FOLLOW A WORD THROUGH THE COLLECTION
Search the corpus.
Phrase search ignores case and repeated whitespace. All-words search finds whole words anywhere on the same page. OCR errors can affect results.
4,043 matching pages
Page 200 of 2031906 · PDF PAGE 66
60 ALICE: AN ADULTERY He sank back contented. ‘‘I have prayed to my God for many days,” he said, ‘‘and by one of the least of my life’s miracles you are here; worthy to receive my trust. For when I knew that I was to die, I destroyed all the papers which held the story of my life—all save one. That I saved; the only noble passage, perhaps—among the many notable. Men will say that it is stained; you, I think, should be wiser. It is the story of how the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. They were not drowned, you know (he seemed to lapse into a day…
1929 · PDF PAGE 395
… wrote a ritual for invoking the moon. The climax of the ceremony was this: Leila Waddell was to be enthroned as a representative of the goddess and the lunar influence invoked into her by the appropriate lyrics. (I wrote "The Interpreter" and "Pan to Artemis".) The violinist was to reply by expressing the divine nature through her art. She was a rough, ill-trained executant, and her playing coarse, crude, with no touch of subtlety to interpret or passion to exalt the sequence of sound. The most cynical critics present were simply stunned at he…
1929 · PDF PAGE 404
…ntire chain of causes and bring his interlocutor to realize the entire vanity of human effort. The moral was, of course, "Get right with God." At this time the consciences of men were much exercised, as our fathers put it, with regard to the monument which Jacob Epstein had made for the tomb of Oscar Wilde in Pčre-Lachaise. This monument had been on exhibition in his studio in London for some months and the most delicately minded dilettanti had detected nothing objectionable in it. No sooner had it been put in the cemetery than the guardian obj…
1929 · PDF PAGE 365
…matter and the astral world of sensation. In his presence I found it quite easy to produce phenomenal phantasms of almost any idea, from gods to demons, which I happened to need at the moment. I had of course a very wide experience of so-called material manifestations; but for the most part these had been independent of my will and often contrary to it. I have already mentioned a number of such phenomena in connection with the Abramelin Operation. I had succeeded in suppressing them by preventing my magical force from leaking away. A miracle an…
1929 · PDF PAGE 305
… men but to rely on him to punish any misconduct when they returned to Yunnanfu. It seemed as if they knew of this compact and the Great God Wilkinson seemed very far off to them. I could feel instinctively that the respect, akin to godly fear, which I had previously inspired was less powerful as an inhibition. We slept on the fourteenth at a seerai, dirty and entirely comfortless. I paid the host more than liberally; but he was insolent and I had no means of abating the nuisance. This emboldened my own coolies to be mutinous; and in the course…
1929 · PDF PAGE 515
…ned from the rhythm and swing of the lyric into which I have introduced this title: By the Brood of the Bysses of Brightening, whose ....God was my sire; By the Lord of the Flame and the Lightning, the King ....of the Spirits of Fire ... This spiritually sublime intensity does not in any way interfere with my intellectual activity. On the contrary, I become more alert than in almost any other conditions. It is as if the illumination of the flash interpenetrated my spirit, as if my mental faculties entered into enjoyment of their ideal nourishme…
1929 · PDF PAGE 229
…to turn the edge of my surgical knife. The heaviest weapon and the truest eye and hand may sometimes fail to account for the smallest of God's creatures. I could not understand why my 10-bore Paradox seemed so ineffective against small birds. One day I came across a rat-snake, nineteen feet long, and said, "This time I will bruise your head and I bet you don't bruise my heel." I was within a few yards of him and fired several times. He moved off with leisurely disgust; he could not imagine what my game could be. Why had I disturbed his sleep? I…
1929 · PDF PAGE 113
… night, when I crawled, panting, through the roasting streets and consumed ice-water, iced watermelon, ice- cream and iced coffee. "Good God," I said to myself, "and this is merely New York! What must Mexico be like!" I supposed that I was experiencing normal conditions, whereas in point of fact I had landed at the climax of a heat wave which killed about a hundred people a day while it lasted. I should have discovered the truth if I had looked at a newspaper; but I did not read them. I had already learnt that even the finest mind is bound to p…
1907 · PDF PAGE 134
… and not for those many who possess the Station of 9. Victoria and the Memorial of an Albert. To become such we must indeed wrestle with God as Jacob wrestled at Bethel till the Deity beget on us a royal race as numerous as the stars of the heavens and the sands of the sea-shore. However many there be in this simmeri cesspit who perchance may perceive in the divine virility of Crowley's pen the deca ence of a Dr. Smiles—a seeker after the evanescent gems of the refuse heap. If so, let these would-be profaners of the mys terious beware, for perc…
1929 · PDF PAGE 293
…. It took a long time for him to grasp my meaning; but ultimately he reassured me as to his creed, which was this: "John Wesley all same God." He was so besotted with drink and drugs that his human qualities, if he ever possessed any, were completely in abeyance. His name was soon corrupted into "Janwar" --- which is Hindustani for "wild animal". The journey to Yunnanfu was unique in my life in one important respect. I became richer as I went along --- by the simple process of spending my money! It was impossible to get a change of silver excep…
