The service ended with an anthem which rolled like thunder among the hills and was re-echoed from the wall of the great rock of Telepylus.
It was a very curious detail of life at the Abbey, that one act merged into the next insensibly. There were no abrupt changes. Life had been assimilated to the principle of the turbine, as opposed to the reverberatory engine. Every act was equally a sacrament. The discontinuity and abruptness of ordinary life had been eliminated. A just proportion was consequently kept between the various interests. It was this as much as anything else that had helped me to recover from the obsession of drugs. I had been kept back from emancipation by my reaction against the atmosphere, in general, and my latent jealousy of Basil, in particular. Lou, not having been troubled by either of these, had slid out of her habit as insidiously, if I may use the word, as she had slid into it.
But the culminating joy of my heart was the completeness of the solution of all my problems. There was no possibility of a relapse, because the cause of my downfall had been permanently removed. I could understand perfectly how it was that Basil could take a dose of heroin or cocaine, could indulge in hashish, ether, or opium as simply and usefully as the ordinary man can order a cup of strong black coffee when he happens to want to work late at night. He had become completely master of himself, because he had ceased to oppose himself to the current of spiritual willpower of which he was the vehicle. He had no fear or fascination with regard to any of these drugs. He knew that these two qualities were aspects of a single reaction; that of emotion to ignorance. He could use cocaine as a fencing-master uses a rapier, as an expert, without danger of wounding himself.
About a fortnight after our first visit to the tower, a group of us was sitting on the terrace of the Strangers’ House. It was bright moonlight, and the peasants from the neighbouring cottages had come in to enjoy the hospitality of the Abbey. Song and dance were in full swing. Basil and I fell into a quiet chat.
“How long is it, by the way,” he said, “since you last took a dose of anything?”
“I’m not quite sure,” I answered, dreamily watching Lou and Lala, who had arrived a week since with the apparatus I required for my experiments, as they waltzed together on the court. They were both radiant. It seemed as if the moon had endowed them with her pure subtlety and splendour.
“I asked you,” continued Big Lion, pulling at a big meerschaum and amber pipe of the Boer pattern, which he reserved for late at night, “because I want you to take the fullest advantage of your situation. You have been tried in the crucible and come out pure gold. But it won’t do for you to forget the privileges you have won by your ordeal. Do you remember what it says in the Book of the Law?
“‘I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge and Delight and bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, and be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all.’”
“Yes,” I said slowly, “and I thought it a bit daring; might tempt people to be foolhardy, don’t you think?”
“Of course,” agreed Basil, “if you read it carelessly, and act on it rashly, with the blind faith of a fanatic; it might very well lead to trouble. But nature is full of devices for eliminating anything that cannot master its environment. The words ‘to worship me’ are all-important. The only excuse for using a drug of any sort, whether it’s quinine or Epsom-salt, is to assist nature to overcome some obstacle to her proper functions. The danger of the so-called habit-forming drugs is that they fool you into trying to dodge the toil essential to spiritual and intellectual development. But they are not simply man-traps. There is nothing in nature which cannot be used for our benefit, and it is up to us to use it wisely. Now, in the work you have been doing in the last week, heroin might have helped you to concentrate your mind, and cocaine to overcome the effects of fatigue. And the reason you did not use them was that a burnt child dreads fire. We had the same trouble with teaching Hermes and Dionysus to swim. They found themselves in danger of being drowned and thought the best way was to avoid going near the water. But that didn’t help them to use their natural faculties to the best advantage, so I made them face the sea again and again, until they decided that the best way to avoid drowning was to learn how to deal with oceans in every detail. It sounds pretty obvious when you put it like that, yet while every one agrees with me about the swimming, I am howled down on all sides when I apply the same principles to the use of drugs.”
At this moment, Lala claimed me for a waltz, and Lou took Basil under her protection. After the dance, we all four sat down on the wall of the court and I took up the thread of the conversation.
“You’re quite right, of course, and I imagine you expected to be shouted at.”
“No,” laughed Lamus, “my love for humanity makes me an incurably optimistic ass on all such points. I can’t see the defects in my inamorata. I expect men to be rational, courageous, and to applaud initiative, though an elementary reading of history tells one, with appalling reiteration, how every pioneer has been persecuted, whether it’s Galileo, Harvey, Gauguin, or Shelley; there is a universal outcry against any attempt to destroy the superstitions which hamper or foster the progress which helps the development of the race. Why should I escape the excommunication of Darwin or the ostracism of Swinburne? As a matter of fact, I am consoled in my moments of weakness and depression by the knowledge that I am so bitterly abused and hated. It proves to me that my work, whether mistaken or not, is at least worthwhile. But that’s a digression. Let’s get back to the words ‘to worship me’. They mean that things like heroin and alcohol may be and should be used for the purpose of worshipping, that is, entering into communion with, the ‘Snake that giveth Knowledge and Delight and bright glory’ which is the genius which lies ‘in the core of every star’. And, ‘Every man and every woman is a star.’ The taking of a drug should be a carefully thought out and purposeful religious act. Experience alone can teach you the right conditions in which the act is legitimate, that is, when it assists you to do your will. If a billiard player slams the balls around indiscriminately, he soon takes the edge off his game. But a golfer would be very foolish to leave his mashie out of his bag because at one time he got too fond of it and used it improperly, and lost important matches in consequence. Now with regard to you and Lou, I can’t see that she has any particular occasion for using any of these drugs. She can do her will perfectly well without them, and her natural spirituality enables her to keep in continual communion with her inmost self, as her magical diary shows clearly enough. Even when she had poisoned herself to the point of insanity, her true instincts always asserted themselves at a crisis; that is, at any moment when you, the being whom it is her function to protect, was in danger. But there must be occasions in your work when ‘the little more and how much it is’ could be added to your energy by a judicious dose of cocaine, and enable you to overcome the cumulative forces of inertia, or when the effort of concentration is so severe that the mind insists on relieving itself by distracting your thoughts from the object of your calculations, a little heroin would calm their clamour sufficiently long to enable you to get the thing done.
