The Vice of Kings: How Socialism, Occultism, and the Sexual Revolution Engineered a Culture of Abuse

by Jasun Horsley

In today's "post-truth" world, we are becoming inundated with fantasy fictions, "alternate news," and grossly oversimplified (and wildly exaggerated) conspiracy theories that identify cryptocratic power structures ruling our fates. But suppose the truth is both stranger than any fiction and more nuanced and disturbing than any theory? Suppose it is not conspiracy but complicity that creates our world?

Beginning as an investigation into the author's childhood inside a closet aristocracy of "progressive" British entrepreneurs, Vice of Kings uncovers a history both disturbingly personal and shockingly universal. By juxtaposing disc jockey Jimmy Savile's secret cultural, criminal, and political affiliations in the second half of the 20th century with the life and teachings of Aleister Crowley in the first, it uncovers an alarming body of evidence that organized child abuse is not only the dark side of occultism, but the shadowy secret at the heart of culture, both ancient and modern.

Genres: Conspiracy Theories, History, Politics, Nonfiction

330 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2018

About the author

Jasun Horsley is an author of several books on popular culture, psychology, and high strangeness. He is a transmedia storyteller, independent scholar, and existential detective. He lives and farms in Spain.

Artist’s Statement:

Books and things (the good ones) are like half-drawn maps of independent explorations into undiscovered lands. But to map the unknown means that first you have to get lost.

I seem to have been born that way: lost, with a question mark over my head. Creativity has been a way to fathom my own place in existence—the idea of writing for an audience is one I have always had difficulty with. Yet creative expression is like a two-way bridge between the inside and the outside, and between the one and the many.

Writing (fiction or nonfiction, there’s no difference) is an experiment in identity construction and deconstruction. It’s a way to take myself apart and see what I am made of, to have a meaningful dialogue with my unconscious, and, over time, to isolate and magnify the voice of my essential Self, to give it body—a body of evidence that is also (almost incidentally) a body of work.

The dialogue so far has been characterized by my fascination for mainstream “pop” culture (especially movies), on the one hand, and for high strangeness (political conspiracies, paranormal phenomena, Ufos, autism, and the like), on the other.

The map I am ending up with is of this no man’s land, this mysterious area of overlap between the mainstream and the margins, the inside and the outside, the seen and the unseen.

Reviews

[Carmilla Voiez · Rating 2 out of 5]

The blurb claimed that this book was well researched, but I saw little evidence of that. While some of the names connected with child abuse are well known, and others would not surprise me, the links put forward as evidence seemed circumstantial at best and very tenuous. I had also read a review in which Horsley was compared to Chomsky (as a respected academic) and this encouraged me to shell out £17 for this book. However, I was disappointed. The narrator/author swerved regularly into homophobia and admitted to abusing animals, including killing two dogs, and other "adventures" completely unconnected to the stated subject of the book.

I would not recommend buying, but other reviewers seem impressed enough to counter my negative review.

[Guy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have begun to write this review several times, in my head, and each time I floundered. I was unable to pull together a coherent way to review the range of horror, of evil, that Horsley has effectively, coherently, and rigorously mapped in Vice of Kings. So, I just started to actually write, even without knowing how to describe how effectively, powerfully, thoughtfully and thought provokingly he has delineated that that evil has been mapped into reasoned and reasonable actions within and initated by the elite social engineers whose 'altruistic' aims are to to bring about social manipulation for the betterment of human evolution; and that they have been able to successfully do this while at the same time keeping the expansive reality of this evil as something that is easily and largely denied by 'sane' people as too unbelievable to be true.

Is this a 'conspiracy' book?

This book is about the vices of our kings (our cultural heroes and political leaders), not their charm, talents, or occasionally genuine virtues.... I trust the reader will do his or her part to keep their attention on the facts being presented, no matter how challenging they may be to their worldview, and try not to blame the messenger, bearing in mind that I am not a historian and this book is not a history book, unless it be of personal history. For the most part, these facts were already 'out there' and available to everyone: All I have done is arrange them into some sort of coherence between two covers. Correlation is not causation, however, and there is always the danger that, by placing related facts side by side (which inevitably means leaving out other related facts), a premature assumption of conspiracy may arise — since conspiracy is almost as verboten a word as there is these days — let us call it conscious complicity of intent.

VoK continues Horsley's search for the truth of his family's trauma, as it became embodied in himself, that he began with Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist . As with Seen and Not Seen, VoK is the work of Horsley moving towards personal wholeness by integrating into his consciousness the traumatizing reality of the conscious, fully intentioned and sanctioned child abuses of all sorts, not just sexual, that are part of a process of social engineering disseminated from Fabian and occult philosophies that are hiding from us in plain sight. His personal exploration, although it is more accurate to call it an extreme self-examination, began as a look into his own experiences and behaviours. But they demanded to be fleshed out in the context of his family, especially from the outrageous behaviours of his brother, who eventually committed a 'noble' suicide, and the successful business 'behaviours' of his grandfather and less successful ones of his father. And from there, what were the intersections of abuse with the society?

The Vice of Kings maps the shadowy intersection between progressive politics, psychosexual research, intelligence programs, behavior modification, occult ritual and philosophy, and organized child abuse, to reveal long-term social and cultural engineering goals throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (back cover).

And VoK does exactly that.

As a long time reader of Noam Chomsky I was not particulary shocked at what Horsley exposes, even though much of it was new to me in the details. And Horsley provides documented details! As I read this I saw a parallel between Horsley and Chomsky: in part because of his attention to detail with references and in part because they both look at the underbelly of power. Chomsky's focus is on political power, while Horsley is looking at the psychological and rationalized foundations of the pernicious intent of that political power through the successful dissemination of Fabian ideals. Those ideals consist of engineering the perfect society for the betterment of the elites, even if that requires the brutalization of the society's 'lesser' members. The brutalization is justifed as the rational application of evolutionary principles, especially environmental stress, that will bring to humanity its 'proper' place in the evolutionary hierarchical order. It is, quite literally, the extension of the eugenics programs that were popular in the early part of the 20th century and that initiated the forced sterilization of people who were deemed unsuitable for human propagation.

And how best to convince 'the unwashed masses' of that proper evolution? Through a dumbing down of the puplic education system. And through propaganda, of course. And here is where a wonderful overlap between Chomsky and Horsley occurs. Horsley delineates the people-relationships that existed between MKULTRA (also called the CIA mind control program, ... the code name given to a program of experiments on human subjects that were designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency—and which were, at times, illegal (Wikipedia)), magic mushrooms, Time-Life, J.P.Morgan bank and two of the giants in the development of the proper social engineering by the intelligent few for the benefit of the many through propaganda: George Kennan and Edward Bernays. Chomsky frequently cites these two for exactly the same thing. This will be a rather long citation, as it is a bit too complex to shorten without losing its rigor.

A few months after [Robert Gordon] Wasson's [discovery of the 'the Flesh of the Gods' magic mushroom in Mexico], the CIA was reporting on the work of 'an amateur mycologist' and the potential to incorporate his findings into what was then Project Artichoke, soon to become MKULTRA . Small world. (Wasson's team was then allegedly 'infiltrated' by CIA agent James Moore, before the next trip to Mexico.) As for Wasson being 'an amateur mycologist': maybe so, but he was also the vice president for public relations at J.P. Morgan at the time, one of the biggest banks in the world, so not exactly an 'independent researcher.' Researcher Jan Irvin (2015) ran a series of well-documented articles presenting evidence of just how deep Wasson's background was. For example, that Wasson headed the CIA's MKULTRA Subproject 58 program. The he served as a chairman to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). That he had close ties to Allen Dulles, head of the CIA and MKULTRA initiator. That he earned a directorship at a pharmaceutical company for his mushroom discovery. That he was an account manager to the Pope and Vatican for J.P.Morgan. That he was in charge of promoting the Russian Orthodox Church for Russian immigrants. (This is an odd overlap with my grandfather's invitation from from the Russian orthodox Church to visit the Soviet Union in 1954, 'without any strings.' Though I have read the 35-page report, I am still unclear about the exact purpose of this visit. There is an appendix in the booklet titled: 'Decree of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. [Communist Party of the Soviet Union]: About mistakes in conducting scientific-atheistic propaganda among the population.

