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                      Absinthe: The Green Goddess
                                   
                                  By
                           Aleister Crowley
                                   
                          Copyright  O.T.O.
                                   
                                  I.
                                   
   Keep always this dim corner for me, that I may sit while the
   Green Hour glides, a proud pavine of Time. For I am no longer in
   the city accursed, where Time is horsed on the white gelding
   Death, his spurs rusted with blood.
   
   There is a corner of the United States which he has overlooked.
   It lies in New Orleans, between Canal Street and Esplanade
   Avenue; the Mississippi for its base. Thence it reaches northward
   to a most curious desert land, where is a cemetery lovely beyond
   dreams. Its walls low and whitewashed, within which straggles a
   wilderness of strange and fantastic tombs; and hard by is that
   great city of brothels which is so cynically mirthful a neighbor.
   As Felicien Rops wrote,--or was it Edmond d'Haraucourt?--"la
   Prostitution et la Mort sont frere et soeur--les fils de Dieu!"
   At least the poet of Le Legende des Sexes was right, and the
   psycho-analysts after him, in identifying the Mother with the
   Tomb. This, then, is only the beginning and end of things, this
   "quartier macabre" beyond the North Rampart with the Mississippi
   on the other side. It is like the space between, our life which
   flows, and fertilizes as it flows, muddy and malarious as it may
   be, to empty itself into the warm bosom of the Gulf Stream, which
   (in our allegory) we may call the Life of God.
   
   But our business is with the heart of things; we must go beyond
   the crude phenomena of nature if we are to dwell in the spirit.
   Art is the soul of life and the Old Absinthe House is heart and
   soul of the old quarter of New Orleans.
   
   For here was the headquarters of no common man--no less than a
   real pirate--of Captain Lafitte, who not only robbed his
   neighbors, but defended them against invasion. Here, too, sat
   Henry Clay, who lived and died to give his name to a cigar.
   Outside this house no man remembers much more of him than that;
   but here, authentic and, as I imagine, indignant, his ghost
   stalks grimly.
   
   Here, too are marble basins hollowed--and hallowed!--by the
   drippings of the water which creates by baptism the new spirit of
   absinthe.
   
   I am only sipping the second glass of that "fascinating, but
   subtle poison, whose ravages eat men's heart and brain" that I
   have ever tasted in my life; and as I am not an American anxious
   for quick action, I am not surprised and disappointed that I do
   not drop dead upon the spot. But I can taste souls without the
   aid of absinthe; and besides, this is magic of absinthe! The
   spirit of the house has entered into it; it is an elixir, the
   masterpiece of an old alchemist, no common wine.
   
   And so, as I talk with the patron concerning the vanity of
   things, I perceive the secret of the heart of God himself; this,
   that everything, even the vilest thing, is so unutterably lovely
   that it is worthy of the devotion of a God for all eternity.
   
   What other excuse could He give man for making him? In substance,
   that is my answer to King Solomon.
   
                                  II.
                                   
   The barrier between divine and human things is frail but
   inviolable; the artist and the bourgeois are only divided by a
   point of view--"A hair divided the false and true."
   
   I am watching the opalescence of my absinthe, and it leads me to
   ponder upon a certain very curious mystery, persistent in legend.
   We may call it the mystery of the rainbow.
   
   Originally in the fantastic but significant legend of the
   Hebrews, the rainbow is mentioned as the sign of salvation. The
   world has been purified by water, and was ready for the
   revelation of Wine. God would never again destroy His work, but
   ultimately seal its perfection by a baptism of fire.
   
   Now, in this analogue also falls the coat of many colors which
   was made for Joseph, a legend which was regarded as so important
   that it was subsequently borrowed for the romance of Jesus. The
   veil of the Temple, too, was of many colors. We find, further
   east, that the Manipura Cakkra--the Lotus of the City of
   Jewels--which is an important centre in Hindu anatomy, and
   apparently identical with the solar plexus, is the central point
   of the nervous system of the human body, dividing the sacred from
   the profane, or the lower from the higher.
   
   In western Mysticism, once more we learn that the middle grade
   initiation is called Hodos Camelioniis, the Path of the
   Chameleon. There is here evidently an illusion to this same
   mystery. We also learn that the middle stage in Alchemy is when
   the liquor becomes opalescent.
   
   Finally, we note among the visions of the Saints one called the
   Universal Peacock, in which the totality is perceived thus
   royally appareled.
   
