For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Leah Hirsig (1883-1975) was one of the most prominent women in the life of British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Hirsig’s importance in Thelema gradually declined, and she distanced herself from the movement in the late 1920s. 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". I argue that Crowley’s Babalon—by symbolizing assertive and transgressive feminine sexuality and the erotic threat to stable, bounded subjectivity—both reifies and challenges dominant perceptions of femininity and feminine sexuality in the early twentieth century.

Leah le pidió que la pintara como un "alma muerta" y de hecho Crowley pintó varios retratos de ella. Hirsig and her older sister Alma were drawn to the study of the occult, and this led them, in the spring of 1918, to pay a visit to Aleister Crowley who was living at the time in Greenwich Village. Over and over again, she smote into my soul that I must understand the way of the gods… We must not look to the dead past, or gamble with the unformed future; we must live wholly in the present, wholly absorbed in the Great Work, ‘unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result’.Leah was forced to fend for herself, now alone, living impecuniously in Paris, and feeling very depressed.

In 1919 Leah Hirsig was consecrated as Crowleys «Scarlet Woman», taking the name Alostrael, «the womb (or grail) of God.Mając dwa lata przeprowadziła się z matką i ośmiorgiem rodzeństwa do Nowego Jorku w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Leah Hirsig was born on 9 Apr 1883 in Switzerland into a large family in which she was one of nine children.