"The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript"
About this Quote
Crowley’s jab lands because it insults two audiences at once: the complacent tourist and the complacent rationalist. A mountain is the most obvious thing in the world, a brute fact you can photograph and file away as “nature.” By comparing that gaze to an illiterate person facing Greek, he frames the landscape as a text with grammar, nuance, and hidden references - and suggests most people don’t even know they’re missing the plot.
The intent is elitist, yes, but it’s also tactical. Crowley spent his life selling the idea that reality has an esoteric syntax: magic, mysticism, and self-transformation as a kind of advanced literacy. The mountain matters here because it was central to his lived mythology; he was a serious mountaineer, and he treated extreme terrain as both testing ground and temple. In that context, the line isn’t just aesthetic snobbery. It’s a manifesto for trained perception: discipline turns “scenery” into revelation.
The subtext is a critique of modern empiricism. The ordinary man “looking” thinks vision is passive, neutral, complete. Crowley’s metaphor insists that seeing is interpretive and socially stratified; some people inherit the alphabet, others never learn it. Greek is a pointed choice: not merely “a foreign language,” but the prestige language of philosophy, scripture, and initiation. He implies that the world is already speaking in sacred dialects, and most of us are functionally illiterate - not because the mountain is obscure, but because we’ve been taught to settle for recognition instead of reading.
The intent is elitist, yes, but it’s also tactical. Crowley spent his life selling the idea that reality has an esoteric syntax: magic, mysticism, and self-transformation as a kind of advanced literacy. The mountain matters here because it was central to his lived mythology; he was a serious mountaineer, and he treated extreme terrain as both testing ground and temple. In that context, the line isn’t just aesthetic snobbery. It’s a manifesto for trained perception: discipline turns “scenery” into revelation.
The subtext is a critique of modern empiricism. The ordinary man “looking” thinks vision is passive, neutral, complete. Crowley’s metaphor insists that seeing is interpretive and socially stratified; some people inherit the alphabet, others never learn it. Greek is a pointed choice: not merely “a foreign language,” but the prestige language of philosophy, scripture, and initiation. He implies that the world is already speaking in sacred dialects, and most of us are functionally illiterate - not because the mountain is obscure, but because we’ve been taught to settle for recognition instead of reading.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Aleister
Add to List
