The Legend of Aleister Crowley
Moral panic and the original Fake News!
This facsimile edition of P. R. Stephensen’s 1930 broadside against the ‘Campaign of Personal Vilification Unparalleled in Literary History’ arrives in 2021 as the mainstream media thrashes in its death throes. Quality digital scans of the original book, never before published material from the Australian OTO archives, as well as a new essay examining the politics of conspiracy and the pathologies of Fake News, make this an indispensable case study of media malfeasance and moral panic.
Some years ago, Crowley was selected by the scavengers of the gutter press as an object for the most neurotic, viperous, and blackguardly ad hominem “campaign” ever waged, even in the disgusting history of British sensational journalism.
From the previously unpublished Introduction
P.R. Stephensen
“Twenty years of cheap newspapers had turned the British from the most stolid to the most hysterical nation in Europe.”
Aleister Crowley, Confessions.