TEGA - Liber CCCXLIII.doc

Liber CCCXLIII: AMRITA
Some Comments on the Elixir of Life
Extracted from the Magical Record of the Beast 666
for the year 1920 e.v.

By Aloster Kerval (Aleister Crowley)

7 June 1:55 a.m.

I feel inspired to jot down a few notes upon the Elixir of
Life.

The Elixir of Life by the Master Therion

The conditions of life are that the organism should be able to
adjust itself continually to its environment. Any individual, to
do this for long, needs either very great intelligence or very
great luck. His chief physical asset is elasticity, the power of
compensation and recuperation. Our bodies are some 75% pure water;
we are a mere sponge, our strength arises from the great
mechanical ingenuity of our structure. But we are not `solid
bodies' like most inanimate beings. This water, by kidneys, lungs,
and skin, constantly cleanses us, and carries off most of our
waste and noxious matter. Block one of these conduits; death
follows very rapidly. However, this drainage system is not quite
perfect; our pipes `fur' like a kettle. Disease and accident
apart, we die of arterio-sclerosis caused by the gradual deposits
of insoluble salts which harden the arteries and destroy the
elasticity which enables them to adjust themselves to new
conditions. In fact, we `perish' like india rubber. Old age is
simply a solidification of the tissues, all of which become hard,
dry and brittle.

As in philosophy, change is life, stagnation death; we should not
fear a brisk metabolism. Why should the process which we call
growth only a few years ago become degeneration? For the same
reason that a well-kept well-oiled machine works more easily with
age while a rusty one wrecks itself. Exercise helps us to sluice
our sewers, but we must flush them well with water to dissolve
mineral waste. We must avoid the ingestion of foods likely to
leave insoluble deposits.

But there is another cause of decay, cause also in part of this
poisoning. Our organs would repair themselves perfectly, if they
were given sufficient rest. In their haste they absorb the first
material to hand, be it good or bad. Also, we call on them to work
before they are fully rested and so wear them gradually out.
Exercise is necessary to keep us clean; but our rest must be
perfect restoration also. We can give the muscles this benefit by
Asana, and also reduce to a minimum the work of heart and lungs.
We can give our digestions rest by eating only at noon and sunset,
thus allowing them a clear twelve hours of the twenty-four.
Pranayama is the ideal exercise as it promotes metabolism to the
utmost with the minimum of fatigue, and can be combined with
Asana.

The Hindus, to whom we owe these practices, realize also (as I,
above) that the solidity of the food is an objection. They try to
live on the Prana (subtle energy) contained in it. For instance,
they teach people to reject their food before it has passed out of
the stomach. In the West, we have sought rather to discover
concentrations of good, and pre-digested preparations with a
minimum of substance liable to form waste insoluble or poisonous
products. We thus endeavor to diminish the work necessary to
assimilation, as well as to avoid dirt and disorder in our Temple.
We even eliminate on occasion the whole alimentary canal, and feed
our patients by direct injection into the blood, or by absorbtion
of nutriment in some convenient mucous membrane.

But mankind--in temperate climes--does not ask merely to exist; it
demands joy; and joy, physiologically speaking, consists in the
expenditure of surplus energy. Men living in the tropics need very
little food since all we require beyond the repair of tissues and
supply of mechanical force, is the heat required to keep our
bodies at 37o Centigrade, as above the temperature of the
air. If that be already 27o or so, we need but half of that
necessary if it be 17o, or one third if it be 7o. Yet men in the
tropics are not more energetic than our Scots and Norsemen. Those
like dolce far niente, repose, as these take pleasure in activity.
Even their phantasies attest to it, the one inventing Nirvana as
the other Valhalla.

We admire the frolics of the young horse turned out to grass; we
cultivate rough games, wild sports, and athletics. The
Struldbruggs of Swift are perhaps, to us, of all his creations the
most horrible. The immortality we ask is neither idleness nor
stagnation. We want infinite Youth to squander, just as we wish a
bottomless purse not to hoard but to spend. We cannot rest, just
as the tropical peoples cannot work properly and efficiently. By
our theory they should live longer than we do; but the same high
temperature that favours them befriends their enemies, bacteria;
and they lack our science of
health.

Now all the means that we take to prolong life, such as I have
outlined above, have so far failed to supply this superfluity of
energy which we really desire. People with diets and breathing
exercises and the like are usually walking sepulchres--some of
them whited! The animal who thinks about his health is already
sick. Absence of noise and friction is the witness of free
mechanical function. Fear actually creates disease, for the mind
begins to explore and so interferes with, the unconscious rhythm
of the body, as the Edinburgh Review killed John Keats.

The man with the best chance of prolonged youth is he who eats and
drinks heartily, not much caring what; who does things vigorously
in the open air, with the minimum of common-sense precautions; and
who keeps his mind at the same time thoroughly active, free from
worry, and his heart high. He has come, with William Blake, to the
Palace of Wisdom by the Road of Excess. He is on friendly terms
with Nature, and though he does not fear her he heeds her, and

does not provoke her. It is better says he, to wear out than to
rust out. True, but is there need to wear out? He tires himself
improperly, and he digs his grave with his teeth.

It is this surplus of good food, this codocil to our Will to Live,
that makes us, like the Englishman on the fine day, want to go out
and kill something. And so Death pays in some much Uric-Acid at
his human Savings-Bank.

