May 20, 2025 • 19 mins
George Noory and historian Dr. Rick Spence discuss the life and legacy of occultist Aleister Crowley, if his reputation as a Satanist was overrated, and his popularity in the 1960s counterculture movement including appearing on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norere with you,
Doctor Rick Spence with US Professor Emeritus of History. His
works include Secret Agent six sixty six, Alistair Curley, British
Intelligence and the Occult, and Wall Street in the Russian Revolution.
Now he's created three incredible video series, including the Real
History of Secret Societies, Crimes of the Century and Secrets
(00:27):
of the Occult. Doctor Rick Spence back on Coast to
Coast spent seven years, Rick, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Well, thanks for having me on Time Flies it does.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
How did you get interested in the occult?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Well, the way I usually I get asked that question
a lot, So the way I usually ask that to say,
one thing leads you to another. You become interested in
one thing that you elsewhere. So I say, probably my
unhealthy obsession with a lot of things began with my
interest in things like modern Russian history. And when you
(01:02):
dealt into modern Russian history you encounter inevitably the Russian Revolution,
which is just well, you can't have revolutions without conspiracies,
and you can't have those without secret societies and usually
somewhere the occult sneaks in along with espionage. So that's
how all of my interests have accumulated.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
Fascinating.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Did you bring any of that into the professorship when
you were teaching the history?
Speaker 3 (01:26):
I did teach a course at the University of Idaho.
I taught courses on Russian history, Middle Eastern history, and
military history. But I have to say that one of
my favorite courses to teach, and probably one of the
more popular ones, was a course called Conspiracies and Secret
Societies and History. So and yes, I actually got away
(01:49):
with teaching that, and it was you know, I would
tell students at the beginning of this is that what
we're really looking at in this course is sort of
the nature of historical reality. How do we know what
we know? And one of the reasons why you end
up with that there are plenty of real conspiracies, by
(02:10):
the way, but one of the reasons you, in addition
to that, ended with conspiracy theories is that their efforts
to explain something. I mean, they may be right, they
may be wrong, they may be a little bit of each,
but usually they exist in the absence of any kind
of definite information, and you know we always like answers,
even when we make them up.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Alisair Crawley was born in eighteen seventy five died in
nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
Tell us about.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Him, well, Alistair Crawley is probably because some of it's
he's the most notorious occultist of the twentieth century.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
Or of the modern era by far, by far.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yes, And some people would go so far as he's
the most notorious Satanist of the twentieth century or the
modern era. Now occultist, he most definitely was what he
would identify himself as being Satanist, He would not, Okay,
And this is let me start out here by saying,
(03:08):
is that I'm not here as a conspicuous advocate or
for Alistair Crowley. First of all, he doesn't need me
or anybody else to defend him. I think he's dead
and I'm not a follower of him, So just in
case anyone is interested, I don't approach this whole thing
by worshiping the man like a god or holding him.
(03:31):
And I find him a very interesting character. I find
him an interesting but also at the same time very
flawed human being. There were lots of He was a
difficult person in a lot of ways. Was he the
emblem of evil that he sometimes pictured as today? Probably not.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
Was he overrated or underrated?
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Well, probably a bit of both as a diabolical genius.
Again as the emblem of evil, he's probably overrated. In
terms of his influence, not so much anymore, I say,
in terms of his cultural influence, he's I think underrated
(04:20):
in some ways. I mean, he's much better known today
than he was during his lifetime. When Crowley died in
nineteen forty seven, he was an obscure figure. I mean,
there were relatively there were small pockets of people scattered
around the world who would even have known who he was.
His books were not widely written. His name was if
(04:41):
it showed up in the press at all, it was
generally in some form of scandal, but still almost forgotten
by the time that he died in forty seven. But
he has had a renaissance, I think, beginning of the
nineteen sixties and continuing today.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
I mean, how did he make money? I mean how
a cultists don't make a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Oh no, no, well that's it, and he didn't make
a lot of money. So there's an interesting question about
his life. He inherited. He came from a reasonably wealthy family, huh.
And not not rich, but his well, his the Crowley
family had made money in brewing. There's still a line
(05:26):
called Crowley Ales, so they were brewers. So his father
had some money from the family brewing interest. But then
I think he also dabbled in what we now call
real estate and had enough money to quit working in
any business and become a And this is interesting. His
father became a lay minister of the Christian Gospel. Oh,
(05:49):
he was developed because you see Crowley Alistair Crowley, or actually,
let's give him his real name. So this is a
This I think is an interesting point which is often
a like that Alistair Crowley is not his actual.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
Name, Edward Alexander.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Edward Alexander Croley is named after his father and Edward
Alexander Eddie to some people, that's his legal name. As
far as I can tell, he never I mean, Alistair
Crowley became his his his nom de plume, the name
that he wrote under. It became the kind of public persona,
(06:26):
It became the character that he played in public in
some ways, and I think of it a way of
an actor assuming a name other than their own. But
and but the point is is that those two croleys
exist in the same person. They're always around at the
same time. We don't know the Alistair Kaer, the the flamboyant,
(06:51):
either inspiring or terrifying occultist Alistair Crowley, that's the guy
who gets all the public attention. That's what the world sees.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Why does he seem to be so relevant today? His
name comes up on this show quite often.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Well, it's starting in the nineteen sixties, and thanks in
part to the sixties counterculture, which was looking for was
looking for heroes in the non traditional places. Crowley appeared
to be a symbol of defiance. He was unconventional, he
(07:28):
was iconoclastic. He was also extingly difficult person in anyways,
but he was He was seen as someone who in
his lifetime, because he was ignored or even persecuted or denigrated,
was then given credit for being some kind of hero
or anti hero. He's gone on to have a lot
(07:49):
of influence in modern I mean in modern occultism of
their organizations and many groups of people who do follow
whose works, who consider themselves to be prolean magicians or
practitioners of prole and magic, and yet his name is
known to other people just generally. Again usually some sort
(08:11):
of satanist weirdo is the way he's often presented. I
give you an example of that, and it's a way
of I'm talking about his influence in the sixties. So
one of the most famous public portrayals of Proli Maybe
I would argue his most famous public appearance posthumously was
(08:33):
when his face a portrait of him, shows up in
nineteen sixty seven on the cover of the Beatles Sergeant
Pepper's Hearts Club Band album. A lot of people had
that album. I had that album, and I have to
say that when I bought it in nineteen sixty seven,
in nineteen sixty eight, I knew that there are the
(08:54):
faces of lots of people on the album, but that
wasn't what I was interested in. And I had no
idea at the time that Alistair Crowley was on it,
or if someone had mentioned he was on it, it
wouldn't have meant much of anything. But I've had people
come up today and one of the things off and said, well,
you know his pictures on the cover of Sergeant Pepper
and you know the Beatles liked him. They put his
picture on the cover of their album, and indeed they
(09:17):
did because but on that cover there are the pictures,
the portraits of at least fifty people. He's just one
of those which the Beatles simply described as people we
like or admire. So Alistair Crowley is there. On the
other hand, though, it is Marlon Brando, Lawrence of Arabia,
(09:37):
Fred Astaire, Marilyn Monroe, there's Bob Dylan, There's both Laurel
and Hardy. So think of it this way. Proley, the
arch magician of the twentieth century, shows up on a
Beatles album cover, but then so do Laurel and Hardy
and Marilyn Monroe, so you have to place him in
that kind of of context. But it's in today that
(10:02):
very few people will mention any of those other people
on the album. But the idea that seems to be
important in some way, Alistair Crowley is there.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
I think he even had Laurel and Hardy on there.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Yes, yes, Laurel and Harneydy. So he's he and Laurel
and Hardy share the billing on Sergeant Peppers.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
How did you get interested in Crawley?
