Barbelith Underground > Temple > The Best Book Shop In the Werld...

Well I'd suggest letting they guy speak for himself by reading a few of his books without allowing the prejudices you're bringing to the table cloud your judgement. You seem to be swallowing wholesale and unquestioningly what I would call the "tabloid version" of Crowley: a lens on his contributions to occultism that he was certainly complicit in cultivating for whatever ill-judged reasons, but which does more to obfuscate the real essence of what he had to say. Have you read Crowley? Or are you basing your prejudice on hearsay?

I only say this because I was dipping into "Magick in Theory and Practice" by Mr C yesterday afternoon, for the first time in ages, and I never fail to be awed by the man's mind, the creativity at work, the staggering levels of insight embedded in the odd cluster of paragraphs. It blows me away, it really does. I'd challenge anyone to read 100 pages of a work like "The Book of Thoth" and not be impressed by the scholarship and creativity that seeps through every page. Crowley's body of work is absolutely stunning, but it really has to be divorced from the juvenile public persona that surrounds it, if you are to have any hope of grasping what he was actually on about.

I certainly don't see eye-to-eye with him on every point - at times I find myself getting annoyed at his short-sightedness in certain areas. At one point yesterday I threw the book across the length of my garden to the tune of: "This is all very well, but how is any of it going to help me pay the fucking gas bill!" Before sitting back down with it again, and being gob smacked for another hour by the density of meaning in every chapter.

The thing is: I don't have to agree with his every sentence in order to appreciate the man's talent and contributions to the field of magic, anymore than I have to get comfortable with the ugly misogyny of someone like William Burroughs in order to enjoy some of his fiction.

It difficult to really know whether Crowley would have been fun to get drunk and fly kites with, especially if you're basing your assumptions on second-hand knowledge, or on biographies written by people who never actually knew the man in their lifetime, or on reviews of those biographies, or worse - on the general impression of who the man was and what he was about that you may have soaked up from popular culture. He doesn't really come across as a "dark character" if you read his books, at least not to me. He comes across as playful and egotistical and sarcastic, sometimes irritating, but always insightful and fascinating in his exposition of the western mysteries.

You can't overlook him really, he was without a doubt the Picasso or the James Joyce, of occultism. Very much a product of the "modernist experiment", and his work is often as demanding of its reader as something like 'Finnegan's Wake'. What you see on the surface is not necessarily the whole picture and you cannot really interact with his books in the same way you might with a standard occult textbook. But if you put the effort into engaging with Crowley's work, and trying to fathom out what he was going on about, it can be really rewarding stuff and not half as "teh darqside" as you might at first assume.