Collected Works of Aleister Crowley 1905-1907 - Collected Works Volume II 1906

Collected Works Volume II 1906

The second volume showed Crowley's maturing poetry and plays of 1902-1904, with the second half of this book breaking into many prose works based on his new-found interest in nineteenth-century philosophy and Buddhism; keeping in mind that Crowley received The Book of the Law from the intelligence Aiwass about this time. Snowdrops from a Curate's Garden and The Goetia were not included in this volume.

CONTENTS

The first work to appear in this volume, Oracles: the Autobiography of an Art, is like a little collected works in itself and contained Crowley's backlog of poems from 1889-1903, including an unfinished Buddhist classic the Dhammapada, Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleur du Mal (also unfinished) and some from Green Alps, his teenage collection of mountaineering poetry. Alice, an Adultery however is a sign of Crowley's maturing poetical skills (as well as again his love of adultery) and claims in the introduction to have been passed him in MS. form from the dying lover of "Alice" on his journeys in the East. It is written in the form of fifty sonnets numbered from the first day to the fiftieth and laments the poet's desire to make love with a married woman.

The Sword of Song was a major breakthrough for Crowley as it was the first to refer to himself as "The Beast" without any reticence as regards his critics, and the cover daringly had "Aleister Crowley = 666" written in Hebrew. It was basically a work based on Robert Browning's Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day and itself contained two long, likewise-colloquial poems called "Ascension Day" and "Pentacoste", both quite anarchic and unreadable because of the constant use of neologisms, disenjambment and punctuation, the poems really set way by means of hundreds of footnotes for collected prose witticisms in the back (even the line-numbering, going up naturally in five, cheekily missed "665" for "666"). The essays and poems in the back include "William Shakespeare", "Pansil", "After Agnosticism", "Preface to Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis", "Summa Spes" and "The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magick" (the introduction also to his edition of The Goetia).

The rest of this volume contains prose, almost avante garde, satire. Of no exception is Ambrossi Magi Hortus Rosarum claiming to be translated from a work by "Christeos Luciftias" and is similar to the fantasy attainments such as The Wake World and The Heart of the Master with the aspirant in alchemical fashion moving through the pictures of the Tarot cards. The Three Characteristics is a tongue-in-cheek take on what is known as a "jataka" story, or incarnation saga of Buddhism, but sounds more like the Book of Job with Ganesh being tempted by Jehiour (really Iehi Aour, Allan Bennett) to inflict various karma on the reincarnating Per R Abu (Perdurabo, Crowley). These two works were originally appendices II and I respectively of The Sword of Song whilst Berashith and Science and Buddhism were its supplements and further philosophical works.

The Excluded Middle, or the Skeptic Refuted and Time are also philosophical satire and previously unpublished. They are both dialogues between "Mysticus" and "Skepticus" ("....Hindu Mystic and a British Skeptic....") and also breaks off into footnote essays actually bigger than the main context.