May 8, 1989 e.v. key entry by
Bill Heidrick, T.G. of O.T.O.
First proof reading 6/2/89 e.v.   --- needs further proof reading
(c) O.T.O.   disk 5

O.T.O.
P.O.Box 430
Fairfax, CA  94930
USA

(415) 454-5176 ----  messages only.


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                            P A R T   F O U R


                            MAGICAL WORKINGS









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                              58



     November 18th, 1905 was my seventh birthday in the Order, I wrote:
"About now I may count my Speculative Criticism of the Reason as not only
proved and understood, but realized."  And on the ninteenth: "The misery of
this is simply sickening --- I can write no more."
      I must explain.  All these seven years, especially when in the East,
I had discussed religion and philosophy with all sorts and conditions of
men.  Further, I had studied the sacred books of all religions of
antiquity.  My experiences all tended to the uniform conclusion that one
could go all round the circle in any argument.  Christian philosophers have
seized on this fact to urge that our only hope of arriving at truth is
through faith; but it is the bankruptcy of faith that originally drove us
to test it by reason.  I saw that the true solution was, on the contrary,
that of the mystic.  In Cabbalistic and scientific language, we possess a
faculty of apprehension independent of reason, which informs us directly of
the truth.
     I wrote in my Magical Diary on November 19th, 1905:

          I realize in myself the perfect impossibility of reason;
     suffering great misery.  I am as one who should have plumed himself
     for years upon the speed and strength of a favourite horse, only to
     find not only that its the speed and strength were illusory, but that
     it was not a real horse at all, but a clothes-horse.  There being no
     way --- no conceivable way --- out of this awful trouble gives that
     hideous despair which is only tolerable because in the past it has
     ever been the Darkness of the Threshold.  But this is far worse than
     ever before; I wish to go from A to B; and I am not only a cripple,
     but there is no such thing as space.  I have to keep an appointment at
     midnight; and not only is my watch stopped, but there is no such thing
     as time ... But surely I am not a dead man at thirty!

     From this date till the first week in February, I was intellectually
insane.  The actual ordeal is described with intense simplicity and passion
in "Aha!"  I call it "the Order of the Veil, the Second Veil" and the "Veil
of the Abyss".  The complete destruction of reason left me without other
means of apprehension than Neschamah.
     I have already explained briefly what are meant by Neschamah, Ruach
and Nephesch.  I must now go a little more deeply into the doctrines of the
Cabbala.  The human consciousness is represented as the centre of a hexagon

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whose points are the various faculties of the mind; but the uppermost
point, which should link the human consciousness with the divine, is
missing.  Its name is Da„th, Knowledge.  The Babylonian legend of the
"fall" is a parable of the shutting out of man from Paradise by the
destruction of this Daath and the establishment of this Abyss.
Regeneration, redemption, atonement and similar terms mean alike the
reunion of the human with the divine consciousness.  Arrived at the highest
possible point of human attainment by regular steps, one finds oneself on
the brink of the Abyss, and to cross this one must abandon utterly and for
ever all that one has and is.  (In unscientific mysticism the act is
represented sentimentally as the complete surrender of the self to God.)
In unsectarian English, the act implies first of all the silencing of the
human intellect so that one may hear the voice of the Neschamah.
     We may now consider further what is meant by Neschamah.  It is the
human faculty corresponding to the idea Binah.  Understanding; which is
that aspect of the divine consciousness which corresponds to the Female
Idea.  It receives, formulates and transmits the pure divine consciousness,
which is represented by a triangle (for the Trinity) whose apex is the
essence of the true self (corresponding to Brahman, Atman, Allah etc. ---
not to Jehovah, who is the Demiurge) and whose other angle is Chiah, the
Masculine aspect of the self, which creates.  (Chiah corresponds to
Chokmah: Wisdom, the Word.)  This divine consciousness is triune.  In its
essence it is absolute and therefore contains all things in itself, but has
no means of discriminating between them.  It apprehends itself by
formulating itself through the postulation of itself as male and female,
active and passive, positive and negative, etc.
     The idea of separateness, of imperfection, of sorrow, is realized by
it as an illusion created by itself for the purpose of self-expression.
The method is precisely that of the painter who plays off one colour
against another in order to represent some particular idea of himself which
pleases him.  He knows perfectly well that each colour is in itself
imperfect, a partial presentation of the general idea of light.
     The "Attainment of Unity" would be, theoretically, to mix up all the
paints and produce a surface without colour, form or meaning; yet those
philosophers who insist on symbolizing God by Unity reduce Him to a
nonentity.  The more logical of these, indeed, carry their thesis a little
further and describe the Deity as "without quantity or quality".  Even the
Prayer Book describes Him as "without body, parts or passion", though it
continues cheerfully by describing His parts and His passions in detail.
The Hindus actually realize that their Parabrahman thus defined, by
negating all propositions soever about him, is not a being at all in any
intelligible sense of the word.  Their aspiration to be absorbed in his
essence depends on the thesis that "Everything is Sorrow."

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     The Buddha took the last logical step, rejected Brahman as a mere
metaphysical figment and replaced the idea of union with him by that of
absorption in Nibbana, a state of cessation pure and simple.  This is
certainly a step forward; but it still throws no light on the subject of
how things came to be such that only cessation can relieve their
intolerable sorrow; though it is clear enough that the nature of any
separate existence must be imperfection.  The Buddha impudently postulates
"Mara" as the maker of the whole illusion, without attempting to assign a
motive for his malice or a means by which he could gratify it.
Incidentally, his "existence in itself" is the whole of the evil Mara,
which is just as impertinent a postulate as any of the uncreated creators
and uncaused causes of other religions.  Buddhism does not destroy the
philosophical dilemma.  Buddha's statement that the fundamental error is
ignorance is as arbitrary, after all, as Milton's that it was pride.
Either quality implies a host of others, all equally inconceivable as
arising in a homogeneous state either of bliss or nonentity.
     In eighty days I went round the world of thought and, like Phineas
Fogg and Omar Khayyam, came out by the same door as in I went.  The
solution must be practical, not theoretical; real not rational.  Tyndall
says somewhere that it is evidently possible for men to acquire at any
moment the use of a new faculty which would reveal a new universe, as
completely as the development of sight has done, or as the invention of the
spectroscope, the electroscope, etc., has done, and shown us unsuspected
material universes.  It is to be carefully observed that we unhesitatingly
class as "material" all sorts of ideas which are not directly appreciable
by any of our senses.  I was in no way apostasizing from my agnosticism in
looking for a universe of beings endowed with such qualities that earlier
observers, with few facts and fewer methods of investigation and criticism
at their disposal, called "gods", "archangels", "spirits" and he like.
     I began to remember that I was myself an initiate, that the Great
Order had given me the Cabbala as my working hypothesis.  I now found that
this doctrine satisfied perfectly my science, my scepticism and my soul.
It made no pretence to lay down the law about the universe.  On the
contrary, it declared positively the agnostic conclusion of Huxley.  It
declared reason incompetent to create a science from nothing and restricted
it to its evident function of criticizing facts, so far as those facts were
comprehensible by it.
     But the Cabbala did not leave me in despair; it asserted the existence
of a faculty such as that suggested by Tyndall, by the use of which I could
appreciate truth directly.  I may here refer to the historic claim of
mystics that their truth is incomprehensible to human reason and
inexpressible in human language.  The arrogance of the proposition was less
repugnant to me than its confession of incompetence and its denial of the
continuity of

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nature.  I have devoted countless days and nights to forcing myself to
formulate the intuitions of trance in intelligible ideas, and conveying
those ideas by means of well defined symbols and terms.  At the period I am
describing, such an effort would have been bricks without straw.  My truly
mystical experiences were extremely few.  I have subsequently developed a
complete system, based on the Cabbala, by which any expression may be
rendered cognizable through the language of intellect, exactly as
mathematicians have done: exactly, too, as they have been obliged to
recognize the existence of a new logic.  I found it necessary to create a
new code of the laws of thought.
     One example pertinent to this period will illustrate the strangeness
of the world revealed by the development of Neschamah.  The human
consciousness is primarily distinguishable from the divine by the fact of
its dependence on duality.  The divine consciousness distinguishes a peach
from a pear, but is aware all the time that the difference is being made
for its own convenience.  The human accepts the difference as real.  It
also fails to accept the fact that it knows nothing of the object as it is
in itself.  It is confined to an awareness that its consciousness has been
modified by its tendency to perceive its sensations, which it refers to its
existence.  One must be expert in Pratyahara to apprehend intuitively the
data of Berkeleyian idealism.  In other words, the condition of human
consciousness is the sense of separateness; that is, of imperfection; that
is, of sorrow.
     Now then for our illustration.  I aspire to the good, the beautiful
and the true.  I define my Holy Guardian Angel as a being possessing these
qualities in perfection and aspire to His Knowledge and Conversation.  I
propose therefore to perform the Sacred Magick of Abra-Melin the Mage.  But
what is my first postulate!  That there exists a real difference between
those qualities and their opposites, between Him and myself.  It is true
that I aim at the identification of myself with Him, but I have already
defined Him as imperfect, maugre my gaudy phraseology, by admitting that He
is separate from me.  I define truth as imperfect by distinguishing it from
untruth.  (When one has crossed the Abyss, these considerations ---
fantastic to the point of comicality as they appear on the surface ---
become the most formidable foes in practical life.  For example, one has to
resolve the antithesis between action and inaction, and one removes one's
motive with deft surgery by destroying the dividuality of joy and sorrow.)
My aspiration in itself affirms the very idea which it is its sole object
to deny.
     Thus, then, all Magick is based on the illusion inherent in the reason
itself.  Since all things soever are separate; since their separateness is
the essential element of their existence; and since all are equally
illusions, why aspire to the Holy Guardian Angel? --- why not to the
Dweller on the Threshold?  To the man who has not passed entirely through
the Abyss thoughts of this kind are positively frightful.  There is no
rational answer possible, from the nature of

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the case; and I was tormented indescribably by these thoughts, thousands
after thousands, each a terrific thunderbolt blasting its way through my
brain during these frightful months.  Of course "The Book of the Law" makes
mincemeat of all such dragons, but I am convinced that the gods
deliberately kept me away from seeking the solution in its pages, though I
was their chosen confidant.  They were determined that I should drain the
last dregs of the vitriol.  ("Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificado Invenies"
"Occultum Lapidem.")
     It was essential that I should learn the technique of crossing the
Abyss with absolute thoroughness for they had it in mind to entrust me with
the task of teaching others exactly how to do it.  Thus, though I crossed
the Abyss at this period, underwent one particular phase of the ordeal, I
was restricted to that particular experience which sufficed for their
immediate purpose in regard to me.  I had to work out its problems in many
other ways on many other occasions, as will appear from the sequel.  "The"
"Book of the Law" was to my hand, but the gods themselves had hardened my
heart against it.  I had hardened my own heart; I had tried to go round the
Boyg.  They answered, "Thou hast said."
     I know now from the experience of others that "The Book of the Law" is
veritably a Golden bough.  It is the only thing that one is allowed to take
with one through Hades and it is an absolute passport.  In fact, one cannot
go through Hades at all; there is no "one" to go.  But the Law itself
bridges the Abyss, for "Love is the law, love under will."  One's will-to-
cross is to disintegrate all things soever into soulless dust, love is the
one force which can bind them together into a coherent causeway.  There,
where torn thoughts sank through the starless space, aching and impotent,
into what was not even nothingness, each alive for ever because reduced to
its ultimate atoms so that there was no possibility of change, no hope of
any alleviation of its anguish, each exquisitely mindful that its captain
had slain himself in despair; there may men pass today in peace.  What with
"The Book of the Law" to guide them, and my experience to warn them, they can
prepare themselves for the passage; and it is their own fault if the
process of self-annihilation involves suffering.
     I cannot even say that I crossed the Abyss deliberately.  I was hurled
into it by the momentum of the forces which I had called up.  For three
years, save for spasmodic and half-hearted incidents, and the great moment
in Cairo which took place in direct opposition to the united efforts of my
scepticism, my cynicism, my disgust with everything, my idleness and my
prejudices, I had been fighting against my destiny.  I had been building up
a great dam.  My occasional return to Magick had been more in the nature of
occasional sprees than anything else, as a man consumed by an over-
mastering passion for a woman and determined to trample her under foot,
might seek relief in occasional flirtations.

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     A magical oath is the most irresistible of all moral forces.  It is an
affirmation of the true will; that is to say, it is a link between the
conscious human and the unconscious divine nature of the man who takes it.
A magical oath which does not express the true will sets these forces in
opposition and therefore weakens the man the more gravely as the oath is
more seriously meant and taken.  But given that the oath is a true
expression of the true will, its effect is to affirm that very union
between the insignificant force of the conscious being and the irresistible
might of that which is "one, eternal and individual", that which is
inexpugnably immune to all forces soever; which when accomplished
constitutes it supreme.
     My position was this.  In 1897 I had unconsciously discovered my true
will and devoted myself to find the means of carrying it out.  In 1898 I
had found the means and had concentrated all my resources of any kind on
making the most of it.  I had swept aside every obstacle, internal and
external.  The reaction of 1902 had lasted just three years; the dam, my
carnal mind, had begun to leak; a moment later, it was swept away by the
avenging tides; they swept away the last remnant of my reason.
     There is a feeble rattle of the rifles of the rearguard, some
ineffectual foppishness about discipline between November the nineteenth
and twenty-fifth, then absolute silence till the eighth of February, when I
write, "About this full moon consciousness began to break through Ruach
into Neschamah.  Intend to stick to Augoeides."
     I found myself in a truly surprising state.

               As I trod the trackless way
          Through sunless gorges of Cathay,
          I became a little child,
          By nameless rivers, swirling through
          Chasms, a fantastic blue,
          Month by month, on barren hills,
          In burning heat, in bitter chills,
          Tropic forest, Tartar snow,
          Smaragdine archipelago,
          See me --- led by some wise hand
          That I did not understand.
          Morn and noon and eve and night
          I, the forlorn eremite,
          Called on Him with mild devotion,
          As the dewdrop woos the ocean.

I had all the innocence and helplessness if a child at the period when it
gropes instinctively for someone to love it, someone whom it knows and
trusts, who is infinitely strong, infinitely wise and infinitely kind.

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     I am not quite sure why I chose the word "Augoeides" to represent my
thought.  It may well be because it was not spoilt for me by any personal
association with the past.  I have been carried away by the necessity of
simplifying (to the utmost of my ability) the story of my passage through
the Abyss.  I must now explain why I issued from it with this particular
idea of Augoeides rather than another, for every idea in my mind had been
shattered in fragments and brayed in a mortar, reduced to impalpable dust
and scattered to the four winds of heaven.  Sir Isaac Newton to the rescue!
His first law of motion is sufficient to make the point clear.

     A body either keeps its course (or else remains at rest)
     Unless by some external force its motion is impressed.

     The effect of my ordeal had been to remove all forces soever which had
impinged on my normal direction.  My star had been diverted from its proper
orbit by, had been held back by, the attraction of other heavenly bodies.
Their influence had been removed.  For the first time in my life I was
really free.  I had no personality left.  To take a concrete case: I found
myself in the middle of China with a wife and child.  I was no longer
influenced by love for them, no longer interested in protecting them as I
had been; but there was a man, Aleister Crowley, husband and father, of a
certain caste, of certain experience, of travel in remote parts of the
world; and it was "his" business to give them his undivided love, care and
protection.  He could do this very much more efficiently than before when I
was aware of what he was doing, and consequently inclined to overplay the
part.
     But with regard to my magical future --- why did I "intend to stick to
Augoeides"?  The reason becomes clear if we consider the nature of the
meditation --- Sammasati --- which had constituted the essence of my
success in passing through the ordeal.
     I determined on this at Allan's suggestion and one of my main objects
in going to stay with him at the choung was to do it.  I thought it could
be done in three days!  There must be a lot of silly young asses knocking
about the world, but I think I can give most of them a couple of strokes a
hole.
     The method of the meditation is described (1911) in "Liber Thisharb",
and I have outlined it in an earlier chapter.  I quote from "The Temple of
Solomon the King" ("The Equinox", vol. I, No. viii).

     ... he found his old comrade, I.A, now a member of the Buddhist
     Sangha, under the name of Bhikku Ananda Metteya.
          It was from him that he received the instructions which were to
     help him to reach the great and terrible pinnacle of the mind whence
     the adept must plunge into the Abyss, to emerge naked, a babe --- the
     Babe of the Abyss.

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          "Explore the River of the Soul," said Ananda Metteya, "Whence and
     in what order you have come."
          For three days --- the longest period allowed by the Buddhist law
     --- he remained in the choung, meditating on this matter; but nothing
     seems to have come of it.  He set his teeth and settled down doggedly
     to this consideration of the eternal why.  Here is a being in Rangoon.
     Why?  Because he wanted to see Bhikku A. M.  Why?  Because --- and so
     on to the half-forgotten past, dark seas that phosphoresced as the
     clean keel of his thought divided them.

     I had eliminated a vast number of possible replies to the question of
Zoroaster above quoted by Allan.  I might even have discovered my true
will, as indeed the meditation should enable me to do, had it not been
interfered with by the larger question with its smashing academic
scepticism.  The question posed by the meditation assumes a casual
connection between events and even to some extent a purposeful connection.
Now in the Abyss these are the very two ideas which are torn from under the
bridge of continuity which they should support.
     The practical point was that I had no proof whatever that there was
any purpose in my past life or could be in my future.  I again quote from
"The Temple of Solomon the King":

          Baffled again and again, the fall with his horse supplied the one
     factor missing in his calculations.  He had repeatedly escaped death
     in matters almost miraculous.  "Then I am some use after all!" was his
     conclusion.  "I am indeed SENT to do something."  For whom?  For the
     universe; no partial good could possibly satisfy his equation.  I am,
     then, the "Chosen Priest and Apostle of Infinite Space".  Very good:
     and what is the message?  What shall I teach men?  And like lightning
     from heaven fell upon him these words: "THE KNOWLEDGE AND CONVERSATION
     OF THE HOLY GUARDIAN ANGEL."

     So again we read (in the diary) on February 11th: "Made many
resolutions of a G. R. (Great Retirement).  In dream flew to me an angel,
bearing an ankh, to comfort me."
     We may now transcribe the diary.  We find the great mind, the complex
man, purged through and through of thought, stripped of all things human
and divine, centred upon one single aspiration, as simple as the love of a
child for its father.
     Like lightning from heaven?  Not lest swift flashed back the obvious
question of the practical man, how?  The answer was immediate: "INVOKING
OFTEN".  I need not have asked.  They were the words of Zoroaster indeed,
but they were also my own.  I had used them in my paraphrase of

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Zoroaster in Tannh„user's song.  And after all, there is nothing specially
magical about them except that they are in the plain common sense of
psychology.  Huxley said that science was organized common sense, and
Frazer that science was successful Magick.  The syllogism presents no
difficulties.
     Only one point remained for consideration.  I had said how almost
insanely anxious I had always been about economizing time.  My mind is,
perhaps, the most infernally active on the globe.  I cannot bear to eat a
meal except as a deliberate debauch.  I like to play a game of chess and
read a book "while fortifying my body thereby" and engaging in conversation
with the other guests.  I was constantly devising dodges for making the
most of every moment.  I hate to shut a door behind me, on the ground that
I might have to open it again.  I detest changing my clothes.  I keep my
head shaved if there is any risk of being called upon to brush my hair.  On
the other hand, I like shaving myself because, as many men know, the
operation tends to produce fertility of ideas.
     Having decided to invoke the Augoeides, how was I to do it without
unnecessary delay?  I had everything ready at Boleskine, but Chen Nan Chan
is sixty li from Pa Shih Pai, and it was as many days from England, home
and beauty, going L for leather.  The operation should begin at Easter.  It
could not be done that year by ordinary means.  But my Sammasati came to
the rescue.  I knew that every event in my life had been arranged by the
gods to be of use to me in the accomplishment of the Great Work.  I did not
need an aeroplane: I had a magical carpet.  I could travel in my astral
body to my temple and perform the Operation, perhaps even more conveniently
than in the flesh.  "Per contra," I could construct my own temple about me
and perform the Operation in my physical body.  For various reasons, I
preferred the latter method.
     I was still entirely "off" "The Book of the Law."  I had with me my
unique vellum copy of "The Goetia" and I proposed to use the Preliminary
Invocation.  I was to begin by performing this twice daily to work up a
current, to acquire concentration, to invoke often.
     On February 11th I had spent the fifty li of the journey, P'u P'eng to
Ying Wa Kuan, in making resolutions to undertake the Great Magical
Retirement.  That night I had a dream, in which an angel flew to me "to
comfort me".  He was bearing an ankh in his hand.  If I had known then, as
I do now, that the ankh is not fundamentally a "crux ansata" but a sandal
strap, the symbol of the power to go, I should have understood that I ought
to make the Retirement on the journey.  It is obviously weakness to rely
upon one's material surroundings, and I was already sufficiently in the
habit of performing meditations in the most unsatisfactory conditions to
have had no hesitation.  I had chosen to set up my first temple at one of
the busiest corners of London, with the deliberate object of training
myself not to be put off by noise.

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     The plan was not a bad one.  I am quite inaccessible to disturbance
except of one kind.  The neighbourhood of anyone on whom I have bestowed
the right to speak to me is a cause of distraction.  In practice I train
such people carefully not to address me when I am working --- aye! at any
time --- without special justification.  I made a further experiment in
October 1908 (see "John St. John") of carrying out a complete Magical
Operation of the most important kind while leading the life of the normal
man-about-town in the Montparnasse quarter.  I did this to demonstrate to
the people who complained that they had not the time or convenience for
Magick, that they could do it without giving up their ordinary business or
social life.
     Though I did not fully understand the implication of the dream, I
managed to act as if I had done so.  I must have had some suspicions that
my old friends the Abra-Melin demons would go on the war path; at least I
acted accordingly from the fourteenth.  Finding myself with the glands of
my throat badly swollen, and my mind distracted by worrying about them, I
asked the Augoeides to remove my fear.  This is dangerously like prayer, on
the surface; but at least I did not ask to be cured.  The request was
immediately granted.  I was ill for several days, but able to continue my
invocations.
     My plan was to transport the astral form of my temple at Boleskine to
where I was, so as to perform the invocation in it.  It was not necessary
for me to stay in one place during the ceremony; I frequently carried it
out while riding or walking.  As the work became familiar to me it became
easier.  I was able to withdraw my attention from the actual words and
gestures, and concentrate on the intention.  On the theory of Sammasati,
every faculty must be used in the Great Work.  On the surface, there seems
little relation between Magick and chess, but my ability to play three
games simultaneously blindfold was now very useful.  I had no difficulty in
visualizing the astral temple by an effort of will, and of course I was
perfectly able to watch the results of the invocations with my astral eyes.
During these weeks I developed the technique though not to the full extent
described in "Liber Samekh".  A description of the method, as far as I had
taken it at this time, is given in "The Equinox", vol. I, No. viii.

     The preamble: he makes a general concentration of all his magical
     forces and a declaration of his will.
          The Ar Thiao section.  He travels to the infinite East among the
     hosts of angels summoned by the words.  A sort of "Rising on the
     Planes", but in a horizontal direction.
          The same remarks apply to the next three sections in the other
     quarters.
          At the great invocation following he extends the Shivalingam to
     infinite height, each letter of each word representing an exaltation
     of it by

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     geometrical progression.  Having seen this satisfactorily, he
     prostrates himself in adoration.
          When consciousness begins to return, he uses the final formula to
     raise that consciousness in the Shivalingam, springing to his feet at
     the moment of uniting himself with it, and lastly uttering that
     supreme song of the initiate beginning: "I am He, the Bornless Spirit,
     having sight in the feet; strong and the Immortal Fire!"
          (Thus performed, the invocation means about half an hour of the
     most intense magical work imaginable --- a minute of it would
     represent the equivalent of about twelve hours of Asana.)

     Despite the distracting influence of the varied adventures described
in the last chapter, I stuck steadily to my practice.  On leaving Hong
Kong, however, being once again a lonely Wanderer of the Waste, I did feel
freer to analyze myself.  I thought the necessity of defining the words
that I used more closely.  There is an indication of this in my entry of
April 4th:

          I foolishly and wickedly put off A.'.; work all day; now it is
     one a.m. of the fifth.  By foolish, I mean contrary to my interest and
     hope in A.'..
          By wicked I mean contrary to my will.
          A.'. goodish; lengthy and reverie-like.  Yet my heart is well.
     I spake it audibly.

Before this time I had been haunted by the first of the two terrible doubts
which I subsequently described in sections 36 and 38 of "Sir Palamedes", but
during the abominable "wind draught" of the first week of March I had made
a partial image of this doubt in the "King-Ghost".  I did not understand
the essence of the doubt and it is hard to explain it in prose, even now.
It seems at first sight to be a reflection of the all-embracing doubt of
the Abyss.  It concentrated itself into the entirely practical question: is
there an Augoeides after all?  Is there a Path of the Wise?  Am I simply
fooling myself?  And in the "King-Ghost" my only answer is to appeal to the
very power whose existence is in dispute.  The extreme beauty of the lines,
their magic melancholy and their appropriateness to the circumstances of my
journey encourage me to quote the poem, which I do:

        The King-Ghost is abroad.  His spectre legions
             Sweep from their icy lakes and bleak ravines
        Unto these weary and untrodden regions
             Where man lies penned among his Might-have-beens.
                  Keep us in safety, Lord,
                  What time the King-Ghost is abroad!

{519}




















        The King-Ghost from his grey malefic slumbers
             Awakes the malice of his bloodless brain.
        He marshals the innumerable numbers
             Of shrieking shapes on the sepulchral plain.
                  Keep us, for Jesu's sake,
                  What time the King-Ghost is awake!

        The King-Ghost wears a crown of hopes forgotten:
             Dead loves are woven in his ghastly robe;
        Bewildered wills and faiths grown old and rotten
             And deeds undared his sceptre, sword and globe.
                  Keep us, O Mary maid,
                  What time the King-Ghost goes arrayed!

        The Hell-Wind whistles through his plumeless pinions;
             Clanks all that melancholy host of bones;
        Fate's principalities and Death's dominions
             Echo the drear discord, the tuneless tones.
                  Keep us, dear God, from ill,
                  What time the Hell-Wind whistles shrill.

        The King-Ghost hath no music but their rattling;
             No scent but death's grown faint and fugitive;
        No fight but this their leprous pallor battling
             Weakly with night.  Lord, shall these dry bones live?
                  O keep us in the hour
                  Wherein the King-Ghost hath his power!

        The King-Ghost girds me with his gibbering creatures,
             My dreams of old that never saw the sun.
        He shows me, in a mocking glass, their features,
             The twin fiends "Might-have-been" and "Should-have-done".
                  Keep us, by Jesu's ruth,
                  What time the King-Ghost grins the truth!

        The King-Ghost boasts eternal usurpature;
             For in this pool of tears his fingers fret
        I had imagined, by enduring nature,
             The twin gods "Thus-will-I" and "May-be-yet".
                  God, keep us most from ill,
                  What time the King-Ghost grips the will!

        Silver and rose and gold what flame resurges?
             What living light pours forth in emerald waves?
        What inmost Music drowns the clamorous dirges?

{520}



















                  Shrieking they fly, the King-Ghost and his slaves.
                  Lord, let Thy Ghost indwell,
                  And keep us from the power of Hell!

                                                        Amen.

     The triumphant answer is simply the mystic's affirmation of interior
certainty.  No doubt this expresses my attitude at the time: I was still a
little child.  But as I grew, so did the doubt.  I saw that the answer
given in the "King-Ghost" was insufficient.  I realized subconsciously what
is the hardest thing of all for any of us to realize; that we are each
"one, eternal and individual", that there is no one on whom we should rely,
that such doubts should be destroyed, neither by the rational method of
refuting them nor by taking refuge with external power --- one must perform
an arbitrary act of manhood.

          Nay!  I deliberate deep and long,
          Yet find no answer fit to make
          To thee.  The weak beats down the strong.

     I had been in fairly regular astral communication with Soror F., but I
wanted to see her in the flesh and therefore called on her in Shanghai.  On
the sixth and seventh of April I explained the position to her, and went to
stay with her on the ninth.  The next twelve days we were constantly
working together.  The results of this work are so important that I must
enter into them rather fully.  It is significant of my eternal subconscious
reaction against "The Book of the Law" that even when editing my diaries for
Captain J. F. C. Fuller for "The Temple of Solomon the King", I
deliberately omitted to pay any attention to them.  The reference is meagre
and vainglorious, and the promise to deal with them elsewhere has never
been kept.  It is evidently a dodge for avoiding the responsibility.

     A.'. in the presence of my Soror F.
          (The results of this and the next invocation were most brilliant
     and important.  They revealed the Brother of A.'. A.'. who
     communicated in Egypt as the Controller of all this work.)

     The first result of my work with Soror F. was that immediately I told
her of the work in Cairo, she said boldly and finally that she believed in
the genuineness of the communication.  I was infuriated.  I believe my main
object in going to see her had been to get encouragement in my revolt.  I
had carefully avoided telling her anything about it in the whole course of
our astral interviews; but she insisted that we should study "Liber Legis"
together.  I had my copy with me.  (It is very remarkable that the gods
managed to look after me so that I am never in lack of anything that I

{521}



















need for the performance of any particular work.  My deliberate
carelessness, my attempts to destroy things, are always quite useless.  The
gods always perform the necessary miracle to enable me to have at hand
anything that may be necessary at the moment.)
     So my diary reads on April 18th:

     Studying "Liber Legis".  Decide to ask F. to invoke Aiwass and converse
     with Him when invoked, and thereby to decide on the quality of that
     Magick.

On the twentieth, therefore, we went into her temple:

          Aiwass invoked appears, of brilliant blue as when she saw him as
     guardian of my sleep.  He has followed me ever, wishing me to follow
     his cult.  When P. took wand, he grows brilliant and breaks up into a
     formless light; yet she feels him as an enemy.  He seems entangled in
     a mesh of light and to be trying to escape.  I warn him that if he
     goes away, he cannot return. (F. in herself is hostile)  "Return to
     Egypt, with different surroundings.  (This misheard: he said "same".)
     There I will give thee signs.  Go with the S. W.  (Ouarda), this is
     essential: thus you shall get real power, that of God, the only one
     worth having.  Illumination shall come by means of power, "pari passu".
     (Evidently my own transcript of her words.)  Live in Egypt as you did
     before.  Do not do a G. R.  Go at once to Egypt; money troubles will
     be settled more easily than you think now.  I will give you no
     guarantee of my truth."  He then turned blue-black.  "I am loath to
     part from you.  Do not take F.  I do not like the relations between
     you; break them off!  If not you must follow other gods.  Yet I would
     wish you to love physically, to make perfect the circle of your union.
     F. will not do so, therefore, she is useless.  If she did, she would
     become useful.  You have erred in showing her the true relation
     between you on spiritual planes.  Having burst that, she will remain
     by her sense of power over you.  (This might mean that her enjoyment
     of her power over me would induce her to continue working.)  She is
     spiritually stronger than you.  You should have dominated her by your
     superior strength on other planes.  She will give you much trouble,
     though eventually she may become a great aid.  But your shorter path
     lies by Egypt and S. W. (Ouarda) though she is not spiritually your
     equal.  S. W. has been your enemy; but you have conquered, she is
     bound to aid you as your will.  She has been your enemy and that of F.
     but you returned her hatred, hence her seeming power over you in the
     present. (Qy. this hearing.)  (Qy. was F. hearing correctly) I will
     give you a sign when alone and away from present medium.  You must
     recognize the sign by your own intuition.  Do not

{522}




















     part from S. W.  Use her!  (Here S. W. appears, with an evil look.
     She glitters, like a jewelled serpent.)  Strange bands of light
     scintillate between her and Aiwass.  A. now takes wand again; still
     feels enmity on spiritual planes.  Aiwass banished; S. W. has
     disappeared.
          A. now tries to speak to A.'..  He wants G. R.; does not mind
     whether S. W. is with me or not; but I should use Brahmacharya (? if
     with her, or anyhow), I shall be guided as things turn up, as to the
     truth or falsehood of Aiwass, who is not to be altogether distrusted.
     (I think the opposition is Aiwass's limitation as a servant.)  A.'.
     will give us a sign: F's freedom.  (I reply that if this comes about
     in a miraculous manner, well and good.)  (Note: Her husband died quite
     unexpectedly not long after this time.)

April 21st.  Sol enters Taurus.

          Open T.'. with A.'. I.'..  (Possibly ...1 spoilt it all)
     asking for special aid in --- what follows.  F. finds the Nuit ring
     good; hence probably her hostility yesterday was due to lower self.
          I.'. of R. H. K. gives glorious material flashes of light,
     akasic (i.e. ultra-violet) and lilac.  The god, beheld, will not
     speak.  Asked for a messenger, Aiwass appears.  F., suspecting him,
     puts a pentagram on him;  he blurs and becomes dirty and discrowned.
     F. takes wand; but this dissipates him.  His real name she says is 270
     = INRI.  F. uses pentagram and shrivels him up to a black charred
     mass.  I ask her to invoke something genuine; a white figure without
     face and with little shape mounts throne.  It has a glittering rayed
     corona.  Says: (to here F. uses normal tone; hence tone of oracle) "I
     am the God of Vengeance.  I am thy Guardian Angel.  I would have thee
     seek thine own soul in silence and alone.  Take no aid with thee; take
     no mortal soul but retire and depart from mankind."  Pentagram makes
     him brighter: he grows firmer.  Repeated, form vanishes and only
     brightness remains.  Asked for a sign of his name ... is written on
     throne.  "I will give no other sign: you must learn to trust your own
     intuition."
          F's intuition tells her that he is genuine.  As to our relations,
     he wishes us to work together (A contradiction "v. supra":) "I do not
     wish you to go too far in work with S. W.  She will dazzle you and be
     apt to lead you astray.  You must always remain as armed when you work
     with her, as a man in full armour.  I would wish you to strengthen the
     link between you and F. on all planes.  You are very needful to each
     other and can only accomplish G. W. together."  (This clearly utter
     rubbish.)  I take wand and curse him by Him who he hath blasphemed.
     Invoking, however A.'. the light becomes more brilliant.  Voice
     continues: "You must go

{523}


        1  I omit reference to a certain private matter.
















     and do a G. R. after which you will get a sign."  (Clearly due to F.
     knowing my wish; but he is clumsy.  Will anything now convince F.?  I
     was trying, as my custom is, to "bowl out" my clairvoyant.)  I take
     serious measures to banish all but A.'..  Voice silenced: and she
     doubts whether voice is from brilliance.  F. feels me absolutely
     necessary for her.  I not.  (Voice is "from her" so cannot be banished
     and it goes on:) "There shall be a short period of work ("?not?") done
     in actual unison; after which your powers join irrevocably together.
     There is no escape from that; you are bound to work together; and the
     fitting time and hour for this shall come simultaneously to you both.
     There will then be no doubt in either of your minds: there will then
     be no obstacle to this union ...  You must look towards this time and
     towards a beacon light.  Never lose sight of that!  You Elaine (F's
     earth-name) will meet with subtle temptation from this object ---
     promises of great power and illumination; but heed them not.  Aleister
     is your true helper from whom you have right to look and demand help.
     You must never cease to demand this aid and by your demand strengthen
     and aid your comrade.  I, your Guardian Angel, tell you this."  (The
     falsity of all this patent more at the time than now --- I foresaw
     what follows.)  I ask proof that he "is" G. A.  It is clear that voice
     and brilliance are distinct  (i.e. from two separate sources.)  F.
     however feels that this rigmarole is true.  Hence we discuss our
     relations and the Great Invocation degenerates.  We began to make love
     to each other.  This, however, is checked by my will and her own
     feeling that we have done enough for honour.  I am not exhausted after
     all this, as I was yesterday.  Is this a proof that all is Right
     Magick, or that little force was expended?  Where am I, in fact?  O
     Holy Exalted One, do Thou illuminate my mind!
















{524}























                              59


     I left Shanghai on the twenty-first of April.  On the twenty-second I
was sick and stayed in bed all day.  I did no regular invocation, but
thought over the recent crisis.  I dismissed the Shanghai experience as a
morbid dream.  Reading through the above record at this distance of time,
after deliberately avoiding doing so for so long, I feel very uncertain
about it; I feel that there was a great deal of genuine communication with
the right people and that the Oracle is confused, contradictory and uneven,
because of the interference of our personalities.
     There was the question of our love affair.  I was absolutely in love
with Rose in the ordinary sense of the term.  My love for Fidelis excluded
the material almost entirely.  I was very proud of my love for Rose and
very happy in it.  The one thing I feel sure of is this: that we had a
superb opportunity to take up the Great Work together and that we missed it
on account of our determination to see things with our own eyes.  We were,
no doubt, quite ready to put the Great Work first, last and all the time;
but we were hampered in doing so by our settled conviction as to what the
Great Work might imply.  For my part, at least, I know that I was always
arguing that such and such a course couldn't be right on general
principles, as I had done when Rose herself had told me how to invoke
Horus; and I had not learned the lesson that my idea of "general
Principles" was not reliable.
     The entry of April 24th shows how admirably the gods arrange one's
affairs.  One may have a perfectly right idea, but as long as one holds to
it they will take pains to upset the apple cart: abandon the idea, and they
immediately hand it back with a charming compliment.  This is the lesson of
the Book of Job.
     I quote the entry in full, concealing only the name of the Order.

          At Kobe.  A.'. fair only; though I invoked all these powers of
     mine.  Yet after, by a strong effort of will, I banished my sore
     throat and my surroundings, and went up in my Body of Light.  Reached
     a room in which a cruciform table was spread, a naked man being nailed
     thereto.  Many venerable men sat around, feasting on his living flesh
     and quaffing his hot blood.  These (I was told) were the adepts, whom
     I might one day join.  This I understood to mean that I should get the
     power of taking only spiritual nourishment --- but probably it means
     much more than this.
          Next I came into an apparently empty hall, of white ivory worked
     in


{525}



















     filigree.  A square slim altar was in the midst, I was questioned as
     to what I would sacrifice on that altar.  I offered all save my will
     to know A.'. which I would only change for its own realization.  I
     now became conscious of god-forms of Egypt sitting, so vast that I
     could only see to their knees.  "Would not knowledge of the gods
     suffice?"  "No!" said I.  It was then pointed out to me that I was
     being critical, even rationalistic, and made to see that A.'. was
     not necessarily fashioned in my image.  I asked pardon for my
     blindness, and knelt at the altar, placing my hands upon it, right
     over left.  Then, one, human, white, self-shining (my idea after all!)
     came forth and put his hands over mine, saying: "I receive thee into
     the Order of ---."

     I came back to earth in a cradle of flame.
     I was thus formally received among the Secret Chiefs of the Third
Order on the astral plane.  It was the natural sequel to the passage of the
Abyss.  I was careful not to presume on a mere vision.  Superb as the
experience was, I would not allow it to turn my head.  I am almost morbidly
sensitive about my responsibility in such matters.  No more fatal mistake
can be made than to grasp after a grade.  Attainment is an appalling danger
if one is not perfectly fitted for it at every point.  One must search
oneself unsparingly for weak spots; the smallest scratch suffices to admit
a germ of disease and one may perish altogether through a moment's
carelessness.  It is unpardonably foolhardy to take a chance in matters of
such serious import.
     I took the vision to heart as a lesson.
     I next day's entry makes this clear.

          Yesterday's vision a real illumination, since it showed me an
     obvious mistake which I had utterly failed to see.  The word in my
     Kamma work (in Burma) was "Augoeides", (a subsequent entry implies that
     the word was "given" me directly from the unseen world) and the method
"     "Invoking Often".  Therefore a self-glittering One, whether my
     conscience approves on not, whether my desires fit or not, is to be my
     guide.  I am to "invoke often", not to criticize.  Am I to lose my grade
     of Babe of the Abyss?  I cannot go wrong, for I am the chosen one;
     that is the very postulate of the whole work.  This boat carries
     Caesar and his fortunes.

     There is here an implication, perhaps, that I had been compelled to
accept the Cairo working.  This is confirmed by the entry of April 30th:

     (It has struck me --- in connection with reading Blake --- that
     Aiwass, etc., "Force and Fire" is the very thing I lack.  My
     "conscience" is really an obstacle and a delusion, being a survival of
     heredity and education.  Certainly to rely on it as an abiding
     principle in itself is wrong.  The one really important thing is the
     fundamental hypothesis: I am the

{536}
















     Chosen one.  All methods will do, if I only "invoke often" and stick to
     it.)

     I resented intensely being told that I was "the Chosen One".  It is
such an obvious man-trap; it is the commonest delusion of the maniac and,
in one form or another, the essence of all delusions.  Luckily, there is an
answer to this.  What can be more really arrogant than assuming that one
has been singled out for "strong delusion"?  I had received some very
remarkable evidence in quite unexpected quarters that I was singled out to
accomplish the Great Work of emancipating mankind.
     One of these is so intensely interesting on its own accord that I must
not omit it, quite apart from its bearing on the question of my destiny.
One morning I had sat down to rest and smoke a pipe on the top of a little
pass in warm misty weather.  Salama came and sat down by my side.  I looked
at him in amazement.  It was an astounding breach of etiquette.  I have
often wondered if he did it deliberately, as if to say, "I am not your
headman: I am a messenger of the gods."  He began, however, in a very
shamefaced, sheepish way, obviously embarrassed.  It was as if he had been
thrust by surprise into the position of an ambassador.  "Sahib," he said,
"last night I had a "tamasha"."  I reproached him laughingly.  "Tamasha" means
an entertainment of any kind, and, in the East, frequently implies a
certain amount of liveliness, possibly an indulgence in forbidden liquor
and flirtation; but he merely meant a dream.  The usual words for dream are
"khwab", "roya", "wahm".  Evidently he wished to imply that his dream was not an
ordinary one, that it was a genuine vision.  (I forgot to ask him whether
he was awake or asleep.)
     He proceeded as follows:

          I was on the shore of a small lake.  It was a wild country and
     the lake was surrounded by tall reeds, some of them growing in the
     water.  The full moon was high in the sky, but there were clouds and
     mist.  You were standing in front of me, sahib; quite motionless, lost
     in thought, as you always are, but you seemed to be waiting for
     someone.  Now there was a rustling in the reeds, and out of them came
     a boat rowed by two beautiful women with long fair hair, and in the
     front of the boat stood another woman, taller and fairer even than her
     sisters.  The boat came slowly across to you; and then I saw that the
     woman held in her hands a great sword, long and straight, with a
     straight crosshilt which was heavy with rubies, emeralds and
     sapphires.  She put this sword into your hands and you took it, but
     nothing was said.  They went away as they had come, into the fringe of
     reeds across the lake.  And that was all I saw.

     I remained unable to reply.  At this time I was the last man in the
world to take anything of the sort seriously; more I was resolved not to do
so even

{527}


















at the cost of restraining the theory of sensory hallucination.  What
struck me dumb was hearing an old shikari tell the story of Excalibur in
language so near to that of Malory as to make no odds.  Could one of his
sahibs have told him the tale long ago, so that it popped up in this
strange fashion with me as the hearer?  I had no doubt whatever of the
man's sincerity and truthfulness and he had no motive for inventing
anything of the sort.
     I cannot believe it a coincidence; I really wondered whether the most
reasonable hypothesis is not that Aiwass, wanting to remind me that I was
chosen to do the Great Work, picked out, on the one hand, Salama as the
most unlikely prophet imaginable; on the other, the tale as one which I
could not possibly dismiss as trivial.  In fact, though I cannot remember
making a record of the incident, and indeed probably took pains to avoid
doing so as a rebuke to self-importance, it remains as vivid and distinct
as almost anything else in my life.  I can see the pass, I can almost taste
the tobacco: I can see his shy honest weather-beaten old face and hear his
timid loyal accents.  In the background the coolies, singing and talking,
pass over the misty slopes; yet I cannot remember where the place was or
even whether it happened on the first or second Himalayan expedition1.
     I continued the Invocation of the Augoeides, with occasional additions
and progressive intensification, week after week.  I rather avoided any
other magical work, on the principle of concentrating every particle of my
energy on the daily routine.  I even refrained, as a rule, from using my
astral eyes during the Invocation itself.  I might easily have been lured
from the Path by getting interested in some of the hosts of angelic forms
that habitually appeared.
     On May the fourth there is an entry which indicates my attitude to the
work itself.  It sounds very simple to make an invocation; but when one
gets to work, behold! a multitude of points, each of which has to be
settled with extreme care.  This entry deals with one such:
         A.'. very energetic on my part, intensely so, better perhaps
     than ever before.
          However (or perhaps because) there was little vision.
          Indeed, this work of A.'. requires the adept to assume the
     woman's part; to long for the bridegroom, maybe, and to be ever ready
     to receive his kiss; but not to pursue openly and to use force.
          Yet "the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent
     take it by force."  May it not be, though, that such violence should
     be used against oneself in order to attain that passive state?  And,
     of course, to shut out all rivals?  Help me, thou Holy One, even in
     this; for all my strength is weak as water, and I am but a dog.  Help
     me.  O self-glittering one!

{528}


        1   I am almost sure, on reflection, that it was on the return from
          Kangchenjunga.


















     draw nigh to me in sleep and in waking, and let me ever be as a wise
     virgin and expect thy coming with a lamp of oil of holiness and
     beauty!  Hail, beautiful and strong one!  I desire thy kisses more
     than life or death.

     From this it appears that I was still as spiritually adolescent as St.
Augustine or St. Teresa.  It seems necessary for juvenile souls to
represent mystical experience by means of anthropomorphic symbols.  The
practice naturally follows the lines laid down by the theory.  For this
reason one's early adventures are accompanied by romantic phenomena and
stigmata.  Buddhist psychology recognizes this.  For instance, the first
Jhana is accompanied by Ananda, bliss; but in the second this quality
disappears.  I think it deplorable that mystic advancement should be
expressed by means of such hieroglyphs as "the Bride's Reception"; that is,
at least, if any peculiar attribution of a sexual character is implied.
     Of course, even above the Abyss, Chokmah and Binah, Chiah and
Neschamah are customarily called Father and Mother; considering how
lamentably prone humanity is to anthropomorphism, it seems unfortunate.
But we cannot deny the justice of the symbolism, and the way to eliminate
the disadvantages and dangers of the situation is to extend the connection
of the word "love" to include all phenomena of the uniting of opposites, as
is done in "The Book of the Law".  Hardly anything is more important for the
aspirant than to get rid of the tendency to make God in his Own image.  One
should learn to regard the formula of Yod, H‚, Vau as universal, not as
generalized from the reproductive process of mammals, but "vice versa".  That
process should be regarded as one particular case of the Law, and that case
by no means an important one.
     We must be constantly on our guard against egocentric implications;
they do not even exalt the ego as they pretend to do, they limit it.  We
become great just so far as we are able to liberate ourselves from the
constriction of our normal conception that we are man.  When one has
crossed the Abyss, especially, one should be altogether free from the
prepossession that one's body and mind are more than inconvenient
instruments through which we perceive the universe.  To increase our
understanding of the cosmos, we must constantly endeavour to counteract the
limitations which the fact that our instrument is a human being seeks to
impose upon us.
     I do not, however, wish to represent the Operation of Abra-Melin which
I was now performing as a retrogression; but I had to undertake it in order
to fulfil completely the formulae of adeptship.  It was necessary to
complete the work of he Second Order before I could adequately take up my
work in the Third.  Again, the mission, in order to carry out which I had
incarnated, was a mission to mankind; and this must explain why, "pari passu"
with my personal

{529}




















progress, I walked continually in the way of the world.  My spiritual life
itself was now therefore definitely duplex, and this fact must be kept in
mind if my subsequent actions are to be properly understood.
     Arriving in England on the second of June, I was stunned by the news
of my bereavement.  I made a point of detaching my mind.  In the train from
Liverpool to London I continued to chat with my companions on the boat as
if nothing had happened.  Having got to bed I released the prisoner.  There
was only one thing to be done: "I solemnly reaffirmed the oath of my
obligation to perform the Operation, offering under these terrible
circumstances all that yet remained."
     I am convinced, by the way, that the unremitting blows of misfortune,
of which this bereavement was the first, were caused by the malice of the
Abra-Melin demons, but that none of them would have reached me if I had
understood and obeyed the Secret Chiefs and the forces behind them in the
Shanghai working.
     It was really curious the way one form of slight illness after another
attacked me.  My wife happened to make some remark to this effect to the
housekeeper, a real old Sussex product.  She nodded her head wisely.
"He'll never be better," she said in an oracular tone, "until that baby is
born."  I found on inquiry that it is a widespread superstition in Sussex
that sometimes especially when the husband is unusually devoted to his
wife, she escapes the usual inconvenience of pregnancy, while he is
constantly ill.  The idea is of sympathetic transference.
     I became seriously ill.  Through everything, surgery and all, I
continued the daily work.  On July 26th I went to stay with Cecil Jones,
who was now an Exempt Adept.  (The initials of his motto are D.D.S.)  I
conferred with him about my operation.  The main points are as follows: (I
quote Captain J.F.C.Fuller's account.)

     July    Here we have a most extraordinary entry, which needs
     27   explanation and illustration.
             Fra. P. was crucified by Fra. D.D.S. and on that cross made to
          repeat this oath: "I, P------, a member of the Body of Christ, do
          hereby solemnly obligate myself, etc., to lead a pure and
          unselfish life, and will entirely devote myself so to raise,
          etc., myself to the knowledge of my higher and Divine Genius that
          I shall be He.
             "In witness of which I invoke the great Angel Hua to give me a
          proof of his existence."
             P. transcribe this, and continues: "Complete and perfect
          visualization of ..." here are hieroglyphics which may mean
          "Christ as P --- on cross."  He goes on: "The low dark hill, the
          storm, the star."  But the Pylon of the Camel (i.e. the path of
          Gimel)

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          open, and a ray therein: withal a certain vision of A.'.
          remembered only as a glory now attainable.
     28      Twenty-fifth week of A.'. begins.
     29      (A.'. continued evidently, for P. writes:)
          Perfect the lightning conductor and the flash will come.
     Aug.    About to try the experiment of daily Aspiration in the
     4    Sign of Osiris Slain.
             Did this twenty-two minutes, with Invocation as of old.
             Cut cross on breast and circle on head.
          ("Scire") The vow of Poverty is to esteem nothing save A.'..
          ("Audere") The vow of Chastity is to use the Magical Force only to
          invoke A.'..
          ("Velle") The vow of Obedience is to concentrate the will on A.'.
          alone.
          ("Tacere") The vow of Silence: so to regulate the whole organism
          that so vast a miracle as the completion of the Great Work
          excites therein no commotion.

          N.B. To look expectantly always, as if He would instantly appear.

     I renewed the Obligation, cutting the cross and circle on my body
every week.  On August 9th I wrote the Invocation of the Ring; that is, of
the symbolical episcopal ring of amethyst, which I wore as an Exempt Adept.

               ADONAI!  Thou inmost Fire,
                  Self-glittering image of my soul,
               Strong lover to thy Bride's desire,
                  Call me and claim me and control!
               I pray thee keep the holy tryst.
               Within this ring of Amethyst.

               For on mine eyes the golden Sun
                  Hath dawned; my vigil slew the Night.
               I saw the image of the One:
                  I came from darkness into Light.
               I pray Thee keep the holy tryst
               Within this ring of Amethyst.

               I.N.R.I. --- me crucified,
                  Me slain, interred, arisen, inspire!
               T.A.R.O. --- me glorified,
                  Anointed, fill with frenzied Fire!
               I pray Thee keep the holy tryst
               Within this ring of Amethyst.

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               I eat my flesh: I drink my blood:
                  I gird my loins: I journey far:
               For Thou hast shown the Rose, the Rood,
                  The Eye, the Sword, the Silver Star.
               I pray thee keep the holy tryst
               Within this ring of Amethyst.

               Prostrate I wait upon thy will,
                  Mine Angel, for this grace of union.
               O let this Sacrament distil
                  Thy conversation and communion.
               I pray Thee keep the holy tryst
               Within this ring of Amethyst.

     I intended to use this Invocation in practice.  The amethyst was to
be, so to speak, the lens through which the Holy Guardian Angel should
manifest.  On September 17th I went to Ashdown Park Hotel, Coulsdon, Surrey
and recovered my health suddenly and completely.  On the twenty-first I had
completed thirty-two weeks of the Operation and thirty-one weeks of actual
daily invocation.  The next day D.D.S. came to see me: we celebrated the
Autumnal Equinox and reconstructed the old Neophyte Ritual of the G.'.
D.'., eliminating all unnecessary features and quintessentializing the
magical formulae.
     On the ninth, having prepared a full invocation and ritual, I
performed it.  I had no expectation, I think, of attaining any special
success; but it came.  I had performed the Operation of the Sacred Magick
of Abra-Melin the Mage.
     It is unlawful to speak of the supreme sacrament.  It was such, as the
following entry shows, that I found it hard to believe that I had been
permitted to partake of it.  I will confine myself to the description of
some of the ancillary phenomena.

     Oct. 9 Tested new ritual and behold it was very good!  Thanked gods
            and sacrificed for --- In the "thanksgiving and sacrifices for
            ... "  I "did" get rid of everything but the Holy Exalted One,
            and must have held Him for a minute or two.  I did.  I am sure
            I did.

     Such is the fragmentary account1 of what was then the greatest event
of Fra. P.'s career.  Yet this is an account of the highest trances --- of
Shivadarshana itself, as we know from other sources.  The "vision" (to use
still the name become totally inadequate) appears to have had three main
points in its Atmadarshana stage ---
        1. The Universal Peacock.

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        1   Captain Fuller's.

















        2. The Universe as Ego. "I who am all and made it all, abide its
     separate lord," i.e. the universe becomes a single and simple being,
     without quantity, quality or conditions.  In this the "I" is immanent,
     yet the "I" made it, and the "I" is entirely apart from it.
     (This is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, or something very like
     it.)
        3. This Trinity is transcended by an impersonal Unity.  This is
     then annihilated by the Opening of the Eye of Shiva.  It is absolutely
     futile to discuss this; it has been tried and failed again and again.
     Even those with experience of the earlier part of the "vision" in its
     fullness must find it totally impossible to imagine anything so
     subversive of the whole base, not only of the ego, but of the absolute
     behind the ego.

     The very next day the enemy struck home below the belt, as described
in the previous chapter.  The blow could not shake my soul.  For over three
weeks I bore the stigmata of my Operation physically.  I visibly radiated
light.  People used to turn in the street to look at me; they did not know
what it was, but the impression must have been irresistible.
     No sooner had this worn off than the enemy struck again at my health.
I was obliged to put myself once more in the doctor's hands and go to
Bournemouth.  I was now thoroughly prepared to take up my Work of
initiating mankind, but I was still determined to do it on the old lines.
     I had no books of reference at Bournemouth, and it struck me that it
would be very convenient if I possessed a volume giving all the
correspondences of the Cabbala in a compact form.  I spent a week in
writing this down from memory and the result is "Liber 777".  (It is to be
noticed that there is no reference to the Cairo working anywhere in this
book.)
     In the month of December the Secret Chiefs formally invited me,
thorough G.R. Frater D.D.S., to take my place officially in the Third
Order.  I still felt that I was not worthy.  Not till three years later did
I accept the grade, and then only after having passed ceremonially through
the Abyss in the fullest possible measure.











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                              60


     The years 1907 and 1908 may be described as years of fulfilment.  No
new current came to stir my life; but the seeds which had been sown in the
past came many of them to harvest.  I had come to my full stature as a
poet.  My technique was perfect; it had shaken off from its sandals the
last dust which they had acquired by walking in the ways of earlier
masters.  I produced lyric and dramatic poetry which shows an astounding
mastery of rhythm and rime, a varied power of expression which has no equal
in the history of the language, and an intensity of idea which eats into
the soul of the reader like vitriol.
     I should have been assigned publicly my proper place among my peers of
the past without difficulty had it not been of one fatal fact.  My point of
view is so original, my thoughts so profound, and my allusions so
recondite, that superficial readers, carried away by the sheer music of the
words, found themselves, so to speak, intoxicated and unable to penetrate
to the pith.  People did not realize that my sonorous similes possessed a
subtle sense intelligible only to those whose minds were familiar with the
subject.  It is, in fact, necessary to study almost any poem of mine like a
palimpsest.  The slightest phrase is essential; each one must be
interpreted individually, and the poem read again until its personality
presents itself.  People who like my poetry, bar those who are simply
tickled by the sound or what they imagine to be the sense, agree that it
spoils them for any other poetry.
     For instance, if I mention a beetle I expect the reader to understand
an allusion to the sun at midnight in its moral sense of Light-in-Darkness;
if a pelican, to the legend that she pierces her own breast to feed her
young on her heart's bleed; if a goat, to the entire symbolism of
Capricornus, the god Pan, Satan or Jesus (Jesus being born at the winter
solstice, when the sun enters Capricorn); if a pearl, to the
correspondences of that stone as a precious and glittering secretion of the
oyster, by which I mean that invertebrate animal life of man, the Nephesch.
     It must not be supposed that I am obscure on purpose.  I have thought
in the language of correspondences continuously, and it never occurs to me
that other people have not at their fingers' ends the whole rosary of
symbols.
     During these two years my domestic tragedy was becoming constantly
more acute.  Rose told me that she was keeping her word, but it had become
impossible to do any work where she was.  She was in a state of continual
irritation.  I was obliged to take rooms in Jermyn Street in order to have
a moment to myself.  In the autumn of 1907 on returning from Tangiers, I

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found that she had obtained one hundred and fifty bottles of whisky from
one grocer alone in five months.  Confronted with the fact, she broke down
and agreed to take a cure for two months, in an establishment at Leicester.
At the end of that time I took her climbing for a fortnight and she came
back to London in excellent health; but ten days later the disease broke
out with redoubled violence.  I did everything that was humanly possible;
but it was fighting a losing game.
     Finally, early in 1909, the doctor threw up the sponge.  He told her
that she must agree to be sequestrated for two years.  She refused: I
insisted upon a divorce.  I loved her as passionately as ever --- more so
than ever, perhaps, since it was the passion of uttermost despair.  I
insisted on a divorce.  I would not be responsible for her.  I would not
stand by and see her commit suicide.  It was agreed that I should be
defendant as a matter of chivalry, and the necessary evidence was
manufactured.  I continued, however, to look after her as before; we even
stayed together as much as we dared, and I saw her almost every day, either
in our house or at my rooms.  Directly the divorce was pronounced I
returned from Algeria, whither I had gone to be out of the way during the
trial, and we were photographed together, with the baby, at the Dover
Street studios.
     I had written the agony of my soul in "Rosa Decidua", which I dedicated
to Lord Salvesen (not Salvarsan), the judge who presided at the trial.
This poem was printed privately and a copy with the best of the photographs
was sent to the judge, with a polite letter of thanks.  (It is reprinted in
"The Winged Beetle", pp. 130-149.)  This poem is, perhaps, my high-water mark
in realism.  It reveals my human self as I had never even attempted to do.
I trace my agony through every writhe.  I feel compelled to quote a few
lines:

          This is no tragedy of little tears.
          My brain is hard and cold; there is no beat
          Of its blood; there is no heat
          Of sacred fire upon my lips to sing.
          My heart is dead; I say that name thrice over;
          Rose! --- Rose! --- Rose! ---
          Even as lover should call to lover;
          There is no quickening,
          No flood, no fount that flows;
          No water wells from the dead spring.
          My thoughts come singly, dry, contemptuous,
          Too cold for hate; all I can say is that they come
          From some dead sphere without me;
          Singly they come, beats of a senseless drum
          Jarred by a fool, harsh, unharmonious.

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     But even my utmost realism dared not face the supreme horror.  Allan
Bennett had written to me to beg me to break off sexual relations with
Rose.  He knew as I did not, that any child of hers must be under the
curse; for, while the baby lay dying in the hospital, its mother was trying
to drown her anguish in drink, and it was slowly borne in upon me that the
fever was due to the fact that the moment my back was turned Rose had
broken out, had neglected to cleanse the nipple of the feeding bottle, and
thereby exposed the child to the germs of typhoid.  The catastrophe which
had stricken the father to the heart was the sister of that which was to
perform the same office to the husband.
     This poem has everywhere been recognized as overwhelming.  E. S. P.
Haynes told me that it was the most powerful that he had ever read, and
Frank Harris wrote from what he thought was his death bed, "In "Rosa Decidua"
there is more" ("scil". than in some other poem of which he has been writing)
"a despairing view of life --- 'beats of a senseless drum --- all's filth'.
To 'My tongue is palsied ... exquisite agony.'  Astounding realism raised
to art by perfect artistry."
     We went on living together, more or less; but her condition became
rapidly worse and in the autumn of 1911 she had to be put in an asylum,
suffering from alcoholic dementia.
     Another seed of the past began to bear fruit at this time.  I had
never attempted to transmit my occult knowledge as such.  I had never
attempted to write prose, as such, apart from short accounts of my climbs,
with the exception of the preface to "White Stains" ("Collected Works", vol.
II, pp. 195-8).  "Berashith" was my first serious attempt at an essay.  That
and "Science and Buddhism" were followed by a "jeu d'esprit" on Shakespeare
("Collected Works", vol. II, pp. 185-90); "Pansil" (vol. II, pp. 192-4);
"After Agnosticism" (vol. II, pp. 206-8); "Ambrosii Magi Hortus Rosarum"
(vol II, pp. 212-24); "The Three Characteristics" (vol. II, pp. 225-32;
"The Excluded Middle" (vol. II, pp. 262-6); "Time" (vol. II, pp. 267-82);
"The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic" (vol. II, pp. 203-4);
"Qabalistic Dogma" (vol. I, pp. 265-6); the introduction to "Alice, An"
"Adultery" (vol. II, pp. 58-61).  Some of the ghazals of the "Bagh-i-Muattar"
are in prose, as well as the preliminary matter; and there is "Eleusis" (vol.
III, pp. 219-30).
     Most of these were written from a very curious point of view.  It was
not exactly that I had my tongue in my cheek, but I took a curious pleasure
in expressing serious opinions in a fantastic form.  I had an instinctive
feeling against prose; I had not appreciated its possibilities.  Its
apparent lack of form seemed to me to stamp it as an essentially inferior
means of expression.  I wrote it, therefore, in a rather shamefaced spirit.
I deliberately introduced bad jokes to show that I did not take myself
seriously; whereas the truth was I was simply nervous about my achievement,
just as a man afraid to disgrace

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himself as a boxer might pretend that the bout was not in earnest.  My
prose is consequently marred by absolutely stupid blasphemies against
itself.
     I now began to see that this was schoolboyish bashfulness, and to feel
my responsibility as an exponent of the hidden knowledge, to treat my prose
as reverently as my verse, and (consequently) to produce masterpieces of
learning and wit.  The "Dedication and Counter-Dedication" of "Knox Om Pax"
is wholly admirable and it rises to a delightful satirical climax of four
stanzas on the "empty-headed Athenians".  "The Wake World" is a sublime
description of the Path of the Wise, rendered picturesque by the use of the
symbols of the Taro, and charming by its personification of the soul as a
maiden.  "My name is Lola, because I am the Key of Delights, and the other
children in my dream call me Lola Daydream."
     "Ali Sloper; or the Forty Liars" shows traces of my old vulgarity.
The "dramatis personae" contain a lot of bad puns and personal gibes, but the
dialogue shows decided improvement; and the "Essay on Truth" is both acute
and witty, with few blemishes.  "Thien Tao" gives my solution of the main
ethical and philosophical problems of humanity with a description of the
general method of emancipating oneself from the obsession of one's own
ideas, while there are passages of remarkable eloquence.
     The last essay in "Knonx Om Pax", "The Stone of the Philosophers which
is hidden in Abiegnus, the Rosicrucian Mountain of Initiation", is really
beyond praise.  Its genesis is interesting.  I had written at odd times,
but mostly during my travels with the Earl of Tankerville, a number of odd
lyrics.  The idea came to me that I might enhance their value by setting
them in prose.  I therefore wrote a symposium of a poet, a traveller, a
philosophical globetrotter, an adept, a classical scholar and a doctor.
They are made to converse about the chronic calamity of society, and the
poems (ostensibly written by one or other of the men) carry on the thought.
The result is, in reality, a new form of art; and I certainly assisted the
lyrics by giving them appropriate springboards.
     In 1903, too, I wrote "The Soldier and the Hunchback, ! and ?" and
"The Psychology of Hashish".  The one goes to the roots of scepticism and
mysticism, and represents them as alternative moods, neither valued in
itself yet each a complete answer to its predecessor.  I show that by
perseverance in transcending each in turn, the original crude distinction
between affirmation and negation tends to disappear; the supreme doubt is
more positive than the more limited assertion.
     "The Psychology of Hashish" pleases me more every time I read it.  It
contains such a wealth of knowledge, it shows such profundity of thought,
that I find myself today still wondering how I ever wrote it.  I find in it
ideas which I am hardly aware that I possess today; how I could have
thought

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thus at this elementary stage of my career, and written it all down in a
single day, is bewildering.  It is completely free from any blemishes of
the old type.  The sublimity of my subject possessed me.
     One other seed had fallen upon fertile ground.  "The chance of the
geologic period" had been seized by Captain John Charles Frederick Fuller,
of the First Oxfordshire Light Infantry.  It had come his way through the
Rationalist Press Association, to whose publications he subscribed.  He had
not done any serious writing before; his utmost had been a few
insignificant articles and poems, which he contributed to the "Agnostic"
"Journal".  He was fighting valiantly against Christianity by the side of
"Saladin", William Ross Stewart, who was the leader of one of the main
branches of militant agnosticism.  The army of Satan had, unfortunately,
failed to keep discipline in the face of the enemy.  The anti-Christins
were in fact as prone to split up into sects as the non-conformists
themselves.  Bradlaugh's personality was big enough to enable him to keep
any differences that he may have had with Huxley in the background, but the
successors of these paladins were degenerate.  Mrs. Besant had broken away
from atheism altogether; her hysteria handed her over from one strong
influence to another as it appealed to her imagination.  G. W. Foote, with
the medal of his martyrdom glittering on his manly breast, marched
monotonously against the mob of Christianity.  He had suffered for the
cause and was consumed by personal pride on that account.  Ross Stewart had
more literary leanings and was accordingly exclusive.  Bernard Shaw was
engaged in public exhibitions of rapier play; his subtlety made his
colleagues doubt his sincerity; and without question his attacks on
Christianity had lost their sting by reason of the very bitterness of his
contempt for convention.
     The Rationalist Press Association, with Grant Allen, Charles Watts,
Edward Clodd, Joseph McCabe, Bertrand Russell, E. S. P. Haynes (the lawyer,
by the way, who had so elegantly and adroitly arranged the details of my
divorce) and numerous other prominent people, was, above all, anxious to be
respectable.  It felt it to be the most important point of policy not to
give occasion to the enemy to blaspheme.  Shelley's domestic diversions
shocked them; they wanted to prove that conventional morality would not
suffer by the abolition of Christianity.  One of the Association's own
lecturers, Harry Boulter, was prosecuted fro the blasphemy of saying in
Hyde Park what a thousand others, from Voltaire to Tyndall, had said for
centuries, and it refused to defend him because his remarks had shocked
policemen.  The attitude seemed to me utterly ignoble.  I have no
particular sympathy with Boulter, but I recognized that in destroying the
delusions of the vulgar one must use the kind of dynamite which they
understand.
     At the same time, I think the Rationalist Press Association ought to
have accepted battle and fought the blasphemy laws to a finish.  It lost
prestige by

