Public Domain Review has posted a shortened version of OTO Cabinet member David Tibet’s introductory essay to his new anthology of Eric, Count Stenbock’s writing, Of Kings And Things, published by Strange Attractor. The essay begins:
“In his lurid and excitable The Magical World of Aleister Crowley (1977), the popular historian of magic Francis King wrote of Count Eric Stanislaus Stenbock that
[he] made an attempt to understand his own homosexuality in terms of traditional occultism, eventually coming to view his condition as an aspect of vampirism and lycanthropy… torn between Catholicism and diabolism… he died, deluded that a huge doll was his son and heir, in 1895.
“This fantastical portrait of a decadent and his doom is as much as even the most dedicated enthusiast of baroque fiction might have known at that time about Stenbock, a deeply mysterious writer described by W. B. Yeats, in his anthology The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, as a ‘scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men’”.
Read the entire essay here: https://publicdomainreview.org/2018/09/12/eric-count-stenbock-a-catch-of-a-ghost/.
Purchase the book here, if you’re located in the UK http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/of-kings-and-things/,
and if you’re located in the U.S. here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/kings-and-things.
