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Aleister Crowley - The Wickedest Man In The World? · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:02
  Unknown: Alex, hello everybody.
• 0:07
  Unknown: Welcome to another episode of dirt nap city, the podcast about interesting dead people. My name is Alex.
• 0:16
  Unknown: I'm here with my friend Kelly.
• 0:16
  Unknown: How you doing today? Kelly, I'm doing great, and I'm wondering if that intro, if you're reading, or if that's memorized.
• 0:26
  Unknown: I'm reading everything. I can't do anything from memory. Okay, okay. I like your consistency with the introduction. I think if we ever do this show live, and we will do the show live, I think that liquid death is going to sponsor a live tour of dirt nap city coming to your city around the world. We'll be drinking the delicious Canned Water of liquid death. And I think that we will memorize everything for that show so that we get it exactly right. Oh, no, like a TED talk.
• 0:58
  Unknown: Yeah, yeah. It'll we'll have slides completely scripted.
• 1:02
  Unknown: We'll do some interactive polling with the audience. I mean, it's gonna be a really great live show. So a lot of people don't realize how scripted this is, but we're reading our script. It's ironic that a show about dead people would be live right now, I get the liquid Duff connection. I didn't get that before, but now I get it. Oh, oh, you just thought I randomly picked it, yeah, oh, yeah. I was wondering why you didn't go with, you know, Aquafina or Fiji. But now I get it. All right. Are you on board? I mean, you know, I I've followed the money, man, okay, all right. Well, you heard it first here, liquid death if you, if you want to get in, Alex follows the money. He also follows the path of interesting dead people, and he's going to tell us about one now. So I got a good one today. You say you think you know who it is without any clues. Can you tell me who you think it is you want to take a guess without any clues. I think you're doing Ozzy Osbourne.
• 2:07
  Unknown: I'm not doing Ozzy Osborne, but you are damn close. Hulk Hogan, no, they both died, if you're listening in the future, Ozzy Osbourne and Hulk Hogan died a little while ago. It's probably a lot a little longer ago, when you're by the time you're listening to this. I tend to have a policy that I let, I let these guys, you know, let the rigor mortis set in. I let him.
• 2:38
  Unknown: I think the the most recent dead person we did was probably Jerry Springer, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah.
• 2:45
  Unknown: That was George Foreman. Maybe, yeah, yeah. George Foreman, actually, I think was like, I think he died the same year that we did the program. So, yeah, you know, like the body to be told, yeah, I tend to let you know, let all the the ceremony go and let everyone talk about them, and then when people stop talking about them, that's when I think we 5200 years. 5200 years.
• 3:11
  Unknown: But you are very close today.
• 3:11
  Unknown: And I won't lie, Ozzy's death got me thinking a lot about this person. Here's the clue I'll give you. This person described himself as the wickedest man in the world.
• 3:32
  Unknown: Oh Prince of Darkness, born in 1875 in Warwickshire, England, and died in 1947 in Sussex, England, the wickedest man in the world, pull pole pot.
• 3:49
  Unknown: No, that's he wasn't English.
• 3:55
  Unknown: English. Wickedest man and died, lived and died in England, described in the basically 1875 through 1947 was he a musician? He was not a musician. He was an occultist.
• 4:14
  Unknown: He was a ceremonial magician.
• 4:14
  Unknown: We'll get into what that means, poet, a novelist, a mountaineer and a painter, and he founded a religion called Thelema. Fella, I've never heard of that. I am talking today about Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley, Mr.
• 4:38
  Unknown: Crowley. That is a tie in. That is a tie in, wow, I've been thinking about this guy a lot lately, and didn't really know much about him, other than the kind of stuff that we used to talk about in middle school, on on the in the playgrounds of middle school in the 80s, to talk about how all these rock musicians that we listen to.
• 5:00
  Unknown: Two that are now classic rock musicians were all into the devil, and we heard from our brother's friends that, you know, somebody wore, you know, had an upside down cross, or that they, you know, bit the head off a bat, bit off a bat, or that they lived in some haunted castle, or that they used all these pentagrams, and it never really seemed real, because we'd listen to the music and never would say too much about the devil or anything, unless you played it backwards, right, right, right.
• 5:32
  Unknown: With the rumor was always that if you played it backwards, it would tell you, you know, to but our moms all we all were sure, even though they were the ones that didn't listen to the music, they were all sure that this stuff was devil inspired, right?
