Stuff You Should Know - Aleister Crowley: Blowhard Narcissist?

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

Aleister Crowley was known as the "wickedest man in the world." But was he really just a blowhard narcissist? You decide! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and that makes this Stuff You Should Know and Chuck, Chuck, Chuck.

Yes. Before we get started, I feel like we should say something to some of the newcomers who haven't quite figured out our vibe yet. When we say, there's a couple, the two we'll call them, the twins. When we say Stuff You Should Know, we even said this on Jeopardy by the way, when we say Stuff You Should Know, we're not saying like, why don't you already know this stuff? You should know this. Of course. We're saying, this is so interesting. We want to share this with you. We think you should know this, so we want to tell you about it. That's the purpose of the title of the podcast. We should call it in this tone exactly. Here's something you

should know. Guys? Okay, I just wanted to get that out of the way. I'd love that. Do you feel like there's been confusion? I feel like there's been confusion for 13 years among some people. I think some people are actually offended by it. Who do these guys think they are? Telling me what I should know. Didn't you think it was title? Yeah, it was apparently imperfect. Because I had an alternate title back then. What was yours? Here's something you should know. Guys? I'm going to try and do my best to couch my disdain for today's topic.

Well, I think you already missed that mission. It's about Alistair. Someone like him was very divisive. You could go to any internet board and read a little bit about this dude. You will still see so much divisiveness. Yeah. There's a lot of conflicting information, including right before we recorded. I said something about Crowley. He said, I heard it was Crowley. I'm going to go ahead and get this out of the way. We'll do an overview of this guy. I found him to be above all narcissistic, one of the most self-aggrandizing, misogynistic, manipulating users of others who didn't really have anything interesting to say or add to the good of human kind in my opinion.

And yet this was your pick. What made you decide to want to do one on Mr. Crowley Crowley? I didn't know anything that much about him. Now I do and now I can have my own informed opinion. Yeah, totally. But if you go on these message boards, you'll find people that say what I said. Right. You'll find people that say the man was pure evil and blah, blah, blah of that train. I don't think he was. I think he was just a narcissist. No, we can dispense with that.

And then other people who are like, he's my hero. Yeah. I think in the people who he is a hero to are also not so disillusioned that they're like, no, he was great in every way. They're like, he was misunderstood and he also was often his own worst enemy is usually how they kind of defend it. Because it doesn't matter whether he was a hero to you, the most evil person in the world, he was frequently called the most wicked man in the world or just a total a-hole who didn't contribute anything. He was a jerk. Everyone agrees. That's the one thing everyone agrees on that. He was a total jerk. Well, I think that's where the narcissism is something that really triggers me in particular.

So that just kept popping up over and over. And I just kept saying, who does this guy think he is? You must have had a really hard time during the narcissist epidemic of the 2000 aughts. What was that? Don't you remember? It was like a whole psychology movement. This pair of psychologists basically tried to make their career by trying to prove that there was an entire generation of narcissists that had been raised and now the world was about to be ruined. And yeah, they were right. But it was pop psychology. What generation was it? I guess millennials is what they were who they were talking about, which is kind of mean because that was at the time everybody was picking on millennials for

just about everything. And then these two come in and were like, yeah, and get this, they're also narcissists. I don't know about that. But I think in Crowley Crowley's case, there's a narcissism that's a narcissistic system. Actually, I said it right. Yeah, you did. That's kind of off the charts. There's a self-importance that self-importance really bugs me too. So intertwined, someone who really thinks they have a lot to say. I mean, you can tell by how much this guy wrote, like overriding. I have so much to say. I'll write 50 books and read any of this stuff. And it's just like, kill me. All right. So I'm going to park all that to the side and be totally neutral from here on out. Well, I don't think you have to be, but I do think we should explain why this guy would

even be worth a podcast episode then. Well, let's just say he is first, because everyone who doesn't know Ozzy Osbourne is like, who even is this jerk? Okay. So even if you're not familiar with Ozzy Osbourne, which stop this podcast right now and go familiarize yourself with the body of work of Ozzy Osbourne, and then come back, and then go back to Black Sabbath. Right. Even if you're not familiar with that, you probably have seen a picture of Alistair Crowley. The picture? Basically the picture where he looks like he's doing the Olin Mills pose like, hey, I'm just hanging out around the barn yard feeling good right now. But he's actually performing a magic ritual, a pose, a form I think is what they were called. Everybody's seen that

