Aleister Crowley: Blowhard Narcissist?

Aleister Crowley was known as the "wickedest man in the world." But was he really just a blowhard narcissist? You decide!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, you're welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and that makes
this stuff you should know? And Chuck Chuck Chuck. Yes.

(00:22):
Before we get started, I feel like we should say
something to some of the newcomers who haven't quite figured
out our vibe yet. When there's a couple, the two
we'll call them the twins when we say stuff you
should know. We even said this on Jeopardy. By the way.
When we say stuff you should know, we're not saying like,
why don't you already know this? Stuff? You should know this.

(00:43):
We're saying, this is so interesting. We we want to
share this with you. We think you should know this,
so we want to tell you about it. That's the
purpose of the title of the episode of the podcast.
We should call it in this tone, exactly, here's something
you should know. Guy's okay, it's trying to get that

(01:04):
out of the way. I love that. Do you feel
like there's been confusion. I feel like it's been confusion
for thirteen years among some people. I think some people
are actually offended by it, Like who these guys think
they are telling me what I should know, didn't you
think of Yeah? And it was apparently imperfect because you know,

(01:26):
I had an alternate title back then, what was yours?
Do you have something you should know? Guys, I'm going
to try and do my best to couch my disdain
for today's topic. Well, I think you already missed that mission. Uh.
It's about Alistair and there's a lot of just you know,

(01:46):
someone like him was very divisive. You could go to
any uh internet board and read a little bit about
this dude and you will still see so much divisiveness. Uh.
And there's a lot of conflicting information, including right before
we recorded recorded I said something about Crowley and he
said I heard it was Crowley. Yeah, So like, uh,

(02:07):
but I just you know, I'm gonna go ahead and
get this out of the way. We'll we'll do an
overview of this guy. But I found him to be
above all narcissistic, one of the most self aggrandizing, misogynistic,
manipulating users of others who didn't really have anything interesting
to say or add to the good of human kind. Wow,

(02:29):
in my opinion, and yet this was your pick. What
made you decide to want to do one on on
Mr Crowley. Crowley, I didn't know anything that much about him,
so now I do, and now I can have my
own informed opinion. But if you go on these message boards,
you'll find people that say what I said. We'll find
people that say the man was pure evil and you know,

(02:50):
blah blah blah of that train. I don't think he was.
I think he was. Uh. And then other people who
are like, he's my hero. Yeah. I think in the
people who uh he is he is a hero too,
are also not so like disillusion that they're like, no,
he was great in every way. They're like, he was misunderstood.
And he also was often his own worst enemy is

(03:13):
usually how they kind of defended. Because it doesn't matter
whether he was a hero to you, the most evil
person in the world. He was frequently called the most
wicked man in the world or just a total a
hole who didn't contribute anything. Um, he was a jerk,
everyone can. Everyone agrees. That's the one thing everyone agrees on,
that he was a total jerk. Well, I think that's

(03:33):
where the narcissism is something that really triggers me in particular,
So that just kept popping up over and over, and
I just kept saying, who does this guy think he is?
You must have had a really hard time during the
narcissist epic epidemic of the two thousand odds. What was that?
Don't you remember? It was like a whole psychology moving

(03:55):
through this para psychologist basically tried to make their career
by trying to prove that there was an entire generation
of narcissists that have been raised and now every the
world was about to be ruined, and general was right,
but it was, you know, pop psychology. What generation was it?
I guess millennials is what they were who they were
talking about, which is kind of mean because that was

(04:15):
at the time everybody's picking on millennials for just about everything.
And then these two come in and we're like, yeah,
and get this, they're also narcissists. I don't know about that,
but I think in Crowley Crowley's case, uh, there's a
narcissistem that's sisum, that's uh a narcissiystem. Actually I said
it right, This kind of off the charts, like there's

(04:36):
a self importance that it self importance really bugs me too.
So intertwined someone who really thinks they have a lot
to say. Uh. I mean, you can tell by how
much this guy wrote, like overwriting, I have so much
to say, write fifty books and like read any of
this stuff and it's just like kill me. Okay, So

(04:57):
all right, so I'm gonna park all that to the
side and beat totally neutral from here on. Now. Well,
I don't think you have to be, but I do
think we should explain why this guy would even be
worth a podcast episode. Then, um, part of let's just
say who he is first, because everyone who doesn't know
Ozzy Osbourne is like, who even is this jerk? Okay,
So even if you don't even if you're not familiar
with Ozzy Osbourne, which stop this podcast right now and

(05:19):
go familiarize yourself with the body of work of Ozzy Osbourne.
Start with come Back, and then go back to the
Black Sabbath, right Um, Like, even if you're not familiar
with that, you probably have seen a picture of Alistair Crowley.
The picture the basically the picture where he looks like
he's doing the Olan Mills pose, like Hey, I'm just

(05:42):
hanging out around the barnyard feeling good right now, but
he's actually performing a magic ritual oppose um a form
I think is what they were called. Uh, everybody's seen
that picture, right, I think so, I mean you probably
a lot of people have probably seen it. Didn't know
that's who that was even, right? And even if you

