WAKEN AND DO WHAT YOU WILL
Hermetic Library Ministry of Information
“I height Don Quixote, I live on Peyote,
marihuana, morphine and cocaine.
I never knew sadness but only a madness
that burns at the heart and the brain,
I see each charwoman ecstatic, inhuman,
angelic, demonic, divine,
Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon
that brims with ambrosial wine.
I went to the city and found it a pity
the devil was playing at hell,
And ten million mortals had entered hell’s portals
and thought they were all doing well.
I said: “See, dear people, on every church steeple
an imp of the devil at play,
See ghouls cut their capers in daily newspapers
and fiends in police courts hold sway;
The mountains are palaces, women are chalices
meant to be supped and not sold,
The desert a banquet hall set for a festival,
ripe for the free and the bold;
The wind and the sky are ours, heaven and all its stars,
waken, and do what you will;
Break with this demon spawn’d hel-inspired nightmare
bond—Magick lies over the hill.”
* * *
They said I was crazy, ambiguous, lazy,
disgusting, fantastic, obscene;
So I hied for my sagebrush and cactus and corn mush,
To see if the air was still clean.
Oh, I height Don Quixote, I live on peyote,
marihuana, morphine and cocaine,
And may I be twice damned for a bank-clerk or store hand
if I visit the city again.”
— “I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote” by John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons
“I wake up quite when we kiss each other, and there is no dream any more.”
— Liber XCV, The Wake World
“Mother of Heaven, we beseech thee to awaken the Master.”
— spoken by Capricornus in The Rite of Saturn
“But in any case any man who is sane at all does make a distinction between the experience of daily life and the experience of dream. It is true that sometimes dreams are so vivid, and their character so persistently uniform that men are actually deceived into believing that places they have seen in dreams repeatedly are places that they have known in a waking life. But they are quite capable of criticising this illusion by memory, and they admit the deception. Well, in the same way the phenomena of high Magick and Samadhi have an authenticity, and confer an interior certainty, which is to the experience of waking life as that is to a dream.
But, apart from all this, experience is experience; and the real guarantee that we have of the attainment of reality is its rank in the hierarchy of the mind.”
— Fourth Lecture, Yoga for Yellowbellies, Eight Lectures On Yoga
“Then let the End awake. Long hast thou slept, O great God Terminus! Long ages hast thou waited at the end of the city and the roads thereof. Awake Thou! wait no more!”
— II 55, Liber LXV, Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente