The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?

THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK fear was the passing spasm of an hour; the magnetism of the path itself was the true lure. It is as foolish to ask me “ Why do you adep ?” as to ask God “‘ Why do you pardon?” Crest son métier. I am not so foolish as to think that my doctrine can ever gain the ear of the world. I expect that ten centuries hence the “nominal Crowleians” will be as pestilent and numerous a body as the “nominal Christians” are to-day; for (at present)I have been able to devise no mechanism for excluding them. Rather, perhaps, should I seek to find them a niche in the shrine, just as Hinduism provides alike for those capable of the Upanishads and those whose intelligence hardly reaches to the Tantras. In short, one must abandon the reality of religion for a sham, so that the religion may be universal enough for those few who are capable of its reality to nestle to its breast, and nurse their nature on its starry milk. But we anticipate! My message is then twofold; to the greasy bourgeois I preach discontent; I shock him, I stagger him, I cut away earth from under his feet, I turn him upside down, I give him hashish and make him run amok, I twitch his buttocks with the red-hot tongs of my Sadistic fancy—until he feels uncomfortable. But to the man who is already as uneasy as St. Lawrence on his silver grill, who feels the Spirit stir in him, even as a woman feels, and sickens at, the first leap of the babe in her womb, to him I bring the splendid vision, the perfume and the glory, the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. And to whosoever hath attained that height will I put a further Question, announce a further Glory. 133