Rosaleen Miriam Norton (2 October 1917 – 5 December 1979), who used the name of "Thorn", was an Australian artist and occultist, in the latter capacity adhering to a form of pantheistic / Neopagan Witchcraft largely devoted to the Greek god Pan. She lived much of her later life in the bohemian area of Kings Cross, Sydney, leading her to be termed the "Witch of Kings Cross" in some of the tabloids, and from where she led her own coven of witches.
Her paintings, which have been compared to those of British occult artist Austin Osman Spare, often depicted images of supernatural entities such as pagan gods and demons, sometimes involved in sexual acts. These caused particular controversy in Australia during the 1940s and 1950s, when the country "was both socially and politically conservative" with Christianity as the dominant faith and at a time when the government "promoted a harsh stance on censorship." For this reason the authorities dealt with her work harshly, with the police removing some of her work from exhibitions, confiscating books that contained her images, and attempting to prosecute her for public obscenity on a number of occasions.
According to her later biographer, Nevill Drury, "Norton's esoteric beliefs, cosmology and visionary art are all closely intertwined – and reflect her unique approach to the magical universe." She was inspired by "the 'night' side of magic", emphasising darkness and studying the qlippoth, alongside forms of sex magic which she had learned from the writings of English occultist Aleister Crowley.
Biography
Early life: 1917–1934
Norton was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, during a thunderstorm at about 4:30 in the morning, to an English middle class, Anglican family who had moved to the country a number of years before. She was the third of three sisters and her siblings, Cecily and Phyllis, were each over a decade older than her. In later life, she would claim that she had been born a witch, with certain biological features to mark her out as such, including pointed ears, blue markings on her left knee and a strand of flesh that hung on her body. When she herself was eight, in June 1925, her family emigrated to Sydney. There they settled in Wolseley Street, in the wealthy northern suburb of Lindfield.
As a child, Rosaleen never liked being conventional, and disliked most other children, as well as authority figures, including her mother Beena, with whom her relationship was very strained. Her father Albert, who was a sailor, was regularly away from home, although provided enough of an income so that the Nortons were able to live comfortably. Nonetheless, she would later describe her life at this time as being "a generally wearisome period of senseless shibboleths, prying adults, detestable or depressing children whom I was supposed to like, and parental reproaches." Due to this, she kept to herself, sleeping not in the house, but in a tent which she pitched in the garden for three years, and kept a pet spider at the entrance which she named Horatius, as well as other pets including cats, lizards, tortoises, toads, dogs and a goat.
Norton was enrolled at a Church of England girls' school, where she was eventually expelled for being disruptive and drawing images of demons, vampires and other such beings which the teachers claimed had a corrupting influence on other pupils. She subsequently began attending East Sydney Technical College, studying art under the sculptor Rayner Hoff, a man who encouraged her artistic talent and whom she greatly admired.
Early career: 1935–1948
Following her art college studies, Norton set herself up to become a professional writer, with the newspaper Smith's Weekly publishing a number of her horror stories in 1934, when she was sixteen, after which they gave her the job as a cadet journalist and then as an illustrator. However, her graphic illustrations were deemed too controversial, and she lost her job at the paper. Leaving Smith's Weekly, Norton moved out of her family home following the death of her mother, and sought employment as an artists' model, working for such painters as Norman Lindsay. To supplement this income, she also took up other forms of work, including as a hospital's kitchen maid, a waitress and a toy designer. Meanwhile, she had taken up a room in the Ship and Mermaid Inn, which overlooked Circular Quay, Sydney, where she began reading various books on the subject of the Western Esoteric Tradition, including those on demonology, the Qabalah and comparative religion.
In 1935, Rosaleen met a man named Beresford Lionel Conroy and they married on 14 December 1940, before going on a hitch-hiking trip across Australia, from Sydney to Melbourne, and on through to Brisbane and Cairns. Returning to Sydney, Conroy enlisted as a commando and went off to serve in New Guinea during the Second World War, and upon his return, Norton, who had been forced to live in a stable during this period, demanded a divorce, which was finally settled in 1951. During their marriage, the couple lived at 46 Bayswater Road, Kings Cross in 1943.Australian Electoral Roll electorate of East Sydney.
Now single once more, Norton took up residence in a boarding house known as the Merangaroo in the Rocks area, which she enjoyed for its "eccentric, communal living." She began looking for illustration work once more, being employed by a monthly free-thinking magazine known as Pertinent, which had been founded in 1940 and which was edited by the poet Leon Batt. Batt admired Norton's work, which was being increasingly influenced by pagan themes, describing her as "an artist worthy of comparison with some of the best Continental, American and English contemporaries."Batt, quoted in . Norton contributed poetry and a cover illustration to Batt's anthology Not for Fools: A Collection of Pertinent Verse (1941). In 1943 Norton exhibited her work with fellow artist Selina Muller in Sydney. Her work at this period was covered in a PIX magazine article in which she described how her paintings were 'psychic experiments' which drew heavily on her unconscious.
