Victor Neuburg

In the winter of 1909 Aleister Crowley and Victor Neuburg walked through the Algerian desert calling the thirty Enochian Aethyrs, the successive worlds named in the material John Dee and Edward Kelley had received three centuries earlier. Crowley scried and spoke; Neuburg wrote, and took a working part in the ritual as well. The record was published as The Vision and the Voice, and it is the fullest first person account of sustained Enochian practice in the modern literature.

The episode that everything else in it turns on is the tenth Aethyr, worked on a mountain near Bou Saada, in which the entity named Choronzon is called into a circle of sand and Neuburg, inside the circle with a knife and a book, has to record what happens while it attempts to break out. The event is presented in the tradition as the crossing of the Abyss, the passage in which the practitioner surrenders individual identity. The atlas records it with the qualification that has to accompany any such account: the record is the only source, both participants had a stake in what it described, and nothing about it is independently witnessed.

The Aethyrs themselves are worth explaining, because the working is unintelligible without them. The Enochian material received by Dee and Kelley includes thirty named regions, each entered by reciting a call in the Enochian language with the name of the Aethyr inserted, and each governed by named spirits. Crowley worked them in reverse order, from the outermost inward, which is how the tenth comes so late in a sequence of thirty and why the record builds toward it rather than reaching it in passing.

What followed was not a partnership of equals and did not end well. The relationship between the two men was collaborative and also coercive, involving obedience, physical ordeal and a degree of control that Neuburg later removed himself from, and after the break he kept his distance from magical work for the rest of his life. The atlas states that much because it is documented and because a record of the working that omitted it would be misleading about what the working was.

His other life is the one he is remembered for outside occult circles. He published his own verse, ran a small press, and in the 1930s edited the poetry page of the Sunday Referee, where he printed and encouraged new writers and was the first to publish Dylan Thomas, along with Pamela Hansford Johnson and others who came through the same column. He died in 1940. It is worth noting the shape of an entry like this one. A person can be in an atlas of religion for a few months of one year and be remembered elsewhere for a decade of quite different work, and where that is so the atlas says both rather than reducing a life to the part that brought it here.

The poetry page is worth a sentence of its own as a piece of literary history. It ran a weekly competition, printed unknown writers, and awarded a book of verse as a prize, and the young men and women who appeared in it went on to matter. That a former ritual partner of Crowley was the person choosing them is the kind of connection between the esoteric and the literary worlds of the period that is easy to miss, and the atlas records it because such crossings were common and are usually left out of both histories.