The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE LAW OF LIBERTY Here is the Calendar of our Church: “But ye, O my peo- ple, rise up and awake! Let the rituals be rightly performed with joy and beauty!” Remember that all acts of love and pleasure are rituals, must be rituals. “There are rituals of the elements and feasts of the times. A feast for the first night of the Prophet and his Bride! A feast for the three days of the writing of the Book of the Law. A feast for Tahuti and the children of the Prophet—secret, O Prophet! A feast for the Supreme Ritual and a feast for the Equinox of the Gods. A feast for fire and a feast for water; a feast for life and a greater feast for death! A feast every day in your hearts in the joy of my rapture! A feast every night unto Nu, and the pleasure of uttermost delight! Aye! Feast! Rejoice! There is no dread hereafter. There is the dissolution, and eternal ecstasy in the kisses of Nu.” It all depends on your own acceptance of this new law, and you are not asked to believe anything, to accept a string of fool- ish fables beneath the intellectual level of a Bushman and the moral level of a drug-fiend. All you have to do is to be yourself, to do your will, and to rejoice. “Dost thou fail? Artthou sorry? Is fear in thine heart?” He says again: “Where I am, these are not.” There is much more of the same kind; enough has been quoted al- ready to make all clear. But there is a further injunction. “Wisdom says; be strong! Then canst thou bear more joy. Be not animal: refine thy rapture! If thou drink, drink by the eight-and-ninety rules of art; if thou love, exceed by delicacy; and if thou do aught joyous, let there be subtlety therein! But exceed! exceed! Strive ever to more! and if thou art truly mine—and doubt it not, an if thou art ever joyous!—death is the crown of all.” 51