Aleister Crowley's Poetic Fin de Siècle: Swinburne's Legacy, Decadent Drag, and Spiritual Sex Magick

Aleister Crowley's undergraduate years at Cambridge in the late 1890s saw him develop an extreme form of decadent eroticism, driven by his desire to be seen as the main heir to Algernon Charles Swinburne's poetry. His 1898 volume White Stains, privately circulated by Leonard Smithers, exemplifies this. Crowley later credited his sexual affair with Herbert Charles Pollitt, a celebrated aesthete and drag artist, with introducing him to English and French decadent writers. Pollitt's influence persisted into Crowley's 1910 work The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz, which celebrates sodomy through an imagined Persian poet's voice, linking to Crowley's occult sex magick rituals.

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Abstract

This article explores the extreme type of decadent eroticism that Aleister Crowley developed while an undergraduate at Cambridge in the later 1890s. The discussion focuses of Crowley's desire to appear as the main legatee of Algernon Charles Swinburne's poetry from the 1860s and 1870s. Especially significant here is Crowley's volume White Stains, which the maverick publisher Leonard Smithers issued in a privately circulated edition in 1898. In the 1920s, Crowley acknowledged that his sexual affair with Herbert Charles (“Jerome”) Pollitt was largely responsible for introducing him to the works of English and French decadent writers. Pollitt—who gained celebrity as an aesthete, art collector, and drag artist in fin de siècle Cambridge—became the major patron of Aubrey Beardsley. In 1910 Crowley acknowledged the legacy of Pollitt's decadent influence into the two concluding faux-ghazals that appear in The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz, which is in part modeled upon Richard Burton's translation of The Perfumed Garden (1886), based on the fifteenth-century heteroerotic manual by Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nefzawi. This 1910 volume, which celebrates sodomy through the voice of an imaginary seventeenth-century Persian poet, belongs to Crowley's established interest in taboo forms of erotic experience that relate to the occult rituals he practiced in relation to sex magick.