The Vice of Kings
Socialism, Occultism, Child Abuse, and the Sexual Revolution
I recently finished reading Jasun Horsley’s 2019 book, The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse (VoK). Given the subject matter of some of my most popular articles here, I’m fairly confident my readership will appreciate it. So if you liked any of the following, I encourage you to buy Jasun’s book and read it:
If you’re not already familiar with Jasun’s work, he’s also on Substack, where he has kindly had me on his podcast twice now. We talked about weird and dark things.
VoK is a remarkable book, and not just because Jasun is a great writer. The content was shocking—even to me. Jasun uncovers connections so odd that one would have seemed like chance, but they crop up over and over again. And practically every person and institution uncovered over the course of his investigation is personal. His grandfather was Alec Horsley, a prominent Fabian socialist and founder of what is now Northern Foods. And within just one or two degrees of separation from Alec and his immediate associates, Jasun uncovers a network of prominent socialists, occultists, pedophiles, and pederasts that more than hint at something very dark.
The book is divided into two parts, the first covering the above connections and the second focusing on the Beast himself, Aleister Crowley. Among the odd connections: Crowley himself pops up repeatedly in part one, in places where I, personally, didn’t expect to find him. For whatever reason, the worlds of socialism, occultism, and sexual boundarylessness closely overlap, and they all fed into the sexual revolution of feminism, gay rights, and free sex.
Jasun traces this trend back to sexologist Havelock Ellis, a founding member of Fabianism in the 1880s. (Other prominent members included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Bertrand Russell, Sidney and Beatrice Webb.) Ellis, an early feminist and forerunner to Kinsey, coined the word “homosexual” and wrote a six-volume work on the psychology of sex. He also showed an early interest in pedophilia and psychedelics. Jasun quotes Bullough’s Science in the Bedroom:
Ellis’ work was a plea for tolerance and for accepting the idea that deviations from the norm were harmless and occasionally perhaps even valuable. He, like [Magnus] Hirschfeld [who founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, perhaps the first organization to advocate for homosexual and transgender rights], was a reformer who encouraged society to recognize and accept sexual manifestations in infants and realize that sexual experimentation was part of adolescence.
This early inclusion of pedophilia and homosexuality in the plea for sexual tolerance would go on to reap the innocence and blood of countless young children in the UK. The “progressive” project, which involved child psychology and social research, inspired the creation of several homes for troubled youths, child care facilities, and experimental schools. Many of these went on to become the centers of large pedophile-ring scandals involving government, police, and intelligence VIPs. Some of the biggest such scandals have included those involving Liberal MP Cyril Smith, the Kincora Boys’ Home, the Elm Guest House, the Islington Children’s Home, BBC icon Jimmy Savile, Lambeth/Shirley Oaks, and various “grooming gang” scandals (e.g. Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford). In many cases the abuses had been going on for decades before exposure:
Savile’s predations [alone] covered at least five decades and included hundreds, if not thousands, of victims, both male and female, ranging in age from five to seventy-five. Yet what is perhaps just as remarkable is the degree to which Savile’s activities were facilitated, indicating that he was part of a larger criminal network that included the highest levels, not just of mass media and entertainment, but of government, law enforcement, and the intelligence community.
In several of the cases Jasun cites, employees who were aware of the abuses claimed they did not come forward for fear of being illiberal. They feared that if they said anything, they would be labeled as somehow homophobic (a “naive interpretation of gay rights,” as a 1995 White Report on the Islington scandal put it). Fabian progressives were instrumental in pushing for and passing new rules and legislation for gay rights, including having homosexuality removed from the category of mental illness in the 1970s. As usual, pedophilia was not far away.
Anthony Grey, a member of the Fabian-affiliated Homosexual Law Reform Society, noted in his book Quest for Justice: Towards Homosexual Emancipation:
I arranged for a few private discussions to be held at the [Albany] Trust’s offices between psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers … I also invited some paedophiles to join in these talks, including … members of the newly-formed (and ill-fated) Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and another group, PAL (Paedophile Action for Liberation).
At one point the Albany Trust teamed up with PIE, proposing that “child abusers were a social benefit,” basically providing free labor because of their volunteering for youth welfare work and other such outreach involving children. From the above-mentioned report:
Islington was deeply influenced by and had many connections to the Paedophile Information Exchange. In the fatally naive 1970s to mid-80s, PIE openly campaigned for sex to be legalized with children from age four, and for incest and child pornography to be legalized. The National Council for Civil Liberties—now Liberty—allowed it to affiliate and its then legal officer Harriet Harman wrote a paper effectively backing some PIE demands.