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deserting a comrade.  People said, as they said of Shaw, that it was "too
proud to fight".  There were still other sects of satanists, down to the
Reverend Guy A. Alfred, who mixed up religious and political revolt like
the Bolsheviks.  In one sense the attitude is logical and it is certainly
courageous.
     Fuller knew the animal and arranged with him to issue a cheap edition
of "The Star in the West" with a preface of his "Alfred's" own, through the
Bakunin Press.  He thought we should begin reconstruction of civilization
at the very bottom.  Alfred was certainly our man!  When I read Conrad's
"The Secret Agent" I instantly recognized him in Comrade Ossipon.  I had
never met so repulsive a type.  Yet the creature had scholarship of a sort,
keen courage and intellectual integrity.  I say "intellectual integrity"
because I would not have trusted him with a threepenny bit.  He did, in
fact, cheat us out of a considerable amount, though we went into the
business with our eyes open.  With regard to the logic of his view, that
Christianity and the social system stood or fell together, I object.  That
is emphatically the Christian view.  The elder Cato was not an anarchist,
nor Julius Caesar a disciple of Karl Marx.  I entirely agree with Nietzsche
that Christianity is the formula of the servile state; true aristocracy and
true democracy are equally its enemies.  In my ideal state everyone is
respected for what he is.  There will always be slaves, and the slave is to
be defined as he who acquiesces in being a slave.
     Such was the situation when Fuller, home on leave from India, came to
see me and told me that he was competing for the prize essay on my work.
He was entirely at one with me on the point of my attitude to Christianity.
We regard it as historically false, morally infamous, politically
contemptible and socially pestilential.  We agree with Shelley, Keats,
Byron, Swinburne and James Thomson as far as they went.  We agree with
Voltaire, Gibbon, Strauss, Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Tyndall, J. G. Frazer,
Ibsen and Nietzsche as far as "they" went.  But we were absolutely opposed to
any ideas of social revolution.  We deplored the fact that our militant
atheists were not aristocrats like Bolingbroke.  We had no use for the
sordid slum writers and Hyde Park ranters who had replace the aristocratic
infidel of the past.  We felt ourselves to be leaders; but the only troops
at our disposal were either mercenaries or mobs.  Like the prince of the
Fronde, we found ourselves fighting by the side of a venal and ignorant
parliament, disorderly banditti, a mob of bourgeois and a horde of beggars.
     The position was all the more annoying because we knew perfectly well
that the vast majority of the aristocracy, both of blood and of brains,
were heartily on our side or profoundly indifferent and aloof.  But they
were all afraid to come out into the open and sweep religion away; or else
felt themselves personally secure from any annoyance and therefore inclined
to let sleeping dogs lie.  For example, it was known that two thirds of the
dons of Trinity College, Cambridge, were openly atheistic, and, according
to all

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the principle of the university, should have been "ipso facto" deprived of
their fellowships, yet they were perfectly safe in the saddle so long as
they abstained from any overt act which the authorities could not overlook.
We thought that this hypocrisy was not the harmless practical joke which it
seems to be at first sight.  We could not ourselves have acquiesced
consciously in any such evasion, and we did not understand how people of
such intellectual superiority could agree to hold their positions on such
humiliating terms.
     It is (incidentally) hardly less humiliating for Christianity itself
that it that it should be so powerless, despite its ostensible
impregnability.  It could not furnish the necessary complement of men of
intellect from its own ranks, and the college was compelled to endure the
contempt of its own fellows.  It could not do without them; it dared not
prescribe them; it dared not prescribe them; it had to be careful to avoid
so much as questioning them on the essential points on which their tenure
of office was supposed to depend.  It dared not even make any overt
endeavour to alter the situation.  It dared not even lament the evil days
on which it had fallen.  It had to pretend that all was well: to deny
boisterously a fact which was notorious.
     As  a matter of fact, Christianity is everywhere in more or less the
same position, thought the most liberal estimate of the proportion of
population that attends any place of worship scarcely reaches one and a
half per cent.  The Church claims --- when not wailing to the opposite
effect --- that the entire population is actively Christian.  The press
cannot believe its ears when it transpires that some professor of geology
does not believe in Genesis.  There is indeed something pitifully heroic
about the enormity of the belief.  It it were not that this infinitesimal
minority is able to exercise such an asphyxiating effect on popular
thought, and such a murderous grip upon popular morals, to torture and
deform the minds of children, to make hypocrisy the price of happiness, one
might even sympathize with this frog in its attempts to persuade itself and
its neightbours that it is an ox.  On one point only were Fuller and I at
odds.  His hatred for Christianity extended to the idea of religion in
general.  He had, of course, a sympathy in his heart for Islam; the
manliness of the Mohammedan makes it impossible to despise his belief in
Allah.  Islam is free from the degrading doctrine of atonement and the
glorification of the slave virtues.  The Moslem's attitude to Allah only
errs in so far as it involves the childish idea of personifying the powers
of the universe.  It is right that we should reverence the majesty of
nature and obey her laws; but he fought with me, hand to hand, week after
week, about the question of Magick.  He had originally intended his essay
to conclude with the sixth chapter, and he had scrupulously avoided any
reference to the magical and mystical side of my work; nay, even to the
philosophical side so far as that was concerned with transcendentalism.
But I showed him that the

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study must be incomplete unless he added a chapter expounding my views on
these subjects.  Thus chapter seven came to be written.
     It is a very complete and just exposition of my views, and it is
especially to be noticed that within the one hundred and thirty-three pages
there is no reference to "The Book of the Law".  (At the time of publication,
therefore, I was still keeping the hem of my garment scrupulously away from
the Cairo working.)  By the time he had written this chapter, I had brought
him to see that materialism, in any ordinary sense of the word, was
thoroughly unsatisfactory as an explanation of the universe; but he was not
in the least inclined to accept any theories which might involve belief of
any kind in a spiritual hierarchy.  In the course of our argument I had
myself been made uneasy by a subconscious feeling that, watertight as my
system was in itself, certain legitimate inferences might be drawn from it
which I was not drawing.
     "The Book of the Law" annoyed me; I was still obsessed by the idea that
secrecy was necessary to a magical document, that publication would destroy
its importance.  I determined, in a mood which I can only describe as a fit
of ill temper, to publish "The Book of the Law", and then get rid of it for
ever.
     I was also annoyed by the way in which Fuller stuck to his guns about
the magical hierarchy in general.  In a spirit of mischief I sent him a
typescript of "The Book of the Law" and asked him to tell me what he thought
of it.  I wanted to disgust him with myself; I wanted him to class me
finally as a hopeless crank.  His answer came in the course of two or three
days: I could not believe my eyes.  This, he wrote, is the utterance of a
Master.  What did he know about Masters, confound him!  It was as if I had
sent a copy of "Tit-Bits" to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he had
reverently pronounced it to be the authentic Logia of "our Lord".
     But there was no getting over the fact.  Here was the Book which I
hated and feared, the Book from which I was desperately trying to escape,
and here was a man who hated anything of the sort without fearing it in the
least, a man who had nothing to escape from; and it was instantly accepted
by him at its face value.  It's no good arguing whether a thing is a hammer
or not, when all you know about it is that it has a habit of knocking you
down.
     It was useless to struggle further.  So late as October 1908, I was
carrying out a Retirement (see "John St. John"), and invoking my Holy
Guardian Angel, without any reference to "The Book of the Law".  Fuller and I
had gone to work to edit my magical diaries and present to the world the
story of my magical career in "The Temple of Solomon the King", as if the
Cairo working were a mere episode of that career.  We were carrying out the
orders of the Secret Chiefs by exposing the G.'. D.'. and publishing its
Ritual, but I was sheltering myself from "The Book of the Law" by taking
advantage of a phrase in the text which insists: "All this and a book to
say how thou didst come

{541}



















hither and a reproduction of this ink and paper for ever-for in it is the
word secret & not only in the English ..."  And the manuscript had been
lost!
     As the sequel will show, the gods knew when to lay their hands on it.
I surrendered at discretion, re-obligated myself and in September 1909
wrote my greatest magical poem "Aha!" in which the Cairo working is
restored to its proper place in my life.  I have made many insurrections
since then; but they have always been quelled in very short order and
punished as they deserved.
     This lengthy preamble will enable the reader to fit into their proper
places the ostensibly incoherent events of 1907 and 1908.  My own
continuous illness, the birth of Lola Zaza and the tragedy of Rose had
combined to complicate my ordinary business, making it impossible for me to
think of making any new plans for exploration.  My affairs in Scotland had
fallen into great confusion through the extravagance and dishonesty of my
factor.  While the cat was away the mice had been extremely busy.
     Fuller and I had clearly understood the imminence of the world
catastrophe.  We did not exactly know where civilization would begin to
crack, or when; we were content to leave such speculations to the Prophet
Baxter, the Rev. Booth Clibborn and such small deer.  But we saw the New
Zealander sitting on the ruined arch of London Bridge quite clearly.
     We could also see the Professor of Archaeology in the University of
Lhasa excavating the ruins of the British Museum.  He discovered a vast
number of volumes of our period purporting to deal with the occult
sciences, but there were few indeed of these which had not crumbled into
dust.  Of those that remained, the vast majority were evidently frivolous.
He rejoiced exceedingly to discover one series of volumes, the dignity of
whose appearance, the permanence of whose paper, the excellence of whose
printing, and the evident care which had been bestowed on their production,
showed him at first sight that the people responsible for their production
had been at infinite pains to make these volumes testify against the
tyranny of time1.  He had them taken to his camp with the greatest care.
Although he could not read a word of the letterpress, the illustrations
were in the universal language, which he could read at sight.  The first
standard work of reference --- the key to the wisdom of the buried past.
     With this vision before us, we determined on making our record of the
highest attainments of human spirits of our generation as worthy as
possible of its subject.  It annoyed us that we could not engrave our
knowledge on ten thousand slabs like those at Mandalay, but we determined
to do our best.  We decided on a fount of type, a size of page and a
quality of paper which could not fail to impress the professors of
posterity, and we determined that our prose should be so simple,so
dignified and so sublime that it would stand out from the slipshod
journalism of the period as the Alhambra above

{543}


        1   WEH Note:  Here Crowley refers to the preferred manner of his
          publication.  Yet he never understood the nature of binding, and
          looked to hand-made papers that yellow and mold in the damp.  He
          sought fine leather for the covers, but the stitchings were of
          linen and the glue such as to fail with age.  The first edition
          of "The Equinox" tends to fall apart at the touch!












the hovels of the vermin that surround it.  The scheme required capital,
and though I was already somewhat embarrassed by the habit of buying a
black egg without haggling, I did not hesitate to put my hand in my pocket.
     Fuller was at this time in grave difficulties, "… la d'Artagnan," but he
gave his time and his toil with magnificent generosity.  His
draughtmanship, within certain limits, was miraculously fine.  Certain
subjects were altogether beyond him; he could not portray the human figure.
His "Adonai-Ha-Aretz" is lamentable, but his symbolic drawing shows the
highest qualities of imagination and execution, and his geometrical work is
almost inconceivably perfect.  His four Watch Towers ("The Equinox", vol. I,
no. vii) and similar illustrations are superb, and his ornamental alphabet
is altogether beyond me to appreciate.  Unfortunately, his prose was florid
and confused, and he suffered acutely from what I call the "comma
bacillus".  He loved a sentence so much that he could not persuade himself
to finish it, but his images are more vivid and virile than those of any
writer I have ever known.
     The style of "The Star in the West" is trenchant and picturesque.  Its
only fault is a tendency to overloading.  I could have wished a more
critical and less adoring study of my work; but his enthusiasm was genuine,
and guaranteed our personal relations in such sort that my friendship wit
him is one of the dearest memories of my life.  I dedicated "The Winged"
"Beetle" to him.
     Alas, I did not take into account the corrupting influence of women.
He held out a long while against the insidious pressure of his wife.  It
was perhaps only through the treachery of another man that mischief was
finally made between us.  But nothing can destroy the past, and the long
years of our intimate friendship were indeed fertile.  We saw each other
nearly every day and worked together in perfect harmony.
     In "The Temple of Solomon the King" Fuller's style was already much
improved, though the story of my life might have been set forth more
simply.  Though his tendency to burst out into ecstatic rhapsodies resulted
in disordering the proportions of its events, in the main his task was
admirably accomplished, and there are passages of astonishing sublimity,
not only in the matter of language but in that of thought.  His point of
view was indeed more subtle and profound than he himself realized.  I am
sure that many passages of this book will stand among the greatest
monuments of English prose extant.
     But he reached his high-water mark with "The Treasure House of
Images".  Formally, this is the most remarkable prose that has ever been
written.  Each chapter of the main part of the book contains thirty
sections, and each section has the same number of syllables.  Each of these
chapters hymns the sign of the Zodiac and in each section that sign is
modified by another sign.  It is the most astonishing achievement in
symbolism.

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     But this is not all.  There is a chapter containing one hundred and
sixty-nine cries of Adoration, which is, as it were, a multiplication of
the previous chapters and a quintesentialization of them.  To this day we
chant these Adorations to the sound of the tom-tom and dance to the music,
and the effect is to carry away the performer into the sublimest ecstasy.
It possesses all the Magick of oriental religious rites, such as those of
the Sidi Aissawa, but the rapture is purely religious.  It is not confused
with eroticism, and that although many of the symbols are of themselves
violently erotic.

     O Thou dew-lit nymph of the Dawn, that swoonest in
          the satyr arms of the Sun!  I adore Thee, Evoe!
               I adore Thee, IAO!

     O Thou mad abode of kisses, that art lit by the fat
          of murdered fiends!  I adore Thee, Evoe!
               I adore Thee, IAO!

     Unfortunately, when our friendship was interrupted so was his literary
career.  I had taught him to write prose, but he has been able to employ
his talents to no better purpose than to win prizes in competitions
organized by the Army Council.
     "The Star in the West" was published in 1907 and was widely reviewed;
for the most part, favourably.  In particular, Soror S. S. D. D. (Mrs.
Emery or "Florence Far" as she was variously known) wrote a very full
criticism of it in the "New Age".  Some of it is so prophetic that it must be
quoted here:

          It is a hydra-headed monster, this London Opinion, but we should
     not be at all surprised to see an almost unparalleled event, namely,
     everyone of those hydra-heads moving with a single purpose, and that
     the denunciation of Mr. Aleister Crowley and all his works.
          Now this would be a remarkable achievement for a young gentleman
     who only left Cambridge quite a few years ago.  It requires a certain
     amount of serious purpose to stir Public Opinion into active
     opposition, and the only question is, has Mr. Crowley a serious
     purpose? ...
          Such are some of the sensations described by Aleister Crowley in
     his quest for the discovery of his Relation with the Absolute.  His
     power of expression is extraordinary; his kite flies, but he never
     fails to jerk it back to earth with some touch of ridicule or pathos
     which makes it still an open question whether he will excite that
     life-giving animosity on the part of Public Opinion which, as we have
     hinted, is only accorded to the most dangerous thinkers.

     I was enormously encouraged by this article.  I knew how serious my
purpose was.  She had reassured me on the point where my faith wavered.  I
had become so accustomed to columns of eloquent praise from the most

{544}
















important people in the world of letters, which had not sold a dozen
copies; to long controversial criticism from such men as G. K. Chesterton,
which had fallen absolutely flat.  People acquiesced in me as the only
living poet of any magnitude.  (There were many better known and more
highly reputed poets --- Francis Thompson, W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling,
and later John Masefield, Rupert Brooke and other small fry, whose
achievement at the best was limited by the narrowness of their ambitions.
I at least was aiming at the highest.)
     Yet hardly anyone had read any of my work and the intrigues of my
enemies had made it impossible for me to make myself heard.  I never cease
to wonder at the persistence of malignant hostility on the part of people
who have never met me or read a line of my writing.  I cannot see why
people should pursue me with secret slander, often of a kind which carries
its own refutation with it.  To give one instance: It was said it was my
practice to lure men into the Himalayas for "weekends" ... I always returned
alone!
     There seemed no limit to the lies that were circulated about me.  As
to motive, I can only imagine that it was partly the revenge of the G.'.
D.'. rebels whom I had smashed, and, subsequently, Mathers and his gang
when it became my duty to put a stop to their swindling and blackmail;
partly to my "intransigence" about other forms of quackery.  I had not spared
the English Alpine Club or the pretenders to literary eminence.  I kept
myself aloof from cliques and simply refused to admit the existence of the
people who were playing at being poets, novelists and philosophers.
     But I had learnt intolerance of all pretence and humbug from
Eckenstein who had on me somewhat the influence that Athos had on
d'Artagnan.  Whenever I was tempted to derogate in any way from the highest
standards of honour, the thought always came to me that I could not face
Eckenstein if I failed.  My family, my college and my friend have always
been my mentors; but, above all, my friend!  His severity was fortified by
his clear sight; no subterfuge was possible with him.  He taught me to
judge my conduct by the most austere standards of rectitude and nobility.
It is not too much to say that he created my moral character.  I had a
fatal tendency to find excuses for myself.  He forced me always to face the
facts and keep ceaseless vigil over the jewel of honour.





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                              61


     My favourite rendezvous was a little chemist's shop in Stafford
Street, managed by a man named E. P. Whineray, one of the most remarkable
and fascinating men that I have ever met.  He was a Lancashire lad all over
and not ashamed of it.  His personal appearance was in itself arresting.
Of medium size and well proportioned, his body seemed intentionally
inconspicuous.  It was the perfect servant of his head.  He was almost
completely bald, with bushy iron-grey eyebrows.  The dome of his skull was
perfectly spherical and suggested the most profound capacity for
reflection.  His eyes were intensely lively and piercing; they shone with
eternal laughter, no less good humoured because supremely cynical.  He
understood human frailty in every detail and not only forgave it, but loved
men for their weaknesses.  He reminded one of an owl; the resemblance was
very striking indeed.
     He knew all the secrets of London.  People of all ranks, from the
courtier and the cabinet minister, to the coachman and the courtesan, made
him their father confessor.  While he never betrayed a confidence, he had a
fund of stories which never failed.  His lightest remarks vibrated with
wisdom.  When one spoke to him, it was like blowing the bellows of a
blacksmith's forge; a shower of scintillating sparks came crackling from
the sombre heart of the fire of his soul.  Like Eckenstein, he saw through
everybody at a glance.  I used to haunt his shop and learned from him about
London.  He had already appeared in literature.  Robert Hichens has set one
of the most subtle incidents of "Felix" in his little shop.  Another reason
for my frequenting him was that he understood me, and one of my weaknesses
is my bitter need of such people.
     He was (incidentally) one of the most learned men in his line.  He had
supplied me with ingredients for some of my magical preparations, such as
kyfi, the mysterious incense of the ancient Egyptians; the perfume and oil
of Abra-Melin, the unguentum Sabbati, and the like.  In particular, he was
at one time able to supply onycha.
     There is an incense sacred to Tetragrammaton.  After the cakes of
light and the incense of Abra-Melin, it is the most powerful of all known
perfumes.  In fact, it is in a sense more powerful than they are, for they
are definitely consecrated to particular purposes, whereas it is entirely
without conscience.  It consists of galbanum for air, onycha for water,
storax of earth and olibanum for fire.  It represents the blind force of
the four elements and by its use one can bring them to manifestation.
Being in itself neither good nor evil, it is extraordinarily dangerous.

{546}





















     I may regard, by the way, that what we call "good" and "bad" are both
extremely limited.  The greatest disasters arise from what we call
indifference.  I once examined the horoscopes of a number of murderers in
order to find out what planetary dispositions were responsible for the
temperament.  To my amazement, it was not the secret and explosive energy
of Heschel, not the sinister and malignant selfishness of Saturn, not the
ungoverned fury of Mars, which formed the background for the crime, but the
callous intellectualism of Mercury.
     Then comes a most extraordinary discovery.  The horoscopes of the
murdered are almost identical with those of the assassins.  They asked for
it!
     Incidentally, history bears out this view.  The greatest horrors in
the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the
vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers.  The
theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the
passionless Robespierre.  The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to
the judicial and businesslike operations of the Cheka.  Human passion at
its worst has generous possibilities, and mercy with the Red Cross ---
theoretically, at least --- is just behind fury in the trenches; but reason
is inexorable and inhuman.  It is not the heart of man which is "deceitful
above all things and desperately wicked", but his brain.
     One evening Whineray told me that a gentleman, whom I will call the
Earl of Coke and Crankum, wished to meet me, having need of my magical
help.  I agreed.  At that moment the man himself walked in.  He took me
round to his rooms; and, to my stupefaction, blurted out the most
extraordinary story.  I could hardly believe my ears.  The man told me his
inmost family secrets, and those of the most atrocious kind, as if I had
known him twenty years.  He said that he was bewitched by his mother and a
woman friend.  On the surface these people were pious Evangelicals.  The
idea that they were trying to murder him by witchcraft was a little
startling, no less so the alleged motive.  Lord Coke had been the second
son.  He claimed that his elder brother had really been the son of some
baronet or other; that his mother hated her husband and had become
desperate when the heir-apparent had been killed in battle.  His mother had
determined to kill her remaining son.
     Coke himself had married an American woman of the meanest character.
She would ring the bell to have the pleasure of hearing the servants call
her "my lady," Coke saw witchcraft in every trifle.  When the countess
happened to sneeze he would deduce that his mother was on the job.  He had
told his troubles to many people, and trusted them at first quite blindly,
and then without a word of warning concluded from some harmless word or act
that they had joined the conspiracy against him.
     Of course, it was a perfectly plain case of persecution mania,
accentuated

{547}




















by his old habit of brandy tippling and his newly acquired one of sniffing
a solution of cocaine.  Apart from his obsession there was nothing wrong
with the man.  He enjoyed magnificent health; he was one of the best
preserved men of fifty to fifty-five that I have ever seen.  He was deeply
religious, with more than a touch of mysticism, and a really deep insight
into the Cabbala, which he understood although he knew little or nothing
about it.  I thought I could cure him and undertook the task.
     My plan in such cases is not to undeceive the patient.  I proposed to
treat his story as literally true in every way and to fight fire with fire.
I said to him: "What you must do is to develop your own magical powers so
as to beat your mother at her own game."
     He had considerable capacity for Magick and understood the object of
the measures which I proposed.  We began by chartering a yacht, which we
anchored in an unfrequented river on the south coast.  I obligated him and
proceeded to teach him how to develop his astral body.  He rapidly acquired
the technique and gained much confidence when he found that by my methods
he could check the results of his clairvoyance.
     I would, for example, give him a talisman which he had never seen
before, and ask him to discover its nature.  We would then compare the
result of his investigation with the book from which I had taken the
talisman, and he would find that he had judged correctly.  (For instance, I
would give him a square containing thirty-six characters in Enochian, which
he could not read.  He would pass in his astral body through an imaginary
door on which this square was inscribed, and tell me that he had come out
upon a balcony overlooking the sea, where a violent storm was raging.  I
would then refer to "The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin" identify the
square, and note that its virtue was to arouse a tempest.  There was thus
no room for self deception as there is when one gets a message from one's
Uncle Ferdinand that he is very happy picking violets, and tell Eliza not
to worry.)
     I soon found, however, that the presence of the countess, though she
was entirely sympathetic and charming, was a hindrance; she took up too
much of his time and thought.  One of the troubles with the man was that he
was shockingly sentimental; it was the worst kind of Dickens.  For that and
other reasons, we decided to make a Great Retirement in a distant country;
our whereabouts was to be concealed; that in itself would tend to confuse
and alarm his mother and her fellow witch.  We crossed to Paris and
wandered down by Marseilles and Gibraltar to Tangiers.
     I was of course in paradise to be once more among Mohammedans, with
their manliness, straightforwardness, subtlety and self-respect!  There was
another point in favour of our journey.  I wanted to get my pupil into the
habit of the open-air life, so as to break him more easily of the cocaine
habit.  The pull of cocaine is almost entirely moral, except in unusually
bad cases.

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There is little or no physical suffering involved in sudden stoppage as
there is in the case of opium and its derivatives.  I wanted to wean him
from the drug by taking his mind off his mother and her machinations, his
wife and her wondrousness, his children and their charm; I wanted to fill
his consciousness with unfamiliar sights and sounds, with actual adventures
and with the physical preoccupation of the day's march.
     Unfortunately, we arrived in Tangiers at a moment of political crisis.
The sultan had just come to smash and even the journey to Fez was unsafe.
Not that we should have cared: Coke was as brave as a lion about everything
outside his dam and her devices; but the authorities would not hear of our
leaving the city --- even the environs were beset by banditti.  It was a
great nuisance, especially as I had got ready for the desert by shaving my
head and getting into my Eastern clothes.  However, I consoled myself by
making excursions after dark into the suburbs and courting all adventures
that might come my way.  I had in fact a perfectly gorgeous time.
     But poor Coke would not enter into the spirit of the East --- in which
we humorously include a country whose name (Morocco, Al'Maghrabi) means
west and whose most easterly point is in the longitude of Oxford.  He was
homesick for the dull uniformity of family life.  That is, I believe, the
heart of England's horror.  Frank Harris has described English vices as
"Adultery with home comforts".  The average Englishman likes to drink tea
in a pair of previously warmed soft slippers, with a smiling piece of meat
presiding over the soggy toast, and unintelligent brats playing halma in
the background.  "The East" only means to him sunstroke, fever and other
diseases, each more dreadful than the rest; people whose views do not
interest him --- they are unintelligible and immoral; discomfort and
boredom.  He has no idea of abstract beauty and he is terribly afraid of
meeting an idea which might stir his stagnant stupidity.
     To me every new scene, every new point of view, is welcome.  I want to
be taught.  I want to enlarge my mind.  "Nihil humani a me alienum puto."
Even so, "humani" is one word too many.  As I wrote in "The Book of Lies".

      The Chinese cannot help thinking that the octave has five notes.
      The more necessary anything appears to my mind the more certain it is
   that I only assert a limitation.

It is natural that my attitude should be utterly abhorrent to my fellow
countrymen.  But they are quite wrong to think that my ideas are anti-
Anglo-Saxon.  They are anti-anything which imagines itself to have a
monopoly of truth or propriety.
     I could not get Coke to take any interest in the people, their
customs, their ideas and their art.  The sunshine on the sparkling sea, the
infinite variety of colour and form, the tingling mixture of races and
religions meant nothing

{549}




















to him.  Beauty was literally splashed over life like a bucket of cold
water over an athlete.  Instead of exhilarating him, he shivered and
moaned.  He kept on groaning like a wounded animal: I want my wife!  I want
my children!  Of course, what he really wanted was cocaine, and that was
just the thing I did not want him to have.
     I had managed to get rid of his persecution mania for the time being.
Whenever he noticed his mother flying past the moon on her broomstick, he
would perform a banishing ritual, and sail out in his astral body on to the
word and chop the broomstick like Siegfried with the lance of Wotan, and
down she would fall into the Straits of Gibraltar, plop, plop.  Nor did he
suffer seriously from the suppression of cocaine.  His only trouble was
that his mind was so sodden with sentimentality that no amount of sunshine
could restore its lightness and elasticity.  If I had been able to take him
into the desert for a couple of months he would have had to live through
the purgatory involved in the absence of sour-faced snobbery and sneaking
servility.
     Thanks to Muly Hafid, there was nothing for it but let him relapse
into the slough of despond and stifle in the stinking slime of civilized
society.  I begged him to walk home from Gibraltar, but it merely gave the
old delusions an excuse to renew their grip.  He classed me as having
joined the conspiracy against him of black magicians, from his mother and
his neighbours to his son's schoolmaster (who had been persuaded by the
devil to inflict one hundred lines of the "Georgics" upon the luckless lad!)
and his family lawyer --- who had been persuaded by Belial to fail to lend
him ten thousand pounds without security.
     I have never been so sorry for any man in my life.  I have never met
anyone more genuinely noble, generous and kind-hearted.  He was the most
amusing companion, witty and well read.  And all these magnificent
qualities were completely marred by a single puerile weakness.  Once again
I had to admit that the superstition and sexual huperaesthesia, which go in
England by the names of religion and love, had emasculated a man.  Anglo-
Saxonism is psychological phthsis.
     At the accession of the new sultan, his subjects took the opportunity
of enjoying themselves, rejoicing in countries where the "spirochaetas"
"pallida" of civilization does not make love luetic, liberty ataxic and life
choreic.  The people are spontaneous about amusements.  To me nothing is
more dreary than the policed processions of noble nonentities, famous
puppets and beauties whose diet is skin food, whose athletics are face
massage and whose fresh air is cocaine.  In England enjoyment has been
reduced to formality.  The studied solemnity of golf is typical.  Every few
holes one's partner gives a little lecture on the healthfulness of the
game, its virtue to bring out the finest qualities of the player, and so on
"ad nauseam".  The Anglo-Sacon consciousness of sin

{550}





















make him feel that he needs an excuse for indulging in the most innocent
pleasures.  The result is that they cease to be pleasures at all.
     Gaiety has become entirely unknown; the nearest approach to it is
tipsy vulgarity.
     The joyous men of Morocco were giving themselves over wholeheartedly
to glee.  Their exercises and sports have been described so often that it
would be absurd to go over the ground once more.  But one amusement is less
well known.  Europeans are not encouraged to assist.
     On one of my lonely adventure walks, I came upon a crowd of about two
hundred people in a secluded spot.  They were protected from intrusion by
unofficial sentinels, strolling (apparently without aim) among the trees in
a circle a couple of hundred yards in diameter.  I knew more or less what
to expect, and before being observed looked myself over to see that every
article of my costume was correct.  I then began to recite what I had
learnt from my sheikh in Egypt --- the "Great Word to become mad and go
about naked".

"     "Subhana Allahu walhamdu lilahi walailaha illa allahu wallahu akbar"
     "wala baala wala quata illa billahi alaliu ala'zhim."
     Glory to God and thanks to God, and there is only one God, and God is
     most great, and there is no strength but in Him, the Exalted, the
     Great.

     It does not take me long to work myself up by means of a mantra, even
of this lengthy type, into a state of ecstasy, and to proceed, if desired,
from that state to actual Dhyana, by concentrating upon any appropriate
cakra.  By ecstasy I do not mean anything characterized by extravagant
action.  It is merely that I seem to myself to be floating in the air or at
least to weigh about one quarter of what I actually do; that I become
completely abstracted from my surroundings and from all internal
interference.  I should thus be either invisible to the sentinels, or, if
observed by them, recognized as a holy man whose religious exercises it
would be an outrage to disturb.  I need hardly say that the thing must be
done properly.  To attempt to fake anything of the sort would be a fatal
error.  The psychic sensitiveness of the Arab would detect it at once; he
would suspect a bad motive, put one down as a blasphemer and cut one down
with unhesitating cheerfulness.  And serve one right!
     In this way I passed the sentinels and mingled with the crowd.  It was
a wild tribe from Seoul.  The women were present, thought they took no
active part, and merely helped to keep the ring.  The circle was some
thirty feet across.  Squatting on its edge were the usual musicians,
playing as usual for dear life, while dancing and yelling were a number of
men, armed with very small light axes of peculiar workmanship.  They were
evidently not the ordinary tools used in daily life, but manufactured for
the purpose of the ceremony.

