The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?

THE EQUINOX You, they say, claim to be a man in Kether (I don’t). Why then, do you not wear boots on your head and hats on your feet ? I can only answer that I the man in Kether (‘tis but an argument) am out of all relation as much with feet and heads as with boots and hats. But why should I (from my exalted pinnacle) stoop down and worry the headed and footed gentle- man in Malkuth, who after all doesn’t exist for me, by these drastic alterations in his toilet? There is no distinction whatever ; I might easily put the boots on his shoulders, with his head on one foot and the hat on the other. In short, why not be a clean-living Irish gentleman, even if you do have insane ideas about the universe? Very good, say my friends, unabashed, then why not stick to that? Why glorify Spanish gipsies when you have married a clergyman’s daughter? Why go about proclaiming that you can get as good fun for eighteenpence as usually costs men a career? Ah! let me introduce you to the man in Tiphereth ; that is, the man who is trying to raise his consciousness from Malkuth to Kether. This Tiphereth man is in a devil of a hole! He knows theoretically all about the Kether point of view (or thinks he does) and practically all about the Malkuth point of view. Consequently he goes about contradicting Malkuth ; he refuses to allow Malkuth to obsess his thought. He keeps on crying out that there is no difference between a goat and a God, in the hope of hypnotising himself (as it were) into that percep- tion of their identity, which is his (partial and incorrect) idea of how things look from Kether. 126