St Paul’s Watch was established in 1915 by Canon Alexander and Surveyor Mervyn Macartney. The idea was to recruit architects and other professionals to help protect St Paul’s from Zeppelin attack during the First World War. In 1939, the Watch was reformed by Dean Matthews to counter Hitler’s nightly attacks on the capital. Two hundred and fifty architects, professionals and cathedral staff were involved, including the Poet Laureate, John Betjeman. During the course of the Second World War, St Paul’s suffered damage to the high altar and the north transept and, on the night of 29 December 1940, suffered bombardment by incendiary bombs. On that fateful night the then Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, phoned the city authorities and said that, ‘at all costs St Paul’s must be saved’. So powerful had the cathedral become as a symbol of beauty, national pride and resistance to oppression by Londoners of all races and religions, that it was absolutely essential that it survive.

  Aleister Crowley 1875–1947

  Aleister Crowley was born into a wealthy English family. His mother was a religious woman and belonged to a strict nonconformist Christian sect called the Plymouth Brethren. Aleister Crowley, however, was a rebellious child. When he was eleven, his mother caught him masturbating; he delighted in her disgust and in the name she called him, ‘The Beast’. In years to come he would be known by this name as well as that of ‘Beast 666’ and ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’.

  In 1895, Crowley went to Cambridge University where, whilst still a student, he published several volumes of sex poetry. An increasing fascination with the occult led Crowley, three years later, to be initiated into a magical society called The Order of the Golden Dawn. He rose through its ranks quickly and was an acknowledged Freemason at that time too.

  Inherited wealth allowed Crowley to travel and also to devote himself to the study of the extreme ends of occultism and conjuration that the Golden Dawn itself frowned upon. It was whilst on honeymoon with his wife, Rose Kelly, in Egypt that Crowley was ‘contacted’ by a spirit he called Aiwass. It was Aiwass who dictated to Crowley his Book of Laws from which Crowley’s most famous saying, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ is taken. From this point on Crowley saw himself as a sort of evil messiah, ushering in a new post-Christian age of vice and depravity. This new ‘religion’ he called Thelema and, in 1920, he went to live in Cefalu in Sicily in order to found a ‘Temple of Thelema’. There with his mistress Leah Hirsig and an often-shifting band of followers, Crowley attempted to raise ancient gods, sacrificed animals and, possibly, human beings too, and had a huge amount of drug-addled sex. Vile rumours abounded which prompted Italy’s then leader, Benito Mussolini – an avowed enemy of Freemasonry himself – to expel Crowley and his followers in 1923.

  A heroin and cocaine addict for most of his adult life, Crowley died in Hastings in 1947. Whether he was indeed a very powerful magician or just a sex-obsessed charlatan is a question that still remains largely unanswered to this day.

 

 

  Barbara Nadel, Ashes to Ashes

 

 

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