Books: Wickedest Man in the World

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Final Hymn. Most sons would by now have felt that they had revenged themselves sufficiently on paternal piety. But not Crowley. "I want none of your faint approval or faint dispraise," he wrote, "I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution, anything, bad or good, but strong." When World War I began, he left Ouarda in an insane asylum and hurried to the U.S., where he spent the early war years writing pro-German propaganda for George Sylvester Viereck's The Fatherland.

At war's end, a "Chinese oracle" ordered Crowley and his handful of disciples to Sicily. Here, Crowley, his ears pierced and hung with rings, "painted and wrote . . . smoked opium, sniffed snow . . . ate grass (hashish), and [took] laudanum, veronal, and anhalonium." He also tried to referee the frequent battles which took place among his concubines.

In his last years, he was a shadow of a man, half-crazy and exhausted by drugs and debauchery, and his wickedness had degenerated into absurdity. But he still had a few followers. He was cremated at Brighton. Over his beflowered coffin a disciple loudly chanted The Beast's erotic Hymn to Pan. The chairman of Brighton's crematorium committee was not impressed by the innovation. Said he, perhaps unconsciously voicing the thoughts of a generation of Englishmen: "We shall take all necessary steps to prevent such an incident occurring again."