The Great Beast and The Great Beast: Crowley at Loch Ness

In 1899 a flamboyant character arrived in Inverness. He purchased the brooding Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness for twice the amount the building was worth, becoming the laird of Boleskine. The man was Aleister Crowley and he had good reasons for paying over the odds for the remote foreboding house.

Crowley was born in Lemington, Warwickshire, in 1875. Rebelling against his ultra strict Christian upbringing he became the most flamboyant and colourfull character in British occult. His magickal and sexual experimentation shocked the prudish Victorian society. Crowley reveled in this and wove an intricate web of mythos about himself.

He chose Boleskine on account of its occult architecture. Previously he had scoured Britain for an abode to suit his needs and found none. Once in Boleskine he intended to carry out the ritual of Abra-Melin, an ancient rite that took 18 months to perform.

The ritual harkened back to the 1400s. The ritual was translated by a Jewish scholar called Abriham the Jew from a North African manuscript. Abriham was wandering the Middle East looking for true magicians from which to learn. He finally came upon a wizened mage called Abra-Melin whom passed the rite onto him. It dealt with the summoning of demonic forces. The ritual demanded idiosyncratic architecture and Crowley had previously tried to replicate this in his London flat. Though not having the desired effect strange things happened there. In the Great Beast’s own words…

“During this time magical phenomena were of constant occurrence. I had two temples in my flat; one white, the walls being lined with six huge mirrors, each six feet by eight; the other black a mere cupboard in which stood an alter supported by the figure of a Negro standing on his hands. The presiding genius of this place was a human skeleton, which I fed from time to time with blood, small birds and the like. The idea was to give it life, but I never got further than causing the bones to become covered in a viscous slime.”

Exactly whose skeleton it was and how Crowley came by it is unclear but if featured in one of his most notorious and amusing spells. Althoea Gyles a local artist and lover of one of Crowley’s poet rivals W.B.Yeats was sent to visit Crowley. Yeats had her scratch his foe’s hand with a brooch and carried a drop of the Beast’s blood back to her spouse. Yeats allegedly used this as a spell component to invade Crowley’s dreams. But more of the precious fluid was needed and Gyles was sent back. This time the Beast was ready and had already sprinkled Gyles apartment with a “magick potion”. Upon arriving at Crowley’s flat she became overcome with lust for the skeleton and made love to the blood and slime festooned cadaver. After this “boneing”she was promptly rejected by Yeats.

Yet more happened at Crowley’s flat apparently on account of the occult decor.

“The demons connected with Abra-Melin do not wait to be evoked; they come unsought. One night Jones and I were out to dinner. I noticed while leaving the white temple that the latch of the Yale lock had not caught. Accordingly, I pulled the door to and tested it. As we went out, we noticed semi-solid shadows on the stairs; the whole atmosphere was vibrating with the forces we had been using. (We were trying to condense them into sensible images.) When we came back nothing had been disturbed in the flat; but the temple door was wide open, the furniture disarranged and some of the symbols flung about the room. We restored order and then observed that the semi-materialized beings were marching around the room in almost unending procession.
When I finally left the flat for Scotland, it was found that the mirrors to take out except by way of the black temple. This had, of course been completely dismantled before the workmen arrived. But the atmosphere remained and two of them were put out of action for several hours. It was almost a weekly experience, by the way, to hear of the casual callers fainting or being sized with dizziness, cramp of apoplexy on the staircase. It was a long time before those rooms were re-let. People fled instinctively at the presence of something uncanny. Similarly, later on, when I gave up my rooms on Victoria Street, a pushing charlatan thought to better himself by taking them. With this object he went to see them. A few seconds later he was leaping headlong down the five flights of stairs, screaming in terror. He had sufficient genuine sensitiveness to feel the forces, without possessing the knowledge, courage and will required to turn them to account, or even endure their impact.”

Crowley’s attempts to perform the ritual at Boleskine failed. No one knows quite why but the rite was never completed. The semi-formed shadows that he evoked in London seemed to have been called again however. John Symonds his biographer recounts that the house’s lodge and terrace became peopled by shadowy shapes. The place seemed to have a strange and violent effect on people. A workman employed to renovate the villa went berserk and attacked Crowley who had to knock to man out and lock him in a coal shed. His lodge keeper who had been a teetotaler went on a three day drinking binge and tried to murder his own wife and children. Crowley finally left in 1918 but some believe he left something behind.

