Wisdom Notes on Psychology

BDSM-2

More Domination and Submission

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

Sometimes this reversal is switched on by excitement. When strange desires have affinity with the world of BDSM and these desires become compelling and very exciting, then we can be reasonably certain that trauma did in fact occur in childhood. We can deduce that his adult BDSM desires indicate how, when he was a child, he interpreted trauma and what he felt about himself after trauma. His BDSM desires represent the interpretations he made about his childhood distresses. In my view, the reality of the BDSM world proves two assumptions. First, the reality of childhood trauma. The intensity of trauma is then reflected in the intensity with which an adult pursues his submissive BDSM values of degradation and humiliation and powerlessness. Secondly, that trauma happened despite the common fact that the adult has no memory of it.

For many people, extreme values and desires are not tied to the need for excitement. The compensatory effects are more familiar. For example, if an adult wants to be the unquestioned leader of a political party (as in Lenin’s case when he was in exile from Russia in the early 1900s), then we can reasonably assume that as a young child he felt devastated by his parent treating him as a nonentity. In other words, Lenin’s adult need to be very important resulted from a childhood feeling of having no importance.

Note 1.
When reversing adult values, we can only be certain of our analysis if the adult is extreme in his significant desires and values. If an adult is reasonable in his desires and values, then they are not the products of trauma. Hence there is no point in attempting the reversal of values of a moderate person. The issue is that childhood trauma, when intense, always intensely drives a person, in either positive or negative ways. The adult feels compelled to follow his desires, even though they are over-the-top.

Note 2.
There is another aspect to the usefulness of reversed values. An adult may seeks ways to neutralise the influences of subconscious guilt, yet still follow his “guilty” desires. One common way is to put himself into a position where someone else forces him to partake of his guilty desires. Suppose a straight guy finds that he likes dressing as a woman and being obedient to a more assertive person, but he feels guilty if he does so. He may then learn to like forced feminisation, where a Dominant person makes him dress as a female and be submissive and obedient to that Dominant. He can now experience the joys of being feminised without feeling any intense guilt.

Similarly with the BDSM slave. He will be forced to participate in various forms of sex play without having any say in the matter. Hence he will not feel any intense guilt about what he is forced to do.

The straight guy and the slave can do things forbidden to their normal state of mind. They can live their forbidden desires and phantasies without blaming themselves for doing so.

Variations from a Transgender Perspective

What we witness in modern times is the widespread and gradual emergence of feminine feelings in men. Men have always experienced feminine feelings throughout history, but nowadays it is becoming more socially acceptable. Most often this emergence begins in childhood, and it can be influential in the way that an adult handles the effects of trauma. For example, a person who has suffered trauma from a parent cannot competently be assertive to an adult of the same sex as that parent. However, assuming that he has not been traumatised by a transgender parent, then when he is an adult he can be dominant to a transgender person. That is, he can be dominant to someone who does not represent the trauma situation. He can also be dominant to someone weaker than himself, that is, someone who experienced trauma at a greater intensity than himself and so is more frail.

When I explored BDSM, I was initially drawn to becoming submissive to a dominant BDSM Master for a short while. However, I found it to be more enjoyable when I was submissive to a transvestite Dominant. The relationship of Dominant to submissive is a power relationship; in my view, only a submissive person can understand how power relationships really function.

In my relationship to a Dominant, I was surprised to find that I was especially turned on by verbal humiliation. I expected the Dominant to address me as bitch and slut (and similar names). Every time I was called these derogatory names I became very excited and felt more submissive. From a psychological perspective, it allowed me to attune to subconscious feelings of denigration originating from my childhood. Also, I preferred to call myself a bitch or a slut rather than call myself by my personal name. A personal name can indicate self-respect, whilst derogatory names do not.

Previously the person may have become excited by depictions of debauchery. Now, under the influence of reversed values, he puts himself in the picture, as it were, and this helps to create his new identity as a slut. Being a slut is now no longer reprehensible but delightful.

In earlier days, before I became transgender, I sometimes thought of a woman as a slut, a bitch, and similar names. This represents degradation of women. Now when I am in transgender mode and see myself as feminine, I apply to myself what I previously called women. In other words, when I switch to femme mode, I apply those beliefs to myself and become the kind of woman that I rejected when I was in guy mode. I enjoy my degradation. This is the reversal of values.

Another way of looking at this stance is that I regard myself as failing to be a worthwhile straight male. Because of my father, I learned to fear masculinity. So I eventually became a transgender person who didn’t have to be masculine. I hate myself for being a worthless male, so I reverse values and become excited by being a worthless female. One main purpose of such stances is that it reduces the intensity of subconscious influences of self-hate, guilt and fear by burying them beneath the excitement.

Interestingly, in my 20s and 30s I was an ascetic in my worldly tastes: I hated my body and was repelled by adornments to it. Now, as a transgender person, I love my body and enjoy adorning it with sexy lingerie.

Being transgender is an issue of femininity for me. My relationships therefore have two aspects to them (as everyone else has too): there is the masculine/feminine balance, and the dominant/submissive balance. The first is how the person balances the masculine and the feminine influences acting on him: these influences come from within himself and from within his relationships. The second is his need to be dominant to some people and submissive to other people.

Femininity can flower in different ways, however. During the late-1960s after I left university I tuned in to being a hippie – this represented the exploration of a different feminine sexuality, one not affected by trauma from my mother.

Role and Validation

The presence of regular self-hatred means that the child’s life lacks a constant source of love from significant people, such as parents, aunts and uncles. Eventually the child learns that it can temporarily overcome the void in its life by seeking excitement. Excitement enhances the child’s weak sense of vanity, enabling it to switch to narcissism (mode of vanity) [¹]. Once the child has become an adult, then it may encounter situations where the external stresses acting on him begin to override his existing repressions and self-control. Subconscious influences now enter normal consciousness. If the person can fit these influences into a suitable set of beliefs then he learns to use them as a source of excitement, thus bolstering his weak sense of narcissism.

When I first encountered the world of BDSM, I found that Dominants value what I despised about myself. I felt like a slut, and this image became valued. So my derogatory belief about myself became an exciting way to find validation.

The subconscious idea that underlies the person’s deepest needs and desires is that of finding one or more particular roles that offer him social validation, so that he can derive a satisfactory sense of psychological fulfilment or achievement in life. For example, a man might identify as a father, in that being a father allows him to attach a lot of significance to his life. He may also identify as a manager, or a carpenter, or a doctor, etc. Each role is a source of social validation.

If he cannot find a socially-presentable role, then he finds one or more suitable roles (for him) within the sectors or groups of society that are currently beyond the pale, such as in the world of BDSM. For an example of a socially-hostile role, criminal behaviour will be validated by other criminals.

The need for a significant social or group role is the motor that drives the person into reversing his values. Roles are built around beliefs and desires. Role is the subconscious idea that reverse values give expression to.

Reverse values can most easily occur when there are suitable beliefs and desires available that can express the reverse values. The 1990s were a very bad time for me, with long periods of depression and self-pity. During this time I did not experience reverse values. I did not know how to cope with my sufferings since my beliefs were totally inadequate to handle that level of distress. For long periods of time I just lay on my bed swamped by self-pity. Whereas, when I broke my foot in 2012 and not long afterwards discovered BDSM, then I was able to cope because BDSM beliefs became my way to handle my distress. In the world of BDSM, the person can receive validation by taking the role of Master, submissive, slut, etc.

• There are Levels to Validation

If a person is invalidated in two situations, one being a low-stress situation and the other being a high-stress situation, then subsequent validation at the low-stress level will be ineffectual at neutralising the invalidation at the high-stress level.

The real function of a satisfactory role is that it prevents guilt (self-pity mode) from being a dominant influence in the subconscious mind. Social validation minimises any prevalence of underlying guilt. Having one or more roles gives a person a place in life. Or, looking at this view from another angle, we can see that the avoidance of guilt (self-pity mode) is the real reason for seeking a satisfactory role in life.

When a person has no role, then he drifts through life. He has no important source of social validation. He may feel that his life has become meaningless as guilt (in self-pity mode) intensifies in his subconscious mind. He survives by repressing his sense of degradation, and/or humiliation, and/or powerlessness into his subconscious mind.

