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Page 156 of 1591929 · PDF PAGE 67
…heir camouflage. My freedom was due to the fact that I had spent most of my life in the open air and gradually acquired immunity. It sometimes strikes me that the whole of science is a piece of impudence: that nature can afford to ignore our impertinent interference. If our monkey mischief should ever reach the point of blowing up the earth by decomposing an atom, and even annihilate the sun himself, I cannot really suppose that the universe would turn a hair. If we are ever to do anything, it can only be by the manipulation of those spiritual …
1929 · PDF PAGE 210
…e physical evidence of the closed doorway and the unsaddled horses. It is of course easy to reply that I may have been asleep the second time as well as the first! And of course there is no answer to that any more than there is to the argument that we are all part of the Red King's Dram, as Lewis Carroll puts the fable of Kwang-Tze. (Kwang-Tze once said to his disciples on awakening: "Just now I was dreaming that I was a butterfly: but is it so, or am I a butterfly dreaming that it is Kwang-Tze?") To return to the wicked city of Paris. J.W.Morr…
1907 · PDF PAGE 138
…s “ Sordello." Are we willing to suffer from it in order to discover the secret of Mr. Crowley’s mind? Is the game worth the candle? The time of year being August and the weather inclement, we are inclined to think it possibly may be. Now is the appointed season, so let us hasten to study the world of Mr. Crowley before the rush of our own lives reabsorbs us. Our principal objection to Mr. Crowley’s style is that it is redundant. For instance, the organs of eneration are always cropping up in unexpected places, such as in Mr. Crowley’s brain—wh…
1929 · PDF PAGE 504
…an intelligences who control the initiate communicate with him. Thus, my adventures in America seemed a series of stupidities for a long time. Nothing I did produced the expected results. I found myself suddenly switched from one episode to another so irrationally that I began to feel that I had somehow got into a world where causality did not obtain. The mystery only became clear when analysis disclosed that the events which threw me about in this manner occurred at almost exact intervals of 73 days, or of some multiple or sub-multiple thereof…
1929 · PDF PAGE 566
… early conversations he had argued with perfect justice that the English market for the English Review was hopeless, at least for a long time, and that therefore the only chance of restoring solvency was to push it in America. It was obvious that I could do this with success. He agreed to my plan, and I wrote accordingly to several of my friends, first-class writers, far better than any in England --- bar Conrad and Hardy --- asking them to contribute. They one and all wrote charmingly and enthusiastically, and sent a number of admirable storie…
1929 · PDF PAGE 264
…the solid slope disappears, one hears the tinkle of falling ice. It is a most astonishing and disconcerting phenomenon. During the while time that I was on the mountain, I experienced no high wind and no unpleasant cold. But the heat of the day was certainly very severe. My skin had gradually become inured to the sun. I had not been burnt painfully in ten years. I simply browned quietly and pleasantly. But on Kangchenjunga it got me --- not badly enough to cause sores -- but enough to make the skin somewhat painful and brittle. Here was another…
1929 · PDF PAGE 363
…s the impression of elemental energy." Yet this was subconscious. In my poems I have treated Rodin from a purely literary standpoint. As time passed my interest in the arts increased. I was still careful to avoid contemporary literature lest it should influence my thought or style. But I saw no harm in making friends with painters and learning to see the world through their eyes. Having already seen it through my own in the course of my wanderings, I was the better able to observe clearly and judge impartially. Perhaps this circumstance itself …
1929 · PDF PAGE 95
…her poems which appear in that volume, were written about this period. It is a kind of backwater in my life. I seem to have been marking time. For this reason, no doubt, I was the more ready to be swept away by the first definite current. It was not long before it caught me. I had a number of conversations with Julian Baker, who kept his promise to introduce me to "a man who was a much greater Magician than he was himself". This was a Welshman, named George Cecil Jones. He possessed a fiery but unstable temper, was the son of a suicide, and bor…
1929 · PDF PAGE 248
…e eyes of the philosophers of two centuries hence. {412} I cannot bring myself to believe that anything which is going on at the present time has any real existence. It is a meaningless letter in a word and its value depends on the rest of the letters. "A" and "O" are in themselves mere varieties of breathing, yet one helps to make "hag", and the other "hog" --- one "cot", and the other "cat". Unless I know the consonants I cannot tell whether I need an "a" or an "o". Now this perception is obvious to everybody, yet everybody acts as if he knew…
1929 · PDF PAGE 366
…ts to interpret it distort it progressively as they adapt themselves to the perceptions of the mind, and become sheer caricatures by the time they are translated into terms of bodily sensation. Now the reality of things depends on their truth, and thus it is that it is not a philosophical paradox but a matter of experience that the search for truth teaches us to distrust appearances exactly in proportion as they are positive. Physical facts betray their hallucinatory nature by their consistent refusal to comply with the requirements of reason, …
