Neuberg, Victor

Victor Neuburg

Victor Neuberg: Poet, Initiate, and Magical Partner of Aleister Crowley

Victor Neuberg (1883–1940) was a poet, editor, and important initiate of Aleister Crowley. For several years, he played a significant role in Crowley’s magical activities and became closely involved in the development of sex magic as a key to occult mysteries. He also assisted Crowley with the publication of his magazine The Equinox and, for five years, remained one of the most important figures in Crowley’s magical circle.

Neuberg was born on 6 May 1883 in London into an Orthodox Jewish family. He was educated at the City of London School and later at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1906 to 1909. In time, he rejected Judaism in favour of agnosticism.

Crowley first encountered Neuberg through his poetry and, in 1909, arranged to meet him at Neuberg’s rooms in Cambridge. The two men were immediately impressed by one another, although Crowley clearly dominated the relationship. Crowley initiated Neuberg into his secret society, the Silver Star, and gave him the magical name Frater Omnia Vincam. Neuberg became deeply attached to Crowley and referred to him as “my guru.”

Crowley then invited Neuberg to Boleskine, his home in Scotland, to give him an intense initiation into occult practice. For ten days, Neuberg underwent severe instruction and ordeals, worsened by exhaustion, lack of food, sleeping naked on a bed of gorse, and sadomasochistic treatment from Crowley, including verbal abuse and beatings with gorse and stinging nettles. Neuberg recorded these experiences in his magical diary, including his performance of the Bornless One Ritual and his long excursions of Rising on the Planes, or astral travel. His visions showed a natural ability for magic, but he also wrote of his disgust at Crowley’s anti-Semitic verbal abuse. At one point, Crowley accused Neuberg of belonging among the Qlippoth, the negative entities of the kabbalistic Tree of Life, and beat him bloody with a gorse switch.

Crowley was eventually satisfied with Neuberg’s magical performance and later, in 1909, took him to Algiers, where they evoked the demon Choronzon. This experience inspired Crowley to include sex as part of ritual practice; for Crowley, it became an illumination of the true workings of magic.

For modern students of occultism, the story of Neuberg and Crowley remains both fascinating and cautionary. It reveals the intensity of ceremonial magic, spirit evocation, magical discipline, power, obsession, and danger. If you want to explore these subjects more deeply, the Occult World Skool Community is a place where you can meet fellow occultists, study demonology, ceremonial magic, ancient occult systems, spirit work, and magical practice with others who take the occult path seriously.

In 1910, Neuberg participated in semi-public rituals in which he invoked Bartzabel, the spirit of Mars, for prophecy. He also performed a wild, dervish-like dance that ended in exhausted collapse. The performances began as private ritual work. Neuberg sat in a Magic Triangle and allowed himself to be possessed by Bartzabel. The spirit accurately predicted the outbreak of the Balkan War in 1912 and World War I. Neuberg danced to the violin playing of Leilah Waddell, one of Crowley’s mistresses. The ritual was received so enthusiastically that Crowley developed seven rituals known as the Rites of Eleusis for public performance.

The Rites of Eleusis were staged in 1910 for paying audiences, who were prepared with a “loving cup,” Crowley’s mixture of alcohol, fruit juice, heroin or morphine, and what he called “the elixir introduced by me to Europe,” probably buttons of mescaline. The potion tasted like rotten apples but had the desired effect on the audience. Neuberg appeared dressed in white, dancing in a spontaneous frenzy to Waddell’s wild violin playing.

The first press reports were favourable. Later, a more hostile report implied that C. S. Jones, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, was involved in a homosexual relationship with Crowley and Allan Bennett. Jones sued the newspaper for libel. The negative publicity may have been encouraged by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, one of the founders of the Golden Dawn, who was suing Crowley in an effort to prevent him from publishing secret Golden Dawn material.

Neuberg’s last major magical involvement with Crowley took place in 1913–14, during twenty-four sex magic rituals known as “the Paris Workings.” In these operations, Crowley was experimenting with sex magic for the Ordo Templi Orientis and increasingly favouring it over the more traditional ritual structures of the Golden Dawn.

The main purpose of the Paris Workings was to invoke the gods Jupiter and Mercury and to persuade them to bestow money. Neuberg was to take the active homosexual role. The workings began on 31 December 1913 and ended on 12 February 1914. Neuberg became possessed by Mercury and answered questions posed by Crowley. He was not always able to perform sexually, and sometimes Crowley took the active role instead. Neuberg also became possessed after the close of the rituals and gave prophecies that failed to happen. During the workings, the two men believed they had discovered previous incarnations in Crete. The final working was intended to obtain money for Neuberg. He soon received a sum from an aunt, but angered Crowley by giving some of the money to others instead of giving it all to him.

The past-life recall inspired Crowley to write about his relationship with Neuberg:

“I am always unlucky for you, you know; you always have to sacrifice everything for my love. You don’t want to in the least; that is because we both have hold of the wrong end of the stick. If only I could leave you and you could love me. It would be lucky. But that apparently has never happened. Mutual indifference and mutual passion, and so on.”

The Paris Workings appear to have been too much for Neuberg, whose affection for Crowley may already have been fading. Another likely reason for his departure was his anger over the death of Joan Hayes, a professional dancer whose stage name was Ione de Forest. She had been hired to perform in the Rites of Eleusis, and Neuberg became enamoured with her, much to Crowley’s displeasure. In 1911, Hayes married, but six months later left her husband and became Neuberg’s mistress, angering Crowley further.

Two months later, Hayes shot herself to death. Neuberg believed that Crowley had placed a spell on her and had magically murdered her.

In the autumn of 1914, Neuberg informed Crowley that he had decided to leave the Silver Star and wanted nothing more to do with him. Furious, Crowley ritually cursed him as a traitor. Neuberg suffered a nervous breakdown, seemingly confirming the dark lore that anyone who crossed Crowley either committed suicide or entered a mental institution.

Neuberg was drafted into the British Army from 1916 to 1919 and served during World War I. Afterwards, he moved to Steyning, Sussex, where he wrote poetry and operated a hand printing press, the Vine Press. He published poetry under his own name and several pseudonyms, though the press never made much money. Without magic, Neuberg felt cut off from his purpose in life and began a slow decline.

In 1921, he married an earlier mistress, Kathleen Goddard. It was not a love match, but a favour to Goddard, who wanted to have a child within marriage. In 1924, she gave birth to a son, and three months later openly took a lover. Neuberg was by then psychologically and physically exhausted. He never fully recovered from the wounds left by his relationship with Crowley.

In 1930, Neuberg met a woman and went to live with her in London. The relationship brought him renewed happiness, and his poetry improved. In 1933, he became poetry editor of Sunday Referee. His final years were peaceful. He died of tuberculosis on 31 May 1940.

Victor Neuberg remains one of the most haunting figures in Crowley’s magical world: gifted, devoted, wounded, visionary, and ultimately marked by the forces he helped unleash. His life stands at the crossroads of poetry, ceremonial magic, possession, demonology, sex magic, and the dangerous intimacy between teacher and initiate.