The ‘Worst Man in the World’ Tells the Astounding Story of His Life in Articles by Aleister Crowley.

“Nobody stops to look at me in the street. My appearance is, I suppose, that of a simple country gentleman up in town for a weekend.

All my notoriety arises from the fact that I am a magician.

I AM THE MASTER THERION.

Practically my whole life has been spent in the study of magic.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “that which is to-day but an ideal and an aspiration, will, if the Conservation of Energy hold good in the noetic world, as we believe it does, to-morrow have blossomed in a life wherein these things are hopes and dreams no longer; but part of the very fact and nature of the Universe”
  2. “I think too that as he knelt before an altar, where a thin flame burnt in a lamp made of green agate, a single vision would have come to him again and again, a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river between high hills where there were caves and towers, and following the light of one Star; and that voices would have told him how there is for every man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life, for wisdom first speaks in images, and that this one image, if he would but brood over it his life long, would lead his soul, disentangled from unmeaning circumstance and the ebb and flow of the world, into that far household, where the undying gods await all whose souls have become simple as flame, whose bodies have become quiet as an agate lamp.”
  3. “His early romances and much throughout his poetry show how strong a fascination the traditions of magic and of the magical philosophy had cast over his mind, and one can hardly suppose that he had not brooded over their doctrine of symbols or signatures, though I do not find anything to show that he gave it any deep study.”
  4. “I think this mysterious song utters a faith as simple and as ancient as the faith of those country people, in a form suited to a new age, that will understand, with Blake, that the holy spirit is ‘an intellectual fountain,’ and that the kinds and degrees of beauty are the images of its authority.”
  5. “O is the Yoni; T, the Lingam; and U, the Hierophant; the 5th card of the Tarot, the Pentagram. It is thus practically identical with IAO”