The Law is for All

Chapter I b Verse 52 65 love. All science, all art, every elaboration should emphasize and adorn the expression of the enthusiasm. All strength and all skill should be summoned to fulfil the frenzy, and life itself should be flung with a spendthrift gesture on the counter of the Merchant of Madness. On the steel of your helmet let there be gold inlaid with the motto “Excess.” The above indications are taken from a subsequent passage of the third chapter of this Book.1 1 [See Commentary to 111:55-56, pp. 170-181.] 2 [Yvette Guilbert (1868-1944) was a French popular singer.] The supreme and absolute injunction, the crux of your knightly oath, is that you lay your lance in rest to the glory of your Lady, the Queen of the Stars, Nuit. Your knighthood depends upon your refusal to fight in any lesser cause. That is what distinguishes you from the brigand and the bully. You give your life on Her Altar. You make yourself worthy of Her by your readiness to fight at any time, in any place, with any weapon, and at any odds. For Her, from Whom you come, of Whom you are, to Whom you go, your life is no more and no less than one con­ tinuous sacrament. You have no word but Her praise, no thought but love of Her. You have only one cry, of inarticulate ecstasy, the intense spasm, possession of Her, and Death, to Her. You have no act but the priest’s gesture that makes your body Hers. The wafer is the disk of the Sun, the star in Her body. Your blood is spilt from your heart with every beat of your pulse into Her cup. It is the wine of Her life crushed from the grape of your sun-ripened vine. On this wine you are drunk. It washes your corpse that is as the fragment of the Host, broken by you, the Priest, into Her golden chalice. You, Knight and Priest of the Order of the Temple, saying Her mass, become God in Her, by love and death. This act of love, though in its form it be with a horse like Caligula, with a mob like Messalina, with a giant like Heliogabalus, with a pollard like Nero, with a monster like Baudelaire, though with de Sade it gloat on blood, with Sacher-Masoch crave for whips and furs, with Yvette Guilbert1 2 crave the glove, or dote on babes like E. T. Reed of Punch; whether one love oneself disdaining every other