Wednesday 8 June 2016

Aleister Crowley Lecture




Anyone with an interest in the mystery of Loch Ness will have no doubt heard of Aleister Crowley. There will be a talk next week in Edinburgh on this infamous person (yes, he is even more infamous than Frank Searle). The talk will be at 7:30pm next Tuesday (14th June) at the Beehive Inn, Grassmarket. Further details can be found here.

Doubtless, some of his time spent near Nessie will be covered, though his complete separation from the inscrutable Highlanders more or less guaranteed he would be none the wiser about the Loch Ness Monster until he read it in the London newspapers years later.

Readers may recall that his house at Loch Ness, Boleskine House, suffered serious damage in a fire back in December 2015. Six months on, the fate of the house is unclear since it will require a substantial amount of money to restore it. Will someone step forward to foot the bill (insurance company or Crowley fan) or will most of the house be demolished? The images below were taken more recently and you can see more at this link.





By coincidence, I watched an old film recently, "The Devil Rides Out", which starred Christopher Lee in his favourite role as the Duc de Richleau. Apparently, the author of the book, Dennis Wheatley, based the evil character, Mocata, on Crowley. You learn something every day.

The author can be contacted at lochnesskelpie@gmail.com





5 comments:

  1. I always think it's a shame most people only see Crowley as a mentalist occult fanatic.

    Perhaps he was, but there was also much more to his story than that. For a start he was a very accomplished mountaineer. He lead one of the first British expeditions to climb K2 and got higher on the mountain that anyone had managed before - well over 20,000 feet before having to abort.

    As for the house; the owners were no doubt insure so I think there will be some sort of rebuild. Given the lengths they went to to screen the place from public view and access, I think they may take the opportunity to build a completely new building on the site. That would be a shame.

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  2. Apparently, souvenir hunters are taking away bricks...

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  3. Oh, I shall add a comment here after the talk if there was anything said of a Loch Ness nature.

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  4. The talk was interesting enough. Crowley came across as a hedonistic libertarian who combined this philosophy with a form of spiritualism and egyptology.

    As for Loch Ness, Boleskine House was obviously mentioned as being built on the site of a former church which reputedly was burnt to the ground with its congregation inside. A myth or one of the atrocities of the post-Culloden era?

    The notion that Crowley's "Magick" had something to do with Nessie's appearance is a non-starter in my opinion as stories of monsters went back well before Crowley arrived at the loch.

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    1. Not true the only sighting was before Crowley was the Saint Columba report which happened in The River Ness not Loch Ness itself the first report of a monster in Loch Ness was in 1933
      This Video explains well please check it out !
      https://youtu.be/P3MzM1gFDZs

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