Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 318: Aleister Crowley Part 3 - Et Tu Poupée?

Episode Date: October 5, 2025

It's the END of the Aleister Crowley series on Chilluminati. Mike, Jesse and Alex learn the juicy details of his end of life magical war against Hitler. 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

Oh, hey, how's it going? Amazing. I just finished paying off all my debt with the help of the Credit Counseling Society. Whoa, seriously? I could really use their help. It was easy. I called and spoke with a credit counselor right away. They asked me about my debt, salary, and regular expenses,

gave me a few options, and help me along the way. You had a ton of debt. And you're saying Credit Counseling Society helped with all of it? Yep, and now I can sleep better at night. When debt's got you, you've got us. Give Credit Counseling Society a call today. Visit no more debts.org. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chulamani podcast, episode 318.

As always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, joined by my very own Alster Crowley and Newburgh themselves, in case you don't remember, that's the guy he went to the desert with, put Karanzan on the demon in, fought with and stabbed in the hand, and then they went home. Do you say Karanza? Karanzan. Karan. Karan, that's right. Yeah, yeah.

Karanzan? Jesse and Alex. Is that a thing? Is Karanzon a thing? It is for him. For him, it was. Caronzon, dude. It's a, I feel like I know that from Super Metro.

It's a demon. It's a demon for him. Samis is half Karanzan, half human. That's, yep, correct. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, same thing. Karanzan is a blood demon that must be defeated towards the end of the fan. Oh, this is old school runescape.

He's an old school runescape demon. I thought you were about to tell me the, what actually Crowley thought it was. Like, I thought we're about to be like, Like only three lightning bolt spells and a frost spell can defeat him. Thankfully, through his mind powers, he developed the highest level.

You learned that on page 309 of his autobiography is that's what can defeat Karan's on. Do you think time out, do you think if I traveled back in time and went and saw Crowley, but only talked in the lingo of final fantasy spells, he would be like, yes, well, I'm fluent in Faraga,

thundaga, and no blizzaga. I'd be like, one of those? I'd be like, um, the strongest of all the spells. I think just being an improviser for like several years, I could like just go hold my own in a wizard battle without any prep. Yeah, but Alastair Crowley is like into improv like Michael Scott from the offices to improv. It's about him exclusively what he wants to do.

And if you produce your own, you're like, it's the most powerful. Oh, no. I would join. I would be like, your powers. my brain. I can't fight you. Please let me learn under you. And then I just like,

you know, join his weird sex call, right? I assume that's what this is. Well, we've established. It's just a sex. Yeah,

we're going to get into that a little bit more today. I mean, they got shut down by Mussolini, right? Like, yeah, yeah, we're going to,

we're going to, so like last episode, uh, we kind of ended off with him getting kicked out of Sicily, but I cut out a lot of like the inner Abby life because we were running on time. So we're going to visit the Abby life. sign to some time slices of the abbey life right now we're gonna we're gonna have to time slice to the abbey yeah yeah well everybody here liz is time slicing themselves to patreon dot com oh my god we're

gonna take a little slice a slice of your time if we will to talk about our time our getting us a little slice of your slice if you know what i mean and that's as far as i'm gonna explain anymore uh just support us on patreon dot com slash chelunit pod it's a great place to go you get a mini sewed every time we put out an episode that is like usually a good another chunk of us talking about usually something that you're wondering if we're ever going to talk about from the news you know like it's pretty good uh ron popcorn's on there you get art from mel you get all kinds of great stuff boys did you see neal breen has announced he finished filming his latest movie hold on we can't watch the no no no no we can't watch the latest one you know we have to watch the sequel to the previous one yep yep we do have to

Faithful findings or there's a sequel. We gotta watch that. We can wait. That's, shout to Cade, wherever my man's at. We can take a few more movies off, right?

We could take like a few breaks, like watch a few other movies with before we go back to Neil Breen. No, no, no, no, let's get it out of the way. Get it out of the way. Give it off like a Band-Aid.

We just, we got a marathon the Breen movies for the next couple of up and popcorn. I'll bring the drinks. Mostly for me. Hell yes. There's just, there's so many movies out there, Mathis,

that are like, trust, I know this is going to sound crazy, but. there are like really great films out there like there's movies that will move you emotionally physically spiritually uh and you're at the end you're like in game good yeah just like spiderman came back in just like end game and you're going to go wow i'm so glad i watch that this is america's ass well hold on hold on hold on hold on you know how sometimes shows podcasts whatever will be like hey if you support

us on patreon to do this kickstar thing or whatever they will have a goal and that goal will be some amazing like, oh, yeah, we'll do the. What if our reward to the fans is if you're here in L.A., we rent like a tiny theater and anyone who can come can come and we'll do a live pop-board. And the first come first serve, we watch a Neil Brie movie on the screen. It's a great idea. I adore that idea.

And it's so fucking doable. I bet you we could get Neil to like pop up. Like where does he live? Like he has to be in L.A., right? Or like in the desert space and time as far as I'm going to. standing on a plateau in the Wiley Coyote Desert, like Dr. Manhattan. Yeah. Yeah, the next one, the sequel is called Cade the Tortured Crossing.

So that's the next one. I can't wait. That's what we're watching. Oh, my God, dude. Yes. The trilogy finally ends. Is that what we're saying? No, that's the sequel.

That's a sequel. But there's other movies that happen in between. Oh, so, okay. So it's a verse. It's a, it's a, it's a brein verse. Oh, yeah, just those two movies. Oh, okay. Faithful findings.

I don't know that I'd say you're all in the Breenverse. No, just those two are. What about double down? What was that one called? The one where you put the two chickens on the outside and the cheese? I was going to say, yeah, yeah, that's a KFC joint. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was it?

Was it called double down? I don't remember. I think so. It's, man, I don't. Don't even try to guess. It doesn't. It is called double down. Yeah, double down is correct.

All right. Yeah. I think that's the one we watched, right? Where he has the vest with the medals on. I think so. That was the last one. who watch, I think of his. I think so horrible.

One of his earliest ones. The one where he takes over Las Vegas from a car in the desert. The hacker. When he's the hacker guy in the desert, a lot and he has like four laptops that are not plugged into anything at all off. Yeah. Oh,

fantastic. Please go. So we've watched like three or four now. No, two or three Neil Breen movies. You're wondering what the hell it is that we, that just happened here, this conversation.

You know what you should do? That's Neil Brin, maybe. You should just turn around and walk away and not look any further into it. And especially, don't sit down and watch one of his films. Because they're not good. I respectfully disagree.

All right, boys. Are you ready for the third and final episode of Alastair Crowley today? Am I ever excited? I want to say a big shout to everybody for the kind words. I appreciate it. This has been one of those topics I've been reading about for years and years and years. And finally, I can info dump at people because this is the only place in life I could ever do this.

I don't know if I could talk to Alster about Alster Crowley for eight hours total. anybody else if we weren't doing a podcast about it. So thank you for letting me do this and supporting and listening to the show. He's a fascinating dude who really has made bizarre waves in history, whether people like it or not. What doesn't mean he was a good dude by any stretch, as we will see. Interesting, dude is the better way. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, very interesting. Yeah. And if you remember last episode, we left off with Alistair Crowley getting his ass literally kicked out of Cicely by the fascist dictator. Benito Mussolini.

And before that, we talked about how he went out into the desert with the poet Nuremberg. And they did this giant ritual to summon Karanzan into the poet's body. And then he got out of the circle. But even though he was the circle that was supposed to contain him. And then they wrestled in the desert for a bit before Alster Crowley stabbed him in the hand. And then he banished the demon. Then he did his Abbey stuff. And we talked about the Abbey a little bit as he got kicked out.

but I cut a lot kind of as we're doing the episode because of time. So in this episode, we're going to time slice the abbey and just look at what life really was like in the abbey. So you understand this man was not living like a luxurious lifestyle in any way and how kind of like gross it was. Also talk about the rituals themselves because we didn't really talk too much about the rituals last episode either in detail. Oh, that's right. We learned about the woman who was over it. Yes, we did. My favorite character.

We're going to learn a lot more about her and why she is the best. why he needed more than one red woman. Yeah. So yeah, before we're still, go back, we're going to fully deep dive here into what that went to the abbey because this is, you know, the abbey is where he got the reputation as the wickedest man in the world. So it's back in 1919, World War I is over. Crowley's been doing whatever the hell he was doing in America.

And like, we could do an entire episode about the shit he was doing on in America for years. It's just go read the books. Just if you want to know more about this. man, go read the books. And he, this is where he found the pro his prophesized magical partner, the woman that we learned about last week, Leah Hersig. Now, Leah was a Swiss American school teacher, which sounds normal until you realize she like willingly signed up to be Crowley's scarlet woman and basically his high priestess in

his cult of magic and his magical sex partner, if you will. She called herself, self, the ape of Toff, which, uh, you know, I guess is a, kind of creative. Wait, what? The ape of toth? Eighth of ape of toth. Yeah, straight up.

Like, APE. Like, you know, I'm an aim. Yeah. I'm an ape of toth. This is why I need to go back and cover this stuff. You know, yeah, we're all apes. She called it with Leah by his side,

the ape of top. Crowley decides he's done just writing about Thelima and his whole do what thou wilt religion. And now it's time to actually build this thing. And this is where he wanted to create what he called an anti- monastery. It's like a monastery, but for sex, magic and drugs. Just like strapped. Yeah. Yeah. Wips, straps, drugs everywhere. A whole lot of nastiness

that needed to be cleaned up and never was as we'll learn in a little bit. Obviously, like, like as a as a template for how to like do and practice bad activities, like morally, you know, whatever bad activities, societally bad activities. it's pretty like funny idea like you know like you go to a place and you like go be really good in a place and you go to a place and you go be really bad in a place there's something kind of funny about that and it makes me think about like how in some countries like drug drug addicts can like go somewhere and do the drugs you know because it's like in a safe place yeah yeah where they have actual safe places a clean shit set up for them yeah exactly the downside of this

of the idea of this so far the idea of it absolutely Absolutely. But like Jesse put last week, this is kind of like a magical Harry Potter college where you would go learn and live out the law of thelma. Well, except like you don't have a broomstick or natural magic like shooting out of your wands and you don't like vanish the shit out of your bowels. Unless you consider jizz magic and your dick a wand. Which he did. Which as we learned, he did. Absolutely. I'll go on the record of saying, I do.

And then, then yes, there was magic. and magic wands being fired off all the time. Wow. For him, like obviously where you said, where are you going to set up this occult sex temple? This is where he found the cheap remote and far away from English authorities area. And Crowley picked Sicily. So in 1920, he and Leah and their new born daughter at the time,

in case you remember, yeah, they had a kid. And they rent the small, single story stone farmhouse on a hillside overlooking, uh, this little fishing village called Cepaloo. And like, When I say farmhouse, I want you to picture like the most run down, sunbaked, cockroach infested kind of shack that you can think of because it was more of a shack than an actual quote unquote farmhouse. By literally everyone's account, this place was deeply unsanitary, like monumentally nasty.

This was supposed to be the cradle of his new civilization, mind you. A cradle of filth. A fatal of filth. Sorry. A cradle of filth. A fatal of krillth. Are you okay? No,

I'm just, I don't know of a Star Trek episode or something. The fatal of krillth. The fatal of krillth. Yeah, this was supposed to be where his future of humanity was going to be forged in this crusty-ass farmhouse in Sicily. And life at the Abbey was,

like, contradictory isn't really a good enough word. On one hand, Crowley ran this place like a legitimate, spiritual, magical school boot camp. The day was super structured, sun adorations at dark.

on, yoga, meditation, hours of complex, rich magic rituals. And Crowley was the head of the abbot, the master that was training all these people and the mysteries of Thelma. And he was super serious and very, very disciplined. But then on the other hand, the only actual rule, if you remember, is do what thou wilt, which in practice meant that it was- actualize your destiny, basically. Yeah, but in practice, it meant this place was absolute pure unrestrained chaos.

and I like mean chaos. All sexual expression was considered sacred. Any orientation, any configuration, any kink. It didn't matter how like extreme it was. And mind you, do what you want. I'm not saying don't do what you want, but there's also. And then call me. There's also kids living in this place.

Yeah, no. Yeah, call Jesse. Like, hey, no king shaming, you know, whatever. Do like fucking weird. Yeah. I won't judge, but I'd like to know that. Yeah. Jesse's just a scholar of the sexual magic.

That's what I've told people for years. Just a scholar. Just here to watch. No one. And much like Crowley, most people are pissed at me for it. Like, don't stop that. So you get what it's like to be. Yeah, no.

That's why I'm interested. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And mixed into all the sex magic stuff was drug use, like rampant drug use, heroin, heroin, cocaine, opium, mesclin, whatever they could get their hands on was being used. And probably didn't treat any of it like partying either. Like these were, he called sacraments, the drugs.

And these, these sacraments were for exploring consciousness and achieving higher states, very spiritual, super holy, all very wildly illegal. And I just meant, again, I said it last episode. I don't know how you explore consciousness doing cocaine and heroin. Like, it doesn't sound like in a kind of consciousness. Not trying hard enough, dude. I guess not. In the center plate piece of.

this whole temple shack Crowley called the Chamber de Chamar the room of nightmares and he personally

painted the walls remember of this room floor to ceiling murals that he spent months working on and they are

like tasteful Renaissance these were vibrantly explicit genuinely disturbing images of the gods

and demons of Delima all tangled up together having sex giving birth dying being killed

being reborn like this is like Like, you know, somebody had a psychotic break and like started painting on their, their walls kind of shit. And at the core of everything happening at the Abbey obviously was the sex magic. Now, you know, it wasn't just orgies with a fancy name. Crowley actually developed this into a weirdly technical structured system. The idea was that the sexual energy, and this is going to sound familiar from our chaos magic series,

specifically the moment of orgasm, generates this massive amount of power. that you could magically harness and direct toward a specific magical goal. You could use it to have visions, receive prophecies, consecrate magical objects, manifest outcomes in the real world. It was like a like a magic engine and sex was the fuel to rev the engine up. You know, when you say that, the first thing I think of is like a really, I don't know if it's a Seinfeld episode, but like a 90s sitcom in one. which they join a sex cult,

but in order to use magic, you have to get off, but one of the characters simply can't. That's absolutely a sign-fell episode. It's like, no matter what I do. I can't. And I mind for some reason, it's the Seinfeld gay.

It's the full- I don't know what I'm in those is, Jerry. I don't know. I'm looking at all my-house's. For the whole episode, Kramer never even realizes there in it. He never even comes across. He didn't know they were in a cult.

Yeah. Yeah, he had no idea. He's like, intent, Jerry. as he just kicks the door to open as he says that I'm saying it can work with anyone the friends crew like everyone every major sitcom can have like Ross just can't get off

he can't do it when other people are around so he can't use magic like that's that's a good bit that's universal that's hilarious I want to like see a mockup episode of that yeah so the whole process is based on this is all on, by the way, these sex rituals are based on Crowley's own very meticulous handwritten records. He documented fucking everything. So we're going to break down how this magic system actually worked because Crowley was, I guess, had nothing if not methodical about his weird shit.

