Text based on the first edition of The Banned

Lecture published 3 February 1930.

 FIRST FRIEND.

Dost surmise
What struck me at first blush; Our Beghards, Waldenses,
Jeronimites, Hussites—does one show his head,
Spout Heresynow ? Not a priest in his senses
Deigns answer mere speech, but piles faggots instead,
Refines as by fire, and, him silenced, all’s said.

Whereas if in future I pen an opuscule

Defing retort, as of old when rash tongues
Were easy to tame—straight some knave of the Hussite
School
Prints answer forsooth ! Stop invisible lungs ?
The barrel of blasphemy broached once, who brings ?

SECOND FRIEND.

Does my sermon, next Easter, meet fitting acceptance ?

Each captions disputive boy has his quirk.
“ An cuique credendum sit ? ” Well the Church kept
“ ans ”
In order till Fust set his engine at work !
What trash will come flying from Jew, Moor and Turk.

When, goosequill, thy reign o’er the world is abolished ?

Goose—ominous name ! With a goose woe began :
Quoth Huss—which means “ goose ” in his idiom un-
polished—
“ Ye burn now a Goose: there succeeds mea Swan
Ye shall find quench your fire ! ”

Fust.
I forsee such a man.
(Browning.)
 GILLES DE RAIS

Long ago when King Brahmadatta reigned in

Benares, a gentleman whose Christian names were
Thomas Henry—you may possibly have heard of
him—he was no less a personage than the Grand-
father of the great Aldous Huxley—once found
himself threatened by a predicament similar to that
in which I stand tonight. He had been asked to
lecture a distinguished group of people.
What bothered him was this : what assumption
was he to make about the existing knowledge of
the audience ? He adopted the sensible course of
asking the advice of an old hand at the game ; and
was told “ You must do one of two things. You
may assume that they know everything, or that
they know nothing.” Thomas Henry thought it
over, and decided that he would assume that they
know nothing.
I think that merely shows how badly brought
up he must have been ; and explains how it was that
he became a dirty little atheist, and repented on his
death-bed, and died blaspheming.
No ! No ! that would be quite impossible bad
manners. I shall assume that you know everything
about Gilles de Rais ; and that being the case, it
would evidently be impertinent for me to tell you
anything about him. So that we can consider the
lecture at an end, and (after the usual vote of thanks)
pass on immediately to the discussion, which I think
ought to be more amusing, if scarcely as informative.
 It is rather an hard saying—however worthy of
all acceptation in a university like Oxford, where, I
understand, the besetting sin of the inmates is lec-
turing and being lectured, but discussions are always
apt to turn out to be amusing, especially if conducted
with blackthorns or shotguns, where as lecturing is
merely an attempt, foredoomed to failure, to com-
municate knowledge which usually the lecturer does
not possess.
I am sure that we all recognize that an attempt
of this kind is impossible in nature. No ! I am
not proposing to inflict upon you my celebrated
discourse on Scepticism of the Instrument of Mind.
I am not even going to refer to the first and last
lecture which I suffered at a dud university some-
where near Newmarket, in which the specimen of
old red sandstone in the rostrum began by remarking
that political economy was a very difficult subject
to theorize upon because there were no reliable data.
Never would I tell so sad a story on a Monday
evening, with the idea of Tuesday already looming
darkly in every melancholic mind. I should like to
be just friendly and sensible, though it is perhaps
too much to expect me to be cheerful.
The fact is that I am in a very depressed state.
My attention was attracted by that little word “ know-
ledge ” of which we hear so much and see so little.
I don’t propose to inflict upon you the M.C.H.,
and demonstrate that the life and opinions of Gilles
de Rais were inevitably determined by the price of
onions in Hyderabad. But I do think that in ap-
proaching a historic question, we should be very
careful to define what we mean—in our particular
universe of discourse—by the word “ knowledge.”
May I ask a question ?
Does anyone here know the date of the battle
of Waterloo ?
Pause. (Someone—I bet—tells me “ 1815.”)
Thank you very much. To be frank with you,
I knew it myself. I did not require information on
that particular point. What I asked was, whether
anyone know the date. I felt that, if so, it would
have created a sympathetic atmosphere.
But since we are talking about Waterloo, we
may ask ourselves what, roughly speaking, is the
extent of our knowledge ?
I have heard plenty of theories about why
Napoleon lost the battle. I have been told that he
was already suffering from the disease which killed
him. I have been told that he was outgeneralled
by Wellington. I have been told that his army of
conscripts was underfed and not properly drilled.
I have also been told that the battle was won by
the Belgians.
