SYMHC Classics: Aleister Crowley

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Alistair Crowley plays a role in what of our upcoming episodes this week, so we are breaking out our episode on him as Today's Saturday Classic. This one originally came out on October fourth, twenty twenty one. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and I'm Holly Frye. Alistair Crowley is somebody I've been considering for an October episode for quite a while. But the thing is, I would kind of stumble across his name in some totally random other part of the year and has nothing to do with October and kind of go, oh, yeah, I was thinking about him for an October episode, but then I'd never made note of that anywhere, and then it would be November. We don't only cover these types of subjects around October, but Crowley does seem particularly suited for a more seasonal October episode, which on this show has become traditionally associated with things that are otherworldly in some way. I grew up in a pretty conservative Methodist household in the nineteen eighties and early nineties. In other words, in the middle of Satanic panic. That meant there were some subjects my mom felt very strongly that I should not be exposed to, and that included sex, drugs, and Satanism. And this episode is going to touch on pretty much all of those things because Alister Crowley was a truly prolific and deliberately transgressive occultist whose practices included sex and drug use. He went on to influence things like modern Satanism, as well as various other new religious movements. And also just the note on pronunciation. If you've ever listened to Ozzy Osbourne, or if you're just an American, or if you speak English with various specific accents, you have probably gotten really used to the pronunciation Alister Crawley. I know that's how I always said it. That's how I think you and I both said it. In last year's episode on Taro Crowley is mine Crowley. Yeah, I think that was what I was even trying to say in that moment when more I said it more Crawley. I think I've always said it Crowley. He said it Crawley though the brewery that his family owned even had crows on the labels, Like I don't know entirely how it became more like Crowley, so it's totally possible at some point during this episode I will regress to saying it the way I've said it my entire life life before learning that he said it Crowley over the last four days. Also, I just want to note that this episode is wild. I kept feeling like this must be the strangest thing that's gonna happen this entire episode, and then I would find another a stranger thing. But at the same time, I feel like his life and his work were just so prolific and so varied that it just really scratches the surface. If you're a deve otey of Alistair Crowley, you may find ten million things that you think we left out. I think that's true of any subject we do. Yeah. Alistair Crowley was born Edward Alexander Crowley in Lymington, spa, Warwickshire, England, on October twelfth, eighteen seventy five. This was the same year that French occultists Elifas Levy died. He was the author of books like The History of Magic, Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual, and The Key to the Great Mysteries we talked about him in our hero episode I Forgot. It was also this same year that past podcast subject Helena Blovotsky co founded the Theosophical Society, which pulled together religious, philosophical, and mystical traditions from all over the world. Crowley felt that it was significant that these two things happened in the year of his birth. This would not have resonated in that way with his parents, though, they were Edward and Emily Crowley, who were part of an evangelical Christian movement known as the Plymouth Brethren. Its founders included John Nelson Darby, whose teachings included the idea that humanity was progressing through a series of ages that would culminate with the end of the world as it was described in the Book of Revelation. Before that point, Christians would be taken to Heaven through the rapture. Plymouth Brethren don't really have a hierarchy of clergy and laity, but Edward was an evangelist and all of this was a big part of Crowley's upbringing. From a young age, he was fascinated by some of the more vivid figures from the Book of Revelation, including the Dragon, the Scarlet Woman, the false Prophet, and the Beast. Thanks to the Crowley's long involvement with the brewing industry, the family was pretty well off. They called their son Alec, and in his words, his childhood was almost abnormally normal. He was educated in private schools, most of them affiliated either with the Plymouth Brethren or with other evangelical sects. His father died when he was eleven, and this was really traumatic. Alec had really idolized his father, and an uncle who played a much bigger role in his life from that point, was really pretty cruel to him. Eventually, alex started to rebel against school, against Christianity, and against his family. He also experienced chronic illnesses, including asthma, that sometimes kept him from being able to attend school, and during those periods he worked with private tutors. He