So first, you have the temple space, the nightmare mural room, which would be ritually purified first and foremost and then sealed with banishing rituals in the pentagram. You've got to keep out unwanted spirits. negative energies and all those that shit obviously can't have random demons crashing your sex magic party that would just be bad and next the participants usually Crowley and Leah at this point though sometimes it would involve others would perform these lengthy invocations calling upon whatever specific divine force they were working with and I'm not talking like 30 minutes this is hours of chanting visualizing building up a massive amount of energy until the whole

room is lost in this kind of like, you know, you think about speaking in tongues kind of thing, that kind of energy. And they're all drug the fuck up while they're doing this. Sex hasn't even begun yet. And then, then after hours of chanting, whatever invocation and in whatever they were doing, that's when the main event happened. The sexual union itself, which was all about building passion to its absolute peak, not just physically, but magically. The goal was to achieve the state of complete egosess ecstasy, nosis, right at the moment of orgasm. In that fraction of a second,

Crowley believed the magician's individual consciousness was totally extinguished, allowing them to connect directly with the divine. No more you, just like pure universal oneness with source. And that is when you project your magical intention with everything you've got. That's the moment where the real actual magic happens. Everything is building up to that one moment so he can like for less than a second

merge with source imprint his wants, desires, intense on the source. And then when he comes back, you know, it's done. Like that's the whole methodology behind it. And this is where it's extra weird because I know already kind of deep. But then yeah, it's not done yet. There's a thing. After that happens, the sexual fluids or elixirs, as Crowley called them, were often than collars. Come on, dude. That's not even what an elixir is, dude. What do you mean, dude?

Mixing up your bodily juices and then, you know, saving it, that's an elixir right there. And who would know better than Crowley, the OG weirdo sex magician? Isn't elixir is like, don't you need to have alcohol in an elixir? Isn't that like the whole point? I have no idea. I didn't, in my research, I didn't look up the technical term of an elixir. I'm sorry. Do you want to do that right now?

What did they do with these elixirs? Well, they collected them, as he called them. And then they were often consumed, usually all of them, including Crowley. Usually he would mix them in, he would mix it into the elixirs into a wafer that he called, quote, unquote, the cake of light. The idea was to internalize. the result of the working to literally consume the magical energy that you just created by coming all over the place and then very Gnostic, very ritualistically imbibe it. And then, yeah, the ceremony would then be after that formally closed out with more banishing rituals

to seal everything up properly in case any lingering magical energy still were around afterward. Do you still want to be part of a sex cult, Jesse? I'm just sorry. I went my mind flashback to the, fictional side felt episode where they all join a sex cult and I just you know there's a jerry bit now where after they've all just orgasmed into a cup and been forced to drink it just Jesse let me correct you everybody's watching only Crowley and Leah have sex everybody else just watches ah and then they all eat their come oh that's what I was asking first off that is that is literally just some guy's power fetish

Well, he, like, makes people, like, that's not some guy. It's Alistair Cruelly. Right. And they're not just his own cum fetish. He makes cakes of light. Yeah, no, that's, that's definitely a fetish, though. And, but like, the, I love the idea of Seinfeld crew. I'm just like, well, we watch that happen.

And then someone's like, all right, well, someone's got to stick around and sanctify the area. And just definitely a Seinfeld bit where he's like, after you've just orgasm everywhere. He's like, we have to sanctify the chamber. That's a shit. That's a shit. And they all think they're going to have sex, but none of them do. And it's Kramer is the only one who is having sex. And that's why he doesn't realize he's in the cult because he's actually getting everything that they're all supposed to be getting.

Oh, my God. And they're all stressed like, I can't get it up, Jerry. And they're all like, oh, my God. It's just, there's so much there. And it's perfect. It's perfect. Newman starts his own sex cult in his own apartment. No, Jerry.

he shows my red woman, Jerry. He shows up in just like a banana hammock thong. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Elaine gets jealous because she wanted that position of power. He's like, you could have been my red woman in the lane. Listen, when you want to reboot the series, call us up. We've got an episode for you.

Just the one. Just the one. Let us know. The one episode is all we've got. Yeah, so that was the world Crowley had built. Like, that was this, that was an almost daily occurrence, the way like all the shit went down. It's kind of very strange. intense environment that's designed to like a lot of cults systematically break down every social,

psychological and sexual, sexual barrier that civilized, quote unquote, society had built up. And some people absolutely thrived in it. And this is where we revisit Raul Lovday, one of Crowley's most dedicated disciples and his wife, Betty. And for just to refresh our memory, Alex, you can read this. This is a from a letter that he wrote back home when he first. moved out to the abbey. This is from Raul Lovday.

The abbey of Thelma is a house, my dear, where each person does his or her own will. The work is a training of the mind, and I am 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. Yeah, he's a, you know, good for him, I guess. It's called a cyber truck, okay?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a new type of car, and it's invulnerable to Bose and errors. And I'm kind of a novice to the cyber trucks and a new better sort of technology. I can order chili dogs from my car. It detects ghost with its motion detecting, motion detecting device. But look, it's good for him. Like, it kind of sounds like he got exactly what he was looking for when he got there, purpose, this enlightenment, a path to something great.

which at the end isn't that what every human in some way is looking for meaning in their lives. But this is the thing about his quote unquote utopian experiment. It is a nasty habit of almost immediately revealing itself for what it is, a very dystopian nightmare. Because while Crowley's devoted followers were having mystical experiences and ego death, the actual physical living conditions of the Abbey were started bad and were just getting horrific. the house was absolutely filthy, like genuinely unsanitary in ways that would make a health inspector cry.

The residents were often malnourished because nobody was particularly concerned with mundane things like eating regular meals. Fit when they were up there on the altar. Bang is what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah, except for Crowley somehow was always, you know. Oh, that's so weird.

That he would have food at his call and they wouldn't. I bet his bedroom was spotless. No, it was not, unfortunately. It was spotted. Yeah. If they had black lights back then, they would have been like, they would have put the black light on and they would have blinded everybody. That's it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, and everybody and everyone was constantly high on some combo of like I said, the heroin or the cocaine or whatever other drug they were getting their hands on.

And then there was the psychological pressure living under the thumb of a guru that was powerful, charismatic. and let's be honest, extremely manipulative like Crowley was, took a serious toll on people. The Abbey was attracting seekers from all over, though, during this time. But this dream was kind of teetering on the edge of becoming a nightmare almost right away. And in 1922, just two to three years in, the couple who would ultimately prove to be the catalyst for the Abbey's complete and total destruction arrived, Love Day and Betty.

And now, as you saw in the little snippet from Raoul's letter, he was kind of the perfect Crowley disciple basically sent kind of like if you're thinking of it in Hollywood terms he was sent straight out of central casting for Crowley he's just a handsome dude already extremely eager to just learn anything he could was a true believer in Thelma and things Crowley was saying and he was also a brilliant guy he was also from Oxford and discovered Crowley through Crowley's journal the Equinox and became just like obsessed he saw Crowley as a true spiritual master and the abbey as his gateway to this enlightenment. So he was all in this and true believer, but his wife, Betty, on the other hand,

she wasn't feeling this shit at. Love you, Betty. Love you, Queen. Betty is phenomenal. She's like the only person who's like, I'm in a simulation. She's like, that's exactly it. She's like, what is fucking happening? She was, to remind you, a former nightclub dancer, way more worldly and street smart

than her husband anyway. And she took one look at Crowley and just saw him for what he was. And to her, this dude wasn't a fucking guru. He was a charlatan, one that was charismatic, maybe, but a charlatan nonetheless, a con artist with a huge God complex. And she also goes to believe that he, she believed Alistair believed his bullshit. Like, he had believed his own nonsense. And when they actually arrived at the Abbey, she was instantly horrified by what she found.

that in Betty's eyes, this was far from a holy sanctuary. It was filthy. The farmhouse was falling apart, full of drug-addled, malnourished weirdos, living under the control of a tyrant. And while Raul was seeing enlightenment somehow in spiritual transformation when he walked through that door, Betty was seeing the reality of people slowly just destroying themselves in the service to one man's ego.

And she was about to become the Abbey's worst enemy. So the tension between Betty May and the Abbey was immediate and intense. Raoul though threw himself into the whole thing with the fervor of a true convert, taking whatever drugs Crowley prescribed, following his every command, totally buying into everything. And Betty was watching everything with increasingly horrified eyes. And honestly, we should be thankful for Betty because it's because of her that we have these incredibly detailed accounts,

like an unflinching look at what life at that. the Abbey was actually like not through the eyes of a spiritual quote unquote master. She saw through all the mystical bullshit and documented it. And see, the sales pitch for the Abbey of Thelma was this beautiful vision of absolute freedom and spiritual enlightenment, do what thou will, express your true nature, achieve cosmic consciousness. And one of Crowley's main instruments of supposedly giving this to you, but was an instrument of control that she saw was something called a magical record.

every single person living at the abbey was required to keep a detailed daily diary and I'm not talking like a diary says like dear guy today we did a ritual no I'm talking like everything what did you eat who did you talk to what were you thinking about did you perform your true will today were you lazy what time did you wake up what time did you shit how much how much time of your day are you supposed to spend like writing this thing at the end of the day so you do all All your day and then however long it takes. It doesn't matter. You just write it all down because you're throughout the day. You're doing all this shit. Like your all days are filled with doing drugs and then ritual, ritual, magical practice, magical practice. This wasn't like a do whatever you want kind of thing, even though that was the rule. But it's like, yeah, this was like a.

Wasn't to do whatever you want kind of thing? Even though it was supposed to be do without wilt. What that truly meant was you're doing rituals every fucking day. You're learning about the book of the law. like there really wasn't a freedom to just kind of do whatever. You had to be, if you were going to be there, you had to be there for the magical education of it all. Like that meant doing drugs,

that meant doing rituals, whatever it took. You had to do what somebody else willed. Yes. And even if you're like, well, literally, that's like, and even if you thought,

oh, well, okay, at least they get to, you know, they're doing whatever and they're writing whatever they want in their book. No, because Crowley would periodically collect these things.

and read through them. Then he'd publicly criticize and humiliate his disciples for their perceived failures in front of everyone else. Like shit, like, oh, you only meditated for two hours instead of three. Yes, you're not really committed to the great work that we're all working toward Bobby. It was a system of constant surveillance. Fuck you, Bobby. Right?

Like, this guy's as a spiritual discipline, but it was just surveillance. Do, like, do what thou wilt by I'm watching you do it and judging you the entire. time. So you better be doing it right. And obviously we talked about the drugs being treated as sacraments, but in practice, it was so much darker than that. Crowley positioned himself as the dispenser of chemical enlightenment. You don't get to just have heroin whenever you wanted it. He would prescribe the heroin, the cocaine, the ether, the masculine for supposedly specific magical purposes or as cures for physical and psychological ailments. He wanted to keep it like clinical. He's like trying to like make it about the process.

Yeah. He's playing doctor with his father, like his followers brain chemistry, but I also, it's like, Jesse's right. It's also control. Like, you get, you get people, these people so addicted to heroin and shit, but you only, they only get it when you give it to them. I mean, this is, this is so very clearly like, egomaniical. Like, the idea, again, he, not only from the fact of like, the, the drugs and controlling

that but also going back to the sex stuff where there is the whole point of that kind of stuff of like i'm going to jerk off in a cup and make you eat it that's like a power trip thing that's like what that is that's like i made these people do this thing how hot like i'm like that is like dad's textbook everything about him and then the fact that he's like do what you will that is that's his like rich kid's side popping up where he's living in this monastery in filth because he doesn't want to clean and he doesn't want to make anyone else clean because that goes against like then he would have to clean. I mean read the book of the law.

It is filled with filthy violent shit like and that's what people are following. Like you like it's it's all part of it. It's all control though. Like it's it's a cult. And like we can recognize. I think that Crowley may have had some hippie-ish ideas that were good at the beginning and but was a complete piece of shit of a manipulative human being. And still,

even if he was not a good person, for better or worse, still made waves on history. And still we wouldn't be living in the world that we would be living in today without him and stuff. Like, he's a very complex dude. But yes, this is all very reminiscent of cult control,

this particular chapter of his life. Like micromanaging every single person's fucking life. Yeah. Yeah. And he only kind of gets a taste of it too because it doesn't last that long. It's only a few years. Like most cults last decades of like, like, like we looked at heaven's game stuff. Because he cared too much about he cared too much about the actual substance of it to like really. To a degree. I agree with you. To become a real shit ball. He was bad at practicing his own shits a lot of the time and like following his own law. But like, yeah, let's go like, you know, falling prey to human shit. But we'll like let's keep going. Because like there's more to this. So obviously all this is going. up. He's prescribing drugs, playing doctor. And then all the while, his scarlet woman, Leah Hersig, was the primary subject of his main experiments. And this is where it gets even more fucked up because Crowley deliberately got her addicted to heroin and ether. This wasn't

like a thing he did accidentally to her. And now he didn't, now he didn't do it out of malice or just to be cruel in his mind. This was a, in his mind, it was completely justified under this twisted rationale that it was a necessary step to, quote, break down her ego, end quote, and make her a more perfect magical vessel, which is wildly misogynistic on top of all of it. Like, it's insane. He was systematically destroying her personality, her health, her sense of self. Yeah, so he didn't see her as a person. No, this is a scarlet woman.

This was his tool, his magical tool. Yeah, but Leah bought into it. And like, I do mean fully and you'll see, we'll get there and you'll see what I mean by that. And obviously, this wasn't actually fucking lightning. This just abuse with pretend mystical paint slapped on it. And while this high-minded spiritual work was supposedly happening, all these cosmic rituals and ego death and achieving higher consciousness, the physical reality of the, of the Abbey continued to deteriorate even further into squalor.

And Betty May's accounts continue to paint how much further, because she was there for a mind you because Raoul wouldn't leave and she wouldn't leave Raul when she when you read her accounts of it she paints like the picture of dishes that would be left unwashed for days that would eventually attract swarms of flies the floors would be caked in filth of disgusting random shit the single toilet there was yeah only a single toilet for like upwards of 10 or so people living in this place um was nightmarish and overflowing like constantly, which is fucking awful. And the residents who were living there were often way too high, too weak from malnutrition

or too busy with their spiritual work to do any basic things like cleaning or maintaining the house. So just snowballed. They were living in literal filth while pursuing cosmic purity. And Crowley's training methods also frequently cross the line from intense spiritual discipline into outright sadistic cruelty. One of the more notorious stories, and this is one I think we talked about last week a little bit, involves a ritual where he allegedly commanded Leah Hersig to cut her own arms with a razor blade.

This was framed as a test of her devotion, an ordeal to prove she had overcome her attachment to her physical body, which sounds very familiar to Heaven's Gate. To Crowley, this was a necessary step in the path to enlightenment. But to anyone with any empathy, this is just a suggest. but calculated abuse. And his temper was apparently very legendary at the abbey. And Betty May also tells this story, and this one is because it's just absurd. Crowley becoming absolutely enraged at a chicken for clucking too loudly and interrupting his concentration during a ritual.

He supposedly then got up and chased the chicken around the house for a while until he eventually caught it. and in a fit of pure primal rage, bit its head off. Like Ozzy Is Osbourne. No. That's what Betty said. Uh, what?

