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Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley, by Lawrence Sutin
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Aleister Crowley was a blustery coward, an arrogant, misogynistic racist with fascist leanings, and a callous user, as often threatened by his sexuality as he claimed to be liberated by it. But he was also a groundbreaking poet and an iconoclastic visionary whose literary and cultural legacies extend far beyond the limits of his reputation. This controversial individual, a frightening mixture of egomania and self-loathing, has inspired passionate--but seldom fair--assesments by historians. Sutin, by treating Crowley as a cultural phenomenon, and not simply a sorcerer or a charlatan, convinces skeptic readers that the self-styled "Beast" remains a fascinating study in eccentricity.
- Sales Rank: #1000154 in Books
- Published on: 2002-01-16
- Released on: 2002-01-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.11" w x 6.00" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 496 pages
Amazon.com Review
The legendary Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) is a tantalizing and bizarre subject. As an occult leader, heroin addict, sexual adventurer, misogynist, and visionary, he is the inspiration for many vile Gothic protagonists. Author W. Somerset Maugham even devoted a novel, The Magician, to this chilling figure of indulgence and religious mockery. Like any good biographer, Lawrence Sutin set out to discover the man behind the myth. After considerable research, Sutin admits that Crowley was "a shameless scoffer at Christian virtue" and "a spoiled scion of a wealthy Victorian family," but he also sees him as a 20th century figure as "protean, brilliant, courageous, and flabbergasting as ever you could imagine."
Consider these facts about the man who named himself "The Great Beast": He was one of the first Westerners to seriously study Buddhism and Yoga. He radically redesigned the traditional Tarot deck (thus the "Crowley deck"). Contrary to common belief, he was never known to participate in satanic ritual--to do so would acknowledge the Christian church, which he was loathe to do (although he nicknamed his son "The Christ Child"). These are but a few of the surprising morsels one can glean from this excellent biography. Don't expect to find Crowley a likable figure. Do, however, expect to meet a flamboyant man who challenged all forms of religious, sexual, and social oppression and hence became a revered visionary and a reviled demon. --Tara West
From Library Journal
The name Aleister Crowley has generally been associated with hedonistic, self-absorbed, occult-infatuated Victorian English intellectuals. Sutin (creative writing, Hamlin Coll.; A Postcard Memoir) does much to expand upon this simplistic perception, showing that while Crowley was indeed all these things, he was also much more. Crowley was an arrogant misogynist, yet he was also a very gifted poet and visionary who painfully drove himself to seek deeper visions through drug-induced vision quests and rampant sexual experimentation. He was prominent in the movement to bring Eastern philosophies into Christian England and America and sought enlightenment in the rawness of nature. Sutin wonderfully details the eccentricities of this puzzling man while being careful not to overburden his narrative with academic psychological theories or personal observations and conclusions. The result is a fascinating, easily readable narrative about one of the most interesting cultural phenomena of the late Victorian period. Recommended for all libraries.DGlenn Masuchika, Chaminade Univ., Honolulu, HI
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
"Virtually every current handbook on the 'cult crisis' in America features a purple-prose paragraph on the sinister Crowley," Sutin says. "The popular image endures of Crowley as a vicious Satanist," but he wasn't. Satan worship, Sutin points out, is the flip side of Christianity. Crowley--"the Beast, the Prophet"--wanted to create "a full-fledged successor religion," in which "Do What Thou Wilt" was the central credo. In charting the progress of the man who also denominated himself "666" (the number of the beast of Revelations 13:18), Sutin examines his imbroglios, his braggadocio, and the improbable conflicts in his makeup and life. An advocate of absolute individual freedom, his politics were decidedly right wing, yet his greatest triumph was making himself the popular face of evil incarnate. Sutin details his doings, writings, and comings and goings in pursuit of that triumph. He examines Crowley whole rather than merely advocating for or against him. Beware, though, for Crowley's success assures that even today a book about him may lead to lively interface with the local minions of decency. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Read what thou Wilt...
By J. Lamberson
Lawrence Sutin gives a thorough look into the life of Aleister Crowley, who was dubbed "the wickedest man alive." Mr. Sutin portrays Crowley with an honest, and open mind, giving the reader a complete and very real idea of who this man was.
Crowley was an interesting man to read about. He was an apiring poet, a very skilled chess player and mountain climber. He published many books on "magick", as he called it. Magick was what he was most well remembered for, dedicating most of his life to this calling. His first introduction to magick was through the "Order of the Golden Dawn," an organization who's members at the time included many contemporary poets and artists.
Crowley would eventually break away from the Golden Dawn, and start his own philosophy of sorts called "Thelema," (the greek word for "will") which is still being practiced and studied to this day.
Crowley studied buddhism and tantra, incorporating them into "Thelema, along with what he learned from the Golden Dawn. His use of drugs was well known, and documented in his book, "Diary of a Drug Fiend." He used some drugs for spiritual purposes, but later fell deep into opium addiction.
All in all, Crowley's life was filled with accomplishments more so than failures. It's a shame that he got more recognition in death, than in life. His books sell much more today than they ever did in his day. At least he left a legacy behind. A legacy that will "endure to the end," much like his magick name, "Perdurabo."
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A little sympathy for the devil...
