The Centre of a Thousand Legends: A Brief History of Boleskine House and Aleister Crowley
This presentation offers a brief history of Boleskine House, located on the southern shore of Loch Ness, in the central Scottish Highlands. Commissioned by Archibald Campbell Fraser (1736–1815), son of the infamous Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, and completed with Masonic honours in 1809, Boleskine House already had a strange, perhaps even notorious history, and decidedly even more so during and after Aleister Crowley’s tenure.A year after joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Crowley purchased the property in 1899 for the ‘sole’ purpose of undertaking a magical rite known as the Abramelin ritual, an operation aimed at coming into contact with his Holy Guardian Angel, or inner genius.Drawing upon extensive research undertaken for a forthcoming publication, I will delve into the reasons why Boleskine House was chosen by a young practitioner of the occult, why it was so important during his formative years and thereafter, and will attempt to disambiguate fact from fiction.
Speaker Bio
Andrew Wiseman is a cultural historian, specialising in the Scottish Highlands from the late medieval to the modern period, who has developed a keen interest, perhaps even an unhealthy one, in Boleskine House and its long-held association with the iconoclastic occultist Aleister Crowley. He is currently editing a number of works, and has authored around twenty chapters and articles as well as numerous blogs and mainstream publications. As author of the forthcoming title Lord Boleskine: Aleister Crowley and the House of the Beast 666, a detailed and engaging account of Crowley’s residence at his Highland home will be offered as well as the controversial legacy which he left in his wake.
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Images:
Boleskine House as photographed in 1912
‘With pipe, purity and posture’: Aleister Crowley as explorer and poet, May 1906, New York
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