by Ivor Edwards
Once Sir Edward was introduced to D’Onston the two talked at some length on many occasions. After a short period of time D’Onston became the pupil of Lytton. Sir Edward arranged to teach D’Onston his craft and of his first lesson D’Onston wrote:
I entered, he was standing in the middle of the sacred pentagon, which had been drawn on the floor with red chalk, and holding in his extended right arm the baguette, which was pointing towards me, Standing thus, he asked me if I had duly considered the matter and had decided to enter upon the course. I replied that my mind was made up. He then and there administered to me the oaths of the neophyte of the Hermetic lodge of Alexandria – the oaths of obedience and secrecy.
D’Onston was now involved with a lodge from which he was to learn the foul side involved in such teachings.
It would appear that more than one player in this game belonged to one secret society or another. D’Onston would have remained lost in the mists of time if Vittoria Cremers had not told her story to Fleet Street journalist Bernard O’Donnell. He had received information from Hayter Preston, editor of the Sunday Referee.
Preston was a friend of the poet Victor Neuburg, and Neuburg had once been a dupe of Aleister Crowley’s. The latter was a professional occultist and writer on the subject, and he had stated that he once knew the Ripper. It is likely that Vittoria Cremers informed Crowley that she had known the killer and that Crowley had jumped on to the band-wagon.
Neuburg was suffering in health due to Crowley’s demands. Crowley’s business manager, Vittoria Cremers, intervened and helped him to break away from Crowley. Cremers was a citizen of the USA and the widow of Baron Louis Cremers, at one time attached to the US Embassy.
This lady had information on the Whitechapel murders. Neuburg had been informed by Cremers of facts relating to the murders. O’Donnell however did not receive enough information from Neuburg to warrant a story so he decided to track down Cremers.
O’Donnell traced the lady to 34, Marias Road, Balham, south-west London. From 1930 until 1934 Cremers wrote pieces for O’Donnell after which time he had in his possession the complete memoirs of Cremers for the years 1888–91. Cremers did not receive any reward or gain for her reminiscences. It is said of this woman that she was almost fatalistic in her beliefs. Her contribution to the story of Jack the Ripper should not be dismissed.
O’Donnell was never to trace the man that Cremers had detailed. Cremers had only known him as Roslyn D’Onston when his true name was Robert Donston Stephenson. Cremers spent over 18 months with Jack the Ripper.
Her story begins in a New York bookshop in 1886. While browsing, she found a book entitled Light on the Path, by Mabel Collins. This book related to the Theosophical movement. The book made such an impression upon her that she joined the society. In 1888, on her arrival into Britain she went to the British Society to enrol and met Madam Helena Blavatsky, the greatest name in Theosophy.
Once Blavatsky found that Cremers had been involved in publishing, she asked her to take over the society’s monthly magazine Lucifer. Cremers agreed and worked from the society’s headquarters at 17, Lansdowne Road, Holland Park. She knew that Mabel Collins was a well-known novelist and spiritualist medium. She also knew that Collins lived nearby, so she concluded that it would only be a matter of time before the two met. I have found no reason to doubt the story Cremers told in her memoirs.
Vittoria Cremers recalled that she met Mabel Collins when Dr Archibald Keightley, his cousin Bertram and Collins visited the Lucifer office at 17, Landsdowne Road, which backed on to the garden of 34, Clarendon Road – Collins’s address. In addition to her Theosophical work and the novels she wrote, Mabel Collins was also a fashion writer on Edmund Yates’s periodical The World. Cremers told Collins that Light on the Path had been the direct cause of her joining the Theosophical movement. The pair became very good friends.
In 1888 Cremers went to America on business and did not return until February–March 1890. She spent a few weeks in Paris before returning to England. She moved into lodgings at 21, Montague Street, off London’s Russell Square. On this same day she decided to look up Mabel Collins so she proceeded to Collins’s address at York Terrace, just behind Madame Tussaud’s in Marylebone Road.
On her arrival, the maid informed her that Collins was away in Southsea writing a new novel. The maid gave Cremers the address and the very next day she took a train to Southsea. On arrival she was appalled at the shabby state of the road in which the address was situated and also by the address itself.
