The Magus of Hay(42)

‘You sound… surprisingly impressed.’

‘It’s compelling. He intended it to be. It’s shown from the Nazi perspective, rather than just… look at these bloody crackpots. And he does it that way because that’s how he received the knowledge. While it was happening. While it was convincing men like Scheffler. While it was white hot.’

‘So what were Rector’s actual views? Did he have Nazi sympathies?’

‘He said not, after the war, when he got accused of it. What he said to the Germans is another matter. It got him through it, anyroad. And it made him a lot of money when it was over. Goes back to university, studying theology and ancient history. Lectures for a while, joins a number of occult fraternities. Meets Crowley in his heroin days, Israel Regardie, Kenny Grant, Austin Spare.’

‘There’s one of Spare’s… erotic cartoons on the wall at Cusop.’

‘Good mate of Rector’s, by all accounts. Maverick, even amongst his occult peers. Died in the sixties.’

‘So why are Spare and the others remembered more than Rector?’

‘Hard to say. Unless, after being suspected of Nazi sympathies, he deliberately courted obscurity. Seems to have given a few lectures to boost sales of Negative Sun and then moved on. Never wrote about Nazism again, despite offers from publishers. Went to ground. Here.’

Seemed Rector’s parents had a farmhouse with some land between Capel-y-ffin and Hay Bluff. A second home; they’d loved it there because it was all so different from the flatlands of Cambridgeshire and the Fens. Summers at the cottage, all the long holidays. So, while Peter wasn’t born there, he and his siblings had done a lot of their growing up in the Black Mountains.

‘Where there’s a tradition of odd events that he must’ve shared with Scheffler on those long night over the schnapps,’ Huw said. ‘You’ll’ve heard of Father Ignatius.’

‘Established an Anglican monastery up there? Around the turn of the twentieth century?’

‘Rector’s old man’d written a paper on him. Father Ignatius being the name adopted by an ordained C. of E. minister called Joseph Leycester Lyne, fanatical Anglo-Catholic. The monastery’s up there to this day, spooky owd place. Better known now, mind, as the home of the artist Eric Gill, who set up his own community in the nineteen twenties. Great sculptor, mad Catholic, colourful sex life involving his daughters. Summat in the air up there.’



‘So we’re actually talking not far from Cusop.’

‘As the crow flies, about six miles. He inherited his parents’ house up in the mountains. This was the nineteen seventies, his escape from the taint of Nazism. He’d written two more books on magic by then, nowt to do wi’ Nazis, but none of ’em sold like A Negative Sun. Sod’s law.’

‘So people did think he was actually a closet Nazi?’

‘It were all a bit of a mess.’ She heard the groaning of old leather as Huw stretched in his chair. ‘It came out he’d sent a chunk of his royalties from the book to Scheffler’s widow. Doing the right thing, as he saw it, and you can understand that. But you still had a lot of anti-German feeling in Britain, even in the seventies, and, aye, he were perceived by some as still being too close to it. I see him as just a very learned, erudite bloke who were a bit naive. And, like I say, he’d moved on.’

‘So he was – I mean the kids at Cusop had it right – he was a magician. Or just someone with an academic interest in it?’

‘Oh, bloody hell, more than an academic interest. Lot of popular demand, them days, for mystical experience, wi’ the drugs and the psychedelic music. He found a way to continue his studies and his… experiments… and make a good living from it. He rebuilds his life, up in the Black Mountains, in his fifties. Sets to work on the owd farmhouse, opens up outbuildings for self-catering accommodation. Converts the biggest barn into what today you’d call a conference suite. Lectures, workshops. People were taught meditation exercises, sent out into the hills to try them out. Strong vibes in the hills above Hay.’

‘Like an ashram?’

‘Aye, a Welsh ashram. Transformation – that were his buzzword. He called it the Centre for the Transformation of Mankind.’

‘There’s modest.’

‘It were the seventies, Merrily. You thought big. For Transformation, read altering your state of consciousness, discovering your psychic potential. Exploring the Inner Planes, as they liked to say. Whatever you liked, except owt that stank of Nazism. He pulled a lot of celebrities into the mountains. Writers. Actors. Musicians.’