Confessions of Aleister Crowley

328 3. This Trinity is transcended by an impersonal Unity. This is then annihilated by the Opening of the Eye of Shiva. It is absolutely futile to discuss this; it has been tried and failed again and again. Even those with experience of the earlier part of the "vision" in its fullness must find it totally impossible to imagine anything so subversive of the whole base, not only of the ego, but of the absolute behind the ego. The very next day the enemy struck home below the belt, as described in the previous chapter. The blow could not shake my soul. For over three weeks I bore the stigmata of my Operation physically. I visibly radiated light. People used to turn in the street to look at me; they did not know what it was, but the impression must have been irresistible. No sooner had this worn off than the enemy struck again at my health. I was obliged to put myself once more in the doctor's hands and go to Bournemouth. I was now thoroughly prepared to take up my Work of initiating mankind, but I was still determined to do it on the old lines. I had no books of reference at Bournemouth, and it struck me that it would be very convenient if I possessed a volume giving all the correspondences of the Cabbala in a compact form. I spent a week in writing this down from memory and the result is Liber 777. (It is to be noticed that there is no reference to the Cairo working anywhere in this book.) In the month of December the Secret Chiefs formally invited me, thorough G.R. Frater D.D.S., to take my place officially in the Third Order. I still felt that I was not worthy. Not till three years later did I accept the grade, and then only after having passed ceremonially through the Abyss in the fullest possible measure. {533} 60 The years 1907 and 1908 may be described as years of fulfilment. No new current came to stir my life; but the seeds which had been sown in the past came many of them to harvest. I had come to my full stature as a poet. My technique was perfect; it had shaken off from its sandals the last dust which they had acquired by walking in the ways of earlier masters. I produced lyric and dramatic poetry which shows an astounding mastery of rhythm and rime, a varied power of expression which has no equal in the history of the language, and an intensity of idea which eats into the soul of the reader like vitriol. I should have been assigned publicly my proper place among my peers of the past without difficulty had it not been of one fatal fact. My point of view is so original, my thoughts so profound, and my allusions so recondite, that superficial readers, carried away by the sheer music of the words, found themselves, so to speak, intoxicated and unable to penetrate to the pith. People did not realize that my sonorous similes possessed a subtle sense intelligible only to those whose minds were familiar with the subject. It is, in fact, necessary to study almost any poem of mine like a palimpsest. The slightest phrase is essential; each one must be interpreted individually, and the poem read again until its personality presents itself. People who like my poetry, bar those who are simply tickled by the sound or what they imagine to be the sense, agree that it spoils them for any other poetry. For instance, if I mention a beetle I expect the reader to understand an allusion to the sun at midnight in its moral sense of Light-in-Darkness; if a pelican, to the legend that she pierces her own breast to feed her young on her heart's bleed; if a goat, to the entire symbolism of Capricornus, the god Pan, Satan or Jesus (Jesus being born at the winter solstice, when the sun enters Capricorn); if a pearl, to the correspondences of that stone as a precious and glittering secretion of the oyster, by which I mean that invertebrate animal life of man, the Nephesch. It must not be supposed that I am obscure on purpose. I have thought in the language of correspondences continuously, and it never occurs to me that other people have not at their fingers' ends the whole rosary of symbols.