Like, he's trying to contact and commune with ancient Egyptian deities, but the chicken won't shut the fuck up. So he fucking just chases it around the house, catches it, bites his head off. Okay. And remember,

I don't necessarily doubt it with the mix of drugs they were all on. Like, I don't necessarily doubt. that that happened. Fair. And other than the drugs and violence, Crowley was also deliberately pitting his own followers against each other,

which was just creating an openly toxic atmosphere of jealousy and competition for what else, his attention in his favor. And who, like, he's thinking, like, he's making these people ask themselves who's the best disciple, who's really committed the work to the work the most,

who does the master love the most? And all it did was keep these people off balance dependent on his approval. and just kept them all infighting. That's crazy. There's no modern version of that. No, not at all.

None. That went away when we all. That's so great. Yeah, got social media. Man, what a different time. Yeah.

And underlying all of this was the constant issue of money. If you remember, he was going broke. And to clarify, too, because I saw this come up, when I say he was a laird of Scotland, doing my quick research,

no, he like he called himself a laird but he wasn't an actual one by like the laws of scotland he wasn't an actual la a i l a r d but he would call himself one regardless uh and that was part of it um part of the whole schick for him but no he wasn't an actual laird because he didn't have he wasn't from there and he didn't have the money for it at the time and all this shit um underlying yeah so he was having money issues and because the great profit the B666 whatever you want to call him was going fucking broke he had uh he lived entirely off the funds of his disciples constantly begging and manipulating them for cash like any good cult leader would and then the arrival of Raul

Lovday who came from a wealthy family wasn't just a spiritual boon for the Abbey it was a financial lifeline for Crowley in Love Day was fresh money to keep the whole sordid experiment afloat for a just that much longer. Like, it's, it's not like, like, that's why I think he endured Betty for as long as he did, because he could not lose Love Day in his cash. If I think if he could, he would have kicked them both out, but he couldn't lose Raoul. And Raoul was super dedicated. And Betty, for her part, tried to get him to leave over and over again, as we'll see.

And he refused to leave. So is this, it was just boiling. over and almost like the universe put Betty there and was trying to teach him a lesson that he refused to fucking see. Yeah, and this whole place, this tense, filthy, psychologically abusive place

was further given a couple more years thanks to Raoul's money. And this was the reality of the Abbey of Thelma. This already simmering pot of dysfunction, the final tragic ingredients have been added and the final kind of tragic events of

Raoul's death are what drove this to collapse. And the human cost of this environment was most visible, though, before Raul died on Leah. This is the scarlet woman, ape of top. Now at the end of all of this, she is just a shell of her former self. She was physically drained, emotionally drained by constant magical and sex abuse were in work, multiple difficult pregnancies, and a severe addiction to heroin and ether. An addiction, remember that Crowley-eathing is crazy, dude. It's so old-timey, dude. It's such It's crazy. And it was actually during this period that Crowley wrote his famous novel diary of a drug fiend,

which when you read it, it's pretty clearly a thinly veiled real-time account of the drug-fueled magical chaos that was just unfolding around him in the Abbey, kind of an art-imitating life thing. And then during all of this, there were the fucking children that were living here. This is one of the darkest and most overlooked aspects of the whole Abbey. saga. And it honestly deserves to be talked about more because while the adults were on their grand spiritual drug driven quest, uh, taking heroic doses of God names what, there were actual children living in the middle of all this. And their story in this is more tragic and heartbreaking

footnote of one of Crowley's great experiment. Crowley had a very specific philosophy about raising children. And it was grounded in the law of Thelma. I get you, I bet you you can guess it's really, really good. He believed they are your slaves for all time until they win their independence from you through strength. More offhand than that, actually. I don't know if that would have been better, but he believed that a child should be given, quote, unquote, perfect freedom to develop their own true will completely unhindered by the arbitrary moral codes and discipline, moral codes and disciplines imposed by their parents or society. Very free range child.

Let your child be every free range kid. Okay. But in practice, this, I guess you could call it a high-minded theory translated more into genuinely dangerous form of child neglect. The children at the Abbey, and yes, there were multiple, included Crowley and Leah's own daughter, Annie Leone, who they nicknamed Poupé, which is French for Dahl, and as well as children of another disciple, a woman named Ninette Shumway. And these kids were largely just kind of left to fend for themselves.

And by Betty May's accounts, she paints like this grim picture of what that looked like in practice. She described the children as running around. They're essentially feral children, often completely naked, covered in filth, clearly underfed. She describes them as looking like little wild animals. and Betty in one particularly cruel but kind of probably accurate observation described the pale malnourished pupae as looking like a little white slug.

It sucks that it says that it's poopie. I know. I know. Poupin. Pompin? I don't know. How you say this in French, but I say.

It feels like poopé is correct. It's definitely poop. It's definitely poopie. It just, it sucks that poopie looks like an emaciated slug. Yeah. She's like emaciated white, a little white slug. out there. It sucks that poopey looks like a slug. Yeah, it's an unfortunate combination.

These children also during, obviously, like during this, were not shielded from any of the Abbey's daily madness. They were present for their rituals, like toddler watching adults in like their magical garb, chanting in languages they did not understand,

exposed to these sexually explicit murals and acts that were happening in front of them. Just, that was their shit too. This was their daily day to day. They would watch their parents, shoot up fucking heroin or smoke opium. That was like a normal Tuesday for them. And this experiment in letting the kids find their own true will led to its most predictable

but absolutely horribly tragic outcome in October of 1920. And this is important to note that this is before Raoul shows up. This is two years before Raoul even shows up. Crowley and Leah's daughter, Pupe, died at the Abbey. What? She wasn't even two years old yet. Oh, my God. The cause almost certainly, Abby's notoriously unsanitary conditions and malnutrition,

leading to an illness that people think was probably typhus or something similar, and then compounding that with malnutrition. Something that would have been completely preventable caused by the filthy environment of lack of care. I should say this happened right soon after Raoul showed up and Betty showed up, rather, like right at that time. Crowley's reaction to the death of his own child is, I mean, we saw what he did with the death of his first child, right? And so it's no surprise that his reaction would be kind of the following.

He didn't record any conventional grief in his personal notes. No mourning, no regret. No, maybe we should have like fucking had a house cleaner come through or anything. Nothing. He didn't seem like any self-reflection. He just treated her death as a magical event. A test sent to him from the gods. In his diary, he wrote about his daughter.

his death with like a cold philosophical detachment analyzing this act of a god and seeing it as a necessary part of his own spiritual ordeal literally just turning it one aiding that shit and making it about him he literally saw his daughter's death not as a personal tragedy but as a not as a consequence of the neglect just this is just another thing for him to have to conquer a piece of the great work at all of the at the end of all this like completely sociopathic and honestly genuinely disturbing. And this event establishes a really dark pattern at the abbey. That's important to understand.

Because when Raul Loveday dies, which we did talk about last episode, and we'll get to that again in a little bit here, like, just know, like there was, it wasn't an accident. If he went to the hospital, any of that stuff, it could have been prevented because they refused to leave their squalid position, place. Of course, they died. You're surrounded by fecal matter and dirty. dirty needles and blood and jizz and all this other shit. Like,

it's depressing. So into this toxic, deadly environment, you know, Betty Mays here. She's recording all this shit. And when she demanded, and she wouldn't keep a magical record personally. And when Crowley demanded she document her thoughts and activities, she basically told him to fuck off. And she openly began mocking the rituals as shit got bad. She'd watch these elaborate ceremonies, roll her eyes,

make sarcastic comments. And most unforgivably in Crowley's eyes, she was constantly trying to get her husband Raoul to leave with her, pleading with him, pointing out the obvious like, hey, honey, like, look around you.

This place is kind of disgusting. Everyone's high on heroin. Children have died here. We need to go. That's crazy. Raul still stayed a true believer. And he refused every goddamn time. He was convinced that he was on the verge of a,

genuine spiritual breakthrough, just the drugs, my man, and that he was about to achieve enlightenment and that Betty's skepticism was just what else, but a test of his devotion. What do they call it in, fucking Scientology, a

negative person, what is it called? I can't remember what it's called. Like, where you're like, you're being like, you gotta remove that person from your life. You're being like a blocker or something like that. Yeah, yeah, like a blocker. Yeah, we'll get into that one day. Oh, God.

I can't. I'm so excited. Anyway, she, like, it's classic kind of cult thinking, though, from Raul here. Like, the idea of, like, the people who love me and want me to leave are actually the ones trying to stop my spiritual progress. So it's a test. I have to go through with this. And so all this life, which was supposed to be harmonious, this experiment in the next three years devolved into psychological war zone where Raul would eventually die.

Betty May had this, uh, had this background that made her completely immune. like Crowley's usual tactics as the nightclub dancer, and her more open vitriolic contempt for him drove Crowley to the edge of insanity. He was used to being worshipped, feared, or at least respected, and not only did Betty not even soften herself, anytime he tried to push,

it just made her go harder and harder. She was the one resident that would push back on everything, and the tension between them was escalating every single day and everyone at the Abbey could fucking fucking, feel it. So Crowley is in his grand role. And during all this is a couple of really good stories that I think really show what Betty was was like. So Betty having none of this shit, he's up there on one of his rituals taking place, pretending to be the God Dionysus. Okay. And in this really cool. So far really cool. Dressed like Dionysus and doing this huge like

ritual. She thinking this is absurd that he thinks he's embodying this primal energy and becoming one with the God, decided that this shit looked like clumsy stomping around the room from a drunk uncle at a wedding. And she didn't just quietly snicker or exchange knowing glances. No, no, no. She bust out openly cackling while he started doing this. Like, full on can't stop breathing, openly heckling him, shattering the sacred atmosphere that was supposed to. to be happening. And in Crowley's mind, you know, imagine being him in that one moment. You're literally channeling a God. Lost in divine ecstasy. You open your eyes and you see Betty, just losing her mind mocking you. And for Crowley, whose ego is genuinely too big,

bigger than it should ever be, this insult was intolerable. He couldn't control her. His usual bag of tricks and the psychological manipulation was failing. The intellectual bullying didn't work. Mystical authority meant nothing to her, and she was more intimidating than he ever was. He didn't know what to do. And the most legendary story in their conflict is one that I think captures their dynamic. Perfectly, it's called the bowl of water incident. And this is just like a chef kiss story. Bowl of water incident.

It's in one sweltering afternoon in Sicily. And remember, this is the farmhouse with no air conditioning at this time. Hot as hell probably smells like actual living shit. Everyone's miserable. And Crowley is in the middle of one. another one of his typically long-winded pronouncements. He's probably holding court. We don't really know what he was doing exactly.

Probably like holding court or pontificating openly to his devouted followers who are all tripping on something about the nature of his true will or whatever. And Betty is just sitting in the corner, getting progressively more fed up with this endless self-important monologue. That rule was making her sit through. So finally, she's sick of it. She gets up quietly, doesn't interrupt him, but gets up. And everyone probably just assumes she's leaving,

she usually does. But no, Betty walks over, fills a bowl to the brim with cold water, walks back to where the great B-666, the most powerful magician in the world, the new prophet of the new Aeon is sitting, just walks over to him nonchalantly,

takes the bowl of cold water, and dumps the entire thing over his head. Oh my God. Just artistic. Fuck it. Perfect. Beautiful. I think it's,

It's like the perfect answer to like this bullshit. It's like you get so fed up. You can't hit him. But fuck, you can at least do this. And the room went dead. Like dead silent after that. The disciples were horrified but didn't know what to do. I imagine to them it was probably like watching someone slap the Pope to like a Catholic.

But like honestly, Betty made her point perfectly. The prophet was just a dude. And now he was soaking wet. sputtering, deeply humiliated. And here's the thing, this wasn't just a one-time event either. This was a constant thing. Betty refused to participate in the rituals. She began interrupting them more and more often.

All this shit. And Crowley, for his part, retaliated with his own petty cruelties. He would mock her intelligence in front of the group, insult her, belittle her. According to Betty's own account, he would also perform magical curses against her. Just like petty ones? Yeah, petty like magical ritual. curses and I curse you, Betty. That's what the name of Baph on that. Does he crucifize

a frog or something? I'm sure. Do you naming it Betty and then crucifying it? Do sending, sending vampires on the astro plane after her? Yeah, I'm sure none of it clearly worked. He do rituals specifically designed trying to make her sick to drive, make her drive, like drive her way. He tried to do a curse that just would make her leave her husband and leave the house.

He saw her not just as like, this is a person to him that was going to nuke this whole thing if she stuck around too long. And it's, again, I think it speaks to Crowley believing his own bullshit that his retaliation was trying to do magic curses at her. Right. Like he was trying to actually like magic her away. And this all kept going and kept going. And then when her husband, the one true believer that she had left in the world, fell violently

ill, she found her found herself in the worst possible position. Now she was trapped in enemy territory. completely at the mercy of a man she had openly mocked, but couldn't leave because her husband was sick, not dead, and forced to plead for her husband's life with someone who would have been perfectly happy to see her gone. One of the more infamous stories from this period comes directly from Betty's tell-all,

and it's kind of another just great look into this thing. According to her account, there was a ritual where her husband Raul was allegedly made to sacrifice a cat as an offering to the son, and he had to kill the cat as part of the magical ceremony. Now, I will know we have to be careful. This, this, I mentioned this ritual because it's the last ritual he did before he started getting sick. Probably because he fucking killed a cat.

The cat. Yeah. Now, we have to be careful like here because this is Betty's version of events, events. And while they're very insightful, there is evidence that some of it may have been exaggerated to make him look worse than he already was. if she was going to a tabloid newspaper with the stuff afterward, just that kind of thing. But I believe Betty more than I believe, like, Crowley and his disciples. And so even if, like, even if the details are exaggerated, I don't know, like, the whole cat, like what detail of the cat thing would have been exaggerated.

But it is interesting that, like, that was the ritual he did. And then he got sick after it. And it's also fascinating that he tried to do curses at Betty to make her sick and make her go away. But it got Raul sick, which kind of achieved the same part. The curses didn't get him sick. I didn't mean to imply that I believe that. But he got sick, which in turn did make Betty go away in its own weird way. He recorded his own diary during all this because he documented everything.

And the specific rituals he performed against Betty, magical bindings designed to curb her influence and break her will. He was literally trying to engage in a magical war with his disciples' wife under his own roof who wasn't even attempting to fight back magically. And so that's the Abby just before the, that's, that's, that's, the abbey's atmosphere just before the final tragedy hits the powder keg that ended this whole thing this is when leah hercig is a broken hollow husk and raoul loveday is a very sick fanatical devotee the winter of 1923 raoul loveday his body already severely weakened from months of this lifestyle

drank from a contaminated mountain spring and from doing so fell violently ill with what was almost certainly what is known as acute enteric fever, which is a disease that shows symptoms very similar to typhoid. Regardless, it was very serious, but with proper medical care, even at the time, it was treatable.

