Aleister Crowley

“ None but the dead can twine the limbs of love.
Come, love! My body in thy passion weeps
Tears keen as dewfall’s, salter than the deep’s.
My bosom! How its fortress wakes, and leaps,
And sleeps!
None but the dead can sleep the sleep of love!
Come, love, caress me with endearing eyes!
Light the long rapture that nor fades nor flies!
Love laughs and lingers, frenzies, stabs, and sighs,
And dies!
None but the dead can know the worth of love! ”

“ Tannhäuser perceives that he is in the palace
of a Great Queen.
Rise, rise, my knight! My king! My love, arise!
See the grave avenues of Paradise,
The dewy larches bending at my breath,
Portentous cedars prophesying death!
See the long vistas and the dancing sea,
The measured motion of fecundity!
Bright winds set swaying the soft-sounding flowers
(Here flowers have music) in my woven bowers,
Where sweet birds blossom, and in chorus quire
The rapt beginnings of immense desire.
Here is the light and rapture of the will:
We touch the stars—and they are tiny still! ”

“ Lets loose on earth, that no man
May linger nor be lost.
The barren woods, deserted,
Lose echo of our sighs—
Love—dies?—
Love lives—in granite skirted,
And under oaken skies.
But best is grim December,
The Goatish God his power;
The Satyr blows the ember,
And pain is passion’s flower;
When blood drips over kisses,
And madness sobs through wine:—
Ah, mine!—
The snake starts up and hisses
And strikes and—I am thine!
Venus.
Those are thy true joys? Cruelty for love?
Tannhäuser. ”

“ A child is easy to degrade! [Pg 71]
Tannhäuser.
Vile thing
I will try otherwise—to raise myself:
But if I fail, I will not drag her down;
I will return.
Venus.
To lose thee for one hour
Is my swift death—so desolate am I!
I have not got one lover in the world,
Save only Tannhäuser. And he will go.
Tannhäuser.
One lover! Who makes up the equal soul
Of all the wickedness beneath the sun?
Lilith! Seek out thy children to devour!
Leave me. I go to my Elizabeth.
Venus.
O no! It kills me! That is naked truth.
I am the soul and symbol of desire,
Yet individual to thy love. Stay! Stay! ”

“ We dwell, eternal shapes of shadowy light.
Only the love on earth that shook and smote us
Begets new stars—truth’s flowers fallen through night
Beyond the gold and glamour of Life’s lotus!
Eternal bliss of Love in birthless bowers!
Light, the gemmed robes of Love! Life, lifted breath,
Ageless existence deifying death! ”

“ Tannhäuser.
O Lady pure, miracle of true love,
I have a bitter word and harsh to say.
This is my curse—no sooner do I speak,
Or formulate my mind in iron words,
That my mind grows, o’erleaps the limit set,
And I perceive the truth that lies beyond—
One further step into a new-fallen night.
Hear then—I hate to hurt your perfect soul; [Pg 128]
I hate myself because I love you still
In that strange intermediate consciousness,
The reason and the mind! This middle way
Ancients called safe—that damns it instantly!
Without some danger nothing great is done! ”

“ She who loves not, she shall cleave unto thee,
Thou the unwilling!”
Peer of Gods is he, equal soul to theirs,
Who lingers in thy passionate embrace:
Whose languor-laden kiss
Cleaves where thy bosom is
A throne of beauty for thy throat and face!
In these dark joys and exquisite despairs,
O Love, let Death lay finger unawares! [Pg 104]
Landgrave.
Passion and music—but no Principle!
How different is Tannhäuser!
(To the unknown minstrel) You, sir, next!
Sing of pure love and noble womanhood.
Our court loves not these wastrel troubadours,
Loose locks, Hushed faces, soul’s unseemliness. ”

“ Tannhäuser.
The love of Isis! No mere love to Her
That is inborn in every soul of us!
It is Her love to Christ that we must taste,
Uniting us with Her eternal sigh.
There is a problem infinite again. ”

“ The constant illusions; the many disappointments; the bitter earnestness of the man amid the grim humour, or more often sheer cacchination of his surroundings; all the bestial mockery of the baffling fiends; the still more hideous mockery in which the Powers of Good themselves seem to indulge; doubt of the reality of that which he seeks; doubt even of the seeker; the irony of the whole strife: are fascinating to me as they are, I make no doubt, to the majority of mankind. ”

