Magick in Theory and Practice (Section 3)

torn asunder by the Maenads of his insensate impulses ; he hath no safety save he himself be Bacchus! Bacchus, divine and human! Bacchus, begotten on Semelé of Zeus, the adulterous Lord of 1 hunder ravishing, brutally, his virginal victim ! Bacchus, babe hidden from hâte in the most holy of holies, the secret of thy sire, in the Channel of the Star-Spate, Whereof one Serpent is thy Soûl! Bacchus, twy-formed, man-woman, Bacchus, whose inno¬ cence tames the Figer, while yet thy horns drip blood upon thy mouth, and sharpen the merriment of wine to the madness of murder! Bacchus, Thy thyrsus oozes sap; thine ivy clings to it; thY Lion-skin slips from thy sleek shoulders, slips from thy lissome ioins; drunk on delight of the godly grape, thou knowest no more the burden o£ the body and the vexation of the spirit. Corne, Bacchus, corne thou hither, corne out of the East; corne out of the East, astride the Ass of Priapus! Corne with thy revel of dancers and singers! Who followeth thee, forbearing to laugh and to leap? Corne, in thy name Dionysus, that maidens be mated to God-head! Corne, in thy name Iacchus, with thy mystical fan to winnow the air, each gust of thy Spirit inspiring our Soûl, that we bear to thee Sons in Thine Image! Verily and Amen! Let not the Magician forget for a single second what is his one sole business. His uninitiated “self” (as he absurdly thinks it) is a mob of wild women, hysterical from uncomprehended and unsated animal instinct ; they will tear Pentheus, the merely human king who présumés to repress them, into mere shreds of flesh; his own mother, Nature, the first to claw at his windpipe! None but Bacchus, the Holy Guardian Angel, hath grâce to be God to this riot of maniacs; he alone can transform the disorderly rabble into a pageant of harmonious movements, tune their hyaena howls to the symphony of a paean, and their reasonless rage to self-controlled rapture. It is this Angel whose nature is doubly double, that He may partake of every sacrament. He is at once a God who is drunken with the wine of earth, and the mammal who quaffs the Blood of God to purge him of mortality. He is a woman as he accepts ail impulses, are they not His? He is a man to stamp Himself upon whatever would hallow itself to Him. He wieJds the Wand, — 263 —-