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The Banned Lecture by Aleister Crowley
Long ago when King Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, a gentleman whose
Christian names were Thomas Henry - you possible have heard of him -
he was no less apersonage than the Grandfather of the great Aldous
Huxley- once found himself threatened be a perdicament similar to that
in which I stand tonite. He had been asked to lecture a distinguished
group of people.
What bothered him was this: what assumption was he to make about
the existing knowledge of the audience? He adopted the sensible course
of asking the advice of an old hand at the game; and was told "You
must do one of two things. You may assume that they know everything,
or that they know nothing." Thomas Henry thought it over, and decided
that he would assume that they know nothing.
I think that merely shows how badly brought up he must have been;
and explains how it was that he became a kirty little atheist, and
repented on his death-bed, and died blaspheming. Gilles de Raise was
born sometime in 1404. He married Catherine de Thonars on the 30th of
November, 1420, thus becoming the richest noble in Europe. He lived
extravagantly until his arrest by the Church. He geban alchemical
studies under the instruction of Gilles de Sille, a priest of
St. malo. Montague Summers believes he sacrificed around eight hundred
children and quotes the proceedings of ecclesiastical high court in
which a Dominican priest named Jean Blouyn took over as the delegate
of the Holy Inquisition for the city and diocese of Nantes. Needless
to say, Gilles "confessed", and was put to the stake and charcoaled on
October 26th., 1440 leaving his estates and untold riches to Mother
Church, who, wasting no time, added them to her list of material
gains. Included in this particular catche were Gilles personal
hand-painted manuscripts which were eagerly welcomed into the Mother
Lode's vault where they sit to this day. Unfortunately, the Vatican's
library is inaccessible to "common folk", and will probably remain so
until the demise of Mother Church herself, at which time this author
will assist other interested persons in converting it into a public
library.
No! No! that would be quite impossibly bad manners. I shall
assume that you know everything about Gilles de Rais; and that being
the case, it would evidently be impertinent for me to tell you
anything about him. So that we can consider the lecture at an end, and
(after the usual vote of thanks) pass on immediately to the
discussion, which I think ought to be more amuising, if scarcely as
informative.
It is rather an hard saying--however worthy of all acceptation in a
university like Oxford, where, I understand, the besetting sin of the
inmates is lecturing and being lectured, but discussions are always
apt to turn out to be amusing, especially if conducted with
blackthorns or shotguns, where as lecturing is merely an attempt,
fordoomed to failure, to communicate knowledge which usually the
lecturer does not possess.
I am sure that we all recognise that an attempt of this kind is
immpssible in nature. No! I am not proposing to inflict upon you my
celebrated discourse on Scepticism of the Instrument of Midn. I am not
even going to refer to the first and last lecture which I suffered at
a dud university somewhere near Newmarket, in which the specimen of
old red sandstone in rostrum began by remarking that political economy
was a very difficult subject to theorise upon because there were no
reliable data. Never would I tell so sad a story on a Monday evening,
with the idea of Tuesday already looming darkly in every melancholic
mind. I should like to be just friendly and sensible, thougf it is
perhaps too much to expect me to be cheerful.
The fact is that I am in a very depressed state. My attention was
attracted by that little work "knowledge" of which we hear so much and
see so little. I don't propose to inflict upon you the M.C.H., and
demonstrate that the life and opinions of Filles de Rais were
inevitably determioned by the price of onions in Hyderabad. But I do
think that in approaching a historic question, we should be very
careful to define what we mean--in our particular universe of
discourse--by the work "knowledge."
May I ask a question?
Does anyone here know the date of the battle of Waterloo?
Pause-- (Someone -- I bet -- tells me "1815.")
Thank you very much. To be frank with you, I know it myself. I did
not require information on that particular point. What I asked was,
wheter anyone know the date. I felt that, if so, it would have created
a sympathetic atmosphere.
But since we are talking about Waterloo, we may ask ourselves what,
roughly speaking, is the extent of our knowledge?
I have heard plenty of theories about why Napoleon lost the
battle. I have been told that he was already suffering from the
disease which killed him. I have been told that he was outgeneralled
by Wellington. I have been told that his army of conscripts was
underfed and not properly drilled. I have also been told that the
battle was won by the Belgians.
Now, all these things are merely matters of opinion. There may be a
little truth in some of them. But we have practically no means of
finding out exactly how much, even if our documentary support is valid
to establish any of these theories. It is, also, almost impossible to
estimate the causes of any given event, if only because those causes
are infinite, and each one of them is to a certian extent an efficient
determining cause.
Take a quite simple matter like the time of year. If it had been
winter instead of summer, the hens would not have been laying and
Hougomont and La Haye Sainte would not have been able to nourish the
contending forces. But though it is profitable for the soul to
contemplate the extent of what we don't know, it is in some ways more
satisfying to our baser natures to consider what we do know in a
reasonable sense of the word.
It is not disputable that the battle of Waterloo was fought and
won. It is not disputable that it was the climax, or rather the
denoucement, of campaigns lasting over a number of years. And there is
no reason for doubting that Napoleon was born in Corsica, that he
entered the French army, and rose rapidly to power by a combination of
military genius and political intrigue.
