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Page 1 of 111929 · PDF PAGE 509
… Francisco) I found myself invited to address a semi-public gathering, I began my speech with the words, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", and proceeded as best I could to explain their import. Again, on the last day of the year, whose midnight I habitually devote to a meditation on the past, culminating in a formulation of my future career, I was moved to write what was shortly afterwards published first as a pamphlet in England, secondly as an article in the International, New York, thirdly in The Equinox, vol. III, no. i, an…
1929 · PDF PAGE 185
…loose. It was just the sort of thing that one might expect; to find that they had bolted up the south end of the mountain and spoilt the whole plan. They arrived, however, on the next day, the nineteenth, and on the twentieth Knowles and the doctor joined us. They arrived in a snowstorm which continued the whole day. It was the first of uninterruptedly bad weather. On the twenty-first the wind dropped, though the snow continued. It tried to clear up on the twenty-second; and the twenty-third was fine. But of course, nothing could be done in the…
1929 · PDF PAGE 279
…ason to be proud. I had been the butt of every gully at school, I had suffered the agonies of knowing myself a coward and a weakling. My whole life seemed at times to be one vast and slimy subterfuge to cozen death. Yet in the past month there had been a dozen outrages upon Europeans in Calcutta, some of them culminating in the most brutal murder. And I was the only Englishman who had come out on top. I had lost four rupees, eight annas, it is true; but I had won the victory, one against six. Thornton was in bed when I arrived; but I had not he…
1929 · PDF PAGE 85
… by any such inexplicable incident as the abandonment of the room, though I have sometimes failed to find the expected girl. Talking the whole matter over with my guide, philosopher and friend, Frater O.P.V., he finds the whole story extraordinarily gripping. He finds the situation nodal for the spirit of romance. An extraordinary number of vital threads or "nerves" of romance. He attaches great significance to the failure of Eckenstein to keep the appointment. It seems to him as if the whole business were a sort of magical ordeal, that Eckenst…
1929 · PDF PAGE 241
…ight to say what anyone else shall or shall not do with his or her body. Establish this principle of absolute respect for others and the whole nightmare of sex is dispelled. Blackmail and prostitution automatically lose their raison d'ętre. The corrupting influence of hypocrisy breaks like a rotten reed. The sweating of "female labour cheapened by prostitution" (as Bernard Shaw says) becomes impossible. I have written at considerable length in recent years on the ethical, as well as on the cosmographical problems solved by the Law of Thelema. I…
1929 · PDF PAGE 306
…l, and more mosquitoes than I had seen for many a month. We hurried on by train to Yen Bay, a filthy hole with no redeeming feature. The whole country and its people are monotonously reddish brown; skin, clothes, food, roofs --- everything but the grass and the trees, which are all the same shade of dull green. The whole forms a curiously harmonious picture, very low in tone and undeniably depressing. The sky itself was uniformly leaden, though I suppose this was a question of the time of the year. There are few features in the scenery; a damp …
1929 · PDF PAGE 529
…. with those of the A.'. A.'.. 93 is also the number of the Secret Word of the Neophyte of A.'. A.'., a word indicating symbolically the whole course of existence. It is in fact a completion of the ideas contained in the Sacred Word of the Hindus, AUM. It was to be discovered later that the Secret Key of The Book of the Law is the number 31, 1/3 of 93. There are three words, each of the value of 31 which represent perfectly the whole mystery of existence. That Aiwaz should have, so to speak, signed himself with His Law, was irrefutable proof of…
1929 · PDF PAGE 300
…d he went on groaning that there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, and I went on sighing that I should like to see one. During my whole journey, I never saw a man whom I could call definitely the worse for opium. My wife's chair coolies were cases in point. They had smoked from twelve years old or thereabouts; and when I say smoked, I mean smoked. Every night on reaching the inn, temple or camp, as the case {489} may be, they cooked their rice and started to smoke directly they had eaten it, continuing till they went to sleep. In the mor…
1929 · PDF PAGE 255
…icated curves and even loops. One ascends rapidly; the view constantly changes; one begins to appreciate the geology of the country as a whole. In the foreground the tropical vegetation is superbly thick and rich. One is so relieved by the change to cool shade and a suggestion of moisture that it comes as a shock to remember that this is the Teri, one of the most deadly fever districts in the world. By lunchtime the character of the vegetation is already markedly altered. The heavy tangle of the low country begins to give place to mountain spri…
1929 · PDF PAGE 36
…ystem by which all its members can be adequately nourished without conflict and the waste products eliminated without discomfort. On the whole, I was so well guarded that incidents like the above were rate accidents. I had been taught by bitter experience that almost anybody might be a spy, so that the slightest indiscretion in talking to an apparently harmless stranger might result in some disaster. The foundations were laid of an exaggerated shyness which has never left me. I was practically debarred from human intercourse, even that of the g…
