Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 442: Aleister Crowley Part I - White Stains

Episode Date: February 13, 2021

It's time to revisit the madman magician Aleister Crowley and explore the infamous power-bottom's early life. In this episode, young Aleister is introduced to the dark arts that would inevitably elevate him to become one of the most well-known wizards in all of history.Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? I lost a crowd. It looks for the magic that lurks down inside. It's in his butt. Damn it, why is it there all the time? I don't know man, but I tell you what, I wish my butt wasn't like a series of sludgy brambles. Because apparently that is where the most power a human being can accrue lives. I did not know that. I guess we're starting the show. Welcome to the last podcast.

On the left everyone, I am Ben hanging out with the powerful butthole that is Henry. And of course Marcus Parks who has a butthole himself. You know that's one thing we all have in common. And your butthole of the three of us is the ones that is, your butthole is probably the most communicative butthole of the three of us. Technically my butthole has stigmata. Wow, your butthole is like the mind in krang where it controls everything. Well actually, what's weird is that when you said stigmata, now I think of your butthole next to Patricia Arquette's breasts. And that is the closest I've ever been to Alistair Crowley. I mean honestly, perhaps Carolina could diagnose your butthole with stigmata.

We'll see. That would be powerful. What if Marcus is, I'm just thinking about Marcus parading around Mexico with his butthole in the air. And I'd be like, look at the butthole. Anyway, all right. Today's episode and a few episodes to follow. We are really excited to cover this topic. We are talking Alistair Crowley. And we're saying Crowley. We're going to go ahead and say right now.

We're going to be saying Crowley because if it's good enough for Ozzy, it's good enough for us. That's right. If it's good enough for Ozzy, it's good enough for last podcast in a lot. We're going to state at the very beginning here, we are not thalamites. So we are not beholden to embarrassing our fellow freighters with any sort of mispronunciation whatsoever because I'm not paying those dues. But I will say because today begins the passage of the initiate, which I think is interesting. We're trying to do this in three parts. And Alistair Crowley even viewed his own life in three parts.

And this is the beginning, the venture towards the beginning of the adventure. And that's why today I'll be known as freighter capillum retro. Whatever you want, buddy. Which translates to what? Brother back here. I looked up back here. And I'm going to go ahead and say I'm going to get a little Crowley in with it as well. And I'm going to say it is my will to pronounce it Crowley.

All right. Well, there we go. No one can tell someone else their will. Let's talk Alistair Crowley. Well, Alistair Crowley, also known as Baphomet, the great B666. Yes. Megatherion. Yes.

Fraterra Perderabo and Caligula 2 was perhaps the most famous and infamous wizard of all time. Save perhaps King Arthur's Merlin. Can you say King Arthur's Merlin correctly? King Arthur's Merlin. Thank you. Well, you notice he never went by Al Crowley because Al Crowley sounds like someone who has really bad chili but brings it to every potluck. When he was a child, he was known as Alec and he hated that because it says, yeah, it's a-lick as a boy, which is just asking for trouble. Absolutely.

But this episode to me is bringing back the wizard. I think that witches are obviously having a moment right now, witches are sexy, it's fun to be a witch. Wizards, we're seeing droopy hats, we're seeing a bunch of guys with fucking foot acne all hanging out in a room smelling like a fucking the worst gym in the world because no one's working out, they're just sitting and reading. But I wonder if we can possibly just give some magic back to the sorcerer. Why does mysticism make women beautiful and men absolutely disgusting? Because disgusting men pray that the mystical powers will help even the playing field between them and beautiful women. That's why I did it, I guess. Well, these days, Crowley is relegated to not much more than a t-shirt.

But during his heyday, he was feared and hated by both the public and his magical contemporaries, although it was the people closest to him that bore the brunt of the great beast's brutality. But even though Crowley did have followers at times, he was not a cult leader by most measures. Mostly because Crowley didn't have the necessary organizational skills, discipline or overwhelming need to be loved that most cult leaders have. He knew that he didn't want to really be, a lot of actors think they can be directors, Crowley was talent. And he knew that he didn't want to have to run all these bullshits and heard the cats of a bunch of, heard these cats of a bunch of the most loser wizards in the world. We'll get into all this. I mean, honestly, this is incredible. I'm proud of him for knowing his role and sticking with it.

Yeah, and while Crowley certainly was a joiner, as we'll see, his ego was actually too large to be a cult leader, making him far too independent to be bogged down by any sort of organized collective. When you say joiner, are you talking about the anal sex? Because isn't that the ultimate join? I mean, more that he would join organizations. He was very eager to join organizations. Not conjoined, anally, I see. And in addition to that, Crowley thrived not on being loved, but by being hated. Now, it's arguable that Alistair Crowley was a sociopath, but that's not definite. It might have been that he was simply a narcissist with an unmatched ego, which, as we know, is a personality combination that can still cause untold damage on any scale.

Or move a lot of t-shirts and inspire all of these, you know, the edgiest of the edgy that would, especially like when you first discover Alistair Crowley. I didn't know, like me as a little kid, like seeing the pictures of Alistair Crowley, especially because I was already interested in the occult. By the time I was like 10, seeing those pictures and he cuts this figure, this incredible, like solid man who really was a very powerful entity. It's not until way, way later on that you realize that anybody who's shaped like Lex Luthor is more likely to be a janitor than a CEO. Yeah, he looked like a pirate, but instead of floating on water, he floated on human diarrhea. There is a lot of shit in here. Yes, there is. Well, Crowley was known in the papers as the wickedest man in the world.

Yes. But that isn't quite accurate. We've covered far more wicked people in just the last six months, never mind the last 10 years, and it would be hard to even call Crowley evil. Instead, as Gary Lockman put it, he was only insensitive, selfish, and driven by a hunger that he seemed unable to satisfy. The embodiment of religious thinker Blaise Pascal's remark that, quote, all human evil comes from man's inability to sit in a room. So has every invention used to masturbate with? That is true. But, you know, in my mind, it's not that he, because that was kind of the point of this series.

So when we first covered Alistair Crowley 10 years ago, we were just kind of interested, obviously, in the power bottoming. He's the most powerful, most famous power bottom since Lindsey Graham. Fucking hell like a horse, fucking hell like a horse. But he, you know, he called himself the wickedest man in the world and we wanted to really examine this. Like, was he actually supremely evil? And I would go as far as to say, when you read the Confessions of Alistair Crowley, which we'll get to, he called himself a Diabolist, which I also love. The idea that someone had more of a professional contrarian. An idea of always being essentially like what Anton Lavey would continue later on with the Church of Satan.

Where it's more about being a constant force against every single thing that is good or whatever you like. He's, unfortunately, it sounds annoying. It is. It's the same stupid bullshit that happens to me where I'm like, well, I'm not watching The Mandalorian until everybody stops talking about it. It's that, but you are a sorcerer. I'm not going to watch it until my deathbed. I'm watching all of these things when I'm 75 and dying. I am. Starting with Breaking Bad. Starting with Breaking Bad.

Yeah, I mean, my wife, Carolee, to help me out with some of this research and Alistair Crowley and her reading was that he was just kind of a little bitch. He is. And when you get into the Confessions, he's way more like the character Rushmore than you'd think. Yeah. And, you know, and as the worst of little bitches are, he lashed out in terrible ways quite often and hurt a lot of the people around him. But what came from this terribly flawed man's soul was a philosophy and a religion that still to this day is followed by adherence the world over. And frankly, still has some merit. Crowley's religion was called Thilema, and the entire structure revolves around one word, will. What's important to note right at the beginning is that when Crowley spoke of will, he wasn't talking about willpower, perseverance, or discipline, which were all things that Alistair Crowley sorely lacked. He learned nothing from the Golden Dawn.

He truly did. He learned absolutely nothing. He couldn't complete shit. You talk, you watch him and every one of the him talk about going through school. He was just like, I understood the lessons absolutely perfectly, but homework, that is for farts. Whoa, I think he did complete a lot of shit judging from what I know about him. Instead, Crowley was more talking about destiny and desire. And that's also a magical property, which is you take a common word. You take this word will.

We all know it as like, you know, I, you know, it's a verb, but he uses it as a noun, which is really important because you have one magical, one magical proponent. The idea is that you take something you might know and then I apply a secret knowledge to it that only I know. And now we all have a secret language and that's what gives us its hidden power. Ooh, that's exciting. What about the word lard? What do you want to change? That sounds like a Gary Busey acronym. Loving always ridiculous dimwits. Yeah, man.

Being single is hard, girls. Well, at its core, Crowley Salamis says that if we were to all follow our own will and rid ourselves of repression, authority and inhibition, humanity would fit together like clockwork and the world would enter a golden age. But while all this sounds good, it would actually be a fucking nightmare in practice. See, this whole thing is dependent on people doing what makes them satisfied and only what makes them satisfied, no matter what that thing is. For example, if healing the sick and helping the poor is what satisfies you, then that is your will. But if suffocating the sick to death and grinding the poor into dust gives you satisfaction, then that is also not only acceptable, but essential to the system. That, in essence, is the meaning of Crowley's most famous phrase, which forms the bedrock of the lame. Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law.

I'm just imagining someone muddling a bunch of poor people's bones, listening to Mada's mouse, the good times are killing me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, times are killing me. Oh my God, I just have to kill so many homeless people. I mean, honestly, I'm just kidding. I'm not having too much fun. It's like, honestly, again, they say, do what you love, you never work a day in your life, but I love grounding all these poor people's bones, and honestly, they just keep coming in. The government keeps on making them poor and poor. What am I supposed to do? It's like they want me to do this. But also, remember, while I'll say, I will put my own little caveat on that statement of saying anything definite is that thelamites themselves will tell you is that it's about the constant interpretation of will, love, what all of these things mean,

and also, how do we get to the core of true will, which is what they're saying with Alasdair Crowley himself. I think in the end, Gary Lachman, he does it a good job. He does a good job of explaining it about how Alasdair Crowley, though, in the end, he really wanted true will for himself. All of this stuff is really about him writing to himself and him trying to say, if I could just get rid of all of the blocks, if I could just get to my true will, I could literally change humankind and I can do it. And then everybody else, you better stay in the outer realms of the Golden Dawn doing the homework because I need your energy coming to me. So it's a little classist. That's why I say make an addendum to the don't tread on me flag, it should say don't tread on me, and the other side say, and I won't tread on you. Isn't that nice?

Otherwise, you're just a bully. Wow. Or tread on me plays. Tread on me. Well, Alasdair Crowley's idea of do with thou wilt and this idea that there are certain people that are above others, I mean, it's a lot like the Alfred Hitchcock movie Rope, where they kill someone, they kill what these two rich boys kill one of their friends because they're trying to test out this theory that murder should be a privilege given to those few up top. It's a great fucking movie. Awesome.

I love that movie. And the other thing about Thelomites, is that what they're called Thelomites? Thelomites tend to spend most of their time trying to pretend that Alasdair Crowley doesn't exist. Well, that's the new movement is to have a Thelama without an Alasdair Crowley because Alasdair Crowley was naughty. But I don't think they understood that like without Alasdair Crowley, there is no Thelama. So I don't really know where you're at. Is it the equivalent of carving out Jesus or Moses? I would say that.

I mean, technically Jesus is this is way more Thelama is way more Crowley branded, where Jesus was, you know, based off of all of the other legends that that that story was based off constantly ripped. And it's just all about the sun coming back for the wintertime, like from the depths. It's just a solar explanations allegory. All right. Well, in many ways, Thelama is actually more extreme than Satanism, because at least Satanism has a caveat that prevents its followers from hurting others in the pursuit of their own desires. And Satanism has rules against harming children or making sexual advances until you've been given what they call the mating signal. That's when a woman grabs her laborious and goes, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it, get it. Oh, wow.

Well, as others have put it, Thelama is really a combination of two late 20th century ideas that came into being long after Crowley was dead. Those ideas are do your own thing and just do it. And in Thelama, both of those statements are meant to be followed without restriction into the greatest excess. And therein lies the reason why we still talk about Crowley to this day, or at least one of the reasons. With as many awful things as Crowley got up to throughout his life, his ideas, but perhaps more importantly, his essence have only gotten stronger as the decades have gone by. But in even outside of his philosophy, self-made religions and ideas, Alistair Crowley is simply one of the great characters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was trying to actually be a villain for all mankind. If you get into book four of Dune, this is where I'm starting this.

The God Emperor, there's going to be a whole episode just designated to just the God Emperor when we talk about this. It's finally will be done, it will be done, kissle. Dune cast is coming. It's coming, but the God Emperor- Listen to them clamoring for it. There is some interest. Please, please, yeah. Thank you so much for the fat man representation, Henry.

I'm here for you. The God Emperor knew he had to situate himself in the center of the universe as a God Emperor to allow the whole universe to hate one point so they all stop fighting each other. So on some point, in some level, Alistair Crowley viewed himself as kind of opinion point of evil and degradation and all this shit to kind of hold the bar for this is where villains should be. All villains fall under my flag. I am in and he existed in real life versus other actual wizards that are losers. But other wizards that used to fight him. So we had this like moment in time where while we have people like HH Holmes who were actual supervillains, we had a guy who but he didn't want to be necessarily Alistair Crowley wanted to be one and created the vision of himself as the great beast for all mankind to hate. Every time you scratch your gentles after a hard workout and sniff them with your hands like you're a gorilla, there lies Alistair Crowley.

It is that smell. It's its essence. It's its essence. It's belly button smell. Yeah. So concerning his character, Crowley performed intricate spells using arcane knowledge that supposedly loosed demons upon the earth. He claimed credit for World War One as an unfortunate byproduct of a ritual gone bad and he included some of the greatest writers of our language like William Butler Yates and Oscar Wilde in his list of personal enemies. He was jealous of Oscar Wilde. Well, who was it?

Yeah. So he looked at the devastation of World War One, saw all the suffering, the explosions, the devastation was just like, I'm going to claim that. Yep. I'm going to claim that as my own. Well, he claimed it as his own, but he needed to make it. His ego is so large that he claimed it as an oopsie doodle. Oh, I see. Yeah.

That he had done this ritual and hadn't quite done it right and had loosed upon upon the earth the demons that caused World War One. Hey Alistair, I'm just talking for all of people. Can you get it fucking right next time? Absolutely. The last time you fucked it up, we had a World War and I think we were going to have another one. I honestly was trying to, I was trying to abort ice cream for our mankind. I credited those horrible men with the steel mass because the cannibals just rip off the nooses. But I'll say at the same time, very metal.

What? Well, that is true. Well, at times, Crowley lived in squalor or extravagance, darkness or light, atop the highest peaks of the world and the lowest depths of human depravity. He was a man who both claimed to channel his guardian angel during the creation of his own philosophy and a man who literally ate shit in the pursuit of magical power and understanding. But perhaps what made Crowley Crowley was the fact that he was quite possibly the last person in the history of the Western world to be taken seriously as a true sorcerer and a man to be feared for holding sway over the powers of darkness. I'm just not. Mr. Crowley. Can we play the sting?

