Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also seem to remember that the story went on to say that Crowley at one point had been praised for his work in the Spanish Inquisition. That was the first he'd actually heard of it--humans had come up with it on their own--so he went and had a look, and then went and got blind drunk, because there are some things even demons would rather not think about. That kind of abrupt tonal slam, from comedy to horror, leavin…
>That was the first he'd actually heard of it--humans had come up with it on their own--so he went and had a look, and then went and got blind drunk, because there are some things even demons would rather not think about. This seems like one of the things you might say to diss humans, but which doesn't actually make sense when you think about it. I don't believe for one moment that an actual demon, who does the kind…
"Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course.
One of them had written it, hadn’t he … “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”
Crowley had got a commendation for the Spanish Inquisition. He had been in Spain then, mainly hanging around cantinas in the nicer parts, and hadn’t even known about it until the commendation arrived. He’d gone to have a look, and had come back and got drunk for a week.
That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.
And just when you’d think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger."