Songs Of The Spirit

By Aleister Crowley

This early work of poetry, by Aleister Crowley, was originally published in 1898. Born in Royal Leamington Spa, England in 1875, Crowley was raised by Christian fundamentalist parents. He attended Trinity College at Cambridge University, but left before graduating. After leaving the college, he devoted his time to studying the occult, and travelled extensively throughout the world in persuit of its secret knowledge. He went on to become a prolific writer, producing essays, prose and poetry on a wide range of subjects. To this day he remains a highly influential figure, both in occult circles and popular culture. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900's and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Oct 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781473377202

Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was an English poet, painter, occultist, magician, and mountaineer. Born into wealth, he rejected his family’s Christian beliefs and developed a passion for Western esotericism. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Crowley gained a reputation as a poet whose work appeared in such publications as The Granta and Cambridge Magazine. An avid mountaineer, he made the first unguided ascent of the Mönch in the Swiss Alps. Around this time, he first began identifying as bisexual and carried on relationships with prostitutes, which led to his contracting syphilis. In 1897, he briefly dated fellow student Herbert Charles Pollitt, whose unease with Crowley’s esotericism would lead to their breakup. The following year, Crowley joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret occult society to which many of the era’s leading artists belonged, including Bram Stoker, W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Between 1900 and 1903, he traveled to Mexico, India, Japan, and Paris. In these formative years, Crowley studied Hinduism, wrote the poems that would form The Sword of Song (1904), attempted to climb K2, and became acquainted with such artists as Auguste Rodin and W. Somerset Maugham. A 1904 trip to Egypt inspired him to develop Thelema, a philosophical and religious group he would lead for the remainder of his life. He would claim that The Book of the Law (1909), his most important literary work and the central sacred text of Thelema, was delivered to him personally in Cairo by the entity Aiwass. During the First World War, Crowley allegedly worked as a double agent for the British intelligence services while pretending to support the pro-German movement in the United States. The last decades of his life were spent largely in exile due to persecution in the press and by the states of Britain and Italy for his bohemian lifestyle and open bisexuality.

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Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley was born in Royal Leamington Spa, England in 1875. Raised by Christian fundamentalist parents, he attended Trinity College at Cambridge University, but left before graduating. Upon leaving the college, he devoted his life to the occult, studying magic, qabalah, alchemy, tarot, and astrology. From 1900 onwards, Crowley travelled extensively, mainly in India and China. In 1904, while in Egypt, he produced one of his most popular works, The Book of the Law, and three years later he founded his magical order.

Throughout the rest of his life, Crowley was a prolific writer, producing essays, prose and poetry on a wide range of subjects. In 1913, he published Magick (Book 4), a lengthy examination of his belief system which draws on a vast range of sources and is regarded by many as his magnum opus. In his later years, Crowley became addicted to heroin and struggled with bankruptcy. He died in Hastings, England, aged 72. To this day he remains a highly influential figure, both in occult circles and popular culture.

Songs of the Spirit

  A fool also is full of words.

Ecclesiastes.

DEDICATION

To J. L. BAKER.

THE vault of purple that I strove

To pierce, and find unchanging love,

Or some vast countenance²

All glory of the soul of man.

Baffled my blind aspiring gaze

With sunlight’s melancholy rays,

And closed with iron hand the ways

That sunder space, divide the days with fiery fan.

Thine was the forehead mild and grave

That shown throughout the azure nave

Where Monte Rosa’s silence gave

The starry organ’s measured sound.

Where for an altar stood the bare

Mass of Mont Cervin,³ towering there;

And angels dwelt upon the stair,

And all the mountains were aware that stood around.

Thine was the passionless divine

High hope, and the pure purpose thine,

Higher and purer than stars shine,

And thine the unexpressed delight

To hold high commune with the wind

That sings, in midnight black and blind,

Strange chants, the murmurs of the mind,

To grasp the hands of heaven and find the lords of light.

Mine was the holy fire that drew

Its perfect passion from the dew,

And all the flowers that blushed and blew

On sunny slopes by little brooks.

Mine the desire that brushed aside

The thorns, and would not be denied,

And sought, more eager than a bride,

The cold grey secrets wan and wide of sacred books.

Thine was the hand that guided me

By moor and mountain, vale and lea,

And led me to the sudden sea

That lies superb, remote, and deep,

Showed me things wonderful, unbound

The fetters that beset me round,

Opened my waking ear to sound

That may not by a man be found, except in sleep.

Thy presence was as subtle flame

Burning in dawny groves; thy name

Like dew upon the hills became,

And all thy mind a star most bright;

And, following with wakeful eyes

The strait meridian of the wise,

My feet tread under stars and skies;

My spirit soars and seeks and flies, a child of light.

Thus eager, may my purpose stand

Firm as the faith of honest hand,

Nor change like castles built of sand

Until the sweet unchanging end.

Happy not only that my eye

Single and strong may win the sky,

But that one day the birds that fly

Heard your fair friendship call me by the name of friend.

THE GOAD.

ανυγρο&nu αμπταιην

αιθερα πορσο

γαιασ Ελλανιασ

αστερασ

εσπερουσ

οιον, οιον

αλγοσ επαθον,

φιλαι.

EURIPIDES.

AMSTERDAM, December 23rd, 1897.

LET me pass out beyond the city gate.

All day I loitered in the little streets

Of black worn houses tottering, like the fate

That hangs above my head even now, and meets

Prayer and defiance as not hearing it.

They lean, these old black streets! a little sky

Peeps through the gap, the rough stone path is lit

Just for a little by the sun, and I

Watch his red face pass over, fade away

To other streets, and other passengers,

See him take pleasure where the heathen