Wolf Fleetwood Ross
Appearances
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
So he says, Taranzan, the first thing he says is, I am the master of form, and from me all forms proceed. I am I. I have shut myself up from the spendthrifts. My gold is safe in my treasure chamber, and I have made every living thing my concubine, and none shall touch them save only I.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
from me come leprosy and pox and plague and cancer and cholera and the falling sickness and i will reach up to the knees of the most high god and tear his phallus with my teeth and i will bray his testicles in a mortar and make a poison thereof to slay the sons of men So that's how he introduced himself. Wow.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
No, yeah, I mean, Neuberg will go to his deathbed saying this is real, and never coming out against what Crowley had written down. They both wrote down what they heard afterwards from memories, and it's basically the same, to my knowledge.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
Yes. Yeah. And they have sacrificed animals. Yeah. And they're in the protective circle. It's like a pigeon is a dead pigeon is at each one of the things. And so then Charanzon starts to fuck with them. And Neuberg hears Crowley say, I don't think I can take any more of this. But Neuberg realizes Charanzon sort of imitating Crowley.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
And now Crowley, they've been separated on this sort of metaphysical plane where they're physically next to each other, but they can't see each other. And then Charanzon says, They have called me the god of laughter, and I laugh when I will slay. And they have thought that I could not smile, but I will smile upon whom I would seduce. Oh, inevitable one, that canst not be tempted.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
And then Charanzon switched axis again and starts telling Neuberg about how awesome he is. He says, I bow myself humbly before the great and terrible names whereby thou hast conjured and constrained me. Let me come and put my head beneath my feet, that I may serve thee, if thou commandest me to be obedient in the holy names. So that's all going on.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
And then, according to Neuberg, Taranzan saw a sort of break in their magical circle where the sand had basically covered one of their lines and makes his way into the circle and physically attacks Neuberg. And Neuberg pulls out his magical dagger and stabs him in the neck and reconstructs the line in the sand as the demon is reeling from being stabbed in the neck.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
So again, sounds like science fiction, but there are two people and one person at one point had no want to protect or ever see Crowley again, but never recanted this. And Neuberg would go on to have a pretty decent career in poetry publishing. Like, he was a man of industry after all of this and, again, would have had every reason to have said this is bullshit, but didn't.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
Yeah, so, I mean, like, you can go buy a John D. grimoire that has all the incantations of Enochian and how to get into the Aethers, but this is the one, too, like...
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
The ritual itself was talked about a bit in detail in some of the books I read, but this is the one I was telling you that I was messing around with ChatGBT, where it's like you can get ChatGBT to tell you exactly how to do a lesser banishing ritual or the Gnostic Mass that the OTO does. You can get literally word-for-word things on that.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
If you say teach me how to summon Charanzon from the 10th Aether... It'll be like, I'm going to try this. C-H-O-R-O-N-Z-O-N. And make sure you write like John D. 10th Aether. It will say, at least for me, what it said, it was like, to summon Tranzon, you must be spiritually and physically prepared to clash with the da-da-da-da.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
Like, I know how to summon him, but I would never share it or something like that. And it was, I was like, what? Yeah.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
You can go sell them and see if it's true.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
I also don't know. Some Aethers seemed really fun. I don't know why you'd want to go to the Choronzon Aether. I just thought it was funny that the chat GPT responses I got were just like, stay away, this is a dangerous beast. And I was like, so is it real?
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
Can AI have intention?
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
So yeah, I mean, Chiranzan's cool. I believe it. Why not?
