- THE
- TREGERTHEN
- HORROR
- Aleister Crowley,
- D.H. Lawrence
- & Peter Warlock in Cornwall
- A Crown Quarto luxury quality paperback on art paper with many photographs (180 pp).
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- Signed by the Author
-
Greta Sequeira -
Crowley's last love
A young woman knocked on the door of
the Eagle’s Nest – a house above Zennor – in a state of distress.
The house was occupied by Katherine Arnold-Foster, formerly Ka Cox, one of
the early loves of Rupert Brooke. Apparently something terrible had
happened in the cottage above − an incident involving the notorious
wizard, Aleister Crowley, then living at The Carn, Tregerthen, allegedly
conducting strange rites at churches and ancient sites in the
neighbourhood. Katherine Arnold-Forster hurried up to the cottage and
confronted Crowley and his wicked set. An appalling argument ensued, after
which she died, either trying to get back from The Carn or in the building
itself. A report of the case
was made but later it went missing or was destroyed. One of the men
involved with Crowley – apparently a conjuration had taken place −
was in a terrible state, gibbering mad.
Edward Alexander Crowley or ‘Aleister Crowley’ has been called the Picasso of the occult. He was the most versatile and notorious wizard of his age whose life was an Arabian Nights fantasia rather than a biography. On attaining his mid-forties, he achieved the distinction of being called ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’ and ‘A Monster of Depravity’ − titles that simultaneously titillated and petrified. Towards the end of his career, when his magical fires were burning low, he spent a brief period in Cornwall and managed to generate yet another scandal.
Inevitably someone
with such a motley reputation attracts rumours and hearsay. Many
latter-day wizards and witches have claimed association with Crowley. He
is often invoked in locations where he would have been either out of place
or unavailable. So hearing of this Cornish connection, I thought I'd look
into the matter, find out whether Crowley actually was in Cornwall,
and to what extent the rumours spread about him were accurate.
THE LAWRENCE TRAIL
A place with which he is associated is the hamlet of Higher Tregerthen, near Zennor. There, in 1916, D.H. Lawrence, along with Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murray, tried to found an ideal community called 'Rananim'. The composer, Peter Warlock, a conscientious objector (who also dabbled in the occult) joined them in a cottage further up the slope along with his girlfriend nicknamed 'Puma'. Oddly enough, Crowley and Lawrence were both published by the English Review under the editorship of Austin Harrison. Furthermore they both had a liking for sunshine, deserts, the great god Pan and the peasant way of life. Their frank, fearless attitude to sexual matters is another issue upon which they find accord. Crowley dedicated his collection of stories Golden Twigs (variations upon themes found in Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough) to 'David Herbert Lawrence' but, despite philosophical similarities, the latter was not eager to trade commendations. “I'm a bit sorry you've got Aleister Crowley at such heavy tonnage,” he wrote to Inky Stephensen, a director of Mandrake and promoter of both Crowley and Lawrence, “I feel his day is rather over.”
Although contemporaries who crossed territories and shared friends and acquaintances − Katherine Mansfield smoked cannabis with Crowley on one occasion − the two men never met. Furthermore Crowley's Cornish escapades post-date the Rananin circle by nearly two decades. The rumours surrounding Crowley’s visit or visits concern black masses being enacted in churches, dancing naked around stone circles and, more seriously, drawing in a young couple and bringing about a fatal accident, possibly a death. Reports persist of him visiting Trencrom Carn or Zennor Quoit where hundreds of years ago, it is alleged, the witches of Penwith used to assemble at twelve o clock on Midsummer’s Night. Other, peripheral stories circulate, like the anecdote of Gerald Priestland, who says that a house in the Land’s End region, where Crowley had once lived, was several years later occupied by two women, one of whom was found dead and the other babbling the devil had shown himself to her. As evidence, this does not bear much scrutiny, save for those who are satisfied by the most nebulous of connections. However, at the back of such constructs, lingers the notorious presence of a man who was never able to fade into the background.
RUMOURS AND FRAGMENTS
For my part, I did not take the rumours seriously and initially doubted whether Crowley had visited the Duchy at all. Allowing for the spectacular publicity attending his antics, I reasoned that, if a sensational event involving him had taken place, the press would have had a field day, as they did in the 1920s, when they frothed over the goings on at his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily.
But owing to a couple of chance meetings, I was forced to revise this view. One Saturday, in the early 1990s, I was drinking at Pentewan with Colin Wilson and a middle-aged lady joined us. She had been an old friend of Colin's and was called Molly. While living in Devon, she told us, she had been friendly with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. They were a charming couple, she recalled. “Sylvia was a perfectly happy normal young housewife.” Then, moving away from the Plath tragedy, her talk turned to Bruce Chatwin, near to whom she now lived, now dying of AIDS. Finally Molly started to reminisce about Cornwall and her memories of Frank Baker - “Dear Frank” - from whom she turned to the incident of the young couple and Crowley, “that dreadful man”, saying he had caused a death or tragic accident to occur.