{551}



















With these weapons the men cut themselves on the head (very rarely
elsewhere) until the blood was streaming from their scalps on every side.
They were, of course, quite unconscious of any pain, and those of them who
were actually blinded by the blood were yet able to see.
     The excitement of the crowd was as great as that of the celebrants
themselves, but it was rigorously suppressed.  I cannot say that the ring
kept absolute silence; I doubt whether I was sufficiently cool to make any
reliable observations, and I certainly was beyond the stage of intellectual
curiosity.  But the impression was that the onlookers were deliberately
abstaining from either speech or gesture.  I governed myself accordingly.
But I was hard put to it to refrain from dashing down my turban, leaping
into the ring with a howl of "Allahu akbar"!", getting hold of an axe and
joining in the general festivity.
     It literally took away one's breath.  The only way I can express it is
that one breathed with one's heart instead of with one's lungs.  I had got
into not dissimilar states while doing Pranayama, but those had been
passive, and this was a --- no, active is a pitifully inadequate word --- I
felt myself vibrating with the energy of the universe.  It was as if I had
become conscious of atomic energy or of the force of gravitation,
understood positively and not merely as the inhibition to rising from the
ground.  I do not know how long I stood there holding myself in, but
judging from subsequent calculations it must have been over an hour: the
sense of time had entirely disappeared.  But I became suddenly aware of a
terrific reaction; I felt that I had missed my chance by not letting myself
go and perhaps been killed for my pains.  At the same time I was seized
with a sudden sense of alarm.  I felt myself to be outside the spiritual
circle.  I was sure that someone would discover me and a swift shudder
passed through me as I apprehended my danger.  Fortunately, I had
sufficient presence of mind to resume my mantra and melt away from the
multitude as silently as I had descended upon it.
     This little adventure always stood out as one of the most exciting (in
a small way) of my life, that is, of merely material adventures; and it has
given me furiously to think about the general formulae of "Energized
Enthusiasm".  The practices of the Sidi Aissawa, the dervishes, some
Asiatic devotees, and many Russian peasants whom I have seen
conscientiously and scientifically exalting their consciousness by bringing
physiological methods to the aid of spiritual aspiration, have been too
individual to compare with these Moors.  In this ceremony the entire body
of assistants were consciously and collectively inducing a spiritual state
which I recognized as entirely different to individual ecstasy.  The soul
which they invoked was neither the sublimation (or simplification) of each
man's personal self, nor was it the universal and immanent Spirit.  It was
a collective consciousness.
     The psychology is similar to that of any mob which works itself up
into

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enthusiasm over some ill-defined religious or political idea; but these
Moors were invoking what I must call their tribal god, for want of a better
term.  They were creating him by pouring their personal enthusiasm into the
pot, so to speak.  I had no doubt that the individual deity thus invented
(I can find no better term) could exist organically, so to speak, and I
began to understand how the prophets of old had succeeded in inventing
their gods, neither personal nor universal, but representing the Platonic
idea, corresponding to the sum of the tribal attributes, and, once
invented, enjoying an independent life, exercising initiative, and so on,
just like a human being, sustained by the united wills of his devotees, and
thus turning the tables on them and compelling them who had made him in
their image to conform with the likeness of him.
     I had quite a number of other small adventures during my short stay in
Morocco.  The character of the people corresponds very closely with my own
in its more salient aspects.  I liked them very much better than the
Egyptians, who seem to me to suffer from too much history, too much
civilization, too much commerce, too much admixture of blood; and above
all, too much cosmopolitanism.  The Egyptian has little national character,
he had been pauperized by the influx of Europeans, and corrupted by the
"evil communications" of Greeks, Armenians and the objectionable type of
Jew.  The Jew in Morocco is, on the whole, a very fine fellow.  He has a
religion and a point of honour, to say nothing of his pride of race.  It
has been said that every nation has the government which it deserves.  I
would add, the type of Jew which it deserves.  His imagination and
sensitiveness make him the touchstone of his surroundings.
     There is a saying in North Africa that the Moor is a lion, the
Algerian a deer and the Tunisian a hare.  When subsequent journeys to North
Africa enabled me to make the comparison, I found it strikingly true.  The
Moors have been called the Irish of of Islam, as the Burmese the Irish of
Asia.  The former metaphor is admirable.  There is an independence, a
pride, a devil-may-careishness and a bonhomie which reminds one strongly of
the more boisterous type of Irish.  The Burmese rather resemble the quiet,
religious type.  The moor is always on the look out for a lark.  I found
myself engaged in all sorts of schoolboy escapades where hard knocks and
Rabelaisian practical jokes gave birth to huge and hearty laughter.  Mortal
enmities and murderous assaults did not in the least interfere with the
jolly friendship of the antagonist.
     I was very sorry when we had to return to England.  We took Granada on
our way.  I found the Alhambra entirely familiar, although I had never been
there before.  It was not a case of the "sens du d‚j… vu", which is a passing
perception.  I went from one court to another as if I had lived there
before; I knew what I was coming to so accurately that I could hardly doubt
that I had really lived there at one time or another.  I remembered nothing
of the

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circumstances; except that it must have been my habit to go to the western
tower and look over the valley, the town somnolent at the foot of the hill,
and the distant sierra, while the sun sank superbly sad among clouds which
seemed to have borrowed their softness and brilliance from swansdown.
     Coke and I arranged to see the dancing of the gypsies who lived in the
caves outside the city, and I made a somewhat elaborate study of the
subject.  The principal dances are the tango, which is quite different to
that with which we have become familiar; the fandango, the civilla gitana;
the soleario gitana, the cachusa gitana, the morongo, the sirrillas, the
baile de la flor, the baile de la bosca and the baile de la bona.
     It is a mistake to say, brutally, as science is inclined to do, that
all dancing symbolized passion.  I am always annoyed with research that
stops half way.  That is the great error of Freud.  When he says, quite
correctly, that dreams are phantasms of suppressed sexual desire, the
question remains, of what is sexual desire the phantasm?  To me it seems no
more than one of the ways of expressing the formula of creation.  I regard
chemical action as identical.  A man and a woman unite; and the result is a
child, which is totally different from them though formed of their
elements.  Just so the combination of hydrogen and chlorine produces
hydrochloric acid.  They are gases; at ordinary temperature it is a liquid.
None of its chemical and physical reactions is identical with those of its
elements.  The phenomena are analogous in very many ways, but the essence
of their similarity is in the Cabbalistic formula Yod, H‚, Vau.
     I have successfully eliminated the danger of obsession by sexual ideas
in this way: I refuse to admit that it is the fundamental truth.  Science
in failing to follow me so far has destroyed the idea of religion and the
claim of mankind to be essentially different from other mammalia.  The
demonstration of anthropologists that all religious rites are celebrations
of the reproductive energy of nature is irrefutable; but I, accepting this,
can still maintain that these rites are wholly spiritual.  Their form is
only sexual because the phenomena of reproduction are the most universally
understood and pungently appreciated of all.  I believe that when this
position is generally accepted, mankind will be able to go back with a good
conscience to ceremonial worship.  I have myself constructed numerous
ceremonies where it is frankly admitted that religious enthusiasm is
primarily sexual in character.
     I have merely refused to stop there.  I have insisted that sexual
excitement is merely a degraded form of divine ecstasy.  I have thus
harnessed the wild horses of human passion to the chariot of the Spiritual
Sun.  I have given these horses wings that mankind may no longer travel
painfully upon the earth, shaken by every irregularity of the surface, but
course at a large through the boundless ether.  This is not merely a matter
of actual ceremonies; I insist that in private life men should not admit
their passions to be an end,

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indulging them and so degrading themselves to the level of the other
animals, or suppressing them and creating neuroses.  I insist that every
thought, word and deed should be consciously devoted to the service of the
great work.  "Whatsoever ye do, whether ye eat or drink, do all to the
glory of God."
     One night in Granada I met one of these gypsies.  The setting was
supremely romantic.  The burden of his life fell from the shoulders of the
poet.  I experienced that spontaneous and irresistible stroke of love which
only exists when the beauty of the human form and the beauty of the rest of
nature are harmonized automatically.  It was one of those experiences which
come even to the most romantic poets, and to them only too few times in a
decade.  Fuller always maintained that the lyric in which I celebrated that
night was the greatest that had ever been written of its kind.  I can do no
less than ask public opinion to examine his judgment.

     Your hair was full of roses in the dewfall as we danced,
     The sorceress enchanting and the paladin entranced,
     In the starlight as we wove us in a web of silk and steel
     Immemorial as the marble in the halls of Boabdil,
     In the pleasaunce of the roses with the fountains and the yews
     Where the snowy Sierra soothed us with the breezes and the dews!
     In the starlight as we trembled from a laugh to a caress,
     And the God came warm upon us in our pagan allegresse.
     Was the Baile del la bona too seductive?  Did you feel
     Through the silence and the softness all the tension of the steel?
     For your hair was full of roses, and my flesh was full of thorns
     And the midnight came upon us worth a million crazy morns.
     Ah!  my Gypsy, my Gitana, my Saliya!  were you fain
     For the dance to turn to earnest? --- O the sunny land of Spain!
     My Gaitana, my Saliya! more delicious than a dove!
     With your hair aflame with roses and your lips alight with love!
     Shall I see you, shall I kiss you once again?  I wander far
     From the sunny land of summer to the icy Polar Star.
     I shall find you, my Gitana, my Saliya! as of old
     With your hair aflame with roses and your body gay with gold.
     I shall find you, I shall have you, in the summer and the south
     With our passion in your body and our love upon your mouth ---
     With our wonder and our worship be the world aflame anew!
     My Gitana, my Saliya!  I am coming back to you!1

     This year was indeed my "annus mirabilis" in poetry.  It began with
"Clouds Without Water", to which I have already called attention in the
matter of its

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        1   Crowley made a sound recording of this poem.  It is widely
          extant.

















technique.  The question of its inspiration is not less interesting.  At
Coulsdon, at the very moment when my conjugal cloudburst was impending, I
had met one of the most exquisitely beautiful young girls, by English
standards, that ever breathed and blushed.  She did not appeal to me only
as a man; she was the very incarnation of my dreams as a poet.  Her name
was Vera; but she called herself "Lola".  To her I dedicated "Gargoyles" with
a little prose poem, and the quatrain (in the spirit of Catullus) "Kneel
down, dear maiden o'mine."  It was after her that my wife called the new
baby!
     Lola was the inspiration of the first four sections of "Clouds Without"
"Water".  Somehow I lost sight of her, and in the fifth section she gets
mixed up with another girl who inspired entirely sections six and seven.
But the poem was still incomplete.  I wanted a dramatic climax, and for
this I had to go to get a third model.  Number two was an old friend.  I
had known her in Paris in 1902.  She was one of the intimates of my
fianc‚e.  She was studying sculpture under Rodin and was unquestionably his
best woman pupil.  She was strangely seductive.  Her brilliant beauty and
wholesome Highland flamboyance were complicated with a sinister perversity.
She took delight in getting married men away from their wives, and the
like.  Love had no savour for her unless she was causing ruin or
unhappiness to others.  I was quite ignorant of her intentions when she
asked me to sit for her, but once in her studio she lost no time, and "The
Black Mass', "The Adepts" and "The Vampire" describe with ruthless accuracy
our relations.  She initiated me into the torturing pleasures of algolagny
on the spiritual plane.  She showed me how to intensify passion by self-
restraint.  The formula is entirely analogous to the physical formula of
the Arabs.  She made me wonder, in fact, if the secret of puritanism was
not to heighten the intensity of love by putting obstacles in its way.
     I regard the idea as entirely morbid and objectionable.  Artificial
impediments to nature are necessarily as disastrous as natural ones.  The
essence of my objection to English ideas of morality is just this: that
sexual relations are over emphasized and assume an entirely
disproportionate value.  The formula of the average novel is to keep the
reader in suspense about the love affairs of the characters.  I confess
frankly that I cannot read such stuff with patience.
     I do not mind a background of love properly subordinated to the true
interest of life; but I do not know any single book of which it is the main
theme which does not disgust me.
     Am I reproaching myself, then, for having written as I have on the
subject?  My defence is duplex.  In the first place, I have no objection to
lyrical love.  "I arise from dreams of thee" and "O lover, I am lonely
here" are legitimate.  It is the sacrament by which man enters into
communion with God.
     There remain my narrative and dramatic books on love.  "The Tale of"
"Archais" is simply jejune; I apologize and pass on.  "The Mother's Tragedy",
"The

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Fatal Force", "Jezebel", "Tannh„user", all treat love not as an object in
itself, but on the contrary, as a dragon ready to devour any one less than
St. George.  "Alice" is partly excusable, because it is really a lyric, when
all is said and done.  In any case, I do not value the book very highly.
It is ridiculous to make anything important depend on the appetites of an
American matron.  The same may be said of "The Star and the Garter", "Why"
"Jesus Wept" exhibits love as the road to ruin.  It is the sentimental point
of view about it which is the catastrophe of Sir Percy's career.  In
"Orpheus" love, it is true, inspires the poet to great deeds of a sort; but
it ends in disappointment and leads him to death.
     But back to my sculptress!  To her I dedicated "Rodin in Rime" and
"Clouds Without Water" itself --- not openly; our love affair being no
business of other people, and in any case being too much ginger for the "hoi"
"polloi", but in such ways as would have recommended themselves to Edgar
Allan Poe.
     There remains a tragic and abominable story to be told.  She suddenly
decided that she had better get married; not being able to marry me, she
did the next best thing, found another explorer and dragged him to the
altar.  This man left shortly afterwards on an expedition which involved
his being very many months beyond reach of communication.  He had a rival
brother officer, who somehow discovered one of the cryptograms.  (As a
matter of fact, it was a simple one; he had merely to take a rule and draw
a straight line to make the name and the surname of the girl stand out "en"
"toutes lettres".)  It might seem that such a man would not know how to draw
a line anywhere, but he drew this line --- and arranged that a copy of the
book thus marked should be handed to the husband by another member of his
party after he had cut his communication with the world, perhaps for years.
In point of fact, it proved to be for ever.
     Now as to section eight of "Clouds Without Water", "The Initiation", I
hardly know why I should have felt it necessary to conclude on such an
appalling chord.  The powers of life and death combine in their most
frightful forms to compel the lovers to seek refuge in suicide, which they,
however, regard as victory.  "The poison takes us:
Chi alpha iota rho epsilon tau epsilon  nu iota chi omega mu epsilon nu ."  The
answer is that the happy ending would have been banal.  The tragedy of Eros
is that he is dogged by Anteros.  It is the most terrible of all
anticlimaxes to have to return to the petty life which is bound by space
and time.  I had the option of coming down to earth or enlisting death in
my service.  I chose the latter course.
     My model was a woman very distinguished and very well known in London
society.  She had already figured as the heroine of "Felix".  She had been
one of the best and most loyal friends of Oscar Wilde.  She was herself a
writer of subtlety and distinction, but she filled me with fascination and
horror.  She gave me the idea of a devourer of human corpses, being herself
already dead.  Fierce and grotesque passion sprang up for the few days

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necessary to give me the required inspiration for my climax.  I could only
heighten the intoxication of love by spurring it to insanity.
     This, in fact, is a final criticism of love itself as such, and
justifies all that has been said about it by the Buddha --- and even by the
Church.  It justifies my own attitude that love must be resolutely torn
from the throne in the human heart which it has usurped.  One must not set
one's affections on things below; one must find an answer to old age and
death.  "Only those are happy who have desired the unattainable."  Love
being the sublimation of the human ego, it follows that the ego itself must
be surrendered.  The limitations of life on earth are intolerable.  The
consciousness is unendurable for all those who have begun to understand the
universe.  Man is so infinitesimally inane, yet he feels himself capable of
such colossal attainment.
     My twelve months of creative spurt reached a climax in February 1908,
when I wrote the five books of "The World's Tragedy" in five consecutive days
at Eastbourne.  This is beyond all question the high-water mark of my
imagination, my metrical fluency, my wealth of expression, and my power of
bringing together the most incongruous ideas so as to enrich my matter to
the utmost.  At the same time, I succeeded in reaching the greatest height
of spiritual enthusiasm, human indignation, and demoniac satire.  I sound
the gamut of every possibility of emotion from innocent faith and
enthusiasm to experienced cynicism.


















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                              62


     Beside all these activities of my own, I came into a new world.  My
Operation of the Sacred Magick was not sterile.  After returning from
Morocco, the spirit came upon me and I wrote a number of books in a way
which I hardly know how to describe.  They were not taken from dictation
like "The Book of the Law" nor were they my own composition.  I cannot even
call them automatic writing.  I can only say that I was not wholly
conscious at the time of what I was writing, and I felt that I had no right
to "change" so much as the style of a letter.  They were written with the
utmost rapidity without pausing for thought for a single moment, and I have
not presumed to revise them.  Perhaps "Plenary inspiration" is the only
adequate phrase, and this has become so discredited that people are loth to
admit the possibility of such a thing.
     The prose of these books, the chief of which are "Liber Cordis Cincti"
"Serpente, The Book of the Heart girt with the Serpent", and "Libri vel"
"Lapidis Lazuli", is wholly different from anything that I have written
myself.  It is characterized by a sustained sublimity of which I am totally
incapable and it overrides all the intellectual objections which I should
myself have raised.  It does not admit the need to explain itself to
anyone, even to me.  I cannot doubt that these books are the work of an
intelligence independent of my own.  The former describes the relation of
the adept with his Holy Guardian Angel; the latter is "The voluntary
emancipation of a certain adept from his adeptship ... the birth words of a
Master of the Temple."
     Even this did not exhaust my creative energy.  As in Cairo in 1902 I
had started the "Lover's Alphabet", on the ground that the most primitive
kind of lyrics or odes was in some way the most appealing and immortal, so
I decided to write a series of hymns to the Blessed Virgin Mary in the
simplest possible style.  I must not be thought exactly insincere, though I
had certainly no shadow of belief in any of the Christian dogmas, least of
all in this adaptation and conglomeration of Isis, Semele, Astarte, Cybele,
Freya, and so many others; I simply tried to see the world through the eyes
of a devout Catholic, very much as I had done with the decadent poet of
"White Stains", the Persian mystic of the "Bagh-i-Muattar", and so on.  I was,
in fact, adopting another alias --- in the widest sense of the word.
     I did not see why I should be confined to one life.  How can one hope
to understand the world if one persists in regarding it from the conning
tower of one's own personality?  One can increase one's knowledge and
nature by

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travelling and reading; but that does not tell one how things look to other
people.  It is all very well to visit St. Peter's and the Vatican, but what
would be really interesting would be to know how they look to the Pope.
The greatness of a poet consists, to a considerable extent, in his ability
to see the world through another man's eyes; and my training in science is
always suggesting to me that I should invent a technique for doing anything
that I want to do.  My technique for borrowing other people's spectacles
was to put myself in the place altogether, either by actually adopting a
suitable alias or by writing a book in their names.  It is a common and
legitimate literary device.
     When in Holland in '97, I had written a Christmas hymn in which the
Nativity was treated realistically.  I now found that Christian piety had
taken away the entire poetic beauty of Bethlehem by declaring that the
Virgin suffered no pain.  (It is really astonishing how these idiots
managed to remove any touch of sublimity from this stupid story!)  I
therefore had to change "her bitter anguish hath sufficed" into "her joyful
ardour hath sufficed", and otherwise degrade my poem to a blasphemous
imbecility, in order to comply with the conventions of the Church.  Apart
from that, what I had written in a spirit not far removed from ribaldry was
found wholly satisfactory.
     I had written, in 1899, while staying with Mathers in Paris, a hymn to
Isis to be used in the ceremonies of Isis worship which he was at that time
proposing to revive in Paris.  I changed the word "Sistron" to "cymbal" and
the word "Isis" to "Mary".  The hymn required no further alteration.  I
think that rather significant.
     Once more, I made a translation of the Fatihah, the most sacred
chapter of the Koran, I replaced the name of God by that of Mary, and once
again found favour with the Vatican.
     I quote a few isolated stanzas:

             The red sun scorches up our veins;
             The white moon makes us mad;
             Pitiless stars insult our pains
             With clamour glad.

          At the foot of the Cross is the Mother of God,
          And Her tears are like rain to enliven the sod,
          While the Blood of the Lord from his Body that runs
          Is the heat of the summer, the fire of its suns.

             See where the cherubim pallid and plumed
             Swing with their thuribles praises perfumed!
             Jesus is risen and Mary assumed:
             Ave Maria!


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             O sorrow of pure eyes beneath
             The heavy-fringed estatic lids,
             Seeing for maiden song and wreath
             Sphinxes and pagan pyramids!

             O Mary, like a pure perfume
             Do thou receive this failing breath,
             And with Thy starry lamp illume
             The darkling corridors of death!

     There was besides such creative work and the editorial work which
Fuller and I had undertaken on behalf of the Order, the task of
reconstituting it in its original purity.  Under Mathers, the Grades had
become meaningless; to be an adept had meant no more than to be a peer of
the realm does in modern times.  It was for me to sweep away all this
nonsense, to re-establish the ordeals, in spirit and in truth.  I was at
first ignorant enough of Magick to imagine that this could be done by the
simple process of replacing sham formalities by real ones.  I proposed, for
example, to test people's courage by putting them in actual contact with
the four elements, and so on, as was apparently done in ancient Egypt; but
experience soon taught me that an ordeal, however severe, is not much use
in genuine initiation.  A man can always more or less brace himself up to
meet a situation when he knows that he is on his trial.  A man might have a
certificate of ability to swim half a mile; and yet be utterly unable, for
a dozen different reasons, to save a friend from drowning when the need
arose.
     Of course it sounds totally impossible to administer ordeals of the
real kind required, but I found by experience that I did not even have to
give the matter a moment's thought.  My magical self took complete charge
of the business without wasting a moment or disturbing me.  It may be
through some act of my own, it may be entirely without my intention, that
aspirants to the Order find themselves in circumstances where they are
tested in the qualities necessary to their stage of initiation.  There is
thus no possibility of evading the intentions of the Order.  It is not
conducted consciously by any men soever, but by mysterious forces
automatically set in motion by the force of the obligations themselves.
     For example; the oath of a probationer apparently involves no
difficulties of any sort; no penalties are stated or implied; the aspirant
merely pledges himself "to perform the Great Work, which is to obtain the
knowledge of the nature and powers of my own being".  He is not required to
reach any particular stage of knowledge by the end of his probation; he is
free to choose such practices as appeal to him; and, provided that his
record shows that he has devoted a reasonable proportion of his spare time
to the Work, he is

{561}




















unhesitatingly passed to the degree of neophyte.  It sounds as if it were
impossible for anyone to fail.  Yet, actually only eight per cent. manage
to get through the year of probation.  The reason is that no sooner does a
man make up his mind to enter the Path of the Wise than he rouses
automatically the supreme hostility of every force, internal or external,
in his sphere.
     I further restored the original rule of the Order that its members
should not know each other officially and have as little to do with teach
other as possible.  Theoretically, a member should know only his introducer
and those whom he himself introduces.  In the present conditions of society
it is practically impossible to maintain this rule with absolute
strictness, but I keep as near to the ideal as possible.  I did relax the
rule, to a certain extent, in 1910 --- it was the greatest mistake I had
ever made, and the mischief done at that time has never been wholly
repaired.  Every month I live I am the more amazed at the praeterhuman
wisdom and foresight of the Order.  I have never known a mistake to be
made; whereas my conscious posers are constantly at fault.  If I had no
other evidence of the authority of the people to whom I am pledged, it
would be supplied by their wisdom.
     It happened that at the funeral of Saladin, Fuller had met a youth
named Neuburg, Victor Benjamin of that ilk, who was at Trinity College,
Cambridge, and knew my work.  Having to go to Cambridge one day on some
business or other, I thought I would look the lad up.  I was not sure of
the name, and there were several similar "burgs" in the university
register, but having drawn my bow at a venture, the first arrow struck the
King of Israel between the harness at the very first shot.  I use the words
"King of Israel" advisedly, for Neuburg was certainly a most distinguished
specimen of that race.  He was a mass of nervous excitement, having reached
the age of twenty-five without learning how to manage his affairs.  He had
been prevented from doing so, in fact, but all sorts of superstitions about
the terrible danger of leading a normal wholesome life.  The neuroses thus
created had expressed themselves in a very feeble trickle of poetry and a
very vehement gust of fads.
     He was an agnostic, a vegetarian, a mystic, a Tolstoyan, and several
other things all at once.  He endevoured to express his spiritual state by
wearing the green star of Esperanto, though he could not speak the
language; by refusing to wear a hat, even in London, to wash, and to wear
trousers.  Whenever addressed, he wriggled convulsively, and his lips,
which were three times too large for him, and had been put on hastily as an
afterthought, emitted the most extraordinary laugh that had ever come my
way; to these advantages he united those of being extraordinarily well
read, over flowing with exquisitely subtle humour, and being one of the
best natured people that ever trod this planet.
     But from the first moment I saw him, I saw far more than this; I read
an

{562}



















altogether extraordinary capacity for Magick.  We soon drifted into talking
about the subject and I found that he already practised a good deal of
spiritualism and clairvoyance.  The former was his bane.  The habit of
making himself spiritually passive and inviting the entire spirit world to
obsess him proved finally fatal to him.  Despite all we could do to protect
his aura, we found it impossible to stop the leak altogether, so that at
any moment he was liable to become possessed of the devil.  He soon learnt
how to protect himself as soon as he recognized that he was being attacked;
but the spirits became very cunning and were at pains to persuade him not
to take the proper measures of protection.  I believe, despite all this,
that he would have succeeded eventually in mending his aura, but in the
principal ordeal of the neophyte he was so seriously damaged that he was
never the same man again.  During the next few years I saw a great deal of
him and his spiritual adventures will serve both as a diversion and warning
on many a page to come.
     Recognizing the possibilities of Neuburg, I decided to utilize them
for the benefit of the Order, and of himself.  The first task was to get
rid, as far as possible, of his physical defects, which turned out to be
very serious.  One day during our walk through Spain, we came upon a
waterfall, and, the weather being oppressively hot, we decided to take a
dip.  In this way I discovered that he was suffering from varicocele very
badly indeed and as soon as we got to England I sent him to my doctor, who
advised an operation, which was duly performed.  He had also pyorrhea so
badly that my dentist said that if he had delayed the visit three weeks he
would not have had a tooth left in his head.  Attention to these points,
and to the physical cause of his neurosis, made a healthy man of him.  One
defect remained; and that was incurable, being a slight spinal curvature.
The change in him was extraordinary.  He lost all his nervousness; he
became capable of enduring great physical fatigue, of concentrating
mentally, and of dismissing the old fads which had obsessed him.
Incidentally, by removing his inhibitions, I released the spring of his
genius, and in the next few years he produced some of the finest poetry of
which the English language can boast.  He had an extraordinary delicacy of
rhythm, an unrivalled sense of perception, a purity and intensity of
passion second to none, and a remarkable command of the English language.

     But the other voice was silent, and the noise of waters swept me
     Back into the world, and I lay asleep on a hillside
     Bearing for evermore the heart of a goddess,
     And the brain of a man, and the wings of the morning
     Clipped by the shears of the silence; so must I wander lonely,
     Nor know of the light till I enter into the darkness.

     He possessed the magical gift of conveying an idea of tremendous

{563}




















vividness and importance by means of words that are unintelligible to the
intellect.

          I go as Thunder  that come but as a bird.

(And then the girl came as a bird, and he went as a worm --- but I
anticipate.)

     Neuburg was the moving spirit of one of those societies which are
always springing up in universities.  They never take root; because death
comes to all alike at the end of three years, so to speak.  People who stay
up for a fourth year are Ancient Mariners, but lack the power to hold the
wedding guest.  Of course people overlap; but the generations follow each
other so quickly and the spirit of youth is so impotent to stamp itself
upon history, that it is a rare piece of luck when any of these clubs or
societies live beyond seven years at the outside.  Neuburg's society, the
Pan society, did make its mark on the university; but that was not its
fault.  It was simply that he found people idiotic enough to make it
invulnerable against the arrows of oblivion by dipping it into the Styx of
persecution.  Nothing could have been more helpful than the attitude of the
Dean of Trinity, an idiot and inept.  I have noticed that people who
dislike me are invariable rendered so blind by malice that they give
themselves away and make themselves ridiculous.
     There is an institution at Cambridge called "Ciccu", Cambridge
Intercollegiate Christian Union.  It is a bestial thing, compact of
hypocrisy and secret vice.  Now my connection with the Pan Society was of
the slightest.  I have merely been invited to read parers, I think
altogether three times, on mysticism or kindred subjects.  Nothing more
harmless can be imagined, but the Ciccu went out of its mind.  I am
compelled to remark at this point that one of the most disgraceful features
of controversy in England is that the upholders of religion and morality,
which are frequently not at all in question, instead of disputing with
their opponents, assail them with the weapons of secret slander.  "This
man," they say, "wants to take a penny off the income tax.  It is certain
that he habitually breaks the Seventh Commandment."  In this instance the
Ciccu did not know or care what it was that I had read to the Pan society.
They merely stated that I hypnotized the entire assembly and took a mean
advantage of them.  It did not matter to them that what I was supposed to
have done is impossible in nature, at least to one of my very mediocre
powers.
     However, the Senior Dean of Trinity, the Rev. R. St. J. Parry, started
to make trouble.  I went to see him and asked him what accusations he had
to make against me.  He merely became confused, tried to bluster, would not
commit himself, and finally said that he had given orders that I was not to
be admitted to the precincts of the college.  On the following morning I
waited in the Great Court for him to come out of chapel and called him a
liar to

{564}

















his face in front of everybody.  It then began to dawn upon him that he had
no power to exclude me from Trinity, I being a life member of the college.
He summoned the president, secretary and treasurer of the society, and
threatened to send them down.  But as it happened they none of them
belonged to Trinity and he had no more power over them than he had over the
Queen of Madagascar.  He must have been a really exceptional fool, even for
a don, not to have found out such essential facts before entering upon his
campaign.  He ultimately resorted to the meanest possible course of action.
He did not dare to attack Neuburg, whose relations were wealthy Jews and
might be relied upon to make every kind of trouble if he interfered with
the hope of Israel; but he threatened a man named Norman Mudd, whose
parents were poor and without influence, with the loss of his mathematical
scholarship.  Unfortunately again, Mudd was the mainstay of the hope of the
college for the forthcoming Tripos, and Mudd himself had the heart of a
lion.  He dared the dean to do his damndest in the most uncompromising
language.  Once again the wretched creature had to draw in his horns.  Only
after I had left the battlefield to seek other victories did he succeed in
bullying Mudd into resignation from the society by frightening his father.
Mudd gave his promise to have no more to do with it --- and promptly broke
it.  The Pan society won all along the line.
     The victory was all the more signal in that an imitation society
called the Heretics, who had been trying to run with the hare and hunt with
the hounds like the Rationalist Press Association, had melted away into the
thinnest kind of mist at the first intimation from the authorities that
their exceedingly mild programme of half-baked infidelity was displeasing
to the powers that were.  The whole incident was trivial in its way, but it
taught me an important lesson of policy.  The more upright and
uncompromising one is, the safer one is from attack.  One's enemies will
resort to the most despicable subterfuges, but they will not have the
courage to come into the open and they will in one way or another fall into
the pit which they dig.  It is true that one can apparently be damaged by
secret slander, when the enemy become foolhardy by open misrepresentation,
but if one is working in the eternal one may be sure that they harm no one
but themselves.  Suppose, for example, that I attack Lloyd George by saying
that he had undergone seven years' penal servitude for burglary, and
suppose Lloyd George treats me with the contempt I deserve.  Well, at the
moment there may be a few people silly enough to believe such nonsense, and
to think that his allowing the statement to go unchallenged makes it
probable that there is some truth in it.  But consider what the biographers
will say?  They will discover that Lloyd George's time was fully accounted
for without the penal servitude, and they will simply wonder what spirit of
insanity possessed me to make so ridiculous a mis-statement.  They will
have

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no difficulty in understanding that he, preoccupied with affairs of state,
could not be bothered to leave his work to chastise me.
     Another consideration arises in this connection.  It is always
difficult to discover who has really said what about one, and even if one
succeeds it is not always the best policy to refute the falsehoods.  If
people were attacking one by merely falsifying or exaggerating actual
incidents, defence would be possible; but when people are bound merely by
the limits of their vile imaginations, it is not easy to keep pace with
them.  What is the use of Lloyd George proving that he did not undergo
penal servitude for burglary if I can retort, "Perhaps not, but you were
hanged for sheep stealing!"  To defend oneself against the accusations of a
knave is to seek justice from the verdict of fools.  If one's work and
one's reputation depends on the opinion of people at the moment, it is, of
course, necessary to meet them on their own ground.  At every election the
most ridiculous falsehoods about the candidates are sedulously circulated
at the last moment; if possible, too late to allow time for refutation.
The election may doubtless depend on such infected activities.
     But when one is working in the eye of God, when one cares nothing for
the opinion of men, either at the moment or at any other time; when one has
surrendered for ever one's personal interests and become lost in one's
work, it is merely waste of time and derogatory to one's dignity to pay
attention to irrelevant interruptions about one's individual affairs.  One
keeps one's powder and shot for people who attack one's work itself.  And
even this is often useless.  The Buddha told his disciples not to combat
error.  If it had only seven heads like the Lennean hydra it might be
possible to sterilize the necks after each operation sufficiently long to
finish the job before they grow again.  But modern hydras have not this
pitiful paucity of talking machines.  Hardly a month passes but I hear some
new and perfectly fantastic yarn about myself, sometimes flattering,
sometimes the reverse, but nearly always entirely baseless, and, as often
as not, bearing internal evidence of its absurdity.  I have been
sufficiently amused to wish to make a collection of these legends, but I
find that my memory refuses to record rubbish of this kind.  It insists on
having some peg whereon to hang its old clothes.
     I am not sure whether it was Henry Maudsley who shows that the mind
develops not by accretion but by co-ordination.  It seems that there is a
certain number of pigeon-holes, if I may use the metaphor, in which
isolated facts may be stored, and that this number is strictly limited.
The efficiency of the arrangement may doubtless be increased by practice
and the use of mnemonics, but sooner or later one comes to the end.  A man
of forty who has devoted every moment of his time to acquiring knowledge
finds almost certainly that he has no more pigeon-holes available, and that
therefore he cannot acquire any new knowledge except by forgetting some of
the old.

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     This, by the way, shows the tremendous importance of selective study.
One of the few gleams of intelligence shown in the works of Conan Doyle is
where Sherlock Holmes is ignorant that the earth goes round the sun and, on
being told, says that he will at once try to forget it.  The case chosen
exhibits the chooser as imbecile, for elementary astronomy is certainly
important to the detective.  But the general idea is sound.
     It is today implicitly admitted by all advanced thinkers in every
science that the reason is no more than an exceedingly imperfect instrument
whose methods are entirely empirical, whose terms lack precision, and whose
theses cancel each other out.  I might claim a good deal of credit for
having written out, as far back as 1902, a reasonably complete
demonstration of this conclusion whose premisses were not stated by the
official leaders of thought till long afterwards.  Yet the theory of
initiation on which European adepts base their systems (derived, possibly,
from the Egyptians and Chaldeans by way of the gnostics, Pythagoras and the
neoplatonists), that of Lao tzu in China, and that of the Vedantists in
India, alike imply something of the sort.  My claim to originality is
confined to the nature of my proof, which I drew from facts of a similar
order to those which have finally driven modern science and mathematics to
their present position; whereas the ancients, as far as we know, based
their thesis on an intuitive perception of the incompetence of reason and
on their experience of the results of illumination.
     I devoted a great deal of time to various essays demonstrative of the
general truth above set forth1 and to this practical problem.  I took all
the mystical and magical practices of all religions all over the world, and
those of the secret teachers and associations to which I had access.  I
have little hesitation in saying that I have not omitted any practice of
importance.  I stripped these methods of all their dogmatic top-hamper, all
their racial and climatic limitations, and all the complications which had
been introduced in the course of time or through the idiosyncrasies of
their inventors.  I further freed them from the weight of the promised
rewards which were supposed to follow on their performance.  I wrote down
the result in the simplest and most dignified prose at my command,
clarifying the instructions by separating them into sections.
     I guided myself by the principle that the object of any useful
practice soever must necessarily be to get rid of some limitation.  Thus
the real object of Asana is evidently to release the body from the pain
which is its normal characteristic; that of Mantra Yoga to smooth the
choppy sea of thought by inducing its movement to take the form of
rhythmical billows.  In this way I set forth the initiated teaching of all
ages and all arts in a uniform and consistent body of writing, being
careful nowhere to imply any theory soever.

