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Satanic Extracts
[Consists of fragments of Crowley's writings acquired by Cosmo Trelawny during World War II. These fragments were copied by Cosmo Trelawny from a mass of Crowley's papers and typescripts left in his rooms by Macgregor Reid. The originals were then sold to a bookseller, and lost when his shop was bombed during the war.]
1.
I, the Beast 666 am called to shew this worship and to send it forth into the world; by my Woman called the Scarlet Woman, who is any woman that receives and transmits my Solar Word and Being, is this my Work achieved; for without woman man hath no power. By us all men learn that all that may be is their Way of Joy for them to go; and that all souls are of the Soul of True Light.
2.
I am a Sun, giving out Light and Life; but she [the Scarlet Woman] is their guide in darkness, making them pure, single of heart, awake to the Highest.
3. The Oath of Fealty.
I bind my blood in Satan's hands All this that lieth betwixt my hands, To thee, the Beast, and thy control, I pledge me; mind and body, and soul.
4. Pledge.
I swear to work my Work abhorred, Careless of all but one reward, The pleasure of the Devil our Lord.
5.
To me, every dirty act was simply a sacrament of sin, a passionately religious protest against Christianity, which was for me the symbol of all vileness, meanness, treachery, falsehood and oppression.
6. The Night House of Mars.
I, Therion, known as the Beast 666, whose highest symbol is the Eagle, and whose lowest is that of the Scorpion, facing Boleskine, making the sign called Puella, standing with feet together, head bowed, my left hand shielding my Phallus, and my right hand shielding my breast have made this record.
I, Therion, have garnered to the full the subtle lore of the Scorpion in the Night House of Mars. Beneath the Standard of Objectivity I serve my great Master Satan and the august Council of Nine composed of Beelzebub, Lucifuge, Asmodeus, Belphegor, Baal, Adrammelech, Lilith and Nahema.
The eagle, a bird of prey, is the symbol of that gigantic Power whose colour is Red and who hath affinity with Capricorn, Babalon.
The Scorpion boasts a Banner of black, brown and yellow, and is under the supervision of ten Demons named respectively, Thamiel, Chaigidel, Satariel, Gamehioth, Galab, Tagririm, Harab-Serapel, Samael, Gamaliel and Nahemoth.
Touching the Centre of my Breast, and my Solar Plexus, I again cry Therion an declare:—
Some two billion people now fill the earth, and, it is on record that fully a billion are drunk or insane or feeble minded or malarial or stricken with hookworm or tuberculosis or leprosy or venereal disease or neurasthenia or malnutrition.
He is indeed a rare man, that hath not some element of Scorpionic madness in his make up. There is the madness of melancholy, the madness of pride; the superstitious madness of false devotion; the madness of ambition, and also the prevalent madness of outrageous lust.
All around and about can be noted or heard the shaking of the hands and lips, paleness, or redness, or swelling of the face, glaring of the eyes, stammering of the tongue, stamping with the feet, unsteady motions of the whole body, rash actions and wild speeches of those whose golden infancy, leading to a brazen youth, hath ended in a leaden age.
Woe to thee Albion. Russia is about to march and with her the Chinese, and the Tartars. Armageddon is upon us.
I, Therion, giving the sign Puer, and standing with feet together and head erect, have spoken.
7. The Lion of the Thicket.
The idea of Napoleon reincarnating to impersonate Anti-Christ seems foolish on the face of it; but when one traces the notion and interprets it by the Light of Occultism, there is nothing absurd in it.
Napoleon means in Greek the 'Lion of the Thicket'—thicket lion or the thicket. The destroyer of the Gentile is called a lion that comes up from the thicket. "The lion has come up from the thicket, the destroyer of the Gentiles is on his way". Making a literal translation of these words—exercising a certain liberty—we find the name of Napoleon ready made—the lion that comes up from the thicket.
Nebuchadnezzar was the lion of the thicket. He was therefore Napoleon. The Emperor Titus was Napoleon. The Goths were Napoleon. Any 'new' power that will subvert the present order of things is a Napoleon. Napoleon's name was curiously expressive of the prophetic image of the destroyer of the Gentiles. But he has not yet done the work. Therefore another 'thicket lion' must appear.
Mussolini is a poor specimen of a lion—a Goose is reported to have saved Rome and a Goose will help to ruin it. Hitler is Napoleonic and definitely antichrist, he seeks to act wholly but not Holy.
