It’s an evocative and indelible image that has been used as an illustration for sundry books on magic, esotericism and the occult: a dusky, oneiric portrait of a woman, her face bearing a wistful, somewhat inscrutable expression. Pre-Raphaelite tresses flow down and cover her naked breasts, leaving visible the skin between them which is emblazoned with some kind of magical sigil, underneath which her hands are entwined in an obviously symbolic gesture.
The woman is Leila Waddell, a musician who was a lover and acolyte of Aleister Crowley. The image was originally published as a frontispiece for Crowley’s The Book Of Lies, depicting Waddell in a ritual pose, the sigil Crowley’s self-styled ‘mark of the beast’.
Waddell’s life story is one that has attracted renewed interest in recent years, particularly with writers interested in female-centred approaches to history. It is also significant in terms of the Crowley mythos. As cultivated by Crowley himself, and many subsequent writers, this tends towards hagiographic depictions of Crowley as a sui generis occult genius.
In this respect, it is perhaps easy to overlook the fact that many of Crowley’s magical achievements were largely collaborations with women – or, to use his magical terminology, ‘scarlet women’, whom he considered avatars of Babalon, the female principle in his Thelemic magical system. For instance, the mediumistic episodes of his first wife, Rose Kelly, were considered instrumental in putting Crowley in contact with the disembodied intelligence ‘Aiwass’ he alleged dictated the to him in 1904; n 1911 another entity, Ab-ul-Diz, spoke through an entranced Mary d’Este Sturges (mother of famed (1912). Similarly, Leah Hirsig was instrumental in the operation of the Abbey of Thelema that Crowley established at Cefalu in Sicily, reputedly suffering the abusive indignity of copulating with a goat during one ritual. Alongside these figures, Waddell is perhaps not given the credit she deserves for being a key collaborator of Crowley’s during a significant period in his magical career.