spent some time in both Malvern College and Tone School before entering Trinity College, Cambridge in eighteen ninety five. Curley changed his name from Edward Alexander to Alistair at about this time. This change probably had a couple of inspirations. One was Percy Bis Shelley's poem Alistair or the Spirit of Solitude, and the other was the Gaelic version of the name Alexander, although that is usually spelled Alasdair, not al eist Er, a name I spelled wrong a lot of times while typing this. I had to add it to my word dictionaries I could keep it straight. Although Curley didn't finish a degree at Trinity, the three years that he did spend there were formative. He played chess and wrote poetry, and he did well in his courses in spite of not really paying attention to them. His parents had always expected him to excel at his schoolwork, but they were also really strict about what he was allowed to read. The only book he could have at home was the Bible. So while he wasn't all that focused on his formal course of study at Trinity, he still studied a lot, immersing himself in things like medieval magic and Rosicrucian mysticism. Rosicrucianism dates back to the seventeenth century, and it's focused on the idea that its members are maintaining and passing down ancient esoteric secrets and wisdom. Curley's time at Trinity was also happening well into a renewed interest in the occult that started in the late nineteenth century. Sometimes this is described as the Occult Revival. It had some common elements with the spiritualist movement that was evolving at about the same time, Like the theosophist movement that was also part of this whole landscape, the Occult Revival brought together a range of influences, including a Victorian understanding of the religious and mythical traditions of ancient Egypt and Greece and Asia. Just as a side note, if you get into academic work about this whole period, there are a lot of different and sometimes slightly contradictory definitions in use for terms like occult and esoteric. Some draw a distinction between a cult meaning hidden knowledge, an esoteric meaning knowledge that is revealed only too specific people like initiates of a specific order. But there is some overlap there, and some people use these terms kind of interchangeably. We aren't going to try to draw a huge distinction between them, especially since a lot of what Alistair Crowley did could really be described using both terms, just kind of depending on what we're talking about. Crowley had his first mystical experience on New Year's Eve, eighteen ninety six while he was on winter break in Stockholm. He later said that this experience quote put me on the road to myself. A year later, the same thing happened again, and he described it this way quote, my animal nature stood rebuked and kept silent in the presence of the imminent divinity of the Holy Ghost, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, yet blossoming in my soul, as if the entire forces of the universe from all eternity were concentrated and made manifest in a single rose. Crowley left Trinity College in eighteen ninety eight. His first poem was published that same year, titled Accladema, A Place to Bury Strangers in, which was credited to a gentleman of the University of Cambridge. Thanks to Crowley's inheritance, he was able to pretty much do what he wanted after leaving college. This included mountaineering and big game hunting, and he traveled extensively for both of those pursuits. But he also traveled in pursuit of knowledge, seeking out mystical and spiritual guidance. Yeah as he started developing whole systems of ritual magic. This travel would also include going to places and like doing these very prolonged involved like mystical rituals and incantations and things. On November twenty sixth, eighteen ninety eight, Croley was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which had been established ten years earlier by William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Ledel McGregor Mathers. This was one of several Hermetic orders that trace their teachings back to writings that were attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, that's a figure who combined the Egyptian deity thought with the Greek deity Hermes. In addition to its Greek and Egyptian influences, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn drew on Christian Mysticism, Kabbalah, and Paganism, as well as Hinduism and Buddhism, plus the work of Queen Elizabeth the first court adviser and astronomer John de On My short list. Folded into all of these influences was focus on ritual magic. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was one of the most prominent and influential esoteric orders of the day, and its influence spread as former members went on to establish their own orders. Initiates into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn adopted a name or sort of motto. Crowley's was perdurabo or I will endure, and then having been initiated, they progressed through ten levels of esoteric knowledge, with each grade being mastered before the person moved on to the next one, revealing a new body of knowledge they had access to. And it wasn't just that a person had to learn everything from one stage before being allowed to advance. The order's members also believed that as you mastered each level, you really evolved and progressed spiritually and psychically. Crowley had a really good memory and was also deeply interested in all of this, and he rose through the grades of the London chapter really quickly. But that did not sit well with everyone else in the order. We're going to talk about that more after a little sponsor break. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had some pretty prominent members and it was enormously influential in Aleister Crowley's life. Its progression through a series of increasingly secretive progressive degrees, and it's focus on ritual magic performed using specific regalia that all formed a template for a lot of Crowley's later writing and work, But his involvement with the organization was also pretty contentious. Some of its more advanced members, including Alan Bennett, took an interest in him, and they personally tutored him and its rituals and its secrets, but other people really questioned his morals. He had developed a reputation as a libertine who abused drugs, and his sex partners included other men. At this point, homosexuality was outlawed in Britain. Oscar Wilde's homosexuality trial had taken place just a few years before. In nineteen hundred, Samuel Ledel McGregor Mathers was head of the Order but had gone to France. Florence Farr was temporarily leading the Order in London in his place. Crowley reached a point where he expected to be inducted into the Golden Dawn's Inner Order, but Farr refused to do it, citing his quote sexual intemperance, so Crowley went over her head, traveling to Paris and taking it up with Mathers. Mathers inducted Crowley into the Inner Order himself. The relationship between Mathers and the rest of the Order was already contentious. Since he was in France, he was out of regular contact with most of the Order, and a lot of people found his behavior to be increasingly errare and dictatorial. Allegations had also arisen that some of the order's foundational manuscripts, which were supposed to be ancient secrets that had been passed down and protected for centuries, were really nineteenth century fakes. So when Crowley arrived at the Order's isis Uranias Temple at thirty six blythe Road in London and announced that Mathers had inducted him into the next degree of the Order and demanded to be shown the manuscripts he was supposed to be able to access at that level, people were upset, and they again refused to do it. Crowley went right back to France, where Mathers told him to take over the temple entirely. So Crowley went back to London again, talked the landlord into letting him into the temple, and then he changed the locks. He said Mathers had designated him as his envoy, and he summoned each member of the Inner order to be questioned. When they arrived, Crowley was wearing Scottish Highland dress, a black mask, a large gold cross, and a dagger at his waist. With the assistance of a police officer, several members of the Order physically removed Crowley from the premises. One of those members was William Butler Yates. In some accounts, Yates and others physically threw Crowley down the stairs. Yates and Crowley really did not like each other. Yates described him as indescribably mad, and also thought Crowley's poetry, which he had written a lot of at this point, was terrible. This incident became known as the Battle of blythe Road, and some accounts of it are fairly straightforward. It was a schism within an organization, followed by each side trying to retain control of its documents and other materials, but others are increasingly fantastic. Crowley biographer Richard Kazinski describes Crowley determining he was under a magical attack during all of this, as street lamps and hearthfires behaved strangely when he passed by, and his raincoat is said to have spontaneously combusted. Yates biographer Richard Ellman published an account in The Partisan Review in nineteen forty eight that describes Crowley and Yates attacking each other, with Crowley using black magic and Yates using white magic. In this account, Yates used some of Crowley's hair to perform an exorcism at the request of poet and artist Althea Gilds, who was in a tumultuous relationship with him. Him being Crowley, not Yates. This piece describes the exorcism as causing a vampire to torment Crowley in the night, and another experienced magician had to help him get rid of this vampire. Ellman's biography of Yates also mentions that quote it is said, which is one of those words that you can say to say a thing that maybe you believe or maybe you don't believe. It is said that Samuel McGregor Mathers died in nineteen eighteen as a result of a magical duel with Alistair Crowley. I'm telling you, this Partisan Review piece is so weird that I am just not confident whether he meant it to be factual or not. Like he's talking about a literal vampire being in bed with Alister Crowley. And picking at him in the night, and I'm just like, it's for real, though I have thoughts, they're not terribly kind. Crowley withdrew