   Would it were possible to assemble in this place the cohorts of
   quotation; for indeed they are beautiful with banners, flashing
   their myriad rays from cothurn and habergeon, gay and gallant in
   the light of that Sun which knows no fall from Zenith of high
   noon!
   
   Yet I must needs already have written so much to make clear one
   pitiful conceit: can it be that in the opalescence of absinthe is
   some occult link with this mystery of the Rainbow? For
   undoubtedly one does indefinably and subtly insinuate the drinker
   in the secret chamber of Beauty, does kindle his thoughts to
   rapture, adjust his point of view to that of the artists, at
   least to that degree of which he is originally capable, weave for
   his fancy a gala dress of stuff as many-colored as the mind of
   Aphrodite.
   
   Oh Beauty! Long did I love thee, long did I pursue thee, thee
   elusive, thee intangible! And lo! thou enfoldest me by night and
   day in the arms of gracious, of luxurious, of shimmering silence.
   
                                 III.
                                   
   The Prohibitionist must always be a person of no moral character;
   for he cannot even conceive of the possibility of a man capable
   of resisting temptation. Still more, he is so obsessed, like the
   savage, by the fear of the unknown, that he regards alcohol as a
   fetish, necessarily alluring and tyrannical.
   
   With this ignorance of human nature goes an ever grosser
   ignorance of the divine nature. He does not understand that the
   universe has only one possible purpose; that, the business of
   life being happily completed by the production of the necessities
   and luxuries incidental to comfort, the residuum of human energy
   needs an outlet. The surplus of Will must find issue in the
   elevation of the individual towards the Godhead; and the method
   of such elevation is by religion, love, and art. These three
   things are indissolubly bound up with wine, for they are species
   of intoxication.
   
   Yet against all these things we find the prohibitionist,
   logically enough. It is true that he usually pretends to admit
   religion as a proper pursuit for humanity; but what a religion!
   He has removed from it every element of ecstasy or even of
   devotion; in his hands it has become cold, fanatical, cruel, and
   stupid, a thing merciless and formal, without sympathy or
   humanity. Love and art he rejects altogether; for him the only
   meaning of love is a mechanical--hardly even
   physiological!--process necessary for the perpetuation of the
   human race. (But why perpetuate it?) Art is for him the parasite
   and pimp of love. He cannot distinguish between the Apollo
   Belvedere and the crude bestialities of certain Pompeian
   frescoes, or between Rabelais and Elenor Glyn.
   
   What then is his ideal of human life? one cannot say. So crass a
   creature can have no true ideal. There have been ascetic
   philosophers; but the prohibitionist would be as offended by
   their doctrine as by ours, which, indeed, are not so dissimilar
   as appears. Wage-slavery and boredom seem to complete his outlook
   on the world.
   
   There are species which survive because of the feeling of disgust
   inspired by them: one is reluctant to set the heel firmly upon
   them, however thick may be one's boots. But when they are
   recognized as utterly noxious to humanity--the more so that they
   ape its form--then courage must be found, or, rather, nausea must
   be swallowed. May God send us a Saint George!
   
                                  IV.
                                   
   It is notorious that all genius is accompanied by vice. Almost
   always this takes the form of sexual extravagance. It is to be
   observed that deficiency, as in the cases of Carlyle and Ruskin,
   is to be reckoned as extravagance. At least the word abnormalcy
   will fit all cases. Farther, we see that in a very large number
   of great men there has also been indulgence in drink or drugs.
   There are whole periods when practically every great man has been
   thus marked, and these periods are those during which the heroic
   spirit has died out of their nation, and the burgeois is
   apparently triumphant.
   
   In this case the cause is evidently the horror of life induced in
   the artist by the contemplation of his surroundings. He must find
   another world, no matter at what cost.
   
   Consider the end of the eighteenth century. In France the men of
   genius are made, so to speak, possible, by the Revolution. In
   England, under Castlereagh, we find Blake lost to humanity in
   mysticism, Shelley and Byron exiles, Coleridge taking refuge in
   opium, Keats sinking under the weight of circumstance, Wordsworth
   forced to sell his soul, while the enemy, in the persons of
   Southey and Moore, triumphantly holds sway.
   
   The poetically similar period in France is 1850 to 1870. Hugo is
   in exile, and all his brethren are given to absinthe or to
   hashish or to opium.
   
