The Law is for All

140 The Law is for All red and warm as the sunset, and her life of a white heat like the heat of the midmost sun. 14. Then rose she up from the abyss of Ages of Sleep, and her body embraced me. Altogether I melted into her beauty and was glad. 15. The river also became the river of Amrit, and the little boat was the chariot of the flesh, and the sails thereof the blood of the heart that beareth me, that beareth me.1 1 “Liber LXV,” 11:7-15. 2 [Hippomanes in classical Greece (Grk., imTop.ai>eg) had two forms, both reputed aphrodisiacs: a black caul found on the forehead of new­ born foals and (as Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon puts it) “a mucous humor that runs from mares a-horsing.” Hippomenes is Atal- anta’s pursuing lover in Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (1617).] 3 [An extinct volcano near Mexico City that Crowley climbed in 1901.] We therefore train our adepts to make the Gold Philosophical from the dung of witches, and the Elixir of Life from Hip­ pomanes;1 2 but we do not advocate ostentatious addiction to these operations. It is good to know that one is man enough to spend a month or so at a height of twenty thousand feet or more above the sea-level; but it would be unpardonably foolish to live there permanently. This illustrates one case of a general principle. We consider the Attainment of various Illuminations, incomparably glorious as that is, of chief value for its witness to our possession of the fac­ ulty which made success possible. To have climbed alone to the summit of Iztaccihuatl3 is great and grand; but the essence of one’s joy is that one possesses the courage, knowledge, agility, endurance, and self-mastery necessary to have done it. The Goal is ineffably worth all our pains, as we say to our­ selves at first; but in a little while are aware that even that Goal is less intoxicating than the Way itself. We find that it matters little whither we go; the Going itself is our gladness. I quote in this connection “Liber LXV,” 11:17-25, one of several similar passages in Our Holy Books. 17. Also the Holy One came upon me, and I beheld a white swan floating in the blue.