Previously published on Agapeta, 8.Banned for almost 100 years, believed to induce madness in those who drank it, absinthe is making a come back. The second image comes from “ Aleister Crowley and Absinthe” by Lucid Absinthe. The image at the top is a photograph of Absinthe Minette by MoonCCat.
Source of the text: Ra-Hoor-Khuit Network’s Magickal Library. 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. 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. Wage-slavery and boredom seem to complete his outlook on the world. 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. So crass a creature can have no true ideal. What then is his ideal of human life? one cannot say. He cannot distinguish between the Apollo Belvedere and the crude bestialities of certain Pompeian frescoes, or between Rabelais and Elenor Glyn. (But why perpetuate it?) Art is for him the parasite and pimp of love. 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. 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.
Yet against all these things we find the prohibitionist, logically enough. These three things are indissolubly bound up with wine, for they are species of intoxication. 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. 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. With this ignorance of human nature goes an ever grosser ignorance of the divine nature. 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. 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.
I have chosen to reproduce the whole part III, devoted to a brilliant description of the prohibitionist, which remains true for any type of bigotry, whether with respect to alcohol and drugs or to unconventional sex: So therefore as special vices and dangers pertinent to absinthe, so also do graces and virtues that adorn no other liquor. We do not curse the sea because of occasional disasters to our marines, or refuse axes to our woodsmen because we sympathize with Charles the First or Louis the Sixteenth. Even in ruin and in degradation it remains a thing apart: its victims wear a ghastly aureole all their own, and in their peculiar hell yet gloat with a sinister perversion of pride that they are not as other men.īut we are not to reckon up the uses of a thing by contemplating the wreckage of its abuse. In part VI he writes thus:Īh! the Green Goddess! What is the fascination that makes her so adorable and so terrible? What is there in absinthe that makes it a separate cult? The effects of its abuse are totally distinct from those of other stimulants. In it he extols the peculiar virtues of this beverage that was often vilified, and became banned in many countries throughout the 20th century. The Old Absinthe House in New Orleans – from It seems to have been composed in the legendary Old Absinthe House in New Orleans. Absinthe: The Green Goddess is an essay in 8 parts by the famous occultist Aleister Crowley, first published in The International, Vol XII No.2, February 1918.
0 kommentar(er)