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
Well, so they also had trouble with Tron's on.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt. 4 "The Great Deceiver" [Patreon Preview]
I mean, you're totally good to say that, because the whole thing is you have to say it in Enochian. Because that's the magical language. So you're totally fine. As long as it's in English, you're fine.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
I didn't look too deep into it. I just took him at its word.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
He was also born tongue-tied, and he had to get his tongue cut so he could never produce R's correctly. Interesting. Kind of funny. Interesting. He was born into a very wealthy family. Yes. His families had breweries all over, and they had these things called Crowley Ale Houses, which was like... a prototype of an English pub where a working man could come in and get a pint and get a sandwich.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And it, I don't know why, but at the time that was like a very novel idea. And in England it just caught on and the family just made a fortune.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
It was the bundling of the food and the ale for a set price.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And the funniest thing is like Crowley was basically born into what I would call like a super Christian cult. So no one drank. No one drank in his family. His father would eventually buck that and start drinking. But for a long time, they were just businessmen who were just – They don't get high on their own supply. No, not at all.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
This religious cult is called the Plymouth Brethren. And from my research into it, it actually could have been a really big movement. But they were so pious that every time they'd get bigger, they'd find a way to separate themselves. So it'd be like, you're not the real Plymouth Brethren. We're the real Plymouth Brethren because we believe – Something very slightly different.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
So this group sort of kept fracturing itself until you end up in the most hardcore sect, which is the part that Crowley's parents were a part of. Yeah, and you have this thing of like – No one else is right. So Crowley grew up thinking that the very small people that surrounded him were the only people going to heaven and everyone else was damned to hell.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
I mean, this is how eventually Crowley's father would sell their shares in a railroad company and invest it into canals. because railroads aren't in the Bible, but canals are. That's really funny. And so Crowley was kind of a genius. He learned how to read at four, but he was only allowed to read the Bible. That's all he read.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And so he grew up with the only sort of comparisons of what a relationship was as sort of God, the devil, the sort of – I wasn't raised religious, but I could only imagine if I was only allowed to read the Bible and only allowed to interact with other people in this very, very small sect.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah, and even their servants, the only servants they'd allow in their house had to be part of this cult. Oh, wow. And then also just the belief that everyone who's not going into this cult is being burned in hell forever. And I think if you have that imprinted on you,
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
from four years old it's it's hard you know uh they would start their day reading the bible he was he read it he basically memorized it um and obviously he will buck this quite hard yeah yes um one could say this was probably even the cause of that you could and yeah just other stuff no christmases no presents no birthdays like just doesn't sound fun for a kid to grow up and
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
No birthdays. Now, his dad probably never held the job. It's unclear. Some people think he did. Other people don't think he did. But definitely what he would do is he considered himself a sort of layman preacher. And he would accost people on the street. And he'd say, what are you doing after this? And they'd say, well, I'm going to go do my shopping or I'm going home. And then he'd go, and then?
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And then, and eventually the person would say, well, I guess I'll just die after that. And he goes, and have you thought about what happens after that? And he would launch into the Plymouth Brethren sort of diatribe about why they needed to convert. And so if you think about it, like he's a really funny character.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
He's a multimillionaire in Victorian England who would do walking tours across the country trying to get people to convert to the Plymouth Brethren. And Crowley would follow him on these walking tours. And he actually really looked up to his dad during this period and thought his dad was trying to save anyone he came into contact to.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And so he had this sort of admiration for his dad as a young boy.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
I'm not exactly sure I have his family tree downstairs, but it might have been his great-great-grandparents. It's old family money. It's old family money.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
I mean, because at this point, if you think about it, his dad never held a job. Crowley will never hold a job. So this money is going back...
