(ebook - occult) Aleister Crowley - Gilles De Rais, stooges (hasło

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GILLES DE RAIS
1
GILLES DE RAIS
The Banned Lecture
By Aleister Crowley
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GILLES DE RAIS
2
Note: Originally this article appeared in 'the OCCULT DIGEST' Vol 2 #3,
Chicago, 1972. The banner proclaimed "COLLECTORS EDITION-FIRST PUBLIC
DISTRIBUTION ANYWHERE OF GILLES de RAIS.
The Banned Lecture
-----------------
GILLES de RAIS
to have been delivered before the
University Poetry Society by
ALEISTER CROWLEY
on the evening of Monday, Feb.3rd.1930
---------------------------
Long ago when King Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, a gentleman whose
Christian names were Thomas Henry - you possible have heard of him -
he was no less apersonage than the Grandfather of the great Aldous
Huxley- once found himself threatened be a perdicament similar to that
in which I stand tonite. He had been asked to lecture a distinguished
group of people.
What bothered him was this: what assumption was he to make about
the existing knowledge of the audience? He adopted the sensible course
of asking the advice of an old hand at the game; and was told "You
must do one of two things. You may assume that they know everything,
or that they know nothing." Thomas Henry thought it over, and decided
that he would assume that they know nothing.
I think that merely shows how badly brought up he must have been;
and explains how it was that he became a kirty little atheist, and
repented on his death-bed, and died blaspheming. Gilles de Raise was
born sometime in 1404. He married Catherine de Thonars on the 30th of
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GILLES DE RAIS
3
November, 1420, thus becoming the richest noble in Europe. He lived
extravagantly until his arrest by the Church. He geban alchemical
studies under the instruction of Gilles de Sille, a priest of
St. malo. Montague Summers believes he sacrificed around eight hundred
children and quotes the proceedings of ecclesiastical high court in
which a Dominican priest named Jean Blouyn took over as the delegate
of the Holy Inquisition for the city and diocese of Nantes. Needless
to say, Gilles "confessed", and was put to the stake and charcoaled on
October 26th., 1440 leaving his estates and untold riches to Mother
Church, who, wasting no time, added them to her list of material
gains. Included in this particular catche were Gilles personal
hand-painted manuscripts which were eagerly welcomed into the Mother
Lode's vault where they sit to this day. Unfortunately, the Vatican's
library is inaccessible to "common folk", and will probably remain so
until the demise of Mother Church herself, at which time this author
will assist other interested persons in converting it into a public
library.
No! No! that would be quite impossibly bad manners. I shall
assume that you know everything about Gilles de Rais; and that being
the case, it would evidently be impertinent for me to tell you
anything about him. So that we can consider the lecture at an end, and
(after the usual vote of thanks) pass on immediately to the
discussion, which I think ought to be more amuising, if scarcely as
informative.
It is rather an hard saying--however worthy of all acceptation in a
university like Oxford, where, I understand, the besetting sin of the
inmates is lecturing and being lectured, but discussions are always
apt to turn out to be amusing, especially if conducted with
blackthorns or shotguns, where as lecturing is merely an attempt,
fordoomed to failure, to communicate knowledge which usually the
lecturer does not possess.
I am sure that we all recognise that an attempt of this kind is
immpssible in nature. No! I am not proposing to inflict upon you my
celebrated discourse on Scepticism of the Instrument of Midn. I am not
even going to refer to the first and last lecture which I suffered at
a dud university somewhere near Newmarket, in which the specimen of
old red sandstone in rostrum began by remarking that political economy
was a very difficult subject to theorise upon because there were no
reliable data. Never would I tell so sad a story on a Monday evening,
with the idea of Tuesday already looming darkly in every melancholic
mind. I should like to be just friendly and sensible, thougf it is
perhaps too much to expect me to be cheerful.
