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- [00:01]
A
Does your day move faster than you can keep up with new Gatorade lower sugar? My family and I can stay at the top of our game. No artificial flavors, sweeteners or colors. 75% less sugar and all the electrolytes of regular Gatorade now available nationwide.
- [00:18]
B
Today we're talking about a man who actively cultivated the absolute worst reputation possible. The British tabloids of the 1920s officially dubbed him the the wickedest man in the world. And he owned it. He called himself the great beast. 666 Afra.
- [00:38]
C
We said we're going to do mystics and you know, I'm not a huge fan of this guy. We're talking about the English occultist, poet, mountaineer and relentless provocateur and self publicist, Aleister Crowley. Last time we did Helena Blavatsky, which was a fantastic introduction to the blueprint of the new age of the ways in which Eastern spiritualism got worked into Western narratives. But Aleister Crowley gives us something much darker, theatrical. But the sex, drugs and rock and roll version of the occult. I'm not as enthused reading about this guy, talking about this guy as I was about lovely Helena, but don't put Alice off, Peter.
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B
And Helena was problematic too.
- [01:22]
C
She was very problematic, but she was Russian, so she got bonus points.
- [01:25]
B
You're just biased. You're biased. Aleister Crow does have something in common with Helena Blavatsky, because while she founded this movement, Theosophy, he founded his own religion, Thelema, based on a single infamous ruling. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. And we're going to find out how he became the ultimate Edwardian bogeyman and about the incredibly repressive world that forged him. And work out if you're right, Peter, in feeling a little bit gloomy about his legacy. See today.
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C
Hello and welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I'm Peter Frankenpern.
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B
I'm Afua Hirsch.
- [02:15]
C
And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events and ideas that have shaped our world and asks whether they have the reputations that they truly deserve.
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B
This is Aleister Crowley, the wickedest man in the world.
- [02:43]
C
Thanks for joining us on Legacy today. To support the show, do please sign up to Legacy.
- [02:48]
B
You can enjoy early access, fewer ads, Q&As and bonus content like the legacy of the escalator, the fish finger and the remote control.
- [02:57]
C
Sign up at Legacy supportingcast fm. Afra, that's quite a good label to have, is it? The wickedest about the. You don't Want to be the fifth wickedest? I guess if you're going to do it, you've got to go all in.
- [03:06]
B
You can see how for the right person, this is it. This is like, you know, top of the power list, top hundred wickedest people. Your top, top dog. In our Blavatsky episode, we talked about why Helena Blavatsky was so ravenous for esoteric ideas. And in her case, it was her access to, quote unquote, secret libraries and Eastern cultures that seemed exotic and radical to her Victorian Western audience. You could say that Crowley's obsession with the occult comes from the exact opposite place. In his case, it was extreme, suffocating repression.
- [03:40]
C
Yeah, repression never ends well, right? We all know that one. That's the whole boarding school problem, right? But he was born Edward Alexander Crowley in 1875 to a very wealthy brewing family. But his parents were members of the Exclusive Brethren, an ultra strict fundamentalist Christian sect. His childhood was entirely defined by the concept of sin. He wasn't allowed to play with children from outside the sect either, and was constantly beaten for minor infractions.
- [04:09]
B
And in the last episode we were talking about the Secret and this idea of kind of manifesting and attracting things. His mother called him the Beast whenever he misbehaved, which she was trying to reference the Book of Revelation to make him become more holy. It had, as is often the case with children and parenting, the opposite effect. Crowley decided, you know what, this beast thing, I could make it work for me. He doubled down, he was like, I'm going to be the best beast possible. And he later wrote that he identified completely with the enemies of God. So I feel like as someone who belonged to a strict Christian sect, he was channeling his mother's worst nightmares and doing it very effectively.
- [04:56]
C
I mean, if she called him poppet, it might have ended up slightly differently, don't you think? Or my little cabbage, my pretty shoe. Then maybe he got differently. But being called Beast, you think, you know, I've got to own it, and if that's how people are going to see me, then I'm going to go big. But he grew up in this, like we said, very repressive sector. We're not just talking about a church you have to go to on Sundays. We're talking about a totalizing 24 hour day worldview and one in which the Devil is a really important main character. He's every single corner, he's there to come to trap you and to entice you. And that, that is probably not that helpful, particularly if You're a young person where you normalize the presence of sin and of evil, where you're trying to do the exact opposite. But who exactly are these people? Afro. What, what is. What are the Exclusive Brethren? Who are they?
- [05:44]
B
I did go down a bit of a Exclusive Brethren rabbit hole, I have to say, because they still exist. They're called the Plymouth Brethren now, which is actually their original name. So they began in the late 1820s, early 18, and they were radical for their time because they rejected the hierarchy of the idea of the ordained clergy, like priests or vicars. They believed all believers were equal priests and that the established Church of England had become corrupt and too entangled with the secular state. But in 1848, the movement split and you had the Open Brethren on one side who believed in maintaining a strict biblical life, but they were willing to fellowship and take communion with other Christians from other denominations. They sound similar. Slightly more chill. Then you get the exclusive.
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C
Slightly.
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B
Slightly more chill. It's not a chill religion, but there's degrees.
