Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: Aleister Crowley About this episode This 2021 episode covers Aleister Crowley, a truly prolific and deliberately transgressive occultist whose practices included sex and drug use. He influenced modern Satanism, as well as other new religious movements.
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2:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Happy Saturday. Aleister Crowley plays a role in one of our upcoming episodes this week, so we are bringing out our episode on him as today's Saturday classic.
2:20 Holly Frey? This one originally came out on October 4, 2021. Enjoy.
2:27 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
2:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:42 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Aleister Crowley is somebody I've been considering for an October episode for 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 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. We don't only cover these types of 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 otherworldly in some
3:28 Tracy V. Wilson? way. I grew up in a pretty conservative Methodist household in the 1980s and early 90s. 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 Aleister Crowley was a truly prolific and deliberately transgressive occultist 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 a note on pronunciation.
4:13 Tracy V. Wilson? If you've ever listened to Ozzy Osbourne, or if you're just an American, or if you speak English with various specific accents, you have probably gotten really used to the pronunciation Aleister Crowley. 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 Tarot.
4:36 Holly Frey? Crowley is mine.
4:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Crowley.
4:38 Holly Frey? Yeah.
4:38 Tracy V. Wilson? I think that was what I was even trying to say in that moment when I said it more Crowley. I think I've always said it Crowley. He said it Crowley, though.
4:50 Tracy V. Wilson? The brewery that his family owned even had crows on the labels. Like, I don't know entirely how it became more like Crowley. So it's totally possible at some point during this episode, I will regress 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 even stranger thing. But at the same time, I feel like his life and his work were just so prolific and so varied that it just really scratches the surface.
5:30 Tracy V. Wilson? If you're a devotee of Aleister Crowley, you may find 10 million things that you think we left out.
5:38 Holly Frey? I think that's true of any subject we do.
5:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
5:41 Holly Frey? Aleister Crowley was born Edward Alexander Crowley in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, on October 12, 1875. This was the same year that French occultist Elifas Levy died. He was the author of books like The History of Magic, Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual, and The Key to the Great Mysteries. We talked about him in our Tarot episode.
6:05 Tracy V. Wilson? I forgot.
6:06 Holly Frey? It was also the same year that past podcast subject Helena Blavatsky 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.
6:24 Tracy V. Wilson? This would not have resonated in that way with his parents, though. They were Edward and Emily Crowley, who were part of an evangelical 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.
6:52 Holly Frey? Plymouth brethren don't 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.
7:13 Tracy V. Wilson? Thanks to the Crowley's long 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 sects. His father died when he was 11, 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.
7:46 Holly Frey? Eventually, Alec started to rebel against school, against Christianity, and against his family. He also experienced chronic illnesses, including asthma, 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 1895.
8:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Crowley changed his name from Edward Alexander to Alastair at about this time. This change probably had a couple of inspirations. One was Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Alastor," 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 times while typing this. I had to add it to my word dictionary so that I could keep it straight.
8:49 Holly Frey? Although Crowley didn't finish a degree at Trinity, the three years that he did spend there 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 schoolwork, 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 17th century, and it's focused on the idea that its members are maintaining and passing down ancient esoteric secrets and wisdom.
9:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Crowley's time at Trinity was also happening well into a renewed interest in the occult that started in the late 19th century. Sometimes this is described as the occult revival. It had some common elements with the spiritualist movement that was evolving 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.
10:09 Holly Frey? Just as a side note, if you get into academic work about this whole period, there are a lot of different and sometimes slightly contradictory definitions in use for terms like occult and esoteric. Some draw a distinction between occult, meaning hidden knowledge, and esoteric, meaning knowledge that is revealed only to specific people, like initiates of a 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 Aleister Crowley did could really be described using both terms, just kind of depending on what we're talking about.
10:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Crowley had his first mystical experience on New Year's Eve, 1896, while he was on winter break in Stockholm. He later said that this experience, quote, "put me on the road to myself."
