Oddlet: Aleister Crowley · 1 min read
Aug 12, 2026
The Beast of Netherwood
What does the wickedest man in the world order for breakfast when he's a sixty-nine-year-old pensioner in a Hastings boarding house?
By 1945 the wickedest man in the world was a sixty-nine-year-old pensioner in a tweed plus-four suit, taking a room at a vegetarian boarding house on the Ridge above Hastings. Aleister Crowley had captained Cambridge's chess team, signed his letters 666, co-led the first attempt on K2, and presided over Kanchenjunga in 1905 while four men died in an avalanche below and he drank tea in his tent. Mussolini had personally deported him. A High Court judge had said he had never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff.
He was now in Room 13 at Netherwood, asking for six teaspoons of sugar in his tea.
He took the heroin his doctor prescribed for asthma openly in the parlour. His preferred snack was tinned sardines under a shaken layer of curry powder. On sunny mornings he stood in the garden with his palms turned upward, performing yoga among the landlady's white rabbits, which he had nicknamed The Chrysanthemums. What the appetite of the Beast 666 was supposed to look like in retirement was, presumably, not this.
The last thing he wanted to do before he died was go into town and see The Wizard of Oz.
He never made it.
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- Wikipedia: Aleister Crowley — Comprehensive biographical entry covering birth/death dates and places, Cambridge education, Golden Dawn initiation, marriages, children, Cairo 1904, K2 1902 and Kangchenjunga 1905, Cefalù, Mussolini deportation 1923, John Bull 'wickedest man' label, Hastings death.
- Britannica: Aleister Crowley — Encyclopaedic confirmation of birth/death dates, description as British occultist and mountaineer, his self-styling as 'the Beast 666,' and his spelling of magick with a 'k'.
- Wikipedia: 1905 Kanchenjunga expedition — Details of the 1905 Kangchenjunga disaster: avalanche killing Alexis Pache and three porters, Reymond descending while Crowley stayed in his tent, the Alpine Club condemnation.
- Pelicanist: review of Antony Clayton's Netherwood: Last Resort of Aleister Crowley — Crowley's final Hastings years: arrival by ambulance 1 February 1945, death in Room 13 at 11am 1 December 1947, landlords Vernon and Kathleen 'Johnny' Symonds, diet (sardines with curry powder, 5–6 teaspoons of sugar in tea), heroin supplied by a local doctor and from London, chess at Hastings Chess Club.
- Hastings & St Leonards Chess Club: Edward Alexander Crowley
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