Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (33 page)

Let us embrace?

(
They embrace, leaning across the corpse. Nuit returns to her throne, and dons the blue robe, thus assuming the power of Isis. Hadit remains, his sword upon the heart of Ra-Hoor-Khuit
)

THE ARISING OF HORUS

Nuit chants the Dirge of Isis.
⁶
After “tomb” in verse four she rises, and Hadit falls back to his knees. At verse five Nuit comes down to the corpse, and raises it with kisses upon the stigmata, wrapping it then in her blue robe. She then clothes it in the white robe. Ra-Hoor-Khuit takes the sword of Hadit and slits his throat therewith. Nuit returns to her throne and Hadit rises and puts on the red robe
.

IX
° (i.e.
Ritual copulation
)

All this bloodshed must not be taken too literally. Both Crowley and the O.T.O. frequently symbolised (magical) sexual intercourse as human sacrifice. Thus in his
Magick in Theory and Practice
Crowley wrote that the ideal sacrifice was “a male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence” and in a footnote claimed that he himself had made this sacrifice about 150 times a year between 1912 and 1928. From Crowley diaries it is clear that he was referring to sexual intercourse; this interpretation is confirmed by a commentary on the above-mentioned passage by Crowley’s German disciple Martha Kuntzel: “It is the sacrifice of oneself spiritually. And the intelligence and innocence of that male child are the perfect understanding of the Magician, his one aim, without lust of result. And male he must be, because what he sacrifices is not the material blood, but his creative power.”

¹
HICE
is. the Coptic name of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and the name of the goddess was usually given in this form in the occult organisation known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which Crowley had at one time been a member. Thus the occultist Wynn Wescott once wrote “I am now
HICE
in the Isis-Urania Temple of the G.D.”—he meant that he held the office of Praemonstrator for the holder of this office had to mentally identify himself with Isis.

²
These names, all drawn from
Liber Legis
, Crowley’s Book of the Law, clearly indicate the late date of this rite. Nuit is the Egyptian star-goddess, the feminine principle that represents infinity; Hadit, the point, is the contrasting principle and from the dialectical interaction between the two is supposed to result the manifested universe. Ra-Hoor-Khuit, the Egyptian war-god, is an aspect of Horus, whose aeon, according to Crowley: began in 1904. The participants in the ritual are clearly supposed to identify themselves with these Egyptian deities.

³
For example nine knocks for Khonsu, the Theban moon-god, eight knocks for Thoth, god of wisdom. The number of knocks is decided by the supposed correspondence between the gods and the spheres of the Qabalistic Tree of Life. Thus all moon gods and goddesses are attributed to Yesod, the ninth sphere of the Tree, and all gods of wisdom, such as Hermes, Woden, and Thoth, to Hod, the eighth sphere.

⁴
This, presumably, would be the
Ritual of the Star Ruby
, a Crowleyan ritual printed on pages 34–5 of Crowley’s
Book of Lies
.

⁵
These two words are drawn from a verse of the Book of the Law. The passage, which many find offensive as well as blasphemous, reads:

“I am in a secret fourfold word, the blasphemy against all gods of men.

Curse them! Curse them! Curse them!

With my Hawk’s head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross.

I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed and blind him.

With my claws I tear out the flesh of the Indian and the Buddhist, Mongol and Din.

Bahlasti! Ompehda! I spit on your crapulous creeds.”

⁶
Probably a reference to some poem written by Crowley.

Ralph Nicholas Chubb (1892–1960) spent the formative years of his childhood and adolescence in the English town of St. Albans. He was educated at the local Grammar School, whose buildings lay close to the Mediaeval Abbey Church, not far from the ruins of the Roman city of Verulamium.

