There is a fourteenth century saying that "opportunity makes the thief," and David Farrant saw his opportunity in the early 1970s and stole other people's identities, titles and the name of an extant organisation (the British Occult Society), but he was found out and punished with a significant term of imprisonment. However, subsequent generations who know little if anything about Farrant's infamous history of opportunistic publicity-seeking and theft might be forgiven for knowing no better when confronted with an endless stream of pernicious propaganda from Farrant and his flunkies.
One month ago witnessed what Farrant believed to be his coup de grâce. It might have proven to be his undoing if anyone could have bought tickets to put questions openly to him. But he was never going to allow that to happen. Not only are all the speakers his hand-picked acquaintances, but every one of them support his derision and discrimination against the traditionalist Christian exorcist Seán Manchester.
Parasites have always been a phenomenon where the Highgate Vampire case is concerned, but those who don't believe in demonology or vampirology holding a Symposium to exploit Seán Manchester's work and then devoting less than 15% of the time to a debate about the vampire itself while only inviting Seán Manchester's detractors to contribute to the event is laughable, or, at least, it would be if it wasn't so pitifully predictable.
What we had on July 19th was a bunch of self-proclaimed and self-styled "experts" discussing something they don't believe in and know absolutely nothing about. And that cost those attending £12.00 per ticket per person.
The word "symposium" means "a conference or meeting to discuss a particular subject."
But the Highgate Vampire was not the subject under discussion. Those invited to contribute to the Symposium were exclusively individuals who dismiss out-of-hand the very existence of vampires!
A sizeable percentage of those invited to talk were witches, mediums, spiritualists etc who do entertain the existence of ghosts, and most of the discussion concentrates on various ghost tales and theories.
The one person definitely not heard talking about the Highgate Vampire at the Highgate Vampire Symposium was Seán Manchester, the author of The Highgate Vampire (British Occult Society, 1985; Gothic Press, 1991) and the man who led the investigation of the case from start to finish; someone, indeed, who has talked many times about the case on radio and television, and featured in scores of professional documentary films made over a period of four decades. His bestselling book is currently optioned for cinematic treatment, and, now into his seventies, he still shares his expertise with academic audiences at private venues.
"Although the programme makes this clear anyway, there is only one session which deals with Seán Manchester's narrative. ... I am aware that you are especially interested in Seán Manchester's version of events, and to avoid disappointment I should point out that the primary focus of the day is not Manchester. There will be debate about social and psychological angles on the Highgate phenomena, but not focussed upon the Manchester narrative." - Della Farrant (26 April 2015)
David Farrant was a figure of fun in and around Highgate in the late 1960s and the early 1970s up until his incarceration when his attention-seeking got out of control. Nobody viewed his publicity stunts as anything more than foolishness to attract attention to himself. There was only him. He had no members and only one associate in the form of John Pope from October 1973. Pope was the self-styled head of the Temples of Satan and successor to Aleister Crowley who, along with Farrant, attempted to raise demons when not delivering voodoo death dolls to people in the vicinity on Farrant's behalf. Though also a publicist and feeble-minded, Pope was genuinely involved in the occult on a depraved and demented level. Farrant was not and never has been.
Farrant's modus operandi has always been to set into motion a circular set of circumstances and then step back as it gathers momentum under the steam of others who buy into it. Those contributing to the Symposium are some of these others who, wittingly or not, have entered into a pact with Farrant. The reward is publicity for what ever it is they want to be disseminated. Even though a pagan/witchcraft/occult bias can influence the more naive, it is largely the desire to step onto a publicity bandwagon which draws these people towards Farrant. What else could it be? You would have to be exceptionally dim to actually believe his paranormal claims, which he revises and contradicts from one year to the next. Those seriously engaged in witchcraft or the occult found him an extreme embarrassment during the period prior to 1982 when Farrant claimed to be both a "high priest of witchcraft" and an occultist, but only in the sense that he emulated each in a theatrical way.
