W. B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley: The “Battle of Blythe Road”

On April 19, 1900, the self-styled “black magician” Aleister Crowley showed up at 36 Blythe Road—the London address of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—wearing full Highland dress: a tartan kilt, an oversized cross on his chest, a black mask over his face, and a sword and dagger at his belt.

He stormed up the stairs, flashed what he claimed was an inverted pentagram sign, and shouted “black magic” at the Golden Dawn members in the middle of a ritual.

At that moment, the “white magician” William Butler Yeats answered—using physics, not sorcery—and promptly kicked Crowley back down the stairs.

That, in essence, is the whole story of the most famous showdown in modern Western occult lore: the Battle of Blythe Road.

Yeats is remembered first as one of Ireland’s greatest poets, so he usually appears in our lives along a literary route. But if you look even a little deeper (and it doesn’t take much), you find that “mystic” sometimes seems to outweigh “writer” in how he understood himself.

Even in his early, pre-fame work, Yeats’s poems are saturated with dreamlike, enchanted atmospheres. In The Lake Isle of Innisfree, the line “Nine bean-rows will I have there” has been read by scholars as more than pastoral detail—an allusion to Kabbalistic number symbolism, with “nine” hinting at completeness and fulfilled wisdom, suggesting inner illumination reached through discipline and solitary practice.

Then, in his 1899 collection The Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats went further, adding detailed notes that spell out the esoteric meanings behind recurring figures and emblems—fairy queens, love-goddesses, roses, heart-shaped flames. The “rose” that keeps returning throughout the book isn’t just decorative: it’s often taken as an echo of Rosicrucian imagery, pointing toward the purified soul and hidden knowledge.

Yeats’s serious involvement with occult societies goes back to 1887. Soon after moving to London, he joined Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. Three years later he formally entered the Golden Dawn through its London temple, the Isis-Urania lodge, and was given a dramatic Latin motto that could only belong to an order like this: Daemon est Deus inversus—“the Devil is God inverted”—abbreviated DEDI.

Isis-Urania is fascinating in its own right. It was the first Golden Dawn temple to become fully operational, yet it was labeled “Temple No. 3.” Even its name is a deliberate fusion: Isis, the Egyptian goddess, paired with Urania, the Greek muse of astronomy—an announcement that this was meant to be a “modern mystery temple” blending ancient Egypt, star religion, and Hermetic tradition.

More striking still: its address really was 36 Blythe Road (London W14). From the outside it looked like any ordinary rented building. Step inside, though, and you’d find a ritual space—altar, throne, checkered floor—set up for ceremonial work. In the 1890s, it was a hub of Britain’s occult scene. More than a hundred members—writers, painters, actors, mediums—formed a diverse, theatrical underground circle.

By 1893, Yeats had advanced to the inner grade 5=6 (Adeptus Minor)—effectively the highest level the Golden Dawn could realistically confer at the time. In a real sense, he was near the top: qualified to lead rituals, guide outer-order students, and take part in the organization’s internal governance.

And it was precisely within this labyrinth of ranks and authority that a rift opened. The London temple, where Yeats was based, began to clash with one of the order’s founders and key leaders, S. L. MacGregor Mathers. That conflict would eventually tear the Golden Dawn apart.

The immediate spark—the match thrown into the powder—was the other main character in our story:

Aleister Crowley.

Crowley fits the stereotype of the brilliant prodigy who seems destined to go off the rails. He entered Cambridge, but quickly tired of conventional Christian education and turned toward Western esotericism instead. After reading A. E. Waite’s writings on ceremonial magic and Karl von Eckartshausen’s The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary (Die Wolke über dem Heiligtum), Crowley was introduced to Mathers through George Cecil Jones—and from that point on, he became Mathers’s most useful weapon in an increasingly vicious internal power struggle.

In November 1898, Crowley was formally initiated into the Golden Dawn with Mathers himself presiding. He entered at the very first outer grade, 0=0 (Neophyte), and chose the motto Frater Perdurabo—roughly, “I will endure to the end.”

Crowley’s rise through the ranks was, frankly, outrageous. Barely two years later, Mathers—over the objections of the London leadership—personally ran an advancement ceremony for him at the Golden Dawn’s Paris temple, the Ahathoor lodge. In a move that broke with normal practice, Mathers pushed Crowley into the Inner Order and awarded him the grade 5=6, putting him on paper at the same level as Yeats.

This wasn’t just about spirituality. It was strategy.

Back in 1892, before Crowley had even joined, Mathers and his wife had moved to Paris. There he set up the Ahathoor Temple—decorated with Egyptian-style banners, props, and temple furnishings—and designated it “Ahathoor No. 7.” Part of that was financial pragmatism. But it also revealed Mathers’s ambition. With the other two founders increasingly absent—Woodman had died, and Westcott was tied up with his work as a coroner—Mathers became the order’s de facto leader. The problem was that his authority didn’t naturally command unanimous loyalty.