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GILLES DE RAIS
4
The fact is that I am in a very depressed state. My attention was
attracted by that little work "knowledge" of which we hear so much and
see so little. I don't propose to inflict upon you the M.C.H., and
demonstrate that the life and opinions of Filles de Rais were
inevitably determioned by the price of onions in Hyderabad. But I do
think that in approaching a historic question, we should be very
careful to define what we mean--in our particular universe of
discourse--by the work "knowledge."
May I ask a question?
Does anyone here know the date of the battle of Waterloo?
Pause-- (Someone -- I bet -- tells me "1815.")
Thank you very much. To be frank with you, I know it myself. I did
not require information on that particular point. What I asked was,
wheter anyone know the date. I felt that, if so, it would have created
a sympathetic atmosphere.
But since we are talking about Waterloo, we may ask ourselves what,
roughly speaking, is the extent of our knowledge?
I have heard plenty of theories about why Napoleon lost the
battle. I have been told that he was already suffering from the
disease which killed him. I have been told that he was outgeneralled
by Wellington. I have been told that his army of conscripts was
underfed and not properly drilled. I have also been told that the
battle was won by the Belgians.
Now, all these things are merely matters of opinion. There may be a
little truth in some of them. But we have practically no means of
finding out exactly how much, even if our documentary support is valid
to establish any of these theories. It is, also, almost impossible to
estimate the causes of any given event, if only because those causes
are infinite, and each one of them is to a certian extent an efficient
determining cause.
Take a quite simple matter like the time of year. If it had been
winter instead of summer, the hens would not have been laying and
Hougomont and La Haye Sainte would not have been able to nourish the
contending forces. But though it is profitable for the soul to
contemplate the extent of what we don't know, it is in some ways more
satisfying to our baser natures to consider what we do know in a
reasonable sense of the word.
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GILLES DE RAIS
5
It is not disputable that the battle of Waterloo was fought and
won. It is not disputable that it was the climax, or rather the
denoucement, of campaigns lasting over a number of years. And there is
no reason for doubting that Napoleon was born in Corsica, that he
entered the French army, and rose rapidly to power by a combination of
military genius and political intrigue.
There is a vast body of indirect evidence which confirms these
statements at every point. Taken as a whole, they would be totally
inexplicable on any other hypothesis. But when we consider the
character of Napoleon, we are at once involved in a mass of
contradictions. Probably no one in history has been more discussed,
and every writer gives a totally different account. Each seeks to
buttress his opinion by incidents which we have no reason to suppose
other than authentic, but seem incongruous. So far as we can get any
triuth out of the matter at all, it is that the character of Napoleon,
like that of everybody who ever lived, was extremely complex. And the
writers are more or less in the position of the Six Wise Men of
Hindustan who were born blind and had to describe an elephant.
Spiritually fortified by these simple meditations, we may apply
their fruits to the problem of Filles de Rais, and ask ourselves what
we really know about hime as opposed to what we have heard about him.
We know that he was a gentleman of good family, because otherwise
he could not have held the offices which he did hold. We know that he
was a brave soldier, and a comrade of Joan of Arc. We know that he had
a passion for science, for the basis of his reputation was that he
frequented the society of learned men. We know finally that he was
accused of the same crimes as Joan of Arc by the same people who
accused her, and that he was condemned by them to the same penalty.
I do not think that I have left out any verfiable fact. I think
that all the rest amounts to speculation. The real problem of Gilles
de Rais amounts, accordingly, to this. Here we have a person who, in
almost every respect, was the male equivalent of Joan of Arc. Both of
them have gone down in history. But history is somewhat curious. I am
still inclined to think that "there aint no sich animile." In the time
of Shakespeare, Joan of Arc was accepted in England as a symbol for
everything vile. He makes her out not only as a sorceress, but a
charlatan and hypocrite; and on tope of that a coward, a liar, and a
common slut. I suspect that they began to whitwash here when they
decided that she was a virgin, that is a sexually deranged, or at
least incomplete, animal, but the idea has always got people going, as
any student of religion knows. Anyway, her stock went up to the point
of canonisation. Gilles de Rais, on the other hand, is equally a
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