June 7, 1989 e.v. key entry by
 Bill Heidrick, T.G. of O.T.O.   --- needs further proof reading
 (c) O.T.O.   disk 7

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

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


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                               76


      Since December 1914, I have thought, time and again, how best to make
 public my political actions in America and the motives which determined my
 policy.  I should have settled any other question off-hand, but I am
 already sensitive about my loyalty to England.  I hasten to explain that
 by loyalty I mean neither admiration, approval or anything amiable of any
 kind.  I reserve the right to speak as severely as Milton, Wordsworth,
 Byron Shelley and Swinburne.  All this does not touch the point.  I am
 English, and that in a very special sense, as being the prophet and poet
 appointed by the gods to serve her.  We do not accuse Isaiah of being
 unpatriotic because he thunders against Israel.  Isaiah's motive is mine.
 There does not exist an essence which constitutes England, uncorrupted and
 incorruptible by any possible phenomenal facts.  I feel myself to be an
 integral element of this England; what I do I do for her sake.  I may have
 to scrub her face with yellow soap, open an abscess, or extirpate a
 cancer.  Working as I do in a world of spiritual causes altogether beyond
 the comprehension of common people I am liable to be misunderstood.
      The essence of my adventure in America may be put in a nutshell.
 From August to October 1914 I had tried every means to get the government
 to use me --- without success.
      In America chance showed me a way, for which I was peculiarly fitted,
 by which I might conceivably play as important a part in the war as any
 man living.  The price of success was moral courage up to the theatrical
 limit.  I must beggar myself of funds, friends and honour for the time
 being.  I doubt whether I considered this clearly beforehand; I might have
 funked if I had.  I do not want to claim undue credit for courage.  I did
 what I did because it lay in my war to do it.  My first step was the
 natural reaction to the opportunity.  But this at least I do claim, that
 when I found how loathsome my work was, what humiliations and privations
 it involved, I set my teeth and stuck to the job.
      Now then, as to the form of my report.  From time to time I sketched
 various statements intended for various readers.  I have chosen the one
 which I wrote in a moment of heartbreak, when, after my work had been
 crowned with success, I found that my two oldest friends understood me so
 little that they thought it their duty to urge me to justify my conduct to
 the world by bringing an action against the most scurrilous blackmailing
 weekly in London.  I was the angrier because at the moment I was
 practically

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 penniless, and because I hoped by submitting in silence a little longer to
 calumny, to make myself again useful to England in a similar capacity if
 certain eventualities, which I then thought not impossible, should
 materialize.
      Outraged in my most sensitive spot, I went to the Cadron Bleu at
 Fontainebleau, lunched, and began my reply to Horatio Bottomley.  I found
 myself too indignant to write, so I went back to the house in the rue de
 Neuve which I had hired and got the Ape of Thoth to take down the tornado
 from dictation.  When she wilted, her stable companion, Sister Cypris,
 took her place; and so on by turns till I was appeased, some twenty-four
 hours later.
      One circumstance conspired with another to hold up the publication,
 but some two years later, intending to go to England, I revised it, with
 the idea of publishing it immediately on my arrival as a challenge to my
 critics.  Fate once more interfered.  Bottomley's long lease was about to
 expire.  The constable he had outrun was on his heels.  The blackmailer,
 attempting to resist being blackmailed, was beginning to see one of the
 magical virtues of silence.  I couldn't publish an attack on a man in the
 witness-box which was evidently temporary accommodation on the way to the
 dock.  So I held my peace and wrote to Bottomley to tell him that I bore
 no malice and hoped he would clear himself.  I hope it comforted him in
 penal servitude to remember that one, at least, of the men whom he had
 wantonly wronged wished him well.  I wish him well no less today, but alas
 that he cannot be hurt by the hard things I happen to say.  Any alteration
 of my pamphlet would destroy the whole spirit of the spasm, the venomous
 virulence of my vituperation is the essay.  I showed the manuscript to
 poor Tommy Earp who might have been a poet if he had not been a plutocrat.
 He said that "The Last Straw" was the limit in its line and my judgment
 jumps with his.  Any considered statement, any documented plea, would lack
 the note of intensity and genuineness which my careless spontaneity and
 impulsive indignation taught me.  I shall therefore print the scorpion as
 I wrote it.  Its devil must excuse its indecorum.  The savage contempt of
 Swift composed an indictment of human nature far exceeding the utmost
 ordered combination, and my "smashing blows" at my own best friends, at
 Bottomley, obscure officials in particular, and bureaucratic blockishness,
 may, I hope, by their very lack of philosophical proportion or aimed
 animosity, demonstrate into what blind rage my normally imperturbably
 spirit is whirled when any man whom I consider worth wasting a word on
 suggests that my loyalty to England could be brought in doubt by any
 aggregation of protoplasm whose intellectual level is above that of a
 Woodrow Wilson himself.

                       THE LAST STRAW

     It is a shameful fact that in July 1914 there was an Englishman so
     dirtily

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     degenerate --- I quote the Patriot Bottomley --- that he was engaged
     in solitary climbs among the High Alps, daring native and foreigner,
     professional and amateur, to follow him.  He did not do this to annoy
     anybody; he had too often already exposed the cowardice of the moneyed
     "Herren" of the English alpine Club; but he wanted to encourage the
     younger generation to climb alone, and to keep himself in good
     training for his third expedition to the Himalayan Mountains, which he
     intended to make in 1915.
          The dirty degenerate, whom I shall hereafter designate by the
     first personal pronoun, had the idea that the war was a serious
     matter.  He thought that he had ideas and virility, and that his
     country needed him.
          The event indicates his fatuity.  Descending the Jungfrau by the
     Rothsthal with a bruised toenail, for which it is not altogether fair
     to blame Messrs Dowie and Marshall, Bootmakers, West Strand, London,
     W.C., who are the best yet, and may be a pound or two on the wrong
     side of the ledger, which this advertisement should square, our
     degenerate, I mean I, went to Bern and asked the British Minister how
     to get home.  The B. M. (which does not mean Blasted Mutt) did not
     know; he said it was impossible --- there might be a train in six
     weeks.  Would Mr. Crowley write his name in a book to reserve a seat
     in that phantasmagoric train?  Mr Crowley wrote it; the B. M. might be
     hard up one day and get a meal --- or an annuity --- by selling my
     autograph.
          But he didn't wait for the train.  The "British Committee" ---
     headed by two gentlemen who sounded like a vaudeville combination, Mr
     Whitehead and Mr Waggett --- asked Mr Crowley what he would do.  Mr
     Crowley would go to London; if there was a train, good; if not, he
     could walk and swim.
          Luck --- no, common sense! --- favoured him; while twenty
     thousand English, and thirty thousand American, millionaires were
     stuck in dirty Switzerland for months, because they hadn't the sense
     to take a train to Paris, unable to cash their drafts, and living on
     the charity of calculating thieves --- I refer to the Swiss hoteliers
     --- he walked down to the station and took the train to Paris, as
     aforesaid.
          I spent a week in Paris.  I was amazed at the sang-froid of the
     people.  They turned from peace to war as simply as a man turns over
     in his sleep.  I arrived in London --- I found that Bernard Shaw had
     told the truth.  Twenty years of cheap newspapers had turned the
     British from the most stolid to the most hysterical nation in Europe.
     According to them the German was a monster like a bogey in a
     nightmare, and it was useless to struggle against him.  At the same
     time, he was a coward who did not dare to advance unless behind a
     screen of Belgian nuns.  He had no discipline, no morale, nothing but
     a talent for rape, torture, petty theft.  His first line troops had
     been annihilated to a man by "les braves Belges", whom we had hitherto
     only considered as

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persons who cut off the hands and feet of the innocent natives of the Congo
basin.
     I was more than ever convinced that I was needed by my country, which
is England, and to hell with everybody.  In my excitement, I had the
hallucination that England needed men.  I found, on the contrary, that the
guiding stars of England needed "business as usual".
     I was interrupted in my futile attempts to fight for my country as I
had been interrupted in my attempts to climb the Alps, this time by an
attack of phlebitis.  I lay six weeks in bed, warned that the slightest
movement might result in sudden death, and advised that in all probability
I should never be able to climb a mountain again.  The period of my illness
covered September and most of October 1914.
     At that time any man who suggested the advisability of conscription
was regarded as a traitor.  Conscription was the very thing we were
fighting.  Austin Harrison said that we were fighting for our golf and our
weekends, Raymond Radclyffe said with, as it seemed to me, somewhat more
plausibility that if we beat the Germans, it showed that the amateur was
better than the professional.
     From my sick bed I dictated an article called "Thorough" in allusion
to the plan of the Earl of Strafford in the time of Charles the First.  I
said, "commandeer every man and every munition in the country."  I said,
"This is not a continental quarrel --- this is life and death for England.
We don't want debates in the House of Commons, or even in Earlswood asylum.
We want a dictator."  No editor would publish it.
     Everyone wanted "business as usual", while Europe was overrun by
madmen, fired by commercial ambitions, as it had been a hundred years
before, fired by the military ambition of a man greater than Bloody Bill.
Napoleon, at least, stood for humanity and for civilization.  He gave
France a code of laws better than any since that which Manu gave to India.
Wilhelm offered nothing but the "Kultur" of the pig-iron-brained Herr
Professor, and the conception of woman as the "Kuh" of "Kche, Kirche und"
"Kinder".  That was what we were fighting --- not for our golf and for our
weekends.  There has been no golf since the introduction of Haskell ball
--- and if our weekends are to mean nothing but "adultry with home
comforts" (in the great phrase of Frank Harris) I think Sunday a
regrettable superstition.
     I grew tired of the heroic defence of LiŠge.  I looked at the map and
I couldn't reconcile it with the folds of our ragged line of absent-minded
beggars.  I didn't like the way in which the journalists excused our
"contemptible little army" for running away because of the treachery of
French generals who were always being shot at sunrise, and always
subsequently writing to the papers to say how much they liked the war.  My
phlebitis affected merely my left leg and the fact that I was a sharp-
shooter and an

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old artilleryman didn't interest the War Office.  I couldn't use my leg ---
could I use my brains?
     I was at dinner with an old friend, the Honourable A. B., the brother
of the Earl of C.  He mentioned that he was in the censor's office.  I
said, "What about me?  I have some little reputation as a man of letters
--- as a critic --- I am an expert in cipher --- I read and write French as
well as I write English (and the world knows how well that is) --- I have a
fair acquaintance with a dozen other languages, including Hindustani --- my
leg will keep me out of war as effectively as Mr Woodrow Wilson will keep
America --- is there nothing I can do to serve my country as it appears
that you are serving her?"
     He said, "I'm afraid you can't do anything --- you see I started in
the Navy --- I had a year or two on a training ship before I became a
barrister --- I have a locus standi.  You didn't even take honours at
Cambridge, as the Patriot Bottomley will one day suppose you to have done
--- you did not even take the ordinary degree.  You wear a short blue gown
and and extremely battered mortarboard.  You have an extraordinary
personality --- a reputation for having committed every crime from murder,
barratry and arson to quaternio terminorum.  You have the subtlest mind,the
deepest knowledge of psychology and the most unusual way of brushing your
hair in England.  I cannot hold out any hopes that any way can be found
whereby you might serve your country."
     He drank eight cups of coffee; he swallowed fifteen glasses of 1911
brandy.  But he could not make me a naval lieutenant who had forgotten the
difference between a powder monkey and a taffrail.
     "You cannot serve your country."
     I said, "Lord Kitchener has asked for a hundred thousand volunteers.
Damn this leg, but couldn't I write or talk?
     He said, "Lord Kitchener is only bluffing.  We don't want men; LiŠge
is holding out."  (This was about a month after it fell.)  "A million and a
half Russians of the steam-roller brand passed through England last night
in a first-class carriage on their way to Flanders.  They travelled from St
Petersburg to Archangel by a railway which has a single line and whose
rolling stock consists of three engines, one tied up with really
serviceable iron wire, and the others with pieces of excellent efficient
string --- and four trucks which aren't so bad, I honestly believe.  And
why they disembarked all those men in Scotland and sent them through
England in a first-class carriage with the blinds drawn, instead of sending
them direct to Dunkirk, I don't know."
     My leg and my Sunday School record alike conspiring to keep me out of
the trenches, and my deplorable lack of stupidity disqualifying me for the
Intelligence Department, I accepted an invitation to go to New York.  It
looked as though there might be fifteen or twenty million dollars in it,
and

{744}




















I had a feeling that my country, the richest in the world, would shortly be
going, cap in hand, to the savages for cowries.  I went to America by the
"Lusitania", on October 24th, 1914, expecting to stay a fortnight and return
with the sinews of war.  It did not take me forty-eight hours to discover
that my egg was addled.
     I had taken with me the equivalent of about fifty pounds in American
coinage.  As luck would have it, one of the first people I met in New York,
Mr D, whom I knew as a collector of rare books, paintings and sculptures,
including some of my own "introuvable" publications, showed an interest in
the purchase of some of my unique editions and manuscripts.  I arranged to
stay in New York until these could be sent over for his approval.  (As a
matter of fact, I had understood him as offering to purchase them all
outright.  Money was at this time of considerable moment to me.  In the
upshot, he purchased between seven and eight hundred dollars' worth of my
goods, instead of between three and four thousand dollars' worth, as I had
expected; and this disappointment left me in great straits financially, as
I had at that time no immediately available resources in England.)

     The Patriot Bottomley is in error, I pray that he may pardon me if I
indicate it.  It is his kindness to me which seeks to flatter me unduly
when he says that I took honours from Cambridge.  Posterity will
understand, on the contrary, that Cambridge has taken fresh honours from
me.  Nay, Patriot though thou be, Horatio, it is human to err.  Homer and
Jupiter have been known to nod.  The Patriot Bottomley makes a worthy third
to these.  Put I did not even take the poll degree at Cambridge.  I am an
undergraduate of Trinity College.  But I am a life member of that college;
so much so, that when the Junior Dean attempted to prevent me from
exercising my right to walk into its courts, I confronted him at the door
of the chapel and called him a coward and a liar to his face.  To rebuke
the authorities of one's college is a distasteful duty; one too often
imposed upon the modern undergraduate.  But there is in me Roman virtue and
I never shrink form a moral obligation.

     I found myself, then, in New York, awaiting the arrival of my books
and manuscripts, an event, unfortunately as I then thought, long delayed.
So I bethought me whether I could not, irrationally, immorally,
unphilosophically, with a game leg but with all my heart and brain, serve
England.
     I was furious at the stupidity of the British propaganda.  It was
worse in America than it had been in England.  At its best, it was an
exaggeration and sheer falsehood, so transparent that Woodrow Wilson
himself, to say nothing of a legion of Italian bootblacks, saw through it.
     As for the German propaganda, it was hardly noticeable.  Was it that
they did not understand the importance of America in the Wilhelmstrasse?
Was

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it that they had the good sense to rely upon the stupidity of the English
apologists to defeat their intentions?
     I had a considerable opinion of the intelligence of Germans, dating
from the time in my boyhood when Helmholtz was the great name in physics,
Haeckel in biology, Mommsen in history, Goethe in poetry, Bach, Beethoven
and Wagner in music; the time when one might say that the whole of organic
chemistry had been developed in Germany.  I had further to remember that
the German social system was considered by nearly all thinking Englishmen
as a sublime model.  German thought and action had been made immortal by
Carlyle.  German social economy had been slavishly adopted by Lloyd George
in the Insurance Act.  Great lawyers like Lord Haldane and talented errand
boys like H. G. Wells mingled their voices (of course, in the latter case,
with a somewhat cockney accent) to extol the greatness of Germany and to
hold her up as a pattern to all good Englishmen.  I reflected that Bismarck
was not exactly a fool in politics, that von Moltke had been hardly an
amateur in the art of war.  I had read von Bernhardi with admiration, both
for his intellectual ability and his moral simplicity.  I did not argue
whether or no he came from Italian stock.  Nietzsche was to me almost an
avatar of Thoth, the god of wisdom; and, whether or no he was a Polish Jew,
Germany had possessed sufficient intelligence to profit by the thwackings
that he gave her.  Yes, I was almost convinced that the German directorate
had decided to allow British hypocrisy and stupidity to win their battles
for them by making themselves absurd and obscene in the eyes of all
sensible people.
     One day, I think early in 1915.  I was seated on the top of what the
American purists calls a stage, and we a bus.  This vehicle was proceeding
(or attempting to proceed) up Fifth Avenue, which is a sort of ditch lined
with diamonds and over-rouged stenographers, all at a price totally
disproportionate to the value of the article.  I was not interested in
these objects of merchandise; I was occupied by my own vanity.  Somebody in
England had sent me press cuttings which described me as the greatest poet,
philosopher, blackguard, mountaineer, magician, degenerate and saint of all
time; and I was thinking that, as in the case of the Queen of Sheba, when
she visited King Solomon, the half had not been told.
     I was aroused from this mood of mingled gratification and
disappointment by a tap on the shoulder.  A voice asked me to excuse its
intrusion.  Its owner explained that, seeing me reading cuttings with the
superscription of a London firm, he assumed me to be at least English-
speaking, in a city where Yiddish was the language of romance.  If so, was
I in favour of a square deal for Germany and Austria?  I replied that I
was.  I have often thought how much nicer Germans and Austrians would be if
they were cut up into little squares and made into soup.

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     I did not reveal to my interlocutor this interpretation of my reply,
for at my initiation I was taught to be cautious.  He, with the frank
bonhomie of the Irishman, told me that his name was O'Brien, that he had to
get off at 37th Street, but that if I could accept his card, he would be
pleased to hold further conversation with me at his office.  Like Jurgen in
the master piece of James Branch Cabel, I am willing to taste any drink
once, and I may incidentally remind my admirers that, if the drink should
be Courvoisier over fifty years old, I will go on till something breaks and
do good work all the time.  So I went to see Mr O'Brien.
     Mr O'Brien was not in.  I think I never saw him again.  But I
discovered that his office was the office of a paper called "The Fatherland",
appearing weekly.  To my surprise, the inmates seemed to know all about me;
and, in the absence of Mr O'Brien, they produced the most extraordinary
little amniote --- half rat, half rabbit, if I am any zoologist at all ---
whose name is Joseph Bernard Rethy.  I looked at this specimen of the
handiwork of the Creator with somewhat mixed feelings, gradually sagging
towards a pessimistic atheism, especially when I learned that, like anyone
in New York who can string together a dozen words without sound or sense,
he was a shining light of the Poetry Society.  (But he is quite a nice
boy.)
     I must admit that I did not know how to talk to him.  With all the
quickness of his Jewish apprehension, he decided that I was meat for his
master, for whom he sent by means of the complicated manual gestures which
form the true language of Jews, and, "pace" Professor Garner, of the other
anthropoids.  To my surprise, this master of his recognized me and came
forward with extend hands, bulging eyes and the kind of mouth which seems
to have been an unfortunate afterthought.  The name of this person was
George Sylvester Viereck.
     I have a decided admiration of sorts for this individual.  He has the
extraordinary faculty of awakening an instructive repulsion in most people
similar to that which many feel with regard to a toad.  He is mean and
cowardly to an extent psychologically almost unfathomable; but his
cowardice is so protected by cunning that he is able to execute a desperate
purpose.  I may arouse a storm of excration for saying so, but I believe
him to be fundamentally one of the bravest of brave men.  He runs away all
the time, but he never forgets to "fight another day".  At one time he
boasted that he was the grandson of the first German Emperor by an actress,
Adele Viereck.  The statement wounded America in its two worst places.  It
asserted superiority and defied propriety.  Viereck has tried to live down
his boast; but I believe that, in his heart of hearts, he fortifies himself
in any crisis by saying secretly, "I am not of dregs like Americans."  His
manners are pleasant, too much so to be a gentleman's.  He is homosexual at
heart --- though I believe not so in practice --- and conscious of this
inferiority, which makes him

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timid.  This is accentuated by a nervous temperament.  He has a remarkable
gift for epigrammatic phrases, a strong sense of rhythm and a great
critical ability, which is masked by his opportunism.  His "Confessions of a"
"Barbarian" is probably the cleverest book ever written by an American about
Europe.  Some of his poems are so simple and direct that, if they miss
sublimity, which may or may not be the case, the blame is to be laid to the
disastrous Jewish trait of conscious cleverness which came so near to
shipwreck the greatness of Heine.
     He recalled himself to my recollection by saying that he had met me in
the office of Mr Austin Harrison, the editor of the "English Review".  It has
been a lifelong rule of mine to take no notice of my contemporaries.  My
companions are the great men of antiquity and my children those of
posterity.  I did not remember him; but as it has been another lifelong
rule of mine to be polite, even to poets, I feigned the recognition and
enthusiasm which I judged appropriate.
     Viereck is a man of considerable talent for conversation.  He knows
the world well.  He is not deceived by the humbug of public men and the
prostitute antics of the press.  He is able to see both sides of any
question.  His point of view possesses the sanity which comes from the
second rater's perception of the necessity of compromise.  I was able to
talk to him as I could have done with an Englishman of similar education.
     But his intelligence was not sufficiently subtle to comprehend the
moral paradox in myself.  I praised Germany --- I sympathized with Germany
--- I justified Germany --- and he erroneously deduced, as the average
Englishman might have done, that I was pro-German.  He did not understand
the attitude which I held.  I can hardly blame him, for it would puzzle
myself if I allowed myself to worry about it.  I may or may not be a
burglar; but even if I am, I am going to drill a hole through the
householder who interrupts my in the exercise of my profession.  This is my
position.  But Viereck could not guess it.  I might be a high-souled
cosmopolitan, like Romain Rolland; I might be an Irish fanatic, like Roger
Casement; I might be a sordid traitor, like Mata Hari.  But he could not
understand my being sincere in thinking like Bernard Shaw would think if he
could think, and equally so in acting like Sir Edward Grey would act if he
could act.
     During the conversation, it dawned upon my dull mind that here were
the headquarters of the German propaganda.  Viereck was a man of suave
insinuating manners and address, a man of considerable political experience
and immense intellectual capacity, fortified by the cunning of one who has
studied long in the hard merciless school which the world throws open to
homosexuals.  Poor fool, his innocence had betrayed him into indiscretion!
The homosexual is comically innocent, and cannot understand the loathing
which which the average man regards what to him is a natural impulse.

{748}





















More, it is not merely moral righteousness, but moral exaltation above what
he considers the animal instinct of the normal man.  So he had plucked
violets from the grave of Oscar Wilde and framed them with an autograph
copy of one of the sonnets written by Lord Alfred Douglas to the shade of
that most distinguished of His Ludship's "Messieurs".  Is it imaginable
that anyone should suppose that he can advertise himself and his sexual
peculiarities on so crude a poster without obtaining the kind of publicity
that will hurt him most with men of cruder sexual prejudices?  But Viereck
had learned his lesson.  He had learned to deny everything.  Even to me,
knowing my reputation, totally undeserved as it happens to be, for similar
abnormalities, he would admit nothing.  This is a most remarkable
circumstance, for the persecution attached to this passion has created a
freemasonry among its devotees which makes them frank to the point of
indiscretion when they think they recognize sympathy in an acquaintance.
Bitter must have been Viereck's initiation that it should have taught him
to be so extravagantly cautious; but it fitted him to handle the German
propaganda.
     I claim this credit, that from the first I recognized him as a master
of craft, an opposite well worthy of every trick of fence.  I am still
unable to agree with Captain (now Commodore) Gaunt (Director of the British
Intelligence for some time, including this time, in New York) in classing
him "as one of the lesser jackals around von Papen", as he wrote me during
our correspondence on the subject.  I claim further credit for perceiving
the limitations of Viereck.  Brilliant though he was, he was not old
enough, solid enough or unselfish and high-minded enough to be trustworthy
enough to handle a propaganda involving the destiny of a people.
     I looked for what the Americans call the "man higher up".  I did not
look in the direction of honest, well-meaning, sentimental von Bernstorff
with all his capacity for routine, his noble credulity, his quite genuine
desire to arrange everything amicably, and his hackneyed training in the
diplomatic service with its hamstrings of etiquette and its chessboard
punctilio.  I did not look towards von Papen, with his stultifying
conviction that he was so much cleverer than anybody else; still less
towards Boy-Ed, who was a breezy naval ass with the instincts, ineradicable
in the Turk, of a gentleman.  Von Mack was a capable person of professional
mind, adequate to gather and present statistics, and obsessed with the
universal lust of the German university man to prove everything five times
over after everybody else has ceased to take the smallest interest in the
question.  There were lots of small fry, good for subordinate positions.
But was there not someone authentically anointed for the work, someone who
had made a special study for years of the psychology of Americans, who had
written books about them?  Was there no man of master mind, ripe
experience, balanced wisdom?

{749}





















     I found such a candidate for the secret director of the German
propaganda in Professor Hugo Mnsterberg.  As it happened, the professor
was an old enemy of mine.  We had quarrelled about philosophy and physics.
His mind was intensely positive, brutally matter-of-fact, but capable of
appreciating subtlety, and far more open to new facts and theories than
most of his opponents supposed.  His arrogance was, to a great extent, the
Freudian protection against his own uncertainty.  He knew psychology, he
knew men; he understood business; and in his capacity of instructor at
Harvard, he had acquired the habit of forming and directing minds.  So much
I knew, and I pictured my duel with him in romantic terms of Sherlock
Holmes and Moriarty.
     But the facts were less enthralling.  The professor had the great
German gift of Being Always Right.  My task was simplified; I had merely to
keep on telling him how very right he was.  He soon ceased to gauge the
temper of the community correctly, began to lay down the law instead of
arguing with moderation and good sense, was hardened in arrogance by
opposition, and became as violent and stupid on his side as our own chosen
propagandists were on ours.  My meat!
     But I am overrunning myself.  My immediate problem was to confirm
Viereck in his conviction that I was pro-German.  There was a very serious
snag in the "English Review" for November 1914.  There was a poem of mine
called "An Appeal to the American Republic" inviting an Anglo-American
alliance.  This poem having been written in 1898, I had had to alter "the
traitor Russian" to "the traitor Prussian", to suit the political
kaleidoscope.  Fortunately I had no difficulty in persuading Viereck that
this action was in the nature of camouflage, designed to exploit the
stupidity of the British public in general and Austin Harrison in
particular.  His knowing Mr Austin Harrison made this easier.
     But personally I was so terribly English!  My accent betrayed me as
his did Peter.  My clothes were obviously Savile Row.  I had not even taken
the precaution to be sufficiently un-English to pay for them.  I clutched
at the straw of my name.  From the myths of antiquity looms a phantom
Crowley somewhere near Kilkenny where the cats come from, and though my
particular Crowleys have been mercifully well-behaved in England since the
bishop of that name who published his naughty epigrams in the time of Queen
Elizabeth, there are lots of Crowleys in America who come direct from
Ireland.
     I found Viereck very sympathetic about Irish independence and I billed
myself as the only and original Sinn Feiner.  My trouble was that I knew
nothing about the Irish question and possessed nothing by the hazy idea
common to most Englishmen, including those who have studied Ireland most
profoundly, that it was a devil of a mess and a devil of a nuisance.
However,

{750}





















Viereck wanted to believe; and he believed, like a Catholic who is afraid
to sleep in the dark.
     Having thus established myself as an Irish rebel and a pro-German, I
went away and considered what I could do about it.  I read "The Fatherland";
I found the German case presented with learning, with logic and with
moderation.  The motifs were scholarship, statistics and statesmanlike
sobriety.  It seemed to me that, in the peculiar temper of the United
States, whose people, however ignorant and dishonest individually, are
always, as a whole, curiously anxious to know the truth and to do justice,
this propaganda was infernally dangerous to British interests.  I talked to
my friends about it.  All they could say was that Viereck was personally
despicable.  Some, like Captain Gaunt, affected to ignore the importance of
"The Fatherland".  Others, even more hopeless from my point of view, seemed
to think that they could suppress "The Fatherland" by continuing their
lifelong policy of omitting to invite Viereck to dinner parties which would
have bored him and given him indigestion.
     I decided on a course of action, which seemed to me the only one
possible in a situation which I regarded as immensely serious.  I would
write for "The Fatherland".  By doing so, I should cut myself off temporarily
from all my friends, from all sources of income, I should apparently
dishonour a name which I considered it my destiny to make immortal, and I
should have to associate on terms of friendship with people whose very
physical appearance came near to reproducing in me the possibly beneficial
results of crossing the Channel with a choppy sea.
     But the German propaganda was being done as well as the British
propaganda ill.  With a little moral ascendancy over Viereck, I could spoil
his game completely by doing as much mischief to Germany as the Patriot
Bottomley and the other hoarse-throated fishwives of Fleet Street were
doing to England.  I met with more success than I had hoped.
     Mnsterberg was not Argus.  I think moreover that folly is contagious.
He could hardly keep his young men in hand, especially when apparent
victory turned their heads.  I found some of them incredibly silly.  I had
always know Paul Carus for an ass since he published "The Gospel of Buddah",
but I had no idea that he was such an ass!  In "The Open Court" he published
a fancy portrait from my pen of Bloody Bill as Parsifal!  Poor old earnest
Christian Endeavour Wilhelm, with his megalomania and his theatricalism and
his fat-witted Lutheran "Gott" and his withered hand and his moving-picture-
star galaxy of uniforms as the up-to-date Messiah!  What a model for "King
Arthur come again", to give the heathen Schrecklichkeit!
     I must have been beautifully drunk to write that.  I don't remember
anything about it --- but I must have been much more than drunk when I sent
it to Paul Carus.  I suppose I had become acclimatized to the idea that all
serious and eminent people are perfectly brainless.  He swallowed it, hook,
line and

{751}




















sinker; and a poor little bookseller in London who had been agent for the
paper for years, and had never read a line of it, got three months in
prison!  The truth is that the British lost all sense of humour when the
war broke out.  I wonder how many millions in blood and treasure it cost us
to "jowk" with such "deeficulty"!
     I worked up Viereck gradually from relativey reasonable attack on
England to extravagances which achieved my object of revolting every
comparatively sane human being on earth.  I proved that the "Lusitania" was a
man-of-war.  I dug up all the atrocities of King Leopold of Belgium, from
mutilated niggers in the Congo to Cl‚o de M‚rode and Anna Robinson.  I
translated atrocity, not merely into military necessity, but into moral
uplift.  I put haloes on the statue of von Hindenburg with his wooden head
and his nightgown of tintacks.  But (on the whole) I took few chances of
letting the Germans perceive the tongue in my cheek.
     One day, however, I got genuinely drunk, not with alcohol but with
indignation.  It was the day of the murder of Edith Cavell.  I sat down and
wrote an article --- a stained glass window representing von Bissing as
Jesus Christ, "that great-hearted, simple-minded, trusting German".  He
extends his hand to her; and says, with tears in his eyes, "Miss Cavell, I
trust you!"  Then she acts the part of Judas; and I conclude with a display
of fireworks, in which she is welcomed to hell by Lucrezia Borgia and the
Marchioness de Brinvilliers and several other vampires, whose names I have
forgotten, having others closer to hand.
     It makes me weep for Germany when I think the Viereck published such
hideous and transparent irony without turning a hair!  Americans do not
understand irony at all.  But Viereck should have done so, considering the
Jewish hetaera and the wily old robber baron in his ancestry.  But are any
tears salt enough to weep for England when I think that none of my
countrymen could read my bitterness and anger between the lines of that
comic travesty of blasphemy?
     I must explain here that I had more than one string to my bow.  It was
really a minor part of my programme to wreck the German propaganda on the
proof of reductio ad absurdum.  I had hoped to gain the full confidence of
the conspirators whom I had identified and deal with them as somebody whose
name I forget dealt with Cataline; and Lord Mount Eagle or whoever it was,
with Guy Faux.  But nobody in British Intelligence had sufficient of that
quality to notice me.
     I have always been unduly optimistic about England.  I know such a lot
of people who are far from being fools.  But war seems to deaden
perception.  Men who are in ordinary times quite acute become ready to
assume that anyone who is waving a Union Jack and singing "Britannia Rules
the Waves" must be an Admiral of the Fleet.  Everybody assumed that the
irritating

{752}





















balderdash I wrote for "The Fatherland" must be the stark treason that the
Germans were stupid enough to think it was.
     A person in my position is liable to see Sherlock Homes in the most
beefwitted policeman.  I did not feel that I was advancing in the
confidence of the Germans.  I got no secrets worth reporting to London, and
I was not at all sure whether the cut of my clothes had not outweighed the
eloquence of my conversation.  I thought I would do something more public.
I wrote a long parody on the Declaration of Independence and applied it to
Ireland.
     I invited a young lady violinist who has some Irish blood in her,
behind the more evident stigmata of the ornithorhyncus and the wombat.
Adding to our number about four other debauched persons on the verge of
delirium tremens, we went out in a motor boat before dawn on the third of
July to the rejected statue of Commerce for the Suez Canal, which Americans
fondly suppose to be Liberty Enlightening The World.
     There I read my Declaration of Independence.  I threw an old envelope
into the bay, pretending that it was my British passport.  We hoisted the
Irish flag.  The violinist played the "Wearing of the Green".  The crews of
the interned German ships cheered us all the way up the Hudson, probably
because they estimated the degree of our intoxication with scientific
precision.  Finally, we went to Jack's for breakfast, and home to sleep it
off.  The "New York Times" gave us three columns and Viereck was distinctly
friendly.
     Over in England there was consternation.  I cannot think what had
happened to their sense of humour.  To pretend to take it seriously was
natural enough in New York, where everybody is afraid of the Irish, not
knowing what they may do next.  But London was having bombs dropped on it.
There was, however, one person in England who knew me --- also a joke when
he saw it: the Honourable A. B., my old friend aforesaid.  Owing to the
confusion inevitably attached to the mud with which we always begin
muddling through, this gentleman had been inadvertently assigned to the
Intelligence Department.
     When he saw the report in the "New York Times", he wrote to me about it.
I knew he would not talk.  I knew he would not blunder.  I wrote back
explaining my position, with he immediately understood and approved.  But
intelligence such as his is a rare accident in an Intelligence Department.
He could not authorize me to go ahead without appealing to his superiors.
He put the case before them.  They were quite unable to understand that I
was merely in a position to get into the full confidence of the Germans if
I had the right sort of assistance.  They idiotically assumed that I
already possessed a knowledge of the enemy's secrets and they sent me a
test question on a matter of no importance --- did I know who, if anybody,
was passing under the name of so-and-so?  I was not going to risk my
precarious position asking questions.  The official English idea of a
secret agent seemed to be that he should act like

{753}



















a newspaper reporter.  The result was that the negotiations came to very
little, though I turned in reports from time to time.1
     There was a Temporary Gentleman named H...d in the British Military
Mission with whom I had such dealings as is possible with the half-witted.
He thought that he detected hostility in my attitude towards him, whereas
it was merely the University Manner.  It was this poor thing whom our
secret service sent to interview me.  I told him that I could find out
exactly what the Germans were doing in America.  I also told him that I had
the absolute confidence, years old, of a man high in the German secret
service --- that I could go to Germany in the character of an Irish patriot
and report on the conditions of the country.  (There was desperate need of
accurate information as to Germany's resources at this period.)  He said,
with the air of one detected in the act of adultery by sixteen separate
sleuths, to say nothing of being doomed by the Black Hand, "But how do I
know that you won't go straight to Viereck and tell him I have been to see
you?"!!!  I am loath to record accents of human speech so eloquent of
mental undevelopment.  I said to him, "What harm would that do?  How would
that save Bloody Bill from his predestined doom?"  He did not know the
answer to that.  But then, he did not know the answer to anything else.
     I must now return to the main subject of this report.  Partially
baffled by the failure of the British to apply common sense to my
proposals, I was compelled to go on playing a lone hand.  It was necessary
to persuade the Germans that arrogance and violence were sound policy, that
bad faith was the cleverest diplomacy, that insult was the true means of
winning friendship, and direct injury the proper conjuration to call up
gratitude.  I could not have succeeded had they not been hardened by
temporary success, duped by the rigidity of their own logic, and rendered
arrogant by the conviction of their own uprightness.
     But it succeeded.  Von Bernstorff's superficiality could not estimate
America.  He was too much a gentleman.  He knew indeed the unhappy truth
that Wilson had been elected because he had kept America out of the war.  I
drummed it into both his donkey ears.  But he was deceived by the humbug of
"the world kept safe for democracy".  The people ruled --- the people had
voted against war.  One can almost envy him his simple creed.  Such a man
might trust his wife and live happy ever afterwards.
     He did not see that "the people" in America are salves who count for
nothing in the minds of their masters.  But America had lent fabulous sums
to the Allies, and would get nothing if Germany won the war but the kicks
which so much pusillanimity and selfishness deserved.  He did not see that
America wanted a pretext for calling the conduct of Germany intolerable.
The scabby old camel, almost ready to start for its trip through dryness,
was looking wistfully for the last straw.

{754}


        1WEH note:  There is a file of this correspondence in British
          Intelligence.


















     For some time I had been contemplating the military situation in its
largest sense.  I had been thinking of water, air and earth as units.  I
had been at some pains to study the question of the necessary limitations
of the three arms of war.  I knew the history of Napoleon gazing glumly
across the Channel, after his triumphant snatch at Europe.  I had written a
paper in "The Fatherland" called "The Future of the Submarine".  I pointed
out that hardly anyone had believed in the naval value of these craft until
three British cruisers were sunk in fifteen minutes.  I pointed out that
this demonstration would convince treasuries.  Every nation would mobilize
all the brains and all the gold and all the influence to find a means of
opening the wound.  I prophesied a development of the submarine as
astounding as that of railways and automobiles --- which dated from the
hour when they were proved practicable and useful.
     On January 3rd, 1917, I returned to the charge with an article which
was ostensibly a criticism of Count von Reventlow's "Vampire", but in reality
my own sermon on that text.  The Patriot Bottomley has quoted one of my
best passages, that in which I proposed to reduce England to the status of
a German colony.  (The Germans printed it without a smile!)  I was very
proud of that article.  It proved that all island races were primarily
fishermen, who lived by snatching fish and must therefore become pirates.
The argument is quite in the style of a real German professor.  I advocated
the "Unrestricted Submarine Campaign".  I secretly calculated, rightly as
the gods would have it, that so outrageous a violation of all law would be
the last straw, and force America to throw off the burden of neutrality.
     My German friends were loud in their congratulations.  It was
confidently whispered among the "cognoscenti" that von Bernstorff's judgment
swayed at its impact.  He withdrew his objections to that brutality, that
insane savagery, that brought America into the war.
     But there's a tick in every sleeping-bag.  My countrymen stayed right
with me to the finish!  In what high glee did I not keep my secret
rendezvous with a friend from a certain British consulate, waving my
article, and crying, "The damned fools have printed it --- and it's going
to turn the trick!"  He read it; his face fell; he turned disgustedly and
growled, "I didn't know you were a German."
     The secret service people, while considering my application for
employment, asked a friend of mine to explain my attitude.  "We don't
understand him," they wailed piteously; "we don't understand him at all."
"Cheer up," said my friend; "you're not the first people to fail to
understand Mr. Aleister Crowley!"
     It is rather irrelevant; but it is certainly very amusing and very
characteristic, the following incident of my campaign.  I had asked the
Honourable A. B. to help me consolidate my position with the Germans by
heating the

{755}





















branding irons of infamy for me in the fire of publicity.  I therefore
attributed it to his ingenuity when I heard that the police had raided the
office of an acquaintance of mine in Regent Street.  They didn't know what
I was after, took my articles at their face value, and thought to annoy,
perhaps to intimidate my by the raid.
     The person they arrested was a motherly old fool who had been
prophesying with tea leaves for about twenty years at the same old stand,
with the full knowledge of the police.  The ordinary course in prosecuting
a fortuneteller is for a polite young man to hand, with deference and
apologies to his prospective victim, a summons to appear before a
magistrate.  But the charge against this woman was factitious.  They wanted
to get at me, at me barely more than three thousand miles away, and
confidently supposed to be sitting in a luxurious suite at the Ritz-
Carlton, quaffing beaker after beaker of champagne to the health of the
Kaiser, as I conspired with the fanatical brewers of Milwaukee.
     One would really have thought that modern education would have taught
the police that the best zoologists agree unanimously that it is hard to
please a tortoise by stroking its shell.  And a comparatively brief course
of logic might easily have enriched this theorem (by a syllogism containing
the minor premise that tortoises are not so sympathetic and altruistic as,
shall we say, policemen) with a corollary that it is even harder to please
a tortoise by stroking the shell of another tortoise many miles away.  Of
course, there is no rigid proof of this.  The premises may be disputed by
the sceptic.
     But at least the police should have heard of Sir Henry Hawkins, a
being, after all, zoologically more akin to me that any tortoise.  When he
was presiding at the trial of some Fenian agitators, some of their friends
planted a bomb on the doorstep of the Honourable Reginald Brett.  Brett
suggested that these earnest folk had committed one of those errors of
judgment which seem inseparable from earnestness, and that the bomb had
really been intended for Sir Henry.  The judge replied, "Do they really
think that they can intimidate me by putting a bomb on your doorstep?"
     So, at the zero hour, reckless of peril, a devoted band of detectives,
with revolvers drawn, went over the top, cheering wildly, to the third
floor of 93 Regent Street, broke down the door, which I think was unlocked,
and found a dozen mild old people trying to browse on the lush grass of my
poetry.
     The police did not even calculate on the possibility of my revenge.
They imprudently entrusted the conduct of the raid to Inspector Currie,
though they might have known that I was perfectly capable of some stupid
joke about his being hot stuff.  The Crown solicitor, too, who conducted
the prosecution, was so named that I might have said, Their artillery is
composed of an old rusty Muskett.  But I matched my fortitude by my
magnanimity and forbore.

{756}




















     However, I made the best of it.  When I had done laughing, I made a
wonderful scene of indignation in the office of "The Fatherland", which
helped me quite a little on my weary way.  But I must admit that I was
downhearted.  How could we hope to win the war if London had got as
hysterical as that?  I looked at the Germans and took courage.
     In the upshot, at last I got enough money to settle my affairs in New
York, where I had been dodging starvation for five years.  That legend of
my growing fat on German gold!  I lost no time in coming home to England.
But I was not at ease.  I was fed up with human beings.  I resolved to
disappear into the desert and give myself wholly to the religious life.  I
knew that my personal friends in England would understand what I had done
in America: they would perhaps be proud of me.  So far, so good.
     But I supposed, from the conversation of some genuinely intelligent
Englishmen in high official positions who were travelling with me across
the Atlantic, that England had recovered sang froid and settled down to
reconstruction and the enjoyment of the fruits of victory.  I wrongly
judged that authority would administer a stern rebuke to any maniacs who
aimed at the perpetuation of bad feeling.  Indeed, I saw little in London
to remind me that there had ever been a war.
     Was there one man who thought that it might still pay to work upon the
baser passions of the mob?  It seemed so: it was Christmas; there was a man
who made a two-page splash about abolishing the wicked German Santa Claus!1
No!  I was again in error.  I must have misinterpreted the motives.  The
man was that great soul, the Patriot Bottomley!
     Such a man would doubtless be as difficult to understand as others had
found me.  He must have had some noble reason for his apparently vile and
baseless attacks on bishops, judges and ministers of the crown, to say
nothing of firms like Waring and Gillow.  I could not concur in the
prevalent opinion that he was as much a blackmailer as De Wend Fenton.  I
could appreciate the eloquence and knowledge of law which, to the amused
amazement of London, had thrice saved him from penal servitude at the hands
of a British jury.  I could not foresee that I should live to be horrified
by the insults of that Shallow, Sir Charles Biron, "I cannot believe Mr
Bottomley on his oath."2
     I did not think that anybody took his "John Bull" more seriously than we
used to do the "Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday" which it has --- not too
advantageously --- replaced in the affections of the people.  I must
confess that I was rather disgusted when my own solicitors sent me half a
page of ravings about myself and asked the explanation of my crimes.  They
must have known that

{757}


        1  "John Bull", Christmas number, 1919.
        2  I wrote this in January 1922, when Mr Bottomley was prosecuting
          Mr Bigland for criminal libel, and the magistrate made this
          remark.


















there was hardly one statement which was true in fact.  The article was
full of careless blunders about matters within their knowledge.
     But that was not what worried me.  I kept on saying to myself, "Why
only half a page?"  The Headmaster of Eton had had a whole page about his
advocating Platonic pleasures for boys.  My own father-in-law, a charming
old gentleman with not even a national reputation, and not an enemy in the
world, but a worthless curate he had discharged, had had a whole page
(inspired by the aforesaid curate) about the way in which he swindled his
servant-girls out of their savings.  I knew that if the great Patriot
seemed to be not giving me my duty, it was from shortage of paper or
writer's cramp, not from lack of kindness of heart.
     I had indeed ample evidence of what wealth of magnanimity was buttoned
beneath that patriotic waistcoat.  A well-known journalist, who has never
written a book on the Musical Glasses, a biography of either Lord Henry
Somerset, Canon Aitken or F. E. Smith, any novel about Fenian dynamiters,
or any short story about Portuguese matadors, had written various articles
for the Patriot Bottomley; and he had not been paid.  Now it came to pass
in the fulness of time that the Patriot felt it his painful public duty to
make weekly attacks upon the firm of Waring and Gillow.  A few days before
these attacks ceased, which they did very suddenly, the journalist chanced
to pass the offices of "John Bull" in a taxi and saw Mr Sam Waring --- the
principal director of Waring and Gillow --- descending the steps.  Quick as
thought, he paid off the chauffeur, bounced upstairs into the private
office of the great Patriot and said firmly, though gently.  "I've come for
my three hundred pounds."
     "How did you know?" was the Patriot's only question.
     "Never mind.  I know."
     And Horatio handed over three hundred pounds in notes.  This was
indeed kindness of heart.
     I could not doubt that if he seemed to be neglecting my publicity, it
was inadvertence.  However, the Patriot Bottomley doubtless felt that he
had wronged me, for he made amends by publishing another article to refresh
public enthusiasm about my crimes, a month later.  I have not seen it, but
I hope he pitched it strong.
     My conscience was clear.  I had been loyal to England.  I had suffered
for her sake as much as any man; I had "fought the good fight, despising
the shame", starvation and solitude of soul and body: I was content.
     But, as in a Greek tragedy, just when I thought myself most safe, the
last straw was gently but firmly placed on my back by two of my oldest
friends.  The first of these is named George Cecil Jones.  I had known him
intimately since the autumn of 1898.  We had been co-workers in the most
arduous task known to mankind: that which Bergson --- so far as his
ignorance allows ---

{758}





















described as "creating oneself a God".  But he had weakened in late years.
He had married.  Life to his optimistic eyes looked like a green field with
a watering trough.  Death in his mind became inseparably connected with the
idea of mutton chops.
     When De Wend Fenton was trying to blackmail me in 1910, he found to
his chagrin that I would not even meet him at dinner, so that he might
propose a "friendly arrangement" over the coffee and cigars, by which I
should pay cash for credit, sovereigns for silence.  Balked by my contempt,
he cast about him for some less wary bird.  If he could only get one of my
friends to sue him for libel, he would be able to wriggle out of it
somehow.  Then, think of all the free publicity!  Even if he lost the case,
it didn't matter, for his paper was bankrupt anyhow.  So he put in a
paragraph so dexterously penned that anyone with a mind less clear than
that of the solicitor who read it over, "ad hoc", might have taken it to mean
that Mr Jones was a sodomite.
     Mr Jones ought to have known better than to waste his time in reading
papers of this class.  He ought to have known much better than to take any
notice of such rubbish.  He ought to have known very much better than to
air his grievance in a court of law.  His youngest baby ought to have known
better than to employ a personal friend with no experience of such cases to
act as his solicitor.  And one would have thought that even such a
solicitor would have known better than to brief a barrister of the kind
that "will see the whole job through for a ten pound note".
     When the case came to trial, the defendants pleaded that they had not
suggested that Mr Jones was a sodomite.  They had not, and never had had,
any intention of suggesting that Mr Jones was a sodomite.  Mr Jones
explained elaborately and excitedly that he was not a sodomite.  The judge,
summing up, said that, doubtful as the case might be on some points, one
thing at least stood out sun-clear, that Mr Jones was not a sodomite.  It
was also evident that the expressions which had offended the plaintiff were
inoffensive; that nobody had ever suggested that Mr Jones was a sodomite.
     The jury then retired.  They were dazed by suppressed sexual
excitement.  Their imaginations projected fascinating yet fearful
phantasms.  When this psychological delirium became articulate, each man
was terrified lest he should let slip some phrase which might arouse
suspicion of sympathy with sexual irregularities against the speaker.
Instinct clamoured that a victim must be found on which to concentrate the
frenzy of the crowd.  Thus, obfuscated by panic, they stammered out
confused and incoherent comments on the case.
     They thought that there was something curious about the evidence.  All
parties "breathed together" that Mr Jones was not a sodomite.  The Latin for
"breathe together" is conspire.  That's what it was --- a conspiracy!  So
they brought in the verdict that the article was a libel and that it was
justified!!! --- such

{759}




















verdict evidently implying that the defendants had perjured themselves,
that the judge was a fool, and that Mr Jones was a sodomite after all!
     I supinely thought that the farce was over, that the climax was
perfect, that there could never be anything funnier than that.  But the
Lord keeps unsuspected bounties for them that love him, and my chalice
overflowed when this very Mr Jones wrote me, in the tone of a dictator,
that I ought to go to law to clear my character from the aspersions cast
upon it by the Patriot Bottomley!  If not, let me communicate no more with
mine truly, G. Cecil Jones!
     But in this jest of Mr Jones' pompous imbecility, there was something
sad.  He had induced my old friend Eckenstein to sign that silly letter.
Eckenstein is a great man and my dearest friend.  But he is an old man and
(I fear me) a dying one.1  His judgment cannot be what it used to be; but
if his memory has not failed him, I will remind him of certain events in
our long friendship.
     I met him at Wastdale Head during Easter week of 1898.  We soon became
climbing companions, a relation which endured so long as he was physically
able to climb.  We were together in the English, Welsh and Scottish
mountains; in the Alps, in Mexico; and ultimately in the Himalayas.
Between us, we hold all but one or two of the world's records for various
feats of mountaineering, both amateur and professional.
     In 1898, I was barely more than a boy, pitiably innocent and
ridiculously ambitious.  (In a sense, I am so still!)
     My other climbing friends, with hardly an exception, came to me and
warned me to "have nothing to do with that scoundrel Eckenstein".  "Who is
he anyhow?  A dirty East End Jew."  (I quote Mr Morley Roberts, the cobbler
of trashy novelettes, who said this to me at Zermatt.)  Furthermore,
Eckenstein had done something in India "so bad that nobody could even guess"
"what it was!"  But that Unspeakable Infamy was the real reason of his
quitting the Conway expedition in 1892, and it was generally supposed that
the murder of several natives, in cold blood, was one of the less
unmentionable ingredients.
     That was rather a hard test of comradeship, I think.  But I knew my
Eckenstein and I disdained to make investigations.  I went on climbing with
him as if the pompous humbugs of the English Alpine Club had never spoken.
By paying guides to haul one over rocks like luggage, one can get a
reputation --- in England --- as a hardy mountaineer.  The envious snarls
of such craven impostors did not disturb me.
     Yet there was something in it, too!  There was enough for Eckenstein
to be arrested in India by a "superior person" whose Christian names were
George Nathaniel.  I never knew the truth of the business; and Eckenstein
always

{760}


        1  This paper was first drafted in March 1920 e.v.  I revised it
          finally in January 1922 e.v.  in the interval Eckenstein had
          died.  I prefer to leave the passages which relate to him as they
          stand.  His death adds grief to my thoughts of him; nothing can
          add to the love I have always had for him, or the honour in which
          I have always held him.














protested that he did not know it himself.  It didn't matter much then; it
doesn't matter at all now.  But I want to recall to Eckenstein that I stood
pat!  I did not ask him to vindicate himself.  I do not empanel a jury of
jackals to try a lion.
     I do not believe that Eckenstein was in full possession of his senses
when he signed that silly letter.

POSTSCRIPTUM:  New Year, 1922; two years less two months since I wrote this
paper.  I "got it off my chest"; next day I had relapsed into my normal
indifference to human imbecility.  I never so much as troubled to revise it
until yesterday.  Then I rescued it from its dusty pigeon-hole simply
because I heard from my representative in London that my supposed pro-
Germanism was a bar to the recognition of my work in England.
     I care nothing for public opinion.  I care nothing for fame or
success.  I am perfectly happy in my retirement.  The full leisure to work,
the freedom from all interruption, the absence of temptations to
distraction: Cefalu realizes my idea of heaven.
     But I am pledged to give my life to the establishment of the Law of
Thelema: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."  So, if the
operations on behalf of that Law are being tampered by the insensate belief
that I ever was, am, or ever could be, disloyal to my country, which I love
with an unreasoning passion, altogether beyond the interference of my
intellectual opinions, I am willing to make this public statement as to
what I did in the war, and why I did it.
     My attitude is unaltered by time.  I still think the English pot as
black as the German kettle, and I am still willing to die in defence of the
pot.  Mine is the loyalty of Bill Sikes' dog; you can't make me believe
that my master is an injured innocent; and the fact that he starves and
beats me doesn't alter the fact that I am his dog, and I love him.
     Let the publication of this paper make clear my integrity!  Let the
British public come to honour me for my stubborn endurance of the shameful
martyrdom, still cruel and still dear.













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                              77


     I propose to summarize briefly my adventures in America.  This chapter
should form a framework into which may be fitted the special accounts of my
activity.  My worst encounter was with the "New York World" which had
distinguished itself by printing Harry Kemp's rubbish about my magical
exploits.  The editor, a genial Irishman --- remarkable precisely for being
half educated neither more nor less correct to eight places of decimals ---
observing that Kemp's statements involved numerous physical impossibilities
took him to a notary and made him swear to their truth.  I have told
elsewhere how it came to be written.  Hearing of my arrival Kemp hurried to
implore me not to give him away.  I contemptuously agreed to save his face.
Of course, I could not admit the truth of such asinine balderdash, so said
that by magical power I had caused him to see what was not, as indeed in a
certain sense I had done.
     Cosegrave sent a sob sister to interview me on my arrival.  She
pestered me with a string of foolish questions, such as "What is your
opinion of America?"  I was insulted.  What did she take me for that I
should pronounce judgment on a continent after twenty-four hours?  I
replied, nevertheless, "I regard America as the hope of the planet --- the
white hope."  About this time Jack Johnson was "hors concours".  White hope
had become a slang phrase for a challenger without a chance.  Of course she
did not see the joke.  I became so weary of the woman's stupidity that she
was bound to make a hopeless hash of what I had said.  I told her to try
something easier.  Reporting a dog-fight would have been about her mark.
She went off in a huff, a sagging, shapeless suet pudding.  He then sent
Henry Hall, who had married a French wife and learnt courtesy.  He had read
a good deal of good stuff and possessed natural intelligence.  I found him
charming.  He confirmed my diagnosis of W. T. Stead, whom he interviewed.
In walking down the street, Stead broke off every minute or two to indulge
in a lustful description of some passing flapper and slobber how he would
like to flagellate her.  Hall wrote a clever and accurate article about the
evocation of Bartzabel.
     I dined at Cosegrave's house one night.  He had asked Evangeline Adams
to meet me as being a famous astrologer.  The meeting led to a lengthy
association.  She wanted me to write a book on astrology for her.  The plan
failed through her persistent efforts to cheat me out of the profits, and
her obstinate ignorance of the elementary facts of nature combined with an
unconquerable antagonism to the principles of applying common sense to the
science.

{762}





















     I learned a good deal, nevertheless.  The work kept me concentrated on
the subject.  At this time, it was my invariable practice to judge from the
personal appearance of every stranger I met the sign rising at his birth.
Having made up my mind, I would ask him to tell me either the hour or the
day of his birth.  I could then calculate the missing day as thus: Suppose
I judge my man to have Libra in the ascendant and he tells me his birthday
is October 1st.  When the sun is in 5ř or 6ř Libra, I can tell him he was
born at sunrise, within a limit of error of about two hours.
Alternatively, should he say, "I was born at midnight", I can give his
birthday to within a fortnight or so of Christmas.  I tabulated my results
over a considerable period and found that I was right in a little over two
cases in three.  Where I was wrong, I found that either the sign I had
chosen for his ascendant was that occupied by his sun, which in some people
determines the personal appearance more effectively than the ascendant, or
else, in erecting his horoscope I found the rising sign occupied by planets
whose nature modified the sign so that it could be mistaken for the one I
had picked out.
     (For instance, a person with Aries rising with the moon and Jupiter
conjoined on the cusp.  The aggressive martial characteristics of the sign
would be toned down by their impelling influence.  I might, therefore,
state his ascendant as Sagittarius or even Pisces.)
     There were, of course, a few cases in which I came a complete cropper,
but the cause of this was almost always an instinctive personal antipathy
to the individual which confused my judgment.  By the most severe standards
I may claim fairly to have been correct in not less than eighty per cent.
of the cases and considering the chance of getting right at random, I
consider it demonstrated beyond dispute that a real relation exists between
the personal appearance and the sign rising at birth.
     Lest any reader should seek to emulate these efforts and meet with
disappointment, let me warn him of two common factors of failure:
     1. People of unfamiliar races manifest the astrological appearance of
their ethnological branch and this masks that due to their nativity.
Experience enables one to penetrate the superficial indication.
     2. The skill required to judge this matter develops with surprising
speed as soon as a certain point has been reached.  It is best to proceed
systematically by asking oneself, first of all, to what element the
examinee belongs.  It is then simple to discriminate between the three
possible signs.  One might mistake Taurus and Scorpio, Gemini and
Sagittarius, but the three signs of any given element are always
distinguishable as easily as a child, an adult and an old man.
     Some signs are almost unmistakable from the first.  But others are so
weak in character that their influence is rarely found unmodified by
planetary considerations.  One must further remark that each sign governs
two main

{763}




















types --- the active and the passive.  Thus Aries: the high brows, long
face, aquiline nose, tall thin muscular figure, shows the fiery and martial
qualities of the sign.  But there is an evil and averse counterpart
corresponding to the ovine nature.  We have the gross, hooked, pendulous
proboscis; the thick, flabby, moist lips; the patient stupid eyes, and
timid, hunted gait of the bad type of Jew.
     Thanks to the resolute refusal of even the educated astrologer to
adopt scientific methods of study, their contemptuous indifference to the
attitude of the recognized sciences towards them, and their adhesion to
tradition, in the right interpretation of which they seek authority, rather
than in the indications of critically analysed experience, the general
ignorance of the subject is as great as ever.
     I propose to demonstrate once for all the truth of the proposition,
that the aspect of the heavens at the time of birth is connected with the
observed characteristics of the native by collecting a large number of
photographs, full face and profile for each subject, and classifying them
according to the horoscope.  I will thus have twelve sets, one for each
sign ascending, twelve showing the possible positions of the sun.  I should
also examine the assertion that people with Mars rising have some scar or
other abnormality on the face, by collecting the photographs of such
people.  Again, Saturn in the ascendant is said to give a melancholy cast
to the countenance.
     Should it, then, appear that one hundred Aries men showed a marked and
characteristic difference from one hundred Taurus men, and so on through
the zodiac, physicists would be hard put to it to deny some nexus.  The
"apparatus criticus" should, of course, be very perfect.  Complications of
the ascendant by the presence of planets must be considered separately.
Their failure to manifest the characteristic appearance of the sign ought
not to be considered fatal to the theory.
     Where the history of the subject is available it would furnish
material for much further research.  We would discover, for instance,
whether the presence of Saturn in the seventh house invariably concurred
with matrimonial misfortune, or in the tenth with rapid rise of fortunes
followed by a sudden crash as in the case of Napoleon, Oscar Wilde, Woodrow
Wilson, Lord Northcliffe and several private cases in my own collection.
The labour required for this research would be enormous, but the bulk of it
would be done by ordinary clerks.  And as for the preliminary difficulty of
collecting material, any great newspaper could carry out the scheme easily
enough.  It would of course be necessary to publish an explanation of the
proposal with a questionnaire covering the principal points, and asking for
good photographs to be sent with the filled up form.
     One final remark.  I found myself able, as my experience increased, to
divine not only the rising sign and the position of the sun, but both
points

{764}




















together.  Accordingly, on several occasions, I succeeded in telling a man
I had never seen before both the house and the day of his birth.  I could
also judge, now and then, such matters as the angular distance between Sol
and Luna, or the aspects and the zodiacal position of other planets.
     The psychological reactions to these demonstrations were most
interesting.  Some people were quite unaffected by the most brilliant
successes.  Some were scared half out of their wits, such as they had.
Others again fell prostrate in awed admiration and jumped from the facts to
the fancy that I must be a Mahatma able to juggle with the stars in their
courses if the wind took me.  Only a small percentage showed intelligent
interest.  I made a great impression on Frank Crowninshield, editor of
"Vanity Fair".  I was in form that night and told everyone exactly right.  He
realized it could not be guessing.  The chances against me ran into
billions.
     I hung about New York all winter trying to get a foothold.  My effort
to countermine German intrigue was my worst handicap, in the case of the
best people.  But as to my literary career, I was no snowflake in hell.
Nobody knew my name, bar the educated "rari nantes in gurgito vasto".  Nobody
would look at my work, either in a periodical form or volume.
     I shall tell later of my grotesque failure to make good as a Master of
Magick.  The people I met knew nothing and thought they knew everything,
and whatever scraps of information they had, they had all wrong.
     I took a week off in March to go to Philadelphia, where the great
Billy Sunday was conducting a revival.  The immense notoriety of the man,
and the incompatibility of the accounts which my queries elicited,
determined me, like the man in the gospel, to hear and see for myself.  I
ran the fox to earth in a vast wooden tabernacle; I forget what won by a
narrow margin on points; and when he came to New York where they had built
a barn bigger than the Albert Hall for the purpose, he could not even get
an audience.  Beelzebub had the best of every round.  Shrewd to the last,
he retired from the ring and left Lucifer with the laurels.  He had had a
great time and had made his pile.  I suppose, at this hour, he is sitting
under his own vine and fig tree, meditating with cynical enjoyment the
Shakespearean aphorism, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"  and on
Sundays that sublime saying of the Saviour --- who had saved him if he had
never saved anyone else --- "Ye are of more value than many sparrows."
     All this time, I had been getting into deeper water financially.  I
had intended, when I left England, to conclude my special business in new
York within a fortnight, to make a little splash in any case, and to get
home in a month on the outside.  What kept me, was that in the first week I
sold over one hundred pounds' worth of first editions to a prominent
collector.  He then expressed a wish to possess a complete set of my works
an also two or three hundred manuscripts.  This should have meant at least
five thousand

{765}




















dollars.  It sounded good to me; since the war nobody in England remembered
the existence of such a thing as poetry.  So I cabled for the stuff and
hung around, with the result that my political opportunity came along.
When the books arrived from England, the collector changed his mind and
only bought a small proportion of the consignment.  This left me flat, and
besides, I was getting into my stride in countermining Mnsterberg.  So I
stagnated in New York, getting lower in the water every day.
     I was nearly down and out, when I got an introduction to the editor of
"Vanity Fair", a perfectly charming man, who reminded me not a little of
Austin Harrison.  He was, however, extremely intelligent and understood his
business thoroughly.  In a couple of years he had pulled the paper up from
nothing to one quarter of a million.  He treated me, through some
inexplicable misunderstanding, as a human being and asked me to write for
him.
     I began with an account of a baseball game as seen by a professor from
the University of Peking.  This was followed up by a series of Hokku.  This
is a Japanese verse form.  It contains three lines totalling seventeen
syllables.  I modified this by introducing regular meter, the first line
dactyl-spondee, the second line spondee-dactyl-spondee, and the third
dactyl-spondee.  A Hokku must contain a very definite finely chiselled idea
or rather, chain of ideas.  Such is the strict rule, but one is allowed a
certain degree of latitude.
      The first line announces the subject of the meditation; the second
the moral reflection suggested thereby, and the third some epigrammatic
commentary.  For instance:

                  BUDDHISM

          I am a petal
          Darkling, lost on the river
          Being -- Ilusion.

