THE CITY OF GOD

A RHAPSODY

by

ALEISTER CROWLEY

THE CITY OF GOD

A RHAPSODY

by

ALEISTER CROWLEY

                                  "In Macrocosmo ΗΛΙΟΣ ΦΑΛΛΟΣ in Microcosmo,

                                   Lucis, Vitae, Libertatis, Amoris est Fons Deus"

                                   cui testis Aedes Moscoviae Kremlin.

                              Christ = Ίησους Χριστς θεου Ύιος Σωτηρ = ΙΧθΥΣ = Il Pesce

                                                            ΛΑΜΟ ΣΒΑΣΙΛΕΥΣ ΤΕΛΕΙΙΥΛΟΥ

Published by the O.T.O.

An Ixvii in 0° 0' 0" Aries

March 21, 1943 e.v., 12.3 p.m.

at

93, Jermyn Street, London, S.W.1.

Dedicated to

Alexander, Bakunin, Boris, Alapin and Azev;

Blavatzky, Bakunin, Boris and Boguljuboff;

Dostoevsky, Dmitri and Diaghileff;

Gogol, Gregory, Gapon, Glinka and Gorky;

Ivan and Illyitch;

Katherine and Kropotkin;

Lenin and Lermontoff;

Mendeljeff, Maisky, Mussorgsky, and Moiseïvitch;

Pushkin, Pavloff and Peter;

Rurik, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Rasputin, Rachmaninoff and Rostopschin;

Timoshenko, Tschaikovsky, Troitsky, Tschigorin, Trotsky,

Turgenieff, Tolstoi and Tchekoff;

Vassily and Verestchagin;

Zosimoff and Zimbalist;

and so on through all the thirty-six letters of

the Alphabet; stones of honour and dishonour

that go to the building of the City of God.

Printed in England

by Chiswick Press Ltd., London, N.11

Portrait by Cambyses Daguerre Churchill

Temple Bar 5788.

Note—This Rhapsody is the complement of "The Fun of the Fair." This reveals the Poet and Magus, as that does the Man of the World.

PREFACE

     Poetry is the geyser of the Unconscious.

     Poetry is the intelligible musical expression of the Real whose mirror is the phenomenal Universe.

     Poetry is the Hermes to lead the “soul” Eurydice from the murk of illusion to the light of Truth; “and on Daedalian oarage fare forth to the interlunar air”.

     A living poem must effect a definite magical excitement- exaltation in the hearer or reader, similar to the experience of “falling in love at first sight” with a woman. Analysis and argument cannot convince, and may inhibit the reaction, which is above emotion and reason.

     The reception of a poem, being a ritual Magical initiation, suffers no interruption. The music must be perfect; hard, maybe, to appreciate, as is Beethoven, but unmistakably sublime when fully understood. Technical perfection, in the absence of Creative Energy, is vanity, like the playing of “Exercises”.

     The “work of art” which appeals to contemporary judgement can never, save some rare accident, be of the timber of Yggdrasil. For one main factor of its immediate success must be its amalgram with the Zeitgeist, a mercurial element corrosive of true gold. Hermes Trismegistus distinguishes three degrees: (I) true, (2) certain beyond error, (3) of all truth. “The Way, the Truth, and the Life” is “the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever”. Great Art is independent of conditions.

     T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, haec turba taeniarum omnis, have log-rolled their heads and their styles until Bloomsbury, Brixton, Balham, Bournemouth and Baaston believe them to be poets. Pendantry and preciosity, push and peacockry, are not the stuff of song.

     Go (with some trifle of aid from Socrates) and challenge their sycophants! It is easy to compel them to define “poetry” so as to exclude John Keats - fed, by the way, on honest porridge, not on “cereals” out of a can. And one will not impossibly be content to leave it at that!

     Here, then, is your chota hazri, fellow-pilgrims to the City of God, with the first blast of a challenge to the critics. Expect a fanfare, OLLA it shall be called; Reistafel for your breakfast dish! At the Solstice, with a bit of luck!

Aleister Crowley.

