Adrift in Ipswich

Matriarchy versus Patriarchy (3)

The Ipswich modern-day Cathars’ interest in the twelve-year-old me, apart from the obvious, seemed to focus on the Passover and the ritual of the Scapegoat.

It took me a number of years to figure this out, because – as an adult – I tried hard to forget the whole wretched business. I failed miserably.

There are variations on the ancient ritual of the Scapegoat but, essentially, the magician or priest puts the sins of a tribe onto a goat and sends it off into the wilderness.

For a long time I tried ignoring recurring nightmares that would occur every year, regular as clockwork – in the Spring - until I finally had to take notice of them and draw the firm conclusion that they were related to these ceremonies.

The Passover features in two of the Abrahamic religions. And also in some Freemasonry rituals.

The Scapegoat features in all three Abrahamic religions, plus any number of pagan religions.

No one has a monopoly on it.

And, of course, it features heavily in the Shadow gnostic religion. Crowley’s pathetic writings are full of it, he is literally slavering over using young, intelligent boys as the Scapegoat.

Black Sabbat, AKA Crowley, with the Ape of Thoth. Art by Olivier Ledroit

I was known as ‘Ginger’ until my late twenties. So being a redhead may well have been a factor, too. The kind of esoteric texts that Crowley drew on specifically mention red haired boys.

So take your pick on what inspired the modern-day Cathars and the details of their rituals. I cannot say with absolute certainty because I simply don’t remember. This needs emphasising – it could be based on anyone and anything. That’s the very fluid nature of Gnosticism.

Although primarily it has to be Crowley.

Anything else would have been a further but superficial embellishment.

What I do remember with considerable clarity is that the Cathars cheated me financially. It’s why, to this day, I’m still thin-skinned on money matters, and anyone who tries cheating me does so at their peril. Thus, when I was first looking at the Cathars, in the early 1990s,

an American editor once short-changed me on my expenses, I went absolutely ballistic. I threatened to take the next plane to the States to see him and get my money from him. After I’d put the phone down, I reflected, ‘Where the hell did that anger come from? Why was I over-reacting? Why was I so upset?’

I didn’t make the connection at that time.

So the anger about being cheated was, initially, my strongest memory.

I was livid. It took a lot of work to exorcise that anger. And it was really because it didn’t appear to make sense. At first.

Why would the Pure Ones cheat a kid when they were wealthy, middle class, probably masonic, and pillars of the local community? Whatever money they had promised me for services rendered would surely have been peanuts to them. The answer, of course, is because they can. And cheating a desperate kid is all part of the hit for them.

It’s probably the best part.

I’m sure when the wealthy cheat the poor, they do it because they really enjoy it. It’s an expression of their power over them.

When I started recalling all this in my forties, it was mainly strong negative emotions with the bare minimum of visual details or specific memories.

This also makes sense. That twelveyear-old was witnessing and was the target of weird rituals that were far beyond his understanding.

And they were truly terrifying.

So what do you do? You have to block it out.

Even so. This was – and still is – bloody annoying because if I had more visual memories, I could have written a fantastic Eyes Wide Shut ceremony. It would have been a gift to a comic writer like me. I could almost imagine it. Almost. I’d probably scare the shit out of myself and everyone who read it. But my higher self, dammit, only gave me the minimum to confirm what happened was true, it was real, and censored the gruesome details – doubtless to protect myself and, perhaps, 2000AD readers.

If you look at Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, it’s not actually that graphic either. Much of what is really going on is left to our imagination. Perhaps that is why it is so frightening.

The film Scandal about Christine Keeler also features an upper-class orgy, but it’s thin on details, and Keeler wrote about an occult ceremony she attended. The Keeler scandal was happening roughly around the time I visited the Old Curiosity Shop. It would have involved similar but wealthier people.

All I knew for certain was that if I was ever a virtuous Little Nell (the heroine of Dickens The Old Curiosity Shop), I certainly wasn’t by the time the Cathars had finished with me.

In an effort to see if there were contemporary accounts of similar weird and bohemian behaviour, so I could try and understand it, I checked out Absolute Beginners (1959)by Colin MacInnes but it was not relevant. And Adrift in Soho (1961) by Colin Wilson. ‘Beats, Bums & Bohemians’. The title certainly sounded promising. It was disappointing. It was publisher hype. Anyone – anyone – who lived through the sixties was more adrift than Colin Wilson. It’s boring. Nothing terrible happens.

So I slowly, and rather reluctantly, began to realise that my home town Ipswich could easily compete with the much vaunted Soho for bacchanalian behaviour.

Ipswich had a port and a notorious red light district which, in recent years, suffered a number of serial killings of working girls.

Then there was the Tattingstone (a village close to Ipswich) suitcase murder, in January 1967, of a young rent boy, Bernard Oliver, aged seventeen. His dissected body was found inside two suitcases.

In fact, that poor kid was actually dissected at the place I worked at in Ipswich: R and W Paul. I was a ‘messenger boy’ there at almost the same time.

This is according to a contemporary account who saw the ‘surgeon’ standing outside Pauls at midnight, wearing surgical gloves and with a suitcase at his feet. The next day the suitcases were found in Tattingstone.

Two paedophile doctors, with past criminal records for child sexual abuse, were the prime suspects but they fled the country – probably with some official help – and died abroad before they could be brought to justice.

The murder took place one year after I’d left Paul’s at age sixteen. I’ve written about this elsewhere. The cold case cop who is hoping to reopen the investigation read my blog and rang me up. We had a very long conversation about my recollections.

Paul’s was definitely the hub for something unpleasant going on after hours when I was there. I have dark memories of that place too, as a supposed ‘messenger boy’. As I said previously, I had a scary youth, encountering a surprising number of dubious and dangerous people.

I only mention the murder here because it bears out that Ipswich was the Soho of East Anglia.

In fact, Ipswich is the paedophile capital of Britain.

And that’s official.

This means there are more known paedophiles living in Ipswich than any other town or city in the UK (I have a ‘league table’ chart which lists them all.).

That’s today.

Who knows how much worse it was back in the 1960s?

But with my memories frustratingly incomplete, and yet constantly nagging me, how was I to find out more about those modern day Cathars of my youth?

I checked my memories with an occult friend of mine who is never wrong where magical matters are concerned. He gave me a ‘reading’. He told me they were not play-acting Satanists out of an old Hammer horror film.

They were the real thing.

And they were in contact with ‘the Other Side’.

It made sense. After all, Crowley seems to have successfully summoned demonic entities.

These ‘Pure Ones’ were the most dangerous fucking people I could possibly get involved with as a kid.

But I felt I didn’t have enough hard facts, enough hard information: a strong narrative to take to the police.

There was a group of them and – at this stage – I couldn’t even remember their names. So what use would my complaint be to the police?

In reality, I was prevaricating. I used the excuse that there was so much else going on in my life. I didn’t have time to deal with the ghosts of the past.

I remember talking it over with artist Kevin O’Neill, shortly after the millennium. He looked really concerned. His response was, ‘Drop it, Pat. Walk away from it.’

So I refused the Quest, as we writers say.

I went to Turkey for six weeks, staying in a friend’s apartment there, writing and enjoying the sunshine. But instead of the relaxing time I envisaged, I was haunted by daymares and nightmares about the Pure Ones. My Muse, my soul, my subconscious, just wouldn’t let it go. She wanted action. Right here. Right now.

And she wouldn’t tolerate any more of my shitty excuses.

She had me cornered, so I had no choice.

I promised that when I returned to England I would finally do something about the Cathars.

The daymares and nightmares immediately stopped.

My Muse is an enthusiastic believer in revenge. She was finally happy.

It was Purification Time.

Next Week: Purification Time