Abbey of Thelema
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The Abbey of Thelema was a temple founded by Aleister Crowley in a rented villa at Cefalu, Sicily in 1920. The name for this magical temple was taken from a fictional abbey in Rabelais's satire Gargantua, where all worldly pleasures were freely indulged. As in that story, Crowley painted the words, "Do What Thou Will" over the door. (These words were also engraved over the doors of Medmenham Abbey, the meeting place of Sir Francis Dashwood's notorious Hellfire Club in the eighteenth century, so Crowley may have gotten the idea from that as well.) He also painted several murals on the interior walls. Here Crowley and his family and followers conducted magical and religious ceremonies, in keeping with his doctrine of Thelema.
Crowley had planned to transform the small house into a global center of magical devotion and reap a fortune in tuition fees paid by acolytes seeking training in the Magical Arts. What both the Abbey and its master actually became was the subject of much rumor and heresay, partly the gossip of locals but mostly the product of John Bull, a British yellow journalist with a particularly vindictive attitude towards Crowley. These included charges of sexual orgies, animal and child sacrifices, drug use, and bestiality. Crowley never admitted to these, but neither did he deny them, feeling that there was no such thing as bad publicity.
In 1923, a young English poet by the name of Percival Hughes died from what appears to have been blood poisoning following his participation in a ritual at the abbey. His wife immediately filed charges with the authorities. With this and the numerous rumors about activities at Thelema in mind, Mussolini's government requested that Crowley and his followers leave the country. The Abbey of Thelema was abandoned and local residents painted over Crowley's murals.
The villa still stands today, but in very poor condition. Filmmaker Kenneth Anger, himself a devotee of Crowley, later uncovered and filmed some of these murals in 1955. Recently other murals were uncovered, and pictures of them were posted on the Internet. "Abbey of Thelema" remains a popular name for various magical societies, Witchcraft covens, and Satanist grottoes. It is also the name of a fan club for controversial rock star Marilyn Manson.
External links:
- Abbey of Thelema Yahoo! Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Abbey_of_Thelema)
- SPIRITUS93's Virtual Abbey of Thelema (http://www.ncf.ca/~ae478/)
