You’ve got enemies? Good, that means you have stood up for something sometime in your life.
– Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill KG OM CH
TD DL FRS RA
I burn and smoke a lot of hashish.
This is my hypothesis: ‘Perhaps hashish is the drug that loosens the girders of the soul, but is in itself neither good nor bad. Perhaps, as Baudelaire thinks, it merely exaggerates and distorts the natural man and his mood of the moment.’
I am no Black Magician. I am a sweet and dangerous soul who shall save this world; this beautiful place, in which we get to live for free.
The goats, seemingly understanding each nuance, and I, quite euphoric, stroll like best mates would have strolled in long-gone summers across the South Downs or on the approach to Canterbury: short-trousered scamps with grubby and tanned knees; scorched, happy pilgrims to a new dawn. Yet we are several goats and a gnarled-yet-vibrant old man in his fifteenth decade.
And I think of how I shall read tonight, my final evening, supine on my bed, by a dandelion-yellow lamp in my sparse but magnificent stone chambers until the night takes me to sleep. I shall fight it though, for why waste these moments, as I shall be gone for a long, long time.
I tell the goats again that 666 is merely the number of the sun.
I tell them, ‘The crass Fleet Street editors should have therefore named me Sunshine.’
If I ever evoked evil spirits, it was only to bind and control them for a good purpose, as we might if we use the dangerous elements of fire and electricity for heating and lighting. I say it again: Black Magic is dangerous and practised by the morally bankrupt. And never by me. My sheet anchor is decency, common sense and love. And I know the value of ambition and dreams, for they provide fuel for the soul. I know the worth also of recognising true genius when one sees it – or just good old-fashioned determination (for this, stubbornness can be a partial substitute).
I say one must not cut one’s coat in accordance with the cloth, for even the meanest tailor knows that one must cut one’s cloth in accordance with the size of the man.
And that fellow should suggest to one’s foes (with the aid of drugs, superstition and chums if required) that they cower, hushed, shrivelled and with belittled hardihoods.
Am I shouting?
I know, forgive me, I am very, very high.
Five hours to go.
Why my sexual preferences should be of any interest to others baffles me. Or does it? I know most gossip-mongers are lonely sorts, who would benefit greatly from an hour undressed and prone with me. (I’m not fussy.) I try to recall the first two lines of Gatsby in such situations.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’
It is only after reading that masterpiece that one realises the narrator is not referring to the advantages of money, but to those of love, true friendship and decency. And so I shall go against my instincts to dismiss the intrusive types, and instead, I shall feel gratitude.
And if you want to know the truth of my predilections, for me, red-headed ladies were, by far, the sauciest. My Scarlet Women. And Leah Horsig was the next one.
We met in Paris as the brutal and punishing terms of the Treaty of Versailles were being decided in June 1919. I was en route to Italy. The Germans feigned gross indignation, but from Hühnerbein to the Kaiser, they were thrilled with how punitive it was to the Prussian spirit. That spongy lard-arse had a proclivity for figurative and literal flagellation and sado-masochism. He revelled in the role of the victim and never more so would he, along with the whole entitled officer class, enjoy being force-fed browned globules of turd by the British and Americans. In the spirit of that fine erstwhile Manhattanite, Randle Dibdin, after a blindfolded spanking at chess, the Prussians yelled quite privately for now, ‘Best of three, you cheating fuckers,’ to the Allies.
The thing is, as with that shit-eating masochist the Marquis69 in the Bastille down the road, they generally revel in coming back for more, the mucky sods.
The Treaty was signed on June the twenty-eighth, 1919, precisely five years after the assassination in Sarajevo and also on Saint Vitus’ Day, a supremely important time in the calendar of the cock-eyed and troubled Serb nationalists. This was guaranteed to irk Belgrade, and therefore Moscow, while the terms would be so vicious on the Germans (scuppered Navy fleet, lands handed to Poland and France, and appallingly steep reparations to be paid in American dollars) that the putrid little inbred Austrian painter was already screaming (to himself in all likelihood, but certainly with no friends) for a re-match. I have a tale to tell of that talentless little arsehole to come, when he tried to glory and elevate himself in my sparkling midst.
I was there in Versailles as it all happened, and then saw the high brass celebrating their guaranteed future employment and toasting their shares in the munitions factories. I spoke to Hühnerbein and the generals one night at Le Chat Blanc, our regular spot on Rue d’Odessa in Montparnasse in the filthy industrial layers of Paris, past the graveyards and the rancid slums that one invariably finds on the eastern fringes of any European city, for the poor bastards there are forced to choke on the shitty air blown from the hub and the elegant west. Forget the frowns, the hand-wringing, the froth and the self-piteous posturing at the terms of the Treaty. These Krauts were all, at their very core,70 privately thrilled and I recall them laughing about it and proposing a toast, as out of their midst that night, walked Leah Hirsig. Her sister was one of Hühnerbein’s broad-minded scrubbers.
The ecstatic shit-eating antics of the Germans were a precise duplicate of my putrid desires for her that very evening. I considered the exact tang and bitterness of our pending and lengthy analingus. I began to compose a verse to both foxy siblings. The little sister Leah reminded me of Solomon’s friend,71 for she had no breasts. She radiated an indefinable sweetness. Without wasting time on words, I began to kiss her. It was sheer instinct. She shared this emotion, and equalled my ardour. We continued with occasional interruptions, such as politeness required, or to answer the mindless intrusions of her sister in the rare intervals when Leah needed to catch her womanly breath. A monumental poem was forming in my mind, as we embraced in front of the intrigued crowd.