Now, all these things are merely matters of
opinion. There may be a little truth in some of
them. But we have practically no means of finding
out exactly how much, even if our documentary
support is valid to establish any of these theories.
It is, also, almost impossible to estimate the causes
of any given event, if only because those causes
are infinite, and each one of them is to a certain
extent an efficient determining cause.
Take a quite simple matter like the time of
year. If it had been winter instead of summer, the
hens would not have been laying and Hougomont
and La Haye Sainte would not have been able to
nourish the contending forces. But though it is
profitable for the soul to contemplate the extent
of what we don’t know, it is in some ways more
satisfying to our baser natures to consider what
we do know in a reasonable sense of the word.
It is not disputable that the battle of Waterloo
was fought and won. It is not disputable that it
was the climax, or rather the denouement, of cam-
paigns lasting over a number of years. And there
is no reason for doubting that Napoleon was born
in Corsica, that he entered the French army, and rose
rapidly to power by a combination of military genius
and political intrigue.
There is a vast body of indirect evidence which
confirms these statements at every point. Taken as
a whole, they would be totally inexplicable on any
other hypothesis. But when we consider the character
of Napoleon, we are at once involved in a mass of
contradictions. Probably no one in history has been
more discussed, and every writer gives a totally
different account. Each seeks to buttress his opinion
by incidents which we have no reason to suppose
other than authentic, but seem incongruous. So
far as we can get any truth out of the matter at all,
it is that the character of Napoleon, like that of
everybody who ever lived, was extremely complex.
And the writers are more or less in the position of
the Six Wise Men of Hindustan who were born
blind and had to describe an elephant.
Spiritually fortified by these simple meditations,
we may apply their fruits to the problem of Gilles
de Rais, and ask ourselves what we really know about
him as opposed to what we have heard about him.
We know that he was a gentleman of good
family, because otherwise he could not have held
the offices which he did hold. We know that he was
a brave soldier, and a comrade of Joan of Arc. We
know that he had a passion for science, for the basis
of his reputation was that he frequented the society
of learned men. We know finally that he was accused
of the same crimes as Joan of Arc by the same people
who accused her, and that he was condemned by
them to the same penalty.
I do not think that I have left out any verifiable
fact. I think that all the rest amounts to speculation.
The real problem of Gilles de Rais amounts, accord-
ingly, to this. Here we have a person who, in almost
every respect, was the male equivalent of Joan of
Arc. Both of them have gone down in history. But
history is somewhat curious. I am still inclined to
think that “ there aint no sich animile.” In the time
of Shakespeare, Joan of Arc was accepted in England
as a symbol for everything vile. He makes her out
not only as a sorceress, but a charlatan and hypocrite ;
and on top of that a coward, a liar, and a common
slut. I suspect that they began to whitewash her
when they decided that she was a virgin, that is a
sexually deranged, or at least incomplete, animal,
but the idea has always got people going, as any
student of religion knows. Anyway, her stock went
up to the point of canonization. Gilles de Rais, on
the other hand, is equally a household word for
monstrous vices and crimes. So much so, that he
is even confused with the fabulous figure of Blue-
qeard, of whom, even were he real, we know nothing
much beyond that he reacted in the most manly way
to the problem of domestic infelicity.
A moment’s digression ; in fact, the main
point. What is the most precise and most atrocious
charge that is made against him ? That he sacrificed,
in the course of Alchemical and magical experiments,
a matter of 800 children ? I submit that, a priori,
this sounds a little improbable. Gilles de Rais
was the lord of a district whose population could
not have been very extensive, and even in that age
of slavery, dirt, disease, debauchery, poverty and
ignorance, which seems to Mr. G. K. Chesterton
the one ideal state of society, it must have been
a little difficult to carry out abductions and murders
on such wholesale principles.
Whenever questions arise with regard to black
magic or black masses, invocations of the devil,
etc., etc., it must never be forgotten that these
practices are strictly functions of Christianity. Where
ignorant savages perform propitiatory rites, there
and there only Christianity takes hold. But under
the great systems of the civilised parts of the world,
there is no trace of any such perversion in religious
feeling. It is only the bloodthirsty and futile Jehovah