from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, or if you look at this from the Order's point of view, he was expelled. The order continued to fracture, eventually changing its name to Stella Matutina and then dissolving in the nineteen twenties. William Butler Yates, who described magic as the most important pursuit of his life next to poetry, went on to be regarded as one of the greatest English language poets of the twentieth century. His widely quoted poem The Second Coming is sometimes read as alluding to Alister Crowley in its last lines, which read, and what rough beast its hour come round at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. I had to memorize this poem, and I guess probably high school. We definitely did not have any conversations about William Butler Yates having a magical duel with anybody, or with Alistair Crowley having anything to do with this. Crowley was twenty four when he tried to take over the isis Urania Temple, and the previous year he had bought bolskein house on the shore of Lochness and was using it to study and do research and to perform arcane rituals, some of which really took months to complete. In the early nineteen hundreds, he also traveled extensively, going to Mexico in July of nineteen hundred with mountaineer Oscar ec and Stein and studying yoga in Sri Lanka, which was known as Ceylon at the time. He did that in nineteen oh one. He also studied Buddhist meditation practices with mentor and former Golden Dawn member Alan Bennett. In nineteen oh two, Crowley and Eckenstein were part of the first formal attempts to reach the summit of the Mountain K two. They got to an elevation of eighteen thousand, six hundred feet, which is five thy six hundred and seventy meters. This is just a little snapshot of Ali's traveling. There was a ton of it. He was a busy bee. After returning to the UK in nineteen oh three, Crowley married Rose Edith Kelly, the widow of Frederick Thomas Scarett. They honeymooned in India and Egypt. Alister claims that Rose had never had any kind of interest in the occult and had no knowledge of Egyptian deities, but that while they were in Cairo in the spring of nineteen oh four, she went into a trance, repeating quote they are waiting for you. He discribed her as being possessed by an entity known as Iowas, who was an agent of Horace and whose name was the true name of the god of Yeside's. So the Jesides are an ethnically Kurdish people who have historically been extremely persecuted, and that is carrying through until today. They continued to be extremely persecuted. It is possible that Crowley had read about them in the work of past podcast subject Helena Blovatski. Her work about them is honestly pretty offensive and mischaracterized them as just straight up devil worshippers. Alistair really didn't believe his wife. She relayed instructions on how to invoke Horace, and he thought that what she said was absurd. He took her to the nearby Egyptian Museum to see if she could identify Horace in any of the objects there. She was drawn to one particular steely, saying it identified the god who was talking to her. That object was labeled as Catalog number six sixty six, and Alistair later called it the Steally of Revealing. Allister eventually came to believe that she was telling him something genuine, and he did various incantations and invocations over a period of weeks in March and early April. Eventually, Rose instructed him to enter the room where he had been working at noon on April eighth, ninth, and tenth, and then for about an hour over those three days, still reporting that she was directly transmitting the words of iowas she dictated what became known as the Book of the Law. This made Rose the first woman to fill the role that Crowley would call his Scarlet Woman. This was meant to be a manifestation of the gardess Babylon, who could channel or transmit messages to him from higher beings. That's not spelled quite like Babylon. It is Baba l o inn instead of b A b y lonn, because the spelling with an a instead of a y was numerogically more important in Crowley's mind. Various women filled this role of the scarlet woman over the next decades, typically after having had various sexual encounters, including performing sexual magic rituals with Crowley. The Book of the Law became the central text of the philosophy and religious movement known as the Lima. The book contains the law of Salima quote do what you will shall be the whole of the law, which is often followed by quote love is the Law, love underwill, and every man and woman is a star. Rose had also told Alistair that he was to be the prophet of a new eon which would see the world move from the Age of o Cyrus to the Age of Horace. This was to be an almost apocalyptic time of struggle and strife, and Crowley later suggested that four printings of the Book of the Law had each preceded the Balllkin War, World War I, the Sino Japanese War, and World War II by a period of nine months. After these events in Cairo, Alister Crowley started associating himself with the number sixty sixty six and the beast from the Biblical Book of Revelation, calling himself the Beast sixty six six or the Great Beast six sixty six. He would go