{567}


        1   "The Soldier and the Hunchback, ! and ?" states it most clearly.



















        In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of
     Spirits and Conjurations; of gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other
     things which may or may not exist.
                                                          "Liber O"
        May be.
        It has not been possible to construct this book on a basis of pure
     scepticism.  This matters less, as the practice leads to scepticism,
     and it may be through it.
                                                       "Liber Thisharb"

This work extended over a number of years, but the fundamental principles
were laid down at this time.  It is just to say that the publication of
these instructions completely revolutionized occult training.  It may not
seem so very important on the surface to have adhered to the point of view
without altering the practice, but in reality the difference is vital.  For
instance, there is a book, "Liber Jugorum", in which the student takes an
oath to exclude a certain thought, word or act, for a given period, and on
every occasion of forgetfulness to cut himself on the wrist with a razor.























{568}


























                              63


     In 1908 I began to be a little restless.  The Himalayas had cured me
of the habit of going to the Alps.  I could not play any longer with dolls
after wooing such grown-up girls as Chogo Ri and Kangchenjunga.  I tried to
settle down in the Latin Quarter, finding a real home at 50 rue Vavin with
M. and Madame Bourcier, people in whom the spirit of the early days of
d'Artagnan was still alive.  There is a peculiar relation between the best
bourgeois of this type and the wandering "gentilhomme", who is seeking his
fortune in one way or another and requires a "pied … terre".  It is one which
implies great mutual respect and affection, and, alas, the qualities which
make such relations possible are  becoming very rare in the world.  Despite
all its drawbacks, there was never a better social system than the feudal,
so far as it derived from the patriarchal.  In getting rid of its abuses,
we have also got rid of the noblest springs of action and the most
congenial code of manners.  The war destroyed this relation altogether.
The Bourciers ended by being as disgusting as any other French people.
     In April I wandered from Paris to Deal and played golf
enthusiastically.  Rose was going from bad to worse.  I had begun to learn
to detect the smell of alcohol, but her cunning was so extraordinary that I
was never able to catch her in the act of drinking.  During the whole
period, in fact, I only did so twice.  The second occasion makes an
interesting story.  It shows the extent to which the obsessing demon can
conceal his presence.
     It was one evening in our house at 21 Warwick Road.  Rose and I were
sitting in my library on the ground floor in the front of the house.  The
dining-room and kitchen were in the basement, the whisky being kept in the
sideboard.  Rose said that she would go and lock up the house, and went
downstairs.  I put off my slippers and followed stealthily.  The  stair
case was partly illuminated, a shadow being cast diagonally across it.  I
heard the dining-room door open and began to descend.  Rose came quickly
back and looked up the stairs; but luckily I was in the shadow and she did
not see me.  She then went very quickly back into the dining-room, leaving
the door open, and I went down the stairs as quickly as possible, hoping to
catch her in the act.  As I reached the foot, whence I could see into the
dining-room, I heard the noise of a door being closed.  Rose was standing
by the sideboard; but there was no evidence of her act except an empty wet
glass.  During the few seconds it had taken me to descend the stairs, she
had opened the sideboard, uncorked the bottle, poured out and drunk the
whisky, and restored

{569}





















everything to its normal condition.  It was an act of prestidigitation and
nothing else.
     I was at my wits' end.  She was no better than before she went to
Leicester.  I thought I would try moral pressure and took counsel of
Fuller, Eckenstein and Gerald Kelly, as well as her doctor.  They were none
of them very hopeful, but they agreed that it might do some good to leave
her and refuse to return until guarantees were given that she had stopped
drinking.  There did really seem some hope; the power of love might work
the miracle, and certainly my love for Rose was stronger than ever,
although cut away completely from its physical support.  I have always been
peculiarly sensitive about trifles in my rapports with women; the most
trivial thing can put me off completely.  (Alexander Harvey has a superb
story, "The Mustache", in which this psychology is admirably set forth.)  I
could have borne her death more philosophically.  I was constantly tortured
by the "memory of the Rose-red hours".  I was not allowed to forget.  There
was the possibility of paradise at my elbow and there was nothing there but
the reek of hell.

          I reel back beneath the blow of her breath
          As she comes smiling to me, that disgust
          Changes her drunken lust
          Into a shriek of hate --- half conscious still
          (Beneath the obsession of her will)
          Of all she was --- before her death, her death!

I hated to go away; in my diary, April 26th I find: "Gerald at twenty-one.
Wonders I didn't put my foot down a year ago.  But Rose's tenderness is
such, and I love her so dearly."  However, I left on the twenty-eighth for
Paris.
     Late in 1908 I picked up a book.  The title attracted me strongly, "The"
"Magician".  The author, bless my soul!  No other than my old and valued
friend. William Somerset Maugham, my nice young doctor whom I remembered so
well from the dear old days of the Chat Blanc.  So he had really written a
book --- who would have believed it!  I carried it off to Scott's.  In my
excitement, I actually paid for it.
     I think I ate two dozen oysters and a pheasant, and drank a bottle of
No. III, one of the happiest champagnes in the famous --- can you say
"caterer's"?  Yes: --- I mean caterer's cellar.  Yes, I did myself proud,
for the Magician, Oliver Haddo, was Aleister Crowley; his house "Skene" was
Boleskine.  The hero's witty remarks were, many of them, my own.  He had,
like Arnold Bennett, not spared his shirt cuff.
     But I had jumped too hastily to conclusions when I said, "Maugham has
written a book."  I found phrase after phrase, paragraph after paragraph,
page after page, bewilderingly familiar; and then I remembered that in my
early days of the G.'. D.'. I had introduced Gerald Kelly to the Order
and

{570}


















reflected that Maugham had become a great friend of Kelly's, and stayed
with him at Camberwell Vicarage.  Maugham had taken some of the most
private and personal incidents of my life, my marriage, my explorations, my
adventures with big game, my magical opinions, ambitions and exploits, and
so on.  He had added a number of the many absurd legends of which I was the
central figure.  He had patched all these together by innumerable strips of
paper clipped from the books which I had told Gerald to buy.  I had never
supposed that plagiarism could have been so varied, extensive and
shameless.  "The Memoirs of a Physician", "The Island of Doctor Moreau", "The"
"Blossom an the Fruit", and numerous other more or less occult works of
fiction had supplied the plot, and many of them the incidents.  "The"
"Kabbalah Unveiled"1" "The Life of Paracelsus", "The Ritual and Dogma of"
"Transcendental Magic" and others had been transcribed, whole pages at a
time, with such slight changes as "failed" for "resulted in failure", and
occasional additions or omissions.
     I like Maugham well enough personally, though many people resent a
curious trick which he has of saying spiteful things about everybody.  I
always feel that he, like myself, makes such remarks without malice, for
the sake of their cleverness.  I was not in the least offended by the
attempts of the book to represent me as, in many ways, the most atrocious
scoundrel, for he had done more than justice to the qualities of which I
was proud; and despite himself he had been compelled, like Balaam, to
prophesy concerning me.  He attributed to me certain characteristics which
he meant to represent as abominable, but were actually superb.
     He represented me as having treated my wife as Dumas makes Cagliostro
treat his, with the object of producing homunculi, artificial living human
beings --- "Was it for these vile monstrosities that Margot was sacrificed
in all her loveliness?"  Well, comeliness is a cheap after all.  To
discover the secret of life, who would not pitch two thirds of our "maudite
race" into the bottomless pit of oblivion, for which, in any case, they are
bound?
     "The Magician" was, in fact, an appreciation of my genius such as I had
never dreamed of inspiring.  It showed me how sublime were my ambitions and
reassured me on a point which sometimes worried me --- whether my work was
worth while in a worldly sense.  I had at times feared lest, superbly as my
science had satisfied my own soul, it might yet miss the mark of making
mankind master of its destiny.
     Well, Maugham had had his fun with me; I would have mine with him.  I
wrote an article for "Vanity Fair" (December 30th, 1908) in which I disclosed
the method by which the book had been manufactured and gave parallel
passages.  Frank Harris would not believe that I was serious.  He swore I
must be making it up.  He could not believe that any man would have the
impudence to publish such strings of plagiarism.  I had to bring a little
library

{571}


        1   WEH note: Itself a plagiarism entire!

















round to the office to prove my proposition, and Harris sat and stared, and
gasped like a fish at each fresh outrage.  He cut down the article to two
and a half pages, but even so it was the most damning exposure of a
literary crime that had ever been known.  No author of even mediocre repute
had ever risked his reputation by such flagrant "stupra".
     Maugham took my riposte in good part.  We met by chance a few weeks
later, and he merely remarked that there were many thefts besides those
which I had pointed out.  I told him that Harris had cut down my article by
two thirds for lack of space.  "I almost wish", I said, "that you were an
important writer."
     I had begun, I do not in the least remember how, to try my hand at
short stories.  Even today having written more than seventy such, I do not
quite understand why this form of art should appeal to me.  I take fits of
it.  I go for a month without thinking of the subject at all, and then all
of a sudden I find myself with ideas and writing them down.  I entirely
agree that the short story is one of the most delicate and powerful forms
of expression.  It forms a link with poetry because one can work up to
ecstasy of one kind or another in a more lyric manner than is possible in a
novel; the emotion evoked is doubtless more limited, but it can be made for
this very reason better defined.  The ecstasy of "Wuthering Heights", "The"
"House with the Green Shutters" and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" is altogether
on a larger scale.  It is built up of more and more varied material and it
is evidently possible to obtain a great general effect.  On the other hand,
the novel loses in poignancy.  Such incidents as the hand at the window in
"Wuthering Heights" and Mrs. Gourlay's exclamation in Douglas's masterpiece
are almost out of keeping with the general plan.
     In Paris I wrote "The Soul Hunter", the diary of an insane doctor who
has drugged his enemy, certified his death, got possession of the corpse,
embedded it in plaster of Paris, and vivisects the brain in order to
discover the seat of the soul --- a nice Christmassy idea.
     Paris disgusted me.  I tried to find peace at Morˆt, but found only
boredom, and went off to Venice with a bad throat which gave me the idea of
the story "Cancer?"  In this a distinguished painter imagines himself to
have cancer of the throat --- and anywhere else of which he is reminded by
some trifling irritation.  (EugŠne CarriŠre is doubtless responsible in
part for the theme.)  He works himself into all kinds of mental fever, but
luckily goes to a doctor --- drawn from my own doctor, Edmund L. Gros, the
famous American physician of Paris --- who pronounces him neurasthenic but
otherwise healthy and prescribes a motoring tour, sending his own brother
to take charge of the patient.  They reach the Pyrenees.  He is so
exhilarated that he can think of nothing better to do than cut his throat.
Another Christmassy idea.
     Venice bored me as badly as Morˆt.  That was, in fact, the essence of
my

{572}




















stories: that I was incurably sad about Rose.  So I got back to Paris and
forgot my sorrows in the kindness of Nina Olivier and various friends.  I
wrote "The Dream Circean".  This is a bigger and better story than either
of the others.  A young man full of romantic ideas of honour and purity has
an adventure in which he rescues a girl from the malice of her mother.
This involves a fight with the servant.  But after he has won he cannot
find the house.  He searches vainly and becomes a monomaniac.  Then he
meets Eliphas L‚vi, who promises to cure him, provided that he swears never
to enter the street where he imagined the house to be as long as he should
live.  He is, in fact, cured; but one day after L‚vi's death he finds
himself in the neighbourhood of the street, and decides to walk through it
merely to celebrate the fact that he is cured, and that it means no more to
him than any other street.  Instantly the old obsession seizes him, and for
the rest of his life he searches through Paris for the girl with golden
hair, though he knows quite well that even if he found her she would be an
old woman.
     Rose's family and my friends had put pressure on her, and her father
wrote to me that I could come back, which I did; but I found that she had
simply become more cunning than ever.
     It was really beyond belief.  It had been hard to convince myself that
she was in the grip of this disease.  I had been told about it in more or
less plain terms by quite a number of people, and had merely been angry
with them.  Now, when I knew it myself, I found other people equally
incredulous.  Haynes told me that he simply could not believe the facts,
though he knew all about her two months in Leicester, and the rest.  Her
doctor told me that she would come to him and beg him, with tears in her
eyes and tones of desperate sincerity, to cure her; and all the while she
would be drinking under cover of her handkerchief.  I took her down to
Sandwich for a fortnight in June and July, but there was nothing to be
done.  One could not even watch her.  She would go out in the early hours
of the morning and appear at the breakfast table hardly able to speak.
     I went back to Paris on July 8th.  I worked on "Clouds Without Water",
"Sir Palamedes", "The World's Tragedy" and "Mr. Todd".  In particular, I wrote
the autobiographical preface to "The World's Tragedy", some ten thousand
words, at a stretch; and certain lyrics, mostly about Dorothy, of whom more
in a moment.  "Mr. Todd", as the name implies, is a personification of
death an the idea of the play is to introduce him as deus ex machina,
helping the characters one by one out of their various troubles.  The idea
sounds a good one, but apart from availing myself of my opportunities for
"double entendre" ("I was told the other day that he held a lot of land in
London and has more tenants than the Duke of Westminister!"), I could not
make much of it.  The repetition of the idea was bound to be rather
ridiculous.  It is my one failure in this period.

{573}





















     The truth doubtless is that I had used up the energy accumulated in my
wanderings, and written myself out: i.e., as far as anything big was
concerned.  I was in excellent form with lyrics and wrote several as good
as anything I had ever done.  In particular "After Judgment", to the honour
and glory of Dorothy, will stand in English literature as one of the most
passionate poems in the language.
     It was certainly time that I went for a walk in the country.  Paris is
not a stimulant to a poet of my calibre; I need to be face to face with God
and see Him, and live.  For when it is said that no man shall look upon His
face and live, the emphasis must be on the word "man".  It is the privilege
of the poet that his life is fed by direct communication with nature, as a
child in the womb of its mother.  The man who is separate from nature, and
is nourished by the gross food of his conscious impressions, produces only
second-rate stuff.  I feel the necessity of being absolutely shut off from
the external universe --- "My life is hid with Christ in God", to borrow
the phraseology of the Christian mystic.  I received my inspiration
directly, without even needing an intellectual peg on which to hang it.  My
consciously conceived work is always inferior; it only exists because when
I come to the point of actual writing, my pen runs away with me.
     So I wanted to get back to the tall timber, but I did not know where
to go.  My course was determined by the necessities of Neuburg's
initiation.  He had joined me in Paris and I proceeded to instruct him
without losing a moment.  He had taken an honours degree in medieval and
modern languages, and he could not order his dinner.  I remember his asking
for red cabbage by he name of "rouge ko-bazhe" --- which is the nearest I
can get to it phonetically.
     He had been warned against drinking absinthe and we told him that was
quite right, but (we added) many other drinks in Paris are terribly
dangerous, especially to a nice young man like you; there is only one
really safe, mild, harmless beverage and you can drink as much of that as
you like without running the slightest risk, and what you say when you want
it is, "Gar‡on!  Un Pernod1."  I forbear to remark on the result, beyond
mentioning that I took Nina and a lady whom I will call Dorothy, as she
figures under that name in numerous lyrics, to the Bal Bullier.  He had had
two double absinthes and they made him bold.  (One of my wittiest remarks
was made one Boat Race Night at the Empire when accosted by two charming
ladies.  I exclaimed to my friend, "That which hath made them bold hath
made me drunk.")
     Neuburg wished to acquire the affections of one of my two girls, but
he could not tell them apart, and he wooed them alternately in the most
extravagantly jejune fashion.  Thanks to his various phobias, he had never
made love satisfactorily to any woman in his life.  He did not know what to

{574}


        1WEH NOTE:  At the time, a particularly good brand of absinthe.
          Pernod is still widely sold, but the wormwood has been excluded
          and the proof cut drasticly from the 186 proof of absinthe.

















say or do.  He made all sorts of clumsy advances, which the girls cruelly
repressed.  Dorothy reproached him sadly:
     "Surely, Mr. Neuburg, you would not say such things to your dons'
wives at Cambridge!"
     Baffled in this direction, he made a supreme appeal to Nina by
offering her two francs and twenty-five centimes.
     We then went to our respective hotels to bed and the reaction began.
He was in bed the whole of the next day, and when I called on him the
morning of the day after that I found nothing had been done to cast a veil
over the natural results of his indiscretion.  But that was Neuburg all
over.  He was physically the filthiest animal that I have ever known.  His
gifts were supernatural.  I remember giving him a saucer to clean: it had a
very small quantity of yellow oil pint in it, left over from painting some
talisman.  He was a long while away and we went into the bedroom to see how
he was getting on.  The saucer seemed as full of paint as before, like the
widow's curse: nay, more he had repeated the miracle of the loaves and
fishes, for he had covered the whole of his dress and his person with this
paint.  It was all over the washstand, all over the walls and floor, and
even to some extent on the ceiling.  This is not a joke.  I do not offer
any explanation; I doubt if there is one.  I simply state the facts and
leave the world to admire.
     Dorothy would have been a "grande passion" had it not been that my
instinct warned me that she was incapable of true love.  She was
incomparably beautiful.  Agustus John has painted her again and again, and
no more exquisite loveliness has ever adorned any canvas.  She was capable
of stimulating the greatest extravagances of passion.  Indeed, the
transports were genuine enough; but they were carefully isolated from the
rest of life, so that she was in no way compromised by them.  At the time I
rather resented this; I was inclined to call her shallow and even to feel
somewhat insulted; but now I see that she was in reality acting like an
adept, keeping the planes well apart.  She was an extremely good friend,
though she never allowed her friendship to interfere with her interests.
In other words, she was a thoroughly sensible and extremely charming girl.
     She was, in addition, one of the best companions that a man can
possibly have.  Without pretence of being a blue-stocking, she could hold
her own in any conversation about art, literature or music.  She was the
very soul of gaiety, and an incomparable comedienne.  One of my most
delightful memories is the matching of our wits.  It was rapture to compete
with her in what we called "leg-pulling", which may be defined as inducing
someone to make a fool of himself.  We carried this out with all due regard
for honour and good feeling; we never did anyone any harm, and we often did
people a great deal of good.
     Neuburg was, so to speak, born for our benefit, and this is what we
did.  We

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began thus; I told Neuburg with the utmost delicacy that Dorothy had been
wounded to the heart by his gross manner of wooing, not only because of her
almost morbid modesty, but because she had fallen in love with him at first
sight.  I urged him to make amends by paying respectful court to her, which
he proceeded to do, she playing up to it with sublime fantasy, but
pretending the greatest reluctance to admit that she was in love with him.
Little by little she yielded and they became engaged.  (She had a husband
round the corner, but one ignores such flim-flam in Montparnasse.)
     In the meanwhile I went on the other tack and urged Neuburg to take
the obvious measures to get rid of the cause of his neurosis, and
ultimately persuaded him to go down to the rue des Quatre Vents and ask an
old friend of mine named Marcelle to undertake his cure.  No sooner had he
done this than I pretended to discover his engagement to Dorothy and
brought to him a sense of the grievous wrong which he had done her by his
infidelity.  I persuaded him that the only manly and honourable course was
to tell her frankly what he had done.  So we arranged a dinner party at
which he should do so.  She insisted on his going into every possible
detail of his misdemeanour.  Considering that he was the shyest man alive
with women and that, furthermore, he supposed her to be even more delicate
in repression, the dinner was excruciatingly funny.  I admitted with sombre
remorse my share in persuading him to disgrace himself and Dorothy took the
severest view of my conduct.  I as the older man, I in charge of his
conscience, I responsible to his parents, etc. etc.  She said she would
never speak to me again and walked home up the boulevard with Neuburg, with
me hanging on the outskirts, pleading and gesticulating to be forgiven, and
always receiving the most austere rebuffs.  At the same time she could not
forgive Neuburg either.  He took it absolutely to heart; he would never be
able to get over having insulted the fairest and dearest and purest of
God's creatures.  Of course he would never speak to me again either.
     I let him suffer for two or three days, then one afternoon I went
across to his hotel and told him that this nonsense had gone on long
enough; and it was time for him to learn something of life; I told him the
facts.  He regarded them as outrageous lies.  I pointed out a hundred
indications that they were true, but he was absolutely convinced of her
purity and my infamy.  I realized that I was wasting my breath.
     "Come across the road", I said wearily, "and see with your own eyes."
     I was almost obliged to use actual force, but he came; and there was
Dorothy, unadorned, smoking a cigarette on my bed.  The boy was absolutely
stunned.  Even with the evidence in front of his eyes, he was loth to admit
the truth.  His ideal woman was shattered thoroughly and for ever.
     The boy had suffered frightfully, but that was not my fault.  It was
the fault of his own romantic idealism; and had I not destroyed it in this
drastic way,

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he would have been the prey of one vampire after another as long as he
lived.  As it was, his physical health became superb, his nerves stopped
playing him tricks, he got rid of all his fads about food, dress and
conduct, his genius soared free of all its silly inhibitions, his magical
powers developed unhindered by the delusions bred of insisting that nature
is what one thinks it ought to be, and his relations with humanity became
reasonable.
     Peace being made, and Neuburg trained, so far as Paris offered a
suitable theatre, I determined to put him up against reality of another
kind.  He had always been accustomed to have everything come to him; he had
been allowed to assume that the world was constituted for his convenience
and comfort.  He had never met any real people at all.  He admitted, so to
speak, the existence of a baker, but he did not really understand that
bread was made with flour and that flour was made from corn by a miller
(whom he had hitherto regarded merely as the father of a miller's daughter
in a poem), and that corn was grown by actual human beings.  So I proposed
to him to walk through the wildest parts of Spain.  We agreed to start from
Bayonne with less than five pounds between us, and managed to make our way
to Madrid on foot, avoiding as far as possible the line of the railway.
     We left Paris for Bordeaux on the last day of July, went on to Bayonne
the next morning, and started the same afternoon for the frontier, reaching
Ustaritz that night.  Three days' walk took us across the Pyrenees to
Pamplona.  The people of the mountain villages seemed to have no experience
of strangers, especially of strangers on foot.  Of course we were not very
beautiful objects to the uninitiated eye.  I was in my climbing clothes,
save that I replaced tweed by buckskin breeches, the same pair as I am
wearing today.  As for Neuburg, I cannot say what he looked like, because
when God made him he broke the mould.
     So the people almost everywhere outside the larger towns supposed us
to be beggars.  It took me some time to discover why my requests for food
and shelter were received with such disfavour.  I spoke Spanish fairly well
as soon as I picked up my Mexican memories; but naturally the people didn't
tell me to my face what was the matter; and having been accustomed to be
treated everywhere as a great lord, it never entered my head for a moment
that they could suppose anything else.  When I found out, I said to myself:
Well, that is easy enough: I will show them some money.  However, they
still regarded us with great suspicion.  They gave us what we wanted, but
did not seem in the least happy about it.  Further investigation, however,
finally revealed that having money, they thought we must be brigands.  We
let it go at that.
     However, misunderstandings were not yet over.  Three times on the road
we were arrested as anarchists.  The soldiers could not understand why
anyone should want to go to Madrid except to kill Alphonso, and I suppose
there

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is something really to be said for this point of view.  They gave us no
real annoyance, our passports being as impressive as they were
unintelligible.  Of course they didn't really think we were anarchists, and
they would not have cared if we had been; but most of these unhappy men
were marooned for indefinite periods in ghastly districts where there was
absolutely no amusement of any kind.  To arrest us was a good excuse to
have someone to talk to.  That, incidentally, is more or less the case with
idle officials everywhere, but in countries like England and America they
have to pretend to take their silly formalities seriously, and so what was
originally no more than "d‚soeuvrement" becomes deliberate annoyance.  The
pettier minds get to enjoy the exercise of this tuppenny-ha'penny
authority, and the regulations which were perhaps instituted in an
emergency survive their usefulness, like the vermiform appendix, and become
the most tedious and irritating tyranny.
     The Pyrenean frontiers of Spain at this point are delightfully
picturesque, though the mountains are anything but imposing.  (Damn those
Himalayas; they have spoilt me for scenery.)  Some of the mountain villages
are filthier and more savage than anything even in German Switzerland.  The
people are neither polite nor picturesque --- they snarl and stink.
     We had a longish day into Pamplona, forty-two kilometres, and got the
first decent meal since leaving Bayonne.  The poverty of the country is
really pitiful.  As George Borrow recounts, the Church sucks the life-blood
of the people.  One can quite understand the moralizing of Protestant
travellers.  Prosperity varies inversely with piety.  Italy is only
flourishing today in those districts where the alimentary canal of industry
has been cleared of the taeniae of Christianity.  The only city of Spain
which holds its own with the rest of the world today is Barcelona, a
notorious hotbed of infidelity and freemasonry.  It is to the last degree
unfortunate that these things should be connected in the minds of the
unthinking with anarchy and other cults implying social disorder.  Lord
Morley was an atheist, Huxley an agnostic, and Edward the Seventh a
freemason; but it would be hard to pick three men more genuinely
enlightened or more truly conservative.
     From Pamplona it is three days' easy walking to Logrono.  We left our
hotel after dinner and walked in the cool of the night about ten kilometres
to a place which we christened "Bats' Culvert" in honour of our shelter.
It was big enough almost to be called a tunnel.  Delightfully warm and dry,
I do not blame the bats for their choice of habitation.
     The road to Logrono is very varied and picturesque.  In particular
there is one fine rock peak which reminded me of Tryfan.  We found the days
terribly hot and dusty.  In order to test our endurance to the highest
point, we talked to each other about the ices of Trinity College kitchen,
which are the best in the world, with those of Rumpelmayer in Paris for a
poor second, and the rest absolutely nowhere.  The walk did me all the good
imaginable,

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but the diet was a little too much for my young friend, who developed
chronic indigestion.
     The people live in the most poverty-stricken circumstances; they
cannot even understand that there may be others differently situated.  In
one place they told us at the hotel that they could give us nothing
whatever to eat.  The courtyard was running wild with poultry, and I told
the woman to slay a couple of birds and roast them.  It must have taken me
a good quarter of an hour to get it into her head that this was a serious
order, and by the time the meal was served the entire village had collected
to see the eccentric millionaires who spent one and fourpence on food at a
stroke.
     Logrono will always live in my memory.  The situation of the town is
very impressive, with its large lazy river, almost dry at that season of
the year, affording a measure of the landscape.  The people were, if
anything, lazier still.  The entire population seemed to be sprawling on
the terraces of the caf‚s drinking the wine of the country, a type of
Burgundy which has more than a little merit.  It is a strong, rough, harsh
wine; but the flavour of the soil is as apparent as that of peat in Irish
whiskey, and it has the advantage of being absolutely genuine.
     The spirit of Logrono was so broad and idle that it was very hard to
drag ourselves away from it, but we managed it somehow and walked in the
cool of the evening of August 9th to a place that we called "Jack Straw's
Castle", at the opening of a magnificent ravine through mighty cliffs of
earth.
     The following day the road led over a high pass, a barren wilderness
of bizarre beauty.  It was nearly nightfall when we reached a wretched
hamlet, so poor that there was really no food to be had.  There was not
even any pretence of an inn, and it was only by long negotiation and the
display of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, in the shape of a silver
dollar, that we persuaded the inhabitants to let us have a cup of goat's
milk apiece, a small scrap of dry bread, and a bed in the straw in a
horribly dirty barn.  It was a glorious meal and a very heaven of repose.
On the third day we completed the one hundred and fifty kilometres on the
road from Logrono to Soria.  The last few hours of the walk were made
splendid by the thunderstorm which I have already described.
     I should have liked to stay in Soria for an unlimited time.  The town
is a stupendous relic of the rugged grandeur of the past.  The people were,
beyond all praise, sympathetic, and I cannot even begin to describe my
appreciation of the cook in our hotel.  It may have been that he was
benefited by the proverb, "Hunger is the best sauce", but I cannot help
that.
     We now found ourselves in danger of striking the main road, so we
turned aside from the direct line to Madrid and struck out for Burgo de
Osma.  Our first night was spent at a place which we called "Witches'
Kitchen Village".  We got lodgings in a house whose sinister aspect was
only surpassed by that

{579}


















of its inhabitants.  We were so doubtful about their intentions that we
barricaded ourselves for the night in the main room.  There were
considerable alarums and excursions; but when they found we meant business
they decided to leave us alone and in the morning everyone was all smiles.
We had forty-four kilometres to walk, most of the way over scrub desert
without a drop of water or a hint of shelter.  It was extraordinarily
dreary and wearisome.
     Burgo de Osma is a lovely little town tucked away in a fold of the
cloak of nowhere.  We had arrived at the psychological moment.  It was
about to celebrate its annual two days of festival.
     The smaller towns of Spain have preserved their distinct
characteristics, their "amour propre".  They are not entirely servile suburbs
of Madrid.  They do not drain themselves of their best blood to supply the
court with sycophants.  It is for this reason that, although Spain has been
torn by civil and dynastic wars, it maintains a certain rugged resistance
to the forces of autocracy on the one hand, and to revolution on the other.
     Burgo de Osma was an excellent example of the cell on whose welfare
and whose differentiation from sister cells, the integrity of the organism
depends.  The pride of the Spanish character is the most valuable factor in
its preservation.  Spain, almost alone of European countries, does not
exude a horde of emigrants upon America.  The pride of the individual is
personal, family and local as well as national.  He prefers haughty poverty
to servile prosperity, and this quality may yet restore him to his former
greatness, when the tide of economics flows once more in his direction,
after Europe has been ruined by the expedients which at present buttress
her artificial system of centralization and standardization.
     At the moment, Spain was deeply exercised with the matter of base
coinage.  It appears that a certain cabinet minister had a brother in
Mexico who eked out a precarious livelihood by exporting brass bedsteads.
The calibre of the uprights was such that silver pesos could be neatly
packed therein, and the influence of the minister prevented the custom
house being surprised at the weight.  These silver pesos were of the same
quality as those from the government mint; and at the then price of silver,
there was over one hundred per cent profit on each coin put into
circulation. It was quite impossible to distinguish the good money from the
bad, except that the coiners had thoughtlessly struck one dollar of Amadeo
II, who lived so long ago that his coins should have been more worn than
these were.
     As we approached Madrid we found the people increasingly suspicious
and unwilling to accept our pesos, and in the last hundred kilometres of so
it was extremely difficult to get them to take our money at all and,
therefore, to get food or shelter.  But when we came to the city itself,
instead of the nuisance reaching a climax, we found that it disappeared
altogether.  The

{580}




















Madrilenes were not going to worry their heads as to whether money was good
or bad.  It doesn't matter, they argued, so long as we agree to take it,
and all the desperate efforts of the government to call in the bad coinage
fell flat.
     Forgive the digression!  We were at Burgo de Osma and the fiesta was
in full swing.  I enjoyed every minute heartily.  For the first time I was
able to see a bull-fight without the accretions of snobbishness when the
famous matador steps forth to exhibit his skill in the presence of royalty,
and the game is not a game but an excuse for servility and intrigue.  It
was all the difference between house football at a public school and a cup
final.  I was able to understand the direct appeal which the sport makes to
the primitive passions.
     There was no excitement and no disgust for me.  I had reached a
spiritual stage in which Sanna --- pure perception --- had ousted Vedana
--- sensation --- I had learnt to look on the world without being affected
by events.  I was able to observe what went on as few people can, for the
average man's senses are deceived by his emotions.  He gets things out of
proportion and he exaggerates them even when he is able to appreciate them
at all.  I made up my mind that it should be an essential part of my system
of initiation to force my pupils to be familiar with just those things
which excite or upset them, until they have acquired the power of
perceiving them accurately without interference from the emotions.  It is
all a branch of the art of concentration, no doubt; but it is one which has
been very much neglected, and it is of supreme importance when the aspirant
arrives at the higher levels, where it is a question of "making no
difference between any one thing and any other thing", and uniting oneself
with each and every possible idea.  For as long as anything soever escapes
assimilation there remains separateness and duality, or the potentiality of
such.  Evil can only be destroyed by "love under will"; and so long as it
is feared and hated, so long as we insist on attributing a real and
irreconcilable existence to it, so long will it remain evil for us.  The
same of course applies to what we call "good".  Good is itself evil in so
far as it is separate from other ideas.
     Through this course of initiation I was brought into great happiness.
I was able to perceive a fact which I had never guessed: that blood on the
shoulder of a bull in the Spanish summer sunlight is the most beautiful
colour that exists.  In the whole of my memories I had only one fact to set
against it; the green of a certain lizard which ran across my path on a
hillside in Mexico.  It is, in fact, very rare to see pure colours in
nature; they are nearly always mixed or toned down.  But when they do
appear they are overwhelming.