I saw Leah as the fortuitous culmination of much searching. She was another astonishing redhead, more pre-Raphaelite tangles to tumble on my cheeks and verdant pupils on the whitest of canvasses. As Frog was known to me as Frog, and I was generally regarded as The Beast, and other chums and lovers had names such as Horse, Rabbit, Eagle, Pony and Shrew, then I would know Leah as Frankenstein’s Monster. Just as the other nicknames were in no way derogatory, then Leah’s moniker was, in fact, the most complimentary of them all. I had by this point landed upon and thrust into several thousand mouths, bums and cunts, and so when I called Leah by this name, she knew that she was the very best bits taken from my vast legions of previous amours. It was as if each detail had been removed from another almost-faultless cadaver with adoration and then stitched by the lightest and deftest of hands to create the completeness of Her. I should not embarrass her or those with the original body part (or element of personality or characteristic), but suffice to say, this new Scarlet Woman of mine was, in the eye of this beholder, rampant fucking perfection. This chiselled and bespoke formula would not have worked as well for everyone, for not all would appreciate her lunacy or her peppery and marginally over-sized feet to sniff or her tendency to claw at my eyes, but such is life. She also liked to slap my exposed and dangling sack until my heavy tears of excruciating ecstasy fell like June rain, and with even more gusto than even darling La Gitana had managed to inspire. Our understanding was telepathic from within that first week. This is indeed rare, and ought to be treasured with vigour and steep gladliness.
Leah was the daughter of a mercenary Swiss gold-panner and her Peruvian lapsed man of God. They robbed around three dozen banks from Lima to Cartagena while both dressed as pregnant nuns, one with a giveaway five o’ clock shadow, a penchant for anything female and massive hands that seemed to have sprouted patches of the wiriest pubic hair below the knuckles. Leah was born in Martinique, after her parents had been stranded on a Dutch clipper in a vicious and unseasonable tropical storm while fleeing the continent of their crimes. Leah lived there on the island for eighteen years, charmed by the Frenchness of it, according to their façade of a story, but far closer to the truth was that they were comforted by a gargantuan stash of American, Peruvian, Venezuelan and Colombian currency and gold, and the absolute lack of any extradition treaty. On her eighteenth birthday, Leah was gifted from Papa the almost untouched take from the Central Bank of Caracas, and she was on the first available ship to Marseille, determined to transmigrate the spirit of her renegade parents to the Old World. She spoke Martinique French quite perfectly, and English and Italian too. Given her parents’ stylish evasion of the law and their maximum joy from crime and wrongdoing, Leah wished to continue this mischief on a stage for more worthy of her than little old Martinique, as delicious and spicy and comfortable as her almost-perfect youth had been. Like those morons at the Golden Dawn, when everything in life had come so easily to them, the natural response is to get ballsy and strive for contact with godliness and with a god. This is where I was so very charmed to oblige her. By Christ, I would oblige her.
The following morning, as she slept, tempting me with her arse, I resisted her exposed charms and instead wrote of her in the form of that nagging poem that had started to form in my mind the previous evening. I had real fun penning it, but tried, with real concentration, not to think instead of that Treaty, those scraps of paper in Versailles that would soon sculpt the century and all of our futures. I had seen this in my visions with Robbie in the Ceylon jungle, it was now making so much more sense.
From my diary:
Against all beastly instincts to wake her roughly and in worship, I sit here in the heat, writing a poem to Leah.
One long poem – an occasional publishable line thrown in when I weakened.
7.00 a.m.: I think I’ll collect all my filth in one poem and mark it Leah in plain figures.
10.00 a.m.: I think I did it.
It contained 666 words, just for my darling mother.
Goddess above me!
Snake of the slime
Alostrael, love me!
Our master, the devil
Prospers the revel.
Tread with your foot
My heart ’til it hurt!
Tread on it, put
The smear of your dirt
On my love, on my shame
Scribble your name!
Straddle your Beast
My Masterful Bitch
With the thighs of you greased
With the Sweat of your Itch!
Spit on me, scarlet
Mouth of my harlot!
Now from your wide
Raw cunt, the abyss,
Spend spouting the tide
Of your sizzling piss
In my mouth; oh my Whore
Let it pour, let it pour!
That clear and distinct Paris morning, I wrote of Satan’s number, but I thought of Christ at this time. I hold the poor fellow totally innocent of the religion that was foisted upon him posthumously. We have much in common, that great man and I, facing trials against the morose of mind and void of spirit, up against the twisted intentions of the self-interested and the vicious. Jesus’ penchant for warm and lustful flesh, his intriguing proximity to men and whores alike remind me of a younger me. Oh ye! Sufferer of trials and holder of victories, all warped in world view by the desperate and the imbecile. We would have been fine pals, he and I. How we would have bellowed across the centuries, bellowed at the stupidity of Man for believing in the slops of faecal mess, for which they hold the Truly Enlightened responsible. We both spread a simple and unfettered message of True Love, and one must question those hollow fuckers who find that distasteful, subversive or dangerous.
True Love. True Love.
During these days and nights in Le Chat Blanc, Hühnerbein spoke to me excitedly of burgeoning fascist movements in Spain, Portugal and Italy. In Rome, a melodramatic and prancing cut-throat called Benito Mussolini was the new pioneer of the right. In 1920, he was still eighteen months away from seizing power, but his star was certainly on the rise, convincing the wobbly-minded and desperate of spirit. The silly arsehole called himself Il Duce. (Oh! please. For heaven’s sake. I preferred to call him Fat Head.) I was briefed on him by some visiting chaps from Whitehall, and given reams of research on the clod. I adsorbed the lot, spouted the bully’s own rhetoric back to Hühnerbein and used this vast knowledge to impress him to the point of giggles.
