Aleister Crowley

I invoked Aiwaz, was shown a phantasm of Baphomet, and suddenly determined to recognize this for Him!

Yea! as I loath, I lust; I prostitute myself to thee, perversely prurient - Wilt thou not make this night the nameless nuptial, the Devil thy Lord and mine at Our Black Mass?

I with Alostrael alone - we shall do Magick unto our Lord the Devil such as the Earth hath never known.

Our Lord the Devil's their Word, the Word Thelema, spoken of me The Beast.

And know that all my joy, perfect, transcending sense, is given of Aiwaz, whom we call the Devil, whose name is Will, loud-uttered by cocaine, is Love.

I sing for God, our Devil, our Lord, Aiwaz.

My light! O my father the Devil! It hath made all things one, being perfect, even as doth the Darkness!

When I was Levi, I drew myself as Ayin or Baphomet, 'The Devil' with Beast's Head. This is the Beast throned, crowned, exalted; the leaper, the erect, the butter-in. Her womb is my city, Babel. This Ayin is then my phallic will, my Holy …

She certainly gave me what I've been losing. Youth's intensity, its craving, the soul-priapism, huge lust and fierce to her, clamour for her to realize with me that mightiest marriage-dream, that Sacrament of Satan that may be consummated …

I had taken the name Baphomet as my motto in the O.T.O. For six years and more I had tried to discover the proper way to spell this name.

Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.

I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me.

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.

I embrace hardship and privation with ecstatic delight; I want everything the world holds; I would go to prison or to the scaffold for the sake of the experience. I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made …

Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.

Destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler. Physical ability and moral determination count for nothing. It is impossible to perform the simplest act when the gods say "No." I have no idea how they bring pressure to bear on such …

The pious pretence that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing. Its overshadowing formlessness obsesses the mind. The way to beat an enemy is to define him clearly, to analyse and measure him. Once an idea is …

No event can be fairly judged without background and perspective.

The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while.

The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to …

Men and women will never behave worthily as long as current morality interferes with the legitimate satisfaction of physiological needs. Nature always avenges herself on those who insult her.

As long as sexual relations are complicated by religious, social and financial considerations, so long will they cause all kinds of cowardly, dishonourable and disgusting behaviour.