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Liber XXXII · Thelema

Liber XXXII · Thelema · Chapter I: Aleister Crowley

Victor Neuburg: Poet, Crowley's Disciple and Magical Partner

Victor Neuburg (1883–1940), poet and Aleister Crowley's disciple: scribe of the 1909 Enochian visions, partner in the Paris Working, mentor of Dylan Thomas.

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Victor Neuburg (1883–1940) was an English poet who became Aleister Crowley's most important disciple and magical partner between 1908 and 1914. He acted as scribe for Crowley's visions of the Enochian Aethyrs in Algeria in 1909, took part in the Rites of Eleusis and the sexual-magical "Paris Working," and then broke with Crowley. In later life he ran a small press in Sussex and, as editor of a newspaper poetry column, helped launch the career of Dylan Thomas.

Early Life, Freethought and Cambridge§

Victor Benjamin Neuburg was born in London on 6 May 1883 into a Jewish family; his father, of Austrian origin, left the household early, and he was brought up by his mother and her relatives. After school in London he worked for a time in the family business but was drawn to literature and to the freethought movement. As a young man he wrote verse for the Agnostic Journal, a periodical of the rationalist and secularist circles of late Victorian and Edwardian London.

In 1906 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read modern languages. There he moved in the university's literary and Bohemian circles, and there, around 1906 or 1907, he met Aleister Crowley, a former Trinity man who was visiting Cambridge to find disciples and readers for his poetry. Crowley was impressed by Neuburg's poems, his mystical temperament and what he regarded as untapped psychic gifts. Neuburg's first collection, The Green Garland, appeared in 1908, while he was still an undergraduate.

Neuburg and Crowley: Discipleship and Training§

Crowley drew Neuburg into his newly founded order of spiritual training, and Neuburg took the motto Omnia Vincam, "I shall conquer all." The relationship that developed was at once that of teacher and pupil, close friends, fellow poets and lovers. Crowley took Neuburg on walking tours in Spain and subjected him to an exacting magical retirement at Boleskine, his house on Loch Ness, in 1909, where the probationer was put through austerities and humiliations intended, in Crowley's view, to break down his ego. Accounts of this period, most of them coloured by Crowley's own retrospective writings or by Neuburg's later friends, differ sharply in tone: some present Crowley as a demanding but effective master, others as a manipulative one.

Neuburg also worked as a contributor to Crowley's journal The Equinox, and Crowley's imprint published his second major collection, The Triumph of Pan (1910). Its poems, pagan and erotic in theme, show the influence of Swinburne and of the magical ideas Neuburg was absorbing, and include homoerotic verse that was daring for its date.

Algeria 1909 and the Rites of Eleusis§

In November and December 1909 Crowley and Neuburg travelled through Algeria on foot, and Neuburg wrote down Crowley's visions of the twenty-eight Enochian Aethyrs, later published as The Vision and the Voice. Neuburg was not a passive stenographer: he took part in the rites, including the sexual operation on a mountain near Bou Saâda that Crowley later regarded as a turning point, and the evocation of Choronzon in the tenth Aethyr on 6 December 1909. In Crowley's record Neuburg sat in the magic circle while Crowley sat in the triangle, and when the shape-changing Choronzon tried to leap into the circle, Neuburg fought it off with a magical dagger. The episode became one of the most famous in modern Enochian magic, and Neuburg's own understanding of what happened that night remains unclear.

In 1910 Neuburg performed in the Rites of Eleusis, a series of seven public ritual performances held by Crowley at Caxton Hall in London, each devoted to one of the classical planets. The rites mixed poetry, music, dance and invocation, with the violinist Leila Waddell as a principal performer and Neuburg as a dancer. The press reaction, some of it hostile and insinuating, contributed to Crowley's growing notoriety and drew Neuburg into it.