We work for Spotify. If we legally can. I just don't trust any wizard who walks into a porta potty and says, you're going to finish that. I don't need. That's most wizards. Yeah, I don't know. Another man's trash is another man's treasure. That's my shit, sir.

But before we get into the full life story of Alistair Crowley, let's acknowledge our sources for this series. Our first is Pertorabo, the life of Alistair Crowley by Richard Kaczynski. This one is by far the more dense of our two books, far more complex and more comprehensive. Recommended only for those with a true hunger for knowledge about Crowley. There's a lot of shit about Crowley in that book and there's a lot of shit about Crowley out there. There's a lot of sources and there's a lot of material. Man, that name Kaczynski really took a hit, huh? Yeah, really did, yeah.

Most of us, though, the book to read is Alistair Crowley, Magic, Rack and Roll and the Wickedest Man in the World by Gary Lockman, who is, as we've said, one of the finest magical minds writing today, in addition to being the first bass player in Blondie. But he doesn't like saying that he was in Blondie. He likes to allude to it. In the introduction to Magic, Rock and Roll and the Wickedest Man in the World, he keeps saying, yeah, and so I was hanging out with a guitarist, Chris, and we were meeting up with our singer, Debbie. We were like, we know who they are. You can hear the guitar licks, though.

That's a kick-ass frickin' title for a book. That's awesome. Yeah. And for my part, I have read, I have attempted, I got through about 100 pages of the Confessions of Alistair Crowley, which is what he said. He said it was far too truthful and far too blasphemous to ever be published. But the reason why it wasn't published is because it's 721 pages long. Oh, my.

And I will say, of all of the writings of Alistair Crowley that I have read this week, right, going through Book of the Law, going through some of the Libers, going through some of the, going through the Book of the Lies, it's easier to read than Dianetics, which I'm very thankful for. Honestly, at least some of it reads. Well, I suppose David Icke's The Biggest Secret. Which one is easier on that? They're all easier because you know what I like about Alistair Crowley? It's short, except for the Confessions, which is just,

it's filled with gems, though. I love it. Just a quick question here so we can kind of establish character via scent. Who stunk more, Rasputin or Crowley? Rasputin. Rasputin, okay. I think Rasputin's stinkier, bigger dick. Okay.

Alistair Crowley, though, probably, I want to say Alistair Crowley fucked more than Rasputin did. Wow. Because Rasputin only played for one team. Alistair Crowley was in every sport. He diversified the field. That's kind of cheating in a way. Yeah, he was the Bo Jackson accumb. Wow.

Two sports star. Well, I'd say anyone out there that is interested in magic or Alistair Crowley, fucking read Gary Lockman's book. It's fantastic. Yes. Read any of Gary. Gary Lockman's, he's one of my favorite authors. Secret History of Consciousness, his book on Madame Blavatsky, Dark Star. It's great.

He's fucking, Lockman's wonderful. He's really, really great. And also, Kessel gave me a massive book for Natalie Knight's wedding for a gift. And it gave us the entire rituals of the Golden Dawn, which has also been endlessly helpful to start to understand how all of these things work. And it's actually kind of approachable once you spend about 20 hours reading many things. You start to understand it, but then also everything else falls away. When I,

Your wife stops loving you. Yeah. Everything else goes. Your health goes. You just start, like I'm just reading this huge tome of Golden Dawn initiation rights, just eating mac and cheese in my underwear, just sitting in the kitchen. But I think that's my most magical essence. Yeah.

That's your will. That is your will. When I bought that book for you in St. Petersburg, Florida, the man like became like his eyes squinted and he was like, oh yes, you want that book? And like he was like, it was really cool. It's fucking, you could kill a fucking rat with that book. Oh, you could. Yeah.

Absolutely. I'm gonna actually say that Ben shows a natural predilection for magic and I actually have something to support that later on in the episode. But for right now, let's get into Alistair Crowley. All right. Let me spread my asshole. I'm just moving the meat around my sit bone so I can, my asshole can really sit on a chair. Oh, there it is.

Don't lose the chair in there. I'm sorry. I just had a shift. Oh, it just keeps picking. Yeah. Alistair Crowley was born Edward Alexander Crowley to Emily and Edward Crowley on October 12th, 1875 and Warwickshire, England. In characteristic bombacity, Crowley claimed that when he was born, he displayed, quote,

the distinguishing marks of the Buddha. See, Crowley was born literally tongue-tied, which meant that days after being born, a doctor had to cut the phrenulum that connected his tongue to the bottom of his mouth. Because of this, Crowley could never correctly pronounce the letter R. He said some, some very choice things about that into the confessions that I cannot say. Crowley also claimed to have been born with a birth call, which is a rare occurrence where a portion of birth membrane remains on the baby's head after birth. It's a little hat.

Cool. Yeah. In folklore, a birth call is said to be an omen that the child is destined for greatness. I think you're supposed to eat it. A lot of people actually do save it. It's the placenta you're supposed to eat with the birth call. What they actually used to do back in Victorian times and in medieval times as well is that the midwife would peel the birth call off and then dry it on a piece of paper.

But that's when you know the baby's fresh because the seal is not broken. I see. And then present it to the mother as a keepsake. Something to prove that my baby is special. Oh, thank you. This is membrane? That's really nice from inside of me that I can put on my wall now. Nice.

That's really great. That's a fun way of making something disgusting really fun. And in addition to all that, Crowley also claimed to have been born with four chest hairs that formed the symbol of the swastika, which as we all know, was a Buddhist symbol for good luck long before the Nazis ruined it. And the more and more you scream that, the more and more you end up as an executive for parlor. So just make sure you know that is no longer a Buddhist symbol for good luck.

Well, there's somebody in Brooklyn that would always wear the swastika and he explained it to a lot of people. Always. But it was also acceptable because I actually ended up because somebody who was walking down the street and someone looked at him and was like, that's what he does. He's a symbol for good luck. Oh, no, that's a problem. No, you were recruited.

Now you're helping. Well, I'm just like, that's what he does. I had the conversation with him. He would be great in pitches. We got to bring him in the room. I don't know. Now, not surprisingly, the later self named Allister, like most magicians, came from money.

Yeah, apparently it's very difficult to sink whole years of your life into ritual magic without being independently wealthy. I don't know why. I don't know what it is about. Like the same thing about being a famous actor or a politician or like it seems about like coming from like gobs and gobs and gobs of money really helps. Well, I like bitter Henry. It's just, you know, it's an uphill climb.

See, the Crowley family were devout Quakers historically, which prohibited them from drinking alcohol. But there was no rule against brewing alcohol. So the Crowleys got into the business of brewing their own ale like a lot of Quakers did. Apparently, the Quakers had a great talent for brewing. Eventually, the Crowleys opened the first ale houses in England. And for the first time, Englishmen could get a cheap pint and sandwich lunch without going to the pub.

Put into modern terms, the Crowleys basically invented chilies. Whoa. Oh my God. That's greater than magic. Power of the Vegeta. They would talk about nothing greater than magic, calling a place chilies and not actually serving chilies. No, you're in England because a chili would kill them.

And of course, the Crowleys were made fantastically rich as a result. Crowley ale houses were everywhere in England. See, that's a thing. That's why I kind of, I almost disagree with the chilies breakdown because to me they're more like a au bon pa. Au bon pa? Do you remember them? Of course I do.

No, I would say it's like a chilies because you can go to, you can go to a chilies and not have a beer. You know? A chilies just got family experience. So you're sitting there and being, you want a beer because you see the vegetas come out and you smell it and you want a beer and you see the big, the big, you see those big, like you want the big fun drinks and stuff to me because you could go in if you're homeless, if you're a businessman.

You can't go into an au bon pa. If you're homeless. Yeah. If you have the money for the au bon pa in the minute, like while you're there, you are more than a member of the au bon pa family. I'm with Marcus Chili's. You can be a working class person. You can go in and have an affordable dinner and you can get diabetes from it.

But Crowley's father had moved past Quakerism into something far more intense. He joined a fundamentalist Hellfire and Brinstone sect called the Plymouth Brethren who are considered among the narrowest Christian sects on earth. So being a Quaker was too crazy, too liberal, too liberal, and to be honest, this is what creates a wizard, by the way, truly, truly. And by narrowest a sect of the Christian belief, he means by butt size. You have to be able to slide through a park bench in order to join the Plymouth Brethren. I love it.

And even within the Plymouth Brethren, there were two subgroups, the open and the closed. The open believed that everyone had the opportunity to go to heaven. The closed Plymouth Brethren, on the other hand, which included Edward Crowley, believed with smug satisfaction that only Plymouth Brethren would be saved and everyone else would burn in hell. Which actually completely mirrors the idea of the walled gardens of the magical societies and the secret societies that Crowley would eventually go and be obsessed with and try to join.

And that was the idea that we are a very specific club and we wear fun hats and we have a specific set of rites. I think for him, really interested him very early on because, again, you're born into the elites. And the one thing that he said about himself is that he said that his whole childhood was born with the idea and that the need to be a snob or an aristocrat, because according to the Confessions, I'm not quite sure about whether I am the most outrageous snob that ever lived or whether I am not a snob at all.

The truth of the matter is, I think, that I will not acquiesce in anything but the very best of its kind. Oh my god, this guy sounds like Russell Brandt. I need to bully this guy or something. Well, Ben, when you say that this is how you create a wizard, you're right, but not quite in the way that you might think. Okay. I mean, just as his son Alistair later devoted his life to religious pursuits with vigor

and passion, Edward Crowley did the same, publishing over 100 religious propaganda pamphlets as a man of spiritual leisure. Edward Crowley didn't work a day in his fucking life. Oh my gosh. No, dawg, his fucking money made his money, dawg. I guess so. Edward Crowley spent his days distributing copies of his pamphlets and bothering people on the street, preaching the literal truth of the Bible and his belief that the end times

were imminent, making him a well-dressed version of a crank with a sign that says the end is near. Hey, man, sometimes it's all about the packaging. Jay Sullivan, our friend who was an actor, probably you shouldn't even say his name, very handsome man. He was a big old 9-11 truther and he got a lot of girls to talk to him simply because he literally is a leading man, very handsome. I will say this about people that have the ominous signs.

Sometimes when the mood strikes you just right, it's kind of cool. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, when the world is kind of witchy and you see someone in the dusk with a sign that says the world, the world will end soon. One of my favorite moments of that was I went to go see Children of Men in the movie theater and I remember feeling like I was all fucked up, was it leaving it and going out and just it was in Times Square and it was one of those like high stress times, I think it was an election year and everyone was like, there was three of those dudes right in front of

the theater and it felt like I was in the Children of Men world for a second. Now it feels like we aren't once again. Yep, that's nice. Edward Crowley was actually such a strict evangelist that his family never celebrated Christmas because he rightly pegged it as a pagan holiday that no true Christian would ever find themselves celebrating if they wanted to go to heaven. But while one might... The word pegging has a lot of different circumstances.

Pagan, I said pagan. Yo, okay, okay, okay. Because you said pegging it as a pagan and a lot of people do. But while one might think that this fundamentalism was exactly what Alistair Crowley was rebelling against, Alistair actually idolized his father and Edward's faith in the literal truth of the Bible would be one of the most important influences on Crowley's later beliefs. Okay. Furthermore, Edward was actually quite popular in the evangelical community and would take

his son on recruitment drives across England where Alistair saw his father command audiences and more importantly, get attention. And Edward was sort of like, and Alistair at the time Alec, he was kind of like a pugsly like creature where he was a very good boy in the very beginning. He loved his father. He remembered every spank. Did he try to kill his sister a bunch? You'd be surprised.

No, his sister was killed by the womb. She was just deleted. It was a self-abort. Oh, no. And he was, he was raptured by his father and there was something about this kind of goon-like child that used to father his, and he used to be like, oh, it's not supposed to have a father and his son hang about with each other. Meanwhile, like he's just standing from the back just being like, one day this will be

me. Sounds like the beginning of the rainmaker. No, it's just anybody who's born with an Elrond body understands that they're born to be in charge of a group of people. Right. Oh, while Crowley hero worshiped his father, he despised his mother for reasons that no one, not even Crowley, has fully been able to understand. Because by his own accounts, both of Crowley's parents spoiled him terribly and loved him

dearly. The closest thing I have to an explanation is that Crowley says that she was physically repulsive. That is what he said. That is what he said. About his mother. He literally said. What do you want to fuck your mom?

She didn't have a nice set on her. Her butt was horribly rounded off. That is literally what he said. Well, who cares? It's your mom. He was a diabolist. So his idea was that you're always searching for whatever is the most taboo fuck thing you can think.

Right. So in my mind, because his mom was so unfuckable to him that he did not like it. He liked his dad. He thought his dad caught a just like a kind of fun figure like he thought he was like that. Striking man. Yeah. He was a striking man.

He was like lumpy and wet. Who cares? I don't know. He wanted to be horny for mommy. I guess. Well, about the only negative aspects of Crowley's mother's personality was that she was strict and she lacked a sense of humor, especially about herself. Crowley described her as a brainless bigot of the most narrow logical and inhuman type,

but that could have easily described his father. It sounds like she was just not happy with people being really mean to her. Well, she was she was kind of like they were all wrapped in the idea. Anybody that's a part of this like very extreme fringe group, I don't think is necessarily great. Yeah. I mean, I don't think that once you're in this world, because it's it's such a it's an angry God religion and everything is about punishment, which ended up being one

of Crowley's most favorite things on the face of the planet. So you have a punishing God and somebody likes to be punished. Boom. Flip it. Perhaps even more important to the life of Alistair Crowley than his natural talent for magic is the fact that when his father died, Crowley stood to inherit somewhere in the neighborhood of seven million dollars in today's money upon reaching adulthood. Yes.

Man, why can't my dad die? I'm waiting for a person I don't know in my family to die and give me money. When's the billionaire check coming? I don't know, but he's different than Madame Blavatsky. When we covered Madame Blavatsky, I think we kind of went a little bit not too far, but we weren't deep until like talking about her magical workings. And in the end, she really was way more of a personality than like a wizard in my mind where Crowley, he did seem to have a natural this natural ability is seen like there is

what's the natural ability? Your dad dies and you get seven million dollars. That's after the fact, it's like he managed to having visions of your father like that idea of like having a dream before they die is the telltale sign that someone has some sort of magical ability. It happens all over the place. People talking about me. Both of you all should be dead.

I have a lot of dreams of that. You mean fantasies of murdering? No, to be fair, they are sad. You have said how many times do you dream that Marcus and I are dead? I have horribly sad dreams. Jesus fucking Christ. I'm not happy though. So that's good.

Until the money kicked in, however, Crowley was still under the influence of his family and while he was said to have been abnormally well behaved prior to his father's death, young Alistair exhibited a complete reversal of behavior afterward that wouldn't let up for the rest of his life. I want to be free. Oh my. Well, I want to be free. With this $7 million you've inherited, everything is kind of free, isn't it?