11:04 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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."
11:29 Holly Frey? Crowley left Trinity College in 1898. His first poem was published that same year, titled "Academa: A Place to Bury 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 in pursuit of knowledge, seeking out mystical and spiritual guidance.
12:01 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 26, 1898, Crowley was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which had been established 10 years earlier by William Wynne Westcott and Samuel L. Del McGregor Mathers. This was one of several hermetic orders that traced their teachings back to writings that were attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. That's a figure who combined the Egyptian deity Thoth with the Greek deity Hermes.
12:47 Holly Frey? In addition to its Greek and Egyptian influences, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn drew on Christian mysticism, Kabbalah and paganism, as well as Hinduism and Buddhism, plus the work of Queen Elizabeth I's court advisor and astronomer John D. On my shortlist, folded 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.
13:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Initiates into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn adopted a name or sort of motto. Crowley's was Per Durabo, or I will endure. And then, having been initiated, they progressed through 10 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 person had to learn everything from one stage before being allowed to advance. The order's members also believed that as you mastered each level, you really evolved and progressed spiritually and psychically.
14:03 Holly Frey? Crowley had a really good memory and was also deeply interested in all of this, and he rose through the grades of the London chapter really quickly. But that did not sit well with everyone else in the order. And we're going to talk about that more after a little sponsor break.
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17:28 Tracy V. Wilson? The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had some pretty prominent members, and it was enormously influential in Aleister Crowley's life. Its progression through a series of increasingly secretive, progressive degrees, and its 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 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 in its rituals and its secrets. But other people really questioned his morals. He had developed a reputation as a libertine who abused drugs,
18:12 Tracy V. Wilson? and his sex partners included other men. At this point, homosexuality was outlawed in Britain. Oscar Wilde's homosexuality trial had taken place just a few years before.
18:24 Holly Frey? In 1900, Samuel Liddell McGregor Mathers 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 Dawn's Inner Order, but Farr refused to do it, citing his, quote, "sexual intemperance." So Crowley went over her head, traveling to Paris and taking it up with Mathers. Mathers inducted Crowley into the Inner Order himself.
18:54 Tracy V. Wilson? The relationship between Mathers and the rest of the Order was already contentious. 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 Order's foundational manuscripts, which were supposed to be ancient secrets that had been passed down and protected for centuries, were really 19th century fakes.
19:24 Tracy V. Wilson? So when Crowley arrived at the Order's Isis Urania Temple at 36 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.
19:46 Holly Frey? Crowley went right back to France, where Mathers told him to take over the temple entirely. So Crowley went back to London again, talked 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 they arrived, Crowley was wearing Scottish Highland dress, a black mask, a large gold cross, and a dagger at his waist.
20:17 Tracy V. Wilson? With the assistance of a police officer, several members of the Order physically removed Crowley from the premises. One of those members was William Butler Yeats. In some accounts, Yeats and others physically threw Crowley down the stairs. Yeats and Crowley really did not like each other. Yeats described him as indescribably mad, and also thought Crowley's poetry, which he had written a lot of at this point, was terrible.
20:47 Holly Frey? This incident became known as the Battle of Blythe Road, 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 Kozinski describes Crowley determining he was under a magical attack during all of this, as "street lamps and hearth fires behaved strangely when he passed by," and his raincoat is said to have spontaneously combusted.
21:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeats biographer Richard Elman published an account in The Partisan Review in 1948 that describes Crowley and Yeats attacking each other, with Crowley using black magic and Yeats using white magic. In this account, Yeats 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 Yeats. This piece describes the exorcism as causing a vampire to torment Crowley in the night, and another experienced magician had to help him get rid of this vampire.
22:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Elman'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 Mather's died in 1918 as a result of a magical duel with Aleister Crowley." I'm telling you, this Partisan Review piece is so weird that I am just not confident whether he meant it to be factual or not. Like, he's, he's talking about a literal vampire being in bed with Aleister Crowley and picking at him in the night, and I'm just like, is for real, though?