And this is why this is kind of a crisis point. This is the moment where everything could have been saved. A proper doctor with modern medicine at the time could have had a shot, a real good shot at saving Raoul life. But what if we did him some jizz? Could it just magical jizz down the throw. Open wide, Raoul. I've got the elixir. It doesn't, he didn't need to. Well, maybe he did. But like, you don't need to. Then you're not working toward the great work, Jesse. And you're not part of the

true believers. You're not doing what you will, man. Exactly. You're holding back. You're not swallowing Alastair Crowley's come is you holding back on your true will. Yeah, I'm all right with that. I can hold back. You don't want to see my true will. I'm all right. Yeah, fair enough. Crowley, though, instead of going to the hospital and his immense fucking magical arrogance and his complete detachment from physical reality, believe that all illnesses had a spiritual

route. So? Suppressive person is the thing that I was thinking of, by the way. Oh, okay. Gotcha. Yeah. He saw Love Day's fever, not as a medical emergency, but as a personal ordeal that, again, much like the death of his daughter, was a magical test that his student.

and him had to overcome through his own spiritual strength. So everything that happens, he's just like, this is about me. It's a test about me. Oh, this is happening all to me. Yeah. And a test to his student. This is a test for a student too. He has to see me suffer.

So instead of getting any actual professional help, you know, taking him to the fucking hospital, Crowley actively discouraged modern medicine. And he dismissed it as an unnecessary. Like we talked about Tim Apple last week. and I know that Steve Jobs was actually his name. Very kind of similar, like a sign of weakness, not going to do it. And he began his own course of treatment, which just meant Crowley magic. The relationship between Crowley and Betty May, which had already been this war of mutual hatred,

now exploded even further into the open. Betty, watching her husband literally die in front, dying in front of her eyes, pleaded and begged Crowley to get a real doctor. She was on her knees crying and begging this man. like that she had hated and ruined rituals and made life a living hell for now she was on her hands and he's begging him please just call a doctor to a fucking doctor get real medicine do something that I'd actually fucking help and Crowley just dismissed her please with contempt to him she was still just the hysterical skeptic that disrupted everything and that the one this was the woman who didn't understand the spiritual significance of what was happening and Raul continued to grow weaker became delirious with fever, gotten, gotten terrible,

unending pain, clearly dying, and Crowley's response was what else to fucking double down on the magic even harder. He would sit at the foot of the young man's bed,

sometimes dressed in his full magical get-up performing incantations and what Betty described as weird ceremonies designed to spiritually battle the illness. He was going to

magical war against the illness now, and he was treating a bacterial infection with poetry and costumes at the end. end of the day. I feel so bad for Betty in this moment because like she's powerless to fucking do anything in this. The strain here is where kind of all snaps on February 16th, 1923 after days of agony, Raul Love Day finally died at the Abbey of Thelma at the age of 23 years old.

God, damn. I kept imagining him as like my age. Yeah. In my mind, I was thinking he was an older gentleman, but I kept glad. I know because that's the drop. And at the end for this is like, yeah, he was a kid. These people were living hard. This dude was impressionable. And like, yeah, it's awful. And this shit terrified Betty May and she was grieving. And she fled back to England as fast as she could.

And she had the story to tell. She found a very willing audience in the sensationalist British tabloids who could not believe their luck that this woman was just coming to them. She sold her story to the Sunday Express, which was. for the next several weeks, ran a series of absolutely, like, lurid, explosive articles exposing the satanic secrets of Crowley's sex death cult in Sicily. This is where the headlines you talked about last week came from. The King of Depravity, New Sinister Revelations, a human beast.

The stories were just the exact storm that everything the British public loved to be outraged about at the time. Black magic, forced drug addiction, sexual depravity, dead children. dead Oxford students, and all of it was happening in a foreign country under the guidance of an Englishman who had rejected everything proper society had stood for. So were these stories exaggerated? Guess to a point. Like, Betty did have an ax to grind in newspapers to sell, like, obviously, but they were all

based on, like, real things that were happening. And, like, she lost her husband. Like, there's not yet. Or she exaggerated a little bit. It's a real tangible thing that you had to witness and experience and you saw the horror that she had to go through and she had to watch him just knowing that there could have been. We know for a fact the drugs were real. The death was real. The deaths were real.

The squalor and the disgustingness of the place was real. And the sex magic being done was real. All that stuff was real. So like whether the rituals about the cat killing and all that other stuff, like that is all exaggerated. It doesn't really matter. knows, but doesn't matter. Exactly. I truly don't think it matters. At least to our opinion of this person. Not that exactly killing a cat doesn't matter. It definitely does. It's just like the point of the getting the story out there. We don't have to find some nebulous story about maybe

a guy killed a cat to make us like dislike this guy for. But even to modern day, Alistair Crowley like full believers, like that is obviously what they hinge themselves on. Right. Like these things that these little bits that may have been exaggerated that defend his point of you. I wouldn't say, you know, Alistair Crowley's beliefs have been ripped apart and like warped so many ways to many different practices out there. It's not even really sure. Like if anybody practices Stella, all that much. But you know, yeah. In this night, this death in 1923 and her leaving, this is the thing that created the media firestorm that gave him the reputation and the image

that was literally known as the wickedest man in the world where the headline, New Sid in Sicily, English girl's story of a monster orgies and Abby came from and I mean you can't buy publicity like that that shit was that she sold like hot cakes every week there was a new revelation that was revealed in the tabloid a new horrifying detail whatever new new reason for respectable society at the time and at large they clutch their pearls at and show why following their traditional ways was best and uh the scandal didn't stay contained in england as we learned like this went international and this is when musilini uh who was the voice of moral authority at fucking Italy here.

This fascist dictator looked at what Crowley's operation was doing through the news that came from England, saw this as unacceptable and sent him packing. He saw Crowley's Abbey as a stain on his shiny new fascist Italy and didn't want any of that degeneracy. And he got expelled by his first dictator in 1923. And so in April of 1923, just a couple months after Raoul's death, The Italian government issued the deportation order. Alice of Crowley and his remaining ragged band of followers were formally and unceremoniously expelled from Sicily and kicked out.

The experiment was done. This lasted. The experiment lasted little like four or five years. The Abbey lasted. Less than a handful for the most part. A crazy couple of years. Yeah. And this was with this done, the utopian community that was supposed to be the cradle of all this new civilization shit gone.

And you know what the locals did with the walls? Crowley had so lovingly covered in explicit murals, they whitewashed them. They just painted right over those things. Just with white paint. Yeah. Just goodbye. Goodbye. It just got rid of it.

Is that, well, I guess you're going to get there, but I was wondering if the monastery is still there. I was about to be like, can I look this up, dude? Well, yeah, because it got bought. No, the monastery. Oh, I don't know if the monastery is still there. I didn't look that up. But I know is Locke Ness home.

was bought by Jimmy's Henry, somebody like that. No, I have to look it up. A musician. A musician bought his old home. I just can't remember who. Yeah.

So now. Feels like something like Ozzy Osbourne would do or something like that. Yeah. It wasn't Osbourne, but yeah, something along those lines. Yeah, Crowley was now again for the third time in his life,

a wandering outcast. And he wasn't just like a pariah to a small insular world of occultism this time, where everyone already thought he was weird. No, because now this he was international he was like an international villain his name was in newspapers across europe and now even america the wickedest man in the world catching like headline wasn't just a nickname it became his brand at this point and his dream had officially died and he was broke as shit the expulsion from sicily in 1923 this was honestly i think this was like crowley had a lot

of failures through his life but this was the one that crushed him this was the one that is like he I would think would see as his biggest failure. And he had a lot of them. And he's 47 years old at this point. Crowley at 47 was a global pariah. And he was kind of reduced to this broke, sick, wandering person. His first stop. How famous do you think?

You're going to see. We've got some stories. His first stop after being kicked out was Tunis, Tunisia. He knew the area from his earlier travels in North Africa, back when he was still young and wealthy. and the world seemed full of possibilities for this guy. It was far from the judgmental eyes of Europe for him, far from any of the newspapers and the scandal

and never reached out there at that point. This was like a place he could kind of like lay low, lick his wounds and just figure out what left of his life he could like put together. And he was still being accompanied by Leah Hersig at this point. She hadn't left his side this whole time. God bless her. Is Scarlet Woman.

And they had another child that still. was still around and surviving. But their relationship, which had been the magical and sexual engine that powered the Abbey in a way, was also collapsing under the weight of everything that had just happened a couple months ago.

The deaths, the failure, trauma, drugs, kids, it all took its toll on Leah. She was broken and Crowley. For better or worse, was fucking Crowley, through it all, which many was already kind of thinking about who his next kind of apprentice or what he could find

that could get him his next magical hit or high was going to be. And after the spectacular, very public implosion of trying to actually live Thelma as a functioning community, Crowley decided at this point he was going to make a strategic pivot. He turned inward. If he couldn't build a physical utopia, if he couldn't create like a lasting Hogwarts-style institution, then he would do the next best thing. He would build his legacy on paper and do everything he could to control his narrative. if the world was going to call him a monster,

he'd write his own story on his own terms and make sure that his version of events survive. You know, like, this is, all about him. Yeah, like this is, it's a good thing none of this is still around. You know what it is? It's a good thing.

It's just like, I will rewrite history so people will stop saying bad things about me. I'm just so happy. It does. It doesn't exist anymore. We're a better society. This guy just got such a shit deal in his own, like, upbringing that he just went into, like,

Alex World from the age of, like, 10 years old and just never came back and just decided the whole world was about him. Yep. And very much so. I kind of agree with that, that take on it. Yeah, he, like, he made it all about him. He dedicated himself to it would become the great project of his later years. And this is one of our main sources we've been using.

This is where he wrote his own massive auto. The Confessions of Alastor Crowley. And this thing is big. It's 320 pages. If you want a first edition hard copy, it runs you like $230-ish, if you want that. It is, I'm going to let you know a hard read. It's fascinating. But here's the confession of Mike Martin.

I didn't finish it. I couldn't. I didn't finish all 320 pages. I got a little more than halfway through. And I was just like, I think, I think I get it. That's okay. I think I get what this is about. You don't need to convince us that it's not worth reading.

I'm fine. Don't read it. Don't read like the book of the law, 60 something pages and read the two autobiographies that suggested by the two different authors, both better ways of looking at this guy. Yeah, this thing is 320 pages of self-aggrandizing,

justifying himself, mythologizing himself, generally just trying to cement his place in history as a misunderstood genius rather than a destructive narcissist, which is what he kind of is. This reads. really was like I look at it.

It's like, it's like, I don't know how to, there's no good comparison. I think of it like a god, like mythologizing themselves while they're alive, but then becoming a, he didn't become a god, right? Like, that's the thing is like, but that's how it feels. Like he's like he's trying to write his own. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That was his goal. Yeah. Um, he framed every single event, every success in spectacular failure as all a necessary destined to step on his path. And the book is honestly just like, if it's a masterpiece of anything, it's, It's a masterpiece of somebody's ego. That's really what it is. It's sprawling and occasionally has brilliant moments, but like we talked about before,

he can have brilliant things. You get moments of truth and honesty and then be buried by your own ego forever. And this is going to be a passage for Jesse to read from it that kind of encapsulates. This is the introduction to the book. I think we may have read this quote before, but I can't remember if we did the last episode or not. I'll do it again. For 50 years. I have been a poet.

This is my 50th birthday. I propose to celebrate it by beginning to write my autobiography. I am going to be my own Boswell. I am going to write the truth and the whole truth and nothing

but the truth. It is the only way of getting even with my enemies. No, we didn't read that last week now that I realized, but uh uh that's part of the part of cut but this is right this is how the book fucking opens dude this is like the mission statement of the fucking confessions book only the truth yeah okay from a fucking man who is constitutionally incapable of being like honest in any way but hey i you know fucking good on him for the confidence uh the way he writes of just like this is how i'm

gonna get even with my enemies is fucking hilarious uh his life in tunisia while he was doing all this was far away from his decadent days at Cambridge where he had money and prospects or even the chaotic energy of the Abbey, honestly, when at least he had followers that were listening to him. Is he out of money? He's just, he's broke. He's completely broke. He spent it all.

It's gone. That's only Leah and his like kids and that's it. That's all he's got. So crazy, man. And now he's kind of like also deteriorating because surprise, living like that in the Abbey wasn't good for his help either. Fair enough. He was in constant.

poor health, suffering from chronic asthma, probably from breathing in shit particles all day long, and that plagued him his entire life. And now also dealing with the effects of his escalating heroin addiction, because he was addicted to, which had gone from being a magical sacrament to now a daily necessity just so we could fucking function. That's fucking crazy, dude. Yeah, he's fallen to the absolute lowest. He was physically dependent, sick and getting worse.

And if you truly take a moment and believe, like just for a moment, believe the kinds of things he was teaching the Thelma, the way he looked at the world or these beings looked at the world. He is being punished for living opposed to those ideals in a lot of ways. It's funny how he like some of these ideals were messy, but a lot of it was the will was like to come together and create your own universes and like be good to each other. And instead, his own ego and humanity of having power over people won. And in that, he lost everything. And he was unable to step outside himself and see that at all and just twisted it into a selfish thing, which ruined his life further. Which is what Spare was talking about. Yes.

This is Osmond Spare, who like was one of his like apprentices who kind of joined Crowley was in the abbey for maybe a few months. and left, that was what he walked out of. He walked in and said, oh, oh, like this core makes sense. Everything else is contradictory to what you're doing. I'm out. And he wrote what would become the core of chaos magic, which then got rediscovered in the 80s and became chaos magic. Like, do you see like the seed of it all?

Oh, this is great. Yeah. More importantly, the Seinfeld episode can have a happy ending where Newman gets his, you know, he's like, tried to be God and like, you can't be God, Newman. And then the next, and then he's back at the end of the episode, he's a mailman again, the end.

Because Kramer lives an honest life to himself and doesn't have to be over. He's often he writes the book. He's the correct candidate. He's the moonchild. He's the moon child. Oh, shit. Yeah, it's crazy. I don't, I'm not trying to put that perspective on to be like, the magic is real. I just, it's fascinating

that he did preach the stuff. And then went on to live a life opposite of it and got punched all the step of the way. The hypocrisy. Yeah, it really shouldn't matter if the magic is real, but you should, but the point was that you did the things that you said anyway. Yeah, exactly. Like, so now he's like deteriorating at age 50, starting to write this shit.

Um, he was also perpetually, desperately broke from this point on. Um, he had no, nowhere, none of his, his manner was gone, money was gone. Um, he was reduced to writing a constant stream of pathetic, a begging, letters to any remaining disciples that were scattered across the world saying things like, please send money, I am the profit of the new Aon and I cannot afford food. Like, he begged to the people that still followed him. And there were actual benefactors still. One of them was a German follower named Carl Germa, who somehow stayed loyal to Crowley

through all of this chaos and would become his primary financial lifeline for years. Carl was basically keeping Crowley alive at this point in his life. And this period in exile also saw the slow, painful, and honestly, almost inevitable collapse of his magical partnership with Leah Hersig. Leah was not just another girlfriend or mistress. Remember, she was Alastrayal, the scarlet woman, the ape of Toff, the woman who had consecrated her entire being to his great work. and she had endured the absolute squalor of the abbey without complaining. She'd given birth to his kids in unsanitary conditions because again, mind you, they didn't even go to the hospital for birthing kids.

