LA VIE PARISIENNE

Tobias Churton. Aleister Crowley In Paris: Sex, Art, And Magick in the City of Light. Inner Traditions, 2023.

Aleister Crowley, ‘the wickedest man in the world’, a label attached to him by his strait-laced God-fearing mother, remains to this day a magnet for readers with an interest in the esoteric or the occult. Such readers will find in this book a mass of detail about Crowley’s life in Paris from his first glimpse of the city in 1883 until his involuntary removal from France by the French immigration authorities in 1929. 

THE KEY TO KEYHOE

Linda Powell.  Against the Odds. Major Donald E. Keyhoe and his Battle to End UFO Secrecy, Anomalist Books, 2023.

To those of us who just think of Donald Keyhoe as the author of some of the earliest and most important UFO books, and as a director of NICAP, this biography gives us an excellent insight into his early career and how he came to be involved with this subject.

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WOMEN OF THE PARANORMAL

Alex Matsuo. Women of the Paranormal. Privately published, 2023.

Writers exploring the history of the paranormal have often noted the prominence of women in the field, most particularly such individuals as Catharine Crowe, Helena Blavatsky, Eleanor Sidgwick, and mediums such as Florence Cook, Eusapia Palladino and the Fox sisters. 

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THE COMPLETE NIGEL KNEALE

Andrew Screen, The Book of Beasts. Headpress 2023.
Andy Murray. Into The Unknown, The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale. Headpress 2017.

Does a book examining the six episodes of Nigel Kneale’s television series, Beasts warrant 430 pages? Beasts is a large, attractive paperback with copious black and white illustrations and undoubtedly a labour of love from author Andrew Screen.

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CITIZEN OF MAGONIA

Jacques Vallée, Forbidden Science 5: Pacific Heights – The Journals of Jacques Vallée 2000-2009, Anomalist Books, 2023

Jacques Vallée holds a special place for Magonians. After all, we owe the very name to his 1969 classic Passport to Magonia. But more importantly, there’s his against-the-crowd advocacy of the idea that the UFO enigma can’t be explained simply by the nut-and-bolts spaceships of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis: it’s way weirder than that. 

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QUEEN OF WANDS

Cat Willett. The Queen of Wands. The Story of Pamela Colman Smith, the Artist Behind the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck. Running Press, 2022.

The 'Rider-Waite' deck is probably the one most used by tarot practitioners, and has almost become the standard 'divinatory' design. Many of the vast range of contemporary decks are variations and developments of its designs. However now most practitioners understand that it has the wrong name and is more usually referred to as the Waite-Smith tarot.

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CITY OF THE BEAST

Phil Baker. City of the Beast; the London of Aleister Crowley. Strange Attractor Press, 2022.

'Psychogeography' is now a familiar concept for exploring the nature of, usually urban, locations, walking through them absorbing their atmosphere, energy and history. This book is perhaps a pioneering example of 'biogeography' reviewing an individual's life through the locations that they have passed through, influenced and been influenced by. The power of this book is that the individual is Aleister Crowley, and the location is London.

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THE REVIEW NOW ARRIVING . . .

Damon Knight. Charles Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained. Gollancz, 1970.

Whilst sorting out a bundle of old papers I came across this review in a letter which Peter Rogerson had sent to the Merseyside UFO Bulletin in 1970. Somehow it had been overlooked and misfiled. I make no apologies for publishing this book review now, 52 years after its subject's original publication date - a record even for Magonia! 

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SEPARATING BELIEF AND REALITY

Ralph Blumenthal. The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science and the Passion of John Mack. (University of New Mexico Press. 2021.

My first thoughts on beginning this account of the life and works of psychologist, ufologist and abductionologist John Mack, was 'when did it all start to go wrong?' I would say round about Chapter 15, but I will go into that later. 

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DOUBT, MYSTERY AND VISION

Kristoffer Hegnsvad. Werner Herzog, Ecstatic Truth and Other Useless Conquests. Reaktion Books 2021.

Is Werner Herzog crazy or is it a mad world? If the world has now gone too crazy then has it superseded Werner Herzog – no question mark required. For me filmmaker Herzog is wildly and responsibly sane: an uncomfortable provocateur passionately driven to discover what’s possible in order to re-think the world: to achieve this he desires to present the viewer of his films with ‘a new grammar of images.’

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THE TROUBLED WORLD OF ISAAC NEWTON

Toni Mount. The World of Isaac Newton. Amberley, 2020.

