The Great Beast in Cornwall

In his autobiography Musical Chairs (pp119-122) Cecil Gray described Cornwall: 'It is a magical place, but the magic is black ... the north Atlantic coast ... with its desolate moors strewn with Druidic monuments and fallen cromlechs and ancient abandoned tin mines going back to the times of the Phoenicians, seems to belong to an entirely different world. In fact, I am sure that it does, and that it represents a corner of the lost continent of Atlantis ...

'Altogether it is like entering the kind of country described by Algernon Blackwood or Arthur Machen - a land in which the boundary between the subjective and the objective becomes vague and indecisive. You begin to distrust the evidence of your senses, and to realise uneasily that things are not always what they seem to be, and this feeling becomes steadily intensified as you leave St Ives and  - passing Tregerthen Farm and the cottage in which DH Lawrence lived during the years I knew him - approach the village of Zennor, where the innermost periphery of this spiritual Black Country begins. From there to Gurnard's Head and Bosigran Castle (where I lived) the crescendo continues, and reaches its climax beyond the village of Morvah: a name of which the dark, sinister sound still strikes a chill into my very marrow.'

One evening alone in his house he heard a loud crash, like a 'thunderbolt' but could find no cause for it and eventually put it down to the Knockers or elemental spirits who are believed locally to dwell in the derelict tin mines.

It's now a few days since I read The Tregerthen Horror and it's very difficult to summarise - it jumps from one incident to another with very little causal connection, although the thread running through is that many of the people involved knew, or 'knew of', Crowley. I get the feeling that the author himself didn't really believe that the entertaining conception he had brewed up would stand up to any scholarly rigour. The author Paul Newman died in 2013. The book can, however, be recommended, as it is a page-turning read, which does contain some useful information on Crowley and in particular material on the mother of his son Aleister Ataturk, Pat Doherty/MacAlpine, and on Ataturk - that I don't think appears in other books on AC - and introduces a cast of characters, many of which were new to me and are worth researching: Meredith Starr, Charles Paget Wade and Wyn Henderson for example.

The blurb tells us: 'Prior to World War Two, West Cornwall generated a number of stories of a bizarre occult nature. Foremost among them was that the Great Beast, Aleister Crowley, stayed at Zennor and founded a mainly female cult who danced naked around stone circles, took powerful narcotics and held orgies up on the moor. ... Some hinted this decadent coven was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of Katherine Arnold Forster, former sweetheart of the poet Rupert Brooke, who died in mysterious circumstances at a 'haunted' cottage near Zennor Carn in 1938.'

As he advances the theory that some kind of West Country-based roving band of occultists heavily influenced by AC was going around the country committing various 'Black Magic' rituals and murders, the author even manages to include the still-mysterious cases of the discovery of a decomposing corpse  'Bella in the Wych Elm' during WW2 and the murder of farm labourer Charles Walton at Lower Quinton on 14 February 1945, the latter investigated by the then-famous Fabian of the Yard. (This week I've been reading Fabian's autobiography, a highly entertaining account of his pursuit and capture of a variety of criminals, mostly facilitated by discovering fragments of clothing that can be traced from their material and stitching to a particular place in England - impossible now I'm sure - or by the simpler expedient of shaking down the limited number of fences of stolen goods in London.)

The core of The Tregerthen Horror is the 'mysterious' and sensationalised death of Katherine Arnold Forster in 1938:

p37: 'Gerald Priestland tells of a house in the Land's End region in which the magician stayed, adding that it was later occupied by two women, one of whom was found dead (years later) and the other babbling that the devil had appeared to her.'

p38: from a newspaper? No source given:
'In the still of the night, a young woman knocked on the door of the Eagle's Nest - a house above Zennor - in a state of distress. Something had happened to Mrs Ka Arnold-Forster, something involving the notorious wizard Aleister Crowley, then living at Tregerthen and conducting pagan rites at churches and ancient sites in the neighbourhood. Hours earlier at the young woman's request, Ka had made her way up to the cottage to confront the Satanist, provoking an appalling confrontation, after which she was taken with a seizure. The Chief Constable of Cornwall was called in to investigate. A man was found on the premises in a terrible state, gibbering mad!"

