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 diges-
tions 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 prepara-
tions 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.