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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Norman Mudd
Chelles [Seine-et-Marne] [Paris]
July 12/24 e.v. (late at night)
Care Frater,
You were not impresses by Hélios. This is your science-complex. You hate to think that I might be right.
I think Haldane would agree that the agricultural-pastoral system can only be superseded provided that artificial food from wood or otherwise as he suggested, is satisfactory.
I write this in order to put plainly and unmistakably a purely scientific question. Is it possible to dispense with improbable vital essences? I might put this briefly and journalistically: Is vampirism essential to nourishment?
This problem is intimately connected with that of incarnation. Instead of denying the Cartesian automation of animals, we admit that we too are automata. But as in the case of Maelzel's chess player, who works the automaton?
I have been meditating a very great deal recently on this question of incarnation. I am sometimes quite fully conscious of the truth of the extreme view that body and mind are an instrument for an independent Ego.
Now, when a separation takes place, there seems to be two conscious individuals, one who withdraws his eye from the instrument, so to speak; the other who unifies the qualities of the instrument in "himself".
Up to a certain point I can transfer my consciousness to and fro between the somatic and spiritual Egos. But when the separation becomes definite, when the spiritual ceases to control the somatic completely—to occupy it effectively, to use a military metaphor—there comes a time when the opposition between the two types of ego is acute. The trouble is that I cannot effectively rid myself of the lower consciousness. I cannot silence it except by occupying it, and this requires a tremendous effort when it happens to be clamouring for self-expression; that is, when its sense of separateness from the universe makes it clamour for relief from pain, for peace, or for joy, as the case may be. One realizes incidentally that satisfaction can only be obtained by putrefaction.
I did not mean to lead the argument so far. Let me repeat the important questions.
Can life thrive on anything but life? Does not the destruction of the vital element by chemical manipulation render a food useless for nourishment? (Note that the extraction of the alkaloids from opium or coca seems to remove what our grandmothers would have called the goodness of the plants. We gain intensity of action at the cost of what I can only call sympathy of action. Cf. the Alchemical doctrine that the metals were "killed" by artificial heat—at least beyond a certain temperature. Have metals (bacilli? Why not?)
There are two possibilities for the food of the future: One, Haldane's saw-dust steaks, the other, pure vampirism. I personally think that the solution is to feed ourselves somehow on Prana. Our digestive systems, the cause of most of our troubles, should atrophy. (Cf. Last Act of "Back to Methuselah".) Frankly, I do not believe in the alternative. My very large experience of unusual foods tells me that Prana is far more important than chemical and physiological suitability.
On three recent occasions, a stallion has had a waking wet-dream in my vicinity and I have been able to get much more energy via the God-form of Harpocrates—the egg absorbing nourishment—than any meal of cooked food can supply.
Carrington's theories of nutrition are very crudely expressed; but I think that there may be this much in them, that it should be possible to distinguish between the chemical-physiological functions of re-building tissue as a basis for Prana and the direct transference of that Prana.
Id est—one cannot live exclusively on the sign of silence in the neighbourhood of a baffled stallion because one's tissue would gradually disintegrate. But equally, one cannot live exclusively on artificial foods because the tissue, unless charged electrically, (I am forced to use this adverb) would never develop spiritual energy. In other words, you must have the copper wire and also the electric charge; but you cannot create a copper wire from a current, and you cannot charge a copper wire by adding more copper.
666.
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