{581}























                              64


     During this walk across Spain, I had much leisure for meditation.  I
was pledged to do my work in the world, and that meant my becoming a public
character and one sure to arouse controversy.  I thought out my plan of
campaign during this walk.  I decided first of all, that the most important
point was never to forget that I was a gentleman and keep my honour the
more spotless that I was assuming a position whose professors were rarely
well born, more rarely well bred, hardly ever sincere, and still less
frequently honest even in the most ordinary sense of the word.
     It seemed to me that my first duty was to prove to the world that I
was not teaching Magick for money.  I promised myself always to publish my
books on an actual loss on the cost of production --- never to accept a
farthing for any form of instruction, giving advice, or any other service
whose performance depended on my magical attainments.  I regarded myself as
having sacrificed my career and my fortune for initiation, and that the
reward was so stupendous that it made the price pitifully mean, save that,
like the widow's mite, it was all I had.  I was therefore the wealthiest
man in the world, and the least I could do was to bestow the inestimable
treasure upon my poverty-stricken fellow men.
     I made it also a point of absolute honour never to commit myself to
any statement that I could not prove in the same sense as a chemist can
prove the law of combining weights.  Not only would I be careful to avoid
deceiving people, but I would do all in my power to prevent them deceiving
themselves.  This meant my declaring war on the spiritualists and even the
theosophists, though I agreed with much of Blavatsky's teachings, as
uncompromisingly as I had done on Christianity.
     I further resolved to uphold the dignity of Magick by pressing into
its service science and philosophy, as well as the noblest English that I
could command, and to present it in such a form as would of itself command
respect and attention.  I would do nothing cheap: I would be content with
nothing second rate.
     I thought it also a point of honesty not to pretend to be "better"
than I was.  I would avoid concealing my faults and foibles.  I would have
no one accept me on false pretences.  I would not compromise with
conventionality; even in cases where as an ordinary man of the world, it
would have been natural to do so.  In this connection there was also the
point that I was anxious to prove that spiritual progress did not depend on
religious or moral codes,

{582}






















but was like any other science.  Magick would yield its secrets to the
infidel and the libertine, just as one does not have to be a churchwarden
in order to discover a new kind of orchid.  There are, of course, certain
virtues necessary to the Magician; but they are of the same order as those
which make a successful chemist.  Idleness, carelessness, drunkenness; the
like interfere with success in any serious business, but sound theology and
adherence to the code of Hampstead as against that of Hyderabad are only
important if the man's body may suffer if his views are erroneous or his
conscience reliable.
     The conclusion of my meditations was that I ought to make a Magical
Retirement as soon as the walk was over.   I owed it to myself and to
mankind to prove formally that the formulae of initiation would work at
will.  I could not ask people to experiment with my methods until I had
assured myself that they were sufficient.  When I looked back on my career,
I found it hard to estimate the importance of the part played by such
circumstances as solitude and constant communication with nature.  I
resolved to see whether by application of my methods, purged from all
inessentials and understood in the light of common-sense physiology,
psychology and anthropology, I could achieve in a place like Paris, within
the period of the average man's annual holiday, what ad come as the climax
of so many years of adventure.  I also felt it proper to fit myself for the
task which I had undertaken in publishing "The Equinox", by fortifying myself
with as much magical force as I might be able to invoke.  The result of
this resolve will appear in its proper place.
     Our short spell of rest at Burgo de Osma sufficed me to collect in my
mind the numberless conclusions of the very varied trains of thought which
had occupied my mind during our fortnight's tramp.  They shaped themselves
into a conscious purpose.  I knew myself to be on the brink of resuming my
creative work in a way that I had never yet done.  Till now I had written
what was given me by the Holy Ghost.  Everything I did was "sui generis" and
had no conscious connection with any other outburst of my genius; but I
understood that from this time on I should find myself writing with a sense
of responsibility, that my work would be coherent, each item (however
complete in itself) an essential part of a pyramid, a monument whose
orientation and proportions should proclaim my purpose.  I should do
nothing in future that was not as definitely directed to the execution of
my true will as every step through Spain was taken with the object of
reaching Madrid; and I reflected that many such steps must seem wasted,
many leading away from the beeline, that I did not know the road and had no
idea what Madrid would be like when I reached it.  All I could do was to
take each step steadily, fearlessly, firmly and determinedly, trusting to
the scanty information to be gathered from signposts and strangers, to keep
more or less on the right road,

{583}





















and to take my chance of being satisfied with the unknown city which I had
chosen as my goal with no reason beyond my personal whim.
     This I made our march symbolize life.  There were other analogies.  We
had to endure every kind of hardship heartily and to take our fun where we
found it without being dainty.  We learnt to enjoy every incident, to find
something to love in every strange face, to admire even the dreariest
wilderness of sunburnt scrub.  We knew that nothing really mattered so long
as we got to Madrid.  The world went on very well without us and its
fortunes were none of our business.  The only thing that could annoy us was
interference with out intention to get to Madrid, though we didn't want to
go there except insofar as we had taken it into our heads to set our faces
towards it.
     All these lessons would be of value when I got to London.  I meant to
tell mankind to aspire to a new state about which I could tell them little
or nothing, to teach them to tread a long and lonely path which might or
might not lead thither, to bid them dare to encounter all possible perils
of nature unknown, to abandon all their settled manners of living and cut
themselves off from their past and their environment, and to attempt a
quixotic adventure with no resources beyond their native strength and
sagacity.  I had done it myself and found not only that the pearl of great
price was worth far more than I possessed, but that the very perils and
privations of the Quest were themselves my dearest memories.  I was certain
of this at least: that nothing in the world except this was worth doing.
We turned our steps from Burgo de Osma.  It would have been pleasant to
halt, but there was nothing to keep us.  We were glad to rest and glad to
go on.  The march to Madrid was the only thing that mattered.  So should it
be with my life.  Success should not stay my footsteps.  Whatever I
attained should restore my energies and spur me to more strenuous strides.
     We marched steadily to Aranda de Duero, Milagros, and many another
village which (to itself the centre of the world) was to me, even then, but
a milestone, and is now no more than a forgotten name which I exhume from
my diary.  The only impressions of this part of the march to Madrid are
"Big Stone Bivouac" where we tried to shelter from a bitter wind, sleeping
till the cold awoke us, and then trying to warm ourselves by exercise until
fatigue sent us once more to sleep.  An alternation of discomforts, which
was repeated half a dozen times during the night.  The memory is
delightful.  All the unpleasant incidents of the period have passed into
oblivion.
     About fifty kilometres from Madrid we passed a magnificent range of
rocks.  The smiling fertile valley does not count; it is the naked rugged
aspiration of the grim granite that leaves its marks in the mind.  It was
for the peasants to think of their fields and see nothing of the universe
but their crops and the coins which they hoarded at harvest, only to pass
into the

{584}




















pouch of the priest and pay for a parcel of earth in which they might
conceal their carcases from the eye of the vulture.
     On August the second, we found ourselves in Madrid and turned wearily
into the first hotel we came to in Puerto del Sol.  Neuburg was by this
time a pretty sick man.  He could not stand the rough food and the fatigue
and the exposure, though he stuck to it with the utmost gameness.  He had
the passive patient courage of the Jew in its fullest development.
However, there was no need for any further display of this virtue, and I
put him to bed and told him to stay there and repair his ravaged intestines
on delicate food until they were strong enough to support him through the
next ordeal.  As for myself, I was as fit as I had ever been in my life,
and appreciating the extreme barbarism of the wilderness was the best
possible preparation for swinging over to the other extreme and feeding my
soul on the refinements of art.
     As a critic of art I have curious qualifications.  My early life left
me ignorant of the existence of anything of the sort beyond Landseer's
"Dignity and Impudence".  I suppose I ought to have deduced the existence
of art from this alone had I been an ideal logician.  Such horrors imply
their opposites.  However, even in my emancipation I never discovered art
as I did literature.  It never occurred to me that there might be a plastic
language as well as a spoken and written one.  I had no conception that
ideas could be conveyed through this medium.  To me, as to the multitude,
art meant nothing more than literature.
     The first picture that awakened me was Manet's wonder "Olympe",
enthusiastically demonstrated by Gerald Kelly to be the greatest picture
ever painted.  I could see nothing but bad drawing and bad taste; and yet
something told me that I was making a mistake.  When I reached Rodin
shortly afterwards I understood him at once, because the sculpture and
architecture of the East had prepared me.  I knew that they were the
expression of certain religious enthusiasms, and it was easy for me to make
the connection and say, "Rodin's sculpture gives the impression of
elemental energy."  Yet this was subconscious.  In my poems I have treated
Rodin from a purely literary standpoint.
     As time passed my interest in the arts increased.  I was still careful
to avoid contemporary literature lest it should influence my thought or
style.  But I saw no harm in making friends with painters and learning to
see the world through their eyes.  Having already seen it through my own in
the course of my wanderings, I was the better able to observe clearly and
judge impartially.  Perhaps this circumstance itself had biased me.  It is
at least the case that I have no use for artists who have lost touch with
tradition and see nature secondhand.  I think I have kept my head pretty
square on my shoulders in the turmoil of the recent revolutions.  I find
myself able to distinguish between

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the artist whose eccentricities and heresies interpret his individual
peculiarities and the self-advertising quack who tries to be original by
outdoing the most outrageous heresiarch of the moment.
     In the galleries of the Prado there is no occasion to trouble about
such matters.  The place fills one with uttermost peace; one goes there to
worship Velasquez and Goya, not to argue.  Perhaps I was still to ingenuous
to appreciate Goya to the full.  On the other hand, there may be something
in my impression that he is badly represented at Madrid.  Much of his work
struck me as the mechanical masterpieces of the clever court painter.
Possibly, moreover, there was no room for him in my spirit, seduced, as it
was, by the vivid variety of Velasquez.  "Las Meninas" is worshipped in a
room consecrated solely to itself, and I spent more of my mornings in that
room and let it soak in.  I decided then, and might concur still had I not
learnt the absurdity of trying to ascribe an order to things which are each
unique and absolute, that "Las Meninas" is the greatest picture in the
world.  It certainly taught me to know the one thing that I care to learn
about painting: that the subject of a picture is merely an excuse for
arranging forms and colours in such a way as to express the inmost self of
the artist.

I had made several experiments with hashish since my return from China,
always with excessive precaution.  Some of these had been somewhat
unexpectedly  successful.  I found that my habit of analysing and
controlling my mind enabled me to turn the effect of the drug to the best
account.  Instead of getting intoxicated, I became quite abnormally able to
push introspection to the limit.  The result of these experiments had been
slowly sorted out and interpreted in the course of months.  I found a
striking analogy between this toxic excitement and the more legitimate
methods of mental development, but each threw light on the other.  I sat up
all one night embodying the essence of my knowledge in an essay, "The
Psychology of Hashish", of which I have already given some account.

Neuburg was well enough to get about after two or three days in bed, but it
was clear that he was in no state to encounter new hardships.  We gave up
the idea of walking to Gibraltar and on August 28th left Madrid for
Granada.  I had kept the promise of "La Gitana" and the city kept its
promise to me.  But it is not safe to stay too long on the summit of
happiness.  Two days later we went on to Ronda, almost the only interesting
thing about which is its physical geography, which twenty-four hours allows
one to absorb easily.  We went on the next day to Gibraltar.  It did not
take us long to find out that we had left freedom behind us.  It was hot;
the Levanter was blowing and taking all the marrow out of one's bones.  I
was utterly tired: I sat down.  I was perceived by a rock scorpion (as they
call the natives of the

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fortress, a detestable and despicable breed, which reminds one quite
unreasonably of the Eurasian) who saw a chance to sting somebody.  He began
by hectoring me and ended by arresting me.  When we got to the police
station, and the sergeant found that we were staying at the best hotel in
the town, and inspected our papers, we received the proper apologies; but I
didn't forget that if I hadn't been a privileged person I might have been
sent to prison for sitting down when I was tired and ill.  This is part of
the price we pay for the privilege of paying exorbitant taxes to support a
swarm of useless jacks in office.
     Of course I may be looking at this incident in a totally wrong light.
The policeman may have mistaken my act as symbolic of a wish to linger in
Gibraltar and deduced that I must be dangerously insane.  Next to Avon, it
is probably the most ghastly place on the globe.  In a previous incarnation
I either insulted a Buddha, or wounded a universal Holy King, or killed my
father and mother --- at least I can suggest no better an hypothesis to
explain my having been held up sometimes as much a four days at a time
waiting for a steamer.  The only way to keep from acute delirious
melancholia is to indulge furiously in the only two articles purchasable in
the place which even promise to palliate one's pangs.  One can buy cheap
editions of fearful and wonderful fiction and packets of the best
butterscotch.  By exhibiting these two drugs continuously, one can produce
in oneself a kind of coma which takes one through the tedium.
     We crossed to Tangiers without delay and I revelled once more and
rejoiced to feel myself back among the only people on earth with whom I
have ever felt any human affinity.  My spiritual self is at home in China,
but my heart and my hand are pledged to the Arab.
     I had begun to train Neuburg seriously in Magick and mysticism.  The
first point was, of course, to get rid of any prejudices and superstitions.
This was not too difficult, he being a professed agnostic.  But the second
point was to train him in the technique.  This was well enough as far as
Magick was concerned, for he naturally possessed the poetic and dramatic
instincts, the sense of the fitness of gesture, and so on: and, more
important than all, it came natural to him to arouse in himself the right
kind of enthusiastic energy in the right way.
     In addition, he possessed a peculiar faculty which I have only found
in anything like the same degree in one other man in my life.  He was a
materializing medium in the strictest sense; that is, he could condense
ideas into sensible forms.  He could not do it at all by himself, because
he lacked the power to collect at one point all the available material of
the required kind, as may be done by concentrated will, and thereby to
create such a state of strain in the atmosphere that the evoked forces must
relieve it, if they possibly can, by a change of state.  Just so carbon
dioxide, if forced into a closed cylinder

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below the critical temperature, relieves the intolerable pressure by
liquefying.  Here the carbon dioxide corresponds to the invisible forces in
the magical atmosphere, separated from its other components, collected in
one place, confined and directed by the Magician.  The critical temperature
corresponds to such magical conditions as quiet and inviolability; the
cylinder to the constraint imposed by the Magician to prevent the
dissipation of his invoked ideas.
     Such indeed is an outline of the theory of calling forth spirits to
visible appearance (by "visible" we always intend audible --- too
dangerously often tangible, and too unpleasantly often capable of producing
impressions of the olfactory nerves).  In practice, however, there is
something lacking to success.
     Neuburg supplied the missing link, as I might have expedited from his
personal resemblance to that Darwinian desideratum.  There was some
substance in him which was on the borderland between the manifest world of
matter and the astral world of sensation.  In his presence I found it quite
easy to produce phenomenal phantasms of almost any idea, from gods to
demons, which I happened to need at the moment.  I had of course a very
wide experience of so-called material manifestations; but for the most part
these had been independent of my will and often contrary to it.  I have
already mentioned a number of such phenomena in connection with the Abra-
Melin Operation.  I had succeeded in suppressing them by preventing my
magical force from leaking away.  A miracle annoyed me as it annoys an
electrician to find that his current is escaping, perhaps giving shocks to
people who have strayed in its path.  His first thought is to detect and
correct the imperfection of his insulation.  Years had passed without my
magical energy breaking loose: I had persuaded it to work through the
proper channels.
     Carelessness showed itself once more in Shanghai.  I was invoking
certain forces with Soror F. in her circle.  After I had constrained them
to come, I proceeded to make a circumambulation with the object of giving
them the desired direction, and when I came to the west of the circle, I
noticed that Soror F. had profanely left her slippers inside it.  These,
not being consecrated objects, had no business there; so I pushed them
gently over the frontier with my foot.  They were seized and flung
furiously to the ceiling with such force that they broke off some of the
plaster.  There was no possibility that my foot had supplied the motive
power, even had I kicked them away in a rage instead of pushing them as
quietly as I could --- which I naturally did, to diminish the disturbance.
There had been several other minor incidents of the same sort on subsequent
occasions; but I took measures, as before, to suppress them.
     The manifestations which Neuburg helped to produce were of an entirely
different character; they occurred in conformity with my will.  I was able
to

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work  more by sight and less by faith than I had ever done before.  Even
the use of the proper material bases for manifestation, such as the incense
of Abra-Melin, Dittany of Crete, and blood, had rarely resulted in more
than "half formed faces", partial and hesitating presentations of the
desired phantom whose substance seemed to hover on the frontier of the
worlds (rather like the Cheshire cat!).  The clouds of incense used to grow
denser in such wise as rather to suggest a shape than to show one.  I could
never be sure, even when my physical eyes told me that a form was present,
whether my imagination and my desire were not playing tricks with my
optical apparatus.  Such shapes almost always vanished when I fixed my gaze
upon them, and there was no means of saying whether this act, by releasing
them from the constraint of my will, had enabled them to escape, or whether
intelligent inspection had not simply dissipated an illusion.
      With Neuburg, on the contrary, there would be no doubt whatever as to
the physical character of the beings which we evoked.  On one occasion the
god came to us in human form (we were working in a locked temple) and
remained with us, perfectly perceptible to all our senses, for the best
part of an hour, only vanishing when we were physically exhausted by the
ecstasy of intimate contact with his divine person.  We sank into a sort of
sublime stupor; when we came to ourselves, he was gone.
     Again, at Victoria Street, a number of us were dancing round the altar
with linked hands and faces turned outwards.  The temple was dimly lighted
and thick with incense.   Somehow the circle broke and we kept on dancing,
each for himself.  Then we became aware of the presence of a stranger.
Some of us counted the men present and found there was one too many.  One
of the weaker brethren got scared, or one of the stronger brethren
remembered his duty to science --- I don't know which --- and switched on
the light.  No stranger was to be seen.  We asked Brother Lucifer --- as I
may call him! --- why he had broken the spell and each of us independently
confirmed his story.  We all agreed about the appearance of the visitor.
We had all been impressed with the same feeling that he did not belong to
the human species.
     I have mentioned two only of a very many experiences of the same kind,
choosing those which seem the most convincing and complete.  More often we
kept the manifestation at a decorous distance.  There is, of course,
extreme danger in coming into contact with a demon of a malignant or
unintelligent nature.  It should, however, be said that such demons only
exist for imperfectly initiated Magicians.  The adept ought to be able to
identify himself absolutely with all beings alike.  Invocations should
always insist on identification.  If this be dully done no harm can ensue,
just as lightning cannot hurt lightning.
     I must confess to pride and pleasure in these performances.  I had
practically abandoned the attempt to obtain material manifestations.  It
was difficult to

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do, dangerous in the doing, and dubious when done.  I had learnt to compel
a spirit to carry out my commands or instruct me on any matter of which I
was ignorant, without being at the pains to demonstrate his presence to my
senses, just as I telegraph instructions to my solicitor or write to some
scholar for information, in full faith that the results will be as reliable
as if I had taken the trouble to arrange a personal interview.  I am
inclined to think that my work with Neuburg was rather a retrogression.  It
made me hanker after phenomena, tempted me to distrust the subtler modes of
realization.
     After he had left me, I felt myself rather lost for a little while,
and I had to learn the lesson all over again that the finer forms of
manifestation are not less but more actual than the grosser; that the
intangible ideas and ineffable intelligences of the most ethereal empires
of the empyrean are stronger and more solid the less palpable they are to
the lower modes of apprehension.  It is hard to explain, and harder to
learn, that truth abides in the inmost sanctuary of the soul and may not be
told, either by speech or by silence; yet all attempts to interpret it
distort it progressively as they adapt themselves to the perceptions of the
mind, and become sheer caricatures by the time they are translated into
terms of bodily sensation.  Now the reality of things depends on their
truth, and thus it is that it is not a philosophical paradox but a matter
of experience that the search for truth teaches us to distrust appearances
exactly in proportion as they are positive.  Physical facts betray their
hallucinatory nature by their consistent refusal to comply with the
requirements of reason, and thought admits its transparent falsity by
violating its own laws at every turn.
     Materialists claim that the senses are the sole source of knowledge.
Good!  Then the most absurd and impossible idea of a madman or a
metaphysician must be derived from sensory impressions no less than a
brick.  We habitually use our mental faculties to criticize and correct our
sensory impressions.  At what point, then, does our judgment cease to be
reliable!  Which is more real; the brick, the facts indirectly learnt from
the brick, such as its chemical and electrical properties, the laws of
nature which I deduce from the sum of such facts, or the mystical moonshine
which meditation on all these evokes?
     In my great initiation in the Sahara, I was told in one vision, "Above
the Abyss" (that is, to that intelligible intuition between which and the
intellect there is a great gulf fixed), "a thing is only true in so far as
it contains its own contradiction in itself."  The initiate must learn to
use this faculty.  Its first advantage is to deliver one from the dilemma
set forth above.  We need no longer doubt that white is white, because that
proposition implicitly asserts what white is black.  Our new instrument
assures us that the whiteness of white depends on the fact of its
blackness.  This statement sounds more than absurd; it is a meaningless
assertion.  But we have already seen that the axioms of the intellect
involve absurdity.  They only impose upon us at first because

{590}


















they happen to be our personal property.  The intuitions of the Neschamah
are guaranteed by interior certainty, and then cannot be criticized for the
simple reason that they have themselves completed the work of criticism of
the most destructive kind before presenting themselves at all.  Buddhist
psychology has analysed many of these characteristics of super-
consciousness and even arranged them in an order corresponding with
spiritual development.
     I may say that I have toiled for many years to express ideas of this
order in terms intelligible to the normal consciousness and susceptible of
apprehension by the normal intellect.  Success has scarcely been complete;
only on rare occasions has the flash fixed itself on the film when the lens
was in focus and the exposure correct.  I am acutely aware that many of my
most arduous and ardent attempts to interpret mystical experience have
resulted in blurred images, sometimes perhaps grandiose and suggestive ---
but that is no compensation for obscurity and vagueness.  May I present one
effort which I myself am able to hold more or less clearly in my ordinary
consciousness?
     The Buddhists describe the closest approximation to true observation
of anything by saying that it is seen in the four-fold formless state,
which they define in the following terms: Any proposition about an object
is simultaneously perceived as being both true and false, but also neither
true nor false.  To perceive an object in this manner implies that the
observer has attained the last possible degree of spiritual development
which permits any positive point of view soever.  Such a man is but one
step from the threshold of Arahatship.  He has only to destroy this
conception of things, as is done in this four-fold formless state, to
attain the trance Nerodha-Sammapatti, in which all being and form is
absolutely annihilated, so much so that the trance is only distinguishable
from Nibbana by the fact that one comes out of it.
     It was on October 2nd, 1919 that I first attained to this Pisgah-sight
of the promised land, Pari-Nibbana.  I was spending the night in
Fleischmann's Turkish Baths in New York.  It was my custom in all such
places to practise the tenth clause of my vow as a Master of the Temple,
"To interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my
soul", by forcing advertisements and other public announcements to yield
some spiritual significance.  I would either apply the Cabbala to the words
and manipulate the numbers so as to reach a state of mind in which some
truth might suddenly spring in the silence, or I would play upon the words
as if they were oracles, or else force the filthy falsehoods of fraudulent
dollar-dervishes to transfigure themselves at the touch of my talisman into
mysterious messages from the Masters.
     I had awakened at dawn and meditated a while upon this four-fold
formless state.  I was merely trying to make out what could possibly be
meant by

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piling contradiction on contradiction as the definition did.  I did not
understand it in the least, and I had not the slightest intention of trying
to reach realization of it.  At that time all such meditation was entirely
out of my line, but accidents will happen even in the best regulated
magical circles and the following extraordinary experience knocked me
sideways.
     I quote verbatim my Magical Record:

          I was putting on my bath-robe after weighing, and turning a
     sleeve inside out, when my masseur, an holy man positively trembling
     on the brink of Arahatship, cried to me that both sides of it were
     inside, and both outside.  I replied humbly that I was seeking for a
     side that neither inside nor outside --- and then like a flash I saw
     that I had it!  Oh Glory Ineffable of Realization!  (Oh Right
     Thinking!)  For either side is both inside and outside because I can
     use it as such, and it is neither inside nor outside with regard to
     the discrimination which might be made by an uninitiate between any
     one thing an any other thing.
          Now this quality is not in the robe, which has two sides easily
     distinguishable by hemmings, machining, etc., to say nothing of
     orientation in space, but in me, and arises from my positive
     determination not to notice whether my back reads "Stolen from the
     Fleischmann Baths" or no.  Now I am not indifferent to comfort.  I
     notice whether the robe is thick or thin; its observed qualities
     depend upon a weakness in me.  All qualities soever in the robe must
     therefore disappear as soon as I am strong enough to ignore them; and
     thus any self-sufficiency or "attainment" destroys my consciousness of
     any separate existence.

     I sincerely believe that I have adequately described a state of mind,
in itself utterly incompatible with ordinary intellectual apprehension, in
the above account, and correctly observed and intelligibly expressed its
characteristics in such a way as to give at least some rudimentary idea of
one type of intuition with whose laws those of the reason have nothing
whatever in common.
     I do not wish to press the point.  In these "lonesome latter days"
there are people in the world who can scarcely define the difference
between Dedekindian and Cantorian cuts, and whose nights are not disturbed
by anxiety about the truth of Fermat's last theorem.  "A fortiori", we had
better swoop on the Straits of Gibraltar and tell a tale of Tangiers.  (I
will confine myself to mentioning that I got a charming letter from my
exquisite Dorothy, to which I replied by the poem "Telepathy" in "The Winged"
"Beetle".)
     In point of fact, we may not be much better off even here.  Most true
tales worth telling are either incredible, improper or both.  One of the
reforms which I introduced into the A.'. A.'. was the abolition of all
obligations of secrecy.  They were never useful except as temptations to
people to break

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them.  The secret knowledge has quite adequate warders.  I have learnt that
I have only to tell the truth about almost anything to be set down at once
as a liar.  It is far better to throw dust in the eyes of the animals whose
faces are turned to the ground, by casual frankness.  If you have a secret,
it is always dangerous to let people suspect that you have something to
hide.
     So much for Neuburg's capacities in Magick.  In mysticism he was
fatally handicapped by his congenital dislike of discipline, order,
punctuality and every moral quality that goes with science.  I started him
on Yoga about this time.  One incident is instructive.  His daily hour for
practising Asana arrived one day when we were crossing to Europe on the
steamer.  He refused to do his work; he could not bear to attract the
attention of the other people on board and appear ridiculous.  (Neuburg!
Ridiculous!  O all ye gods and little fishes!)  I, being responsible for
him as his holy guru, performed the practice in his stead.  He experienced
remorse and shame, which did him good; but several other incidents
determined me to impose on him a Vow of Holy Obedience.
     I must point out the virtue of this practice.  Technically it is
identical with that in vogue in the Society of Jesus.  The pupil must obey
his teacher, "perinde ac cadaver".  But the moral implication is wholly
antagonistic.  The Jesuit is taught that obedience to his superior and
humility before him are virtues in themselves pleasing to God.  In the
A.'. A.'. the superior is, so to speak, the sparring partner of the
pupil.  His function is to discover the prejudices, fears and other
manifestations of tendency which limit the pupil, by observing the
instinctive reactions which may follow any order.  The pupil discovers his
own weaknesses, which he then proceeds to destroy by analysing them,
somewhat as Freud has recently suggested --- science is always discovering
odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its
cleverness! --- as well as to master them by habitually ignoring their
inhibition.  If the superior is anything of a psychologist, he should be
able to teach the average weakling fairly perfect self-control in three
months at the outside.  Neuburg improved enormously in consequence of the
practice, and his final breakdown was due to a strain of racial congenital
cowardice too deeply seated for eradication.  He at least gained this: that
he was brought face to face with this fundamental moral deficiency in his
character.  For the rest of his life he must expiate his infirmity, that
his suffering may teach him the necessity of tackling it from the beginning
in his next incarnation.
     It was time for me to get back to England.  Neuburg was to join his
relations at San Sebastian, and as soon as he was gone, I wrote "The
Soldier and the Hunchback, ! and ?" on the thirteenth of December.  Two
days later I left Plymouth by the "Marlborough".


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                              65


     In London I put my foot down at once by taking away my daughter until
Rose agreed to follow the doctor's instructions and get rid of her
dipsomania once and for all.  She capitulated and the necessary measures
were taken.  This left me free for my proposed Retirement, which I decided
to undertake in Paris rather than London.  The details of every single
minute of my life for the next fortnight are accurately recorded in "John
St. John".  Here I need only say that the work was successful beyond all
expectations.  I not only achieved my stated object, but obtained access to
a reserve of energy which carried me on for years, performing Herculean
labours without conscious effort.  My time was in fact very fully taken up
with the preparation of "The Equinox".  I had to be constantly seeing Fuller,
who was editing my Magical Records and the vast mass of material connected
with the G.'. D.'., besides which I had my own work to do preparing the
books of instruction on a special and scientific basis.
     Besides this, I was writing a good deal of poetry.  Some of my most
important work belongs to this period.  "The Wizard Way", "the Garden of
Janus", "After Judgment" and "Bathyllus" are especially notable.  I was
seeing a good deal of Frank Harris, who was publishing much of my best work
in "Vanity Fair".  It was the first encouragement I had ever had, and in a
way it came too late, since I was already entirely disillusioned with
regard to fame.  The approval of Frank Harris was another matter; it was
something, and something very great, to know that my work gained me the
respect of the very few men on the planet who knew the difference between
Keats and Lewis Morris.  I had been recognized as a poet of the first class
by my peers and the applause of the mob would leave me as cold as its
neglect or hostility does at present.
     I kept hard at work in London until after the publication of the first
number of "The Equinox".  There was, besides, much work to be done in
reorganizing the order, to which many people were anxious to obtain
admission.  My domestic tragedy was coming to a crisis.  The disease seemed
incurable.  The doctor said that the only hope was for Rose to sign away
her liberty for two years, and as she refused to do this there was nothing
for it but for me to obtain a divorce.  There was no sense in my being
plaintiff, though I had plenty of ground.  To me it seemed a breach of the
pledge to protect one's wife, which is the first point of a husband's
honour.  It was consequently agreed that Rose should be plaintiff and the
necessary evidence was manufactured in the usual way.

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     My year was very much broken into by the vicissitudes of this wretched
business.  Rose was always begging to be taken back and it was very hard
for me to be firm.  I made things as easy as possible for her by spending
as much time with her as I could.  The marriage having been in Scotland,
there was no King's Proctor to cause one's knees to tremble, and it was
unlikely that any spies would discover that we were living together, to all
intents and purposes, the whole time the divorce was pending.
     Apart from short trips to Paris, I was in England till autumn, when I
thought it best to keep well out of the way during the actual time of the
trial.  I took Neuburg to be my chela and we left London on November 10th.
In the meanwhile I was doing comparatively little personal magical work and
my lyrics were all of lesser importance.  The fact of the matter was that I
had got to the end of my tether.  The gods had put their foot down --- thus
far and no farther!  I felt myself my life had become broken up into a
succession of insignificant adventures.  But I did not know why.  The
reason was that one cannot work beyond a certain point in a New Aeon on a
formula of the Old, and I had sealed my stubborn refusal to make "The Book"
"of the Law" the basis of my work by taking advantage of the technical excuse
that I could do nothing in the absence of the manuscript.  And that had
been lost for years.
     It was part of my plan for "The Equinox" to prepare a final edition of
the work of Dr. Dee an Sir Edward Kelly.  I had a good many of the data and
promised myself to complete them by studying the manuscripts in the
Bodleian Library at Oxford --- which, incidentally, I did in the autumn ---
but it struck me that it would be useful to get my large paintings of the
four Elemental Watch Towers which I had made in Mexico.  I thought these
were probably in Boleskine.  I decided to go up there for a fortnight or
so.  Incidentally, I had the conveniences for conferring upon Neuburg the
degree of neophyte, he having passed brilliantly through his year as a
probationer.
     I consequently asked him, and an Emmanuel man named Kenneth Ward, to
come and stay with me.  I had met Ward at Wastdale Head shortly before,
having gone there to renew my ancient loves with the creeds of the gullies.
It happened that Ward was very keen on skiing.  I had several spare pairs
and offered to give him some.  This casual circumstance proved an essential
part of the chain by which I was ultimately dragged behind the chariot of
the Secret Chiefs.  At least I thought it was a chain.,  I did not realize
that steel of such exquisite temper might be beaten into a sword fit for
the hand of a free man.
     To my annoyance I could not find the elemental Watch Towers anywhere
in the house.  I daresay I gave up looking rather easily.  I had got into a
state of disgusted indifference about such things.  Rose might have
destroyed them in a drunken fit, just as she might have pawned them if they
had

{595}




















possessed any commercial value.  I shrugged my shoulders accordingly and
gave up the search.  The skis that I had promised Ward were not to be found
any more than the Watch Towers.  After putting Neuburg through this
initiation1, we repaired to London.  I had let the house and my tenant was
coming in on the first of July.  We had four days in which to amuse
ourselves; and we let ourselves go for a thorough good time.  Thus like a
thunderbolt comes the incident of June 28th, thus described in my diary:

          Glory be to Nuit, Hadit, Ra-Hoor-Khuit in the highest!  A little
     before midday I was impelled mysteriously (though exhausted by playing
     fives, billiards, etc. till nearly six this morning) to make a final
     search for the Elemental Tablets.  And lo! when I had at last
     abandoned the search, I cast mine eyes upon a hole in the loft where
     were ski, etc., and there, O Holy, Holy, Holy! were not only all that
     I sought, but the manuscript of "Liber Legis!"

