1888
REASON JACK THE RIPPER WAS NEVER CAUGHT
DISINFORMATION FROM NEWS SERVICES
WRONG PROFILE AMONG POLICE SERVICES
NO ONE SUSPECTED A CHILD MURDERER IN 1888
CROWLEY NEVER TALKED. ALBEIT, CROWLEY LEFT MANY IRONIC CLUES IN HIS ARTICLE 'JACK THE RIPPER'. THIS ARTICLE IS A CLASSIC EXAMPLE OF OCCULT MISDIRECTION.
MYTHS ENDURE TO THIS DAY. NO ONE HAS LOOKED FOR THE RIGHT SUSPECT. NO ONE HAS ASKED THE RIGHT QUESTIONS. NO ONE HAS FOLLOWED THE RIGHT TRAIL OF CLUES.
MYTH ENDURES THAT THE LOCATION OF RIPPER MURDERS FORMS A PENTAGRAM. THIS IS FALSE. IT FORMS THE GEOMETRIC SHAPE OF ALEISTER CROWLEY'S PROGRESSED NATIVITY CHART DURING THE TIMES OF THE RIPPER MURDERS.
NO HANDWRITING ANALYSIS WAS TAKEN BETWEEN RIPPER LETTERS AND CROWLEY'S KNOWN HANDWRITING
VERY PROBABLE OCCULT COVER-UP FOR MANY YEARS
[THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE BY ALEISTER CROWLEY DISPLAYS THE IRONIC CLUES THAT HE LEFT INDICATING HIS OWN GUILT IN THE CASE OF JACK THE RIPPER. IMPORTANT CLUES ARE IN BOLD LETTERS.]
JACK THE RIPPER
BY
ALEISTER CROWLEY
To acquire a friendly feeling for a system, to render it rapidly
familiar, it is prudent to introduce the Star to which the persons of the
drama are attached. It is hardly one's first, or even one's hundredth
guess, that the Victorian worthy in the case of Jack the Ripper was no
less a person than Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. She has, however, never been
unveiled to the unthinking multitude; very few, even of those who have
followed her and studied her intently for years, have the key to that
"Closed Palace of the King."
If the reader happens to have passed his
life in the study of what is nauseatingly known as "occult science," he
would, if he were sufficiently intelligent, grasp one fact firmly; that
is, that the persons sufficiently eminent in this matter who have become
known as teachers, are bound to have possessed in overflowing measure the
sense of irony and bitter humour. This greatest treasure in their
characters is their only guarantee against going mad, and the way they
exercise it is notably by writing with their tongues in their cheeks, or
making fools of their followers. H. P. B. is known by the profane and
vulgar as an old lady who played tricks and was exposed; but her motives
were not what such persons supposed. These tricks were a touchstone for
her followers; if they were so little understanding of the true nature of
her Work that any incidents of this kind affected in the smallest degree
their judgement, then the sooner she was rid of them the better.
The truth of H. P. B., as in the case of
any artist, is to be known by a study of her best work; in this case a
small volume called The Voice of the Silence.
One of the closest followers of H. P. B.,
and in the sphere of literature unquestionably the most distinguished,
with the possible exception of J. W. Brodie-Innes, was a woman named Mable
Collins. Her novel, The Blossom and the Fruit, is probably the best
existing account of the theosophic theories presented in dramatic form.
One of the great virtues acclaimed and defended by this lady was that of
chastity. She did not go quite as far as the girl made famous by Mr Harry
Price upon the Brocken a few years ago, whose terror of losing the jewel
of her maidenhood was such that she thought it unsafe to go to bed without
the protection of a man; but Mable Collins had considerable experience of
this form of chastity a deux; at the same time, reflecting that one of the
points of H. P. B.'s mission was to proclaim the Age of the Woman, she
occasionally chose a female for her bed-fellow.
Some few years before Whitechapel
achieved its peculiar notoriety, the white flame of passion which had
consumed the fair Mabel and her lover, who passed by the name of Captain
Donston, had died down; in fact he had become rather more than less of a
nuisance; and she was doing everything in her power to get rid of him.
