Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 316: Aleister Crowley Part 1 - The Great Wizard Wrestling Match of 1900

Episode Date: September 21, 2025

It's FINALLY TIME! Mike, Alex and Jesse dive DEEP into one of the most influential, absurd and insane individual to ever live. The Great Beast 666 himself, Aleister Crowley! Thank you to - CashApp Use Code [SECURE10] All you lovely people at Patreon! HTTP://PATREON.COM/CHILLUMINATIPOD Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Editor - DeanCutty http://www.twitter.com/deancutty Show art by - https://twitter.com/JetpackBraggin http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Sources: Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley by Lawrence Sutin Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley by Richard Kaczynski The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography by Aleister Crowley (Among many others)

Are you someone who watches every true crime documentary the day that it releases and then find yourself always wanting to know more? Googling the timelines, red flags, and then falling into the social media rabbit hole? Well, I'm here to do all of that for you, bringing the facts, theories, and details that no one else is covering on my hit true crime podcast serialously with Annie Elyse. Whether it's everything with the Idaho 4 case now that the documents are unsealed or shocking cases you've never heard of, packed with love triangles, cults, and twists you won't see coming. With over a million downloads a week, I break it down for you just like your best friend would. Serialistly with Annie Elise. New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday wherever you

get your podcasts. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chulamani podcast, episode 300. Oh, shit, I forgot what episode number were on. 300 and something, 340 something, I think. Episode 471. Yeah, 471. As always, I'm one of your else, Mike Barron, joined. As always, my two wonderful co-host and one of my best friends, Jesse and Alex.

Oh. Hey. Hello. Oh, are you only saying that because he's trying to get us into some sort of cult of chaos, magic. so that you can summon some sort of demon that will then give you the ability to, I don't know, shoot lightning out of your eyeballs. Chaos magic is behind us now. Here's the thing.

Thank God. That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me. We're never going to talk about magic again on the show, right? I didn't say, we're not talking about magic ever again. Chaos magic is behind us. Do you mean chaos magic is behind us now because it is predated? The thing that we're talking about right now is predated, predates chaos magic by 100 years and everything that chaos magic is goes straight into.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then eventually it leads to the Scarlet Witch. Yeah. Kind of. Well, maybe you were really good at it. Our chaos magic, hopefully. It leads you to our Patreon. Yes, that's right.

If you, if it is your will that we should continue making this podcast, write that sentence down on a piece of paper. Actually, write down the letters, www. W dot P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot C-O-M-L-L-U-M-U-M-I-N-A-T-I-I-T-I-I-T-I-I-T-I-I-T-I-T-I-O-D and-O-D. Come to our website. What is it? And then you'll just come. Yeah, you'll, you'll help us. Your will will be done. You see what I'm saying? And in that way, you practice magic. Yeah. Yeah.

That's what I said. To practice magic, give us money. Today, boys, I'm very excited. Uh-oh. Oh, oh, before we, before I really want to jump in the topic. But, hey, limited time stickers are still available over at the eddy.com slash Chulimani with their collaboration with Doris doodles. There are five mystery stickers that you can see kind of the general shape of when you

check out the, uh, the actual store page and grab them. We'll be doing kind of these like collaborations with artists that we're super fans of to, you know, showcase their art and everything we sell is 50-50 split with them. So, uh, go check it out at the Yeti.com slash Chulimani. It is cool, good, tight, yeah, smart, so tight, awesome, so smart, great, neat, and zany. And zany is the key, though. If it's not zany, we don't want to even mess with it. No, no.

That's what we're known for, our zaniness. The next few episodes actually are pretty goddamn zan. Because we are officially leaving L.A. month after a wonderful couple months of L.A. month and some awesome topics. Or are we? Or are we in a lot of ways. And as we do, we are entering the world again outside of L.A. and in doing so. Oh, I'm sorry. No, you're correct. This is the beginning of a series we've been talking about doing for years now. This is the series on none other than Alistair Crowley. You may know the name. Crowley. you can't point at me to continue. None of you go, bomb, bomb, bon, bon, none of you. No, it's fine, whatever. I thought you were like, I thought you were like, I was like, I was like, and now you do the rest.

I thought you had, I thought you had planned something with Mathis that you were going to like do and I was like getting ready to watch it. You were cool. You were doing like a little finger thing. I thought I was like, I was trying to get you to jump in. No, I'm with you. I'm with you. I just, we're going to do like a whole bit.

I thought you were going to, I thought I was about to watch a show. That's all. You know, it's okay. I mean, it could have been a show if you all jumped on board. Yeah, bomb, bomb, bomb, there go. Right, thank you. All right, we're getting magic is for it. Dean can fix it.

He'll make it magic. It'll work. He won't. Man, Crowley. Yeah, bomb, bomb, bomb, there you go. Thank you so much to Cash App for sponsoring today's episode. And listen, when it comes to your money, you deserve to feel safe from fraud and in control. I mean, who wouldn't want to feel like that with their money?

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Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank, banking services provided by CashUp's bank partners, prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, instant discounts provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc., brand. Visit cache.app slash legal slash podcast for disclosures. Thank you again to Cash for sponsoring the video. Alastair Crowley part one starts today. And boys, in a lot of ways, some people are less of a person and more of a legend. Their lives are such a chaotic mess of truth, lies, and self mythology that the real human being gets kind of lost in all that noise. And that legend can be whatever you kind of needed to be, a hero, a villain, prophet, fool, you can fill in the blank. And we're about to spend a lot of time with a man who was called all of those things.

And you kind of get the feeling that he actively cultivated every single one of them. This is a guy who claimed he was taking dictation from ancient Egyptian gods, a man who got into a literal magic fight with one of Ireland's greatest poets. He started a religion whose one and only law was, and this may sound familiar, do what thou wilt. And he ran a sex magic commune in Sicily that got so out of hand that he was personally kicked out of the country by none other than Mussolini. He was a world-class mountaineer.

Huh? Kind of tight. That's kind of sick. To get kicked out by Mussolini, it's kind of tight. It's kind of sick. You kind of get some points on my worldview. He was a world-class mountaineer who tackled some of the highest people. on Earth, a brilliant poet, a supposed government spy, and a hopeless heroin addict.

You can't tell the story of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab without him. You can't tell the story of El Ron Hubbard in Scientology without him. His face is on the cover of the Beatles, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band. You take a look at the photo in the top left, second from the left. He's the bald dude in the back. That's an interesting list of people, by the way. That's a notoriously interesting. list of people. A weirder list of people than you would expect. I know what else? You can't tell

that Alex has a dragon with fuck me eyes behind him unless you're a Patreon member. That's right. You can't see it. It's true. But it's there. It's there. Right there. Then keeps looking at me. I'm like, calm down, dragon. You know, maybe, maybe later. Now, oh, look. You just gave my, my wife a hilarious gifah laugh five days in the future. Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin bought his old house and from the birth of modern witchcraft to the entire 1960s counterculture his fingerprints are everywhere so who was alister crowley was he a genuine spiritual pioneer who actually mapped the hidden corners of human consciousness or was it the ultimate con man a spoiled rich kid who used his family's money to build a personality cult leaving a trail of broken lives in his

wake and the truth he kind of was all of the above and to even begin to understand the legend And you have to start with the man. And to understand the man, you have no choice but to start with the strange, wealthy, and intensely religious world that created him. Because before he was the Great Beast 666, he was just a little boy named Alec trapped in a gilded cage. Can I ask a question? And I just as across the board, everything we talked about for the last couple weeks, just

in general, the entire course of this podcast, every time that we mentioned. in like this person did something incredibly weird. It's usually like a rich kid. Yeah. And I feel like the lesson we're learning is that when you reach a certain point, we have so much money that you have nothing to

do with your time. You don't have to work. And so you're like, I'm going to make it a cult. Alternate explanation, right? We're all weird fuckers. But people with money, A, can do it. Can do it. Be weird. And B, people care about them.

Because they're rich, thus better than the rest of us. Let that be an indictment to you out there. Just kidding. That's why you need to make us rich, because then you associate with us via your money. Is that how it works? If this gets rich enough, he will get abducted by aliens and Catmandu just like Graham Morrison. I think the lesson learned here is that if you have to ask, ask people to make you rich,

you will never be rich. You must take it by force and be a terrible person. I think is the lesson we've learned over the years. We're rich. You must truly be awful. We're rich in laughter together I'm rich in vibes you guys It does mean that I eat salting crackers

Probably more than you do But yeah But it's a vibe Salting crackers it's a vibe They're tasty if you have to Well whatever the case Our dear our dear boy Alec was about to learn The only way out from his gilded cage

Was to burn it all to the ground So before we start A big shout out to the three main books I'm using as my sources for this The first one is do what thou wilt, a life of Alistair Crowley by author Lawrence Sutton. It's not that you meant do with that will, the Cholumina episode from last week starting Kurt Maloney. Also that, yeah, go listen to that for sources on this. Then you got Perderabo, the life of Alistair Crowley by Richard Kaczykowley, and then obviously the one that I had to include in this, the confessions of Alistair Crowley and autobiography by Alistair Crowley about himself.

So did you like, can I ask a question about that, just like a less? Fact-based question and a more subjective question for you. Is he insufferable? Yeah. Yeah. I find him wildly entertaining and hilarious. But if he was in person, I feel like I would get annoyed with him very fast. How long is the book?

How long is the, how long is the autobiography? Like 200 some odd pages, I'd have to double check. Could you have done 600? Oh, he could have. Oh, I know he could. I don't know if I could do 600 pages. He refers to himself in like third. person often.

I read a lot of letters about Alastair Crowley from Alistair Crowley in my in my Parsons episode. And the dude, like love the dude. Love what he represents. Love everything he talks about. Really think he's interesting. 320 pages. Sorry.

I was off by. 320. I love what he's brought to the world for the most part. Not a perfect individual, but an interesting, an interesting one nonetheless. However, he talks like, he talks. like when you ask somebody about an anime they really like and they don't have a lot of social skills. Oh, oh, dude, I couldn't make it very well at

time. He wants to hurt you with his overwhelming knowledge. Yes, that's exactly. He wants to get on top of you and dominate you with his knowledge about something that you don't have. More intelligent than you could ever be. And I, Alistair Crowley, and more than you could ever be. And like, that's just that is how he fucking talks.

Most people don't understand that Final Fantasy Nine is. It's a finale for the entire series. You just must open your eye and have the proper experiences in life that I have to understand. There are aspects of Crowley, I adore, and there are so many of them that I'm like, you had to have been one of the most annoying men of your time. You just had to have been. But also, he carried that confidence and swaggered that just, well, let's get, yeah,

we did a good talk. So to start off, our story kicks off on October 12, 1875, and a quiet, respectable, English town called Lamington Spa. This is the dead center of the Victorian era as well, a time that had like very rigid social rules and a public morality that was just suffocatingly tight around the, the people of its time. 1870s, Victorian England. Yes, 1875 is when he's born.

That's the time, the time when the middle class came to exist. Yep. Started to hate sex and violence. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And decided that half the stuff that. half the stuff that we think about in our lives should be a secret really crazy it went a lot of ways it was kind of like an empire of like appearances right sure this is like a time of huge industrial

progress also happening like you're not amused out of this yeah yeah and this is all running head first into like an equally massive spiritual anxiety and into this world edward Alexander crowley is born and on paper this kid kind of just won the birth lottery of its of his era his family was swimming in cash. His father, Edward Crowley, had retired in his 30s from the family business, a massively successful brewery called Crowley's Ails. That's hilarious. I know. And the brand was so well known, the slogan was basically a household phrase. Good ale is Crowley's. That was their slogan. Really? Yeah. This fortune meant a life of incredible privilege for him, a comfortable home and any education he wanted.

But here kind of like is the first great irony of this kid's life that is just kind of packed with irony all through it. The man who would become the world's most famous advocate for every kind of indulgence was raised on beer money. And it was money from a product, his own family considered a personal ticket straight to hell. I don't want to talk about a, I don't want to talk about it too much in a numerology type way.

But it's interesting also that his name is based. basically Crowley ale Alexander yeah yeah Alexander yeah Edward yeah yeah you're right I didn't put that together the Crowley household wasn't even a typical home it wasn't a typical home for the newly rich there was no R on the walls no music no parties the library wasn't filled with novels or poetry and the vast fortune was used to build a home completely sterilized of any world pleasure because the Crowleys weren't just Christians they were something else way more extreme They were devout, leading members of a radical, fanatical, and a deeply exclusionary sect of the Plymouth Brethren. I was going to say, conservatives.

Is that like, churchism? Very, yeah. Well, yeah, you can't like understand a single thing about Crowley without understanding the brethren because his entire life was about to become a meticulously constructed point by point rebuttal of everything that they stood for. So what were the Plymouth brethren? it. We're not talking about like your standard go to church on Sunday Christianity. This is the hardcore like splinter cell version of the faith. It was a movement born in the 1820s from a group of men who were disgusted with the established church of England, seeing it as a corrupt, bloated bureaucracy that had lost its way. Plymouth being like from like Plymouth Rock kind

of vibe from the like, but puritanism. Like we are normal Christianity isn't good enough. We're going to go, like, wear buckles on our hats kind of Christianity. It's like super, super, super. I believe they're Irish and I believe that they were like the most Protestant Protestants that you can fucking imagine. Like, though they protested like the nonconformity of them compared to the regular Christian church was the point. You're a thousand percent correct because the guy, literally the guy behind it all was

an Anglo Irish theologian named John Nelson Darby. And Darby and his followers wanted to get. back to what they saw as pure, primitive Christianity of the first apostles. That meant no hierarchy, no priests, no bishops. They were all just, quote, unquote, brethren in Christ. But Darby's most influential and lasting contribution was a concept he basically invented called dispensationalism. This is the idea that God has a different plan for different ages of history.

And most importantly, Darby taught that they were living in the final fallen age right before the literal any day now return to Jesus Christ. Sound fucking familiar. It sounds a lot like Osmond Spare. And it sounds a lot like the people like Huckabee and all that shit, like our politicians who believe we're in the end times now. That's that part, yes, but the part about removing all distractions from the text.

Oh, sure. It's like Bible only, right? Yes. Oh, that's the only book they had in their house. Yeah. I feel like it's like the parallels are great, mostly because, it's technology base. The more there's rapid change in the world, the more people look for at this point in time, we're talking steam engines and factories and all sorts of stuff.

And the world is changing. The smoke is filling the air. Cities are looking dark and danker and like wires for electricity are about to happen. Yeah. Like it's a revolution. And so there's also revolution in bringing back that old time religion. Like we're too, we're too kind. We're showing too much empathy to these people have you every so often it happens it happens like every 50 years we get hit with another wave of it have you seen those propaganda comics from i think it's american when electricity was like becoming a thing and like yes like huge like electricity is evil kind of shit i'm like it's humans having fucking change man anything new when they're like it's evil here's the thing the people that are thinking that and feeling that are like right like like like like i mean

no way you're not wrong look at us like the reason like i don't know that much about the with Brethren as a modern organization. I don't know what their politics are. So I can't like speak on that. But like in terms of their philosophy right now, this is the most empathetic. I feel, I feel for these people, you know what I mean? Like talking about electricity being scary. Let's talk about AI for a second and all the things.

What I thought too. That was the correlation of my mind. That's what it does to our. We're thinking about AI in terms of what it does to our culture. From the unthinking, unfeeling, unfilling plugged into a tube people that AI will propagate into the world, they want the AI teat to suck on. They in a hundred years will love the AIT. But right now, us, people, I was born before there was internet. I didn't have a cell phone until I was 17. You know what I mean? Like, I was a little late on that for my age, but like,

still, like this type of thing. The people that join a group like this, it makes perfect sense and the appeal of something like chaos magic today or even just the return to doing a good job. as a notion of caring about doing a good job to me could get me into a fucking religious group like this if I was a fucking fucked up poor person from the 1820s or whenever the fucks is a really vulnerable yeah a seriously vulnerable position I mean you're right I mean the way we look at AI think about think about back then when they were getting electricity for the first time and how that changes everything you know you're like living in a home of like wood fire flames candles and now all of a sudden these people with these buildings where

they're living on top of each other and apartments have like these lights that just turn on with a switch. Like, that's Dane. It's got to be like that. Think about Van Life. Think about these people that want to like that dude in the bus who died in the movie, they made the movie about him into the wild or whatever.