Yeah. In fact, it could be that Crowley's change in behavior and his hatred of God-bothering Christians had something to do with his father's death. Instead of getting care from an actual doctor for his cancer, Edward and his brethren decided that it was God's will that he instead try an alternative treatment called electrohomio-pathy. Oh, that's like a dummer, Steve Jobs. I guess that's God's will, huh? Yeah.

By following the quote unquote will of God as was prescribed by the Plymouth brethren, Edward Alistair's idol had been taken away or so that is a way that Alistair Crowley could have looked at it. But on the other hand, this was also 1886, so it's not like the guy was fucking refusing chemotherapy. Yeah, but they would have taken like a vice or something to your knee or like some weird things that they did back in the day. They would have at least done so much to bleed your tits until the blood all came out.

They could have cut out his tongue. Yeah. Interesting. That would have worked. Yeah. Interestingly though, it's at this point in Alistair Crowley's autobiographies after his father's death that Crowley begins to refer to himself in the third person as if he becomes something outside of himself.

Uh-oh. Now concerning Crowley's change of behavior, the only book available for young Alistair to read was the Bible. And after his father's death, Crowley began to identify not with Jesus as he had for his first 11 years, but Satan. Satan! Satan! Satan!

Well, he likes the idea. He just immediately hooked in. There's an impulse that I understand where he hooked into the idea, fell in love with the villain of the story. Yeah. It's his one story. So he fell in love with the villain. He immediately said like, this is such a one-sided representation.

Like it just says the devil's evil, the devil's evil. Meanwhile, like I want to know what his shit's about because he immediately fell in line with Satan. I think he also sort of worshiped Mary Magdalene a little bit as well. He did want a part of that. Yes, he did. Yeah. I mean, actually he did.

I mean, particularly Crowley became obsessed with the book of Revelation. He felt solidarity with the dragon, the false prophet, the great beast, and the scarlet woman. And see, Marcus, I texted you about this. There is a quote that he says that says why the predilection he had towards the Satanic magic. And why he understood the binary powers of Satan before anybody else could binary. Okay.

This is a quote. This is Alistair Crowley talking about himself. This is before he started talking about himself and the first person he liked to talk about himself and the third person. Okay. It is probable that these peculiarities are connected with certain curious anatomical facts. Well, his masculinity is above the normal, both physiologically and as witnessed by the

powerful growth of his beard. He has certain well-marked feminine characteristics, not only his limbs as slight and as graceful as a girl's, but his breasts are developed to quite abnormal degree. Thus, there's a sort of hermaphroditism in his physical structure and this is naturally expressed in his mind. So he stopped. Man, big titty boys. Big titty boys.

I can get him a bearded lady. I mean, I can find him one of those. Remember Rebecca Romain? Rebecca Romain Stamos. And dirty work. She had a beard. I remember that. Big old boobs.

No, but this is about the big titty boys out there. This whole episode, we're all top heavy. He's fucking... Oh, he wanted a big titty boy. No, look at these. He was a big... He said he was a big titty boy and because he was a big titty boy, he was better than a small titty boys.

No titty boys. No titty boys don't have natural magical inclinations. The big titty boys understand the struggles of the woman. How hard it is when your nipples chafe when you run, how you just know that everyone's staring and looking at them and wondering when they can fucking suck on them and babies look at them thinking you're a woman. Meanwhile, I'm talking about baby sucks on them. They start coughing because all the hairs.

Yeah. But you gotta shave and you gotta shave and it keeps coming back and you look like a pork you pine with cancer. Well, it's not good. But concerning Crowley's obsession with Satan, it must be pointed out that Crowley was not strictly a Satanist, as in he'd never worshiped Satan. Where as he put it, he simply went over to Satan's side. He didn't hate God or Christ, but instead hated the God and Christ of the people he

hated. Here's another quote. Crowley writes, I was in the death struggle with self. God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours. He thought about it for three hours. Three hours. God conquered. Now I only have one doubt left.

Which of the twain was God? Well, Crowley, I mean the Christianity he hated was the Christianity of hypocrisy and cruelty. The false Christianity, the kind of Christianity that is still poisoning our fucking society to this day. Every day. He had $7 million to dry his tears with. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Money doesn't solve all your problems, Kissel. It does. It's just most of them. There's like 97% of them. Quite a bit of them. Quite a bit of them. You can deal with your problems and like, you know, hang out with them and figure it out.

But then think of the sadness that comes with the wealthy. I know. Do you want to talk about GameStop? GameStop stock now. So Crowley decided that if so many people could be mistaken about God, then they could also be wrong about sin. And therefore, as he later wrote, I was anxious to distinguish myself by committing sin. But the thing about Crowley is that for someone so ensconced in the metaphysical, he tended

to take most things, like the Bible, literally. And while this might have been his father's influence, Gary Lachman believes that this way of thinking puts Crowley on the spectrum for autism. See, some but not all people with autism have a hard time with colloquial language. I, you know, common phrases that we all take for granted. And Crowley certainly had this problem. For example, when Crowley heard, you know, ah, cats have nine lives. He decided to see for himself.

I will crush every life. He does. That's what he decided immediately. Yeah. Okay. At age 14, Crowley captured a cat and subjected it to nine forms of death. Arsenic, chloroform, hanging, gassing, stabbing, slashing, smashing, burning and drowning. And then he threw the goddamn thing out of a high window.

All of these hours killing this creature and all I did was create a frisbee. How did it do? Did it live? No. Did it die after the first one? I'll be honest. Honestly, it died on the way to the house. I think it was very sick.

Oh, it sounds like it. Furthermore, Crowley seemed to have a hard time understanding experiences, what they call tacit knowledge. Where we are able to enjoy sex simply for the act itself or able to enjoy a couple of drinks just to relax, Crowley needed to take these actions to their extremes in order to understand them as we do, as we have just sort of a preternatural understanding of these things. He was drinking during sex.

What kind of Costanza guy is this? But you know what? It's weird because I do believe that there is a, you can do a performative. There are things that you do in a performative sense, which is what Crowley did do often, but I did think he had a weird other like, everything had to be for his great work. It's like how I turned my Civ VI what I liked into a stream. So now I like have to do it. It's the same thing where every single, is it the same thing?

It's like he became everything he loved. He turned into a fucking job and to like a, I must now fill myself to the brim with sex so that I see it's every intricacies. Meanwhile, it's like, it's, you know, there's, I don't know what he does all the time. I don't think he like was like a master at sex. I don't know. I don't know. No, no, no.

I mean, you know, concerning his way of thinking about things literally and taking them to the extremes in his mind, in order to understand sin, he had to commit the ultimate sin. The sin that was committed against the Holy Ghost itself. Oh my God, he's not going to pay his taxes. The ultimate sin. Whoa. Well, I mean, the ultimate sin, it was unknowable yet unforgivable. He didn't know what it was, but he would spend his life trying to find it.

Because he has a little boy. He had the same sort of predilection. He didn't understand like as a little kid, I, I mean, I don't want to put myself in his shoes all the time, but I remember being a little kid in Sunday school and asking the priest, I was like, why do I have to like confess to you and not directly to God? And he, the only excuse he had was like, well, that's what we do. I am God's representative. Yeah.

Why are actually, why are you ruining this day for the priest? Yeah. Fuck this guy. Fuck his whole, fuck this school. I don't want to be there. So I was good. I'm a part of it. That's when he started calling me the devil and he used to like do little like horn prints

at me every single time I asked a question, but he had the same thing. I'm not sure if that's true. No, but he, yes, it is completely true. And then he said like it's the constant thing where he said, I don't get why you can commit all of these sins, but then you can throw a Hail Mary pass on your deathbed and all of a sudden you're in fucking heaven. Like he never understood that. So he wanted to find the one thing I could do that no matter what I got to, like no matter

how desperate I got for God, like towards the end of my life, like he kind of created this like warranty for Satanism for himself where he's like, so that by the time I get to my deathbed, even if I'm so deluded enough to ask God for forgiveness, I've committed the unforgivable sin. So at least I will finally go to hell where I belong. Not possible. But Crowley did have moments in his childhood in which things might have turned out differently. One of his tutors, a Bible salesman named Archie Douglas, was the closest thing to

a normal person that Crowley had in his life. Oh man, you imagine looking at a stack of Bibles just sweating profusely, being like, I got to move these fucking things. Oh yeah. I got to move these Bibles today. Everyone has a damn Bible in this fucking town. I'm going to start burning Bibles. If I burn Bibles so I can sell new Bibles, is that against God?

It might be, but honestly, it'd be nice if you put a couple of pictures of breasts in it or maybe like something that people would like. Yeah, well Archie introduced the sheltered Crowley to smoking, drinking, gambling, billiards and women in a way that was probably inappropriate by our standards, but entirely normal in 1880s England. Yeah, I mean nothing really, that's just playing pool at a bar talking to women. But he was 11. You know what I mean?

Like it's the difference when you give it a little. But I mean, he was 14. Oh, he was 14. He was 14. Oh, he was 14 by Wisconsin and Texas standards and Queen standards. People bar at 14, they're at bars with their folks. Oh yeah, you could suck a dick by the time you got a mouth. Well, that is, well while hanging out with Archie, Crowley met an actress and fell in

love and later said that during the 10 days he spent with her, the nightmare world of Christianity vanished and his obsession with sin fell from his shoulders into the sea of oblivion. Oh my God. He was just a fucking teenager. He can't, he came. That's the thing, he came and he was just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought you were going to say he fell in love with the theater.

No, he fell in love with the dick. Oh. Yeah. He said when he discovered masturbation, he applied himself to it with characteristic vigor. That is one way to put it, it's one way to put not getting out of your room. I did masturbate before this episode so I can keep my coming so I'd be extra powerful. Isn't that exciting for you?

Nice. It should be exciting for you both. It is not exciting for me. I don't want to know how much is, I'm filled with it today. Weird Harry Cum is swimming around inside of you. But when Alistair's family discovered that Archie Douglas was giving young Crowley a taste of the secular life, they dismissed the tutor writing in a letter that they did so because Alistair was too happy.

Oh, come on. Kids shouldn't be that happy. The teenage Crowley was thrust back into a world of guilt and repression but was now all too conscious of the life that existed outside of the confines of a strict Plymouth Brethren lifestyle. See this is the problem with strict lifestyles. He actually is totally normal. Yes.

He lives in a Buster Keaton world of insanity and he's like in the 60s he's just a hip guy. He's just a normal person that likes sex and wants to have fun with the opposite sex who wants to do stuff or wants to have like he wants to experience things. But without that structure he's not Alistair Crowley. Yep. Interesting. Now this taste of the good life might have been what inspired Crowley into the most infamous

of his young dalliances. Then at 14 Crowley supposedly seduced his parlor maid and they add sex on his mother's bed. Put down that bucket of shit and have sex with this bucket of shit. Oh, wow. No. Now concerning sex Crowley would later write this. My sexual life was very intense.

Love was a challenge to Christianity. It was a degradation and a damnation. Sounds like you just jerked off a bunch. And again that does sound kind of cool on the surface. A challenge to Christianity, a degradation and a damnation. But there was a problem with looking at sex this way. Crowley never... Yes.

Yes there is. Next thing you know you're by the river that happens to be green and then you're the green river killer. Yep. Because when love when sex becomes your war against God it feels like things have gotten very heavy. Right. I mean Crowley he never looked at sex as an act of love.

He just never grew out of the immature belief that sex was simply a naughty act that was done solely because it was forbidden. But it's interesting how that he lived this life. That's his whole thing. He kept chasing sin, chasing all of the shit. Meanwhile, the parameters for sin were set by the Christian Bible. So all of a sudden you're playing by the Christian Bible's rules. Oh yeah.

He never left his puritanical beliefs behind. All he did was reverse them. That's all he did. That's interesting. His life was always enthralled to the Christian church. He was always enthralled to what he was taught when he was a little kid by his father. Which is why Anton Leves took the step further and said that the Satan kept the Christian church in business all these years.

That's what he kind of, that's what the next step is, is the idea of well now you all been playing in these rules. The goal is to break out of the rules, which is what Alaser Crowley will eventually try to do. But concerning the maid, Crowley found a way to make this even naughtier. When the maid confessed to Alaser's uncle Tom, Crowley lied and said that he had been at the tobacconist, admitting to a smaller transgression to get out of a larger one. Oh man, things were so much cooler then.

I'm going to the tobacconist and now it's like, I'm gonna go get some smokes. Yeah. It's like a man with an apron and like a bunch of like vials and stuff. That's classic. No, the tobacconist nowadays is just a place called nothing but smokes and it's called but and you can get a fucking, you can get a fucking, you know, 40 ounce soda for a dollar. That's what a tobacconist is now. What do you mean heaven?

Honestly, a good 40 ounce soda, a nice menthol, simple pleasures. Nothing but smokes. They still dot every corner of Lubbock, Texas. Well, that's, you know, people don't have enough tobacco in Lubbock. I mean, you got to do something to carry the COVID farther into the neighborhood. You know what I mean? That smoke helps. Well, because Crowley admitted to the smaller sin, he was punished lightly and the maid

was fired for lying. Oh, and this Crowley found that he could simply deflect blame and get away with anything. And as a result, like any practice narcissist, no bad thing that ever happened to Alistair or any bad thing that happened because of his actions was ever his fault. You know, this was a really weird episode in the nanny with Fran Dresser. Remember that when the, when the son had sex with her and then the dad's like, what happened and the son was like, I didn't have sex with her, I went to smoke cigarettes and then they fired the nanny.

You ever see the nanny xxxx triple X ever seen that? I think you said four X's almost. Yeah. Yeah. And then fourth X was a lot. That's where she just cleans up after all the sex. Yeah. That's why I was just like, oh, now I'm just watching a woman work.

But this incident and others like the time Crowley almost blew himself up with a 10 pound homemade firework led to Crowley's first alias, the Great Beast, six six six, which was given to him by none other than his mother. It's set so early. It's set really, really early. We don't know if she actually did or if that was just a story, but still that was what he, how he thought of himself. Well, he identified with the Great Beast six six six.

So there was something about it. He identified with the idea of, because what we now know when we covered revelations, what we know is that the, uh, that was all technically political theater, but he read this as the first time you see something fucking super metal in your life and you're already going to be a person that's inclined to super metal fucking imagery. And then you see the Great Beast. And so you're just like, look at it, I'm the fucking dragon too, dude. Meanwhile, like your name's Clyde and you do a bunch of fucking like death metal.

Like while you're also working at the seven 11, but it's cool. You know what I mean? Cause that's your, that's your shit. But you know, the great six, the great B six six. Six just sounds like a gamer tag. It sounds like somebody that I play in Madden, by the way, Thursdays on Twitch to an O. Or it sounds like that guy Morbid that was featured on that fucking Elisa lamb documentary. If any of you motherfuckers out there that was on that documentary that blamed Morbid

for killing Elisa lamb, you owe him a fucking apology for killing a man's means of self expression. Leave Morbid alone. Leave Morbid alone. You owe Morbid an apology, an apology, I'm talking to you, I'm highly, I'm very disappointed in you. I don't know who he's disappointed in, but he's mad at somebody and Morbid is good. No, Morbid is just a guy trying to make music and everyone would call him creepy, but he

just, he's just trying his best. I like his name. Well for the next couple of years, Crowley seemed to have lived the life of a normal wealthy young Brit shuffling through multiple boarding schools, not because of bad behavior but because he was mercilessly bullied at each one. It's hard when you're born to be above others. Yeah, I don't know. That was his belief.