It would appear by the evidence that both D’Onston and Collins had a seamier side to their lives, which they tried to keep hidden from many of their associates. One can only imagine the depths of degradation to which they would sink. Their sexual exploits knew no bounds. And in relation to D’Onston, it would appear that his lust for power and sexual gratification would make Collins’s pale into insignificance.
On enquiring as to the whereabouts of Mabel Collins, Cremers was led by an unkempt woman to the room Collins had acquired. Cremers said the room was sparsely decorated and was not a comfortable place in which to be. She was amazed that someone like Collins would inhabit, let alone pay to stay in, such a place. It was on this first visit that Cremers was introduced to the man she would come to know as Roslyn D’Onston.
Collins questioned Cremers about her recollection of a Pall Mall Gazette article about Rider Haggard’s ‘She’ written by D’Onston. Cremers remembered that Collins had mentioned the article in early 1889 but had not read it herself. Collins admitted to writing to the author of the article, D’Onston, who had been ill in hospital. D’Onston had promised to meet with Collins as soon as he was better.
Collins said D’Onston had finally contacted her and was described as a great magician who had wonderful magical secrets. Her excitement at meeting this man was evident and she admitted that he was with her in Southsea. She also suggested that the three of them go into business together.
D’Onston finally arrived and Cremers was introduced to Collins’s lover. Cremers said he entered the room so quietly that she was surprised to find him there. She noticed afterwards that there was an uncanny absence of sound in all his movements, describing him as ‘the most soundless human being she ever knew’.
Collins had informed Cremers that D’Onston never ate and would refuse an offer of tea. This statement struck her as most peculiar, but she was to recall it later when she knew more about D’Onston. Cremers said her first sight of D’Onston was of a tall, fair man of unassuming appearance, at whom no one would look twice. She admitted she was impressed, but could not really say why – saying it was an ‘indefinable something’.
D’Onston had a pleasant and cultured voice and a military bearing, suggesting power and strength. He was pale; his face had a queer pallor – not a particle of colour anywhere; his bottom lip was pink, his upper lip hidden by a fair moustache. His teeth appeared to be discoloured from pipe smoking. D’Onston’s eyes were pale blue and ‘there was not a vestige of life or sparkle in them’. He also appeared to be extremely well groomed.
Collins and D’Onston moved back to London 14 days after their encounter with Cremers. Collins wished, for the time being, to keep her affair with D’Onston very discreet; after all was said and done she had her reputation to consider. Cremers came to the rescue by persuading her own landlady, Mrs Heilman, to take D’Onston in as a lodger. This state of affairs lasted for a very short period of time because he never appeared to eat anything. Mrs Heilman expressed her fears that he might die on her property and asked him to find other accommodation, but the situation soon straightened itself out.
The trio engaged in discussing a business project. D’Onston was possessed of little-known recipes for beauty products. Collins and Cremers put up the money and D’Onston provided the recipes from which the various concoctions were prepared. They formed a company, the Pompadour Cosmetique Company, and took premises in Baker Street on the site where Baker Street Underground Station n
ow stands. It was then a street of houses and the office must have been just opposite the fictional residence of Sherlock Holmes.
It consisted of a large office on the first floor, where all the business was conducted and the ‘concoctions’ made up, and a smaller room immediately behind it. The second floor was occupied by a private family. Cremers had a flat on the third floor. The problem of D’Onston’s accommodation was solved by letting him live in the small back room on the first floor. This was Mabel Collins’s suggestion and it certainly was a way out of the difficulty. It was she who had furnished it for him with just a bed, table, washstand, chair and a huge zinc bath.
The trademark of The Pompadour Cosmetique Company designed by D’Onston was a naked woman cut off at the genitals. This veiled clue must have appealed to his ego. D’Onston’s fixation for naked women seems to have occupied a considerable amount of his time. He chose the colour red for his trademark. D’Onston liked to write with red ink. Imagine how those Victorian women would have reacted if they had known what they were smearing on their faces!