If Germany were to have her revenge for defeat and the spiteful terms of the Treaty, then Hühnerbein’s chums and he would experiment in fertile Mediterranean soils and unforgiving national psyches first. While he was both daydreaming and pontificating to me, Prudence and Dandylyon provided some balancing soulful and nutritional ideas. They spoke instead of my destiny and how I must now finally found my own religion of Thelema. We took its inspiration and concept from François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais was a sixteenth-century French scholar, essayist, humanist, scholar and monk. In this text, he described the ideal of Thelema’s abbey as an anti-monastery, where the people were ‘spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free Will and pleasure’.
‘Just the ticket,’ I thought. And I pondered Rabelais’ own words: ‘If the skies fall, one may hope to catch the larks.’
The final consideration – a wholly selfish and personal one – was that I was now quite smitten with Leah, and needed to be with her and by her side. She knew Italy and Sicily well, and was ecstatic to learn of my intentions to take her with me as my Scarlet Woman. MI-1 thought it ideal that I observe the Italian situation up close while still laying the groundwork for my future infiltration into Germany. They knew already, of course, that a second war was inevitable.
In the summer of 1920, I told the Bavarian that it was time to define my own religion, by giving her a bona fide home. I would leave immediately for Sicily where I planned to find and found the Abbey of Thelema. Here I might be near enough to Rome to aid in his plans for a right-wing insurgency. Hühnerbein was thrilled by this, as his proximity to and friendship with the founder of a religion, a living and collaborating god, would only boost his standing in Berlin.
Leah and I both needed the countryside. After all of the horror of war and then the excesses of Paris, it was certainly once again time for me to rusticate. Prudence and Leah (with MI-1’s help) gathered a small mob of willing adherents and their eager children, all eager to breathe fresh Mediterranean air. They were all a carefree, barefoot and bohemian lot, quite unsuited to the England or France of the time.
We needed an unadulterated spot where I could tell the urchins in the morning that, ‘Up there is the sun. When it gets over there, you may return.’ I could send them off to play and know they would come back with grubby knees, smudged foreheads and a reddy-pink tone to their chops. They would then soon eagerly divulge their tales of mischief, stealing fruit from trees, handkerchiefs from washing lines and swimming in forbidden streams. I had a very precise picture of what was required for my Abbey. And most thrilling, I knew Leah would perpetually be offered on my altar there. And I on hers.
You stale like a mare
And fart as you stale;
Through straggled wet hair
You spout like a whale.
Splash the manure
And piss from the sewer.
Down to me quick
With your tooth on my lip
And your hand on my prick
With feverish grip
My life as it drinks—
How your breath stinks!
Your hand, oh unclean
Your hand that has wasted
Your love, in obscene
Black masses, that tasted
Your soul, it’s your hand!
Feel my prick stand!
Your life times from lewd
Little girl, to mature
Worn whore that has chewed
Your own pile of manure.
Your hand was the key to—
And now you frig me, too!
I had always fancied Italy. Byron and Shelley adored her, and like me, had her love forced upon them by exile, though mine was pretend, of course. In London, that rancid rag, John Bull was in the midst of one of its lunatic public attacks upon my character. It sold copies for them, but I benefitted more for it also gave my name the highest currency across the continent in Berlin. The last headline I saw in a copy that had made its way to Paris was
ANOTHER TRAITOR TROUNCED
Career and Condemnation of the Notorious Aleister Crowley We await an assurance from the Home Office or the Foreign Office that steps are being taken to arrest the renegade or prevent his infamous feet from ever again polluting our shores.
You get the idea. People continued to believe this nonsense, even without an arrest or a charge. Any sane, reasonable or analytical person would surely wonder why, and come to only one conclusion, as fantastical as it may have appeared. And that was that I was not who they claimed, but then again, I was not who I claimed to be either. So little imagination is such a let-down, but as I tipped my cap and winked boyishly to the spirit of Percy Blakeney, I left the Pimpernel’s Paris for my Sicilian years.
Drunkenness is a curse and a hindrance only to slaves. Shelley’s couriers were ‘drunk on the wind of their own speed.
Anyone who is doing his true Will is drunk with the delight of Life.
– Aleister Crowley
4 May 1921
We landed in Rome and, by train, dropped south. Of course.
I found the abbey after having consulted my I Ching72 each day while in Italy.
Perhaps fifty of us – at this point I was not even aware of many of the names of the willing mob assembled by my friends, and this added to my Kurtzian elevation – sailed south from Naples to the northern coastline of Sicily on a fishing boat provided by the First Lord of the Admiralty. It was odd that I only missed Winston when I sat opposite him and looked into his eyes. I then cherished each second, and privately wished I could enjoy this deep-shag carpet luxury every day. I guess this is the measure of a perfect friendship and the greatest of friends.
The crossing was smooth and blissful, as the adults burned weed and the children dipped their hands in the cerulean waters. Leah laid her head on my thigh and whistled, sang, whistled. The wind enveloped us, and bade us a good morning. Those who imagine the spirits of Italy reluctant to accept these bad seeds should think again. The porpoise squeaked a welcome. I knew them to be easily aroused critters, and we exchanged a glance. Upon departure from the mainland when the rope was lobbed onto the bow, Pompeii puffed out a smoke ring to wish us safe passage. Then as we neared Sicily, Mount Etna exhaled an almost identical chuff of dust to welcome us all.
We landed on the beach at Cefalù (pronounced Chay-fah-loo), a tiny fishing town with only a handful of dwellings and soft sand underfoot. We carried no baggage, no belongings. We were pioneers, adventurers in a vanguard that was beautiful and obscene.
