The pleasure which escapes them changes itself for them into a long irritation and desire. The more murderous are their excesses, the more it seems to them that supreme happiness is at hand. … One more bumper of strong drink, one more spasm, one more violence done to Nature… Ah! at last, here is pleasure; here is life … and their desire, in the paroxysm of its insatiable hunger, extinguishes itself for ever in death.
Éliphas Lévi, trans Aleister Crowley, Liber XLVI The Key of the Mysteries
Man owes himself to his family; his family owes itself to the fatherland; and the fatherland to humanity.
The egoism of man merits isolation and despair; that of the family, ruin and exile; that of the fatherland, war and invasion.
The man who isolates himself from every human love, saying, “I will serve God,” deceives himself.
Éliphas Lévi, trans Aleister Crowley, Liber XLVI The Key of the Mysteries
Mysteries of other worlds, hidden forces, strange revelations, mysterious illnesses, exceptional faculties, spirits, apparitions, magical paradoxes, hermetic arcana, we shall say all, and we shall explain all. Who has given us this power? We do not fear to reveal it to our readers.
Éliphas Lévi, trans Aleister Crowley, Liber XLVI The Key of the Mysteries
This war is as ancient as the world; the Greeks figured it under the symbols of Eros and Anteros, and the Hebrews by the antagonism of Cain and Abel. It is the war of the Titans and the Gods. The two armies are everywhere invisible, disciplined and always ready for attack or counterattack. Simple-minded folk on both sides, astonished at the instant and unanimous resistance that they meet, begin to believe in vast plots cleverly organized, in hidden, all-powerful societies. Eugène Sue invents Rodin; churchmen talk of the Illuminati and of the Freemasons; Wronski dreams of his bands of mystics, and there is nothing true and serious beneath all that but the necessary struggle of order and disorder, of the instincts and of thought; the result of that struggle is balance in progress, and the devil always contributes, despite himself, to the glory of St. Michael.
Éliphas Lévi, trans Aleister Crowley, Liber XLVI The Key of the Mysteries
The avowed accomplices of our passions may disgust us by humiliating us; at our own risk and peril our pride will teach us how to resist them. But what is more dangerous for us than our hypocritical and hidden accomplices? They follow us like sorrow, await us like the abyss, surround us like infatuation. We excuse them in order to excuse ourselves, defending them in order to defend ourselves, justifying them in order to justify ourselves, and we submit to them finally because we must, because we have not the strength to resist our inclinations, because we lack the will to do so.
Éliphas Lévi, trans Aleister Crowley, Liber XLVI The Key of the Mysteries
TO KNOW, TO DARE, TO WILL, TO KEEP SILENT, are, as we have said elsewhere, the four qabalistic words which correspond to the four letters of the tetragram and to the four hieroglyphic forms of the Sphinx. To know, is the human head; to dare, the claws of the lion; to will, the mighty flanks of the bull; to keep silent, the mystical wings of the eagle. He only maintains his position above other men who does not prostitute the secrets of his intelligence to their commentary and their laughter.
Éliphas Lévi, trans. Aleister Crowley, Liber XLVI The Key of the Mysteries
The true Christian is a stranger to the sectarian spirit; he is all things to all men, and looks on all men as the children of a common father, who means to save them all. The whole cult has for him only a sense of sweetness and of love: he leaves to God the secrets of justice, and understands only charity.
Éliphas Lévi, trans Aleister Crowley, Liber XLVI The Key of the Mysteries
Greater Feast of Alphonse Louis Constant, Éliphas Lévi, died May 31, 1875 at Paris, France
Greater Feast of Alphonse Louis Constant (also known as Éliphas Lévi), died May 31, 1875 at Paris, France
Reader’s Theatre with Hermetic Library for May 2016 is unrehearsed, un-staged participatory readings from literature, plays, poetry, and more. Readers for May are Olivia Bishop, Jonah Locksley, William Thirteen, and John Griogair Bell.