who has achieved such monstrous births. Such
upas-trees can only grow in the poisonous mire of
fear and shame where thought has putrefied to
Christianity.
There is thus no antecedent improbability that
Gilles de Rais (or any other person of that place
and period) was addicted to black magical practices,
for they were all Catholics. The power of the Church
was, at that time, absolute, and even research was
limited by the arbitrary theology imposed upon the
mind of everyone. The abomination was at its
height. But its decline has been rapid. True, one
hundred years later it was still possible for Queens
to be bulldozed by Presbyterian pulpiteers, but the
time was already predictable when their best was
for undergraduates to be bluffed by homosexual
ecclesiastics. I suppose it is all in the family.
While these profound thoughts were producing
a hypochondriac obnubilation of my mental faculties,
it suddenly occurred to me that after all, I had heard
this story before. And I saw the connection.
In the pitch-dark ages, when Christianity held
unchallenged sway over those portions of this globe
which it had sufficiently corrupted, the pursuit of
knowledge—knowledge of any kind—was justly
estimated by the people in power as the one and
only dangerous pursuit. Even so, as late as 300 years
ago, it was not considered very gentlemanly to be
able to read and write. I am not sure that it is.
In any case, it is a great error in education to
teach these things. Grammar, we must never forget,
appears in the word “ Gramarye,” beloved of Sir
Walter Scott, and “ grimoire,” a black magical
ritual—that is to say, any written document.
Precious little knowledge filtered through Chris-
tianity. It was against the interests of the Church,
and in those times it was much easier to suppress
people and ideas than it is now, though even to-day
we find priests—at least in Oxford—who appear
not to have heard of a certain recent invention by a
notorious Magician inspired by the Devil—the
Printing Press.
But they feared. So those who pursued know-
ledge were at the best under strong suspicion of
heresy. I need not quote the obvious names. But
there were certain bodies of people who did carry
on the old knowledge, mostly by oral tradition, and
who were perforce tolerated to a certain extent,
because even the little knowledge that they did
possess was so exceedingly useful. The best way to
make armour, or to build Cathedrals, or to heal
sickness would enable the Christian to get ahead of
his friends. Therefore, although conscience evidently
demanded the maximum amount of persecution
compatible with the existence of villains, the Jews
and the Arabs were at least allowed to live. Besides,
the Arabs saw to that themselves.
But no one was better aware than the Pope
that knowledge was power. For all he know, and he
probably knew that he did not know much, the
Jews and the Arabs might get together and overturn
the whole construction of society. Had he not in his
own records the very best example of such a
catastrophe ?
There is a large number of excellent people,
possessed of even less that the minimum amount of
brains required to grease a gimlet, who are always
boring us with the bogey of the Jew-Bolshevist
peril. But as most of them are Roman Catholic
and unaware that Rome is laughing in its sleeve
at them, they conveniently ignore what should be—
if they realised it—their best argument. What was
the ultimate cause of the destruction of the great
civilization of Rome ? What corrupted the spirit
of a people unconquerable in arms ? What but
the spread of the slave morality of the Jewish
communists of the period ? If you will take your
New Testaments from your pockets, you will find
in the fourth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles
and the thirty-second verse : “ And the multitude
of them that believed were of one heart and soul ;
and not one of them said that aught of the things
that he possessed was his own, but that they had all
things in common.” Of course one of them, and
he too was a Jew, tried to hold out on the kitty,
and was struck miraculously dead for his pains.
Lenin and Trotsky never did as well !
So, as Roman Catholics are always telling us,
the Church has a monopoly of logic, and the Pope
argued that all Jews were communists. Anyone
who had or wanted knowledge must be a Jew, and
therefore a communist, and therefore—well, the
Pope too believed in preparedness, though he probably
called it a programme of disarmament. When people
scrap battleships in the name of peace on earth and
goodwill to men, it means that they have found
battleships useless and too expensive, and that they
have found something cheaper and more deadly.
So the Curia kept a weapon in reserve, in order to
be sure of having a nice jolly pogrom whenever
they gave the word. And what was the word to be ?
Nice quiet peasant folk, or genial hard-working
hunters and fighters, are not easy to arouse to indis-
criminate slaughter without reason. In order to get
them going, there are only two things which you can