Yeah. Do we know if he was bullied or if he was extremely mean and rude to everyone and they reacted to it? I imagine he was a 50-50. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well at that time in Victorian England though, the latest fad amongst the rich was climbing

the chalk cliffs on Britain's coasts and Crowley found that he had a natural talent for climbing. And before he knew it, he'd conquered such heights as the Devil's Chimney and Cullen Crack. Oh yeah, I remember Cullen's Crack and I tell you what, he could use a sweep. He actually was very, very good at mountain climbing. He's one of those, the thing about Alastair Crowley too is that he really was an incredible physical specimen.

Yeah. He was very disciplined when he came to mountain climbing and yoga and meditation and there's something about it that, because mountain climbing, when he said it was his only true release, because it was the only time he was, it was the only time he was finally alone with his favorite person who was his himself, which is basically what he said, which is God, at least he's honest enough to admit it. Sure, sure. Yeah, pretty soon he was obsessed with climbing and actually he'd fucking, he would go on

to set world records. Really? And of course until the whole endeavor went to shit. And he was a free climber. He thought that anybody climbed with like pickaxes and ropes was a pussy, but actually I think that it's the opposite where it's just like, I need an elevator. Yeah. Well, we're elevator people.

Yeah. I need an elevator. I need like, I need one of those snow, I need a snow plow and I need a car and I need heat. Yeah. And like McDonald's in a bag. Yeah. You just need a normal life.

I'm now, I'm thinking about that movie free solo. If he did anything like that, he was, that's scary stuff. People die a lot. Oh, a lot they die. Yeah. It's so much, so much healthier not to hang on to the side of mountains. You have such a higher out of falling if you're hanging out to the side of a mountain than if you're not.

We'll get into it next episode, but he fucking climbed K2. He was, yeah, he was, he was no slouch when it came to this. With his asshole? No. Just with his butt. No, what he would do is that he'd release the cheeks and then the wind would kind of give him a little boost and he'd go, oh, like a parachute. Okay.

But it was while he was climbing that Crowley met a German mountaineer named Oscar Ekenstein. Ekenstein was 17 years older than Crowley, and Crowley immediately took to him as a father figure. And as it happened, Ekenstein had a particular interest in psychic phenomena, and it was Ekenstein who first planted the seed of magic in Crowley's brain. You know, say what you will about fate. Say what you will about like your destiny. But there's something about all of these characters, Madame Bovatsky, Anton Levé, the magic seems

to find them in a way where he was a technically searching for always in the constant search for like what's going to be the thing that tempts me. What's going to be the thing because he already is kind of dabbling in his diabolism and he wants to be a professional contrarian and then he was like wondering what that thing is going to come. Oh, like these things just kind of show up where like you have to have it in someone that helps you onto the path of the initiate. Like that's the main thing.

You have to have the calling to it. I wonder why that happens like that. Well, the other thing to also remember with Alistair Crowley is that everything we've said up to this point, he might have just fucking made up. Who knows? Yeah, it could it could just be that he is building, you know, he built his own mythology because all of this stuff is taken from, you know, his confessions. It comes from him.

Yeah. Yeah. So the histories of Alistair Crowley up to this point, like up to the like right now, once we get now that we're at Oscar Ekenstein, then we're now at people who actually talked and said like, yeah, I knew Alistair Crowley. So that's every single one of them said that this man had a natural talent for magic. It's possible. Whatever magic is, whatever that means, he had a natural talent for it.

It is possible that he found his mother to be quite attractive then, isn't it? Or do you think that was telling the truth, is that the little piece of truth in the series of lies? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. In the meantime, though, Crowley's family was pressuring him to choose a career, but the only things that Crowley cared about were climbing and his lifelong love of poetry.

He loved poetry. What could be a career even in late 1800s? Especially in the late 1800s. That's about the only time you could fucking do it. In fact, when his family suggested he become a doctor, he replied with a smart ass poem. In part, it read. The lupus is over her face and head, filthy and foul and hard and dread, and her shrieks they would almost wake the dead, rotting away.

No don't have to be a doctor. That is a war. Be like, oh, you're really good at poetry. He's not really good at poetry. He's not really good at poetry. I just want to say before we get into any more of his poetry, Alistair Crowley's poetry sucks. Well, it's better than if he was a doctor, he would have been a worse doctor than he

was a poet. I don't know. You know, and while that verse, I mean, it's fine for a kid, it's really as good as Crowley's poetry got. Oh, it's poetry awful. And Crowley would continue writing poetry just as bad, if not worse than that, for the rest of his life. And we're going to cover some of his poetry later on in the episode.

All right, other toss-up question, Jim Morrison or Crowley, most overrated poets, most overrated poets. Oh, good lord, I don't know. Both have gotten, both of their, both of those figures have gotten thousands of people, if not millions of people, laid. You know what I mean? So like on some level that you're both successful, but it's not until after you come that you sit and be like, well, actually, this song kind of sucks.

It doesn't really mean anything. That's it. Yeah, I actually, I was kind of lost in the moment there, but actually now that I think about it, it's not good at all. No, the doors make the eagles sound like they were really in, in the head of time. Yeah, I think Crowley is probably better than ride the snake to the lake. The snake is long seven miles. Wow.

I'm actually going to answer my own question and go with Jim Morrison. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's what we said in our No Dogs in Space series on Joy Division is that if, if Jim Morrison had Ian Curtis' lyrics, then he would have been one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. But Jim Morrison was a fucking awful lyricist. God, he was terrible.

But I do love the doors. Okay. I'll take it as you will. Now right around the time that Crowley was first hearing about supernatural goings on from Oscar Eckenstein, Crowley turned 21 and therefore came into his full inheritance of $7.3 million. Give it up. Give it up.

I don't know if this is going to help him or not. As such, Crowley no longer had to worry about his family, but his family had also completely unprepared Alistair for a life with money. In Alistair's words, he had never outgrown the infantile belief that the universe was a teat made for him to suck. And all his life, as Lockman put it, he essentially expected to open his mouth and food would simply fly in. Which kind of helps you for a while.

I think when you're young, if you have the confidence, like this idea that like there is not everywhere I go, there's a safety net, I think that that's because there was. Yes, but you don't, you don't fully understand it because you're too young to understand like how helpful your upbringing was to your life. Like what happens with my little Jerry, my little Beagle Chihuahua? He doesn't know how much work goes into getting him in the house all the time. Yeah, he doesn't know how good he has it. Crowley, so, but it can then lead to you being extra powerful when you're young because you

just don't understand that there's a limitation. And then it's not till the money runs out and then you're like, oh, there was a net. It wasn't about me. It was about the money. I see that. Yeah. And it does run out a lot faster than Crowley thought it would. But back then, Crowley dressed in the most extravagant silk clothes and wore the floppiest

of bow ties. So many floppy bow ties. That's kind of fun though. He traveled all over Europe and spent New Year's Eve, 1896 in Stockholm, where Crowley's entire outlook on life changed. It was at midnight that Crowley quote, joined the military order of the temple, which was his way of saying that this was his first time bottoming for another man. And Crowley found that he very much enjoyed his newfound bisexuality.

This quote, I mean, I've never tried to mess with my brambles because it kind of feels like if you try to get in my butt, it's like sticking a broom handle into a bunch of messy hair-filled soup. It'd be hard to get it out. Yeah, sure. You don't want to have someone stuck in there. You have to go to the doctor with the whole person on your back. And when he had butt sex the first time, this was his reaction.

It's like, we're like, okay. I was awakened to the knowledge that I possessed a magical means of becoming conscious of and satisfying a part of my nature, which had up to that moment concealed itself from me. It was an experience of horror and pain, combined with a certain ghostly terror, yet at the same time, it was a great deal more to the story, and I may not tell it yet. That whole thing can now be summed up with two words, wink it. Wink it, this second occasion, because the second time he had butt sex that night, it quickened my spirit, it quickened my spirit, and always with the result of loosening the

girders of the soul. Oh my, I'm happy he had fun. That's great. Good for him. He did. Oh, this is very big for him. In his confessions, this was one of the biggest moments in his life. Okay, good for him.

He called it the purest and holiest spiritual experience that exists. He saw butts, and specifically, it wasn't topping, it was bottoming, it was man having sex with him. That's what he saw as truly magical, but with Crowley, the words magical and sexual are usually pretty interchangeable. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he meant to say the word bonerific. Yeah, that could be it too. He loved it.

Yeah, he loved it. You know, the more I think about his sex life, it sounds like Roy Cohen, that psychotic lawyer that worked with McCarthy, that closeted gay who also had a bunch of anti-gay legislation, but he was also a very powerful power bottom, and there's a power thing in there to use the word power once again. It's something about disrupting the pillars. Yeah, something about that. But while Crowley was undoubtedly bisexual, it was more likely that this spiritual feeling

came from the fact that gay sex was the naughtiest sex of all, not least because it was still, at this time, highly illegal in most of the world, because he's not only going against the Plymouth Brethren, he's not only going against Christianity, he is now going against society. He is now doing something that he enjoys, that someone else enjoys, but he could still get arrested for. One search by Crowley on Pornhub would make him a conservative. One, he'd be like, I just did power bottoming.

What is all this? Holy God. God, you believe having sex with a grandmother? Oh my God. Fascinating. Fascinating. Regardless, though, soon after Stockholm, Crowley began a relationship with an early drag queen named Herbert Charles Pollitt, whose drag persona was a play on a French actress

Leanne de Pougie that he called Diane de Roofie. That's a great name. It was cool. He seemed like a very cool figure, Pollitt. Yeah. He was a swinging dude. I thought Herbert was going to be his drag name, and I was like, that kind of missing the mark.

Ladies and gentlemen, take it to the stage. Herbert. I'm a woman. Herbert. I'm a damn woman. We're not going to address me as such. Okay, but you're... Okay, Herbert.

Thank you. As you may call it, Crowley entered into a social circle of decadent dandies that included who else but writer Oscar Wilde. Oh. Now, considering how Wilde was all about decadence, you'd think that he and Crowley would get along famously. No, but it turns out it's a... A tiger fight?

Yeah. Oh. Yeah. I mean, as it often goes with strong, similar personalities, Crowley fucking despised Wilde. Despite Wilde being one of the most obviously gay men in history, Crowley said that Wilde had simply become gay as a career move. Yeah, Alistair Crowley just turned into Adam Corolla for some reason. I just love that that's been around forever.

For forever. Like, this idea ever. That guy was sucking dick to climb that, well, you know, you could probably do that as well. Oh, sure. I mean, if you're actively sucking dick, but Oscar Wilde? Sure. You have to like it a little bit, though, no matter what.

Yeah. But Oscar Wilde, I wonder if he had any... I didn't really get into if he had any reaction to Alistair Crowley, but Alistair Crowley was obsessed with Oscar Wilde, but also at the same time saying that he was not a real... He couldn't really do it. He's just... He's gay for fun. Was this a one-sided feud?

I have a feeling Oscar Wilde didn't give a flying shit. I couldn't find anything about Oscar... I mean, Oscar Wilde definitely didn't write anything about Alistair Crowley. I mean, what was most likely going on here was another example of deflection. See, a lot of Crowley's poetry and his lust for the forbidden, as well as his antagonism towards Christian morality is suspiciously similar to what Wilde was writing when Crowley was still a child. In fact, in one essay, Wilde wrote of the true personality of man, which is pretty goddamn

close to Crowley's ideas about man's true will. That was something that those of us at Lockman discovered. Yeah, he's inspired, though. He's not stealing. He's continuing. I wonder if he was underwhelmed by Wilde and then felt as if everything he read was a lie or something. I mean, he must have had some deep personal reason to hate him.

He was just bitter because Oscar Wilde was the center of attention of the pop culture movement. He was the coolest, most decadent, he was accepted by all people because, again, he comes down to us all contrarians, such as myself, is that the whole thing is you want to be the fucking devil's advocate. You want to be the most evilest man in the world. You want everybody to hate you, but at the same time, you want them to want you in the room and you want there.

You want to be so undeniable. You're so powerful and you tell everybody, go fuck yourself, but when you tell them to go fuck themselves, you want them to still be like, thank you, Alistair, thank you. Yes, I will go fuck myself, but it's very difficult because a lot of people don't have that reaction. I don't think that you want anyone to hate you. I don't. I deeply don't want people to love me.

He thought, that's what he said, I want people to hate me, but what he meant is that I want attention. Yeah. Because of the similarities between himself and Oscar Wilde, Crowley talks shit on Wilde whenever he could, while it's likely Wilde simply dismissed the young Crowley with a trademark clever barb. Gay. I'm more like, yay for me, I got you, Crowley.

You're brilliant, Mr. Wilde, brilliant, I say. Yeah, I am a pretty good poet, huh? And I'm Zasker, and nice to meet you. You really just captured the essence of Oscar Wilde's clever nature. Hey, you like to scurffy, I got it from the store. You guys want some beers? I would love if you'd find out that that's how he really sounds. Hey, Papa's quite here, you want to watch a game?

Hey, you want to sip my dick a little bit? I wrote a poem the other day, you want to hear it? It's nice. That would be nice. You want to do an arm wrestling competition? I would love to. You want to hug, do we fall asleep? Yeah.

Fuck you, I like jazz. All right. Eventually, though, Crowley and Charles Pollitt broke up, and Crowley entered a deep depression as to what he should do with the rest of his life. He thought about being a diplomat after he took a vacation to St. Petersburg, but that seemed too ordinary for the likes of Crowley. He also straight up said he couldn't learn languages, he was just like, there we see, I just obviously understood all of the grammar immediately, but I would not sit and do the

work of memorizing all these precious words, all these different types of words, and you're like, come on, buddy. Can you imagine that just being like, what should I do with my life? Be a diplomat? Maybe I'll be a prime minister, like what's crazy about his privilege that he is with there. See, one of Crowley's defining characteristics, and perhaps his main motivation, is his desire to be known and remembered.

He believed himself to be an extraordinary person, very special, and he wanted to find a way to give himself the immortality he believed he deserved, and this was before he had accomplished anything. He's like 20. He was special. He knew he was special. You saw the swapska hairs? Nothing more special than that.

In his mind, even a career as a great poet, which he most certainly was not, would be forgotten in a century or two, and eventually Crowley decided that the material world was one of decay and the only way to truly achieve immortality beyond even the destruction of the Earth would be to invade the sanctum of the God of his youth and enter the spiritual world. But since Crowley was so goddamn literal all the time, he couldn't accept the sort of immortality that religious folk believed awaited them after they died. Instead, Crowley needed first-hand sensory evidence of spiritual beings.

