Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 317: Aleister Crowley Part 2 - How To Lose a Holy War

Episode Date: September 28, 2025

Mike, Jesse and Alex jump head first into the next chapter of Crowleys life, and see the dark underbelly of Crowley... HelloFresh - http://www.hellfresh.com/chill10fm Code: chill10fm 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

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chuluminati podcast, episode 317. As always, I'm one of your hosts, Mike Martin, joined by my two non-raptured friends, Jesse. and Alex we're still here boys didn't get raptured I'm so sorry did you mistake me for possibly queer I don't understand how the Bible works help me I must I must stress

I know we did that episode a while back about like a culty things and that whole when something doesn't come true like a prophecy how people adjust watching it happen in real time was the greatest thing I've ever seen I went to rapture TikTok to go see all the people who had posted I'm going to be raptured

And I went to go see, and it roughly breaks down to this. Not in, oh, wow, I was wrong. Man, that sucks. All of them were roughly, how dare you make fun of me for my beliefs. Would you rather believe in God and not get raptured or mock me and not believe in God? And then when you had to stand before the Lord be punished. And I was like, you just flip that back on everyone. That's crazy.

That's how you do it, dude. That's how you do it. I think people didn't get raptured. They just weren't raptured away. I was middle of getting raptured. No, no, Mathis.

There you were. God came to me in a dream. God came to me in a vision. No, I was middle of the sky, dude. I was naked and God came to me and he told me what's up. He said, I won't rapture anyone until they release the Epstein files. He said that for me.

Dude, that's big of him to take a stance like that. That's crazy. Oh, then I probably shouldn't have just like jerked off middle of rapture to make him send me back down so I could finish playing my name. He told me that was real awkward. He was like you. hang out with this guy and I was like like hang out's a relative term legally bound to be there yes

we spend time together often I was like I don't even know that guy I don't even know I don't trust me God I don't trust me God trust me God I don't he's like cool cool anyway release the Epstein files that's right that's what he said release Epstein files release the Epstein files welcome back to Alistair Crowley gentlemen how are you Alistair Crowley would be for the Epstein files being released 100% you would love is if a bunch of people listen to this episode right now. Headed over to patreon.com slash. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He loves it when people support the arts. And what is this, but the art of confidence? Is that right? You know, kind of. Not necessarily wrong. You can say that,

that Alistair Crowley was a master of the art of confidence. He really was in a way. I would absolutely say that is not, not even in a way. He just was. He just, he was the master of his own confidence. Unfortunately,

he was literally a confidence artist. He really, Yes, despite the negative connotations that may connote. Well, we'll see what that's about today and how negative his life ends up getting for a while. And it gets negative pretty bad for a while. Negative pretty bad for a while. Yeah, it really does. But I want everybody to, before we start this episode, you know, this is like, do, I want you to listen to this episode like Crowley intended.

Build with weed or whatever your particular substances, that legal wherever you are. finished um and uh i told you boys this over text but there was a brief moment while i had uh decided to do drug of a particular choice um i drove to a state where it was legal for sure to do it and when i did it uh i had a brief moment where i was like i'm alister crowley reincarnated and just want you to know you should you know start worshipping me now because i'm all right i'll pass how did it feel him how did it feel it was it was a brief it was like two seconds where I was like, oh my God. And then after that, it was hilarious. Question. What was this? What, what do you mean? What was this? You said you did a thing.

Oh, a drug. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I did mushrooms. Okay. All right. So you weren't, were you like, traveling through reality. Did you what happened to you? I didn't crack through reality. I had a moment where I was like, I wonder if I can like contact Crowley because I told you, like, I wonder if I'll reach him. And this is true. Last time this happened to you, you were like, I saw an old. friend and he gave me advice. Yes, it was very bizarre. And this time, that's kind of the vibe that I would love. I would love a good, like, talk to an old friend.

I don't know that I'd be chill with like, yeah, so Crowley had nothing better to do except come and talk to me. Yeah. So, like, no, the no voices like showed up. Crowley didn't show up and talk to me. I tried, I was like, I wonder if. And I had a moment of like, no, I am Alistair Crowley reincarnated. And then, then it was really funny after that.

there was no voice I debated something that told me that the answers to the questions I have the human mind is not built to comprehend or understand and that no matter how many times I ask I will never truly understand it now you know that it was very bizarre probably high strangeness but stories for another time it was rad it is super rad hell yeah is that a reference I'm not getting because I feel like it might be no it's just a word that means like I never know I I never know if you're like using the word rad and then it's like a reference also. No, this isn't, this is in high school. We're not trying to get you.

Waking up and realizing that I'm Alistair Crowley, I think would be would feel rad. So I was just wondering. It was sick. It was a sick feeling for two seconds. And then I, then I found it hilarious that I even had that feeling at all. Like it washed away very fast. But that's not what today's about. Today's about the actual Alistair Crowley while he lived in the early 1900s, not as a

reincarnated middle aged white man doing a podcast. about him. I bet you there's a lot of those out there if you ask them. I think there probably are. So last we left off, our boy, Alistair Crowley had actually gone from being our boy. He's our boy,

dude, from being a kid stuck in like a super Christian home to basically speed running his way to the top of the magical world. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. He started calling himself the great beast because of his mom, terrorized his teachers, and then helped light the fuse that blew up the biggest magical club in Europe

the hermetic order of the golden dawn all in about a three year span when he got initiated to when he like destroyed them. For those who don't remember, this man had a, had a professor X style fight with a bunch of other order members and it might be the greatest description I've ever heard of anything in the

history of mankind. Because you know it was nerdy as hell. It probably was like, it probably would have been a great place for Triumph, the insult dog to be at. Oh my God. It would have been a forest for that. The people standing around counter spelling while him and the the head of the household of wrestling on the ground and posing their will upon each other.

You just know they were like, no, oh, you didn't cast that. No, oh, no. Banks shields. I, I larked for like many years. And I don't even think that would have been as dorky as how this would have looked. No, no, no, you didn't pronounce it correctly. You didn't pronounce it correctly. Technically, you didn't pronounce it.

It's not vampire. I am referred to the rules. Remember, he did attack somebody apparently in the astral plane with a vampire. Oh, yeah. Right, right, right, right, right. That's just one guy who wanted to be included. That guy was in the corner, and he was like, oh, there was a vampire on me.

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he ended up in Cairo in 1904. And this is where the story kind of takes the hard left turn off of the weird, main magical road we've been on and go screaming into the desert of channeled gods. Thanks to a series of what he saw as totally impossible nudges from his wife Rose proudly gets put on the, on the like the psychic phone with something, a voice, a disembodied intelligence, spooky ghost, I don't know, whatever the fuck you want to call it, that named itself AWAS, A-I-W-A-S. And for three straight days, one hour each day, Crowley just sat there and wrote down what this thing dictated to him.

And the result was a short, super weird and kind of just hard to understand document called the Book of the Law. Now, I've read the book of law, 60 some odd pages. It's really short. And it's not even like paragraphs. It's like a bullet point list through the whole thing. It's very bizarre. I'm going to read excerpts of it in a moment here.

between this episode or next if you want to read it. It's like 100% literal what he's talking, what he's saying? He's saying like literally this is what's happening here. It's not like where we're kind of like, oh, I was in a mind state where you could say that was happening. Right.

He doesn't believe. Yeah, yeah. This is auto writing. He didn't work on it. He didn't go back and make it nice. Correct. If you're familiar with the phenomenon of auto writing, that is this kind of like what's happening here.

The book claimed to be the new holy text for the next phase of humanity. And Crowley, the beast himself, and it was its chosen profit for some reason, and this should have been the ultimate win for him, the culmination of his entire life's work up to this point. Except he was, at least seemingly terrified by the book. He looked at this thing that he'd written, this supposed divine revelation, and wanted nothing to do with it.

He was so freaked out by its message and the sheer weight of what he was supposed to do with it, that he took the manuscript. script, shoved it into a drawer, and then just tried to pretend the whole damn thing didn't happen for a long time. So, so is there, is there a lot of like, does that, is that consistent with a lot of accounts that he had this book that he wrote that disturbed him? Or is that like suddenly when he published the book, he had this story about a few years ago, this disturbed me? So we do have some accounts. This book is older than, but we'll get into it. as we go through the story.

I don't want to jump ahead too far. We are going to kind of get into like what the book, what he did with it and all that stuff. So the next chapter is kind of like what happens when this guy basically supposedly channels these weird gods and then ghosts the god. So on April 10th, 1904, the spooky voice of AWAS clicks off. And Crowley's just sitting there in the Cairo apartment with a 65 page manuscript that's supposed to reboot human civilization.

his first reaction like I said it wasn't pride or excitement just like hell no oh hell no I'm not not dealing with this shit yeah and he starts actually reading what he wrote down and he said the dread of it just gets worse the first chapter supposedly spoken

by a goddess name Newit is all this beautiful kind of cosmic poetry this were like the line that I had Jesse read last time every man and every woman as a star came from very kind of woodstock hippies vibe but then the tone of shit Yeah, kind of feels cute almost.

Very, very much so. But then the tone shifts pretty hard. The next two chapters are kind of like this elitist, not so uncommonly violent, immoral philosophy that's laid out. And you got to remember, this is a dude who, for all his rebellion, he's still a product of Victorian England of the time. He was still steeped in the ethics of Western civilization. He's still super sexist and racist. Yeah, of course, you know, now the document, I'm working from other cultures. Yes, very, you know, the book of law that I'm about to read from includes a long explanation of the book's ideas and it presents itself as if it's from the book itself.

Even like, I got confused when I started reading this because at the very beginning, there's paragraphs and I thought this was also like AWAS translation. It isn't. The first like few pages actually is not from the original cryptic, goes. dictated text, it's from Crowley's own commentary that he wrote years later, uh, kind of like his own commentary on what like, like, if he was like to do a director's cut commentary on a movie or something. Like that's what the opening of the book is. Sure. So I'm going to read you in his own words, Crowley trying to make sense of this new world order. It's him trying to explain this book before you read the book. And I'm just going to read this next. And it also give you like a really

good idea of the tone and how Crowley writes. And it's a bit long. so just hang in there. The third chapter of the book is difficult to understand and may be very repugnant to many people born before the date of the book, April 1904. It tells us the characteristics of the period on which we are now entered. Superficially, they appear appalling.

We see some of them already with terrifying clarity. But fear not. It explains that certain vast stars or aggregates of experience may be described as gods. One of these is in charge of the destinies of this planet for periods of 2,000 years. In the history of the world, as far as we know accurately, are three such gods.

Isis, the mother, when the universe was conceived as simple nourishment drawn directly from her. This period is marked by matriarchal government. Next, beginning 500 BC, Osiris the Father, when the universe was imagined as catastrophic, love, death, resurrection, as the method by which experience was built up. This corresponds to patriarchal systems. And now, Forrest, the child, in which we come to perceive events as a continual growth partaking in its elements of both these methods and not to be overcome by circumstance. This present period involves a recognition of the individual as the unit of society.

We realize ourselves, as explained in the first paragraphs of this essay. Every event, including death, is only one more accretion to our experience, freely willed by ourselves from the beginning and therefore also predestined. This god, end quotes, Horus, has a technical title. Heru Raha, a combination of twin gods, Rahor Kuit and Hoare Parcrat. The meaning of this doctrine must be studied in magic. He is symbolized as a hawk-headed god enthroned. He rules the present period of 2,000 years beginning in 1904.