(06:02):
haven't seen that picture and you still haven't heard of
Alistair Crowley, if you're a Beatles fan, if you are
a fan of new age stuff, Uh, if you like crystals,
if you buy people candles with their birthday horoscope on
them because you think it's actually going to influence their year,
you can thank Alistair Crowley because he was basically the

(06:24):
center point for all of that stuff coming about in
the West, the idea of occultism, mysticism um, spirituality outside
of Christianity, Judaism, and even islam um. That the fact
that it's present in Europe and America today is almost
exclusively through his efforts and work. Yeah, I mean, I

(06:48):
will say this, The only reason he's noteworthy is because
he did what he did when he did it. Uh.
In the eighties, if you would turn on Jerry Springer
on on any day, you would see eight Alistair Crowley
sitting on stage. But this guy was doing it, you know,
very early on in the nineteen hundreds throughout the early

(07:09):
twentieth century when that kind of stuff, like that's why
he got so much press was because he was doing
things that you dare not speak of it at a
time when people weren't doing these things, or at least
out loud. Even today still people are like, this guy
was really over the top and bounds in a lot
of ways. Like you said, there's some people in the
message boards who still are like he was evil. They're

(07:29):
still scared of him. Uh. And this guy has been
dead for sixties seventy years, and even when he was alive,
he really wasn't all that menacing. I mean, um, like
he tried to be. But if you just stopped and
we're like, what are you doing and really kind of
took yourself out of his his little realm, you might

(07:50):
even laugh at him. Depending on the situation. Yeah, I
know you would, all right. So let's I guess start
at the beginning and what kind of breeze through his childhood,
which was formative for sure. Uh. He was born in
eighteen seventy five in England. Uh, he's he's a british
Man and he was born into a wealthy family. His

(08:10):
family were Brewers, they brewed ale and but we're very,
very religious, and this was a big, big deal because
they were members of a of a religious group called
a Christian group called the Brethren, which was sort of
just Christianity on steroids as far as uh, you know,
saying things like sex was bad and sinning was bad, uh,

(08:34):
to the point where it reversed him. It had the
opposite effect. Yeah, not only was like sex bad, like
that's bread and butter Christian stuff. This was like, um,
like you didn't sign the lease I saw, or you
didn't like take out life insurance because it suggested that
you didn't have full faith that Jesus was about to
come back any day now, like you didn't plan for
the future. You also didn't take medicine and that ended

(08:56):
up killing his father, Alistair Crowley's father Um, who developed
cancer and that apparently was a treatable condition at the time,
which kind of surprised me. Although they were probably just
gonna cut his tongue out, that was it, But rather
where they really is that what they were gonna do?
I mean when they say cancer of the tongue and surgery,
than what else could it mean? Okay, sure, so Um,

(09:18):
the Brethren that of which he was a member, apparently
they were an equal egalitarian group. They all kind of
got together and like, we don't think you should do that.
We think that it kind of shows a lack of
faith in Jesus. And he was like, Okay, I'm just
gonna roll the dice and see what happens. And he died. Um.
And that apparently really soured Alistair Crowley on Christianity because
he really looked up to his father one. But I

(09:39):
think he also really fully bought like the Brethren as well. Um,
and this was a huge like jarring um crash into
a wall. Yeah, you know, it left him with a
lot of money when he would become an adult, I think. Uh,
and the Grabster helped us out with this one. I
think he said it was about two million bucks in
today's money, so a lot of money, but as we

(10:00):
will see, certainly not enough to last a lifetime even
back then, at least the way he burned through it. Definitely,
it's amazing it lasted as long as it did. Really. Yeah,
it made me wonder how much drugs cost back then,
because he bought a lot of them. Yeah, but he
could just go down to the local chemist or you know,
um pharmacy and buy him over the counter. So they

(10:21):
were relatively cheap, I guess I would guess. So, yeah, alright,
chemist doesn't try to tax you. Yeah, everyone knows pharmaceuticals
are super cheap. Uh. So he was left with his mom,
who you know, by all accounts, they didn't have the
best relationship. Um. She was also super religious. I think

(10:42):
ed dug up in one biography that he sort of
treated her as if she were the help uh in
one of the servants, and she in fact referred to
him as the Beast, which was from the Book of Revelations,
in a name that he would later I think he
kind of keep on using for himself. Yeah, And I
saw that she was I saw both that she was
jokingly calling him that in a way but also just

(11:05):
chiding him for his bad behavior, or that she was
a very, very pious person, and that she would not
have called him the Beast unless she was like genuinely
disgrace and and um abhorred by his behavior, you know
what I mean, Like she she wouldn't have used that lightly.
So I'm not sure I'm gonna go with that. The
second interpretation because it's it's scarier. Uh. So then he

(11:27):
eventually makes his way to Cambridge in he didn't graduate,
but this was where he really kind of started getting
interested in two things that would define the rest of
his life. Uh, the occult and sex. Yeah, for sure,
that's where his his life Countries is typical going to

(11:50):
college stuff, you know, sort of um, and and he
was also he got into some other stuff that we
don't have to get into it much, but he he
was a mass or not like a grand master, but
he was a really good chess player for a while
then the grand master from what I saw, like if
he had pursued it, yeah, yeah, like he was considering
a profession like of chess. But he also was a

