Crowley’s Cactus Cocktails and Curries

by 5ocietyx

crowley curry

The Rites of Eleusis are a series of seven public invocations or rites written by Aleister Crowley, each centred on one of the seven classical planets of antiquity. They were performed by Crowley, his lover Leila Waddell, and Victor Neuburg in October and November, 1910, at Caxton Hall, London.

The names of the seven Rites are The Rite of “Saturn”, “Jupiter”, “Mars”, “Sol”, “Venus”, “Mercury” and “Luna”. Crowley claimed that the Rites were designed to inspire the audience with ‘religious ecstasy’, and that merely reading them would help people “cultivate their highest faculties”. Some in the popular press thought otherwise, and considered the Rites an immoral display, riddled with ‘blasphemy and erotic suggestion.’

The independent researcher Richard Spence, who has extensively researched Crowley’s links to the secret services in his book Secret Agent 666 says this, ‘The audience at the private performance were provided with a special treat, a mescaline cocktail to enhance their enjoyment. The Beast carefully observed the reactions.’

And this incident was apparently not an isolated one in Crowley’s life. His fondness for narcotics and psychedelics seems to have extended beyond the indulgent or recreational, and into a sort of early mind-control project, which would be quite useful for someone who wanted to obtain information from another individual.

From Richard Spence again, ‘Crowley once boasted “i have myself made extensive and elaborate studies of the effects of indulgence in stimulants and narcotics,” and produced “a vast quantity of unpublished data” on the subject. the Beast routinely administered mescaline or other drugs to willing and unsuspecting subjects (spicy curries were a favourite means), methodically cataloguing the results. These observations ended up in another of his journals, Liber CMXXXIV, The Cactus, which he described as an “elaborate study of the psychological effects produced by Anhalonium Lewinii… compiled from the actual records of some hundreds of experiments. The Cactus vanished after the war.’

taken from –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rites_of_Eleusis

Secret Agent 666, Richard B. Spence (2008)