     The ground was completely cut away from under my feet.  I remained for
two whole days meditating on the situation --- in performing, in fact, a
sort of supplementary Sammasati to that of 1905.  Having the knack of it, I
reached a very clear conclusion without too much difficulty.  The essence
of the situation was that the Secret Chiefs meant to hold me to my
obligation.  I understood that the disaster and misery of the last three
years were due to my attempt to evade my duty.  I surrendered
unconditionally, as appears from the entry of July 1st.

          I once more solemnly renounced all that I have or am.  On
     departing (at midnight from the topmost point of the hill which crowns
     my estate) instantly shone the moon, two days before her fullness,
     over the hills among the clouds.

     This record is couched in very general terms, but it was intended to
cover the practical point of my resuming the task laid upon me in Cairo
exactly as I might be directed to do by my superiors.
     Instantly my burden fell from my back.  The long crucifixion of home
life came to a crisis immediately on my return to London.  At the same time
every other inhibition was automatically removed.  For the first time since
the spring of 1904 I felt myself free to do my will.  That, of course, was
because I had at last understood what my will was.  My aspiration to be the
means of emancipating humanity was perfectly fulfilled.  I had merely to
establish in the world the Law which had been given me to proclaim: "...
thou hast no right but to do thy will."  Had I bent my energies from the
first to proclaiming the Law of Thelema I should doubtless have found no
obstacle in

{596}


        1   The preparation for this was in some ways trying to the
          candidate.  For instance, he had to sleep naked for seven nights
          on a litter of gorse.
















my path.  Those which naturally arise in the course of any work soever
would have been quietly removed by the Secret Chiefs.  But I had chosen to
fight against myself for five years and "If Satan shall be divided against
Satan, how shall his kingdom stand?"  The more I strove, the more I
encouraged an internal conflict and stultified myself.  I had been
permitted to complete my initiation, for the reason that by doing so I was
fitting myself for the fight; but all my other efforts had met with
derisory disaster.  More, one does not wipe out a lustre of lunacy by a
moment of sanity.  I am suffering to this day from the effects of having
wasted some of the best years of my life in the stupid and stubborn
struggle to set up my conscious self against its silent sovereign, my true
soul.  "Had Zimri peace who slew his master?"
     The superficial reader may smile at my superstition.  Why should I be
so sure that the accident of finding an old portfolio in a loft was no
accident, but a "coup de maŒtre" struck by people, for all anyone can prove,
who have no existence except in my diseased imagination?  I could answer
the criticism by massing the evidence, but I prefer to leave that to be
studied in another place when the facts have been marshalled so formidably
that it is impossible for any reasonable being not to conclude that a
praeterhuman agency was at work on my life.  I will merely point out that
in modern science the test of truth is less the degree of the probability
of any fact, than that which is implied by the text "Wisdom is justified of
her children".  Facts are judged by their fertility.  When a discovery
remains sterile, the evidence of its truth is weakened.  The indication is
that it is not a stone in the temple of truth; it does not fit in with the
entire fabric of knowledge.  A new fact proves itself by its fitness;
isolated, it is repugnant to the continuity of nature.  When it is seen to
explain cognate difficulties, to complete imperfect conceptions; when it
leads to lives of research which bear fruit, some sixtyfold, some
eightyfold and some an hundredfold, then it becomes impregnable.  My
conviction in the reality of my magical experiences does not depend on any
single event.  It is because so many incidents, each one more or less
incredible and inexplicable when considered by itself, become inevitable
when considered in their totality and, instead of themselves requiring to
be explained, are the means of throwing light upon every obscure corner of
the cosmos.
     The mere potency of the incident of June 28th proves that its
implications were enormously beyond itself.  I was inured to miracles of
every kind and I no more allowed them to influence my action that Professor
Ray Lankester is guided in his researches by "Napoleon's Dream Book"1".  The"
"finding of the manuscript was not even a miracle; it happened in the"
"ordinary course of nature.  There was nothing so wonderfully remarkable"
"about its character.  It is this very fact that makes us ask how it is that"
"so ordinary a circumstance should have been the power to break down the"
"resolute resistance of a"

"{597}"


"        1   Such, at least, is a tenable hypothesis.  I have no direct
          evidence that he does not do so!














"
"Magician whose will had been developed to the utmost by every type of"
"training from evocation to exploration?"
"     The answer can only be that, exactly as Coriolanus, insensible to all"
"other appeals, was touched by the tears of his mother, so I, whose"
"determination had defied every form of pressure, direct and indirect, was"
"only waiting to hear the unmistakable voice of my Master, and that this"
"insignificant incident supplied the intuitive certainty: that none other"
"than he was behind it.  The finer minds among men can oppose intellectual"
"criticism to intellectual demonstration; to the subtle assurances of"
"intuitions which are perhaps imperceptible of articulate expression they"
"can find no answer."

"     I knew in myself from the first that the revelation in Cairo was the"
"real thing.  I have proved with infinite pains that this was the case; yet"
"the proof has not strengthened my faith, and disproof would no nothing to"
"shake it.  I knew in myself that the Secret Chiefs had arranged that the"
"manuscript of The Book of the Law" should have been hidden under the Watch
Towers and the Watch Towers under the skis; that they had driven me to make
the key to my position the absence of the manuscript; that they had
directed Kenneth Ward's actions for years that he might be the means of the
discovery, and arranged every detail of the incident in such a way that I
should understand it as I did.
     Yes; this involves a theory of the powers of the Secret Chiefs so
romantic and unreasonable that is seems hardly worth a smile of contempt.
As it happens, an almost parallel phenomenon came to pass ten years later.
I propose to quote it here in order to show that the most ordinary events,
apparently disconnected, are in fact only intelligible by postulating some
such people as the Secret Chiefs of the A.'. A.'. in possession of some
such prevision and power as I ascribe to them.  When I returned to England
at Christmas 1919, all my plans had gone to pieces owing to the dishonesty
and treachery of a gang which was bullying into insanity my publisher in
Detroit.  I was pledged in honour to look after a certain person; but I was
practically penniless.  I could not see any possible way of carrying on my
work.  (It will be related in due course how this condition of things came
about and why it was necessary for me to undergo it.)
     I found myself at Morˆt, on the edge of the Forest of Fountainebleau,
with nothing to do but wait.  I did not throw up the sponge in passionate
despair as I had done once before, to my shame --- I had been rapped
sufficiently hard on the knuckles to cure me of that --- but I said to the
gods: "Observe, I have done my damnedest and here I am at a dead centre.  I
am not going on muddling through: I demand a definite sign from you that I
am still your chosen prophet."  I therefore note in my diary, on January
12th 1920, as follows:

{598}





















     I am inclined to make my Silence include all forms of personal work,
and this is very hard to give up, if only because I am still afraid of
"failure", which is absurd.  I ought evidently to be non-attached even to
avoiding the Woes-Attendant-Upon-Refusing-The-Curse-Of-My-Grade, if I may
be pardoned the expression.
     And why should I leave my Efficacious Tortoise and look at people till
my lower jaw hangs down?  Shall I see what the "Yi" says?  Ay.  Question:
Shall I abandon all magical work soever until the appearance of a manifest
sign?
     Answer:
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ     No symbol could be more definite
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ     and unambiguous.
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ

     I have invoked Aiwaz to manipulate the Sticks; and, wishing to ask,
"What shall be the Sign?" got instantly the reference in CCXX to Our Lady
Babalon: "... the omnipresence of my body."  But this is not quite clear; I
took it mentally as referring to the expected arrival of Our Lady, but it
might mean a trance, or almost anything.  So I will ask "Yi", as my last
magical act for the time being.
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ     I think this means the arrival of
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ     our Lady.  I have serious doubts
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ     whether the hexagram should not
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ     have been:
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ

              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ     which would have certainly meant
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ     that.  That I should doubt anything
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ     is absurd: I shall know the Sign,
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ     without fail.  And herewith I close
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ     the Record and await that Sign.
              ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ

The next entry is dated Sunday, February 1st.

     Kindly read over the entry of Jan. 12th with care exceeding.  Now
then:  On Friday, Jan. 30th, I went to Paris to buy pencils, Mandarin, a
Palette, Napoleon Brandy, canvases and other appurtenances of the artist's
dismal trade.  I took occasion to call upon an old mistress of mine, Jane
Ch‚ron, concerning whom see "The Equinox", vol. I, No. vi, "Three Poems".
She has never had the slightest interest in occult matters and she has
never done any work in her life, even of the needlework order.  I had seen
her once before since my escape from America, and she said she had
something to show me, but I took no particular notice and she did not
insist.  My object in calling on this second occasion was multiple.  I
wanted to see the man with whom she was living, who had not yet

{599}














returned from Russia; I wanted to make love to her, and I wanted to smoke a
few pipes of opium with her, she being a devotee of that great and terrible
god.
     Consider now: The Work whereby I am a Magus began in Cairo (1904) with
the discovery of the stele of Ankh-f-n-Khonsu, in which the principal
object is the body of our Lady Nuith.  It is reproduced in colours in "The"
"Equinox", Vol. I, No. vii.  Jane Ch‚ron has a copy of this book.  On Friday
afternoon, then, I was in her apartment.  I had attained none of my
objectives in calling on her and was about to depart.  She detained me to
show me this "something".  She went and took a folded cloth from a drawer.
"Shut your eyes," she said.
     When I opened them, they saw a cloth four feet or more in length, on
which was a magnificent copy, mostly in appliqu‚ silk, of the stele.  She
then told me that in February 1979, she and her young man had gone to the
south of France to get cured of the opium habit.  In such cases insomnia is
frequent.  One night, however, he had gone to sleep and on waking in the
morning found that she, wakeful, had drawn a copy of the stele on a great
sheet of paper.
     It is very remarkable that so large a sheet of paper should have been
at hand; also that they should have taken that special book on such a
journey; but still more that she should have chosen that picture, nay, that
she, who had never done anything of the sort before, should have done it at
all.  More yet, that she should have spent three months in making a
permanent thing of it.  Most of all, that she should have shown it to me at
the very moment when I was awaiting an "unmistakable" sign.
     For observe, how closely the words of my entry of January 12th
describe the Sign, "... the omnipresence of my body."  And there She was
--- in the last place in the world where one would have sought Her.

                ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ
Note too, the   ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ
accuracy of the ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ
"Yi King" symbol  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ        ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ
                ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  for   ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ
                ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ        ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ is, of course
the symbol of our Lady, and the God below Her in the stele
      ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ
is    ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ  the sun.
      ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ

     All this is clear proof of the unspeakable power and wisdom of those
who have sent me to proclaim the Law.
     I observe, after a talk with M. Jules Courtier yesterday, that all
their S.P.R. work is proof of extra-human forces.  We knew about them all
along; the universe is full of obscure and subtle manifestations of
energy;we are constantly advancing in our knowledge and control of them.
Telekinesis is of the same order of nature as the Hertz rays or

{600}

















the radium emanations.  But what nobody before me has done is to prove the
existence of extra-human intelligence, and my Magical Record does this.  I
err in the interpretation, of course; but it is impossible to doubt that
there is a somebody there, a somebody capable of combining events as a
Napoleon forms his plans of campaign, and possessed of powers unthinkably
vast.

     If these events be indeed the result of calculation and control on the
part of the Secret Chiefs, it seems at first sight as if the people
involved had been prepared to play their parts from the beginning.  Our
previous relations, the girl's addiction to opium, my friendship with her
lover, and his interest in my work; omit any item and the whole plan fails.
But this assumption is unnecessary.  The actual preparation need not go
back further than three years, when the stele was embroidered.  We may
allow the Secret Chiefs considerable option, just as a chess player is not
confined to one special combination for his attack.  We may suppose that
had these people not been available, the sign which I demanded might have
been given me in some other equally striking way.  We are not obliged to
make extravagant assumptions in order to maintain that the evidence of
purpose is irresistibly strong.
     To dismiss this intricate concatenation of circumstances, culminating
as they do in the showing forth of the exact sign which I had demanded, is
simply to strain the theory of probabilities beyond the breaking point.
Here then are two complicated episodes which go to prove that I am walking,
not by faith but by sight, in my relations with the Secret Chiefs; and
these are but two links in a very long chain.  This account of my career
will describe many others equally striking.  I might, perhaps, deny my
inmost instinct the right to testify were any one case of this kind in
question; but when, year after year, the same sort of thing keeps on
happening and when, furthermore, I find myself able to predict, as
experience has taught me to do in the last three years, that they will
happen, and even how the pieces will fit into the puzzle, I am justified in
assuming a causal connection.
     As any billiard player knows, while a ten-shot might be fluked by a
novice, or even that he might run up a break of twenty or thirty now and
again, a consistent sequence of breaks averaging twenty-five over a series
of months cannot possibly happen by chance; this proves impugnably both
that certain management of the cue combined with judgment must result in
certain movements of the balls, and that skill and not luck determines the
success of the player.  Again, at roulette a run of one hundred on red
might happen once in a thousand years by pure chance; but if it occurred a
dozen times a night for a week it would prove that the table is furnished
with a mechanical device by which the croupier could control the fall of
the ball.

{601}




















     From this time I accepted the Law in its entirety; that is, I admitted
its absolute authority.  I was not, however, at the end of my difficulties.
Much of the book was unintelligible, and many passages, especially in
Chapter III, entirely repugnant.  I was content to leave these points to be
cleared up by the gods themselves in their own good time.  They had proved
that I could trust them to manage what was after all their own affair and
not mine.  I refrained from pushing my criticism.  I took the general sense
of the Book, so far as I understood it, as at once the starting point and
the summit of my Magick.
     This change of attitude was tremendous.  I had always been tongue-tied
in the matter of expressing my spiritual self in poetry and my lyrics had
been comparatively unimportant.  The dealt only with certain aspects of the
matter.  I could point to nothing which really represented my personality
as a whole or brought the events of my career into intelligible relation.
The more I learned to study and love "The Book of the Law", the better I was
able to integrate myself.
     "Sir Palamedes" was the most ambitious attempt to describe the Path of
the Wise as I knew it.  It is in its way almost complete, but there is no
attempt to show the necessary sequence of the ordeals described in each
section.  The last section, in which Sir Palamedes, after achieving every
possible task and finding that all his attainments did not bring him to the
end of his Quest, abandons the following of the Questing Beast; he returns,
discomfited, to the Round Table, only to find that, having surrendered, the
Questing Beast comes to him of its own accord.
     I could not pretend that this was more than a "tour de force", an
evasion of the issue.  I know now that the true solution is this: there is
no goal to be attained, as I had reached Madrid; the reward is in the march
itself.  As soon as I got to Madrid my adventures were at an end.  If I had
had to stay there I should have been bored to death, even if it had been
the city of God itself.  The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's
energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new
experience.  To stop means simply to die.
     The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.  Sir
Palamedes expressed himself fully in following the Questing Beast.  His
success (as described in the poem) would in reality have left him with
nothing to live for.  My own life has been indescribably ecstatic, because
even when I thought that there was a reward and a rest at the end, my
imagination pictured them as so remote that I was in no danger of getting
what I wanted.  I am now wise enough to understand that every beat of my
pulse marks a moment of exquisite rapture in the consciousness that the
curve of my career is infinite, that with every breath I climb closer and
closer to the limit, yet can never reach it.  I am always aspiring, always
attaining; nothing can

{602}





















stop me, not even success.  I had some perception of this in these years of
my life in London, for I wrote in "The Book of Lies": "Only those are happy
who have desired the unattainable."
     "The Equinox" should have been, on its merits, a very successful
venture.  Frank Harris had generously given me one of the best stories he
ever wrote, "The Magic Glasses".  Fuller had contributed a gargantuan
preface to "The Temple of Solomon the King" (the title of the story of my
magical career), a series of sublimely eloquent rhapsodies descriptive of
the various possible attitudes towards existence.  There were three
important instructions in Magick; the best poem of its kind that I had so
far written, "The Wizard Way"; "At the Fork of the Roads", a true and
fascinating story of one of my early magical experiences; "The Soldier and
the Hunchback ! and ?" which I still think one of the subtlest analyses
that has ever been written on ontology, with its conclusion: that ecstatic
affirmation and sceptical negation are neither of them valid in themselves
but are alternate terms in an infinite series, a progression which is in
itself a sublime and delightful path to pursue.  Disappointment arises from
the fear that every joy is transient.  If we accept it as such and delight
to destroy our own ideals in the faith that the very act of destruction
will encourage us to rebuild a nobler and loftier temple from the debris of
the old, each phase of our progress will be increasingly pleasant.
"pi alpha mu phi alpha gamma epsilon 
pi alpha gamma gamma epsilon nu epsilon tau omega rho ", "All devouerer, all begetter",
is the praise of Pan.
     In us the will to live and the will to die should be equally strong
and free, should be recognized as complements of each other, neither
complete in itself; and the antithesis between them a device invented for
our own amusement.  All energy implies vibration.  Man is miserable in the
last analysis because he fancies that when what gives him pleasure is
destroyed, as he knows it must be sooner or later, the loss is irreparable;
so he shores up his crumbling walls instead of building himself a better
house.  We all cling to outworn customs of every kind and lie to ourselves
about love when we know in our hearts that there is no more oil in the
lamp, and that the best thing we can do is to look for a new one.  We are
afraid to lose whatever we have.  We have not the sense to see that
whatever it may be, it is bound to go sooner or later, that when it does
its place will be filled by something just as good, and nothing is more
stupid than to try to set back the sun upon the dial of Ahaz.
     As soon as we learn that everything is only half, that it implies its
opposite, we can let ourselves go with a light heart, finding just as much
fun in the red leaves of autumn as in the green leaves of spring.  What is
interesting is the complete cycle.  Life itself would be deplorably petty
were it not consecrated by the fact of its incomprehensibility and
dignified by the certainty that however petty, futile, baroque and
contemptible its career may

{603}



















be, it must close in the sublime sacrament of death.  As it is written in
"The Book of the Law", "-death is the crown of all."
     The supplement to the first number of "The Equinox" is a plain reprint
of my Magical Record in Paris, mentioned above.  I have omitted no detail
of my doings.  My dinners, my dalliance and my other diversions are
described as minutely as my Magick, my mantras and my meditations.  Nothing
of the sort had ever been published before.  It is a complete demonstration
of the possibility of achieving the most colossal results in conditions
which had hitherto been considered an absolute bar to carrying on even
elementary work.  It proves my proposition that the efficacy of traditional
practices is independent of dogmatic and ethical considerations; and,
moreover, that my sceptical formulae based on a purely agnostic viewpoint,
and on the facts of physiology and psychology, as understood by modern
materialists, were entirely efficacious.
     In summary, let me add that "The Equinox" was the first serious attempt
to put before the public the facts of occult science, so-called, since
Blavatsky's unscholarly hotch-poch of fact and fable, "Isis Unveiled".  It
was the first attempt in history to treat the subject with scholarship and
from the standpoint of science.  No previous book of its kind can compare
with it for the perfection of its poetry and prose; the dignity and
sublimity of its style, and the rigidity of its rule never to make any
statement which could not be proved as precisely as the mathematician
exacts.  I confess to being entirely proud of having inaugurated an epoch.
From the moment of its appearance, it imposed its standards of sincerity,
scholarship, scientific seriousness and aristocracy of all kinds, from the
excellence of its English to the perfection of its printing, upon everyone
with ambition to enter this field of literature.
     It did not command a large public, but its influence has been
enormous.  It is recognized as the standard publication of its kind, as
encyclopedia without "equal, son, or companion".  It has been quoted,
copied and imitated everywhere.  Innumerable cults have been founded by
charlatans on its information.  Its influence has changed the whole current
of thought of students all over the world.  Its inveterate enemies are not
only unable to ignore it, but submit themselves to its sovereignty.  It was
thus entirely successful from my personal point of view.  I had put a pearl
of great price in a shop window, whose other exhibits were pasted diamonds
and bits of coloured glass for the most part, and at best, precious stones
of the cheaper and commoner kind.  From the moment of its appearance,
everyone had to admit --- for the most part with hatred and envy in their
hearts --- that the sun had appeared in the slum and put to shame the dips
and kerosene lamps which had lighted it till then.  It was no longer
possible to carry on hole-in-the-corner charlatanism as heretofore.
     I printed only one thousand and fifty copies, the odd fifty being
bound

{604}




















subscription copies at a guinea, and the rest in boards at five shillings.
Had I sold a complete edition straight out without any discounts my return
would thus have been three hundred pounds.  The cost of production was
nearer four hundred.  Similar figures apply to the other nine numbers.  In
this way I satisfied myself that no one could reproach me with trying to
make money out of Magick.  As a matter of fact, it went utterly against the
grain to take money at all.  When anyone showed interest in my poetry or my
magical writings, the attitude so delighted me that I felt it utterly
shameful to have any kind of commercial transaction with so noble an
individual, and I used, as often as not, to beg him to accept the book as a
present.
     My feeling about accepting money is even more general than this; it
rasps every delicate nerve.  I feel that the world owes me a handsome
income and I have no shame whatever in taking it, provided it is a sort of
tribute.  The fortune I had inherited was perfectly all right and it never
occurred to me to inquire into its sources.  "Widowers' Houses" shocked
without convincing me.  Thinking it over, I suppose fraud and robbery "are"
the only two sources of wealth, bar exceptional cases; and I suppose that
after all the most honest and most honourable way of getting money is to
sell one's writings.
     Yet I still feel there is something very wrong about it.  Good work is
priceless and bad work is worthless.  Besides, even the best writers are
tempted to do their worst work by the fact that publishers, as a class, are
persuaded that the public prefer rubbish.  The fact is that there are
hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the
enemy.  Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and
whispers, "More money for more work."  One ought to have an independent
income or another profession.  There is hardly one first-rate writer in the
last century who has not been starved, persecuted, slandered, bullied,
exiled, imprisoned or driven to drink or drowning.
     To return to "The Equinox", there was no question of selling even that
small edition even at that pitiful price.  I have never had any idea of how
to do business.  I can make plans, both sound and brilliant; but I cannot
force myself to take the necessary steps to put them into practice.  My
greatest weakness is that as soon as I am sure that I can attain any given
object, from climbing a mountain to exploiting a beauty spot, I lose
interest.  The only things I complete are those of which (as for instance,
poetry and Magick) I am not the real author but an instrument impelled by a
mysterious power which sweeps me away in effortless enthusiasm which leaves
no room for my laziness, cynicism and similar inhibiting qualities to
interfere.
     I did try to get a few booksellers to stock "The Equinox" but found
myself immediately up against a blank wall of what I must call Chinese
conventionality.  I remember hearing of an engineer in the East who wanted
to

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built himself a house and employed a Chinese contractor.  He pointed out
that the work would be much easier by using bricks of a different size to
that which the man was making.  He obeyed, but a day later went back to the
old kind.  The engineer protested, but the man explained that his bricks
were of a "heaven-sent" size1.
     So I found that the format of "The Equinox" shocked the bookseller;
worse still, it was not a book, being issued periodically, nor a magazine,
being to big and well produced!  I said, "What does it matter?  All I ask
you to do is to show it and sell it."  Quite useless2.

     I spent my spare time in the summer, for the most part, with frivolous
friends in the Thames valley.  I sorely needed just that sort of
relaxation.  My soul was badly bruised by the ruin of my romance, but I had
a good time of a sort.  At least, one of my friends was the most amusing
person in his peculiar way that ever met.  I must tell one incident, very
instructive, as showing the ravages which can be wrought by strong
sexuality in an unbalanced mind which, on the one hand, cannot control it
and, on the other, fears it and thinks it should be suppressed.
     My friend, "Gnaggs" we will call him, had just been divorced from a
trained nurse, the woman in the case being a plump, pretty piece of pink of
the barmaid type, whom he then married.  "Gnaggs" thought his first duty
was to safeguard the morals of the woman who had just divorced him!  She
was living in a block of flats near Hyde Park.  Someone was sending him
anonymous letters about her.  One evening he joined our party --- his wife
and a few others --- when we came in from the river to dine at the Ray Mead
Hotel.  He had just received another letter, which said plainly that some
man was going to be at his first wife's flat that night.  He rushed up to
London.
     When not clamouring for chastity in language which would have seemed
to Savonarola violent and extreme, Gnaggs exhorted his wife to enjoy
herself  with any man she fancied.  Neuburg was engaged in a furious
flirtation with her, and he and I went back to Gnaggs's house with Mrs. G.
and my own inamorata.  Neuburg wanted to stay the night; and his hostess,
who was very drunk, was a greedy as he was.  But I was warned by a heavenly
vision.  I felt it in the marrow of my bones that a storm was brewing.  I
put my foot down; and though I almost had to use main force to get Neuburg
to go home, I had my way.  I was still talking to my own friend at half-
past two, when I heard the click of the garden gate and steps on the path.
The house door opened and shut with sinister softness.  There there was
absolute silence.
     A few minutes later there was a frightened scream from Mrs. Gnaggs.  I
        1   WEH Note:  This is a typical misunderstanding (by Crowley and
          the Engineer, not the Chinese contractor!).  China has had
          standards of weights, materials and money for a very long time.
          These standards were set by imperial edict, and when originally
          propagated had penalties for violation up to and including death
          by torture.  In plain words, when the Engineer demanded a change
          from the official standard, he coerced a violation of the law.
          The contractor attempted to explain by saying that the size of
          the bricks was a matter of ancient imperial law = "from the Jade
          Emperor, or spirit of the past Emperors, in Heaven".
        2   WEH Note: Possibly for the same reasons as the Chinese brick of
          the previous note.  Most countries have very different laws
          governing the sales and distribution of periodicals over books.
          For example, in the USA a periodical is not subject to sales tax,
          has a different postal rate and has provisions of constitutional
          protection quite different from those of a book.  Very likely
          this became a question of what laws to follow, not one of social
          confusion but rather conflicting statute.






threw on a dressing gown and went out.  She was standing in a kimono on

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the landing with a candle, in hysterics, leaning over the balustrade and
calling to know who was there.  I said, "It is only some beastly burglar,"
took the candle and went down.  No one in the hall.  In the dining-room, in
pitch darkness, Gnaggs was standing, trembling, as white as a fish's belly.
I lit up, called upstairs that all was well, and told him he had no
business to frighten his wife.  He seemed incapable of speech.  I got him a
drink and he gradually pulled himself together.  We started to smoke and he
told me his story.
     He had left his bicycle on the kerb some fifty yards from the entrance
to the house where his first wife lived and waited in the shadow for her
lover to come out.  The man appeared about one o'clock.  Gnaggs instantly
fell on him, left him for dead on the pavement, sprinted to his machine and
raced home.  I congratulated him on his resourcefulness in making life
interesting and got him to go to bed.  He was a good deal scared about the
police, in case he had killed the man.  We watched the papers anxiously.
     The next day a paragraph appeared.

          Mysterious midnight assault near Hyde Part.  Dr. Herpes-Zoster1,
     a prominent physician of Clyster Street, was assaulted brutally, and
     battered by a thug at the door of 606 Mercury Mansions, Iodine Street,
     Hyde Park, about one o'clock this morning.  He was discovered
     unconscious by the policemen on the beat and taken to Knocks Hospital,
     where he was found to be suffering from numerous contusions and
     serious internal injuries.  He had not been robbed and can assign no
     motive for the attack, as he is not aware that he has any enemies.  He
     had been spending a quiet evening with some old friends. Professor and
     Mrs. Phthisis.

     Once more I congratulated Gnaggs and this time quite sincerely.  It
was certainly quite improbable that the police would get on his trail, as
his victim was an utter stranger, as much to his first wife as to himself!
     I found this sort of thing added a spice to life.  Gnaggs could be
relied upon to take one out of the rut every few minutes.  Some weeks later
I went to spend the weekend with him.  I was worn out with worry and work
and had caught a bad chill.  He was out when I got to the house.  Mrs.
Gnaggs saw that I was really ill and made me lie down on the sofa in the
combination smoking-room and conservatory, and went to get shawls to cover
me up.  As she bent over me to arrange them, the door opened and Ganggs
walked in with his eternal bicycle.  He jumped to the false conclusion that
she was kissing me -- (God forbid!) --- and started a row.  I was really
too ill to do more than look on lazily, with amused contempt; but after
half an hour of recriminations, Gnaggs went out to telegraph to her father,
his lawyer and several possible allies.  She followed him out.

{607}


        1   WEH Note: Another artificial name, this time based on that
          dread but largely trivial eruptive inflammation.  The remaining
          names are suggestive as well:  "Clyster" = enema.  Mercury and
          Iodine were then used to treat sexual and skin diseases.  "Hyde"
          can be taken as a pun for hidding = a beating or for skin.
          "Knocks" = blows.  "Phthisis" = a wasting disease.  "Gnaggs" of
          course is a pun for "nags".












     Two minutes later I heard her scream for help.  I ran out and found
that he had got her by the throat.  On seeing me he let her go; she ran
screaming into the house.  He followed, swearing to kill her.  I made a
beeline for the drawing-room poker, but the room was so full of
trumpery ornaments that there was no room to swing it.  So we clinched.  We
fought our way to the hall.  I finally got him down on the staircase.  He
kicked the balustrade to splinters; but I held on.  Luckily, his hair was
very long, so that I could knock his head on the edge of a stair whenever
he tried to break away.  I begged Mrs Gnaggs and the servants to send for
help, but they were much too interested in watching the scrap.  I had to
hold him down for an hour and a half when another guest turned up and
restored peace.
     We sat down to dinner perfectly good friends.  On second thoughts he
realized that his suspicions had been absurd.  But his wife got hot as he
got cool.  During the meal she tried to kill him, first by throwing the
soup tureen and a few dishes at him across the table, and secondly with the
carving knife.  It was one of the most delightful dinners I ever ate.
     The story has no sequel.
     They squabbled and scrapped and scratched for some years, and then
went, first to Canada, then to California, and squabbled and scratched some
more.  They are back in England now, separated most of the time, and only
meeting when they feel they would like to squabble and scrap and scratch
some more.  He is madder than ever, and she has developed into a large lump
of dough.  She has caught his complaint, and divides her time between
drunken orgies with any loose fish she can find, and passionate
protestations that she is utterly pure.
     I really believe she persuades herself that the other half of her life
does not exist.  To me both extremes seem equally the debauches of an
unbalanced and uncontrolled emotionalism.  This view is confirmed by the
fact that as she advanced in flabbiness, fat and the forties, she found it
harder to attract men, and took to spasms of spiritualism.  She raves about
her "Guides" and explains the most natural events of life as parts of
various portentous plans prepared by people "from the other side".
     On August 22nd the spirit suddenly sprang up in my soul like a serpent
and bade me testify to the truth that was in me in poetry.  I knew London
would stifle me and rushed down to Maidenhead.  I spent three days in a
canoe, chiefly in the reach under the wier by Boulter's Lock.

               Choose tenderly
          A place for thine Academy.
          Let there be an holy wood
          Of embowered solitude
          By the still, the rainless river,

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          Underneath the tangled roots
          Of majestic tress that quiver
          In the quiet airs; where shoots
          Of kindly grass are green,
          Moss and ferns asleep between,
          Lilies in the water lapped,
          Sunbeams in the branches trapped
          --- Windless and eternal even!
          Silenced all the birds of heaven
          By the low insistent call
          Of the constant waterfall.
          There, to such a setting be
          The carven gem of deity,
          A central flawless fire, enthralled
          Like Truth within an emerald!
          Thou shalt have a birchen bark
          On the river in the dark;
          And at the midnight thou shalt go
          To the mid-stream's smoothest flow,
          And strike upon a golden bell
          The spirit's call; then say the spell:
          "Angel, mine angel, draw thee nigh!"
          Making the Sign of Magistry
          With the wand of lapis lazuli
          Then, it may be, through the blind dumb
          Night thou shalt see thine angel come,
          Hear the faint whisper of his wings,
          Behold the starry breast begemmed
          With twelve stones of the twelve Kings!
          His forehead shall be diademmed
          With the faint light of stars, wherein
          The Eye gleams dominant and keen,
          Thereat thou swoonest; and thy love
          Shall catch the subtle voice thereof ...

     It was given me during these days to experience fully once more every
incident in my initiation, so that I might describe them while still white-
hot with their wonder.  It is this that assures me that this poem is unique
of its kind.  Its only rival is the "Bhagavad-Gita", which, despite its
prolixity, confines its ardour to Vishvarupa-darshana.  Apart from this, it
treats of Hindu dogma and ethics.  At its best, it is a sectarian work.
"Aha!" covers all religious experience, asserts no axioms, advocates no
cut-and-dried codes.  In some

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eleven hundred lines I have described all the principal trances, from the
three types of Dhyana (Sun, Moon, Agni) and the four elements (for
instance, the Disc "like a black boundless diamond whirring with millions
of wings"), to the spiritual beings that inhabit the invisible universe,
and the Samadhic Trances, Atmadarshana and Shivadarshana.
     I have also described the moral and intellectual phenomena of
initiation and indicated the main principles on which the aspirant should
base his working.  The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian
Angel comes as the climax to these triumphs.  It is significant that I
proceed from this point instantly to declare the Law of Thelema, and give a
dithyrambic epitome of the three chapters of the Book.  I say distinctly
that this message to mankind is to be identified with the Word of my Holy
Guardian Angel.  It is only as I write this that I realize that the poet in
me perceived that Aiwaz and mine Angel were one.  Till this moment I
believed that I had reached this conclusion after many months of meditation
in the last three years and accepted it provisionally with the greatest
hesitation.
     This psychological paradox, by the way, is very frequent.  Again and
again I have made important discoveries with tedious toil only to remember,
in the hour of triumph, that I had written them down years earlier.  It
seems that I do not know what I am writing, or even understand what I have
written.
     The poem ends with "Blessing and worship to the Beast, the prophet of
the Lovely Star".  Henceforth I must be no more an aspirant, no more an
adept, no more aught that I could think of as myself.  I was the chosen
prophet of the Masters, the instrument fit to interpret their idea and work
their will.  I cannot say whether I realized this identification of myself
with the messenger of the Masters, this resolution of my complex equation
into a simple expression, in which the x of my individuality was
eliminated, made it possible for the Secret Chiefs to initiate me fully as
a Master of the Temple, three years since my prudent refusal to accept it.