(12:12):
noteworthy mountaineer. Um. He was in the party that attempted
the first British attempt on K two. Ever it was unsuccessful,
but they ended up breaking a record of of living
at twenty thousand feet longer than anybody else. Like, he
was a serious mountaineer for a very long time. But
as he just kind of got a little older, and

(12:32):
especially as he got a little further into like magic
and sex in particular, he just kind of lost as
much interest, like those were his life's passions, and all
of a sudden he's like, I think I'd rather have
sex of every single kind I can possibly think of
than than climb a mountain. And he still climbed some mountains,
and there were some huge issues that came out of

(12:53):
that pursuit and at times, but um, like you said,
more than anything, he directed his life towards magic and sex.
He says, I think I'd rather climb sexual mountains sexual right, Um, well,
should we take a break already? I think we should. Okay, Well,
then you just answered your own question. You begged the
question in the best sense of that term. All right,

(13:14):
We're gonna take a little break here. I'm gonna collect
myself and we'll talk more about sex magic right after this.

(13:51):
I think before we talk about sex magic, can we
talk a little bit about his poetry. Sure? Um, he
was a writer, and like we said, he wrote up
to about fifty books, and some of these were collected
and published just from stuff he had written along the
way after his death. But he felt like he had
a lot to say to the world. Wrote a lot

(14:12):
of erotic poetry. The first collection was called White Stains,
under the pseudonym Archibald Bishop. I don't have to work
too hard to figure out what that means. I mean,
it's so juvenile, it's hilarious a lot. Did you ever
read did you read any of his poetry? No? I
mean I saw like clips and snippets of it, and
just just from reading so much stuff about how how

(14:33):
not great it was, I was like, I'm not reading this.
I'm not gonna read it. In fact, I can't read
it on the air because it's a family friendly show.
All of them start there once was a man from Nantucket. Uh,
there once was a narcissist from Nantucket. But there's a
poem I would encourage our readers of age to go

(14:55):
look up. And if you're not of age, don't do it.
If you're listening with your kid right now, distract him briefly.
But it's a poem called Celia Farts c E l
I A P H A r T S no no
f A r T s uh. And it's just a
great example. And I'm sure he had more, you know,

(15:15):
I guess legitimate poetry than this. But reading Celia Farts
really soured me on what I felt like he thought
he had to say to the world. Well, yeah, that's
the thing. I think one of the things is is
like it'd be I see what you're saying. It's a
little bit um wow. Uh yeah, yeah I did. There's

(15:36):
a Pinterest post that has it. It's like the first
thing that comes up, so you don't even have to
really click in anywhere. But but I think one of
the things that's so off putting about him is he's
like a Victorian, maybe an Edwardian, a Regency era, but
he's like of that era. He's using words like farts
and like it just keeps getting worse than that poem,

(15:58):
and it's just like so it's just so like crude today,
Like if somebody published that stuff today, you'd be like,
this is crude and lowbrow. But somebody from the era
doing it makes it exponentially worse for some reason. And
I think that that is exactly what he was into. Yeah, well,
he certainly loved to push buttons. Uh. He rejected Christianity

(16:21):
so forcefully that he decided, not only am I not
into it, but I want to be the opposite of it.
I think that the only problem with sin are the
hang ups that people put on it and that to
be truly happy, you should just send sin sin and
I'm really good at it. And so that's what I'm
gonna do with my life. Yeah, and that this is

(16:41):
what he did. And he did um he, like I said,
like any basically any sex act you can think of.
I did not see any accusations of bestiality, which really
surprised me. Did oh you did? Okay? Did did you
get the impression that he actually did that, because I
again would be surprised if he hadn't you know, met
a donkey or two in his time? Saw that I

(17:03):
saw And we'll get to this his time when he
was living in his slum commune in Italy. Things got
really weird there. And of course I don't think we
even said why. There's a lot of conflicting information he
You can never tell when he was being straight or
writing the truth, and you can never tell when someone
had when he had made an enemy and they were
writing something not true to make him look even worse.

(17:26):
It's really hard to parse out the truth. But I
did see stuff about uh, not him committing a sexual
act with an animal, but forcing a woman uh to
with a goat. Okay, And that I mean That's the
thing is it is plausible. And the reason why is
because he really did have a lot of sways, right,

(17:50):
he added a lot. He had enough sway over his acolytes,
gearing like his peak that he could have gotten something
like that accomplished, if he'd really set his mind to it.
It's entirely possible. It did happen. He was into some
really freaky stuff, but like you said, you can't really
tell what was made up by his enemies. And he
had almost nothing but enemies. He had people who just

(18:12):
had just met him and were under a spell, and
enemies which were people who had known him for longer
than a couple of years. That was basically his his world.
Like he didn't have friends necessarily, actually not even necessarily.
He didn't have friends. He had people who were under
a spell or had had just come out from under
a spell. Yeah, And that I think that's one of

(18:34):
the things too, that really helped to reinforce how I
feel about him, is that, um, well, first of all,
anyone who doesn't have old friends, you got to investigate
that a little further, I think. But sure things happen
in life, but in his case, I think the fact
that he was. I think had he given the opportunity,

(18:54):
he would have started a massive money making religion allah
l Ron Hubbard. But it's seems like he could never
attract more than a handful of people at a time.
And I think that's for a reason, Yes, personality based reason.
I think the proof is in the pudding. He set
out to create a huge, massive religion that would change

