Led Zeppelin: Chapter Nine: So Mote it Be (continued)
Certainly, Page's interest in Crowley and
the occult really took hold during the early days of Zeppelin's
success. With the money to fully indulge his passions, he
became a serious collector of Crowleyana, including
first-edition books - some signed by the Beast himself - plus
some of his hats, canes, paintings, his robes… anything
he could get his hands on. After his affair with Miss Pamela
was over, he phoned from England one night asking her to search
for some Crowley artefacts he had been told were for sale in
Gilbert's Bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard: specifically, a
typed manuscript with scribbled notes in the margin in
Crowley's own hand. Page wired her $1700 and she bought it and
mailed it to him, special delivery. In thanks, he sent her an
antique necklace of a turquoise phoenix, its wings spread,
holding a large gleaming pearl. She immediately broke down in
tears, filled with “pain and delight.” For “a
handsome sum” he also bought a volume of Crowley's diary
from Tom Driberg, the Fleet Street columnist, Labour MP and
peer of the realm who had met Crowley as an undergraduate at
Oxford in 1925. Bound in red morocco leather and encased in
baroque silver, it recorded his “daily magickal and
sexual doings.”
Page's most notorious purchase, however,
was of one of Crowley's most infamous former abodes, Boleskine
House, near Foyers, in Scotland, on the south-east bank of Loch
Ness, across the water from the 2,000ft snow-capped bulk of
Meall Fuarvounie. Built in the late 18th Century on consecrated
ground - the site, it was said, of a former church burned to
the ground with its congregation still inside - there was also
a graveyard where the ruins of the original Chapel and still
lay alongside a small Watcher's Hut where relatives of the
newly-buried would spend weeks in order to ward off
grave-robbers. Its original owner was the Honourable Archibald
Fraser, a relative of Lieutenant General Simon Fraser, Lord
Lovat at the time. The Honourable Archibald apparently chose
the site specifically to irritate the Lieutenant General, whose
lands surrounded the property, in retribution for Lord Lovat's
support of the English during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.
The associations with the Fraser family can also be seen in the
Gothic burial ground, with its crumbling, lichen-covered
gravestones and vaults that sits loch-side, across a single
track road from Boleskine House's front fence. There was also
said to be a tunnel connecting the graveyard to the house.
Boleskine House remained in Fraser family
ownership until Crowley bought it in 1899. A large, rambling
and remote country pile facing north with close access to river
sand - important ingredients in enacting magick rituals -
Crowley later claimed to have invoked over a hundred demons
during his years there, including the enactment of the
Abra-melin ritual, his hurried abandonment of which it is
reckoned lies at the heart of the house's disturbing atmosphere
and the unusual manifestations that still regularly occur
there. But then Crowley also spent time at Boleskine shooting
sheep, catching salmon, climbing the surrounding hills and
scaring to death the locals who refused to go anywhere near the
place after dark. A five-bedroom mansion with slate grey roof
and pale pink stucco walls, it's actually a very
attractive-looking residence. Mock Greek columns, stone dogs
and stone eagles stand guard on each side of the main door, the
house sheltered by a screen of mature Douglas Fir and Cyprus
trees and several handsome Cedar and Eucalyptus trees. Stone
steps lead to fruit gardens and an orchard. Having sold the
place, however, in the wake of his impoverished return to
Britain after the First World War, Boleskine continued to lead
a strange existence. Hollywood star and real-life gangster
George Raft had been involved in a scandal involving selling
shares in a piggery supposedly built on Boleskine's grounds -
except there weren't any pigs in it. After the Second World War
it was owned by an army major named Fullerton, who would shoot
himself with his own shotgun in 1965. The couple that owned it
immediately prior to Page's purchase were said to have
conducted a 'black magic' baptism on their child.
In 1969, Kenneth Anger - who had just
finished his cult movie classic Scorpio Rising - heard it was
back on the market and rented it for a couple of months. A year
later Jimmy Page heard about it and promptly bought the house,
installing an old school friend, Malcolm Dent, as live-in
caretaker. “Jimmy caught me at a time in my life when I
wasn't doing a great deal and asked me to come up and run the
place,” Dent said in 2006. When he arrived he found a
magick circle, a pentagram and an altar in the dining hall. It
wasn't until later that he learned from Jimmy that Crowley had
used the room as his temple. A six foot-plus Londoner and
former commercial salesman, Dent didn't believe in things that
go bump in the night. Living at Boleskine, though, soon changed
his mind. He had only been there a few weeks when he heard
strange rumblings one night coming from the seventy-foot
hallway. The noise stopped when he went to investigate but
began again as soon as he shut the door. “That's when I
decided to find out what I could about the house,” he
later recalled. The rumbling in the hall, he discovered, dated
back as far as the Battle of Culloden and was said to be the
head of Lord Lovat, beheaded in the Tower of London.
“Above Boleskine there's a place called Errogie,”
Dent explained, “which is supposed to be the geographical
centre of the Highlands. Boleskine was then the nearest
consecrated ground to Errogie and it's thought his soul, or
part of it, ended here.”
