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The Abbey of Thelema: “Do What Thou Wilt”
Nestled on the rugged cliffs of Cefalù, Sicily, where the Mediterranean crashes against ancient stone and the La Rocca rock looms like a silent sentinel, stands a modest whitewashed villa slowly surrendering to time. Overgrown with wild herbs and ivy, its cracked walls whisper of a radical experiment that once shook the world. This is the Abbey of Thelema, Aleister Crowley’s utopian temple of magick, freedom, and the uncompromising pursuit of True Will. For three brief, blazing years (1920–1923), it was no ordinary commune. It was a living laboratory for Thelema, the philosophy that declared: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
The Spark: From Rabelais to the Beast
The name itself was borrowed from François Rabelais’ 16th-century satire Gargantua and Pantagruel. In the fictional Abbey of Thélème, the only rule was “Fay ce que vouldras”, “Do what thou wilt.” Crowley, the infamous occultist, mountaineer, poet, and self-proclaimed “Great Beast 666,” saw in this a blueprint for a new age. After receiving The Book of the Law in Cairo in 1904, dictated, he claimed, by a disembodied voice named Aiwass, he founded Thelema as a religion of radical self-realization.
In 1920, guided by the I Ching, Crowley and his Scarlet Woman, Leah Hirsig (a fierce American schoolteacher who became his magical partner and “Babylon”), rented Villa Santa Barbara on the outskirts of Cefalù. They christened it the Abbey of Thelema, or Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum, a college toward the Holy Spirit. It was never meant to be a monastery of denial. It was an anti-monastery: a place where the soul could burn brightly through ritual, yoga, sex, art, and unfiltered experience.
Inside the Abbey: Robes, Rituals, and the Chambre des Cauchemars
Life at the Abbey followed a disciplined yet liberated rhythm. Residents rose for daily adorations to the Sun (Liber Resh), performed yogic exercises, studied Crowley’s writings, and participated in ceremonial magick, including the Gnostic Mass. They wore simple robes. Children ran free, witnessing adult rituals without shame. There were no clocks, no imposed rules beyond the Law of Thelema.
The heart of the house was the common room, painted scarlet with a magick circle honoring Nuit, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit. But the most infamous space was La Chambre des Cauchemars, the Chamber of Nightmares. Here, Crowley covered the walls in surreal, erotic, and demonic murals: phallic figures, entwined lovers, nightmarish beasts, and symbols drawn from Egyptian gods, Tantra, and his own visions. Visitors stepped into a psychedelic fever dream where the sacred and the profane danced as one.
Drugs flowed freely, cannabis, cocaine, heroin, peyote, used not for escape but as sacraments to shatter the ego and reveal the Holy Guardian Angel. Sex magick, central to the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), was practiced openly. Love was the law, love under will. For Crowley and Hirsig, this was paradise: a place where the True Will could flourish without Victorian repression.
Yet paradise is rarely simple. The Abbey attracted a rotating cast of seekers, artists, and the curious. Jane Wolfe, a Hollywood actress, arrived and documented her rigorous training in her Cefalù Diaries. The poet Raoul Loveday and his wife Betty May came in 1922, drawn by the promise of transcendence.
The Fall: Scandal, Death, and Mussolini’s Boot
Tragedy struck in February 1923. Raoul Loveday fell gravely ill and died, officially from enteric fever caused by contaminated spring water. Rumors, however, painted a darker picture: a ritual involving the blood of a sacrificed cat, black magick gone wrong. Betty May, devastated, returned to England and fed the British press lurid tales of orgies, drug-fueled rites, and devil worship. Headlines screamed “The Wickedest Man in the World.”
By then, Italy was under Benito Mussolini’s rising fascist regime. The dictator had no patience for decadent British occultists painting pornographic murals on Sicilian soil. Crowley was labeled an undesirable alien and expelled in April 1923. The Abbey was abandoned almost overnight. Locals, scandalized and superstitious, whitewashed the murals. The once-vibrant temple began its slow decay into the ruins we see today.
A century later, the Abbey of Thelema still stands, roof caved in, walls crumbling, yet strangely magnetic. Urban explorers and Thelemic pilgrims still visit. In 1955, filmmaker Kenneth Anger (a devoted Crowleyite) scraped away layers of whitewash, revealed the surviving murals, and shot his lost film Thelema Abbey. The site remains free to access, a haunting monument to both human daring and human frailty.
The Abbey was never perfect. It exposed the tension at the heart of Thelema: the noble ideal of True Will versus the messy reality of ego, addiction, and unchecked desire. Yet its spirit endures. Crowley’s work at Cefalù was among his most prolific, he wrote Diary of a Drug Fiend here and refined the rituals that still shape modern occultism and counterculture.
Standing amid the overgrown gardens with the sea wind in your hair, you can almost hear the old chants at dawn. The Abbey reminds us that some dreams are too wild for the world to contain, yet too powerful to ever fully die.
Do what thou wilt.
The Law remains.
The ruins still speak.Love is the law, love under will.
MORE ABOUT ALEISTER CROWLEY
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)
Aleister Crowley is probably the Black Magician who is the most popular foreground figure in Hollywood and the Music Industry today. He is considered being the one who “invented” backward messages on music recordings (used by The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones to name a few). A great percentage of the rock/rap/hip hop musicians of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s are highly influenced by this occult, black magician. And sadly enough, it is often not even by their own choice – the satanic influence is something that is programmed into the artist’s mind by the “Illuminati” to serve a specific goal. You will learn more about this as go along. Now, let me introduce the most popular black magician (together with L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology) of today. Crowley has had a significant influence on the young people’s minds from the 50’s up to this date …
Carl Anderson
A presentation:
Aleister Crowley is the occultist and Satanist that is maybe the most well known. His works “The Book of the Law”, “Magick in Theory and Practice” and “The Book of Thoth” are broadly used in occult circuits. Crowley himself didn’t take much credit for having written them, as he stated they were written by automatic handwriting, being channeled from a higher being called Aiwaz (or Aiwass). This being said he had lived in Caldea during the reign of Hammurabis (around 1750 BC), but later, in his book “Magick in Theory and Practice”, Crowley identified Aiwaz as his own genius. He was actually very proud of this book, which he used as a Bible for his own religion – Thelema. Crowley looked at man as a sleeping god who gradually started to understand what powers he possesses. He also taught that Satan was identical with the Sumerian devil/god Shaitan, who he stated had been worshiped in the Egyptian deserts long before the ages of the Pharaohs.
He was also a drug- and sex addict and was addicted both to opium, hashish, cocaine, mescaline, amphetamines and heroin, in order to perceive higher states of beingness (drug abuse is very common to occultists in general). When he discovered mescaline, he developed seven rituals, Rites of Eleusis, and rented Caxton Hall to demonstrate them. Later he opened up a Temple of Satan in London, where many high society ladies became his pupils. By that time Crowley had shaved his head and filed his canine teeth so sharp that he could initiate every new woman with a “kiss of the snake”, as he gave them a bite either on the wrist or in the throat.
“Do what thou will shall be the whole of the Law” [The work of the OTO … is geared towards the achievement of a world-spanning empire … The Law “Do what thou wilt” is the law of this new state – a One World Government] was his motto for the OTO, which was the secret order he himself was the Grandmaster of. He rejected traditional morality in favor of the life of a drug addict and brutal womanizer (“I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend” is a line from one of his poems). He even enjoyed being called the “wickedest man in the world”. He was married twice, and both his wives went insane. Five of his mistresses committed suicide.
People who met Crowley verified that he had occult powers, and as an example William Seabrook tells the following story: Seabrook wanted a demonstration of Crowley’s powers, so the latter chose a man by random out on the street and followed him, imitating his walk. Suddenly Crowley fell but was rapidly on his feet again. At the same time the other man fell on the sidewalk. Crowley and his companion helped the man up, and he looked confused, trying to find the banana peel.
Crowley was also the man who came up with putting backwards messages into musical recordings. Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin used this on some of their albums. Jimmy Page put a backward satanic message on the mega hit “Stairway to Heaven” (“Here’s to my sweet Satan”). Page also bought Crowley’s mansion in Scotland and was/is a true follower of his teaching, as was the late drummer John Bonham from the same group. Beatles also used backwards messages like “Paul is dead” on their albums and Crowley’s head is present on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”.
Aleister Crowley was born in Warwickshire where he revolted against a strict religious childhood. He left his studies and became initiated into the secret order of the Golden Dawn in 1898. After some time he came into conflict with its leaders and went to Mexico. From there he traveled a lot, to India and Ceylon, where he studied yoga and Buddhism. Buddhism replaced his occult interests for a while, until he got a strange experience in Cairo, Egypt in 1904. By curiosity his wife Rose asked him to do an occult ritual. She then went into a state of trance and brought down a message from some strange being. “He’s waiting for you”, she told Crowley. “Him”, she said, was Horus, the God of wars and the son of Osiris in the old Egyptian mythology.
At first, Crowley didn’t believe her, so he started asking her a few questions to reveal her as a fraud. But Rose, who didn’t know very much about the occult, gave the correct answers …
The message that was sent to Crowley, told him to sit down by his desk a certain time three days in a row. He obeyed and in these three days he wrote “The Book of Law” with automatic writing. This means ones hand is moving by another force than ones own …
Crowley’s messenger taught that the old Age of Osiris soon would follow by the new Age of Horus. But first Earth must bathe in blood. There should be a World War(!). The Book of Law told about a race of Superhuman and condemned the old religions, the pacifism, democracy, compassion and humanity. “Let my servants be few and secret, they shall reign over the many and the known”, the Superhuman continued. The rest of the message goes in the same spirit. The lower races should be humiliated and condemned and even killed. It taught “no mercy”. [Long before the Roswell incident, where a flying saucer crashed in the desert and dead aliens were found, Crowley made a drawing of one of his “messengers” called Lam – the drawing is identical with the Grey Aliens with the big black eyes, who nowadays are so well promoted in movies and among abducted].
The messenger also declared that Crowley was the Beast 666 from the “Book of Revelations” (13:18) who had come to destroy Christianity. He tried to forget the whole thing, but from 1909 and forwards, he started taking the messages seriously.
Crowley then left his former occult teacher MacGregor Mathers, who by then was a broken man. Mathers started a psychic war against Crowley. They contacted “demons” with which they attacked each other, and Mathers lost. Such demonic warfare is very common today among the Brotherhoods.
Long after his death, Crowley became a hero for many young people within the flower-power movement. The irony in all this is, that these young people cried for peace and love. Crowley in his turn welcomed the First World War, as necessary to sweep away the old age and start the new one. Since he revealed his revelations, he became the head of the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) in Germany, which gave him a great influence over similar people in Germany. It’s also well known that Hitler was influenced by him and that Crowley himself tried to contact Hitler during the 2:d World War.
Old Gloomer’s track “Abbey Of Thelema”
30 okt 2011 (3/10) – Poor, but in a fascinating, awkward way.
GLOOMER, an avid enthusiast of grandmaster Aleister Crowley since the age of 11, delves into the mystique surrounding the Abbey of Thelema.
Drawing inspiration from Crowley’s teachings, GLOOMER navigates the sonic landscape with an homage to the profound knowledge and mysticism surrounding this influential figure. Crowley’s deep esoteric insights and association with figures like Ron Hubbard are reflected in GLOOMER’s sonic exploration.
For those intrigued by Crowley, Hubbard, CIA connections, and UFOs, a deeper dive into these topics may yield fascinating revelations. A journey into the interconnected web of esoteric knowledge and government involvement awaits.
🎵 Sonic Exploration: Crafted in FL-studio, “ABBEY OF THELEMA” invites listeners to embark on a sonic journey that resonates with the mystique of Crowley’s teachings and the esoteric realm he created.
Free High Quality track download:
https://gloomer2000.bandcamp.com/track/abbey-of-thelema
Free complete album download:
https://gloomer2000.bandcamp.com/album/gloomy-invazions-2012-pt-iii
Track made in FL-studio.
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