Tag: Aleister Crowley

Cannibal killer who claimed he was possessed by occultist Aleister Crowley ate victim’s finger during savage murder

A cannibal killer who murdered a man then torched his flat is facing a life sentence.

Gabriel Brown stabbed Joseph Johnston 22 times during a ‘punishment’ attack at the 58 year-old’s home in Annan, Dumfries and Galloway in November 2024.

Sick Brown, 35, also chopped off the victim’s ring finger, cooked and ate it.

The body of Mr Johnston – known as Ernie – was later discovered in the burned out flat.

Such was the graphic nature of the details jurors had to endure, that the judge in the case excused them from ever having to take part in a jury again.

Although Brown had never met Mr Johnston until the night of the attack, the victim had previously been in a relationship with his step-mother.

The High Court in Glasgow heard that ex-bouncer Brown decided to target Mr Johnston amid claims of what he had been told about their time together.

Brown – a convicted sex offender – had denied murder and had lodged a special defence that he had been suffering from a mental disorder at the time.

The killer told the court he had been possessed by the spirit of 19th-century born occultist Aleister Crowley, who apparently told him to ‘take Ernie’s soul’.

However, jurors rejected his claims and today found him guilty of murder following the near two-week trial.

Brown will learn the minimum time he will spend behind bars when he is sentenced next month.

The trial was told how Mr Johnston and Brown’s step-mother had previously been together.

She had at one stage pointed out to the killer where Mr Johnston lived. She had also referred to Mr Johnston using a derogatory name.

Brown – who had been diagnosed with mental health issues when he was a teenager – had downed alcohol and smoked cannabis before he went to the victim’s home late at night.

Mr Johnston allowed him in and the pair appeared initially to be getting on – even opting to take a photo together.

However, later that night Brown launched what was described as a ‘savage’ attack on his defenceless victim.

As well as the multiple stab wounds and cutting off a finger, the killer also carved letters onto Mr Johnston’s face.

To try and cover up what he had done, Brown started fires in four different areas of the property including torching furniture, turning on cooker hobs and putting metal cutlery in a microwave.

He also ripped out smoke alarms to prevent them going off before fleeing the scene and returning to his step-mother’s home.

He also texted another person that night making an accusation about Mr Johnston and adding ‘he sleeps forever’.

The body of Mr Johnston was later discovered in his charred kitchen.

During the trial, Brown claimed to remember taking a knife out of the victim, but said he had ‘no recollection’ of putting the blade there.

Asked by his KC Thomas Ross how the weapon would have got there, Brown stated: ‘I attribute it to Aleister Crowley. I put it down to possession. I have previous incidents which my friends have told me about.’

Questioned whose hand the knife was in, the killer added ‘Aleister Crowley’s. We share a body. When removing the knife it was my hand.’

Brown recalled hearing a ‘death rattle’ and Mr Johnston bleeding heavily.

He went on to graphically describe what he did to the man’s left ring finger.

He told the trial: ‘Later on I did something I would describe as a favour to him.’

Mr Ross: ‘What was that?’

Brown: ‘I removed and consumed his finger.’

The sick murderer admitted he ‘cooked’ the digit, but that ‘Aleister was going to take his soul’.

The court heard Brown was arrested after being found sleeping in his step-mother’s attic.

In cross examination, Brown refuted the accusation by prosecutor Eric Robertson that he had gone to ‘square up’ to Mr Johnston that night.

After the verdict, it emerged Brown had previous been jailed for offences involving young girls.

Lord Mulholland deferred sentencing for reports, but warned Brown he may never be released.

He told him: ‘This was sustained, vicious and merciless attack on a defenceless man on his own home.

‘It was motivated, in your own words, by a desire to punish the victim for what you believed had happened to your step-mum during her relationship with him.’

‘You brutally assaulted him with a knife, stabbing him at least 22 times, inflicting blunt force injuries and severing his finger.

‘The fact that it was his ring finger is evident of your motivation that it was a punishment attack.

‘Carving initials on his face is redolent of the extent of your savage attack.’

After Brown was taken back to the cells, Lord Mulholland said he was excusing jurors from further jury service for life due to the ‘harrowing and graphic’ evidence they had heard.

Following the verdict, Police Scotland Senior Investigating Officer, Detective Inspector Graeme Robertson, said Brown will now ‘face the consequences of his despicable actions’.

He added: ‘While this verdict does not change the outcome, I hope it brings Joseph’s family some form of comfort.’

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“In his short 37 years, John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons embodied at least several different roles in one tormented but glorious life.
By day, Parsons’ unorthodox genius created a solid rocket fuel that helped the Allies win World War II and NASA send spacecraft to the moon. Co-founder of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Corporation, a lunar crater was named after Parsons.
By night, Parsons called himself The Antichrist when he performed Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic rituals to create a new sort of human being that would finally destroy Christianity.
In a Pasadena mansion, the dark, handsome Parsons hosted soirees for the emerging literature of science fiction, visited by writers such as Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and none other than L. Ron Hubbard, who later founded the Church of Scientology. With Hubbard playing his “Scribe,” Parsons enacted dark “Babalon” rituals to help foment a new occult age. Jack Parsons died suddenly in a huge, mysterious explosion that even today cannot be definitively explained. Was it murder? Suicide? Or just an accident?
Feral House’s paperback edition adds new photographs and an Afterword about Parsons’ “Black Pilgrimage.” One of the inspirations for hit television series, “Strange Angels.””

