more raves for
Elmer Crowley
A Katabasic Nekyia

In Elmer Crowley, a Katabasic Nekyia, Tom Bradley dismantles and re-welds biography, novel, creative non-fiction and metaphysical treatise into a bizarre satire. Aleister Crowley, alias "The Anti-Christ," has bungled his karma and ended up the Looney Tune character Elmer Fudd. The whole outlandish premise plays out as a mockery of occultism’s darkest delusions. The subtitle means a descent into a ritual by which ghosts are invoked to divine the future. The narrator is the incarnated ghost of Crowley. He and Hitler are sometimes compared for the similarities of their occult-based belief in “Do As Thou Wilt” as justification for turn- ing hapless followers into “stringless marionettes.” Crowley’s opening words refer to Hitler as his “magickal child,” setting the moral tone for what follows. Numerous themes branch out from this initial asser- tion with key scenes wickedly illustrated, adding ‘graphic novel’ as yet another misleading describer of Bradley’s furcated katabasis.

Crowley, Fudd, Hitler, Buddha, Yeats, Heliopolitan hierophants, the Goddess Baubo, assorted “Nilotic dream despots”, a carrot-eating Madame Blavatsky, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and their Warner Brothers producer, Leon Schlesinger bounce and boing their way across human history. These are the launch points for Bradley’s inquiries into ques- tions of meta-ethics and truth against a background of “Esoteric Hitlerists.”

Crowley’s tragic flaw is his fixed idea that “magick is done to the strains of incantatory monotony, not self-conscious art.” This trans- lates into control of non-questioning followers to serve his ends, noting with admiration that the A-bomb is “the most magickal blackjack to come swinging along since the sage Aurva armed his king with the fire missile in the Vishnu Purana.”
Crowley and Fudd share a speech defect: the inability to pronounce the R sound (“that wascal wabbit”). “Many fine magi,” Crowley claims, “perhaps even a slim majority... are poorly spoken.” That would include (besides Buddha and Hitler’s doctor) Leon Schlesinger, the money behind the Warner Brothers cartoons. Crowley and Schlesinger meet at a Hollywood orgy over a shared pederastic interest in a youth who also has a speech impediment. Whether Elmer Fudd’s “babbling weakness” on screen is a gibe at Crowley’s lisp is something the reader will have to determine. Either way, reincarnation as a lisping Looney is not an inapt destiny for the Anti-Christ who infamously wrote in his Confessions, “direct injury [is] the proper conjuration to call up gratitude.”

Doing as one wills, central to Crowley’s philosophy of Thelema, easily leads to a perverted will to power. Crowley realises after it’s too late that his magick act stinks. “Is ‘wayward sorcery’ a damnation offense as [Madame Blavatsky] proclaimed?” All you need is love, not will. As Bradley has stated elsewhere, “The universe runs on a Theosophical rather than a Thelemic dispensation.”
Elmer Crowley may confound those who want their words to move through books like soldiers in formation and come to a uniform halt at the end. But readers willing to navigate outside the usual throughways will find themselves in the higher vistas of this rich and complex tome, slim enough for the slow and multiple readings it deserves.

--John-Ivan Palmer


RICHARD KACZYNSKI, author of the definitive Perdurbo: The Life of Aleister Crowley, internationally recognized expert on The Great Beast 666:

In the grand tradition of Snoo Wilson's I, Crowley and J. Edward Cornelius's The Milkman Letters comes Elmer Crowley: A Katabasic Nekyia, a novella from Tom Bradley's fertile (or should I say febrile?) imagination with twenty full-page illustrations by David Aronson and Nick Patterson.

According to the back cover, "After making careful preparations to ensure himself a proper reincarnation, the dying Aleister Crowley flubs one syllable of the magickal incantation...and comes back as Elmer Fudd." This self-described "picaresque graphic novel" reads like an account of Crowley's death-bed fever dream or an afterlife bardo journey gone terribly wrong, wherein the fifty-eight Wrathful Deities take on the aspect of warped and sinister versions of Looney Toons archetypes. Here, Crowley is a twisted Elmer Fudd, with Bugs-cum-Choronzon as his mercurial psychopomp.

Bradley emulates Crowley's first-person narrative style throughout by mixing ostentatious verbiage with calculated-to-shock impropriety, and the result reads like a trippy, post-mortem, long-lost epilogue to The Confessions... Digressions aplenty recall episodes from the life and times of the recently departed Great Beast, with one or two apocryphal events thrown in (hey, this is fiction, so some creative license is expected). These are amusing Easter eggs for readers conversant with the details. One example that I particularly enjoyed was an indictment of Golden Dawn Chief MacGregor Mathers--a devout vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist in the mold of Anna Kingsford--for using black magic to kill Crowley's hunting dogs.

