The Law is for All

Chapter III & Verse 19 159 I found XAIPE A/.A.-., 718, “Hail to the A.-.A.-..” I grace­ fully acknowledged the greeting to Our Holy Order, but went on with my search. There is no such word as AXPIETA,1 “unchristlike things”; only blind bigotry could be satisfied with so crude an invention. 1 [The ST has the numeration 6.] Then came XAPATH, 713, an “engraved character.” That was a true name for the Stèle; if I suffixed AA, 5, it might read “The Mark of Hadit.” But I did not feel inwardly that thrill of ecstasy that springs in the heart or that dawn of amaze­ ment that kindles the mind, when Truth’s sheer simplicity takes form. There is a definite psychological phenomenon which accompanies any important discovery. It is like First Love, at First Sight, to the one; like the recognition of a Law of Nature, to the other. It inflames one with Love for the Uni­ verse, and it explains all its puzzles, in a flash; and it gives an interior conviction which nothing can shake, a living cer­ tainty quite beyond one’s argued acquiescence in any newly acquired facts. I lacked this; I knew that I had to seek further. The Truth uttered by Aiwaz is hidden with such exquisite art that it is always easy to wring out a more or less plausible meaning by torture. Yet all such learned and ingenious fumblings reveal their own impotence; the Right Key opens the safe in a sec­ ond, so simply and smoothly as to make it ridiculous to doubt that the lock was made by a master smith to respond to that key and no other. The reader will have noticed that all the really important correspondences in this Book are so simple that a child might understand them. There are also my own creaking and lum­ bering scholar-dredgers, not one of which is truly illuminat­ ing or even convincing. The real solutions, moreover, are almost always confirmed by other parts of the text, or by events subsequent to the Writing of the Book. I worked on: I asked myself for the thousandth time what the Stèle could claim with literal strictness as “its name.” I scribbled the word ETHAH and added it up. The result is 546, when ET counts as 500, or 52, when ET is 6, a frequent usage, as in ETATPOE, whose number is thus 777. Idly enough, my tired pen subtracted 52 from 718. I started up like a Magician who, conjuring Satan in vain till