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

“We magicians are men of science who, by the practice of our craft, keep just ahead of popular understanding. The result is that we are misunderstood and blackguarded all our lives.

After we are dead—sometimes centuries after—the world catches up, and discovers that we were benefactors and nor villains.” [via, also]

Consider also:

  1. “even the Will to the Great Work may be misunderstood of Men; for this Work must proceed naturally and without Overstress, as all true Works.”
  2. “Each one of these prohibitions is the application in our human lives of some great Law of nature,-of some Law that governs in the Mental World as surely as does gravitation in the physical universe; and the whole might be described as a system of mental hygiene”
  3. “In my textbook, Theory and Practice of Magick will be found the definition of the word magic, or magick, as I prefer to spell it, to distinguish the real from the fake. It is ‘the science and art of causing change to occur in accordance with the will.'”
  4. “But I am a white magician, not a black one. I belong to a secret order which has representatives all over the world; we are all working for the good of humanity, not for its downfall.”
  5. “The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits are as the more phantastical errors in their lives; as Coleridge’s opium cloud; as Villiers De L’Isle Adam’s candidature for the throne of Greece; as Blake’s anger against causes and purposes he but half understood; as the flickering madness an Eastern scripture would allow in august dreamers; for he who half lives in eternity endures a rending of the structures of the mind, a crucifixion of the intellectual body.”