Bit confused on the ending to this. If i got it right i'm unhappy, if i got it wrong i'm stupid and unhappy. The evil guys are so over the top. So much so that when someone was nailing a live cat to the floor, i burst out laughing (or maybe i have issues.. ;) ). Great atmosphere though. ( )

Imagine my surprise at seeing how many re-issues there are of this work -- and how many LT participants have listed it! I read the First -- and at that time the only Edition some years ago and will add nothing much to the previous Reviews except to say that Crowley would have been astonished that so many people have taken it so seriously, probably much more seriously than he did himself. It's a lark, a jolly pass-time for a loveable screwball in his semir-retirment -- and incidentally, an unacknowldged inspiration for that hack-job ROSEMARY'S BABY. ( )

Lots of nakedness and frolicking in gardens, quite pretentious and yet, a bit of magick succumbed to, has never hurt a flea, well me...oh! yes, but that's an altogether different type of tale. A decent and fun read by Crowley, nothing read in advance is necessary for ones enjoyment, if you like this sort of tome, as I do. Of course I had read the Illuminatus Trilogy, before this book ~ but Crowley does easily, completely, stand on his own. ( )

I read this book many, many years ago and thought it was a fair book back then. But upon rereading it recently I have found that there is just so much more to the book than my first reading. Of course I have had over the last couple decades been able to read much more about Crowley and his exploits and the Golden Dawn and its people who were in it and I would highly recommend reading a great deal more about all of these folks before reading Moonchild. Having done that the book definitely becomes more enlightening and explains Crowley's attitude to its members which are played out in this book. I mean this book had me in falling out of the chair when he started in on Arthwaite because I could readily agree with him in his thoughts after reading Arthur Waite's books. And his depiction of Mathers is just as funny. A good read, just do the prep and you will enjoy it more. ( )

I read this novel as a youngster. I read it after a period wherein I was besotted with all things Huysmans. I was raised a Catholic, so I could appreciate the ritual, etc. but my callow intelligence couldn't put its callow head around all these, what Lovecraft would call Eldritch matters. So I bumped into Crowley via Colin Wilson. Needless to say that I had not much luck penetrating these recondite matters on my own, so I enlisted the help of Robert Anton Wilson's books, a writer that literally fell off the shelf, as Colin Wilson's Library Angel says they will, as I tipped-toed around the local, and only occult bookstore. Before you label me as an afternoon occultist, I must admit here that I viewed it all as a spooky cartoon. Twelve years of Catholic School beat all the 'belief' out of me. And today I believe that we don't know enough to say for sure, either way, it would take a lot of convincing - there I go again!
But back to the novel. Our author makes it plain that everyone is a second-rater next to him. He whips everybody through the streets with a whip he doubtless borrowed from 'Bitter' Bierce. Two who come in for his special brand of oppobrious heckling is the poet Yeats and the occult historian, Arthur Edward Waite. There is some truth mixed in with his vitriol but, to me, it sounds like sour grapes more than anything else. Here he describes the poet Yeats:

The third commissioner was the brains of the business. He was a man highly skilled in Black Magic in his own way. He was a lean, cadaverous Protestant-Irishman named Gates, tall, with the scholar's stoop. He possessed real original talent, with now and then a flash of insight which came close to genius. But though his intellect was keen and fine, it was in some way confused; and there was a lack of virility in his make-up. His hair was long, lank and unkempt; his teeth were neglected; and he had a habit of physical dirt which was so obvious as to be repulsive even to a stranger.
But there was no harm in him; he had no business in the Black Lodge at all . .

More about Yeats:

It would be only by an effort that he spoke in English; the least distraction would send him back into Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, none of which languages he understood. He was a peddler of words; his mind was a rag-and-bone shop of worthless and disjointed mediaevalism.
After a severe struggle, he would 'proceed to an allocution.' He never 'spoke'; he 'monologized.'

About his art:

And indeed he had a pretty amateur talent for painting in water-colors: some people thought it stronger than his verses. For ten days he watched the butter-fly net with extreme care. He wrote down the routine of the inhabitants by the hour. Nothing escaped him of their doings in the garden; and (as it happened) the preponderating portion of their work lay out-of-doors. He could not make nor head nor tail of the fact that the most important people were apparently doing no magick of any kind, but, careless lovers, enjoying the firstfruits of their flight to the South.

We are led to believe that in the psychic scuffle between Yeats and Crowley, Crowley always came out on top. Doubtless the dawns were something less than Golden when these two were on the stage.

A.C. didn't save all his invective for fellows such as the poet Yeats. He seemed always to have a burr in his saddle when the redoubtable Arthur Edward Waite arrived on the aulic scene. If the reader isn't familiar with Waite's prose, this bit won't have as much bite, but I'm willing to wager there will be something here for just about any reader's amusement:

His Grimoire (Waite's) was in reality excellent for its purpose; for the infernal hierarchy delights in intelligible images, in every kind of confusion and obscurity. This particular lucubration was calculated to drag the Archdemon of Bad Syntax himself from the most remote corner of his lair.
For Arthwait could not speak with becoming unintelligibility; to knot a sentence up properly it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introduced; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.
This is not to be achieved in a moment; it is not enough to write disconnected nonsense; it must be possible for anyone acquainted with the tortuosities of the author's mind to resolve the sentence into its elements, and reproduce - not the meaning, for there is none, but the same mental fog from which he was originally suffering.
An example or two:
Ru-volvolimperipunct (circle), Subinfractically (below), Suprorientalize (arise), Kinematodrastically (soon), Phenomenize! (appear)

Now, I will admit that it wont go well if I enter the land of A.E. Waite without a pile of reference books, but I won't go as far as to say that he has no MEANING.
Reading MOONCHILD these many years later was not as mystifying an experience as my fledgling attempt. But I can't help seeing in Crowley the precocious childe who is always capering to get his parent's or anybodies attention. It has come out in recent biographies that the Great Beast's claws were not nearly as lethal as he thought they were, though I am quite sure that he did every 'damned thing' he could to earn the name of 'the wickedest man in Europe.' ( )