The Star in the West

THE OLD BOTTLE 155 The limbs of agony about the trunk Of torture-rapture stabbing through-Maurya ! Ay , that was I ; and I the weeping wolf That howls about this hell that is my heart ; And I the icy and intangible That beholds all , and is not. ? Looking into the crystal globe he sees the future two thousand years after the horrid murder . The deed has thriven into a religion , and the victim into a god . As it was in the beginning , is now , and ever shall be : world without end .? mutters Rupha the hag of eternity , as Criosda falls dead before the mummy of the murdered girl , his sister Maurya : Murder a mode And love a mode of the unknown that is , That not thyself nor I can ever see.3 A fitting cry indeed to herald us into the pustulous domains of Jahveh and his murdered Son . In dealing with the Christian faith , Aleister Crowley by no means goes simply baldheaded for it like the unread secularist of the sixpenny platform ; for, we find a distinct growth from a reverential regard towards its founder , to a satirical disregard for him , and his final dismissal in a jest . Such a mental pro gression is only natural ; from the sublime irrationality of a de Kempis the student will almost inevitably , even unwittingly , pass through the adulations of a 1 The God - Eater , vol . ii, p . 137 . Ibid . vol . ii, p . 139 . 3 Ibid . vol . ii, p . 138. The gods of the ancients were all immolaters of men , and loved blood . Moloch only differed from Jahveh by lack of orthodoxy , and the god of Jephthah had similar mysteries to those of Belus .