Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
The Portrayal of Aleister Crowley by the Press During His Life-time and Beyond; A Real or Imagined Fear?
How was Aleister Crowley portrayed
by the press during his lifetime and after his death? Were the press reporting
fairly and accurately on Crowley? Did they express the genuine concerns of a nation,
or were they merely indulging in sensationalism to sell more papers? By examining
the archives of various publications and comparing the coverage of Crowley
against the coverage of other similar events (including theatre reviews and general
news), we may throw some light on the matter.
By
establishing that the media (both now and in the 18th century) was not
purely reflective of society as Michael Wolff suggests in his unfortunately named
essay ‘Charting the Golden Stream’ but
instead, as Kate Jackson puts it “...an active and integral part of it.”, we
can take this to mean that whilst newspapers reflected society back at its
self, the same newspapers also exerted an influence by shaping how, and what,
society thought.
Aleister Crowley
featured regularly in the press of his day, and it would seem that for the most
part, the attitude of the press towards him was one of benign bemusement but as
Robertson points out in the introduction to Richard T Cole’s book The Un-Magickal Record Of The Great Beast 666;
“Crowley played
a dangerous game: he cultivated a devilish image that was useful for putting
off fainthearts and attracting the adventurous and curious, but it backfired when
the gutter press repeatedly shat on him.”
A review of
Crowley’s The Rites of Eleusis, “...a series of
seven public invocations or rites, each centered on one of the seven classical
planets of antiquity.” demonstrates how,
as a playwright and director, he was perceived by the press; “...the only
relief in a dreary performance was afforded by a neophyte falling off his
stool, which caused mild hilarity among a bored and uncomfortable audience...” (Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LX, 1910) and “Mr Crowley
says the end and aim of his rites is ecstasy. Somebody ought to tell him that
ecstasy of any kind is impossible when your foot has gone to sleep.” (Ibid).
A bad review
does not prove that the press dealt unfairly with Crowley. A review of Mr
Charles Frohman’s Repertory, from a similar time as Crowley’s Rites, asks what
good drama is: “Apparently, with Mr Frohman, it is to be an art of audacious,
not to say iconoclastic experiment” (The
Times, 1910,) and “There is much, however, that we venture to consider
suspect and possibly harmful, harmful to the young dramatist and harmful to the
drama as an art.” (ibid).
It is plain to see
that the Victorians exercised (subjective) discernment with regard to the
theatre, and if we look as far back as 1839, critics and artists alike were
imposing their (subjective) opinions on the public, albeit about paintings in
the following example. William Thackeray said of the French School of Painting
“...the bloated, unnatural, stilted, spouting, sham sublime, that our teachers
have believed and tried to pass off as real, and which your humble servant and
other anti-humbuggists should heartily...endeavour to pull down”.
On July the 3rd,
1915 Crowley and a group of people renounced their allegiance to England in a
dawn ceremony at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. This event was covered in The New York Times approximately ten
days after the event, and the report is amazingly detailed and even handed (New York Times, 1915) when one considers
the political climate in which Crowley and the group were acting.
It appears that The Times (London) was far too busy
reporting on the first World War because there was no mention of Crowley’s
stunt from the 3rd of July 1915 or the following ten days
afterwards. However, there were plenty of headlines concerned with the war,
including “The Battles of North Arras” (The
Times, 1915) “Russians Captured by Italians” (Ibid) and “The Second Battle
of Ypres” (Ibid).
In the
introduction to Sand Robertson’s The Illustrated Beast - The Aleister
Crowley Scrapbook, Colin Wilson suggests that throughout his life Crowley
was “...in the grip of a ravenous, unsatisfied appetite for recognition...” and
despite Crowley’s efforts, he remained relatively unknown by the British
public, however “...quite suddenly, he
became a household name when the magazine John
Bull [Wilson’s italics] dubbed him ‘the wickedest man in the world’, and
ran headlines like THE KING OF DEPRAVITY, A HUMAN BEAST and A MAN WE’D LIKE TO
HANG [Wilson’s capitals].” (Ibid).
The tactic of
using shocking, attention grabbing headlines to lure potential newspaper buyers
into purchasing is not a new one, and is a hallmark of journalistic practices employed
several decades before Crowley’s birth. According to Joel Weiner’s Papers for the Millions, publications such as Lloyd’s Weekly (1842), the News of the
World (1843) and Reynolds’s Newspaper (1850) had made “...breakthroughs in
layout, particularly in the coverage of crime stories, which often feature
crossheadings like “Execution” or “Confession.””.
In addition to
the shocking headlines, there was also the belief that newspaper editors should
have “...no objection to facts if they are also novel. But he (should) prefer a
novelty that is not a fact to a fact that is not a novelty.” (Hearst, in
Weiner). In the July edition of Action magazine
(1953), there is a lurid feature on Crowley entitled ‘The Strange Case of the
Man Who Founded a Sex Cult’ which includes such ‘novelties’ (for they were
certainly not facts) about Crowley such as Hitler believing him to be a living
god and Crowley exerting influence in America to the extent that the dollar
bill was redesigned to include the eye of Horus in honour of him.
