Book//mark – Moonchild | Aleister Crowley, 1917

.

“I’m a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.”

“May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall!”

“In Astrology, the moon, among its other meanings, has that of “the common people,” who submit (they know not why) to any independent will that can express itself with sufficient energy. The people who guillotined the mild Louis XVI died gladly for Napoleon. The impossibility of an actual democracy is due to this fact of mob-psychology. As soon as you group men, they lose their personalities. A parliament of the wisest and strongest men in the nation is liable to behave like a set of schoolboys, tearing up their desks and throwing their inkpots at each other. The only possibility of co-operation lies in discipline and autocracy, which men have sometimes established in the name of equal rights.”

“Don’t talk for five minutes, there’s a good chap! I’ve a strange feeling come over me–almost as if I were going to think!”

“Who hath the how is careless of the why”

“Belief is the enemy of knowledge.”

“Look at the testimony of literature. In the days of chivalry our sympathies go with the Knight-errant, who redresses wrongs; with the King, whose courage and wisdom deliver his people from their enemies. But when Kingship became tyranny, and feudalism oppression, we took our heroes from the rebels. Robin Hood, Hereward the Wake, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Rob Roy; it was always the Under Dog that appealed to the artist.”

“My three-dimensional mind thinks all this ‘real,’ a history; where at most it is a geography, a partial set of infinite aspects.”

“Thus each step in sorcery is also a step in slavery; and that any man should put such power in the hands of another, no matter for what hope of gain, is one of the mysteries of perverse psychology.”

 Aleister Crowley, Moonchild. A Prologue, 1917