Leila Waddell was a capable musician but she had little work, so in 1912 Crowley came up with the idea of finding some other women – six, remembered in his Confessions as three dipsomaniacs and four nymphomaniacs – to form a band, which became a troupe of seven female fiddlers called The Ragged Ragtime Girls.
They played gigs in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and above all Russia in the summer of 1913, where they played at the Moscow Aquarium. Crowley accompanied them there for six weeks, with a burst of creativity that included his best-known poem ‘Hymn to Pan’ and his Gnostic Mass, perhaps inspired by encountering the high ritual of the Russian Orthodox church. This included his list of Gnostic saints including Pan, Christian Rosencreutz, Gauguin, Nietzsche, Wagner, and Theodor Reuss, through to English figures such as John Dee, Sir Edward Kelley, William Blake,1 Sir Richard Burton, Swinburne, and Crowley himself.
Meanwhile in March 1913 they appeared at the Tivoli Theatre (also known as the Old Tivoli, or Tivoli Theatre of Varieties) which was at 65-70½ Strand, on the southern side between Durham House Street and Adam Street (it was demolished in 1914, replaced by the Tivoli cinema, and the site is now a featureless modern office block). The Ragged Ragtime Girls were in the Easter programme, on the same bill as George Formby senior, father of the more famous ukulele artist. Crowley's description of them taking London by storm may be an exaggeration.