Thelema ScholarTHE ALEISTER CROWLEY COLLECTION
FOLLOW A WORD THROUGH THE COLLECTION

Search the corpus.

Phrase search ignores case and repeated whitespace. All-words search finds whole words anywhere on the same page. OCR errors can affect results.

7 matching pages

Page 1 of 1
1909 · PDF PAGE 20

The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?

…rear-guard actions ; at every moment a soldier is slain by a hunchback; but as we retire there is always a soldier just by us. Until the end. The end? Buddha thought the supply of hunchbacks infinite ; but why should not the soldiers them- selves be infinite in number? However that may be, here is the point; it takes a moment for a hunchback to kill his man, and the farther we get from our base the longer it takes. You may crumble to ashes the dream-world of a boy, as it were, between your fingers; but before you can bring the physical universe…

original embedded textRead original & transcription →
1909 · PDF PAGE 22

The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?

THE EQUINOX are unfavourably placed to observe this, desperately clinging as we are to the bob of the pendulum, sick with our senseless swinging to and fro in the abyss ! We must climb up the shaft to reach that point—but— wait one moment! How obscure and subtle has our simile become! Can we attach any true meaning to the phrase? I doubt it, seeing what we have taken for the limits of the swing. True, it may be that at the end the swing is always 360° so that the !-point and the ?-point coincide; but that is not the same thing as having no swin…

original embedded textRead original & transcription →
1909 · PDF PAGE 12

The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?

… as meaningless as any other. Who are we, then? We are Spencerian Agnostics, poor silly, damned Spen- cerian Agnostics ! And there is an end of the matter. VI It is surely time that we began to question the validity of some of our data. So far our scepticism has not only knocked 120

original embedded textRead original & transcription →
1909 · PDF PAGE 16

The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?

…atter as a boiling-point determination! —and as for his (usually her) future, I content myself with mere common sense about the probable end of a fool. So that after all I keep my scepticism intact—and I keep my Samadhi intact. The one balances the other; I care nothing for the vulgar brawling of these two varlets of my mind! . Vil If, however, you would really like to know what might be said on the soldierly side of the question, I shall endeavour to oblige. It is necessary if a question is to be intelligibly put that the querent should be on …

original embedded textRead original & transcription →
1909 · PDF PAGE 27

The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?

…a start, and I will soon set the hunchback lion and the soldier unicorn fighting for your crown. And they shall lie down together at the end, equally glad, equally weary; while sole and sublime that crown of thine (brother !) shall glitter in the frosty Void of the abyss, its twelve stars filling that silence and solitude with a music and a motion that are more silent and more still than they; thou shalt sit throned on the Invisible, thine eyes fixed upon That which we call Nothing, because it is beyond Everything attainable by thought, or tran…

original embedded textRead original & transcription →
1909 · PDF PAGE 14

The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?

THE EQUINOX out works is dead,” so, good friends, Samadhi is all humbug unless the practitioner shows the glint of its gold in his work in the world. If your mystic becomes Dante, well; if Tennyson, a fig for his trances! But how does this tower of Samadhi stand the assault of Question-time? Is not the idea of Samadhi just as dependent on all the other ideas—man, time, being, thought, logic? If I seek to explain Samadhi by analogy, am I not often found talking as if we knew all about Evolution, and Mathematics, and His- tory? Complex and unscie…

original embedded textRead original & transcription →
1909 · PDF PAGE 23

The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?

THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK Little brother, he says, let us rather consider that as the pendulum swings more and more slowly every time, it must ultimately stop, as soon as the shaft is of infinite length. Good! then it isn’t a pendulum at all but a Mahalingam— The Mahalingam of Shiva (amo Shivaya namaha Aum !) which is all I ever thought it was; all you have to do is to keep swinging hard—I know it’s hook-swinging!—and you get there in the End. Why trouble to swing? First, because you're bound to swing, whether you like it or not; second, be…

original embedded textRead original & transcription →