Wasson also had a Russian wife, Valentina, who was religious and from the Russian intelligentsia. Primary documents reveal that Wasson was involved in helping to cover up J.P.Morgan's involvement in the Civil War's Hall of Carbine Affair, and that Wasson directed the disinformation campaign, earning him his position as vice president for public relations for J.P.Morgan. Wasson was close friends with Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda and spin [in order to ensure the proper running of a democracy] and nephew to Sigmund Freud. Wasson was also friends with George Kennan, one of the engineers of Operation Paperclip (the program to secretly bring top Nazi officials and scientists into the USA.) Wasson's superior at J.P.Morgan, Henry Davison, was a member of the infamous Skull and Bones secret student society at Yale University, as was Henry Luce at Time-Life. Davison created Time-Life for his boss, J.P.Morgan. C.D.Jackson, head of US psychological warfare (and purchaser of the JFK Zapruder film), was VP at Time-Life and later became its president. And so on (all this via Irvin, 2015) (69-70 my emphasis).

Horsley splits the book into two parts. The first is about the links and interleavings between various ostensibly disparate organizations and people and social evolutionary engineering, as above, occultism including black rituals involving children, sex and death, organized and supported child predation and the speedy development and expansion of Fabianism that was so succesful that we are now living it so completely that it is the air that we breathe: we simply do not actually see it. The second part is a deeper look at the role of Aleister Crowley's occultism and black magic in our society and to expose its presence as alive and well and in no small part contributing to the prevalence of child sexual abuse and even ritual death.

And it would be much easier on the heart and mind to dismiss this book as the ramblings of someone making demons out of ghosts than to consider that even some of what this book explores is true. But this book cannot be dismissed as such. Not only does it align with some of my own experiences and small research, it also aligns with subtle allusions from odd sources: Marcus Aurelious's Meditations, Montaigne's Essays as well as in Apulious's story The Golden Ass. Horsley's research is strong and open to the public to confirm, which is another overlap with Chomsky.

At times Horsley steps inside the narrative to wonder at the disbelievablity of what he has discovered and disclosed. He closes with his own reflections of the work:

The prevalence of child sexual abuse in our society is a bitter pill to swallow. The idea that it could be organized, systemic and intentional (part of a hidden [Fabian directed social engineering] 'policy') is a whole bottle of bitterness. Correlation does not equal causation; just because we can map an interest in promoting the idea of child sexuality, or in prematurely sexualizing children through various forms of interference, or, most disturbingly of all, in using the psychological trauma (stess) of sexual abuse to 'crack' psyches open and thereby shape culture at large, none of this proves that widespread sexual abuse is a direct result of these interests or agendas. But I trust even the most sceptical reader will allow for some relation between the two.
...
I imagine that one reason for resisting the findings in this present work will be the sheer difficulty in accepting just how prevalent child sexual abuse is in our world. I have avoided citing some of the statistics about these (e.g. Lloyd deMause), because statistics are always questionable at best, and in this case they are so shocking as to be unbelievable to many people. Even for myself, after many years immersed in this material, I find a strange disconnect between what I am aware of and what I am able to believe. Each time I allow some distance from what I have written, I find myself doubting my own conclusions. It is only when I return to them and revisit the evidence that my doubts again dissolve. But even all this evidence would be insufficient, without the confirmations of more direct experience.

Horsley continues by sharing how running a small used goods store in small town Canada has, without him seeking it, brought to him the awareness of the extent to which his customers know of or are themselves victims of child sexual abuse. He is being told these stories outside the

context of group therapy but [in] that of a used goods store, which makes it fair to suppose I am hearing about only a small percenage of the actual cases. Even so, it appears to be everywhere. In Canada that is literally true, because the extent of sexual and physical abuse of Native American children forced to attend residential schools was found, in some cases, to be 100 percent (Milloy, 2011)(p273-4).

That is how he ends VoK. He begins it thus:

My brother and I were born and raised in an environment that glamorized vice and normalized corruption — in which corruption disguised itself as virtue.