When we climbed out of the boat, Leah stayed right by my side (I could sniff her), and we splashed the gentle breakers. Our skin dried from the knee down in the heat as our shins emerged from the Mediterranean. Leah, my emotional alchemist, seemed to turn the fishy brine on my hands into an aphrodisiac, as we inhaled the scent from our palms. She wanted me to take her there. Rasputin was indeed correct, God wanted us to fornicate. Even the Lord’s Prayer corroborated it, ‘Our Father who art in Heaven. Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy WILL be done.’ Thy WILL. Thy WILL.
Rub all the much
Of your cunt on me, Leah
Cunt, let me suck
All your glued gonorrhoea!
Cunt without end!
Amen! ’til you spend!
Cunt! you have harboured
All dirt and disease
In your slimy unbarbered
Loose hole, with its cheese
And its monthlies, and pox
You chewer of cocks!
Cunt, you have sucked
Up pricks, you squirted
Out foetuses, fucked
Till bastards you blurted
Out into space—
Spend on my face!
Rub all your gleet away!
Envenom the arrow.
May your pox eat away
Me to the marrow.
Cunt you have got me;
I love you to rot me!
This unruly mob bade farewell to our skipper. He gave a very English salute, then bellowed across the small expanse of foam, ‘I am sorry, sir. But this is from the First Lord of the Admiralty.’
He raised two fingers at me, his middle and forefinger with his palm facing towards his face.
‘He said you would understand.’
It was the invective of the English army, that curse73 and abuse reserved from the Anglo fighter to all of his enemies abroad.
I bellowed back across the waters, ‘Tell your boss that I am eyeing his wife. And she knows, and writhes at the prospect of being tarnished by a bullet-headed and fat-fingered god.’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘Repeat my message!’
He repeated the message, word-, intonation- and spirit-perfect.
‘Good lad!’
‘Thank you, sir.’
He grinned, saluted again, and set to sea with a business-like and happy swagger.
The children led the way, for the marvels appeared to be attuned to the quest of my Great Work of founding the Abbey and my religion. But first they took us to an ice-cream parlour, where we all sat and were brought icy water. I had some coins in my pocket, adequate for us all until the Bank of Palermo opened, though this, it soon became clear, was an irregular and unpredictable occurrence. The locals were, however, as welcoming as the porpoise, and allowed us to run an account, once they discovered that we were intending to stay. They knew of the generosity of those English poets who had gone before, and many a struggling business had flourished through the patronage of those strange foreign types, all heavy eyelids and slow melodramatic gestures of well-intended pomposity from too much opium.
MI-1 knew of three empty and rentable properties along that coastline. The children played games with the maps, as if searching for buried treasure. I guess, in a funny sort of way, that was precisely what we were all doing.
That afternoon, we all walked inland to the middle one. We did not need to look any further when we found her some three hours later. The moods of the tired children crescendo’d and thrummed as we neared the plot. This was a fair barometer, for both Leah and I knew we had found our paradise. We approached from the north, up the hill, that began to carry a tang of an orange and peach orchard, until the aroma was heavy and dense, forcing a mad delight upon us all. The wildflowers that framed the broad stone pathway were of intense whites, yellows and crimsons, all in a peak of bloom and pristine, as if the King of England were expected on that mountainside. And yes, the angle was steep enough to be considered as a perfect gradient for sex magick. The stone walls at the boundary of the property were overgrown with moss and high grass, capeweed and lanky dandelions. Golden midges danced in the sun and rested in tulip trees. They seemed as eager as giddy sons and daughters to show off the charms of the property that they had found first, inviting us generously into their secret. We walked over the threshold of the boundary, and the children already knew that we were home.
Immediately, I noticed two wells, and both were plentiful. The water was fresh, clean and chilled. The house itself was a large old place, perhaps three hundred years old, and imposing enough to take the name Abbey. It seemed to correlate perfectly with Rabelais’ vision of where one might found such a movement. She radiated this liberal desire, with her robust horticulture, her generous water and her well-lit rooms for lengthy consideration of sciences and arts, leavened yoga and intense meditation. We had vistas from weedy scrublands to the east and west to track the sun from morning to evening, where the orchard on both sides offered a dappling of her glare onto white walls and happy faces. It was almost impossible to feel melancholy on either flank at dusks and dawns, thrusting the artist into a frenzied creation that I had not experienced since Frog and I had snorted an ounce of powder by Loch Ness and then shut up.
Spend again, lash me!
Leah, one spasm
Scream to splash me.
Slime of the chasm
Choke me with spilth
Of your sow-belly’s filth.
Stab your demonic
Smile to my brain!
Soak me in cognac
Cunt and cocaine;
Sprawl on me! Sit
On my mouth, Leah, shit!
Shit on me, slut!
Creamy the curds
That drip from your gut!
Greasy the turds!
Dribble your dung
On the tip of my tongue!
Churn on me, Leah!
Twist on your thighs!
Smear diarrhoea
Into my eyes!
Splutter out shit
From the bottomless pit.
In the midst of my manly desire for Leah, I was very aware that this affair, this adoration was a fuel to achieve my True Will. If the love affair with La Gitana had forced me into accepting the likelihood of heartbreak and poetry, then I knew this romance was also not just lust and filth for its own end. Leah might even help us all expunge the drugs and the reliance on them from our lives, and propel us into greatness. Was it even perhaps a time to grow up? These thoughts would soon lead me to write my first and largely semi-autobiographical novel, The Diary of a Drug Fiend, there on Sicily. In twenty-seven days, twelve hours and forty-five minutes, I dictated the whole of the 121,000-word manuscript of this to Leah. I even added this in the notes to Part II of the text, and by crikey, I was serious.
