Who is White Stains?
White Stains is a poetic work, its title based on male masturbation, written by English author and occultist Aleister Crowley under the pseudonym "George Archibald Bishop". It was published in 1898 by Leonard Smithers in Amsterdam, Netherlands. White Stains contains various poems in both English and French which can also be regarded as individual works. The majority of these poems are overtly sexual in content. Crowley claimed that he had written White Stains for the purpose of rewriting Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis in a lyrical form. As with other works of Crowley, obscenity is celebrated. David Bowie references "white stains" in his song Station to Station.
