September 4, 2025 • 48 mins
From mountaineer and poet to occultist and self-proclaimed "Great Beast 666," the life of Aleister Crowley is a labyrinth of contradictions. This podcast delves deep into the man dubbed "The Wickedest Man in the World" by the tabloids, separating the myth from the man and exploring the forces that shaped this enigmatic figure.
Born into a wealthy, fundamentalist Christian family in Victorian England, Edward Alexander Crowley rebelled against his strict upbringing to embrace a world of esotericism and free will. We'll trace his journey from a brilliant but unruly student at Cambridge to his initiation into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where he quickly made a name for himself—and just as many enemies, including fellow poet W.B. Yeats.
Follow Crowley's globe-trotting adventures, from his pioneering mountaineering expeditions on K2 to his mystical experiences in Egypt that led to the creation of his own religion, Thelema, and its central tenet: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." We'll explore his controversial "Abbey of Thelema" in Sicily, and his later years marked by poverty and drug addiction.
Crowley was a master of self-promotion and a magnet for scandal, but his influence on Western esotericism, from modern Paganism to the counterculture of the 1960s, is undeniable. We'll examine his lasting legacy, from his writings and the creation of the Thoth tarot deck to his surprising appearance on the cover of a certain Beatles album. Was he a charlatan, a visionary, or a misunderstood genius? Join us as we unravel the tangled life of Aleister Crowley, a man who continues to fascinate and horrify to this day.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Unknown (00:02):
Alex, hello everybody.
Welcome to another episode ofdirt nap city,
the podcast about interestingdead people. My name is Alex.
I'm here with my friend Kelly.
How you doing today? Kelly, I'mdoing great, and I'm wondering
if that intro, if you'rereading, or if that's memorized.
(00:26):
I'm reading everything. I can'tdo anything from memory. Okay,
okay. I like your consistencywith the introduction. I think
if we ever do this show live,and we will do the show live,
I think that liquid death isgoing to sponsor a live tour of
dirt nap city coming to yourcity around the world. We'll be
drinking the delicious CannedWater of liquid death. And I
(00:50):
think that we will memorizeeverything for that show so that
we get it exactly right. Oh, no,like a TED talk.
Yeah, yeah. It'll we'll haveslides completely scripted.
We'll do some interactivepolling with the audience. I
mean, it's gonna be a reallygreat live show. So a lot of
people don't realize howscripted this is, but we're
(01:11):
reading our script. It's ironicthat a show about dead people
would be live rightnow, I get the liquid Duff
connection. I didn't get thatbefore, but now I get it. Oh,
oh, you just thought I randomlypicked it,
yeah, oh, yeah. I was wonderingwhy you didn't go with, you
(01:32):
know, Aquafina or Fiji. But nowI get it. All right. Are you on
board? I mean, you know, I I'vefollowed the money, man, okay,
all right. Well, you heard itfirst here, liquid death if you,
if you want to get in, Alexfollows the money. He also
followsthe path of interesting dead
people, and he's going to tellus about one now. So I got a
good one today. You say youthink you know who it is
(01:58):
without any clues. Can you tellme who you think it is you want
to take a guess without anyclues. I think you're doing Ozzy
Osbourne.
I'm not doing Ozzy Osborne,but you are damn close. Hulk
Hogan, no,they both died, if you're
listening in the future, OzzyOsbourne and Hulk Hogan died a
(02:22):
little while ago. It's probablya lot a little longer ago, when
you're by the time you'relistening to this. I tend to
have a policy that I let, I letthese guys, you know, let the
rigor mortis set in. I let him.
I think the the most recent deadperson we did was probably Jerry
(02:42):
Springer, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah.
That was George Foreman. Maybe,yeah, yeah. George Foreman,
actually, I think was like, Ithink he died the same year that
we did the program. So, yeah,you know, like the body to be
told, yeah, I tend to let youknow, let all
the the ceremony go and leteveryone talk about them, and
(03:04):
then when people stop talkingabout them, that's when I think
we 5200 years. 5200 years.
But you are very close today.
And I won't lie,Ozzy's death got me thinking a
lot about this person. Here'sthe clue I'll give you. This
person described himselfas the wickedest man in the
(03:28):
world.
Oh Prince of Darkness, born in1875
in Warwickshire, England, anddied in 1947 in Sussex, England,
the wickedest man in the world,pull pole pot.
(03:49):
No, that's he wasn't English.
English. Wickedest man and died,lived and died in England,
described in the basically 1875through 1947
was he a musician? He was not amusician. He was an occultist.
(04:14):
He was a ceremonial magician.
We'll get into what that means,poet, a novelist, a mountaineer
and a painter, and he founded areligion called Thelema. Fella,
I've never heard of that. I amtalking today about Aleister
Crowley. Aleister Crowley, Mr.
(04:38):
Crowley. That is a tie in. Thatis a tie in, wow, I've been
thinking about this guy a lotlately, and didn't really know
much about him, other than thekind of stuff that we used to
talk about in middle school, onon the in the playgrounds of
middle school in the 80s, totalk about how all these rock
(04:58):
musicians that we listen to.
Two that are now classic rockmusicians were all into the
devil, and we heard from ourbrother's friends that, you
know, somebody wore, you know,had an upside down cross, or
that they, you know, bit thehead off a bat, bit off a bat,
or that they lived in somehaunted castle, or that they
(05:21):
used all these pentagrams, andit never really seemed
real, because we'd listen to themusic and never would say too
much about the devil oranything, unless you played it
backwards, right, right, right.
With the rumor was always thatif you played it backwards, it
would tell you, you know, to butour moms all we all were sure,
even though they were the onesthat didn't listen to the music,
(05:44):
they were all sure that thisstuff was devil inspired, right?
And don't trace all that stuff.
They could trace all this stuffback to this guy who wasn't even
alive back then, named AleisterCrowley. Okay, so I want to talk
about him today. I want to talkabout what, who he was, what he
(06:06):
did. I want to talk abouthow he, even though he died in
1947 how he influenced all ofour rock gods of the 60s and 70s
andearly 80s, yeah, and just kind
of the legacy that he leavestoday, because he actually
didn't have, for someone thathad kind of a cult. He didn't
really have that many followers.
(06:30):
He was, he was famous, but moreinfamous than famous. People
tended to know who he was whenhe was alive.
But he was definitely like atroublemaker, for sure. Okay,
this guy was born EdwardAlexander Crowley, not Alistair.
(06:50):
His parents wereDie Hard, religious evangelists.
His dad was a preacher. His daddied when Alistair was 11, and
that made Alistair rebel. Fromthat point on, he became, went
from like this literal choir boyto the Antichrist in like five
(07:11):
years. We kind of talked aboutthat in the Brothers Grimm about
how father figure passing awayhas a big impact on a lot of
these people. Absolutely. A lotof times it turns people poor,
but I think in this case, heactually the father. They had
money, so that wasn't anythingto worry about. But his mom
(07:33):
couldn't really handle him. Hewas 11 years old. She would
scold him, and she called him abeast.
I mean, he called her a beast.
He said, You're a beast forscolding me, and she retaliated
by calling him the beast, whoa,and that's how she referred to
her son. From then on, was thebeast? Well, he really leaned
(07:53):
into that, and he was verydramatic kind of kid, like he
was maybe what we'd call today,like a goth kid, kind of Yeah,
but he was really dramatic andinto theatrics and all that kind
of stuff. He went to TrinityCollege in Cambridge. He was a
very smart kid. He studiedliterature and philosophy. But
really, when he was in college,he was mostly into hookers and
(08:16):
reading about the occult andclimbing really dangerous
mountains. Like, he was reallyinto mountain climbing, really,
and that's not something thatusually goes along with the
occult mountain climbing, yeah,for some reason he was a big
mountain climber. He was justinto that. So he was, he must
have been physically fit, yeah,at that age, yeah, yeah, okay.
(08:38):
But really into, like, readingabout the occult, and, like I
said, really into, like,Ian Ashbury, yeah, no, not the
cult the occult. But he wasreally into hookers too, like I
said, and he was really into youcould call him bisexual, or you
(08:58):
could call him Amber sexual. Hewas he write poetry about, I'm
trying to keep it relativelyclean here, but he would write
poems about animals and men andwomen and lots of different
hedonistic acts. But mostly hejust liked to push buttons.
(09:21):
Yeah, just like to push buttons.
Let me kind of set the scenehere. This is Victorian England
walking around with a candy,candy cigarette in his mouth,
as we've talked about before.
Victorian England was very, veryrestrictive and prudish. In
fact, they used to cover uptable legs. They would cover
table legs because they were toosuggestive. That's how, that's
(09:43):
how kind of sexually repressedVictorian times were. Wow,
right? And he was into like, youknow, I think to in today's
world, we see so many rock starsthat are kind of like.