They did it in the abbey. She'd served as a primary magical partner for like his most intense demanding sexual rituals. She let him get her addicted to heroin. I don't know if she actually, I should have phrased that differently. She got addicted to heroin because of him and couldn't get out from his thumb. I don't want to say she let him get her addicted to Perrin because manipulation from a fucking cult leader is like hard to get away from. The failure of the Abbey was as much, you know,

she was a victim rather of the failure of the Abbey as much as anybody else was there. But in her mind, she'd been completely devoted to making this work and she was a true believer. And the whole ordeal had left her physically and spiritually exhausted. She was burnt out at this point, a shell of the vibrant woman who had originally arrived in Sicily. And Crowley, in his typical fashion, did not respond to her exhaustion with any compassion, gratitude for her years of service or sacrifice. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Instead, he subjected her to a series of increasingly cruel tests designed to completely shatter what was left of her ego and prove her absolute unwavering devotion, even as she was falling apart

out driven away with Crowley. According to his own magical diaries, again, this guy documented everything. He would command her to have sex with other men, sometimes complete strangers. And this wasn't presented as like a, hey, we're an open relationship. Let's explore. This was him explaining it and framing it as a magical duty that she had to do. A magical pupae, if you will. A magical pupae, if one wilt.

This is like, and she had to magically overcome, rather, it was framed as a magical duty an ordeal that she had to overcome to transcend jealousy and attachment. And he would publicly humiliate her in front of what he, what few followers would eventually visit every once in a while, like making her less than nothing. Yeah, it's, it's pure control. Like he is all control. Brutalizing this poor woman. Yeah.

And while this is all going on, a new disciple did actually appear on, show up. And her name was Dorothy Olson, a young American woman who had entered their circle in Tunisia with a fresh energy, enthusiasm, and stars in her eyes. She had heard legends and probably not much else. Dorothy, compared to him being 50, she was in her early 20s, young enough to be one of Crowley's daughters for sure. And she came from a completely different world than the broken, traumatized people currently visiting or surrounding him at any given point.

She wasn't damaged yet. She hadn't been ground down by years in the Abbey. She hadn't lost any kids. No heroin addiction. speak of, Crowley became immediately captivated, shall we say. Not by her as a person necessarily, but more Crowley was like never really interested

in people as people to begin with. He was more captivated by what she represented. A fresh start. New energy to feed on, a blank canvas, something that he could take his magical paint and paint his magical system onto. Like, the fact that she wasn't a broken, traumatized heroin addict just made her more

attractive to Crowley. Right. Because he can break her and traumatize her and make her a heroin addict. Exactly. Dorothy had come to North Africa as a spiritual seeker, having read Crowley's works and become fascinated by Thelma. She was an artist herself, exactly the kind of person who would be drawn to Crowley's philosophy of radical individual freedom and magical transformation. And she all saw on him what Leah had seen years earlier.

She saw a prophet, somebody who was a genius, and someone who could teach her and show her the gateway to the transcendent kind of enlightenment that she was seeking. What she didn't see when none of the men saw at first, honestly, was the pattern that we have now seen through up three episodes. She didn't understand that she wasn't special in any way to Crowley, that this had all happened before, would happen again if allowed. She was just the latest in a long line of Scarlet women, each one arriving full of hope and devotion, and each one used up and discarded when the next one came along.

And of course, Crowley doesn't matter from being 50, started up right away. He wasted no time and began grooming Dorothy as his new primary magical partner teaching her the rituals, initiating her into the mysteries of sex magic, positioning her as the new vessel for Babylon. And crucially, he began elevating her status within their small group at Leah's expense. For Leah, watching this unfold in real time, I can't imagine how devastating it was. she had been given everything. She gave her health. She gave kids. Her own fucking sanity.

Like she gave everything to this man. And now she was watching herself be actively replaced like worn out furniture. Dorothy was getting all his attention. All the magical focus, the intimate instruction, everything that once Leah was getting. And the thing is, Dorothy probably didn't even really realize that she was complicit in this cruelty at first at all. She likely thought that she and Leah were both serving. Crowley and the great work together, kind of both serving this master. She didn't really understand that Crowley's world, but they could only be one true

scarlet woman at a time, and who she was and her ascension was wholly at the whim of Crowley's ego and who he thought or would rather have around. This pattern, the cycle of idealization and then disregard was something Crowley repeated, now was about to repeat a second time, and as soon as a magical part sure showed signs of breaking down of needing actual care and compassion rather than just more ordeals and tests. That's what his interest in them would wane. It happened with his first wife. It was happening now with Leah. And conveniently, there was now, there was always another young seeker ready to kind of like step into that role, convinced they would be different that their devotion would be

enough that they were the true scarlet woman. Dorothy Olson would eventually learn that Leah had learned, what had Leah had learned, that serving Crowley as Crowley, Crowley. his magical partner was far from any honor and gave you no direction to any sort of spiritual path. All it was was slow motion consumption of your entire being in the service of one man's bottomless need for validation and power. He was a narcissist. Could you imagine if that was something that still happened today? Crazy. I'm so glad we don't do that. The amount of people that would be chewed up and spit out by such a person. Crazy. We'd be insane. We've gone to then isn't it crazy 100 years

proud of us this was a pattern this is a pattern that would repeat throughout his whole life even to his fucking death as one magical partner just came useless cycled through the end for Leah wasn't any single dramatic

breakup like it was for his first wife where he put his first wife into the insane asylum there was no good big confrontation it was just a more cruel end than that it was a slow agonizing process of watching yourself being replaced in real time while watching while having to watch it happen and as crowley's attention shifted to dorothy this younger american woman lea status is the

one true scarlet woman just fully dissolved she was kind of demoted sideline for the newer fresher thing made to feel like she was just another follower instead of a high priestess that she had been for years and eventually with her health completely broken and her spirit crushed she finally left his inner circle. She had nothing. Completely broke, no resources, no support system. She gave him out anything like any cult member does. She had no, like everything. And her children would go with her. The most telling and genuinely tragic part, though, to Leah Hersig's story is that is the part that really shows you how deep Crowley's influence went to her. Unlike so many other people who left Crowley's orbit and spent the rest of their lives denouncing him or warning

others away like Betty May. Leah never renounced Thelma. She never turned on the teaching. She remained a true believer until the day she died, even after leaving him. She fully believed in it all. She would make her way back to America, would get a job as a school teacher, going back to what she would do before she left for Crowley, and moved on to live a quiet, obscure, kind of completely anonymous life. We don't know too much about her after that. Nobody knew that she'd been the scarlet woman, you know, in her hometown. Nobody knew that she'd been some high priestess. She got the ending, I think a lot of cult members don't get.

They, she was able to some way slip back into society, uh, and kind of find a stable footing there again. Even if she was permanently a believer of Thelamon could never really let go of that, which I can imagine is hard when you've done your whole life at something. That's how a lot of like, Scientologists are too, is they like still kind of. Yeah. just believe even though they're not part of the group anymore. Yeah.

And there's a whole conversation about like that, like aspects of these cults that maybe do genuinely help people work through things that you can't let go of. And you're like, well, that really did work. But yeah, I'm glad she at least was able to not, she didn't die in the squalid, but having to lose a child,

I can never imagine. Right. So she, like I said, she just never stopped believing. And when she went on, living kind of a normal life as an anonymous individual again, despite Crowley's,

own poverty, his own on and off illness, despite his own personal turmoils. The work of Thelma continued because it fucking had to, right? That's all Crowley had left. He was not, while he may no longer have been the abbot of a functioning anti-monestery, whatever the fuck he called it, and now he was just like a reclusive, sick author, desperately trying to write his own legend in existence before he died, he began churning out articles, instructional papers for new holy books, commentaries, commentaries on his old works. Anything to keep his magical

order, the AA, still alive in some way, through correspondence. While he couldn't gather students physically anymore, he did it through the mail. He was kind of like a king and exile for these people, ruling over his own dwindling empire through paper

and ink and snail mail. Though he didn't really own anything, he would live across a variety of small houses and cheap hotels across North Africa and Europe. His wandering during this period eventually led him to the one place in Europe that was a as decadent, chaotic and artistically vibrant as Crowley himself at this point in time, the Wymer,

Wymer, Berlin in the early 1930s. And if you know anything about Wymer Berlin, you know this was the thing. Everything turned out fun. Yeah, yeah. For this moment, though, it was kind of the perfect place for a broke aging, drug addicted occultist to just kind of land for now. This was the Berlin of Cabaret of Christopher Isherwood writing goodbye to Berlin of absolute, a lot of artistic and sexual freedom existing in this doomed bubble. The city was simultaneously falling apart while creativity was exploding. The economy was in shambles. I mean, you guys, I'm sure you guys have seen historical pictures of people with wheelbarrows

of cash, yeah, full of money that they were rolling around to go burn to shopping shit. Yeah. Yeah. And go burn for heating their own homes. Unemployment was astronomical. There was political violence just open in the streets. communists and fascists literally fighting each other in alleys but somehow and maybe because it's the chaos i don't know Berlin had become the cultural capital of europe at this point the city was a

magnet for artists writers performers all kinds of outsiders and misfits um you were just kind of if you were weird if you were avant-garde if you didn't fit anywhere else you went to berlin the nightlife was apparently legendary the cabarets were pushing boundaries the art scene was exploding with expressionism and Dada. And most importantly is, yeah, you say Dada, right? Yeah, Dada, D-A-D-A. Yeah. And most importantly, for Crowley, there was a queer subculture that was thriving in a

way that simply just didn't exist anywhere else in the world very much. There were gay bars, lesbian clubs, drag shows, openly queer performers, all of this in 1930, which is kind of wild when you think about it. And Crowley arrived in Berlin around 1930 and for maybe the first time in years, He actually seemed to kind of be in his element again. He set himself up in cheap lodgings in Bohemian districts, probably Schoenberg or around Nalindor for plots. If any of people know what those places are like, I'd love to hear from you.

I'll give you boys the spelling in case you want to look it up at any point. But yeah, I mean, so this is like a time of, you know, in Berlin, people were expressing themselves and coming, you know, being able to be who they were in public. and people were very supportive of this. And then there was like a terrible backlash against that. Thank God that doesn't happen today. Yeah. We are so much more advanced than we were in the 30s.

That was a hundred years ago, guys. We're like, we're better off. We've evolved. The difference now is that people today were convinced we were in an inflation that we were definitely going through inflation. Still are, Bob, way worse now. But it wasn't like this. You know, people burning money because it,

literally was a way to create warmth because it was so meaningless. Right. Yeah. Right. I mean, someone had to be blamed, clearly. So yeah. That didn't end.

That was fine. It definitely wasn't because of the corrupt politicians and old like, no, no, no, no, Kings and Queens. Don't be silly. Yeah.

But we as a people as a world have moved past that. Of course. Yeah. Absolutely. Of course we have. And the thing with Alistur is he didn't have any money for forever or anything fancy. So it was just living and boarding houses and cheap. hotels during this time.

But now he was in a city that kind of understood him. And his daily routine became kind of ritualistic. He'd wake up. He'd wake up late. Do his morning adorations in yoga. He never stopped the magical practice. Even when he's at his lowest, it's important to point out.

And then make his way to the cafes. Berlin's cafe culture is apparently incredible. I don't really know. I mean, right now, Berlin in general has like some pretty amazing, like, cafe culture and like you know barsy culture and club culture it's a good place yeah well apparently these cafes were like even even around this time we're like

artistic salons political meeting grounds for people everything kind of just happening at once and apparently just a constant haze of cigarette smoke everywhere um but i don't know if that's that much so isn't that still very much like common out in europe still smoking like cigarette smoking yeah cigarettes are pretty big there's still people who smoke in europe compared to here but I wouldn't say it's a main thing.

Yeah, I wasn't sure. Crowley became kind of a regular fixture at several cafes in the artistic districts to the point where he'd begin holding court for hours, nursing a single coffee because he couldn't afford any more than that, regaling whoever would listen to him with stories of his magical exploits and his times at the Abbey or his encounter with demons and gods. And all I imagine when I was writing this was like that guy at the con who catches your ear and you didn't mean to give him the attention

but you did and then he starts talking at you for an hour about how he's like a something high wizard yeah for like way too fucking long yeah exactly I don't know what I don't show about that doesn't sound like a thing I've ever experienced no no I probably am usually that guy let's be real I was that guy so I made a podcast about

about video games from before 2013 that's my that's my deal right yeah yeah to the young artist and writers of Berlin like Alistra see seemed like this exotic and kind of people like knew about him he was a notorious figure which gave him an edgy kind of uh flare uh because again wickedest man in the world was following him everywhere and he was right there in their cafe granted looking increasingly frail and shabby and not really commanding attention with any formidable charisma as much anymore but he still had

away with words and he was painting again too at this point he'd found his artistic kind of flare also re-sparked probably had always been kind of a i'd say he's a comprehensive competent painter, not a master in any way, but he wasn't terrible at it. And he tried to sell his works to make ends meet. He'd set up in cafes or galleries, did quick portraits for people, selling his more elaborate occult-themed paintings to whoever'd be interested in buying them. The problem was that very few people were interested in buying paintings from the wickedest man in the world and occultist during an economic depression that was happening at the time. And money wasn't really easy to come by. He made almost nothing from it, but it gave him purpose at least. And it kind of

distracted and it allowed him to interact with the art scene. Financially, Crowley survived in Berlin the same way he'd been surviving everywhere else. Other than that, the begging. Carl Ghermer from Germany, like I mentioned, was still feeding him money at this time. But he also tried to make money through more writing at this time, too. He was still producing articles, essays on magic, Thelma, trying to get them published in whatever esoteric journal he could. But the market for occult literature in 1930s, early 1930s Germany,

while it was better than in England wasn't making him rich. The people in Crowley encountered during this period were a fascinating kind of cross-section of Weimer, Berlin's Bohemian underground. While we don't have like really detailed records of everyone he met, he wasn't a meticulous, he wasn't like that meticulous about his diaries and stuff. We know he moved in circles that included artists, writers, performers, and fellow occultists. He definitely crossed paths with some of Berlin's openly queer artistic community. uh,

which was another like he felt, the way he writes about it, he's felt so free being in a place that he could be bisexual and like open about and not worry about it must have been wild at that time to be that free. Especially after he wrote the book of one, which talks about allowing yourself to be free and like be who you are in that way. Yes. Um,

yeah, literally and he could for the first time be completely open about, open about his sexuality. And, uh, as we move into his mid 50s and we're looking increasingly rough from of drug abuse and to poor health that didn't stop. He threw himself into the scene with like a wild enthusiasm. Apparently, not only would become regulars at cafes, but soon people would see him at

cabarets all the time visiting the famous or infamous night spots or Berlin. It didn't matter to him. Places like the El Dorado, one of Berlin's most famous gay and lesbian clubs where performers did elaborate drag shows, the silhouette, which is another clear club, the Klyse Casino, all of these places where Crowley would go. And like, man, this is another part of me where I'm like, I wonder if he had just discovered this shit. He needed, he needed like Tumblr. He needed like Tumblr.

Yeah, yeah. He needed like Tumblr when it first came out. He traveled to Berlin first instead of anywhere else. You know, like, I wonder, but like, oh, wait, this is where I can like settle in. And honestly, there were a lot of people there that knew him as the infamous beast 666. And that also was huge for them. Because, you know, the rebel fee, it's like that rebel thing. He eventually got connected with Germany's occult underground.