“Now, it’s utterly wrong to force yourself to work from a sense of duty. The more thoroughly you succeed in analysing your mind, the more surely you become able to recognise the moment when a supreme effort is likely to result in definite achievement. Nature is very quick to warn one when one makes an error. A drug should act instantaneously and brilliantly. When it fails to do so, you know that you shouldn’t have taken it, and you should then call a halt, and analyse the circumstances of the failure. We learn more from our failures than from our successes, and your magical record will tell you by the end of the year so accurately what precise circumstances indicate the propriety of resorting to any drug, that in your second year you must be a great fool if you make even half a dozen mistakes. But, as the Book of the Law says, ‘Success is your pr
oof.’ When you resort to such potent and dangerous expedients for increasing your natural powers, you must make sure that the end justifies the means. You’re a scientific man; stick to the methods of science. Wisdom is justified of her children; and I shall be surprised if you do not discover within the next twelve months that your Great Experiment, despite the unnecessary disasters which arose from your neglecting those words, ‘to worship me,’ has been the means of developing your highest qualities and putting you among the first thinkers of our generation.”
The mandolin of Sister Cypris broke into gay triumphant twitterings. It was like a musical comment upon his summary of the situation. The moon sank behind the hill, the peasants finished their wine and went off singing to their cottages; Lou and I found ourselves alone under the stars. The breeze bore the murmur of the sea up the scented slopes. The lights in the town went out. The Pole Star stood above the summit of the rock. Our eyes were fixed on it. We could imagine the precession of the Equinoxes as identical with our own perpetual travelling through time.
Lou pressed my hand. I found myself repeating the words of the creed.
“‘I confess my life, one, individual, and eternal, that was, and is, and is to come.’”
Her voice murmured in my ear, “I believe in the communion of Saints.”
I made the discovery that I was after all a profoundly religious man. All my life I had been looking for a creed which did not offend my moral or intellectual sense. And now I had come to understand the mysterious language of the people of the Abbey of Thelema.
“Be the Priest pure of body and soul!”
The love of Lou had consecrated me to do my will, to accomplish the Great Work.
“Be the Priest fervent of body and soul!”
The love of Lou not only kept me from the contamination of ideas and desires alien to my essential function in the universe, but inspired me to dynamic ecstasy.
I do not know how long we sat under the stars.
A deep eternal peace sat like a dove, a triple tongue of flame upon our souls, which were one soul for ever.
Each of our lives was one, individual, and eternal, but each possessed its necessary and intimate relation with the other, and both with the whole universe. I was moreover aware that our terrific tragedy had been necessary, after all, to our attainment.
“Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
Every step in evolution is accompanied by colossal catastrophe, as it seems when regarded as an isolated event, out of its context, as one may say.
How fearful had been the price which man had paid for the conquest of the air! How much greater must be the indemnity demanded by inertia for the conquest of the spirit! For we are of more value than many sparrows.
How blind we had been! Through what appalling abysses of agony had we not been led in order that we might say that we had conquered the moral problem posed by the discoveries of organic chemistry.
“The master of tide and thunder against the juice of a flower?”
We had given the lie to the poet.
“This is the only battle he never was known to win.”
We no longer looked back with remorse on our folly. We could see the events of the past year in perspective, and we saw that we had been led through that ghoulish ghastliness. We had followed the devil through the dance of death, but there could be no doubt in our minds that the power of evil was permitted for a purpose. We obtained the ineffable assurance of the existence of a spiritual energy that worked its wondrous will in ways too strange for the heart of man to understand until the time should be ripe.
The pestilence of the past had immunised us against its poison. The devil had defeated himself. We had attained a higher stage of evolution. And this understanding of the past filled us with absolute faith in the future.
The chaos of crumbled civilisations whose monuments were on the rock before us, had left that rock un-marred. Our experience had fortified us. We had reached one more pinnacle on the serrated ridge that rises from the first screes of self-consciousness to a summit so sublime that we did not even dare to dream how far it soared above us. Our business was to climb from crag to crag, with caution and courage, day after day, life after life. Not ours to speculate about the goal of our Going. Enough for us to Go. We knew our way, having found our will, and for the means, had we not love?
