The Law is for All

Chapter I * Verse 52 73 guzzling and the swilling of the savage as he crams his enemy’s raw liver into his mouth, or tilts the bottle of trade gin, and gulps. Because his meal is loathly, must we insist that any methods but his are criminal? How did we come to Laperouse and Nichols1 from the cannibal’s cauldron unless by critical care and vigorous research? 1 [Two restauranteurs who founded, respectively, Lapérouse in Paris and the Café Royal in London.] The act of Love, to the bourgeois, is a physical relief like defal­ cation, and a moral relief from the strain of the drill of decency; a joyous relapse into the brute he has to pretend he despises. It is a drunkenness which drugs his shame of himself, yet leaves him deeper in disgust. It is an unclean gesture, hideous and grotesque. It is not his own act, but forced on him by a giant who holds him helpless; he is half madman, half automaton when he performs it. It is a gawky stumbling across a black foul bog, oozing a thou­ sand dangers. It threatens him with death, disease, disaster in all manner of forms. He pays the coward’s price of fear and loathing when pedlar Sex holds out his Rat-Poison in the lead-paper wrap­ ping he takes for silver; and pays again with vomiting and with colic when he has gulped it in his greed. All this he knows, only too well; he is right, by his own lights, to loathe and fear the act, to hide it from his eyes, to swear he knows it not. With tawdry rags of sentiment, sacksful of greasy clouts, he swathes the corpse of Love, and, smirking, sputters that Love had never a naked limb; then as the brute in him stirs sleep­ ily, he plasters Love with mire, and leering, grunts that Love was never a God in the Temple Man, but a toothsome lump of carrion in the corner of his own stye. But we of Thelema, like the artist, the true lover of Love, shameless and fearless, seeing God face to face alike in our own souls within and in all Nature without, though we use, as the bourgeois does, the word Love, we hold not the word “too often profaned for us to profane it”; it burns inviolate in its sanctuary, being reborn immaculate with every breath of life. But by “Love” we mean a thing which the eye of the bourgeois hath not seen, nor his ear heard; neither hath his heart conceived it. We have