Moonchild is a novel written by the British occultist Aleister Crowley in 1917. Its plot involves a magical war between a group of white magicians, led by Simon Iff, and a group of black magicians, over an unborn child.
In this work, numerous acquaintances of Crowley appear as thinly disguised fictional characters. Crowley portrays MacGregor Mathers as the primary villain, including him as a character named SRMD, using the abbreviation of Mathers' magical name. Arthur Edward Waite appears as a villain named Arthwaite and the unseen head of the Inner Circle of which SRMD was a member. "A.B." is theosophist Annie Besant. Among Crowley's friends and allies, Allen Bennett appears as Mahatera Phang, Leila Waddell as Sister Cybele, the dancer Isadora Duncan appears as Lavinia King, and her companion Mary D'Este (mother of Preston Sturges, and who helped Crowley write his magnum opus Magick: Book 4 under her magical name "Soror Virakam") appears as Lisa la Giuffria. Cyril Grey is Crowley himself, while Simon Iff is either an idealized version of an older and wiser Crowley or his friend Allen Bennett.
£9.99
£25.00
£9.99
Ethel Archer (1885-1962), the daughter of a clergyman, was born in Sussex, and expelled from school at the age of fourteen for asking questions in Scripture class. In 1908 she married the aspiring artist Eugene Wieland, and lived with him in West London. The couple made the acquaintance of Aleister Crowley, joined his A∴A∴ magical organization, and set up a publishing company called Wieland and Co., to publish Crowley’s periodical The Equinox, as well as other texts, including Archer’s first poetry collection The Whirlpool (1911). She published two other books, Phantasy and Other Poems (1930) and the occult novel The Hieroglyph (1932).
This 32-page chapbook assembles together twelve poems never collected in the author’s lifetime, which originally appeared in such places as The Equinox and The Occult Review.
Paperback.