Everywhere his government is taking root. Observe for yourselves, the decay of the decay of, the sense of sin, the growth of innocence and irresponsibility, the strange modifications of the reproductive instinct with a tendency to become bisexual or episcene, the childlike confidence in progress combined with nightmare fear of catastrophe, against which we are yet half unwilling to take precautions. Consider the outcrop of dictatorships, only possible when moral growth is in its earliest stages, and the prevalence of infantile cults like communism, fascism, pacifism, health crazes, occultism, and nearly all its forms, religion sentimentalized to the point of

practical extinction. Consider the popularity of the cinema, the wireless, the football pools, and guessing competitions, all devices for soothing fractious infants, no seed of purpose in them. Consider sport, the babyish enthusiasm enrages which it excites, whole nations disturbed by disputes between boys. Consider war, the atrocities which occur daily and leave us unmoved and hardly worried. We are children. How this new aeon of Horace will develop, how the child will grow up, these are for us to determine, growing up ourselves in the way of the law of Thelma, under the enlightened guidance of Master Therion. The moment of change from one period to another is technically called the equinox of the gods. It's also kind of a weird side shout out to another book

he had written by this time. Sure, I was about to say that, uh, that's, that's a very well-known. The empire strikes back. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Remember, they always strike back. Democracy daughters. Ferocious fascism, cackling communism, equally frauds, cavort crazily all over the globe. They are hemming us in.

They are abortive births of the child, the new aeon of horace. Liberty stirs once more in the womb of time. Evolution makes its changes by anti-socialistic, ways. The abnormal man who foresees the trend of the times and adapts circumstances intelligently is laughed at, persecuted, often destroyed by the herd, but he and his heirs, when the crisis comes, are survivors. Above us today hangs a danger never yet paralleled in history. We suppress the individual in more and more ways. We think in terms of the herd. War no longer kills soldiers. It kills all indiscriminately. Every new measure of the most democratic and autocratic governments is

communist in essence. It is always restriction. We are all treated as imbecile children. Dora, the Shops Act, the motoring laws, Sunday suffocation, the censorship, they won't trust us to cross the roads at will. Fascism is like communism and dishonest into the bargain. The dictators suppress all art, literature, theater, music, news. That does not meet their requirements. Yet the world only moves by the light of a genius. The herd will be destroyed in mass. The establishment of the law of Thelima is the only way to preserve individual liberty and to assure the future of the race. In the words of the famous paradox of Comptide Phoenix, the absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will.

All men and women are invited to cooperate with the master Therion in this, the great war. It's like squid word doctrine. It's like it's pretty hardcore. It's like cool guy justification thesis. yeah in 1904-ish like cool guy justification thesis and you can again god he's insufferable I mean I really it really wasn't like that I love I love reading it because I like I can hear his annoying voice when I do it and I can just like see him feeling his own genius and jerking himself off when he's like writing this opening to his book it's just phenomenal

but he's also got away with words he really does he's very poetic he's very descriptive And he's not really saying stuff that's not good. Like a lot of the stuff that he's saying is very like, hey, society sucks. And we're just trying to shake off the shackles of society and do what we want to do instead. And people should be thinking about that more. That part is like a sort of correct sort of like he ended up being right about this. It's where he hooks up on to like the law of. Thelma is the only way to preserve it, though, is like, all right, well.

Him being like jaywalking, how dare you be angry and set laws so we don't get hit by? Like, but these are all new things back then, you know? Yeah, he's just up his own butt on it. Like, this is kind of like when you hear someone complain about laws and things that are happening today. But it's like, yeah, but I keep, you may not like it. But there's a reason that law exists because someone else did something absolutely stupid. like this yeah it does start it does start to sound a little bit like libertarian like anti-vax like yeah i got a cyber truck before Elon went crazy type shit like there's the interesting thing

is is it clearly comes and you can tell the way he's writing it comes from a place of privilege like because he's so wealthy and he grew up so like he isn't i don't the the things he says you're like right right right right no you are you benefited from the system that exists listed. So why are we changing anything? Now that I had all this free time, because I didn't have to work all of the day, I was able to think about the fact that people should have more. Give me out. Free time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Holy shit. Hey, at least he's a rich guy who came to that conclusion.

That's true. Everybody else should have some free time as opposed to being like only I should have free time. That's true. I mean, yeah. I mean, he wasn't, he didn't have a problem with being the only guy with free time, but he thought other people should have some. Correct. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, basically he's saying history's broken up, broken up into 2000 year periods or aeons, each ruled by a different God concept, just to kind of compact, like pack it up for people who may not have like, who may have tuned out halfway there. Basically says first you have the idea of aeon of ISIS, ultimate mom god era, universe was all about nourishment. Things were run by matriarchs and everyone was getting their needs met directly from source. We used to eat liver. Do you hear me? We used to eat pure liver and blood. and that you know the liver king dude but yeah that's exactly like what the town like the tone of this this like this like religious sort of like obviously he's appealing to like a time that is not accessible for in a realistic way right it's like yes in the same way that like the liver king

guy's like going back to like the caveman days because it's like a time that you can like really easily romanticize because most people have no idea what it was like and and just sort of like does like a remix on Egyptian religion because nobody ancient Egyptian is there to be like the fucking talking about bro like I mean yes

yeah correct like it's crazy like I don't know we're going to keep going because it can just hang on just like bottle that we got more yeah because next up then the 500 BC era this was the aeon of Osiris dad god time universe is now seen as a as the cycle of catastrophe, the cycle of love and death and resurrection. I think a lot more father figures, patriarchal systems, and the story of the dying and

rising God familiar in other gods. Like the dying and rising like virgin birth, God dying and resurrection. It's, it's, it's, uh, Dionysus and Greek gods, uh, you know, it's, I think it's, it's raw, right? It's raw and Egyptian gods. And that's the only one. And that's the only one. That's the only two.

There's no, that's never happened before after that. Never, not once, never. And that brings us to where we are now, or we still are technically now in 2025, but what began in 1904, the Aeon of Horace, this is Magic Space Child kind of timeline, which supposedly, right, well, technically, he says it kicked off right before 1904, right as 1904 started. This is our time. This is the era.

The individual is the most important. We're all supposed to realize we're at the center of our own universe and every single thing that happens to us, even death, is just an. another experience that we willed for ourselves to have, which also sounds very familiar to a lot of other beliefs in ancient religion, Eastern religions. Horace basically is the boss for the next 2,000 years. And Crowley says his influence is basically starting to pop up everywhere. And this is where he gets kind of real spicy, looking at the budding 20th century and basically

saying, I told you so. He writes, quote, and I'm going to question, question, question. Based on what he was saying, is he pro individual? Or anti, because it sounds like he was saying, he keeps dropping like communism is going to be the death of us all. But he also sounds like he's saying the individualism is what's making you all corrupt. No, he's what he's saying is the power of the individualism because what he's saying about communism is it turns you into a mindless herd devoid of individualism. Sure, sure. But then he says stuff that only in an individualistic society could we actually achieve. And he's like,

that's bad too. Like what? Sorry. Well, he was talking about the, the corrupt that happens with people and like that's not a like a communistic corruption that's the corruption of an individual wanting their own needs and desires and that kind of thing yeah I mean he's a little hypocritical in some of the things he says for sure because does he like we said he does get into this list of like old man get off my law and political there's a little bit of squid word doctrine in there there's a little bit of Bert from Burton Ernie doctrine in there but I think I think to his credit dude had no books besides the Bible till he was like a grown ass boy yeah yeah yeah he's probably

when he got shelter probably not the most used to dealing with anybody who lives in the different way than him yeah exactly like like uh again yeah 14 is when he got us got his hands on his first book that wasn't the bible um but still like it's crazy he is he is he is a he's a individual built and boiled in a unique world and circumstance there's also shoutouts i can't remember the Reddit user, but over on the subreddit, someone posted, there's a documentary from Australia, a 45-minute documentary about the Plymouth Brethren, and that there still exists today and that kind of after the main, main leader of it died, what happens? It fractured.

And it became a bunch of other different, more like intense cults. Just go, it's worth it, it's 45 minutes. It's worth a watch. Thank you, huge shout out to the person who dropped that. I apologize. I didn't write you in my script, so I forgot your name. I'm very sorry, but it's a really cool look at what this religion is. But yeah, like, and it is pretty wild to hear the guy who started his own magic cult

call communism and fashion, fascism, infantile cults. It's like, you know, little pot and me kettle there. Sports. You know, like he says, he says like, look at us. It's a boy. We enjoy all those jocks with their easy lives with their big muscles that people just like without having to be educated, that their bodies just draw them towards so that they don't have to get inheritances to have power and in social life.

It's like, dear, four chan. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah, there's a good chance probably would have become a four chanter, man. Ins thing so. Yeah. Oh, for sure.

Yeah. He just rants and raves about this stuff. He's just, you know, I don't understand, like I said, I don't understand the, because he goes against theater as well in like cinema, but then he says, autocrats remove the arts. Again, like I'm saying, he's very contradictory in what he said, but it has the same vibe as when you read a fortune where it's like this month, make sure you don't get involved in any new things, but also trying new things can get you involved in stuff.

And you're like, huh? Yeah. It's that kind of vibe. Yeah. You'll appreciate this what I wrote next, Jesse, because I mean, you've already said it, But, you know, it's the most galaxy-brained libertarian fucking rant you've ever heard from a guy trying to start a new world religion, essentially. Like, he's literally libertarian ranting. Like, that's exactly what he's doing.

And of course, what's the only way to save humanity from this nanny state nightmare? You guessed it. Establishing the law of Thelma with him, the master Therion. He's master Therion, by the way, leading the charge. Of course. To buy the book? His money? Like, did you have to buy it?

Okay. Yeah, of course. So that was all Crowley. sales pitch. But let's get back now to 1904 and the stuff in the book that actually had him supposedly so freaked out. Remember, man, that was forced to memorize the Gospels. Guy raised, Blessed are the Meek. Then he reads the second chapter of this new holy book spoken supposedly by an entity named Hadid and gets hit with this absolute, just like anti-sermon. I'm going to have Jesse read this. This is right out of the book of law chapter two from Hadid, which is a very different

each chapter is a different god and they have very different tones i definitely read this when i was like 23 i was like yo right exactly yeah yeah yeah it's got that like stoner like you know it's kind of like yeah like donnie darko adjacent in in a way yeah yeah i've never seen donnie darko but i understand okay let's say the boondock saints just like the type of the people the people that watch those movies at that time fight club is another movie in this. I feel like at that time you also read the book of, what's it called?

The book of lies, the book of law. The book of the law. Yeah, book of law. Yeah. I can't. This is, this is, this is purely up its own but text. All right, here we go. Up its own butt text, dude.

We have nothing with the outcasts and the unfit. Let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings. Stamp down the. wretched and the weak. This is the law of the strong. This is our law and the joy of the world.

Yo, that is literally, when people on TV are like, empathy is evil. Yeah. It's the same vibe, dude. That's crazy. Chapter two is basically that kind of vibe, the whole way through.

It's only chapter two, though. It's only Hadid when he is speaking. Does he see things like this? It's weird. I mean, like, you literally stamp down the wretched in the week. It's about as far from the turn the other cheek as you can get that he learned. It's basically interdimensional social Darwinism. And it wasn't just a one-off line.

The third chapter dictated by the hawkheaded god of war, Rah-Hour, Kuwait. Really quickly, like just really quickly. Yeah. Once we've stamped down all of the poor and the weak, and they no longer exist. Um, who runs all the things that we do so that we can live a life of luxury? You, you're the master of your own universe, bro. You figure it out. Give me out.

AI, dude. Oh, shit. You're right. Never mind. Empathy's a sin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I got it. All right. Alex, who needs people when we can have robots. Yeah, all right. Lordchain, baby. I'm going to have you read this, a quote, Alex, from chapter three. This is a quote, dictated by the hawkheaded. God of War, Ra, Ho, or Queet, which just doubles down to the violence.