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Well, you know, you inevitably run across his name. He's
he's one of those croly in some ways, even if
you're not in a story, and it's like you know
that pair of shoes you're constantly tripping over every time
you turn around. I really took a particular interest in him.
I mean, I knew his reputation. I knew that he had,
(10:46):
at various times claimed to have worked for British intelligence.
Now I have to say that I didn't take that
claim particularly seriously. Didn't dismiss it, but I didn't cam
hadn't seen anything to support it. And even people who
otherwise were let's say, proley fans didn't seem to pay
(11:06):
much attention to it either. What I was doing is
that I was doing research on other spies in and
around New York City during World War One, and I
just sort of care. I was sending off to the
National Archives, who are different files. This is when you
had to do these things by mail, and I thought, well,
you know, I'll just ask whether or not in the
(11:31):
National Archives the files that I was looking at, which
were the files of a thing called the Military Intelligence Division.
It really no longer exists in that form, but it
was kind of the FBI of its day, and whether
or not the Military Intelligence Division, which kept track of
all kinds of subversity or suspicious characters during the First
(11:53):
World War, whether they had a file on Parley. And
they did, and it wasn't a very big file. In fact,
there's barely anything to it, and there's really only one
paragraph in that file that was of any particular interest
where he was concerned. But it was very interesting. So remember,
as I said, Crowley had later periodically claimed that while
(12:19):
in the United States during the First World War, not
in England, but in the United States, that he had
done secret work for the British government. They had been
in his Majesty's service, and that part of that service
included basically pretending to be a trader of actually writing
(12:41):
anti British propaganda for a German publication, a German American publication,
and he certainly did that. He certainly wrote anti British articles.
Those were published, you can find them, you can read them,
and they're really quite anti British. But the question was
was there anything to Proley's claim that he he had
done this somehow with the knowledge and approval of the
(13:03):
British government. Well, here's the interesting part. From that American
intelligence support. The Americans were suspicious of crole and they
were thinking about arresting him. So they went to the
British consulate in New York and they asked them about him,
and to quote from the mid report, it was determined
(13:25):
that Alister Crowley was an employee of the British government
at present in this country under official business, of which
the British Consul New York City has full cognizance.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
Wow, so they backed him up.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Yes, So in that case he was telling the truth.
They also went on to note that it was found
that the British government was fully aware of the fact
that Croley was connected with German propaganda and had received
money for writing anti British articles.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
Wasn't Hitler a follower of Crowley?
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Uh No. There's a lot of efforts to try to
connect them together. And Croley was in Berlin. He was
he had a kind of front row seat for the Nazis'
rise and in the early nineteen thirties, but he left
before Hitler came to power. I think he tried to
communicate with him. You know. He sent letters to everybody,
(14:18):
sent letters to Stalin, anybody whose interest he thought he
could possibly brush up. But no. The one thing that
I have not been able to do, and I'd be
perfectly happy to do it if I could. It would
be cool if I could, is to put Crowley and
Adolf Hitler in the same room together, or any approximate
to each other other than being the same city at
(14:40):
any given time, which one of the two would get
out liede, you know, And I give Croly the edge
of the cron His heyday was quite athletic.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
Was he a nice guy?
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Well, that's the question that could be asked about all
of us by someone at some point. I think it
would depend very much on the situation he was. I
think it's it's fair to say that he was a
very difficult friend if you were friends with him. The
(15:16):
one thing that I certainly would never do would be
to loan him money. It goes back to the question
where did the money come from? A lot of it
was bummed off his friends.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
When you lend money, you very rarely get it back anyway.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Reck you would if you lent money to Alistair Curley,
you would never see it again. So you had to
be that kind of a friend, and he would come
back and ask you for more, he had no talent
for managing money. He inherited a modest fortune which he
basically ignored and squandered. And essentially any money that, as
(15:46):
far as I can see, any money that came into
his hands, he simply spent on one thing or another.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Tell me about the title of your book, Agent six
sixty six, which is part of Curley.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Well, was he ever? Was he ever actually called Agents
sixty sixty six? No, but it makes a good title.
