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Liber XXXII · Thelema

Liber XXXII · Thelema · Chapter I: Aleister Crowley

The Abbey of Thelema at Cefalù: Crowley's Sicilian Commune

The Abbey of Thelema at Cefalù, Sicily (1920–1923): how Crowley's commune began, daily ritual life, its residents, Raoul Loveday's death and the expulsion.

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The Abbey of Thelema was the small religious community that Aleister Crowley founded in a rented farmhouse outside Cefalù, on the northern coast of Sicily, in 1920. Named after the imaginary abbey in Rabelais's Gargantua, it was meant to be a college where students would live by the law of The Book of the Law and train in magick. It lasted barely three years: after the death of a young Oxford graduate and a British press campaign against Crowley, Mussolini's government expelled him from Italy in 1923.

Rabelais, Thelema and the Idea of an Abbey§

The idea of an abbey came from literature before it came from Crowley. In Gargantua, François Rabelais described the Abbey of Thélème, a community without walls or vows whose only rule was "do what you will". Crowley adopted the Greek word thelema ("will") as the name of his religion, and the law of The Book of the Law echoed Rabelais's motto; the background is explained in What Does "Do What Thou Wilt" Mean?.

By 1920 Crowley had spent five years in the United States, where he had met Leah Hirsig, a Swiss-born schoolteacher who became his principal partner and whom he hailed as his Scarlet Woman under the magical name Alostrael. He wanted a place where he could live outside conventional society, write, and train students in the system of the A∴A∴ and the Ordo Templi Orientis. Sicily offered a warm climate and low costs. Crowley later said that he chose Cefalù after consulting the Chinese oracle of the I Ching; see the I Ching.

Founding the Abbey at Cefalù, 1920§

Crowley, Hirsig and Ninette Shumway, a young widow who also became Crowley's lover, arrived at Cefalù in the spring of 1920 with three small children: Hirsig's son Hansi, Shumway's son Howard and Poupée, the infant daughter of Crowley and Hirsig. They rented the Villa Santa Barbara, a single-storey farmhouse on the slope above the town, with a view of the sea and of the great rock that overlooks Cefalù.

The household was poor and the building simple: a central hall surrounded by small bedrooms, with no modern sanitation. Crowley named the place the Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum, the College of the Holy Spirit, and announced it as a centre where students could come for instruction. The first months brought both hope and grief. Shumway gave birth to a daughter, Astarte Lulu Panthea, but Poupée, who had been sickly from birth, died in a hospital in Palermo in October 1920. Crowley recorded his distress in his diaries.

The central room, used as a temple, was painted by Crowley with vivid and often explicitly sexual or demonic figures. He called it La Chambre des Cauchemars, the Chamber of Nightmares, and intended the images as a confrontation with fear: a student who could meditate calmly among them was supposed to have mastered the terrors of the unconscious.

Daily Life, Ritual and Discipline§

Life at the Abbey followed a routine that combined religious observance with personal training. Residents performed the four daily solar adorations of Liber Resh vel Helios at dawn, noon, sunset and midnight, and greeted one another with the Thelemic formula "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law". Ritual work included banishing rituals, invocations and, on some occasions, celebrations of the Gnostic Mass. Students practised yoga and meditation, studied Crowley's writings and The Book of the Law, and kept detailed magical diaries, which Crowley read and annotated.

Crowley also pursued his own magical work with Hirsig, including sexual magic, a part of his system discussed in Sex Magick. Children were raised with considerable freedom, in line with his views on education, which visitors found either admirable or alarming. Drug use was also part of the Abbey's history. Crowley had been prescribed heroin earlier in life for asthma and bronchitis and had become dependent on it; at Cefalù he and others used drugs in what he regarded as experiments in self-mastery, and the difficulty of breaking his addiction is a recurring theme of his diaries from these years.

During a stay in London in 1922 Crowley wrote the novel Diary of a Drug Fiend, which ends at an idealised "Abbey of Thelema" where two addicts are cured by discovering their True Will. The book's publication that year helped draw the attention of the popular press.

Residents and Visitors§

The Abbey was never large. Apart from the core household, its students came and went:

  • Jane Wolfe, an American actress who had worked in silent films, arrived in 1920 and stayed for several years, undergoing a long magical retirement. She later became a central figure of Agape Lodge in California.
  • Cecil Frederick Russell, a young American who had served in the US Navy, came in 1921. He quarrelled with Crowley and later founded his own magical group in the United States.
  • Frank Bennett, an Australian member of the OTO, visited in 1921 and reported a profound spiritual experience during his stay; he took Crowley's teaching back to Australia.
  • Raoul Loveday, a gifted Oxford graduate, arrived late in 1922 with his wife, the artist's model Betty May, who disliked Crowley and the Abbey from the start.

The later development of these networks is traced in Thelemic Orders and, for California, in Jack Parsons and the Babalon Working.

The Death of Raoul Loveday and the Expulsion of 1923§

Loveday fell ill early in 1923 and died at Cefalù on 16 February, of what doctors identified as acute enteritis, an intestinal infection. Accounts usually attribute it to drinking contaminated water from a mountain spring during an excursion, although Crowley, who was also ill, blamed local conditions. Betty May returned to London and gave her story to the Sunday Express, including the allegation that a cat had been sacrificed in a rite at the Abbey. The Sunday Express and the weekly John Bull ran a series of lurid articles calling Crowley a monster and a corrupter of youth; this was the period in which the phrase "the wickedest man in the world" became attached to him, as discussed in Was Aleister Crowley a Satanist?.

The scandal reached the Italian authorities at a time when Mussolini's new Fascist government was suspicious of foreign residents and secret societies. In April 1923 Crowley was ordered to leave Italy, and he departed for Tunisia at the beginning of May. Hirsig remained for a short time before joining him. Crowley never returned, and the community dispersed during the following year as his relationships with Hirsig and others broke down. In 1925, two years after the death of Theodor Reuss, Crowley was accepted by part of the order as head of the OTO, and his attention turned to the movement in Germany and later to England.

The Villa After Crowley: Anger, Kinsey and the Murals§

After the Abbey closed, its owners whitewashed the painted walls. The building passed into local memory as a place of scandal. In 1955 the American filmmaker Kenneth Anger, an admirer of Crowley, travelled to Cefalù, scraped away the whitewash and photographed the surviving murals; the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, who was interested in the sexual dimension of Crowley's teaching, visited the site in the same period. Anger made a short film about the building, which has not survived in public circulation.

The villa still stands but has long been derelict, and only faint traces of the paintings remain. For Thelemites it is a site of pilgrimage and historical interest; for biographers such as Lawrence Sutin and Richard Kaczynski it marks both the high point of Crowley's attempt to build a Thelemic community and the beginning of his reputation as a public villain. The episode is summarised in the life of Aleister Crowley.

Frequently asked questions§

Where was the Abbey of Thelema?§

It was in the Villa Santa Barbara, a rented farmhouse on the hillside above Cefalù, a town on the northern coast of Sicily, about seventy kilometres east of Palermo.

How long did the Abbey of Thelema last?§

Crowley founded it in the spring of 1920 and was expelled from Italy in the spring of 1923. The community dispersed during the following year.

Why was Crowley expelled from Italy?§

After Raoul Loveday's death in February 1923, British newspapers published sensational stories about the Abbey. Mussolini's government, already wary of foreigners and secret societies, ordered Crowley to leave in April 1923.

Can you visit the Abbey of Thelema today?§

The building still exists outside Cefalù but has long been derelict and is not a public museum. Only faint traces of Crowley's murals survive.

Sources and further reading§