Thelema ScholarTHE ALEISTER CROWLEY COLLECTION
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Page 98 of 103
1907 · PDF PAGE 229

Collected Works (Vol. III)

…mands no greater sacrifice than that of an hour’s leisure in the week, and even offers to repay that with social con- sideration for the old, and opportunities of flirtation for the young. The word ‘‘dear”? has two senses, and these two are one. Pressing the ‘‘ out-of-doors” argument, as we may call it, I will challenge each of my readers to a simple experiment. Go out one night toa distant and lonely heath, if no mountain summit is available: then at midnight repeat the Lord’s Prayer, or any invocation with which you happen to be familiar, or …

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1929 · PDF PAGE 577

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

…s had anticipated the success of the movement to follow naturally upon the forthcoming election. Mussolini would not accept power, they told me, even if it were offered. He had too much sense. I was consequently amazed to hear of the coup d'état. Rome was wild with enthusiasm. The Fascisti swarmed all over the city. I thought their behaviour admirable. They policed the towns and suppressed any attempted breach of the peace with the utmost efficiency; but for all that my first doubts disturbed my pleasure in the victory. I thought Mussolini was …

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1929 · PDF PAGE 86

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

…e absence of thunderstorms and then proceeded to tie up the watchmen. He was as thoroughly anglicized as possible. The chief mark of the old Adam was a tendency to professional dogmatism. When he felt he was right, he was almost offensively right; and on any point which seemed to him settled, the coefficient of his mental elasticity was zero. He could not imagine the interference of broad principles with the detailed results of research. The phrase "general principles" enraged him. He insisted on each case being analysed by itself as it arose. …

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1929 · PDF PAGE 331

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

331 In 1903, too, I wrote The Soldier and the Hunchback, ! and ? and The Psychology of Hashish. The one goes to the roots of scepticism and mysticism, and represents them as alternative moods, neither valued in itself yet each a complete answer to its predecessor. I show that by perseverance in transcending each in turn, the original crude distinction between affirmation and negation tends to disappear; the supreme doubt is more positive than the more limited assertion. "The Psychology of Hashish" pleases me more every time I read it. It contai…

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1929 · PDF PAGE 339

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

… form, the tingling mixture of races and religions meant nothing {549} to him. Beauty was literally splashed over life like a bucket of cold water over an athlete. Instead of exhilarating him, he shivered and moaned. He kept on groaning like a wounded animal: I want my wife! I want my children! Of course, what he really wanted was cocaine, and that was just the thing I did not want him to have. I had managed to get rid of his persecution mania for the time being. Whenever he noticed his mother flying past the moon on her broomstick, he would pe…

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1929 · PDF PAGE 345

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

…n 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 twelv…

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1929 · PDF PAGE 73

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

… an illdefined longing for spiritual attainment. The background is vividly coloured by observation and experience. The atmosphere of the old streets of Amsterdam, of the colleges of Cambridge and of the mountains, lakes, forests and rivers, among which I wandered solitary, is evident in every stanza. The influence of my reading is almost negligible. The "wish- phantasm" of the book is principally that of a wise and holy man living in a lonely tower, master of the secrets of nature. I had little conscious aspiration to that ideal. In practice, I…

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1929 · PDF PAGE 152

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

…nerally speaking, good deeds are always done with some such objects. A rich woman who is childless will plaster an existing dagoba with gold leaf, or build a new one, in the hope of becoming fruitful. The method by which this Magick is supposed to operate is somewhat obscure. There is no question of propitiating an offended deity in canonical Buddhism; but in point of fact, it is probable that the custom is a survival of pre-Buddhistic fetishism. There are innumerable traces of the old demonology in the practical life of the people. Buddhism di…

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1929 · PDF PAGE 505

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

… of the symbolic character of the ordeal as its beginning. I took tea with the Cat at her club the next afternoon. We lost no time. She told me --- a string of lies --- of her loveless marriage with an old satyr who had snatched her almost from the cradle. She was about to divorce him; and having loved me at first sight, not sensually, but as my spiritual sister, we could be married quite soon. We sealed the sacrament with a kiss; and there was no reason why, in the ordinary course of events, we should not have proceeded to an immediate liaison…

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1929 · PDF PAGE 497

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

… the rocks. We brought the provisions across from the southern inlet and made breakfast. We patted our bellies, contemplated life and behold it was very good. {782} 79 My summer was uneventful. Such adventures as I had were pleasant variations from routine. I must tell one tale from its interest to amateurs of coincidence and philosophers whose favourite subject of meditation is "What a small world we live in!" To ascend the Hudson in a sailing canoe is not so simple as it sounds. No great effort is required to come to grief. It had taken me al…

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1929 · PDF PAGE 328

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

…nd go to Bournemouth. I was now thoroughly prepared to take up my Work of initiating mankind, but I was still determined to do it on the old lines. I had no books of reference at Bournemouth, and it struck me that it would be very convenient if I possessed a volume giving all the correspondences of the Cabbala in a compact form. I spent a week in writing this down from memory and the result is Liber 777. (It is to be noticed that there is no reference to the Cairo working anywhere in this book.) In the month of December the Secret Chiefs formal…