   There is however another consideration more important. There are
   some men who possess the understanding of the City of God, and
   know not the keys; or, if they possess them, have not force to
   turn them in the wards. Such men often seek to win heaven by
   forged credentials. Just so a youth who desires love is too often
   deceived by simulacra, embraces Lydia thinking her to be Lalage.
   
   But the greatest men of all suffer neither the limitations of the
   former class nor the illusions of the latter. Yet we find them
   equally given to what is apparently indulgence. Lombroso has
   foolishly sought to find the source of this in madness--as if
   insanity could scale the peaks of Progress while Reason recoiled
   from the bergschrund. The explanation is far otherwise. Imagine
   to yourself the mental state of him who inherits or attains the
   full consciousness of the artist, that is to say, the divine
   consciousness.
   
   He finds himself unutterably lonely, and he must steel himself to
   endure it. All his peers are dead long since! Even if he find an
   equal upon earth, there can scarcely be companionship, hardly
   more than the far courtesy of king to king. There are no twin
   souls in genius.
   
   Good--he can reconcile himself to the scorn of the world. But yet
   he feels with anguish his duty towards it. It is therefore
   essential to him to be human.
   
   Now the divine consciousness is not full flowered in youth. The
   newness of the objective world preoccupies the soul for many
   years. It is only as each illusion vanishes before the magic of
   the master that he gains more and more the power to dwell in the
   world of Reality. And with this comes the terrible
   temptation--the desire to enter and enjoy rather than remain
   among men and suffer their illusions. Yet, since the sole purpose
   of the incarnation of such a Master was to help humanity, they
   must make the supreme renunciation. It is the problem of the
   dreadful bridge of Islam, Al Sirak--the razor-edge will cut the
   unwary foot, yet it must be trodden firmly, or the traveler will
   fall to the abyss. I dare not sit in the Old Absinthe House
   forever, wrapped in the ineffable delight of the Beatific Vision.
   I must write this essay, that men may thereby come at last to
   understand true things. But the operation of the creative godhead
   is not enough. Art is itself too near the reality which must be
   renounced for a season.
   
   Therefore his work is also part of his temptation; the genius
   feels himself slipping constantly heavenward. The gravitation of
   eternity draws him. He is like a ship torn by the tempest from
   the harbor where the master must needs take on new passengers to
   the Happy Isles. So he must throw out anchors and the only
   holding is the mire! Thus in order to maintain the equilibrium of
   sanity, the artist is obliged to seek fellowship with the
   grossest of mankind. Like Lord Dunsany or Augustus John, today,
   or like Teniers or old, he may love to sit in taverns where
   sailors frequent; or he may wander the country with Gypsies, or
   he may form liaisons with the vilest men and women. Edward
   Fitzgerald would see an illiterate fisherman and spend weeks in
   his company. Verlaine made associates of Rimbaud and Bibi la
   Puree. Shakespeare consorted with the Earls of Pembroke and
   Southampton. Marlowe was actually killed during a brawl in a low
   tavern. And when we consider the sex-relation, it is hard to
   mention a genius who had a wife or mistress of even tolerable
   good character. If he had one, he would be sure to neglect her
   for a Vampire or a Shrew. A good woman is too near that heaven of
   Reality which he is sworn to renounce!
   
   And this, I suppose, is why I am interested in the woman who has
   come to sit at the nearest table. Let us find out her story; let
   us try to see with the eyes of her soul!
   
                                  V.
                                   
   She is a woman of no more than thirty years of age, though she
   looks older. She comes here at irregular intervals, once a week
   or once a month, but when she comes she sits down to get solidly
   drunk on that alternation of beer and gin which the best
   authorities in England deem so efficacious.
   
   As to her story, it is simplicity itself. She was kept in luxury
   for some years by a wealthy cotton broker, crossed to Europe with
   him, and lived in London and Paris like a Queen. Then she got the
   idea of "respectability" and "settling down in life"; so she
   married a man who could keep her in mere comfort. Result:
   repentance, and a periodical need to forget her sorrows. She is
   still "respectable"; she never tires of repeating that she is not
   one of "those girls" but "a married woman living far uptown," and
   that she "never runs about with men."
   
