Colin Burrow writes:

Crowley is not primarily a storyteller, since he thinks that the same stories are retold and refashioned in different ages, as climaxes in world history echo one another, and as versions of different stories are transformed, alchemically, into others. But if there is a story to Aegypt, it is that of a failed academic called Pierce Moffett, who loses his job as a history professor and goes into a pastoral retreat (literally: one of his friends is a shepherd) in the Faraway Hills in upstate New York. He sets out to write a book about the history of magic, which was to have argued that in ages which believed in magic, magic happened, and that intellectual revolutions change not only how the world is perceived but how it functions: ‘if our consciousness contributes to making the world, then our consciousness can alter it.’ He also thinks that somewhere there might be a grail or a philosopher’s stone that retains the magical powers of a previous age.

(LRB 1 November 2007)

Overlook | paperback 429 pp. |ISBN: 9781585679867