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Oracles, the biography of an art
[Oracles]
Although Ralph P. Lester is credited on the titlepage with providing explanatory notes, the actual notes are limited to seven short entries: three biographical, two bibliographical and two noting metrical peculiarities. Noteworthy is a preface by Crowley in which he displays a self-deprecating humour.
The Death of the drunkard
It should be noted that this fragment is of a wildly revolutionary tendancy. It made him the Ibsen of a school where a parson and a chapel were considered with the rest of the non-Plymouth-Brethren world as so many devils let loose from hell.—R. P. L. [p. 1]

Spoila Opima
From "Green Alps," a volume (luckily) burnt at the printers, and so dropped.—R. P. L. [p. 5]

The little half-sovereign
The occasion of this poem was the meeting of the author with a fair and virtuous damsel of pleasant address and conversation. She politely asked him to call at her residence on the following Sunday: but, on his doing so, she straightway demanded half-a-sovereign, and proffered a shameful equivalent. The indignant boy went off and gave vent to his feelings in the above rhymes.—R. P. L. [p. 17]

Adaption of "Onward Christian Soldiers" to the needs of Brethren
This astonishing piece of satire was composed after some weeks in the house of a Plymouth Brother whose children and friends had gone over to one of the other kinds of Brethren at the great split of 1894. Almost every phrase used therein is a quotation, not a parody.—R. P. L. [p. 20]

Ode to Sappho
This and the following poems up to page 60 are from "Green Alps."—R. P. L. [p. 21]

Dhammapada
The reader will kindly note such important changes of metre as occur in the two last verses of Chapter I. and elsewhere. The careless might suppose that these do not scan; they do, following directly or by analogy a similar change in the Pali.—R. P. L. [p. 147]

In the Great Pyramid of Ghizeh
If this poem be repeatedly read through, it falls into a subtly rhymed and metrical form.—R. P. L. [p. 168]

Oracles. The biography of an art : unpublished fragments of the work of Aleister Crowley With explanatory notes by R. P. Lester and Aleister Crowley. Boleskine,Foyers, Inverness : Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth , 1905. 175pp. plus Excerpt A - from the catalogue 14pp., A list of the works of Mr. Aleister Crowley, order form.


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