When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  Any suggestion that Jones’ death may have had anything to do with his dilettante-ish interest in the occult was quickly brushed aside by Page, just as it would be when, a dozen years later, the same suggestions would be made about the premature death of one of his own band. Instead, as the next few years flew by and Zeppelin began to take over from the Stones as the world’s biggest rock band, Jimmy’s interest in Crowley and the occult deepened to the point of almost complete immersion.

  So who is Aleister Crowley and what is it about him that Jimmy Page – and millions of others around the world – still finds so compelling? And how much did the guitarist’s interest in Crowley’s occult teachings influence his own life and work? In order to answer that question, first we need to expose a few myths about Crowley. Famously once described in a magazine headline as the Wickedest Man in the World, while it’s true that Crowley’s influence proved to be the undoing of more than one of his many disciples – suicide, madness and death were recurring motifs for various wives and followers throughout his life – he certainly was not a Satanist. Nor did he practise ‘black’ magic. ‘I did not hate Jesus and God,’ he said, ‘I hated the Jesus and God of the people I hated.’ His main message, as he wrote in The Book of the Law, condensed as follows:

  ‘There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt…

  It is a lie, this folly against self…

  I am alone: there is no God where I am…

  Every man and every woman is a Star…

  The word of Sin is restriction…

  Remember all ye that existence is pure joy;

  that all the sorrows are but shadows; they pass

  and are done; but there is that which remains…

  Love is the law, love under will…’

  One also needs to consider the historical background of secret societies such as the Golden Dawn, which Crowley joined as a young man and which would exert a huge influence throughout his life, even after he’d resigned; the A.A. – aka the Great White Brotherhood, Crowley’s own attempt at forming a secret magickal society; and, most significant today, the O.T.O. – the Ordo Templi Orientis, aka Order of the Temple of the East, aka Order of the Oriental Templar – that Crowley eventually became head of and to which it seems likely Page was invited to join in the early Seventies, and to which it is believed – as far as anyone can tell given the vow of silence that being an initiate inevitably entails – he still belongs today. Or as writer, filmmaker, Zeppelin fan and himself a member of the O.T.O., Dave Dickson says: ‘I would be surprised, given his interest, if Page wasn’t a member of the Order. I don’t know for certain because it’s not like there’s a membership list. All I’m saying is, if you are interested in Crowley to the extent Page is, it seems almost inconceivable that he wouldn’t be.’

  As with all great sciences and religions, the teachings of the O.T.O. and other comparable ‘brotherhoods’ are full of arcane and dramatic rituals learned from ancient ‘grimoires’ (grammars of magic) handed down and rewritten from generation to generation, surviving the centuries despite the endless and ongoing attempts to erase them from history. Condemned by the Vatican as the worship of false gods, they are in fact the study of many different, more ancient ‘gods’. Something the monotheist rule of Christianity in its myriad guises not unreasonably considers threatening. Hence the deliberate branding of such beliefs as ‘heresy’ and ‘devil worship’, and the systematic persecution of such ‘diabolic’ practices, from medieval witch-burning to simple modern-day ridicule. Yet every pre-Christian civilisation had its medicine man, its shaman or high priest who understood the delicate balance of the forces of nature and how one might invoke them to the greater good; gifted individuals whose potions and practices were passed down father-to-son; the magic they created the fundamental ingredient of all the most ancient religions; the aim, to see into the future and affect its outcome. Usually, this was for beneficial purposes, though curses were prevalent too.

  The element of fertility was vitally important, with sex an integral part of many aspects of magic ritual – specifically, the controlled delay of orgasm, redirecting the sexual energy into ensuring that rituals are performed in properly ‘exalted’ circumstances. As practised by O.T.O. members of various higher degrees, these would include heterosexual magickal acts (adoration of the phallus as the microcosmic counterpart to the sun), masturbatory and autosexual techniques (referred to as the Lesser Work of Sol), and, at the highest level, anal intercourse techniques as sexual and magickal. Thus, ancient Eastern temples were filled with ‘sacred prostitutes’, an idea that went all the way back to ritualistic orgy and/or ritualistic human sacrifice and which Crowley almost single-handedly resurrected more than three thousand years later. Indeed, Ezra Pound once remarked that all religions could be boiled down to the single idea that copulation is good for the crops or that copulation is bad for the crops – with Christians coming out on the side of the latter, and Crowley (and, by definition, the O.T.O.) heartily endorsing the former.

  Dave Dickson: ‘The definition of magick is that it’s a causation of a change in the physical universe by the application of will. What Crowley is saying is that sex is this huge motivating force, that when you’re in that moment of passion, the feeling that you have, it’s as if you are somehow connected to the whole of the universe. That every sense in your body is on fire…and effectively that’s what Crowley’s use of magick was all about, using that [sexual] energy and that connectedness, not only for that intense feeling, but getting it to produce something beyond that, using that power to have some effect further down the line.’

