Book Review: Richardson on Fortune & Crowley
Richardson, Alan. Alistair Crowley and Dion Fortune: The Logos of the Aeon and the Shakti of the Age. Woodbury, MN: Lewellen Publications, 2009.
One topic that often comes up in biographies of Aleister Crowley more often than in biographies of Dion Fortune concerns the nature of the relationship or the interactions between these two pillars of twentieth century occultism. Throughout their lives, there seems to have been but one meeting between the two and thus there is not much to talk about. So one would expect a short book, and this one clocks in at a short 173 pages. Yet, there is more.
Alan Richardson is not a historian, although he has written a few biographies, Here, though, he attempts two narrative feats that would give any historian pause. The first of these daring-do's is that Richardson explains, not one biography, but two biographies in what, again I'll stress, is an extremely short book. Israel Regardie’s biography of Crowley, The Eye of the Triangle, comes out at over 500 pages, and it doesn't even get to Crowley’s last 40 years. Tobias Churton’s biography is over 400 pages. So, clearly in Crowley’s case there is adequate source material for a lengthy book. Similarly, Richardson's own biography of Dion Fortune, Priestess, is over 250 pages. To say that there is going to be quite a bit of condensation in a short double biography such as this is classic understatement.
The second remarkable, and historiographically more complicated undertaking that Richardson attempts is that he tells these biographies in reverse chronological order. This means that the first chapter deals with the deaths of Fortune and Crowley and their legacies. Richardson then proceeds backwards in time to discuss their work during World War Two (what has been called the Magical Battle of Britain), their work during the 1930s, their construction of temples and orders in the 1920s (which for Crowley extends a little earlier), and their publication of two of the cornerstone studies of twentieth-century Hermetic Qaballah: 777 and The Mystical Qaballah. Richardson continues with Crowley’s and Fortune’s interactions with and initiations into various occult organizations especially the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its descendants and concludes with their early lives and births. To tell a story in such a way is quite difficult because stories unfold, and narratives are often told in chronological order; we like to explain causes before effects. I don't know, and I'm not going to say, whether or not Richardson actually pulls off a good reverse history (there are so few for comparison), but it is definitely worth a read just to see how this has been attempted.
Lastly, there are two interesting appendices in this book completely unrelated to the Fortune. One is Jerry E. Cornelius’s side by side analysis of Alistair Crowley's occultism and Gerald Gardner’s Wiccanism. Cornelius’s point, I think, is to show that Gardenarianism is not original. The second appendix is a letter to Richardson from William G. Gray wherein Gray reminiscences about Alistair Crowley who Gray knew when he was younger.
This short book is a really good read, and quite remarkable. It is no longer in print, which is quite unfortunate, but if you can find it on the secondary market, it is worth picking up.