Imagination & Visionaries Part Six

The police found Norton guilty of exhibiting obscene pictures at the Kashmir Cafe in 1957 and, after numerous appeals, a number of her paintings were destroyed in 1960 by the authorities. This action among others made Rosaleen Norton by far the most persecuted artist and intellectual in Australian society. A large part of this was due to Norton having the courage to be so outspoken about her sexual, religious and aesthetic preferences. However, the continual legal wrangling and lurid gossip finally took their toll on both Norton and Greenlees. Norton retreated from the public eye in the 1960s and Greenlees was institutionalized because of mental health problems brought on by the never ending harassment.

In 1974, the Rt. Rev. Marcus Loane, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney set up a Commission of Inquiry into occult practices. This was reportedly only the second such inquiry held in a Protestant country since the Middle Ages. The Commisssion reported, amongst other sensational claims, that occultism and Satanism were the "most sinister" of modern "crazes" and that "occultism may provide pornography with a religious base to work from." They even recommended that legislation be passed to prohibit ouija boards, tarot cards and similar devices or instruments of the occult. This report spurred the popular press to even more dramatic headlines.

However, Rosaleen Norton continued to live a quieter and more private life. She also remained defiant and courageous to the very end, and continued to work on her art and magickal practices until cancer took her on 5 December 1979. She died at the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Hospice in Sydney still worshipping Pan. Shortly before she died she is reported to have said, "I came into the world bravely; I'll go out bravely."

This last section will be about just a few things about Norton's religious beliefs and a final quote from the major source for this article. Pan was the major god that Rosaleen worshiped. Pan was the Greek god of shepherds and flocks, of hunting, mountain wilds, and rustic music. Pan was also associated with fertility and theatrical criticism and his season is spring. His name originates from the word paein meaning "to pasture," and he is a companion of the nymphs. Rosaleen Norton's religious beliefs were syncretic. Even though Pan was the major deity in her belief system, she also held such gods as Jupiter, Hecate, Neptune and Baphomet in high regard. In Norton's belief system Pan was celebrated for his creative (generative) powers. Her first magical ritual was "in honour of the horned god, whose pipes are a symbol of magic and mystery, and whose horns and hooves stand for natural energies and fleetfooted freedom; And this rite was also my oath of allegiance and my confirmation as a witch."

Norton believed these gods to have their own reality and not simply as representations of psychological forces to be acted upon. They appeared to the magician when they chose to do so-NOT at the whim of the magician. Norton's readings in the occult included the works of Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune and Eliphas Levi. In her autobiographical articles, Norton remarked that the "onset of adolescence often awakens the religious urge as well as the sexual urge, and this was so with me." It is not known whether Norton practiced Aleister Crowley's system of sexual magick. He did have the most comprehensive and explicit guide to the relationships between sexual practice and magical ritual. Norton "practiced what she preached" and her belief system was fully integrated into her daily life. She wrote: "As for 'Do I feel frightened of the things I see?' No! Never! Most of them are as familiar a part of my world as the teapot is. And as necessary to me."

Jack Sargeant is the author of "The Witch of Kings Cross" which appeared in Fortean Times August 2007 issue #224 which is the source of most of the information of this small series along with wikipedia. Jack Sargeant asks at the end of his fantastic article about Rosaleen Norton and her fascinating (and many times very difficult) life: "What seems remarkable now is the apparent lack of support Norton received during her trials, even when the state took it upon itself to destroy her artwork. There was no outcry from museums or artists, suggesting that the country's artistic and intellectual communities were either paralyzed by cowardice or simply indifferent to Norton's fate. Such a lack of action remains shocking to this day." The art shown is more of Rosaleen Norton's work.