I also think that this is a precursor to the LRH sentiment, the only way to make money is to start a religion, where there's also a little bit of that, where he knows that he wants to surpass Oscar Wilde as just being a poet. He wants to be a magus. He wants to be like a person whose will moves the will of the entire world. That's how important he thought he was. LRH kind of had the same high-flying idea, I'm going to become a prophet, I'm going to make me a prophet, because then everyone will always remember me and I'll finally matter

to somebody, not like my mother, not like my mother who never got it. No, your mother. It seems like she loved him quite a bit. No, well, she honestly, there's a whole, when you confessions is honestly, it gets into way too much detail of his childhood, but it's a whole thing where he moved in with even more conservative people, because he liked his dad's conservatism, but when he worked with his mom's side of the family, he hated all of them. It's a whole thing.

Okay. Well, taken further, Crowley decided, just like all fundamentalists do, that both God and the devil were very real beings. But where a fundamentalist Christian fears the Satan that he believes is real, Crowley decided that Satan was the one to contact. Satan is my boy. Oh, that's a fun thing for a hat. It is, yeah.

Well, I find that fucking fascinating, that he had that same fundamentalist belief that someone who lives down the fucking road in the trailer park does, where they believe that God is real, that Satan is real and is actively trying to fucking get his claws into their life, but he flips it, completely. I actually would have to disagree with you, though. The person in the trailer park knows God isn't real. It's still the rich. Yeah.

They don't believe that God is real. Yeah. Yeah. That's why they're rich. Yeah. That's not because they got super lucky. I would say that's lower. Yeah.

You'd have to be at least lower middle class to get that in your brain. But you know, there's also things about just being a born-edge lord that can actually weirdly help you out at some point, where he said, he understood like, oh, it's about kind of like branding. Like if you want to say, there's a cynical sign of it, he's like, I am gonna, there's nobody in this field yet. There's no real big person fighting for Satan yet. He saw a gap.

Real historical figures. The more and more we cover guys like this, they understand the scopes of human eras innately in a way that maybe some other people don't look at their lives. He looked at the whole world and he was like, where can I be the most famous? Like, where can I be? What is the thing that works for me? Like that uncharted territory of butt stuff seems to be where my Plinko Chip will fall. I need to fucking snake myself up into the G-spot of Satan and right there is where I'll

be the only one in the space. So then everything I do will be new and fun and something else and then people will pay attention to me. You think about the inventor of basketball, that Dr. Guy Golf, you got the whole on the ground. Naysmith. Naysmith? I think Naysmith was...

Is it Naysmith? Naysmith, yeah. Was it basketball? Like, didn't he want it to be like everybody got to hold the ball for a certain amount of minutes at the same time, nobody dribbled, they can just throw it into like a basket on the ground? Was it an original white basketball? Game changed quite a bit since then, but he saw a hole in the ground for golf and said

what if you put a hole in the sky? See that? Basketball. Boom. Whoa. That's smart. Now, perhaps Crowley was simply following his nature, but while God is unknowable and unreachable, except in death or when God feels like it, Satan could actually be called up.

And the means for Crowley to do this were found in a book called The Book of Black Magic and Packs. Sometimes you got to call who will pick up the phone. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. But honestly, you can see him going to one of those old-timey British bookstores. Oh, you remember the book? It would be really cool.

I remember when I went to one, the one that was closed in Melbourne. I went to that dark magic store and holy shit, I remember walking through it and I was like, this is like, I felt like Alistair Crowley. I got my big tits. I got a black shirt on. It was fucking sweet as hell, man. I finally felt at home. Well, The Book of Black Magic and Packs, published in 1898 with all seriousness by Arthur Waite,

documented the more famous books of spells, also known as grimoires, and attempted to synthesize all of them into one usable system. Waite also, within the book, alluded to the possibility that there might be a hidden church out there somewhere, that's capital H, capital C, where the true rights of initiation into a world of magical power might be learned. Now, Crowley wrote to Waite asking for further information about this hidden church, but Waite only gave Crowley more reading. You're going to want like and subscribe.

That's like what he did to Crowley. The suggested book was The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary by Carl von Eckhart Schausen. Von Eckhart Schausen was Bavarian, and was actually a member of the original non-conspiracy Illuminati, but left, but he left when he discovered that the Illuminati were actually only concerned with boring old reason. They're all so such furry dotties. They're furry dotties. It has how it always starts, we'll talk about the golden dawn too, but these guys are the

same thing. I mean, they had a couple of guys, Weishhoft, the guy who started the Bavarian Illuminati. He did want to control governments, but you know, in the end, you got to have a vision guy in the end of everybody else trying to put all the nuts and bolts of like, well, we got to get all these fucking illuminated people in a room together. Who's ordering salads? Oh, he doesn't eat fucking rabbit. This guy doesn't eat beans.

I'm a pescatarian. I get it. Well, you know, the Bavarian Illuminati trying to get all that power through the pretzel. The pretzel power is very real. And if you can car-blow world leaders, you can control their mind. Make them sleepy. Absolutely. In the cloud upon the sanctuary, though, Von Eckhart Schausen did indeed speak of the

hidden church which had so peaked Crowley's interest. And from that point forward, Crowley's main goal was finding that church. Highly literal. Same thing. He was also obsessed with the Holy Grail when he was very young or the same thing because he wanted to go find it. It's all in secret schools of allegoricals, all about his knowledge, finding yourself. It seems like it's going to be really expensive.

It is a lot of travel. Well, I mean, that is true. I mean, all the secret schools, all that stuff, it is all allegorical. All the rituals and all that stuff is allegorical. But Crowley at every point thought that it was literal and he was looking for the literal truth. And eventually he made it literal. That's the, well, that's the call.

The call is that. However, Crowley was also at this time playing at being a writer. In 1898, Crowley self-published seven different works at great expense and extreme extravagance, printing each edition on expensive handmade paper. Because they were so expensive to print and because Crowley was quite proud of his work, he charged ridiculously high prices. And since no one knew who the fuck Crowley was and the people who did didn't like him, no one bought any of his books.

But hey, he's got 7.3 million dollars of fucks he care. What does he care? He fucking drains, but it's also like how someone with two TV credits can teach a $600 improv class at a place because they put it because certain improv schools, which are not around as much anymore, they charge a bigger fee than other schools because it looks like their school is more important than other schools. Yeah. But then of course you do get a bit roll, maybe.

I'm 30 rock. Hey, that's also gone. Yeah. Amongst these works, however, was perhaps Crowley's most infamous outside of his magical writings. That was a collection of poems called White Stains. Yeah, we got to it. Oh, I hate having a case of the bird shits.

That's horrible, the old White Stains. Sometimes it just leaks. Pidgey crap. You know, even after the sex, it leaks out, you know, it gets in the nerve. What are you talking about? What are you, this disgusting. It's gonna get worse. It's pornographic, yet still somehow boring.

White Stains features poems about bestiality, necrophilia, eating shit, drinking piss and having sex with Christ on the cross. Cool. And even though all that sounds like it'd be a hoot, it's still boring because Crowley wasn't fucking awful poet. It's unbelievable. How are you making piss drinking? How are we making piss drinking boring?

I don't know. How is making and having sex with Jesus Christ on the cross boring? There are, however, there's some fun turns of phrase concerning coprophilia and eurohagia, like in this poem called Go Into the Highways and Hedges. I hope everyone has had this hydrated. Yes, welcome to this middle class poetry reading. Next up is Alistair Crowley. Yeah, so good to be here.

Yeah, absolutely. And influence the minds of the young. Here we go. Let my fond lips but drink very golden wine, my bright-eyed Arab. Only let me eat the rich brown globes of sacramental meat, steaming and firm, hot for them, hot from their home divine. And let me linger with thy hands and mine and lick the sweat from dainty, dirty feet, fresh with the loose aroma of the street, and then anon I'll glue my mouth to thine.

This is the height of joy to lie and feel thy spiced spittle trickle down my throat. This is more pleasant than at dawn to steal towards lawns and sunny brooklets and to gloat over earth's peace and hear in ether float songs of soft spirits into rapture peel. Drink up his kids. Alistair Crowley, everybody. Alistair Crowley. That's Mr. Alistair Crowley to you. And Tommy, Tommy, you're next, you have a poem about visiting Big Ben with your family

over the summer. Big Ben is a man, he is made of shit, Big Ben is a man, he made me eat that shit. I learned from Mr. Crowley. I see that you did. Alistair, please leave. Now, from my reading, considering how the title of that poem is a biblical reference along with the brown globes of meat being sacramental and the fact that the glober is Arabic and also gluing my mouth to thine spitting spittle trickle.

The poem is about him eating Jesus's shit and snowballing it back into Jesus's mouth. It makes all the sense in the world. You say snowball, I would call that cocoa mouth. That's cocoa mouth. That's a poo ball. That's a poo ball. I don't know about that. All right.

All right. And again, how do you make that boring? How do we make it boring? I don't know. Just it. Because that is really it. Well, let's see if he can make Necrophilia boring. All right.

I'm going to take this one. Okay. Yeah, do it. This one I'm going to take. And this one's unimaginatively titled Necrophilia. My nostrils sniff the luxury of flesh decaying, bowels torn of festive worms like Venus born of entrails foaming like the sea. Cool.

Yes! Dead. Yeah. Thy buttocks now are swan soft and thou sweatest knot and hast a strange desire begotten me to lick thy bloody brow, to gnaw thy holy cheeks and pull thy lustful tongue from outed sheath to wallow in the bowels of death and rip thy belly and fill full my hands with old putridities to chew thy dainty testicles, to revel with the worms and hell's delight in such obscenities, to pour within thine heart the seed mingled with poisonous discharge

from a swollen gland, inflamed enlarge with gonorrhea's delicious breed, to probe thy belly and to drink the godless fluids and the pool of rank putrescence from the stool thy hanged corpse gave, whose luscious stink excites these songs sublime, the rod gains new desire, dive, howl, cling, suck, rave, shriek, and chew, excite the fuck, hold me, I come, I'm dead, my god! I gotta tell you Julie this is the best Yule Jam I've ever seen. Really impressive, really impressive stuff, absolutely, and also Peggy you're up next with your poem about meeting the queen.

Mrs. Queen. Mrs. Queen. Give me P. Mrs. Queen. I'm thirsty for P. P. P. P. Give it me, Mrs. Queen. I thank thee. Mr. Crowley you have poisoned my entire class. I am an inspiration.

No, it is weird because it is really, it's very over the top, it's very death medley. It is. Yeah, it's got some merits here and there. I mean if you had some sick ass licks and some badass drums and stuff, I mean it could work. But you know, it's like what happened with Rage Against the Machine when the lead singer just got rid of the band and just did poetry, doesn't really work the same without Morella. No, it doesn't.

No, it doesn't. But you can hear like a fucking black metal musician just deploy that within right now to see you hanged on with boys at this distance. Throwing a bunch of pig blood onto the audience like that one band did in Brooklyn. Wate, yeah. Now, while Crowley was wasting time printing books that no one read, he was also going on climbing expeditions with father figure Oscar Ekenstein, who was also giving Crowley more books on the occult.

Did I tell you the story about how Alistair Crowley busted his taint? Every day. That's the reason why he got his, that was one of the problems that he had. What happened? He was ice skating as a child and apparently that's, his dick used to leak and blood sometimes because he fell on the tip of an ice skate. Well he was, and it stabbed him in his, what he called his most prized perennium. Oh, why?

It stabbed him in his taint and from then on he had problems with blood and shit coming out of the tip of his penis from then on because of that. Well, you want to put a little sign up, just letting people know that's possible. That's rough, right? Yeah, don't go ice skating, I guess. What does it have to do with him climbing mountains with Oscar Ekenstein? Well, I guess he always knew where he was going because of the blood trail. The trail.

Yeah, you knew where he was all the time. Like, you know, because when they say with, if a lady has a, I hate the snail, I hate the snail trail term. That's a weasel trail. Yeah, that makes sense. But no, it was because, that's why he said it was common for his dick to leak in the poems. Ah.

It's also the richest kid, like, accident ever. You're a blown taint. Yeah. Well, out of the books that Ekenstein gave Crowley, the most consequential by far was the Kabbalah unveiled by Samuel Mathers. Now, we're not going to subject everyone to another explanation of Kabbalah, because by this point in our 10 years of putting out shows, you're either into it and know the concept already, or you've just fucking tuned out every time we've talked about it, which

is fair. Yeah, I don't know if we need to, you don't need to hear us struggle to explain the, the unknowing ether that all of us have. You're about to start explaining it, you go further. Just listen to Madonna's Ray of Light and you'll get it. Yes, then you get it. Yes. Well, actually, if you listen to Hunky Dory or Station to Station, that's our state,

yeah, you know, various Bowie albums. Just go listen to our fucking episode on David Bowie and the Occult and we get into the, we get into the fucking Kabbalah pretty hardcore there. But the reason why you might have tuned out is because the Kabbalah is incomprehensible to most people unless it's terribly oversimplified. And even oversimplified, it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Four words. Lady henna tattoo.

Yes. Yes, Indian Rachel Dozo. You know what it is? I'll tell you what, I can give you a pretty good explanation of it right now, but it's because I've spent about 20 hours this week reading about esoteric magic shit, but talk to me next week and I won't be able to tell you a single fucking thing about it. All right. Really, what was most important about the Kabbalah-unveiled concerning Crowley was the

man who wrote it, Samuel Mathers. But before Mathers came into Crowley's life directly, Crowley still had a few more magical characters to meet. During one climb with Ekenstein in the Swiss Alps, Crowley wasn't feeling well and left the camp for the nearest town. Once there, he went to the nearest pub and held court on the subject of alchemy, which, of which he knew next to nothing. Sure.

You know what though? It's a boring ass day in the pub. You've heard everybody's stories, including your own a thousand times. Let's get a drunk rich kid in there, screw me to an alchemy. Fucking bring fancy fester in here. Come on, let's do it. He definitely went from a pugsly to a fester eventually and he comes in the room and he just fucking, he's warbling about like, you know, any sort of magic and, you know, and

his perennium and all that shit. That's a good part. That's like, we'll have one more round of shots, he's getting into the perennium conversation. However, one of the men listening to Crowley that day was an Englishman and chemist named Julian Baker. Julian Baker approached Crowley and told him that he was in fact a practicing alchemist who had actually achieved fixed mercury, which is apparently a difficult thing to do in the alchemical world.

I put it in the fridge. It's incredible. But then it turned out it's all, but you know, again, all these fucking, all the alchemists, it's all, again, it's all allegory. It doesn't mean anything until he says this thing, but I think it's about him getting trapped in his quote unquote fixed mercury, if you know what I'm saying. Yeah, I think they're just going to end up having a lot of anal sex with each other. Through Julian Baker, Crowley met another practicing magician named George Jones.