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C
Yeah.
- [06:34]
B
Aleister Crowley's family belong to the other branch. There is nothing, zero, that is chill about this sect, the Exclusive Brethren. They're led by a very rigid theologian named John Nelson Darby, and he believes in the absolute uncompromising purity of the Exclusive Brethren. And any other Christian that doesn't agree with their exact theology is going to be completely cut off. And this cutting people off is actually the defining characteristic of the Exclusive Brethren. It's a doctrine of separation from iniquity. The whole secular world is controlled by the devil. To remain pure, members must physically and socially separate themselves from that society. And that translated in Crowley's time to pretty extreme rules. Peter.
- [07:23]
C
So look, I've done loads on Christian dualists in the late antiquity and beyond. So this idea about the different hemispheres of controlled by God and the devil, the idea that there's a kind of light and day, there's a light and darkness, it has a hugely important legacy in Europe. We see it, things like the Cathars, they're worth an episode or two as well. So please let us know if you'd like us to do those. But it has a long tradition that's born probably out of Near Eastern religions. I mean, that's how Zoroastrianism really works. It's. There's these two different hemispheres and there are different kinds of dualisms, but it's a kind of what we see with the Exclusive Brethren. It's a sort of return to something that you could recognize elsewhere. So, for example, the strict Rules that you mentioned up were it extends to things like no socializing with outsiders. You can't be friends with anybody from the outside. So that creates a kind of, obviously a hierarchy where you sit because you're better than everybody else. You couldn't eat a meal with non members. So commensality was seen as a profound spiritual endorsement. If you sit and break bread with someone, then you are becoming friends with them and you're exposing yourself to risks. And then all the rest of it again, which you see in lots of dualist movements, the hardliners, there's no, you know, things like sex, things like enjoyment, things like dancing, even in some cases, things like meat are forbidden with the exclusive Brethren. No reading literature, no novels, no theatre, no secular music, no games. And Crowley's brought up reading precisely one book, and no prizes for guessing what that might be after.
- [08:58]
B
Yes, it is a very biblical education, and I have to say, you know, I have a lot of time for the Bible, but this lifestyle is no fun. It's not a joyous life. It's a strict, suspicious, feel fearful, kind of angry environment where everything is seen as a threat. And even within that pretty rigid world, Aleister's being raised to believe that he's part of the Elect. This is a tiny, chosen fraction of humanity that will be saved. And everyone else, from the butcher at the corner to the Archbishop of Canterbury, is going straight to hell. It's kind of ironic, actually, that this family, who are part of the elect of this incredibly strict church, are making their money from brewing beer. But there's always these contradictions in these extreme religious groups. And Alastair has all this privilege, but it's an unhappy life. He goes to an extreme boarding school that's run by the Brethren, where he's constantly monitored for sin, also beaten more. He keeps getting called the beast by his mother. And when he's 11, his father, this brewer, who has this very profitable company called Crowley's, Alton Ales, dies. He dies of tongue cancer. Alistair, whose name is still Alexander, he hasn't changed his name to Alistair get, inherits a huge share of his father's fortune, but he doesn't have access to it yet. It's put into a trust and he will gain control when he's 21. And it's worth about 40,000 pounds, which is a good few million in today's money. So it means that Crowley also will never have to work a normal job. And this will be an important factor because other occultists that we'll encounter, you know, have to hold down day jobs or scramble for wealthy patrons. Crowley has none of those pressures. He's got the freedom to fund his own ideas. The thought of that, even in this repressive world, is operating on his character. So that the minute he breaks away as a young man who enters Trinity College, Cambridge, he starts to reinvent himself.
- [10:59]
C
Peter and so his birth name, Edward. Alexander. He despises Edward because it was his father's name and he associates it with Brethren purity. He feels Alexander is too common, so he adopts Alistair with a Gaelic spelling which he thinks sounds and reads more poetically, more romantic, more distinguished. And his choice was very deliberate. He claimed to have read a book that the most favorable name for achieving immense fame had to follow a specific poetic meter. This shows you the world of the classic classical world. Adactyl, that's one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. Strawberry, for example, followed by aspondi, two stressed syllables. Jab, jab, for example. So this is the Moment in the 1890s, the Decadent movement in art and literature. You think of Oscar Wilde, perhaps, or Beardsley, and Crowley leans into this. He goes bonkers at Cambridge. He really learns to enjoy himself, having come from that repressed background. He starts to dress flamboyantly, he smokes expensive cigars. He starts writing highly explicit self published erotic poetry, including a notorious volume called White Stains, which I'm going to guess you can work out what that's about. And he also becomes sexually experimental, so he embraces his bisexuality. He has numbers of affairs with both men and women, including a passionate romance with a Cambridge drag performer, an art collector called Herbert Charles Pollitt. And just remember, this is the time when Oscar Wilde is imprisoned for homosexuality. So there are lots of people reacting. But Crowley, like we said at the beginning, doubles down. He doesn't do anything by halves, he goes full in.