There is a vast body of indirect evidence which confirms these
statements at every point. Taken as a whole, they would be totally
inexplicable on any other hypothesis. But when we consider the
character of Napoleon, we are at once involved in a mass of
contradictions. Probably no one in history has been more discussed,
and every writer gives a totally different account. Each seeks to
buttress his opinion by incidents which we have no reason to suppose
other than authentic, but seem incongruous. So far as we can get any
triuth out of the matter at all, it is that the character of Napoleon,
like that of everybody who ever lived, was extremely complex. And the
writers are more or less in the position of the Six Wise Men of
Hindustan who were born blind and had to describe an elephant.
Spiritually fortified by these simple meditations, we may apply
their fruits to the problem of Filles de Rais, and ask ourselves what
we really know about hime as opposed to what we have heard about him.
We know that he was a gentleman of good family, because otherwise
he could not have held the offices which he did hold. We know that he
was a brave soldier, and a comrade of Joan of Arc. We know that he had
a passion for science, for the basis of his reputation was that he
frequented the society of learned men. We know finally that he was
accused of the same crimes as Joan of Arc by the same people who
accused her, and that he was condemned by them to the same penalty.
I do not think that I have left out any verfiable fact. I think
that all the rest amounts to speculation. The real problem of Gilles
de Rais amounts, accordingly, to this. Here we have a person who, in
almost every respect, was the male equivalent of Joan of Arc. Both of
them have gone down in history. But history is somewhat curious. I am
still inclined to think that "there aint no sich animile." In the time
of Shakespeare, Joan of Arc was accepted in England as a symbol for
everything vile. He makes her out not only as a sorceress, but a
charlatan and hypocrite; and on tope of that a coward, a liar, and a
common slut. I suspect that they began to whitwash here when they
decided that she was a virgin, that is a sexually deranged, or at
least incomplete, animal, but the idea has always got people going, as
any student of religion knows. Anyway, her stock went up to the point
of canonisation. Gilles de Rais, on the other hand, is equally a
household work for monstrous vices and crimes. So much so, that his is
even confused with the fabulous figure of Bluebeard, of whom, even
were he real, we know nothing much beyond that he reacted in the most
manly way to the problem of domestic infelicity.
A moment's digression; in fact, the main point. What is the most
precise and most atrocious charge that is made against him? That he
sacrificed, in the course of alchemical and magical experiments, a
matter of 800 children? I submit that, a priori, this sounds a little
improbable. Gilles de Rais was the lord of a district whose population
would not have been very extensive, and even in that age of slavery,
dirt, disease, debauchery, poverty and ignorance, which seems to
Mr. G. K. Chesterton the one ideal state of society, it must have been
a little difficult to carry out abductions and murders on such
wholsale principles.
Whenever questions arise with regard to black magic or black
masses, invocations of the devil, etc., etc., it must never be
forgotten that these practices are strictly functions of
Christianity. Where ignorant savages perform propitiatory rites, there
and there only Christianity takes hold. But under the great syst4ms
of the civilised parts of the world, there is no trace of any such
perversion in religious feeling. It is only the bloodthirsty and
futile Jehovah who has achieved such monstrous births. Such upas-trees
can only grow in the poisonous mire of fear and shame where thought
has putrefied to Christianity.
There is thus no antecedent improbability that Gilles de Rais (or
any other person of that place and period) was addicted to black
magical practices, for they were all Catholics. The power of the
Church was, at that time, absolute, and even research was limited by
the arbitrary theology imposed upon the mind of everyone. The
abomination was at its height. But its decline has been rapid. True,
one hundred years later it was still possible for Queens to be
bulldozed by Presbyterian pulpiteers, but the time was already
predictable when their best was for undergraduates to be bluffed by
homosexual ecclesiastics. I suppose it is ll in the family.
While these profound thoughts were producing a hypochondriac
obnubilation of my mental faculties, it suddently occured to me that
after all, I had heard this story before. And I saw the connection.
In the pitch-dark ages, when Christianity held unchallenged sway
over those portions of this globe which it had sufficiently corrupted,
the pursuit of knowledge--knowledge of any kind--was justly estimated
by the people in power as the one and only dangerous pursuit. Even so,
as late as 300 years ago, it was not considered very gentlemanly to be
able to read and write. I am not sure that it is.
In any case, it is a great error in education to teach these
things. Grammar, we must never forget, appears in the word
"Gramarye," beloved of Sir Walter Scott, and "grimoire," a black
magical ritual--that is to say, any written document.
Precious little knowledge filtered through Christianity. It was
against the interests of the Church, and in those times it was much
easier to suppress people and ideas than it is now, though even today
we find priests--at least in Oxford--who appear not to have heard of a
certain recent invention by a notorious Magician inspired by the
Devil--the Printing Press.
But they feared. So those who pursued knowledge were at the best
under strong suspicion of heresy. I need not quote the obvious
names. But there were certain bodies of people who did carry on the
old knowledge, mostly by oral tradition, and who were perforce
tolerated to a certain extent, because even the little knowledge that
they did possess was so exceedingly useful. The best way to make
armour, or to build Cathedrals, or to heal sickness would enable the
Christian to get ahead of his friends. Therefore, although conscience
evidently demanded the maximum amount of persecution compatible with
the existence of villains, the Jews and the Arabs were at least
allowed to live. Besides, the Arabs saw to the themselves.
