A charitable company striving to rebuild a fire-stricken mansion above the southern shores of Loch Ness has taken a step forward with major clearance work. Members of the Boleskine House Foundation, which bought the 200-year-old building and estate grounds last year, have removed around 18,000kg of fire-damaged material from the oratory room. That part of the building is believed to be where Aleister Crowley, the occultist and author, wrote some of his works while living there from 1899 and 1913.
Oxford undergraduates are more adventurous than Oxford dons. The Oxford Poetry Society, a typically worthy undergraduate club, decided to venture on a strange fields by listening to a lecture by Mr Aleister Crowley on Gilles de Rais, a fifteenth-century magician known to history as the companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc and to children as the celebrated Bluebeard. The dons, however, took alarm, and so Mr Crowley has had to stay behind in Kent, leaving, one imagines, his inquiring young disciples to the less exciting delights of a paper on Wordsworth, or, perhaps, even on the metrical basis of Alexander Pope’s verse.
The invaluable 100th Monkey Press website has just added some fascinating chess articles by and about Aleister Crowley.
Tobias Churton: Some people may come to Crowley through rock n roll. Led Zeppelin III (1971) had “Do what thou wilt” inscribed on its run-out groove, if memory serves, and I suppose this gave the music a kind of free-form, libertarian rationale. However “Do what thou wilt” does not mean “Do as thou wilt”, so people in search of mere kicks of self-indulgence might be disappointed when they discover Crowley was a stickler for discipline!
One theory about Jack’s real identity involved an infamous name in Britain. Aleister Crowley, the occultist, black magician and writer, was known in his time as The Wickedest Man In The World. “It is surprising that Aleister Crowley has not yet been proposed as a precocious Jack,” Richard wrote, “an oversight which, doubtless, some future theorist will correct.“
In 1936, Parsons along with his colleagues Edward Foreman and Frank Malina initially appear to experience a day of failed rocket launches. Before attempting one last launch, Parsons decides to cast a spell on the rocket, much to the understandable skepticism of Foreman and Malina. The rocket makes it about a 100 feet up before blowing up but in the explosion, Parsons claims to once again see a woman in red…
Amazon Prime’s original series, Lore, has taken on its share of spooky historical legends. And now as Season 2 approaches, it’s digging even deeper into the strange myths surrounding real-life people. In particular, the upcoming episode of Lore based on the true story of Jack Parsons could get pretty weird, especially if you know about Parsons’ past.
Behemoth have unleashed another visually stunning music video. In their classic black-and-white style, Behemoth have debuted a clip for “Bartzabel,” which is filled with blasphemy and nudity. It’s a departure from their more recent material; “Bartzabel” isn’t a track filled with blast beats and gargling gutturals, acting more as a mood piece fairly mellow in execution.
The Hermit invites us to discover wisdom and the progress that comes with study; the card also indicates that the Hermit is a person of integrity, but that he is scared to trust in others and completely express what he is feeling – very much as Jimmy Page was, polite to the point of sometimes being a little boring. The painting of the Hermit on the inner sleeve was by a supposed friend of Jimmy Page’s called Barrington Coleby. There is no record whatsoever of any such person, and there were those who believed the real painter was none other than Jimmy Page himself.
The fuse is indeed about to hit the powder keg very soon on ‘Strange Angel’ and the episode lays out a lot of groundwork and context that could possibly set the stage in further seasons (if the show does get renewed) to explore Jack’s ultimate meeting and friendship with the likes of Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Tensions are high as Jack slowly alienates himself from his loved ones to blindly walk the path of Thelema, which he now believes is the key to realizing his dreams.
This work was first published in 1895 in Trinidad and achieved instant obscurity, However, it seems that a bell was rung somewhere as 9 years later, on 8th April 1904 Aiwass instructed Crowley that, as well as the mantras and spells and the work of the wand and the sword, he should learn and teach “the obeah and the wanga”.
Dutch millionairess Trudy Piekaar-Bakker told how disappointed she was in the looters who raided it after the blaze and warned the Curse of Boleskine House would exact retribution on them. The Amsterdam businesswoman who made her fortune in a Japanese car parts business also talked about restoring the burned out shell…