22:41 Holly Frey? 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 Matatina and then dissolving in the 1920s. William Butler Yeats, 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 20th century. His widely quoted poem, "The Second Coming," is sometimes read as alluding to Aleister Crowley in its last lines, which read, "And what rough beast, its hour come round at
23:24 Holly Frey? last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born."
23:28 Tracy V. Wilson? I had to memorize this poem in, I guess, probably high school. Uh, we definitely did not have any conversations about William Butler Yeats having a magical duel with anybody, or with Aleister Crowley having anything to do with this.
23:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Crowley was 24 when he tried to take over the Isis Urania Temple. And the previous year, he had bought Bolzkein House on the shore of Loch Ness 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 1900s, he also traveled extensively, going to Mexico in July of 1900 with mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein and studying yoga in Sri Lanka, which was known as Cylon at the time. He did that in 1901. He also studied Buddhist meditation practices with mentor and former Golden Dawn member Alan Bennett. In 1902, Crowley and Eckenstein were part of the first formal attempt to reach the summit
24:28 Tracy V. Wilson? of the mountain K2. They got to an elevation of 18,600 feet, which is 5,670 meters. This is just a little snapshot of all of his traveling. There was a ton of it.
24:38 Holly Frey? He was a busy bee. After returning to the UK in 1903, Crowley married Rose Edith Kelly, the widow of Frederick Thomas Scarrett. They honeymooned in India and Egypt. Alastair claimed that Rose had never had any kind of interest in the occult and had no knowledge of Egyptian deities, but that while they were in Cairo in the spring of 1904, she went into a trance, repeating, quote, "They are waiting for you." He described her as being possessed by an entity known as Iwas, who was an agent of Horus and whose name was the true name of the god of Yezidis.
25:15 Tracy V. Wilson? So the Yezidis are an ethnically Kurdish people who have historically been extremely persecuted, and that is carrying through until today. They continue to be extremely persecuted. 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 devil worshippers.
25:42 Holly Frey? Alastair really didn't believe his wife. She relayed instructions on how to invoke Horus and he thought that what she said was absurd. He took her to the nearby Egyptian museum to see if she could identify Horus in any of the objects there. She was drawn to one particular stele, saying it identified the god who was talking to her. That object was labeled as catalog number 666 and Alastair later called it the stele of revealing.
26:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Alastair 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, Rose instructed him to enter the room where he had been working at noon on April 8th, 9th, and 10th. And then for about an hour over those three days, still reporting that she was directly transmitting the words of Iwas, she dictated what became known as the Book of the Law. This made Rose the first woman to fill the role that Crowley would call his Scarlet Woman. This was meant to be a manifestation of the guardess Babylon, who could channel or transmit
26:54 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 instead of a Y was numerologically 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 rituals with Crowley.
27:28 Holly Frey? The Book of the Law became the central text of the philosophy and religious movement known as the Lima. The book contains the law of the Lima. "Do what you will shall be the whole of the law," which is often followed by, "Love is the law, love under will, and every man and woman is a star." Rose had also told Aleister that he was to be the prophet of a new aeon, which would see the world move from the age of Osiris to the age of Horus. 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 I, the Sino-Japanese War,
28:10 Holly Frey? and World War II by a period of nine months.
28:14 Tracy V. Wilson? After these events in Cairo, Aleister Crowley started associating himself with the number 666 and the beast from the biblical book of Revelation, calling himself the Beast 666, or the Great Beast 666. He would go on to write 12 more holy books between 1907 and 1911, describing himself as under the direct influence of a spirit or some kind of other elevated being while writing each of them.
