AleisterCrowley-AbsintheTheGreenGoddess.pdf

Absinthe: The Green Goddess

Aleister Crowley

Keep always this dim corner for me, that I may sit while the

Green Hour glides, a proud pavine of Time. For I am no longer in

the city accursed, where Time is horsed on the white gelding

Death, his spurs rusted with blood.

There is a corner of the United States which he has overlooked.

It lies in New Orleans, between Canal Street and Esplanade

Avenue; the Mississippi for its base. Thence it reaches northward

to a most curious desert land, where is a cemetery lovely beyond

dreams. Its walls low and whitewashed, within which straggles a

wilderness of strange and fantastic tombs; and hard by is that

great city of brothels which is so cynically mirthful a neighbor.

As Felicien Rops wrote,--or was it Edmond d'Haraucourt?--"la

Prostitution et la Mort sont frere et soeur--les fils de Dieu!"

At least the poet of Le Legende des Sexes was right, and the

psycho-analysts after him, in identifying the Mother with the

Tomb. This, then, is only the beginning and end of things, this

"quartier macabre" beyond the North Rampart with the Mississippi

on the other side. It is like the space between, our life which

flows, and fertilizes as it flows, muddy and malarious as it may

be, to empty itself into the warm bosom of the Gulf Stream, which

(in our allegory) we may call the Life of God.

But our business is with the heart of things; we must go beyond

the crude phenomena of nature if we are to dwell in the spirit.

Art is the soul of life and the Old Absinthe House is heart and

soul of the old quarter of New Orleans.

For here was the headquarters of no common man--no less than a

real pirate--of Captain Lafitte, who not only robbed his

neighbors, but defended them against invasion. Here, too, sat

Henry Clay, who lived and died to give his name to a cigar.

Outside this house no man remembers much more of him than that;

but here, authentic and, as I imagine, indignant, his ghost

stalks grimly.

Here, too are marble basins hollowed--and hallowed!--by the

drippings of the water which creates by baptism the new spirit of

absinthe.

I am only sipping the second glass of that "fascinating, but

subtle poison, whose ravages eat men's heart and brain" that I

have ever tasted in my life; and as I am not an American anxious

for quick action, I am not surprised and disappointed that I do

not drop dead upon the spot. But I can taste souls without the

aid of absinthe; and besides, this is magic of absinthe! The

spirit of the house has entered into it; it is an elixir, the

masterpiece of an old alchemist, no common wine.

And so, as I talk with the patron concerning the vanity of

things, I perceive the secret of the heart of God himself; this,

that everything, even the vilest thing, is so unutterably lovely

that it is worthy of the devotion of a God for all eternity.

What other excuse could He give man for making him? In substance,

that is my answer to King Solomon.

II.

The barrier between divine and human things is frail but

inviolable; the artist and the bourgeois are only divided by a

point of view--"A hair divided the false and true."

I am watching the opalescence of my absinthe, and it leads me to

ponder upon a certain very curious mystery, persistent in legend.

We may call it the mystery of the rainbow.

Originally in the fantastic but significant legend of the

Hebrews, the rainbow is mentioned as the sign of salvation. The

world has been purified by water, and was ready for the

revelation of Wine. God would never again destroy His work, but

ultimately seal its perfection by a baptism of fire.

Now, in this analogue also falls the coat of many colors which

was made for Joseph, a legend which was regarded as so important

that it was subsequently borrowed for the romance of Jesus. The

veil of the Temple, too, was of many colors. We find, further

east, that the Manipura Cakkra--the Lotus of the City of

Jewels--which is an important centre in Hindu anatomy, and

apparently identical with the solar plexus, is the central point

of the nervous system of the human body, dividing the sacred from

the profane, or the lower from the higher.

In western Mysticism, once more we learn that the middle grade

initiation is called Hodos Camelioniis, the Path of the

Chameleon. There is here evidently an illusion to this same

mystery. We also learn that the middle stage in Alchemy is when

the liquor becomes opalescent.

Finally, we note among the visions of the Saints one called the

Universal Peacock, in which the totality is perceived thus

royally appareled.

Would it were possible to assemble in this place the cohorts of

quotation; for indeed they are beautiful with banners, flashing

their myriad rays from cothurn and habergeon, gay and gallant in

the light of that Sun which knows no fall from Zenith of high

noon!

Yet I must needs already have written so much to make clear one

pitiful conceit: can it be that in the opalescence of absinthe is

some occult link with this mystery of the Rainbow? For

undoubtedly one does indefinably and subtly insinuate the drinker

in the secret chamber of Beauty, does kindle his thoughts to

rapture, adjust his point of view to that of the artists, at

least to that degree of which he is originally capable, weave for

his fancy a gala dress of stuff as many-colored as the mind of

Aphrodite.

Oh Beauty! Long did I love thee, long did I pursue thee, thee

elusive, thee intangible! And lo! thou enfoldest me by night and

day in the arms of gracious, of luxurious, of shimmering silence.

III.

The Prohibitionist must always be a person of no moral character;

for he cannot even conceive of the possibility of a man capable

of resisting temptation. Still more, he is so obsessed, like the

savage, by the fear of the unknown, that he regards alcohol as a

fetish, necessarily alluring and tyrannical.