The Abbey of Thelema at ‘Telepylus’ is a real place. It and its customs and members, with the surrounding scenery, are accurately described. The training there given is suited to all conditions of spiritual distress, and for the discovery and development of the ‘True Will’ of any person willing to seek a higher fulfilment. Those interested are invited to a) communicate with the author of this book through the publisher and b) visit with him upon request. He awaits you ecstatically.
It sold well, and kept us comfortable as Father’s wealth eventually started to erode. This was never a worry to me for I could always rely on the gullible to fill my coffers, and this of course, meant old ladies, the infirm and the Germans. The lads at MI-1 were perpetually generous with pounds sterling and the boundless resources afforded to an Empire: accommodation, transport, restaurant tabs for nourishment and booze, drug-dealers, doctors, lawyers, publishers. Unless I was travelling, I rarely carried any money. Everyone knew me, and either wanted me as a friend or wanted to avoid me as an enemy. I used this state of notoriety, but preferred not to exploit it. It was a fine line. I believe I judged it to perfection, even when in the nebulous midst of a week-long jag or the cloudy trough or pristine peak of a regular bender.
After Drug Fiend was finished and shipped off to my publisher, Mandrake Press, in London, I then wrote Moonchild in a six-week period. It was a time for real work. Next I attempted the notoriously tricky format of short stories.
‘The Testament of Magdalen Blair’ brought this review from some half-baked rotter. I was most proud.
‘One of the most horrible stories ever written’ (Penguin Encyclopaedia of Horror & the Supernatural)
The lad at the marginally more informed Manchester Guardian managed to grasp at least some of ‘His Secret Sins’.
‘Menacingly beyond the margins of sanity, and too troubling to even consider it as good or bad. Read it.’ (the Manchester Guardian)
And perhaps the best of the lot was a precise critique of ‘Stratagem’, a tale that had been accepted and published immediately by the English Review. I had long admired Conrad.
‘A subtle exposure of English stupidity. Without a doubt, the greatest short story I have read in three decades.’ (Joseph Conrad)
And so, a love like Leah’s allowed for a true roaming of the creative spirit. It was so efficient to have perpetual perfection in one’s presence. There was always a depressing stupidity in having had to waste uncounted and priceless hours in chasing what ought to have been brought to the back door every evening with the milk. I wrote my novels, we had sex magick, and, despite our best intentions on some days, we continued to take drugs, while the rules of the house allowed for and encouraged climbing, swimming and long walks. We were introduced to Palermo’s premier dealer in heroin, cocaine and peyote. His name was Amatore, and he was introduced to everyone at the Abbey. We shall meet him momentarily. Everyone had access to a limitless supply, but this was not to sanction vast use, but to provoke the opposite response of removing all temptation. I hoped that by doing this, the lesser beings in the commune would therefore not embarrass us when the Germans and the Italian fascists visited, for this time was coming and central to my plan and the goal of MI-1.
Turn to me, chew it
With me, Leah, whore!
Vomit it, spew it
And lick it once more.
We can make lust
Drunk on Disgust.
Splay out your gut,
Your ass hole, my lover!
You buggering slut,
I know where to shove her!
There she goes, plumb
Up the foul Bitch’s bum!
Sackful of skin
And bone, as I speak
I’ll bugger your grin
Into a shriek.
Bugger you, slut
Bugger your gut!
Wriggle, you hog!
Wrench at the pin!
Wrench at it, drag
It half out, suck it in!
Scream, you hog dirt, you!
I want it to hurt you!
I was now known to all as The Beast. This was a term of endearment, a moniker of love and, to me, a celebration of earth and nature. Well now, this Bête et Belle had pranks and devilry in mind. Our target was the Fat Head.
Leah shouted to me, as she held the fat rope and lowered the bucket containing a grinning and playful urchin into the chill of the well on a stuffy and airless June day. I do not even know if it was male or female, I just recall that the innocence of its androgyny ruled. That elegant and towering summer was in her early pomp, urging us on, nudging us to a euphoria that made us wonder if this was all real.
‘Daaaah-ling Beast?’
‘Yes, Monster?’
She always expelled a small gasp of (almost animal) delight when I called her that. This was especially amusing in the company of those who did not understand the depth of the compliment and adulation behind the name.
‘I have been thinking about Benito,’ she said.
‘Yes, so have I, my love. He might be a tough nut to crack. What were your thoughts? What are your conclusions?’
The child in the bucket touched the surface of the crystal water down the stone hole. There was a shriek of ecstasy that brought a visible joy to Leah’s face. Utter happiness lived between our gazes in those seconds, compounded and multiplied by the unbridled innocence of the gaiety and mirth in the well below us. Perhaps this is when we were at our best. Stop the world. Yes, I knew that evil was beginning to bubble across the blue water, but I already knew, deep down, that we would beat it.
‘Our victory over Benito must be a lasting one, and be a stain in his mind that he cannot scrub. We must leave here both as victors, but also with an ability to remind him of this at will in the future. We have to be able to trouble him and make him shudder whenever we wish and from a distance,’ she went on.
‘I agree. But what of the Germans?’
‘Well, it is key that they trust you over Benito, hold you in greater esteem. Their alliance with him is one of convenience. Their reliance on you comes in the form of speaking to their gods.’
‘Go on. I like it a lot.’
‘Men like Mussolini are used to getting their own way. And this feeds their power. It is self-perpetuating. He needs to experience misery and fear. His type is not used to it.’
