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Chris Scott
Chief Inspector
Username: Chris
Post Number: 547
Registered: 4-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, September 24, 2003 - 1:02 pm: |       |
I found a cover illustration of this book - see below
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John Savage
Detective Sergeant
Username: Johnsavage
Post Number: 82
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2003 - 12:36 pm: | |
Hi Chris,
This is a new one on me.
Any further details?
Regards,
John Savage |
Chris Scott
Chief Inspector
Username: Chris
Post Number: 550
Registered: 4-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2003 - 3:11 pm: | |
Hi John
The book about Crowley was already listed in the threads but with no info. I have found the following about Osher:
J. Edward Cornelius, fraternally known as Frater Achad Osher 583, was born in New Haven Connecticut into an extremely old New England family in July of 1951. He is the eleventh direct descendant of Captain Aaron Cornelius whose ship arrived in America in 1645 and who was one of four men who founded Flushing, Long Island. On his mother's side he is a direct descendant of Mary Sanford, the last woman hung for witchcraft in Connecticut on June 13th 1662 (almost thirty years before the witchcraft hysteria broke out in Salem Village). All this, and more, he has written in a laborious autobiography about his family and himself simply titled I Meant Well. He is also an accomplished occult artist with many of his oil paintings gracing the walls of the old Edwardian home which he and his wife own in Berkeley, California. He has had a strong interest in Crowley's works since the late 1960s although the group in which he was initiated was far more pagan. The private Crowley library and archive of the Corneliuses is considered one of the largest in the world.
The text of the Crowley article on jack can be found at:
http://www.econcrisis.homestead.com/JTRbyCrowley.html
On the same site there are some writings about the Ripper's pentagram.
As to the contents of the Frater Osher book, I found this resume:
The Cornelius version of 1993 and Pangenetor Lodge's version of 1994 entitled 'Did Aleister Crowley Know the Identity of Jack the Ripper,' includes Crowley's essay along with an article by AO583 titled The Crowley-Ripper Connection'. This latter pamphlet was incorporated almost verbatim into a chapter in Red Flame No.3 (1996) with new material.
There is also a long article on the Ripper/Crowley connection at
http://www.redflame93.com/JacktheRipper.html
This contains the interesting observation:
There is yet another story worth mentioning. When the writer Bernard O'Donnell was doing an interview with Aleister Crowley in the thirties (15) he learned that the Great Beast actually knew Robert Donston Stephenson before he had died in 1912.
This is interesting as the actual date of Donston/Stephenson's death is not know. I will bechecking this out!!!
Hope the above helps
Chris |
Chris Scott
Chief Inspector
Username: Chris
Post Number: 554
Registered: 4-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2003 - 3:56 pm: | |
There is another connection with the Empire News in that Crowley published an article in this paper as follows:
CROSS OF SEVEN POINTS (newspaper article by A. Crowley)
Empire News, England, May 19th 1934
Note: Gerald Yorke writes that this is an "article on Jack the Ripper."
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Chris Scott
Chief Inspector
Username: Chris
Post Number: 555
Registered: 4-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2003 - 4:02 pm: | |
The account by Cowley in his own words is from Chapter 71 of his "Confessions:"
Her name was Vittoria Cremers. She claimed to be the bastard of a wealthy English Jew and to have married a knavish Austrian baron. She was an intimate friend of Mabel Collins, authoress of The Blossom and the Fruit, the novel which has left so deep a mark upon my early ideas about Magick. In 1912 she was in her fifties. Her face was stern and square, with terribly intense eyes from which glared an expression of indescribably pain and hopeless horror. Her hair was bobbed and dirty white, her dress severely masculine save the single concession of a short straight skirt. Her figure was sturdy and her gait determined though awkward. Laylah found her in a miserable room on 176th Street or thereabouts. Pitifully poor, she had not been able to buy Liber 777 and had therefore worked week after week copying in the Astor Library. She impressed Laylah as an ernest seeker and a practical business woman. She professed the utmost devotion to me and proposed to come to England and put the work of the Order on a sound basis. I thought the idea was excellent, paid her passage to England and established her as a manageress.
