Ripper
own cult: the Argentinum Astrum, A:A, or Silver Star. Like the Golden Dawn, it developed rituals to gain Magick powers. Crowley shaved his head and lived on mescalin. He dressed in robes akin to those of the Ku Klux Klan. While entertaining mistresses in their home, he hung his wife upside down in the closet, driving her insane. Crowley stressed the sacramental use of sex. During a Paris ritual, he publicly sodomized disciple Victor Neuberg. To "serpent's kiss" lovers, he filed his canine teeth to points. His current Scarlet Woman he branded on the breast. Claiming his shit was sacred, he defecated on carpets.
    In 1909 Crowley experienced possession. He and Victor Neuberg performed the ritual in the North African desert. Crowley wanted Choronzon, a demon mentioned in sorcerers' grimoires, to occupy his body temporarily. While Neuberg sat protected by a circle, Crowley sacrificed three pigeons in a triangle. As the invocation to Choronzon was recited, Neuberg swore he saw phantoms swirling about his master.
    Denounced in Britain, Crowley sought Utopia in Sicily. Accompanied by his disciples and current Scarlet Woman, he founded the Abbey of Thelema in a decrepit villa in 1924. As Crowley slipped deeper into drug addiction— chronicled in his novel Diary of a Drug Fiend — foreign Satanists flocked to the Abbey. There they found Crowley staging nightly orgies in his Chamber of Nightmares decorated with demons. Women coupled with animals as the Beast slit each rutting beast's throat.
    One of those lured to Thelema was an Oxford graduate named Raoul Loveday. Loveday dragged his wife Betty May along, where, under the influence of heroin and cocaine, Crowley told her, "I knew Jack the Ripper. He was a magician, one of the cleverest ever, and his crimes were the outcome of his Magick studies. The Ripper was a well-known surgeon of his day. Whenever he was going to commit a new crime he put on a new tie." Crowley showed Betty May a trunk containing bloody neckwear.
    Utopia ended because the Beast sacrificed a cat. While incense burned and Crowley signed the pentagram with his staff, the animal was stretched across the Abbey's altar. Loveday botched the job of slitting the cat's throat, so he was forced to drink a cup of its warm blood. Gagging, he collapsed and later died on the day Crowley predicted from his horoscope. Mussolini expelled the cult from Italy.
    Crowley published his Confessions in 1929. This work contains the passage quoted in Jolly Roger. He later expanded the story about Vittoria Cremers and the trunk in his essay "Jack the Ripper." It mentions five ties, not the original seven, and identifies the trunk's owner as Robert Donston Stephenson, a London physician. The doctor wrote contemporary columns on Jack the Ripper for Pall Mall Gazette. His work for Lucifer, an occult journal, was published under the pen name Tautriadelta.
    Tau is a Hebrew/Greek letter written as a cross or T.
    Tria is the Greek number three.
    Delta — Greek for D — is triangle-shaped.
    Tautriadelta.
    Cross-three-triangles.

    Hookers

    Vancouver
    Thursday, December 3, 1992, 3:17 A.M.

    Fog lights on and both naked corpses in back, the van crept along the shore of foggy Point Grey. Past Jericho Beach, Locarno Beach, Spanish Banks, and the Plains of Abraham, it snaked uphill toward UBC tipping the tonguelike bluff. On a clear night, across English Bay to the right, you could see the whole North Shore and Lighthouse Park. One of the houses near the park was where DeClercq slept, but now his home, the mountains beyond, and the harbor were gobbled up. There was only mist, vapor, smog, and cloud, knifed by the van's yellow fog lights.
    Skull was driving.
    High above Tower Beach where concrete gun emplacements had watched for the Japanese, past the cairn commemorating Captain George Vancouver's meeting with Spanish explorers Valdez and Galiano in 1792, the van reached the Law School where Chancellor Boulevard joined the foreshore road. Turning right,

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