THE VOICE OF FIRE

 

The Editor in his robe

Volume 2, Number 1. Summer Solstice. An CXXII. Sunday  21^st June 2026 e.v.

 

‘Draw into naught
All life, death, hatred, love:
All self concentred in the sole desire –
Hear thou the Voice of Fire!’
 

Tannhauser. Aleister Crowley.

 

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Love is the law, love under will.

 

Volume 2, Number 1 of the Voice of Fire is dedicated to the poet, Ether Archer (1885-1962)

 

 

CONTENTS
 

Editorial
Ethel Archer
Victor Benjamin Neuburg and Aleister Crowley: Lovers, Seer and Scribe.
Ra-Hoor-Khuit (poem)
From the Vaults
To Frater Omnia Vincam (poem)
Boleskine After Crowley (with recent photographs)
The Poet Returns by Victor Neuburg
The Four Adorations
The Magic Book Worm

 

 

 

EDITORIAL

 

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law

 

It has come to the attention of the editorial staff here at the Voice of Fire that there is yet a need for mirth and folly for it has been eleven years since the last edition of the Voice of Fire (Autumn Equinox, 23^rd September 2015 e.v.) and this second volume, (the first number also being number eleven) is now making its appearance. I cannot say for sure whether there will be more editions to follow or if they do they will be more sporadic.
So what has happened in the interim? Work has continued under several inefficient Prime Ministers, all of whom have done sterling work in eroding the fabric of a once great and prosperous nation and reducing its significance under the weight of poorly prepared government; Prime Ministers and heartless politicians, I might add, who think nothing of starving a nation that gave us Shakespeare, Nelson and Churchill (and of course Edward Alexander Crowley) to death and inflicting heavy tax burdens upon the poor; a people that know there is strength in solidarity but are unable to wield and manage such force –
yet they are not defeated, they never have been and never shall be. ‘Enough of politics!’ I hear you cry, let them crumble unto dust! ‘I spit on your crapulous creeds’ [AL. III: 54]
We all face various difficulties and situations in our daily life but through struggle and determination we overcome them to face the next challenge – in the immortal words of Norman Mudd: ‘oil your tools and be ready to hew them in pieces before mine eyes that I might paddle in their treacly guts’ [Letter to Crowley, 1909, see Friendship in Doubt: Aleister Crowley, J F C Fuller, Victor Neuburg, & British Agnosticism. Richard Kaczynski. Oxford University Press. 2024. p. 89] There was also a pandemic to contend with and just three months after the last edition, Boleskine House suffered a terrible fire on Wednesday 23^rd December 2015 e.v. causing severe damage; the ruins were bought by the Boleskine House Foundation in April 2019 only to suffer another fire in July that year. It has since, thankfully, been fully restored and completed in April 2026 e.v. There was the death of a Queen and the birth of a King… but enough about cabbages and kings. I am dedicating this edition to the poet and loyal friend of Crowley and Neuburg, Ethel Archer, whose poetry should be more widely appreciated – her cookbook is also a delightful dalliance and I have often thought how interesting it would have been had Crowley published his own ‘Aleister Crowley Cook Book’ which perhaps would have had such mouth-watering delicacies as ‘boiled toad and fried Jesu’, wild ‘Boleskine’ haggis and curry Kanchenjunga, or maybe Cefalu goat soup; Therion lamb stew or beef Crowley in a mescal button sauce, served with Beast broth followed by Cakes of Light and an excellent Cup of Libation.
I am also including some photographs from my recent expedition to Boleskine House during the Thelemic Holy days in April and my article on Neuburg, that rare and simple soul, ‘Vickbird’, who had the courage and devotion to continue under his ‘sweet wizard’ despite many tribulations and ordeals; without wishing to sound too pompous or pretentious, it was he I found at Boleskine, although Crowley still lingers in the Temple, if you seek him, it was the resolute shade of Neuburg I encountered who inspired me to research and write the article I present here.
But first I wish to talk a little about the magical path and how easy it is to become distracted from one’s course and how the journey becomes more circuitous and one’s motions seem inert. This is a natural feeling when an active motion suddenly or over a period of time becomes decreased. One may stray from the path but there will be subtle hints and nudges by a higher authority to remind one of the oath one has taken; a declaration before the whole universe of one’s intentions towards the Great Work for which you shall be held accountable. A magical oath is a binding affirmation cast far unto the void for all the worlds to hear beyond mere space and time and is not something to take lightly – every action has a re-action (we can see this in climate change where nature is re-acting to mans’ actions of the past) – one cannot simply walk away from it and not expect certain consequences, for one shall find, and I have found, almost miraculously, one is drawn and gently directed back towards the path thou hast chosen. In making an oath, the magician is invoking the Powers of the Universe to assist, causing a chain of events to be established and set in motion. ‘Courage is the first virtue of the magician’ Crowley says in his Introduction to the Vision and the Voice for one is invoking higher intelligences who orchestrate the celestial beauty which governs Nature and all manifestations of perception – ignore thy duties at thy peril, for thou shalt surely feel the loving wisdom or cursive wrath upon the ‘conscience of the King’ [Hamlet: Act II, scene II]. Distractions are plentiful upon the journey or the quest – the daily grind to put bread upon the table and the dirge of modern annoyances – the rise of Artificial Intelligence can consume one’s whole being if left unchecked, but let us remember that we are not slaves to ‘AI’, it is merely a tool to work with, and AI has the numerical value of 11, the number of Magick!
We must recognise the transient nature of things, of those around us and ourselves, for we are merely a short intake of breath in the Mystic Laws of Transcendental Truth. Let us remember, as we bask beneath the solstice sun at its zenith, raking the dying embers and awaiting the sunset of Christianity and all the old religions that we sit upon the sunrise of the Dawn of Thelema, a Law of Love and Liberty that has only seen one-hundred-and-twenty-two similar sunrises – in that time, in fact relatively recently, we have seen the acceptance of neural diverse individuals, sexuality and different genders, expressed within the Light of Love of the Crowned and Conquering Child before the death spasms of Christian contempt for the individual’s rights to express such natural physical, mental (moral) and spiritual emotions –  that same great orb of fire Crowley looked upon and that another hundred-million souls will look up to see together with her sister Moon. We are on the threshold of grasping infinity in our hands as mankind moves away from this small and beautiful planet to reach other worlds and colonise them; to make contact with cosmic civilisations and intelligent life forms beyond the measure of our understanding. Humanity shall survive and so shall all of our desire, passion, ingenuity and beauty, striving to create and explore which is in our nature as we each play a valued and vital part in the expansion of Love and Light and Liberty and the Law of Thelema!

 

Love is the law, love under will.

 

 

 

ETHEL ARCHER
 
‘Love knows no barrier, Love knows no shame
All is enveloped in rose-coloured flame!’

[To Lilith. Ethel Archer. The Whirlpool, p. 17]

 

Ethel Edith Florence Archer was born in Slougham, Sussex, in 1885, (she was christened there on 24^th November 1885) the fourth of five children born to the Reverend Osmond Andrew Archer (1852-1943) and Emily Agnes Moore Sinyanki (1857-1926) who were married at St Peter’s Church in Brighton, Sussex on 14^th September 1878. Osmond was educated at Lincoln College, Oxford (2ndclass Mods, 1873 and 3^rd class Lit. Hum. 1875, B.A. 1876); he was ordained deacon in 1878 at Winchester and priest in 1880 at Hereford. He was 2^nd Master at Basingstoke Grammar School in 1878 and curate of Whitbourne, Worcestershire from 1880-81 and many other parishes including Harpsden, Oxfordshire 1883-84, Slougham, Sussex 1884-86, St George’s Old Brentford 1887-88, All Soul’s, Poplar 1889, All Soul’s, Islington 1892-95, and St Peter’s, Regent Square 1895-97. Osmond and Emily’s first child was Cyril Osmond Saint John Archer, born at 6, Bloomsbury Place, Marine Parade, Brighton on 15^th September 1879; he became an architect’s assistant (and later a draughtsman for a steelwork constructional engineers) and in 1907 in Norwich, he married Ethel Emily Maria Simpson (1878-1956) and they had two children, both born in Norwich: Cyril Francis Harold Archer, born 7^th February 1908 (died 1989) [he married Maud A. L. Gordon in Croydon in 1936] and Queenie Irene M. Archer born 1909 [she married Arthur E. J. Rawlingson in Croydon in 1914]. Cyril served in the military during 1917 and died in Highgate on 16^th June 1938, aged 57. The next child born to Osmond and Emily was Francis Herbert Archer, born in Lancashire in 1882 who later became a clerk in a shipping office; the next child was Maud Archer in 1883 followed by Ethel in 1885 and Irene Constance Archer, born on 2^nd December 1889 on the Isle of Wight. Irene married the well-known tenor singer who had trained at the Royal Academy of Music, Lionel Ross Oliver (1879-1961) at Hampstead on 14^th February 1914; they lived at 1, Highfield Avenue, Golders Green for the rest of their life and their daughter, Charmion June Ross-Oliver L.R.A.M., A.R.C.M. was born on 2^nd June 1920; Charmion, was a professional pianist and teacher at the London College of Music in 1954 and she gave recitals at London’s Royal Albert Hall, London Hippodrome and Palladium, Scala and Wigmore Hall. Irene died in Hendon in 1961 aged 51 and her husband, Lionel, died there twenty years later in 1961 aged 81.
There is an interesting article in The Poetry Review, volume XVII, London, Erskine Macdonald Ltd. 1926 (pp. 67-69) under the title ‘An Egregious Letter’ (a letter from a child of ten [Ethel] with poems enclosed at the end of the last century) which gives a little of Ethel’s background which says she began writing at the age of eight – ‘almost before she could read!’ which goes on to say ‘until she had reached the age of fourteen she never had a book of verse of any description in her possession, nor had she read or heard any poetry except the few scanty selections from Walter Scott or Shakespeare that were given out in the school lesson once a week! The children were never given the book, except for occasional correction. Seemingly at the school to which she had the misfortune to be sent poetry was considered to be positively immoral: there was not a single volume of verse to be found in the whole of the school library, and when by the merest accident the school authorities discovered that the child had been writing poems (for she was far too shy ever to have shown her work to anyone but her father) she was given a long lecture by her dormitory mistress and told it was ‘very morbid and unnatural and if she didn’t take care she would go mad.’ Not once did this unhappy child, who possessed the unmistakable marks of genius, ever have a word of commendation for her work, not even when as a child of twelve she translated almost straightaway into good English poetry a French poem upon which she had never set eyes before. She was practically expelled from school for having asked a few simple questions in the Scripture class (and for smoking a cigarette in the bathroom), quite a repetition of Shelley’s treatment at Oxford, but Ethel Archer was only fourteen and had never heard of Shelley or Keats!
At the age of fourteen the child I am speaking of wrote poems that might (except for their spirituality) have been written by Milton or Keats in their early manhood. It was merely considered ‘unhealthy’. Her poems were almost entirely inspirational, and she seldom had to alter a word or a phrase (not even as a child of ten), and even now her work is inspirational, though she has in these days to polish up lines in a way that she never had to then. Many of her poems were written in the middle of the night, but only mentally, of course; until a poem was quite perfect in her head she never wrote a line of it down, and as a consequence of this is able perfectly to remember every poem she has ever written. Although there are about sixty of them!’ The article goes on to say that ‘her father, when but twelve years of age, wrote an epic poem of more than 600 lines – an extraordinarily fine piece of work, he uncle Andrew (whose book on the Crusades was published by Fisher Unwin in 1884) began to write poetry at the age of seven! The other uncle, Charles, took a double first in Classics. He was an ‘Oriel’ man, her father, a ‘Lincoln’ man and a scholar of his college. Her grandfather on the mother’s side was a Jewish Rabbi, of the tribe of Judah, a direct descendant in the royal line from King David, and traced his descent back to King Jehoiakim. He afterwards became an Anglican priest, and was disinherited of great possessions as a result. He it was who baptised Charles Abram Montefiore. He spoke eleven languages, and such a perfect knowledge of the Old Testament that it was said he could have rewritten it in Hebrew had it been lost. It would have been very strange if his granddaughter had not been unusually gifted.’ The article then quotes the first two verses from a poem entitled Love:
 
One night Love flew down from on high,
Leaving behind her the starry sky,
And on the earth he lighted down,
All living things with joy to crown.
 
He touched the stately lilies pale,
And they did his sweet breath inhale,
And sending out a sweet perfume,
Their lovely fragrance found no room.’
 
The uncle the article mentions who published The Crusades is Thomas Andrew Archer, M.A. Oxon (1853-1905), brother of Ethel’s father, Osmond who were the sons of Thomas Andrew Archer (1826-1853) who married Emma Charity Osmond (1826-1862) in Salisbury, Wiltshire on 14^th July 1847. The grandfather on her mother’s side was John Elhanan Sinyanki (1815-1899) who married Agnes Moore (born 1820) at St Margaret’s, Westminster on 7^th September 1852.
Ethel published her first book – the ‘Book of Plain Cooking’ in the Practical Housewife series volume 2 [London. A. Traherne] in 1904.
In 1908 Ethel married the artist Eugene John Wieland (1880-1915), son of Thomas Thatcher Wieland (born Scotland 1857, died 1942) and Eugenie Le Roux (1855-1931) [who were married in Dover in 1877] of Sunnyfield House, Guisborough, Yorkshire. She nicknamed him ‘Bunco’. Ethel became a member of Crowley’s magical order, the A.A. and helped with the publication of The Equinox – Eugene had set up the press, Wieland and Co. which published the periodical. Ethel, (who had been dubbed ‘Sappho’ by Victor Neuburg because of her love poems to women) and Eugene attended the performance of the Rite of Artemis at 124, Victoria Street, on Tuesday 23^rd August 1910 and Ethel said of the Cup of Libation which was passed around the audience (a concoction of mescal buttons [Anhalonium Lewinii- ‘peyote’], herbs, alcohol and fruit juice) that it tasted like ‘rotten apples’.
Ethel’s first volume of poetry was The Whirlpool published by Wieland and Co. in 1911 which had a cover design by her husband, an introduction by Crowley and a dedicatory sonnet by Victor Neuburg (p. 9) – ‘To E. A.’
 
The radiance of darkness, and the surge
Of waves of blackness, and the lucent veil
Of violet light, compounded with the pale
Red light of passion, here commingled urge
The spirit to adoration: on the verge
Trembles a fiery Soul! Hail! Hail! oh, Hail!
Thou lyric laughter of the enfranchised Male,
Thou fury of the eternal Woman’s dirge!
 
Ah! Lesbos! let thy waves receive once more
This soul tormented, striving still to gain
The land of laughter, and the hungry Shore!
Ah! Sappho! thou art born on earth again!
Call to thy lover till the friends adore
Thy soul, and the angels cry aloud for pain!
 
V.B.N.
 
Ethel included her sonnet to Victor in the volume (p. 28):
 
To V. B. N.
 
What silent shadow stirs the sentient air?
Like some dim-whirling flame-flower from the Loom
Of Darkness; swifter circling ‘mid the gloom
Of incense-laden shadows, to the air
Of softly chanted mantrams; till the prayer
So oft-repeated fills the sombre room
With magic mighty as the dusky plume
Of the Concealed One, by whom we swear!
 
Victor! Twice Victor! By the golden lays
Of many-moulded music, hear our praise!
Accept our homage, whilst our spirit whirls
With thine: in fiercest ecstasy unfurls
New glory ever, - till the vision slays
Itself, of its own beauty, Passion’s pearls.
 
The volume is rich in dark sentiments of love and passion and is reminiscent of Poe in its lyrical beauty – ‘How shall I picture thee – how shall begin? / Lovely and Evil One nurtured in Sin! / veiling those mystic eyes all thoughts within, /smiling yet sorrowful, watching earth spin!’ [To Lilith. p. 16] And here, in ‘The Song Virginal’, there is an extraordinary eruption of transient rapture at the touch of a lover – ‘I love thy warm white body, magic hands, / that hold me for a while from dark despair.’ (p. 19) The final verse (p. 19) echoes with the destructive power of desire –
 
O come! My fair enchanting Lotus-flower
Bear me across the opal-tinted sea.
Subdue me with thy wondrous weak’ning power,
Siren that tell’st of Sweet fertility,
And I renounce all earthly destiny,
All that the gods may give me for a dower,
All! All! To be with thee, one brief mad hour.
 
 
Archer had many articles and poems published in The Occult Review and The English Revew * and she also had several of her poems published in The Equinox: from volume I, number IV: ‘Midsummer Eve’ (p. 310) [also in The Whirlpool, p. 42], ‘The Felon Flower’ (p. 325) [The Whirlpool, pp. 23-25], ‘The Dreamer’ (p. 208) [The Whirlpool, p. 13]; from volume I, number V: ‘The Vampire’ (p. 143); from volume I, number VI: ‘Circe’ (p. 52), ‘Come, Love awaken!’ (as ‘Song’) (p. 66), ‘Sleep’ (p. 112) [The Whirlpool, p. 43]; from volume I, number VII: ‘Silence’ (p. 290); from volume I, number VIII: ‘In Limine’ (p. 77); from volume I, number IX: ‘The Fairy Fiddler’ (p. 115) and from volume I, number X: ‘A Ballad of Bedlam’ (p. 207)
When war broke out, Eugene served with the 19^th Battalion London Regiment, 47^th London Division and attained the rank of sergeant. He was wounded at the Battle of Loos and died in a Canadian Hospital on 5^th October 1915 aged 35 and Sergeant E. J. Wieland, 2248, was buried at Le Treport Military Cemetery.
Ethel’s second and final volume of poetry, Phantasy and Other Poems, was published in 1930 by Victor Neuburg’s Vine Press with a cover by Harry Clarke. Her only novel, The Hieroglyph was published in 1932 and draws upon the Rites of Eleusis for inspiration. [all three books: The Whirlpool, Phantasy and Other Poems, and The Hieroglyph were re-issued in original re-prints by Snuggly Books in 2023 – The Whirlpool (pp. 98), Phantasy and Other Poems (pp. 118) and The Hieroglyph (pp.286); there was also a 32 page chapbook, The Vampire and Other Poems published with twelve of Archer’s poems by Occult Press (120 hand-numbered copies) in 2025,and ‘Shadow & Shine’, an 82 page book of her poems, published and unpublished with an Introduction by Phil Jenson, by Lulu.com]
 
Ethel Archer died in Chelsea in 1962, aged 76.

*such as the following poems in The English Review: ‘Silence’ and ‘A Song’ – volume XXIX, July 1919, p. 7, and ‘A Ballad of Bedlam’ – volume XXIX, November 1919, pp. 392-393. In The Occult Review: ‘Some Folk-Lore of the Mass’ – volume L, number 5, November 1929, pp. 327-329; ‘A Note on Exorcisms’ – volume XLVII, number 6, June 1928, pp. 389-392, and ‘Imagination and Reality’ – volume XLV, number 5,  May 1927, pp. 306-309.

 

 

VICTOR BENJAMIN NEUBURG
AND ALEISTER CROWLEY:
LOVERS, SEER AND SCRIBE
BY
BARRY VAN-ASTEN

 

‘The mystic moon o’erhangs her, whence of late

The gods to earth transferred their charge, and she,

The perfect Mother of the Uncreate,

Hath taken to her flesh, that is to be

The way of carnal birth, the door of fate

Betwixt the borders of Infinity.’

 

[from ‘The Creation of Eve’ by Victor Neuburg.

Cambridge Poets, 1900-1913. Tillyard. 1913. p. 148]

 

 

In this analysis of Victor Neuburg I wish solely to concentrate on the young poet’s development under the influence of Aleister Crowley, an influence which sprung from love and devotion towards the older poet and mystic, which climaxed into a vision of Crowley as a god upon the earth and ended in doubt, abandonment and ritual cursing.
Victor Benjamin Neuburg, born in Islington, London on Sunday 6^th May 1883, matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge at the Michaelmas [Autumn] Term aged 23 in October 1906 to read Modern and Medieval Languages; his rooms are in Whewell’s Court, staircase L (1).
Victor continues writing poetry for the Agnostic Journal (which was founded in 1877) through 1906-1907 (2) and he is on particularly good terms with one of its editors – William Ross Stewart, also known as ‘Saladin’. Another contributor to the Agnostic Journal whom Neuburg becomes acquainted with at the home of Saladin, 30, Canterbury Road, Brixton, London, is John Charles Frederick Fuller (1878-1966). J. F. C. Fuller had written a critical essay on the poetical works of Aleister Crowley which was published in 1907 as The Star in the West; Fuller and Crowley became firm friends and associates following this. Fuller mentions Neuburg to Crowley who has admired some of his poetry in the Agnostic Journal for their sense of ‘astral travel’.
William Ross Stewart died at his home in Brixton on Friday 30^th November 1906 and Saladin’s funeral took place on Thursday 6^th December at Brookwood Cemetery, Woking, and it is probable that Neuburg and Fuller attended (3).
Neuburg having written a letter to Crowley on 28^th January 1907, Crowley, takes it upon himself to visit Cambridge to meet the young poet, Victor Neuburg, being a Trinity man he is accustomed to visiting his old college and it is likely that this occurred during the Lent term of 1907 (January to March) when Victor was in residence (4); Richard Kaczynski gives the date of Thursday 28^th February (1907) when Crowley went on his “First Missionary Journey” to Cambridge (5). Was Neuburg thinking of Crowley when he wrote: ‘The Son of Man hath fallen deep, / the Man of Sun hath yet to rise… Arise! Cast off the web ye’ve spun; / stand naked to the rising sun!’ [The Eagle and the Serpent, the Agnostic Journal, Saturday 30^th March 1907]
 
The two poets became acquainted very quickly and Victor was soon under the spell of the older poet who saw in Victor, a young man with a developing magical capacity which could be nurtured.

 

UNDER MAGDALEN BRIDGE
 
The lapping, lapping, lapping of the stream
Makes songs around my lazy-light canoe;
The soft brown haze of dusk shines softly through
The dripping trees, and the damp meadows seem
A plateau as of lost desire, a dream
That melts from gold to gray; a soft breeze blew
Across the brow of waking night, and dew
Re-bathes the earth that grows a fading gleam.
 
The sleepy river ripples, ripples ever
Betwixt the old brown wall and meadows trim;
The tideless song of Never, Never, Never
Lulls the wet woods, and ever growing dim
The fields are grey with mist, and slip away
Into the darkness with the dying day. (6)
 

In October 1907, two undergraduates arrive that will become Neuburg’s friends and fellow enthusiasts of Crowley – Gerald Hume Saverie Pinsent (1888-1976), who also resides in staircase L at Whewell’s Court, and Norman Mudd (1889-1934), studying mathematics, who has rooms in staircase J, Whewell’s Court (7). Norman Mudd became a member of Neuburg’s Pan Society, a poetry reading club to which Crowley attended several meetings to give talks (where he also met eighteen year old Mudd); and Keneth Martin Ward became President of the Cambridge University Free Thought Association (CUFA) which Neuburg is a member; Gerald Pinsent later became President (8).
Another undergraduate who became a friend of Neuburg’s and came under the influence of Crowley was Kenneth Martin Ward (1887-1927) who came up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge in October 1906 on a physics and chemistry scholarship (he met Aleister Crowley while climbing at Wastdale Head during the winter of 1908) (9).
 

SPAIN

 

On Wednesday 8^th July 1908, Aleister Crowley is in Paris working on several literary compositions [‘Clouds without Water’, ‘Sir Palamedes’ and the preface to ‘The World’s Tragedy’; ‘Mr Todd’ and ‘After Judgement’] and with him is the young undergraduate and poet, Victor Neuburg. Neuburg left Trinity College, sometime after the end of the Easter Full Term, which ended on Friday12th June 1908. They are staying in separate hotels and Crowley has begun training Neuburg in magick as part of his initiation and curing him of his ‘romantic idealism’; with them is Crowley’s lover, the artist’s model, ‘Dorothy’ [Euphemia Lamb, born Nina Forest (1889-1957)]. After two weeks or more in Paris, Crowley suggests to Neuburg that they take a walking tour across Spain, from Bayonne to Madrid, taking two weeks to do so, avoiding the railway line. (10) On Friday 31^st July, the two men set off from Paris for Bordeaux. The next day, Saturday 1^st August, they travel to Bayonne and in the afternoon begin their walk to the Spanish frontier, reaching Ustaritz that night.
They walked for three days across the Pyranees and encountered difficulty and much hardship along the way – ‘three times on the road we were arrested as anarchists. The soldiers could not understand why anyone should want to go to Madrid except to kill Alphonso, and I suppose there is something really to be said for this point of view. They gave us no real annoyance, our passports being as impressive as they were unintelligible. Of course they didn’t really think we were anarchists, and they would not have cared if we had been; but most of these unhappy men were marooned for indefinite periods in ghastly districts where there was absolutely no amusement of any kind.’ [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. pp. 577-578]
Together they travel through Pamplona, arriving on Tuesday 4^th August and leaving the next day for a three day walk to Logrono, arriving on Friday 7^th August. They spent the next night together in a cave which they romantically named ‘Bat’s Culvert’; they left Logrono the following day, on Sunday 9^th August and in the evening and camped for the night in a ravine which they called ‘Jack Straw’s Castle. The next day they walked continuously until they reached a small hamlet in the evening where they drank a cup of goat’s milk, feasted upon a ‘small scrap of dry bread’ and slept upon straw in a ‘horribly dirty barn’. [Confessions. p. 579] It is not surprising that they spent the next night in a hotel at Soria having walked several hours in a severe thunderstorm. The following day was Crowley’s fifth wedding anniversary, Wednesday 12^th August, and they spent the night in a ‘sinister looking house’ with ‘sinister looking occupants’ in a place they named the ‘Witches’ Kitchen Village’ and they ‘barricaded ourselves for the night in the main room. There were considerable alarums and excursions; but when they found we meant business they decided to leave us alone and in the morning everyone was all smiles.’ [Confessions. p. 580]
They had another 44 km to walk without water or shelter. Burgo de Osma was about to celebrate its two day festival and Crowley witnessed a bull fight. They stayed and rested here for two days or possibly longer.
They marched on to Aranda de Duero and then to Milagros and past many other villages. They were now 50 km from Madrid and they came upon a place they called ‘Big Stone Bivouac’ where a bitter wind forced them to try and shelter, ‘sleeping till the cold awoke us, and then trying to warm ourselves by exercise until fatigue sent us once more to sleep. An alternation of discomforts, which was repeated half a dozen times during the night. The memory is delightful. All the unpleasant incidents of the period have passed into oblivion.’ [Confessions. p. 584]
They reached Madrid on Saturday 22^nd August and stayed the night in a hotel at Puerto del Sol, and Neuburg being quite ill from the ‘rough food and the fatigue and exposure’ he needed to rest. Crowley says he stays in his bed for 2-3 days. Crowley spends his time in Madrid visiting the Museo del Prado art galleries. Also in Madrid Crowley finished writing his ‘The Psychology of Hashish’ which would appear in part two of The Herb Dangerous [The Equinox, volume I, number II] written under the pseudonym ‘Oliver Haddo’ in reference to the character based on Crowley in W. Somerset Maugham’s novel ‘The Magician’ (1908).
On Friday 28^th August Crowley and Neuburg left Madrid and walked all day; the next day, Saturday 29^th, they reached Granada and Crowley renews his relations with the wild gypsy woman whom he met there the year previously and of whom he wrote his celebrated love song ‘La Gitana’ on 21^st July 1907. The next day they walked to Ronda and arrived in Gibraltar on Monday 31^st August. They stayed at a hotel and later crossed the strait of Gibraltar to Tangiers.
On Sunday 13^th September Neuburg left Crowley to visit his relatives in San Sebastian, [the Michaelmas full term at Trinity College, Cambridge began on Saturday 10^th October, so he must have returned by that date]. On the same day, Sunday 13^th September, Crowley took advantage of the solitude to write ‘The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?’ [The Equinox, volume I, number I, March 1909] Two days later, on Tuesday 15^th September, Crowley returned to London, before leaving again and arriving in Paris on Wednesday 30^th September where thus begins his Great Magical Retirement on Thursday 1^st October 1908, recorded as ‘John St. John’ [The Equinox, volume I, number I, Supplement. March 1909] (11)

 

‘To-night, the wind shall play among the trees,
To-night, still waters shall reflect the sky,
To-night, the moonlight over wide stretch’d seas
Shall rouse the slumb’rous earth with melody.’
 