picture, right? I think so. I mean, you probably, a lot of people have probably seen it and didn't know that too, that was even. Right. And even if you haven't seen that picture, and you still haven't heard of Alistair Crowley, if you're a Beatles fan, if you are a fan of New Age stuff, if you like crystals, if you buy people candles with their birthday horoscope on them, because you think it's actually going to influence their year, you can thank Alistair Crowley, because he was basically the center point for all of that stuff coming about in the West. The idea of occultism, mysticism, spirituality outside of Christianity, Judaism, and even Islam, the fact that it's present in Europe and America today is almost exclusively

through his efforts and work. Yeah. I mean, I will say this, the only reason he's noteworthy is because he did what he did when he did it. In the 80s, if you would turn on Jerry Springer on any day, you would see eight Alistair Crowley sitting on stage. But this guy was doing it very early on in the 1900s throughout the early 20th century when that kind of stuff, like that's why he got so much press was because he was doing things that you dare not speak of at a time when people weren't doing these things, at least out loud. Yeah. Even today still, people are like, this guy was really over the top and out of bounds in a lot of ways. Like he said, there's some people on the message boards who still are like, he was evil. They're still

scared of him. And this guy's been dead for 60, 70 years. And even when he was alive, he really wasn't all that menacing. I mean, like he tried to be, but if you just stopped him, we're like, what are you doing? And really kind of took yourself out of his little realm. You might even laugh at him depending on the situation. I would. Yeah. I know you would. All right. So let's, I guess, start at the beginning and we'll kind of breeze through his childhood, which was formative for sure. He was born in 1875 in England. He's a British man. And he was born into a wealthy family. His family were brewers. They brewed ale, but were very, very religious. And this was a big, big deal because they were members of a religious group called a Christian group called

the Brethren, which was sort of just Christianity on steroids as far as saying things like sex was bad and sinning was bad to the point where it reversed him. It had the opposite effect. Yeah. Not only was like sex bad, like that's bread and butter Christian stuff. This was like, like you didn't sign a lease, I saw, or you didn't like take out life insurance because it suggested that you didn't have full faith that Jesus was about to come back any day now. Like you didn't plan for the future. You also didn't take medicine. And that ended up killing his father, Alistair Crowley's father, who developed tongue cancer and that apparently was a treatable condition at the time, which kind of surprised me, although they were probably just going to cut his

tongue out. Yeah, that was it. But rather, were they really, is that what they were going to do? I mean, when they say cancer of the tongue in surgery, then what else could it mean? Okay, sure. So the brethren of which he was a member, apparently they were an equal egalitarian group, they all kind of got together and like, we don't think you should do that. We think that it kind of shows the lack of faith in Jesus. And he was like, okay, I'm just going to roll the dice and see what happens. And he died. And that apparently really soured Alistair Crowley on Christianity because he really looked up to his father one. But I think he also really fully bought like the brethren as well. And this was a huge like jarring crash into a wall.

Yeah, it left him with a lot of money when he would become an adult, I think, and the Grabster helped us out with this one. I think he said it was about two million bucks in today's money. So a lot of money. But as we will see, certainly not enough to last a lifetime, even back then, at least the way he burned through it. Definitely. It's amazing it lasted as long as it did, really. Yeah, it made me wonder how much drugs cost back then because he bought a lot of them. Yeah, but he could just go down to the local chemist or, you know, pharmacy and buy them over the counter. So they were relatively cheap, I guess.

I would guess so, yeah. I mean, the chemist doesn't try to tax you. Yeah, everyone knows pharmaceuticals are super cheap. Sure. So he was left with his mom who, you know, by all accounts, they didn't have the best relationship. She was also super religious. I think Ed dug up in one biography that he sort of treated her as if she were the help in one of the servants. And she, in fact, referred to him as the beast, which was from the book of revelations and a name that he would later, I think, kind of keep on using for himself. Yeah, and I saw that she was, I saw both that she was jokingly calling him that in a way,

but also just chiding him for his bad behavior, or that she was a very, very pious person and that she would not have called him the beast unless she was, like, genuinely disgraced and abhorred by his behavior. You know what I mean? Like, she wouldn't have used that lightly. So I'm not sure. I'm going to go with that the second interpretation because it's scarier. So then he eventually makes his way to Cambridge in 1895. He didn't graduate, but this was where he really kind of started getting interested in two things that would define the rest of his life, the occult and sex. Yeah, for sure. That's where his life kind of changes. This is typical going to college

