“We place no reliance on virgin or pidgeon.
Our method is science, our aim is religion.”


The idea of a synthesis of science and religion was central to Crowley's ideas and made him popular with later writers like Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. This quote from his Confessions expands upon the idea, in the context of drugs:

...

This is an extract from Crowley's essay on absinthe. The essay is typically verbose and and not easy to read, so I have tried to extract the relevant parts. I am dubious about the effects of absinthe but Crowley waxed lyrical about it.

_______________________________

Ah! the Green Goddess! What is the fascination that makes her so adorable and so terrible? Do you know that French sonnet "La legende de l’absinthe?" .....

"The Legend of Absinthe"

Apollo, who mourned at Hyacinthe's demise,
Refused to concede this victory to Death.
Much better that the soul, adept in transformation,
Had to find...

Soon after finding music from the Russian OTO, this comes my way:

AL - 100th Anniversary: Compilation of an exclusive and unreleased tracks dedicated to Aiwass & New Aeon & The Book Of The Law technically called Liber AL vel Legis sub figura CCXX as delivered by XCIII = 418 to DCLXVI that was dictated in Cairo on April 8th-10th in the year 1904.

This is a surprisingly good collection of modern music dedicated to Liber Al and Crowley in general. What is intersting is that Crowley's words are used here. These days it is relatively easy to produce good quality music inexpensively. One of the highlights of the collection is a new track by Genesis P-Orridge-- one...

Synopsis of Six Articles on Drugs

These articles were never written -- a great loss since Crowley succinctly anticipates (by at least thirty years) the main trends in sociological and psychopharmacological hought as they developed, often painfully, in the 1960s and 1970s. Although this synopsis appears to have been written in mid-to-late 1920s possibly the early 1930s), the articles could well have appeared in The Psychedelic Review or The Journal of Psychedelic Drugs. Aside from underscoring Crowley's pioneering work in this field, this synopsis remains valuable as an outline of Crowley's mature view of drugs later in his life -- their use and abuse....

Music Of Thelema

Music by Valentin Dubovskoy, ordered by Moscow Oasis of OTO.


Ever wondered what the Crowley's poems, invocations and rituals might sound like set to Russian music? No-- nor me! But you can download MP3s here:

http://www.dubovskoy.net/epage49.htm

1. Credo (from the Gnostic Mess)
2. Hymn (from the Gnostic Mess)
3. One star in sight
4. Hymn to Pan
5. Invocation of Hecate
6. Nekam, Adonai!
7. Lift up this love
8. The Interpreter
9. Pan to Artemis
10. Stele of Revelation (AL III:37-38)
...

...

There is chapter in this book, Strange and Dangerous Dreams: the Fine Line Between Adventure and Madness by Geoff Powter, which is about mountaineering. Crowley was an accomplished mountaineer, although a poor team member. He reached a creditable height on K2 very early on, but treated fellow climbers and porters with contempt.

In fact, the first serious attempt to climb K2 was undertaken in 1902 by Oscar Eckenstein and Aleister Crowley via the Northeast Ridge.

The author examines Crowley psychologically in an interesting way, without being a rabid 'follower' or a dismissive critic, and details his career as a climber.

You can read much of the chapter...

Thrill with lissome lust of the light,
O man! My man!
Come careering out of the night
Of Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan! Come over the sea
From Sicily and from Arcady!
Roaming as Bacchus, with fauns and pards
And nymphs and satyrs for thy guards,
On a milk-white ass, come over the sea
To me, to me,
Come with Apollo in bridal dress
(Shepherdess and pythoness)
Come with Artemis, silken shod,
And wash thy white thigh, beautiful God,
In the moon of the woods, on the marble mount,
The dimpled dawn of the amber fount!
Dip the purple of passionate prayer
In the crimson shrine, the scarlet snare,...

Novelist Jake Arnott writes about Crowley as an inspiration for fictional characters.

________________________________


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/b...eys-lives.html


The Satanist and spy has inspired memorable characters

By Jake Arnott
published: 6:30AM BST 30 May 2009



Jake Arnott's The Devil's Paintbrush features Aleister Crowley


Aleister Crowley is the...

Roll Away the Stone: An Introduction to Aleister Crowley's Essays on the Psychology of Hashish with the complete text of The Herb Dangerous [by] Aleister Crowley Regardie, Israel (1968)

Roll Away the Stone
by Israel Regardie

The purpose of the hashish-session was simply to provide the student with a fore-taste or some adumbration of the mystical experience towards which he was focusing all his energies. It was never the intention of Crowley at any time to use drugs as a substitute for the body-mind discipline which he insisted on beyond all other things. This was the furthest notion from his mind. ...

I want to emphasize unequivocally that Crowley...

...

Like another of Robert Anton Wilson's literary heroes, Joyce, Crowley, despite his interesting writings, appeared to be racist. He appeared to be Anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti- Bengali and generally prejudiced, despite traveling extensively and learning about yoga and the Hebrew Cabala and so on. Catherine Yonwode looks at his more inflammatory racist statements. She does however miss Crowley's weird sense of humour. Crowley loved to shock people-- he was never PC.

One of his statements was that 'niggers' were almost as bad as "Americans". His sneer about the Jews in Palestine being inferior to the "Nazarenes" (Palestinians) seems less outrageous in the...

Jack Parsons was a member of the OTO in the US, also a pioneer rocket scientist and one-time associate of L. Ron Hubbard.

He wrote this ditty:

"I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote,
marijuana, morphine and cocaine,
I never know sadness, but only a madness
that burns at the heart and the brain.
I see each charwoman, ecstatic, inhuman,
angelic, demonic, divine.
Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon that brims with ambrosial wine."

Oriflamme, Journal of the O.T.O., 21 February 1943

Comparable to the Alf Laylah wa Laylah itself, a very Tower of Babel, partaking alike of truth both gross and subtle inextricably interwoven with the most fantastic fable, is our view of the Herb — Hashish — the Herb Dangerous. Of the investigators who have pierced even...

Certainly towards the end of his life Crowley was a heroin addict. He took large daily injections, as much as his doctor would prescribe, it seems. He did take heroin as a cure for asthma. His most fervent admirers like to make excuses for him, but the fact remains.

Kenneth Grant, one of his more enthusiastic 'followers' recalls in Remembering Aleister Crowley:

"The complications which Crowley found too fearful to contemplate concerned his need for medicaments which he was taking against his severe bouts of asthma. His health was deteriorating rapidly and when I finally went to stay with him many of my services consisted in getting doctors and chemists to...

I thought I would dedicate some blog space to Aleister Crowley, the infamous Western mystic, mountaineer, early drug experimenter, eccentric, bi-sexual and adventurer. He was a fascinating individual, although I couldn't say that I admire his personality. To paraphrase Israel Regardie, despite his all too obvious character flaws (of which he was not ashamed-- his arrogance, misogony, racism, pettiness), his life and work are of great interest.

Here is an essay on cocaine. If you can ignore his verbose style, he makes relevant observations about the drug. At the time, it was not nearly so widely used.

Part 1:

...