this is an extract from Mogg's "Mandrake Speaks" newsletter, which you can sign up for here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Mandrake

His website is here: http://www.mandrake.uk.net/

It's nice to see a reviewer who, for the most part, has really "got" what the book was trying to achieve....... Mogg wrote: 

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The History of British Magick After Crowley
Kenneth Grant, Amado Crowley, Chaos Magic, Satanism, Lovecraft, The Left Hand Path, Blasphemy and Magical Morality

Dave Evans 2007, isbn 978-0-9555237-0-0 422pp

This is a very readable, at times fascinating if perhaps slightly tendentious account of magick since the death of Aleister Crowley in 1947. It is strongest on material of the last thirty years that more or less corresponds with the author’s own entry into the chaos magick scene.

The first 200 pages of the book lays down the theoretical basis for the author’s approach to the material, the kind of thing that would please the examiners for Dave Evans successful PhD submission at British University under the supervision of the world renowned pagan scholar Professor Ronald Hutton.

Numerous authorities are cited including the highly influential work of Paul Heelas, whose theoretic stricture that ‘the academic simple does not have the tools to assess’ a magician's theology or claims to power’ (p230). The academic must, so we are told, confine himself to surface contingencies of a belief system rather than any underlying meaning. This I must say I find an odd position and makes for a book that is strong on anecdotal detail but has little to say about the meaning and purpose of magick. But there again these are my own presuppositions and I would have to admit they are not shared by a great many, if any other magicians, certainly not many of those cited in the book.

This book is certainly quite different to any previous history you might have read. The subject matter is the kind of stuff that was almost invariably left out of previous studies. So whereas Chaos magick was pretty much dismissed in a few sentences in Tanya Luhrman’s notorious study, Dave Evans, who is a chaos magician, bends the stick the other way. So much so that we might call this a chaos magick history of British magick. And no bad thing that. Some so-called scholars often can not see the wood for the trees. Professor Keith Thomas once strode through an Oxford’s town hall full of magicians, on his way to an interview where he denied the possibility of contemporary magical practice!

For Dave Evans British magick since 1947 really only comprises three topics – Kenneth Grant, who for a short time was Crowley’s unpaid secretary before becoming one of several claimants who attempted to seize control of the OTO when Crowley’s caretaker Germer began to fail. But before that a bit of light relief in a long disquisition on Amado Crowley, self-styled ‘love child of the beast’ and claimant to some sort of secret hereditary ‘Thelemic’ tradition. And finally Chaos magick in various permutations, beginning with its putative progenitor – Lionel Snell.

So despite describing itself as a history of British magick this is no serial account but more of an examination of three related examples. You won’t find very much here about the practice of magick within Wicca, or even very much of the so-called tradition of ‘white magic’ as in for example Gareth Knight, Marian Green, William Bloom etc. Also strangely absent is Mike Magee, one time editor of very influential occultzine Sothis. In the 1970s he was groomed to be the head of KG’s 'Typhonian' OTO but when he asked for the kind of tantrik initiation alluded to in Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, was told that he needed to look elsewhere for authentic 'diksha' and which he eventually found. It is this same stream that is the source of the Left Hand Path material that resurfaces in the works of several chaos magicians, although I’m not sure they always acknowledge such. So respect.

Personally I could have done with knowing less about Amado Crowley. I just don’t see the point of taking fifty odd pages to tell us that the author cannot validate any of his claims to his ‘father’s’ magical inheritance. The strange thing is that Amado does have a circle of devoted followers and what I wanted to know is what keeps them going? Is it really just inherent human credulity? The fact that ‘people prefer fakes’ or is there something interesting going on behind the scenes. Amado’s magical system is dismissed as a mere blend of Wicca with Francis Barrett, which doesn’t sound so unpromising to me, depends if Amado is good a ritualist. Maybe the guy has charisma – we are never really told because this is not something ‘academics’ have an opinion on??

I was happy to leave the Amado behind and much more interested in Kenneth Grant –
Although here I guess the line that has emerged all over now is that KG is really a game player - to him nothing is really that serious? Of course game playing, or to give it a fancy name – the ludic – can be a very productive mental activity – especially for the artistically inclined – witness the whole surrealist package of which KG is part. As an indication of the territory midway between hard fact and fiction inhabited by KG, consider the possibility that the character of Phineas Nigellus who appears for the first time in The Ninth Arch has an uncanny resemblance to Phineas Nigellus, the ex-headmaster of Hogwart's School for Wizards! Dave Evans avoids the thorny question of how this all fits with being head of a magical order. In fact I should warn folk that this is afteral a chaos magick view of magical development and traditional order type activities play very little role in this account. In fact the British revival since 1981 of the so-called ‘Caliphate’ OTO is pretty much ignored throughout this book which will delight some and infuriate others.

This material on KG and the final section, a long overdue survey of Chaos magick, is certainly the strongest part of the whole book and well worth the read. Of course some will see in this one long series of pub-stories of the kind much liked by chaots. Perhaps to the outsider it will confirm the belief that magick really is just a castle in the air. To which I’d say some of it clearly is just glamour or pose with very little content. But perhaps that is the value of this provocative thought provoking book. It makes you ask – surely that’s not all there is? But there again this is where we pass out of the arena of the academic and into the real theatre of magick.

[mogg]

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