Product Description

Crowley advocated the practice of magick and encouraged his followers to create their own life styles and develop a keen self knowledge. He wrote many books on his subject and is still revered as the master of the dark arts with books and websites and followers all over the world. Martin Booth has used his skills as a biographer to encapsulate the man and his extraordinary life-style in a chilling tale of magic and intrigue.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #280452 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
"1 'A fine, fair and gripping piece of work that places Crowley before the reader in all his bizarre immensity' SUNDAY TIMES 2 'A formidably well-researched and well-written biography, which has the additional merit of being extremely funny' THE TIMES 3 'Dedicated research and enthusiasm' INDEPENDENT (Weekend Review)

About the Author
Born in Lancashire in 1944, Martin Booth was educated in Hong Kong and London. He has published ten novels and a number of non-fiction titles including biographies and wildlife studies. He is also a film and documentary writer who travels widely. He is married with two children and lives in Somerset.

Customer Reviews

Father of Magick whether you like him or not
I was pleased to find a biography of Crowley written by someone who was not prejudiced for or against him. Mr. Booth is able to illustrate clearly that Crowley was neither all good nor all bad. A person who reads the book with an open mind will get a pretty clear picture of what Crowley was all about. Personally, after reading the book, I came to the conclusion that Crowley was "a good man who did bad things." The book makes it abundantly clear that the theme of Crowley's life was EXCESS! EXCESS! EXCESS! This one colossal fault caused him to make a mess of his life and the lives of many of the people who became involved with him.

Still, he was a highly intelligent, well educated, well traveled, sophisticated person whose writings became the basis for magic as we know it today. Just about any magic book you might pick up that has been written since his time contains principles created by him. He is the "Father of Magic" as we know it today.

He was a prolific writer, but got little or no recognition for his works except for his "Book of the Law," which basically states that every individual has a right to be who he or she is, whether his or her way of life fits the notion of the norm put out by churches, governments or societies of the day. It is his staunch defense of the rights of the individual throughout his lifetime that has caused him to be remembered and loved by many regardless of his personal faults and foibles, which were great, and regardless of whether they are interested in being magicians or not.

The books shows that much of his horrendous reputation was created by a vicious press who, after he lost his fortune, took advantage of the fact that he had no money to sue them for libel, and exploited every opportunity to malign him to the utmost over a long period of time.

Engrossing and excellent biography
The late Martin Booth was a writer of great skill and insight, and in Aleister Crowley he had a fantastic subject to examine. The result is a thoroughly fascinating book.

Most of the things people 'know' about Crowley aren't true. He was not a Satanist per se, wasn't deliberately much more wicked than anyone else, and frankly often felt put upon or victimized himself. However, he was certainly aware of the concept of self-promotion, and to the extent he could, he reveled in his notoreity and reputation when it suited him (and played hurt when it didn't).

Crowley's severe upbringing is held responsible for bringing out much the rebel in him, and no doubt this is true; but the Victorian age itself was full of people who set out looking for the novel and for adventure. Crowley's poetry and prose, much of it self-published, and his mountain-climbing in particular, is of a piece with the times and the spirit of the English. Booth spends much time on Crowley's mania for climbing, and his triumphs really are impressive - but then so are his failures. And Crowley did not handle failure very well at all. People die, and not by black magic, and relationships are ruined.

There is a turning point in Crowley's life, where before that he was clearly a talent in the ascendant, his personality multi-faceted, his interests varied and success in life expected and frequent. And then things begin to slide. His relationships become more and more selfish, one-sided, and destructive; his drug use becomes more reckless and slips from his control; he becomes frustrated that his progress in the Great Work is impeded, that he cannot make headway. His addictions, which once opened perspectives and perceptions, now block real gains. He becomes more impatient, lashing out at life, the people around him who trust him and look to him for insight, insight he seems to know he does not really possess, might only just be on the verge of possessing. The harder he presses, the more destructive and wasteful and self-defeating his behavior. It is really sad. Suddenly, he is an old and weak man, embittered and poor. And then he died and it was all over.

Crowley was obviously a man of great intellectual power, of charisma, and of drive. He knew everyone, knew a bit of everything. Booth writes with obvious appreciation for Crowley's real genius... and so it is all the more a shame when it is Crowley himself, always pointing the finger assigning blame to others, who clearly is the cause of his own unraveling. While a life well worth studying, Crowley is in the end not a powerful magician controlling the elements, but an old man in a cafe, waiting on an acquaintance or two for a game of chess to pass the time.

Fascinating Biography -- but not one for the Goth kids
Crowley was an absolutely amazing figure who knew everyone from Rodin to L. Ron Hubbard. Born wealthy yet raised in a sort of Puritan movement, he early on became interested in living an extreme life free of societal shackles.

He became an accomplished mountain climber (organized first attempt on K2 etc) then turned to what he is best known for, which is "magick." (This is "magic" with a "k" added -- for the Greek word for vagina!) He took a ton of drugs, decided sex (of basically any sort) was integral to his experiments, and seems to have sincerely believed he was conjuring demons and so forth. The idea of him as "the wickedest man on earth" is overblown, as he was the target of some unscrupulous libeling by the tabloid press. Though he sought to cast spells cursing people and so on, he was never exactly a satanist, but rather continued to practice Christian, Islamic, and whatever other rituals he could get his hands on. That said, Maugham felt he was evil, and both his financial dishonesty and the trail of broken lives -- mostly women -- that he left later in his life, when he would pick up one acolyte after another and expose them to heavy drug use and "demonology," seem to mark him as something of a sociopath.

The late Martin Booth turns it all into a an absolutely fascinating book. Crowley comes across as a destructive jackass whose search for meaning in the weird was ultimately tragic, in that it prevented him from having any real human relationships. Booth is often very funny, and seems absolutely fair. However, the occasionally agnostic position he takes on whether Crowley was actually achieving magickal effects is strictly tongue in cheek. Anyone looking for a book that will tell them Crowley may have truly been successfully magickal will be disappointed. Booth, who's more interested in the truth, makes the very idea seem ridiculous. If moral insight really led to supernatural powers, Crowely, for all his learning, would have been the last person to achieve them. Booth does, however, tell it all in a highly entertaining and totally convincing fashion, so if you're looking for the rationalist take (and a great read) this is for you.

One caveat: the British paperback edition is very cheaply produced, and will look well worn after a single reading.