Energized Enthusiasm

Author: Aleister Crowley Publisher: Publish Date: Review Date: Status:💥

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The divine consciousness which is
reflected and refracted in the works of Genius feeds upon a certain secretion, as I believe.
This secretion is analogous to semen, but not identical with it.
There are but few men and fewer women, those women being
inevitably androgyne, who possess it at any time in any quantity.

S
o closely is this secretion connected with the sexual economy that it appears to me at times as if it might be a by-product of that process which generates semen. That some form
of this doctrine has been gener
ally accepted is shown in the prohibitions of all religions. Sanctity has been assumed to depend
o
n chastity, and chastity has nearly always been interpreted as abstinence. But I doubt whether the relation is so simple as this
would imply; for example, I find in myself that manifestations of
mental creative force always concur with some abnormal
condition of the physical powers of generation. But it is not the
case that long periods of chastity
, on the one hand, or excess of orgies, on the other, are favourable to its manifestation, or even to
its formation.

I know myself, and in me it is extremely strong; its results are
a
stounding. For example, I wrote Tannhäuser, complete from conception
to

of the fall of nights and days, eve
n after stopping; nor was there any reaction of fatigue. This work was written when I was
twenty-four years old, immediately on the completion of an orgie
which would normally have tired me out.

p. 2

Often and often have I noticed that sexual satisfaction so-called has left me dissatisfied a
nd unfatigued, and let loose the floods of verse which have disgraced my career.
Yet, on the contrary, a period of chastity has sometimes
fortified me for a great outburst. This is far from being invariably
the case. At the conclusion of the K2 expedition, after five months
of chastity, I did no work whateve
r, barring very few odd lyrics, for months afterwards.

I may further refer to my second journey to Algeria, where my
s
exual life, though fairly full, had been unsatisfactory. On quitting Biskra, I was so full of ideas that I had to get off
the train at El-Kantara, where I wrote “The Scorpion.”
Five or six poems were written on the way to Paris; “The Ordeal of Ida
Pendragon” during my twenty-four hours’ stay in Paris, and
“Snowstorm” and “The Electric Silence” immediately on my
r

To sum up, I can always trace a connection between my
sexual condition and the condition of
artistic creation, which is so c
lose as to approach identity, and yet so loose that I cannot predicate a single important proposition.

I find it in my experience that it is
useless to flog a tired horse. There are times when I am
absolutely bereft of even one drop of this elixir. Nothing will
restore it, neither rest in bed, nor drugs, nor exercise. On the
other hand, sometimes when after a s
evere spell of work I have b
een dropping with physical fatigue, perhaps sprawling on the floor, too tired to move hand or fo
ot, the occurrence of an idea has restored me to perfect intensity o
f energy, and the working out of the idea has actually got rid of t
he aforesaid physical fatigue, a

p. 4

Exactly parallel (nowhere meeting) is the case of mania. A
madman may struggle against six t
rained athletes for hours, and show no sign of fatigue. Then he
will suddenly collapse, but at a second’s notice from the irritable idea will resume the struggle as
fresh as ever. Until we discovered “unconscious muscular action”
and its effects, it is rational to suppose such a man “possessed of a
devil”; and the difference between the madman and the genius is
not in the quantity but in the quality of their work. Genius is
organized, madness chaotic. Often t
he organization of genius is on original lines, and ill-balanced and ignorant medicine-men
mistake it for disorder. Time has shown that Whistler and
Gauguin “kept rules” as well as the masters whom they were
s
upposed

The Greeks say that there are three methods of discharging the
Leyden Jar of Genius. These three methods they assign to three
G
ods. These three Gods are Dionysus, Apollo, Aphrodite. In
English: wine, women and song.
Now it would be a great mistake to imagine that the Greeks
were recommending a visit to a brothel.