So he's so connected. Now. One of the things he
did embrace and one of the reasons why he gets this,
you know, satanic reputation, is that he liked to adopt nicknames.
Remember he renamed himself Alistair when he was a teenager.
(16:18):
He decided basically to adopt that name and kept it
name right. Yeah, Well that's just I describe it as
his stage name. That's his public stage name, that's his
public persona. That's how he restructured himself.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Like Hollywood actors changed their name. That's what he did,
just in the same way.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
But behind the scenes. You know, the names on checks
and passports and census recordings is Edward Alexander Crowley. So
that person that is still the kind of legal identity
which he possesses, which I actually think is a kind
of alternate persona in a way. I think there were
(16:59):
always sort of two people there. There was Edward Crowley
and there was Alistair Crowley. They occupied the same body,
but I think they were there were slightly slightly uh
slightly different different personas.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
Would you say he was a wicked person.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Oh, he could do things. He was capable of doing
things that the average person would probably find immoral and
perhaps even horrifying and occult is well. Croley's answer was
that in the in the pursuit of hidden knowledge and
(17:37):
the in the pursuit of a cult wisdom, you have
to be willing to cross boundaries. Uh. One of the
there's a principle one could argue, in a sense of
kind of a cult principle that the value of transcendence,
that is, and by this I don't mean transcendental meditation,
I mean transcending boundaries. The better way to put his
(18:01):
transgression with the value of transgression of deliberately breaking taboos.
And you can say that that's one of the things
that Proly in a way dedicated part of his life
to doing It was part of his old shit. I
suppose was breaking taboos, defying conventions, and you know that
(18:22):
can go from thumbing your nose at etiquette at dinner
parties to carrying out human sacrifice. It could corruct. It
depends upon where you went to place that boundary. So
Proley's boundaries of actions were probably wider than the average person.
There were things that he would do that that would
I would are shock. That was part of the purpose
(18:45):
of shock and horrified probably most people. I don't know
that that necessarily made him a horrible person. It made
him a person who, under certain circumstances, could do shocking, immoral,
and perhaps horrible things.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norere with you,
Doctor Rick Spence with US Professor Emeritus of History. His
works include Secret Agent six sixty six, Alistair Curley, British
Intelligence and the Occult, and Wall Street in the Russian Revolution.
Now he's created three incredible video series, including the Real
History of Secret Societies, Crimes of the Century and Secrets
(00:27):
of the Occult. Doctor Rick Spence back on Coast to
Coast spent seven years, Rick, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Well, thanks for having me on Time Flies it does.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
How did you get interested in the occult?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Well, the way I usually I get asked that question
a lot, So the way I usually ask that to say,
one thing leads you to another. You become interested in
one thing that you elsewhere. So I say, probably my
unhealthy obsession with a lot of things began with my
interest in things like modern Russian history. And when you
(01:02):
dealt into modern Russian history you encounter inevitably the Russian Revolution,
which is just well, you can't have revolutions without conspiracies,
and you can't have those without secret societies and usually
somewhere the occult sneaks in along with espionage. So that's
how all of my interests have accumulated.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
Fascinating.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Did you bring any of that into the professorship when
you were teaching the history?
Speaker 3 (01:26):
I did teach a course at the University of Idaho.
