Aleister Crowley

Crowley was a truly prolific and deliberately transgressive occultist whose practices included sex and drug use, and he went on to influence modern Satanism, as well as some other new religious movements.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and I'm Holly fry Alistair Crowley
is somebody I've been considering for an October episode for

(00:22):
quite a while. But the thing is, I would kind
of stumble across his name in some totally random other
part of the year and that has nothing to do
with October and kind of go, oh, yeah, I was
thinking about him for an October episode, but then I'd
never made note of that anywhere, and then it would
be November. Um. We don't only cover these types of

(00:45):
subjects around October, but Crowley does seem particularly suited for
a more seasonal October episode, which on this show has
become traditionally associated with things that are other worldly in
some way. I grew up in a pretty conservative Methodist

(01:06):
household in the nineties, eighties and early nineties, in other words,
in the middle of Satanic panic. That meant there were
some subjects my mom felt very strongly that I should
not be exposed to, and that included sex, drugs, and Satanism.
And this episode is going to touch on pretty much
all of those things because Alistair Crowley was a truly

(01:30):
prolific and deliberately transgressive occultists whose practices included sex and
drug use. He went on to influence things like modern Satanism,
as well as various other new religious movements. And also
just the note on pronunciation. If you've ever listened to
Ozzy Osbourne, or if you're just an American, or if

(01:52):
you speak English with various specific accents, you have probably
gotten really used to the pronunciation and Alistair Crawley, I
know that's how I always said it. That's how I
think you and I both said it in last year's
episode on Taro Crowley is Crowley. Yeah, I think I

(02:12):
think that was what I was even trying to say
in that moment when I'm more I said it more Crawley.
I think I've always said it Crowley. He said it Crowley,
though the brewery that his family owned even had crows
on the labels, Like I don't know entirely how it
became more like Crowley. Um, so it's totally possible at

(02:35):
some point during this episode I will regrets to saying
it the way I've said it my entire life before
learning that he said it Crowley over the last four days. Also,
I just want to note that this episode is wild.
I kept feeling like this must be the strangest thing
that's gonna happen this entire episode, and then I would
find another stranger. But at the same time, I feel

(02:57):
like his life and his work were just so prolific
and so varied that it just really scratches the surface.
If you're a de vote of Alistair Crowley, you may
find ten million things that you think we left out.
I think that's true of any subject we do. Alistair
Crowley was born Edward Alexander Crowley in Leamington, spa, Warwickshire, England,

(03:20):
on October twelfth. This was the same year that French
occultists La Fas Levy died. He was the author of
books like The History of Magic, Transcendental Magic, It's Doctrine
and Ritual, and The Key to the Great Mysteries. We
talked about him in our Tero episode I Forgot. It
was also the same year that past podcast subject Helena

(03:43):
Blovotsky co founded the Theosophical Society, which pulled together religious,
philosophical and mystical traditions from all over the world. Crowley
felt that it was significant that these two things happened
in the year of his birth. This would not have
resonated in that way with his parents, though, They were
Edward and Emily Crowley, who were part of an evangelical

(04:05):
Christian movement known as the Plymouth Brethren. Its founders included
John Nelson Darby, whose teachings included the idea that humanity
was progressing through a series of ages that would culminate
with the end of the world as it was described
in the Book of Revelation. Before that point, Christians would
be taken to Heaven through the rapture. Plymouth Brethren don't

(04:27):
really have a hierarchy of clergy and laity, but Edward
was an evangelist and all of this was a big
part of Crowley's upbringing. From a young age, he was
fascinated by some of the more vivid figures from the
Book of Revelation, including the Dragon, the scarlet Woman, the
false Prophet, and the beast. Thanks to the Crowley's long

(04:48):
involvement with the brewing industry, the family was pretty well off.
They called their son Alec, and in his words, his
childhood was almost abnormally normal. He was educated in private schools,
most of them affiliated either with the Plymouth Brethren or
with other evangelical sex His father died when he was eleven,

