The Transplutonic rites of Eros

Part six: Williamson's initiation into Witchcraft

The cool steps lead down to a private annex of the Hotel Crystal, which has twelve cubicles, six on each side of the cubic room. The identity of their occupants are shrouded by fine white silken veils. The number twelve is, no doubt, of astrological import. The three priestesses of the Dairy, for that is what it is called, are dressed in equally translucent costumes. The centre of the room has an altar with a large golden bowl set on a tripod. Each cell has a novitiate, naked, male, tied by wrists and ankles in the manner of St Andrew to a crux decussata. A young Cecil Williamson, in his early twenties, is privy to the secrets of this rite. The young men of that age were soon to face another kind of death.

Dinard was a fashionable resort for the English in the 1930s, enchanted by the belle-époque villas built by an Anglo-American aristocracy. Hitchcock would base the house in Psycho on the style of these, and is commemorated in a statue on the beachfront. For the magician, it gives a sense of the psychic architecture and troubling undercurrents the place has invoked.

In the brief oxygen spasm of libidinous energy between the wars, cocaine was available from the chemist, as were preparations of laudanum and opium. A floating class of aristocrats and bourgeoisie refreshed themselves in a river of champagne, dalliance and oh-so en vogue occultisms and astrology. The last of the trans-Neptunian planets Pluto, named for the lord of the Underworld, had been discovered on May 1st and cast its baleful rays of sexual perversity over the decade.

Cecil Williamson’s entry to the world of ‘the high society bogey bogey business’ came earlier, when he entered the pay of Mayfair medium Madame Delahaye. The virgin Cecil stood blanch faced in his white eton suit, hair powdered with flour, and was required to give a yes or no answer based on a pre-arranged signal. It was she who introduced him to the intelligence business; the scrupulous amassing of scandal, rumour and incontrovertible facts with which to control the field of operations. Williamson would refurbish that account later when he seemingly confided to interviewers about what witches do. Williamson had been first picked out because of the white light Delahaye saw behind him, in which we might discern a Luciferian beatitude. She noted his propensity for silence approvingly too.

Delahaye would go on to be the astrologer of Christian Dior, consoling him when his sister was taken to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp that she would be returned alive. By whatever method the celestial intelligencer came by it, her prediction proved correct. High fashion has continued to batten on astrologers, tarot and ritualistic display ever since.

Though Cecil was in Dinard in the tow of his grandmother and her companion, Madame Delahaye was there as well, making her rounds of the hotels to read Lenormand cards for the holidaying elites. His boy in white act was soon required elsewhere, and when the Madame of the Hotel Crystal desired his ministrations he would be summoned to the Dairy.¹

At the sound of three trumpets, the three priestess milkmaids began their deosil circumambulation of the chamber, visiting each house in turn. The stellar emissions were skilfully drained from the captives into a silver chalice held by the cherub of the rite. The young man in a white eton suit brought the mixed offerings to be poured into the central golden bowl. The quarters were addressed and the mixture ignited with alcohol and a spectacular ‘who-o-o-mp!’²

What are we to make of these transplutonic rites of Eros celebrated in the Hotel Crystal? To answer that question we must evaluate who it is that provided the testimony. Can we indeed consider Williamson any kind of reliable source?

At the conclusion of the previous chapter of our story, Cecil Williamson had made a series of remarkable claims:

1. The Operation Mistletoe ritual to thwart the Nazis which was overseen by Aleister Crowley in the Ashdown Forest.

2. The existence of a shadow world of witches operating under the
   codename Walsingham that had survived in secret from the Tudor period.

3. His membership of the New Forest Coven which predated that of Gerald Gardner and the birth of Wica.

The first two points have been discredited, Mistletoe for relying on the hoaxer Amado Crowley, and Walsingham having no evidential basis beyond Williamson’s uncorroborated testimony.

As for a third damning strike, we have the correspondence of Gardner and Williamson, housed in the archive of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, which covers the period of the two men’s relationship when their joint venture at the Witches’ Mill on the Isle of Man turned sour.

In a series of letters, from early 1953 onward, a disgruntled Gardner berates Williamson for not passing on the names of those drawn into the spider’s web of the Witches’ Mill, but rather ‘keeping the information to himself’ in spite of their prior arrangement to that end. And more damningly that,

you quite agreed that you could not be told all the secrets of witchcraft unless you joined and took the oaths. NN and NN were willing at the time, we understood you to say that your wife would not let you.³

It would appear that Gwen Williamson was well aware of the proclivities of the naturist Gardner, the sexual secret of the third degree, and did not want Cecil to partake of that forbidden fruit on a saggy mattress in the sweaty confines of the witches’ cottage in the grounds of the Fiveacres nudist club.

Gardner is also angry about a display of items in the museum, loaned by the Southern Coven, which included a ritual phallus. In that letter he refers to them with the phrase ‘me and my friends.’⁴ We cannot therefore include Williamson as a coven member.

He writes again in reference to the exhibit that, ‘I will not cooperate in making a Dennis Wheatley, Montague Summers pack of lies.’⁵

That sounds to me like a tension which had already arisen between the showman Williamson and an oath bound Gardner about what direction the museum should take. It is an accusation that will return when Williamson has free rein to stage his displays as he pleases in subsequent museums.

But Gardner lies too, notably about Crowley where he repeats the tale of AC not wanting to submit to a woman,

He could not stand to have a High Priestess having a superior position and having to kneel to her and while he Highly approved of the Great Rite, he was very shocked at the nudity.⁶

This little lie being used by Gardner to bolster his reputation shows us that the two men had locked horns and were vying for control of information, people and access to the world of the witches. Gardner was the insider and Williamson shut out.

We can only conclude from these documents that Williamson has lied, not only to Gardner, but consistently to Michael Howard who was desperate to find a traditional witchcraft survival. He also lied to the press, television and pagan magazines without scruple. So the events that transpired in the Hotel Crystal were likely not quite as he told them. Thus everything is thrown into doubt.

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Beneath witchcraft is the erotic imaginal. If we are to enter the secret world of Williamson, we have to consider not his written or spoken record, but the set of obsessional images, the dioramas.

When we return to the Hotel Crystal things have changed. Now we look through the eyes of Cecil Williamson, the film director; like Hitchcock, he sees Dinard not as it is, but through a transplutonic lens.

In my mind’s eye, I encounter the quiet and introverted Cecil, alone in his world of secrets. When he is not being summoned to stand as the motionless prop for a society medium, or escorting his grandmother to dinner, he is cognisant of a milieu becoming possessed by a wild eros. The slim figures of women in bias cut liquid backless dresses flicker through the grand hotels. They have the flared darting eyes and jittery movements of those on the sniff. The misrule of a privileged class plays out faraway from the constraints of England, in a place that seems positively Mediterranean. The parties go deep into the warm Brittany night in the villas spangled along the Emerald Coast. Palms are read, cards are laid, and the newly discovered Pluto extends its subtle hands into the fatal horoscope of those whose youth is a decade or so away from terrible war.

Tucked away with a dog-eared copy of Flaubert’s Salammbô, Williamson has his own erotic reveries. In its pages the high priestess of Tanit ascends to the rooftops and hymns the Goddess of the Moon. The lush immersive prose describes her rising from a lynx skin couch to salute the pole star and quadrants of the heavens before making the call to the Lady herself and falling, as if struck, to the ground. Later she dances and pleasures herself within the coils of her great black python. It remains a salacious read, made yet more immediate, when we recall that the Tanit cult had allegedly taken root here, among the tin-trading Celts, as well as in Cornwall.

Are the rites of the Dairy a species of dream? I suggest that they are. Williamson has combined a fevered reading of Flaubert with the pornography of the French Revolution, concerning the dairy built for Marie-Antoinette at Rambouillet with its monumental grotto and statue of the nymph Amalthea who raised the infant Zeus on goat’s milk. Perhaps he has heard the news from Paris that Maria de Naglowska was conducting Masses of the Flèche d'Or, and added them to the erotic set piece. I think the old boy liked to shock.

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In the sparce record of Williamson we cannot rely on the literal truth of his words, but we can consider the erotic tableaux, both those staged in the museum and provided as biography.

His witchcraft origin story – his initiation into witchcraft – now seems to be just such a scene. In the school holidays he was packed off to the quiet Devon village of North Bovey, where he saves an elderly woman who is being stripped naked by men intent on proving that she is a witch. The men are looking for the devil’s mark and to scratch her for giving them ‘the eye.’ Cecil throws himself on her exposed body and refuses to let go, an act that brings him into the wayside world of the Aunty Mays. It is also a sexual image, heightened by the violence and discrepancy of ages.

But my concern is primarily with another tableau. I am unable to confirm if it was first constructed in Windsor or Bourton-on-the-Water, but was certainly not present at the Witches’ Mill. It is a tableau which coalesces after, and as a product of, his split with Gerald Gardner. It marks a return to his role as film director, spy and now, Man in Black. It is the most enduring element of his erotic world.

Denied entry into the sexually charged atmosphere of Gardner’s Wica cult, Williamson creates one of his own; in which his wife Gwen will allow him to partake. She is seen here crouched to adjust the hem of the prone wax initiate while their receptionist prepares the flower display. The sign of Tanat hangs above the altar. A professional make-up artist in the film industry Gwen is used to composing the mise-en-scéne. Along with the horned devil receiving a tarred black baby, this is the most provocative display the museum will ever stage. As Gardner warned, it is all very Dennis Wheatley.

You will admit that there is always a little perversity in paying to see what lies beyond the heavy curtain. That keying into desire shows the curator has already got the jump on you. Your first move has been predicted by impulses that lie so deep beneath all the knotted up Christian and materialist clap-trap that you did not have words for them. How much more muted were those desires in the England of the 1950s.

Step this way, for there are wonders to behold, and the answer to that barely dared question: Am I a witch? Are these your lost possessions, laid out like a test for a reincarnated lama? Were you weighed against a Bible on these scales? Did you burn for knowing the ways of herbs and the words of psalms and the mysteries of birth and the powers of the natural world? Are these needle-fixed poppets wearing the faces and dresses of your enemies? Is the horned god of the witches your god? And is it your body that waits and aches on the altar?

The men for the most part shuffle outside, nervously pulling on their Wild Woodbine cigarettes, wreathed, unseen. Cloaked in harsh apotropaic smoke they do not question if their wives and children will emerge the same as when they went in. Their world is resolutely not to be found living amongst the dead things, the women’s things, of what is revealed to the denied dark senses.

Doreen Valiente wrote to him about the display, her friends having seen it at Bourton-on-the-Water and breathlessly relayed the facts to her. She wondered if either the shell grotto in Margate or the Isle of Thanet⁷ were in some way connected to the cult, and confessed that she had heard rumours of just such an organisation. Williamson’s imaginal had stirred the desires of others.

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As the museum moves to a final home in Boscastle, the tableau undergoes changes; and so do the tastes of the public. It is regarded as at best a little tacky, at worst exploitative, but certainly it seems untethered from any genuine current of witchcraft, or of relevance to the swelling Goddess movement and Neopaganism.

When Cecil hands over the museum to Graham King, the inevitable decision is made to remove the diorama. Present for this operation is village wisewoman Cassandra Latham-Jones, who confided to me what she found. The Priestess, pictured above, is holding a length of fabric and concealed within it was an ivory phallus. It confirms that Cecil was staging the highest mystery of the witch cult, the Great Rite, hidden in plain sight.

There was a second discovery; as she wrote to me,

The other item I can't find on the website, which is odd as I thought that all items were catalogued. From what I can remember, it was a small talisman made of metal (either pewter or tin). The inscription was what appeared to be an upright crescent/semi circle on top of an upright triangle. I'm not sure where this was originally placed as it fell to the floor as we were moving the prostrate figure from the altar.

The Cult of Tanit was not merely a honeytrap for the tourist imagination, but masked a serious undertaking to cut a secretive path, rooted in the eros of encounter with the other.

Further discoveries in the museum archives reveal that the cult had practices, people and ritual sites⁸ and to which I now possess the keys.

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Postscript

My thanks to Christina Oakley-Harrington for her directions to the relevant letters of Gerald Gardner. To the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic for access to their archive. To Cassandra Latham-Jones for sharing her recollections of the diorama and other cogent insights. To Steve Patterson for the scan of the floodwater stained picture of Cecil cupping the breast of the Priestess, and his endless stream of information and local asides.

1. I have been unable to identify this figure, any information provided about her will be both accredited and appreciated.

2. Williamson gives his account of the scurrilous going on in Talking Stick Issue XII Autumn 1993.

3. 29C MOWG29. For further letters in this vein, in the shocking handwriting and glitchy typing of GG see also MOWG02, MOWG03, MOWG89, MOWG30, MOWG53, and MOWG27

4. MWOG02

5. MOWG 30

6. MOWG 49

7. A false etymology of the type we encountered in the first of these articles.

8. Previously I only considered Lantinney, but I now have new information.