Leah Hirsig Biography

Leah Hirsig

Born: 9 April 1883 in Trachselwald, Bern, Switzerland.

Died: 6:15 a.m., 22 February, 1975 in Meringen, Switzerland.

Leah Hirsig was born 9 April 1883 into a family of nine siblings in Trachselwald, Bern, Switzerland. Her family moved to America when she was two, and she grew up in New York. She was a school teacher and taught at a high school in the Bronx.

She and her older sister Alma were drawn to 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 Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. Aleister and Leah felt an immediate and instinctive connection. Leah asked him to paint her as a "dead soul' and in Aleister painted several portraits of her.

In 1919 she was consecrated as his Babalon or, "Scarlet Woman", taking the name Alostrael, "the womb (or grail) of God."

Leah had been previously married to Edward Hammond, by whom she had a son, Hansi Hammond.

Crowley's lover from January 1919 through August 1924. He called her 'The Ape of Thoth.' She presided over Crowley's 'Ipsissimus' grade and was his Scarlet Woman during the Abbey of Thelema years (1920-1923) Leah was the best known of the 'Scarlet Women'.

In February 1920 Aleister and Leah had a daughter, Anne Leah Crowley (nicknamed Poupée) They moved shortly after to Cefalù (Palermo), Italy and helped Aleister found the Abbey of Thelema on April 14, 1920. Aleister and Leah signed the lease as Sir Alastor de Kerval and Contessa Lea Harcourt. Poupée died nine months later in a hospital in Palermo on October 14, 1920.

By June 1924, despite Hirsig's loyalty 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, choosing 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. From her diary one sees how devoted she was. "I should have liked, as a human creature, to have died in the arms of the Beast 666 who, it will be noted in my first diary (commencing March 21, 1919), was and is my lover, my mate, my Father, my child, and everything else that Woman needs in Man. But I have never interfered with his Work, which was my Work, the Great Work, except in ignorance."

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.

Leah renounced both the Beast and her title on 26 December 1929. She returned to America to be with her sister Alma Hirsig and son Hansi and to resume her job as a schoolteacher. She died at in Meringen, Switzerland on 22 February 1975.