In 1920 Aleister Crowley rented a low house outside Cefalù, Villa Santa Barbara, from Baron Carlo La Calce and called it the Abbey of Thelema. The name came from Rabelais and the abbaye de Thélème of Gargantua and Pantagruel, an anti-monastery run by no law or rule but the will of those living in it; the rule here was the Book of the Law, which Crowley said he had received in Cairo in 1904. With Leah Hirsig he made it the Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum, a school and world centre for his religion that was not meant to be a religion, and gathered around it an international group of students of the order he had founded in 1907.
What to see
What is left is a low building with a failing roof and brambles in the rooms. The walls were covered with Crowley's paintings, explicit enough that they were whitewashed after he left; the only complete record is the set of photographs Fosco Maraini took in the early fifties, when the Californian filmmaker Kenneth Anger spent three summer months here with the sexologist Alfred Kinsey, scraping off the lime and bringing writings and figures back into view. The film he made from it, Thelema Abbey, 1955, is considered lost. In 2005 the Danish artist Joachim Koester photographed the rooms again for his series Morning of the Magicians.
What went on here is documented in the diaries residents were required to keep: adorations to the sun four times a day, yoga, ritual, housework and the systematic use of drugs. The American actress Jane Wolfe stayed three years under the name Soror Estai; her notebooks were later published as the Cefalu Diaries. The end came in 1923 with the death of Raoul Loveday, a 23-year-old Oxford undergraduate: his wife Betty May blamed a ritual involving the blood of a cat, while biographers point to enteric fever caught from a mountain spring Crowley had told them not to drink from. Her interview with the Sunday Express and the expulsion ordered by the government did the rest; the women of the group sold the furniture to local people to pay off his debts and their fares home.
Visiting
There is nothing to visit: the house is private, unsafe and unguarded, with no ticket, no opening hours and no sign pointing to it, and the inside is off limits. In December 1990 the region signed a protection order at the town's request, and the council has repeatedly discussed buying the place and turning it into a museum; an international conference in 1997, Un mago a Cefalù, tried to restart the process, and in 2010 the property was briefly and unsuccessfully put up for sale. Whoever walks up sees an outside wall and empty windows, nothing more: the real visit is the story, not the building.
Our editors' tip
Read it before you go. Sciascia built Apocrifi sul caso Crowley on it, in Il mare color del vino, 1974; Vincenzo Consolo touches on it in Nottetempo, casa per casa, which won the Strega prize in 1992; Giuseppe Quatriglio told it in Il diavolo a Cefalù. Then walk up at dusk, stay outside the fence, and save the Norman cathedral and the Mandralisca museum for the next morning: the contrast between the two Cefalùs is the best reason to make this detour.