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Page 218 of 2251907 · PDF PAGE 230
…expectant of some great and mysterious result. I pledge myself, if you have a spark of religion in you, that is, if you are properly a human being, that you will (at the very least) experience a deeper sense of spiritual communion than youghave ever obtained by any course of church-going. After which you will, if you are worth your salt, devote your life to the development of this communion, and to the search for an instructed master who can tell you more than I can. Now the earlier paganism is simply over- flowing with this spirit of communion…
1929 · PDF PAGE 33
…first time honest friendship, wholesome love, frank, gay and courageous, became possible and actual. I had loved nature as a refuge from mankind. I now perceived the beauty of the world in conjunction with the beauty of my species. For the first time {75} the sea sparkled, the breezes whispered other songs than those in praise of solitude, the flowers lent their fragrance and their folly to light, laughing girlhood; the moon, instead of Artemis, was Aphrodite. I said, "she is warmer than Dian . . . Come up through the lair of the Lion With love…
1929 · PDF PAGE 140
…nt and the perceived --- in Dhyana these two have become one. At first this union usually takes place with explosive violence. There are many other characteristics; in particular, time and space are abolished. This, however, occurs with almost equal completeness in certain states of normal abstract thought. {242} The attainment of this trance is likely to upset the whole moral balance of the student. He often attributes and exaggerated importance to the imperfect ideas which represent his memory of what happened. He cannot possibly remember the…
1929 · PDF PAGE 353
… did myself proud, for the Magician, Oliver Haddo, was Aleister Crowley; his house "Skene" was Boleskine. The hero's witty remarks were, many of them, my own. He had, like Arnold Bennett, not spared his shirt cuff. But I had jumped too hastily to conclusions when I said, "Maugham has written a book." I found phrase after phrase, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, bewilderingly familiar; and then I remembered that in my early days of the G.'. D.'. I had introduced Gerald Kelly to the Order and {570} reflected that Maugham had become a g…
1929 · PDF PAGE 228
…m in five minutes. He went off quietly and I never had a chance for a shot. One elephant whose track I followed took the camp of a Frenchman in his morning stroll. The man's wife had taken him out to Ceylon to keep him way for alcohol, but prohibition forgot the proverb, "Out of the frying-pan into the fire". The elephant got him before I got the elephant. One of our most beautiful camps was a sort of dak baghla near the shores of a superb lake. Open on its principal arc, the further shore merged into marshes. In the shallow waters at the edge …
1929 · PDF PAGE 544
…nzy of mistrust and jealousy. It made things worse that I smilingly accepted her tantrums exactly as an alienist with the outbursts of a maniac. I refused to quarrel; my kindness, tenderness, affection and nonchalance were inexpugnable. She went from bad to worse during the following months, but I maintained firm correctness and at last she gave up trying to drag me down to her ignoble ideal. In the depths of her despair there grew a glimmer. She began to understand that love was not necessarily accompanied by meanness, falsehood, callousness a…
1929 · PDF PAGE 512
…heless, I moved it singlehanded into the lake, where I fixed it by driving piles. Passers- by spread the story of the hermit with superhuman strength, and people came from all parts to gaze upon the miracle. I should mention that normally my physical strength is far below the average, especially for work of this kind. It is quite an effort for me to shift a sixty pound load for even a few feet. So much for the sufficiently remarkable truth. Of course imagination improved on the story. I received an indignant letter from New York from the lady w…
1929 · PDF PAGE 11
…im; he is as interested in dissecting rooms as in anything else. When he met the dead body of Consul Litton, he turned back, knowing the man was dead. But when the corpse was brought to Tengyueh, he assisted unflinchingly at the inquiry, because in this instance there was an object in ascertaining the cause of death. One other group of incidents of early childhood. The family went to the west of England for the summer. Alick remembers Monmouth, or rather Monmouth Castle. It is curious that, in the act of remembering this for the purpose of this…
1929 · PDF PAGE 165
…far superior to our own and to enter into open competition is to invoke defeat. We won India by matching our irrational, bigoted, brutal manhood against their etiolated culture. We cannot even plead that we have lacked a prophet. The genius of Rudyard Kipling, however aesthetically abominable, has divined the secrets of destiny with cloudless clarity. His stories and his sermons are equally informed by the brainless yet unanswerable argument based on intuitive cognition of the critical facts. India can be governed, as history proves, by any ali…
1929 · PDF PAGE 221
…scent of all thy beauty burns upon the ....wind. The deep perfume Of our own love is hidden in our hearts, ....the invulnerable ring. No man shall know. I bear thee down unto ....the tomb, beyond the tomb, Rose on the breast of the world of spring! I went upstairs. I began to suspect the truth, that my absolute indifference to rose, combined with my perfectly casual willingness to marry her in order to do her a service, as one might offer a stranger one's place in an omnibus, had purged her heart of its passion for the fat sensuality of Frank S…