But no one was better aware than the Pope that knowledge was power.
For all he know, and he probably knew that he did no know much, the
Jews and the Arabs might get together and overturn the whole
construction of society. Had he not in his own records the very best
example of such a catastrophe?
There is a large number of excellent people, possessed of even less
that the minimum amount of brains required to grease a gimlet, who are
always boring us with the bogey of the Jew-Bolshevist peril. But as
most of them are Roman Catholic and unaware that Rome is laughing in
its sleeve at them, they conveniently ignore what should be--if they
realised it--their best argument. What was the ultimate cause of the
destruction of the great civilisation of Rome? What corrupted the
spirit of a people unconquerable in arms? What but the spread of the
slave morality of Jewish communists of the period? If you will take
your New Testaments from your pockets, you will find in the fourth
chapter of the Acts of the Apostles and the thirty-second verse: "And
the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and soul: and
not one of them said that aught of the things that he possessed was
his own, but that they had all things in common." Of course one of
them, and he too was a Jew, tried to hold out on the kitty, and was
struck miraculously dead for his pains. Lenin and Trotsky never did as
well!
So, as Roman Catholics are always telling us, the Church has a
monopoly of logic, and The Pope argued that all Jews were
communists. Anyone who had or wanted knowledge must be a Jew, and
therefore a communists, and therefore--well, the Pope too believed in
preparedness, though he probably called it a programme of
disarmament. When people scrap battleships in the name of peach on
earth and goodwill to men, it means that they have found battleships
useless and too expensive, and that they have found something cheaper
and more deadly. So the Curia kept a weapon in reserve, in order to be
sure of having a nice jolly pogrom whenever they gave the word. And
what was the word to be?
Nice quiet peasant folk, or genial hard-working hunters and
fighters, are not easy to arouse to indiscriminate slaughter without
reason. In order to get them going, there are only two things which
you can play on--greed and fear. The motive behind the Crusades was
the story of the fabulous wealth of the East. We find, in fact, that
well-organised armies of buccaneers, such as the Templars, did not
bring back incalculable spoils, while the honest pious mugs ruined
themselves in the process.
Now, in this particular sport of suppressing earnest enquirers, it
was not much good trying to play on people's greed. For everyone knew
that even if the Jews had wealth, they managed to hide it very
successfully, and that they had a nasty was of arranging for
protection with people who were too powerful to be bullied, and too
good business men to be fooled into killing the goose that laid the
golden eggs. So the only motive available was fear, and in those ages
where ignorance was fostered with infinite devotion, it was even
easier to create a scare about bogies than our propaganda in the
recent scrap found it.
I was in Venice just before the war, when Halley's comet was
around, and although the Pope himself sprinkled holy water over the
comet, and sent it his special benediction and told the people it
would do no harm, in his most ex cathedra manner, the Venetians
gathered themselves in panic-stricken crowds in the Square of St. Mark
and waited, howling, for the end of the world.
It was accordingly easy enough to associate the pursuit of
knowledge with the most abominable crimes, real or imaginary or
both. For this reason, we hear--not as a demonstrated thesis, but as a
commonplace of inherited knowledge--that Jews were sorcerers and
wizards. In other works, they know something about grammar. We heard
that they transformed themselves into cats or bats, and sucked
people's big toes. I have never, personally, investigated the question
as to whether this form of nutrition is palatable. But, alas! even in
those idyllic Chestertonian times there was a little shrewd common
sense knocking about; the instinct--sometimes very splendidly
described as horse sense--which comes from intimate wordless
unintellectual communing with Nature (please do not take that word
"communing" in any bad sense; if it were not for Baldwin, I would be a
Conservative myself)--the instinct of some people, who at the bottom
of their hearts, did not so much believe in these phantasms. I was not
so easy to get them to go out and murder a lot of inoffensive people
at the word jump. They had to be supplied with something a little more
tangible.
You will notice how all this fort of argument is invariably of the
ad captandum variety. It is produced out of nowhere for a definite
purpose; and, as the French say, does not rime with anything. If it
did, of course, it would immediately be exposed as nonsense. It is
satisfied that nobody can disprove it any more than they can prove it.
Take a concrete example. A nice young gentleman the other day
wanted (very properly) to earn his living, and not being peculiarly
endowed by Nature in the matter of original invention, he thought he
might make a story out of the idea of a Suicide Club. In this he was
evidently correct. Robert Louis Stevenson had in fact proved the
point. So he took Stevenson's story and transferred it to Germany, and
drivelled on about the ace of spades, and quoted statistics of
suicides, and said that I was the president of the Club and that the
Berlin police were after me.
Now, I am afraid it would be a little bit difficult for anyone to
prove that I am responsible for any suicides that may take place in
Germany. But, on the other hand, it is quite impossible for me to
disprove it.So now, if you want to attack anybody without the
slightest fear of contradiction, you know how to set to work.