- [12:36]
B
But first he has a crisis, as so often the case for these mystic or pretender mystical characters. So in the winter of 1897, Crowley falls ill and he has this feverish recovery during which he has this terrifying realization about his mortality. He realizes that human existence is fundamentally futile, that even if he becomes the greatest, the greatest diplomat or the greatest poet, he's still going to die. And that not just he's going to die, but we're all going to die. The earth will eventually be swallowed by the sun and all human achievements will be erased. I think this is something that in adolescence or early adulthood, everyone has this kind of new confrontation with the precarity of our existence. And you know, for many of us that prompts maybe more thinking about our spiritual lives or our sense of purpose. But Crowley's a narcissist and a traumatized narcissist at that. So these kind of quite human reflections are not the direction he's going. And he comes to a very clear decision. The only pursuit that matters, the only thing he believes will transcend his inevitable physical death and offer true permanence is spiritual mastery. And not in a sense of pursuing light, but as he conceives it, a sense of pursuing darkness. He immediately abandons all his political ambitions. He goes to a bookstore and he buys a book by A.E. waite called the Book of Black Magic Unpacked. And that is a really important book in its day.
- [14:09]
C
Peter was published in 1898 just as he's emerging from his psychological crisis. And if before, wait, I published his book, if you wanted to study real historical magic, you had to go after rare unpublished manuscripts about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But the Book of Black Magic and of Pacts changes that. It's essentially a comprehensive scholarly how to about ceremonial magic. It's. He's compiled some notorious French Latin grimoire, so sort of, you know, dark occultish texts, has detailed instructions on sorcery, summoning spirits, infernal necromancy and so on. And for it, for a young rebel trying to break away like Crown, it's giving him a step by step guide about what is bad and dangerous and how to make it even worse.
- [14:58]
B
It's interesting because all the mystics we've looked at had this idea that to really make it as a mystic you need to uncover some loss ancient or medieval text. What's different now is that AE Waite has actually helpfully compiled and translated these like obscure medieval and ancient texts and put them in this kind of compilation book so that Aleister Crowley can just read it. So for the first time it's made much easier to kind of scavenge this material. But Waite is a very different author from Crowley. He is not a sexually fluid, rebellious, chaotic young heir in pursuit of darkness. Waite is actually a respected and quite stuffy very Christian mystic. He's actually famous today for co creating a very, very popular tarot deck called the Rider. Waite Smith Tarot deck. It's one of the most widely recognized tarot decks in the world. I don't know if you've ever had a tarot reading, Peter. Have you?
- [15:52]
C
No, I'm not a Tarot boy. Have you?
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B
Afraid. I think this could be a really interesting Bonus episode. Just a thought. Let us know if you'd like to see Peter and I have a tarot reading. I suspect the chances of us getting it done with a Rider Waite Smith deck would be quite high. I have had a tarot reading with
- [16:10]
C
a Rider Waite Smith, but I'm gonna
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B
save that for a bonus episode.
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C
Yeah, I'm interested to hear. Yeah.
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B
But Waite didn't write the book to encourage people to practice black magic. He did it to examine in a more scholarly and academic way that the history of Western magical traditions. But Crowley had his own agenda. And the impact that this book had on his thoughts just can't be overstated. It gave him the sense of clarity that he wanted to become an occultist. And he was so influenced by Waite, he actually wrote to him and said to the older scholar, I want to become a real occultist. What do I do next? And Waite helpfully gave him some book recommendations, including a book called the Cloud upon the Sanctuary, another book which blew Crowley's mind because it contained the concept of a hidden church or this secret brotherhood of enlightened spiritual masters who hold the keys to the universe. And Crowley became obsessed with finding this secret society in real life, and it led him to join an order called the Order of the Golden dawn in 1898, of which Waite was already a senior member. So Crowley's still at Cambridge. He's in his early 20s at this point. Point he joins the Golden Dawn. Waite's already a senior, highly influential member. And this is where that relationship breaks down, as you can probably guess it would, given their very different approaches to life.
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C
Look, I think. I think it speaks to the idea of trying to find secret meaning and hidden meaning. It speaks to people who are sort of too clever for their own good. It speaks to the idea of wanting to find a ways of being even more exclusive. So in a way, the Brethren gets replaced by. By golden dawn as a result, because it's. It gives you an opportunity to. To try to do something different. But like you said, Afwa, he falls out with weight eventually seeing him as someone who's boring, pompous and pedantic, and later mercilessly attacking his style of writing in his own magazines. But anyway, he joins this society, the Hermetic Order of the golden dawn, meaning it's all closed off, it's highly secretive, and its member, his members include lots of other people we might do in other episodes, but people you all know, like the poet W.B. yeats and Bram Stoker and so on. And what do they actually do, Afra, in this golden dawn society? What are they busy doing? They're not just reading fortunes with their. With their tarot cards.
- [18:31]
B
The Order of the golden dawn are not just reading fortunes, like you said. They're practicing high ceremonial magic. This involves memorizing Hebrew text, studying the Kabbalah, practicing Egyptian visualizations, and performing these very elaborate. And they sound actually very theatrical rituals in robes. Trying to communicate with higher spiritual planes actually sounds a lot more like some things that people I know do in real life than I would like
- [19:02]
C
people I know look at Instagram reels. I don't know anybody's doing theatrical rituals and robes. Oh, well, apart from my college where we have high table, we have dinner in Oxford that we wrap on a robe. I don't think that's what he means.
