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Limited Editions by Aleister Crowley & Victor B. Neuburg |
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Aleister
Crowley
WANTED !!NEW!!
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THE SOUL OF OSIRIS |
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Title: |
The Soul of Osiris. A History. |
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Variations: |
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Publisher: |
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.1 |
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Printer: |
Chiswick Pres: Charles Whittingham and Co., Tooks Court, Chancery Lane, London.1 |
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Published At: |
London.1 |
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Date: |
1901.1 Dr. Richard Kaczynski places the publication date as March 7, 1901.4 |
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Edition: |
1st Edition. |
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Pages: |
x + 132.2 |
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Price: |
Priced at five shillings.1 |
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Remarks: |
The Soul of Osiris is the second half of The Mother's Tragedy which was so long that Kegan Paul suggested splitting it into two separate books.4 Crowley was disappointed with Kegan Paul's management of his book sales and closed his account with them in May of 1904. Between 1902 and 1904, Kegan Paul had only managed to sell seven copies of The Soul of Osiris.5 Crowley had the original holograph manuscript for The Soul of Osiris bound in crushed levant morocco by Zaehnsdorf with a half morocco slip case.6 |
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Pagination:2 |
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Contents: |
- Prologue: - Fame - The Altar of Artemis - To Richard Wagner - “The Two Emotions” - Asmodel - “The Sonnet” - Jezebel - Wedlock - Love at Peace - Lot - Sonnet for Gerald Kelley’s Jezebel - The May Queen - A Saint’s Damnation - “Many Water Cannot Quench Love” - Love, Melancholy, Despair - The Gate of the Sanctuary - “The Two Minds” - “The Two Wisdoms” - “The Two Loves” - To Laura - The Nameless Quest - “A Religious Bringing-Up” - “The Law of Change” - Synthesis - The Holy Place: - The Neophyte - The Name - Cerberus - The Evocation - “The Rose and the Cross” - Happiness - The Holy of Holies: - The Palace of the World - The Mountain Christ - To Allan Macgregor - The Rosicrucian - The Athanor - The Chant to be said or Sung unto our Lady Isis - A Litany |
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Comments by Aleister Crowley: |
However, my surface reaction was to shake the dust of Colombo from my feet and to spend my two days in Kandy in writing Why Jesus Wept. The title is a direct allusion to the ladies in question. I prefaced the play with five dedications to (1) Christ, (2) Lady Scott, (3) my friends (Jinawaravasa, whom I had met once more in Galle, and myself), (4) my unborn child, and (5) Mr. G. K. Chesterton. (He had written a long congratulatory criticism of my The Soul of Osiris.) — The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. New York, NY. Hill and Wang, 1969. Page 384-385. |
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Reviews: |
It is not often that one is able to close a book of modern verse, and by a hitherto unknown author, with the feeling that here is the promise of a new poet. Of course, the occurrence must be, of necessity, of extreme rarity. In “The Soul of Osiris” there is no doubt that there is the fairest promise of not only good but great work to come, and one can only hope that the author will go on from the achievement of this volume to higher achievements in the near future. When we reflect on the considerable bulk of the book and the equality of its several poems, we are assured of the justice of our first impression, and it is therefore with some feeling that we announce it. In “The Soul of Osiris” we have a human document, and we can only compare it with those which Charles d’Orleans, Francoise Villon, and Paul Verlaine have given us. Everyone who is a student of the personal note in art knows what these great masters have given us, the value and the truth of it all. To such the work to be found in “The Soul of Osiris” will be a joy. Our comparison is, of course, limited: we are not dealing with the whole work of a poet who has passed away and comparing it with the whole work of other poets; we have but the beginnings of a body of work, but the spirit is present, and the achievement accomplished in this first fragment is such as warrants us in making our somewhat bold comparison. The spirit of it is entirely akin to the suffering which was part physical but in greater part mental. It was the stress of poetic emotion, an emotion which was so keen as to be a part of every waking moment of life, that renders all such poetry so poignant, and there is this poignancy of emotion in “The Soul of Osiris.” And yet there is joy in the book: joy over accomplishment. The accomplishment of a great travail resulting in the birth of something fine and lovely, travail because of the immensity of the problem and the doubt of its complete solution. Solution there is, however. Mr. Crowley had the prophet’s vision when he wrote at the end of the book, “The Epilogue is Silence.” That chapter of his life is securely ended and he wakes to new things, and we shall be glad indeed to witness his solution of those also, as we have participated in the solved problem he has already presented in verse worthy of the greatness of his theme. As poetry this book reaches a high technical excellence: there are some small inequalities, but they are not worth calling attention to, for the general level of the verse is so high. Mr. Crowley seems to possess all the attributes of a true poet, and we sincerely trust that the promise of this—as far as we know his first volume—will be speedily followed by its successor. —The Birmingham Daily Gazette, 28 June 1901. ______________________________
