Black Magic on Trial: Aleister Crowley, Libel, Litigation and the Law Courts
This presentation aims to survey the various legal battles faced or initiated by one of the twentieth-century’s most notorious and influential practitioners of the occult. By anyone’s standards Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) was a litigious individual who sought recourse to the law on more than a few occasions. Of the three main legal disputes (1911, 1922 and 1934) in which he was either a defendant or plaintiff, the most notorious case was the trial dubbed the ‘Black Magic’ Libel Action of 1934 in which Crowley sought legal redress to an incident dating back to his Cefalù days, where he had established the Abbey of Thelema. A memoir entitled Laughing Torso (1932) by Nina Hamnett (1890–1956), in which a lurid passage appears, raised Crowley’s hackles as he claimed that he was being libelled by referring to his occult practices as black magic. Having lost the case and having to pay damages, Crowley’s precarious financial problems ended in declaring bankruptcy the next year. Coverage of the trial was syndicated throughout the press and helped to seal Crowley’s notorious reputation.
No stranger to the law courts, Crowley’s first brush with the legal system dates back to the incident known as the ‘Battle for Blythe Road’ in 1900 but which did not go any further due to a solicitor’s wise piece of advice. His divorce case, initiated by his estranged wife, Rose Kelly, became a cause célèbre. His involvement, however, with the law did not all end in losses as in the case of the ‘Looking Glass’ Trial (1911) and also the one involving his novel The Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922), both involving libel, and both of which concluded in Crowley’s favour.
Given his self-inflicted and self-promoted notoriety, particularly from the yellow press of the 1920s onwards, Crowley’s reputation, one in which he sometimes relished, became a challenge for him as it preceded him and the trials he went on to lose, it may be argued, tended to eschew evidence. Trial by character rather than by evidence seems to have been the order of the day.
Speaker Bio:
Andrew Wiseman is a cultural historian, specialising in the Scottish Highlands from the late medieval to the modern period, who has developed a keen interest, perhaps even an unhealthy one, in Boleskine House and its long-held association with the iconoclastic occultist Aleister Crowley. He is currently editing a number of works and has authored around twenty chapters and articles as well as numerous blogs and mainstream publications. As author of the forthcoming title Lord Boleskine: Aleister Crowley and the House of the Beast 666, a detailed and engaging account of Crowley’s residence at his Highland home will be offered as well as the controversial legacy which he left in his wake.
Curated & Hosted by:
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.
Image: Wall paintings in a room in the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily, Italy, used by Aleister Crowley as a sleeping room. Image by Erik Albers. Public Domain.
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