Basil Crouch – The Making of a God and other Works of Black Art

Basil Crouch – The Making of a God and Other works of Black Art
Finbarr – 2010

It’s been a while since I read a grimoire. Here’s some rubbish.

This is little different from the other Basil Crouch books I’ve read. It’s written from the perspective of the publisher rather than Crouch himself, and although it is never explicitly stated, the narration makes it seem like Mr. Crouch was dead at the time of its publication in 2010. I have it on good authority that ol’ Basil died in 2020, so it’s very likely that this was actually written by him. The ridiculous amount of praise for Crouch in the text seems to confirm this suspicion.

Basil Crouch gave his publisher a book he deliberately made up, but the magic therein worked. The narrator, presumably still the publisher, claims that he prints so many books guaranteeing success and happiness not because they don’t work but because the success they provide is addictive.

Shoon is a magical land in Africa like Shambala, but aliens landed there 10,000 years ago. The Chinese had proof of this, but they hid it. Crouch gives some examples of the magic of Shoon being used to improve the lives of others. I haven’t read Crouch for years, but one of these testimonies, a story about a girl getting hurt at a fair and then being miraculously healed sounded familiar. There was another one in which a thalidomide man used Shoon magic to make his arms grow to normal size.

Make a paper-mache doll and fill it with pieces of junk and build it an altar. Name it after an African deity.

Breath in the doll’s mouth, and it will turn into a god. Talk to it, and give it offerings every day. The next portion of book describes appropriate offerings and prayers for each day.

To enslave another person, buy a doll, draw some shitty symbols on it, and pretend it’s the person you want to bum. Then give it to the fetish you have created. It might talk to you in response.

The effort that went into making these illustrations is breathtaking.

You can also use the doll you made to invoke demons. The idea here is remarkably unclear. I think the demons are supposed to possess it.

Now some instructions on how to get a barren woman pregnant. Crouch knows it works because he knew a 12 year old boy and a 9 year old girl who got pregnant this way. Also, a barren woman who was raped by the leader of an African tribe got pregnant this way. To do it, you draw a circle on the ground, bring your partner into it, strip off and then smoke a cigarette. Blow the cigarette smoke on each other, have a ride, and then go out and buy some maternity clothes.

Next up, a weird story about a man who can make himself invisible by moving his hands a certain way. This is followed with unrelated instructions on how to summon the invisibility demon. It’s genuinely hard to imagine anyone taking this seriously.

The book ends with a report about a monkey grave being found in Rwanda that Crouch read in a tabloid. It has nothing to do with anything.

Honestly, this text was so incoherent that it’s difficult to analyze. It starts off with a discussion about Shoon, the secret African city, and then goes on to tell how to make a doll that will solve all your problems. I guess the doll is a Shoonish thing, but I’m not sure this is ever explicitly stated.

Pure shit.

Basil Crouch’s Fairy Gold

It’s been a long time since I’ve discussed the work of Basil Crouch. I heard recently that he died last year. He wrote one book that was a bit paedoey, but he was fairly amusing otherwise. The man was either a half-arsed swindler, a loony or both.

This week’s offering is an utterly ridiculous book of his called Fairy Gold. I don’t know when this was published or who published it. It looks like a DIY job. I’m just going to summarize this one.

Basil Crouch has a little pond in his back garden. 5 fairies and a frog live there.

The first chapter of the book is made up of accounts of people who do and don’t believe in fairies. The ones who don’t believe are all poor losers. The ones who do believe are rich success stories.

Part two is about the different kinds of fairies. Fairies are reincarnated good people. Bad people come back as frogs. This section also details where fairies live.

The third section is about how the Cottingley Fairy photos are real. The girls who took those photos admitted they were fake. There’s a funny bit in this part where Crouch tells how he went out to Cottingley to see if he could commune with the fairies but instead found a dead dog in a plastic bag. LOOOOL.

