Celtic Chess

W.B. Yeats’s Celtic Enochian Chess

(Enochian Chess Series Vol. III)

Steve Nichols

Celtic Chess: W.B. Yeats’s Celtic Enochian Chess
Enochian Chess Series Vol.III
Steve Nichols
– over 100 illustrations many in colour.
ISBN:
978-1906958947
US$39.99 / UK£30.00

Click Here for Celtic Chess: W.B.Yeats’s Celtic Enochian Chess / UK

Click Here for Celtic Chess: W.B.Yeats’s Celtic Chess / USA & Elsewhere

Buy the Enochian Chess set (all three books) for only £70.00 free postage / UK

Buy the Enochian Chess set (all three books) for only $90.00 free postage USA

Elsewhere write for details

W.B. Yeats’s Celtic Enochian Chess  

A black imitation-leather, gold unpublished notebook dated December 1898, shows us the Yeats-Gonne-Pollexfen team at work. Virginia Moore transcribes in 1954 this record of these three Celtic Twilight magicians exploring the four fabled “Cities,” of Falias, Murius, Findias, and Gorias –  regions of the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire –  under their respective Gods (the Dagda, Danu, Brigid, and Lugh) and High Druids.  

On questioning the four Druids, Maud Gonne discovered she and Yeats had received the Initiation of the Cauldron (purification/water). Gonne also received the Initiation of the Stone (earth); whereas Yeats had attracted the powers of the Wand (air) signifying supernatural inspiration. Beyond these Elemental Initiations came that of the White Globe, governed by the elder-god Elathan (front cover). Yeats and Pollexfen went – or thought they went –  with help of talismans to Falias, wherein a rough stone house George saw a skeleton of gold with diamond teeth. Next, they went to Murias (water), where a Druid showed them a bath full of indolent bathers. Trips continued to Findias (air), and Gorias (fire), where Pollexfen saw the lower part of the fire God Aengus (“passive form of Lug”). 

This amazing sixteen board sub-elemental extension to the Golden Dawn Enochian Chess system was the culmination of such endeavours by W.B. Yeats and his circle. Full board designs, details of talismanic constructions, suggested pieces, and my account of Yeats’s magickal feud with McGregor Mathers, is published here – much for the first time.   

Khemetic Enochian Chess

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Hypermodern Magick

(Enochian Chess Series Vol. II)

Steve Nichols

Khemetic Enochian Chess
Hypermodern Magick
Steve Nichols
Illustrations many in colour.
ISBN: 978-1-906958-86-2
US$39.99 / UK£30.00

Click Here for Khemetic Enochian Chess / USA & Elsewhere

Click Here for Khemetic Enochian Chess / UK

Buy the Enochian Chess set (all three books) for only £70.00 free postage / UK

Buy the Enochian Chess set (all three books) for only $90.00 free postage USA

Elsewhere, write for discount details and invoice

Khemetic Chess (Hypermodern Magick) is a stand-alone book that outlines my theory of magick, and sheds light on ‘active divinatory’ Enochian Chess. Exploring the 64 (8×8) paradigm, it looks at both historical and recent Enochian Chess variants. Aleister Crowley features prominently; and I look at strong Khemetic strands in Thelema such as the Crowning of Horus. It also encompasses Tantra, and Tsakli pieces (moveable shrines) for “No Self” Enochian Chess.

This book explains how 88 Ptolemaic emblemata gave birth to familiar Christianised tarot designs. These 88 divide into four groups of 22 Atous, and these combine with the Minor Arcanaii of the Four Winds, 56 divination cards for each of the 4 Elements or Chessboards. Four packs of 78 “Tarot of the Four Worlds.”

Khem, ancient Egypt, seems to be the fount of many magickal practices and survivals in diverse cultures. I trace some Khemetic influences on Tibetan Bonpo and Hinduism. Essential components and structure from Kabbalah also seem to begin with the Khemetic game of Zenet, and the Hymn to the Ten Bau of Amen-Ra rather than with such texts as Sepher Yetzirah and Zohar of the Late Medieval Period. Horus, Isis and the other Great Ones of Khem work better under governance of the Tetragrammaton (word with four letters) “AMEN” rather than under the arguably anti-Kemetic, Tetragrammaton YHVH.

