Confessions of Aleister Crowley

562 Let me quote from my own experience. As early as 1907, I was warned by a friend, I cannot say with what truth, that the police were watching me. My conscience being clear, I replied, "Good, I shan't be burgled." In 1910 during "The Rites of Eleusis" in Caxton Hall, to which we purposely invited a police representative, they had other men in plain clothing outside the building, apparently hoping that something indictable would ooze through the brickwork. In 1913-14 again, my studio near Onslow Square was a regular rendezvous for spies. I was always seeing them in the courtyard, skulking behind trees as I went to and fro from dinner. What they had hoped to find out I cannot imagine. In Detroit, months after my return to Europe, they repeatedly raided poor half-crazed Ryerson's house in search of some evidence of the "Devil Worshipper's Mystic Love Cult" and of course found nothing; from which they concluded not my innocence, but that my pact with the devil contained a clause guaranteeing me against the discovery of my crimes. If any of those obstinate asses had possessed sufficient intelligence to study a single page of my writings, he would have seen at once what ridiculous rubbish were the accusations made against me by foul-minded and illiterate cheats whom I had never so much as met. While I was in America, the London police not only disgraced themselves by the brutal raid on poor old Mrs Davies, described in "The Law Straw", but covered themselves with shame and ridicule by sending to prison a poor little bookseller who had sold for many years The Open Court, a well-known philosophical magazine of the highest character. Again they sent round a man to Frank Hollings to frighten him out of selling The Equinox, though no complaint had ever been made about it. Even my personal friends were haunted by sinister spies who made mysterious inquiries and uttered oracular hints about the frightful things that might happen if they happened. They wrote to my lawyers, and called on them to inquire my address which they knew perfectly well, and on my complaining to them about the theft of some of my property, not only refused to take up the matter, but answered me through the local police of the place where I lived, saying that I was "well-known" in Scotland Yard. The fact is undeniable, but the insinuation cowardly and dirty. The latest news from the front is that the special commissary in Tunis, having asked me to call with regard to an irregularity in my permis de séjour, amplified his remark with the cock-and-bull story intended to persuade me that I ran the risk of assassination by ferocious Fascisti. I asked the British consul to make inquiries and as with Hamlet --- the rest is silence. What interests me is the perverse psychology in this case. What can be their object? I am not annoyed but amused. But why should they waste so {888} much energy and public money on watching a man year after year when one would have thought that the most elementary common sense would have told them anyhow, after the first few months, that I was no more likely to infringe the law than the Archbishop of Canterbury? I vaguely assume some connection between this puerile policy of halfhearted pinpricks and the perennial flowering of the fantastic falsehoods about me. It suggests that I possess some quality which attracts the attention of the half-witted so that they cannot leave me alone. I have often wished to collect "The Thousand and One Nights of Nonsense", of which I am the hero. Seabrook's serial in 1923 is absurdly incomplete. My arrest in mistake for Bevan, whom I resemble about as much and as little as I do any other featherless biped, is rather typical of the odd incidents that help to keep me young. But when people ask me to clear my character of the aspersions upon it, my mind runs back to that scene in the smoking-room. I say to myself, "My dear man, if it took you an hour to prove to a perfectly sensible Frenchman so simple and clear a case with all the trumps in your fist, how long would it take to persuade a prejudiced ignorant public, congenitally incapable of understanding your point of