[The Garden of Youth (iii), A Green Garland. p. 1]

 

Neuburg published his first collection of poetry, ‘A Green Garland’ in 1908 with the London publisher, Probsthain & Co. It was published with financial assistance by his friend and fellow undergraduate of Trinity College, Wilfred Edward Hermann Schmiechen (later Merton) (12) The volume shows Neuburg’s delicate touches as a poet, influenced by Shelley and Swinburne, with a huge appreciation for Edward Carpenter and Walt Whitman:
 
‘A Leaf (Of Grass) From Walt Whitman’ (p. 30):
 
Then the eyes close; the lamp is darkened now,
The spirit’s prison is empty, the spirit free;
A gentle hand smoothes the unclouded brow,
Kind fingers seal the eyelids tenderly,
And, maybe in the darkness, ere he rise,
The watcher plants a kiss on the shut eyes.
 
Asleep! asleep! the soothing night-air blows
The hair the wind may ruffle never more;
The door is shut; the camp-fire cracks and glows,
The shadows waver darkly in its roar
A shadow-play of death and life: the damp
Of evening dews o’erspreads the little camp.
 
Sweet breeze, blow softly o’er the dead, the dead,
The day is passed, the night is starless, chill
The herald-breeze of dawn, ere dawn is red
With sunlight, blows from the high eastern hill
The night is cold; draw close your cloaks, for lo!
The unknown road far stretches. Let us go.
 
The majority of the poems in the collection are poems Neuburg has previously had published in the Agnostic Journal, as this poem, ‘To Shelley’ (pp. 34-36) which was published in the Agnostic Journal of 20^th May 1905 and begins:
 
‘Radiant son of the South, whose fingers
Strayed in Love o’er a heart-strung lyre,
The glamour of Summer’s veil still lingers
Over the hills of thy native shire,
Sweetest of all our country’s singers,
Whose voice was flame, and whose eyes were fire.’
 
In the third verse the poet truly reaches heights of sublime beauty: ‘Still are the sky-larks upward winging / over the fields where thou hast been, / still the wild sea her spray is flinging, / glittering greenly in sunlight sheen.’ Before the beautiful fourth verse (pp. 34-35):
 
Brother and bard, thy voice’s thunder
Changed the grey sky of the past to white:
Still we listen in pain and wonder –
Still we weep in our heart’s delight
When the golden sun at eve goes under
The earth’s red rim at the touch of Night.
 
And the final and ninth verse of the poem ends triumphantly (p. 36):
 
Our songs shall rise as the dawn grows whiter,
Our hearts shall throb with the promise of Day;
‘Neath skies more deep, and in sunlight brighter,
With golden lyres we will go our way –
Take thou this lay of a dawning lighter,
A song of the springtide, of Sussex in May.

 

A list of other poems in the collection – with those which appeared in the Agnostic Journal giving the date of publication in brackets:

1. The Garden of Youth, (pp. 1-4) [30^th September 1905], 2. The First Poet, (p. 5), 3. The Eagle and the Serpent, (pp. 6-10) [30^th March 1907], 4. Two Sonnets, (pp.11-12), 5. Between the Spheres, (pp. 13-14) [8^th October 1904], 6. Ballade of the Daisy, (pp. 15-16) [18^th May 1907], 7. An Old Song, (p. 17) [27^th January 1906], 8.The Swan Song, (pp. 18-19) [27^th May 1905], 9. My Homeland, (p. 20) [6^th May 1905], 10. The Fugitive, (pp. 21-23) [17^th June 1905], 11. Carmen Triumphans, (pp. 24-27) [13^th August 1904], 12. A Song of the Promise of Dawn, (p. 28), 13. Serenade, (p. 29) [12^th May 1906], 14. A Leaf (of grass) from Walt Whitman, (p. 30), 15. Young Summer, (pp. 31-33) [26^th May 1906], 16. To Shelley, (pp. 34-36) [20^th May 1905], 17. A Recall, (pp. 37-40) [2^nd March 1907], 18. An Agnostic View, (pp. 41-42) [15^th September 1906], 19. A Lullaby, (pp. 43-44) [14^th January 1905], 20. Three Singers, (pp. 45-47), 21. A Song of Freedom, (p. 48-49) [14^th May 1904], 22. The Dream, (pp. 50-53) [17^th February 1906], 23. A Song of Dawn, (pp. 54-55) [31^st October 1903]. At the end of the volume is a full page advert for Crowley’s  ‘An Appeal to the American Republic’.

 

Throughout 1908 Crowley would make visits to Cambridge to see his young college friends – ‘It had been customary, whenever Crowley came to Cambridge, for one of our circle at Trinity to put him up at the College and collect a company in our rooms to meet him, talk with him and listen to the papers he used to read to us.’ (13)

On Thursday 28^th January 1909, Norman Mudd, as secretary of CUFA was summoned to see the Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, Rev. Reginald St. John Parry (1858-1935), who had been his tutor during his first term. He was told to cease distributing Fuller’s The Star in the West and cancel the invitation for Crowley [and Fuller] to attend and give a talk to the CUFA on Sunday 14^th February or face the consequences, namely expulsion; he was given 24 hours in which to reply to this demand.

On the same evening, the CUFA Committee, met and discussed the predicament of the forthcoming lecture by Aleister Crowley and to consider the Dean’s ultimatum. They decided to interview the Dean the next day, Friday 29^th January.

In an undated letter to Crowley from Mudd, (probably written the day after the Friday interview with the Dean – Saturday 30^th January), he explains the situation and the twofold demands of Rev. Parry, (he also mentions that Neuburg has written to Crowley previous to his own letter): which requires cessation of the distribution of the Star in the West, and cancellation of Crowley’s invitation to talk at CUFA, calling him a man of ‘evil repute’. He goes on to say ‘the only explanation he could give of his demand [to cease distribution of the book] was that the book was as filthy as its subject and author.’ Under extreme pressure, Mudd says that he ‘wrote a letter to the Dean telling him what I thought of his soul and agreed not to distribute copies of The Star in the West without previously notifying him.’ He mentions that the ‘committee waited on him last night’ and that ‘pitched battle will commence’, adding that the ‘dons like loose shits fall away & will decompose under strain.’ (14)

 

 

OLIVIA VANE

 

Neuburg’s poem ‘The Romance of Olivia Vane’ was written in March 1909. Neuburg is in Paris and seemingly waiting for Crowley to join him there. Neuburg must have travelled to Paris after the Lent term at Cambridge which ended on Wednesday 24^th March (Full Term ended on Monday 15^th March]
[Lent Term ran from Tuesday 5^th January to Wednesday 24^th March; the undergraduate teaching period known as Full Term ran from Friday 22^nd January to Monday 15^th March]
 
Crowley, would have been in London seeing to the final arrangements in publishing the first edition of volume I of The Equinox [March 1909]. It is worth noting that the Spring Equinox occurred on Sunday 21^st March, so it is reasonable to assume that Crowley joined Neuburg in Paris shortly after this date.
 
From the beginning of the poem Neuburg is in a state of apprehension for his magical mentor, his ‘sweet wizard’ to join him, longing in fact as he waits, for he tells us (in verse V) that ‘I cross the water with the sun; / the light plays on the sea. / The Channel waters race and run / betwixt thy soul and me’ and that he shall ‘love thee ever, unto death – / till the last star-crowned sun / in glamour of spring-tide witnesseth / the thing that we have done.’ But what have Crowley and Neuburg done? He tells us in the next verse (VI) that ‘I have found thee, I have bound thee, / one in Pan are we!’
In verse V he writes ‘cross’ the channel which seems to imply he is writing this first section, at least up until verse VI on the boat (verse VI begins: ‘Light wind, night wind’ and he may be composing this verse upon the deck). Verse VII states that he ‘crossed the channel, yesterday…’ and he is consumed with desire, summoning Crowley to him – ‘Come thou and slumber with me; there is rest / for thee and Love together, in my breast.’ He goes on:
 
Slow was thy wooing, so I crept upon thee
Until thy radiant face from sleep did rise;
And in the moment that I leapt upon thee,
I felt the agony of thy burning eyes,
And all my heart was thine; and now I know
The depth of fire beneath life’s glittering snow.
 
Again (verse VIII) he implores his lover to:
 
Come back across the sea to comfort me
With purple kisses, touches all unplanned!
Let me once more feel thy strong hand to be
Making the magic signs upon me! Stand,
Stand in the light, and let mine eyes drink in
The glorious vision of the death of sin!
 
Verse X begins ‘All yesterday the spring was born, / the spring that Ovid sang of old;’ it seems that Neuburg is telling us that yesterday ‘the spring was born’, in other words, the spring equinox of Sunday 21^st March. If indeed he is we can estimate that Neuburg crossed the channel to Dieppe on or around Friday 19^th March, four days after Full Term ended at Cambridge, and that verse X is written on the fourth day after travelling (his third day in Paris), Monday 22^nd March (where ‘yesterday’ would have been the equinox of Sunday 21^st).
 
In the next verse (XI) Neuburg is anticipating the future when he shall be questioned upon Crowley and their relationship – and he shall reply: ‘”I knew him once in this wide universe.”
 
And they shall ask me of your garb and port,
And of the miracles men say you wrought,
And I shall smile upon their questioning,
And tell how in my soul you wrought the spring.
 
The theme of spring continues in verse XII and in verse XIII Neuburg is almost mad with waiting: ‘I await thee in this city; when thou dost come, / my songs shall end; thy lips shall make me dumb.’ Here it seems that Neuburg is confessing that these songs, the poems in Olivia Vane, are an act of concentrated will to invoke his lover to him. There is an erotic charge as he goes on:
 
My virile soul shall tremble at thy coming,
And thou shalt spend the spirit’s plenteous store
On me, to sleep and death well-nigh succumbing
Beneath thy body’s weight. Ah, come once more;
Grant me but that I seek, and I shall be
For ever fastened on the breast of thee.
 
Come, and bring ease unto my thirsting soul;
Give what thou hast, spare me nor pain, nor dread;
Ah! Having taken love thou hast taken the whole:
Lie on my breast, and let me stroke thy skin
With my light hand! Come thou, and enter in!
 
The waiting is feverish and brings anxiety: ‘I see the summer sky break into rime, / and I must sing in rhythm with it still, / until thou comest tome; all the time / thou art not here, with song dost thou fulfil / the daylight, since the secret hour I won / the lyric light of thee, my risen sun.’
 
In verse XV he is still waiting patiently: ‘Fresh from the heaven of new-born desire, /
I wait thee here, and all my veins are fire’, he tells us that he ‘knew not love, till thou hadst given me pain’ and continues in sweet supplication: ‘Take thou my body, now hermaphrodite, / Pink-tipped and gleaming white, / for love’s sake wrought.’
 
In verse XVII he says that ‘a hundred sonnets yesterday took wing, / a thousand lyrics flew…’ so we may say that a new day has begun and this is more than likely the first poem of that day. In it he makes a solemn confession that ‘the wonder thou has wrought, lest should I blush / when next I hail thee, Bride.’ In the same poem he says that he has ‘reached the city rare’ and ‘rode unto the western hill’ which probably signifies he is in Montmartre, the artistic quarter, strictly in the north, its western prospect overlooks views of the Eiffel Tower.
In verse XIX in the ‘City of Light’ (Paris) he is visiting the Luxembourg Gardens. He is in a state of passionate expectation for ‘I shall see thee to-morrow’ and ‘clasped heart to heart we shall lie / naked; all day we shall borrow / the space and the spread of the sky.’ He is ‘lilies and burning red roses / that flame and grow strong with desire’
In verse XXI he recalls their first meeting (in Cambridge two years earlier in 1907): ‘Ah! When we rose to greet, / did we pierce through the outer gloom? / when our eyes first came to meet, / did we know of the secret doom / that lay in our hearts, my sweet, / a perilous tender bloom?’ In the final verse (XXII) Neuburg seems to prophesise a time in the future when there will be no need for secrecy for ‘the lovers yet to be’ like himself and Crowley, ‘who have dared a lonely sea.’ The next stanza repeats this notion: ‘Lovers! Ye shall dare to be / wise, and in your wisdom free.’ And finally in the last stanza he sings:
 
Ages hence – my song grows fainter,
For the light fades from my mind –
Poet, player, singer, painter,
Learn the secret: be not blind.
Know the sign shall set ye free;
Hear the word of mystery.’
 
The poem ends with a curious couplet – ‘There is a maiden harp-player, and a silver flute is held / in the hands of an hermaphrodite: this thing shall be fulfilled’. We can assume that Neuburg is finally re-united with his beloved Crowley and the song ends suddenly; perhaps the final couplet is incomplete because the appearance of the ‘bride’ broke the songster’s spell or energised inspiration of poetic longing for the union.
The great sense of waiting for his lover to come to him echoes another of Neuburg’s poems written prior to his sojourn in Paris and published in the first edition of the Equinox in March 1909 – ‘The Lonely Bride’ (pp. 95-97) [also printed in The Triumph of Pan, pp. 40-42]. This seven-lined eight verse poem speaks of a woman who frequents the market place and waits, with head ‘bowed down with the shame of my thought’, and ‘mine eyes grow hot with disgrace. / Oh the evil that men have wrought!’ In the third verse she says that ‘I stare all day at the men that pass, / and all that I see I crave’. There is a terrible ache, an unsatisfied need, the same sense of desire as yet unfulfilled that Neuburg engaged with in Paris, yet in his case it was Crowley who took the role of the bride; here, Neuburg is the female form who says in verse VII: ‘If they but knew of my need, my need, / as I wait in love’s barren land, / to me, to me, would they speed.’ (p. 96) Eventually, the tension mounts as it surely must find some relief –
 
‘Ah! the weary waiting till one shall speak,
Oh! then the spell will fall,
And I shall find what I seek. (p. 97)
 
The poem, Olivia Vane, tells me that Neuburg and Crowley were lovers during March 1909 and that any doubt must surely be cast aside when it comes to their intimacy during Victor’s initiation at Boleskine in Scotland.
 
Neuburg probably travelled back to London with Crowley for on Monday 5^th April he is with Crowley during his initiation into Crowley’s magical order, the A.A., the first probationer to do so.
 
Neuburg would have returned to Cambridge for the start of the Easter Term on Saturday 17^th April     [Easter Term 1909 was from Tuesday 20^th April to Thursday 24^th June; Full Term ran from Friday 23^rd April to Monday 14^th June]
 
With Easter Term ending on Monday 14^th June, Neuburg travelled two days later on Wednesday 16^th June to Scotland. [the Cambridge Tripos lists with Neuburg’s name was published in the London Daily Telegraph and Courier on Friday 18^th June 1909, p. 12]

Victor Neuburg (1883-1940) of Trinity College, Cambridge and Kenneth Martin Ward (1887-1927) of Emmanuel College, Cambridge visited Crowley at Boleskine on Wednesday 16^th June 1909, they had travelled together by sleeper train from Cambridge, which, Victor noted in his magical diary of Friday 18^th June, he had ‘now quitted in all probability for ever.’ Kenneth (whom Crowley had met at Wastdale Head) was there specifically to borrow Crowley’s skis and Victor was there to undergo a ten day magical retirement beginning on Friday 18^th June and ending on Sunday 27^th June. Victor had a special chamber prepared for him to work in upstairs (presumably an attic room) and the Retirement consisted of basic yoga techniques and the performance of magical rituals which included ‘The Bornless One’ invocation. The next morning, Thursday 17^th June, Victor slept late and ‘after breakfast of tea and toast he had a hot bath, then he was escorted to the chamber prepared for him. This was a room where the floor was covered with a magic circle. There was an altar on which incense was burning, and Victor found a further supply of incense and of charcoal, also a magic sword and an ankh; he had on his magic robe. He was left to his own devices.’ [Jean Overton Fullerton, pp. 157-158]
He would also learn to recite mantras and write a record of his astral travels. Crowley also allowed him to study the Holy Books.
On Friday 18^th June he wrote in his magical record: ‘At the time of my acceptance as a Chela into the A.A. I was basically employed in working for my Final at Cambridge, and having but three weeks wherein to do practically two years’ work, everything other than Academic study had to be temporarily abandoned. The only magical practice performed during these three weeks, and during the examination (which lasted one week), was that of the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, which up to this time has been regularly performed by me… I was successful, by the way, in my examination, and am entitled to an honours degree, which I shall, however, not take, having no use for it, and being unable to afford the twelve pounds (or guineas) which it costs.’
 
 
Victor spent much of his time alone at the house except when Crowley would visit him in his bedroom on the ground floor to discuss elements of magical theory and philosophy or Victor would go to Crowley’s bedroom. It is not overstepping the mark to assume that both men enjoyed some sort of intimacy as each was indulging the others tendencies: Neuburg was drawn to masochism and Crowley delighted in sadistic behaviour. In an entry in his magical diary, for day five on Tuesday 22^nd June, Victor wrote at 10.32 a.m.: ‘My guru was dissatisfied, upbraiding me bitterly with being among the Qliphoth [illusory images of an inferior nature]. He is apparently a homosexual sadist for, in giving me thirty-two strokes with a gorse switch drew blood, he showed great unction. He performed the ceremony with obvious satisfaction. The ceremony was quite painful, though it aroused no emotion in me save that of laughter. I shall rest for a space.’
Crowley added a footnote to this entry: ‘Slandering one’s Guru is punished in the thirty-second and lowest Hell’, beneath which Victor writes: ‘A small price to pay for the invention of a new vice.’ [Fuller. pp.164 and 169]
 
On Friday 25^th June Victor wrote in his record: ‘By God! the pessimism – the essential pessimism – of Buddhism and Christianity are easily explainable now… There is no way out. One is optimistic enough to hope that there is no God, and that there are no gods. If this be so, one can weep. But if gods exist, one must curse them besides weeping, and that is such a trouble. Scarcely worth while.
I can now realise why everything that I have longed for and ultimately obtained has immediately become dust and ashes to me. There is really nothing to attain, since we cannot fathom the ultimates of the universe. We are all imbecile babes, and we break our toys, and they cry because we have not more toys to break. And there are fools who have learned the first two or three letters of the Alphabet, and they go about bragging of their knowledge of literature.’
At the end of his retirement, he writes on Sunday 27^th June: ‘I see how my only guide so far has been Rebellion against Authority; this it is that has at length led me to a faint glimmer of the True Light; I have, by the grace of the gods, been led out of the darkness and the twilight.’
 
Victor had first met Rose Crowley at Boleskine (whom it seems was sleeping alone at the house in a separate bedroom) and she was at this time consuming a lot of alcohol. Following the completion of the Retirement Victor was awarded the grade of Neophyte by Crowley.
During the time of Victor’s  Magical Retirement Crowley had been looking for his four large paintings of the Elemental Watch Towers which he painted in Mexico, and thought to be at Boleskine House. The skis he had promised Kenneth Ward were also hard to locate at the house. ‘After putting Neuburg through his initiation, we repaired to London. I had let the house and my tenant was coming in on [Thursday] the first of July. We had four days in which to amuse ourselves; and we let ourselves go for a thorough good time. Thus like a thunderbolt comes the incident on June 28^th, thus described in my diary:
 
Glory be to Nuit, Hadit, Ra-Hoor-Khuit in the Highest! A little before midday I was impelled mysteriously (though exhausted by playing fives, billiards, etc. till nearly six this morning) to make a final search for the Elemental Tablets. And lo! when I had at last abandoned the search, I cast mine eyes upon a hole in the loft where were ski, etc., and there, O Holy, Holy, Holy! Were not only all that I sought, but the manuscript of Liber Legis! [Diary entry: Monday 28^th June 1909]
The ground was completely cut away from under my feet. I remained for two whole days meditating on the situation – in performing, in fact, assort of supplementary Sammasati to that of 1905. Having the knack of it, I reached a very clear conclusion without too much difficulty. The essence of the situation was that the Secret Chiefs meant to hold me to my obligation. I understood that the disaster and misery of the last three years were due to my attempt to evade my duty. I surrendered unconditionally, as appears from the entry of July 1^st.
Once more I solemnly renounced all that I have or am. On departing (at midnight from the topmost point of the hill which crowns my estate) instantly shone the moon, two days before her fullness, over the hills among the clouds.’ [Confessions. p.596]
 
This realisation on Thursday 1^st July 1909, two days before the full moon as Crowley says (which occurred on Saturday 3^rd July), seems to at once free Crowley from his inhibitions and he is aware of his true purpose which is to be the ‘means of emancipating humanity’ and to ‘establish in the world the Law which had been given me to proclaim: “Thou hast no right but to do thy will.”’
 
But there seems to be an inconsistency in what has been recorded about Neuburg undergoing further initiation for in The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg (p. 167) we are informed that Neuburg, thinking his ‘ordeal was completed’ when the initiation ended on Sunday 27^th June, was told by Crowley that ‘for the next ten nights he must sleep on the floor, entirely naked, on a litter of gorse’ and that he must cut and collect the gorse himself. It is possible that Crowley had this in mind for his chela and suggested it to him and we know Neuburg took three days writing up a written record of his day-to-day initiation in a special bound volume Crowley had given him; it is conceivable that Neuburg began this form of training while writing up his diary but if Crowley knew he had a tenant arriving on Thursday 1^st July, then ten nights would not be possible as Neuburg ended on the 27^th which left only three more days until they had to vacate Boleskine. Also, the following day on Monday 28^th when Crowley and his guests were exhausted from playing billiards and fives etc. and he re-discovered the manuscript of Liber Al just before midday, he would probably have been less attentive towards Neuburg and concerned by the significance of the revelation. So far as I can see, Neuburg could only have completed three or four more nights of initiatory training, naked, upon his bed of gorse.
 
On Thursday 1^st July 1909, Crowley and Neuburg travelled back to London; Neuburg stayed at the Adlephi Hotel and assisted Crowley with the editing and publishing of his magical periodical ‘The Equinox’ at the Headquarters of the A.A., 124, Victoria Street, London, (convenient for Neuburg as his Aunt T lived opposite at 125, Victoria Street).
As well as his duty with the Equinox, Neuburg wrote the homoerotic poem ‘The Lost Shepherd’ which was published in the second edition of the Equinox on 23^rd September (Autumn equinox) 1909 (pp. 131-136) [and also The Triumph of Pan, pp. 46-51]. The poem, which consists of 16 verses recounts the story of the shepherd, hailed ‘a foolish man’, who in verse X, found the ‘groves of Pan’ and in the following verse, succumbs to the goat god’s lust –
 
And as he clasped me, slim and slight,
I roared with the pain he gave,
And he cried, “I will hold thee here all night,
My beautiful, dark-haired slave;
Kiss my lips and laugh in my eyes,
And I’ll bring magic out of the skies,
And thy flame shall yield to my eyes’ fierce light
Ere thine ashes are laid in the grave!”
 
Victor could almost be singing of Crowley… he goes on in verse XII:
 
The god’s tongue flashed, and he roared with glee
At each spasm he drew from the breast of me,
And the mystery of Panic mirth
Lay bare in the sight of a man.

 

CHORONZON

 

 

Following the publication of the second edition of the Equinox in September, Crowley and Neuburg decided to go on a great magical retirement together, to Algiers.
Together, they are to explore the 30 Aethyrs using the Nineteen Enochian Calls or Keys as was obtained by Sir Edward Kelly and his scribe, John Dee; Crowley acted as seer and Neuburg was his scribe, writing down the record of all that occurred [Crowley had already investigated the first two Keys (30^th & 29^th) on November 14^th and 17^th 1900 – see The Temple of Solomon the King, The Equinox volume I, number III, p. 269]
They reached Algiers on Wednesday 17^th November 1909 and from there two days later on Friday 19^th they left for Arba. On Sunday 21^st November they reach Aumale and on Tuesday 30^th November they are at Bou-Saada.
They had climbed Daleh Addin, a mountain in the desert near Bou-Saada and ‘on the afternoon of [Friday] December 3^rd I invoked the fourteenth Aethyr. Here was a veil so black and thick that I could not pass through. I tore off layer after layer with desperate effort, while in my ears there pealed a solemn voice. It spoke of me as dead.’ Crowley then says that he ‘prepared to return to the city’ but ‘suddenly came the command to perform a magical ceremony on the summit. We accordingly took loose rocks and built a great circle, inscribed with the words of power; and in the midst we erected an altar and there I sacrificed myself.’ Crowley is here referring to an act of sexual magick, Neuburg taking the positive role with the intention of removing ‘certain conceptions of conduct’ which still lay within the magician’s heart so that he may cross the Abyss.
The Abyss is an void ‘empty of being; it is filled with all possible forms, each equally inane, each therefore evil in the only true sense of the word – that is meaningless but malignant, insofar as it craves to become real.’ On Monday 6^th December, Crowley and Neuburg went far from the city into a hollow among the dunes to evoke the tenth Aethyr and they made a ‘Circle to protect the scribe [Neuburg], and a Triangle wherein the Abyss might manifest sensibly. We killed three pigeons, one at each Angle, that their blood might be a basis whereon the forces of Evil might build themselves bodies.’ The name of the Dweller of the Abyss is Choronzon, a mighty demon who appeared to Neuburg in many physical forms: a woman Neuburg was in love with, Crowley, a serpent with a human head and a naked savage. Neuburg had sworn an oath to strike with the Magical Dagger at anything which entered the Circle, even if it were the appearance of Crowley himself. Crowley sat apart separately having retired to a secret place, where is neither sight nor hearing, in his black robe with his hood drawn over his face, seated in the ‘Thunderbolt’ asana. Choronzon in its many forms attempted to induce Neuburg to leave the protective circle or to gain entrance to it and possess the scribe; on one occasion, Choronzon was making a long speech of incoherent words and blasphemies keeping the scribe busy in writing while throwing sand from the Triangle to obliterate the Circle before reciting ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’. Choronzon seized his opportunity and rushed upon the circle through the gap in the form of a naked savage and attacked Neuburg. ‘He flung him to the earth, and tried to tear out his throat with his froth-covered fangs. O. V. [Neuburg] invoked the names of God, and struck at Choronzon with the Magical Dagger. The demon was cowed by this courageous conduct, and writhed back into the triangle. O. V. then repaired the Circle; Choronzon resumed his ravings, but could not continue… at last all the energy latent in the blood of the pigeons was exhausted by the successive phantoms, so that it was no longer able to give form to the forces evoked. The Triangle was empty.’ Crowley wrote the Holy Name of BABALON in the sand with his Magical Ring and they ‘lit a great fire to purify the place, and destroyed the Circle and Triangle. The work had lasted over two hours, [between 2 and 4.15 p.m.] and we were both utterly exhausted, physically and in every other way. I hardly know how we ever got back to Bou-Saada.’ [see Liber 418, The Vision and the Voice, Introduction]
On Wednesday 8^th December they walked across the desert to Biskra, arriving there a week later on Thursday 16^th December, where they called upon the fourth Aethyr between 9 and 10.30 in the morning, and the third the following day [9.30-11.30 a.m.]. The second Aethyr was invoked on Saturday 18^th December [9.20-10.05 a.m.] and continued on Monday 20^th December [8.35-9.35 p.m.] while the final and first Aethyr was invoked at Biskra (before finishing the second Aethyr) on Sunday 19^th December between 1.30 and 3.30 p.m. and thus ended the Vision and the Voice.
There is a telling 13-page letter that Crowley writes from the Royal Hotel in Biskra to Fuller, dictated to Neuburg and written in the younger man’s hand, on Saturday 18^th December 1909; after praising Neuburg, his scribe, it goes on to say that ‘I have had an awful job keeping him [Neuburg] off these Arab boys. He has a frightful lust for brown bottoms, because when he was at school he was kicked by a man with brown boots; and being a masochist as well as a paederast, that accounts for it.’ (15) It is hard to believe that Victor, by all accounts a sensitive man would have written such a statement to a friend such as Fuller, yet it exists in his handwriting; the fact that he did not refuse to write it suggests he did not disagree with the statement and that he felt no shame in his desires. It is dictated by a man he truly trusts and believes in (AC) to a devoted friend (Fuller) in confidence and perhaps a little with his tongue in his cheek, but it is another indication as to the true nature of Neuburg’s sexual desire towards his own sex which I believe was, like Crowley, bisexual. Crowley also hints at Neuburg’s uncontrollable passions early on in his Algerian Diary in an entry dated [Monday] 22^nd November 1909 while they are at Aumale and staying at the Hotel Grossat; he says that ‘after dinner went to a wicked place, where I profoundly regret to be obliged to confess, my comrade [Neuburg] displayed unequivocal symptoms of bawdiness. My duty to his poor mother and uncles, as well as my own moral sense, compelled me to repress this terrible lust for carnal copulation with words severe indeed – but not unjust.’ He next adds that ‘I stayed, myself, with an Arab wench.’ (16)
Having completed the Great Magical Retirement in the desert, on the last day of the year, Friday 31^st December, they left Algiers and set sail for Southampton.
 

 

BARTZABEL

 

On Monday 9^th May 1910, three days after Victor’s 27^th birthday (on Friday 6^th May) Victor was with Crowley and Leila Waddell at Rempstone Hall, the house of Commander Guy Montague Marston, [Royal Navy] (1871-1928) in Dorset. During that night, they invoked the spirit of Mars (see The Bartzabel Working)
The splendid result of incorporating music and poetry to heighten the senses gave Crowley the idea to stage a ritual along these lines.
 
Between Thursday 9^th and Friday 10^th June 1910, Neuburg received the following poem during an invocation: I.nsit N.aturae R.egina I.sis. In the poem a silent ‘green goddess’ [Isis] whom the poet hails and asks: ‘How shall I have speech of Thee, who know not thy speaking? / how shall I behold Thee, who art hidden in the darkness?’ The young adorer goes on to say that ‘I have left the groves of Pan that I might gaze upon Thee, / gaze upon the Virgin that before Time was begotten, / Mother of Chronos….’ Then he hears a voice speak to another, asking: ‘”Who stands with downcast eyes in the temple of our Lady?”’ and the reply is: ‘”A wanderer from the world who hath sought the halls of silence; / yet knoweth he not the Bride of the Darkness, / Her of the sable wings, and eyes of terrible blindness / that see through the worlds and find nothing and nothing, / who would smite the worlds to peace, save that so she would perish, / and cannot, for that she is a goddess silent and immortal, / utterly immortal in the gods’ eternal darkness.”’ The poem, which Neuburg signs as Omnia Vincam, was published in The Equinox, volume I, number IV, (pp. 21-23)
Another poem that Neuburg writes in June is The Sunflower, which he composed on Tuesday 21^st June 1910, the day before the Summer Solstice and publishes in The Triumph of Pan (pp. 66-70), dedicating it to the journalist and novelist, George Raffalovich (1880-1958). In the poem he seems to record a vision of the Lord Osiris who gives him the ‘long-forgotten signs’ and he is cautioned to ‘speak them not aloud, till I with heavenly wines / am drunken, and in vision speak to thee.’ The poem ends:
 
Let not the fear of me abase thy pride;
I seek thee for a bridegroom; I, the bride,
Shall come to thee, unsought; be kind to her
Who comes to thee bearing a Sunflower.
And the two Rods shall strike, and there shall be
A mighty fire in heaven to set me free
From prison; sleep thou seven days again,
Until I bear the light into thy brain:
And thou art weary, – but await my word.
I go as Thunder, that came but as a Bird.

 

ARTEMIS

 

On the evening of Tuesday 23^rd August 1910, select members of the public and press were invited to witness a ritual at 124, Victoria Street, a ceremonial Rite of Artemis. A reporter from The Sketch, Raymond Radclyffe, attended the ceremony held at 124, Victoria Street and described the event in The Sketch of the following day, Wednesday 24^th August 1910, (p. 44) under the heading – ‘A New Religion’:
 
‘A certain number of literary people know the name of Aleister Crowley as a poet. A few regard him as a magician. But a small and select circle revere him as the hierophant of a new religion. This creed Captain Fuller, in a book on the subject extending to 327 pages, calls Crowleyanity. I do not pretend to know what Captain Fuller means. He is deeply read in philosophy, and he takes Crowley very seriously. I do not quite see whether Crowley himself is driving; but I imagine that the main idea in the brain of the remarkable poet is to plant Eastern Transcendental Buddhism, which attains its ultimate end in Samadhi, in English soil under the guise of Ceremonial Magic. Possibly the average human being requires and desires ceremony. Even the simplest Methodist uses some sort of ceremony, and Crowley, who is quite in earnest in his endeavour to attain such unusual conditions of mind as are called ecstasy, believes that the gateway to Ecstasy can be reached through Ceremonial Magic. He has saturated himself with the magic of the East a very real thing, in tune with the Eastern mind. He is well read in the modern metaphysicians, all of whom have attempted to explain the unexplainable. He abandons these. They appeal only to the brain and once their jargon is mastered they lead nowhere least of all to Ecstasy! He goes back upon ceremony, because he thinks that it helps the mind to get outside itself. He declares that if you repeat an invocation solemnly and aloud, expectant of some great and mysterious result, you will experience a deep sense of spiritual communion. He is now holding a series of séances. I attended at the offices of the Equinox. I climbed the interminable stairs [five flights]. I was received by a gentleman robed in white and carrying a drawn sword. The room was dark only a dull-red light shone upon an altar. Various young men, picturesquely red, or black, stood at different points round the room. Some held swords. The incense made a haze, through which I saw a small white statue, illumined by a tiny lamp hung high on the cornice. A brother recited the banishing ritual of the Pentagram impressively and with due earnestness. Another brother was commanded to purify the Temple with water. This was done. Then we witnessed the Consecration of the Temple with Fire, whereupon Crowley, habited in black, and accompanied by the brethren, led the Mystic Circumambulation. They walked round the altar twice or thrice in a sort of religious procession. Gradually, one by one, those of the company who were mere onlookers, were beckoned into the circle. The Master of the Ceremonies then ordered a brother to bear the Cup of Libation. The brother went round the room, offering a large golden bowl full of some pleasant-smelling drink. We drank in turn. This over, a stalwart brother strode into the centre and proclaimed The Twelvefold Certitude of God. Artemis was then invoked by the great ritual of the Hexagram. More Libation. Aleister Crowley read us the Song of Orpheus from the Argonauts. Following upon this song we drank our third Libation, and then the Brothers led into the room a draped figure, masked in that curious blue tint we mentally associate with Hecate. The lady, for it was a lady, was enthroned on a seat high above Crowley himself. By this time the ceremony had grown weird and impressive, and its influence was increased when the poet recited in solemn and reverent voice Swinburne’s glorious first chorus from Atalanta, that begins, When the hounds of spring. Again a Libation again an invocation to Artemis. After further ceremonies, Frater Omnia Vincam was commanded to dance the dance of Syrinx and Pan in honour of our lady Artemis. A young poet, whose verse is often read, astonished me by a graceful and beautiful dance, which he continued until he fell exhausted in the middle of the room, where by the way, he lay until the end. Crowley then made supplication to the goddess in a beautiful and unpublished poem. A dead silence ensued. After a long pause, the figure enthroned took a violin and played with passion and feeling, like a master. We were thrilled to our very bones. Once again the figure took the violin, and played an Abend Lied so beautifully, so gracefully, and with such intense feeling that in very deed most of us experienced that Ecstasy which Crowley so earnestly seeks. Then came a prolonged and intense silence, after which the Master of the Ceremonies dismissed us in these words By the Power in me vested, I declare the Temple closed. So ended a really beautiful ceremony beautifully carried out. If there is any higher form of artistic expression than great verse and great music I have yet to learn it. I do not pretend to understand the ritual that runs like a thread of magic through these meetings of the A.A. I do not even know what the A.A. is. But I do know that the whole ceremony was impressive, artistic, and produced in those present such a feeling as Crowley must have had when he wrote So shalt thou conquer Space, and lastly climb the walls of Time and by the golden path the great have trod Reach up to God. R. R.’
 
Following a dress rehearsal (of the Rite of Jupiter) on the afternoon of Wednesday 28^th September, there was a description of the temple at Victoria Street in the Morning Leader of Thursday 29^th September 1910 (p. 5) which said that ‘after climbing innumerable stairs, the seeker after Truth came upon a door guarded by a flaming eye.’ He goes on to say that ‘the room was extravagantly furnished and reeking with the aroma of incense. The floor was bare and polished and marked out with a wide red circle. Triangles and circles, and all the strange Abracadabra of the True Mystic, hung around the walls: there were silver goblets on stands, supported by volumes of strange books, and upon a pedestal all to itself stood a bust, in black marble, of the High Priest himself, inscribed with the motto ‘Fiat Voluntas Tua’ [Thy will be done]. In the centre of the circle was a throne covered with a table cloth. The High Priest vaulted upon it and sat cross-legged like a Buddha. At his feet crouched, shivering, a youth (also in black and gold), and around the rim of the red circle sat two youths and a Maiden in the most profound attitudes of concentration. The Maiden was wearing a hooded robe of sea green, and she carried a shining silver star on her forehead. The two young men were cloaked in red and both carried a flaming sword (by Clarkson) point downwards.’ The article goes on to describe the ‘weird ritual’ which ‘by the way, was the Rite of Jupiter’, saying that the High Priest was ‘going off into an interesting Primary Convulsion and waving a conjuror’s ivory wand.’ He then summoned ‘the guests to the banquet’ and ordered that the libations be produced.
 
The Rite of Artemis was later developed into the Rite of Luna in the Rites of Eleusis and the rites were performed at London’s Caxton Hall over several nights on consecutive Wednesdays with the doors opening at 8.30 p.m. and the performances starting at 9 p.m. The first performance was the Rite of Saturn on Wednesday 19^th October, followed by the Rite of Jupiter [Wednesday 26^th October], the Rite of Mars [Wednesday 2^nd November], the Rite of Sol [Wednesday 9^th November], the Rite of Venus [Wednesday 16^th November], the Rite of Mercury [Wednesday 23^rd November] and the Rite of Luna [Wednesday 30^th November].One of the actresses in the Rites was Jeanne Heyes (1890-1912) who went by the professional stage name Ione de Forest; she played the part of the moon and Neuburg became infatuated with her, much to Crowley’s annoyance.

 

PAN

Rosa Mundi est Lilium Coeli

 

In the beginning of December 1910, Crowley and Neuburg set off once more to Algiers to continue the work they had begun with the Enochian Keys. They arrived at Marseille around 7^th December and stayed at the Hotel de la Regence where they had to wait until Friday 9^th December to get the boat to Algiers; there, they caught the train to Bou Saada, where they stayed for six nights and on Thursday 15^th December they began their walk, taking along with them, camels and the camel guide and a young boy. Frustrated with the camel owner and the boy who both showed lack of willingness, they continued alone with the camels but later found them cumbersome and returned them to the camel owner, who had followed them. The second day of walking saw them enduring a heavy rain storm which ceased the following day (when they abandoned the camels) and they walked to Biskra. No or very little magical work was done on the journey as they both seemed despondent and Neuburg seemed plagued by illness and fatigue. Crowley left Neuburg at Biskra and returned alone. Neuburg recovered well enough to travel to Tunis and return from there. It was a disappointing time. While they had been walking, Neuburg’s collection of poetry, ‘The Triumph of Pan’ was published by The Equinox and many of the poems are dedicated to the poet’s friends, such as Gerald Pinsent, Norman Mudd, Kenneth Martin Ward, Arthur F. Grimble (17), and of course, Aleister Crowley. The poem after the title of the volume, The Triumph of Pan, consists of 44, eight line verses and begins by declaring that ‘there are three gods who in their talons hold me; / they dig within my breast…’ and we learn in the second verse that the first of these three gods is a woman, ‘with burning glances mingled / with longings soft and pure’; and ‘the second god laughs loud upon my plaining, / seeing in me his prey’. This second god ‘hath no pity’ and with his ‘great hand on my brow / brings visions never to be known of me / till I be one with his mad mystery’ is Pan himself, and lastly, the third god, ‘is one Great One, cold and burning’ who is ‘crafty and hot in lust’. This third god is male for ‘He sees the immortal light / break through me to the night, / where Love is cast in impotent despair / from her communion with the upper air.’ In the third and fourth lines of verse IV the poet says as if in feminine form, this god ‘would make me a Sapphist’ and adding in a homosexual context ‘and an Urning, / a Lesbian of the dust.’ This third god is obviously Crowley.
The poem ends:
 
Yea! And the lyre is mine, and I am fearless,
Naked, and free, and young;
The torch is out; no longer night is cheerless;
The hot young day is sprung
From out the loins of God!
Rise from the barren sod,
Raise high the Paean of God in Man!
Io Triumphe! Hail to the new-born Pan!

 

THE UNKNOWN ROSE

 

The Equinox, volume I, number X of September 1913 contains a poem by Victor titled ‘Rosa Ignota – A Poem for Pilgrims’ (pp.129-198) The poem begins with the Latin phrase: Rosa Verae Semper Quae Vivit Et Diliget – The Rose of Spring which Lives and Loves Forever. And then we find the heartfelt words of the poet as he remembers his saviour-poet and mystic, Crowley, coming to his beckoning letter, to Cambridge, that fateful day in February 1907:

 

I searched the world for life; at length I came

Unto a gateway I could not pass through;

And then I turned, calling upon the name

Of you.

 

And so you came to me; each dawn was new,

And every sunset was a scarlet flame,

And noon was glorious in gold and blue.

 

So now I care not for my mystic shame;

Love brings no fears, and life gives nought to rue,

So I may sing unto the love and fame

Of you.

 

The poem then begins with an Invocation in which Neuburg is surely speaking of Crowley:

 

O thou whose scent enchanted my vain youth

From the more bitter truth

Of easy things,

How hast thou led me on

To the mire?

Thou madest thyself wings

Of false and fecund fire;

Thou bad’st me don

An alien robe of shame.

Ah! Sweetheart, thee I blame,

And may not blame,

For the sweet, eternal shame

That seared my soul,

And left my spirit free,

Free! to weep before thee,

And thou hast slain me;

Thou hast slain me whole,

I am all dead to thee,

My Rose my Rose, my Rose,

 

It seems Neuburg is singing of the loss of his ‘sweet wizard’s’ affection for him and continues by declaring that ‘this my song shall be / the last I shall sing to thee, / to thee. Oh, the wind blows / thy secret to me, Rose!’ (p. 138) These lines suggest Neuburg has discovered something about Crowley, his Rose whose love he laments, that has caused him great sadness and distress. The poem contains many such references to the Rose and the Lily, in fact they are a recurring theme which we first encountered in the poem Olivia Vane: ‘Come, and be glad of the flowers / I have plucked from the bosom of thee’ ‘…lilies and burning red roses / that flame and grow strong with desire’; symbolically the Rose represents love, passion, beauty, devotion and romance, while the lily is a symbol of purity, innocence and everlasting love. Part II [The Garden] mentions a ‘marriage of nyph with faun’ (p. 139) and part III [Amor Intellectualis] ends with the lines: ‘still shall I feel the wind that blows. / From the secret grave of thee, my Rose.’

The poet is dejected, saying, almost prophetically ‘yet shall he worship thee / with his tears / for a few short years. / And then he shall be / nothing at all to thee, / who sang thee when no other man would sing thee, / who brought unto thee all that he could bring thee.’ [part VI The Valley, p. 149]. In part VIII [Inspiration] the poet in despair and rejection cries ‘my little heap of ashes, thou wast god, / yea, utterly wast thou god!’ (p. 155) Neuburg is here stressing the fact that he utterly believed Crowley to be the earthly personification of a god and now he doubts even this…

 

‘So there are no more roses, no more roses;

There shall be no more songs to thee.’ (p. 155)

 

In part IX [The Descent into Matter] there is a bitter cry of resentment when the poet says – ‘forsaken one, whom I have found, thou art ravished / by the phallus of Time, of Time that pierceth thee / so keenly that thou art torn, thy virgin body / a prey to the lust of Time!’

 

When at the last my throbbing lyre reposes

In endless sleep; yet one last rose shall blow

Upon our graves, one rose, one Rose of roses.

“Out of his heart a rose, from hers a briar.”

O Love! My flame-flower of immortal fire! (p. 192)

 

‘I may not speak it. Yet my tongue still mutters

Cravingly, eagerly, oh! desperately.

What is this thing that still my glad mouth utters?

I may not say it. Darling, even to thee:

Thou that hast granted heaven in a kiss.

O Darling, need I tell thee what is this? (XIII. pp. 193-194)

 

We talk so foolishly of love! We lie

Lip unto lip, heart pressed to beating breast

All too oblivious of the hours that fly

For ever onward to eternal rest. (p. 194)

 

Oh, shall they be renewed, those sacred hours?

Or shall the jealous gods our love destroy,

Being jealous that with only mortal powers

We have dared to steal their own immortal joy? (p. 195)

 

In the final stanzas of the poem [part XXII In The End] is Neuburg recalling their walk across Spain in 1908 or the march through Algiers of 1909 calling upon the aethyrs – ‘in dreams of desert valleys, mountains steep, / with winding paths; hot suns and scorching plains.’ (p. 196)

 

‘Because a poet’s curse I bear away, / my payment for the vision of the day’ (p. 196)

In the final verse of part XXII the poet asks:

 

So do my songs end here; the hour is fled,

And there are no more roses; I am fain

To cease from singing. Wait! the hour is sped,

Oh! now the hour is dead, and I am fain

Awake life’s young sons back to the soul again! (p. 197)

 

The poem ends after The Epilogue with the words: Explicit Opusculum Nondum Finis – The work is finished but the end is not yet. The whole poem seems to read like Neuburg’s De Profundis in which he is renouncing his obligation to Crowley.

If we look at the circumstances surrounding the writing of this poem and the cause of Neuburg’s profound sadness and grief, we can see that the culmination of his despair is caused by the suicide of Jeanne Merton with whom he had been having an affair. We must now look a little closer into her life and their unfortunate relationship.

 

THE SAD DEMISE OF JEANNE MERTON

 

Jeanne Eugenie Heyse was born on 19^th June 1890 at Kirkwood House, Hornsey, the daughter of Ferdinand Francis Ernest Heyse, born in Holland in 1861 and Margaret Murrane, born in Galway, Ireland in 1866; Ferdinand, of 3 Guildford Place, London and Margaret, third daughter of John Murrane of Tuam, Ireland, were married on 16^th February 1887 at St. Philip’s Church, Lower Sydenham (18). Ferdinand, a Freemason, inventor of patents and a wholesale provision merchant and Margaret had the following children: Kathleen Marguerite Louise Heyse, born 17^th January 1888 in Hornsey (19), Jeanne born 1890; Eileen Norah Heyse, born 29^th December 1891 in Hornsey; Evelyn Florence R Heyse born between January and March 1893 in Hornsey who sadly died a few months later, and Blanche Mona F Heyse, born in Brentford, Hounslow, London on 28^th February 1897 (20).
 
Jeanne Heyse, 19 years old of 167, Brixton Road, London, married Wilfred Merton at St. George’s, Hanover Square on Friday 22^nd December 1911 (Jeanne’s sister, Kathleen witnessed the marriage). Just ten days later, at the start of the New Year on Monday 1^st January 1912, Jeanne’s father, Ferdinand Francis Ernest Heyse died aged 59 in Lambeth, London. Jean Overton Fuller goes into some detail about Jeanne, who had trained at RADA, and Wilfred in her Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg (p. 211) saying that ‘after the ceremony at St. George’s, Joan [Jeanne] and Merton and Victor travelled to Paris together, the best of friends’ and that ‘Merton knew the situation which had existed previously with Victor’ and his wife, Jeanne. ‘On their return’ she continues, ‘Joan and Merton went to live in [number 5] Cardinal Mansions, Westminster, and Joan became an arts student studying painting and took a room in Rosetti Studios, Flood Street. It was now that she met [the artist and writer] Nina Hamnett’ (1890-1956). She continues: ‘About the beginning of June, five or six months after marriage, she left Merton and installed herself in the studio. (p. 212) It seems that Neuburg was still infatuated with Jeanne and carrying on an affair with her.
Wilfred, no doubt exasperated by this, filed for divorce on Tuesday 4^th June 1912, citing Neuberg as co-respondent for adultery. Two months later, at her home, Rosetti Studios, on Thursday 1^st August 1912, 21 year old Jeanne Merton shot herself in the heart with a revolver [gun licence issued to Jeanne in the name of Ione de Forest on Thursday 18^th July at Sloan Square.’ (Fuller. p. 219)] She left a suicide note explaining that she ‘intended committing suicide tonight because of the unbearable position which my extremely rash and unfortunate marriage has placed me in.’ There was another letter for her husband which simply said: ‘You have killed me.’ prior to her suicide she had been visited in the evening by Nina Hamnett who found her packing; they had arranged to meet the following day at 11 a.m. at her apartment. When Nina came the next day she found an envelope attached to the door with the key and she let herself in and found the body prostrate on the divan, the pistol by her slippers. The next day, Saturday 3^rd August, her inquest occurred at Chelsea Coroner’s Court.
We can see from this terrible action the predicament it put many of those around her and poor Neuburg would have been utterly distressed and heartbroken. It was known all along that Crowley had taken a dislike to Jeanne because of her and Victor’s relationship. The poem, ‘Rosa Ignota’ speaks of a ‘wind that blows’ suggesting he has discovered something about Crowley which he finds difficult to believe and to me this suggests that he has seen a copy of Crowley’s Book 4, published in 1913 and come upon the section where it says: ‘An adept known to the Master Therion [Crowley] once found it necessary to slay a Circe who was bewitching brethren [Neuburg]. He merely walked to the door of her room, and drew an Astral T (“traditore”, and the symbol of Saturn) with an astral dagger. Within 48 hours she shot herself.’ In the footnote Crowley says that ‘The Adept here in question was therefore obliged to incorporate the elemental spirit of the girl – she was not human, the sheath of a Star, but an advanced planetary daemon, whose rash ambition had captured a body beyond its capability to conduct – in his own magical vehicle. He thereby pledged himself to subordinate all the sudden accession of qualities – passionate, capricious, impulsive, irrational, selfish, short-sightedness, sensual, fickle, crazy and desperate, to his True Will.’ [Book 4, Magick in Theory and Practice]. Crowley is of course referring to himself when he says ‘an adept’ – did he really stand outside Jeanne’s door at Rosetti Studios on or around Tuesday 30^th July 1912 and draw with an astral dagger the letter ‘T’ and the symbol of Saturn? I don’t believe he did, but it is possible Crowley travelled there in his astral form, the ‘body if light’ and used the ‘astral dagger’; either way, it seems Victor took him seriously at his word and whether he did or not, he is more than happy to take the blame for such an awful tragedy.

