A BRIEF HISTORY OF
BOLESKINE HOUSE
BY
BARRY VAN-ASTEN

 

This article is taken from my published magical periodical ‘The Voice of Fire’, volume I, number III (Winter Solstice: Saturday 21^st December 2013), and extended.

 

 

SIMON, LORD FRASER OF LOVAT

 

Boleskine House stands on the South-Eastern shore of Loch Ness in Scotland and it was built around 1760 as a hunting lodge for the Honourable Archibald Campbell Fraser, born 16^th August 1736 and dying 8^th December 1815. Archibald was the 38^th Chief of the Fraser Clan and he was the 3^rd son of Simon, the 11^th Lord Fraser of Lovat who after a trial of five days was sentenced to death on 19^th March 1747. He was beheaded at the Tower of London aged 80 years old on 9^th April 1747 for supporting the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion. He was the last man to be executed in this manner in Britain.

Archibald married Jane Fraser, in 1763, the daughter of William Fraser and sister of Sir William Fraser bart. Archibald and Jane had six sons, none of whom lived beyond Archibald’s death in 1815 to continue the line and so the Lovat estate was transferred to a distant cousin, Thomas Alexander Fraser of Strichen (1802-1875).

After 1782 and the death of Archibald’s elder half-brother Lieutenant-General Simon Fraser, born 1726, Archibald inherited the family estate and also became a Member of Parliament for Inverness-shire. He also became Colonel of the 1^st Inverness-shire local militia.

The house was built on land purchased from the Church on a site reputedly chosen to annoy Lord Lovat whose estate surrounded the property. There is a legend which states that the house may have been built on the site of a church which caught fire trapping the entire congregation who perished inside, but there is no evidence to prove this.

There is also the legend that the minister for Boleskine during the mid to late 17^th century, the Reverend Thomas Houston was plagued by a local wizard who raised the bodies of the dead in the burial ground (indeed his own grave is located there) and that he had to lay the dead. There is some truth in this for we find in the ‘Publications of the Scottish History Society’ volume xxiv, 1643-1688, edited with an Introduction, from the Original Manuscript, by William Mackay [Edinburgh, 1896] that in ‘June 1670 Mr. Thomas Houston, minister of Boleskine, complained that “his house had been laitly [sic] seized upon by Lochabber Robbers, himself threatened with naked swords and drawne durks at his brest [sic], his money and household stuff plundered; and seeing that one of their number suffered death laitly therefore at Inverness the rest of them were lieing [sic] in wait for his life, and threatening his ruine [sic] and damage, so that in the evening he is affrayed to [be] burnt to ashes or [i.e. before] morning”. Mr. Houston had reason to be alarmed, for his predecessor had been barbarously murdered.’ [Introduction, p. xv] Also ‘in 1684, the minister of Boleskine reported “that all persons of all ranks indifferently buried their dead within his church, not only his own parishioners, but some others of the neighbouring parishes, so that several coffins were hardly under ground, which was like to be very dangerous and noisome to the hearers of the word within the said church.” Boleskine was not worse than other parishes. The dogs that followed the people to church fought over the human bones that protruded through the earthen floor; and for the malignant fevers that so often ravaged the country, the foul air which the worshippers breathed while they worshipped was not less responsible than the insanitary condition of their dwelling-houses.’ [Introduction, p. xvii]

The house appeared in articles for let such as this: ‘Romantic Summer residence in Inverness-shire, to be let, furnished, entry immediately, Boleskine Cottage, within a mile of the Falls of Foyers, the most celebrated of British cataracts, and 18 miles from Inverness, is to be let furnished for such period as may be agreed on. To a family that may desire a few months retreat to the romantic scenery of the Highlands, a more interesting situation but seldom offers. The cottage is slated, and being situated on a rising ground, commands a complete view of Loch ness, from east to west. It consists of a spacious public room, of 32 feet in length, two large bed-rooms, and two wings, one of which contains kitchen and servants apartment; the interior of the other wing is not thoroughly furnished. The public post road passes within a few yards of the house, and a steam boat, between Inverness and Fort Augustus, touched at Foyers regularly every day during summer, by which conveyance all kinds of provisions may be depended on.’ [Caledonian Mercury, Saturday 4^th May 1822, p. 3, and Monday 22^nd July 1822, p. 1]

During September to November 1849 John King Esq. a member of the Parochial Board of Inverness, was living at Boleskine Cottage and his Gamekeeper was Hugh Fraser. [Inverness courier. Thursday 20^th September 1849, p. 3, and Thursday 22^nd November 1849, p. 1]

The Inverness Courier of Thursday 19^th September 1850 (p. 1) states that a ‘Game Certificate’ for the period 6^th July to 12^th September was issued to J. S. Entwistle Esq. of Boleskine Cottage. From The Sporting Review of January 1851 we see that on Boleskine and Dunmaglass Moors, ‘J. S. Entwistle Esq. got 400 brace of grouse.’

An ad appeared in the Inverness Courier of Thursday 7^th February 1856 (p. 1) which reads: ‘Growing Larch, Ash, and Elm, for sale. In the Larch Wood at Boleskine, planted 30 years ago, and covering 8 acres or thereby, the half whereof, or about every second tree, is marked for sale. The circumference of this Larch is believed to be 35 inches at 3 feet from the base. The servant at Boleskine Cottage, south side of Loch Ness, will point out the lot. Apply to the proprietor A. T. F. Fraser, of Abertaff, by Inverness.’

And again: ‘Furnished Residence, with or without Shooting & Fishing, to be let, with immediate entry. Boleskine Cottage, delightfully situated on the South Banks of Loch-Ness, about eighteen miles from Inverness, and one mile from the Falls of Foyers, together with Garden and 40 Acres of Land, partly planted and partly arable. Coach-House, and Four Stall-Stable, and with or without the superior Shootings and Fishings on Wester Aberchalder, extending to upwards of 2000 Acres, and within two miles of the cottage – will be let, with immediate entry, for such period as may be agreed on. The cottage contains two large Public-rooms, five Bed-rooms, four Dressing-rooms, and ample servant’s accommodation. This residence is one of the most attractive and commodious in the Highlands. Loch-Ness affords ample Salmon and Trout fishing, other adjoining shootings may probably be had if desired. Application to be made to Donald Davidson, solicitor, Inverness; or to Mr Snowie, gun-maker, there. Inverness, 12^th May 1859.’ [Inverness Courier. Thursday 19^th May 1859, p. 4] Ads for the letting of Boleskine House in the Inverness Courier also appeared from March to July 1859; June to July 1862; July to August 1865 and April to August 1868.

On Saturday 18^th February 1860 a man was drowned near Boleskine House. The Inverness Courier of Thursday 23^rd February 1860 (p. 5) reported that ‘at about 5 pm, James Chisholm, servant to Captain Clavering, and Duncan Maclaren, shepherd, went out in a boat to set some lines, leaving a companion on the shore. On exchanging positions when about 40 yards from the shore, Maclaren resigning to Chisholm the sculls he had been pulling, the boat upset, and Maclaren being thrown to a distance struck out for the land, Chisholm clinging to the keel. The boat with Chisholm ultimatelt reached the shore, but Maclaren must have sunk, overcome with fatigue and the excessive cold.’ Maclaren’s body was never found, but the most disturbing part of the story is that they had to ‘record most heartless conduct on the part of an onlooker, for we are credibly informed that he actually saw the boat upset and the poor men clinging to it, and then walked away to Inverfarigaig, a distance of a mile and a half, without giving the least alarm, although Chisholm’s house was but 300 yards distant.’

‘Desirable Highland Residence on the South Bank of Loch-Ness, to be let’ says the Inverness Courier of Thursday 5^th August 1869 (p. 4). It goes on to say that there is ‘Policies and Garden’ and ‘ample accommodation for a large family; a Four-stalled stable, Coach-House and Porter’s Lodge.’ Access to the house is easy ‘both by the County Road, which passes through the Grounds… and by Loch-Ness, on which steamers ply daily in Summer and Autumn, and twice a week in Winter. Refer to the Proprietor, A. T. F. Fraser of Abertaff; or to D Davidson, solicitor, Inverness; or to Mr Snowie, gun-maker, there; or, in Edinburgh, to Aeneas Macbean, W. S.’

On 31^st January 1887 ‘Mrs Janetta Fraser Macpherson Fraser, widow of the late Archibald Thomas Frederick Fraser of Abertaff [died 1884], and great granddaughter of the Right Honourable Simon, eleventh Lord Lovat (of the 45)’ died at Boleskine House [Dundee Courier. Tuesday 8^th February 1887 (p. 4). The house remained in the Fraser family until Crowley bought it in 1899.

 

MARY ROSE HILL BURTON

 

Mary Rose Hill Burton was born on 11^th July 1859 at Lauriston Place, Edinburgh. She was the daughter of the historian and political economist John Hill Burton, born 22^nd August 1809 in Gallowgate, Aberdeen and dying on 10^th August 1881 at Morton House in Edinburgh. John Hill Burton is the author of such works as: ‘Jacobite Correspondence of the Atholl Family’ (1840), ‘Life and Correspondence of David Hume’ (1846), ‘Lives of Simon Lord Lovat and Duncan Forbes of Culloden’ (1847), ‘Narrative from Criminal Trials in Scotland’ (1852), and ‘History of the Reign of Queen Anne’ (1880). Mary Rose Hill Burton is his daughter by his second marriage (after his first wife Isabella’s death in 1849) to Katherine Innes born in 1824, the daughter of the Judge, historian and antiquary, Cosmo Nelson Innes (1798-1874). Cosmo was the author of several works including: ‘Scotland in the Middle Ages’ (1860), ‘Sketches of Early Scottish History’ (1861), ‘Ancient Laws and Customs of the Burghs of Scotland A.D. 1124-1424’ (1868) and ‘Lectures on Scottish Legal Antiquaries’ (1872). John and Katherine were married on 3^rd August 1855 at St Paul’s, York Place, Edinburgh. Along with daughter Mary they had three more children: William Kinninmond Burton (1856-1899), Rose Burton (1857-1858) and Cosmo Innes Burton (1862-1890).

Mary Rose Hill Burton studied under the Edinburgh Association of the University Education of Women and she became an artist. She died on 5^th June 1900 in Rome, Italy, (probably either visiting or living there on the proceeds from the sale of Boleskine House the previous year to Aleister Crowley for twice the market value of the property).

Her obituary appeared in the Standard: ‘Miss Mary Rose Hill Burton, a daughter of the historian Mr John Hill Burton, by his second wife Katherine Rose, daughter of the late sheriff Cosmo Innes, of Morayshire, died last week in Rome. She was born in Edinburgh and was educated at Paris, where she devoted herself enthusiastically to the study of art. In landscapes and interiors she attained most distinction, her style being that of the French school, and she was an exhibitor at the Royal Academy, where a canvas of hers, “keening” exhibited in 1892, attracted much attention. Fond of travelling, she, a few years since, paid a visit to her brother, William, in Japan, where he was consulting engineer to the Mikado, and brought home with her several clever sketches, which she afterwards exhibited in her own room in London, and one of which, at least, “Iris Garden at Tokyo”, was shown on the wall of the Royal Academy of 1896. The deceased lady was about forty years of age.’ [The London Standard. Friday 15^th June 1900. p. 5]

Mary was opposed to the British Aluminium Company (formed in 1895) building their works at Foyers to supply the Inverness District with electricity. The smelting plant was to use the Falls of Foyers for its power. Mary was ‘one of two Stratherrick residents who voted to limit and contain British Aluminium’s development in the area… Mary Rose Hill Burton, for example, drew and painted the Falls as much as she could prior to British Aluminium’s takeover.’ [Artistic Advocate: Mary Rose Hill Burton and the Falls of Foyers. Janice Helland. Journal of Scottish Historical Studies. Scottish Economic and Social History, volume 17, November 1997, p. 127]

Mary’s mother, Katherine died at the age of 71 in 1898, of heart disease, on Tuesday 29^th November in Boleskine House; she had lived at Boleskine House since April 1894 and she was an active campaigner for women’s education and suffrage and she was the author of ‘Memoir of Cosmo Innes’ published by W. Paterson in 1874, and ‘Memoir of Mrs Crudelius’ published in 1879. Katherine also wrote a memoir of her husband John Hill Burton which appeared in the preface to his volume ‘The Book Hunter’ (1882). Her death notice appeared in the Inverness Courier, dated Friday 2^nd December 1898 (p. 1): ‘Died, at Boleskine House, suddenly, Katherine Innes, aged 71, eldest Daughter of the late Cosmo Innes, and Widow of the late John Hill Burton. R.I.P. Funeral from Boleskine to Stratherrick at 12, on Saturday 3^rd December. Requiem Mass at 11 at Boleskine. All are invited to attend.’ The following year, Boleskine House was ‘for let’ according to the Inverness Courier of Tuesday 23^rd May 1899, (p. 1). (1)

 

ENTER ALEISTER CROWLEY

 

Aleister Crowley was looking for a ‘magical house’ to perform the ‘Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage’. The first essential is a house in a more or less secluded situation. There should be a door opening to the north from the room of which you make your oratory. Outside this door, you construct a terrace covered with fine river sand. This ends in a “lodge” where the spirits may congregate.’ [Confessions. p. 184]

While travelling through the Highlands in August 1899, Crowley stopped off at Foyers with the intention of seeing the Falls of Foyers and climbing some of the rocks around Loch Ness. It was from one of the rock faces that Crowley glimpsed the perfect location for performing the Sacred Magic – Boleskine House. The house was a large one-storey hunting lodge half way between Foyers and Inverfarigaig with extensive grounds incorporating a formal garden and orchard and various out-buildings such as stables etc. Opposite the house on the Loch-side was the ancient burial ground of the Fraser Clan and further beyond, across the Loch lay the romantic ruins of Urquhart Castle. The house seemed to be perfect for the Abra-Melin Operation.

‘If possible the whole of this Operation should be performed in a place where solitude can be obtained; the best being, as Abramelin writes: “Where there is a small wood, in the midst of which you shall make a small Altar, and you shall cover the same with a hut of fine branches, so that the rain may not fall thereon and extinguish the Lamps and the Censer.” The Altar should be made of wood and in the manner of a cupboard, so that it may hold all the necessary things. There should be two tunics, one of linen, and the other of Crimson or Scarlet Silk with gold. The sacred oil is prepared from myrrh, cinnamon and galangal mixed with olive oil. The incense of Olibanum, storax, and lign aloes, or cedar, is reduced to a fine powder and well mixed together. The Wand is cut from an Almond tree.’ [The Equinox, volume I, number III. The Temple of Solomon the King]

Crowley had made his mind up that he must have the house and so he contacted the owner, Mary Rose Hill Burton, who after an initial denial accepted Crowley’s offer at twice the value of the house, paying £2000. On 17^th November 1899 Boleskine House belonged to Crowley.

