Aleister Crowley
Man, Myth & Magick
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Narrated by:
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Cliff Truesdell
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By:
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Steven Ashe
About this listen
Ask almost anyone their view on Aleister Crowley and opinions will polarize: he was a genius; a psychopath; a drug-riddled sex maniac; a champion of sexual freedom against the restrictions of Victorian prudery and hypocrisy; he was a secret agent; a lost-soul poet; a playboy with little better to do than dabble in magic; a lifestyle imitator of Oscar Wilde and Richard Burton; a drug addict; a narcissistic sadist; a visionary artist.
Few commentators are qualified to critique Crowley's esoteric motivations and ambitions and most simply dismiss him as a black magician who had fallen from the path. But if he did fall, why? Exactly where did he imagine the path led in the first place? And how far did he actually succeed in his life-long mission to overthrow the established order and herald a new age of magick? Ashe thinks he knows and has written a narrative that presents a lively biography from the perspective of understanding Crowley's roots in the magic of the Order of the Golden Dawn.
Crowley was not the first of the great English magicians and certainly will not be the last. This work has been written for the general audience with a simple elegance, but has enough surprises to delight the most hackneyed Crowley expert.
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Eerie and fascinating
- By Jikai Zenshin on 03-19-21
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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Rebel Souls
- Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians
- By: Justin Martin
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Rebel Souls is the first book ever written about the colorful group of artists - regulars at Pfaff's Saloon in Manhattan - rightly considered America's original Bohemians. Besides a young Whitman, the circle included actor Edwin Booth; trailblazing stand–up comic Artemus Ward; psychedelic drug pioneer and author Fitz Hugh Ludlow; and brazen performer Adah Menken, famous for her Naked Lady routine. Central to their times, the artists managed to forge connections with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and even Abraham Lincoln.
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A Wonderful Read with Vibrant Characters
- By A on 11-11-15
By: Justin Martin
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The Swerve
- How the World Became Modern
- By: Stephen Greenblatt
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic by Lucretius—a beautiful poem containing the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles.
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Very compelling history, a less compelling thesis
- By A reader on 05-01-12
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C. S. Lewis - A Life
- Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet
- By: Alister E. McGrath
- Narrated by: Robin Sachs
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In honor of the 50th anniversary of C. S. Lewis' death, celebrated Oxford don Dr. Alister McGrath presents us with a compelling and definitive portrait of the life of C. S. Lewis, the author of the well-known Narnia series. For more than half a century, C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series has captured the imaginations of millions. In C. S. Lewis - A Life, Dr. Alister McGrath recounts the unlikely path of this Oxford don, who spent his days teaching English literature to the brightest students in the world and his spare time writing.
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Awakening my curiosity and desire to read more!
- By Pearl Glacier on 03-13-13
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Keats
- A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
- By: Lucasta Miller
- Narrated by: Sally Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment.
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A Romantic Life
- By David on 05-03-22
By: Lucasta Miller
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Butterfly in the Typewriter
- The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of a Confederacy of Dunces
- By: Cory MacLauchlin
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. In Butterfly in the Typewriter, Cory MacLauchlin draws on scores of new interviews with friends, family, and colleagues as well as full access to the extensive Toole archive at Tulane University, capturing his upbringing in New Orleans, his years in New York City, his frenzy of writing in Puerto Rico, his return to his beloved city, and his descent into paranoia and depression.
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Worth it! Good biography. Informative.
- By French Quarter on 07-09-13
By: Cory MacLauchlin
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The Road to Monticello
- The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson
- By: Kevin J. Hayes
- Narrated by: David Baker
- Length: 25 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Jefferson was an avid book-collector, a voracious reader, and a gifted writer - a man who prided himself on his knowledge of classical and modern languages and whose marginal annotations include quotations from Euripides, Herodotus, and Milton. And yet there has never been a literary life of our most literary president.
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Very Boring Book
- By Greg on 05-13-14
By: Kevin J. Hayes
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The Year of Lear
- Shakespeare in 1606
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. But that year, at age 42, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn - King Lear - then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.
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Detailed and satisfying
- By Tad Davis on 02-24-16
By: James Shapiro
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The Sun and the Moon
- Hoaxers, Showmen, and Lunar Man-Bats in 19th-Century New York
- By: Matthew Goodman
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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The Sun and the Moon tells the delightful and surprisingly true story of how a series of articles in the Sun newspaper in 1835 convinced the citizens of New York that the moon was inhabited. Purporting to reveal discoveries of a famous British astronomer, the series described such moon life as unicorns, beavers that walked upright, and four-foot-tall flying man-bats. It quickly became the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era.
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some very good some very bad
- By peter on 10-30-10
By: Matthew Goodman
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Figuring
- By: Maria Popova
- Narrated by: Natascha McElhone
- Length: 21 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries - beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement.
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Stunning
- By Laura on 03-12-19
By: Maria Popova
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The Man Who Invented Fiction
- How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
- By: William Egginton
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.
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Very Interesting and Informative, but Poorly Read
- By LCorSMT on 06-21-23
By: William Egginton
What listeners say about Aleister Crowley
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dobbs
- 08-18-15
Straight to the Point Biography of Crowley
Well researched, unbiased, and of course with anything pertaining to Crowley, full of strange and slightly disturbing stories about his life. Does not break new ground, but excellent for anyone who has even a passing interest in this unique man. Recommended.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Rowdy Wilkins
- 11-20-18
Worth the listen
Takes a lot from Crowleys diaries and other books and is pretty unbiased. Gives a more overall view of the life of Aleister Crowley
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- TZaal
- 12-23-18
different
I was expecting this to be more entertaining. Reading Crowley & reading about Crowley are very different experiences. In short, this book reveals (to me) that Crowley used his family fortune to indulge in his eccentric hedonism in excess.
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- jacelk
- 10-20-15
Boring
I think reading the encyclopedia would have been more entertaining. Not at all what I expected.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Terra
- 11-26-21
Really tried. Couldn’t finish it.
Anytime I read bad reviews on books I’m interested in, there’s a part of me that sort of scoffs like “they just didn’t ‘get’ the book.” I decided to start this book in spite of other reviews, and I was not rewarded for it. Either the book is poorly written or the voice actor isn’t doing it justice because I got lost so many times. Gang, I restarted this book (no exaggeration) 5 times. I restarted chapters more times than that. I really wanted to like this book, but I’ll admit when I am beat. This book jumped around a lot, repeated phrases or stories so much that it was confusing and the voice actors doesn’t use inflection.
TLDR: hard to follow, really wanted to like it but gave up after 5 tries. Praise the completionist who finishes this book.
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Overall
- Joe
- 11-18-19
WTF!?
The poor man barely pronounced one of the names correctly, and as for content...why? This is an abysmal retelling of a few noteworthy anecdotes and barbaric panhandling of Crowley I'm ashamed to admit I succumbed to even a chapter of this twaddle
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2 people found this helpful