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Page 76 of 831906 · PDF PAGE 274
… to assault my person, and to cause me to remember that your cook never forgets to spit into your honour’s soup, were it not that we may find a refuge from difference of caste and race, custom and language, in the supreme unity, that of the ultimate force of which this universe is the expression. Scept. I have listened with patience to what is after all (you must admit) a rather spiteful tirade—— Myst. Forgive me if I interrupt. Do me the honour to remember that it was said in self-blame. I tried to give your honour “the giltie’’ (as one of you…
1929 · PDF PAGE 383
… justly. The error is one of the worst because it attracts all these forces which, being themselves weak, are made malignant by pain and find their principal solace in taking it out of anyone they feel they can bully. Worse still, the hysterical expansion of the ego means the deepest possible treason to truth. It invites obsession by every deceitful demon. They puff up the pride of the fool still further; they flatter every foible, exhort him to acts of the most {614} ridiculous kind, induce him to talk the most raving rubbish and teach him to …
1929 · PDF PAGE 532
… and surrounded by a series of mirages. Innumerable people came into my life and passed out again, without leaving any trace. {840} 1. I find that I wrote it down plainly seventeen years ago! But I had no conception of its terror --- one must be a Magus to get that! The fact was that none of the people appointed by Amalantrah to various tasks were willing to undertake them. It may well be that this was due to a lack of real faith on my part. The communications from the Wizard had become confused and even contradictory. I had failed to understan…
1929 · PDF PAGE 263
… Having got the men across, we proceeded up the rocky slopes. I must confess that here I had misjudged the difficulty. I had expected to find quite easy walking, but there were a few passages where it amounted to scrambling from the point of view of a loaded man. I decided to arrange for a fixed rope as a measure of safety, it being my plan to send the picked coolies up and down regularly to bring up supplies as they {434} were needed. In the meantime, the men behaved magnificently, laughing and joking and giving each other a helping hand whene…
1929 · PDF PAGE 76
…ch of artistry entirely beyond my original scope; but I never allowed myself to fall under its dominion. I was determined to triumph, to find my way out on the other side. Baudelaire and Swinburne, at their best, succeed in celebrating the victory of the human soul over its adversaries, just as truly as Milton and Shelly. I never had a moment's doubt that I belonged to this school. To me it is a question of virility. Even James Thomson, ending with "confirmation of the old despair", somehow defeats that despair by the essential force of his gen…
1929 · PDF PAGE 338
…scover its nature. We would then compare the result of his investigation with the book from which I had taken the talisman, and he would find that he had judged correctly. (For instance, I would give him a square containing thirty-six characters in Enochian, which he could not read. He would pass in his astral body through an imaginary door on which this square was inscribed, and tell me that he had come out upon a balcony overlooking the sea, where a violent storm was raging. I would then refer to The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin ide…
1929 · PDF PAGE 337
…imited. The greatest disasters arise from what we call indifference. I once examined the horoscopes of a number of murderers in order to find out what planetary dispositions were responsible for the temperament. To my amazement, it was not the secret and explosive energy of Heschel, not the sinister and malignant selfishness of Saturn, not the ungoverned fury of Mars, which formed the background for the crime, but the callous intellectualism of Mercury. Then comes a most extraordinary discovery. The horoscopes of the murdered are almost identic…
1929 · PDF PAGE 165
…the conqueror. England is losing India by consenting to admit the existence of the conquered races; by consenting to argue; by trying to find a value for incommensurables. Indian civilization is 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. H…
1905 · PDF PAGE 230
… to show some brilliant charge or desperate hand-to- hand struggle, he may fail to grasp its significance in his dispositions; or indeed find it to be quite unexpected and foreign to his calculations; yet a few years or months later the same battle may be lucidly, tersely, and connectedly described, so that a child is able to follow its varying fortunes with delight and comprehension: just so has my own observation of a life-history more subtle, a battle more terrible, been at last co-ordi- nated: I can view the long struggle from a standpoint …
1929 · PDF PAGE 336
…ost austere standards of rectitude and nobility. It is not too much to say that he created my moral character. I had a fatal tendency to find excuses for myself. He forced me always to face the facts and keep ceaseless vigil over the jewel of honour. {545} 61 My favourite rendezvous was a little chemist's shop in Stafford Street, managed by a man named E. P. Whineray, one of the most remarkable and fascinating men that I have ever met. He was a Lancashire lad all over and not ashamed of it. His personal appearance was in itself arresting. Of me…
