“You can denounce me as anything you like,” Crowley replied. “It will not alter the truth.”
“Have you at any time practiced black magic?” J. P. Eddy asked of his client for clarification.
“No. I have always written in condemnation of black magic.”
“What is the object of the magic in which you believe?”
“My particular branch is the raising of humanity to higher spiritual development.”
When Crowley prepared to leave the stand, Justice Swift asked one last question. “I would like to ask if Mr. Crowley could give the court the shortest and, at the same time, most comprehensive definition of magic which he knows.”
He happily obliged, quoting his own work on the subject. “Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformation with the Will. It is white magic if the Will is righteous and black magic if the Will is perverse.”
“Does it involve the invocation of spirits?” Swift asked.
“It may do so. It does involve the invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel, who is appointed by Almighty God to watch over each of us.”
“Then it does involve invocation of the spirits?”
“Of one spirit. God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.”
“Is magic, in your view, the art of controlling spirits to affect the course of events?”
“That is part of magic, one small branch.”
“If the object of the control is good then it is white magic?”
“Yes.”
“And if the object of the control is bad, it is black magic?”
“Yes.”
“When the object of the control is bad, what spirits do you invoke?”
This was becoming technical, and Crowley tried to be clear. “You cannot invoke evil spirits; you must evoke them or call them out.”
“When the object is bad, you evoke evil spirits?”
“You put yourself in their power. In that case, it is possible to control, or bind, evil spirits for a good purpose, as we might if we use the dangerous elements of fire and electricity for heating and lighting, and so on.”
“Thank you.”
After two days of testimony, Crowley stepped down from the witness stand.
Karl Germer appeared on the stand as a character witness for Crowley. When Martin O’Connor cross-examined Germer, he asked incredulously, “Have you ever seen Mr. Crowley invoke spirits?”
“Yes.”
“What spirits?”
He answered proudly, “The spirit of magnanimity.”
“How do you know it was the spirit of magnanimity?”
“I suppose you have got to be sensitive in order to perceive.”
Justice Swift asked Germer, “Can you point to any difference between the spirit of magnanimity and the spirit of hospitality?”
Karl mused and answered, “I think that is very easy.”
O’Connor pressed him, “You are sure it was the spirit of magnanimity which came, and not the spirit of hospitality?”
The highlight of this ridiculous bit of testimony, according to an observer, was “the unforgettable scene of an Irish barrister requesting a German witness to read an alleged obscene poem that Crowley had written in French.”6
Images from the trial (left to right): Aleister Crowley giving the sign of silence; Betty May; and Karl Germer. (photo credit 1.1)
It was Friday the 13th. As Justice Swift predicted, the trial entered its fourth day. Betty May had been called by the defense, and J. P. Eddy attempted unsuccessfully to discredit her the same way the defense had discredited Crowley. An unexpected incident, especially damaging to Crowley, came out of this questioning. “In regard to your position in this case,” Eddy proposed, “I put it to you plainly that you are here as a ‘bought’ witness.”
“I am here to help the jury,” Betty May replied.
“I am suggesting, without making any imputation against the solicitors, that you were obviously unwilling to come unless you were paid to come.”
“No.” She said she received £20 at most from the defendants’ solicitors.
“What was it for?”
“It was for my expenses.”
“What expenses?”
“I lived in the country and they wanted me in London, and they had to pay my expenses.”
“In reply,” Eddy addressed the court, “she received a letter stating, ‘I am afraid I cannot send you as much as another £5. I am grateful for your help, but I thought previous remittances covered a good deal.’ ” The reading of that letter staggered everyone—the witness and the defense included. Betty May admitted she received £5 from Messrs. Waterhouse, the solicitors. Without missing a beat, he handed another letter to the witness and asked, “Are you known as ‘Bumble Toff’?”
“Lots of people call me by that name.”
“Do you know anyone by the name of ‘Poddle Diff’?”
“Yes, he is an old friend of mine.”
“Is that letter signed by an old friend of yours?”
“I don’t know, I have not seen him for so long.”
“Do you swear you have not received that letter addressed to ‘dear Bumble Toff’?”
Before she could answer, Hilbery voiced an objection, which Swift sustained. “The witness says she does not remember receiving the letter,” the Justice ruled. “There the matter must stop.” Betty returned the letter to Eddy.
“Did you not discuss with ‘Poddle Diff’ the question of your giving evidence in this case?” Eddy asked.
“No,” she answered. “He had enough troubles of his own without troubling about mine.”
With that, Eddy rested his unusual cross-examination.
Hilbery reexamined Betty, who stated she hadn’t seen the letters produced by Eddy for a long time: they’d been removed from a small box of her personal papers. “Did you ever authorize anyone to extract those documents from your box of private papers and give them to Mr. Crowley?” Hilbery asked.
“Certainly not.”
Justice Swift asked, “Are these the ones produced by Mr. Crowley?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“Do you know how Mr. Crowley got possession of your letters?” Swift probed.
“I cannot imagine how he got them.”
“Were there other letters in the case?” Hilbery asked her.
