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by Aleister Crowley (Author)
"This book was written in 1917, during such leisure as my efforts to bring America into the War on our side allowed me. Hence my illusions on the subject, and the sad showing of Simon Iff at the end. Need I add that, as the book itself demonstrates beyond all doubt, all persons and incidents are purely the figment of a disordered imagination?"
So begins the cattiest, messiest novel from infamous transcriber of the Book of Lies, the Beast Himself, Aleister Crowley(1875-1947). Hiding behind the guise of fiction, Moonchild is Crowley's platform to throw shade at his nemeses in England's spiritualist circles: the Theosophists, Christian Scientists, The Society for the Psychical Research--none are spared Crowley's sardonic quips. He trashes Madame Blavatsky as a fraud and darkly hints that Anne Besant--like himself--may have had hidden connections to the shadowy underbelly of metaphysical military intelligences.Crowley's main ire is reserved for "black magicians" such as Arthur Edward Waite and MacGregor Mathers, whose thinly-veiled fictionalized selves haunt Moonchild as its primary antagonists, captives of the evil forms of magick they have chained themselves to.
The narrative follows the initiation of "Lisa la Giuffria" (a representation of Crowley-muse Mary D'Este) into the White Lodge, recruited to fill the role of the Goddess Artemis in a secret Experiment that could re-order the future of all humankind. It is in these passages that Crowley reveals some of the technical mechanisms of his Order's particular magickal system--as the heretical blood magick practiced by the truly wicked and the fallen.
The Jabberwoke pocket edition births this text into a new century, so that its surreal message of the dangers of surrendering to the dark and straying from the path of the Tao can enlighten the children of the age of Aquarius, and all the Moonchildern to come.
