SYMHC Classics: Aleister Crowley

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.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Alistair Crowley plays a role in what of
our upcoming episodes this week, so we are breaking out
our episode on him as Today's Saturday Classic. This one
originally came out on October fourth, twenty twenty one. Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production

(00:23):
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson,
and I'm Holly Frye. Alistair 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

(00:46):
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

(01:10):
for a more seasonal October episode, which on this show
has become traditionally associated with things that are otherworldly in
some way. I grew up in a pretty conservative Methodist
household in the nineteen eighties and early nineties. In other words,
in the middle of Satanic panic. That meant there were

(01:33):
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 Alister Crowley was a truly
prolific and deliberately transgressive occultist whose practices included sex and

(01:55):
drug use. He went on to influence things like modern Satanism,
as well as various other new religious movements. And also
just the note on pronunciation. 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

(02:17):
gotten really used to the pronunciation Alister Crawley. 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 Taro Crowley is mine Crowley. Yeah, I think that
was what I was even trying to say in that
moment when more I said it more Crawley. I think

(02:37):
I've always said it Crowley. He said it Crawley though
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

(02:58):
way I've said it my entire life 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 a 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

(03:22):
the surface. If you're a deve otey of Alistair Crowley,
you may find ten million things that you think we
left out. I think that's true of any subject we do. Yeah.
Alistair Crowley was born Edward Alexander Crowley in Lymington, spa, Warwickshire, England,
on October twelfth, eighteen seventy five. This was the same

(03:43):
year that French occultists 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 hero episode I Forgot.
It was also this same year that past podcast subject
Helena Blovotsky co founded the Theosophical Society, which pulled together religious, philosophical,

(04:08):
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. 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

(04:29):
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. Plymouth Brethren don't really
have a hierarchy of clergy and laity, but Edward was

(04:50):
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. Thanks to the Crowley's long involvement with
the brewing industry, the family was pretty well off. They

(05:11):
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 eleven,
and this was really traumatic. Alec had really idolized his father,

(05:32):
and an uncle who played a much bigger role in
his life from that point, was really pretty cruel to him. Eventually,
alex 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

(05:54):
during those periods he worked with private tutors. He spent
some time in both Malvern College and Tone School before
entering Trinity College, Cambridge in eighteen ninety five. Curley changed
his name from Edward Alexander to Alistair at about this time.
This change probably had a couple of inspirations. One was

(06:14):
Percy Bis Shelley's poem Alistair or the Spirit of Solitude,
and the other was the Gaelic version of the name Alexander,
although that is usually spelled Alasdair, not al eist Er,
a name I spelled wrong a lot of times while

(06:35):
typing this. I had to add it to my word
dictionaries I could keep it straight. Although Curley 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

(06:58):
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 seventeenth century, and it's focused

(07:19):
on the idea that its members are maintaining and passing
down ancient esoteric secrets and wisdom. Curley's time at Trinity
was also happening well into a renewed interest in the
occult that started in the late nineteenth century. Sometimes this
is described as the Occult Revival. It had some common
elements with the spiritualist movement that was evolving at about

(07:42):
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 and Greece and Asia.
Just as a side note, if you get into academic

(08:05):
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 a
cult meaning hidden knowledge, an esoteric meaning knowledge that is
revealed only too specific people like initiates of a specific order.

(08:26):
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 Alistair Crowley did could really be described
using both terms, just kind of depending on what we're
talking about. Crowley had his first mystical experience on New
Year's Eve, eighteen ninety six while he was on winter

(08:49):
break in Stockholm. He later said that this experience quote
put me on the road to myself. 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

(09:13):
the entire forces of the universe from all eternity were
concentrated and made manifest in a single rose. Crowley left
Trinity College in eighteen ninety eight. His first poem was
published that same year, titled Accladema, 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

(09:37):
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.
Yeah as he started developing whole systems of ritual magic.
This travel would also include going to places and like

(10:00):
doing these very prolonged involved like mystical rituals and incantations
and things. On November twenty sixth, eighteen ninety eight, Croley
was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,
which had been established ten years earlier by William Wynn
Westcott and Samuel Ledel McGregor Mathers. This was one of

(10:24):
several Hermetic orders that trace their teachings back to writings
that were attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, that's a figure who
combined the Egyptian deity thought with the Greek deity Hermes.
In addition to its Greek and Egyptian influences, the Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn drew on Christian Mysticism, Kabbalah,

(10:47):
and Paganism, as well as Hinduism and Buddhism, plus the
work of Queen Elizabeth the first court adviser and astronomer
John de On My short list. Folded into all of
these influences was 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

