Sex, Drugs, and the Abbey: Inside Aleister Crowley’s Occult Utopia

What really went on at Thoth tarot creator Aleister Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema? His vision for an occult utopia on the coast of Sicily was the site of sex magic, drug-taking, a rivalry among scarlet women, and the marriage of a young poet and his tigress. The goings-on would eventually inspire a London newspaper to deem him the ‘wickedest man in the world.’ Michelle Tea gives us a glimpse into the story of The Abbey of Thelema in all its twisted glory in today’s special themed episode.

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Michelle Tea: Hello and Welcome to Your Magic. I’m Michelle Tea, and today on the podcast I’m going to switch up the format with a dive into a subject with frankly unfathomable depths: Thelema. As an esoteric philosophy, a magickal practice, a cultural and historical phenomenon, anyone could investigate Thelema forever, and still have more to ponder. So, what I’ve done is chisel a tiny sliver off the history of the tradition and its founder, Aleister Crowley. 

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Whenever I’m explaining to a person who exactly Aleister Crowley was – pretty hard to sum up, as you may know; the guy lived a lot of lives – I always mentioned that he was dubbed, in his homeland the UK, ‘The wickedest man in the world.’ I love this insult-slash-compliment, because it’s hyperbole only glittered the globe-trotting occultist’s bad-boy reputation. I mean, really? The wickedest man in all of 1923? Barely settled into a peace from World War I, the sparks that would lead to the conflagration of World War II were already beginning in Nazi Germany, alongside the sensational, gruesome and still unsolved Hinterkaifeck murders in the Bavarian countryside. (Google it, true crime people). The Armenian Genocide was coming to a grisly end, though the brutality would live on in a global co-signing of Turkey’s denial of the events. In the United States, down in Florida, a twentieth-century Karen falsely accused a Black man of rape, sending a mob of rednecks into the African-American community of Rosewood on a killing spree. The early twenties, as most eras, had no shortage of bonafide atrocities perpetuated by deeply wicked individuals. Was Crowley really on par with these monsters? I decided to investigate the catalyst for the famed put-down - why did the press insist he was the most wicked man alive? – and I fell into a delightful – and often disturbing – rabbit hole of bohemia  I’m eager to share with you, dear listeners. It involves a gorgeous beach town on the coast of Sicily; an occult-curious schoolteacher named Leah Hirsig, who became Crowley's filthy-rotten-dirty lover and magical partner;  a sidebar tangent to peek at the drug-addled Marriage-addict known as Tiger Woman, the filthiest poem ever written, and more. Join me as I travel back in time and over to Europe, to suss out what The Great Beast 666 (that’s Crowley) was up to at his short-lived occult Utopia, The Abbey of Thelema. There are a lot of colorful characters, and I want to share every one of them with you, so I’ll try to go slow and not overwhelm. But, before I begin, trigger warning – these spiritual seekers were engaged in some pretty alarming activities.

Now, to get us started, ya’ll know who Aleister Crowley was, right? A Libra, born in the UK in 1875, he went on to start the spiritual movement Thelema, which is still very much practiced – indeed, enjoying a type of digital renaissance – today. His Thoth Tarot deck is a contemporary best-seller, and has been enormously influential since its publication in 1944. Having once written, ‘1000 years from now the world will be sitting in the sunset of Crowlianity,’ the likely narcissist was not incorrect about the lasting power of his influence.

By the time the ’20s rolled around, Crowley had already joined the clandestine metaphysical temple The Golden Dawn, had had a bazillion affairs with mostly women but also some dudes; had prolifically penned many poems and plays, novels and memoirs and important spiritual writings, been initiated into Freemasonry, climbed some mountains, traveled the literal globe, studied Buddhism, taken up yoga, got into Islamic mysticism, founded a publishing company, did SO MANY DRUGS, blew through his inheritance, founded a couple of occult religions, did a blood sacrifice in the African desert, went heavy into sex magic, produced an ongoing musical performance for a troupe of female violinists, wrote for Vanity Fair, hung out with some evangelical Christian relatives in Florida (which has, apparently, always been a magnet for Evangelic Christian relatives), translated the Tao Te Ching (dow de jing) , took up painting, and much, much more. However you may feel about Crowley – and he was, for sure, majorly problematic – just a glance at his life’s story will push you to live your life a little more grandly.