Subsequent owners of Boleskine have also reported disturbances. Musician and former member of the super group Led Zepplin, Jimmy Page brought the house over 20 years ago. His friend and custodian of Boleskine, Malcolm Dent has experienced the house’s dark side on several occasions.

“Most of the oddities occurred during upheavals in the house. I am not talking about wallpapering, but structural alterations. Any time there was any thing 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 up 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.”

Another time Malcolm some friends saw a statue of the Devil rise up from a mantelpiece, float to the ceiling then smash to the floor. The most horrifying event happened early one morning when the disturbances reached a crescendo.

“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.”

Could it be that the daemon summoning ritual had worked in a way Crowley had not foreseen?
Modern day wizard Doc Shiels thinks this may well be the case. Whilst engaged in the magical “Monstermind” experiment described later in this chapter, Doc made the acquaintance of a man named Patrick Kelly. Kelly claimed to have photographed a lake monster in Lough Leane, in 1981. This however was not the most fantastic of his claims.

He said that he was a direct descendant of Edward Kelly, the notorious scryer of Dr John Dee. Dee was the court magician to Queen Elizabeth 1st and claimed to speak with the dead via a young medium whom he had trained.

The modern day Kelly also claimed his father, Laurence, had met Aleister Crowley in Paris in 1933 shortly after he had left the Abbey of Thelema . Crowley told Laurence that he was very interested in the Loch Ness Monster whose first major flap of 20th century was occurring.

Finally Patrick Kelly and his father both claim to have seen the Loch Ness Monster on May 1st 1969 close to Boleskine. Fantastic assertions indeed but at least for this last one there may be some evidence. In June of the same year three American students were exploring the 17th century cemetery below Boleskine house. The came upon a curious object, it was an old tapestry wrapped around a conch shell. The tapestry was decorated with serpent like symbols embroider in gold thread. It measured 4 feet by 5 feet and seemed to be old and threadbare. There were reddish stains at each corner as if objects had been placed there. All in all it looked like an alter cloth. The shell was about 5 inches long, white and inscribed with two parallel grooves and a lotus blossom. When blew it produced a harsh braying sound. The objects were taken to the Victoria and Albert Museum to be studied by experts. The tapestry was latter identified as being Turkish in origin. The snake like symbols were Turkish script for serpent. We should also note that today lake Van in the East of Turkey is said to be inhabited by a dragon.

Lotus flowers, like the one on the conch shell, along with roast swallows were said to be the favorite food of dragons in China. They were often used as offerings to dragons in oriental lakes, to appease them and insure rainfall. Could Patrick Kelly and his father have been performing some kind of ritual at Loch Ness? Perhaps they were disturbed and had to leave behind their artifacts as they hurriedly retreated. If this were the case then it seems the Kelly’s were successful in their endeavor.

Infamous wizard, surrealist, and performer Anthony “Doc” Shiels instigated the largest  monster raising experiment ever in 1977. Doc had been in contact with seven professional psychics from around the world for some time. The group called themselves Psychic Seven International or P-S-I.  The seven decided to try and contact or called up aquatic dragons by using their powers. Doc took part in a number of spectacular rituals involving skyclad witches, beside various bodies of water in Ireland and Scotland. His colleagues concentrated on other lakes around the globe. The experiment commenced on the last day of January or more importantly Imbolc.

Doc saw the results for himself on the 21st of May. He had traveled to Scotland with his wife Chris. And on the 20th he had preformed a ritual invocation involving the Niddnidiagram. This is Doc`s sigil used in monster raising rituals. It resembles an eye with a trident resting atop it.

The following day he was in the car park of the Inchnacardoc Lodge with four friends when they all saw three humps gliding through the water about 900 feet away in the direction of Fort Augustus. The humps slipped with hardly a ripple beneath the surface. None of the group had a camera on them at the time. Doc, though elated at the beast’s presence, was understandably frustrated. Little did he know that he would later that day take what are widely regarded to be the finest pictures of the Loch Ness Monster ever obtained?

