THE NEWCASTLE DAILY CHRONICLE

Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Northumberland, England

31 July 1907

(page 8)

CROWLEYANITY.

“The Star in the West”: A Critical Essay upon the Works of Aleister Crowley. By Captain J. F. C. Fuller. The Walter Scott Publishing Company. 6s. net.

It is certainly not to be denied that Aleister Crowley’s works require elucidation if we are able to appreciate their mystical symbolism, though even with the help of Captain Fuller’s clever, and often brilliant, essay all may not arrive at an understanding, or at all events a sympathetic understanding, of the poet. The author would have us believe that what Beardsley and Whistler did for art, Crowley is to-day doing for poetry. This is the place in which Captain Fuller places him:—“It has taken 100,000,000 years to produce Aleister Crowley. The world has indeed labored, and has at last brought forth a man, Bacon blames the ancient and scholastic philosophers for spinning webs, like spiders out of their own entrails; the reproach is perhaps unjust, but out of the web of these spiders Crowley has himself twisted a subtle cord on which he has suspended the universe, and swinging it round has sent the whole fickle world’s conception of these excogitating spiders into those realms which lie behind Time and beyond Space. He stands on the virgin rock of Pyrrhonic-Zoroostrianism, which unlike the Hindu world conception, stands on neither Elephants nor Tortoise, but on the Absolute Zero of the metaphysical Qabalists.”