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B
I mean, you're in the actual, like, medieval center of the ritual, not the one that's trying to recreate it.
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C
Yeah, yeah, okay.
- [19:21]
B
It's really interesting how much I recognize many of these ideas and actually how much consistency there is across all the mystics that we've studied. They all are interested in Kabbalah and Hebrew. They're interested in ancient Kemet, ancient Egyptian ideas. They're mishmashing them into these kind of rituals that serve their own needs for kind of pomp and ceremony and performance. But also genuinely. And I think this is where we do need to be less cynical. I think these people are genuinely in pursuit of something. I think they're motivated by a sense of really seeking some kind of hidden or deeper truth. What they do with that is, I guess, the story and the part that gets messy and where you get these clashes. Crowley being Crowley, he's a narcissistic, arrogant character. He quickly outgrows the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He thinks that he's weighed too big to listen to someone like WB Yeats. He's not impressed by Bram Stoker. He gets kicked out of the order after clashing with many of its members, and he decides that he is going to go and travel the world. And of course, as an heir to this large fortune, he can do that. So he takes himself off at the turn of the 20th century to Mexico, India, Ceylon, which is now Sri Lanka, and he sets about learning advanced yoga and meditation techniques.
- [20:39]
C
So one conclusion you could take from this is don't ever travel, because it opens your mind to bad ideas. And we have that with Helena Blavatsky, too, where, you know, her trips, potentially to Tibet, if she ever got there. But Crowley, he travels all over the place. So he pursues. When he goes to Mexico, his other major obsession, which is mountaineering. So he climbs volcanic peaks like Popepital and Issacuatl. And he initiates magical retirements, locking himself away to practice intense rituals and scrying. That's we talked about with Nostradamus, staring into crystals or mirrors. And he learns that London isn't just the only place you could do this stuff. In Ceylon or Sri Lanka, he meets a man called Alan Bennett, rather unpromisingly. Bennett has been Crowley's greatest mentor and friend in golden dawn, but had had severe asthma, so he'd gone to go to Asia for its climate and become a Buddhist monk. So Crowley starts to study Theravada, Buddhism and advanced yoga, meditation, all these things again. There's a pattern building up here. What do we call it? The mix and match, the buffet, the pick and mix. Borrowing from the pick a mix. That was how you called it? Much better than mine. Yeah, it is in India, too. He does the pick a mix too.
- [21:48]
B
He does. I mean, again, I think, to give a little credit, he does take quite seriously these ideas. He does spend time really learning Buddhist meditation practices and how to turn inward to overcome the ego, to dispense with thought and control until the ego is dissolved. It's just hard to see how you could really immerse yourself in those ideas and then go on to become a kind of narcissistic, controlling.
- [22:13]
C
Well, it worked for Himmler. They loved all the Indian symbols, the swastikas and the art and the visuals and the yoga and the. I mean, it's. I mean, I'm not just saying that as a joke. I mean, it's absolutely right.
- [22:25]
B
It's just. I am. I mean, it's a thing I'm realizing, I find so fascinating, these characters who appropriate profoundly spiritual ideas with ancient histories behind them and then weaponize them for something like genocidal or abusive or toxic. It's just such a. Like. It just seems so contradictory that if you really understand those ideas, that you could use them to do these things. And also in Crowley's case, he really understands the kind of spiritual essence of extreme physical exertion. He undertakes these genuinely challenging hikes, mountaineering expeditions. He manages to the K2 summit, the highest mountain in the world. But he connects these physical acts of endurance with kind of spiritual testing. And, you know, I think that's something we can also all recognize. Like pushing your body to its physical limits connects you with elements of your spirit or character or soul in a way that you know you otherwise might not find. And he feels that surviving the Himalayas gives him true enlightenment. And on top of that, he's practicing this Hindu yoga that makes him understand the body's energy centers or chakras. And he will later integrate these with his Western ideas of sexual magic. So again, this pick and mix, taking these like ancient spiritual beliefs, but then turning them into something that feels a lot more base and rooted in desire and control. And Crowley thinks that Western ceremonial magic lacks mental discipline because he has access to what he thinks are these superior ingredients for his own practice.
- [24:01]
C
Well, Crowley has that thing that others do too. You know, like we mentioned the Himmler and so on, is the sneering at other people and the conviction of your own physical, moral, mental, spiritual superiority. So there's something that creates these hierarchies by being able to see things, do things in different ways. And it always evolves, you having enlightenment that other people don't have because you're a superior being. So it's all linked very closely with ideas about race too. So in Crowley's case, he starts to do things like spelling magic with a K to differentiate the fact that he's more serious than anybody else who just does stage illusions. He defines magic as the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will. So it means that your mental agility is so profound that you have an ability to do things that mere mortals and humans aren't able to do. And this all comes to to a head with something called the Book of the Law, which is a defining moment in. In 1904, he's in Cairo with his wife Rose. He claims that a disembodied entity named Awas dictates a text to him over the course of three days, and that becomes called the Book of Law.
