The Creole word zombi had appeared in US writing since the 1880s, but Seabrook took the credit for Americanising the term: Chapter 13 was entitled ‘Dead Men Working in Cane Fields’. In 1929, he published The Magic Island, an account of a trip to Haiti in which he pursued his usual interests: initiation into ‘native’ rituals, drinking blood, feeling the authentic power of the savage gods. Back in Paris, he bribed the morgue to give him a limb from a recent corpse, which he cooked and ate: not bad, he reported, a bit like veal. (He may have disdained magic in the West, but he was convinced that witchcraft exercised power in ‘savage’ societies.) He failed, blaming the French colonial administration for policing the natives too obsessively. In 1931, he went to the French colonies in West Africa to join a ‘cannibal’ cult. In 1924, Seabrook travelled to the Middle East and wrote Adventures in Arabia. At the start of the Second World War, Seabrook was the subject of a photo-story in Life magazine when he hosted a magical ceremony to issue a hex on Hitler. London, he said, ‘houses more strange cults, secret societies, devil’s altars, professional “Sorcerers” and charlatans than any other metropolitan area on Earth.’ He repeated stories of sympathetic magic and spoke of attending black masses in London (‘rather a bore unless one gets a kick out of blasphemy’). Seabrook’s book on witchcraft was cast in the rhetoric of the sceptical researcher, looking for proof in an open spirit of inquiry but bewildered at the extent of credulity. They communicated solely by various inflections of the magic word ‘Wow’. In 1919, Crowley visited Seabrook for a week of ritual experiment at his farm in upstate New York. Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today (1942) included an account of his friendship with Aleister Crowley. Intimately connected with his sadomasochism was a lifelong interest in the occult. Seabrook’s second wife, the novelist Marjorie Worthington, later discussed his kinks in The Strange World of Willie Seabrook. He paid Man Ray to photograph Lee Miller in masochistic poses. In No Hiding Place (1942) he psychoanalysed his penchant for ‘putting chains on ladies’. He published photographs in the Surrealist journal Documents, edited by Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, and a short story or two, but was mainly known for his self-mythologising travel books and disarming memoirs. Seabrook, who committed suicide in 1945, is probably most famous now for introducing the zombie to American popular culture in 1929, but he was also a bestselling journalist, travel writer, pulp anthropologist, Great War veteran, primitivist, sadomasochist, occultist, and fellow traveller among the Modernists in New York, London and Paris. Dover Press has reissued William Seabrook’s 1934 memoir Asylum, an account of his self-committal to a mental hospital in an attempt to cure his chronic alcoholism.
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