Confessions of Aleister Crowley

330 This poem has everywhere been recognized as overwhelming. E. S. P. Haynes told me that it was the most powerful that he had ever read, and Frank Harris wrote from what he thought was his death bed, "In Rosa Decidua there is more" ("scil". than in some other poem of which he has been writing) "a despairing view of life --- 'beats of a senseless drum --- all's filth'. To 'My tongue is palsied ... exquisite agony.' Astounding realism raised to art by perfect artistry." We went on living together, more or less; but her condition became rapidly worse and in the autumn of 1911 she had to be put in an asylum, suffering from alcoholic dementia. Another seed of the past began to bear fruit at this time. I had never attempted to transmit my occult knowledge as such. I had never attempted to write prose, as such, apart from short accounts of my climbs, with the exception of the preface to White Stains (Collected Works, vol. II, pp. 195- 8). Berashith was my first serious attempt at an essay. That and "Science and Buddhism" were followed by a jeu d'esprit on Shakespeare (Collected Works, vol. II, pp. 185-90); "Pansil" (vol. II, pp. 192-4); "After Agnosticism" (vol. II, pp. 206-8); "Ambrosii Magi Hortus Rosarum" (vol II, pp. 212-24); "The Three Characteristics" (vol. II, pp. 225-32; "The Excluded Middle" (vol. II, pp. 262-6); "Time" (vol. II, pp. 267-82); "The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic" (vol. II, pp. 203-4); "Qabalistic Dogma" (vol. I, pp. 265-6); the introduction to Alice, An Adultery (vol. II, pp. 58-61). Some of the ghazals of the Bagh-i-Muattar are in prose, as well as the preliminary matter; and there is Eleusis (vol. III, pp. 219-30). Most of these were written from a very curious point of view. It was not exactly that I had my tongue in my cheek, but I took a curious pleasure in expressing serious opinions in a fantastic form. I had an instinctive feeling against prose; I had not appreciated its possibilities. Its apparent lack of form seemed to me to stamp it as an essentially inferior means of expression. I wrote it, therefore, in a rather shamefaced spirit. I deliberately introduced bad jokes to show that I did not take myself seriously; whereas the truth was I was simply nervous about my achievement, just as a man afraid to disgrace {536} himself as a boxer might pretend that the bout was not in earnest. My prose is consequently marred by absolutely stupid blasphemies against itself. I now began to see that this was schoolboyish bashfulness, and to feel my responsibility as an exponent of the hidden knowledge, to treat my prose as reverently as my verse, and (consequently) to produce masterpieces of learning and wit. The "Dedication and Counter-Dedication" of Knox Om Pax is wholly admirable and it rises to a delightful satirical climax of four stanzas on the "empty- headed Athenians". "The Wake World" is a sublime description of the Path of the Wise, rendered picturesque by the use of the symbols of the Taro, and charming by its personification of the soul as a maiden. "My name is Lola, because I am the Key of Delights, and the other children in my dream call me Lola Daydream." "Ali Sloper; or the Forty Liars" shows traces of my old vulgarity. The dramatis personae contain a lot of bad puns and personal gibes, but the dialogue shows decided improvement; and the "Essay on Truth" is both acute and witty, with few blemishes. "Thien Tao" gives my solution of the main ethical and philosophical problems of humanity with a description of the general method of emancipating oneself from the obsession of one's own ideas, while there are passages of remarkable eloquence. The last essay in Knonx Om Pax, "The Stone of the Philosophers which is hidden in Abiegnus, the Rosicrucian Mountain of Initiation", is really beyond praise. Its genesis is interesting. I had written at odd times, but mostly during my travels with the Earl of Tankerville, a number of odd lyrics. The idea came to me that I might enhance their value by setting them in prose. I therefore wrote a symposium of a poet, a traveller, a philosophical globetrotter, an adept, a classical scholar and a doctor. They are made to converse about the chronic calamity of society, and the poems (ostensibly written by one or other of the men) carry on the thought. The result is, in reality, a new form of art; and I certainly assisted the lyrics by giving them appropriate springboards.