- [25:07]
B
The Book of Law declares that this is the dawn of a new era for humanity, which he calls the Aeon of Horus. So again, he's appropriating these ideas from ancient Kemet and adding his own twist. So he says the old religions of self sacrifice are dead. The new law is absolute personal freedom and self realization. Do what thou wilt. It's like taking spiritual ideas and using them to advocate narcissism and anarchy.
- [25:37]
C
Basically, it all comes down to doing, yeah, I'm number one. It's the age of the individual and self power. As long as you've got deep enough pockets and you've got complete conviction in your own superiority and discipline, then you're going to be fine. But it's actually a recipe for complete chaos. And when we come back for the break, we're going to see about how when Crowley tries to put this personal philosophy into practice, chaos is literally exactly what he gets.
- [26:05]
A
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- [26:20]
B
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C
So before the break, we had Alastair Cowley receiving the book of Law from the spirits and declaring herself to be a prophet of the new age. We just very briefly mentioned his wife, Rose. As so often is the case, women get written out of these kinds of histories. But tell us about Rose Afwa.
- [27:02]
B
I think it's so important. As you said, Peter, you can't judge the legacy of someone like Aleister Crowley without looking at the trail of destruction he left in the life lives of the women in his circle. And Rose Edith Kelly is one of the most tragic and pivotal figures in his story. And without her, there would be no Book of the Law, this pivotal text that propels him to fame. So ironically, Rose had absolutely no interest or background in magic or the occult when she met him. It's a really crazy story about how they met. She was the sister of Gerald Kelly, a painter who is one of Crowley's friends from Cambridge. And in the summer of 1903, Crowley was visiting his friend Gerald Kelly, and his sister Rose was there. And Rose was in a state of deep distress because her family was forcing her into an arranged marriage with a man she didn't love. So Crowley, who was, in his defense, I guess, you know, not a fan of these oppressive societal rules, especially given the background he'd had, genuinely wanted to help her and proposed this radical solution. He said, I'll marry you, but it can be a marriage of convenience and it will get you off the hook for this other marriage that you've been roped into so that her family couldn't force her to marry the other guy. And Crowley promised that as soon as they were married, he would just leave her alone and get on with his life and the travels he was planning. So it was kind of like a, you know, no cost opportunity for her. So they eloped the next day. And then, surprisingly, they actually fell in love and decided that they would stay together. So they went on this honeymoon as an actual married couple who actually wanted to be in a relationship. But then when they were on this honeymoon in Cairo, this mystical event, as Crowley describes it, takes place.
- [28:44]
C
Yeah, I mean, he tries to show off his new wife by performing a minor ritual to some of the sylphs of the Air Elementals. And it doesn't work. Instead, Rose, who has had no training or exposure to this sort of stuff, suddenly slips into a deep and spontaneous trance where she keeps repeating this phrase, they are waiting for you. And she tells Crowley that the ancient Egyptian God Horus was trying to contact him. What are the odds? Crowley was very skeptical, but he thought she was either making it up or having a psychotic episode. So he decides to cross examine her about Egyptian mythology to prove that she didn't know what she was talking about. And she answered every mystical question correctly. So he still doesn't believe her. So he takes Rose to the newly opened Bulak Museum, now the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and he tells her to point out the image of the God that was trying to speak to him. They walk past several massive statues of Horus, which Rose ignores. Finally, she stops in front of a relatively obscure small wooden funerary tablet called the Steel of Ankh F? N Kosu, and it features a image of Horus. And Crowley looks at the museum exhibit's catalogue number for the tablet, and the number was 666.
- [29:57]
B
Dun dun dun. It is a spooky episode. And what I like about this story is that it's Crowley who's skeptical because he doesn't see Rose as a mystic or someone with any authenticity in this field of channeling or slipping into trances. But she's the one offering these revelations through this contact she has with Horus. And 666, of course, resonates with him because he has been calling himself the Great Beast 666, mainly in rebellion to this strict Christian upbringing ever since his childhood. So of course, he takes this as absolute, undeniable proof that real spiritual forces are at work. And he later renames that tablet the Stele of Revealing. And Rose is now his psychic conduit. She gives him instructions. Not just vague elliptic instructions, but like quite tangible instructions. She says that for three consecutive days, the 8th, 9th and 10th of April, he has to sit alone in their hotel room for one hour from exactly noon till 1pm so he does exactly what she says. And during those three hours, guess what happens, Peter?
- [31:08]
C
Well, it's very lucky that as well time for him to be able to enjoy a good luncheon. And also you know of course that 666 is not on the tablet, it's just in the catalog. So it's a bit of a stretch. But the voice from the entity named Awas talks him and gives him the ideas and what should be written down in the book of law. And I don't know how long it's taken you to write your book Safwa, but three lunchtime sittings for an hour wasn't enough to let me.
- [31:32]
B
I need to get in touch with Ayahuas.
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C
Listen, might help but I think what's interesting is that Rose is important and she's the intercessor. Well, you know, obviously bananas. But Crowley's entire religion, if you can call it that, is built on the foundation of her sudden and unexpected clairvoyance. So he starts in his writings to call her the Ouarda, the sea or Ouarda is Arabic name for Rose. So he's, he's pick and mixing with all this stuff too.