He also experienced “the most
terrifying night of my life” when he awakened one night
and heard what sounded like a wild animal “snorting,
snuffling and banging” outside his bedroom door. “I
had a knife on the bedside table and I opened the blade and sat
there. The blade was small and wouldn't have done any good but
I was so frightened I had to have something to hang onto. The
noise went on for some time but even when it stopped I couldn't
move. I sat on the bed for hours and, even when daylight came
it took lots of courage to open that door.” He added:
“Whatever was there was pure evil.” Another friend
who spent the night there awoke “in a hell of a state,
claiming she'd been attacked by some kind of devil.”
But despite these and other hair-raising
occurrences - chairs switching places, doors banging open and
shut inexplicably, carpets and rugs rolling up on their own -
he had never considered leaving. “Initially I thought I'd
be coming for a year or so, but then it got its hooks in me. I
met my then wife at Boleskine House. My children were raised
there - my son Malcolm was born in Boleskine House. We loved
living there - in spite of the peculiar happenings that went on
there.”
Page, meanwhile, began doing everything he
could to return the house to how it would have looked during
Crowley's time. As well as all his treasured Crowleyana, he
bought seven chairs from the Cafe Royal, each with a name-plate
back and front, including those of Crowley, Marie Lloyd,
Rudolph Valentino, art critic James Agate, Sir Billy Butlin,
artist William Orpen and sculptor Jacob Epstein. Crowley's
chair would be placed at the top of a large banquet table in
the dining hall with three down both sides. Geese and peacocks
roamed the grounds and in a field beside the gardens a herd of
goats grazed, some from Bron-Yr-Aur. And he arranged for
self-proclaimed “Satanic artist” Charles Pace to
paint some Crowley-esque murals on the walls, based on those
later uncovered by Kenneth Anger under the whitewashed walls at
the Abbey of Thelema.
It's fair to say that Page revelled in the
rumours surrounding Boleskine House. In a 1976 radio interview
with Nicky Horne he boasted, “I'm not exaggerating when I
say that any people that have gone to that place and stayed
there for any length of time, by that I mean a month, say, have
gone through very dramatic changes in their personal lives and
whatever. It's quite an incredible place, and yet it's not
hostile. It just seems to bring the truth out of people in
situations… people have had quite unusual
experiences.” Asked how the house had affected him
personally, he gave a weak, druggy laugh. “The whole
house has been filled with tales of people being taken to
asylums because of drunkenness, suicides, you name it and it's
there, you know?”
Helping Jimmy with his hunt for rare
Crowleyana in the early Seventies was a new acquaintance,
writer, antiquarian bookseller and Crowley expert Timothy
D'Arch Smith. Tim, a great cricket fan who lives within walking
distance of Lords Cricket Ground in north London, recalls Page
first coming to see him “at my little office just off
Baker Street, in Gloucester Place, in about 1970, sent, I
suspect, by Gerald Yorke, who was Crowley's disciple, because I
was doing - and I'm still doing - Crowley's bibliography. This
chap with long hair came down to the office, and I had a few
Crowley things. We were being redecorated and there was pop
music going on - probably the Beatles, I suppose - on a little
tinny transistor that belonged to the painters. And I said to
Jimmy, 'Christ, what a din!' and he said, 'Well, actually this
is my business.' I said, 'Terribly sorry'. I had no idea who he
was until I saw the cheque. He just came down to buy Crowley
books from me.”
Were these rare texts? “Well, at the
time he bought an awful lot more because he didn't have so
much. Now he's got almost all the printed books apart from
Snowdrops from a Curate's Garden [1904], which nobody's got and
really is a rare thing. It does exist, there's a copy in the
Warburg Institute, and a bookseller friend of mine had another
copy that he sold - it's in America now. But it really is
terribly rare because I think they were all destroyed by the
customs, as opposed to the other two [rare] pieces, which were
White Stains - which actually is a moderately common book - and
The Bagh-I-Muattar.”
Tim adds: “It didn't take me very
long to realise how serious he was. He was always very
charming. But the trouble with him of course was like all these
really famous people he was terribly difficult to get in touch
with. And if you'd bought something for £250 in those
days you couldn't really keep it in stock… I had some
very nice things which he didn't get. Of course he was touring
[and] there were no emails or anything like that. The other
thing is that being Jimmy and being so rich, and this is true
of a lot of rich book collectors, they always have it in the
back of their mind that somebody's put a nought on the
price.”
Jimmy was also fascinated to learn that
Tim had visited Boleskine when he was in the army in the
late-Fifties. “I was told if I was caught in the grounds
[then owner] Major Fullerton would set the dogs on me.”
Instead, he and a friend “climbed the hill behind
Boleskine and took photographs. And we could see Fullerton and
the dogs padding around.” He later gave the photos to
Jimmy. “They were only little snapshots but he was so
pleased! We were up in the mountain, you know, that Crowley
used to practise climbing on. But Jimmy said it would be good
because they'd changed it so much and he was terribly pleased
about it.” continue reading
