70. Aleister Crowley

Born at 30 Clarendon Square, Leamington Spa, on October 12, 1875, to a Plymouth Brethren preacher and a mother who would call him the Beast from the Book of Revelation, Edward Alexander Crowley grew up to make the name his own. This week we follow him from the prayer meetings of Warwickshire to a boarding house in Hastings: the sadistic Brethren school in Cambridge, the Golden Dawn and his brawl with W.B. Yeats on the stairs at Blythe Road, the house on Loch Ness where he tried to summon the kings of hell and never closed the door, the Cairo flat where a voice over his left shoulder dictated The Book of the Law over three lunch hours in April 1904, the Kangchenjunga expedition that left four men under an avalanche while he drank tea, the demon Choronzon in the Algerian desert, the Rites of Eleusis, the Paris Working, five strange years in wartime America, and the Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, where an Oxford graduate named Raoul Loveday died and Mussolini threw Crowley out of the country. We lay out what Thelema actually teaches, from True Will and the three Aeons to the A∴A∴ grades, sex magick, Liber OZ, and the women he called Scarlet and used up one after another. Then three hauntings that follow him: Boleskine House and Jimmy Page's caretaker's worst night, the House of Ghosts at Cefalù that Kenneth Anger scraped the whitewash off in 1955, and Lam, the big-eyed grey thing Crowley drew in 1918, which runs straight into Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard, and an explosion in Pasadena. We close with four days in the West Midlands: Leamington and Warwick Castle's Ghost Tower, Stratford and a night at the hotel where The Haunting was filmed, Coventry and Coombe Abbey, and Birmingham for the Black Sabbath Bench, Aston Hall, a balti, Dudley Castle's Grey Lady, and a four-pound pie in the Black Country. Support the show at patreon.com/highwaytohell for ad-free episodes and bonus content. SOURCES Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (ed. Symonds and Grant, 1969); The Book of the Law (1904); The Equinox of the Gods (1936); Magick in Theory and Practice (1929); The Vision and the Voice (1911); Liber OZ (1941) Betty May, Tiger Woman (1929) Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (2010) Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (2000) Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley: The Biography (2011); Aleister Crowley in Paris (2022) John Symonds, The Great Beast (1951) Richard B. Spence, Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult (2008) Gary Lachman, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World (2014) George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (2005) Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival (1972); "Statement on LAM," Starfire vol. 1 no. 3 (1989) Picture Post, "Kenneth Anger at the Abbey of Thelema," November 26, 1955 Contemporary press via aleistercrowleytimeline.com: The Pioneer (Sept. 29, 1905); Daily Mail (Sept. 11, 1905); Alpine Journal (Feb. 1906); Morning Leader and Daily Chronicle (Oct. 1910); Sunday Express (Nov. 26, 1922); John Bull (Mar. 24, 1923); Daily Express (Apr. 14, 1934); Yorkshire Post and Birmingham Gazette (Dec. 2, 1947); Crowley's 1918 Amalantrah diaries The Scotsman, "House of the Unholy"; The Wild Hunt, "Renovation Plans Underway for Boleskine House" (2019); Boleskine House Foundation Jimmy Page interview, Rolling Stone (1975) Pasadena Police Department and Los Angeles press, June 1952 (Parsons) Travel: Leamington Observer; Visit Warwickshire supernatural trail; Higgypop and Spooky Isles haunted-location guides; Express & Star; Coventry Telegraph; Birmingham Westside BID and Central BID (Black Sabbath trail, 2025–26); Songkick and Stereoboard venue listings