The Equinox (Volume I, Number VIII)

THE EQUINOX and prolonged. This service to humanity he successfully performed; the “Rump” of the London Temple was dis— persed, and its chief, his occupation gone, left to the more diverting pastime of trying to dodge the Criminal Law Amendment Act. With autumn we find Fra. Ρ. still less occupied with magic; he spent the winter skating at St. Moritz, where his only occult exploit seems to have been parson-baiting, and though he returned to Scotland in the spring, it was only for a few days. For on April 27, 1905, one of the old comrades of his journeys in Central Asia sought him out, and proposed a new Expedition. Fra. P. gleefully accepted, and on May 6, having got together his kit, left his home, and sailed for India on theי12111? His diary is henceforth barren of all interest to us. We learn only that the success of his plans was spoilt by a mutiny, which resulted in the death of four innocent people, and a good deal of damage to the mutineers, and that in con- sequence he went off to visit his old friend the Maharaja of Moharbhanj, and shoot big game. After spending a few days with this amiable despot, he went off alone into the jungle, and his thoughts immediately reverted to magic, to the performance of the Great Work, though not as yet to the Egyptian revelations. His antipathy to these, with their irrational instructions, grew and grew. It was only with the shattering of his reason that he could possibly accept them, and act on them. Yet even in this month’s wandering in the jungle we find little in the diary but the record of exercise of strange magic powers. We read three or four times that a certain adept 8