Is like from Marilyn Manson toDavid Bowie, but just like
pushing the buttons ofconventionality, right, of of
(10:08):
saying, I don't want to be like,you know, society tells me to be
so he would, you know, publishbad poetry and,
you know, have wild parties, butjust to kind of push the buttons
of society. So he grew up withsome money, you said, a little
bit of money. Yeah, I don't, Iwouldn't call him rich or
anything, maybe. But I justwonder if, yeah, he never, did
(10:29):
he ever have, like, a normaljob, you know, like a got to
support yourself kind of job, orwas he just sort of, don't
think, I thought your daughter,I think life, I think, yeah, I
think he was, it was like that.
Well, he was, it was a writer,you know, he would write, write
things, sure, get thingspublished back when you could do
that. At this point, he changedhis name to Alistair. At this
point, remember, his name wasEdward Alexander, and I have a
(10:52):
quote from him that I would liketo read in the style of maybe a
a flamboyant fussy British guyfrom the 1800s to see how I do,
I hope you practice. This iswhat he says.
For many years, I had loathebeing called Alec, partly
(11:16):
because of the unpleasant soundand sight of the word, partly
because it was the name by whichmy mother called
me, Edward did not seem to suitme, and the diminutive TED or
Ned were even less appropriate.
Alexander was too long and Sandysuggested toe hair and freckles.
I had read in some book or otherthat the most favorable name for
(11:36):
becoming famous was oneconsisting of a Dactyl followed
by a spondy, as at the end of ahexameter like Jeremy Taylor,
Aleister Crowley fulfilled theseconditions, and Alistair is the
Gaelic form of Alexander toadopt it would satisfy my
(11:57):
romantic ideals. Wow. Very welldone. Do you know what a Dactyl
and a spondy are? Well, JeremyTaylor, right. So, yeah,
anything that like Jeremy likeduck, duck and a
spawn D and then spondy was toolong syllable. So like Jeremy
(12:19):
Taylor, Benjamin Franklin.
Aleister Crowley, like anythingthat's like, it has a rhythm
follow that has rhythm thatlike, short, short, long, long,
long, right? If you're talkinglike Morris code. So he picked
his name because of the sound ofit. Aleister Crowley, yes.
Jeremy Taylor, it definitelyBenjamin Franklin. It definitely
sounds like somebody shakingyour hand. Aleister Crowley,
(12:43):
nice to meet you, right, right,yeah, yeah, yeah. He was also,
like, a little odd that he wouldtime his meals. He'd time his
bodily function, time hisdreams, to test his own
willpower and magicaldiscipline. And he was really
into this thing called that. Hecalled Magic, and it's magic
with the CK at the M, A, G, I,C, K. I'll explain more about
(13:08):
that a little bit. Yeah, I'veseen that. And he kind of
invented that term. Okay,so he was in in 1898 he joined
the secret society called thehermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn. That was a secret societyof British I know it's so
pretentious, a secret society ofBritish intellectuals who were
(13:30):
into magic symbols and robes,like they were really into like,
you could picture this, right? Abunch of guys getting together.
I'm thinking oats. I'm thinkingof the righteous, the righteous
gemstones, their their robes,yeah, exactly, exactly. But the
poet WB Yates was actually inthis club like they were actual
intellectuals, not I mean, thiswas an actual serious thing, and
(13:52):
he advanced through the orderpretty quickly, you know, but he
creeped people out. He was superintense, and his erotic ritual
experimentation, I guess youcould call it,
and he was into a lot of drugstoo. Drugs back then in the late
(14:12):
1800s were not that illegal, anda lot of people did cocaine and
heroin, and and you they getstrung out, but they were, there
wasn't like, there wasn't like,a illegality to it, right? They
were more of a functionaljunkies.
I don't know how functional theywere, but a lot of famous people
(14:35):
did really hardcore drugs backthen, so, but hold on, I was
kind of strung out. I think I'mreminded of Rasputin in a lot of
this. So Rasputin was beforethis. Though, right,
when did Rasputin live? It was1700s Putin was
(14:58):
check or was it the sametimeframe? No, there were.
Around the same time. SoRasputin was
lived from 1869 to 1916 so, ohyeah, a little bit. They could
have hung out.
They could have, I mean, it wasRussian, though they probably,
yeah, but, but still. I mean, itsounds like, it sounds like they
were kindred spirits. Any anyreports on how Mr. Crowley
(15:20):
smelledNo but I do have verification
that of all the people thatwe've done on dirt and upset he
he did meet one person. Do youwant to guess who it was we've
talked about? Yeah, I'm gonnasay he met Henry Ford.
No no. Houdini, Ah, okay, thatmakes sense. They were, you
(15:45):
know, I'll tell you a little bitabout that here. In a magic
they decided how to spell magic,yeah, exactly. He called that
entertainment magic, or, like,performative magic, but it was a
lot different than the kind ofmagic that he was doing, which
was not for um,for enter show, yeah, not for
(16:06):
Yeah. I want you to explain thatwhen you can, yeah, yeah. Um, so
he got kicked out of thehermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn after a power struggle.
Plus he was trying to summondemons in his apartment, like he
was just getting too weird forthese people, all right? And
(16:26):
then he wrote an a collection,an erotic collection of bad
poetry. And he called hiscollection. He called this book
of poetry, white stains.
You know, of course, was it wasbanned in the UK. In Victorian
England, there broke lots oftaboos. He talked about lots of
(16:48):
kinds of sex, even bestiality.
I was today. I was like, How badcould it have been? Let me read
some of the stuff, and I blushedpretty bad. So I'm not gonna
read any of that stuff here fromthe book of white stains. Yeah,
I read a little bit and decidednot to, not to subject you to
(17:11):
that. But like I said, I mean,this was Victorian England. He
was trying to stir things up.
Newspapers called him a satanicpervert, and he leaned into that
and loved the attention. Yeah,he said the key to joy is
disobedience. So he was a rebelrouser, and he just hated, like,
the way society was sorepressive, and he was just
trying to to lean into all that.
(17:35):
So now he's reading all thismystical stuff. He's
experimenting with rituals.
He called it. He called thethese erotic rituals. He called
it sex magic with a ck, which islike the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Yeah, exactly. But he thought hewas destined for something big.
Sex magic, exactly. So hetraveled all over. He traveled
(17:59):
to Europe, I mean, to Egypt andIndia and China. He went, he got
married, and he and his wifeRose, moved to Cairo, and one
day in his apartment or hishotel room, and in Cairo, he
claims to have been contacted byan, I guess, I'll call it an
entity named Iwas,who dictated to him the what do
(18:22):
you call it the book of law,okay, and the book of he wrote
it all down. And the book of lawstarts off do what thou will.
That should be. The whole law,do what thou will love is the
law love under will. So thatdoesn't mean do whatever you
(18:45):
want, but rather do what you'remeant to do. And it's whole
thing, his whole, likephilosophy, strip away all that,
all the, you know, crazy stuffthat we're talking about, his
whole thing was, there's thisthing called Your will. And
everybody has a true will, andthat will is what you were meant
to do in life, and do whateverit takes to do that thing.
(19:12):
And that's and every everythingwill turn out okay, as long as
youalways are going towards that,
that will, don't let the manstop you. So by today's
standards, that's actually verymodern, very accepted. That's
actually what a lot of peoplewill tell you to do. What color
is your motivational speakers?
(19:35):
What? What color is yourparachute, exactly. So he was
really in. So when I say will,when I talk about the will, just
keep in mind that when we'retalking about Will, it's what
you were meant to do, andeverything else is just kind of
window dressing to get attentionfor his you know, main thesis
was, do what do what you weremeant to do. Do what thou will.
(20:00):
Yeah, okay, but this wasn't evensomething he wrote. He claims it
was divinely inspired, and hewas just right, and the medium
so right, and he was theprophet, right, yeah.
So magic, this, M, A, G, i, c,um,
okay, is not. Is different thanstage magic like Houdini, right?
(20:23):
And he and Houdini actually hitit off. They met in 1914 in
London. They hit it off. Houdinisaid that Crowley was curious
but intelligent, but he didn'tbelieve it. Remember, Houdini
was famously, like, notinterested or didn't believe in
the occult or any of that stuff.
Remember he and his wife? Yeah,they were trying, trying to,
(20:45):
trying to get their contacttheir dead relatives or
something, or each other. Magicto him, to Crowley, was the
science and art of causingchange to occur in conformity
with the will. So whenever youchange something and changes,
any change in the universe, andremember, Will is like your
(21:07):
destiny, what you're meant todo, yeah? So like, if it's your
will to be a painter, forexample, then every brush stroke
you take is magic, right?
Anything you're doing towardsthat goal is magic, M, A, G, I,
C, K,so you relying your actions, so
the universe bends to them. Inour world, that's goal setting,
(21:27):
right? That's just yeah, do goalsetting. But in this world,
somehow it meant chanting inrobes with naked people and
goats and lots of drugs. Likeit's so crazy that this is so
much a part of our world now,but it was so radical back then
that it was seen as like satanicreverse now, because he was
(21:47):
trying to get people'sattention, and because everyone
saw him as so bizarre andcreepy, and he leaned into that
so he could get attention. So,yeah, he he definitely leaned
in. He called himself thewickedest man in the world. Just
because the press and peoplewere calling, were calling him.
