrs. Viola Bankes tells the following remarkable story of a talismanic ring worn by Aleister Crowley, the poet, magician and traveler:

There was a very fine diamond and ruby ring which Crowley always wore on the wedding finger. It represented a serpent, and was of great antiquity. He declared it to be a talisman which brought good luck to himself but misfortune to others. One night he was sitting at dinner with us, and I had an ardent desire to handle the ring and inspect it closer. He slipped it off and gave it to me to look at, but warned me not to try it on my finger. ‘It is particularly disastrous to women,’ he said. Perhaps he expected me to give way to the obvious temptation and slip it on my finger. Women can seldom refrain from tasting forbidden fruit—if only to see why it is forbidden. However, I handed it across to my husband, who also abstained superstitiously from trying it on. Crowley watched us in silence until the ring was handed back to him. ‘A man was copying some designs for me the other day,’ he said slowly. ‘There was a very powerful electric light over the table where he was working, with an opaque glass shade. I took off this ring to show him, and before I could warn him he had slipped it on his finger. A second later he got up too quickly from the table and caught his head with some force against the shade. His forehead was gashed from top to bottom.’