play on—greed and fear. The motive behind the
Crusades was the story of the fabulous wealth of
the East. We find, in fact, that well-organised armies
of buccaneers, such as the Templars, did bring back
incalculable spoils, while the honest pious mugs
ruined themselves in the process.
 Now, in this particular sport of suppressing
earnest enquirers, it was not much good trying to
play on people’s greed. For everyone knew that
even if the Jews had wealth, they managed to hide
it very successfully, and that they had a nasty way
of arranging for protection with people who were
too powerful to be bullied, and too good business
men to be fooled into killing the goose that laid the
golden eggs. So the only motive available was fear,
and in those ages where ignorance was fostered with
infinite devotion, it was even easier to create a scare
about bogies than our propaganda in the recent
scrap found it.
I was in Venice just before the war, when
Halley’s comet was around, and although the Pope
himself sprinkled holy water over the comet, and
sent it his special benediction and told the people
it would do no harm, in his most ex cathedra manner,
the Venetians gathered themselves in panic-stricken
crowds in the Square of St. Mark and waited, howling,
for the end of the world.
It was accordingly easy enough to associate
the pursuit of knowledge with the most abominable
crimes, real or imaginary or both. For this reason,
we hear—not as a demonstrated thesis, but as a
commonplace of inherited knowledge—that Jews
were sorcerers and wizards. In other words, they
know something about grammar. We heard that they
transformed themselves into cats or bats, and sucked
people’s big toes. I have never, personally, investi-
gated the question as to whether this form of nutrition
is palatable. But, alas ! even in those idyllic
Chestertonian times there was a little shrewd common
sense knocking about ; the instinct—sometimes very
splendidly described as horse sense—which comes
from intimate wordless unintellectual communing
with Nature (please do not take that word “ com-
muning ” in any bad sense ; if it were not for Baldwin,
I would be a Conservative myself)—the instinct of
some people, who at the bottom of their hearts, did
not so much believe in these phantasms. It was not
so easy to get them to go out and murder a lot of
inoffensive people at the word jump. They had to
be supplied with something a little more tangible.
You will notice how all this sort of argument
is invariably of the ad captandum variety. It is pro-
duced out of nowhere for a definite purpose ; and,
as the French say, does not rime with anything.
If it did, of course, it would immediately be exposed
as nonsense. It is satisfied that nobody can disprove
it any more than they can prove it.
Take a concrete example. A nice young gentle-
man the other day wanted (very properly) to earn
his living, and not being peculiarly endowed by
Nature in the matter of original invention, he thought
he might make a story out of the idea of a Suicide
Club. In this he was evidently correct. Robert Louis
Stevenson had in fact proved the point. So he took
Stevenson’s story and transferred it to Germany,
and drivelled on about the ace of spades, and quoted
statistics of suicides, and said that I was the president
of the Club and that the Berlin police were after me.
Now, I am afraid it would be a little bit difficult
for anyone to prove that I am responsible for any
suicides that may take place in Germany. But, on
the other hand, it is quite impossible for me to dis-
prove it. So now, if you want to attack anybody
without the slightest fear of contradiction, you know
how to set to work.
 I omitted to mention that all these suicides were
excessively beautiful and even voluptuous young
women of high social position, and that the wicked
president had blackmailed them out of vast sums.
You see, the people for whom this dear young gentle-
man was writing all get sexually excited by pictures
of young women, and also by any statement about
large sums of money. For they immediately have
a wish phantasm—if they had large sums themselves,
what terrible fellows they could be.
In the Middle Ages, the art of exciting the
people was not very different. The Jew had always
an immense hoard of ill-gotten wealth, and of course
every penny that was exacted by Reginald Front-de-
Boeuf was laid to the Jews’ account. But there was
another treasure that the peasant was afraid to lose,
the dearest treasure of all, his children. As little
boys, thank God, have a habit of straying in search
of adventure and getting lost in the process, which
is good for their souls, the peasant naturally has
moments of serious disquietude as to whether some-
thing terrible can have happened to little Tommy.
Very Good. All we have to do is to play on the
alarm.
We put into his mind that little Tommy (who
turns up all right, if rather muddy, half an hour
later) has almost certainly been kidnapped by the
Jews for purposes of ritual murder.
