13/09/2026
THE GREATER FEAST OF LAYLAH đź’«
On this day, 13 September 1932, Leila Ida Nerissa Bathurst Waddell died in Sydney at the age of fifty-two. Born in Bathurst, New South Wales, in 1880, Waddell was an accomplished professional violinist long before her name became entwined with that of Aleister Crowley. To students of Thelema she is better remembered as Laylah, one of Crowley’s Scarlet Women, but to describe her simply as his lover or muse obscures the much more interesting part she played in the formation of early Thelemic culture.
Waddell met Crowley after coming to London in 1908, where she was working professionally as a violinist. She soon became one of the central figures around him during an extraordinarily productive period. Most significantly, Crowley himself recalled that the germ of the Rites of Eleusis emerged from an evening in which he recited poetry and Waddell answered him on the violin, the two gradually producing an improvised dialogue of word and music that generated an atmosphere of religious ecstasy among those present. That experiment developed into the celebrated public Rites of Eleusis of 1910, in which Waddell performed. The episode is worth remembering because it restores some of her agency. She was not simply standing beside the magician while he invented something. Her music was part of the process through which a new form of Thelemic ritual performance came into being.
As “Laylah,” she also became inseparable from the imaginative world of Crowley’s The Book of Lies, published in 1913, and from the complex symbolism through which Crowley explored eroticism, mystical intoxication, contradiction and the dissolution of the individual self. He called her by a bewildering succession of exalted names, including Scarlet Woman, Mother of Heaven and Sister Cybele, while poems and stories drew upon their relationship. Yet Waddell had a life and career outside Crowley. After years performing internationally, she eventually returned to Australia, resumed professional musical work and teaching, and appeared with organisations including the Sydney Conservatorium and the Royal Philharmonic Society of Sydney.
Ninety-four years after her death, Leila Waddell deserves to be remembered as something more than a footnote in Crowley’s biography. She belonged to that remarkable generation in which ritual, poetry, theatre, music and occultism briefly ceased to occupy separate compartments, and her violin was quite literally one of the instruments through which the earliest public culture of Thelema found its voice.