Hypermodern Magick explains, continues and augments innovations that began with the literary modernist and psychological experimenter, WB Yeats and continued with political surrealist, Ithell Colquhoun, and Don Kraig (Modern Magick).

Steve Nichols’ fully featured Windows ENOCHIAN CHESS SOFTWARE for one to four players can be downloaded by using the coupon code instructions inside together with evidence of purchase. The PC software makes this advanced and complex game immediately playable. Steve Nichols was the first to publish Enochian Chess sets in 1982 with support from Israel Regardie and others. Steve has given many demonstrations, readings and lectures about the game over the decades.


THE ENOCHIAN CHESS SOFTWARE CAN BE DOWNLOADED FROM chaturanga.co

 

Rosicrucian Chess of The Golden Dawn

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Enochian Chess Series Vol. I
Steve Nichols

Khemetic Enochian ChessRosicrucian Chess of The Golden Dawn
Enochian Chess Series Vol.I
Steve Nichols
– over 200 illustrations many in colour.
ISBN: 978-1-906958-78-7
US$39.99 / UK£30.00

Click Here for Rosicrucian Chess of The Golden Dawn / USA & Elsewhere

Click Here for Rosicrucian Chess of The Golden Dawn / UK

Buy the Enochian Chess set (all three books) for only £75.00 free postage / UK

Buy the Enochian Chess set (all three books) for only $100.00 free postage /USA (Elsewhere write for details)

This is the first in a trio of books that together form The Complete Enochian Chess. Enochian Chess in part comes from the Elizabethan system of Enochian Magic originated by the Court Astrologer, Dr John Dee. It was developed into its current form in Victorian times by SL MacGregor Mathers and William Wynn Westcott. This book includes a complete facsimile and commentary of Moina Mathers’s Alpha et Omega Enochian Chess papers together with a brief history of the game, notes on play and strategy, and instructions for Active divinatory methods utilised by this system. Notes and illustrations by Ithell Colquhoun (some previously unpublished) help explain this advanced and complete system of magick in its own right.

Originally it was only taught to Golden Dawn initiates who had risen to the rank of Zelator Adeptus Minor, and required a comprehensive knowledge of Tarot, Geomancy, Kabbalah, various magical formulae, the symbolism of the Candidate, the Ceremony of the Neophyte Grade, working knowledge of the art of Invocation and Banishing, Pentagram and Hexagram rituals, formation of Telesmatic Images, Sigils, and knowledge of the Enochian Tablets. Enochian Chess subsumes other Passive systems of divination such as tarot and astrology, and has powerful prophetic properties.

************************************************************************************************************
Steve Nichols’ fully featured Windows ENOCHIAN CHESS SOFTWARE for one to four players can be downloaded by using the coupon code instructions inside together with evidence of purchase. The PC software makes this advanced and complex game immediately playable.

THE ENOCHIAN CHESS SOFTWARE CAN BE DOWNLOADED FROM chaturanga.com

***********************************************************************************************************

Steve Nichols was the first to publish Enochian Chess sets in 1982 with support from Israel Regardie and others. Steve has given many demonstrations, readings and lectures about the game over the decades. This book includes new revelations about the Golden Dawn invention of Enochian Chess, with a particular spotlight on important Eastern occult sources previously hidden.

 

Crowley

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A Beginners Guide
John S. Moore & John Patrick Higgins

Front coverLR

Crowley a beginners guide UK / £15.00

Crowley a beginners guide USA / US $22.00


Crowley, A Beginners Guide
John S. Moore & John Patrick Higgins
Format: Softcover/b/w Illustrated/154pp
ISBN: 978-1-906958-69-5
£15.00 /US $22.00
Subjects: Aleister Crowley/Thelema/Magick/Occult/Biography.