There was a serious interest in esoteric traditions in Weimar, Germany. This was a period where an organization like the Thule Society and other mystical orders were active, which we will cover one day, the Thule Society very deeply, because they are connected to the Nazis. And some of these groups had nationalist and proto-Nazi leanings. Like, I don't know how many people know, but Hitler was involved with the Thule Society when he was very, very young. sure and like like that all leads into that it's it's another so many things we could cover on the show um

yeah so like this is all mingling with them but there were genuine magical practitioners who were interested in crowley's work with thelma the a a a etc and through these connections he gained a few more german disciples um and uh they would later become incredibly report into the survival of thelma after crowley's death these people that he was meaning now helped keep all this shit alive after he passed away. Even as Crowley was enjoying this brief renaissance though in Berlin, the darkness was still kind of gathering in the country. He was watching in real time as Nazis gained power.

As the political violence just got worse, as the freedoms that made Berlin special began to erode. And the cabarets started to feel more desperate. The queer clubs knew their days were numbered. Everyone kind of felt it coming on. Crowley, despite as many flaws, saw exactly what the Nazi. he's represented. He watched them with horror and contempt, seeing them as the antithesis of everything he

believed in. Can't imagine what that would be like. I know, weird to see. I'm so glad that doesn't happen anymore. Where he championed, where proudly championed individual will and freedom, they demanded conformity and obedience. Like, again, he was there about celebrating sexual liberation and they preached repression and racial purity, where he, like, he was in a lot of ways the opposite, even if he was

a piece of shit human being. You know, he wasn't quite a Nazi in that way. Yeah, he was a tragic firsthand witness to all of this stuff kind of coming down. It's, you know what's fascinating about this? Is it the reason, I mean, obviously, it's because he liked the freedom of the moment and being able to be himself. But there's also something to be said for the fact that as a Nazi, your whole thing was that Hitler guy, he's the one in charge, he's the best, we love that.

and it's kind of like I can imagine him being mighty pissed that someone else was doing his stick. Mm-hmm. You know what I mean? Like, like, that is, I can, he's like, I don't like what they're doing. But also like, how dare he? I do also truly think he hated the Nazis. I truly do think he hated them very much.

Honestly, it's just another end of that spectrum of control. Of course. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the abbey is a great. That's why I wanted to revisit in detail today, because it is a true look at.

when he gave into his most egocentric cult-like mentality. Yeah. But he despised the Nazis. He saw them correctly as the complete antithesis to everything that his philosophy stood for. I hesitate to say everything he stood for. Well, he was a hypocrite of his own philosophy. Let's be clear. Exactly that.

He wasn't a hypocrite in this so much. He was like he was like he thought he was doing it, but he wasn't doing it. Which made him. But like, yeah, he had inability to self-reflect. That's the problem. You didn't have awareness. I mean, like, you know, accidental hypocrisy is still hypocrisy. Yes, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, for him, Nazism was about subsuming your individual identity into the collective for following orders and eliminating anyone who was different. To Crowley, they represented everything wrong with humanity. But by, but being Crowley, he also couldn't just hate the Nazis like a normal person can. No, he saw this as an opportunity for what else? another round of magical warfare.

Of course he did. In his mind, and remember his mind is a very strange place. World War II wasn't just a conventional military conflict. This was the ultimate magical conflict, a global battle between the forces of his new aeon horace, individual liberty, true will, enlightenment, blah, blah, blah, and the dark regressive herd mentality of the Nazi regime representing the dying old aon, if you remember the father the the the patriarchal society of repression this grand battle is the final one before the new age begins and while he was too old and too sick and honestly too infamous to fight in any

conventional sense he wasn't going to be enlisting or anything like that but he genuinely believed he had a crucial role to play in a secret war one that was being fought with like last time symbols, curses, the astral plane and rituals. Crowley thought he was fighting Hitler with magic spells from his room. And maybe he was. Maybe. And like as delusional as it sounds, he fucking was serious about it. I mean, admittedly, Hitler and a lot of his dudes were probably on the same level.

Fool society. They really were into occult stuff. So they may that, you know, you might not be. That's absolutely wrong. You're going to see why you might not be wrong, Jesse, and why I will do a series as equally in depth about the full society. Because there is a story that's one of the most famous about this time period where he's doing this war, magic war, and kind of just a fascinating one in that, where his, his,

Crowley's magical war effort involves one of the most iconic symbols in World War II, the V for victory hand gesture, peace, V for victory, whatever. You know the two fingers, like, yeah, this one, the two fingers up. For audio listeners, two fingers up, like you do a peace sign, essentially. That sign Churchill made famous to rally the British public. Yeah, Churchill, all that. Crowley made a quiet but extraordinary claim to his inner circle that the entire gesture was his idea fed to the British government

through his old contacts in British intelligence. V for victory is his? Yep. Okay. Let's talk about those intelligence contacts because this is kind of. unaware, it gets really interesting. Crowley absolutely did have connections to British intelligence. This isn't conspiracies theory territory.

It's documented fact. During World War I, when he was cowardly running away, he'd done some work for British intelligence in America. Again, he talks about how it was pro-propaganda stuff, but there's rumors that there was stuff he was doing quietly that we don't know about. And obviously the pro-progerman absurdist articles he would write. It's kind of a Crowley move playing both sides. Like, there's no way to know.

But during World War II, he definitely crossed paths with British intelligence. One of his documented context was Ian Fleming. Like, is that? I don't know if you know, like that, Ian. Yes. What? The creator, the future creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming. But also like,

Ian Fleming guy who helped with one of World War II's most notorious, like, traps for Germany. That guy. Fleming was working on naval intelligence at the time that he knew him. And multiple sources confirmed that he and Crowley knew each other. In fact, there's a document, documented meeting where Fleming consulted Crowley about the Rudolph Hess Affair in 1941. one. Two years before America got involved, or right when America was getting involved. Why?

See, well, when Hitler's deputy, Rudolph Hess, inexplicably flew solo to Scotland and what appeared to be some kind of bizarre peace mission, British intelligence was baffled. They didn't know what the hell it was about, if it was genuine or a trap. Fleming and others in naval intelligence reportedly met with Crowley to get his take on the occult interests of Nazi leadership. Sure, sure. I don't know if they met with Crowley,

but the U.S. to the same. Like, everyone was like, we don't know, we don't know if it's real, but we can't take any chances, make a team, and their whole thing is basically Indiana Jones. Like, that happened.

I have no, I don't have any paperwork that I could find that they were working with, he ever met with America. He may have, but he'd met with British, intelligence and they wanted to understand if Hess's mission had any connection to esoteric beliefs that some Nazis held. And whether Crowley actually provided useful intelligence or just entertained them with his theories,

we don't know because the details were top secret. But the contact was real. And Fleming being Fleming was absolutely fascinated by Crowley. That's fascinating. You can see Crowley's influence all over the James Bond novels, the exotic locations, the emphasis on ritual and routine, the larger than life villains with grandiose plans, even some of Bond's more esoteric knowledge.

La Chifre, the villain in Casino Royale is essentially a dark magician figure, and Fleming knew exactly who Crowley was and what he represented. Crowley exclaimed that he'd suggested the V sign to British intelligence was he completely, like, we don't know if he was making it up,

but it's not impossible. He did have the contacts, the timing actually works out, The V campaign started gaining momentum in 1941 when Crowley was still in contact with intelligence circles. And here's where Crowley's genius for self-mythologizing comes in because according to him, this wasn't just some simple morale boosting gesture. No, no.

This was a devastating magical counter curse aimed directly at the heart of Nazi power, the swastika. It was an opposing sigil. It's like the negative pephe. It's like the anti-pepe. Yes, yes. was the, yeah, it was the opposing sigil. Crowley explained that with his typical, with his typical mix of genuine occult knowledge

and theatrical flair, the swastika he said, in its ancient original essence before the Nazis corrupted it, is a solar symbol. It represents the sun, light, order, creative energy, all positive, generative forces. The Nazi regime had taken this powerful sacred symbol that appears in cultures from India and Native America and weaponized it, weaponized it, harnessing it for their fascist ideology. Now, we won't go into it deeply, but this is a side tangent. The way they twisted it in Nazi, uh, in Nazi occultism and I assume, I think the Thule society is they said that the swastika came from ancient white humans, which is where

the master Aryan race called it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why they, Nazis used it. They took it because it wasn't really being used for anything and rebranded it. And, like, just so like, like, that's what he was doing was. was like taking the swastika and making a counter sigil essentially. So the Njazeem corrupted it. And to fight the swastika magically, Crowley argued,

you couldn't just oppose it conventionally. You needed to magically neutralize it. You needed a counter sigil. Enter the V sign in Crowley's elaborate magical system. And remember, man, it spent decades developing this shit. It wasn't just a made-up on the spot. This two-finger gesture carried serious occult weight. It represented the horns up.

of Apophis, the ancient Egyptian serpent demon of chaos and destruction, who eternally tries to devour Arra, the sun god, every single night as he travels through the underworld. Apophis is the enemy of solar order, the force of primordial chaos that threatens to unmake creation itself. So he wasn't targeting the Nazi symbols in what the Nazis wanted it to represent. He was targeting it in what it truly corally represented in the truth behind the the symbol in attacking its real meaning, not its Nazi meaning to collapse the Nazis from the inside. Take God.

The V was also the sign of Typhan in Greek mythology, the father of monsters. The chaotic titan who challenged Zeus himself, the final boss in the newly released Hades 2. In Crowley's magical alphabet, it was the letter VAL, VAU, associated with the planet Mars in representing force, destruction, and overcoming.

This man was like, not one, not two. three religions coming down strong on the Nazis. That's like a wrestling, like, oh, they're coming out of it. And also the undertaker's there. And then like a stone cold shows up. All right. And it's like the rock suddenly is there. And like, you know, Vince McMahon's like, oh.

That's what you think it's over? The astro vampire reveals its face. Crowley's theory went like this, basically. Every time someone in Britain and eventually across the allied world flashed of the V for victory sign. They were, whether they knew it or not, participating in the largest magical ritual ever performed in human history. This is where it sounds like Grant Morrison's, the Invisibles, and what he wanted people to do with his sigil that he created, which is also a V, by the way, I just want you to know. Millions of people all making the same gesture, all focusing

their intention on defeating the Nazis, whether consciously or not, they were collectively invoking the chaotic, destructive, sun-devouring power of apophis to magically blind and overwhelm the solar energy that the Nazi Swatzica was channeling. Hell yeah. I love this. It's a subversive kind of way of magical thinking, turning a simple gesture of defiance into a nationwide, worldwide curse against the Third Reich. I just, I think it's kind of magical genius.

I fucking love this. Is it true? we don't know. We don't know what the meeting was. We don't know what they said. We can't know. And so we're taking this from Crowley, who is known to lie in elaborating. It does a lot. Yeah. And lies a lot. So the honest answers, we don't know. Most historians are kind of skeptical. The V for Victory campaign has a pretty well documented origin story that doesn't involve Crowley already. And it was promoted by the BBC's Belgian service, popularized across occupied Europe as a symbol of resistance. And then adopted by. Churchill who love the theatrical drama of it, there's no smoking gun document that says Alistair Crowley suggested this. But here's the thing, even if Crowley didn't actually suggest it to British intelligence, even if Fleming just met with him about Hess and nothing more, the magical interpretation itself is genuinely clever by this guy.

Whether you believe in magic or not, Crowley understood something profound about symbols in collective psychology that chaos magic went on to embody. He understood that a simple gesture, repeated by millions, carries power. He understood that symbols shape consciousness, that they bypass rational thought and tap into something deeper, something corporations and CEOs feast on to this day. And there's one more detail that adds credibility, though, to Crowley's claim, at least circumstantially. Churchill often flash the V sign backwards, palm facing inward rather than outward. In Britain, that's basically the equivalent of flipping someone to the bird. It's an insulting, aggressive gesture, which, let's be honest, is way more in characterful with Churchill and Crowley, if I'm saying, a peace sign.

And if this was meant to be a magical curse, doing it in the insulting manner rather than the peaceful manner, which is what that is, would be, would make sense. It would make perfect sense if you're using it as a curse rather than a blessing. again it's circumstantial that's like literally only a piece of circumstantial evidence of if he actually did tell them about that but we don't know well and honestly we'll never know for certain there's really no way i don't think we'll ever really know for certain what was said in that exchange whether it was real or just Crowley's last great act of self mythologizing it's still a fucking great fucking story yeah and knowing and knowing even if through that story we know about his connections to Fleming and British intelligence were real at the very least. And they knew of him.

Beyond this grand, unverifiable claim, his personal war effort was way more direct. According to his followers at the time, he would actually perform daily rituals in his room at the Netherwood boarding house. The like not regular prayers, like targeted magical attacks that he reportedly used photographs of Hitler and other top Nazi officials as the focus for banishing rituals. designed to magically constrain their influence and bind their will. You do what you can do. Yeah. He's doing what you can do.

If you're home, you know, you're trying to figure it out. You do what you can do. Yeah, he's jizzing all over pictures of Hitler to banish him, man. You know, you got to do what you got to do. You're right. But he didn't just keep his contempt in private rituals either. He was also very public. The most concrete evidence of his attitude comes from a scathing review that he wrote about Adolfs

Hitler's mindcom. of the book? He wrote a review of the book. Crowley was savage, honestly. Hitler's writing style, he called, quote, vapid and verbose, the bouncing of a clumsy and self-conscious clown and comparing it to a,

comparing it to a quote, stupid and tedious conversation in a country pub in the middle of the night. Crowley's main analysis, though, was psychological. He believed that Hitler was not a true forward-thinking leader, but a man completely, possessed by the dying, by the dying ideologies and energies of an older time, he saw Hitler as a

throwback and a tool for the old gods. His most famous assessment comes from analyzing a passage he did where Hitler describes himself lying at a hospital, blinded by a gas attack, where he receives his defined call to save Germany. And Crowley read that and jumped on it saying, quote, one is reminded of the story of conversations in a Methodist chapel. I have quoted this passage because it is the key to the whole of Hitler's book. He is the man of God who has heard the voice of God. In other words, he is a medium, the kind of person who is used by some intelligence, which he does not understand to be its mouthpiece regardless.

Hitler is a youthful tool, not a possession of his own will, but the will of a God. The God that he believes he's being spoken to by it. for Crowley anyway. Crowley saw this though. You have to understand for Crowley. This was, this was like one of the worst things you could do. It's pure weakness.

He wasn't a man of his true will. Like I said, he was an empty vessel. He saw him as like a hysterical victim of his own delusions, which, you know, again, if Crowley took a second to look inward,

you know, maybe he'd see something similar. Fair enough. This led though to his most pointed and famous insult. He saw Hitler as being akin to what he called, and I love this. a quote Hitler was a hysterical virgin

He called him an old-timey He called him an old-timey in-cell Essentially, he used the old-timey language calling him an in-cell That's basically what he was He was And this is open contempt Combined with his infamous reputation

Just made him a target The Nazis were obsessed with purging What they called Entotong or Degeneracy From German culture And Alistair Crowley was the walking Talking embodiment of everything they considered degenerate because he's doing this in Germany. He's doing all this wall in Berlin and shit.

He was a foreign occultist, a drug user, prominent figure in the queer art scene and the Nazis, and the Nazis were starting to brutally suppress that. The final straw appears to have been a personal betrayal. A disgruntled German disciple, a woman named Hanna Yeager, had a bitter falling out with Crowley over personal and financial matters. She allegedly reported him to the newly empowered authorities, providing them with a convenient dossier of a scandalous lifestyle. The ratting of the out to the Nazis has begun. Like people are like, you're not doing what I like.