I omitted to mention that all these suicides were excessively
beautiful and even boluptuous young women of high social position, and
that the wicked president had blackmailed them out of vast sums. You
see, the people for whom this dear young gentleman was writing all get
sexually excited by pictures of young women, and also by any statement
about large sums of money. For they immediately have a wish
phantasm--if they had large sums themselves, what terrible fellows
they could be.
In the Middle Ages, the art of exciting the people was not very
different. The Jew had always an immense hoard of ill-gotten wealth,
and of course every penny that was exacted by Reginald Front-de-Boeuf
was laid to the Jews' account. But there was another treasure that the
peasant was afraid to lose, the dearest treasure of all, his
children. As little boys, thank God, have a habit of straying in
search of adventure and getting lost in the process, which is good for
thier souls, the peasant naturally has moments of serious disquietude
as to whether something terrible can have happened to little
Tommy. Very Good. All we have to do is to play on the alarm.
We put into his mind that little Tommy (who turns up all right, if
rather muddy, half an hour later) has almost certainly been kidnapped
by the Jews for purposes of ritual murder.
The main accusation against Gilles de Rais is therefore just this
general accusation against anyone in Christendom who exhibited any
desire for knowledge. Only, in his case, it was concentrated and
exaggerated to fantastic lengths by some factor or other on which I
feel it useless to speculate. The one thing of which I feel certain is
that 800 children is a lot.
I don't know over how many years these practices were supposed to
have spread. As I think you must all feel sure by now, I know nothing
whatever of my subject.
But scientific experiment in those days was always a very prolonged
operation. They thought nothing of exposing some unknown substance to
the rays of the sun and moon for periods of three months at a time, in
the hope that in some mysterious way the first stage of some
dimly--visaged operation might be satisfactorily accomplished. And
even if they sacrificed a child every day, it would have taken a
matter of two and a half years to dispose of 800 children. Besides, it
must have taken more
than a few minutes to kidnap a child with the secrecy obviously required.
Did the disappearance of the first four hundred, say, put no parents on
their guard?
I think, at the best, it is a case of little Tommy who told his mother that
therewere millions of cats on the wall of the back garden, but under
cross-examination, in the style made popular by the dialogue of Lot with
Almighty God, admitted that it was "Tom and another."
Of course, it will be obvious to you by this time that I have been
seduced by Jewish gold, and the only way that I can think of to disarm
your suspicions is to bring forward another case of the same kind,
little more then a century old, with which Jews had nothing to do.
There was a poet laureate--I am not quite sure what this species of
animal is--but his name was Robert Southey, and he lived, if you can
call it living, about the time of William Blake. He wrote a number of
words arranged in some scheme connected with rime and rhythm;
apparently, like golf clubs, "a set of instruments very ill-adapted to
the purpose." But, anyway, he called it a poem, and the title was
something to do with the old woman of Berkeley and who rode behind
her. The person who rode behind her was Mr. Montague Summers' friend,
the Devil. What she actually did to merit this favour is to me rather
obscure, because I have forgotten the whole beastly thing. But I do
remember two lines, because I am in the same line of business myself.
I have candles made of infants' fat,
I have feasted on rifled graves.
Southey was an ambitious man. He was not content with the brilliant
success of this masterpiece of the poetic art. He immediately sat down
and wrote another alleged peom all about infants' fat and rifled
graves and the Devil coming for the villain at the proper moment.This
poem has nothing to do with witchcraft. It is called "The Surgeon's
Warning."
I think this is the best evidence in support of my thesis--whatever
that is, I am not quite sure--that it is possible to adduce.
In the minds of the kind of people who believe in their neighbours
making candles of infants' fat and digging up corpses to economise on
the butcher's bill, the surgeon--that is to say, the man in pursuit of
knowledge which it is hoped may alleviate human pain--is the same kind
of animal as the witch and the ritual-murdering Jew.
It is, no doubt, because it is a part of the old taboo complex
about the corpses of one's relatives, that the clerical attack on
surgeons concentrated itself on one fact--the fact that to learn to be
a surgeon you must have corpses to dissect. For at that time, it will
be remembered, hospitals were not as flourishing as they are today,
and it was very difficult to find living people whom you could cut up
to see what came of it. The surgeon was, in fact, not understood at
all, except in the one way which such people were capable of
understanding; i.e., as the body-snatcher. The rest of his proceedings
were perfectly mysterious to them.
You notice that even Charles Dickens--who may yet go down to
history for having wished to prosecute Holman Hunt, of all people in
the world, for painting indecent pictures--takes very much this
popular view of medicine and pharmacy in Pickwick.
I think, then, it is not altogether unfair to assume that Gilles de
Raid was to a large extent the victim of Catholic logic. Catholic
logic: and the foul wish-phantasms generated of its repressions, and
of its fear and ignorance. He wanted to confer to a boon on humanity;
therefore he consorted with the learned; therefore he murdered little
children.
I think it is about time that somebody got after
J. B. S. Haldane. It is too late to do anything more to Fidley and
Latimer, but I am quite sure that the candle they lit was made of
infants' fat. It is no use your starting to rifle Graves, because his
publishers might resent you interference.
Those in favor of the motion will now please signify the same in
the usual manner. Any may the Lord have mercy on your souls!