on to write twelve more holy books between nineteen oh seven and nineteen eleven, describing himself as under the direct influence of a spirit or some kind of other elevated being while writing each of them. In May of nineteen oh five, Rose gave birth to a daughter. That daughter died as a baby. Alistair and Rose later had two more children and then eventually divorced. Crowley also continued to indulge his love of mountaineering and led a team in an attempt to summit Counchinjunga in nineteen oh five. After a climber and three porters were killed in an avalanche, he ended the expedition. In nineteen oh nine, Crowley established a religious order that's often called by the name Argentum, Astrum, or Silver Star. This order's name, though, is typically written as two a's, each of them, followed by a symbol of three dots arranged in a triangle. That symbol is used as an abbreviation symbol in freemasonry. As part of this he established a periodical called The Equinox, which was dedicated to publishing things about magic and the occult. When he printed materials that had originated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Samuel McGregor Mathers tried unsuccessfully to sue him. A few years later, Theodore Royce of the Ordo templey Orientis made a similar allegation about the OTO's secrets appearing in Crowley's writings. The OTO had been founded sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, and it drew from both Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, with some of its practices also involving sex magic. Crowley claimed to have had no knowledge of the OTO, and that he must have learned those secrets directly from the entities that he was channeling when he wrote his Holy Books. Royce inducted Crowley into the OTO, and Crowley became deeply involved and really influential in this organization, including writing its gnostic Mass in nineteen thirteen. The rituals and practices that he developed for the OTO expanded on its existing use of sex magic and involved both sexual symbolism and ritual sex. In his words, quote, when you have proved that God is merely a name for the sex instinct, it appears to me not far to the perception that the sex instinct is God. We're gonna move on to some more mundane but we promise still controversial parts of Crowley's life after we pause for another sponsor break. Alister Crowley spent most of World War One in the United States, and during that time he contributed to a pro German newspaper called The Fatherland. He also wrote a lot of material that was both pro German and anti British, and more broadly anti Allies. He claimed that he did all of this because he was working for the British Secret Service to help the Allied war effort. In his account, he had used his surname, which, although he was English, there are plenty of Irish people who have some variation on Crowley as their surname, and he had also used his past connection to Irish poet William Butler Yates to convince German American poet and journalist George Viereck that he was an Irish nationalist, and he had done this so that he could infiltrate a secret network of German operatives in New York. As part of this entire ruse, on July third, nineteen fifteen, he and nine other people sailed all around New York Harbor under an Irish flag, calling themselves the Secret Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic, and declaring war on England. Whether Crowley was really working for the British Secret Service isn't entirely clear. His accounts make it sound like he took all this upon himself and then went to the British authorities to get their buy in, basically repeatedly offering his services as a spy, only to be ignored. He also claimed that his pro German writing was intentionally over the top so that it would make Germany look ridiculous. Crowley's activities in the United States naturally raised suspicions, and at one point British consul Charles Clive Bailey confirmed to US investigators that Crowley was working with Britain, but other British officials contradicted this. Although the British press was scathing about Crowley's wartime behavior, when he went back to the UK after the war, he never faced any sort of official inquiry or charges for any of the actions that really would have been considered treasonous unless he really was doing them as some kind of covert operation for British Intelligence. There is a whole book about this whole idea. I did not read the whole book, but I did read some papers and articles by the author, and I don't know where. I have thoughts about where I land on it, but I don't feel like I have hear backing up of them. Uh. In nineteen twenty Crowley started a religious community in Sicily called the Abbey of Thelema. This was meant to be a utopian community as well as a spiritual community for members of the argent Astrom and the Oto. This community became associated with drug use, sexual excesses, and strange rituals, and faced increasing hostility from neighbors. Crowley was a cue used of murder after one of the Thelemites, Raul Loveday, died in nineteen twenty three. Loveday had probably drunk some contaminated water, not totally clear, but his wife, Betty May, said that