Naturally eager to assist in this manoeuvre was her new mistress, a lady
passing under the name of Baroness Cremers, whose appearance and character
are very fully and accurately described in a novel called Moonchild.
An American woman of the name of Cremers.
Her squat stubborn figure was clad in rusty-black clothes, a man's except
for the skirt; it was surmounted by a head of unusual size, and still more
unusual shape, for the back of the skull was entirely flat, and the left
frontal lobe much more developed than the right; one could have thought
that it had been deliberately knocked out of shape, since nature, fond, as
it may be, of freaks, rarely pushes asymmetry to such a point.
There would have been more than idle
speculation in such a theory; for she was the child of hate, and her
mother had in vain attempted every violence against her before her birth.
The face was wrinkled parchment, yellow
and hard; it was framed in short,thick hair, dirty white in colour; and
her expression denoted that the utmost cunning and capacity were at the
command of her rapacious instincts.
But her poverty was no indication that
they had served her and those primitive qualities had in fact been
swallowed up in the results of their disappointment. For in her eye raved
bitter a hate of all things, born of the selfish envy which regarded the
happiness of any other person as an outrage and affront upon her. Every
thought in her mind was a curse - against God, against man, against love,
or beauty, against life itself. She was a combination of the witch-burner
with the witch; an incarnation of the spirit of Puritanism, from its
sourness to its sexual degeneracy and perversion.
A prolonged contemplation of the above
portrait may possibly fertilize the seed of doubt in some minds as to
whether this woman was in every respect an ideal companion on one's
passage through this vale of crocodile tears; but tastes differ, and she
certainly mastered exquisite Mable Collins, turned her against her
teacher, persuaded her to embark on the most contemptible campaign of
treacheries. For, recognizing in H. P. B. one of the messengers sent from
time to time by the Masters to take a hand at the carpenter's bench where
humanity is slowly shapened, she thought that to destroy her would be as
acceptable to the powers of darkness as could be imagined.
Of Donston less is known [ROSLYN D'ONSTON WAS SO CLOSE IN HIS ANALYSIS OF THE CASE OF JACK THE RIPPER, HE COULD HAVE EASILY EXPOSED CROWLEY IN LATTER YEARS]; it is believed
that he was a cavalry officer, of the Household Cavalry at that, but under
another name. Cremers tried to persuade people that he had been caught
cheating at cards, but there is no reason to suppose that any disgrace
attached to his leaving the Service. He was by all accounts a sincere
sympathiser with the sufferings of our maudite race; his profession was
obviously of no particular use to him, holding these sentiments, and
apparently he drifted first into studies medical, and (later) theological.
He was a man of extremely aristocratic appearance and demeanour; his
manners were polished and his whole behaviour quiet, gentle, and composed;
he gave the impression of understanding any possible situation and of
ability to master it, but he possessed that indifference to meddling in
human affairs which often tempers the activity of people who are conscious
of their superiority.
These three people were still living
together in Mabel Collins' house in London; but as previously hinted, they
were trying to get rid of him. This, however, was not an altogether easy
task. The reputation of the novelist was a very delicate flower, and in
the early days of her beguine for Donston she had written him many scores
of letters whose contents would hardly have appeared altogether congruous
with the instructive and elevating phrases of The Blossom and the Fruit.
Now, although Donston was so charming and
pleasant a personality, although his graciousness was so notable, yet
behind the superficial gentleness it was easy to recognize an iron will.
His principal motif was righteousness; if he thought anything his duty, he
allowed nothing else to stand in the way of performing it, and for one
reason or another he thought it right to maintain his influence over Mable
Collins. One theory suggests that he was loyal to H. P. B., and thought it
essential to fight against the influence of Cremers. This, at any rate, is
what she thought, and it made her all the more anxious to get rid of him;
judging everybody by herself, she was quite sure he would not hesitate to
use the love-letters in case of definite breach; so, to carry out her
scheme, the first procedure must obviously be to obtain possession of the
compromising packet and destroy it.