Bradley sure did his homework. Bottom line: This is one weird mofo! I can't think of anything else quite like it.


THE PROMETHEUS REVIEW

Looking for something a little different? Bored with reading the Book of Law? Is the Great Beast no longer quite…Beastly enough? If you answered yes to these questions, then you will enjoy reading the combination of Tom Bradley’s wit with original art by David Aronson and Nick Patterson. Be warned though, if you have no sense of humour and tend to be overly sentimental, this isn’t the book for you. This book is more akin to Crowley’s own humour – dark, satirical and full of cryptic puns which are designed to stealthy slip over the unaware reader's head.

This is coupled with bizarre surrealist imagery that unfolds like a psychedelic experience of Crowley and other mystic characters. Both esoteric and darkly entertaining, this fills in the void that is often missing in modern interpretations of Crowley –a sense of humour. Elmer Crowley is reminiscent of some of Terry Pratchett’s use of Crowley’s imagery, but this book takes it much further. It is however also clear that the author has a high knowledge of esoteric symbolism and Crowley’s works, and this is worked well into the text, with multiple layers of symbolism that unfold like little spring buds.

Elmer Crowley is not the only figure in this book – there are others, such as Willy the Celtic Revivalist. Even Serrano and Blavatsky are not spared in this neatly packaged book. Reading Elmer Crowley is like reading Crowley’s inner dialogue at 3:am, after an intensive journey into his own inner abyss. It is therefore, a magickal working that Crowley himself would be proud of. Perdurabo must be very careful, lest he disturb his nemesis, the sinister and deadly rabbit Chronozon, the bunny of the Abyss.

The interior is excellent art, and I have to admit that a favourite of mine is Horus, with his hawk head now replaced by that jester of the bird world, the Australia cockatoo.


Undoubtedly some uptight person will get offended by this book – but what of it? Offending people is exactly what the Great Beast liked to do and I can imagine Crowley, in his astral form laughing at these people, the humourless mediocre magicians who take offense at absolutely everything because really they just want …to be normal! This is a book for the real fans of Crowley--the ones who can enjoy and understand his sense of humour.

"After making careful preparations to ensure himself a proper reincarnation the dying Aleister Crowley flubs one syllable of the magickal incantation…and comes back as Elmer Fudd."

"The nekyia is no aimless or destructive fall into the abyss but a meaningful katabasis- it’s object the restoration of the whole man." (Jung)
--Gwendolyn von Taunton


CHARLOTTE ROGERS, author of P. is for Prostitute

This is an extraordinary book, and as with all books of any real calibre, can be read on various levels.

My first reading was what I call the "reviewers skim" where I wallowed in the outrageous imagery generated by the rollicking language and wonderful graphic illustrations (I’ll never be able to look at Bugs Bunny’s pert nether regions in the same way again).

I realised very quickly that a skim wouldn’t do Elmer Crowley justice as the illusions and allusions are not randomly generated for effect but deep and knowledgeable reference to Crowley’s life and writings, The Tibetan and Egyptian Book of the Dead and The Eleusinian Mysteries.

Simply enough, this book is twisted, fantastical and genius. It captures the feel of Crowley with his bawdy, politically incorrect irreverence, his arrogance and his committed magickal spirituality and awareness.

Elmer Fudd also encapsulates the surreal madness of life, fate, karma, belief and Loony Tunes when viewed by slipping your perceptions just a little off kilter.

Elmer Crowley: a Katabasic Nekyia isn’t simply a very good and well illustrated book or even a fantastically written mad romp; it is a journey. How the reader chooses to appreciate that journey is up to them.

I have a feeling that I will be reading this book, and taking the multi levelled journey, many more times.

I’ll close with a very relevant quote from an interview with the author by The Drill Press where he was asked, ‘what is a writer?’

The writer, on the other hand, in making an artefact, reveals an implicit awareness of time’s paradoxical untensefulness. He is making a profession of faith in the illusory nature of cause and effect, which is a huge step in uncovering the procedures of existence—how they don’t really proceed at all.

The writer is not just expelling carbon dioxide and sound waves, but is leaving behind an object that in some microcosmic way recapitulates those unproceeding procedures. What the writer does is less like monkeys grooming in a circle and more like Neanderthals sprinkling their dead with flowers.