 

MERCURY AND JUPITER

 

The two magicians seem to put their differences aside and in December 1913, Crowley and Neuburg embark on what will be their final magical work together which shall become known as The Paris Working. Neuburg, now with the grade of Zelator, 2=9 and the motto Lampada Tradam (21) takes on the role of scribe and performs the active part in the ceremonies.
The first working (opus I) occurred on Wednesday 31^st December 1913 from 11.40 p.m. to 1.40 a.m. and the two men are utilising the sexual energies they had invoked in Algiers four years earlier; during the ceremony, an invocation of Thoth [Mercury] brings the god to manifestation as a young boy. As midnight struck the new year signalling the death of the old, Neuburg reached his orgasm and the sacred words of the Versicle were spoken in a swoon of ecstasy: ‘Jungitur in vati vates, rex inclyte rhabdou / Hermes tu venias, verba nefanda ferens.’ [‘Behold! The Priest is joined to the Priest: illustrious king of the Staff / mayest thou come, Hermes, bearing the unutterable words!’] The magical operations are of interest and worth a brief summary:
Opus II: Thursday 1^st January – Friday 2^nd January 1914. The Temple was opened at 11.20 p.m. and the Versicle began at 11.40 p.m. and ended at 11.55 p.m. Crowley says that ‘Frater L.T. [Lampada Tradam, Neuburg] completely lost control and although a man of some education, degraded himself and dispersed the holy invoked prana by defacing this volume with the meaningless scrawls…declaring them to be the inspiration of Thoth, which were unworthy even of His ape. In this way a great part of the virtue of the Rite was lost.’ Hermes as ‘Messenger’; the Temple was closed ‘about 2 o’clock of the forenoon of Friday.’
Opus III: Friday 2^nd January – Saturday 3^rd January. The Temple was opened about midnight and closed at 2.15 a.m. Hermes as ‘Force’. He is ‘Semen, the vehicle of the Father. He despises talk, and is all energy and action.’
Opus IV: Monday 5^th January – Tuesday 6^th January. The Temple was opened at 9 p.m. and closed at 10 p.m. conversing until 1 a.m. Hermes. [Crowley is suffering from a cold]
Opus V: Tuesday 6^th January. The Temple opened approximately at 9.30p.m. and closed at 10.30p.m. Juppiter.
Opus VI: Wednesday 7^th January. The Temple opened at 9 p.m. and closed at 9.45 p.m. Juppiter, but Frater L.T. ‘failed at proper method.’
Opus VII: Thursday 8^th January – Friday 9^th January. The Temple opened 10 p.m. and closed at 11.20 p.m. Juppiter.
Opus VIII: Sunday 11^th January – Monday 12^th January. Invoked Hermes.
Crowley and Neuburg, the latter feeling ill, took a week off: on Tuesday 13^th January they performed ‘The Mass of the Phoenix’ and on Thursday 15^th January Crowley and Neuburg went to the forest to regain strength of health.
Opus IX: Monday 19^th January – Tuesday 20^th January. The Temple opened at 11.45 p.m. and closed at 12.30 a.m. Juppiter.
Opus X: Tuesday 20^th January – Wednesday 21^st January.  The Temple opened at 11.30 p.m. and closed at 12.15 a.m. Juppiter, as Amoun-Ra, ‘plumed and phallic. Astral bells.’
Opus XI: Wednesday 21^st January – Thursday 22^nd January. The Temple opened at 11 p.m. and closed at 1.45 a.m. Juppiter.
Opus XII: Thursday 22^nd January – Friday 23^rd January. The Temple opened at 9. 55 p.m. and closed at 11 p.m.  Juppiter.
Opus XIII: Monday 26^th January – Tuesday 27^th January. The Temple was opened at 11.30 p.m. and closed at 2 a.m. Juppiter, Frater O.S.V. [Crowley] inspired to dance.
Opus XIV: Tuesday 27^th January – Wednesday 28^th January. The Temple opened at midnight and closed at 1.07 a.m. Juppiter.
Opus XV: Wednesday 28^th January – Thursday 29^th January. The Temple was opened at 11. 15 p.m. and closed at 12.10 a.m. Juppiter.
Opus XVI: Thursday 29^th January – Friday 30^th January. The Temple opened at 10.30p.m. and closed at midnight. Juppiter and ‘additional rites’.
Opus XVII: Monday 2^nd February – Tuesday 3^rd February. The Temple opened at 10.30p.m. and closed at 12.50 a.m. Juppiter.
Opus XVIII: Tuesday 3^rd February – Wednesday 4^th February. The Temple opened at 10.30 p.m. and closed at 1.05 a.m. Juppiter and ‘complete absorption of force.’
Opus XIX: Wednesday 4^th February – Thursday 5^th February. The Temple was opened at 11.28 p.m. and closed at 12.50 a.m. Juppiter.
Opus XX: Thursday 5^th February. The temple was opened at 10 p.m. and closed at 11 p.m. Juppiter.
Opus XXI: Monday 9^th February. The Temple was opened (mentally) at 9.10 p.m. and closed at 9.25 p.m. Juppiter.
Opus XXII: Tuesday 10^th February. The Temple opened at 9.30 p.m. and closed at 10.15 p.m.
Opus XXIII: Wednesday 11^th February. Juppiter.
Opus XXIV: Thursday 12^th February (the final working). The Temple opened at 6.15 p.m. and closed at 7 p.m. Frater L.T. [Neuburg] was ‘taken by Juppiter to be His cup-bearer.’ (22)
 
The Paris Working would be the last time Neuburg and Crowley worked together. In May 1914, Neuburg, Crowley and Hayter Preston [William Edward Hayter Preston, 1891-1964] are at victor’s home in London when Hayter Preston and Crowley have a massive argument. Victor goes to Branscomb near Seaton in South Devon, invited by Olivia Haddon, to stay in one of the cottages (Vittoria Cremers is in another) and it was here that they heard the news that war was declared on 4^th August; Victor left towards the end of September.
In conclusion I believe the ultimate factors in Neuburg’s break with Crowley was Crowley’s attitude and behaviour towards Victor’s relationship with Jeanne Heyse, later Merton and the manner of her death, to which Crowley took great delight in being the instigator of; this, together with the outcome from the Looking Glass trial of 1910 and friends and acquaintances such as J. F. C. Fuller, Hayter Preston and Vittoria Cremers (1860-1937), all giving Neuburg advice to break from Crowley whose reputation was floundering. It seems Neuburg took that advice and he went to see Crowley in London before A.C. went off to America around September-October of 1914 and he told the older poet and magician that he was severing the relationship, thus breaking his magical oath. Crowley of course, did the only thing he could do, and ritually cursed Neuburg before his eyes; Victor would have been stunned by such an action, which subsequently caused Victor to have a nervous breakdown. He becomes an unlikely soldier in the Royal Army Service Corps and a man living under a curse for the rest of his life which he devotes to poetry and his Vine Press. We can only speculate upon the deep intimacy Crowley and Neuburg shared together and the picture of the childlike Victor, hiding his inky fingers from Crowley’s inspection of them at Victoria Street and saying ‘shant’ is very endearing, as is Victor’s charming use of the word – ‘ostrobogolous’. But the ghost of Crowley haunted Victor to the end of his days, having been through so much together in the eight years in which they had become lovers, seer and scribe.

 

SERPENS NOCTIS REGINA MUNDI
(Invocation a la Lune. Ballade Argentee.)
 
Oh lustrous Lady of the luminous lake,
Moving in magic mazes through the trees –
The sombre, swaying trees – light-lady, take
A moment’s murmurings; heart-harmonies
That break my breast: I kneel before thy knees,
All humbly hesitant; the silver shoon
I crave to kiss make molten melodies
 To the Slow Nocturne of the Rising Moon.
 
Oh lustrous Lady, for thy shadow’s sake
Is slain my slumber, ended all my ease;
I dream at dawn, nor with the wild-birds wake
To dulcet day; marred are mine images
Of lost lowlands, of secret summer seas,
Where grave gold Glamour is so subtly strewn,
That from that dryad-dream no faerie flees
To the Slow Nocturne of the Rising Moon.
 
Oh lustrous Lady of the Silver Snake,
Whisper thy worshipper if his pleadings please
Thine ear; oh, merrier music might I make –
Murmurs of moonlit meads, of light-green leas –
Where pagan priests muttered the Mysteries
Before the baleful Birth; in their swaying swoon
They prophesied palely in thy curious keys
To the Slow Nocturne of the Rising Moon.
 
L’envoi,
 
Oh lustrous Lady, may my memories
Of the untroublous times ere noisome noon
Bring back thy secret serpent-sorceries
To the Slow Nocturne of the Rising Moon.
 
[Tillyard. pp. 155-156]

 

 

NOTES:

 

1. Michaelmas Term at Cambridge during 1906 was from Monday 1^st October to Wednesday 19^th December; Full Term (8 weeks) was from Friday 12^th October to Wednesday 5^th December. V. B. Neuburg is listed under the list of freshmen at Trinity, his residence being ‘L, Whewell’s Court’ in the Cambridge Independent Press, Friday 12^th October 1906, p. 6. Also matriculating at the same time at Trinity and on the same staircase at Whewell’s Court with Neuburg, is the philosopher, Charles Dunbar Broad (1887-1971); Broad won a scholarship from Dulwich College and went up to Trinity to study natural Sciences but later switched to Moral Sciences (he graduated in 1910 and was elected a Fellow of Trinity).
2. A list of Neuburg’s works in the Agnostic Journal for 1906: An Old Song (27^th January 1906), The Dream (17^th February 1906), Serenade (12^th May 1906 [and Green garland 1908]), Young Summer (26^th May 1906 [and Green Garland 1908]0, Three Lyrics and a Sonnet (2^nd June 1906), Freethought (30^th June 1906), To the Moon (7^th July 1906), Four Sonnets to William Blake (18^th August 1906), Marie Spiridonova (25^th august 1906), A Song for a Free Spirit (8^th September 1906), An Agnostic View (15^th September 1906 [and Green Garland 1908]), Four Poems from the German (22^nd September 1906), Rejected Sonnets (24^th November 1907), Saladin: In Memoriam (15^th December 1906); several works also appeared in 1907: De Morte (in Honour of Saladin) (19^th January 1907), Paganismand the Sense of Song (19^th January 1907), A Recall (2^nd March 1907 [and Green Garland 1908]), The Eagle and the Serpent (30^th March 1907 [and Green Garland 1908]), Freethought (6^th April 1907), Ballade of the Daisy (18^th May 1907 [and Green Garland 1908]).
3. The Michaelmas term at trinity College, Cambridge during 1906 was from Monday 1^st October – Wednesday 19^th December; Full Term in which academic lectures took place was from Tuesday 9^th October – Tuesday 4^th December so Neuburg would have been free to attend.
4. Lent Term at Cambridge during 1907 was from Sunday 13^th January – Monday 25^th March; Full Term was from Tuesday 22^nd January – Tuesday 12^th March.
5. Neuburg’s letter to Crowley, 28^th January 1907, IV/12/7, papers of Major General  john Frederick Charles (1878-1966), GB99, KCLMA Fuller, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College Library, London. Crowley’s  ‘First Missionary Journey’, Crowley diary entries, 28^th February – 3^rd March, 1907, Aleister Crowley Collection, MS-01002, box 11, folder 5, Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin, given in Friendship in Doubt. Richard Kaczynski. p. 79.
6. Under Magdalen Bridge, a poem by Neuburg probably written while an undergraduate at trinity College and published in Cambridge Poets, 1900-1913: An Anthology. Aelfrida Tillyard. Cambridge. W. Heffer. 1913. p. 147.
7. Cambridge Independent Press, Friday 4^th October, p. 5.
8. In an article in the Cambridge Independent Press of Friday 19^th November 1909, p. 2, titled ‘Freethought in Cambridge’ a lecture by the philosopher Mr. Anthony Mario Ludovici (1882-1971) on ‘Nietzsche the Imoralist’ took place in a room at the Liberal Club on Thursday 11^th November 1909. Pinsent as President presided and made the opening remarks, saying that the ‘Cambridge Freethought Society had been open to misunderstanding from the beginning’. The article goes on to say that ‘The Dean of one of the colleges had hinted at the impropriety of forming it at all, and in regard to one lecture in particular, in whom the Society had no personal interest except on the part of a few members…’; the society ‘gradually raised its membership during the past year until it reached the very low figure of 30. At the end of the year a good many went down, and now they had little more than 20 members, among them two Fellows of Trinity…’ The second part of the lecture by A. M. Ludovici was also held at the Liberal Club on the evening of Thursday 18^th November 1909; Pinsent presided and ‘a short discussion followed the paper.’ [Cambridge Independent Press, Friday 26^th November 1909, p. 8]
9. Kenneth Martin Ward, born 11^th August 1887, son of James Ward and the Irish-British suffragist, scientist and author, Mary Ward. He joined Crowley’s magical order, the A. A. on Tuesday 25^th May 1909 and he died in 1927 aged 39.
10. see the article: Heat and Dust: Crowley’s walk across Spain. Audrarep. The Voice of Fire, volume I, number X [Autumn equinox: 23^rd September 2015 e.v.]
11. John St. John [The Equinox, volume I, number I, Special Supplement, March 1909] is a fascinating document which details Crowley’s Great Magical Retirement in Paris beginning on Thursday 1^st October 1908 and ending on Tuesday 13^th October 1908. He tells us that ‘months before, for quite other reasons, I had moved most of my portable property to Paris; now I got to Paris, not thinking of a retirement, for I now know enough to trust my destiny to bring all things to pass without anxious forethought on my part – and suddenly, therefore, here do I find myself – and nothing is lacking…’ He goes on: ‘Quite slowly and simply therefore did I wash myself and robe myself as laid down in the Goetia, taking the Violet Robe of an Exempt Adept (being a single Garment), wearing the Ring of an Exempt Adept, and the Secret Ring which hath been entrusted to my keeping by the Master. Also I took the Almond Wand of Abramelin and the Secret Tibetan Bell, made of Electrum Magicum with its striker of human bone. I took also the magical knife, and the holy Anointing Oil of Abramelin the Mage.’ [John St. John. Prologue. p. 10]
12. Wilfred Edward Hermann Schmiechen (1888-1957), son of the artist Hermann Schmiechen (1872-1923) who married Antonia Gebhard in Dusseldorf in 1883 (they divorced in 1898); Hermann and Antonia had four children: Herbert Keith Wolfram Schmiechen (1884-1950), Elsa Emma Lily Antoinette Schmiechen (1886-1933), Wilfred and Gerald Edward Siegfried Schmiechen (1893-1983). The Schmeichen siblings later changed their surname to Merton, after their stepfather, Zachary Merton (1843-1915). Wilfred Merton, engraver, publisher and book collector, later married the actress who appeared in Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis, Joan Hayes [Jeanne Eugenie Heyse, born Edmonton in 1890], who also used the professional stage name Ione de Forest, at St. George’s, Hanover Square on Friday 22^nd December 1911. Joan and Wilfred parted several months later and Joan took her own life, shooting herself in the heart at her home, Rosetti Studios, Flood Street, Chelsea, London on Thursday 1^st August 1912. She left a suicide note explaining that she ‘intended committing suicide tonight because of the unbearable position which my extremely rash and unfortunate marriage has placed me in.’ there was another letter for her husband which simply said: ‘You have killed me.’ She was 21 years old.
13. Norman Mudd to George Cecil Jones, 15^th January 1923, O.T.O. Archives. See Kaczynski, Friendship in Doubt, p. 81.
14. Norman Mudd letter to Aleister Crowley, OS EEI, Yorke Collection, Warburg Institute, London, given in Kaczynski’s Friendship in Doubt, p. 86. Mudd wrote a follow-up letter on 1^st February 1909, see Kaczynski pp. 89-91.
15. The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg. Jean Overton Fuller. p. 179.
16. Algerian Diary (1909), J F C Fuller Papers, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, University of London; also The Vision and the Voice with Commentary and Other Papers. Aleister Crowley with Victor B. Neuburg & Mary Desti [The Collected Diaries of Aleister Crowley, 1909-1914 e.v.], The Equinox volume IV, number II. Samuel Weiser, Inc. York Beach, 1998 e.v. Appendix I, p. 413.
17. Sir Arthur Francis Grimble, KCMG, (1888-1956), friend of Neuburg’s who was at Magdalen College, Cambridge. Neuburg dedicates the poem, ‘Under Magdalen Bridge’ to him (The Triumph of Pan. p. 87). Grimble’s poems appeared in Cambridge Poets,1900-1913 (Aelfrida Tillyard, 1913): ‘Atlantis’ (pp. 93-94) and ‘Birth’ (pp.94-95) In 1914 he joined the Colonial Office, became Resident Commissioner (1925) and Administrator and Colonial Secretary of St Vincent (1933) and Governor of the Seychelles (1936-1942) and Governor of the Windward Islands (1942-1948).
18. Marriage: Heyse and Murrane, Dublin Evening Telegraph, Saturday 5^th March 1887, p. 1. Jeanne Heyse birth: Morning Advertiser, Monday 23^rd June 1890, p. 1; (Eileen’s birth: The Gentlewoman, Saturday 9^th June 1892, p. 46). Ferdinand was a Freemason [presented as W.S. elect in May 1888 and Steward in 1889] at Sir Hugh Middleton Lodge number 1602 and had several patents under his name: in 1894, Ferdinand Heyse of 12, Basinghall Street, London, patented a ‘utilizing asbestos for producing gas from mineral oils’ with his partner, Italian civil engineer, J. Artidoro Farinetti. On 10^th July 1894 [patented in England on 12^th May 1893], Heyes and Farinetti, both of 15, Seething Lane, London, patented a ‘boot or shoe cleaning machine [1^st October 1896, US Patent Office]. In 1880 Ferdinand, a Commission Agent is carrying on a business at 78, Fenchurch Street, London and in 1889 Ferdinand and Margaret Heyse are living at 12, Campsbourne Road Hornsey; in June 1893 Ferdinand Heyse is carrying on a business as F. Heyes & Co. commission Merchant, at 15, Seething Lane, London with ties to Vredenberg 8, Arnheim, Holland [‘Dissolution of Partnership’: In March 1885 Ferdinand is listed under Heyes & Dasum, 15, Seething Lane, Commission Agents and Merchants, 6^th March, debts by Ferdinand Heyes who continues the business] In 1894 Ferdinand and Margaret are living at The Chimes, Grove Park Road, Chiswick, London. In May 1896 there was a Law Court action by Anglo-French Gold Fields of Australasia (Limited) against Ferdinand Heyes, company underwriter and promoter, to recover £750 money due in respect of shares which had been allotted by the plaintiff company to the defendant. Defendant denied liability.’ [Morning Post, Monday 18^th May 1896,p. 4] see also 1911 census, Brixton, London: RG14, piece/folio: 765, schedule: 382,page: 1, and 1901 census, Walthamstow, Essex: Household Identifier: 2313613, piece/folio: 35, schedule: 12, page: 3. Ferdinand F. E. Heyse died on 1^st January 1912, the probate was on 17^th January and names his wife – Margaret Heyse.
19. Kathleen Marguerite Louise Heyse married Capt. Oscar Dunstan Winterbottom, (born 30^th November 1890 in Kensington, London) at St George’s, Hanover Square in 1918. Oscar was the son of one of the wealthiest men in Britain, George Harold Winterbottom (1861-1934) and the mezzo-soprano and actress, Louise Elizabeth Babb, also known as ‘Minnie Byron’ (1861-1901). Kathleen and Oscar had the following children: Noel Margaret Winterbottom born 24^th December 1918 (she died Noele Margaret Dewhurst in Warwick in 1978); Sheila Elizabeth Winterbottom, born 12^th April 1920 (she died unmarried in Aylesbury in 1989) and Myra Elaine Winterbottom  born 7^th April 1923 (she died Myra Elaine Churton in Crewe in 1973). Oscar Winterbottom died aged 64 in Cheshire in 1955; Kathleen died in Berkshire on 4^th December 1978.
20. Eileen Norah Heyse died unmarried on 6^th May 1980 in Kensington, London; she is buried with her sister Kathleen and her husband Oscar under the name Sheelagh Eileen Heyes. Blanche Mona F Heyse also died unmarried, between January and March 1979 in Brighton. For newspaper articles related to Jeanne Heyse death see: ‘On the eve of Divorce Case’, Yorkshire Evening Post, Saturday 3^rd August 1912, p. 5; ‘Lady Artists end Tragic occurrence in Chelsea studio’, The People, Sunday 4^th August 1912,p. 13; Daily News, Monday 5^th August 1912,p. 5; Leeds Mercury, Monday 5^th August 1912,p. 3;Lincolnshire Echo, Monday 5^th August 1912, p. 4; Gloucestershire Citizen, Monday 5^th August 1912,p. 5; ‘Shot through the heart’, Fulham Chronicle, Friday 9^th August 1912, p. 6;
21. Neuburg probably chose this Latin motto Lampada Tradam [I shall pass on the torch] as it is something he would have been familiar with and seen at Trinity College, Cambridge for the motto is that of William Whewell and it is carved onto the stonework of the main gateway from Sidney Street into Whewell’s Court where Nueburg’s rooms we located.
22. see Liber CDXV Opus Lutetianum – The Paris Working the Book of the High Magick Art that was worked by Frater O.S.V. 6=5 and Frater L.T. 2=9. (also the brief summary of the Paris Working; Grimorium Sanctissimum, and The Holy Hymns to the Great Gods of Heaven) [The Vision and the Voice with Commentary and Other Papers. Aleister Crowley with Victor B. Neuburg & Mary Desti, being The Equinox volume IV number II. Samuel Weiser, Inc. York Beach, Maine. 1998. pp. 343-409]

 

 

RA-HOOR-KHUIT
 
I
 
This splendid thing of tort religion and reason;
This curve of simplistic design; this chisel
I sculpt with and create wondrous things with;
This abstract notion remaining undefined…
By beauty’s pulse to flicker slow within me
And by summoned will to ceaseless stir the
Indefatigable passions I wear around me to
Remove them slowly and find me bare of
Antique shames and modern insecurity, that
We clothe ourselves in… In rhythms show me
Death’s boundary and lines drawn of ecstasy;
Fill me with inescapable wonder, pull through
Your world of glamour and false suspension
And complete me by the utter ravishing of me
For I have buried my whole self and my religion
In the boundless beauty and perfection of you;
Buried my soul in your soul – gently carry me
In soft dimensions of your thoughts that shroud me.
And like a child within your arms, surround me
In all the essence of your being and everything you do.
This noble distraction of the mind I dwell upon
Is the outward projection of your brain’s formation
Wished into being through strange ceremonies of
Our desire, dreaming as petals upon our naked skin…
It is the brush with which I paint my legacy;
The pen with which I write my song!
 
II
 
His hungry mouth, sensual and unending
In its night-time hunt upon me, by limb
And torso, fixed fearsome and firmly by
Tooth and lip… and a ruthless intensity
Preys upon me by predator instinct; by
A senseless compulsion to digest love
In avenues and dark places of solemnity…
To overwhelm by consumption and impale
Between thighs of muscular longing that
Rage to his beauty and sweet satisfaction
That joins him deep within me without regret.
In perpetuity, he shall sing and devour beauty;
Make sun appear when clouds are charred grey
And light the bosom rejoicing at his coming
Upon which he kisses faithful and turns away;
Away to new dimensions of this animal form
Released from the dark night unto the holy day!
 
III
 
Earthwards, in our frail rejoicing
Like two comets, bodies touching,
Where the inward deep is pressing
Into the aftermath of our nuptials;
We each compress our passions as
In silence, we wept of our monolithic
Tender feelings – and I will taste you,
I said, through the seasons in our soft,
Intrepid devotion, sweet upon lips that
Are humble and mime the words that
Night shall bring upon them. Nectar-
Breathing honey and morning dew,
Caressed by tongue and lip together…
 
We forged a chain of semi-erections
In the dark; of shadowy blushes unseen
As each folded upon the other and made
A sanctuary of love and beauty and lust…
All things which comply to our understanding
And the wonder of bathing in our naked
Misconceptions of the unknown or the
Harsh words thrown idly in our anger
As we gaze upon the organs of our misrule
And never tire of praising them in our
Devoted way, like acolytes in love…
I loved you in the enormity of my passion
And devoured you, body and brain…
 
We formed our features to compel joy
Upon our bodies and our minds; to bring
Sweet contentment to our souls… and we
Lengthened by moonlight soft into solid
Posture and drank our fragrant surrender.
We slept, and like flowers budding on the
Morrow, our pollen drifted into us and over
Us and fair we seized then what was ours
By conjuration as sun upon the window;
Pollen lifted by the breeze and the bee and
The gentle flap of butterfly wing between us
As we touched and limb to limb, we kissed
The day anew…
 
Barry Van-Asten.

FROM THE VAULTS

Ephemera from the Thelema Beyond Crowley one day conference held at Conway Hall, 25, Red Lion Square, London on Saturday 10^th April 2004 e.v. The event (which I had the good fortune to attend – editor) marked one hundred years since the reception of The Book of the Law.

 

 

 

TO FRATER OMNIA VINCAM

 

‘I have, by the grace of the gods, been
led out of the darkness and the twilight.’
[The Magical Record of Omnia Vincam: Sunday 27^th June 1909]

Here, in the belly of its infamy, by the lonely haunt of Pan, I
Slept soft in moonlit grove that echoed thy wild unrest where still
Remembrance of ordeals and devotions beguile me strange and fill
My mind to thy sonnets, thy ceremonies and thy song… O sigh,
 
Sweet songster, and should thy body and brain be yet reborn
And thy shadowed soul recalled and Pan desire thy features, torn
Through a wilderness of strong caresses, sweet nymph unto faun
Who aches by subtle madness at the swift coming of the dawn!
 
