First published c. 1904 in France, Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden is a hilarious and remarkably inventive collection of erotic prose and verse written by the influential libertine-mystic and magician Aleister Crowley. Sections of prose and verse are unified through a biographical frame narrative attributing them to a single author-poet-perpetrator. The first section, The Nameless Novel, was written primarily to amuse Crowley’s convalescing wife, Rose Kelly. A scatological parody of erotic literature, it takes aim at the usual targets of libertine fiction and modern erotica but, at the same time, lampoons their (libertine fiction and erotica’s) limitations and conventions through absurdity and hyperbole. The verse sections, which include black parodies of notable Victorian poets such as Robert Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne, were added to extend the literary forms in Crowley’s earlier erotic work, White Stains (1898), which is also available from Birchgrove Press.

Snowdrops from a Curate's Garden

CROWLEY, Aleister

Literature & Fiction

Teitan Pr

Short stories deal with the myths and themes of J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough

Golden Twigs

Short Stories & Anthologies

The first facsimile edition of this masterwork of Hermeticism and Magick, described by its author as "the most remarkable book on the Mystic Path ever written." It has long been treasured by students and collectors in its first edition of 1907. Crowley poured his occult knowledge, particularly that which he learned in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, into the four essays contained therein. It is an essential work for all students of the Golden Dawn and Magick.

Konx Om Pax: Essays in Light

One of Crowley's rarest works: part homo-erotic parody, and part mystical text. As described in Crowley scholar Martin P. Starr's Introduction to the 1991 facsimile edition, there were only 200 copies of the book printed, but many of these were destroyed in a customs seizure not long after publication, so that even before the beginning of the First World War Crowley was speaking of its rarity. A second customs seizure (1924) depleted the number of surviving copies yet further, and it is consequently one of Crowley's rarest works.

The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz

Humor & Satire

The Winged Beetle

History & Criticism

The first documentary study of Aleister Crowley's contemporary followers in North America, told through the life of their de facto leader, Wilfred Talbot Smith (1885-1957). Smith, the unacknowledged offspring of a prominent English family, emigrated to Canada where he met Charles Stansfeld Jones and through him, the works of Aleister Crowley. Although Crowley and Smith met only once, their twenty year correspondence proved to be a major link to the few and the faithful attracted to Crowley's work in the United States and Canada. Smith's spiritual life centered first on the initiatic structure of the Order of the A.·.A.·., complemented by the emerging fraternal and social schemes of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). Smith followed Jones into a few long-forgotten movements like the Universal Brotherhood and the Psychomagian Society, but he declined membership in C.F. Russell's Choronzon Club.
 To promulgate the Crowleyan teachings, in 1934 Smith incorporated his own "Church of Thelema"--known to Los Angeles newspaper readers as the "Purple Cult." The following year he initiated OTO activity in Los Angeles which attracted its own cast of occult characters. Smith's life reached a strange conclusion when Crowley, taking a page from Louis Bromfield's novel, THE STRANGE CASE OF MISS ANNIE SPRAGG, which explored "the twin mysteries of love and religion and the confusion that lies between" and combining it with a reading of Smith's natal chart, sent him off on a retreat to determine which God he was incarnating. It was a journey from which Frater 132 never returned...
 THE UNKNOWN GOD is a fascinating and complex human story, intimately interwoven with the lives of most of Crowley's disciples in the United States including C.F. Russell Jane Wolfe, Max R. Schneider, Jack Parsons, Louis T. Culling, Frederic Mellinger and Grady L. McMurtry as well as occult teachers like H. Spencer Lewis (AMORC) Paul Foster Case (BOTA), and Wayne Walker (OM), Hollywood actors such as John Carradine and even the founder of the Mattachine Society, Harry Hay. Students of 19th and 20th century esoteric movements, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Theosophical Society and the Crowley-derived organizations, will find THE UNKNOWN GOD worth reading.

The Unknown God: W.T. Smith and the Thelemites

Religion & Spirituality

Starr, Martin P.

New Age & Spirituality

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