What does the ruin of Boleskine House have to do with QAnon? – Contemporary Religion in Hostorical Perspective

Here’s a piece I published early this year on the Open University’s blog. It connects the challenges to the restoration to a cottage in the Highlands of Scotland to the storming of the US Capitol Building on Jan 6th 2021 – both expressions of the same fear of non-existent Luciferian ritual child abusers.

large numbers of people believe that such an imagined Satanic Other exists. For most, this is probably just an internalisation of Christian narratives about good and evil, and of the existence of demons and devils. These implicit beliefs are stoked up by more active players, however, mostly (though not exclusively) Christian fundamentalists with an axe to grind, and who, because of the traditional association of Christianity with moral good, are able to speak into the ear of the press, police and politicians. But there is certainly an aspect that is to do with defending the body politic against invasion – which is why such ideas tend to flare up at times of societal unrest, and why we see the same motifs popping up in antisemitic tracts from the Middle Ages to the Third Reich.

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Boleskine House, July 2016

Presumably, many of my readers will be aware that Boleskine House on the Northern shore of Loch Ness caught fire just before Christmas last year. Boleskine House was formerly owned by Aleister Crowley, and was later owned by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin who has had a long involvement with Crowley. In fact, I have been told that Page is (or was) the owner of one of the two biggest collections of Crowley material in the UK. (The other is, I think, Alan Moore). Page has since been given an OBE by the Queen for his charity work.

As an aside, I once worked with an older gentleman who had worked for Page when he owned the building in the 1970s, who told me Page was looking for a secret room under the main house which Crowley had installed for a temple. They never found it.

Having heard differing reports about the state of the place, when I found myself camping by Loch Ness around a mile along the shore, I had to go and take a look. The takeaway: it’s bad, but not as bad as it could be. The roof is gone on the shore end of the building, but the walls are intact. At the west end, the top of the arches on the windows are gone. I didn’t hang around because, frankly, it wasn’t really safe and while there’s no trespassing law in Scotland, people can sure act like there is.