—–
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
Nearly seventy years after his death Aleister Crowley, the notorious Beast 666, is only just beginning to attract serious academic attention. Even so we would not expect to find him on any mainstream university courses; he is still too much associated with occultism. So, Crowley – A Beginners Guide is not your standard beginner’s guide.

“Let my servants be few & secret: they shall rule the many & the known.”
Readers may be surprised at the richness and complexity of his thought, as well as the extent of his influence. He needs background to be understood. Giving this opens fresh perspectives on much recent intellectual history.

Crowley – A Beginners Guide presents his main ideas in a straightforward and accessible format, with drawings and diagrams to place them in their historical context. It relates him to contemporary movements in art and scholarship. It describes his relationship to modernism and postmodernism, and his role in the counterculture of the sixties, as well as his continuing influence today. Interspersed are entertaining stories of his life and reputation.

Brilliantly illustrated by John Higgins, Crowley – A Beginners Guide, is a highly accessible guide to this fascinating, complex and controversial figure. It neither promotes nor condemns him, presenting hostile as well as favourable views of his character and achievement.

John S Moore is a freelance writer and independent scholar living in London. He is the author of Aleister Crowley: A Modern Master (Mandrake of Oxford, 2009) and Nietzsche – An Interpretation, (AuthorsOnline Ltd, 2011) and has written on Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein and Edward Bulwer-Lytton among others. More information at www.johnsmoore.co.uk

John Patrick Higgins is a writer and illustrator. He is the author of The Narwhal and Other Stories www.amazon.co.uk/Narwhal-other-stories-Patrick-Higgins ebook/dp/B007N6KJW8
He writes art criticism for various magazines and is Creative Director of Shot Glass Theatre Company www.culturenorthernireland.org/reviews/performing-arts/shot-glass. See also www.facebook.com
He lives in Belfast, which he continues to find extraordinary.

Read a review of Crowley A Beginners Guide from Magonia Review of Books pelicanist.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/crowley-for-beginners.html

Crowley – A Beginners Guide (Look Inside)

Making Talismans

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Nick Farrell

Making Talismans cover



Making Talismans
Nick Farrell
Format: Softcover/284 pp/illustrated.
ISBN: 978-1-906958-57-2
£19.99 /US$25
Subjects: Magic/Occult.

Discover the secret keys and practical techniques to turn mundane objects into “living entities of power,” bringing real change in your life. By pooling magical practices from shamanism, paganism, the Order of the Golden Dawn, and Dion Fortune, Making Talismans offers training and techniques for performing advanced magical talismanic operations.

For many years this occult classic has been “out of print” and now has been reworked by the author to reveal more detailed and advanced magical work.

This book is nearly entirely practical and tells the reader how to create talismans which work and how this specialist form of magical work can be part of a spiritual path.

Nick Farrell is the author is the Chief Adept of the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea which is a modern Golden Dawn dedicated to magical experimentation and development.

http://nick-farrell.blogspot.com/
Nick Farrell’s Blog – A blog providing training for all interested in the Golden Dawn, the magical writings of Nick Farrell and his Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea

Click here for UK edition including postage

Click here for US edition

Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg

Jean Overton Fuller
(Magical Biography)

Dylan1936The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg
Jean Overton Fuller
Format: Softcover
ISBN:
£15.00 / US$24.00
Subjects: Biography/Aleister Crowley/Thelema/Magick.

Click to Buy in UK

Click to buy in USA & AUS

The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg is really two books in one:
The record of Victor Neuburg’s extraordinary journey to magical enlightenment.         And the story of Aleister Crowley, the magus who summoned Neuburg to join
him in his quest.

‘The book opens with the author’s entry into the group of young poets including Dylan Thomas and Pamela Hansford Johnson. They gather around Victor Newburg in 1935 when he is the poetry editor of the Sunday Referee. Gradually the author becomes aware of his strange and sinister past, in which Neuburg was associated in magick with Aleister Crowley.