Mr. Crowley is a disciple of Swinburne, Rossetti and Symons—especially Symons. The burden of his song is “desire.” He appears to be one of those anæmic creatures who find an embrace unsatisfactory unless accompanied by bites. “All my limbs were bloody with your mouth.” This may be mayhem, but is it poetry? This occurs in “The Gate of the Sanctuary” and “The Holy Place” to “The Holy of Holies,” we shall, of course, escape this sort of thing. Shall we? Not if the author knows himself. For even here we have “libertine touches of small fingers,” and a “beloved mouth that beats and bleeds.” Beyond this “Holy of Holies” comes an epilogue; and this is all there is of it: “The epilogue is SILENCE.” Paresis, more likely! —The Critic, September 1901. ______________________________
The Soul of Osiris. By Aleister Crowley. (Kegan, Paul & Co.)—This new volume by Mr. Crowley fuses heathen and Christian elements in a remarkable manner. It consists of detached poems dealing with some of the great elemental facts of life as expressed in Egyptian and Christian symbols. The difference between them, however, is by no means so great as the ordinary reader supposes. Anticipations of what are commonly deemed especially Christian truths are found in Egyptian religion as in many others, and they lend themselves to mystic representations in symbol language. Mr. Crowley presses these symbols into his service, and his poetic treatment of them is very striking. The poems contain much fluent versification, and will familiarize thoughtful readers with the great and numerous common elements between the Egyptian and Christian mysteries. —The Bradford Observer, 24 May 1901. ______________________________
A book of picturesque poems, called “A History”: they are forceful and effective, taken in small quantities; but inclined to be too generally turgid. —The Bookman, May 1901. ______________________________
Many swallows do not make a nightingale; but weather for swallows is weather for nightingales. So, when minor poets are in season, we may hope an occasional major one. (We use the term “minor poet” in the sense given it by modern journalism, though with protest that the title borne by Crashaw, Vaughan, Collins and Gray should be put to such unworthy use.) Nor is the minor poet without his own value. We have heard of Single-speech Hamilton—who made several speeches. But the minor poet often does flower capriciously in one or more poems unforgettable, or which deserve not to be forgotten: Wolfe’s “Burial of Moore” is the best-known example. Unfortunately, he usually lives on that success, writing reams of unnoticeable poems on the strength of it. One would like a legal enactment for muzzling all such poets once they had fulfilled their natural function. But it is impossible to resist the plea that they might do it again; though you know they will not, any more than a man can regain the pleasant climax of intoxication by persevering drinks. Their repeated indulgence in “blushful Hippocrene” has mush the same steadily deteriorating effect. But, though long experience plentifully chastens any over-sanguine expectation, we always approach a fresh “catch” of minor verse with the hope that it may contain at least one specimen of fortuitous and fortunate perfection. We can hardly say that such hope is fulfilled by the array of volumes before us. Yet we are far from disappointment. For at least one writer shows a promise, in certain qualities, above any recent poets we have seen. Mr. Crowley, in his Soul of Osiris, has what hardly any of them have—a forceful, if narrow inspiration, both in respect of imagination and emotional power. It is forceful rather than forcible, influent rather than affluent; not broad and opulent, but straight and intense. It is a geyser rather than an ample and irresistible river. For he is, alas! often tense instead of intense, and always more or less troubled by violence; but it is, on the whole, not the violence of weakness, but of somewhat anarchic strength. There is no necessity that this Nazarene should be shorn, but he would be the better for having his hair combed. For (dropping all metaphor), apart from his violences, Mr. Crowley has defective technique. Strange as it appears in one with such evident force and glow, it would seem as if “the sweet trouble” of the poet were too often a burden of spirit to him and the bands of rhyme too strong for him. Those flowery shackles clearly cut into the flesh of his expression in more than one place. Thus—
A mystic mortal and a maid, Filled with all things to fill the same,
shows an awkwardness of diction which can only be explained by the supposition that he found it uneasy to fill up the rhyme to “name” and “flame.” Another instance of poor technique follows directly after:
To overflow the shores of God, Mingling our proper period.
