Who Used To Live Is This House?

Question

As we all well know, when "Stairway To Heaven" is played backwards, people claim it reveals a message supporting Satan. More people believed this theory after Jimmy Page bought a house in Scotland which was a well known Satanic chruch. Who lived and owned this building before Page bought it?

Answer 1

That would be Aleister Crowley

Page had a fascination with the poet, novelist, artist, occultist and founder of Thelema, Aleister Crowley. He bought Crowley's rural retreat, Boleskine House, which is on the banks of Loch Ness in Scotland, though he no longer owns the property having sold it to hoteliers in the late 1980s. Page's collection of Crowleyana is considered to be the most significant in private hands: paintings by Crowley from Page's collection were displayed at a critically acclaimed exhibition at the October Gallery, London, in 1998.

In the early 1970s, Jimmy Page owned an occult bookshop and publishing house, "The Equinox Booksellers and Publishers" in Kensington High Street, London, eventually closing it as the increasing success of Led Zeppelin resulted in his having insufficient time to devote to it. The company published a facsimile of Crowley's 1904 edition of "The Goetia". The seriousness of Page's intent was demonstrated by the dustwrapper being printed on the notoriously fragile camel hair paper of the original.

What made people particularly curious about Page's connection with the occult was the appearance of four symbols on the jacket of Led Zeppelin's fourth album. It was generally accepted that the four symbols represented each member of the band. During tours and performances after the release of Led Zeppelin IV, he often had zodiac symbols embroidered on his clothes (referred to as his "Dragon Suit", it included the signs for Capricorn, Scorpio and Cancer which are Page's Sun, Ascendant and Moon signs, respectively) along with the so-called "ZoSo" symbol. This fuelled the curiosity of many fans who went to great lengths to find out what the symbols meant. The source of the ZoSo symbol itself is no longer a mystery but the meaning of it still is; it originated in 'Ars Magica Arteficii' (1557) by J Cardan, an old alchemical grimoire, where it has been identified as a sigil consisting of zodiac signs. The sigil is reproduced in "Dictionary of Occult, Hermetic and Alchemical Sigils" by Fred Gettings, published in 1982 by Routledge & Kegan Paul (see here). It had previously been conjectured that the symbol was derived from various occult and mystical sources, most notably The Kabbalah, a stylised "666" from Aleister Crowley's Equinox publication or from Austin Osman Spare's "Zos Speaks"' but these are now considered to be probably incorrect. It has also been alleged that the symbol is merely a doodle that Page scribbled while on the telephone. Page will still not comment on the symbol's meaning.