“Yes. Everything was taken from the case but the case was left. The contents were all stolen.”
Martin O’Connor opened the case for Nina Hamnett’s defense with an attack not only of Crowley’s credibility but his very beliefs. “It is appalling that, in this enlightened age a court should be investigating magic which is arch-humbug practiced by arch-rogues to rob weak-minded people. I hope this action will end for all time the activities of this hypocritical rascal. As to his reputation, there is no one in fact or in fiction against whom so much inquity has been alleged. I suggest the jury stop this case, say they have heard enough of Mr. Crowley, and return a verdict for the defendants.”
Noticing two jurors talking, Swift interrupted O’Connor’s statement. The two jurors looked up at Swift inquisitively. “Members of the jury,” he explained to them, “I thought that you were speaking to each other.” After a few sheepish looks, he added, “There is no reason why you should not whisper to him.”
The foreman asked, “May I be given an opportunity to do so?”
“I have stopped learned counsel so that you might speak to each other, if you want to do so.”
The jurors conferred; the foreman addressed the bench. “It is unanimous amongst the jury to know whether this is a correct time for us to intervene.”
“You cannot stop the case as against the defendants. You may stop it against the plaintiff when Mr. Eddy has said everything he wants to say.”
Feeling success imminent, O’Connor added nothing more and called no evidence, passing the trial back to Eddy to close. He did his best to argue Crowley’s case. Sticking
to strictly legal ground, he pointed out that no evidence supported the allegation that a baby had disappeared from the Abbey, or that local peasants were afraid of Crowley. Moreover, Mrs. Sedgwick’s testimony on the events at Cefalù was wholly unreliable. “No reasonable jury can do other than find a verdict in favor of Mr. Crowley. The defendants’ views notwithstanding, the law of libel is available to everybody, whether he is of good or bad character.”
When Eddy finished, Swift addressed the jury. “Thirty minutes ago you intimated to me that you had made up your minds about this case and that you did not want to hear any more about it. I pointed out to you that before you could stop it, Mr. Eddy was entitled to address you. I also pointed out that before I could take your verdict I must be satisfied that you understand the issues you are trying.
“I have nothing to say about the facts except this: I have been over forty years engaged in the administration of the law in one capacity or another. I thought I knew of every conceivable form of wickedness. I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me. I have learnt in this case that we can always learn something if we live long enough. I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous, and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man who describes himself to you as the greatest living poet.
“If you think that the plaintiff fails on the ground that he was never libeled, or that his reputation was never damaged, or if you think the defendants have justified what was written, then your verdict should be fore the defendants. Are you still of the same mind or do you want the case to go on? If there is any doubt about the matter, the case must go on.”
They returned a unanimous verdict for the defendants with costs. Crowley had lost.
In retrospect, Crowley v Constable and Co. was a truly bizarre case. It is difficult today to imagine the events of this trial: the notorious self-styled Great Beast—who explained to the court that this name simply meant “Little Sunshine”—testifying on the differences between white and black magic; the prosecution challenging Crowley either to magically attack Malcolm Hilbery or to render himself invisible in the courtroom; poor Karl Germer being chided about the differences between the spirit of magnanimity and the spirit of hospitality; and a stupefied Betty May being asked on the stand to admit to irrelevant pet names like “Poodle Diff” and “Bumble Toff” from stolen letters. In the end, the trial was much like Jones v. The Looking Glass over two decades earlier: Crowley was a person of such notoriously bad character that he had no basis for claiming damage from what, to the jury, appeared to be factual statements. In this case, Crowley’s past failures to take legal action to protect his reputation worked against him. Ultimately, Hamnett’s book did not accuse Crowley of black magic but reported what villagers near the Abbey purportedly believed.
“Case violated by collapse of Swift & Nina. General joy—the consternation of Constable & Co. & co.,” Crowley mysteriously recorded in his diary for Friday the 13th of April—a decidedly unlucky day. He filed out of the courtroom past the reporters who would plaster his name and face all over their papers. His only remark, to the puzzlement of the paparazzi, was a quote from Rudyard Kipling’s “If”:
If you can meet Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same.
After the trial, Robin Thynne introduced Crowley to his nineteen-year-old mistress, Deirdre Patricia Maureen Doherty (b. 1915).7 Granddaughter and legal ward of Newlyn painter of children Thomas Cooper Gotch (1854-1931; Royal Society of British Artists, Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour), she had been sent to London to stay with a relative, Lord Justice Slesser. For her amusement, Slesser suggested she watch a trial in progress: Crowley v. Constable and Co. While they were, for the time being, casual acquaintances, “the girl Pat,” as Crowley would come to know her, would give AC the thing which neither Bill nor Pearl nor any other Scarlet Woman could: an heir.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The War of the Roses (and the Battle of the Book)
Even as his solicitors lodged a notice of appeal for the so-called “Black Magic Libel” case, Crowley felt repercussions from the trial. Arraigned on charges of feloniously receiving stolen letters—four originals and one copy—he pleaded not guilty and was released from the Marylebone police station on £10 bail until his trial. Although Kerman announced, “Mr. Crowley has a complete answer to this charge,” Captain Eddie Cruze, from whom Crowley had purchased the letters to use against the Tiger Woman in court, was nowhere to be found despite a warrant for his arrest.