More generally, Fabianism advocates for a “scientifically planned society,” to be implemented not revolutionarily, but gradually. Appropriately, their symbol is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Oddly, Fabian circles included Theosophists (the above-mentioned Annie Besant), Crowleyites, and Wiccans rubbing shoulders with Bilderbergers, Zionists, advocates of world government, and leftists obsessed with childhood sexuality. On the latter, Jasun notes: “The view that sexually interfering with children is harmless [and sometimes beneficial] … runs through the entirety of this investigation.”
Fabians were central to the creation of the UK Labour Party in 1900, the London School of Economics, the League of Nations, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Quoting John Taylor Gatto: “In the United States, some organizations heavily influenced by Fabianism are the Ford Foundation, … the Stanford Research Institute, the Carnegie Endowments, … and RAND.” Two founding Fabians (Beatrice Webb and Annie Besant) were active in “women’s rights.” By 1939, the CFR had “established a strictly confidential War and Peace Studies” project in the State Department, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (also Fabian-influenced). Allen Dulles headed the security and armaments group of the project, which was kept secret even from most CFR members.
Influenced by early Fabians like Ellis and Edward Carpenter (a gay rights advocate), Ernest Westlake created the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry in 1916—aimed at children—which later provided the basis for Wicca. The Order revered a pagan trinity of Pan, Artemis, and Dionysus. Harry Byngham, who replaced Westlake upon his death, promoted phallus worship and was introduced to Aleister Crowley by Crowley’s fellow sodomite Victor Neuburg. Besant’s Theosophist associate, Charles Leadbeater, was a pederast and sex magick practitioner; he resigned from the Society after admitting that he taught boys under his care to masturbate.
The infamous Alfred Kinsey—an admirer of Crowley and correspondent with Canadian MKULTRA-psychiatrist Ewen Cameron—was also funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. According to James H. Jones, Kinsey was a sadomasochist, homosexual, and he campaigned for “his goal of undermining American morality to establish a sexual utopia.” He employed pedophiles to abuse children as part of his research.
Ellis’s, and [Margaret] Mead’s, and [her OSS husband Gregory] Bateson’s, and Kinsey’s “research”—black propaganda or not—was effective in spreading the “gospel of free love” and kick-starting a revolution, one that continues to this day with no apparent end in sight. … Seventy years after his death, the transgressive, pleasure-seeking, “spiritually liberating” (and ego-aggrandizing) values exemplified by Crowley’s life are almost universally accepted components of the “enlightened” neoliberal lifestyle.
Michael Hoffman cites historian Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), which argues that “early nineteenth century English standards of masculine conduct allowed for genital contact among boys or men, provided its practitioners eventually wed members of the opposite sex.” He also quotes Julie Anne Taddeo’s research on the Cambridge Apostles in Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity:
Through their affiliation with the elite Brotherhood of the Conversazione Society [which formed circa 1820], otherwise known as the Cambridge Apostles, these men hoped to spread the gospel of the Higher Sodomy among other enlightened contemporaries … [In the early 1900s,] Strachey and [Fabian-linked economist John Maynard] Keynes … hoped for mass conversion to sodomy. … The Cambridge Apostles represent an important chapter in the history of sexuality and masculinity in early 20th century England. They regarded themselves as rebels whose devotion to Plato [whom they championed as the new god] was part of a larger agenda … Cambridge Apostle and historian Noel Annan identifies Strachey’s generation of Brothers as ‘a cult of homosexuals’ … At Cambridge the Brothers … claimed to be ‘the priests of a new civilization.’
The Apostles considered sodomy a new creed of manliness and transcendental love. They only went public with their homosexuality in the 1880s, the same decade which saw the creation of Fabianism. Strachey once wrote to Keynes: “We must tell the whole truth; and the whole truth is … feelings are good … and we say in the same breath that the best ones are Sodomitical.”
So what about Crowley himself? In a journal entry from 1920, he wrote: “My will to free mankind is so to speak sodomitic.” In his New and Old Commentaries, also written in the early 1900s, he wrote: “The Beast 666 ordains by His authority that every man, and every woman, and every intermediately-sexed individual, shall be absolutely free to interpret and communicate Self by means of any sexual practices soever.” If Crowley were alive today, he would have pronouns.