(11:09):
spread as former members went on to establish their own orders.
Initiates into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn adopted
a name or sort of motto. Crowley's was perdurabo or
I will endure, and then having been initiated, they progressed
through ten levels of esoteric knowledge, with each grade being

(11:30):
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,

(11:51):
you really evolved and progressed spiritually and psychically. 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. We're going to
talk about that more after a little sponsor break. The

(12:21):
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 it's focus on ritual magic performed using specific regalia
that all formed a template for a lot of Crowley's

(12:42):
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 and its rituals and its secrets, but
other people really questioned his morals. He had developed a
reputation as a libertine who abused drugs, and his sex

(13:05):
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. In nineteen hundred, Samuel Ledel McGregor
Mathers was head of the Order but had gone to France.
Florence Farr was temporarily leading the Order in London in

(13:25):
his place. Crowley reached a 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. The relationship between Mathers and the rest of

(13:49):
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 errare 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,

(14:13):
were really nineteenth century fakes. So when Crowley arrived at
the Order's isis Uranias Temple at thirty six 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

(14:37):
refused to do it. 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

(14:59):
be questioned. When they arrived, Crowley was wearing Scottish Highland dress,
a black mask, a large gold cross, and a dagger
at his waist. 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 Yates. In some accounts,

(15:21):
Yates and others physically threw Crowley down the stairs. Yates
and Crowley really did not like each other. Yates described
him as indescribably mad, and also thought Crowley's poetry, which
he had written a lot of at this point, was terrible.
This incident became known as the Battle of blythe Road,

(15:43):
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 Kazinski describes Crowley
determining he was under a magical attack during all of this,

(16:04):
as street lamps and hearthfires behaved strangely when he passed by,
and his raincoat is said to have spontaneously combusted. Yates
biographer Richard Ellman published an account in The Partisan Review
in nineteen forty eight that describes Crowley and Yates attacking
each other, with Crowley using black magic and Yates using

(16:25):
white magic. In this account, Yates used some of Crowley's
hair to perform an exorcism at the request of poet
and artist Althea Gilds, who was in a tumultuous relationship
with him. Him being Crowley, not Yates. This piece describes
the exorcism as causing a vampire to torment Crowley in

(16:47):
the night, and another experienced magician had to help him
get rid of this vampire. Ellman's biography of Yates also
mentions that quote it is said, which is one of
those words that you can say to say a thing
that maybe you believe or maybe you don't believe. It
is said that Samuel McGregor Mathers died in nineteen eighteen

(17:08):
as a result of a magical duel with Alistair 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 talking about a
literal vampire being in bed with Alister Crowley. And picking

(17:30):
at him in the night, and I'm just like, it's
for real, though I have thoughts, 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 Matutina and then dissolving

(17:53):
in the nineteen twenties. William Butler Yates, 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 twentieth century. His widely quoted
poem The Second Coming is sometimes read as alluding to
Alister Crowley in its last lines, which read, and what

(18:15):
rough beast its hour come round at last slouches towards
Bethlehem to be born. I had to memorize this poem,
and I guess probably high school. We definitely did not
have any conversations about William Butler Yates having a magical
duel with anybody, or with Alistair Crowley having anything to
do with this. Crowley was twenty four when he tried

(18:38):
to take over the isis Urania Temple, and the previous
year he had bought bolskein house on the shore of
Lochness 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 nineteen hundreds, he also
traveled extensively, going to Mexico in July of nineteen hundred

(18:58):
with mountaineer Oscar ec and Stein and studying yoga in
Sri Lanka, which was known as Ceylon at the time.
He did that in nineteen oh one. He also studied
Buddhist meditation practices with mentor and former Golden Dawn member
Alan Bennett. In nineteen oh two, Crowley and Eckenstein were
part of the first formal attempts to reach the summit

(19:20):
of the Mountain K two. They got to an elevation
of eighteen thousand, six hundred feet, which is five thy
six hundred and seventy meters. This is just a little
snapshot of Ali's traveling. There was a ton of it.
He was a busy bee. After returning to the UK
in nineteen oh three, Crowley married Rose Edith Kelly, the
widow of Frederick Thomas Scarett. They honeymooned in India and Egypt.

(19:43):
Alister claims 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 nineteen oh four, she went into a trance, repeating
quote they are waiting for you. He discribed her as
being possessed by an entity known as Iowas, who was

(20:03):
an agent of Horace and whose name was the true
name of the god of Yeside's. So the Jesides are
an ethnically Kurdish people who have historically been extremely persecuted,
and that is carrying through until today. They continued to
be extremely persecuted. It is possible that Crowley had read
about them in the work of past podcast subject Helena Blovatski.

(20:27):
Her work about them is honestly pretty offensive and mischaracterized
them as just straight up devil worshippers. Alistair really didn't
believe his wife. She relayed instructions on how to invoke Horace,
and he thought that what she said was absurd. He
took her to the nearby Egyptian Museum to see if
she could identify Horace in any of the objects there.

(20:50):
She was drawn to one particular steely, saying it identified
the god who was talking to her. That object was
labeled as Catalog number six sixty six, and Alistair later
called it the Steally of Revealing. Allister eventually came to
believe that she was telling him something genuine, and he
did various incantations and invocations over a period of weeks

(21:13):
in March and early April. Eventually, Rose instructed him to
enter the room where he had been working at noon
on April eighth, ninth, and tenth, and then for about
an hour over those three days, still reporting that she
was directly transmitting the words of iowas she dictated what
became known as the Book of the Law. This made

(21:36):
Rose the first woman to fill the role that Crowley
would call his Scarlet Woman. This was meant to be
a manifestation of the gardess Babylon, who could channel or
transmit messages to him from higher beings. That's not spelled
quite like Babylon. It is Baba l o inn instead
of b A b y lonn, because the spelling with

(22:00):
an a instead of a y was numerogically 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.

(22:21):
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 Salima quote do what you
will shall be the whole of the law, which is
often followed by quote love is the Law, love underwill,
and every man and woman is a star. Rose had

(22:41):
also told Alistair that he was to be the prophet
of a new eon which would see the world move
from the Age of o Cyrus to the Age of Horace.
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 Balllkin War,
World War I, the Sino Japanese War, and World War

(23:04):
II by a period of nine months. After these events
in Cairo, Alister Crowley started associating himself with the number
sixty sixty six and the beast from the Biblical Book
of Revelation, calling himself the Beast sixty six six or
the Great Beast six sixty six. He would go on
to write twelve more holy books between nineteen oh seven

(23:26):
and nineteen eleven, describing himself as under the direct influence
of a spirit or some kind of other elevated being
while writing each of them. In May of nineteen oh five,
Rose gave birth to a daughter. That daughter died as
a baby. Alistair and Rose later had two more children
and then eventually divorced. Crowley also continued to indulge his

(23:48):
love of mountaineering and led a team in an attempt
to summit Counchinjunga in nineteen oh five. After a climber
and three porters were killed in an avalanche, he ended
the expedition. In nineteen oh nine, 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

(24:11):
two a's, 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

(24:33):
the Golden Dawn. Samuel McGregor Mathers tried unsuccessfully to sue him.
A few years later, Theodore Royce of the Ordo templey
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 twentieth century, and it drew from

(24:54):
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. Royce inducted Crowley into the OTO,

(25:14):
and Crowley became deeply involved and really influential in this organization,
including writing its gnostic Mass in nineteen thirteen. 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, quote, when you

(25:37):
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. 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.

(26:04):
Alister Crowley spent most of World War One 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

(26:24):
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 Yates to
convince German American poet and journalist George Viereck that he

(26:48):
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 third, nineteen fifteen, 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

(27:08):
Provisional Government of the Irish Republic, and declaring war on England.
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

(27:32):
also claimed that his pro German writing was intentionally over
the top so that it would make Germany look ridiculous.
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

(27:55):
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.

(28:19):
There is a whole book about this whole idea. I
did not read the whole book, but I did 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 hear backing up
of them. Uh. In nineteen twenty Crowley started a religious
community in Sicily called the Abbey of Thelema. This was

(28:42):
meant to be a utopian community as well as a
spiritual community for members of the argent Astrom and the Oto.
This community became associated with drug use, sexual excesses, and
strange rituals, and faced increasing hostility from neighbors. Crowley was
a cue used of murder after one of the Thelemites,

(29:02):
Raul Loveday, died in nineteen twenty three. Loveday 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,

(29:22):
Crowley was expelled from Sicily. 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 androgynists, or as having
both masculine and feminine traits, calling himself both Alister and

(29:43):
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 Karl Heinrich Unrichs to describe
a range of sexual orientations and gender identities. By this point,

(30:05):
Curley had also become addicted to heroin. We haven't really
gotten into it here, but like a lot of the
rituals that he would do and his mystical work would
be done under the influence of various drugs. In nineteen
twenty two, he wrote Diary of a Drug Fiend, which
was a novel that he said was based on personal experience.

