But why is there no life in any of our Slain God rituals! It is for us to
restore them by the Word and the Grip.
For us, who have the inner knowledge, inherited or won, it remains to
restore the true rites of Attis, Adonis, Osiris, of Set, Serapis, Mithras, and
Abel.
Aleister Crowley, review of John Yarker’s The Arcane Schools in Equinox I:iv
This point being established, let me further make a distinction between the two great classes of sodomites. Ulrichs has pedantically christened them Urning and Uranodioning; for the former we have no colloquial name: the latter we term Bimetallist. Being himself an Urning, he has naturally failed to grasp the vast gap that divides the classes, which is that between an indulgence and a morbid craving; between the insane delusion that one is Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar and the sane and healthy resolve to emulate the exploits of these worthies in mysticism and war respectively. We pity the Urning, as we pity the consumptive or the drunkard; but we do not pity him in any special sense, any more than a connoisseur of fine wines pities the drunkard above all other pitiable folk. We do not acknowledge any nervous weakness as having a peculiar claim on us, just because it lies in the same plane as one of our hobbies.
Aleister Crowley, Bagh I Muattar, The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz
It goes to show you that you should never give your mind any kind of instructions even half in fun, unless you’re prepared to have them carried out whether you approve later or not.
Fritz Leiber, The Night of the Long Knives [Amazon, Publisher, Local Library]
“Imagine if they’d had you in Alexandria.” “Would it have added to the sum of human happiness if the library had survived?” “Apparently most of it did, despite the myth.” “Humans never use the information they’ve got. They seem to value it less the more they have.” “But there’s a romance in what we don’t know or never can.”
Karen Traviss, The Best of Us [Amazon, Bookshop, Local Library]
Its handy to have friends who are weird as you are.
G. Willow Wilson, & al., Ms Marvel, Vol 2: Generation Why
“You may say the question aloud,” Hawthorne said. “We have no secrets here.”
Philip K Dick, The Man in the High Castle [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
“Henceforth I have no secrets from thee, Wagner,” was the answer, while the stranger’s eyes gleamed with unearthly luster; then, bending forward, he whispered a few words in the other’s ear.
George W M Reynolds, Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf [Amazon, Amazon (Dover), Gutenberg, Publisher, Local Library]
Some of these societies, being based upon a financial scheme for making money, pretending to be able to employ divine powers in their service and to have the will of God at their command for the purpose of procuring for their adherents physical health and worldly benefits, met with great success; for the multitudes will always rush to that camp, where they think that a mine of gold has been discovered and where they are expecting a share; and the holding out promises of making salvation easy has always been the fundamental power of every clerical institution.
Franz Hartmann, The Dangers of Occultism
suspected Illuminatus, Lieutenant Franz Hebenstreit von Streitenfeld. The latter attended the meetings often, and expressed such Illuminist, utopian socialist views as “human misery would continue so long as men said ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ and refused to have things in common.”
Terry Melanson, Perfectibilists: The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
“Dearest princess!” I replied, “I do not know what you are talking about. I am not luminous, and I never saw a luminous man. In our country nobody has a light of his own.”
“Alas!” said the princess, “what a fearful fate it must be to have no light, and to live in a country of perpetual darkness.”
Franz Hartmann, Among the Gnomes
