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This volume brings together the uncollected short fiction of the poet, writer and religious philosopher Aleister Crowley. Crowley was a successful critic, editor and author of fiction from 1908 to 1922, and his short stories are long overdue for discovery. Of the forty-nine stories in the present volume, only thirty were published in his lifetime. Most of the rest appear here for the first time. Like their author, Crowley's stories are fun, smart, witty, thought-provoking and sometimes unsettling. They are set in places he had lived and knew well: Belle Epoque Paris, Edwardian London, pre-revolutionary Russia and America during the first World War.

The title story 'The Drug' stands as one of the first - if not the first - accounts of a psychedelic experience. His 'Black and Silver' is a knowing early noir discovery that anticipates an entire genre. 'Atlantis' is a masterpiece of occult fantasy, a dark satire that can stand with Samuel Butler's Erewhon. Frank Harris considered 'The Testament of Magdalen Blair' the most terrifying tale ever written. Extensive editorial end-notes give full details about the stories.

Other Stories include:

• The Three Characteristics
• The Wake World
• T'ien Tao
• The Stone of the Philosophers
• Cancer
• At the Fork of the Roads
• The Dream Circean
• Illusion d'Amoureux
• The Soul-Hunter
• The Daughter of the Horseleech
• The Violinist
• The Vixen
• The Ordeal of Ida Pendragon
• Apollo Bestows the Violin
• Across the Gulf
• His Secret Sin
• The Woodcutter
• Proffessor Zircon
• The Vitriol-Thrower
• The Testament of Magdalen Blair
• Ercildoune
• The Stratagem
• Lieutnant Finn's Promotion
• The Chute
• A Death of the Impasse de l'Enfant Jésus
• Atlantis
• The Mysterious Malady
• The Bald Man
• Black and Silver
• The Humour of Pauline Pepper
• A Nativity
• Every Precaution
• God's Journey
• The Colour of My Eyes
• Dedit!
• Colonel Pacton's Brother
• The Vampire of Vespuccia
• As You Were!
• Only a Dog
• The Virgin
• A Masque
• The Es

This volume brings together two series of short fiction by the poet, writer and religious philosopher Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). It includes the first complete publication of Simple Simon, the detective series featuring Crowley's most memorable fictional creation, the mystic-magician-philosopher-psychoanalyst-detective Simon Iff. The idealised Crowley in old age, Simon Iff is wise, knowing and unfailingly humorous as he applied psychoanalysis, Taoism and his own religious philosophy of Thelema to divine the depths of human nature and solve a wide array of crimes and mysteries. The six Scrutinies of Simon Iff stories are set in France and England, anchored by Iff's beloved Hemlock Club. The twelve Simon Iff in America stories afford Crowley's penetrating insights into America as he found it during his residence from 1914 to 1919. His three Simon Iff Abroad stories take the reader to tribal North Africa, inaccessible Central Africa and to the high seas. The two Simon Iff Psychoanalyst stories were among the earliest tales to use the new science of psychoanalysis to solve mysteries. Also included is Crowley's other major short fiction series, the eight stories of his legendary Golden Twigs, which were inspired by Sir J.G. Frazer's encyclopedic study of myth and religion in history, The Golden Bough.

This collection is a companion volume to Crowley's previously uncollected short stories, The Drug and Other Stories, also published by Wordsworth. Extensive editorial end-notes give full details about the stories.

Simon Iff Stories:

• The Big Game
• The Artistic Temperament
• Outside the Bank's Routine
• The Conduct of John Briggs
• Not Good Enough
• Ineligible
• What's in a Name?
• A Sense of Incongruity
• The Ox and the Wheel
• An Old Head on Young Shoulders
• The Pasquaney Puzzle
• The Monkey and the Buzz-Saw
• A Dangerous Safe Trick
• The Bitter Bit
• Nebuchadnezzar
• Suffer the Little Children
• Who Gets the Diamonds?
• The Natural Thing to Do
• Desert Justice
• In the Swamp
• The Haunted Sea-Captain
• Psychic Compensation
• Sterilised Stephen

Golden Twigs

• The King of the Wood
• The Stone of Cybele
• The Oracle of the Corycian Cave
• The Burning of Melcarth
• The Hearth
• The Old of the Peepul-Tree
• The Mass of Saint Sécaire
• The God of Ibreez