There are only two solutions possible, the invention of either a
solvent more perfect than water, or a super-Food. The first
alternative is theoretically none too probable. As to the second,
if food were merely a chemical and mechanical agent in us, the
problem would be one of diet. But there is some reason to believe
that food contains a substance yet unanalyzed and unweighed
which is of the nature of pure Energy. Live foods, like oysters,
stimulate inexplicable; foods long stored lose their nutrive
value, though the chemist and physicist can detect no change. We
need no psychical research but only common sense and common
experience to tell us that there is a difference between a live
thing and a dead one beyond the detective powers of the
laboratories of Mid-Victorian arrogance and dogmatism.

A copper wire changes not in colour, weight, or chemical
composition when a current of electricity passes through it; must
we deny the existence of that force whose nature is still
perfectly mysterious despite our knowledge of its properties, our
measurements and our control of it? Why then deny a Life- bearing
force? Ostensibly because `there is no evidence of it'; but mainly
because the hypothesis happened to be packed in with the
theological parcel of rubbish. But we have nothing to span the gap
between the two well-ascertained groups of facts familiar to all;
namely the facts of `matter' and the facts of `mind'.

To our copper wire again! Electricity is matter of a subtle and
tenuous sort, in a peculiar state of motion; so is my hypothetical
Life-bearing force. The charged copper wire does not wear out; why
should the human body do so, if only we could feed it with pure
Life?

Nature everywhere is prolific of live things, animal and
vegetable. (Pray note that these things, and only these avail to
feed us.) What wealth of `spriritual' force in and acorn! What
history, its beginning veiled beyond all search! What potentiality
of future life, of growth, of multiplication, beyond all
conjecture! Like us, it has the power of Life; it can take live
things and dead things into its own substance, bidding them, for
its own purposes, to live again, transfigured! There's far more
energy in the acorn than in radium, at which fools gape so wide in
wonder. Far more, and far higher; radium only degenerates and
dissipates; the acorn lives!

But all that energy is latent and potential; the acorn must be
fed, like the fire that it is. (For every growth is a chemical
change, a kind of combustion, element married to element with
violence, with change of state, with heat, light pleasure, pain,
as its by-products. Growth crowns itself with bloom or scent, with
flame or colour, with wisdom conscious or unconscious.) The acorn
cannot hoard its wealth or experience, use its credit of
possibility, except by taking earth, air, and water into
partnership, and invoking on the Venture, the Benediction of the
Sun. If we destroy the fragile walls of its huge Library of
Wisdom, we do not otherwise than the Saracen at Alexandria. The
ages draw black hoods over their mighty foreheads; they cover
their inscrutable eyes; they breathe no more upon us; their voice
is Silence, Mystery, Oblivion; and we are left orphan, exposed
like Oedipus, cheating croupier, Malice, has loaded with a curse.
Where is the treasured wisdom of that dead world? Where is the
Sphinx that hid in our crushed acorn? It was; it is not. Love
itself no more intangible, more fugitive, more tragic, or more
heedless. Its Fate? The oracles sneer; the hieroglyphs are
indecipherable; the black lamb is found without a heart, and we
must make our pilgrimage perforce to the altar of the Unknown God.
All we can say is: It is not. Nay, but It was; and so, in some
strange form, must be; else were all science and all mathematics
falsehood and mockery.

But, as long since we learned, first to distinguish rubbed from
unrubbed amber, next to measure, last control, though never yet to
understand, the nature of, the force that made that distinction;
so we can tell the living from the dead, can even measure life
roughly, by taking heed of its external shews and proofs; so we
shall come to control it, perhaps--nay, surely!--to create it.

We cannot yet direct the forces of the acorn, save within
narrowest limits; we can stop, thwart or foster, even distort its
growth; but we cannot lure it so far from its path as to grow Elms
from it. But that is due to the definite bent and scope of the
particular structure of the physical basis of the Life-force which
must be one even as Electricity is one.

We shall be able to gather, if not to create, this Life; to
transmute it into other forms of force, as now we transmute heat
to light. We shall be able to store it, to harness it, to guide
it; to absorb its energy ourselves directly, without resorting to
our present gross, inefficient, cumbrous and dangerous means of
abstracting it from ores (if I may say so) mechanically, blindly,
empirically, and with such toil and strife. Our journey--by such
means of transit--is necessary and hateful; our travelling
companions are our diseases, and the host to ease us at the end of
the short, the weary day, is Death.

As we cannot drink at the source of Life, keep Youth perpetual as
we can keep Light--strange realization of the Rosicrucian's dream,
or, it may be, discovery of his secret!

But we have found the Super-food. We know a vehicle of which a few
grains can house enough pure light to fill a man not only with
nourishment, but with Energy almost superhuman, and parallel,
Intelligence incredibly sun-bright for four-and twenty hours. That
substance is theoretically easy, but practically hard to obtain.
In England and America it would be impossible to procure any
quantity even of the raw material, at least in strength and
purity; much less to prepare it. We know how to charge this
substance with the Life-force. The process is at present laborious
and expensive; great skill is required, and much precaution for
errors in preparation are hard to detect, and may result in
hideous mischance.

It is now six years since we gained our knowledge. They have been
crowded with experiment; we are arrived at the practical stage. We
cannot understand the true Nature of this force; we cannot measure
it; we cannot create it, or obtain it synthetically. But we can
purify and intensify it; we can, within wide limits, determine at
will the quality and scope of its action; we can postpone death,
increase energy, or prolong youth; and we are justified in saying
that we possess the Elixir of Life

666

Note: The Elixir is only administered to selected individuals for
good reason shown. The normal course of treatment consists of two
or three months' preparation in the place prepared for the purpose
in Sicily, followed by the necessary period, usually one month, of
the actual experiment which is made in the greatest secrecy.

Here at 5:50 a.m. (legal time) on the
Day of Diana, being the 7th of June,
An XVI Sol in Gemini.