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
generations at this point and we're in the 1800s so like they did good for themselves yes yes okay that is interesting and was his dad a good guy was he a bad guy by all accounts his his dad compared to his mom he loved his dad and he thought his dad was great he hated his mom uh he would later claim he hated his mother because she was too ugly to be attracted to but i think that's probably just for shock value one of the most complicated
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
That's Crowley. Oh. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And that'll come... Yeah. But... But from all I could tell is while his dad was alive, it was harmonious living, but within this sort of cult. And his father would get sick when he was 11, and he would get – cancer, unfortunately, tongue cancer. And they actually had a connection to the royal family surgeon.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And unfortunately, the Plinus brethren got together, they prayed over it, and they decided that he should do something called electrohomopathy, which is like, I looked into it, I tried to look into it, it's like, just... Gobbledy-gook. And it probably killed his dad. Not saying that he wouldn't have died anyway. Obviously, tongue cancer in the 1800s is probably fatal anyway.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
But I do think this pushing him away from that made Crowley start to hate the Plymouth Brethren because, in his opinion, they helped kill the only sort of good thing about it for him. Also, pause.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah, and I think that Crowley would hate the contradictions. Like, he would start to notice them. He said after his father died, he became a free thinker and was able to sort of view things and just say, this isn't making sense. The literal interpretation of all this stuff isn't making sense. And so... after his father died, uh, his life just got way worse.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Like he got, he started getting sent to these boarding schools that were run by Plymouth brethren and they were intense. Uh, He may have been sexually assaulted during that time. He was definitely beaten. In one of the boarding schools, the headmaster claimed to be so pious that he had never slept with his wife and encouraged the students to do the same.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
But this is when Crowley's dark side starts to come out a little bit, or a lot, considering. Yeah. According to him, this is when he started to have fantasies of torture and being sexually degraded by very powerful women. He also took things very literally to the point where some of his biographers think he might have been on the spectrum to some sort. And I'll give you an example.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
One time in boarding school, he got a cat and He got a cat, he suffocated it, he hung it, he stabbed it, he poisoned it, he smashed its skull, he lit it on fire, he drowned it, he shot it, and then he threw it out the window to see if cats really do have nine lives.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
But he had been told cats have nine lives, and this is his way of, like, testing that.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yes, and it's the same thing with the Bible, because what he'll start to do is, you know, the Bible became literal for him, and he, like— I don't want to get ahead of myself, but he started to try and pray to the devil the same way he had been praying to Jesus via the Plymouth Brethren because he just thought – Let's switch it up. Let's switch it up basically.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
He did so much to the cat. He did so much. And he was surprised to find that it didn't survive because he had been told it had had nine lives.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yes. And on his vacations from boarding school, as he sort of began to rebel again, his mother would refer to him as the beast. And again, taking everything literal, he took to the Bible and sort of the beast.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
I'm not super familiar with the Bible, but obviously 666, the great beast, the ushering of the new era, and the scarlet woman and the whore of Babylon that would be riding the great beast, ushering in this new era. And this idea, this relation to that will come into play a lot later into his life. But it's interesting that at the very beginning of
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
He takes the name of the beast just because his mother scolds him with it.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah. Yeah, and he hated his mother and he hated her whole family because they were all in the Plymouth Brethren to the point where his mother, his uncle, he had an uncle called Tom, who is his mother's brother. And later in life, he would publish Tom's obituary while Tom was still alive in the newspaper and send it to him. That's impressive. I mean, that is English humor. I'm English.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
I know you wouldn't imagine it from my voice, but Crowley is a really, really English character in a funny way.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
I mean, trust me, we have some better anecdotes coming up later.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
So he... He started to begin to have this obsession with trying to leave Christianity. He wanted to sin in a way that burned the bridge behind him. So there was no going back. Like I said, he began to pray to the devil, but it didn't have any results. And he was really disappointed by that.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And then he says in his journal after that, he found out what masturbation was and, quote, I applied myself to this practice with much vigor. So that took the price of playing to Satan was jerking off basically in the beginning.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah, we will definitely get into that. So his... career at boarding school came to an end because he was being punished by this headmaster maybe fairly maybe unfairly actually but definitely unfairly because what was happening is he was being locked basically in a shed in solitary confinement with very little clothing was getting very very sick and
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And when his mother and some relatives came to visit him, they knew that even for them, this was going too far. I mean, it's not like they didn't believe in physical punishment, but they actually went and got that school shut down and Crowley's education. Yeah. And Crowley's education started to, uh, basically come in the form of handpicked tutors, uh,
