Contents The first work to appear in this volume, Oracles: the Autobiography of an Art, is like a little collected works in itself and contained Crowley's backlog of poems from 1889 to 1903, including an unfinished Buddhist classic the Dhammapada, Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (also unfinished) and some from Green Alps, his teenage collection of mountaineering poetry.
It is written in the form of fifty sonnets numbered from the first day to the fiftieth and laments the poet's desire to make love with a married woman.
It was basically a work based on Robert Browning's Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day and itself contained two long, likewise-colloquial poems called "Ascension Day" and "Pentacoste", both quite anarchic and unreadable because of the constant use of neologisms, disenjambment and punctuation, the poems really set way by means of hundreds of footnotes for collected prose witticisms in the back (even the line-numbering, going up naturally in five, cheekily missed "665" for "666").
The essays and poems in the back include "William Shakespeare", "Pansil", "After Agnosticism", "Preface to Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis", "Summa Spes" and "The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magick" (the introduction also to his edition of The Goetia).
Of no exception is Ambrossi Magi Hortus Rosarum claiming to be translated from a work by "Christeos Luciftias" and is similar to the fantasy attainments such as The Wake World and The Heart of the Master with the aspirant in alchemical fashion moving through the pictures of the Tarot cards.
The Three Characteristics is a tongue-in-cheek take on what is known as a "jataka" story, or incarnation saga of Buddhism, but sounds more like the Book of Job with Ganesh being tempted by Jehiour (really Iehi Aour, Allan Bennett) to inflict various karma on the reincarnating Per R Abu (Perdurabo, Crowley).
They are both dialogues between "Mysticus" and "Skepticus" ("....Hindu Mystic and a British Skeptic....") and also breaks off into footnote essays actually bigger than the main context.
The chapters are TO OSCAR ECKENSTEIN, with whom I have wondered in so many solitudes of nature, and thereby learnt the words and spells that bind her childrenTO MARY BEATON, whom I lamentTO THE MEMORY OF IEHI AOUR, with whom I walked through Hell, and compelled itTO MY WIFE