Jasun demonstrates, in my mind if not that of the devoted Crowleyites, that Crowley “both advocated and was involved in the ritualistic abuse, and possibly murder, of children (as well as the torture of animals) for ‘magickal’ purposes.” While Crowley’s supporters refuse to believe (or admit) that he was serious about these things (they basically think he was “clearly” larping), Crowley provides clear instructions for such practices and admits to such crimes in his writing (several of which are supported by third-party testimony).
“Crowley’s avocation of total sexual freedom and a shedding of all inhibitions was central both to his life and his mission.” More disturbingly, he wrote: “the Beast 666 adviseth that all children shall be accustomed from infancy to witness every type of sexual act.” This he practiced in Italy with the children of two close female followers. In his diary entry for August 12, 1920, he describes “the sodomizing of a two-year-old boy; the oral abuse of a five-month baby girl; the invitation to rape the same infant; and the sadistic torture of at least one of these children.” (His infant daughter died less than two months later; the mother miscarried six days after that. One associate spoke of a baby mysteriously “disappearing.”) Elsewhere he admits to coprophilia. His writings are basically a melange of paraphilias.
Crowley’s sodomitic partner, Neuburg, was one of the founding members of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency in 1931, along with a Fabian named Eve Saville (Order of the British Empire). Freud, Jung, and Ellis were all vice-presidents for 1934. (Freud also infamously downplayed and denied child sexual abuse.) Another Crowley follower, JPL-founder Jack Parsons, along with other members of Crowley’s OTO, were accused in 1942 of raping a 16-year-old boy; police dismissed the boy’s accusations as “fantasy.” (Jasun cites a few other cases of OTO groups accused or charged with ritual abuse, and the alleged murder, of children.)
If there is one god I would consider akin to Crowley, it would be Dionysus—god of wine, fertility, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theater, embodying liberation from societal constraints, subversion of norms, and the irrational and unpredictable forces of life (chaos). Naturally, Dionysus was central to Crowley’s religion of “Thelema.” Thelema signifies the appetitive will and was used by the French Franciscan friar François Rabelais as the name of the fictional abbey in his novels Gargantua and Pantagruel. The Abbey’s only rule was “Do what you will,” borrowed by Crowley as his central axiom: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
Dionysus leads a procession of frenzied female maenads and erect-phallused satyrs. In the Dionysian Mysteries and maenadic rites, ecstatic worship could involve sparagmos of a sacrificial animal followed by omophagia—tearing it apart bare-handed and consuming the raw flesh or blood. This was interpreted as the god entering the sacrifice (in legend, and perhaps reality, sometimes a human victim), allowing devotees to partake of his divine essence, achieve union with him, and experience rebirth or liberation.
Our contemporary culture is positively Dionysian-thelemic.
According Dr. Karen Mitchell, human predators as a rule are sexually “boundaryless.” As such, they are often “bisexual,” or display a variety of paraphilias (sadism, pedophilia, necrophilia, autogynephilia, coprophilia, bestiality, etc.). This apparently includes an interest in the full spectrum of “gender identities.” They are also sadists.
So what is it that connects socialism and child abuse? First, one more example: the short-lived Kinderladen movement in Germany, which aimed at the “sexual liberation of children,” featuring students playing “games that involved taking off their clothes, reading porno magazines together and pantomiming intercourse.” Fleischhauer and Hollersen write:
… it was precisely in so-called progressive circles that an eroticization of childhood and a gradual lowering of taboos began. It was a shift that even allowed for the possibility of sex with children. … Sexual liberation was at the top of the agenda of the young revolutionaries who, in 1967, began turning society upside down. The control of sexual desire was seen as an instrument of domination, which bourgeois society used to uphold its power. Everything that the innovators perceived as wrong and harmful has its origins in this concept: man’s aggression, greed and desire to own things, as well as his willingness to submit to authority. The student radicals believed that only those who liberated themselves from sexual repression could be truly free.
To them, it seemed obvious that liberation should begin at an early age. Once sexual inhibitions had taken root, they reasoned, everything that followed was merely the treatment of symptoms. They were convinced that it was much better to prevent those inhibitions from developing in the first place. Hardly any leftist texts of the day did not address the subject of sexuality.
