Confessions of Aleister Crowley

402 have been equally fair to rearrange the letters of the judge's surname to make a sentence describing a deplorable fact in pathology, and accuse his lordship of outraging propriety every time he signed a cheque. The judge made rather malicious fun of both sides. Every few minutes some mysterious fact would crop up which I could explain better than anyone else. "But surely," the judge would murmur, "the proper person to tell the court about this is Mr. Crowley. Why don't you call Mr. Crowley?" And both sides would deplore the impossibility of discovering where Mr. Crowley was, though I was sitting in the court lippis et tonsoribus notus, thanks to my unmistakable peculiarities --- I will not say the majesty and beauty of my presence; having been familiarized to everybody in England by innumerable photographs as an explorer, poet, Magician, publisher, religious reformer, dramatist, theatrical producer, reciter and publicist. The Looking Glass, of course, could not call me, because I should have immediately disclosed that the libel on Jones was only an incident in an elaborate attempt to blackmail, and Jones would not call me because he was afraid that my contempt for conventions, my scorn of discretion as merely a euphemism for deceit, and my confidence in the power of truth and in the integrity and intelligence of men in general, would lead me to make some damaging admission. He was ill advised. The intensity of my enthusiasm, my candour and my {641} sheer personality would have dominated the court. They would have been bound to understand that even my follies and faults testified to my good faith, high-mindedness and honour. No man with a personal axe to grind would have done such frank, fearless, imprudent things. I had never been conciliatory; I had never been a flatterer or an opportunist. Brand himself was not more contemptuous of compromise. Such a man may be misguided, wrong-headed, a maker of mischief, but he must be sincere. It would have been seen at once that the beliefs and prejudices of men meant nothing to me, that my eyes were fixed on the enternal, my mind conscious only of God, and my heart wholly filled with the love of the Light. However, he feared. He had forgotten the first words of his initiation, "Fear is failure and the forerunner of failure." Therefore he failed. The only allegation against him was that he was my friend and colleague and he read into this the suggestion that our relations were criminal. The defendants denied that they had ever meant to make any such suggestion. The judge said in his summing up that, obscure as the case might be in many ways, one things was clear: Mr. Jones had sworn emphatically that he was innocent of the offence in question, the defendants had sworn that they had never at any time, and did not now, intend to suggest that he was guilty of any such conduct. The jury retired. Apparently they saw something sinister in the unanimity of plaintiff, defendant and judge. They breathed together, so to speak, and the Latin for that was conspiracy. If nobody had suggested this atrocity, it was time someone did! They returned as radiant as they had departed distressed. They declared that the defendants had perjured themselves in denying that they had accused Mr. Jones: that Mr. Jones had perjured himself in denying his guilt; that the judge had made a fool of himself by directing them to believe the evidence on either side; that The Looking Glass had meant to accuse Mr. Jones of felony; and, finally, that a felon he was. My contact with civilization has taught me little and that little hardly worth learning. One sees only the superficial aspects of things and those as often as not are deceptive. One's comprehension is confused and incoherent; one's conclusions cancel each other out. But my two days in court did really add to my practical knowledge of homo sapiens. Jones had sworn so simply, sincerely, solemnly, earnestly and emphatically; Fuller had spoken up with soldierly straightforwardness. Against these were matched the almost insane pomposities of Mathers, a notorious rascal, the bombastic blusterings of Berridge, an ill-reputed doctor on the borders of quackery, who had blanched and stammered at the first word of cross-examination; the sly evasions of Cran, a solicitor whose shifty glance was itself enough to warn the veriest tyro in physiognomy not to believe a word