The text, again, we're working with, is kind of the greatest hits of some of the most metal lines I've read, though. Sick, okay. Worship me with fire and blood. Worship me with swords and with spears. Let blood flow to my name. Trample down the heathen. Be upon them, oh warrior, I will give you of their flesh to eat. Sick.

hell yeah fuck yeah yeah this this is the document he's kind of stuck with after three days of one hour

channeling or automatic writing for one part cosmic we're all star dust poetry two parts brutal manifesto for a holy war

with the side of cannibalism in there it's kind of just like a weird I mean if he really was scared it's no wonder he was scared

of this thing like it's a weird ass fucking book and this wasn't some philosophical idea to be debated into like a London drawing room

this was a divine order and he'd just been made the fucking five star general of team eat the heathens the weight of that was a lot for for crowley this is the five star general of team eat the heathens is an incredible thing to say thank you yeah fucking i agree i was very proud of that uh but like this is the crowley world man he but this is like all the shit he believes in so like when this happens to him that's how he feels so what does he fucking do uh he just fucking just tries to find an excuse to fucking get out of it is what he starts trying to do he decides to

test the book he types of the manuscript and sends them to the smartest most advanced occultist he knows including his old mentor george cecil jones which we talked about in episode one and this is where i'm talking about there's evidence that this book had been around for a little while because he was sending copies of it off early uh he figured may if this thing is for real maybe these guys will immediately recognize its power right like maybe that'll be it and he sends it out and he waits he waits he waits total silence nobody writes back at all uh like in the few that did write back there was no awe in their writing back they were just like interesting when jones when jones though finally wrote back and he did finally

get back to him he literally basically just dismissed it as it was nothing special he was like there's nothing special about this. And for Crowley, that was the best news he could have actually ever received. It was his out. Well, experts have spoken,

books of dud, guess it was just some weird psychic indigestion I had. In Cairo, we're out, we're free. I don't have to worry about it anymore. And with a totally clear conscience,

he takes the original handwritten pages, the supposed key to the new age for all of mankind through the law of Thelma, and he misplaces them, hoping to never see them again. He loses them. He just fucking loses them.

Like, he just kind of put them down. I don't need this. It's unimportant. It's unimportant. Kind of like not, but not on purpose. Like,

like he, as far as he kind of says, he just kind of plopped it in with his papers and it just kind of disappeared into the shuffle one. Like, he just lost track of it. He didn't give a shit about it anymore. That's so crazy,

dude. And after, and after telling a God to get lost and convenient losing its holy book, Crowley decides to try the most shocking and rebellious thing you can think of at this point in his life. He tries, but I feel like all people in born and raised in his circumstances,

try at least one. He tries to be normal. He just tries. This is like work at KFC arc. Right. He could remember he's married at this point. He's a wife. Sure.

So he and rose pack up from Cairo, leave Egypt, and head back to his estate, back in Boleskin. Boliskin, I think it's how you say it. I think I was saying it wrong before. That house on the shores of Loch Ness. And he settles into the life of a proper, just Scottish laird. He's hunting. He's fishing, writing poetry. And it's not about blood-dry.

not about blood-drinking war gods. It's about love and nature and boring hippie shit. And in July of 1904, he and Rose would have their first child, a daughter. And now the document we're working from says he named her Newit, after the supposed star goddess in the book he just disowned. Neweet? Like, N-U-I-T, like Knight in French? Is that how it's supposed to be? Is it supposed to be night because it's like Egyptian I thought. I don't I don't know isn't that doesn't that mean night in French maybe it's the same. I don't know

maybe it is the same. La Nui. And that was her name well he named her new eat. It doesn't matter. He named her new eat but that was just her first name because her actual name the one she went by was Lilith. Sure of course.

You have to hear her whole name. I will copy paste it but I'm going to say it first. It is. Neweet, Ma, Ahathor, Hakate, Sappho, Jezebel, Lilith, Crowley. Oh, so, uh, got beat up at school a lot. Sappho Jezebel Lilith? Yeah, there you go.

I copy past it. There you go. Newee Ma Atha, Ahatur, Hecatee. So far, like, at least it's just a strange name that, like, maybe is interesting. Sappho Jezebel Lilith is like, that is, like, that is. it's new eat try too hard crowley it's like it's like the it's like the activation like spell of like mansurian christians yeah yeah dude absolutely uh the holy soldier the shining soldier like yeah yeah yeah the shining soldier uh and like for a hot second he's kind of got it all

he's a husband a dad wealthy country gentleman poet he's living the life he would quote unquote supposed to be living, but we all know that ain't going to last. You can't domesticate the great beast. The quiet life for him was like a cage and the dude needed to rattle the bars. The divine purpose that he was running from left a God-sized hole in his life and he needed to fill it with something loud and dangerous enough to drown out all that silence. He needed a mission, a war. And so he looked around the globe and found the biggest, coldest and most unforgiving enemy he could a mountain he decided he's back on his he's back on his bitch he's he's back on his shit yeah he's going mountain climbing he decided he was going to be the first

man to conquer the third highest peak on earth kong kong jeng kong junga you i mean i think that's how you say it but just like better than that if you're trying like this is for him the biggest distraction he could find. And in 1905, this is about as big and distracting as it got for him. So you got to understand the sheer monumental arrogance of this idea, though. This isn't like any old mountain. It's located on the border of Nepal and Sikkim. Kangchenjunga is the third highest peak in the world and climbers call it the savage mountain. It's infamous for being insanely difficult and prone to just deciding to kill you with a sudden massive avalanche at the most imperfect time. And back then, it was one of the last.

last great unconquered prizes of mountain climbing. Like more a mythical monster than one that had ever been conquered. For Crowley, that's exactly what he fucking wanted. This was perfect. It was a giant, a moral force of nature that he could throw his ego against. It was a war he understood something that he's used to doing. And he finances the whole thing himself and assembles an international team of actual experienced climbers, including a Swiss doctor named Jules Jacquette Gullimaud.

Then there was a massive support team of hundreds of local porters from Adarji Ling. And at the top of this whole pyramid was Crowley himself, the dictatorial leader of this posse of people, a small village of people. And this is where the cracks start to show before they even fucking hit the snow. Crowley's leadership style was to put it mildly, a fucking dumpster fire. He was arrogant, he was nasty,

and had a serious sadistic streak. The other climbers, especially the professional Dr. Guillemad, were used to a team approach where, you know, you try not to die together. Crowley treated them like cannon fodder and his personal like psychodrama of his story of conquering this mountain. His treatment of the local porters was even worse, monstrously worse.

He saw them as tools, not people, and believed the only way to get them to work was through pure terror. It's on this trip that he gets a reputation for using his whip and even his pistol to threaten and beat the porters into submission. He was far from a team leader. He became a tyrant ruling a tiny mobile kingdom with an iron fist bought by his money. This is where the cracks in the humanity of who this fucking asshole is under the surface of

all as a cult enlightenment. Far from a band of brothers, this was a dysfunctional, resentful crew being dragged up a death trap by one man's ego. And once they got onto the Yalan Glacier, the conditions were brutal, extreme cold, thin air, altitude sickness is kicking everyone's ass. But the toxic atmosphere within the team was even worse than the weather. Crowley and the Swiss climbers clashed over everything. They argued about the route with Crowley pushing. for a path that was faster, but also way, way more likely to get them all killed. They argued about the pace because Crowley just wanted to go, go, go, go, regardless of human

costs. And they argued constantly about his horrific treatment of the porters, which appalled the other climbers and gear mod. The expedition basically split into two warring factions, the sane professional climbers, and Crowley. And while all this was going on, Crowley's behavior just gets fucking weirder. While everyone else is focused on the life and death of business of not falling into a crevice, he's often off in his own little world, like daydreaming.

He's sitting in his tent writing poetry, scribbling in his diary about his grand magical about his grand magical will versus the will of the mountain. He wasn't on a climbing expedition in his own mind. Like for him, this was a giant magical operation that was going to help cleanse him and like recenter him magically. He was the hero of his story, living that universe perspective that he so claimed, and the mountain was the dragon for like all intents and purposes. And everyone else, the experienced climbers and the porters that he was brutalizing were just

like NPCs in his story. This wasn't an expedition, it was a hostage situation at 20,000 feet. And it was about to all go horribly, tragically wrong. Because, you know, the like truly insane part is that despite Crowley running this little frozen dictatorship and the whole team hating each other's guts, they were actually making incredible progress. It's like a

testament to just how good the other climbers really were. This is pushed higher and... I keep forgetting that this is about Alistair Crowley now. Like this is like, this is like so, this fucking... Now we're in a mountain like fucking like tragedy.

Like his life is insane. Like the reality and the truth of his life when you leave all the, even if you leave all the myth at the door is insane. And yeah, we're like, we're still about Crowley. As they pushed higher and higher,

setting up camps along the glacier, by early 1905, they hit Camp 5 at around 21,000 feet, higher than anyone had ever been on the mountain Kong Chen Junga before. They were, as they hit this, they were at their absolute limit.

They were exhausted, frostbitten, and honestly, from just the sounds of like the dire, re-entries I read spiritually shattered. These people were done. The team was in a state of open mutiny. Dr. Gielier,

Gier, Maude and two of the other climbers, an individual by the name of Rigi and another by Posh, had finally had enough. They looked at the route Crowley was insisting on, looked at the unstable snow, looked at each other and made the only

sane goddamn choice anyone can make in that moment, basically saying, let's be this. This is suicide. We're turning back, whether the psycho in charge, who paid us. Exactly, likes it or not. Fuck you.

We're going home. Like, we're getting out of here. The expedition right on the verge of historic success finally collapsed under their weight of Crowley's bullshit. And that's when the Savage Mountain decided, eh, fuck it. I'm going to get involved too. Now, to give you a nun, build the scene.

You're over 21,000 feet up, basically on the edge of space. The expedition, in 1905, mind you. The expedition has its final ugly breakup. Giri Maude, Rieh, and Posh, along with a few other the other porters, confront Crowley. They're done. They tell him the route ahead is a death trap and that he is, in their professional opinion, a reckless madman. They're all going down with or without him. Crowley is incandescent with rage.

Just completely loses it at this point. In his mind, this isn't a smart safety decision. It's ultimate betrayal. He was about to conquer his great enemy to win his personal war against his fucking mountain and his soldiers were deserting him on the battlefield alone. Now there's a sacred unwritten rule of the mountains. You are responsible for the people you are with. Your lives are in each other's hands.

And Crowley took that rule, spit on it, set it on fire, shit on and afterward. And in a staggering act of pure fucking hubris, he just absolves himself of all responsibility. He tells them if they're going down, they're on their own. He's staying put. So this small, desperate party. with Guillemad and all, and the three local porters begin their dangerous trip

down the glacier alone. They're exhausted, demoralized, and moving across a stretch of ice notorious for being unstable. And that's when it happened. One of the men slips. The rope team loses its footing. The slight disturbance is all it takes.

The whole unstable snowpack just fucking lets go. A massive slab of snow and ice breaks free with a deafening crack and roar. Have you ever heard large crack of ice like in videos as it just like echoes? That's the noise that echoes across this bordering on space mountainside

and it just sweeps down the mountain. The climbers and porters are just engulfed, tossed like rag dolls and just pure white chaos and buried. And by some absolute miracle though, some of them survive. Dr. Giamad and Riege battered and half frozen actually managed to claw their way out of the snow.

But Alexis Pash and the three other porters who were with them were gone, vanished under the avalanche, buried deep under tons of ice. And now stranded in shock with darkness falling, the survivors do the only thing they can. They start screaming for help. God. Their desperate cries echo up the silent frozen glacier right to Camp 5 where their leader, Alistair Crowley, sits alone,

in his tent. And Crowley heard them. He would admit that later. He heard their cries for help, clear his day for over an hour. And this is it. This is the moment that would define Alistair Crowley for the rest of his life.

