The Star in the West

ducere by espermet EST, ne 194 THE STAR IN THE WEST escas istence ontologic fiction , whilst the second rises from fact ; both , para doxical as it may seem , are at one and the same time contradictory and identical , merging into a perfect unity, not in the realms of a spiritual or material monism , but in those of a Hylo -Idealistic philosophy , which is Agnostic, and from thence into a Self- Illum inism which baffles definition . For many centuries now , European thought has been labouring under the damnosa hereditas of fore gone conclusions . And as religion in the attempt to anthropomorphise power , through the medium of dialectic symbols , lost all footing and plunged head long into the pandemoniac majesty of Deity , so philo sophy , losing all grip of reality by clutching the illusive realism of its own creative faculties , was it self whirled into that furnace of hereditary prejudice , and educational bias , from out of which it has flowed a mass of molten and subservient acquiescence . Lost in the axiomatic whirlpools of egotistical conceit , it has been cast up once again on the shores of unknow able despair , a veritable mass of philosophic pig - iron , of no further use than that of acting as ballast to the good ship which is to carry us across the turbid ocean of raging Eclectics . Crowley is more than a new - born Dionysus , he is more than a Blake , a Rabelais or a Heine ; for he stands before us as some priest of Apollo , hovering ’ twixt the misty blue of the heavens , and the more certain purple of the vast waters of the deep . Before the name of That which is beyond life and death , beyond matter and energy , beyond the human and the mortal ; he stands , holding before us as a stan dard , the homologue of the Labarum of old , “ In