Technically, I digress; but I cannot refrain from telling her favourite story. She boasted of her virginity and of the intimacy of her relations with Mabel Collins, with whom she lived a long time. Mabel had however divided her favours with a very strange man whose career had been extraordinary. He had been an officer in a cavalry regiment, a doctor, and I know not how many other things in his time. He was now in desperate poverty and depended entirely on Mabel Collins for his daily bread. This man claimed to be an advanced Magician, boasting of many mysterious powers and even occasionally demonstrating the same.
At this time London was agog with the exploits of Jack the Ripper. One theory of the motive of the murderer was that he was performing an Operation to obtain the Supreme Black Magical Power. The seven women had to be killed so that their seven bodies formed a "Calvary cross of seven points" with its head to the west. The theory was that after killing the third or the fourth, I forget which, the murderer acquired the power of invisibility, and this was confirmed by the fact that in one case a policeman heard the shrieks of the dying woman and reached her before life was extinct, yet she lay in a cul-de-sac, with no possible exit save to the street; and the policeman saw no signs of the assassin, thought he was patrolling outside, expressly on the lookout.
Miss Collins' friend took great interest in these murders. He discussed them with her and Cremers on several occasions. He gave them imitations of how the murderer might have accomplished his task without arousing the suspicion of his victims until the last moment. Cremers objected that his escape must have been a risky matter, because of his habit of devouring certain portions of the ladies before leaving them. What about the blood on his collar and shirt? The lecturer demonstrated that any gentleman in evening dress had merely to turn up the collar of a light overcoat to conceal any traces of his supper.
Time passed! Mabel tired of her friend, but did not dare to get rid of him because he had a packet of compromising letters written by her. Cremers offered to steal these from him. In the man's bedroom was a tin uniform case which he kept under the bed to which he attached it by cords. Neither of the women had ever seen this open and Cremers suspected that he kept these letters in it. She got him out of the way for a day by a forged telegram, entered the room, untied the cords and drew the box from under the bed. To her surprise it was very light, as if empty. She proceeded nevertheless to pick the lock and open it. There were no letters; there was nothing in the box, but seven white evening dress ties, all stiff and black with clotted blood!
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RosemaryO'Ryan
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2003 - 8:45 pm: | |
Dear Chris,
Further to your posts re, Mme. Blavatsky and Jack the Ripper...was it not as the notorious emminent
gris of London, 1888-1898, that Mme. Koluchy introduced London high society to her special charms? See, "The Brotherhood of The Seven Kings",
1899, [L.T.Meade & Robert Eustace]. What is fiction and what is fact...that is the question!
Rosey :-) |
John Savage
Detective Sergeant
Username: Johnsavage
Post Number: 84
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Friday, September 26, 2003 - 11:27 am: | |
Hi Chris,
Many thanks for that detailed information, I shall try to read through the links provided over the weekend whenI have more time.
It is a pity I did not know about the Empire News article of 19th. May 1934 a little earlier as only a couple of days ago I was at Colindale reading the same newspaper for the 1935 stories of our friend Dr. Dutton. (of which I hope to post further details later)
Regards,
John Savage
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David Knott
Police Constable
Username: Dknott
Post Number: 6
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Friday, September 26, 2003 - 5:55 pm: | |
Hi,
Any collectors interested in owning a copy of this book (more of a pamphlet really) there is one for sale at www.oddballbooks.com for $15.
If you're just interested in the text, then it can be found in its entirity (plus a bit more added recently) at the redflame ULR provided by Chris Scott above.
David |
Thomas C. Wescott
Sergeant
Username: Tom_wescott
Post Number: 13
Registered: 4-2003
| | Posted on Friday, September 26, 2003 - 9:12 pm: | |
Hello all,
You would do well not to buy this book. It merely reprints Crowley's writings, which are readily available on the internet. Crowley did not know D'Onston, and his accounts are a garbled rendering of Vittoria Cremer's story. You'd do better by purchasing Melvin Harris' "The True Face of Jack the Ripper' and Ivor Edwards' 'JTR's Black Magic Rituals'.
Yours truly,
Tom Wescott |
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