   It is not the failure of marriage; it is the failure of men to
   recognize what marriage was ordained to be. By a singular paradox
   it is the triumph of the bourgeois. Only the hero is capable of
   marriage as the church understands it; for the marriage oath is a
   compact of appalling solemnity, an alliance of two souls against
   the world and against fate, with invocation of the great blessing
   of the Most High. Death is not the most beautiful of adventures,
   as Frohman said, for death is unavoidable; marriage is a
   voluntary heroism. That marriage has today become a matter of
   convenience is the last word of the commercial spirit. It is as
   if one should take a vow of knighthood to combat dragons--until
   the dragons appeared.
   
   So this poor woman, because she did not understand that
   respectability is a lie, that it is love that makes marriage
   sacred and not the sanction of church or state, because she took
   marriage as an asylum instead of as a crusade, has failed in
   life, and now seeks alcohol under the same fatal error.
   
   Wine is the ripe gladness which accompanies valor and rewards
   toil; it is the plume on a man's lancehead, a fluttering
   gallantry--not good to lean upon. Therefore her eyes are glassed
   with horror as she gazes uncomprehending upon her fate. That
   which she did all to avoid confronts her: she does not realize
   that, had she faced it, it would have fled with all the other
   phantoms. For the sole reality of this universe is God.
   
   The Old Absinthe House is not a place. It is not bounded by four
   walls. It is headquarters to an army of philosophies. From this
   dim corner let me range, wafting thought through every air,
   salient against every problem of mankind: for it will always
   return like Noah's dove to this ark, this strange little
   sanctuary of the Green Goddess which has been set down not upon
   Ararat, but by the banks of the "Father of Waters."
   
                                  VI.
                                   
   Ah! the Green Goddess! What is the fascination that makes her so
   adorable and so terrible? Do you know that French sonnet "La
   legende de l'absinthe?" He must have loved it well, that poet.
   Here are his witnesses.
   
     Apollon, qui pleurait le trepas d'Hyacinthe,
     Ne voulait pas ceder la victoire a la mort.
     Il fallait que son ame, adepte de l'essor,
     Trouvat pour la beaute une alchemie plus sainte.
     Donc de sa main celeste il epuise, il ereinte
     Les dons les plus subtils de la divine Flore.
     Leurs corps brises souspirent une exhalaison d'or
     Dont il nous recueillait la goutte de--l'Absinthe!
     
     Aux cavernes blotties, aux palis petillants,
     Par un, par deux, buvez ce breuvage d'aimant!
     Car c'est un sortilege, un propos de dictame,
     Ce vin d'opale pale avortit la misere,
     Ouvre de la beaute l'intime sanctuaire
     --Ensorcelle mon coeur, extasie mort ame!
     
   What is there in absinthe that makes it a separate cult? The
   effects of its abuse are totally distinct from those of other
   stimulants. Even in ruin and in degradation it remains a thing
   apart: its victims wear a ghastly aureole all their own, and in
   their peculiar hell yet gloat with a sinister perversion of pride
   that they are not as other men.
   
   But we are not to reckon up the uses of a thing by contemplating
   the wreckage of its abuse. We do not curse the sea because of
   occasional disasters to our marines, or refuse axes to our
   woodsmen because we sympathize with Charles the First or Louis
   the Sixteenth. So therefore as special vices and dangers
   pertinent to absinthe, so also do graces and virtues that adorn
   no other liquor.
   
   The word is from the Greek apsinthion. It means "undrinkable" or,
   according to some authorities, "undelightful." In either case,
   strange paradox! No: for the wormwood draught itself were bitter
   beyond human endurance; it must be aromatized and mellowed with
   other herbs.
   
   Chief among these is the gracious Melissa, of which the great
   Paracelsus thought so highly that he incorporated it as the
   preparation of his Ens Melissa Vitae, which he expected to be an
   elixir of life and a cure for all diseases, but which in his
   hands never came to perfection.
   
   Then also there are added mint, anise, fennel and hyssop, all
   holy herbs familiar to all from the Treasury of Hebrew Scripture.
   And there is even the sacred marjoram which renders man both
   chaste and passionate; the tender green angelica stalks also
   infused in this most mystic of concoctions; for like the
   artemisia absinthium itself it is a plant of Diana, and gives the
   purity and lucidity, with a touch of the madness, of the Moon;
   and above all there is the Dittany of Crete of which the eastern
   Sages say that one flower hath more puissance in high magic than
   all the other gifts of all the gardens of the world. It is as if
   the first diviner of absinthe had been indeed a magician intent
   upon a combination of sacred drugs which should cleanse, fortify
   and perfume the human soul.
   
