Renault Roaming

Here's a bit of geology:
A long, long time ago a handsome shepherd named Daphnis was devoted to sheep and bucolic singing. He was a mediterranean deity embodying the vital spirit of Nature.
It came to pass that a nymph called Echenais fell maddly in love with him, but he would have none of it. So, this is Sicily remember, in a fit of jealousy and rage, she blinded him.
Eventually he allowed himself to die and Aphrodite transformed him into the rock of Cefalù, which is where I am today.
The earliest evidencedates back to prehistoric times and comprises a handful of lines scratched into the walls of a cave. Nobody has the foggiest notion why.
Later the ancient Greeks colonised the place, calling it imaginatively Kephaloidion - head shaped promentory.
When the Romans arrived they moved the town up onto the Rock for safty from pirates like the Vandals and then Saracens. The remains of some fortifications, traces of warehouses, and baking ovens date to the Byzantine period can be seen.
Ther rainwater collection system, military barracks, church of St Anne and Calogero were also part of the town on the rock, allowing it to be self-sufficient for a considearble time. After a long, Saracen seige the town surrendered in 857. There is no evidence of subsequent human habitation.
The house belonged to Edward Alexander Crowley, who preferred the name Aleister, a pansexual, mystic, occultist, ceremonial magician, deviant, recreational drug experimenter, poet and accomplished mountaineer (he climbed K2 and other heights,) who was also known as Frater Perdurabo and The Great Beast 666. The British press called him “The Wickedest Man in the World.”
Aleister is famous for introducing sex and drugs as sacramental rituals into a system he called Magick, after experimenting with Argentium Astrum and Ordo Templi Orientis, ( Order of the Eastern Temple.) He believed in finding one’s “True Will”, summed up in the Law of Thelema (the religion he established): “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Followers were to shirk societal norms and follow hedonistic impulses. The inherent individualism of Thelemic values were later to be absorbed into the sixties counter-culture.
In 1919 he had a revelation. He and his followers had to create a temple, the Abbey of Thelema; motto: “Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum” The group settled in Cefalù, where he and his lover Leah Hirsig, rented this house dedicated to ritual practices. Crowley’s own bedroom, labeled by himself as “la chambre des cauchemars” (or “the room of nightmares”) was entirely hand-painted by the occultist with explicitly erotic frescos, hermaphroditic goblins, and vividly colored monsters.
Later Crowley recalled his time in Cefalù as one of the most prolific and happy of his life, even though he suffered from drug addiction and had to write the scandalous Diary of a Drug Fiend to finance his community.
Crowley and his people were evicted by Mussolini’s regime in 1923. The dictator had no sympathy for pornographic art or mysticism. Once the Abbey closed, the villagers whitewashed the murals, which they somewhat correctly saw as demonic. This erased much of the history and work of Crowley in Cefalù. Afterwards, the house was considered haunted and remained abandoned until 1955, when Kenneth Anger, an experimental filmmaker and follower of Crowley, located the ruins of the villa and attempted (unsuccessfully) to restore the Chambre des Cauchemars.
I thought there might be something to photograph as a change to Byzantine mozaics, but nobody in the Tourist office or library would admit to any knowledge about the place or its history, so I could not gain access, although I worked out where it was through a process of elimination.
He founded the religious philosophy of Thelema which enforced an idealist, libertine rule of “Do what thou wilt.”Read more