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And for the most part, they were Plymouth brothers approved. However, there was one tutor called Charles Douglas who slipped through the cracks and really changed Crowley's life forever. Charles Douglas believed it was really important for young men to be physically fit as well as mentally fit.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
So he would take a young Crowley on these long walking tours across England, visiting different villages and historic sites. And so he was getting his education and his exercise at the same time. But Charles Douglas was also a man who was not super religious and he smoked and he drank and he gambled.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And he did all these things, and he introduced Crowley, a 15-year-old Crowley, to all of those things. To the point where, on one of their walking trips, Crowley actually lost his virginity to one of the village girls.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah, it sounds like an awesome way to be educated, I agree.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Learning how to gamble, doing billiards. And you've got to think, like, this guy has been so constrained his whole life. And now he has a literal sense of freedom in his walking tours, but also this, like, revelation of freedom. I'm sinning, and I'm not being shot dead at the moment. This whole world just kind of opened up to him.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
The other thing that he did, which would be with Crowley for the rest of his life, is he introduced Crowley to poetry and classics. And Crowley... You could make an argument that Crowley would have rather been a great poet than a great occultist. He was always chasing poetry fame. He was obsessed with poetry. I'll detail it.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
He would come in contact with the great poets of his time, and his poetry would span sort of – the most insane topics, which I will mention in a bit, to very mundane topics.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
No. But he considered himself to be the greatest poet of all time. So that's important.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah, yeah. So... So here's Crowley returning home from his walking trip. Poor Charles Douglas was eventually fired for all his indiscretions. But Crowley now had a taste for sex, and he would steal money from his mother and go visit village prostitutes all the time. He also would seduce one of his in-house servants and sleep with her in his mother's bed as an extra fuck you to his mom.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And when the servant came forward because she felt guilty, he would deny it. And then that servant was fired for lying.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And then... If anyone else wants to jump down this rabbit hole because I didn't. But according to Crowley, that servant would go to London, live as a prostitute, be killed by Jack the Ripper. Huh? Yeah. And Crowley would claim that he knew who Jack the Ripper was and named him as Robert Dawnston. And I briefly looked into that. Thank you.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
I'm doing good. I'm very excited to be here.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
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Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
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Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
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Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
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Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
That's actually really surprising. I know, because later in life he'd become obsessed with anal sex with women. But Yeah, I think it's also fair to call him bisexual. I really do. I don't think, at the time, I don't, it's obviously, you could be arrested for that. Yeah, this was extremely illegal. Extremely illegal.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yes, and he would have some relationships with men later in life, but they were all magical-based. They weren't sort of companion-based. That was always for women. And wherever he was at, a lot of times he would go to the Middle East because sex between men at that time was actually okay, more okay over there. And so he would go and sort of imbibe himself in houses of pleasure and stuff. Yeah.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah, so today we're talking about Alistair Crowley, and it was actually your idea, and I think it's super fitting because we're going one up the chain to the guy who sort of more or less created everything that ensnared Jack Parsons.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
So we could dive deep into the psychology of the time. But it is interesting that this is how it starts. So that October, Crowley would fall seriously ill, like almost deathly ill. And he'd start to meditate on how he wanted to leave his mark in the world. And he thought diplomats... would be forgotten. He thought poets were only slightly less forgotten. And he just was sort of at an end.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And at the end of this sickness, he decided that only spiritual things were worthwhile, that he would make his name in the spiritual world because Again, I think Crowley could never escape his Christian upbringing and how much that weighed on him. So it does kind of make sense that he would try and basically create his own Bible later on. Interesting.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Now, these two incidences sort of reunited Crowley's attempts to physically get in contact with the devil. Now that he was older and he had access to funds, he was able to visit an occult bookstore and buy this book called The Book of Ceremonial Magic. Or the Book of Black Magic, depending on which biography you're reading.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And that's the one I actually sent to you, and it's got these beautiful illustrations in it, but it's a bit scary looking, and we both don't want it in our house.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
I don't want a tome. It's like I said, I'm agnostic. Could 100% fly open one night. Yeah, I don't need a flying book. Yeah. So the important thing besides the rituals in this book is that hinted at a secret church or a secret order being out there. And this really got Crowley's attention. So he actually wrote to the author and demanded to know what the secret order was. And the author wrote back.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
and told him to read this book called The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary. And this book didn't do much to clear things up, but it continued to hint at a secret order, and it was written by a different author. So Crowley thought he was sort of stumbling onto this secret society that would be his indoctrination. So returning to Cambridge...