Doc and Chris had hitch-hiked to Drumnadrochit and from there walked to Urquhart Castle, overlooking the Loch. At four pm he was ensconced in a ruined tower looking over the water from a window, this time with his camera.

“Quite suddenly, a small dark head on the end of a long sinuous neck broke the surface of the water, about a hundred yards away. It was, undoubtedly, the Loch Ness Monster, proudly erectile, ready to be snapped. I instantly raised my camera and shot two pictures during the few seconds the creature was visible. Its neck was four or five feet long, greenish brown, with a yellowish underside. Its open mouthed head was tiny in relation to the muscular neck. The animal turned away from me, straightening its neck before sinking vertically.

I stood there mesmerized by the brief dreamlike vision. My hart beating rapidly, hands shaking as I lowered the camera, whispering expletives, ecstatic.”

Doc`s friend David Clark arranged for the high speed Ektachrome film to be developed by Newquay Colour Services, who handled most of the colour transparency work for Cornish Life magazine. The two snaps were startling in their clarity showing the muscles in the beast’s neck and it’s open mouth. The gleam of an eye even seems to be visible.

Martin Gilfeather of the Glasgow based paper Daily Record (that, ironically, was the paper that printed the first photo of Nessie back in 1933) asked Doc to send him both slides. Prudently Doc decided to send just one. The next day Gilfeather asked to see the other snaps on the roll of film. These were the before and after shots, mainly innocuous holiday snaps, but the journalist wanted to see if edge numbers of the photos all matched up. The roll was dispatched and after the snaps were examined to Gilfeather`s satisfaction, the pictures were published in the Record’s national sister the Daily Mirror.

It was then the backlash started. Many investigators have noticed it. It plagues them with ill luck that can range from camera failure to serious illness. Some call it the Loch Ness Hoodoo, Doc calls it psychic backlash. The Daily Record had promised to return Doc`s  pictures promptly. He got his slide back after an agonizing two week wait. His roll of film, the precious negatives were never returned. The paper said they had been mislaid. Doc has not seen them since.

David Benchley, a Falmouth based photo journalist, made a glass copy negative of the second monster shot. Doc sent this to fellow Monstermind participant, American psychic Max Maven. It was sent in a sealed package to Boston, Massachusetts. The package arrived but the picture had disappeared. To top this off another journalist, Frank Durham, had made copy slides of the first Nessie photo. The day these arrived the glass negative of monster shot two was dropped and smashed.

Doc wrote an affidavit declaring the photos to be genuine. Veteran monster hunter Tim Dinsdale sent this, together with the slide of the first shot to Dr Vernon Harrison. Dr Harrison was a photographic scientist and form president of the Royal Photographic Society. Dr Harrison wrote back with the following analysis.

“Dear Mr Dinsdale
                           I have examined the photographic transparency stated to have been taken by Mr A.N.Shiels on Saturday 21st May 1977 from the shore of Loch Ness in the vicinity of Castle Urquhart. This examination has been made through a binocular microscope at all magnifications up to x100. I find the transparency to be quite normal and there is no evidence of double exposure, superimposition of images or handywork with bleach or dye.

The object depicted is certainly not a branch of a tree, a trick of the light or an effect of uneven processing. Under magnification a small reptilian head is seen looking towards a point on the right of the photographer. The lighting comes from behind, and somewhat to the right of the photographer; and the foreshortening of the water shows that the object was photographed from a considerable distance trough a long focus lens. The creature has a wide mouth, partly open, and light is reflected strongly from the lower lip, which is presumably wet. There is an indication of two eyes and a stubby nose. The head is attached to a long neck whose girth increases as it approaches the water. The neck is smooth and reflects the light strongly, and it appears to be paler in colour on its lower side. The course of the neck can be traced some inches below the surface of the water until it is lost to view because of the turbidity of the water. The image of the submerged part is distorted by the surface wavelets of the water, and I find these distortions to be entirely naturalistic. There is even a wavelet that has been reflected back from the left side of the neck and caught the light of the sun.

