Incomer from hell

Once you are near it, the place is very far from weird. It is an unassuming Georgian villa, standing above the quiet old road which skirts the southern shore of Loch Ness. Built in the last decades of the eighteenth century, it was no more than a lodge for the local aristocracy.

Since 1889, however, notoriety has hung like a vapour over Boleskine House. Strange doings have been rumoured there, things almost unspeakable, since it became the home of the ``wickedest man in the world'' - the man, declared John Bull magazine, ``that we would like to hang.''

It is not so difficult to see what it was about Aleister Crowley that attracted such editorial comment. He was a bisexual drug-addicted charlatan with a fondness for the black arts.

There's little doubt that he did have an influence on the group of people around him, however, which included film director Donald Cammell who shot himself in April. At times Cammell played down the connection - his father was a friend and one account names Crowley as Cammell's godfather - but conceded that being brought up in a household where magick (as Crowley spelled it) was real, had an effect on him. That would not surprise anyone watching Cammell's most notorious work Performance.

Crowley propagandised against his country during the First World War; he walked blithely away from Himalayan accidents, leaving his fellow mountaineers to their fate, and he claimed to be the prophet of a hedonistic new religion which would replace Christianity.

The 24-year-old who first walked into Boleskine House on Loch Ness-side in August, 1899, was a mere pupa of the fully-formed wizard who would come to call himself ``The Beast'' and be abominated in the press 20 years later.

He bought this unsuspecting little single-storey villa at Boleskine because he was already fascinated by the black arts, and the magician Abra-Merlin had advised that in order to conjure up one's Guardian Angel one must construct an oratory with certain physical and geographical characteristics. It should have a north-opening door, a terrace covered with fine river sand, and a lodge at the end of the terrace.

Crowley had inherited a huge fortune of #40,000, and he was prepared to spend all of it on the appropriate site for the Operation of the Sacred Magick.He ended up half way between the sleeping hamlets of Foyers and Inverfarigaig.

Crowley's first few years at Boleskine were a mixture of mundanity, magic, and mischief.

Then he raised the demons in the lodge above Loch Ness and discovered them to be uncontrollable. A workman employed to renovate the building attacked Crowley and had to be locked in the cellar.

Crowley absent-mindedly scribbled some incantation on the Foyers butcher's bill, and the poor tradesman promptly chopped through his own femoral artery and died. His lodgekeeper, who had claimed to be a teetotaller, went on a three-day binge and tried to kill his wife and children.

His housekeeper unsurprisingly handed in her notice and fled. People began to take the old hill paths, rather than risk offending the inhabitants of Boleskine House.

It is not difficult to imagine the impact that Crowley had on the Highlands at the turn of the century. That big, bold, amoral man with his gypsy band of friends and his matter-of-fact communications with the netherworld hit the district like a howitzer. He was the incomer from hell.

Like most men of certainty and all of the half-mad, Crowley went on his way quite unperturbed by the opinions of others. He christened himself the Laird of Boleskine and Abertarff, in respect of his two Highland acres, and had a coronet with a gilded ``B'' embossed on his notepaper. (The honorific was later elevated to Lord Boleskine.)

And then he got married in the Highlands, but not in any normal way.

In the summer of 1903, when Crowley was 28 his friend Gerald Kelly joined him in Boleskine. Kelly's mother and widowed sister were taking the waters 20 miles away at the Strathpeffer spa, and one day a letter arrived from Mrs Kelly requesting a visit from her son.

Crowley went along for the ride. It transpired that Mrs Kelly was worried by the behaviour of her daughter Rose. Intrigued, Crowley befriended Rose. Her problem was, he discovered, easily solved. She was a young widow pestered by boring older men, one or other of whom her mother was determined she should marry.

Lord Boleskine proposed his solution. If she would marry him, Crowley declared - why then, Rose could not possibly be forced to marry anybody else. And he would not be a demanding husband. In fact, after the wedding he would disappear.

Rose delightedly agreed, and in the grey of the dawn of the following morning the couple went to Dingwall, where they roused a lawyer and were married at 8am. Crowley had no sooner drawn his sgian dubh from his stocking and ceremoniously kissed it than Gerald Kelly burst in and swung a punch.

But it was too late. The couple were obliged to register their marriage with the local sheriff. Dingwall and Strathpeffer were, to Crowley's great joy, ``seething with scandal'' as the happy couple boarded the train to honeymoon on the West Coast.

It is too easy to assume that the Boleskine set was solely a collection of drug-raddled and sex-obsessed misfits and outcasts. His social circle was extraordinarily distinguished. As a young man in the south he had met William Butler Yeats, who shared his interest in magic (and in poetry, although Crowley considered that he was a far superior poet to Yeats).

Crowley features in the work of such acquaintances as W Somerset Maugham (in whose novel, The Magician, Boleskine House becomes Skene and Crowley became Oliver Haddo. He was also known as ``the Mahatma'' in Arnold Bennett's Paris Nights. He hung around with Christopher Isherwood and the Berlin set which would be immortalised in Mr Norris Changes Trains. He gave hallucinogenic drugs to Katherine Mansfield (she was sick). He drew portraits of Aldous Huxley; he was sketched by Augustus John; he climbed with Professor Norman Collie; Tom Driberg was his acolyte; he dined with Stephen Spender; he advised young Peter Brook on a production of Dr Faustus, he corresponded with H L Mencken.

He was, during those happy years at Boleskine before John Bull magazine dubbed him the wickedest man in the world, little more than another eccentric Edwardian free-thinker.

He left Boleskine before the First World War, and sold it some time after that, while he was on the continent or seeing out the war in the USA, where he wrote articles in praise of the German psyche. He returned to Britain after the conflict, to be pilloried and libelled in the newspapers.

In the 1920s, when he had been expelled from most European countries and was nursing a heroin addiction which had been formed not by recreational use but because a Harley Street physician had prescribed it for his asthma (heroin was not made illegal until 1922), he occasionally voiced a longing for the peaceful Highlands. His 1931 will asked for his ashes to be placed in an urn on the ledge of the cliff behind Boleskine House. (They were not. When he died in 1947 Crowley was cremated in Brighton.)

Not only are his ashes absent. There is no numen hanging over Boleskine House now, no matter what my friends suggest.

In 1969, the film-maker Kenneth Anger, who made the black cult movie Scorpio Rising, rented Boleskine House for the summer. A new generation, attracted by his drug use, by his sexual anarchy, by his mysticism, and by his coda: ``Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law'', had stumbled across Crowley.

Anger told his fellow Crowleyite, Jimmy Page of the rock band Led Zeppelin that the place was available, and in 1970 Page bought it . . . and the rest is mythology. Did Page sign a pact with the Devil in Boleskine House? asked the popular press of the 1970s in a wonderful reprise of Crowley's coverage. Was Led Zeppelin's inexplicable success the result of a pact which would lead to the Devil claiming the band's drummer, its lead singer's boy child, and almost killing Robert Plant's family while Page was in Sicily exploring Crowley's former dwelling there?

No. Vodka killed John Bonham, a virus carried off little Karac Plant, and the boy's mother was badly injured in a car crash.

The 1960s are long gone now, Page has sold Boleskine House, and all that is left of Crowley is a north-facing door, a terrace, and a lodge, and a reputation to die for.