• 5:46
  Unknown: And don't trace all that stuff.
• 5:52
  Unknown: They could trace all this stuff back to this guy who wasn't even alive back then, named Aleister Crowley. Okay, so I want to talk about him today. I want to talk about what, who he was, what he did. I want to talk about how he, even though he died in 1947 how he influenced all of our rock gods of the 60s and 70s and early 80s, yeah, and just kind of the legacy that he leaves today, because he actually didn't have, for someone that had kind of a cult. He didn't really have that many followers.
• 6:30
  Unknown: He was, he was famous, but more infamous than famous. People tended to know who he was when he was alive.
• 6:38
  Unknown: But he was definitely like a troublemaker, for sure. Okay, this guy was born Edward Alexander Crowley, not Alistair.
• 6:50
  Unknown: His parents were Die Hard, religious evangelists.
• 6:53
  Unknown: His dad was a preacher. His dad died when Alistair was 11, and that made Alistair rebel. From that point on, he became, went from like this literal choir boy to the Antichrist in like five years. We kind of talked about that in the Brothers Grimm about how father figure passing away has a big impact on a lot of these people. Absolutely. A lot of times it turns people poor, but I think in this case, he actually the father. They had money, so that wasn't anything to worry about. But his mom couldn't really handle him. He was 11 years old. She would scold him, and she called him a beast.
• 7:43
  Unknown: I mean, he called her a beast.
• 7:43
  Unknown: He said, You're a beast for scolding me, and she retaliated by calling him the beast, whoa, and that's how she referred to her son. From then on, was the beast? Well, he really leaned into that, and he was very dramatic kind of kid, like he was maybe what we'd call today, like a goth kid, kind of Yeah, but he was really dramatic and into theatrics and all that kind of stuff. He went to Trinity College in Cambridge. He was a very smart kid. He studied literature and philosophy. But really, when he was in college, he was mostly into hookers and reading about the occult and climbing really dangerous mountains. Like, he was really into mountain climbing, really, and that's not something that usually goes along with the occult mountain climbing, yeah, for some reason he was a big mountain climber. He was just into that. So he was, he must have been physically fit, yeah, at that age, yeah, yeah, okay.
• 8:38
  Unknown: But really into, like, reading about the occult, and, like I said, really into, like, Ian Ashbury, yeah, no, not the cult the occult. But he was really into hookers too, like I said, and he was really into you could call him bisexual, or you could call him Amber sexual. He was he write poetry about, I'm trying to keep it relatively clean here, but he would write poems about animals and men and women and lots of different hedonistic acts. But mostly he just liked to push buttons.
• 9:21
  Unknown: Yeah, just like to push buttons.
• 9:21
  Unknown: Let me kind of set the scene here. This is Victorian England walking around with a candy, candy cigarette in his mouth, as we've talked about before.
• 9:30
  Unknown: Victorian England was very, very restrictive and prudish. In fact, they used to cover up table legs. They would cover table legs because they were too suggestive. That's how, that's how kind of sexually repressed Victorian times were. Wow, right? And he was into like, you know, I think to in today's world, we see so many rock stars that are kind of like.
• 10:00
  Unknown: Is like from Marilyn Manson to David Bowie, but just like pushing the buttons of conventionality, right, of of saying, I don't want to be like, you know, society tells me to be so he would, you know, publish bad poetry and, you know, have wild parties, but just to kind of push the buttons of society. So he grew up with some money, you said, a little bit of money. Yeah, I don't, I wouldn't call him rich or anything, maybe. But I just wonder if, yeah, he never, did he ever have, like, a normal job, you know, like a got to support yourself kind of job, or was he just sort of, don't think, I thought your daughter, I think life, I think, yeah, I think he was, it was like that.
• 10:39
  Unknown: Well, he was, it was a writer, you know, he would write, write things, sure, get things published back when you could do that. At this point, he changed his name to Alistair. At this point, remember, his name was Edward Alexander, and I have a quote from him that I would like to read in the style of maybe a a flamboyant fussy British guy from the 1800s to see how I do, I hope you practice. This is what he says.
• 11:10
  Unknown: For many years, I had loathe being called Alec, partly because of the unpleasant sound and sight of the word, partly because it was the name by which my mother called me, Edward did not seem to suit me, and the diminutive TED or Ned were even less appropriate.
• 11:27
  Unknown: Alexander was too long and Sandy suggested toe hair and freckles.
• 11:32
  Unknown: I had read in some book or other that the most favorable name for becoming famous was one consisting of a Dactyl followed by a spondy, as at the end of a hexameter like Jeremy Taylor, Aleister Crowley fulfilled these conditions, and Alistair is the Gaelic form of Alexander to adopt it would satisfy my romantic ideals. Wow. Very well done. Do you know what a Dactyl and a spondy are? Well, Jeremy Taylor, right. So, yeah, anything that like Jeremy like duck, duck and a spawn D and then spondy was too long syllable. So like Jeremy Taylor, Benjamin Franklin.
• 12:19
  Unknown: Aleister Crowley, like anything that's like, it has a rhythm follow that has rhythm that like, short, short, long, long, long, right? If you're talking like Morris code. So he picked his name because of the sound of it. Aleister Crowley, yes.
• 12:35
  Unknown: Jeremy Taylor, it definitely Benjamin Franklin. It definitely sounds like somebody shaking your hand. Aleister Crowley, nice to meet you, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was also, like, a little odd that he would time his meals. He'd time his bodily function, time his dreams, to test his own willpower and magical discipline. And he was really into this thing called that. He called Magic, and it's magic with the CK at the M, A, G, I, C, K. I'll explain more about that a little bit. Yeah, I've seen that. And he kind of invented that term. Okay, so he was in in 1898 he joined the secret society called the hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. That was a secret society of British I know it's so pretentious, a secret society of British intellectuals who were into magic symbols and robes, like they were really into like, you could picture this, right? A bunch of guys getting together.
• 13:36
  Unknown: I'm thinking oats. I'm thinking of the righteous, the righteous gemstones, their their robes, yeah, exactly, exactly. But the poet WB Yates was actually in this club like they were actual intellectuals, not I mean, this was an actual serious thing, and he advanced through the order pretty quickly, you know, but he creeped people out. He was super intense, and his erotic ritual experimentation, I guess you could call it, and he was into a lot of drugs too. Drugs back then in the late 1800s were not that illegal, and a lot of people did cocaine and heroin, and and you they get strung out, but they were, there wasn't like, there wasn't like, a illegality to it, right? They were more of a functional junkies.
• 14:31
  Unknown: I don't know how functional they were, but a lot of famous people did really hardcore drugs back then, so, but hold on, I was kind of strung out. I think I'm reminded of Rasputin in a lot of this. So Rasputin was before this. Though, right, when did Rasputin live? It was 1700s Putin was check or was it the same timeframe? No, there were.
• 15:00
  Unknown: Around the same time. So Rasputin was lived from 1869 to 1916 so, oh yeah, a little bit. They could have hung out.
• 15:11
  Unknown: They could have, I mean, it was Russian, though they probably, yeah, but, but still. I mean, it sounds like, it sounds like they were kindred spirits. Any any reports on how Mr. Crowley smelled No but I do have verification that of all the people that we've done on dirt and upset he he did meet one person. Do you want to guess who it was we've talked about? Yeah, I'm gonna say he met Henry Ford.
• 15:40
  Unknown: No no. Houdini, Ah, okay, that makes sense. They were, you know, I'll tell you a little bit about that here. In a magic they decided how to spell magic, yeah, exactly. He called that entertainment magic, or, like, performative magic, but it was a lot different than the kind of magic that he was doing, which was not for um, for enter show, yeah, not for Yeah. I want you to explain that when you can, yeah, yeah. Um, so he got kicked out of the hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn after a power struggle.
• 16:20
  Unknown: Plus he was trying to summon demons in his apartment, like he was just getting too weird for these people, all right? And then he wrote an a collection, an erotic collection of bad poetry. And he called his collection. He called this book of poetry, white stains.
• 16:41
  Unknown: You know, of course, was it was banned in the UK. In Victorian England, there broke lots of taboos. He talked about lots of kinds of sex, even bestiality.
• 16:53
  Unknown: I was today. I was like, How bad could it have been? Let me read some of the stuff, and I blushed pretty bad. So I'm not gonna read any of that stuff here from the book of white stains. Yeah, I read a little bit and decided not to, not to subject you to that. But like I said, I mean, this was Victorian England. He was trying to stir things up.
• 17:15
  Unknown: Newspapers called him a satanic pervert, and he leaned into that and loved the attention. Yeah, he said the key to joy is disobedience. So he was a rebel rouser, and he just hated, like, the way society was so repressive, and he was just trying to to lean into all that.
• 17:35
  Unknown: So now he's reading all this mystical stuff. He's experimenting with rituals.
• 17:43
  Unknown: He called it. He called the these erotic rituals. He called it sex magic with a ck, which is like the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
• 17:50
  Unknown: Yeah, exactly. But he thought he was destined for something big.
• 17:54
  Unknown: Sex magic, exactly. So he traveled all over. He traveled to Europe, I mean, to Egypt and India and China. He went, he got married, and he and his wife Rose, moved to Cairo, and one day in his apartment or his hotel room, and in Cairo, he claims to have been contacted by an, I guess, I'll call it an entity named Iwas, who dictated to him the what do you call it the book of law, okay, and the book of he wrote it all down. And the book of law starts off do what thou will.
• 18:32
  Unknown: That should be. The whole law, do what thou will love is the law love under will. So that doesn't mean do whatever you want, but rather do what you're meant to do. And it's whole thing, his whole, like philosophy, strip away all that, all the, you know, crazy stuff that we're talking about, his whole thing was, there's this thing called Your will. And everybody has a true will, and that will is what you were meant to do in life, and do whatever it takes to do that thing.
• 19:12
  Unknown: And that's and every everything will turn out okay, as long as you always are going towards that, that will, don't let the man stop you. So by today's standards, that's actually very modern, very accepted. That's actually what a lot of people will tell you to do. What color is your motivational speakers?
• 19:35
  Unknown: What? What color is your parachute, exactly. So he was really in. So when I say will, when I talk about the will, just keep in mind that when we're talking about Will, it's what you were meant to do, and everything else is just kind of window dressing to get attention for his you know, main thesis was, do what do what you were meant to do. Do what thou will.
• 20:00
  Unknown: Yeah, okay, but this wasn't even something he wrote. He claims it was divinely inspired, and he was just right, and the medium so right, and he was the prophet, right, yeah.
• 20:12
  Unknown: So magic, this, M, A, G, i, c, um, okay, is not. Is different than stage magic like Houdini, right?
• 20:23
  Unknown: And he and Houdini actually hit it off. They met in 1914 in London. They hit it off. Houdini said that Crowley was curious but intelligent, but he didn't believe it. Remember, Houdini was famously, like, not interested or didn't believe in the occult or any of that stuff.
• 20:41
  Unknown: Remember he and his wife? Yeah, they were trying, trying to, trying to get their contact their dead relatives or something, or each other. Magic to him, to Crowley, was the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will. So whenever you change something and changes, any change in the universe, and remember, Will is like your destiny, what you're meant to do, yeah? So like, if it's your will to be a painter, for example, then every brush stroke you take is magic, right?
• 21:18
  Unknown: Anything you're doing towards that goal is magic, M, A, G, I, C, K, so you relying your actions, so the universe bends to them. In our world, that's goal setting, right? That's just yeah, do goal setting. But in this world, somehow it meant chanting in robes with naked people and goats and lots of drugs. Like it's so crazy that this is so much a part of our world now, but it was so radical back then that it was seen as like satanic reverse now, because he was trying to get people's attention, and because everyone saw him as so bizarre and creepy, and he leaned into that so he could get attention. So, yeah, he he definitely leaned in. He called himself the wickedest man in the world. Just because the press and people were calling, were calling him.
• 22:05
  Unknown: You know, this bizarre thing, I think today's celebrities, a lot of them are just like this, right? They do something to get attention, to get their word about something else out. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't well, he saw it as no, no, press is bad press, right?
• 22:24
  Unknown: And so by, by agreeing with two things, by agreeing with these people when they said bad things about him, you know that he's wicked and he's evil, he's he's getting more press. But then also, when you agree with somebody who's trying to put you down, and you just say, Yes, that's right. You kind of take away their power, right? All of a sudden they're trying to make a point that you're awful. And, you know, you do these things.
• 22:49
  Unknown: And if you just say, Yeah, I do, then they're like, what do they say? You know, they have no rebuttal to that, right? Right?
• 22:58
  Unknown: Exactly. So he founded this religion based on this ideal is called Thelema. Thelema, okay, and Thelema emphasize radical freedom. Keep in mind that Victorian England wasn't radically free at all personal responsibility, which is a key here, because this wasn't about chaos or selfishness and breaking from traditional moral codes, which there was a lot of them back in. This is, you know, back in Dickens times, right?
• 23:30
  Unknown: He you have to live authentically and ethically on your own terms. Again, in 2025 America, this is custody, yeah, a lot of people are into right authenticity, finding your true will. I think if he was alive today, he would be on tick tock, telling people to find their true passion and their calling and follow it without being shackled, and he wouldn't have had to go to all this other stuff. Now he was a strange guy, and he was into all this stuff, but the message that he was trying to get out is very modern by 21st Century Western standards, I think, yeah, look at, look at Alice Cooper, or Trent Reznor, you know, or some of these guys, right, that embrace the, you know, the makeup and the sort of satanic side, but are really just telling you to be free, absolutely, absolutely. He declared himself the prophet of this religion because it was dictated to him by us. Yeah, he started calling him. The newspapers were like, This guy's crazy. He's, you know, they were afraid. You know, he was. He was being free in a society that wouldn't let you be that way.
• 24:41
  Unknown: So he would try to provoke people. So he would call himself the great beast, 666, okay, now, now, now, remember his mother called him the beast, yeah, and so he got that from her, and he knew that back then, anybody that was like, not conf.
• 25:00
  Unknown: If non conformist was considered satanic. So he didn't even have to say anything about Satan. He they were already calling him satanic. So he was leaning into that, calling himself the great beast. 666, he would also use symbols that Victorian people, that they would think look satanic, like pentagrams and like the like I said, the robes.
• 25:23
  Unknown: He wasn't a Satanist at all. He said, I can't say I was ever really fond of Satan, but he did it to shock and rebel against society. Yeah, and Victorian climate was so restrictive that, you know, anything like I said, anything outside of the norm was considered satanic. He loved the drama and the ceremony of it all. Wow.
• 25:47
  Unknown: Now I forgot to mention he was also a spy.
• 25:52
  Unknown: Okay, during World War One, he was recruited by British intelligence to work as a spy in the US and Canada to gather information on while he was sympathizers, or, yeah, yeah, like he was they. He was in the US and Canada. While he was there, he was like, trying to figure out, like, people that were on the German side, Americans and Canadians. He was so convincing that the US intelligence, um, took him in for questioning and accused him of being a German spy because he was hanging around the German sympathizers, yeah, but he like that. That was just a little footnote, like another thing that he did, but kind of interesting. He never met Mata Hari, though, that, you know, no, not. But he This shows how much, how kind of charismatic he was, right? If he was charismatic and influential enough that that's why the British intelligence, probably, you know, pursued him to do this. So he in in the 1920s now, we're in the 1920s he goes to Italy, and he buys this house in Sicily, and he calls it the abbey of Thelema, and that's where all the followers lived. In fact, this was a commune. Communes weren't really a thing back in the 1920s so he's kind of the first one to do communes. Now, these, they became really big again, very ahead of his time, very ahead of the whole, you know, free love movement.
• 27:28
  Unknown: But a lot of his followers live there, and they would have have lots of drugs. And like when I said, when I say drugs, I mean, this was kind of before psychedelics, but this was heroin and cocaine, mostly lots of sex rituals. Now the neighbors were the ones reporting all this stuff. We never had any inside information from people that were inside the house, so a lot of this information came from the neighbors, right? And they probably wanted to vilify him, and so they might be rumors, yeah, um, eventually Mussolini.
• 28:05
  Unknown: Mussolini kicked him out of Italy.
• 28:11
  Unknown: It's funny, as bad as he was, as wicked as he was, he was never really arrested for anything, never spent any time in jail, none of the stuff he was doing, even the drug, the drugs weren't illegal. The parties that he had were annoying to people, but they weren't really illegal. The most illegal things he was doing was publishing that like pornographic po poetry, right, right, but all they would do is ban his stuff. They weren't throwing him in jail. So he was like the baddest man around, but he was not spending time in jail, like our friend Rasputin, who was constantly getting thrown in right in jail for different things, right? Wow.
• 28:44
  Unknown: But like I said, this was a prototype of the the communes that you'd have in the 1960s so by the early by the 1930s and 40s, he started getting older, getting into bad health. He was taking lots of heroin for his pain, and he died penniless in 1947 at the age of 72 Wow. His last words were, I'm perplexed.
• 29:13
  Unknown: Pretty good last words. Those are good, pretty good last words. That's just a great phrase underused, right? I feel like I need to work that into my conversation. I'm perplexed.
• 29:22
  Unknown: Well, I would be careful to say it you might, might be your last words. Well, maybe just the word perplexed, underused word. So I went back and I looked at some of the last words of some people that we've talked about on dirt nap city before, and I thought I'd share most of them. Most of them, most people don't have last words that are recorded. And some of these, you know, are, you know, a lot of historians say I'm not sure if those were his last words. Yeah, reported.
• 29:50
  Unknown: How do you verify? I'll read you some of these. Yeah, don't blame nobody but yourself.
• 29:58
  Unknown: Those were the last words of.
• 30:00
  Unknown: Of Al Capone. Well, I don't blame nobody but yourself. I think he was talking to his doctor. That sounds that sounds on brand, yeah, dying man can do nothing easy.
• 30:14
  Unknown: Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin, okay, money can't buy life. Great.
• 30:18
  Unknown: Last Words. Bob Marley, money can't buy life. I'm tired of fighting. Who do you think said I'm tired of fighting that?
• 30:29
  Unknown: Foreman, no, that's a good one. Harry Houdini, oh, yeah, yeah. Who literally, you know, punch, yeah. Punched in his stomach.
• 30:42
  Unknown: I don't believe these were last words. They seemed a little too scripted, but it is reported that Henry Ford's last cue the eye roll on Henry Ford.
• 30:49
  Unknown: It was reported that his last words were, it is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system. For if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. Wow, I call BS on that.
• 31:01
  Unknown: That is not his. That sounds like Tracy Chapman. You know, poor people like take what's theirs. I like these last words.
• 31:09
  Unknown: These are my, maybe my favorite.
• 31:13
  Unknown: I have not told half of what I saw.
• 31:16
  Unknown: Oh, hold on, hold on. Was that Howard Hughes No? Marco Polo.
• 31:23
  Unknown: Marco Polo, yes, yes. Actually, story each other, yeah, yeah, okay. I, I do remember that now, but I Yeah.
• 31:35
  Unknown: This one you might think is John Lennon, but obviously John Lennon probably didn't have any profound last word since he was assassinated, it is not the love you make, it's the love you give. Nikola Tesla said that is not the love you make, it's the love you give, yeah, and this one by Teddy Roosevelt, I'm just going outside, and maybe sometime.
• 32:00
  Unknown: Wow, and never came back. Never came back. Oh, Teddy, wow. So those were the last words of our residents here.
• 32:10
  Unknown: Mr. Crowley didn't actually have that many followers. They'd say it was sometimes a dozen at a time, maybe a huge, few 100 Max total. So for someone with that few followers, he really had a big influence. His book started finding their way into bookshops, occult bookshops, which occult bookshops usually were like, right next to head shops you know, or you know, drug stores, or stores that, you know, sold like paraphernalia, hash pipes and things like that, bongs. In the 50s and 60s, they would kind of be connected.
• 32:47
  Unknown: People would get high and then read these, you know, occult books and Aleister Crowley stuff would find his way into the bookstores. His theatrics made him really famous, especially in England, and he kind of anticipated those 20th century counter culture swings that were about to happen, things like breaking taboos and personal freedom and psychedelic drugs that were about to come on the scene, the sexual revolution. He was ahead of his time on that new age thinking with crystals and all that kind of stuff. I'm he was doing that stuff, you know, 50 to 100 years before other people consulted that.
• 33:26
  Unknown: Yeah, when you think about it, 50 years, 100 years later, people like David Bowie and Marilyn Manson were doing the same thing that he was just pushing the envelope, getting reputations, but then leaning into it instead of shrinking.
• 33:42
  Unknown: Well, the 1960s came and these people who were teenagers going to these cult store occult stores, are now in their 20s and making music. The first time you ever really see him pop onto the scene was, I don't know if you knew this, but his face is on the cover. He's one of the faces on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts, club, band album. I didn't know that that was him, but, I mean, there's a lot of people on that cover, lot of people. Yeah, there's probably 50 people on that cover. And there are people that are influential people, right? John Lennon was really into the do what thou wilt.
• 34:20
  Unknown: Message, yeah, he might. He might have misinterpreted it to mean, do whatever you want, and a lot of people did.
• 34:29
  Unknown: But you know, that's how he ended up on the cover of Sergeant peppers. WOW.
• 34:34
  Unknown: Jimmy Page, the guitarist for Led Zeppelin, was a huge Aleister, Crowley fanatic. He collected his memorability. I mean, Jimmy Page got to be a millionaire very quickly in life, bought Aleister Crowley's house on Loch Ness in Scotland. Oh, wow.
• 34:55
  Unknown: People said that house was haunted, and he really leaned into all that mysticism.
• 35:00
  Unknown: Cult stuff. Um, you know, if I know you're not a big Led Zeppelin guy, but you can picture what their albums look like, yeah, Led Zeppelin four.
• 35:07
  Unknown: Yeah, very so, so that was a lot of the thelemic imagery from from that religion, but Jimmy Page was the only one in the band that was into that stuff. A robber plant thought it was annoying and nuisance.
• 35:24
  Unknown: Rubber plant was more into like, Nordic gods, yeah, Lord of the Rings, exactly, yeah. And the other two guys were bored of all of it, but they didn't really have a say. So, so all that, the anytime you see, like, all those symbols and all that, that was all Jimmy Page is doing. He was really into that stuff, okay? Timothy Leary, yeah, the, you know, kind of the 60 guy who introduced LSD, he was into the same stuff, but he used LSD instead of sex magic, okay, but it was into the same free love and do what thou will and all that kind of stuff.
• 36:00
  Unknown: And then the hippies that you've talked about in the past, they were all about the ideas of free love and psychedelics and communes. But it's really interesting to me that we go from the wickedest man in the world influencing free love, yeah, like, those things don't really seem like they go together, but you can draw a direct line from Aleister Crowley in the 1920s and teens to the counter culture of the 60s. I think that's really pretty interesting. And he influenced so much of the music. I mean, the Rolling Stones came out with their said, their satanic Majesty's request in 1967 which was kind of a goof on Sergeant Pepper's.
• 36:49
  Unknown: But people, you know, parents, were really like he. They use the word satanic. They must be, you know, worship the devil.
• 36:56
  Unknown: They came up their song Sympathy for the Devil, yeah, which, if you read it or listen to it. It has, it's nothing to do with Mick Jagger worshiping the devil like it's a kind of a cool story, right? Yeah, yeah. Jim Morrison was really into the occult and all this stuff. And, of course, drugs. David Bowie said that Aleister Crowley kind of influenced his Ziggy Stardust character.
• 37:20
  Unknown: And then Black Sabbath were, were into a lot of this stuff too, but none of these bands actually came out and said, We worship the devil. It was a lot of the symbolism and and kind of dipping into, uh, Aleister Crowley stuff and their the the kind of, you know, diagrams that kids would write on their folders and write scroll right that they were into. It was really pretty superficial. But, man, those parents that our parents and parents of kids our age were acting just like the people in Victorian England did when Aleister Crowley was around like he was pushing buttons. The bands of the 60s and 70s were pushing buttons, and everybody was acting the same way. It was just happening again, like 50 years later.
• 38:14
  Unknown: Um Ozzy Osbourne came up with a song in 1980 called Mr. Crowley.
• 38:19
  Unknown: He it's not anything about worshiping Mr. Crowley. In fact, in the song is mostly about trying to figure out, were you a prophet? Were you a fraud? Were you crazy?
• 38:28
  Unknown: It has that real. You could picture the song, yeah, that goth beginning, that organ music, Ozzy wasn't really into him at all. He says, I read a book about him. He was just a strange guy that gave me the idea for a song. I didn't study him much. I just liked the way his story sounded for a heavy metal song, kind of like this box getting an end of that right? Like, yeah, exactly.
• 38:50
  Unknown: That's kind of the beginning and end of Ozzy's involvement. He wasn't like some sort of a Aleister Crowley freak. You wrote one song about the guy he wasn't. He wasn't like Jimmy Page buying his house and not at all, not at all. I just think it's funny that in the 80s, history kind of repeated itself, when a lot of these bands capitalized on the spectacle of all this stuff, like you said, leaning into moms, thinking that this stuff was satanic. Remember the parents resource music group with our music Commissioner, yeah, she tried to ban a lot of the heavy metal music that was that was influenced with the stuff. It's almost like Aleister Crowley had a second act. It almost in, which is what we like to talk about in this show, people that after they die, people are still talking about them. They're still influencing.