stuff, you know? Yeah, sort of. And he was also, he got into some other stuff. We don't have to get into it much, but he was a master, not like a grandmaster, but he was a really good chess player for a while. He could have been a grandmaster from what I saw, like, if he had pursued it legitimately. Yeah, yeah. Like, he was considering a profession, like, of chess. He also was a noteworthy mountaineer. He was in the party that attempted the first British attempt on K2 ever. It was unsuccessful, but they ended up breaking a record of living at 20,000 feet longer than anybody else. Like, he was a serious mountaineer for a very long time, but as he just kind of got a little older, and especially as he got a little further into like magic and sex in particular,

he just kind of lost as much interest. Like, those were his life's passions. And all of a sudden, he's like, I think I'd rather have sex of every single kind I can possibly think of than climb a mountain. And he still climbs some mountains, and there were some huge issues that came out of that pursuit at times. But like you said, more than anything, he directed his life toward magic and sex. He says, I think I'd rather climb sexual mountains. Sexual. Right. Well, should we take a break already? I think we should. Oh, okay. Well, you just answered your own question. You begged the question in the best sense of that term. All right. We're going to take a little break here. I'm going to collect myself and we'll talk more about sex magic right after this.

Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye,

bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars. If you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think before we talk about sex magic, can we talk a little bit about his poetry? Sure. He was a writer and like we said, he wrote up to about 50 books and some of these were collected and published just from stuff he'd written along the way after his death. But he felt like he had a lot to say to the world. Wrote a lot of erotic poetry. The first collection was

called White Stains under the pseudonym Archibald Bishop. Don't have to work too hard to figure out what that means. It's so juvenile. It's hilarious. Did you ever read any of his poetry? No. I saw clips and snippets of it and just from reading so much stuff about how not great it was, I was like, I'm not reading this. I'm not going to read it. In fact, I can't read it on the air because it's a family friendly show. All of them start. There once was a man from Nantucket. There once was a narcissist from Nantucket. But there is a poem I would encourage our readers of age to go look up. And if you are not of age, don't do it. If you're listening with your kid right now, distract them briefly. But it's a poem called Celia Farts. C-E-L-I-A-P-H-A-R-T-S.

No, no. F-A-R-T-S. And it's just a great example. And I'm sure he had more, I guess, legitimate poetry than this. But reading Celia Farts really soured me on what I felt like he thought he had to say to the world. Well, yeah, that's the thing. I think one of the things is, it's like... I see what you're saying. It's a little bit... Wow. Did you look it up? Yeah, yeah, I did. There's a Pinterest post that has it. It's the first thing that comes up, so you don't even have to really click in anywhere. But I think one of the things

that's so off-putting about him is he's like a Victorian... Maybe an Edwardian or Regency era, but he's like of that era. He's using words like farts and it just keeps getting worse in that poem. And it's just so crude today. If somebody published that stuff today, you'd be like, this is crude and lowbrow. But somebody from that era doing it makes it exponentially worse for some reason. And I think that is exactly what he was into. Yeah, well, he certainly loved to push buttons. He rejected Christianity so forcefully that he decided, not only am I not into it, but I want to be the opposite of it. I think that the only problem with sin are the hangups that people put on it. And to be truly happy, you should just

sin, sin, sin. And I'm really good at it. And so that's what I'm going to do with my life. Yeah. And that is what he did. And he did... Like I said, basically any sex act you can think of, I did not see any accusations of bestiality, which really surprised me. Did you? Oh, I did. Oh, you did? Okay. Did you get the impression that he actually did that? Because I, again, would be surprised if he hadn't met a donkey or two in his time. I saw that. I saw, and we'll get to this, his time when he was living in his slum commune in Italy. Things got really weird there. And of course, I don't think we even said why there's

a lot of conflicting information. You could never tell when he was being straight or writing the truth. And you could never tell when someone had, when he had made an enemy and they were writing something not true to make him look even worse. So it's really hard to parse out the truth. But I did see stuff about not him committing a sexual act with an animal, but forcing a woman to with a goat. Okay. And that, I mean, that's... The thing is, it is plausible. And the reason why is because he really did have a lot of sway. I thought you could say a lot of goats. Right. He had enough sway over his acolytes during like his peak that he could have gotten something like that accomplished if he'd really set his mind to it. It's entirely possible it

did happen. He was into some really freaky stuff. But like you said, you can't really tell what was made up by his enemies. And he had almost nothing but enemies. He had people who just had just met him and were under his spell and enemies, which were people who had known him for longer than a couple of years. That was basically his world. Like he didn't have friends necessarily. Actually, not even necessarily. He didn't have friends. He had people who were under his spell or had just come out from under his spell. Yeah. And I think that's one of the things too that really helped to reinforce how I feel about him is that, well, first of all, anyone who doesn't have old friends, you got to investigate that a little further, I think. But sure, things happen in life. But in

