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Title: The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz by Aleister Crowley ISBN: 0-933429-05-3 Publisher: Teitan Pr Pub. Date: May, 1991 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $29.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: "podex" isn't in my dictionary though.
Comment: I'd be honored to be the first person to review this book. It seems odd that nobody bothered to before me; nearly every other work by Crowley has been reviewed by a representative selection of lunatics with bad grammar. Hmmm. I wonder what it is about this one.

Whether or not you "buy" Crowley as Prophet of the New Aeon and all that other crazy stuff, you have to concede that a) he was an extremely prolific writer, and b) nearly everything he wrote is extraordinary, if only for its audacity. The man had some nerve. In the present case, he dared, in 1910 London, to publish this volume of "ghazals" (sonnets on the Persian mold) treating vividly and explicitly of homosexual intercourse. This is no sublimated Oscar Wilde stuff either. Crowley gets down to plumbing. True, he does it from behind several pseudonyms - a "Major Lutiy", a "Reverend P.D. Carey", and of course, "Abdullah el-Haji" himself, the supposed original seventeenth-century Persian author of these crimes. The Major, it seems, had infiltrated a Sufi sect and acquired a rare copy of the "holy text" so jealously guarded from Westerns (hence its absence from the local library) and prepared it for publishing. But he was killed in S. Africa before he could complete the task; so a colleague picked it up on his behalf, and got the Reverend to put in his two cents on the general subject for the introduction.

This gives Crowley an opportunity to vent his own ideas on homosexuality from three different points-of-view, and while nobody today will read this book unaware of its true authorship, it was also intended to impart the credibility of three "respectable" men to this rare amalgam of oriental mysticism and hard-core gay sex. They speak of "sodomy" with absolute frankness as though it had never been considered socially tabu. The Reverend's essay is particularly explicit.

Then we get to the ghazals themselves. The first line reads: "As I placed the rigid pen of my thought within the inkstand of my imagination, I tasted the bliss of Allah..." Immediately you know what you're in for. He doesn't restrict himself to euphemisms for sex - rather sex is supposed to be the euphemism for the mystic "relations of Man with God," and is therefore treated in graphic detail. The text is littered with footnotes containing an amazing assortment of esoteric "odds and ends." There'a a table with the ninety-nine names of Allah, a clairvoyant's description of the 72 demons of the Goetia, a demonstration of magic squares - even an advertisement for "orchitic testicular substance - prepared from the testicals of the goat."

Crowley's major precedent here was Sir Richard Burton with his lush descriptions of Arabic homosexual practices in the footnotes to his translation of the "Arabian Nights," but of course The Beast takes it a hundred times as far in about a thousandth of the volume. Unique, elaborate to the point of rococo, vivid and contradictory and sure to offend practically everybody.