With this ignorance of human nature goes an ever grosser

ignorance of the divine nature. He does not understand that the

universe has only one possible purpose; that, the business of

life being happily completed by the production of the necessities

and luxuries incidental to comfort, the residuum of human energy

needs an outlet. The surplus of Will must find issue in the

elevation of the individual towards the Godhead; and the method

of such elevation is by religion, love, and art. These three

things are indissolubly bound up with wine, for they are species

of intoxication.

Yet against all these things we find the prohibitionist,

logically enough. It is true that he usually pretends to admit

religion as a proper pursuit for humanity; but what a religion!

He has removed from it every element of ecstasy or even of

devotion; in his hands it has become cold, fanatical, cruel, and

stupid, a thing merciless and formal, without sympathy or

humanity. Love and art he rejects altogether; for him the only

meaning of love is a mechanical--hardly even

physiological!--process necessary for the perpetuation of the

human race. (But why perpetuate it?) Art is for him the parasite

and pimp of love. He cannot distinguish between the Apollo

Belvedere and the crude bestialities of certain Pompeian

frescoes, or between Rabelais and Elenor Glyn.

What then is his ideal of human life? one cannot say. So crass a

creature can have no true ideal. There have been ascetic

philosophers; but the prohibitionist would be as offended by

their doctrine as by ours, which, indeed, are not so dissimilar

as appears. Wage-slavery and boredom seem to complete his outlook

on the world.

There are species which survive because of the feeling of disgust

inspired by them: one is reluctant to set the heel firmly upon

them, however thick may be one's boots. But when they are

recognized as utterly noxious to humanity--the more so that they

ape its form--then courage must be found, or, rather, nausea must

be swallowed. May God send us a Saint George!

IV.

It is notorious that all genius is accompanied by vice. Almost

always this takes the form of sexual extravagance. It is to be

observed that deficiency, as in the cases of Carlyle and Ruskin,

is to be reckoned as extravagance. At least the word abnormalcy

will fit all cases. Farther, we see that in a very large number

of great men there has also been indulgence in drink or drugs.

There are whole periods when practically every great man has been

thus marked, and these periods are those during which the heroic

spirit has died out of their nation, and the burgeois is

apparently triumphant.

In this case the cause is evidently the horror of life induced in

the artist by the contemplation of his surroundings. He must find

another world, no matter at what cost.

Consider the end of the eighteenth century. In France the men of

genius are made, so to speak, possible, by the Revolution. In

England, under Castlereagh, we find Blake lost to humanity in

mysticism, Shelley and Byron exiles, Coleridge taking refuge in

opium, Keats sinking under the weight of circumstance, Wordsworth

forced to sell his soul, while the enemy, in the persons of

Southey and Moore, triumphantly holds sway.

The poetically similar period in France is 1850 to 1870. Hugo is

in exile, and all his brethren are given to absinthe or to

hashish or to opium.

There is however another consideration more important. There are

some men who possess the understanding of the City of God, and

know not the keys; or, if they possess them, have not force to

turn them in the wards. Such men often seek to win heaven by

forged credentials. Just so a youth who desires love is too often

deceived by simulacra, embraces Lydia thinking her to be Lalage.

But the greatest men of all suffer neither the limitations of the

former class nor the illusions of the latter. Yet we find them

equally given to what is apparently indulgence. Lombroso has

foolishly sought to find the source of this in madness--as if

insanity could scale the peaks of Progress while Reason recoiled

from the bergschrund. The explanation is far otherwise. Imagine

to yourself the mental state of him who inherits or attains the

full consciousness of the artist, that is to say, the divine

consciousness.

He finds himself unutterably lonely, and he must steel himself to

endure it. All his peers are dead long since! Even if he find an

equal upon earth, there can scarcely be companionship, hardly

more than the far courtesy of king to king. There are no twin

souls in genius.

Good--he can reconcile himself to the scorn of the world. But yet

he feels with anguish his duty towards it. It is therefore

essential to him to be human.

Now the divine consciousness is not full flowered in youth. The

newness of the objective world preoccupies the soul for many

years. It is only as each illusion vanishes before the magic of

the master that he gains more and more the power to dwell in the

world of Reality. And with this comes the terrible

temptation--the desire to enter and enjoy rather than remain

among men and suffer their illusions. Yet, since the sole purpose

of the incarnation of such a Master was to help humanity, they

must make the supreme renunciation. It is the problem of the

dreadful bridge of Islam, Al Sirak--the razor-edge will cut the

unwary foot, yet it must be trodden firmly, or the traveler will

fall to the abyss. I dare not sit in the Old Absinthe House

forever, wrapped in the ineffable delight of the Beatific Vision.

I must write this essay, that men may thereby come at last to

understand true things. But the operation of the creative godhead

is not enough. Art is itself too near the reality which must be

renounced for a season.

Therefore his work is also part of his temptation; the genius

feels himself slipping constantly heavenward. The gravitation of

eternity draws him. He is like a ship torn by the tempest from

the harbor where the master must needs take on new passengers to

the Happy Isles. So he must throw out anchors and the only

holding is the mire! Thus in order to maintain the equilibrium of

sanity, the artist is obliged to seek fellowship with the

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