The Law is for All

Chapter I A Verse 51 53 persecution, idleness, self-indulgence, social stress, overpopula­ tion, sex-antagonism. They show with Poincare’s1 precision that Jesus and Paul struck at the heart of hell when they proclaimed marriage a scourge, and offered the testimony of John and Timo­ thy to support the plea of Plato on behalf of psederastic passion. Out of the Court there slunk Mark Antony, his toga to his face, one of the legion of lost souls that woman had withered; behind him groped blind Samson, disinherited Adam, feeling his way along the table where they had piled countless papyri writ with woes of kings and sages woman-wrecked, and many a map of towns and temples torn and trampled beneath the feet of Love, their ashes smouldering still, and smoky with song to witness how Astarte’s breath had kindled and consumed them. Extinguished empires owned that their doom was the device of Venus, her ven­ geance on virility. 1 [The mathematician Jules-Henri Poincare (1854-1912). Crowley read his works in the original French; they have since been translated.] By Paul sat Buddha smiling, Ananda’s arm about his neck, while Mohammed paced the floor impatiently between two war­ rior comrades, his belt bearing an iron key, a whip, and a sword, wherewith to limit women’s liberty, their love, their life, lest to his loss they lure him. The Beast is there also, aloof, attentive. He will not weigh the evidence in the balances of any particular kind of advantage. He will not admit any standard as adequate to assess the absolute. To him, the pettiest personal whimsy outweighs all wisdom, all phi­ losophy, all private profit and all public prudence. The sexual obol of the meanest is stamped with the signature of his own sov­ ereign soul, lawful and current coin no less than the gold talent of his neighbour. The derelict Moon has the same right to drift round Earth as Regulus to blaze in the heart of the Lion. Collision is the only crime in the cosmos. The Beast refuses therefore to assent to any argument as to the propriety of any fashion of formulating the soul in symbols of sex. A canon is no less deadly in love than in art or literature; its acceptance stifles style, and its enforcement extinguishes sincerity.