Ralph seems to have been a sexually precocious child, for his first orgasm was induced by the motions of his rocking-horse, and, even in the England of the early twentieth century, such toys were not usually owned by those who had reached the normal age of puberty. For the rest of his childhood he regularly indulged in masturbation although, like many children of Victorian parents, he was haunted by feelings of guilt. So strong were these in Ralph’s case that he was afraid to meet the eyes of his school-fellows whom, he felt sure, were able to discern his guilty secret. From the very first his inclinations seem to have been homosexual, and his early masturbation fantasies were based upon his memories of a group of village boys who he had seen naked by the sea-shore.

When Chubb was eighteen years old he fell passionately in love with a choir-boy whom he had seen in the Abbey; this love was never consummated, for although Chubb ardently desired the lad to “be his boy-bride”, he never plucked up sufficient courage to speak to him. In the same year Chubb had a brief, but much more fruitful, relationship with a fifteen-year-old boy and throughout that golden Edwardian summer of 1910 the two boys roamed the countryside, “fondling, spending, silently embracing”. All good things must come to an end, however, and in October 1910 Chubb, who had won a scholarship to Selwyn
College, went up to Cambridge, where he was awarded a half-Blue in chess and proceeded B.A. in 1913.

At the outbreak of war in 1914 Chubb enlisted as a soldier. Unlike so many of the volunteers who went out to Flanders with the “red little dead little, army” Chubb survived, being mentioned in despatches and reaching the rank of Captain before being invalided out with “shellshock”. After his discharge he studied painting at the Slade, but left London forever in 1921, living for six years at Curridge, in Berkshire, and then moving to Fair Oak Cottage, Ashford Hill, near Newbury, where he was to spend the rest of his life.

Chubb’s homo-erotic and occult preoccupations were not given explicit voice in such early publications as
Manhood
(1924) and
Woodcuts
(1928) but in 1929 he made a bold, and most injudicious, declaration of his inclinations in the penultimate paragraph of the
Notes on Some Water-Colour Drawings
which was inserted into the catalogue of his exhibition at the Goupil Gallery. In this he not only stated that he believed “absolutely in masculine love—boy love in particular” but expressed his view—now a commonplace one amongst both homosexuals and liberal Anglican theologians—that the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and the young St. John was homosexual in nature.
¹
In the same year he published
An Appendix
in which he announced that he was “here to save England”; it is clear that throughout the ’twenties he had come increasingly under the influence of the writings of William Blake and that he had come to regard himself as being, like his hero, a poet, an artist, and a prophet.

Chubb was impressed by Blake’s successful blending of prose, poetry and illustration into one artistic whole and tried to achieve the same effects by means of lithographic book-production. In all, Chubb produced seven lithographic books and an eighth was in an advanced state of preparation when he died in 1960. In six of these he outlined his synthetic religion, an amalgam of Blake, occultism and pederasty. The first of them,
The Sun Spirit
(1931), a fantasy bearing a faint family likeness to
The Chemical Marriage of Christian Rosycross
and other allegories of spiritual progression, was comparatively restrained in tone,
but, as time passed, the contents of each succeeding volume bore more and more resemblance to the inchoate outpourings of schizophrenia.

By the time Chubb came to write
The Heavenly Cupid
(1934), published in an edition of only forty-three copies, he had come to believe in the imminent arrival of an “age of the Holy Ghost”. This perennial mystical occult fantasy has enjoyed an underground existence since the thirteenth century and was admirably described by Huysmans in
La-Bas
. He wrote:

“There are three reigns, … that of the Old Testament, of the Father, the reign of fear; that of the New Testament, of the Son, the reign of expiation; that of the Gospel of St. John, of the Holy Ghost, which will be the reign of ransom and love. It is the past, the past, the present and the future; it is winter, spring and summer; the one says Joachim of Floria, has given the germinating wheat, the other the ear, the third will give the corn in the ear. Two of the Persons of the Holy Trinity have been made manifest, the Third Person is logically bound to appear.