Long ago when King Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, a gentleman whose
Christian names were Thomas Henry - you possible have heard of him -
he was no less apersonage than the Grandfather of the great Aldous
Huxley- once found himself threatened be a perdicament similar to that
in which I stand tonite. He had been asked to lecture a distinguished
group of people.
What bothered him was this: what assumption was he to make about
the existing knowledge of the audience? He adopted the sensible course
of asking the advice of an old hand at the game; and was told "You
must do one of two things. You may assume that they know everything,
or that they know nothing." Thomas Henry thought it over, and decided
that he would assume that they know nothing.
I think that merely shows how badly brought up he must have been;
and explains how it was that he became a kirty little atheist, and
repented on his death-bed, and died blaspheming. Gilles de Raise was
born sometime in 1404. He married Catherine de Thonars on the 30th of
November, 1420, thus becoming the richest noble in Europe. He lived
extravagantly until his arrest by the Church. He geban alchemical
studies under the instruction of Gilles de Sille, a priest of
St. malo. Montague Summers believes he sacrificed around eight hundred
children and quotes the proceedings of ecclesiastical high court in
which a Dominican priest named Jean Blouyn took over as the delegate
of the Holy Inquisition for the city and diocese of Nantes. Needless
to say, Gilles "confessed", and was put to the stake and charcoaled on
October 26th., 1440 leaving his estates and untold riches to Mother
Church, who, wasting no time, added them to her list of material
gains. Included in this particular catche were Gilles personal
hand-painted manuscripts which were eagerly welcomed into the Mother
Lode's vault where they sit to this day. Unfortunately, the Vatican's
library is inaccessible to "common folk", and will probably remain so
until the demise of Mother Church herself, at which time this author
will assist other interested persons in converting it into a public
library.
No! No! that would be quite impossibly bad manners. I shall
assume that you know everything about Gilles de Rais; and that being
the case, it would evidently be impertinent for me to tell you
anything about him. So that we can consider the lecture at an end, and
(after the usual vote of thanks) pass on immediately to the
discussion, which I think ought to be more amuising, if scarcely as
informative.
It is rather an hard saying--however worthy of all acceptation in a
university like Oxford, where, I understand, the besetting sin of the
inmates is lecturing and being lectured, but discussions are always
apt to turn out to be amusing, especially if conducted with
blackthorns or shotguns, where as lecturing is merely an attempt,
fordoomed to failure, to communicate knowledge which usually the
lecturer does not possess.
I am sure that we all recognise that an attempt of this kind is
immpssible in nature. No! I am not proposing to inflict upon you my
celebrated discourse on Scepticism of the Instrument of Midn. I am not
even going to refer to the first and last lecture which I suffered at
a dud university somewhere near Newmarket, in which the specimen of
old red sandstone in rostrum began by remarking that political economy
was a very difficult subject to theorise upon because there were no
reliable data. Never would I tell so sad a story on a Monday evening,
with the idea of Tuesday already looming darkly in every melancholic
mind. I should like to be just friendly and sensible, thougf it is
perhaps too much to expect me to be cheerful.
The fact is that I am in a very depressed state. My attention was
attracted by that little work "knowledge" of which we hear so much and
see so little. I don't propose to inflict upon you the M.C.H., and
demonstrate that the life and opinions of Filles de Rais were
inevitably determioned by the price of onions in Hyderabad. But I do
think that in approaching a historic question, we should be very
careful to define what we mean--in our particular universe of
discourse--by the work "knowledge."
May I ask a question?
Does anyone here know the date of the battle of Waterloo?
Pause-- (Someone -- I bet -- tells me "1815.")
Thank you very much. To be frank with you, I know it myself. I did
not require information on that particular point. What I asked was,
wheter anyone know the date. I felt that, if so, it would have created
a sympathetic atmosphere.
But since we are talking about Waterloo, we may ask ourselves what,
roughly speaking, is the extent of our knowledge?
I have heard plenty of theories about why Napoleon lost the
battle. I have been told that he was already suffering from the
disease which killed him. I have been told that he was outgeneralled
by Wellington. I have been told that his army of conscripts was
underfed and not properly drilled. I have also been told that the
battle was won by the Belgians.
Now, all these things are merely matters of opinion. There may be a
little truth in some of them. But we have practically no means of
finding out exactly how much, even if our documentary support is valid
to establish any of these theories. It is, also, almost impossible to
estimate the causes of any given event, if only because those causes
are infinite, and each one of them is to a certian extent an efficient
determining cause.
Take a quite simple matter like the time of year. If it had been
winter instead of summer, the hens would not have been laying and
Hougomont and La Haye Sainte would not have been able to nourish the
contending forces. But though it is profitable for the soul to
contemplate the extent of what we don't know, it is in some ways more
satisfying to our baser natures to consider what we do know in a
reasonable sense of the word.
It is not disputable that the battle of Waterloo was fought and
won. It is not disputable that it was the climax, or rather the
denoucement, of campaigns lasting over a number of years. And there is
no reason for doubting that Napoleon was born in Corsica, that he
entered the French army, and rose rapidly to power by a combination of
military genius and political intrigue.