Part 4 is a conversation that Basil Crouch has with his cat. The 5 fairies that lived in his pond have gone missing, and his cat tells him that they were kidnapped by evil fairies.

Part 5 is instructions on how to make a model fairyland. This is essentially a shitty arts and crafts exercise involving plasticine, blue crepe paper and cardboard cut-out fairies stuck onto lollipop sticks.

The sixth and final section of the book is a ritual that Basil Crouch performed to set the fairies from his garden free. He seems to be suggesting that you perform the exact same ritual. I’m not sure why this would have any effect for somebody else though. Unless your cat has told you that your local fairies have been kidnapped by a goblin, this book will be utterly useless.

I haven’t exaggerated. This book is silly crap.

Doll Magic – Basil LaCroix

Doll Magic – Basil Crouch
Finbarr – 2005

Ok, so I know that last week I said I was going to cut back on posting, and I know that one of the reasons for this cutback was the shockingly low standard of the stuff I’ve reviewed recently, but old habits die hard, so here is a post on an abhorrently stupid pamphlet on doll magic by the incredibly stupid occultist, liar and probable child predator, Basil Crouch. Crouch’s The Hallowed Genie deals with a similar topic, but Doll Magic is shorter than that book and therefore a bit less stupid.

Here’s a brief summary:

Basil spent his childhood travelling around with a circus. He used magic to help a girl whose skull had been fractured. 20 years later, this girl’s mother bequeathed Basil a pair of crudely made magical dolls and a text on how to use them.

Basil gives very basic instructions on how to make a doll – you can basically just tape 2 sticks together and stick a tennis ball on top of one. That’ll do. Then you put energy from your head into this doll, and it will do magic. The magic only works if you are willing to clear your house of stuff you no longer need. Hoarders can’t do magic. The Law of Attraction is real, but it doesn’t work if what you want is bad for you. Has this last paragraph seemed illogical and silly? The section of Doll Magic that it’s paraphrasing certainly is.

The next parts describes how to make a doll that will help you make decisions and talk to dead people and another that will help you contact the gods of voodoo when you need money. The spell you say for the money is, “Money and honey I need, Money and honey with speed, Money and honey I plead, Money and honey give me indeed”. This is bound to be effective.

The last part of the book describes how to make a doll that will cure you of any ailment or disability. You make the doll and then tell it stories about what you would do if you weren’t sick. The doll will help you believe these stories and then you won’t be sick. It really works. One guy was in a wheelchair for 20 years, but then he tried this and he could walk again!

There’s not much to say about this pamphlet. If you ever come across a copy, use it for shitter-paper. Usually I spend more time and effort on my posts, but I only decided to do this one a bit before it was due, so it had to be on something very short and awful. You’d have to be a real pinhead to take this rubbish seriously, and I have drawn a picture of such an individual in an attempt to redeem myself for making my readers aware that this pile of stinking garbage exists. Ladies, gentlemen and everyone in between, I give you the scholar of Crouch:

basil lacroix crouch

Secrets of the Black Temple by the Red Spider

Since starting this blog 4 years ago, I’ve reviewed more than 250 books. Some of which have been classics of literature, while others have been bizarre esoteric nonsense. The book I’m about to review is a pretty good example of the latter.

Secrets of the Black Temple by the Red Spider (Basil Crouch)
Self published – Unknown publication date. (Probably 1980s)

Although the text is initally attributed to “The Red Spider”, it becomes quickly apparent that the author is Basil Crouch. It’s not until the final pages of the book that the relationship between these two is discussed. (I can’t say it’s ever clarified.) I don’t normally summarize books, but this thing is so odd that I feel it necessary. I’ll highlight the more salient points for those who aren’t entirely invested in understanding this curious grimoire.

There is a very bad secret society. The author initially refers to this order as “The Temple of Set”, but I really don’t think that he’s talking about the order established by Michael Aquino.

Giant stones containing the spirits of ancient Taihitian leaders killed many innocent people because other people had been sacrificed on these rocks. One of these stone spirits is named Moana. Unfortunately, this is not the Disney Moana.

