A Magick Life: The Life of Aleister Crowley
by Martin Booth
Coronet Books, £8.99, ISBN 0340718064
If you believe in magic as much as in little green men from Mars, it is difficult to be impressed by the most famous magician of the last century. Edward Alexander Crowley was born into the peak of the Victorian Age in 1875 and lived until 1947 to see the first and second World Wars. Before Crowley discovered magic at age 22 he was a chess player of repute and he wrote poetry of more than ordinary ability. He became a mountaineer with numerous first ascents to his name; initially in England and Scotland, later in the Alps, and eventually in the Himalayas. For all his daring and pioneering climbs, he was known as an exceedingly careful and deliberate mountaineer. Yet, “Crowley was to develop into a person forever pushing the boundaries of experience, reacting to emotions and impulses rather than reason.” (p. 22).
He was considered the greatest magician of his age. This means he was opposed to Christianity, he borrowed from Theosophy, Spiritualism, and other psychic beliefs of the time. Crowley described magic as using one’s will power to accomplish things without obvious means. “Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” (p. 82). He compared this to the Roman Catholic Mass where the will of the priest changes the bread and the wine. The astral body of light, the universal ether, and human thought were part of the faculties needed for accomplishing magic. The author of the biography says that much of what Crowley suggested as magic, that is the imagination, the subconscious, the reaching for control by the mind, have today become topics in the psychiatrist’s office (p. 85).
Crowley claimed to have been inspired by the Rosicrucians, by the history of the Knights Templar, the Cathars, and Albigensians. Organizations Crowley founded or belonged to bore such names as the Golden Dawn, “Lichte Liebe LebenTempel”, the Theosophical Society, “Ordo Templi Orientis”, or “Argentinum Astrum”. Clearly the concepts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarding what was magic and what is real differed from the ideas of later periods. Booth has written a competent biography of an exceptional character. It is easy to read, but much more difficult to understand or to sympathize with.
