..something about this has always stuck powerfully in my mind aswell….( from the book Powers of Darkness Powers of Light by John Cornwell ( a religous author it should be said )
Oppressed
Philip Tudor lived in a cramped council flat high above the Elephant and Castle district of south London. He met me as I came out of the lift on the eleventh floor. He was, I guessed, in his mid-thirties, tall and broad in the shoulder. He wore his hair almost shoulder length at the back, but he was balding at the front, which gave his head a dome-like, intellectual appearance. He was dressed in black corduroys and a black sweater, and it was quite obvious that he was wearing make-up, which gave his long, oval face a pallid, effeminate look. He could have been an off-duty ballet-dancer.
He offered me some Scotch out of a quarter bottle and when I declined he poured himself a third of a tumbler and topped the glass up to the brim with water.
'I'm trying to get off this,' he said, 'but I prefer controlled drinking to complete abstinance; it's not very realistic - complete abstinence, I mean.'
There were several crucifixes on the walls, a holy-water stoup and a print of Millais' painting, Christ the Light of the World.
He sat opposite me in a battered armchair, leaning forward, glass in one hand, a smoking cigarette in the other. He was shaking slightly, as if he were cold.
'You've heard of phrases like "his hair stood on end",' he said, 'or, "he jumped out of his skin", or, my "blood froze". I can tell you that when you get mixed up with Satanism those phrases become a literal reality. But it's not what people think.
'Let me tell you the whole thing from the beginning... I'm going to be frank with you, and you're going to be shocked, but people have got to understand what they have to be afraid of.' He paused a moment as if to gather his thoughts.
'Three years or so ago,' he began, 'I joined an amateur theatre group; I can't tell you where - it wasn't around here. I don't want any more hassle from them. The bloke that ran the thing, let's call him Michael H., was a very forceful type; people tended to get involved with him. He was bisexual and seemed to be able to pull blokes or girls just as it suited him. I admit that I was quite attracted to him myself. If you haven't guessed already, I'm gay'.
'Michael H. had a strong presence and a very quick tongue. He made me feel inadequate - yet the more he put people down the more they got infatuated with him. He had terrific self-confidence, appeal. I'm not sure what his background was; he gave the impression he'd dropped out from something ...medicine or law. He was well-educated; he knew a lot of people and he was on the fringes of the art world'.
'We did some quite good things, a bit of high-brow and gloomy - Huis Clos, Dr Faustus, The Seagull. I never got a part in a play, but we used to do improvisations sessions, method acting and so on, most weeks in the evenings. The improvisations used to get hairy; he liked to experiment with power situations, like when somebody's taken prisoner or made a victim. He wanted to bring latent aggression and fear out of people'.
'I realized that he had an inner circle and it irritated me that I didn't belong to the favoured few. He would come and have a drink with some of us occasionally, as if he were doing us a favour, but he was always rather cool socially, and sort of knowing - as if he had you taped'.
'Then one day, out of the blue, he rang me in a friendly way and asked if I'd like to take part in a sort of theatre workshop; he said it was hush-hush and involved some experimental work. "I think it might appeal to you," he said. I was flattered, and I agreed to go along; in fact I was fetched by car and driven with several other members of the group to a house somewhere in Byfleet'.
'As soon as I arrived I guessed what was going to happen. There were twelve of us, including myself and Michael H.. It was a large room at the back of the house and a table had been set up to look like an altar; we were asked to take our clothes off and put on long blue robes. At first I thought it was rather pathetic, a bit of a cliche, like Hellfire Club stuff, or The Omen or something. But when we got started I realized that the whole point of it was to give vent to a stream of blasphemy. The idea was to outdo each other ...take it to the ultimate extreme.
'By upbringing I am Church of England, but I hadn't been to church for years and I wasn't particularly interested in religion. But somehow you retain a basic feeling of reverence for it. Michael H. told us that the point of the exercise ws to release ourselves from the stranglehold of subconscious ties, to make ourselves free and thereby powerful.'
'He would begin to recite a prayer - asking us to repeat it reverently with him; then he would suddenly say something obscene and make us repeat it. At one point two or three of the group started to giggle, but each time this happened he stopped and made us do it again. He kept saying, "Come on! Don't send it up! Enter into it!"'
'The next stage was the ritual. There was a chalice filled with wine on the alter and some Communion breads, and after saying reverent prayers like a priest he spat into the chalice and started cursing. Then somebody turned the light out so there was only one candle, and everything started to degenerate.'
'In the end there were people copulating, or at least they were going through the motions - like realistic improvising. Then one of them started masturbating for real and came all over the alter; people were making obscene gestures with the chalice and the crucifix, and Michael H. was urging everybody on with a stream of filth, getting everyone worked up. In the middle of all this he got one of the girls to lie on the alter and started fondling her, then he took one of the Communion breads and pushed it up her vagina, saying, "Fuck Christ! Fuck Christ!" It sounds pathetic, a bit comic, just to talk about it now, but at the same time it started to make me feel really weird. I was taking pleasure in blasphemy. But he still hadn't reached the really scary part.'