Some naive revolutionaries may have genuinely believed this, but if so, they fell for the doublespeak. I would argue that the need for “sexual liberation” is primarily an expression of human predatory sexual boundarylessness. While reading Jasun’s book, and keeping Mitchell’s persistent predatory personality model in mind, my mind kept returning to passages such as these by Lobaczewski:
In a civilization deficient in psychological knowledge, hyperactive individuals driven by an inner angst caused by a feeling of being different easily find a ready echo in other people’s insufficiently developed consciousness. Such individuals dream of imposing their power and their different experiential manner upon their environment and their society. Unfortunately, in a psychologically ignorant society, their dreams to impose on societies their own, different way of experiencing and conceptualizing, and then, their power, still stand a chance of being accomplished.
In any society in this world, psychopathic individuals and some of the other deviant types create a ponerogenically active network of common collusions, partially estranged from the community of normal people. An inspirational role of essential psychopathy in this network appears to be a common phenomenon. They are aware of being different as they obtain their life-experiences and become familiar with different ways of fighting for their goals. Their world is forever divided into “us and them”: their little world with its own laws and customs, and that other foreign world of normal people that they see as full of presumptuous ideas and customs by which they are condemned morally.
Many of them consciously and subconsciously take advantage of this weakness [i.e., the psychological parallax between perception and psychopathological reality] in order to force themselves into it, along with their myopically determined activities characterized by egoistical concepts of self- or group-interest. Other people … then find an open gate to bulldoze their different way of life through unobliging societies in an attempt to fulfill their grandiose aims, which are in reality insane and unrealistic.
The ideology of associations affected by such degeneration has certain constant factors regardless of their quality, quantity, or scope of action, namely, the motivations of an aggrieved group, radical redress of the grievance, and the higher value of the individuals who have joined the organization. These motivations facilitate sublimation of the feeling of being wronged and different, caused by one’s own psychological deficiencies, and appear to liberate their carriers from the need to abide by the insufficiently understood moral demands of “that other” world of normal people.
If you consider that probably all human predators are sexually deviant, and that sexuality plays a large role in one’s self-image (especially if that sexuality is considered socially deviant), then all these passages hit differently when read with this in mind. While I don’t think they should be read exclusively through that lens, doing so sure goes a long way to explaining the link between socialism and sexual boundarylessness. Let me paraphrase slightly:
Every society contains socially hyperactive and sexually deviant individuals driven by an inner angst caused by the awareness that they are different and that society at large considers their sexual activities to be criminal and immoral. They form ponerogenic groups partially estranged from normal society and dream of imposing their sexuality upon society (e.g., “mass conversion to sodomy”). Their world is forever divided into “us and them”: their world, and that of “normal,” heterosexual, cisgendered people, which they see as full of presumptuous customs and restrictive morals by which they are unfairly judged and mistreated (“control” of sexual desire as “an instrument of domination”). Many take advantage of normal people’s naivety in order to bulldoze their sexuality and myopic self- and group-interest into unobliging societies (e.g., via various sexual liberation and civil rights movements) in order to fulfill their grandiose, insane, and unrealistic goals of “total sexual liberation” (e.g., “absolute freedom” to commit “any sexual practices” whatsoever). In order not to feel “wrong” and “immoral,” they adopt an ideology based on their victim status, the radical redress of their grievances, and their higher value (like the Cambridge Apostles), thus sublimating their feelings of inferiority into ones of superiority and allowing them to discount the moral demands of the “normal” world.
The dark implication of this is that it was deliberate. And it throws some other facts into perspective. Joël van der Reijden, of the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics (ISGP), for example, argues that modern feminism and LGBTQ activism are not organic grassroots movements, but top-down “revolutions” engineered and funded by globalist elites through a “Liberal CIA” faction utilizing groups like George Soros’s Open Society, the Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller entities. This funding creates the illusion of spontaneous “social change” while advancing a broader agenda undermining traditional family structures, birth rates, gender norms, and Western demographics.
van der Reijden also did extensive research into the Belgian Dutroux pedophile/murder scandal—counterpart to the Franklin scandal in the U.S. As I concluded in some of my articles linked above, such scandals are unfortunately the norm. In the last 50 years, several have erupted, only to be subsequently covered up. The year 1987, for example, saw the Finders case, investigated by the U.S. Customs Service, which Jasun briefly covers in Prisoner of Infinity (PoI):
Photographs allegedly showed naked children involved in bloodletting ceremonies of animals and sexual orgies, including a photograph of a child in chains. Evidence was found for an international network of child trafficking for sexual and other purposes. … Cursory examination of documents revealed detailed instructions for obtaining children for unspecified purposes. The instructions included the impregnation of female members of the community, purchasing children, trading and kidnapping … There were pictures of nude children and adult Finders, as well as evidence of high-tech money transfers.