It's like the witch trials back in the day, right? Sure. He's ratting them out directly to the now empower SS, like those people. For the Nazi regime, which is already busy cleansing Berlin at this time of any of these undesirables, this was the only excuse they needed. So Alistaira Crowley was unceremoniously expelled from Germany now as well, adding a second fascist dictator from World War II to the list of leaders who had personally kicked him out of their country.

Kind of hot. Got to say. Yep. Damn right. Because remember, Germany mostly started with deportations. The thing is, is they just had, they started deporting more people than they could send anywhere, which was the point. And then they started building camps for them, which they were only supposed to concentrate

people in for a limited time. And then they couldn't get rid of the people inside of those concentration camps. So they started killing them. do you see america a very particular parallel you should be paying attention to you we're past that guy sweet come on society has moved on everything's going blurry nobody ever rats anybody out to the government and for for what they say about anything definitely not near me where ice is around yeah because they're not the gestapo guys he returned to england after being kicked out of germany even from much older now increasingly even more

frail, but his ego remained very much intact. And it was that ego that would lead him into his final, but most humiliating public battle. In the last bit of his life, an artist in former acquaintance named Nina Hamnet, published a book of memoirs called Laughing

Torso. In it, she casually repeated some of the old sensationalist rumors about the Abbey of Thelma, mentioning black magic and a story about a baby disappearing. For Crowley, this was the last straw. He was done. After a decade of being slandered by the press, he decided to fight back in a disastrously arrogant move that

kind of echoed a little bit of Oscar Wilde's fatal lawsuit. Alistair Crowley sued Nina Hamnet and her publisher for libel. Crowley was genuinely thought, uh, probably genuinely thought that this trial would be a moment of vindication for him. He thought that this would be his chance to finally clear his name in a proper court of law to present his philosophy to the world. Uh, he'd get the stage he was looking for. and what he considered a respectable form

where he could explain himself and show everyone that he wasn't the monster of the tabloids made him out to be. He was going to set the record straight. He was catastrophically, spectacularly wrong. The trial became a public spectacle like he'd hoped, but a full-on trial where the British establishment could finally put Alistair Crowley

in his entire shocking worldview in the dock and tear it apart after him getting in and out of the country for over three decades at this point of doing this shit. The defense lawyers who were brilliant lawyers, by the way, at their job, who dredged up every single scandal that could get their hands on for him.

Every controversial piece of writing he made, every rumor that had ever been attached to his name over 40 years. They read aloud the most blasphemous pages, passages from his own poetry, the stuff about defiling crucifixes, mocking Christ. They read the most like brutal, violent verses from the book

of the law that we talked about, things like let my servants be few in secret they shall rule the many in the known and all of that stuff about trampling down the week they brought up the abbey of phelma the dead children the drugs sex magic betty may's testimony just nothing was left off the table this painted him not as a misunderstood philosopher spiritual teacher in any way this was a disaster for him crowley being crowley was absolutely his own worst enemy on the witness stand too he was arrogant condescending to these people. He tried to explain the incredibly complex, complex intricacies of his magical system. Like that was going to do goddamn anything. Trying to explain the cabala. It just shows, it's like this episode kind of, I think, for people like who hear about these dumb sort of embarrassing things that he does and kind of like check out on the entire concept of him. You know what I mean? Yeah. It probably did that for anybody who was waiting to check out on him. This was probably a perfect way for

them to do it. Absolutely. Some people needed an off ramp. They needed more. evidence or whatever. Because at the end of the day, as we said earlier, Crowley was still a piece of shit human being who was narcissistic and couldn't even do the only good shit he was supposed to be being philosophizing for. So on the court stand, he's literally trying to explain the cabala. He starts going on about the different grades of his magical order, the AA, what the symbolism of Thelma is to a audience that was not receptive at all, a conservative British judge and

a jury who had already made up their minds about him. Like, he came across exactly as they thought he was going to. This pretentious, self-important fraud that was just trying to justify his own depravity with fancy words. And they're not wrong. The verdict was honestly kind of a foregone conclusion from the moment the trial started. This man lost very, very badly. But the real damage, the thing that would cement in the worst, like his legacy in the

worst possible way. came from the judge's own summing up of the course. The judge in his final address to the court, unleashed in torrent of abuse on Crowley. Here's a little bit from the legal epitaph of his entire public life that I'll have Jesse Reed. This is from the judge. This is from a British judge?

The British judge, yep. Okay. Where I have been over 40 years engaged in the administration of the law, I thought I knew of every form of wickedness. I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me. I have learned in this case that we can always learn something more if we live long enough. I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous, and,

a bombardable stuff as that which has been produced by the man who describes himself to you as the greatest a living poet. That is like a pretty staving commentary from the judge to Crowley. Ever since that man started wearing black suits with red jewelry, it has been so scary for me. Oh, man. One of my best friends from high school who's a lawyer now, love him to death. he's like our age Gothic lawyer still to this day

wears crimson red ties like love that man Gothic lawyer that rocks awesome I love you so much dude he floats in the courts of all time fog rolls in when he appears if he could flow into court he absolutely would

and he would not hesitate he would not hesitate yeah so that's all from a judge like that's in official court documents you can read that's not tabloid shit And it only got worse for Crowley because Crowley wasn't just publicly humiliated and legally declared to be the embodiment of wickedness.

He was also then ordered to pay the defendant's substantial court costs. He had no money. Legal feeds for trial like this were massive. Crowley was fucking dead broke. This verdict didn't embarrass him only because it literally forced him into actual legal official bankruptcy. This was the end. At nearly 60 years old,

Alastair Crowley was now in the eyes of both the law and the public, just a failure in all ways. His reputation was shattered beyond any possibility of repair. His money gone for the rest of his life. His health was failing and on a decline he could not stop from the decades of abuse he put his body through. And the great magical warrior who claimed to have battled gods and demons on the astral plane was now just a sick, tired old man who became a public laughing stock, but nothing left but his infamy and his unshakable, delusional belief continually even now in his own divine mission. The bankruptcy, while obeying the final mail in the coffin for his public life,

any remaining dignity, any tread of glory gone, the great magician who climbed the K2 mountains, traveled the world, inherited a fortune, owned estates like, Bullskin Manor. Now he's like living in boarding houses and living on the streets or in cheap hotels. And those final years living in the boarding house he called a house called Netherwood in the seaside town of Hastings would be where he'd spend the last days of his life. And if you know anything about English seaside towns, Hastings is like, I guess fine from what I've been able to see.

Like nothing special, nothing glamorous. It's not like it's exciting. It's where seemingly kind of like Florida, like where elderly people to go to require, like retire quietly and watch the sea. Like that seems like that. Which is very different from where this man. been living for the rest of his, the previous of his life.

He hosted decadent parties in Europe and now he's just chilling out here. But the thing about Crowley is even in decline, even broke and sick and living in a boarding house, he was still trying to remain relentlessly productive. Like the man just physically couldn't stop. He spent his days writing, endlessly revising his old work

and keeping up this massive correspondence with the very few remaining followers scattered to the world he still had. He was still teaching, still explaining Thelma, still being the prophet, even though basically nobody gave a shit anymore. And again, this is why I believe he was a true believer of his own bullshit. I think he was too. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, it was during the final period at Netherwood that he completed what many consider his magnum opus on the tarot, the book of Toff. Now, this is a, we're not going to get into it super deeply because it's a whole other thing. But this is like a really incredibly complex reinterpretation of the tarot cards through the lens of Thelma, mixing Egyptian symbolism, Kabbalah, astrology, and his own magical system into one comprehensive occult text on tarot. It's its own version of tarot. It's still used today by serious tariff, some serious tarot students, and it's still considered

one of the most detailed and scholarly works on tarot were ever written. I'd be curious for those who practice tarot. I know there are those who listen, who listen. I love what you do, by the way. what your thoughts are on like Toth tarot, like what you personally think of it. If you even heard of it, have you used it before.

Because we're going to go into it a little bit here. The book on it all was only half the project. Crowley also wanted to create a completely new tarot deck to go with it that would perfectly illustrate his Thalamic interpretation. And here's where things get even weirder, I don't say weird, maybe the word I should use is more interesting. Because he still was able to find people that wanted to do this with him.

He found an artist to bring his vision to life. That was about as far from his, this person was as far from his usual broken disciples as you can get. Her name was Lady Frida Harris, and she was a wealthy society woman married to a liberal member of parliament, and she moved in completely different circles in Crowley. Like, she was a regular at high society events, political events. You know, she is the establishment as we understand it.

She was also an accomplished artist with a background in both traditional and modern art movements. Then she met Crowley in the late 30s, as far as I could tell. She became utterly fascinated by his occult knowledge and agreed to take on what she thought was going to be a quick project, painting a new tarot deck. But it was not a quick project. What followed was a five-year collaboration, starting in 1938 and ending and ending in 1940. As described, it was apparently both like a tumultuous, contentious, and exhausting time that also produced one of the most brilliant, beautiful, intricate tarot decks ever created. Frida Harris, like, was a wonderful, like, illustrator who knew exactly what she was doing.

She was a very serious artist who brought her own considerable talent and visions to the work. It wasn't her just taking orders from crowling on what to paint. She painted in watercolor and gouache, if that's how you say it. Wash. Like the artistic medium? Yeah, I guess that's what you would describe that as. I didn't really look it up. Yeah, it's like a watercolor color, right?

Gosh. Gosh. Yeah. And gosh. Using art deco and art newvo, like influences to create these things. This is how they were described. So I just used the terms. I don't know much about art.

And I, if I kept going on another rabbit, oh, no. It's GW.A. It's like GW. A, J, like, gouache. G-O-U-A-A-C-H-E? Yeah. Either way, whatever it was, obviously, whatever the case, like, as one can imagine, working with Crowley was predictably a nightmare.

He was, like, hiring an artist, one of the things I love to do is, like, I want you to do what you, I'm not an artist, right? Like, I want to see you, your influence, what you do. There's an artist out there who just, like, cringed. Maybe, I mean, some people, like, direct, like, I, I don't. I know what I want. I'm with you. I'd say,

like, but if I, like, we work with somebody, right? We'll say like, we want them themed after this,

this, this, or like these kinds are cryptids or monster, but like, do it in your style. Like, I want to see your flavor.

Right. I want to see your independence come through. That's why you would pick anyone over anyone. Like anyone specific over anybody at all. Yeah. But Crowley was like incredibly demanding. He would obsess over every tiny detail. Each card had to be,

had to incorporate specific astrological symbols. Kabbalistic correspondences, Egyptian deities, Hebrew letters, elements, and parts of Estellemic philosophy, all while still being visually coherent and beautiful. And Crowley, being Crowley, would make her repaint cards over and over and over and over again if they didn't meet his exact specifications. Some cards she redid five, six, seven times, I was able to read. She'd finish a painting, show it to him, and he'd say things like, no, the angle of a sort wrong, he's to point more toward the symbol of Mars, uh, the color of the background needs to be

more golden to represent the sun's influence in this decan, like that kind of shit. And, uh, Frida Harris, like, had a strong, like, she was very independent herself. Again, she came from a place of wealth and privilege. She wasn't like broken. She wasn't traumatized in any way. Uh, so she'd argue back. She'd defend her artistic choices. They'd have intense arguments about whether a particular shade of blue was more appropriate for water symbolization. or whether a geometric pattern would spiral clockwise or counterclockwise for maximal maximal magical effect. Like it was a genuinely collaborative process, I think, against Alistair Crowley's will

because it was often contentious. And she also financed the entire project herself. Crowley was broke, so he couldn't pay her shit. She spent years of her life and her own money creating this deck because she genuinely believed in the artistic and spiritual values. of what they were making together. And the tragedy kind of also is that neither of them got to see the deck published properly in their lifetimes.

A few black and white versions came out, but the full color Toth Tarot, the version that shows off Frida Harris' incredible artwork in all its glory, wasn't published until 1969. That's crazy. Crowley had been dead for 22 years at that point. And Frida Harris had died about six years earlier, 1962. Oh, they're very cool. Yeah, eight years earlier, sorry. Yeah, they're beautiful.

Go look it up if you haven't everybody. The deck they created together kind of has become one of the most influential and widely used tarot decks in the world. It's considered a masterpiece of both the cult scholarship and visual art to this day. Yeah, it's really, the story of the creation of this tarot deck is fascinating. And he couldn't have done it without Lady Frida Harris at all. She was the reason this thing even happened. And it's really, really cool. She got to spend five years arguing with Crowley making this ship, which is crazy.

His health obviously still continued to just deteriorate. His chronic asthma, which had plagued him since childhood, was now so severe. And again, even in his old age and his deterioration, he's still addicted to heroin. He's still doing heroin going up on 70. But at this point, this is the times it was, though. He was so addicted and he was dying. He was so old. doctors just had started to prescribe it to him now.

So the few doctors he got to see, just gave him heroin. Whatever, man. Do it. So he spent his final years of life as a legally sanctioned heroin addict. And in his own mind, he was still the B-666, all this other nonsense that he was. And he still did get to remain the center of a small devoted cult of followers to the very end. They just found this when they would come and visit these few followers, they would talk about like what they would expect when they visited. him when they find when they visited him was often just a they described a frail elderly man

shuffling around in a dressing gown looking like somebody's kind of some people described him as looking like someone's eccentric grandfather with his hair but uh when he was in when he was engaged in talking to you or when you could get him to talk about magic or philosophy or poetry or whatever that energy was still there that intellect would come bubbling back and he would be like all like talking about it for hours but as he got older he knew the end was coming he his body was starting to give out, and in typical Crowley fashion, he faced it on his own terms and with no regrets and no fear. On December 1st, 1947, at the age of 72, Alistair Crowley died at Netherwood Boardinghouse.

The official cause of death was a respiratory infection. His lungs finally gave out after a lifetime of asthma and heavy smoking. The legend, of course, is a bit more dramatic. One of the more popular stories, almost certainly made up as far as I could find, but still not like too good not to mention. They claimed his last words were a final battled a baffled whisper, simply

saying as he died, I am perplexed. And then he died. Pretty cool. Yeah. So I don't, you know, it'd be cool if that was true. Crowley though, being Crowley, still had a scandal up his sleeve, even after his

final exit. He will, his will specifically stipulated that his body be cremated, and that a very specific ceremony be read at his funeral. Obviously, no Christian service. He wanted something that would horrify proper English society one last time on his death. The service was held at a crematorium in Brighton, attended by a small handful of friends and devoted followers,

maybe a dozen people total for a man who once was way more famous than that. As the coffin began to slide toward the furnace, his old friend and literary executor, a guy named Lewis Wilson, stood up and began to read Crowley's most famous and bombastic pagan poem, the hymn to Pan. The poem isn't gentle or peaceful in any way. And he gave it in a full-throated, ecstatic invocation to the great horned god of nature, Pan, the god of wild places of lust of chaos, all that primal energy. And it was a celebration of everything the Christian establishment despised. Jesse, go ahead and read this. I am thy mate.

I am thy man. Goat of thy flock. I am gold. I am God. Flesh to thy bone. Flower to thy rod. With hoofs of steel, I race on the rocks through solstice stubborn to equinox.