Contents: Beginnings / Mystic of the Agnostic Journal / Crowley and the Golden Dawn / Initiation / Magical Retirement / Equinox and Algeria / Rites of Eleusis / Triumph of Pan / Desert / Triangles / Moon Above the Tower / Templars and the Tradition of Sheikh El Djebel / Paris Working / The Sanctuary / Arcanum Arcanorum / Dylan Thomas


REVIEWS
Recently I found myself in Oxford on other business and met up with Mogg Morgan of Mandrake of Oxford Press, always a pleasure to talk to him about books and magic! During a chat about Aleister Crowley’s poetry, Mogg mentioned Victor Neuberg and reminded me this book is in Mandrake’s catalogue.
I was really glad to pick up my copy, which I’m enjoying very much at the moment. A good addition to my research library on occult literary modernism, it starts with an account of Victor Neuberg’s life in 1930s London as poetry editor of The Sunday Referee and the circle of young poets and writers whom he nurtured (including Dylan Thomas, Pamela Hansford Johnson and Jean Overton Fuller herself).
The book then switches to Jean Overton Fuller’s search for the truth about Victor’s magical association with Aleister Crowley. It’s a fascinating literary detective story – oh for the days (1960s) when a carefully-placed letter in the press would result in invites to tea with people who were personally involved!
In what is effectively a double magical biography, she pieces together Crowley and Neuberg’s journey on foot into the Sahara to perform rituals and then their ‘Paris Workings’, which prove to be dangerous and challenging.
Jean is a sympathetic and intuitive writer, providing a compelling portrait of Victor Neuberg and his literary/magical circles, not holding back on her critical comments on aspects of Crowley’s behaviour (eg abandoning Neuberg alone in the desert!), but appreciating the nature of his work and honouring the enduring love Neuberg maintained for Crowley. Reading this, I think I’d have really enjoyed meeting Victor Neuberg.
– Sue Terry, May 2023

‘Those interested in Western occult history will welcome this revised and expanded edition of an important work first published in 1965.

Overton Fuller’s biography of Neuburg paints an intimate portrait of this complex character who was as much mystic as poet. A prominent figure in London’s literary bohemia in the 1930s, Neuburg encouraged such writers as Dylan Thomas, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Hugo Manning and many others, including Overton Fuller.

In his earlier days, Neuburg had been a disciple, magical partner and possibly even lover of Aleister Crowley during a period of ground-breaking magical experiments.

‘Vicky encouraged me as no one else has done,’ Dylan Thomas declared on hearing of Neuburg’s death. ‘He possessed many kinds of genius, and not the least was his genius for drawing to himself, by his wisdom, graveness, great humour and innocence, a feeling of trust and love, that won’t ever be forgotten.’ ‘ . . . there was a whiff of sulphur abroad, and all of us would have liked to know the truth of the Aleister Crowley’s legends, the truth of the witch-like baroness called Cremers, the abandonment of Neuburg in the desert.’

– Pamela Hansford Johnson

‘No dry biography this but an illuminating and compelling account of a multi-faceted personality who lived during an exciting period of occult and literary history. An absolute must-have!’
– (ME) In Prediction Magazine November 2005

—————————–

To mark the centenary of Dylan Thomas, here’s an extract from JOF’s book that narrates her first meeting with the soon-to-be-famous poet:

“We agreed to Zoists”: Dylan Thomas & the Occultist Victor Neuburg (Aleister Crowley’s lover & collaborator)

“We agreed to Zoists.

Runia wanted us to have badges, ‘so that one Zoist can recognize another, if you meet outside, or if we have provincial centres.’

There was a murmur of dissent. Some of us felt this thing was getting inflated. And we didn’t want badges. We weren’t boy scouts; just a few people who wanted to come here and sit and talk to each other on Saturday evenings.

‘All right, no badges,’ she said. ‘But it is agreed we have a name?’

It was agreed but there was no enthusiasm for the name, our feeling being for the informal. Before we left Runia made us cups of tea.

When eventually we broke up, and I stood again in the road outside, I felt I could tell my mother I had been among distinguished people. But the truth was I felt something else as well. I felt I had been in ancient Egypt and for this feeling I could find no explanation.

