The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

THE EQUINOX with Livingstone and Gordon, Havelock and Nicholson, than damned with Charles Watts and John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart Doctor in Letters Fellow and Lecturer Of Trinity College In Cambridge, and Fellow Of the Berritish Ac—ad—em—y,. I wonder, by the way, whether “letters” isn’t a {misprint. If not, did he really qualify at the Sorbonne ? ALEISTER CROWLEY. THE ARCANE SCHOOLS. By JOHN YARKER. William Tait, 3 Wellington Park Avenue, Belfast. 12s. net. The reader of this treatise is at first overwhelmed by the immensity of Brother Yarker’s erudition. He seems to have examined and quoted every document that ever existed. It is true that he occasionally refers to people like Hargrave Jennings, A. E, Waite, and H. P. Blavatsky as if they were authorities; but whoso fishes with a net of so wide a sweep as Brother Yarker’s must expect to pull in some worthless fish. This accounts for Waite’s contempt of him; imagine Walford Bodie reviewing a medical book which referred to him as an authority on paralysis ! The size of the book, too, is calculated to effray: reading it has cost me many pounds in gondolas! And it is the essential impossibility of all works of this kind that artistic treatment is not to be attained. But Brother Yarker has nobly suppressed a Spencerian tendency to ramble; he has written with insight, avoided pedantry, and made the dreary fields of archeology blossom with flowers of interest. Accordingly, we must give him the highest praise, for he has made the best possible out of what was nearly the worst possible. He has abundantly proved his main point, the true antiquity of some Masonic system. It is a parallel to Frazer’s tracing of the history of the Slain God. But why is there no life in any of our Slain God rituals? It is for us to restore them by the Word and the Grip. For us, who have the inner knowledge, inherited or won, it remains to restore the true rites of Attis, Adonis, Osiris, of Set, Serapis, Mithras, and Abel. ALEISTER CROWLEY. 240