28:44 Holly Frey? In May of 1905, Rose gave birth to a daughter. That daughter died as a baby. Aleister and Rose later had two more children and then eventually divorced. Crowley also continued to indulge his love of mountaineering and led a team in an attempt to summit Kanchanjunga in 1905. After a climber and three porters were killed in an avalanche, he ended the expedition.
29:08 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1909, Crowley established a religious order that's often called by the name Argentum, Astrum, or Silver Star. This order's name, though, is typically written as two As, each of them followed by a symbol of three dots arranged in a triangle. That symbol is used as an abbreviation symbol 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 that had originated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Samuel McGregor Mathers tried unsuccessfully to sue him.
29:47 Holly Frey? A few years later, Theodore Royce of the Ordo Templi Orientis made a similar allegation about the OTO's secrets appearing in Crowley's writings. The OTO had been founded sometime around the turn of the 20th century, and it drew from both Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, with some of its practices also involving sex magic. Crowley claimed to have had no knowledge of the OTO and that he must have learned those secrets directly from the entities that he was channeling when he wrote his holy books.
30:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Royce inducted Crowley into the OTO, and Crowley became deeply involved and really influential in this organization, including writing its Gnostic mass in 1913. The rituals and practices that he developed for the OTO expanded on its existing use of sex magic and involved both sexual symbolism and ritual sex. In his words, "When you have 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."
30:53 Holly Frey? We're gonna move on to some more mundane, but we promise still controversial, parts of Crowley's life after we pause for another sponsor break.
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33:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Aleister Crowley spent most of World War I 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 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. And he had also used his past connection to Irish poet William Butler Yeats to convince
33:55 Tracy V. Wilson? German-American poet and journalist George Virek that 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 3, 1915, 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 the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic. And declaring war on England.
34:25 Holly Frey? 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. He also claimed that his pro-German writing was intentionally over the top, so that it would make Germany look ridiculous.
34:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Crowley'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 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. There is a whole book about this whole idea. I did not read the whole book, but I did
35:35 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 here backing up of them.
35:47 Holly Frey? In 1920, Crowley started a religious community in Sicily called the Abbey of Thalima. This was meant to be a utopian community, as well as a spiritual community for members of the Argent Astrum and the OTO. This community became associated with drug use, sexual excesses, and strange rituals, and faced increasing hostility from neighbors.
36:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Crowley was accused of murder after one of the Thalimites, Raoul Lovday, died in 1923. Lovday 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 expelled from Sicily.
36:36 Holly Frey? 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 Aleister and a feminized 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 Carl Heinrich Ulrichs to describe a range of sexual orientations and gender identities.
37:16 Tracy V. Wilson? By this point Crowley 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 1922, he wrote Diary of a Drug Fiend, which was a novel that he said was based on personal experience. In 1925, he was named Outer Head of the Order of the OTO. And then in 1929, he got married again, this time to Maria Theresa Ferrari de Miramar. They separated not long after that. Also, in 1929, he wrote Magic in Theory and Practice. This outlined, quote, "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will."
38:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Crowley explained that he 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."
38:19 Holly Frey? In 1930, Crowley faked his own death in Portugal, leaving a suicide note for 19-year-old Hani Jaeger, who was the latest to be appointed his Scarlet Woman. This letter said he was going to be swallowed by the Boca do Inferno, or the Mouth of Hell, which is a dramatically arched cliff formation over rushing seawater not far from Lisbon.
38:42 Holly Frey? He did not die. He resurfaced in Berlin, where his artwork, which we have not gotten into at all, was being shown at the Newman-Nierendorf Gallery in 1931.
38:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, this 19-year-old, who was acting as a Scarlet Woman, apparently after his disappearance, insisted that she had seen his ghost the next day. Crowley, once again, apparently offered his services as some kind of spy during World War II, 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 1940s, he wrote "The Book of Thoth," a short essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians, and he worked on a tarot deck with Frida Harris. That's something we talk about more in our episode on Tarot, which came out last year.