1929 · PDF PAGE 265
…ing. The doctor had recovered his health and his {437} good humour, and we had none of us a moment's doubt that he would put the fear of God into Righi and carry out the above instructions promptly and efficiently. On Thursday, August 31st, I started up the slopes with six men and a perfectly light heart. The problem was, of course, how to get the coolies up with the minimum of trouble. I sent Salama ahead with an axe and shovels on a rope. Their job was to clear away all loose snow and to enlarge the steps made by Salama so that the way up the…
1929 · PDF PAGE 350
… late to allow time for refutation. The election may doubtless depend on such infected activities. But when one is working in the eye of God, when one cares nothing for the opinion of men, either at the moment or at any other time; when one has surrendered for ever one's personal interests and become lost in one's work, it is merely waste of time and derogatory to one's dignity to pay attention to irrelevant interruptions about one's individual affairs. One keeps one's powder and shot for people who attack one's work itself. And even this is of…
1929 · PDF PAGE 520
…ity. While as to the individual, his position might be gauged by the case of my own cousin in Florida, who quite seriously believed that God had sunk the Titanic to rebuke the presumption of the builders, of the pitifully comic worship of the weakly megalomaniac at the White House, and of the moral and mental level of such people as I met in the masonic lodges whose gambols I have described in a previous chapter. Hope died in my heart. There was not one glimmer of light on the horizon anywhere. It seemed to me an obscene mockery to be called a …
1904 · PDF PAGE 104
…these are methods, bad or good, for extricating ourselves from the universe. Closely connected with this question is that of the will of God. People argue that an Infi- nite intelligence must have been at work on this cosmos. I reply No ! There is no intelligence at work worthy of the name. The Laws of Nature may be generalised in one—the Law of Inertia. Everything moves in the direction determined by the path of least resistance ; species arise, develop, and die as their collec- tive inertia determines; to this Law there is no exception but th…
1929 · PDF PAGE 510
…ary to destroy in oneself the roots of those motives which determine a man's course, in order to enjoy the omnipotence and immunity of a god. The second point of the ordeal concerned the choice between the women. The Owl offered all the delights of carefree ease and placid pleasure; but there was nothing to be gained. The Monkey represented a life of turmoil and anxiety, with few magnificent moments amid the hours of fretfulness; but progress was possible. It was as if the Secret Chiefs had asked me, "Are you content to enjoy the fruit of your …
1907 · PDF PAGE 249
… mate—and I? ili. 87 O Lesbian maiden, ii. 6 O Light in Light! O flashing wings of fire! ili, 199 O light of Apollo! iii. 200 O Lord our God, i. 24 O love! and were I with thee ever! iii. 3 O Love! Pure mystery of life, 1. 247 O lover, I am lonely here, ii. 109 O Man of Sorrows: brother unto Grief, 1. 207 O master of the ring of love, i. 179 O mortal, tossed on life’s unceasing ocean, ll. 107 O Mother of Love, i. 17 One day from landing, ii. 80 One way sets free, ii. 53 On his couch Imperial Alpin, i. 1o1 O Night! the very mother of us all, i. …
1929 · PDF PAGE 74
…e parody of humanity, and so on for the rest. These were the people to whose ranks I was seeking admission. "There, but for the grace of God, goes Aleister Crowley," I exclaimed to myself with disgust, and there and then I registered a vow never to play another serious game of chess. I perceived with praeternatural lucidity that I had not alighted on this planet with the object of playing chess. Aleister Crowley, by the way! I have not yet explained how I came to have changed my name. For many years I had loathed being called Alick, partly beca…
1929 · PDF PAGE 410
…housand years. Their decay and total disappearance is explained quite easily by the gradual failure of the water supply. To the eye of a god, mankind must appear as a species of bacteria which multiply and become progressively virulent whenever they find themselves in a congenial culture, and whose activity diminishes until they disappear completely as soon as proper measures are taken to sterilize them. "Westward the Star of Empire takes its way" sounds splendid, but it is really very silly. Since I have understood that I am the Spirit of Soli…
1929 · PDF PAGE 507
… which I paid it. The reason is this; just as the Master of the Temple is sworn to interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with his soul, so is the Magus to make his every act an expression of his magical formula. Being in course of initiation at the time, I did not realize what was going on. It is only on reflection that I have come to understand that my relations with these two women constituted an ordeal; a test of my fitness for the Grade. It is written "as below, so above"; and my reaction to these women furnished a sure …
1929 · PDF PAGE 164
164 really does apply pretty well the came to their infinite diversity. God help the traveller who punishes his servants unjustly! His lack of judgment show them a weak point of which they can take advantage to avenge themselves in a thousand ways. On the other hand, one is even more despised if one fails to visit intentional misbehaviour with the full penalty of the law. I was far from well. Various symptoms of malaria kept on cropping up and I was in constant pain with pityriasis versicolor, which is a form of the {281} so-called dhobi itch (…