Rosaleen Norton Link

Gavin Greenlees Link

Sir Eugene Aynsley Goossens Link

Greek god Pan Link

Imagination & Visionaries Part Five

Rosaleen journeyed to Melbourne in 1949 with her lover, the poet Gavin Greenlees, to set up an exhibition at the university there. Four of the artworks included in the exhibition were seized by the police and prosecuted on charges of obscenity. She was prosecuted with the Crown prosecution alleging that such works could 'deprave and corrupt the morals of those who saw them' and the police alleged that they were inspired by works of medieval demonology. The charges against her were dismissed and the charge of four pounds and four shillings awarded against the police department. In 1952 a beautifully produced leather-bound limited edition book of her paintings, with each one complemented by a poem by Gavin Greenlees (15 April 1930-5 December 1983), was published by Walter Glover. The book should have been a success-produced in a numbered edition of 500. However, in 1953 the work was seized by the authorities. Two pictures in it had been judged to be obscene. The volume was subsequently allowed to be sold with the censor's ink covering parts of the offending pictures. The book was not only banned by American customs, but copies of the book were confiscated and burned by the U.S. Customs Department.

The tabloid press had a field day with headlines such as the "most blatant example of obscenity yet published in Australia." Now Rosaleen Norton was the subject of increasingly lurid stories by the yellow press with headlines referring to her as "the witch of Kings Cross." Dark stories of witchcraft, "black masses," sexual magical rites and Satanism began to regularly appear in Australian newspapers and magazines, and "Roie Norton" soon became a household name. Gavin Greenlees became quite involved in one particular incident. Thieves tried to sell pictures of Norton and Greenlees in flagrante delicto to the press. Obviously the pix weren't published but news that they simply existed at all shocked conservative Australia. Finally, in April 1957, Norton and Greenlees would be found guilty of assisting in the production of obscene photographs and fined. On 5 March 1956, Sir Eugene Aynsley Goossens, who was the ABC director of music, conductor of the Sydney Symphony and head of the NSW State Conservatory of Music was arriving in Australia from a trip to his native England. Goossens was a friend of Norton and Greenlees. He was stopped at Sydney airport and accused of importing prohibited imports, including pornographic photos and ceremonial masks and other "paraphenalia" for use in certain "rituals."

Due to the public scandals, Goossens lost his jobs and was forced to return to England within two months where he died in 1962. It has never been completely explained as to the motive the authorities had for searching the famed conductor and his luggage. It is believed by many that the authorities stole letters from Goossens to Norton which talked about sex magick from when they had illegally searched Norton's home. In 1957 Walter Glover was declared bankrupt and the copyrights to the artwork which had been assigned to him were taken over by the Official Receiver in Bankruptcy. The copyrights to Norton's artwork were finally returned to him in 1981. He managed to re-publish the book without difficulty in the more liberal political atmosphere of 1982. Rosaleen Norton had died in 1979 and didn't live to see her work published without being violated and to receive the respect it deserved. Sadly, Norton's life provided so much grist for the mill for the yellow press (and more respectable publications) her artwork was mostly ignored by galleries and critics of her day. Luckily the more Bohemian and cutting-edge bars and coffee shops of Kings Cross would often exhibit her work and she would sell paintings now and then through these places.

Norton was occasionally employed to paint murals in cafes and clubs. Throughout the 1960s, Norton was famed as the head of an active coven in Kings Cross, and she was regularly featured in the popular press. Friends who know her from this time recall her with fondness and invariably refer to how kind she was, quite the opposite from the disturbed "demon" or "sex maniac" painted by the press. Two more works of Rosaleen Norton's are shown in this article. The top image shows the god Pan. This was the major god she worshipped. To be continued...

Imagination & Visionaries Part Four

In Sydney's Kings Cross neighborhood you will see large brass plaques in the pavement. Kings Cross is an area long noted for its Bohemian atmosphere and denizens. The plaques celebrate this areas sometimes ridiculed and steamy past and are also an attempt to generate interest from tourism in the area. Between the "touristy" El Alamein Fountain and rows of strip clubs on Darlinghurst Road, among the names of famous drag queens and local community campaigners is a plaque that says "Rosalee Norton," and a second one that says "born in a thunderstorm with pointed ears...genius or crank?" Who knows what percentage of passersby will wonder about this plaque and the woman who inspired it? I hope that it is more than I imagine it would be, for I feel Rosaleen Norton's life story is both fascinating and instructive.