Gavin Greenlees and the Melbourne exhibition: 1949–1950 It was at Pertinent that she met a younger man named Gavin Greenlees (1930–1983). Greenlees had grown up in a middle-class family where he had developed an early interest in surrealism, and had become a relatively successful poet, having his work published in such newspapers as ABC Weekly and Australia Monthly. By mid-1949, the two had become good friends, and hitchhiked together to Melbourne, searching for a venue where Norton could hold an exhibition of her art. They settled on the University of Melbourne's Rowden White Library, where forty-six of her paintings, including Timeless Worlds, Merlin, Lucifer and The Initiate were put on public exhibition. However, the exhibition did not go well, and only two days after it had opened, police officers had surveyed the gallery and removed four paintings – Witches' Sabbath, Lucifer, Triumph and Individuation – which they deemed to be obscene. Norton was subsequently charged under the Police Offences Act of 1928. At the court case, held in Melbourne's Carlton Court, she was defended by A.L. Abrahams, who argued that the images in the recently published The History of Sexual Magic, a book that the Australian censors permitted, were of a far more obscene nature than Norton's paintings. She won the case, and was awarded £4/4/- in compensation from the police department.
Kings Cross and Walter Glover: 1951–1954 With the legal hassle in Melbourne over, Norton and Greenlees, who had become lovers, returned to Sydney, where they moved into the house at 179 Brougham Street. This was in the area known as Kings Cross, which at the time was renowned for being a red light district and for people living bohemian lifestyles, particularly artists, writers and poets. Here Norton associated with many of the locals, including Dulcie Deamer, the "Queen of Bohemia", whose book of poetry, The Silver Branch, included one of Norton's pictures. Several of the local cafes in the area, such as the Arabian, the Apollyon and the Kashmir, displayed some of her artworks, and she became a relatively well known figure in Kings Cross.
Increasingly, many curious visitors came to see Norton and Greenlees at their home, which she had decorated with her own occult murals and a placard on the door stating "Welcome to the house of ghosts, goblins, werewolves, vampires, witches, wizards and poltergeists." The couple, widely seen as local eccentrics, even befriended several sympathetic police officers, although many in the police force disapproved of their activities, and searched for criminal charges that could be levelled at them. In September 1951, they arrested Norton and Greenlees, accusing them of vagrancy (an accusation that could be levelled at anyone without a steady job, whether or not they were actually committing vagrancy). However, publisher Walter Glover came to their aid, offering them employment as his assistants. After seeing examples of the pair's work, he decided to publish a book containing a combination of Norton's artwork and Greenlees' poetry.
The result was published as The Art of Rosaleen Norton in 1952, and contained such paintings as Black Magic, Rites of Baron Samedi and an image depicting the horned demon Fohat, with a snake for his phallus, whilst Greenlees' poems featured in the work included The Angel of Twizzari and Esoteric Study. Restricted to a limited edition of 500 copies, The Art of Rosaleen Norton had been produced to a high quality, with each edition being bound in red leather with gold blocking, illustrated endpapers, and ribbon marker. It contained 31 black-and-white reproductions of artworks by Norton (29 of which were full-page or near full-page plates). This work was banned in New South Wales on the grounds of obscenity, and subsequently its import into the US was forbidden. The publisher, Walter Glover, had intended an edition of 1000 copies (so stated in the book), 650 to be bound in cloth (ordinary edition) and 350 in leather (the edition deluxe), with the first 20 copies of the leather edition to include a colour artwork by Norton. Only a small number – probably less than 20 – were issued in leather due to the prohibitive cost and it is also certain that far fewer than the intended 650 copies were bound in cloth, although the exact number that were distributed is unknown. Copies numbered up to 505 are known to exist.
After the book's release, Glover was charged by police with the production of an obscene publication, and Norton was called into court to explain her artwork. The judge ruled that two of the images in the book, The Adversary and Fohat, did qualify as being obscene under Australian law, and that they had to be removed from all existing copies of the book. Glover "blacked out" the two "obscene" plates in a few copies, but most were unaltered. The authorities in the United States were even stricter, with customs actively destroying any copies of the book that were imported into their country. The controversy had helped gain publicity for Norton's work, but left Glover bankrupted. Alan Cross, the book's binder, realizing that he would never get paid, was instead given his choice of Norton work, of which he chose Fohat.
Tabloid sensationalism and Sir Eugene Goossens: 1955–1959