When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

by Mick Wall

  But the most heinous crime Crowley apparently admitted to – though never actually accused of in his lifetime – was that of human sacrifice, with the ideal victim, as he wrote in Magick in Theory and Practice, ‘a male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence’. He claimed he had performed this rite an average of 150 times a year from 1912 onwards. Another typically bizarre Crowley joke, surely? Yes and no. For while it would surely have been impossible for anyone to carry out such an outlandish feat, let alone someone as in the public eye by then as Crowley, what he was actually referring to was the same ‘scientific secret’ he’d been experimenting with all those years – in essence, the formula of the Rose and Cross, the magick foundation that underpins all forms of religion; the ‘sacrifice’ Crowley spoke of to do with his successful invocation of his Holy Guardian Angel, Aiwass; the death done 150 times a year to the ‘little child’ within. That is to say, to Crowley himself, as well as – symbolically – Aiwass. A ritualistic act committed in that trancelike state where all the opposites are finally transcended, breaking down the barriers that separate Ego from one’s True Self – and from the Universe. No wonder he considered himself a living deity at the end of it, for he had achieved godhead. He said.

  Crowley spent his last years in and out of court, instigating futile libel actions or fighting actions taken out against him. After a minor heart attack he moved to a cheap boarding house in Hastings, where he breathed his last on 1 December 1947, aged seventy-two. It’s said he lay screaming for morphine but the doctor attending him refused. Crowley howled with rage: ‘Give me morphine – or you will die within twenty-four hours!’ Still the doctor refused. Crowley died a few hours later, tears streaming down his cheeks. Reportedly, his final words were: ‘I am perplexed. Sometimes I hate myself…’ Eighteen hours later, the doctor was dead too. Newspapers claimed that at the Great Beast’s cremation in Brighton his followers conducted a Black Mass; in reality a Gnostic Catholic Mass, during which a priestess – yet another Scarlet Woman, presumably – took off her clothes (hence the lurid headlines). Afterwards, Crowley’s ashes were whisked away to America. The local council passed an ordinance that no such ‘heathen rites’ would ever be tolerated in their town again.

  How much of the legend one believes, there’s little doubt that for all his ‘rottenness’, as he memorably described it to the American writer Frank Harris, Crowley was an accomplished mystic, yogi and devoted student of occultism. Amongst the detritus of his strange legacy were genuinely compelling works, such as his extraordinary treatise on yoga, Book Four, and his insightful Gospel According To St. Bernard Shaw (published posthumously and later re-issued as Crowley on Christ). And while W.B. Yeats would sum up most people’s view when describing Crowley as ‘indescribably mad’ the facts are that he was also a record-breaking mountaineer (by 1901, he and fellow-climber, Oscar Eckenstein, held all but one of the world’s climbing records between them). He was also a remarkable orator, portrait painter, muralist, big-game hunter and expert chess player. His influence was astonishingly wide-ranging during his lifetime and especially after it. Mentor to the illustrious Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, inspiration for both Somerset Maugham’s 1902 novel, The Magician, and Malcolm Lowry’s classic semi-fictional Under the Volcano, published the year Crowley died, James Bond author Ian Fleming also modelled one of his most famous super-villains, Bloefeld, on Crowley, who he’d gotten to know when Fleming worked for British intelligence during the Second World War. (Fleming suggested Crowley as interrogator for Rudolf Hess when the occultist Nazi leader mysteriously parachuted into Scotland.) It’s claimed it was even Crowley who suggested Churchill’s famous V for victory sign, a magickal gesture, he said, that would counteract Nazi use of the swastika.

  After the war, one of Crowley’s most ardent disciples was a young Californian named Jack Parsons, who wrote a ‘fourth chapter’ of The Book of the Law and later became one of the masterminds behind the American space programme. Working alongside Parsons was L. Ron Hubbard, who later ran off with Parsons’ mistress and founded the cult of Scientology. Parsons took up instead with his own Crowley-esque scarlet woman, the Beat artist Marjorie Cameron, who would later star in some of Kenneth Anger’s films and was said to be the inspiration behind the Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’. Parsons, who died in a lab explosion in 1952, now has a crater named after him on the dark side of the moon.

  Crowley’s writings on drugs, too, are prescient; decades later, psychedelic gurus such as Timothy Leary would merely echo many of his earlier claims. He also influenced post-Beat counterculture (William S. Burroughs endlessly recycled Crowley’s ‘sex-magick’ theories in his own writings), and became something of a patron saint to the original hippies of the late Sixties whose advocating of drugs and ‘free love’ again echoed much of the old master’s teachings. It was now that the revival of interest in Crowley began in earnest, and has continued in a consistently upward curve ever since. Though as Dave Dickson points out, ‘He became this kind of hippy hero, but this is hugely open to misinterpretation. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law – basically, what that means is: each of us has a purpose in life. This was the Crowley philosophy. That we are each put on Earth to achieve certain goals. And the purpose of our being on Earth is to discover what that destiny is and to follow it no matter what – the idea of True Will. What it doesn’t mean is: “Hey, you can do whatever you like, because you don’t have to worry about the consequences.”. That’s a total misunderstanding of what Crowley was actually saying.’

  Nevertheless, from the late Sixties on, Crowley’s influence can be detected in all branches of the arts, including the occultism of such films as Performance and The Devil Rides Out (whose depraved character Mocata is another based on Crowley) and of course the life and work of Kenneth Anger, who became a higher-up in the O.T.O. Crowley’s also been the model for various TV villains such as a murderous demonologist in Britain’s Bergerac series, and name-checked in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose lead character, Buffy Summers, is named after another occult notable, Montague Summers. Yes, he fully believed that in the future Crowleyanity (as he called it) would ultimately displace Christianity. But his advocacy of the still undiscovered powers of the human mind put him a century ahead of what are now considered the most advanced thinkers of the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, his work is collected and studied with greater interest now than in his own lifetime, his influence on modern culture arguably as pervasive as that of Freud or Jung.

  The question here is how much – if any – did Jimmy Page’s own absorption of the works of Aleister Crowley influence either the music or the success of Led Zeppelin? Speaking with Nick Kent in 2003, Page said: ‘I found that [Crowley’s] system worked. Plus, all the aspects of ritual magick, talismanic magick – I could see that it worked.’ And all that impacted on Zeppelin’s music, Kent asked? ‘As far as my involvement went, it did, yes,’ said Page. He certainly offered up enough clues during the band’s lifetime. For Page, music and magick were clearly linked. As he told me more than once, the music of Zeppelin was ‘made by the four of us, to create this fifth element…There was a definite telepathy between us, an energy we created that the audience picked up on and sent back to us. Really powerful stuff…’

  This ‘fifth element’ he refers to might as easily describe the pentagram, the five-pointed star that is the ancient and powerful symbol of ritual magick. As Dickson points out: ‘The only reason people get interested in magick is because they are interested in power. You use the skills you possess to improve your lot, everybody does. If one accepts that Page has learned about magick, it would be surprising to me if he didn’t use that skill to basically forward his personal and/or group ambitions.’ He pauses, then adds: ‘Whether that eventually comes back to bite him or not is open to speculation. All I’m saying is if you’ve got a skill you tend to use it.’ A ‘skill’ he suggests that would have been engaged numerous times. ‘If you’ve got a toothache, you take an aspirin.
If that doesn’t work, you might take another one. If you say, I want a successful career, chances are that’s not gonna come out of one ritual.’

  Crowley, who believed that books and other works of art could be talismanic in themselves, was known for performing rituals to ensure the success of his own writings. As mentioned in his diaries between 1914 and 1920, where his editor Stephen Skinner counted as many as eighteen specific operations enacted by Crowley under the heading ‘literary success’ – for example, his Simon Iff stories (‘for literary current’); certain magazine pieces (for ‘success in Shaw article’) and poetry (for ‘poetic inspiration’). Were Crowley alive today and recording albums, it seems certain he would be doing the same for them too.

  Or as Page pointedly told writer Chris Salewicz in 1977: ‘You know, there are a thousand paths and [people] can choose their own. All I know is that [with Crowley] it’s a system that works.’ He added with a laugh: ‘There’s not much point in following a system that doesn’t work…When you’ve discovered your true will, you should just forge ahead like a steam train. If you put all your energies into it there’s no doubt you’ll succeed. Because that’s your true will. It may take a little while to work out what that is, but when you discover it, it’s all there.’

  Certainly, Page’s interest in Crowley and the occult really took hold during the early days of Zeppelin’s success. With the money now to fully indulge his passions, he became a serious collector of Crowleyana, including first-edition books – some signed by the Beast himself – plus some of his hats, canes, paintings, his robes…anything he could get his hands on. After his affair with Miss Pamela was over, he phoned from England one night asking her to search for some Crowley artefacts he had been told were for sale in Gilbert’s Bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard: specifically, a typed manuscript with scribbled notes in the margin in Crowley’s own hand. Page wired her $1,700 and she bought it and mailed it to him, special delivery. In thanks, he sent her an antique necklace of a turquoise phoenix, its wings spread, holding a large gleaming pearl. She immediately broke down in tears, filled with ‘pain and delight’. For ‘a handsome sum’ he also bought a volume of Crowley’s diary from Tom Driberg, the Fleet Street columnist, Labour MP and peer of the realm who had met Crowley as an undergraduate at Oxford in 1925. Bound in red Morocco leather and encased in baroque silver, it recorded his ‘daily magickal and sexual doings’.

  Page’s most notorious purchase, however, was of one of Crowley’s most infamous former abodes, Boleskine House, near Foyers, in Scotland, on the south-east bank of Loch Ness, across the water from the 2,000-foot snow-capped bulk of Meall Fuarvounie. Built in the late eighteenth century on consecrated ground – the site, it was said, of a former church burned to the ground with its congregation still inside – there was also a graveyard where the ruins of the original chapel still lay alongside a small watcher’s hut, where relatives of the newly buried would spend weeks guarding against grave-robbers. Boleskine House’s original owner was the Honourable Archibald Fraser, a relative of Lieutenant General Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat at the time. The Honourable Archibald apparently chose the site to build his house specifically to irritate the Lieutenant General, whose lands surrounded the property, in retribution for Lord Lovat’s support of the English during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. The associations with the Fraser family can also be seen in the Gothic burial ground, with its crumbling, lichen-covered gravestones and vaults that sit loch-side across a single track road from the main house’s front fence. There was also said to be a tunnel connecting the graveyard to the house.

  Boleskine House remained in Fraser family ownership until Crowley bought it in 1899. A large, remote country pile facing north with close access to river sand – important ingredients in enacting magick rituals – Crowley later claimed to have invoked over a hundred demons during his years there, including the enactment of the Abra-melin ritual, his hurried abandonment of which it is reckoned lies at the heart of the house’s disturbing atmosphere and the unusual manifestations that still occur there. But then Crowley also spent time at Boleskine shooting sheep, catching salmon, climbing the surrounding hills and scaring to death the locals who refused to go anywhere near the place after dark. A five-bedroom mansion with slate grey roofing and pale pink stucco walls, it’s actually a very attractive-looking residence. Mock Greek columns, stone dogs and stone eagles stand guard on each side of the main door, the house sheltered by a screen of mature Douglas Fir and Cyprus trees and several handsome cedar and eucalyptus trees. Stone steps lead to fruit gardens and an orchard. However, having sold the place in the wake of his impoverished return to Britain after the First World War, Boleskine continued to lead a strange existence. Hollywood star and real-life gangster George Raft had been involved in a scandal involving selling shares in a piggery supposedly built on Boleskine’s grounds – except there weren’t any pigs in it. After the Second World War it was owned by another former Crowley disciple, an army major named Fullerton, who would later shoot himself with his own shotgun in 1965. Previous owners were said to have conducted a ‘black magic’ baptism on their child.

  In 1969, Kenneth Anger, who had just finished his cult movie classic Scorpio Rising, heard it was back on the market and rented it for a couple of months. A year later Jimmy Page heard about it and promptly bought the house, installing an old school friend, Malcolm Dent, as live-in caretaker. ‘Jimmy caught me at a time in my life when I wasn’t doing a great deal and asked me to come up and run the place,’ said Dent in 2006. When he arrived he found a magick circle, a pentagram and an altar in the dining room. It wasn’t until later that he learned that Crowley had used the room as his temple. A six foot-plus Londoner and former commercial salesman, Dent didn’t believe in things that go bump in the night. However, he had only been there a few weeks when one night he heard strange rumblings coming from the seventy-foot hallway. The noise stopped when he went to investigate but began again as soon as he shut the door. ‘That’s when I decided to find out what I could about the house,’ he said. The rumbling in the hall, he discovered, dated back as far as the Battle of Culloden and was said to be the head of Lord Lovat, beheaded in the Tower of London. ‘Above Boleskine there’s a place called Errogie, which is supposed to be the geographical centre of the Highlands. Boleskine was then the nearest consecrated ground to Errogie and it’s thought his soul, or part of it, ended here.’

  He also experienced ‘the most terrifying night of my life’ when he awakened to hear what sounded like a wild animal ‘snorting, snuffling and banging’ outside his bedroom door. ‘I had a knife on the bedside table and I opened the blade and sat there. The blade was small and wouldn’t have done any good but I was so frightened I had to have something to hang onto. The noise went on for some time but even when it stopped I couldn’t move. I sat on the bed for hours and even when daylight came it took lots of courage to open that door.’ He added: ‘Whatever was there was pure evil.’ Another friend who spent the night there awoke ‘in a hell of a state’, claiming she’d been attacked by ‘some kind of devil’.

  Despite these and other hair-raising occurrences – chairs switching places, doors banging open and shut inexplicably, carpets and rugs rolling up on their own – Dent never considered leaving. ‘Initially I thought I’d be coming for a year or so, but then it got its hooks in me. I met my then wife at Boleskine House. My children were raised there – my son Malcolm was born in Boleskine House. We loved living there in spite of the peculiar happenings that went on there.’

  Page, meanwhile, began doing everything he could to return the house to how it would have looked during Crowley’s time. As well as his growing collection of Crowleyana, he bought seven chairs from the Café Royal, each with a nameplate back and front, including those of Crowley, Marie Lloyd, Rudolph Valentino, drama critic James Agate, Sir Billy Butlin, artist William Orpen and sculptor Jacob Epstein. Crowley’s chair would be placed at the top of a large banquet table in the dining room with three down both sides. Gee
se and peacocks roamed the grounds and in a field beside the gardens a herd of goats grazed, some from Bron-Yr-Aur. And he arranged for self-proclaimed ‘Satanic artist’ Charles Pace to paint some Crowley-esque murals on the walls, based on those later uncovered by Kenneth Anger under the white washed walls at the Abbey of Thelema.

  It’s fair to say that Page revelled in the rumours surrounding Boleskine House. In a 1976 radio interview with Nicky Horne, he boasted: ‘I’m not exaggerating when I say that any people that have gone to that place and stayed there for any length of time, by that I mean a month, say, have gone through very dramatic changes in their personal lives and whatever. It’s quite an incredible place, and yet it’s not hostile. It just seems to bring the truth out of people in situations…people have had quite unusual experiences.’ Asked how the house had affected him personally, he gave a weak, druggy laugh. ‘The whole house has been filled with tales of people being taken to asylums because of drunkenness, suicides, you name it and it’s there, you know?’

  Helping Page with his hunt for rare Crowleyana in the early Seventies was a new acquaintance, writer, antiquarian bookseller and Crowley expert Timothy d’Arch Smith. Tim, a great cricket fan who lives within walking distance of Lord’s Cricket Ground in north London, recalls Page first coming to see him ‘at my little office just off Baker Street, in Gloucester Place, in about 1970, sent, I suspect, by Gerald Yorke, who was Crowley’s disciple, because I was doing – and I’m still doing – Crowley’s bibliography. This chap with long hair came down to the office, and I had a few Crowley things. We were being redecorated and there was pop music going on – probably the Beatles, I suppose – on a little tinny transistor that belonged to the painters. And I said to Jimmy, “Christ, what a din!” and he said, “Well, actually this is my business. I said, “Terribly sorry.” I had no idea who he was until I saw the cheque. He just came down to buy Crowley books from me.’