China adventures of world’s ‘wickedest man’: Aleister Crowley’s brushes with death, spirits and ‘appendix on toast’ in Yunnan
- Occultist Aleister Crowley’s journey through Yunnan in 1905/6 bristled with a sense of the supernatural, and some of his tales of the trip were truly macabre
- But when celebrating the success of an expedition he had continuously insisted was horror-haunted and dangerous, he likened it to a safe bus ride in London
In December 1905, somewhere outside Tengyueh (now Tengchong), in China’s Yunnan province, occultist Aleister Crowley sat down to a wayside lunch with British consul George Litton.
Crowley, who was travelling with his wife, Rose, and one-year-old child, had arrived by mule over the nearby Burmese border. Litton had set off to settle some dispute in the mountainous and densely forested region and met the incoming Crowley on the road.
According to Crowley’s unreliably autobiographic The Confessions (1929), Litton remarked, “Whatever one hears, however extraordinary, is true in China somewhere or other!”
There was no shortage of extraordinary stories about Crowley himself. A member of the occult Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Englishman had published erotic poetry that shocked his contemporaries, and a long prose poem that he claimed had been dictated to him in Egypt by a supernatural being. He had been joint-leader of the first ever attempt to scale K2, in 1902, and of an equally abortive attempt on Kanchenjunga, in 1905; the latter was a disastrous expedition during which four of the party died – partly Crowley’s fault, it was rumoured.
He was considered too much of a bisexual libertine even for the drug-taking and far-from-buttoned-up circles in which he moved, and the British press was later to label him, probably to his satisfaction, “the wickedest man in the world”.
Litton was not wrong. To hear of the self-titled Great Beast 666 in such an obscure corner of China was extraordinary in itself. Yet here he was.