     We analyse this as follows: In saying "I am" one implies that one is
only a detached derelict in the darkness of ignorance, whose essential
quality is the illusion of existence.
     I wrote a double Hokku on the Hokku itself.  Here it is:

                THE HOKKU

          Catch me, caress me,
          Crush me!  Gather a dewdrop ---
          Star to a system!

          God in an atom!
          Comets revel around it ---
          That is a Hokku.

{766}


















     I became a frequent contributor to "Vanity Fair".  I can never be
sufficiently grateful to Frank Crowinshield for his kindness and patience.
My association with him is the one uniformly pleasant experience of dealing
with editors that I can quote.  He always took pains to make the most of
his material.  If a contribution did not suit him, he did not reject it
without a word of explanation.  He talked it over, and suggested
modifications.  I thus found out how to suit his taste without injuring my
self-respect.  Most editors drive away their best contributors by treating
them like street beggars and leave them bewildered at the rejection.
Others, again, haggle over the terms and as often as not delay or evade
payment.  They then wonder why they fail to hit the public taste.  It soon
goes around that getting a cheque from so-and-so is like fishing for sharks
with a trout rod.  The editor is tacitly boycotted.
     This and my work with Evangeline Adams kept me going through the
summer.  I had a glorious time, what with love and sea bathing.  I wrote a
good deal of poetry; in particular "The Golden Rose", and a set of lyrics,
mostly sonnets to Hilarion, who appears later, in "the Urn", as "the Cat
Officer".  This woman possessed a unique atmosphere.  I can only describe
it as "sweetness long drawn out".  This translated itself in terms of
rhythm.  I quote a typical sonnet:

        IN THE RED ROOM OF ROSE CROIX

     The bleeding gate of God unveils its rose;
     The cavernous West swallows the dragon Sun:
     Earth's darkness broods on dissolution,
     A mother-vulture, nested on Repose.
     Ah then, what grace within our girdle glows,
     To garb thy glee-gilt heart, Hilarion,
     An Alpenbluehn on our star-crested snows.

     O scarlet flower, smear honey on the thigh
     Of this shy bee, that sucks thy sweetness dry,
     O bower of sunset, bring me to thy sleep
     Wherein move dreams stained purple with perfumes,
     Whose birds of Paradise, on Punic plumes,
     Declare dooms undecipherably deep.

     Compare this with any previous sonnet of mine and notice the
lusciousness of the lines.
     I also wrote a one-act play "The Saviour".  The main idea of this had
been in my mind for a long while as a presentation of irony.  The council
of a city in the extremity of despair invoke a long-expected saviour.  He
appears to their rapturous relief but turns out to be the enemy they feared
in his most

{767}



















frightful form.  I elaborated this theme by introducing episodes where they
are given a chance to escape.  They throw this away for the sake of the
saviour.  The poignancy is further increased by various vicissitudes.  The
council is guided by a fool whom they ignore, being the only character with
a grain of common sense, and by a prophet whose insane purpose is to
deliver the city to destruction.  By his inspired advice, the council are
lured into one disastrous folly after another, and when the catastrophe
occurs the prophet throws off the mask and bloats over the ruin he has
wrought.
     This play was accepted by Morris Brown but as bad luck would have it,
war conditions obliged him to close his theatre before it could be
produced.  I published it in "The International" in March 1918, but only
after a struggle with my lawyer, who was seriously alarmed lest Washington
should think the cap fitted and suppress the number.  The play being
written three years earlier, and there being not the slightest allusion to
or analogy with current events, his protest showed how dire a reign of
terror had been established by the megalomaniac in the White House and his
brutal and thick-headed bravo, Burleson.
     On October 6th, I left New York for a trip round the coast.  I wanted
to see the San Francisco exhibition, and I wanted to get first-hand facts
about the attitude of the people, outside the Wall Street machine, to the
war.  With this I combined a honeymoon with Hilarion; though the sky was
cloudy and windy, she popped in and out all the time, having decided to
spice the romance and adventure by taking her husband in tow.
     My first stop was Detroit, where Parke Davis were charming and showed
me over their wonderful chemical works.  They had installed countless and
ingenious devices for conduction the processes involved in manufacture by
machinery.  Many of these produced effects of exquisite beauty of a land
till then dreamed of in my philosophy.  A great mass of pills in a highly
polished and rapidly revolving receiver was infinitely fascinating to
watch.  The spheres tumbled over each other with a rhythmical rise and fall
in a rhythm which sang to the soul.
     They were kind enough to interest themselves in my researches in
Anhalonium Lewinii and made me some special preparations on the lines
indicated by my experience which proved greatly superior to previous
preparations.
     In Chicago, I met Paul Carus, who received me royally and showed me
the city.  The man had always interested me as being widely learned, yet
understanding so little.  After meeting him, I decided that I liked him for
it.  He was a big-hearted, simple-minded creature, with a certain childlike
vision, by the light of which he judged the external world, a little like
the White Knight in "Alice"!

{768}






















     I confess to dislike Chicago.  It resembles New York more than its
citizens would like to admit, but lacks altogether the cosmopolitan and
man-of-the-world atmosphere of Gotham.  It gives the impression of being a
pure machine.  Its artistic and cultured side shares the deadness of the
rest.  It compares with New York rather as Manchester with London.
     I called on Narnet Munroe, described in the charge sheet as a poetess.
She edits a periodical called "Poetry".  I am still not sure if she knew my
name and my work, but she showed no interest whatever!  She was loaded to
the gunwhale with a cargo of conceit.  She was the standard of perfection
by which Milton and Keats might be measured in terms of their inferiority
to her.  Incidentally these two were bracketed zero.  The first article of
her faith was that rhythm and rime were incompatible with poetry.  Her
creed contained many similar dogmas, all fixed with bigoted intolerance.  I
got away from this dessicated spinster and her dreary drone with alacrity.
     I proceeded westward.

          As I came through the desert, thus it was.
          As I came through the desert ...

     Chicago is the forlorn outpost of civilized man.  Every mile beyond
marks a lower rung on the ladder of evolution.  St Paul and Minneapolis are
merely magnified markets always open.  There is no life of any kind outside
business.  I suppose that poor damned souls are sweating all they know to
get out somehow, somewhere.
     West of the twin cities, even towns become rarer and each is more
transient and inhuman than the last.  The vastness of nature and the
stupendous strength of her elemental forces have cried in vain.  They move
no man to wonder or admiration.  He goes about his ant-like work with
hurrying intentness, incapable of seeing or hearing anything not directly
bearing on the problems that preoccupy him.  Nobody reads, nobody thinks.
When anyone does, they make short work of him.  Not until one crosses the
Rockies is there a semblance of resurrection.  The coast, in touch with the
Pacific archipelago and Asia, has caught a little of their culture.
     I was warmly welcomed in Vancouver by my "Son", who had established a
large and increasing Lodge of O.T.O.  They had made with their own hands
admirably effective furniture and ornaments, and they had been splendidly
drilled in the Rituals.  I regretted the necessity of going on so soon.
     I travelled by sea via Victoria to Seattle.  My principal observation
is that the inhabitants of the Pacific coast have almost everything in
common; original racial differences seem to matter little; I suppose
because the great distance from the base makes them feel that they have
burnt their boats.  It would be quite impossible to distinguish a British
Columbian from a

{769}





















Californian, while, on the other hand, the people of the coast differ very
widely from anyone east of the Rockies.  The point is important.  The
common psychology and common interests of the coast tend to unite them as
against the transmontane tribes.  The divergence of economic aims widens
yearly.  It seems certain that a time will come when the antagonisms of
their neighbours will reach a climax.  Few English, even those who have
travelled in the States, have any real grasp of the geography.  West of St
Paul only Denver and Salt Lake City boast over a hundred thousand
inhabitants in all that weary wilderness.  One thinks of Chicago as the
capital of the Middle West, as if it were half way across.  In fact the
distance of the two coasts is something like four to one.  The political
link which joins the coast with the Middle West is very much too long to be
natural; it would have snapped long ago, but for the idealistic fancies
about unity.  They will have to yield to the persistent hammering of fact.
Secession is certain, sooner or later, but the conditions are so peculiar
that to forecast its form would be an insolence to fate.
     The Middle West is predominantly Teutonic and Scandinavian.  I found
little overt sympathy with Germany for all that.  Still less, any impulse
to show active sympathy.  But as for going into the fight on our side, the
suggestion outraged elementary common sense.  One prominent Kansas paper
had a long editorial, angrily refusing sympathy with the ideas of "those
fools down east" and expressing the hope that an air-raid on New York would
teach them a much needed lesson.  It was argued with the utmost vehemence
that the Middle West was independent of the east.  They refused to admit
for a moment that their prosperity as producers could be imperilled by the
calamities of their transport agents and customers.
     On the coast, this hard, cold-blooded selfishness was tempered by the
climate.  I met much superficial sympathy with both sides.  But there was a
universal agreement to refuse to judge the rights and wrongs of the war.
It was Europe's business and nobody else's.  It would be a crime, a blunder
and stark treason to the constitution for America to take a hand.
     Since my last visit San Francisco had been rebuilt.  The old charm had
vanished completely.  It had become a regular fellow.  The earthquake had
swallowed up romance, and the fire burnt up the soul of the city to ashes.
The phoenix had perished and from the cinders had arisen a turkey buzzard.
     I hurried south, stopping off at Santa Cruz, to see the famous big
trees.  I snatched a meal in the town and walked out in the gloaming.  My
sweetheart was waiting for me in the dusk just beyond the town limits.
"How glad I am you have come," she whispered.  "Let us walk together to the
grove.  You shall sleep on my bosom all night, beneath the shadow of the
giant sentinel whose spear points salute the stars."  My sweetheart wove
herself

{770}






















about me, an intoxicating ambience.  Drunk with delight I strode through
the silence.  It must have been sheer luck that I found the grove, for one
cannot see it from a distance, at least on a dark night.  But I walked
straight to the clump and threw myself down dog-tired and happy beyond all
whooping.  I gazed awhile through the tangle of branches up to the stars.
They closed.  I slept.
     At dawn, I woke refreshed, had breakfast in a cabin hard by and
wandered back to the railway.  I had had a perfect holiday from the Spirit
of America!  The fresh morning air became articulate and whispered a sound
in my ear.  Hear it is:

              AT BIG TREES, SANTA CRUZ

          Night fell.  I travelled through the cloven chasm
             To where the redwood's cloistered giant grove
             Sprung gothic and priapic; wonder wove
          God's glory, gathered in the Titan spasm
          Nature's parturient anguish.  Murk pantasm
             Moving I seemed!  I found the treasurer trove
             Of fire, and consecrated all to love,
          Smiting my soul within the protoplasm.

          Within that temple of the midnight sun
          I cried all night upon Hilarion!
             All night I willed, I loved, I wrought the spell
          That Merlin muttered low in Broceliaunde,
          Till over Santa Cruz the day star dawned.
             God should have heard me, had I cried from Hell!

     I wandered on to Los Angeles, and, having been warned against the
cinema crowd of cocaine-crazed, sexual lunatics, and the swarming maggots
of near-occultists, I came through undamaged.  I found a range of hills
north of the city and had a marvellous day speeding from crest to crest.  I
was so exhilarated that walking would not serve my turn.  I had to run!  As
I ran, this sonnet shaped itself in my spirit?

          I ran upon the ridges of the hill
             That from the North-guard watch Los Angeles.
             Now I life up my priestly hands to bless
          The Sun, from whose emblazoned cup God spills
          The wine to comfort all earth's infinite ills;
             The cordial of man's heart, whose dour distress
             Heals only in immaculate silence
          According as he knows, and love, and wills.

{771}




















          Ay!  Thought is grown a geyser-gush of flame
          Since those two hours this morning when you came,
             When, like a comet swirling to its sun,
          You strangled me in your Astarte's tress,
          And wove me into serpent silences.
             Upon your body's loom, Hilarion!

     My outward journey ended at San Diego.  Near the city is Point Loma
where lived Katherine Tingley, who with William Q. Judge seceded from the
Theosophical Society when Annie Besant snatched the reins.  I knew nothing
of the woman, but her refusal to accept the unscrupulous usurpation was in
her favour, and a casual glance at her official organ had impressed me not
unfavourably.  I decided to see her and discuss the possibility of an
alliance.  To my amazement she refused to receive me when I called at the
settlement.  From the moment I entered the grounds I was aware of the most
nauseating atmosphere that I had ever met magically.  The suggestion was of
a putrefying and entirely bloodless flesh, as if a cannibal had sucked out
its life to the last drop and flung it away.  Her disciples corresponded.
They moved about limp and listless, corpse-pallid, with the eyes of dead
fishes. I got out of the cesspool without wasting time, but even so I had
to pay for my imprudence.
    San Diego possessed one most attractive feature.  It is within a short
motor ride of the frontier of Mexico.  One comes to a town, Tia Juanta,
which thrives on refugees from righteousness.  It is composed exclusively
of brothels, drinking saloons and gambling hells.  I don't care for this
sort of thing, but it was at least much better than anything north of the
border.
     Going east, I stopped off to see the Grand Canyon.  It is superb, of
course, the best thing in the whole country; but, at that, it is not in the
same class as Himalayan scenery.  The sunset effects are certainly
splendid, but to me the many interests lie in the geological problem.
     The canyon is a zigzag slit cut out deep through a practically level
plateau.  The upper part of the gap seems to show that side streams fed the
main river at some time, and this explanation is usually offered.  My
objection is that the level is squarely cut away.  One looks down over the
edge to a perpendicular depth of some hundreds of feet before the sheer
rock eases off to slopes.  The flatness of the plateau makes it impossible
that it could ever have been crossed by streams and I could hardly believe
that tributaries so numerous and so short, springing from nowhere in
particular, could have gouged out the gorges.  I prefer to suspect that the
original event was an earthquake, which opened a long crack, and that the
river took advantage of this natural channel.
     I went down the Colorado River by Angel Trail.  I wanted to make

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sure I had not lost my old speed and surefootedness.  The previous record
from the edge of the cliff to the river was some minutes over two hours.  I
did it in one hour twenty minutes to a second!  I paid the price; the nails
of my big toes were so badly bruised that the came off completely.  I
rested by the river's edge and wrote this sonnet:

          I lie beneath the cliff of the canyon.
             Down the long trail I flitted like a swallow,
             Daring the very elements to follow,
          Nor paused to mark the crags I leapt upon.
          Now, lying in the sun, my soul's a swan,
             Soars through the boundless blue to greet Apollo:
             I call my love by name.  Remote and hollow
          The rocks re-echo me: "Hilarion!"

          How pure and beautiful the body is
          Lapped in fatigue's caressing ecstasies!
             For then the soul is free to leap above it,
          To soar, to dive, to seek and find his mate
          In the dominion of the uncreate,
             And lastly --- to return to it, and love it!

     This was my last adventure.  I returned to New York by short stages
and resumed the anchorless tossing.  The one new feature was my affair with
Stuart X.
     The next act was the appearance of Ananda K. Koomaraswamy, the
Eurasian critic of religion and art, with his wife, Ratan Devi, a musician
from Yorkshire, who had fallen in love with him and filched him from his
first wife.  He soon got sick of her and took refuge in India, but finding
it a continual nuisance to have to send her supplies, wrote her to join
him.  It had been suggested, with the secret hope that the climate would
rid him of his incubus.  She made the journey in charge of his best friend,
a wealthy Punjabi, whom she promptly seduced.
     After a series of violent scenes in Bombay, the half-breed accepted
the situation and all three travelled together for some time in the hills.
Ratan Devi possessed a strange seductive beauty and charm, but above all an
ear so accurate and a voice so perfectly trained, that she was able to sing
Indian music, which is characterized by half and quarter tones
imperceptible to most European ears.  His idea was to bring her out to New
York.  He introduced himself to me, knowing my reputation on Asiatic
religions and Magick.  I invited them to dine and to pass the evening at my
apartment, so that she might sing to the tamboura her repertoire of
Kashmiri and other Indian songs.  I was charmed and promised to do all I
could to make her a success.

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I introduced them to several influential people and wrote a prose poem
about her singing for "Vanity Fair".
     She and I lost no time about falling in love.  This suited her husband
perfectly.  The high cost of living was bad enough without having to pay
for one's wife's dinner.  All he asked was that I should introduce him to a
girl who would be his mistress while costing him nothing.  I was only too
happy to oblige as I happened to know a girl with a fancy for weird
adventures.
     He was anxious to rid himself of even theoretical responsibilities and
therefore proposed a divorce.  I agreed with a yawn.  Details never
interest me.  Meanwhile, she had made her debut and scored a superb
success.  This had never occurred to her husband, who, being unable to
appreciate her supreme art, hardly took her singing seriously.  In fact,
her success was largely due to my assistance.  I taught her how to let her
genius loose at the critical moment.  However, to her husband, only one
thing mattered at all.  There might be money in her.  Right about face!  He
wriggled out of the divorce on various puerile pretexts and then pulled out
the pathetic stuff, and pleaded with her to come back to him.  She was the
only woman he had ever loved, etc., "ad nauseam".
     These manoeuvres were conducted at the top of their voices.  It was a
series of scolding matches and epileptic fits.  I had a gorgeous time!
what annoyed them both more than anything was my utter indifference to the
whole affair.  My position was that if she chose to live with me, she
could.  When she wanted to get out there was the door wide open.  But I
wouldn't lift a finger for any purpose whatever.
     The situation was complicated by her becoming pregnant.  This changed
my attitude.  I still refused to interfere with her will, but now I was
prepared to make any sacrifice necessary to insure her welfare and that of
our child.
     She was making quite a lot of money by now so he pestered her day and
night, whenever he could spare a moment from the German prostitute with
whom he was now living, having been thrown out by my eccentric friend.  He
had queer ideas, had the eminent mongrel.  The cost of a double room being
slightly less than that of two single, he effected a prudent economy by
putting this girl in the same bed with his wife when he was out of town.
     During this time I was often away in Washington, thus missing a good
deal of the fun.  In June, I came back proposing to spend the summer in a
cottage by Lake Pasquaney.  Ratan Devi was one of those women whose chief
pleasure is to show her power over men. She tried it on me, but a bath
brick would have done quite as well.  Convinced after many desperate
efforts that I would not run after her or even walk her way, she began to
understand true love, to recognize me as her master and quit playing the

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fool.  She did not divine that my Gibraltar firmness was calculated policy.
I really loved her and knew that the only hope of making her love me was to
kill the vanity which prevented her from being true to herself, and giving
her whole heart.
     Before I left for New Hampshire, we had a farewell meeting.  She was
now too far advanced in gestation to appear in public, so her husband had
persuaded her to go to England for the confinement, and also to make
various necessary arrangements with regard to the future.  He had now
cunningly pretended to give way about the divorce, admitting my right to my
child and its mother.  His real motive was very different.  She was a
particularly bad sailor.  During a previous pregnancy, she had been obliged
to break the journey to save her life.  She was in fact on the brink of
death when they carried her ashore and she lay for weeks so ill that a
breath of wind might have blown her away.  It was, at least, not a bad bet
that the Atlantic voyage would end in the same or even more fortunate way.
     I still refused to put pressure upon her.  I said, "Here's my address.
You're welcome whenever you like to come, and I love you and will serve you
with every ounce of my strength."
     I went off.  In a few days she joined me.  The peace and beauty and
solitude renewed the rapture of our love.  I had given my word to do
nothing to hold her and after a few days she decided to go to England; her
children needed her.  It was her peculiar perversity to be at one time the
artist absolute; at another the mother and no more, and the trouble was
that whenever common sense wanted her to be the one, she invariably assumed
the personality of the other.  So now, just because I represented art,
music and love, her troll tugged at her to be maternal.
     Off she went.  The Eurasian's calculations were not far wrong.  The
voyage caused a miscarriage and she lay between life and death for over six
weeks.  Needless to say, the moment the mischief was done, she repented
bitterly.  When she returned to America, I was in New Orleans.  She
implored me to come back to her.  She wrote once, and often twice, every
day, each averaging a dozen pages.  There were also telegrams.  I replied
with immovable firmness.  "You insisted on going away, with the result of
killing our baby.  I love you and I'll take you back, but on this
condition; that you make a clean break with the past."
     Her unhappy temperament kept her at war with herself.  She wanted to
have her cake and eat it as well.  She wouldn't burn her bridges.  I
maintained firm correctness and it all came to nothing.  My heart is still
not wholly healed, but I relieved myself of part of my pain by using the
whole story, exact in every detail, as the background of my Simon Iff yarn
"Not good enough" ("The International", January 1918).  I made one change.
Koomaraswamy, Haranzada Swami; Haranzada being the Hindustani word for

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"bastard".  The publication of this tale came as a slight shock to the
self-complacency of the scoundrel.
     I must not omit one characteristic incident.  He happened to be
momentarily hard up and conceived the really brilliant idea of concocting a
fable that his German girl was a new Sappho.  He made her copy out a number
of poems from my "Collected Works" and sent her round to Putnam's to persuade
them to publish the really remarkable work of this romantic young American
beauty rose.  The girl told his wife in bed one night, they having found a
bond of common sympathy in their contempt and loathing for "The Worm" as we
had familiarly called him.  She told me at once, and I have every reason to
believe that the letter I wrote to Putnam's is treasured in the archives of
the firm as the last word in savage contempt.
     So ended my adventures with these fascinating freaks.  I must now run
back to New Orleans.
























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                              78


     New Orleans and San Antonio are said to be the only two towns in the
United States which possess souls of their own.  That of New Orleans was
already being driven out under my eyes, and I dare say that by this time
the work of destruction is complete.  Probably San Antonio has shared its
fate.  The most depressing feature in the country is the uniformity of the
towns.  However singular the geographical situation and its topographical
peculiarities, the possibilities of beauty have been nullified by the
determination of the people to do everything just right, according to the
measure in fashion.  Wherever one is, sooner or later, one gets tired of
one's surroundings.  In Europe, the cure is easy.  One toddles along to the
next place sure of finding some novelty.  In America, however far one goes,
the same hideous homogeneity disappoints one.  The relief conferred by the
old quarter of New Orleans threw me instantly into an ecstasy of creative
energy.  I wrote day and night continuously --- poems, essays and short
stories.  My principal invention was the detective "Simon Iff" whose method
of discovering the solution of a problem was calculation of the mental and
moral energies of the people concerned.
     I wrote a series of six stories about his exploits and followed it by
"The Butterfly Net" or "the Net", a novel in which he is a secondary character.
In this novel I have given an elaborate description of modern magical
theories and practices.  Most of the characters are real people whom I have
known and many of the incidents taken from experience.
     During this time, I was also granted what mystics describe as "the
Beatific Vision" which is the most characteristic of those attributed to
Tiphereth, the archetypal idea of beauty and harmony.  In this vision one
retains one's normal consciousness, but every impression of daily life is
as enchanting and exquisite as an ode of Keats.  The incidents of life
become a harmonious unity; one is lost in a rosy dream of romantic
happiness.  One may compare it to the effect produced by wine on some
people.  There is, however, no unreality in the vision.  One is not blinded
to the facts of existence.  It is simply that the normal incoherence and
discrepancy between them has been harmonized.
     While on this subject, let me mention that Tiphereth corresponds to
the grade of initiation on the Threshold of the Order of R. R. et A. C.,
and to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.  It
therefore marks a critically important stage in initiation.  Only one other
is equally

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cardinal: the grade of Master of the Temple, which is the Threshold of the
Order of the A.'. A.'..  I have called the vision corresponding to this
the "Vision of Wonder" which permeates one's daily life in a similar way.
The difference is that penetrating beyond sensory perceptions, one is aware
of the mechanism of events, of the subtle chain of causes which connect
them.  One perceives in detail how each impression necessarily succeeds its
forerunner.  The effect is that one is lost in wonder at the ingenuity of
the universe, to use a very inadequate word, as being the only one
available.  One feels the intense awed admiration which the greatest
masterpieces of Kant, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Riemann, Kelvin,
and such as they inspired, with this difference: that all impressions are
equally puissant to produce it.
     My best essay was "The Green Goddess" written in the old Absinthe
House itself, and adorning its main theme the philosophical reflections
suggested by absinthe with descriptions of the inn, its guests, and the
city.
     From New Orleans I went to stay with my cousin Lawrence Bishop on his
orange and grapefruit plantation in Florida.  I shall describe elsewhere
the spiritual abyss in which these lost souls were plunged.  I cannot think
of Florida, but in my ears rings the exceeding bitter cry of poor little
sixteen-year-old Alma, "I've found it doesn't pay to tell the truth."
     This visit opened up an expanse and depth of heartache which I had
thought impossible.  Cousin Lawrence saw how ill I was.  The family fed on
offal which I would not have thrown to a decent pig.  He had stayed with us
in England and realized that I could not be expected to eat such garbage,
so he asked me kindly what I would like to eat so as to build up my
strength.  I said, "Don't bother about that.  All I need is plenty of fruit
and milk."  It seems too rotten to be true but his wife made a point of
cutting me off from milk as much as she dared, and went to the utmost pains
to hide the supply, so as to cheat me out of the glass of milk I was
supposed to have before going to bed.  (I always stayed up late working.)
     The mean malice of his hag is too dreadful to contemplate, yet all
things serve the poet's turn.  She gave me the idea of one of my best "Simon"
"Iff in America" stories, "Suffer the Little Children".
     Let us hurry back to New York.  I arrived there in the spring still
sick of some malady which produced depression and weakness and took the
spirit out of me without showing any obvious symptoms.  I found once more
that I was a stranger.  I had nothing definite to do, no plausible plans.
I wandered wearily through the weeks utterly powerless to concentrate on
anything, to interest myself in anything: I simply suffered.  Things got
worse and worse.  My resources came to an end.
     One of my old disciples, Leon Engars Kennedy, a portrait painter, had
arrived from Europe.  We renewed our friendship.  Indeed he needed my

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help badly enough.  His moral tone, never high, had been almost destroyed
by the war.  The trouble with him was that he had never grown up; he was in
receipt of an ample allowance from his family, but it was always gone
before it arrived, and he dragged on from month to month borrowing a dollar
here and a dollar there from everyone he met.
     I remember a scene almost too humiliating to tell.  The janitor of his
studio was a crippled lad, with a large family --- a half-starved creature
with the pathetic eyes of a wounded fawn.  It was horrible to hear Kennedy,
the adopted son of a multi-millionare, pleading almost on his knees with
eloquent appeals for pity, mingled with the cunning arguments of a
confidence man, for a loan of two dollars.  I am glad to think that I
helped the boy both spiritually and practically.  I badgered him into
working regularly at his art, arranged an exhibition for him, interested a
number of influential people in him, persuaded others to help him out,
wrote him up in "The International", and otherwise pulled him through.  I
failed, however, to keep him out of the clutches of a very beautiful red-
headed Irish typist, hysterical from sexual suppression.  She finally
persuaded him to marry her, and I am afraid his last chance of a career is
among the dusty documents in the files of the marriage bureau at City Hall.
At least, I have heard no more of him since his return to Holland.
     He, in his turn, showed me great kindness.  When it came to the point
where I could not pay for a bed, he let me sleep on the sofa in his studio.
This was a garret in an old half-decayed house on Fifth Avenue, lacking
even a water supply.  But to me it was a paradise.  Its poverty and
discomfort were transformed into luxury by the thought of Kennedy's
kindness.  I slept here for quite a long time.  My health picked up
gradually and, as the result of a Magical Operation on May 27th, became
suddenly perfect.  I was thus able, on May 28th and 30th, to perform two
important Magical Operations completed by a third a few days later, with
the object of giving effect to my will to establish the Law of Thelema.
The result was that I secured control of "The International" and became
contributing editor (implying practically sole responsibility for the
contents) in August.
     This magazine was originally the organ of pure literature, the only
one in the United States of any authority.  Unfortunately, the editor ---
and to all intents and purposes the proprietor --- was Mr George Sylvester
Viereck.  At the outbreak of the war, he transformed the character of "The"
"International", introduced pro-German propaganda and thus ruined its
reputation.  It was now on the black list in Canada and refused admission
by the postal authorities of the colony.  Its best friends had withdrawn
their support; its circulation had dwindled almost to nothing, and it
staggered on mechanically from month to month without heart or hope.  In
eight months I pulled it up so

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successfully that it became saleable.  It was bought by Professor Keasbey,
who issued one number so dreary, unintelligible and futile that it died on
the spot.
     Keasbey had been professor of institutional history in the University
of Austin, Texas.  He was a charming and cultured man, but full of cranky
notions about socialism, which he held with arrogant obstinacy.  His
literary style, on which he prided himself, as would have been ridiculous
in Ruskin or Walter Pater, was turgid, convoluted, incoherent, over-loaded,
redundant and beyond the wit of the most earnest and expert reader to
comprehend.  He was not far behind William Howell Williams, elsewhere
mentioned, in his power to baffle inquiries.  Frank Harris agreed on this
point, no less than all the other people to whom I put it.  He told me with
amazement that he had been badgered into printing a half-page article of
Keasbey's in "Pearson's", of which he was then treasurer, able, therefore, to
put pressure on the editor.  This number came under the censure of Burleon.
He had gone to Washington to justify himself.  Burleon had shown him the
copy which had been submitted to the censors.  Keasbey's article was marked
as objectionable by all three pencils.  Harris exploded.  "You can't
understand it," he raged.  "I can't understand it.  I don't believe there's
any man alive who could make head or tail of a single sentence.  How can it
do any harm?"
     Keasbey's social opinions had cost him his chair at Austin.  He had
read and admired some of my work, and sought me out in my cottage by Lake
Pasquaney.  We spent three delightful days without even stopping talking,
bar odd snatches of sleep.  In conversation, he was delightful, breezy and
instructive.  Our acquaintance had ripened into something like friendship.
He behaved very strangely in this matter of "The International".  He
professed the warmest friendship for me, spent sometime almost every day in
my office chatting; we lunched and dined together quite often, but he never
breathed one word of his intention to buy "The International", and when the
transaction became public, he went one better.  He asked me to continue my
contributions and even suggested that I should work jointly with him, yet
all the time, his idea was to oust me altogether.  He refused to print a
single line from my pen, and that, although he was in despair about filling
the number.  He must too have known that the success of the paper was
entirely due to my personality; he knew that I had written nearly
everything myself, and that the only other important elements had been
given to me by their authors purely as a token of their personal admiration
and friendship for me.  I suppose he was utterly blinded by his conceit,
which he possessed to a degree to which I can recall no parallel.  However
that may be, the result was that the May number was a monument of
incomprehensible, worthless and unreadable rubbish, and that he found
himself in his brand new and portentous offices, monarch of all he
surveyed, with his overlaid infant a corpse at his feet.  The episode is
excellently mirthful.

