Leah Hirsig

American occultist

Leah Hirsig (April 9, 1883 – February 22, 1975) was an American schoolteacher and occultist, notable for her magical record diary, The Magical Record of the Scarlet Woman, which describes her experiences and visions as an associate, friend, and victim of occult writer Aleister Crowley. She was the most famous of Crowley's "Scarlet Women".

Hirsig was born into a family of nine siblings in Trachselwald, Canton of Bern, Switzerland. However, they moved to the United States when she was a child aged two, and she grew up in New York City. Growing up in the city, she was taught at a high school in the Bronx.

Hirsig and her older sister Alma were drawn to the study of the occult, and this interest led them in the spring of 1918 to pay a visit to Aleister Crowley, who was living at the time in the Manhattan neighborhood of Greenwich Village. Crowley and Hirsig felt an immediate and instinctive connection. Leah asked him to paint her as a "dead soul" and in fact Crowley painted several portraits of her. In 1919, after seeking out Aleister Crowley due to her interest in the occult, she was consecrated as his Babalon or, "Scarlet Woman", taking the name Alostrael, "the womb (or grail) of God." Leah Hirsig wrote in her 1921 diary: "I dedicate myself wholly to The Great Work. I will work for wickedness, I will kill my heart, I will be shameless before all men, I will freely prostitute my body to all creatures". Hirsig had previously been married to Edward Hammond, by whom she had a son, Hans Hammond (1917 1985).

With Crowley, Leah had a daughter, whom they named Anna Leah (Poupée) Crowley. She was born on 26 January 1920 in Fontainebleau, France. She died on 15 October 1920. Hirsig's role as Crowley's initiatrix reached a pinnacle in the spring of 1921 when she presided over his attainment of the grade of Ipsissimus, the only witness to the event. By June 1924, while Hirsig—the Scarlet Woman—stayed loyal to Crowley during money troubles and painful surgeries for his asthma symptoms, the two of them found their relationship was suffering. She wrote in her diary that his "rasping voice so jarred me that I wanted to scream." After a few months Crowley broke it off, presenting her with a new "Scarlet Woman" by the name of Dorothy Olsen. But this did not lead Hirsig to abandon her commitment to Thelema. Her diary from this period reveals her continuing devotion to the Great Work, her renewal of her magical oaths, her ongoing invocations of Ra Hoor Khuit, and her consecration of herself as the bride of Chaos. In 1925, when Crowley asked her to serve again for a period as his scribe and secretary, she readily accepted; she was ready to give her assistance when it was necessary to the furtherance of his magical work and to the promulgation of the Law of Thelema. As Crowley wrote in his diary during the Cefalù period, "She loves me for my work She knows and loves the God in me, not the man; and therefore she has conquered the great enemy that hides behind his clouds of poisonous gas, Illusion."

Hirsig spent the winter in Paris, France, where her financial problems continued. Crowley biographer Lawrence Sutin rejects the assertion of earlier writers that she worked as a prostitute. She continued to work for Crowley and the promulgation of Thelema for at least three years. She later married William George Barron, with whom she had a son, Alexander Barron. On March 13, 1926 her sister Marian Dockerill (born Anna Maria Hirsig), published her exposé on Aleister Crowley, "Oom the Omnipotent" and others in a series of articles which began running on this date in the New York Journal, titled "My Life in a Love Cult, A Warning to All Young Girls". This exposé has been adjudicated, incorrectly, to their other sister Magdalena Alma Hirsig, in the belief that Marian Dockerill was not a real name, but a pseudonym. Hirsig later rejected Crowley's status as a prophet, while still recognizing the Law of Thelema. Ultimately she returned to her work as a schoolteacher in America. Crowley biographer John Symonds wrote that he had found rumors that she had converted to Roman Catholicism. Hirsig died in 1975 in Meiringen, Switzerland, aged 91.

Thelemapedia. (2004). Leah Hirsig. Retrieved April 28, 2006.