The question immediately arose -- where
is it? Donston, with most men of his class, was contemptuously careless of
interference with his private affairs; he left everything unlocked; but
there was, however, a single exception to this rule. One of the relics of
his career in the cavalry was a tin uniform case, and this he kept under
his bed very firmly secured to the brass frame-work. This, of all his
receptacles, was the only one which was always kept locked. From this,
Cremers deduced that as likely as not the documents of which she was in
search were in the trunk, and she determined to investigate at leisure.
In those days, transport in London was
almost slower than today; from Bayswater or Bloosbury -- memory is not
quite sure as to where they lived -- to the Borough was certainly more
than a Sabbath day's journey; the only evidence of speed in the whole city
was the telegraph. Accordingly Cremers arranged one day for a telegram to
be dispatched to Donston, informing him that some friend or near relative
had met with a street accident, had been taken to Guy's Hospital, and
wanted to see him. Donston immediately started off on this fictitious
errand. As he left the house, Mabel laughingly warned him not to get lost
and run into Jack the Ripper.
While he is changing busses, it may be
proper to explain that these events coincided with the Whitechapel
murders. On the day of his journey, two or three of them had already been
committed -- in any case sufficient to start talk and present the murderer
with his nick-name. All London was discussing the numerous problems
connected with the murders; in particular it seemed to everybody
extraordinary that a man for whom the police were looking everywhere could
altogether escape notice in view of the nature of the crime. It is hardly
necessary to go into the cannibalistic details, but it is quite obvious
that a person who is devouring considerable chunks of raw flesh, cut from
a living body, can hardly do so without copious evidence on his chest.
One evening, Donstan had just come in
from the theatre -- in those days everyone dressed, whether they liked it
or not -- and he found the women discussing this point. He gave a slight
laugh, went into the passage, and returned in the opera cloak which he had
been wearing to the theatre. He turned up the collar and pulled the cape
across his shirtfront, made a slight gesture as if to say: "You see how
simple it is;" and when a social difficulty presented itself, he remarked
lightly: "Of course you cannot have imagined that the man could be a
gentleman," and added: "There are plenty going about the East End in
evening dress, what with opium smoking and one thing and another."
After the last of the murders, an article
appeared in the newspaper of W. T. Stead, the Pall Mall Gazette, by Tau
Tria Delta, who offered a solution for the motive of the murders. It
stated that in one of the grimoires of the Middle Ages, an account was
given of a process by which a sorcerer could attain "the supreme black
magical power" by following out a course of action identical with that of
Jack the Ripper; certain lesser powers were granted to him spontaneously
during the course of the proceedings. After the third murder, if memory
serves, the assassin obtained on the spot the gift of invisibility,
because in the third or fourth murder, a constable on duty saw a man and a
woman go into a cul-de-sac. At the end there were the great gates of a
factory, but at the sides no doorways or even windows. The constable,
becoming suspicious, watched the entry to the gateway, and hearing
screams, rushed in. He found the woman, mutilated, but still living; as he
ran up, he flashed his bullseye in every direction; and he was absolutely
certain that no other person was present. And there was no cover under the
archway for so much as a rat.
The number of murders involved in the
ceremonies was five [CROWLEY WOULD KNOW], whereas the Whitechapel murders so-called, were seven
in number; but two of these were spurious, like the alien corpse in
Arsenic and Old Lace. These murders are completely to be distinguished
from the five genuine ones, by obvious divergence on technical points.
The place of each murder is important,
for it is essential to describe what is called the averse pentagram, that
is to say, a star of five points with a single point in the direction of
the South Pole. So much for the theory of Tau Tria Delta.
