Shadow Worlds by Andrew Wood

Author:Andrew Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Massey University Press
Published: 2023-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Some might argue that including Rosaleen ‘Roie’ Norton (1917–1979), the ‘Witch of King’s Cross’, is, perhaps, stretching the ambit, as she did not personally know Crowley and moved to Australia when she was a young child. Even so, her veneration of the god Pan and devotion to sex magick was heavily indebted to Crowley’s writings, and her connection to Aotearoa is worth celebrating.

Norton was born in Dunedin to unexceptional English-immigrant Anglican parents — her father a captain in the merchant navy and a cousin of the composer Vaughan Williams, her mother a ‘conventional, highly emotional woman, far too absorbed in her family’54 — but she was a far from unexceptional child. She was born during a thunderstorm, and later in life she would claim that being born with pointed ears, blueish marks on her left knee and a hymenal tag marked her out as a witch from the beginning.55 From age three she was drawing what she called ‘nothing beasts’ — animal-headed ghosts with tentacular arms.56 As a five-year-old she once had a vision of a shining dragon beside her bed. This and other unusual events convinced her from an early age that another, spiritual word existed.57

The family moved to Sydney in 1925, settling in Lindfield, a rapidly developing bush-clad middle-class suburb of double-brick California bungalow and federation-style houses. Norton had a strained relationship with her parents in her teens — she lived in a tent in the garden for three years, and collected assorted animals as pets.58 Increasingly alienated by the mainstream, around the age of 14 she was expelled from her Anglican girls’ school because her drawings of witches, devils and vampires were thought disruptive.59

She then enrolled at East Sydney Technical College, where her artistic talents were encouraged by sculptor Rayner Hoff (1894–1937),60 and where she began reading the writings of Éliphas Lévi, Dion Fortune, the Kabbalah, and especially Aleister Crowley.61

After leaving college, Norton supported herself with various menial jobs, marrying Beresford Lionel Conroy in 1940. They divorced in 1951 and Norton moved into an eccentric boarding house in Merangaroo.62 To support herself she took on illustration work with the magazine Pertinent, which started in 1940 and was edited by the Welsh-born poet Leon Batt. Batt admired Norton’s work greatly.63 Buoyed by such encouragement, in 1943 Norton had a major exhibition with fellow artist Selina Muller.

In an article about the show in Pix pictorial magazine, Norton talked about her experiments with self-hypnosis and how she drew on her unconscious for material.64 In style and content Norton’s art strongly resembles English artist and magician Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956), who had briefly associated with Crowley before going on to found his own sigil-based system of Chaos magic.

Rosaleen Norton, artist and putative witch.

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