And I rave. And I rape. And I, well, you got to have me say. And I ripped her. take it out of context. And I rip, and I rend everlasting world without end. Manican maiden, manned man in the might of pan. Yeah, can you fucking imagine being at the crematorium?

Stand up. They say, about to say the last things. And he just starts, I rave and I rape and I rip and I rent. Honestly, if you were invited, you probably knew what you were in for. Like, if you were invited and showed up, you were probably like, yeah, I wish I could hear him because I don't know what he really sounds like. Apparently, while the people who were there were not horrified, the crematorium staff was. Oh, sure. I bet they were like, bro, I don't get paid enough for this. That's exactly like how I feel like it would be, like reported threats that they were going to stop the service entirely if they didn't do it, if they didn't stop it.

But after that poem was read, it was already done. The Crowley was already burning at that point. and you couldn't really stop that. And so his poem got read. And in that last scandalous moment, kind of like a final middle finger to the respectable society, at least in his own mind,

even Alistair Crowley was dead. But even in death, the B666 refused to go quietly. The local authorities were absolutely not amused by the pagan spectacle at their nice respectable crematorium. And the press went ballistic on it. Headlines like,

Black Magic Rights at Brighton Crematorium were plastered after Crowley's death across newspapers. The town council held emergency meetings and declared that such a thing would never happen in that town ever again. Proper England was like, once again, it got out and it did, it did make them clutch their pearls one last time. It worked. I mean, for Alist or Crowley, kind of was the perfect exit for this dude. I bet you he would have loved the outrage that that it caused. And some say that his ashes were given to his followers who were supposed to fly them back to his American disciples for some kind of memorial. Oh, they snorted those.

Well, what happened to them next is a mystery. We actually, I couldn't. There's nothing I could find as to where they actually went. They're kind of like, some say they got lost in transit. Some people say they were misplaced somewhere in England and America, which is kind of an anticlimactic. end in that way. But some say they actually got buried in a garden somewhere in New Jersey by one of his American followers.

And then there's the really out there story that claims they were ritually consumed, like Jesse said, by his followers, distorted for eaten for them as a sacred sacrament, like his, you know, his lightcakes and all that stuff. But we don't know. We genuinely have no earthly idea like what happened to him. But because despite him being dead, there's still one last little influence that we're going to talk about here right in his last two years of life. Because to understand Crowley's legacy and what happens next and how Thelma survived after

his death, there's one person we need to revisit briefly that we talked about deeply during the focus of one Alex's episodes, John Parsons or Jack Parsons, whatever you want to call him. Same guy. Same guy. Jack Parsons, obviously, he's a whole story into himself. And I would go back and listen to that episode if you haven't yet. because by day, like a quick, it's very brief, but by day, Parsons was just a rocket scientist, brilliant, kind of crazy. Like, he was one of the key founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is still one of NASA's most important facilities.

His pioneering work on solid rocket fuel was instrumental in the American space program. He was a genuine, real genius who helped lay down scientific groundwork. But by night, Jack Parsons was a devout practicing thalemite and a hardcore occultist. He was the head of the Agape Lodge of the OTO in Pasadena, California, and he took Crowley's teachings with the utmost seriousness. His large mansion, which he called the Parsonage, the Hitch is fucking great for his last name, being Parsons, became like this famous bohemian crash pad, which was ended up being a bizarre mix of rocket scientists during the day.

And then at night, he turned it into like a hub for artists, writers, science fiction authors, and occultists to mingle. it was a lot of wild parties, a lot of intellectual and philosophical debates, debates, and serious by the book magical rituals. Some of these people were NASA engineers doing sex magic with Jack Parsons and stuff. And into the already strange world in 1945 walked a man who would become one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century to this day. L. Ron Hubbard.

The dirtiest dog of all. At this point in his life, Hubbard. Hubbard was a fast-talking, and like we're getting a brief moment of Hubbard in this. We will talk about Hubbard in depth in the not too different distant future. But at this point where we're seeing in 1945, Hubbard was already a fast-talking, charismatic, red-headed pulp science fiction author with a background in the Navy. He'd written for magazines. He had some minor success.

And he was desperate for a successful book. And he was clearly looking for the next big thing and his next big angle and his next big opportunity. Jack Parsons, the brilliant scientist that he was, was immediately and completely captivated by Hubbard. He didn't see a grifter or a con man in him. What he saw was another genius and potentially another magical prodigy with an immense amount of untapped psychic potential. And the two men became very fast, instant friends and magical collaborators. Hubbard moved right into the Parsonage. Elrond Hubbard moved in with Jack Parsons and started participating in Parsons' match.

rituals and Parsons was so impressed with his new magical partner that he wrote these glowing letters about Hubbard to the aging and dying Alistair Crowley in the final years of his life. Here we go. Back in England. Yeah. Basically saying things like, I found this amazing guy. He's going to be huge for Thelma. You're going to love him.

He's going to be able to carry on your work. And Crowley, and this kind of shows you that even at the end of his life, Crowley still had a good bullshit detector, except for his own. and he immediately wasn't impressed. His response that he sent back to his followers in California, including to Jack Parsons, was immediately and deeply suspicious. I'm going to have Alex read this.

This was Crowley's response on Hubbard to Parsons. I'm still awaiting a report on this L. Ron Hubbard. I'm inclined to believe he is a common swindler, but I have to act on the assumption that he is a person of the highest possible integrity until I have proof to the contrary. and boy does he get it. Yeah, yeah. Crowley was like, this guy just basically sounds like a con artist,

but I'll give him the benefit of a doubt for now until he reveals himself. Because he didn't meet him personally. He was just hearing about him through Parsons' letters. But Crowley's instincts were actually very spot on. But Parsons was blinded by this enthusiasm. And his belief that he'd found this magical genius ignored the warning entirely. And Hubbard decided, and alongside Hubbard, he decided to embarked, together on one of the most ambitious and frankly insane magical operations imaginable.

The thing that I'm not even convinced Alistair Crowley believed it in the most literal sense, but Parsons certainly did the great Babylon working. The goal of this months-long series of incredibly intense rituals was to literally manifest for them, a living, breathing incarnation of Babylon. on. While Crowley went through the scarlet women one at a time, I truly, I really do not know if I, if Alistair really believed in a literal scarlet woman in the way that these people did. Like that the deity? Yes. Like the, as a deity. This divine great scarlet woman, the woman they've been, you know, that Crowley was pseudo bringing on, but just kind of calling the women he's

with the scarlet women. This one was supposed to be the divine feminine goddess from Crowley's cosmology, the mother of Obama. Masons, acting as the high priest, wanted to magically summon his perfect elemental mate from the astral plane so that they could together conceive a moon child via sexual magic and a magical Messiah would usher in the new Aeon. They were taking all of Crowley's new Aeon, ISIS child, all the stuff, and turning it into a form of literal magic that even Crowley wasn't you talking about or doing. He didn't believe that there was going to be a.

a birth of an, like the moon child who would dominate everything. These were very rituals to get him to a place of gnostic emptiness so that he can impress upon reality. In his mind, this is his thing. But for Jack Parsons, he's seeing this as, oh, this is actually literal. We're going to summon a literal demon like woman and conceive of a godlike child. Now, granted, Crowley did go out to the desert and maybe think he put Crohn's on inside of his friend, but it just was weird.

Like, it's hard to know on that aspect, but they go through this months long, and we're going to talk about this month's long ritual in the actual Hubbard series that I plan on doing. The working of Babylon, yeah, it's a crazy thing. Yeah, yeah, we'll worry about all of that. Hubbard's role in all this was to be the scryer.

He was supposed to be the psychic navigator in this whole ritual. He was supposed to use his supposedly incredible psychic talents to guide the ritual, make contact with entities on the other side, and help Parsons navigate the dangerous spiritual territory that they were magically entering. See, I feel like I could have done this part. I feel like I could have just been like, I see her.

Isis in white. Like, you know, you just kind of do your bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Whether Hubbard actually had any psychic abilities or not, I'm going to go ahead and say you could probably guess the answer to that.

Yeah. So for weeks, they would do, these two are doing intense inocyan rituals. That's the super complex angelic magic system that the Elizabethan magician, John D created and then magic fucking Alistair kind of took and adapted. They're doing sex magic invocation, spending hours in ritual every night.

Parsons is basically exhausting himself trying to tear a hole in reality to pull a fucking goddess through it. And then, and he's, this is the guy who creates rocket fuel. And then after all of this work, that's when a woman appears in Parsons' life. Her name was Marjorie Cameron.

She is a fiery, independent, red-headed artist, who was unlike anyone Parsons had ever met, and Parsons in his magically heightened, ritually drunk state, was instantly convinced that she was the elemental goddess they were trying to summon this whole time. She wasn't just a woman that he was meeting randomly.

This, to him, with the red hair and all, was the living incarnation of Babylon herself, manifested in flesh because of his magical workings with Elron Hubbard. And he immediately fell for her completely. they began this passionate but very tumultuous, genuinely crazy relationship, which you will learn the rest of. We can learn a lot of in the Parsons episode that we talked about and how that all kind of turned out with the yacht, but we're also going to learn a lot more of when we eventually do

El Ron Hubbard stuff. The plan was to buy boats and resell the boats according to what he told Parsons, but it was clear that he just bought a vacation boat for him in his hot little piece to sail around in Florida for a couple days. Yeah, they'd be like this crazy relationship because it's involved, like, explosions, FBI investigations, one of the more tragic endings in a cult history. Parsons, summoned a storm and destroyed them. Yeah. But one of the things that I could get at, obviously, was El Ron Hubbard, the future creator of Scientology, inspired by Alistair Crowley himself.

Was Hubbard not really a religious man at all, but was he a magician or at least someone who understood how magical thinking and ritual could be weaponized? to create belief systems and control people. Because if you look at early Scientology, and we will, with the e-meters, the complex hierarchies, the secret knowledge revealed only at higher levels, the idea that you're unlocking hidden powers within yourself, it all has a sucal structure underneath the sci-fi language. It's Crowley's magical order system

with serial numbers filed off and aliens added in, if you were to use like a changing the evidence metaphor. But for now, I'm going to simply leave you with a tantalized, thought that another enormous deep dive into Scientology in Hubbard himself is definitely somewhere on the horizon for us. And I promise you, when we get there, it will be a hell of a ride because Hubbard's story from Pulp Fiction writer to magical practitioner to founder of one of the most controversial religions in modern history is somehow even wilder than Crowley's. And he, Crowley for his part, fundamentally changed how Western culture thinks about magic, sex,

drugs and individual freedom for better or worse. And let's be honest, it's mostly worse, given all the abuse and the deaths and the destroyed lives he left in his wake. But his ripples are still echoing throughout our present day. Every time someone talks about manifesting or finding their true purpose or sex magic or challenges religious authority, there's a little bit of Crowley's influence in there, whether people know it actively or not. And in the end, isn't that exactly what Crowley wanted?

He didn't want to be loved or respected fully. He wanted to be remembered. He wanted to fundamentally change human consciousness, just think he wanted to do it while he was still alive, to be the prophet who ushered in the new age. He wanted his ideas to outlive his body out, though, at the end, and to spread around through culture and to make it impossible for the world to forget about him. And in my opinion, mission accomplished. Alistair Crowley got what he wanted in the end, even if he was tortured through his life and tortured others to get it. And that ends our three-part series on Alastair Crowley, gentlemen. I obviously, we got to wrap it up.

It's been two, three very long episodes, but I'm now, as always. Now, if you listen to this, you know who about this guy, you got it. I'm curious, what your final thoughts are you boys in particular on, on Alistair Crowley before we say goodbye. I feel like the legend is more influential than the man in a lot of ways. but I think in terms of his own brand, but I think his influence is more than you realize in a lot of ways where you have no idea that he's the influence for a lot of things.

And I think that's interesting. Yeah. For victory, who knows? But also like, also, but like you said, the legend is more influential, but that's also by his design by creating his self autobiography, which where a lot of legend even comes from. Right.

And like, you know, the libertarian elements of his personality, I pretty much agree with for the most part, you know, like I I respect a lot of the things that he thought about. But obviously, he was just a piece of shit in a lot of ways. Everything before is a human person, like who lived his own life. He did not rise. You know, he's not Christlike in that he rose to the level of his own teachings. He just kind of wrote him down and then didn't do him.

But that's kind of perfect for these types of teachings in a way. Well, you, Jesse. I mean, I think his, you know, going back to what Alex. was saying the idea of who he was is not nearly as uh reflective of sort of like the legend of him right like yeah and i think it's compounded you have you know like ozy osborne in like 1980 or whatever that was being like i'm going to make a whole song about and like the the legend continues and people pick what they want from i this is so topical because like i'm sure you know it's in the last week the rapture was a thing that was happening.

The rapture was a thing. And the rapture is not a biblical concept. It was created in the 1830s by John Nelson Darby. And like that's a dude people forgot about. But the concept of what he created, basically fan fiction, what he created and elaborated on from, you know, biblical passages became a thing that today people still talk about and use and and believe. to be a thing that is real.

And I think, you know, the dark arts as Crowley was doing are a lot of the way we see the dark arts now. We perceive it through the lens of what he crafted, whether that's real or not. It's how we view things. And it's how a lot of modern media picks up on all this stuff. And I think it's fascinating that things that happened 100, 200 years ago can have such major ramifications to today. Big time.

And I hope people can see like why Alastor Crowley has to be done first before we do any Thule or Elron Hubbard stuff. I want to do some fool shit. That sounds awesome. You need the context. The one you're going to be. I'm building context very slowly. When we build up to the point we reveal that hellboy is real at the end of all of this.

And a guest. Yeah. And he's going to come be on the show. Yep. Yeah. Maybe we can just get Gamel de Toro and that'll be close to. Yo, that would be a get. I'd be so happy.

I'd be pleased. as punch. Garamo, if you listen, join us. Also, Ron Perlman, if you're listening. Also, David Harbor, if you're listening, also whoever the fuck played Hellboy in that weird ass other Hellboy movie. Also, the guy who was like a weird Sandman Nazi guy. I bet he has a story.

Yeah, that was weird. Yeah. I don't know how we did. We got to get him on the show. He was like a weird living evil stretch Armstrong. Oh, oh. David Hypeer. Love to have you.

Oh, yeah. Hey, yeah. And what a gentleman, too. Yeah. Yeah, Jack Kessie, he's the other, he's the other hellboy. Let's get him in here too. He's English. Let's get him in.

We're out, though. We're done. Thank you all so much for listening. We're off to do Minnesota patreon.com slash illuminatic pod where you can support us and get some fun bonuses in the background. Neil Breen movies are coming again soon. And yeah, next week is a Jesse episode. I'm very excited. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Thank you all so much for us now. We're in October. Spokymore. So we're ready for some horrific stories. Okay, goodbye, everybody. Is that the Joker from the movie Joker? Yeah.

I think you know. Yeah. See you guys later. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Joluminaati podcast. As always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, joined by the... I don't know who they are. There's two...

Perens Hill and Bud Spencer. No. You and Trinity. Oh! I don't understand, and I probably never will. Let me just tell you right now that there's two Kennedy and Claire Redfield. I'm telling you. I think he's...

Literally just looked up famous duos. Cheech and Chalk. And it'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 my mind.

Alex and Jesse.