I call your name in silence which speeds through my eager brain
And in the shade of youthful folly unto each tender bosom, drawn
The shade of all thy suffering, poet, is summoned once again
To reveal thy sadness and thy longing and thy infernal pain…
 
O see mine angel come to me, in sweet dream of love withdrawn…
And we messed each other up with roses, so fragrant and forlorn;
Yes, we wore them in our hair and thorns pierced us tenderly
And our blood infused a sense of longing invoked magically.
 
O bend me into manifestations beyond this mortal boundary of time;
Sing your love-words truthfully from your sonnet-filled soul sublime.
And I wait to hold you here with me, more than earthly blood and bone;
As I call your name unto the air to stir the ancient throne
 
Where sits Our Father, He, our God, the sacred Lord of Night!
Do I stand, my face and form turned wildly towards thee, acolyte?
Brother, bind me not, as I greet the sun with words… ye alone,
Release me that I may be content within the Sanctuary of stone.
 
And for perfume – mix blood and olibanum, infuse the Temple; delight
Our hearts to fragrant movements as we dance sylph-like by lustral light
With sweet words from sweeter lips aroused by love’s simple orison
To surrender in our ravishment of songs – O poet, dearly thou hast won
 
The laurels from the heads of Keats and Shelley and Lord Byron… see
The green-boughed forest of Inverfarigaig…where I sought thee solemnly
Deep in thine enchantment, unmoved…should this rapture never cease
Until Death’s dark call in the wilderness, signals our release!
 
Barry Van-Asten. Boleskine. Friday 10^th April 2026.

 

 

BOLESKINE AFTER CROWLEY
By Barry Van-Asten

 

Aleister Crowley sold Boleskine House in 1913. On Monday 5^th May that year it was sold to protect Crowley from creditors. The house and its thirty-four acres of land was sold to ‘the trustees of MMM [Mysteria Mystica Maxima] (namely, himself [Crowley], Leila, [Waddell] and Cowie [George MacNie Cowie])… the MMM paid £500 to Crowley and assumed £900 in debts and bills on the property.’ (1)
Crowley returned to Boleskine for the last time during September to October 1914. Boleskine had been mortgaged to fund Crowley’s publications such as The Equinox and other poetical and magical writings. The house was being rented by Dr William Murray Leslie MD, CM, FRCS (Edin) (1859-1951) for £250 per year so that the bank could be paid. Dr Murray Leslie was a Scottish physician and barrister and he attempted to treat Rose Crowley for her alcoholism. ‘Crowley went to Boleskine from time to time during the intervals between his travels. Then he let it; and the estate was finally engulfed in his financial ruin. With it he lost a library of rare works on Magic and kindred subjects. In 1937 I went for a holiday to Drumnadrochit. Crowley asked me to visit Boleskine and to make enquiries as to what had happened to these books. He had never ceased to hope that he might recover them.
I went to Boleskine on a radiant late summer day, motoring round Loch Ness through Inverness. I called on the new owners, went over the house, mused in the Italian garden. Crowley’s ghost – not the Abramelin Demons – haunted me everywhere. I left when the shadow of the great rocks crawled over house and garden. The visit, memorable to me, was fruitless to Crowley. I learned that his books had been sold in Inverness at public auction.’ [Aleister Crowley the Black Magician. C R Cammell. 1951 (1969 ed. p. 45)]
The ‘public auction’ Cammell mentions occurred on Tuesday 22^nd April 1919 at Queen’s Gate Hotel Hall in Inverness; the household furniture and complete furnishings were sold off and the Inverness Courier had been advertising the up-coming sale since 8^th April 1919 promising ‘particulars later’. The Friday 18^th April edition of the Inverness Courier (p. 8) listed an inventory of the interior furnishings of the house to be sold: ‘Hall: very fine brass dial 8-day clock, in carved oak case; handsome oak hat and umbrella stand; wheel barometer, Hall tables and chairs, linoleum, rugs, mats etc., Dining Room: inlaid mahogany telescope table, 8 ft; mahogany sideboards, couch, easy chairs and 6 small chairs in Pegamoid [an artificial leather waterproof fabric]; desk, stationary holder, revolving book-cases (2), occasional tables and easy chairs; Brussels carpets, rugs, fender, kerbs, rests, and fire-irons; curtain poles and curtains; portier [portiere, hanging curtain or drape], pictures, ornaments etc., Drawing Room: circle door French cabinet, mahogany cabinet, fine music cabinet, mahogany corner cupboard, sofas and couches, easy and single chairs, card table, antique tea caddy; coal vases [decorative metal (brass or copper) coal holder (usually with handle) to stand by fireplace], china, pictures and ornaments; fine axminster carpet and rugs etc., Billiard Room: oak billiard table and accessories, occasional tables, easy and single chairs, pictures, ornaments etc., Bedrooms: fine walnut and mahogany suites, brass and iron beds and bedding; odd wardrobes; chest of drawers; mirrors, carpets and rugs; bedroom ware, pictures, ornaments, fenders and irons etc., blankets, fine lace and embroidered bedspread etc., Pantries: solid silver tea and coffee service (Georgian), 2 fine old English entrée dishes, spoons, forks, cutlery etc., dinner, breakfast and tea sets, glass, crystal etc., Kitchen: tables, chairs and all the usual utensils, including solid cast aluminium sauce-pans, stew-pans, frying-pans; copper and enamelled kettles etc., etc., Miscellaneous: 1 pair curling stones, in wicker cases; fine brass spread-eagle reading stand, suitable for church or hall; fishing rods, reels etc., and other sporting appliances. Sale at 11 a.m. Maciver & Co. R. J. Douglas, Auctioneer.’

 

THE PRIESTLEYS AT BOLESKINE

 

Boleskine was eventually sold on Friday 12^th July1918 to Dorothy C. Brook who had been living in London at 60, North Gate, Regents Park, for £2,500. Dorothy C. Brook, born 1888, married Arthur Edward Priestley (1888-1960) on 16^th January 1919 at All Saint’s Church, Finchley Road, St. John’s Wood, London. The marriage was officiated by the Reverend Hornby Steer, the vicar, and the Reverend E. V. O’Connor, Offord D’Arcy. The bride was given away by her Uncle, Colonel J V W Rutherford. [The Gentlewoman. Saturday 8^th February 1919, p. 32-33] Dorothy, was the daughter of the zoologist and naturalist, George Brook, FLS [Fellow of the Linnean Society], FRSE [Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh] (1857-1893), and Fanny Elisabeth Scott (1861-1917), who were married on 10^th January 1888 at Benwell in Northumberland (3).
Arthur Edward Priestley, of the Manor House, Offord D’Arcy, was born in St Neots, Huntingdonshire on 30^th June 1888, the son of William Priestley, (1842-1912) and Elizabeth Looker (1846-1913) (4).
Dorothy and Arthur seem to have taken to Highland life and were well-liked within the community; In September 1921 Mrs Priestley was advertising for a caretaker at Boleskine House, ‘used to housework, must be highly recommended’ [The Scotsman. Friday 16^th September 1921, p. 1] Dorothy Priestley also attended the Foyers Gala Day on Saturday 10^th June 1922, a lovely summer afternoon in which there was a pavilion and a shooting gallery, clock golf, a shinty six-aside tournament and even a ‘face-washing’ competition; Mrs. Priestly of Boleskine House was one of the three judges in the Baking competition; also, there is a Miss Scarf of Boleskine House, who received equal second place, presumably she is one of the servants at the house. [Highland News. Saturday 17^th June 1922, p. 3]
During April 1926 Arthur Edward Priestly living at Boleskine House had applied for the licence for Foyers Hotel, which was granted [Aberdeen Journal. Thursday 22^nd April 1926, p. 5 and Highland News. Saturday 24^th April 1926. p. 6]. In the same year (1926), a motorist was travelling along the road at Loch Ness towards Boleskine House when there was an accident. The driver, Mr Vernon Roberts of Dalpowie House, Dunkeld, a collector and connoisseur of Old English pottery, swerved suddenly and his car went over a steep embankment, ‘falling sixty feet on the rocks below. This, however prevented the car going into the Loch. Mr Roberts was uninjured, and a dog that accompanied him in the car was thrown into the water, but swam ashore. The car was badly smashed.’ [Aberdeen Journal. Wednesday 18^th August 1926, p. 3]
In August 1931 the Priestley’s place an ad in the wanted columns for a ‘caretaker’ who will ‘help in the house when required. Apply with references, stating age and wages required, to A E Priestley, Boleskine, Foyers. [The Scotsman. Thursday 27^th August 1931, p. 1] and the following year – ‘Cook, experienced wanted for Huntingdonshire and Inverness-shire, six servants, including kitchen maid; five in family. State age, wages, references, to Mrs Priestley. Boleskine, Foyers, Inverness.’ [The Scotsman. Saturday 19^th November 1932, p. 5]
Arthur attended many local functions and meeting, such as the Foyers local branch of the S.W.R.I. [Scottish Women’s Rural Institute, founded in 1917] on Wednesday 1^st October 1930, in the Club Hall, where he gave an ‘interesting lecture descriptive of a trip to Jamaica’ and a ‘hearty vote of thanks was accorded to him, on the motion of Mrs Skelton’ who presided. [Inverness Courier. Friday 3^rd October 1930, p. 5] The following year he was unable to attend the Gleann Mor Horticultural Association’s meeting held at the War Memorial Hall in Fort Augustus and sent a letter of apology for his absence [Inverness Courier. Tuesday 13^th October 1931, p. 6] but he did manage a few years later in 1937 to attend the Stratherric branch of the S.W.R.I. in Gorthleck Hall on Thursday 11^th November where he ‘kept the members enthralled with his racy account of his holiday experiences in the United States.’ [Northern Chronicle and General Advertiser for the North of Scotland. Wednesday 17^th November 1937, p. 6]
Arthur Edward Priestly is still living at Boleskine House up until at least November 1937 from the newspaper articles- one article from 8^th April 1936 [Aberdeen Press and Journal, p. 10] states that A E Priestly, Boleskine House, won the ‘best two yearlings’ at the Inverness Show.
On Saturday 5^th June 1937 the owners of Boleskine House opened their gardens to the public from 2-7 p.m. under the ‘Scotland’s Garden Scheme for the benefit of the Queen’s Institute of District Nursing (Scottish branch)’ [Aberdeen Journal. Friday 4^th June 1937, p. 6].

 

View of the house from the garden

FOYERS HOTELS LTD.

 

In 1943, Mrs Janet Helen Loweth nee Gray (1916-1995), of Boleskine House, Foyers, Managing Director and Secretary of the Foyers Hotels Ltd. applied for a certificate for the Foyers Hotel [Highland News. Saturday 30^th October 1943, p. 3]. Janet and her husband, David Donaldson Loweth (1911-1963), intended to reside at Boleskine House, which Janet’s father had recently bought, permanently. Janet and David as Managing Directors of a recently formed company with £4000 capital, Foyers Hotels Ltd., had taken over Mr Edwards’ the Foyers Hotel. David, born in February 1911 in Kettering Northamptonshire (he died on 21^st February 1963 in Staffordshire) was the son of Mr Charles F. Loweth, Director of the Singer Sewing Machine Co. Ltd. and he married his second wife Janet Helen Gray, born in Glasgow on Friday 11^th August 1916, the third daughter of Mr and Mrs John Gray of Alloa (died 22^nd September 1946) in 1939 in Blythswood, Glasgow. Janet and David had a young daughter with them when they came to Boleskine named Kirsteen Ann Forbes Loweth, born in Kelvingrove, Glasgow in 1941, and while at the house, two more daughters were born: on Thursday 13^th March 1944, David and Janet celebrated the birth of their daughter at Boleskine House [The Scotsman. Monday 13^th March 1944, p. 6]; this must be their daughter, Diana J. G. Loweth; and two years later, ‘At Boleskine, Foyers, on [Sunday] 24^th March 1946 – to Janet, wife of David D Loweth, a daughter.’ [The Scotsman. Wednesday 27^th March 1946, p. 6], which must be Rosemary L. D. Loweth, born at Parkgrove Nursing Home, Glasgow (5).
Soon after the birth of Diana, in June, Janet would be in the news again for a different reason: ‘Mrs Janet Helen Gray or Loweth, Hotelkeeper, Foyers, pled guilty to a charge of having, by the hands of one of her employees, on Sunday May 7, sold, or gave out to Randell Pitman, attached to a Newfoundland camp, a quarter bottle of port wine for consumption off the premises. She was admonished and fined only in expenses, amounting to £1, 3s 6d. An agent stated that Mrs Loweth, when the matter had been brought to her attention, had been very much annoyed by the offence committed by one of her staff.’ [Highland News. Saturday 24^th June 1944, p.3]
The Loweths don’t seem to have much luck with their staff at the house and seem to be continually advertising for cooks, maids or gardeners; in January 1946 they were seeking a ‘cook-general or two girls, temporary or permanent, particularly good wage. Phone Loweth, Boleskine’ [Highland News. Saturday 12^th January 1946, p. 8] (the same month that the Loweths were selling a Henhouse with ‘5 divisions, approx 40 ft by 8 ft, good condition £30’ [Inverness Courier. Friday 19^th January 1945, p. 2] and in August that year, appeared an ad in the wanted column of The Scotsman [Friday 4^th August 1944, p. 8] saying ‘handyman-chauffeur and general maid: good prospects, accommodation in house. Cottage available later, if desired. Loweth. Boleskine, Foyers, Inverness.’
The following year, a ‘House Tablemaid, trained or un-trained, permanent or temporary, good wages’ was requested in the Inverness Courier [Tuesday 11^th September 1945, p. 4] and another ad appeared in the Highland News of Saturday 8^th December 1945 (p. 8) saying Wanted Couple: Wife as cook-general, husband as handyman, able to drive an advantage, or assist gardener; live in mansion house or cottage, apply, Loweth, Boleskine, Foyers.’ The ‘gardener’ was a Mr. ‘R. Phillips’ whose appointment to Boleskine House is mentioned in the Banffshire Journal of Tuesday 27^th March 1945 (p. 8) which says that ‘Mr. R Phillips’ of ‘Galatord, Dufftown, lately retired postman, has been appointed head gardener to Mr. D. D. Loweth, Boleskine, Foyers, Inverness and is leaving Dufftown this week. Mr Phillips has resided in Dufftown for 3 years and is well known as a successful exhibitor of garden produce at flower shows. He is an ex service man and was a sergeant in the Home Guard.’

 

The Gatehouse

DAVID SHIRLEY CRIGHTON SIMPSON

 

In 1946 Boleskine House was in possession of Mr David Shirley Crighton Simpson (1909-1969), who was born in Peebles, Scotland in 1909, the son of Walter Thorburn Simpson (1867-1938) and Mary Sinclair Simpson nee Pottinger (6); David was educated at Harrow School and Cambridge University. He became a Chartered Accountant and during the war he joined the London Scottish as a private before being commissioned with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders where he served in France and was wounded in 1944; when he retired from the army in 1955 he had reached the rank of Major (Royal Scots, Territorial Army) and was the holder of the Territorial Decoration (T.D.). He became Managing Director of The Distiller’s Agency Ltd. and sales director of White Horse Distiller’s Ltd. (7)
In the Aberdeen Journal [Thursday 2^nd January 1947, p. 5] under ‘situations vacant’ appeared this ad: ‘Gardener wtd, keen and energetic, able to milk; wife assist in house; first-class cottage, indoor sanitation and bath; on bus route and one mile from school; references required. Apply Factor, Boleskine House, Foyers, Inverness-shire.’
The house appeared from time to time up for sale ‘by private treaty’ as a ‘desirable residence known as Boleskine House, Foyers, with policy grounds… overlooking Loch Ness’ [Country Life, volume 113, 1953. p. 1114]
Articles continued to appear in the British Press concerning Aleister Crowley, mostly painting a negative portrait of the man. One such article which is relevant appeared in the Picture Post:
‘I was very interested in your articles on Aleister Crowley, as my Uncle (who is still alive) worked for him at Boleskine for a year, laying out his gardens. Crowley called himself Lord Boleskine. One day when he was out shooting rabbits, my Uncle got in the way, and had the heel of his boot shot at. The local people were very dubious about Crowley’s sanity, and kept away from him. He had a room built like a temple, where he used to pray to a dummy which was suspended from the roof.’ (G. F. Urquhart, Inverness)’. [‘Crowley’s Gardener’. Picture Post. 17^th December 1955]

The Driveway to the house

 

JOHN ROBERT RANKEN FULLERTON

 

John Robert Ranken Fullerton was born in Thrybergh, Yorkshire on 22^nd August 1894, the son of John Skipwith Herbert Fullerton (1866-1940) and Mary Grace Clarks (1872-1956) who were married at Silkstone, Yorkshire in May 1894.
On Sunday 16^th March 1924, John R. R. Fullerton married his second wife, Evelyn May Palmer, born 1899 in Northumberland, the daughter of Sir Alfred Molyneux Palmer (1853-1935), 3^rd Bart, and Ellen Edith Young (8) John and Evelyn Fullerton must have been living at Boleskine House during early 1949 as there is an article announcing the engagement of  Naomi Fullerton, ‘only daughter of Mr and Mrs John Fullerton of Boleskine House, Foyers, Inverness-shire’ in the Dundee Courier of Thursday 3^rd February 1949 (p. 2).
In July 1954, Mrs Fullerton of Boleskine House, Foyers, presented the prizes at the Foyers Junior Secondary School [Inverness Courier. Friday 2^nd July 1954, p. 6] and the following year, Mrs Fullerton opened the Boleskine Church of Scotland sale of work at the Church Hall in Foyers, at 3 p.m. on Saturday 3^rd September 1955 [Northern Chronicle. Wednesday 31^st August 1955, p. 1]; this was an annual sale in connection with Stratherric and Boleskine Church of Scotland and they raised £137, 10s; Mrs Fullerton gave a speech to open the sale. [Inverness Courier. Friday 9^th September 1955, p. 5]
Although not all their activities were welcomed, as in this article from the Northern Chronicle [Wednesday 12^th May 1954, p. 5] which says that ‘two fox terriers, belonging to John Fullerton, estate owner, Boleskine House, near Foyers, were stated to have worried a sheep on the side of Loch Ness, and in his case a fine of £4 was imposed’ by Inverness Sheriff Court.
The house seems to be up for sale ‘at a very moderate price’ in April 1957 and is described as a ‘small home farm’ with ‘valuable timber and gardens’. The 34 acre estate has a ‘tennis court’ and ‘modernised cottages’ and the house contains: ‘Reception rooms, 5 bathrooms, central heating and electricity. Boathouse and excellent fishing. Grouse shooting and stalking available…’ This ‘small economical property in a heavenly setting’ was being sold by agents John Speir & Co. Chartered Surveyors, Glasgow. It seems the Fullertons had no buyer for this very tempting offer and they remained at Boleskine until the end of the decade.
John famously delighted in annually opening the gardens at Boleskine House in connection with Scotland’s Garden Scheme to the public several years running; in December 1952 Fullerton of Boleskine House was advertising for a ‘Gardener Handyman required, excellent cottage on main bus route, 1 mile from Foyers. Good references essential.’ [Highland News. Saturday 13^th December 1952, p. 2]. During 1954 the gardens were open on Wednesday 26^th May from 2-7 p.m. and open the following year also; in 1958, the gardens were open on Wednesday 18^th June from 2-7 p.m. [Inverness Courier. Friday 13^th June 1958, p.7] and in 1959 the grounds were open on Wednesday 17^th June from2-7 p.m. and admission was one shilling [Highland News. Friday 12^th June 1959, p. 9]. Prior to this, the Northern Chronicle of Wednesday 13^th May 1959 (p. 1) ran the following article: ‘Gardener, with good references, required; good house, wages and perquisites; on main bus route; 1 hour from Inverness. Fullerton. Boleskine, Foyers.’
The house was advertised for sale in August 1959 as a ‘compact, fully modernised House’ with a ‘most attractive garden’ and ‘2 modernised cottages’ and a ‘private boathouse’; the agents were: Messrs Bernard Thorpe & Partners, 5 Glenfinlas Street, Edinburgh. [The Scotsman. Thursday 6^th August 1959, p. 8]

 

The Trout Lake

SUICIDE AT BOLESKINE

 

Boleskine House was then owned by retired Army Major Edward Errick Grant (1909-1960) and his wife Nancy. Major Grant seems to have suffered from violent outbursts as several months before his death in November 1960; he was on trial for three hours at Inverness Sheriff Court on Wednesday 11^th May and found guilty on five charges, admitting two charges of police assault. He was accused of assaulting his cousin, Mrs Mary Grant, on two occasions at his home, The Bungalow, Boleskine, in March 1960 and the police constable Albert Sutherland, who had been called to Boleskine House by Mrs Grant, was struck on the shoulder by the Major, and police constable Alan McPhee was assaulted in a cell at Inverness Burgh Police Station. ‘The Major had a gun – (a rifle with a bullet in the breach)’ and he ‘appeared to be very drunk and he opened his eyes and the Major muttered: Somebody in this house is going to be murdered.’ [Daily Record. Thursday 12^th May 1960, p. 7] Sheriff Douglas Donald fined the accused £10 for the assault and £5 for breach of the peace and he was ordered to lodge £25 caution for good behaviour for one year. [Dundee Courier. Thursday 12^th May 1960, p. 6]
On Tuesday 8^th November 1960 the Major’s house-keeper Anna MacLaren heard the sound of a gunshot in the house and when she went into the house she discovered Major Edward Grant’s body, his head blown off with a shotgun in one of the bedrooms at Boleskine. He had taken his own life at the age of 51. He was examined by pathologist H J R Kirkpatrick and the cause of death on the death certificate reads: ‘gunshot wound of head’.
Edward was the youngest child of Frank Morrison Seafield Grant, a merchant and farmer born 29^th June 1865 at Dyke, Moray in Scotland and Caroline Frances Grant nee Philips, born in 1872 (they were married in 1893 in Cheadle, Staffordshire). The Grants lived at Knockie, Whitebridge in Inverness-shire and they had the following children: Patrick Francis Grant (1895-1970), born in Eccles, Pendlebury, Lancashire (Patrick became a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Artillary and on retirement he farmed at Knockie from 1946-1966); Hugh Murray Grant MBE, MC, (1897-1946) – Hugh joined the Queen’s Own Highlanders and worked in administration in Kenya. He was killed on duty at Loita on 16^th August 1946; Janet Anne Grant, born 1898, Elizabeth Grant born 1901,Mary Grant born 1904; Margaret Grant, born 1907,married Sir Henry Campbell De La Poer Beresford-Pierce (1905-1972) in 1932 and she became a Justice of the Peace. She died on 1^st February 1995. Edward Errick Grant, who was born in Chelford, Cheshire where the Grants had been living prior to the birth of Hugh Murray Grant in 1897 and up until at least 1911, was educated at Eton and Oxford. He was a cadet at Eton College’s Junior Division of the Officer Training Corps and he later joined the Territorial Army becoming a 2^nd Lieutenant in the Lovat Scouts (22^nd February 1929) and the same rank in the Infantry’s Supplementary Reserve of Officers in the Camerons (2^nd May 1931). He was married to Nancy Glover Willows, born in Kettering, Northamptonshire in 1907, the daughter of Captain George Wallace Willows JP (1874-1958) of Rushton Manor, Kettering, and Marian Elsie Willows nee Jones, born 1885. Edward and Nancy were married in 1933 at Kisumu, Kenya Colony and Nancy had been a keen rider to hounds and painter of hunting scenes.
On Edward’s death record at the Highland’s Archives in Inverness, it records he was a ‘mining engineer (retired)’. The death was registered by Edward’s brother Patrick two days later on Thursday 10^th November 1960.

