Confessions of Aleister Crowley

276 There is an idol in my house By whom the sandal always steams. Alone, I make a black carouse With her to dominate my dreams. With skulls and knives she keeps control (O Mother Kali!) of my soul. She is crowned with emeralds like leaves, and rubies flame from either eye; A rose upon her bosom heaves, Turquois and Lapis Lazuli. She hath a kirtle like a maid --- Amethyst, amber, pearl, and jade! This poem is important as foreshadowing my final solution of the problem of evil and sorrow, the interpretation of illusion by the initiate and its transmutation into truth. I saw as usual a good deal of Thornton. One morning, driving down the Maidan in his tum-tum, I said, "I cannot formulate a plan of action of any kind because there is no true continuity in phenomena." He turned on my quite simply, and said, "Quite so, but there is equally no continuity in yourself." That, of course, was no news to me. It was Hume's answer to Berkeley, for one thing. It was the essence ofSakkaya-Ditthi, for another. The ground was cut away from under my feet. At the moment, my consciousness failed to pick up the full purport of this proposition, for I found myself suddenly forced into action by a set of circumstances of which I had no control, and which bore no relation to any past purpose of my life. But I believe they were arranged for me by the Secret Chiefs. My wife was due to arrive with the baby on the twenty-ninth and the natural thing would have been to see a little of Calcutta society, especially as I was naturally a bit of a lion, and then stroll across Asia somewhere, at our leisure. The Secret Chiefs arranged for me to be in a situation where I was at their mercy. They meant to initiate me whether I liked it or not. And this is how they went to work. I set forth after dinner, one fate-fraught night, to try to get unguided to a street of infamy called "Culinga Bazar" from the corner of the Maidan. It was a worthy feat to attempt; for I had been to the Bazar only once before, in 1901; and then I had been driven to it in the dark from afar distant part of Calcutta. The night was extremely dark; the streets were lighted only by the flares and fireworks of the native festival --- the Durga-Puja --- which was in {453} course, and all semblance of honesty or decency quitted the houses before I had advanced three minutes into the bowels of Calcutta. As I did so, my savage instincts surged to my brain. I "smelt" the direction almost at once; and as I got into this state, I became aware of impending trouble of some sort, as savages are. That "eerie feeling", alone in a desperate section of a foreign city at night? Nine to one it is plain funk. But as I had already admitted, I am the biggest coward alive; and I have constantly forced myself to face my fear. So not I was not tingling with the pleasurable sense of confronting the unknown; I had the definite sense of being trailed. The sensation angered me; I tried to ascribe it to imagination. I forgot it and I went my way. Presently, however, I turned aside for a moment from the dim street I was treading into an alley guarded by a black archway. I had no idea where it might lead; I simply wished to withdraw from the observation of my fellows for a few seconds, for reasons which are fully described and justified in Carpenter's Physiology.