Some writers suppose that in the
ancient rites of Eleusis the High Priest publicly copulated with the High Priestess. Were this
so, it would be no more “indecent” than it is “blasphemous” for
the priest to make bread and wine into the body and blood of God.
True, the Protestants say that it is blasphemous; but a
Protestant is one to whom all thi
ngs sacred are profane, whose mind being all filth can see nothing in the sexual act but a crime
o
r jest, whose only facial gestures are the sneer and the leer. Protestantism is the excrement of human thought, and
a
ccordingly in Protestant countries art, if it exist at all, only exists to revolt.

Agree then that it does not follow form the fact that wine,
woman and song make the sailor’s tavern that these ingredients
must necessarily concoct a hell-broth.
There are some people so simple a
s to think that, when they have proved the religious instinct to be a mere efflorescence of
t
he sex-instinct, they have destroyed religion. We should rather consider that the sailor’s tavern gives
him his only glimpse of heaven, just as the destructive criticism of
the phallicists has only proved sex to be a sacrament.
Consciousness, says the materialist
, axe in hand, is a function of the brain. He has only re-formul
ated the old saying, “Your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost.”!

N
ow sex is justly hallowed in this sense, that it is the eternal fire of the race. Huxley admitted that “some of the lower
animalculæ are in a sense immortal,” because they go on
reproducing eternally by fission, and however often you divide x

by 2 there is always something left. But he never seems to have
seen that mankind is immortal in exactly the same sense, and goes
on reproducing itself with similar c
haracteristics through the ages, changed by circumstance indeed, but always identical in itself.
But the spiritual flower of this process is that at the moment of
discharge a physical ecstasy occurs, a spasm analogous to the
mental spasm which meditation gives. And further, in the
sacramental and ceremonial use of the sexual act, the divine
consciousness may be attained.

The sexual act being then a sacrament, it remains to consider
in what respect this limits the employment of the organs.
First, it is obviously legitimate to employ them for their
natural physical purpose. But if it be allowable to use them
ceremonially for a religious purpose, we shall find the act hedged
about with many restrictions.
For in this case the organs become holy. It matters little to
mere propagation that men should be vicious; the most debauched
roué might and almost certainly would beget more healthy
children than a semi-sexed prude. So the so-called “moral”
r

But admit its religious function, and one may at once lay
down that the act must not be profaned. It must not be undertaken
l
ightly and foolishly without excuse. It may be undertaken for the direct object of continuing the race.
It may be undertaken in obedienc
e to real passion; for passion, as its name implies, is rather ins
pired by a force of divine strength and beauty without the w
ill of the individual, often even against i

I
t is the casual or habitual—what Christ called “idle”—use or rather abuse of these forces which
constitutes their profanation. It w
ill further be obvious that, if the act in itself is to be the sacrament in a religious ceremony, this act must be accomplished
solely for the love of God. All personal considerations must be

banished utterly. Just as any priest can perform the miracle of
transubstantiation, so can any man, possessing the necessary
qualifications, perform this other miracle, whose nature must
form the subject of a subsequent discussion.
Personal aims being destroyed, it is à fortiori
necessary to neglect social and other similar considerations.

I
need hardly emphasize the necessity for the strictest self-control
and concentration on their part. As it would be blasphemy to
enjoy the gross taste of the wine of the sacrament, so must the
celebrant suppress even the minutest manifestation of animal
p

Of the qualifying tests there is no necessity to speak; it is
sufficient to say that the adepts h
ave always known how to secure e
fficiency. Needless also to insist on a similar quality in the assistants;
the sexual excitement must be suppressed and transformed into its
r
eligious

With these preliminaries settled in order to guard against
foreseen criticisms of those Protestants who, God having made
them a little lower than the Angels, have made themselves a great
deal lower than the beasts b
y their consistently bestial interpretation of all things human and divine, we may consider
first the triune nature of these ancient methods of energizing
enthusiasm.

Music has two parts; tone or pitch, and rhythm. The latter
quality associates it with the dance, and that part of dancing
which is not rhythm is sex. Now t
hat part of sex which is not a form of the dance, animal movemen
t, is intoxication of the soul, which connects it with wine. Further identities will suggest
themselves to the student.

