PK in The National: Restoring Aleister Crowley's Boleskine House reminds us of "magick" power

And does any sufficiently advanced magic begin to look like technology?

This is a fully-research-linked, mildly updated version of my paywalled column for The National, published Saturday, July 27th, 2024

A DECREPIT historic house, on the banks of a Scottish loch, receives £250,000 from the Lottery fund for its restoration. An item, it would seem, for the slowest of news days.

The grantees say their designs “reimagine the historical elements of the B-listed building, with a nod to important eras of the house’s past, while reducing its carbon footprint”. All the boxes ticked.

Except … Boleskine House, perched just above Loch Ness, is far more than an opportunity to vend weak tea and buttered fruit scones.

This is the former home (from 1899 to 1913) of the monstrous vendor of “magick”, Aleister Crowley. It was subsequently bought by the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, a devotee of Crowley’s (1970-1992).

The head of the Boleskine House Foundation, Keith Readdy, published an academic book in 2018 on Crowley’s “spiritual legacy”. In a 2019 interview with Two Horizons, a site promoting Crowley’s Thelemic religion, Readdy regularly asserts the “secular” intent of the restoration.

But his foundation also “intends to co-operate with the O.T.O. [the mystic religious order Crowley headed] and be sympathetic to their aims”.

The biographers say Crowley bought Boleskine because it was situated perfectly to complete one of his major magic rituals, the Operation of Abramelin the Mage – but that he didn’t complete it, leaving unfinished business with the spirit world.

So, what is there to worry about? We might imagine strains of the Led Zep III album wafting through the tannoy. There could be chaps in capes, speaking a Matt Berry accent, swooshing around the gardens trying to “elucio-date the aetherrrr”. Scotland’s a big place, culturally and spiritually. We can cope (and see this old BBC Scotland documentary coping luridly).

But can we really cope with Aleister Crowley? Self-styled as the “wickedest man in the world”, pursuer of multi-sexual orgies and drug-laden, demon-summoning rituals, absolute scandaliser of the Victorians and Edwardians?

To be honest, it’s all ribbons to me. But some fine minds I respect make a case for attending to Crowley, and his impact on popular culture, as a prophet of our times (though not in their best aspects).

The Californian writer Erik Davis comments that “Crowley’s later experiments in communal living, bisexuality and drug gobbling mark him as a prototype of the post-war world’s wayward counterculture and its emphasis on hedonic personal alchemy.

“In Crowley’s The Book Of The Law, we read that ‘Every man and woman is a star’. That remains a startlingly poetic prophecy of the obsessive transmutations to come.”

The English philosopher Jules Evans notes that Crowley’s libertarian ethos – “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ – is a perfect fit for rock superstars. In addition to Jimmy Page, Evans charts the explicit embrace of Crowley by Bowie and The Beatles (his bald head makes it to the cover – top left – of Sgt. Pepper’s), Kanye West and Jay Z, Metallica and Iron Maiden, and many others.

But Evans also mounts a cultural critique. “Crowley’s ‘do what thou wilt’ has become one of the ruling philosophies of our time”, he writes. “Our culture is now one of occult consumerism, in which adverts use symbols and incantations to urge us to ‘Just Do It’ – to follow every impulse, to feed every alter-ego, to yield to every temptation, and above all, to spend.

“‘Do what thou wilt’ doesn’t end in happiness or power”, concludes Evans. “It ends in emptiness, addiction, madness and self-destruction.”

Between Davis and Evans, you get a perspective on a “Crowley centre” which would take it way beyond some kind of New-Age, pagan-friendly cake shoppe.

This could instead be a permanent reminder of the perils of hyper-individualism and escapist hedonism. A caution that sovereign, superior, desirous selves are an inadequate basis for any sustainable society.

There’s another aspect of Crowley’s legacy that the scholars are also asking us to attend to. Which is what he meant by (and spelled uniquely) as “magick”. This is a psychological method and technique for focusing your action, and a semiotic means of changing your world.

The Scots comic book writer Grant Morrison was insistent, over a decade ago, that we lived in a world of brands and products that operated like magic sigils – icons designed to summon up a reality.

“The logo or brand, like any sigil, is a condensation, a compressed, symbolic summing up of the world of desire which the corporation intends to represent”, wrote Morrison in his 2011 essay Pop Magic.

“The logo is the only visible sign of the corporate intelligence seething behind it…Corporate sigils are super-breeders. They attack unbranded imaginative space. They invade Red Square, they infest the cranky streets of Tibet, they etch themselves into hairstyles. They breed across clothing, turning people into advertising hoardings.”

Back to the musicians for a moment. As the ex-Blondie bassist, now esoteric scholar, Gary Lachman wrote in his Crowley biography: “Magic and the music industry make use of much of the same materials – imagery, special effects (light shows), illusion, trance.

“Both reach down below the conscious mind to the deeper, older, more visceral levels of ourselves.”

Evans notes that when Crowley conducted bongo-led (and drugged up) ritual dances in busy London streets, he probably invented the hallucinogenic rave.

So if you see the brand (or even the Russell Brand) as a sigil, do you find a way to resist its allure? Or do you make your own, and enjoin in the battle for minds? I swither – which maybe itself affords some defence.

ON one side, in our current world of short, intense narratives (or “memes”), some of them can really “infest” you, in Morrison’s language. For example, I just caught the US presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s first proper campaign video.

It blew through me like fire. Images of the joyous faces of Harris among diverse Americans (and fuzzy video of the Perpetrator-in-Chief), with Beyoncé growling and howling away about “freedom”.

So powerful, it’s as if it’s summoning up a new reality for the viewer. There’s Crowley’s magick toolbox laid out on the floor, being fully used.

On the other side, there’s only one understanding of magic I can really live with. That belongs to the science-fiction giant Arthur C Clarke: “Every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

His sentence pertains to this day. We have portals in our pockets, deep fakes and VR worlds in our visual fields, techno-telepathy and artificial super-intelligence and bio-customised medicine round the corner. Hard to deny the magic effects there.

But I’ve taken to flipping the phrase round in recent years. What if any sufficiently advanced magic (using some of the preceding definitions of magic) is indistinguishable from technology?

By which I mean that the deep yearnings for transcendence that we find in our popular culture – the declarations of love and lust, the explorations of other worlds – are shaping, even driving the design of our technologies.

How rich and generative, as opposed to brittle and extractive, are our imaginations? It’s a very important question. Because these imaginations are connected to powerful and ubiquitous technologies that could make a heaven or a hell of this earth.

“Sufficiently advanced magic” – cultivating our intent and narratives to the highest level we can – may be one of the things that saves the human species from collective self-termination.

Put that on a plaque at Boleskine House! But let there be more kinds of magician, and magic, involved there than that of the old mountebank – swirling cloak, Egyptian head dress, bewildering relationships and all. And that’s only the guitarist.

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