The Sword of Song

The Sword of Song was a major breakthrough for Crowley as it was the first to refer to himself as "The Beast" without any reticence as regards his critics, and the cover daringly had "Aleister Crowley = 666" written in Hebrew. It was basically a work based on Robert Browning's Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day and itself contained two long, likewise-colloquial poems called "Ascension Day" and "Pentacoste", both quite anarchic and unreadable because of the constant use of neologisms, disenjambment and punctuation, the poems really set way by means of hundreds of footnotes for collected prose witticisms in the back (even the line-numbering, going up naturally in five, cheekily missed "665" for "666"). The essays and poems in the back include "William Shakespeare", "Pansil", "After Agnosticism", "Preface to Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis", "Summa Spes" and "The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magick" (the introduction also to his edition of The Goetia).