D’Onston was responsible for the manufacture and packaging of the products, the development of the logo and the naming of the company. D’Onston took full advantage of Collins and milked her for all she was worth. For D’Onston, women were no more than a means to an end. Collins was to go bankrupt shortly after her association with D’Onston came to such a sour end.
Cremers now persuaded Blavatsky to commission an article from D’Onston as she knew that he was always strapped for cash. The piece which he wrote for the November 1890 issue of Lucifer was entitled ‘African Magic’ and it contained chilling revelations.
Cremers said she did not see the article until it was brought to her notice in 1931. She stated that she would not have fully understood it at the time and certainly would not have associated the writer with the Ripper crimes.
AFRICAN MAGIC
by Tau-Tria-Delta
article by Roslyn D’Onston
Before we enter into the subject of the occult art as practised on the West Coast of Africa, it will be well to clear the ground by first considering for a moment what we mean by the much-abused term ‘Magic’.
There are many definitions of this word; and in bygone ages, it was simply used to designate anything and everything, which was ‘not understood of the vulgar’. It will be sufficient for our purpose to define it as the knowledge of certain natural laws which are not merely unknown but absolutely unsuspected by the scientists of Europe and America.
It is a recognised fact that no law of nature can be – even for a single moment – abrogated. When, therefore, this appears to us to be the case – when for instance, such a universally known law as that of the attraction of gravitation seems to be annihilated, we must recognise the fact that there may be other laws at present unknown to Western science which have the power of overriding and suspending for the time being the action of the known law.
The knowledge of these hidden laws is what we understand by the term occult science, or magic. And there is no other magic than this, and never has been, at any period of the world’s history. All the so-called ‘miracles’ of ancient times can be and are reproduced at the present day by magists when occasion requires. An act of magic is a pure scientific feat, and must not be confounded with legerdemain or trickery of any kind.
There are several schools of magism, all proceeding and operating on entirely different lines. The principal of these, and on whose philosophy all others are founded, are the Hindu; the Tibetan, the Egyptian (including the Arab) and the Obeeyan or Voodoo. The last named is entirely and fundamentally opposed to the other three; it having its root and foundation in necromancy or ‘black magic’, while the others all operate either by means of what is known to experts as ‘white magic’, or in other cases by ‘psychologising’ the spectator. And, a whole crowd of spectators can be psychologised and made at the will of the operator to see and feel whatever things he chooses, all the time being in full possession of their ordinary faculties. Thus, perhaps a couple of travelling fakirs give their performance in your own compound or in the garden of your bungalow. They erect a small tent and tell you to choose any animal, which you wish to see emerge therefrom. Many different animals are named in rotation by the bystanders, and in every case the desired quadruped, be he tiger or terrier dog, comes out of the opening of the canvas and slowly marches off until he disappears round some adjacent corner. Well, this is done simply by ‘psychologising’, as are all the other great Indian feats, such as ‘the basket trick’, ‘the mango tree’, throwing a rope in the air and climbing up it, pulling it up and disappearing in space, and the thousand and one other similar performances which are ‘familiar as household words’ to almost every Anglo-Indian.
The difference between these schools and that of the Voodoo or Obeeyah is very great, because in them there is deception or want of reality in the performance. The spectator does not really see what he fancies he sees: his mind is simply impressed by the operator and the effect is produced. But in African magic, on the contrary, there is no will impression; the observer does really and actually see what is taking place. The force employed by the African necromancers is not psychological action by demonosophy.
White magists have frequently dominated and employed inferior spirits to do their bidding, as well as invoked the aid of powerful and beneficient ones to carry out their purposes. But this is an entirely different thing: The spirits which are naturally maleficient become the slaves of the magist, or votary of black magic, is, on the contrary, the slave of the evil spirit to whom he has given himself up.
While the philosophy of the magist demands a life of the greatest purity and the practice of every virtue, while he must utterly subdue and have in perfect control all his desires and appetites, mental and physical, and must become simply an embodied intellect, absolutely purged from all human weakness and pusillanimity, the necromancer must outrage and degrade human nature in every way conceivable. The very least of the crimes necessary for him (or her) to commit to attain the power sought is actual murder, by which the human victim essential to the sacrifice is provided. The human mind can scarcely realise or even imagine one tithe of the horrors and atrocities actually performed by the Obeeyah women.
