Magick Without Tears

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.