Lyric of Love to Leah

Come, my darling, let us dance

To the moon that beckons us

To dissolve our love in trance

Heedless of the hideous

Heat & hate of Sirius-

Shun his baneful brilliance!

Let us dance beneath the palm

Moving in the moonlight, frond

Wooing frond above the calm

Of the ocean diamond

Sparkling to the sky beyond

The enchantment of our psalm.

Let us dance, my mirror of

Perfect passion won to peace,

Let us dance, my treasure trove,

On the marble terraces

Carven in pallid embroeideries

For the vestal veil of Love.

Heaven awakes to encompass us,

Hell awakes its jubilance

In our hearts mysterious

Marriage of the azure expanse,

With the scarlet brilliance

Of the Moon with Sirius.

Velvet swatches our lissome limbs

Languid lapped by sky & sea

Soul through sense & spirit swims

Through the pregnant porphyry

Dome of lapiz-lazuli:-

Heart of silence, hush our hymns.

Come my darling; let us dance

Through the golden galaxies

Rythmic swell of circumstance

Beaming passion’s argosies:

Ecstacy entwined with ease,

Terrene joy transcending trance!

Thou my scarlet concubine

Draining heart’s blood to the lees

To empurple those divine

Lips with living luxuries

Life importunate to appease

Drought insatiable of wine!

Tunis in the tremendous trance

Rests from day’s incestuous

Traffic with the radiance

Of her sire-& over us

Gleams the intoxicating glance

Of the Moon & Sirius.

Take the ardour of my impearled

Essence that my shoulders seek

To intensify the curled

Candour of the eyes oblique,

Eyes that see the seraphic sleek

Lust bewitch the wanton world.

Come, my love, my dove, & pour

From thy cup the serpent wine

Brimmed & breathless -secret store

Of my crimson concubine

Surfeit spirit in the shrine

-Devil -Godess -Virgin -Whore.

Afric sands ensorcel us,

Afric seas & skies entrance

Velvet, lewd & luminous

Night surveys our soul askance!

Come my love, & let us dance

To the Moon and Sirius!

La Gitana

Your hair was full of roses in the dewfall as we danced,

The sorceress enchanting and the paladin entranced,

In the starlight as we wove us in a web of silk and steel

Immemorial as the marble in the halls of Boabdil,

In the pleasuance of the roses with the fountains and the yews

Where the snowy Sierra soothed us with the breezes and the dews!

In the starlight as we trembled from a laugh to a caress,

And the God came warm upon us in our pagan allegresse.

Was the Baile de la Bona too seductive?Did you feel

Through the silence and the softness all the tension of the steel?

For your hair was full of roses, and my flesh was full of thorns,

And the midnight came upon us worth a million crazy morns.

Ah! my Gipsy, my Gitana, my Saliya!

were you fain For the dance to turn to earnest? -

O the sunny land of Spain!

My Gitana, my Saliya! more delicious than a dove!

With your hair aflame with roses and your lips alight with love!

Shall I see you, shall I kiss you once again?

I wander far From the sunny land of summer to the icy Polar Star.

I shall find you, I shall have you! I am coming back again

From the filth and fog to seek you in the sunny land of Spain.

I shall find you, my Gitana, my Saliya!

as of old With your hair aflame with roses and your body gay with gold.

I shall find you, I shall have you, in the summer and the south

With our passion in your body and our love upon your mouth -

With our wonder and our worship be the world aflame anew!

My Gitana, my Saliya! I am coming back to you!

Crowley With Magick Wand

Chess Master

Crowley maintained that he learned chess from books by the age of six, and first competed on the Eastbourne College chess team (where he was taking classes in 1892). He says that he showed immediate competence, beating the handicapped local champion and later editing a chess column for the local newspaper, the Eastbourne Gazette, through which he criticised the Eastbourne team.
He later joined the university chess club at Cambridge, where, he says, he beat the president in his first year and practised two hours a day towards becoming a champion — "My one serious worldly ambition had been to become the champion of the world at chess." His writings make it clear that he and his supporters thought he would achieve this goal:
I had snatched a game from Blackburne in simultaneous play some years before. I was being beaten in the Sicilian defence. The only chance was the sacrifice of a rook. I remember the grand old master coming round to my board and cocking his alcoholized eye cunningly at me. 'Hullo,' said he. 'Morphy come to town again!' I am not coxcomb enough to think that he could not have won the game, even after my brilliancy. I believe that his colossal generosity let me win to encourage a promising youngster.
I had frequently beaten Bird at Simpson's and when I got to Cambridge I made a savagely intense study of the game. In my second year I was president of the university and had beaten such first-rate amateurs as Gunston and Cole. Outside the master class, Atkins was my only acknowledged superior. I made mincemeat of the man who was champion of Scotland a few years later, even after I had given up the game. I spent over two hours a day in study and more than that in practice. I was assured on all hands that another year would see me a master myself.
—Aleister Crowley