One of Isaac Newton’s lesser-know achievements must be acquiring one of the largest library fines in British history. A book he borrowed from Trinity College Library before 1667, found in Newton’s personal library in 1943 and returned to the College. At the time it was borrowed there was a fine of 2s.6d. (12½p.) per week for books returned later than two weeks. By my calculations that is an overdue charge of almost £1800, not allowing for any inflation in over 275 years! 

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MAGICAL LIFE

Spenser Kansa. Wormwood Star, The Magical Life of Marjorie Cameron. Mandrake, 2020.

This is the first ever biography of Marjorie Cameron who as an artist, occasional actress and supposed witch circulated in the American Underground art world and film scene from the 1940s-60s. Whilst never being as narcissistic, as say anyone living in Andy Warhol's factory, her self-effacement and mysterious reticence didn't prevent her from being noticed. Cameron was a distinctly odd woman attracted to magic pursuits and all those round her instantly picked that up.

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ALL TIED UP

Adam Begley. Houdini, the Elusive American. Yale University Press, 2020.

From the beginning, Houdini’s life was surrounded by deception. In an account of his life he said he was born on April 6th, 1863 “in the small town of Appleton in the state of Wisconsin”. In fact he was born Ehrich Weiss on March 24th of that year in Budapest, not arriving in the USA until he was four years old.

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LEONARDO DECODED

François Quiviger, Leonardo da Vinci: Self, Art and Nature, Reaktion Books, 2019.

The 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death has naturally unleashed a tsunami of books about the Renaissance genius, few of which add anything new to what’s been written before. This one, though, stands out by offering a novel approach to an understanding of Leonardo’s character, the thirst for knowledge that drove him, and the way he navigated the rigid and often precarious society into which he was born - and how his art related to all this. 

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WALLACE COLLECTING

Patrick Armstrong. Critical Lives: Alfred Russel Wallace. Reaktion Books, 2019.

Although Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin discovered the principle of evolution through natural selection, the life of Alfred Russel Wallace can be seen “as a story of an individuals triumph over tragedy and hardship”.

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THE WORM IN THE APPLE

Nick Kollerstrom. The Dark Side of Isaac Newton - Science's Greatest Fraud? Pen and Sword Books, 2018.

The question mark added to this book's subtitle gives an indication of the approach taken by its author, Nick Kollerstrom, in what amounts to a thorough deconstruction of the reputation of one of Britain's greatest icons. In any public poll of the 'greatest Britons who have ever lived' you will invariably find Sir Isaac Newton in the top ten, along with the other usual candidates, such as Winston Churchill, William Shakespeare and Charles Darwin. 

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SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF EXISTENCE

Jack Neave. The Surrender of Silence: The Memoirs of Ironfoot Jack, King of the Bohemians. Edited by Colin Stanley. Strange Attractor Press, 2018.

'Ironfoot Jack' earned his nickname from the metal frame that supported one leg, which through some accident, was several inches shorter than the other. 

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THE MAN WHO MADE THE BLOTS

Damion Searls. The Inkblots - Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing. Broadway Books, 2018.

When I first took a look at the cover of this book, the title prompted a stray thought to arise in my mind.  Was this not the name of a black American vocal group that was popular in the 1940s and early 50s? An online check quickly confirmed that they were, of course, known as 'The Ink Spots'. Presumably they chose that name to emphasise that they were all black, but they were certainly not making any reference to the famous 'Rorschach Inkblot Test', nor do they have any relevance to this book review. 

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THE WICKEDEST MAN, IN AMERICA

Tobias Churton. Aleister Crowley in America. Art, Espionage, and Sex Magic in the New World. Inner Traditions, 2017.

Crowley has a good biographer in Tobias Churton, as he too is loud and opinionated about his subject. We have had the pleasure of launching several of his books at The Atlantis Bookshop and on one occasion, we stood him on a stepladder out in Museum Street and he declaimed from there for tourists and the passers-by - some of whom stopped to listen!

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MEETING WITH A REMARKABLE MAN

Tobias Churton. Deconstructing Gurdjieff; Biography of a Spiritual Magician. Inner Traditions USA. 2017.

Of all the spiritual teachers who have reached some measure of public prominence and fame there is none quite so enigmatic and fascinating as George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (?1877-1949). One of the key points of his teaching was that most humans are disunited three-brained beings in a state of hypnotic 'waking sleep', acting more or less like machines according to their programming and external stimuli.

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