THE EQUINOX
Together for many months we studied and practised
Ceremonial Magic, and ransacked the ancient books and MSS.
of the reputed sages for a key to the great mysteries of life
and death. Not even fiction was neglected, and it was from
fiction that we gathered one tiny seed-fact, which (in all these
years) has germinated to the present essay.
Through the ages we found this one constant story.
Stripped of its local and chronological accidents, it usually
came to this—the writer would tell of a young man, a seeker
after the Hidden Wisdom, who, in one circumstance or
another, meets an adept; who, after sundry ordeals, obtains
from the said adept, for good or ill, a certain mysterious drug
or potion, with the result (at least) of opening the gate of the
Other-world. This potion was identified with the Elixir Vite
of the physical Alchemists, or one of their “ Tinctures,” most
likely the “White Tincture” which transforms the base metal
(normal perception of life) to silver (poetic conception), and we
sought it by fruitless attempts to poison ourselves with every
drug in (and out of) the Pharmacopceia.
Like Huckleberry Finn’s prayer, nuffin’ come of it.
I must now, like the Baker, skip forty years, or rather
eight, and reach a point where my travels in India had
familiarised me with their systems of meditation and with
the fact that many of the lesser Yogis employed hashish
(whether vainly or no we shall discuss later) to obtain
Samadhi, that oneness with the Universe, or with the
Nothingness, which is the feeble expression by which alone
we can shadow that supreme trance. I had also the advan-
tage of falling across Ludlow’s book, and was struck by the
circumstance that he, obviously ignorant of Vedantist and
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