Like he just like left. It makes sense. Sorry. I spoke over you, Jesse. No, it's, it's interesting to see that that is like everyone has that. I try so hard.

I feel like things are unfair. or taking into the next level it comes technology. Like, I work hard and y'all have the easy mode and that's terrible. That's like some devils. There's multiple levels, but it's fascinating that currently today,

the reason why you don't see a huge rise and, like, cultish activity is that a lot of people, especially younger kids, Alpha and Gen Z, it's really funny to watch them be like, no, I, we're

Working hard is not going to get me anything. You can't trick them into being like, come, join us. They've been so fucked. They've been so fucked by capitalism that the connection between working hard and doing a good job and getting money is like broken. Yeah. And that's like you can't be like, you work so hard. And come, work hard for me.

Like, what's in it for me? You can't really cult a lot these days. Good. Good. I'm glad that they're like that man. Because the millennials, I feel like we're the last generation that was kind of like bought into the idea. that when we get our college degree, we'll get a job.

Oh, there's so many millennial cults. Like, yeah, that is a real thing. The amount, especially in L.A., the amount of, like, 30 and 40-year-olds caught up in, like, culty things. Yeah. Absolutely is true. And I think that's because we're, yeah, you're right. We're the last one that we were told, like, if you work hard, you can achieve anything.

And then over the 40 years that we've existed, it's all, it's, we've just proven wrong or wrong. We weren't the last ones that were told. They still tell that to kids, but it, it was in earnest for us. And then 08. I mean, the Great Recession happened and shit and it was just like, yeah, ever since 2001 it's just been kind of down. The only reason doctors make money is because of

insurance companies in America. It's all broken. Like you said, it's all broken. Look at teachers. Look at everybody else. And I think it's very funny because when you talk about like everything that you're going to talk about today, like the whole like how you make a cult, it kind of is ineffective new modern era when it comes to

younger kids. Now, again, us and older we had caught up in some cult. salty shit frequently. Alex wants to open a 2013 compound. What I actually want to do is turn the Chulubinati into a secret society that cares about doing good, making things feeling interesting

and does cool shit all over the world. Speaking of Alex's 2013, compound, the other nights on the daily show, they had a bit about reverting back to 2008. No, I'm sorry. It was the 1980s. It's like, we're going to go back to the 1980s. Oh, when he had the key tar?

Yeah, they had the key tar. And he's like, hey, we're going to go back to the 80s. And I was thinking about you the entire time and then the bit that landed for me really well is at the end they're like all we have to do is like change this and this and this and this about society and he's like and that's easier than pretending it's the 1980s and I was like that's real so I get you Alex I understand now yeah 2013 let's do it like I'm talking about my like I only know my own self right I only know my own happiness I only know my own experiences in life I read a lot I see what other people are going through yeah like i don't know stuff like spirituality like hardcore spirituality i it we did

they didn't have the fascist corporate like overarching hopelessness that we have today like people could still like go out and get rich and do things but but but it makes so much sense it makes so much sense we market got did have companies that had company credits that you could only use in company stores for a very long time and shit they did have that they did have that but nobody read like you nobody is true it's very true you didn't like no you didn't know about that like people who are like I like the simpler life I want to go be simple they don't the things that probably you like to be in a super bibley group probably the things that you have to give up yeah just guessing were probably not important to them in the same way they are to us now like

sex and freedom like I feel like back in the day of like ancient Greece people didn't even think about themselves as individuals the way that they do now. You know what I mean? Like I feel like like right when people were starting to be able to write as like a normal thing and communicate in that way, I feel like the idea that you were going to go be something interesting is like not even a thing or like that your life and your experience as a person. I don't think so.

Because there's still stuff like, but then I still like read like all the ancient like hierarchy like the ancient like graffiti and like ancient complaints about like not good enough copper like that com like that er complaint from ancient egypt like humans have always been bitching about capitalism writing it down 100% writing it down once you can write yes but before you can write before before you can like understand that there's like a system in place for everybody to communicate before you understand about like a larger intelligence network that's out there like just the idea that you're going to write a book it so hard but like i'm just the idea yeah we're talking about the birth of magic or something like that right because or something

yeah like but like i've ever heard i forget the name of the theory or what it's called but the idea that language is like kind of like a virus that both allowed us to communicate but also restricts in how we can express ourselves i think that was the great philosopher um hidale kojima oh you might be right shit i think you're talking about metal gear solid five the phantom pain i think getting back into the crowley life uh this guy john nelson derby uh with all this dispensationalism charles nelson riley is that what you just said yes correct yep exactly Correct. John Nelson Darby. This is the guy, well, he didn't invent the idea of it. He's kind of the guy who popularized the concept of the rapture, like the idea that all true believers would be physically, yeah, like that would be physically yanked up into the sky to hang out with Jesus before the Great Tribulation, which would be like a seven year long horror show on Earth, essentially. In a best selling book series. Yes, also true. Didn't they make a game about that too? And several films.

Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty popular thing. But again, it's, I want to point out for the record, it's fairly interesting that that is a concept created by a dude. Yep. And very similar to how most depictions of most religious things are just like some book or some painting or something that a person made. And it's like, that's the way we visit. And we think about it now. Yeah. Which is crazy to me because, yeah, go one day, just take some time, everyone listening.

You don't have to be religious. but like go read some some like spiritual text but like go read the bible go read the koran milton for fuck sake that'll fuck you up because you're going to be like wait which parts of the bible yeah like this isn't even in the bible yeah they just made stuff up because it was cool sounding like dante's inferno is hard as hell but like also that's just some guys yeah you just made it up that's a comic book said in hell bro you have to so you just get for for this particular topic you kind of put yourself in the mindset of a young Crowley growing up in a world where the apocalypse is not like a metaphor it's on

schedule it's on the schedule they're waiting for it to happen and it kind of breeds this profound sense of alienation from the rest of the world which you just see as a sinful sinking ship that you're about to be like express airlifted right out of what if what if it what if it already happened and no one was good enough and now we're all here with the antichrist fair fair honestly I believe it and the Crowleys though they belong to even even within the extreme like Plymouth version of Plymouth Brethren they believe they belong to the most extreme wing of this already extreme movement the quote unquote exclusive brethren that's the wing of the Plymouth Brethren that they belong to like crypto vibes I don't like that at all

yeah the name says it all dude it is literally like dudes breaking off into like alpha and beta and whatever and then be like no no I'm sigma dude I'm like yeah the best alpha Now, no, we're exclusive. We don't have a Bible. We don't have a Bible. We share a Bible. We fucking, there's one Bible in the town. Bro, you, you, you, uh, gen Z,

Gen Alpha, absolutely cult mentality. There's Sigma mindset, Alpha mindset. That's just, it's just, it's TikTok cultish now. It's just TikTok groups you just belong to now. They just believe in software. They just believe in like, like gamified, gamified things that you didn't have to gamify before. Everything's a game, dude.

Yeah, that's what they, that's the, that's their cultishness is like in their pocket, man. Well, the exclusive. of brethren's primary spiritual practice was separation. They believe that they, and pretty much only they had it right, that they were saints and their job was not to mix with the worldly, they called them. Not literally. No, they were not to mix with like the world.

No, they didn't literally think they were saints, right? Well, in their mind they did. They would be saints after they die. Like they're living such pure, pure, pure, pure lives. Yeah. This isn't how sainthood works in this world. No, this is a different. First you've got to be a gamer.

Then you got to do some. Miracles. Yeah, the worldly was everybody from atheist to Methodist, dude. It didn't matter. And, Jesse, I'm going to have you read this. I'm going to have you read this quote from one of the biographers, Lord Sutton, from his book about his life a little bit here. It's so funny.

As a Methodist, I just want to point out, we get crapped on all the time by everyone Christian. They're like, you guys suck. Like, all right. Sorry. Art, sports, and secular literature. were all forbidden in the Crowley home. Alex Boyhood was a ceaseless round of prayer meetings and Bible readings.

The brethren strove to create a holy environment for their children by shielding them from myriad temptations of the world. The rest, for an intellectually vibrant and physically energetic boy like Alex, was a sense of living in a hermetically sealed bell jar with the rich, of life observable only from a distance and sternly condemned so he's so he's fucking walking phoenix yeah yeah yeah yeah that's uh god i haven't i don't see that movie once man this has the exact same vibe is like a kid who isn't allowed to have any sweets yeah and then they get out of the house and that's all they have or like a law that says you can't

drink till you're 21 years old and then every single person under the age of 21 is like a fucking raging alcoholic for more more than ever before and yeah it definitely has that like do this because we tell you to do this and it's like but i'm a kid yeah exactly the kid knows nothing uh so that was his world a house with no art a house with no music how did he literally a single book a world where joy itself was literally suspicious like uh it was a pressure cooker that was designed to produce a perfect saint that was like the whole point but when you use the wrong and green child wait like a moon child but like the sun child but like anybody who lives in the household and lives that pure life is going to be a saint it's not just for their kid

but them they're just saying they're coming the perfect lifestyle like in a george or well type way correct yeah yeah but obviously if you're using like you to use like the pressure cooker metaphor i'm using like wrong ingredients also means bad you can have a bad time the core ingredients for crowley's special little spiritual pressure cooker or his father edward crowley who was by all accounts seemingly a genuinely kind, gentle, and supposedly, according to Crowley, a very deeply sincere man. Like, I'm imagining puritanical, but is that like not the vibe? It sounds like it.

It is the vibe, but like, probably seemed to look up to his father. Like, he, he seemed to look up to him. Um, even in his later writings, seems to have, seems to have, seems to have like loved and admired him immensely. And after retiring from the brewery, Edward dedicated his life and his fortune to being a traveling preacher for the brethren. He was in some like ranting, fire, and brimstone demagogue. He was an earnest intellectual who had found his truth and wanted to share it.

He saw his brilliant young son, Alec, as his successor. And for a while, it looked like he was right. Alec was a prodigy, memorizing huge portions of the King James Bible with shocking ease. The man had a photographic memory. And his mother, Emily Bertha Bishop, was another story altogether. In Crowley's memory, she was the living embodiment of the face's worst quality. She was cold and judgmental, wholly unimaginative. He famously called her a brainless bigot, whose chief motive in life was, quote, the gratification of a morbid and

inhuman piety, where his father was a sincere, sincere love in the faith. His mother was its more rigid and unforgiving version of the dogma. And for the first few years, Alec played the part that he was given. He was the boy saint, the biblical whiz kid who could recite scripture for hours. he was the proof that the Brethren system of Holy Isolation was working. But his mind was way too sharp. He was way too analytical. He seemed seemingly to me autistic in a lot of ways.

He began to weaponize the only tool that they ever gave him, the Bible itself. A child asking questions is one thing, but young Alex wasn't just curious. He was interrogating his faith even from a very, very young age. He was cross-examining it like a hostile witness. in a lot of ways. Armed with a photographic memory and an unnerving grasp of logic, he would corner his tutors and just start going to work on him. He'd point out contradictions between the Old and New Testaments. He'd ask for a lot of logistical explanation of Noah's Ark that made any kind of physical sense because he couldn't make sense of it. He would ask how a God of

perfect love could design a world based on suffering internal damnation. These weren't just interesting questions of a trial trying to understand at this point. They were, they were honestly calculated attacks of a budding, like, lawyer-esque mindset, trying to dismantle his perceived prosecution's case. He had like no input. And so he just like, it's like when you buy one video game when you're like young. And then that's the only game your parents ever gave you. And you're like the best eternal champions player in the entire world. But nobody else has even ever put their hands on that game. Yep. That's a perfect description. That's exactly correct. Because He only had the Bible, no book, nothing.

It actually, like, Phyllis, like, psych, I didn't know this about him. I never really looked into him as a person. Psychologically, this makes so much sense for, like, the imagery of his life. Like, this is why you need to know so much. Like, when I say we got a deep dive Alistair, this is why. The context in which he grew up informed so much about who he became as an adult. For the brethren, where faith was defined as absence of doubt, having him, question like this was deeply disturbing for his parents. It was a sign that something was

spiritually wrong with the boy. And no one felt this more acutely than his mother, Emily. While his father saw a brilliant mind wrestling with scripture, his mother saw a defiant soul making deals with the devil. He was willful, imaginative, and took a perverse pleasure and just being difficult. She was rigid, humorless, and saw any deviation from her worldview as a personal insult so their personalities were always on just a constant collision course it happened in a moment of pure of pure exasperated fury after a particularly grueling confrontation likely one of Alex theological logic traps his mother finally broke looking at this strange defiant and unnervingly intelligent son she spat out the single worst thing she could possibly think of to call him and she

called him the beast i don't say she called him the N-word. So she basically gave him permission to have, like, the coolest nickname a kid could have. Yeah. So, like, yeah, but for a moment. And no context. And, like, independently developed, like, separate, like, Darwinian evolution nickname of the beast. Because once you find out that it wasn't, because once you find out that it wasn't, like,

his nickname because he was, like, the beast. Like, he, like, drank a bunch of beers. And you find out that it's, like, because he lived in a world where there was only the Bible and he challenged all conventions until his own mother couldn't think of anything worse to call him than The Beast. Then that becomes like a sick-ass nickname. It's pretty great.

It's pretty cool, dude. And like for her, for a woman who steeped in this apocalyptic imagery of the book of Revelation day in and day out, this wasn't just a name. The Beast number 666 is the ultimate agent of Satan on Earth, the Antichrist.

It was the most damning curse she could possibly utter at him. But for a boy who already felt like an alien in his own, alien in his own home, a boy who was starting to suspect that everything he was told was good was actually just boring and repressive. This wasn't a condemnation. Like you just said, Alex, it was a coronation. He seized the name. He embraced it. He decided right then and there. The beast. He probably said that right back. Right. Yeah. The beast. A. Then I would become the beast. And that's what he did. It was the first and maybe the most powerful act of

ceremonial magic he ever performed he took a curse his mother had thrown at him and transformed it into a coronation and a title a badge of honor he was recasting himself from a flawed saint into the perfect sinner if his mother's world was good he would proudly declare himself evil this decision was the psychological blueprint for the rest of his entire life he truly became like a Christian scholar of evil. Right. This wasn't just a phase, mom. Like, here's how he looked back on it years later from an excerpt from his book.

Alex, if you want to, you know, you got to try and become Alistair Crowley here. This is right out of his book. The Beast was the chosen one who had been from the beginning. It was not a case of a naughty boy wanting to be a bogeyman. It was a passion of the soul. He was not satisfied with the statement that he was a miserable sinner. He wanted to be the chief of sinners. It was the first step on the path of a true will

to be not merely a rebel, but a revolution. And see, I love his writing sometimes. I really do. I love his, but you can also like taste the insufferable, like, language on that he uses. This is what an Alex episode feels like to the audience. Yeah, he wanted to be chief of sinners. And this idea led him from just thinking, rebellious thoughts, to actively experimenting with his reality.

He started to test the world around him to see what else was a lie. Now, this brings us to one of the most infamous and to some disturbing stories from his childhood. But I have to preface this by saying, like, it comes directly from his own autobiography, so it may be heavily embellished or just entirely completely made up. But the fact that he chose to tell the story about himself is more of what's true. truly revealing here. He's heard the proverb that a cat has nine lives. Most kids would just accept that as a piece of folklore.

But Crowley decided to test it empirically. According to his own account, he captured a cat and systematically subjected it to various poisons and physical injuries, clinically observing the results to see if the proverb held up. Now, the story is, of course, horrifying. But the point of it for Crowley, I don't think, wasn't just the cruelty. It was the methodology.

It was the declaration of faith in his new religion that he called scientific Illuminism. The core idea is pretty simple. Truth is not found in ancient books or moral codes. Truth is found through direct, personal, and often transgressive experimentation. He was rejecting the wisdom of his elders and replacing it with the cold hard data

of his own senses, no matter how ugly the process. He was becoming, in his mind, a scientist of the forbidden. Again, there's no way to know if that cat story is true. But again, I think it's like a lot like the Bible, almost a metaphorical story to represent what he is in his own mind. I think he made it, it's like straight up like magic marketing, like straight up in like will based true will fell Thelmaic fucking marketing. I mean, that's kind of his whole vibe is is really great marketing. yeah well breaking down the boundaries between truth and like writing something down it's like

it's like you know the same thing that we've been talking about this whole time with magic it's just like enacting your will it's like well if i say something that's true and it a hundred years pass a lot of people will believe it and a lot of people won't believe it because they all you know just the notion of willing it into the universe right yeah well and while you know at his young age this internal revolution was still kind of rising. It was still very much contained within his own family life, held in check very much by a single person, the person whose authority that he tempered and loved and respected,

which was his father. While he was kind of a pain in the ass, he always kind of listened to his dad, he loved his dad, there was just like he kept him from being too crazy. But that final anchor was about to be completely ripped away. In 1886, his father was diagnosed with, quote, cancer of the tongue.

The irony, the fact that he had tongue cancer while being a fucking roaming preacher is kind of funny. A man whose entire identity was built on using his voice was being silenced by a disease. The illness was kind of really long and painful. And on March 5th, 1887, Edward Crowley died. Alistair at the time was just 11 years old. The impact of this event was very total on his kind of mindset. it was a psychological earthquake for him. For any kid, a parent's death is tragedy, but for a Crowley,

it was a very complex cataclyism of grief, both grief and relief, along with like a profound feeling of liberation. Again, his dad was the only one that really kept him in check. And the man he loved now being gone, but so was the living embodiment of the Plymouth Reverend, the last sincere pillar of the faith in his life. Yeah, it was like his respect for them was his, on that dude completely and now that that was gone his his again is his sincere like belief in

the faith crumbled and for a boy who's already at war with scripture the fact that god didn't save his most devoted servant was the ultimate proof that the entire system was a fraud the king was dead and so for crowley was god there's it's like the idea of like a lot of thing a lot of kids go through that losing either a pet or anything that first real loss was like if you're religious like i grew up as a catholic being like well why do you're you take this person away if, like, you know, they were good and all that stuff, like, but now, you know, you're in the extreme religion version where your dad is in the exclusive version of your extreme religion being a preacher and God isn't going to save him

from the disease. Yeah, that was it for Crowley. And you really are, you really are on an island. It's Prospero dying and leaving his daughter alone. It's like, you know, crazy. I'm impressed with that reference. I like that a lot. I do actually, I did actually go to school.

I choose to sound crazy as an aesthetic choice. I like the keeping it classy. The next thing, you know, like Mass is going to be like, so anyway, I was jizzing on sigils. Jizzing on sigils. Well,

that'll come. Don't worry. Wait, well, he's 11 right now. He's 11. Wait until he's like 15, yeah. Yeah,

we're going to. So the dust settled from his father's death, uh, death. 11 year old Alec was left with two immediate practical things. First, he was newly rich. His father's fortune,

which was about, Some reports, I don't have like a specific number, but some reports put it around 40,000 pounds at the time. He got that when he was 11 years old? Yeah, because as, you know, man of the house, that kind of era. Wow, that's a crazy law. Okay. That's worth like today's money is worth millions. It's worth millions of dollars.

It was left in a trust for him. This financial freedom would become the engine for the rest of his life because it meant, as we said right the beginning of the episode, he would never have to compromise, never have to get a job. never have to bow to anyone for a paycheck. The man could do whatever the fuck you wanted. You smoke and crack and fuck bitches all day and write a book about it. Literally, yeah. But the second thing was the only moral authority respected was gone. And it was replaced by one he despised because he was now in the primary care of his mother and his maternal uncle, Tom Bond Bishop.

If his father, we looked at him as like the avatar of like a sincere, even if misguided dude, a believer in his faith. His uncle was the embodiment of what Crowley saw as its hypocritical, tyrannical nature. The sincerity of his father's faith was now gone. And in his place, the daily grinding reality of his maternal uncle. And his own book, Crowley's Confessions, if you want to go read it, that's the name of the book, by the way, are filled with acidic portraits of this guy. Painting him is like petty, cruel, often talked about how's wildly stupid he is constantly. he tells a story about how his uncle, like a tattling on him, like All Brethren, had a secret passion for paintings of the old Dutch masters, many of which were, ironically,

rowdy tavern scenes filled with drunken revelry. And obviously, the young Crowley, this wasn't just a funny quirk. It was just straight up proof of a deeply repressed and hypocritical dude. He describes his uncle as a skinflint who would bully the household staff and who seemed to take a sadistic pleasure and thwarting his every desire, quote, unquote. That's why he said it. Skinflint. Skinflint.

Yeah, I love that word, dude. This daily exposure to a man who spouted pious rhetoric while acting like a petty tyrant was the final nail in the coffin for Crowley's faith. His father had shown him that a good man could hold these beliefs. His uncle showed him how those same beliefs could be used as a mask for a cruel and selfish nature, which is something I feel like we see often nowadays. and it was just the perfect incubator for a lifelong hatred of religious authority. So now his stage was set.

The boy had a name, The Beast. He had a philosophy, direct personal experimentation, and he had a cause, the total liberation of his own will from the prison of Victorian Christian morality. All he needed now to finish this fantasy was a battlefield. And his guardians were about to provide him with one. Seeing their strange, wealthy, and now orphaned charge, spinning completely out of control, they made a decision like all parents of that era do he must be sent away because he is weird correct they packed him up and sent him to boarding school and not just any school they chose institutions run by and four members of the plymouth brethren this is exactly what happened to mansons by the way just yeah it's very silly yeah dude seriously uh they were hoping to finally break his spirit with a double dose of religious dogma it's actually crazy the plan is to break your child's spirit

Yep. Like, that's a wild plan. Like a horse. But if you believe, if you thoroughly fully buy into that your way is the only way your boy gets to heaven and he refuses, what do you like do? I mean, look, admittedly, if you're hyper religious and you aren't like, I'm trying to save you, bro. Like, at that point, you're doing it wrong. So I guess if you're really going to go fool like we're the Plymouth cult, then I, yeah, I mean. It's on point.

It's just a little out there and wacky. We already know about this 11, 11 year old boy. This is like fucking trying to like put out a fucking fire with a gasoline. Just like you're just, you're making it worse. It's just get this kid out of our life vibe. Like we don't want to do with him.

Oh God, yeah. You know, 18, what years in now? She definitely was just getting, 19, something like that. We're now in 18. Yeah, we're in, where were we?

1887 is when he died. 1887. So, so. Let's just like the thing I don't get about this, like when you send somebody away to a Christian institution for being a troublemaker to make them more Christian, like that's going to work. Like, I just want to hear one time that that's ever worked because like by 1890, the writing's already on the wall for religion, right? Like the world is going to stop being religiously motivated pretty soon. We can see it, right? People are starting to like buy titty magazines and drink beer and not go to church or think about church.

even identify with the church, right? Like, why on earth would you, like, market your way of living as, like, miserable? Like, why would you, like, like, it doesn't make sense to the survival of your way of life as a thing that you would turn it into making the people that follow it have a horrible time? Late stage capitalism and, like, CEOs, like, why are you destroying the thing that makes you money? Late stage capitalism makes perfect sense because the people, has to go up. No, the people just at the top, their daily lives become more important to them as they get older and more rich and they take more of the world's money away. And somebody's benefiting, right? There are people at the top whose lifestyle's excellent and crazy because of capitalism. And Christianity, I guess maybe those people exist. I guess they do. I mean, he's one of them, right? They made money off of literally because he's a beer. So it's his father. Yeah, but that beer sends everybody to hell. They never drank the beer. They sold it to the world. and made and got back off sinners.

Again, if I was Kid Crowley and I saw that, I would have the same questions that, you know, Alex, like, it doesn't make sense. But I'm talking about the, I'm talking about the brethren, not the Crowley's. Like, I'm talking about, why are they like, we should be scary? It's like, it should be nice to be like a

part of the brotherhood. That's all I'm saying. It should feel nice. I just don't see what you get it. Witnesses nowadays, though, right? Like, they're super restrictive and like, yeah, but they're very nice. Because they're trying to go around and whip They don't send their children. I think, but I think you're also, okay, so I think you're conflating like the mother being like all of them.

Because remember, the father was friendly and nice and went around was a friendly preacher of the brethren. He wasn't like a mean one. The mom is the mean one. To me, the fact that there is a brethren institution that whips your ass is that. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm saying.

I don't understand why things like Christianity have schools that are like, well, the thing that we do is we beat it into them. Because it just doesn't, it just doesn't make sense. still the 1800, so they're still beating people for anything. But it does make sense, though, again, going back to what I was saying, if you truly believe you were fighting for someone's soul, then there is no stopping point in saving them. It isn't like, like, if I'm beating you, it's because I'm trying to save you and I don't understand why you don't want to go to heaven. Like that's because I love you. If that's, I mean, like, that's the extent of that. Like, it's one of those, like, abusive dad things where it's like, I'm beating you for your own good. Don't make me do this. But also, let's sell the people that don't believe in our stuff, beer? Like I just, no, because they're making money off of them. But that's, that's exactly what I'm saying.

It just, it's not, it's not the perfect, it's not the perfect religious life that they're saying. No, I agree. It's hypocritical. But also time wise, we're still in the era of a beer safer than water. I guess. I guess. But I don't think they cared about that. No, but I mean like, you know, time on wise, it isn't as much of a like diabolical sin.

It's just, it's just ideologically inconsistent. That's all I'm saying. Oh, you're correct. But again, you're like Crowley is like, you know, Crowley agrees with you. And him being sent off to the school, this was his declaration of war. This was the battlefield he was fucking waiting for. And that boy arrived like Ben Shapiro, but actually smart. Like he was ready to like debate everybody.

He had a bottomless contempt for authority. and a burgeoning sense of his own satanic destiny. His main tour of duty was at a school in Cambridge run by a man named H. Dossie Champney, a fellow exclusive brother of the Plymouth Brethren. And here, Crowley perfected the art of psychological warfare. He knew simple rule breaking, he knew simple rule breaking was for amateurs. A boy with his reputation would just be punished.

To truly win, he had to undermine the very system of belief that gave his captors their power. over him. He had to prove he was smarter, more cunning, and more willing to cross lines than they were prepared for. His most infamous campaign was waged directly against the headmaster himself. First, let me give you the setup here. Crowley, this is the boy who privately called himself the Antichrist still, began to fake a profound religious conversion. He began feigning piety with a theatricality that was in like apparently just wild. He did. dedicated his life to this. He wept during prayers.

He begged the headmaster for private spiritual counseling. Speaking of his own sinfulness with a trembling but earnest voice, he played the part of the prodigal son who was so coming home after like Ealing so convincingly that he completely won Champneys trust. The dude was like, all right, I'll play your fucking game and just method acted. Then the time to sting. having established himself as a model of piety, Crowley arranged to be, quote, unquote, accidentally discovered by Champney in a sexually compromising position with a girl who worked in the school's kitchen. The goal was never to elicit, like the actual act itself.

That was all secondary. The goal was to inflict the maximum possible psychological damage on the headmaster to take the trust that he had so carefully cultivated and then just shableness. in the most dramatic way imaginable at the time, forcing the man to confront the fact that he had been completely and utterly duped by a now 12-year-old boy. It was a power play, an act that was just so high on the emotional cruelty, but so fucking smart that designed to prove his will was superior to their faith. This is why 30-year-olds look like 60-year-olds in this time period is because they were having to think like this and do shit like this and deal with this type of shit.

It's in this part where I'm just like, God, damn, man. I respect you for that. That shit's crazy. No wonder they took the wrong dinosaur skeletons and ran with it. They had shit going on. Hi there. My name is Annie Elise, aka your true crime BFF and host of the podcast Serialously. I have been a true crime enthusiast forever, but I wished somebody would break down the cases for me like a friend,

giving all the details and discussing every twist in turn. So I decided to create a podcast that does. just that. Serialessly with Annie Elise is topping the charts with over one million weekly downloads. I do the deep dives in these cases so you don't have to. Diving into all the raw details, saying what we're all thinking, and in a conversational way, just like having a conversation with your best friend. So join me and let's talk all things true crime. Serialously with Annie Elise, new episodes drop every Monday and Thursday wherever you get your podcasts. But around this time, like this period was also marked by a more serious scandal. an event that would cement his reputation as a genuine pariah.

At another school in Stratham, I think if I say it, he was accused of a sexual relationship with a younger boy. Now, the details are completely lost in time, completely and deliberately hushed up by the school. And Crowley himself is unsurprisingly vague about the situation. We'll never know the true nature of the event. But in the hyper-puritanical atmosphere of Victorian England, an era where the trials of Oscar Wilde would have soon

ruin one of the country's greatest literary figures, this accusation alone was a social death sentence to Crowley. The result was that Crowley was now seen as a, as moral poison. Wait, so he got kicked out of the other school, went to another school, got caught doing something with a younger boy, and then got, and then, and we don't know what it is or why, or if it's true. What's so crazy about this? I mean, ignoring the like, the like caught with younger boy or like made out with the girl like everything he's doing at least at this age has the same vibe as at you know any kid who's acting out who just is like give me attention i'll do whatever i want in order to get attention he has like a i guess him embracing the beast title

is very similar to when a you know a parent and i'll say a bad parent calls their child's you know, like, I don't know, like a name of some sort. And the kid is like, if that's what you think I am, that's what I'll be. And then they act out in that way. And it has like, it's almost sad in a way. Because it's very clear that he's acting out because he's not getting any sort of real love at home. If he just had like some, if he just had like some books and some friends, yeah, he probably would have had similar values, but he probably wouldn't have been A psychopath. At this point, like, after this is, after this is, like, caught with this and it's done,

he was seen as basically what he called, quote, unquote, a serpent in the garden, somebody who endangered the souls of other boys. The reputation, this reputation followed him. And it likely contributed to the deep sense of alienation and prosecution that he would carry with him for the rest of his life. He was now, like, truly an outcast, a role that he seemed, like, seemed to simultaneously resent. relish at the same time this feeling of being a righteous outcast kind of a lone sane man in a world of hypocrites became absolutely central to his identity as Alex is just saying uh

and here's how he as an old man looking back framed this constant state of war this is for you jesse to read uh this is uh from crowley's confession so brawley his words himself in my case the unjust persecution which i had to endure from my earliest years was perhaps the first factor determining my career. I was represented as a monster of inequity because I was not a hypocrite, because I did not share the degrading superstitions of my torturers. Every low-minded lout had the right to insult and injure me because he was on the side of the angels.

That's like a perfect encapsulation to have we sees the religion, you know. This contrastly kind of warfare took a serious, like, toll on him. The stress of being perpetually at odds with this entire world began to manifest in his actual body. He developed albuminuria, I think is how you say it, which is a serious kidney condition. His health declined so sharply that doctors had to intervene, and their diagnosis was a very stark one. The oppressive, stressful environment of the schools was literally starting to kill him. He had to be withdrawn from the schools. And so Crowley kind of won in that way.

He won through a combination of rebellion and scandal and genuine illness. He made himself so fundamentally toxic to this very system that the system had no choice but to vomit him out. Like it kind of worked, right? Like he got so sick that he had to leave. He just literally escaped. He like literally filled it up with so much shit that it pooped him out. It shot him out.

He was freed from the institutionalized religion of boarding school and now it was instead assigned a personal tutor in the seaside town of Eastbourne. This was supposed to be a period of like convalescence. For Crowley, it was a period, though, of unprecedented freedom. Freed from the Brethren's curriculum, he began his real education. You go read a book. You go talk to somebody, look at a titty. Literally threw himself into literature, like not as a pastime, but as a way to find his allies.