her late husband had been forced to drink the blood of a cat in a ritual. Not long after that all of this controversy surrounding him, Crowley was expelled from Sicily. By this point, Crowley had pursued relationships with various people regardless of their gender, both within and outside the context of sex magic. Crowley had also started to describe himself as androgynists, or as having both masculine and feminine traits, calling himself both Alister and a feminized version of Alice. Over the years, he also took on just a ton of pseudonyms and identities drawn from an assortment of ethnicities and religious identities. At times, Crowley used language coined by Karl Heinrich Unrichs to describe a range of sexual orientations and gender identities. By this point, Curley had also become addicted to heroin. We haven't really gotten into it here, but like a lot of the rituals that he would do and his mystical work would be done under the influence of various drugs. In nineteen twenty two, he wrote Diary of a Drug Fiend, which was a novel that he said was based on personal experience. In nineteen twenty five, he was named Outer Head of the Order of the Oto, and then in nineteen twenty nine he got married again, this time to Maria Theresa Ferrari de Miramar. They separated not long after that. Also in nineteen twenty nine, he wrote Magic in theory and practice. This outlined quote the science and art of causing change to occur. In conformity with will, Curley explained that he spelled magic with a K at the end because quote, I chose therefore the name magic as essentially the most sublime and actually the most credited, of all the available terms. I swore to rehabilitate magic, to identify it with my own career. In nineteen thirty Crowley faked his own death in Portugal, leaving a suicide note for nineteen year old Hanni Yaeger, who was the latest to be appointed his scarlet woman. This letter said he was going to be swallowed by the Bocca do Inferno, or the mouth of Hell, which is a dramatically arched cliff formation over rushing seawater not far from Lisbon. He did not die. He resurfaced in Berlin, where his artwork, which we have not gotten into at all, was being shown at the Newmannerendorf Gallery in nineteen thirty one. Yeah, this nineteen year old who was acting as a Scarlet Woman, apparently after his disappearance, insisted that she had seen his ghost. The next day, Crowley once again apparently offered his services as some kind of spy during World War Two, but was apparently again denied. There are also some reports that he tried to personally meet with Adolf Hitler, but those are really unsubstantiated. In the nineteen forties, he wrote the Book of Toth, a short essay on the tarot of the Egyptians, and he worked on a tarot deck with FRIEDA. Harris. That's something we talk about more in our episode on Taro, which came out last year. In the last years of his life, Alister Crowley became friends with writer John Simmons, who essentially filled the role of literary executor after Crowley's death. He also met Kenneth Grant, who started working as Crowley's secretary and assistant. In one letter, Crowley called Grant quote a definite gift from the gods. Many of Crowley's many posthumously published works were curated and edited by Simmons and Grant. Alister Crowley died on December one, nineteen forty seven. He had spent the last of his inheritance many years before this, and by the time he died he was penniless and living in a boarding house in Hastings. Although he had been the subject of just scandalous newspaper reports in earlier years. By the time he died, he was not nearly so infamous. His obituary in the New York Times simply read Edward Alexander Crowley, better known as Alister Crowley, author and poet, who was an alleged practitioner of black magic, died today in Hastings at the age of seventy two. But Crowley's popularity and infamy skyrocketed during the nineteen sixties in tandem with the counterculture movement. This wasn't really a defined movement, but more of an overlapping group of movements and interests and organizations that were all, in one way or another, a rejection of the values and norms of earlier decades. This included, of course, the free love movement, the psychedelic drug movement, and a resurgence in interest in spiritualism and the occult, all of which makes total sense for people to bring Alistair Crowley into it. A ripe time, Yeah, Alister Crowley is one of the people on the cover of the Beatles Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which came out in nineteen sixty seven. He's in the back row, second from the left. Crowley was also one of the first Westerners to write about a number of Eastern disciplines and practices, including tantra and Hatha and Raja yoga. These writings found a new audience as interest in Eastern practices really spread in the nineteen sixties and seventies. Although since Crowley's understanding of all this was definitely skewed through his very specific lens, that unfortunately means that his perspective on some of this has become pretty entrenched in the Western understanding of these disciplines, even when it does not represent them accurately at all. The