And to Crowley, all of this seemed serendipitous. He'd been searching for a magical master, and here he was with two. Pretty soon, Baker and Jones were teaching Crowley how to astrally project by going through all the rituals, formulas, and meditations necessary to send your spirit out of your body for a cruise on the astral plane. That's awesome. I tell you what, though, the longer you meditate, I can kind of understand a little bit about like how you can get yourself to the place where you can project, you can see yourself

projected out. And he just had an unnatural, like uncanny ability to really key into meditation and ritual. And to do it fast. Yeah. I mean, he took to astral projection remarkably fast. And that was a judgment that came from Baker and Jones. That wasn't Crowley saying, I was very fast.

That's other people that know magic saying, holy shit, this guy can do this faster than we ever could. For those of you screaming about how astral projection is not real, it's more about the idea that someone can hold this ad imaginary storyline in their head for so long and allow it to kind of play out in a dreamlike fashion. That's how I kind of view it. Whether or not it's real or not, quote, unquote, blah, blah, blah. It's more like how you kind of let yourself openly dream in a way where you are not controlling

a narrative that you're seeing in your inner eye. You are trying to create an environment where the thing that you're seeing on the inside of your head is playing out without your direction. It's like the first Wi-Fi. Isn't that nice? It is. It really is. Damian Eccles talks about that in his book as well about being in solitary confinement.

It's a good skill to learn. Oh yeah. You can find it in a cell. In addition to the projections, Crowley was also having powerful visions, counting 18 in just two months. In one vision, a hideously deformed giant appeared and attempted to break Crowley's magical barrier with malicious intent, but Crowley raised his magical sword, traced a protective pentagram, intoned the tetragrammaton, and banished the spirit.

Bye! Bye! Ladies and gentlemen, is the first RPG ever to be played. This is we're about to head into full-on LARP territory, my friend. Yeah, I mean, I'm well aware that this vision sounds incredibly goofy, but think of it this way. To Crowley, Baker, and Jones, while this may not have physically happened, it was nonetheless a real experience.

Even if it was just an hallucination, it was still induced naturally by these men without the aid of drugs, and inducing hallucinations of this sort had taken Baker and Jones years to achieve. All you skeptical motherfuckers right now, I know you couldn't just sit down and start hallucinating as if you'd just taken a fucking tab of acid. I am happy. These guys could do it. I am happy that you just made up people for you to yell at.

That's what we do here. That is really good. But you know what's called? That's called the power of magic is what it did. He created an enemy, and then we destroyed it. But every time someone's like, oh, I saw, I got to the other plane holistically, and then they judge you for taking mushrooms. What they do is much more dangerous, because they'll be like, I ran for 1,000 miles, and

then they do all that. I didn't eat for a month. Physical trances are very real. I always talked about it. I really did find a key into doing more physical things repetitively actually helps me get into a trance state faster than just sitting and thinking. Oh yeah, working out. But you as a guy that kind of, it's just about, do you have the confidence enough to

believe in your own bullshit that on some level, you've now made it real to five people. It's becoming real. The more and more people who consider it to be real, that's what the magic is. That's where the mysticism is. It's a human connection to something that's ethereal, which is what we're trying to create here. We're trying to tell the human story versus our normal magical garbage that dog meat and I are prone to maybe exploring where this is more of a story like, you know, these

guys are just like, well, this guy, he's either a great liar or he's a really good liar. Yeah, absolutely. He's one or both. Yeah. And even though it'd take Baker and Jones years to achieve, Crowley had managed it in months, if not weeks, if not days. And he'd done so after reading just a few books.

He had no training. He just knew how to do it. But concerning Crowley's natural abilities, after just two months of training with his new buddies, both decided that Aleister Crowley was competent enough to join the hidden church that Crowley had been seeking all along. The hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. We are back at lightweight Hogwarts. It is heavyweight Hogwarts to be honest.

This is the problem is that Crowley was expecting he had a lot of hype for the hidden church. There was a lot of hype. And I'll get to that here in a second. Now before we get into Crowley's disastrous time with the Golden Dawn, it would be helpful for us to have a very, very brief refresher concerning the differences between left and right hand path magic. Because it is essential to understanding Crowley's rise and fall. And I'm going to keep this very, very short.

I promise. I promise. I promise. I'm not adding anything. We'll do Tyrannosaurus Rex arms for both. Little hands, little left hand path, little right hand path. Well basically right hand path magic, which includes organizations like the Order of the Golden Dawn, is more of a quest for spiritual transcendence and knowledge.

While the left hand path, like Crowley's later Salema, is concerned more with physical results in the here and now. In other words, in right hand path magic, the creation becomes one with the creator. While on the left, the creation becomes the creator and is therefore supposed to be able to see the source code of the universe and rewrite it as they see fit. In essence, you become Neo in the Matrix. And in right hand magic. That's magic.

And in the right hand path magic, they believe in the idea that only certain people should be allowed to physically practice magic. Where the left hand path magic is a way more about unlocking the open wall gates of these secret societies and letting everybody in. And if you want an example of a cool synchronicity, the name of our show alludes to left hand path magic on the left. Even though the show was named by Ben, who at the time had no knowledge of magic whatsoever. What are you talking about?

We already did this episode on magic. I told you about, I like the guy who floats. David Blaine. You love David Blaine. And Copperfield. That's easy. Copperfield. Again, hits his call to the passage of the initiate.

Yes, indeed. Now concerning the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, it's three founding figures were Dr. William Woodman, Dr. William Westcott, who studied under Madame Blavatsky and Samuel Mathers, who had written the Kabbalah book that Crowley had loved so much. Now it's important that Westcott studied under Blavatsky because much like Blavatsky's hidden masters who held all the real magical power and granted spiritual authority, the Golden Dawn had a similar concept with the secret chiefs. This is constant throughout every secret society.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn essentially took the teachings that the Rosier Crucians have been doing for 300 years and also mixed with the Kabbalah, mixed with all of the ancient teachings of the Egyptian secret schools. So the work that is inside of the initiation rites and the rituals of the Golden Dawn is stuff that is old, but they created sort of like a fake story of how they got it, right? There's always some hidden master that you have to be a special adept to get in touch with and then the adept takes the lessons and then spreads it around to everybody else and it's just not supposed to be meant for laymen.

You're supposed to be gradually spoon fed these things and you're supposed to do rituals that are supposed to be kind of boring and humdrum and rote but they're supposed to become such a part of what you do, the invocation, the banishments, all the lesser things you're supposed to do, such a part, it still works into your body that then you're allowed to keep going up the ranks and then again you keep finding out that it's fucking expensive. It's really expensive. Yes. Yeah, that's what you do.

And if you time it out just perfectly you realize it's all bullshit right before you die. That's when you go. The whole thing was be sure to drink your oval tea. Now at its height the Golden Dawn had about a hundred members spread across several lodges and taught the use of magical weapons, talismans, magical circles, and astral projection among many other things. According to occult historian Colin Wilson's reading, the Golden Dawn practiced serious

ceremonial magic as opposed to ritual magic that used drugs or sex, two things that would become Crowley's main motivators. Yeah. But when Crowley finally reached his initiation into the Golden Dawn, he was sorely disappointed with what he found. Oh yeah buddy, because think about this, there was a period of time when there were people that would put on whatever their tax forms, they were wizards, were walking around, these were real historical figures that believed that they had these, that they were on a path,

that they were training to be legit sorcerers, so again Hogwarts was real ostensibly. There was John Dee, like John Dee existed, he was a court magician and that wasn't that long ago. They existed, so they were around, these were real characters, but then you show up and then it's kind of like when you meet your favorite comedian and then you find out. Then you do a podcast with him for ten years? Yeah. Yeah, Henry was quite a fan.

Oh yeah, and then they become a liability, you know what I mean, you just, you didn't change this person, but you know, when he showed up, I guess it wasn't Hogwarts. Oh. Well, Crowley had been expecting something out of the cloud upon the sanctuary, the fucking Harry Potter book that he'd read. He was expecting dangerous rituals performed in a mysterious hidden temple where demons could at any point take the life of a member. My favorite was he was going into the ritual when he was going to be initiated.

His first question was like, so tell me, how many people have died during the ritual? And they're all like, nobody, but I mean, Clark has asthma. You know what I mean? And then they have to like, yes, it's just going, like, ah. Instead his initiation took place in a Masonic hall that the Golden Dawn had rented for the occasion. So we have like kind of a wee workspace, and we were thinking maybe we could do it there. Um, guys, I actually have the conference room signed out from two to three, so.

Yeah, we got to actually make this really quick. Yeah, because it's 255, I just want to say, just, just more of a, just more of a warning to you guys in about five minutes, I'm going to come around and ask you guys to leave, aren't you? So you know, and then you can, but great, have fun with the daggers. When do I become a demon? And Crowley, ever the snob, judged the people who initiated him into the Golden Dawn as quote, a model of middle-class mediocrities.

Some of the members were even disappointed in themselves. One of them, one of them called the order the very essence of British middle-class dullness and a club like any other that was simply a place to pass the time and meet one's friends. They could have just made it more fun. They, they, but the problem is they had to be, they're British, so everything has to be serious. And Alistair Crowley walks in there and he was just so excited and then he's just like, oh no, I'm the coolest one.

So basically he walked into like an alcoholics anonymous meeting and be like, you all don't get hammered and don't say your names. I got this all wrong. Oh shit. I thought this was where we got drunk. I thought this was a no names party. But in Crowley's judgment of the members of the Golden Dawn being mediocre, he was being entirely unfair and was once again putting other people down as a way to raise himself

up. I remember because he was trying to talk about how he wanted to be a chess master and then when he went to his first chess masters like this big thing would go and he looked around and he's just like, literally, he's like, they're all dressed so bad, I can't believe. Oh my goodness. He quit. He was just like, oh, I can't be in there. Uh-huh.

Well, at this point in its history, the Golden Dawn actually had some pretty impressive members, both male and female. You had Annie Horniman, who had helped, Annie, it's spelled, it's Horniman. I know it's Horniman, but look, it's spelled horny man, I know Annie Horny Man. Yes, we're the long lineage of the horny man, I'm Ted Horniman, that's Bob Horniman, I'm Carol Horniman. Yes, indeed. Well, anyway, she helped launch the career of George Bernard Shaw, an important person.

There was Florence Farr, a famous actress and women's rights activist. At one point, even Bram Stoker was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn. Oh my, the ultimate horny man. But perhaps the most impressive member, who was deep in the sauce the entire time, was a man known in the Golden Dawn as Daemon Est Deus Inversus, which translates to English as, the devil is God inverted. Oh, damn, got me, dude. I mean, if he can say his name, he's not that drunk.

Batman was one of the greatest poets of the English language, William Butler Yates. Yates? Wow, great. But Crowley had no respect for Yates, mostly because Yates rightly had no respect for Crowley's poetry. Crowley was around some of the most powerful people of his era. Why didn't he, he could have formed the traveling Woolburys with them, trying to like get together. It seems like he closed a lot of doors for himself.

Yeah. They saw something in each other because Yates became his immediate enemy. Why? Because Yates was the good one and he's the new bad one. Well, Yates was the talented one and Crowley was the asshole. Maybe if Crowley would have tried to learn, he could have gotten talented. He could have. And the other thing about Crowley is that, you know, speaking of him learning, part of

the reason why he was such a terrible poet and such a terrible writer is that he refused to have anyone else edit him. Yeah, he was taking notes. That's what Charles Manson did. Exactly. Exactly. He thought he was too much of a genius for anyone to touch his work. Okay.

Well, really, the only people that Crowley had any respect for in the Golden Dawn was co-founder Samuel Mathers and Alan Bennett, Samuel's number one guy. See, despite being a talented magician, Alan Bennett wasn't a successful man. The day after Bennett and Crowley met, Crowley went to the South London slum and found that Bennett was living in poverty in an apartment that he shared with another Golden Dawn member. You have roommates in a studio? Nothing's worse than that. Honestly, it is disappointing to see an older man with a roommate, especially if he's a

wizard. But it's also not a reason to judge them and think they're less than you. But the truth is, I think more wizards than not have roommates. Of course they do, or they're homeless. Seeing an opportunity, Crowley told Bennett that in exchange for magical instruction, Bennett could come live across town with him in Crowley's luxurious apartment. You'll call yourself a roommate, but I will call you a butt boy. And yay, they did have much anal sex.

But this didn't seem to be Crowley's only motivation. From my interpretation, Crowley was just kinda lonely. He was living by himself. He'd rented the apartment under the name Count Vladimir Svarov, and he was spending his days wandering the streets talking to tradesmen in a Russian accent. This is the thing about the Golden Dawn. Why are we talking about this guy again? Listen, he gets better.

It gets better. He becomes cooler. He gets better. Yeah, he becomes much cooler. Yeah. But there's a fucking awos and fucking horrors, so there's all kind of fucking, you know, fucking in a goddamn pyramid. That's not acceptable.

That's not acceptable. Get to all that, we have to talk about how fucking pathetic Alfred Crowley was at many points in his life. Well, we all did things when we were improv students, and when we were beginning sketch comedians. We know that you do because of the thing. I never signed a lease with the name Vlog the Ben before. Well, he...

You didn't have any imagination, and you were in a prop comic like me. It's illegal. It's illegal. You had to be a character stand up to understand what this is like. All of these guys, this is the truth, the Golden Dawn, love them to death. These guys are, um, in a word, nerds, because they really did, they like to put on play acts. There are a lot of the rituals before you got to the part where you're allowed to practice

magic. You had to do these plays, these like theaters, where you kind of would like play out these kind of parables and shit in costumes. And it was actually a thing within the Golden Dawn where like, it was, I don't know if you call it like a fashionable thing or it was like a phase. A lot of these guys would do stuff like that where they'd put on a costume, give an accent, and act like somebody else. Well, S.L. Mathers, Samuel Mathers was really big into that.

He changed his name to McGregor for a little bit because there was a big like fad where everyone wanted to be Celtic for a little while, and Victorian England. Oh my God, he did that. Yeah. So he changed his name to McGregor Mathers and talked in a Scottish accent, wore kilts everywhere. It was fucking nerdy. It was so nerdy.

It's really, really nerdy. I'm just happy that that kind of appropriation has been going on forever. Yeah. How you say? Cucumber? Cucumber? How you say? But he was like playing this like being a Russian dude, and they said that he was awful at it.

But you know, at the same time, he was trying to, in a way it was like he was trying to fit in. It seems like he wasn't good enough. No, he was just lonely, and he's just walking around literally like, it's lonely to be evil. It's hard, man, you want just to be hugged. You can also just go down to the pub and not be an annoying prick and then have a friend. It's that thing where you keep pushing and pushing people away, and you just want them to keep coming back to you as much as you push them away.

You want to be needed. You want to be loved. You want to eat something. That's going to take some money. Yeah. Well, he said that he was doing this to test whether people would treat a Russian nobleman differently than an upper class Englishman. What a difference between the two.

I think he did it just so he'd have an excuse to talk to people. Yeah, he was kind of like being a Sasha Baron cone. He was having fun. Regardless of Crowley's motivations, though, Bennett, of course, jumped at the chance to lead the slums. And before they knew it, Crowley's life was taking a truly magical turn. According to Crowley, he succeeded in materializing the helmeted head and left leg of a healing spirit called Bouer in his apartment.