Few will discern at first sight that the sense of the last line is—“Confusing our natural limits.” The obscurity is caused by the ungrammatical use of “mingling” with a singular noun. We do, indeed, say “he has mixed the idea,” or, “he has mixed the whole business.” But these are sufficiently loose colloquialisms, and should have no place in literature. Moreover, in the second case, “business” is regarded as a collective noun. “Period” here is not. We might point, also, had we space, to cases of grammatical ambiguity, which would be easily neglected in an easy poem, but in abstruse poetry (like Mr. Crowley’s) are swiftly resented by the strained attention. And the reader does well to be angry. A broken round in the ladder makes small odds when we are mounting the garden wall: it is quite another thing in the rope ladder whereby we are scaling a precipice. The harder the theme the more severely should a poet close up every rivet in the expression. But from this same poem (“Asmodel”) may be quoted stanzas showing Mr. Crowley at his best. It describes a dream-woman, the woman of his “star”:
Only to me looks out for ever From her cold eyes a fire like death; Only to me her breasts can never Lose the red brand that quickeneth; Only to me her eyelids sever And lips respire her equal breath; Still in the unknown star I see The very god that is of me.
The day’s pale countenance is lifted, The rude sun’s forehead he uncovers; No soft delicious clouds have drifted, No wing of midnight’s bird that hovers; Yet still the hard blind blue is rifted, And still my star and I as lovers Yearn to each other through the sky With eyes held closed in ecstasy.
But the poem, like all the poems, must be read entire to appreciate it. It will be obvious, even from this specimen, that they are mystical and therefore difficult. Strength and emotional intensity are what distinguish Mr. Crowley from a score of others with far greater gift of technique. They are what excuse—and cause—much that needs excuse. They are what should bring him to a prominent place among later poets, when he has learned to possess instead of being possessed by them, and to master technique, instead of suffering his inspiration violently to break open the gates of speech. —The Academy, 15 June 1901. ______________________________
Verses similar to these have been often written before, but have not the words, simple as they are, the ring of genuine poetry? Religious poetry is not always poetic. This cannot, however, be said with regard to the volume of verse entitle The Soul of Osiris, by Aleister Crowley. There is much in the volume which will excite admiration, and much that will perplex and irritate the unintiated reader. The poet is, indeed, a mystic, and veils a morbidly exaggerated Catholicism under an ultra-Egyptian passion for death. Take as an example of the sickly mysticism of these poems the following:
“I stood within Death’s gate, And blew the horn of Hell; Mad laughter echoing against fate, Harsh groans less terrible, Howled from beneath the vault; in night the avenging thunders swell’d.”
This is the opening of a poem called “Cerberus.”
“Nature is one with my distress, The flowers are dull, the stars are pale, I am the Son of Nothingness. I cannot lift the golden veil. O Mother Isis, let thine eyes Behold my grief, and sympathise!”