(19:15):
the world. That was his goal, as we see, and
just it didn't happen. And he also died um without
money even though he had money, despite you know, like
actually trying to perform magic rictuals to attract money. So like, yeah,
he his intent was there. But the thing to me,
the thing to me that makes him legit in some way,

(19:37):
is that he was still performing rituals, still performing magic
um to the end, Like he never gave up on it,
even though like it didn't bring him the fame and
the fortune and it didn't change the world that he wanted,
Like he dedicated, truly dedicated his life to that. Yeah,
I don't think he was a charlatan. I do think
that he bought into this garbage himself, so you know,

(20:03):
he was authentic, definitely. I think that's actually what I
was trying to say, So, should we go to Stockholm? Yeah,
I think we should go to Stockholm because, um, that
is where his one of his first mystical experiences happened,
or that's the way he described it at least. Yeah,
and it was am I reading this right and that
this mystical experience basically was a result of having homosexual

(20:26):
intercourse for the first time. Yeah, gay sex, Okay, good
for him. And hey, I want to be clear, I'm
not knocking in anyone's kink because he had a lot
of them. Not I'm not knocking that at all. What
someone does in the bedroom is like, that's fine, and
that's great. I support all of that. But I think

(20:46):
his self importance of like having to detail and write
about it all as a guide book for others. Uh,
just it is. It was a real turn off for me. So, um,
the reason that he was detailing this stuff and writing
a guide book for others using things like sex. Um.
And by the way, once he was like, oh, actually

(21:07):
I'm bisexual. Like for the rest of his life he um.
He had relationships with men and women, and there was
one man in particular, Jerome paul It, that he later
said he really regretted breaking off his relationship with because
paul It wasn't into the occult. But he wrote that, Um,
with paul It, he had achieved ideal intimacy, which the

(21:28):
Greeks considered the greatest glory of manhood and the most
precious prize of life. So that's how he described one
of his his relationships with a man. Yeah. Um, and
that really says a lot for somebody who didn't necessarily
consider himself bisexual. I think he more than anything considered
himself straight. He just had, like you know, gay sex

(21:50):
from time to time when the when it suited him.
And sometimes some of those acolytes, like you said, he
had no more than a few people around him, sometimes
it was all men. And if you were an acolyte
of his, not only were you helping him perform magic rituals,
you were helping him perform sex magic too. And um,
who knows where that was going to go. But very often,

(22:10):
more often than not, it was degrading. He used sexual
degradation as a way, like a path, like a magic ritual,
but also it was to show power and dominance over
his acolytes as well. Yeah, and for some reason, and
again like if you look at the S and M
community that it didn't feel like that to me, because

(22:32):
if that's your kink, that's fine too. This felt more
like a manipulative user of people than any particular sexual kink.
Or maybe he was born at a time where I
don't know. I mean, he certainly lived in a time
where none of this was acceptable. Homosexuality was illegal uh
in England at the time, So I don't know. I'm

(22:53):
trying to try to frame it at in the at
the time and place and try and be a little
bit more understanding what I mean. I from stuff I saw,
and like reports from some of his acolytes, he he
seemed to like truly get pleasure from this stuff. Oh,
I'm sure he did, so, I don't I don't know
if it was just like a means to an end,
like I think he was really immersed in it personally

(23:16):
as well. I think so. But it seems like every
time he was challenged as not the uh that that
he was done with someone once he had used them up,
including his wife, which you know we'll get to in
a minute. But um, just I guess we should quickly
mention he did have other career paths he could have taken.
We mentioned the chess. Uh, he did go to Russia

(23:39):
to um to learn the business of diplomatic services, which
is something he chose at Cambridge. But um he none
of this stuff interested in him. I think once he
went down the path of the occult and uh, these
sexual you know, you know, orgies at times that he
would get involved in, he was like, this is it

(23:59):
for me? Yeah, I'm living my best life. I'm out there, Jerry,
and I'm loving every minute of it. Very nice that
didn't think of Signfeld references. So um, so he he
winds up his time at Cambridge and he's basically comes
out of it like completely devoted to the occult, even

(24:21):
more devoted to sex, figuring out ways to combine those
two things. He's still mountaineering from time to time. He's
a he considers himself a poet. Um. But he also
he continued, he was a poet before he read Celia parts.
But he also one of the other things about him
I saw it described as he was a magician, and

(24:43):
he considered himself a genuine magician. And he presented himself
as a genuine magician, not an illusion. It's not a
stage magician, somebody who actually could could bend reality using
his will based on rituals and spells and incantations and
communicating with people from or beings from other other spiritual planes.

