The Equinox (Volume I, Number III)

THE BIG STICK he is so keen to find proof of Egyptian antiquity in everything. On p. 228 he quotes as an example of original sign-language that he “watched with interest our bluejackets leaning over the side of a man-of-war talking to one another” by means of their hands and fingers. Of course what they are really doing is semaphore signalling without flags after the official signalling with flags has ceased. In spite of these small over-eagernesses, this book is a revolutionary volume, a work that should stimulate argument and comment; and we hope that it will induce others to collect and discover the secrets of the past before they are devoured by our Minotaurean Civilization. It is a melancholy fact that though amongst the rudest of rude savages secrets have been kept and great systems maintained for hundreds of thousands of years, the “clever” children of the present with all their arts and crafts are only destroyers of the past. We defame antiquity, annihilate those who still venerate it—mentally we destroy their minds with a corrupt and idolatrous Christianity, a veritable haggis of guts and blood, and their bodies with gunpowder and loathsome diseases. In a few years all will have gone; but (say you?) all will be saved, stored in our libraries and museums, But, we answer, even these in a few centuries will be dust and ashes; the very paper of this book which we are reviewing, beautiful though it be, will, like a girl’s beauty, vanish before forty years are past. Our inventions are our curse, they are our destruction. What was coagulated in the minds of barbarians for thousands and tens of thousands of years we shall have destroyed utterly, utterly, in as many days and nights. Civilization has driven her plough over Stellar and Solar mythology, wantonly, and at haphazard, and in their place she has cultivated the Unknowable and Andrew Lang! If the Utilitarian progress in the next few years as he has in the last, soon we shall have some socialistic fellah depriving the world of its last great monu- ments, and building labourers’ cottages out of the stones and bricks of the Pyramids, because they are so very much more useful. “Solve” is the cry to-day; the Sabbatic finger of the Goat points upwards, yet on the clouds of darkness does it scrawl a sigil of light. A new God stirs in the Womb of its Mother; we can see his form, dim and red, in the cavern of Time. Dare we pronounce his name? Yea! It is Horus, Horus the Child, reborn Amsu the Good Shepherd, who will lead us out of the sheepish stupidity of to-day. How many understand this mystery? Perhaps none save those who have seen and subscribed to the Law of Thelema, LECF. THE LosT VALLEY. By ALGERNON BLACKWOOD. Nash. 6s. It is the penalty of factitious success that the need of fuel increases like the dose ofa drug-fiend. Instead of clothing his wit with silk from the loom of life 343