Many myths have developed around the house from the time of Crowley’s ownership which include those of a local butcher cutting off his own hand with a cleaver and dying after receiving a note from Crowley scribbled on a piece of paper with a spell on the reverse. There are also rumours that a tunnel exists and runs from the cellars of Boleskine House to the burial ground which lies below the house by the roadside. Crowley says in his ‘Confessions’ (pp. 358-359) that he had ‘picked out Boleskine for its loneliness. Lord Lovat and Mrs Fraser-Tytler, my nearest neighbours, were eight miles away, while Grant of Glenmoriston was on the other side of Loch Ness. Besides, Boleskine was already the centre of a thousand legends. Even before I came there there was a fine crop of the regular Highland superstitions. I certainly used to hear the “rolling of the head”, but when I put in a billiard table, the old gentleman preferred it to the corridor and confined his amusement to the gunroom. Even before that, he had always stopped at the Pylon of the corridor which marked off from the rest of the house the wing which was consecrated to Abra-Melin. I have never discovered any explanation of these noises. We used to listen at the door of the gunroom, and the head would roll merrily up and down the table with untiring energy. The moment we opened the door the noise would stop; but there would be no visible cause.

During my absence, the reputation of the house had become more formidable than ever before. I have little doubt that the Abra-Melin devils, whatever they are, used the place as convenient headquarters and put in some of their spare time in terrifying the natives. No one would pass the house after dark. Folk got into the habit of going round through Strath Errick, a detour of several miles. There was a great many definite legends; but I made rather a point of refraining from making a collection. I was completely committed to rationalism and the occurrence of miracles was a nuisance. I should have liked to deny the reality of the whole Abra-Melin business, but the phenomena ware just as patent as the stones of the house.’ Concerning the location of the ‘temple’ or ‘oratory’, Crowley goes on to say that he ‘set apart the South-Western half for my work. The largest room has a bow window and here I made my door and constructed the terrace and lodge. Inside the room I set up my oratory proper. This was a wooden structure, lined in part with the big mirrors which I brought from London.’ [Confessions. p. 184]

 

GREAT TROUBLE

 

In London, Crowley had been living at 67 and 69 Chancery Lane with his ‘Golden Dawn’ friend and magical mentor, Allan Bennett (1872-1923). Crowley had taken the name Count Vladimir Svareff and they had two temples at the flat, a white temple with six large mirrors (6 x 8 feet in size) and a black temple.

In November 1899, Laura Graham, a pseudonym of Mrs Lilian Horniblow (2) whom Crowley was having an affair with, warned him that there was danger from the police, knowledge, which she said was given her by ‘the Astral’ [plane]. Crowley, who was set upon a course of completing the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, was beginning to cool in his affair and attentions towards Laura as the ritual requires celibacy. However, he seems to take the warning seriously. At this time he is also contending with factions within the Golden Dawn working against him, namely Yeats and a man named Frederick Leigh Gardner (1857-1930), who had denied him entrance into the Second Order of the Golden Dawn, the Ruby Rose and Golden Cross, and to the grade of Adeptus Minor, 5=6. In his Magicall Diarie of December 1899, Crowley writes on Friday 8^th December that he has undergone ‘6 days prep[aration] Consecrated W D P [Wand of Double Power] by 0=0 formula’ etc, and on Tuesday 12^th December he writes: ‘Raised Gnothi [written in Greek: Frater Gnothi Seauton – W E H Humphrys] to 1=10 know thyself [Gnothi’s motto written in Greek] as assistant.’ A magical ceremony was performed between them ‘to obsess Gardner. (L G [Laura Graham] sees the source of this op[aration]). Shortly after closed temple. Portal etc. 5=6’. It is not clear whether Laura Graham is at the ceremony or not, but like Humphrys, who acts as Crowley’s assistant at Boleskine, she did travel to the Highlands to his magical retreat, for he mentions in his diary of 1900 in his ‘train of events’ written on Saturday 24^th February, that ‘shortly after my Great Trouble, Laura warns me that I am in danger from the police. This from Astral [November 1899]; but she received an anonymous letter before coming here warning her that I “was about to be in trouble” (and that therefore she had better not be mixed up in it)’. The ‘before coming here’ [to Boleskine] establishes the fact that she was at the house. In his Confessions (p. 189) Crowley says that his ‘old Cambridge acquaintance’ [Humphrys] who took Rosher’s place at Boleskine, ‘began to show symptoms of panic fear’ and eventually left quite mysteriously after less than a month at the house; of Laura, meanwhile, he says, that he went to Paris to have his 5=6 degree conferred on him by Mathers (16^th January 1900) and ‘on my return, [to Boleskine] ten days later, found that my protégée [Laura Graham] had also taken fright, fled to London and hidden herself.’

On Thursday 11^th January 1900, Crowley accidentally met his friend Evelyn Hall in Bloomsbury, London and she stressed that certain rumours about Crowley’s conduct at Chancery Lane had intensified; rumours that hinted at illegal sexual practices of a homosexual nature. Crowley made the following entry in his diary: ‘She reaffirms her statements: but her description of the “college chum” is absurd and her whole attitude ridiculous. She knows one fact only – the name Crowley at Cambridge.’ At the time Crowley was staying at the Hotel Cecil and that day he visited his friend, Allan Bennett who was ‘very ill’ and he called on Evelyn Hall who was out so he left ‘a note giving my address’ (Hotel Cecil).

On Saturday 13^th January Crowley went to see his friend and fellow magician, ‘V. N. [Volo Noscere – George Cecil Jones (1873-1953)] and over Sunday 14^th and Monday 15^th January he ‘saw I. A. [Allan Bennett] till 7 o’clock.’ That same day, Monday 15^th January, at 7 p.m. Crowley received two letters from Evelyn Hall at Hotel Cecil which say: ‘you (and all your friends at 67 [Chancery Lane]) are watched by police. This is connected with “the brother of a college chum” but no doubt can be entertained of the meaning of her hints. She naively assumes the charge to be true!’ [Crowley’s Diary 1900]

That same day, Crowley ‘caught the night boat to Paris’ adding ‘as I had originally intended’ and the following day, Tuesday 16^th January, he is ‘admitted to the Glory of Tiphereth’, in other words, Mathers had initiated him into the Second Order of the Golden Dawn, to which he had been barred in London. We learn from his diary at this time that he is with Mathers for a week and he asks him ‘to judge the astrological figure of the time of reading aforesaid letters. He says: the news is true but you (Saturn on the cusp of Capricorn) are very strong and the end of the matter is good. He advises me to avoid London: I may be in Cambridge only for a few days. By the Codselim symbol, I invoke the Great Names of God the Vast One, and reach town [London] safely.’ In London he visits ‘I. A. [Bennett] and O. E.’ [Oscar Eckenstein (1859-1921), whom he invites to Boleskine House] and ‘both jeer at my alarms: for, knowing already how Awful are the Forces leagued against me, I am not surprised at these troubles: Neither do I fear them, yet to find me might be to spoil my plans. On regaining the thorny bosom of Alma Mater [Cambridge], I meet Fra.[ter] Gnothi Seauton [William Evans Hugh Humphrys]. He goes much further: but is even more mysterious than Evelyn Hall. He says: yes, you are “wanted” though he thinks [two words scratched out] and adds “The danger is most pressing just before Easter” (Humphreys (sic) is certainly at this time manoeuvring to get me out of the way.) I write to V. N. [G. C. Jones] asking his help. He thinks I am mad, or obsessed! I use the Moon pentacle of the key of Solomon and reach Boleskine in safety on Feb. 7’.

 

THE SACRED MAGIC OF ABRAMELIN THE MAGE

 

On Wednesday 7^th February 1900 Crowley was at Boleskine House and settling into Highland life: ‘The house is a long low building. I set apart the south-western half for my work. The largest room has a bow window and here I made my door and constructed the terrace and lodge. Inside the room I set up my oratory proper. This was a wooden structure, lined in part with big mirrors which I brought from London.’ [Confessions.p.184] These of course, are the mirrors Crowley had installed at his flat in Chancery Lane, London. On Wednesday 28^th February he went to Inverness to buy a ‘new censor etc.’ and by Saturday 24^th February he began making his preparations for the Sacred Magic of Abramelin (which must begin at Easter), taking his ‘Oath of the Beginning’ on that day:

‘I, Perdurabo, Frater Ordinis Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis, a Lord of the Paths in the Portal of the Vault of the Adepts, a 5=6 of the Order of the Golden Dawn; and an humble servant of the Christ of God; do this day spiritually bind myself anew:

By the sword of vengeance:

By the Powers of the Elements:

By the Cross of Suffering:

That I will devote myself to the Great Work: the obtaining of Communion with my own Higher and Divine Genius (called the Guardian Angel) by means of the prescribed course; and that I will use my Power so obtained unto the Redemption of the Universe.

So help me the Lord of the Universe and mine own Higher Soul!

 

THE OBLIGATION OF THE OPERATION

 

I, Perdurabo, in the Presence of the Lord of the Universe, and of all Powers Divine and Angelic, do spiritually bind myself, even as I am now physically bound unto the Cross of Suffering.

(1) To unite my consciousness with the divine, as I may be permitted and aided by the Gods Who live for ever, The Aeons of infinite years; that, being lost in the Limitless Light, it may find itself: to the regeneration of the Race, either of man or as the Will of God shall be. And I submit myself utterly to the Will Divine.

(2) To follow out with courage, modesty, loving-kindness and perseverance the course prescribed by Abra-Melin the Mage; as far as in me lies, unto the attainment of this end.

(3) To despise utterly the things and the opinions of this world lest they hinder me in doing this.

(4) To use my powers only to the Spiritual well-being of all whom I may be brought into contact.

(5) To give no place to Evil: and to make eternal war against the Forces of Evil; until even they be redeemed unto the Light.

(6) To harmonize my own spirit so that Equilibrium may lead me to the East; and that my Human consciousness shall allow no usurpation of its rule by the Automatic.

(7) To conquer the temptations.

(8) To banish the illusions.

(9) To put my whole trust in the Only and Omnipotent Lord God: as it is written, ‘Blessed are they that put their trust in Him.’

(10) To uplift the Cross of Sacrifice and Suffering; and to cause my Light so to shine before men that they may glorify my Father which is in Heaven.

Furthermore, I most solemnly promise and swear: to acquire this Holy Science in the manner prescribed in the Book of Abra-Melin, without omitting the least imaginable thing of its contents; not to gloss or comment in any way on that which may be or may not be, not to use all this Sacred Science to offend the Great God, nor to work ill unto my neighbour: to communicate it to no living person, unless by long practice and conversation I shall know him thoroughly, well examining whether such an one really intendeth to work for the Good or for the Evil. I will punctually observe, in granting it, the same fashion which was used by Abra-Melin to Abraham.

Otherwise, let him who receiveth it draw no fruit therefrom. I will keep myself as from a Scorpion from selling this Science. Let this Science remain in me and in my generation as long as it shall please the Most High.

As all these points I generally and severally swear to observe under the awful penalty of the displeasure of God, and of Him to whose Knowledge and Conversation I do most ardently aspire. So help me the Lord of the Universe, and my own Higher Soul!’

At Boleskine Crowley kept a small twenty page book in which he recorded his magical work titled: ‘The Book of the Operation of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage (Being the account of the events of my life, with notes on the operation by P., an humble Aspirant thereto)’. After the ‘Oath of the Beginning’ the rest of the book which commences from November 1899 and ends in February 1900 is divided into three sections dealing with the events of his life during that period; the ‘Operation of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin’, and finally with MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn business which caused Crowley to postpone the working of the ‘Sacred Magic’.

There are some insightful entries on his daily life at Boleskine, such as Saturday 10^th March 1900 in which he woke with a ‘very bad headache’ and later ‘walked in my garden before lunch.’ He also goes on to say he ‘read also in the Blossom and the Fruit [The Blossom and the Fruit: a true story of a magician’ by Mabel Collins (1851-1927) published in 1889], and meditated upon unselfishness: The Ego: and such subjects.’ Later that day he formulated the ‘Obligation of the Operation’.

Also at this time Crowley was receiving visions through the process of skrying and ‘Rising on the Planes’ as taught in the Golden Dawn, on Monday 12^th March he records: ‘In bed, I invoked the Fire angels and spirits on the tablet, with names etc., and the 6^th Key. I then (as Harpocrates) entered my crystal. An angel, meeting me, told me among other things, that they (of the tablets) were “at war with the angels of the 30^th AEthyrs, to prevent the squaring of “the circle”. I went with him unto the abodes of Fire, but must have fallen asleep, or nearly so. Anyhow, I regained consciousness in a very singular state half consciousness being there, and half there. I recovered and banished the Spirits, but was burning all over, and tossed restlessly about… very sleepy, but consumed of fire! Only repeated careful assumption of Harpocrates’ god-form enabled me to regain my normal state. I had a long dream of a woman eloping, whom I helped, and after of a man stealing my Rose Cross jewel from a dressing-table in a hotel. I caught him and found him a weak man beyond natural (I could bend or flatten him at will), and then the dream seemed to lose coherence… I carried him about and found a hair-brush to beat him, &c. &c. Query: Was I totally obsessed?’

And again on Thursday 15^th March: ‘Invoking the angels of Earth I obtained a wonderful effect. The angel, my guide, treated me with great contempt and was very rude and truthful. He shewed me divers things. In the centre of the earth is formulated the Rose and Cross. Now the Rose is the absolute Self-Sacrifice, the merging of “all” in the 0 (Negative) the Universal Principle of generation through change (“not” merely the feminine), and the Universal Light “Khabs” The Cross is the Extension of Pekht principle. Now I should have learned more but my attention wandered. This closes the four elemental visions: prosecuted, alas! with what weakness, fatuity, and folly! Also [on Tuesday 20^th March]: ‘I… in the afternoon shut myself up, and went on a journey… I went with a very personal guide: and beheld (after some lesser things) our Master as he sate by the Well with the Woman of Samaria. Now the five husbands were five great religions which had defiled the purity of the Virgin of the World: and “he whom thou now hast” was materialism (or modern thought). Other scenes also I saw in His life: and behold I was crucified! Now did I go backwards in time even unto Berashith, the Beginning, and was permitted to see marvellous things. First the Abyss of the Water: in which I, even I, brooded amid other dusky flames as S upon M held by my Genius. And I beheld the victory of Ra upon Apophis and the First of the Golden Dawns! Yea: and monsters, faces half-formed, arose: but they subsisted not. And the firmament was. Again the Chaos and the Death! Then “Ath” Hashamaim v. “ath” h-aretz. There is a whirling intertwining infinitude of nebulae, many concentric systems, each system non-concentric to any other, yet “all” concentric to the whole. As I went backwards in time they grew faster and faster, and less and less material . (P.S. This is the scientific hypothesis, directly contrary to that of Anna Kingsford), and at last are whirling wheels of light: yet through them “waved” a thrill of an intenser invisible light in a direction perpendicular to the tangents. I asked to go yet further back and behold! I am floating on my back cast down! Ina wind of Light flashing down upon me from the immeasurable Above. (This Light is of a blueish silver tinge.) And I saw that Face, lost above me in the height inscrutable: a face of absolute beauty. And I saw as it were a Lamb slain in the Glamour of Those Eyes. Thus was I made pure: for there, what impunity could live? I was told that not many had been so far back: none further: those who “could” go farther would not, since that would have reabsorbed them into the Beginning, and that must not be to him who hath sworn to uplift the Standard of Sacrifice and Sorrow, which is strength.(I forgot the Angels in the Planetary Whirl. They regarded me with curiosity: and were totally unable to comprehend my explanation that I was a “Man, returning in time to behold the “Beginning of Things”.) Now was I able to stand in my Sepiroth: and the Crown of Twelve Stars was upon my head! I then went into the centre of the earth (I suppose) and stood upon the top of a high mountain. The many dragons and guardians I was able to overpower by “authority”. Now the mount was of glistening whiteness, exceeding white as snow: yet dead and unluminous. And I beheld a vision, even like unto that of the Universal Mercury; and I learnt that I myself was sulphur and unmercurial. Now having attained the Mercurialising of my Sulphur I was able (in my vision) to fecundate the mountain (of Salt). And it was instantly transmuted into gold. What came ye out into the wilderness for to see? No: into living, glowing, molten Light: the Light that redeemeth the material world! So I returned: having difficulty to find the earth (?). But I called on S.R.M.D. [‘S Rioghail Mo Dhream: MacGregor Mathers] and V.N.R. [Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum: Moina Mathers] who were glad to see me; and returned into the body: to waste the night in gibing at a foolish medico.’ [The Equinox, volume I, number III. The Temple of Solomon the King: ‘The Magician’]

Crowley had asked Golden Dawn member George Cecil Jones (1873-1960) [Frater Volo Noscere] to join him for the six month operation to assist him with the ordinary day to day business at Boleskine but he declined. Crowley then asked another Golden Dawn member Charles Henry Rosher (1858-1936) [Frater Aequo Animo] (3) who accepted but after less than a month he suddenly and mysteriously left one morning without so much as a ‘good bye’ to Crowley. An old Cambridge friend [Humphrys] (4) also came but ‘within a few weeks he began to display symptoms of panic and strange fears, stating that there were “presences” in the place of an evil nature. At length he left me, and I carried on alone.’ [The Magician of Loch Ness: Uncanny Happenings at Manor of Boleskine. Empire News, 12^th November 1933]

His diary at the time is a fascinating document saying on Wednesday 21^st February that the frost was ‘preventing my temple being completed’ and three days later he received a letter from I. A. [Allan Bennett] saying “I warn you that you are in very grave danger” having thrice been visited by the Angel of the Lord in the visions of his head upon his bed. “A certain thing more sacred than sphere of Sensation broken.” As he told me later.’ Crowley begins a three-day fast on Friday 9^th March at 6 p.m., taking lunch at noon (‘eggs, milk, scones, and fruit. And so on till 6 p.m. when the fast is broken by a meal of meat.’) He rose before dawn to make his ‘general confession of my whole life and the obligation’. The fast ended at 6 p.m. on Monday 12^th March. We also learn that his friend the mountaineer, Oscar Eckenstein (1859-1921) whom he met at Wastdale Head in 1898, is staying with him at Boleskine and is mentioned several times in the diary: on Tuesday 13^th March he ‘went climbing with O. E.’; on Friday 16^th March: ‘went on hills with O. E. to ski’; on Wednesday 21^st March he is revising his ‘climbing paper with O. E.’ (on the same day he received a ‘threatening letter from Laura’ [Lilian Horniblow]; on Saturday 24^th March: ‘In the afternoon I tried to go to the Twll-Du [Welsh ‘black hole’ – anus] for O. E. with poor success. I then began to fix up things for a final. The wand wanted straightening.’ [a disappointing erection] This implies that there was some sort of sexual intimacy between Crowley and Oscar Eckenstein, and on Wednesday 28^th March he is again ‘revising climbing paper with O. E.’ Crowley’s magical work at Boleskine is intense and he continues his prayers and devotions, such as this on Saturday 24^th March in which he ‘rose at 5.45 and at 6 made my confession and accepted the Obligation. At the end of the confession I heard a Great Voice saying: Thine iniquity is taken away: thy sin is purged.’

While at Boleskine, sometime before the spring equinox on Wednesday 21^st March, Crowley ‘wrote to Miss Maud Cracknell (‘Tempus Omnia Revelat’), the assistant secretary of the Second Order, [of the Golden Dawn] and asked her to send him a number of Zelator Adeptus Minor manuscripts. It is likely that she sent him a brief reply and advised him to apply to her superior in the Second Order, who was Mrs E. A. Hunter (‘Deo Date’).’ [The Magicians of the Golden Dawn. Ellic Howe. p. 207] Howe quotes the letter (pp.207-208) in his volume, which says that he [Crowley] ‘ought to mention that my identity with one Aleister Crowley and one Count Svareff are not generally known; and, in the work on which I am now engaged (with the full approval of G. H. Fra. D. D. C. F. [Greatly Honoured Frater, Mathers]) it would be very dangerous for me if everybody (even on the Order) knew this. So I will ask you not to mention the fact.’ He goes on to wish her and Hunter the ‘greetings of the equinox’; he signs it ‘Perdurabo (Aleister MacGregor). On the evening of Saturday 31^st March he received a reply from ‘Deo Date’ of the Second Order and writes in his diary that she is ‘apparently mad. Resolved to write to D. D. C. F. offering myself.’

On Monday 2^nd April he journeyed ‘all day and night’ to return to London where he arrived the following day at 10 a.m. In London he visited ‘E. S. D.’ [‘Eritus Similus Deo’: the artist Gerald Kelly (brother of his future wife, Rose Kelly) who was initiated into the Golden Dawn on 31^st October 1899], the diary reads: ‘Bring him back and trap Gnothi Seauton [W Humphrys] in attempting Laura. He seems nearly as big a blackguard as myself. I misbehave as usual. Oh Lord, how long?’ The next day he visited ‘V. N.’ [Volo Noscere – G C Jones] and on the evening of Friday 6^th April he had a visit from his magical friend ‘C. S.’ [Julian Baker].

He left London for France on Sunday 8^th April and arrived in Paris the following day to see Mathers. He left Paris at 11.50 a.m. on Friday 13^th April for London and ‘towards the end of April, 1900, P[erdurabo] returned to his lonely house in the north, but only remaining there for a few days, he travelled back to Paris. For it was now past Easter, and so too late in the year to begin the operation of Abramelin.’ [The Temple of Solomon the King, The Equinox, volume I, number iii, 1910, pp. 266-267; also Howe, p. 231]

Crowley says in his ‘Confessions’ (p. 189) that while he was ‘preparing the talismans [for the operation of the sacred magic], squares of vellum inscribed in Indian ink, a task which I undertook in the sunniest room in the house, I had to use artificial light even on the brightest days. It was a darkness which might almost be felt. The lodge and terrace, moreover, soon became peopled with shadowy shapes, sufficiently substantial, as a rule, to be almost opaque. I say shapes; and yet the truth is that they were not shapes properly speaking. The phenomenon is hard to describe. It was as if the faculty of vision suffered some interference; as if the objects of vision were not properly objects at all. It was as if they belonged to an order of matter which affected the sight without informing it.’

The phenomena which occurred were certainly enough to test a man’s nerves; but Crowley dared to do things which other men of his generation dared not think of, much less speak about. The sinister influence was not confined to the house. Crowley’s lodge-keeper, “a total abstainer for twenty years”, became “raving drunk for three days” and “tried to kill his wife and children”. [Aleister Crowley the Black Magician. C. R. Cammell. 1951. (1969 ed. p. 43)].

Crowley left Boleskine and went to visit MacGregor Mathers in Paris on Monday 15^th January 1900. The next day Mathers initiated Crowley into the Second Order of the Golden Dawn as an Adeptus Minor 5=6. Crowley returned to Scotland and reached Boleskine on Wednesday 7^th February. On his return from Paris he met his friend, the climber Oscar Eckenstein (1859-1921) in London and invited him back to Boleskine. They enjoyed the ski-laufing and the salmon.

The Abramelin operation was interrupted in April 1900 by squabbles within the Golden Dawn, and Crowley, acting on the Head of the Golden Dawn, MacGregor Mathers (who was still in Paris) was given the task to clear up the mess which was ensuing from the Isis-Urania Temple of the Second Order at 36, Blythe Road, Hammersmith, London. [see Crowley’s ‘Confessions’ and Kaczynski’s ‘Perdurabo’ for an account of this]

With the Sacred Magic interrupted and having to wait at least another year, Crowley returned to Boleskine after Easter for a few days and then set off to Paris before sailing for New York and heading for Mexico where another chapter of adventure begins!

 

LORD BOLESKINE

 

Apart from a few days in Edinburgh from Monday 13^th July to restock his wine cellar Crowley was at Boleskine during the spring of 1903 with the intention once again to continue the Sacred Magic of Abramelin but matters took a different course. On Wednesday 12^th August 1903 he married Rose Edith Kelly at Dingwall, in Scotland. Rose Edith Skerrett (1874-1932) as she was known from a previous marriage was the daughter of the Reverend Frederic Festus Kelly (1838-1918) and sister of the artist and friend of Crowley’s from Cambridge University, Gerald Festus Kelly (1879-1972).

While Crowley was enjoying these romantic pursuits Boleskine House was in the hands of his long-time friend since childhood, Louis Charles Richard Duncomb Jewell (1866-1947). He was the eldest son of a Plymouth Brother and he became a Roman Catholic and called himself Ludovic Cameron. He had originally intended to spend a week at Boleskine during July-August 1903 but he and Crowley got on so well that he stayed longer and took care of matters at the house until Aleister and Rose returned from a short honeymoon in western Scotland on Friday 14^th August. Duncomb Jewell also began a bibliography of Crowley’s published works and this is printed in The Collected Works of Aleister Crowley, volume III (1907): ‘Towards an outline of a Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of Aleister Crowley.’ (Appendix A). While Crowley was away, Duncomb Jewell, under the name Cameron, placed an ad in the Inverness Courier on Friday 9^th October1903 (p. 8) which reads: ‘Housekeeper (working) wanted at once for Country House; light place; plain cooking. One Gentleman. Apply, with full particulars as to age, experience, wages required, references, and stating whether Catholic or Protestant, to Captain Cameron, Boleskine House, Foyers.’

On their return home from Paris in the summer of 1904, Aleister and Rose ‘wandered back to Boleskine, after arranging with a doctor named Percival Bott (1877-1953) to come and stay with us and undertake the accouchement. I asked my Aunt Annie to preside over the household, and an old friend of Gerald’s (Kelly) and mine, Ivor Back [Dr. Ivor Gordon Back, 1879-1951] at this time a surgeon at St George’s to make up the house party.’ [Confessions. p. 405] Also at this time another guest came to stay at Boleskine, an Indian Army doctor Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Andrew Gormley (1849-1925) whom Crowley described as a ‘masochist’. He would later marry Rose Edith Crowley in 1912.

The guests enjoyed Crowley’s hospitality and Crowley played the Highland laird to the hilt – ‘we had a glorious time at Boleskine’ he says in his Confessions. ‘What with the salmon and the venison and my cellar, billiards and rock scrambling, the good company and the perfect summer, life passed like an ecstatic dream. In summer in the Highlands, time seems to forgive. At midnight one can sit and read in the open air even in the absence of the moon. Night is “one faint eternal eventide of gems”. [p. 406] In the garden at Boleskine Crowley had ‘constructed a large trout pond’ beyond the well-kept Italian garden and there he had a Canadian canoe to fish from. He also built a sacred spring and a boathouse at the side of the lock.

‘When Rose and I first arrived at Boleskine, we had made a sort of sporadic effort to carry out some of the injunctions of Aiwass. We had arranged before leaving Egypt for the “abstruction” of the Stele of Revealing. I did not understand the word or the context, and contented myself with having a replica made by one of the artists attached to the museum. We now proceeded to prepare the “perfume” and the “cakes” according to the prescription given in chapter III, verse 23-9. We had resumed Magical work, in a desultory way, on finding that Mathers was attacking us. He succeeded in killing most of the dogs. (At this time I kept a pack of bloodhounds and went man-hunting over the moors.) the servants too were constantly being made ill, one in one way, and one in another. We therefore employed the appropriate talismans from The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin theMage against him, evoking Beelzebub and his forty-nine servitors. Rose had suddenly acquired the power of clairvoyance… As to this perfume of The Book of the Law, “Let it be laid before me and kept thick with perfumes of your orison; it shall become full of beetles as it were and creeping things sacred unto me.” One day, to my amazement, having gone into the bathroom to bathe, I discovered a beetle.’ [Confessions. p. 408] Crowley goes on to describe the beetle as ‘about an inch and a half long’ with a ‘single horn nearly as long as itself. The horn ended in a small sphere suggestive of an eye.’ The beetles seemed to swarm all around Boleskine House and in the gardens for about a fortnight but he says he never saw one of the beetles outside the estate. ’I sent a specimen to London but the experts were unable to identify the species.’ [p. 409]

‘I took the necessary measures to protect Rose against the murderous attack of Mathers, and went on playing billiards. The attack was, however, prolonged and deadly. We were putting central heating into the house, and attempting to construct a small golf course on the estate.

Ivor and I were playing billiards one morning after breakfast, when we heard screams and oaths from the direction of the kitchen. I snatched up a salmon gaff as the readiest weapon and we hurried out. One of the workmen had become suddenly maniacal and attacked my wife, who was making her usual inspection of the offices. It was the work of a moment to gaff the offender and thrust him into the coal cellar, and send for the police. As they were a long time in coming, the animal made several attempts to crawl out of the chute, but our vigilance succeeded in baffling him, and he was duly handed into custody. But nothing followed!’ [p. 409]

A daughter was born to Rose and Aleister at Boleskine House on Thursday 28^th July 1904 which they named Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley. The baby was delivered by Dr Percival Bott (the child would die two years later in Rangoon, Burma). The following week, on Friday 5^th August 1904, an ad appeared in the Inverness Courier (p. 7) which read: ‘Wanted, thoroughly experienced Nurse for baby. Apply, with references, and stating wages expected, to Lady Boleskine, Boleskine House, Foyers.’

It was a delightfully happy time for Crowley but ‘as the summer faded, we broke up. I did not want Rose and the baby to have to endure a Highland winter and towards the end of October went off to St Moritz to make arrangements for them to come out.’ [p. 413] Rose joined Aleister there in November and left the baby with her parents under the charge of a trained nurse. On their return Crowley is happy to be back at Boleskine with no real plans to occupy him so he takes to playing practical jokes such as putting a signboard up in the field across the road from Boleskine which read: ‘This way to the Kooloomooloomavlock (does not bite), in the hope that the wayfarer might amuse me by going to look for it.’ [p. 415]

At the beginning of 1905, Boleskine House was ‘To let’ and the following ad which has much to say on the house appeared in The Field [Saturday 21^st January 1905, p. 6]: ‘To let, for fishing season, or as may be arranged, Boleskine House, Foyers, with right of rod fishing on Loch Ness. The house is beautifully situated on the eastern shore of the Loch. It contains four public rooms, seven bed and dressing rooms, four servants’ rooms etc. also billiard room and fine library, all freshly painted and re-finished, and heated by a new hot water installation; stalls, horse box, kennels, large garden, good boat, and services of ghillie; post and telegraph office one mile away. Apply to James Ross and Boyd, Solicitors, Inverness.’

On Thursday 27^th April 1905 Doctor Jules Jacot-Guillarmod (1868-1925) the physician and photographer from the 1902 expedition to K2 of which Crowley was a member, visited Aleister at Boleskine House. The Doctor had high expectations of hunting Scottish game and so Crowley decided to play one of his greatest practical jokes on him! ‘I was heartily glad to see him. He was the same cheerful ass as ever, but he had got a bit of a swelled head and was extremely annoyed with me for not leading him instantly to stalk the sinister stag, to grapple with the grievous grouse, and to set my ferrets on the fearful pheasant. He could not understand the game laws. Well, I’m a poet; I determined to create sport since it did not exist. More, it should be unique. I opened the campaign as follows. Tartarin [Guillarmod] knew the origin of the wild buffalo of Burma. When the British destroyed the villages, their cattle escaped the bayonet and starvation by taking to the jungle, where they had become practically a new species. After the ’45 the British had pursued the same policy of extermination – I mean pacification – in the Highlands, and I thought it plausible to invent a wild sheep on the analogy of the wild buffalo. And more, the beast should be already famous. I described its rarity, its shyness, its ferocity, etc., etc., - “You have doubtless heard of it,” I ended; “it is called the haggis.” [p. 417]

And so, on the morning of Saturday 29^th April, Crowley’s ghillie and piper Hugh Gillies, ‘with disordered dress and wild eyes, came rushing into the billiard room after breakfast. He exploded breathlessly, “there’s a haggis on the hill, my lord!” We dropped our cues and dashed for the gun case. Trusting to my skill, I contented myself with the .577 Double Express, and gave Tartarin the principal weapon of my battery, a 10-bore Paradox, with steel-core bullets. It is a reliable weapon, it will bring an elephant up short with a mere shock, even if he is not hit in a vital part. With such an arm, my friend could advance fearlessly against the most formidable haggis in the Highlands.

Not a moment was to be lost. Gillies, followed by the doctor, myself and my wife, tiptoed, crouching low, out of the front door and stalked the fearsome beast across the Italian garden. The icy rain chilled us to the bone before we reached the edge of the artificial trout lake. I insisted on wading through this – up to the neck, guns held high – on the ground that we should thus throw the haggis off our scent!

We emerged dripping and proceeded to climb the hill on all fours. Every time anyone breathed, we all stopped and lay low for several minutes. It was a chilly performance, but it was worth it! Tartarin soon reached the point where every bent twig looked to him like one of the horns of our haggis. I crawled and dipped and choked back my laughter. The idiocy of the whole adventure was intensified by the physical discomfort and the impossibility of relieving one’s feelings. That interminable crawl! The rain never let up for a single second; and the wind came in gusts wilder and more bitter with every yard of ascent. I explained to Tartarin that if it should shift a few degrees, the haggis would infallibly get our scent and be off. I implored him to camouflage his posteriors, which arose in front of my balaclava, heaving like the hump of a dying camel. The resulting wriggles would have driven Isidora Duncan to despair; the poor man was indeed acutely conscious that, automatically, he had not been constructed with the main idea of escaping notice.

However, after an hour and a half, we reached the top of the hill, three hundred feet above the house, without hearing that hideous scream-whistle of alarm by which (so I had been careful to explain) the haggis announces that he has detected the presence of an alien enemy.

Breathlessly, we crawled towards the hollow space of grassy and heathery knolls that lay behind the huge rock buttress that towers above the garden and the lake, that space whose richness had tempted our distinguished visitor to approach so near to human habitation.

The mist drove wildly and fiercely across the hillside towards us. It magnified every object to an enormous size, the more impressively that the background was wholly blotted out. Suddenly Gillies rolled stealthily over to the right, his finger pointed tremulously to where, amid the unfurling wreaths of greyness, stood…

Tartarin brought forward the 10-bore with infinite precision. The haggis loomed gargantuan in the mist; it was barely fifty yards away. Even I had somehow half hypnotized myself into a sort of perverse excitement. I could have sworn the brute was the size of a bear.

Guillarmod pressed both triggers. He had made no mistake. Both bullets struck and expanded; he had blown completely away the entire rear section of Farmer McNab’s prize ram.’ [pp.417-418] The next day (Sunday 30^th April), the ferocious beast of the Highlands was served for dinner!

As a matter of fact, it is said that Crowley’s servant and lodge-keeper Hugh Gillies also suffered at the hands of the Abra-Melin demons when his ten year old daughter died suddenly at her desk at school and one year later, Gillies’s 15 month old son died of convulsions on his mother’s knee! (5)

 

1909 AND THE DISCOVERY OF LIBER LEGIS

 

Victor Neuburg (1883-1940) of Trinity College, Cambridge and Kenneth Martin Ward (1887-1927) (6) of Emmanuel College, Cambridge visited Crowley at Boleskine on 16^th June 1909, they had travelled together by sleeper train. Kenneth (whom Crowley had met at Wastdale Head) was there specifically to borrow Crowley’s skis and Victor was there to undergo a ten day magical retirement beginning on Saturday 18^th June and ending on Monday 28^th June. Victor had a special chamber prepared for him to work in upstairs (presumably an attic room) and the Retirement consisted of basic yoga techniques and the performance of magical rituals which included ‘The Bornless One’ invocation. The next morning, 17^th June, Victor slept late and ‘after breakfast of tea and toast he had a hot bath, then he was escorted to the chamber prepared for him. This was a room where the floor was covered with a magic circle. There was an altar on which incense was burning, and Victor found a further supply of incense and of charcoal, also a magic sword and an ankh; he had on his magic robe. He was left to his own devices.’ [Jean Overton Fullerton, pp. 157-158]

He would also learn to recite mantras and write a record of his astral travels. Crowley also allowed him to study the Holy Books. Victor spent much of his time alone at the house except when Crowley would visit him in his bedroom on the ground floor to discuss elements of magical theory and philosophy or Victor would go to Crowley’s bedroom. It is not overstepping the mark to assume that both men enjoyed some sort of intimacy as each was indulging the others tendencies: Neuburg was drawn to masochism and Crowley delighted in sadistic behaviour. In an entry in his magical diary, for day five on 22^nd June, Victor wrote at 10.32 a.m.: ‘My guru was dissatisfied, upbraiding me bitterly with being among the Qliphoth [illusory images of an inferior nature]. He is apparently a homosexual sadist for, in giving me thirty-two strokes with a gorse switch drew blood, he showed great unction. He performed the ceremony with obvious satisfaction. The ceremony was quite painful, though it aroused no emotion in me save that of laughter. I shall rest for a space.’

Crowley added a footnote to this entry: ‘Slandering one’s Guru is punished in the thirty-second and lowest Hell’, beneath which Victor writes: ‘A small price to pay for the invention of a new vice.’ [Fullerton. pp.164 and 169]

Victor had first met Rose Crowley at Boleskine (whom it seems was sleeping alone at the house in a separate bedroom) and she was at this time consuming a lot of alcohol. Following the completion of the Retirement Victor was awarded the grade of Neophyte by Crowley. (7)

During the time of Victor’s  Magical Retirement Crowley had been looking for his four large paintings of the Elemental Watch Towers which he painted in Mexico, and thought to be at Boleskine House. The skis he had promised Kenneth Ward were also hard to locate at the house. ‘After putting Neuburg through his initiation, we repaired to London. I had let the house and my tenant was coming in on [Thursday] the first of July. We had four days in which to amuse ourselves; and we let ourselves go for a thorough good time. Thus like a thunderbolt comes the incident on June 28^th, thus described in my diary:

Glory be to Nuit, Hadit, Ra-Hoor-Khuit in the Highest! A little before midday I was impelled mysteriously (though exhausted by playing fives, billiards, etc. till nearly six this morning) to make a final search for the Elemental Tablets. And lo! when I had at last abandoned the search, I cast mine eyes upon a hole in the loft where were ski, etc., and there, O Holy, Holy, Holy! Were not only all that I sought, but the manuscript of Liber Legis! [Diary entry: Monday 28^th June 1909]

The ground was completely cut away from under my feet. I remained for two whole days meditating on the situation – in performing, in fact, assort of supplementary Sammasati to that of 1905. Having the knack of it, I reached a very clear conclusion without too much difficulty. The essence of the situation was that the Secret Chiefs meant to hold me to my obligation. I understood that the disaster and misery of the last three years were due to my attempt to evade my duty. I surrendered unconditionally, as appears from the entry of July 1^st.

Once more I solemnly renounced all that I have or am. On departing (at midnight from the topmost point of the hill which crowns my estate) instantly shone the moon, two days before her fullness, over the hills among the clouds.’ [Confessions. p.596]

This realisation on Thursday 1^st July 1909, two days before the full moon as Crowley says (which occurred on Saturday 3^rd July), seems to at once free Crowley from his inhibitions and he is aware of his true purpose which is to be the ‘means of emancipating humanity’ and to ‘establish in the world the Law which had been given me to proclaim> “Thou hast no right but to do thy will.”’

Crowley stayed at Boleskine on and off until he sold it in 1913. On Monday 5^th May that year it was sold to protect Crowley from creditors. The house and its thirty-four acres of land was sold to ‘the trustees of MMM [Mysteria Mystica Maxima] (namely, himself [Crowley], Leila, [Waddell] and Cowie [George MacNie Cowie])… the MMM paid £500 to Crowley and assumed £900 in debts and bills on the property.’ (8)

Crowley returned to Boleskine for the last time during September to October 1914. Boleskine had been mortgaged to fund Crowley’s publications such as The Equinox and other poetical and magical writings. The house was being rented by Dr William Murray Leslie MD, CM, FRCS (Edin) (1859-1951) for £250 per year so that the bank could be paid. Dr Murray Leslie was a Scottish physician and barrister and he attempted to treat Rose Crowley for her alcoholism. ‘Crowley went to Boleskine from time to time during the intervals between his travels. Then he let it; and the estate was finally engulfed in his financial ruin. With it he lost a library of rare works on Magic and kindred subjects. In 1937 I went for a holiday to Drumnadrochit. Crowley asked me to visit Boleskine and to make enquiries as to what had happened to these books. He had never ceased to hope that he might recover them.

I went to Boleskine on a radiant late summer day, motoring round Loch Ness through Inverness. I called on the new owners, went over the house, mused in the Italian garden. Crowley’s ghost – not the Abramelin Demons – haunted me everywhere. I left when the shadow of the great rocks crawled over house and garden. The visit, memorable to me, was fruitless to Crowley. I learned that his books had been sold in Inverness at public auction.’ [Aleister Crowley the Black Magician. C R Cammell. 1951 (1969 ed. p. 45)]

The ‘public auction’ Cammell mentions occurred on Tuesday 22^nd April 1919 at Queen’s Gate Hotel Hall in Inverness; the household furniture and complete furnishings were sold off and the Inverness Courier had been advertising the up-coming sale since 8^th April 1919 promising ‘particulars later’. The Friday 18^th April edition of the Inverness Courier (p. 8) listed an inventory of the interior furnishings of the house to be sold: ‘Hall: very fine brass dial 8-day clock, in carved oak case; handsome oak hat and umbrella stand; wheel barometer, Hall tables and chairs, linoleum, rugs, mats etc., Dining Room: inlaid mahogany telescope table, 8 ft; mahogany sideboards, couch, easy chairs and 6 small chairs in Pegamoid [an artificial leather waterproof fabric]; desk, stationary holder, revolving book-cases (9), occasional tables and easy chairs; Brussels carpets, rugs, fender, kerbs, rests, and fire-irons; curtain poles and curtains; portier [portiere, hanging curtain or drape], pictures, ornaments etc., Drawing Room: circle door French cabinet, mahogany cabinet, fine music cabinet, mahogany corner cupboard, sofas and couches, easy and single chairs, card table, antique tea caddy; coal vases [decorative metal (brass or copper) coal holder (usually with handle) to stand by fireplace], china, pictures and ornaments; fine axminster carpet and rugs etc., Billiard Room: oak billiard table and accessories, occasional tables, easy and single chairs, pictures, ornaments etc., Bedrooms: fine walnut and mahogany suites, brass and iron beds and bedding; odd wardrobes; chest of drawers; mirrors, carpets and rugs; bedroom ware, pictures, ornaments, fenders and irons etc., blankets, fine lace and embroidered bedspread etc., Pantries: solid silver tea and coffee service (Georgian), 2 fine old English entrée dishes, spoons, forks, cutlery etc., dinner, breakfast and tea sets, glass, crystal etc., Kitchen: tables, chairs and all the usual utensils, including solid cast aluminium sauce-pans, stew-pans, frying-pans; copper and enamelled kettles etc., etc., Miscellaneous: 1 pair curling stones, in wicker cases; fine brass spread-eagle reading stand, suitable for church or hall; fishing rods, reels etc., and other sporting appliances. Sale at 11 a.m. Maciver & Co. R. J. Douglas, Auctioneer.’