(25:04):
Right magic, right, And he apparently was the one who
added the K at the end, which was an old,
old spelling of magic. But he did that to differentiate
the two, right. But he didn't invent the K, he
just brought it back. Yeah, he revised From what I saw. Uh,
he was obsessed with books, not only reading. Uh. He
had wall to wall books in his apartment. Um. But

(25:26):
like I said, writing Uh, ed dug up a scholar
that that suggested he might have what's called grandma mania,
which is a pathological obsession with writing and to never
be satisfied and to just keep writing, starting new things
before you're finished, that kind of thing. So that might
be possible, right. Um. So one of the other things

(25:48):
that he was really good at was traveling, like he
could just go somewhere like he I saw him described
as like utterly without inhibition, whether it was with sex
um or whether it was like, oh let's go see
how they do things in Burma. Uh. And as when
he went from place to place, he picked up things
he would feel he would find like the occult and

(26:09):
esoteric traditions and religious traditions, even mainstream religious traditions of
these places, and would figure out how, you know, certain
parts of them fit in with his own his own
view of the occult and his own practices with magic
and um. He did that by by just touring the
world for long periods of time, which is something people
did back then anyway, right, Like you know, if you

(26:31):
went to Europe, you stayed there for like two years
because it took so long to get there and back. Right.
But he even for his time, he was he was
a very seasoned traveler. Yeah, And like you said, it's
really one of the important facts of his life because
what he would end up doing is creating his own uh.

(26:52):
I guess, I guess you would call it a religion Salima.
But Salima was based on all of these travels and
everything he picked up. He'd There were a couple of
secret society occult societies he joined along the way, uh
and then eventually ran a foul love. One was called
the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn UH and one
was called the Ordo Temple orientis uh the O T O.

(27:16):
And it seems like in both of these groups, and
these were you know, years apart, so it wasn't like,
I think seven and nine years apart he joined these
both times. It seemed like he tried to run the
show when he got involved and rewrite their stuff to
suit his needs. And what he was doing though, was

(27:36):
was really trying to create his own jam uh and
kind of using up these order you know, religious orders
along the way. Yeah. And um, I saw just a
little side thing real quick, Chuck. I saw that he
once had a vampire sicked on him by William Butler Yates,
the poet. Yeah, they were there were enemies within the
uh what was it called the first one the Golden

(27:58):
the Order of the Golden Dawn. Yeah, and like uh,
Yates considered himself a white witch, and he very clearly
had decided that, um, that Crowley was a black witch
or a black magician, I should say. And um so
for for Yates and the other people in the Golden
Dawn who were opposed to Crowley, they considered like him

(28:18):
dangerous and like he couldn't learn some of these these
mysteries because he would unleash the stuff on humanity and
basically start a reign of evil here on earth. So
Yates six sicked the vampire on him for like nine nights,
all right, he that he just went up a notch
in my book? Then who Yates? No? Oh really, because

(28:38):
why do you hate Yates even more than you hate
Alistair Crowley? No? No, I love Yates, but to have
to be able to say that, Hey, you know, one
time WB Yates sick the vampire on for nine days.
For not days? He just he just earned a little,
a little point in the Chuck world. I'm glad we
talked about that. Then, Uh, for a while he lived
for a pretty long while. He bought this house on

(29:01):
Lochness called the pronounced the bull Skin House or bulls Skin,
uh not bull skin. This house became a little more
famous in the nineteen seventies when Jimmy Page bought it
of led Zeppelin because he was fairly obsessed with Crowley
for a while, although by all accounts, Page did not
spend much time there. It was in very bad condition

(29:22):
and he kind of took one look at it and
was like, somebody should fix his place up, And he
assigned a guy to live there and just never really
went back. But um, he did live there for a while,
and he owned the house for kind of a long time.
It was one of it was one of the only
places he would stay for any length of time. Basically, yeah,

(29:42):
bull Skin reminds me of Archibald Bishop for some reason.
You know, it doesn't sound right like another student then
would be dr bull Skin right. One of the ways
that he brought people under his influence, to even people
who opposed him, was by using his wealth. Um, he

(30:02):
wasn't above using drugs. He he was surrounded by people
who were using drugs, and some of them had happened
upon like habits, habits like heroin or cocaine habits. He
would he would find people who had you know, power
or status in some of these orders and would be like, Hey,
how about I give you some of that heroine you
crave so much, an unlimited supply. How's that sound? Go

(30:23):
ahead and initiate me into this inner circle. Um, he would.
He would use stuff like that. Like you said, he
was one of the greatest manipulators of his age, for sure,
But in doing so, what he was doing was he
wasn't just doing it to get power. His ambition wasn't
just to become the head of the Golden Dawn or
the head of the O t O. He wanted to

(30:45):
learn as many secrets as he could, just like when
he was traveling in the East, Uh and he was
picking up you know, yoga um or he was picking
up mysticism from Egypt. Like he wanted to learn their secrets,
to figure out the stuff that actually worked. That was
his goal. That was his ultimate goal. Okay um. So
I mentioned a wife. In nineteen o three, he married

(31:07):
Rose Edith Kelly uh and they were really really really
into each other. She was uh got very into what
he was into. Uh. They went to Cairo on their
honeymoon in nineteen o four and by all accounts, it
was a life changing experience where they were both channeling
Egyptian gods. And this is where he through channeling Egyptian gods,

(31:31):
so says him, Um wrote his big sort of bible
called the Book of the Law, which would become the
basis for Thalma. Uh. And he says he was, you know,
like I said, channeling uh a being called I was,
Oh really yeah, I was. That's how I heard it
from everything, okay uh. And so you know this is

