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The trial was held in April 1911 but the outcome pleased no one save Fenton for, although the jury established that Jones had been defamed by implication, they also concurred that the defamation was essentially true. During the trial, much of the evidence submitted centered on Aleister Crowley with one of the chief witnesses being his old adversary, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. Suddenly it seemed as if their ‘magical duel' had begun all over again, only this time Mathers had the upper hand.

The fall-out from the trial hit Crowley hard. His most trusted second-incommand, Captain Fuller, announced that he could no longer be acquainted with the group for fear of damaging his career and several other members now decided to leave.

In contrast, one new member of the group was a married woman by the name of Mary Desti who, perhaps due to her striking good looks or to her exceptional gifts, was destined to become Crowley's new partner. Soon after Crowley had initiated her into the Argentum Astrum as a probationer (with the chosen name Virakam – a combination of the Sanskrit words for ‘man' and ‘lust'), they traveled to Switzerland and afterwards settled, along with her young son, Preston, in Italy. The ensuing weeks were not idyllic, Preston quickly growing to loathe Crowley, particularly the way in which he treated his mother.

[Crowley's] repugnant reaction each time my poor mother had so far forgotten his teachings as to utter in his hearing a singular personal pronoun like ‘I' or ‘me' or ‘mine.' The instant his ears were so assaulted, he solemnly withdrew an open penknife from his robe, raised his arm so the loose sleeve of his robe fell back to expose his bare forearm, and then with the penknife slashed a small fresh slice under the ladder of slices he had already incised into his forearm […] Reading about some of his subsequent exploits, I realize that my mother and I were lucky to escape with our lives.
9

Although shortly after arriving in Italy Desti had filed for divorce from her husband, Solomon Sturges, eventually she and Crowley parted ways leaving her free to marry a Turkish man called Veli Bey.

Single again, Crowley traveled extensively during this period and continued to write and explore his own particular brand of ‘erotomagick.' But bad press followed him wherever he went and in 1912 yet another grim episode occurred involving a young woman by the name of Joan Hayes. Employed by Crowley to perform in a rerun of
The Rites of Eleusis
for which she had to dance on stage with Crowley's ex-lover Victor Neuberg, the two began an affair. Crowley was far from happy with this, believing that it interfered with his protégé's work, but the affair continued even after Hayes married another man, Wilfred Merton. The marriage was doomed to failure and six months after it had begun, the two separated, shortly after which, in August 1912, Hayes shot herself through the heart. It was a grisly turn of events, but one made all the more dreadful by Neuberg's assertion that Crowley had somehow murdered her through a combination of psychological bullying and black magick. Nor was Crowley averse to admitting (however obliquely) to this crime.

An adept known to The Master Therion [Crowley] once found it necessary to slay a Circe who was bewitching brethren. He merely walked to the door of her room, and drew an Astral T (the symbol of Saturn) with an astral dagger. Within 48 hours she shot herself.
10

Obviously the above statement cannot be proved, nor is there any doubt that it is anything other than the self-satisfied posturing of a highly egotistical man, but as with other previous examples, it does illustrate the nature of this vain and vile individual. Who else, after all would claim responsibility for killing a harmless woman? Neuberg obviously agreed for save from a brief sojourn with his mentor in Paris, by 1914 he had grown completely disillusioned with Crowley to the extent that he broke off all communications with him. Interestingly, rather like Crowley's wife, Rose, Neuberg then went on to suffer a complete breakdown, but afterwards recovered enough to marry and later raise a family and run a successful publishing business. Once out of Crowley's clutches, or so it seemed, everyone stood a good chance of success.

Argenteum Astrum, by way of contrast, was falling apart. Disillusioned by the bad press he had received after the Jones v. The
Looking Glass
trial and never quite regaining the membership numbers he lost as a result of the court action, Crowley began channeling his energies into other areas. Not that he didn't continue, but without the support of people such as Captain Fuller and Victor Neuberg, Crowley lost interest and maybe even impetus in his new world order.

Instead he acquainted himself with a German, Rosicrucian magical sect known as the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) – or the Order of the Temple of the Orient – becoming the head of the English-speaking branch some time afterwards. Later, he sat out the majority of World War I in the United States, writing vast amounts of what amounted to anti-British propaganda, while experimenting with drugs such as cocaine, opium and heroin to which he rapidly grew addicted. It was during his American stay that Crowley also met Leah Hirsig – the woman with whom he was to return to England and who was also to give him his third child, Anne Léa – nicknamed Poupée. The couple returned to London separately, but in the early part of 1920 decided to retreat abroad, this time to Italy where they rented the Villa Santa Barbara – a place Crowley soon renamed the Abbey of Thelema – his new religious order. In fact the teachings of Thelema were nothing more than an extension of those of the argenteum Astrum, i.e. its main principle was the founding of a New Aeon although such worthy aims were somewhat undermined by the Abbey's soon-to-be adopted nickname – the ‘horsel' (a bowdlerized version of ‘whore's cell'.) Once more Crowley was in his element, presiding over rituals, practicing his particular brand of erotomagick and indulging in acts of sadomasochism. Hirsig joined him in the latter, and if the following account is true, seemingly enjoyed her role of torturer.