He's the expedition leader. He has a duty to these men. A cry for help in the high Himalayas is a sacred call to action to mountaineers that any decent human being would do something to answer. But Crowley did nothing. According to the survivors, he briefly poked his head out of his tent,

looked down the glacier at the scene of the devastation, and then deciding the situation was hopeless, simply went back inside. To do what? Drink tea and write in his diary. And I'm not making that up. Like, he made no attempt to form a rescue party. He offered no aid.

He sat alone in his temp, sipping tea and scribbling his thoughts down while members of his team were dead or dying in the snow, just a few hundred yards below him. Now, to be fair, I don't know what you can do to save them. I know, like, even on Everest today, like, you, like, you sit down and fall asleep on the peak. You basically have to be left behind. Like, there might be some tries to rescue you, but Everest is littered with bodies and people die on it every year.

But something about just having, like, the survivors he was saying they saw, like, his head peek over and he just kind of, like, walked away and did nothing. I don't know. It feels still very cold to me. I mean, you can say, yeah, like, what could you do? But also, this is a man who notoriously said, don't have empathy, use the little people, stamp on them. Like, yeah, he doesn't ring to me as a guy who'd be like, what could I do to help them? The doubt they're dying.

He's like, well, I'm fine. So what does it matter? To that point for the rest of his life, Alastair Crowley had a neat two-part answer as to why he did nothing. part one was his quote unquote rational leader excuse he'd argue that a rescue attempt at night in an active avalanche zone would have been pure suicide he'd be risking more lives to save men who were probably already dead and you know on the surface that's a cold but arguably large logical assessment for a mountaineering perspective but then you look at what he was actually writing

and you get the second far more chilling reason if you read he saw the accident as a kind of divine punishment. In his mind, they defied his will. They had mutinied against him in the mountain itself had passed judgment. They brought it on themselves. This was magic in action. The most damning evidence is always comes from the man himself. According to his own diary, written as his men lay dying just a few hundred feet below him, he had the following to say, Alex, you can take this one if you'd like. A mountain accidents, an accident of a nature, which is not altogether unforeseen. I was not over-anxious to deliberately sacrifice my own life and that of my coolies.

The end of the expedition is a fitting commentary on the beginning. And that's just immediately shows how cold he was about it. Like, he was writing that as it happened. No grief in that, no remorse, just attached kind of an analysis, observing a failed experiment kind of tone. just like, well, well, that's what happens. And the next morning, Crowley calmly packs up his camp, he and the porters who stayed with him begin their descent,

and they walk right past the scene of the avalanche, past the surviving shell-shock climbers without offering any significant aid or help in searching for the bodies of the dead. He just walked away. And when he finally got back to civilization, the story he spun for the press was an absolute masterpiece of self-serving victim-blaming garbage.

He blamed the dead climbers for their own demise, citing what he called their mountaineering inadvisibilities. The international climbing community was horrified. He was condemned as a coward and a monster. His career as a world-class mountaineer was over effectively after this permanently, and he had run to the most dangerous corner of the world to escape his destiny. And all he found there was an even darker version of the beast he'd always been anyway. The Kensunga scandal made Crowley a total mountaineering pariah.

Stripped of the one thing that gave him a somewhat respectable identity, he became a wanderer. He left India and with his wife Rose and their infant daughter, Lilith in tow, just drifted through the east. He was a man with no reputation left to lose, still running from the prophecy of the book of the law, and it seems the universe was about to crank up the pressure to get his attention, because the next tragedy struck in Rangoon, in Rangoon Burma in 1906. their young daughter, Lilith, the child his name, first name was Neween, was a nod to the very revelation he was supposedly abandoning. The daughter contracted typhoid fever.

This was a moment that could have brought a fractured family together under the right circumstances, a crisis that kind of demanded the full attention of a father. But instead, it just revealed the chilling, empty depths of Crowley's detachment from basic human emotion. as his infant daughter's life kind of just hung in the balance with his wife Rose growing more and more frantic and unstable Crowley simply just fucking left he went off on a hunting expedition leaving them to deal with the crisis alone

his diaries from that time too are a bizarre mess of like random travel notes and grandiose magical nasal gaving with almost no mention of the fact that his own child was even dying in them and while he was away of course Lilith fucking died. Dude.

When Crowley returned, he wasn't met with shared grief. He was met with blame. And he deflected it immediately. In his mind, the fault for his child's death wasn't his own staggering negligence. It was all Rose's fault. Duh. He accused her of causing Lilith's death through her own carelessness and her escalating alcoholism.

This accusation, though, was the final killing blow to the marriage altogether. And the story of Rose Kelly is one of the. the most tragic in Crowley's entire orbit, and there are many more to come. The woman who had been the clear calm channel for the supposed divine intelligence in Cairo was now completely broken. The strain of her life with him, the horror of losing a child and her own pre-existing struggles and budding alcoholism plunged her into severe alcoholism. Their travels ended. Crowley would eventually have her institutionalized, and they would never see each other again. The unwinning oracle of this supposed new aeon was just another casualty left in the

prophet's chaotic and dangerous wake like it's the ending to rose is wildly unfair and just very evil like he he does a typical abusive thing of like to leave and since he's not there he can't be to blame because he didn't do anything wrong he wasn't there so obviously it was rose's fault because you know she died while rose was there it sucks That is so, like, of its time in the most, like, disgusting way. Yeah. Right. 1906.

I mean, yeah, look at where his life's at in 1906, right? Reputation as a world-class mountaineer now gone, completely destroyed. Firstborn child, dead. Wife, lost alcoholism and locked away an institution. He's managed to fail spectacularly at every single aspect of any conventional, successful, normal life. He is completely alone, stripped of family, fame, any sense of direction. And for a man with a lesser ego, this would have broken them. But Crowley's ego is just too fucking big to be broken by would break normal empathetic people.

Let's get into it. Crowley, he progressed the staggering, like this next series of personal failures. He saw them not as a result of his own bottomless arrogance, but like as a deliberate, systematic campaign of divine punishment. This was the gods punishing him is how he spun this in his mind. This is the crucial turning point for Crowley. He looks at the wreckage, concludes that the secret chiefs, the spooky entities behind the book of the law, were intentionally blowing up his life to force him back onto their chosen path.

This is the kind of ego fortress we're talking about here, where any sort of like horrible life thing is now, well, it's divine, it's divine out of my hand. So what am I going to do? Not one, not two. A plethora of gods have come for me. specific. Correct. Correct. Exactly correct. And from his perspective, the death on Ken Chenjunga, this was the universe pushing him for his pride and for trying to run from his mission. The horrific death of his daughter, Lilith, this was a brutal lesson in the consequences of

his disobedience. The total collapse of his marriage, this was just the gods stripping away all the worldly attachments that were distracting him from his true will. He had tried to throw their holy book in the trash, and in return, they were burning his entire world to the ground, reflecting on this period. He wrote, and I will have Jesse read this. I was still baffled, a soul in agony. My failure on Kang Chunjunga and the death of my child had robbed me of my self-confidence. I began to ask myself whether the secret chiefs who had initiated me were not tired of my disloyal neglect. Everything that I had touched had crumbled into dust. That's how in his own words, he saw it. Strip of everything, he then decides to continue

his journey alone, wandering deeper into the wilderness of southern China. It was here at his absolute lowest point, a failed leader, grieving, well, in air quotes, grieving father, a man with nothing left to lose, that he finally decided that, fuck it, I'm going to stop running, that he was ready to pick up the phone and he decides to perform a grand magical ritual to finally get a straight answer from the cosmos. This is some fluffy ceremony in a fancy temple. This was raw, desperate magic performed alone in the wild. He starts scrying, staring into a reflective surface to get visions. And this time, he gets a clear signal. He makes contact with some non-physical intelligence that calls itself Abouldes, A-B-U-L-D-I-Z. And

Abel-D-I-Z was not here to offer a shoulder to cry on. It was there to deliver a cosmic kind of ass kicking. The message in no uncertain terms was a confirmation of his dark his fears. The voice tells him that every single tragedy of the last two years was a direct consequence of him ditching the book of the law, the dead climbers, death of his daughter, end of his marriage, all of it orchestrated as a campaign of divine punishment to break him down for his disobedience. He was given a simple, stark ultimatum, either accept the mission as the profit of the new aon and get to work or face an even greater future of suffering, ending with the complete and utter destruction of his magical powers.

The rough map, that's time. That was it. The god he had been running from for two years, finally backed him into a corner, and the running to him was supposedly over. Humbled and terrified and submission, Crowley began the long journey back to Europe. He knew his first task.

He had to find the original handwritten manuscript of the book of the law, the one that he so carelessly lost years before. He returns to his home in Bulliskin, now haunted by the ghost of his failed life, and the demons that he summoned that he never, a fully got rid of if you remember that half ritual he did for six months but not fully six months and he starts tearing the whole fucking house apart and this is where another piece of

official Crowley myth falls right in a place after a frantic search the manuscript is nowhere but then and the story here is a little too perfect a workman doing repairs in the attic supposedly notices a loose floorboard he pulls it up and what's underneath what else but the 65 page manuscript. I thought he just happened to lose it. Exactly. You don't just happen to lose it in a floorboard. This is what is so the God's putting it back.

Magical about it. That's why it's faded like those plates that he pulled out of that yard that one time. Right. Oh, it's a different guy. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Different guy. Different guy, but similar situation.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Of course, Crowley didn't see this as a lucky break. No, this was a miracle, a final magical sign that he was back on the path and that the secret chiefs were ready for him to begin so in crowley's mind the rediscovery of the manuscript is anything but a coincidence it's a miracle uh and it's the it's like the the green stone right like if they'd to be found faded to be used very similar to sword in the stone that's how he starts kind of uh metaphorically looking at this book from this point on um and this is the moment where he finally surrenders he's been backed in the corner so fuck it you might

as we'll do it. And here's, uh, I'm going to say, this is another quote from supposedly from Crowley himself that kind of just perfectly encapsulate his attitude here. And I will have Alex now read this one. I had been tempting the lightning for years. Now it had struck. My worldly reputation was shattered. My fortune was crumbling. My wife was in an asylum. A child was dead. I had to yield. Put myself in my desperation under the guise. of this book, the book of the law. And I said, let me see if this is all true. I will do my part of the bargain. And with the manuscript back in his hands, something inside him shifts. The terror he felt in Cairo is gone, replaced by a new, cold sense of purpose. The world tried to break him, and it succeeded.

But now he's putting the pieces back together into a totally new shape. This isn't Alastair Crowley, the rebellious poet or the disgrace mountaineer anymore. No, this is a total rebuttal. This is a total rebrand. He is now the master Therion. He is the great B-6666. He is the prophet of the new Aeon, and his mission is now crystal clear. He has to establish the law of Thelma on Earth.

It's so funny. It's just, sorry. No, go up, please. Say. This is, like, exactly the same course that Parsons life took in, like, almost every way, like, in a lot of different angles. Like, he also was like, you know what? I'm the anti-crime. now. Like, I wrote a book of

occultism now. You know, his wasn't a magically back after he found it, but similar situation. We'll learn more about their relationship in the not so far future. From Crowley's perspective, obviously.

And his mission, obviously, now clear to establish law, Thelma on Earth. To do that, though, what does he need other than fucking any religion needs? He needs some followers. He needs people that will listen to him. He needs to build his own magical order, a new golden dawn, but one that serves the crowned and conquering child of the new age, not the dying god of the old one. The prophet was finally ready

to preach. So Crowley returns to England, a man possessed. The aimless wandering is over, the running is done. He has a divine, terrible mission. And the first thing a prophet needs is to get, is a school to train his upcoming disciples. First thing you need is a school? Yeah, like Professor X. Okay, sure. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But even a guy with an ego the size of a fucking planet knows he can't do it alone. If he just stands on a corner in London shouting, I'm a prophet worship my hawkheaded God, he's just going to get thrown in a pad and cell like he did to his wife. To give his new order any kind of legitimacy, he needs an ally, a respected magician whose credibility is solid.