I taught courses on Russian history, Middle Eastern history, and
military history. But I have to say that one of
my favorite courses to teach, and probably one of the
more popular ones, was a course called Conspiracies and Secret
Societies and History. So and yes, I actually got away
(01:49):
with teaching that, and it was you know, I would
tell students at the beginning of this is that what
we're really looking at in this course is sort of
the nature of historical reality. How do we know what
we know? And one of the reasons why you end
up with that there are plenty of real conspiracies, by
(02:10):
the way, but one of the reasons you, in addition
to that, ended with conspiracy theories is that their efforts
to explain something. I mean, they may be right, they
may be wrong, they may be a little bit of each,
but usually they exist in the absence of any kind
of definite information, and you know we always like answers,
even when we make them up.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Alisair Crawley was born in eighteen seventy five died in
nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
Tell us about.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Him, well, Alistair Crawley is probably because some of it's
he's the most notorious occultist of the twentieth century.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
Or of the modern era by far, by far.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Yes, And some people would go so far as he's
the most notorious Satanist of the twentieth century or the
modern era. Now occultist, he most definitely was what he
would identify himself as being Satanist, He would not, Okay,
And this is let me start out here by saying,
(03:08):
is that I'm not here as a conspicuous advocate or
for Alistair Crowley. First of all, he doesn't need me
or anybody else to defend him. I think he's dead
and I'm not a follower of him, So just in
case anyone is interested, I don't approach this whole thing
by worshiping the man like a god or holding him.
(03:31):
And I find him a very interesting character. I find
him an interesting but also at the same time very
flawed human being. There were lots of He was a
difficult person in a lot of ways. Was he the
emblem of evil that he sometimes pictured as today? Probably not.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
Was he overrated or underrated?
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Well, probably a bit of both as a diabolical genius.
Again as the emblem of evil, he's probably overrated. In
terms of his influence, not so much anymore, I say,
in terms of his cultural influence, he's I think underrated
(04:20):
in some ways. I mean, he's much better known today
than he was during his lifetime. When Crowley died in
nineteen forty seven, he was an obscure figure. I mean,
there were relatively there were small pockets of people scattered
around the world who would even have known who he was.
His books were not widely written. His name was if
(04:41):
it showed up in the press at all, it was
generally in some form of scandal, but still almost forgotten
by the time that he died in forty seven. But
he has had a renaissance, I think, beginning of the
nineteen sixties and continuing today.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
I mean, how did he make money? I mean how
a cultists don't make a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Oh no, no, well that's it, and he didn't make
a lot of money. So there's an interesting question about
his life. He inherited. He came from a reasonably wealthy family, huh.
And not not rich, but his well, his the Crowley
family had made money in brewing. There's still a line
(05:26):
called Crowley Ales, so they were brewers. So his father
had some money from the family brewing interest. But then
I think he also dabbled in what we now call
real estate and had enough money to quit working in
any business and become a And this is interesting. His
father became a lay minister of the Christian Gospel. Oh,
(05:49):
he was developed because you see Crowley Alistair Crowley, or actually,
let's give him his real name. So this is a
This I think is an interesting point which is often
a like that Alistair Crowley is not his actual.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
Name, Edward Alexander.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Edward Alexander Croley is named after his father and Edward
Alexander Eddie to some people, that's his legal name. As
far as I can tell, he never I mean, Alistair
Crowley became his his his nom de plume, the name
that he wrote under. It became the kind of public persona,
(06:26):
It became the character that he played in public in
some ways, and I think of it a way of
an actor assuming a name other than their own. But
and but the point is is that those two croleys
exist in the same person. They're always around at the
same time. We don't know the Alistair Kaer, the the flamboyant,
(06:51):
either inspiring or terrifying occultist Alistair Crowley, that's the guy
who gets all the public attention. That's what the world sees.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Why does he seem to be so relevant today? His
name comes up on this show quite often.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Well, it's starting in the nineteen sixties, and thanks in
part to the sixties counterculture, which was looking for was
looking for heroes in the non traditional places. Crowley appeared
to be a symbol of defiance. He was unconventional, he
(07:28):
was iconoclastic. He was also extingly difficult person in anyways,
but he was He was seen as someone who in
his lifetime, because he was ignored or even persecuted or denigrated,