Not all of those who had been present on the first evening returned the following Saturday, but as I attended every week I began to know the regulars. Arriving soon after 8 (dinner at the hotel where my mother and I lived, was at 7, so it was a rush), I always found a certain number of people there already, though there was usually some time to wait until Vicky and Runia came from the inner room. It was in this waiting time that I had to find my feet, as it were among the other young ones. Nobody was ever introduced at Vicky’s. One just found out for oneself. I did not find the young men easy although they made efforts to draw me into the circle, for they assumed an acquaintance with modern poetry and political authors greater than I possessed; I could not always follow their allusions, and I had the feeling they all participated in a form of culture slightly strange to me. I was therefore grateful when a good looking young man, quiet mannered and of a more ordinarily civilized demeanour, settled himself beside me and asked, simply, ‘How did you come to Vicky’s?’

I told him about the circular letter I had received. He knew Geoffrey Lloyd had sent some out and asked, ‘What do you do when you’re not writing poems for Vicky? What’s your background, so to speak?’

I told him I had been on the stage since I was seventeen.
He said ‘Fancy our having an actress among us!’

‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.

‘William Thomas’, was what I first thought he said, but then he added, ‘It’s a special Welsh name.’
There could be nothing very special about William, and I puckered my brows.
‘You’ll never have heard it before,’ he said. ‘Nobody in England ever has. It should really be pronounced Wullam, in Welsh.’ Or was he saying ‘Dullan’?

‘It’s a special Welsh name,’ he repeated. ‘I shall have to spell it for you. D-Y-L-A-N. In Wales, it’s pronounced Dullan. But I’d been corresponding with Vicky for some time before I came to London, and when I arrived I found he had been calling me Dillan, in his mind. I thought if Vicky didn’t know how to pronounce it nobody in England would, so I decided to take it as the standard English pronunciation of my name. Otherwise I’d spend all my time telling people it was Dull and not Dill, and I think perhaps Dillan sounds more elegant than Dullan. Only Idris objects and thinks it’s frightfully fancy! Because he’s Welsh, too, and he knows! but now I’m getting even Idris trained to call me Dillan, though it’s under protest!’
‘What part of Wales do you come from?’ I said.

‘Oh, I only come from a small town. Swansea.’

Whereas I had previously felt myself to be the most naive member of a group otherwise composed of sophisticated, bohemian intellectuals, I now felt I had, vis-à-vis Dylan Thomas, at any rate, an advantage in being a Londoner. ‘I should have thought Swansea was a large town,’ I said. ‘I was near there all last summer. If you had been to the theatre at Porthcawl you would have seen me on the stage!’

‘No, I’m afraid I didn’t’ he said. ‘What a pity!’

Giving the conversation a turn he did not expect, I said, ‘Have you ever been down a mine?’
‘No.’

‘I have!’ I explained triumphantly. ‘Near Crumlin. I once played a January date in the Rhondda. Or more exactly the Ebbw Vale.’ I told him how I had persuaded the men at a pit to take me down the shaft, and how, having arrived at the bottom, I was given a lamp to hold and escorted along a passage which had been hewed through the coal to a point where it became so low that one would have had to proceed on hands and knees. I was shown a fault seam, which I felt with my fingers.

‘You have seen something in Wales which I haven’t!’ said Dylan. He explained that his home was some distance from the mining regions. He described the part of Swansea where he lived, with a detail I cannot now recall, except that it sounded salubrious and agreeable. His father was Senior English Master at the Grammar School. ‘Living where I do one doesn’t really see anything of all that,’ he said, with reference to my allusion to the coal mining (and depressed) areas. ‘Idris comes from the Rhondda,’1 he said. ‘I haven’t been into those areas.’ As though he had been slightly shamed by my adventure, he added, ‘Perhaps I ought to have done.’

‘It’s because you live there that you wouldn’t think of it,’ I said. ‘When one is touring one feels one must see everything in case one never comes again. When I was sixteen, my mother and I made a tour of Italy, Pisa, Rome, Naples, Capri, and back through Perugia, Florence and Milan. We felt we had to go into everything, even the smallest church we passed on any street. We realized we had never “done” London half as thoroughly because we took it for granted.’