He went looking for other minds like his, other souls, who had felt that same suffocating pressure of convention and had fought back. And so he discovered the great romantic poet, Percy Byshe Shelley, I think it's I say he said the middle name, and was electrified to learn that Shelley had been expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism. This wasn't, he wasn't alone. He devoured the pagan poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne. He read Thomas Huxley's sharp critiques of Christian morality.

For the first time, he was building his own intellectual world. brick by brick from the books the brethren would have just burned for even seeing he was forging his own identity not just in opposition to his family but an alliance with a grand tradition of artistic and philosophical rebellion he was no longer just a bad boy he was an aspiring intellectual an artist and kind of a philosopher of transgression i like i love that he just dove into the shit immediately he's like a gentleman bastard yes he's like he's like a fucker. He's like a professional fucker. You know what's crazy? If this was

like the 1970s, he would have been a comedian. Yeah. He would have been Lenny Bruce. Yeah. Yeah, he would have straight up. George, George Carlin. If microphones existed, damn. Yeah, he would have. Because like, his rebellion wasn't just like intellectual. It was very practical.

And his first major experiment and morality started like during that hostile simmering environment of his youth. At the age of 14, fueled by the brethren's constant, hysterical warnings about the evils of lust and the damnation of, quote, unquote, fallen women, beware the fallen women boys, Crowley decided he needed to gather his own data on fallen women. So, he saved up his pocket money, snuck away from his family at night, and for the first time,

hired a prostitute. His goal, as he tells it, was not primarily sexual. It was more of like a scientific experiment. He had been taught that these women were monsters, corrupted, subhuman creatures, rotting with disease and spiritual decay. He wanted to see one up close. He wanted to observe the monster in its quote unquote natural habitat. But the woman he met utterly shattered his expectations.

He found not like a degraded monstrous fiend, but a perfectly ordinary, even charming young woman. She was kind, professional, and there was absolutely nothing monstrous about this woman. And in his book Confessions, he describes this as a moment of profound earth-shattering revelation that I will have Jesse Reed. had been taught that the wages of sin is death. I'd been told that a single immoral act was sufficient to plunge the soul into a retrievable damnation. I'd expected to find a monster of wickedness, corruption, and horror. My first surprise was that she was a perfectly ordinary,

respectable, and good-natured young woman. The second, that the act itself, so far from being a terror, was an apocalypse of beauty. The whole foundation of my morality was shattered. Dude enjoyed getting laid, basically. He was like, that was fucking the best. An apocalypse of beauty is such a cool way to describe, like, the act itself. I mean, yeah, like, definitionally, apocalypse we associate with, like, end of the world, but it's not what it means. No, it ended his worldview in that way.

This is exactly the same reason they tell Americans to, like, go out of the world. of the country for while you're young just go somewhere far away that you're not comfortable for like two or three weeks and you'll like change your entire shit same thing with sex like like it's wild how scared everybody is of it today it's been totally removed from conversation almost totally in this country that's what i'm talking about that's what i'm at speaking of there's also like this is uh the other end in august when i was in the UK one of the things I noticed frequently is there are a lot of ads, TV programs, whatever, about death. And it isn't like here in the States where it's like, for your final expenses, right?

We don't talk at all about it. It's really weird. And we do, it's insurance that never says exactly what they mean. In the UK, they were like, I'll be dead soon. So you probably want my money. And I was like, whoa. It's a different vibe. But I think, yeah, it's one of those things where America's kind of wacky sometimes

where we have that still 1800s, late 1800s view on things. Like, no, no, no, sex and death and morality and all this of it. Like, no, we don't want to talk about it. It's complicated. We don't want to, our kids can get weird. It's very strange how weird we are as a society. But at the same time, if you think about how America started as a puritanical branch of religious people, like it makes total sense, too.

Sure. But for Crowley in this moment, this was the experiment he ran. And his results contradicted everything he had been told. And his conclusion was like another simple but profound one. Not only were the brethren just wrong, they were fucking liars. The brethren were liars. They had lied to him about sex. They had lied to him about women.

And if they lied about that, they were probably lying about everything else. This single event did more to dismantle his inherited worldview than a thousand theological debates could have done. And this is to the point that Jesse was making is, like, leaving and experiencing something, even if you think you, like, are from a very, like, you know, I open or like, like, I know, I know a lot of people are very kind of culturally rich part of the U.S., just leaving the U.S. and going and living in another culture for a fucking week. You don't have to have a good experience.

You just have to see how it is. It's crazy what it does for you. And that's, like, what this fucking did to him. It completely changed everything that he thought about this shit. And this isn't even, he went to a different culture. He went down the street. Saved his money and got laid. Yeah.

Like, you could go to another city in your state and experience a different culture. Like, yeah. Yeah, I think it's just broadening your horizons. And in this case, he's right. It's fascinating to me that religiously, I understand, even though I don't support it, I understand why, again, if you really believe, like you're really believing and you want to save souls, you will tell people sex is a sin because you don't want them to get like something into sex and you're like look it's a sin because you have to wait until you're

married and if you really believe that you will hammer that into people and the thing is is that uh yeah it goes against all biology literally yeah goes against everything that all species on earth deal with which is like no like that feels good for a reason like that's i was so scared of sex for so long because i've just raised in that catholic mindset Like, I just didn't, I don't know when we're fucking near it until I was like 18, 19. There's no reason to demonize it other than to control people. Yeah, exactly. You know, there's lots of causes out there that people demonize the people's reactions to or, you know, create some sort of intent behind.

Like, if you want to just talk about putting sex and stuff, you're like, are you a fucking freak that you got to put a penis going into a vagina in something? Like, why did you do that? Or, you know, you can weaponize it against gay people and say, yeah. Why did you show a picture of gay people? Should you be in jail? And people are like, I'm scared of gay people, too. You should be in jail. It's ridiculous.

It's fucking crazy. So, yeah, this one experiment, I mean, this is another one of those moments where you look at what he did. Like, this is just kind of how he lived his life from this moment forward. His experiment with, like, the prostitute was shattering for a dramatic shattering of his moral education. And his rebellion was also taking other more subtle forms. During this period, he began to cultivate, like, a rich inner life that was completely

hidden from his guardians and one of the most one of the most important developments during this time was his passion for the game of chess. He became a wildly good chess player. As a boy he was skilled enough to join the prestigious Cambridge University chess club

and hold his own against seasoned adults. For Crowley this was far more than just a simple game. Chess was the perfect way to like keep his mind sharp, another battlefield for him to like measure himself against others. It was like a self contained world of pure logic, strategy, intellectual combat.

It was a place that you could exercise his will, dominate another opponent, chief total victory through superior intellect, all within a socially acceptable kind of enact his will. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. But it makes sense, honestly. Like, it makes total sense. This game kind of honed his ability to think several moves ahead.

He kind of credits chess for that to anticipate opponent's actions and to be, like, ruthlessly sacrifice lesser pieces for a much greater strategic goal should it be need should need done like it's such a wild the more you talk about him the more i'm like if he was born today the worst he would be is a guy who had weird takes on tumbler you know what i mean like he's the the the territory has already been tread but he also is the context setter for the aesthetic of guys who post on tumbler weird shit. So, you know, I don't know. It's, it's like, yeah, or Boris. It is. It is a catch 22. But like it is, you know, it's interesting to see time and place and, you know, the money to just say like, I can do whatever I want forms such an influential person that goes on to make me

have to sit through countless episodes on chaos magic, that son of a bitch. Yeah. It's that pressure cooker that he was born and that birthed this person. Yeah. Uh, yeah, he, he credits chess for his, like, all that strategic kind of thinking. And these are skills that would serve him well in his later magical and personal conflicts. In a lot of ways, I kind of see the chessboard as his first real magical training round. At the same time, he was also sharpening his more strategic mind that he was also, he was also secretly building his intellectual arsenal.

With a limited freedom as tutors loud, he began to acquire his own small library. That's where he discovered the poets I talked about, the philosophers who would become his more spiritual allies. He found his own experience of religious. oppression mirrored in Shelley's atheism, and he saw his own burgeoning sexual and aesthetic sensibilities validated in the decadent poetry of Swinbur. And for the first time, he was beginning to realize he wasn't a unique monster, but part of a noble tradition of artistic and intellectual rebels.

He was finding his tribe. He was realizing that he isn't this beast, though he wore that title for the rest of his life. He sort of gained appreciation for something very normal. at a time we're getting an appreciation for this shit got these people in trouble because he was just in a in the only Bible like he was in like the get out house right and then he he gets he steps out he's in the village and he steps outside and it's like they don't even know how how their world works because they're so used to it he's like I see the freedom that they have yes yes

correct I agree with that uh and a lot this is like a pretty like this part of his life is kind of an often skip period of his youth. But I still think it's important because we do see the crucial components of the future great beast kind of falling into place during this time. He had the intellectual hatred of hypocrisy, forged by the life with his uncle and his mom. He had shattered sexual morality, accomplished through just a single deliberate experiment. He had the ruthless strategic intellect honed by the chess board. And now he had a literary tradition that gave his personal rebellion, a universal voice

amongst others that he saw as equals. he wasn't just this bad kid anymore he was now becoming a young man with a coherent if developing philosophy of his own based on simple a simple powerful principle trust only what you can experience for yourself which you can see would eventually become to what douse wilt it's crazy because i just listen to i just listened to tom waits and like smoked weed and red and rice and i got to the same place yeah yeah the boy who is supposed to become a great preacher for the Plymouth Brethren was dead and well gone now. And in his place stood the man who was about to set his sights on Cambridge University. The goal was never the sexual encounter

itself. That was just the bait. The goal was the look on Chapney's face when he concocted all this stuff. We're kind of catching back up in the timeline here. And for him, this masterpiece of psychological cruelty that was designed to take trust, the pride, the spiritual certainty he had so carefully cultivated in the man and shatter it in that single perfectly staged moment. And and the power play to prove that his own cunning and will was far more powerful than their simple faith. It was the declaration that he wasn't just a player in their goddamn game. He was the one controlling the board from behind the scenes. But while that was his most elaborate campaign,

his reputation as a moral poison was cemented by a much more serious scandal at a school in Stratham. Now, when you ask, like, was he going to that school where he had that sexual relationship with the other young boy? The answer is, no, he wasn't going to that school, but he was in, contact with other boys from that school while he was at his school. And while the details, like I said, are completely, like, really lost and he even doesn't really talk about it that much, like, because at the time, it was kind of a potential crime. And that's why I think that it did happen, but he's even vague on it because it was a potential crime at that time.

Again, we had that giant, the Oscar Wild hearings, which were about that author having, you know, this illicit affair. The affair that he was having was with the young aristocrat by the name of Lord Alfred Bozzy Douglas, which led to a vicious feud with Bozzie's father, the British Marquess of Queensberry, and after Queensberry publicly accused Oscar Wilde of being a sodomite, Wilde in a disastrously arrogant move, sued them for libel, and then this backfired spectacularly, and Queensberry's lawyers produced evidence of Wilde's relationship with working class male prostitutes. And Wilde not only lost the case, but was immediately arrested. And what followed was then a series of sensational public trials for gross and decency under a new law that criminalized all homosexual acts, private or not. The trials became a rational spectacle and a show trial, like a show trial for an entire way of life. And when Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labor, a sentence that would utterly destroy his health and spirit, a wave of moral panic and homophobic, persecution swept across Britain. So when I say he did this, like the wild trials created a

climate of pure terror for gay men and it forced the vibrant queer subculture deep underground and gave a new vicious weapon to blackmailers and moral crusaders. And after 1895, you didn't need to be convicted. The mere accusation of gross indecency was then enough to ruin your career. It's a witch trials, right? You're thrown out of your home, make you a social pariah. This was the world Crowley was living in. So when he went and did this act, you have to understand how powerful of an act it was for him to actively go do it in the world he was living and seeing a fuck you, like I'm going to have this relationship anyway, but also why the school is completely buried it. Don't talk about it. And even in his own writings, he's very vague about the exact

details of that relationship. Because I don't think he wanted to go to fucking prison either. So yeah, when a school accused him of a similar crime, it wasn't just a matter of discipline. It was an accusation that carried the threat of total social and legal annihilation at this time period. Yeah, this time period sucked. And so it's, again, the Oscar Wild trials are just kind of, unfortunately, just important context to like why we know so little about this particular thing. It no longer mattered if Crowley was like the clever prankster. He was now officially branded a corruptor of youth, the snake in the garden, as I said earlier.

This wasn't just his mother calling him a beast anymore either. This was an institutional judgment being handed down. It solidified his status as a true outcome. and it undoubtedly fueled the sense of righteous indignation that would animate him for the rest of his life. He saw himself as a martyr, punished for daring to be free in a world of hypocrites. And here's a telling passage from his autobiography

where he reflects on this period that Alex is going to read here. You can kind of hear the resentment, but also the pride and being the one who refused to play along. As I was saying, like the act itself was powerful. The masters were, for the most part, ministers of the gospel. Their idea of education was to form a tame, spiritless creature, respectful to his pastors and masters, and a ready tool for the exploiter. My ideal was a man who should be himself, and master of himself. Every natural impulse was damned as devilish from the first.

It was my business to defy this hydra-headed monster of hypocrisy and stupidity. And what better way to confront it than by engaging in the very acts that create that hydra in the first place? So his guide and mentor now being tutored would also kind of become his tormentor in this pursuit was one of the most remarkable figures in the history of mountaineering as well. This is a man by the name of Oscar Ekenstein. Yeah, he's being tutored by this individual, but also this guy is a very, like, he's very big about mountaineering. Ekenstein was everything the stuffy, aristocratic, British Alpine Club was not. He was the son of a German Jewish socialist revolutionary, a brilliant engineer and a fiercely indefiastic. dependent thinker. He basically invented the modern 10 point cramp on for climbing on ice and

pioneered guideless climbing, believing a man should rely on his own skill not to be let up a mountain like a tourist. What a fucking divergence we're about to take right now. Right. Because like he gets sent off from this school. He gets shot out. Right. He then goes to get edict tutored by this individual, which he gains the freedom to build his library. And it just so happens that his tutor and these people that he meets over there are like mountaineers and like like revolutionary people and shit, it's like really, really weird that they're like, he keeps budding into these people. I think in Victorian England, you're either a mountain climber or you went to the jungles and you like found a temple or you rode in a motor

car or you went in a hot air balloon. I feel like everybody has some kind of wacky hobby in the Victorian era. Mountaineering is like just a super crazy one. Yeah, I guess. Like, yeah, Crowley is just like, during this time too, he's like, this is like what it was called like his Cambridge era, because he's in the Cambridge chess club and stuff. And like while all those around the people, like he called him, like the people he was around at that time were like velvet-clad poets, champagne-soaked dandies, as he would call them in often, that's not the kind of person he was at this time. At the exact same time as he was like cultivating his persona of supreme indulgence,

which is something like we'll get into it a little bit. The Crowley, this is a Crowley who was turning his back on like decadent parties that were happening around him and sought out the. more brutal purifying disciplines of mountain climbing like he because of his tutors and stuff started getting interested in mountain climbing and so instead of like joining all these Cambridge uppities Oscar Ekenstein kind of influenced him to start getting interested in mountain climbing and Ekenstein then kind of just took Crowley under his wing but it's like tutelage was a kind of he calls it a form of refined torture he wasn't really just teaching Crowley how to climb

Crowley kind of puts it that he was teaching him how to master his own mind. Echinstein's philosophy was that climbing was a form of active meditation. The goal was to achieve a state of perfect, thoughtless concentration, where the body simply acted without the interference of the chattering and fearful mind. He had a series of exercises that kind of helped to achieve this. One of the more famous anecdotes tells that how Echinstein would force Crowley to stand on a large, uncomfortable boulder in a painful posture for hours. He couldn't shift his weight, scratch an itch, or even think about not thinking.

This is literally the matrix now we're talking about. Dude, I had that same thought when I was like reading this shit. I'm like, this is literally the invisibles. Yeah, this is literally invisibles again. We're back to the invisible. He's making it. It's so weird, man. It's so weird.