“ All the illusion vanishes, and Tannhäuser finds himself in a cross-way of the forest, where is a Crucifix. He is kneeling at the foot, amazed, as one awakening from a dream, or from a vision of mysterious power. ”

“ I take it that there have always, or nearly always, been on the earth those whom Councillor von Eckartshäusen, the Svámi Vivekánanda and their like, call “great spiritual giants” (can there be any etymological link between “yogi” and “ogre”?) and that such persons, themselves perceiving Truth, have tried to “diminish the message to the dog” for the benefit of less exalted minds, and hidden that Truth (which, unveiled, would but blind men with its glory) in a mass of symbology often perverted or grotesque, yet to the proper man transparent; a “bait of falsehood to catch the carp of truth.” ”

“ Tannhäuser.
Not great! The consciousness of man
Their many generations moulded so
To fix in definite ideas, and clothe
Their Maker in the rags. If skies are vast,
So gems are tiny: who shall choose between? ”

“ With his seducer’s heart of hell! My voice!
Death! Your cry echoes me?
Voices.
Death! Death!
Tannhäuser.
Leap out,
Sword of my fathers! you have heard my harp!
Its music stings your vile hypocrisy
Into mere hatred. Truth is terrible!
You, cousin, taken in adultery!
You, Wolfram, lover of the kitchen maids!
You, Jerome—yes, I know your secret deeds!
You, ladies! Are your faces painted thus
Not to hide wrinkles of debauchery?
To catch new lovers?
Landgrave.
Stop the lying mouth!
Friends, your sword-service! [Pg 124]
Tannhäuser. ”

“ Steady and strong, persistent to the heart!
So shall this song be made more terrible
With the soul-mastering spell,
Choke, stagger, know the Evil, Beauty’s counterpart!
Whose long-drawn curse runs venom in my veins?
What dragon spouse consumes me with her breath? [Pg 63]
What passionate hatred, what infernal pains,
Mixed with thy being in the womb of Death? ”

“ This poem has been written in the blood of slain faith and hope; each foolish utterance of Tannhäuser stings me with shame and memory of old agony; each Ignis Fatuus that he so readily pursues, reminds me of my own delusions. But, these follies and delusions being the common property of mankind, I have thought them of sufficient interest, dramatic and philosophical, to form the basis of a poem. Let no man dare to reproach me with posing as the hero of my tale. ”

“ Now, regarded in this light, all religions, quá religions, are equally contemptible. The Hindu Gnanis say “That which can be thought is not true.” As machineries for the exercise of spiritual and intellectual powers innate or developed, certain sets of symbols may be more or less [Pg 13] convenient to a special trend of mind, reason, or imagination; no more: I deny to any one religion the possession of any essential truth which is not also formulated (though in a different language) in every other. ”

“ Love being throughout the symbol of his method, as Beauty of its object, it is through Love, refined into Pity, that he at last attains the Supreme Knowledge, or at least sufficient of it to put the last straw on the back of his corporeal camel, and bring the story to a fitting end. ”

“ Save that mine eyes have seen a little truth,
My body found a little weariness.
I am very feeble! Hither comes the hunt!
[A horn winds quite close by.
The noble, doomed, swift beauty! Closer yet
Pant the long hounds! What heart he has! One, two!
See the brach dying by his bloody flank!
So could not Tannhäuser awhile ago.
My help lay outside and above myself.
What skills him he is brave? He ends the same.
Poor stag! Here sweep the foremost hunters up.
My very kinsmen! There rides Wolfram too!
The proper minstrel! The ideal lover! [Pg 84]
The pure, unsullied soul. Even so, forsooth! ”

“ The history of any man who seriously and desperately dares to force a passage into the penetralia of nature; not with the calm philosophy of the scientist, but with the burning conviction that his immortal destiny is at stake ”

“ Tannhäuser.
That is a question. I am not so sure
My song was not entirely to that end.
Wolfram.
Yes, poet, true one that you are indeed!
You shew us the dilemma of the soul,
The Gordian knot Love only hews asunder.
Tannhäuser.
Or—shall I say?—soothes only, bandages,
Not heals the sore of Destiny?
Wolfram.
No, certes,
But substitutes for one reality
Another—and a lovely pleasant one.
Tannhäuser.
Existence is illusion after all;
Man, a bad joke; and God, mere epigram!
If we must come to that. And likewise love. [Pg 114]
Landgrave. ”