{610}

























                              66


     I had no special magical object in going to Algiers, which I reached
on November 17th.  As my chela, I took Frater Omnia Vincam, a neophyte of
the A.'. A.'. disguised as Victor Neuburg.  We merely wanted to rough it
a bit in a new and interesting corner of the planet of which we were
parasites.  We hastily bought a few provisions, took the tram to Arba and
after lunch started south, with no particular objective beyond filling our
lungs with pure air and renewing the austere rapture of sleeping on the
ground and watching the stars, serenely silent above us, till the face of
sleep, kissing our eyes, hid them from us in her heavy and holy hair.  On
the twenty-first we reached Aumale, after two nights in the open and one at
a hovel that may have looked so tired on account of its sisypean struggle
to pretend to be an hotel.
     I cannot imagine why or how the idea came to me.  Perhaps I happened
to have in my rucksack one of my earliest magical notebooks, where I had
copied with infinite patience the Nineteen Calls or Keys obtained by Sir
Edward Kelly from certain angels and written from his dictation by Queen
Elizabeth's astrologer with whom he was working.  The sixth book of their
magical workings was translated by Casaubon and is one of the very few
genuine and interesting works of Magick of any period.  Much of their work
still defies explanation, though I and Frater Semper Paratus, an Adeptus
Major of A.'. A.'., have spent much time and research upon it and
cleared up many obscure points.
     The fact which stamps this working as sincere is this: over one
hundred squares filled with letters were obtained --- in a manner which no
one has quite understood.  Dee would have one or more of these tables (as a
rule 49x49), some full, others lettered only on alternate squares, before
him on a writing table.  Kelly would sit at what they called the Holy Table
and gaze into a "shew-stone" which, with some of the talismans on the
table, may be seen in the British museum.  Kelly would see an angel in the
shew-stone, who would point with a rod to letters on one of these charts in
succession.  Kelly would report, "He points to column 6, rank 31" and so
on, apparently not mentioning the letter, which Dee found and wrote down
from the "table" before him.  This seems to imply that Kelly did not know
what words would be formed.  If he did, we must assume that he knew the
position of each of the 2,401 letters in each of the tables, which seems a
somewhat surprising accomplishment.  When the angel had finished, the
message was

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rewritten backwards.  (It had been dictated backwards as being too
dangerous to communicate forwards --- each word being in its nature so
powerful that its direct communication would have evoked forces which were
not wanted at that time.)
     These Keys or Calls being rewritten backwards, there appeared
conjurations in a language which they called "Enochian" or Angelic.  It is
not a jargon; it has a grammar and syntax of its own.  It is very much more
sonorous, stately and impressive than even Greek or Sanskrit, and the
English translation, though in places difficult to understand, contains
passages of a sustained sublimity that Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible do
not surpass.  To condemn Kelly as a cheating charlatan --- the accepted
view --- is simply stupid.  If he invented Enochian and composed this
superb prose, he was at worst a Chatterton with fifty times that poet's
ingenuity and five hundred times his poetical genius.

          Can the Wings of the Wind understand your voices of Wonder?  O
     Ye! the second of the First! whom the burning flames have framed in
     the depth of my Jaws!  Whom I have prepared as cups for a wedding, or
     as flowers in their beauty for the chamber of Righteousness!  Stronger
     are your feet than the barren stone; and mightier are your voices than
     the manifold winds!  For you are become a building such as is not,
     save in the Mind of the All-Powerful.
                                             (Second Key)

     I prefer to judge Kelly from this rather than from stale scandal of
people to whom any Magician, as such, smelt of sulphur.  If, on the other
hand, Kelly did not write this, he may of course have been a common
ignorant scoundrel, one of whose abnormalities was a faculty for seeing and
hearing sublimities, just as a burglar or business man might be able to
describe St. Paul's Cathedral far better than the dean.
     There are nineteen of these Keys: the first two conjuring the element
called Spirit; the next sixteen invoke the four Elements, each subdivided
into four; the nineteenth, by changing two names, may be used to invoke any
one of what are called the thirty "Aethyrs" or "Aires".  What these are is
difficult to say.  In one place we are told that they are "Dominion
extending in ever widening circles without and beyond the Watch Towers of
the Universe", these Watch Towers composing a cube of infinite magnitude.
Elsewhere, we find that the names of the angels which govern them are
contained in the Watch Towers themselves; but (most disconcerting
disenchantment!) they are identified with various countries of the earth,
Styria, Illyria, etc., as if "aire" simply meant "clime".  I have always
maintained the first definition.  I suspect Kelly of finding Dee
unsupportable at times, with his pity, pedantry, credulity, respectability
and lack of humour.  I could

{612}




















understand that he broke out and made fun of the old man by spouting
nonsense.
     The genuineness of these Keys, altogether apart from any critical
observation, is guaranteed by the fact that anyone with the smallest
capacity for Magick finds that they work.  Prove "The Cenci" to have been
forged by Hogg and conclude that Hogg was therefore a knave, well; but do
not try to argue that, Hogg not being a poet, "The Cenci" must be drivel.  I
had used these Keys a great deal and always with excellent effect.  In
Mexico I thought I would discover for myself what the Aethyrs really were,
by invoking them in turn by means of the nineteenth Key and, skrying in the
spirit vision, judge their nature by what I saw and heard.  I investigated
the first two Keys on November 14th and 17th, 1900.  "The Vision and the
Voice" was mysterious and terrific in character.  What I saw was not beyond
my previous experience, but what I heard was as unintelligible to me as
Blake to a Baptist.  I was encouraged by the evident importance of these
results, but I found that I could no more force myself to go on to the
twenty-eighth Aethyr than I could have thrown myself from a cliff.  I
accepted the rebuff; but, while dismissing the matter from my mind, managed
to preserve the record throughout my wanderings.  I had not thought of
continuing this work for nearly nine years; but at Aumale a hand suddenly
smote its lightning into my heart, and I knew that now, that very day, I
must take up "The Vision and the Voice" from the point where I had laid it
down.
     We accordingly bought a number of notebooks and after dinner I invoked
the twenty-eighth Aethyr by means of the nineteenth Key.  When we came to
compare it with those of the twenty-ninth and thirtieth Aethyrs, we found
that it exhibited the same peculiarities of subject and style.  This is
true also of the twenty-seventh Aethyr, and so to the twenty-fourth, yet
there is a continuous advance towards coherence, both in each Aethyr itself
and as regards its neighbour.  The subject shows progressive solemnity and
sublimity, as well as tendency to fit in with those conceptions of the
cosmos, those mystic laws of nature, and those ideas of transcendental
truth which had been already foreshadowed in "The Book of the Law" and the
more exalted of my trances.
     The deduction is not that my individuality was influencing the
character of the vision more and more as I got, so to speak, into my
stride, for the interpretation of my Algerian Work made clear the meaning
of the utterly obscure oracles obtained in Mexico.  It became evident
indeed that what stopped me in 1900 was simply that my Grade did not
entitle me to go further than the twenty-ninth.  I was, in fact, told that
only a Master of the Temple can penetrate beyond a certain point.  Of
course anyone might use the Key for any Aethyr he chose, but he would
either get no vision at all or

{613}





















expose himself to deception, and that probably of the deadly dangerous
kind.

          God is never so turned away from man, and never so much sendeth
     him new paths, as when he maketh ascent to divine speculations or
     works in a confused or disordered manner, and as it adds, with
     unhallowed lips, or unwashed feet.  For of those who are thus
     negligent, the progress is imperfect, the impulses are vain, and the
     paths are dark.
                                         ("Zoroaster")

     I solemnly warn the world that, while courage is the first virtue of
the Magician, presumptuous and reckless rashness has no more connection
with it than a caricature of the ex-Kaiser with Julius Caesar.  It is
composed partly of sham pride prompted by self-love and self-doubt; partly
by the insane impulse which the extremity of fear excites.  There are
plenty of V.C.'s who won the cross, not "for valour", but for lack of self-
control over their crisis of cowardice.  Discipline automatically made
running away impossible; the only way out was to rush forward and do
whatever their innate instinct suggested.  I know two V.C.'s myself who
have no memory whatever of the act that won them the cross.
     Similar psychology often makes young Magicians forget that "to dare"
must be backed by "to will" and "to know", all three being ruled by "to keep"
"silence".  Which last means many things, but most of all so to control
oneself that every act is done noiselessly; all disturbance means
clumsiness or blundering.  The soldier may happen not to be hit as he
carries his wounded comrade through the barrage, but there is no luck in
Magick.  We work in a fluid world, where every moment is compensated at
once.  Light, sound and electricity may be shut out, and so the effects of
human thought, speech and action may divert or delay their action, but
Magick, like gravitation, knows no obstacle.  It is true that one can lift
a fallen flower from the floor and keep it on a table; but the forces are
at work all the time, and the action has been completely compensated by the
redistribution of the stresses on every material object in the whole
universe, by the shifting of the centre of gravity of the cosmos, as my
muscles sway from one state of equilibrium to another, and the flower
exerts its energies from the mahogany instead of the carpet.
     Presumption in Magick is, therefore, sure to be punished --- swiftly
and justly.  The error is one of the worst because it attracts all these
forces which, being themselves weak, are made malignant by pain and find
their principal solace in taking it out of anyone they feel they can bully.
Worse still, the hysterical expansion of the ego means the deepest possible
treason to truth.  It invites obsession by every deceitful demon.  They
puff up the pride of the fool still further; they flatter every foible,
exhort him to acts of the most

{614}



















ridiculous kind, induce him to talk the most raving rubbish and teach him
to think himself the greatest man in the world --- nay, not a man, but a
god.  He scores every fiasco as a success, takes every trifle as a token
either of his sacrosanct sovereignty or of the malice of hell whose hounds
have been mustered to martyr him.  His megalomania swings from maniacal
exaltation to melancholia, with delusions of persecution.
     I have seen several cases of exactly this kind caused by so seemingly
trivial a mistake as carelessness in consecrating the Circle for an
evocation of an inferior spirit; claiming a Grade in the Order without
having made sure of having passed every test perfectly at every point;
presuming to instruct a probationer in his work before becoming a neophyte;
omitting essential points of ritual as troublesome formalities; or even
making excuses for error of the kind by which a man persuades himself that
his faults are really due to the excess of his merits.
     I remember one man who attributed his failure to perform Asana
properly to his exceptional physical energy.  His body, said he, was
endowed with such force that he must be meant to move it --- it was all
very well for ordinary men to try to sit still, but for him it was clearly
an unnatural notion.  Five years later, he told me he had become the
strongest man on the planet and begged me to empty my revolver at his chest
if I didn't mind the bullets rebounding and breaking my windows.  I spared
my windows; besides, I hate to clean my revolver.  He then offered to take
me downstairs and watch him shoulder a motor car and run down the road with
it.  I told him that I knew he could do it and wouldn't insult him by
asking for proof.  He went away, prancing and purring.  Next day I had a
postcard from him and guessed from his shaky upstrokes what was the matter.
It chimed in with his talk.  A month passed, then I heard that he had been
diagnosed as suffering from general paralysis of the insane.  The man who
had been singled out from the herd for splendour of strength could not move
a muscle; he rolled from side to side with regular rhythm.  The man who
boasted could no longer speak; he uttered a long monotonous howl, hardly
varying by a note, hour after hour.
     It is such cases that keep me constantly on my guard against being
"too proud to fight" --- or to sweep the floor, if it comes to that.  My
Grade as a Magus of A.'. A.'., my office as the Logos of the Aeon, the
Prophet chosen to proclaim the Law which will determine the destinies of
this planet for an epoch, singles me out in a sense, puts me in a class
which contains only seven other names in the whole of human history.  No
possible personal attainment could have done this.  There are countless
initiates, especially in Asia, who have scaled very summit in the range of
spiritual success.  I should unquestionably have become insane from
satisfaction at the fulfilment of my utmost aspirations having been granted
to me

{615}





















so superlatively beyond imagination conceived, but for (as I said before)
"my sense of humour and my common sense".
     I never let myself forget the rocks which have baffled me: the Coolin
Crack on Beachy Head (curse it!), the direct way up the Deep Ghyll Pillar
(damn it!), the east face of the Dent Blanche (blast it!).  I hardly every
plume myself even on my poetry unless I am very depressed.  I prefer to
dwell on my ignorance of various subjects --- a quite inexhaustible list;
and the superficiality of my knowledge of the few of which I know what
little I do.  I meditate on my mistakes in dealing with mankind, my
innocence of their most obvious characteristics.  My simplicity is such
that I often wonder if I am not half-witted.  On practically every matter
which men who can hardly read, and have certainly never read a book worth
reading, understand with every part of their minds better than I understand
with any part of mine, even in what I have studied with sweat, at the cost
of eyesight, sleep and digestion.
     This digression has been permissible because of its pertinence to my
Algerian initiation.  I may now resume the narrative.
     My method of obtaining "The Vision and the Voice" was as follows: I
had with me a great golden topaz (set in a Calvary cross of six squares,
made of wood, painted vermilion), engraved with a Greek cross of five
squares charged with the Rose of forty-nine petals.  I Held this as a rule
in my hand.  After choosing a spot where I was not likely to be disturbed,
I would take this stone and recite the Enochian Key, and, after satisfying
myself that the invoked forces were actually present, made the topaz play a
part not unlike that of the looking-glass in the case of "Alice".
     I had learned not to trouble myself to travel to any desired place in
the astral body.  I realized that space was not a thing in itself, merely a
convenient category (one of many such) by reference to which we can
distinguish objects from each other.  When I say I was in any Aethyr, I
simply mean in the state characteristic of, and peculiar to, its nature.
My senses would thus receive the subtle impressions which I had trained
them to record, so becoming cognizant of the phenomena of those worlds as
ordinary men are of this.  I would describe what I saw and repeat what I
heard and Frater O.V. would write down my words and incidentally observe
any phenomena which struck him as peculiar.  (For instance: I would at
times pass into a deep trance so that many minutes might elapse between two
successive sentences.)
     Such observations may be contemptuously dismissed as imaginary; but
having already shown that all knowledge is equally an illusion, the thought
is no inhibition.  Yet there are different degrees of falsity and critical
methods which are valid within their capacity.  Thus we trust our
experience of perspective to correct the crude statement of our eyesight
that the furthest house in a suburban street is smaller in various ways.
They may also verify our visions in various ways.  They must be coherent
and consistent with themselves;

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they must not contradict the conclusions of other experiences whose
warrants are identical; and before we admit that they possess any value,
they must increase our knowledge in such ways as would convince us in
ordinary life that our interlocutor was an individual other than ourselves,
and his information verifiably such as we could not have gained otherwise.
It may seem as if such conditions could never be fulfilled, but it is quite
easy to formulate them, and such visions as these under discussion are full
of internal evidence of their authenticity.
     Let me give one example.  The Angel of the twenty-seventh Aethyr said:
"The word of the Aeon is MAKHASHANAH."  I immediately discredited him;
because I knew that the word of the Aeon was, on the contrary, ABRAHADABRA.
Inquiry by the Holy Cabbala then showed me that the two words had the same
numerical value, 418.  The apparent blunder was thus an absolute proof that
the Angel was right.  Had he told me that the word was ABRAHADABRA, I
should have thought nothing of it, arguing that my imagination might have
put the words in his mouth.
     Let me illustrate the strength of such proof by material analogy.
Suppose I receive a telegram, signed Jobson (my lawyer), "Your house has
been burnt down."  If I already know this from the caretaker, Jobson is
merely confirming a known fact of which he and many others may be aware.
The telegram might have been forged.  Equally, if I have not heard from
other sources, or if I have heard, on the contrary, that all is well, the
telegram carries no conviction; it establishes a "prima facie" case for
inquiry: no more.  But if such inquiry confirms the telegram, it becomes
probable that Jobson really dispatched it, though not with complete
certainty; short of seeing him personally, the genuiness of the message is
only a presumption.
     Suppose, however, that I read "London is burnt down. Jobson."  The
statement is incredible as it stands.  Jobson and I, however, have a secret
understanding known to nobody else that any proper name in our
communications shall stand for something else, discoverable by taking a =
1, b = 2, and so on, thus giving a number whose meaning is to be bound in a
code, in which each item of my estate represents a number.  He has never
used the word "London" before.  I add it up, refer to the code and learn
that London must mean my house.  Now, whether I have already heard the news
or no, and even if investigation proves the information to be false, I may
at least feel sure that Jobson himself, and nobody else, was the author,
If, in addition, it proves true, I may be sure that on this point his
knowledge exceeds my own.  Suppose, then, that the telegram proceeds to
inform me of a number of other matters which I have no immediate means of
verifying.  I shall nevertheless be justified in assuming their
authenticity and acting on the advice in just the measure of my confidence
in Jobson's integrity and ability.
     Such is one of the simplest methods of criticizing the data afforded
by

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visions.  An isolated case need not convince one completely, and it would
be ridiculous to argue from a single test, however striking,  that all
communications purporting to come from the same source must be genuine an
authoritative.  It is the cumulative effect of repeated tests over a period
of years that gives confidence.  Incidentally, one acquires by experience
the faculty of knowing by instinct whether any given sight or sound is
genuine; just as one learns to recognize the style of a writer or painter
so that the most plausible imitations fail to deceive, hard as it may be to
say in so many words what strikes one as suspicious.
     Now, "The Book of the Law" guarantees itself by so closely woven a web
of internal evidence of every kind, from Cabbalistic and mathematical
proofs, and those depending on future events and similar facts, undeniably
beyond human power to predict or to produce, that it is unique.  The thirty
Aethyrs being, however, only second in importance, though very far away, to
that Book, the Lords of Vision were at pains to supply internal evidence,
more than amply sufficient that the revelations therein contained may be
regarded as reliable.  No doubt the proof appears stronger to me than to
anyone else, because I alone know exactly what happened; also because many
passages refer to matters personal to myself, so that only I can fully
appreciate the dovetailings.  Just so a man can never prove to another the
greatness of Shelley as fully as he feels it himself, since his certainty
partly depends on the secret and incommunicable relations of the poet with
his own individual idiosyncrasies.
     I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do
to me.  I do not regret this.  All I ask is that my results should convince
seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while
seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine.  I do not want to
father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a
faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions.  I want each man to
cut his own way through the jungle.
     We walked steadily to Bou Saƒda, invoking the Aethyrs one by one, at
convenient times and places, or when the spirit moved me.  As a rule, we
did one Aethyr every day.  We reached Bou Saƒda on November 30th; on
December 8th we started through the desert for Biskra, which we reached on
December 16th, completing the work on the nineteenth.  Our adventures will
be told later on.
     By the time I reached Bou Saƒda and came to the twentieth Aethyr, I
began to understand that these visions were, so to speak, cosmopolitan.
They brought all systems of magical doctrine into harmonious relation.  The
symbolism of Asiatic cults; the ideas of the Cabbalists, Jewish and Greek;
the arcana of the gnostics; the pagan pantheon, from Mithras to Mars; the
mysteries of ancient Egypt; the initiations of Eleusis; Scandinavian saga;

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Celtic and Druidical ritual; Mexican and Polynesian traditions; the
mysticism of Molinos no less than that of Islam, fell into their proper
places without the slightest tendency to quarrel.  The whole of the past
Aeon appeared in perspective and each element thereof surrendered its
sovereignty to Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, the Lord of the
Aeon announced in "The Book of the Law".
     These visions thus crystallized in dramatic form the theoretical
conclusion which my studies of comparative religion had led me to
adumbrate.  The complexity of the whole vast subject resolved itself into
shining simplicity, I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears the
truth in terms of Time.  I understood directly that the formula of Osiris
necessarily assumed all sorts of apparently incompatible forms as it was
applied to different conditions of race, climate and similar conditions.  I
saw also that Horus might reconcile all religions, it being possible now to
bring all countries to agree on a few fundamental principles.  Science had
practically driven prejudice into the dark.  Faith was little more than a
shibboleth which no longer influenced opinion or action.  I saw my way to
combine a few simple incontrovertible scientific principles into a Law
which would allow the loftiest aspirations to seek satisfaction in
spiritual spheres, the religious instincts to realize their sublimity
through ritual, and to assist the scientific mind to see that even the most
materialistic concept of the cosmos was ultimately mystical, that though
mind might be merely a function of matter, yet that matter might equally
well be represented as a manifestation of mind.  The sequel will show how I
fared in this ambitious adventure.
     Besides this, I became subtly aware that this Work was more than the
impersonal exploration which I had meant to make, I felt that a hand was
holding my heart, that a breath was whispering words in a strange tongue
whose accents were yet both awful in themselves and like enchantments
encompassing my essence with an energy mighty to work on my will in some
inscrutable way.  I began to feel --- well, not exactly frightened; it was
the subtle trembling of a maiden before the bridegroom.  My ardour
increased with every vision and every vision became intenser and more
intimate.  I fortified myself by magical practices.  Two or three times I
had found it difficult to get into the Aethyr; there were bars which I
understood as not to be passed by the profane.  The progressive sublimity
and solemnity made me tremble lest I should not be worthy to behold the
mysteries that lay in the future.
     So I consecrated myself by reciting this chapter of the Koran:

          Qol: hua allahu achad: alahu assmad: lam yalid:
          walam yulad: ya lam yakun lahu kufwan achad

a thousand and one times a day during the march, prostrating myself after

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each repetition.  The physical effort of this exercise beneath the blazing
sun as I marched, mile after mile, across the dusty, stony, glaring
stretches of sterile solitude was very severe; but the exhaustion of my
body and the pain of my mutinous mind as I thrashed it into submission with
the lash of the mantra, prepared me for the moment of invoking the Aethyr.
My spiritual part had nothing to fear from the garrulence of the mind which
I had flogged into dumb duty.
     In the nineteenth Aethyr appeared an Angel who revealed herself as
appointed to lead me personally through the initiation appointed.  At the
time I hardly understood this.  I could not imagine that my personal
progress could have any connection with what I still supposed to be purely
objective phenomena; but in the eighteenth Aethyr the Angel thereof
prepared me ceremonially for the ceremony.  In the seventeenth, the full
magical meaning of equilibrium was made clear to me.  "Motion about a point
is iniquity", "Breath is iniquity" and "Torsion is iniquity".  I understood
that every disturbance (which makes manifestation possible) implies
deviation from perfection.  It is for this reason that my individuality
(which distinguishes me from all other beings) involves the idea of
injustice.  Therefore, to penetrate beyond the Abyss, where iniquity cannot
exist, my personal self-hood must be annihilated.  The sixteenth Aethyr
showed me how this might be done.  My being must be dissolved in that of
the infinite.  This was symbolized by the destruction of the Demiurgus, he
being the creator of diversity.  He being destroyed, I was shown an image
of my true self; and that self vanished, absorbed in a virgin.  This told
me that the climax of my love of the infinite was identification there.
     In the fifteenth Aethyr, the vision definitely took form as a ceremony
of initiation.  I was examined by an assembly of adepts and my right to the
Grades of the Second Order admitted.  I was then allowed to be entitled to
the Grade of a Babe of the Abyss and a Master of the Temple.  They
continued the examination and refused to accept me as a Magus.  They then
instructed me in various matters and made me make certain preparations for
the vision following.
     On the afternoon of December 3rd I invoked the fourteenth Aethyr.
Here was a veil so black and thick that I could not pass through.  I tore
off layer after layer with desperate effort, while in my ears there pealed
a solemn voice.  It spoke of me as dead.

          And I still go on, struggling with the blackness.  Now there is
     an earthquake.  The veil is torn into thousands of pieces that go
     flying away in a whirling wind.  And there is an all-glorious Angel
     before me, standing  in the sign of Apophis and Typhon.  On his
     forehead is a star, but all about him is darkness, and the crying of
     beasts.  And there are lamps moving in the darkness.

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          And the Angel says: Depart!  For thou must evoke me only in the
     darkness.  Therein will I appear, and reveal unto thee the mystery of
     UTI.  For the Mystery thereof is great and terrible.  And it shall not
     be spoken in sight of the sun.

     I must explain that we had climbed Da'leh Addin, a mountain in the
desert, as enjoined by the Angel during the previous night.  I now withdrew
from the Aethyr and prepared to return to the city.  Suddenly came the
command to perform a magical ceremony on the summit.  We accordingly took
loose rocks and built a great circle, inscribed with the words of power;
and in the midst we erected an altar and there I sacrificed myself.  The
fire of the all seeing sun smote down upon the altar, consuming utterly
every particle of my personality.  I am obliged to write in hieroglyph of
this matter, because it concerns things of which it is unlawful to speak
openly under penalty of the most dreadful punishment; but I may say that
the essence of the matter was that I had hitherto clung to certain
conceptions of conduct which, while perfectly proper from the standpoint of
my human nature, were impertinent to initiation.  I could not cross the
Abyss till I had torn them out of my heart.
     I remember nothing of my return to Bou Saƒda.  There was an animal in
the wilderness, but it was not I.  All things had become alike; all
impressions were indistinguishable.  I only remember finding myself on my
bed, as if coming out of some catastrophe which had blotted out in utter
blackness every trace of memory.  As I came to myself, I found myself
changed.  I knew who I was and all the events of my life; but I no longer
made myself the centre of their sphere, or their sphere the standard by
which I measured the universe.  It was a repetition of my experience of
1905, but far more actual.  I did not merely admit that I did not exist,
and that all my ideas were illusions, inane and insane.  I felt these facts
as facts.  It was the difference between book knowledge and experience.  It
seemed incredible that I should ever have fancied that I or anything else
had any bearing on each other.  All things were alike as shadows sweeping
across the still surface of a lake --- their images had no meaning for the
water, no power to stir its silence.
     At ten minuted to ten I returned to the Aethyr.  I was instantly
blotted in blackness.  Mine Angel whispered the secret words whereby one
partakes of the Mysteries of the Masters of the Temple.  Presently my eyes
beheld (what first seemed shapes of rocks) the Masters, veiled in
motionless majesty, shrouded in silence.  Each one was exactly like the
other.  Then the Angel bade me understand whereto my aspiration led: all
powers, all ecstasies, ended in this --- I understood.  He then told me
that now my name was Nemo, seated among the other silent shapes in the City
of the Pyramids under the Night of Pan; those other parts of me that I had
left for ever

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below the Abyss must serve as a vehicle for the energies which had been
created by my act.  My mind and body, deprived of the ego which they had
hitherto obeyed, were now free to manifest according to their nature in the
world, to devote themselves to aid mankind in its evolution.  In my case I
was to be cast out into the Sphere of Jupiter.  My mortal part was to help
humanity by Jupiterian work, such a governing, teaching, creating,
exhorting men to aspire to become nobler, holier, worthier, kinglier,
kindlier and more generous.
     Finally, "Fifty are the gates of understanding and one hundred and six
are the seasons thereof, and the name of every one of them is Death."  I
took this to mean that Aleister Crowley would die at the end of this time.
The event has shown that it referred to my attainment of the Grade of
Magus, for this took place at the exact moment here predicted.
     The thirteenth Aethyr explains the work which a Master of the Temple
must do.  He is hidden under the earth and tends his garden.  These gardens
are of many kinds, but in every case he treats the roots of the flowers in
various ways.  Each flower gives birth to a maiden, save one, of which
commeth a man child who shall be Nemo after him.  Nemo must not seek to
know which flower this is.  He must tend his garden with absolute
impartiality.
     The twelfth Aethyr describes the City of the Pyramids, whose queen is
called BABALON, the Scarlet Woman, in whose hand is a cup filled with the
blood of the saints.  Her ecstasy is nourished by the desires which the
Masters of the Temple have poured from their hearts for her sake.  In this
symbolism are many mysteries concealed.  One is that if a single drop of
blood be withheld from her cup it putrefies the being below the Abyss and
vitiates the whole course of the adept's career.
     In the eleventh Aethyr is shown the fortress on the frontier of the
Abyss, with its warrior wardens.  I had thought that my ordeal was over.
But no!  I was suddenly faced with the fact that I had to cross the Abyss
consciously, understanding its nature; for when I had passed through it
there was in me no power to perceive.  I knew no more than this --- a
negative idea --- that its power was to dissipate me into dead dust.  Now
being bidden to cross it consciously, I asked the Angel, "Is there not one
appointed as a warden?"  I meant my Holy Guardian Angel, for whose
Knowledge and Conversation I had abandoned all.  The answer: "Eloi, Eloi,"
"lamma sabacthani"."  I knew that even my holiest, mine inmost self, might
not protect me from the grim abominations of the Abyss.
     We therefore changed our magical procedure.  We went far out from the
city into a hollow among the dunes.  There we made a circle to protect the
scribe and a triangle wherein the Abyss might manifest sensibly.  We killed
three pigeons, one at each Angle, that their blood might be a basis whereon
the forces of evil might build themselves bodies.

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     The name of the Dweller in the Abyss is Choronzon, but he is not
really an individual.  The Abyss is empty of being; it is filled with all
possible forms, each equally inane, each therefore  evil in the only true
sense of the word --- that is, meaningless but malignant, in so far as it
craves to become real.  These forms swirl senselessly into haphazard heaps
like dust devils, and each such chance aggregation asserts itself to be an
individual and shrieks, "I am I!"  though aware all the time that its
elements have no true bond; so that the slightest disturbance dissipates
the delusion just as a horseman, meeting a dust devil, brings it in showers
of sand to the earth.
     Choronzon appeared in many physical forms to Omnia Vincam, while I
abode apart in my magical robe with its hood drawn over my face.  He took
the form of myself, of a woman whom Neuburg loved, of a serpent with a
human head, etc.  He could not utter the word of the Abyss, because there
is no word; its voice is the insane babble of a multitude of senseless
ejaculations; yet each form spake and and acted as if aping its model.  His
main object was to induce O.V. to leave the circle, or to break into it; so
as to obsess him, to live in his life.  O.V. had many narrow escapes, and
once Choronzon made a long speech at a great pace to keep O.V. so busy
writing it down that he would not notice that sand was being thrown from
the Triangle so as to obliterate the Circle.  The torrent of obscene
blasphemy was beyond his power to keep up, concentration being impossible.
It became an incoherent series of cries; then suddenly, perhaps catching
the idea from O.V.'s mind, the demon began to recite Tom o"Bedlam.
     There was now a gap in the Circle; and Choronzon, in the form of a
naked savage, dashed through and attacked O.V.  He flung him to the earth
and tried to tear out his throat with froth-covered fangs.  O.V. invoked
the names of God and struck at Choronzon with the Magical Dagger.  The
demon was cowed by this courageous conduct and writhed back into the
Triangle.  O.V. then repaired the Circle; Choronzon resumed his ravings,
but could not continue.  He changed once more into the form of the woman
whom O.V. loved, and exercised every seduction.  O.V. stuck to his guns and
the dialogue took other forms.  He tried to shake O.V.'s faith in himself,
his respect for me, his belief in the reality of Magick, and so on.  At
last all the energy latent in the blood of the pigeons was exhausted by the
successive phantoms, so that it was no longer able to give form to the
forces evoked.  The Triangle was empty.
     During all this time I had astrally identified myself with Choronzon,
so that I experienced each anguish, each rage, each despair, each insane
outburst.  My ordeal ended as the last form faded; so, knowing that all was
over, I wrote the holy name of BABALON in the sand with my magical ring and
arose from my trance.  We lit a great fire to purify the place and
destroyed the Circle and Triangle.  The work had lasted over two hours and

{623}





















we were both utterly exhausted, physically and in every other way.  I
hardly know how we ever got back to Bou Saƒda.
    Not till the evening of the following day did I feel strong enough to
invoke the ninth Aethyr.  A surprise was waiting for me.  The nineteenth
Key contains the text of the original curse on creation.  Each phrase
formulates some calamity.  I had always shuddered at its horror as I
recited it.  But now, the Abyss being crossed, and all its horror faced and
mastered, the words of the Key suddenly thrilled with a meaning that I had
never suspected.  Each curse concealed a blessing.  I understood that
sorrow had no substance; that only my ignorance and lack of intelligence
had made me imagine the existence of evil.  As soon as I had destroyed my
personality, as soon as I had expelled my ego, the universe which to it was
indeed a frightful and fatal force, fraught with every form of fear, was so
only in relation to this idea "I"; so long as "I am I", all else must seem
hostile.  Now that there was no longer any "I" to suffer, all these ideas
which had inflicted suffering became innocent.  I could praise the
perfection of every part; I could wonder and worship the whole.  This
attainment absolutely altered my outlook.  Of course, I did not at once
enter into full enjoyment.  The habit of misunderstanding everything had to
be broken, bit by bit.  I had to explore every possibility and transmute
each base metal in turn into gold.  It was years before I got into the
habit of falling in love a first sight with everything that came my way.
     The ninth Aethyr shows this transformation symbolically.  The universe
is represented as a maiden, all innocence, adorned with all perfection.
     The remaining Aethyrs partly complete the experience proper to the
Grade which I had attained, and partly shadow forth, in strangely obscure
and formidable forms, the mysteries of the higher Grades, or rather the
guards to them.  As I advance, it became more and more difficult to obtain
the vision.  In the second Aethyr, for example, begun on the morning of
December 18th, the work had to be broken off and the invocation repeated.
Yet again I found the strain unsupportable, had to break off, and go to the
hot baths of Hamman Salahin; and I continued, immersed to the neck in the
hot sulphur spring.  The water somehow soothed my nerves, enabling me to
experience the Aethyr without physical collapse.  Even so, I could not get
to the end and only did so after over more than two days' concentrated
consecration of myself.




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