The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (The Spirit of Solitude: An Autohagiography)

Description

Published 1969, this corrected edition first published by Routledge & Kegan Paul 1979. Published by Arkana Books 1989. [Rear cover:] "Aleister Crowley's autobiographical confessions are a fascinating record of his lifetime’s journey into strange regions of consciousness. A ‘saint’ of the ‘Gnostic’ church, Crowley subtitled his six-volume work ‘an autohagiography’. He describes his initiation into magic, his world-wide travels and mistresses, his experiments with sex and drugs, and the philosophy of his famous *Book of the Law* which contains the gospel that Crowley proclaimed for all mankind: the Law of Thelema, or Do What Thou Wilt. Generations before his time, Crowley invoked sex, drugs and Eastern philosophy in his perpetual and often bizarre search for self-realization. The Confessions, skilfully edited and annotated by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant, serves as the perfect introduction to Crowley’s extraordinary life and thought." Reconstructed from the 217.8MB gateleg trucolor 150dpi PDF at https://archive.org/details/the-confessions-of-aleister-crowley-an-autobiography-edited-by-john-symonds-and-kenneth-grant/ Given the low image definition the searchable text layer is rudimentary but the page images are human-legible. The source PDF omits paper pages 6-7, 12-13, 384-385 which page images are therefore missing here but pp 6-7, 384-385 have been completed with text from the ocr-only version, leaving only pp 6-7 incomplete (start of editors' Introduction). The new 56.4MB PDF version of the present reworking is now located at: https://archive.org/download/symonds-grant-the-confessions-of-aleister-crowley-1989/SYMONDS%2BGRANT-The_Confessions_of_Aleister_Crowley_%281989%29.pdf