January 1920 found Crowley more than a bit battered from living so hard and fast. He was shunned in London for having been collaborating with Germany during World War One, though there is some evidence that his anti-British writings had been a cover for spy work on behalf of his homeland. A doctor had prescribed him heroin to aid to manage his asthma attacks, and he was swiftly addicted. He took off to Paris with his lady of the moment, Leah Hirsig. Leah had been a high school teacher in the Bronx with a spooky side; she’d sought out Crowley while he’d been briefly living in Greenwich Village, painting and publishing on the Freemason’s dime. As what happens when one spends too much time with Crowley, they began fucking, with Leah taking on the role of Crowley’s Scarlett Woman – sort of like a girlfriend, but with massive sex magic obligations (And we are gonna do a podcast just about the Scarlet Women because they are fascinating people). By the start of spring Leah had given birth to Crowley’s baby, Anna Leah, and the lovers had formed a thruple with the baby’s nanny, Ninette Shumway, a woman they’d met on their Atlantic passage from New York to London. Ninette was a recent widow whose husband had died in a car crash, leaving her the single mother of a little boy the same age as Leah’s little boy. Yes, Leah already had a son, and Crowley already had a family but these people liked to live large. Not too long after Leah popped out baby Anna, Ninette shared that she, too, was pregnant with the Beast’s offspring. Leah was about as cool with this as Ninette was about sharing Crowley’s affections with another – this was not a groovy poly scene, circa 1920. It was more like a megalomaniacal narcissist doing whatever the hell he wanted under the banner of freedom and enlightenment, while the women held in his charismatic sway went along with it resentfully. Classic bad times.

With humans multiplying around him, Crowley began dreaming dreams about a pastoral paradise where he could raise his sudden, growing family. It was time to go back to the land. He envisioned a commune of people practicing Thelema together. The main principle of the practice is the idea that each of us possesses a ‘true will’ - a real reason for being here, that is deep and cosmic, and not at all what we might think it is. In Thelema, one grows ever closer to this knowledge by way of intricate rituals that involve costumes, and sex, and drugs, as well as studying esoteric texts, in particular those penned by Crowley himself. 

Crowley tossed the I Ching to decide where in the world this mystical valhalla should be. The coins said Cefalu, a historically Greek town in Palermo that had only been a part of Italy for fifty or so years. By the middle of April, the whole lot of them were shacked up at Villa Santa Barbara, a large, stone home set in the midst of Mediterranean wildlands. Crowley christened it The Abbey of Thelema.  

Things at the Abbey started sucking right away. Leah retained her status as Crowley’s Scarlett Woman; the sway she had on Crowley was apparently considerable. He wrote a truly wild poem in her honor, ‘Leah Sublime.’ It is hard to know what part to excerpt, as the entire piece is just so psychedelically, sexually depraved. Here, I’ll try:

Splash the manure

And piss from the sewer.

Down to me quick

With your tooth on my lip

And your hand on my prick

With feverish grip

My life as it drinks –

How your breath stinks!

On it goes, involving more golden showers, gonorrhea, menstruation, flagellation, scat play, cocaine, vomit, all in a rhyme-y, Dr. Seuss in Hell type of cadence, ending with, ‘Leah, I love you / I’m going insane / Do it again!’

Now, Crowley and Leah were freaks in the sheets to a very extreme degree. Leah took her role as Scarlet Woman super seriously; she was willing to fornicate with a goat for magic, and helped Crowley in this ritual called Ips-iss-imus, according to him ‘the highest level of attainment . . . the master of all modes of existence.’ It sounds like reaching a state where really nothing matters but in a super esoteric way. Clearly, Crowley was living – and encouraging others to live – as though no earthly thing did matter, a life that seemed to produce moments of beauty as well as these experiences of seeming horror; like the Aghori of India, who deeply, physically embrace the most repulsive aspects of earthly life, believing that nothing is outside the perfection of Shiva, Crowley and Leah drugged and sexed and magiced themselves into a frankly terrifying-seeming space beyond good and evil.

Leah was committed to being Crowley’s partner in slime; she had, after all, written in her diary, shortly after commencing their relationship, ‘I dedicate myself wholly to The Great Work. I will work for wickedness, I will kill my heart, I will be shameless before all men, I will freely prostitute my body to all creatures.’  As gnarley as it all was, she seemed to have a lot of agency and was living her best horrible life. Or was she? 

By the fall, little Anna, Leah’s baby with Crowley, had died, and LEAH, pregnant again, suffered a miscarriage. Sick with so much death, the addled couple turned an evil eye towards Ninette, by now eight months pregnant. The vibes never chilled out between the romantic rivals, and Crowley and Leah came to the conclusion that their third had cast a spell upon the offspring, murdering them with magic. Crowley called Ninette out, officially banning her from the Abbey with an exorcism, the text of which went ‘ . . . we cannot risk further damage; if the hate is still in course, it had better coil back on its source.’ (This dude loved to rhyme.) Ninette spent the last weeks of her pregnancy living with a peasant somewhere in town. Crowley did allow her to return after the birth of the baby, Astarte Lulu Panthea. After her wild entry onto this plain, Astarte was eventually shipped to the states to be raised by an aunt under the name Louise Shumway. She died in Oakland in 2014, a Presbyterian great-grandmother who’d earned her living as a school teacher. So, happy ending there, at least, it seems.

Back at the Abbey. Crowley’s utopic vision struggled toward actualization. There were many visitors, and much yoga, magical orgies, and devotions to the sun god Heru-Ra-Ha, a mash-up of two Egyptian solar gods unique to Thelema. Many rituals were enacted. But Crowley’s ill health and heroin addiction, the women’s paranoid rivalry and the host of dead babies really cast a pall across the sunny island commune. It seemed the bad vibes were growing, congealing. And as it was fated, one of Crowley’s most promising visitors would in fact be the cause of the Abbey’s complete disintegration.

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The guest went by the name Raoul Loveday, a twenty-three years old poet who, despite his participation in the intense bohemia of 1920s London, had also managed to get an undergraduate history degree at Oxford. Loveday was obsessed with Crowley, and the feeling was mutual; it was said that Crowley was looking upon the young Brit as his possible magical heir. It seemed crucial that LOveaday make the trip to CHE-faH-lu, in spite of his health being not too hot - A surgery the year prior had left his immune system shot. his friend Nina Hamnett, the so-called ‘Queen of Bohemia,’ a bisexual painter who was an expert on sea shanties and was legend for dancing naked on a café table in Montparnasse had written that, prior to the trip, he looked like hell. In her memoir, Laughing Torso, she’d commented that he appeared ‘half dead,’ and documented her efforts to try to dissuade him from visiting the Abbey: ‘I had heard that the climate at Cefalu was terrible; heat, mosquitoes, and very bad food. The magical training I already knew was very arduous. I urged them not to go ... but they were determined.’

The ‘they’ Hamnett referred to was Loveday, and his wife Betty May - and here is where I will sidetrack from our Crowleian investigaiton to give thisn wild woman a bit of her due. Betty May was a bohemian so outlandish she made Nina Hamnett’s tabletop shimmy look like The Good Ship Lollipop. Betty May – soon to be known as Tiger Woman, also the name of her eventual memoir – spent her early years in utter poverty, sleeping on rags while her single mom hustled, then was sent to live with the father she’d never met, a violent guy who spent most of his time hanging out at his girlfriend’s brothel. Once he got arrested, Betty was sent to live with first one aunt, and then another. She spent her teen years living on a farm in Somerset, and hit the boho London scene around 1910. Having spent a bit of her childhood singing and dancing for pennies thrown by passing sailors, Betty May knew how to entertain, and quickly set herself with an act at various pubs, also modeling on the side. She got the nickname Tiger Woman from a criminal lover who himself went by the name White Panther. All these people sound like drug store perfume, don’t you think? Smitten, Betty took off to meet with him in Paris, where he ran with a violent street gang, and was instantly attacked by the guy’s girlfriend, Hortense. When White Panther broke up the scuffle, Betty May was in such a frenzy that she chomped down on his wrist, and her lover spat, “Tigre!” There are other explanations for her nickname, such as a penchant for wearing tiger stripes, or a number where she drank from a saucer while crawling around like a cat, but I prefer this one, don’t you?