“Love is the law, love under will.”
The words were neither on our lips nor in our hearts. They were implicit in every idea, and in every impression. We went from the court up the steps, through the open glass doors, into the vaulted room with its fantastic frescoes that was the strangers’ room of the Abbey of Thelema; and we laughed softly, as we thought that we should never more be strangers.
Moonchild
A PROLOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book was written in 1917, during such leisure as my efforts to bring America into the War on our side allowed me. Hence my illusions on the subject, and the sad showing of Simon Iff at the end. Need I add that, as the book itself demonstrates beyond all doubt, all persons and incidents are purely the figment of a disordered imagination?
London, 1929. A.C.
—Aleister Crowley
CONTENTS
I. A Chinese God
II. A Philosophical Disquisition
III. Telekinesis
IV. Lunch, After All
V. Of The Thing In The Garden
VI. Of A Dinner
VII. Of The Oath Of Lisa La Giuffria
VIII. Of The Homunculus
IX. How They Brought The Bad News From Arago To Quincampoix
X How They Gathered The Silk
XI Of The Moon Of Honey, And Its Events
XII. Of Brother Onofrio
XIII. Of The Progress Of The Great Experiment
XIV. An Informative Discourse Upon The Occult Character Of The Moon
XV. Of Dr. Vesquit And His Companions
XVI. Of The Spreading Of The Butterfly-net
XVII. Of The Report Which Edwin Arthwait Made To His Chief
XVIII. The Dark Side Of The Moon
XIX. The Grand Bewitchment
XX. Walpurgis-night
XXI. Of The Renewal Of The Great Attack
XXII. Of A Certain Dawn Upon Our Old Friend The Boulevard Arago
XXIII. Of The Arrival Of A Chinese God Upon The Field Of Battle
Chapter I
A CHINESE GOD
LONDON, in England, the capital city of the British Empire, is situated upon the banks of the Thames. It is not likely that these facts were unfamiliar to James Abbott McNeill Whistler, a Scottish gentleman born in America and resident in Paris but it is certain that he did not appreciate them. For he settled quietly down to discover a fact which no one had previously observed; namely, that it was very beautiful at night. The man was steeped in Highland fantasy, and he revealed London as Wrapt in a soft haze of mystic beauty, a fairy tale of delicacy and wistfulness.
It is here that the Fates showed partiality; for London should rather have been painted by Goya. The city is monstrous and misshapen; its mystery is not a brooding, but a conspiracy. And these truths are evident above all to one who recognises that London’s heart is Charing Cross.
For the old Cross, which is, even technically, the centre of the city, is so in sober moral geography. The Strand roars toward Fleet Street, and so to Ludgate Hill, crowned by St. Paul’s Cathedral; Whitehall sweeps down to Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. Trafalgar Square, which guards it at the third angle, saves it to some extent from the modern banalities of Piccadilly and Pall Mall, mere Georgian sham stucco, not even rivals to the historic grandeur of the great religious monuments, for Trafalgar really did make history; but it is to be observed tha
t Nelson, on his monument, is careful to turn his gaze upon the Thames. For here is the true life of the city, the aorta of that great heart of which London and Westminster are the ventricles. Charing Cross Station, moreover, is the only true Metropolitan terminus. Euston, St. Pancras, and King’s Cross merely convey one to the provinces, even, perhaps, to savage Scotland, as nude and barren today as in the time of Dr. Johnson; Victoria and Paddington seem to serve the vices of Brighton and Bournemouth in winter, Maidenhead and Henley in summer. Liverpool Street and Fenchurch Street are mere suburban sewers; Waterloo is the funereal antechamber to Woking; Great Central is a “notion” imported, name and all, from Broadway, by an enterprising kind of railway Barnum, named Yerkes; nobody ever goes there, except to golf at Sandy Lodge. If there are any other terminals in London, I forget them; clear proof of their insignificance.
But Charing Cross dates from before the Norman Conquest. Here Caesar scorned the advances of Boadicea, who had come to the station to meet him; and here St. Augustin uttered his famous mot, “Non Angli, sed angeli”.
Stay: there is no need to exaggerate. Honestly, Charing Cross is the true link with Europe, and therefore with history. It understands its dignity and its destiny; the station officials never forget the story of King Alfred and the cakes, and are too wrapped in the cares of – who knows what? – to pay any attention to the necessities of would-be travellers. The speed of the trains is adjusted to that of the Roman Legions: three miles per hour. And they are always late, in honour of the immortal Fabius, “qui cunctando restituit rem”.
This terminus is swathed in immemorial gloom; it was in one of the waiting-rooms that James Thomson conceived the idea for his City of Dreadful Night; but it is still the heart of London, throbbing with a clear longing towards Paris. A man who goes to Paris from Victoria will never reach Paris! He will find only the city of the demi-mondaine and the tourist.
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