In another time, watched as three hundred and sixteen half materialized demons ran rampant around his room. Oh, my God. You could even like take it off that big hat of his and throwing it down and stamping on it. Be like, you damn demons who get out of my sugar and they're in my asshole. Cut to his neighbors downstairs with the broom handle, just slamming the top of their wall. Just be like, can you shut up, please?

It is just anybody that is in another apartment. That is what they're doing. They're chasing three hundred and sixteen half materialized demons. What a nightmare. To make it extra spooky, Crowley even kept a skeleton in his cupboard that he fed with blood, small birds, and tea because he was trying to bring it back to life. But all he managed was to grow a little bit of slime on the bones. Yes.

And now that I think about it, I put this slime on there. This is my slime. This is homebrewed slime, your homebrewed slime. Wow. And now that I think about it, according to Crowley, the magical atmosphere was so thick in this apartment that the landlord had a hard time renting out the space after Crowley and Bennett finally left. Oh, it was the magical atmosphere that was thick.

Yeah, I guess that's it. Is that why you got charged to clean up your apartment because of the magical atmosphere you left behind, Kessel? It was my bud lighting gonga that I had set up. But besides magical instruction, Bennett's most important yet negative contribution to Crowley's life was the introduction of drugs. See Bennett had asthma, which in 1898 entitled him to opium, morphine, cocaine, and chloroform. Oh shit, since when is the guy with asthma the coolest guy in the fucking world?

Also since when does chloroform help you with asthma? It helps sleep. I don't know if you need help. With these drugs, Bennett introduced the idea of combining mind-altering substances with the practice of magic, which was something Crowley would try and use sometimes to great effect, but mostly to great detriment throughout his life. But even though Crowley was thriving, all was not well within the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn.

Even before Crowley showed up, a power struggle had been brewing between the founders. Wizards always start- come on wizards, we gotta stop fighting with each other. I don't think that's possible. This wizard on a wizard crime has to stop, okay, because then it comes down to why we gotta fight. There's something with people who call themselves wizards that seem like they enjoy getting into fights with other people. Also Natalie happened to say that wizards technically have been stolen by the KKK, so

that's why we should call them sorcerers, but I think we need to take your word back. I think that's actually good. Not the same can be said for the swastika. The Nazis actually didn't win that one, but I think you're right. The word wizard is back into the magic community. As long as you don't put the word grand in front of it, I think wizard's fine. We can take wizard back. But what if you're a very impressive wizard?

You can call yourself a big boy wizard. I'm saying the whole thing. You can call your- the KKK doesn't own anything, that's what I say. When the Golden Dawn, he who speaks to the secret chiefs holds all the magical cards. Who are completely real. Yeah. I mean, the secret chiefs is just like Madame Pobosky said. Yeah, it's like the hidden chit- the hidden masters are actual people.

But yeah, the secret chiefs are real. In the beginning, the three founders all claimed to have spoken to their specific secret chiefs. But by 1898, co-founder William Woodman was dead, and Dr. Westcott had been outed as a wizard. See, Westcott had left behind some papers in a handsome cab, and those papers had spoken quite extensively of Westcott's magical pursuits, and those same papers had made their way to his superiors at the London Coroner's Office. Pros and cons of me being a wizard.

True. Lots of friends, cool new hat, ate a really nice sandwich today, and in my mind I changed it to a grilled cheese, but I'm not allowed to have cheese because the doctor said I should cut back on animal fats. Cons. I am completely alone. Aww. I have no skills, and I did nothing but imagine yesterday.

Let's get that cheese sandwich. This tells you so much about like magical orders. So this guy, Dr. Westcott, he is the head of the, or he is the co-head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It's one of the most, you know, storied magical orders in history. His boss told him that if he wanted to keep his job, he's got to cut out the magic. This is the reminds me of Morbid. I keep thinking of Morbid.

Did you say he worked at the Coroner's Office? He worked at the Coroner's Office. Yeah. He was the biggest god kid in the fucking world. Yeah, dude. He was fucking cool as shit. He was like, he was working for the mortuary office. He was a wizard on the side, and his fucking boss said, well, I'll tell you what, Greg,

you can either cut open these corpses, or you can continue being a wizard. Make your choice. So Westcott left the magical world behind. At least temporarily. Amen. Well, cutting up British corpses is just that big. Do you know how many sketch comedians we lost to day jobs? Oh, well, mostly.

Westcott would eventually return, but in the meantime, Mathers was the only man in the room with a line to the secret chiefs. And that created a power imbalance. Having the three of them there kind of helped settle the group, having three people who have had direct conference with the secret chiefs, because I also had a series of documents that were supposedly given to them from this German contact, and that German contact someone with the secret chiefs. But the thing is that now you only have one.

And that means he has so much power over this group, and presiding over a group of people that are also literally power hungry is very difficult. It is. Also, I have to mention, there's a WWE storyline with Roman Reigns as the chief, the head of the table, the great Simone family. It's exactly this. So I don't, it's very bizarre. Since two of the Golden Dawn's three founders were Freemasons, they took concepts from their

former organization. The Golden Dawn had a hierarchical system of degrees, just as the Freemasons do, with three sections called orders, first order, second order, third order, and each order had 10 grades. The first grade in the first order was Neophyte, which is someone not yet on the magical ladder. And it was at this level that Crowley was christened Frotter Purderabbo, which means he who endures to the end. Sure.

Oh, well that is very true, isn't it? It does. Power Bottom. But since Crowley already knew most of the stuff you're supposed to learn as a Neophyte, and since he was naturally tuned into magic itself, whatever magic is, and whatever these people considered it, he quickly rose up through the ranks of Zellator, Theoricus, Practicus, and Philosophus. Honestly, if I had more hours in the day, it would be so fun to join into the OTO or something

like this just to be able to be a part, like have all the sashes and shit. That's why it's fun. That's why people get into Scientology too, I guess. Yeah, you think that that would be a good idea? You don't think you'd be part of a massive scandal, maybe in a documentary, maybe incarcerated at some point? It could help the numbers of the show. Honestly, it could help us.

Yeah, it could help us in here. It could help us into a bizarre sex cult. I mean, I don't know. Now these grades represented the first order, in which initiates like Crowley performed ceremonies and rituals and studied the philosophy of magic, yet did not actually practice ceremonial magic in the Golden Dawn style themselves. That privilege was saved for the second order, where Samuel Mathers and William Butler Yates were, among others.

Yeah, the second order was the house team of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Yeah. Above the second order was the third order, the highest order, and that was where the secret chiefs were, and that was also where no member of the Golden Dawn had yet reached. You know what would help us, the three of us, help make decisions? You know what we should do? We should create a fourth chair, but like, no, no, no whiteboard, I don't want to write anything down.

But we should all sit, when we have meetings, we should have a chair that's empty, that we say, that's the chair for the CEO of LPN. And we have to ask the chair, and then each one of us decides, we have to go look at our scrying balls and all talk about what a boss told us to do through the scrying balls so that we don't have to be the leaders of ourselves. Huh. Well, that goes against every single one of our beliefs. And this third order, this highest level, this is where Crowley believed he deserved

to be. It didn't matter that his mentors had never reached that point or even come close, he believed that he was going to be at the highest level one of these days. What is it called? The abysmous? That's like the God level. The abysmous? Yeah, abysmous.

It's abysmous. Abysmous. Yeah, it's unnecessarily complicated. Abysmous. Yeah, but it means being a human God, which is also very similar to what happened with Mormonism, which is, you know, we talk about all of this, and we talked about this, we already did this. Yeah, we talked about this, yeah.

But even though Crowley had risen to the highest level of the first order in a matter of months, a probationary period was required before he could advance to the second order. So you could really think about why you're in the second order. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so Crowley spent time performing magic on his own. In the apartment where he was living as Count Svareff, Crowley decided to perform a highly difficult and complex magical working known as the Abramelon Ritual.

Basically, this is a ritual that is designed to put the magician in contact with their own personal guardian angel. Now, the way the term guardian angel is used here is not necessarily how we might think of a guardian angel. Like say, it's not like George Bailey's guardian angel, and it's a wonderful life. What these magicians meant when they say guardian angel is contact with a higher intelligence that can impart hidden knowledge, which now that I think about it is exactly what George Bailey's guardian angel did for him.

Yep. And all it took was suicide. Suicide. It's a suicide. Suicide. Suicide. But the problem with the Abramelon Ritual is that it requires patience and discipline, which for Crowley, two things that were always in short supply.

In order to make the ritual work, the aspirant must lead a pure and holy life and do nothing but concentrate on the ritual for six whole months. Once the aspirant has totally focused himself on the task, then and only then can the fun part with all the magical accoutrements and demon battling and such begin. Okay. But Crowley was not living a pure and holy life. Well, you know what he did is that he did that try hard thing. It was just why the Rushmore concept comes up when I think about Alistair Crowley, where

he thought that he was so special and so talented that instead of like doing small things first or like building up to doing something, he saw like the most fucking impressive biggest ritual of all of them. And he said, I'm going to do that one. I'm going to do that one. I'm going to make y'all, I'll show y'all, I'll do that one. And he meanwhile, like no one's asking him to do it. No one's like saying like, Hey, you don't, you should do this because they're like, he's

building the aquarium. Yeah. Yes. And he's like, there is no reason. Yeah. And instead of living a pure and holy life, Crowley was more focused on drinking, drugs and sex with other members of the golden dawn. Well, isn't that a different kind of holy life?

It is. He slept with Florence Farr, Alan Bennett and began somewhat of a relationship with an initiate named Elaine Simpson. Meanwhile, Bennett had moved to warmer climbs for his asthma. And since the apartment he and Crowley shared just wasn't the same. And since Crowley's building was under police investigation for homosexual activity, you're in. You're in the epicenter.

This is the 9 11 of homosexual activity inside of that apartment. Dumbass cops. Yeah. What you guys doing in there? I smell, I smell, I smell, I smell, I smell, I smell cool because all that Crowley decided to move under the claim that the apartment just wasn't the right place for the Abra Mellon ritual. It wasn't.

You have to build the whole thing. I got into it. We'll just talk about it more in next episode. I mean, honestly, the police sirens outside just be like, you guys doing gay stuff in there. You're doing gay stuff in there. So in August of 1899, Crowley left London and bought a property in Scotland called Bullskin. And that property was where else but right on the shores of Loch Ness.

Cool. Neat. However, this seeming confluence of paranormal lore is merely a coincidence, although some do blame Crowley for summoning the Loch Ness monster when it appeared decades later. You know why not? Sure. Why not? Blame him.

Sure. He made it. But he put a lot of work into it, chonking, chonking, chonking a little bit. You'll see. Seems hard. Now, almost as soon as Crowley arrived at Bullskin, before he even began doing Abra Mellonic magic, he found that the shadowy figures who had haunted his London apartment had followed him there and strange things began occurring at Bullskin.

Crowley's coachman, usually a sober man, became a drunk. The lodgekeeper pulled a Jack Torrance and tried killing his wife and kids, a psychic whom Crowley had brought from London, suddenly gave up the calling and started a career in high-risk sex work. Hey, honestly, psychic to sex work really works because it requires the same amount of skill. You literally have to be able to read people. It's all weird.

You gotta be entertaining. I don't know about high-risk sex work, do you do it while well-splunking or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if it's good. No, doing it in a way that might get you killed. Ah, okay. I like splunking. Sure.

In addition to all that business, there was actually a fatality, although it could have been a coincidence. A local butcher died from an accidental slice of an artery, but Crowley claimed credit, saying the accident occurred because Crowley had absentmindedly written demonic names on a bill from said butcher. Crowley, you were gonna want to start getting these things right. I am because you are killing people with the stroke of a pen. I don't have an eye for detail.

You're gonna want to get it. It is, he did have an eye for detail, that's actually wrong. He was like that, but he's just such a flippant, weird dude, but this is the kind of shit that we talked about how when I was doing various little chaos magic rituals, the type of weird shit that starts happening around you that is very disruptive to your normal life. It's like dark synchronicities, weird things that keep happening, like feeling like you're being watched, doors opening, stuff like that where you start to feel like a crazy person because you are not properly doing the shit if it is real that you were doing.

But true to form, Crowley couldn't focus on the Abra-Mellon ritual. Instead, his thoughts often wandered back to the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn, and eventually he decided that there was no reason why he should have to wait any longer to be initiated into the second order. Alright. Now by the year 1900, Dr. Westcott had gotten around his boss's objection to his magical career and had returned to the Golden Dawn. You can cut up the corpses again.

And this return had caused a rift between Westcott and Samuel Mathers. See Mathers had come to believe that Westcott, way back when the order was founded, had forged a letter from his secret chief, Anna Sprengel. What's a Sprengel, please? Anna Sprengel, yes. Anna Sprengel. Yeah, a secret chief Anna Sprengel, yes. But we don't know if she's real or not.

I see. But because Mathers believed that Westcott had forged this letter, he believed that Westcott had lied his way into power. No way. I don't think people would do that. No Mathers hadn't told anyone about this yet, but the schism was still growing. As such, the Golden Dawn was becoming divided between those who followed Westcott and those who followed Mathers.

And Westcott was winning. Regardless though, Crowley still wrote a letter to Westcott asking to be let in to the second order. But much to Crowley's chagrin, Westcott roundly rejected Crowley's request. Now it could be that Crowley was rejected because he was Mathers' golden boy. And Mathers was on his way out. It could also be that Crowley was refused because of his homosexual relationships and because Crowley was using sex to gain magical power.

I don't know, it sounds like maybe half a one, half a six a dozen to the other. Could be. Honestly, I think Crowley was refused admission to the second order because most of the magicians just didn't like him. They didn't like him. And Crowley was ruining their fucking vibe. Well the thing is, he was ruining their vibe, but they were ruining his vibe. I mean, honestly though.

Because they didn't get his shtick and they didn't understand how like, honestly, having like your own like villain within your little world could have helped everybody because it's like another character. It makes you more like the Justice League where you have like all these different types of like fucking weird people all in one room with superpowers and shit. So you're saying it's if the fucking Punisher joined the Avengers. That's what it's like. That would have been dope.

It would be cool, right? I don't know because also you can have a turd in the punch bowl and might not be good looking at Isaiah Thomas. That's the problem. The 1992 Dream Team, definitely good enough, but nobody liked him with Jordan. Jordan and him were fighting. Everyone was fighting with him. He was very mean to a lot of people.

I mean, it's like, you know, Crowley walks into the room and he expects everybody to adjust to him. And they just, I mean, it's just not the fucking vibe they're going for. They're not looking for a dude that's fucking shooting heroin into his eyeball while another dude is blasting him in the ass. He's, they're looking for, sitting in a room and doing pretty much the same motions over and over again. Yeah.

