Biographical Details
Amado Crowley initially announced himself to the occult world via his adopted name, Amado Crowley, in 1971, when he was past the age of forty, through a statement sent to the publishers of the encyclopedia on the subject, Man, Myth & Magic. However it would later be inferred from his 1991 book, The Secrets of Aleister Crowley, that his name was registered at birth as Andrew Standish.
Like Aleister Crowley, Amado used and taught a syncretic mix of Western magical techniques along with Eastern methods including meditation and yoga. However, he maintained that the cornerstone of Aleister's religion of Thelema, The Book of the Law, was a fraud and that The Book of Desolation, a purported text given to him by Aleister, which has remained unpublished, is the only true Crowleyan holy writ.
Crowley's biographers have found no documentary evidence regarding Amado's claim of descent from Aleister Crowley, and the claim is universally dismissed as bogus by Crowley scholars. Gerald Suster wrote:
"Amado claims in his book that Aleister taught him between the ages of 7 and 14: i.e.1937–1944. If so, why isn't there a single mention of this vital matter in Crowley's Diaries? There he records matters as trivial as the breaking of a tooth or the quality of his dinner: but he does not see fit to record meetings with an initiation of a son destined to be his successor."He died in February 2010.
Read more about this topic: Amado Crowley
Famous quotes containing the words biographical and/or details:
“Biography, in its purer form, confined to the ended lives of the true and brave, may be held the fairest meed of human virtue—one given and received in entire disinterestedness—since neither can the biographer hope for acknowledgment from the subject, not the subject at all avail himself of the biographical distinction conferred.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may have been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)