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consecrated by the fact of its incomprehensibility and dignified by the certainty that however 
petty, futile, baroque and contemptible its career may 
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be, it must close in the sublime sacrament of death. As it is written in The Book of the Law, "-death 
is the crown of all." 
The supplement to the first number of The Equinox is a plain reprint of my Magical Record in Paris, 
mentioned above. I have omitted no detail of my doings. My dinners, my dalliance and my other 
diversions are described as minutely as my Magick, my mantras and my meditations. Nothing of the 
sort had ever been published before. It is a complete demonstration of the possibility of achieving 
the most colossal results in conditions which had hitherto been considered an absolute bar to 
carrying on even elementary work. It proves my proposition that the efficacy of traditional practices 
is independent of dogmatic and ethical considerations; and, moreover, that my sceptical formulae 
based on a purely agnostic viewpoint, and on the facts of physiology and psychology, as understood 
by modern materialists, were entirely efficacious. 
In summary, let me add that The Equinox was the first serious attempt to put before the public the 
facts of occult science, so-called, since Blavatsky's unscholarly hotch-poch of fact and fable, Isis 
Unveiled. It was the first attempt in history to treat the subject with scholarship and from the 
standpoint of science. No previous book of its kind can compare with it for the perfection of its 
poetry and prose; the dignity and sublimity of its style, and the rigidity of its rule never to make any 
statement which could not be proved as precisely as the mathematician exacts. I confess to being 
entirely proud of having inaugurated an epoch. From the moment of its appearance, it imposed its 
standards of sincerity, scholarship, scientific seriousness and aristocracy of all kinds, from the 
excellence of its English to the perfection of its printing, upon everyone with ambition to enter this 
field of literature. 
It did not command a large public, but its influence has been enormous. It is recognized as the 
standard publication of its kind, as encyclopedia without "equal, son, or companion". It has been 
quoted, copied and imitated everywhere. Innumerable cults have been founded by charlatans on its 
information. Its influence has changed the whole current of thought of students all over the world. 
Its inveterate enemies are not only unable to ignore it, but submit themselves to its sovereignty. It 
was thus entirely successful from my personal point of view. I had put a pearl of great price in a 
shop window, whose other exhibits were pasted diamonds and bits of coloured glass for the most 
part, and at best, precious stones of the cheaper and commoner kind. From the moment of its 
appearance, everyone had to admit --- for the most part with hatred and envy in their hearts --- 
that the sun had appeared in the slum and put to shame the dips and kerosene lamps which had 
lighted it till then. It was no longer possible to carry on hole-in-the-corner charlatanism as 
heretofore. 
I printed only one thousand and fifty copies, the odd fifty being bound 
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subscription copies at a guinea, and the rest in boards at five shillings. Had I sold a complete edition 
straight out without any discounts my return would thus have been three hundred pounds. The cost 
of production was nearer four hundred. Similar figures apply to the other nine numbers. In this way 
I satisfied myself that no one could reproach me with trying to make money out of Magick. As a 
matter of fact, it went utterly against the grain to take money at all. When anyone showed interest 
in my poetry or my magical writings, the attitude so delighted me that I felt it utterly shameful to 
have any kind of commercial transaction with so noble an individual, and I used, as often as not, to 
beg him to accept the book as a present. 
My feeling about accepting money is even more general than this; it rasps every delicate nerve. I 
feel that the world owes me a handsome income and I have no shame whatever in taking it, 
provided it is a sort of tribute. The fortune I had inherited was perfectly all right and it never