(05:08):
and this was really traumatic. Alec had really idolized his
father and an uncle who played a much bigger role
in his life from that point was really pretty cruel
to him. Eventually, alex started to rebel against school, against Christianity,
and against his family. He also experienced chronic illnesses, including asthma,

(05:31):
that sometimes kept him from being able to attend school,
and during those periods he worked with private tutors. He
spent some time in both Malvern College and Tonbridge School
before entering Trinity College, Cambridge. In Curly changed his name
from Edward Alexander to Alistair at about this time. This

(05:52):
change probably had a couple of inspirations. One was Percy
bish Shelley's poem alis Store or the Spirit of Solitude,
and the other was the Gaelic version of the name Alexander,
although that is usually spelled a L A S d
A I R, not a L E I S T
e R, A name I spelled wrong. A lot of

(06:15):
times while typing this, I had to add it to
my word dictionaries that could keep it straight. Although Crowley
didn't finish a degree at Trinity, the three years that
he did spend their were formative. He played chess and
wrote poetry, and he did well in his courses in
spite of not really paying attention to them. His parents
had always expected him to excel at his school work,

(06:38):
but they were also really strict about what he was
allowed to read. The only book he could have at
home was the Bible. So while he wasn't all that
focused on his formal course of study at Trinity, he
still studied a lot, immersing himself in things like medieval
magic and Rosicrucian mysticism. Rosicrucianism dates back to the seventeenth century,

(07:00):
and it's focused on the idea that its members are
maintaining and passing down ancient esoteric secrets and wisdom. Curly's
time at Trinity was also happening well into a renewed
interest in the occult that started in the late nineteenth century.
Sometimes this is described as the Occult Revival. It had
some common elements with the spiritualist movement that was evolving

(07:23):
at about the same time, like the Theosophist movement that
was also part of this whole landscape. The Occult Revival
brought together a range of influences, including a Victorian understanding
of the religious and mythical traditions of ancient Egypt, ancient Greece,
and Asia. Just as a side note, if you get

(07:45):
into academic work about this whole period, there are a
lot of different and sometimes slightly contradictory definitions and use
for terms like occult and esoteric. Some draw a distinction
between occult meaning hidden knowledge, an esoteric meaning knowledge that
is revealed only too specific people like initiates of a

(08:05):
specific order, But there is some overlap there, and some
people use these terms kind of interchangeably. We aren't going
to try to draw a huge distinction between them, especially
since a lot of what Alistair Crowley did could really
be described using both terms, just kind of depending on
what we're talking about. Crowley had his first mystical experience

(08:26):
on New Year's Eve eight nineties six, while he was
on winter break in Stockholm. He later said that this
experience quote put me on the road to myself. A
year later, the same thing happened again, and he described
it this way quote, My animal nature stood rebuked and
kept silent in the presence of the imminent divinity of

(08:47):
the Holy Ghost, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, yet blossoming in
my soul, as if the entire forces of the universe
from all eternity were concentrated and made manifest in a
single rose. Crowley left Trinity College in his first poem
was published that same year, titled Academa, A Place to

(09:09):
Very Strangers in which was credited to a gentleman of
the University of Cambridge. Thanks to Crowley's inheritance, he was
able to pretty much do what he wanted after leaving college.
This included mountaineering and big game hunting, and he traveled
extensively for both of those pursuits. But he also traveled

(09:30):
in pursuit of knowledge, seeking out mystical and spiritual guidance,
yeah as he started developing whole systems of ritual magic.
This travel would also include going to places and like
doing these very prolonged involved like mystical rituals and incantations
and things. On November Crowley was initiated into the Hermetic

(09:55):
Order of the Golden Dawn, which had been established ten
years earlier by William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Ladell McGregor Mathers.
This was one of several Hermetic orders that trace their
teachings back to writings that were attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.
That's a figure who combined the Egyptian deity thought with

(10:17):
the Greek deity Hermes. In addition to its Greek and
Egyptian influences, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn drew
on Christian mysticism, Kabbala, and Paganism, as well as Hinduism
and Buddhism, plus the work of Queen Elizabeth, the first
court adviser and astronomer John d On my shortlist. Folded

