New Age of Horus

THE SPENDTHRIFT  

~Aleister Crowley~

“ARCADIA, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon.” What words 

to conjure with, what five shouts to slay the five senses, and

set a leaping flame of emerald and silver dancing about us as

we yell them forth under  the oaks and over the rocks and

myrtle of the hill-side. “Bruised to the breast of Pan”—

let us flee church, and chapel, and meeting-room; let us

abandon this mantle of order, and leap back to the heaths, 

and the marshes, and the hills; back to the woods, and the

glades of night! back to the old gods, and the ruddy lips 

of Pan! 

How the torches splutter in the storm, pressing warm

kisses of gold on the gnarled and knotted trunks of the beech 

trees! How the fumigation from musk and myrrh whirls 

up in anaromatic cloud from the glowing censer!—how for a 

time it greedily clings to the branches, and then is wafted to

the stars! Look!—as we invoke them, how they gather 

round us, these Spirit of Love and of Life, of Passion, of

Strength, and of Abandon—these sinews of the manhood of

the World! 

O mystery of mysteries! “For each one of the Gods is in

all, and all are in each, being ineffably united to each other

and to God; because each, being a super-essential unity, their 

conjunction with each other is a union of unities.” Hence 

each is all; thus Nature squanders the gold and silver of our

understanding, till in panic frenzy we beat our head on the

storm-washed boulders and the blasted trunks, and shout

forth, “Io … Io … Io … Evoe! Io … Io!” till the glades

thrill as with the music of syrinx an sistrum, and our souls are 

rent asunder on the flaming horns of Pan.