Aleister Crowley
The Diary of a Drug Fiend
e-artnow, 2021
Contact: [email protected]
EAN 4064066499778
Table of Content
Chapter IV. Au Pays De Cocaine
Chapter VI. The Glitter on the Snow
Chapter VII. The Wings of the Oof-Bird
Chapter VIII. Vedere Napoli E Poi-Pro Patria-Mort
Chapter III. The Grinding of the Brakes
Chapter I. King Lamus Intervenes
Chapter III. The Voice of Virtue
Preface
This is a true story.
It has been rewritten only so far as was necessary to conceal personalities.
It is a terrible story ; but it is also a story of hope and of beauty.
It reveals with startling clearness the abyss on which our civilisation trembles.
But the self-same Light illuminates the path of humanity: it is our own fault if we go over the brink.
This story is also true not only of one kind of human weakness, but (by analogy) of all kinds; and for all alike there is but one way of salvation.
As Glanvil says: Man is not subjected to the angels, nor even unto death utterly, save through the weakness of his own feeble will.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
- ALEISTER CROWLEY.
Book I. Paradiso
Chapter I.
A Knight Out
Yes, I certainly was feeling depressed. I don't think that this was altogether the reaction of the day. Of course, there always is a reaction after the excitement of a flight ; but the effect is more physical than moral. One doesn't talk. One lies about and smokes and drinks champagne.
No, I was feeling quite a different kind of rotten. I looked at my mind, as the better class of flying man soon learns to do, and I really felt ashamed of myself. Take me for all in all, I was one of the luckiest men alive.
War is like a wave; some it rolls over, some it drowns, some it beats to pieces on the shingle; but some it shoots far up the shore on to glistening golden sand out of the reach of any further freaks of fortune.
Let me explain.
My name is Peter Pendragon. My father was a second son; and he had quarrelled with my Uncle Mortimer when they were boys. He was a struggling general practitioner in Norfolk, and had not made things any better for himself by marrying.
However, he scraped together enough to get me some sort of education, and at the outbreak of the war I was twenty-two years old and had just passed my Intermediate for M.D. in the University of London.
Then, as I said, the wave came. My mother went out for the Red Cross, and died in the first year of the war. Such was the confusion that I did not even know about it till over six months later.
My father died of influenza just before the Armistice.
I had gone into the air service ; did pretty well, though somehow I was never sure either of myself or of my machine. My squadron commander used to tell me that I should never make a great airman.
" Old thing," he said, " you lack the instinct," qualifying the noun with an entirely meaningless adjective which somehow succeeded in making his sentence highly illuminating.
" Where you get away with it," he said, " is that you have an analytic brain."
Well,