 

The Stables

MARY VERITE GRANT

 

The Mrs Mary Grant, cousin of Edward Errick Grant, whom he was accused of assaulting, is the same Mary Verite Grant, also Loraine, born Friday 23^rd January 1914, for in an article by Alex Main for the Aberdeen Evening Express of Friday 28^th April 1961 (p. 7), it states that ‘Mrs Mary Verite Loraine’ is the ‘daughter of the late Mabel Love, the musical comedy actress, a Gaiety girl.’ It goes on to describe Mary’s home: ‘The white stone mansion said to have been the scene of black magic orgies when owned by the Prince of Black Magic, Aleister Crowley’ had become ‘too costly to have a housekeeper looking after me, and she’s exceptionally good, but a place of this size needs a man running it…Mrs Grant says that it will break her heart to leave Boleskine but she still has the memory of that fateful night last November when her second cousin, Major Edward Grant, shot himself in one of the bedrooms. In the little bedroom facing out the loch, where the Major took his life, she said: I miss him terribly. After that night I had a serious nervous breakdown and was in hospital for a time, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my days in a sick bed. I want to make a completely fresh start. Mrs Grant then spoke reticently of her war-time exploits. She said she was an underground organiser, for resistance groups and many times led escaped British soldiers over the Pyranees.’ The rest of the article goes on to say she ‘declined to name the man she says she is to marry’ and that the ’47 year old former London society beauty’ was ‘selling up her 32-roomed mansion Boleskine House, Foyers, and says she has started proceedings for divorce from her husband, Captain Anthony Loraine, former captain the Queen’s Flight. Local people have linked her name with an Inverness-shire man, but he said today, it’s not me. From her country home, overlooking Loch Ness, Mrs Grant repeated I do not want to reveal the name of my husband-to-be at the moment. But we are building a house near Beauly. It should be ready by the time my divorce comes through. Twice-married Mrs Grant – resorted to my maiden name when my husband and I parted – says, she cannot continue to run Boleskine on her own. Mrs Grant’s husband, Capt. Loraine, was a friend of the famous airwoman, the late Amy Mollison. He is senior Captain in BOAC and after flying DC7C’s went on to Boeing 707 jets last year. During the last war he was three times co-pilot of Mr Churchill’s aircraft over the Atlantic…’ It then goes on to mention that Anthony is a ‘cousin of Sir Percy Loraine, one-time British Ambassador in Rome. He also flew Sir Anthony Eden over the Atlantic while Eden was Premier. The Queen decorated him with the M.V.O. during the return flight from Bermuda, which he captained. While captain Loraine was on that Bermuda flight, his wife, at that time referred to a Mrs Mary Loraine – reported that she had been robbed of valuable furs.’ (9)

 

The Boat House

THE SAUSAGE SCANDAL

 

Boleskine House was up for sale ‘with some fishing rights on Loch Ness’ in January 1961. In March 1962, Mollie Loraine, having recently parted from her husband, Dennis Henry Loraine, went on holiday to Scotland with her new partner, Peter Rolte Johnston (once a van driver for R.V.S. ‘Royal Victoria Sausages’); Mrs Loraine had been looking for a place to fatten pigs for their company Royal Victoria Sausages and they saw the enchanting Boleskine House was for sale and the following year, Boleskine House was bought by Dennis Henry Loraine. Mollie ‘demanded that the huge circular bed in the main bedroom be left.’ [Daily Express. Thursday 1^st December 1966, p. 2] Dennis Loraine, (10) Managing Director of Cadco Development Ltd. Company and Managing Director of the Royal Victoria Sausage Company, ‘whose food processing projects at the new town of Glenrothes in Fife, had been the subject of a board of inquiry, was a confidence trickster. He even persuaded the film actor, George Sanders (1906-1972) who had a terrible head for business, and his wife, Benita, to invest in their sausage enterprise, Cadco as a Director and guarantor, and he eventually lost hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Mollie (or Molly) and Peter were both Managing Directors in their Highland Weaners and Fatteners Ltd. Company (registered in June 1963) which they ran from Boleskine House; a planning application to the Inverness County Council was submitted for the building of a ‘piggery’ at Boleskine in January 1963. In March of that year, Molly Loraine gave an interview to the Daily Record [Saturday 9^th March 1963, p. 10] which asked if she was concerned about the reputation of the house being haunted; the article says: ‘Is Mrs Loraine worried? Not a bit she says: everyone told us hair-raising tales. It made me all the keener. It is such a pretty place. Mrs Loraine is moving into lonely Boleskine House on the eastside – the side most tourists never reach. It was the home of the black magician Aleister Crowley…’ Molly lived at the house with her three sons: Damocles (born 1953), Tarquin (born1959), and Tristan (born 1962) – ‘They are sitting on the steps of the room used by Aleister Crowley for practicing black magic… People still talk in whispers: the evil that lurked there will not go over the threshold. A former tenant shot himself and two others are said to have gone mad because of what they saw and heard.’ The reporter goes on to say that ‘I visited slender brown-eyed Mrs Loraine in the caravan behind the house in which she is living while extensive alterations are being made. Two of her sons, Damocles 9 and Tarquin 3 romped noisily as she told me: I do not think ghosts have a chance here – I have not seen or heard a thing. Damocles goes to school in the village and we gave a party for the children. They were all playing and twisting in the haunted part of the house. I am sure any ghost would have been scared away. Mrs Loraine a former air hostess and actress has two sons with her. One-year old Tristan will join them later.’ Interestingly, the article mentions that Boleskine House ‘has been transformed into an easy-to-run single storey house. Two upstairs wings have been demolished’. Mrs Loraine said ‘The house is not so lonely now. A pig fattening station is being built 100 yards away and Mrs Loraine is organising local housewives in a plan to knit fashion garments for sale. She is also connected with a film company which plans to do location work nearby.’
It was a sad end for Mollie, as an article in the Daily Express by Robin Turner [Friday 2^nd December 1966, p. 11] under the headline: ‘Woman in Cadco case says: Now I’m broke and all alone’ in which the ‘housewife whose £180 butcher’s bill led to the Cadco affair’ spoke [on Thursday 1^st December] of her champaign life with ex-husband Dennis Loraine, one of the key figures in the scandal’. It goes on to say that ’33-year old Mollie Loraine’ is ‘bedridden in her barely furnished flat and worried about where the next quarter’s rent – due today – is coming from.’ She died the following year in 1967 in Hove, Sussex.
Boleskine House became a listed property on 5^th October 1971 and the original text description of the building stated that it was ‘Begun late 18^th century and continuously enlarged until circa 1830. Now forms single storey, irregular 7-bay house with projecting outer bays with truncated gables. Pink harled with ashlar dressings and margins (some rendered).Present SE front probably re-cast from NW. Centre projecting pilastered ashlar bay with entrance flanked by narrow side lights; porch linked to outer bays by shallow loggia supported by slender Roman Doric columns; deep continuous entablature. NW elevation; round-headed window in gabled centre bay (probably former entrance) 3-window projecting bowed bays (to right with modern alteration to one window) with bowed piended roofs in bays 2 and 6;outer bays with Venetian windows. Multi-pane glazing; long and short channelled ashlar quoins. Symmetrical  pair ridge and panelled and wallhead stacks; slate roofs. East service door masked by later single storey; single bay extension. Interior; long corridor runs full length of house in SE front probably formed in earlier 19^th century; panelled arches and screens flanking centre entrance bay. Simple plaster cornices to 2 public rooms with bowed bay windows giving to NW.’

 

HALBERT KERR

 

The next owner of Boleskine House was Halbert James Haldane Kerr, who was born in Glasgow on Tuesday 10^th April 1917, the son of Halbert James Kerr, an assistant manager born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1882; young Halbert and his parents went to live in Montreal in June 1920 where he was educated and during the war he served in the London Fire Brigade during the Blitz before transferring to the Canadian Blackwatch; he was later wounded in active service and taken prisoner. (11)
 
Boleskine House was to be opened as a ‘tourist mansion’ according to the Highland News of Thursday 28^th March 1968 (p. 1) under the heading: ‘Black Magic Mansion to be Tourist Mecca – Boleskine House gets table licence’; it was to be opened in April 1968 by the ‘man behind the scheme – Canadian businessman Halbert J. Kerr’ who ‘scoffs at the tales of black magic rituals and haunted corridors, where the infamous Aleister Crowley is said by some to have practiced black magic and to have held regular meetings with the Devil in a room known as “The Temple”. It goes on to say that Kerr had been ‘granted a table licence for Boleskine House, where he has spent the last year supervising modernisation. He has also acquired the chair which Crowley used at the Café Royal in London and as an extra attraction he has bought chairs used by Oscar Wilde, Rudolph Valentino, Jacob Epstein, Marie Lloyd, James Agate and Billy Butlin. The chairs still have the original names on them. Although Mr Kerr is not worried about the notorious Mr Crowley – or Lord Boleskine as he called himself – many people still talk about his black reputation. He is described in an old book as a great practical joker with a great collection of weapons who would often scare the daylights out of innocent passers-by by appearing on the highway with servants clad in outlandish garb.’ After the house opened as a hotel another article a week after the opening appeared saying that the ‘new proprietor’ Mr Kerr, despite the reputation of the house, ‘had no second thoughts about turning the house into a hotel. A native of Glasgow, Mr Kerr has spent most of his life in Canada, where he worked as an insurance adjuster. He has already been promising the attractions of the new hotel and its surrounding countryside in New York and Montreal, and his first party of North Americans is booked in for July [1968].’ The article goes on to say that the house ‘offers limited accommodation – eight bedrooms providing room for sixteen people’ and that Mr Kerr hoped to ’establish a regular local custom, offering dining facilities in a quiet and restful country atmosphere.’ [Inverness Courier. Tuesday 30^th April 1968, p. 6]
During the summer of 1969, the experimental film-maker and Crowley enthusiast, Kenneth Anger (1927-2023), rented Boleskine House for a few months.
In May 1970, Mr Kerr returned back to Boleskine from a nine month stay in Canada to find changes in the area during his absence he was not happy about. He wrote to the Inverness Courier which printed his letter (dated 12^th May) on Friday 15^th May 1970 (p. 7): ‘Sir – I live at Boleskine House, Foyers, although I have been in Canada for the past nine months. I found on my return that an access road to the installation site of the Foyers scheme had been driven through Boleskine, and Nuttall’s forces still there, consolidating and widening. In July last I visited the Hydro offices in Edinburgh, and was assured Boleskine land would not be affected, although clearly from a plan then produced there was no avoiding involvement as Boleskine land extended to lochside. In July last the Hydro understood the ground below the perimeter road belonged to the Forestry Commission, but as I received the impression any road would be at lochside, I wasn’t unduly concerned about impaired amenities, and just waited for some personal approach from the Hydro to explain in detail just what was proposed. No word has been directed to me at Boleskine House nor has the Hydro even bothered to reply to my correspondence. While reconciled to a lochside road, I was shocked to find a ravine just below the graveyard with what presumably will emerge as a road at the bottom… If there is to be a great gulch forever creating an Upper and Lower Boleskine only the Hydro, I imagine, would say that property values haven’t suffered.’ Kerr ends his letter on an amusing note, saying ‘I can’t help wondering what Aleister Crowley’s demons are thinking. We’re on good terms at the moment as the good natured ones predominate. I hope I can convince them to vent their spleen on the Hydro and not me. – Yours, etc., H. J. Kerr’.

 

JIMMY PAGE AND MALCOLM DENT

 

In 1971 Boleskine House was bought by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and Jimmy’s childhood friend Malcolm Dent (1944-2011) who lived at the house to supervise the restoration of the building. Malcolm P. Dent (who played the ‘Hermit’ figure in the Jimmy Page sequence for the film ‘The Song Remains the Same’ shot in the grounds at Boleskine House) was born on Friday 11^th February 1944 in Bridport, Dorset, and was brought up in Surrey; he came to Boleskine House at the age of 23 with Jimmy Page in 1971 and met his future wife there and raised a family there for more than twenty years.
In an article in the Highland News [Thursday 4^th February 1971, p. 8] titled ‘Boleskine enters pop era’ it says that the house, which was ‘subsequently converted into a private country hotel’ was ‘put up for sale by its Canadian owner, a Mr Halbert Kerr, at a minimum asking price of £14,000. Jimmy, 25, who plays with the progressive group Led Zeppelin, is at present abroad and it is not yet known what his plans for the house are. On a visit to Boleskine some weeks ago he told a couple who are acting as house keepers that he had a place in Reading, but felt he would have more scope and freedom at Foyers.’
Malcolm Dent acted as curator for twenty years at Boleskine and witnessed many strange phenomena: “Most of the oddities occurred during upheavals in the house. I am not talking about wallpapering, but structural alterations. Any time there was anything major, it was almost as though the house didn’t like it. If we didn’t get on with the job and get it finished, something would let us know about it. We would be wakened during the night with heavy doors banging all over the place and carpets and rugs being rolled up. It was though it was a reminder to get on quickly and get the job over”.
On another occasion Malcolm and some friends witnessed a “small porcelain figure of the Devil [which] rose off the mantelpiece to the ceiling, then smashed into smithereens in the fireplace”.  The most horrifying event though happened early one morning: “I was awakened in the wee small hours and just knew something was wrong. I was petrified. Something outside the bedroom door was snorting, snuffling and banging. It sounded like a huge beast. I had this clear picture in my mind of what it looked like, but there was no way I was going to open the door. I had a knife on my bedside table and I opened the blade and just sat there. The blade was so small it wouldn’t have done any good, but I was so frightened that I just had to have something to hang on to. The noise went on for some time but even when it stopped, I still could not move. I sat in bed for hours and even when daylight came, it took a lot of courage to open that door. Whatever was there, I have no doubt it was pure evil.” [‘Beware of the Beast’ by Bob King. Highland News. Saturday 8^th February 1997]

 

THE BATTLE OF THE PYLONS

 

Jimmy Page, Malcolm Dent and other inhabitants of Boleskine House campaigned against the proposed plane to install 96 foot tall pylons along Loch Ness which would encroach onto the Boleskine estate – four on the side of Loch Ness and one in the grounds of Boleskine House with further pylons up the face of  the hillside overlooking the Loch. Dent had issued a circular letter to undertake a campaign against the pylons in 1971 and a public inquiry was ordered by the Scottish Secretary Mr. Gordon Campbell in January 1972. The inquiry was held at Inverness on Monday 8^th May 1972.
In an article in the Highland News [Thursday 18^th November 1971, p. 4] under the heading: ‘The Laird in Jeans’ we read that ‘pop artist, Jimmy Page – spent the weekend at Boleskine House to check on the progress of the opposition to the Loch Ness “metal” monsters. It is feared the pylons would be an eyesore, damage amenity and desecrate the beauty of the Loch and surrounding landscape. So far, the Hydro Board has rejected alternative proposals for burying the lochside route or hitching it on wooden poles. A decision on a possible public inquiry is awaited from the Scottish Secretary, Mr Gordon Campbell…’ It goes on to say Jimmy Page, ‘bought Boleskine House earlier this year and hopes to make it his permanent home one day. He also has a home near London. Jimmy is a keen preservationist especially in regard to worthwhile old buildings and feels strongly about the menace of pollution.’
Other inhabitants of Boleskine House who stood against the pylons was the artist Barrington F. Coleby (1945-2014) who was born in Surrey; in 1977he was living at Foynes Field Cottage, near Nairn and between 18^th July to 16^th August that year, he was exhibiting his work at the Eden Court Theatre, Inverness with fellow artist, Gordon Corrance (brother of the photographer, Douglas Corrance; Gordon later became an art teacher). Coleby, along with his wife, the Glasgow-born writer and poet, Fiona Macleod, lived at Boleskine as caretakers for Page from November 1971 and Fiona, the daughter of a Hebridean father, baked her own bread as she worked on her novel; she was also the mother of a three-month old child at the time (November 1971).
Two senior North of Scotland Hydro-Electricity Board officials visited Boleskine House on Thursday 30^th September 1971 to explain the proposed development in detail; Page was not at the house but Malcolm Dent was there to greet them. A few months later, on Wednesday 22^nd December 1971, over two-hundred people attended a meeting organised by Page and Dent at Rose Street Hall, Inverness where Page won the public over with his campaign. Malcolm Dent, who had been making furniture at Boleskine House, raised 1500 signatures against the Hydro proposals for the planned pylons.
Malcolm Dent’s daughter, Uraina Dent, born Thursday 19^th August 1971 also lived at Boleskine House and attended Boleskine School in Foyers (she later married Gavin Anderson at Trinity Church, Inverness in January 1994); and later, Malcolm Dent’s son, also named Malcolm Dent, was born in Boleskine House around 1975, and he went on to play guitar in a band, like his godfather, Jimmy Page. It seems Malcolm Dent, his wife and children, all loved living at Boleskine House. He even assisted the famous Loch Ness monster hunter, Frank Searle (1921-2005), in March 1975, giving him permission and towing his caravan to a location on Boleskine land where his ‘Lock Ness Investigation Bureau’ could watch for the monster undisturbed; unfortunately, the council had different ideas and told him to vacate the land as he didn’t have planning permission. Searle had been investigating the monster at the Loch since 1969 in a tent and when he moved to Boleskine he’d already been five years at Dores and had two tent sites on a Ballachladaich farm with permission from the farmer- at a council meeting for Foyers on Tuesday 8^th April 1975, councillor Laurence Hasson objected to Searle’s application and it was rejected.
Jimmy Page only lived at Boleskine House for a short time and during the restoration it is said that Satanist Charles Pierce helped with the redecoration. Page also invited film-maker and fellow Crowley enthusiast Kenneth Anger to Boleskine. Page had agreed to produce the soundtrack for Anger’s film ‘Lucifer Rising’ but unfortunately due to a falling out this was not used.
Jimmy Page and Malcolm Dent had been in a six-year legal dispute since 1982 over the boundary of Boleskine House with Drumalbyn Development Trust of 6, Queensgate, Inverness, who brought the civil action against them. The row concerned a boundary fence which Malcolm put in place and being accused of allegedly stealing land belonging to Boleskine Lodge, opposite Boleskine House; the fence had taken in a small burn and a small piece of land and Page and Dent argued that they had ‘sole and exclusive right to land round Boleskine Lodge…’ Somehow, legal documents lodged in legal process, had mysteriously vanished but a photocopy of the document was accepted to show the exact boundary. The Sheriff at Inverness Sheriff Court ordered Malcolm Dent to remove the 275 ft length of fence. [Inverness Courier. Friday 26^th February 1988, p. 7]
Malcolm Dent sadly died on Saturday 15^th October 2011 at Inverness Highland Hospice; his private funeral took place a week later on Saturday 22^nd October.

 

THE MACGILLIVRAYS

 

Jimmy Page sold Boleskine House, with its five bedrooms, 14 rooms and an orchard, in 1990 for £250,000 (the selling agents were: Strutt Parker & Co. of Edinburgh) to retired hoteliers Ronald and Annette MacGillivray who ran the residence as a Bed & Breakfast. Ronald MacGillivray was born in Ibrox, Glasgow and he was Chairman of the Clan MacGillivray International Association which began in 1999. Ronald Macgillivray, devoted husband of Annette and father of Morven and Blair, died at Boleskine House on Tuesday 5^th February 2002 after an illness, aged 67 and the funeral service was held at Boleskine House at 1 p.m. on Monday 11^th February 2002. The MacGillivrays, who had no interest in the dark history of Boleskine, did not encourage sight-seeing and claimed that nothing out of the ordinary happened during their occupation of the house. Sometime after Ronald’s death the house was sold.
One of the more ludicrous articles following the Macgillivray’s departure from Boleskine included this from the Aberdeen Press and Journal for Tuesday 11^th January 2005 (p. 10) under the headline: ‘Exorcist called in to subdue bed of the Beast’. The article goes on to say that an ‘exorcism is to be carried out on a “possessed” bed once slept in by self-styled Satanist Aleister Crowley, who considered himself to be the devil.’ More nonsense follows: ‘Guests at The Steadings Hotel at Farr, Inverness-shire, are unable to sleep in the bed, claiming it rocks violently…’ The haunted bed ‘was sold after his [Ronald Macgillivray] death and ended up at The Steadings. Owner Andy Pavitt said guests had complained regularly about “ghostly goings on” in the bedroom, including claims that the bed had rocked violently. He has invited Kevin Carylon, who practices white magic and believes in a universal force to get rid of the bed’s evil spirits. Mr Carylon, who has performed special rituals at Loch Ness in an attempt to save the monster from the clutches of Nessie-hunters, said “I have been asked to do an exorcism on the bed as Crowley’s influence appears to remain.” People are unable to sleep in the room. No one spends longer than one night, which is obviously bad for business…’ It says that ‘the bed once took pride of place in the main bedroom of Boleskine House…’ which was unlikely to be Crowley’s actual bed, which was sold at auction in 1919;it is most probable that it is the either the circular bed mentioned by Mollie Loraine or some other bed that has gathered a sensationalist and superstitious notoriety.
After Ronald MacGillivray’s death in 2002, Boleskine House was bought by the secretive Amsterdam millionaire, Mrs Trudy Piekaar-Bakker and it was used as a holiday home for her friends and family.
 
 
On Wednesday 23^rd December 2015 a devastating fire caused severe damage to the house and much of the interior was lost to the blaze. The roof had also partially collapsed.
The house and its land was put up for sale in April 2019 for £500,000. It was bought by the Boleskine House Foundation whose intention was to rebuild and restore the house and open it to the public. Another fire, due to suspected arson, was reported on Wednesday 31^st July 2019 which destroyed what was remaining of the original house’s interior and roof.
The restoration of the house was completed in April 2026 and following an evening gala event on Friday 10^th April 2026, the house was open to the public on Saturday 11^th April from 9 a.m. with tours of the house and grounds and guest speakers.
 
Despite the turbulent history of the house and fears that it would be irretrievably lost, it seems the future of Boleskine House is in safe hands under the care of the Boleskine House Foundation.

 

 

Diagram of the ground floor (drawn roughly to scale)

 

1. Side, servants and tradespersons entrance, now a utility room.
2. Site of the chimney for the kitchen fireplace; presumably there is or was a fireplace in the room above also.
3. The Kitchen. There is a door on entering the kitchen to the left which is probably a pantry or storage place beneath the stairs.
4. On exiting the kitchen the cellar steps are located to the left which descent into a small ‘wine’ cellar.
5. Stairs ascending to the first floor and bedrooms of the north-eastern wing of the house.
6. Room in the north-eastern wing of the house, now a bar area.
7. Chimney and fireplace; there is presumably a fireplace in the room above.
8. Furthest room in the north-eastern wing, now a snug-lounge area.
9. Site of original fireplace and chimney, demolished and not rebuilt. The house was transformed into a ‘single-storey’ building sometime before March 1963 when Mrs. Mollie Loraine mentioned that the ‘two upstairs wings have been demolished’. Photographs of the time also confirm this. In 1989, Jimmy Page had ‘carried out a series of extensive improvements since buying the house in 1971 from the Canadian businessman Mr Halbert Kerr’. Page was planning ‘extensive re-roofing and other refurbishments to the south wing as part of a programme.’ [Led Zep guitarist has big house plans. Aberdeen Press and Journal. Wednesday 8^th February 1989. p. 9]
10. The Dining Room with its bow windows facing out towards Loch Ness.
11. Chimney and fireplaces.
12. Drawing-Room. It is my opinion that this would have been Crowley’s ‘gun room’ where he said he had his billiard table, being probably the only room large enough for a billiard table and space to play unhindered.
13. Chimney and fireplaces.
14. The Temple Room or ‘Oratory’ where Crowley performed the Sacred Magic of Abramelin.
15. The Door to the Terrace – originally a window, Crowley had a door installed here as it faces due North as required in the ritual. Malcolm Dent says, that ‘one of the first things he [Crowley] did was to consecrate the south-western part of the house to the occult.’ He also says, falsely I believe, that ‘this included the dining room. It became his temple, and to him it was the most important room. Crowley put a north-facing door into this room, which led to a terrace of river sand – it is a flower bed today.’ [Sunday Mail (Glasgow). Sunday 31^st March 1991, p. 34] It does not make sense that the room would have been a dining room so far away from the kitchen.
16. The Library.
17. Chimney and fireplace, presumably there is a fireplace in the room above.
18. Stairs ascending to the upper rooms in the south-eastern wing of the house.
19. W.C.
20. Room in the south-east wing, possibly Crowley’s study, now an office space.
21. Chimney and fireplace, presumably there is a fireplace in the room above.
22. This window in the furthest south-eastern part of the house was at one time a doorway; an early photograph of the house shows the door distinctly and images of the ruins after the fire also confirm this. Is it possible that this was Crowley’s bedroom next to his study? In the Magical Record of Omnia Vincam [Victor Neuburg] of 1909 he mentions that the chamber prepared for his initiation work during the ten day magical retirement is located upstairs in the house (with a fireplace, a magic circle and an altar etc.) and his bedroom is on the ground floor and on occasions he comes downstairs from his chamber to take biscuits from Crowley’s bedroom or to talk with him [see: The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg. Fuller. Pp. 157-169]. Victor sees Rose at the house and she is sleeping separately in another part of the house, presumably the north-eastern side not consecrated and dedicated to Abramelin and magical work.
23. Room in the south-eastern wing of the house along with rooms 14, 16 and 20 consecrated and dedicated to the Sacred Magic of Abramelin.
24. Site of original chimney and fireplace; the chimney was removed (along with the same located in the north-eastern wing) during the tenancy of Mollie Loraine.
25. The Long Corridor and the south-eastern pylon, a boundary between the consecrated and un-consecrated part of the house.
26. The Front Entrance.

 

 

NOTES:

 All photographs c. 1913 - The Manifesto of the M.M.M. London, containing 12 photographs of Boleskine House and the surrounding area.