I did not question her because it was not appropriate to the situation. What she said did not sound like hearsay, more like jagged, living memory, yet no exact details were provided, only a hint of something dreadful. But what I did do is manage to make contact with the few people who remember the incident and by putting the various pieces together, assemble a picture of an extraordinary group of men and women, with Crowley at their centre, who not only performed rituals, but worked as spies and occult disinformers, stirred powerful rumours and ripples in the area around Land's End - so much so their names were given as suspects at the time of the Walton Murder, investigated by Fabian of the Yard.
'The Tregerthen Horror' is Now Available at this site (see Buy Now buttons) in a large, attractively illustrated and cheaply priced format. Copies are also obtainable from <Lulu.com> from whose website I hope to issues copies of Abraxas 20.
THE AUTHOR: PAUL
NEWMAN
Born
in the West Country, Paul Newman has written a variety of books, ranging
from topographical and biographical studies to works on social history and
archaeology. He was brought up in Somerset and moved to Cornwall in the
mid–1980s. His novel Galahad (2004) won the Peninsula Prize for a
story reflecting the cultural and historical diversity of South West
England.
PRESS
OPINIONS
The Hill of the Dragon (1979)
People
who set out to write well-researched books on unexplained phenomena
without an axe to grind deserve an award for heroism. Scientists and the
incurious will snipe and lunatic fringe draw hysterical conclusions. So it
must be particularly cheering to Paul Newman, author of a neat and witty
book on dragons, to learn from the Blashford-Snell expedition that an
18-foot Saurian is still alive and well and eating people. Mr Newman’s
book is great treat for the romantic zoologist, exploring the world-wide
dragon myths with a thoroughness that would have delighted to late Willy
Ley and Rupert Gould.
(Elizabeth Hogg – The Daily Telegraph)
Somerset Villages (1986)
In this delightful impressionistic guide, Paul Newman takes us through the many villages of Somerset, paying dues to the virtues of Cheddar Cheese, Taunton Cider and Hamstone. With a sharp eye and easy, evocative style, he opens our eyes to things we would otherwise overlook or ignore.
(The Countryman)
The Meads of Love (1994)
The biography, the first since the poet’s son wrote an idealized portrait following Harris’s death, is written with wit and style; it sets the homespun life against the great events of the time, and uses the poems to make intelligent guesses about Harris’s character.
(DM Thomas – The Guardian)
Lost Gods of Albion (1998)
The
delight of this book is that it is a well-read and wry survey of the
extraordinary variety of response and interpretation the hill-figures have
evoked down the centuries.
(Richard Mabey – Daily Telegraph)
(Ronald Hutton – Antiquity)
A History of Terror (2000)
Since human beings became aware of their own existence, people have been afraid. But have they always been afraid of the same things? Wild animals, spirits, demons and psychopaths: down the ages, the objects of our anxieties have changed and shifted. In this elegantly written, engagingly conversational and superbly informative book, Paul Newman charts the shapes and sizes our fear has taken, from the rustic ‘panic’ of ancient herdsmen suddenly confronted with the Great God of the wild, to postmodern websurfers, overwhelmed by the glut of useless facts on the ‘information superhighway’.
(Gary Lachman – Fortean Times)
Galahad (2004)
The reader will soon be disarmed by the sheer inventive gusto of Mr Newman’s imagination. In these pages we meet not only King Arthur and the other knights of the Round Table but the necromantic King Bladud of Bath and his amazing Romano‑Celtic flying machine, the mythic figure of Herne the Hunter (originally the Celtic God Cernunnos) whose disembodied head is drawn across the British countryside by four oxen; a singing dog who gives Galahad some useful hints; three bloodthirsty Vikings; the Wicker Man, King Lear (this time with three sons); the lovely Catherine, Bladud’s daughter, who administers to the inebriated Galahad a sharp kick where it hurts most; and a host of bizarre human and animal characters. One might perhaps be forgiven for thinking that this is a sort of Arthurian Harry Potter story. Far from it, however, for this poetic and fabulous romp through Celtic chivalry and landscape raises some deeply important questions. Galahad is a kind of holy fool, innocent and always well meaning, who stumbles into bewildering situations yet somehow, by sheer luck or providence, emerges still confident and determined in his quest… Galahad can truly be compared to no other book written on this theme: T H. White’s marvellous saga, ‘The Once and Future King’, was the last previous attempt in English; but White’s satire is benign and playful compared to Newman’s.
(Donald R. Rawe – Western Morning News
Aleister Crowley and the Cult of Pan (2005)
Few more nightmarish figures stalk through the pages of English literature than Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), poet, magician, mountaineer, drug-taker and agent provocateur. When he died, he left behind a mass of poems, essays, lyrics, meditations and narratives that few scholars have ever bothered to assess. In this book Paul Newman dives into the occult mire of Crowley’s works and fishes out gems and grotesqueries that are by turns ethereal, sublime, pornographic and horrifying in their bitterness and revulsion. Showing how Crowley, like Wilde before him, stood in ‘symbolic relationship to his age’, this groundbreaking study relates him to contemporaries like Rupert Brooke, G.K. Chesterton and the Portuguese modernist, Fernando Pessoa.
Buy Now at Lulu.Com
Paul Newman
Email <lordcrashingbore@btinternet.com>