She was good, this Scarlet Lass. She was very good. She was also most attentive to the splashing child and its safety, as she plotted the destruction of a dictator. She put her head below the rim of the stone well, at her hip height and yelled down to create her own echo, ‘I love you … love you … ve you … you … you …’
She stood erect again and continued speaking to me.
‘I love you, Leah,’ came out of the well with the deftest of pitches.
‘He is a coward, and this is where we attack. I have thought of several nasty tacks to take. He might be exposed as a pederast, but so what? His supporters wouldn’t believe it or would simply ignore it. Others would die for speaking of it. We could cripple him or assassinate him, but we would not want to be exposed and it is quite likely such martyrdom might increase his popularity.’
‘Exactly. We need to hollow out his mind, and let him know it is we who have done it. And this needs to also be our protection from him. We need him to know that our deaths will bring his own demise,’ I said. ‘And we must remember that it is the Germans who remain the true enemy. Benito is a means not an end,’ I added. ‘Subtlety makes these things so much more fun. These European types are quite blind to it, you know.’
‘I heard everything that you were saying,’ a voice came from behind us. It was Amatore, that strange fish of a drug-dealer, that marvellous outlaw with righteous wickedness within the grasp of his slim and manicured digits.
‘You need to be quiet. This talk is … how you say … seditious.’
Amatore really was a quiet and studied sort, who knew, of course, all kinds of weirdoes from his trade. I heard that he handled the wide spectrum of types with lofty but endearing even-handedness, and from what I saw, offered each of them that even-toothed grin set in a handsome, olive cheekboned frame that seemed so alluring; almost perfect both to Leah and to me. And that was the evening he had brought ether to us as a treat. He interrupted our shameless and overt plotting.
‘È un gran cagasotto. Dorme ogni notte con la luce accesa. Potresti spaventarlo a morte.’74
‘Really! Continue!’ I said.
‘Oh goody,’ squeaked Leah.
If he were really afraid of ghosts and ghouls to such a degree, one of a whimpering brat, perhaps it really was time to dabble in all that Black Magic stuff I was consistently accused of man-handling.
Leah said, ‘Take your own advice, Beast. If you’re going to get blamed for something, say, “Balls to it.” And do it regardless.’
She was right, now it was truly time to have some measured75 fun with it all.
‘I love you, Amatore,’ I said.
‘No problem, boss. Tell me when you want more ether. I must go into Palermo. Those jazz lads are fiends and need feeding.’ Leah’s Italian was as proficient as his English, the impressive and stylish brute.
‘What else do you know about him?’
When Amatore spoke his own dialect, he always spoke in Milanese.
‘È un prudente. Petrificato del sesso. Avresti spaventato a morte per una seconda volta. Anche parlare di un’orgia lo spingerà alla distrazione.’76
‘Anything else we need to know?’
‘Sì. Se sa che sei cazzo con lui, lui ti farà morire tutti.’77
And Amatore left, leaving us with vital new clues as to Benito’s destiny and a vast stash of ether and other goodies.
Beast-Lioness, squirt
From your Cocksucker’s hole!
Belch out the dirt
From your Syphilis soul.
Splutter foul words
Through your supper of turds!
May the Devil our lord, your
Soul scribble over
With sayings of ordure!
Call me your lover!
Slave of the gut
Of the arse of a slut,
Call me your sewer
Of spilth and snot
Your fart-sniffer, chewer
Of the shit in your slot.
Call me that as you rave
In the rape of your slave.
Fuck! Shit! Let me come
Alostrael—Fuck!
I’ve spent in your bum.
Shit! Give me the muck
From my whore’s arse, slick
Dirt of my prick!
Rumours of my constant orgies had swirled around London. Apparently and according to the Daily Mail and John Bull, I had forced many men into anal sex, the children had been given drugs, and one loud-mouth called Raoul Loveday claimed that I had made him drink cat’s blood and urine. Does no one ever know how to simply say, ‘No’? Am I so powerful to have everyone simply do what I say, even when they find it so abhorrent? For this is precisely what the clods appear to be suggesting. Grown-ups might make up their own minds.
Rotters and imbeciles had published lies. Nincompoops had bought and read those ghastly tabloids and relished the gossip, while neither Sir Percy Blakeney nor I had given a jot. We had declined legal offers to sue for slander, preferring to claim we were destitute in Italy and unable to fund such extravagances. The truth had been that we simply had to keep our innocence quiet, for behind the lines of mischief, one might run amok. To be precise, we were planning our move on the head of the Fascist Party and I now wanted to wield his fear of Black Magic as an ancient and troubling sword. My Benito, that Fat Head who was now running Italy.
I had been accused of being a black magician. No more foolish statement had ever been made about me. I despised the thing to such an extent that I could hardly believe in the existence of people so debased and idiotic as to practice it. I could not have celebrated The Black Mass, if I had wanted to, for I was not a consecrated priest of the Christian Church. The only black things about me were the resin I smoked, the occasional splendid Negress I joyously polluted in Cairo, and the night skies above Cefalù that we, as the oddest family in the land, so adored.
*
From down in the well, the playful child yelled to be brought up, and Leah pulled in the rope. I helped her, but only so that I could rub her from behind through the thin yellow cotton she wore. My dubious and loving intentions could not be masked, for I too wore only thin cotton around my centre. The child climbed out, exhausted, spent and ecstatic. It fell to the weedy floor, gasping out laughter. We both stared at the vision at our feet. I knew Leah to be maternal, but suspected her to be barren. Leah never let this cloud ruin her day.
Leah then looked at me, and spoke.
‘I wish we were able to control his dreams. Instead, we might have him seduced by three vampirical beauties, cursed with a venereal disease or with persistent lice.’