his case, I think the fact that he was, I think had he given the opportunity, he would have started a massive money-making religion, a la Elran Hubbard. But it seems like he could never attract more than a handful of people at a time. And I think that's for a reason. Yes. Personality-based reason. I think the proof is in the pudding. He set out to create a huge, massive religion that would change the world. That was his goal, as we see. And just, it didn't happen. And he also died without money, even though he had money, despite, you know, like actually trying to perform magic rituals to attract money. So, like, yeah, his intent was there. But the thing to me, the thing to me that makes him legit in some way is that he

was still performing rituals, still performing magic to the end. Like, he never gave up on it, even though, like, it didn't bring him the fame and the fortune, and it didn't change the world that he wanted. Like, he dedicated, truly dedicated his life to that. Yeah, I don't think he was a charlatan. I do think that he bought into this garbage himself. So, you know, he was authentic. But definitely, I think that's actually what I was trying to say. Should we go to Stockholm? Yeah, I think we should go to Stockholm, because that is where his, one of his first mystical experiences happened, or that's the way he described it, at least. Yeah, and it was, am I reading this right, in that this mystical experience

basically was a result of having homosexual intercourse for the first time? Yeah, gay sex. Okay. Good for him. And hey, I want to be clear, I'm not knocking anyone's kink, because he had a lot of them. I'm not knocking that at all. What someone does in the bedroom is like, that's fine, and that's great, I support all of that. But I think his self-importance of like, having to detail and write about it all as a guidebook for others, just, it was a real turn off for me. So, the reason that he was detailing this stuff and writing a guidebook for others, using things like sex, and by the way, once he was like, oh, actually I'm bisexual, like for the rest of his life, he had relationships with men and women. Sure.

And there was one man in particular, Jerome Paulit, that he later said he really regretted breaking off his relationship with, because Paulit wasn't into the occult. But he wrote that with Paulit, he had achieved ideal intimacy, which the Greeks considered the greatest glory of manhood in the most precious prize of life. So, that's how he described one of his relationships with a man. Yeah. And that really says a lot for somebody who didn't necessarily consider himself bisexual. I think he more than anything considered himself straight, he just had like, you know, gay sex from time to time when it suited him. And sometimes some of those acolytes, like you said, he had no more than a few people around him. Sometimes it was all men. And if you were an

acolyte of his, not only were you helping him perform magic rituals, you were helping him perform sex magic too. And who knows where that was going to go, but very often, more often than not, it was degrading. He used sexual degradation as a way, like a path, like a magic ritual. But also it was to show power and dominance over his acolytes as well. Yeah. And for some reason, and again, like if you look at the S&M community, that it didn't feel like that to me. Because if that's your kink, that's fine too. This felt more like a manipulative user of people than any particular sexual kink. Or maybe he was born at a time where, I don't know, I mean, he certainly lived in a time

where none of this was acceptable. Homosexuality was illegal in England at the time. So I don't know. I try to frame it at the time and place and try and be a little bit more understanding. You know what I mean? From stuff I saw in reports from some of his acolytes, he seemed to truly get pleasure from this stuff. Oh, I'm sure he did. So I don't know if it was just like a means to an end. I think he was really immersed in it personally as well. I think so. But it seems like every time he was challenged, he was done with someone. Once he had used them up, including his wife, which we'll get to in a minute. But just, I guess we should quickly mention, he did have other career paths he could have taken.

We mentioned the chess. He did go to Russia to learn the business of diplomatic services, which is something he chose at Cambridge. But none of this stuff interested him. I think once he went down the path of the occult and these sexual orgies at times that he would get involved in, he was like, this is it for me. Yeah. I'm living my best life. I'm out there, Jerry, and I'm loving every minute of it. Very nice. I didn't think his Seinfeld reference was about that. So he winds up his time at Cambridge and he basically comes out of it completely devoted to the occult, even more devoted to sex, figuring out ways to combine those two things.

He's still mountaineering from time to time. He considers himself a poet, but he also He would have said he was a poet before he read Celia Parts. But he also, one of the other things about him, I saw it described as he was a magician and he considered himself a genuine magician and he presented himself as a genuine magician, not an illusionist, not a stage magician. Somebody who actually could bend reality using his will based on rituals and spells and incantations and communicating with people from or beings from other spiritual planes, right? Yeah. Magic with a CK.

