When the Devil Visited Wales

When I was at school it was considered de rigueur for boys in the fifth form to read certain novels. James Herbert’s gruesome work, The Rats comes to mind. As does the author Dennis Wheatley who wrote a number of horror thrillers between the 1930s and the 1960s. Wheatley died in 1977 and I recall watching him on a television programme around that time declare that “the devil is a real person.”

Thomas Sheridan has described Wheatley, with his detailed accounts of magic rituals as a whistle blower on the upper echelons of the British ruling class and what they get up to behind the scenes in their mansions and stately homes. One of the more famous of his novels is The Devil Rides Out, a 1934 tale in which the heroes, the Duke de Richleau and his colleague Rex Van Ryn rescue their friend Simon Aron from the clutches of a satanic group operating from a stately home on Salisbury Plain. The novel was later made into a film replete with rituals and car chases, but it omitted the final battle with the evil Mocata for the mummified phallus of Osiris, an object which will enable its possessor to start a world war (one which broke out a few years later in real life). The novel itself is full of references to occult organisations, to witchcraft, seances and books such as the Kabbalah and Aleister Crowley’s “Book of the Law, the main theme of which is his leitmotif, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

Crowley himself is an interesting character, having been born in 1875 to strict Christian parents but having rejected this and followed his own path into magic and satanism. He was involved in various organisations (such as the Golden dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis) and activities, including ritual sex magic. One newspaper of the 1920s described him as “the wickedest man in the world.” Crowley relished this as he did other titles such as “the Beast 666.” Some doubt that everything written about Crowley was true as there is some evidence that he was an intelligence asset for the British during the First World War. In other words, the sceptics say, there was some element of creating a legend behind which the real man stood. Of Crowley’s devotion to darkness I have no doubt, and the intelligence accusation reinforces this view because the occult features prominently in Wheatley’s espionage and war novels such as They used Dark Forces.

On a visit to the tourist attraction Tredegar House, I was surprised to find that Crowley had been a frequent visitor during the tenure of Evan Morgan,Second Baron Tredegar, who inherited the title on his father’s death in 1934 and who himself died in 1949. Evan was described as a bohemian, but he had a deep interest in the occult. And despite a wide circle of contacts including Lloyd George and the Christian apologist GK Chesterton, the “Black Monk” was described by Crowley himself as an “adept of adepts.” Morgan had something at Tredegar House which was described as a “magick room” and the wickedest man in the world described it as the finest he had ever seen.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby that the rich are not like us, “they are different.” Certainly, it may be true that they look down on the rest of humanity. But are they now trying to make the rest of the world as corrupt as them? During the 1800s rich and powerful men were at the forefront of opposing the campaign to raise the age of consent to sixteen years. During the lifetime of Prince (Later King) Edward, “Bertie” had regular wild parties, at which married women were carefully picked so as to avoid any scandal arising from an unwanted pregnancy.  The advent of contraceptives for the masses began to fritter that away for the ordinary people The sexual revolution which began after World War II accelerated with the development of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s. Sexual behaviour was changed radically through popular culture by such means as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and a whole range of cinema and television presentations, from James Bond to Emmerdale. Christian morality has been largely erased and made to seem oppressive.

As if the Welsh Government’s new Curriculum and Assessment (Wales) Act 2021 isn’t enough, imposing compulsory sexuality teaching on children as young as three years of age, Disney is now promoting a show called Little Demon, about a girl whose mother was impregnated by the devil. The most gruesome of occult rituals are portrayed as cool, as is the idea that Satan can give you superpowers to deal with school bullies. And this devotion to darkness is explicitly presented as female empowerment.

Wales thought it had been gaining a measure of self-government when devolution arrived in 1999. Instead, as argued in another post, Wales has a uniparty and the Uniparty’s ideology is a depraved globalism.