So he goes right back to the beginning. He goes to the man who first opened the door to the magical world for him, his old mentor. George Cecil Jones. You have to imagine the scene, like, in walks Crowley, the volatile prodigy of this guy who helped burn the golden dawn to the ground, showing up on his original, like, a teacher's doorstep, but he's not a student anymore. He arrives declaring himself a prophet, carrying a new holy book, and claiming a direct mandate from the secret chiefs. And Jones, who just had a few years earlier, had dismissed a copy of this very book as

unimportant is now confronted with a totally transformed Crowley, a man just completely radiating with a new level of certainty and power about what he's about to do. So Crowley walks in and, you know, I can imagine just smells of fucking ego and pitches his old cautious mentor on the idea of co-founding a new religion. It was, you know, hey, Liz, there's an idea. You know what, that'd be like if one of you two came to me and said, no, for real. Okay. We're going to make a religion. Are you in? Alex did that. It's the car, 2013. No, no, no. That's just that's just a call. That's not a religion. That's just a bit. There's not a real. There's no. Yeah, you still have to pay taxes in real, like, in 20205. Yeah. Well, fair. Actually, it'd be more like if I came to you guys, have you ever heard of a space butterfly? Because I see you know. They're real. I believe it's real. Yeah. How many of our listeners don't know that reference? I want to know. I would wager enough due that I could start a cult. Oh, absolutely.

I think enough, dude, that you could relaunch that plushy. Mm-hmm. Agreed. Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. Um, yeah. And unsurprisingly, this wasn't, this was not an easy sell to Jones here. You don't say.

No, but Crowley, dude, when he was on a mission, he was a fucking force of nature between his formidable and he was a smart man, like his formidable intellect, the sheer power of his own conviction, whatever spooky shit Jones saw when he did his own magical background check on the situation. The old man was convinced eventually. George Cecil Jones agreed to co-found a new magical order with Alistair Crowley. This was a massive coup. Jones was a serious, respected magician.

His involvement was like getting a good, like a good housekeeping seal of approval for Crowley's insane new venture. It gave him the legitimacy that he was now lacking because of all the fuckups he just endured. So, in 1907, they founded the A triangle mark, A triangle mark. Huh? I don't know, it's supposed to be like alpha delta, alpha delta? No, it's like this. You've seen it. I'm going to give you the full name.

But that's how they, that's the look of the, what it looks like. A triforce. A triforce. It stands for Argentium Astrum, or Latin for the Silver Star. that is their order. The AA was this, maybe not, you know,

the greatest, not that AA. That didn't exist back then. That wasn't, alcohol wasn't a problem back then. Right. The AA was designed to be the ultimate magical curriculum, like a kind of boot camp for magic people.

Think like Harry Potter, but like capitalism. It was Crowley's attempt to build like a perfect rational system for enlightenment, a new and improved golden dawn for his new aeon. And its motto kind of just said it all. The motto was, the method of science, the aim of religion. That's a, yeah, Jesse, just looks like he got hit. He had to, like, process for a second.

I mean, so it's fine. I know you understand. Yeah, it's, it seems like an impossibility. Because science is about constantly questioning, and religion is about the power of belief and not questioning things. So, like, no, dude, we talk about it. People who believe in science, it's like a religion, dude. Like, I mean, I think people leave in science that it will give answers if you keep asking questions, but the whole point is you keep asking questions and you never settle because there is no definitive answer.

You're always looking for the next truth while faith-based things, the truth is what is written and there is no other truth to look for. Yeah, it almost comes off as like wild, wild like loyalty to him. Don't question him. Yeah, like believe completely in him. Also, we're going to do it scientifically, so it seems like we're smart. So I mean, like, like, it's the, it's the science of like, we get to have it both ways. We have the belief of like unquestioning faith in me, but also I get to question the rest of the world. I, again, I agree with how it's like you would interpret it.

But this is, I'm going to explain what he meant by this line because this, like, what he meant was magic was it's more about magic. Right. Like, magic wasn't supposed to be about blind faith. It was an experimental science of the soul in his head. Every student that would come in would have to learn ceremonial magic of all different types, from Kabbalistic practice, all the way to yoga and meditation, like, just the works. They had to learn all the different ones. And the single most important rule was that you had to keep a detailed magical diary

and you were your own laboratory and your diary was your lab notebook. You had to record every ritual, every result, every weird dream, no matter how embarrassing or pointless it might seem. And Crowley remembered how the Golden Dawn had kind of like torn itself apart over petty squabbles about who had the bigger, more secret ritual. So he decided on a new strategy. He was going to just publish fucking everything. Starting in 1909, the AA began publishing a massive, massively produced journal called The Equinox. and it was kind of like a bombshell dropped right in the middle of the quiet

secretive world of occultism at the time in its pages Crowley just started systematically publishing in plain English all the secret rituals knowledge and techniques of the Golden Dawn that he'd learned you just fucking, it's like someone getting a hold of the masonry like books or

Scientology like lore or whatever and then just putting it out there he was basically like yeah like you know a good way to think of him like publishing a book of magic tricks. Yeah, yeah, like, but like to the occult world, he's like, he's like being a snowed in right now or, you know, I guess. I guess what I mean is all the magic tricks of all the magicians. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the mass magician. Yeah, yeah, it's the last magician thing from

the 90s. Yeah. Yeah, because he's giving way the keys of the kingdom. Or I guess early 2000s, but yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly that. His reasoning was simple, though. It was like the secrets he claimed protected themselves. You could give a man the blueprints for a nuclear reactor, but, But unless he's a brilliant physicist willing to do the hard work, they're just useless pieces of paper. And the mission statement in the very first issue is pure uncut, arrogant, Alastair Crowley. Here's what it said, Jesse, for you. We have determined to publish the priceless treasures of which we are the guardians. We are not forcing them upon the world, but we are striking the shackles from the hands of the slaves.

we are showing the royal road to the spiritual life it is the only road there is no other we have brought the water of life from the well of the wise and we are pouring it upon the sand

hell yeah and that's how yeah exactly and that's how we basically felt about it out there like fuck it kind of punk like all my favorite movements

in art kind of like start in a similar in a similar way Yes. In his mind, he was like a liberator of human consciousness by doing this in a way. And with the AA and the equinox, Crowley was no longer now a lone wolf. He was the public leader of a new magical movement as small as it may be to start. He had an order, a holy book, and now a public voice. And he was about to use it to pick one last epic fucking magic fight with the man who had started him on his path in the first place. By publishing all of the Golden Dawn. secrets he wasn't just sharing knowledge he was committing the ultimate act of betrayal against his former master s l mcgregor mathers and mad this guy who he wrestled with him in the hallway mathers who considered the golden don's teachings his personal intellectual property was to put

it mildly fucking enraged he saw crowley's actions as a declaration of magical war and a magical war is what he fucking got hell yes let's go the conflict was falling fought on two fronts. The first one was the important but boring one. The courts of London, where Mathers sued Crowley to try and get an injunction to stop the publication of the equinox. The second battle, which secretly, according to Crowley, was the one fought with curses on the astral plane. And that one was far more vicious. So Mathers, sitting in his apartment in Paris, is fucking fuming.

And according to Crowley, he decides to do a lot more than just. Sue, with this full-scale magical assault, he tries to ruin this man's life. This was a wizarding duel to the death in his mind. Crowley and his students

started reporting all sorts of spooky phenomena that began happening. Bad headache. They claimed they were being attacked by terrifying astral entities like a, I guess, like a magical, like DDoS,

attack, I guess. They told stories of poltergeist activity, of strange unnatural winds blowing through the sealed rooms, and the constant oppressive feeling of being watched by something nasty. But Alistair Crowley does not

play defense. His philosophy was always the best defense is a ludicrously oversized offense, basically. So in 1910, he and his star pupil at the time, a young poet named Victor Newberg, decided to fucking go magically nuclear. In their temple, they performed a massive and dangerous ceremony. The evocation of

Batsabel, the spirit of Mars. Now, think of Bartsabelle as the magical equivalent of the god of war, a famously aggressive entity embodying all the fiery, violent energy of Mars. The plan was to summon this thing into their temple and then aim it like a magic key-seeking missile with the coordinate set from McGregor Mather's apartment in Paris. Crowley claimed that the ritual was a terrifying success and then the magical fallout was immense. But the war also had a much pettier and kind of frankly more bizarre side. This brings us to one of the weirdest stories in Crowley's entire career.

The Battle of the Frogs. This is, it sounds like a chapter from like, like, A song of ice and fire. Yeah, yeah. It definitely isn't going to be like one. A smaller house fighting for like independence against the empire or something. No, it's probably not. So this story obviously is probably exaggerated by Crowley for a fact.

But the legend goes, Mather's supposedly sent a threatening psychic message to Crowley in the middle of the night. I'm guessing Crowley in a fit of high magical peak in a, yeah, and a fit. of high magical peak mixed with a pure childish spite decided to retaliate with a bit of folk magic. He went to a pond, caught a bunch of frogs, and then brought them back to his temple. He then performed a ceremony where he solemnly baptized each frog with the name McGregor Mathers, and then, after they were baptized under that name, crucified each one of them on tiny little frog-sized crosses, and then cursed them as they were being crucified on them. that fucking take him hours I'm guessing like all that and not go like what am I

doing the dude I think like if he starts asking what I'm doing now it's too like he's too late you're right you're right you're he's too deep dude uh he remember he had a fucking psychic magic war with like counters it's like one part high ceremony magic one part elaborate ritual and it just completely cruel to the animals the war finally came to head and though not in a magical duel, but in the courtroom. The judge in a moment of pure, glorious British common sense essentially threw the whole case out. He ruled that since Mathers claimed to have received the rituals from spirits,

he couldn't possibly claim copyright over them in a human court. You can't sue on behalf of a ghost. It was basically an entire public humiliation for Mathers. Mathers lost spectacularly. And Crowley had one decisive. That was the war of the frogs. It's just, he just crucified a bunch of frogs.

He crucified a bunch of frogs. Okay. Well, that's fucked up. That's fucked up. It doesn't sound that much like a war, but okay. That's a battle of the frogs. Yeah,

he had beaten his old master in court and in his own mind had utterly vanquished him on the astral plane. The student had officially surpassed the master, very Sith-like. With a war against Mathers 1, Crowley, now in his mid-30s, entered a new phase.

He was no longer, he's still younger than all of us, basically. He was no longer just a rebel. He was a leader and now a guru. He was the master Therion, and he started attracting a circle of devoted, if often eccentric, students. His journal, the Equinox, was now the most famous and infamous occult publication in the world. He was, for the first time, the undisputed central figure of English occult magic, of the English occult magic scene.

And it was because of this newfound notoriety that in 1912, he got an unexpected visitor. A man named Theodore Rius, the head of a German magical fraternity called the Ordo Templi Orientus, or the OTO. They're here. Yeah, you may, that may sound familiar to a lot of people. They're here. And he traveled all the way to London just to confront Crowley because Rius was fucking furious. He accused Crowley of publishing the single most important and secret teaching of the OTO's highest most secret degree. He claimed Crowley had exposed their ultimate mystery to the

public. Crowley was completely baffled. He insisted he knew next to nothing about the OTO, let alone its deepest secrets, and he asked Rius to show him where exactly in all of his writings he had supposedly given the game away. And Rius pointed to a specific, seemingly obscure past in one of Crowley's books. And so to Reus, so Reus points to this one obscure passage in one of Crowley's books and Crowley reads it

and in that moment, the penny kind of drops. The great ultimate, super secret mystery at the heart of the Ordo Templi Orientis was something that Crowley didn't openly talk about beyond this one offhanded mention.