Mountain Man

Crowley was obsessed with mountain climbing, which he used as a tool to combat his chronic asthma. He taught himself by scrambling up Cumberland Fells and Beachy Head, after which, he started spending every holiday by switching between the Alps and Bernese Oberland.
In March 1902, Oscar Eckenstein and Crowley undertook the first attempt to scale Chogo Ri (known in the west as K2), located in Pakistan, and Eckenstein had set out to teach Crowley about the techniques of climbing. The Eckenstein-Crowley Expedition consisted of Eckenstein, Crowley, Guy Knowles, H. Pfannl, V. Wesseley, and Dr Jules Jacot-Guillarmod. They ascended June 8, and after eight days, weather conditions were taking their toll. Two months in, they found themselves back down on the plain, which made this Crowley's first recorded defeat.
In May 1905, he was approached by Dr Jules Jacot-Guillarmod (1868 - 1925) to accompany him on the first expedition to Kangchenjunga in Nepal, the third largest mountain in the world. Guillarmod was left to organise the personnel while Crowley left to get things ready in Darjeeling. On July 31 Guillarmod joined Crowley in Darjeeling, bringing with him two countrymen, Charles-Adolphe Reymond and Alexis Pache. Meanwhile, Crowley had recruited a local man, Alcesti C. Rigo de Righi, to act as Transport Manager. The team left Darjeeling on August 8, 1905, and used the Singalila Ridge approach to Kangchenjunga. At Chabanjong they ran into the rear of the 135 Indians/ Central Asians who had been sent ahead on July 24 and July 25, who were carrying food rations for the team. The trek was led by Aleister Crowley, but four members of that party were killed in an avalanche. Crowley's autobiography states they reached about 25,000 feet.
Crowley was sometimes famously scathing about other climbers, in particular Owen Glynne Jones, whom he considered a risk-taking self-publicist, and his 'two photographers' (George and Ashley Abraham).

Abbey of Thelema

Crowley, along with Leah Hirsig, founded the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily in 1920.The name was borrowed from Rabelais's satire Gargantua, where the "Abbey of Theleme" is described as a sort of anti-monastery where the lives of the inhabitants were "spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure." This idealistic utopia was to be the model of Crowley's commune, while also being a type of magical school, giving it the designation "Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum," The College of the Holy Spirit. The general programme was in line with the A∴A∴ course of training, and included daily adorations to the Sun, a study of Crowley's writings, regular yogic and ritual practices (which were to be recorded), as well as general domestic labor. The object, naturally, was for students to devote themselves to the Great Work of discovering and manifesting their True Wills. Mussolini's Fascist government expelled Crowley from the country at the end of April 1923

Doors of Perception

Crowley was a habitual drug user and also maintained a meticulous record of his drug-induced experiences with laudanum, opium, cocaine, hashish, alcohol, ether, mescaline and heroin.Allan Bennett, Crowley's mentor, was said to have "instructed Crowley in the magical use of drugs." The Cairo revelation from Aiwass/Aiwaz specifically recommended indulgence in "strange drugs". While in Paris during the 1920s, Crowley experimented with psychedelic substances, specifically Anhalonium lewinii, an obsolete scientific name for the mescaline-bearing cactus peyote. In October 1930, Crowley dined with Aldous Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours persist that he introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion.
Crowley first developed a drug addiction after a London doctor prescribed heroin for his asthma and bronchitis. His life as an addict influenced his 1922 novel, Diary of a Drug Fiend, but the fiction presented a hopeful outcome of rehabilitation and recovery by means of Magickal techniques and the exercise of True Will. At the time of his death he was addicted to heroin.