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
This is interesting, but Crowley actually had a sort of boyfriend for the kind of only time in his life. And this person was an early archetype of a drag queen. Really? Yeah, and I have pictures and stuff I can show you afterwards of them in full drag performing. And they had a pretty normal relationship. Crowley quoting was, our relationship was that of a marriage.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
He made a man and a poet out of me and I lived as his wife. Huh. Yeah, again, like super not allowed at the time. Like you're going to jail for a long time if this ever comes out. Unfortunately, his partner was not into rock climbing and not into the occult.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And as these two things started to take more and more of Crowley's time, they eventually got in the way of their relationship and they would part ways.
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah, yeah. It's a lot of people in Portland go through the same thing. It's true. Tale as old as time. Totally. And then... Sort of a new person would enter Crowley's life who's called Oscar Wilde. I've heard the name. Yeah, right? And this would happen towards the end of his relationship with his live-in relationship. And they...
Otherworld
The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
hated each other but actually more truthfully i think crowley hated him and oscar wilde barely knew who crowley was crowley would claim that oscar wilde was not actually gay and was doing it to be famous which is just not true at all um that's really funny yeah really funny and um Also during this relationship, Crowley started to suspect that he might be hermaphroditic because he had big breasts.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And he thought that this led him to understood women better than anyone because he knew his feminine side and could manipulate them. And as one biographer put it –
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Okay. But one biographer said he wished he was a hermaphrodite but was unfortunately simply bisexual. Okay. Alright, so he moves on.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
That is Crowley. He's very quotable.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And then... So after this relationship, he meets... this guy called Oscar Ecclestein, who would become his best friend who's not involved in magic. Their relationship would be purely rock climbing. Oscar Ecclestein was famous in rock climbing circles at the time, had invented some new pieces of gear, and sort of took Crowley in as his student.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Oscar was much older than Crowley at the time, and they would form this relationship. Also, he began to publish his own poetry at his own expense. And he would do this for the rest of his life. And it would actually be where most of his fortune would go. Because when he published poetry, it would be like the finest leather, the finest pages.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
What the book looked like at the time was incredibly important. And he would claim, I don't think this is true, but he would claim that's why he was never a famous poet is because his books were too expensive. It couldn't reach the masses. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And I'm not exaggerating. He would spend millions of dollars of his fortune self-publishing by today's standards. It would probably be the number one expense that would drive him to be broke later in his life. And that's another thing sort of along with his sexual escapades is from this point out, he's always publishing books. And as he grows, it'll sometimes be poetry books.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
sometimes be a cult, sometimes be novels. Like this man's output is just ridiculous. So yeah, I'm not going to mention every book he publishes because that would be a fool's errand. But again, you should just be assumed in the background, he's having sex and writing. I love these two caveats.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Exactly. And for instance, at the end of his college career, he's already published five books. Five books in four years. One of these books is very notorious. It's called White Stains. And it was so controversial, it had to secretly be printed in Amsterdam because the publisher feared arrest should he typeset this in England at the time. And a lot of these...
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, actually, very, very soon we'll get, we're going to get into the Led Zeppelin part very early. And I actually have a special connection to all that.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Poems, I think, are done for shock value to try and get noticed. He has one poem that's about having sex with Jesus as he's being crucified on the cross. Okay. He has another poem titled Necrophilia that is, you know, it's got some crazy lines in it. I can just...
