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up to that moment concealed itself from me. It was an experience of horror and pain, combined 
with a certain ghostly terror, yet at the same time it was 
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1. There is a great deal more to this story; but I may not tell it --- yet.  
2. WEH Note: Remember, this was the 1890s, not the 1990s, when most 
people will be reading this copy.  
the key to the purest and holiest spiritual ecstasy that exists. At the time, I was not aware of the 
supreme importance of the matter. It seemed to me little more than a development of certain 
magical processes with which I was already familiar. It was an isolated experience, not repeated 
until exactly twelve months later, to the minute. But this second occasion quickened my spirit, 
always with the result of "loosening the girders of the soul", so that my animal nature stood rebuked 
and kept silence in the presence of the immanent divinity of the Holy Ghost; omnipotent, 
omniscient and omnipresent, yet blossoming in my soul as if the entire forces of the universe from 
all eternity were concentrated and made manifest in a single rose. 
The second event took place in October 1897. The occasion was an attack of illness. It was nothing 
very serious and I had long been accustomed to expect to die before I came of age. But for some 
reason or other I found myself forced to meditate upon the fact of mortality. It was impressed upon 
me that I hadn't a moment to lose. There was no fear of death or of a possible "hereafter"; but I was 
appalled by the idea of the futility of all human endeavour. Suppose, I said to myself, that I make a 
great success in diplomacy and become ambassador to Paris. There was no good in that --- I could 
not so much as remember the name of the ambassador a hundred years ago. Again, I wanted to be a 
great poet. Well, here I was in one of the two places in England that made a specialty of poets, yet 
only an insignificant fraction of the three thousand men in residence knew anything about so great a 
man as Aeschylus. I was not sufficiently enlightened to understand that the fame of the man had 
little or nothing to do with his real success, that the proof of his prowess lay in the invisible 
influence with he had had upon generations of men. My imagination went a step further. Suppose I 
did more than Caesar or Napoleon in one line, or than Homer and Shakespeare in the other --- my 
work would be automatically cancelled when the globe became uninhabitable for man. 
I did not go into a definite trance in this mediations; but a spiritual consciousness was born in me 
corresponding to that which characterizes the Vision of the Universal Sorrow, as I learnt to call it 
later on. In Buddhist phraesology, I perceived the First Noble Truth --- Sabbé Pi Dukkham --- 
everything is sorrow. But this perception was confined to the planes familiar to the normal human 
consciousness. The fatuity of any work based upon physical continuity was evident. But I had at this 
time no reason for supposing that the same criticism applied to any transcendental universe. I 
formulated my will somewhat as follows: "I must find a material in which to work which is immune 
from the forces of change." I suppose that I still accepted Christian metaphysics in some sense or 
another. I had been satisfied to escape from religion to the world. I now found that there was no 
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satisfaction here. I was not content to be annihilated. Spiritual facts were the only things worth 
while. Brain and body were valueless except as the instruments of the soul. 
The ordinary materialist usually fails to recognize that only spiritual affairs count for anything, even 
in the grossest concerns of life. The facts of a murder are nothing in themselves; they are only 
adduced in order to prove felonious intent. Material welfare is only important as assisting men 
towards a consciousness of satisfaction. 
From the nature of things, therefore, life is a sacrament; in other words, all our acts are magical 
acts. Our spiritual consciousness acts through the will and its instruments upon material objects, in 
order to produce changes which will result in the establishment of the new conditions of 
consciousness which we wish. That is the definition of Magick. The obvious example of such an 
operation in its most symbolic and ceremonial form is the Mass. The will of the priest transmutes a