 

THE PRIESTLEYS AT BOLESKINE

 

Boleskine was eventually sold on Friday 12^th July1918 to Dorothy C. Brook who had been living in London at 60, North Gate, Regents Park, for £2,500. Dorothy C. Brook, born 1888, married Arthur Edward Priestley (1888-1960) on 16^th January 1919 at All Saint’s Church, Finchley Road, St. John’s Wood, London. The marriage was officiated by the Reverend Hornby Steer, the vicar, and the Reverend E. V. O’Connor, Offord D’Arcy. The bride was given away by her Uncle, Colonel J V W Rutherford. [The Gentlewoman. Saturday 8^th February 1919, p. 32-33] Dorothy, was the daughter of the zoologist and naturalist, George Brook, FLS [Fellow of the Linnean Society], FRSE [Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh] (1857-1893), and Fanny Elisabeth Scott (1861-1917), who were married on 10^th January 1888 at Benwell in Northumberland (9).

Arthur Edward Priestley, of the Manor House, Offord D’Arcy, was born in St Neots, Huntingdonshire on 30^th June 1888, the son of William Priestley, (1842-1912) and Elizabeth Looker (1846-1913) (11).

Dorothy and Arthur seem to have taken to Highland life and were well-liked within the community; In September 1921 Mrs Priestley was advertising for a caretaker at Boleskine House, ‘used to housework, must be highly recommended’ [The Scotsman. Friday 16^th September 1921, p. 1] Dorothy Priestley also attended the Foyers Gala Day on Saturday 10^th June 1922, a lovely summer afternoon in which there was a pavilion and a shooting gallery, clock golf, a shinty six-aside tournament and even a ‘face-washing’ competition; Mrs. Priestly of Boleskine House was one of the three judges in the Baking competition; also, there is a Miss Scarf of Boleskine House, who received equal second place, presumably she is one of the servants at the house. [Highland News. Saturday 17^th June 1922, p. 3]

During April 1926 Arthur Edward Priestly living at Boleskine House had applied for the licence for Foyers Hotel, which was granted [Aberdeen Journal. Thursday 22^nd April 1926, p. 5 and Highland News. Saturday 24^th April 1926. p. 6]. In the same year (1926), a motorist was travelling along the road at Loch Ness towards Boleskine House when there was an accident. The driver, Mr Vernon Roberts of Dalpowie House, Dunkeld, a collector and connoisseur of Old English pottery, swerved suddenly and his car went over a steep embankment, ‘falling sixty feet on the rocks below. This, however prevented the car going into the Loch. Mr Roberts was uninjured, and a dog that accompanied him in the car was thrown into the water, but swam ashore. The car was badly smashed.’ [Aberdeen Journal. Wednesday 18^th August 1926, p. 3]

In August 1931 the Priestley’s place an ad in the wanted columns for a ‘caretaker’ who will ‘help in the house when required. Apply with references, stating age and wages required, to A E Priestley, Boleskine, Foyers. [The Scotsman. Thursday 27^th August 1931, p. 1] and the following year – ‘Cook, experienced wanted for Huntingdonshire and Inverness-shire, six servants, including kitchen maid; five in family. State age, wages, references, to Mrs Priestley. Boleskine, Foyers, Inverness.’ [The Scotsman. Saturday 19^th November 1932, p. 5]

Arthur attended many local functions and meeting, such as the Foyers local branch of the S.W.R.I. [Scottish Women’s Rural Institute, founded in 1917] on Wednesday 1^st October 1930, in the Club Hall, where he gave an ‘interesting lecture descriptive of a trip to Jamaica’ and a ‘hearty vote of thanks was accorded to him, on the motion of Mrs Skelton’ who presided. [Inverness Courier. Friday 3^rd October 1930, p. 5] The following year he was unable to attend the Gleann Mor Horticultural Association’s meeting held at the War Memorial Hall in Fort Augustus and sent a letter of apology for his absence [Inverness Courier. Tuesday 13^th October 1931, p. 6] but he did manage a few years later in 1937 to attend the Stratherric branch of the S.W.R.I. in Gorthleck Hall on Thursday 11^th November where he ‘kept the members enthralled with his racy account of his holiday experiences in the United States.’ [Northern Chronicle and General Advertiser for the North of Scotland. Wednesday 17^th November 1937, p. 6]

Arthur Edward Priestly is still living at Boleskine House up until at least November 1937 from the newspaper articles- one article from 8^th April 1936 [Aberdeen Press and Journal, p. 10] states that A E Priestly, Boleskine House, won the ‘best two yearlings’ at the Inverness Show.

On Saturday 5^th June 1937 the owners of Boleskine House opened their gardens to the public from 2-7 p.m. under the ‘Scotland’s Garden Scheme for the benefit of the Queen’s Institute of District Nursing (Scottish branch)’ [Aberdeen Journal. Friday 4^th June 1937, p. 6].

 

FOYERS HOTELS LTD.

 

In 1943, Mrs Janet Helen Loweth nee Gray (1916-1995), of Boleskine House, Foyers, Managing Director and Secretary of the Foyers Hotels Ltd. applied for a certificate for the Foyers Hotel [Highland News. Saturday 30^th October 1943, p. 3]. Janet and her husband, David Donaldson Loweth (1911-1963), intended to reside at Boleskine House, which Janet’s father had recently bought, permanently. Janet and David as Managing Directors of a recently formed company with £4000 capital, Foyers Hotels Ltd., had taken over Mr Edwards’ the Foyers Hotel. David, born in February 1911 in Kettering Northamptonshire (he died on 21^st February 1963 in Staffordshire) was the son of Mr Charles F. Loweth, Director of the Singer Sewing Machine Co. Ltd. and he married his second wife Janet Helen Gray, born in Glasgow on Friday 11^th August 1916, the third daughter of Mr and Mrs John Gray of Alloa (died 22^nd September 1946) in 1939 in Blythswood, Glasgow. Janet and David had a young daughter with them when they came to Boleskine named Kirsteen Ann Forbes Loweth, born in Kelvingrove, Glasgow in 1941, and while at the house, two more daughters were born: on Thursday 13^th March 1944, David and Janet celebrated the birth of their daughter at Boleskine House [The Scotsman. Monday 13^th March 1944, p. 6]; this must be their daughter, Diana J. G. Loweth; and two years later, ‘At Boleskine, Foyers, on [Sunday] 24^th March 1946 – to Janet, wife of David D Loweth, a daughter.’ [The Scotsman. Wednesday 27^th March 1946, p. 6], which must be Rosemary L. D. Loweth, born at Parkgrove Nursing Home, Glasgow (12).

Soon after the birth of Diana, in June, Janet would be in the news again for a different reason: ‘Mrs Janet Helen Gray or Loweth, Hotelkeeper, Foyers, pled guilty to a charge of having, by the hands of one of her employees, on Sunday May 7, sold, or gave out to Randell Pitman, attached to a Newfoundland camp, a quarter bottle of port wine for consumption off the premises. She was admonished and fined only in expenses, amounting to £1, 3s 6d. An agent stated that Mrs Loweth, when the matter had been brought to her attention, had been very much annoyed by the offence committed by one of her staff.’ [Highland News. Saturday 24^th June 1944, p.3]

The Loweths don’t seem to have much luck with their staff at the house and seem to be continually advertising for cooks, maids or gardeners; in January 1946 they were seeking a ‘cook-general or two girls, temporary or permanent, particularly good wage. Phone Loweth, Boleskine’ [Highland News. Saturday 12^th January 1946, p. 8] (the same month that the Loweths were selling a Henhouse with ‘5 divisions, approx 40 ft by 8 ft, good condition £30’ [Inverness Courier. Friday 19^th January 1945, p. 2] and in August that year, appeared an ad in the wanted column of The Scotsman [Friday 4^th August 1944, p. 8] saying ‘handyman-chauffeur and general maid: good prospects, accommodation in house. Cottage available later, if desired. Loweth. Boleskine, Foyers, Inverness.’

The following year, a ‘House Tablemaid, trained or un-trained, permanent or temporary, good wages’ was requested in the Inverness Courier [Tuesday 11^th September 1945, p. 4] and another ad appeared in the Highland News of Saturday 8^th December 1945 (p. 8) saying Wanted Couple: Wife as cook-general, husband as handyman, able to drive an advantage, or assist gardener; live in mansion house or cottage, apply, Loweth, Boleskine, Foyers.’ The ‘gardener’ was a Mr. ‘R. Phillips’ whose appointment to Boleskine House is mentioned in the Banffshire Journal of Tuesday 27^th March 1945 (p. 8) which says that ‘Mr. R Phillips’ of ‘Galatord, Dufftown, lately retired postman, has been appointed head gardener to Mr. D. D. Loweth, Boleskine, Foyers, Inverness and is leaving Dufftown this week. Mr Phillips has resided in Dufftown for 3 years and is well known as a successful exhibitor of garden produce at flower shows. He is an ex service man and was a sergeant in the Home Guard.’

 

DAVID SHIRLEY CRIGHTON SIMPSON

 

In 1946 Boleskine House was in possession of Mr David Shirley Crighton Simpson (1909-1969), who was born in Peebles, Scotland in 1909, the son of Walter Thorburn Simpson (1867-1938) and Mary Sinclair Simpson nee Pottinger (13); David was educated at Harrow School and Cambridge University. He became a Chartered Accountant and during the war he joined the London Scottish as a private before being commissioned with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders where he served in France and was wounded in 1944; when he retired from the army in 1955 he had reached the rank of Major (Royal Scots, Territorial Army) and was the holder of the Territorial Decoration (T.D.). He became Managing Director of The Distiller’s Agency Ltd. and sales director of White Horse Distiller’s Ltd. (14)

In the Aberdeen Journal [Thursday 2^nd January 1947, p. 5] under ‘situations vacant’ appeared this ad: ‘Gardener wtd, keen and energetic, able to milk; wife assist in house; first-class cottage, indoor sanitation and bath; on bus route and one mile from school; references required. Apply Factor, Boleskine House, Foyers, Inverness-shire.’

The house appeared from time to time up for sale ‘by private treaty’ as a ‘desirable residence known as Boleskine House, Foyers, with policy grounds… overlooking Loch Ness’ [Country Life, volume 113, 1953. p. 1114]

Articles continued to appear in the British Press concerning Aleister Crowley, mostly painting a negative portrait of the man. One such article which is relevant appeared in the Picture Post:

‘I was very interested in your articles on Aleister Crowley, as my Uncle (who is still alive) worked for him at Boleskine for a year, laying out his gardens. Crowley called himself Lord Boleskine. One day when he was out shooting rabbits, my Uncle got in the way, and had the heel of his boot shot at. The local people were very dubious about Crowley’s sanity, and kept away from him. He had a room built like a temple, where he used to pray to a dummy which was suspended from the roof.’ (G. F. Urquhart, Inverness)’. [‘Crowley’s Gardener’. Picture Post. 17^th December 1955]

 

JOHN ROBERT RANKEN FULLERTON

 

John Robert Ranken Fullerton was born in Thrybergh, Yorkshire on 22^nd August 1894, the son of John Skipwith Herbert Fullerton (1866-1940) and Mary Grace Clarks (1872-1956) who were married at Silkstone, Yorkshire in May 1894.

On Sunday 16^th March 1924, John R. R. Fullerton married his second wife, Evelyn May Palmer, born 1899 in Northumberland, the daughter of Sir Alfred Molyneux Palmer (1853-1935), 3^rd Bart, and Ellen Edith Young (15) John and Evelyn Fullerton must have been living at Boleskine House during early 1949 as there is an article announcing the engagement of  Naomi Fullerton, ‘only daughter of Mr and Mrs John Fullerton of Boleskine House, Foyers, Inverness-shire’ in the Dundee Courier of Thursday 3^rd February 1949 (p. 2).

In July 1954, Mrs Fullerton of Boleskine House, Foyers, presented the prizes at the Foyers Junior Secondary School [Inverness Courier. Friday 2^nd July 1954, p. 6] and the following year, Mrs Fullerton opened the Boleskine Church of Scotland sale of work at the Church Hall in Foyers, at 3 p.m. on Saturday 3^rd September 1955 [Northern Chronicle. Wednesday 31^st August 1955, p. 1]; this was an annual sale in connection with Stratherric and Boleskine Church of Scotland and they raised £137, 10s; Mrs Fullerton gave a speech to open the sale. [Inverness Courier. Friday 9^th September 1955, p. 5]

Although not all their activities were welcomed, as in this article from the Northern Chronicle [Wednesday 12^th May 1954, p. 5] which says that ‘two fox terriers, belonging to John Fullerton, estate owner, Boleskine House, near Foyers, were stated to have worried a sheep on the side of Loch Ness, and in his case a fine of £4 was imposed’ by Inverness Sheriff Court.

The house seems to be up for sale ‘at a very moderate price’ in April 1957 and is described as a ‘small home farm’ with ‘valuable timber and gardens’. The 34 acre estate has a ‘tennis court’ and ‘modernised cottages’ and the house contains: ‘Reception rooms, 5 bathrooms, central heating and electricity. Boathouse and excellent fishing. Grouse shooting and stalking available…’ This ‘small economical property in a heavenly setting’ was being sold by agents John Speir & Co. Chartered Surveyors, Glasgow. It seems the Fullertons had no buyer for this very tempting offer and they remained at Boleskine until the end of the decade.

John famously delighted in annually opening the gardens at Boleskine House in connection with Scotland’s Garden Scheme to the public several years running; in December 1952 Fullerton of Boleskine House was advertising for a ‘Gardener Handyman required, excellent cottage on main bus route, 1 mile from Foyers. Good references essential.’ [Highland News. Saturday 13^th December 1952, p. 2]. During 1954 the gardens were open on Wednesday 26^th May from 2-7 p.m. and open the following year also; in 1958, the gardens were open on Wednesday 18^th June from 2-7 p.m. [Inverness Courier. Friday 13^th June 1958, p.7] and in 1959 the grounds were open on Wednesday 17^th June from2-7 p.m. and admission was one shilling [Highland News. Friday 12^th June 1959, p. 9]. Prior to this, the Northern Chronicle of Wednesday 13^th May 1959 (p. 1) ran the following article: ‘Gardener, with good references, required; good house, wages and perquisites; on main bus route; 1 hour from Inverness. Fullerton. Boleskine, Foyers.’

