Leila Waddell

Leila Ida Waddell (1880–1932) was an Australian violinist, teacher and collaborator in Crowley's ritual performances. Known in his writings as Laylah, she brought an established musician's repertoire and stage experience to the early Thelemic circle. Her professional career extended across concert work, musical theatre, touring ensembles and teaching.¹⁾

Born in Bathurst, New South Wales, Waddell studied with Henri Stael and taught violin at the Presbyterian Ladies' College in Croydon, Ascham and Kambala. Her contemporary obituary records a public debut in recitals associated with the city organist Arthur Mason. She subsequently appeared as a soloist with the Brescians, whose performances in peasant festival costume accompanied J. T. West's early cinematograph shows.²⁾

This early setting combined live music, theatrical presentation and projected moving images. It gives a fuller picture of the performance experience she later brought to Crowley's projects. She was already accustomed to music functioning within a programme of visual and dramatic entertainment.

West introduced Waddell to London, where she led the onstage band in A Waltz Dream at Daly's Theatre. Under the stage description “The Ragtime Gipsy”, she worked in vaudeville. Her touring activities included an ensemble she formed of six women violinists who also performed stylised dances, as well as smaller groups.³⁾

The obituary also records extensive work in the United States and further study with Leopold Auer. This combination of continued training and touring places her within an international professional music network. Her biography cannot be reduced to a period spent in Crowley's company without losing much of the explanation of her artistic competence.

Waddell was a principal performer in the Rites of Eleusis, staged at London's Caxton Hall in October and November 1910. The published title page names her with Crowley, and the prefatory note states that she selected the solos from her own repertoire. This directly credits her with a musical decision-making role in the production.⁴⁾

In the Rite of Saturn, the Mother of Heaven plays before the Master of the Temple emerges from the shrine. A note identifies Wieniawski's Kuyawiak; a later passage calls for a Bach aria arranged for the G string. Music helps organise the action and its emotional changes. It is neither incidental background nor a written lecture on the symbolism of Saturn.⁵⁾

The arrangement joins an existing concert repertoire to newly composed ritual drama. Crowley's text, Victor Neuburg's dance and Waddell's playing address the audience through different senses. Alice Gorman's account places this collaboration within an effort to produce religious ecstasy through the arts.⁶⁾

The original supplement assigns the choice of music explicitly:

The solos were chosen from her repertoire by Miss Leila Waddell.

— Unsigned production note, The Rites of Eleusis, introductory note.⁷⁾

This credit identifies a contribution to the programme as well as a performance role. Waddell brought an existing repertoire to the enterprise and selected from it. The wording helps recover the collaboration as a combination of specialised skills: the publication credits Crowley with writing and production, acknowledges another contributor to parts of two rites, and separately names Waddell’s musical selection. Treating every element as Crowley’s composition would erase the distinctions made by the source itself.

The published scripts show music doing several kinds of dramatic work. In the Rite of Mercury, the figure Soror Gemini plays between speeches and invocations. One cue specifies a Sarabande by Bach; at the close, after Mercury seats her on his throne, the designated music is a Nocturne by G. Boyle. The sequence gives instrumental performance a place within the action, rather than treating it as an overture detached from the ritual.⁸⁾

The Rite of Luna makes the relation between speech and music particularly visible. Luna, identified with Artemis, is listed with a silver robe, veil and violin. The other figures repeatedly address a presence whose response is withheld. Pan's invocations, the movement of the Satyr and the guardians' exchanges accumulate around that silence. At the conclusion, Pan tears down the veil; Luna plays a Chaconne by Bach, and a long silence follows before the final dismissal.⁹⁾

On this reading of the script, the instrumental solo occupies the position where an audience might expect an answer in words. The music is therefore bound to the revelation staged by the ceremony. The concluding silence is also prescribed, giving the sound a frame and allowing it to determine the pace of the ending. Waddell's contribution as a violinist was central to making such a design work in performance.

These examples also show how the rites brought an existing concert repertoire into a new theatrical setting. Bach and Boyle were not composing a continuous commissioned score for these scripts. Their pieces were selected and placed alongside poetry, invocations, colour, costume and movement. The meaning of a musical passage within the ceremony consequently depended on its position and on the action surrounding it.

The 1911 printed text documents that arrangement, but it should not automatically be treated as an exact transcript of every London performance in 1910. It gives firm evidence for credited collaboration and the intended integration of music with drama. Questions about a particular evening's execution would require contemporary programmes, reports or other performance records. This distinction allows Waddell's musical agency to be discussed concretely without inventing an audience response or an undocumented performance detail.

The final rite makes the transition from music to silence visible in its stage directions:

[LUNA plays accordingly.
[A long silence.

— Aleister Crowley, The Rites of Eleusis.¹⁰⁾

The footnote names Bach’s Chaccone. After the silence come the closing ceremonial exchanges and departure. The music consequently occupies a decisive interval between the tearing down of the veil and the declaration that the task has ended. The silence is given duration by the adjective “long”, making the cessation of sound part of the script’s organisation. This describes the published plan; evidence about a particular performance is needed to establish how that interval was realised before an audience.

After her years abroad, Waddell resumed orchestral and teaching work in Sydney. Her obituary names engagements with J. C. Williamson's orchestras at Her Majesty's and the Criterion, and work with the Conservatorium and Philharmonic Society orchestras. It also records her teaching at the Convent School of the Sacred Heart in Elizabeth Bay. She died in 1932.¹¹⁾

These later activities demonstrate the continuity of a working musician's life. Performance and teaching remained central after the episodes for which she is best known in occult histories. The obituary's evaluation of her technique and refinement belongs to contemporary musical remembrance, providing a useful counterpart to Crowley's literary image of Laylah.

Crowley's references to Laylah, including those in The Book of Lies, belong to poetry and personal symbolism. A poem can preserve an important aspect of a relationship without serving as a literal account of every event. Concert notices, scripts, correspondence and the obituary provide other kinds of evidence through which to understand Waddell's life.

Read together, these materials reveal an artist who contributed choices, training and performance skill to a collaborative undertaking. See Energized Enthusiasm and Thelema in art, literature and music.

The Book of Lies prints Waddell's portrait with the caption Laylah immediately after p. 94. On that page, chapter 77 places the same name beneath a much longer symbolic heading. The body of the chapter reads simply:

Laylah.

— Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies, chapter 77, p. 94 (1913).¹²⁾

The photograph supplies a visual counterpart to that literary naming. It should not be described as a performance photograph of the Rites of Eleusis: the source establishes its place in the book, while the concert and production records establish her professional activities.

Leila Waddell in the portrait captioned LAYLAH, The Book of Lies (1913), following p. 94. Source and original. Public domain: original published 1913. Click to enlarge.