Author Prof. Richard Spence: Secret Agent 666 Aleister Crowley

And we are live. Hello everyone out there in Twitter, which I refuse to call X, Facebook and Rumble the only places I'm allowed to actually talk really, because YouTube reminds me on a very fairly constant basis that I'm not supposed to do things there. I'm to here with today today with the Occult rejects Lisa and Nick, and our special guest today is doctor Rick Richard Spence, the author of Secret Agent sixty six six Alistair Crowley, British Intelligence and

I forgot the last part of the in the occult Yes India Cult. So doctor Spence or Rick, tell us little bit about yourself, what your background is. I know the book was out in twenty two thousand and eight. I'm not sure if there's any been any updates or anything like that, but just give us a little story. What you do, how you came about this wire while you were interested in it and stuff like that. Okay, who am I? Why should you pay any attention to anything that I say?

As well as I was saying before we went live For anybody who's wondering, I am a genuine academic, so I actually have a real degree from a real university, and I need to point that out, because there are unreal degrees from unreal universities. So what am I taught at the University of Idaho here in beautiful Moscow, Idaho, or I am now and it's springlike weather for the time being. Beginning in nineteen eighty six, so I taught for thirty four years. I retired in twenty twenty, which seemed to be

an opportune time. Since retirement, I've been involving myself in various writing and other projects. And we might talk more about those, or we don't. That's not a big deal in and of itself. And prior to that,

what was my academic background? I got my master's and PhD, the thing that really counts from the University of California at Santa Barbara, which is not the University of California surfing branch, as people point out there at that in nineteen eighty one, most of my real sort of you know, the academic I started out really as interested in modern Russian history. So academically that's kind

of my thing. But what do you find out, especially, you know, if you're curious, if you have any kind of imagination, which a lot of people in academia don't ranklickly. You find that one thing leads you to another. I mean, people ask me, how did you get interested in Crowley or how did you get interested in secret societies or occultism and the rest of this, And I did, just didn't wake up one morning and I was interested in it. It was because I had been interested in something

else, and through one thing I was led to another. Think of it as the process of enlightenment or disenlightenmented, or however you want to see that. So when you deal with modern Russian history, you deal with the Russian Revolution. And if you deal with the Russian Revolution, you deal with what else. You don't have revolutions without conspiracies and secrecy, secret societies, which

revolutionary movements are. And so that's where. And also espionage was something else that I'm you know, I'm always kind of hunting spies in one form or another. And my wife accuses me that I now think everyone is a spy, which is not true almost everyone, but not entirely. So you get interested in espionage, and then you find out the links between espionage and occultism.

This this kind of symbiotic relationship between the two and various other let's say, clandestine organizations, all those things that exist in the dark, the historical dark, the shadows of history. So I would say that that kind of turned my interests away from what might be sort of standard political, diplomatic,

or economic history, although I'm interested in all of those two. The kind of shadow areas of history, or literally the history that isn't written about, the stuff that gets left out usually because it's inconvenient or inconclusive, it raises more. You know, we like to have our stories come together, that's

the whole thing. So one of the things that as an historian that struck me is that you hear this whole thing about, you know, story history being something which is it's written by the victors, which it absolutely is. So you never get the whole story that there's no giant book somewhere in which you know, there's a giant black book somewhere they you know, in a giant underground library that records everything that ever happened. Sounds like that that this

is some of the ways that the people think what historians do. The historians just read from the book. We pull up the book and we just read, We just spense knowledge from it. Now there isn't any book. What historians do is they make up history. That is, they try to come up with a narrative to explain what happened, because really we don't have a lot in the way of definite facts about things. So I'll give you an

example. Everybody, I think can agree another maybe a few who don't, but I think pretty much everyone can agree that World War II, something that we describe as the Second World War happened. Now we can quibble about the beginning thirty seven or thirty nine or where it was. That kind of varies, you know, from one country to another. But the Second World War happened. And by the way, by calling at the Second World War,

we're also acknowledging that a First World War happened. But that's another story. So world War two happened. That's a fact. And then you can come up with other ones. You can come up with, you know, the rough number of people killed, the number of times. You know, you can you can come up with a kind of mathematical list of things that are connected with that. You can find Kievan. There was a Battle of Stalingrad. There was a Battle of Guadalcanal that took place between such and such a

time. But when you get to the key question, the really important question of why World War two happened, Well, that's not a fact. There are no facts about that. There are only opinions. So most of what we regard as an historical narrative is a story, a kind of script, which has been composed to incorporate and explain the facts that we have. So we had this war, here is why it happened, and so you're now creating a story around that. Now that story could be very very accurate,

it may be correct, or it could be wildly off base. But whatever the case, what you'll generally find is if you take any particular kind of historical event, whether it's World War two, the Russian Revolution, American Revolution, or whatever, you can take the known facts such as they are, and you can create different narratives to explain them. That is, you can embed them in a matrix of a different story, so you can make it come out different ways. And the thing is that if you do it well,

they're all more or less plausible. So then you're left with the question is that, well, since I can come up with different explanations for this, which one is correct some Again, maybe entirely correct. Usually you'll find that some are probably more accurate than others, but none are completely accurate because we can't go back and explain the past. You can't do that. Yeah,

it's because nobody ever understood what was happening at the time. So again, an example, you've probably been in a situation, or you may have been somewhere and other people, your friends may have been there, and you

both think that you're sort of looking at the same thing. You think that you've experienced the same event, but between yourselves or if you're you know, questioned by the police, for instance, there would be variations in your experience, so it would turn out that you didn't exactly experience the same thing. Now, that doesn't mean that one of your experiences really is real and everyone else is is false. It just means that you're sort of in your own

sort of reality. In this case, I think maybe one of the best way was ever put to me was by one of my freshlers has said, is that really you only get half of history at best, because what people see, what we all see, is what's in front of us, and that can be the same time, there's a whole other half of the world which is happening behind us and we're not looking at it. So two people in the same place, at the same time, at the same event,

facing in two different directions will not have the same experience. One isn't more true than the other one. They're just different in that case. So that's one of the things I think you have to understand. And to me, this actually, you know, it doesn't ruin history. It makes it more interesting. It's it's fluid, it's it's malleable. It's this thing which is kind of constantly changing because we never have the real thing to begin with.

It's always sort of inventing and reinventing itself over and over again. We don't know what happened, but we always have to search to figure out hopefully what did. That's interesting too, because it's like the depth of the of the experience based on what you know as far as the backstory, will give you

a different impression of what you're seeing when the event actually occurs too. So if you're just on the surface level, you're going to see whatever is presented to you, and that's going to be based on your own perception, your

own ability to comprehend what's happening. But if you had a deeper you know, like an in for instance, with your book, if you knew the inner workings of Crowley and his you know, his persona of being this Irish rebel, basically, you might understand why he was doing something a little bit differently when it happened, like say the event at the the you know, the Statue of Liberty, rather than the onlooker who doesn't know who he is at all and just sees the experience, you know, Like that's I mean

to take that one answer the thing about crole. So this is World War one, New York. It's nineteen fifty and Croley has come over to respends the war, and he sets up this whole. It's it's kind of a performance art and that's one of the ways. You know, Croley is kind of a performance artist. And so he gets together his entourage. You know, he's got his girlfriend who plays the fiddle, Isla Waddell, and then he collects the drugs and and there's also a New York Times reporter. That's

the key thing. He makes sure that the press is there to cover it, which means there's nothing which is unplioned about what's happening. This is stunted, and they all go out and he proclaims he declares war in the British Empire. And he pulls out what's supposed to be his British passport and he rips it up, and he goes into some sort of you know, esoteric gobbledy goop about you know, Ireland being connected to Atlantis and which goes over

the head of the New York Time reporter. But this this, and it gets in and it gets in the news, and he said, now, the thing about Crowley, though, so you've seen this event. Simple fact is he's not Irish in any way, shape or form. In fact, I don't think he ever set foot in Ireland. And his entire life could be wrong, but it was. He just stepped in and stepped out. He's not Irish. None of the actual Phoenians in New York have anything to do with him. They don't know who this guy is. He's not part

of any recognized Irish nationalist organization. The only people he's convinced to some degree that he's an Irish nationalist are the Germans in New York. He tends to think that the representatives of the Imperial German government and German Americans, you know, the Kaiser's crowd. They fall for this. The Irish never do. And and and he's not tearing up his his passport. He's tearing up an envelope. His actual British passport is safe back in a drawer at home.

