Confessions of Aleister Crowley

349 (And then the girl came as a bird, and he went as a worm --- but I anticipate.) Neuburg was the moving spirit of one of those societies which are always springing up in universities. They never take root; because death comes to all alike at the end of three years, so to speak. People who stay up for a fourth year are Ancient Mariners, but lack the power to hold the wedding guest. Of course people overlap; but the generations follow each other so quickly and the spirit of youth is so impotent to stamp itself upon history, that it is a rare piece of luck when any of these clubs or societies live beyond seven years at the outside. Neuburg's society, the Pan society, did make its mark on the university; but that was not its fault. It was simply that he found people idiotic enough to make it invulnerable against the arrows of oblivion by dipping it into the Styx of persecution. Nothing could have been more helpful than the attitude of the Dean of Trinity, an idiot and inept. I have noticed that people who dislike me are invariable rendered so blind by malice that they give themselves away and make themselves ridiculous. There is an institution at Cambridge called "Ciccu", Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union. It is a bestial thing, compact of hypocrisy and secret vice. Now my connection with the Pan Society was of the slightest. I have merely been invited to read parers, I think altogether three times, on mysticism or kindred subjects. Nothing more harmless can be imagined, but the Ciccu went out of its mind. I am compelled to remark at this point that one of the most disgraceful features of controversy in England is that the upholders of religion and morality, which are frequently not at all in question, instead of disputing with their opponents, assail them with the weapons of secret slander. "This man," they say, "wants to take a penny off the income tax. It is certain that he habitually breaks the Seventh Commandment." In this instance the Ciccu did not know or care what it was that I had read to the Pan society. They merely stated that I hypnotized the entire assembly and took a mean advantage of them. It did not matter to them that what I was supposed to have done is impossible in nature, at least to one of my very mediocre powers. However, the Senior Dean of Trinity, the Rev. R. St. J. Parry, started to make trouble. I went to see him and asked him what accusations he had to make against me. He merely became confused, tried to bluster, would not commit himself, and finally said that he had given orders that I was not to be admitted to the precincts of the college. On the following morning I waited in the Great Court for him to come out of chapel and called him a liar to {564} his face in front of everybody. It then began to dawn upon him that he had no power to exclude me from Trinity, I being a life member of the college. He summoned the president, secretary and treasurer of the society, and threatened to send them down. But as it happened they none of them belonged to Trinity and he had no more power over them than he had over the Queen of Madagascar. He must have been a really exceptional fool, even for a don, not to have found out such essential facts before entering upon his campaign. He ultimately resorted to the meanest possible course of action. He did not dare to attack Neuburg, whose relations were wealthy Jews and might be relied upon to make every kind of trouble if he interfered with the hope of Israel; but he threatened a man named Norman Mudd, whose parents were poor and without influence, with the loss of his mathematical scholarship. Unfortunately again, Mudd was the mainstay of the hope of the college for the forthcoming Tripos, and Mudd himself had the heart of a lion. He dared the dean to do his damndest in the most uncompromising language. Once again the wretched creature had to draw in his horns. Only after I had left the battlefield to seek other victories did he succeed in bullying Mudd into resignation from the society by frightening his father. Mudd gave his promise to have no more to do with it --- and promptly broke it. The Pan society won all along the line. The victory was all the more signal in that an imitation society called the Heretics, who had been trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds like the Rationalist Press Association, had melted away into the thinnest kind of mist at the first intimation from the authorities that their exceedingly mild programme of half-baked infidelity was displeasing to the powers that were. The whole incident was trivial in its way, but it taught me an important lesson of policy. The more upright and uncompromising one is, the safer one is from attack. One's enemies will resort to the most despicable subterfuges, but they will not have the courage to come into the open and they will in one way or another fall into the pit which they dig. It is true that one can apparently be damaged