There is a vast body of indirect evidence which confirms these
statements at every point. Taken as a whole, they would be totally
inexplicable on any other hypothesis. But when we consider the
character of Napoleon, we are at once involved in a mass of
contradictions. Probably no one in history has been more discussed,
and every writer gives a totally different account. Each seeks to
buttress his opinion by incidents which we have no reason to suppose
other than authentic, but seem incongruous. So far as we can get any
triuth out of the matter at all, it is that the character of Napoleon,
like that of everybody who ever lived, was extremely complex. And the
writers are more or less in the position of the Six Wise Men of
Hindustan who were born blind and had to describe an elephant.
Spiritually fortified by these simple meditations, we may apply
their fruits to the problem of Filles de Rais, and ask ourselves what
we really know about hime as opposed to what we have heard about him.
We know that he was a gentleman of good family, because otherwise
he could not have held the offices which he did hold. We know that he
was a brave soldier, and a comrade of Joan of Arc. We know that he had
a passion for science, for the basis of his reputation was that he
frequented the society of learned men. We know finally that he was
accused of the same crimes as Joan of Arc by the same people who
accused her, and that he was condemned by them to the same penalty.
I do not think that I have left out any verfiable fact. I think
that all the rest amounts to speculation. The real problem of Gilles
de Rais amounts, accordingly, to this. Here we have a person who, in
almost every respect, was the male equivalent of Joan of Arc. Both of
them have gone down in history. But history is somewhat curious. I am
still inclined to think that "there aint no sich animile." In the time
of Shakespeare, Joan of Arc was accepted in England as a symbol for
everything vile. He makes her out not only as a sorceress, but a
charlatan and hypocrite; and on tope of that a coward, a liar, and a
common slut. I suspect that they began to whitwash here when they
decided that she was a virgin, that is a sexually deranged, or at
least incomplete, animal, but the idea has always got people going, as
any student of religion knows. Anyway, her stock went up to the point
of canonisation. Gilles de Rais, on the other hand, is equally a
household work for monstrous vices and crimes. So much so, that his is
even confused with the fabulous figure of Bluebeard, of whom, even
were he real, we know nothing much beyond that he reacted in the most
manly way to the problem of domestic infelicity.
A moment's digression; in fact, the main point. What is the most
precise and most atrocious charge that is made against him? That he
sacrificed, in the course of alchemical and magical experiments, a
matter of 800 children? I submit that, a priori, this sounds a little
improbable. Gilles de Rais was the lord of a district whose population
would not have been very extensive, and even in that age of slavery,
dirt, disease, debauchery, poverty and ignorance, which seems to
Mr. G. K. Chesterton the one ideal state of society, it must have been
a little difficult to carry out abductions and murders on such
wholsale principles.
Whenever questions arise with regard to black magic or black
masses, invocations of the devil, etc., etc., it must never be
forgotten that these practices are strictly functions of
Christianity. Where ignorant savages perform propitiatory rites, there
and there only Christianity takes hold. But under the great syst4ms
of the civilised parts of the world, there is no trace of any such
perversion in religious feeling. It is only the bloodthirsty and
futile Jehovah who has achieved such monstrous births. Such upas-trees
can only grow in the poisonous mire of fear and shame where thought
has putrefied to Christianity.
There is thus no antecedent improbability that Gilles de Rais (or
any other person of that place and period) was addicted to black
magical practices, for they were all Catholics. The power of the
Church was, at that time, absolute, and even research was limited by
the arbitrary theology imposed upon the mind of everyone. The
abomination was at its height. But its decline has been rapid. True,
one hundred years later it was still possible for Queens to be
bulldozed by Presbyterian pulpiteers, but the time was already
predictable when their best was for undergraduates to be bluffed by
homosexual ecclesiastics. I suppose it is ll in the family.
While these profound thoughts were producing a hypochondriac
obnubilation of my mental faculties, it suddently occured to me that
after all, I had heard this story before. And I saw the connection.
In the pitch-dark ages, when Christianity held unchallenged sway
over those portions of this globe which it had sufficiently corrupted,
the pursuit of knowledge--knowledge of any kind--was justly estimated
by the people in power as the one and only dangerous pursuit. Even so,
as late as 300 years ago, it was not considered very gentlemanly to be
able to read and write. I am not sure that it is.
In any case, it is a great error in education to teach these
things. Grammar, we must never forget, appears in the word
"Gramarye," beloved of Sir Walter Scott, and "grimoire," a black
magical ritual--that is to say, any written document.
Precious little knowledge filtered through Christianity. It was
against the interests of the Church, and in those times it was much
easier to suppress people and ideas than it is now, though even today
we find priests--at least in Oxford--who appear not to have heard of a
certain recent invention by a notorious Magician inspired by the
Devil--the Printing Press.
But they feared. So those who pursued knowledge were at the best
under strong suspicion of heresy. I need not quote the obvious
names. But there were certain bodies of people who did carry on the
old knowledge, mostly by oral tradition, and who were perforce
tolerated to a certain extent, because even the little knowledge that
they did possess was so exceedingly useful. The best way to make
armour, or to build Cathedrals, or to heal sickness would enable the
Christian to get ahead of his friends. Therefore, although conscience
evidently demanded the maximum amount of persecution compatible with
the existence of villains, the Jews and the Arabs were at least
allowed to live. Besides, the Arabs saw to the themselves.
