ORDINARY MORALITY
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“My own attitude was unhampered by any ethical considerations. I had seen a good deal of Mathers personally. He was unquestionably a Magician of extraordinary attainment. He was a scholar and a gentleman. He had that habit of authority which inspires confidence because it never doubts itself. A man who makes such claims as he did cannot be judged by conventional codes and canons. Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people. For example, assume a Prime Minister who has private information that somebody has discovered, and is cultivating, a new germ by means of which he intends to destroy the nation. To pass a ‘Short Act’ would be to give the alarm and precipitate the disaster. It would be his duty to override the law and put his foot upon the mischief. Then again, the whole of Mathers' conduct might have been in the nature of a test. It might have been his way of asking the adepts whether they had the power of concentrating on the spiritual situation, of giving up for ever all their prejudices.”
— writing about Florence Farr, MacGregor Mathers in Chapter 22 of Confessions
“As all true Art is spontaneous, is genius, is utterly beyond all conscious knowledge or control, so also is sex. Indeed, one might class it as deeper still than Art; for Art does at least endeavour to find an intelligible means of expression. That is much nearer to sanity than the blind lust of the sex-impulse. The maddest genius does look from Chokmah not only to Binah, but to the fruit of that union in Da'ath and the Ruach; the sex-impulse has no use for Binah to understand, to interpret, to transmit. It wants no more than an instrument which will destroy it.
‘Here, I say, Master, have a heart!’
Nonsense! (I continue) What I say is the plain fact, and well you know it! More, damned up, hemmed in, twisted and tortured as it has been by religion and morality and all the rest of it, it has learnt to disguise itself, to appear in a myriad forms of psychosis, neurosis, actual insanity of the most dangerous types. You don't have to look beyond Hitler! Its power and its peril derive directly from the fatal fact that in itself it is the True Will in its purest form.”
— Chapter XV: Sex Morality of Magick Without Tears
“Believe me, the humbug about ‘morality’ in this country and the U.S.A., yes, even on the Continent in pious circles, is Hobgoblin No. 1 on the path of the Wise. If you are fooled by that, you will never get out of the stinking bog of platitudinous mouthings of make-believe ‘Masters.’ Need I refer to the fact that most of the unco’ guid are penny plain hypocrites. A little less vile are those whose prejudices are Freudian in character, who ‘compound for sins that they're inclined to, By damning those they have no mind to.’
Even when, poor-spirited molluscs, they are honest, all that twaddle is Negation. ‘Hang your clothes on a hickory limb, and don’t go near the water!’ does not produce a Gertrud Ederle. Thank God, the modern girl has cast off at least one of her fetters—the ceinture de chastété!
Perhaps we have now relaxed enough; we see that the ‘Holy man’ is not such a fool as he looks; and we may get on with our excursions into the ‘Morality’ of the Law of the New Aeon, which is the Aeon of Horus, crowned and conquering child: and—‘The word of the Law is Θελημα.’”
— Chapter LXX: Morality (1) of Magick Without Tears
“Judged by any ordinary standard, he is absolutely and entirely evil, he has broken his occult vows and all codes of morality, openly stating that he has done so and will continue to do so. He may have a very great purpose in view.
No living person perhaps has had such an influence on occult thought, and wrought so much change therein. He has knowingly taken upon himself a tremendous Karma, but what will be the ultimate result it is impossible to judge. To all appearance, as I remarked, he is the personification of evil.”
— Chas. Lazenby, speaking about Aleister Crowley, quoted at The International Forum, The International Vol XI Iss 10