Judge Whiteley tried the case at the Old Bailey on July 24 and 25. Although Betty (May) Sedgwick testified that Cruze had stolen the letters from her Seymour Street residence, Constantine Gallop (c. 1893–1967)1 argued on Crowley’s behalf that she had given Cruze the letters as a guarantee of money she had promised him; and, since they were therefore his letters, he was free to pass them along to Crowley.
“Is this the first time there has been any charge against you in any place in the world?” Gallop asked Crowley.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“Apart from the criticism justly or unjustly leveled against you for your book, has anything ever been leveled against your character in any court?”
“Not in any court.”
“Were you plaintiff in the action Constable and Another?”
“I was and I am,” Crowley answered, alluding to his appeal.
“In the course of that action, did you hear that Mrs. Sedgwick would probably be called as a witness against you?”
“Yes.” He testified that in December 1933 he learned that Cruze knew all about her plans. “Betty May was preparing to commit perjury. That I already knew from several sources.… I wanted to know whether these letters did prove the plans of Mrs. Sedgwick.” He paid £5 for the letters.
“Did you at any time suspect that these letters had been stolen?”
“No.”
The jury deliberated half an hour before reaching a verdict. Believing Betty May’s letters to be valueless, and hence useless as a security, they disbelieved Crowley’s story and found him guilty. Because of his clean record, Judge Whiteley let him off lightly. “These letters ought not to have been used, ought never have been in your possession, or handed to your solicitor at all. However, they were used, and no harm had in fact been done; therefore I am not going to send you to prison.” Whitely put AC on probation for two years and ordered him to pay fifty guineas toward costs for the prosecution.2
“Thank you, my Lord,” Crowley replied. In the back of his mind, however, he was screaming: “Idiots! Even a scapegoat is liable to butt.” He planned an appeal, but advised against it by both his lawyer and the I Ching, he dropped it.
On November 8, however, Crowley’s appeal of the “Black Magic Trial” made it to court. After three days of testimony, Lord Justices Greer, Slesser, and Roche decided that, although the case was well argued, it was unfair to take the objectionable passages out of context, where they were clearly not libelous. They sustained Swift’s judgment and dismissed the case.3
The day after losing his appeal, Crowley, sick with pneumonia, was evicted from his room in Grosvenor Square. All told, 1934 had been a bad year.
Another unfortunate upshot of Crowley’s popularity in the daily law reports was that his creditors now knew where to find him. On February 14, 1935, Crowley faced the Official Receiver as case number 38 in bankruptcy court, with liabilities from thirty-eight unsecured loans and ten partly secured loans totaling £4,695. AC described himself as an author and psychiatrist. When asked why, during the years in which he was affluent, he never paid income tax, Crowley replied that he never received any forms, nor was he ever asked to pay taxes. Questioned about his lifestyle, he remarked that he always bought the most expensive clothing and paid £25 per pound for tobacco. Although he valued his stock of books at £20,000 and his life story at £2,000, he claimed to be unable to sell them because of a boycott of his works in E
ngland and the damage done to his reputation by recent lawsuits. For these reasons, he had earned only £78 in book sales and £135 from articles since January 1932; loans and his family trust covered his remaining expenses. He also blamed his insolvency on mismanagement by Yorke. “The assets comprised a large claim in a pending action against a person now said to be in Shanghai,” Crowley reported, claiming that once the suit was settled he would again be solvent.
At that, Yorke’s representatives, who attended the trial in case Yorke was dragged into this, informed the Receiver that the claim to which Crowley referred was two years old and that he had made no attempts in that time to pursue it. The receiver invited Crowley’s creditors to help him bring his case to court and thereby reclaim their money. None took up the gauntlet.
It was settled: Crowley was bankrupt. Finding he had no household furniture, creditors seized his manuscripts and diaries. (Fortunately, his trust fund payments were not subject to this ruling.) Not until 1939 did he pay dividends on his debts, amounting to two pence on the pound.4
The last time Hayter Preston saw Aleister Crowley—in May 1914—they were arguing over Victor Neuburg. He never expected to hear from AC again, so his invitation to dine at the Old Ship in Brighton was too curious to pass up. Crowley’s motives, however, became clear once he pitched an article to Preston for the Referee. Nevertheless, he accepted and, after considerable editing, “My Wanderings in Search of the Absolute” appeared in the March 10, 1935, edition. It was a digest of Crowley’s early life, focusing on travel and mysticism.5
The next working day, AC strolled into the Referee offices wearing his black Homburg hat. “These,” he said, depositing a stack of manuscripts on the editor’s desk, “are the future installments of my article.” Crowley became livid when told that the Referee wanted no other articles. He claimed Preston had contracted a series of articles, and if that agreement was broken, he would sue for breach of contract.
And sue he did. As with his other lawsuits at this time, Crowley lost.
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