THE BULLETIN

Glasgow, Scotland

3 April 1958

(page 10)

BOOKS.

The Worst Man in the

World has No Humour

Aleister Crowley who called himself “the Great Beast” and was called by others “the worst man in the world,” was probably the most widely publicized practitioner of magic of this century. The Crowley cult was always good for a story in the sensational papers, and we were titillated by amazing, startling “disclosures” of black magic, love, abodes, and, most promising of all, orgies.

True, Crowley was a magician—but in the Magic of Aleister Crowley (Muller: 21s) John Symonds, his biographer, sums him up as “no more than a minor and unorthodox Satanist.” Crowley—his baptismal name was Alexander, and he glamorized it himself at Cambridge—practised his odd rites in various parts of the world, and Mr. Symonds gives fairly full descriptions and explanations of his invocations and whatnot.

And the author provides an interesting picture of the Beast in his last years, a tired, almost forgotten old man.

Yet what remains most vividly in this profane mind is the thought that a mage of the Crowley kind mustn’t have a sense of humour or even a fondness for nonsense. Striking upon a bell eleven times and crying “Abrahadabra,” or invoking “Arogogorobrao: Southou: Moderio: Phalarthao: Dop: Ape, the Headless One,” while precisely stanced on the pentagram and maybe facing east really doesn’t seem much of an orgy, though it may well induce the giggles.