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     I shall describe in its due place the course of my friendship with
Maitland Ambrose Payne.  One day he told me of a Singalese joint on 8th
Avenue where they made real curry.  I began to frequent it and thus met the
lady who appears, in "The Urn", as the "Dog-headed Hermes or Anubis".  She
was a Pennsylvanian Dutch girl, the only member of her family not actually
insane.  We joined forces and took a furnished apartment in a corner house
on Central Park West near its northern limit at 110th Street.  From the bow
window of the drawing-room trees only were to be seen.  They rested and
rejoiced my spirit.  I could forget New York, although within half an hour
from my office.
     My salary was twenty dollars a week; two dollars more than that of my
typist.  Life had taught me to enjoy outrages of this kind.  It gave me
pleasure to contrast my own generosity with the meanness of the rich and to
take pride in my ability to accept smilingly such insults and privations.
During this autumn as fully detailed in another place, the passion to
express myself through art was born in me.  The months passed in a pageant
of delight.
     My liaison with the Dog came suddenly to an end.  Exactly as in the
case of my wife, the half-suppressed strain of madness in her blood came to
the surface.  She took to orgies of solitary drunkenness.  This was nothing
new; in fact, when I met her they were of almost daily occurrence.  I
succeeded in pulling her together for a time, but she relapsed.  When I
found this out, I told her the story of my wife and put my foot down.  I
gave her to understand that if it happened again I was through.  She knew
me for a man of my word an quit, but a few days later it was as bad as
ever.  I gave her one more chance, but of course in vain.
     Early in October, I broke up the menage and transferred my
headquarters to a studio in West 9th Street, which I shared with a friend
of the Dog's, hereafter described as the Camel.
     Her name was Roddie Minor, a married woman living apart from her
husband, a near artist of German extraction.  She was physically a
magnificent animal, with a man's brain well stocked with general knowledge
and a special comprehension of chemistry and pharmacy.  She was at this
time employed in the pathological laboratory of a famous doctor, but
afterwards became managing chemist to a prominent firm of perfumery
manufactures.
     I have said that she had a man's brain, but despite every effort,
there was still one dark corner in which her femininity had taken refuge
and defied her to expel it.  From time to time the garrison made a
desperate sortie.  At such moments her womanhood avenged itself savagely on
her ambition.  She was more frantically feminine than any avowed woman
could possibly be.  She was ruthlessly irrational.  Such attacks were
fortunately as short as they were severe, but unfortunately too often did
irreparable damage.
     In the upshot, this characteristic led to our separation.  I treated
her as an

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equal in all respects, and for some months everything went as smoothly as
if she had been really a man.  But that beleaguered section of her brain
sent out spies under cover of night, and whispered to the besiegers
sinister suggestions, to shake their confidence in themselves.  The idea
was born and grew that she was essentially my inferior.  She began to feel
my personality as an obsession.  She began to dread being dominated, though
perfectly well aware that I wished nothing less, that her freedom was
necessary to my enjoyment of my own.  But she failed to rid herself of this
hallucination, and when I decided to make a Great Magical Retirement on the
Hudson, in a canoe, in the summer of 1918, we agreed to part.  There was no
quarrel.  Our friendship and even our intimacy continued.  My last night in
New York before leaving for Europe was spent in here arms.
     Such weekends as she could manage were passed in my camp on Oesopus
Island.  Her first visit was rather an adventure.  She had brought up
supplies of canned stuff from New York to Staatsburg, where I met her with
the canoe.  She had understood from my letter that the island was close to
this town, and had foolishly failed to consult a map.  She was tired with
her week's work and the long journey; the train was late, night was
falling, the wind was getting up, and the rain beginning to skirmish.  The
canoe was loaded down within an inch of the gunwale.  The wind blew dead in
our teeth.  The river began to roughen and the rain to come down more
steadily.  Our progress was tediously slow and the journey not without
peril.  At one point the stream is bayed out so that for something like a
mile one is right out of reach of land.  The slightest accident would have
been critical.  We hardly dared paddle with our full strength.  We took
something like five hours to reach the island using our utmost effort.  It
was after eleven o'clock when we beached the canoe.  By this time the poor
girl was drenched to the skin, completely exhausted and almost starving.
Her femininity took advantage of the weariness of the besieging army to
sally forth from the main gate.  She wanted to curse God and die, and,
presumably to get into training, cursed me.  I could not comfort her.  She
threw herself on my couch and collapsed.  I covered her with rugs and
watched by her side all night.  Refreshed by sleep, she was herself again
when the sun struck the rocky ridge which walled the lilied creek which my
camp overlooked.  The sky had cleared, the rain dried off the rocks.  We
brought the provisions across from the southern inlet and made breakfast.
We patted our bellies, contemplated life and behold it was very good.




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                              79


     My summer was uneventful.  Such adventures as I had were pleasant
variations from routine.  I must tell one tale from its interest to
amateurs of coincidence and philosophers whose favourite subject of
meditation is "What a small world we live in!"
     To ascend the Hudson in a sailing canoe is not so simple as it sounds.
No great effort is required to come to grief.  It had taken me all I knew
to get round a certain rectangular bend against a gusty wind of uncertain
temper.  The river was white with foam, and what with cross currents and
sudden squalls I had wondered more than once how matters would turn out.
In case of capsizing it might have been no joke to scramble up the
perpendicular cliffs which hemmed in the stream in many places.  Once or
twice, while trying to use my sail, I had just shaved upsetting.  The bend
once past, the breeze had steadied, and I was able to lounge luxuriously in
the stern and watch the shores stream past.  The only question was where to
sleep.  The hours passed and no sign of human habitation.  In the end I
submitted to fate and spent the night in the open on a stony slope.
     The next day, after lunching gloriously on a convenient islet, I came
to Newborough Bay, where the river widens out to something like three times
its average.  There is a town on either bank connected by a steam ferry.  I
was merrily sailing along, when a squall struck the canoe without warning.
I found myself rushing recklessly through the water, with the spray
shooting from beneath my bows high into space.  I was then aware that I was
being driven helpless between the two steamers.  My sail refused to come
down.  At infinite risk, I crawled forward and unshipped the mast, thus
managing to pull up before reaching the point of danger.
    I looked south.  The weather threatened to worsen.  It might be nasty.
I was more than a mile from the shore.  My best chance was to reach safety
before the storm came to its full powers.  I therefore put the tackle in
order, reshipped the mast, and half-hoisted the sail, ready to lower again
if things got bad.  I flew upstream at a terrific pace for over an hour.
The threatened tempest passed clear to the south.  It was now dark and once
again I bethought me of a bivouac.  Exhausted by my struggle, I paddled
wearily, the wind having dropped entirely, past a wharf.  Having no money
to waste on a bed --- my two dollars, twenty-five of original capital not
having noticeable increased --- I shook my head and shouted a genial
refusal to a stripling who hailed me from the quay and suggested my
sleeping in the village.  But an

{783}






















older man came forward and offered to let me doss it in a boathouse.  I was
really all in and decided to accept.
     He hailed some boatmen who carried my canoe on shore, while I walked
with the kind old captain to the boat club.  We had settled on where I was
to sleep, when in came a man, obviously a gentleman and obviously English.
He made the same observation about me, though what with my inch of beard,
deep sunburn and general air of ruffianism. I presented an aspect rarely to
be found in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.  He insisted on taking me to his
house for supper and putting me up for the night.  I gratefully accepted.
Five minutes later we had found out that he had at one time been a master
in King Henry VIII's School in Coventry, and had known my Aunt Annie and
her family who honoured that town with their residence since their
childhood.  The next morning after breakfast I resumed my journey.  He took
me in his launch with the canoe in tow as far as Poughkeepsie where we
parted.
     I promised to write and tell him where my permanent camps was, in the
hope that he would allow me to share his hospitality by bringing his family
to lunch.  The sequel has one more amusing coincidence.  There was, of
course, no way by which he could warn me of his visit.  One morning there
came to me a quite irrational wish. I found myself thinking, "How I wish I
had prawns for lunch!"  The thought recurred despite indignant attempts to
banish it.  An hour or so later, I heard my name shouted.  I jumped up and
found no trace of the shouter.  I knew the voice must come from a boat, and
ran up and down the island furiously.  Still nothing in sight.  It must
have been half an hour before we found each other, though looking
everywhere, and the island being quite small.  Whitehead had brought his
wife and her sister with various luxuries to mitigate the austerity of the
fare traditionally proper to hermits, and one of these was --- prawns!
     On August 19th, I was obliged to go to New York for two days on O.T.O.
business.  The result was amusing.  I called on my old friend Tony Sarg,
the artist, and gave him an enthusiastic description of my holiday.  "There
is only one fly," I said, "in the apothecary's ointment.  Like Adam in
Eden, I lack an Eve."  He laughed.  "Don't worry!  I know a girl game for
any adventure.  She has wonderful hair --- orange-red curls, calculated to
produce delirium tremens at a moment's notice.  Here's her name and
address."  At that moment a small crowd called and for the next half hour
we rocked with laughter at the astounding imitation which Tony gave of me
wooing a woman.  I left a note for the girl --- Madeleine was her name ---
at her hotel, asking her to drop in to lunch any day she felt like it.  I
didn't expect her to come and once more I was wrong.
     I went back to Oesopus the following day, supplied with several large
cans of red paint.  On both the east and west shores of the island are wide

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steep cliffs of smooth rock, obviously provided by Providence for my
convenience in proclaiming the Law.  I devoted a couple of days to painting
"Do that thou wilt" on both banks for the benefit of passing steamers.  The
little paint left over was dedicated to Madeleine.  I barked a tree in
front of my tent for the name of the beloved, and again on a convenient
rock hard by.  No sooner was this done than a man came off from the
mainland in a boat with a telegram from Madeleine to meet her at Hyde Park
Station, a few miles below the island.  I went down.  As I paced the
platform I noticed a tall, distinguished, military-looking man, who seemed
to be eyeing me strangely.  He finally made up his mind to speak.  "Are you
Mr Crowley?" he said.  In my surprise I nearly forgot to say, "Do what thou
wilt shall be the whole of the Law."  We then got into conversation.
     It appeared that he was in charge of the "Intelligence" of Dachers
County, New York; whereupon I confided to him that the Department of
Justice had instructed me to keep my eyes open for any suspicious
incidents.  He requested me to to report anything of the sort also to him,
to which, of course, I gladly agreed.  He then confided that my own
behaviour had turned the country upside down.  The mysterious stranger, the
fact of my having no companion, had aroused suspicion, as also my habit of
sitting for hours in an apparently uncomfortable attitude and absolutely
motionless.  Reports had been made to him.  He had set inquiries on foot.
The mystery only grew deeper.  Nobody seemed to know anything definite.  He
had had all Staatsburg "on the grill".  He had found it impossible to
identify me, until at last one of the girls in the post office, evidently
in a class by herself in the matter of intelligence, supplied a clue.  She
knew me by the scarlet tassels of my golf stockings.  He had had me
watched, and of course found nothing wrong, but on asking New York City if
they could supplement the information, he learned to his intense amazement
that I was myself working for the Department of Justice.  He told me of
various sinister rumours about spies.  "Hang it," said I, "what could a spy
possibly do in a section like this?"  "Well," said he, "there are rumours
of flashes of light on the west shore at night which suggest signalling.
It might mean serious mischief.  We are sending the troops to New York by
night train.  A spy might easily estimate our numbers, send the news east
by a chain of flashed signals and have it wirelessed to Berlin!"
     I promised to keep watch, and then the train came in.  There was no
difficulty in recognizing Madeleine in that background of barbarism.  She
stood out like a strawberry among a heap of hips and haws; a short sturdy
figure trimly tailored, with a round smiling face, and an ivory complexion
framed in that pyrotechnic display of hair.  Sarg's eloquence had failed to
do her justice.  She had brought a huge trunk.  My face dropped.  What
would the canoe say?  We managed to get it aboard and started upstream,
reaching camp without incident bar a narrow squeak of being swamped by the
wash of a

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passing steamboat.  We had a great lunch with the burgundy and absinthe and
old brandy, which I had brought back from New York.
     But some people are never satisfied.  She apparently expected to find
a young palace with livery lackeys by the dozen, so she explained that she
had merely dropped in for lunch, as per invitation, on her way to visit her
brother, the incumbent of the parish of Staatsburg.  She gave so many
details so ingenuously that I might have believed her if I had not happened
to know that the amenities of Staatsburg did not include any such person as
she described.  I politely professed to credit her and promised to take her
ashore in time to reach him by dinner.  To pass the afternoon we went for a
paddle round the island.  Near the northern point I noticed that my feet
were wet.  I knew that the canoe leaked slightly and forgot it.  A hundred
yards or so further on I found my ankles immersed.  It was evident within
the next minute that the leak was serious.  We were opposite the cliffs,
landing was impossible.  The water gained.  Nothing remained but to bale
and paddle for dear life and reach the south inlet before sinking.  She
thought the opportunity unequalled for a display of hysterics.  But I spoke
so sharply and sternly that she postponed the performance and began to
bale.  We just did it and only just, thanks to the help of two boys who had
come to camp close to the landing place a couple of days earlier.
     They rushed in waist deep and pulled us in.  By that time the water-
logged wreck hardly answered the paddle.  We dragged the canoe up the
beach.   The water poured from the stern through a gap six inches across.
     We sat and smoked and swapped stories, while Madeleine had her
hysterics.  When she tired of being not noticed, I took her back to the
tent and made tea.  "And that", I remarked, is good night to the visit to
the vicarage.  If we can mend that bundle of firewood at all, which I
doubt, we can't even begin till we've got materials from Staatsburg, which
means tomorrow morning!"  "But I must get to my brother's!" she persisted
petulantly.
     I gave a short, but instructive lecture on the physical geography of
islands, especially insisting on the definition as a piece of land wholly
surrounded by water.  She began to howl like a hyena.  (I knew, of course,
that she had not the slightest intention of going, had Neptune himself
arrived to conduct her.)  "But I must go!" she wailed, and then put up a
big bluff about her virtue and her reputation.  I said I would ask the boys
to row her ashore in their boat.  They of course agreed, but when I came
back with the good news, she had bethought herself of the privilege of her
sex, and declared that here she was and here she would stay.  Again I
acquiesced.
     She spent some time trying to think up some excuse for a fresh fuss,
but the best she could do was to say that she must have a bath.  "Make your
mind easy," said I, and quoted statistics about the area of the Hudson
river.  It took her quite a long time to convince herself that I was really
one of those inhuman

{786}



















monsters who cannot be dislodged from the fortress of patient smiling
politeness and imperturbable good temper.  But after dinner she gave it up
with a sigh.
     "Oh well," she thought, "if I can't have my holiest joy of keeping a
man on the jump, I suppose I may as well make shift with the next best
thing, my famous imitation of a grand passion."  She suited the action to
the thought, and swooned into my embrace.
     Having mended the canoe as well as I could --- it was old and rotten
beyond permanent repair --- I took her to Central Park on Tuesday.
     Meanwhile, her stay had been otherwise exciting.  I spent my nights
watching for signals on the west shore, and sure enough, from time to time
the dark mass of the woods was lit up, now here, now there, by shafts of
momentary brilliance at irregular intervals.  I noted the exact time of
each and compared them.  They showed a periodic function.  Further analysis
convinced me of the cause.  Whenever a train passed, the light from the
funnel became visible whenever the trees thinned out.  I explored the
woods, and found the gaps corresponded to these calculations.  That ghost
was laid.  I could see only a narrow section of the river close to the
shore.  At 10:07 on the second night this section was traversed by a rowing
boat manned by two men and a shapeless heap in the stern, which might have
been a third or a cargo -- it was too dark to make sure.  They rowed in
dead silence with muffled oars.  They were clearly about some secret
business.
     The next morning, looking for something under my pillows, I found my
revolver was missing.  I did not like it.  The evening before, both the
boys and I thought we saw a strange man on the island just after dark.  We
gave chase and thought we saw him slipping through the trees, but failed to
report him.
     I decided to call on my friend the colonel and report.  He was very
pleased with my solution of the mystery of the alleged signals, and agreed
that the incident of the boat looked bad.  On his part, he had a new yarn.
An old boatman, as steady and sober as one could wish, swore to having seen
an object of the size and shape of a football surmounting a stick about two
feet out of the water, and moving against the current at a regular rate.
The word "submarine" was whispered by the pallid lips of patriots.  Every
day the new type of submarine chaser might be seen steaming downstream, to
be fitted with its armament, five or six a day.  No one knew the limits of
German genius.  The "Deutschland" had crossed safely with her supplies of
606, America's most urgent need.  It was perfectly possibly that they had
built a new type of submarine capable of raising hell in the Hudson.
     When I got back to the island, one of the boys brought me my gun.
Madeleine, expecting me to bring back a squad of secret service men, had
owned up that she had found it in my pillows, got scared and thrown it into
the brushwood.

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     The climax of the joke came after my return to New York.  The secret
service, unaware of my relation with the colonel, got wind of the rumours
about the mysterious hermit and sent two men to investigate.  They found
the island desolate and no more illuminating clues to crime than the words
"Madeleine" and "Do what thou wilt" on the rocks.






































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                          P A R T   S I X


                      AT THE ABBEY OF THELEMA









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                              80


     I was back in New York on September 9th and started at once to make
arrangements to publish volume III of "The Equinox".  (I should explain that
volume II consists of ten numbers of silence to balance those of speech.)
I found a studio at 1 University Place, at the corner of Washington Square.
Having only one room I thought  I would camouflage the bed and had a large
screen with three sections made for me.  I covered the canvases with a
triptych, my first attempt at painting in oil.  The design was symbolic of
the three principles, Sun, Moon and Agni (fire), of the Hindus.  The bed
being still visible from some parts of the room, I got a second screen of
the same pattern, which brought me to fame.  For some days it stood
patiently pleading to be painted, but I could not think of a subject.
     Early in January, I received a visit from the lady hereafter called
the Ape of Thoth and her elder sister.  The chain of circumstances
antecedent is strangely tenuous.
     I had brought a letter of introduction, from England, to Hereward
Carrington from my friend the Hon. Everard Feilding.  Through Carrington,
it came about that I was asked to lecture under the auspices of a
particularly transparent charlatan named Christiansen, who worked the
sealed letter swindle with a crudity that paid a very poor compliment to
his audience.  Among my hearers was only one bearing even a remote
resemblance to the human species, an old lady painted to resemble the cover
of a popular magazine.  I went to talk to her after the lecture and found
she was an intimate friend of dear Hereward's.  I saw no more of her except
by accident for a few minutes' chat on two or three occasions.
     One evening in the spring of 1918, I was surprised by her calling with
her youngest sister.  I could not ask them into the studio, being engaged
in an important conference with an antique, but sprightly German lady who
boasted of having introduced cabarets into America, and had abandoned
worldly pleasures for spiritual joys.  She had been entangled in the toils
of one of the charlatans who worked the Rosicrucian racket, merrily
disdainful of criticism based on his elementary blunders in Latin and his
total ignorance of the history of the Order which he claimed to rule.  The
old lady was simple-minded, sincere and earnest.  I did not grudge the
labour of trying to get her to use common sense, but as almost invariable
in America, and heartbreakingly common even in Europe, the task was beyond
my powers.

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     Just as extreme hunger makes a man shovel down anything that looks
like food, so the ache of the soul for truth makes it swallow whatever
promises.  The poor old woman was so pathetically eager to find a Master,
that she would not banish the phantasm.  I proved in a dozen different ways
that the man was a foul liar.  That was easy enough.  His claims were
grotesquely absurd.  For instance, he said that I don't know how many
knights of England and France --- the most improbable people --- were
Rosicrucians.  He said the Order was founded by one of the early Egyptian
kings and professed to have documentary evidence of an unbroken hierarchy
of initiates since then.  He called the Order Rosae Crucis and translated
it Rosy Cross.  He said that in Toulouse the Order possessed a vast temple
with fabulous magnificent appointments, an assertion disprovable merely by
consulting Baedeker.  He said that Rockefeller had given him nine hundred
thousand dollars and at the same time sent round the hat with an eloquent
plea for the smallest contributions.  He professed to be a learned
Egyptologist and classical scholar on terms of intimacy with the most
exalted personages.  Yet, as in the case of Peter, his speech betrayed him.
He was a good chap at heart, a genuine lover of truth, by no means
altogether ignorant of Magick, and a great fool to put up all this bluff
instead of relying on his really good qualities.  But her faith in him was
built on the rock of her wish that his nonsense was true, and because he
stood between her and blank despair.
     To return, I went out to excuse myself to my visitors.  The "little
sister" reminded me of Solomon's friend, for she had no breasts.  She was
tall and strangely thin, with luminous eyes, a wedge-like face, a poignant
sadness and a sublime simplicity.  She radiated an indefinable sweetness.
Without wasting time on words, I began to kiss her.  It was sheer instinct.
She shared it and equalled my ardour.  We continued with occasional
interruptions, such as politeness required, to answer her sister in the
rare intervals when she got out of breath.
     They went away after a while and I saw them no more until this equally
unexpected call in January.  They wanted my advice about finding an
apartment in the village (a geographically vague section in this part of
New York is called "Greenwich Village").  She wished to be near the New
York University, having begun a course of lectures on law, being sick of
her job as a teacher in Public School No. 40, the Bronx, which meant
telling lies to an amorphous mob of adolescent Hebrew huskies, the only
consolation being the certainty that no one would notice the nonsense she
was obliged, by the city, to grind out.
     While we talked, I took off her clothes and asked her to come and pose
for me when she felt inclined.  I proposed, half in joke, to solve her
problem by taking her as a lodger.  They drifted out and I never expected
to hear any more of the matter.  But on the eleventh of January she
suddenly blew in.  (She

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swears I telephoned to ask her and perhaps I did.  I have my moments of
imbecile impulse.  I undressed her again, but this time not with impunity.)
     To appease conscience I proceeded to make a sketch, a rough rude
scrawl.  I had never drawn from the nude before.  The essential simplicity
of the human body beneath its baffling complexities was the Sphinx itself.
I threw down my pencil in disgust and despair.  But after she had gone I
could not sleep.  I lay in the dark and found my thoughts drawn by
invisible gossamer to the drawing.  I picked it up and was suddenly aware
that looked at with the figure vertical instead of horizontal, it meant
something.  I was seized with a spasm of creative energy and all night long
I splashed the central canvas with paint.  When she took the pose I had
asked her, "What shall I call the picture; what shall I paint you as?"  She
had said, "Paint me as a dead soul."  My screen is called Dead Souls.
     She stood central, her head the keystone of the arch of monsters.  Her
face is ghastly green.  Her fleshless body lustreless, white and grey-blue
shadows beneath the ribs.  On the left-hand panel is a kneeling Negress,
bestially gross, her gaze fixed adoringly on the Queen of Dead Souls.
Perched on her shoulder, a parrot of brilliant plumage, many hued, surveys
the scene with insolent indifference.  On the opposite canvas is a kneeling
woman huddled as if in agony, a cascade of lustreless hair tumbling to her
hips.
     Along the entire base are rows of misshapen heads; all anguish, all
perversity, all banishment from the world of reasonable things is portrayed
in almost endless variety.  The screen is grotesque, yet is undeniably a
work of genius.  It possesses a unity.  The dead souls have composed a
living soul.  Everyone who saw it went away horror-struck or in the spirit
of Shimei.  But they all talked of nothing else.  Bob Chandler came again
and again to gaze and gloat.  He brought everyone he knew to look at it.
And even artists famous for their classical refinement had to admit its
grisly power.  In short, the dead souls conquered the city and their Queen
their creator.  She came like Balchis to Solomon, bringing gifts, an
endless caravan of fascinations.  Innumerable elephants groaning under the
treasury of virtues, while in her own slim-fingered hands, she brought her
heart.  Before her coming the concubines covered their faces and fled.  We
found almost at once a splendid studio on the south side of Washington
Square, a long and lofty room with three wide windows, looking out across
the tree tops to the opening of Fifth Avenue.
     From this point of vantage the ensuing months appeared tolerable.  I
was occupied in defeating the dishonest intrigues of the people in Detroit
who had sent emissaries to approach me in the winter.  I was persuaded to
put the publication of "The Equinox", vol. III, No. 1 into the hands of those
latter, and they immediately began to try to evade fulfilling the terms of
the contract.  I spent the summer in a tent beyond Montauk at the extremity
of Long Island.

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The Magical Retirement made it clear that the current was exhausted.  I had
finished my work in America and began to prepare my escape.
     In the autumn I accepted an invitation to visit my friends William and
Kate Seabrook on their farm in Georgia to which they had retired.  He had
held an important position on the Hearst papers, and his sanity and decency
had revolted against so despicably disgusting a job.  He knew he was a
genius and the effect of knowing me was to make him ashamed of himself.
Alas, not long after my influence was removed, he became a backslider.  He
made sporadic attempts to escape from his environment, but the caress of
this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the artist's word and it
becomes untruthful.
     I passed a delightful six weeks in the south.  Political and social
conditions were of great interest.  The standardized surface has overspread
the south, but it has not completely smothered the old violence of passion
and prejudice.  The hatred of the Yankee and his fear of the Negro are as
great as ever.  In the latter case it has increased.  The recent revival
and the nation-wide spread of the Ku-Klux-Klan is one of the most sinister
symptoms of recent years.
     From Atlanta I went to Detroit and then took in the Mammoth Caves of
Kentucky.  I need not describe them.  I content myself with the remark that
they make a third wonder of the world worth seeing, from Niagara to the
Grand Canyon.  Except for the Yellowstone Park, which I have not yet seen,
nothing else in America is worth seeing first or last for the matter of
that.
     A final inspection of the bughouse in Detroit left me free to get back
to Europe.  I reached London a few days before Christmas 1919.




