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
I mean, I can send it to you, but, you know, to quote a little bit, to gnaw thy hollow cheeks and pull thy lustful tongue from out its sheath, to wallow in the bowels of death and rip the belly fill, fill. My hands with all putridities to true thy dainty testicles, to revel with the worms in hell's delight in such obscenities. And that's just... two paragraphs from a much longer poem.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
So you get the gist. And in Victorian era, this would be considered like... just unknown. You know what I mean? This would put you in, this would put you in jail basically with this guy out there.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah. Like just doing, going out and just doing insane stuff for shock value. Um, cause that's what a lot of this sounds like in the early times is, is trying to get noticed via shock value.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Well, the thing is what he couldn't put his name on white stains because he'd be arrested. So he would, he would send them out under pseudonyms at the time. Uh, It's hard to figure out why exactly he was doing this other than I think if the book was well-received, he would come out and be like, it was me.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
But to give himself cover at the time in case no one cared, which no one did care at the moment and later in life.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yep, and books. And he reaches the end of his college career. He gets very good grades but refuses to sit the final examination because he considers it's a waste of time. So he just leaves without a degree after four years of studying.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Basically. I think there were some famous poets and famous thinkers from Cambridge that had done the same thing. So he was sort of trying to be like, I'm as good as that person.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah, I think Tennyson might have done it. I could be wrong about that. But some very famous English poets did that. So he was trying to put himself in the same category as these people.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Um... So after college, he's mountain climbing with Ecclestein in the Swiss Alps, and he gets sick, and he has to climb down. This is 1898, and he climbs down into the village of Zermatt, and he goes into a beer hall, and it's a big, crowded place, and he starts lecturing everyone on alchemy, even though he doesn't know anything about alchemy. He just kind of makes a fool of himself.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah, I guess as Aleister Crowley, you could say, was like the last mainstream magus. And sort of, if you look throughout history, the magician or... the sorcerer, Merlin, the round table, they've always been real, and figures that are actually real, such as John Dee, who was Elizabeth I's court, who did all sorts of magic. Caligistro was another one who ended up, unfortunately, in a jail cell.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
but and this is crazy one of the attendants in that beer hall was a man called julian l baker who was a real alchemist and practicing occultist magician and he sort of pulls crowley to the side and starts talking to him and crowley tells him i want to join the secret order like what is the secret order about and julian l baker confirms it's real and
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
but says he's not a master and he can't help Crowley, but when he returns to London, because this guy also lived in London, he would connect him to a master who could initiate him. So upon arriving back in London, he meets George Cecil Jones, who would be Crowley's magical mentor and friend for many, many, many years.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
they'd eventually actually co-found their own magic order together and then have a horrible falling out. But right now Jones is Crowley's like connection to the occult. This initial thing is sort of forged. Um, so Baker and Jones set out to, before they introduce him to the order and bring him in, they want to train him a bit. They want to, They want to like see if he's a worthy disciple.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
So they give him some magical practices, meditation and astral projection. And apparently both men were astounded at how fast Crowley could astral project and go and fall asleep. And they would move things in different rooms and Crowley would be able to tell them exactly where stuff was.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And they just hadn't, according to what I read, they hadn't seen anyone sort of take to this practice as fast as Crowley did. Um, so Crowley again asked Jones for admission. Um, I'm, I'm pretty sure it's the same order mentioned in the books, but I just, you know, who knows?