You know, this bizarre thing, Ithink today's celebrities, a lot
(22:10):
of them are just like this,right? They do something to get
attention, to get their wordabout something else out. And
sometimes it works, sometimes itdoesn't well, he saw it as no,
no, press is bad press, right?
And so by, by agreeing with twothings, by agreeing with these
people when they said bad thingsabout him, you know that he's
(22:32):
wicked and he's evil, he's he'sgetting more press. But then
also, when you agree withsomebody who's trying to put you
down, and you just say, Yes,that's right. You kind of take
away their power, right? All ofa sudden they're trying to make
a point that you're awful. And,you know, you do these things.
And if you just say, Yeah, I do,then they're like, what do they
(22:54):
say? You know, they have norebuttal to that, right? Right?
Exactly. So he founded thisreligion based on this ideal is
called Thelema. Thelema, okay,and Thelema emphasize radical
freedom. Keep in mind thatVictorian England wasn't
radically free at all personalresponsibility, which is a key
(23:16):
here, because this wasn't aboutchaos or selfishness and
breaking from traditional moralcodes, which there was a lot of
them back in. This is, you know,back in Dickens times, right?
He you have to liveauthentically and ethically on
your own terms. Again, in 2025America, this is custody, yeah,
(23:37):
a lot of people are into rightauthenticity, finding your true
will. I think if he was alivetoday, he would be on tick tock,
telling people to find theirtrue passion and their calling
and follow it without beingshackled, and he wouldn't have
had to go to all this otherstuff. Now he was a strange guy,
and he was into all this stuff,but the message that he was
(23:59):
trying to get out is very modernby 21st Century Western
standards, I think, yeah, lookat, look at Alice Cooper, or
Trent Reznor, you know, or someof these guys, right, that
embrace the,you know, the makeup and the
sort of satanic side, but arereally just telling you to be
(24:19):
free, absolutely, absolutely. Hedeclared himself the prophet of
this religion because it wasdictated to him by us. Yeah, he
started calling him. Thenewspapers were like, This guy's
crazy. He's, you know, they wereafraid. You know, he was. He was
being free in a society thatwouldn't let you be that way.
(24:41):
So he would try to provokepeople. So he would call himself
the great beast, 666,okay, now, now, now, remember
his mother called him the beast,yeah, and so he got that from
her, and he knew that back then,anybody that was like, not conf.
If non conformist was consideredsatanic. So he didn't even have
(25:04):
to say anything about Satan. Hethey were already calling him
satanic. So he was leaning intothat, calling himself the great
beast. 666, he would also usesymbols that Victorian people,
that they would think looksatanic, like pentagrams and
like the like I said, the robes.
He wasn't a Satanist at all. Hesaid, I can't say I was ever
(25:27):
really fond of Satan,but he did it to shock and rebel
against society. Yeah, andVictorian climate was so
restrictive that, you know,anything like I said, anything
outside of the norm wasconsidered satanic. He loved the
drama and the ceremony of itall. Wow.
(25:47):
Now I forgot to mention he wasalso a spy.
Okay, during World War One, hewas recruited by British
intelligence to work as a spy inthe US and Canada to gather
information on while he wassympathizers, or, yeah, yeah,
like he was they. He was in theUS and Canada. While he was
(26:10):
there, he was like, trying tofigure out, like, people that
were on the German side,Americans and Canadians. He was
so convincing thatthe US intelligence, um, took
him in for questioning andaccused him of being a German
spy because he was hangingaround the German sympathizers,
yeah, but he like that. That wasjust a little footnote, like
(26:34):
another thing that he did, butkind of interesting. He never
met Mata Hari, though, that, youknow, no, not. But he This shows
how much, how kind ofcharismatic he was, right? If he
was charismatic and influentialenough that that's why the
British intelligence, probably,you know, pursued him to do
this. So hein in the 1920s now, we're in
(26:59):
the 1920s he goes to Italy, andhe buys this house in Sicily,
and he calls it the abbey ofThelema, and that's where all
the followers lived. In fact,this was a commune. Communes
weren't really a thing back inthe 1920s so he's kind of the
first one to do communes. Now,these, they became really big
(27:21):
again, very ahead of his time,very ahead of the whole,
you know, free love movement.
But a lot of his followers livethere, and they would have have
lots of drugs. And like when Isaid, when I say drugs, I mean,
this was kind of beforepsychedelics, but this was
heroin and cocaine, mostly lotsof sex rituals. Now the
(27:45):
neighbors were the onesreporting all this stuff. We
never had any insideinformation from people that
were inside the house, so a lotof this information came from
the neighbors, right? And theyprobably wanted to vilify him,
and so they might be rumors,yeah, um, eventually Mussolini.
Mussolini kicked him out ofItaly.
(28:11):
It's funny, as bad as he was, aswicked as he was, he was never
really arrested for anything,never spent any time in jail,
none of the stuff he was doing,even the drug, the drugs weren't
illegal. The parties that he hadwere annoying to people, but
they weren't really illegal. Themost illegal things he was doing
was publishing that likepornographic po poetry, right,
(28:32):
right, but all they would do isban his stuff. They weren't
throwing him in jail. So he waslike the baddest man around, but
he was not spending time injail, like our friend Rasputin,
who was constantly gettingthrown in right in jail for
different things, right? Wow.
But like I said, this was aprototype of the the communes
that you'd have in the 1960s soby the early by the 1930s and
40s, he started getting older,getting into bad health. He was
(28:56):
taking lots of heroin for hispain, and he died penniless in
1947 at the age of 72Wow. His last words were, I'm
perplexed.
Pretty good last words. Thoseare good, pretty good last
words. That's just a greatphrase underused, right? I feel
(29:18):
like I need to work that into myconversation. I'm perplexed.
Well, I would be careful to sayit you might, might be your last
words. Well, maybe just the wordperplexed, underused word. So I
went back and I looked at someof the last words of some people
that we've talked about on dirtnap city before,
(29:38):
and I thought I'd share most ofthem. Most of them, most people
don't have last words that arerecorded. And some of these,
you know, are,you know, a lot of historians
say I'm not sure if those werehis last words. Yeah, reported.
How do you verify? I'll read yousome of these. Yeah, don't blame
nobody but yourself.
Those were the last words of.
(30:00):
Of Al Capone. Well, I don'tblame nobody but yourself. I
think he was talking to hisdoctor. That sounds that sounds
on brand, yeah, dying man can donothing easy.
Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin,okay,
money can't buy life. Great.
Last Words. Bob Marley,money can't buy life. I'm tired
(30:24):
of fighting. Who do you thinksaid I'm tired of fighting that?
Foreman,no, that's a good one. Harry
Houdini, oh, yeah, yeah. Wholiterally, you know, punch,
yeah. Punched in his stomach.
I don't believe these were lastwords. They seemed a little too
(30:45):
scripted, but it is reportedthat Henry Ford's last
cue the eye roll on Henry Ford.
It was reported that his lastwords were, it is well enough
that people of the nation do notunderstand our banking and
monetary system. For if theydid, I believe there would be a
revolution before tomorrowmorning. Wow, I call BS on that.
That is not his. That soundslike Tracy Chapman. You know,
(31:05):
poor people like take what'stheirs. I like these last words.
These are my, maybe my favorite.
I have not told half of what Isaw.
Oh, hold on, hold on. Was thatHoward Hughes No? Marco Polo.
Marco Polo, yes, yes. Actually,story each other, yeah, yeah,
(31:28):
okay. I, I do remember that now,but I Yeah.
This one you might think is JohnLennon, but obviously John
Lennon probably didn't have anyprofound last word since he was
assassinated, it is not the loveyou make, it's the love you
give. Nikola Tesla said that isnot the love you make, it's the
(31:51):
love you give, yeah, and thisone by Teddy Roosevelt, I'm just
going outside, and maybesometime.
Wow, and never came back. Nevercame back. Oh, Teddy, wow. So
those were the last words of ourresidents here.
Mr. Crowley didn't actually havethat many followers. They'd say
(32:14):
it was sometimes a dozen at atime, maybe a huge, few 100 Max
total. So for someone with thatfew followers, he really had a
big influence. His book startedfinding their way into
bookshops, occult bookshops,which occult bookshops usually
were like, right next to headshops you know, or you know,
(32:38):
drug stores, or stores that, youknow, sold like paraphernalia,
hash pipes and things like that,bongs. In the 50s and 60s, they
would kind of be connected.
People would get high and thenread these, you know, occult
books and Aleister Crowley stuffwould find his way into the
bookstores. His theatrics madehim really famous, especially in
England, and he kind ofanticipated those 20th century
(33:01):
counter culture swings that wereabout to happen, things like
breaking taboos and personalfreedom and psychedelic drugs
that were about to come on thescene, the sexual revolution. He
was ahead of his time on thatnew age thinking with crystals
and all that kind of stuff. I'mhe was doing that stuff, you
(33:22):
know, 50 to 100 years beforeother people consulted that.
