Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (25 page)

Leadbeater’s life and personality were alike peculiar, he was a human enigma and he cries out for a biographer. One thing, however, is I think quite certain. However odd his sexual beliefs, whatever his relationships with some of his pupils may have been, he was not “a Black Magician using homosexual activities to create a reservoir of astral power”—there is not a shadow of proof for the allegations made by Dion Fortune and accepted unthinkingly by so many occultists.

¹
The one exception to this seems to be that strange character Ralph Chubb, who managed to blend occultism, the love of young boys, and nature worship into one incoherent whole. See Appendix, “Ralph Chubb, Boy Love, and William Blake”.

²
The pseudonym of Mrs. Violet Evans; for some brief details of her interesting magical career see
chapters 16
and 18 of my
Ritual Magic in England
(Neville Spearman 1970).

³
This quotation, which I take from the (cyclostyled) June 1948 issue of a tiny occult magazine called
Hermes
is particularly interesting for its association of homosexuality with the legendary, blood-sucking, vampire. I am confident that vampirism in both nineteenth-century literature and twentieth-century occult fantasy is symbolic (on an unconscious level) of forbidden sexuality in general and of oral-genital contact in particular. The sexual undertones of such short stories as
Camilla
and such novels as
Dracula
are only too apparent.

⁴
At the period in question; in later years there were even stranger and more exotic flowerings of Theosophical doctrine, largely derived from Annie Besant’s personal interpretation of Hinduism.

⁵
For some account of Levi and MacKenzie see
chapters 2
and
3
of my
Ritual Magic in England
(Neville Spearman 1970).

⁶
Or, to be more correct, those of them who followed the leadership of Colonel Olcott and Annie Besant. The majority of American Theosophists had broken away from the parent body in April 1895 and had been at first led by William Q. Judge and then, since Judge’s death, by the “Purple Mother”, Katherine A. Tingley, a former spiritualist medium. The followers of Katherine Tingley, loathed Leadbeater, just as they loathed all the others who were in any way associated with Annie Besant.

⁷
Formally, the Esoteric Section (at one time called the Eastern Section) was an unofficial organisation, its members of no more importance than any other member of the Theosophical Society. In practice, however, it always wielded great power and later, after the death of Colonel Olcott, exerted real control over the affairs of the Society.

⁸
There was an element of wry comedy in Fullerton’s indignation, for he himself seems to have had homosexual inclinations and, in February 1910, was charged with sending indecent letters through the mails—interestingly enough the letters were sent to young Douglas Pettit. Fullerton was found unfit to plead and spent the rest of his life in a home for the criminally insane.

⁹
Or, to be more accurate, an alphabetic code. This was simple enough in nature; all consonants were represented by the previous letter of the alphabet, all vowels by the following vowel in the series, a, e, i, o, u. Thus the coded letter
e
could represent either the consonant
f
or the vowel
a
.

¹⁰
We owe our best description of this famous eye to that odd Russian, Vsevolod Solovyoff. He wrote of Olcott that “one of his eyes was extremely disobedient, and from time to time used to turn in all directions, sometimes with startling and most disagreeable rapidity. As long as the disobedient eye remained still, you had before you a handsome, agreeable and kindly, but not particularly clever man, who won you by his appearance and inspired you with confidence. Then suddenly something twitched, the eye got loose and began to stray suspiciously and knavishly, and confidence vanished in a moment.” The full text of Solovyoff’s amusing presentation of Olcott can be found on pp. 36–9 of his
A Modern Priestess of Isis
(Longman Green & Co. 1895).

¹¹
Koot Hoomi was one of the Masters, those, almost certainly mythical, semi-supernatural beings who supposedly dwelt in the Himalayas and had given Madame Blavatsky her mission. As far as the message to Van Hook was concerned it seems clear that either there was a doctrinal split in the Great White Brotherhood (as these supermen were collectively known), or that the celestial telephone lines had become badly crossed—for only a few months previously Koot Hoomi’s colleague, the Master Morya, had informed Olcott that while Leadbeater was indubitably sincere his sexual teachings were utterly wrong.

¹²
Arthur H. Nethercot, whose two-volume biography seems destined to remain the definitive study of die life of Annie Besant, finds some discrepancy between the Besantine “conception of Jesus as an Avatar and Jesus as a mere Master among other Masters”. I do not think this discrepancy has any real existence. The extremely confused Christology of Annie Besant was very similar to that of the Docetics; she regarded Jesus as a mere man, in whom the “Cosmic Christ” had manifested at the time of his baptism in the Jordan. Jesus, she held, had continued to be “overshadowed” until the crucifixion, when the Christ (temporarily) withdrew from his vehicle, thus explaining Jesus’ cry from the cross of “My God, My God, why hast though forsaken me”. It is interesting to note that Mary Baker Eddy held very similar views as to the nature of the Christ.

¹³
A reference to “the sin of Onan”, a now obsolete term for masturbation. Onan, it will be remembered, was the Old Testament character who “spilled his seed upon the ground”, thus arousing the anger of Jehovah. Most Hebrew scholars are now convinced that the Biblical passage in question refers not to masturbation but to
coitus interruptus
, the practice of male withdrawal before ejaculation.

¹⁴
In the
Ancient Catholic Church
—the name by which Mathew was calling his tiny organisation.

¹⁵
Bishop King a professional astrologer, remained a Theosophist until his death in 1953. Gauntlett resigned from the episcopate in 1924, joined the British Israelites, and travelled widely giving lectures designed to prove that the Anglo-Saxons were the lost ten tribes of Israel.