   And it is no doubt that in the due employment of this liquor such
   effects are easy to obtain. A single glass seems to render the
   breathing freer, the spirit lighter, the heart more ardent, soul
   and mind alike more capable of executing the great task of doing
   that particular work in the world which the Father may have sent
   them to perform. Food itself loses its gross qualities in the
   presence of absinthe and becomes even as manna, operating the
   sacrament of nutrition without bodily disturbance.
   
   Let then the pilgrim enter reverently the shrine, and drink his
   absinthe as a stirrup-cup; for in the right conception of this
   life as an ordeal of chivalry lies the foundation of every
   perfection of philosophy. "Whatsoever ye do, whether ye eat or
   drink, do all to the glory of God!" applies with singular force
   to the absintheur. So may he come victorious from the battle of
   life to be received with tender kisses by some green-robed
   archangel, and crowned with mystic vervain in the Emerald Gateway
   of the Golden City of God.
   
                                 VII.
                                   
   And now the cafe is beginning to fill up. This little room with
   its dark green woodwork, its boarded ceiling, its sanded floor,
   its old pictures, its whole air of sympathy with time, is
   beginning to exert its magic spell. Here comes a curious child,
   short and sturdy, with a long blonde pigtail, with a jolly little
   old man who looks as if he had stepped straight out of the pages
   of Balzac.
   
   Handsome and diminutive, with a fierce mustache almost as big as
   the rest of him, like a regular little Spanish fighting
   cock--Frank, the waiter, in his long white apron, struts to them
   with the glasses of ice-cold pleasure, green as the glaciers
   themselves. He will stand up bravely with the musicians bye and
   bye, and sing us a jolly song of old Catalonia.
   
   The door swings open again. A tall dark girl, exquisitely slim
   and snaky, with masses of black hair knotted about her head,
   comes in. On her arm is a plump woman with hungry eyes, and a
   mass of Titian red hair. They seem distracted from the outer
   world, absorbed in some subject of enthralling interest and they
   drink their aperitif as if in a dream. I ask the mulatto boy who
   waits at my table (the sleek and lithe black panther!) who they
   are; but he knows only that one is a cabaret dancer, the other
   the owner of a cotton plantation up river. At a round table in
   the middle of the room sits one of the proprietors with a group
   of friends; he is burly, rubicund, and jolly, the very type of
   the Shakespearean "Mine host." Now a party of a dozen merry boys
   and girls comes in. The old pianist begins to play a dance, and
   in a moment the whole cafe is caught up in the music of
   harmonious motion. Yet still the invisible line is drawn about
   each soul; the dance does not conflict with the absorption of the
   two strange women, or with my own mood of detachment.
   
   Then there is a "little laughing lewd gamine" dressed all in
   black save for a square white collar. Her smile is broad and free
   as the sun and her gaze as clean and wholesome and inspiring.
   There is the big jolly blonde Irish girl in the black velvet
   beret and coat, and the white boots, chatting with two boys in
   khaki from the border. There is the Creole girl in pure white
   cap-a-pie, with her small piquant face and its round button of a
   nose, and its curious deep rose flush, and its red little mouth,
   impudently smiling. Around these islands seems to flow as a
   general tide the more stable life of the quarter. Here are honest
   good-wives seriously discussing their affairs, and heaven only
   knows if it be love or the price of sugar which engages them so
   wholly. There are but a few commonplace and uninteresting
   elements in the cafe; and these are without exception men. The
   giant Big Business is a great tyrant! He seizes all the men for
   slaves, and leaves the women to make shift as best they can
   for--all that makes life worth living. Candies and American
   Beauty Roses are of no use in an emergency. So, even in this most
   favored corner, there is dearth of the kind of men that women
   need.
   
   At the table next to me sits an old, old man. He has done great
   things in his day, they tell me, an engineer, who first found it
   possible to dig Artesian wells in the Sahara desert. The Legion
   of Honor glows red in his shabby surtout. He comes here, one of
   the many wrecks of the Panama Canal, a piece of jetsam cast up by
   that tidal wave of speculation and corruption. He is of the old
   type, the thrifty peasantry; and he has his little income from
   the Rente. He says that he is too old to cross the ocean--and why
   should he, with the atmosphere of old France to be had a stone's
   throw from his little apartment in Bourbon Street? It is a
   curious type of house that one finds in this quarter in New
   Orleans; meagre without, but within one comes unexpectedly upon
   great spaces, carved wooden balconies on which the rooms open. So
   he dreams away his honored days in the Old Absinthe House. His
   rusty black, with its worn red button, is a noble wear.
   