Yet, though the price is awful, horrible, unutterable, the power is real. There is no possibility of mistake about that. Every petty king on the West Coast has his ‘rain-maker’. It is the fashion among travellers, and the business of the missionaries, to ridicule and deny the powers of these people. But they do possess and do actually use the power of causing storms of rain, wind and lightning. When one considers that however ignorant and brutal a savage may be, yet that he has an immense amount of natural cunning and his very ignorance makes him believe nothing that cannot be proven to him, no ‘rain-maker’ could live for one year unless he gave repeated instances of his powers when required by the king. Failure would simply mean death. And the hypothesis that they only work their conjurations when the weather is on the point of change is only an invention of the missionaries. The native chiefs are, like all savages, able to detect an approaching change of weather many hours before it takes place. And is it at all likely that they would send for the rain-maker and give him sufficient cattle to last him for twelve months, besides wives and other luxuries, if there were the slightest appearance of approaching rain?
I remember well my first experience of these wizards. For weeks and weeks there had been no rain, although it was the rainy season. The mealies were all dying for want of water; the cattle were being slaughtered in all directions; women and children had died by scores, and the fighting men were beginning to do the same, being themselves scarcely more than skeletons. Day after day, the sun glared down on the parched earth, without one intervening cloud, like a globe of glowing copper, and all Nature languished in that awful furnace. Suddenly, the king ordered the great war drum to be beaten, and the warriors all gathered hurriedly. He announced the arrival of two ce
lebrated rain-makers, who would forthwith proceed to relieve the prevailing distress. The elder of the two was a stunted, bowlegged little man, with wool which would have been white had it not been messed up with grease, filth and feathers. The second man was rather a fine specimen of the Soosoo race, but with a very sinister expression. A large ring being formed by the squatting Negroes, who came – for some unknown reason – all armed to the teeth, the king being in the centre, and the rain-makers in front of him, they commenced their incantations. The zenith and the horizon were eagerly examined from time to time, but not a vestige of a cloud appeared. Presently the elder man rolled on the ground in convulsions, apparently epileptic, and his comrade started to his feet pointing with both hands to the copper-coloured sky. All eyes followed his gesture, and looked at the spot to which his hands pointed, but nothing was visible. Motionless as a stone statue he stood with gaze riveted on the sky. In about the space of a minute a darker shade was observable in the copper tint, in another minute it grew darker and darker, and, in a few more seconds developed into a black cloud, which soon overspread the heavens. In a moment, a vivid flash was seen, and the deluge that fell from that cloud, which had now spread completely overhead, was something to be remembered. For two days and nights that torrent poured down, and seemed as if it would wash everything out of the ground.
After the king had dismissed the rain-makers, and they had deposited the cattle and presents under guard, I entered the hut in which they were lodged, and spent the night with them, discussing the magical art. The hut was about fourteen feet in diameter, strongly built of posts driven firmly into the ground, and having a strong thatched conical roof. I eventually persuaded them to give me one or two examples of their skill. They began singing, or rather crooning, a long invocation, after a few minutes of which the younger man appeared to rise in the air about three feet from the ground and remain there suspended, and floating about. There was a brilliant light in the hut from a large fire in the centre, so that the smallest detail could be distinctly observed. I got up and went to feel the man in the air, and there was no doubt about his levitation. He then floated close to the wall and passed through it to the outside. I made a dash for the doorway, which was on the opposite side of the hut, and looked round for him. I saw a luminous figure, which appeared like a man rubbed with phosphorised oil; but I was glad to rapidly take shelter from the torrents of rain. When I re-entered the hut, there was only the old man present. I examined the logs carefully but there was no aperture whatever. The old man continued his chant, and in another moment his comrade re-appeared floating in the air. He sat down on the ground, and I saw his black skin glistening with rain, and the few rags he wore were wet as if he had been dipped in a river.