A witch gave abortions. When she died, a box of hers ended up in a second hand shop and killed the shop owner’s dog and cat. Then he sold it, and the person who bought it got sick and went to hosptial. Then her ward caught fire and she disappeared.

A man got sick. Basil went in to him, said a prayer to Satan and then realised the man’s daughter had a doll that was actually a cursed ritual statue that needed to be appeased. He appeased it, and then the lad got better and buried the doll back where he found it.

A very successful girl got sick and became a loser because her boyfriend won her a cursed doll at a fair which the fairground guy had found in the fair. It had been left behind by a man who had found it in the ocean. It was originally from Haiti

You don’t choose to join the Black Temple. (I assume this is the order he referred to as the Temple of Set at the beginning of the book.) The Black Temple kidnap you, test you with a questionnaire and then ask if you wanna join.

Next come some instructions on how to set up a temple in your home.

To decide which man you want to marry, play heads or tails with a piece of bread.

A magician took on a job to magically assassinate somebody. He couldn’t do it though because he had no period blood at his disposal. He came up with a cunning plan to solve this problem – he took some hypnotism lessons from the author of this book and then set up a fake psychiatry practice. He hypnotised a young girl. Then he raped her and got her pregnant.
Problem solved.

the dreaded incubi.jpg Nothing makes any sense here.

A psychiatrist hypnotised one of his patients into robbing a bank then killing himself.

Smelly, the tragically named magician, took a job putting a revenge curse on a man. He sent a mean letter to the man that said “you are doomed”. Then he paid a kid to give flowers that looked as though they came from a mistress to the man’s wife. The wife argued with the man when he got home, resulting in him driving away, running a red light and killing a baby in a pram.

At this point the narrative cuts to Smelly bending a woman over, tearing out her tampon, sticking a bottle in her pussy and telling her to menstruate into it. No explanation is given as to why this is being described.

A mean magistrate sentenced a poor man with a wife and kids to 2 years hard labour for poaching rabbits. The man’s wife went to the local magician, a chap named Lankynob, for help. He raped her several times. Then he skinned a rabbit so it looked like a fetus and hung it in the magistrate’s garden. A picture of this was published in the local newspaper and the magistate got so angry that he had a stroke. The man he had sentenced left his wife after finding out that she had been raped, so she started dating Lankynob, the rapist magician.

For 25 pounds, Basil Crouch will teach you a foolproof, scientific method of betting on horses. It’s guaranteed to make you rich.

A woman complained to a magician because another sexier woman had called the police on her because she was a bad mother.
The magician took some dirty pictures of this woman and then raped her.

For a small fee, Basil Crouch can enlarge your photos. He’s very discreet. No pics of kids without parental permission.

Now there’s a description of a weird group ritual – half the book in and we’re finally getting to the Black Order of this book’s title. The start of the ritual sounds like standard masonic nonsense, but things turn uncomfortably dark when a lad shows up with a 14 year old girl and proceeds to spike her Fanta with sleeping tablets and then fingers her in front of his friends. After watching the child molestation, the lads do another ritual to kill a person. Basil doesn’t include details here, but he’s willing to sell them to you if you promise to be discrete.

black temple ritual Then there’s the above pic of a coven and a cum-collector about to rape a 21 year old virgin. (This part is actually explained about 50 pages later.)

The author then says that he once convinced two 14 year old girls to go to bed with him. He claims that he only did this to see if he could and that he actually refrained from doing anything to them. In my humble opinion, any adult man who tries things like this should be swiftly executed.

Suzy wanted some cash. She approached the Black Order for help. They invited her to a ritual, violently stripped her naked, stuck a knife into her tits and licked the blood

To get money, the Black Temple hypnotise old ladies and bank managers.

The Black Temple once got a lad a job, then one of the members convinced that same lad to spend all of his money on an expensive car.