The poor quality of his life may give rise to long periods of despair. Then he encounters the world of BDSM. In this world, this milieu, there is a place for someone like him. Degrading, humiliating, and powerless roles can have high social values in this milieu. Therefore, by embracing some form of low-status role, such as a sexual slut or a submissive bitch or an obedient sissy, he becomes valued and validated. Such validation minimises the underlying influence of guilt. The despair of drifting through life is released from his subconscious mind. So too the repressed thoughts of any degradation, humiliation, and powerlessness are accepted, allowing the associated anxiety to be released as well. The release of the anxiety initiates a catharsis [²]. Now he feels excited about his formerly-repressed thoughts and feelings. He has now reversed his values. From now on, the reverse values always generate excitement when he revels in them. This process of reversing values can happen so quickly within the mind that the first time it happened he probably did not understand how or why it happened. All he is aware of is that a source of excitement has suddenly come into his life. He has found a role that can now give some meaning to his life.

However, there is a difficulty here. Having adopted a “suitable” role, this will work fine as long as the person doesn’t encounter more psychological turmoil. If he is subjected to deeper stress than his role can handle, he will be driven to acquire a new role that can handle that deeper level of stress. His new role and practices will be more degrading or more humiliating or more powerless than his previous role.

If this “downward” process into roles continues, he reaches and crosses a psychological barrier. Then instead of being driven by guilt (mode of self-pity), he becomes driven by guilt (mode of self-hate). Any sense of narcissism (mode of self-love) has become very weak. Now he treads the path towards depersonalisation [³]. In the world of BDSM, he may end with a lifestyle role as a slave to a Master or Mistress. By a lifestyle role, I mean a role that is engaged in for much, or all, of his time, perhaps for months or even years. In this situation, excitement has evaporated, and he is just the impersonal plaything of a Dominant person. Impersonality has become his way of handling intense self-hatred. His personality has been severely damaged and he needs to be under the control of a stern Dominant who takes charge of his life.

• The Role of Faith

The world of BDSM is not an acceptable one in most non-Western countries. In such countries, what is the usual route for many people whose quality of life is quite poor and who seek validation?  It is the traditional route of finding faith in God or in a teacher or in a religious organisation.

Faith offers help to the person, but that help is limited, since it does not resolve the psychological issues that are distressing the person. The real function of faith is to encourage character development in positive ways. For most believers, perhaps the major usefulness of faith is that it enables a person to find compatible groups who share the faith. Group members believe that their group activities keep faith alive, but all that really happens is that group validation provides the psychological comfort that the person is seeking. It is the group validation that keeps the group motivated and inspired. This view is easily verified by considering all the hostile activities that some groups make towards other competing groups (whether religious or social) – there is nothing spiritual about hostility.

In terms of handling troublesome psychological issues, the major difference between the world of BDSM and the world of faith is that BDSM can explore such issues, whilst faith represses them. BDSM offers a means of understanding the mind, whilst faith does not.

Analysing a BDSM Phantasy

In my phantasies I am sometimes the victim, sometimes the victimiser, sometimes the submissive, sometimes the dominant. In the darkness of my mind I play out these phantasies, analyse them, and discover the underlying reasons for them. However, there is always a price to pay for wisdom.

Jean Genet wrote, if the hero join combat with night and conquer it, many shreds of it remain upon him! [4]
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, if you gaze into the void long enough, the void will gaze into you. [5]

Suppose that we find some phantasies to be very absorbing, but we have been conditioned to think of them as being immoral. Now for some reason we find ourself reversing values. Now we revel in the excitement of the phantasies, and because they are so exciting they may regularly emerge into our usual thoughts and daydreams. In effect, we play out our trauma in symbolic form by using role-play; if the trauma originated in childhood, we play out our childhood relationship to the parent. Being punished or humiliated as a child is not unusual. However, the intensity of the phantasies indicates that the punishment or humiliation was excessive and damaged the child.

The excitement of the phantasies may be sufficient for most people, but I am always interested in analysing significant states of mind. So after the peak of excitement fades a little, I begin the analysis. Suppose, in retrospect, we know that a particular exciting phantasy has several major factors or themes to it. When the phantasy first arouses us, we are not aware that it has these many themes. At first we are only aware of the theme within it that immediately grips our attention and produces the excitement.

For example, in the phantasy of being submissive to a Master, some themes that can feature in the phantasy are:
a). The desire to be submissive.
b). The desire to have someone take control of one’s life.
c). The desire to be punished.
d). The desire to receive humiliating treatment.
e). The desire to abandon one’s previous personality, with all its defects, and adopt a new one.
f ). The desire to be servile to a dominant authority.

