William Buehler Seabrook

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William Buehler Seabrook (born February 22, 1884 in Westminster , Maryland , † September 20, 1945 in Rhinebeck , New York ) was an American writer , occultist , globetrotter and journalist . Stimulated by his numerous travels, he dealt with magical cults of the so-called " primitive peoples ", paranormal phenomena, magic , Satanism and Voodoo and published numerous works with an ethnological background. Seabrook belongs to the so-called Lost Generation .

Recording by Robert H. Davis (1931)

Life

Seabrook began his career as a reporter for the Augusta Chronicle in Augusta , Georgia . During the First World War , he served in the French Army in 1915 . In the gas war during the First World War , he suffered gas poisoning near Verdun . He was awarded the Croix de guerre for his services .

After the war he first became a reporter for the New York Times and began to travel. In addition to his own writing activities, he has written articles for Cosmopolitan , Reader's Digest and Vanity Fair .

During a trip through West Africa , he joined the Gueré people for a time . It was there that his interest in cannibalism began . As he wrote in his travelogue Jungle Ways , published in 1931, he had the opportunity there to “try a stew with rice and a sizeable rump steak or even a small piece of sirloin.” Seabrook said it was a recently killed man who was not murdered. “It was like good veal, not too young, but not beef either. It wasn't like any other meat I'd eaten before. It was almost as good as veal, so I don't think a person with an ordinary palate could tell it from veal. It was tender, good meat with no such characteristic taste as goat, game or pork, for example ... "

Around 1920 he met the occultist Aleister Crowley know. Crowley spent a week at Seabrook's farm. Seabrook later wrote the experience down in the book Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today .

In 1924 Seabrook traveled the Arab world . He lived with Bedouins and Kurdish Yazidis and became acquainted with dervishes and devil worshipers . In 1927 he published the successful travelogue Adventures in Arabia: among the Bedouins, Druses, Whirling Dervishes and Yezidee Devil Worshipers . He then traveled to Haiti , where he dealt with voodoo and the cult des morts (worship of the dead, cf. Baron Samedi ). He described his experiences in Magic Island , published in 1929 .

Seabrook spent his life engaging in occult practices, most of which he had come to know in the colonized countries. He later came to the conclusion that he had not seen anything that could not be explained by rational scientific means. He presented his theories in 1940 in the work Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today , which deals with cults, black and white magic, ritual magic , werewolves , satanism , vampirism (the latter shown, among other things, in the case of Elisabeth Báthory ).

Because of his acute alcoholism , Seabrook was admitted to the Bloomingdale Mental Hospital in Westchester County for treatment in December 1933 at his own request with the help of friends . He stayed there until the following July. In 1935 in the book Asylum , he described his experiences as another trip to a foreign country. Asylum became a bestseller. In the foreword, Seabrook noted, just to be on the safe side, that this was not fiction or embellishment.

After returning from another trip to Africa, he married the American writer Marjorie Muir Worthington (1900–1976) in France in 1935. The marriage ended in divorce in 1941 due to Seabrook's alcoholism and predilection for sadistic practices . The photographer Man Ray , who was friends with Seabrook, staged the surrealist photo series Les fantasies de Monsieur Seabrook in 1930 as an allusion to his sexual preferences.

William Seabrook committed suicide with a drug overdose on September 20, 1945 in Rhinebeck, New York . The writer was first married to Katherine Pauline Edmondson from 1912 to 1934. After his divorce from Marjorie Worthington, he married Constance Kuhr in May 1942, with whom he had a son, William.

Works

  • 1917: Diary of Section VIII
  • 1927: Adventures in Arabia
  • 1929: The Magic Island
  • 1930: Jungle Ways
  • 1933: Air Adventure
  • 1934: The White Monk of Timbuctoo
  • 1935: Asylum
  • 1938: These Foreigners: Americans All
  • 1940: Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today ; Reprinted by Sphere Books Ltd, London 1970, ISBN 0-7221-7690-2 .
  • 1941: Doctor Wood: Modern Wizard of the Laboratory
  • 1942: No Hiding Place: An Autobiography

Short stories

  • 1921: Wow

German translations

  • Mysterious Haiti. Riddles and symbols of the Vodu cult . Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-88221-333-7
  • Let the bird catcher come. Adventure of a Drinker . Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-88221-813-4

literature

  • Marjorie Muir Worthington: The Strange World of Willie Seabrook . Harcourt, Brace & World, New York 1966

Individual evidence

  1. ^ William Bueller Seabrook: Jungle Ways George G. Harrap and Company, London, Bombay, Sydney 1931
  2. ↑ Guide to the Marjorie Worthington Papers 1931-1976 . Retrieved September 17, 2009 (English)
  3. ↑ Verena Krieger: Metamorphoses of love: art studies on eros and gender in surrealism . LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2006 ISBN 3-8258-9936-5 , p. 43 excerpt from Google Books
  4. ^ Gary Don Rhodes: White zombie: anatomy of a horror film . McFarland, 2001, ISBN 0-7864-0988-6 , p. 288 excerpt from Google Books

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Seabrook, William Buehler
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer, occultist, globetrotter and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH February 22, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Westminster, Maryland
DATE OF DEATH September 20, 1945
Place of death Rhinebeck