It's not well written, its a redicolous, but good try anyway!!!
Keep always this dim corner for me, that I may sit while the
Green Hour glides, a proud pavine of Time. For I am no longer in
the city accursed, where Time is horsed on the white gelding
Death, his spurs rusted with blood.
There is a corner of the United States which he has overlooked.
It lies in New Orleans, between Canal Street and Esplanade
Avenue; the Mississippi for its base. Thence it reaches northward
to a most curious desert land, where is a cemetery lovely beyond
dreams. Its walls low and whitewashed, within which straggles a
wilderness of strange and fantastic tombs; and hard by is that
great city of brothels which is so cynically mirthful a neighbor.
As Felicien Rops wrote,--or was it Edmond d'Haraucourt?--"la
Prostitution et la Mort sont frere et soeur--les fils de Dieu!"
At least the poet of Le Legende des Sexes was right, and the
psycho-analysts after him, in identifying the Mother with the
Tomb. This, then, is only the beginning and end of things, this
"quartier macabre" beyond the North Rampart with the Mississippi
on the other side. It is like the space between, our life which
flows, and fertilizes as it flows, muddy and malarious as it may
be, to empty itself into the warm bosom of the Gulf Stream, which
(in our allegory) we may call the Life of God.
But our business is with the heart of things; we must go beyond
the crude phenomena of nature if we are to dwell in the spirit.
Art is the soul of life and the Old Absinthe House is heart and
soul of the old quarter of New Orleans.
For here was the headquarters of no common man--no less than a
real pirate--of Captain Lafitte, who not only robbed his
neighbors, but defended them against invasion. Here, too, sat
Henry Clay, who lived and died to give his name to a cigar.
Outside this house no man remembers much more of him than that;
but here, authentic and, as I imagine, indignant, his ghost
stalks grimly.
Here, too are marble basins hollowed--and hallowed!--by the
drippings of the water which creates by baptism the new spirit of
absinthe.
I am only sipping the second glass of that "fascinating, but
subtle poison, whose ravages eat men's heart and brain" that I
have ever tasted in my life; and as I am not an American anxious
for quick action, I am not surprised and disappointed that I do
not drop dead upon the spot. But I can taste souls without the
aid of absinthe; and besides, this is magic of absinthe! The
spirit of the house has entered into it; it is an elixir, the
masterpiece of an old alchemist, no common wine.
And so, as I talk with the patron concerning the vanity of
things, I perceive the secret of the heart of God himself; this,
that everything, even the vilest thing, is so unutterably lovely
that it is worthy of the devotion of a God for all eternity.
What other excuse could He give man for making him? In substance,
that is my answer to King Solomon.
II.
The barrier between divine and human things is frail but
inviolable; the artist and the bourgeois are only divided by a
point of view--"A hair divided the false and true."
I am watching the opalescence of my absinthe, and it leads me to
ponder upon a certain very curious mystery, persistent in legend.
We may call it the mystery of the rainbow.
Originally in the fantastic but significant legend of the
Hebrews, the rainbow is mentioned as the sign of salvation. The
world has been purified by water, and was ready for the
revelation of Wine. God would never again destroy His work, but
ultimately seal its perfection by a baptism of fire.
Now, in this analogue also falls the coat of many colors which
was made for Joseph, a legend which was regarded as so important
that it was subsequently borrowed for the romance of Jesus. The
veil of the Temple, too, was of many colors. We find, further
east, that the Manipura Cakkra--the Lotus of the City of
Jewels--which is an important centre in Hindu anatomy, and
apparently identical with the solar plexus, is the central point
of the nervous system of the human body, dividing the sacred from
the profane, or the lower from the higher.
In western Mysticism, once more we learn that the middle grade
initiation is called Hodos Camelioniis, the Path of the
Chameleon. There is here evidently an illusion to this same
mystery. We also learn that the middle stage in Alchemy is when
the liquor becomes opalescent.
Finally, we note among the visions of the Saints one called the
Universal Peacock, in which the totality is perceived thus
royally appareled.
Would it were possible to assemble in this place the cohorts of
quotation; for indeed they are beautiful with banners, flashing
their myriad rays from cothurn and habergeon, gay and gallant in
the light of that Sun which knows no fall from Zenith of high
noon!
Yet I must needs already have written so much to make clear one
pitiful conceit: can it be that in the opalescence of absinthe is
some occult link with this mystery of the Rainbow? For
undoubtedly one does indefinably and subtly insinuate the drinker
in the secret chamber of Beauty, does kindle his thoughts to
rapture, adjust his point of view to that of the artists, at
least to that degree of which he is originally capable, weave for
his fancy a gala dress of stuff as many-colored as the mind of
Aphrodite.
Oh Beauty! Long did I love thee, long did I pursue thee, thee
elusive, thee intangible! And lo! thou enfoldest me by night and
day in the arms of gracious, of luxurious, of shimmering silence.
III.
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. 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.
With this ignorance of human nature goes an ever grosser
ignorance of the divine nature. 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. 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. These three
things are indissolubly bound up with wine, for they are species
of intoxication.
Yet against all these things we find the prohibitionist,
logically enough. 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. 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. (But why perpetuate it?) Art is for him the parasite
and pimp of love. He cannot distinguish between the Apollo
Belvedere and the crude bestialities of certain Pompeian
frescoes, or between Rabelais and Elenor Glyn.
What then is his ideal of human life? one cannot say. So crass a
creature can have no true ideal. 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. Wage-slavery and boredom seem to complete his outlook
on the world.
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. 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. May God send us a Saint George!
Absinthe: The Green Goddess
By
Aleister Crowley
