Confessions of Aleister Crowley

417 Let me first enumerate the comparatively profane achievements of these few months. Firstly, "Across the Gulf". This is a prose story of some twenty thousand words. The theme is my own life in the 26th Dynasty, when I was Ankh-f-n-khonsu and brought about the Aeon of Osiris to replace that of Isis. The story must not be taken as true in the ordinary sense of the word, but as allegorical. I wrote many lyrics, but especially "The Sevenfold Sacrament". This poem subsequently appeared in the English Review and has often been reprinted. It {665} is, one might say, a pendant to Aha! It is one of my finest achievements from a technical point of view and describes the actual experience of a night which I spent at Montigny. I was staying at an inn called the Vanne Rouge, on the bank of the Loing overlooking a weir. (The inn has since then become fashionable and impossible; at that time it was adorable in every way.) In eddies of obsidian, At my feet the river ran Between me and the poppy-pranky Isle, with tangled roots embanked, Where seven sister poplars stood Like the seven sisters of god. Soft as silence in mine ear, The drone and rustle of the weir Told in bass the treble tale Of the embowered nightingale. Higher, on the patient river, Velvet lights without a quiver Echoed through their hushed rimes The garden's glow beneath the limes. Then the sombre village, crowned By the castellated ground, Where in cerements of sable, One square tower and one great gable Stood, the melancholy wraith Of a false and fallen faith. Over all, supine, enthralling, The young moon, her faint edge falling To the dead verge of her setting, Saintly swam, her silver fretting All the leaves with light. Afar Towards the Zenith stood a star, As of all worthiness and fitness The luminous eternal witness. I described how the silence stripped me of myself; how I came once more into the Abyss and was drawn thence into the most secret Temple of the Most High, and there received the seven-fold sacrament. Nor is it given to any son of man To hymn that sacrament, the One in Seven, Where God and priest and worshipper, Deacon, asperger, thurifer, chorister, {666}