Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page outside Boleskine House in 1971. Boleskine is now a pleasant family home with no reported supernatural activity. Thanks, LePoint.fr.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Aleister Crowley and his ‘system of control’. In that post I mentioned how Crowley biographer Richard Spence avoids discussing parts of Crowley’s life that smell like psychological operations against the British public. (Spence is a favorite at Washington D.C.’s ‘International Spy Museum’, a propaganda-stuffed tourist trap.) I’m going to elaborate on my observation with a review of a 2000 BBC documentary titled The Other Loch Ness Monster.
I’ll remind readers that the BBC was birthed from the same mother as America’s CIA: the fortune and contacts of international businessman and Churchill crony William Stephenson. I’ve written about the BBC and Stephenson’s efforts to undermine democracy in The Empire is Listening. As you can imagine, I’ve little good to say about this Crowley documentary.
The Other Loch Ness Monster is a highly sensationalized look at Crowley’s time in Boleskine House, a family home he bought on the banks of Loch Ness. The legend is that Crowley bought the home in order to conduct an Abramelin magic ritual in private, however from day one everyone– locals included– knew Crowley intended to ‘summon demons’ at Boleskine. Richard Spence stands out as a biographer of Crowley because he never examines Boleskine in his intel-savvy book Secret Agent 666, Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult– in fact, Spence barely mentions Boleskine even though the home was a huge part of Crowley’s religious facade.
Why not examine the Boleskine mythos, Prof. Spence? You provide an array of interesting information on Crowley’s cult mentor at the time, arms-dealer and Abramelin magic scholar Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. Why not talk about what Crowley was doing when Mathers called him to Paris in 1899, just prior to Crowley selling Mathers out to the British Government? After all, Crowley’s doings at Boleskine are crowd-pleasers (and book-sellers); they offer supportive context for the spy work you say Crowley was doing in NYC during WWI; and they’re also what the music biz promoted so heavily during the Sexual Revolution.Why not talk about Boleskine, Professor?
I believe that The Other Loch Ness Monster answers my question to Richard Spence. The showmanship surrounding Boleskine house happened a couple of years after Crowley began studying the ‘systems of control’ devised by Adam Weishaupt and Edward Kelley. Boleskine, and its Kabbalistic demons, was an exercise in encouraging superstition. Systems of control like Crowley’s exploit superstition, as philosopher David Hume recognized in his essay Of Superstition and Enthusiasm. The BBC’s continued promotion of Crowley’s Boleskine stunt, and Spence’s reluctance to talk about the stunt, are evidence that the same control tactic which Hume recognized is employed today.
The famous 1766 portrait of Hume by Allan Ramsay. This was painted one year before Hume was made Undersecretary of State (British Empire), during which time he was given access to “all the secrets of the kingdom, and indeed, of Europe, Asia, Africa and America“. Hume was not just an ‘ivory tower’ philosopher.
Hume wrote his essay in 1742 as part of a larger work titled Essays Moral, Political and Literary. Here’s what he has to say about superstition and power-worship:
As superstition is a considerable ingredient in almost all religions, even the most fanatical; there being nothing but philosophy able entirely to conquer these unaccountable terrors; hence it proceeds, that in almost every sect of religion there are priests to be found: But the stronger mixture there is of superstition, the higher is the authority of the priesthood…
My third observation on this head is, that superstition is an enemy to civil liberty, and enthusiasm a friend to it. As superstition groans under the dominion of priests, and enthusiasm is destructive of all ecclesiastical power, this sufficiently accounts for the present observation.
(Readers should not assume that Hume is a friend to “enthusiasm” from these excerpts– he felt that the bad effects of “enthusiasm” were shorter-lived than those of “superstition”. I encourage everyone to read the full essay, it’s short.)
Recognizing superstition for what it is– softening the masses up for domination by authority figures– ties together some interesting threads in our current zeitgeist. ‘Encouraging superstition’ may provide a reason why American television is full of ‘ghost shows’ (some openly government-endorsed!); alien nonsense; and other mindless, sensational programming. The value of superstition for control may also explain Western leaders’ strange love affair with Islam.