(10:38):
into all of these influences was a focus on ritual magic.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was one of
the most prominent and influential esoteric orders of the day,
and its influence spread as former members went on to
establish their own orders. Initiates into the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn adopted a name or sort of motto

(11:00):
Rolies was perdurabo or I will endure, and then having
been initiated, they progressed through ten levels of esoteric knowledge,
with each grade being mastered before the person moved on
to the next one, revealing a new body of knowledge
they had access to. And it wasn't just that a

(11:21):
person had to learn everything from one stage before being
allowed to advance. The Orders members also believed that as
you mastered each level, you really evolved and progressed spiritually
and psychically. Crowley had a really good memory and was
also deeply interested in all of this, and he rose

(11:42):
through the grades of the London chapter really quickly, but
that did not sit well with everyone else in the Order.
We're going to talk about that more after a little
sponsor break. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had

(12:04):
some pretty prominent members and it was enormously influential and
Alistair Crowley's life. Its progression through a series of increasingly
secretive progressive degrees, and it's focus on ritual magic performed
using specific regalia that all formed a template for a
lot of Crowley's later writing and work. But his involvement

(12:26):
with the organization was also pretty contentious. Some of its
more advanced members, including Alan Bennett, took an interest in
him and they personally tutored him, and its rituals and
its secrets, but other people really questioned his morals. He
had developed a reputation as a libertine who abused drugs,
and his sex partners included other men. At this point,

(12:49):
homosexuality was outlawed in Britain. Oscar Wilde's homosexuality trial had
taken place just a few years before. In nineteen hundred,
Samuel Laddel McGregor. Mat Others was head of the Order
but had gone to France. Florence Farr was temporarily leading
the Order in London in his place. Crowley reached the
point where he expected to be inducted into the Golden

(13:11):
Dawn's Inner Order, but far refused to do it, citing
his quote sexual intemperance. So Crowley went over her head,
traveling to Paris and taking it up with Mothers. Mothers
inducted Crowley into the Inner Order himself. The relationship between
Mathers and the rest of the Order was already contentious.

(13:32):
Since he was in France, he was out of regular
contact with most of the Order, and a lot of
people found his behavior to be increasingly erratic and dictatorial.
Allegations had also arisen that some of the Orders foundational manuscripts,
which were supposed to be ancient secrets that had been
passed down and protected for centuries. We're really nineteenth century fakes.

(13:57):
So when Crowley arrived at the Order is isis Urania
Temple at thirty six blythe Road in London and announced
that Mathers had inducted him into the next degree of
the Order and demanded to be shown the manuscripts he
was supposed to be able to access at that level,
people were upset and they again refused to do it.

(14:20):
Crowley went right back to France, where Mothers told him
to take over the temple entirely. So Crowley went back
to London again talk the landlord into letting him into
the temple, and then he changed the locks. He said
Mathers had designated him as his envoy, and he summoned
each member of the Inner Order to be questioned. When

(14:41):
they arrived, Crowley was wearing Scottish Highland dress, a black mask,
a large gold cross, and a dagger at his waist.
With the assistance of a police officer, several members of
the Order physically removed Crowley from the premises. One of
those members was will Iam Butler, Yates. In some accounts,

(15:02):
Yates and others physically threw Crowley down the stairs. Yates
and Crowley really did not like each other. Yates described
him as indescribably mad, and also thought Crowley's poetry, which
he had written a lot of at this point, was terrible.
This incident became known as the Battle of Life Road,

(15:23):
and some accounts of it are fairly straightforward. It was
a schism within an organization, followed by each side trying
to retain control of its documents and other materials, but
others are increasingly fantastic. Crowley biographer Richard Kazinski describes Crowley
determining he was under a magical attack during all of this,

(15:45):
as street lamps and hearth fires behaved strangely when he
passed by, and his raincoat is said to have spontaneously combusted.
Yates biographer Richard Ellman published an account in The Partisan
Review in y eight that describes Crowley and Yates attacking
each other, with Crowley using black magic and Yates using

