Confessions of Aleister Crowley

342 say nothing of his pride of race. It has been said that every nation has the government which it deserves. I would add, the type of Jew which it deserves. His imagination and sensitiveness make him the touchstone of his surroundings. There is a saying in North Africa that the Moor is a lion, the Algerian a deer and the Tunisian a hare. When subsequent journeys to North Africa enabled me to make the comparison, I found it strikingly true. The Moors have been called the Irish of of Islam, as the Burmese the Irish of Asia. The former metaphor is admirable. There is an independence, a pride, a devil-may-careishness and a bonhomie which reminds one strongly of the more boisterous type of Irish. The Burmese rather resemble the quiet, religious type. The moor is always on the look out for a lark. I found myself engaged in all sorts of schoolboy escapades where hard knocks and Rabelaisian practical jokes gave birth to huge and hearty laughter. Mortal enmities and murderous assaults did not in the least interfere with the jolly friendship of the antagonist. I was very sorry when we had to return to England. We took Granada on our way. I found the Alhambra entirely familiar, although I had never been there before. It was not a case of the sens du déjŕ vu, which is a passing perception. I went from one court to another as if I had lived there before; I knew what I was coming to so accurately that I could hardly doubt that I had really lived there at one time or another. I remembered nothing of the {553} circumstances; except that it must have been my habit to go to the western tower and look over the valley, the town somnolent at the foot of the hill, and the distant sierra, while the sun sank superbly sad among clouds which seemed to have borrowed their softness and brilliance from swansdown. Coke and I arranged to see the dancing of the gypsies who lived in the caves outside the city, and I made a somewhat elaborate study of the subject. The principal dances are the tango, which is quite different to that with which we have become familiar; the fandango, the civilla gitana; the soleario gitana, the cachusa gitana, the morongo, the sirrillas, the baile de la flor, the baile de la bosca and the baile de la bona. It is a mistake to say, brutally, as science is inclined to do, that all dancing symbolized passion. I am always annoyed with research that stops half way. That is the great error of Freud. When he says, quite correctly, that dreams are phantasms of suppressed sexual desire, the question remains, of what is sexual desire the phantasm? To me it seems no more than one of the ways of expressing the formula of creation. I regard chemical action as identical. A man and a woman unite; and the result is a child, which is totally different from them though formed of their elements. Just so the combination of hydrogen and chlorine produces hydrochloric acid. They are gases; at ordinary temperature it is a liquid. None of its chemical and physical reactions is identical with those of its elements. The phenomena are analogous in very many ways, but the essence of their similarity is in the Cabbalistic formula Yod, Hé, Vau. I have successfully eliminated the danger of obsession by sexual ideas in this way: I refuse to admit that it is the fundamental truth. Science in failing to follow me so far has destroyed the idea of religion and the claim of mankind to be essentially different from other mammalia. The demonstration of anthropologists that all religious rites are celebrations of the reproductive energy of nature is irrefutable; but I, accepting this, can still maintain that these rites are wholly spiritual. Their form is only sexual because the phenomena of reproduction are the most universally understood and pungently appreciated of all. I believe that when this position is generally accepted, mankind will be able to go back with a good conscience to ceremonial worship. I have myself constructed numerous ceremonies where it is frankly admitted that religious enthusiasm is primarily sexual in character. I have merely refused to stop there. I have insisted that sexual excitement is merely a degraded form of divine ecstasy. I have thus harnessed the wild horses of human passion to the chariot of the Spiritual Sun. I have given these horses wings that mankind may no longer travel painfully upon the