Bryan Wynter and Aleister Crowley: twin ghosts of Zennor Carn

Rupert White

This summer I visited Carn Cottage, in Zennor.

The property has been derelict for well over a decade and the track that once lead up to it has almost completely disappeared under a blanket of ferns and moorland heather. The house itself is slowly crumbling away, and now consists of an old single-storey cottage with a dilapidated breezeblock extension at its far end. On the opposite side a small upstairs room, which would have looked back towards Eagle's Nest and the ocean has, in the last couple of years succumbed to the Atlantic storms (or burnt down?) and disappeared. A galvanised tank that still collects rainwater has survived, however.

The artist, Bryan Wynter, one of the most interesting and inventive of the St Ives modernists, lived and worked in Carn Cottage between about 1945 and 1965. He was a true bohemian, and given there was no mains water or electricity on the carn he must have enjoyed an unconventional but remarkable life here. Certainly there are several black and white photographs documenting this period, and one of the most memorable, taken by Roger Mayne, shows a gathering around the kitchen table also involving painter Karl Weschke and poet W S Graham (below). The cottage's rustic fireplace with its horizontal slab of rough granite, still intact now, is clearly visible in the back ground.
 

It would be hard to imagine a more dramatic location for an artist's house and studio. Indeed given its stunning location high on the moor, and the fact that, other than the Barbara Hepworth Museum there are no other historic artist-homes that can be easily visited in the St Ives area, it is pretty unique, and for those interested in Cornish Art History a 'must-see'.

Its a shame, then, that in recent years the completely spurious idea that Carn Cottage once belonged to Aleister Crowley has propagated like wildfire across the internet. In 2020, for example, several trashy newspapers like The Sun and The Mail published stories to this effect, whilst a couple of years earlier The Mirror, using images taken by Greg Martin, went with the silly, 'clickbait' headline: 'Inside abandoned home where infamous Satan worshipper Aleister Crowley 'raised the devil''.

Aleister Crowley does have some connections to Cornwall, especially Newlyn, and to people in Cornwall, like novelist Mary Butts (these connections are explored in my book 'Magic and Modernism' - Butts stayed at the Abbey of Thelema on Sicily, for example), but the notion that Crowley owned Carn Cottage and was responsible for the death of Ka Arnold-Forster there in 1938 is, literally, pure fiction: a myth that originates in Frank Baker's 1956 novel 'Talk of the Devil'.

The huge rambling book by Paul Newman 'The Tregerthen Horror' of 2005 revived Baker's Crowley-in-Zennor myth and gave it added complexity (Newman, incidentally, wrote an interesting piece for artcornwall.org a year or two after this). Elements of Newman's book have recently reappeared in more digestible form in Bob Osborne's lively, but unreferenced, 'Spirit of Zennor' (2023).

Baker's myth, rather than fading away, has therefore endured up to our own era, and as a consequence Wynter's cottage now attracts all-manner of aspiring occultists and wannabe Thelemites. In amongst other bits of graffiti, is a diagram of the 10 sefiroth, or the kabbalistic 'Tree of Life', drawn on the floorboards, and an impressive unicursal hexagram with a five-petalled rose - the symbol of Crowley's Thelema - on its walls.

Carn Cottage now therefore seems to be a place haunted by two ghosts: one the rightful owner, the other an imposter. Frank Baker's sensationalist Crowley myth has completely obscured the truth about the place: a truth which is, arguably, much more interesting.
 

Paul Newman's artcornwall.org feature 'The Unknown Guest' http://www.artcornwall.org/features/Paul_Newman_Unknown_Guest.htm

2010 interview with Michael Bird: http://www.artcornwall.org/interviews/Michael_Bird_on_Bryan_Wynter_and_St_Ives.htm

On Mary Butts http://www.artcornwall.org/features/Rupert_White/Mary_Butts_In_Cornwall.htm

Colquhoun on Crowley http://www.artcornwall.org/features/Ithell_Colquhoun/The_Torso_Laughs.htm

Magic and Modernism on Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/0evWknZJ

13.7.24