Israel Regardie Quotes

This elaborate Golden Dawn system became part of Crowley's own inner world ... He carried it further than even the Golden Dawn principals had envisaged. I know of nothing within the Order documentary that even hints at the kind of visionary and spiritual experience that Crowley managed to get out of it.

All that can be said with truth of this Absolute and Supreme Reality is that IT IS. This must suffice.

According to the traditional philosophy of the Magicians, every man is a unique autonomous center of individual consciousness, energy, and will - a soul, in a word. Like a star shining and existing by its own inward light, it pursues its way in the star-spangled heavens, solitary, uninterfered with, except in so far as its heavenly course is gravitationally modified by the presence, near or far, of other stars. Since in the vast stellar spaces seldom are there conflicts between the celestial bodies, unless one happens to stray from its appointed course - a very rare occurrence - so in the realms of humankind there would lie no chaos, little conflict, and no mutual disturbance were each individual content to be grounded in the reality of his own high consciousness, aware of his ideal nature In the his true purpose in life, and eager to pursue the road which he must follow. Because men have strayed from the dynamic sources inhering within themselves and the universe, and have forsaken their true spiritual wills, because they have divorced themselves from the celestial essences, betrayed by a mess of more sickly pottage than ever Jacob did sell to Esau, the world in this day presents a people with so hopeless an aspect, and a humanity impressed with so despondent a mien. Ignorance of the course of the celestial orbit, and the significance of that orbit inscribed in the skies forever, is the root which is at the bottom of universal dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and race-nostalgia

It is a well-worn saying but one nonetheless true and nonetheless worthy of repetition, inasmuch as it expresses peculiarly the situation now widely prevalent, that "where there is no vision the people perish. " Mankind as a whole, or more particularly the Western element, has lost in some incomprehensible way its spiritual vision. An heretical barrier has been erected separating itself from that current of life and vitality which even now, despite willful impediment and obstacle, pulses and vibrates passionately in the blood, pervading the whole of universal form and structure. The anomalies presented today are due to this rank absurdity. Mankind is slowly accomplishing its own suicide. A self-strangulation is being effected through a suppression of all individuality, in the spiritual sense, and all that made it human. It continues to withhold the spiritual atmosphere from its lungs, so to speak. And having severed itself from the eternal and never-ceasing sources of light and life and inspiration, it has deliberately blinded itself to the fact - than which no other could compare in importance - that there is a dynamic principle both within and without from which it has accomplished a divorce. The result is inner lethargy, chaos, and the disintegration of all that formerly was held to be ideal and sacred.

It really makes little difference in the long run whether The Book of the Law was dictated to [Crowley] by preterhuman intelligence named Aiwass or whether it stemmed from the creative deeps of Aleister Crowley. The book was written. And he became the mouthpiece for the Zeitgeist, accurately expressing the intrinsic nature of our time as no one else has done to date.