Right. And he apparently was the one who added the K at the end, which is an old spelling of magic, but he did that to differentiate the two. Right. But he didn't invent the K. He just brought it back. Yeah. He revived it. Yes, from what I saw. He was obsessed with books, not only reading. He had wall to wall books in his apartment. But like I said, writing, Ed dug up a scholar that suggested he might have what's called Gramma Mania, which is a pathological obsession with writing and to never be satisfied and to just keep writing, starting new things before you're finished, that kind of thing. So that might

be possible. Right. So one of the other things that he was really good at was traveling. He could just go somewhere. I saw him described as utterly without inhibition, whether it was with sex or whether it was like, oh, let's go see how they do things in Burma. And when he went from place to place, he picked up things. He would find the occult and esoteric traditions and religious traditions, even mainstream religious traditions of these places and would figure out how certain parts of them fit in with his own view of the occult and his own practices with magic. And he did that by just touring the world for long periods of time, which is something people did back then anyway. If you went to Europe, you stayed there for like two

years because it took so long to get there and back, right? But even for his time, he was a very seasoned traveler. Yeah. And like you said, it's really one of the important facts of his life because what he would end up doing is creating his own, I guess you would call it a religion, Thilema. But Thilema was based on all of these travels and everything he picked up. There were a couple of secret society, occult societies he joined along the way and then eventually ran a foul love. One was called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and one was called the Ordo Templi Orientis, the OTO. And it seems like in both of these groups, and these were years apart, so it wasn't like, I think seven to nine years apart, he joined these. Both times,

it seemed like he tried to run the show when he got involved and rewrite their stuff to suit his needs. And what he was doing, though, was really trying to create his own jam and kind of using up these religious orders along the way. Yeah. And I saw just a little side thing real quick, Chuck. I saw that he once had a vampire sicked on him by William Butler Yates, the poet. Yeah, they were enemies within the, what was it called, the first one? The Golden Dawn. The Order of the Golden Dawn, yeah. And Yates considered himself a white witch and he very clearly had decided that Crowley was a black witch or a black magician, I should say. And so for Yates and the other people in the Golden Dawn who were opposed to Crowley, they considered him

dangerous. And he couldn't learn some of these mysteries because he would unleash the stuff on humanity and basically start a reign of evil here on earth. So Yates sicked a vampire on him for like nine nights. All right. He just went up a notch in my book then. Who, Yates? No. Crowley. Because why do you hate Yates even more than you hate Aleister Crowley? No, no. I love Yates, but to be able to say that, hey, you know, one time WB Yates sicked a vampire on him. For nine days. For nine days. He just earned a little point in the Chuck world. Okay. Well, I'm glad we talked about that then. For a while, he lived, for a pretty long while, he bought this house on Loch Ness called the, I sought to pronounce the Boleskin House, or Boleskin,

not Boleskin. This house became a little more famous in the 1970s when Jimmy Page bought it of Led Zeppelin because he was fairly obsessed with Crowley for a while. Although by all accounts, Page did not spend much time there. It was in very bad condition. And he kind of took one look at it and was like, yeah, somebody should fix this place up. What a guy to live there and just never really went back. But he did live there for a while and he owned the house for kind of a long time. It was one of the only places he would stay for any length of time, basically. Yeah. Boleskin reminds me of Archibald Bishop for some reason. You know? Doesn't sound right.

Like another student of him would be Dr. Boleskin. Right. Yeah. One of the ways that he brought people under his influence too, even people who opposed him, was by using his wealth. He wasn't above using drugs. He was surrounded by people who were using drugs and some of them had happened upon habits like heroin or cocaine habits. He would find people who had power or status in some of these orders and would be like, hey, how about I give you some of that heroin you crave so much and unlimited supply? How's that sound? Go ahead and initiate me into this inner circle. He would use stuff like that.

Like you said, he was one of the greatest manipulators of his age, for sure. But in doing so, what he was doing was he wasn't just doing it to get power. His ambition wasn't just to become the head of the Golden Dawn or the head of the OTO. He wanted to learn as many secrets as he could just like when he was traveling in the East and he was picking up yoga or he was picking up mysticism from Egypt, like he wanted to learn their secrets to figure out the stuff that actually worked. That was his goal. That was his ultimate goal. Okay. So I mentioned a wife in 1903. He married Rose Edith Kelly and they were really, really, really into each other. She was, got very into what he was into. They went to Cairo on their honeymoon in 1904.