‘Yes, but the madness from syphilis would only make him more unpredictable and therefore dangerous,’ I said. ‘I too have considered cheap stunts, traditional tricks and ghost stories, but these are always too flimsy and not sturdy enough to last over time, for, as even that child knows, there are no such things as ghosts. Never mind ones that we can control. The weakness and the belligerence of his mind are our key points of attack. Spiritual fear and sex are his weak points.’
‘Beast, let us sit and meditate. The malice we seek shall come to us.’
And so three hours later, after a lengthy meditation on the eastern slopes, I yelled, ‘Leah, my love, I have it.’
It was that remarkable morning in the rosy June of 1922 when that strange aroma passed my nose. It made me gag for a second, it was wholly out of place in the orchards. My tantra was interrupted, but so blissful was it that my landing was cushioned. I smiled and heard a child giggling through the trees, the birdsong competing for the air waves. The wind brought the vile tang again, a sliver of a stench that fondled a memory from decades earlier, and, in my mind, I heard the sturdiest of words. And the inspiration that we sought came from the recollection and the spirit of a filthy Russian holy man.
‘Ai lins bilele unui înger.’78
I heard it again in my mind, even more loudly. Rasputin, you magnificent fucker.
I now yelled out those same words.
‘Beast? What is it?’
‘Can you smell it? Can you smell the shit?’
And there, from a frothing sewer pipe that simmered in the early June heat, I had my answer as to how we would goad a dictator.
I smiled at Leah, confident in the coalescing plan around my magnificent Russian cornerstone. ‘Our salvation, my darling, is Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin.’
I resolved to use the teachings of a mad monk to haunt this pioneering fascist. My Russian brother, my friend and my hero would lead the spiritual cavalry charge and come to our rescue, blaspheming, copulating, neck veins prominent, and worryingly ripe.
‘I shall explain, Monster.’ (Gasp!) ‘Come sit between my knees, while we stare at this day.’
Leah moved to me. She dropped to the ground, settling down with her back to me and between my knees, holding my ankles with those slender fingers.
‘First, my love, I shall dine with Benito in Rome, both arranged and attended by Hühnerbein. Towards the end of our dinner, invisible ink shall turn deep lilac on my forehead and cheeks in the form of a pentagram and two inverted crucifixes. I shall chant mumbo jumbo and Sanskrit as if under a spell, a troubling invocation. I shall laugh it all off, as I then calm and order a fine brandy, sending the coward scarpering for his staff car. Several playful fires shall then start around him in synchronicity in the coming hours and then again throughout the following days. This will make him afraid of me and know the rumours of my devilish connections are true. Hühnerbein will not know that this will petrify the duke, and he will be looking instead for an impressed Benito. This will make Benito will feel even more isolated. Bear with me.’
Her head dropped back onto my thigh.
‘Secondly, I shall then write an essay to be published in London, Moscow, Paris and across Italy, each in the local language. This piece shall declare the New Tenets of Thelema based on the teachings of the New Obsidian Lord, the Holy Man Rasputin. In it, I will be heralded as a god. It shall be called something,’ and I waved my left hand skyward, ‘like How Perpetual Fornication Can Deliver the Vilest Sinner to God the Quickest. This will make him afraid of Rasputin, whom he believes to be dead.’
She laughed. Then she laughed again and more loudly this time, as the idea seemed to seep in.
‘The final part of the plan is thus. Now always remember that the Italians are suckers for visions. They see the face of the weeping Madonna in browning apples, drying paint, and bruised thighs. And so, I shall employ a whole squadron of mischievous sorts. They shall be tall Legion-types, and then some lanky agents of England, and then some actor friends of my pal, Randle Dibdin, currently not employed at the Cinecittà Studios in Rome. These lads will all be avowed enemies of Il Duce.’
‘And what will they do, Masterful Beast?’
She, of course, already knew the answer.
‘Ha ha ha! They shall dress in stinky robes and appear yelling Slavic filth outside churches across the country. They might or might not be joined by an actor, playing a chubby-thumbed, bullet-headed Englishman with demonic symbols on his face. They might or might not be joined by an actor of unimportant dimensions, for all he or she needed to do was to wear a goat’s head.’
She shuffled in excitement.
‘These apparitions and visions of Rasputin (with troubling chums) shall be coordinated and synchronised across his country, as well as the islands of Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily to cause absolute confusion and fear-mongering. To further weigh on the prancing Duke’s mind, exact replicas shall also be reported from several locations in Italian East Africa and around the Horn. They are an even more superstitious lot there, and so these myths shall soon be magnified and exaggerated; all the better to make Mussolini shudder and lay awake at night, sweating like a well-worn whore in church.’
‘And if he knows you are cavorting with the ghost of Rasputin, he dare not touch you in this life – or the next – for fear of reprisals by your spirits and by the spirits of your pals and followers.’
‘Precisely, my darling!’
‘There is only one thing he would fear more than the man who brought down the Romanovs.’
Leah finished my thought.
‘And that is a dead Russian holy man, an English demon-invoker and a representative of slaughtered nature all coming to ignite Italy into a frenzy of fucking for God.’
‘Yes.’
And then we sat and smiled, as I thought of how we could even desecrate a few altars here and there, and perhaps pay a few ladies to claim they had been soiled by the spirit of the Russian monk with embellishments of animal ferocity, near-death climaxes afore the Godhead and shuddering man-widths. And how He growled and drooled and slobbered in what appeared to be a rural Romanian twang.
Meanwhile, in front of us in the long grass, the androgynous one, with its yellow curls and lilac aura, gurgled a rare and guttural joy. And made daisy chains, as I thanked the stench of shit in that generous June breeze for helping me to hollow out the mind of one of the biggest cunts that ever lived.