   Black, by the way, seems almost universal among the women: is it
   instinctive good taste? At least, it serves to bring up the
   general level of good looks. Most American women spoil what
   little beauty they may have by overdressing. Here there is
   nothing extravagant, nothing vulgar, none of the near-Paris-gown
   and the lust-off-Bond-Street hat. Nor is there a single dress to
   which a Quaker could object. There is neither the mediocrity nor
   the immodesty of the New York woman, who is tailored or
   millinered on a garish pattern, with the Eternal Chorus Girl as
   the Ideal--an ideal which she always attains, though (Heaven
   knows!) in "society" there are few "front row" types.
   
   On the other side of me a splendid stalwart maid, modern in
   muscle, old only in the subtle and modest fascination of her
   manner, her face proud, cruel and amorous, shakes her wild
   tresses of gold in pagan laughter. Her mood is universal as the
   wind. What can her cavalier be doing to keep her waiting? It is a
   little mystery which I will not solve for the reader; on the
   contrary--
   
                                 VIII.
                                   
   Yes, it was my own sweetheart (no! not all the magazines can
   vulgarize that loveliest of words) who was waiting for me to be
   done with my musings. She comes in silently and stealthily,
   preening and purring like a great cat, and sits down, and begins
   to Enjoy. She know I must never be disturbed until I close my
   pen. We shall go together to dine at a little Italian restaurant
   kept by an old navy man, who makes the best ravioli this side of
   Genoa; then we shall walk the wet and windy streets, rejoicing to
   feel the warm sub-tropical rain upon our faces. We shall go down
   to the Mississippi, and watch the lights of the ships, and listen
   to the tales of travel and adventure of the mariners. There is
   one tale that moves me greatly; it is like the story of the
   sentinel of Herculaneum. A cruiser of the U.S. Navy was detailed
   to Rio de Janeiro. (This was before the days of wireless
   telegraphy.) The port was in quarantine; the ship had to stand
   ten miles out to sea. Nevertheless, Yellow Jack managed to come
   aboard. The men died one by one. There was no way of getting word
   to Washington; and, as it turned out later, the Navy Department
   had completely forgotten the existence of the ship. No orders
   came; the captain stuck to his post for three months. Three
   months of solitude and death! At last a passing ship was
   signaled, and the cruiser was moved to happier waters. No doubt
   the story is a lie; but did that make it less splendid in the
   telling, as the old scoundrel sat and spat and chewed tobacco?
   No, we will certainly go down, and ruffle it on the wharves.
   There is really better fun in life than going to the movies, when
   you know how to sense Reality.
   
   There is beauty in every incident of life; the true and the
   false, the wise and the foolish, are all one in the eye that
   beholds all without passion or prejudice: and the secret appears
   to lie not in the retirement from the world, but in keeping a
   part of oneself Vestal, sacred, intact, aloof from that self
   which makes contact with the external universe. In other words,
   in a separation of that which is and perceives from that which
   acts and suffers. And the art of doing this is really the art of
   being an artist. As a rule, it is a birthright; it may perhaps be
   attained by prayer and fasting; most surely, it can never be
   bought.
   
   But if you have it not. This will be the best way to get it--or
   something like it. Give up your life completely to the task; sit
   daily for six hours in the Old Absinthe House, and sip the icy
   opal; endure till all things change insensibly before your eyes,
   you changing with them; till you become as gods, knowing good and
   evil, and that they are not two but one.
   
   It may be a long time before the veil lifts; but a moment's
   experience of the point of view of the artist is worth a myriad
   martyrdoms. It solves every problem of life and death--which two
   also are one.
   
   It translates this universe into intelligible terms, relating
   truly the ego with the non-ego, and recasting the prose of reason
   in the poetry of soul. Even as the eye of the sculptor beholds
   his masterpiece already existing in the shapeless mass of marble,
   needing only the loving kindness of the chisel to cut away the
   veils of Isis, so you may (perhaps) learn to behold the sum and
   summit of all grace and glory from this great observatory, the
   Old Absinthe House of New Orleans.
   
   V'la, p'tite chatte; c'est fini, le travail. Foutons le camp!
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