LIBER D
CCCXI 8

By the use of the three methods in one the whole being of man
may thus be stimulated.
The music will create a general harmony of the brain, leading
it in its own paths; the wine affords a general stimulus of its
animal nature; and the sex-excitement elevates the moral nature of
the man by its close analogy with the highest ecstasy. It remains,
however, always for him to make the final transmutation. Unless
h
e have the special secretion which I have postulated, the result will be commonplace.

So consonant is this system with the nature of man that it is
exactly parodied and profaned not only in the sailor’s tavern, but
in the Society ball. Here, for the lowest natures the result is
drunkenness, disease and death; for the middle natures a gradual
b
lunting of the finer feelings; for the higher, an exhilaration amounting at the best to the foundation of a life-long love.
If these Society “rites” are properly performed, there should
be no exhaustion. After a ball, one should feel the need of a long
walk in the young morning air. The weariness or boredom, the
headache or somnolence, are Nature’s warnings.

Now the purpose of such a ball, the moral attitude on entering,
seems to me to be of supreme importance. If you go with the idea
of killing time, you are rather killing yourself. Baudelaire speaks
o
f the first period of love when the boy kisses the trees of the wood, rather than kiss nothing. At
the age of thirty-six I found myself at Pompeii, passionately kis
sing that great grave statue of a woman that stands in the avenue of the tombs. Even now, as I
wake in the morning, I sometimes fall to kissing my own arms.

I
t is with such a feeling that one should go to a ball, and with such a feeling intensified, purifi
ed and exalted, that one should l
eave it. If this be so, how much more
if one go with the direct religious purpose burning in one’s whole being! Beethoven
roaring at the sunrise is no strange spectacle to me, who shout

w
ith joy and wonder, when I understand (without which one cannot really be said ever to see) a blade of grass. I fall upon my
knees in speechless adoration at the moon; I hide my eyes in holy
awe from a good Van Gogh.

Imagine then a ball in which the music is the choir celestial,
the wine the wine of the Graal, o
r that of the Sabbath of the Adepts, and one’s partner the Infinite and Eternal One, the True
a
nd Living God Most High! Go even to a common ball—the Moulin de la Galette will
serve even the least of my mag
icians—with your whole soul aflame within you, and your whole
will concentrated on these transubstantiations, and tell me what miracle takes place!

It is the hate of, the distaste for, life that sends one to the ball
w
hen one is old; when one is young one is on springs until the h
our falls; but the love of God, which is the only true love, diminishes not with age; it grows d
eeper and intenser with every satisfaction. It seems as if in the noblest en this secretion
c
onstantly increases—which certainly suggests an external reservoir—so that age loses all its bitter-ness. We find “Brother
Lawrence,” Nicholas Herman of Lor
raine, at the age of eighty in continuous enjoyment of union with
God. Buddha at an equal age w
ould run up and down the Eight High Trances like an acrobat on a ladder; stories not too dissimilar are told of Bishop Berkeley.
Many persons have not attained union at all until middle age, and
t

Now I am certainly of opinion tha
t genius can be acquired, or, in the alternative, that it is an almost universal possession. Its
rarity may be attributed to the crushing influence of a corrupted
society. It is rare to meet a youth without high ideals, generous
thoughts, a sense of holiness, of his own importance, which, being
interpreted, is, of his own identity with God. Three years in the
world, and he is a bank clerk or even a government official. Only

those who intuitively understand from early boyhood that they
must stand out, and who have t
he incredible courage and endurance to do so in the fa
ce of all that tyranny, callousness, and the scorn of inferiors can do; only these arrive at manhood
uncontaminated.

