Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Liber AL vel Legis I:40
This section of our website was originally published as a Red Flame titled THE ALEISTER CROWLEY DESK REFERENCE, A Listing of the Works of Aleister Crowley 1875-1947 in the private Library of J. Edward & Marlene Cornelius. The idea behind this volume began long ago in some bygone past when my hair was not quite as thin and gray. I was hunting for a poem written by Aleister Crowley to highlight a piece which I was writing when my mind went suddenly blank. We've all been there. As for me, I know Crowleyana like the back of my hand but somehow I could not locate the one particular poem which I needed. I just stood there starring at my library. A solid wall of Crowley books from ceiling to floor stared back in a silence that bordered on being annoying. I should have been able to find the poem at my finger tips, but I could not. No matter how many volumes I searched, the poem remained elusive. Here I was, having one of the largest private collections of Crowleyana in the world and it seemed to do me no good. I could not find what I needed and that frustrated me. So, what was I to do? To remedy the situation I immediately set upon the task of creating an index of Crowley's writings which were in my possession. Not only did this include a breakdown of where every single poem was found, and how often, but it also contained a breakdown of everything written by Aleister Crowley which I owned or even knew about. This turned out to be quite a task but one which my Marlene and I immersed ourselves in joyfully. It took years to complete. My finished project was 'technically' never meant to be published. It was meant for my own personal use, but too many people who saw my bound manuscript wanted a copy and everyone kept suggesting that it would make a great issue of Red Flame. I tried to explain how it was flawed, basically being it was just my own library, but no matter how much I protested, in the end they wore me down. I released it as a Red Flame in 1997. The issue went out of print in lest than three months.... Now, years later, with over forty pages of added material, we have decided to put the entire project on our website.
Love is the law, love under will.
Liber AL vel Legis I:57
Frater Achad Osher 583
~ FOREWORD ~
The extent, range and variety of Crowley's written work can easily overwhelm even the experienced enthusiast. He wrote almost every day of his life, authoring literally thousands of pieces from postcards to encyclopaedia. He was a lifelong diarist, wrote novels, short stories, invocations to Pan and hymns to the Virgin Mary; and he did all this under a bewildering variety of psuedonyms. He regarded himself first and foremost as a poet. His first book and his last were books of poetry. His friend Louis Wilkinson, who appreciated Crowley's cooking and company more unreservedly than his verse, records a book dedication Crowley wrote for him:
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"On Crowley the Immortals ironically look,
He sought fame as a poet and he found it as a cook."
And yet it is not poetry for which he is best remembered. Enormously well read, and with a prodigious vocabulary, he brought an independence of thought to everything he wrote-from articles on radical politics to psychological theories only subsequently recognised as valid. The Simon Iff detective stories foreshadow offender profiling by several decades and his theories and opinions on 'the drug problem'-briefly that the social cost is doubled rather than halved by prohibition-is once again on the agenda of British legislators. What were occult secrets a century ago are now the bread and butter of sports psychologists.
Crowley was always a contrarian and uncompromising freethinker and half a dozen of his books were proscribed in their day as pornographic. By modern standards however, to which Crowley has been a significant if largely unacknowledged contributor, they excite or outrage only the most feeble minded or uptight. Christianity and its contribution to human misery was a target Crowley rarely neglected. In Edwardian England this three-pronged rebellion worked against literary acceptance and most of Crowley's work was privately published.
Prior to the First World War, while Crowley was still a wealthy man, this was no problem and the early works were wilfully rare and complex. By 1914 they were already a focus for collectors of expensive and tastefully produced books. When the money had gone books went unpublished rather than be issued in inferior form but no resource went untapped to bring out what he could. "Now a book should be a very holy thing" wrote Crowley in 1913, "and it is difficult for the outsider to distinguish the cornerstone from that which should be 'heaved over amidst the rubbish'. " Who could possibly disagree with that?
Posthumously almost everything that Crowley wrote has appeared in some form or other. But where to look? Some early work was amongst the last to appear. Additionally, essays and articles prepared for one purpose were incorporated into later works as and when possible. Crowley's Confessionsfor example is a half million-word compilation from diaries, essays and articles - sometimes abridged sometimes extended. Forty years separate the publication of first third from the remainder of this book.
After his death in 1947 the flame of truth was preserved largely due to
the enlightened foresight of Gerald Yorke in England and the devotion and
enterprise of Karl Germer and others in America. By the 1970s the World
had begun to catch up with the Man who was ahead of His Times. Rarity and
complexity returned if not always tasteful production. Rival publishers, rival
heirs and rival interpretations vied with private enthusiasts and privateers in a
sometimes-unseemly wrangle that continues to this day. The world had waited almost thirty years for a commentary on Liber Al then three turned up together.
In his textbooks on magick, mysticism and the fulfilment of human potential Crowley is without peer. In this field, where obscurantism is endemic and dissimulation routine, Crowley's works are of unparalleled clarity and integrity. Almost every area of occult endeavour has been analysed, stripped of the barnacles of centuries, and resynthesised-often with considerable humour. Lightness and wit run like veins through all but the religious works.
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Despite the promising title of the three volume Collected Works (which deals only with his early poetry and philosophical essays) There is no easy way into the corpus. Not only that but many of Crowley's works have numerous titles compounded by foreign alphabets and Latin numerals. Unsurprisingly these are not always faithfully reproduced. To make life even more interesting Crowley not only wrote under scores of pseudonyms but sometimes generously ascribed authorship of his work to friends and acquaintances.
There just has to be guide to this maze-a consumer guide-and now there is: you have it on your screen. What started as a book (superb but already scarce) has evolved into a web-based resource of unparalled thoroughness beautifully handled. With the capacity to be updated and expanded continuously it is the most complete, up-to-date and user-friendly listing ever of what Crowley wrote. This will aid everyone from the freshest-faced aspirant to the most burnt out old wizard. Collectors and researchers alike will benefit from, and hopefully contribute to, a growing asset for the present Aeon. This complicated subject has at last found a medium that can contain it. Indeed a web site too can be a holy thing.
Andrew Drylie
~ A etc ~
100 POEMS (poetry)
Note: This book is listed in a Mandrake prospectus (circa 1929) of future works to be released. It is presumed that no copy survives.