He's like building his life and these people just kind of like magnetized to him. Uh, for Echinstein, the goal was to exhaust the body and the conscious mind until only a core of pure, silent will remain. On other occasions, while at high altitude physically exhausted and oxygen deprived, Eckstein would suddenly demand that Crowley solve complex math problems in his head as they were climbing. Be your man, you must be swift as course she will. Like what is, like what is happening? I don't know, like, he's this guy, he's tutoring, and they're like doing a montage. Yeah, and this guy is crazy. Eckstein kind of comes out of nowhere and just like is a huge influence on his life.

It was a method designed to break the mind down and rebuild it into a tool of pure, focused will yet again. For Crowley, though, this wasn't a sport. This was the most profound spiritual training he had ever received. He fucking loved this. It pushed him and broke him in ways that he, like enjoyed um it was here like clinging to a rock face with frozen fingers while his brain screamed for release that he truly discovered the concept that he later would call his in caps true will this was the center of all everything right Crowley spent his university holidays making

a name for himself as a serious climber in the Alps he found that mountain climbing It could not be a more apt physical real world metaphor for the thing that he is trying to teach. Do you see why in some aspects, I look at Crowley and I'm like, you are an incredible individual. And in other ways, I'm like, you are insufferable. It's like a roll of the dice with like extreme thematic resonance. Yeah, yeah. Like in the Alps, like tackling difficult peaks and honing the skills that would later take him to the Himalayas. this physical discipline was the crucial, like, kind of like, weird counterweight that his life of

indulgence needed. It proved to him that the path of power wasn't just through exploring the pleasures of the flesh, but through conquering pain. It was a lesson in mastering the two opposite poles of human existence and experience. In one hand, drunken sex, which would become ritualistic magic, and then the other, pushing your body to the point of breaking, and then through the power of your own mind saying fuck it i'm going to do it anyway these simultaneously back in the relative safety of cambridge his intellectual curiosity in the cult was tipping over into active practical experimentation because during all of this started learning about the cult and reading a little bit about it but it was only ever part of his literary collection stuff that he

found interest in but as he was doing this more mountain climbing things he became more and more interested. And he met a fellow student, a serious chemist named Julian L. Baker. Now, Baker, like Crowley, was fascinated by the legends of alchemy. But while Crowley approached it from a mystical perspective, Baker approached it as a problem of chemistry. Like, he believed alchemy was real. It's another perfect Victorian hobby right there. He's in Cambridge University for chemistry trying to figure out alchemy. Yeah, maybe alchemies, maybe they were on to something with that turning shit into gold shit. Literally.

Dude. So they decided both of them together. They became friends. And they decided to pool their resources and knowledge and embark on the most ambitious quest Cambridge students who have a passing interest in the occult and alchalcone you can ever do. What they called the great work. They were going to create the Philosopher's Stone. Stop.

That is it. That's what they came together at this point. They're like 17-ish, I think, right around the same. era. This is a perfect place for Bill and Ted to go. I guess. It would be perfect. They'd show up. So they did what you could

do when you're rich. They set up a proper laboratory. And for months, Crowley and Julian Baker dedicated themselves to the ancient art of trying to create the philosopher stone. Crowley would pour over the cryptic allegorical texts from alchemists like Paracelsus

trying to decipher the mystical instructions. Baker would then take those allegories and try to translate them into chemical procedures and they worked with mercury. They distilled, they calcined, they followed the arcane steps as best as they could.

This is like when Claire tries to make a hot pocket. This was like an imperfect fusion of mystical and scientific and of course, they didn't succeed in creating a magical stone that turns lead and gold. Surprise. I know fucking surprise. I'm disappointed too. But in another, it is not

the journey, my dude. It is the destination, man. But in another way, the experiment was a massive success. This was Crowley's first serious hands-on attempt at practical magic. He wasn't just reading about it anymore. He was doing, it's like after I read about chaos magic and attempted some chaos magic. I was like, you know what? Fuck it. I might as well try. You know what? I'm going to do it. He was doing it. And the experience solidified his belief. And the experience solidified his belief that magic was a science, an experimental process of trial and error. Failing to produce the stone didn't convince him the alchemy was a lie. It just convinced him that he hadn't found the right method yet. The quest was still ongoing and real. And these ideas started bleeding into his

reality. The barrier between his occult studies and his everyday life began to dissolve. During a climbing trips in the Alps, while resting in a hut near the Matterhorn, he had a vivid waking vision of the 16th century alchemist Paracelsus. And it was another sign to him, another confirmation that he was on the right path. The world of spirits, of hidden masters, was starting to reach out to him. His life was a collection of powerful but disconnected pursuits. He was a poet, a climber, a sexual explorer, an amateur chemist. He needed a unifying theory, a single mission to dedicate all of his formidable energy to.

and that mission was revealed to him on New Year's Eve 1896. He was on a solo trip to Stockholm, Sweden, because fuck it, you're rich as fuck at this time. Why is there always a story like this? I don't know, man. I just, isn't it weird patterns? Do we, have we ever talked about Valas on the show? It sounds like, I think Valis? Valis.

No, not in any detail. Philip K. Dick, Grant Morrison. Yeah. Alster Crowley. It's weird, man. They've all had one. We'll do a deep dive. It similarly is deep to Matt and Blavatsky one day, too.

Um, which is similar. But yeah, he was off on a solo trip to Stockholm, Sweden. I'm as he... Like, hiccups out of nowhere. Hi there. My name is Annie Elise, aka your true crime BFF and host of the podcast Serialously. I have been a true crime enthusiast forever. But I wished somebody would break down the cases for me like a friend,

giving all the details and discussing every twist in turn. So I decided to create a podcast that does just that. Serialously with Annie Elise is topping the... the charts with over one million weekly downloads. I do the deep dives in these cases, so you don't have to. Diving into all the raw details, saying what we're all thinking, and in a conversational way, just like having a conversation with your best friend. So join me and let's talk all things true crime.

Serialistly with Annie Elise. New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday wherever you get your podcasts. As he later described it, he was in a state of deep, almost depressive contemplation when something inside him shattered. His normal everyday consciousness, the personality of Alistocrelli, with all of its ambitions and desires, simply fell away.

In its place was a vast, silent, sacred awareness. It was his first experience that he claims of true mystical union, a state he'd later equate with the yogic state of samadhi, or as psychedelic uses call, ego death,

or ego dissolution, something that can happen if you are not not not even with psychedelics if you're meditative and you often meditate this can also happen and if you die too right yes often people say like their near-depth experience is this feeling of like doesn't doesn't you this yeah doesn't your body flood with DMT when you die that's that is like a myth or a legend I don't think there's any proof that it does don't you turn into pure psychedelic crystals when you die don't you become like a star child made of moon dust and yeah I think you turn into math

you become algebraic equations when you die so if i turn into math that's the biggest like that's the that's the greatest victory guy can achieve for years i've been terrible at it but in death i become a brilliant mathematician of space and time no you don't get to no you don't become a mathematician you just become literal math oh aren't i a mathematician if i made a math oh fit chaos magic oh oh shit you're doing chaos magic jesse good job mine is what's 105 times four well i That's what you break down into. What divided by zero does? Maybe you could.

Maybe that's why they can't figure it out yet because you haven't died. Jesse Cox is what happens when you divide by zero. That's your like, that's your like original Twitter bio like back in 2007. Oh, is Jesse Cox like the molecule man or like the anchor being of every reality? That's not true. Don't put that on me. I don't need that.

What if you're the true? What if you're our Truman? Oh shit. What if we're all actors and you're Truman? Yeah, that's what it means. That would explain my Mathis keeps trying to get me to buy Ovalteen. the clues are right there math as dude i'm telling you

chaos magic uh yeah this this is uh this is uh in in the state of like pure awareness i guess he became absolutely unshakably convinced of two separate things first that his true self was the immortal was an immortal divine being and second that he was being guided by the secret chiefs the hidden spiritual masters he'd read about the same beings he felt were behind the legends of the rosicrucians another thing we've covered via alex in the past wait so he rejected religion only to find a different religion only to like have this a state of awareness and like yeah to be fair he created a religion too shit yeah yeah he hasn't done it yet but he's on his way to creating a religion yeah uh the the experience

kind of fused all the disparate parts of his life into a single kind of purpose, and he was no longer just like fighting the world of his father and his mother. He was in his mind a holy warrior, a chosen agent of the secret chiefs tasked with the great and terrible mission. The Stockholm Vision ended his amateur phase, at least as he claims it, and his life now had direction. He had to find a system. He had to make formal contact. He had to find the earthly representatives of the masters who had just spoken to him. him in the silence. And that is true will.

And that is true will. Prowley returned to Cambridge, a changed man. On the surface, obviously nothing was different. He still wore the finest of clothes, wrote his provocative poetry and indulged his senses. But underneath it all, a core of cold, diamond hard purpose had formed. His former pursuits were no longer ends in themselves. They were now just tools in his arsenal. His life, a series of interesting experiments, was now a single focus quest.

to find the earthly link to the secret chiefs. So he began to hunt for the forbidden and hidden door into this invisible world. He devoured books on Rosicrucianism, the Knights Templar, Freemasons, looking for a signal, a clue. And the breakthrough came, not in a dusty library. Instead, though, kind of fittingly, in the midst of one of his other great passions. What else? More mountaineering.

In the summer of 1898, while he was climbing in Zermott. Switzerland, he struck up a conversation with a fellow Englishman named Henry Curry. They started talking about chemistry, and Crowley, never won for modesty, likely began boasting about his alchemical experiments. Curry was intrigued, and he mentioned he knew another chemist in London, who was also deeply interested in the esoteric side of science, a man named George Cecil Jones, which is such a fucking 1800s, like, fucking English name. It really is.

I love it. this was the lead that Crowley was kind of waiting for and so upon his return to London he arranged a meeting and George Cecil Jones was in many ways Crowley's complete opposite where Crowley was a flamboyant wealthy aristocratic rebel Jones was a respectable middle class and rather conventional industrial chemist he was also a high-ranking member of the societies Rosicruciana in Anglia an older more gentle and Christian mythical esoteric society reserved for high-ranking Freemasons. And he was a cautious, serious, but deeply knowledgeable about the occult. All these weird little religious things, man.

They're all these kind of... It amuses me to no end that magic is evil unless it's Jesus magic. Right. It just is so funny to me that it's like... I know. This is good magic, though. This is the fun magic.

This has a different... This has a different entire credo behind it. You know what I mean? Jesus magic. It's not about the magic. It's about the Jesus. You're right. It's about the orgs.

It's not about the scripture. I got no, like, Jesus seems like a pretty chill dude. Like, uh, Jesus is, Jesus is the Bible is fucking cool. He seems chill as hell. Yeah. I think it's, man. Jesus is just all right with me. I think he would smoke weed and vibe.

I feel like Jesus would be a partaker. It's the acts of man that are bad, not. Of course. Not God. Yeah, this guy So Sean Goddry over here from Last Crusade

At this point in history Crowley is now 23 years old And he is With all the arrogance and theatricality Of everything he's done prior He's only 23 23 year olds are unbearable So like I get it

That's how old Bob Dylan was When he wrote like a Rolling Stone Also like the greatest American folk song of all time that's like six and a half minutes long. There's something pure about being 20. It's like some 23 year old's fucking notebook fucking shit. It's like, I know. And I like know every word.

It's like crazy. So when Crowley did show up at this guy's doorstep, Jones was understandably wary of this guy because he's nothing like him. He saw the brilliance, the raw intellectual horsepower behind Crowley because Crowley was fucking smart. But he also saw the immense ego and the moral recklessness that he wore so proudly on and sleeves. Jones wasn't about to hand over the keys to his kingdom to the strange young man without a serious vetting process first. And so began Crowley's unofficial magical probation.

For months, Jones tested him. He didn't teach him a single ritual or spell. He just gave him a reading list, directing him to the foundational and often driest texts of mysticism. He was testing his seriousness, his commitment, his intellect, and one of the books on that list would hit Crowley like a bolt of lightning. It was a short, dense, mystical work by an 18th century German, a German author named Carl von Eckertschausen, Eckhartschausen, titled The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary. This book wasn't a grimoire of spells. It was a philosophical text that laid out a radical idea that behind all the visible external

religions and mystical orders of the world, there exists a single, secret, and truly illuminated inner circle of adeps. This secret church as he called it was made up of beings who had achieved true spiritual enlightenment and who guided the evolution of humanity from a hidden plane. This shit is

D&D. Fodder. It's the best. I love this. The plot of the invisibles. It all very true. Reading these words for Crowley was like an electric shock of confirmation that this was it.

This was the intellectual framework for the intensely personal vision that he had back in Stockholm. Von Eckertschausen was describing his secret chiefs. The book proved to him that this experience wasn't a delusion, that it was contact with a real, if hidden, spiritual order. And it meant that an earthly organization that served as the outer court, quote unquote, to this inner circle, had to exist. Crowley's performance during this probation was flawless. He devoured the books Jones gave him, his sharp mind, easily mastering the complex material. This ferocious dedication to an undeniable genius finally convinced Jones that he was the real deal. Jones decided that this strange, arrogant young man was ready.

He finally revealed the existence of the one organization that was actively pursuing the path laid out in that book. And it was called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This was the moment the entire last two years of his life had been building towards, the hermetic order of the golden dawn. Jones agreed to be his sponsor, and Crowley formally applied for admission. On the evening of November 18, 1898, Alistair Crowley presented himself at Mark Mason's Hall in London. He was led into a darkened temple, a space filled with strange symbols, rope figures, in the thick, sweet smell of incense. He was blindfolded, bound with ropes, and led on a symbolic journey around the temple, temple challenged by officers representing the four classical elements.

He was in the heart of the machine. At the climax of the ceremony, he knelt before an altar and took a long, terrifyingly specific oath of secrecy. This wasn't a social club. This was a magical blood pact, and the oath made the dire consequences of breaking it crystal clear. and Jesse, you're going to read what this oath was. I'm so excited. Crazy. I, Mathis, in the presence of the Lord of the Universe, on this day, September 17th, 2025,

due of my own free will and accord, hereby and hereon, most solemnly pledge myself to keep. secret all and everything that may be discovered to me in this order. I will not debase my mystical knowledge in the labor of evil magic. These several points I solemnly swear to observe under the awful penalty of voluntarily submitting myself to a deadly and hostile current of will set in motion by the chiefs of the order by which I, Mathis, should fall slain and paralyzed as if blasted by lightning. Blasted by lightning.

They're like, I'll do all good. I got you guys. I'm part of the club. And if not, blast me with lightning. This is what kind of like swears I made with my friends when we put all our Pokemon cards together. Yes, yes. But the other question is it says I should fall.

slain and paralyzed? Yeah, it doesn't make, like, I don't understand how that means. Do you really need to be paralyzed if you're slain? I guess, see,

I thought that same thing. I guess if you die and you're like struck rigid, like a cartoon character who gets struck by lightning, I guess. That's like one of those shot and then hung by the neck until death. And then run over by a monster truck. That's just blasted by lightning. Well,

when the oath was complete, he was asked to choose a magical motto, a new name to signify his birth into the world of magic. And he had his choice prepared. He chose the Latin phrase, Frater Perderabo, brother, quote, I will endure to the end, is what it means. The Latin phrase, fraterer per Durabo means I will endure to the end. It was a perfect choice for him. It was a name that was forged on like the frozen rock faces of the Alps.

It was a declaration that his undying will and his absolute commitment to the reach of the highest peak of spiritual attainment, no matter the cost, no matter the suffering. would be one he would embark upon, and he had endured his childhood. He had endured his schools. He had endured this. He would not stop until he had mastered every secret the order had to offer. And with that oath done, the blindfold was removed. Time out. Really quickly, really quickly, before we remove the blindfold and go on earth our lives,

if the two of you had to join the order, what would your catchphrase be? Oh, shit. Let me get up, I mean, look up a Latin translation. Oh, he has to be Latin? Well, his was Latin trans. think so. Sentum Orum.

What's that mean? 100 gold. Okay. I would be paratissusum ad explorandum. What is that? I'm ready to be probed. It's pretty on it.