(16:06):
white magic. In this account, Yates used some of Crowley's
hair to perform an exorcism at the request of poet
and artist ALTHEA. Giles who was in a tumultuous relationship
with him, him being Crowley, not Yates. This piece describes
the exorcism as causing a vampire to torment Crowley in

(16:28):
the night, and another experienced magician had to help him
get rid of this vampire. Ellman's biography of Yates also
mentions that quote it is said, which is one of
those words that you can like say to say a
thing that maybe you believe or maybe you don't believe.
It is said that Samuel McGregor Mathers died in eighteen

(16:49):
as a result of a magical duel with Alistair Crowley.
I'm telling you, this partisan review piece is so weird
that I am just not confide it whether he meant
it to be factual or not. Like he's talking about
a literal vampire being in bed with Alistair Crowley and

(17:10):
picking at him in the night, and I'm just like,
it's for real, though I have thoughts, um, they're not
terribly kind. Crowley withdrew from the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn, or if you look at this from the
Order's point of view, he was expelled. The order continued
to fracture, eventually changing its name to Stella Monte Tina

(17:33):
and then dissolving in the nineteen twenties. William Butler Yates,
who described magic as the most important pursuit of his
life next to poetry, went on to be regarded as
one of the greatest English language poets of the twentieth century.
His widely quoted poem The Second Coming is sometimes read
as alluding to Alistair Crowley in its last lines, which

(17:54):
read and what rough beast, it's our come round at
last slouches towards slam to be born. I had to
memorize this poem and I guess Broadley High School. Uh.
We definitely did not have any conversations about William Butler
Yates having a magical duel with anybody, or with Alister
Crowley having anything to do with this. Crowley was twenty

(18:17):
four when he tried to take over the isis Urania Temple,
and the previous year he had bought bull Skine House
on the shore of Lochness and was using it to
study and do research and to perform arcane rituals, some
of which really took months to complete. In the early
nineteen hundreds, he also traveled extensively, going to Mexico in
July of nine hundred with mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein and studying

(18:42):
yoga and Sri Lanka, which was known as Ceylon at
the time. He did that in nineteen o one. He
also studied Buddhist meditation practices with mentor and former Golden
Dawn member Alan Bennett. In nineteen o two, Crowley and
Eckenstein were part of the first formal attempts to reach
the summit of the mountain k Too. I got to

(19:03):
an elevation of eighteen thousand, six hundred feet, which is
five thousand, six hundred seventy meters. This is just a
little snapshot of all of us traveling. There was a
ton of it. Here's a busy bee. After returning to
the UK in nineteen oh three, Crowley married Rose Edith Kelly,
the widow of Frederick Thomas Scarrett. They honeymooned in India
and Egypt. Alistair claimed that Rose had never had any

(19:27):
kind of interest in the occult and had no knowledge
of Egyptian deities, but that while they were in Cairo
in the spring of nineteen o four, she went into
a trance, repeating quote they are waiting for you. He
described her as being possessed by an entity known as Iowas,
who was an agent of Horace and whose name was
the true name of the god of Yesides. So the

(19:49):
Yesodes are an ethnically Kurdish people who have historically been
extremely persecuted, and that is carrying through until today. They
continued to be extremely persec you did. It is possible
that Crowley had read about them in the work of
past podcast subject Helena Blavatsky. Her work about them is
honestly pretty offensive and mischaracterized them as just straight up

(20:14):
devil worshippers. Alistair really didn't believe his wife. She related
instructions on how to invoke Horace, and he thought that
what she said was absurd. He took her to the
nearby Egyptian Museum to see if she could identify Horace
in any of the objects there. She was drawn to
one particular steely saying and identified the god who was

(20:35):
talking to her. That object was labeled as catalog number
six six six, and Alistair later called it the Steely
of Revealing. Alistair eventually came to believe that she was
telling him something genuine, and he did various incantations and
invocations over a period of weeks in March and early April. Eventually,

(20:57):
Rose instructed him to enter the room where he had
been working at noon on April eighth, ninth, and ten,
and then for about an hour over those three days,
still reporting that she was directly transmitting the words of
Iowa's she dictated what became known as the Book of
the Law. This made Rose the first woman to fill

