"Sky" (1969/1971)

45. Also I beheld my God, and the countenance of Him was a thousandfold brighter than the lightning. Yet in His heart I beheld the slow and dark One, the ancient One, the devourer of His children. 46. In the height and the abyss, O my beautiful, there is no thing, verily, there is no thing at all, that is not altogether and perfectly fashioned for Thy delight. 47. Light cleaveth unto Light, and filth to filth; with pride one contemneth another. But not Thou, who art all, and beyond it; who art absolved from the Division of the Shadows. — Aleister Crowley, Liber LXV: The Book of the Heart Girt with a Serpent, Chapter IV

“I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.” — Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis), Chapter I, verse 64

“Should a Sky-Seller live forever?”

"Sky" is tricky aesthetically; once again, it comes down to theotropic dissonance. There are small miracles of language here, and it is, in its way, a brilliant allegory—just not of what it purports to allegorize, drug use. For it to work, it needs carry more weight. It manages this, for me at least, though this will no doubt be a highly idiosyncratic post.

Lafferty this time gives the reader a decaying urban landscape called the Rocks, a post-apocalyptic city. In the lowest part, what was once an underground parking garage, lives the Sky-Seller, Mr. Furtive, who is "fox-muzzled, ferret-eyed, slithering along like a snake." Mr. Furtive comes out only at night, and when he does, he sells a mysterious substance called Sky. Welkin Alauda is a girl so preternaturally light that it is said her bones were hollow and filled with air. She goes to Mr. Furtive for Sky. Their transaction is a hurried, nervous ritual in the pre-dawn shadows. Welkin buys a sack of the substance from the seller, whose black eyes glitter with the fear that "if real light should ever reflect into them he'd go blind."

Welkin and her friends (Karl, Icarus, and Joseph) are literal and figurative Sky-Divers who, along with their pilot Ronald Kolibri, use the substance Sky to trip while skydiving. After taking Sky, each in a different way, they take a simple crop-dusting plane to altitudes where there is no breathable air. Under Sky’s influence, they experience a surreal, detached reality presented in Lafferty’s most psychedelic language. Theirs is a personal cosmos where physical laws are suspended. "We have our own rotundity and sphere here," Icarus says, "and it is apart from all worlds and bodies." The Sky-Divers land on clouds, create spheres of ice crystals, and look down upon the ordinary world as an abject world, one that they must keep flat. As the story progresses, they become increasingly delusional and hubristic.

And each of their dives is more extreme than the last, until the group of them has a sense of invincibility. They fly a million feet high. They fly so high that Welkin can play a godlike trick: "I've switched worlds on the world, and it doesn't know what happened to it." Are parachutes even needed?

For the story's last dive, Welkin goes on a nocturnal journey deep into the "fungoid odor and the echoing dampness of the underground" to find the Sky-Seller. There, he reveals that Sky is derived from "the insane ghost-white of the deadliest and queerest of them all, the Fly Amanita," a poisonous mushroom sublimated into a narcotic. He tells her, "Nobody ever comes back many times for Sky. You will be back never. Or one time."

On the group’s final flight, they believe they achieve an apotheosis. They no longer need Sky, because "They were Sky." Stepping chuteless from the plane, now the Eternal Eagle (the plane renamed itself), they pass into a reality outside of time and space, a place of "pure light that had an everywhere source." They are creators and destroyers. There is a very good bit of writing about killing all flies on Earth with a word that ties into the story's deepest metaphors. They eat asteroids "like peanuts," and extinguish the sun with "a certain ineptitude." Their power is absolute until it isn’t. A cosmic curiosity and a gnawing internal worm of doubt compel them to recreate their old world and descend to it. They are drawn back to the very thing they believed themselves to have transcended.

Predictably, it is catastrophic. As each man slams into the Earth, he receives the Lafferty bloodsmell treatment, which includes being made to "fold up and break up from the bottom" as bones splinter. Welkin, though, being lighter, survives the crash but is a broken person. The story ends an indeterminate time later, with Welkin now "a shaky old woman on crutches." She again moves through dark passages under the Rocks. No longer an airy girl, she looks for the Sky-Seller in the darkness: “Sky for salving the broken Crone! Sky for the weal of my hollow bone!”