I have no ‘outrageous’ sayings of Dylan Thomas to record. His conversation with me was perfectly drawing-room and unexceptional. I remember him as a polite young man. Friendly, but not at all presuming.
He told me the origins of the circle of which I now formed part. ‘First one and then another of us found our way to Vicky’s through entering into correspondence with him or something like that, and so a circle grew up around Vicky. We’re all very fond of Vicky.’ He explained that, ‘always reading each other’s names in print we began to wonder what the ones whom we hadn’t seen were like.’ So they had had the idea ‘of sending out circulars to everybody who was a contributor. He thought it had brought in some interesting people. ‘Well, it has brought you!’ Perhaps one could name some kind of a regular thing of it. ‘The only thing I don’t like is the name Zoists!’ he said.

I laughed and said, ‘It does sound a bit like protozoa, zoophytes and zoids!’

Dylan pulled a funny face.

‘We’re always called “Vicky’s children”,’ said Dylan. ‘It’s a bit sentimental, but I don’t think we shall ever be called anything else.’

It had been at the back of my mind while he was speaking that his name, as he had spelled it out, was one which I had read in the Sunday Referee in a context more important than that of the weekly prizes. I had not taken the paper regularly before I joined the circle, or I would have known the whole build-up. I said, ‘Aren’t you the winner of a big prize? I believe you’re one of the distinguished people here!’
‘It was through Vicky and the Sunday Referee that a book of my poems has been published,’ he said. He explained that a prize was offered twice yearly, part of which consisted in the publication of the winner’s poems in book form. ‘The first was awarded to Pamela Hansford Johnson. She isn’t here tonight. I was given the second of them.’ He said that Vicky had helped him pick out what he thought were the best of the poems he had written.

‘What’s it called?’

‘Just 18 Poems. It was published just before Christmas, and I think it’s doing quite well.’ He added, ‘I’m very grateful to Vicky. It’s a big thing for me. One’s first book is the most difficult to get published. Everyone says so. Now that I have one book published, it should be easier to get the next accepted, perhaps by an ordinary firm.’

My sentiment for Vicky was already so strong that I was slightly shocked.

Dylan Thomas saw it. ‘Vicky doesn’t expect us to stay with him!’ he said. ‘This is a nursery school from which we are expected to go out into the world. When we can get published elsewhere nobody is more pleased than Vicky!’

Just then the moment for which we had been waiting arrived. The door from the inner part of the house opened and our hosts came out to join us.

Vicky came straight up to Dylan and me. I did not know which of us the distinction was meant for but it gave me joy. He stood by my chair, looking down on us beamingly, and said to Dylan, ‘You’re entertaining this little lady?’

Dylan said, ‘I’ve been telling her something of the history of the Poet’s Corner.’

*********************************

Laugharne,
Carmarthenshire,
Wales
19 June 1940
Dear Miss Fuller
I haven’t heard anything from Vicky and Runia for years, until about a fortnight ago.
Then Pamela Johnson wrote to tell me that Vicky had just died. I was very grieved to hear it; he was a sweet, wise man. Runia’s address is 84, Boundary Road, NW8. At least, I suppose she is still there. I wrote her a letter, but I haven’t had a reply yet; probably she’s too sad to write.
Yours sincerely
Dylan Thomas

#occult #literarymodernism #aleistercrowley #victorneuberg #poetry #magick #mandrakeofoxford

Aleister Crowley A Modern Master

John S. Moore
(Biography)


Aleister Crowley, A Modern Master
John S. Moore
Format: Softcover
ISBN:
£15.00/US$22.00
Subjects: Biography/Aleister Crowley/Magick/Thelema/Philosophy.

Click HERE for USA & AUS

Click HERE for UK

Aleister Crowley’s appeal on the level of popular culture has been well catered for by a number of biographies that have appeared in recent years, but the more intellectual side to him, which is equally fascinating, has not received so much serious treatment.

