Clouds Without Water: 'Save death alone! I see no happy end''

By Aleister Crowley

Edward Alexander Crowley was born on 12th October 1875 to wealthy parents in Royal Leamington Spa in Warwickshire.

He was educated at Malvern College, Tonbridge School, Eastbourne College and finally Trinity College, Cambridge where he focused on his passions of mountaineering and poetry and published several volumes.

Life for Crowley was to abandon his parents’ Christian faith and instead to inject himself into Western esotericism. In 1898, he joined the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and was trained in ceremonial magic before studying both Hindu and Buddhist practices in India.

On his Egyptian honeymoon in 1904 he claimed contact with an entity―Aiwass―who gave him the sacred Book of the Law which served as the basis for the Thelema religion where he identified as its prophet. During the Great War, which he spent in the United States, he claimed to be working for British Intelligence but by the 1920s he had decamped to pursue a libertine lifestyle in Sicily, and in the ensuing scandals was evicted by the Italian Government.

He divided the following two decades between France, Germany, and England, and the continuing promotion of Thelema.

During his life he gained widespread notoriety for his drug use, his bisexuality, and his alarming views on society. In short, polite society frowned on his ways, his thoughts and his influence but to many others his stance had much of value. Even after death he was a darling for the 60’s counterculture but his influence has since waned.

His literary works were both prolific and covered many topics. In the early part of his career he published many poetry books, even plays, before his darker and more forceful works came to dominate his output.

Aleister Crowley died on 1st December 1947 at Hastings in England. He was 72.<

• Language: English
• Publisher: Portable Poetry
• Release date: Jun 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781835476093

Book preview

Clouds without Water by Aleister Crowley

Originally released as by the Reverend C Verey

FOR CIRCULATION AMONG MINISTERS OF RELIGION

Edward Alexander Crowley was born on 12th October 1875 to wealthy parents in Royal Leamington Spa in Warwickshire.

He was educated at Malvern College, Tonbridge School, Eastbourne College and finally Trinity College, Cambridge where he focused on his passions of mountaineering and poetry and published several volumes.

Life for Crowley was to abandon his parents’ Christian faith and instead to inject himself into Western esotericism.  In 1898, he joined the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and was trained in ceremonial magic before studying both Hindu and Buddhist practices in India.

On his Egyptian honeymoon in 1904 he claimed contact with an entity―Aiwass―who gave him the sacred Book of the Law which served as the basis for the Thelema religion where he identified as its prophet.  During the Great War, which he spent in the United States, he claimed to be working for British Intelligence but by the 1920s he had decamped to pursue a libertine lifestyle in Sicily, and in the ensuing scandals was evicted by the Italian Government.

He divided the following two decades between France, Germany, and England, and the continuing promotion of Thelema.

During his life he gained widespread notoriety for his drug use, his bisexuality, and his alarming views on society.  In short, polite society frowned on his ways, his thoughts and his influence but to many others his stance had much of value.  Even after death he was a darling for the 60’s counterculture but his influence has since waned. 

His literary works were both prolific and covered many topics.  In the early part of his career he published many poetry books, even plays, before his darker and more forceful works came to dominate his output.

Aleister Crowley died on 1st December 1947 at Hastings in England. He was 72.

Clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.

Jude 12, 13.

Index of Contents

Preface

The Manuscript

Dieu libre et libertin

A Quean of the Quality

A Terzain

I.—⁠The Augur

II.—⁠The Alchemist

III.—⁠The Hermit

IV.—⁠The Thaumaturge

V.—⁠The Black Mass

VI.—⁠The Adept

VII.—⁠The Vampire

VIII—⁠The Initiation

Notes

Prayer

CLOUDS WITHOUT WATER

PREFACE BY THE REVEREND C VEREY

Receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.

So wrote the great apostle nearly two thousand years ago; and surely in these latter days, when Satan seems visibly loosed upon earth, the words have a special and dreadful significance even for us who—thanks be to God for His unspeakable mercy!—are washed in the blood of the Lamb and freed from the chains of death—and of hell.

Surely this terrible history is a true Sign of the Times. We walk in the last days, and all the abominations spoken of by the apostle are freely practised in our midst. Nay! they are even the boast and the defence of that spectre of evil, Socialism.

The awful drama which the unhappy wretch who penned these horrible utterances has to unfold is alas! too common. Its study may be useful to us as showing the logical outcome of Atheism and Free Love.

For the former, death; for the latter, the death-in-life of a frightful, loathsome, shameful disease.

Receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.

It may seem almost incredible to many of us, perhaps safely established in our comfortable cures, among a simple and Godfearing people, that any man should have been found to pen the disgusting blasphemies, the revolting obscenities, which defile these pages.

Nor can it be denied that a certain power of expression, even at times a certain felicity of phrasing—always, indeed, a profound dramatic feeling—is to be found in these poems. Alas! that we should be compelled to write the words! That an art essentially spiritual, an art dignified by the great names of Gascoigne Mackie, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, George Herbert, should here be prostituted to such ignoble use. Truly the corruption of the best is the lowest—corruptio optimi pessima. Nor can one gleam of Hope, even in the infinite mercy of our loving Father, tinge with gold the leprous gloom of our outlook.

These clouds without water have no silver lining.

The unhappy man need not have feared that the poor servants of God would claim him as repentant, though surely we would all have shed the last drop of our blood to bring