(31:52):
where he has his He's had awakenings before, but this
is where he came up with his dianetics. Basically, yeah,
I saw I was continued on like for years and
years and years. Is basically a guardian angel for him
and whatever acolytes he had serving him at the time,
Like they would call on I wast for protection sometimes.
So he was like a kind of a lifelong guardian

(32:12):
for um, for Crowley, at least to Crowley and his
his followers. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean he
talked a lot about guardian angels. UM. He had a
two daughters, uh, and then towards the end of his
life had a son who has an interesting story that
we should probably do a short stuff on um. But
in nineteen o five they had Lilith, who was her

(32:32):
first daughter. She died and I saw different things here.
She died of typhoid in Burma. But I saw that
he had basically kind of abandoned his wife at this
point and she couldn't really care for her herself because
of her alcoholism, and he blamed her death on her. Uh.
I don't know how true that is, But they would
eventually have a second daughter named Lola, Zaza who you

(32:55):
found one of the greatest pictures of any human of
all time on the internet. It is so cool, man,
that kid looks like just a genuinely cool, freaky it girl,
you know what I mean. Well, she's wearing a goat,
so we should just preface that for people who were
triggered by wearing animal hides. And she's wearing more than
a hide, it's a hide and a head. Yeah, yeah,

(33:16):
I think that was a good idea yea. Um. But
so her sister's name, her full name, sister lilith Um,
who proceeded her and died as a baby, was nu
eat ma ah ha thor Hectate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley.
I'm in hotep. Yeah, just went by Lilith for short, Yes,
and she had very sadly a very short life. Yeah yeah,

(33:38):
so I saw that too. That um, even though Crowley
had abandoned his wife and infant baby in China and
they were making their way back and she died in Burma,
that he still blamed He blamed Rose for the baby's death,
like like fully took zero responsibility for it. And that
was a frequent um uh, like a common thing that

(33:59):
happened that he did during his life to like things tragedy,
sometimes life ending tragedy would would befall people around him
because of him and his decisions, and he just would
not accept responsibility for that kind of stuff. Yeah, one
of the reasons he uh was eventually ostracized from the
mountaineering community, which um was a pretty small community at

(34:22):
the time. UH. He reportedly was on a trip with
some people um got into a fight with them while
they were on the trip because he wanted to control
how it went down, and they he splintered off from them.
There was an avalanche and they were all basically buried
and like crying for help, And as the story goes,
he was nearby drinking tea and like didn't do anything

(34:43):
to help them, and they died. And then the word
got out and everyone was like, I don't want to
climb with this guy anymore. Yeah. I think he even
wrote like an article about the expedition in the Daily
Mail and used it to blame everybody but himself for it.
That sounds about right, Yeah, I mean he really was
person at all and actually was a bad person in
a lot of ways. To Yeah, he had um Rose

(35:06):
institutionalized eventually for alcoholism. Um, I don't know. I didn't
hear about his son, um, and I don't know what
his relationship with was with his daughter Lola. Um, they
just kind of fade out of the story and he
just kind of continues on, which probably says about everything
you need to know. Yeah, well, let's do a short

(35:27):
stuff on his son, because it was there was way
more to this story than I could really comprehend for this,
But he had a son late late in life who
eventually was a part of the I think British military
and tried to overthrow the government, who died in the
two thousand's. I think he died in two thousand and six.
So um, this was like way late in his life.
But yeah, let's let's maybe follow up on that. So

(35:50):
you want to take another break and then just come
back and hit a few more high points and then
talk about his his idea of what magic was. Sure, Okay,
We're going to do that, everybody, And don't worry, we
will talk about sex magic eventually. Okay, So you said

(36:38):
that he ended up joining a second group, the O
t O. Prior to that, he tried his hand at
founding his own secret occult group. The A A, which
from pretty much every source I saw stood for astrom
argentine um, which means silver star, so is the Order
of the Silver Star. Basically, Yeah, it's A with a

(36:58):
little symbol than A and a little symbol m um.
And as as after, the O t O, which was
an established group, approached him because apparently he was publishing
secrets um of the O t O. But that sued,
He did get sued, but from from basically all accounts,
he he really had not exposed their secrets knowingly. He

(37:21):
had stumbled upon the stuff stuff himself through his own
rituals and practice, and they they found out that he
had accidentally done this, that he hadn't he'd figured it
out himself, and he said, oh, well, you're immediately like
a high ranking O t O official and we're going
to initiate you now. Um, because anybody who stumbled on
their secrets themselves just automatically became a member. And so

(37:42):
he was very proud of that and happy about that.
And of course the O t O kind of went
different ways with him because it was Alistair Crowley after all, um,
and he started pursuing other stuff too. Yeah, and we
should point out to that when he was sued by
his rival from the Golden On for publishing secrets. He
won that lawsuit, so he he didn't lose it. Um,

(38:06):
But yeah, he pursued other things. There's uh this longstanding
story that he uh tried to and he definitely tried
to become a spy for Britain during the Wars, but uh,
he was always rebuffed unless you believe that he really
really was a spy, and he was so on the

(38:26):
down low that that information never really came out. Um,
but by all accounts, he tried to be a spy
during the Wars in England. Always said thank you, but
no thank you. Then he went to work for the
Germans for a little while. And this is where he
gets a little confusing. He because he claimed he was
trying to write as a writer. He was trying to

(38:49):
write stuff about the Germans. It was so preposterous that
it would have helped the Allies. But but who knows, Yeah, um,
who knows. He is kind of up for debate whether
he was actually a secret agent or not. For sure,
I don't know. Probably well, I don't know. I guess
it could be settled that those things are probably those
documents are still around somewhere if they exist, you know. Um.

