Nevill Drury,Stealing Fire from Heaven: the Rise of Modern Western

Book Reviews / ARIES () – Nevill Drury, Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic,New York: Oxford University Press , ix + pp. ISBN ----. The British-born Australian author Nevill Drury has been preoccupied with esoteric and magical traditions for some four decades. He has written numer- ous books and had a key role in a television documentary called The Occult Experience, made in the s, from which much of the material in this book is derived. This book has three essential components: first, an overview of the history of Western magical thought; secondly, a discussion of its resurgence in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; thirdly, an examination of certain partic- ular individuals who have helped to shape the modern magical imagination. The first component is curiously selective. Chapter , headed somewhat mis- leadingly “Medieval Precursors”, jumps from the Kabbalah to the Hermetic tradition, then to alchemy and the Tarot. There follows a cursory chapter on Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, covering well-trodden ground, then a chapter on the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, its origins and magical system. Here Drury mentions the correspondence between one of the co-founders, William Wynn Westcott, and an alleged German Rosicrucian adept, Fräulein Anna Sprengel, who had the magical motto Sapiens Dominabitur Astris. Drury writes that recent research ‘suggests that the correspondence with Fräulein Sprengel was fictitious, although it appears that she was a real person with gen- uine esoteric connections’ (p. ). The timing of this book prevented Drury from being able to include my discovery about this correspondence, namely that the letters from Sapiens Dominabitur Astris indicate a male gender for the writer (see my article ‘Fräulein Sprengel and the Origins of the Golden Dawn: A Surprising Discovery’ in Aries Vol. , No. , ). This points strongly to the correspondence having been not only a forgery but a highly inept one. Drury emphasizes the importance of the individual will in modern magic and hence not surprisingly devotes a chapter to Aleister Crowley. Again, Drury’s timing is unlucky, because he just missed having the benefit of Tobias Churton’s searching new book, Aleister Crowley: The Biography (London: Wat- kins ). Drury deals interestingly with the transmission of the magical and mystical use of sexuality, mentioning the Gnostic Phibionites and their practice of consuming menstrual blood and semen, the Hindu and Buddhist Tantrics, the teachings of Paschal Beverly Randolph, and of course the sex magic prac- tices of Aleister Crowley and the O.T.O. One of the central theses of Drury’s book is that ‘since the s, Western magical practice in Britain and the United States has been polarized, producing © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, DOI: 10.1163/156798912X645953 Book Reviews / ARIES () – two major streams of occult thought led, on the one hand, by Crowleyan Thelema and its various derivative offshoots and affiliated movements, and by Wicca and Goddess spirituality on the other’ (p. ). He goes on to say that ‘many of these contemporary magical practitioners identify themselves as belonging to the Left-Hand or Right-Hand Path in Western magic’ (p. ). For Drury, the Left-Hand Path encompasses sexual magic and, more generally, an antinomian approach involving taboo-breaking, cultivation of the individual will, celebration of the carnal and a willingness to work with forces considered dangerous by the Right-Hand faction. While I would question Drury’s categorization as being overly simplistic, he is at his most interesting when discussing exponents of the Left-Hand Path, as he defines it. There is an insightful sub-chapter on the artist Austin Osman Spare (–), a genius who deserves to be as famous as con- temporaries such as Augustus John and Stanley Spencer, but whose visionary and magical art made him suspect for the artistic establishment. Equally fas- cinating is the sub-chapter on the colourful Australian neo-pagan artist and witch Rosaleen Norton (–), whom Drury knew and interviewed. Like Spare, she developed her own occult universe, populated by pagan deities, demons, elementals and half-human creatures. At the age of she began using self-hypnosis as a means of accessing this world and making it visible in her art. Some of her paintings feature classical pagan deities such as Pan, whom she especially revered. Others depict her guardian spirit Janicot or— more terrifyingly—the spider-like demon whom she called Werplon, repre- senting the chaotic forces of the Qliphoth in Kabbalistic tradition. Several works by both Spare and Norton are reproduced here. Then comes a section on “The Rebirth of the Goddess”, dealing with Gerald Gardner and other exponents of the modern witchcraft movement. Although useful as a brief overview of the movement, it again covers well-trodden ground and adds little to previous studies such as Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon (). Drury quotes the biography Gerald Gardner: Witch (), published under the name of Jack Bracelin, but does not mention that the book was in fact written by the Sufi author Idries Shah. Frederic Lamond, who was a member of Gardner’s coven, told me that Shah’s reason for writing the book was that he believed Wicca to be the religion of the future. The following chapter deals with contemporary Satanism and black magic, focusing on the Church of Satan, created by Anton LaVey, and the Temple of Set, led by former Church of Satan member Michael Aquino and his wife Lilith Sinclair, both of whom were interviewed by Drury for his film The Occult Experience. Aquino, a doctoral graduate from the University of California at.

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