The City of God

          Day after day we crawled

          Beneath the leaden, flat,

          Featureless heaven, across dull emerald

          Field after field, whereon no aureate

          Sunrise awakened earth’s Magnificat,

          Save at the marge where, rimmed with duller pines,

          Dun earth mixed with black heaven, there unsealed

          A red eye glowing through that furtive field,

          As if the bloodhound of Eternity

          Tracked the thief Time. Remorseless rain

          Beat down, pale piteous monotony,

          Upon the inexplorable plain.

          A gnome that staggers under the grim load

          Set on his back by God,

          Might pity our weak jolting as we moved

          Hopelessly, yet inevitably, on,

          Under who knows what senseless goad,

          Unlovable as unloved,

          Towards the evasive horizon

          That mocked us without laughter, wrapped

          In its own cynic sleep,

          Careless of the vitalities it trapped,

          Not sanguine from the blood it lapped,

          Not living from the life it sapped,

          But in eternal gloom,

          Its own soul’s tomb.

          This was the sombre way we went—

          Not eloquent of death, since death is change,

          But of some tideless ocean sad and strange

          Beneath a mute, immobile firmament,

          The sun himself struck silent at the nod

          Of some more awful God.

          We were so far from the one city we sought

          That we had never hoped; and so despair

          Never built bastions against the thought

          That we might—in some ultimate—be there.

          Sunset and dawn were but the same red eye,

          The first behind us and the last before,

          Nor was the night more leaden than the day,

          Since—to see less no worse than to see more,

          Sight’s limit being that monotony

          Of grievous green and grey!

          Wonder could no more touch the soul. The dawn

          Broke as it peers had broken—when we found

          Ourselves in an enchanted ground

          Where all the plain was suddenly withdrawn,

          And we were in the midst of alien races

          And monstrous market places

          Where no man marked us. An armed man stood out

          From the bright-coloured rabble: he was black

          From head to foot, save for the peacock’s plumes

          That were his crest—then was this wonderland

          Storied Baghdad or silken Samarcand?

          Kashgar the envied? Yarkand the yak’s mart?

          Himis of holy men beyond utmost wrack

          Of Himalaya? Pride of Jhelum’s strand,

          Srinagar, happiest hope of every heart?

          Oh! but the warrior signed for us to loose

          Our shoes, for that the ground whereon we trod

          Was holy already from profaner use,

          Being the outskirts of the City of God.

                                        II.

          Close-ranked, the legions of the spear-bright rain

          Roared as they charged; we came incontinent

          Within a space: a threshold of twin spires,

          Topaz and jade, confront the firmament,

          And ’twixt them nestled the babe fane,

          Formed with blue canopy, the golden fires

          Of stars about it; there we stayed and there

          Put up petitions well and thorough to fare,

          Whirls of faint smoke that soared in the thin air.

          Lo! suddenly we felt our feet unshod

          Bleed with the sharp bliss of the City of God.

                                        III.

          Towered above the abyss, the red wall ran

          Mightily forth, its crenellated crest

          A square-toothed saw, God’s luminous azure

          Poured through each palpitant embrasure,

          Save where, crown over crown, fan over fan,

          Dome upon dome, cupola beyond cupola,

          Great gland, sun, moon, cross, crescent, breast

          And mightiest breast and gland and vesica

          Heaving with natural and unnatural longing,

          Crowding, coalescing, thronging,

          Mixing their magic, clouding over all

          With pale, pure gold, the spring sun’s thrall

          Thrilling with ecstasy to burst the blue —

          Oh! all our hashish dreams came true

          When we beheld the jewel of the city,

          Its nine glands coloured like all manner of fruit

          And flowers with stripe and trellis, whorl and spire,

          Even like all manner of beast and bird that be,

          And every gland stood bare, disdaining pity,

          Each shaft a column of fire,

          And its vibration was a lyre,

          And the echo of it a lute,

          So that a mighty melody

          Shone out thereof, a maze of moon in the gloom

          All inexpressibly dowered with perfume.

          And this was molten, this was living stone,

          This was the very flesh and blood of God,

          Incarnate Christ, the Saviour, hailed alone

          Artifex, martyr, the reviving god

          That on itself begat the one true vine

          And from its own breast drew the only wine.