100% so far. After the old was done, he chose his name. The blindfold was removed. The bonds of the ropes were cut. He was no longer just Alistair Crowley. this rebellious poet from Cambridge, he was now Frater Perderabo, a neophyte in the hermetic order of the golden dawn. He was finally, officially, on the path. He'd found the door, and he was able to kick it off its hinges.

Having passed through that guarded door, Crowley's life, which had been a chaotic and explosion of different passions, now imploded into a single white-hot point to focus. The poetry, the decadent parties, even the mountains, all of these are now secondary. part of the order. They were now just aspects of the man who had one all-consuming purpose to master the system of magic he had just entered and to climb its grades as quickly as humanly possible. He had found his great work and he pursued it with the obsessive ferocity of a starving man who had just been sat down at a luxurious banquet. His luxurious flat at 60 Chancery Lane, once his decadent court, now transformed into a full-time magical library

and monastery, or laboratory in monastery, rather. Crowley established a daily regimen of practice that would have broken any lesser man. His day would begin and end with the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram, a foundational ceremony designed to purify a magician's space in mind. He didn't just perform it, though, that went about mastering it, practicing it until the vibrations of the divine names and the tracing of the pentagram. became second nature muscle memory like the things he would do on the mountain where he doesn't have to think about it he spent hours in meditation trying to still the constant chatter of his mind and he filled notebooks with detailed dated and timed records of his experiments and scrying astral

projection treating it all with the rigorous documentation of any chemist in a lab the golden dawn's curriculum was basically just like a magical university and for him as a neophyte and through the subsequent grades of the Outer Order, Zellator, Theorichus, Patrickus, and Philosophists. He was required to study a series of dense knowledge lectures, and these were more dry academic papers covering the vast intellectual foundations of Western magic, the intricacies of the Kabbalistic tree of life, the astrological and elemental meanings of the Hebrew alphabet, the complex symbolism of the tarot, the basics of alchemy and geomancy, For most members, this was a slow, multi-year process.

But Crowley, who I am convinced as autistic, this was his special interest. He treated it like a race. He didn't just read the lectures. He basically absorbed them, memorized them verbatim. He created his own elaborate systems of cross-referencing and notation. And his brilliant mind effortlessly was synthesizing these disparate streams of esoteric thought and, like, theory, into a coherent whole. His progress was, kind of to put it mildly, unprecedented in the order, but it was about to be accelerated even further by a fateful meeting.

Inside the Isis Uranaria Temple, Crowley quickly took the measure of the other members. He found many of them to be in his snobbish view, pretentious delitants. That's artisan. Oh, no, no, that's exactly what I was thinking is because what you're saying about this guy, he sounds like he 100% is in. I don't know if he believes it, but he's like, he loves it. It's like me when I find the lore of a fantasy series or sci-fi thing, and I must know everything, and I will deep dive it to an extent that is ridiculous. And then I'll be like, glad I know all that.

And I feel like he has that where he is obsessed with this all. And he loves everything about it. Even if he doesn't, like, believe it is a thing, he loves the thing it is. And he's super into it. And everyone else, I was like, yeah, I bet eventually he's going to find out that. that everyone else involved is kind of like a rich dude looking for some social fun. Yep. And he's like, no, no.

Literally. Yeah. It's literally. It was like, oh, this makes perfect sense. Yeah, of course. You're like, y'all are trash. Yeah, he's in there trying his hardest and he's surrounding himself with these people. And he's like, oh, you all suck.

Like you said, he saw them a snobbish, pretentious delitons, artists and intellectuals who enjoyed the mystery and the robes, but literally shied away from the grueling practical work. They wanted a club. They want to, and whenever, when you give people a fucking uniform and a secret thing to belong to, they're, that's like, that's what that says. That becomes their shit. But they weren't into it for the magic. But there was still one man who commanded his immediate and total respect, a brother named Alan Bennett. Bennett was by many of the accounts in the order, one of the most brilliant and magically gifted members of the entire order. He was a master of ceremonial magic, a deeply intuitive psychic. And he possessed an encyclopedic knowledge. of occultism. He was also kind of a tragic figure. He was chronically ill with severe asthma that left him gasping for breath, and he was

living in abject poverty in a squalid London tenement, often going about without food for the day. He was a magical genius, trapped in a broken body with literally no resources. And having asthma in the 1890s, good luck. I don't know what the fuck you do. I can barely do with it when I was younger.

I had to have the big inhaler. You know what I mean? Yeah, dude. It's like, what do you do? Well, Crowley, the wealthy aristocrat with a hunger for knowledge equally as strong as this other guys, saw an opportunity. Recognizing Bennett's genius instantly, he made a proposition. He invited Bennett to move out of his slum and into his own luxurious flat on Chancery Lane. Crowley would become his patron. He would provide food, shelter, medicine, and all the resources Bennett needed to live and work in comfort. In return, Bennett would become Crowley's private tutor.

Their partnership would change the course of Crowley's life. yet again. His flat became a 24-7 magical boot camp. Benet was a notoriously demanding teacher. He drilled Crowley relentlessly on the minutiae of the Kabbalistic correspondences. He corrected his ritual technique with painstaking precision. He guided him through advanced meditations and taught him practical magical techniques that are far beyond the scope of the Outer Order curriculum. Thanks to Bennett's intensive one-on-one tutelage, Crowley wasn't just learning the Golden Dawn system. He was mainlining this shit like a drug. getting a master class from one of its most advanced practitioners he could find like he got exactly

what he wanted man he got a literal teacher that just and i can see him getting corrected in like little minutiae him loving it him just like soaking in wanting to master it not getting himself getting better sort of yes exactly like when i play a fighting game and i get better at the fighting game it's like that this period also exposed crowley to a whole new world of thought then it was a serious student of Eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhism, one of the first and Englishmen to publicly declare himself a Buddhist. He introduced Crowley to the concepts of meditation, mindfulness, and the yogic philosophies that would become a massive part of his spiritual toolkit years later. This intense period of shared work is one of the few times in his life that Crowley seems to have formed

a genuine mutual respectful friendship with somebody. He admired Bennett's brilliant mind and his resilience, and Bennett seems to have been genuinely fond of his strange, arrogant, but ferociously dedicated student. And Alex, I'm going to have you read this bit right out of Crowley's autobiography about how he felt about him. For the first time since my father's death, I had found a man who could command my respect. So great was my reverence for his learning and for his magical power that I was ready to sit at his feet as a disciple. I had a man who could teach me, and whose knowledge and power was so obviously immense that I could not possibly feel

any sense of rivalry. And that lack of rivalry with Bennett was key. But while Crowley was in awe of his teacher, his rapid progress and blatant arrogance were starting to cause serious friction with the rest of the London Temple. He made zero effort to hide

the fact that he considered most of them to be his intellectual inferiors. He was open and scandalous personal life, again, living, drunken, and having a lot of sex, combined with his almost inhuman rate of advancement began to kind of alarm the more conservative, established members of the order. The quiet, respectable mystics of the Isis Yuryanya temple were beginning to realize they had

a magical prodigy in their myths. And they were also beginning to suspect he was also a monster. By the end of 1899, after just over a year of ferocious, obsessive work, Alistair Crowley had done what most members do in a decade. He'd completely mastered the curriculum of the outer order. He'd passed every exam, memorized every lecture, perfected every ritual in his own mind, and by the order's own rules, he was more than qualified for the next great step. Initiation into the secretive and powerful second order.

With this, you have to understand. The second order wasn't just like another promotion. The outer order was basically a magical grammar school. It was all theory. It gave you the vocabulary, the symbols, and the basis. of techniques, but the second order was where the real magic happened. This was the inner circle of adepts. This was where they taught you how to invoke gods, how to evoke spirits into visible

appearance, how to consecrate powerful talismans, and how to actually travel on the astral planes. Gaining entry was the entire goal of the outer order. It meant you were no longer just a student. You were a recognized adept, but admission wasn't automatic. You had to pass the difficult exams, which Crowley, as I said, of course, aced. But then you had to pass the final one, a subjective hurdle. You had to be deemed morally and spiritually fit by the leaders of your temple. Yikes. Yeah. And it was at this final

hurdle that Crowley's ambitions slammed headfirst into a brick wall named William Butler Yates. The leadership council of the Isis Iyrania Temple, with Yates as its most influential voice, formerly met to consider the advancement of Alistair Crowley or known to the church Frater Perderabo and the verdict was a resounding no they refused he did not get promoted their reasoning was a laundry list of everything Crowley was they pointed to his scandalous personal life

especially as open bisexuality at this point which they felt was immoral and brought the secretive order into disrepute they distrusted his motives seeing his relentless ambition not as a spiritual quest but as an egotistical hunger for power. They were deeply suspicious of his relationship with Alan Bennett, seeing it as a backdoor deal to get secret knowledge before he was ready. But most of all, they disagreed with his entire approach to magic.

Yates in particular was horrified by Crowley's scientific results-oriented methods. Yates was a mystic. He believed magic was a delicate, reverent art, a way of communing with the soul of the world. Crowley treated it like a form of spiritual engineering, a series of levers to be pulled to get the results, want. To Yates, this was a dangerous and profane attitude that could only lead to disaster, like the dark side of the force. He genuinely saw Crowley as a potential black magician,

a force of spiritual corruption. The writer and Yates' biographer Richard Elman actually sums up the poet's view on Crowley perfectly for Jesse to read. This comes from the second book that I mentioned. Yates felt that Crowley's soul was in a tumultuous and chaotic state. He acknowledged his genius and his learning, but he distrusted his swaggering and insolent manner. He saw him as a demonic force, someone who was trying to overleap the eternal boundaries. The last thing Yates wanted was to give such a man the keys to the kingdom. Like he said, he's insufferable, you know, in a lot of ways. And you can imagine as well that this refusal did not sit well with Crowley, because he saw it as an intolerable insult.

He was, in his mind, the most dedicated and accomplished student the order had ever seen. He had followed all the rules, passed all the tests. To be denied by this committee of what he called suburban visionaries and Tea Party occultists was a clear act of jealousy on their part. They weren't protecting the order. They were protecting their own petty authority from a man whose talent dwarfed their own. But Crowley was a master strategist. A direct fight with the entire London Council was a losing battle.

So he made an end run. he decided to appeal to the highest court in their world, the one man with absolute authority over every member of the Golden Dawn, a man he had been carefully cultivating a relationship on the sides by himself from the very fucking beginning, a man by the name of Samuel Liddell McGregor Mathers. Mathers was one of the three original founders of the Golden Dawn and by 1900 was its sole undisputed leader. He was a brilliant, flamboyant, and deeply eccentric character, a master of historical fencing, a self-proclaimed Scottish Highlander, despite the fact that he was born in London, a genuine genius of esoteric synthesis, he was the man who

had translated the arcane documents and built the entire Golden Dawn system. And by this point, he was living in self-imposed exile in Paris, throwing increasingly paranoid and resentful of the London Temple, which he felt was becoming too independent and disrespectful of his authority. Crowley had been playing the long game on the side, just in case things didn't go his way. He had been corresponding with Mathers directly, sending him flattering letters and progress reports, effectively bypassing the entire London leadership. Mathers, isolated and paranoid in Paris, just as we're right in January of 1900 now, was delighted. In Crowley, he didn't see a dangerous degenerate. He saw a fiercely loyal disciple, a magical prodigy who respected

his authority in a way the Londoners no longer did, and Crowley was the perfect ally in Mathers' own simmering conflict with the Isis Urania Temple. So, in December of 1899, armed with his official rejection from London, Crowley traveled to Paris to plead his case directly to the master. It was a checkmate move in chess, essentially. He presented himself to Mathers as a loyal student being persecuted by a jealous and insubordinate clique. Mathers, whose ego was at least as largest Crowley's, I'd say, readily agreed, and this was the perfect opportunity to slap down the London Council and reassert his own absolute power. So, in January of 1900, in his Paris apartment, S.L. McGregor Mathers, the supreme and undisputed chief of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,

personally initiated Alistaira Crowley into the Adeptus Minor, which is a grade of the second order. The news of this act hit the London Temple like a fucking thunder clap. It was a direct and contemptuous dismissal of the authority and their denial. But if Mathers thought this would bring the Londoners to heal, he had severely misjudged them. The Isis-Yaranya Temple, this was the final proof that their distant leader had become an unpredictable tyrant. They did not capitulate, they instead declared war. They formed a committee to formally investigate Mather's leader. ship, and they started digging. They questioned the very foundation of his authority, his claim to be in communication with the quote-unquote secret chiefs. They came to the

conclusion that these communications were either a complete fabrication or a dangerous delusion. Worse, they uncovered evidence suggesting that some of the order's founding documents had been forged. The entire legitimacy of the Golden Dawn was suddenly in question. It was a full-blown constitutional crisis for this group of people. In March of 1900, the London dawn, the London Temple, rather, voted to suspend S.L. McGregor Mathers from his position and to operate as an independent magical body. They were, in effect, seceding. Mathers, incandescent with rage in his Paris apartment, made his next move. He had one weapon left in his arsenal, a weapon that was loyal, magically potent and utterly ruthless, a man by the name of Alistair Crowley.

He formally appointed Trotorabo as his official envoy. Crowley's mission was simple but aggressive, he was to return to London, march into the temple, and sees all of its property in Mather's name. This includes their ritual implements, their secret papers in the vault of the adepti, a symbolic chamber that was the very heart of the temple. So is that surprised you, Alex? You just so, it's just so petty. It's just such a funny, petty move. Drama. Yeah. It's drama club kids all grown up in a lot of ways. Crowley, who had been waiting for a moment like this, his entire life, accepted the mission with glee.

This was not a debate anymore. He was officially on a raid. In April of 1900, the confrontation came to a head. Crowley arrived at the Order's temple space at 36 Blythe Road, but he did not arrive as Alistair Crowley, the Cambridge poet. He arrived as a vision of terrifying magical authority. This is one of the most famous and utterly bizarre anecdotes in the history of just occultism.

Crowley showed up dressed in full Highland regalia, A kilt in plaid as a nod to Mathers claimed a Scottish heritage. Over his face, he wore a heavy black mask, a symbol of the invisible powers he served. Around his neck hung a massive, gleaming golden Celtic cross and at his side, a ceremonial dagger. Yikes. He was accompanied by his then mistress and magical partner, woman by the name of Elaine Simpson, and they were armed with illegal summons. He was there to repossess the temple by 40s. if necessary.

I just want you imagine this 20, like, five-year-old nerd dressed up like this with papers in his hand he's here. I am here to reclaim the temple by force, if necessary. And it's got like his mistress hanging out with him. Light saber turns on. Yeah. Yeah. What followed, though, was less an epic magical battle and more a deeply kind of serious, weird, occult

farce on the other side of the door where WB. Yates and other senior London members. They refused to entry. Crowley, in his full masked regalia, attempted to force his way in. Can I fucking open the door. A bizarre shoving match then ensued in the hallway of a London townhouse

with the future Nobel prize-winning poet physically wrestling the man who would become the world's most infamous magician. It's like these two wildly important figures of history are wrestling in a hallway

because a paranoid man in Paris told him to go take this filming back. It's so stupid and hilarious. It's so dumb because he's in his fucking regalia while this other guy is not. And he's like in a mask. It's awesome. It's awesome. I love

it. It is like a whole. It's almost hilariously tropey. It's making me laugh. It's like a Colin Brothers movie. Yeah. It's like unbelievable. Yeah. You just hear just like scuffling like yeah. It's like magical realism literally. Yeah. You don't make you tap out I'll make you tap out

Oh God So they're wrestling in their fucking Like fucking house And because in the minds Of the participants This wasn't like a scuffle This was a magical battle Crowley

That's so funny It's just two dudes wrestling on the ground They're like Beware The spells It's like It's like an enemy fight

I told you It's brought It's come to this brothers I didn't wish to come to this But Crowley, you are the highest level amongst us can see their magical battle. To them all the lie, it looks as though they are wrestling on the ground. But it's only because they're casting the magic so quickly that we can not comprehend their powers.

I can see the VFX brothers. The best part, though, is like it wasn't a quiet wrestling because while they're wrestling, Crowley was launching what he called currents of wills at his opponent. Hell yes. Psychic attacks, demonic attacks and curses, designed to break. their nerve. In his mind, he was a magical warrior laying siege to a force of a fortress

gripped with this other holy warrior. Yates and his allies were performing counterspels. I just wanted it. There's only there are a friend standing around the circle casting counterspels, casting counterspels, but like in Latin. It's like shitty Harry Potter.

It's awesome. It's awesome. I love this shit so much. Yates and his allies were performing counter spells and banishing rituals on the spot as they were wrestling that believing they were holding back a genuine force of spiritual evil one of the members a lawyer named hunter later claimed to have been astrally attacked by a vampire sent by crowley yo how do you know like would have loved to have been here i would love to have stealing lightning bolt lightning bolt

Was he like, Vampire bat? This is incredible. I had no clue they had a fight. Dick, I see, I knew you would love this.

Everything about this is screams the greatest role play session ever. I'm serious. I'm convinced nothing actually happened, but these guys were living like there were kids again. This is like when a kid is like,

no, I didn't kill me. Shields a lot. It's my Sunday best. This is, Alex, you're going to read this, is just a bit from a letter where Crowley described his appearance at the time. Oh, it's so good.

I appeared in the character of a boy general with Kilt, Dirk, and Sporan, a black mask over my face and a great gold cross on my breast. It was a terrific apparition. The scene was pure comic opera. But for them, I must have seen the fiend himself.

For I was masked and armed and my words were curses. I mean, well, you just hear you slapping like, him in the back I say vampire bats upon you. And that guy's a lawyer and he's like, I got to text my vampire. The other guy, no.

He just walks out of the room. I'm blinded. This fallout was catastrophic for the order of the Golden Dawn. The court case forced the intensely secretive society out into the open. Its secret documents, its rituals, and its membership lists were all exposed as a public eye. The scandal became immense. The court ultimately sided with the London Temple, granting an injunction against Crowley and Mathers, they had lost. The original hermetic order of the Golden Dawn, the single most influential magical society of the modern era,

was effectively now dead. The schism complete. That is so crazy, man. The London Temple, though it had won was shattered by the infighting and would soon splinter and competing factions Mather's authority was already broken and Alistair Crowley he was now a magical outcast in less than two years he had acted as the catalyst that brought

the entire structure crashing down he attacked and be thrown to God literally he walks into this place masters it all and then is playing the side game with Mathers and it's just like just he's like if I can't say this whole shit all comes down. I'm bringing it all down. It's insane. It's fully psycho. He was expelled from the

London group and had burned his bridges with the only master he'd ever respected. So he was now alone without a teacher, without an order, but he was also free. He had mastered their system, seeing its limitations, and then helped to destroy it. Now it was time to forge his own path. In the spring of 1900, he was a man reborn. At 25, he was fully, like being the fully initiated adept, but he did not just sit in London and gloat after all was done. He did what he always did when faced with a new chapter. He went to the mountains. Gotta go.

The London order's gone. He just went for a climb, headed out, expedition. Love to see it. So he met up with his old climbing mentor, Oscar Eckenstein, and together they traveled to Mexico. This trip served a dual purpose. First, yeah, off to Mexico. First, it was a return to the forge.

He needed to recalibrate, get away from the political squabble. of London and back to the brutal, honest reality of a rock face. He and Eckinstein made a series of daring climbs, summiting several of Mexico's volcanoes. It was a way of kind of re-centering himself in the discipline of pure will.

Second and more importantly, though, Mexico became his first laboratory as an independent magician. Freedom from the rigid curriculum of the Golden Dawn, he began to experiment. He started a serious practical exploration of Inoccian magic. This is a complex and

famously dangerous system of angelic communication discovered by the Elizabethan Magus, Dr. John D. And to put it kind of simply, an Anecumagic is like the high voltage, deep end of the Western magical pool. The Golden Dawn had access to it, but they were very cautious. Crowley now off the leash decided to dive in head first. Fuck it. It was during this period of intense self-directed work that he solidified the plan for his great work. The seat had been planted by his former master Mathers, who had been translating a 15th century German manuscript called the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abrilin the Mage. And this was not just a grim war of spells either. This was a book that laid out a single massive and incredibly arduous ritual

designed to achieve the ultimate goal of all Western magic, the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Confused? No, it almost seems like the plot to Final Fantasy tactics is this point. I'm there. I just, it's just, at this point, I've dissociated from it being reality, right? Oh, for sure. Yeah, now, now we're just in, now we're just in treehouse games territory. Yeah, the minute you gave me an epic battle.

When the neighbors from the next neighborhood over came over and they had a neighborhood war. Yeah. The only thing missing was them using Nerf. Yeah. Other than that, it's, oh. Vampire, black. It's on my eyes. I know it.

To understand what Carly did next, you have to understand the Holy Guardian Angel or HGA, for short. This isn't an angel in the Christian sense with wings in a halo. It is essentially your own, it is essentially your own higher self, your divine genius, the silent, perfect inner divinity that is your true identity. Some call it like in more modern times like the Christ consciousness or the source

or whatever you want to call it. According to the Abra-Lean text, every person has one, but our mundane consciousness is too cluttered with noise and desire to hear its voice. The goal of the Abralene operation is to purify your entire being so completely that you can finally meet and communicate directly with this inner God. It is in effect the attainment of personal enlightenment. That's really what he's talking about here. Sure. Just in like the goofiest way imaginable. Yes, the dorkiest magical way possible instead of talking about like fucking.

This guy would have been a great DM. Yes, yes. And insufferable because he'd be, he'd be great to start. But then he'd be a rules lawyer to him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then he'd have his own Deiasex Machina character that would have to keep coming in and like saving the day. So. That kind of happens in this story several times, I would say.

Yeah, yeah. It kind of does. But the Aberlin process is a brutal ordeal. The ritual requires the magician to completely withdraw from the world. six months. They have to live in a specially prepared house with a terrace for invocations in a private temple space. And for six, those six months are spent in progressively more intense periods of prayer, purification, and meditation. It's a general, it is a full-time job of spiritual devotion, which is why somebody who's rich as fuck, who has all the time in the world

on their hands can do it. Question. Is this a known thing? Or is this what he says? said he had to do. Oh, this is a known thing. Like, this is a thing that, like, is a thing. Like, if you're asking if he made this up, he didn't make this up. Like, this, like, there's, there's, there's months, does it say this is what you need to do? Yes.

All right. I'm always a little. When he's like, in my mind, oh, yeah, no, I need six months by myself. Oh, no, for sure. Well, okay. So here's the thing. Like, well, we're talking about what it requires, like, obviously, whether he did actually go for six months.

I don't know. I would say it's not impossible, though, living and growing up in the house that he did. That was like devoid of everything and not allowed to intermingle with the world. I could see somebody like him having the ability to do that. So, yeah, they have to live in this specially prepared house, progressively more intense prayer, purification, meditation, and only at the end of this grueling process. And only if you're successful, because there's no guarantee of being successful, does the holy guardian angel appear?

And then comes part two. After that communion, the magician is required to summon the chief demons of hell and bind them, proving that his new, enlightened will is now master of both the divine and the infernal realms. Just like King Solomon. Yeah, man. For Crowley, this was it. This was the master key. This was the operation that would take him beyond the theoretical grades of the golden dawn and into the state of true personal cosmic consciousness.

He had decided, even before the schism, that he would undertake to see. men's task, and he knew he needed the, and he knew he needed the perfect place to do it. And he found it. On the southeastern shore of the mysterious Loch Ness in Scotland, he purchased a remote one-story manor called Bolskine Manor. This house was perfect for what he wanted. It was isolated, surrounded by hills, and the dark deep waters of the lock. It was oriented in the direction of the Aberlein Grim War required, and it had a history steeped in local legend and spoof folk lore. The name Bole or Bullskin itself

it means the place of the dangerous pass. Local legend claimed the house was built on the scorched earth of an ancient church that had been burned to the ground with his entire congregation trapped inside. Of course. A local wizard was supposedly also beheaded there.

For Crowley, local wizard. Yeah. Who knows? Just fucking for Crowley, for Crowley, the dark brooding atmosphere wasn't a drawback. It was an asset. What? The addition of local wizard is really funny. Is that me? Am I not?

There were local wizards that did shit for towns back in the day. Like that was the way that it exists. Fair enough. The local wizard is a rough time for that guy. Just from the corner of the laundromat. Right, exactly. For Crowley, the dark brooding atmosphere wasn't just a drawback. It was part of the whole stick.

And it was a place of power far from the distractions of the world. And now with the golden dawn in his rearview mirror, Bolskin was no longer just a private temple. It was his fortress of solitude. He returned from his travels in Mexico and took up residence as the Laird, the Laird of Berkskin. That's how you

say it, I'm pretty sure. I'm just going to... So you know, I say, like, how do you say that? Laird of Boleskine, Boleskine. And then he didn't just move in. He inhabited the role with a theatrical gusto that we kind of expect from head at this point. On his own terms, he designed and registered his own personal tartan, the Tartan of

McGregor and Bullskin, a nod to his now embattled former chief Mathers. He took up the gentlemanly pursuits of hunting and fishing, but did so with the obsessive focus of a magician, seeing them as an exercise and discipline. He quickly became a bizarre and unsettling presence for the famously tack to turn locals in the nearby village of Foyers, and they saw a wealthy eccentric Englishman with strange visitors and even stranger habits, and a mythology quickly began to go around him. from the locals. But the layered lifestyle was just the external performance. The true work was happening inside. He immediately began converting Bullskin into a dedicated magical temple,

meticulously following the instructions laid out in the Abilene book. He constructed an oratory, the main temple space with a door opening to the north. The book required a terrace covered in fine river sand where the spirits would be summoned to appear. Crowley built one overlooking the vast, dark, and famously deep waters of Loch Ness. And with the physical space prepared, he began the operation itself. And it's crucial to understand what a monumental act of self-discipline this was, especially for a man like Crowley. The Abbelene workings demand a life of almost monastic austerity.

He was required to be celibate. He had to follow specific dietary laws. He was to have no business or social dealings that weren't absolutely necessary. His days were structured by a series of escalating prayers and invocations. from sunrise to sunset. It was a complete and total withdrawal from the world, a six-month-long walking meditation designed to purify the soul

until it was a perfect mirror, ready to reflect the light of its own inner divinity. And for a time, Crowley was a model of devotion, throwing himself into the grueling schedule with the same iron will he'd applied to climbing mountains. But as the operation progressed, the house started to get weird. According to Crowley, the magical forces he was summoning

were so powerful that they began to, quote, unquote, slop over from the controlled environment of the temple into the surrounding world. The dark reputation of Bullskin began to earn its keep. This is where the legend of Crowley at Bullskin truly kind of takes off with a series of anecdotes that are impossible to verify, but essential to the myth. He claimed the spirits he was invoking were notoriously difficult to banish and they started causing chaos. A local workman he employed suddenly went mad his lodgekeeper a lifelong uh lifelong uh lifelong lodgekeeper fell into a mysterious violent delirium the most famous story involves a local butcher crowley irritated with the man for sending him the wrong cut of meat supposedly scribbled a few demonic names from the abberlin

text in the back of the bill before sending it back the butcher upon receiving it accidentally severed his own femoral artery with a cleaver and bled to death whoa uh crowley far from being horrified by these events, took a perverse pride in them. He saw them as objective proof that his magic was real and immensely powerful, that he was unleashing forces that were warping the very fabric of reality around his remote Scottish estate. And Alex, you're going to read this quote from Crowley about the Aberleam workings themselves. The magical forces which I had called into action are still flowing and will continue

to do so for all I know to the contrary. The spirits which I had called up got out of hand. One of the keepers went mad and tried to kill me. The workmen on the estate all threw up their jobs. And I, who was responsible for all this? What of me? Well, I am Alistair Crowley. I mean, in that's a moment where I'm like, you're insufferable.

You're insufferable. But then, just as he was reaching the most intense phases of this epic six-month ordeal, he stopped. He abandoned the great work. The reason was a pull from his old life. A pair of con artists, a husband and wife team, known as the Horos, had emerged in Paris claiming to be the true leaders of the Rosicrucian order, and using materials they had likely stolen or copied from McGregor Mathers, Mathers embroiled at a legal and magical battle

to expose them. He was now in a panic. He saw the Horos, not just as charlatans, but as powerful black magicians who were attacking him on the astral plane, sending vampires and other demonic entities. He used to assault him and his wife. And I don't know why vampires are the go-to, like... Sentousal. Like, you know, the spiritual vampire, the ones that, like, suck your spirit.

Yeah, yeah, you're doing all right. Psychic vampires. It's just not something I can shoot out of my hands. No, they summon them in the astral plane. Yeah, it's just vampires, like, it's just so funny. So in Mather's desperation, he summoned his most powerful and loyal student to Paris to help him fight this new war. Crowley was faced with a choice.

Stay in isolation at Bullskin and complete the most important spiritual quest of his life or return to the world of intrigue and magical combat to aid the masterpiece. Like Luke Skywalker, dude. It is like Luke Skywalker, dude. Oh, what is he going to do? In a decision he later would come to regret, he chose the latter. He packed his bags, left Bullskin and went to Paris, just like Luke Skywalker did. Remember when Luke was funny, Vader?

He threw a vampire out of that shit was fire. Yeah. There was a vampire there for sure. Yeah, for sure. He got his hand cut off and he looked up at him and just was like, vampire! And that was it. He just shot vampire. I'd never be a vampire like you.

That was just a clone of the vampire, but. Okay, you know, we never know. According to a cult theory, uh, and certainly according to Crowley's own personal mythology, this was a catastrophic mistake. He had spent months invoking the most powerful. powerful forces of the spirit world, including the chief demons of hell, and the entire point of the six months, month process was to first achieve communion with the holy guardian angel and then armed with that divine authority, confronted master those demonic forces by abandoning the operation halfway through, he effectively kicked down the door to hell and just was like, man, fuck it, and walked away, leaving it swinging wide open. He had, in magical terms, made a huge mess.

The legend goes that the unbalanced forces he had unleashed remained tied to him. and Tobolskine house itself for years to come, causing chaos and tragedy wherever they touched. He had knocked on the door of God, but had walked away before getting an answer, leaving a host of demons waiting at the foyer. Crowley arrived in Paris and threw himself into the fray. The conflict was fought on two fronts.

In the mundane world, in messy legal battles, probably the most real version of the fight, with Mather suing the horrors to expose them as fraud, and in the magical world, it was in their minds, a life and death struggle. Crowley and Mathers would spend their nights performing elaborate banishing rituals, constructing talismans for protection,

and launching their own currents of will back up the enemies, which I imagine included vampires. This is the most Professor X should I've ever heard, where this is like, you hold your hand out, and it's like, I'm battling you right now. I must return and help my friends.

No! Gene. Gene. Scott No Eric what my head what are you doing

fucking strange get out of my head Arnold well Alistair no get out of my head All mutant kind Alistair

Get out of my head Charles Alistair is the Maglito but there is no Professor X to go against him man not yet

anyway Jack Parsons no Jack Farson's just closer to like Gambit dude blew himself up yeah straight up um

remember this that's what he said this shit all the psychic night battles were strange and paranoid I imagine they must have been an exhilarating time for these guys it must have been so much fun

I would have loved doing a part of this this is like this is like four nights a week D&D is what this is like great but also like doing four nights a week D&D and also then also living

with one of your players or your DM This close proximity to his old master began to reveal cracks in their relationship. While the legal case was eventually won, the horrors were exposed to the frauds that they were and their temple collapsed. But the victory was hollow because in the process, Crowley's idol had crumbled. He had come to Paris to serve the magical genius he revered, and he left seeing Mathers as a flawed, arrogant, and deeply paranoid man. The final break was just a swift one at the end. The exact details are disputed.