  Born in Leamington, in 1875, into a non-denominational Evangelical Christian movement called the Plymouth Brethren, Edward Alexander Crowley was the son of a wealthy brewing family; an extremely bright child who could read by the age of four and was studying Greek and Latin by ten. Able to quote passages verbatim from the Bible, it wasn’t until the death from cancer of the father he was named after and adored, when he was just eleven, that young Edward began displaying the rebellious streak that would both mar and distinguish his later life. Let down by a god that had left him bereft and at the mercy of a mother he regarded with fear and suspicion, he now rejected his parents’ religion wholesale and grew up to be vehemently anti-Christian.

  Sent to board at a Brethren school in Tonbridge he decided to test the theory that cats possess nine lives by experimenting with different ways of killing them. Expelled, he was sent to Malvern where he was bullied for being fat. Having persuaded his mother to remove him by claiming he was being sexually abused, he was finally given a home tutor who, despite being a former Bible Society missionary, introduced him to such worldly pursuits as billiards, betting and cards. At fifteen, his domineering mother discovered her wayward son having sex on her bed with a chambermaid and loudly denounced him as ‘a little beast’. Many of his later sexual fantasies were of his degradation at the hands of cruel, domineering women; psychical and emotional equals – priestesses – he dubbed the ‘Scarlet Women’. His obsessive quest for a dominant and sadistic mistress would remain the defining sexual symbol of his life and it was not without irony that he later dubbed himself the Great Beast – one of dozens of outlandish aliases he adopted throughout his life, including Sir Aleister Crowley, Saint Aleister Crowley (of the Gnostic Catholic Church), Frater Perdurabo, Frater Ou Mh, To Mega Therion (also meaning ‘the great beast’), Count McGregor, Count Vladimir Svareff, Prince Chiao Khan, Mahatma Guru Si Paramahansa Shivaji, Baphomet the Supreme and Holy King of Ireland, and, after he had ascended to the level of a living deity in the O.T.O., Ipsissimus. He is chiefly remembered now, however, as the Great Beast and/or the Beast 666. The ‘666’ suffix, he disingenuously told the judge in a libel case, ‘means merely sunlight. You may call me Little Sunshine.’.

  As a young man, he was a great prankster. One of his favourite jokes was to write scandalised critiques of his own works, as with his infamous prose poem White Stains, which he fixed a thunderously straight-
faced prologue to: ‘The Editor hopes the Mental Pathologists, for whose eyes alone this treatise is destined, will spare no precaution to prevent it falling into other hands.’ Then gave the author’s name on the title-page as George Archibald, a much loathed, real-life uncle. His great literary ‘discovery’ in 1910 – a supposedly ancient occult tome named The Bagh-I-Muattar [The Scented Garden] – was actually all his own, quite brilliant work, including the English major he claimed had translated it before dying heroically in the Boer War. Another time, hearing that the authorities, scandalised by the size of the genitals on Epstein’s statue of Oscar Wilde had covered it with an extraneous butterfly, he took it upon himself to forcibly remove the offending object, then walk into one of London’s stuffiest restaurants wearing it over the crotch of his trousers.

  There was a serious side to much of the hilarity, of course. For example, the endless pseudonyms, which he later claimed a less frivolous reason for, as he explained in The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: an Autohagiography: ‘I wanted to increase my knowledge of mankind. I knew how people treated a young man from Cambridge…Now I wanted to see how people would behave to a Russian nobleman [Count Vladimir Svareff]. I must say here that I repeatedly used this method of disguise – it has been amazingly useful in multiplying my points of view about humanity. Even the most broad-minded people are necessarily narrow in this one respect. They may know how all sorts of people treat them, but they cannot know, except at second hand, how those same people treat others.’ Role playing, they call it now.

  ‘Aleister’ was a pseudonym, chosen in 1895 for its Celtic Druidic overtones. He was a student at Cambridge by then – reading moral sciences – where his insatiable appetite for all things immoral found him having illicit sex on an almost daily basis (mainly with other) and enjoying his first taste of drink and drugs. When his hated mother died three years later he inherited £40,000 (approximately £5 million in today’s money) and immediately left Cambridge for London without bothering to complete his degree. Instead, he moved to a flat in London’s Chancery Lane, signing the lease under the name Count Vladimir Svareff. In 2006, when the building – now a four-storey office block – was being demolished for redevelopment, workmen arrived one morning to find a human skull perched amongst the rubble, illuminated by a single flickering candle, and beside that a pile of twigs arranged in the shape of a pentagram. The ghost of Crowley, perhaps? More likely a prank by one of his more ardent followers. For it was here, in an area of London full of medieval resonances, that Crowley first began experimenting with the occult. Having recently been initiated into the Golden Dawn, he now took the name Frater Perdurabo, meaning: Brother I-Will-Endure-To-The-End (he later changed it to Frater Ou Mh or Brother Not-Yet), and began learning of such secret arts as the invocation of angels and demons, invisibility, and astral travel.

  The origins of the Golden Dawn are themselves shrouded in more mystery than even Crowley was able to unravel. Whatever system of belief holds the key, they are all based on the same ancient ideas traceable back to the tenth century BC and the rites of King Solomon, author of the most famous grimoire of all, The Key of Solomon. Based on the Book of Enoch, described by Dave Dickson as ‘one of the great works of apocalyptic literature’, according to Eliphas Levi it tells the story of ‘angels who consented to fall from heaven that they might birth of Magic.’ Hence the inclusion of ‘Enochian calls’ in many of the occult rituals practised up to the time of Crowley and beyond to the present day.

  A collection of spells and incantations passed down through the centuries in various forms (its text to be copied out by hand for it to work properly) and the first to prescribe the casting of a magic circle on the floor (to contain demons and spirits that would otherwise wreak havoc before they were ritually banished) and many other details of ritualistic magick as practised here in the twenty-first century, from the instructions on how to hand-make robes, to the symbolic use of knives, swords, staffs, wands and other magical ‘weapons’, a Greek version of The Key of Solomon dating from the twelfth century AD, can still be found at the British Museum today, while official Vatican records show that in 1350 Pope Innocent VI ordered the burning of another version of the same book. It was also Solomon who first wrote of adepts entering trances in order to ‘charge’ themselves with magic energy, along with the use of pentagrams and other talismans. In another of Solomon’s grimoires, known as The Lesser Key of Solomon, he provides incantations for invoking seventy-two principal demons, all of them named and described in exact detail.

  Basically, what Crowley preached in his innumerable works – over a hundred published, at last count – was essentially the summation of all these ideas, along with ideas taken from the Knights Templar and their evolutionary offshoot, the Freemasons, and mixed them up with his own experiments with hashish, peyote, heroin, omni-sexuality, meticulous study of the Tarot and comparative religion, boiling the knowledge down to what he described as ‘the quintessence of known methods’. The turning point came during a visit to Cairo in March 1904, when his first wife Rose fell into a trance and began murmuring phrases such as ‘It’s about the Child’ and ‘They are waiting for you’, which led to Crowley discovering the name of his Holy Guardian Angel, Aiwass – ‘dictating’, he claimed, the whole of The Book of the Law to him over a three-day period. There followed a four-month period of ‘insanity’ walking through China as Crowley attempted to become the ‘little child’ Aiwass had spoken of. When he returned to England, he was ready to begin one of the most difficult magickal operations of all: the achievement of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel; an invocation taking six months that requires expert magickal techniques, part of which involved being ‘crucified’ while swearing the following oath: ‘I, Perdurabo, a member of the Body of Christ, do hereby solemnly obligate myself…and will entirely devote my life so as to raise myself to the knowledge of my higher and Divine Genius that I shall be He.’

  It seems there was an evangelical aspect to Crowley’s studies, too; certainly a desire to show off his knowledge. Partly in order to stop Crowley publishing their occult secrets in his bi-annual magazine, Equinox (published on the two days of equinox each year, 21 March and 23 September), in 1912 he became the English head of the O.T.O., where he was astonished to find that his ‘new ritual’ to invoke the Holy Guardian Angel was the O.T.O.’s most closely guarded secret. As he wrote in Confessions: ‘I personally believe that if this secret, which is a scientific secret, were perfectly understood, as it is not even by me after more than twelve years’ almost constant study and experiment, there would be nothing which the human imagination can conceive that could not be realised in practice.’

  He abandoned his first wife Rose and their daughter, whom he had named Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith, and who would die soon after. ‘I was no longer influenced by love for them, no longer interested in protecting them as I had been,’ he wrote. When the First World War broke out, he fled to America where he gave an infamous pro-Germany speech at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Returning to Britain in 1919 broke and saddled with a raging heroin habit, Crowley accepted a publisher’s advance of £60 (roughly £3,000 in today’s money) and promptly decamped to Sicily, where the cost of living was dirt cheap. With his new American mistress Leah Hirsig, a new baby daughter and her nurse, Ninette, who also bore Crowley a child, he set up home in a primitive hilltop villa which he named the Abbey of Thelema.

  It was his adventures at the abbey in the early Twenties (bowls of heroin left around, children allowed to watch the grown-ups having sex, rituals involving animal sacrifice and a woman being penetrated by a goat et al) that led to the lurid headlines in John Bull magazine – the Wickedest Man in the World was swiftly followed by similar bold-type accolades such as The King of Depravity and A Man We’d Like To Hang – and which finally brought Crowley to the attention of the wider British public. Meanwhile, a series of women attempted to personify his ‘Scarlet Woman’ ideal: as well as Leah and Nine
tte, there was Dorothy Olsen, another American; followed by a third wife, Maria Ferrari de Miramar; then a nineteen-year-old German mistress named Bertha Busch of whom he wrote: ‘Instantly I got down on the scarlet woman. She pissed gallons. I tore off her clothes and we fucked and fucked.’

  Clearly, involvement with The Beast came at a price. All three wives were eventually driven mad, with Hirsig actually committed to an asylum, while Busch stabbed Crowley with a carving knife before subsequently committing suicide. There were also a series of miscarriages and a suspicious death at the abbey – reputed to have been caused by drinking cat’s blood – before Mussolini himself ordered Crowley out of Italy. He fetched up in North Africa, sleeping with young boys and prostitutes in every city he visited, before publishing an account in 1922 of his time at the abbey, the relatively mundane Diary Of A Drug Fiend, which the Sunday Express demanded be suppressed on the strength of its provocative title alone.