4 February 1930: Disciplinary action will be taken against university Poetry Society if Crowley is allowed to give talk on a 15th century magician
FACSIMILE PAMPHLET banned_lecture_text.pdf (100thmonkeypress.com)
From our correspondent
A lecture which was to have been given to the University Poetry Society to-night by Mr Aleister Crowley has been officially banned. Mr Crowley, who was to have spoken on the fifteenth-century magician Gilles de Rais, has received notice from Mr H Speaight, the secretary of the Poetry Society, not to come to Oxford as disciplinary action would be taken if his lecture were delivered here. The secretary’s letter was as follows:-
Unseen Aleister Crowley writings reveal 'short-story writer of the highest order'
I am writing to tell you that we have been unfortunately forced to cancel next Monday’s meeting of the Poetry Society. It has come to our knowledge that if your proposed paper is delivered disciplinary action will be taken involving not only myself but the rest of the members of the society. In these circumstances you will, I trust, understand why we have had to cancel the meeting.
Mr Crowley’s Statement
Mr Crowley, when interviewed at his home in Kent, said he considered that there was “some underhand business” behind the prohibition. He said he thought the trouble was due to a report that he was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the death in Sicily of a young Oxford undergraduate, Mr Raoul Loveday, who was his secretary. He also said:
“Perhaps the refusal to let me lecture has come because Gilles de Rais is said to have killed 500 children in ritual murder and in some way this was connected with myself, since the accusation that I have not only killed but eaten children is one of the many false statements that have been circulated about me in the past.”
Copies or the lecture which Mr Crowley would have delivered are to be on sale in the streets of Oxford to-morrow.
Editorial: timid Oxford
As is only fitting, Oxford undergraduates are more adventurous than Oxford dons. The Oxford Poetry Society, a typically worthy undergraduate club, decided to venture on a strange fields by listening to a lecture by Mr Aleister Crowley on Gilles de Rais, a fifteenth-century magician known to history as the companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc and to children as the celebrated Bluebeard. The dons, however, took alarm, and so Mr Crowley has had to stay behind in Kent, leaving, one imagines, his inquiring young disciples to the less exciting delights of a paper on Wordsworth, or, perhaps, even on the metrical basis of Alexander Pope’s verse. But perhaps the young men were not really so much adventurous as foolhardy, for, according to Mr Crowley’s statement to a reporter, Gilles de Rais seems to have a been a man of whom the worst might be believed.
From the archive, 13 April 1934: "Black Magic" Libel Action
Mr Crowley, however, seems to think that possibly the ban on his lecture may have been caused not so much by the horror of the tale he had to tell as by a possible confusion in the Vice Chancellor’s mind between the lecturer and the subject of his lecture, for he tells us: “The accusation that I have not only killed but eaten children is one of the many false statements that have been circulated about me.
From our correspondent
THE GUARDIAN
Tue 4 Feb 2020
Oxford, Monday
Oxford, Monday
A lecture which was to have been given to the University Poetry Society to-night by Mr Aleister Crowley has been officially banned. Mr Crowley, who was to have spoken on the fifteenth-century magician Gilles de Rais, has received notice from Mr H Speaight, the secretary of the Poetry Society, not to come to Oxford as disciplinary action would be taken if his lecture were delivered here. The secretary’s letter was as follows:-
Unseen Aleister Crowley writings reveal 'short-story writer of the highest order'
I am writing to tell you that we have been unfortunately forced to cancel next Monday’s meeting of the Poetry Society. It has come to our knowledge that if your proposed paper is delivered disciplinary action will be taken involving not only myself but the rest of the members of the society. In these circumstances you will, I trust, understand why we have had to cancel the meeting.
Mr Crowley’s Statement
Mr Crowley, when interviewed at his home in Kent, said he considered that there was “some underhand business” behind the prohibition. He said he thought the trouble was due to a report that he was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the death in Sicily of a young Oxford undergraduate, Mr Raoul Loveday, who was his secretary. He also said:
“Perhaps the refusal to let me lecture has come because Gilles de Rais is said to have killed 500 children in ritual murder and in some way this was connected with myself, since the accusation that I have not only killed but eaten children is one of the many false statements that have been circulated about me in the past.”
Copies or the lecture which Mr Crowley would have delivered are to be on sale in the streets of Oxford to-morrow.
Editorial: timid Oxford
As is only fitting, Oxford undergraduates are more adventurous than Oxford dons. The Oxford Poetry Society, a typically worthy undergraduate club, decided to venture on a strange fields by listening to a lecture by Mr Aleister Crowley on Gilles de Rais, a fifteenth-century magician known to history as the companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc and to children as the celebrated Bluebeard. The dons, however, took alarm, and so Mr Crowley has had to stay behind in Kent, leaving, one imagines, his inquiring young disciples to the less exciting delights of a paper on Wordsworth, or, perhaps, even on the metrical basis of Alexander Pope’s verse. But perhaps the young men were not really so much adventurous as foolhardy, for, according to Mr Crowley’s statement to a reporter, Gilles de Rais seems to have a been a man of whom the worst might be believed.
From the archive, 13 April 1934: "Black Magic" Libel Action
Mr Crowley, however, seems to think that possibly the ban on his lecture may have been caused not so much by the horror of the tale he had to tell as by a possible confusion in the Vice Chancellor’s mind between the lecturer and the subject of his lecture, for he tells us: “The accusation that I have not only killed but eaten children is one of the many false statements that have been circulated about me.
” The story he had to tell was gruesome enough. De Rais was accused of having killed 500 children in ritual murder, and all that can be said in his defence is that the ecclesiastical court which tried and excommunicated him knew of only 140 cases.
Perhaps, however, after all, Mr Crowley was only proposing to talk about Rais as the patron and part-author of the Mystère de la Passion, or the Mystery of Orleans. In that case it would be a pity to deprive the young men of so much erudition.
ALSO SEE
Aleister Crowley’s Forbidden Lecture Revisited –Murder, Magick & Gilles De Rais
By Mogg Morgan
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