Yeah, when you think about it,50 years, 100 years later,
people like David Bowie andMarilyn Manson were doing the
same thing that he was justpushing the envelope, getting
reputations, but then leaninginto it instead of shrinking.
Well, the 1960s came and thesepeople who were teenagers going
(33:49):
to these cult store occultstores, are now in their 20s and
making music. The first time youever really see him pop onto the
scene was, I don't know if youknew this, but his face is on
the cover. He's one of the faceson the cover of Sergeant
Pepper's Lonely Hearts, club,band album. I didn't know that
that was him, but, I mean,there's a lot of people on that
(34:10):
cover, lot of people. Yeah,there's probably 50 people on
that cover. And there are peoplethat are influential people,
right? John Lennon was reallyinto the do what thou wilt.
Message, yeah, he might. Hemight have misinterpreted it to
mean, do whatever you want,and a lot of people did.
But you know, that's how heended up on the cover of
(34:32):
Sergeant peppers. WOW.
Jimmy Page, the guitarist forLed Zeppelin, was a huge
Aleister, Crowley fanatic. Hecollected his memorability. I
mean, Jimmy Page got to be amillionaire very quickly in
life,bought Aleister Crowley's house
on Loch Ness in Scotland. Oh,wow.
(34:55):
People said that house washaunted, and he really leaned
into all that mysticism.
Cult stuff. Um, you know, if Iknow you're not a big Led
Zeppelin guy, but you canpicture what their albums look
like, yeah, Led Zeppelin four.
Yeah, very so, sothat was a lot of the thelemic
imagery from from that religion,but Jimmy Page was the only one
(35:17):
in the band that was into thatstuff. A robber plant thought it
was annoying and nuisance.
Rubber plant was more into like,Nordic gods, yeah, Lord
of the Rings, exactly, yeah. Andthe other two guys were bored of
all of it, but they didn'treally have a say. So, so all
that, the anytime you see, like,all those symbols and all that,
(35:40):
that was all Jimmy Page isdoing. He was really into that
stuff, okay? Timothy Leary,yeah, the, you know, kind of the
60 guy who introduced LSD,he was into the same stuff, but
he used LSD instead of sexmagic, okay, but it was into the
same free love and do what thouwill and all that kind of stuff.
And then the hippies that you'vetalked about in the past, they
(36:03):
were all about the ideas of freelove and psychedelics and
communes. But it's reallyinteresting to me that we go
from the wickedest man in theworld
influencing free love, yeah,like, those things don't really
seem like they go together, butyou can draw a direct line from
(36:25):
Aleister Crowley in the 1920sand teens to the counter culture
of the 60s. I think that'sreally pretty interesting. And
he influenced so much of themusic. I mean, the Rolling
Stones came out with their said,their satanic Majesty's request
in 1967which was kind of a goof on
(36:45):
Sergeant Pepper's.
But people, you know, parents,were really like he. They use
the word satanic. They must be,you know, worship the devil.
They came up their song Sympathyfor the Devil, yeah, which, if
you read it or listen to it. Ithas, it's nothing to do with
Mick Jagger worshiping the devillike it's a kind of a cool
(37:05):
story, right? Yeah, yeah. JimMorrison was really into the
occult and all this stuff. And,of course, drugs. David Bowie
said that Aleister Crowley kindof influenced his Ziggy Stardust
character.
And then Black Sabbath were,were into a lot of this stuff
too, but none of these bandsactually came out and said, We
(37:28):
worship the devil. It was a lotof the symbolism and and kind of
dipping into, uh,Aleister Crowley stuff and their
the the kind of, you know,diagrams that kids would write
on their folders and writescroll right that they were
into. It was really prettysuperficial. But, man, those
(37:48):
parents that our parents andparents of kids our age were
acting just like the people inVictorian England did when
Aleister Crowley was around likehe was pushing buttons. The
bands of the 60s and 70s werepushing buttons, and everybody
was acting the same way. It wasjust happening again, like 50
(38:09):
years later.
Um Ozzy Osbourne came up with asong in 1980 called Mr. Crowley.
He it's not anything aboutworshiping Mr. Crowley. In fact,
in the song is mostly abouttrying to figure out, were you a
prophet? Were you a fraud? Wereyou crazy?
It has that real. You couldpicture the song, yeah, that
(38:31):
goth beginning, that organmusic, Ozzy wasn't really into
him at all. He says, I read abook about him. He was just a
strange guy that gave me theidea for a song. I didn't study
him much. I just liked the wayhis story sounded for a heavy
metal song, kind of like thisbox getting an end of that
right? Like, yeah, exactly.
That's kind of the beginning andend of Ozzy's involvement. He
(38:52):
wasn't like some sort of aAleister Crowley freak. You
wrote one song about the guy hewasn't. He wasn't like Jimmy
Page buying his house and not atall, not at all. I
just think it's funny that inthe 80s, history kind of
repeated itself, when a lot ofthese bands capitalized on the
spectacle of all this stuff,like you said, leaning into
(39:16):
moms, thinking that this stuffwas satanic. Remember the
parents resource music groupwith our music Commissioner,
yeah, she tried to ban a lot ofthe heavy metal music that was
that was influenced with thestuff. It's almost like Aleister
Crowley had a second act. Italmost in, which is what we like
to talk about in this show,people that after they die,
(39:38):
people are still talking aboutthem. They're still influencing.
I don't think he could have everimagined what heavy metal music
would sound like or be like, orI'm not sure if he would have
been friends with Jimmy Page oranything. I mean, they didn't
have a ton in common, but Ithink it's interesting that it
was affecting music that waslistened to way after he.
(40:00):
He died. Yeah, and that so manypeople he became, he became sort
of the poster child through thesymbolism and just the rituals
and all the things that he saidand promoted, it might surprise
a lot of people that thereweren't really any bands outside
of maybe, like, you know, thekind of bands that we wouldn't
(40:22):
have never even heard of,death metal bands that really
actually worship the devil.
It was all this looseassociation with Aleister
Crowley's weird writings.
And that was all because thesepeople were like, I want to just
kind of be different. I want todrop out. I want to do what I
(40:44):
want to do. Also, back to the nopress is bad press, right? As
soon as you got parents talkingabout you in a bad way, that's
free press, right? That's,that's like, Absolutely,
they're, they're saying allthese awful things. What makes
the kids want the albums evenmore, right? And rock and roll
is all about rebellion, as we'vetalked about before. So what's
more rebellious than AleisterCrowley? Right?
(41:07):
Not much.
I think it's interesting though,that even though he was the
source of all this, that itdidn't trickle down like Jimmy
Page was into that stuff, butnever really explained any of
it. He would just kind of put itout there. And maybe that's how
it works. Maybe that's themysticism, right? Yeah, you put
out all these symbols on yourrecord and don't talk about it,
(41:29):
and then people can assume whatthey want exactly. He had
actually had a press conferenceand said, Here's what my record
means, here's what these symbolsmean. That would have been
boring,right? Let people, let people
pick and choose and decide forthemselves what it means. Yeah,
it's kind of like the naked manat the pentagram on the rush
albums. You know, I've heardsome conversations about that,
(41:50):
but it's not what people think.
Sure, sure, sure. Sometimes theyput a lot of thought into it, as
I'm sure rush did, because theyput a lot of thought in
everything. Sometimes they putalmost no thought into it, like
Ozzy did. Mr. Crowley is knownmostly for its incredible guitar
solo by Randy Rhoads than it isany kind of text in the actual
(42:15):
song. Yeah, yeah.
So as we go here, I just want toask you a question. I want to
ask, Who do you think is thewickedest person in dirt nap
city? I'll give you fourcandidates here that I was
thinking about. Okay, so youknow he, he had said that he was
(42:36):
the wickedest man in the world.
But we've got four candidateshere that I think are pretty
wicked, okay, we've gotRasputin, yeah, I think, without
a doubt, yeah, pretty wicked,yeah. We've got Aleister
Crowley, okay, who maybe was allshow.
We've got Mata Hari Okay, who Ithink, you know, I think we've
(42:59):
determined, after a while thatwas kind of set up, yeah, yeah.
And also in over her head.
But then we've got Typhoid Mary,who maybe was accidentally the
wickedest, yeah, but we we'renot judging here, but I'm
saying, Who do you think, if wewere to judge, who do you think
is the wickedest? I can't thinkof of all of those people. I
(43:20):
think Russ Putin is the one Iwould least like to be around.
You'd be the most creeped outby, yes, yes. So I'm gonna go
with he's actually wicked, yeah,the other ones, yeah, yeah. And
he smells like a goat, yeah.
Well, congratulations, recipeand you did it again. You out.
You out wicked, the most wickedperson in the world.
