Joseph Bernard Rethy

Born: Unknown.

Died: Unknown.

Joseph Bernard Rethy was a children's poet and author of the book The Song of the Scarlet Host, and Other Poems. Crowley met Rethy in January of 1915 at the office of The Fatherland.

He is described in Crowley's Confessions thusly:

" . . . So I went to see Mr. O'Brien. Mr. O'Brien was not in. I think I never saw him again. But I discovered that his office was the office of a paper called The Fatherland, appearing weekly. To my surprise, the inmates seemed to know all about me; and, in the absence of Mr. O'Brien, they produced the most extraordinary little amniote—half rat, half rabbit, if I am any zoologist at all—whose name is Joseph Bernard Rethy. I looked at this specimen of the handiwork of the Creator with somewhat mixed feelings, gradually sagging towards a pessimistic atheism, especially when I learned that, like anyone in New York who can string together a dozen words without sound or sense, he was a shining light of the Poetry Society. (But he is quite a nice boy.)

"I must admit that I did not know how to talk to him. With all the quickness of his Jewish apprehension, he decided that I was meat for his master, for whom he sent by means of the complicated manual gestures which form the true language of Jews, and, pace Professor Garner, of the other anthropoids."

Later, when Crowley was the editor of the International, Rethy provided him with articles which Crowley published within its pages.