(39:12):
So he after World War Two, Um, he ended up
going back to England. He remember, he traveled the world.
He did. He traveled across the Sahara into into Tangier,
I think on foot. He traveled from the Pyrenees down
to Gibraltar on foot. Um. He did time in Mexico, Japan, India,

(39:32):
did a lot of mountain climbing. So he did tons
of traveling. But I guess towards the end of his life,
as it was winding down a little bit, he he
wanted to be closer to home. He had a lifelong
case of bronchitis. UM. So we moved back to England
and a doctor prescribed him heroin and uh he right,
He's like, oh yeah, well friends. But I don't know

(39:56):
if he had successfully kept himself from becoming addicted to
it before or not, But this time it got its
hooks in him and he spent the last several years
of his life addicted to heroin. Like heavily addicted to
heroin UM and ended up dying I believe in nineteen seven, Yes,
basically broke in a boarding house yeah, alright, so maybe

(40:18):
we should talk, uh, finally about sex magic. Finally, sex magic.
I mean you're going to say that I can't proceeding
that all that proceeding this is all a big part
of it. But I did mention his stay in Italy. Uh,
these were three big years in his life. Is when
he lived at a um ed calls it a small

(40:40):
estate in Sicily, but it was really a pretty rundown,
ramshackle farmhouse down the middle of nowhere. Uh. And this
is what he called his church. This is the Abbey
of uh Salima. And it was squalid and it was gross,
and he had h This is where things he did,
the worst of the worst, even by his standards, when

(41:02):
it came to these rituals. And this is where animal
sacrifice may or may not have happened, blood ritual may
or may not have happened. Ingesting all kinds of human
excrement may or may not happen. Um, it was you know,
these were the dark days, or I guess, as far
as he's concerned, the best days, right, the salad days. Maybe.

(41:25):
So sex magic. I don't want to give sex magic
bad name because a lot of people practice sex magic
and there's a lot of wide variety of sex magic
and even the stuff A lot of the stuff that
Alistair Crowley, you know, um performed was just kind of like, oh,
that's it, okay, Um, that's that seems fine. It wasn't
necessarily degrading or debasing, It didn't necessarily involve sacrifice or

(41:47):
anything like that. They're frequently multiple people involved. Um. But
it's like in all of it was in the service
of like entering a higher plane, communicating with other beings
u um and figuring out, you know, what worked best
and what what didn't work um. But what sex magic
and sex magic seems to have been pretty much the

(42:10):
basis of all of his rituals. Did you get that
impression to like, pretty much all of the magic he
did was sex magic to some degree or another, right, Yeah,
And that that's one of the sort of issues I
have with him, is it seemed like most of it
revolved around getting people to do sexual acts they wouldn't
have ordinarily done. Um. So again, the purpose of all

(42:32):
of it, as far as he was saying, was to
to figure out what else is out there and to
basically use magic too to to communicate with higher planes
and to get that knowledge and to basically bring it
back here on earth to create a more just and
equitable society under Thalamic law. Right. That was That's what

(42:56):
his stated point was. That's what his point was. He
wrote very detailed graphic manuals that were very precise about
every sex act you can think of, Uh, to be
you know, part of his Theleamic religion, and he sort
of believed that he was onto something with magic being
what he thought was the middle ground between science and religion.

(43:19):
He thought religion was seemingly thought religion was way too constrictive, uh,
and kind of got in between people in and attaining
spiritual enlightenment. Uh. He it seemed like he thought science
was too rigid. I would argue that he probably thought
science was too caught up in facts and things like that,

(43:40):
where he wanted to be a little more loosey goosey
with it. And so he thought he sort of had
the perfect middle road there with magic with the c K. Yeah,
that's what I'm saying. He would use experimentation and trial
and error to figure out the best way, the most
effective ritual magic. Right. Uh, it seems that you know,
and this is one of those deals where ed even
it's out he was sort of a man of his

(44:02):
time and his attitudes towards other races. Uh. He did
express racist and anti Semitic attitudes at times, um, but
maybe no worse than other people did at the time.
That doesn't excuse it, obviously, but as far as just
sort of putting him in a time and place. But
you know, he also traveled all over the world and
experience all different types of cultures, and I don't think

(44:25):
did so with disdain, right. Um. We talked also Chuck
about um uh Salima and the the law of Salima um,
and there's a very famous like passage from it. Well,
there's really just kind of three laws for Thalima. But
the one that that people um cite most frequently and

(44:47):
is actually, I guess inscribed on the vinyl of led
Zeppelin's third album, appropriately called led Zeppelin three. Um, it's uh,
it's do what thou wilt shall be the whole of
the law. Yes, And if there's ever been a string
of words more right for misinterpretation, it is that one. Yeah.

