THE BIG STICK
he is so keen to find proof of Egyptian antiquity in everything. On p. 228 he
quotes as an example of original sign-language that he “watched with interest
our bluejackets leaning over the side of a man-of-war talking to one another”
by means of their hands and fingers. Of course what they are really doing is
semaphore signalling without flags after the official signalling with flags has
ceased.
In spite of these small over-eagernesses, this book is a revolutionary volume,
a work that should stimulate argument and comment; and we hope that it will
induce others to collect and discover the secrets of the past before they are
devoured by our Minotaurean Civilization. It is a melancholy fact that though
amongst the rudest of rude savages secrets have been kept and great systems
maintained for hundreds of thousands of years, the “clever” children of the
present with all their arts and crafts are only destroyers of the past. We defame
antiquity, annihilate those who still venerate it—mentally we destroy their minds
with a corrupt and idolatrous Christianity, a veritable haggis of guts and blood,
and their bodies with gunpowder and loathsome diseases. In a few years all will
have gone; but (say you?) all will be saved, stored in our libraries and museums,
But, we answer, even these in a few centuries will be dust and ashes; the very
paper of this book which we are reviewing, beautiful though it be, will, like a
girl’s beauty, vanish before forty years are past. Our inventions are our curse,
they are our destruction. What was coagulated in the minds of barbarians for
thousands and tens of thousands of years we shall have destroyed utterly,
utterly, in as many days and nights. Civilization has driven her plough over
Stellar and Solar mythology, wantonly, and at haphazard, and in their place she
has cultivated the Unknowable and Andrew Lang!
If the Utilitarian progress in the next few years as he has in the last, soon
we shall have some socialistic fellah depriving the world of its last great monu-
ments, and building labourers’ cottages out of the stones and bricks of the
Pyramids, because they are so very much more useful. “Solve” is the cry
to-day; the Sabbatic finger of the Goat points upwards, yet on the clouds of
darkness does it scrawl a sigil of light. A new God stirs in the Womb of its
Mother; we can see his form, dim and red, in the cavern of Time. Dare we
pronounce his name? Yea! It is Horus, Horus the Child, reborn Amsu the
Good Shepherd, who will lead us out of the sheepish stupidity of to-day. How
many understand this mystery? Perhaps none save those who have seen and
subscribed to the Law of Thelema, LECF.
THE LosT VALLEY. By ALGERNON BLACKWOOD. Nash. 6s.
It is the penalty of factitious success that the need of fuel increases like the
dose ofa drug-fiend. Instead of clothing his wit with silk from the loom of life
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