MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS
By Aleister Crowley

Chapter XXXVI: Quo Stet Olympus: Where the Gods, Angels, etc. Live

Cara Soror,

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

We settled what Gods, angels, demons, elementals were some little while ago; we also wrote of how they live, so now, insatiable Seeker, you ask where.

But surely, even as a child—did you not sing that immemorial Gregorian plain-chant

"There's a Friend for little children
Above the bright blue sky."

Simple enough.  A nice flat earth: sun, moon, stars, planets, satellites hung up to dry, with occasional meteorites and comets jazzing about to vary the monotony; above all that, this bright blue floor based upon Reckitts' and advertisements for the Riviera.

Just like that.  And above that again, the Jew Jeweller's hashish dream of heaven: see the Apocalypse.  A vulgarization of Baudelaire's still, shining, mirror world!

How right Rome was when she put her foot down on great Galileo and his upstart kind!  But she did not do the job properly.  She should have brewed a bogus bogey-tale to frighten people off astronomy for ever.  But perhaps it was already too late!  The mischief had struck roots too deep for her.

What had these wizards wrought?

Those lovely mediaeval Charts Celestial that still enchant us by sheer beauty and sublimity had been made mockery by those sinister adepts of sorcery!

No more flat earth on four pillars—on?—

In India the earth was supported by an elephant who stood on a tortoise—who . . . ?  No floor above.  Nothing but empty space with swarming galaxies; no room for "heaven."  Simpler to call Olympus or Meru the home of the Gods—believe it or not! don't ask questions!

Yet all the time the difficulty is of our own silly making.  The most elementary consideration of the nature of Gods, angels, demons, and the rest, as shown by their peculiar faculties, stamps them all instantly as Beings pertaining to more than three dimensions!  Just as no number of lines is enough to produce the smallest plain, as a cube is capable of containing an infinite number of squares, so, far from there being no room for heaven, there is absolutely nothing but room!

Yet of course the nature of that space is for ever incomprehensible, nay inconceivable, by any being of a lower dimension.  Only when we have succeeded in uniting our Conscious (three-dimensional) with our Unconscious (four-dimensional) Self can we expect even a symbolic conception of how things go on "in them furrin parts."

Speculation on such points is unpardonably profitless; I have only devoted these few paragraphs to the subject because it is useful to rebut the somewhat soapbox type of critic who thinks to rebut the whole thesis "Sunt Daemones" by the snook-cocking query "Quo Stet Olympus."

Love is the law, love under will.

Yours fraternally,

666


© Ordo Templi Orientis.  Original key entry by W.E. Heidrick for O.T.O.  HTML coding by Frater T.S. for Nu Isis Working Group.

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