Contents

Partial File of the Collection in
"The Sword and the Song"

Liber 67

I flung out of chapel and church

Temple and hall an meeting-room

Venus' Bower and Osiris' Tomb,

and left the devil in the lurch,

While God got lost in the crowd of gods,

And soul went down in the turbid tide

Of the metaphysical Lotus-eyed,

And I was -- anyhow, what's the odds?

[...]

Yet by-and-by I hope to weave

A song of Anti-Christmas Eve

And First- and Second-Beast-er Day.

There's one who loves me dearly (vrai!)

Who yet believes me sprung from Tophet,

Either the Beast or the False Prophet;

And by all sorts of monkey tricks

Adds up my name to Six Six Six.

Retire, good Gallup! In such strife her

Superior skill makes "you" a cipher!

Ho! I adopt the number. Look

At the quaint wrapper of this book!

I will deserve it if I can: It is the number of a Man.

Aleister Crowley, from "Ascension Day" in The
Sword of Song

I find some folks think me (for one)

So great a fool that I disclaim

Indeed Jehovah's hate for shame

That man to-day should not be weaned

Of worshipping so foul a fiend

In presence of the living Sun,

And yet replace him oiled and clean

By the Egyptian Pantheon,

The same thing by another name.

Thus when of late Egyptian Gods

Evoked ecstatic periods

In verse of mine, you thought I praised

Or worshipped them -- I stand amazed.

I merely wished to chant in verse

Some aspects of the Universe,

Summed up these subtle forces finely,

And sang of them (I think divinely)

In name and form; a fault perhaps --

Reviewers are such funny chaps!

I think that ordinary folk,

Though, understood the things I spoke.

For Gods, and devils too, I find

Are merely modes of my own mind!

Aleister Crowley, from "Pentecost" in The Sword
of Song