Our old pal Lankynob is being initiated into the 10th degree of the Black Order. The ritual involves him being jerked off by a brother in the Order while a prostitute is fingered opposite him. Their discharges are mixed together on a sheet of paper on the floor. Now Lankynob is going to be given the knowledge of how to use the Order’s foolproof system of betting on horses, but before he learns this, the prostitute must be killed.

The actual murder here is never described, but the author does tell us that she is stabbed in the breasts and raped several times beforehand. The author offers an alternative way to get the horse racing system – just send him 25 quid and promise to keep it a secret.

For a good ritual, its best to sacrifice a baby, but if this isn’t possible, a sex magic ritual will do. A man and a woman go to a graveyard with two pre-made plasticine figures. Make one in the likeness of a “wishy washy semi-invalid girl who is always pale” and the other in the likeness of a man. They then find a grave of a man and offer his spirit some sex with the girl represented by the plasticine figure. Next, the real woman present at the grave sucks the real mans dick. Then they put the plasticine figures on the ground and step on them, thus allowing the ghost of the dead man to spiritually rape the invalid girl.

A lad called Skints was kicked out of the Black Order for putting an irreversible curse on another member. He later used witchcraft to seduce a girl and impregnate her. Her dad ran him over in his car and he died.

A 105 year old magician came to the Black Temple once and tried to sell them herbal remedies for impotence.

One member of the Temple used voodoo poison to kidnap children so he could sell them to Arabs. The author is remorseful over the fact that this man is dead.

It turns out that Jesus was never crucified. He just went to Glastobury and set up a church there instead. The ritual to pick a high priest/priestess of the Black Order has been handed down from Christ himself:
A kidnapped virgin is tied to the ground. Thirteen men are wanked off into a cows horn with a hole drilled in the tip. When the bukakke cornucopia is full, the small end of it is shoved into the virgin’s cunt and then the cum collector blows hard into the other end, pumping the reservoir of gip into the virgin’s womb. If she doesn’t die, the virgin will give birth to the next high priest/priestess of the order.

tosser sperm Honestly.

To steal a person’s good luck, write their name on a piece of paper and have a woman wank you off so that you gip on their name.

To create a Psychogone (a weird spirit creature similar to the Hallowed Genie in Basil’s other book) you should make a little figure out of wax. Make sure it has a willy. Then find a willing participant to do some weird sex magic with. Make sure to hypnotise or drug her so she’s willing. (Yeah, I know.) Then fuck her a little bit, whip your dick out, cum on her pussy lips, and then stick the little wax doll you made into her cunt and frig her with it until she gets off. Then sling her out of your house. Your Psychogone is now ready for business.

The author then goes on to say that the Spider gave him more spells and rituals but these involved animal sacrifice so he wants to keep them secret because he likes animals. This part is interesting because it suggests that the information in this book came from this Spider character and not from Basil himself. This seems like a pathetic attempt to exculpate himself – he has already given his own name and address several times throughout the text.

Basil then says that he will initiate others further in person, but only if they’re female.

The contents of this book are so disjointed and childish that it is difficult to read this as the work of a sane individual. The way in which the text will drop a story only to continue it much further on made me wonder if the author hadn’t been practicing William Burrough’s cut-up technique, but a note at the back of the book claims that Basil had over 75 years experience with occult magic when he wrote this book. If this is true, it seems far more likely that it is senility rather than artistic experimentation that is to blame for this book’s lack of coherence. A low IQ shouldn’t be disqualified from our considerations either. The only other book I’ve read by this lad was also very, very stupid and shit.

Basil advertises several different services throughout the book including photocopying, selling herbs, and occult initiations, but my favourite money-making scheme of his is the following image. It is included in the middle of the book. It has zero relation to anything that comes before or after it.

basils girl 2 pound Send me two pound, and I’ll tell you whose arse this is.

