As Related by Rupert Grayson

from

STAND FAST, THE HOLY GHOST

Tom Stacey, Ltd., 1973.

(pages 142-143)

Alastair [sic] Crowley, the Black Magician, had propelled his drug-charged body to see us; looking into his yellow eyes, set is a brown-pocked yellow face, across the two-foot-wide Georgian table that divided us, I was truly revolted. The manuscript, the story of his life, ran to about 300,000 words and I promised the book would receive our immediate attention. When he left the room I opened the door and windows to rid the room of the atmosphere of aromatic evil he had left on his brief visit. I have already explained that the rule of the house was that no one bearing a manuscript should be turned away without seeing one of us, and when he had been shown up I had not in fact associated him with the man who liked to be known as the Beast 666. So my first impression of him was in no way influenced by hearsay.

I had met Betty May, the dark-haired artist's model who sat for John [Augustus John] and Epstein [Jacob Epstein]. She was known as 'the tiger-woman' and like most models had acquired poise and current culture from the artists and writers she had consorted with. In addition she was a delightful folk-singer and first-class cook who had acquired her art the hard way over the studio stove. At the time I met her she was the companion of Edgell Rickward.

Betty, as a girl-bride, had gone to live together with her undergraduate husband [Raoul Loveday], who had fallen under Crowley's influence in the 'monastery' [Abbey of Thelema] that the Beast had founded on Corfu. She told us that the women members of the mystical community at their periods were constrained to wear a gourd between their thighs to catch the menstrual flow; which from the remotest antiquity has been deemed to possess most powerful magical properties. Dried and pounded to powder, they were a main ingredient in the Host in the Black Mass of which Crowley was the daily celebrant.

It was in her absence from the 'monastery', whose motto was 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' (which has a Rabelaisian ring until one remembers that heroin had replaced wine, the poppy had ousted the grape), that Betty's young husband died his mysterious death.

One version had it that Crowley, celebrating the Black Mass with a hell of a hangover, had slit the throat of his acolyte, Betty's bridegroom, instead of that of the sacrificial goat; who had cut up rough at certain of the sexual activities that were expected of him. Anyway, whatever the truth, there was a terrific scandal and Mussolini was so outraged that he expelled the oblates from the island.

The manuscript Crowley brought us was as strange and sinister a work (unpublished until recently) as one would expect; it was the only book I remember turning down for no better reason than our instant dislike for its author.