“… The Holy Spirit also, by the Christ in Glory, will come to be immanent in created beings. He will be the principle that transforms and regenerates them …”

Chubb managed to combine this doctrine with the deification of boy-love:

“I announce a secret event as tremendous and mysterious as any that has occurred in the spiritual history of the world. I announce the inauguration of a Third Dispensation, the dispensation of the Holy Ghost on earth, and the visible advent thereof on earth in the form of a Young Boy of thirteen years old, naked, perfect and unblemished.”

Chubb’s fantasies steadily developed until, in
The Child of Dawn
(1948) and
Flames of Sunrise
(1954), he personified himself as the Archangel Raphael, the protector of Albion, England’s otherworldly counterpart. I think it unlikely that anyone will ever go to the trouble of fully identifying Chubb’s sources, but from my brief examination of these last-mentioned books it seems obvious to me that he had read and re-read such occult writers as Blavatsky and Eliphas Levi, that the writings of the seventeenth-century alchemist and physician Paracelsus
had exerted a strong influence upon him, and that he was not unacquainted with the works of such comparatively obscure late seventeenth-century mystics as Samuel Pordage and Jane Lead. In his
Love in Earnest
Timothy d’ Arch Smith has admirably summed up the contents of Chubb’s later writings:

“The heterogeneous mass of occult facts and figures collected … embrace numerology, astrology, classical and Celtic mythology, Christianity, the Grail legend … and all these various systems are twisted and entwined to shed light on his prophecy of the Third Dispensation, the Advent of the Boy-God. Coincidental dates and minor chance occurrences are interpreted as auguries of his mission.”

Chubb died in 1960, an embittered failure with few admirers and even fewer followers. The only recognition he obtained during the last years of his life was from the Lord Abbot of the Order of St. Raphael who conferred upon him an illuminated scroll. Richard Due de Palatine, the Lord Abbot in question, had originally been a priest of the Liberal Catholic Church under the name of Ronald Powell. At about the same time as he had attained his ducal status he had become the first Bishop of the Pre-Nicene Catholic Church, an organisation which aspired to “co-ordinate the Masonic, Theosophical, Rosicrucian, Hermetic … Gnostic and Esoteric Christianity …, and their relationship to the Eternal Truths of God.” I cannot help feeling that a scroll, even an illuminated one received from such an august source, was poor recompense for Chubb’s forty years of hard work.

A full account of Chubb’s life can be found in Timothy d’Arch Smith’s intensely readable
Love in Earnest
(Routledge and Kegan Paul 1970).

¹
Needless to say there is no evidence whatsoever to support this odd (and to me, for one, most offensive and blasphemous) theory. The idea seems to have originated with the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, who also held that Jesus had a sexual relationship with the woman of Samaria.

Just as Reuss chartered Aleister Crowley’s
Mysteria Mystica Maxima
as a semi-independent British section of the O.T.O. (see
chapter 10
) so he chartered the
Mysteria Mystica Aeterna
as an Austrian section (under the leadership of Rudolf Steiner) and the
Mysteria Mystica Veritas
as a Swiss section.

The
Mysteria Mystica Veritas
appears to have enjoyed a quiet—almost a dormant—existence until 1943 when a Swiss-German occultist known as Frater
Paragranus
was initiated into it. Within a few years Frater
Paragranus
had become the Chief of the Swiss section of the O.T.O., had entered into friendly relationships with the disciples of Aleister Crowley—notably Karl Germer—and had established a magazine. Subsequently Frater
Paragranus
inherited the chieftainship of Krumm-Heller’s
Ancient Rosicrucian Fraternity
and the Patriarchate of the
Gnostic Catholic Church
—this latter dignity he derived from Chevillon, murdered by the Gestapo in 1944, who was himself the successor of Joanny Bricaud. Frater
Paragranus
is also the head of one of the several groups who claim to be the true heirs and successors of the Illuminati of Weishaupt as revived (
circa
1895) by Leopold Engel.