
Inside Aleister Crowley’s satanic Sicilian monastery
The Abbey of Thelema looks out on the wide Mediterranean. Italy has a long history of occultism and Crowley was likely aware of the various cults and religious sects that… Read more »
The Abbey of Thelema looks out on the wide Mediterranean. Italy has a long history of occultism and Crowley was likely aware of the various cults and religious sects that… Read more »
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”.
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.’
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.
Ancient Egypt magazine continues to be an essential monthly read for all those interested in the Egyptological basis of Thelema and to contextualise the life of Ankhefenkhons I. This month’s issue is especially interesting…
“A Warning to Australia: DEVIL WORSHIP HERE!” read the headlines, next to the image of a thin woman with unkempt hair, pencil-thin arched eyebrows and a focused scowl. Her name was Rosaleen Norton, “Roie” to those who knew her, a New Zealand-born artist and witch who made her home in Darlinghurst, near Sydney’s Kings Cross, in the 1940s and ’50s scandalising the conservative establishment.
UK tabloid, The Sun, presents a wander through the more controversial parts of Chris Salewicz’s new biography of Jimmy Page. Crowley features, of course, along with drugs and the rest.
A REMOTE ruin once owned by a notorious occultist dubbed “the wickedest man in the world” has been placed on a list of historic buildings under threat. Boleskine House, which sits on the south-east shore of Loch Ness, was reduced to a burnt-out shell when a fierce blaze ripped through the property in 2015. It was previously the home of infamous “black magician” Aleister Crowley, who scandalised British society in the early 20th century through his experiments with sex, drugs and the occult.
Fortean Times, April 2018: Why the Goat-Headed God of the Templars is Making a Satanic Comeback. Nuff said!
Aleister Crowley makes it to a (rather silly) article in the Metro newspaper: In 1918, the famous English occultist Aleister Crowley performed weird occult rituals in New York while absolutely… Read more »
The inter-connection of occultism and espionage goes back at least to the Elizabethan intrigues of Dr. John Dee, and certainly is much older than that. For Crowley, Dr. Dee was a role-model in more ways than one. Occult orders and spy agencies do share much in common. Both are focused on the acquisition and safeguarding of specialised knowledge and embrace secrecy as a cardinal virtue.