(43:45):
Those guys can have each other.
As far as I'm concerned,they can get food served to them
by Typhoid Mary. That's right,our dirt commissary and go see a
show with Mata Hari, yeah,you're doing her day. We don't
judge. No judgment here. Dirtnap City is a judgment free zone
(44:06):
like Planet Fitness.
All right, Kelly, well, that'sall I got for Mr. Crowley. Love
it. You enjoyed it. I didn'tknow anything about him. I just
knew the name. So that waspretty awesome. Thank you.
Oh, Mr. Crowley, what went on inyour head? Oh.
(44:30):
Mr. Crowley, you waiting on.
(46:18):
I want to guide My white horse.
Man.
I Hear approaching Your Time And
Alex, hello everybody.
Welcome to another episode ofdirt nap city,
the podcast about interestingdead people. My name is Alex.
I'm here with my friend Kelly.
How you doing today? Kelly, I'mdoing great, and I'm wondering
if that intro, if you'rereading, or if that's memorized.
(00:26):
I'm reading everything. I can'tdo anything from memory. Okay,
okay. I like your consistencywith the introduction. I think
if we ever do this show live,and we will do the show live,
I think that liquid death isgoing to sponsor a live tour of
dirt nap city coming to yourcity around the world. We'll be
drinking the delicious CannedWater of liquid death. And I
(00:50):
think that we will memorizeeverything for that show so that
we get it exactly right. Oh, no,like a TED talk.
Yeah, yeah. It'll we'll haveslides completely scripted.
We'll do some interactivepolling with the audience. I
mean, it's gonna be a reallygreat live show. So a lot of
people don't realize howscripted this is, but we're
(01:11):
reading our script. It's ironicthat a show about dead people
would be live rightnow, I get the liquid Duff
connection. I didn't get thatbefore, but now I get it. Oh,
oh, you just thought I randomlypicked it,
yeah, oh, yeah. I was wonderingwhy you didn't go with, you
(01:32):
know, Aquafina or Fiji. But nowI get it. All right. Are you on
board? I mean, you know, I I'vefollowed the money, man, okay,
all right. Well, you heard itfirst here, liquid death if you,
if you want to get in, Alexfollows the money. He also
followsthe path of interesting dead
people, and he's going to tellus about one now. So I got a
good one today. You say youthink you know who it is
(01:58):
without any clues. Can you tellme who you think it is you want
to take a guess without anyclues. I think you're doing Ozzy
Osbourne.
I'm not doing Ozzy Osborne,but you are damn close. Hulk
Hogan, no,they both died, if you're
listening in the future, OzzyOsbourne and Hulk Hogan died a
(02:22):
little while ago. It's probablya lot a little longer ago, when
you're by the time you'relistening to this. I tend to
have a policy that I let, I letthese guys, you know, let the
rigor mortis set in. I let him.
I think the the most recent deadperson we did was probably Jerry
(02:42):
Springer, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah.
That was George Foreman. Maybe,yeah, yeah. George Foreman,
actually, I think was like, Ithink he died the same year that
we did the program. So, yeah,you know, like the body to be
told, yeah, I tend to let youknow, let all
the the ceremony go and leteveryone talk about them, and
(03:04):
then when people stop talkingabout them, that's when I think
we 5200 years. 5200 years.
But you are very close today.
And I won't lie,Ozzy's death got me thinking a
lot about this person. Here'sthe clue I'll give you. This
person described himselfas the wickedest man in the
(03:28):
world.
Oh Prince of Darkness, born in1875
in Warwickshire, England, anddied in 1947 in Sussex, England,
the wickedest man in the world,pull pole pot.
(03:49):
No, that's he wasn't English.
English. Wickedest man and died,lived and died in England,
described in the basically 1875through 1947
was he a musician? He was not amusician. He was an occultist.
(04:14):
He was a ceremonial magician.
We'll get into what that means,poet, a novelist, a mountaineer
and a painter, and he founded areligion called Thelema. Fella,
I've never heard of that. I amtalking today about Aleister
Crowley. Aleister Crowley, Mr.
(04:38):
Crowley. That is a tie in. Thatis a tie in, wow, I've been
thinking about this guy a lotlately, and didn't really know
much about him, other than thekind of stuff that we used to
talk about in middle school, onon the in the playgrounds of
middle school in the 80s, totalk about how all these rock
(04:58):
musicians that we listen to.
Two that are now classic rockmusicians were all into the
devil, and we heard from ourbrother's friends that, you
know, somebody wore, you know,had an upside down cross, or
that they, you know, bit thehead off a bat, bit off a bat,
or that they lived in somehaunted castle, or that they
(05:21):
used all these pentagrams, andit never really seemed
real, because we'd listen to themusic and never would say too
much about the devil oranything, unless you played it
backwards, right, right, right.
With the rumor was always thatif you played it backwards, it
would tell you, you know, to butour moms all we all were sure,
even though they were the onesthat didn't listen to the music,
(05:44):
they were all sure that thisstuff was devil inspired, right?
And don't trace all that stuff.
They could trace all this stuffback to this guy who wasn't even
alive back then, named AleisterCrowley. Okay, so I want to talk
about him today. I want to talkabout what, who he was, what he
(06:06):
did. I want to talk abouthow he, even though he died in
1947 how he influenced all ofour rock gods of the 60s and 70s
andearly 80s, yeah, and just kind
of the legacy that he leavestoday, because he actually
didn't have, for someone thathad kind of a cult. He didn't
really have that many followers.
(06:30):
He was, he was famous, but moreinfamous than famous. People
tended to know who he was whenhe was alive.
But he was definitely like atroublemaker, for sure. Okay,
this guy was born EdwardAlexander Crowley, not Alistair.
(06:50):
His parents wereDie Hard, religious evangelists.
His dad was a preacher. His daddied when Alistair was 11, and
that made Alistair rebel. Fromthat point on, he became, went
from like this literal choir boyto the Antichrist in like five
(07:11):
years. We kind of talked aboutthat in the Brothers Grimm about
how father figure passing awayhas a big impact on a lot of
these people. Absolutely. A lotof times it turns people poor,
but I think in this case, heactually the father. They had
money, so that wasn't anythingto worry about. But his mom
(07:33):
couldn't really handle him. Hewas 11 years old. She would
scold him, and she called him abeast.
I mean, he called her a beast.
He said, You're a beast forscolding me, and she retaliated
by calling him the beast, whoa,and that's how she referred to
her son. From then on, was thebeast? Well, he really leaned
(07:53):
into that, and he was verydramatic kind of kid, like he
was maybe what we'd call today,like a goth kid, kind of Yeah,
but he was really dramatic andinto theatrics and all that kind
of stuff. He went to TrinityCollege in Cambridge. He was a
very smart kid. He studiedliterature and philosophy. But
really, when he was in college,he was mostly into hookers and
(08:16):
reading about the occult andclimbing really dangerous
mountains. Like, he was reallyinto mountain climbing, really,
and that's not something thatusually goes along with the
occult mountain climbing, yeah,for some reason he was a big
mountain climber. He was justinto that. So he was, he must
have been physically fit, yeah,at that age, yeah, yeah, okay.
(08:38):
But really into, like, readingabout the occult, and, like I
said, really into, like,Ian Ashbury, yeah, no, not the
cult the occult. But he wasreally into hookers too, like I
said, and he was really into youcould call him bisexual, or you
(08:58):
could call him Amber sexual. Hewas he write poetry about, I'm
trying to keep it relativelyclean here, but he would write
poems about animals and men andwomen and lots of different
hedonistic acts. But mostly hejust liked to push buttons.
(09:21):
Yeah, just like to push buttons.
Let me kind of set the scenehere. This is Victorian England
walking around with a candy,candy cigarette in his mouth,
as we've talked about before.
Victorian England was very, veryrestrictive and prudish. In
fact, they used to cover uptable legs. They would cover
table legs because they were toosuggestive. That's how, that's
(09:43):
how kind of sexually repressedVictorian times were. Wow,
right? And he was into like, youknow, I think to in today's
world, we see so many rock starsthat are kind of like.
Is like from Marilyn Manson toDavid Bowie, but just like
pushing the buttons ofconventionality, right, of of
(10:08):
saying, I don't want to be like,you know, society tells me to be
so he would, you know, publishbad poetry and,
you know, have wild parties, butjust to kind of push the buttons
of society. So he grew up withsome money, you said, a little
bit of money. Yeah, I don't, Iwouldn't call him rich or
anything, maybe. But I justwonder if, yeah, he never, did
(10:29):
he ever have, like, a normaljob, you know, like a got to
support yourself kind of job, orwas he just sort of, don't
think, I thought your daughter,I think life, I think, yeah, I
think he was, it was like that.
Well, he was, it was a writer,you know, he would write, write
things, sure, get thingspublished back when you could do
that. At this point, he changedhis name to Alistair. At this
point, remember, his name wasEdward Alexander, and I have a
(10:52):
quote from him that I would liketo read in the style of maybe a
a flamboyant fussy British guyfrom the 1800s to see how I do,
I hope you practice. This iswhat he says.