There is a lack of virility in poetry of this sort, but it cannot be denied that Aleister Crowley is a true poet—a poet of the school of Baudelaire and Poe. —The Westminster Review, October 1904. ______________________________
This is one way into Dreamland. Aleister Crowley, in “The Soul of Osiris” (London: Kegan Paul), reveals what seems to him an even more excellent way. He calls his volume with its four books “a History”—the history, evidently, of a very modern spirit as it has passed from the rule of the bodily senses and Baudelaire to the most exalted moods of mysticism. “Man’s approach to God is regulated by the strictest laws, and follows a true mathematical curve”—these words from Mr. Thorold Roger’s Introduction to the ‘Dialogue of St, Catherine’ might well serve as a motto for “The Soul of Osiris;” and the rationale of the transformation might be summed up in these other words of Mr. Rodgers: The desire for ecstasy is at the very root and heart of our nature. Human life is informed at every stage by this desire for ecstasy, of self-escape into something higher. Mysticism alone affords to those favored beings who are competent in brain and will for its ardors a true and lasting realization of this desire. Neither the sensual nor the sentimental life can do so, for nature or society constantly throws us by illnesses or laws on the hither or farther side of its perfect realization. “The Soul of Osiris” begins with a prologue, “Obsession,” addressed to Charles Baudelaire. Book I., “The Court of the Profane,” is given over to more or less symbolic portrayal of a life of surrender to the senses. Book II., “The Gateway of the Sanctuary,” portrays the struggle between the senses and the spirit. Book III., “The Holy Place,” describes the soul’s earliest moments of triumph. Book IV., “The Holy of Holies,” is the imaginative record of typical phases of mystical ecstasy. The depth and volume and the passionate intensity of the feeling in many of these poems are unmistakable, as are also the frequent richness and visionary splendor of the imagery and the aptness and transfiguring of the rhythms. But equally clear is the fact that the usual faults of the mystical imagination are already hurting the poet’s work. We all know what happened to the transcendently beautiful lyrical genius of Blake. Aleister Crowley should keep a copy of the “Prophetic Books” next to the whipcord scourge in his anchorites cell. Already the world he bodies forth in his verse is too often merely a clotted mass of willful emotional symbols. That this need not be so, such stanzas as the following from “Jezebel” prove beyond cavil:
“A lion’s mane, a leopard’s skin Across my dusty shoulders thrown: A swart, fierce face, with eyes where sin Lurks like a serpent by a stone. A man driven forth by lust to seek Rest from himself on Carmel’s peak.
“A prophet with wild hair behind, Streaming in fiery clusters! Yea, Tangled with vehemence of the wind, And knotted with the tears that slay; And all my face parched up and dried, And all my body crucified.
“Ofttimes the Spirit of the Lord Descends and roods me with his breath My words are fashioned as a sword, My voice is like the voice of death. The thunder of the Spirit’s wings Brings terror to the hearts of kings.”
This is plastic enough, and so is the entire long narrative poem of which it is a part—plastic and immensely dramatic. Other poems show the same qualities. Of the mystical ardor that finds often beautiful are often wearisomely vague and wordy expression in the later poems, the following stanzas may stand as representative:
“O guardian of the pallid hours of night! O tireless watcher of the smitten noon! O sworded with the majesty of light. O girded with the glory of the moon! Angel of absolute splendor! Link of mine Old weary spirit with the All-Divine!
“Ship that shalt carry me by many winds Driven on the limitless ocean! Mighty sword By which I force that barrier of the mind’s Miscomprehension of its own true lord! Listen and answer, and behold my brow Fiery with hope! Bend down and touch it now!
“Press the twin dawn of thy desirous lips In the swart masses of my hair: bent close And shroud all earth in masterless eclipse, While my heart’s murmur through the being flows, To carry up the prayer, as incense teems Skyward, to those immeasurable streams!”
