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luminously in focus, I find it very hard to remember the order in which they occurred. There are, 
moreover, 
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curious contradictions in myself against which I seem always to be stumbling. For example, as late 
as 1894, I think it must be, I find myself writing hymns of quite acceptable piety. One was published 
in "The" "Christian;" it began: 
I am a blind man on a helmless ship 
Without a compass on a stormy sea. 
I cannot sink, for God will hold me up, etc. 
Again, I wrote a poem on the death of my Aunt Ada, which I thought good enough to include in my 
Songs of the Spirit, and is entirely irreproachable on the score of piety. It seems as if I possessed a 
theology of my own which was, to all intents and purposes, Christianity. My satanism did not 
interfere with it at all; I was trying to take the view that the Christianity of hypocrisy and cruelty 
was not true Christianity. I did not hate God or Christ, but merely the God and Christ of the people 
whom I hated. It was only when the development of my logical faculties supplied the demonstration 
that I was compelled to set myself in opposition to the Bible itself. It does not matter that the 
literature is sometimes magnificent and that in isolated passages the philosophy and ethics are 
admirable. The sum of the matter is that Judaism is a savage, and Christianity a fiendish, 
superstition. 
It is very strange that I should have had no inkling of my tendency to Mysticism and Magick by means 
of any definite experience. It is true that, from the beginning, I held the transcendental view of the 
universe, but there was nothing to back it up in the way of experience. Most children have a touch 
of poetry and believe in what I hate to call psychic phenomena, at least to the extent of fancying 
they see fairies or being scared of "bugges by night". But I, although consciously engaged in the 
battle with "principalities and powers", never had the slightest hallucination of sense or any 
tendency to imagine things ghostly. I might have had an ambition to see the devil and talk things 
over with him, but I should have expected such communication to be either perfectly material or 
perfectly intellectual. I had no idea of nuances. When I eventually learnt how to use my astral eyes 
and ears, there was no confusion; the other world had certain correspondences with our own, but it 
was perfectly distinct. I seem to have made a very determined effort to prevent the obliteration of 
my spiritual consciousness of the world beyond the veil by the ink of terrestrial experience. Then 
again, there are sudden outbreaks of a fully formed personality, in which I spoke with the assurance 
and authority of a man of fifty on subjects on which I had really no opinion at all in the ordinary 
sense of the word. 
There is one amazing incident; at the age of fourteen as near as I can remember. I must premise 
that I have always been exceptionally tenderhearted, except to tyrants, for whom I think no 
tortures bad enough. In 
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particular, I am uniformly kind to animals; no question of cruelty or sadism arises in the incident 
which I am about to narrate. 
I had been told "A cat has nine lives." I deduced that it must be practically impossible to kill a cat. 
As usual, I became full of ambition to perform the feat. (Observe that I took my information 
unquestioningly au pied de la lettre.) Perhaps through some analogy with the story of Hercules and 
the hydra, I got it into my head that the nine lives of the cat must be taken more or less 
simultaneously. I therefore caught a cat, and having administered a large dose of arsenic I 
chloroformed it, hanged it above the gas jet, stabbed it, cut its throat, smashed its skull and, when 
it had been pretty thoroughly burnt, drowned it and threw it out of the window that the fall might 
remove the ninth life. In fact, the operation was successful; I had killed the cat. I remember that all