• 39:42
  Unknown: I don't think he could have ever imagined what heavy metal music would sound like or be like, or I'm not sure if he would have been friends with Jimmy Page or anything. I mean, they didn't have a ton in common, but I think it's interesting that it was affecting music that was listened to way after he.
• 40:00
  Unknown: He died. Yeah, and that so many people he became, he became sort of the poster child through the symbolism and just the rituals and all the things that he said and promoted, it might surprise a lot of people that there weren't really any bands outside of maybe, like, you know, the kind of bands that we wouldn't have never even heard of, death metal bands that really actually worship the devil.
• 40:30
  Unknown: It was all this loose association with Aleister Crowley's weird writings.
• 40:37
  Unknown: And that was all because these people were like, I want to just kind of be different. I want to drop out. I want to do what I want to do. Also, back to the no press is bad press, right? As soon as you got parents talking about you in a bad way, that's free press, right? That's, that's like, Absolutely, they're, they're saying all these awful things. What makes the kids want the albums even more, right? And rock and roll is all about rebellion, as we've talked about before. So what's more rebellious than Aleister Crowley? Right?
• 41:07
  Unknown: Not much.
• 41:09
  Unknown: I think it's interesting though, that even though he was the source of all this, that it didn't trickle down like Jimmy Page was into that stuff, but never really explained any of it. He would just kind of put it out there. And maybe that's how it works. Maybe that's the mysticism, right? Yeah, you put out all these symbols on your record and don't talk about it, and then people can assume what they want exactly. He had actually had a press conference and said, Here's what my record means, here's what these symbols mean. That would have been boring, right? Let people, let people pick and choose and decide for themselves what it means. Yeah, it's kind of like the naked man at the pentagram on the rush albums. You know, I've heard some conversations about that, but it's not what people think.
• 41:55
  Unknown: Sure, sure, sure. Sometimes they put a lot of thought into it, as I'm sure rush did, because they put a lot of thought in everything. Sometimes they put almost no thought into it, like Ozzy did. Mr. Crowley is known mostly for its incredible guitar solo by Randy Rhoads than it is any kind of text in the actual song. Yeah, yeah.
• 42:18
  Unknown: So as we go here, I just want to ask you a question. I want to ask, Who do you think is the wickedest person in dirt nap city? I'll give you four candidates here that I was thinking about. Okay, so you know he, he had said that he was the wickedest man in the world.
• 42:38
  Unknown: But we've got four candidates here that I think are pretty wicked, okay, we've got Rasputin, yeah, I think, without a doubt, yeah, pretty wicked, yeah. We've got Aleister Crowley, okay, who maybe was all show.
• 42:54
  Unknown: We've got Mata Hari Okay, who I think, you know, I think we've determined, after a while that was kind of set up, yeah, yeah.
• 43:03
  Unknown: And also in over her head.
• 43:06
  Unknown: But then we've got Typhoid Mary, who maybe was accidentally the wickedest, yeah, but we we're not judging here, but I'm saying, Who do you think, if we were to judge, who do you think is the wickedest? I can't think of of all of those people. I think Russ Putin is the one I would least like to be around.
• 43:27
  Unknown: You'd be the most creeped out by, yes, yes. So I'm gonna go with he's actually wicked, yeah, the other ones, yeah, yeah. And he smells like a goat, yeah.
• 43:35
  Unknown: Well, congratulations, recipe and you did it again. You out.
• 43:39
  Unknown: You out wicked, the most wicked person in the world.
• 43:45
  Unknown: Those guys can have each other.
• 43:45
  Unknown: As far as I'm concerned, they can get food served to them by Typhoid Mary. That's right, our dirt commissary and go see a show with Mata Hari, yeah, you're doing her day. We don't judge. No judgment here. Dirt nap City is a judgment free zone like Planet Fitness.
• 44:08
  Unknown: All right, Kelly, well, that's all I got for Mr. Crowley. Love it. You enjoyed it. I didn't know anything about him. I just knew the name. So that was pretty awesome. Thank you.
• 44:20
  Unknown: Oh, Mr. Crowley, what went on in your head? Oh.
• 44:30
  Unknown: Mr. Crowley, you waiting on.
• 46:18
  Unknown: I want to guide My white horse.
• 46:18
  Unknown: Man.
• 46:28
  Unknown: I Hear approaching Your Time And