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                              81


     In "The Vision and the Voice", the attainment of the grade of Master of
the Temple was symbolized by the adept pouring every drop of his blood,
that is his whole individual life, into the Cup of the Scarlet Woman, who
represents Universal Impersonal Life.  There remains therefore (to pursue
the imagery) of the adept "nothing but a little pile of dust".  In a
subsequent vision the Grade of Magus is foreshadowed; and the figure is
that this dust is burnt into "a white ash", which ash is preserved in an
Urn.  It is difficult to convey the appropriateness of this symbolism, but
the general idea is that the earthly or receptive part of the Master is
destroyed.  That which remains has passed through fire; and is therefore,
in a sense, of the nature of fire.  The Urn is engraved with a word or
symbol expressive of the nature of the being whose ash is therein.  The
Magus is thus, of course, not a person in any ordinary sense; he represents
a certain nature or idea.  To put it otherwise, we may say, the Magus is a
word.  He is the Logos of the Aeon which he brings to pass1.
     The above is obscure.  I perceived and deplore the fact.  The idea may
be more intelligible, examined in the light of history.  Gautama Buddha was
a Magus.  His word was Anatta; that is, the whole of his system, which
revolutionized the thought of Asia, may be considered as based upon and
consecrated in that one word, which is his denial of the existence of the
Atman or "soul" of Hindu philosophy.
     Later, Mohammed also partially overturned an age by uttering his word,
Allah.  But to us, practically, the most important case of the kind is that
connected with such "gods" as Dionysus, Osiris, Baldur, Marsyas, Adonis,
Jesus, and other deifications of the unknown Magus concerned.  The old
pagan worship of the Mother-idea was superseded by the word IAO or its
equivalents, which asserted the formula of the Dying God, and made the
Male, dying to himself in the act of love, the engineer of the continued
life of the race.  This revolution cut at the root of all previous custom.
Matriarchy vanished; self-sacrifice became the cardinal virtue, and so
through infinite ramifications.
     This idea of accomplishing the Great Work by a voluntary death was
bound up with the belief that the sun died, and was reborn with the hours
and the seasons.  Astronomy having exploded this fiction, mankind was ready
to gain a further comprehension of its own parallel case.
     My own word, Thelema, supplies a new and scientifically sound basis
for

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        1  Cf. Rabelais: the final secret is in the bottle inscribed TRINC.



















ethics.  Self-sacrifice is a romantic folly; death does not end life; it is
a temporary phase of life as night and winter are of terrestrial activity.
Many other conceptions are implied in this word, Thelema.  In particular,
each individual is conceived as the centre of his own universe, his
essential nature determining his relations with similar beings and his
proper course of action.  It is obvious that these ideas are revolutionary.
Yet to oppose them is to blaspheme science.  Already, in a thousand ways,
the principles involved have replaced those of the Dying God.  Little
remains but to accept Thelema consciously as a statement of law, so that
any given problem may be solved by applying it to each case.
     The man Crowley had been chosen to enunciate this Law, that is, to
exercise the essential function of a Magus.  But he had yet to understand
it, a task which involved the crossing of the Abyss, already described; and
further, to identify his will with the Law, so that his personality might
act as the focus of its energy.  Before he could be that pure will whose
name is that word, he had to be purged by fire of all competing volitions;
and this was done by those who had chosen him during this part of his life,
which I am about to record.
     He had indeed got rid of his sense of the personal self, yet his force
was discharging itself dispersedly through all sorts of channels
appropriate to the various elements in his nature.  It was necessary to
constrain every particle of his energy to move in one sole direction.  (The
physical analogy of a gas whose electrons are polarized and one not so
organized is not so bad.)
     It must now be explained how he was able to understand what was
happening to him in this initiation --- his life from 1914 to 1919.  The
Grade of Magus is traditionally connected with the idea of the number 2;
male creative energy, wisdom and the expression of a single idea in terms
of duality.  It transmits the idea of the divine unity to its feminine
counterpart, the understanding, somewhat as a man transmits the essence of
his racial character to his wife so that he perceives his inmost nature,
itself unintelligible to him directly, by observing the flowering of that
essence in his son.  The Hebrew title of the idea embodying these
characteristics is Chokmah, whose numerical value is 73.  This fact appears
arbitrary and irrelevant; but it forms part of the symbolic language in
which the praeterhuman intelligences who control the initiate communicate
with him.  Thus, my adventures in America seemed a series of stupidities
for a long time.  Nothing I did produced the expected results.  I found
myself suddenly switched from one episode to another so irrationally that I
began to feel that I had somehow got into a world where causality did not
obtain.  The mystery only became clear when analysis disclosed that the
events which threw me about in this manner occurred at almost exact
intervals of 73 days, or of some multiple or sub-multiple thereof.  I
understood from this that 73 terrestrial days made up a single day of
initiation.

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As soon as I had grasped this singular fact, I was able to interpret each
such period by considering how its events influenced my spiritual
development.  In this I succeeded so well that towards the end I became
able to predict the sort of thing that would happen to me beforehand, which
helped me to meet circumstances intelligently and make the fullest and most
appropriate use of them.
     One further point with regard to this initiation must be mentioned,
though it sounds so fantastic even to myself that I can scarcely smother a
smile.  In the ancient ceremonies of the Egyptians the candidate was
confronted or guided on his journey by priests wearing the masks of various
animals, the traditional character of each serving to indicate the function
of its wearer.  Quaint as it sounds, I found myself discovering an almost
stupefying physical resemblance to divers symbolic animals in those
individuals whose influence on me, during their appointed period, was
paramount.
     From these and other indications I have been able to construct an
intellectual image of the initiation; and if these preliminary remarks be
thoroughly understood, it should be easy to follow the course of my
progress to the Grade of Magus.
     The first period of my sojourn in the United States was consecrated to
my preparation for more active instruction by isolation and darkness.  I
had arrived with a not inconsiderable reputation, both as a man of letters
and as a Magician.  I had numerous connections with prominent people in
both camps and was furnished with excellent introductions.  I was
positively stupefied to discover, by the most baffling experiences, that by
none of these means could I make my way into public life.  I lectured with
apparent success; yet literally nothing came of it.  I was welcomed by
editors and publishers, written up and entertained with surprising
enthusiasm; yet I failed to sell a single poem, story, essay or even
article (except in the special case of political writing in one paper of no
credit) and no one would hear of publishing a book.  Occasionally, a man
promised great things; but the arrangements always fell through suddenly
and unreasonably.  I had a host of friends in the city, yet days and weeks
would pass without my seeing a soul except in the most casual way.
     I was even unable to practise my personal Magick.  An inscrutable
paralysis had me by the spine.  After many days I said to myself that I
must break up these conditions forcibly; I would a-wooing go whether my
mother would let me or no.  I set my teeth and began my ritual.  But I was
now confronted by a new obstacle.  I could not do the proposed operations,
urgently necessary as they were.  I found myself forced to a daily
invocation of Mercury (the god corresponding to the Grade of Magus) with
whom I did not consciously want to have any dealings.  For three times
three-and-seventy days I remained thus blind and impotent, oppressed and
overwhelmed by the sense of my

{797}




















utter failure and futility, although on the surface all the conditions were
in my favour, and there was not anywhere one single visible obstacle.  I
met dozens of interesting and important people; yet on none of these did my
personality seem to produce the slightest effect, while (equally) none had
any message for me.  The surprise of the situation can only be understood
if it be remembered that during my whole life I had never failed to attract
eager attention wherever I went, to bring off whatever I planned, and to
feel myself in every way a centre of electric energy.
     My paralysis extended to every relation of life.  I had never known
what it was to lack human love; and now, not only did I fail to find a
single friend, but when Laylah came from England to join me, I recognized
instantly that she was a stranger.
     The three Chokmah days (let me so call these periods of 73 days) ended
on June 9th, 1915.  On the tenth the oppression and obscurity were over.  I
was asked to dinner by a journalistic friend.  He had bidden two women to
meet me; one prominent as a poetess; the other, as an actress.  I will call
one the Cat, the other the Snake; Pasht and Apophis.  The Cat was ideally
beautiful beyond my dearest dream and her speech was starry with
spirituality.  The Snake glittered with the loveliness of lust; but she was
worn and weary with the disappointment of insatiable desire.  Her intellect
was brilliant but cynical.  She had lost faith in the universe.  Her speech
was like a sword, to shear away the subtlest sophistries by which we so
pitifully persuade ourselves that the perfection which we seek is possible.
     A magnetic current was instantly established between the three of us.
In the Cat, I saw my ideal incarnate, and even during that first dinner we
gave ourselves to each other by that language of limbs whose eloquence
escapes the curiosity of fellow guests.  It was the more emphatic because
we were both aware that the Snake had set herself to encompass me with the
coils of her evil intelligence.
     The sequel was as strangely significant of the symbolic character of
the ordeal as its beginning.  I took tea with the Cat at her club the next
afternoon.  We lost no time.  She told me --- a string of lies --- of her
loveless marriage with an old satyr who had snatched her almost from the
cradle.  She was about to divorce him; and having loved me at first sight,
not sensually, but as my spiritual sister, we could be married quite soon.
We sealed the sacrament with a kiss; and there was no reason why, in the
ordinary course of events, we should not have proceeded to an immediate
liaison.  But the gods wished to test me.  I really believed in her
spirituality.  I really loved her with a love more exalted than aught in
all my experience.  Yet in my soul I knew, against all reason, that she was
a fraud; her aspirations affectations; her purity a pose; a false,
heartless, brainless, perverse imitation of my ideal.  I fought down the
intuition; I swore with all the passionate power of the poet that she was
what

{798}




















she seemed.  I staked my happiness on her truth and made oath to be utterly
worthy of her love.
     They tested me by sending her out of the city for nearly a month.  I
endured the torture of absence, of doubt, of despair, with all the might of
my manhood.  To confirm myself ceremonially in this course of combat, I saw
her rival occasionally, so as to affirm my absolute devotion to my ideal.
To repulse the demons of realism, I set my foot upon the neck of the Snake
that strove to shake my faith in the existence of perfection.
     On July 8th, the Cat returned to New York.  Love had conquered.  We
consecrated ourselves that same night to its service.  But though the Cat
had given herself thus simply and straightforwardly, she enjoyed the
exercise of her power over me by tormenting me with doubts of her truth.
She pretended to be disgusted by the sexual side of love and in a thousand
ways kept me on pins and needles.  Not many days elapsed before she
suddenly left the city without leaving word for me.  She had driven me to
such desperation that I nearly lost control of myself when I heard that she
had gone.
     Summoning my veteran chief of staff, General Gynoniastix, I was
readily convinced that this was a case for employing the strategy familiar
to all men who have made up their mind to preserve their independence even
at the cost of a broken heart.  I telephoned straightaway to the Snake and
asked her to lunch, after which we went round to my apartment.  I was not
moved by love; I simply wanted to torture the woman I hated as the woman I
loved was torturing me.  I made no advances; I was brutally rude; and to
clinch the matter, I inflicted physical pain.
     I had unusually pointed canine teeth.  I fix a fold of flesh between
the two points; and then, beating time with one hand, suddenly snap, thus
leaving two neat indentations on the flesh concerned.  I have often done
this as a demonstration; often as a jest or a psychological experiment,
sometimes as an intimation of affection, but never till then as a callous
and cruel insult.  Probably I misjudged my own motives.  Somehow or other
the genuineness and integrity of this lost soul began to appeal to me.  I
began to contrast her hard bitter cynical disbelief with the soft honied
superficial assurance of her rival: before I knew what I was doing, our
duel had developed into a death struggle in which my hate and hopelessness
strove to swamp themselves in a surge of amorous frenzy.
     The spasm swept me away.  I no longer remember how we went out and
dined, or how we got down to her house.  Every nerve in my soul was
screaming with implacable pain.  Through it all I stuck to my guns; I never
forgot that I loved the other woman and all that she stood for.  But when
at last exhaustion ended the orgy, twelve hours or more of indescribably
insane intoxication, I sank into a sleep deeper than death --- and woke at
dawn to find myself inscrutably purged of iniquity.  I knew myself "innocent"

{799}





















in a sense more sublime than any imagination can conceive, and from this
state I came mysteriously into a trance of a kind which I had never
experienced.  Its occurrence marks a definite stage in my spiritual career.
     It is so important to the understanding of my life that it must be
quoted verbatim from the record which I made immediately on my returning to
my apartment --- where I received an additional proof that I had come
successfully through the ordeal in the shape of a telegram from Pasht
explaining why she had left the city, and how she had been prevented from
letting me know.  (Another string of lies!)

          Result:  This is one of the greatest experiences of my life.
     Curious that the 1906 success also came through a magical thanksgiving
     under stress of passion.  I went off to sleep almost at once.  In the
     morning I woke early, before seven, in an absolutely renewed physical
     condition.  I had the clean fresh feeling of healthy boyhood, and was
     alert and active as a kitten --- post talem mortem!  Mentally, I woke
     into "Pure Love".  This was symbolized as a cube1 of blue-white light
     like a diamond of the best quality.  It was lucid, translucent, self-
     luminous and yet not radiating forth.  I suppose because there was
     nothing else in the cosmos.  This verb love is intransitive; the love
     has no object.  My gross mind vanished; when, later on, memory
     pictures of Hilarion2 arose, they were rejected automatically.  All
     the desire --- quality, the clinging, the fear, were no more; it was
     Pure Love without object or attachment.  I cannot describe the quality
     of the emancipation given by this most wonderful experience.  Aum.

     It may not at first sight be apparent why this rather silly and
commonplace intrigue should merit the attention which I paid it.  The
reason is this; just as the Master of the Temple is sworn to interpret
every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with his soul, so is the
Magus to make his every act an expression of his magical formula.  Being in
course of initiation at the time, I did not realize what was going on.  It
is only on reflection that I have come to understand that my relations with
these two women constituted an ordeal; a test of my fitness for the Grade.
It is written "as below, so above"; and my reaction to these women
furnished a sure indication of how I should act in the greatest
circumstances.  For having succeeded in completely harmonizing the various
energies of my being, there was no longer any danger that I should regulate
my actions by conflicting standards.  When therefore I rejected the Snake
and chose the Cat, I was affirming

{800}


        1  I say "a cube"; yet its most salient property was that it was
          without boundaries.  Experience of similar trances is necessary
          for the understanding of this statement, which is a perfectly
          proper expression of a perfectly observed fact, despite its
          intellectual self-contradiction.
        2  This was the "mystic name" chosen for herself by the Cat.  She
          had a smattering of theosophy and remembered this as being the
          name of some "Mahatma".














magically that I would insist upon realizing my ideal (most people idealize
the real --- which they dare not face) even though I knew it not to exist
and was broken-hearted by the continual mockery of the deception.
     The word of a Magus is always a falsehood.  For it is a creative word;
there would be no object in uttering it if it merely stated an existing
fact in nature.  The task of a Magus is to make his word, the expression of
his will; come true.  It is the most formidable labour that the mind can
conceive.
     Having made this decision, my next task was to cause my word to become
flesh.  The morning of the fifth Chokmah day was devoted to the begetting
of a son.  I wanted to fulfil the love which I had found.  As before, I
understood nothing of this; I simply wanted to have a child by the Cat, and
performed a series of Magical Operations with this object.  I did not know
that I was attempting a physical impossibility.
     (I must digress to explain that every cause must produce its proper
effect; so that, in this case, the son whom I willed to beget came to birth
on a plane other than the material.)  I must have been very blind indeed
not to recognize my true situation, if for no other reason than the
following.  The celebration of the autumnal equinox coincided with an
Operation with the object above stated.  It was the last of this series of
Operations, though I had no reason whatever for stopping, and only
discovered the fact, much to my surprise, long after.  Now, the word of
this equinox was "Nebulae", which evidently points to the conditions which
result in the birth of a star.  What I had really done was therefore to
beget a Magical Son.  So, precisely nine months afterwards, that is, at the
summer solstice of 1916, Frater O.I.V. (the motto of C. Stansfeld Jones as
a probationer) entirely without my knowledge became a Babe of the Abyss.
     I failed completely to understand the telegrams in which he announced
the fact.  His action was unprecedented in the whole history of Magick.  It
was utterly beyond my imagination to conceive of such an occurrence.  He,
on the other hand, while ignorant of my Operation in the autumn, understood
perfectly at the time what he was doing; that he was being born as "The
Child" predicted in "The Book of the Law".  This interpretation does not rest
upon any arbitrary ideas, either on his part or mine.  "The Book of the Law"
speaks of this "Child" as "One", as if with absolute vagueness.  But the
motto which Frater O.I.V. had taken on becoming a neophyte was "Achad"
which is the Hebrew word for "One".  It is further predicted that this
"Child" shall discover the Key of the interpretation of the Book itself,
and this I had been unable to do.  (The Book asserts that I should not
succeed in this, astounding as it may seem, as I had 93 well in my mind,
also 31 as the value of AL and LA, whose importance in the Book I
understood perfectly.  The text literally teems with hints; yet I never
thought of 31 as the Key.  Such blindness is a miracle more surprising than
any amount of

{801}




















perspicacity.)  And in actual fact he did so discover that Key, two and a
half years later.
     Those unacquainted with our methods may ask for the basis of the
assurance that the key in question really fitted the lock.  The answer is
that the moment it was communicated to me, I applied it to a number of
obscure passages in the Book, and found that it elucidated them completely.
Incidentally, I received another very striking proof of the genuineness of
the discovery.  Every six months, at the equinoxes, it becomes my duty to
obtain a word from the gods, whose symbolic meaning indicates the events of
importance to the Order which will occur in the course of the ensuing
equinox.
     (For instance, in the autumn of 1918, the word was "Eleven".  Apart
from its special technical meanings, there was this: that the Armistice was
signed at 11 o'clock on the 11th day of the 11th month of the year.)  Now,
the word of the equinox in which this Key was discovered was SAC.  I was
greatly puzzled to interpret this word and it did not become clear in the
light of the events of the period as it usually does.  Only now, when I am
writing this account, some four years later, has it suddenly flashed upon
me that the numerical value of the word is identical with that of the Key!1
There are numerous other confirmations; but the above ought to suffice the
most sceptical that the author of "The Book of the Law" possessed an accurate
knowledge of future events.
     The next important stage in my initiation was the formal proclamation
of my attainment.  As the Master of the Temple I wore a seal ring; the
lapis lazuli, engraved with my cipher, was covered by a platinum lid
studded with pyramids to represent the City in which the Masters of the
Temple abide.  On October 12th, in the train from Chicago to Vancouver,
while engaged in my annual Sammasati meditation on my Path since the
previous birthday, I was suddenly impelled to tear off this lid.  A little
later I left the train; and on reaching the hotel found that the lapis
lazuli had dropped out of its setting.  In the morning I sought and found
it on the platform of the station, broken into seven pieces.  I picked them
up and put them away with the utmost care in my travelling safe, intending
to distribute them on my death to my nearest representatives.  Just over a
year later, looking through my belongings, the packet was missing.  (I have
noticed

{802}


        1  SAC = Shin, Aleph, Chet, HB:Chet HB:Aleph HB:Shin , 300 + 1 + 8 = 309.
            (Tarot Trumps corresponding to these letters.) XX + XI + 0 =
          31.  The compound letter (Greek äT) in special reference to this
          combination of Tarot Trumps is the third of the words of value 31
          (AL and LA) which complete 93.  A volume might be (and has been)
          written on the fitness of this whole symbolism.
            SAC = Tzaddi, Aleph, Kaph, HB:Koph HB:Aleph HB:Tzaddi , 90 + 1 + 20 = 111 =
          HB:Peh HB:Lamed HB:Aleph  = Aleph.  1 = HB:Dalet HB:Chet HB:Aleph  = "One".  (Frater O.I.V.
          and the predicted discoverer of the Key.)  Both spellings are
          valid to reveal the word and its discoverer!  Such intricacy of
          device is one of the most evident proofs of the praterhuman
          intelligence of the author of "The Book of the Law".














that every time I receive an important initiation, some cherished article
mysteriously disappears.  It may be a pipe, a pen or what not: but it is
always an object which is impregnated with my personality by constant use
or special veneration.  I cannot remember a single occasion when this has
not happened.  The theory is that the elementals or familiar spirits in
attendance on the Magician exact, so to speak, a tip on all important
occasions of rejoicing.)  My idea in tearing off the lid was to proclaim
ceremonially that I would come out of the darkness of the City of the
Pyramids.  (The exact period between these two initiations was predicted
during the former; of course, in symbolic language, whose meaning appeared
only on fulfilment.)
     By thus accepting the Grade of Magus I had incurred certain
responsibilities.  Previously, I had taken the attitude that, while "The"
"Book of the Law" had been given to the world through me, and though I was
ineluctably bound thereby, I could stand aloof to some extent.  I could
consider myself as a Magician pledged to the Law, accepting it and working
by its formula: but not identified with its promulgation to the exclusion
of all other aims.
     My formal attainment of the Grade involved my identifying myself with
the word Thelema.  My personality must be completely merged in it.  On
realizing this I realized also how carefully I had avoided compromising
myself in this respect.  I had never openly proclaimed the Law in the first
person, as one might say, either in speech or writing.
     Accordingly, when (on arrival at San Francisco) I found myself invited
to address a semi-public gathering, I began my speech with the words, "Do
what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", and proceeded as best I
could to explain their import.
     Again, on the last day of the year, whose midnight I habitually devote
to a meditation on the past, culminating in a formulation of my future
career, I was moved to write what was shortly afterwards published first as
a pamphlet in England, secondly as an article in "the International", New
York, thirdly in "The Equinox", vol. III, no. i, and fourthly as a pamphlet
in Australia by Frater Ahah.1  In this I summarized shortly the events
which had led to my attainment of the Grade, and explained that I was
thereby committed to an irrevocable and absolute identification of myself
with my office as the Logos of the Aeon of Horus.  For the future my whole
essence must be

{803}


        1  G.H. Frater AHAH 6ř = 5 ř R.R. et A. C. is the humblest
          and simplest of the Brethren of the Order.  He has worked with
          his hands since he was nine years old and he understands and
          loves the Law and its Logos as a child does its mother and
          father.  He has my respect and affection as no other of my
          Brethren: for he represents to me mankind incarnate at its
          weakest (and therefore strongest) and noblest (and therefore most
          "common").  He is, in a word, that "Man" of whom I am, being 666
          )the number of a man) and whom I love and serve.  An illuminating
          incident: he cannot spell, but under inspiration writes as none
          has ever done save one --- John Bunyan!














conterminous with that of the word, and my dynamical formula with that of
its utterance.
     I continued by setting forth the import and purport of that word.  I
announced that since "Every man and every woman is a star.", each of us is
defined and determined by a set of co-ordinates, has a true will proper and
necessary, the dynamic expression of that nature.  The conclusion from
these premises is that the sole and whole duty of each of us is, having
discovered the purpose for which he or she is fitted, to devote every
energy to its accomplishment.
     It need hardly be said that the theory of ethics thus outlined
involves the consideration of many difficult and important problems.  I did
not understand at that time the extent of the implication and have devoted
immense labour in recent years to the solution of the theorems which are
corollary to the fundamental proposition.  It must suffice for the present
to record the writing of this message.  The act was the ceremonial gesture
significant of my attainment: as one may say, the King's speech at the
opening of the Parliament of the New Aeon.






























{804}




















                              82


     The sixth Chokmah day was devoted to a terrible ordeal.  I had by this
time been enlightened as to the falseness of the Cat; it therefore became
my duty to slay her.  I had created truth by means of an untrustworthy
material and must therefore no longer cling to the image of the ideal.  I
must destroy it, well knowing that it would never again be possible for me
to delude myself with poetical puppets.  I must face reality for good and
all.
     The desolation in my heart was unspeakably dreadful and the seventh
Chokmah day found me in the same solitude and silence as the first three;
with this difference: that a minister was appointed to comfort and console
me.  Exactly as before, every single relation that I had established
snapped suddenly.  I had plenty of friends; but none of them meant
anything.  However, my consolation was supreme.  On the one hand, the
despairing cynicism of the wise realist Snake, on the other, the heartless
vanity of the foolish idealistic Cat, had left me hopeless for humanity.
     In this extremity, I met a very rare animal.  A woman!  She was a
regular street-walker.  She had been familiar with hardships, callousness,
obsession, shame and poverty from her cradle; but she possessed every noble
quality to the full.  Hers was the true pride, generosity, purity and
passion to which the Cat so basely pretended; and hers also the clear-
insighted intelligence, the wide experience and deep insight of the Snake.
Yet she had faced and conquered her foes, instead of acquiescing in
despair.
     I am not one of those sentimental slop-mongers who are always finding
angels in the mud.  On the whole, my experience of outcast woman had not
provoked any excess of sympathy.  I thought that in most cases their own
defects were responsible for their misfortunes.  Indeed, I failed to
realize consciously the sublimity of this girl until long afterwards.  But
today, I see clearly enough the nature of her mission; which ended as
strangely as it began, at the close of the Chokmah day.  She disappeared
into the "Ewigkeit" without a word and all my efforts to trace her were
fruitless.
     This day of repose and reward had prepared me for my next ordeal.  At
the beginning of the eighth day appeared a Monkey and an Owl.  Once again I
was confronted with the necessity of choosing between two ideas.  The
Monkey had all the insensate passion, volubility and vanity of the less
developed primates.  She was a great artist and a great lover; yet in each
of these functions she displayed the utmost inanity of conceit.  The Owl,

{805}





















on the other hand, was incapable of sublimity and at the same time free
from affectation.  She was as pleasant and sensible as the Monkey was
excruciating and absurd.
     The nature of my ordeal was twofold.  In the first crisis, it was put
up to me to do the right thing without permitting any interference from
personal inclination or consideration of the ultimate consequences of my
line of action.  The test was applied at a conference of the parties
chiefly concerned.  The Monkey's husband wanted me to take her off his
hands.  A divorce was to be arranged and a marriage to follow.  Asked to
give my views, I began "I have no personal feeling in the matter."  The
words were a bombshell.  Both husband and wife realized, to their amazed
horror, that they had neither of them any means of influencing my conduct.
I found myself completely master of the situation.  It is only necessary to
destroy in oneself the roots of those motives which determine a man's
course, in order to enjoy the omnipotence and immunity of a god.
     The second point of the ordeal concerned the choice between the women.
The Owl offered all the delights of carefree ease and placid pleasure; but
there was nothing to be gained.  The Monkey represented a life of turmoil
and anxiety, with few magnificent moments amid the hours of fretfulness;
but progress was possible.  It was as if the Secret Chiefs had asked me,
"Are you content to enjoy the fruit of your attainment and live at peace
with the world, surrounded by affection, respect and comfort, or will you
devote yourself to mastering and fertilizing mankind, despite the prospect
of continual disquietude and almost certain disappointment?"  I chose the
Monkey.  I was perfectly willing to make the best of the Owl, in my spare
time, so to speak; but I accepted the responsibility attached to her rival
without reservation.
     A single day was sufficient for this part of the initiation.  At the
dawn of the ninth day all had been arranged.  The Monkey went to England to
wind up certain of her affairs and the Owl had no string on me.  I was thus
able to undertake a Great Magical Retirement in June.  For this purpose I
went to live in a cottage on the shores of Lake Pasquaney in New Hampshire.
My initiation now took on a more strictly magical character.  I was able to
enter into direct communication with the realities of existence instead of
conducting them by means of symbolic gestures.
     My very first experience was the announcement of the birth of my
"son", as above mentioned.  I did not understand the matter in that light
but in this: that by means of my system of training, a man had crossed the
Abyss and become a Master of the Temple in much shorter period than had
ever been known.  My own case had been extraordinary.  Eleven years had
sufficed me to accomplish a task which in human experience had never
required much less than triple the time.  Moreover, the conditions had been
almost

{806}





















uniquely favourable for me.  I possessed all the qualities, all the
resources requisite.
     In the case of O.I.V. the period was shorter still, and by much; while
for him the conditions had been wholly adverse.  He was obliged to earn his
living in a distasteful and exhausting manner.  His domestic circumstances
were atrocious.  He had not the means of travel or even of scholastic
research.  I could only conclude that his success was almost wholly due to
the excellence of the system which I had given to the world.  In short, it
was the justification of my whole life, the unique and supreme reward of my
immeasurable toils.
     Fortified and rejoiced by this good news, I began at once to devote
myself to research in the strict sense of the word.
     And then the fun began!  I found myself unable to do anything of the
sort.  I am not quite sure how the circumstances responsible for this fit
in with my general situation, but they are well worthy of record for their
own sake.
    I have mentioned elsewhere that in the bosom of the Sanctuary of the
Gnosis of the O.T.O. is cherished a magical formula, extremely simple and
practical, for attaining any desired object.  It is, however, peculiarly
appropriate to the principal operations of alchemy, most of all the
preparation of the Elixir of Life and the Universal Medicine.  At first I
used this method casually.  It was only when various unexpectedly and even
astoundingly successful operations compelled my attention, that I devoted
myself systematically and scientifically to the serious study and practice
of it.  For some two and a half years I had conducted a careful and
strenuous research into the conditions of success.  Experience had shown me
that sometimes this was complete, but at others partial or even negligible,
while not infrequently the work would result in failure, perhaps almost
amounting to disaster.
     Just before leaving New York I had prepared by this method an elixir
whose virtue should be to restore youth, and of this I had taken seven
doses.  Nothing particular happened at first; and it never occurred to me
that it might be imprudent to continue.
     I was mistaken.  Hardly had I reached my hermitage before I was
suddenly seized with an attack of youth in its acutest form.  All mental
activity became distasteful.  I turned into a mere vehicle of physical
energy.  I could hardly bring myself to read a book even of the lightest
kind.  I could not satisfy my instincts by paddling the canoe which I had
imported.  I spent about an hour every day in housework and cooking; the
remaining fifteen hours of waking life were filled by passionately swinging
an axe without interruption.  I could hardly stop to smoke a pipe.
     There was no self-delusion about this, as I might have persuaded
myself to believe in the absence of external evidence.  But this was
furnished by an irrefutable monument.  I wanted to build a wharf for my
canoe.  With this

