Confessions of Aleister Crowley

515 unrippled sheen of the lake. Then the advance guard of the tempest, the hail and the rain splashed down in giant drops like bullets. Then came the berry purple of the cloud, and under it the wind lashed the lake into tempestuous froth so fiercely that no water remained visible. The storm struck deadly chill: and, having been reminded recently of the lurking malaria in my blood, I decided to put on dry clothes. {812} I must give a brief description of the construction of the cottage. It was of wood, built round a chimney stack and fireplace of brick. The main room faced the lake; and on the other side of the stack were a bedroom which I did not use and the kitchen. The main room, where I slept, being occupied by my guests, I had to take my dry clothes into the bedroom. This room had two small windows. I forget whether they were both closed; but if open, the slit was not more than two or three inches wide. There was a door, also closed, leading into the kitchen. The other door which led to the main room may possibly have been a little ajar. To put on my stockings, I sat down on a chair close to the brickwork of the chimney stack. As I bent down, I noticed, with what I can only describe as calm amazement, that a dazzling globe of electric fire, apparently between six and twelve inches in diameter, was stationary about six inches below and to the right of my right knee. As I looked at it, it exploded with a sharp report quite impossible to confuse with the continuous turmoil of the lightning, thunder and hail, or that of the lashed water and smashed wood which was creating a pandemonium outside the cottage. I felt a very slight shock in the middle of my right hand, which was closer to the globe than any other part of my body. I must emphasize that I was not in the slightest degree alarmed or otherwise mentally disturbed. It will be remembered that I had been struck by lightning on the Pillar Mountain many years earlier. I have always felt extreme oppression while an electrical storm is gathering and a corresponding exhilaration the moment it breaks. I have a powerful instinctive feeling that I am myself an wholly electrical phenomenon, and the wilder the storm, the more completely do I feel myself in my element. I am impelled to physical enthusiasm expressed in delightedly triumphant magical gestures and outbursts of ecstatically religious incantations. I am thrilled to the marrow by the mere full title of the Tarot Card called the Knight of Wands, "The Lord of the Flame and the Lightning, the King of the Spirits of Fire!" I want to shout aloud the superb Enochian invocation of that force. Something of that exaltation may be divined from the rhythm and swing of the lyric into which I have introduced this title: By the Brood of the Bysses of Brightening, whose ....God was my sire; By the Lord of the Flame and the Lightning, the King ....of the Spirits of Fire ... This spiritually sublime intensity does not in any way interfere with my intellectual activity. On the contrary, I become more alert than in almost any other conditions. It is as if the illumination of the flash interpenetrated my spirit, as if my mental faculties entered into enjoyment of their ideal nourishment and simulation thereby. {813} I was consequently in the best possible condition to observe. My perfectly impersonal interest, and of course my scientific training, stood me in excellent stead. My time sense was markedly altered, much as I have described in the account of the attack on me in Calcutta. I was thus able to observe the events of what was probably not more than five seconds as if it had been as many minutes. I thought the phenomenon of sufficient interest to record; and wrote a brief description to the New York Times. The result was surprising. I found myself inundated with letters of inquiry from so many electrical students that I had at last to have an account multigraphed to send out. I had supposed that globular electricity was a well-known and undoubted, if rare, phenomenon, and was amazed to learn that until then it had never been seen by any reliable and competent observer. I had quite an elaborate correspondence with with Professor Elihu Thompson, one of the greatest