There was a tragic postscript to the Rites of Eleusis in August 1912, with the death of the actress-dancer who played the role of The Moon.
Ione de Forest (her stage name; she was born Jeanne Heysel) had already been much praised in a staging of Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird, and she was loved by Ezra Pound (she is addressed as “O woman of my dreams” in his poem ‘Dance Figure’, and mourned in his poem ‘Dead Ione’). She was not a member of the A∴A∴, had no interest in magic, and had simply answered an advertisement in The Stage, but this brought her in close contact with Crowley's circle, and – despite having recently married engraver Wilfred Meynell, in December 1911 – she had a relationship with Victor Neuburg, distracting him, as Crowley saw it, from magic and from Crowley himself.
Ione was troubled and people noticed her unhappiness, made worse by divorce proceedings. In the summer of 1912 she and Meynell separated; she moved into Flat 1, Rossetti Studios and also acquired a pearl-handled revolver. On 1 August she told her friend Nina Hamnett that she was going away, and that Hamnett could have some clothes if she came round the following day. After letting herself into Ione's studio the next morning, Hamnett found her dead body: she had shot herself through the heart.
Arthur Calder-Marshall shapes this into a polished short-story-like episode, in which Ione shoots herself after Neuburg speaks harshly to her (“If you go out of that door, I shall kill myself!”; “All right – kill yourself then.”). Neuburg never forgave himself, and in turn he never forgave Crowley. As Neuburg told it, that night Neuburg had been possessed by the spirit of Mars – he had been violent and aggressive – because Crowley had not “closed the Temple” properly; he had not brought Neuburg down again before letting him out on the street.
Jean Overton Fuller has a completely different version centring on Ione's marriage and her sexual difficulties. Whatever happened, in Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), Crowley – writing as The Master Therion – claims magical responsibility:
An adept known to THE MASTER THERION once found it necessary to slay a Circe who was bewitching brethren. He merely walked to the door of her room, and drew an astral ‘T’ (‘traditore’ and the symbol of Saturn)1 with an astral dagger. Within 48 hours she shot herself.
As a boast for the effectiveness of magic, it reads like something from the fictional pages of Moonchild. There is no doubt who this adept is meant to be (and more than one Crowley biographer, perhaps by accident, simply omits the first four words).