Quotes from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

“The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

“Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

“Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

“Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life....”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

“Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [....] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

“...in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

“Indubitably, Magick is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgement and practice than in any other branch of physics.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

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“First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.


I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed


the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.”
― Adrienne Rich, quote from Diving Into the Wreck

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