So for some days, weeks, or even months we replay the phantasy in our mind, immersed in the same theme. Eventually the novelty begins to wear off when the theme is no longer quite so exciting. Then we realise that we have begun to attune to a second theme that is emerging. Now we realise that the phantasy has two factors to it. After we replay the phantasy enough times, then again the novelty wears off and we may abandon the phantasy for a time. After a while it attracts our excitement again and we notice that a third theme has emerged and this is now causing the excitement. If we are discerning enough, we may realise that this theme has always been in the phantasy but was over-shadowed by the first and second themes.

This process of being absorbed in a phantasy till the excitement wanes, and then picking up on it again when a different theme takes precedence, is the way to analyse the phantasy. The order in which the themes emerge indicates the relative importance to the person of each theme. The most important theme emerges first, and the least important will be last.

This particular method of analysing a major phantasy will take many months, perhaps years, depending on how long it takes the novelty of each theme to wear off (thus allowing the next theme to become prominent). Hence analysing phantasies will keep the person locked into negative states of mind for ages, and this will make it hard for the person to develop a more positive mental outlook on life. Pursuing psychological wisdom, rather than just accumulating psychological knowledge, produces a bleak state of mind. This is the price that is paid for wisdom. 

If we decide to remain in a neutral state of mind when analysing the phantasy, so that we refrain from indulging in prolonged excitement over it, then we will not be able to assess accurately the relative importance of any themes that we detect. To understand a phantasy, you have to engage with it.

• The Psychological Mirror Effect

Suppose that I am looking at pictures of Dominants who have a cane or whip in their hands as a sign of their dominance. The Dominants will be either male, female, or trans. Each one has a different effect on me. The male Dominant will mirror, in some ways, my relationship to my father; similarly the female Dominant will mirror, in some ways, my relationship to my mother. My father dressed smartly, so a Dominant who dresses similarly will attract me, whilst one who dresses casually, even sloppily, will have no effect on me. The sexiness of him is of little interest to me. With female Dominants, they will need to look sexy and classy, as my mother did, to get my total interest. Sexiness is important to me in a female Dominant. The most interesting situation for me, however, is produced by a trans Dominant.

What attracts me in a trans Dominant is a picture of someone I would like to be myself, that is, the image I would convey to someone if I were a trans Dominant. So the Dominant I would like to be submissive to mirrors my exciting and sexy view of myself if I could become Dominant. By viewing pictures of trans Dominants that I find exciting, I can analyse my subconscious desires on how sexy I feel, what makes me feel sexy, what I look for in other people, what turns me off from people, what kind of relationships work for me, how I handle intimate relationships, etc.

There are two levels of analysis I work with. When I contemplate moderate depths to BDSM relationships and desires, I am analysing psychological reasons for such relationships. These relationships orientate around my submissiveness. However, when I descend into deeper depths of BDSM and want to be a slave to a Master, then I am analysing the psychic reasons for this relationship [6]. Now we come to the core attraction of being a slave. For the slave, the reversal of values is a long-term way of handling psychic pain, which ordinary psycho-analysis rarely influences. Psycho-analysis works well with psychological difficulties, but has limited use in psychic problems.

Effects of Trauma on Intellectual Functioning

As a free thinker, my twin pursuits are the analysis of the external world and the analysis of my own internal world. Usually when analysing the external world, my mood is pride (mode of hatred of others). This mode of hatred allows the mind to think clearly and function well, being temporarily free of emotional attachments. However, it is a very different situation when I’m analysing my internal world, especially my subconscious mind.

When I turn to my internal world, my mood usually changes to guilt (mode of self-pity). Trauma always increases the likelihood that guilt will be a significant background mood, since the person’s self-confidence has fallen to low levels. Guilt in its mode of self-pity tends to confuse the mind and drain it of psychic energy. In general, guilt switches off intellectual concerns because it also seems to reduce the flow of nervous energy to the brain. (The mind functions on psychic energy and the brain functions on nervous energy). 

When the guilt is intense, then there is not much psychic energy available to make sustained intellectual effort; I soon start yawning and may soon fall asleep. The practice of concentration, which requires a lot of psychic energy, rapidly uses up the energy reserve that I have. I fall asleep (which is Nature’s way of regenerating the psychic energy that the mind needs).

Self-pity by itself has almost the same effect as guilt (mode of self-pity). The difference is :-
With guilt (self-pity mode), I want to study but cannot.
With self-pity, I have no desire to study.

The experience of trauma always increases the subconscious intensities of guilt and self-pity, thereby increasing the difficulties of analysing the subconscious mind. The experiences of guilt and self-pity are needed in order to understand how the mind works, yet they simultaneously tend to slow down analytical thinking about one’s internal world. So far I have been analysing my mind for over a quarter century; its taken this long because its all very slow and exhausting work.

Psychological Rebellion

Consider a child who is sensitive and intelligent. He may be harshly punished by a parent or a teacher (or anyone in a position of authority over him), and afterwards feel that he has been unfairly treated. When he becomes an adult, what is he likely to do?  One long-term reaction may be to seek some form of justification of himself, by becoming a rebel to the social norms of his day. By being a rebel, the person effectively creates a new identity for himself, one that is not based on trauma. He desires to be his own idealised self, independently of how other people would like him to be. Rebelliousness acts as a by-pass mechanism to fear and self-pity, allowing a more resilient identity to emerge.

As regards myself, I have a life-long history of feeling rebellious. In my 20s, I was a hippie and embraced the new sexual ideas – this influence has remained with me ever since. In my 30s, under the social backlash against the hippie era, I embraced puritanism and eventually found faith in two English yoga teachers; this faith lasted about six years, and then I rejected it because faith was too inadequate for my needs. In my 50s, I became rebellious to spiritual norms, as I engaged in a long hostile relationship with my higher self.  Then in 2012, I broke my heel: the physical pain was initially overwhelming and I suffered a severe emotional crisis. I felt that my higher self had unfairly and harshly punished me. My reaction was to reverse values, abandon puritanism, and became licentious. Being licentious was much more fun. The following year I entered the world of BDSM, positioning myself as a submissive and passive transvestite seeking a harsh Dominant. Hence my rebellious reaction propelled me into the direction of exploring degradation, denigration and rejection.

Anything that is dreary in normal consciousness becomes exciting in reversed values. Or, as I sometimes humorously put it, the bigger the saint, the bigger the sinner (in reverse values). When I had a few long periods of happiness, then the attractions of BDSM faded. But once happiness ended and life became bleak once more, then the attractions of BDSM rose up again. I eventually lost interest in BDSM when my self-confidence grew to a sufficient level.

I look at some examples of rebellious behaviour, using Aleister Crowley, T. E. Lawrence, and Richard Burton as examples.

Aleister Crowley is famous as one of the founders of modern magic. He had little affection for his mother, and his father was an extreme religious fundamentalist. In my view, Crowley feared his father and hated his mother. In his youth, after he was severely punished at school, he plunged into the world of sexual debauchery. As an adult, he delighted in transgressing the social norms of his day. In his later life, after each big failure or social opprobrium, he plunged ever deeper into socially-scandalous behaviour. [7]

T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) achieved fame in World War I by his exploits in Arabia helping the Arabs against the Ottoman empire that ruled them. He ended the war with the rank of colonel and retired from the army. After the British government failed to honour the commitments to the Arabs that had been made during the war, Lawrence felt so bad that he first briefly rejoined the army as a lowly private, and then afterwards joined the RAF as a lowly aircraftman. In those times, this was perhaps the basest thing he thought he could do. Ideas of debasement are relative to each social era and each social class, so such ideas change as society changes.

In general, degradation and debasement indicate very low feelings of self-worth and self-esteem. Therefore when an emotional crisis crushes me, I sink to the level where degradation matches my feelings of low self-worth. That is, my self-worth now attunes to activities that match it. Low self-worth leads to activities which require low self-worth.

Richard Burton, the 19th century explorer, is famous for translating Arabic sexual writings. His father appears to have been a bully and his mother was inhibited emotionally, so she could not show much affection to her son. Burton could not become authentic within the limits produced by his childhood distress. So he had to create a new identity for himself. In general, the new identity takes its impulse from the parent who denigrated the child. Because his father denigrated him, Burton had to create a new male identity to replace his negatively-conditioned childhood one. But the new identity had to be significantly different from the social stereotype of male authority in his times. So he created an identity as an explorer of the forbidden (much like Crowley did) as his means of attaining authenticity. Burton explored the “natural” sexology of the East, whilst for comparison Freud explored the inhibited sexology of the West. [8]

Burton’s parents were middle-class, like Crowley’s parents. The advantage of this in those times was that usually a nanny was hired to look after the child. The nanny could supply the emotional warmth that the child needed but which was absent in his parental relationships.   