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“This eclectic collection presents a series of articles outlining Robert Anton Wilson’s unique perspective on the notorious scoundrel and mystic, Aleister Crowley – the Man, the Mage and his life’s work. The centerpiece, “Do What Thou Wilt,” recently liberated from the archival depths of Harvard University, is published here for the first time ever. In this, until recently unknown manuscript, Wilson examines and contrasts the pragmatic and theoretical revelations of Crowley’s system, Thelema, with various other contemporaneous scientific research into expanded consciousness. Lion of Light is fleshed out with an introduction and foreword by Lon Milo Duquette and Richard Kaczynski respectively, along with four additional pieces by seasoned explorers that shed light on the relationship of these two Masters, Wilson and Crowley.

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“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Like many of my generation, I was steeped to magical maturity in a technicolor broth stirred by the Holy Trinity of Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson. But when the subject is Aleister Crowley, I cannot possibly imagine a more informed, brilliant and insightful commentator than Robert Anton Wilson.

Love is the law, love under will.” – Lon Milo DuQuette, author of The Magick of Aleister Crowley

“Two of the twentieth century’s most provocative thinkers – Robert Anton Wilson and Aleister Crowley – meet in this career-spanning collection of Wilson’s essays on magick and Thelema. RAW and AC go together like peanut butter and shrooms.” – Richard Kaczynski, author of Perdurabo and The Weiser Concise Guide to Aleister Crowley”

Who Was Aleister Crowley…Occultist, Satanist, and British Spy?

An otherwise auspicious birth in 1875 brought forth into the world Aleister Crowley who defied all acceptable standards of his time. His arrogance matched his defiance and bordered on grandiose. He founded the religion of Thelema, practiced sex magic, and may have worked as a double agent for the British. Based on the legends about Crowley, it would be easy to sum him up as the perverse, drug-addicted, satanic, wickedest man in the world. However, it seems that he was much more than any one of those things. Exactly who was Aleister Crowley – the person who could evoke respect and devotion in some people but disgust, hatred, and fear in others?

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‘The Battle of Blythe Road’: When William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley Had a Magic Duel

It ended, as magic duels often do, with someone being kicked down a flight of stairs.

In 1900, the rivalry between poets and self-proclaimed magicians William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley had reached a fever pitch. Crowley was a notoriously malevolent practitioner of ceremonial magic and occultism who unnerved Victorian England with his amoral beliefs and behaviors, including drugs and promiscuity. In his early twenties, he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society that embraced the study of magic. Among its members were Dracula author Bram Stoker and Yeats, who was one of the 20th century’s most renowned poets.

It soon became apparent that Yeats and other members of the London chapter were uncomfortable with Crowley’s interpretation of their practices and rituals: They decided Crowley would no longer be welcome. This made the occultist quite angry. Anticipating a possible face-off with Yeats, Crowley consulted with MacGregor Mathers, a magician and founder of the Golden Dawn who advised Crowley on “spells” that could convert Golden Dawn members into siding with Crowley. Mathers also recommended Crowley dress in Celtic garb.

Both Crowley and Yeats were gripped in the belief their occult skills could have a real-world effect: Crowley wanted to take some of the organization’s top-secret papers and was prepared to use his magical abilities to do it, though he was also reportedly armed with daggers.


When Crowley showed up to the London headquarters of the Golden Dawn on Blythe Road, a physical confrontation ensued. According to Yeats biographer Richard Ellman, a determined Crowley attempted to ascend a flight of stairs while Yeats and other members of the Golden Dawn confronted him, each shouting spells at the other. Despite their claimed mastery of their craft, the “battle” ended when, according to Ellman, Yeats resorted to simple assault and cast his foot on Crowley’s person:

“…When Crowley came within range the forces of good struck out with their feet and kicked him downstairs.”

For his part, Yeats described the duel with Crowley ending with Crowley being escorted out of the building and then phoning police so he wouldn’t return. The ending was rather anticlimactic, but the confrontation nonetheless earned the dramatic name of “The Battle of Blythe Road.”

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Boris’s beach blonde’s X-rated play: Glamorous PR guru Carrie Symonds, 30, starred in ‘satanic sex cult’ based on writings of unabashed occultist

She may have gone to ground since finding herself at the centre of a political storm, but there was a time when Carrie Symonds was rather less camera-shy, as these pictures show.

Taken from Miss Symonds’s social media posts, they show the 30-year-old former Tory aide, who has been linked to Boris Johnson, in a variety of glamorous poses on holiday, and even starring in a ‘satanic sex cult’ theatre production during her university days.

One of the photographs shows her on a beach, thought to be Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera, holding a watermelon.

Others were taken of her at the helm of a yacht, lying in the sun in Tuscany and drinking a glass of rose wine on a balcony.

But the most shocking pictures show her performing in an X-rated play. It is thought she took part as a drama student at Warwick University, where she studied from 2006 to 2009.

The production was based on the writings of self-styled mystic Aleister Crowley – an unabashed occultist who revelled in his infamy as ‘the wickedest man in the world’. He died in 1947.

Crowley’s form of worship involved sadomasochistic sex rituals with men and women, spells which he claimed could raise evil gods, and the use of hard drugs, including cocaine and heroin.

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