But the core of the story is that Mathers, in a fit of paranoia, turned on his most loyal student. He accused Crowley of being a secret agent for the secret chiefs, sent to usurp his own divine authority. And he claimed Crowley was also a black magician trying to seize control of the order for himself. The master's trust had curdled into suspicion, and for Crowley, this was the ultimate betrayal. He had abandoned the most important spiritual quest of his life at the time to help out. the help him out because of the loyalty to this man only to then be accused of treachery have you ever friendship have you ever seen that documentary about the renaissance fair dude this feels just like that god dude that documentary sucked too by the way it is so boring what but he kind of does

uh i thought it was gonna be more about like the actual fair and stuff and it was instead it was more about his weird need to find love before he died yeah yeah and a guy who's really fucking good selling snacks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very good at selling snacks. Yeah, with this final bit, the friendship was over in a dramatic confrontation. Crowley for, Crowley then formally renounced his allegiance, his last tide of the Golden Dawn severed, and now he was fully on his own. And a man with no master, no order, and a fortune to burn does not stay in one place for long. The next couple of years were a whirlwind of relentless travel, very much a kind of find yourself journey for a man who already believed he was a god he wandered he climbed he wrote and then in the summer of

1903 he did something completely insane he got married like normal style yeah the woman was rose kelly the sister of his friend the painter gerald kelly yeah of course he wasn't going to meet again no he's not going to meet anybody outside of his right small friendship circle rose was a young widow and her family was pressuring her into an arranged marriage that she dreaded. Crowley, hearing of her plight, decided he'd intervene. But he didn't just offer advice. In a move of pure theatrical willfulness, he proposed to her himself. There was no romance, there was no courtship.

As Crowley tells it, he married her almost as a strategic move. An act of chivalry to save her from an unhappy fate. It was an act of his will, a demonstration that he could bend reality to his desires, Rose of seeing a way out, accepted. They were married within days, and it was a marriage of convenience between two virtual strangers,

which was a bizarrely pragmatic arrangement that would accidentally lead to the birth of a new religion. Their honeymoon was an extended tour of the world. One of their first major stops was Cylon, which is modern day Sri Lanka. And there, by a remarkable coincidence, Crowley was reunited with his first

great magical teacher, Alan Bennett, the guy he took in who was like poor and just kind of hung out in his apartment. Bennett, his health was still failing, had gone east and Ben ordained a Buddhist monk because he was also the first Western Buddhist that kind of announced himself as such. Crowley decided to stay. For several months, he put a ceremonial magic aside and under Bennett's expert guidance, he went through and put himself through the brutal discipline of yoga and Buddhist meditation. He learned to control his breath, to silence his thoughts, and to push his consciousness into states he had never experienced before.

He was adding the profound mind mastery techniques of the East to his already formidable arsenal of Western magic. And after their time there, Rose and Alistair resumed their travels. By early 1904, the newly married, yoga-trained, masterless magician, and his young wife found themselves in Cairo, Egypt. He believed he was in control of his destiny, planning his next adventure. He had no idea he'd been led there, that he was about to become. a scribe, and that the entire purpose of his life was about to be revealed to him in a hotel room by the Nile. Once settled in their Cairo apartment, Crowley was eager to get back to his own work, and to ease back into it, he decided to perform a relatively simple ritual. He told Rose

he would perform an invocation to, quote, show her the silts. These were elemental air spirits. For him, this was a fairly basic piece of magic, a kind of parlor trick to impress the new wife, who up to this point, had shown zero interest or aptitude for any of the occult at all. He set up a makeshift temple and began, but something unexpected happened. The sylphs never showed up. Instead, his wife, Rose, began to act very strangely. She seemed to slip into a trance, a state of consciousness completely alien to her normal, rather social personality.

And she began to repeat a single cryptic phrase, over. and over again. They are waiting for you. Crowley, I guess to put it mildly, was annoyed. He saw this as a hysterical fit. Maybe his wife, bored of being ignored while he chanted in a corner, was just trying to get his attention by mimicking what she thought a magical experience should look like. He ignored her, but she was insistent.

He is waiting for you. She'd correct. And the being who was waiting was a specific singular key. Crowley, the master magician, the adept who had battled. Yates and Mathers was not about to be taken in by what he assumed was his wife's fantasy. So he decided to call her bluff. He began to grill her with a series of technical, Kabbalistic questions. Questions a novice with no training could ever possibly know the answer to.

He was treating her like a potentially hostile spirit that needed to be identified and dismissed. And here's his own account of the skeptical interrogation from his later work, the equinox of the gods. It's not one of the main sources I've used for this, but one of the many. I've been reading about this man for fucking years. Jesse, this is for you. I therefore questioned her closely. Although she knew little or nothing of my magical pursuits, she answered with perfect accuracy.

I asked her to describe the being. She said, He has a hawk's head. I recognize the guard of horse. I continued my cross-examination. I asked for proof. She said, The proof is here.

He is telling me that you have offended him. You have to invoke him and supplicate his pardon. I asked, what have I done? She answered. You are trying to work with the sylphs. And he is a god, a much higher being. A god with a hawk's head, horse, Rose, who knew nothing of the Egyptian pantheon beyond what a tourist might see,

had identified a specific form of the god. and she had correctly identified that trying to conjure elemental spirits in the presence of a god was a grave, magical foe pa. Crowley's skepticism was shaken. This was not a lucky guess. His wife was now an unwilling mouthpiece for something. Over the next few days, the messages continued through Rose. The identity, Horace, demanded that Crowley perform a specific invocation to him. Crowley now intrigued and a little unnerved, complied. On March 20th, he performed the ritual. During the ceremony, he claimed to feel a powerful electric presence, a force of immense power, and intelligence. He, according to him, had made contact.

But the entity wanted more. A few days later, Rose again in a trance gave him a new instruction. He wants to show you his image. She told Crowley to take her to the Baulak Museum, a nearby collection of Egyptian antiquities, and Crowley, now following the threat of this mystery, agreed. They went to the museum. He let Rose lead the way, assuming she'd take him. to one of the grand famous statues of Horus, but instead she walked him straight past all of them

through several galleries, moving with a strange dreamlike purpose. She finally stopped dead in front of a small painted wooden funeral stelle from the 26th dynasty. It was a fairly minor artifact, one most tourists would barely glance at. The stelle depicted a priest, a man named Ankhavna Konsu, giving an offering to the hawk-headed god Rahur Kui. Rahu Kruit, I think, a specific and powerful form of Horace. This was the image the entity wanted him to see. Crowley was impressed by the specificity, but he still needed one final, undeniable sign. He was a man who believed in signs and symbols, in cosmic coincidences that revealed the hidden machinery of the universe.

He glanced the small inventory card on the display case to see the museum's exit number for his particular stelle. The number was what else, but 666. The Great Beasts number. One that it was given early when he was but a child. This was the moment that shattered him. The lightning bolt for Alastair Crowley, the boy who had been called the beast by his mother, the man who had adopted 666 as his own personal number, the odds of this specific artifact, revealed by a spirit through his untrained wife,

bearing this exact number was so astronomically impossible, it could only be one thing. A direct, undeniable, and terrifying message from the, gods. This was not a coincidence. This was a confirmation. He dubbed the artifact the stelle of revealing. Very D&D name, by the way. Yeah. The stelle of revealing. Jesse, you look skeptical. I mean, he's thinking about how similar this story sounds to a famous story that I told on the show called the Greenstone. Yeah, that's exactly what he's thinking of. Just like a week, maybe two weeks ago was watching this video on

YouTube about are Laboobo's evil? And the girl who's doing the video you know besides full on grifting one of the things that came across was she's like Labuboos are demonic because they are associated with

Pizzu which is just not a thing. They just sound similar. And the reason why Pizzuzu is demonic is because in an episode of the Simpsons they gave Maggie a Zuzu like a Labubu, and so that's, that's, that's connected. And then Pizzuzu, because Pizzuzzi was the demon god of the wind, that's demon, completely ignoring that Mesopotamian folklore is different from what, but anyway, then, of course, she goes, the guy who made Labuboos was inspired by Norse mythology.

And as you know, Norse gods are false gods, thus, Labubuos are demons. And it was this huge, like, mish, mash of all ideologies. gods are false gods that's what she said what the fuck superstition is that so that's awesome i love that but it's like okay so taking every all that of like it's north so it's evil it was in the simpsons and they said it was evil it you know demons uh demon is in the name of the demon god of the wind so that's evil right all these different things and like pezuzu in modern culture is just because the exorcist right like that's right it was just this like mismatch and that's the same thing here

when I hear like they went to Egypt and there he saw 666 which of course we all know is the beast an entirely different religion that played no role in this religion whatsoever but as you know they're all connected because the baddies love to hang out together some sort of legion of doom villainy intent of like anti-establishment religion of like well you know it's actually they're all together and so you can put them all in one thing it just seems hilariously perfectly fitting like yes of course the egyptians knew six six this was the was exactly correct well i think that's most that that that specific thing is supposed to be like a sign from the gods that it is for him to him it's like giving him his name but there's no way to give his name so they give six six six i don't

if it's like specifically because it's like the devil it's more like oh he'll know what that means that was their plan yes because that's how he always takes on he's Cook on six. So goofy. That's how he tells it. I completely understand how he tells it. But it's one of those things where it's like, he could have had this revelation anywhere. The fact that this Egyptian is what makes it so interesting.

But it also falls into something we talk about on the show all the time, which is like, it's old and from a different culture. So it's magical to better. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. For him, for him, his skepticism was vaporized in this moment. He was now a true believer, a humble servant of the force that had just spectacularly to him proven its existence.

So, he went back to his apartment and waited for instructions. And they came. As before, for a rose. She told him that a messenger from the entity would come. He was to enter his temple room on three specific consecutive days, April 8th, 9th, and 10th, 1904. On each day, he was to be ready at noon precisely. A disembodied voice would then speak to him for exactly. one hour. His job was not to question, not to analyze, not to argue. His job was to be a scribe,

to write down everything he heard. The grand, arrogant, world-conquering magician was now reduced to the role of a secretary for a god. All his years of training, all his battles, all his explanations and explorations had led to this. And on the morning of April 8th, he prepared his temple, set out his pen and paper, and as the clock ticked towards midday, he sat down at his desk, waiting in the hot, silent Cairo air. At precisely noon, it began. It wasn't a voice in his head, not a spiritual impression. He would be adamant about this for the rest of his life, that it was a voice, a real, physical sounding voice that seemed to come from over his left shoulder. He described it as having a deep timber, musical, and expressive, as if a tall, dark man was standing just behind him

speaking clearly and calmly in English. Crowley never looked. He simply lived, listened and he wrote he later gave a name to the being he believed he was speaking to AWAS I'm gonna just copy pasted for you so that's the name that's the name that I that I recognize isn't that also from Pandora not Pandora what is it called that movie the movie about the blue people what are oh avatar yeah yeah yeah well yeah well yeah my ay wah that kind of thing is now yeah but this is different I know it's different all right I know it's different for exactly one hour from noon to 1 p.m. the voice dictated Crowley's hand flew across

the page, trying to keep up. He was not an author. He was a conduit in this moment. At precisely 1 p.m., the voice stopped. The next April 9th, the same thing happened, and again on the third day and final day, April 10th. Three days, three hours, one book. When it was over, Crowley was left with a 65-page handwritten manuscript. He would come to call it the Liber Alvelegis, Latin for the book of the law. The book was divided into three short chapters, each one dictated by a different divine entity, each with its own unique voice and message. The first chapter was delivered by Newitt, the Egyptian goddess of the infinite heavens, the queen of the stars.

Her voice is cosmic, poetic, and overwhelmingly loving. It's a chapter of boundless expansion and joy, a radical departure from the sin-obsessed religion of Crowley's youth. It's in a message of ecstatic pantheism declaring that the universe is not a fallen place of suffering, but a divine playground for celestial beings. It contains what is perhaps a most beautiful and concise summary of her philosophy, which Jesse, it's one sentence, but I want you to read it. I think it's beautiful.

Every man and every woman is a star. And that is that new it. The second chapter was dictated by being named Hadit. If Newit is the infinite circumference of the cosmos, Hadith is the infinitely small. Secret to the secret point at the center of every individual consciousness. He's like the hidden flame in the heart, kind of the spark of the soul, the core of every star. His voice is fiery, aggressive.

It's a celebration of life in motion and of the fierce, secret will to exist amongst all of us. It's a chapter that rails against old ideas of pity and compassion for the week, urging the individual to pursue their own unique path with the explosive force of an expanding star. The third and final chapter was delivered by Rahor Kuit, the hawk-headed god, of war and vengeance, the very same deity Crowley had seen on the seal of revealing. He is the crowned and conquered child, the product of Neweets' infinite space and Hadid's secret fire, and his voice is harsh, commanding, and prophetic. It is in this chapter that the book announces the new dawn of the new aeon, a new

two thousand-year cycle for humanity called the Aeon of Horace. This new age, the voice declared, would be one of war, fire, and the destruction of the old, dying religions like Christianity. It would be an age of individualism, of self-realization, and of godhood achieved by man. And it is in this final forceful chapter that the book delivers its central ethical principle,

the law that was to govern this entire new age. And Alex, I think it's only appropriate you read this one line from this book. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Now this is, without a doubt, the most famous and most misunderstood phrase Crowley ever transcribed. It is not a call to hedonistic anarchy like many think. It is not a

license to simply do whatever you want. In the context of the book, Wilt is synonymous with one's true will. Your unique divine purpose in the cosmos, the true orbit of your soulful star, so to speak. The law means that your one and only duty in life is to discover that true purpose and to execute it and to do nothing else. It's like whatever it takes. But to fulfill your purpose. Don't do anything. Do what thou wilt means do what thou higher self wishes.

The law means that your one and only duty in life is to discover that true purpose, execute it, do nothing else. And at 1 p.m. and April 10th, the voice of AWAS fell silent for the last time. Crowley was left with the manuscript, a document that claimed to be nothing less than a new holy book for the next two millennia with him as its unwilling prophet. So, what was his reaction to this monumental world altering revelation? He was actually terrified. He was horrified by the book. He didn't understand its cryptic poetic language.

He was appalled by its violent, elitist, and seemingly immoral philosophy. The sheer crushing weight of the responsibility it placed on him was too much for him to bear. This wasn't the arcane, but respectable magic of the golden dawn. this was something else entirely, a wild, dangerous, and revolutionary new spirituality that threatened overturned the entire world. He was not ready to be its prophet. So he did what many have done when faced with the divine calling they don't want. He refused the call. He took the 65-page manuscript, the supposed key to a new aeon for humanity, and he put it away. For years, he would ignore its instructions, try to forget the voice he had heard in that Cairo hotel room, and attempt to go on with

his life as if it never happened he had received the word he had he had been given the law and in his final and in his and in his first official act as the prophet of the new aeon it was to turn his back on it all the great work of his life had just been handed to him and he wanted absolutely nothing to do with it and that is where we'll pick back up next week with alister crowley part two gentlemen. The book of the law, baby. Oh, yeah. I hope you all enjoyed.

That felt so fucking good. I've been wanting to do this for so long. I had such a good time with this. I can't wait for episode two. I'm already basically done with the script for episode two. Hell. Ready to go. We're off to do a minisota over at patreon.com

slash illuminati pod. Everybody, thank you guys so much for supporting us. Make sure you follow us wherever you are. Leave us a five-star review wherever you are. And head over to the Yeti.com slash Chulminati to buy some stickers. We appreciate to we love you. Goodbye.

Hi. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Trulamati podcast. As always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, joined by the... I don't know who they are. There's two... What? Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer.

No. Neo and Trinity. I don't understand, and I probably never will. Let me just tell you right now that there's two... Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield. I'm telling you, I think he literally just looked up. Famous Dioch and Chich and Chaw. And he's been going through the list ever since.

I'm trying to dig deep. Which one of you is Dick Powell? Me? Your name's Jesse Cox. I want to lose my name. I want my masterpiece I want to look at me I want my master

I want to look at I want to look at I want to look at Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Trulminati podcast. As always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, joined by Alex and Jesse. Like a shooting star across the sky that's actually a UFO. Hi there, my name is Annie Elise,

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