Hume elaborates on his ideas about control by explaining how superstition can prey on personal vulnerabilities aggravated by stress:
As superstition is founded on fear, sorrow, and a depression of spirits, it represents the man to himself in such despicable colours, that he appears unworthy, in his own eyes, of approaching the divine presence, and naturally has recourse to any other person, whose sanctity of life, or, perhaps, impudence and cunning, have made him be supposed more favoured by the Divinity. To him the superstitious entrust their devotions: To his care they recommend their prayers, petitions, and sacrifices: And by his means, they hope to render their addresses acceptable to their incensed Deity. Hence the origin of PRIESTS, who may justly be regarded as invention of a timorous and abject superstition, which, ever diffident of itself, dares not offer up its own devotions, but ignorantly thinks to recommend itself to the Divinity, by the mediation of his supposed friends and servants.
Crowley wished to set up himself, or more accurately set up his masters, as such priests through Thelema. Sensational documentaries like The Other Loch Ness Monster also work to this end by encouraging superstition.
Crowley’s spectacle at Boleskine had at least two goals. Firstly, Crowley was infiltrating a prominent secret society/cult called ‘The Golden Dawn’, which was headed by MacGregor Mathers, who was Crowley’s mentor at the time. Mathers was translating The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage in 1899 (it was published in 1900), so Crowley’s attempt at conducting the Abramelin ritual was probably designed ingratiate himself with the Golden Dawn’s leader. Secondly, the rite gave Crowley an opportunity to establish himself as a ‘magickal’ authority in the eyes the British public. Crowley seems to have done everything possible to draw attention to his work while in Boleskine, including complaining to the police about the lack of local prostitutes (according to Kenneth Anger/Esquire’s Mick Brown).
The ‘Abramelin’ rite was supposed to conjure demons which Crowley would ‘convert to the light’ over the course of several months using the force of his personality. The ghost-story around Boleskine hinges on Crowley conjuring these demons but never fully converting them. One hundred years later the BBC is still promoting this ghost story and strains itself to weave Crowley’s antics into ‘Loch Ness Monster’ sightings.
The BBC strains itself. If you’ve got 29 minutes to waste, I encourage you to watch The Other Loch Ness Monster– it’s a textbook example of propaganda promoting superstition.
The writer/director duo responsible for this documentary, Charles Preece and Garry S. Grant, interviewed a number of Crowley’s ‘true believers’, including the U.K. head of the O.T.O. John Bonner and Crowley promoter Kenneth Anger, neither of whom provide intelligent criticism of Crowley’s stunt but instead feed the myths surrounding Boleskine. (The O.T.O., or ‘Ordo Templi Orientis’ was founded by German spy Theodor Reuss, who Crowley– depending how you look at it– either went into business with OR whose O.T.O. organization Crowley infiltrated.)
The thrust of The Other Loch Ness Monster is to portray Crowley as a misunderstood visionary who battled dark forces to bring humanity a “charter of universal freedom”. Sounds vaguely American, doesn’t it? Needless to say, there’s no examination of Crowley’s blatant hypocrisy nor mention made of the people he chewed up and spat out over the course of his career.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the documentary is how it treats Crowley’s relationship to MacGregor Mathers. Mathers was an arms dealer who supported revolutionary movements across Europe– revolutions which went counter to the British Empire’s interests. Many wealthy people in Mathers’ circle of occult contacts shared his revolutionary politics. According to Spence, the British government tasked Crowley with disrupting Mather’s revolutionary network inside the ‘Golden Dawn’ cult, which the Crowley did. Crowley was effective because he was able to win Mathers’ confidence, as Charles Peerce writes:
In his diary Crowley wrote: “As far as I was concerned, Mathers was my only link to the secret chiefs to whom I was pledged. I wrote to him, offering to place myself and my fortune unreservedly at his disposal. If that meant giving up the Abramelian operation for the present, alright.”
Half way through Crowley’s self-aggrandizing ritual at Boleskine, Mathers contacted Crowley asking The Beast to come to Paris to help him. (Paris would be the center of much of Crowley’s intelligence work.) For some reason, Mathers was in trouble– Crowley’s promoters rarely explain what type of trouble Mathers might have been in. Spence says that on July 15th 1899 a yacht carrying one of Mathers’ arms shipments destined for Spain was apprehended by the French with Aleister Crowley onboard. One month later, Crowley was still a free man: he bought Boleskine and moved in that November to begin the Abramelin ritual. Shortly thereafter Mathers called Crowley back to Paris; Crowley biographer Lawrence Sutin says Crowley left for France on January 15th 1900 to ‘help’ Mathers deal with infighting amongst Golden Dawn leadership. By the end of 1900, both Crowley and Mathers had been expelled from the order, i.e. Mathers lost his power-base.
I believe that Crowley knew leaving for Paris would help his primary mission to take down Mathers. Crowley decided to travel south even though leaving the Abramelin ritual half way meant letting his priest-mask slip.
This is how Kenneth Anger, who made a hostile takeover bid for Thelema in the 1960s and 70s, describes what went on between Crowley and Mathers in 1899:
His [Crowley’s] master at the time, in the Golden Dawn, was in hot water over something and pleaded with Crowley to help bail him out. So Crowley dropped the ceremony, which was– you’re not supposed to do this. Once you begin something you’re supposed to follow through.”
I’ll point out that if Crowley was honest in his religious quest, then by breaking the Abramelin ritual he put ‘converting the forces of darkness to good’ on hold so he could help a buddy in Paris. Does that sound like a reasonable decision?
Kenneth Anger continues:
Interrupting a magic ceremony is a great thing. He [Crowley] later realized that he should not have gone to Paris, that he should have let his so-called master, whose name is Mathers, fall in his own shit, because, uh, finally he [Crowley] realized that he [Mathers] was a false master.
Anger smooths over Crowley’s awkward 1911 smearing of his one-time friend Mathers as a ‘Jacobite conspirator against the British Empire’ by claiming Crowley realized that Mathers was a “false master”. It’s unclear to me whether Crowley spent significant time at Boleskine after his Abramelin stunt was interrupted; Crowley sold the home in 1913. (Kenneth Anger lived in Boleskine for a period during the 1950s, shortly after meeting Marjorie Cameron back in the USA.)
Crowley’s unfinished ritual left Boleskine open as a dangerous portal to the spirit world, the BBC claims. The documentary goes on to suggest that this spirit portal explains many modern Loch Ness Monster sightings and is why bad luck dogged subsequent owners of Boleskine, such as the Russian-born actor George Sanders, who lost a livestock business based on the Boleskine property; and yet another Army Major, Edward Grant, who committed suicide in the house in 1960.
(1960 was well into Anger’s campaign to promote Crowley and Marjorie Cameron to cultural revolutionaries. Readers interested in MK ULTRA will remember Army Dr. Frank Olson committed suicide under the influence of LSD surreptitiously administered by the CIA in 1953.)
In fact, there’s something a little off about the suicide of Major Grant. Charles Preece and Garry S. Grant interviewed Major Grant’s housekeeper, Anna MacLaren, who in the documentary rather dispassionately relates the story of finding the Major’s dog chewing on a fragment of the Major’s head. (He had shot himself.) Before she realised the bone was part of her employer’s skull, Ms MacLaren had found it strange that the dog had a treat at all, because the Major and his wife had a “huge refrigerator with nothing in it”. I wonder how much time Major Grant and his wife spent at Boleskine before he dramatically decided to shoot himself in Crowley’s old ritual-bedroom?
In the decade following Major Grant’s ‘picturesque’ suicide, Crowley’s legacy was given phenomenal media exposure. In 1967 The Beast was featured on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album cover and starting in 1968 Crowley was promoted by The Rolling Stones’ antics with Kenneth Anger. The Beatles and Stones were just a start– Aleister Crowley would make rounds through the Music Biz: Crowley was plugged by Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page (also with Anger’s help), David Bowie, Sting (who revealed his Thelemic faith in CIA-banked Penthouse magazine), Ozzy Osbourne and more recently Jay-Z.
I’m not the only one to have noticed the music industry’s love for intelligence agent Aleister Crowley. Charles Preece writes: “Crowley seemed to have a special appeal to musicians, who saw themselves as the social rebels of rock.” However, Preece’s 29 minute documentary only gives a superficial examination of Crowley’s promotion in the “counter-culture”, mostly through flattering snippets of (then young) musicians Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Jimmy Page.
Anger’s promotion of Crowley via London’s music industry deserves a closer look. In the late 1960s Kenneth Anger gained access to popular British entertainers through his art-dealer friend Robert Fraser. Fraser was an Eton boy and son of a knighted banker; prior to his art career he had been working in the USA. (Doing what?) Fraser’s connections put Anger in touch with two of the most successfully marketed bands of all time, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles.
In the case of the Rolling Stones, the ‘evil’ version of the Beatles, Anger’s appeal was fostered by “witch” girlfriends: Marianne Faithfull for Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg for Keith Richards. (I encourage readers to read up on Marjorie Cameron and her ‘witches’ in California.) These women weren’t ordinary groupies; they had staying power and influence with the ‘lead men’.
I could write a lot about Anger’s involvement with the Stones and his film about Crowley’s ‘rebirth’, Lucifer Rising. Right now, I’ll just give a taster: Anger and his agent Marianne Faithfull.
Marianne Faithfull is a gal with intelligence connections. Her dad was a spook for the British who collaborated with Marianne’s mother’s family, a mixed Jewish/Austrian family, who lived (freely) in Berlin during WWII and helped socialist partisans during the war. Marianne’s mother was a dancer during the Weimar period; TheGeneologist.co.uk describes her career with a reference to the movie ‘Cabaret’.
Faithfull seems to have been Anger’s access to Mick Jagger, much like Marjorie Cameron became the link between her husband Jack Parsons and Aleister Crowley. In 1967 it was Anger who gave Faithfull a freshly-translated copy of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which is supposed to have inspired the song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. (I can hear the intel gears cranking: “We’ve got Mirra working on a potentially subversive Russian novel about the Devil. How can we use this in our ongoing Cold War operations? Somebody call Anger.” :) )
The irony of all this is that The Master and Margarita is damning of irresponsible spooks like Anger, Faithfull and especially Crowley. I encourage anyone interested to check out my posts Is the Devil a German?, Blitz Witch and Henry Wondergood. I’m told by readers that these posts changed the way they view the modern ‘American Empire’ and the Russian Revolution.
The final section of The Other Loch Ness Monster features interviews with Jimmy Page’s “old school friend” Malcolm Dent who looked after Boleskine for the musician until Page sold the home in the early 1990s. Dent and his friend, photographer Dougie Corrance, provide more lurid stories about the lingering effects of Crowley’s ‘magick’ and the ghostly encounters they had around Page’s Scottish home.
The Other Loch Ness Monster does not discuss Faithfull’s background; Anger’s background; nor Jimmy Page’s eventual disillusionment with Crowley. The documentary doesn’t provide anything like a critical analysis of the music industry’s role promoting Aleister Crowley from the 1960s-present. Instead, The Other Loch Ness Monster ends by taking a side-swipe at the current owners of Boleskine, who don’t wish to talk to the media or cooperate with the BBC’s superstition crusade. Through clever editing, director Garry Grant suggests to the audience that the current owner’s unwillingness is due to a misguided belief that ignoring ‘the problem’ will make Crowley’s demons go away. Charles Preece and Garry Grant even go so far as film one man with a heavy brogue declaring that he would never buy Boleskine, should it come on the market again… which ought to help keep future Scottish psy-ops within budget. ;)