1929 · PDF PAGE 48
…k and I never thought of doubting it. Now I had made the first solitary descent of the Ennerdale face of the Pillar Rock, a feat at that time considered theoretically impossible. He asked me casually whether it was the sort of place that he could take his daughter. I did a sort of rule of three sum in my head. If poor little I, the beginner, could do it, a fortiori so could the great man, even with the handicap of the girl novice. As a matter of fact, he could not climb at all, and the delightful pair found themselves crag-fast. Some years late…
1929 · PDF PAGE 294
…aches are extremely pestilential; but in this section one might establish an ideal sanatorium. The course of the Salween had not at that time been completely explored. There is not only fever but massacre in that romantic ravine. Part of it is inhabited by the Lolos (they are not vaudeville artists but tribes) reported to be exceedingly primitive and addicted to head hunting, kidney chasing, phallus fishing and testicle trapping, so that their cooks are famous for stewed spleen, pancreas puddings and appendix on toast. I met a number of these t…
1929 · PDF PAGE 118
…acts) the habit of lying begets credulity. My friend never profited except now and then for a few lucky weeks, though he scooped in that time enough to keep a man with a grain of good sense for the rest of his life. The confidence trick is protean, but in all its forms the essence is to get the victim off his guard. Observe how this fact confirms by general theory that surrender of the will to the guidance of the emotions is destructive of judgment. The first act in every trick is what is called the "come on" or the "build up". Its crudest form…
1929 · PDF PAGE 521
…my lack of confidence in the Secret Chiefs recoiled on myself. (In Magick, of course, the punishment always fits the crime.) At the same time, the Secret Chiefs themselves had made no mistake. They knew perfectly well what was my breaking strain and they deliberately pushed me beyond my limit for several excellent reasons. They wanted me to know the extent of my capacity to endure; and thereby, of course, to increase that capacity in the future by showing me that even when I thought I had broken the chain it held by invisible links as firmly as…
1929 · PDF PAGE 193
… and ten minutes actual going to Shigar, which in the ordinary way is three long marches. The pace of the current varies enormously. Sometimes we were kept half an hour at a time spinning about amid contending eddies; sometimes we were flung violently down the stream at over twenty miles an hour. The sensation is extraordinarily exhilarating --- the motion, the imminent peril, the intoxication of the air, the majesty of the background, but above all, the beatific realization that, as the doctor said, "the roads are doing our walking for us," co…
1929 · PDF PAGE 78
…secret forces of nature, and for a career of devoted labour on behalf of "the Creation which groaneth and travaileth". My poetry at this time is charged to the highest point with these aspirations. I may mention the dedication to Songs of the Spirit, "The Quest", "The Alchemist", "The Philosopher's Progress", "A Spring Snowstorm in WAstdale", "Succubus", "Nightfall", "The Storm", "Wheat and Wine", "Vespers", {146} "Astrology" and "Daedalus". In "the Farewell of Paracelsus to Aprile", "The Initiation", "Isaiah" and "Power", I have expressed my i…
1929 · PDF PAGE 137
…to the press. I put aside Orpheus and left aside Alice, An Adultery to ripen. I did not think much of it; and would not publish it until time had ratified it. One of my principal inhibitions at this period was due to the apparent antinomy between the normal satisfaction of bodily appetites and the obvious conditions of success. I did not solve this completely until my attainment of the Grade of Mater of the Temple in 1909, when at last I realized that every thought, word and act might be pressed into the service of the soul: more, that it must …
1929 · PDF PAGE 567
…ver fifteen years earlier he had been on the staff of a paper called What's On belonging to my old acquaintance Robert Haslam and at one time edited by poor crazy Dartnell. The gods had certainly started a new drama. The accident of this man, J. D. Beresford his name is, being the literary advisor of Collins probably made all the difference to the fate of the book. The synopsis was accepted enthusiastically and I obtained the pledges of money and advances, as per the "Yi" forecast, to the extend of a sixty-pound advance and a contract on much b…
1929 · PDF PAGE 528
…nation of letters. However, I was completely baffled. I gave it up as a bad job, cursing Amalantrah heartily for having made me waste my time. On Monday morning I went to the office of The International. It was a "workless Monday", Dr Garwood having ordered that no office buildings should be heated on Monday for five weeks, on account of the coal famine. I stayed only a few minutes to look over my mail. On Tuesday I returned to the office, and found on my desk a letter addressed to Viereck and transferred by him to me to be answered. This lette…
1929 · PDF PAGE 205
…cold acumen and L---'s superb indignation, expressed in fiery swords of speech, would drive some luckless driveller from the room. Or at times they would hold down their victim, a bird fascinated by a snake, while they pitilessly exposed his follies to the delighted crowd. Again, a third, pompous and self-confident, would be led on by them, seemingly in full sympathy, to make an exhibition of himself, visible and hideous to all eyes but his own. L---, his eager face like a silver moon starting from a thundercloud, his hair, would pierce the ver…