The Aleister Crowley Society
“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.”
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.
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.
A couple working to rebuild the fire-ravaged Boleskine House by Loch Ness are selling charred remnants of the building for £49 a bag. Past owners have included the Fraser clan, Led Zeppelin rocker Jimmy Page and infamous cult leader Aleister Crowley. A crowdfunding campaign was started last year and has so far generated more than £22,500 of the £220,000 target for donations.
Sympathy for the Beast, the new album by Twink and the Technicolour Dream, is based on the wonderfully imaginative poetical works of Aleister Crowley, whose natural and intrinsic musical quality Twink and the Technicolour Dream have tried to intensify with their psychedelic musical drive, using sections of the original poems as lyrics for their songs or narrations for their musical backgrounds.
Kamuret Press will be releasing an extensively annotated edition of Aleister Crowley’s first talismanic book, his remarkable “The Sword of Song,” edited and introduced by Richard Kaczynski. This collection of poetry, essays, satire, kabbalah, Buddhism and magick preserves the layout of the rare 1904 first edition, while incorporating material added by Crowley in his 1906 “Collected Works.” In addition, this new edition notes Crowley’s revisions, insertions, and deleted lines in the various manuscript and typescript versions of the work in development.
Early announcement of a new book, Aleister Crowley – Early Poetic Works – Edited, Annotated and Introduced by Christian Giudice. Aleister Crowley is beyond doubt the most influential occultist of the 20th century. While he is hailed as one of the giants of the esoteric sciences, very little attention has been devoted to Crowley’s years as a Cambridge undergraduate (1895 –1898), when the author wrote and published an incredible amount of verse: this poetry, firmly planted within the vogue of the day, tells the tale of his doomed love affair with actor and female impersonator Jerome Pollitt and of his first steps towards occult sciences.
Richard Kaczynski, author of Perdurabo, the best biography of Aleister Crowley, has announced the publication in August of a ‘revised and expanded’ edition of his excellent Panic In Detroit supplement…
Boleskine House is to be restored and made accessible by its new owners ‘to honor Crowley’s legacy.’
This illustrated lecture traces the appearance of the infamous magus Aleister Crowley in cinema, as both a character and an influence. Gary Parsons follows him from earliest flickering images portraying him, through the Hammer horror era, and right up to the avant-garde. Along the way we meet Kenneth Anger, The Devil Rides Out, and a smattering of European art house films. We promise an enlivening evening with the Great Beast, celluloid-style. Gary Parsons is a film maker and a graduate in film from Goldsmiths College London. He has been interviewed for both Dazed and Hero magazines. He has previously spoken on ‘Witchcraft Documentaries of the 1970s’ and we are delighted to welcome him back to Treadwell’s.
Crowley supposedly died in 1947, but in Ian Thornton’s new novel, set in the present day, the Great Beast is alive and well and living in Shangri-la. Now over 130 years old, thanks to the magical air of his mystical location, he looks back on his life and decides it is time to set the record straight. For Crowley was not the evil man he is often portrayed as. This was just a cover to hide his real mission, to save the twentieth century from destroying itself and to set humanity on the road to freedom and liberty. The Death and Afterlife of Aleister Crowley is an epic novel that will make you see this notorious figure in a completely new light, as he encounters an impressive cast of real-life characters including Timothy Leary, The Beatles, Princess Margaret, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock.
Aleister Crowley — A famous British philosopher and occultist, not to be confused with our demon Crowley. The real-life Crowley dabbled in black magic and wrote the occasional novel, one of which might have inspired part of the sequence of Pepper’s original names. Moonchild follows a young woman who is caught between teams of white magicians and black magicians, and a plan to impregnate her with an ethereal being. Well, it’s either that or The NeverEnding Story.
Those who have bought the property have not been named but they plan to fully restore the house where Crowley centred his black magic investigations after he bought it, aged 25, in 1899. It was later bought by Led Zeppelin founder and guitarist Jimmy Page in the 1970s with the rock god owning the “most notorious home in the Highlands” for around 20 years.
If something supernatural and evil had descended on Boleskine House and Loch Ness, then it didn’t take long before it began affecting and infecting the people that lived around the loch. On one occasion, shortly after moving into Boleskine House, Crowley returned to the abode after a stroll in the hills, only to find a priest sitting in his, Crowley’s, study. As pale as a ghost…
The expanded Third Impression of ‘The Wickedest Books in the World: Confessions of an Aleister Crowley Bibliophile’ by Blair Mackenzie Blake is now available. The new limited edition (200 copies) is a sumptuously produced hardcover that contains an updated author’s preface as well as a number of additional full-colour glossy…
Read more
Formerly a gracious B listed Georgian house of historic note, Boleskine House was predominantly destroyed by fire in 2015 and today the main walls with echoes of its former splendour are all that remains. The opportunity now exists to restore the house and grounds to create an outstanding property subject…
Read more
Amazon have announced the planned publication in December 2019 of the latest in Tobias Churton’s series of biographies: Aleister Crowley in India: The Secret Influence of Eastern Mysticism on Magic and the Occult. Follow Aleister Crowley through his mystical travels in India, which profoundly influenced his magical system as well as the larger occult world.
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!