Children imitate not what they are told but what they are shown. [I would add, what they see, which often includes things that the parents and society do not mean to show.] Thinking of everyone who grew up during this period in Britain, watching Jimmy Savile [since discovered to be an open, nearly public, heinous paedophile] cracking jokes about his crimes on national TV, going to schools and care homes run by sexual predators, unable to talk about it or even consciously acknowledge it, the question arises, what sort of long-term effect does this have on generations of children? My brother's case [— see Sebastion Horsley for a cleaned-up biography —] may just be one, particularly extreme case among legion (p.xxvii).

What to do with this knowledge, this 'awareness'? That has been, up to writing this review, an unstated perhaps unconscious question and likely one that has slowed my getting this review done. To be honest, I don't know. How does evil propagate? By those who recognize nascent evil, and do nothing to stop it before it becomes too large to easily stop. How to react to that? It seems straightforward, but how to act on something that has become in our culture not only the elephant in the room, but the elephant no one sees, let alone even wants to see? To share my awareness and be seen as a lunatic? To carefully share that awareness with those already somewhat aware, not unlike, oddly enough, Morpheus's approach to Neo in 'The Matrix'? That may be the most unsettling result of reading this book: what to do? For now, I will judiciously share my awareness and his book. And I will continue to walk the talk of healing the not atypical childhood wounding I experienced from my own traumatized parents with Sadhana and therapy. Perhaps that will be enough, to simply reduce the trauma level in my world by having it leave my mind, my personal unconscious, and my body.

[Frederick Heimbach · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hard book to review. A lot of people will find this frustrating but I found it intensely sympathetic. Readers should go into it understanding the author is mostly just sharing his subjective reactions to a childhood of intense sadness and possibly something worse.

As far as crimes and outrages go, the author summarizes existing documented cases rather than presenting any new hard evidence. He does tie many threads together; some will find that "conspiratorial" but Horsley does a good job of keeping the speculation and the facts sorted. I didn't find anything dishonest about his approach anywhere.

Basically if you're prone to distrust elites or if you're simply open minded, this harrowing book will be worth the read despite the sordid subject matter and the lack of definitive conclusions. If you're eager to dismiss all such discussion as conspiracy mongering, then don't bother.

[EDM · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is so much good in this book, especially if you are interested in a summary of the modern history of UK narrowed down to libertarian agendas and social change. However, in terms of conspiracy theorizing the evidence presented is not conducive to the conclusions reached. On the other hand, this is not my main concern regarding the author and the book. The second part of the work is dedicated to investigating the occult around the persona of Aleister Crowley. The author has serious concerns that Crowley's occult rituals might have transgressed to unacceptable areas involving severe abuses of children. Also, he attributes all the mistakes of his past life to the wrong philosophies of sexual liberation, theosophy, and the occult. A careful read of the book reveals the following:

a) The author used to be a dedicated practitioner of Magick according to Golden Dawn and Thelemic practices.
b) He has no repressed memories. He has a bleeding anus and abdominal cramps that he attributes to body memories of anal penetration during infancy.
c) At some point he has experienced enlightenment in terms of tuning in to his own feelings as well as others'. He terms this phase in his life 'Ipsissimus' level attainment, despite his present rejection of initiations and magical grades.

Apparently, his enlightenment appeared to him unlikely to have resulted from his former magical practice, while it is very likely that acting out his own drives through magick has matured him to the understanding he eventually obtained. He tends to separate the process completely from the results, in contrast to his knowledge of Freud who made a career and theory out of this puzzling way healing occurs. The author has in the past had the habit of attributing his physical sensations and ailments to Karma and spiritual forces. I believe his claims to repressed memories has a similar characteristic. About half of adults older than age 50 have hemorrhoids, symptoms of which include anal bleeding and comorbid with abdominal cramps, constipation. Given the author's familiarity with Latin America and its cuisine, couldn't his symptoms be simply attributed to consuming too much hot sauce?

[Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that circumambulates an abyss. Really an incredible work.

There's a profound honesty to this book, the author is resolutely careful not to speak with a "knowing" voice, to not throw out any number of hypotheses which so readily present themselves to the imagination, given the subject matter. He allows the audience to do so if they please.

Beyond that is the authors similarly profound conscious depth of understanding of the nature of the subject matter, for him, it clearly extends to a level of far deeper than the verbal... and if there was any criticism, it would be that there is some lack of clarity here.. but perhaps any fault in this respect lies with the reader (i.e. me).