But no one was better aware than the Pope that knowledge was power.
For all he know, and he probably knew that he did no know much, the
Jews and the Arabs might get together and overturn the whole
construction of society. Had he not in his own records the very best
example of such a catastrophe?
There is a large number of excellent people, possessed of even less
that the minimum amount of brains required to grease a gimlet, who are
always boring us with the bogey of the Jew-Bolshevist peril. But as
most of them are Roman Catholic and unaware that Rome is laughing in
its sleeve at them, they conveniently ignore what should be--if they
realised it--their best argument. What was the ultimate cause of the
destruction of the great civilisation of Rome? What corrupted the
spirit of a people unconquerable in arms? What but the spread of the
slave morality of Jewish communists of the period? If you will take
your New Testaments from your pockets, you will find in the fourth
chapter of the Acts of the Apostles and the thirty-second verse: "And
the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and soul: and
not one of them said that aught of the things that he possessed was
his own, but that they had all things in common." Of course one of
them, and he too was a Jew, tried to hold out on the kitty, and was
struck miraculously dead for his pains. Lenin and Trotsky never did as
well!
So, as Roman Catholics are always telling us, the Church has a
monopoly of logic, and The Pope argued that all Jews were
communists. Anyone who had or wanted knowledge must be a Jew, and
therefore a communists, and therefore--well, the Pope too believed in
preparedness, though he probably called it a programme of
disarmament. When people scrap battleships in the name of peach on
earth and goodwill to men, it means that they have found battleships
useless and too expensive, and that they have found something cheaper
and more deadly. So the Curia kept a weapon in reserve, in order to be
sure of having a nice jolly pogrom whenever they gave the word. And
what was the word to be?
Nice quiet peasant folk, or genial hard-working hunters and
fighters, are not easy to arouse to indiscriminate slaughter without
reason. In order to get them going, there are only two things which
you can play on--greed and fear. The motive behind the Crusades was
the story of the fabulous wealth of the East. We find, in fact, that
well-organised armies of buccaneers, such as the Templars, did not
bring back incalculable spoils, while the honest pious mugs ruined
themselves in the process.
Now, in this particular sport of suppressing earnest enquirers, it
was not much good trying to play on people's greed. For everyone knew
that even if the Jews had wealth, they managed to hide it very
successfully, and that they had a nasty was of arranging for
protection with people who were too powerful to be bullied, and too
good business men to be fooled into killing the goose that laid the
golden eggs. So the only motive available was fear, and in those ages
where ignorance was fostered with infinite devotion, it was even
easier to create a scare about bogies than our propaganda in the
recent scrap found it.
I was in Venice just before the war, when Halley's comet was
around, and although the Pope himself sprinkled holy water over the
comet, and sent it his special benediction and told the people it
would do no harm, in his most ex cathedra manner, the Venetians
gathered themselves in panic-stricken crowds in the Square of St. Mark
and waited, howling, for the end of the world.
It was accordingly easy enough to associate the pursuit of
knowledge with the most abominable crimes, real or imaginary or
both. For this reason, we hear--not as a demonstrated thesis, but as a
commonplace of inherited knowledge--that Jews were sorcerers and
wizards. In other works, they know something about grammar. We heard
that they transformed themselves into cats or bats, and sucked
people's big toes. I have never, personally, investigated the question
as to whether this form of nutrition is palatable. But, alas! even in
those idyllic Chestertonian times there was a little shrewd common
sense knocking about; the instinct--sometimes very splendidly
described as horse sense--which comes from intimate wordless
unintellectual communing with Nature (please do not take that word
"communing" in any bad sense; if it were not for Baldwin, I would be a
Conservative myself)--the instinct of some people, who at the bottom
of their hearts, did not so much believe in these phantasms. I was not
so easy to get them to go out and murder a lot of inoffensive people
at the word jump. They had to be supplied with something a little more
tangible.
You will notice how all this fort of argument is invariably of the
ad captandum variety. It is produced out of nowhere for a definite
purpose; and, as the French say, does not rime with anything. If it
did, of course, it would immediately be exposed as nonsense. It is
satisfied that nobody can disprove it any more than they can prove it.
Take a concrete example. A nice young gentleman the other day
wanted (very properly) to earn his living, and not being peculiarly
endowed by Nature in the matter of original invention, he thought he
might make a story out of the idea of a Suicide Club. In this he was
evidently correct. Robert Louis Stevenson had in fact proved the
point. So he took Stevenson's story and transferred it to Germany, and
drivelled on about the ace of spades, and quoted statistics of
suicides, and said that I was the president of the Club and that the
Berlin police were after me.
Now, I am afraid it would be a little bit difficult for anyone to
prove that I am responsible for any suicides that may take place in
Germany. But, on the other hand, it is quite impossible for me to
disprove it.So now, if you want to attack anybody without the
slightest fear of contradiction, you know how to set to work.
