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: #194241 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Aleister Crowley, occultist, poet, novelist, bisexual adventurer and drug user was not a man to inspire half-hearted reaction in his own lifetime. He was either adored or vilified. So Martin Booth's crisply written, agenda-free biography which sets out simply to tell the truth objectively is a welcome addition to Crowley literature.

Born to a wealthy brewing family, Crowley, whose parents belonged to the fanatical Plymouth Brethren sect, had a miserably repressed childhood. He spent much of the rest of his life apparently trying to shake off what he regarded as the filth of Christianity. Magic for Crowley, who decided while still at Cambridge in 1898 on a career as a magus, was intrinsically linked to human will. He came to believe that he and his disciples could control almost anything by exerting will. Like the poet WB Yeats he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Eventually he became leader of the Order of the Oriental Templars or Ordo Templi Orientis, which survives as a huge international cult organisation and gave Booth access to its archives. As Booth says "Crowley may have been oversexed but he was first and foremost a religious and not a debauched character". But famously, and how the tabloid press loved it, Crowley believed that sex was what liberated the creative force necessary to his "work" and he had ritual (and spontaneous) vaginal and or anal intercourse with many hundreds of women and men all over the world. Sometimes the rituals--upon which Booth is to be congratulated for sparing us too many prurient details--involved animals too. Drugs changed the perception of the participants.

Booth's book does what it promises. It provides the extraordinary facts and leaves you to decide for yourself from an informed position whether this man--in whom interest has grown considerably since his death in 1947, especially during the 1960s--was merely a degenerate charlatan or an impassioned, although arguably misguided, magical missionary, pitiful at the end of his life.--Susan Elkin

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

A definitive Resource?
Years spent studying Crowley and his Magick has left me feeling that there was something more to Crowley than other biographers were revealing. After reading Martin Booths excellent version of events surrounding Crowley's life the missing pieces came into full focus. This is a well written, superbly researched and articulate account of the man himself. No stone is left unturned and Crowley is revealed 'warts an all'. From this perspective one is left able to judge his magickal work from an enlightened perspective. Recommended whole heartedly.

A useful and generally fair biography of 'the Great Beast'
It takes a bold biographer to attempt the life of such a bizarrely complex and famous (or notorious) character as Aleister Crowley. Martin Booth has done a good, thorough, highly focused job, even if more scholarly writers could cite sources beyond the wide range of those he has used, and could also pick up various small points of inaccuracy. Booth has striven for dispassionate objectivity, but in the nature of things, Crowleyites will probably argue that the book understates the artistic, intellectual and 'magickal' achievements of the Great Beast 666, while the sceptical may equally well complain that Booth has underplayed the absurdity of Crowley's philosophical pretensions and the gross callousness of his relationships with the many weak and unhappy people who fell under his spell. However I'd suggest it's a measure of Booth's success that his biography will at least provide something for both camps: hard detailed information for the earnest student of Crowley's life and of the history of the evolution of modern occultism, and a measure of entertainment and bemusement for those not persuaded that Crowley was - to quote Raymond Greene, one of the sources Booth doesn't mention - anything more than 'a very silly man'.

A worthy, if at times pedestrian, review of Corwley's life.
The author has obviously gone to great lengths to attempt to give an entirely unbiased view of Crowley's life, and succeeds to a greater extent than most others to date; though at times, opinions do filter into his prose. Perhaps the greatest criticism is a seeming over-reliance on Crowley's own autobiography ("The Confessions of..."), though this is more likely to be an attempt to balance the obvious biases presented by history's own view of the man. A thorough text, though it seems rather rushed towards its close. Nor does the author seem to take particular note of Crowley's other works themselves, offering their penning by Crowley as little more than an afterthought. Nevertheless, it stands as one of the better biographies of one of history's most maligned characters.