She held a lighted cigarette against my breast. I shrank back and moaned. She spat her scorn, and puffed at it and put it back. I shrank and moaned. She made me fold my arms, sucked at the paper till the tobacco crackled with the fierceness of its burning; she put it back for the third time. I braced myself; I tightened lip and thrust my breast against it.
11

New members showed up at the Abbey every week hoping for Crowley's guidance, but although on the surface things appeared to be going well, the reality was that Crowley had acute financial problems, added to which the seemingly idyllic Villa Santa Barbra was nothing short of an unsanitary slum. Crowley was taking increasing amounts of cocaine and heroine to feed his growing habit – the subject of which became central to a novel written during this period,
Diary of a Drug Fiend,
in which the central theme is that of a young couple struggling to free themselves from drug addiction. Sadly fiction did not reflect fact, for Crowley never attempted to free himself from his addiction. Instead, he sank into further acts of depravity, at one time creating what he termed the ‘Seth ceremony' which not only called for a chosen member of his group to have intercourse with a goat but afterwards for the goat to be slaughtered and its blood drunk. With all this afoot and bearing in mind the unsanitary conditions in the abbey, it is hardly surprising that a death knell began to ring. Poupée died on October 14, 1920 at a hospital in Palermo and barely six days later Hirsig, who was pregnant again, suffered a miscarriage. The loss of two children in such quick succession must have been devastating and perhaps it was this that drove Crowley to write his
Diary of Drug Fiend
. Certainly he was in need of money, but just as when he staged
The Rites of Eleusis
, the press ripped the novel apart. In particular a critic by the name of James Douglas who worked for the
Sunday Express
wrote an article entitled ‘A Book for Burning' in which he said, ‘Although there is an attempt to pretend that the book is merely a study of the deprivation caused by cocaine, in reality it is an ecstatic eulogy of the drug and of its effects upon the body and the mind.'
12

Following on from this article, press coverage of Crowley and the fun and games at the villa grew even worse. The
Sunday Express
printed another article entitled, ‘Aleister Crowley's Orgies in Sicily' with the subtitle, ‘The Beast 666.' With all the bad publicity, one might have thought, new disciples would have been sparse on the ground, but nothing was further from the truth. One of them, Frederick Charles Loveday (better known as Raoul) showed up at the villa with his wife, May, in late 1922. May was never happy in Crowley's company and constantly begged her husband to leave, particularly when Crowley gave them both razors with which to cut themselves every time they lapsed into using the word ‘I' – a pronoun only Crowley was allowed to utter.

Aleister Crowley had many articles, essays and books published, both fictional novels and supposedly nonfiction books about ‘magick' and the occult but his first published work was a poem,
Aceldama
, in 1898.

By 1923 things had grown even worse, with Raoul falling seriously ill. May put this event down to a combination of factors amongst which was the large quantity of drugs that her husband had begun to take at Crowley's instigation, alongside the drinking of a cat's blood as part of a ritual over which Crowley presided. Despite these two health-defying acts however, it was almost certainly the consumption of contaminated water that caused Raoul's illness. He died on February 16, 1923, three days after which May returned to England where she gave an interview to the
Sunday Express
who promptly labeled Crowley a ‘drug fiend' and ‘the spreader of obscene practices.'

Back in Italy, Crowley was handed an expulsion order, an event which prompted him to spend many years wandering the world, forever plagued by his reputation as ‘the wickedest man in the world.' These were desperate times, with Crowley constantly trying to feed his heroine habit, whilst at the same time in search of more money and disciples. The heydays of the Golden Dawn and Argenteum Astrum were over, and now all that lay ahead were years of isolation without even a publisher willing to print his work.

Aleister Crowley died on December 1, 1947 from myocardial degeneration combined with acute bronchitis. He was seventy-two-years old. There are various accounts of his last words – a Mr. Rowe recorded that they were ‘Sometimes I hate myself', whilst someone else insisted that, ‘I am perplexed,' was the last thing he uttered. The truth is however, that at the time of Crowley's passing, no one else was present in the room, therefore whatever it was he said before he died, fittingly remains secret.

THE THULE SOCIETY – NAZISM'S PRECURSORS

The Thule people died as the first sacrifices for the Swastika. The Thule people were those to whom Hitler first came, and the Thule People were those with whom Hitler first allied himself.

R
UDOLF
VON
S
EBOTTENDORFF
,
Before Hitler Came
, 1933

W
orld War I was supposed to be the ‘war to end all wars'. Millions of men, women and children had died during its progress, but while the soldiers who limped home to Britain were at least safe in the knowledge that they had won the war, Germany's fighting men were afforded no such comfort. Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the German nation was one of, if not the, most law-abiding countries in Europe. Its citizens were hard-working, orderly and well mannered. World War I changed all that. Returning from the battlefields, German soldiers had grown accustomed to levels of violence and scenes of carnage never before experienced. On their return home they faced not a heroes' welcome, but a disillusioned and divided populace depressed and struggling to survive in a climate of severe economic instability. By April 1921 the Allies had demanded reparations to be paid by Germany to the tune of 132 million gold marks (approximately £6,600 million). This caused the value of the German mark, which in 1918 had stood at the rate of four to the dollar, to spiral out of all control to seventy-five to the dollar. By the summer of 1922 this had almost quadrupled to four hundred. These were dark times indeed for a country more used to leading the world rather than following meekly behind.

The southern city of Munich, perhaps more than any other principal municipality in Germany – the constitution of the Weimar Republic afforded the old German states such as Bavaria, Prussia and Saxony a certain amount of autonomy by giving them their own state governments and representative assemblies – was worst affected by this mood of dissatisfaction and violence. Even during the war, Munich had stood apart from other cities, with Hitler remarking that ‘bad morale and war-weariness were more pronounced in Munich than in the north.'
1

BOOK: The Most Evil Secret Societies in History
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