I existed all right, but I existed only as a condition of constant desiring and yearning, because I knew nothing.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything

Consider also:

  1. New article about Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes claims the villain, Lord Blackwood, is inspired by Aleister Crowley
  2. “Behold! I came with haggard mien again Into the hall, and mingled with the train, A corpse amid the dancers. Then the king Saw me, and knew me–and he knew the ring!”
  3. “The initiator, and/or initiatic team, would proceed to create a condition wherein the energies of the psyche would be awakened and brought to the surface of consciousness. However, for this to work effectively, it requires that those energies being awakened in the initiate already be alive and well in the psychic body-consciousness of the initiator. This is a critical point, and the failure of this condition being met, is the principle cause for esoteric initiations as a whole being of questionable value.”
  4. “We had quarrelled about philosophy and physics. His mind was intensely positive, brutally matter-of-fact, but capable of appreciating subtlety, and far more open to new facts and theories than most of his opponents supposed. His arrogance was, to a great extent, the Freudian protection against his own uncertainty. He knew psychology, he knew men; he understood business; and in his capacity of instructor at Harvard, he had acquired the habit of forming and directing minds. So much I knew, and I pictured my duel with him in romantic terms of Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty.”
  5. “She loved me then; she loves me now, afar. Ah, she knew not! and I, so steeped and stained With fierce sins, knew myself unworthy of The heart I gained, And, a lost mariner whose polar star He is ashamed to look to, cast away her love.”