was then given credit for being some kind of hero
or anti hero. He's gone on to have a lot
(07:49):
of influence in modern I mean in modern occultism of
their organizations and many groups of people who do follow
whose works, who consider themselves to be prolean magicians or
practitioners of prole and magic, and yet his name is
known to other people just generally. Again usually some sort
(08:11):
of satanist weirdo is the way he's often presented. I
give you an example of that, and it's a way
of I'm talking about his influence in the sixties. So
one of the most famous public portrayals of Proli Maybe
I would argue his most famous public appearance posthumously was
(08:33):
when his face a portrait of him, shows up in
nineteen sixty seven on the cover of the Beatles Sergeant
Pepper's Hearts Club Band album. A lot of people had
that album. I had that album, and I have to
say that when I bought it in nineteen sixty seven,
in nineteen sixty eight, I knew that there are the
(08:54):
faces of lots of people on the album, but that
wasn't what I was interested in. And I had no
idea at the time that Alistair Crowley was on it,
or if someone had mentioned he was on it, it
wouldn't have meant much of anything. But I've had people
come up today and one of the things off and said, well,
you know his pictures on the cover of Sergeant Pepper
and you know the Beatles liked him. They put his
picture on the cover of their album, and indeed they
(09:17):
did because but on that cover there are the pictures,
the portraits of at least fifty people. He's just one
of those which the Beatles simply described as people we
like or admire. So Alistair Crowley is there. On the
other hand, though, it is Marlon Brando, Lawrence of Arabia,
(09:37):
Fred Astaire, Marilyn Monroe, there's Bob Dylan, There's both Laurel
and Hardy. So think of it this way. Proley, the
arch magician of the twentieth century, shows up on a
Beatles album cover, but then so do Laurel and Hardy
and Marilyn Monroe, so you have to place him in
that kind of of context. But it's in today that
(10:02):
very few people will mention any of those other people
on the album. But the idea that seems to be
important in some way, Alistair Crowley is there.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
I think he even had Laurel and Hardy on there.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Yes, yes, Laurel and Harneydy. So he's he and Laurel
and Hardy share the billing on Sergeant Peppers.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
How did you get interested in Crawley?
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Well, you know, you inevitably run across his name. He's
he's one of those croly in some ways, even if
you're not in a story, and it's like you know
that pair of shoes you're constantly tripping over every time
you turn around. I really took a particular interest in him.
I mean, I knew his reputation. I knew that he had,
(10:46):
at various times claimed to have worked for British intelligence.
Now I have to say that I didn't take that
claim particularly seriously. Didn't dismiss it, but I didn't cam
hadn't seen anything to support it. And even people who
otherwise were let's say, proley fans didn't seem to pay
(11:06):
much attention to it either. What I was doing is
that I was doing research on other spies in and
around New York City during World War One, and I
just sort of care. I was sending off to the
National Archives, who are different files. This is when you
had to do these things by mail, and I thought, well,
you know, I'll just ask whether or not in the
(11:31):
National Archives the files that I was looking at, which
were the files of a thing called the Military Intelligence Division.
It really no longer exists in that form, but it
was kind of the FBI of its day, and whether
or not the Military Intelligence Division, which kept track of
all kinds of subversity or suspicious characters during the First
(11:53):
World War, whether they had a file on Parley. And
they did, and it wasn't a very big file. In fact,
there's barely anything to it, and there's really only one
paragraph in that file that was of any particular interest
where he was concerned. But it was very interesting. So remember,
as I said, Crowley had later periodically claimed that while
(12:19):
in the United States during the First World War, not
in England, but in the United States, that he had
done secret work for the British government. They had been
in his Majesty's service, and that part of that service
included basically pretending to be a trader of actually writing
(12:41):
anti British propaganda for a German publication, a German American publication,
and he certainly did that. He certainly wrote anti British articles.
Those were published, you can find them, you can read them,
and they're really quite anti British. But the question was
was there anything to Proley's claim that he he had
done this somehow with the knowledge and approval of the
(13:03):
British government. Well, here's the interesting part. From that American
intelligence support. The Americans were suspicious of crole and they
were thinking about arresting him. So they went to the
British consulate in New York and they asked them about him,
and to quote from the mid report, it was determined
(13:25):
that Alister Crowley was an employee of the British government
at present in this country under official business, of which
the British Consul New York City has full cognizance.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
Wow, so they backed him up.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Yes, So in that case he was telling the truth.