Even where we found thoroughly
good seed sprouting in favourable ground, too often is the
re a frittering away of the forces. Facile encouragement of a poet or painter is far worse for
him than any amount of opposition.
Here again the sex question (S.Q. so-called by Tolstoyans, chastity-mongers, nut-fooders, and
such who talk and think of nothing else) intrudes its horrid head.
I believe that every boy is originally conscious of sex as sacred.
But he does not know what it is. With infinite diffidence he asks.
The master replies with holy hor
ror; the boy with a low leer, a f
urt

I am inclined to agree with the Head Master of Eton that
pæderastic passions among schoolboys “do no harm”; further, I
think them the only redeeming fe
ature of sexual life at public schools.1

The Hindoos are wiser. At the
well-watched hour of puberty the boy is prepared as for a sacrament; he is led to a duly
consecrated temple, and there by a wise and holy woman, skilled in
the art, and devoted to this end, he is initiated with all solemnity
into the mystery of life.

The act is thus declared religious, sacred, impersonal, utterly
apart from amorism and eroticism and animalism and senti-mentalism and all the other vilenesses that Protestantism has

made of it.

The Catholic Church did, I believe, to some extent preserve
the Pagan tradition. Marriage is a sacrament.1
But in the attempt
to deprive the act of all accretio
ns which would profane it, the Fathers of the Church added in spite of themselves other
accretions which profaned it more. They tied it to property and
inheritance. They wished it to serve both God and Mammon.

To return. The rarity of genius
is in great part due to the destruction of its young. Even as in physical life that is a
favoured plant one of whose thousa
nd seeds ever shoots forth a b
lade, s

But just as rabbits increased a
pace in Australia, where even a missionary has been known to beget n
inety children in two years, s
o shall we be able to breed genius if we can find the conditions which hamper it, and remove them.
The obvious practical step is to
restore the rites of Bacchus, Aphrodite and Apollo to their proper place. They should not be
open to every one, and manhood should
be the reward of ordeal a
nd initiation. The physical tests should be sev
er

1
Of course there has been a school of devilish ananders that has held the act in itself to
be “wicked.” Of these blasphemers of Nat

LIBER D
CCCXI 12

killed out rather than artificially preserved. The same remark
applies to intellectual tests. But such tests should be as wide as
possible. I was an absolute duffer at school in all forms of
athletics and games, because I despised them. I held, and st
ill hold, numerous mountaineering world’s records.

Similarly, exam-inations fail to test intelligence. Cecil Rhodes refused to employ
any man with a University degree. That such degrees lead to
honour in England is a sign of E
ngland’s decay, though even in England they are usually the step
ping-stones to clerical idleness o

Such is a dotted outline of the picture that I wish to draw. If
the power to possess property depended on a man’s competence,
a
nd his perception of real values, a new aristocracy would at once b
e created, and the deadly fact that social consideration varies with the power of purchasing champagne would cease to be a
fact. Our pluto-heiro-politicocracy would fall in a day.
But I am only too well aware that such a picture is not likely
to be painted. We can then only work patiently and in secret. We
must select suitable material and train it in utmost reverence to
these three master-methods, or aiding the soul in its genial orgasm.

This reverent attitude is of an importance which I cannot over-rate. Normal people find normal relief from any general or
special excitement in the sexual act.
Commander Marston, R.N., whose experiments in the effect
of the tom-tom on the married Englishwoman are classical and
conclusive, has admirably describ
ed how the vague unrest which she at first shows gradually assumes the sexual form, and
culminates, if allowed to do so, in shameless masturbation or
indecent advances. But this is a natural corollary of the propo-sition that married Englishwomen
are usually unacquainted with sexual satisfaction. Their desires are constantly stimulated by
brutal and ignorant husbands, and never gratified. This fact again
account for the amazing prevalence of Sapphism in London
S

T
he Hindus warn their pupils against the dangers of breathing exercises. Indeed the slightest laxness in moral or physical tissues
may cause the energy accumulated by the practice to discharge
itself by involuntary emission. I have known this happen in my
o

It is then of the utmost importance to realize that the relief of
tension is to be found in what t
he Hebrews and the Greeks called prophesying, and which is better when organized into art. The
disorderly discharge is mere waste, a wilderness of howlings; the
orderly discharge is a “Prometheus unbound,” or “L’age
d
’airain,” according to the special aptitudes of the enthused person. But it must be remembered the special aptitudes are very
easy to acquire if the driving force of enthusiasm be great. If you
cannot keep the rules of others, you make rules of your own. One
s

