The Equinox (Volume I, Number I)

THE ACOLYTE BEFORE we enter upon the events of the Great Journey of Frater P., during which for six years he voyaged over the face of the globe in quest of the mystic knowledge of all nations, it will be necessary here to recount, briefly though it may be, the circumstances which led up to his entering into communi- cation with the Order of A.°. A.°. Born of an ancient family, but a few days after the fifty- sixth Equinox before the Equinox of the Gods, he was reared and educated in the faith of Christ as taught by one of the strictest sects of the many factions of the Christian Church, and scarcely had he learnt to lisp the simplest syllables of childhood than his martyrdom began. From infancy he struggled through the chill darkness of his surroundings into boyhood, and as he grew and throve, so did the iniquity of that unnatural treatment which with lavish and cruel hand was squandered on him. Then youth came, and with it God’s name had grown to bea curse, and the form of Jesus stood forth in the gloom of Golgotha, a chill and hideous horror which vampire-like had sucked dry the joy of his boyhood; when suddenly one summer night he broke away from the ghouls that had tormented him, casting aside the sordid conventions of life, defying the laws of his 231