The Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley | Secret Societies 4 | European History | Extra History
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Join us on a journey through the hidden corners of Victorian society, where secret societies and occult practices shape the course of history with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its profound influence on modern spirituality and popular culture.
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You guys always make My day! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Didn't expect to see a wizard duel be mentioned today, but I'm always excited to learn something new! 😄
Imagine being some delivery man who walked in on the fight
Hey! I love the show, I've been watching since the Late Bronze Age Collapse! However... It's Crowley like Holy, Not Crowley like fouly. I'll try to remember to find you a source on that. I've found it before, but don't recall exactly where.
Anime before tv's where invented fr fr xD
The wizard battle made me think of kids on a playground playing Naruto
"Nuh-uh. I totally hit you."
I think the writer of the manga knew about that and decided to make a whole manga and anime based off of it
I was thinking of Cartman's battle with the phony psychics.
Shun-un-un-un-un
The power of God AND anime on their side, AGHHHHHHHH
“I summon…Polymorph of the Arcane Goddess!” “I summon Just Kick the Fucker.”
Out of mana but not out of options.
In other words, W.B. Yates did a Rider Kick on Alaster Crowley
I CAST FIST!!! - Marneus Calgar
@@snarst "I CAST THUNDER SPELL!" - Sophist
I cast Glock- Silver Loaded!
Two adults shouting magic curses and hand gestures at each other is a very funny image 😂
Laudenum is a hell of a Victorian drug 😂
I thought that's what people did in courts.
@@actdimensionsah, yes. If Law was a school of magic in DnD then you could have Law Lawson's Law School of Law Magic. The tuition is high, so they say, but they provide all the material components. One must bring their own semantic and verbal components, however.
reminds me of that south park episode with the psychics
Christianity 😨
It's good to see larping was alive in the 1900s
There’s always a couple of guys that take it too far. 🤔 Didn’t realize that this was a tradition.
My thought exactly. These are the D and D and Magic the Gathering nerds I went to high school with, except they lived 100 years ago and became famous.
And What If is precisely through magick that he is alive.... Maybe EVEN TODAY
@@michaelgj23if DnD, Magic yhe Gathering or LARP had been around for longer these guys would probably just have done that instead.
It’s far from larping. Once you start learning about the occult you start being able to recognize why things are the way they are. The most powerful people in the world are all in these secret societies for a reason. But yeah sure.. it’s larping lol
Crowley actually originated the 'k' in 'magick', to distinguish it from stage magic.
It's just the British/commonwealth spelling
Yeah magick is mostly used in witchy circles to describe the act itself e.g kitchen magick, elemental magick ect. Some think it's just the British way but nah the generalised version is magic
Funny enough most circles these days don't even use the term 'magic' using either spelling, favoring other, less ambiguous, terms of art instead.
@@lucidnonsense942 not according to Oxford's English Dictionary; it most likely became the more common popular spelling because Crowley was both British and a very well known public figure.
I heard a scholar say that Crowley just couldn't spell very well .
Just the image of two grown dumbasses throwing gang signs at each other makes me glad I was born after TV was invented😂😂😂
I mean gangsters throw gang signs at each other to this day
@@internetperson3436 Don't forget the homeless transients and vagrants. They also throw gang signs to scare off other transients and vagrants.
@@internetperson3436 they do but then the guns also show up...
@@mehunlanghynniewta4748 thats the ultimate power, human technology
I mean it is silly looking but so is prayer so to each their own.
Somewhere in his grave, Yeats' Corpse screamed in rage in the 80's when Crowley got the ultimate victory by being the subject of one of Ozzy Osbourne's best songs.
Which one? "One of Ozzy's best" doesn't narrow it down
@@Attaxalotlseems like it was just one that was literally named Mr Crowley, which I've never heard of in my entire life but now I kind of want to listen to that song
If it's any consolation, Yeats gets a mention in a song by The Smiths.
MIiiiiiister Crowley~~~ *bam bam bam~~~*
Which I'm totally listening too after I finish this episode.
When barbarian attempts stealth as a wizard. "I cast boot!" *spartan kick*
Hahahaha😂
This is like something out of Venture Brothers, i just imagine them shouting FIREBALL to one another
It was mostly random hebrew or latin
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Go team Venture!
Aleister Crowley was actually one of the original members of the Guild before it was the Guild of Calamitous Intent
@@georgesears2916 You used to be all "Go Team Venture!" but now you're all...g-g-go team...b-b-BOOBIES!