Betty May spent her days getting soused, feeding a growing cocaine habit and canoodling with a series of men, most of whom died, some under suspicious circumstances. Out canoeing with a beau named Richard, the couple had met with some sort of accident, after which Richard became sick and died. While engaged to a lawyer she cavorted with a besotted farmer who accidentally shot himself in the head while they walked together in the forest. This ruined her engagement, but Betty May was swiftly betrothed once more, now to an aspiring doctor who went by ‘Bunny’ and brought them tons of cocaine from the hospital. They were in the midst of a divorce when Bunny died in combat during world war one. Betty May, however, was already somehow married once more by the time Bunny passed, now to some asshole Australian British Army Major named George Dibbs King Waldron. George Dibbs would beat Betty May whenever she used drugs, and after a three-day bender abused her with “the severest beating I have ever had.” Betty May credits this as the beginning of the end of her cocaine addiction. I’d like to think it dawned on her that maybe her drug use was leaving her vulnerable to the controlling rage of a loser jarhead. Betty May kicked coke by turning her attentions first to morphine, and then to her original drug of choice, alcohol.

Betty May’s next engagement was to the painter Jacob Kramer, though Kramer’s mom put the kibosh on him marrying a shiksa, so it never happened. Enter Frederick Charles Loveday – you can call him Raoul – Betty May’s next husband, and heir apparent to the Thelemic throne.

Now Crowley was not psyched about Lovejoy putting a ring on it. He found Betty May to be beneath him, dissing the Harlequin club, where the pair met, as “a sordid and filthy drinking den . . . frequented by self-styled artists and their female parasites.” Visiting the pair in London, he took in one of Tiger Woman’s performances, and later slammed Betty for being “three parts drunk, on the knees of a dirty-faced loafer, pawed at by a swarm of lewd hogs, breathless with lust. She gave herself to their gross and bestial fingerings and was singing in an exquisite voice.” This from the guy who mates his main squeeze with goats and writes epic poetry about drinking her diseased pee. Well, he liked her singing anyway. And he admired how she’d kicked her cocaine addiction, but he was at best patronizing to her, calling her “a charming child, tender and simple of soul,” attributing her simple-mindedness to the cocaine having done irreparable damage to her mind. Never mind that Loveday was living off Betty May; the debt-ridden scholar had access to no money save the daily pound she made artist-modeling. Crowley hoped to whisk them both from the squalid, back room they were renting, and put Loveday to work at the Abbey. And so, in the fall of 1922, he did.

In Cefalu Crowley and Betty May did their best to get along, even going on some rock-climbing adventures together. She was shook, though, when she came across a trunk filled with old, bloody ties. Yep. It looked like they’d been bloody for a long time, the fabric was hard, rigid with the dried blood. Crowley not only claimed that they were Jack the Ripper’s ties – apparently the fiend liked to wear a new one for each kill – he claimed that Jack was still alive, and that Crowley knew him, and that he was both a surgeon and a magician and had learned the secrets of invisibility, a secret Crowley told Betty he knew as well.

While Betty is snooping around like a little Nancy Drew, Raoul is super psyched to be in the home of his idol, boning up on his occult studies and engaging in rituals. Betty comes to the rituals as well – it seems like in order to be there you must participate, and she didn’t want to be separated from her husband. Loveday needed her care – his shabby health had only gotten shabbier since landing on the island. He suffered from malaria now, and was diagnosed with acute enteritis, an intestinal inflammation that can be caused by a weakened immune system. That winter, Loveday not at his best, he participated in a ritual that Betty May insisted required him to kill a cat and drink a cup of its blood. Loveday did so, and shortly thereafter died.

Now, all along, Betty May had been sending little items back to the UK press, gossipy bits about the goings-on in wacky Crowley’s Mediterranean playground. On her return to London, she sold them the story of her husband’s death-by-cat-blood for five-hundred pounds. Public sentiment, never kind to Crowley, had really turned on him after the publication of his tell-all, Diary of a Drug Fiend a year earlier. Now, the masses were horrified. Blared the headline, The Wickedest Man in the World! And at the end of it all, I can’t say it doesn’t ring true. A Man We’d Like to Hang! Another newspaper brayed. Crowley insisted Loveday had died after drinking from a dirty stream, a stream Crowley had warned him not to drink from. He wanted to sue the press for slander, but lacked the cash to do it. Word of the goings-on in Celafu reached Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini; he ordered Crowley banished from the country.

Back in London Betty May was soon married again, this time to the journalist Noel Mostyn Sedgewick. After accompanying him to a rookery, where he amused himself shooting at rooks (are those crows?), Betty May was charged with the tasks of snapping the necks of the birds who hadn’t cleanly died, as well as baking them into a pie, chores that fully grossed her out. Sedgewick ate her pie, and swiftly died. His mother accused Betty May of poisoning him, but she was never charged.

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Crowley and Leah Hirsig were on the skids after all this debauchery and drama. On the fall equinox , she wrote a formal letter to Crowley withdrawing her services as his Scarlet Woman and freeing him to find another poor woman to impregnate, which, of course, he did, an American named Dorothy Olsen, who he promptly whisked off to Tunisia, leaving Leah penniless in Paris.

It took Leah a few years to untangle and understand her time with Crowley and within Thelema. She continued to work for the temple and commit herself to the ritual, consecrating herself as the Bride of Chaos. She eventually came to publically scorn Crowley, distancing herself from him and challenging his claim AS prophet, while continuing to adhere to the truth of Thelema’s philosophy, sheh eventually got married, had a kid, and eventually, it is said, converted to Catholicism. She’d had enough. 

You know who else had had enough? Leah’s sister! While Leah was out in Sicily schtupping goats with Crowley, her sister, Alma, had fallen into the clutches of another wayward guru, Pierre Bernard, also known as The Omnipotent Oom, the man who brought yoga to the United States. By the time Alma got tangled up in his mess he’d already been imprisoned for kidnapping a couple of teenaged disciples. She became his High Priestess, and was under his control for a bit before breaking free and eventually writing a tell-all piece, My Life in a Love Cult, which exposed Bernard’s American tantric practice for a manipulative sex cult. What are the chances that both sisters would wind up the concubines of powerful, mystic madmen? Could such a thing be genetic?

As for the Abbey itself, it still stands, horribly decrepit, in the touristy beach-town of Cefalu. The walls, once covered with Crowley’s coked-up, mystical paintings, were whitewashed by the Italian government after the eviction. Many years later, artist and filmmaker Kenneth Anger made the journey to the island – as many Thelemites and Crowley-curious continue to do – and did the work to remove the paint, exposing once more Crowley’s bright and messy artwork below. His 1955 film, Thelema Abbey, is said to document the restoration of the murals, but the film is, sadly, lost to time.

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Thanks for tuning into another episode of Your Magic. You can support us — plus get access to a whole bunch of bonus content — at patreon.com/thisisyourmagic. Every dollar makes our work possible. Make sure you follow us on Twitter and Instagram @thisisyourmagic and subscribe to our newsletter at thisisyourmagic.com. You can rate us and subscribe right here on Spotify — do what you need to do to never miss an episode. You can email us at hello@thisisyourmagic.com, we would love to hear from you.

This episode was produced and edited by Molly Elizalde, Tony Gannon, and Vera Blossom. We got production support from Kirsten Osei-Bonsu. Our executive producers are Ben Cooley, myself, and Molly Elizalde. Our original theme music is by John Kimbrough. 

Online sources I sought in the creation of this episode include Wikipedia, Abandoned Spaces, Atlas Obscura, Derelict Places, Weird Italy, Farout Magazine, The Vintage News, Wonders of Sicily, Sicilian Magpie, Place and See, Dangerous Minds, We Are South Devon, Ultimate Pop Culture, Open Culture, a Live Journal authored by Content Love, Dazed Digital, Lashtal.com and Harvard University online.

Thanks for listening!

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