For many years, I had loathebeing called Alec, partly
(11:16):
because of the unpleasant soundand sight of the word, partly
because it was the name by whichmy mother called
me, Edward did not seem to suitme, and the diminutive TED or
Ned were even less appropriate.
Alexander was too long and Sandysuggested toe hair and freckles.
I had read in some book or otherthat the most favorable name for
(11:36):
becoming famous was oneconsisting of a Dactyl followed
by a spondy, as at the end of ahexameter like Jeremy Taylor,
Aleister Crowley fulfilled theseconditions, and Alistair is the
Gaelic form of Alexander toadopt it would satisfy my
(11:57):
romantic ideals. Wow. Very welldone. Do you know what a Dactyl
and a spondy are? Well, JeremyTaylor, right. So, yeah,
anything that like Jeremy likeduck, duck and a
spawn D and then spondy was toolong syllable. So like Jeremy
(12:19):
Taylor, Benjamin Franklin.
Aleister Crowley, like anythingthat's like, it has a rhythm
follow that has rhythm thatlike, short, short, long, long,
long, right? If you're talkinglike Morris code. So he picked
his name because of the sound ofit. Aleister Crowley, yes.
Jeremy Taylor, it definitelyBenjamin Franklin. It definitely
sounds like somebody shakingyour hand. Aleister Crowley,
(12:43):
nice to meet you, right, right,yeah, yeah, yeah. He was also,
like, a little odd that he wouldtime his meals. He'd time his
bodily function, time hisdreams, to test his own
willpower and magicaldiscipline. And he was really
into this thing called that. Hecalled Magic, and it's magic
with the CK at the M, A, G, I,C, K. I'll explain more about
(13:08):
that a little bit. Yeah, I'veseen that. And he kind of
invented that term. Okay,so he was in in 1898 he joined
the secret society called thehermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn. That was a secret societyof British I know it's so
pretentious, a secret society ofBritish intellectuals who were
(13:30):
into magic symbols and robes,like they were really into like,
you could picture this, right? Abunch of guys getting together.
I'm thinking oats. I'm thinkingof the righteous, the righteous
gemstones, their their robes,yeah, exactly, exactly. But the
poet WB Yates was actually inthis club like they were actual
intellectuals, not I mean, thiswas an actual serious thing, and
(13:52):
he advanced through the orderpretty quickly, you know, but he
creeped people out. He was superintense, and his erotic ritual
experimentation, I guess youcould call it,
and he was into a lot of drugstoo. Drugs back then in the late
(14:12):
1800s were not that illegal, anda lot of people did cocaine and
heroin, and and you they getstrung out, but they were, there
wasn't like, there wasn't like,a illegality to it, right? They
were more of a functionaljunkies.
I don't know how functional theywere, but a lot of famous people
(14:35):
did really hardcore drugs backthen, so, but hold on, I was
kind of strung out. I think I'mreminded of Rasputin in a lot of
this. So Rasputin was beforethis. Though, right,
when did Rasputin live? It was1700s Putin was
(14:58):
check or was it the sametimeframe? No, there were.
Around the same time. SoRasputin was
lived from 1869 to 1916 so, ohyeah, a little bit. They could
have hung out.
They could have, I mean, it wasRussian, though they probably,
yeah, but, but still. I mean, itsounds like, it sounds like they
were kindred spirits. Any anyreports on how Mr. Crowley
(15:20):
smelledNo but I do have verification
that of all the people thatwe've done on dirt and upset he
he did meet one person. Do youwant to guess who it was we've
talked about? Yeah, I'm gonnasay he met Henry Ford.
No no. Houdini, Ah, okay, thatmakes sense. They were, you
(15:45):
know, I'll tell you a little bitabout that here. In a magic
they decided how to spell magic,yeah, exactly. He called that
entertainment magic, or, like,performative magic, but it was a
lot different than the kind ofmagic that he was doing, which
was not for um,for enter show, yeah, not for
(16:06):
Yeah. I want you to explain thatwhen you can, yeah, yeah. Um, so
he got kicked out of thehermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn after a power struggle.
Plus he was trying to summondemons in his apartment, like he
was just getting too weird forthese people, all right? And
(16:26):
then he wrote an a collection,an erotic collection of bad
poetry. And he called hiscollection. He called this book
of poetry, white stains.
You know, of course, was it wasbanned in the UK. In Victorian
England, there broke lots oftaboos. He talked about lots of
(16:48):
kinds of sex, even bestiality.
I was today. I was like, How badcould it have been? Let me read
some of the stuff, and I blushedpretty bad. So I'm not gonna
read any of that stuff here fromthe book of white stains. Yeah,
I read a little bit and decidednot to, not to subject you to
(17:11):
that. But like I said, I mean,this was Victorian England. He
was trying to stir things up.
Newspapers called him a satanicpervert, and he leaned into that
and loved the attention. Yeah,he said the key to joy is
disobedience. So he was a rebelrouser, and he just hated, like,
the way society was sorepressive, and he was just
trying to to lean into all that.
(17:35):
So now he's reading all thismystical stuff. He's
experimenting with rituals.
He called it. He called thethese erotic rituals. He called
it sex magic with a ck, which islike the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Yeah, exactly. But he thought hewas destined for something big.
Sex magic, exactly. So hetraveled all over. He traveled
(17:59):
to Europe, I mean, to Egypt andIndia and China. He went, he got
married, and he and his wifeRose, moved to Cairo, and one
day in his apartment or hishotel room, and in Cairo, he
claims to have been contacted byan, I guess, I'll call it an
entity named Iwas,who dictated to him the what do
(18:22):
you call it the book of law,okay, and the book of he wrote
it all down. And the book of lawstarts off do what thou will.
That should be. The whole law,do what thou will love is the
law love under will. So thatdoesn't mean do whatever you
(18:45):
want, but rather do what you'remeant to do. And it's whole
thing, his whole, likephilosophy, strip away all that,
all the, you know, crazy stuffthat we're talking about, his
whole thing was, there's thisthing called Your will. And
everybody has a true will, andthat will is what you were meant
to do in life, and do whateverit takes to do that thing.
(19:12):
And that's and every everythingwill turn out okay, as long as
youalways are going towards that,
that will, don't let the manstop you. So by today's
standards, that's actually verymodern, very accepted. That's
actually what a lot of peoplewill tell you to do. What color
is your motivational speakers?
(19:35):
What? What color is yourparachute, exactly. So he was
really in. So when I say will,when I talk about the will, just
keep in mind that when we'retalking about Will, it's what
you were meant to do, andeverything else is just kind of
window dressing to get attentionfor his you know, main thesis
was, do what do what you weremeant to do. Do what thou will.
(20:00):
Yeah, okay, but this wasn't evensomething he wrote. He claims it
was divinely inspired, and hewas just right, and the medium
so right, and he was theprophet, right, yeah.
So magic, this, M, A, G, i, c,um,
okay, is not. Is different thanstage magic like Houdini, right?
(20:23):
And he and Houdini actually hitit off. They met in 1914 in
London. They hit it off. Houdinisaid that Crowley was curious
but intelligent, but he didn'tbelieve it. Remember, Houdini
was famously, like, notinterested or didn't believe in
the occult or any of that stuff.
Remember he and his wife? Yeah,they were trying, trying to,
(20:45):
trying to get their contacttheir dead relatives or
something, or each other. Magicto him, to Crowley, was the
science and art of causingchange to occur in conformity
with the will. So whenever youchange something and changes,
any change in the universe, andremember, Will is like your
(21:07):
destiny, what you're meant todo, yeah? So like, if it's your
will to be a painter, forexample, then every brush stroke
you take is magic, right?
Anything you're doing towardsthat goal is magic, M, A, G, I,
C, K,so you relying your actions, so
the universe bends to them. Inour world, that's goal setting,
(21:27):
right? That's just yeah, do goalsetting. But in this world,
somehow it meant chanting inrobes with naked people and
goats and lots of drugs. Likeit's so crazy that this is so
much a part of our world now,but it was so radical back then
that it was seen as like satanicreverse now, because he was
(21:47):
trying to get people'sattention, and because everyone
saw him as so bizarre andcreepy, and he leaned into that
so he could get attention. So,yeah, he he definitely leaned
in. He called himself thewickedest man in the world. Just
because the press and peoplewere calling, were calling him.
You know, this bizarre thing, Ithink today's celebrities, a lot
(22:10):
of them are just like this,right? They do something to get
attention, to get their wordabout something else out. And
sometimes it works, sometimes itdoesn't well, he saw it as no,
no, press is bad press, right?
And so by, by agreeing with twothings, by agreeing with these
people when they said bad thingsabout him, you know that he's
(22:32):
wicked and he's evil, he's he'sgetting more press. But then
also, when you agree withsomebody who's trying to put you
down, and you just say, Yes,that's right. You kind of take
away their power, right? All ofa sudden they're trying to make
a point that you're awful. And,you know, you do these things.