As the recent revelations in the UK around Jimmy Savile make clear, such de-eroticized expressions of libido may be far from exceptional inside the upper echelons of corporate and political power structures. In fact, the evidence indicates that psychopathic individuals like Savile are essential to the functioning of these structures.
And in VoK itself:
I think there is a view among the ruling class that sexual abuse—which they do not admit is abuse—is just an inescapable part of the world of the power elite. … It is a world in which circles of government, intelligence, literature, occultism, homosexuality, drugs, rape, and murder intersect and overlap so seamlessly as to be all-but indistinguishable.
Similarly Hoffman, in Twilight Language:
Child sex rings operating among the “best circles” of society, including governments and their intelligence agencies, are sign posts pointing to the existence of extraordinary malice in high places. Child molestation rings operating at elite levels of government and entertainment are an explosive reality that can (and should) detonate the people’s faith in the ruling class.
And if the sexual revolution was part of a larger pathocratic agenda, Lloyd deMause’s interpretation of Weimar Germany, which Jasun cites, may be correct: “If the aim, say, is totalitarianism, first promote the opposite ideas pertaining to individual freedom, sexual liberation, artistic expression, human rights, and drug experimentation.” Such a “release of the collective unconscious … then leads to a corresponding reaction … even more ‘Draconian’ social restrictions.”
Hoffman takes it even further, tracing this conspiracy’s origins back to the Hermetic brotherhoods of the early 17th century, a satanic project he characterizes as the unfettered, targeted interference with nature and the purposeful reshaping of reality. In Twilight Language, for instance, he identifies Baphomet (the hermaphroditic goat) as “a sigil of the alchemical transformation of humanity,” adding: “we are experiencing the public fulfillment of the age-old alchemical magnum opus in its full spectrum: the racial, sexual, agricultural and transhuman assault on nature.”
Many such cases not only deal with the rape of children; sometimes the rapists are accused of murdering or even ritually sacrificing (and sometimes cannibalizing) victims. As possible background and justification for this practice, Crowley wrote: “it was the theory of the ancient Magicians, that any living being is a storehouse of energy … At the death of the animal this energy is liberated suddenly.” He added that “for nearly all purposes human sacrifice is best.” Jasun comments:
… the bid for immortality (puer aeternus) lies underneath the desire to steal innocence. Putting psychic poisons into a child goes hand in hand with drawing off the child’s psychic essence, his or her soul stuff … through the infliction of pain and terror and a feeding on that emotional/psychic energy.
He quotes George Steiner: “To torture or violate a child is to desecrate in man the image of God where that image is most luminous.” And Crowley himself: “For the highest spiritual working one must accordingly choose that victim that contains the greatest and purest force. A male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory and suitable victim.” Recall the Dionysian sparagmos and omophagia, which were believed to somehow give access to the god himself. It seems that practice may live on. Renée Haynes writes:
Deliberate attempts have … been made from time to time to stimulate the psi-function by means of orgy. The cult of Dionysus and the life of Aleister Crowley afford concrete and revolting examples of this, and [bisexual] Arthur Rimbaud, writing in the 1870s, provided a prescription and a theory: “The poet makes himself a seer by a long, vast, and reasoned derangement of all the senses—every form of love, of suffering and of madness.” It seems probable that if these attempts succeed it is because they are exceptionally forceful methods of dissociation …
Similarly, on the dissociative nature of traumatic abuse, Jasun writes: “a side effect—or more likely a primary goal—of splitting the psyche may be accessing other realms from which nonhuman ‘beings’ (forces) can be summoned and then harnessed.” Whether or not that actually occurs is an open question; whether or not some of these people believe it does, and try to achieve it, is not so uncertain.
In one of those strange wyrdwefts, Donald Barr—OSS officer and father to former Attorney General Bill Barr—wrote a novel in the 1970s: Space Relations: A Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Tale. In it, “Craig,” a member of a future aristocratic intergalactic human empire is dispatched to a strategically important colony planet, Kossar, originally settled as a place of exile for political extremists. Kossar is now divided into seven domains, each ruled by a member of an oligarchic high council.