1929 · PDF PAGE 464
…severe, but I see little to modify. Poe and Whitman are still in my opinion the only first-rate writers until very recent years. I still find Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Emerson, Bret {735} Harte, Mark Twain and the rest devoid of any title soever to rank among the sons of genius. I might admit that they possessed great talents, but that is foreign to the question. I had been prevented from writing the other two essays partly because the editor, following his invariable rule, broke his
1929 · PDF PAGE 499
…ndy and absinthe and old brandy, which I had brought back from New York. But some people are never satisfied. She apparently expected to find a young palace with livery lackeys by the dozen, so she explained that she had 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 …
1929 · PDF PAGE 424
…ch forms a Trinity of sympathetic ideas relating respectively to the Three Orders comprised in the A.'. A.'.. It is really an attempt to find a Periodic Law in the system. LIBER CDLXXIV. The Book of the Mouth of the Abyss or of Knowledge. A course of study in philosophy is prescribed as a preliminary. The aspirant having assimilated all existing systems, he is instructed how to analyse the nature of the reason itself and thus how to cross the Abyss on the Intellectual Plane. Having cleansed and renewed his mental faculties in this way, he resum…
1929 · PDF PAGE 477
…hereas it was merely the University Manner. It was this poor thing whom our secret service sent to interview me. I told him that I could find out exactly what the Germans were doing in America. I also told him that I had the absolute confidence, years old, of a man high in the German secret service --- that I could go to Germany in the character of an Irish patriot and report on the conditions of the country. (There was desperate need of accurate information as to Germany's resources at this period.) He said, with the air of one detected in the…
1929 · PDF PAGE 478
… that this demonstration would convince treasuries. Every nation would mobilize all the brains and all the gold and all the influence to find a means of opening the wound. I prophesied a development of the submarine as astounding as that of railways and automobiles --- which dated from the hour when they were proved practicable and useful. On January 3rd, 1917, I returned to the charge with an article which was ostensibly a criticism of Count von Reventlow's Vampire, but in reality my own sermon on that text. The Patriot Bottomley has quoted on…
1929 · PDF PAGE 171
…on the fourteenth of May, and put in four days making {292} arrangements for the next stage of the journey. We could no longer depend on finding enough coolies, the villages beyond Shigar being poorly populated. We took much credit to ourselves, and gave more to the efficiency of government officials, that we had come through from Srinagar without a day's halt, we the largest party of Europeans to have made the journey. Central Asia, by the way, is the home of polo, which is played to this day with the utmost enthusiasm. Needless to say, the ga…
1929 · PDF PAGE 185
…their party on the glacier below and wondered whether they had not broken 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; …
1929 · PDF PAGE 459
459 prejudices. I find this unity in the aspiration to escape from the restrictions of crystallized conventions. Germans who resented military service, Jews who found the pressure of persecution and ostracism unendurable, Armenians obsessed by the fear of massacre, Italians to whom the pettiness, poverty and priestcraft of their country were paralysing, Irish insulted and injured by English oppression, all alike bring me to America as a paradise of elbow room, liberty and prosperity. One aspect of this aspiration has a more general bearing. All…
1929 · PDF PAGE 562
…ous for spies. I was always seeing them in the courtyard, skulking behind trees as I went to and fro from dinner. What they had hoped to find out I cannot imagine. In Detroit, months after my return to Europe, they repeatedly raided poor half-crazed Ryerson's house in search of some evidence of the "Devil Worshipper's Mystic Love Cult" and of course found nothing; from which they concluded not my innocence, but that my pact with the devil contained a clause guaranteeing me against the discovery of my crimes. If any of those obstinate asses had …
1929 · PDF PAGE 584
…, when the current of creative energy is checked so that my mind, temporarily exhausted, becomes the prey of apprehension. Yet even so I find myself better able, as every year passes, to set my heel on the serpent of worry. Only in moments of complete mental and spiritual collapse from the overstrain of prolonged effort does my faith falter for a few hours. Perhaps the gods intend to insist on my acquiring the power to triumph, even at such moments, over adversity. The serpent's {921} fangs will fix themselves in my heel if it share the vulnera…