¹⁶
The
LORD MAITREYA
, it will be remembered, was the Coming Christ, shortly due to manifest Himself, so it was believed, in Krishnamurti. It is to be presumed that Leadbeater took Wedgwood to the
LORD MAITREYA
by means of a quick visit to the astral plane.

¹⁷
Leadbeater had never particularly liked the opposite sex and by 1916 this aversion had reached the point where he (a) refused to shake hands with women and (b) refused to stay in houses where husband and wife shared a bed.

To European radicals and Utopians of the last century the word “America” had the same semi-magical appeal that the word “Russia” had for left-wing intellectuals of the ’thirties and the word “Cuba” has for some black militants today. These Utopians regarded America as the sociological laboratory in which they would put their theories into practice, turn their dreams into reality. At one time or another almost every charismatic sect, whether political or religious in its underlying ideology, made an attempt at communal living on the North American continent. On the whole the politically orientated communities were far less successful than those in which the common ideology was of a religious nature; thus the communities founded by the followers of such early socialists as Robert Owen and Fourier soon folded up, in spite of the optimism of their founders,
¹
while some of the religious communities founded at the same time still survive.

Most of these communities held unorthodox sexual beliefs of one kind or another, varying from, at one extreme, the Shakers who believed all sexuality to be sinful and preached total abstinence,
²
to, at the other, the Oneida perfectionists, who looked upon sex as a sacrament and arranged that at puberty child-members of their community should be initiated by older members of the opposite sex. These communities
and their beliefs, however, lie outside my main theme, for they do not seem to have derived from any traditional esoteric source. The same is probably true of the sexual magic of P. B. Randolph, the nineteenth-century mulatto occultist whom I have mentioned in a previous chapter, in spite of its resemblance to certain aspects of Tantricism.
³

The sexual magic of the
Ordo Templi Orientis
was introduced into North America before 1914 by Aleister Crowley’s disciple C. S. Jones, who eventually opened branches of the Order in Vancouver, Los Angeles and (possibly) Washington D.C. Jones was devoted to his occult master, whose teachings he considered to be applicable to every aspect of human existence,
⁴
and worked hard to build up the O.T.O., although without much success. However, Theodor Reuss—who, it will be remembered, was Crowley’s superior in the O.T.O. until 1922 —disregarded Crowley’s claims to occult supremacy in America and in 1916 conferred a charter upon an already-existing organisation authorising it to function as the North American branch of the Order. Crowley had a low opinion of the American chief of this organisation. He described him as:

“… one of the charlatans who worked the Rosicrucian racket, merrily disdainful of criticism based on his elementary blunders in Latin and his total ignorance of the history of the Order which he claimed to rule…

“… I proved in a dozen different ways that the man was a foul liar. That was easy enough. His claims were grotesquely absurd. For instance, he said that I don’t know how many knights of England and France—the most improbable people—were Rosicrucians. He said the Order was founded by one of the early Egyptian kings and professed to have documentary evidence of an unbroken hierarchy of initiates since then. He called the Order Rosae Cruris and
translated it Rosy Cross. He said that in Toulouse the Order possessed a vast temple with fabulous magnificent appointments, an assertion disprovable merely by consulting Baedeker. He said that Rockefeller had given him nine hundred thousand dollars and at the same time sent round the hat with an eloquent plea for the smallest contributions. He professed to be a learned Egyptologist and classical scholar on terms of intimacy with the most exalted personages. Yet, as in the case of Peter, his speech betrayed him. He was a good chap at heart, a genuine lover of truth, by no means altogether ignorant of Magick, and a great fool to put up all this bluff instead of relying on his really good qualities….”

The man whom Crowley regarded with such amused contempt was H. Spencer Lewis and the Order he led to which Reuss had given a charter was the
Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Cruris
, better known as AMORC, an organisation whose easily-parodied style of advertising (“Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin and Spiro Agnew! What was the secret of these men’s towering intellectual abilities and intense personal charm? All were Rosicrucians! Write
NOW
for your free booklet!”) has been familiar to readers of pulp-magazines for over fifty years.

Reuss found Lewis a disappointment, however, for the latter was more interested in building up a personal following of his own than acting as a mere lieutenant of Reuss and the O.T.O. It is difficult to know whether Lewis made any actual experiments with sex-magic techniques, but if he did so he soon abandoned them, and while it is true that a certain amount of O.T.O.-derived material was incorporated into AMORC publications during the period 1916–20 it was soon eradicated. Nevertheless, some diagrams of a magical nature which Lewis lifted from Crowley’s
Equinox
(such as the Rose Cross which Lewis took from
Equinox
III) have continued to be used by AMORC and still appear in its literature. In later years Lewis found his early connections with Crowley and the O.T.O. a cause for much embarrassment, for they were publicised by his great rival R. Swinburne Clymer —the head of various small, allegedly Rosicrucian societies—in his many attacks upon AMORC in general and Lewis in particular; Clymer referred to Lewis as “the boastful pilfering Imperator with his black-magic, sex-magic connections”—a description which seems to have afforded Lewis little pleasure.

In the ’thirties a former follower of Crowley, a one-time resident of
the Abbey of Thelema named C. F. Russell, established an American occult society teaching an unorthodox version of the sexual magic of the O.T.O. Crowley gave his own unflattering impressions of his erstwhile disciple when he came to write his autobiographical
Confessions
. Throughout his narrative Crowley, with untypical kindness, referred to Russell as “Godwin”. He wrote: