EsoteriaA library of sacred & hidden knowledge
Liber XXXII · Thelema

Liber XXXII · Thelema · Chapter I: Aleister Crowley

Rose Edith Kelly: Crowley's First Wife and the Cairo Working

Rose Edith Kelly, Aleister Crowley's first wife: their 1903 marriage, her role as Ouarda the Seer in Cairo in 1904, their daughters and her later tragic life.

7 min read 1,610 words Updated

Rose Edith Kelly (1874–1932) was the first wife of Aleister Crowley and the person who, according to Crowley's own account, set in motion the reception of The Book of the Law in Cairo in 1904. Acting as a seer under the name Ouarda, she told Crowley that the god Horus wished to communicate with him and led him to the funerary stela that became the Stele of Revealing. Thelemites regard her as the first of Crowley's "Scarlet Women"; her later life, marked by bereavement, alcoholism and divorce, was unhappy.

The Kelly Family and Rose's Early Life§

Rose Edith Kelly was born in 1874 into a comfortable clerical family. Her father, the Reverend Frederic Festus Kelly, was vicar of Camberwell in south London, and her younger brother Gerald Kelly (1879–1972) became one of the most successful portrait painters of his generation, eventually knighted and elected President of the Royal Academy.

Crowley knew Gerald before he knew Rose. The two young men had met through Cambridge, and in 1902 Crowley spent time in Paris among Gerald's circle of artists and writers. By the summer of 1903 Rose was a widow in her late twenties, having married young and lost her first husband, an army officer. She was living with her family and, according to Crowley's later account, was under pressure to accept a marriage she did not want for the sake of financial security.

Marriage at Dingwall, 1903§

In the summer of 1903 the Kelly family was staying at the Highland spa of Strathpeffer, not far from Crowley's house at Boleskine on Loch Ness. Crowley, hearing of Rose's predicament, offered a solution typical of his romantic and impulsive temperament: he would marry her at once, purely as a formality, so that she would be free of her family's demands, and they would then go their separate ways.

On 12 August 1903 the couple went to Dingwall and were married by declaration before a local official, a form of civil marriage then possible under Scots law. Gerald Kelly, who learned of the plan too late, was furious, and relations between the two men were strained for a time. The marriage of convenience did not remain one. Crowley and Rose fell passionately in love, and Crowley later wrote that the months that followed were among the happiest of his life. His love poems of the next few years, gathered in collections with titles such as Rosa Mundi, were written for her.

Honeymoon in Paris, Egypt and Ceylon§

The couple set out on an extended honeymoon in the autumn of 1903, travelling by way of Paris and Naples to Egypt. In Cairo, Crowley later claimed, he spent a night with Rose in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, reciting an invocation by candlelight until the chamber seemed filled with a pale astral light. They continued to Ceylon, where Crowley had earlier studied yoga with his friend Allan Bennett, and hunted and travelled before Rose's pregnancy led them to turn homeward.

At this stage Crowley had largely set aside the ceremonial magic he had learned in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Rose had no training in magic and, by Crowley's account, little interest in it. This is important to the story that followed, because Crowley later presented her ignorance as proof that her pronouncements could not have come from her own knowledge.

Ouarda the Seer: Cairo, 1904§

The couple returned to Cairo early in 1904 and took an apartment, presenting themselves with some theatricality as a Persian prince and princess. In mid-March Crowley performed an invocation intended, he said, to show Rose the sylphs, the spirits of the air. Instead she entered a dreamy, abstracted state and repeated that "they" were waiting for him. Over the following days she told him that the message concerned Horus and that he had offended the god.

Crowley tested her. He asked her a series of questions about Horus, his symbols, his colours and his place in a system of correspondences that she had no means of knowing, and later recorded that her answers were correct against very long odds. The decisive test came at the Boulaq Museum, then Cairo's museum of antiquities, where he asked her to identify an image of Horus. She passed several figures and stopped before a painted wooden stela of the priest Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu, showing the falcon-headed Re-Horakhty. The exhibit bore the inventory number 666, the number Crowley had taken as his own. The object and its history are described in The Stele of Revealing.

On Rose's instructions Crowley entered his study at noon on 8, 9 and 10 April 1904 and wrote down, over three hours each day, the three chapters dictated by a voice he called Aiwass. The result was Liber AL vel Legis, the founding text of Thelema; see Thelema and The Book of the Law. In his published account, The Equinox of the Gods (1936), Crowley called her "Ouarda the Seer", ouarda being a French transliteration of the Arabic word for "rose". Historians note that the story is known almost entirely from Crowley's own accounts written years afterwards, and that its details cannot be independently confirmed.

Lilith, Lola Zaza and the End of the Marriage§

In July 1904, at Boleskine, Rose gave birth to a daughter, to whom Crowley gave a long string of names beginning with Nuit and ending with Lilith; she was known as Lilith. In 1905, after Crowley's failed expedition to the Himalayan peak of Kangchenjunga, Rose and the baby joined him in India, and the family travelled through Burma and across southern China early in 1906, Rose and Lilith carried in sedan chairs on mountain roads.

On the way home the family separated: Rose set out for England with Lilith, while Crowley crossed the Pacific and North America. Lilith died of typhoid in Rangoon during the journey in 1906, before he reached England. Crowley blamed Rose, whose heavy drinking had begun to alarm him, and the loss shadowed the rest of their marriage.

A second daughter, Lola Zaza, was born in 1907 and survived a serious illness in infancy. Rose's alcoholism grew worse, and in 1909 she obtained a divorce on grounds of Crowley's adultery, which he did not contest; for a time they continued to live together. In 1911 she was committed to an asylum suffering from alcoholic dementia. She later remarried and lived out of the public eye, and she died, according to biographers, in 1932. Lola Zaza was raised by the Kelly family and had little contact with her father.

Rose's Place in Thelemic History§

In Thelemic tradition Rose holds a unique position. Crowley later listed her first among the women he considered to have held the office of the Scarlet Woman, the human counterpart of the goddess Babalon, which he associated with a series of partners including Leah Hirsig at the Abbey of Thelema. Without her intervention, on his own account, The Book of the Law would never have been written.

Biographers have read her role in different ways. Richard Kaczynski and Lawrence Sutin take her contribution seriously as part of the psychology of the event, while noting how much of it rests on Crowley's retrospective narrative. Some writers have suggested that she understood more of her husband's interests than he allowed, others that he shaped her words into a story that suited his later claims. Feminist historians of esotericism have also drawn attention to the way women such as Rose served as seers and mediums for male magicians, as in the earlier partnership of John Dee and Edward Kelley described in Enochian magic, while receiving little of the credit. Her story is part of the wider biography of Aleister Crowley.

Frequently asked questions§

Who was Rose Edith Kelly?§

Rose Edith Kelly (1874–1932) was Aleister Crowley's first wife and the sister of the painter Sir Gerald Kelly. She acted as seer in Cairo in 1904, the event that led to the writing of The Book of the Law.

What did Rose Kelly do in Cairo in 1904?§

According to Crowley, she fell into an altered state, announced that Horus wished to speak to him, answered his questions about the god correctly and picked out the Stele of Revealing in the Boulaq Museum. She then told him when and where to receive the dictation of The Book of the Law.

Why is Rose Kelly called Ouarda?§

Crowley gave her the name "Ouarda the Seer" in his published accounts. Ouarda is a transliteration of the Arabic word for "rose".

Did Crowley and Rose Kelly have children?§

Yes. Their first daughter, Lilith, was born in 1904 and died in Rangoon in 1906; their second, Lola Zaza, was born in 1907 and was raised by Rose's family.

Sources and further reading§