Confessions of Aleister Crowley

235 March 17th. I don't remember whether I repeated my attempt to show her the sylphs, but probably did. It is in my character to persist. She again got into the same state and repeated her remarks, adding, "It is all about the child." And "All Osiris." I think I must have been annoyed by her contumacy. Perhaps for this reason I invoked Thoth, the god of wisdom, presumably by the invocation printed in Liber Israfel (The Equinox, Vol. I, Vo. VII), which I knew by heart. I may also have been subconsciously wondering whether there was not something in her remarks, and wanted to be enlightened. The record says, "Thoth, invoked with great success, indwells us." But this strikes me as to some extent "written up" in a spirit of complacency, if not arrogance. I remember nothing of any result. March 18th. Possibly I repeated the invocation. The record says, "Revealed that the waiter was Horus, whom I had offended and ought to invoke." {393} "Waiter" sounds like a sneer. I thought is was sheer impudence of Ouarda to offer independent remarks. I want her to see the sylphs. I must have been impressed by one point. How did Ouarda know that I had offended Horus? The troubles of Mathers were due to his excessive devotion to Mars, who represents one side of the personality of Horus, and no doubt I was inclined to err in the opposite directions, to neglect and dislike Mars as the personification of unintelligent violence. But was her bull's-eye a fluke? Her mention of Horus gave me a chance to cross-examine her. "How do you know that it is Horus who is telling you all this? Identify him." (Ouarda knew less Egyptology than ninety-nine Cairene tourists our of one hundred.) Her answers were overwhelming. The odds against her being right were one in many million. I allowed her to go on. She instructed me how to invoke Horus. The instructions were, from my point of view, pure rubbish. I suggested amending them. She emphatically refused to allow a single detail to be altered. She promised success (whatever that might mean) on Saturday or Sunday. If I had any aspiration left at all, it was to attain Samadhi (which I had not yet ever done). She promised that I should do so. I agreed to carry out her instructions, avowedly in order to show her that nothing could happen if you broke all the rules. On some day before March 23rd, Ouarda identified the particular god with whom she was in communication from a stele in the Boulak Museum, which we had never visited. It is not the ordinary form of Horus but Ra-Hoor-Khuit1. I was no doubt very much struck by the coincidence that the exhibit, a quite obscure and undistinguished stele, bore the catalogue number 666. But I dismissed it as an obvious coincidence. March 19th. I wrote out the ritual and did the invocation with little success. I was put off, not only by my scepticism and the absurdity of the ritual, but by having to do it in robes at an open window on a street at noon. She allowed me to make the second attempt at midnight. March 20th. The invocation was a startling success. I was told that "The Equinox of the Gods had come"; that is, that a new epoch had begun. I was to formulate a link between the solar-spiritual force and mankind. Various considerations showed me that the Secret Chiefs of the Third Order (that is, of the A.'. A.'. whose First and Second Orders were known as G.'. D.'. and R.R. et A.C. respectively) had sent a messenger to confer upon me the position which Mathers had forfeited. I made it a condition that I should attain Samadhi; that is, that I should receive a degree of illumination, in default of which it would be presumptuous to put myself forward. March 21st-22nd-23rd. There seems to have been a reaction after the success of the twentieth. The phenomena faded out. I tried to clear up my