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Magick Life

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Martin Booth is an excellent writer and very readable (unlike his subject). This is not an unbiased biography (no such anything exists) but he tries to present a balanced account of this fascinating character. At times he is quite humourous, as in his description of Neuberg and Crowley's rituals in Algeria. He's neither dogmatically for Crowley nor overly skeptical. I came away from reading this book more sympathetic to Crowley than before and with a better understanding. Much better than Symond's exploitative original biography.

The most striking, yet unintentional, conclusion of `A Magick Life' must be that it is simply not quite possible to be truly impartial when describing the life of Aleistar Crowley. That noted, and despite his mildly overt sympathises with Crowley's occultic elucidations, Martin Booth certainly provides a decent challenge to any a priori statement on the above in dealing with this tenebrous figure.

Tracing Crowley's existence from his puritanical upbringing amidst the Plymouth Brythen, to his repeated attempts at achieving fame and succeeding notoriety to his lonely, heroin-dependent death, Booth provides a fascinating look at the development of `The Wickedest Man in the World', and the observations of a life that never bordered on the mundane or mediocre.

Is Booth able to give an accurate depiction of Crowley? Certainly, he is not whitewashed regarding his conceit or his appalling treatment of those closest to him. However, the general picture Booth creates is that of a pretentious but rather foolish eccentric. Debates over the accuracy of this analysis is one that will continue to rage.

Overall, a very engaging book which should help satisfy anyone's curiosity for Crowley.

this book gives an accurate unbiased account of the life & times of aleister crowley, a thoroughly enjoyable read, you can make up your own mind whether you think he was a conman or a conjuror. all the facts are there...you decide!

Perhaps the best biography of Aleister Crowley out there, the author remains fair and balanced in his presentation of the very controversial life of a man whose name elicits a reaction in nearly anyone alive since his emergence in the media. The author is definitely fair and balanced, but to accomplish this he must present every relevant side and viewpoint. Citing an exhaustive amount of research, the picture of Crowley is built into a three dimensional historical figure as seen from the objective eye. The problem this exhaustive exploration produces in an incredibly dry piece of historical literature. The accuracy, validity, and honesty are much appreciated, but the reader is seemingly confronted with a dozen dates per page. This book manages to make one of the most controversial and heatedly debated lifetime dull and uninteresting! Completing a single chapter is like a hike across a dessert, and the voluminous size is a disheartening prospect as you slug through page after page.