The most interesting aspect of this story is how it plays with what might be called, following Aleister Crowley, the mystery of filth. One of the big ideas in Crowley’s magickal system is a spiritual practice of confronting and embracing phenomena that typically cause fear, shame, and disgust. It is, essentially, a spiritual form of shock therapy with the idea that spiritual liberation could come by breaking down ingrained psychological barriers and dualistic thinking, tied up with the Thelemic principle that "All phenomena are Sacraments" and the instruction to "Subdue thy fear and thy disgust. Then—yield."

The way it works is that the seeker of gnosis confronts the socially and personally taboo with the aim of transcending the conventional distinctions between pure and impure, sacred and profane. One of the few well-done discussions of it is Gordan Djurdjevic’s “The Great Beast as Tantric Hero,” where Djurdjevic makes a convincing case that the method is related to certain Tantric traditions that use decadence as a spiritual technique to overcome the ego's limitations and achieve a state of non-dual consciousness where no experience is rejected.

This is where you should stop reading if you are squeamish. There are many terrible biographies of Crowley and only one great one. It’s Perdurabo by Richard Kaczynski, a man who obviously both understands and admires Crowley. The book is worth reading for the first half of that. Kaczynski gives the full portrait of Crowley, including what is probably his most notorious dive into the mystery of filth, an ordeal Crowley undertook with his partner Leah Hirsig at the Abbey of Thelema.

As recounted in Crowley’s magical diary, Hirsig challenged him to prove his ability to transmute all things by consuming her excrement as a Eucharist. After initial revulsion, Crowley complied, seeing it as a successful initiation that allowed him to overcome his final inhibitions and declare, “I am indeed High Priest. I’ll blush no more.” Eating shit, for him, was so intense and transgressive that he considered it the ultimate application of his philosophy. It showed that by intentionally embracing what is considered the most base and repulsive, the magician could destroy the illusion of objective purity and impurity, thereby liberating the True Will from all conditioned limitations. Some of Crowley’s disgust, I’ve long thought, came from Leah Hirsig’s social class. Crowley himself had inherited a fortune from his father. That’s the first part.

The second part would take us deep into the rabbit hole, but suffice it to say that in Crowley’s system, there are two main ways of achieving esoteric gnosis. One is the way of the mystic, and the other is the way of the magician. One aspect of the magician’s path is the idea that one can pass through the floor of the universe (the abject, as it were) and emerge spiritually strengthened. There is something of this in what Crowley called passing through the Abyss, with its close connection to Babalon.

With those two pieces, we can use The Great Beast to work out some of the metaphysical logic in "Sky." Lafferty’s Sky-Divers have their own version of the mystery of filth. Their quest for transcendence begins in the decaying urban filth of the Rocks, sourcing their sacrament from Mr. Furtive. "Sky" is a quintessence of the abject: a narcotic derived from a poisonous, “insane ghost-white” mushroom cultivated in underground darkness by a man with hairy palms. They eat the earth’s base and toxic elements to reach a state of ethereal purity. The logic of their method fits the magical principle of Crowleyan transmutation. They take the lowest matter to reach the highest state. And at first, it looks like it will work. They achieve their own “rotundity and sphere,” a subjective reality in which they feel unbound by physical laws and can look down upon the material world as a lesser, flat existence they have transcended. It is unmitigated superbia.

This is where Lafferty’s own metaphysics have something to say about the magician's path. In the Crowleyan model, passing through the Abyss annihilates the ego; it perfects the True Will; and so forth. Lafferty’s characters inflate themselves to a cosmic scale, mistaking godlike delusion for genuine gnosis, which is more than a little like Aleister himself.

What they are doing is escapism. I am of the humble opinion that Crowley did not transcend the material world and achieve mastery by eating his girlfriend’s shit. And the Sky-Divers don’t pass through the floor of the cosmos into anything either; they just use its filth to launch themselves away from it and dash out their brains. It is a story about the metaphysics of filth.

Of course, the Great Sky-Seller eventually hit earth—dying impoverished, writing to groups like the Agape Lodge, preying on the young, a heroin addict.

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