It is not quite clear as to whether this
pseudonym concealed the identity of Donston himself. The investigation has
been taken up by Bernard O'Donnell, the crime expert of the Empire News;
and he has discovered many interesting details. In the course of
conversation with Aleister Crowley this matter came up, and the magician
was very impressed with O'Donnell's argument. He suggested an astrological
investigation [THE GUILTY DOG, OR 'LA' IF ONE WILL, ALWAYS BARKS FIRST]. Was there anything significant about the times of the
murders? O'Donnell's investigations had led him to the conclusion that the
murderer had attached the greatest importance to accuracy in the time.
O'Donnell, accordingly, furnished Crowley with the necessary data, and
figures of the heavens were set up.
A brief digression about astrological
theory: the classical tradition is that the malefic planets are Saturn and
Mars, and although any of the planets may in certain circumstances bring
about misfortune, it is to these two that the astrologer looks first of
all for indications of things going wrong.
Some years before this conversation,
however, Crowley had made extensive statistical enquiries into astrology.
There is a small book called A Thousand and One Horoscopes [CROWLEY HAVING A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE] which includes
a considerable number of nativities, not only of murderers, but of persons
murdered. Crowley thought this an excellent opportunity to trace the evil
influence of the planets, looking naturally first of all to Saturn, the
great misfortune, then to Mars, the lesser misfortune; but also to Uranus [ALL PLANETS IN ASPECT IN CROWLEY'S PROGRESSED CHART DURING THE RIPPER MURDERS],
a planet not known to the ancients, but generally considered of a highly
explosive tendency. The result of Crowley's investigations was staggering [NO DOUBT IT WAS];
there was one constant element in all cases of murder, both of the
assassin and the murdered. Saturn, Mars, and Herschel were indeed rightly
suspected of doing dirty work at the crossroads, but the one constant
factor was a planet which had until that moment been considered, if not
actively beneficent, at least perfectly indifferent and harmless -- the
planet Mercury [MERCURY ALSO IN ASPECT IN CROWLEY'S PROGRESSED CHART DURING THE RIPPER MURDERS]. Crowley went into this matter very thoroughly and
presently it dawned on his rather slow intelligence [OR MURDEROUS INTELLIGENCE, AS THE CASE MAY BE] that after all this
was only to be expected; the quality of murder is not primarily malice,
greed, or wrath; the one essential condition without which deliberate
murder can hardly ever take place, is just this cold-bloodedness [CROWLEY CONVINCES THE READER OF THIS MUCH], this
failure to attribute the supreme value of human life [CROWLEY STANDS IN SEVERE DANGER OF HYPOCRISY]. Armed with these
discoveries the horoscopes of the Whitechapel murders shone crystal clear
to him. In every case, either Saturn of Mercury were precisely on the
Eastern horizon at the moment of the murder (by precisely, one means
within a matter of minutes) [THIS IS TRUE ON A REGULAR CHART. ALBEIT, IN CROWLEY'S PROGRESSED CHART IT IS PRECISELY THE OPPOSITE].
Mercury is, of course, the God of Magic,
and his averse distorted image the Ape of Thoth, responsible for such evil
trickery as is the heart of black magic, while Saturn is not only the cold
heartlessness of age, but the magical equivalent of Saturn. He is the old
god who was worshiped in the Witches' Sabbath [AGAIN, CROWLEY WOULD KNOW].
Naturally, to his devotees, Saturn is not
to be associated with misfortune redeunt saturnia regna;1 Saturn has all
the fond wisdom of the grandfather.
To return from this long explanatory
digression, it was necessary in order to give the fair Cremers time to
extricate the uniform case from its complex ropes, the knots being
carefully memorised, and to pick the locks.
During this process her mind had been far
from at ease; first of all, there seemed to be no weight. Surely a trunk
so carefully treasured could not be empty; but if there were a packet of
letters more or less loose, there should have been some response to the
process of shaking. Her curiosity rose to fever pitch; at last the lock
yielded to her persuasive touch; she lifted the lid. The trunk was not
empty, but its contents, although few, were striking.
Five white dress ties soaked in blood [A COMPLETE AND UTTER FALSEHOOD].