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Wanderer of the Wastes: Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast, as Mountaineer

The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.–Aleister Crowley

Boasting in his Confessions, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), with all the braggadocio of youth, claimed he was “white-hot on three points; climbing, poetry and Magick.” All these pursuits were to define his early career as a mountaineer, poet and magician. Given his immersion in the latter two, Crowley’s hitherto neglected mountaineering career has only recently excited a renewed interest by his various biographers. This presentation intends to put into context Aleister Crowley’s controversial mountaineering career particularly regarding his involvement in the first ever attempt to scale K2 (1902) and then Kangchenjunga (1905), the world’s second and third highest peaks. Through his revelatory discovery of the relatively new Victorian sport of rock-climbing during his teenage years, Crowley developed a keen awareness of technique and methodology and eventually set his sights on attempting to conquer two of the most challenging and treacherous Himalayan peaks.

Having climbed throughout the British Isles and then the Alps, Crowley came under the wing of Oscar Eckenstein (1859–1921), his mountaineering superior. As a preparatory exercise, they both climbed Mexico’s highest peaks in 1900, creating a number of fast high-altitude ascents. There, it was decided to make an attempt to conquer K2, led by Eckenstein, which ended in failure. Joined by Dr Jules Jacot Guillarmod (1868–1925), Crowley then made an attempt upon Kangchenjunga, on which he led, but which also ended not only in failure but also controversy. It was an abject disaster from which Crowley’s reputation would never fully recover.

Despite a yearning to try his luck again on Himalayan peaks, it was an ambition that for Crowley would remain unfulfilled. Nonetheless, his interest remained which would never be completely subdued despite his ostracisation from the mountaineering establishment.

Drawing upon recent research, this presentation aims to reassess Crowley’s mountaineering career by offering a more nuanced and better-balanced view of his achievements in the nascent art of Himalayan mountaineering at the outset of the twentieth-century.

Image: Aleister Crowley. Public Domain

Biography

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. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.Image: Aleister Crowley, Aimé Dupont Studio, 5th Ave, New York, May 1906

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The Brompton Time Machine

In an old cemetery in the West of London, half-hidden by trees, there stands an imposing twenty-foot-tall mausoleum, built of dark, polished granite with a pyramidal roof and a large copper door. Intended as the final resting place of the 19th-century heiress Hannah Courtoy and her two daughters, the mausoleum was designed by the Egyptologist and sculptor Joseph Bonomi, possibly with the help of eccentric inventor Samuel Warner

Since its construction in 1854, a legend has arisen that it is, or houses, a Time Machine

After a number of odd dreams, Stephen Coates began to research and write about the Courtoy mausoleum, and, as people all around the world became interested, his research began to be reported widely, including by the international press

In this talk, he will expand on his investigations into Hannah Courtoy, Joseph Bonomi and Samuel Warner, and why they might have tried to build a time machine. He will also reveal an extraordinary alternative theory about the mausoleum

Whether or not you are a believer, for now, leave your scepticism behind, bring along your imagination and enjoy as we climb aboard The Brompton Time Machine.

Speaker Bio:

Stephen Coates is a musician, broadcaster and cultural curator
https://linktr.ee/StephenCoates

Hosted & Curated by:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

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The hidden lives of the dissected

In this illustrated talk, author and journalist Jackie Dent uncovers the extraordinary history of the dissected. Her own grandparents donated their bodies to an Australian university—and a chance encounter led Jackie to investigate what really happened to their bodies.In this talk, she reveals the stories of those who have been studied in the name of science: from the 17th-century British attorney John Knill to the high-profile dissection of Indian Marxist politician Jyoti Basu in 2010. Beyond voluntary donations, Jackie will explore the lives of the poor and vulnerable who were dissected without consent—a practice still prevalent in many parts of the world today.

Tracing the ever-shifting attitudes toward cutting up the dead, Jackie takes us from the “holy anatomy” of the 14th-century Italian nun Chiara de Montefalco to today’s humane anatomy movement, where donors are honoured with ceremonies, sculptures and tombstones.

Speaker Bio:

Jackie Dent is a journalist and author of “The Great Dead Body Teachers”, a book exploring the history of whole body donation and anatomy. She has worked for many media outlets including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, Monocle, The New York Times, Reuters, Strewth! and The Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Her career has also included stints with the United Nations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Ossetia and South Sudan. She currently works as a medical writer and is completing a PhD at the University of Sydney on “The Pleasures of War”.

IMAGE:“The Relations of the Principal Blood Vessels to the Viscera of the Thoracico-Abdominal Cavity” by Joseph Maclise in Surgical Anatomy, 1851. Coloured lithograph courtesy of Wellcome Collection.

Hosted by:

Cat Irving has been the Human Remains Conservator for Surgeons’ Hall since 2015 and has been caring for anatomical and pathological museum collections for over twenty years. After a degree in Anatomical Science she began removing brains and sewing up bodies at the Edinburgh City Mortuary. Following training in the care of wet tissue collections at the Royal College of Surgeons of England she worked with the preparations of William Hunter at the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University, where she is now Consultant Human Remains Conservator. Cat is a licensed anatomist, and gives regular talks on anatomy and medical history. She recently carried out conservation work on the skeleton of serial killer William Burke

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Necromancy: Death, Ritual and the Imagination

From ancient tombs to Victorian séance parlours, humankind has long sought to speak with the dead — and to listen when they whisper back. In this illuminating and unsettling lecture, cultural historian Lena Heide-Brennand delves into the shadowed history of necromancy: the rituals, taboos, and imaginative worlds that blur the boundary between the living and the departed.

Tracing the practice from the Greek Magical Papyri to Norse seiðr, from Renaissance conjurers to Romantic poets, this talk explores how societies have used death not only as a mystery to be feared but as a language to be read. What does it mean to summon a voice from the grave? How do art, faith, and folklore preserve the presence of the dead — and what ethical questions linger in that act of calling?

A journey through centuries of memento mori and midnight invocation, this lecture invites you to stand at the threshold where scholarship meets the supernatural, and imagination keeps the dead forever speaking.

Bio:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day