1. Perdurabo. Richard Kaczynski. 2021 ed. p. 274.
2. Are these the same ‘four revolving walnut bookcases’ Crowley had in his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge? Very likely.[see Confessions, p. 15]
3. Dorothy’s mother, Fanny Elisabeth Brook, born Scott in Newcastle on 29^th July 1861, died on Sunday 23^rd September 1917 at Littlewick House, Maidenhead. Her obituary states that Mrs. George Brook, of 60, North Gate and Villa Albany, Cannes, widow of George Brook, FLS and younger daughter, the late Sir Walter Scott [1826-1910], Bart, Beauclerc, Riding Mill, Northumberland [Reading Mercury. Saturday 29^th September 1917, p. 7] She was buried at St John’s Church, Benwell, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Her father, Sir Walter Scott, (born in Cumberland on 17^th August 1826) married Ann Brough (1825-1883) at Bromfieldin Cumberland on 17^th November 1853. Sir Walter died at Cape Martin, France on 8^th April 1910. As well as daughter Dorothy, she had another daughter named Kathleen Grace Brook (1893-1974) who married Louis Noel Menteth Jackson (1893-1921) in High Wycomb in 1915. Fanny’s husband, George Brook, Fellow of the Linnean Society (founded 1788) published several papers on zoological subjects [1^st December 1891: ‘Description of new species of Madrepora’ in the Collection at the British Library; ‘On a new Genus of Collembola (sinella) allied to Degeeria, Nicolet’ – Journal of the Linnean Society of London, Zoology, vol 16, issue 95, pp. 541-545, September 1882] died in Hexham, Northumberland on 18^th September 1893. The Colonel Rutherford who gave Dorothy away at her wedding was Colonel John Victor Walton Rutherford (1857-1938) who married Dorothy’s aunt, Annie Mary Scott, (born 14^th October 1856) at Benwell on 10^th December 1891; Annie Rutherford died in Yorkshire on 13^th June 1922.
4. Arthur Edward Priestley, born Saturday 30^th June 1888 was the youngest child of William Priestley, born 7^th August 1842, a corn miller and farmer with 298 acres who employed 7 men and 4 boys; William married Elizabeth Looker, born 24^th October 1846, in Huntingdonshire on 3^rd September 1868. [in the 1881 and 1891 census they had 3 servants] They lived at the Manor House, Offord D’Arcy and had five children: Fanny Edith Priestley (born 8^th May 1874),she married Edward George Saltmarsh (1870-1931) in May 1896 and she died in Cornwall in October 1973; Constance Lily Priestley (born 2^nd August 1877), she died in October 1973; Percy William Priestley (born September 1880) he died on 25^th April 1935;  Dorothy Annie Priestley (born 3^rd September 1883) she died in 1971 and Arthur Edward (born 1888); in the 1911 census Arthur Edward is a ‘corn miller’s assistant’. William Priestley died on 21^st November 1912 and his wife, Elizabeth died on 10^th May 1913. Arthur Edward Priestley died in Cape Town, South Africa on Monday 24^th October 1960.
5. After leaving Boleskine, The Loweths moved to Maidenhead in Berkshire. Their first daughter, Kirsteen, who went to West Linton House School in Maidenhead, got married there in March 1961 to Andrew Hunter Findlay of Pinkneys Farm, Maidenhead; they had three children: John A. Findlay, born Maidenhead in 1962, Gary D. Findlay, born Maidenhead in 1964 and Clive Richard Findlay born in Windsor in 1970. Kirsteen died in London on 11^th March 2014. Diana Loweth married Anthony J. Taylor in Maidenhead in 1967 and had a daughter named Annelice Helen Taylor, born in Islington, London in 1975. Rosemary Loweth married Andre R, Lefevre in Maidenhead in 1968 and had a son named Gauthier John Lefevre born in Chiltern in 1974. David Donaldson Loweth died on 21^st February 1963 at Stafford General Infirmary and he was cremated on 26^th February at Henley Road Crematorium, Reading, Berkshire.
6. Walter Thorburn Simpson married Mary Sinclair Pottinger, daughter of Robert Pottinger, late Inspector-General of Hospitals and Fleets, on 10^th June 1902 in Leeds. Walter died at Wellnage, Duns, at the age of 75 on 4^th May 1942; his wife, Mary died at a Carlisle Home on 14^th November 1938.
7. David Shirley Crighton Simpson died at Stirling Royal Infirmary on Sunday 17^th August 1969, aged 59; he was survived by a wife, son and two daughters. Taken from his Obituary: The Scotsman. Tuesday 19^th August 1969, p. 6. David’s older brother, Robert Alison Crighton Simpson T.D., FRIBA., FRIAS, was born 28^th June 1903 at Peebles and educated at Harrow School under Reverend Lionel Ford, M.A.; he was admitted into Caius College, Cambridge on 1^st October 1922 (BA 1925) and he became an architect (FRIBA). His first professional assignment was at Durham and the Cathedral gave him a lifelong interest in ancient buildings and he had a vast knowledge of history. After Durham he worked in a partnership at Workington. During the war, at Workington, he joined the Border Regiment TA and was evacuated at Dunkirk on 8^th June 1940; he later transferred to the 8^th Battalion Royal Scots and was wounded in 1944; he attained the rank of Major when he retired in 1953 and attended the parade at the Coronation and received the Coronation Medal; he was awarded the Territorial Decoration (TD). He married Rosemary Euphemia Morrison in 1932 (Rosemary died at Hag Lodge, Peebles on 27^th May 1999) and was a keen piper, as were his sons. He died on 28^th September 1962 at Ellenford Lodge, Ellenford, Duns. [Obituary: Ross-shire Journal. Friday 12^th October 1962,p. 6]
8. John R. R. Fullerton, ‘Captain, late 19^th Royal Hussars’, married his first wife, Moira Faith Lillian de Yarburgh-Bateson (born Bateson, 1898-1982) at St George’s, Hanover Square, London on Friday 24^th October1919; the marriage was annulled in 1923. Moira died on 21^st December 1982; John R. R. Fullerton died on Friday 14^th January 1966 and his second wife, Evelyn, died on Sunday 7^th August 1960. John and Evelyn’s only daughter, Naomi Fullerton, born in Atcham in 1925, married Patrick Arthur Malcolm Cox, only son of Mr and Mrs William A. M. Cox of The Croft, Longforgen, (near Dundee), Perthshire, at Westminster in June 1949.
9. Mary Verite Grant also Loraine, died in a house fire at her home, flat 1, 38, Sussex Square, Brighton, Sussex, on Wednesday 5^th September 1973.
10. Dennis Henry Loraine was born Dennis Henry Edwards in Bristol in 1921 (mother’s maiden name: Rickard); he married his 3^rd wife, Molly Groves, (born in 1932 in Stepney, London) at Kensington in 1953. They had three children: Damocles Dennis Loraine, born Kensington in October 1953, [Damocles Loraine was arrested for breaking into a chemist shop and forcing open the dangerous drugs cabinet at Hopeman, Morayshire in March 1984; (he pled guilty at Elgin Sheriff Court on Friday 4^th May). Northern Scotland and Moray and Nairn Express. Saturday 31^st March 1984, p. 30]; Tarquin L. Loraine born in Hove in March 1959 and Tristan D. Loraine born in Chanctonbury, Sussex, in January 1962. Molly left Dennis in 1962 and the marriage was dissolved. Molly lived in Storrington after Boleskine house until June 1966 then moved in with her parents in Sussex; she died in Hove, Sussex, aged 34 in 1967. Dennis Loraine married his fourth wife, Sandra Marshall, aged 22 from Wiltshire who had been his secretary for four years, just before he was arrested in Las Vegas in August 1965; he died in 2006.
11. Halbert James Haldane Kerr returned to Montreal after selling Boleskine House to Jimmy Page and was the owner of an insurance claims office; he retired with his wife to St Patrick then to North Hatley where he died on Sunday 4^th June 2006; his funeral took place a week later on Saturday 10^th June at 2 p.m. Halbert’s son, Andrew Halbert Kerr (by his first wife Heather Grant, whom he divorced) was born in Montreal and also lived with his father at Boleskine House. Andrew also worked as an insurance adjuster with his father and married Cynthis Hawkins in 2008; he died in Toronto, aged 71 on 12^th August 2023.

 

Photographs from a recent expedition to Boleskine

My tent beyond the burial ground

THE BOAT HOUSE

THE HOUSE

Steps down to the cellar

The Temple or Oratory Room

The Temple still unfinished

The North Door

The Library

 

THE POET RETURNS
By Victor B. Neuburg

 

The starlight lends me raiment;
(How slowly old songs die!)
A dream I give in payment,
Of my dreams newborn and shy.
 
A moonbeam lends its burden;
(How slowly old songs fail!)
A dream I give as guerdon;
For all my dreams are pale.
 
So through the dark I wander;
How sweet the old songs seem!)
All undisturbed I ponder;
All palely still I dream.
 
Beneath the stately beaches
(How sweet the old songs were!)
I mouth my silver speeches
To make my own heart stir.
 
Beside the curious river
(How strange the old songs are!)
I glide to watch the shiver
On the water of a star.
 
Under the night’s grave splendour
(How far the wise old songs!)
I murmur words as tender
As a lover’s fancied wrongs.
 
The strange, strong songs I fashioned
(Those songs grown now sold!)
Seem vaguely fair and passioned,
Now my hot heart is cold.
 
The starlight lends me raiment;
My path a white moonbeam.
A song I give in payment,
For love I add a dream.
 
[The Smart Set. Volume: xliii, Number: 2, June 1914. p. 102]

 

 

THE FOUR ADORATIONS

 

The following notations were found amongst the papers of ‘He who works in Silence to fulfil’ who is also known as Audrarep, their meanings are left to those who understand.

 

1. Dawn: Adoration of Ra. The Star Ruby Ritual. Purification. a) Liber AL I.
2. Midday: Adoration of Ahathoor. Consecration. [Kaph – DM (41)] Anointing the 5 Sacred centres: forehead, phallus, right shoulder, left shoulder, heart (IAO) – The Talisman. b) Liber AL II.
3. Sunset: Adoration Tuum. XI: Pe (69) The Summons & the Sacrament. The Mark of the Beast Ritual [The exchanging of the Lion force etc.] – Pe to Pe. c) Liber AL III.
4. Midnight: Adoration of Kephra. XI Invocation – The God Invoked. Yod-Ayin. The Star Ruby Ritual. Silence.

THE MAGIC BOOK WORM

REVIEWS BY BARRY VAN-ASTEN

The Magic of My Youth – by Arthur Calder-Marshall.

Published in 1951 by the novelist and critic Arthur Calder-Marshall (1908-1992), ‘The Magic of My Youth’ is a beautifully written autobiography which moves serpent-wise through the threads of the author’s past, gently alighting upon distant visions and occurrences, but mostly the book recounts his fascination with magical and spiritual themes and his acquaintance with ‘Vickybird’ (Victor Neuburg, the poet and disciple of occultist Aleister Crowley) – ‘having spent the first fifteen years of my life in ignorance of Crowley’s existence, I became aware of him from four separate sources in the course of six months: from a Sunday newspaper, from my brother at Oxford; from a vision of the Tiger Woman, Betty May, in full Bacchanal at a Bloomsbury Hotel and, most remarkable of all, from the Steyning Poet.’ [Neuburg] (The Poet and the Seer: The Illusionist of Islington. p.19.) Calder-Marshall summons up the way in which magic (or magick as it is rightly spelt) seems to occur naturally, as if events are subtly manipulated so that the desired intention is brought to pass, almost unobserved; this is described perfectly in the tale told by Tom Driberg concerning ‘Cosmo the Great Illusionist’ in the opening chapter, the Prelude. The author evokes a picturesque vision of Steyning in the 1920’s and of the poet, Neuburg, who ‘each morning’ would ‘emerge from Vine Cottage with a string bag and an obese white bitch and make for the High Street.’ (p.23) Vickybird really comes to life through Calder-Marshall’s tender descriptive touches: ‘He carried an ash stick, and he was always dressed in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, with stockings which rode in rucks around his spindly legs, and shoes so old that the leather was cracked.’ With his ‘thin venous hands’ and a ‘head which, by nature disproportionately large for his body, was magnified by dark Medusa locks which rose from his scalp and tumbled curling down his forehead.’ The bedraggled poet with his razor cuts and threadbare clothing must have been quite a sight in quaint old-fashioned Steyning!
Young Arthur and his brother Robert, four years his senior, made friends with the odd poet as children and later when Robert went to Oxford Arthur learnt all sorts of tales handed down from ‘Bobby’ concerning the adventures of the harmless and amusingly eccentric poet, Victor Neuburg and his relationship with notorious magician Aleister Crowley – “In the first decade of the century, it appears that he went into the middle of the Sahara with Aleister Crowley and, drawing a circle in the sand, they summoned up the Devil.” (p.31) As in all books which reference the Beast Crowley the usual sensational diabolic nonsense surfaces because as humans we naturally gravitate towards the exaggerated truth spiced with a little ‘invented myths’ which is after all more interesting than the mundane. Neuburg corrects Arthur on their meeting, saying “in the first place, we did not go into the middle of the Sahara, but merely into the desert a few miles out of Marakhesh. And we did not draw a circle, but a pentacle, which from a magical point of view is a very different matter.” (p.34) The author describes a lovely scene in which Arthur’s father, calling the author’s bluff visits Vine Cottage to meet the clumsy and seemingly awkward Vickybird and his wife Kathleen, drawn with a light touch of comedy; and young Arthur goes to Oxford and meets Vickybird’s equally eccentric Aunt Helen, the Seer for tea with her two mongooses, a parrot and a half-blind pine-marten – ‘She must, I thought, have been a very beautiful woman when she was young. Even now, with her height and slenderness accentuated by the long black gown, her tawny hair bound with a broad fillet of python-skin, she was strikingly handsome.’ (p. 69) In London she got to know Neuburg and Crowley and became interested in the occult and read the stars; she lived on credit and perpetuated the war between ‘Artists’ and ‘Philistines’. When the bailiffs came calling it was Arthur who took care of her precious things in his Oxford rooms until the University forbade him to visit her again. She died quite insane.
There are some fascinating reminiscences of Arthur aged fifteen living in Bloomsbury when his brother was at Oxford, of seeing the ‘Epstein model’ Betty May, the Tiger Woman, which leads us naturally into Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu and the young St John’s College, Oxford poet who married Betty May: Raoul Loveday (1900-1923) whose ‘poetry was as wildly romantic as his love-making. He admired immensely decadents like Dowson and Lionel Johnson who hid the pretty in grandiloquence, bridging the gulf between reality and splendour with alcohol. He drank whisky by the toothglass.’ (p. 111) A man who, Calder-Marshall tells us was ‘more than half in love with death.’ (p.113)
At Oxford Arthur performs a ‘Black Mattins’ in his college rooms and rumour of the Black Mass swept through the colleges and an hour after it was performed he was sent for by the Dean and asked if a Black Mass took place and if he had ‘the Consecrated Host and a defrocked priest.’ Actually it was a harmless ‘Esbath’ celebration, but he was almost sent down for it! He became Secretary of the Oxford Poetry Society and he invited Neuburg to give a talk which he at first declined but accepted on the promise of a suit from Arthur to wear for the occasion. He was originally to lecture on Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ but decided upon ‘Poetry and Poesy, or the Making, Mating and Matching of the Word’, spending two months in preparation for it; the lecture was terrible but Neuburg felt invigorated by it and deemed it a wonderful success! Arthur tells Vickybird that he intends to invite Crowley to speak and the Steyning poet opens up about himself and Crowley and tells Arthur that ‘one evening they were invoking Mars, and the ceremony started as usual with Crowley as the High Priest declaring, “The Temple is Open.” There were the appropriate liturgies and invocations, and then Vickybird, who had been given a drug which he did not specify, rose to ‘dance down’ the God. ‘Dancing down,’ as I understood it, involved the abnegation of the dancer’s own personality. He became a vacuum into which he drew the God.
“And then,” said Vickybird, “instead of declaring that the Temple was closed, he deliberately dismissed us. He pretended later that it was forgetfulness. But he could no more forget that than a Catholic priest could forget the Ite, missa est.” and he continues – ‘”The first thing I remember was squeezing back into my soul. It was like being in a very small room with an immensely powerful man who wanted to kill me by sheer pressure. I told you that you wouldn’t understand, and pray God that you never will. The God Mars is a killer and he wanted to use my body. I fought him for seventy-two hours before I gained possession of my body again.” (p. 163-4) Then of course we hear all about the Ione de Forrest episode on Thursday 1^st August 1912, Neuburg’s lover who committed suicide – would Neuburg really have said something so cruel as ‘All right, kill yourself!’ to her plea of ‘If you go out of that door I shall kill myself!’ I don’t think so, but the young poet was under mental distress at the time and attached to Crowley so anything is possible. Vickybird blamed himself and Crowley for her death and guilt confined him to the obscure pastures of Steyning. Meanwhile, Arthur’s brother Robert dies and we hear all about the bohemians who inhabit London’s Fitzroy Tavern, The Plough, and the Marquis of Granby, painters, writers and models drowning their creative genius in alcohol. And of course he meets the socialite Betty May who informs him that Crowley is in London and determined to see the Beast he meets Crowley at the Eiffel Tower near the Fitzroy Tavern one evening after dinner and they settled a date for Crowley to give his lecture to the Oxford Poetry Society – its subject will be Gilles de Rais! Naturally the lecture is banned a few days before it is to take place and the lecture was published and circulated through the colleges. Arthur meets the Beast one more time in December 1929 at a cottage in Knockholt, Kent where the magician is staying with his wife Maria Teresa, and the two men do psychological battle over a bottle of brandy, Crowley turning on the old hypnotic charm and Arthur not falling for it, comically matching him across the table attempting to outstare the Mage!
Towards the end of the book Arthur writes his first rejected novel having taken three months to create it and he takes a six weeks teaching job as Senior Classics Master at Bogglesham Grammar School. In the Epilogue, ‘The Ship Comes In’, there is a delightful re-acquaintance between Arthur and Vickybird in London, when the poet had found new love and a new job as Poetry Editor for the Sunday Referee.
‘The Magic of My Youth’ has been a wonderful experience and Calder-Marshall practices no pretence and indeed it shall be a book I will turn to again. Being a great admirer of Crowley it is nice to get this different perspective of him from one who met him; a picture which does not place the great magician centre stage but like a prowling tiger around the circumference and of course anything on Neuburg is a delightful revelation as there is not enough on this gentle magician-poet. The author keeps the narrative light and introduces some wonderful moments of humour throughout the 226 pages. This really is an immaculate little book (my copy has acquired a ‘loving energy’ from sensitive hands and a delicate aged aroma familiar to all book lovers!) Excellent!

Witchcraft: It’s Power in the World To-Day – by William Seabrook.

Published in 1941, William Seabrook’s oft’-cited book on witchcraft has become a staple of occult literature and is a fascinating read. William Seabrook (1884-1945) was an American travel writer with a life-long interest in the occult, a man who proudly admitted to having eaten human flesh and studied under various witch-doctors in Africa; he committed suicide by taking an overdose. Once the reader has got over the initial arrogance of the author in his Foreword ‘Exploding a Non-Sequitur perched on the Horns of a Dilemma’ one actually finds it quite an engrossing book. Its 299 pages are divided into three parts: I – ‘The Witch and her Doll’ which explores the origins and general use of the ‘witch doll’ in various cultures, such as the ‘Monstrous Doll in Africa’, the ‘Doll de Luxe in London’ and the ‘Nail-Studded Doll in Toulon’. Part II looks at the ‘Vampire and the Werewolf’, recounting such cases as Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614), the ‘Vampire 1932 from Brooklyn, New York’, the ‘Panther-Man from the Ivory Coast’, the ‘Caged White Werewolf of the Saraban’, and the ‘Werewolf in Washington Square’. Part III ‘White Magic, Professor Rhine, the Supernormal, and Justine’ opens with a ‘Presentation of an Open Question, to which a Negative Answer may not be the Final Word’ and he gives examples from his own experiences such as the ‘Astral Body on a Boat’, ‘Upton Sinclair’s “Mental Radio”’, ‘W E Woodward with a Hatpin driven through his jaws’, Justine Dervish Dangling’ and ‘Justine in the Mask’ (Justine was his then girlfriend who assisted Seabrook in their experiments with ESP and exploring future Time events). The Appendix has a plethora of ‘Supplementary Notes, Anecdotes, and Illustrations’. It will not come as any surprise to the reader for the author spells it out endlessly that he does not believe in the existence of spirits and all the other ‘mumbo-jumbo’- connected with the occult or the ‘supernormal’ of which he says is ‘anything which occurs contrary to the fixed, known laws of time-space, the fixed, known rules of logic, or endours its supposed possessor with senses and powers outside those laws and rules as known up to now’. (p. 145) In fact, I found his opinions, although he has much knowledge and practise in the occult, quite infuriating, as he remains sceptical as to the effectiveness of witchcraft where there is no human intervention to cause the desired results: ‘when the intended victim believes the force attacking him is super-human the doll, for him becomes a fatal image of certain doom, and he tends more easily to crack up emotionally and functionally.’ (p. 46. ‘Wooden Doll in a Cave’) Of course there is always the human element when a natural or unnatural desire is set in motion and psychologically if the victim is aware that a ‘curse’ has been placed upon them the result will be that more effective, but to dismiss the world of spirits is absurd in my opinion. He maintains that all magical phenomena occurs solely through human ‘physical’ and ‘psychological’ intervention or ‘induced-autosuggestion’ and fails to understand the simplest laws of natural magic (or magick as I prefer to spell it) in which the practitioner must have faith in his or her intentions and observe the correct magical procedures to bring about those intentions just as if one were to cast a fly onto the surface of a stream, by the proper motions a salmon is landed. His arrogance does not let him understand the power of the mind during conjuration (invocation and evocation) – the God Mars is just as tangible as the Pope and just as deadly! Although he is correct in his assumptions that ‘dolls’ are merely symbols in sympathetic and imitative magic; a fetishistic point to focus the force or current of the will and create a magical link, in dark magic it is the focus of concentrated hatred and destructive thought.
In part III – ‘Our Modern Cagliostros’ he mentions three ‘white magicians’ in the world today, who have real power, two of whom he came to know: I. George Gurdjieff (1866-1949), who seemed to have power over his acolytes to cause them to perform unbelievable feats of acrobatic skills and physical endurance; II. Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the founder of the Great White Brotherhood whom he met through Frank Harris in 1917 in New York, and III. Pierre Arnold Bernard (1875-1955), a yogi known as the ‘Great Oom’ and founder of a ‘love cult’ whom Seabrook did not meet and has little to say about. Interestingly he gives examples of his meetings with Crowley, whom he describes as ‘a strange, disturbing fellow, with a heavy pontifical manner mixed with a good deal of sly, monkey-like, and occasionally malicious humour. He wore an enormous star sapphire on the forefinger of his right hand, and had his head shaved’ (p. 173) He goes on to give details about Crowley’s ‘Magical Retirement’ for forty days and nights, travelling up the Hudson River in a canoe with his tent to Esopus Island:
‘The provisions looked suspicious and since we’d paid for them we decided to inspect them. They consisted of fifty gallons of red paint, three big house-painter’s brushes, and a heavy coil of rope. We investigated further. He hadn’t bought so much as a tin of beans or a loaf of bread. He’s blown every cent for the red paint. He had nothing in his pockets except the ticket for the trip up the river.
“What are you going to eat, for crying out loud?” we asked, and he replied, in his heaviest pontifical manner:
“My children, I am going to Esopus Island, and I will be fed as Elijah was fed by the ravens.” (p. 175-6) He was indeed fed, but not by ravens, by kindly farmers for forty days!
‘all summer excursionists going up and down the river saw painted on the cliffs south of Kingston two enormous legends:
Every Man and Woman is a Star!
Do What Thou Wilt shall be the Whole of the Law.’ Seabrook adds that he had ‘rigged himself a sling, and painted, we were told, from sunrise to sundown. Thereafter he had sat cross-legged on the ground in front of his tent.’ (p. 176) After Crowley returned to New York in September, the next day Seabrook invited him to the Plaza for lunch and Seabrook asked him what he had gained from his forty days as a hermit to which Crowley said he would show him. They took a walk in the park – then 5^th Avenue, near to the Public Library and crossed 42^nd Street, ‘ahead of us was strolling a tall, prosperous-looking gentleman of leisure, and Crowley, silent as a cat, fell into step immediately behind him. Their footfalls began to synchronize, and then I observed that Crowley, who generally held himself pompously erect and had a tendency to strut, had dropped his shoulders, thrust his head forward a little, like the man’s in front, had begun to swing his arms in perfect synchronization – now so perfect that he was like a moving shadow or astral ghost of the other.
As we neared the end of the block A.C., in taking a step forward, let both knees buckle suddenly under him, so that he dropped, caught himself on his haunches, and was immediately erect again, strolling.
The man in front of us fell as if his legs had been shot out from under him – and was sprawling.’ (p. 177) He also mentions Jane Wolfe’s (although he does not name her) experiences at Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu and the death of Raoul Loveday. Despite such visual evidence he still clings to his sceptical stance although he does admit that Crowley had real powers and he comes close to admitting the possibility that ESP may be a genuine factor in experiments of thought transference, all this from a man who confesses to have ‘eaten cat in Naples and caterpillars on the Ivory Coast. I have also eaten stewed young man. I have drunk the sacrificial blood of goats and bulls at voodoo altars.’ (p. 181) A little erratic but thoroughly compelling!

Tiger Woman: My Story – by Betty May.

Betty May has led an exhausting and adventurous life and she was only 36 when ‘Tiger Woman’ was published in 1929. Throughout the eight chapters of the book we find a headstrong, earthy and quite child-like personality, almost a victim of her own fate who intrudes upon one improbable moment to the next; she could not help but become a figure of hedonistic notoriety – ‘I have never tried to be ordinary and fit in with other people. I have not cared what the world thought about me, and as a result I am afraid what I thought has often not been very kind.’ (Introduction) Betty and her three siblings were raised in squalor and misery in London’s Tidal Bay, but because of her misbehaviour she was sent to live with her cruel and drunken father (he had a penchant for bashing cats’ brains out against walls) who lived in a brothel with a Jewish woman named Sarah. The father showed no sign of love towards Betty and was eventually arrested (by his own father who was a Police man) for living off immoral earnings and given two years in prison and Betty went to live first with an Aunt on a barge and later with an Aunt on a farm in Somerset. Following a sexual encounter with an older man, a Master of the local Grammar School she was sent out into the world and naturally drifted towards London. She wasn’t long in London when her beautiful yet wild looks began to attract attention and when she failed to submit to the abuse, assaults, bribes and threats of a man who proclaimed to love her, he took her by taxi to a club in Leicester Square and pushed her down the stairs – it was her first glimpse of the smoky underworld of London’s nightlife with its dancing and jazz music and she became intoxicated by it. She began to frequent clubs such as the Endell Street Club and the Café Royal where artists such as Jacob Epstein, Augustus John and the art critic Roger Fry hung-out and held court amongst the bohemians like Nina Hamnett and the artist’s models. Suddenly, Betty goes to Bordeaux on a whim (all her adventures seem to be on a whim) with a man she later finds out to be a ‘white slaver’ and she manages to escape his clutches; homeless and hungry, she finds work dancing at a Café before being abducted by a street gang leader known as ‘White Panther’ and taken to Paris where she becomes a member of his gang and she is referred to as ‘Tiger Woman’. One of her more shocking and shameful episodes concerns Betty leading a young English undergraduate on and taking him to the gang’s headquarters where he is robbed and dumped outside Paris; the young man informs the police who raid the HQ (the gang had prior notice and fled). Betty is blamed and given an ultimatum: bring back the man or suffer the consequences (in other words they would kill her) so she hunts the man and finds him and lures him to the gangs new HQ and she is forced to brand the young man with a hot knife on his breast before he is again dumped in Monmartre. Again he goes to the police, the HQ is raided and gang members are taken into custody – Betty returns to England and her adventures make her the toast of the Endell Street Club and the Café Royal crowd.
She gets engaged to a man named Arthur and the next day gets engaged to marry Dick and lives with his parents in a village Rectory for three months, utterly bored – she escapes and returns to London and on seeing Arthur she agrees to marry him in a week’s time. The night preceding the eve of the wedding she is at the Café Royal where she meet her friend ‘Bunny’ who declares his love for her – they get married on the same day she was to marry Arthur! They honeymoon in Scotland and she finds Bunny is a cocaine addict and Betty succumbs to the drug also – they are thrown out of the hotel and back in London live at the home of Stewart Gray, the man behind the ‘back to the land’ movement. At the outbreak of war Bunny joins up and when he goes to France in December 1914 she is bored in Richmond, working at a hairdresser’s and a tobacconists; she fears she has contracted leprosy (from one of the hair nets manufactured in China) and she and Bunny agree to divorce (as it turns out Bunny dutifully dies in battle) and Betty escalates into a world of dope and drink and even becomes psychotic and suicidal. Before Bunny’s death she had met an Australian Major who fell for Betty and they get married and he attempts to help her get off the drugs and alcohol. While she is living in Hastings free of drugs she finds out her husband has been unfaithful with a French woman and they get divorced.
She gets noticed by the sculptor Jacob Epstein who makes the bust of her known as the ‘Savage’ which brings her minor celebrity (and artistic immortality) until she met a brilliant, young Oxford undergraduate in 1922 named Raoul Loveday; within a month they were married. Raoul, who had secured a First in History at St John’s College, Oxford was interested in Egyptology and the occult and he soon became acquainted with the notorious Aleister Crowley who asked him to join him at his Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, Sicily; Betty is fearful but afraid of losing Raoul to the magician decides to go with her husband and they both travel to the Abbey in November 1922. She describes life at the Abbey (if you are fond of cats look away!) as she fights the hold Crowley (whom she does not name but refers to throughout as the ‘Mystic’) seems to have over the young Raoul and we are escorted through the events which lead up to poor Raoul’s death just three months after arriving from drinking unclean spring water. Back in London, poor and in her Soho room, Betty’s luck changes when a journalist offers to pay her £500 in return for her life story; the newspapers are filled with the scandals concerning Crowley, the Abbey and Raoul’s death! She then meets a strange woman by the name of Princess Waletka, a mind-reader and she travels to America with her, spending three months in her company and in her stage-show. Betty returns to England alone and gets engaged (again!) to a man named Carol, a sporting journalist whose mother is suitably unimpressed with Betty. They marry and there is a great stand-off between mother and daughter-in-law until one day when Betty is ill in bed she can take no more and Betty throws a cup of tea over her mother-in-law before rushing off to London. Her husband on hearing this resigns from his work, bundles her in a taxi and takes her back – she is bored of hearing about the sport (hunting, shooting and fishing) and of family history from Carol’s mother so Betty pitches a tent and opens a cake and sweet shop in the village, making all the confectionary herself, before growing tired of it and giving it up. One day Carol went out shooting rooks and Betty joined him, wringing the necks of those which were only wounded; a week later Carol is ill and Betty nurses him; her mother-in-law accuses her of killing her son and Betty at the end of her rope attacks her before doing what she does best – escaping back to London!
Throughout the book Betty leaps from one wild adventure to the next, willing to settle down with first this man and then that man, but it was inevitable that she would fail at marriage, even the most ardent lover would find it difficult to cage a tiger. The absence of a father-figure in childhood seems to me the single point which continually propels her into marriage and into a Freudian un-satisfaction of being dominated and conforming to what is expected and acceptable. She walks blindly into matrimony just as she walks blindly into the excesses of London’s ‘bright, young people’, obliterating the memory of war’s devastation, and in this she is in many ways, a modern woman, quite fearless and determined, easily prone to boredom and fierce when needs to be. She does not look for sympathy; she places her story down for the world to gawp at and merely says accept it for it is who I am! Much of her tale concerning the Abbey differs to Crowley’s version of events in his ‘Confessions’ – Crowley was not always wholly reliable and prone to exaggerate while I think Betty does tell the simple truth, if perhaps a little clouded by time as she never mentions keeping a journal which would have been of vital importance for the sake of historical accuracy, nevertheless, ‘Tiger Woman’ is the account of someone who did not fall for Crowley’s magical personality and someone who breezed through life at the cruel hand of fate and accepted it, good or bad! An astounding story and an extraordinary life indeed!

