Spiritual Forum

ABSINTHE: THE GREEN GODDESS
By Aleister Crowley
First published in “The International” Vol XII No.2
New York, February 1918
I.
Keep always this dim corner for me, that I may sit while the Green Hour glides,
a proud pavine of Time. For I am no longer in the city accursed, where Time is
horsed on the white gelding Death, his spurs rusted with blood.
There is a corner of the United States which he has overlooked. It lies in New
Orleans, between Canal Street and Esplanade Avenue; the Mississippi for its
base. Thence it reaches northward to a most curious desert land, where is a
cemetery lovely beyond dreams. Its walls low and whitewashed, within which
straggles a wilderness of strange and fantastic tombs; and hard by is that great
city of brothels which is so cynically mirthful a neighbor. As Felicien Rops
wrote,--or was it Edmond d’Haraucourt? - "la Prostitution et la Mort sont frere et
soeur - les fils de Dieu!" At least the poet of Le Legende des Sexes was right, and
the psycho-analysts after him, in identifying the Mother with the Tomb. This,
then, is only the beginning and end of things, this "quartier macabre" beyond
the North Rampart with the Mississippi on the other side. It is like the space
between, our life which flows, and fertilizes as it flows, muddy and malarious
as it may be, to empty itself into the warm bosom of the Gulf Stream, which (in
our allegory) we may call the Life of God.
But our business is with the heart of things; we must go beyond the crude
phenomena of nature if we are to dwell in the spirit. Art is the soul of life and
the Old Absinthe House is heart and soul of the old quarter of New Orleans.
For here was the headquarters of no common man—no less than a real
pirate—of Captain Lafitte, who not only robbed his neighbors, but defended
them against invasion. Here, too, sat Henry Clay, who lived and died to give
his name to a cigar. Outside this house no man remembers much more of him
than that; but here, authentic and, as I imagine, indignant, his ghost stalks
grimly.
Here, too are marble basins hollowed—and hallowed!--by the drippings of the
water which creates by baptism the new spirit of absinthe.
I am only sipping the second glass of that "fascinating, but subtle poison,
whose ravages eat men’s heart and brain" that I have ever tasted in my life; and
as I am not an American anxious for quick action, I am not surprised and
disappointed that I do not drop dead upon the spot. But I can taste souls
without the aid of absinthe; and besides, this is magic of absinthe! The spirit of
the house has entered into it; it is an elixir, the masterpiece of an old alchemist,
no common wine.

And so, as I talk with the patron concerning the vanity of things, I perceive the
secret of the heart of God himself; this, that everything, even the vilest thing, is
so unutterably lovely that it is worthy of the devotion of a God for all eternity.
What other excuse could He give man for making him? In substance, that is my
answer to King Solomon.

II.
The barrier between divine and human things is frail but inviolable; the artist
and the bourgeois are only divided by a point of view—"A hair divided the
false and true."
I am watching the opalescence of my absinthe, and it leads me to ponder upon
a certain very curious mystery, persistent in legend. We may call it the mystery
of the rainbow.
Originally in the fantastic but significant legend of the Hebrews, the rainbow is
mentioned as the sign of salvation. The world has been purified by water, and
was ready for the revelation of Wine. God would never again destroy His
work, but ultimately seal its perfection by a baptism of fire.
Now, in this analogue also falls the coat of many colors which was made for
Joseph, a legend which was regarded as so important that it was subsequently
borrowed for the romance of Jesus. The veil of the Temple, too, was of many
colors. We find, further east, that the Manipura Cakkra—the Lotus of the City
of Jewels—which is an important centre in Hindu anatomy, and apparently
identical with the solar plexus, is the central point of the nervous system of the
human body, dividing the sacred from the profane, or the lower from the
higher.
In western Mysticism, once more we learn that the middle grade initiation is
called Hodos Camelioniis, the Path of the Chameleon. There is here evidently
an illusion to this same mystery. We also learn that the middle stage in
Alchemy is when the liquor becomes opalescent.
Finally, we note among the visions of the Saints one called the Universal
Peacock, in which the totality is perceived thus royally appareled.
Would it were possible to assemble in this place the cohorts of quotation; for
indeed they are beautiful with banners, flashing their myriad rays from cothurn
and habergeon, gay and gallant in the light of that Sun which knows no fall
from Zenith of high noon!
Yet I must needs already have written so much to make clear one pitiful
conceit: can it be that in the opalescence of absinthe is some occult link with
this mystery of the Rainbow? For undoubtedly one does indefinably and subtly
insinuate the drinker in the secret chamber of Beauty, does kindle his thoughts
to rapture, adjust his point of view to that of the artists, at least to that degree
of which he is originally capable, weave for his fancy a gala dress of stuff as
many-colored as the mind of Aphrodite.

Oh Beauty! Long did I love thee, long did I pursue thee, thee elusive, thee
intangible! And lo! thou enfoldest me by night and day in the arms of gracious,
of luxurious, of shimmering silence.

III.
The Prohibitionist must always be a person of no moral character; for he
cannot even conceive of the possibility of a man capable of resisting
temptation. Still more, he is so obsessed, like the savage, by the fear of the
unknown, that he regards alcohol as a fetish, necessarily alluring and
tyrannical.
With this ignorance of human nature goes an ever grosser ignorance of the
divine nature. He does not understand that the universe has only one possible
purpose; that, the business of life being happily completed by the production
of the necessities and luxuries incidental to comfort, the residuum of human
energy needs an outlet. The surplus of Will must find issue in the elevation of
the individual towards the Godhead; and the method of such elevation is by
religion, love, and art. These three things are indissolubly bound up with wine,
for they are species of intoxication.
Yet against all these things we find the prohibitionist, logically enough. It is
true that he usually pretends to admit religion as a proper pursuit for humanity;
but what a religion! He has removed from it every element of ecstasy or even
of devotion; in his hands it has become cold, fanatical, cruel, and stupid, a
thing merciless and formal, without sympathy or humanity. Love and art he
rejects altogether; for him the only meaning of love is a mechanical—hardly
even physiological!--process necessary for the perpetuation of the human race.
(But why perpetuate it?) Art is for him the parasite and pimp of love. He
cannot distinguish between the Apollo Belvedere and the crude bestialities of
certain Pompeian frescoes, or between Rabelais and Elenor Glyn.
What then is his ideal of human life? one cannot say. So crass a creature can
have no true ideal. There have been ascetic philosophers; but the prohibitionist
would be as offended by their doctrine as by ours, which, indeed, are not so
dissimilar as appears. Wage-slavery and boredom seem to complete his outlook
on the world.
There are species which survive because of the feeling of disgust inspired by
them: one is reluctant to set the heel firmly upon them, however thick may be
one’s boots. But when they are recognized as utterly noxious to humanity—the
more so that they ape its form—then courage must be found, or, rather, nausea
must be swallowed. May God send us a Saint George!

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