Confessions of Aleister Crowley

345 She was herself a writer of subtlety and distinction, but she filled me with fascination and horror. She gave me the idea of a devourer of human corpses, being herself already dead. Fierce and grotesque passion sprang up for the few days {557} necessary to give me the required inspiration for my climax. I could only heighten the intoxication of love by spurring it to insanity. This, in fact, is a final criticism of love itself as such, and justifies all that has been said about it by the Buddha --- and even by the Church. It justifies my own attitude that love must be resolutely torn from the throne in the human heart which it has usurped. One must not set one's affections on things below; one must find an answer to old age and death. "Only those are happy who have desired the unattainable." Love being the sublimation of the human ego, it follows that the ego itself must be surrendered. The limitations of life on earth are intolerable. The consciousness is unendurable for all those who have begun to understand the universe. Man is so infinitesimally inane, yet he feels himself capable of such colossal attainment. My twelve months of creative spurt reached a climax in February 1908, when I wrote the five books of The World's Tragedy in five consecutive days at Eastbourne. This is beyond all question the high- water mark of my imagination, my metrical fluency, my wealth of expression, and my power of bringing together the most incongruous ideas so as to enrich my matter to the utmost. At the same time, I succeeded in reaching the greatest height of spiritual enthusiasm, human indignation, and demoniac satire. I sound the gamut of every possibility of emotion from innocent faith and enthusiasm to experienced cynicism. {558} 62 Beside all these activities of my own, I came into a new world. My Operation of the Sacred Magick was not sterile. After returning from Morocco, the spirit came upon me and I wrote a number of books in a way which I hardly know how to describe. They were not taken from dictation like The Book of the Law nor were they my own composition. I cannot even call them automatic writing. I can only say that I was not wholly conscious at the time of what I was writing, and I felt that I had no right to "change" so much as the style of a letter. They were written with the utmost rapidity without pausing for thought for a single moment, and I have not presumed to revise them. Perhaps "Plenary inspiration" is the only adequate phrase, and this has become so discredited that people are loth to admit the possibility of such a thing. The prose of these books, the chief of which are Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente, The Book of the Heart girt with the Serpent, and Libri vel Lapidis Lazuli, is wholly different from anything that I have written myself. It is characterized by a sustained sublimity of which I am totally incapable and it overrides all the intellectual objections which I should myself have raised. It does not admit the need to explain itself to anyone, even to me. I cannot doubt that these books are the work of an intelligence independent of my own. The former describes the relation of the adept with his Holy Guardian Angel; the latter is "The voluntary emancipation of a certain adept from his adeptship ... the birth words of a Master of the Temple." Even this did not exhaust my creative energy. As in Cairo in 1902 I had started the "Lover's Alphabet", on the ground that the most primitive kind of lyrics or odes was in some way the most appealing and immortal, so I decided to write a series of hymns to the Blessed Virgin Mary in the simplest possible style. I must not be thought exactly insincere, though I had certainly no shadow of belief in any of the Christian dogmas, least of all in this adaptation and conglomeration of Isis, Semele, Astarte, Cybele, Freya, and so many others; I simply tried to see the world through the eyes of a devout Catholic, very much as I had done with the decadent poet of White Stains, the Persian mystic of the Bagh-i-Muattar, and so on. I was, in fact, adopting another alias --- in the widest sense of the word.