(45:09):
I think a lot of people say he's basically saying, uh,
there are no consequences, just do whatever you want and uh,
which is um. And we should point out he he
was never a Satanist. He was called that at times,
and I think when people think of Alistair Crowley, probably
because of Azzi and Um, people think he was a Satanist,
but he never was. And he kind of used that

(45:30):
a little bit to get some attention, but he was
never into Satanism. Um. But the reason I mentioned that
is uh to do with that quote, like apparently he
did not mean it that way, like you can just
do whatever you want as long as you're making yourself
happy and uh, go not with God, but go with yourself. Well,
what I saw was that he's saying do without wilt,

(45:51):
meaning like your purpose in life is the purpose in life,
like figuring out what your purposes and applying your full
self to it. Is Is it that that's the whole
of the law. That's that's what that that meant to him? Um.
He also said the law love is the law love

(46:12):
under will, meaning like to to find love and to
be a loving person under like. Secondary to the idea
that figuring out what your purpose in life is um.
So then loving loving your purpose and learning to love
by carrying out your purpose. And then um thou hast
no right, but do thy will, which means just you

(46:32):
really should be doing those first two. Yeah, so um,
those that that was like the law of Thalima. But
like like you're saying, like he's frequently considered a Satanist
even though he never was, and like the people are
like he didn't have any regard for consequences and he
kind of didn't. But that's not really what that Thalie
mc law was saying. So he was very much misinterpreted
and reinterpreted, um, and that especially started I think he died.

(46:58):
He was very very no notorious while he was alive, um,
but when he died, not many people showed up. The
papers covered it. But then that was seven. He just
kind of, um fell out of public consciousness from what
I understand, until nineteen sixties seven when he made a
surprise cameo on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts

(47:19):
Club Band album. Yes, the very famous album cover with
a which was a collage of many many famous people
and Alistair Crowley was right in there. Apparently John Lennon
um enjoyed his writings, as did Jimmy Page and Timothy
Leary and you know his influence was was pretty great
in what would end up being sort of the the

(47:40):
hippie uh experimental drug culture of the nineteen sixties. Uh.
They would invoke Alister Crowley's name here and there for sure. Uh. So,
you know, for someone who UH would probably not be
a blip on the radar today, Uh, he had a
lot of lasting influence and still does. And the apparently

(48:00):
also the New Age movement that really started to blossom
in the eighties and has been kind of revived today.
Seventies and eighties, I should say, UH found his roots
in the fifties, and those people were directly influenced by Crowley.
Crowley's followers. UM. So he was very much the father
of the modern New Age movement and all of its

(48:20):
preoccupation with occultism and mysticism. And you mentioned um the
you mentioned how had he had he had a chance
to be like al Ron Hubbard, he would have grabbed it.
And I agree with you, I think he would have.
But there's apparently a story that even the scientologists confirmed,
but they they interpreted it differently, UM, that l Ron

(48:42):
Hubbard was actually UH an acolyte, a follower of um
of Alistair Crowley's immediate air. So like who they founded
the agap A Lodge, and Ron Hubbard was there performing
magic with another guy, Jack Parsons, who founded the Jet
Propulsion Lab, who was a big time Crowley acolyte um.

(49:04):
And the scientologists say l Ron Hubbard was there trying
to destroy this this church from the inside. But a
lot of people say no, this is actually where all
round Hubbard started to get his ideas for scientology, and
and that's where it grew from, was from Crowley's influence.
You could draw some parallels, that's for sure. Yeah, one
or two. So that's it. How do you feel like,

(49:27):
did you take a bath? Yeah? I'm with you. I
kind of do too. Um, okay, well we made it
through Alistair Crowley everybody. And since Chuck said he needs
to take a bath and I agree, it's time for
a listener mail. I'm gonna call this repping at the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This is from Evan
and Kaylee. Evan Weaver from Harrisonburg, Virginia sophomore James Madison

(49:53):
University and his girlfriend Kaylee Wagner went to the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame and he says this on
our way there, we re listened to the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame podcast to build the anticipation once there,
and when we finished looking through all the exhibits, we
found ourselves at a station where we could design custom
band logos and print stickers. Kaylee and I decided to

(50:15):
make some of these stickers based on our favorite band
names from the podcast. Awesome uh. They print two copies
of the sticker, one to take home, another two place
on the walls of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Needless to say, if you ever visit there and find
stickers with the band names Worm, Burden and Itch Scratch Cycle,
that's awesome. You know who put them there? Yeah, Evan

(50:37):
and Kayley. That is huge. We need to get this
to be a thing that Evan and Kayley started. Every
visitor needs to do this. Attention stuff you should know listeners,
including the New Twins. If you ever go to the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, will you follow in
Evan and Kayley's footsteps for us? It would be awesome. Yeah.
Our goal is to one day take over the real

(50:59):
band names. There so many stuff you should know, faith,
that would be wonderful. See, that's a great exhibit that's
way better than you know. Jimmy Pages mailbox from bowl
Skin House behind plexiglass. You know. Oh, I so wish
that was there. It maybe it maybe that's where I

(51:23):
got my post. So thanks a lot, Evan and Kaylee,
not just for the email, but for starting what we
can only hope is a Stuff you Should Know tradition
to last for years and years and years. Uh. And
if you want to be like Evan and Kaylee and
start a new tradition, or even if you just want
to get in touch and say hi, you can email
us too at stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com.

(51:48):
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