THE TATLER AND BYSTANDER

London, England

24 December 1947

(page 406)

Standing By.

D.B. Wyndham Lewis.

Warlock.

Last time we saw that eminent Satanist, the late Aleister Crowley—self-labelled “the wickedest man in the world,” but how did he know?—we remembered from a Medieval treatise that the devil does not reward his buddies very well.

It was a soft spring dusk of 1930 outside the Dôme on the Boulevard Montparnasse, and all the Bohemians were taking their apéritif, especially those from Golders Green and Pooskabunkie, Mo. The Satanist looked shoddy, shuffling, and depressed, though still practising his well-known piercing-eye trick, to no effect whatsoever. He seemed to have lost all that evil panache which once ravished Bloomsbury, by all accounts. A little later he published a mystical novel of exhausting dullness, of which we noted one extract only:

Cyril’s tone transformed his asinine utterance into something so Sybilline, Oracular, Delphic, Cumæan, that his interlocutor almost trembled . . .

Exactly like the Black Magician himself, in fact. Many fools trembled before Mr. Crowley in his prime. Nevertheless we maintain he got a far rawer deal from the Master of Witches than Faust, for he was allowed to decline into total obscurity.