THE EQUINOX
persuades himself 01 his own attainment.
If contradicted on
the subject, he is cross and spiteful and cattish.
IfI criticise
Mr X, he screams, and tries to injure me behind my back; if
I say that Madame Y is not exactly St Teresa, she writes a
book to prove that she is.
Such persons “ swollen with wind, and the rank mist they
draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread,” as Milton
wrote of a less dangerous set of spiritual guides.
For their unhappy followers and imitators, no words of
pity suffice.
The whole universe is for them but “the glass
of their fool’s face”; only, unlike Sir Palamedes, they admire
it.
Moral and spiritual Narcissi, they perish in the waters
of illusion
A friend of mine, a solicitor in Naples, has told
me strange tales 01 Where such self—adoration ends.
And the subtlety of the devil is shown particularly in the
method by which such neophytes are caught by the Black
Brothers.
There is
an
exaggerated
awe, a solemnity of
diction, a vanity of archaic phrases, a false veil of holiness
upon the unclean shrine.
Stilted affectation masquerades as
dignity; a rag-bag 01 mediaevalism apes profundity; jargon
passes
101 literature; phylacteries increase about the hem
of the perfect prig, prude, and Pharisee.
Corollary to this attitude is the lack of all human virtue.
The greatest magician, when he acts in his human capacity,
acts asia man should.
In particular, he has learnt kind—
heartedness and sympathy.
Unselfishness is very often his
long suit.
just this the mystic lacks.
Trying to absorb
the lower planes into the higher, he neglects the lower, a
mistake no magician could make.
I56