THE ROCKFORD REPUBLIC

Rockford, Illinois, U.S.A.

18 July 1923

(page 11)

A DRUG FIEND’S DIARY

Aleister Crowley has written a new book which has made a bigger sensation in London than Jurgen did in America. The London newspapers carried seven-column headlines about him on their front pages and The Diary of a Drug Fiend became the center of a raging storm. Some critics cried: “Burn the book!” Others called it “A work of genius that will rank with DeQuincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater.”

As for the author, Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair, writes “Aleister Crowley is one of the most extraordinary Britishers—a poet, explorer, mountain climber, an adept in esoteric philosophy—in short a person of so many sides and interests that it is no wonder a legend has been built up around his name in his own lifetime.

“He has published more volumes of poetry than he has lived years, and has climbed more mountains than he has lived months. The Equinox, his work on occultism, is only a part of the gigantic literary structure which he has built up in the past five years.

“In 1900 he explored Mexico without guides. Two years later he spent many months in China. In 1906 he crossed China on foot. The success of his drama The Rites of Eleusis in London, 1910, did not tempt him to settle there for long, as he was next heard of in the heart of the Sahara.

“As a naked yogi, he has sat for days under the Indian sun, begging his rice.

Like every true magician, he has experimented with hundreds of strange poisons. He shocked the orthodox with his book, The Sword of Song, which was virtually an attack on everything established—but soon compelled them to forgive him because of the religious fervor of his next volume—a book of devotional hymns.

“He has hitherto lived in Paris when not on his travels. One of his friends is Augustus John, the painter, who has done some wonderful sketches of him.”

The Diary of a Drug Fiend is a novel about cocaine, heroin, morphine and opium, a true story in which the characters and places are disguised under the veil of fiction. In graphic detail Crowley paints the delirious ecstasies of the false paradise of the drug user and finally describes his own amazing theories as to how society shall rid itself of this bondage. It is a terrible story, yet one of hope and strength; a revelation of a startling abyss, and of a saving power.