And by all accounts, it was a life-changing experience where they were both channeling Egyptian gods. And this is where he, through channeling Egyptian gods, so says him, wrote his big sort of Bible called The Book of the Law, which would become the basis for Thilema. And he says he was, like I said, channeling a being called Iwas. That's all I saw. Oh, really? Yeah, Iwas. That's how I heard it from every day. Oh, okay. And so, you know, this is where he has his, he's had awakenings before, but this is where he came up with his dynetics, basically. Yeah, I saw Iwas continued on like for years and years and years is basically a guardian angel for him and whatever acolytes he

had serving him at the time. Like they would call on Iwas for protection sometimes. So he was like a kind of a lifelong guardian for Crowley, at least to Crowley and his followers. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, he talked a lot about guardian angels. He had two daughters, and then toward the end of his life had a son who has an interesting story that we should probably do a short stuff on. But in 1905, they had Lilith, who was their first daughter. She died, and I saw different things here. She died of typhoid and Burma, but I saw that he had basically kind of abandoned his wife at this point, and she couldn't really care for her herself because of her alcoholism, and he blamed her death on her.

Don't know how true that is, but they would eventually have a second daughter named Lola Zaza, who you found one of the greatest pictures of any human of all time on the internet. It is so cool, man. That kid looks like just a genuinely cool freaky it girl, you know what I mean? Well, she's wearing a goat, so we should just preface that for people who are triggered by wearing animal hides, and she's wearing more than a hide. It's a hide and a head. Yeah, yeah, I think that was a good idea. Yeah. But so her sister's name, her full name, sister Lilith, who proceeded and died as a baby, was Nuit Ma Ahathur Hectate Safo Jezebel Lilith Crowley. I'm in Hotep.

Yeah, just went by Lilith for short. Yes, and she had very sadly a very short life. Yeah, yeah, so I saw that too, that even though Crowley had abandoned his wife and infant baby in China, and they were making their way back and she died in Burma, that he still blamed, he blamed Rose for the baby's death like fully. It took zero responsibility for it, and that was a frequent, like a common thing that happened or that he did during his life too, like things, tragedy, sometimes life ending tragedy would befall people around him because of him and his decisions, and he just would not accept responsibility for that kind of

stuff. Yeah, one of the reasons he was eventually ostracized from the mountaineering community, which was a pretty small community at the time, he reportedly was on a trip with some people, got into a fight with them while they were on the trip because he wanted to control how it went down, and they, he splintered off from them, there was an avalanche, and they were all basically buried and like crying for help, and as the story goes, he was nearby drinking tea and like didn't do anything to help them, and they died, and then the word got out, and everyone was like, I don't want to climb with this guy anymore. Yeah, I think he even wrote like an article about the expedition in the Daily Mail and used it to blame everybody but himself for it.

That sounds about right. Yeah, I mean, he really was not a good person at all, and actually was a bad person in a lot of ways too. Yeah. He had Rose institutionalized eventually for alcoholism. I don't know, I didn't hear about his son, and I don't know what his relationship with his daughter, Lola, they just kind of fade out of the story, and he just kind of continues on, which probably says about everything you need to know. Yeah, well, let's do a short stuff on his son, because it was, there was way more to the story than I could really comprehend for this, but he had a son late, late in life, who eventually was a part of the, I think, British military and tried to overthrow the government, who died in the 2000s, I think he died in 2006, so

wow. This was like way late in his life, but yeah, let's maybe follow up on that. So you want to take another break and then just come back and hit a few more high points and then talk about his idea of what magic was? Sure. Okay, we're going to do that, everybody, and don't worry, we will talk about sex magic eventually. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do,

you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh god. Seriously, I swear, and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so, my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular,

and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology,

it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so you said that he ended up joining a second group, the OTO. Prior to that, he tried his hand at founding his own secret occult group, the AA, which from pretty much every source I saw stood for Astrum Argentinum, which means Silver Star. So it was the order of the Silver Star, basically. Yeah, it's A with a little symbol, then A in the little symbol. And as after the OTO, which was an established group approached him, because apparently he was publishing secrets of the OTO, but he did get sued. But from basically all accounts,

he really had not exposed their secrets knowingly. He had stumbled upon this stuff himself through his own rituals and practice. And they found out that he had accidentally done this, that he hadn't, he'd figured it out himself. And they said, oh, well, you're immediately like a high-ranking OTO official and we're going to initiate you now. Because anybody who stumbled on their secrets themselves just automatically became a member. And so he was very proud of that and happy about that. And of course, the OTO kind of went different ways with him because it was Alistair Crowley after all. And he started pursuing other stuff too. Yeah, and we should point out too that when he was sued by his rival from the Golden Dawn for publishing secrets, he won that lawsuit. So he