{807}



















object I cut down a tree and trimmed a twenty-two foot log.  Its
circumference at the smaller end was too great for my arms to meet round
it.  My only instrument for moving this was a wooden pole.  The tree had
fallen about a hundred yards from the bank; and though it was downhill all
the way to the lake, the ground was very uneven and the path so narrow that
it was impossible to roll the log at all.  Nevertheless, I moved it
singlehanded into the lake, where I fixed it by driving piles.  Passers-by
spread the story of the hermit with superhuman strength, and people came
from all parts to gaze upon the miracle.  I should mention that normally my
physical strength is far below the average, especially for work of this
kind.  It is quite an effort for me to shift a sixty pound load for even a
few feet.
     So much for the sufficiently remarkable truth.  Of course imagination
improved on the story.  I received an indignant letter from New York from
the lady who had lent me the cottage, reproaching me for having built a dam
right across the lake, to the detriment of navigation!
     This spasm of energy continued without abatement for some three weeks,
after which I gradually recovered the balance of my normal faculties.  The
effect of my operations was now to increase the energy of each of them, but
in reasonable proportion.  I was now able to begin my proposed magical
research.
     In order to erect the temple of the New Aeon, it appeared necessary to
make a thorough clearance of the rubbish of its ruined predecessors.  I
therefore planned and executed a Magical Operation to banish the "Dying
God".  I had written in "the Wizard Way":

          He had crucified a toad
          In the Basilisk abode

and now I did so.  The theory of the Operation was to identify the toad
with the "Dying God" and slay it.  At the same time I caused the elemental
spirit of the slain reptile to serve me.
     The result was immediately apparent.   A girl of the village, three
miles away, asked me to employ her as my secretary.  I had had no intention
of doing any literary work; but as soon as I set eyes on her I recognized
that she had been sent for a purpose, for she exactly resembled the
aforesaid toad.  I therefore engaged her to come out every morning an take
dictation.  I had with me a copy of Bernard Shaw's "Androcles and the Lion"
and bethought myself that I would criticize the preface.  The almost
unparalleled knowledge of the text of the Bible which I had acquired in
early childhood was shocked by Shaw's outrageously arbitrary selection of
the texts that sustained his argument.  His ignorance of Asiatic life and
thought had led him into the most grotesque misapprehensions.  I set out to
criticize his essay, section by section; but the work grew under my hand,
and in three

{808}



















weeks or so, I had produced a formidable treatise of some forty-five
thousand words.  I had intended to confine myself to destructive criticism
of my author; but as I went on, my analysis of the text of the gospels
revealed the mystery of their composition.  It became clear both those who
believe in the historicity of "Jesus" and their opponents were at fault.  I
could not doubt that actual incidents and genuine sayings in the life of a
real man formed part of the structure.  The truth was that scraps of
several such men, distinct from and incompatible with each other, had been
pitch-forked together and labelled with a single name.  It was exactly the
case of the students who stuck together various parts of various insects
and asked their professor, "What kind of a bug is this?"  "Gentlemen," he
replied, "this is a humbug."
     In writing this book, I was much assisted by Frazer's "Golden Bough"
and, to a less extent, by Jung's "Psychology of the Unconscious".  But my
main assets were my intimate knowledge of the text of the gospels, of the
conditions of life and thought in the East, of the details of magical and
mystical work, and of the literary conventions which old writers employed
to convey their ideas.
     I may mention the absurdity of Shaw finding difficulty in the fact
that the visit of the three "Kings" is not mentioned in profane history.
Shaw did not realize that a "King" may be the equivalent of a very minor
chieftain in the Highlands.
     Again the injunctions to abandon family ties and worldly cares involve
no social theories.  They are addressed only to would-be disciples, and
have been so given --- from the dawn of history to the present day --- by
every Eastern teacher that ever balanced himself upon one thumb, used a hip
bath instead of a soup plate, or rode the Wheel of Samsara in preference to
a bicycle.
     Once more, the irrational incidents of the life of Christ become
entirely normal when understood as the rubric of a ritual of initiation.
     I claim that my book establishes the outline of an entirely final
theory of the construction of Christianity.  The subject is far too vast
and complex to be adequately discussed in this autohagiography.  But I have
no hesitation in referring the student to my essay for the solution of any
and every difficulty which he may have found in the consideration of this
matter.
     Having completed this treatise, I discovered myself to be inspired to
write a number of short stories based on "The Golden Bough".  They are "The
Hearth", "The God of Ibreez", "The Burning of Melcarth", "The Old Man of
the Peepul Tree", "The Mass of St Secaire", "The King of the Wood", "The
Oracle of Cocytus" and "The Stone of Cybele".
     Now with regard to my magical work strictly speaking, its character
was presumably determined by my Grade.  The Magus corresponds to the
Sephira Chokmah, whose manifestation in the universe is Masloth, the

{809}




















Sphere of the Fixed Stars.  It was accordingly proper that I should receive
a revelation of the universe in this aspect.  I began my meditation with no
special objective in view.  Almost immediately (instead of after a long-
continued effort, as had been the case generally speaking in the past) I
obtained a Samadhi of which my conscious memory brought back the account
"Nothingness and twinkles", adding subsequently "but what twinkles!"  This
Samadhi developed in the course of time, as I repeated it, into such
importance that I feel almost justified in calling it the radix of my whole
philosophical outlook.  I have described it, giving historical details, in
my Comment on "The Book of the Law", ch. I, v. 59.  It seems convenient to
quote this in this place, as throwing light upon the progress of my inmost
apprehension of the universe from this time forward.

                  THE "STAR-SPONGE" VISION

          There is a vision of a peculiar character which has been of
     cardinal importance in my interior life, and to which constant
     reference is made in my magical diaries.  So far as I know, there is
     no extant description of this vision anywhere, and I was surprised on
     looking through my records to find that I had given no clear account
     of it myself.
          The vision developed gradually.  It was repeated on so many
     occasions that I am unable to say at what period it may be called
     complete.
          I was on a retirement in a cottage overlooking Lake Pasquaney in
     New Hampshire.  I lost consciousness of everything but a universal
     space in which were innumerable bright points, and I realized this as
     a physical representation of the universe, in what I may call its
     essential structure.  I exclaimed, "Nothingness with twinkles!"  I
     concentrated upon this vision, with the result that the void space
     which had been the principal element of it diminished in importance;
     space appeared to be ablaze, yet the radiant points were not confused,
     and I thereupon completed my sentence with the exclamation, "but what
     twinkles!"
          The next stage of this vision led to an identification of the
     blazing points with the stars of the firmament, with ideas, souls,
     etc.  I perceived also that each star was connected by a ray of light
     with each other star.  In the world of ideas each thought possessed a
     necessary relation with each other thought; each such relation is of
     course a thought in itself; each such ray is itself a star.  It is
     here that the logical difficulty first presents itself.  The seer has
     a direct perception of infinite series.  Logically, therefore, it
     would appear as if the entire space must be filled up with a
     homogeneous blaze of light.  This however is not the case.  The space
     is completely full and yet the monads which fill it are perfectly
     distinct.  The ordinary reader might well exclaim that such statements
     exhibit symptoms of mental confusion.

{810}

















          A further development of the vision brought to the consciousness
     that the structure of the universe was highly organized, that certain
     stars were of greater magnitude and brilliancy than the rest.
          While at Montauk, I had put my sleeping bag to dry in the sun.
     When I went to take it in, I remarked, laughingly, "Your bedtime,
     Master Bag," as if it were a small boy and I its nurse.  This was
     entirely frivolous; but the thought flashed into my mind that after
     all the bag was in one sense a part of myself.  The two ideas came
     together with a snap, and I understood the machinery of a man's
     delusion that he is a teapot.
          From this I came to another discovery: I perceived why platitudes
     were stupid.  The reason was that they represented the summing up of
     trains of thought, each of which was superb in every detail at one
     time.  A platitude was like a wife after a few years; she has lost
     none of her charms, and yet one prefers some perfectly worthless
     woman.
          It would be quite impracticable to go fully into the subject of
     this vision of the Star-Sponge.  It must suffice to reiterate that it
     has been the basis of most of my work for the last five years, and to
     remind the reader that the essential form of it is "Nothingness with
     twinkles".






















{811}
























                              83


     It is a remarkable fact that physical phenomena of an appropriate
character frequently accompany a spiritual event.  I fail to see any
special significance, from a magical point of view, in the experience now
to be related; but it is highly interesting in itself, and there is
unquestionably a striking correlation between it and the vision just
described.
     One morning I had started before dawn for the upper reaches of the
lake.  The day was breathlessly intense, the calm was somehow positive
rather than negative, and seemed to conceal some huge menace.  It was as if
the heart of the world had stopped.  I felt an indescribable awe,
overwhelming in its solemnity.  The act of paddling seemed almost a
blasphemy.  However, I made a fire on a rocky islet and cooked and ate my
lunch, returning to the cottage in a curiously exhausted state.  It was one
of those days when the electrical conditions seem to abstract every
particle of energy from one's nerves.  The condition is familiar enough to
me, and I understood that it foretold an approaching thunderstorm; in fact,
an hour later, as I sprawled lazily on the verandah, I saw the imminence of
the tempest.  I realized that, wharf or no wharf, my canoe could not
possibly live through what was coming.  I dashed down to the water's edge
at the exact moment when the first drop of rain fell, and although the
distance was barely a hundred and fifty yards in all, and I picked up the
canoe and tucked it under my arm like an umbrella, I was soaked and
dripping before I got back to shelter.  At this moment, a dog-cart,
occupied by a man, a woman and a child, was hastily backed up away from the
road, and they asked leave to take refuge till the rain stopped.  I showed
them into the main room, staying outside myself to watch the wonder of the
storm.  Daylight had disappeared with the utmost suddenness.  A pall of
purple black drove down the valley at a height of scarce a hundred feet
above the water, and this pall was veined with a network of incessant
lightning.  Beneath it the air seemed praeternaturally clear.  It was the
most spectacular performance I had ever seen.  Ahead of the storm, the vast
blue sky stood speckless above the unrippled sheen of the lake.  Then the
advance guard of the tempest, the hail and the rain splashed down in giant
drops like bullets.  Then came the berry purple of the cloud, and under it
the wind lashed the lake into tempestuous froth so fiercely that no water
remained visible.
     The storm struck deadly chill: and, having been reminded recently of
the lurking malaria in my blood, I decided to put on dry clothes.

{812}





















     I must give a brief description of the construction of the cottage.
It was of wood, built round a chimney stack and fireplace of brick.  The
main room faced the lake; and on the other side of the stack were a bedroom
which I did not use and the kitchen.  The main room, where I slept, being
occupied by my guests, I had to take my dry clothes into the bedroom.  This
room had two small windows.  I forget whether they were both closed; but if
open, the slit was not more than two or three inches wide.  There was a
door, also closed, leading into the kitchen.  The other door which led to
the main room may possibly have been a little ajar.  To put on my
stockings, I sat down on a chair close to the brickwork of the chimney
stack.  As I bent down, I noticed, with what I can only describe as calm
amazement, that a dazzling globe of electric fire, apparently between six
and twelve inches in diameter, was stationary about six inches below and to
the right of my right knee.  As I looked at it, it exploded with a sharp
report quite impossible to confuse with the continuous turmoil of the
lightning, thunder and hail, or that of the lashed water and smashed wood
which was creating a pandemonium outside the cottage.  I felt a very slight
shock in the middle of my right hand, which was closer to the globe than
any other part of my body.  I must emphasize that I was not in the
slightest degree alarmed or otherwise mentally disturbed.  It will be
remembered that I had been struck by lightning on the Pillar Mountain many
years earlier.  I have always felt extreme oppression while an electrical
storm is gathering and a corresponding exhilaration the moment it breaks.
I have a powerful instinctive feeling that I am myself an wholly electrical
phenomenon, and the wilder the storm, the more completely do I feel myself
in my element.  I am impelled to physical enthusiasm expressed in
delightedly triumphant magical gestures and outbursts of ecstatically
religious incantations.  I am thrilled to the marrow by the mere full title
of the Tarot Card called the Knight of Wands, "The Lord of the Flame and
the Lightning, the King of the Spirits of Fire!"  I want to shout aloud the
superb Enochian invocation of that force.  Something of that exaltation may
be divined from the rhythm and swing of the lyric into which I have
introduced this title:

     By the Brood of the Bysses of Brightening, whose
        God was my sire;
     By the Lord of the Flame and the Lightning, the King
        of the Spirits of Fire ...

This spiritually sublime intensity does not in any way interfere with my
intellectual activity.  On the contrary, I become more alert than in almost
any other conditions.  It is as if the illumination of the flash
interpenetrated my spirit, as if my mental faculties entered into enjoyment
of their ideal nourishment and simulation thereby.

{813}




















     I was consequently in the best possible condition to observe.  My
perfectly impersonal interest, and of course my scientific training, stood
me in excellent stead.  My time sense was markedly altered, much as I have
described in the account of the attack on me in Calcutta.  I was thus able
to observe the events of what was probably not more than five seconds as if
it had been as many minutes.
     I thought the phenomenon of sufficient interest to record; and wrote a
brief description to the "New York Times".  The result was surprising.  I
found myself inundated with letters of inquiry from so many electrical
students that I had at last to have an account multigraphed to send out.
     I had supposed that globular electricity was a well-known and
undoubted, if rare, phenomenon, and was amazed to learn that until then it
had never been seen by any reliable and competent observer.  I had quite an
elaborate correspondence with with Professor Elihu Thompson, one of the
greatest living authorities on electricity, about it.  It appeared that
previous accounts were the statements of common sailors.  They left
considerable room for doubting the existence of globular electricity at
all.  This doubt was strengthened by the extreme difficulty of framing any
satisfactory hypothesis to explain the occurrence.  My observation turned
out, therefore, to be (in its way) a matter of primary importance.  I
ventured to suggest an explanation of my own; but Professor Thompson felt
that, while it covered the facts of the case and even those of previous
observations, it involved a conception of electricity which was not easy to
reconcile with the implications of certain other phenomena.
     In the course of our correspondence, Professor Thompson communicated
several extremely subtle and stimulating ideas as to the nature of matter,
electricity and indeed of nature in general.  They perhaps helped me to
envisage consciously, for the first time, a strictly formal identification
of the results of rational intellection with those of immediate intuition.
I had felt, not without severe qualms, that the data of Neschamah might be
in irreconcilable antagonism with those of Ruach.  I was not in any way
shaken in my opinion  that the crown of Ruach (Da„th, Knowledge) had no
true place on the Tree of Life, that it was essentially illusory and self-
contradictory.  It had been my constant preoccupation to find a means of
expression for the truth of spiritual illumination in terms of rational
comprehension, and moreover to justify the former without denying the
validity of the later.  Professor Thompson's remarks filled me with hope.
It must be remembered that at the period when I studied science most
exclusively, the reaction against mysticism was in full swing.  The
persecution of Darwin was like an unhealed scar; its contemplation bred
resentment against the very root of any religious interpretation of the
universe.  I had been forced into the awkward position of having to be
ready to go to the stake with Maudsley,

{814}





















Ray Lankester and Haeckel, as against superstitious religion, and yet to
attack their conclusions with the utmost vehemence in the interests of the
impregnable spiritual position which I had built on the rock of my own
actual experience.  At last it had become conceivable that this antinomy
might be overcome, and that in the best way, in the way indicated by the
symbolism of the Cabbalah itself; that is to say, the eyes of science were
opening gradually to the perception that the results of observation and
experiment demanded an interpretation as repugnant to common sense (as
understood by the man in the street and the Rationalist Press Association)
as the utmost conceptions of Pythagoras, Paracelsus and that Great Order
itself of which I was an initiate.  My subsequent researches have been
almost exclusively determined by considerations of this kind.  While I have
done my utmost to advance directly towards truth by the regular traditional
magical and mystical methods which "The Book of the Law" had perfected, I
have constantly sought "pari passu" to correlate my results with those of
modern intellectual progress; indeed, to demonstrate that the deepest
thinkers are unwittingly approaching the apprehension of initiated ideas,
and are in fact, despite themselves, being compelled to extend their
definition of the Ruach to include conceptions proper to Neschamah, that
they are, in other words, becoming initiates in our sense of the word
without suspecting that they are committing high treason against the
majesty of materialism.
     The remaining Chokmah days of the initiation proper seemed to be
devoted principally to showing the candidate the material on which he is to
work.  I hope it will not sound too strange if I say that up to this time
of my life I had been to a certain extent living in a fool's paradise.  In
one way or another, either by actual shelter, by the protection of social
and financial resources, by my own poetic rose-coloured spectacles, or by
the singularly happy choice that I had made of the people among whom I
dwell, I had not seen in all its naked nastiness the world of mankind.  I
had seen a good deal of cruelty, stupidity and callousness; I realized how
ignoble were the lives of the average man and woman, but there had been
practically always a reasonable amount of compensation.  It is necessary to
live in the United States and know the people well to get a really clear
view of hell with the lid off.  I had already been some time in the
country, but the truth about New York had been camouflaged.  I, being who I
was, had come into contact with the very cream of the city, and on my
travels about the Union, I had seen little more than the superficial life
of the people as it appears to the wanderer whose tent is a pullman car, a
swagger hotel, or the abode of some friend who by that very fact is not
truly representative of his community.  I was soon to be brought into
intimate relations with a society so primitive that it had no means of
knowing who I was or recognizing the

{815}





















class I represented; to experience what the French rather neatly call le-
struggle-for-lifeisme; and that with the absolute moral certainty of being
completely beaten from the very nature of things.  In a country where the
most week and ignorant, the least intelligent and resourceful, find it easy
enough on the whole to earn a fairly decent living, and where the slightest
capacity of almost any sort makes it a safe bet that ten years will put its
possessor in Easy Street, I was to find myself a candidate for complete
destitution.  For many months I was, for the first time in my life,
constantly preoccupied with the problem of keeping myself alive, and did so
only by the operations of periodical windfalls.  Again and again my coracle
sank under me and each time those responsible for the conduct of my
initiation handed out something to go on with from some totally unexpected
source, in order to keep me on that psychological razor-edge whence one can
always see the abyss as one can no longer do when one is in it.  In this
way, I saw all classes and all races, but no longer from the privileged
standpoint, with the result that I was able to understand thoroughly what
they were like to themselves and to each other.  The horror and
loathsomeness of those conditions left a permanent mark upon my character.
It went far to destroy my capacity for lyrical expression, or perhaps
rather to make impossible the point of view necessary to that kind of
creative impulse.  Love itself was to appear in a totally new form.  I had
never before understood its roots in the moral weakness and physical
incompetence of our breed of monkeys.  I had been familiar enough with its
romantic and spiritual implication, with the social and economic
complications which degrade its ideal, and even with the brutalities and
blasphemies which lust and greed impose upon it.  I had never understood it
as the expression of the bitter need of desperation which is after all its
true nature so far as all but a very few individuals "rari nantes in gurgito"
"vasto" are concerned.
   It would be impossible for me even to attempt the merest outline of the
abomination of desolation upon which the Chiefs forced me to gaze during
these long dreary dreadful days.  It was not that I saw only the vilest and
basest elements in society; on the contrary, I was deeply impressed by the
essential virtue which forms part of every human being, and the poison upon
the barb of my experience was the fact that ignorance, unskilfulness, moral
weakness and the like made the helplessness and hopelessness of virtue
utterly complete.  Everywhere I saw unspeakably loathsome and inhuman vices
triumphing with scarce a show of resistance; commerce in its uncleanliest
forms had harnessed morality, religion and even science to its Jaganath
car.  Every decent instinct, whether of the individual or of the community,
was the prey of this ghoul.  In another chapter I shall give instances of
the kind of thing which was not wholly dominant but practically universal.
I have said enough to convey a general idea of the nature of the ordeal
through

{816}




















which I was passed at this period.  I need only record a few of the actual
magical results.
     The misery which I underwent at this time had done much to cloud my
memory.  I do not clearly remember, for example, my reasons for going to
New Orleans almost immediately after returning from Lake Pasquaney.  It was
my last glimpse of beauty for a long while.  The old French-Spanish quarter
of the city is the only decent inhabited district that I discovered in
America.  From the architecture to the manners of the people, their
clothes, their customs and their cookery, all was delightful.  It was like
being back in Europe again with the added charm of a certain wildness and
romance; it was a civilization "sui generis", with its own peculiar adornment
in the way of history.  It enabled me to realize the spirit of the Middle
Ages as even the most remote and time-honoured towns of Europe rarely do.
I took a room conveniently close to the Old Absinthe House, where one could
get real absinthe prepared in fountains whose marble was worn by ninety
years' continual dripping.  The result was that I was seized by another of
my spasms of literary creation, and this time, the definite sexual stimulus
which I had imagined as partly responsible for such attacks was, if not
absent, at least related to an atmosphere rather than to an individual.
     It lasted, if I remember rightly, some seventeen days.  I completely
lost track of the properties of times and place.  I walked over to the
Absinthe House in my shirt sleeves on one occasion without being in the
slightest degree aware of the fact.  My best work was an essay "The Green
Goddess", descriptive of the Old Absinthe House itself in particular, and
the atmosphere of the quarter in general.  It may be regarded as the only
rival to "The Heart of Holy Russia" for literary excellence and
psychological insight.  I wrote also "The Scrutinies of Simon Iff", a series
of six more or less detective stories; two or three less important essays;
some short stories, of which I may mention "Every Precaution" for its local
colour; and all but the last two or three chapters of my first serious
attempt at a long novel, "The Net".  I also began from the very depths of my
spiritual misery a very strange book of an entirely new kind; so much so
that I describe it as "A Novelissim".1  Its title is "Not the Life and"
"Adventure of Sir Roger Bloxam".  It remains unfinished to this day; in fact
it is hardly theoretically possible to finish it, strictly speaking.  I
have indeed serious qualms as to whether I have not overstepped the limits
of truth in saying that I began it.  To be safe, I should be content to say
I wrote a good deal of it.
     The lyrical faculty remained almost entirely dormant, no doubt owing
to the fact that in a quarter where almost every woman attracted me
intensely, I was quite unable to fix my affection on a single specimen.
Perhaps also it was inhibited by the iron which was entering my soul inch
by inch and being twisted in my heart by the pitiless love of the Secret
Chiefs of the Order.

{817}


        1  WEH note:  Actually, it's a shaggy dog story.

















It was this, without doubt, which threw a monkey-wrench into my creative
machinery and its destructive energy may be measured by the frightful
circumstance which must next be recorded.
     The city of New Orleans is divided into two main sections by a broad
thoroughfare.  On one side is the Spanish quarter, on the outskirts of
which was a large and picturesque red light section; one of the most
interesting places of its kind that I have ever seen.  In fact, if we
except Cairo, it would have been hard to beat.  Across the main street was
the modern commercial Americanized section where hardly a brick but
screamed an obscene blasphemy against everything that might delight a poet,
arouse enthusiasm in a lover, or abstain from revolting the instincts of a
gentleman.  Before I had been long in the city, it had become obvious that
this cancer was eating away the breast of the beautiful city, and the
conviction was stamped into my soul by a very definite hoof-mark of the
mule morality.
     A millionaire with a very large interest in the racecourse at Havana
bethought him that it would be good business to do away with the
competition of New Orleans in that form of sport.  He therefore proceeded
to organize what is called a "clean-up" of the city.  He bribed prominent
pulpits to awake the consciences of sincere puritans, squared the
politicians and the newspapers, brought blackmail to bear on any honest
people that seemed likely to stand in his way, and in every other respect
fulfilled the conditions requisite for plundering the city and persecuting
the poor, in the name of righteousness according to the most approved
methods.  His most spectacular success was to shut up the red light
district, so far as the poorest classes were concerned.  The effect of
these proceedings was brought home to me by an incident which, happening in
the United States, appeared to me vastly comic.  I had been to the library
in Lee Circle to get a book and descending the steps was accosted by a
woman with a request for charity.  I recognized her as one of the denizens
of the wooden shanties of the red light district.  My sympathy was aroused
by the shameful cruelty to which she had been subjected by the hypocritical
and dishonest manoeuvres of the millionaire and his myrmidons.  Her case
was peculiarly pathetic as she was suffering from an active and contagious
form of disease.  The most elementary common sense and decency would have
come to her rescue long before, in the interest of her clients, no less
than her own.  I asked her what she was going to do now that her office had
been closed.  To my surprise, she was perfectly cheerful.  The relief which
she sought was only temporary, for she had got a good position as a
nursemaid in a family of three young children for the following week!
     Such was one of the innumerable similar symptoms of the foul disease
which is ravaging the United States, and has already destroyed almost every
vestige of the political, religious and individual liberty which was the
very essence of the original American idea.  My spirit sank under the
contemplation

{818}



















of the irremediable calamity which threatens to engulf the whole of
humanity since it is now an accepted principle of business to endeavour to
make tyranny international, to suppress all customs of historical interest,
and indeed everything which lends variety or distraction to human society
in the interest of making a market for standardized products.  The moral
excuse for these activities is miserably thin, for the element which it is
most important to suppress is originality as such, even when the question
concerns the very idea of craftsmanship in itself.  The idea at the back of
puritanism is the reduction of the mass of humanity to a degree of slavery
which has never previously been so much as contemplated by the most
malignant tyrants in history; for it aims at completing the helplessness of
the workman by minimizing his capacity.  He must no more be permitted to
exercise the creative craftsmanship involved in making a pair of boots; he
must be rendered unable to do more than repeat mechanically, year in, year
out, one meaningless item in the manufacture, so that when the pinch comes
it shall be impossible for anyone to have boots at all except through the
complex industrial conspiracy of the trusts.  This idea, consciously or
subconsciously, lies underneath all attempts to extend "civilization".  The
progress of this pestilence is only too visible all over the world.
Standardized hotels and standardized merchandise have invaded the remotest
districts, and these would be economically impossible unless supported by
the forcible suppression of local competition.  When, therefore, we find
the newspapers indignant at Mohammedan morality, we may suspect the real
trouble is that American hatters see no hope of disposing of their surplus
stock, as long as the wicked Oriental sticks to his turban or tarbush.  The
exquisite, dignified and comfortable clothes of remote people, from Sicily
to Japan, must give way to the vile shoddy products of foreign factories,
and the motive is supplied by a worldwide campaign on behalf of social
snobbery.  The people are persuaded that they ought to try to look like a
sporting duke or a bank president.  Such plans obviously depend on the
destruction of everything that makes for originality, self-respect, the
love of beauty or the reverence for history.
     It took me a long while before I could formulate consciously this
idea, so protean are its disguises and so subtly sinister its stratagems.
But I have always possessed the instinct, I have always reacted
automatically against this principle whenever I found it.  It should be
obvious that "Do what thou wilt" cuts diametrically athwart this modern
civilization to destroy the distinctions which constitute the sole hope of
humanity to make real progress by the selection and variation which are the
means of evolution.  It may be said that my own work is in the nature of
missionary enterprise; and that this is, in fact, the very thing to which I
object, since its idea is to persuade people to abandon their established
beliefs and customs.  This criticism is invalid.  I do, as a matter of
fact, object to missionary enterprise as such, whether it take the

{819}




















form of imposing the cult of Osiris on the worshippers of Adonis, of
persuading the Chinese to eat with knives and forks, or of making Eastern
women obscenely ridiculous by changing their superb and suitable robes for
frocks which pretend to have been made in Paris.  But my message differs
fundamentally from all previously promulgated precisely at this point.  My
predecessors have invariably said, "My belief is right and yours is wrong;
my customs are worthy, yours are ignoble; my dress is decent, yours is not;
think as I think, talk as I talk, do as I do, or you will be wretched,
poor, sick, disgraced and damned; besides which, I shall cut your head off,
burn you alive, starve you, imprison you, ostracize you and otherwise make
you sorry you did not agree to be a good boy."  The essence of every
missionary message has been to assimilate the taught to the teacher; and it
has always been accompanied by bribes and threats.  My message is exactly
opposed to any of this.  I say to each man and woman, "You are unique and
sovereign, the centre of an universe.  However right I may be in thinking
as I do, you may be equally right in thinking otherwise.  You can only
accomplish your object in life by complete disregard of the opinions of
other people.  You must not even take the outward signs of success as
indications that the course of action which has produced them would serve
your turn.  For one thing, my coronet might not suit your complexion but
give you a headache; for another, the measures which I took to obtain that
coronet might not succeed in your case."
     My mission is, in short, to bring everyone to the realization and
enjoyment of his own kingship, and my apparent interference with him
amounts to no more than advice to him not to suffer interference.  It may
appear from this as if I were opposed to joint action directed to the
attainment of a common purpose.  But, of course, this is not the case.  The
advantages, not merely of cooperation but of disciplined union are the same
as they were with previous theories of life.  Yet there is a certain
practical difference which, by the way, is curiously illustrated by the
parallel of military discipline.  In primitive warfare, the nexus between
comrades is practically limited to an agreement to forget their individual
quarrels in face of the common enemy.  The training of a soldier thus
amounted to encouraging his personal prowess.  It was gradually seen that
some sort of plan for combined action made for victory, so that one leader
or chieftain should be detailed to carry out a definite duty.  It soon
became clear that isolated action was dangerous to the whole army; and the
consequent tendency was developed to the point at which the Prussian drill
sergeant was invaluable.  The aim was to reduce the soldier to a brainless
bulk of brawn, to be manipulated as mechanically as a chessman, exercising
his inherent energies without the slightest wish or power to think or act
for himself.  (This stage corresponds to that which we are rapidly
approaching in industry.)  Now at least we have reached a further stage.
The complexity of a battle and its mere extent in space have made it
impossible for

{820}



















a single man to handle his troops as was done by Marlborough and Napoleon,
and therefore it has become once more necessary for the subordinate
officer, and even, to some extent, the private soldier to understand his
responsibility, to exercise initiative within limits, and also to train
himself to be able to carry out a variety of operations demanding very
varied knowledge and skill, instead of, as before, being confined to a
highly specialized task demanding blind obedience and the suppression of
all intelligence.  The Charge of the Light Brigade has in fact become
impossible.  We are moving intelligently enough back in the direction of
Sir Launcelot and Crillon.  The necessities of warfare are the more truly
instructive in that the military type of mind is so contemptible.  The
commander-in chief is always hopelessly incompetent either to conceive or
to perceive correctly the very elements of his business.  The progress of
military science is imposed upon stupidly by the facts; and it affords us,
therefore, the best possible illustration of the blind workings of
evolution.  That is why industry, whose chiefs are just one degree less
brainless than the Kitcheners and Frenches, is actually behind war in its
biological adaptation to environment.  Industrial crises are not so
immediately fatal as those of tactics.  Necessity has not so free a hand
with the birch rod; and so, conditions alter more slowly, and their
significance is less easy to interpret.





