As noted above, this book seems to have been self published. Perhaps it was due to the lack of a publisher’s restrictions that Basil felt comfortable including so much rape in here. My biggest complaint about Crouch’s The Hallowed Genie was that it wasn’t dark enough, but the Secrets of The Black Temple is too dark. This is the bad kind of darkness. I want to read about people cutting off arrogant priests’ heads, not a gang of scumbags molesting a drugged 14 year old.

Basil Crouch was not a knowledgeable magician. He was a disgusting old pervert with a poorly functioning brain. It is good that he is dead. If I knew where he was buried, I’d dance on his grave.

Well that’s all I have to say about Basil for the moment. As I mentioned before, this blog has now been going for four years. I’ve enjoyed the experience quite a lot, but I am considering slowing things down a little. Since starting this blog, I’ve limited my reading to mostly occult and horror books. It might be healthy for me to branch out a little, but I want to keep this blog for spooky stuff. This probably means going back to two or three posts a month rather than the 2 a week I’ve been aiming for since September. We’ll see how things work out. Anyways, I want to sincerely thank everyone who follows along with my ramblings. I’m always happy to receive recommendations or to chat about books on facebook, twitter or email, or just leave a comment below.

The Hallowed Genie – Basil Crouch

The Hallowed Genie – Basil E. Crouch
Finbarr International – Publishing date unknown
It seems that the standard of books being reviewed on here recently has declined in a pretty serious way. It’s sad to think of the few people who are dumb enough to buy this kind of rubbish, but it’s more depressing still to think that more than a couple actually put this crap out.

First off, this author’s name is Basil Crouch. That sounds far too similar to Basil Brush for me to be able to read this book without imagining the text being narrated by a snooty English fox. This was doubtlessly the reason for the author’s adoption of the slightly more mysterious pen name ‘Basil La Croix’ for some of his other works.

Anyways, ol’ Basil was either a moron or a swindler. The spells/rituals in here are so stupid that I hope he only put them to paper to relieve idiot Occultists of their expendable income. It’s either that or he was a mentally deficient teenager.

Build a little monster out of clay and then put him in a circle of candles. Tell him 10 times that you need some money, read him some Bible verses, and in no time at all, you’ll be a millionaire. The key to this ritual is the word ‘need’. Telling a Genie that you want something is useless; you have to tell them that you need it.

Basil blames wants for a great deal of the world’s ills. He claims to have medical evidence to show that women who experience an unsatiated desire during pregnancy are likely to give birth to a mutant.

medical curiosities The above “medical curiosity” was actually a woman named Rosa Plemons. She suffered from muscular atrophy. She was supposedly kidnapped when she was 19 and put in a freak show. Her tale is more tragic than curious, and I don’t know why she was included in here. I don’t know anything about the bendy lad at the bottom.

Basil makes his ridiculous claim about wants and needs halfway through the book, but it’s only on the last page that he includes images of the resulting ‘medical curiosities’. This is just one of several examples of how disorganized this text is. Certain paragraphs explain that the next section of the book will discuss a certain issue, but that issue won’t actually be mentioned until pages later. Also, it seems as if Basil decided to pad out his text with a few lengthy Biblical Psalms in order to reach his desired page count.

the book of knowhow Me on the bus to work in the morning.

When I started this blog, I read just about any occult-related material I could get my hands on. I quickly realised that most of it is airy-fairy, white-people-with-dreadlocks nonsense. I then focused my attention on black magic and Satanism. I haven’t read or reviewed much that doesn’t at least touch on the darker side of Occultism, so I must have been expecting something of that ilk when I decided to read this. Unfortunately, this book has no badness in it. There’s nothing interesting about it other than the author’s sheer incompetence. This is pathetic.

Note: Since writing this review, I came across a thread about Basil Crouch online. Apparently he was a well respected magician, and there’s curious tales about people destroying his books because they were too “tempting and Dark”. I have managed to track down pdf copies of a few more of his texts, and even though the Hallowed Genie is absolutely awful, I have grown curious and will doubtlessly read and review his other works at some stage. Stay tuned.