Rosaleen Miriam Norton (2 October 1917-5 December 1979) was an Australian artist, occultist and witch sometimes referred to as "the witch of Kings Cross." She was born in New Zealand, and the seven-year old Rosaleen emigrated with her family to Australia in 1925. Rosaleen knew from a very young age that she was different from other children. The young girl chose to sleep in a tent in the garden. Out here she enjoyed being in the prescence of an orb spider. The spider's prescence had the extra benefit of scaring her family away so she had the privacy to begin to look at nature's wonders and enjoy her love of the night. Even at her young age, she was "aware of a world wherein moved vast, mysterious powers, the sense of gay daemonic prescences and hauntingly familiar atmospheres, elusive yet powerful and compelling, when everything around me seemed to change focus like patterns in a kaleidoscope."

Her feelings and intuitions led to a series of visions and intuitions she experienced as a child, including the awesome otherness of a dragon. Rosaleen felt a deep awareness of greater dimensions beyond the material world. These other sides to being and reality would have a profound influence on her artwork and her magical philosophy later in life. As a young girl, poor Rosaleen had a foreshadowing of the scandals and problems with authority figures that would befall her later in life. At school, she had drawn a picture inspired by Saint Saen's Danse Macabre that scared the wits out of her teachers at Chatswood Girls Grammar. They saw the young girl as an immoral influence on the other pupils and she was expelled. Rosaleen was able to get a place at East Sydney Technical College because of her artistic talents. Even there two teachers tried to have her expelled, but the head of the school threw in his support for her. When Rosaleen began her college life she was in a vastly different world than that of the suburbs where she left her family. She stayed at a hotel near Circular Quay that was then-ahem-charmingly known as "Buggery Barn." She fit right in among this milieu of "artists, writers, musicians and drunks."

Soon after this she moved two more times finally landing in a run-down neighborhood near Kings Cross. Rosaleen was definitely a night owl, bisexual, artist and occultist by then. She enjoyed the camaraderie of the Cross's nocturnal inhabitants, and she spent most of her life living in or close to the area which is the unofficial heart of the city. She supported herself as a pavement artist and an artist's model to make a very low income as a student. Norman Lindsey, whose paintings evoked an eroticism and mysticism that would become so imbued in her own work, was the artist she modelled for. Later on, Rosaleen did discern a major difference between her own and Lindsey's work: "His is a Daylight world and the satirical element is used as a foil rather than admitted as another form of beauty. The vision of Rosaleen Norton is one of Night; she dislikes any of the sterotypes of beauty and finds the 'Daylight' world in general does not make good subject matter." Norton wrote this last bit about herself anonymously. Lindsey described her in condescending terms as a "grubby little girl with great skill who will not discipline herself." Despite what other people and the moralistic, conservative Australian press said about her, Norton continued to study art and pursued a personal study of trance states and the unconscious.

According to her autobiographical articles in the Australian Post she described entering a "deep trance state lasting for five days...what some Buddhist schools call the "Trance of Annihilation." Norton was also reported to have taken certain hallucinogenic drugs or plants to undergo her psychic journeys and achieved visionary states. She also devoted time to reading C.G. Jung, Eastern philosophy, Theosophy and after that texts which had concentrated more directly on magical workings and rituals. Through her intense study of these areas and numerous personal observations, Norton was able to present her experiences within a metaphysical framework instead of a purely psychological one. The magical realms or planes of existence she encountered helped her to produce her artwork. Often her artwork portrayed entities she witnessed in these altered states of consciousness. In addition, some of her paintings showed her own image alongside these beings depicted in a state of meditation, psychically crossing over into another plane of being. The first image is of Rosaleen Norton with one of her paintings and the second one is also another of her works. To be continued...