I omitted to mention that all these suicides were excessively
beautiful and even boluptuous young women of high social position, and
that the wicked president had blackmailed them out of vast sums. You
see, the people for whom this dear young gentleman was writing all get
sexually excited by pictures of young women, and also by any statement
about large sums of money. For they immediately have a wish
phantasm--if they had large sums themselves, what terrible fellows
they could be.
In the Middle Ages, the art of exciting the people was not very
different. The Jew had always an immense hoard of ill-gotten wealth,
and of course every penny that was exacted by Reginald Front-de-Boeuf
was laid to the Jews' account. But there was another treasure that the
peasant was afraid to lose, the dearest treasure of all, his
children. As little boys, thank God, have a habit of straying in
search of adventure and getting lost in the process, which is good for
thier souls, the peasant naturally has moments of serious disquietude
as to whether something terrible can have happened to little
Tommy. Very Good. All we have to do is to play on the alarm.
We put into his mind that little Tommy (who turns up all right, if
rather muddy, half an hour later) has almost certainly been kidnapped
by the Jews for purposes of ritual murder.
The main accusation against Gilles de Rais is therefore just this
general accusation against anyone in Christendom who exhibited any
desire for knowledge. Only, in his case, it was concentrated and
exaggerated to fantastic lengths by some factor or other on which I
feel it useless to speculate. The one thing of which I feel certain is
that 800 children is a lot.
I don't know over how many years these practices were supposed to
have spread. As I think you must all feel sure by now, I know nothing
whatever of my subject.
But scientific experiment in those days was always a very prolonged
operation. They thought nothing of exposing some unknown substance to
the rays of the sun and moon for periods of three months at a time, in
the hope that in some mysterious way the first stage of some
dimly--visaged operation might be satisfactorily accomplished. And
even if they sacrificed a child every day, it would have taken a
matter of two and a half years to dispose of 800 children. Besides, it
must have taken more
than a few minutes to kidnap a child with the secrecy obviously required.
Did the disappearance of the first four hundred, say, put no parents on
their guard?
I think, at the best, it is a case of little Tommy who told his mother that
therewere millions of cats on the wall of the back garden, but under
cross-examination, in the style made popular by the dialogue of Lot with
Almighty God, admitted that it was "Tom and another."
Of course, it will be obvious to you by this time that I have been
seduced by Jewish gold, and the only way that I can think of to disarm
your suspicions is to bring forward another case of the same kind,
little more then a century old, with which Jews had nothing to do.
There was a poet laureate--I am not quite sure what this species of
animal is--but his name was Robert Southey, and he lived, if you can
call it living, about the time of William Blake. He wrote a number of
words arranged in some scheme connected with rime and rhythm;
apparently, like golf clubs, "a set of instruments very ill-adapted to
the purpose." But, anyway, he called it a poem, and the title was
something to do with the old woman of Berkeley and who rode behind
her. The person who rode behind her was Mr. Montague Summers' friend,
the Devil. What she actually did to merit this favour is to me rather
obscure, because I have forgotten the whole beastly thing. But I do
remember two lines, because I am in the same line of business myself.
I have candles made of infants' fat,
I have feasted on rifled graves.
Southey was an ambitious man. He was not content with the brilliant
success of this masterpiece of the poetic art. He immediately sat down
and wrote another alleged peom all about infants' fat and rifled
graves and the Devil coming for the villain at the proper moment.This
poem has nothing to do with witchcraft. It is called "The Surgeon's
Warning."
I think this is the best evidence in support of my thesis--whatever
that is, I am not quite sure--that it is possible to adduce.
In the minds of the kind of people who believe in their neighbours
making candles of infants' fat and digging up corpses to economise on
the butcher's bill, the surgeon--that is to say, the man in pursuit of
knowledge which it is hoped may alleviate human pain--is the same kind
of animal as the witch and the ritual-murdering Jew.
It is, no doubt, because it is a part of the old taboo complex
about the corpses of one's relatives, that the clerical attack on
surgeons concentrated itself on one fact--the fact that to learn to be
a surgeon you must have corpses to dissect. For at that time, it will
be remembered, hospitals were not as flourishing as they are today,
and it was very difficult to find living people whom you could cut up
to see what came of it. The surgeon was, in fact, not understood at
all, except in the one way which such people were capable of
understanding; i.e., as the body-snatcher. The rest of his proceedings
were perfectly mysterious to them.
You notice that even Charles Dickens--who may yet go down to
history for having wished to prosecute Holman Hunt, of all people in
the world, for painting indecent pictures--takes very much this
popular view of medicine and pharmacy in Pickwick.
I think, then, it is not altogether unfair to assume that Gilles de
Raid was to a large extent the victim of Catholic logic. Catholic
logic: and the foul wish-phantasms generated of its repressions, and
of its fear and ignorance. He wanted to confer to a boon on humanity;
therefore he consorted with the learned; therefore he murdered little
children.
I think it is about time that somebody got after
J. B. S. Haldane. It is too late to do anything more to Fidley and
Latimer, but I am quite sure that the candle they lit was made of
infants' fat. It is no use your starting to rifle Graves, because his
publishers might resent you interference.
Those in favor of the motion will now please signify the same in
the usual manner. Any may the Lord have mercy on your souls!
