Crowleyan Folklore at Netherwood

There's a large amount of stuff that's accumulated this year for the blog that I just don't have time to write up properly. Anyway, as it's the day after Halloween I thought this piece from my current research was appropriate.

At the moment I'm looking into Aleister Crowley as a figure from English folklore, the most ubiquitous historic candidates are, I suppose, Dick Turpin, Nell Gwyn and Oliver Cromwell, about whom a wealth of folklore exists, much of which concerns various secret tunnels that they used/had constructed - that's all covered in my book 'Secret Tunnels of England: Folklore & Fact'.

What I want to look into at the moment are the connections that have been forged over the years between Crowley and various English or UK locations, some of which he may never have even visited. This was sparked by reading this week The Tregerthen Horror by Paul Newman, which I'll try to review in the next post. In a nutshell: this is an entertaining enough book that starts out fairly sensibly inquiring into an apparently 'mysterious' death in a remote Cornish cottage, but then attempts to trawl in so many murders with ostensibly 'occult' links and a cast of Bohemian and eccentric characters so vaguely connected (although many had met Crowley) that towards the end it becomes hard not to laugh out loud at the absurdity of it all - we even get the Occult Nazis thrown in.

To start with let us return to Hastings and Netherwood. As I say in p.5 of that book: 'One can still occasionally read in the 'Hastings & St Leonards Observer' about "Crowley's Curse' on the town, whereby if you live here you will never be able to leave and if you do leave you will always come back eventually. It is said that throwing a stone with a hole in it into the sea will lift the curse on any Hastings resident.' What seems strange is that Crowley would curse a place where he enjoyed a reasonably comfortable time, albeit increasingly subject to illness, in the intellectually stimulating environment of Netherwood and with access to the famous Hastings Chess Club to pursue his favourite pastime.

There is plenty of information on the folklore of stones with natural holes in them, called Hag Stones, used to deter witches, often hung outside the front door of a house.  See for example here and here. Interestingly there is also Crowleyan folklore attached to the quoits of Cornwall, which I will mention in another post on the Beast in the West Country.

As far as Netherwood itself is concerned The Tregerthen Horror includes some interesting material that I hadn't come across before about the house after his death. I quote from pages 114-115 - my comments in square brackets:

'Crowley may have been dead, but his spirit hovered around Hastings and its environs. A newspaper report on his deserted room being hung with mysterious, oppressive paintings like 'totem poles' [probably The Pier, 1934, known to be in his room], the purpose of which could not be understood. After the boarding house closed [c.1969/70] Netherwood acquired a spooky reputation and lapsed into dilapidation. Packs of boys would clamber over the high barrier and explore the grounds. One youthful marauder recalled entering the Victorian ruin and creeping down to the cellar where a startling sight awaited him. Strewn around the darkness were what might be termed 'cardboard sculptures', cut-outs, man-shaped and emblematic, heavily crayoned and held together by string. They were 'relics' Crowley had used for ritual purposes. It was indefinably creepy, seeing them forlornly hung up on rusty nails and over the backs of broken chairs in that static, dust-filled silence.

'The magician had long passed on, yet his eerie, slightly childish devices lingered like vestiges of an arcane purpose beyond resurrection. [Or maybe they actually were just children's cardboard cut-out figures, or some 'artwork' by an earlier resident. There are a number of quite detailed accounts written by visitors to AC at Netherwood and while they mention the paintings there is nothing about these artefacts.]

'Thus the myth was born in Hastings, the myth of the demon Crowley who, some allege, cursed the place, sapping the willpower of its occupants and making it impossible for them to leave. Hastings became Ixion's wheel, a destiny to which one was tied in the same way that one was tied to drugs, alcohol or the dole queue. In the last two decades [the book was published in 2005] the fortunes of the town started to decline. Crime, narcotics and  powerful Goth scene [more Steampunk these days] dominated the youth culture and Crowley - a heroin addict himself - naturally featured in the myth-making. Although Netherwood was no longer standing, teenagers would point to any brooding property and identify it as the place where the beast had once lived [ a number of gloomy candidates still existed along The Ridge when I first moved to Hastings over 10 years ago, but most have since been demolished, including the Robert de Mortain pub, right next to the site of Netherwood, which was demolished and rebuilt as a small 'gated community' over the last couple of years.]

'Hence Crowley, who had planned to usher in a new aeon of light and love, became associated with the darkness of addiction, dehydration and spiritual inertia. The joyous dance of Pan was reincarnated in the wavering stagger of the junkie negotiating the chip-spattered, polystyrene-carton-clogged streets desperately seeking his ultimate fix.' [ Doesn't make you want to come here on holiday, does it?]

What I always find exasperating in books of this kind is that there are no footnotes and very few references that would enable a researcher to verify various statements and accounts - many of which are taken from novels that the author believes are actually romans a clef that can be taken as 'factual'. At least there is a bibliography, which I am currently exploring.

While working on the revised edition of Netherwood I was told that film maker and Crowley obsessive Kenneth Anger had visited Netherwood when he was in this country toward the end of the 1960s, at a time the house was still operating as a guest house - he stayed for a period with Jimmy Page in his amazing house in Kensington (before he had Robbie Williams for a neighbour). I wrote to Anger at an address I was given in Las Vegas but I never received a reply.

Legendary folk singer Shirley Collins, who grew up in Hastings, recalls (as David Tibet notes in the foreword to Netherwood and as I heard at a folk horror conference) that as a girl she was told not to enter the grounds of Netherwood as a 'black magician' lived there and she would either cross over the road when walking along that part of The Ridge or peddle past furiously on her bike.

A local band has made a record about Crowley's Curse: here

To conclude for now: at a talk I gave a few months ago in London - not on Netherwood or Crowley - an elderly woman approached me afterwards and told me that she had lived in Hastings as a young girl and teenager in the 1960s. She had visited Netherwood many times, as her boyfriend was the son of the owners. They would make love in the house when the parents were out - their favourite room for making the beast with two backs was No.13, the room in which Crowley had stayed.