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Moonchild: A Dream Analysis By Fra. O.L.L. | |
Page 1  Aleister Crowley's novel, 'Moonchild' suffers from the weakness of many occult novels. Crowley is so busy telling us the rules of magick and lecturing us on mysticism that he often has characters lecture each other at length on the nature of these topics rather than keep the action moving. This is also a weakness of Dion Fortune's work and most lesser novelists, with the notable exceptions of the Kathrine Kurtz and Debra Turner Harris who manage to keep the action going in their Adept series. The reason to look at this weakness in Moonchild first is that I intend to use this novel to explore its author's consciousness at the time of writing it. Thus its split sense of purpose and A.C.'s necessity to convince readers of magick's scientific pedigree becomes very interesting. This novel was originally penned under the working title, 'The Butterfly Net'. In his confessions Crowley mentions writing it as well as some short stories while on tour in the U.S. during WWI. At the time he had stopped in New Orleans and describes himself as experiencing the vision of Tiphereth. In his autohagiography he says:"During this time I was also granted what the mystics describe as 'The Beatific Vision' which is the most characteristic of those attributed to Tiphereth, the archetype of beauty and harmony. In this vision one retains one's normal consciousness, but every impression of daily life is as enchanting and exquisite as an ode of Keats. The incidents of life become harmonious unity; one is lost in a rosy dream of romantic happiness. One may compare it to the effect produced by wine upon some people. There is, however, no unreality in the vision. One is not blinded to the facts of existence. It is simply that the normal incoherence and discrepancy between them has been harmonized." -(Crowley, Symonds and Grant, Eds., 1979,) So it is interesting that while having this supremely unifying vision of beauty he seems to have such a problem unifying his own will with regards to the purpose of this this book. In the Author's Note penned in 1929 for the first publication he says, "This book was written in 1917, during such leisure as my effort to bring America into the War on our side allowed me. Hence my illusions on the subject and the sad showing of Simon Iff at the end. Need I add that as the book itself demonstrates beyond all doubt, all persons and incidents are purely the figments of a disordered imagination?" Further, Crowley cannot allow himself the freedom to develop a world where magick simply works and the questions and discomforts that we experience with it in our world are removed. This is the secret of writing the effective science fiction or fantasy novel according to Ursula K. La Guin: simply change what you're going to change and allow your characters to take these facts for granted. Although the liner notes of my edition suggest that we will find the character of Crowley represented in the Adepts of light, I would suggest that we find the soul (anima) of Crowley in the person of Lisa La Giuffria and his shadow represented in the Adepts of darkness. And that the while his ego is engaged in a vision of unifying beauty his unconscious is engaged in a life and death battle, which I am not sure he ever completed. So my approach to this novel is going to be a highly psychological one in that I am going to use it as though it were a Self-state dream. That is to say that we are going to attempt to understand more clearly the mind of Aleister Crowley and what may make up that mind at this particular junction in his life. Having said this we will begin the study of our dream/book with a much shortened retelling of the plot. If the reader is familiar with the plot please feel free to click here to skip the following summary.
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