didn't lose it. But yeah, he pursued other things. There's this long-standing story that he tried to, and he definitely tried to become a spy for Britain during the wars. But he was always rebuffed unless you believe that he really, really was a spy. And he was so on the down low that that information never really came out. But by all accounts, he tried to be a spy during the wars and England always said, thank you, but no, thank you. Then he went to work for the Germans for a little while. And this is where it gets a little confusing. Because he claimed he was trying to write, as a writer, he was trying to write stuff about the Germans that was so preposterous that it would have helped the Allies. But who knows? Yeah, who knows. It is kind of up for

debate whether he was actually a secret agent or not, for sure. I don't know. I guess it could be settled that those things are probably, those documents are still around somewhere if they exist, you know? Yeah. So after World War II, he ended up going back to England. Remember, he traveled the world. He traveled across the Sahara into Tangier, I think, on foot. He traveled from the Pyrenees down to Gibraltar on foot. He did time in Mexico, Japan, India, did a lot of mountain climbing. So he did tons of traveling. But I guess toward the end of his life, as it was winding down a little bit, he wanted to be closer to home. He had a lifelong case of bronchitis. So he moved back to England and a doctor prescribed him heroin. And he said,

oh, I've had plenty of this. Right. He's like, oh, yeah, well, friend. But I don't know if he had successfully kept himself from becoming addicted to it before or not. But this time it got its hooks in him. And he spent the last several years of his life addicted to heroin, like heavily addicted to heroin, and ended up dying, I believe, in 1947. Yes. Basically broke in a boarding house. Yeah. All right. So maybe we should talk finally about sex magic. Finally. Blood sugar, baby. Not blood sugar, sex magic. I knew you were going to say that. I can't. No. But preceding the, oh, not preceding. This is all a big part of it. But I did mention his stay in Italy. These were three big years in his life

is when he lived at a, Ed calls it a small estate in Sicily, but it was really a pretty run down ramshackle farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere. And this is what he called his church. This was the abbey of Thelima. And it was squalid and it was gross. And he had, this is where things, he did the worst of the worst, even by his standards, when it came to these rituals. And this is where animal sacrifice may or may not have happened. Blood ritual may or may not have happened. Ingesting all kinds of human excrement may or may not happened. It was, you know, these were the dark days. Or I guess as far as he's concerned, the best days. The salad days. Maybe. So sex magic. I don't want to give sex magic a bad name because a lot of

people practice sex magic. And there's a lot of wide variety of sex magic. And even the stuff, a lot of the stuff that Aleister Crowley, you know, performed was just kind of like, oh, that's it. Okay. That seems fine. Right. It wasn't necessarily degrading or debasing. It didn't necessarily involve sacrifice or anything like that. There were frequently multiple people involved. But it's like, and all of it was in the service of like entering a higher plane, communicating with other beings and figuring out, you know, what worked best and what didn't work. But with sex magic and sex magic seems to have been pretty much the basis of all of his rituals. Did you get that impression too? Like pretty much all of the magic he did was sex

magic to some degree or another. Right. Yeah. And that's one of the sort of issues I have with him as it seemed like most of it revolved around getting people to do sexual acts they wouldn't have ordinarily done. So again, the purpose of all of it, as far as he was saying, was to figure out what else is out there and to basically use magic to communicate with higher planes and to get that knowledge and to basically bring it back here on earth to create a more just and equitable society under thelamic law. Right. That's what his stated point was. That's what his point was. He wrote very detailed graphic manuals that were very precise about every sex act you can think of to be a part of his thelamic religion. And he sort of believed that

he was onto something with magic being what he thought was the middle ground between science and religion. He thought religion was seemingly thought religion was way too constrictive and kind of got in between people and attaining spiritual enlightenment. It seemed like he thought science was too rigid. I would argue that he probably thought science was too caught up in facts and things like that, where he wanted to be a little more loosey goosey with it. And so he thought he sort of had the perfect middle road there with magic with the CK. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. He would use experimentation and trial and error to figure out the best way, the most effective ritual magic. Right. It seems that, you know, and this is one of those deals where

Eddie even points out he was sort of a man of his time and his attitudes towards other races. He did express racist and anti-Semitic attitudes at times, but maybe no worse than other people did at the time. That doesn't excuse it, obviously, but as far as just sort of putting him in a time and place. But, you know, he also traveled all over the world and experienced all different types of cultures and I don't think did so with disdain. Right. We talked also, Chuck, about Thelima and the law of Thelima. And there's a very famous like passage from it. Well, there's really just kind of three laws for Thelima, but the one that people cite most frequently and is actually, I guess, inscribed on the vinyl of Led Zeppelin's third album appropriately called