So he went on the offensive. Mathers accused Westcott of forging the famous correspondence and authorization supposedly received from German Rosicrucian “Hidden Chiefs.” Among senior members in London, this landed like a bomb. Because if the foundational “letters from Germany” were fabricated, then the Golden Dawn’s prized origin story—its claim to a legitimate continental lineage—started to look shaky.

It forced an uncomfortable question onto everything the order relied on: the Cipher Manuscripts, Book T, the entire grade system and ritual corpus. Were these teachings truly handed down by mysterious adepts? Or were they, in reality, the product of a few late-Victorian professionals working at their desks after hours?

London’s veteran members turned against Mathers. Paris—specifically the Ahathoor temple—became his stronghold. In 1900, Mathers moved quickly: he advanced Crowley to 5=6 at Ahathoor, then appointed him as his personal envoy and sent him back to London to seize control of the Isis-Urania temple.

This is where the timelines finally collide. But according to Yeats’s later official report, the scene was not the melodramatic brawl legend has made it out to be—no theatrical fistfights, and certainly not the slapstick “kicked down the stairs” moment people love to repeat. What actually happened was much more mundane: Crowley never even got inside. The landlord, along with police who were called to the scene, stopped him before he could enter, and Yeats had him removed from the premises—“politely,” as Yeats put it.

The reason was simple enough: Yeats and the others were the legal tenants of the flat. An outsider had no right to force entry. Afterward, Yeats and the landlord changed the locks, and—just like that—the “Battle of Blythe Road” was over.

Crowley may have realized how ridiculous he looked. Once his costume-drama intrusion was exposed for what it was—an attempted break-in dressed up as occult theatre—he lashed out. He had an anonymous leaflet printed, signed “Envoy,” trying to deny that he was the masked man who’d harassed the temple. Nobody found it convincing.

Still, the London Isis-Urania temple never really recovered. After successfully resisting Mathers and Crowley’s power grab, the London group immediately declared itself independent of Mathers and began running its own affairs. But independence brought new fractures. A. E. Waite wanted to steer the organization toward mystical philosophy and contemplative study, while others—Yeats among them—argued for keeping the original ceremonial magic tradition alive.

The split became formal in 1903. Waite reorganized the London temple while keeping the “Golden Dawn” name. Yeats and most of the members joined a new offshoot, Stella Matutina (“Morning Star”). Within that new order, Yeats advanced to 6=5 (Adeptus Major) and remained involved until he finally withdrew in 1921.

Then, in 1917, when Yeats was 52, he and his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees began experimenting with automatic writing. Over more than a year, they amassed a huge cache of notes and diagrams. Yeats spent the following years shaping that material into an ambitious symbolic system meant to connect the cosmos, human life, history, and the soul—a framework that became his most famous occult work, A Vision.

For readers who come to Yeats through the poems, A Vision can feel like a brick wall—dense, dry, and actively discouraging. But to Yeats it wasn’t a side project or an eccentric detour. It was a kind of private bequest to his fellow initiates: a “hidden inheritance” meant to be understood fully only by those who recognized the Theosophical and Golden Dawn scaffolding underneath it. Without that background, a lot of its machinery just looks like baffling symbolism. With it, the book starts to read like an insider’s map.

Crowley, meanwhile, took defeat as a cue to stop trying to win other people’s institutions and build his own. After 1900 he traveled widely—especially in Asia—studying and practicing different esoteric traditions, and over time he assembled a system that was unmistakably his. In 1904, in Cairo, he claimed to have received a revelation from a higher intelligence, and from that experience he launched Thelema, a new current built around a single, blunt principle: “Do what thou wilt.”

He also stopped honoring the Golden Dawn’s oaths of secrecy. He published material that had once been strictly initiatory—most famously printing Golden Dawn ritual texts in his journal The Equinox—and he made little effort to soften the edges of his public persona. He openly promoted drug use, sex magic, and “dark” ceremonial work, not as rumors whispered by enemies but as part of his own self-mythology.

That kind of provocation was irresistible to the press. In Britain’s tabloids of the 1920s and 1930s, Crowley was sensationally labeled “the wickedest man in the world,” becoming the era’s go-to villain whenever journalists wanted a face for the supposed menace of occultism.

Seen from today’s distance, 36 Blythe Road is just an ordinary apartment building—renovated long ago, passed through multiple landlords, its locks changed more times than anyone could count. The incident later dramatized as the “Battle of Blythe Road” amounts, in legal terms, to a dispute about leases and keys.

And yet, in the history of modern esotericism, it reads like a stone dropped into deep water: a single splash that marks a turning point. The mystery isn’t the makeshift temple in a rented flat. The real mystery is harder—and more modern:

In a world like ours, is a truly “secret” order still even possible? One that isn’t absorbed into literature, or torn apart by publicity and scandal—one that survives quietly, operating at a low whisper inside the inner lives of only a few.