Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Passing mention of Aleister Crowley in a brief blurb about Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater recently at The Independent.

“De Quincey ‘launched a fascination with drug use and abuse’ that formed an unlikely link between writers disparate as Dickens, Wilde, Aleister Crowley and the Thompsons (Francis and Hunter S.).” [via]

Consider also:

  1. Nothing More Nothing Less – incantation
  2. Electric Sunbeam
  3. “The title of this chapter refers to a Hebrew legend, that of the prophet who heard ‘a going in the mulberry tops’; and to Browning’s phrase, ‘a bruised, black-blooded mulberry’.”
  4. “He was called twice to Rome to answer for his suspected heresies, but avoided the summons because of the protection of a patron, the Holy Roman Emperor. After the death of this patron he was said to have traveled to England, but that the monks who were his students ultimately stabbed him to death with their pens in a fit of apoplexy over his sophistry.”
  5. “But one thing seems evident to me: that unless we get rid of our hypocritical Anglo-Saxon plague of Pharisaism, we shall never be fit to live with.”