“ If you do not accept my conclusion that all religions are the expression of truth under different aspects, facets of the same intolerable gem, you are forced back on the conclusions of those unpleasing persons the Phallicists. But should you travel to the East, and tell a Lingam-worshipping Sivite that his is a phallic worship he will not be pleased with you. ”

“ Under these circumstances I have not scrupled to subvert anything that appeared to me to need subverting in the interests, always identical, of beauty and of truth. Anachronism may be found piled upon anachronism, and symbolism mixed with symbolism. [Pg 12]
In one direction I have restrained myself. Nowhere does Tannhäuser refer to the Vedas and Shastras or to the Dhamma of that blameless hypochondriac, Gotama Buddha. I take all the blame for so important an omission, not without a shrewd suspicion that the commination will take the form of “For this relief much thanks!” ”

“ PREFACE As, after long observation and careful study, the biologist sees that what at first seemed isolated and arbitrary acts are really part of a series of regular changes, and presently has the life-history of the being that he is examining clear from Alpha to Omega in his mind; as, during a battle, the relative importance of its various incidents is lost, the more so owing to the excitement and activity of the combatant, and to the fact that he is himself involved in the vicissitudes which he may have set himself to observe ”

“ I am but an asker of questions, such as may be found confronting those who have indeed freed their minds from the conventional commonplaces of the platitudinous, but have not yet dared to uproot the mass of their convictions, and to examine the whole question of religion from its most fundamental source in the consciousness of mankind. ”

“ The Tannhäuser who talks is the “Only Being in an Abyss of Darkness,” the natural man ignorant of his identity with the Supreme Being. The various other characters are all little parts of Tannhäuser’s own consciousness and not real persons at all: whether good or bad, all alike hinder and help (and there is not one whose function is not thus double) the realisation of his true unity with all life. ”

“ When I pronounced it—else had She Herself,
Hathoör or Mary, risen. Misery!
Incessant mystery of the search for Truth!
Venus.
Search out my mystery a little while!
Tannhäuser.
There is a flush of passion in thine eyes,
An hunger in them ”

“ Consequently it is impossible any more to divine whether virtue or vice (as understood of old) will cause the irreparable catastrophe which is the one element of drama which we may still (in the work of a modern dramatist) await with any degree of confidence.
I trust that I may be forgiven for adopting the idea that Tannhäuser was one of those mysterious Germans whose reputed existence so perturbed the Middle Ages ”

“ Drama indeed is an altogether misleading term; monodrama is perhaps better. It is really a series of introspective studies; not necessarily a series in time, but in psychology, and that rather the morbid psychology of the Adept than the gross mentality of the ordinary man.
It may help some of my readers if I say that my Tannhäuser is nearly identical in scheme with the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Literary and spiritual experts will however readily detect minor differences in the treatment. ”

“ The dogs are loose. Ride forward, gentlemen!
[Amid the winding of horns and cries of the
huntsmen the company moves off.
Heinrich.
[Pg 92]
They hate his very name! Dear Tannhäuser!
[Exit.
[Pg 93]
[Pg 94]
ACT IV.
“So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force:
What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer
The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse
Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer
Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,
Despair: but ever mind the whirling fear,
Let, through the tumult, break the poet’s face
Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!” ”

“ So, to the poet’s tourney.
Wolfram.
Sire, Lord Heinrich
Craves your high pardon.
Landgrave.
Ha! He is not here!
Wolfram.
Our sturdy lover will not be consoled [Pg 100]
For losing, as he phrases it, his friend.
Landgrave.
Well, we forgive him the more readily
Because of the occasion. One alone
Of all themes possible may grace this hour;—
Love! Let the lots of precedence be drawn.
Tannhäuser, you will string us once again
Your harp forgotten?
Tannhäuser.
That will I, my lord.
Herald.
On the Lord Wolfram falls it first to sing.
Wolfram (sings) . ”

“ Tannhäuser.
The simple love of life and gladness there!
Merely to be, and worship at the heart.
How complex, the machinery of me!
Better? I doubt it. Hark! he tunes again. [Pg 78]
Shepherd-boy (sings) .
O Gretchen, when the morn is grey,
Forsake thy flocks and steal away
To that low bank where, shepherds say,
The flowers eternal are. ”