Crowley, A Modern Master is neither an account of his life, nor a straightforward presentation of his teaching, but an attempt to place him clearly in the context of modern ideas as well as a number of older traditions.

Extracts

Even, or even especially if you have little interest in the occult, Aleister Crowley deserves your attention. He applied his powerful intellect to engage with some of the most pressing issues of his own day, many of which remain as vital as ever. His Magick, and his Thelema, outlandish as they might at first sound, are not just fringe ideas, they offer provocative answers and solutions to many of the urgent questions that still beset us.

His message is meant for all, as he firmly states in the introduction to Magick in Theory and Practice. He challenged received opinion, which responded by cutting him out of serious history. Untangle his ideas from their bizarre sounding setting, and we can see how unjust was his exclusion. Most importantly, while received opinion has somewhat changed its character over the past sixty years it is still powerfully subverted by the life and work of this badly underrated great man.

My object is to make Crowley intelligible in a mainstream context, to bring his creative achievement more into the light of sympathetic attention, render his ideas more accessible, and his religious outlook and experience available. This involves rewriting much recent intellectual history. The object is also to make excuses for him, defending what has been criticised as the more contemptible side of his character. While my main target audience is people who already know about Crowley and are intrigued enough to want to explore the context of his ideas, I am also writing for anyone interested in modern thought who is curious to discover if I really can make a case for his importance.

The plan for this book was first conceived in 1984 as a contribution to the Fontana Modern Masters series. This was a series of paperbacks about the people who supposedly defined modernity, what is most creative and distinctive in the age in which we live in. I felt strongly that Crowley deserved a place among these assorted gurus. It was annoying, reading much of what was taken so seriously and admired, that the writings of this unique genius should be so completely disregarded. Knowing the prejudice against him I didn’t have any serious hope, but sent off a proposal all the same. I was told Crowley was not a suitable subject for inclusion. ‘From a publishing point of view’, I was told, he was ‘simply too different from the other people we have included as subjects’. This was of course to be expected. Ezra Pound, high priest of modernism, had been adamant there should be no place for the Beast, far preferring Crowley’s nemesis, Mussolini. I meant to show that Crowley is not so out of place in such company as is said.

John S. Moore

REVIEW

‘That John Moore thinks Aleister Crowley is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century can be in no doubt after reading what amounts to a 200 pages attempt of a rehabilitation of the great beast.

Moore is the first to admit that his book is a defence of Crowley. ”The object is to make excuses for him”, Moore asserts, ”defending what has been criticized as the more contemptible side of his character.” Moore has no interest in the simple retelling of Crowley’s life and works: pointing out that this has been done many times.Instead he aims to try to put Crowley’s thought, work and behaviour into context. In an attempt to make Crowley ”intelligible”, Moore expends many chapters in highly detailed examination of Crowley’s output. Texts and behaviour are examined in the light of ‘Romanticism’, ‘Protestantism’ and ‘Philosophy’, while what Moore describes as ‘Crowley’s sexual Stalinism’ is given an equally thorough examination.

This is not a book for those with no knowledge of Crowley or his work. John Moore expects that you will have heard of (if not be familiar with) Crowley’s main texts and, after a short but informative description of Crowley’s life, lauches the reader straight into the nitty-gritty.

If you are a devotee of Crowley and can see no wrong in him, or any of his behaviour, you will find this book greatly to your taste. I, for one, however found some of Moore’s rather blithe assertions hard to take. One such was that Crowley’s execrable behaviour towards the women in his life could be glossed over with ”His was an aristocratic path. Sex lives of true aristocrats in all their complexity are not reducible to simple formula for democratic consumption.” I’m afraid that doesn’t quite do it for me. Quibbles aside this is a really thought-provoking take on Crowley as a thinker, ego and possible guru. It highlights his huge creativity and determination to live as he believed he should, no matter the consequences: whether of drug abuse, sexual ‘addiction’, megalomania or accusations of debauchery. Well worth a place in any collection of Crowleyana.’

Pagan Dawn Samhain-Yule 2009