1929 · PDF PAGE 4
…itely dramatic composition. It comes to a climax on April 8th, 9th and 10th, 1904 e.v. The slightest incident in the {31} History of the whole universe appears to him as a preparation for that event; and his subsequent life is merely the aftermath of that crisis. On the other hand, however, there is the circumstance that his time has been spent in three very distinct manners: the Secret Way of the Initiate, the Path of Poetry and Philosophy, and the Open Sea of Romance and Adventure. It is indeed not unusual to find the first two, or the last t…
1929 · PDF PAGE 438
…e" me! There was some trivial difference in one of the grips or some other totally meaningless formality. A measureless contempt for the whole mummery curled my lip. I squared the matter (as already related) by having myself initiated in Lodge Number 343 "Anglo- Saxon" in Paris. What that led to I have recounted elsewhere and now quote: I happened to know that the chaplain of the British Embassy in Z--- was Past Grand Organist of a certain English province. He proposed me, found a seconder, and I was duly initiated, passed and raised. I was war…
1929 · PDF PAGE 480
… their knowledge. But that was not what worried me. I kept on saying to myself, "Why only half a page?" The Headmaster of Eton had had a whole page about his advocating Platonic pleasures for boys. My own father-in-law, a charming old gentleman with not even a national reputation, and not an enemy in the world, but a worthless curate he had discharged, had had a whole page (inspired by the aforesaid curate) about the way in which he swindled his servant-girls out of their savings. I knew that if the great Patriot seemed to be not giving me my d…
1929 · PDF PAGE 432
…tween London and Paris. I wrote a few first-rate lyrics, a few more or less important essays, such as "Energized Enthusiasm", but on the whole, the virtue had gone out of me as far as big conceptions and elaborate executions were concerned. The campaign of 1911 had exhausted my heavy ammunition for the time being. None the less, I could point to one solid achievement on the large scale, as I must consider it, although it is composed of more or less disconnected elements. I refer to The Book of Lies. In this there are ninety-three chapters: we c…
1929 · PDF PAGE 57
…ed; I was as incapable of thought of any kind as if I had had the toothache. I have a genuine grudge against the system on this account. Whole months of my life, which might have been profitably spent in all sorts of work, were taken up by the morbid broodings of the unsatisfied appetite. Repression is as mentally unwholesome as constipation, and I am furious, to this hour, that some of the best years of my life, which should have been spent in acquiring knowledge, were sterilized by the suffocating stupor of preoccupation with sex. It was not …
1929 · PDF PAGE 110
…WEH Note: This portion is a development of the Hebrew text of the first verse of Genesis. Mathers was behaving badly; he was sick of the whole business. Mrs. Emery, the nominal representative of the Chief, was trying to find a diplomatic solution. Her attitude was most serious and earnest and she was greatly distressed by her dilemma. She had thought it best to resign quietly, but received a reply of the most staggering character. The letter is dated February 16th, 1900, and I quote the last two paragraphs in full. Now, with regard to the Secon…
1929 · PDF PAGE 275
275 every kind of magical and mystical lore into the volume, there is nowhere any reference to The Book of the Law. I was setting my whole strength against the Secret Chiefs. I was trying to forget the whole business. The book itself is a complete treatise on mysticism, expressed in the symbolism prescribed by Persian piety. It describes the relations of God and man, explains how the latter falls from his essential innocence by allowing himself to be deceived by the illusion of matter. His religion cease to be real and become formal; he falls i…
1929 · PDF PAGE 206
… what a worm!" and led the conversation to some more savoury subject. On the other hand there was B---, a popular painter, upon whom the whole Dog pounced as one man, to destroy him. But when they saw that his popular painting was not he, that he had a true heart and an honest ambition, how quickly were the swords beaten into absinthes and the spears into tournedos! {347} S---, again, with a face like a portrait by Rembrandt, a man of no great intellect, but making no pretence thereto, how he was loved for his jolly humour, his broad smile, his…
1929 · PDF PAGE 503
… the Voice, the attainment of the grade of Master of the Temple was symbolized by the adept pouring every drop of his blood, that is his whole individual life, into the Cup of the Scarlet Woman, who represents Universal Impersonal Life. There remains therefore (to pursue the imagery) of the adept "nothing but a little pile of dust". In a subsequent vision the Grade of Magus is foreshadowed; and the figure is that this dust is burnt into "a white ash", which ash is preserved in an Urn. It is difficult to convey the appropriateness of this symbol…
1929 · PDF PAGE 457
… jugglery the life of a totally different individual has intruded upon my own. Now, years afterwards, it still seems to me as if for the whole period of the initiation I had been transported into an unfamiliar world; their history is a magical history in the most comically complete sense. Its events are neither real nor rational --- save only in relation to the condition of an experiment, exactly as a candidate in freemasonry sees, hears, speaks and acts with his normal senses, yet in a way which has no relation to his previous experience. The …