Led Zeppelin 3. It's, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Yes. And if there's ever been a string of words more ripe for misinterpretation, it is that one. Yeah, I think a lot of people say he's basically saying there are no consequences. Just do whatever you want. And we should point out he was never a Satanist. He was called that at times. And I think when people think of Alistair Crowley, probably because of Ozzy and people think he was a Satanist, but he never was. And he kind of used that a little bit to get some attention, but he was never into Satanism. But the reason I mentioned that is to do with that quote, like apparently he did not mean it that way. Like you can just do whatever you want as long as you're making yourself happy and go not with God, but

go with yourself. Well, what I saw was that he's saying do what thou wilt, meaning like your purpose in life is the purpose in life, like figuring out what your purpose is and applying your full self to it is it. That's the whole of the law. That's what that meant to him. He also said love is the law, love under will, meaning like to find love and to be a loving person under like secondary to the idea that figuring out what your purpose in life is. So then loving your purpose and learning the love by carrying out your purpose. And then thou has no right, but do thy will, which means just you really should be doing those first two. So that was like the law of Thilema. But like you're saying, like he's frequently considered a Satanist even though he never was. And like

people are like he didn't have any regard for consequences and he kind of didn't, but that's not really what that Thilemic law was saying. So he's very much misinterpreted and reinterpreted. And that especially started, I think he died, he was very, very notorious while he was alive. But when he died, not many people showed up, the papers covered it. But then that was 1947. He just kind of fell out of public consciousness from what I understand until 1967 when he made a surprise cameo on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band album. Yes, the very famous album cover with a, which was a collage of many, many famous people. And Alistair Crowley was right in there. Apparently, John Lennon

enjoyed his writings as did Jimmy Page and Timothy Leary. And his influence was pretty great in what would end up being sort of the hippie experimental drug culture of the 1960s. They would invoke Alistair Crowley's name here and there for sure. So, you know, for someone who would probably not be a blip on the radar today, he had a lot of lasting influence and still does. And apparently also the new age movement that really started to blossom in the 80s and has been kind of revived today, 70s and 80s, I should say, found its roots in the 50s. And those people were directly influenced by Crowley, Crowley's followers. So he is very much the father of the modern new age movement and all of its preoccupation with occultism and mysticism. And you mentioned

how had he had a chance to be like Al Ron Hubbard, he would have grabbed it. And I agree with you, I think he would have. But there's apparently a story that even the Scientologists confirm, but they interpreted it differently, that Al Ron Hubbard was actually an acolyte, a follower of Alistair Crowley's immediate heir. So they founded the Agape Lodge and Al Ron Hubbard was there performing magic with another guy, Jack Parsons, who founded the Jet Propulsion Lab who was a big time Crowley acolyte. And the Scientologists say Al Ron Hubbard was there trying to destroy this church from the inside. But a lot of people say, no, this is actually where Al Ron Hubbard started to get his ideas for Scientology. And that's where it grew

from, was from Crowley's influence. You could draw some parallels, that's for sure. Yeah, one or two. So that's it, how do you feel? Like I need to take a bath? Yeah, I'm with you. I kind of do too. Okay, well, we made it through Alistair Crowley, everybody. And since Chuck said he needs to take a bath and I agree, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Reppin' at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This is from Evan and Kaylee, Evan Weaver from Harrisonburg, Virginia, a sophomore at James Madison University. And his girlfriend Kaylee Wagner went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And he says this, on our way there, we re-listened to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame podcast to build the anticipation. Once there, and when we finished looking through all the exhibits,

we found ourselves at a station where we could design custom band logos and print stickers. Kaylee and I decided to make some of these stickers based on our favorite band names from the podcast. Awesome. They print two copies of the sticker, one to take home and another to place on the walls of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Needless to say, if you ever visit there and find stickers with the band names Wormburden and Itch Scratch Cycle, that's awesome. You know who put them there. That is really cool. Yeah, Evan and Kaylee, that is huge. We need to get this to be a thing that Evan and Kaylee started. Yes, every visitor needs to do this. Attention, stuff you should know listeners, including the new twins. If you ever go to the Rock and Roll

Hall of Fame, will you follow in Evan and Kaylee's footsteps for us? It'd be awesome. Yeah, our goal is to one day take over the real band names because there's so many stuff you should know. That'd be wonderful. See, that's a great exhibit. That's way better than Jimmy Page's mailbox from Bullskin House behind Plexiglass. I so wish that was there. It may be. It's where I got my post. So thanks a lot, Evan and Kaylee, not just for the email, but for starting what we can only hope is a stuff you should know tradition to last for years and years and years. Agreed. And if you want to be like Evan and Kaylee and start a new tradition, or even if you just want to get in touch and say hi, you can email us too at stuffpodcastatihartradio.com.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or

wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.