And if you just say, Yeah, I do,then they're like, what do they
(22:54):
say? You know, they have norebuttal to that, right? Right?
Exactly. So he founded thisreligion based on this ideal is
called Thelema. Thelema, okay,and Thelema emphasize radical
freedom. Keep in mind thatVictorian England wasn't
radically free at all personalresponsibility, which is a key
(23:16):
here, because this wasn't aboutchaos or selfishness and
breaking from traditional moralcodes, which there was a lot of
them back in. This is, you know,back in Dickens times, right?
He you have to liveauthentically and ethically on
your own terms. Again, in 2025America, this is custody, yeah,
(23:37):
a lot of people are into rightauthenticity, finding your true
will. I think if he was alivetoday, he would be on tick tock,
telling people to find theirtrue passion and their calling
and follow it without beingshackled, and he wouldn't have
had to go to all this otherstuff. Now he was a strange guy,
and he was into all this stuff,but the message that he was
(23:59):
trying to get out is very modernby 21st Century Western
standards, I think, yeah, lookat, look at Alice Cooper, or
Trent Reznor, you know, or someof these guys, right, that
embrace the,you know, the makeup and the
sort of satanic side, but arereally just telling you to be
(24:19):
free, absolutely, absolutely. Hedeclared himself the prophet of
this religion because it wasdictated to him by us. Yeah, he
started calling him. Thenewspapers were like, This guy's
crazy. He's, you know, they wereafraid. You know, he was. He was
being free in a society thatwouldn't let you be that way.
(24:41):
So he would try to provokepeople. So he would call himself
the great beast, 666,okay, now, now, now, remember
his mother called him the beast,yeah, and so he got that from
her, and he knew that back then,anybody that was like, not conf.
If non conformist was consideredsatanic. So he didn't even have
(25:04):
to say anything about Satan. Hethey were already calling him
satanic. So he was leaning intothat, calling himself the great
beast. 666, he would also usesymbols that Victorian people,
that they would think looksatanic, like pentagrams and
like the like I said, the robes.
He wasn't a Satanist at all. Hesaid, I can't say I was ever
(25:27):
really fond of Satan,but he did it to shock and rebel
against society. Yeah, andVictorian climate was so
restrictive that, you know,anything like I said, anything
outside of the norm wasconsidered satanic. He loved the
drama and the ceremony of itall. Wow.
(25:47):
Now I forgot to mention he wasalso a spy.
Okay, during World War One, hewas recruited by British
intelligence to work as a spy inthe US and Canada to gather
information on while he wassympathizers, or, yeah, yeah,
like he was they. He was in theUS and Canada. While he was
(26:10):
there, he was like, trying tofigure out, like, people that
were on the German side,Americans and Canadians. He was
so convincing thatthe US intelligence, um, took
him in for questioning andaccused him of being a German
spy because he was hangingaround the German sympathizers,
yeah, but he like that. That wasjust a little footnote, like
(26:34):
another thing that he did, butkind of interesting. He never
met Mata Hari, though, that, youknow, no, not. But he This shows
how much, how kind ofcharismatic he was, right? If he
was charismatic and influentialenough that that's why the
British intelligence, probably,you know, pursued him to do
this. So hein in the 1920s now, we're in
(26:59):
the 1920s he goes to Italy, andhe buys this house in Sicily,
and he calls it the abbey ofThelema, and that's where all
the followers lived. In fact,this was a commune. Communes
weren't really a thing back inthe 1920s so he's kind of the
first one to do communes. Now,these, they became really big
(27:21):
again, very ahead of his time,very ahead of the whole,
you know, free love movement.
But a lot of his followers livethere, and they would have have
lots of drugs. And like when Isaid, when I say drugs, I mean,
this was kind of beforepsychedelics, but this was
heroin and cocaine, mostly lotsof sex rituals. Now the
(27:45):
neighbors were the onesreporting all this stuff. We
never had any insideinformation from people that
were inside the house, so a lotof this information came from
the neighbors, right? And theyprobably wanted to vilify him,
and so they might be rumors,yeah, um, eventually Mussolini.
Mussolini kicked him out ofItaly.
(28:11):
It's funny, as bad as he was, aswicked as he was, he was never
really arrested for anything,never spent any time in jail,
none of the stuff he was doing,even the drug, the drugs weren't
illegal. The parties that he hadwere annoying to people, but
they weren't really illegal. Themost illegal things he was doing
was publishing that likepornographic po poetry, right,
(28:32):
right, but all they would do isban his stuff. They weren't
throwing him in jail. So he waslike the baddest man around, but
he was not spending time injail, like our friend Rasputin,
who was constantly gettingthrown in right in jail for
different things, right? Wow.
But like I said, this was aprototype of the the communes
that you'd have in the 1960s soby the early by the 1930s and
40s, he started getting older,getting into bad health. He was
(28:56):
taking lots of heroin for hispain, and he died penniless in
1947 at the age of 72Wow. His last words were, I'm
perplexed.
Pretty good last words. Thoseare good, pretty good last
words. That's just a greatphrase underused, right? I feel
(29:18):
like I need to work that into myconversation. I'm perplexed.
Well, I would be careful to sayit you might, might be your last
words. Well, maybe just the wordperplexed, underused word. So I
went back and I looked at someof the last words of some people
that we've talked about on dirtnap city before,
(29:38):
and I thought I'd share most ofthem. Most of them, most people
don't have last words that arerecorded. And some of these,
you know, are,you know, a lot of historians
say I'm not sure if those werehis last words. Yeah, reported.
How do you verify? I'll read yousome of these. Yeah, don't blame
nobody but yourself.
Those were the last words of.
(30:00):
Of Al Capone. Well, I don'tblame nobody but yourself. I
think he was talking to hisdoctor. That sounds that sounds
on brand, yeah, dying man can donothing easy.
Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin,okay,
money can't buy life. Great.
Last Words. Bob Marley,money can't buy life. I'm tired
(30:24):
of fighting. Who do you thinksaid I'm tired of fighting that?
Foreman,no, that's a good one. Harry
Houdini, oh, yeah, yeah. Wholiterally, you know, punch,
yeah. Punched in his stomach.
I don't believe these were lastwords. They seemed a little too
(30:45):
scripted, but it is reportedthat Henry Ford's last
cue the eye roll on Henry Ford.
It was reported that his lastwords were, it is well enough
that people of the nation do notunderstand our banking and
monetary system. For if theydid, I believe there would be a
revolution before tomorrowmorning. Wow, I call BS on that.
That is not his. That soundslike Tracy Chapman. You know,
(31:05):
poor people like take what'stheirs. I like these last words.
These are my, maybe my favorite.
I have not told half of what Isaw.
Oh, hold on, hold on. Was thatHoward Hughes No? Marco Polo.
Marco Polo, yes, yes. Actually,story each other, yeah, yeah,
(31:28):
okay. I, I do remember that now,but I Yeah.
This one you might think is JohnLennon, but obviously John
Lennon probably didn't have anyprofound last word since he was
assassinated, it is not the loveyou make, it's the love you
give. Nikola Tesla said that isnot the love you make, it's the
(31:51):
love you give, yeah, and thisone by Teddy Roosevelt, I'm just
going outside, and maybesometime.
Wow, and never came back. Nevercame back. Oh, Teddy, wow. So
those were the last words of ourresidents here.
Mr. Crowley didn't actually havethat many followers. They'd say
(32:14):
it was sometimes a dozen at atime, maybe a huge, few 100 Max
total. So for someone with thatfew followers, he really had a
big influence. His book startedfinding their way into
bookshops, occult bookshops,which occult bookshops usually
were like, right next to headshops you know, or you know,
(32:38):
drug stores, or stores that, youknow, sold like paraphernalia,
hash pipes and things like that,bongs. In the 50s and 60s, they
would kind of be connected.
People would get high and thenread these, you know, occult
books and Aleister Crowley stuffwould find his way into the
bookstores. His theatrics madehim really famous, especially in
England, and he kind ofanticipated those 20th century
(33:01):
counter culture swings that wereabout to happen, things like
breaking taboos and personalfreedom and psychedelic drugs
that were about to come on thescene, the sexual revolution. He
was ahead of his time on thatnew age thinking with crystals
and all that kind of stuff. I'mhe was doing that stuff, you
(33:22):
know, 50 to 100 years beforeother people consulted that.
Yeah, when you think about it,50 years, 100 years later,
people like David Bowie andMarilyn Manson were doing the
same thing that he was justpushing the envelope, getting
reputations, but then leaninginto it instead of shrinking.