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1929 · PDF PAGE 456

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

…ick. During the operation I had a bad attack of influenza, which settled down to very severe bronchitis. I was visited one evening by an old friend of mine and her young man, who very kindly and sensibly suggested that I should find relief if I smoked a few pipes of opium. They accordingly brought the apparatus from their apartment and we began. (Opium, by the way, is sacred to Jupiter, and to Chesed, Mercy, as being sovereign against pain, and also as enabling the soul to free itself from its gross integument and realize its majesty.) My bronc…

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1929 · PDF PAGE 40

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

…mbing mountains. But at least there was no Christianity! and what morality there was was rather manly than otherwise. However, I was now old enough to match myself against my private tutors and found greater freedom with them than at school. I decided to leave and drew such a picture of the abominations which went on, though I knew nothing about them or even what they were, that my mother refused to let me go back. I told her, she once reminded me, that "if Mr. Huntingdon (the housemaster) knew what was going on in the house, it would break his…

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1929 · PDF PAGE 189

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

…y bad previously to make such an entry; for my diary, whatever its other defects, is a supreme model of the laconic style. Another chit told us that Pfannl was worse. The doctor went up to Camp 12 to look after him. Nemesis had come to town. Athletic training, as understood by athletes, is a violation of the first principles of nature. Wilkie Collins, in Man and Wife, had told me about it. A little old woman is provoked to personal conflict by the Pride of England and it ends by his collapsing. The same thing had happened to Pfannl. They had th…

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1904 · PDF PAGE 120

The Sword of Song

… y ears ago: “Therefore, O Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves. Be ye a refuge to yourselves. Betake y ourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lam p. Hold fas t as a refugee to the truth. Look not for refuge to any one be- sides y ourselves.” (M ahaparanibbana S utta, ii. 33.) And to such seekers only does the Buddha promise “the very topmost Height”— if only they are “anxious to learn.” This is the corner-stone of Buddhism; can scien- tific men deny their assent to these words when they look back on the history of Thought …

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1929 · PDF PAGE 176

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

…e must call, however one may hate to do so, the vital principle in food. We had already found on Iztaccihuatl that canned food ten years old failed to nourish anything like as well as stuff recently tinned. We derived much more energy from fresh-killed mutton, cooked before rigor mortis had set in, than from ordinary butcher's meat. I ultimately learnt that I could make myself actually drunk on half a dozen oysters chewed in the manner of the yogis. One of the practices of Hatha Yoga consists in learning to reverse the peristaltic action of the…

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1929 · PDF PAGE 70

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

…e frozen snow to the little pass which leads down to the valley. We had hardly crossed it when we met a rescue party sent up by the dear old hotel keeper, Anzevui, who had a curious personal affection for me as the bad boy of the valley who was always making things interesting. Our descent had been watched through glasses; and they had come to the conclusion that we must have met with an accident, because our route down the mountain was an original variation of the regular way and supposed to be impossible. We had, in fact, met with one exceedi…

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1929 · PDF PAGE 175

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

… better to be forty than thirty. Eckenstein at forty-three, despite his congenital tendency to respiratory troubles, was by no means too old; and Knowles, twenty years younger, was emphatically too young. Guillarmod, at thirty-three, and Wessley, at thirty-one suffered less than any of us. In Wessely's case this was mostly because he had no imagination enough to be ill. None of us had ever seen such a perfect pig. He was very greedy and {299} 1. WEH Note: 100.7 Degrees F. very myopic. In order to eat, he would bend his head over his plate and, …

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1929 · PDF PAGE 229

Confessions of Aleister Crowley

…. It dawned slowly upon my mind that there must be something {382} wrong with my cartridges. When we got to camp, I put up the lid of an old box and fired at it from ten yards, in order to test the penetration of the shot. The pellets did not mark the board; they bounced back and hit me in the face. I reserved my remarks from my return to Colombo. This event took place on the sixteenth of January. My headman had swindled me outrageously; but there was no remedy. There is no remedy for anything in Ceylon. The whole island is an infamy. It is imp…

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1907 · PDF PAGE 252

Collected Works (Vol. III)

…256 To sea! Tosea! The ship is trim, iii. 5 Towards the mountains and the night, i. 89 To what God should he appeal? ii. 226 Truth, like old Gaul, is split in three, iii. 3 Turn back from safety: in my love ::bide, i. 133 ‘“‘ Truth, that’s the gold!” ii. 144 "Twas dark when church was out ! iii, 60 Twilight is over, i. 53 ULYSSES ’scaped the sorceries of that queen, 1, 121 Under the stars the die was cast to win, iii. 65 Under the summer leaves, ii. 7 Unity uttermost showed, iii, 209 Unto what likeness shall I liken thee, i. 114 Unwilling as I …

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