And it's a stunt. And it was a stunt meant to get in the press and to impress the people he wanted to impress, who were the Germans in New York, because he is selling himself to them as at the most a British renegade or an Irish patriot who is willing to then help the German cause. And he has to sell that to them, and he has to sell it because he's actually working for the British Empire. Now, this was one of those things that in his lifetime Crowley would periodically claim, and he

was usually in some time of duress. You know, he often felt unappreciated, don't we all? And that's the main complaint I think good ever have, is that people just don't appreciate all the things that I've done. They don't appreciate me, well, he'd argue, know, and particularly when people would condemn him for being the wickedest man in the world and a renegade and trade. I mean, that reputation as a trader stuck with him and he

never shook it off. And as time went on, because he knew he wasn't one, but he couldn't explain exactly why he wasn't one because of the Official Secrets Act, he would say that you no, no, really, when I was in New York, I was working for the British cause I was really working undercover, and nobody really seems to have believed that, I mean, even his friends never quite believed it. So I was actually,

here's the case. I was doing research on another person who was also involved in espionage with some connections to the British during the same period, and I wondered, you know, I wonder if this kind and Crowley ever had it

the connection with each other. So I sent off to the National Archives of Washington, DC to see whether or not in the files of this now agency that no longer exists called the Military Intelligence Division, whether they had any whether there was a file I'm crawling so was that the name of it before they became m I five and m I six? Was it the US government wasn't see what it was. In World War One, the fbis we know today

really didn't exist. There was a Bureau of Investigation, but it wasn't terribly important, and there was there was no sort of national security apparatus. So during World War One, the US Army stepped in and you had the m i D, which then actually was the group that was going around investigating everyone. Okay, they were investigating pro Germans, anybody they thought were Bolsheviks, you know, if they thought anyway you were suspect and your loyalty to the

US, they were, And they created a huge card file. Long before at Jaggar Hoover did that, the m i D had done it. And the interesting thing about the m i D files is that because that agency as such is extinct, all of its files are declassified and you can you can look through them so that they're all open, which is usually not something you

run into with intelligence files. So I got this little file that that that came back to me, and they did have something on Crawley and I'm reading through it and most of it's not particularly interesting, but there was, and I actually have it right here. So the I get my glasses to read this because I want to read it correctly. So I'm running through this whole thing, and there's really in this whole not very long file, there's just

one paragraph. This is this is this is what research is actually like. You read through hundreds of pages until you come across the one paragraph, hopefully well that we'll actually have something useful in it. So it's this guy, the guy that's reporting as an mid local officer, who's actually you know, Crowley has been sort of hanging around at his neck of the wood up around in the Hudson River valley. And they know that Crowley had written for these

pro German magazines prior to this. Now, the US is already this is nineteen eighteen, the United States is in the war. So you know, anybody British or otherwise who's considered to have written for a pro German magazine is suspect. So they're thinking about arresting it. And they make an inquiry to the British consulate in New York. And here's the key element of this.

Let's see what we have here. Let's see it was determined that Alistair Crowley was an employee of the British government at present in this country an official business of which the British Consul New York has full cognizance. Now, the importance of that, which is really more like a sentence than a paragraph, is that it meant. This is what jumped out to me that what Croley had been saying about working for the British government wasn't bullshit, that was he was.

So what is stated here, what the British Consul stated was that he is an employee of His Majesty's government and we know what he's doing and basically layoff, let him continue doing his thing. Now that's interesting because it then shit, it takes all of Krohley's comments and it puts them in a different perspective. But of course what it doesn't tell you. What doesn't it tell you what? What is he employed doing? What's his job? Well,

there are only so many possibilities for that. He's not involved in anything economic, he's not there in the war mission, he's not part of any official British agency. And I've done enough research in that area that I've looked through the personnel list of every single British agency and Alister Crowley's nowhere to be found on it. So what is he doing? What's he doing that the consul would basically acknowledge that he's there, But then we're not going to tell you

what is going on. And that's because he is involved in clandestine work, he is involved in intelligence works. He was doing exactly what it was he said he was doing. So that then began this process of trying to figure out what that could be. So it's it's one of these things that comes in into you know, I said before that I was very interested in spy hunting. I suspect a lot of people being about spies, well, very rarely. You know, is it going to be obvious? It's never supposed

to be obvious, or you know, you're not doing your job. So what do you have to look for is you have to look for a sort of pattern of associations. Who do these people know, who do they come in contact with, what sort of things are they doing? And so in Crowley's case, you notice that he is the most obvious. Thing he did was that he infiltrated the German propaganda apparatus in New York. And the reason why that was important when he first arrived. So Crowley arrives in New York.

I always loved this part. He arrived in New York on Halloween aboard the Lusitania. The Lusitania is still going to be around for a few months, but it is a doomed ship. Okay, this this ship is going to be sunk by the Germans some months down the road. But he shows up, you know, on October the thirty first. Now that's one of those things that I think, you know, the same goes. Sometimes a

cigar is just a cigar. So you know, the Canard Line had a certain schedule and the Lusitania was going to arrive on the thirty first, and that's about it. I don't think Aleister Curley arranged that way. It just happened. I mean, maybe the universe arranged it that way, but he didn't. So he shows up in nineteen fourteen and from that time up through the middle of nineteen seventeen. This is one of these little historical details A

lot of Americans missed. The World War One was on, but the United States was neutral, so the US doesn't join the war until it's been going on for a better part of three years, and only in the latter part of it. So the United States is a neutral country in fourteen fifteen sixty even through the early part of nineteen seventeen, and therefore German diplomats and agents and British diplomats and agents are all sort of free to operate within the country

and scheme against each other, which they're doing. There is this kind of secret war which is going on between British and German agents, and then of course you got Russian and French agents thrown into that as well. So what Crow has done is that he creates this backstory about himself as being a renegade or as being an Irish rebel, because he has to come up with some

reason as to why he would be willing to essentially betray his country. And he is able to convince certain people in the German propaganda apparatus which is trying to sway American opinion towards Germany. And you know, even he will remark that they seem to be incredibly gullible, and I have to admit, they

never seem to ask the right questions. They take him at face value and they're completely bamboozled by And he then uses that means not only to figure out what the Germans are doing, doing propaganda wise, because he's setting at their private meetings where they're talking about where their next move is going to be. But he also makes suggestions to them. He argues that you might do things, which brings us back for a moment to that whole question about that doomed

ocean liner, the Lusitania. So in May nineteen fifteen, the Lusitania is a British liner, but it is torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Ireland by a German U boat. And you know that's that's always kind of a problem because you've just sunk a liner with a lot of passengers on it and including something like one hundred and twenty eight Americans go down with the ship. Now there's more than a thousand people to do, but there are Americans who

are killed. Now. The interesting thing is is that the British, the British Admiralty, which by the way, is the actual agency that Crowley works for. Okay, so Crowley is in this period of league is not employed by what will become six or five. He's employed by another intelligence agency, which is the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Division, the NID. See some of these things that gets complicated, and you you can kind of get lost in the

shuffle. Is that most countries have more than one intelligence agency. So we've got the CIA, there's the FBI, there's the NSA. There are a couple of others who've never heard of. But it's a house of many rooms. That's the way to think about it. Any kind of intelligence apparatus is a house of many rooms. So the Admiralty had been using the Lusitania to carry war supplies. So it's carrying passengers in the cabins below, in its

cargo hole, it's carrying gun cotton and unassembled shells. That means legally it's a target. So if you take an ocean liner and you put contraband on it, and then it can be and this actually is you know of these things less. There's actually an American inquiry into the Lusitania, and that's what they determine is that it was carrying contraband supplies. So as nasty as it was, the Germans were technically legally correcting what they did. It was fair

game. Now Crowley claims that it that the meetings of the German Propaganta Cabinet, the question came up about well you know what would be a big deal. You know, the Lusitania was sort of the pride of the British liner fleet, and so sinking it would be have some sort of propaganda value. And we know that they're carrying war supplies and it, so we have a reason to do it. But can we? But then the question came, how would they How would the American react to this, because you know,

we don't want to piss them off? And Crowley said, look, Americans are like children. They have no actual experience in the rough and tumble of great power politics, which practically speaking, in nineteen seventeen we didn't how quickly we learn, we didn't know that much about it. And he goes, Americans are like children. So what you have to do, if you have to treat them firmly, what you want to do is scare the be Jesus out of them. You want to show that the Germany is tough and determined,

it will stop it nothing. So if there's an ocean liner full of passengers and has got war supplies on it, it'll be sunk, and he goes, that will send the message you want to to the Americans. It will send the message that Germany is frightening and too tough to it, and he goes, that's what you want to do. Now, that's what he claimed he did. I wasn't there. I don't know whether he did it, but it kind of fits because that that did happen. Someone sold to

Berlin on that idea, But of course it had the opposite effect. It outraged people, It almost brought the US into the war two years early. And the main thing it did is that it completely poisoned American German relations. So from that point on, in much of the American press, to much of the American public, the Germans became the bad guys, and so Crawley

the boast. This was one of his great success just sell an idea to people on one basis when you're actually hoping that for have the opposite effect. So there are other things that came along. Most one of the things that's not in the book. So one of the things the questioning is that whether any updates. I may, at some point in the new Ark future do another edition of the book. There are things I can add to it. I don't think there's any huge amount of stuff I could add to it.

But one of the things I could add is that if you go some years on, if we go up to nineteen thirty nine, if we go up to the eve of the next war, World War two, there's a thing called a kind of it's basically a census, but it was called a survey of the British population, and it was an accounting of people in Britain. But one of the things that included, you know, the same sort of

stuff, their name, their address, their occupation. But then off sort of to the right hand side of the column, almost always in a blue pencil, the annotator would go along and they would note what sort of past military experience or association these people add. And it's interesting because what it tells you is that they're already expecting there's going to be a war, and what we want to do is to figure out who might be useful in that war,

who has the skills or experience that we might use. So we find Crowley under by the way, his real name, which is Edward Alexander Crowley. And that's the point I want to come back to, because it's also missed. But you find him under this, and it's got his address. I think it actually gives his This is nineteen thirty nine, and he gives his profession as psychoanalyst, which he claimed to be on various occasions. Your flood over there in blue pencil, it's written in Emergency List NID. So

NID remember stands for Naval Intelligence Division. Emergency list was a list of former naval personnel people with past experience who could be called up for emergency service in wartime. So it's kind of an auxiliary list of people you would have. But the important thing here is that Crowley's on it. He's on the and I so that that's one of those things. To me, that's another confirmation that he's working, he's always been working for the NID, and that he's

on their emergency list, even twenty years on from the war. The other thing which is intriguing about being on the emergency list is that, so far as I can tell, in every other case I can find, and I've only looked at a certain number of people to be on that you were generally a naval officer of some kind, you had a commission. I've never seen any other evidence. I've never even seen Croley claim that he held the commission. But this is a suggestion that he may have and it comes back to

this thing of his real name. So again, is his name, the only legal name he ever possessed, he never changes. It is Edward Alexander Crowley, which means that there are always two people in one person. So here's an interesting way to think about it. Alistair Crowley, the version of

Alexander. See what he does is he sort of stylizes his middle name because he's you know, he doesn't want to be Eddie Junior, which is interesting because among his family and close friends, he was always known as Eddie. So I want you to think of that the next time you see a picture

of Alistair Crowley and to say Eddie Eddie. Do you ever wonder if that's like because I have questioned this, like and I think that these people take on like some stage persona yeah, character name, But like, now, if Alosa Croley is dead, does that mean that Edward Crowley is alive? I mean, did both of them die in December nineteen forty seven, or well, is it just a character that's on the stage. It's now done

and dead, but the person still lives on. I mean, you just gotta stop wearing ritual clothes and just go by a different name and nobody would know who the hell you are. You know, anything is possible. I mean, in all probably he seems you know, I say he was dead when they said he was dead. I've just wondered that about all the people too. Yeah, but it could, It could be employed by other people,

and it has been employed before. Yeah. So you know, you got to be certain about things that it comes down to, like facts, and the facts is you actually see the dead body? All right? If somebody just tells you that someone is dead, remember, it's hearsay, like Asama bin Laden, it's hearsay. Nobody, well you know they told me. See this comes back to this point. The reason why most of us believe things is because somebody told us they were true, correct, and we

just repeat whatever it was that we were told. We seldom ever think about and most people never do. They just heard the story. But the reason why you think this is because someone told you that, not because you have

any experience with it yourself. So Crowley sort of began to craft this alistair identity as a teenager, and then later through most of his public professional life, he becomes the occultist Alistair Crowley. It is exactly as you suggested, Nick, it's a stage name, it's a persona he's created, but he's always running parallel to that, existing simultaneously every moment of the day is Edward Alexander Crowley. And so the question is are they always doing exactly the same

thing. I mean, the checks come to Edward, to Alistair whenever you would get them, and it you know, at one point it occurred to me is that I've been trying to, you know, try to find documentation. And an interesting case that I actually relate in the book is that m I five is the British Internal Security Agency, so they're like our FBI. They they're not a spy agency, they're a counter spy agency, so they're

always sniffing around what people are doing. So I wrote to m I five you can do that, and I said, do you have any files on Alistair Crowley? Okay, I'm looking, you know, and you have to give the whole sort of you know, it's like they don't know who he is, so you have to tell them, oh, yeah, he was alive from this period. And I got back a reply going, oh, you know, it turns out that we don't, you know, we might have had some, but they were The excuse you generally get is that other

were files of the past. But yeah, we threw them away or they were too old. Nobody wouldn want to over look at these things, so we burned them. Okay, that's not why you burn files. Okay, you don't destroy files because you think they're useless. You destroy files because you think they're possibly compromising. So now the odd thing was I going through other files, I found cross references the files on Crowley. I found not one. I found two, two files with two different numbers, both relating to

Alistair Crowley. So I thought I would be a smart ass about it and I wrote back to them. I said, oh, you know, I found these two references to these two files, and you know, maybe you could look again. Got back another polite letter which basically said that, oh, first of all, it said, thank you for bringing this to our attention, thank you for telling us that we had these files on Crowley, and we've gone back and checked, and you know we did, but they

all got destroyed. We can't locate them anymore. So here, again, is a typical thing you'll find in dealing with intelligence agencies. If you're trying to get information, the first answer will be we don't have anything. If you then can show any evidence that they did, it will then be like, oh, yeah, we did, but we don't have that anymore. So that's what's happening. How am I going to know that? So, you know, he occurred to me that maybe maybe I'm looking unto the wrong

name. Maybe I should ask really be asking for stuff under Edward Alexander Crowley, because they wouldn't make that connection for me. Well, by the way, I try that, and they don't have any of those either. Even though maybe they're a were, they're not entirely sure. But I still suspect. And one of the things I want to continue looking into is that if you probe around to the right places and you look under the right name, if you look for Edward as opposed to Alistair, you're going to find more

things than you would suspect otherwise. So I even we get that hand to anybody else who wants to go searching after these things as well. So I think that, yeah, that part of what Croley is doing. What Alistair Crowley is is his stage name, it's his public persona. It's this person that he plays and the tragedy, and I do think that Croley in some ways is a kind of tragic figure. I mean, you know, he was an asshole in a lot of ways. There's no getting around that.

He was not an easy person to deal with. But nevertheless, he did get saddled with a reputation that he did not legitimately deserve. Not that he didn't embrace that for a long time. You know, when in nineteen twenty two the British press described him as the wickedest man in the world, he

kind of thought that was cool because he liked pissing off the authorities. You know, it's you know, you like making people mad, and the whole idea you can get these you know, pressy past press barons so uptight, you know, the pearl clutters to clutch them even tighter and called, well, you must have achieved something if they think you're the wickedest man in the world. Yeah, otherwise they don't talk about you at all when you don't

exist. You know, infamy is just fame with more letters. So but the thing is, the thing you keep in mind all your children out there, is that once you get that reputation, it is a stink. You will never get off of you. And that's what he began when he later wanted to be taken seriously, when he wanted to be seen as something other than, you know, some sort of creepy Croley another Cooeen. He found that that he couldn't that idea had now been completely implanted in the public mind

and they didn't want to. A case of that was in I think it's in nineteen thirty four. There was a woman in Britain by the name of Nina Hamnet who wrote a book called The Naked Torso I don't know how I remember that, but I did, and it was, you know, it was this autobiographical thing. But at some point Decker to say earlier Crowley had run a kind of a cult commune on the north coast of Sicily, the

the abbey of Thelema, a place called Cephalou. You know, this was It was a miserable failure in a lot of ways, but this was and people came there and you know, they perform magic, had sex, got sick, a whole variety of things happened, and Nina Hamnet's and she and her boyfriend were there, and her boyfriend got sick and died. Her boyfriend died of typhoid calood. The water wasn't any good, and you know, there wasn't anything terribly weird about it. Crowley in fact told him don't drink

out of that well, and he did it anyway. Yeah, I heard it was Capwood. It was a ritual thing that they did, and was actually a cat that poisoned him. I think that's her story, but no, she's got so she told this whole story about child sacrifice and Crowley being responsible for her boyfriend's death. So he decided, Okay, here's my chance because I know that what she's saying here alive. So I'm going to sue

her for libel. She's libeling me but she was, and then will then go into court and I can establish that this book is a massive lies and therefore this can help undercut all these other stories about me. I can I can redeem my reputation by suing Nina Hamnet and showing that her stories are lies. Well, he handled the whole thing poorly, But the main thing was is that once he got into court, everyone was against him. The judge hated him. It had already decided he was, you know, the scum

of the earth. Most of the jury had already read about him in the papers and knew who he was. And Crowley's lawyers could present medical certificates from Italian authorities showing the guy's cause of death. It didn't matter. Okay, It was creepy Crowley who was bringing charges against this woman, and he lost the case. It bankrupted him, and all her defense had to do was

just to go through and read newspaper or so. What they did, of course, is they put him on trial, and they weren't going to try to prove what she said was good, right, They were just really going to prove that if she says anything horrible about him, there are already so many or the horrible things about him that this you know that somehow it must be true. So his whole calculation was completely wrong. But he was doing that in his effort to try it in some way, get to redeem his

reputation in some way, but he couldn't and he never really does. But I think it's that situation that you can get. You know, if you play a role long enough, the role begins to play you, the character becomes you, right. I think that's what happened to him, and of course that brings up the interesting question is that if Alistair Crowley was a stage name, if it was a persona, then how much of everything connected to

it is fake? Yeah, yeah, I mean there's that, But I mean there's also the House at Lockness that I mean, would why would to me, Paige be interested in it if there wasn't occult stuff going on there.

I believe that the rituals were actually occurring. There's even this idea that with the Lucidania, uh, that the thing that Churchill would do and he was he was the what do you call it, the first Royal Admiral of or whatever it was called, uh, while he was in Admiralty Intelligence, Crowley was and that that's that thing was supposed to be the sign of Typhon

which they were evoking for the ritual of taking down the Lusitania. So there's that idea out there that that's a thing, and I think that there's a lot of valid I mean brought he you know, developed thilemma. He was given basically the reins of the Oto and added the sodomy degree the eleventh. I mean, he did a lot of he did a lot of things that were well, very vaulted, So it's not like he would didn't have an

interest in it and he was just playing a part. You know. I'm trying to raise that possibility because on the one hand, you have people who would argue that, well, we were hard to find people who had argue that Crowley was was completely a fake because their whole idea was that magic and everything he stood for, the whole rum of a coult is nothing but fakery,

and therefore since he promotes it, he is ergo a fake. Well, I've thought this is like, we know, like the ot O and the AA was like Cia or Rosicrucian orders that they use as a puppet. It's just to be like, yeah, he'll be the full guy and they'll just I do question. I'm not saying that Crowley wasn't a screwed up guy, but I actually whatever you're saying, Rick, I think I question a lot of his stories if they're even true, Tol, especially his mountain climbing.

I'm sorry, I think those are actually occult stories. If you understand occultism and magic, you'll see exactly what they're saying about Crowley. There. He's not climbing a fucking mountain. I could be well, I'm sort of raising this to suggest that here again do you enter this realm of uncertainty? Hey, and this is the very thing are you talking about. The people might be up on the mountain to say, yeah, that was Crowley up

there, whoever the fuck he paid. Probably, so you're talking about like desolation of the Apex like it's actually it's a reference to a type of ritual or I think he's just doing by work at that time, Nick, I don't know. I mean, I do think like what he was saying, I do think he played both sides. I do think like he was definitely working both sides. But I just there's too many stories about him, And I'm not saying it to defend the guy. That just some of them.

To me, if you're into occultism, and even if you understand his writing and see certain things he hits on, it's like, well, you're seeing it in these stories that's supposedly describing his life as well. So I go, how much of this is ciphered occultism for other occultists to see, how much is bullshit or how much is it real? It's all of them. It comes into this. It's the same sort of thing. There are things

that we experience, there are things that we're told. So our whole general grasp of reality is based on this amalgam of things that we've experienced and then things that we're told more than what we're told, and we're experienced, and we also know that we can seem that we we don't have exactly the same experience to others who might have been there at the same time. So it's all very it's spooky, it's subjective, It depends upon perspective, and it

depends upon your own mindset at the time. So I mean, here's one case in point, when Crowley claimed that he was working for British intelligence in New York in World War One. That is I am of different things true, Okay, the full ramifications of everything that that included. There are probably lots of other things we don't know about. I mean, by going through

and looking at his actions, you know what I would do. Much of what I do in the book is that, Okay, here's here's essentially that the record of what he did and who he knew, where he went during that period of time. There are some things in that that seem to be very clearly intelligence related is connection. You know his writing for the Fatherland. All right, that's that's clearly that one of the things. But that wasn't all there was to it. And then there are other things that are in

some ways less certain but possible. So at one point he goes on this whole Yeah, he gets money out of it. This is one of the things to look for people that don't have money who suddenly get money in their hands. So the thing that Crowley is continually complaining about during the war years in the States is that he's not getting any money. He's not getting any money. He complains later that, yeah, that the British government paid him,

but they didn't pay him very much. So suddenly he gets enough money in his pocket so that he can go on a cross country, a strail circuit journey all the way to the West coast of the United States and back to New York. Wasn't cheap now, was it cheap? Then? So where does he get the money? And then why does he take this particular route, and why does he visit these particular places. So on the part of it is that he's performing magical rituals along the way, and I just

to come back to a point the game of earlier. I think Crawley believed in magic, that he took his occult beliefs seriously. But I also don't think, if you look and read carefully, that he necessarily knew exactly what was going on. He's as confused about this as anybody else. I mean, there's one point I think it's in magic and theory and practice where he goes. You know, you don't really worry too much about whether these things

are happening because of external for you know, is it something external? Are there gods and demons and entities who are doing this or is it just some manifestation of your own psyche. So it's adviced basically is that don't worry about it. If he works, the only thing is if it works. If it works, you don't care why it works. But he didn't really know. He didn't really know whether this was something I am doing or whether it's

something which is being done to me, you know what I mean. Another thing that I think is like kind of like the hammer on the point that you're saying. Another thing that me and Lisa have even noticed ourselves from covering

like older people that were you know, before Crowley and before Math. You know, you start to almost see I think, especially with Crole, I think it kind of like had a clue and then ripped off other people's ideas and just changed your art a little bit and kind of just rebranded someone else's idea. Yeah, well that's I mean, that's a coviding before it's just

ripping it off and renaming it. Yeah. I think of how many people they're all probably roughly acquainted with Madame Blovotsky and theosophy, you know, root races, you know, you know, ascended math. You have to find out how many times that's been ripped off by every cult leader between No, it's one of the biggest ones. I think. I was, I was,

you know, uh watching this uh documentary about this strange cult. They're all strange, but this was the Mother God called the Love has One You haven't seen that you really should, because first of all, it's one of the lamest cults I've ever heard of. Most of the time, it's like you try to figure out why would they believe that? But this is when like, what on earth is the matter with you people? You know what?

You know? The ahead of it is this woman who is a former manager of McDonald's, and she thinks she's the Mother God and she has to process negative energy by drinking yourself into a stupor. But this was the best part of it. She's guided by her version of the ascended Masters, which I think she calls the Celestials, and the Chief, her sort of archangel, Gabriel, is the ghost of Robin Williams. Yes, yes, so

you've got some. When it was telling you that I guess I need more alcohol in order to save the world, and oh, the ghost of Robin Williams was here and he told you you all have to do this and give me your money. Is this the same one that turned like grayskin? Because she was giving her colonials, she essentially poisons herself and she ends up as this kind of green gray money. And of course when she's dead, they can't accept that she's dead, so they just keep her moldering corpse, you

know, surrounded by Christmas lights. But it's just it's all got insane, so it's decorated like a Christmas tree. Maybe it's just you know, it's like she went out on the web and she, you know, read something about theosophy and thought Oh, it's interesting, So I'll just come up with my own version of it, but it just gets repeated over Well, you're talking about rip off? What did Crowley rip off? For sure? The oto, he didn't come up with it. It was a German secret society

formed years before, and he really just sort of stole it. You know, you know, no offense to you, Eddie, but none of you did just sort of steal it. And they kind of were impressed by Crawley because of stuff that he stole from Mathers that made him was intelligent, right, I mean, isn't that kind of how that went? Well, yeah, he got in there, you know, he would try to take whatever him but yeah, he stole all the stuff from from the Hermitic Order of

the Golden Dawn and god knows what else. But I think you steal from each other. And I've thought it's funny about that, Like, you know, every secret society obviously they're gonna ask you. You're not supposed to repeat anything. But it's like the guy who's his name on disorder actually ran his mouth about a lot of stuff he wasn't supposed to from the Golden Dawn. But you want me to not I just think I just find that kind of

contradictory with the OTO. You're a guy had no problem running his mouth about the Golden Down. It is, but it's yeah, it's so yeah. See, he essentially just appropriate. He stole the OTO part of it. I mean, some of them never really recognized him. But it wasn't something that he developed. It wasn't the name that he came up with, but

it was a good vehicle. He wanted something to promote the Lima, which just never you know, Rick wasn't he liked the perfect asset though, because some of these secret societies were impenetrable, and some of the people that were attending these secret societies were people that they wanted to get secrets from, even if it's just a scientist, even if it's just a mathematician, a physicist, or whoever, if if you were fighting a technical none an intelligent war.

As these societies, as these agencies were calling themselves intelligence. And for some reason, it seems like to me that these intelligence agencies, regardless if it's British, American, Russian, they're all interested in the esoteric. They're all interested in the mind. The mind is the last frontier that everybody wants to conquer, then you want to know what these people are saying, what these practices are about, these rituals, what are they gaining? Are they

able to manifest or infiltrate other people's mind? And he was the perfect asset for them in that whole regard. And I think it was somebody had mentioned that he had and correct me if I'm wrong. I think he had kind of food barred an op or something in Italy and then he kind of was trying to recover from that or something. Correctly, that's connected to this abbey of Thilema, Okay, and the reason the Italians it was the early part

of Mussolini's government. But the reason the Italians expelled him, I think their public reason was because he was morally reprehensible, so they expelled him from the country. But in the internal documentation they suspect him of being a spy. Okay, And it's the same reason he gets kicked out of France in nineteen twenty nine. The French poll his residency permit and they make some sort of excuse like he was fooling around with people. We think maybe we were involved

in drug dealers, but basically we think he was a spy. We think we think he was a British spy. And by the way, the French always think the English is spying on them because they always are so excuse if your France. You know, they learned this with Joan of Arc never trust the English. So but that was his uh, you know, in Germany in the early thirties, the Germans thought that he was a spy, and

he is consistently. But it's there's this whole this the thing. One of the things that intelligence and occultism has in common is the obsession with secrets and how to keep it secrets, and how to keep it secrets. So what do you want to do is you want to get other people's secrets, then

you want to hide them away and and embed them in something else. So this is where of the whole idea of coming up with ritualistic language and allegory as a way of some times disguise stories are just ciphered stories and somebody else well, now that's like, that's why I think when he's when he's in the States during the war, he writes he sort of created this his version of Sherlock Holmes called Simon if Okay, So simon If was his his first

sort of occult detective and and the stories and you can find them there. They're published the Scrutinies of Simon If. They collect the stories, and actually most of them are oh, I won't say most, some of them are pretty good. And but the thing about them is that he's writing about things that are going on. And if you go through some of these stories, you can find that he's writing about real places and real people and to some

degree real events. So he's talking about in one of the stories that all involves using o Oiji board to sort of ferret out this German conspiracy. And the od thing is is that that's based upon something that actually happened, because there's another British intelligence official, a guy named Norman Thwaites, who writes his own version of that where he talks about the same thing. I mean, he and Crowley are giving slightly different versions of So they'd involved a young woman

with psychic abilities at al Ouiji board and a German plot. So Crawley is embedding these fictional stories about a fictional character, which is so first of all, simon If is based on him. Simon If is just his version of himself. It's another character he's created, and he's creating these stories that's talking about events that, to some extent actually happened. But it also probably there are things that are so here you don't know. You've entered twilight zone.

You've entered the twilight And see that's me what history is. History is the Twilight Zone. You get into it and you're never quite sure what's real and what is it. Some of it is okay. The Simon, the character in the story, is actually a version of the person who's writing it, and it incorporates things that actually happened, and it incorporates fanciful elements that went on as well. So there's a female character that shows up in some of

the Simon if story is called Dolores Cass. It's sort of like this this college girl that he takes under his wing. And so a question that I and a couple of other people had is that was there an actual basis for that character? So who in real life was Dolores Cass or is she completely fictional? Did he just make her up? Is she based on a real person? And if she is, how closely is she based on that real person? We never figured that one out. But if you go through you

could sort of look who the potential candidate is. I tend to think that she's an amalgam of two or three different people. But then now that this is the other thing you find that's that's what literature, this thing is full of. You you end up with a fictional character that isn't based on one person, but if is based on several different people, incorporating different different aspects of them. But it was you know the value, Well, let's think

of it this way. What if magic works, particularly in this sense, in the Crowleian sense that that one can alter well whether, as he put it, you can create change and can formity with will, that you can use consciousness individual or collective to alter reality. That's what he's talking about.

You can shape reality through will. Now, what if you can just imagine the intelligence implications of that, If you could possibly so, you're certainly going to want to look into it. So if you ever wonder whether the CIA and other agencies are constantly you know, they've got a bunch of remote viewers or psychics in a back room somewhere, and then they do that constantly, it's because there is the there is the you have to figure out whether that

works. I think I think that was the beginning of proto quantum mechanics. There's certainly an overlap with that as well, because because if you don't look into it, if you don't prove to yourself it can work or it can't work, then you can't know what it is your opponents were doing. I just think of this way. Should figure out how you can put curses on God, a death curse God. That's the easiest assassination in the world and

is completely untraceable. People will just drop dead and we'll we had nothing to do with it. Can we do that? I don't know. It's like a few million dollars and black funds and find out looks about making people drop dead through will heart attacks. We got to try. Well, it's it's the whole, it's the minute stare at goats, Okay, and there's there's a real story for it. So what am I doing? Why am I staring at the goat? I'm trying to concentrate to stop its heart. Okay,

this guy's gotta go. This is this is this is what the purpose of this would be. Somebody, and we've got to know. Yeah, I did want to ask you a question. I hate to go back a little bit. It was just like an idea that actually a listener had in a chat on mine. I think somehow we were talking about Crowley in like different addresses, and I guess, first off, I'd like to ask you, do you know how many places? And have to put you on the

spot, how many different addresses did he live at? Why he was supposedly, you know, I guess an agent, because like I guess, like, let's say there just in the States during World War I wana his entire life, no, like when you think he might have actually been working like for intelligence, well somewhere. I didn't compile it, but a friend of mine went through and tried to come up with every address they could confirm. Or he lived in the US between nineteen fourteen and nineteen nineteen, so it

isn't the US for about five years. And I've got that around some way. It's many he moved around. Yeah, And the reason why I was even bringing that up is because somebody brought up a good point. I thought about that, and not necessarily every address, but like I would wonder, are those addresses actually kind of like safe houses for the intelligence and their housing

him there to begin with. So it's just it was just kind of like a you know, just a wondering idea, like, you know, maybe people that have lived there prior and after might also be intelligence as well. That could always be an interesting question. He lived in hotels, and I know one of them was a Rewort hotel which was in Manhattan, which later became a much more CD place than it was at the time, but a

lot of artists needed to stay there. I mean. The one thing, the one thing that the British didn't want in that period when he when he's actively working, is they don't they don't want to have anything that would connect them with him. Everything is supposed to separate them. So that's one of his complaints is that he's largely left on his own, so they're not going to do much for him. When he really needs it, they'll come up

with money. This is something else to look for in Crawley's whole career. You noticed that his whole life, basically once he spends his inheritance, was exhausted by nineteen seventeen. That was the question I had. Yeah, yeah, I think I think nineteen step that's when he gets one of the last chunks from his mother. Yeah, for cruy al from mom and uh. And there's this interesting relationship there, but it's you know, but he goes

through his money. Uh. And he could have he could have frittered his life away in pleasant debauchery if he just had some sense of how to manage money. And he doesn't. He's terrible with money. He borrows money from people, he never pays it back. He's not particularly a good friend. I think I think he would have been a real pain in the ass of a friend because he would constantly you know, it's the one that never has

a place to stay, never has any money. He's always complaining. There's a book, you know, here's this group of followers in California, Gopy Lodge in Los Angeles, one that Jack Parsons gets connected to. And there's there's a to me a kind of revealing book that was written by Martin Starr called The Unknown God, which which is was essentially sort of the history of

the Agappy Lodge and of the Oto and in Hollywood and Los Angeles. And it doesn't really amount to much of anything, and but it has it deals with the correspondence between Crowley who's sitting over in London, constantly complaining about one thing or another, and all he wants from these people is money, and

he just treats them. These are people, you know, Wilfred Smith and others who misguided or not, have largely devoted their lives to him and really do send him any spare amounty they have, and he just treats them like shit. He constantly complains he is ungrateful for anything they do to him, and you know, and then that to me sort of epitomized Crawleys as an asshole, as someone who's just a difficult person to deal with. That manipulation

like that. I don't know why I'm hearing myself, but that's that's a that's a tool of manipulation though like the beaten dog. You know, it's more loyal if you did it like crap type of thing. And with him, I mean he probably at that time, if we believe the story has had multiple addictions, so that type of attitude would also come out too.

If you were fiending, you know, you would want it. You would want the money before you had the itch, well ahead of time, before you had the itch, right because after that you're out of your mind. So yeah, he's but it's it's it's a toxic relationship. Yes he's manipulating, but it's it's just it's he's just being He's an enigma though who was passionate him. Yeah, Like there's certain people he does actually take under his wing with like some sort of tenderness. So it's weird how he acts.

It's it's very And here's the thing that I wonder because when you look at his childhood, those brethrens like the Plymouth, the Exclusive, going back to the Moravian you can even go back to the Asiatic like those those were the converts from from Jacob Frank that created those would then become Christian Zionist Brethrens like that was that was those converts that became you know, Catholics and Christians that formulated those The Asiatic Brethren was started by Jacob Frank's brother in law. So

you have this Sabotine Francis type of thing which is completely inverted. You have the child abuse, the sex, all that stuff, all the all the breaking of the of the taboos. How much of that was part of Crowley's you know childhood that may have made him more of the beast than we would

imagine. And that type of person Francis is never supposed to be what he is outwardly, you know, inuitarly, not outwardly, right, So he would be the perfect type of candidate four type of like a like an intelligence

agency type of spy because he lived that way. You always have a fake persona for the world where you're you know, you're you're coveting and you're secreting, you know, what you actually do in private, and they like the whole thing is like you know, wife swapping orgies, blood rituals, drinking blood and all kinds of stuff like that child rape was one of those, and passing around your own children. So who knows what he had experienced.

Well, there again, if you look from the outside, what you see in the Crowleys as a you know, a puritanical, a well off trade family. You know they're they're they're not aristocrats. You know, they've they've made money in trade. They're the bourgeoisieois right, respectable, right and respectable, a very respectable family and members of a non conformist Christian fundaments a sect.

Now, what kind of weird things could possibly go on in a Christian fundamental asseect all right, maybe nothing okay, And see you don't know. And it's not trying to assist that it's one thing or another, but the that's just it. You don't know. All you see is the kind of outside of this family. You don't know what the internal dynamics were in one form or another. He certainly had a very bad relationship with his uncle. Yes, his mother's brother, Tom Booth, last name is Booth, hated

him and I think probably his uncle despised me. You know what, what exactly was the root of that? Why was the uncle so negative towards him and he towards the other one. It's, you know, trying to understand that there's nothing more mysterious than the dynamic of human interactions. He was devastated by his father's death, and I think it was like some kind of lung or not tongue cancer or something, right like, that's some kind of weird

thing with his mouth, that cancer. I think that's what. Yeah, he idolized his father. Of course, you know, his father died eleven so he could he could you know, you never had to deal with him. He never lived through his dad as an adolescent word. And I'm almost wondering that doesn't necessarily mean that it was absent of the like sexual abuse, because that bond can still remain there even if there was that, and that

could have been the reason why he was so devastated. It doesn't mean that there was, but that doesn't mean that there was either, right exactly. It's just we're creating our narratives that we cannot look into anymore. It's one of those things. And and it's opaque because that's something that doesn't doesn't yield

physical records. You know, I don't know. Maybe he run across as the chest and a bunch of people wrote person the letters in one form or another, but you're not going to find that, so you really don't know. They wouldn't be very frank to them if they wrote it down anyway. Oh you're not. People do that even though they're not supposed to. Okay, even spy, you never write and never put anything in writing. Ok

I hope you've all learned that so far. But I think one of the the underlying themes of Crowley it was everything was supposed to be interpreted backwards. Everything was supposed to be interpreted opposite of what you see and what you read.

If if I'm not mistaken, he said, you even talked about at some point like to be if you're going to be a legitimate and what do you call a serious magician, you should learn to talk backwards, walk backwards, you know, all kinds of weird stuff like to do in backwards. It almost makes you wonder if the realm that he's trying to access is like a mirror image of ours, so they only notice you if you're moving the

same way that they are. It's kind of a weird thing, right, yeah, or so much like with how everything is inverted, everything is backwards les, yeah, and then in the oculum, yeah, no, absolutely. And then he was a huge fan of the author from Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll. And Lewis Carroll had the condition where he in his mind everything was already flipped. Like in terms of seeing things, it was already flipped. He didn't have the readjustment as a normal vision and as well as

reading. And I think it's the Alice in Wonderland syndrome, which it is. Weirdly, it's the acronym sounds like iowas, which was the entity that he contacted in Egypt, so you know, the similarities are there hugely well as usual, there's you know, it's so likely you can read things on multiple levels, which is system with me. Is just another way of saying you don't understand it. And then and that's that's I think that's okay to do. I think it's really where you've got to start out is going I

don't understand this. I mean, there's something here, but I don't know exactly what it is. And it's you've got to, you know, to sort of keep yourself honest in a way. You don't want your narrative to get too carried away with it. So it's that is sometimes sometimes the story, the script can can take over because you want to make all of this turnout. You know, you want to be able to say I under I

know everything, and I understand everything. And then that's where you know, you've you've always got this slippery slope where speculation begins to turn into fact or into portraying the fact. Okay, where something it possibly could be to things into where it is in some way, and we like certainty, we like the story to come out into a particular way. But the reality is that things aren't certain. Nothing is, you know. I think like what you're

kind of getting at, and I think like what you're saying. I guess it would be the after effect of like trying to guess that things that you really don't know anything about, but making it certain. I feel like you

actually kind of described and it's my just my opinion. I do think it may be kind of due to occultist or something something with the Internet, but I feel like that thinking has kind of interjected itself into conspiracies hugely, and especially like Quanon stuff, to where you're going to tumble down this just absurdity of things and just keep going and just almost roam with fantasies that you've created so you can make sense of something your brain can't act rapids head around.

Like I actually wonder if that's like part of like mentally syopping people. We're gonna give you ship that you're actually gonna play with so much you'll never even know what the fuck happened. Well, you can give them enough information and then lead them to towards a particular conclusion. I mean, you always have

to somehow get them to think that it's their idea. That's you know, you're you're manipulating in a particular way, like the Delphi method, right, Like when you you with leading questions, you kind of get people to expose their own uh what do you call it, the weaknesses in their in their argument. It's a pretty selected Yeah, you're kind of leading it right by bye your questioning. You're getting them to have to examine themselves. Yeah.

Well, it's the other thing that we all confront is the role also being continually manipulated all the time. I mean, just look at advertising, all right, there's there's nothing which is you know, it's one of the things that you know, certainly from the time I've retired martly because it's you know, useful. Is that. I admit to being kind of a YouTube junkie. All right. I used to watch television. Now I just watch stupid crap on YouTube. And sometimes it's it's good. Sometimes it is just to

I do enjoy every now and then just stupid mindless crap. I like people spied lunking. Okay, it's going down in caves for some reason. Satisfied. But the one thing, and this this isn't any like I haven't noticed anything that shouldn't have been obvious to me to begin with. And I'm embarrassed to say that this didn't strike me them and I looked at it. But if you go through when you look at the descriptions of most videos on YouTube,

they're all exaggerated. Okay, it's all it's clickbait, it's it's never it never comes up with what it is that it advertises it's going to be. And this is just purely manipulated. This is YouTube doing this. It's marketing. It's marketing, and you know, uh, like I'm big into true crime sometimes just to like sometimes I even use that just like decompressed or just like I know that's probably not the nicest thing to think about, but

whatever to decompress, but I'll put that on. But there's like certain channels that I've been noticing, you know, for a while now that I will see that the headline is not exactly what happened in the crime, it's what if once you press play and get into it, it hasn't actually happened. Co Burgers, you know, they got them, Like what the fuck? Like you know, like you just played with my emotions over the title of this show. Okay, So did you just mention and yeah, you know

that I live in the town where that murder occurred. We've been dying to ask you about the pulse who's been talking about Yes, it's so, it's it's it put Moscow, you know where, like the murder capital of the Pacific north West or over that now. But but that's one of the EPs, is that I do watch some of these things. The US is.

You know, you've got all these two crime shows and these various people who are you know, whether they're psychics who are trying to figure out the case, but there are people who just come up with they've never been here. Okay, this is an example of someone who's trying to analyze. There's one woman in particular, and apparently she can use Google Maps, she just can't

use it well. And she's got all of this whole sort of geography of the place in her mind, and so she describes the relationships between play and it's just it's not there. If you just went and looked at the place, you would realize that these plays are not in any way and connected to each other. You know, the tunnels under the university are just perfectly normal

access to tunnels there's no gold mine. You know, it's just one just I can't describe it any other way than one moronic story after the other, which is completely based on nothing. And and it's just and I just want to tell these people that you're not helping. Okay, this is not helping anyone, This is not solving the case. You're not getting any closer. You're just free form fantasizing. Well you can, if you can do it, but it's you know, you're just describing a place that does not exist.

It exists only in your mind. Uh, it's not actually there. So you're saying that it's not the catacombs of a mythrae in temple underneath that uh university for a definite fact, that there is no mith raem under the university. But I'm pretty damn sure there isn't. There's nothing that would be extremely So, you know, I don't I don't particularly I don't hate fraternities and sororities. I have, you know, full disclosure. I've never been

part, never wanted. I think they're weird, but nevertheless, that's what people want to do. But you know, I've known enough people and then that they're relatively you know, there's probably some beast reality that goes on farm animals, that type of thing. You know, nothing that that's but I'd say that's about as far as it goes, you know, human sacrifice. I think it stops probably before that, but it depends of course upon the

fraternity and the way their things are going. But it's yeah, people with just and and and I think in in the the Idaho four case, in the in that case, one of the things that feeds is is simply the lack of information. And and because there is no information, then it will just be there's there. There's one particular piece of video, the grub truck

video. You ever seen this, and it's the place where the two girls or to them, it's just it's a grub truck of just out there for people get out of bars and they can go and eat food and throw it up before they get home. And there it's just it's there's nothing unusual going on. It's just a typical night at this place. But people have gone over every frame of this and they have somehow almost that every single person there is somehow involved in the murder, all of them. And it's just this

gigantic all encompassing conspiracy. You know that involves macaroni and cheese and you know nothing. It's just you know, I have actually as you, I don't think this would be such a big of a case on like YouTube and conspiracy people if there is more information, Because you're right, I think the lack of it gives the lack of information to imaginations and over time. Yes, but it's a prime example, I guess if I had a point in here.

The example is that this is where with a lack of information, people want to create a narrative, and so they'll will create all of these different scenarios about the murder and who was responsible to the rest of it, some more absurd than others, all different levels of absurdity. But it's all based because they don't actually have any real and so they then do what people do, They make it up, which ties back into your point about history.

How you have such a lack of maimation they have to make it. You did that, well, you know, you got to come up with it. We just can't leave it unexplained. So there's got to be so this this is why it happened. Well maybe it did, maybe it didn't. So are we talking about the same one where there's like sticks laid across the body, and it was one okay, okay, okay, gotcha. This

was just you know, knife slaughter ry. We don't have those a regular run of the military crest, just you know, just bloody murder for some unknown purpose. Rights. So I had a well, now you guys go first, because I was gonna I I had a quick comment. I spent some time with Crowley's handwritten journals, and I started to see how and this

is prior to this was for the vision and the voice. His publication is considered I guess the second most important what he considered from book of the law, and and I started to see how he was formulating, formulizing the actual

book. And so he would write on one side of the page and on the other side there was like mathematical formulations, or he was you know, scribbling something, drawing stuff out, or there was actual sometimes math equations, and then you know, you would see Jamatria tup because he would write out, you know, a phrase and then the numbering and what have you.

And so it's it gave me the impression that there was a lot more going on prior to I mean, obviously with any person who writes, you're formulating how you're going to style it. One other thing that stuck out to me the most was there were specific words that were capitalized over and over and over that had no real noun importance to be capitalized, and you and they're in

there. It included also like in an addition to where I guess they gave it to him and he would circle and cross out like, no, this had need to be capitalized. No, this word's not capitalized, even though it was the exact same more two pages before. And so you almost start to see like a method to the madness of it into where it felt like

it was code. It felt like there was a cipher. It felt like there there was more, much more thought than just hey do this, do that you might get this result or use this ritual, use this spell or

whatever. It much more layered than any of that. And not to not to go on about it, but it almost seemed like people that they kind of look at some of this stuff that they take it at face value and they're not truly seeing that all of this other stuff of probably his upbringing and then his involvement in all the secret societies, and then as well as some of the visions he claimed to have had that there was that the actual book,

final product was much more layered than actual people were giving credit for, and not to you know, go on about that. It just it seemed like, I don't know that there was there was much more going on there, and that potentially this final product was something that involved intelligence, that involves some sort of cipher that involved also a coded message out to the rest of the world world for many different walks of life. Well, first, yeah,

I think you're absolutely right. I can't say in detail, but I think you're you're onto something that there's there's always a different levels of meaning. You can find that in most things. Right, if there's you know, you think about this way, why would particular words, Well, there's nothing random about it. So if he's capitalizing words, it's not random. I mean something, there's a purpose. The mystery here is figuring out what that

purpose is supposed to be. And the answer to that that some would give is that, well, if you can't see it, you're not supposed to. It will be obvious to those to whom it's obvious. The rest of us, it just looks chaotic. It looks it looks random in some way, but the moment is that it's not random. Nothing like that is done randomly, so it's and I think there probably are some intelligence techniques in that

in a way. And you know, again you want if you want to disguise things, one of the ways you can do it is to make it make something which is meaningful appear to be meaningless, something which is calculated appear to be random, so that no one looking at it from the outside will really understand what's going on when it comes to his intelligence connections. Is intelligence work. The thing the governing factor that hangs over this is the Official Secrets

Act, which was actually fairly new. I think that comes in around nineteen ten, nineteen eleven. But what it means, and this is very real, is that you never talk about this. I mean, you know, it's like first rule of fight club. You never talk about fight club of this thing. And that, by the way, in not just British intelligence elsewhere, is the single most important factor. If you are told that you never talk about these things, you never talk about them, and if you

do, there will be very serious consequences. And I think that that was in fact One of the things that you can kind of look at if you go through is that there aren't these kid in the press. For He'll say, I think of the one of the times he got closest is spilling the beans was around nineteen twenty nine when he's kicked out of France, and this

makes press around the world you can even regret about in America. He's thrown out of France and he and this is when he comes back and he goes, oh, you know I can I you know, I work for British Naval intelligence. He even implies he has some connection to American intelligence, which he did, and he actual and then he mentions a name. He mentions this particular official, Captain Guy Gaunt, and Gaunt was in fact the head of naval intelligence in New York. And now so he's a real that's the

guy, all right, that Guy Gaunt. He had direct contact with Guy Gott, knew him. And he says at one point that I, you know, if I'm drawn into court, he's basically threatening to take legal action in France and to call Guy Gaunt to come in and testify that he really was working for British intelligence. Well that's when sort of you know, the crap hits the fan. So anytime Crowley tends to look like he might open his mouth a bit too much, things happened to him. Yeah, okay.

And then, for instance, one of the things that happens is he does get called back to England. He meets with his fellow you know, Carter, who says that you know it, basically tells him, look, we need you to keep your mouth shut. Well, we'll take care of you. We're not going to bring you. You can't come back to England because you're still too hot here, but we're going to send you to Berlin

and we're going to pay you. This is one of the few places where it's acknowledged that he's sent to Berlin and he's paid something like fifty pounds a month to live there and report on what's going on. Berlin in nineteen thirty and thirty two is a very interesting place for a number of obvious reasons. But that's what they do. They come in tell him to shut up and say we'll give you some money, we'll send you off to Germany, but

you must keep your mouth shut. And there's the question, is he's bankrupted nineteen thirty four. The Nina Hamlet case destroys Wes Bryans of his finances. So what does he live on for the rest of his life? Who pays his bills? Who pays for the little packet of heroin he gets from the Harley Street pharmacist every week. Well, the answer to that, you consider it is ultimately it's paid for by His majesty. Okay, through the number of particular cutouts in that way, but that's part of the deal. Will

take care of you. Look, we'll even provide you with a girlfriend. So Pat Doherty shows up. I don't think Pat Doherty was ever romantically interested in him. I also doubt that she ever actually had his child. I think she had someone else's child, Robin. That's who her actor or her lover was. Who Robin Thine was am I six? So she who does Pat Doherty go to work for during World War two? British Intelligence? The same as Curly. They're all in this together. So they send in a

controller. In this case, they send in Thine and his girlfriend. She romances Curly. She takes care of the old guy, does the rest for it, but she's essentially there to watch over him and to make sure that he behaves himself well. And so the reason that I bring this up the Vision and Voice, is because you had mentioned the act being in nineteen eleven, and that is exactly the same year the Vision and Voice was published.

And so I wondered if that was like a to British intelligence, like, you know, I have this information, I've coded it, I'm putting it out there kind of like a daunte because he almost seemed like the biggest troller. Really he was the biggest troll, and so it almost seems like this was his you know, way of doing that. These are my my theories that have no substance. There's a dance going on between them. I mean, he had information that had he gone public, well, they could have

been embarrassing. Probably not much more than that. I mean, one of the things that he could have spilled the beings on was the degree to which British intelligence spy on the Americans during World War One as well, and which they did. I mean, no one is fair game from that. Yeah.

The another guy I've one of my other unhealthy interests is the fellow who was actually the head of what we would think of as a parallel British Agency m I six in New York. In that period, it is Sir William Wiseman and Wiseman in writing about British intelligence activities in neutral America through the war

and even after the war begins when they become allies. You know, he's writing to his superiors, writing to Mansfield coming back in London, who's the head of the whole shebang, and says, you know, the Americans are allies, but they don't know all of what we've done, and they never will know. So there are allies, but we carry on things that are

completely secret from them. And in fact, at one point Wiseman actually moves nominally away from the head of the SIS station, places it in the hands of his subordinate, and then forms a separate secret organization that the Americans will know nothing about, so that there is a kind of you know, Wiseman controls his own intelligence cell which is separate from the main one. And so what's he doing? What was the whole purpose? You know, something something

that the Yankees weren't supposed to ever know about. And if Crawley had any kind of knowledge of those things, well that could be you know, embarrassing, that could cause those kind of and that maybe that's one of the things that he sort of has in his arsenal, because he could one day just decide to take those consequences, and you know, and those consequences might be that he would be cut off without any money and completely ostracize and the worst

place they'd kill it. But if you're willing to take that chance, he could do it. And they know that. That's my argument would be, and that's why again in twenty nine, they would pull him back, give him money, give him another assignment, just keep him. But his whole complaint was that, you know, they just feed him enough to keep him from starving. They would never really his view, I think was was of

immense ingratitude for what it was that he'd done. He could never publicly take credit for this because his view was that, you know, I served the Crown, I actually did these things when I can, but I can never talk about them. I can never publicly acknowledge about them, and instead I have to live the rest of my life being looked upon as a semi trader or as an outright trader for what I did, which isn't true, and I can never take credit for that, and giving me anything to compensate for

it, right, he would. His basic view was that he'd been screwed, and he had because that's what intelligence agencies will do to you. So there's a couple of things in your book that made me think that there's a and I know it sounds like a cliche to use this word, but the word is Illuminati because you have this inglestat connection with Eckerthausen, You have this

idea of the of this Jesuit uh influence. And then and then when you go into what happened with Mathers, I mean, at one point you're talking about Yates not wanting him to even be uh initiated, right, foreign Yates don't want him initiated, so he rushes over to mather to Mathers and has him initial has him initiate him, and then they go try to storm the castle basically, and it ends up getting him and Mathers basically kicked out of the order. And then, I mean you could think of it as being

effectively what he wanted to have happened was a goldenn who dispersed. But this whole Jacobite element that they're saying is part of Mathers, Well, that would have been part of the the uh, the Illuminati quote quote unquote English thing too, because they fomented the French the French Revolution. I mean, that's

that's who those guys were. So it's kind of interesting that it makes me think that he's wrapped up in it in a different way too, and that might be the reason why throughout his life he was getting in some sort of you know, I don't know what you would call that, a little a little bit of a pension, I guess because he's, uh, he's got some he's got some connections. He has a perfect uh pedigree for it,

being being from an elite family that has a perfect cover. They are Francis, and so are freaking most of the people in the UH, in the orders, in the Illuminati, because once once that connection happened in the seventeen eighties, there there was no there's not really of a difference between the Jesuit and the Francas at that point, and it just it just it all kind of makes too much sense that there was something else going on there and why

he would be involved in so many of these lodges too, because I think he was old blood in a sense. It could be yeah, yeah, I mean that that's not a that's not a definite answer, because I don't think there is a definite answer, right, Yeah. The thing you have to do, I think the other side of not pushing your narrative too far, not not believing your own bullshit to a degree, is always keeping mind that what you're dealing with here is simply a realm of possibilities. Yeah.

