PREFACE 
xv 
Leadbeater (though his name is more than hinted at), a 
follower who 
is not and never was a member of a lodge in good 
standing working under a Grand Lodge of Free and 
A c c e pte d Masons. 
The Sanctuary 
must be 
purged . ... He is not even a free man, but the hired tool 
of a woman. ... This woman-pollution 
to that pure 
word/-comes to us from the nauseous fraud by which 
she made herself the real if not the nominal mistress of 
the T.S. . .. This is the secret object of the attempt to 
hold the election of S. G.M. G. without due notice, to 
drag our holy Rite into the mire, to chain it to the 
chariot wheels of a Krishnamurti, to make us pandars to 
the antique and impotent uncleanness of a senile 
sodomite. 
Apart from the contempt exuded in this speech, there is an 
amusing and hypocritical element to be detected here that 
should not be lost in the shuffle. By his own admission 
Crowley was, if not an overt homosexual deviant, then a 
person who had a powerful homosexual component in his 
character structure. His strictures against Leadbeater as an 
old sodomite are, to say the least, evidence that he was 
dishonest and unscrupulous where it suited his purpose 
regardless of any peculiarities inherent in his own personality. 
It is the pot calling the kettle black. The Bagh-i-Muattar, one 
of the books Crowley wrote sometime during 1914, is 
nothing else but a textbook of homosexual and deviant 
practices hidden under the mask of Sufi mysticism. That is 
Crowley's business, not mine. But if then he attacks another 
person on the grounds of homosexuality, his hypocrisy 
stands out like a sore thumb and will win him but little 
support. 
I hold no brief for Bishop Leadbeater, believe me. My own 
condemnation of him rests, not on the grounds that he was 
"an old sod" or a "bugger," but that he, together with Mrs.