Reviews

Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist by Phil Baker. Strange Attractor Press, 2011. Hardback, 334 pages, colour plates, b/w illustrations throughout text. £25.00. Although there has been a fair amount of biographical material by Spare available over the years, this has been scattered amongst a…
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AMeTh Lodge Journal – Vol I No 1 March 2011 The occult world has always been very well supplied and supported in terms of its community publications, providing contacts, announcements and, occasionally, articles of real interest Usually highly ‘partial’, used by group members as a forum for criticising members of…
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Aleister Crowley: The Biography Tobias Churton Watkins Publishing 2011 You know something? It’s odd, very odd. Aleister Crowley died six decades ago, ignored and forgotten, a figure almost studiously overlooked, almost wilfully disregarded. These days it is often said that by 1947, Crowley was a bogey man, a demonologist dusted…
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“What kind of magic would you like to see tonight?” booms the Beast at the start of this show: “Would you like to see Horus fly through the stalls?” The opening premise of this one man show at Edinburgh’s fringe is that Crowley has degenerated into a kind of faded…
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The premise of this book is hurled at the reader like another climate catastrophe: there exists, we are told, an existential threat to humanity which requires us to buck up spiritually or face an Atlantis-like destruction. Taking the opportunity to provide the solution himself to this rather vague threat, Kenneth…
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In days of yore, when men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were, well, yet to visit the luminous mind of Douglas Adams, there was a thriving tradition of so-called “occult journals” or magazines, sold by mail-order or on the shelves of…
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“A Postcard From Hell” by R.T. Cole Printed by Orange Box Books, 2009 102 pp. (of reviewed proof) Hardback Ltd. Ed. of 156 Copies Several years ago, in 2004, a new Pirate set sail on the Thelemic Literary Sea, Black Flag/Naughty Nun. Dangerous waters, those. Along the way of publishing…
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I happened to be in Paris earlier this week and took the opportunity to visit the current exhibition Traces du Sacre or Traces of the Sacred at the Pompidou Centre. Elements of the Show have been discussed within Lashtal’s pages recently and so I will try not to duplicate those….
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Well, we’ve been looking forward to this one for a long, long time. Bruce Dickinson’s intention to produce a movie featuring Crowley in a prominent role was first mentioned on LAShTAL.COM back in 2002 and I’m told by a prominent bookseller that he was discussing it as much as eighteen…
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There can be few minor poets that have been the subject of as many biographies as Aleister Crowley: accolades and denunciations, works of scholarly research and feeble cut-and-paste treatments. But once in a rare while comes along something new, something that catches the eye and engages the brain. Richard T…
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