All I am thinking of is the South Park episode where Cartman becomes a psychic and gets into a battle with a bunch of other psychics.
Exactly what went through my mind. I couldn’t stop laughing 😂
DO YOU SEE
@@typacsk I see...ice cream, and sprinkles, and Quadruple-Stuffs!
The intro sounds like the beginning to a fantasy novel. The fact that these are real people from 200 years ago doing spells like they are in middle school makes it funny.
Two hundredyears ago? This was 124 years ago and its possible that things like this might still be happening around the world to this day, we just don't know about them.
I know this still happens in Indonesia, and several Asian and African countries. They still kinda big in the whole "Imaginary" Spiritual thingy. On second thoughts, the whole world still do this, just with a more "widely acceptable" text, like Bible and stuff. They congregate and "Pray" away, sickness, Diseases, Plagues etc, and Covid19 Came and everything backfired, those who Congregate become Epicenter of Plagues(they have always been, but this one is recent and better recorded).
Yeah, it reminds of being a kid in the 2000s and playing Harry Potter- the Major Difference is that even as a child, I knew it was just a game.
@@rennor3498Lol it happens all the time and its not even hidden at all. Crowley’s OTO are still around thought theyre more of a fraternity now. Austin Osman Spare who was friends with Crowley and founding member of the OTO is one of the founders of chaos magick, which is probably the most popular branch. John Dee who was mentioned in the video created Enochian magic, which itself is a part of the bigger Abrahamic mysticism alongside kabblah and Solomonic stuff
Yeats is a major historical figure and literary hero amongst the Irish, accredited for some of the greatest literary works from our island. Its crazy to think he was once a wizard and defeated the most evil man in England with a well placed kick. Poetic, you might say!
Sounds like bunch of adults playing Dungeons & Dragons. This would be a hilarious scene in an Aleister Crowley movie!
I cast Magick Missile at the darkness!
And Crowley was using a lot of heroin and cocaine, so consider that at least Crowley (and probably many of the others) were high as kites and stoned as bedrock during this "battle". It must have been quite the sight!
@@J.D-g8.1 Cranked up on drugs and trying to do magick? That bunch must have put on quite a show! Imagine being the cop who had to write up that arrest report!
@@jasonblalock4429 Magick Missile? Good move! Heck, the whole messed up incident could inspire a role-playing game.
@@jasonblalock4429 “Where are the Cheetos!?”
Ah yes, the Reigen special "Anti-Esper Kick" technique. Always works, no exceptions.
Those 2 would have LOVED Magic: the Gathering
or maybe they would have loved role playing games like d&d. unfortunately its inception was still more than half a century away at their time.
Honestly MtG is probably a bit too mathy for either of them. They would likely have loved the *concept* however.
@@remixtheidiot5771probably would've made some banger campaigns.
In a way, they're kind of responsible for DnD, MtG and the like.
They wouldn’t just love MtG. They’d write a whole book about how the Ancient Egyptians used MtG as their spellcasting system.
Fun fact, Crowley was the inspiration for Perturabo from WH40K, and his home planet is named Olympia because the headquarters of the Golden Dawn was in the Olympia district in London
Now that's interesting!
Complete with inferiority complex and jealousy issues. (I would have thought Magnus or Lorgar would be Crowley but this makes sense too.)
@slayer0235 eh, both Magnus and Lorgar actually accomplish things unlike Crawley. And if anything suffer from hubris of pride rather than inferiority complexes.
Finally an explanation on why he's the pettiest man alive!
Pre-comic con society was rough on fantasy nerds
*Crowley-* "With this treasure, I do summon!" *Imperator-* "Boot to the head!"
Crowley, you fail to grasp Tai Kwon Leep. Approach that you might see.
And another for Jenny and the Wimp
@@aaronman4772 I see another Frantics/4-on-the-Floor fan.
Is it bad that that first dialog option immediately made me think of Jujutsu Kaisen?
This duel has very strong "I HAVE THE POWER OF GOD AND ANIME ON MY SIDE" vibes
Aliester Crowley had always been my favorite mysterious figure. I am so glad you guys finally mentioned and told story of him at last.
He's a weirdo and even people who practice Thelema tend to find him a bad person
@@excessiveone9952 I acknowledge his weirdo. His lewd public gestures and his ridiculous orgy parties in his property in Italy. Not to mention his catastrophic mountain expeditions too. Then among his more curious claims of him being a spy on behalf of Britain and many more. I'll agree being weird and even awful, yet it does make him even more interesting figure.
