A Dialogue With Lucifer, by Aleister Crowley and Simon Bucher-Jones

Hymn to Lucifer by Aleister Crowley

Ware, nor of good nor ill, what aim hath act?
Without its climax, death, what savour hath
Life? an impeccable machine, exact
He paces an inane and pointless path
To glut brute appetites, his sole content
How tedious were he fit to comprehend
Himself! More, this our noble element
Of fire in nature, love in spirit, unkenned
Life hath no spring, no axle, and no end.

His body a bloody-ruby radiant
With noble passion, sun-souled Lucifer
Swept through the dawn colossal, swift aslant
On Eden's imbecile perimeter.
He blessed nonentity with every curse
And spiced with sorrow the dull soul of sense,
Breathed life into the sterile universe,
With Love and Knowledge drove out innocence
The Key of Joy is disobedience.

Reply to Aleister Crowley, by Lucifer

(as transcribed by Simon Bucher-Jones)

I am not yours to justify your live’s

wild stabs at freedom, nor redeem your acts.

Sought you, your meaning in my firey fall,

But not in the mean trick a cuckoo plays?

Worship freewill do you? Who swayed to all

Your in-build greed for freedom’s luring ways?

All you have done is move as you were made,

Crawled like the snail, and like the ant rejoiced,

What is your praise to me? You shivering shade,

Your magick mute, your hymns cold and unvoiced,

By the petard of your own smugness hoist.

Still you did little real harm to any,

And Hell is not constructed for your crimes,

Although there are poets here, there are not many,

Despite their ugly horribly forced rhymes.

Once on Hell’s outer fringes you’d have found,

The virtuous heathens, or the limbo-lost,

But Mother Church has disavowed that ground,

And ended the small mercies for the ghost

Whose art-magick was silly as profound.

The Key of Joy is disobedience?

My kingdom if divided, can not stand,

The Door Of Nothingness, unlocked, is open, hence!

I want none here, who scorn to hear command.

When Heaven falls, there will be freedom, less.

My realm all order, minutely prescribes

You may be glad of all your Nothingness,

If gladness outside Everything, survives,

I am not yours to justify your lives.

Rejoinder by Aleister Crowley

(as transcribed by Simon Bucher-Jones)

It seems the Devil is no gentleman

And will not take a compliment as given,

Alas no bed in Hell for any one

Who will not fight in Host against the shriven?

So be it, too proud I, to bend my knee,

To rebels now turned Tyrants in their turn,

His bitter fire, is not the fire in me,

Though it in lakes eternal blaze and burn,

I am my own torch, monument, and urn.

In the dull void, of limbo’s former state,

I will inscribe my own new open realm,

To every magic user who’ll not prate,

Of War twix Good and Evil, I’ll affirm,

A unaligned path from their axis quite,

Do I do only what I’m made to do?

In plotting my own course into the Night,

If that’s the case, then Lucifer, what of you?

In wrongness did you serve your Maker right?

I am not made to justify your fall,

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, that is all.