(21:18):
the role that Crowley would call his scarlet Woman. This
was meant to be a manifestation of the gardis Babylon,
who could channel or transmit messages to him from higher beings.
That's not spelled quite like Babylon. It is b A
B A l O N instead of B A B
Y l O N, because the spelling with an a

(21:41):
instead of a y was numeragically more important in Crowley's mind.
Various women filled this role of the Scarlet Woman over
the next decades, typically after having had various sexual encounters,
including performing sexual magic ritual with Crowley. The Book of

(22:02):
the Law became the central text of the philosophy and
religious movement known as Salima. The book contains the law
of Salima quote do what you will shall be the
whole of the Law, which is often followed by quote
love is the Law, love under will, and every man
and woman is a Star. Rose had also told Alistair

(22:23):
that he was to be the prophet of a new eon,
which would see the world move from the Age of
o Cyrus to the Age of Horace. This was to
be an almost apocalyptic time of struggle and strife, and
Crowley later suggested that four printings of the Book of
the Law had each preceded the Balkan War, World War One,
the Sino Japanese War, and World War two by a

(22:46):
period of nine months. After these events and Cairo, Alistair,
Crowley started associating himself with the number six six six
and the beast from the Biblical Book of Revelation, calling
himself the Beast six six six or a great Beast
six six six. He would go on to write twelve
more Holy Books between nineteen o seven and nineteen eleven,

(23:08):
describing himself as under the direct influence of a spirit
or some kind of other elevated being while writing each
of them. In May of nineteen o five, Rose gave
birth to a daughter. That daughter died as a baby.
Alistair and Rose later had two more children, and then
eventually divorced. Crowley also continued to indulge his love of

(23:30):
mountaineering and let a team in an attempt to summit
Kanchenjunga in nineteen o five. After a climber and three
porters were killed in an avalanche, he ended the expedition.
In nineteen o nine, Crowley established a religious order that's
often called by the name Argentum, Astroum, or Silver Star.

(23:50):
This order's name, though, is typically written as two a's,
each of them followed by a symbol of three dots
arranged in a triangle. That symbol is used as an
abbreviation ensemble in freemasonry. As part of this he established
a periodical called The Equinox, which was dedicated to publishing
things about magic and the occult. When he printed materials

(24:12):
that had originated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,
Samuel McGregor Mathers tried unsuccessfully to sue him. A few
years later, Theodore Royce of the Ordo Templary Orientist made
a similar allegation about the O t O secrets appearing
in Crowley's writings. The O t O had been founded
sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, and it

(24:34):
drew from both Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, with some of its
practices also involving sex magic. Crowley claimed to have had
no knowledge of the O t O and that he
must have learned those secrets directly from the entities that
he was channeling when he wrote his Holy Books. Royce
inducted Crowley into the O t O, and Crowley became

(24:56):
deeply involved and really influential in this organization, including writing
its gnostic Mass in nineteen The rituals and practices that
he developed for the O t O expanded on its
existing use of sex magic and involved both sexual symbolism
and ritual sex. And his words quote, when you have

(25:18):
proved that God is merely a name for the sex instinct,
it appears to me not far to the perception that
the sex instinct is God. We're gonna move on to
some more mundane but we promised still controversial parts of
Crowley's life after we pause for another sponsor break alistair.

(25:45):
Crowley spent most of World War One in the United States,
and during that time he contributed to a pro German
newspaper called The Fatherland. He also wrote a lot of
material that was both pro German and anti British, and
more broadly anti Allies. He claimed that he did all
of this because he was working for the British Secret

(26:06):
Service to help the Allied war effort. In his account,
he had used his surname, which, although he was English,
there are plenty of Irish people who have some variation
on Crowley as their surname uh. And he had also
used his past connection to Irish poet William Butler Yates
to convince German American poet and journalist George Viereck that

(26:28):
he was an Irish nationalist, and he had done this
so that he could infiltrate a secret network of German
operatives in New York. As part of this entire ruse,
on July third, nine fifteen, he and nine other people
sailed all around New York Harbor under an Irish flag,
calling themselves the Secret Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety of

(26:49):
the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic and declaring war
on England. Whether Crowley was really working for the British
Secret Service isn't entirely clear. His accounts make it sound
like he took all this upon himself and then went
to the British authorities to get their buy in, basically
repeatedly offering his services as a spy, only to be ignored.

(27:13):
He also claimed that his pro German writing was intentionally
over the top so that it wouldn't make Germany look ridiculous.
Curly's activities in the United States naturally raised suspicions, and
at one point British consul Charles Clive Bailey confirmed to
US investigators that Crowley was working with Britain, but other

(27:35):
British officials contradicted this. Although the British press was scathing
about Crowley's wartime behavior, when he went back to the
UK after the war, he never faced any sort of
official inquiry or charges for any of the actions that
really would have been considered treasonous unless he really was
doing them as some kind of covert operation for British intelligence.

(28:00):
There is a whole book about this whole idea. I
did not read the whole book, but I did read
some papers and articles by the author, and I don't
know where. I have thoughts about where I land on it,
but I don't feel like I have You're backing up
of them, uh uh. In nine, Crowley started a religious
community in Sicily called the Abbey of Thalima. This was

(28:22):
meant to be a utopian community as well as a
spiritual community for members of the argent astrom and the
O t O. This community became associated with drug use,
sexual excesses, and strange rituals, and faced increasing hostility from neighbors.
Crowley was accused of murder after one of the Thereymites,

(28:43):
Rale Loveday, died in n Loveday had probably drunk some
contaminated water, not totally clear, but his wife, Betty May,
said that her late husband had been forced to drink
the blood of a cat in a ritual. Not long
after that all of this controversy surrounding him, Crowley was

(29:04):
expelled from Sicily. By this point, Crowley had pursued relationships
with various people regardless of their gender, both within and
outside the context of sex magic. Crowley had also started
to describe himself as androgynous, or as having both masculine
and feminine traits, calling himself both Alistair and a feminized

(29:25):
version of Alice. Over the years, he also took on
just a ton of pseudonyms and identities drawn from an
assortment of ethnicities and religious identities. At times, Crowley used
language coined by Karl Heinrich Rix to describe a range
of sexual orientations and gender identities. By this point, Crowley

(29:46):
had also become addicted to heroin. We haven't really gotten
into it here, but like a lot, a lot of
the rituals that he would do and the like his
mystical work would be done under the influence of various drugs.
In he wrote Diary of a Drug Fiend, which was
a novel that he said was based on personal experience.
In ninety five he was named Outer Head of the

(30:09):
Order of the O t O, and then in ninety
nine he got married again, this time to Maria Theresa
Ferrari de Miramar. They separated not long after that. Also
in nineteen twenty nine, he wrote Magic in Theory and Practice.
This outlined quote the science and art of causing change
to occur in conformity with Will, Curley explained that he

(30:31):
spelled magic with a K at the end because quote,
I chose therefore the name magic as essentially the most
sublime and actually the most discredited, of all the available terms.
I swore to rehabilitate magic, to identify it with my
own career. In nineteen thirty, Crowley faked his own death

(30:51):
in Portugal, leaving a suicide note for nineteen year old
Honey Yeager, who was the latest to be appointed his
scarlet woman. This letter said he was going to be
swallowed by the Bocca dot Inferno, or the mouth of Hell,
which is a dramatically arched cliff formation over rushing seawater
not far from Lisbon. He did not die. He resurfaced

(31:13):
in Berlin, where his artwork, which we have not gotten
into at all, was being shown at the Newman near
Endorf gallery. In one Okay, this is nineteen year old
who was acting as a scarlet woman, apparently after his disappearance,
insisted that she had seen his ghost. The next day,
Crawley once again apparently offered his services as some kind

(31:34):
of spy during World War Two, but was apparently again denied.
There are also some reports that he tried to personally
meet with Adolf Hitler, but those are really unsubstantiated. In
the nineteen forties he wrote the Book of Toth, a
short essay on the tarot of the Egyptians, and he
worked on a tarot deck with FREDA. Harris that's something
we talked about more in our episode on Taro, which