@tompegorinno5141 true that, I'm no thelemite but I do find it a wonderful faith
@@excessiveone9952 I only read parts of what Thelema is about. Only thing I understood is do what thou will which often means do what you ought to/destined to. His adventure topics was something that I was more invested on reading upon. Thanks for allowing me with this discourse with you :D
Crowley was a fascinating and really brilliant figure. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Read his work yourself and look into a few of the biographies if you’re interested in the man.
"I CAST FIST!" -- Yeats
*KICK
I don’t know, Crowley might have been into that
"Now, get out of here!" I, Allister Crowley, can't feel my teeth... (wubwubwub)"
Oh, how it would have looked like to unaffiliated person watching the battle... Someone could have made a killing by selling popcorn and refreshments.
E
Taking a dagger to a wizard fight is just so British .
What occult wizard doesn't have a ritual dagger on hand? And if you know you're full of bunk because magic is just a neat fiction you're selling, it pays to have something you can actually rely on.
@@bthsr7113yeah, wizards get proficiency in daggers, darts, slings, quaterstaffs, and light crossbows.
"It seems our incantations are too much against his mystic might. You know who are great at fighting mages ? Warrior monks, I CAST KICK !!"
Yeats defeated Crowley not with Occult spells, but with the esoteric knowledge of Ti Kwan Leep: Boot to the Head!
In his defense, he wasn't ready. He wasn't allowed the appropriate time to learn the lessons of Ed Grubberman.
Never thought I'd see a Frantics reference in the wild!
@@meatharbor But he should have been familiar with the most important lesson: Always get in the first shot.
Man, this really takes me back to the days of my friends and I naruto running through the shopping mall casting jutsus at each other as we battled to become Hokage of our hidden village.
If you did as accurate a movie as possible about Crowley, it would be called completely unbelievable.
E
The fundamentalists would freak out
@@seanemery1917 Many of them will freak out at the mention of his name, even outside of any of his context. About 17 or 18 years ago I was banned from a TTRPG mailing list for daring to use his "do what thou wilt" as a way to explain GM fiat because of a fundie leaning faction of the group. Mind, many of them just know of him as 'a satanist'.
they probably wouldn't even be able to mention the fact that his main financial backer in the US was the father of modern rocketry who ended up trying to summon the antichrist with the founder of scientology
They'd have to break the fourth wall nearly every five minutes to tell people "We're not kidding, this is exactly what happened" Cinema Sins still makes an hour long video about how unrealistic it is.
They're a bunch of D&D Wizards: 18 in Intelligence, like 3 in Wisdom, and a single, lonely point in Constitution.
I assume Yeats and the others justified their "spellcasting" having to effect on Crowley by assuming he must have bee protected by powerful enchantments that rendered their spells useless. Fortunately for them, as Terry Pratchett has taught us, magic resistance does nothing against half a brick in a sock, or in this case boot to the face.
I absolutely thought of Rincewind making weird faces and hand gestures before kicking the opponent in the balls while watching this!
Yup, Terry Prachett was onto something there. XD
Yeats yeeting Crowley down the stairs is how I want all wizard duels to end.
Aleister Crowley is featured in the anime/novel - A Certain Magical Index which is awesome btw. 😊
Alistair & William: We are wizards. Everyone else:🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
The irony is to think Crowley was known as the wickedest man in the world, so some people were probably terrified of that dork edge lord.
9:00 The reference to Circle K is so on point!
"Bill, strange things are afoot at the Circle K." -- Ted "Theodore" Logan
Aleister Crowley must be the ancestor of the kid who yelled "Don't f*ck with me ! I've got the power of God and anime at my side !" "AAAAAAH"
That magick duel, basically just summed up a game of MTG
Please do the Greek war of independence of 1821 against the ottoman empire next I've been asking for this since the first episodes of the sengoku Jidai!!
Here here
They don’t care unless you’re a patron.
@@ferretyluv nobody asked
@@Thecrimsonking01 OP did.
@@ferretyluv *no body asked you
Crowley used Psybeam! But nothing happened. Yeats used Low Kick! It’s super effective!
A magician casts a spell, a second magician casts a counter-spell, a third magician helps the first magician. The soldiers come in and massacre the magicians. It is an approximative citation of a book from Raymond E. Feist. The introduction of this video reminded me that passage.