Fortunately a researcher has since done some extra work on the story and it's important if you read the book to look at this short online essay The So-Called Tregerthen Horror by Antoni Diller (with sources), which rapidly clears up any 'mystery' of that unfortunate death. You can find it and download it here. As the author notes, Crowley was only ever in Cornwall for 2 weeks in August 1938 and in poor health, which makes the number of 'black masses' and rituals he is rumoured to have performed all the more unlikely - much of the time was spent reacquainting himself with his son.

See link here for modern pictures of the cottage where the death took place. It was later used by the artist Bryan Winter, whose work looks interesting.

Here's a selection from The Tregerthen Horror of what I think will have to be referred to as 'The Cornish folklore of Aleister Crowley':

p35: 'A holidaymaker, Steve Martin, recalled hitchhiking in Cornwall in the summer of 1981 and being given a lift by a local vicar in a Morris Minor. As they drove over the moor, the man of the cloth pointed out "a small hill, easily seen from the road" saying that Aleister Crowley had lived in the vicinity and held black masses on that hill, and that since then nothing had grown on the spot. No birds visited it or plants grew there. "I recall it was a pretty bare looking hill," commented Steve, who had started to wonder whether the man was really a vicar or a sinister impersonator.'

p37: Roughtor, Bodmin Moor. This louring outcrop of granite was the backdrop to the murder of Charlotte Dymond in 1844. Aleister Crowley is reported to have climbed it and performed a rite on the summit, a salutation to Ra or the spirits of the air.'

p36: John Heath Stubbs lived at Zennor in the late 1940s, he wrote (in his autobiography? - as usual no sources):
'It is said that Aleister Crowley had lived in the parish of Zennor at one period with a party of his female disciples. Crowley and they were said to have been run out of the country by local magistrates. It is told that Crowley had a conflict with the vicar of Zennor who threw holy water over him in the churchyard in the presence of the congregation. Crowley's retort was: "He's not a real priest and it's not real holy water. If he were, and it were, I would sizzle."'

p71:
'In A View From Land's End, Denys Val Baker stated Crowley undoubtedly performed "dozens of black masses inside the old church at St Buryan."'To his credit, Newman is sceptical about this.

Apropos holed stones in Hastings, Amado Crowley (who claimed to be AC's son) reported that the Beast conducted a ritual at the Cornish stone circle Men-An-Tol (on 12 August 1943, the same day as The Philadelphia Experiment - itself debunked effectively in the current issue of Fortean Times Nov 2019) in which the boy was passed through the hole in the stone known locally as the 'Devil's Eye. See here

For now, let's leave the last word to occultist, artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun (writing in the 1950s), whose own star seems to be rising these days:

The Living Stones of Cornwall Introduction by Stewart Lee (Peter Owen, 2017) first ed Peter Owen 1957:
'Shortly before the war, the man whom the sensational press is still calling 'The wickedest man in the world' paid a visit to Mousehole. This was a gift to gossip, which flourishes like an exotic plant in the soft moist air; from rumours still current in the neighbourhood and even beyond, one would suppose that 'the Beast', as Aleister Crowley indiscreetly styled himself, had made on several occasions a protracted stay. The accusations range widely in seriousness; some merely assert he was a bad influence in the district, others that he and his followers danced naked round the stone circle at Tregaseal; yet others that he performed rites on the rocks above Trevelloe; that he revived Druidic cults involving human sacrifice and that his disciples in the locality still resort to this practice, kidnapping women for the purpose. (One or two mysteries of disappearances which the police failed to solve are 'explained' in this way). Not a word of factual evidence is brought forward in substantiation ...'