The house was advertised for sale in August 1959 as a ‘compact, fully modernised House’ with a ‘most attractive garden’ and ‘2 modernised cottages’ and a ‘private boathouse’; the agents were: Messrs Bernard Thorpe & Partners, 5 Glenfinlas Street, Edinburgh. [The Scotsman. Thursday 6^th August 1959, p. 8]

 

DARK DEEDS AND DEATH AT BOLESKINE

 

Boleskine House was then owned by retired Army Major Edward Errick Grant (1909-1960) and his wife Nancy. Major Grant seems to have suffered from violent outbursts as several months before his death in November 1960; he was on trial for three hours at Inverness Sheriff Court on Wednesday 11^th May and found guilty on five charges, admitting two charges of police assault. He was accused of assaulting his cousin, Mrs Mary Grant, on two occasions at his home, The Bungalow, Boleskine, in March 1960 and the police constable Albert Sutherland, who had been called to Boleskine House by Mrs Grant, was struck on the shoulder by the Major, and police constable Alan McPhee was assaulted in a cell at Inverness Burgh Police Station. ‘The Major had a gun – (a rifle with a bullet in the breach)’ and he ‘appeared to be very drunk and he opened his eyes and the Major muttered: Somebody in this house is going to be murdered.’ [Daily Record. Thursday 12^th May 1960, p. 7] Sheriff Douglas Donald fined the accused £10 for the assault and £5 for breach of the peace and he was ordered to lodge £25 caution for good behaviour for one year. [Dundee Courier. Thursday 12^th May 1960, p. 6]

On Tuesday 8^th November 1960 the Major’s house-keeper Anna MacLaren heard the sound of a gunshot in the house and when she went into the house she discovered Major Edward Grant’s body, his head blown off with a shotgun in one of the bedrooms at Boleskine. He had taken his own life at the age of 51. He was examined by pathologist H J R Kirkpatrick and the cause of death on the death certificate reads: ‘gunshot wound of head’.

Edward was the youngest child of Frank Morrison Seafield Grant, a merchant and farmer born 29^th June 1865 at Dyke, Moray in Scotland and Caroline Frances Grant nee Philips, born in 1872 (they were married in 1893 in Cheadle, Staffordshire). The Grants lived at Knockie, Whitebridge in Inverness-shire and they had the following children: Patrick Francis Grant (1895-1970), born in Eccles, Pendlebury, Lancashire (Patrick became a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Artillary and on retirement he farmed at Knockie from 1946-1966); Hugh Murray Grant MBE, MC, (1897-1946) – Hugh joined the Queen’s Own Highlanders and worked in administration in Kenya. He was killed on duty at Loita on 16^th August 1946; Janet Anne Grant, born 1898, Elizabeth Grant born 1901,Mary Grant born 1904; Margaret Grant, born 1907,married Sir Henry Campbell De La Poer Beresford-Pierce (1905-1972) in 1932 and she became a Justice of the Peace. She died on 1^st February 1995. Edward Errick Grant, who was born in Chelford, Cheshire where the Grants had been living prior to the birth of Hugh Murray Grant in 1897 and up until at least 1911, was educated at Eton and Oxford. He was a cadet at Eton College’s Junior Division of the Officer Training Corps and he later joined the Territorial Army becoming a 2^nd Lieutenant in the Lovat Scouts (22^nd February 1929) and the same rank in the Infantry’s Supplementary Reserve of Officers in the Camerons (2^nd May 1931). He was married to Nancy Glover Willows, born in Kettering, Northamptonshire in 1907, the daughter of Captain George Wallace Willows JP (1874-1958) of Rushton Manor, Kettering, and Marian Elsie Willows nee Jones, born 1885. Edward and Nancy were married in 1933 at Kisumu, Kenya Colony and Nancy had been a keen rider to hounds and painter of hunting scenes.

On Edward’s death record at the Highland’s Archives in Inverness, it records he was a ‘mining engineer (retired)’. The death was registered by Edward’s brother Patrick two days later on Thursday 10^th November 1960.

 

MARY VERITE GRANT

 

The Mrs Mary Grant, cousin of Edward Errick Grant, whom he was accused of assaulting, is the same Mary Verite Grant, also Loraine, born Friday 23^rd January 1914, for in an article by Alex Main for the Aberdeen Evening Express of Friday 28^th April 1961 (p. 7), it states that ‘Mrs Mary Verite Loraine’ is the ‘daughter of the late Mabel Love, the musical comedy actress, a Gaiety girl.’ It goes on to describe Mary’s home: ‘The white stone mansion said to have been the scene of black magic orgies when owned by the Prince of Black Magic, Aleister Crowley’ had become ‘too costly to have a housekeeper looking after me, and she’s exceptionally good, but a place of this size needs a man running it…Mrs Grant says that it will break her heart to leave Boleskine but she still has the memory of that fateful night last November when her second cousin, Major Edward Grant, shot himself in one of the bedrooms. In the little bedroom facing out the loch, where the Major took his life, she said: I miss him terribly. After that night I had a serious nervous breakdown and was in hospital for a time, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my days in a sick bed. I want to make a completely fresh start. Mrs Grant then spoke reticently of her war-time exploits. She said she was an underground organiser, for resistance groups and many times led escaped British soldiers over the Pyranees.’ The rest of the article goes on to say she ‘declined to name the man she says she is to marry’ and that the ’47 year old former London society beauty’ was ‘selling up her 32-roomed mansion Boleskine House, Foyers, and says she has started proceedings for divorce from her husband, Captain Anthony Loraine, former captain the Queen’s Flight. Local people have linked her name with an Inverness-shire man, but he said today, it’s not me. From her country home, overlooking Loch Ness, Mrs Grant repeated I do not want to reveal the name of my husband-to-be at the moment. But we are building a house near Beauly. It should be ready by the time my divorce comes through. Twice-married Mrs Grant – resorted to my maiden name when my husband and I parted – says, she cannot continue to run Boleskine on her own. Mrs Grant’s husband, Capt. Loraine, was a friend of the famous airwoman, the late Amy Mollison. He is senior Captain in BOAC and after flying DC7C’s went on to Boeing 707 jets last year. During the last war he was three times co-pilot of Mr Churchill’s aircraft over the Atlantic…’ It then goes on to mention that Anthony is a ‘cousin of Sir Percy Loraine, one-time British Ambassador in Rome. He also flew Sir Anthony Eden over the Atlantic while Eden was Premier. The Queen decorated him with the M.V.O. during the return flight from Bermuda, which he captained. While captain Loraine was on that Bermuda flight, his wife, at that time referred to a Mrs Mary Loraine – reported that she had been robbed of valuable furs.’ (16)

 

THE SAUSAGE SCANDAL

 

Boleskine House was up for sale ‘with some fishing rights on Loch Ness’ in January 1961. In March 1962, Mollie Loraine, having recently parted from her husband, Dennis Henry Loraine, went on holiday to Scotland with her new partner, Peter Rolte Johnston (once a van driver for R.V.S. ‘Royal Victoria Sausages’); Mrs Loraine had been looking for a place to fatten pigs for their company Royal Victoria Sausages and they saw the enchanting Boleskine House was for sale and the following year, Boleskine House was bought by Dennis Henry Loraine. Mollie ‘demanded that the huge circular bed in the main bedroom be left.’ [Daily Express. Thursday 1^st December 1966, p. 2] Dennis Loraine, (17) Managing Director of Cadco Development Ltd. Company and Managing Director of the Royal Victoria Sausage Company, ‘whose food processing projects at the new town of Glenrothes in Fife, had been the subject of a board of inquiry, was a confidence trickster. He even persuaded the film actor, George Sanders (1906-1972) who had a terrible head for business, and his wife, Benita, to invest in their sausage enterprise, Cadco as a Director and guarantor, and he eventually lost hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Mollie (or Molly) and Peter were both Managing Directors in their Highland Weaners and Fatteners Ltd. Company (registered in June 1963) which they ran from Boleskine House; a planning application to the Inverness County Council was submitted for the building of a ‘piggery’ at Boleskine in January 1963. In March of that year, Molly Loraine gave an interview to the Daily Record [Saturday 9^th March 1963, p. 10] which asked if she was concerned about the reputation of the house being haunted; the article says: ‘Is Mrs Loraine worried? Not a bit she says: everyone told us hair-raising tales. It made me all the keener. It is such a pretty place. Mrs Loraine is moving into lonely Boleskine House on the eastside – the side most tourists never reach. It was the home of the black magician Aleister Crowley…’ Molly lived at the house with her three sons: Damocles (born 1953), Tarquin (born1959), and Tristan (born 1962) – ‘They are sitting on the steps of the room used by Aleister Crowley for practicing black magic… People still talk in whispers: the evil that lurked there will not go over the threshold. A former tenant shot himself and two others are said to have gone mad because of what they saw and heard.’ The reporter goes on to say that ‘I visited slender brown-eyed Mrs Loraine in the caravan behind the house in which she is living while extensive alterations are being made. Two of her sons, Damocles 9 and Tarquin 3 romped noisily as she told me: I do not think ghosts have a chance here – I have not seen or heard a thing. Damocles goes to school in the village and we gave a party for the children. They were all playing and twisting in the haunted part of the house. I am sure any ghost would have been scared away. Mrs Loraine a former air hostess and actress has two sons with her. One-year old Tristan will join them later.’ Interestingly, the article mentions that Boleskine House ‘has been transformed into an easy-to-run single storey house. Two upstairs wings have been demolished’. Mrs Loraine said ‘The house is not so lonely now. A pig fattening station is being built 100 yards away and Mrs Loraine is organising local housewives in a plan to knit fashion garments for sale. She is also connected with a film company which plans to do location work nearby.’

It was a sad end for Mollie, as an article in the Daily Express by Robin Turner [Friday 2^nd December 1966, p. 11] under the headline: ‘Woman in Cadco case says: Now I’m broke and all alone’ in which the ‘housewife whose £180 butcher’s bill led to the Cadco affair’ spoke [on Thursday 1^st December] of her champaign life with ex-husband Dennis Loraine, one of the key figures in the scandal’. It goes on to say that ’33-year old Mollie Loraine’ is ‘bedridden in her barely furnished flat and worried about where the next quarter’s rent – due today – is coming from.’ She died the following year in 1967 in Hove, Sussex.

Boleskine House became a listed property on 5^th October 1971 and the original text description of the building stated that it was ‘Begun late 18^th century and continuously enlarged until circa 1830. Now forms single storey, irregular 7-bay house with projecting outer bays with truncated gables. Pink harled with ashlar dressings and margins (some rendered).Present SE front probably re-cast from NW. Centre projecting pilastered ashlar bay with entrance flanked by narrow side lights; porch linked to outer bays by shallow loggia supported by slender Roman Doric columns; deep continuous entablature. NW elevation; round-headed window in gabled centre bay (probably former entrance) 3-window projecting bowed bays (to right with modern alteration to one window) with bowed piended roofs in bays 2 and 6;outer bays with Venetian windows. Multi-pane glazing; long and short channelled ashlar quoins. Symmetrical  pair ridge and panelled and wallhead stacks; slate roofs. East service door masked by later single storey; single bay extension. Interior; long corridor runs full length of house in SE front probably formed in earlier 19^th century; panelled arches and screens flanking centre entrance bay. Simple plaster cornices to 2 public rooms with bowed bay windows giving to NW.’

 

HALBERT KERR

 

 

The next owner of Boleskine House was Halbert James Haldane Kerr, who was born in Glasgow on Tuesday 10^th April 1917, the son of Halbert James Kerr, an assistant manager born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1882; young Halbert and his parents went to live in Montreal in June 1920 where he was educated and during the war he served in the London Fire Brigade during the Blitz before transferring to the Canadian Blackwatch; he was later wounded in active service and taken prisoner. (18)

Boleskine House was to be opened as a ‘tourist mansion’ according to the Highland News of Thursday 28^th March 1968 (p. 1) under the heading: ‘Black Magic Mansion to be Tourist Mecca – Boleskine House gets table licence’; it was to be opened in April 1968 by the ‘man behind the scheme – Canadian businessman Halbert J. Kerr’ who ‘scoffs at the tales of black magic rituals and haunted corridors, where the infamous Aleister Crowley is said by some to have practiced black magic and to have held regular meetings with the Devil in a room known as “The Temple”. It goes on to say that Kerr had been ‘granted a table licence for Boleskine House, where he has spent the last year supervising modernisation. He has also acquired the chair which Crowley used at the Café Royal in London and as an extra attraction he has bought chairs used by Oscar Wilde, Rudolph Valentino, Jacob Epstein, Marie Lloyd, James Agate and Billy Butlin. The chairs still have the original names on them. Although Mr Kerr is not worried about the notorious Mr Crowley – or Lord Boleskine as he called himself – many people still talk about his black reputation. He is described in an old book as a great practical joker with a great collection of weapons who would often scare the daylights out of innocent passers-by by appearing on the highway with servants clad in outlandish garb.’ After the house opened as a hotel another article a week after the opening appeared saying that the ‘new proprietor’ Mr Kerr, despite the reputation of the house, ‘had no second thoughts about turning the house into a hotel. A native of Glasgow, Mr Kerr has spent most of his life in Canada, where he worked as an insurance adjuster. He has already been promising the attractions of the new hotel and its surrounding countryside in New York and Montreal, and his first party of North Americans is booked in for July [1968].’ The article goes on to say that the house ‘offers limited accommodation – eight bedrooms providing room for sixteen people’ and that Mr Kerr hoped to ’establish a regular local custom, offering dining facilities in a quiet and restful country atmosphere.’ [Inverness Courier. Tuesday 30^th April 1968, p. 6]

During the summer of 1969, the experimental film-maker and Crowley enthusiast, Kenneth Anger (1927-2023), rented Boleskine House for a few months.