- [32:01]
B
The fact that she's so pivotal is what makes it so tragic how it ends for her because she's now like deeply immersed in this lifestyle of constantly traveling, of practicing rituals and magic and his very narcissistic self centered pursuit of these answers. And it really takes a toll on her. They have a child, a daughter called Jezebel Lilith. They call her Lilith.
- [32:25]
C
That's for sure. That's for sure. Tafwa. Okay, Huff, she's called Luitma Atahor Hekatee Safer, Jezebel Lil. That tells you a bit about how they want to see.
- [32:34]
B
They just throw in all of the kind of like out there female characters from history, but she in 1906 contracts typhoid and dies. And Crowley blames Rose for this little girl's death and it breaks Rose. Basically she's grieving for their child. Crowley's coping by self medicating and by being even more dogged in pursuit of his so called mysticism. He's taking more and more drugs, he's having more and more sex with more and more mistresses and Rose breaks. She develops severe debilitating alcoholism. They have a second daughter called Lola Zaza. But by then the marriage is broken. Crowley divorces her in 1909 on the grounds of his adultery, allegedly so that she wouldn't bear the stigma. But it is his adultery that's helping to break her, and she eventually dies in an asylum for people like her, alcohol induced dementia in 1932. So she spends the last 20 years of her life suffering from this terrible illness in an institution. And I think it's. Whenever you look at a close, intimate partner of someone, I think you see truths about the way they live as well. And being close to Crowley is a very perilous business. Not just because of what happens to Rose, but we'll see other women in his orbit who also have unhappy outcomes. And you know, I don't. I'm not saying you can always blame a male partner for what happens to a woman, but you often can. And in this case you. It's hard to not notice the pattern.
- [34:09]
C
So Crowley doesn't, doesn't stick around as, as his wife gets committed to an institution, he moves on. And he heads to Cefalu in Sicily, where he establishes the Abbey of Thelema, which he sees as being a magical commune where followers can practice his rituals, where he can paint, where he can write, he can explore free love without being judged by anybody else, but basically doing things his own way. And life at the abbey is extreme. Crowley's methods of magic now evolve. Drugs, and I mean proper drugs, not just hashish, but mescaline, cocaine, heroin. They're there to break down the ego and achieve higher states of consciousness. I think we all know people who think that that's how that works. And also practices sex magic, believing that energy generated during orgasm could be harnessed to manifest real world desires. We could have seen him and Kellogg having a fun party together. But life at the Abbey wasn't, wasn't as glamorous as it sounds. Perhaps good for Crowley.
- [35:09]
B
Doesn't sound glamorous to me at all. You know, like this guy kind of harnessing his semen to manifest consciousness in all these women. It's just gross. But he is also not very sanitary and he's running out of money. So the Abbey is pretty dirty, impoverished and very abusive because he's a tyrant. He forces his followers to sleep on the floor. He is constantly demanding these exhausting rituals, including sexual rituals. He's openly manipulating their psychological weaknesses. And of course this, if this sounds like a recipe for disaster, it is.
- [35:43]
C
Well, partly because in 1923, a young Oxford educator follower called Raoul Loveday dies at the Abbey. The official cause is intestinal infection from drinking contaminated water. But Loveday's furious wife returns to London and sells her story to the Sunday Express. And that, that creates a proper scandal.
- [36:00]
B
The tabloids go nuclear. They paint the Abbey as a house of satanic orgies, blood sacrifices and murder. And they brand Crowley the wickedest man in the world. And, you know, it's interesting because I don't think he would actually be mad at any of those monikers. He would probably wear that as a badge of honor. But in this case, a young man has died and there's this public outcry. This is the equivalent of the Hodgson Report for Helena Blavatsky, but much more visceral because people think he's dangerous and that he's satanic. And there's so much public disquiet around him that Benito Mussolini, who's by now the fascist dictator in Italy, actually expels Crowley from his home in the country. And it's the destruction of this abbey world that he's created, but also his reputation. And it never recovers. Peter, no.
- [36:50]
C
So after the disgrace of Love Day's death, Crowley has basically squandered his fortune. He's been detached from society, he's scandalized, and he basically becomes an impoverished wanderer and an addict. So he is originally prescribed opiates to deal with his asthma. And that all goes from bad to worse. He eventually dies in 1947 by the sea in Hastings. His fifth child, Ataturk, and his child's mother, his third wife, are by his side. And his final words are. Which sums up a good podcast episode. I am perplexed.
- [37:22]
B
According to Patricia, as Aleister Crowley slipped from this life to the next, the heavens opened in a mighty thunderclap to welcome him home. But there's definitely another story about his ending. Because he was once, whatever you think of him, this wielder of great esoteric power, at least in how people perceived him. He's now dying, age 72, in obscurity at a rundown guest house in Hastings, which is rather spookily named Netherwood House. And he spent his last few years there feeding his heroin habit and reading long into the night in, of course, a room that was number 13. But his wealth is long gone. His last possession of any value, a gold pocket watch, is stolen by another lodger before his gun corpse is even cold. But there is one last weird, spooky story around his death.