Well, the 1960s came and thesepeople who were teenagers going
(33:49):
to these cult store occultstores, are now in their 20s and
making music. The first time youever really see him pop onto the
scene was, I don't know if youknew this, but his face is on
the cover. He's one of the faceson the cover of Sergeant
Pepper's Lonely Hearts, club,band album. I didn't know that
that was him, but, I mean,there's a lot of people on that
(34:10):
cover, lot of people. Yeah,there's probably 50 people on
that cover. And there are peoplethat are influential people,
right? John Lennon was reallyinto the do what thou wilt.
Message, yeah, he might. Hemight have misinterpreted it to
mean, do whatever you want,and a lot of people did.
But you know, that's how heended up on the cover of
(34:32):
Sergeant peppers. WOW.
Jimmy Page, the guitarist forLed Zeppelin, was a huge
Aleister, Crowley fanatic. Hecollected his memorability. I
mean, Jimmy Page got to be amillionaire very quickly in
life,bought Aleister Crowley's house
on Loch Ness in Scotland. Oh,wow.
(34:55):
People said that house washaunted, and he really leaned
into all that mysticism.
Cult stuff. Um, you know, if Iknow you're not a big Led
Zeppelin guy, but you canpicture what their albums look
like, yeah, Led Zeppelin four.
Yeah, very so, sothat was a lot of the thelemic
imagery from from that religion,but Jimmy Page was the only one
(35:17):
in the band that was into thatstuff. A robber plant thought it
was annoying and nuisance.
Rubber plant was more into like,Nordic gods, yeah, Lord
of the Rings, exactly, yeah. Andthe other two guys were bored of
all of it, but they didn'treally have a say. So, so all
that, the anytime you see, like,all those symbols and all that,
(35:40):
that was all Jimmy Page isdoing. He was really into that
stuff, okay? Timothy Leary,yeah, the, you know, kind of the
60 guy who introduced LSD,he was into the same stuff, but
he used LSD instead of sexmagic, okay, but it was into the
same free love and do what thouwill and all that kind of stuff.
And then the hippies that you'vetalked about in the past, they
(36:03):
were all about the ideas of freelove and psychedelics and
communes. But it's reallyinteresting to me that we go
from the wickedest man in theworld
influencing free love, yeah,like, those things don't really
seem like they go together, butyou can draw a direct line from
(36:25):
Aleister Crowley in the 1920sand teens to the counter culture
of the 60s. I think that'sreally pretty interesting. And
he influenced so much of themusic. I mean, the Rolling
Stones came out with their said,their satanic Majesty's request
in 1967which was kind of a goof on
(36:45):
Sergeant Pepper's.
But people, you know, parents,were really like he. They use
the word satanic. They must be,you know, worship the devil.
They came up their song Sympathyfor the Devil, yeah, which, if
you read it or listen to it. Ithas, it's nothing to do with
Mick Jagger worshiping the devillike it's a kind of a cool
(37:05):
story, right? Yeah, yeah. JimMorrison was really into the
occult and all this stuff. And,of course, drugs. David Bowie
said that Aleister Crowley kindof influenced his Ziggy Stardust
character.
And then Black Sabbath were,were into a lot of this stuff
too, but none of these bandsactually came out and said, We
(37:28):
worship the devil. It was a lotof the symbolism and and kind of
dipping into, uh,Aleister Crowley stuff and their
the the kind of, you know,diagrams that kids would write
on their folders and writescroll right that they were
into. It was really prettysuperficial. But, man, those
(37:48):
parents that our parents andparents of kids our age were
acting just like the people inVictorian England did when
Aleister Crowley was around likehe was pushing buttons. The
bands of the 60s and 70s werepushing buttons, and everybody
was acting the same way. It wasjust happening again, like 50
(38:09):
years later.
Um Ozzy Osbourne came up with asong in 1980 called Mr. Crowley.
He it's not anything aboutworshiping Mr. Crowley. In fact,
in the song is mostly abouttrying to figure out, were you a
prophet? Were you a fraud? Wereyou crazy?
It has that real. You couldpicture the song, yeah, that
(38:31):
goth beginning, that organmusic, Ozzy wasn't really into
him at all. He says, I read abook about him. He was just a
strange guy that gave me theidea for a song. I didn't study
him much. I just liked the wayhis story sounded for a heavy
metal song, kind of like thisbox getting an end of that
right? Like, yeah, exactly.
That's kind of the beginning andend of Ozzy's involvement. He
(38:52):
wasn't like some sort of aAleister Crowley freak. You
wrote one song about the guy hewasn't. He wasn't like Jimmy
Page buying his house and not atall, not at all. I
just think it's funny that inthe 80s, history kind of
repeated itself, when a lot ofthese bands capitalized on the
spectacle of all this stuff,like you said, leaning into
(39:16):
moms, thinking that this stuffwas satanic. Remember the
parents resource music groupwith our music Commissioner,
yeah, she tried to ban a lot ofthe heavy metal music that was
that was influenced with thestuff. It's almost like Aleister
Crowley had a second act. Italmost in, which is what we like
to talk about in this show,people that after they die,
(39:38):
people are still talking aboutthem. They're still influencing.
I don't think he could have everimagined what heavy metal music
would sound like or be like, orI'm not sure if he would have
been friends with Jimmy Page oranything. I mean, they didn't
have a ton in common, but Ithink it's interesting that it
was affecting music that waslistened to way after he.
(40:00):
He died. Yeah, and that so manypeople he became, he became sort
of the poster child through thesymbolism and just the rituals
and all the things that he saidand promoted, it might surprise
a lot of people that thereweren't really any bands outside
of maybe, like, you know, thekind of bands that we wouldn't
(40:22):
have never even heard of,death metal bands that really
actually worship the devil.
It was all this looseassociation with Aleister
Crowley's weird writings.
And that was all because thesepeople were like, I want to just
kind of be different. I want todrop out. I want to do what I
(40:44):
want to do. Also, back to the nopress is bad press, right? As
soon as you got parents talkingabout you in a bad way, that's
free press, right? That's,that's like, Absolutely,
they're, they're saying allthese awful things. What makes
the kids want the albums evenmore, right? And rock and roll
is all about rebellion, as we'vetalked about before. So what's
more rebellious than AleisterCrowley? Right?
(41:07):
Not much.
I think it's interesting though,that even though he was the
source of all this, that itdidn't trickle down like Jimmy
Page was into that stuff, butnever really explained any of
it. He would just kind of put itout there. And maybe that's how
it works. Maybe that's themysticism, right? Yeah, you put
out all these symbols on yourrecord and don't talk about it,
(41:29):
and then people can assume whatthey want exactly. He had
actually had a press conferenceand said, Here's what my record
means, here's what these symbolsmean. That would have been
boring,right? Let people, let people
pick and choose and decide forthemselves what it means. Yeah,
it's kind of like the naked manat the pentagram on the rush
albums. You know, I've heardsome conversations about that,
(41:50):
but it's not what people think.
Sure, sure, sure. Sometimes theyput a lot of thought into it, as
I'm sure rush did, because theyput a lot of thought in
everything. Sometimes they putalmost no thought into it, like
Ozzy did. Mr. Crowley is knownmostly for its incredible guitar
solo by Randy Rhoads than it isany kind of text in the actual
(42:15):
song. Yeah, yeah.
So as we go here, I just want toask you a question. I want to
ask, Who do you think is thewickedest person in dirt nap
city? I'll give you fourcandidates here that I was
thinking about. Okay, so youknow he, he had said that he was
(42:36):
the wickedest man in the world.
But we've got four candidateshere that I think are pretty
wicked, okay, we've gotRasputin, yeah, I think, without
a doubt, yeah, pretty wicked,yeah. We've got Aleister
Crowley, okay, who maybe was allshow.
We've got Mata Hari Okay, who Ithink, you know, I think we've
(42:59):
determined, after a while thatwas kind of set up, yeah, yeah.
And also in over her head.
But then we've got Typhoid Mary,who maybe was accidentally the
wickedest, yeah, but we we'renot judging here, but I'm
saying, Who do you think, if wewere to judge, who do you think
is the wickedest? I can't thinkof of all of those people. I
(43:20):
think Russ Putin is the one Iwould least like to be around.
You'd be the most creeped outby, yes, yes. So I'm gonna go
with he's actually wicked, yeah,the other ones, yeah, yeah. And
he smells like a goat, yeah.
Well, congratulations, recipeand you did it again. You out.
You out wicked, the most wickedperson in the world.
(43:45):
Those guys can have each other.
As far as I'm concerned,they can get food served to them
by Typhoid Mary. That's right,our dirt commissary and go see a
show with Mata Hari, yeah,you're doing her day. We don't
judge. No judgment here. Dirtnap City is a judgment free zone
(44:06):
like Planet Fitness.
All right, Kelly, well, that'sall I got for Mr. Crowley. Love
it. You enjoyed it. I didn'tknow anything about him. I just
knew the name. So that waspretty awesome. Thank you.
Oh, Mr. Crowley, what went on inyour head? Oh.
(44:30):
Mr. Crowley, you waiting on.
(46:18):
I want to guide My white horse.
Man.
I Hear approaching Your Time And
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