People are generally fascinated by the Highgate Vampire case, but some want to take their interest to another level. Seán Manchester, who wrote his book The Highgate Vampire thirty years ago, is definitely not a publicity-seeker, avoids generating unnecessary sensation, and certainly provides no merry-go-round for obsessives and attention-seekers to board. Also, those who have exploited or written about the case in a book of their own will get no mileage out of Seán Manchester in the publicity stakes. He helped Paul Adams as a favour to Peter Underwood who pulled out of the project (Written in Blood). That, at least, prevented the work being less inaccurate as it might otherwise have been, and, as Seán Manchester has noted, there was nothing malicious in Adams' book, even though the final manuscript arrived too late for crucial corrections to be made. Paul Adams eventually threw in his lot with Farrant largely because he wanted the sort of sensationalist attention for his product that Farrant appears on the surface to offer. Paul Adams was chosen to compère the Symposium.
Apparent straight away is the hostility every one of the invited contributors harbour towards Seán Manchester. Some, eg Farrant lackey Redmond McWilliams, stalk and troll Seán Manchester daily.
David Farrant lights the fuse and then runs away when the sensationalism explodes, having achieved the publicity he craves. He acted like a vampire hunter during the months from March to October in 1970, which brough him coverage in local and national newspapers, television programmes and other people's books. This was largely due to his orchestrated arrest in August of that year. After which he disclaimed ever having believed in or hunted vampires. Two years later, he performed necromancy in a Barnet churchyard with Victoria Jervis and, again, arranged to be arrested with a local newspaper journalist at hand to take photographs of the arrest. Even the prosecution stated that he probably had the police alerted. The following year he raised demons with John Pope (pictured below with Farrant) and was arrested while in the process of summoning Pan alongside a naked Pope.
The incongruousness of John Pope standing in the altogether while Farrant, attired in an old mackintosh, waves a ritual dagger about in the air was completely lost on him. Police had nevertheless been alerted and the pair of them ended up in court with the guarantee of massive press coverage. By now Farrant had overstretched himself and the police had realised they were being used to bring him the sort of publicity only an arrest and court appearance would achieve.
While in prison on even more serious charges, including threatening people with black magic (something Farrant did not deny), he wrote an article in 1975 for New Witchcraft magazine, issue 4, in which he boasted of summoning Satan in the dead of night at Highgate Cemetery. The naked girl assistant, believed to be Martine de Sacy, was never properly identified. A brief extract from Farrant's unedited and unaltered article follows:
"The intrinsic details regarding this part of the ceremony however, must remain secret; suffice it is to say here that the entity (in its now omniscient form) was to be magically induced by the ritual act of blood-letting, then brought to visible appearance through the use of the sex act. ... I disrobed the Priestess and myself and, with the consecrated blood, made the secret sigils of the Deity on her mouth, breast, and all the openings of her body. We then lay in the Pentagram and began love-making, all the time visualizing the Satanic Force so that it could - temporarily - take possession of our bodies."
Today Farrant denies he ever partook in Satanism, necromancy, black magic, and Left-hand Path occultism. Even so, it is interesting to examine the Symposium participants. Among them is someone who describes himself as a chaos magician (he spells it the Aleister Crowley way, ie"magickian") and necromancer; someone who describes himself as a monster-hunter and folklorist; someone else who describes himself as a Theosophist and initiated Gardnerian witch who lectures on shamanism and esoteric studies; an assortment of spiritualists who believe they are in touch with the dead; and somebody else who apparently researches and writes about The Friends of Hecate.*
* (In September 1981, the body of Jillian Matthew, a homeless schizophrenic was discovered, having been raped and strangled. In their 1987 book The Demonic Connection, authors Toyne Newton, Charles Walker and Alan Brown claimed the woods were used for rituals by a satanic cult calling itself The Friends of Hecate.)
It is difficult to imagine that anyone actually takes David Farrant seriously, but some obviously find him useful in a perverse sort of way, a sinister catalyst for getting ripples to appear on an erstwhile tranquil pond; thus enabling their own project to have a publicity platform. However, the very fact that Farrant is involved invariably acts as a double-edged sword and the damage his name will inflict on a project or a person far outweights any potential benefit.
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