The forgotten temple of Thelema
Since I was 16 I was very interested on the life of Sir Aleister Crowley. Crowley was the greatest magican in the 19th century and a lot of people know him. He wrote a lot of books about magic and the most of them I read as I was young. Also I read books and articles about his life.
As I was 19 I travelled to Scotland and I Went to Boleskin house, where Crowley lived for a long time, but in this time the house was owned by Jimmy Page and it was not possible to see the inside rooms. I heard about a second place in Cefalú / Sicilia, where Crowley builded up his Thelema temple. I had no money to go to Cefalú and some people say, that the temple was destroyed after Kingsey and Kenneth Anger made their film about Crowley there, so stopped my thinkings to going there.
In the year 2006 I travelled on a holiday trip to Sicilia and I had a stopp in Cefalú. I asked some people, but no one can help me or had some informations about the Thelema abbey. I Meet a german woman and she worked as a vist guide in Cefalú since two years. I asked here about the temple and she also didn´t know something, but she was directly intereseted by the theme. She told me, that she had an idea, who can help us to get more informations. That evening she came back and said to me, that we had will have a date later, with an old journalist she knows. He told us where we can find the abbey and that the house is still there, but he said that the windows closed with nails and the house is in a bad condition.
The next day we meet two other tourist guides, also interested on the house and we went to the area where the house should be. Behind a big new sport arena in an edge, under a lot of trees and in a wild garden we find an old destroyed house. All windows was closed and on one site we find a destroyed door, which someone has opened. We went inside and we found destroyed rooms, old furniture and the whole roof has big holes and you can see the evening sky.
On the other end of the house, in the last room we found what we search. On the wall we see a lot of Crowleys original paintings. I looked over and I can see that we must be in the old sleeping room of Crowley, he called “The chamber of nightmares” I know some descriptions of the paintings and could found a lot of them on the walls. I was impressed, that the pictures still their after 70 years. Some people brought flowers and a lot of people wrote things on the other walls. When you stand inside this room you feel the spirit of the old time and the magic of this area. The house is in a such bad condition, that the time will destroy the last paintings of Crowley and than “Thelema abbey” is gone forever.
Two years later I went to Egypt and search for the so called Stèle of Revealing in the archeological museum in Cairo, which ispire Crowley to write the "Book of The Law". It is still in the Museum and you can find it on the second floor on the left side. The artefact is still in a good condition and I was happy, that you can still see it in the museum
But a lot of people help to remember Crowley and his work. Page has the biggest collection of Crowley items, Kenneth Anger owns a lot of pictures, painted doors from the Abbey and Ozzy Osbourne wrote the song “Mr Crowley”. Also a very old movie with Vincent Price, “The black cat” is based on Crowleys life. I will end with Crowleys importents sentence “Do what you whilt should be the whole of the law”