ALEISTER CROWLEY'S 7 HEADED DEMON STICK. by [CROWLEY (Aleister)].: Very Good No Binding (1890) (2025)

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A carved knobstick. 87.4 cm. length, darkish wood, tapering to approximately 7.5 cm. at the widest point, brass ferrule on tip. Styled in the form of seven three-dimensional demonic heads along a serpentine raised root form. The serpent s head facing four heads on the knob of the stick, a root ball, and the tail ending just above another three on a terminal teased out of the root, branch and knot structures. Late nineteenth-early twentieth century. Provenance: Crowley to the auctioneer Miller, Paxton and Fairminer (?) then Crowley to Professor Thomas Higham then to Cecil Williamson, sold to a private art dealer then to Julio Mario Santo Domingo for the LSD Library. Exhibited next to Gerald Yorke s wand that he inherited from Crowley in An Old Master, the Art of Aleister Crowley , October Gallery, London, April 7-18 1998 & La Chambre des Cauchemars: Peintures Inconnues d Aleister Crowley , Palais de Tokyo, Paris, May June 2008. The market for Crowley material has had far too few truly interesting, desirable, enigmatic and beautiful old objects such as this carved stick that once belonged to the 'Old Devil' (with a bloody good provenance story chucked in). Other sticks have of course appeared at auction and in the trade, such as a recent, very decorative one that appeared in 2015 at Brightwells. Yet none are as fascinating in themselves as design objects and they do not have provenance with the heft of Cecil Williamson the great collector of magical objects and the founder of the Museum of Witchcraft, that has been in the Cornish village of Boscastle since 1960. Williamson was a great showman and he often liked to expound on his life and in an interview for Talking Stick magazine he discussed Crowley and the acquisition of objects from and about him and this stick in particular, thus. I have his 7 headed demon stick and the way I came to acquire it was when I was collecting and researching shellcraft (because I had a museum dedicated to shellcraft), I had the privilege of meeting, knowing, and having as a very good friend, a man older than myself. He was Professor Thomas Higham. He, with a friend of his, had met Crowley at Oxford many years previously and Crowley had come up to them one morning and said it was absolutely vital that he got up to London. He had not got a penny and could he borrow a tenner so that he could get up to Paddington? He said, in return, they could have this stick and he would give them the money when he got back. Anyway, Thomas Higham, a charming fellow, gave old Crowley the £10 he needed and he left his stick behind. That stick remained there for many years until Thomas said to me one day Old Crowley s gone, the stick s still here. You may as well have it . I was very pleased to get it and asked how much I owed him for it. He told me that I did not owe him any more than the £10 that Crowley borrowed for it . He recounted his ownership of the stick and that it was Crowley s in document #8408 in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic s archive again, thus: I have a lot of relics from people like Aleister Crowley. I have got his Baphomet ring and his demon stick and I have various paintings of his. I don t show them, though it seems a shame in some ways . This is surely Thomas F. Higham, Latin scholar at Trinity and Public Orator of Oxford University. Crowley spent two large inheritances very quickly and relied on the charity and patronage of others like Lady Frieda Harris. It was Harris who arranged for an exhibition of their tarot card designs in Oxford which, against her wishes, Crowley attended. On visiting Occult & Alchemical Drawings at Oxford s Nicholson & Venn Galleries in June 1941 he discovered that the note he had seen in Atlantis Bookshop saying it was cancelled was correct. Perhaps he met Higham there, left behind his stick and other belongings in exchange for drugs, his favourite Perique tobacco, and a train ride back to London. Seller Inventory # 243723

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