In May 1970, Mr Kerr returned back to Boleskine from a nine month stay in Canada to find changes in the area during his absence he was not happy about. He wrote to the Inverness Courier which printed his letter (dated 12^th May) on Friday 15^th May 1970 (p. 7): ‘Sir – I live at Boleskine House, Foyers, although I have been in Canada for the past nine months. I found on my return that an access road to the installation site of the Foyers scheme had been driven through Boleskine, and Nuttall’s forces still there, consolidating and widening. In July last I visited the Hydro offices in Edinburgh, and was assured Boleskine land would not be affected, although clearly from a plan then produced there was no avoiding involvement as Boleskine land extended to lochside. In July last the Hydro understood the ground below the perimeter road belonged to the Forestry Commission, but as I received the impression any road would be at lochside, I wasn’t unduly concerned about impaired amenities, and just waited for some personal approach from the Hydro to explain in detail just what was proposed. No word has been directed to me at Boleskine House nor has the Hydro even bothered to reply to my correspondence. While reconciled to a lochside road, I was shocked to find a ravine just below the graveyard with what presumably will emerge as a road at the bottom… If there is to be a great gulch forever creating an Upper and Lower Boleskine only the Hydro, I imagine, would say that property values haven’t suffered.’ Kerr ends his letter on an amusing note, saying ‘I can’t help wondering what Aleister Crowley’s demons are thinking. We’re on good terms at the moment as the good natured ones predominate. I hope I can convince them to vent their spleen on the Hydro and not me. – Yours, etc., H. J. Kerr’.

JIMMY PAGE AND MALCOLM DENT

 

In 1971 Boleskine House was bought by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and Jimmy’s childhood friend Malcolm Dent (1944-2011) who lived at the house to supervise the restoration of the building. Malcolm P. Dent (who played the ‘Hermit’ figure in the Jimmy Page sequence for the film ‘The Song Remains the Same’ shot in the grounds at Boleskine House) was born on Friday 11^th February 1944 in Bridport, Dorset, and was brought up in Surrey; he came to Boleskine House at the age of 23 with Jimmy Page in 1971 and met his future wife there and raised a family there for more than twenty years.

In an article in the Highland News [Thursday 4^th February 1971, p. 8] titled ‘Boleskine enters pop era’ it says that the house, which was ‘subsequently converted into a private country hotel’ was ‘put up for sale by its Canadian owner, a Mr Halbert Kerr, at a minimum asking price of £14,000. Jimmy, 25, who plays with the progressive group Led Zeppelin, is at present abroad and it is not yet known what his plans for the house are. On a visit to Boleskine some weeks ago he told a couple who are acting as house keepers that he had a place in Reading, but felt he would have more scope and freedom at Foyers.’

Malcolm Dent acted as curator for twenty years at Boleskine and witnessed many strange phenomena: “Most of the oddities occurred during upheavals in the house. I am not talking about wallpapering, but structural alterations. Any time there was anything major, it was almost as though the house didn’t like it. If we didn’t get on with the job and get it finished, something would let us know about it. We would be wakened during the night with heavy doors banging all over the place and carpets and rugs being rolled up. It was though it was a reminder to get on quickly and get the job over”.

On another occasion Malcolm and some friends witnessed a “small porcelain figure of the Devil [which] rose off the mantelpiece to the ceiling, then smashed into smithereens in the fireplace”.  The most horrifying event though happened early one morning: “I was awakened in the wee small hours and just knew something was wrong. I was petrified. Something outside the bedroom door was snorting, snuffling and banging. It sounded like a huge beast. I had this clear picture in my mind of what it looked like, but there was no way I was going to open the door. I had a knife on my bedside table and I opened the blade and just sat there. The blade was so small it wouldn’t have done any good, but I was so frightened that I just had to have something to hang on to. The noise went on for some time but even when it stopped, I still could not move. I sat in bed for hours and even when daylight came, it took a lot of courage to open that door. Whatever was there, I have no doubt it was pure evil.” [‘Beware of the Beast’ by Bob King. Highland News. Saturday 8^th February 1997]

 

THE BATTLE OF THE PYLONS

 

Jimmy Page, Malcolm Dent and other inhabitants of Boleskine House campaigned against the proposed plane to install 96 foot tall pylons along Loch Ness which would encroach onto the Boleskine estate – four on the side of Loch Ness and one in the grounds of Boleskine House with further pylons up the face of  the hillside overlooking the Loch. Dent had issued a circular letter to undertake a campaign against the pylons in 1971 and a public inquiry was ordered by the Scottish Secretary Mr. Gordon Campbell in January 1972. The inquiry was held at Inverness on Monday 8^th May 1972.

In an article in the Highland News [Thursday 18^th November 1971, p. 4] under the heading: ‘The Laird in Jeans’ we read that ‘pop artist, Jimmy Page – spent the weekend at Boleskine House to check on the progress of the opposition to the Loch Ness “metal” monsters. It is feared the pylons would be an eyesore, damage amenity and desecrate the beauty of the Loch and surrounding landscape. So far, the Hydro Board has rejected alternative proposals for burying the lochside route or hitching it on wooden poles. A decision on a possible public inquiry is awaited from the Scottish Secretary, Mr Gordon Campbell…’ It goes on to say Jimmy Page, ‘bought Boleskine House earlier this year and hopes to make it his permanent home one day. He also has a home near London. Jimmy is a keen preservationist especially in regard to worthwhile old buildings and feels strongly about the menace of pollution.’

Other inhabitants of Boleskine House who stood against the pylons was the artist Barrington F. Coleby (1945-2014) who was born in Surrey; in 1977he was living at Foynes Field Cottage, near Nairn and between 18^th July to 16^th August that year, he was exhibiting his work at the Eden Court Theatre, Inverness with fellow artist, Gordon Corrance (brother of the photographer, Douglas Corrance; Gordon later became an art teacher). Coleby, along with his wife, the Glasgow-born writer and poet, Fiona Macleod, lived at Boleskine as caretakers for Page from November 1971 and Fiona, the daughter of a Hebridean father, baked her own bread as she worked on her novel; she was also the mother of a three-month old child at the time (November 1971).

Two senior North of Scotland Hydro-Electricity Board officials visited Boleskine House on Thursday 30^th September 1971 to explain the proposed development in detail; Page was not at the house but Malcolm Dent was there to greet them. A few months later, on Wednesday 22^nd December 1971, over two-hundred people attended a meeting organised by Page and Dent at Rose Street Hall, Inverness where Page won the public over with his campaign. Malcolm Dent, who had been making furniture at Boleskine House, raised 1500 signatures against the Hydro proposals for the planned pylons.

Malcolm Dent’s daughter, Uraina Dent, born Thursday 19^th August 1971 also lived at Boleskine House and attended Boleskine School in Foyers (she later married Gavin Anderson at Trinity Church, Inverness in January 1994); and later, Malcolm Dent’s son, also named Malcolm Dent, was born in Boleskine House around 1975, and he went on to play guitar in a band, like his godfather, Jimmy Page. It seems Malcolm Dent, his wife and children, all loved living at Boleskine House. He even assisted the famous Loch Ness monster hunter, Frank Searle (1921-2005), in March 1975, giving him permission and towing his caravan to a location on Boleskine land where his ‘Lock Ness Investigation Bureau’ could watch for the monster undisturbed; unfortunately, the council had different ideas and told him to vacate the land as he didn’t have planning permission. Searle had been investigating the monster at the Loch since 1969 in a tent and when he moved to Boleskine he’d already been five years at Dores and had two tent sites on a Ballachladaich farm with permission from the farmer- at a council meeting for Foyers on Tuesday 8^th April 1975, councillor Laurence Hasson objected to Searle’s application and it was rejected.

Jimmy Page only lived at Boleskine House for a short time and during the restoration it is said that Satanist Charles Pierce helped with the redecoration. Page also invited film-maker and fellow Crowley enthusiast Kenneth Anger to Boleskine. Page had agreed to produce the soundtrack for Anger’s film ‘Lucifer Rising’ but unfortunately due to a falling out this was not used.

Jimmy Page and Malcolm Dent had been in a six-year legal dispute since 1982 over the boundary of Boleskine House with Drumalbyn Development Trust of 6, Queensgate, Inverness, who brought the civil action against them. The row concerned a boundary fence which Malcolm put in place and being accused of allegedly stealing land belonging to Boleskine Lodge, opposite Boleskine House; the fence had taken in a small burn and a small piece of land and Page and Dent argued that they had ‘sole and exclusive right to land round Boleskine Lodge…’ Somehow, legal documents lodged in legal process, had mysteriously vanished but a photocopy of the document was accepted to show the exact boundary. The Sheriff at Inverness Sheriff Court ordered Malcolm Dent to remove the 275 ft length of fence. [Inverness Courier. Friday 26^th February 1988, p. 7]

Malcolm Dent sadly died on Saturday 15^th October 2011 at Inverness Highland Hospice; his private funeral took place a week later on Saturday 22^nd October.

 

 

THE MACGILLIVRAYS

 

Jimmy Page sold Boleskine House, with its five bedrooms, 14 rooms and an orchard, in 1990 for £250,000 (the selling agents were: Strutt Parker & Co. of Edinburgh) to retired hoteliers Ronald and Annette MacGillivray who ran the residence as a Bed & Breakfast. Ronald MacGillivray was born in Ibrox, Glasgow and he was Chairman of the Clan MacGillivray International Association which began in 1999. Ronald Macgillivray, devoted husband of Annette and father of Morven and Blair, died at Boleskine House on Tuesday 5^th February 2002 after an illness, aged 67 and the funeral service was held at Boleskine House at 1 p.m. on Monday 11^th February 2002. The MacGillivrays, who had no interest in the dark history of Boleskine, did not encourage sight-seeing and claimed that nothing out of the ordinary happened during their occupation of the house. Sometime after Ronald’s death the house was sold.

One of the more ludicrous articles following the Macgillivray’s departure from Boleskine included this from the Aberdeen Press and Journal for Tuesday 11^th January 2005 (p. 10) under the headline: ‘Exorcist called in to subdue bed of the Beast’. The article goes on to say that an ‘exorcism is to be carried out on a “possessed” bed once slept in by self-styled Satanist Aleister Crowley, who considered himself to be the devil.’ More nonsense follows: ‘Guests at The Steadings Hotel at Farr, Inverness-shire, are unable to sleep in the bed, claiming it rocks violently…’ The haunted bed ‘was sold after his [Ronald Macgillivray] death and ended up at The Steadings. Owner Andy Pavitt said guests had complained regularly about “ghostly goings on” in the bedroom, including claims that the bed had rocked violently. He has invited Kevin Carylon, who practices white magic and believes in a universal force to get rid of the bed’s evil spirits. Mr Carylon, who has performed special rituals at Loch Ness in an attempt to save the monster from the clutches of Nessie-hunters, said “I have been asked to do an exorcism on the bed as Crowley’s influence appears to remain.” People are unable to sleep in the room. No one spends longer than one night, which is obviously bad for business…’ It says that ‘the bed once took pride of place in the main bedroom of Boleskine House…’ which was unlikely to be Crowley’s actual bed, which was sold at auction in 1919;it is most probable that it is the either the circular bed mentioned by Mollie Loraine or some other bed that has gathered a sensationalist and superstitious notoriety.

After Ronald MacGillivray’s death in 2002, Boleskine House was bought by the secretive Amsterdam millionaire, Mrs Trudy Piekaar-Bakker and it was used as a holiday home for her friends and family.

 

On Wednesday 23^rd December 2015 a devastating fire caused severe damage to the house and much of the interior was lost to the blaze. The roof had also partially collapsed.

The house and its land was put up for sale in April 2019 for £500,000. It was bought by the Boleskine House Foundation whose intention was to rebuild and restore the house and open it to the public. Another fire, due to suspected arson, was reported on Wednesday 31^st July 2019 which destroyed what was remaining of the original house’s interior and roof.

The restoration of the house was completed in April 2026 and following an evening gala event on Friday 10^th April 2026, the house was open to the public on Saturday 11^th April from 9 a.m. with tours of the house and grounds and guest speakers.

 

Despite the turbulent history of the house and fears that it would be irretrievably lost, it seems the future of Boleskine House is in safe hands under the care of the Boleskine House Foundation.

 

 

 

 

 

Diagram of the ground floor (drawn roughly to scale)

 

1. Side, servants and tradespersons entrance, now a utility room.
2. Site of the chimney for the kitchen fireplace; presumably there is or was a fireplace in the room above also.
3. The Kitchen. There is a door on entering the kitchen to the left which is probably a pantry or storage place beneath the stairs.
4. On exiting the kitchen the cellar steps are located to the left which descent into a small ‘wine’ cellar.
5. Stairs ascending to the first floor and bedrooms of the north-eastern wing of the house.
6. Room in the north-eastern wing of the house, now a bar area.
7. Chimney and fireplace; there is presumably a fireplace in the room above.
8. Furthest room in the north-eastern wing, now a snug-lounge area.
9. Site of original fireplace and chimney, demolished and not rebuilt. The house was transformed into a ‘single-storey’ building sometime before March 1963 when Mrs. Mollie Loraine mentioned that the ‘two upstairs wings have been demolished’. Photographs of the time also confirm this. In 1989, Jimmy Page had ‘carried out a series of extensive improvements since buying the house in 1971 from the Canadian businessman Mr Halbert Kerr’. Page was planning ‘extensive re-roofing and other refurbishments to the south wing as part of a programme.’ [Led Zep guitarist has big house plans. Aberdeen Press and Journal. Wednesday 8^th February 1989. p. 9]
10. The Dining Room with its bow windows facing out towards Loch Ness.
11. Chimney and fireplaces.
12. Drawing-Room. It is my opinion that this would have been Crowley’s ‘gun room’ where he said he had his billiard table, being probably the only room large enough for a billiard table and space to play unhindered.
13. Chimney and fireplaces.
14. The Temple Room or ‘Oratory’ where Crowley performed the Sacred Magic of Abramelin.
15. The Door to the Terrace – originally a window, Crowley had a door installed here as it faces due North as required in the ritual. Malcolm Dent says, that ‘one of the first things he [Crowley] did was to consecrate the south-western part of the house to the occult.’ He also says, falsely I believe, that ‘this included the dining room. It became his temple, and to him it was the most important room. Crowley put a north-facing door into this room, which led to a terrace of river sand – it is a flower bed today.’ [Sunday Mail (Glasgow). Sunday 31^st March 1991, p. 34] It does not make sense that the room would have been a dining room so far away from the kitchen.
16. The Library.
17. Chimney and fireplace, presumably there is a fireplace in the room above.
18. Stairs ascending to the upper rooms in the south-eastern wing of the house.
19. W.C.
20. Room in the south-east wing, possibly Crowley’s study, now an office space.
21. Chimney and fireplace, presumably there is a fireplace in the room above.
22. This window in the furthest south-eastern part of the house was at one time a doorway; an early photograph of the house shows the door distinctly and images of the ruins after the fire also confirm this. Is it possible that this was Crowley’s bedroom next to his study? In the Magical Record of Omnia Vincam [Victor Neuburg] of 1909 he mentions that the chamber prepared for his initiation work during the ten day magical retirement is located upstairs in the house (with a fireplace, a magic circle and an altar etc.) and his bedroom is on the ground floor and on occasions he comes downstairs from his chamber to take biscuits from Crowley’s bedroom or to talk with him [see: The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg. Fuller. Pp. 157-169]. Victor sees Rose at the house and she is sleeping separately in another part of the house, presumably the north-eastern side not consecrated and dedicated to Abramelin and magical work.
23. Room in the south-eastern wing of the house along with rooms 14, 16 and 20 consecrated and dedicated to the Sacred Magic of Abramelin.
24. Site of original chimney and fireplace; the chimney was removed (along with the same located in the north-eastern wing) during the tenancy of Mollie Loraine.
25. The Long Corridor and the south-eastern pylon, a boundary between the consecrated and un-consecrated part of the house.
26. The Front Entrance.

