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.