Volume 14, Number 5 · March 12, 1970
Marks of a Buddha
By Nigel Dennis
The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
edited by John Symonds, edited by Kenneth Grant
Hill & Wang, 960 pp., $14.95
'I find no fault in this man,' said Pontius Pilate on a certain occasion, and I must follow him on the present occasion. I find no fault at all in the book under review; if it was not sent into this world to redeem man it was sent certainly to fill man with hilarity. Moreover, the author agrees with the reviewer as to the faultlessness of his work—and when I say 'agrees,' which is the present tense, I say it deliberately. In a previous incarnation, in the period of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, Aleister Crowley was a priest named Ankh-f-n-Khonsu and a stele depicting him as such may be seen any day in the Boulak Museum in Cairo (ask the man for 'Exhibit No. 666'). So I cannot believe that after his reincarnation in Warwickshire (A.D. 1875) and death in Hastings (A.D. 1947), this excellent time-traveler has merely gone the way of all flesh: it would not be in character. Either he is with us now, or he is enjoying a rest before his next reincarnation: in view of his energetic nature, the first alternative is the more probable.
Review, 2334 words
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