There is nothing 'sent out' from the Celestial Broadcasting Station of the Beast 666 but what is lovely. The Beast teaches that it is not against reason to be passionate—but the lion, or wavelength from the thicket, i.e. jungle, is passionate without reason. Still, without a manifestation of tyranny we could not register the attributes of mercy, in this world anyhow.
Light admits not of corruption; it is not infected, though its functions where all is filthy. Understand this and you will appreciate the teaching of the Master Therion.
Remember the Holy Spirit often acts as a 'Roaring Lion' or as 'the old Serpent', instead of an 'Angel of Light'. We must take things as they really are. The twins of Set-Isis, harlot and beast, are still busy with that sodomitic and incestuous lust which is the traditional formula for producing demi-gods. Consider the case of Mary and the Dove, Leda and the swan.
Aleph the Fool ever impregnates the woman according to the dictate of Yod, the Angel of the Lord. His sister has seduced her brother Beast, shaming the Sun with her sin; she has mastered the Lion, and enchanted the Serpent. Nature is outraged by Magick; man is beastialised and woman defiled. The conjunction produces a monster; it affirms regression of types. Instead of a man-god conceived of the Spirit of God by a virgin in innocence, we are asked to adore the bastard of a whore and a brute, begotten in shamefullest sin and born in most blasphemous bliss.
As we made clear in the AA publication (class D) dealing with the Ritual of the Mark of the Beast, this is indeed the formula of our Magick; we insist that all acts must be equal; that evidence asserts the right to exist; that unless evil is a mere term expressing some relation of haphazard hostility between forces equally self-justified, the universe is as inexplicable and impossible as uncompensated action; that the orgies of Bacchus and Pan are no less sacramental than the Masses of Jesus; that the scars of syphilis are sacred and worthy of honour as much as the wounds of the Martyrs of Mary. It should be unnecessary to insist that the above ideas apply only to the Absolute.
Toothache is still painful and deceit degrading to a man relative to his situation in the world of illusion; he is doing his will by avoiding them. But the existence of 'Evil' is fatal to philosophy so long as it is supposed to be independent of conditions. It is because space is dark that we see the sun. We cannot see the stars in daylight. Mercy shines in the midst of guilt and its consequences. Had there been no law there had been no transgression—no justice, no mercy. Good would be unintelligible as a worod without evil to contrast with it.
Evil is eternal, but not necessarily dominant; it is the victim to be destrpyed, but never annihilated; it is the eternal darkness, in which light (goodness) ever shines.
Every principle in existence has its positive and its negative. Positive Divinity is God: Nature is only negative Divinity. There is no reason to doubt the infinity of Nature. Indeed, finity affirmed of Nature involves an absurdity. But then, again, a universal implies a particular. And the indivisible a divisible. Hence it follows that though positive Divinity be one and indivisible, negative Divinity is infinitely many and divisible. The negative particular Divinity CAN die, but the positive universal never.
Such subjects may well be beyond the comprehension of our Arch-bishops; but still they are susceptible of logical expression. It is for this end that man has the logos, or logical principle given to him, and he only of all animals.
If there were no fools how could one tell whether a man was wise or not and if wise men were very common, like pebbles, and fools, like diamonds, were very rare, then fools would be more valuable than they ought to be. Male philosophy is a dry solid; female philosophy is a liquid. These two like the pill and the draught of the chemist; or the flower and the water and yeast of the baker; or the copper and zinc and water of the galvanist, are indispensable for compounding the true elixir of life.
8. A Prophecy.
The artificiality of the present social fabric of the present so-called civilisation, will be torn into shreds; and as the dying leaves in the forest are driven before the strong winds of autumn, shall the shreds of the existing social fabric be scattered. The destruction that mankind is drawing down upon itself will come in the form of war, famine, pestilence, fire, flood, cyclones, earthquakes and cataclysms.
9. The Black Magician.
The black magician was dressed in his most noble vestments (he was an ex-priest):—but the crosses on them had been elaborated by dividing each arm into two parts, so that each cross made four Y's at the base. He was standing at the ruined altar of a deserted chapel, a place long since given over to the owl and the bat. There was enough roof left to give shelter to occasional tramps or gypsies, but all traces of door and window had departed.
By his side stood an atrocious woman who inspired him, robed also as a priest, but with her garments looped in such a manner as to make the dress indecent. There were two lights on the altar, candles of black wax, both on the north side of what served for a crucifix. There was a live toad nailed to a scarlet cross. Around it was wrapped a strip of linen, torn from one of their prospective victim's shirts by a bribed laundress. For incense a stick of yellow sulphur smouldered on charcoal.
