Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)

I love this book. Meant to be taken in small doses, it's the best and worst of Uncle Al, with jokes, puns and outright snarkiness on so many levels. Many of it is inside jokes, so if you don't have a background in Western Hermetic Qabalah and/or general Crowley, it wont be as much fun. I'd always recommend his Autohagiography first

Crowley writes superbly, a surprising conclusion to make about one who was once called “the wickedest man in the world.” His descriptions come at you from an unexpected angle and one is forced to pause, to slow down at the sheer uniqueness of what is being said. A cursory reading will miss his subtlety and, while not deserving of a slow reading per se, we should call it 'slower than normal' reading. Then, we would approach the book properly.

There is a sensuality to the language which is show more decadent in same way that the music of the Grateful Dead somehow brings to mind the idea of overripe fruit. I have to wonder, however, if I am being slowly corrupted by this book. Crowley writes like a man whose familiar associations arrive from a dimension different from ours. About such folk, we might have once said ". . . not quite right" which only means they don't fit our particular social paradigm. The 21st century reader struggles to accommodate Crowley's phrases and metaphors, whose effect is to gently push one out of a comfortable reality . . . especially since the subject matter is the overuse of cocaine and heroin. If there is an agenda here, it may be precisely to accomplish that gentle push.

The story of Peter Pendragon and his lover Lou Laleham unfolds in three parts, Paradiso, Inferno, and Purgatorio, a take off on Dante's tour of the afterlife. The couple travel through Europe on stipends from Peter's inheritance, gradually succumbing to the enflaming passions created by a heroin and cocaine addiction. As the addiction becomes more pronounced and the propensity for self-knowledge rises, the perspective turns increasingly wild and, for this reason, spiritual. It is an unaccustomed spirituality: that of the liberated mind, the insane mind, a mind that no longer turns automatically from questionable things. There is a coming-to-terms period in the second section of the book, called Inferno, which touches on these mad things. The perspective is utterly fascinating – a good exposure to things beyond the ken of most of us.

Having said that, this reader felt a kinship with that narrator's internal monologue. These voicings ring similar to what form spontaneously on the basis of immediate experience. In some cases, they may be felt only briefly before cultural cues have had their chance to redirect them into more acceptable cliches. We all live inside the gated communities of our expectations. Those gates and walls are quite invisible to ordinary perception. It is from within these walls we knowingly pass judgement on the world "out there. "What is good? and what is bad?” Typically we are supplied with the answers by culture, along with a corresponding judgment. Such judgments. . . in fact, all judgments. . . are (as a bottom line) based on the need to have a reliable handle on the world. They vital to the survival of that squirming little creature we call 'self.'

A strange book, possibly a 'gateway' book (to further questionable activities), and a worthwhile reading experience. You're a reader. Have some courage. show less

It is always going to be difficult to review a religious text especially one produced only 120 years or so ago (1904). Such a text is going to be regarded by some as holy beyond criticism and by others as arrant nonsense wholly to be disregarded.

I come between the two positions in seeing such texts as insights into particular mind-sets at particular times and places in history and their reception indicating hidden, or shall we say 'occult', psychological needs - in this case in the show more post-decadent Edwardian era as much as in Crowley himself.

A lot of this particular text is nonsense - romantic egypto-mania synthesising many different influences in the mind of the creative narcissist called the Beast (Aleister Crowley). The religious text, numerology, the tarot, a sub-Nietzchean Will and whatever comes to hand makes the whole.

On the other hand, we also see a restless 29-year old adventurer who had a poetic sensibility in a stuffy conformist culture already sensing that it had peaked. If Crowley was writing nonsense, it was still a poetic response to the nonsense that was the post-Victorian British Imperial 'hive'.

The book, very short and exclamatory and, of course, contradictory, is made for 'ekstasis' and declamation. Crowley was a poet of the decadent type before he started publishing rather than performing magickal works.

By the time he wrote the Book of the Law in Egypt, he had had nearly a decade of hyper-sexualisation, occultism and foreign adventuring behind him. The Book of the Law is a poetic yell centred on the essence of what this was all about - the will to freedom from social constraint.

It was not enough though to just say 'I will' and be a libertarian individualist. He needed to find meaning in his will. The meaning lay in the freedom to desire and to be (the two things appearing to be much the same thing in him).

An ambiguous egalitarian individualistic "every man and every woman is a star" was contradicted by a form of salvationary elitism for those who understood this maxim - so that we have a touch of the Robespierre in Crowley perhaps.

The message was not this (after all, it was just a statement of fact in his mind) so much as "love is the law, love under will". This is not crassly to be interpreted as a merely sexual position but as something that underpins all existence and to which one's True Will is aligned.

Perhaps if he had just said this in non-poetic terms, it would have been easier for everyone but this would not have fitted Crowley's penchant for the dramatic or allowed him to take a leadership role in attracting people into his orbit, creating an image that was later to draw in many creative people.

Although no stranger to scandal, indeed generally seeking it, where would be the fun in just looking Edwardian Britain in the eye and simply giving it a rationalised alternative model of libertarian being that it would have discounted as 'mad'? Later, Jack Parsons could be rational enough for us.

We have to recognise that Crowley was not only a narcissist but also sincere in his lust for a life of both freedom and meaning. To construct the conditions for an occult religion with a supernatural intervention and himself as prophet fitted his demonstrable love of the dramatic.

I suspect most people reading "The Book of the Law"are either going to lose themselves in the nonsense while picking up on those two key phrases as the hook for their own lives or they are going to be puzzled and then uninterested in the effort of trying to unravel Crowley's meaning.

Although everyone has the potential to be a star (divine) in Crowley's vision, that potential required each person to 'get' the revelation of their own freedom and True Will. This meant paradoxically overcoming both the world in which ones lives and the Thelemite alternative.

There is little consistency and a lot of ego in Crowley. This was no Kantian system-builder. His existentialism was intellectually rocky to say the least. But as dramaturge he went beyond any reasonable statement of freedom and desire to create its absurd artistic opportunity.

In this respect he was insidiously culturally important, especially to the Sixties Generation, and reached deep into popular culture, largely through musical appreciation of the creative link between music and the occult and, thence, through later adolescent identification, into the other popular arts.

On balance, unless you have the passion to become a Thelemite, Liber AL vel Legis (the Book of the Law) can probably be passed by but it should not be dismissed as unimportant. Crowley's poetic and dramatic magickal intervention did change our world. show less

Crowley is never boring, although sometimes his poetry is. This work of fiction is very much of its time (post-WWI Europe), complete with the sexism, racism, antisemitism and colonialism of a British gentleman of the era (I'm not sure if Crowley was considered a gentleman at the time but I am sure he considered himself one). The plot is about a couple of a certain station in life who meet, marry and debauch themselves, all with the help of cocaine and heroin. It's quite harrowing. The last show more few chapters tells how they redeem their lives through the practice of Thelema taught to them by a character who is very much Crowley himself by another name. Crowley said this was fictionalized autobiography and while I am sure that is true for the story of addiction and degradation, the depiction of Crowley's actual Abbey of Thelema, already is in operation at the time of his writing of the book, was a dump and far cry from the starry-eye utopia envisioned in the novel.

At any rate, it's an interesting look at that moment of history and an interesting look at what Crowley thought it would look like, a far cry from what he managed to do with his own life. show less