Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

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Do what thou wilt will be the whole of the Law.

A truly exceptional biography of Aleister Crowley. For context, this is the fourth biography of Crowley I've read (counting the Confessions) and it's the best of them in every way. Detailed, thoroughly researched and footnoted, and sympathetic to Crowley's project, but not too sympathetic to Crowley himself. Prior biographies I've read tended to fall into two camps: either 1) laudatory exercises in hero worship, hand-waving away all the ugliness, or 2) relentlessly hostile hatchet jobs treating him as a charlatan or a monster. By contrast, Kaczynski takes Crowley's Great Work seriously, but isn't afraid to point out when he was being a humbug or behaving shamefully towards the people who loved him.

The book is also very rich in little details. Despite 25 years of reading various Crowleyana, I learned a lot of new things about Crowley from this book, some lovely, but many ugly. I think my overwhelming impression was that the conventional apologist's cry ("the world got Crowley all wrong during his life") was partly correct, but the mistakes were principally ones of degree rather than direction.

For example, the story goes Crowley was unappreciated as a living author, but this book offers a dazzling showcase of the richness and variety of his literary career, including contacts with a shocking number of fin de siecle luminaries.¹ While Crowley's literary and occult output certainly didn't get the respect it deserved in his lifetime, he was, nonetheless, routinely published in various periodicals and sold many books. He may have been underrated, but was hardly toiling in obscurity.

And while the yellow press vilified him with all sorts of lurid, false accusations of black magickal excess (inter alia willfully misinterpreting his writings to suggest he practiced human sacrifice), Crowley actually did do a lot of mundanely awful things. The world mistakenly thought he was extraordinarily, diabolically Evil, the "wickedest man alive." In reality his evil was the merely ordinary, lowercase "e" evil of interpersonal cruelty, which requires no facility with sorcery and merits no superlatives.

Many years ago, I would have described myself as a sincere Thelemite. While I've long since moved on (I didn't need this book to see the worst of Crowley's problems), I profited greatly from his technical writing on magick and I'll confess to still feeling a thrill at reading the Book of the Law or the rituals. But seeing the pettiness and meanness (in both senses) of the Magus dragged out into plain view was sobering. It was a bit like revisting my first apartment many years later. Looking around, I remembered the joys and struggles, but also noticed that the place seemed dingier and grubbier than I remembered. It was hard to shake the sneaking suspicion that the roaches had been there all along.

Truly a remarkable book. Recommended to anyone with even a passing interest in Crowley or the history of 20th century occultism.

Love is the law, love under will