- [38:16]
C
So about three months before his death, his long term physician, Dr. William Brown Thompson, has refused to prescribe him any more drugs. So while Crowley is on his deathbed, he puts a curse on his doctor. And the day after Alistair Crowley dies, Dr. Thompson, surprise, surprise, is found dead in his bathtub in Mayfair, allegedly of natural causes. But the tabloids, they love a bit of Crowley story. They go bananas all over again and they imagine that Crowley has the ability to curse people from as he slips into the grave. And it seems like quite a coincidence, but as we're gonna see after we come back from the break, the legacies of Crowley and his life become more and more mainstream in the second half of the 20th century.
- [39:04]
A
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B
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- [40:03]
C
So, afwa. Crowley dies a bankrupt pariah, scandalized, disgraced. And yet, amazingly, you find him on the COVID of the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. And Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page even bought Alastair Crowley's old house in Scotland, knowing that it was his and wanted to live there. How has he become a pop culture pin up?
- [40:27]
B
I mean, people have described him as a kind of proto rock star. Obviously, like 50 years before that was a thing, because by the 1960s, the whole culture in countries like Britain, which was heavily defined by duty, duty to God, your country, your family, are beginning to shift. And there is this absolute appetite for ideas about doing you, you know, which is exactly what Crowley preached, like, do what thou wilt. And it becomes a kind of mantra for this generation who are obsessed with living your truth, finding yourself, exploring consciousness through drugs and psychedelics, rejecting traditional moral boundaries. And of course, somebody who took that to an extreme, while not everything he did might be seen as desirable, it becomes the blueprint for this whole hippie movement and sexual revolution.
- [41:16]
C
And, and it's not just a one off. I mean, this goes through the whole of the culture of the 60s, in particular. I mean, tell us a bit about the Beatles, about Led Zeppelin, about David Bowie, Ozzy Osborne. It just goes on and on and on. I mean, is it just because he's saying, look, do what feels good. And that's part of the kind of the story of breaking down social bonds and, you know, the story of counterculture, of war, of families Falling apart of change in the 20th century. But just it's, it's everywhere.
- [41:45]
B
The Crowley story, it's the taboo, isn't it? And you know, this is so interesting to think he lived so long before a kind of death metal rock star could even have been conceivable. But yet when this starts to become a movement in the culture, the idea of like the occult and satanic imagery and lyrics about death and sex and orgies and Satanism, you know, the whole realm. Even if you think about songs like Madonna's Like a Prayer or Lil Nas X lap Dancing on Satan, this entire esthetic of like dark rock metal, you could trace it all to Crowley's realization that mixing the demonic with the erotic creates the most potent way in to the culture. And that's something that artists, musicians, writers lap up, especially when the structures of society start to make it more permissible. So he's somebody who's lived decades before but has kind of created this blueprint for the dark, sexual, transgressive cultural movement. And you know, I think that is often the case that somebody who takes something to the extreme is often going to be a deeply flawed, narcissistic character. Is still kind of ahead of their time in predicting the trajectory of popular culture. And I think it maybe reflects in a way on us that the way our culture has evolved has been to become more interested in egotistical, selfish, consumerist and dark pursuits of desire and the taboo and the unseen. And so the things that made him a pariah in his own time, ironically make him pretty sexy today. Not to me. I don't find him sexy at all. I just want to put that on the record.
- [43:31]
C
Just put on the record. I mean, look, I guess the drugs, the self destruction, the kind of, you know, who wants to live until you're old, you know, are all themes that have a legacy in the pop world. Right, but the music world. But I mean, I know that you're also interested in the space race and the way in which Crowley links to modern science. Afro.
- [43:53]
B
This is actually my favorite part of the Crowley story because one of his most devoted disciples in the 1940s was a man called Jack Parsons. And Parsons was also a bit of a maverick in his case, a brilliant self taught chemistry living in California. And he used to perform Crowley's magic rituals at night, while during the day he was busy inventing rocket fuel. Not just any rocket fuel, but the solid rocket fuel that was eventually used to take Apollo 11 to the moon. And Parsons genuinely believed that the occult rituals and his Rocket science were two sides of the same coin, Peter.
- [44:30]
C
I mean, it's amazing. And then we mentioned a bit about Jimmy Page and Crowley's house, Boulderskin House at Georgian Hunting Lodge on the shore of Loch Ness. Even today, Thelema comes up in the mainstream press often, right?