The Paris Working and the Break with Crowley§

Between late December 1913 and February 1914 Crowley and Neuburg undertook in Paris a series of more than twenty magical operations that Crowley called the Paris Working. The rites combined ritual invocation of the gods Mercury (Hermes) and Jupiter with homosexual sexual magic, and their aims, as recorded in the surviving notes, included both spiritual insight and practical results such as money. The record is an important document for historians of sex magick because it shows Crowley experimenting with the techniques he would later teach in the higher degrees of the Ordo Templi Orientis.

Soon afterwards the partnership ended. Neuburg broke with Crowley in 1914, and Crowley is said to have pronounced a formal curse on him. Whether or not that story is accurate in detail, Neuburg suffered a serious breakdown in the following period. He served in the army during the First World War and afterwards stayed away from organised magic for the rest of his life, though he seems never to have lost his interest in mysticism and spoke of his Crowley years to younger friends.

Steyning, the Vine Press and the Sunday Referee§

After the war Neuburg settled at Steyning in Sussex. He married in the early 1920s and had a son, and with friends he ran the Vine Press, a small hand press that printed poetry, including his own. The Vine Press anthology Lillygay (1920), a collection of anonymous and folk poems, gave its name to a song cycle by the composer Peter Warlock, who set several of its texts.

Neuburg's best-known public role came late. In 1933 he became editor of the "Poet's Corner" in the London newspaper the Sunday Referee, a weekly feature that published poems sent in by readers and awarded prizes. Through it he encouraged a generation of young writers. The most famous was Dylan Thomas, whose poem "That Sanity Be Kept" appeared in the column in 1933 and whose first book, 18 Poems (1934), was published with the support of the Sunday Referee's prize scheme. Pamela Hansford Johnson, later a novelist, was another of his discoveries, and the future biographer Jean Overton Fuller was among the younger poets in his circle. Neuburg died of tuberculosis in London on 30 May 1940.

Legacy and Assessment§

Neuburg's reputation has been shaped by two very different afterlives. In the literary world he is remembered chiefly as an editor and mentor, a gentle, eccentric figure who helped Thomas and others into print. Arthur Calder-Marshall's memoir The Magic of My Youth (1951) portrays him affectionately in his Steyning years, and literary historians of Thomas's early career give him a prominent place.

In the history of Thelema and modern magic he is remembered as Crowley's partner in some of his most significant operations, and therefore as a witness and co-creator of key Thelemic texts. Jean Overton Fuller's biography The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg (1965) presented him partly as Crowley's victim, a sensitive poet drawn into experiences that damaged him; Crowley's biographers, including Lawrence Sutin and Richard Kaczynski, generally give a more balanced account that recognises Neuburg's own agency and his genuine interest in the work. Scholars of gender and sexuality in esotericism also see the Crowley–Neuburg relationship as an unusually well-documented case of same-sex intimacy shaping ritual practice in the early twentieth century.

His own poetry, little read today, deserves a place in the history of Edwardian pagan verse. It shows how the revival of interest in Pan and the classical gods, visible in writers from Kenneth Grahame to E. M. Forster, could take a frankly religious and magical form. Neuburg's career thus links the occult world of Aleister Crowley with the mainstream of modern English literature.

Frequently asked questions§

What was Victor Neuburg's role in The Vision and the Voice?§

He was Crowley's scribe and ritual partner in Algeria in 1909, writing down the visions of the Enochian Aethyrs as Crowley dictated them. He also took part in the evocation of Choronzon in the tenth Aethyr.

What was the Paris Working?§

It was a series of more than twenty sexual-magical operations performed by Crowley and Neuburg in Paris in early 1914, invoking Mercury and Jupiter. Its record is an important source for the history of Crowley's sex magick.

How was Victor Neuburg connected to Dylan Thomas?§

As editor of the "Poet's Corner" in the Sunday Referee from 1933, Neuburg published Thomas's early poems and helped bring out his first book, 18 Poems, in 1934. He was one of the first editors to champion Thomas's work.

Did Neuburg remain a Thelemite after leaving Crowley?§

He left Crowley and organised magic in 1914 and did not return to either. Friends reported that he kept an interest in mysticism and spoke of his magical years, but he did not work as a Thelemite in later life.

Sources and further reading§