39:28 Holly Frey? In the last years of his life, Aleister Crowley 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 posthumously published works were curated and edited by Simmons and Grant.
39:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Aleister Crowley died on December 1, 1947. 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 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 Aleister Crowley, author and poet, who was an alleged practitioner of black magic, died today in Hastings at the age of 72."
40:32 Holly Frey? But Crowley's popularity and infamy skyrocketed during the 1960s 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, the free love movement, the psychedelic drug movement, and a resurgence in interest in spiritualism and the occult.
41:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh, which makes total sense for people to bring Aleister Crowley into it.
41:06 Holly Frey? A ripe time.
41:07 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, Aleister Crowley is one of the people on the cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which came out in 1967. He's in the back row, second 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 audience as interest in Eastern practices really spread in the 1960s and 70s. Although, since Crowley's understanding of all this was definitely skewed through his very specific lens, that unfortunately means that his perspective on some of this has
41:48 Tracy V. Wilson? become pretty entrenched in the Western understanding of these disciplines, even when it does not represent them accurately at all.
41:55 Holly Frey? The OTO went through its own resurgence in the 1960s, and Crowley's work influenced other new religious movements in the mid 20th 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.
42:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, among other things, he extensively used the deity of Baphomet, which is the one with the goat head, which has become a symbol associated with Satanism. He was not the only person that was using that deity, obviously, but that's one of the many ways. Crowley also knew and worked with Gerald Gardner, who's the namesake of Gardenarian Wicca. And Gardner's early writing on witchcraft draws pretty heavily from Crowley's work on ritual magic and from the OTO, which Gardner tried to revive after World War II. Gardner's work in witchcraft eventually did move away from these roots.
42:59 Tracy V. Wilson? But Crowley's work also influenced modern witchcraft more broadly outside of the scope of Gardenarian Wicca, starting in about the 1950s and 60s.
43:10 Holly Frey? It is not entirely clear whether Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard ever personally met, although Hubbard described him, meaning Crowley, as his "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 with rocket engineer and OTO leader Jack Parsons on a series of magical rituals known as the Babylon Working in 1946. 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 to take
43:52 Holly Frey? a human form. Hubbard served as Parsons' seer or scribe during these rituals, dictating the voice of Babylon from the astral plane.
44:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Crowley himself does not seem to have been too eager about all this. In a 1946 letter, he wrote, "Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is trying to produce a Moon Child. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats."
44:19 Holly Frey? The collaboration between Parsons and Hubbard did not last long, though. Parsons' 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 profit.
44:34 Tracy V. Wilson? The 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," Hugh B. 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.
45:11 Holly Frey? Aside from that, Alistair Crowley also became a recognizable and notorious figure in popular culture. He had already been reimagined in fiction decades before his death, including in William Somerset Maugham's 1908 novel, The Magician. Later, Ian Fleming modeled the Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld after him. Crowley's work influenced psychologist and psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, whose Alistair Crowley collection included Bolshkine House, which is currently slated for renovations after it was badly damaged by two fires in the last few years. Crowley has appeared in that Ozzy Osbourne song we mentioned at the top of the show and in David Bowie's
45:53 Holly Frey? Quicksand. The Demon Crowley in the novel Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett was also, of course, named for him. The list goes on and on.
46:03 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 it was about occult beliefs and practices. But there's been some really more nuanced and thoughtful work about Crowley and about the 19th century occult revival more generally just in the last couple of decades, which honestly, I took some pleasure in reading all of those things, even though sometimes there was whiplash involved because I would
46:46 Tracy V. Wilson? read one person that was like, just making it sound like all of these things that happened were 100% 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.
47:02 Tracy V. Wilson? And then, you know, some more nuanced writing that has been happening more recently. That's more like, okay, this is the context that all of this was happening in. These are the many things that it has contributed to, that kind of stuff. Phew.
47:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook URL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is [email protected] . You can find us all over social media at @MissedInHistory. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
47:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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