They also went on to note that it was found
that the British government was fully aware of the fact
that Croley was connected with German propaganda and had received
money for writing anti British articles.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
Wasn't Hitler a follower of Crowley?
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Uh No. There's a lot of efforts to try to
connect them together. And Croley was in Berlin. He was
he had a kind of front row seat for the Nazis'
rise and in the early nineteen thirties, but he left
before Hitler came to power. I think he tried to
communicate with him. You know. He sent letters to everybody,
(14:18):
sent letters to Stalin, anybody whose interest he thought he
could possibly brush up. But no. The one thing that
I have not been able to do, and I'd be
perfectly happy to do it if I could. It would
be cool if I could, is to put Crowley and
Adolf Hitler in the same room together, or any approximate
to each other other than being the same city at
(14:40):
any given time, which one of the two would get
out liede, you know, And I give Croly the edge
of the cron His heyday was quite athletic.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
Was he a nice guy?
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Well, that's the question that could be asked about all
of us by someone at some point. I think it
would depend very much on the situation he was. I
think it's it's fair to say that he was a
very difficult friend if you were friends with him. The
(15:16):
one thing that I certainly would never do would be
to loan him money. It goes back to the question
where did the money come from? A lot of it
was bummed off his friends.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
When you lend money, you very rarely get it back anyway.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Reck you would if you lent money to Alistair Curley,
you would never see it again. So you had to
be that kind of a friend, and he would come
back and ask you for more, he had no talent
for managing money. He inherited a modest fortune which he
basically ignored and squandered. And essentially any money that, as
(15:46):
far as I can see, any money that came into
his hands, he simply spent on one thing or another.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Tell me about the title of your book, Agent six
sixty six, which is part of Curley.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Well, was he ever? Was he ever actually called Agents
sixty sixty six? No, but it makes a good title.
So he's so connected. Now. One of the things he
did embrace and one of the reasons why he gets this,
you know, satanic reputation, is that he liked to adopt nicknames.
Remember he renamed himself Alistair when he was a teenager.
(16:18):
He decided basically to adopt that name and kept it
name right. Yeah, Well that's just I describe it as
his stage name. That's his public stage name, that's his
public persona. That's how he restructured himself.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Like Hollywood actors changed their name. That's what he did,
just in the same way.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
But behind the scenes. You know, the names on checks
and passports and census recordings is Edward Alexander Crowley. So
that person that is still the kind of legal identity
which he possesses, which I actually think is a kind
of alternate persona in a way. I think there were
(16:59):
always sort of two people there. There was Edward Crowley
and there was Alistair Crowley. They occupied the same body,
but I think they were there were slightly slightly uh
slightly different different personas.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
Would you say he was a wicked person.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Oh, he could do things. He was capable of doing
things that the average person would probably find immoral and
perhaps even horrifying and occult is well. Croley's answer was
that in the in the pursuit of hidden knowledge and
(17:37):
the in the pursuit of a cult wisdom, you have
to be willing to cross boundaries. Uh. One of the
there's a principle one could argue, in a sense of
kind of a cult principle that the value of transcendence,
that is, and by this I don't mean transcendental meditation,
I mean transcending boundaries. The better way to put his
(18:01):
transgression with the value of transgression of deliberately breaking taboos.
And you can say that that's one of the things
that Proly in a way dedicated part of his life
to doing It was part of his old shit. I
suppose was breaking taboos, defying conventions, and you know that
(18:22):
can go from thumbing your nose at etiquette at dinner
parties to carrying out human sacrifice. It could corruct. It
depends upon where you went to place that boundary. So
Proley's boundaries of actions were probably wider than the average person.
There were things that he would do that that would
I would are shock. That was part of the purpose
(18:45):
of shock and horrified probably most people. I don't know
that that necessarily made him a horrible person. It made
him a person who, under certain circumstances, could do shocking, immoral,
and perhaps horrible things.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
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