By Mark Nadja
Crowley is one of those characters who endure by reason of what can be a rather cultish following--in other words, those who find him influential tend to idolize him and resist any tendency toward his iconic deflation. So Suster's ultimately even-handed biography of the Great Beast--and Beast he often was--is likely to rub a good many devotees the wrong way. Neither fawning, nor derisive, Suster admirably succeeds in treading a middle path in review of Crowley's controversial life and legacy...both of which remain, in the final analysis, difficult of assessment.
Still, Suster makes a fair and reasonable accounting of this legacy. A good deal of the problem lies with Crowley's own tendency to mythologize the events of his life inasmuch as this egoistic inflation was part of the technique of his magick. What most outright scoffers fail to understand is that magick is as much a matter of metaphor and imagination, not simply lying, as the mundane adjudge, but a kind of sleight-of-hand with reality itself. There is a thin line between self-inflation for purposes of magickal attainment and mere self-delusion and that is always an issue when assessing Crowley but it's a mistake often made by the "uninitiated" to suppose that Crowley was nothing more than a failed poseur because he died physically broken, drug-addicted, materially impoverished, and largely ridiculed where he wasn't outright ignored by his contemporaries.
True magick, after all, is not about waving magic wands around and producing bushels of money--that kind of Harry Potter stuff is the hocus-pocus which the hoi polloi associates with the word "magic." As Crowley was at some pains to point out, true magick is a matter of self-exploration at its most intense and extreme, of challenging and expanding to its furthest limit what it means to be a human being. Magick is poetry applied to life--and in this sense Crowley's life reads as a 20th century Odyssey.
Suster takes the measure of Crowley not as god or devil, but as a man who would recreate himself as myth--and therefore simultaneously both man and myth. That is the challenge Suster--and any future biographer of Crowley--faces: to separate the man and myth, but not separate them so much that you lose the truth altogether, because the true Crowley is less than one and more than the other.
There is a good deal made here about Crowley's bisexuality--in particular his homosexual side--and how it informed, formed, and, in some cases, de-formed his life...which might rankle the more macho-oriented types who often take the Beast as their magickal model of satanic masculinity. But these are generally the types who, just as much as the hysterical moralists, misinterpret what Crowley was really about. One can easily imagine, and enjoy, the confused reaction of such hero-worshippers to the revelations here that Crowley engaged in lifelong homosexual practices, performing in the passive role in a persona that he referred to as "Alice." Aleister Crowley, the ominous shaven-headed Baphomet of the famous dead-eye photo, a boy-toy with a feminine alter-ego? Do What Thou Wilt--deal with it.
According to Suster, Crowley, a product of his times, had a little trouble dealing with it himself--but defiantly stood in opposition to his times in this, his unconventional sexuality, as so much else. Crowley was prophetic, not only for the pronouncements in his texts, but, perhaps, even more, in his very embodiment of the contradictions in the world in which he lived, and the cataclysmic changes that were soon to come--changes we are continuing to feel the results of today. As a result, Crowley, as prophet, not to mention as a poet, magician, thinker, was accorded little respect in his own time; but that really shouldnt surprise anyone. By his very nature, a prophet isn't living in his own time, but in the future, and thus, can only be appreciated in retrospect, by the world he foresaw. But in his own day, to the world in which he lives, such a man as Crowley can only be a monster, a fool, a lunatic, and an irregularity. It's this imbalance that Suster attempts to redress, and, in my opinion, succeeds in doing.
We are all, in some respects, the magickal children of Aleister Crowley. But like all children, we take for granted our progenitors. Already, even a man such as Crowley seems somewhat quaint, outdated, even conventional. If so, it's a testament to the accuracy of his foresight and the truth of his message. Lest we forget, it was Crowley who described our world before it ever existed--and whose works remain of value in describing how it works...and, for the adept, how to work it.
Suster's book is a substantial attempt to put into order a supremely disordered life, to preserve a human picture of Crowley, his life and his work, that allows the reader--both magically inclined and not--an approach to the Beast. Whether one decides to get into the cage with it and learn more is left to the reader's discretion.
All this aside, *Do What Thou Wilt* is simply a good read. Lively, surprisingly well-written ((all too many biographies don't seem to be written by real writers)), and apparently well-researched, it's a book you're likely to find hard to put down. One gets the sense that Suster knows a considerable amount not only about his subject, Aleister Crowley, but his subject's subject, magick. Here, in a book that must be regarded as right now the definitive text on the life of Crowley, we have a down-to-earth, unsensational accounting of an out-of-this-world, sensational life. *Do What Thou Wilt* but I recommend this book without reservation.
9 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
the place to start, and probably finish, your interest
By A Customer
The most balanced, well-written, well-researched biography of Crowley ever written, out of dozens of attempts. It avoids the idiotically sycophantic efforts of I. Regardie, K. Grant, R. A. Wilson ( some of those who believe the destructive, egomaniacal, blood and dope drinking Crowley to be the avatar of the century at least and of all history at most) and similar occult/psychology true belivers while steering clear of the opposite cliff, the naive dismissals of Symonds, Hutchinson, Colin Wilson and the kinds of hacks who write entries for those ridiculous encycopedias of the supernatural. This book is a thankless labor of love by a writer whose talents are exactly suited for it and should be the first and last stop for all those with a casual interest in the life of that erraticly brilliant, ultimately repugnant clown of spirituality, Aleister Crowley.
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