 

 

Further Reading:

 

A Country called Stratherrick –A Historical Portrait of the Highland District. Alan B. Lawson. 1987.The book includes ‘An  Account of the Kirk of Boleskine with some Historical Notes on the Parish’ published in 1978.

The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. Edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant. London. Arkana Penguin Books. 1969.

The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. Translated by S. L. MacGregor Mathers. London. J. M. Watkins. 1897 [2^nd edition: London. John M. Watkins.1900; republished by Dover Publications, Inc. New York. 1975]

The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg. Jean Overton Fuller. W. H. Allen. 1965. The book includes examples from Victor’s 127 page Diary. The document entitled ‘The Magical Record of Omnia Vincam’ from which Jean Overton Fuller quotes was owned by General J F C Fuller and is unpublished.

The Great Beast. John Symonds. London; New York. Rider and Co. November 1951.

A Magick Life: The Biography of Aleister Crowley. Martin Booth. London. Hodder & Stoughton. 2000.

Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley. Lawrence Sutin. New York. St Martin’s Press. 2002.

Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley. Richard Kaczynski. United States (Arizona). New Falcon Publications. 2002.

Hammer of the Gods – Led Zeppelin, Unauthorised. Stephen Davis. New York. William Morrow and Company, Inc. [Great Britain: Sidgwick& Jackson] 1985. 

 

 

NOTES:

 

1. Boleskine House was also advertised ‘to let’ in the Inverness Advertiser on the following dates: Tuesday 5^th April 1859, Tuesday 16^th April 1867 and Tuesday 3^rd August 1869.
2. Lilian O’Bryen Horsford (1875-1958), second daughter of Frederick Wallis O’Bryen Horsford (born 1842), married Lt. Col. [later Brigadier General] frank Herbert Horniblow (born 1860) of the Royal Engineers, on 2^nd October 1895 at Christ’s Church, in Clifton, Gloucestershire. She went by the name ‘Laura Graham’ for adulterous assignations.
3. Charles Henry Rosher (1858-1936), engineer, architect, occultist and writer, the eldest of fourteen children born in Middlesex to Frederick Rosher (1829-1897) and Mary Sophia White (born 1833). Charles joined the Golden Dawn in May 1894 taking the name Frater Aequo Animo; he married Emily Frances Bevan (born 1857) on 28^th September 1882.
4. William Evans Hugh Humphrys, born 11^th February 1876, Hatherley Grove, Bayswater, London. Downing College Science graduate, the son of Rev. Hugh Humphrys (born Dublin, 1838) and Louisa Charlotte Catherine Evans (born 1854) who were married at St Georges, Hanover Sq. London on 28^th April 1875. W E H Humphrys was initiated into the Golden Dawn as a neophyte on 21^st November 1899, five months after graduating and he took the name: Gnothi Seauton. He married Jessie Alice Holliday (born 1875) on 29^th August 1911 in Camden Town, London. William Humphrys, a ‘radio engineer and inventor’ died in Middlesex on 21^st March 1950.
5. The eldest daughter of Hugh and M. Gillies of Boleskine Lodge, Foyers, named May Gillies, actually died suddenly aged 16 in January 1922 at 46, High Street, Inverness [Highland News. Saturday 28^th January 1922, p. 1] It is probable that she was the same ‘May Gillies’ who attended day and evening classes at Miss E. Fraser’s School of Typewriting and Shorthand at 22, High Street, Inverness. Pupils, including May, took their ‘Pitman’s examinations’ in December 1921 and were awarded their certificates in early January 1922 [Inverness Courier. Friday 6^th January 1922, p. 5] Hugh Gillies, the youngest son of Donald Gillies of Inverfarigaig, and grandson of Hugh McBeth (or Macbeth) of Achness, Strathnaver, Sutherlandshire, died aged 64 at Boleskine, Foyers on Tuesday 20^th September 1932 [Highland News. Saturday 1^st October 1932, p. 1]
6. Kenneth Martin Ward was born in Cambridge in 1877, the son of Harry Marshall Ward (1854-1906) who was Professor of Botany at Cambridge University from 1895, who married Selina Mary Kingdon (1864-1922) on 25^th July 1883. Harry and Selina had several children, most notable: Frank Kingdon Ward, OBE, born 6^th November 1885 who was an explorer, author and plant collector; he died on 8^th April 1958 and Winifred Mary Ward, FRCSLT, (1884-1979) who was a speech therapist. Kenneth was educated at Oundle School before going up to Cambridge in October 1906. He was initiated into Crowley’s A.A. on 25^th May 1909, after Neuburg, and took the motto: ‘Laiada I Maelperegi’ [Enochian: Secret is in Fire]. He died in London aged 39 on Tuesday 1^st February 1927, having returned home on sick leave from Rangoon the previous April where he was Professor of Physics at Rangoon University; he was treated at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, Endsleigh Gardens, Euston Road, and at King’s College Hospital but was told nothing could be done for him. His mother, Mrs Mary Ward’s memoir of her son, was published by Simpkin Marshall Ltd. in 1929.
7. For an account of Victor’s time at Boleskine see ‘The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg’ by Jean Overton Fuller.
8. Perdurabo. Richard Kaczynski. 2021 ed. p. 274.
9. Are these the same ‘four revolving walnut bookcases’ Crowley had in his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge? Very likely.[see Confessions, p. 15]
10. Dorothy’s mother, Fanny Elisabeth Brook, born Scott in Newcastle on 29^th July 1861, died on Sunday 23^rd September 1917 at Littlewick House, Maidenhead. Her obituary states that Mrs. George Brook, of 60, North Gate and Villa Albany, Cannes, widow of George Brook, FLS and younger daughter, the late Sir Walter Scott [1826-1910], Bart, Beauclerc, Riding Mill, Northumberland [Reading Mercury. Saturday 29^th September 1917, p. 7] She was buried at St John’s Church, Benwell, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Her father, Sir Walter Scott, (born in Cumberland on 17^th August 1826) married Ann Brough (1825-1883) at Bromfieldin Cumberland on 17^th November 1853. Sir Walter died at Cape Martin, France on 8^th April 1910. As well as daughter Dorothy, she had another daughter named Kathleen Grace Brook (1893-1974) who married Louis Noel Menteth Jackson (1893-1921) in High Wycomb in 1915. Fanny’s husband, George Brook, Fellow of the Linnean Society (founded 1788) published several papers on zoological subjects [1^st December 1891: ‘Description of new species of Madrepora’ in the Collection at the British Library; ‘On a new Genus of Collembola (sinella) allied to Degeeria, Nicolet’ – Journal of the Linnean Society of London, Zoology, vol 16, issue 95, pp. 541-545, September 1882] died in Hexham, Northumberland on 18^th September 1893. The Colonel Rutherford who gave Dorothy away at her wedding was Colonel John Victor Walton Rutherford (1857-1938) who married Dorothy’s aunt, Annie Mary Scott, (born 14^th October 1856) at Benwell on 10^th December 1891; Annie Rutherford died in Yorkshire on 13^th June 1922.
11. Arthur Edward Priestley, born Saturday 30^th June 1888 was the youngest child of William Priestley, born 7^th August 1842, a corn miller and farmer with 298 acres who employed 7 men and 4 boys; William married Elizabeth Looker, born 24^th October 1846, in Huntingdonshire on 3^rd September 1868. [in the 1881 and 1891 census they had 3 servants] They lived at the Manor House, Offord D’Arcy and had five children: Fanny Edith Priestley (born 8^th May 1874),she married Edward George Saltmarsh (1870-1931) in May 1896 and she died in Cornwall in October 1973; Constance Lily Priestley (born 2^nd August 1877), she died in October 1973; Percy William Priestley (born September 1880) he died on 25^th April 1935;  Dorothy Annie Priestley (born 3^rd September 1883) she died in 1971 and Arthur Edward (born 1888); in the 1911 census Arthur Edward is a ‘corn miller’s assistant’. William Priestley died on 21^st November 1912 and his wife, Elizabeth died on 10^th May 1913. Arthur Edward Priestley died in Cape Town, South Africa on Monday 24^th October 1960.
12. After leaving Boleskine, The Loweths moved to Maidenhead in Berkshire. Their first daughter, Kirsteen, who went to West Linton House School in Maidenhead, got married there in March 1961 to Andrew Hunter Findlay of Pinkneys Farm, Maidenhead; they had three children: John A. Findlay, born Maidenhead in 1962, Gary D. Findlay, born Maidenhead in 1964 and Clive Richard Findlay born in Windsor in 1970. Kirsteen died in London on 11^th March 2014. Diana Loweth married Anthony J. Taylor in Maidenhead in 1967 and had a daughter named Annelice Helen Taylor, born in Islington, London in 1975. Rosemary Loweth married Andre R, Lefevre in Maidenhead in 1968 and had a son named Gauthier John Lefevre born in Chiltern in 1974. David Donaldson Loweth died on 21^st February 1963 at Stafford General Infirmary and he was cremated on 26^th February at Henley Road Crematorium, Reading, Berkshire.
13. Walter Thorburn Simpson married Mary Sinclair Pottinger, daughter of Robert Pottinger, late Inspector-General of Hospitals and Fleets, on 10^th June 1902 in Leeds. Walter died at Wellnage, Duns, at the age of 75 on 4^th May 1942; his wife, Mary died at a Carlisle Home on 14^th November 1938.
14. David Shirley Crighton Simpson died at Stirling Royal Infirmary on Sunday 17^th August 1969, aged 59; he was survived by a wife, son and two daughters. Taken from his Obituary: The Scotsman. Tuesday 19^th August 1969, p. 6. David’s older brother, Robert Alison Crighton Simpson T.D., FRIBA., FRIAS, was born 28^th June 1903 at Peebles and educated at Harrow School under Reverend Lionel Ford, M.A.; he was admitted into Caius College, Cambridge on 1^st October 1922 (BA 1925) and he became an architect (FRIBA). His first professional assignment was at Durham and the Cathedral gave him a lifelong interest in ancient buildings and he had a vast knowledge of history. After Durham he worked in a partnership at Workington. During the war, at Workington, he joined the Border Regiment TA and was evacuated at Dunkirk on 8^th June 1940; he later transferred to the 8^th Battalion Royal Scots and was wounded in 1944; he attained the rank of Major when he retired in 1953 and attended the parade at the Coronation and received the Coronation Medal; he was awarded the Territorial Decoration (TD). He married Rosemary Euphemia Morrison in 1932 (Rosemary died at Hag Lodge, Peebles on 27^th May 1999) and was a keen piper, as were his sons. He died on 28^th September 1962 at Ellenford Lodge, Ellenford, Duns. [Obituary: Ross-shire Journal. Friday 12^th October 1962,p. 6]
15. John R. R. Fullerton, ‘Captain, late 19^th Royal Hussars’, married his first wife, Moira Faith Lillian de Yarburgh-Bateson (born Bateson, 1898-1982) at St George’s, Hanover Square, London on Friday 24^th October1919; the marriage was annulled in 1923. Moira died on 21^st December 1982; John R. R. Fullerton died on Friday 14^th January 1966 and his second wife, Evelyn, died on Sunday 7^th August 1960. John and Evelyn’s only daughter, Naomi Fullerton, born in Atcham in 1925, married Patrick Arthur Malcolm Cox, only son of Mr and Mrs William A. M. Cox of The Croft, Longforgen, (near Dundee), Perthshire, at Westminster in June 1949.
16. Mary Verite Grant also Loraine, died in a house fire at her home, flat 1, 38, Sussex Square, Brighton, Sussex, on Wednesday 5^th September 1973.
17. Dennis Henry Loraine was born Dennis Henry Edwards in Bristol in 1921 (mother’s maiden name: Rickard); he married his 3^rd wife, Molly Groves, (born in 1932 in Stepney, London) at Kensington in 1953. They had three children: Damocles Dennis Loraine, born Kensington in October 1953, [Damocles Loraine was arrested for breaking into a chemist shop and forcing open the dangerous drugs cabinet at Hopeman, Morayshire in March 1984; (he pled guilty at Elgin Sheriff Court on Friday 4^th May). Northern Scotland and Moray and Nairn Express. Saturday 31^st March 1984, p. 30]; Tarquin L. Loraine born in Hove in March 1959 and Tristan D. Loraine born in Chanctonbury, Sussex, in January 1962. Molly left Dennis in 1962 and the marriage was dissolved. Molly lived in Storrington after Boleskine house until June 1966 then moved in with her parents in Sussex; she died in Hove, Sussex, aged 34 in 1967. Dennis Loraine married his fourth wife, Sandra Marshall, aged 22 from Wiltshire who had been his secretary for four years, just before he was arrested in Las Vegas in August 1965; he died in 2006.
18. Halbert James Haldane Kerr returned to Montreal after selling Boleskine House to Jimmy Page and was the owner of an insurance claims office; he retired with his wife to St Patrick then to North Hatley where he died on Sunday 4^th June 2006; his funeral took place a week later on Saturday 10^th June at 2 p.m. Halbert’s son, Andrew Halbert Kerr (by his first wife Heather Grant, whom he divorced) was born in Montreal and also lived with his father at Boleskine House. Andrew also worked as an insurance adjuster with his father and married Cynthis Hawkins in 2008; he died in Toronto, aged 71 on 12^th August 2023.