It will be necessary for most Englishmen to emulate the self-control of the Arabs and Hindus, wh
ose ideal is to deflower the greatest possible number of virgins—eighty is considered a fairly
good performance—without completing the act.
It is, indeed, of the first import
ance for the celebrant in any phallic rite to be able to compl
ete the act without even once allowing a sexual or sensual thought to invade his mind. The
mind must be as absolutely detached from one’s own body as it is
from another person’s.

LIBER D
CCCXI 14X

Of musical instruments few are suitable. The human voice is
the best, and the only one which can be usefully employed in
chorus. Anything like an orchestra implies infinite rehearsal, and
introduces an atmosphere of artificiality. The organ is a worthy
solo instrument, and is an orchestra in itself, while its tone and
a
ss

The violin is the most useful of all, for its every mood
expresses the hunger for the infinite, and yet it is so mobile that it
has a greater emotional range than any of its competitors.
Accompaniment must be dispensed with, unless a harpist be
a

The harmonium is a horrible instrument, if only because of its
associations; and the piano is l
ike unto it, although, if unseen and p
layed by a Paderewski, it would serve. The trumpet and the bell are excellent, to startle, and the crises
of a ceremony.
Hot, drubbing, passionate, in a different class of ceremony, a
class more intense and direct, b
ut on the whole less exalted, the tom-tom stands alone. It combines well with the practice of
mantra, and is the best accompaniment for any sacred dance.

Of sacred dances the most pra
ctical for a gathering is the seated dance. One sits cross-legged on the floor, and sways two
and fro from the hips in time with the mantra. A solo or duet of
dancers as a spectacle rather distracts from this exercise. I would
suggest a very small and very bri
lliant light on the floor in the middle of the room. Such a room is best floored with mosaic
marble; an ordinary Freemason’s Lodge carpet is not a bad thing.1
T
he eyes, if they see anything at all, see then only the rhythmical or mechanical squares leading in perspective to the
simple unwinking light.

The swinging of the body with the mantra (which has a habit
of rising and falling as if of its o
wn accord in a very weird way) becomes more accentuated; ultimately a curiously spasmodic
s
tage occurs, and then the consciousness flickers and goes out; p
erhaps breaks through into the divine consciousness, perhaps is merely recalled to itself by some variable in external impression.

The above is a very simple description of a very simple and
earnest form of ceremony, based entirely upon rhythm.
I
t is very easy to prepare, and its results are usually very e

Wine being a mocker and strong drink raging, its use is more
likely to lead to trouble than mere music.
One essential difficulty is dosage. One certainly needs
e
nough; and, as Blake points out, one can only tell what is enough by taking too much. For each man the dose varies enormously; so
does it for the same man at different times.

The ceremonial escape from this is to have a noiseless
a
ttendant to bear the bowl of libation, and present it to each in turn, at frequent intervals. Small doses should be drunk, and the
bowl passed on, taken as the worshipper deems advisable. Yet
t
he cup-bearer should be an initiate, and use his own discretion before presenting the bowl. The sl
ightest sign that intoxication is mastering the man should be a sign to him to pass that man. This
practice can be easily fitted to the ceremony previously described.

LIBER D
CCCXI 16

The sexual excitement, which must complete the harmony of
method, offers a more difficult problem.
It is exceptionally desirable that the actual bodily move-ments
involved should be decorous in the highest sense, and many
people are so ill-trained that they w
ill be unable to regard such a ceremony with any but critical or lascivious eyes; either would be
fatal to all the good already done. It is presumably better to wait
u
ntil all present are greatly exalted before risking a profanation. It is not desirable, in my opinion, that the ordinary
w
orshippers should celebrate in public. T
he sacrifice should be single. Whether or no …

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Energized Enthusiasm

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