TX001 · Footnote 29 · route entry 22 of 26
Tree 418
A numbered tree and blind owl sign pull Aleister Crowley into the story as historical resident, occult projection, and narrative risk.
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Recorded in English · 2:56
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Transcript
A few more steps ahead on the right is tree 418, and on it a yellow sign with a blind owl.
Stop there and let's spend a moment with the tree.
Like an ink blot on the edge of the blueprint, Aleister Crowley lurches into the story. A British occultist, writer, and mountaineer and infamous in his own lifetime, he called his practice “magick,” with a “ck”, branded himself “the Beast 666,” If you’ve ever brushed up against tarot aesthetics, you’ve probably brushed up against him: the Thoth deck was created for him by Lady Frieda Harris, and he wrote “The Book of Thoth” as this guidebook, It was dense, and symbolic, and weirdly influential.
And if you’ve ever stared at the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, there he is too, one more infamous face in that psychedelic pantheon, smuggled into the mainstream as a kind of cultured dare. So in 1930, he was drifting around Weimar Berlin.
A few months later, he slips down to Portugal to the wave-gnawed cliffs at Boco de Forno, the mouth of hell, and stages a suicide that newspapers briefly take seriously. Then, as if nothing happened. He turns up alive again here on the Lietzensee, renting a room in a building just across the lake.
There are rumors.. Of course, there are rumors.. of nocturnal rituals by the water, where we are standing at tree number 418
A maple- leafed Plantain, believed to have been planted in 1807.
Let's continue.
Keep the lake to your right and walk in the same direction we were
We'll check out the war memorial just up ahead.
There were spirals chalked on boathouse doors, where respectability was already hanging by a thread. Whether or not Crowley ever muttered an incantation on the Lietzensee almost doesn't matter. The possibility of him here is enough. Another way, using the park not as a living room or a leisure facility, but as a temporary temple. A hinge between this world and the same other badly lit backstage. As you continue along the shore. You don't have to choose.
But if your feet suddenly change rhythm. If the trees feel like stage props, if the lake looks briefly like the dark pupil of something enormous, you can decide for yourself whose footsteps you're really following.