The Law is for All

Chapter I A Verses 62—63 85 whose function is to bring the Soul to the realization of its own glory: Dionysus, Aphrodite, Apollo—Wine, Woman, and Song. The ancients, both in the highest civilizations, as in Greece and Egypt, and in the most primitive savagery, as among the Buriats and the Papuans, were well aware of this, and made their reli­ gious ceremonies orgia, “works.” Puritan foulness, failing to understand what was happening, degraded the word “orgies” to mean debauches. It is the old story of the Fox who lost his tail. If you cannot do anything, call it impossible; or, if that be evidently absurd, call it wicked! It is critics who deny poetry, people without capacity for Ecstasy and Will who call Mysticism moonshine and Magick delusion. It is manless old cats, geldings, and psychopaths, who pretend to detest Love, and persecute Free Women and Free Men. Verbotenism has gone so far in certain slave-communities that the use of wine is actually prohibited by law!! I wish here to emphasize that the Law of Thelema definitely enjoins us, as a necessary act of religion, to “drink sweet wines and wines that foam.” Any free man or woman who resides in any community where this is verboten has a choice between two duties: insurrection and emigration. The furtive disregard of Restriction is not Freedom. It tends to make men slaves and hypocrites, and to destroy respect for Law. Have no fear: two years after Vodka was verboten, Russia, which had endured a thousand lesser tyrannies with patience, rose in Revolution. Religious ecstasy is necessary to man’s soul. Where this is attained by mystical practices, directly, as it should be, people need no substitutes. Thus the Hindus remain contentedly sober, and care nothing for the series of Invaders who have occupied their country from time to time and governed them. But where the only means of obtaining this ecstasy, or a simulacrum of it, known to the people, is alcohol, they must have alcohol. Deprive them of wine, or beer, or whatever their natural drink may be, and they replace it by morphia, cocaine, or something easier to conceal, and to take without detection.