Didn't know Yeats was also a master of Ti Kwan Leep I love that this story just feels like fandom drama
YALL GET IN HERE 🗣️ THERES A NERD FIGHT GOING ON 🤓🥊
I read an account by Alastair Crowley of a “wizard duel” he had. It essentially was two dudes in a staring competition and pretending to cast spells on each other. It was exactly like the psychic battle Eric Cartman got into with the psychic detectives in that South Park episode. 😂
I mean it sounds a little sketchy but MacGregor going up and saying "Yeah there's gonna be an apocalyptic war near."and he said this before WWI and WWII
Not really. Europe was a powder keg, WW1 was Only A Matter Of Time and plenty of contemporary people knew it or at least felt it in their bones.
Bismarck called it in 1888, 26 years before the start of WWI, adding “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off”
@@trr94001 Pretty much. MacGregor was just stating the obvious and packaging it in a way to make it seem profound.
The only thing missing here is a sign saying “WE DEMAND TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY”
So, the great wizard-duel of the age ended like a sketch from The Frantics. "I cast my ultimate spell... BOOT TO THE HEAD!"
Crowley's own secret society, the Ordo Templi Orientis, still exists to this day.
Plot twist they where all just roleplaying
I have never thought of Victorian era as a golden age. I have always thought of it as insanity, sickness, disease, and unhygienic
Agreed. I do think it was a golden age for literature written in English*, but that's a pretty specific category. * includes American, Irish and Canadian authors, Joseph Conrad, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu if you stretch the chronology a little...
It was a golden age of British culture, wealth, literature, science, and technology for the middle and upper classes. Compared to previous eras, more wealth had spread around and upward mobility was never easier. The empire was at its height, the world was smaller than ever before thanks to steamships and trains. Archeology was born. People started to believe in preserving our patrimony. While the beginning of the Victorian age was filthy, it was during that same Victorian age that London developed a new sewer system that’s still in use today. It was in the Victorian era that epidemiology was born to control cholera, smallpox vaccines were developed, and running water brought to the masses. Now, if you were working class or a child, life sucked. If you thought about the environment, it was awful (as it was in every industrialized nation). But on the whole, Britain was at its zenith.
Mr. Crowley What went on in your head? Oh, Mr. Crowley Did you talk to the dead?
Beat me to it 🥷
What went on in his head? Mr. Yeats' boot, apparently.
Your lifestyle to me seemed so tragic With the thrill of it all You fooled all the people with magic Yeah, you waited on satan's call...
There's always one person who breaks the game and ends up getting the tried and true, kick to the face. The only response to an "I got an everything prof shield, and a sword gun that never misses, and it's in the rules so you can't tell me no."
It is IMMENSELY funny to me that these two just advanced on each other making funny hand signals and chantings at one another until one of them just kicked Crowley in the face and that was that
Yeats yeeting Crowley is commemorated in chaos magick even today; stoked to see this covered, and I feel like people who discuss this era of occulture don't mention it enough.
As soon as you mentioned Crowley storming in, I knew. Best exorcism spell is "kick down the stairs" and best warding spell is "change the damn locks"
The "battle" between Crowley and the Temple puts me in mind of that one Indiana Jones scene, where he just shoots the swordsman doing all the elaborate tricks.
This is by far the least crazy thing Crowley got up too.
LIGHTNING BOLT!! LIGHTNING BOLT!!
Esoterica is a great channel to explore this stuff further.
Great channel!
3:30 Huh, so I wasn't *too* far-off when I thought that the next episode (or two) will mention the Freemasons.
I mean... they're Masons, of course they're experts in building pyramidal structures.
these guys would've loved D&D
"Mr. Crowley What went on in your head? Oh, Mr. Crowley Did you talk to the dead? Your lifestyle to me seems so tragic With the thrill of it all You fooled all the people with magic Yeah, you waited on Satan's call" -Ozzy Osbourne
I'm a minor practitioner witch, but the mental image of two grown ass men flinging 'curses' at each other is utterly hilarious to me. It must have looked like a bunch of live action role players getting a little too into character. 🤣🤣🤣
even if it sounds ridicolous because it's not something usual to see, compared to the (fake) seriousness of adults, I found the image of two cursing each other pretty violent. I have huge respect of magic practitionists, but seeing magic used in such cases really fuel the stereotype of "witches who want to hurt people"
@@literallypochiyama It is a continuously harmful stereotype.
In thr end we all learned something important, that kicking someone down the stairs is one of the most powerfull spells in existance
@@supergowiak4369 ok...?
@@literallypochiyamaWomp womp
I am so happy you covered the Battle of Blythe road. It is my favorite historical story of all time
Nooo I miss the echo for the *ORDO EXTRA HISTORIA!*
That Victorian Era Absinthe was supa high power, they say....