The main accusation against Gilles de Rais is
therefore just this general accusation against anyone
in Christendom who exhibited any desire for know-
ledge. Only, in his case, it was concentrated and
exaggerated to fantastic lengths by some factor or
other on which I feel it useless to speculate. The
one thing of which I feel certain is that 800 children
is a lot. I don’t know over how many years these
practices were supposed to have spread. As I think
you must all feel sure by now, I know nothing what-
ever of my subject.
But scientific experiment in those days was
always a very prolonged operation. They thought
nothing of exposing some unknown substance to
the rays of the sun and moon for periods of three
months at a time, in the hope that in some mysterious
way the first stage of some dimly-visaged operation
might be satisfactorily accomplished. And even if
they sacrificed a child every day, it would have
taken a matter of two and a half years to dispose of
800 children. Besides, it must have taken more than
a few minutes to kidnap a child with the secrecy
obviously required. Did the disappearance of the
first four hundred, say, put no parents on their
guard ?
I think, at the best, it is a case of little Tommy
who told his mother that there were millions of cats
on the wall of the back garden, but under cross-
examination, in the style made popular by the
dialogue of Lot with Almighty God, admitted that
it was “ Tom and another.”
Of course, it will be obvious to you by this
time that I have been seduced by Jewish gold, and the
only way that I can think of to disarm your suspicions
is to bring forward another case of the same kind,
little more then a century old, with which Jews
had nothing to do.
There was a poet laureate—I am not quite
sure what this species of animal is—but his name
was Robert Southey, and he lived, if you can call it
living, about the time of William Blake. He wrote
a number of words arranged in some scheme con-
nected with rhyme and rhythm ; apparently, like
golf clubs, “ a set of instruments very ill-adapted to
the purpose.” But, anyway, he called it a poem,
and the title was something to do with the old woman
of Berkeley and who rode behind her. The person
who rode behind her was Mr. Montague Summers’
friend, the Devil. What she actually did to merit
this favour is to me rather obscure, because I have
forgotten the whole beastly thing. But I do remem-
ber two lines, because I am in the same line of
business myself.
I have candles made of infants’ fat,
I have feasted on rifled graves.
Southey was an ambitious man. He was not
content with the brilliant success of this masterpeice
of the poetic art. He immediately sat down and
wrote another alleged poem all about infants’ fat and
rifled graves and the Devil coming for the villain
at the proper moment. This poem has nothing to do
with witchcraft. It is called “ The Surgeon’s
Warning.”
I think this is the best evidence in support of my
thesis—whatever that is, I am not quite sure—
that it is possible to adduce.
In the minds of the kind of people who believe
in their neighbours making candles of infants’ fat
and digging up corpses to economise on the butcher’s
bill, the surgeon—that is to say, the man in pursuit
of knowledge which it is hoped may alleviate human
pain—is the same kind of animal as the witch and
the ritual-murdering Jew.
It is, no doubt, because it is a part of the old
taboo complex about the corpses of one’s relatives,
that the clerical attack on surgeons concentrated
itself on one fact—the fact that to learn to be a surgeon
you must have corpses to dissect. For at that time,
it will be remembered, hospitals were not as flourishing
as they are to-day, and it was very difficult to find
living people whom you could cut up to see what
came of it. The surgeon was, in fact, not understood
at all, except in the one way which such people were
capable of understanding ; i.e., as the body-snatcher.
The rest of his proceedings were perfectly mysterious
to them.
You notice that even Charles Dickens—who
may yet go down to history for having wished to
prosecute Holman Hunt, of all people in the world,
for painting indecent pictures—takes very much this
popular view of medicine and pharmacy in Pickwick.
I think, then, it is not altogether unfair to assume
that Gilles de Rais was to a large extent the victim
of Catholic logic. Catholic logic: and the foul wish-
phantasms generated of its repressions, and of its
fear and ignorance. He wanted to confer to a boon on
humanity ; therefore he consorted with the learned ;
therefore he murdered little children.
I think it is about time that somebody got after
J. B. S. Haldane. It is too late to do anything more
to Ridley and Latimer, but I am quite sure that the
candle they lit was made of infants’ fat. It is no use
your starting to rifle Graves, because his publishers
might resent your interference.
Those in favour of the motion will now please
signify the same in the usual manner. And may the
Lord have mercy on your souls !