No one who reads such poems as these, and in addition the strangely visionary “Nameless Quest,” the sonnet to Allan MacGregor” and “The Rosicrucian,” can doubt that this poet is authentic and will reveal to the world much new beauty. —Deseret Evening News, 26 October 1901. ______________________________
The more anarchic poets of the early part of the century devoted themselves largely to the exhilarating task of attacking the supernatural wholesale. With Mr. Swinburne at their head, they quoted whole passages of the Old Testament, with negatives and irreverent applications interspersed, and by this commodious method succeeded in combining the advantages of being original and profane with the advantages of drawing on an old and excellent stock of literary images. Like Mr. Swinburne, they set Paganism against Christianity: like him they could not tolerate a single Deity, but seemed, for some singular reason, to got very comfortably with a great many. The same remarkable idiosyncracy was to be remarked in their attitude towards the ladies whom they tragically and ecstatically adored. But the dominant note Swinburnianism, beyond all question, was the attack upon religion; the vast and incredible conception which has been swallowed by the secularist school, that the religious sentiment, which stretches from one end of history to the other, is one vast hereditary malady and unbroken nightmare. This view seems to us to-day as hard to believe as any fable the legends of the saints. But the remarkable story has been the story of the conversion of the poets. Whoever else is satisfied with the of age science, they clearly are not. They have divided the human soul by every conceivable scientific number, and they find there is always something over. Philosophers may draw the boundary of human knowledge and human utility in one place or another, as they please: but to the poets it will always be the tree or hedge that is just beyond the boundary that is beautiful, alluring, and imperative. Thus it has happened that the poets have gradually faced round, and are now, in most cases, thoroughly fanatical upholders of the supernatural. The new school of mystics, rather than be for one single moment degradingly connected with common sense, will maintain that the changes and adventures of their lives are really traced out in the rotation of colossal planets or the common creases in their hands. The poets exaggerate it, as they exaggerate everything, since exaggeration is the definition of art. But the great fact remains, Swinburne, at the period of “Poems and Ballads,” would certainly have used the word “saint” and “artist” as antagonistic, with some very fine lines about tyrannous praises and pallid, and also about songs made sweet of desire. Mr. W. B. Yeats uses “saint” and “artist” as almost interchangeable. Mr. Yeats is, of course, the most striking example of this transition. So far is he from thinking the spirit world illusory, that it would appear to be the actual world about which he has his doubts. He hears of green grass with well-bred humour, and is informed that the sun in the sky with the air of one who is not to be taken in. But there are more definitely minor poets (if the appalling double comparative may be permitted) who are even more decided examples of the extent to which the poets have “got religion.” One of those is Mr. Aleister Crowley, whose book “The Soul of Osiris” seems to us to show a power and promise above the average of minor poetry. Frequently, no doubt, there are painful examples of the affectations of his school; but while there are some who are too old to be natural, there are others who are too young to be natural, and we fancy Mr. Crowley is of the latter class. An instance of this elaborate and perverse way of doing things may be found in a fine eulogistic sonnet to Wagner, which is headed “Before hearing ‘Siegfried.’ ” The Philistine cannot help asking if Mr. Crowley felt less agreeable after hearing “Siegfried.” Mr. Crowley follows the old Swinburne tradition in all the externals. The most irresistible trait he can find in a maiden is that she should bite like a mad dog. When he wishes to eulogise a friend he indicates that the friend’s garden is full of sunset-coloured sins (we make Mr. Crowley a present of this phrase), and then everyone is happy. In the poem of “Jezebel” he again obtains a somewhat cheap effect of unconventionality by creating a scandal between the Queen and Elijah. We can only say that if those characters whose acts are recorded in the Book of Kings really did feel a tender affection for each other, they both adopted a thoroughly a Swinburnian mode of expressing it. It may be an imaginative defect in ourselves, but we have never been able to understand the peculiar poetry which appears to attach in the decadent mind to the sex element in persons who have not only desecrated, but almost certainly exhausted it. Jezebel appears to us merely prosaic. But though Mr. Crowley, whom we have taken as a type of the converted decadent, is thoroughly Swinburnian in his odd taste in “painted lips” and such things, he exhibits in the most startling form the great return to the shrine of the praeter-natural of which we have spoken. His whole book, “The Soul of Osiris” is devoted to the conception of the gradual return of a passionate and fickle spirit to holiness. He offers a remarkable tribute to the almost forgotten truth than man is never genuinely at home except in goodness, that artistic emotions can no more refresh the nature than a liqueur can quench the thirst. His last poem, the “Litany,” at the end of the section called “The Holy of Holies,” is a very powerful lyric, expressing in lines that have all the smoothness of true force and all the lucidity of true mysticism, the cry of man in his last and worst agony, the agony of desolate frivolity and hopeless freedom:
Nature is one with my distress, The flowers are dull, the stars are pale; I am the Soul of Nothingness, I cannot life the golden veil. O, Mother Isis, let thin eyes Behold my grief and sympathise!