Sex magic. Basically, the theory and practice of using sexual energy. And yes, the actual physical fluids produced during the sexual act as a kind of magical gasoline, right? We talked about it in the chaos magic series in this way, too. This is where it all comes from. It was a way to fuel your rituals, consecrate talismans, achieve visions, manifest your will on earth, et cetera, et cetera. And now, because this one

little line was in a book that he mentioned sex magic, the OTO was convinced that he's had stolen their sex magic and published it out for other people to read, uh, which is a very weird jump to take, but it's the one he's fucking took. And now confronted with the accusation that he stole the secret, Crowley comes back with the most astonishing and kindly, frankly, convenient defense imaginable. And this is Crowley's version of the story. So you just got to take it with a grain of salt. He looks at Reus and basically says, I didn't steal your secret. I discovered it all by myself through my own masturbation personal research yeah yeah by fucking sex magic just doing he's which i would believe turns out this dude is sex really rules and uh it's pretty

magical yeah he's like actually like sex is yeah like that's exactly how i see it as well like but again it's early 1900 Victorian mindset like talking about sex magic in a publication even an offhanded comment he's like alarming to people like it does like it does like you know, they pulled attention. So the fact that, you know, he approached it and whatever. But I agree. It's exactly that he was doing magical experimentation. It's very clear he's been doing it his whole life.

At some points, we're like, sex is kind of sick. Can I like do sex and magic? I got to say it's pretty cool. Yeah, I want to do sex and magic. Like we, like we've said in past episodes, this is strong. Like, how could I get girls to have sex with me vibes? like what is like oh yeah it's magic baby it's magic

for a while like girl my dick is magic like that's the vibe here that's the magic my magic wand is my dick yeah that's literally part of it that's actually it is a weird joke that's part of it yeah we'll get there we'll get there we'll get there we'll get there so he claimed he arrived at the same exact conclusion completely independently

and he thought it was own little discovery and because he's Alistair Crowley he just immediately published it for the world to see never imagining it was some central doctrine doctrine of some obscure German secret society. And Rius is just floored at this. His brain does a complete 180. He thinks there is no way this arrogant Englishman could have just stumbled upon our highest

secret by accident. He must be a true, he must be a true spiritual master, an adept so powerful, he received knowledge directly from the secret chiefs themselves. Of course. He just fucking's like, oh, well, then obviously you're just, I'm. Secret Chief. Yeah. That's like the, like, and we talked about the rapture people earlier today.

Like, they just flipped it around. He's like, oh, okay, so you're a secret chief then. Oh, sorry, I need water my throat. I don't know. Yeah, like far from remaining enemies, Rios immediately starts treating Crowley like a long lost brother. And this whole bizarre, angry confrontation ends with an even more bizarre offer. Rius now totally convinced of Crowley's genius, appoints him as the national grand mass.

as the National Grand Master General of the OTO for all of Great Britain and Ireland. That doesn't even make fucking sense, bro. But it's happened to him now twice. I know. And it like Parsons. I know. We'll get there. He was given the cool new title of Baphomet and was basically handed the keys to the

entire English speaking branch of the order. He was literally just given control of the English branch of the order. It's fucking crazy. And through a complete utter accident, Alastair Crowley had just fucking failed upwards into becoming the leader of a second major international magical organization. Like, God. It reminds me of cult leaders when they absorb falling apart cults.

Do you remember when we talked about in the Ugandan cult when we did that episode on the Ugandan cult tragedy, how that guy absorbed a smaller cult as like their leader. They just like came because they still needed to be in a cult, I guess. And it just fucking inflates this numbers, inflating his ego and truly, but it does truly give him more power and reach. And the first thing he does with this new toy is completely gut it

and rebuild it in his own image. He just fucking takes the OTO and he's like, well, mine now. And he saw the OTO as the perfect public facing vehicle for the book of the law. He rewrote its rituals, its constitution, its teachings to be in perfect alignment with his new. religion, Thelma. Under Crowley, the OTO was to become the official church of this new law. And now his grand strategy was complete. He had two organizations, each with a different purpose.

First, you had the AA. That was the spiritual core of this whole stick. It was the lonely, difficult, solitary path of the mystic and the monk. That was like his crew. Yeah. Yes. A hardcore system for individual spiritual attachment, attainment. Think of it as like magical special forces. Then you had the OTO. This was the outer social body of this construct. It was a fraternal organization with lodges, degrees, and social events designed to spread the law of the do what thou wilt to a wider, more worldly audience. This was the regular army, the public face of the movement. And we can even look back at Heaven's Gate when we recently did, where they created their little blitz campaigns of going in, giving speech one, which was the

outer version of the speech, easier to digest, easier to, like, hang on to. And if you came back and stuck around, you got the more hardcore version of their practices. And this is how directly how Crowley himself described the OTO's more practical applications for Jesse to read. Yeah, I know. The OTO is a body of initiates in whose hands are concentrated the wisdom and knowledge of the following bodies.

it represents a serious effort to organize the elite of humanity to bring the world to the knowledge of the law of tholema the order is in fact a training school for men and women of the wizarding world of harry potter yeah yeah it's a training school for men and wind of the wizarding world of harry potter he was building a magical version of the freemasons or the elks lodge with a whole lot more sex and a hawk headed war god. By 1914, Alastair Crowley was at the absolute apex of his career. He was the undisputed leader of the English occult scene, the master of two international magical orders, and the celebrated profit of a revolutionary new law

and he had just built his church, and then the world fucking caught on fire. Because when the Great War erupted across Europe in August of 1914, most people saw it as a political catastrophe. Crowley saw it as divine confirmation. The blood and fire that were about to consume

generation were in his mind the literal fulfillment of the prophecies in the book of the law that he wrote in 1904. This was the violent, messy birth of the aeon of Horace, just as the ghost of AWAS had foretold. So, while the young men of Britain were flocking to enlist and fight for king and country, their great occult prophet did something different. He packed his bags, and on October of 1914, bordered a ship to the U.S. He got the fuck out. Uh, And on the surface, this looks fucking super cowardly. The British press and his many enemies immediately branded him as a traitor and a pro-German, a reputation that would stick to him for the rest of his life.

And the more mundane truth is that he was also in serious financial trouble. His family fortune had been so wildly mismanaged. And for the first time in his life, Crowley was going broke. He saw America as the land of opportunity. And so, and I think a mix of cowardice because of the law of the war and also because he was running out of money, he arrived in New York and settled into the bohemian world of Greenwich Village, but the plan didn't quite work out. How old was he doing this?

Mid-30s. Okay. So like me. Yeah. Yeah. Like you're the, yeah, you like your age. You know, the youngest of the three of us. For sure.

The youngest person on the internet. And the whole internet. Yeah. We're kind of immortal on the internet if you think about it. Yes. The Laird-Bolskine was gone and replaced by a struggling writer living in cheap and cheap boarding houses. He tried to establish himself as a guru, but the American occult scene was largely unimpressed with him. He was just a nobody.

Nobody gave a fucking shit. And it was here broke in a drift in New York that he began the most controversial political chapter of his life. He started writing propaganda for the Germans. Whoops. Oops. whoops he got a job at a pro-german anti-British magazine called the fatherland whoops churning out whoops accident churning out violently anti-British articles he praised German militarism mocked the monarchy and called for an Irish rebellion on the face of it

this was just straight up treason as Alex might say whoopsie this is Alistair Crowley so it's never really that simple his defense which he maintained until he died is that the whole thing was a sham and this this is a this is a huge i just think you know this part of his life this is this is this is this podcasting phase oh yeah where he started as a cult podcast by the end of it he was like you know what fascism isn't so bad he said he said the n-word on there a couple times they came after him three years later he was like no no no no no no no what do you mean yeah but anyway we're having hitler on next week i've got questions hey hitler you ever do drugs uh what was it like to get high man would it surprise is you

to tell you that later on in his life, Alistair supposedly maybe actually did work for a government. I believe you because I know what you're going to say. We're a pipeline, right? Podcaster to government pipeline. Maybe that's what we're doing. You ever think about that's what we've been trying. Maybe that's what the whole Indian series was about.

No. No way too hip and cool. Come on. But this part of his life that we're about to get into is a hugely contested part of his life that historians like still debate about the merits of today. because he claimed he was, in fact, working as a secret agent for British intelligence. That his mission, he said, was to infiltrate the German propaganda machine and destroy it from the inside through pure ridicule. He would write articles that were so over the top, so absurdly and cartoonishly evil in their pro-German sentiment,

that they would backfire, discrediting the German cause in the eyes of the still neutral American public. That he wasn't a traitor. he was a patriotic troll working for the crown he was a four chaner working against the uh the patriotic troll is the saddest like most pathetic thing I've ever heard doesn't matter what time period

that's what they keep telling us everybody before they find out it was really like some fucking right wing person right exactly dude a patriot's probably a patriotic democratic leftist troll yeah obviously woke did it but the evidence

the problem the issue within life's debated is like the evidence is still very, very insanely ambiguous because there's no smoking gun document otherwise be settled, no like paste job from MI6 or anything, but the sheer absurdity of some of his articles is really hard to explain otherwise. For example, in one famous article proudly advised the German Navy to start sinking passenger ships without warning, especially they should start doing it on neutral American ones. Why? Because the resulting, quote, outburst of virile indignation would be, in his words, better than a thousand German victories. He was literally advocating for the sinking of

the Lusitania, but framing it in a way that sounded like a diabolical plot that could only serve to awaken the sleeping giant of like American America against Germany. He basically predicted Pearl Harbor, kind of. Kind of, yeah. Now, obviously, was that genuine to reason, uh, was it a brilliant piece of reverse psychological propaganda of the entire war? Probably not the historians like Richard B. Spence have made a compelling, although circumstantial case. I literally just point to him climbing a mountain to be like, no, no, no, he definitely meant kill those people on the boats. Right. Like this guy in the mountain was like, screw the week. I, who cares about these porters? Let them die. Anyway, I was, I said that about that.

because I was trying to, like, mess with big mountain. Big Mountain got so faced by that, bro. I showed them. Yeah. Like I said, the one historian that could find that really presents a pretty compelling, but still circumstantial case is Richard B. Spence. But, like, there's no way to know. And I'm still more on the side that I think he was just like,

he just spins his failures to successes whenever he can. While this whole spy versus traitor drama was in full. though his magical work still continued he spent time living as a hermit on an island in the hudson fucking river performing rituals and painting the core tenants of thelma on the rocks uh like cool man he was yeah he wasn't at work writing german articles wait dude cool when the war finally ended in nineteen 18 he was left in america his reputation in england now more toxic than ever and when alster crowley finally returned to england in 1919 there was no heroes welcome he was a pariah. His work

for German propaganda publications during the war had cemented his reputation as a traitor in England, and his already scandalous personal life made him a tabloid villain. He was broke, infamous, and for a man who craved disciples, largely alone. But he hadn't been idle in America amidst the poverty and the spy games. He had

found the one thing he believed he needed to reignite his prophetic mission. He had found his scarlet woman. The first scarlet woman, specifically. His first scarlet woman. How fucking, how fucking funny. And him returning to England in 1919, by the way, to me, is evidence he left England

because the war. Oh, thank you. 100%. He was just like, now, bye. The concept of the scarlet woman is central to the felon of religion. You have to understand this. This is not skippable for, this will be on the test at the end.

She's not just a girlfriend or a sidekick. She is a specific, magical office, we'll call it. the earthly incarnation of the goddess Babylon, the consort and counterpart to the Beast 666. To get the world-changing magic done, the beast needs his Babylon. And Crowley is the beast. And lacking the Scarlet Woman meant he couldn't do his world-changing magic completely.

He's got to have a babe, dude. He's got to have a fucking babe. And Crowley believed he had found her in a Swiss-American school teacher named Leah Hersig. Leah had been drawn into a circle in New York, and her interest quickly intensified into a white-hot devotion to him. She was intelligent, intense, and utterly committed to Crowley's vision through this thing. And through a series of rituals, he formally consecrated her as his scarlet woman, giving her the magical name, Alastriel, Alastriel, sorry, I'm pronouncing it wrong. Like an elf queen? Like, here you go.

Oh, cool, man. Alastriel. Alastriel. or someone from a what's that show or I guess it's actually the comic but the one with the dream with dream with the Morpheus man yeah Sam it's definitely a sad man character yeah on Australia the rituals the real the rituals included a lot of like channeling beings a lot of hours of doing like precise movements around an ingram on the ground blood drawing and a fuck ton of sex mixed into it like just constantly throughout it um and with his

prophesized partner finally by his side he felt his mission kicking back into high gear it was no longer enough just to write about philema it was time to build a living breathing laboratory for it for like the third time he envisioned a new kind of community this magical college again or anti monastery where the law of do without willth could be lived in its purest form and he would call this place the abbey of thelima looking for a location that was cheap remote and far from the prying eyes of the english authorities he settled on the island of sicily in 1920 with leah hersig and their newborn daughter he rented a small single story stone farmhouse on a hillside overlooking the ancient fishing village of sephaloo this rustic run this rustic sun baked and by honestly all accounts

deeply unsanitary villa would become the most famous and infamous magical commune of the 20th century. Life at the Abbey was a bizarre experiment in contradictions. On one hand, it was a place of intense spiritual discipline. The day was often structured around sun adorations, yoga, meditation, and then complex magical rituals with Crowley as the head abbot training his disciples. But on the other hand, it was also a place of absolute unrestrained personal freedom, which often looked a lot like pure hedonistic chaos. The only rule again was do what thou wilt. This meant that all sexual expression was considered sacred. Drug use, particularly heroin, cocaine and opium, was rampant through this place. Treated not just recreationally, but these drugs were

treated as a sacrament, a chemical key to unlocking consciousness. I, heroin and cocaine sounds like the worst possible things so you'd want to do to fucking explore your consciousness. But what do I know? I've only done fucking, like, maybe consciousness has been like much less explored at that time in general. So maybe they just like need to go like, maybe nobody had ever gone buck wild like that on that stuff.

I say that about all the terrible things I do too. Yeah, like, yeah, yeah, exactly. I ate those two chili cheese burritos from Taco Bell yesterday to do enlighten my conscience. I did that too, just so you know. So I should do that before I met in the way that's us caught up in the moment and ordered two chili cheese burritos and didn't care that later that would be a problem. No, no. The real question is, did you get a caramel apple and impanata as well?

First off, absolutely. Let's not pretend. That was my order. Not smart. I just ordered off that special menu. Yeah, decades, baby. Decades. Yeah, dude.

A little brandy over Taco Bell in the middle of it. you're cruelly. Talk about blow your ass out. Yeah, for his house, which was the now in the temple, the centerpiece of the house was the temple, rather, which Crowley called the Chambore de Cochemaar or Room of Nightmares. He personally covered the walls in his own art, a series of vibrant, explicit, and often terrifying murals depicting the gods and demons of Thelma intertwined in sex, birth, and death. It was very psychedelic, pornographic, magical manifesto painted directly under the house itself.

Did you see the new Superman? Oh, yeah. You know that when they're doing the Hall of Justice and they got that painting at the top of like the history of superheroes? Yeah. It's like that for Thelma. Okay. Okay.

Like a beautiful illustrative tapestry. Yeah, but it's less like in the movie and more like, uh, I don't know. You went on Rule 34 and you typed in mural at Hall of Justice, Superman, 2025, Rule 34. And then it's just, I'm there all just bang it. Yeah, yeah. It'd be way closer to that. You're completely correct.

Yeah, if you will, the sales pitch for this thing. This is an expert. I'm going to let you read this, Alex. This is an excerpt from a letter written by one of his most famous disciples, a man by the name Raul Loveday. And this is a. I'd love it. This is like what the Abbey was kind of like. It's like a sales pitch of the Abbey.

The Abbey of Telemah is a house, my dear, where each person does his or her own will. The work is a training of the mind, and I'm the most devoted of all the pupils of the master. Here we do not talk. We act. We do not believe. We know. I am, in fact, a kind of novice in a new and better sort of religion. There you go.

That's the pitch for fucking joining the abbey. Nice and idealic, right? Hell yeah. But obviously, this idealic place wasn't super idealic. The house was filthy. The residents were often malnourished and high on something or mixes of stuff. And the constant psychological pressure, and this sounds like a little Manson-y, right? Like, and the constant psychological pressure of living under the thumb of a guru as powerful, mean and manipulative of Crowley could be.

took a toll on these people. The Abbey was a beacon for seekers, but it was a dream on the verge of becoming a nightmare. Remember, he named it the room of nightmares. And in 1922, the couple who would prove to be the catalyst for the Abbey's complete destruction arrived from England. Their names were from the letter initially,

Raoul Lovday, and his wife, Betty May, which is not, you know, a name that feels like belongs in Thelma at this place. Raoul was the archetypical Crowley disciple. He was a brilliant, handsome, idealistic young man from Oxford who had discovered Crowley's journal, the equinox and became completely enchanted. He saw Crowley as a true guru and the Abbey as the gateway to enlightenment, like real true believer stuff.

And his wife, Betty May, however, was not a true believer. But she was a vivacious former nightclub dancer, far more worldly and pragmatic than her husband. And she was deeply skeptical of Crowley, seeing him as a manipulative charlatan. And she was immediately horrified by what she found in Sicily when they went. In her eyes, the Abbey was no holy place. This was a filthy, dilapidated farmhouse where people were just fucking and doing drugs. And the residents were not enlightened addicts at all. They were just a collection of drug-addled, malnourished weirdos under the thumb of this charismatic tyrant.

Can we just really quickly talk about the fact that it took a nightclub dancer. who I guarantee it is though. She was probably hot, it took her a person who very clearly has dealt with like dudes being too drunk or the nightlife of a big city or other dancers being on drugs. Like she has real world experience,

not like a rich kid pretending to be into, you know, magic. She lived a life, had like some like school of hard knocks, learning and walked in this room and was like this is some bitch shit like she looked at it was like 0.2 seconds and was like I love that. I think it's amazing. This was like this is so stupid. It's always the wife of like a believer

to be like what are you doing dude? Like what is going on? Yeah. I think that's so funny that it took like the realest person in the room to be like grow up. This is seriously this is what we're doing. Yep. I love it. So goddamn much. Obviously the tension was fucking immediate. Love Day threw himself, though, into the grueling magical regimen with the fervor of a true believer, a convert, taking drugs and following Crowley's every command. Betty May just looked on with growing horror as the days passed.

The most infamous story from this period comes directly from her later tell-all expose. According to her, there was a ritual in which her husband Raoul was allegedly made to sacrifice a cat as an offering to the son. Now, this is Betty's version, and she had every reason to make Crowley look as monstrous as possible, but I fully believe it's true. It gives you kind of a taste of the stories that kind of would later, would be starting to emerge out of the household into rumors amongst the public. Life at the Abbey was obviously also taking a physical toll. The diet was poor. The sanitation was non-existent, and the drug use was constant. And in the winter of 1923, Raoul Loveday, weakened from his lifestyle.

drank from a contaminated mountain spring and fell violently ill with what was likely acute enteric fever. Damn. A disease that is similar to typhoid. Jesus. This was the kind of crisis right there. That's like, died on the Oregon Trail kind of shit.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. This was a crisis point for them. A proper doctor likely could have saved him if early enough. But Crowley, obviously. and his huge ego and his magical arrogance believe that all illness had a spiritual root and discouraged modern medicine.

So instead of taking Love Day to a hospital, Crowley treated him with his own brand of magical healing, performing rituals at his bedside as the young man's condition grew progressively worse. I love that. Don't love that. It's kind of like what, uh, no, Tim Apple did. Not Tim Apple though, you know what I mean.

Tim Apple. The guy who, uh, who, who, created Apple. Steve Jobs? Yes. Steve Jobs. This whole thing was like, I'll figure out a way to do this without medicine. And they just died. On February 16th, 1923, Raulov Day died in agony in the Abbey. Betty May was now, who stuck with him the entire time, was now grieving after being traumatized and a terrified widow, she just immediately fled back to England with a story to tell. tell everybody. And she found a very willing audience in the sensationalist British tabloids, of course.

She sold her story to the Sunday Express, which for the next several weeks ran a series of lurid, explosive articles exposing the satanic secrets of Crowley's sex death cult in Sicily. And the stories were a perfect storm of public outrage filled with tales of black magic, forced drug addiction and sexual depravity. And they were almost certainly exaggerated, but they were based on a kernel of truth that made them all the more terrifying. This media firestorm is what permanently cemented Crowley's public image as the wickedest man in the world.

And this is an actual, Jesse, in your best, like, 19, like, not, no, like transatlantic accent. This is a headline from that time about what was going on there. New Sin in Sicily. English girls' story of a monster. Orgy's in Abbey. Splash, right on a toilet. This scandal became an international incident. The stories of a depraved English cult practicing black magic on Italian soil eventually reached the ears of Italy's new leaders at the time, a new leader at the time, rather, a man obsessed with projecting an image of a clean, orderly, and morally superior and upright new Roman Empire, Benito Mussolini.

The other Hitler. Yeah, yeah. He was not amused. He saw Crowley's abbey as a stain on his new fascist Italy, a den of foreign degeneracy that had to be purged. In April of 1923, the Italian government issued a deportation order. Alistair Crowley and his remaining followers were formally and unceremoniously expelled from Sicily. Kind of badass to get thrown out by Mussolini.

I got to say it. I'll say it again. Getting thrown out by Mussolini for having a sex cult. Yeah, it's kind of. It's kind of badass. Kind of hardcore. Yeah. It's kind of sick.

Yeah. The great experiment, though, with that was over. And the Abbey of Thelma, this quote unquote utopian community that was meant to be the cradle of a new civilization was unceremoniously shut down. The walls covered in their pornographic magic murals painted by Crowley himself were whitewashed by the horrified locals. and Crowley was once again an outcast, but this time he wasn't just a pariah in the small world of occultism.

He was now an international villain. The dream had died and the beast was once again a wanderer. The expulsion from Sicily marked the beginning of a long and very slow decline for him. For the better part of the next decade, Crowley drifted through Tunisia, France, and Germany, often broke and in failing health, but this was not a period of inactivity either for him. after the spectacular public failure of trying to live Thelma, Crowley turned inward. He dedicated himself to building the intellectual and theological foundation

of his new religion still. It was during these years of exile that he wrote some of his most important works. He began his massive autobiography, which is one of the sources that we're using, the confessions, a monumental attempt to seize control of his own narrative, his own rebranding, as I talked about in the first episode in a lot of ways. he was no longer just like a prophet he was now becoming in his mind a theologian the saint paul to his own strange christ well the saint paul to his own strange christ is

another great uh image to think about yeah but it's true like that's how i saw it like in my mind and while crowley is wandering around europe broke and infamous he's starting to think about his legacy he gets obsessed with this prophecy in the book of the law that talks about a magical who would further his mission, he needs an heir, and for a while he believes he's found him in an unassuming accountant from Vancouver, Canada. This guy's name was Charles Stansfeld-Jones, who went by the magical name Frater Akkad. In 1916, while studying the book of the law, Akkad believed he had a massive breakthrough. He did some complex Kabbalistic analysis and claimed he had discovered the book's secret key.

