The Equinox (Volume I, Number VI)

THE RITE OF SATURN And now at last authentic word I bring, Witnessed by every dead and living thing ; Good tidings of great joy for you, {or all : There is no God ; no Fiend with names divine Made us and tortures us ; if we must pine, It is to satiate no Being’s gall. It was the dark delusion ofa dream, That living Person conscious and supreme, Whom we must curse for cursing us with life; Whom we must curse because the life He gave Could not be buried in the quiet grave, Could not he killed by poison or by knife. This little life is all we must endure, The grave’s most holy peace is ever sure, We fall asleep and never wake again ; Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh, Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh In earth, air, water, plants, and other men. We finish thus ; and all our wretched race Shall finish with its Cycle, and give place To other beings, with their own time-doom Infinite aeons ere our kind began ; Infinite æons after the last man Has joined the mammoth in earth’s tomb and womb. We bow down to the universal laws, Which never had for man a special clause Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate : If toads and vultures are obscene to sight, If tigers burn with beauty and with might, Is it by favour or by wrath of fate ? All substance lives and struggles evermore Through countless shapes continually at war, By countless interactions interknit: If one is born acertain day on earth, All times and forces tended to that birth, Not all the world could change or hinder it. Ι7