- [44:42]
B
Well, there was a scandal because that property that Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin bought has now been taken over as a kind of protected property and as a place where people can explore and learn more about Aleister Crowley. And this prompted this kind of moral outrage and especially the more conservative press, the Telegraph described Thelema and the idea of it being practiced on Loch Ness as all chance and sodomy and the Eye of Horus, which is as predatory and disgusting in Crowley's own day as Jimmy Savile or Jeffrey Epstein is in ours. So, you know, he's being linked with these modern characters who are abusive, predatory, dark evil. And it's just so interesting to me that you have that on the one hand, while on the other hand you still have active followers of Crowley's religion of the Ordo Templi Orientis, which he founded, even women. And I again went on a bit of a rabbit hole and found the oto, that's the kind of acronym for the Ordo Templi or Reentis, the OTO's annual women's symposium. Ladies of force and fire. Who? Some ladies who meet in cities like Minneapolis and enjoy panel discussions on things like thelemic feminism, wine tasting and a blow the roof off Crowley esque ritual. Was Crowley a feminist? That is an absolute hard no. But there are things about his religion that were egalitarian because it was, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. He's not saying men can do what they will more than women. He's kind of so fiercely individualistic that you could interpret that as giving everyone agency. That is, to me, if you ignore the reality that he regarded that as a kind of carte blanche to sexually exploit and break women. So, you know, the idea that everyone can do what they want isn't equal in a power structure that is misogynist. And on top of that, he had some very specific ideas about women which I think, you know, you can interpret in different ways. He regarded female sexuality as this massive, untapped source of divine power. He had this concept of the Scarlet woman, an earthly avatar of the goddess Babylon who had the highest level of spiritual importance. And he wanted women and encouraged them to be sexually voracious, independent and unapologetic. I wouldn't really describe that as girl power. It was almost like women as a resource to be tapped and exploited for his own sex, spiritual progress. But it's certainly true that in a Victorian context, kind of encouraging women to be sexually voracious and independent was of course very radical and looks a lot more feminist than the status quo at the time.
- [47:30]
C
I don't think he was encouraging that all the sort of the, the fetishization and the, the kink in terms of sexual liberation of women. I think it was, he was quite happy for that to happen when he was in the room and it was about his own sexual desires being satisfied. But I mean that, you know, what can we say about his, his views about, about sex in general? Is this all just self serving? It's an egotist and a narcissist who creates rules that suit and work for him rather than something that is actually spreading the. And his ideas and wonders elsewhere.
- [48:04]
B
I think anyone who's ever like been in a relationship with a narcissist will know that there's no healthy sex in a narcissistic context. And he used sex to fuel his narcissism and his desire for control. He was kind of consuming women in a way. They were like batteries. And many of the scarlet women that he was intimate with suffered from severe mental breakdowns and exhaustion, drug addiction after these like prolonged and draining sessions of intense sex magic with him. And you know, there's no way that today we wouldn't have a narrative about consent and power in that situation because he was a guru, he was in charge. This was his thing, it was his money. He pressured his followers, both male and female, because he was also bisexual, into these like very extreme sexual acts that he regarded as pushing them to their personal boundaries. And he kind of described in the language of breaking their egos. But everybody who's ever read anything about a culture knows that when you mix unlimited access to people's bodies with this pseudo spiritual language and a narcissistic controlling leader, it is an absolute recipe for abuse and control. And I think, you know, the veneer of spirituality only makes it more dangerous because it allows people to follow him and suspend their critical faculties and their judgment. And it also attracts people who are vulnerable and searching for someone who, who has the answers. So by tying his personal voracious sexual desire to these concepts of true will and discovering your authentic self, he was able to exploit in a really dangerous way.
- [49:43]
C
And if you see the legacies dubbed today, you could see it in things like modern witchcraft or wicca the connection being that the man credited with founding modern wicca in the 1950s was a British civil servant. It's always British civil servants. Gerald Gardner. And he met Crowley at the end of Crowley's life and was initiated into his Order of the Eastern Temple, Ordo Templi Orientalis. And when Gardner created the rituals for Wicca, he lifts a huge amount of material directly from Crowley's writing. So this has a legacy that carries on even. What are we now, 70, 80 years after Crowley's death? I'm not sure I've enjoyed Crowley's company hugely, afwa, but he was a mystic, I guess, in not quite a traditional way, the same way that perhaps Nostradamus was. He wasn't trying to predict the future. He had a very clear vision of what he thought spiritualism looked like. And his story started and ended with himself.
- [50:36]
B
He didn't predict the future, but he actually laid the foundations for it culturally in many ways, and I think not in a way that necessarily has a very positive legacy, but, you know, I think we are in some ways living in a world that Aleister Crowley built. And the commoditization of sex and the fetishization of the female body and the layering of these like, ideas of like, energy and pursuing your truth even onto things like BDSM and kink. You know, it's like sexual ideas that are kind of totally subjective, but they can be used for someone to find fulfillment and self acceptance or they can be exploited and commoditized by others. And sadly, I think we live in a society that tends much more towards the latter. And I think that we can trace that straight back to Crowley. So of course, like not all people who are wickers, not all people who are interested in sex, positivity and energies are manifesting the darkness of what he believed in. But there is definitely a stain of the dark ideas he had all over all aspects of popular culture today.
- [51:44]
C
Thank you for listening to Legacy.
- [51:46]
B
To dive deeper and support the show, sign up to Legacy. Plus, you'll get to enjoy bonus episodes, early access, fewer ads, Q&As and much more. Go to Legacy Supportingcast FM.
- [51:57]
C
And don't forget, you can watch all our episodes on Spotify and YouTube too. For anything else, including our substack and updates on TikTok and Instagram, just check out the show notes or search Legacy podcast. I'm Peter Franker. Pen.
- [52:10]
B
Hi, I'm Afwa Hersh and we'll see you on the next episode of Legacy.