Jane Wolfe: The Cefalu Diaries 1920-1923.

Published in 2008 by the Temple of the Silver Star and compiled and introduced by Dr. David Schoenmaker who is the founder and Chancellor of that Magical Order, ‘The Cefalu Diaries’ contains the bulk of the surviving diaries handwritten and typed by Jane Wolfe during her magical training under Crowley at the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu.
Sarah Jane Wolfe (1875-1958) was an American actress born in Pennsylvania, who in 1910 moved to Hollywood and played minor, supporting roles in silent films. A few years later she became interested in the occult and read Crowley’s magical publication The Equinox and she felt drawn to magick and contacted Crowley through the ‘International’ in which Crowley had published some of his works and a correspondence was struck up. Crowley became increasingly passionate towards Jane, there was something mysterious about her, about the name which seemed to signify a young, lithe and athletic wolf-like creature which appealed to him and a meeting was arranged at Bou Saada on 25^th June 1920; Crowley then changed the meeting place to Tunis and sent a telegram to Jane which she did not receive and so while she sat it out in Bou Saada feeling foolish and dejected, Crowley was in Tunis wondering why this fascinating woman did not arrive! Jane, ever resilient and determined, took it on herself to travel to Cefalu and so she met Crowley in July and all the romantic illusions fell immediately away; Crowley was deeply disappointed and Jane thought Crowley and the Abbey filthy beyond belief. But, she had made the long journey there from Los Angeles and it was her will to be there and there she stayed and she proved a loyal and devoted student of Crowley and magick as the diaries show, she practices her Asana, Pranayama and Dharana techniques in meditation, recording her visions. Crowley accepted Jane as a Probationer of his magical order on 11^th June 1921 and she took the name Estai; two days later on 13^th June she undertook a 31 day Magical Retirement, taking a vow of silence and living in Crowley’s tent on the beach near the Abbey. Unfortunately the diary for this period is missing. But there is a wealth of insight into the magical training at the Abbey with a few descriptions of Abbey life and its ritual regime, the children, Leah Hirsig and Ninnette Shumway, the fleas and of course Crowley’s comments are invaluable such as here when on 29^th May 1921, Frater Genesthai (C F Russell who was also a Probationer at the Abbey) did a Tarot Divination for Jane (Crowley is bemused as Genesthai ‘can’t do Tarot yet’); Jane types the results out for Crowley in her diary after which Crowley adds, like a teacher marking a schoolboy’s exercise book – ‘This is the most unintelligible drivel I have read for a long time.’
Wolfe went on to help found South California’s Agape Lodge of the OTO, in fact she was Lodge Master and she died at the age of 83 in 1958 and throughout her magical career she remained a devoted friend of Crowley to the end, of which there were few. For an excellent biography of Wolfe one can do no better than go to the College of Thelema’s ‘In the Continuum’ by Soror Meral who was admitted as a Probationer by Wolfe on 3^rd June 1940. We have Soror Meral (Phyllis Seckler, 1917-2004) the magical student of Wolfe’s to thank for preserving these valuable documents which also contains Crowley’s comments written in pencil and produced here in facsimile. Wolfe’s magical diaries may be of little interest to those who do not appreciate Crowley’s system of Magick or Thelema but to those who do they are quite beautiful as we get close to her through the writing which contains copious spelling mistakes, some quite amusing such as ‘math of the poon’ for ‘path of the moon’ – all that opium can become distracting and take its toll on grammar and besides, all ‘Spelling is defunct;’ (Liber Al. III. 2.) I would have liked to see an abundance of footnotes but then I’m a footnote freak and one can never have too many! An enlightening read!

Spirit Intercourse: Its Theory and Practice – by J. Hewat McKenzie.

 

James Hewat McKenzie (1869-1929) was the Scottish born founder of the British College of Psychic Science who became interested in the paranormal in 1900. Following a series of lectures in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow during 1915, he published ‘Spirit Intercourse’ in 1917. One can understand the need for this book when one considers the awful loss of life on the battlefields of France and Belgium and the need to console grieving parents and loved ones; an interest in spiritualism exploded and filled the gaping chasm left by the church.  The book is divided into nine chapters over 295 pages which looks at the various evidence such as materialization and techniques of mediumship through objective and subjective phenomena. McKenzie, who was a member of the Christian Church for thirty years came to the conclusion through Christian worship that there was no evidence to confirm that man had a soul or that even a spirit world existed; following his departure from the church he underwent years of personal study in the science of ‘life after death’ and his own belief in spirit communication was established: ‘The records of the Society for Psychical Research have actually proved to my mind, first, survival pure and simple, the persistence of the spirit’s life, as a structural law of the universe; second, that between the spiritual and the material worlds an avenue of communication does in fact exist; third, that the surviving spirit retains, at least in some measure, the memories and loves of the earth.’ (F. W. H. Myers. Quoted on page 35) He goes into great depth as to the science and culture of the soul and the first steps in spirit intercourse, mapping the spirit spheres and describing the laws that one may find there. Psychic science, he says, proves that at the death of the body a person still functions as a conscious being; that being is a refined spirit body or a soul which has substance and weight. The soul existed with a physical body during life and can communicate with persons on earth before and after death. McKenzie states that the world of the spirit or the soul lies immediately around the physical earth and that while alive, a person can leave the physical body and explore the spheres of refined physical states – the spirit world for we are triune beings: body, soul and spirit (ego, thought). The soul has a similar organic structure to that of the physical, its own organs etc. This is all very interesting and then McKenzie suddenly feels the need to question his readers’ moral behaviour and physical virtues and that old Christian devil rears its ugly head in his chapter on the culture of the soul which he declares needs four components to become aware of spiritual contact, firstly, aspiration (or prayer), secondly, right diet (apparently cooked flesh is disagreeable with the spirits!), thirdly, exercise and fourth is self-control; to this he adds rhythmic-breathing, concentration and meditation. A lot of this I can swallow but when it comes to ‘planetary spirit intercourse’ whereby the Earth spirits of the seventh sphere can communicate with the Martian spirits of the seventh sphere for example seems ridiculous to me and why when we enter the spirit world are our souls clothed in human shape and why do we need to live in brick (not actual material brick but an ethereal substance-like brick) buildings? Why is not the soul condensed into a circular ball of energy? Although I cannot agree with much that McKenzie has to say on the spirit world (the seven spheres that surrounds the earth and the other planets in our Solar System) and his belief that there is no danger in such communications as in possession and negative influences etc. seems naïve, but the book does have some interesting things to say and it is a good, understandable book for most of it.

 

Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons – by George Pendle.

 

To anyone interested in the occult, particularly Aleister Crowley and Thelema, the name Jack Parsons will be a familiar one. The British author George Pendle (born 1976) of St Peter’s College, Oxford has written a fascinating biography of Parsons and ‘Strange Angel’, published in 2005, tells that adventurous tale through twelve chapters which capture the exciting and dangerous times of early rocketry and jet propulsion and the dark occult obsession at the heart of Parsons. Jack was born Marvel Whiteside Parsons on 2^nd October 1914 in Los Angeles to parents Ruth Virginia Whiteside and Marvel H. Parsons who were married in 1912 in Massachusetts. Unfortunately Marvel was less than faithful to Ruth and she forced him to move out in January 1915 and they split. Marvel tried to seek forgiveness but Ruth is adamant and they divorce (he later attempted suicide and spent the rest of his life in hospital, dying in 1947). Young Marvel became John (also Jack) and mother and child with Ruth’s wealthy parents moved to Pasadena in 1916. Little Jack was spoilt and solitary and an avid reader of science fiction pulp magazines. He attended Washington Junior High School aged 12 where he was bullied but soon made friends with a boy named Edward Forman who had similar interests; Jack even tried to invoke the devil in his bedroom and some success scared him witless! The occult fascinated him – ‘magic suggested there were unseen metaphysical worlds that existed and could be explored with the right knowledge. Both rocketry and magic were rebellious against the very limits of human existence; in striving for one challenge he could not help but strive for the other.’ (p. 11) He then went to John Muir High School (1929-31) and a short stay at Brown Military Academy for Boys in San Diego where he was also bullied – he hated it there and blew-up the toilets! He was expelled and returned to Pasadena to the University School in 1931 and graduated two years later. He enrolled at the Pasadena Junior College for just one term before finding work at the Hercules Powder Company in Los Angeles where he learnt to handle nitroglycerine and gained knowledge of chemicals and explosives. In July 1934, nineteen year old Parsons proposed to Helen Northrup and they were married the following year on 26^th April, he was 20, Helen (who had been abused by her step-father) was 24. Jack went with his friend Forman to Caltech in 1935 and spoke to the graduate in aeronautics, William Bollay, who referred them to the twenty-two year old Frank Malina who also had interests in rockets and space travel. Although Caltech did not fund them they let them use the laboratories. This new rocket research group became known as the Suicide Squad! Through Parsons interest in the occult he came across the English occultist Aleister Crowley and was instantly fascinated; ‘both magic and rocketry had a basis in the imagination and in scientific method.’ (p. 85) In 1939 he attended the Church of Thelema (established 1934) at 1746 North Winona Boulevard, Hollywood, where the Agape Lodge of the OTO celebrated a weekly Thelemic Gnostic Mass in the attic room. He now became acquainted with the likes of 64 year old Jane Wolfe who had been with Crowley at Cefalu and an English Thelemite, 53 year old Wilfred T. Smith who acted as Priest during the Mass. Jack and Helen Parsons were initiated into the Agape Lodge of OTO on 15^th February 1941 and Jack’s motto was: ‘Thelema Obtentum Procedero Amoris Nuptiae’ which roughly means the Establishment of Thelema through Rituals of Love. Jack persuaded his friend Grady McMurtry to join and became a sort of mentor to him; he also became friends with Paul and Phyllis Seckler and met Karl Germer in New York, but all was not well in the Parson household. When Helen went on vacation with her mother in June 1941, Jack had an affair with her young half-sister, Sara known as Betty who was seventeen years old. Helen found out on her return but stuck with Jack until she fell into the arms of Wilfred T. Smith, Head of the Agape Lodge and became the Priestess in the Mass and eventually became pregnant by Smith, having a son named Kwen. The Lodge moved to 1003 Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena and in January 1943 Crowley, hearing rumours of Smith’s behaviour as Head, asked him to step down; Smith had been banished and he took Helen with him to live on a turkey farm and Parson’s became temporary Head of the OTO at Agape Lodge. It is at this time that a charismatic creep with a bag-full of tall-tales enters the Lodge, the fantasy writer – Lieutenant L. Ron Hubbard, (born 1911). Parsons fell under the spell of the phoney Hubbard who took Betty from Jack and charmed his way through most of the women at the Lodge. Parsons had always been drawn to dark magic and the inhabitants of 1003 became concerned by the negative and hostile vibrations at the Lodge. Jack performed a series of Enochian magic rituals (an operation using sympathetic magic through solitary sex) to conjure a magical being to replace Betty, an Elemental! Phenomena is reported at 1003 before Hubbard and Parsons travelled to the Mojave Desert and at sunset Parsons declares that it is done – on their return home that 18^th January 1946 to the Lodge Parsons finds the twenty-three year old Marjorie Cameron, known as ‘Candy’ waiting for him – Jack writes to Crowley saying his Elemental manifested and before long they are performing sex magic together in an attempt to invoke the incarnation of the Goddess Babalon. When Marjorie went to New York Jack went into the Mojave Desert and heard the voice dictating ‘The Book of Babalon’ which was intended as a fourth chapter to Crowley’s Liber Al. Later in the Desert he performs the rituals given in the Book of Babalon and Hubbard sees vision – Jack believed that Babalon would be born in the world nine months later! Jack sold 1003 Orange Grove Avenue and he, Hubbard and Betty went into business together as ‘Allied Enterprises’, Parsons putting his entire savings into the enterprise, over $20,000. Hubbard and Betty went to Miami to buy three yachts and sell them at a profit; the gullible Parsons sat waiting for news and when it did not come he went to Miami where the cheating Hubbard and Betty were but wind of this got to them and they sailed off! Parsons performed an Invocation Ritual in his Hotel room, the Invocation of Bartzabel, the Spirit of Mars; Hubbard’s yacht hit a storm which brought the charlatan and his whore Betty back to Miami. During the court case ‘Allied Enterprises’ was dissolved and Hubbard was to pay Parsons $2,900, a mere fraction of what the swindling Hubbard had stolen; Betty and Hubbard married a month later and the criminal Hubbard went on to form a pseudo-religious cult called Scientology which unfortunately still brain-washes dullards drawn to its nonsense today!  Parsons resigned from the OTO and Crowley gladly accepted and he moved to Manhattan Beach and married Marjorie Cameron on 19^th October 1946 (she later left him and Parsons was reduced to practicing sex magic with prostitutes); he performed a Ritual of ‘madness and horror’ which lasted forty days, believing he was a Master of the Temple, telling Wilfred Smith he was the Antichrist and was to open the way for Babalon! The FBI investigate him and Marjorie eventually returns to his side before he died in a horrible accident on Tuesday 17^th June 1952 in his laboratory at home at Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena; a huge explosion from the chemicals he was handling swept his right arm and the right side of his face away before he died in hospital; he was thirty-seven years old. When his mother Ruth heard the news, she took a lethal dose of pills and just four hours after her son’s death she was dead too! Jack was cremated and his ashes were fittingly scattered in the Mojave Desert. This is an exceptionally interesting work by Pendle and the author really gets to grips with the early stages of rocketry and jet technology; Parsons was instrumental in the developments of jet propulsion and space travel yet he has been neglected through his other ‘embarrassing’ interests in the occult which sadly has overshadowed his life; those pioneering beginnings of the OTO Agape Lodge in California which so frustrated Crowley are equally fascinating and although many of its members do seem to be playing at devil-worship and over-indulging in sex and drugs, losing their perspective on Crowley’s vision for the Lodge and the true Light of Thelema (the serious and faithful Jane Wolfe of course is the exception), Crowley even had Grady McMurtry who had been with Crowley in England learning magical techniques, go to Agape Lodge and write a report on the Lodge and its members, underlying its quite farcical dramas, there was a serious attempt at spiritual attainment and the manifestation of the Aeon of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, as given in Crowley’s Book of the Law, Liber Al vel Legis. There will be many tales told in the future of the history of mankind’s will to explore outer space and inner space and the author has produced an excellent biography of a man whose passion helped us to achieve even to dream of such things! Very good!

 

The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O. – by Francis King.

 

This controversial tome published in 1973 by the British occult writer Francis X. King (1934-1994) really caused quite a furore among members of the Ordo Templi Orientis (‘Order of Oriental Templars’, O.T.O.) as it was revealing their long-held ‘secrets’ which are acquired through steps or degrees of magical and spiritual attainment. ‘Our Order possesses the KEY which opens up all Masonic and Hermetic secrets, namely, the teaching of sexual magic, and this teaching explains, without exception, all the Secrets of Freemasonry and all systems of religion.’ (‘Oriflamme’. 1912.) As someone who has never been drawn to the O.T.O. or other Freemasonic twaddle I found much of this volume a complete waste of my time, much like being a member of the aforementioned organisations.
In part one, King, the author of over twenty published works which include: ‘Ritual Magic in England’ (1970), ‘Sexuality, Magic and Perversion’ (1972) and ‘Witchcraft and Demonology’ (1991), presents us with a history of the order from its birth and development, including the Manifesto of 1917, through to the structure of the degree system and the great men who helped shape the order such as Theodore Reuss ‘Frater Merlin’, Franz Hartmann with his Theosophical background in India and of course Aleister Crowley who became the successor to the Outer Head of the Order following the resignation of Reuss in 1922 and who revised the rituals to conform with Liber Al vel Legis and devised a Gnostic Mass. Following Crowley’s death in 1947 Karl Kelner ‘Frater Saturnus’ became the Head of the Order until his death in 1962.
It is all really quite laughable nonsense of course and any true adept will see through the worthless Masonic-style rituals King has thrown together in part two of the book from Minerval to the Sixth Degree; some would even suggest it is all about as useless as the English Royal Family but thankfully I would never suggest such a thing. Part three provides a little more interest and a little less laughter as we get to the Secret Instructions of the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Degrees: De Natura Deorum [Of the Nature of Gods] (7^th Degree), De Nuptiis Secretis Deorum cum Hominibus [Of the Secret Marriage of Gods and Men] (8^th Degree), Agape vel Liber C vel Azoth [The Book of the Unveiling of the Sangraal] and De Homunculo Epistola [Of the Homunculus] (9^th Degree) which over time have all been plundered before and sought out by the genuine adept upon the path. Although King’s intention to publish the rituals was honourable this is incomplete trash which has acquired some sort of mystique over the decades due to the notion that so-called ‘secrets’ of sex magic are being revealed, ‘secrets’ which any decent enthusiast of Crowley and ritual magic already knows or is able to perceive from the written works. The rituals are dreary and any young neophyte with an ounce of dramatic creativity and a flair for romance can do a much better job and I would advise this as being much more effective and relative. This may have caused a few ripples at one time and even now copies are selling for outrageous prices, but the lake has dried up, long ago. Don’t bother!

 

Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God – by Kenneth Grant.

This wonderful gem from the treasure store of magical publications appeared in 1973 (the same year that King’s dire ‘Secret Rituals of the OTO’ disgraced the shelves) and its eleven chapters (233 pages) is the second book in Grant’s Typhonian Trilogy; eleven of course is the number of magick and chapter one: ‘The One Beyond Ten’ (which is eleven) explains the psycho-sexual energies involved in Crowley’s reception of Liber AL vel Legis in 1904 and the similarities to the Tantras. Eleven is also the number of the Qliphoth which must be evoked by formulating the averse pentagram (the Star of Set) after balancing the five elements within the self, represented by the upright pentagram (the Star of Nuit); eleven is also the path of Aleph on the Tree of Life (Wisdom and Folly). Kenneth Grant (1924-2011) who met Crowley in the autumn of 1944 at Netherwood in Sussex, became the Great Beast’s personal secretary until June the following year and learnt ceremonial magick with him before being initiated into the O.T.O.; in fact, Crowley saw him as his successor (Grant was expelled from the O.T.O. in 1955 by Karl Germer, the Outer Head of the Order because of Grant’s conflicting ideas and influences concerning Thelema). In 1954 Grant founded the New Isis Lodge until 1962 and we can see from this book that he is very knowledgeable concerning the Qabalah and mythology, especially eastern tantric systems which are expressed in the form of the Scarlet Woman, whose number is 156, in chapter two. She is Babalon in respect of the Vama Marg, the esoteric aspect of Tantra, the exoteric being the Dakshina Marg; the number 156 conceals the functions of the Scarlet Woman, Binah, the City of the Pyramids beneath the Night of Pan. The Magic Power of Kundalini is raised which energises the Chakras, generating vibrations, influencing the chemical compositions of the woman’s glandular secretions. After appropriating the amrit (‘nectar’) precipitated at any given chakra, these vibrations inform the fluids which flow from the genital outlet, utilised by the Priest: ‘the Secret Seed of the Star is absorbed orally by the Magician after it has been evoked into the Chakra: Masculine – ‘Blood of the Lion’, Feminine – ‘Gluten of the Eagle’. This Kundalini is described in the third chapter ‘Zone of the Fire Snake’ and Grant draws the distinction between the cosmic forces associated with Crowley, H P Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. Further associations are made in chapter four ‘The Angel and the Aeon’ which brings into focus the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel in the aeon of Horus the Crowned and Conquering Child whose menstruum is semen as opposed to blood which was the menstruum in the previous Aeon of Osiris; Horus incorporates both aspects in the blending of the sexes (bisexual) as in Baphomet. Chapter five looks at the ‘Tantric Element of the O.T.O.’ and the Advent of the Aeon of Horus (Crowley’s enlightenment through his encounter with Theodore Reuss in reference to Crowley’s ‘Book of Lies’), Crowley’s experiments with the ‘secret wisdom’ in the Paris Working of 1914 and the Law of Thelema Solar-Phallic consciousness which superseded Christianity; this manifests in the active form of the current of Heru-ra-ha (Horus) as Ra-Hoor-Khuit (IX Degree) and in the passive as Set or Shaitan as Hoor-paar-kraat (XI Degree), the dual modes of the operation of Baphomet. ‘Dream Control by Sexual Magick’ takes us into chapter six and explains the mental and astral activity of dream control and the sexual polarity induced by sexual arousal, the bodily ‘pranas’, saturating the kundalini energy stored in the chakras of the Scarlet Woman who is the ‘Gate of Vision’ and manipulated by ‘mudras’ to produce ‘kalas’, vaginal fluids; this energy is either absorbed by the magician or allowed to rise through the chakras enabling the magician to explore the Aethyrs. Grant also touches upon Crowley’s method of annihilating the moral prejudice and conformity, such as the absorption of repellent substances, as given in Liber Aleph (chapters 22 and 23) and the formula of N.O.X. Other formulas are dealt with in the seventh chapter ‘The Sabbath Wine and the Devil’s Graal’, such as IAO: Isis-Apothis-Osiris. The Yod (Hand in Hebrew) is the Hermit of the Tarot, the solitary seed (Virgo); A is Apophis, the ‘evil’ serpent represented by the whore; O is the true ‘eye’, Ayin (Yoni) attributed to the Scarlet Woman. Crowley developed this further into FIAOF whereby F (Vau) is the child, the Son – Love under Will (see Magick). Grant goes on to say that Crowley misinterprets the essence of the ‘unmentionable vessel’ in the eleventh degree which should not be an act of sodomy as Crowley practiced it but the Lunar Current as expressed in the ‘Elixir Rubeus’. Passing through chapter eight’s ‘Moon-Power: Its Names, Numbers and Reverberant Atavisms’ which describes the full moon lunar current together with certain symbols and sigils and ways of utilising them in ritual form, we come to chapter nine, ‘The Witches’ Sabbath and the Reincarnation of Primal Obsessions’ which incorporates the assumption of God-forms and the nature of obsession – the birth of an entity, the subconscious thought-entity which as it becomes stronger can enter the material plane; the author also touches upon Crowley’s ‘Eroto-Comatose Lucidity’ (De Arte Magica. 1914). Coming to the Cosmic Climax, Grant brings in his own interpretations of the formula of Horus (Hoor-par-kraat and Ra-Hoor-Khuit) and the lunar-cosmic principles involved in certain extra-terrestrial intelligences in chapter ten ‘Nu-Isis and the Radiance Beyond Space’. He expresses the threefold formula of woman, the earthly vehicle of Nuit as: (a) the lower Isis (unwedded and all pleasure), Lilith/Babalon – Luna; (b) the middle Isis (procreatrix, Mother of Earth), Eve/Venus – Venus, and (c) the Heavenly Isis (the Bride of Hadit [Set]: Nuit) – Nu-Isis, the transplutonic Isis (Grant operated the New Isis Lodge of the O.T.O. for seven years from 1955-1962 to transmit the knowledge of Nu-Isis, before the great eruption of the final chapter, eleven, ‘Living Beyond Time’ brings us the formula of Tetragrammaton (YHVH) and other aeonic formulas before delivering the Elixir of Life and the 93 current. This is an invaluable volume to any aspiring magician in the Thelemic System of Magick and Kenneth Grant is a true visionary, as yet not fully appreciated.