Comments
by
Aleister
Crowley: |
But the German propaganda
was being done as well as the British propaganda ill. With a
little moral ascendancy over Viereck, I could spoil his game
completely by doing as much mischief to Germany as the Patriot
Bottomley and the other hoarse-throated fishwives of Fleet
Street were doing to England. I met with more success than I had
hoped.
Münsterberg was not Argus.
I think moreover that folly is contagious. He could hardly keep
his young men in hand, especially when apparent victory turned
their heads. I found some of them incredibly silly. I had always
know Paul Carus for an ass since he published The Gospel of
Buddah, but I had no idea that he was such an ass! In The
Open Court he published a fancy portrait from my pen of
Bloody Bill as Parsifal! Poor old earnest Christian Endeavour
Wilhelm, with his megalomania and his theatricalism and his
fat-witted Lutheran Gott and his withered hand and his
moving-picture-star galaxy of uniforms as the up-to-date
Messiah! What a model for "King Arthur come again", to give the
heathen Schrecklichkeit!
I must have been
beautifully drunk to write that. I don't remember anything about
it—but
I must have been much more than drunk when I sent it to Paul
Carus. I suppose I had become acclimatized to the idea that all
serious and eminent people are perfectly brainless. He swallowed
it, hook, line and sinker; and a poor little bookseller in
London who had been agent for the paper for years, and had never
read a line of it, got three months in prison! The truth is that
the British lost all sense of humour when the war broke out. I
wonder how many millions in blood and treasure it cost us to "jowk"
with such "deeficulty"!
—The Confessions of Aleister Crowley.
New York, NY. Hill and Wang, 1969. Pages 751-752. |
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