          And all was rainbow and aurora blended

          In fluent colours interchanged and splendid

          Pure water whirled into pure fire and flecked

          With miracles of form,

          Wheels upon wheels expiring and erect,

          Colour and sound in storm,

          The heart of God within a frame of blue:—

          Our hashish dream come true!

                                        IV.

          And all this hung above a mighty river.

          Curve after curve, an amphisbaena, wound

          About the base of those pale precipices

          That cut the clouds, whose curtained eyelids quiver

          In their absorb’d gaze into that profound,

          The abyss of height confronting the abysses

          Of East and North.—Oh! but the fiery fan

          Of burning water that made molten love

          To the fiery face of the fair fane above,

          Whose pure and whose palingenetic plan

          Was older than all worlds, than that hot hour

          When Christ Ischyros capped the topmost tower

          About whose root the royal river ran.

                                        V.

          Gold upon gold, dome above dome, faint arrow

          Kindling sharp crescent, as the sunrays swept,

          Save for one midnight moment when one narrow

          Fierce ray, exhaling from no eye that slept

          Of God, our God, the sun—gold upon gold,

          Frond upon frond, fold upon fold

          Of walls like leaves and cupolas like flowers,

          And spires and domes that were as fabled fruit

          Of the low lands beyond the pillared seas

          O Hercules!

          Silver, sharp showers

          Swept on the city, and made mighty suit

          To the great god whose amorous hours

          Were housed in those eternities

          Within, where, by the frescoes and the gold,

          Musical, manifold,

          Carven like lace, by malachite

          And pophyry and chrysolite,

          Where in their copper cold sarcophagi

          Hundreds of emperors lie,

          And in their reliquaries bediamonded

          Thousands of saints still watch their jewelled bones;

          And beneath canopies of precious stones

          Invoked archangels, each an armed host,

          Hold ready to defend with glaive and spear

          The frontiers of the city, there appear

          The emblazoned ensigns of the Holy Ghost

          That all invisible pervades the whole,

          Being its secret soul.

          There, in that sanctuary of silences,

          There is a Word,

          The Word that built the city, never heard

          By any of those archangel phalanxes,

          Unuttered even in the holy heart

          Of God, or breathed by its own lightning breath,

          Since from all being it stands ever apart,

          Its name being Life, and that name’s echo Death.

                                        VI.

          Then when I was caught up into rapture—yea!

          From heaven to heaven was I swept away.

          And all that shadow city past,

          And I was in the City of God at last.

          This city was alive, athrob, astir,

          Shaped as the sacred, secret place of Her

          That hath no name on earth, whose whisper we

          Catch only in the silence of the sea.

          And through it poured a river of sunset blood,

          Pulsing its choral and colossal flood

          Throughout the city, and lifting it aloft,

          Too subtle-strenuous and too siren-soft,

          So that the very being of it did swim

          Into Herself, bliss to the buoyant brim,

          And rose and fell as only rise and fall

          The bosoms of those maids ecstatical

          Whom Gods caress with giant spasms—

          Red orgiastic dawns of the orgasms

          Wherein the soul, beneath its own feet trod,

          Spends itself in the sanctuary of God!

                                        VII.

          And in that heart of hearts was no more I,

          No more the heart; but sobbing through the sky,

          Came trembling the more awful beat, the blast

          Of a million trumpets blazoning the past,

          Heralding the to-be, and on their wings

          Whirred incommunicable things.

          And in their wake, tremendous and austere,

          A form of fear,

          Awe in the shape of the Most Holy One,

          A globe, an eye, a hawk, a lion, a lord,

          A bowl of brilliance, a winged globe, a sword—

          All these in one, and one beyond all these,

          Mute, ithyphallic, caryatides

          Like gods about his car, came crested on

          The one true God, the Sun!

          Instant, the city swirling to its brim

          With Life unthinkable, dissolved in Him.

          Instant, explosion shook the bounding night,

          Smote it but once, and left but one thing, Light.

          Oh, but the scarlet swallows up the blue—

          Our hashish dreams come true!

This edition consists of 200 copies numbered

and signed by the Author.

Price: Five Shillings

This copy is No.