When it came to
reporting on Crowley, there was no shortage of novel facts and certainly no
shortage of novelties that were not facts but it was only after the death of Raoul
Loveday at Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, Sicily (and Crowley’s
subsequent expulsion from the island by Mussolini) that the press truly turned
on him. The Sunday Express used
numerous eye-catching headlines to denounce Crowley (and presumably sell more
papers into the bargain); these included “Aleister Crowley’s Orgies in Sicily”
(Sunday Express, 1922) and “New
Sinister Revelations of Aleister Crowley” (Sunday
Express, 1923). The purpose of this piece is not to explore the truths or
untruths behind the headlines but it cannot be doubted that headlines such as
these would have had an impact on the public’s impression of Crowley. This is confirmed by Robertson when he speculates
that an average person’s earliest memories of Crowley were of “...the leering
devil-worshipper, according to the lurid descriptions of his parents drawn from
dimly remembered articles in the Sunday
Express [Robertson’s italics] of long ago.”.
The press blamed
Loveday’s death on drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat under the direction
of Crowley – something he vehemently denied - and that Crowley was a very, very
bad man. Crowley refuted the manner in which he has been portrayed by the press
and blamed the entire situation on the newspapers and Betty May (Raoul’s wife);
speaking of her in his autobiography ‘An Autohagiography: The Confessions Of
Aleister Crowley’ he says “...an accident had damaged her brain permanently so
that its functions were discontinuous, and she had not mended matters by taking
to cocaine at the age of about twenty. After some years of addiction, she found
herself using a quarter of an ounce or more daily. She suddenly took fright and
cured herself by switching over, first to injections of morphia, and then to
plain alcohol.”. He also claims that unscrupulous journalists had gotten Betty
May drunk and convinced her to make up lies about the manner of Loveday’s death
and activity at the Abbey. Crowley also claimed that the media had deliberately
misrepresented the facts, knowing that he was too poor to sue for libel.
When it came to
confusing the press (and people in general) Crowley didn’t help matters; on the
nature of blood and human sacrifices he wrote in Magick In Theory And
Practice that “A male child of perfect innocence and high
intelligence is the most satisfactory and suitable victim.”. A foot-note to
this statement reads “It appears from the Magical Records of FRATER PERDURABO
that He made this particular sacrifice on an average about 150 times every year
between 1912 E.V and 1928 E.V”. This would suggest that Crowley sacrificed
approximately 2400 boys during this period. In actual fact ‘child sacrifice’
was a euphemism for a particular strain of sex magick but Crowley did little to
clarify this. The fact that that he also claimed to be in contact with
praeter-human intelligences and his work was therefore outside the sphere of
‘normal’ understanding and ethical practices should also be noted. It is hardly
surprising that he was misunderstood by the press, who then in turn misinformed
the general public.
To recap, this piece
has demonstrated that in regard to Crowley’s artistic/theatrical pieces, the
press were not particularly impressed, but the press were equally unfavourable
with their reviews of other theatre produced at the same time. It has also been
demonstrated that there was unfavourable press in existence even before Crowley
was born. Therefore we can discount the idea that Crowley’s art was persecuted
by the press – reviewers have, and will continue, to exercise their subjective
opinion on art, the theatre and everything else in existence.
Regarding the
reporting, or lack of, about Crowley’s renouncement of his allegiance to
England; the New York Times article
is very well-balanced and does not report Crowley in any kind of negative
light. It merely records events but does not comment on them. Anyone reading
the article could form their own opinions about the event (although it is
possible that their perception may have already been coloured by previous news
articles about Crowley and his behaviour). The
Times in London was too preoccupied with reporting on the war to even
bother with writing an article on the subject.
It has also been
shown that the use of shock headlines to grab the reader’s attention (and thereby
sell more newspapers) was already an established practice. But as suggested at
the start of this piece, the press did not (and still does not) merely reflect
society; it also influences, therefore the idea that the public’s view of
Crowley was negatively influenced by the headlines of such publications as John Bull or the Sunday Express cannot be discounted.
If we also take
into account that ‘novelty’ was also seen as being preferable to ‘fact’, it is
neither a huge nor difficult step to conclude that the press made use of
untruths about Crowley to sell newspapers.
Finally, we see
that Crowley often made use of, what would have been at the time, offensive and
outrageous metaphors. He did not make much effort to clarify the true meaning
behind his ‘sleight of word’ and allowed people to arrive at incorrect
conclusions about his work and his behaviour. He certainly did not do himself
any favours in regard to how he was portrayed in the press.
Therefore it is
only logical and sensible to conclude that admittedly the press could be
unfavaourable to Crowley’s artistic endeavours but this was clearly not a
personal attack; they just didn’t like his work. The press in his lifetime (and
beyond) were guilty of using sensational headlines to smear Crowley and they
also invented novel facts about him. However, in some instances, they reported
in a clear and unbiased fashion.
Crowley, for his part, often wrote in an ambiguous manner which would
have confused the average person, let alone a ‘news-hungry’ journalist.
Would it be too
much to suggest that Crowley and the press were in a parasitic relationship
whereby Crowley attempted to gain publicity and the press attempted to gain
increased readership through the use of outrageous headlines and suspect ‘facts’?
Big thanks to
Mogg Morgan for his suggestions for research on this piece.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
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