1929 · PDF PAGE 258
…ice. A few moments later I found that my hand was wet with blood, running fast, and looking down I saw a leech on the back of it. How it managed to fall from the sky I don't know. I have seen leeches up to seven inches long; and there seems hardly any limit to the amount of blood they can assimilate. I heard of a gorged leech weighing nearly two pounds and I believe it without effort. Another strange sight in these parts is the sheep. Tartarin, still proud of his haggis, invented wonderful theories to explain the fact that they are muzzled. How…
1929 · PDF PAGE 325
…5 symbols. The practice naturally follows the lines laid down by the theory. For this reason one's early adventures are accompanied by romantic phenomena and stigmata. Buddhist psychology recognizes this. For instance, the first Jhana is accompanied by Ananda, bliss; but in the second this quality disappears. I think it deplorable that mystic advancement should be expressed by means of such hieroglyphs as "the Bride's Reception"; that is, at least, if any peculiar attribution of a sexual character is implied. Of course, even above the Abyss, Ch…
1929 · PDF PAGE 336
336 Now this would be a remarkable achievement for a young gentleman who only left Cambridge quite a few years ago. It requires a certain amount of serious purpose to stir Public Opinion into active opposition, and the only question is, has Mr. Crowley a serious purpose? ... Such are some of the sensations described by Aleister Crowley in his quest for the discovery of his Relation with the Absolute. His power of expression is extraordinary; his kite flies, but he never fails to jerk it back to earth with some touch of ridicule or pathos which …
1929 · PDF PAGE 499
… merely dropped in for lunch, as per invitation, on her way to visit her brother, the incumbent of the parish of Staatsburg. She gave so many details so ingenuously that I might have believed her if I had not happened to know that the amenities of Staatsburg did not include any such person as she described. I politely professed to credit her and promised to take her ashore in time to reach him by dinner. To pass the afternoon we went for a paddle round the island. Near the northern point I noticed that my feet were wet. I knew that the canoe le…
1929 · PDF PAGE 322
…ished my sore throat and my surroundings, and went up in my Body of Light. Reached a room in which a cruciform table was spread, a naked man being nailed thereto. Many venerable men sat around, feasting on his living flesh and quaffing his hot blood. These (I was told) were the adepts, whom I might one day join. This I understood to mean that I should get the power of taking only spiritual nourishment --- but probably it means much more than this. Next I came into an apparently empty hall, of white ivory worked in {525} filigree. A square slim …
1929 · PDF PAGE 114
…om the police. I engaged a young Indian girl to look after me and settled down to steady work at Magick. I had an introduction to an old man named Don Jesus Medina, a descendant of the great duke of Armada fame, and one of the highest chiefs of Scottish {202} rite free-masonry. My Cabbalistic knowledge being already profound by current standards, he thought me worthy of the highest initiation in his power to confer; special powers were obtained in view of my limited sojourn, and I was pushed rapidly through and admitted to the thirty-third and …
1929 · PDF PAGE 216
…try had run completely dry. I had not touched the unfinished Orpheus; wrote nothing new. I no longer aspired to become the redeemer of humanity. I doubt whether I should have been able to attach any meaning to any such words. After returning from Edinburgh, I do not seem even to have kept a record and I remember nothing about my doings. July is however the date of an essay "The initiated interpretation of ceremonial magick" which I prefaced to my edition of The Goetia. I had employed Mathers to translate the text of The Lesser Key of Solomon th…
1929 · PDF PAGE 390
…o be broken off and the invocation repeated. Yet again I found the strain unsupportable, had to break off, and go to the hot baths of Hamman Salahin; and I continued, immersed to the neck in the hot sulphur spring. The water somehow soothed my nerves, enabling me to experience the Aethyr without physical collapse. Even so, I could not get to the end and only did so after over more than two days' concentrated consecration of myself. {642} 67 We may now turn to this journey without the transcendental telescope. It was nothing to shout about as or…
1929 · PDF PAGE 478
…on that text. The Patriot Bottomley has quoted one of my best passages, that in which I proposed to reduce England to the status of a German colony. (The Germans printed it without a smile!) I was very proud of that article. It proved that all island races were primarily fishermen, who lived by snatching fish and must therefore become pirates. The argument is quite in the style of a real German professor. I advocated the "Unrestricted Submarine Campaign". I secretly calculated, rightly as the gods would have it, that so outrageous a violation o…
1929 · PDF PAGE 443
…derstood, as it is not even my me after more than twelve years' almost constant study and experiment, there would be nothing which the human imagination can conceive that could not be realized in practice. By this I mean such things as this: that if it were desired to have an element of atomic weight six times that of uranium that element could be produced. If it were desired to devise an instrument by which the furthest stars or the electrons could be brought within the range of every one of our senses, that instrument could be invented. Or th…