TBH, the very idea of Yeats giving somebody more than a tongue-lashing is hilarious!
The new thumbnail is PERFECT! 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Oh my god, a century later these dorks would DEFINITELY be trying to use ninja hand seals and ki shouts at each other.
Watching this on my birthday! So far, it's my favorite present. 😁
happy birthday !! 🎂
Happy birthday! 🎂
Happy birthday
As an actual Circle K employee I got a bit giddy at the mention🥰🥰
Video suggestion: This year marked the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. In a single day, the longest standing dictatorship in Europe ended, democracy was established by a military coup were soldiers brought flowers in the barrels of their guns to show that they wanted no violence. In this day, the colonial war that raveged for 14 years ended, and a year after Guine Bissau, Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Princepe, Angola, Mozambique and East Timor emerged as independent countries. Since it is a special anniversary, I would very much like to propose it to Extra History to do a video it. I propose you research the POV of captain Salgueiro Maia and his accomplishments. I'm sure you'll not be disappointed =)
“Strange things are afoot at the circle k.”
"I HAVE THE POWER OF GOD AND ANIME ON MY SIDE' -Crowley, probably
The staircase battle definitely has the “I cast manual breathing!” wizard meme feels. XD
I cast fixate on your own tongue
@@biohazard724 I cast sound nobody but you can hear!
As a huge fan of the "A Certain Magical Index" franchise, this episode makes me happy... *Floats upside down in a tube mysteriously*
Mr. Crowley, what went on in your head? Oh Mr. Crowley, did you talk to the dead?
"My Little Yukuza- Murder is Magick!"
5:26 You are on this council, but we do not grant you the rank of master
A single kick is more powerful than every spell combined
This is South Park, Season 8 Episode 13, "Cartman's Incredible Gift". It is the scene where Cartman mind battles against the psychics.
Uncle Al was an interesting character. He was a frail child and took up took up rock climbing to build muscle and help his breathing, his books on rock climbing are still useful today.
This magic fight sounds like an adventure time episode
"Boots to the face! My one weakness!...how did you know?" -Alistair Crowley (probably)
The Wizard Battle reminded me of the Psychic Detective Battle from South Park.
This is btw the Mr Crowley Ozzy Osborne sings about.
The battle reminded me of Cartman's battle with the psychics.
"PREPARE THYSELF QUILL BEARER!" literally minos prime
As someone who was part of a youth group with the Freemasons and extensive study of Wicca and witchcraft, this video cracks me up because you can see the pathway of certain religious movements. Also the wildest thing I know about Crowley is that he held a super secret ritual in the pyramids at Giza. The dude was wild and the people I have met who follow his teaching are also kind of wild 😅
Didn’t he also spy on the Bolsheviks at one point
You would expect someone who follows someone who wrote about r@ping his own child would be weird
This reminded me of the Battle that Cartman had with the psychics in South Park.
I can't even imagine what a world in which none of these people existed would look like. Both Crowley and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's influence on pop culture is so massive that such a world might be unrecognizable.
With Wizard battle, am also thinking of the psychic fight in South Park with Cartman and the other psychics.
It’s like that South Park episode with the psychic mind battles.
My ex is a member of Thelema. Just as strange as the rest. I suppose he just wanted answers, something more spectacular than the more mundane truth.
Yep it's not any weirder than all the people that eat zombie flesh and drink blood every Sunday morning 😅 (as someone who had never heard of Christianity may put it)
@@bubbles581 pretty sure people sharing wine and bread are seen as more normal than weirdos casting spells at each other while dressed like burlesque dancers. There's no amount of mental gymnastics that will make wacky cult members look the same as ordinary religion.
I had always thought that things was done faster when you used the word "Quick". Now i understand why. It's truely a magickal word.
Then in the heat of their wizard dual Yates called upon the darkest and most foul being to defeat and imprison his foe: The policemen.
i can only imagine the neighbors in that moment having to hear a bunch of adults yell "MAGIC MISSILE" at each other
W.B.Yates sounds like some southern wrestling promotion from territorial era, welcome to Dubya Bee Ayts!
Video Suggestion: Singapore’s independence and rise from 3rd world to 1st, it’s pretty interesting
Yay Its Extra History Time!
Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters series takes place around this time, and Crowley and Blavatsky are both mentioned at least in the first book. This definitely clarifies a few things.
there's some recordings on KZhead of Yeats changing his poetry. I highly recommend listening to it after this