Clouds of incense smoke swirled around the man in the long hooded cape as he chanted magic

incantations in an ancient language. He was standing in a large room in the southwest

wing of a long single story house inside which stood a crudely constructed oratory. The

large wooden structure was painted white and black and lined in part with huge mirrors

or the better to keep the magical energy concentrated in one place. On the ground was painted

a large circle, triangle and pentagram and in the centre of it all stood an altar, lined

with a single human skeleton. For the past several weeks, the man had been feeding

it, laying offerings of blood and small birds onto its ribs. Over time, the offerings

had turned into a viscous black slime which coated the bones and dripped from the altar

onto the floor in thick piles of ooze. Dotted around the skeleton, incense and candles

burned, the smoke and flames fluttering in the chill night air which flowed in through

an open doorway at the north end of the room. While outside, thunder rumbled and heavy

clouds scuddyed across the midnight sky. Just perceptible through the dark was a large

terrace covered in fine river sand, below which a lawn dropped down, first to a graveyard

and beyond that to the shores of a vast black-watered lock. The man was Alistair Crowley,

the year was 1899 and the location was the southeastern shore of Loch Ness. You're

listening to unexplained and I'm Richard McLean Smith.

For those unfamiliar with his story, Alistair Crowley was born in 1875 to a wealthy God-fearing

family in Lemminton, Spar, England. Crowley's parents were fundamentalist Christians, but

he preferred to indulge in somewhat more esoteric pursuits. Educated at Trinity College

at the University of Cambridge, Crowley focused his attention on mountaineering and poetry,

then in 1898 joined the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn, a ritual magic society whose

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