Their boredom and absolute power have driven them to madness, to the point that Kossar’s entry into the empire has been stymied by the Man-Inhabited Planets Treaty’s clause (written by Craig) against alliances with slave owning societies, due to its practice of kidnapping humans to become illegal playthings of the galaxy’s super-rich. … Craig spends two years as a slave of the beautiful, sensual, and sadistic Lady Morgan Sidney, the only female member of the oligarchy, with whom he became romantically involved. Together, they lived in her castle, ruling over and engaging in sexual relations with those under their dominion, including an enslaved teenager at a clinic used to breed enslaved people. When Craig stumbles on hints of an alien invasion, he realizes he must escape to save humanity. Craig is depicted as undisturbed by Lady Morgan’s sadism. When he is ordered to sexually assault the enslaved teenager, he enjoys his participation in the act.
In the early 1970s, Barr was headmaster of the elite Dalton School in New York City. There, he hired Jeffrey Epstein—who lacked a college degree—to teach mathematics and physics. Epstein worked at Dalton for a couple of years before moving into “finance.” In addition to the more well-known allegations of rape and sexual abuse made against Epstein and associates are others resembling the plot of Barr’s novel. As a teenager at Epstein’s New Mexico Zorro Ranch, Shantae Davies overheard, but never witnessed, something about “a baby actually being born and then just disappearing [shades of Crowley]—like Ghislaine [Maxwell] taking it. … I do remember overhearing conversations about trying to create the perfect baby … And I know that there was sort of a hunt, if you will, for the perfect gene pool.”
In 2019, the FBI had also received a tip from a former staff member that “two foreign girls” were buried on the ranch: “Both died by strangulation during rough, fetish sex.” New Mexico Representative Melanie Stansbury claimed to have read details in the unredacted files regarding “the harvesting of sex organs,” “women having forced abortions or forced pregnancies or coerced pregnancies,” and generally “the most horrible and heinous things that anyone could imagine.”
While there haven’t been any suggestions that Epstein was an occultist—to my knowledge—one final example from VoK checks all the boxes. Tom Driberg (later Baron Bradwell) was a British Labour politician, journalist, and MP. Known for his flamboyant, hedonistic, and often scandalous life, he was an alleged informant for MI5 and “even briefly earmarked by Aleister Crowley as his natural successor for world teacher.”
Even more ominously, Driberg (who fully embraced the social and cultural freedoms of the ’60s) enjoyed a lengthy friendship with the Kray twins [the most notorious British gangsters of the 1960s], and in July 1964, both he and Lord Boothby (a well-known Conservative peer [and child abuser]) were alleged to have been sexually propositioning males at a dog track and to be involved with a criminal underworld scene. Driberg and Boothby attended parties at the Krays’ flat where “rough but compliant East End lads were served like so many canapés…”
Author and psychotherapist Anthony Storr called Driberg “the only person he ever met who could truly be called ‘evil’.” Author and sodomite Gore Vidal shared in acts of sexual predation on “rugged young men” with Driberg, according to Christopher Hitchens’s memoir. Robin Bryans, who had intimate knowledge of the British political aristocracy and published four now out-of-print memoirs, noted in one of them that “Many of Driberg’s Oxford friends enjoyed the black mass.”
At one point Bryans comments, in passing, “Incest and child sex abuse disgust me yet neither activity could be dissociated from people I had the misfortune to have dealings with” … Yet Bryans seems to have no misgivings about his close—possibly sexual—friendship with Evan Tredegar, whom he casually implicates not merely in Black Mass rituals and sadomasochism but also murder. He names Tom Driberg … and Aleister Crowley as participants within the same shadowy vice-world … “Human blood [as well as semen] was essential for any version of the black mass as I had learnt when some of Crowley’s devotees celebrated, and as a boy of sixteen I had seen how Even Tredegar brightened up more than house parties, and indulged in doings from which women … were banned … Many people besides me have pointed out that boys’ bodies are temples of the Holy Ghost, but on consecrated ground they bugger those temples, sometimes drugging the boys before sex as part of the black mass …
Bryans even hinted at “suspicious deaths” and ritual murder.
Remember Lobaczewski:
Their world is forever divided into “us and them”: their little world with its own laws and customs, and that other foreign world of normal people that they see as full of presumptuous ideas and customs by which they are condemned morally.
Now I hope we have some idea about the character of such predators’ “little world” with its own thelemic laws and Dionysian customs.
Jason wrote a book about the leader of the cult I was once in. It was horrible and wonderful to read, a profound catharsis. I know he can see into the darkness and bring what is hidden to light. Thank you for the recommendation, bound to be horrible but enlightening.
I've never read any Aleister Crowley.
It didn't look like my cup of tea.
Although, with regard to esoterism and buggery, it has always seemed to me you wouldn't need to be a zen master plumber to know that ain't going anywhere any good.