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The former home of notorious occultist Aleister Crowley – once dubbed ‘the wickedest man in the world’ – is set to be restored after its owners were given the green light to repair the fire-damaged building. Permission to build 10 holiday homes in the grounds of Boleskine House, which overlooks Loch Ness, has also been granted by the Highland Council.Continue Reading

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By the time Page acquired Boleskine he had already become fascinated by Crowley, buying up Crowley-related ephemera that included private manuscripts, first editions of books, artwork, items of clothing and ceremonial vessels. Allegedly built on the site of a 10th Century Kirk (Scottish church) that according to legend “had beenContinue Reading

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Manon Hedenborg White and [Henrik Bogdan] have signed a contract with Oxford University Press for an annotated edition of the magical diaries of Leah Hirsig (1883-1975). This will be the first academic, annotated, and complete edition of Hirsig’s magical diaries from the crucial period of 1923–1925, published together with a selection of contemporary letters.Continue Reading

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[Oscar Eckenstein] was the inventor of the modern crampon and the first to develop a shorter ice axe. Both of which made climbing ice dramatically more efficient and safer and though having evolved some, these are still in use today. Crowley and Eckenstein met in the late 1800’s and he immediately recognized the young Crowley’s potential as a climber and took him under his wing.  Like Crowley, he was an admirer of the works of Sir Richard Francis Burton who Crowley would later canonize a saint of the EGC.Continue Reading

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Legendary comic book artist and writer Savage Pencil discusses three Edwardian underground figures: Montague Summers, Austin Osman Spare and Louis Wain… From his ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Zoo’ series for Sounds in the 1970s, to designing artwork for the likes of Sonic Youth, Sunn O))), The Fall and Current 93, under the name Savage Pencil he has established a wild, hallucinatory style – a trip that’s equal parts hilarious and terrifying.Continue Reading

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Jimmy Page has spent lockdown indexing his books, he said in a new BBC radio interview. Page spoke to Zoe Ball on July 22 to promote the release of “Scarlet,” a 1974 song he recorded with The Rolling Stones which will be released on their expanded edition of “Goats Head Soup.” Ball asked Page what he’s been doing during lockdown. “I’ve been going through, I’ve been sorting out and indexing my books. I’m actually in the countryside,” Page said.Continue Reading

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When Jimmy Page bought an imposing mansion on the banks of Loch Ness in 1970, he was drawn to the property because it once belonged to infamous occultist Aleister Crowley. The Led Zeppelin guitarist sold up after 22 years and few visits, reportedly concluding that there were “bad vibes” there. Today there are claims that occult groups are still haunting the “most notorious home in the Highlands”.Continue Reading

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[Aleister Crowley] visited west Cornwall and it is said by some that he summoned up the very Devil himself in Carn Cottage, which led to a woman’s death, and performed a black mass down the hill in Zennor church. What many may not realise is that in 1934, Crowley, then aged 58, was introduced to a 19-year-old from Newlyn named Patricia Doherty.Three years later she gave birth to the boy Crowley considered his son and heir, Randall Gair Doherty, who was nicknamed Aleister Ataturk.Continue Reading

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“Aleister Crowley was born in England in 1875. He was a famous occultist, media personality and libertine. But in the summer of 1916, he needed a vacation – except he called it a magical retirement, because a man like him would never do anything so mundane as vacation. He chose Hebron, New Hampshire, to get away from it all because he had an acquaintance there, a psychic by the name of Evangeline Adams.”Continue Reading

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“In the late Victorian era, the famous English occultist Aleister Crowley was also intrigued by the sphinx, writing in Liber Aleph (De Natura) of the sphinx’s wholeness and simultaneous fragmentation, an intermingling of the feminine and the masculine. There, the sphinx becomes a symbol of that which cannot be signified. According to Willis Goth Regier in Book of the Sphinx, the French symbolist Alfred Jerry, who lived at the same time as Crowley, was also fascinated by the sphinx.”Continue Reading

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“We became aware that past social media posts made by one of our newly appointed trustees show images that are in conflict with this statement, and that many have rightfully found them upsetting, distasteful, and insensitive. Following this the trustee in question was asked to resign which they did this morning, alongside two others who resigned because they disagreed with this decision.”Continue Reading

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NOW AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON with all new material such as THE FALL OF LENG, POET-KING OF LENG and THE CRYSTAL PARLIAMENT. Journey to the icy plateau of Leng, marvel at the Age of Steam and The Gentleman Ape! Travel aboard the London-Mars Express with the mystic Sir Aleister Crowley. Discover the secret of the Brompton Time-machine! Over 500 pages with a cover designed by the author, Sean Woodward.Continue Reading

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The Boleskine House Foundation announced this evening it had taken ownership of another 3.5 hectares of property for £165,000. A former trustee William Banks, who had bought the land containing the old coach house and stables in his own name in 2019, agreed to the sale after giving the Foundation first right of refusal. Trustees Kyra and Keith Readdy are leading the effort to restore Boleskine House to its former glory. Previously the home of occultist Aleister Crowley and rock star Jimmy Page, it was acquired from Dutch owners last year after a devastating fire tore through the uninsured building in 2015.Continue Reading

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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.Continue Reading

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Pregnant with her first child, and beginning a slide into an abyss of heroin use, [Anita] Pallenberg, then 26, had a preoccupation with black magic that led her to increasingly fantastical realms. ‘I had an interest in witchcraft,’ she recalled later, ‘in Buddhism, in the black magicians that my friend, Kenneth Anger, introduced me to. The world of the occult fascinated me.’Continue Reading

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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.Continue Reading