(31:56):
came out last year. In the last years of his life,
Alistair crow Lee became friends with writer John Simmons, who
essentially filled the role of literary executor after Crowley's death.
He also met Kenneth Grant, who started working as Crowley's
secretary and assistant. In one letter, Crowley called Grant quote
a definite gift from the gods. Many of Crowley's many

(32:18):
posthumously published works were curated and edited by Simmons and Grant.
Alistair Crowley died on December one. He had spent the
last of his inheritance many years before this, and by
the time he died, he was penniless and living in
a boarding house in Hastings. Although he had been the

(32:39):
subject of just scandalous newspaper reports in earlier years, by
the time he died he was not nearly so infamous.
His obituary in the New York Times simply read Edward
Alexander Crowley, better known as Alistair Crowley, author and poet
who was an alleged practitioner of black magic, died today
in Hastings at the age seventy two. But Crowley's popularity

(33:03):
and infamy skyrocketed during the nineteen sixties in tandem with
the counterculture movement. This wasn't really a defined movement, but
more of an overlapping group of movements and interests and
organizations that were all, in one way or another, a
rejection of the values and norms of earlier decades. This included,
of course, a free love movement, the psychedelic drug movement,

(33:26):
and a resurgence in interest in spiritualism and the occult,
well of which makes total sense for people to bring
Alistair Crowley into it a ripe time. Yeah. Alistair Crowley
is one of the people on the cover of the
Beatles Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which came out
in nineteen sixty seven. He's in the back row, second

(33:46):
from the left. Crowley was also one of the first
Westerners to write about a number of Eastern disciplines and practices,
including tantra and hatha and Raja yoga. These writings found
a new audiences. Interest in Eastern practices really spread in
the nineteen sixties and seventies, although since Crowley's understanding of

(34:08):
all this was definitely stewed through his very specific lens.
That unfortunately means that his perspective on some of this
has become pretty entrenched in the Western understanding of these disciplines,
even when it does not represent them accurately at all.
The O t O went through its own resurgence in
the nineteen sixties, and Crowley's work influenced other new religious

(34:31):
movements in the mid twentieth century as well. Today, Crowley's
name is almost synonymous with Satanism, although his work wasn't
really about worshiping the devil, but his work did influence
the development of modern Satanism. Among other things, he extensively
used the like the deity of Bafomet, which is the

(34:51):
one with the goat head, which has become a symbol
associated with some with a Satanism. He was not the
only person that was using that deity, obviously, but like
that's one of the many ways. Crowley also knew and
worked with Gerald Gardner, who's the namesake of Gardener Ian Wicca,
and Gardener's early writing on witchcraft draws pretty heavily from

(35:16):
Crowley's work on ritual magic and from the O t O,
which Gardner tried to revive after World War two. Gardener's
work and witchcraft eventually did move away from these roots,
but Crowley's work also influenced modern witchcraft more broadly outside
of the scope of gardener Ian wicca, starting in about

(35:36):
the nineteen fifties and sixties. It is not entirely clear
whether Crowley and l. Run Hubbard ever personally meant, although
Hubbard described him meaning Crowley as his quote very good
friend in various lectures, but it does seem as though
Crowley's work had an influence on Hubbard, which may have
influenced his development of dianetics and scientology. Hubbard had worked

(36:00):
with rocket engineer and O t O leader Jack Parsons
on a series of magical rituals known as the Babylon
Working in N that is, once again, not Babylon like
the place, but b A B A L O N.
These were based on Crowley's teachings and were centered on
the idea of conceiving a child that would be known
as the Moon Child, which would allow the deity Babylon

(36:21):
to take a human form. Hubbard served as parsons seer
or scribed during these rituals, dictating the voice of Babylon
from the astral plane. Curley himself does not seem to
have been too eager about all this. In a ninety
six letter, he wrote, quote, apparently Parsons are Hubbard or
somebody is trying to produce a moon child. I get

(36:44):
fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.
The collaboration between Parsons and Hubbard did not last long,
though Parson's wife left him for Hubbard, and Parsons lost
most of his life savings in a failed project that
he his sister in law, and Hubbard started to try
to buy yachts and resell them for a prophet. The