Using these examples I formulate a rule of rebellious behaviour which is applicable to sensitive and intelligent children and adults. The intensity with which it is followed is related to the depth of the person’s sensitivity. In cases of mild sensitivity, it may be absent or not evident. The more “spirit” and sense of adventure that a child has, the more likely he is to follow this rule.

• Rule of Psychological Rebellion

The more that the child is harshly and unfairly punished or criticised, the more delight and satisfaction he gets from becoming a rebel
and exploring behaviour that gets more and more outrageous or degrading.

When the child or adult feels that it has been harshly and unfairly treated, it becomes rebellious. The rebellion is always against what is conceived to be the normal or accepted rules of good behaviour for that era. The rebellion is against the moral standards of the person administering the punishment, or against the standards of the authority who has betrayed the person.

The rebel immerses himself in behaviour that is immoral or degrading or debasing. If he is subsequently harshly treated, he goes ever deeper into such forms of denigration and degradation that he now revels in. The impulse to go deeper into such behaviour occurs in order to spite the moral or conventional standards of the parent, teacher, or governing authority. The deeper he goes into such behaviour, the more exciting it becomes for him. The child or adult believes he is doing this from his own free will; in fact, he is only following the intense influences of his subconscious need for justification. If he can adequately justify himself, he becomes authentic, even if other people consider him to be debased.

Sometimes this rule becomes a social one too. In this case, numerous creative people in the same period rebel against existing social norms. Then we witness decadence and fin de siècle cultural explosions.

Freedom

The normal person looks at reality through socially-conditioned eyes. He has been taught to value and desire a nice respectable job, and a nice respectable wife, with nice and respectable children, and to live in a nice and respectable neighbourhood. His eyes have psychological filters in front of them, and these filters obscure what reality is actually like. The impact of trauma is one means of removing these filters. Under the impact of trauma the person’s values and desires change and this change can produce a profound effect on human consciousness.

The most profound change comes from the experience of abandonment trauma. By changing one’s values, abandonment turns into the call of the wild. It becomes the pursuit of freedom and the deep yearning for adventure (which is different from the exciting but transient adventures of youth). The emotion that drives the need for freedom is pride (mode of hatred of others). The call of the wild has always attracted people who have to be free from conventional social conditioning, though the call may be rationalised as the pursuit of the unknown. The early explorers felt this in varying intensities as they explored wildernesses on land, travelled in unknown countries or sailed over distant seas.

But how meaningful is the desire for freedom?  Freedom means only that the person can push moderately beyond his current boundaries that are derived from social conditioning and character limitations. A freedom that we can reach and enjoy is only that which is compatible with our existing mental and psychological development, because that development determines our beliefs.

For the ordinary person, his social conditioning and character limitations determine what he is prepared to believe, and within these boundaries his mental and psychological development determines what he will actually believe.

We can always speculate beyond our boundaries, but speculation is not belief. Speculation is not adventure. If we push too far beyond our boundaries, we would not be able to handle in an harmonious manner whatever reality we find – we will make mistakes, and perhaps even fail.

[¹]. I have three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [1]

[²]. Catharsis is explained in my articles on Abreaction on the Home page. [2]

[³]. Depersonalisation is described in two articles, Six Variations and Seven Roots of Trauma - 4, and BDSM-1. [3]

[4]. The quote by Genet is in his book The Thief 's Journal.  First published in 1949, and then by Penguin Books, 1967. [4]

[5]. The quote by Nietzsche is in his book Beyond Good and Evil. Vintage Books, Random House, 1966. [5]

[6]. The mind is split into two halves. The lower mind handles everyday activities and is the world of psychology. The higher mind handles intellectuality, philosophy, higher mathematics, mysticism, meditation, contemplation, etc. [6]

[7]. Kaczynski, Richard. Perdurabo, the Life of Aleister Crowley. North Atlantic Books. [7]

[8]. Brodie, Fawn. The Devil Drives. Eland Publishers, 1986. A biography of Burton. [8]

Copyright © 2026 Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine, and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced
anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.