But I missions they're kind of interesting because of these type of elements that we're trying to place a finger on, like why was he getting this money? You know, and like other reasons like why was he in these lodges if you had a you know, a the whole, the whole, the family thing is what really gets me is what the brethrens are really about. What was he to begin with? Right exactly? So he presumably the place he would have been recruited or he would have been spotted, was it Cambridge when

he was in college? Yea, And because that's the usual, I mean Oxford and Cambridge were the you know, that was the finishing schools for the British elite. I mean that's you know, his whole idea. He was going to go there, and he was going to go into the diplomatic service. And but there was one of the jobs, one of the auxiliary jobs of faculty and other people, was to keep an eye out for people who

could be useful in other areas. And this, you know, this, this is going back to a period when British intelligence as we know it now was, it was in a much more amorphous form. I mean six really don't come along until nineteen oh nine, so they're not around in nineteen hundred,

they're not around in nineteen ninety. What you had were things like well, you know, every the Foreign Office ran intelligence operations, the War Office did, Naval intelligence did as well, but they were much less institutionalized they were later on, but it was there. I mean, there's always spying which is taking place, and there's always a lookout for people who were capable for it. So what you would be doing is, you know, one of the guys you know, a couple of generations later, you know,

right under John Leacarey. We'll talk about how he's recruited in university's always almost always in university, and you know what you're sort of looking for our people who have what it could be called a a flexible view of things. Because one of the things that we'll first have to be explained to you if you're going to go into that work is you're going to have to be prepared to do things. One of the first things you're gonna have to prepare to lie

a lot. Everyone live a law will begin with the fact that you can never really talk about what it is that you do, so you'll have to. So you must lie, and if necessary, you have to be willing to kill. And you can't get a lot of qualms about that point. So when it comes up you you know, we don't want any sort of conscience gonna be an on this. And through a you know, part of the whole sort of you know, the tutoring process at universities, much of

it was kind of one on one. People would get to know you very well, and one one of the person you know put it is that, you know, the typical sort of came undergraduate experience was it was as much a kind of psychoanalysis as it was education. That's how they wow, can you everybody else do that? Or is it just me? Exactly? You're

crazy? All right? So that other the other thing that is related to what you're talking about, with this one on one the minerval of the Minerva in the they weren't even they didn't even know the name of their of their organization, but it was when Whyslop was in control of this, they would only have one contact throughout their entire you know, maneerval period which could last up to three or three to five years, and they wouldn't know anybody else

who was also in the order. So this kind of is like that same isolation thing where that's like basically it's a time period where they're analyzing. Like even when they went to study up on the thing, they could only read

at that mentor's house. They couldn't take anything with them, and they couldn't write anything down, but they would have to produce a for them based on what they learned, and then they would assess what they interpreted this stuff to me to see whether or not they were, you know, of use and if they were the right type of mindset for what they were looking for. But this would go on for like years, and this was this whole isolation

type of thing where they were doing this with people. It's very similar to psychoanalysis that you're talking about, Like with the Cambridge thing. It's they have the same structure. And I think universities have been using you know, like you said, like the fraternities and things like that for a very long time for that very reason. I think probably I don't know, I don't know what predates what, but there they seem to be hand in hand with these

lodges. Well, there are things that to add in a certain element of

personal experience in this. When I was in grad school at U see Santa Barbara, I was, I was actually in a The thing I was in with in the history department was then called the Balkan Studies Program, So it wasn't a Russian studies program, but the closest we had the ball So that just covered all of Eastern Europe. So we're in that, and so the Bulkans, you know, my main professor was a Yugoslav, you know, and it was an anti communist Serbian emigray who had come over and gotten a

job. And you know, you found lots of Eastern European anti communist emmigreys around things like that. Who else are you going to come across? So keep in mind this is the nineteen seventies, late Cold War and you've got I think, which specializes in training people in the history of what was then Iron Curtain countries. So the whole concept was that if you really get into Bulgarian history, then at some point you're going to go to Bulgaria. Right,

this is the kind of idea. Who would possibly be interested in that, who would be interested in the people who were interested in that field, who could possibly see any kind of future utilitary value, and someone who would want to go and travel and observe in the Eastern block. Right, can narrow that down to three little letters, and I'll leave it to you to

guess which ones they are. Now. I got to admit, when I was there at the time, although we were aware of all of those things, it never really occurred to me that that was kind of going on around me. And it was, you know, it was just sort of oblivious to it in some way. And it was only many years later in the whole set of circumstances. Excuse me that someone who was there at the same time, and they go, well, you know who the CIA spotter was, right, I go, No, I don't think, so they go,

and I'm not going to use the person's name. I don't think they're around anymore. But it was suffice to say it was a retired military off officer who was kind of there taking a degree but never really seemed to finish one. And it was a very friendly and nice guy and was always asking lots of questions about what you're interested in in the arrest and then it was like, yeah, that was it. So that's why he invited his to

parties at his household. Oh yeah, and it was. And I don't know, they didn't recruit me. It's a mother, but that yes, And it would it would be obvious that that was going on and there was someone who was there it was doing it. But unless you were paying attention at the time, it was just this guy the other things that are taking place. Sometimes I think people think like we popped out as conspiracy theorists.

It's like, no, when I was like eighteen nineteen twenty, I wasn't thinking I don't worry about the CIA then, right, you know what I'm saying, Yeah, you're in another world. You're thinking about school and ass I had a healthy just taste for the for government because I always messed around

with a lot of officials by a lot of officials who carry badges. But as far as you know, going too deep into anything, I definitely had like a moment in twenty eleven where I think that I actually started like to really like impact me to where I couldn't I couldn't ignore it if I wanted to. So it's kind of interesting. But we are almost at the two hour mark. Rick, you say that you are working on some new projects. Are they books? Are they blogs? Like we see? Can I

can? I? Can I do my shameless self promotion? Now? I don't have to, but you know that doesn't really come naturally to me, so I have to think about it as well. All right, shameless self promotion, Well, there are the books, okay, which you don't make any money off of book, so it's not too shameless. Secret Age at sixty sixty six, my biography of Sydney Riley, Trust No. One.

My least favorite of my books and the most recent is Wall Street and the Russian Revolution, which, if you're skullduggery that sounds like Anthony Sutton type it is. It is my sort of my take off from from Anthony Sutton, and I wanted to stay very close. But it's not the Bolshevik Revolution it's the Russian Revolution. And I would say the book is not a refutation of something, it's an expansion of everything he was working out, and I think

a clarification in that regard. And I also my first book I ever wrote was a biography of an obscure Russian Revolution area that everybody should know about. They don't by the name of Forres savan Kov. But if you want to understand how I got started on this whole dark path, that would be one

place it would begin. But since then, there are the books, if anybody wan looks for them, there are there are lots of articles which are floating around about things and uh in everything from journals like American Communist History. No, you don't have to be a communist, but you can be. Uh, it's about the history of the party. Uh, to Intelligence and National Security Journal of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence. You know, just google my

name and you'll you'll find them out there. But what I've been working on, what I really want to plug, which actually does make some money, are work that I've done video series for Wonderum or the Great Courses. So again you can look under Great Courses or their new corporate name Wondrium and I have done three courses to date for them. They're cold courses. They're basically series. It's you know, me sitting around talking with visuals. Well,

this is one. I'm in this one. It's not my particular. There's the Real History of Secret Societies, there is Crimes of the Century, and there are Secrets of the Occult. I am currently working on one that deals with great Villains of History, or at least villains. And then there are the two other series of Secret World of Espionage and The Decoding True Crime. So that is that is my ouvra of work, I guess for great courses.

Yeah, so I would plug those. Real History Secret Societies was done in sort of collaboration with History Channel and A and E. So he has slightly higher production values for that reason. But I'm happy with all of them. And I think if you're interested in them. Now, for someone something like SS of the Occult, if you are well versed in occultism, it's

likely to be occultism one on one. Okay, so it deals with some you know, you've got twenty four episodes, but you're trying to discuss a topic which is complicated, right, nuanced, and also keep in mind you have to do that in each episode in thirty minutes. So this is the idea. We're going to talk about rituals. Okay, I got thirty minutes to do that. So what kind of examples are going to have? So there's a lot of things that tend to be left on the cutting room floor,

some interesting ones, but I think it. You know, I've gotten good, good feedback on that as well. I've also done some uh you know, I have my fingers in the pies of various sort of movie or TV thing which if they ever come to Fruition then we'll tell talk about those. Very cool but one of the one of my one of my favorite things that I keep trying and I'll just bring this up and hope that someone will

hear about it and they'll be interested enough to produce it. It would be a series called Flying Saucers and Secret Agents, so which deals much more. It's not about aliens in that sense as it is about you know, our three letter agency friends and yeah, faking things for the most part. That's just you know, some things are real, some things they're not either. That's one of those things that I would that would be sort of my favorite thing. To do if I could, but you don't always get to do

that. Very cool, and we'd love to have you back on again too, because I talked and there's still still a lot more that I would have to ask myself, Chris, I'm sure you guys have more questions too. It was I held back saying I didn't want to take them the show. Yeah, it was really good, A lot of good stuff, I really very much. You know, maybe next time we can talk about, you

know, Jack Parsons. Why I think Jack Parsons was a spot the old Ron Hubbard and clear I think I think I think al Ron Hubbard was as well. So there times they are you know, so all right that iconic picture of Parsons holding what looks like a coffee can with a wire on it, it's just so ridiculous, like oh that makes things why It's like, come on, guys, uh too funny and uh, I guess we would have to address the question. And did he in fact have sex with his

dog and his mother? His mother? Probably his dog, I know know, dog's not telling dog exact the mother, you know, she and her some they were close. Very is here again, this is what you can say they had it abnormally close relationship. How that seems to be a roughly factual statement. How abnormally that's a matter of opinion, it's a matter of conjecture. Really yeah, uh, around the table real quick and just anyone any final thoughts, questions real quick and then no, no. I thought

that was really great. I really would like to actually get more into probably Parsons and and Harvard, and I think there's a lot of good one for sure. Even if we could venture into like I don't know what we how

much we all have that I would do some research on this myself. But like the jumping off point there with Hubbard with scientology and then the processed church that would be interesting and the four four P or four pie coult Yeah, yeah there, but yeah, definitely all right, Well, thank you so much, sir. I really appreciate your time. Get all your links into the yes, and hopefully we'll talk again. Yeah, this is a lot of fun. Thank you so much. Bye, bye bye, And we were out.