Through the open roof the stars looked down upon the profanation. The voice of the operator was the sole vibration in that still air. He began to say the Mass, but reversing the order of the words of every sentence. His voice was a peculiar nasal drone, rising and falling by sharp and inharmonious changes. When he should have made the sign of the cross, instead he spat upon the ground and crossed it with his left foot. The divine names he replaced by a peculiar hissing whistle. The host was triangular, made of unleavened oatmeal mixed with blood. For chalice he used a vessel consecrated to all baseness and impurity, and the cloth with which he covered it was a napkin drenched in blood: it held no wine, but water from a well in which the body of a still-born child had been steeped.
As the hideous rite processed, the wizard became aware of a great need of firmness. His knees shook under him; and again he looked round as though to see some presence that he felt. No: there was nobody there but his clerk whose flaming red hair shone like fire itself in the night, curling out like serpents from under the biretta, and whose tigerish green eyes were blazing with intense excitement. Neither noticed that the stars no longer shone above the chapel; neither realised that the atmosphere had become suddenly hot and stifling.
It is impossible to tell the details of the final consecration of the accursed elements, with what defilements and curses the consummation of the mass took place, or with what hideous gesture the apostates abandoned themselves to the adoration. But this must be told, that with the consecrated water the priest baptised the toad in the name of their victim, (whom I shall style X)—saying "As this creature of toads shall wither and die upon the cross, so let it be with X".
The great clock of the nearby cathedral boomed midnight: the ceremony ended. The hysteria of the abominable celebrants died down: suddenly the woman took the ex-priests arm.
"Look", she cried.
The ex-priest came to himself. The whole chapel was ablaze with globes of fire, and the storm shook the walls of the chapel with whirling rage. A rotten beam came crashing down from the roof. "Come away" said the ex-priest unshaken, "There is danger here": but at that instant the storm died down, the electricity of the air discharged itself finally to earth; the stars shone out again.
But the horror of real loneliness enveloped the celebrants as they stood within the chapel. From the sanctuary they had come back into the world; and they were no longer of the world. They had cut themselves irrevocably from their fellow creatures. The realisation came to them simultaneously; for a moment they stood aghast. The the woman's passion turned loneliness into exhaltation; she clung wildly to her accomplice, and their mouths met in solemn resignation to, and acceptance of, their ineffable and appalling doom.
10. The Slave of the Beast 666.
The Ego becomes the Slave of the Beast 666. Transformed into an adoptive son of the race of Eblis, he is reborn in the image of the Beast and recognises his natural instincts as divine. He is taught that man could not wrest from nature her hidden secrets, nor create the sciences if his intellect were not a direct emanation of the First Cause. His soul shows mercy only to those who are allied with the Beast. His justice is vengeance on all his adversaries.
As a disciple of the Beast he becomes a new Jehovah-Eblis to fight the Christian faith. His ego is a new Lucifer, wearing the crown that he has won by the overthrow of the political and social order, civil authority, and private property.
He communes with the heart of the Beast and kisses the symbol of his generative forces. He learns the equality of the two eternal Kings, and keeps the balance between them (Matter and Spirit both equally eternal).
He is then ranked among the Knights of Abaddon, lions and scorpions, and the Angel of the bottomless pit. He accepts the promise of the final triumph of the Beast over Jehovah-Adonai, and the conquest of Paradise Lost.
Identified with the Beast, the Ego rules over both spheres, temporal and spiritual; he becomes is own Pontiff. He becomes the lord of the Brazen Serpent (Speirema 444) which cures the wounds caused by Adonai. He is received into the choir of the Genii and the Seraphim of the hierarchy of Demons. He is admitted to the presence of the Genius of Darkness, and makes his act of submission to Baphomet. He realises that his reason is the sole rule of Truth, the sole key of science and of politics.
The churchmen oppose the Beast and his authority from the Chiefs, with their Property, their Religion, and their Law. He is taught that of these infamous enemies, it is religion which he must help to attack; because no people has ever survived its Religion, and by killing it, both Law and Property is at the mercy of the Beast. He is ordained Pontiff, and crucifies Christ in effigy, thus defeating the menace of the Cross (Stauros 777) by mockery.
The Beast has supremacy over:—all constituted authority, all power.
The disciple of the Beast must attend all meetings held in the open when the Moon is at the full.
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