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
There was a bunch of secret orders at the time, but Crowley ends up becoming an initiate of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
But it was this role in society. And Crowley is not only the last one who took that mantle, but he pushed it very far. And he ended up probably going a bit too far, some would say. Yeah. He was famously known in his time as the wickedest man alive. You know, he went by a lot of great names. Some of them were self-prescribed, which was 666, the beast, Master Theron.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
You know, he was really looking for attention.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yes, yeah. And he thought a lot of himself. He thought of himself as a prophet, as someone who had been given a new religion, a new social order that would overthrow the current order and that he would be sort of among the gods in ushering in this new age, but I don't want to get ahead of myself.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry, Sergeant Pepper.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And that's kind of the funny thing about Crowley is he would have loved his influence. He would have – oh, God, if he had lived to see how big he became, he would have just – it would have been all his dreams come true in a weird way. Because by the time he died, he was not super well-known anymore. His books had never sold. He had thought of himself as a failure. Yeah.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And as time went on, his influence just sort of grew and grew and grew until you're in a world where Jay-Z is wearing a T-shirt that says, do what thou wilt, which is the sort of number one proponent of Crowley's religion. Yeah.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
I can name a couple, but Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin, he has all of Crowley's originals, his journals and stuff, and he even bought Crowley's mansion in Scotland for a while and lived in it. And it's funny, I was talking that I was going to be doing this with my grandpa, who's an old rocker. To say the least. Yeah, he's a pretty good rocker.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
But he was telling me, like, I was with Jimmy Page, and we were partying, and he was doing rituals, and I was right there.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah, so he had some sort of firsthand experience with Jimmy when Jimmy was going down that rabbit hole. He didn't partake in it, but he was like, it wasn't a passing fad. These guys were actually doing the rituals and really into it. So again, and then I have to say, the really annoying thing about researching Crowley is...
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
on both sides of the he's the wickedest man in the world or he's the greatest sorcerer ever, people have an agenda. Like back when he was alive, he was just like, Their version of tabloids at the time were just hammering him. And so you could write a book about him killing children or whatever shortly after his death, and that would be accepted.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And now in today's time, there are people who make a full-on living just writing and lecturing about Crowley. So they're sort of – want to show the best side of him at all times. So you kind of have to cut your own middle ground between worst person in the world and greatest sort of godly magician spreader of Thelema.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And I just want to say, like, by all means, To truly be an expert in Crowley would take years. To read all of his first... He kept three journals and wrote... His Confessions, which I've read some of, is like 1,500 pages alone. So there are people who are definitely more knowledgeable in the world who have dedicated their life, or at least a significant part of it, to Crowleyism.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
I think just before we jump in, I just want to quote someone who is much more into the occult than I am. And they had a really good... which is occultism is what is hidden from sight. And it's the belief that what is hidden is most of the world and most of reality. And the physical world that we're aware of is a very small part of a much larger reality.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And the methods and practices of occultism allow people to enter the larger reality or access the larger reality to be exploited in the physical realm. And a direct quote from Crowley is, magic is the art and science of causing change to occultism.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
change to occur in the conformity with will so i just want to lay out though because we're going to be talking about magic and occult a bunch and i think it's good just to that's the sort of stuff we're talking about it's Weirdly, it's close to manifestation. A lot of ritual magic is about concentrating your will and manifesting stuff.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
So it's not too far adjacent from beliefs that we hold today pretty openly at any Silver Lake coffee shop.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Yeah, really good point. Really good point.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
He would love it. I mean, there's that not to already start with the conspiracy theories, but it's like the CIA was studying astral projection at a time. He would have loved that. He would have loved that.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
Let's dive into this. Let's dive in.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
All right, so Crowley was born 50 years after the death of Napoleon in 1875. But he died somewhat in the modern era after World War II. And I think it's really interesting when you're talking about this time period because it's when the Victorian era sort of becomes the modern era. And the people who live in this world are living in a world where not all the maps are filled in.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
You know, like there's... there's this unknownness about the world at the time and it sort of fades away within their lifetime. So you, you find these really interesting people that are crawling out of Victorian era repression or religiousness into this sort of new world where anything can go. Um, so, Anyway, he was born on October 12th, 1875. He was originally born Edward Crowley.
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The Life of Aleister Crowley Pt 1: "The Great Beast"
And this is before the Nazis, so it didn't have that connotation. Okay. And he claimed that is the mark of the beast. He was also born with a veil of afterbirth on his face, which is indicative of great magical abilities, according to him. And then finally he had a membrane restricting his foreskin, and that is apparently the sign of the Buddha according to a book I read.