He excitedly wrote to Crowley to announce his discovery. And Crowley was absolutely electrified by getting this letter. He saw this not as a student's interpretation, but as a divinely inspired confirmation that he was still doing the right thing. This quiet, brilliant man in Crowley's mind in Canada, he believed, was the prophesized child that he'd been looking for. Crowley officially hailed Frotter Akad as the magical son, an heir of the beast 666.

and here's a diary entry from the time that Crowley talks about how excited he is about this. Alex, all you. The key to the whole riddle has been found. This child, Fra Ashad, has been the seer. I'm quite overwhelmed by the stupendous and terrifying truth. This is the most important event

in the history of the planet for probably 10,000 years. Which is, you know, around agriculture wheel, you know, that kind of thing. I wouldn't, you know, I don't agree with him, but hang to each their own. A Canadian accountant doing magic math, dude, that's what we're looking at here. The man had absolutely no chill. He, like almost every close relationship of Crowley's life, it was destined, obviously, to end in a bitter divorce, too.

Because as time went on, Brotter Akad's own journey began to diverge from Crowley's. He started developing his own interpretations and even claimed to have ushered in his own new aeon, because of course he fucking did. And obviously for Crowley, like every goddamn thing else in his life, this was an intolerable betrayal. There was only one prophet of the aeon, him. The son was now a rival. And in a fit of rage, Crowley turned on the man he had once hailed as his divine successor.

He officially excommunicated him, denounced him as a black magician, and declared him a demented drone, and a total failure. It was a tragic and repeating pattern at this point. Crowley desperately craved a true partner, but as his, his, fucking huge ego could not tolerate anyone who might one day challenge his authority and it kind of sounds honestly very familiar to the narcissists in power

today. The egos will have like are in the same room for too long. They start fucking fighting with each other and have fallouts. And this toxic pattern of needing a partner while also needing to completely dominate them was never clear than the man who was arguably his most important magical partner ever.

A young poet named Victor Newberg. Newberg was in a lot of ways the perfect Crowley disciple, brilliant, sensitive, sensitive guy from Cambridge, captivated by Crowley's charisma. Their first meeting is like a classic anecdote from Crowley. There where upon being introduced to the young poet, immediately challenged him to a magical contest to see who could write the better poem to the God Mercury and Newberg from that

moment on was hooked. Their relationship, that's all it took, dude. Want to have a magic poem battle? Best poem to Mercury. Do we just become best friends? I think we just became best friends and they just start angrily writing. Their relationship was intense, productive,

often incredibly cruel too. Crowley saw Newberg as a powerful natural psychic like seeing eye dog for magical exploration in a way. But Crowley's training often resembled outright sadistic abuse. He would force Newberg into grueling exercises that would exhaust him, humiliate him in public, time and again,

and push him to the brink of his sanity, all under the guise of breaking down his ego. together they decided they were ready for the ultimate magical challenge in the Kabbalistic system there is a great terrifying gulf that separates the world of man from the world of the divine this gulf is called the abyss this also exists in vampire the masquerade is the same kind of thing to cross it is the most dangerous trial a magician can undertake to succeed you must confront and master the dweller in that gulf a demonic entity that represents pure, mindless chaos, and disintegration.

And the demon's name is Choronzan, or Karanzen. Choranzan. Choron. Choronz on, you know, whatever, however say that name right there. Koranzan's only purpose is to shatter your ego and disperse your consciousness into a meaningless void. To face him is to face total annihilation of the self. And Crowley decided it was time.

In November, he and Victor Newburgh, would travel into the Sahara Desert, the physical embodiment of the abyss, if you ask me, and they would summon this demon into a physical vessel. And this was not like a theatrical exercise to them. This was the magical equivalent of trying to wrestle with like a fucking black hole. Here is Crowley's own description of the entity that they were about to willingly invite into their presence for Jesse to read. You love this shit.

You know you do. The name of the dweller in the abyss is Corazon, but he is not really an individual. The abyss is empty of being. It is filled with all possible forms, each equally devoid of substance. And so, each evil in the only true sense of the word, that is meaningless but malignant, and so far as it craves to become real. A lot of stuff is meaningless but malignant.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, in other words, he's basically saying it's not a who, it's a what. Embodiment of pure, meaningless chaos, a cosmic kind of cancer that just wants to become real by tearing down everything that has meaning. And in November,

Alistair and Victor are deep in the Sahara Desert near Bao Sa'ad Saada in Algeria. I'm sorry, I'm butchering that shit. This is their temple. The setup is simple. Newberg, the gifted psychic, is the vessel. He is going to sit inside a magical triangle drawn in the sand,

the designated parking spot for manifesting the spirit, and offers himself up for the demon to possess. Crowley, the master magician that he is, sits outside in the protective circle, armed with his holy book and his dagger. His job is to summon the demon, control it, interrogate it, and then... Slend his throat.

Well, banish it, close enough. So you got the scene of two. men alone in the middle of the largest desert on earth. One is about to willingly, in his mind, let himself be possessed by the ultimate demon of chaos, while the other prepares to confront it with nothing but a circle in the sand for protection. And the stakes were absolute. Failing this is instant death.

So, in the vast emptiness, Crowley began the ritual. He stood within his protective circle and started chanting the Anachian calls, which is a strange kind of guttural, angelic language that was said to open the gates between worlds. He was calling to the home of Karanzan, according to his magical record, the effects were immediate and terrifying. First, the demon manifested through Nureberg's mouth. But the voice of Karanzan wasn't some single booming demonic tone. It was a torrent of chaos. It would flatter Crowley one moment and spit vile insults the next.

It would speak profound philosophical truths and then immediately follow them with complete gibberish. It was a voice of pure dispersion and its only goal was to speak. to break Crowley's concentration and shatter his mind. Here is a direct account of the demon's words spoken through Hitt, Newburgh, as Crowley transcribed them. So who wants to be, I'm going to let you choose. Who wants to be the demon? I want to be the demon. Oh, shit.

There you go. That's what you need to see. You're a demon being channeled through Nuremberg. I am a mighty serpent, and my name is Babylon. Oh, thou that art so beautiful, come unto me. All is joy. I am the lust and the joy and the bliss and the disillusion. But I am not I.

I am not. I am all. Oh, I am a wicked cortisone. I have no soul. I will get out of the triangle and have you. I am a beautiful girl. I want you. I am a fool.

Ha, ha, ha. I love the idea of, like, this poet, Newburgh's being like, I am a beautiful girl and I want you. Just like at Crowley and Crowley just standing there like, back demon, back, I say. He's like, oh, when you did. Lightning bolt, lightning bolt. Vampire. Fireball. Magic missile.

Magic missile. The demon then began a full-scale psychological assault. Taunton Crowley with his deepest insecurities and failures, trying to lure him out of the circle with promises of ultimate power. All the while, the physical body of Victor Newburgh was writhing in the sand, his face contorting into a thousand different shapes. and then the attack became physical. The possessed body of Newburgh grabbed handfuls of sand

and began throwing it at the circle. Pocket sand. Yeah, at the circle. Pocket sanding the circle itself, trying to erase the protective line. Now, according to the laws of magic, if that line is broken, the magician is then left completely exposed.

The demon screamed through Nureberg's lips. The circle is broken. I am coming for you. Oh, shit. I have coming for you. are you and in this moment of ultimate crisis Crowley decided he had to act he took his magical dagger and according to his own account

stabbed the possessed Newberg in the hand physically subduing him then in the most dramatic moment of the ritual he left the relative safety of a circle to physically wrestle the demon possessed man back into the triangle and I don't know how that works because you can just go back in

yeah like that's what I'm okay like He's like, fucking, I'm getting out of the circle, and I'm wrestling you. And they started wrestling in the sand so he could try to wrestle Newberg back into the triangle who had stepped out. But according to his own logic and magic, that would should immediately kill him, but it's not. And so he's wrestling him in the sand in the middle of the Sahara Desert by themselves. And during this chaotic struggle, one man battling what he believed to be the embody make of cosmic chaos itself. Finally, after the struggle, Crowley overpowered him. and he completed the ritual,

forcing the demon to give it secrets and then banishing it with a final exhausting series. What do you mean complete the ritual? He was able to subdue it back into the triangle. Yeah. Get the demon to give this, interrogate the demon like he planned, interrogate him, get secrets,

and then banish it with a final exhausting series of incantations and banished it. He had stared in his mind, he had stared into the abyss, bought its guardian hand to hand, in the sand of material plane and somehow he had won. So Newburgh got stabbed in the hand a little bit

I'm assuming is what happened when that fight happened. That's what it sounds like. And when it was over, the two men were left exhausted. They were physically and psychically drained, traumatized by the ordeal. And Newberg in particular was horrified

by the experience of having been a vessel for such a malevolent and chaotic force. He also was stabbed. He was also stabbed in the hand. But for Crowley, this was the ultimate victory. He believed that he had faced the dweller in the abyss and won. He had confronted the ultimate principle of chaos and imposed his will upon it. In the language of his own magical system, he had successfully crossed the abyss.

He had attained the grade of a master of the temple. He was no longer just a prophet in waiting. He was a fully realized spiritual master. The shy, rebellious boy from a pious home had gone to the edge of insane. insanity stared into it and had not blinked. And when Alistair Crowley and Victor Newberg finally stumbled out of the Sahara Desert in December, they were changed men. Newberg was psychically scarred, of course, but Crowley in his own mind was triumphant. He returned to London no longer as a seeker or a student. He returned in his mind an actual master. This was

the beginning of the most productive and powerful period of his life. Convinced of his own supreme attainment, he threw himself into the work of building his new magical kingdom again with a renewed almost messianic fervor. His journal of the equinox became the single most important occult publication in the world and he was for a time untouchable. The years that followed were a direct result of like his acceptance of all of this. And his, the next question for him was, what does a man who believes he has conquered both heaven and hell who mastered the void do

next? And so we end this chapter of his life with Crowley at the absolute peak of this new wave up. And as we've already seen, the answer was that he tried to build that heaven on earth. And though a small squalid attempt at first in Sicily, in Sicily with his abbey

of Thelma, would become still the most notorious and tragic figure in the occult world at that time. It was where his grand philosophy of absolute freedom collided with messy brutal realities of human nature and where people like Jack Parsons and Elron Hubbard come into play. Natural pick back up next week for the third and final part of Alistair Crowley. This could be a great like movie. I would love to watch like a big dumb movie of this. This got to be right. This got to be a Crowley movie. Or like maybe like

a Crowley like you know what's the sex education? Remember that show? Yeah. Yeah. It was like about sex experts like I would love to see like a long form unfolding of this stupidity I I'm curious before we go on our last part next week how you boys feeling about Crowley overall how like what do you feel about the man obviously he's like a bit of a shithead but I think I kind of dig what he's I think I'm picking up what he's putting down I like I guess yeah I get it's very I think I feel similarly I in no way I in no way condone any of the bad things that he has done but I understand the gist of what he was saying and doing let's put it that way yeah yeah yeah yeah you too jessing feel similarly uh I mean he seems like a goober

to me but like I I I'm more fascinated by the fact that someone who can so clearly be like kind of an elitist asshole still creates an aura of he was in the dark arts and he is this you know Like, there's very clearly a mystique about him that the way we're hearing it doesn't ring true to me at all. But I'm positive in the time, the mystique is what led people to him. But like, looking back at it through the lens of history, I'm like, this guy was an idiot. And sometimes the most profound idiots cause the biggest waves in history. It's some big ideas.

He had some big ideas. You know what I mean? You have big ideas. Yeah. uh we're off to go to minnesota at patreon.com slash illuminati pod thank you guys so much for being here uh for this long dissertation we'll be back for one of the final part next week i'm so excited i've always wanted to do this it's been so much fun um yeah we appreciate you we love you we'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Bye.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Joluminaity 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? Karen's Hill and Bud Spencer. 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 duos Cheech and Charles 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 I'm a deep I want my body good I want to eliminate me I want my mind because

I want to look in a need I want to look at me 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. I'm