Checkmate! Best of three, perhaps?
I knew that this would plant a fearful and horrific Pavlovian seed within Benito, one that I might then trigger at will in the future with the appearance of a bearded giant and his pals at Faustian crossroads and by deserted churches around that marvelled land.
The Italians are famously rigorous within the constraints of the church, but just imagine if that faux passion could be harnessed through their equally eager groins and become instead a thoroughly righteous fuel to sexual union. What I mean to say is, what if God Himself were to sanction free love in Italy, it would be a magnificent and self-fuelling chaos. This was my way in.
Grigori would have been so proud. I imagined that that fair lad, Christ himself, would also have smirked at the humour of it all. Dandylyon, Orr, Prudence and Winston were ecstatic at the news of the prank. They scoured John Bull on my behalf at a luncheon at the club (Prudence was permitted as a nurse) and found no mention of a fascist dictator, petrified to leave his palace. The editor did, however, cover at length Rasputin’s printed essay on free love from beyond the grave. MI-1 types all chuckled across the breadth of a continent at the thought of the Fleet Street fury in their little boy paws and bubbling piety as they typed of my genius and my filth.
Eat it, you sow!
I’m your dog, fuck, shit!
Swallow it now!
Rest for a bit!
Satan, you gave
A crown to a slave.
I am your fate, on
Your belly, above you.
I swear it by Satan
Leah, I love you.
I’m going insane
Do it again!
The propagandists, the purposefully misinformed historians and the gossipers will tell you that I was ignominiously thrown off Sicily by Il Duce’s strongmen. Of course, this was nonsense. The truth was, in 1923, after three years on the island, my work was largely done. I could make Mussolini cower and shrink from a thousand miles. I had written like I never had, I had performed rituals that would take my infamy to new levels, I had even hosted Hühnerbein and his Bavarian and Prussian clowns with a regularity and proximity that made us all feel like brothers. Winston considered all of this as mission accomplished, especially as the Germans who had passed through the Abbey had names that history would note: Hess, von Ribbentrop, Goebbels and Speer. I wrote thus to Dandylyon:
In the absence of the magical jungle resin goo, I charm the nasty bastards with bawdry poetry in English and German, anti-London chat, and even a few mirthful songs that describe the shortcomings of the Anglos in sexual union and cuisine. Many times at supper with them, I lash out at Benito, for I know that if I am to be seen as a truly audacious and brave menace, then slandering Il Duce on his own turf in front of his allies shall certainly achieve this. I see them glance at each other with impressed nods. I know that if I were in a fist fight with Benito, they would cheer me on. Remember too, they think I have Satan on my side. What an ace to hold that is!
Sicily has inflated my spirit and my cause. The intensity of the sex magick has thrilled the grown-ups, while leaving us leavened, youthful and delirious. Our drug intake has peaked and then subsided as I feel more in control than I ever thought I would. My filthy poetry has reflected my true self for the first time, I feel. We frolic with children, and I have gained a window into what a true childhood with other small friends might be like. It makes me think of my father a lot, and always fondly. And quite crucially and a source of great pride to me, I have founded a religion of my own. I thank you, Mr Churchill, for this.
MI-1, Winston, Leah, Dandylyon, Orr, Prudence and I all knew it was time for me to return, but it was far more important to allow Hühnerbein to believe that he had hatched a plan to have me spy for Germany in London. It was 1923 and they were now on the rise. They wanted their best man in London. Again, I was thrilled to oblige.
We all walked down to the port of Cefalù in a similarly ecstatic and thrilled manner as to how we had all arrived, the children played, the flowers bloomed, and the family at the ice-cream parlour fed us all into sated raptures. The same small boat and mariner welcomed us with a very English salute.
We waded out to the boat, void of belongings, just as we had arrived.
I turned to bid farewell to Sicily’s nature and smiled at her king, Etna. He exhaled a smoke ring to acknowledge our departure with a fondness. Sicily would miss me, for she appreciates the mischievous and sly imp. I blew her a kiss, and promised to come back one day. And I always preferred to keep my promises, and I still do.
Have not I spoken, even I, Benito,
The big, the brave, the mighty Mussolini,
The ultra-modern Caesar. With my ‘Veni
Vidi, Vici’? – let all the world agree, too!
Does a mere mountain think that it is free to
Stir up sedition? Shall such teeny-weeny
Volcanoes venture to display their spleeny
And socialist cant? – Subside, mosquito!
– ‘A Song for Italy,’ 1923, Aleister Crowley
69 The Marquis de Sade was moved out of the Bastille the day before it was stormed on July the fourteenth, 1789 leaving just seven symbolic clods in there, but wars have been fought over less.
70 I avoid purposefully the term, ‘soul’.
71 Solomon 8.8 – We have a little sister. And she hath no breasts. What shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?
72 An ancient divination text that offers advice and direction through the choice of random numbers.
73 The apocryphal word has the archers of King Henry flicking the Vs to the French at Agincourt to show they still had their crosshairs. The dispute to its origins lingers. It might be more simply a version of the cuckold sign. Quite simply, it means ‘Fuck off’.
74 ‘He is a big pussy cat. He sleeps with the light on. You could scare him to death.’
75 Measured is key, for my pre-eminent knowledge of the Occult allowed me to walk the most precipitous of lines with bold confidence.
76 ‘He is a prude. Petrified of sex. You would scare him to death for a second time. Even talk of an orgy would send him to distraction.’
77 ‘Yes. If he knows you are fucking with him, he will slaughter you all.’
78 ‘Blessed are those who lick the balls of an angel.’