(30:25):
In nineteen twenty five, he was named Outer Head of
the Order of the Oto, and then in nineteen twenty
nine he got married again, this time to Maria Theresa
Ferrari de Miramar. They separated not long after that. Also
in nineteen twenty nine, he wrote Magic in theory and practice.
This outlined quote the science and art of causing change

(30:46):
to occur. In conformity with will, Curley 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 credited, of all the available terms.
I swore to rehabilitate magic, to identify it with my
own career. In nineteen thirty Crowley faked his own death

(31:11):
in Portugal, leaving a suicide note for nineteen year old
Hanni Yaeger, who was the latest to be appointed his
scarlet woman. This letter said he was going to be
swallowed by the Bocca do Inferno, or the mouth of Hell,
which is a dramatically arched cliff formation over rushing seawater
not far from Lisbon. He did not die. He resurfaced

(31:32):
in Berlin, where his artwork, which we have not gotten
into at all, was being shown at the Newmannerendorf Gallery
in nineteen thirty one. Yeah, this nineteen 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

(31:53):
of spy during World War Two, 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 nineteen forties, he wrote the Book of Toth, a
short essay on the tarot of the Egyptians, and he
worked on a tarot deck with FRIEDA. Harris. That's something
we talk about more in our episode on Taro, which

(32:15):
came out last year. In the last years of his life,
Alister 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

(32:38):
published works were curated and edited by Simmons and Grant.
Alister Crowley died on December one, nineteen forty seven. 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.

(33:03):
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 Alister Crowley, author and poet,
who was an alleged practitioner of black magic, died today
in Hastings at the age of seventy two. But Crowley's
popularity and infamy skyrocketed during the nineteen sixties in tandem

(33:27):
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

(33:48):
the occult, all of which makes total sense for people
to bring Alistair Crowley into it. A ripe time, Yeah,
Alister Crowley is one of the people on the cover
of the Beatles Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which
came out in nineteen sixty seven. 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

(34:12):
and practices, including tantra and Hatha and Raja yoga. These
writings found a new audience as interest in Eastern practices
really spread in the nineteen sixties and seventies. Although since
Crowley's understanding of all this was definitely skewed through his
very specific lens, that unfortunately means that his perspective on

(34:35):
some of this has become pretty entrenched in the Western
understanding of these disciplines, even when it does not represent
them accurately at all. The Oto went through its own
resurgence in the nineteen sixties, and Crowley's work influenced other
new religious movements in the mid twentieth century as well. Today,
Croley's name is almost synonymous with Satanism, although his work

(34:57):
wasn't really about worshiping the devil, but his work did
influence the development of modern Satanism. 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

(35:20):
was using that deity obviously, but like that's one of
the many ways. Crowley also knew and worked with Gerald Gardner,
who's the namesake of Gardenerian Wiccka, 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

(35:40):
after World War Two. Gardner's work in witchcraft eventually did
move away from these roots, but Crowley's work also influenced
modern witchcraft more broadly outside of the scope of Gardenerian Wicca,
starting in about the nineteen fifties and sixties. It is
not entirely clear whether Crowley and l Ron Hubbard ever

(36:02):
personally met, although Hubbard described him meaning Crowley as his
quote 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

(36:24):
Babylon working in nineteen forty six that is, once again
not Babylon like the place but Baba Lon. These were
based on Crowley's teachings and were centered on the idea
of conceiving a child that would be known as the Moonchild,
which would allow the deity Babylon to take a human form.
Hubbard served as parsons seer or scribe during these rituals,

(36:46):
dictating the voice of Babylon from the astral plane. Curly
himself does not seem to have been too eager about
all this. In a nineteen forty six letter, he wrote, quote,
apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is trying to produce
a moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the
idiocy of these goats. The collaboration between Parsons and Hubbard

(37:10):
did not last long, though Parson's 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 prophet. The Church of Scientology is notoriously secretive and
has denied that Crowley influenced its doctrines in any way,

(37:31):
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
Alister 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

(37:52):
the Book of the Law, also appears in a nearly
identical way in some of Hubbard's scientology writing. Aside from
Alister 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 Mom's nineteen oh
eight novel The Magician. Later Ian Fleming modeled the Bond

(38:16):
villain Ernst stavro Blofeld after him. Crowley's work influenced psychologist
and psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary and led Zeppelin guitarist
Jimmy Page, whose Alister Crowley collection included bull Scheme House,
which is currently slated for renovations after it was badly
damaged by two fires. In the last few years. Crowley

(38:37):
has appeared in that Ozzy Osbourne song we mentioned at
the top of the show, and in David Bowie's 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. In terms of writing
about Crowley, for a long time, there were pretty much
two modes. There was the work of believers who uncritically

(39:00):
accepted everything he saidis 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 nineteenth century occult revival more generally, just

(39:24):
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 read one
person that was like just making it sound like all
of these things that happened were one hundred percent real,
and then a different person would describe the exact same
scenario and be like, and of course you can see

(39:46):
Alistair Crowley was totally absurd, 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. Whoosh, Thanks

(40:13):
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 RL or something similar over
the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can find us all over social media at misst inistory,

(40:34):
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. 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.