(37:04):
Church of Scientology is notoriously secretive and has denied that
Crowley influenced its doctrines in any way. But in the
paper The Occult Roots of Scientology, which was published in
the journal Nova Religio, the Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions,
and then also in the book Alistair Crowley and Western Esotericism,

(37:25):
hub Urban argues that the idea of a guardian or
a guardian angel, which was present in Crowley's work all
the way back to the Book of the Law, also
appears in a nearly identical way in some of Hubbard's
scientology writing. Aside from that, Alistair Crowley also became a
recognizable and notorious figure in popular culture. He had already

(37:47):
been reimagined in fiction decades before his death, including in
William somerset Mom's Night You Know eight novel The Magician.
Later Ian Fleming modeled the Bond villain Earnst stavro Blofeld
after him. Crowley's work influenced psychologist and psychedelic drug advocate
Timothy Leary and led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who's Alistair

(38:08):
Crowley collection included bull Skeeing House, which is currently slated
for renovations after it was badly damaged by two fires
in the last few years. Crow Lee has appeared in
that Ozzy Osbourne song we mentioned at the top of
the show, and in David Bowie's quicksand the Demon. Crowley
in the novel Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry
Pratchett was also of course named for him. The list

(38:31):
goes on and on. In terms of writing about Crowley,
for a long time, there were pretty much two modes.
There was the work of believers who uncritically accepted everything
he said as fact, and people who saw him as
more of an egomaniacal Charlatan libertine whose work was a
lot more about self aggrandizement and intentionally scandalizing people than

(38:53):
it was about occult beliefs and practices. But there's been
some really more nuanced and thoughtful work about Crowley and
about the nineteenth century occult revival more generally, just in
the last couple of decades, uh, which honestly, I took
some pleasure in reading all of those things, even though
sometimes there was whiplash involved, because I would read one

(39:15):
person that was like just making it sound like all
of these things that happened were a real and then
a different person would describe the exact same scenario and
be like, and of course you can see Alistair Crowley
was totally absurd. Uh. And then you know some more
nuanced writing that has been happening more recently that's more like, Okay,

(39:36):
this is the context that all of this was happening in.
These are the many things that it has contributed to. Uh,
that kind of stuff. Do you have a listener mail?
I do from layla Um and it's not a lot,
it's it's lovely. So Layla and said when I started

(39:58):
the episode on Eunice Newton it this morning for my commute,
I expected another great episode as per usual, I did
not expect to hear a little hometown history. Though I
grew up outside of Saratoga Springs, New York, in a
small town one stop late called Galway. Galway just happens
to be the boyhood home of Joseph Henry. The house
has since collapsed due to disrepair, but when I was

(40:20):
a kid attending Joseph Henry Elementary it was in good shape.
We even had Joseph Henry Day where an actor would
come in and teach us about Henry and all his accomplishments.
It made my morning commute really special to hear you
talk about a place very close to my heart, my hometown.
Being a lover of science and an engineer, I also
really enjoyed hearing about Foot and her research and the

(40:41):
level of scientific detail you included. As always, thank you
both for what you do. I've been listening to the
show for about six years now and it comes up
in regular conversation with my husband and family. And of course,
please see the attached pictures of my fur babies. Because
I know you love them. Thanks again, Layla. So thanks
for this email, Layla. I did not look a ton
into Joseph Henry when I was working on that episode

(41:03):
beyond you know, confirming that he was the secretary of
the Smithsonian and all this other stuff, and I did
not know that he was from so close to the
area where the Foot family lived. Um, so thanks for
drawing my attention to that. And then also thank you
for these adorable pictures of two cats and two dogs.
One of the dogs, I'm just sort of imagining the

(41:25):
setup for this picture. One of the dogs just has
snow all over their face, as though perhaps it was
snowing time and time to just put doggy face directly
down into that snow bank. It's pretty great phoebies, So
thank you, Leila. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast where history podcasts

(41:45):
that I heart radio dot com and we're all over
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(42:05):
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