The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

DEAD WEIGHT since. He had wished to go down to posterity as the modern Fludd—and would have done so, only this time there were not eight persons saved. However, this was not the worst. The future saint (as it was written that he should become!) made incursions upon Magic, with the unhappiest results. Fundamentally incom- petent to apprehend the very nature of the question, and utterly incapable of humour, the ingenious Lévi pulled his leg to the limit. The future saint! could see only contradictions in the profundities of the master, and in complaining that Lévi was always “‘ stultifying himself” (when he was merely indulging the irony of which he was one of the most brilliant exponents that have ever lived), branded stultus, stultioy, stultissimus upon his own marmorean brow. He could not even be trusted with a text. His Book of Black Magic and of Pacts was not only a monument of misunderstanding, but of garbling and mutilation; nor did the future saint! improve matters by the dishonest trick of reissuing the volume as the Book of Ceremonial Magic, or Book of Magic, when he tried to make a market in the more benighted agricultural districts of England. His method of throwing mud at masters naturally resulted in the gate of every occult sanctuary being slammed in his face. The future saint! obtained admission (it is true) to the pseudo-Rosicrucian order of Mathers, but on that order passing, as it did for a week or so, into the control of an honest man, that honest man’s first act was to expel the aforesaid Waite with ignominy. Thus excluded, the future saint1 could find no better device than to proclaim himself its head. With- 1 As will presently appear, he became such. (Gloria Crowleiae! 215