It is not possible to say from a single still transparency what the photograph represents. The obvious explanation is that the photograph depicts a living creature strongly resembling a Plesiosaurus. However it could be a hoax. For example, a diver might have a model of the head and neck and be holding it above the water while he himself was submerged. A third possibility is that the photograph is not of an outdoor scene at all, but is a reduction of an imaginative painting by a competent artist. To produce a sufficiently deceptive painting would require a detailed knowledge of the effects of light reflected from, and transmitted trough rippled water; and it is just these effects I find so impressive in the photograph.

While I feel the alternative explanations I have suggested are not very plausible, they can only be excluded by a study of any independent evidence that may be available.
Yours sincerely,
V.G.Harrison.

The results worldwide were spectacular, 1977 was a year filled with monsters. A gigantic aquatic dragon was sighted off San Francisco Bay. Champ the monster of lake Champlain appeared.  A 12 meter (40 foot) monster was seen in lake Kol-Kol in what was then Soviet central Asia. Miss M Lindsay took two pictures of Morag, the monster of Loch Morar on 31st of January. On the same day a monster was spotted in Loch Sheil by John Smith. The Loch Ness Monster was seen on at least three occasions. Mr and Mrs Alex McLeod, Pat Scott-Innes, and a Mr Flemming and his daughter Helen. Three colour photographs of Morgawr the Cornish sea dragon were taken by Gerald Bennet from Parson’s Beach and the monster was spotted again by Ray Hopley off Trefusis Point.

A spectacular set of sighting, but they came at a cost, if one gives credit to Doc`s psychic backlash theory. Dr David Hoy, one of the American participants in Monstermind suffered a heart attack. Another member Major Leslie May MBE, of Edinburgh also fell ill and many other members of the team from the former USSR, Mexico, and India have seemingly vanished. Doc has heard nothing of them since 1977. Doc himself was attacked by a mob in Plymouth, accidentally set his beard on fire, had a son involved in a motorbike crash, had his daughter thrown by a usually docile horse, had another daughter stricken by abdominal pains, and lost two cats to some unidentifiable malady. Ted Holliday another long term monster hunter reported a similar “curse” that seemed to bejinx him some years before.

The idea that the Loch Ness Monster was a malevolent supernatural entity reached its peak some years before Monstermind in the early 70s. In 1973 one man believed things had gone on too long and decided to exorcise Loch Ness. He was the Reverend Dr Donald Ormand. Dr Ormand was perhaps the 20th century’s most renound exorcist. During his long career had dealt not just with ghosts and deamonic possetion but with latter day vampires, phantom black dogs, and areas of the sea were people were drawn by a strange siren like urge to drown themselves. These cases, fantastic as they are, pale into children’s games when compared to the Doctor’s strangest case.

Dr Ormand’s first encounter with a lake monster happened 1967 whilst on a caravanning holiday on the shores of Long Loch in Ross-shire. One morning he set out to walk to the village of Ardelve. His route took him past Loch Duich. As he looked out over the loch, the calm water suddenly became violently disturbed, foaming and heaving. For one absurd moment the Reverend thought a submarine was breaching in the loch. But the object revealed itself to be some immense aquatic animal with two huge humps that reared out of the water. Then just as swiftly as it had surfaced the beast sank, leaving only concentric ripples as a clue to its manifestation.

It was not until the following year that Dr Ormand began to suspect that these monsters were not conventional flesh and blood creatures. In June1968 he had a far more alarming encounter with a sea serpent. The Reverend was holidaying with his friend Captain Jan Andersen in Norway. Andersen had offered to show Dr Ormand the “eeriest waterway in Norway”, the Fjord of Trolls (note the link with hairy giants!). The entrance to the fjord is hidden and was used by British craft during WW2.  The men travelled along the long, narrow waterway screened on either side by gargantuan cliffs. But it was only on their return journey that the exorcist began to feel something was badly wrong. A feeling of growing menace began to creep over the area. As they approached the entrance to the fjord the water began to seethe.