Oto went through its own resurgence in the nineteen sixties, and Crowley's work influenced other new religious movements in the mid twentieth century as well. Today, Croley's name is almost synonymous with Satanism, although his work wasn't really about worshiping the devil, but his work did influence the development of modern Satanism. Yeah. Among other things, he extensively used the deity of Baphomet, which is the one with the goat head, which has become a symbol associated with Satanism. He was not the only person that was using that deity obviously, but like that's one of the many ways. Crowley also knew and worked with Gerald Gardner, who's the namesake of Gardenerian Wiccka, and Gardner's early writing on witchcraft draws pretty heavily from Crowley's work on ritual magic and from the Oto, which Gardner tried to revive after World War Two. Gardner's work in witchcraft eventually did move away from these roots, but Crowley's work also influenced modern witchcraft more broadly outside of the scope of Gardenerian Wicca, starting in about the nineteen fifties and sixties. It is not entirely clear whether Crowley and l Ron Hubbard ever personally met, although Hubbard described him meaning Crowley as his quote very good friend in various lectures, but it does seem as though Crowley's work had an influence on Hubbard, which may have influenced his development of dianetics and scientology. Hubbard had worked with rocket engineer and OTO leader Jack Parsons on a series of magical rituals known as the Babylon working in nineteen forty six that is, once again not Babylon like the place but Baba Lon. These were based on Crowley's teachings and were centered on the idea of conceiving a child that would be known as the Moonchild, which would allow the deity Babylon to take a human form. Hubbard served as parsons seer or scribe during these rituals, dictating the voice of Babylon from the astral plane. Curly himself does not seem to have been too eager about all this. In a nineteen forty six letter, he wrote, quote, apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is trying to produce a moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats. The collaboration between Parsons and Hubbard did not last long, though Parson's wife left him for Hubbard, and Parsons lost most of his life savings in a failed project that he his sister in law, and Hubbard started to try to buy yachts and resell them for a prophet. The Church of Scientology is notoriously secretive and has denied that Crowley influenced its doctrines in any way, but in the paper The Occult Roots of Scientology, which was published in the Journal Nova Religio, the Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, and then also in the book Alister Crowley and Western Esotericism. Hugh B. Urban argues that the idea of a guardian or a guardian angel, which was present in Crowley's work all the way back to the Book of the Law, also appears in a nearly identical way in some of Hubbard's scientology writing. Aside from Alister Crowley also became a recognizable and notorious figure in popular culture. He had already been reimagined in fiction decades before his death, including in William Somerset Mom's nineteen oh eight novel The Magician. Later Ian Fleming modeled the Bond villain Ernst stavro Blofeld after him. Crowley's work influenced psychologist and psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary and led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, whose Alister Crowley collection included bull Scheme House, which is currently slated for renovations after it was badly damaged by two fires. In the last few years. Crowley has appeared in that Ozzy Osbourne song we mentioned at the top of the show, and in David Bowie's quicksand the Demon Crowley in the novel Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett was also of course named for him. The list goes on and on. In terms of writing about Crowley, for a long time, there were pretty much two modes. There was the work of believers who uncritically accepted everything he saidis fact, and people who saw him as more of an egomaniacal Charlatan libertine, whose work was a lot more about self aggrandizement and intentionally scandalizing people than it was about occult beliefs and practices. But there's been some really more nuanced and thoughtful work about Crowley and about the nineteenth century occult revival more generally, just in the last couple of decades, which honestly, I took some pleasure in reading all of those things, even though sometimes there was whiplash involved, because I would read one person that was like just making it sound like all of these things that happened were one hundred percent real, and then a different person would describe the exact same scenario and be like, and of course you can see Alistair Crowley was totally absurd, and then you know some more nuanced writing that has been happening more recently that's more like, Okay, this is the context that all of this was happening in. These are the many things that it has contributed to that kind of stuff. Whoosh, Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. 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