{821}

























                              84


     Considerations of this kind were constantly present to my mind at this
period.  Before my eyes was the sickening spectacle of humanity sinking
ever deeper into the sticky slime of slavery.  The tragedy of New Orleans
illustrated one phase of the calamity.  While as to the individual, his
position might be gauged by the case of my own cousin in Florida, who quite
seriously believed that God had sunk the "Titanic" to rebuke the presumption
of the builders, of the pitifully comic worship of the weakly megalomaniac
at the White House, and of the moral and mental level of such people as I
met in the masonic lodges whose gambols I have described in a previous
chapter.
     Hope died in my heart.  There was not one glimmer of light on the
horizon anywhere.  It seemed to me an obscene mockery to be called a Magus.
I must have been afflicted by "lust of result"; at least it came to this,
that I felt that I could not go on with my work.  On every side the wizened
witches of religion and morality were shrill in celebration of their
obscene sabbath.  I felt that I had not only failed, but that it was little
short of lunacy to imagine that I could ever make the slightest impression
upon the monstrous mass of misery which was soaking through the very spine
of mankind.  My faith failed me; I made a gesture of despair; I committed
spiritual suicide, I closed my Magical Record and refused to write.  "If
the Masters want me to do their Work," said I, "let them come forward and
call me."
     This action is the only of my life of which I am really ashamed.  I
should not have surrendered while there was breath in my body.  Well,
perhaps it was not altogether a surrender; but it was at least a desperate
appeal of anguish.
     The penalty of my momentary lapse was frightful.  Its effects are
still observable today.  The subject is really too painful to discuss at
length.  I need say no more than this: that my lack of confidence in the
Secret Chiefs recoiled on myself.  (In Magick, of course, the punishment
always fits the crime.)  At the same time, the Secret Chiefs themselves had
made no mistake.  They knew perfectly well what was my breaking strain and
they deliberately pushed me beyond my limit for several excellent reasons.
They wanted me to know the extent of my capacity to endure; and thereby, of
course, to increase that capacity in the future by showing me that even
when I thought I had broken the chain it held by invisible links as firmly
as ever and was, in fact, unbreakable; for it is an essential element of my
being to be pledged to the performance of the Great Work.  They also taught
me by this means the

{822}




















consequences of any such error; and this has been very useful to me in
dealing with those who may be in danger of making a similar blunder.  The
penalty itself was also the means of arranging events in such a way as to
be of service to me in subsequent initiation.
     I don't know whether I thought the world would come to an end, because
I chose to turn nasty --- but I was certainly very much annoyed to find
that, as in the case of the great Lord Cardinal, when he had finished
cursing "nobody seemed one penny the worse".  The Secret Chiefs were to all
appearance entirely unconcerned at what I had done.  Like my own Blind
Prophet, I had pulled down the pillars on which I supposed the temple to be
supported, but he at least succeeded in crushing himself, and I had not
even done that!
     What happened was in fact extremely curious.  Stevenson observes that
when a Magi is cashiered, he does not fall to be a rural dean or words to
that effect.  I found myself, like Othello, with my occupation gone.  I
might not be able to perform the task of a Magus, but there was certainly
nothing else for me to do.  I had no remorse, not so much as a qualm of
conscience.  The Secret Chiefs kept silent.  And I found that after a
fortnight or so I simply could not stand it any longer.  I felt more than a
little like a naughty dog, but there was simply nothing to be done but to
crawl back with my tail between my legs, and I remember with somewhat
shamefaced amusement, that I had a sort of hope that I had escaped notice.
     The situation had not in any way changed; when I reopened my Magical
Record I did so entirely without hope of any kind; in fact, perhaps the
best way to express the situation is that my misdemeanour had served to
purge me of the "lust of result".  But as for having escaped notice, if I
had really harboured any delusions on that point, my mind was completely
disillusioned in the first eleven seconds.
     I said to myself that the obvious first step was to invoke Mercury.  I
instantly found myself, with a little internal laugh simmering in my solar
plexus, saying, "But I am Mercury."  The suppressed chuckle was cut short
suddenly by that feeling akin to alarm which a man often feels when he is
sitting up late at night enjoying a book, and is suddenly reminded, perhaps
by some slight noise, of some serious matter; an unexpected visitor, can it
be, outside his door?  For I was aware that there was something more in
what I was saying to myself than its plain implication, and it came to me
by some inscrutable instinct to couch the idea otherwise.  "Mercurius sum","
I murmured, and now the unheard voice, not so loud as a whisper yet more
compelling than a burst of thunder, told me without the use of language,
"No, that isn't it, say it in Greek."  "Epsilon rho mu eta sigma 
epsilon iota mu iota ," I affirmed solemnly, and knew immediately that I had
done what was required of me, yet wondering almost contemptuously what was
the object of the translation, and then, far more rapidly than I could have
discovered by conscious calculation, I knew that

{823}




















"Epsilon rho mu eta sigma  epsilon iota mu iota " had the numerical value of
418, the Magical Formula of the Aeon.  At the very first moment of resuming
communication with my soul, the Secret Chiefs had given me an indubitable
token of their existence, of their vigilant guardianship, by communicating
their password, so to speak, in this cipher.  My spirit leapt with joy to
be reassured once more by this superbly simple means, this exquisitely neat
and convincing language; yet stark shame savaged me.  How could even such a
mule of a mind as mine have been so obstinate to resist such perfect
control?  How could I ever have been such a coward as to lose my courage
even for a moment, seeing that year after year the Secret Chiefs had never
failed me?  I had never despised myself so deeply.  But the very sharpness
of my scorn had also its use.  It guaranteed me forever against a
repetition of any such collapse.  I did not ask for any further token; I
did not even form resolutions, or so much as ask for instruction.  I simply
became alive to the fact that I was a Magus, with every implication
possible, and that I should infallibly perform whatever tasks might be
given me.  I even began to understand that the actual absence of any task
was evidence that my present conditions were essential to the Great Work;
that my apparent impotence was part of the plan of the Secret Chiefs.  I
had been childishly petulant in wanting to bathe in "Abana and Pharphar
rivers of Damascus", and thinking myself insulted by being told that the
petty trickle of Jordan, a stream that did not even lead to the ocean,
would suffice to cleanse my limbs of leprosy.  Somehow or other, the
ghastly situation in which I found myself, the stagnation of my career and
the paralysis of my powers were essential to my proper progress.  I ceased
to fret about the future, as to protest against the present.  I took
everything as it came almost without comment, confident that at the right
moment I should find myself in the right position to do what was right.
     Having witnessed the bedevilment of New Orleans, I was sent to
Titusville, Florida, to complete my contemplation of the unspeakable
degradation of humanity which is constantly being wrought by Christianity
and commerce.  I saw my cousin Lawrence, as decent a lad as one could wish
to see, spiritually stunted and corrupted in every way by savage
superstition; his wife, hardly turned thirty, a wrinkled hag of sixty, with
no idea of life beyond the gnawing fear for the hereafter and the horrible
pleasures of venting her spite on her neighbours and thwarting and
persecuting her children; his son, deprived of every boyish amusement,
driven to secret indulgence in the most wretched vices, and his sisters
(one of them with a voice which would have made her a queen in any
civilized capital) thwarted in every innocent aspiration, and their eyes
wide open to the frightful knowledge that they could never be anything but
drudges sold into the worse slavery of marriage at eighteen, and ruined old
women, dead to every possibility, at twenty-five.  Their constant cry was
"I don't want to grow up to be like Mother!"  Their

{824}




















least actions were spied on, their every attempt to fit themselves by
education to get out of the ghastly swamp where they sweated away their
youth in conditions which made the fever and famine themselves, with which
they were familiar, more bearable than the malignant tyranny of the people
to whom the very crocodiles might have served as a reproach and an
inspiration.
     From this hell of ignorance and family life I was removed to a very
different place of punishment.  I was to have a view of New York as it must
appear to the average stranger, to all such of its inhabitants (these must
constitute a very considerable percentage) who have not established
business and social connections.  It is striking evidence of the ability of
the Secret Chiefs to arrange the conditions of an initiation that such an
experience was possible for me; for, by this time, I was pretty well-known
in the city in very varied sets, and as it happened, I had under my hand as
good a means of making myself not only prosperous but popular, as any man
could possibly wish for.
     During my retirement by Lake Pasquaney I had, according to my custom
when in solitude and in need of relaxation, passed the time by dealing
myself hands in such games as skat, piquet and bridge.  I was led to invent
a new game, a variation of auction bridge, which we subsequently called
"pirate bridge".  This appeared to me such an improvement on the ordinary
game that I throught I would introduce it to the public.  I convinced the
editor of "Vanity Fair" of its merits and suggested that R. F. Foster should
be called in to put the rules into definite shape.
     It gave me a very curious feeling, by the way, to be in such relations
with a man who, twenty years before, had been the inaccessible godhead of
the universe of card games to my undergraduate enthusiasm!  As a matter of
fact, he misunderstood one of my rules; and I think the game was spoilt in
consequence.  However, even as it was, "Vanity Fair" was devoting a long
article every month to the subject, and I had only to wander into the
appropriate circles to make myself the darling of the community.  But the
Secret Chiefs had it in mind that so far from doing anything of the sort, I
should spend months of absolutely sickening solitude, direst poverty and
impotence to take any action whatever, so that I might realize how the
world feels to the very vast majority of the inhabitants of its civilized
sections, to people without resources, prospects, friends or exploitable
abilities.  I was also to be prepared to take up a public career for the
first time in my life; my previous manifestations having been of a semi-
private or amateur kind.
     This period was inexpressibly distressing; apart from other
unpleasantnesses, my health broke down in a quite inexplicable way.  There
was no satisfactory diagnosis; the symptoms were confined to a spiritual
and physical malaise which deprived me alike of ambition and energy.  (I
have good reason to suspect that this was partly due to the reaction from
my experiment in reviving youth.)  And there were other trials.  At one
time I

{825}


















was so poor that I had to lie on the sofa of a friend in the garret which
he called his studio to have anywhere to sleep, and I really don't quite
remember what I did about eating.  I suppose I must have earned a few
dollars now and again in one way or another.
     The Chokmah day beginning in June saw the break-up of these
conditions.  A new officer appeared.  The initiation had now entered upon
an entirely different phase.  The function of the officers was no longer to
administer ordeals (I had passed the tests); they were sent as guides to
lead me on a journey through the Desert to the appointed "House of the
Juggler" in which a Magus symbolically lives.
     The first part of the initiation had occupied thirteen Chokmah days
counting from November 3rd, 1914 to June 9th, 1917.  I was able to
recognize my guide.  During the past days I had done much work in analysing
and interpreting the mysterious events which had characterized my sojourn
in America.  From this time on my progress was far less unintelligible than
had hitherto been the case.  I was therefore not surprised when an officer
appeared at about the expected date, and her physical appearance told me at
once where I had got to in my journey; for the god whose place is on the
Threshold of the Temple, whose function is to guard the portal of the
sanctuary and introduce approved candidates to the assembled deities, is
Anubis.  This god is always represented with the head of a jackal.  (This
has sometimes been interpreted as a dog; whence the dog-headed Hermes in
the mythology which the Greeks borrowed from Egypt.)
     Now this guide exactly resembled a dog; not only physically but
morally.  She had all the canine qualities, the best and the worst, in
perfection, and she certainly served to start me on my new journey.  The
impending section of my initiation was easy to understand.  In the former I
had been prevented from establishing any regular relations as a teacher or
prophet with humanity.  I had been prepared in solitude to become such.  I
was now, little by little, to enter upon my life as the Prophet of the Law
of Thelema.
     In July I was made the editor of "The International", a monthly which
had the distinction of being the only publication in the United States with
a genuine claim to represent the best literary tradition.  The editor had
made the fatal mistake of prostituting its columns to political propaganda.
The paper was, therefore, on the rocks.  Its literary merits had been
entirely forgotten in the salient fact of its pro-German tendencies.  I
explained elsewhere how I came to be connected with anti-English
sentiments, and part of my plan in taking over the paper was to restore it
to political propriety, unknown by its backers, and also to keep close
watch upon their activities, on behalf of the Department of Justice.  But
my main object was, of course, to obtain a medium for the proclamation of
the Law.
     For all practical purposes, I was in complete control of the policy of
the

{826}



















paper; but as far as pushing it was concerned I was obliged to rely on the
broken reed of merit, for it was conducted financially with short-sighted
meanness.  I had no idea that cheese-paring could be reduced to such a fine
art.  My own salary was twenty dollars per week, which was, at that time,
little more than the wage of an unskilled stenographer, and it was a Titan
task to extract as much as ten dollars or the price of a lunch for a long
article or story by a well-known writer.  They expected me to get a cover
design by a first-rate artist for five dollars and would try to cheat him
or her out of it at that.  I was horribly ashamed of having to cadge
contributions in this way, but very proud to remember that many brilliant
people seemed only too glad to give their work.  They felt it an honour to
support a magazine with such high standards as I introduced.  One little
fact illustrates the position with lurid light.  Having got my article
free, the least I could do was to have half a dozen copies of the number in
which it appeared sent to the authors.  The proprietor would countermand
such instructions behind my back, not because of the cost of the paper, for
there were always ample "returns", but to save the postage.
     The upshot of all this was that I wrote the bulk of the paper myself,
camouflaging the fact by the use of pseudonyms.  After eight months I had
so improved the reputation of the paper that it had become a valuable
property, and it was accordingly sold to a man who was so stupid as not to
know that its sole asset was myself, and so fat-headed that he thought he
could run it himself.  He would not even accept a contribution from me,
though I offered him one out of pure kindness.  He pretended to be a great
friend of mine and I had not realized the dirtiness of the intrigues
against me.  Well, he had his way and got out just one number.  As soon as
people found my name absent they would not buy it.  Its sudden destruction
was the greatest compliment I had ever received.
     During the three Chokmah days of my control of the paper I devoted
every energy to proclaiming the Law of Thelma in its pages both directly
and indirectly.
     My first important step in this direction, the thin end of the wedge,
was an article "The Revival of Magick" which ran serially, ending in
November.  The last paragraph, a mere coxcombical flourish, though written
with the quite serious idea of indicating to some person of adequate
intelligence, the direction in which to seek for a Master, provided an
element in an incident of the utmost complexity.  I propose to recount this
in great detail, because it gives an idea of the extraordinary strength and
subtlety of the proof that I am in communication with some intelligence
possessing knowledge and power altogether superior to anything that we can
reasonably ascribe to any human being.
     This paragraph runs as follows:

{827}






















          Herein is wisdom; let him that hath understanding count the
     number of The Beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is
     six hundred and three score and six.

     I must now return to the feature of my initiation: for the other
conditions of the incident in question are connected therewith.
     After only one Chokmah day I was obliged to get rid of my faithful
Anubis.  She had been a fine friend, but her manners were such that I could
not really have her about the camp.  Besides this, such a journey as I was
now about to undertake required an animal of greater strength and size than
the dog.  To take me to the oasis I required a camel; and at the beginning
of the next Chokmah day I found an admirable Mehari at the door of my tent.
It is to be noticed that in this part of the initiation I was in no
perplexity.  I understood the proper function of the officer in charge of
my progress and wasted no time in discussing right relations.
     In January 1918, I published a revised version of the "Message of the
Master Therion" and also of the "Law of Liberty", a pamphlet in which I
uttered a panegyric upon the Law as the key to freedom and delight.  (To
get rid of the subject I had better mention here the other magical essays
which appeared in "The International": "Cocaine", "The Ouija Board",
"Concerning Death", "Pax", "Hominibus Bonae Voluntatis", "Geomancy",
"Absinthe", "De Thaumaturgia", "Ecclesiae Gnosticae Canon Missae".  Of
these, "Liber XV", its scope and purpose, I have already described at
length.)  The point which I wish to bring out is that despite the
constraint imposed upon me by the requirements of public taste, I succeeded
in proclaiming the Law to a wide audience of selected readers, explaining
its main principles and general import in straightforward language, and
also in putting over a large amount of what was on the surface quite
ordinary literature, but implying the Law of Thelema as the basis of right
thought and conduct.  In this way I managed to insinuate my message perhaps
more effectively than could possibly have been done by any amount of
visible argument and persuasion.  "The Scrutinies of Simon Iff" are perfectly
good detective stories, yet they not only show a master of the Law as
competent to solve the subtlest problems by considerations based upon the
Law, but the way in which crime and unhappiness of all sorts may be traced
to a breach of the Law.  I show that failure to comply with it involves an
internal conflict.  (Note that the fundamental principle of psychoanalysis
is that neurosis is caused by failure to harmonize the elements of
character.)  The essence of the Law is the establishment of right relations
between any two things which come into contact: the essence of such
relations being "love under will".  The only way to keep out of trouble is
to understand and therefore to love every impression of which one becomes
conscious.
     Even in my political articles I make the Law of Thelema the sole basis
of

{828}



















my articles.  I apply it, in short, to every circumstance of life, securing
in this way a completely coherent point of view.  Most men and practically
all Anglo-Saxons have an elaborate system of mental watertight
compartments.  One of the most important elements of the panic fear of
truth in every form, the distrust of any man who seems likely to
investigate things seriously, is due to the consciousness that even a
superficial analysis will reveal a state of spiritual civil war whose issue
it is impossible to foresee.  They all pretend to be Christians, yet the
injunction "Love your enemies", which by the way is really the first
corollary of the Law of Thelema, is universally regarded as infinitely
objectionable.  I am myself in all kinds of a mess simply because I insist
upon putting this into practice.  I refuse to consider my enemies as
irreconcilable; I take the utmost pains to understand and love them.  By
this means I invariably succeed sooner or later in destroying them, that
is, of incorporating them into my own idea of myself.  (I am liable to
express this operation by saying that having slain my foe in ambush, I
devour his heart and liver raw in order to fortify myself with his courage,
energy and other fine qualities, and then I become very sad when I am
currently quoted as a cannibal.  Picturesque metaphor is not always
appreciated.)  I cannot make the public understand that to treat a man as
an enemy in the ordinary sense of the word, to damage him in every possible
way, and otherwise to disintegrate him, is simply to cut off one's nose to
spite one's face.  There is nothing in the universe which is not
indissolubly one with every other thing; and the greatest man is he who
makes no difference between any one thing and any other thing.  He becomes
the "chief of all" as stated in "The Book of the Law".



















{829}






















                              85


     We may now return to the subject of the initiation itself.  Besides my
work of proclaiming the Law to the profane and expounding it to the
aspirant, I was set the task of analysing it in such a way as to illuminate
the most advanced.  During most of the winter I gave most of my spare time
to the creation of literature which corresponded nobly with this three fold
labour.  I wrote the twelve stories "Simon Iff in America".  These were a
continuation of the previous "the Scrutinies of Simon Iff", but constructed
for the most part on mere mechanical principles.  I may even compare them
to chess problems.  The general method was to think of a situation as
inexplicable as possible, then to stop up all chinks with putty, and having
satisfied myself that no explanation was possible, to make a further effort
and find one.  I find it hard to consider this sort of thing as serious
literature, and yet so ineradicable is the artistic instinct in me that the
Old Adam peeps out sufficiently often to remove these stories from the
category of "jeux d'esprit".  In particular, the story "Suffer the Little
Children", whose setting is in Florida as I knew it, flames so fiercely
with the passion excited in me by the conditions which I found there, a
passion which I cannot fairly describe as pity, scorn, disgust,
indignation, or even any combination of these, that I believe this tale may
stand like the broken statue of Osymandias, in the eyes of a new
civilization, as a witness of the tyranny and abomination which Christians
have taught us to associate with the name of Christ.  It is at least an
extremely accurate study of life in Florida; the accuracy is guaranteed by
the acuteness of the suffering of the observer.  One does not see children
vivisected before one's eyes without receiving an impression, and the
emotion which in ordinary cases might obfuscate and mislead the looker-on
was in my case transformed into an ideal stimulant of clear-sightedness.  I
felt intensely that I had to have all my wits about me in order to expose
the atrocity of the abominations which I was compelled to witness.  The
brilliance of the story is striking evidence of the fierceness of my
reaction against the conditions of the backwoods life of the United States.
One of the chief reasons for the inexpressible intensity of my feeling is
doubtless that the nameless tortures which I saw inflicted as a mere matter
of routine upon women and children as such broke open the sepulchre in
which I had long since buried my own sufferings at the hands of
Evangelicalism and released these fetid, noxious and malignant spectres
once more to prey upon my mind.

{830}






















     So much for the profane.  For the aspirant I wrote the book called "De"
"Lege Libellum", otherwise called "The Sandal", in which I analysed the Law as
the source of light, life, love and liberty, and pronounced a panegyric
upon it in each of these respects successively.  For sustained sublimity of
prose this book perhaps ranks next to those in which my pen was definitely
and authentically inspired.  (The criterion of such inspiration, by the
way, is that in the case of an inspired book such as "Liber VII" or "Liber LXV"
I do not dare to "change as much as the style of a letter".  I show, in
fact, precisely that reverence for the author which should always be
observed by the mere editor, and in this case, having not only the
manuscript but my memory to assist me in case of any question arising as to
the text in consequence of what my earliest tutor would doubtless have
considered imperfections of caligraphy, there is fortunately no reason for
anxiety as to the critical perfection of the text.)
     The above remarks may appear strange as a preliminary to the statement
that I regarded and still regard this book "The Sandal" as essentially an
exercise in technique undertaken in order to fit myself to write "Liber"
"Aleph, The Book of Wisdom or Folly", which is beyond question a consummate
masterpiece in its particular sphere in literature.  It has always been my
custom to practise with a rapier very thoroughly before fighting a duel.
If occasionally these friendly bouts have resulted in a few deaths --- the
more the merrier!
     "Liber Aleph, The Book of Wisdom or Folly" was intended to express the
heart of my doctrine in the most deep and delicate dimensions.  (Before
using the word dimensions many considerations occurred to me.  It is
startling; that quality itself is not repugnant to its use in such a
connection.  Its use was followed by a discussion between myself and my
cynocephalus, who was herself struck by the singularity of the word, so
much so, that I had to warn her not to spell it with two d's, and my
explanations, thought unsatisfactory, decided me to insert this note in the
text of my autohagiography.)1
     "Liber Aleph" is the most tense and intense book that I have ever
composed.  The thought is so concentrated and, if I may use the word,
nervous, that both to write then, and to read now, involved an involves an
almost intolerable strain.  I remember how I used to sit at my desk night
after night --- it was the bitterest winter that had been known in New York
for many

{831}


        1  The content of the above passage, properly analysed, should
          serve as an immensely valuable indication of the methods employed
          by my mind.  Note in particular my reliance on obscure allusion.
          The remark about spelling expects the reader to be instantly
          reminded of the story of the "Something ... Marquis of
          Queensberry" who, receiving the sympathetic condolences of a
          friend on having been mixed up with the trial of Oscar Wilde,
          replied that he regretted only one thing about the whole case;
          which was that on the libellous card, handed by him to the porter
          of the club, to be given to Oscar Wilde, he had spelt the word
          "sodomite" with two "d's".














years --- but even if the central heating had been the flames of hell
itself, I doubt whether I should have been warm.  Night after night I sat,
all through, rigid as a corpse, and icier; the whole of my life
concentrated in two spots; the small section of my brain which was occupied
in the work, and my right wrist and fingers.  I remember with absolute
clearness that my consciousness appeared to start from a perfectly dead
forearm.
     The book is written in prose, yet there is a formal circumscription
more imminent than anything which would have been possible in poetry.  I
limited myself by making a point of dealing thoroughly with a given subject
in a single page.  It was an acute agony, similar to that of Asana, to
write, and the effort removed me so far from normal human consciousness
that there was something indicibly ghastly in its unnaturalness when I got
into bed in full daylight in the hope of acquiring a particle of warmth
from the complacent Camel.
     I may now deal thoroughly with the complex and astounding incident
which I promised to describe above.  The Camel was a doctor of pharmacy,
employed in pathological analysis, and later in manufacturing perfumery.
She had never had any interest in Magick or any similar study, and I had
not attempted to rouse it.  One weekend she was lying on a mattress on the
floor smoking opium, the apparatus having been lent us by a famous
chiropractor who had bought it during a trip to Cuba, out of curiosity.  I
was sitting at my desk, working.  To my surprised annoyance, the Camel
suddenly began to have visions.  I shut off my hearing in the way I have
learnt to do; but after some five minutes babbling she pierced my defences
by some remark concerning an egg under a palm tree.  This aroused me
instantly, for the last instruction given to myself and Soror Virakam was
to go to the desert and look for just that thing.  I saw then a kind of
continuity between those visions and these.  It was as if the intelligence
communicating were taking up the story at the point at which it had been
dropped.  Of course, it might have been a mere coincidence.  But that point
could be easily settled by cross-examination.  I began to ask questions.
The Camel said that someone, whom she called "the Wizard", wished to
communicate with me.  I am not a spiritualist who accepts any message as of
divine origin.  I insist on knowing with whom I am talking, and on his
showing such qualities of mind that the communication will benefit me.
     Now, as it happened, I had a test question to my hand.  I had taken
the name Baphomet as my motto in the O.T.O.  For six years and more I had
tried to discover the proper way to spell this name.  I knew that it must
have eight letters, and also that the numerical and literal correspondences
must be such as to express the meaning of the name in such a ways as to
confirm what scholarship had found out about it, and also to clear up those
problems which archaeologists had so far failed to solve.  Here, then, was
an

{832}




















ideal test of the integrity and capacity of the Camel's Wizard.  I flung
the question in his face.  "If you possess the superior knowledge which you
claim, you can tell me how to spell Baphomet!"  The Camel knew nothing of
the Hebrew and little of the Greek.  She had no idea that a conventional
system existed by which one could check the accuracy of any given
orthography.  Her Wizard answered my question without hesitation.  "Wrong,"
said I, "there must be eight letters."  "True," he answered, "there is an R
at the end."  The answer struck me in the midriff.  One theory of the name
is that it represents the words Beta alpha phi eta 
mu eta tau epsilon omicron sigma , the baptism of wisdom; another, that it is a
corruption of a title meaning "Father Mithras".  Needless to say, the
suffix R supported the latter theory.  I added up the word as spelt by the
Wizard.  It totalled 729.  This number had never appeared in my Cabbalistic
working and therefore meant nothing to me.  It however justified itself as
being the cube of nine.  The word chi eta phi alpha sigma ,1 the mystic title
given by Christ to Peter as the cornerstone of the Church, has this same
value.  So far, the Wizard had shown great qualities!  He had cleared up
the etymological problem and shown why the Templars should have given the
name Baphomet to their so-called idol.  Baphomet was Father Mithras, the
cubical stone which was the corner of the Temple.
     I therefore felt justified in concluding that the Wizard really
possessed sufficient intelligence to make it worth my while to listen to
him.  I hastily recorded the dialogue to that point.  My next question
inquired his name.  He replied "Amalantrah".  I added this up.  This time
the result was conclusive.  Its value is 729.  Already he had shown me that
I, in my office as Baphomet, was the rock on which the New Temple should be
built, and he now identified himself with me through his own name being of
equivalent value.  There was however so far no link between the Order to
which he belonged and the Great Order; 729 is not a significant number in
the Cabbala of Thelema.  But when I asked him to assign a mystic name to
the Camel, he replied "Ahitha" which adds to 555, an obvious correlative
with my own number in the Great Order, 666.  It defined, so to speak, the
function of the Camel in that Order.
     Striking as were these results, I maintained my sceptical method and
proceeded to apply test after test.  The Wizard never made the slightest
mistake.  Taking his answers as a whole, he made it mathematically probably
to a degree approximating certainty as closely as the most exact physical
equations that he spoke with conscious knowledge.
     We began a series of interviews with him.  There was what I may call a
permanent background to the vision.  He lived in a place as definite as an
address in New York, and in this place were a number of symbolic images
representing myself and several other adepts associated with me in my work.
The character of the vision served as a guide to my relations with these

{833}


        1  WEH note:  Crowley obtains these totals by a complex mixture of
          Greek and Hebrew substitutions, including use of cognate letters.
          In simple Greek gematria, the total is very different.
















people.  More especially there were three women, symbolized as three
scorpions of the symbolic desert which I was crossing in my mystic journey.
It is not yet clear whether I dealt with these women as I should have done.
One was Eva Tanguay, the supreme artist, whom I hymned in the April
"International"; one, a married woman, a Russian aristocrat in exile, and
one, a maiden, to whom the Wizard gave the mystic name of Wesrun.  This
name can be spelt in two ways: one adding to 333, the number of Choronzon,
Dispersion, Impotence and Death; the other to 888, the number of
Redemption.  It seemed that it was my task to save her as Parzifal saved
Kundry.  But as I say, I am not clear whether I did not fail completely in
my dealings with all three women.  I doubt whether I trusted the Wizard as
I should have done.  It may be that I made "a great miss", the result of
which has been to ruin my work temporarily.
     Besides this regular visit to the place where the Wizard lives, it was
my custom to ask his aid in the solution of any problems which occurred in
the course of my regular working.  On the night of February 24th, I
happened to want to know whether I could use my name in the Great Order,
Tau Omicron  Mu Epsilon Gamma Alpha  Theta Eta Rho Iota Omicron Nu , (TO MEâA éHPION), in
conjunction with Hebrew letters.  The Wizard replied, "Yes."  I asked,
"Shall I use the whole name or Theta Eta Rho Iota Omicron Nu  alone?  He
answered, "Theta Eta Rho Iota Omicron Nu  alone."  I then spent some hours in
trying to transliterate Theta Eta Rho Iota Omicron Nu  into Hebrew in such a way
as to give a number which would mean something in my general Cabbalistic
scheme.  I failed completely!  This is very remarkable in itself, I having
had twenty years' experience of the art, and the possible spellings being
very numerous.  Ingenuity can nearly always find a more or less
satisfactory orthography for any given combination of letters.  However, I
was completely baffled.  I gave it up as a bad job, cursing Amalantrah
heartily for having made me waste my time.
     On Monday morning I went to the office of "The International".  It was a
"workless Monday", Dr Garwood having ordered that no office buildings
should be heated on Monday for five weeks, on account of the coal famine.
I stayed only a few minutes to look over my mail.  On Tuesday I returned to
the office, and found on my desk a letter addressed to Viereck and
transferred by him to me to be answered.  This letter had therefore arrived
the day before and had been written in Bridgeport, connecticut, on Saturday
evening at the identical hour at which Amalantrah had told me that I could
use a Hebrew spelling of Theta Eta Rho Iota Omicron Nu  in my work.  The writer
of the letter was one Samuel A. Jacob, a designer of Syrise and similar
founts of type.  He was an entire stranger to anyone in the office, as to
myself.  His letter concluded, "Please inform your readers that I, Shmuel
bar Aiwaz bie Yackou de Sherabad, have counted the number of The Beast; and
it is the number of a man:  Th = 400  R = 200  I = 10  V = 6  N = 50,"
giving the spelling HB:Nun HB:Vau HB:Yod HB:Resh HB:Taw  = 666.  At the exact time,
therefore, when the Wizard had told

