The Winged Beetle

About this book

A beetle spreads its wings beside poems of love, ritual, memory and transgression. Aleister Crowley gives his 1910 collection a title drawn from Egyptian religious symbolism.

The Winged Beetle ranges through intimate dedications, occult imagery, satire and translations from French verse, revealing a writer whose literary ambitions were as strong as his interest in magic. The book is less a single argument than a shifting portrait of relationships and obsessions. Its poems are often provocative, and their changes of tone can be startling.