Customer Reviews

The History of Magic in the Modern Age: A Quest for Personal Transformation

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It's quite hard finding an authoritative and yet easy to read survey of the western magical traditions. What I like about this book is that it provides a very good overview of the sources of western magic - including the Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Gnosticism and the Tarot, and then draws all these strands together.

When it comes to the 20th Century all the major figures are there, including Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Austin Spare, Anton La Vey, Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders - as well as the leading figures of contemporary Wicca ( the Farrars, Z Budapest, Starhawk et al.) There is a special chapter to distinguish between Wicca and Satanism, which I also found very worthwhile.

Many people now realise the metaphysical dimensions of the internet, and this book also covers magic and cyberspace.

I haven't seen another book quite like this one and I hope it gets widely read. It should become a classic, alongside Margot Adler's " Drawing Down the Moon " .

While it is a reasonable overview (apart from being weak on Druids), this book, disappointingly for something so recently published, accepts the origin myths of Wicca and Goddess-worship at face value. For example, it repeats Alex Sanders' account of his initiation by his grandmother into a multi-century lineage of witches as fact, even though Sanders himself later admitted that he had made it up, and also takes the Gardnerian wiccan myth of lineage as likewise true. (The balance of evidence is that Gardnerian Wicca was invented by Gardner in the 1950s, pretty much out of whole cloth.)

It also puts a lot of emphasis on the "Quest for Personal Transformation" aspect of magic, even though (as in all religions, it must be said) it seems far more common for practitioners of magic to seek temporal comfort and advantage than personal transformation - Drury doesn't really acknowledge this adequately, in my view.

To quote Golden Dawner A.E. Waite's Book of Ceremonial Magic (Chapter 7):

We have seen that the sorcerer of the Middle Ages was usually squalid and necessitous; hence he coveted treasures: he was usually despised, and hence he longed for mastery, for the prestige of mystery and the power of strange arts: he was usually lonely and libidinous, and hence he sought, by means of spells and philtres, to compel the desire of women. To be rich in worldly goods, to trample on one's enemies and to gratify the desires of the flesh--such are the ends, variously qualified and variously attained, of most Ceremonial Magic...

And this appears to apply equally to many of the people and groups featured in this book.

The book does mention the personality clashes, arguments and organisational splits in the various groups, however, so it isn't completely naive. What came through for me was, frankly, what a sad bunch of losers most of these people were. Their quest for personal transformation, at least positive personal transformation, seems to have largely failed, in the absence of a clear concept of the "good" or a developed interpersonal ethic.