To the side of a mind concerned with idle merriment there is certainly something a little funny in Mr. Crowley’s passionate devotion to deities who bear such names as Mout and Nuit, and Ra and Shu, and Hormakhou. They do not seem to the English mind to lend themselves to pious exhilaration. Mr. Crowley says in the same poem:
The burden is too hard to bear, I took too adamant a cross; This sackcloth rends my soul to wear, My self-denial is as dross. O, Shu, that holdest up the sky, Hold up thy servant, lest he die!
We have all possible respect for Mr. Crowley’s religious symbols, and we do not object to his calling upon Shu at any hour of the night. Only it would be unreasonable of him to complain if his religious exercises were generally mistaken for an effort to drive away cats. Moreover, the poets of Mr. Crowley’s school have, among all their merits, some genuine intellectual dangers from this tendency to import religions, this free trade in gods. That all creeds are significant and all gods divine we willingly agree. But this is rather a reason for being content with our own than for attempting to steal other people’s. The affectation in many modern mystics of adopting an Oriental civilization and mode of thought must cause much harmless merriment among the actual Orientals. The notion that a turban and a few vows will make an Englishman a Hindu is quite on par with the idea that a black hat and an Oxford degree will make a Hindu an Englishman. We wonder whether our Buddhistic philosophers have ever read a florid letter in Baboo English. We suspect that the said type of document is in reality exceedingly like the philosophic essays written by Englishmen about the splendours of Eastern thought. Sometime European mystics deserve something worse than mere laughter at the hands of Orientals. If there ever was one person whom honest Hindus would have been justified in tearing to pieces it was Madam Blavatsky. That our world-worn men of art should believe for a moment that moral salvation is possible and supremely important is an unmixed benefit. But to believe for a moment that it is to be found by going to particular places or reading particular books or joining particular societies is to make for the thousandth time the mistake that is at once materialism and superstition. If Mr. Crowley and the new mystics think for one moment than an Egyptian desert is more mystic than an English meadow, that a palm tree is more poetic than a Sussex beech, that a broken temple of Osiris is more supernatural than a Baptist chapel in Brixton, then they are sectarians, and only sectarians, of no more value to humanity than those who think that the English soil is the only soil worth defending, and the Baptist chapel the only chapel worthy of worship. But Mr. Crowley is a strong and genuine poet, and we have little doubt that he will work up from his appreciation of the Temple of Osiris to that loftier and wider work of the human imagination, the appreciation of the Brixton chapel. C. K. Chesterton. —The Daily News, 18 June 1901. ______________________________
“The Soul of
Osiris: a History,” by Aleister Crowley (Kegan Paul, Trench, and
Co., 5s. net), is an ambitious piece of work. We cannot pretend
to have mastered the historical scheme, which is implied in the
sub-title; but we presume that the books of this “history” are
“The Court of the Profane,” “The Gate of the Sanctuary,” “The
Holy Place,” and “The Holy of Holies,” while its chapters are
composed of the poems on various subjects and in various metres
which the several books contain. There, we fear, we must leave
Mr. Aleister Crowley’s production in order to turn to a work,
absolutely different in kind, but alike in the claim it makes on
the time and patience of its readers. . . . ______________________________
The power . . . which is undeniable, cannot hide from us either
its extreme unpleasantness or the gratuitously offensive
treatment. . . . There is a wearisome occurrence of all the ugly
machinery with which the fleshly school of poetry has made us
too familiar. ______________________________
We are compelled to read even where the subject matter fails to
attract, and we venture to think that in Aleister Crowley we
have found a poet, whose genius has yet to unfold. . . . ______________________________
The Soul of Osiris, by Aleister Crowley (Kegan Paul, 5s. net.), is a volume of ambitious verse, exhibiting considerable technical skill and a blatant disregard of good taste. What shall be said of a writer who puts into the mouth of Elijah such lines as these:—
Now let me die, to mix my soul With thy red soul, to join our hands, To weld us in one perfect whole To link us with desirous hands. Now let me die, to mate in hell With Thee, O harlot Jezebel! —The Church Times, 31 May 1901. |
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