And they liked the little sandwiches and it really was just a hangout for them. They were all like hanging out when then Alistair Crowley is like, we will crack open the very grout. We will rise demons from the grave and they're all like, honestly, I just want to fucking have lunch. I don't hang out with overbearing stand up comedians. That's why I never run out of the big boy table. It's just a lot of one up and a lot of one up and just a little more.

I'm too chill for that. Well, yeah, I always said that if I am. William Butler Yates thought that Crowley was quote, a quite unspeakable person. But it's not like Yates himself was particularly freaked out about Crowley's drug use or his sexual carousing. Because Yates, he was doing mescaline and smoke and hash in service of magic long before Crowley even heard of the idea. He just didn't fucking like him.

But since Westcott and Mathers were already engaged in a magical spat, Crowley became the monkey in the middle. And Mathers decided to assert his authority by initiating Crowley into the second order himself. I'll make my own second order. All right. That's what he did. He was like, all right, we don't need to be in that one.

We'll do the other one. I'll make you do my own. We'll do it ourselves. Absolutely. But when Crowley went to Golden Dawn headquarters in London to receive the rituals appropriate for his new grade, he was stopped at the door by Miss Cracknell, the Golden Dawn Secretary. Oh. It was told that the temple didn't recognize his initiation.

Oh, Lord. Oh, that's like that. Secretaries are always the toughest people in the building. They are. They are the front lines. You're yelling at Alistair Crowley. Alistair Crowley's like standing in front of you and be like, no, sorry, I don't see a name on the list.

Don't see it on the list. Basically, the Golden Dawn was sending a message to Mathers that they didn't recognize his authority anymore. My authority. And in response, Mathers put Westcott on blast, revealing in a letter to second order member Florence Farr that Westcott had forged his letter from Anna Springle. Oh, Lord. Got snitched out on that one.

You can't be forging those letters. Not from magical adepts. What this meant was that since Westcott had lied about Anna Springle, he had never been in contact with the secret chiefs and therefore every bit of magical knowledge that the order possessed had come from Mathers. And it was only through him that the Golden Dawn could exist. So much fighting. Just one more thing before I go, guys.

How you say cucumber? I love this guy. What country is this guy from? In response to that, Westcott said, no, no, no, that's a powerful review. And he doubled down on his claim that his letters from Anna Springle were genuine. After that, Yates and most of the others backed Westcott while Crowley backed Mathers. So Crowley and Mathers formed a plan to retake the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. Yes, it's time.

I'll still take over. Now, Crowley and Mathers weren't alone, but strange things began to happen to the people who backed them. Two members loyal to Mathers had their carriage spontaneously catch on fire and loyalist Elaine Simpson's rubber raincoat did the same. It's fucking weird, man, magic's starting to do in a magic fight. It's a wizard fight. Yeah.

Honestly, the rubber must have gone to her body. That would have been horrible. It must have melted to her body and stuff. That's very uncomfortable. As far as Crowley went, his protective talisman seemed to be bleaching itself, which to him and Mathers was proof that they were under magical attack from Westcott and his followers. Oh, man. It's real.

It could be. It's real. To counter this, Crowley and Mathers decided to retake possession of the Golden Dawn Headquarters in London, and that brings us to the Battle of Blith Road. Think about this. This is real. This is about to happen, like this isn't real, and there are other people trying to live their normal lives.

You know what I mean? Everybody else is living just a normal London life. Yeah, they just want to have a couple of drinks at the pub, go work at the fish place. There is a magical war happening. Right in front of them. They have no idea. No clue. No clue.

Almost like it's not. It's real. I'm not going to say that. I'm not saying that. No, it's not. Once they decided upon a course of action, Mathers sent a telegram to members both loyal and on the fence, telling them to arrive at Golden Dawn Headquarters on Blith Road on April 20th.

Fuck yeah, 420. 420. However, the only person who actually took any action on this was William Butler Yates, who heard about the upcoming coup and just changed the fucking locks. Jesus Christ. We literally could have stopped the whole insurrection in January 6th if someone had just done that. Honestly, half a lock.

That may have worked. Oh, wow. Okay. Oh, yeah. He just went and he was like, oh, oh, they're coming. Oh, they're coming to take over the Golden Dawn. Oh, and Crowley showed up for the battle that day, though. He was dressed for the part.

Crowley arrived wearing full Highland Scottish dress, along with a huge crusader's cross around his neck, made of gold, a dagger at his waist, and a black mask over his face. It is very hot in here. It is like when the rich white dude shows up at the YMCA to play basketball and the brand new Jordans kick ass in here, got like awesome ass clothes. Dude, it's just like he put this black mask over his face. You know, he can't see shit. Yeah, so like Walker and two other adepts are like helping go everywhere and he's like,

I do not need your help. I have the sight of the mind. Show me where the door is. See, the plan was to rush the place with loyalist Elaine Simpson and a hired goon. And the point was they were going to take possession of one of the ritual rooms. But once again, they were going to start like doing magic inside the rooms and seal everything. Yeah. And once again, Miss Cracknell stood in their way.

Oh, I love Miss Cracknell. But this time she was no match for the two magicians and their goon. They rushed past and Miss Cracknell headed to the post office to send a telegram to a local second order member named EA Hunter pleading for help. But when Miss Cracknell arrived with Hunter, they found that Crowley had taken possession of a series of rooms and had again changed the locks. And Crowley had also childishly written his name on a roll call of second order initiates. It seems like the magician is the locksmith that changed the locks.

What dubious mac and ray is this excellent control of the doors. And that's why I cross out yeets. Fuck you. Fuck you. Wow. And then I write Alice the Crowley. Very big. Wow.

Well, eventually, Florence Farth, the second order initiate to whom Mathers had written on a sprinkle letter. She showed up. She just called the cops. Oh, these fucking cops. You'll see. All right. Yeah.

They arrived and told Crowley to leave, which he did under protest. This is under protest that I'm leaving. Don't tease me, bro. I'm not leaving because you're telling me I'm leaving because I'm hungry. Is that right? There is no food in here. Honestly, I thought catering was here, but they must get it in, they must deliver it. But two days later, he returned.

Elaine Simpson was there yet again, but there was no goon to be had because the goon they'd hired this time couldn't find the place and only showed up after everything was over and done with. Where is my goon? He's like outside. He's like in black. He's like, you know, it's like covered in sweat and he's like trying to like issue orders to people.

It's like he's sucking in the fabric of the mask, like into his face and stuff like, oh, and then eventually just kind of probably had to fold it over and just be like, OK, just find the goon. Where is the stairs? The goon is just out there knowing that he has a job to do and he can't find it. That wizard guy's gonna be mad at me. So Crawley without a goon and since Yates had changed the locks again, Crawley had to get inside somehow and they weren't letting him in this time.

So he went and talked to the landlord and convinced the landlord to unlock the door for him. Eight week for the person who is the town locksmith. I mean, keep these wizard wars going. Yeah. The landlord's got Aleister Crowley screaming at you and you just like, all right, I'll let you in. So Crowley entered the headquarters once again and with all seriousness, climbed the stairs,

making the sign of the Pentecost inverted and shouting magical curses at anyone who stood in his way. Your curse and your curse and your curse. Honestly, it reminds me of those martial arts videos where the guy is like a pseudo martial artist that just gets his ass kicked by a real martial artist. The one who finally stopped him was William Butler Yates, who simply kicked Crowley down the stairs with nothing more magical than his fucking foot. Yates.

These are all updates. Because he's the practical guy who's always like, just change the fucking locks. He's like, oh, you're fucking throwing magical curses at me. Bam. He just fucking goes rolling down the stairs. Get the fuck out of here then. An author and a poet, I guess the author wins. But I'll tell you what.

The fight versus the author and the poet. This is one of those roasts that sticks with a man, you know what I mean? And finally, Yates convinced the landlord who'd let Crowley in in the first place to call the police. Oh, God. And once again, Crowley was politely asked to leave. None of protest. There was real crime going on, right?

Isn't this like, like there was a bunch of murders and stuff happening? Like, this is what the police are doing? This is year 1900. This is like 12 years after Jack the Ripper. Wyatt Chapel's still a mess. Yeah. Yeah. Once Crowley was gone, Yates ejected both Samuel Mathers and Elaine Simpson from the

second order, but made a point to say that Crowley wasn't kicked out because he'd never been accepted in the first place. Oh, I hate you. You can't be kicked out of a thing you've never been in. I will let you bottom me until you go insane. Like was this known as just like bitch behavior or did he create this where was he the first one to be like, you can't fire me. I quit.

Or was that already something in the lexicon of the people? I think that that's been around since jobs existed. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, in a last dish effort to stay in his magic club, Crowley took the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn to court but lost the case and was ordered to pay a five pound fee in court costs.

So you don't get to do with tangible, intelligent people set up so we can have a society. You can't solve your problems that way. You decided to be a wizard. So you have to do it by wizard magic. You don't get to use the courts. He kicked me in my bottom and my bottom is for loving. Concerning Yates and Crowley though, it's thought by some that Aleister Crowley might have partly been the inspiration for what is arguably Yates's greatest work, the second

coming. If one reads the poem with the things falling apart in the center not holding and all at, it's not hard to imagine Crowley as the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, the man who represents the worst full of passionate intensity while the best lack all conviction. Damn. So he's like the anti-muse muse. Yeah. He's like what Carly Simon wrote the You're So Bane song about.

Yes. Who was that about again? Worn Beatty. No, it was not Worn Beatty. Yes, it was. Really? Well, he says he thinks it is. Well, that's because he's an asshole.

I have no idea. He might be like. I don't know. I have no idea. But even though Crowley lost the battle of Blith Road by any measure, he still joined Samuel Mathers in Paris and declared himself the winner. That's all you have to do. There it is.

Why didn't you want to be there? Wow. I didn't even want to go there. I love it. Magical thinking mixed with politics can lead to nightmares. In this case, I guess it's okay. But even though Crowley had quote unquote won, the shy. What did he win again?

The battle. He won the battle. But what did you get out of it? He's in the second order and in his mind, he's in his mind. He's in the second order. They don't recognize Westcott. They don't recognize any of these other fucking people. He's in the second order.

He wrote his name in the fucking book. He won. Okay. Okay. I'm not going to argue. Sure. But even so, the shine on Samuel Mathers was starting to wear off for Crowley. See when Mathers wrote the letter about Anna Springle to Florence Farr, he said he knew Westcott

was a fraud because Anna Springle was alive and well and working with him in Paris. When Crowley joined Mathers in Paris though, he found that Mathers had just been scammed. The woman who was claiming to be secret chief Anna Springle was actually a woman named Mrs. Horos, who'd gotten secret information about Mathers from none other than Madame Blavatsky years earlier. Grifters gonna grift. And was pretending that it was secret knowledge when it was just came from her and Madame Blavatsky fucking gossiping.

Wow. See, Mrs. Horos was obese and had claimed to have absorbed Madame Blavatsky's spirit after her death. And when she'd done that, she gained not just Blavatsky's knowledge, but her weight as well. That's why I call all jelly donuts Blavatsky's. Yeah. When I lack money, I take everything on time.

I eat a bunch of spaghetti. I call it reading books. I read a lot of books. But even though Mathers fell for it, all this bullshit was too much for even someone as ready to believe as Crowley was. And since Mathers gave up his rebellion after the Battle of Blith Road, Crowley gave up on Mathers and the Golden Dawn. But in this, Lachman makes a fucking great point and it's one of my favorite, so far

it's my favorite point that he makes. Even though Crowley left the Golden Dawn, Crowley still spent his life reaching for higher and higher degrees of magical knowledge as they were laid out by the order, as if he'd quit the Boy Scouts, but still kept trying for merit badges. It was like how he originally kept to the Satan's, how he kept to the standards of Satan being evil within the construct of the Christian belief. So he's still within a structure that he is working in. Just like the people who were too fat to be in the military, but still go and buy military

fatigues and walk around with guns. If there's something so much scarier than the person who was too dumb to be a cop, but who was just patrolling for the people. John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz, it's all the same shit, but Alistair Crowley, he will eventually break free. So after that, Crowley decided that his magical destiny lay elsewhere. So the Abra-Mellon ritual was once again abandoned and Alistair boarded a ship en route to New York City.

New York City? Woo! And that's where we'll pick back up for Part 2. All right! Yes! Alistair Crowley must have had a blast on that boat to New York City. Woo! It was a lucitania.

Alistair takes Manhattan. Hopefully it's better than when Jason did it. It's not. Yeah. Great. You last a little longer than ten fucking minutes, though. But they paid so much money for those ads in Times Square to get on the big screen. This story is going to get more windy.

Next week is way more magic. When's the gaping? When's the gaping, guys? It already kind of started. Was there not enough gaping in this episode for you? I didn't hear the word gap one time until I just brought it up, Wilson. I think you'll see a little bit of a gap here, my friend, if you set your eyes upon it. We shall do its next episode, and then, so this was the passage of the initiate heading

its way towards what is then called Adventures of the Magical. The second episode, we'll see all of the adventures now that the man has passed through the gates onto the road towards becoming a business. He will try and do whatever he can to attain contact with his HGA. But guess what? Third episode shows what happens when you get addicted to heroin. You are not a cool person anymore, unfortunately. Don't do with heroin.

If you've done it, congratulations on being off of it. That's really a difficult drug. It's an awful drug. It's very difficult. But that's what I learned. I was doing some research on Mr. Mitch Hedberg and every story that all of his friends have about him, and we're just like, well, we just kind of hung out in his hotel room. Those are not the stories you want your friends to have.

No. Does it make you a cool guy? I would rather hear you being like, he got hammered and took a dump in the Christmas tree. Great. That's why the second half of Sid Nancy is fucking awful because it's just heroin. And heroin is just boring. Absolutely.

All right, everyone. Well, thank you all so much for listening. We hope you're doing well. We got some big news, and we'll keep you up to date on all of that news. First of all, we got doggy robes on the last podcast merch, which are cute as fuck. Very cute. And then we will eventually have tour dates. Yeah, we got some live shows that we're going to tell you about.

We also have The Weedline is coming. We just had a great meeting. It is inching forward, so we will be able to be in your brain in more ways than just one. And then we've got Holden, McNeely, and I are beginning our dissent at the Dune. I believe it's going to be March 15th is when the dissent in the Dune is going to begin. And then we have our new someplace underneath, a new show coming out. But also, no dogs underneath, no dogs in space, has just finished their first season.

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30 PST. Watch. TV slash podcast network. What a time to be alive. Watch Henry be as violent as he wishes he could be in real life. I get it out though. Absolutely. I thank God for it.

Oh, happy Valentine's Day. Um, it's also the, um, we're now a year with Spotify. Ah, haven't kicked us off. There you go. Not yet. Not yet. Haven't kicked us off. All right, everyone.

Thanks for listening. Hail yourselves. Hail Satan. Hail Geen. Look who's deletions everybody. Help me. Please do. Mr Crowley.

Woo. Although Ozzie is British. She should have said it right. Yeah, but Mr Crowley. That sounds terrible. That sounds terrible. He made the right choice. Yep.

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