{834}



















me that this could be done, a stranger in a distant town was actually
writing the solution which baffled me.  Observe that the preparation of
this was the problem in my article "The Revival of Magick" published three
months earlier!
     This incident in itself is sufficiently startling.  On the theory that
Amalantrah is what he claims to be it is quite natural and simple.  Any
other theory, such as coincidence, or telepathy outrages reason.  But this
was not all.
     Besides his Americanized signature "Samuel A. Jacob", he gave his true
name: "SHMUEL Bar AIWAZ bie YACKOU de SHERABAD".  I could hardly believe my
eyes.  Till that moment I had had no idea that Aiwass was anything but an
artificial name, like Ahitha.  I had tried to find a spelling for it,
having never seen it written except in the English in "The Book of the Law",
but only heard it.  I had decided on AIVAS = 78, the number of Mezla, the
influence from the highest unity, and therefore suitable enough as the
title of a messenger from Him.  I wrote to Mr Jacob for the Hebrew spelling
which he gave as OIVZ, whose value is 93.  The import of this discovery was
terrific; 93 is the value of Theta Epsilon Lambda Eta Mu Alpha , the Word of the Law
proclaimed by Aiwass, and of Alpha Gamma Alpha Pi Eta , Love, part of the
interpretation of Theta Epsilon Lambda Eta Mu Alpha .  It was also that of the Lost
Word of freemasonry, which I had re-discovered, thus linking up the
mysteries of the O.T.O. with those of the A.'. A.'..  93 is also the
number of the Secret Word of the Neophyte of A.'. A.'., a word
indicating symbolically the whole course of existence.  It is in fact a
completion of the ideas contained in the Sacred Word of the Hindus, AUM.
It was to be discovered later that the Secret Key of "The Book of the Law" is
the number 31, 1/3 of 93.  There are three words, each of the value of 31
which represent perfectly the whole mystery of existence.  That Aiwaz
should have, so to speak, signed himself with His Law, was irrefutable
proof of his existence.
     I must add one cumulative proof which came to light only in 1923.  "The"
"Book of the Law" claims to express its ideas not by its literary meaning
alone but by the actual letters of the manuscript.  It had annoyed me ---
after the above demonstration --- that in the manuscript the name was spelt
AIWASS, which does not add to 93.  But this year, reflecting that "The Book"
"of the Law" is connected more with the Greek Cabbala than with the Hebrew, I
transliterated AIWASS into Greek off-hand.  Its value is 418!  and this is
the number of the Magical Formula of the Aeon.  It represents the practice
of the Book as 93 does the theory.  It is now evident with what
inconceivable ingenuity AIWAZ has arranged his expression.  He is not
content to give one spelling of his name, however potent; he gives two
which taken together are not merely twice as significant as either alone,
but more so, in a degree which is beyond me to calculate.
     This incident with its many ramifications is perhaps the most
remarkable

{835}



















thing that has ever happened to anybody.  I was not only shown the
knowledge and ingenuity required to choose a name for himself which will
sum up my life and thought both in the past and in the future as also to
include explanations of historical mysteries; but he seems able to arrange
for people that I never hear of to exercise an intimate influence on my
life at the exact moment when the effect will give the demonstration its
highest possible dramatic value.  Suppose, for instance, that Jacob had
sent me his solution within a month of the publication of the problem.  It
would have been no more than an interesting contribution to the Cabbala.
It is necessary to obtain a comprehensive idea of the facts of the
relationship between him and myself as a whole in order to grasp the
subtlety and strength of his plan and its execution.
     Any man who studies the circumstances with intelligence will be forced
to the hypothesis as to the nature of AIWAZ which I myself entertain.  It
is true that this hypothesis involves difficulties of its own; it implies a
magical theory of the universe altogether incompatible with materialism.
One might call it an Arabian Nights theory.  But one must dismiss one's
prejudice from the start.  This theory, however antecedently absurd, is
constantly bearing fruit of new facts and new discoveries.  This after all
is what science requires.  I have already given a number of other instances
where fresh facts confirm the old.  For myself in particular the ultimate
fact is that I have been able to govern my life quite satisfactorily year
after year on the basis of this theory.  My life, interpreted by it, is
intelligible, and when guided by it, successful.  Whenever I do anything
reasonable I come a cropper, and if I were to attempt to explain the events
of my career in any other way, I should be confronted by a piled chaos of
utterly unintelligible absurdities.
     The sale of "The International" left me stranded.  War hysteria had
reached its height.  The British would not employ me, failing to understand
or to trust.  The Department of Justice, though warmly appreciative of my
work, did not offer to pay me for it, nor did I ask them to do so.  My
stupid kingliness still stood in my way.  I should have felt dishonoured by
accepting payment for my patriotic service.  All sources of income dried up
completely.  I therefore borrowed a canoe, tent and camp outfit from a
friend and started up the Hudson on a Great Magical Retirement with two
dollars and twenty-five cents as my total capital, no prospect of obtaining
more when that was exhausted, and full confidence that the Secret Chiefs
would supply my physical needs.  It was my business to do their work and
theirs to look after their servant.
     This Magical Retirement proved of critical importance.  A week's
paddling put me in perfect physical and mental condition.  I found an ideal
solitude on Oesopus Island.  The Camel spent the first weekend with me,
bringing me a supply of canned provisions.  I began at once to work on a
new translation,

{836}




















with Commentary, of the "Tao Teh King".  This book, one of the oldest in
existence, is surely one of the wisest.  But all previous translations,
however scholarly, had completely failed to convey the meaning of Lao Tzu.
An uninitiated translator is bound to meet constantly with apparently
nonsensical passages.  One must know what the author is likely to mean by
any given phrase, and this can only be done my a man who has intimate
experience of the spiritual states and magical principles set forth.
Otherwise, the translator is in the position of a scholar ignorant of
football who should try to translate some slangy description of a cup tie.
He will think that "wing" has something to do with a bird and be puzzled as
to how it got into the game; a "hot shot" will set him thinking of the
siege of Gibraltar, and the result of his labours will be a farrago of
nonsense.  Alternatively, realizing the general character of the text, he
will wrench every passage to suit his own ideas on the subject.  No one has
understood what Lao Tzu meant by either Tao or Teh.  I, possessing the keys
to the Universal Cabbala, and also experience of the spiritual states which
Lao Tzu is discussing, was able to produce a lucid and coherent version of
the classic.  Those who have seen my manuscript after bitter disappointment
with previous translations, have instantly recognized the sublimity and
wisdom of the Chinese Master.
























{837}























                              86


     I found that my long abstinence from magical practices had injured my
powers.  I resumed elementary drill and soon got back to my old form.  For
one thing, my protection against mosquitoes had worn off.  I spent a night
motionless, offering my body to them and concentrating on the thought that
they were equally divine with myself.  I forced myself to love them, so
that in union with them the apparent differences between us might vanish in
ecstasy.  I compelled my body to accept, to welcome and even to long for
their bites, as being acts of love whereby I nourished their lives.  In the
morning, though badly bitten all over, there was no inflammation whatever;
and from that time on they never bit me at all.
     I soon recovered the powers of Pratyahara and Dharana.  My mind became
still; the impact of impressions ceased to obsess me, I became free of the
illusion of the reality of material things.  All events became equally
indifferent, exquisite phrases in an eternal symphony.  (Imagine listening
to Beethoven with the prepossession that C is a good note and F a bad one;
yet this is exactly the stand point from which all uninitiates contemplate
the universe.  Obviously, they miss the music.)
     I soon began to acquire the Magical Memory to recall my past
incarnations.  I refuse to assert any theory of what this really means.
All memory is a re-awakening of ancient impressions.  What I was really
doing was penetrating to the deeper layers of my unconscious self.  When,
therefore, I remember my life as Cagliostro or Pope Alexander the Sixth, I
am quite willing to interpret the experience as a dreamlike imagination, a
dramatization of certain deeper elements in my character.  I may, however,
argue on the other side, that my present life is, almost equally, an
artistic representation of my nature. There are also some fairly strong
arguments for the actuality of such memories.  Events in the past sometimes
throw light on the present.  For instance, when I came to remember what had
happened to me in Rome, Naples and Paris, I understood certain obscure
instinctive feelings about those cities which had always been
unintelligible,1 and were in direct conflict with my conscious ideas about
them.  I will summarize as follows:
     Shortly before the time of Mohammed, I was present at a Council of

{838}


        1  Revising this chapter, in Tunis, my Ape reminded me of how much
          of these past lives was spent in Sicily and North Africa; and
          that, when my present life came to an end (of a sort; all the
          forces which had till then acted upon me having been worked out)
          I drifted quite aimlessly to that part of the world, as if my
          unconsciousness, its labours accomplished, had automatically
          turned its face towards home!

















Masters.  The critical question was the policy to be adopted in order to
help humanity.  A small minority, including myself, was hot for positive
action; definite movements were to be made; in particular, the mysteries
were to be revealed.  The majority, especially the Asiatic Masters, refused
even to discuss the proposal.  They contemptuously abstained from voting,
as if to say, "Let the youngsters learn their lesson."  My party therefore
carried the day and various Masters were appointed to undertake different
adventures.  Mohammed, Luther, Adam Weishaupt, the man we knew as Christian
Rosencreutz, and many servants of science, were thus chosen.  Some of these
movements have succeeded more or less; some have failed entirely.  In my
present incarnation I have met several such Masters, who, having failed,
are now building up again their shattered forces.  My own task was to bring
oriental wisdom to Europe and to restore paganism in a purer form.  I was
involved in the catastrophe which overtook the order of the Temple, and as
Alexander the Sixth, failed in my task of crowning the Renaissance, through
not being wholly purified in my personal character.  (An appropriately
trivial spiritual error may externalize as the most appalling crimes.)
     Before this Council, there is a long gap of complete amnesia.  I
merely remember that I was Ko Hsuen, a disciple of Lao Tzu, the author of
the "King Khang King", the classic of Purity; which, by the way, I translated
into English verse during this Retirement.  All I know is that somehow or
other I made a "great miss", forfeited my Mastership, and had to climb the
ladder again from the bottom.  It is the shame and agony of this which have
prevented me from facing the memory --- so far.
     Almost every day I found myself in some new trance, each of course
perfect in its own way, and each of a depth and sublimity which makes
description impossible to attempt; yet all the time it seemed to me that
each trance was no more than the letter of a word, as if some truth were
being revealed which could only be expressed piecemeal.  The crown of these
trances was an angelic vision such as I had never before enjoyed.  The
communication was perfect on all planes of being; and this completeness
conferred a sense of reality altogether beyond previous experience.  It was
the difference between meeting a friend face to face, and trying to
reconstruct his personality from letters, photographs, gramophone records,
memories and cherished flowers.
     It may be that this vision was granted me in order to fortify me for
the climax of my Retirement.  On September 5th, my record contains the
following entry.
     I feel that I am more likely to be able to convey some hint of the
colossal character of this revelation if I simply quote the broken
staggering words in which I wrote it down at the time.  As will be seen, I
did not dare to write what it actually was, but I remember at this moment
how I had to invoke

{839}





















the deep-seated habit of years to get courage to drag myself to my diary.
I felt like a soldier wounded to death, scrawling in his own blood the
horrifyingly disastrous information which he has lost his life in seeking.

          5:00 p.m.  The meditation of this afternoon resulted in an
     initiation so stupendous that I dare not hint at its Word.  It is the
     supreme secret of a Magus, and its is so awful that I tremble even now
     --- two hours later and more --- 2:20 p.m. was the time --- as I write
     concerning it.  In a single instant I had the Key to the whole of the
     Chinese wisdom.  In the light --- momentary glimpse as it was --- of
     this truth, all systems of religion and philosophy became absolutely
     puerile.  Even the Law appears no more than a curious incident.  I
     remain absolutely bewildered, blinded, knowing what blasting image
     lies in this shrine.  It baffles me to understand how my brother Magi,
     knowing this, ever went on.

          I had only one foreshadowing of this Vision of Jupiter --- for so
     I may call it! --- and that was a Samadhi which momentarily
     interrupted my concentration of Sammasati.  This can only be described
     vaguely by saying that I obtained a reconciliation of two contraries
     of which "There is a discrimination between good and evil" is one.

          This experience has shaken me utterly; it has been a terrible
     struggle to force myself to this record.  The secret comes along the
     Path of Aleph to Chokmah.  I could write it plainly in a few words of
     one syllable, and most people would not even notice it.1  But it has
     might to hurl every Master of the Temple into the Abyss, and to fling
     every adept of the Rose Cross down to the Qliphoth.  No wonder One
     said that the "Book T" was in ashes in the Urn of a Magus!  I can't see
     at all how it will affect me at present.  Even the Way of the Tao
     looks idiotic --- but then of course that's what it is!  So I suppose
     that's it, all right.  And its freedom, in an utterly fascinating and
     appalling sense, is beyond my fiercest conception.

     An experience of this intensity demands a period of repose, no less
than a boat race or any other form of intense effort.  The adepts have
always insisted on due preparation for any initiation.  As "The Book of the"
"Law" says, "...  Wisdom says: be strong!  Then canst thou bear more joy.
..."  I accordingly broke up my camp after a few days' holiday from magical
work, and returned to New York.
     The next period is strangely confused.  It was as if I were left in
the Desert with no idea of direction and surrounded by a series of mirages.
Innumerable people came into my life and passed out again, without leaving
any trace.

{840}


        1  I find that I wrote it down plainly seventeen years ago!  But I
          had no conception of its terror --- one must be a Magus to get
          that!















     The fact was that none of the people appointed by Amalantrah to
various tasks were willing to undertake them.  It may well be that this was
due to a lack of real faith on my part.  The communications from the Wizard
had become confused and even contradictory.  I had failed to understand his
plan and to acquiesce unreservedly in it.  This weakness of mine naturally
reacted on the other people concerned.
     Only one clear duty lay before me.  The five years of silence which
were to follow the publication of number 10 of "The Equinox" were at an end.
I therefore devoted myself to planning another ten numbers, beginning at
the spring equinox of 1919.  I had an immense amount of material ready for
publication.  The one critical omission was the comment on "The Book of the"
"Law", which I had constantly shirked re-writing.  I pulled myself together
and went down to Atlantic City for the purpose of getting this done.  My
idea was to write it inspirationally; which is correct.  The only drawback
was that the inspiration was forced and feeble.  I know now that the
writing of this Comment must be a definite miracle, parallel with that of
the production of the Book itself.
     I stumbled on through the Desert somehow.  Even today I hardly
understand the object of the ordeals of this journey.  At the beginning of
the next Chokmah day I found myself on the edge of the oasis which I was to
make my home.  I had identified myself with the god of my Grade of Magus,
Tahuti, the Lord of the Word, and I was invested accordingly with the
attributes proper to him.  The last of the officers in my initiation was
the Ape of Thoth.  This creature translates into action his thought or, in
other words, is the instrument through which his idea assumes sensible
form.  This Ape became my permanent companion.  At this moment, she is
beside me in a bathing house at Marsa Plage near Tunis, writing these
words.
     Tahuti being the Lord of Speech, I published number 1 of volume III of
"The Equinox" on March 21st, 1919.  I arranged for it to contain something
like a complete programme of my proposed Operation to initiate, emancipate
and relieve mankind.
     The first item is a "Hymn to Pan", which I believe to be the most
powerful enchantment ever written.  Next, after explaining the general idea
of my work, I issued a curriculum, classifying the books whose study should
give a complete intellectual knowledge of all subjects which bear on the
Great Work.
     The book of "The Sandal" presents a lyrical interpretation of the Law of
Thelema.  This is followed by the first installment of "The Magical Record
of my Son", Frater O.I.V.V.I.O., to show how in actual practice a fairly
normal man came to attain to be a Master of the Temple.  Every pertinent
detail of his career from the start is clearly set forth.
     The latter half of the volume is devoted to explaining the principles
of

{841}




















the O.T.O. showing how men and women may work in groups publicly, and
giving outlines of a social system free from the disastrous defects of our
present civilization.  I republished the Ritual of the Gnostic Mass in this
section.  The supplement consists of Blavatsky's "Voice in the Silence" with
a very full commentary.  My purpose was to bring back Theosophists to the
true principles of their founder; principles which have been shamefully
abandoned by her successors --- to the utter ruin of the society, either as
a nursery for adepts or as a civilizing influence in barbaric Christiandom.
     During this winter, I was approached by a powerful body of high grade
freemasons in Detroit.  They knew only too well that their Order was at the
best tomfoolery; and, for the rest, anything all the way down to fraud and
blackmail.  They desired the light which they knew me to possess.  I
offered to reorganize freemasonry, to replace the pomposities and
banalities of their ragbag of rituals by a simple, lucid and coherent
system.
     I soon saw that any effort would be a waste of time.  Even their
compact group was torn by bitter jealousies.  Their leader, for all his
fine talk, had only one real desire --- to communicate with his dead wife,
a silly smirking society waxwork, a pink-tea princess!  Their second string
was a doctor, who spent sleepless nights sweating with shame and
sentimentality in an agony of anxiety as to whether it was his duty to get
divorced in order to marry a white-haired spinster, half-crazy with the
pain of cancer, with whom he had no sexual relation at all, but an
overwhelming obsession that she was his sister-soul, his mystic mate, his
psychic partner and his Ouija Wife.  A third, illiterate and bigoted, was a
mere spat of ignorant argument that the signs of the zodiac had somehow got
mixed up, apparently owing to some confusion about the precedence of the
twelve apostles!  The only member of the group who had even a smattering of
education, as we understand it in Europe, was more than half insane on the
subject of sex.  He had got it into his head that a secret method of
managing such matters existed, the possessor of which could perform all
sorts of miracles, from curing consumption to making a million dollars.  He
spent his life hunting for books on sexual Magick; and, knowing that I was
in possession of the secret he sought, spent a whole night shivering in the
corridor with his ear to the keyhole of my bedroom, in the hope of hearing
something that would give him a hint.  He even tried to use his own
mistress to spy on me: when she came from my room, he started to browbeat
and bully her into giving the minutest details of her adventure!
     The best of the crowd was a young doctor who had sufficient sense to
see how stupid the rest were, to disdain the bluff of the advertising
adepts, and to realize that genuine magicians were necessarily gentlemen
and scholars.  He felt himself utterly lost in the darkness of Detroit, but
despaired of mending the matter by setting forth to seek the Graal without
guidance.  He was

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so fixed in doubt and distrust that even the truth, soiled by his
suspicion, could not quell the whispers of the demons of denial.  They
persistently persuaded his shaking soul that the weeds of falsehood grew so
rank that never a seed of truth might find a space to shoot.  Thus,
doubting the whole world, he had learnt to doubt himself.  His will was
sodden with scepticism.  He could never make up his mind to do anything
definite.  The man had many great qualities, but the dollar-snatching
charlatans that pullulate in America had driven him to drift and potter.
He did not even understand that he might have saved his soul by devoting
himself to the shallowest quack in Chicago, daring death and damnation for
the hollowest humbug that ever wrote himself Rosicrucian without knowing
how to spell it.  Pluck would have pulled him through in the long run; as
Blake said, "if the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise."
     It did not take me long to see that the real object of this gang was
to exploit me.  They wanted something for nothing; instead I was the only
man to profit --- I gained the knowledge of the astonishing variety of
dirty tricks that men could play under the mask of friendship and respect.
     But I was immune to the virus.  I possessed not only something, but
everything, and was only too eager to give it for nothing.  I naturally
became an object of the deepest suspicion.  Unable to comprehend honour,
unselfishness and generosity, my frank loyalty and royal largesse baffled
their brains.  They felt sure that it concealed some super-subtle scheme
for swindling them or getting them into my power.  They thought they knew
that the more noble an action appeared, the deeper the deceit and the
dirtier the design beneath it.  I adhered to simple straightforward sense.
I told the truth without a thought of what might happen in consequence.  It
was inconceivable to them that I, knowing so much, should yet be innocent.
They knew me poor.  It was strange indeed that I never tried to make money,
or even accepted it when offered!  The result of all this was that I, doing
my utmost to enlighten them, deepened their darkness.  I simplified and
emphasized the truth; they merely floundered further into falsehood.
     I tried my hardest to manifest myself, to explain my point of view, my
mental methods, my morals, manners, motives and magical objectives.  I
merely became the more mysterious.  They could never guess how I would act
in any circumstances.  My purpose being single, it was incomprehensible to
their complex confusion of cravings.  My "yes" appalled them --- it was
such a sinister way of saying "no"; and when I said "no" they sweated and
swooned with fear of what I might mean by so satanic a way of saying "yes".
I kept on smiling; I became silent; they saw me as the Sphinx.  They began
to quarrel among themselves; scandal, divorce suits, bankruptcies and every
sort of nastiness followed.  My "son", who had lived in Detroit for some
months trying to teach them the elements of sense and decency, left them to

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stew in the stinking soup they had cooked, and went off to Chicago.  Both
he and I learnt a priceless lesson in our dealings with these demoniacs.
We have that to thank for the steady, quiet, natural success of his
campaign in Chicago.
     One cannot deal with Americans on the principles which seem inevitable
in Europe.  One often sees a placard in offices, "come in without knocking.
Go out the same way."  They would rather not hear unpleasant truths.  What!
Shoot a sleeping sentinel?  Nope; rush the chloroform in case he wakes!
They have learnt the psychological fact that confidence is a real asset.  A
man works best when he feels he is sure to succeed.  A fear of failure
palsies every faculty.  The vogue of Christian Science, and countless cults
for drawing in dollars by wishing one had them, persuading oneself that
somehow or other they will arrive, scorning every success, forgetting every
failure, shutting one's eyes to unpleasant facts, and interpreting every
bit of good luck as a triumph beyond the power of trumpets to tell --- a
token of the intense interest taken by the Almighty in His favourite child
--- this course of conduct, though its more reasonable practitioners are
ready to admit that it is rant and rubbish, is pursued as part of a
calculated policy.  They are ready to fool themselves in order to take
advantage of the stimulating effect of optimism.
     The other side of the medal is this: when any man points to any fact
that shakes this opium serenity, checks this cocaine self-assurance, that
man takes a chance of a free ride out of town on a rail.  The spirit of
criticism is detested and dreaded.  It is easy to understand why this is.
The States have been won from the wilderness by a system which demanded
courage and clear sight from the pioneers; but once the trail was blazed,
the rest of the work was done on a basis of credit which a European banker
would consider utterly reckless gambling.  Everyone, from the farmer and
merchant to the manufacturer and financier, entered into a tacit agreement
to bet that any given enterprise would succeed.  As the natural resources
were there, while luck decreed that the commonwealth should not have to
face any overwhelming obstacle, the gamblers have won.  It is obvious that
any man in an outpost besieged by nature (such as is every new settlement
outside New England, the Atlantic coast and the old settlements in the
south) was really a traitor if he said, however truthfully, anything which
might daunt the spirit of his comrades.  Those men won out through sheer
ignorance of the chances against them, stolid stupidity which blinded them
to their desperate plight and bestial insensibility to the actual hardships
which they had to endure.  It was criminal to insist on the existence of
evils for which there was no remedy.
     This spirit has persisted, though its utility is past.  It has become
a fixed feature of the religion of the country.  It was the deadliest
delusion that I had to meet.  Spiritual attainment, magical; development,
any line of work

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soever whose material is subtler than the sensible world, demands (as the
first condition of success) the most severe spirit of scepticism, the most
scientific system of research.  For immediately one becomes aware of
impressions and ideas which are not subject to the criticism of sensory
perception, they are inevitably influenced by the individual
characteristics of the observer and the distortion is difficult to detect
because, until one is very advanced indeed, one is not aware of the
aberration caused by the error of the instrument.  Even in the world of
sense, similar troubles occur.  To a man who is colour-blind, the red light
is "really" green --- beyond his power to make any correction, because the
source of his error is in the instrument of sight itself.  He might well
say, "But if, as you tell me, this green lamp is red, how do I know that it
is a lamp, not a tiger?  I have only my eyes to depend on."
     I found it impossible to persuade even the most intelligent people who
came to me to take the first step --- that of clearing the ground of their
minds of every preconceived idea.  They yearned for me to fill them up to
the neck with any ridiculous rubbish that flattered their vanity, fed their
folly, doped their dread of death and damnation, and inflated their idle
fancies, intoxicated their inane ideals.  I simply hammered away with cold
common sense.  I drenched them with douches of doubt.  I pricked their
bladders of bluff; I tapped their dropsical sentimentality and applied a
clyster of candour to the constipation of their respectability.  By this
simple expedient I drove them all away.  I made myself enemies everywhere.
The crowd of charlatans were particularly annoyed.  They were eager to hail
me as their master and even to give me the lion's share of the swag.  It
hurt them horribly when they found I would not play the game, or even take
the trouble to hail them to my barn door.  Every people has the prophets it
deserves; the credulous cowardly ice-cream-soda idealist is best left with
the illiterate illuminati, rascally Rosicrucians, magpie mediums, parrot
psychics, and cockroach clairvoyants with whom they feel at home.  One
cannot initiate imbeciles.
     My adventures in Detroit came as the climax which confirmed the
conclusions I had already formed from casual conversations and
correspondence with a fairly large and varied selection of would-be
disciples.  Only in rare individuals could I detect a trace of genuine
aspiration, of the ambition to attain, either for their own sake or for
that of others, in any allowable sense.  They wanted more social success.
Nobody seemed to have the faintest idea of what is really meant by
knowledge and power.  Some seemed anxious to help the progress of humanity;
but here again, the wish was partly a puff-ball of pride, partly a maudlin
sentiment such as one finds in servants' hall novelettes.
     The ignorance of all, without exception, was simply without limit.  It

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was rare to find a man who knew so much as the names of the most famous
classics.  Their ignorance was not even accessible to instruction.  It was
armourplated, and adorned with a bigoted belief in the most blatant
balderdash.  I met the heads of four flourishing cults who claimed to be
Rosicrucians.  Not one of them had so much as heard of "The Fama"
"Fraternitatis" or "The Chymical Marriage".  The most famous astrologer in the
States, who makes fifty thousand dollars a year, did not know that the
solar system was essentially a disk.  She thought the planets were stuck at
random in the sky like so many plums in a suet pudding.  In thirty years of
daily use of the Ephemeris, she had never observed that Neptune takes
fifteen years or so to pass through a sign of the zodiac, and told her
clients that Neptune being in such and such a sign at their birth, they
must possess various curious powers.  When I pointed out that this applied
to everyone born in three lustres, she was at first bewildered, then
incredulous; and, proof being produced, angry and insulting.
     These were the highest class of merchants of Magick.  The majority of
writers on the subject bleat on from blunder to blunder.  I met no single
man in the United States in five years who had any idea what Yoga actually
is, much less of the metaphysical theories on which it is based.  Its
objects and methods were either understood so vaguely as to be a mere
variation on Sunday School sob stuff, or distorted by dreams of the dollar
or the dread of disease; their information being based on some book
purporting to be the secret instruction of a particularly prominent yogi,
but in fact the illiterate rubbish of an unsuccessful horse doctor from
Idaho who could hardly find India on the map --- even if you offered him a
dollar to do it.
     This illiterature is distributed indiscriminately; a vast venomous
vomit!  There being no background of education, no standard of criticism,
the reader has no means of distinguishing between the best and the worst.
He has no means of forming a groundwork on which his mind might build.  It
is impossible for the European to understand the helplessness of these
people.  We have definite principles in our minds by which, consciously or
unconsciously, we judge with fair correctness of things which may be in a
sense entirely strange to us.
     For instance, suppose that I am unable to read a single word of
Russian.  I am nevertheless able to get a fair general idea of the probable
character of the contents of any book by applying what I may call Sherlock
Holmes methods.  Obviously, I might be deceived.  Gogol's masterpiece might
be badly printed on rotten paper and defaced with vile illustrations in
order to fool me.  A series of such traps would teach me to distrust my
judgment.
     Now, this is just the position in which the American finds himself.
He has been sold so many pups that he flinches when he hears "the
watchdog's honest bark".  He has been told, till his ears are nigh
bursting, every sort of

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falsehood, even a truth being exaggerated until its original nature hardly
matters, on every conceivable subject.
     From earliest infancy, every American citizen is trained in "make-
believe".  That is why "Huckleberry Finn" is the one masterpiece of character
drawing that America has produced.  The American is at heart acutely
ashamed of his defects.  His ideal of perfection is intensely dear to him,
and I am the last person to blame him for refusing to admit that its
attainment is impossible.  But his nerves are constantly raw from realizing
in his inmost heart that he is, after all, lacking in all sorts of ways.
     In one way or another practically every American is devoured by this
demon of discontent, which is by no means the species which we call divine.
The yearning of the poet to surpass all other singers, his rage at the
resistance of the language to his rapture, have their root in his absolute
trust in and worship of himself.
     I cried, Like Elijah:  This is no country for the poet Aleister
Crowley, or the adept, To Mega Therion, whose hope to help his fellow men
has this one anchor: Truth shall make you free!




























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