Gilles de Rais: The Banned Lecture

Aleister Crowley

I'm still trying to find the history on this; whether a lecture was actually planned and then later disallowed, written and then rejected as an appropriate lecture, or simply privately published and called "the banned lecture" in order to stir up interest. The last option would, I'm sure, have amused the old fraud to no end.

This small (and now exceptionally rare) pamphlet does sound like a lecture, if one that has a tendency to wander quite a bit. Gilles de Rais is discussed, to be sure, but Crowley admits roughly halfway through that he has no knowledge of his subject; is comments are aimed at debunking the impossibly large number of children de Rais is said to have murdered (eight hundred in Crowley's account; others, e.g. Bataille's excellent The Trial of Gilles de Rais, mention that contemporary reports mentioned numbers in the four figures). Crowley's argument does contain some seeds of logic, though the de Rais hobbyist will note a few places where a firmer grasp on his subject might have steered Crowley in a different direction (e.g., for the most part, de Rais didn't abduct his victims; they came to the castle looking for apprenticeships).

The most interesting thing about the pamphlet is wondering, if the first option in the first paragraph of this review is actually the accurate one, why on earth this lecture was actually banned. Crowley makes some remarks about Jews that could probably be taken in a disparaging light if taken out of context, but (a) one would assume that anyone reading this to approve it would be reading the comments in context and (b) anti-Semitism wasn't exactly taboo in 1930 England. There is a more vicious, but slightly more subtle, attack on the Roman Catholic church that may have incensed some folks. I can't imagine that the lecture's core idea, that de Rais didn't actually kill eight hundred children, would be considered a reason for the lecture to be banned. But you never know.