Aleister Crowley Reads Occult Poetry in the Only Known Recordings of His Voice (1920)

"Theirs was a feud over the practices of occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; but it was also-at least for Crowley-over poetry. Crowley envied Yeats' literary skill; Yeats could not say the same about Crowley. But while he did not necessarily respect his enemy, Yeats feared him, as did nearly everyone else. As Yeats' biographer wrote a few months after Crowley's death in 1947, "in the old days men and women lived in terror of his evil eye.""

"The press called Crowley "the wickedest man in the world," a reputation he did more than enough to cultivate, identifying himself as the Anti-Christ and dubbing himself "The Beast 666." (Crowley may have inspired the "rough beast" of Yeats' "The Second Coming.") Crowley did not achieve the literary recognition he desired, but he continued to write prolifically after Yeats and others ejected him from the Golden Dawn in 1900: poetry, fiction, criticism, and manuals of sex magic, ritual, and symbolism-some penned during famed mountaineering expeditions."

Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats engaged in a rivalry tied to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and to Crowley's envy of Yeats' poetic skill. Crowley cultivated a notorious public image, identifying himself as the Anti-Christ and dubbing himself "The Beast 666," and earned the press label "the wickedest man in the world." Yeats feared Crowley, and contemporaries remembered people living "in terror of his evil eye." Crowley wrote prolifically in poetry, fiction, criticism, and manuals on sex magic, ritual, and symbolism, often during mountaineering expeditions. He pursued diverse activities—mountaineering, chess, scholarship, painting, yoga, and founding Thelema—while struggling with heroin addiction and presiding over an abusive cult.

Read at Open Culture