No, I'm the most evilist man in the world!

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the infamous "black magician" was once called "the most evil man in the world."  This was in the mid to late 1930s.  This title he took to heart and he called himself "The Beast."

Yeah, right... most evil man in the world.  He's living in the era of Hitler and Stalin and Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army and Crowley's the most evil man in the world?!?  I don't think so!  I think you're going to have to do more than sacrifice a few chickens to compete with, well, any of the evil guys from that era.  

Even General LeMay, who had a pathological fixation on firebombing Japanese civilians, a fixation so bad that Admiral Nimitz had to go to President Truman to try and get at least a handful of LeMay's B-29 bombers to actually be used to attack real strategic targets like airfields, ports, shipping and factories instead of slaughtering Japanese population centers, "Mad Bomber" LeMay was far worse than anything Crowley could magick up.   And Crowley is the most evil man in the world of this era?

Now, Aleister Crowley is famous and has quite a following even nowadays.  I've read quite a bit about him due to my interest in the occult and ritual magic.  He was indeed a rather unsavory man.  He abused the women in his life (his wives and "scarlet women").  He was a drug addict.  He was most certainly not nice to most the so-called friends in his life.  He died alone and flat broke in 1947.  Crowley squandered away a huge life savings on weird and bizarre attempts to make his own cult compound and such.  

But as far as we know, he never killed anyone.  Well, some might argue that one of his 'scarlet women' may have been driven to suicide but this hardly stacks up to Hitler's einsatzgruppen.  Crowley was also bi-sexual (although he claimed that his homosexual liaisons were purely for magickal purposes).  I don't know completely what his views on homosexuality were but from what I read, his only opinion was that being homosexual was dangerous because of what happened to poor old Oscar Wilde.  Hardly the raving anti-homosexual ravings that you see in people from this era, especially from the so-called "most evil man in the world."

I haven't read too many of Crowley's personal writings, but from what I've seen, he's a far cry from H.P. Lovecraft.  Oh yeah, Lovecraftians to this day go on and on about how he was simply a man of his times with beliefs everyone had.  But the man can't go more than a few pages without reminding you of how anyone not Anglo-Saxon isn't human.  Not to mention his famous poem on the creation of black people (using the N world).   As for the Jews, for Lovecraft, they were worse than Cthulu.

As I said just now, Crowley was no prize.  He was vain, self-centered, abusive, nasty, bad-tempered, and all manner of things along those lines.  But the most evil man in the world in the early nineteenth century through to the year of his death?  Not even close!