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.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
'A fine, fair and gripping piece of work that places Crowley before the reader in all his bizarre immensity' SUNDAY TIMES 'A formidably well-researched and well-written biography, which has the additional merit of being extremely funny' THE TIMES '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.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Engrossing and excellent biography,
This review is from: Magick Life (Paperback)
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.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Father of Magick whether you like him or not,
By
This review is from: Magick Life (Paperback)
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.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Master Therion,
By Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Magick Life (Paperback)
I was coming home from the library when a small child stopped me, tugged my hand, and asked me to step towards the hoarding that covered an abandoned building on Eighth Street here in San Francisco. It seemed that a charitable agency was having a book sale for the wee ones of our city. A few adults stood prowling the street corners but otherwise the sale was entirely organized and manned by these children--none more than 12 years of age, and most barely out of kindergarten. I was a little surprised to see that their book offerings, propped up against the plywood walls of the abandoned shack, were largely books about the occult. Indeed I didn't know which way to look, it was all about black magic and how to hex one's enemies. Finally one child said, "What's the matter, dude, ain't you gonna buy nothin'? C'mon, it's all for the children." He looked ready to blow his tin whistle and summon the vague shadows of the adults on the corner and in the dark alley, so I took out my wallet, threw down a dollar bill, and came away with Martin Booth's 2000 biography of Aleister Crowley, who looked like a nasty sort on the cover with those large staring eyes and one side of his mouth drawn up in a gesture sort of like a smile, but probably a rictus.
It's taken me months to get through it, and in the interim I find that author Booth died on Lincoln's Birthday, 2004. Since Booth gives us example after example of figures who, having angered Crowley in some manner, then passed on, no matter how many years later, insiders said that he had cursed them and caused their deaths magically, so naturally it makes me wonder if the shade of Master Therion, as AC called himself (he admitted in court to using literally "hundreds of names"), had perhaps been upset by this book, which calls a stone a stone most luridly. On the whole, it is one of the best books I have read in ages, and as a biography, I can't praise Booth enough for the way in which he continually manages to clear a space amid the rhetoric of Crowley's fans and enemies, in which his very real achievements can be appreciated for what they were. I do think he over-rates Crowley's poetry, and his writing in general, but maybe I just haven't read enough of AC to make it resonate in my head. Beyond everything else A MAGICK LIFE is a book of eccentric characters. I loved reading about Oscar Eckerstern, for example, a mountaineer chum of Crowley's who suffered from a peculiar problem, throughout his life he "was periodically subjected to physical attacks by complete strangers, who tried to kill him; he assumed it was a case of mistaken identity." I liked when Crowley was living with Allan Bennett and keeping a human skeleton in the front room, to which they would try to restore human life by using tootbrushes to "feed" its bones a viscous mess of blood and sparrowmeat. Elaine Simpson, one of Crowley's lady-friends, was initiated into the order of the Golden Dawn in top secret, and Crowley was later annoyed to visit Hong Kong and to find out that Simpson was using the ceremonial golden robes of the forbidden rituals to enter and win fancy dress party competitions. Booth is fairly broadminded about Crowley's erotic nature, his rampant desire for women on the one hand, and on the other for a younger acoylte who would mount him magically while he was on all fours high on ether. I mean, we've all been there, but Booth has an easy way with this dual nature, and never makes too big a fuss over it. When Crowley was a teen he was under the thumb of some religious relatives, one of whom wrote a moral story about the "Two Kings" who spoil young men's lives--"Smo King" and "Drin King," and impertinent Crowley wrote in that *he* knew two Kings more popular among boys than Smo and Drin. Even the saddest moments were marked by some comic incongruity. When Crowley's daughter died in infancy--she had been named Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith--a catty acquaintance said she had been "done in by nomenclature." It IS a sad story of decay and decline, one that made me resolve anew to take better care of my own magical powers.
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