“What on Earth is it?” asked the Reverend.
“It can be only one thing”,replied the Captain. “It would be useless to try and avoid it.”
Two massive humps appeared, much like the ones the Doctor had seen in Scotland but much closer. The massive animal bore down on their boat with terrifying speed. And the frightened cleric braced himself for an impact that would turn the vessal to matchwood.
“It will not hurt us, they never do”, shouted the captain. Sure enough the monster veered to the starboard at the last moment and submerged.
“Shall we follow it?” inquired the Reverend, eager to see more of the fantastic animal.
The captain’s reply was cryptic.
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. The further we keep away from that thing the better. When I said evil it’s what I really meant. This is the third time I have seen it. On the other occasions it was further north, closer to the North Cape. They are what our ancestors called the Sea Serpents. Today people regard them as existing only in legend. But when you have seen them you believe in them.”
Dr Ormand questioned his reasoning. “But why are they evil? That one might have easily capsized our boat but it did us no harm.”
The Captain’s answer was even stranger than before
“They don’t do physical harm. They want to convince any who see them that they are harmless. The evil they do is to men’s characters. The serpent in the Garden of Eden was no ordinary snake, and what you have just witnessed is no ordinary creature.”
Dr Ormand enquired as to their true nature.
“I don’t know for certain, but I think their character was described in the first book of Genesis. I am not sure even that it exists physically or not- there are things which do not exist and yet may be visible to man.”

The more Dr Ormand thought on Andersen`s words the more convinced he became that the monsters were paranormal in nature.

“The explanation for these extraordinary appearances, in my submission, lies not in the field of science, but in the realm of the supernatural. What has been seen, and is still visible to some on occasion, is not a concrete present-day monster, but a projection into our day and age of something which had its habitat in Loch Ness and its surroundings, millions of years ago.”

Commenting on modern witnesses he says…

“What they saw was not something that was taking place at that precise moment. The gigantic creature they were so privileged to see was no longer in the land of the living. It was something seen out of time. The so- termed Loch Ness Monster is on physical but psychical, a spectre of something which existed in the waters and on the shores of the vast lake in the dim recesses of the past.”

He had his ideas backed up in 1972 whilst attending a meeting of the Organization of Enquiry into Psychical Disorder in Sweden. An eminent Scandinavian neurologist delivered a report concerning the monster of lake Storsjon. The report was about the malevolent effect the monster seemed to have on those who hunted for it or had seen it regularly. It resulted in shocking moral degeneration. Similar patterns were found, or so the neurologist claimed, in Irish and Scottish cases.

At almost the same time Dr Ormand received a letter from F.W.Holliday the renowned monster hunter who had recently come to similar conclusions to the Doctor. The letter congratulated him on his insight.

With these encouragements the Doctor made up his mind to exorcise Loch Ness. The Reverend believed that the monster’s manifestations were not in themselves evil, but rather evil had attached itself to the phenomena and the area. He believed he could purge this evil and leave the monsters intact. This theory was not shared by F.W.Holliday who believed the creatures themselves to be overwhelmingly evil.

The Doctor decided to seek the advice of a fellow exorcist Reverend Dom Robert Petipierre, a monk of the Anglican Order of St Benadict. Dom Robert took a large map of the loch and drew a cross upon it. The top of the crucifix was at the Inverness end of the loch and the base near Fort Agustus.The intersection terminated on the left at Drumnadrochit and on the right at a point between Inverfahigaig and Dores. The men planned preliminary exorcisms at each of these points. The final right was to be carried out in the center of the cross in the middle of the loch in a boat. All the points of entry and exit along waterways were bound against evil to stop the contamination spreading during the ritual.

Between them the exorcists drew up a rite from German, Spanish, Roman, Greek, and English sources. On June 2nd 1973 the ritual took place. Accompanied by Holliday Dr Ormand exorcised all of the points and eventually on a small boat he rowed to the center of the dark peaty loch. There floating on 800 feet of cold, black water he gave the final exorcism.

“I adjure thee, thou ancient serpent, by the judge of the quick and the dead, by Him who made thee and the world, that thou cloak thyself no more in manifestations of prehistoric daemons, which henceforth shall bring no sorrow to the children of men.”

After the ceremony Dr Ormand felt drained and fell into a deep sleep. He believed his exorcism to be a success and subsequently went on to exorcise Lake Storsjon in Sweden.

However monsters are still reported in both lakes today.