1909 · PDF PAGE 3
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK: ! AND?
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Page 1 of 11909 · PDF PAGE 5
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK: ! AND? “Expect seven misfortunes from the cripple, and forty-two from the one-eyed man; but when the hunchback comes, say ‘Allah our aid.’” ARAB PROVERB. I Inquiry. Let us inquire in the first place: What is Scep- ticism? The word means looking, questioning, investigating. One must pass by contemptuously the Christian liar’s gloss which interprets “ sceptic” as “ mocker” ; though in a sense it is true for him, since to inquire into Christianity is assuredly to mock at it ; but I am concerned to intensify the etymo…
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1909 · PDF PAGE 19
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK This man performs great magic; very strong medicine. He does really find gold on the midden and skeletons in pretty girls. In Abiegnus the Sacred Mountain of the Rosicrucians the Postulant finds but a coffin in the central shrine; yet that coffin contains Christian Rosencreutz who is dead and is alive for evermore and hath the keys of Hell and of Death. Ay! your Tiphereth man, child of Mercy and Justice, looks deeper than the skin! But he seems a ridiculous object enough both to the Malkuth man and to the Kether ma…
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1909 · PDF PAGE 27
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son that He receiveth.” I shall really be glad if a few of you will get it over, and come and sit on daddy’s knee! The first step is the hardest; make 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 solitud…
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1909 · PDF PAGE 20
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
…nite Light, and Space, and Nothing. So then we retire up the path, fighting 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 i…
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1909 · PDF PAGE 17
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK the Academic Scepticism is a wholesale firm, I hope !—and practically, I challenge you to draw valid distinctions. All these are states of the consciousness of man; and if you seek to destroy one, all fall together. VII I must, at the risk of appearing to digress, insist upon this distinction between philosophical and practical points of view, or (in Qabalistic language) between Kether and Malkuth. In private conversation I find it hard—almost impossible— to get people to understand what seems to me so very simple …
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1909 · PDF PAGE 11
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK Vv We are of course no happier when we examine the Many, separately or together. They converge and diverge, each fresh hill-top of knowledge disclosing a vast land unexplored ; each gain of power in our telescopes opening out new galaxies ; each improvement in our microscopes showing us life minuter and more incomprehensible. A mystery of the mighty spaces between molecules ; a mystery of the ether-cushions that fend off the stars from collision! A mystery of the fulness of things ; a mystery of the emptiness of th…
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1909 · PDF PAGE 7
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK ence? Experience is impossible without memory. What is memory? The mortar of the temple of the ego, whose bricks are the impressions. And the ego? The sum of our experience, may be. (I doubt it!) Anyhow, we have got values of y and g for x, and values of ¥ and zg for y—all our equations are indeterminate; all our knowledge is relative, even in a narrower sense than is usually implied by the statement. Under the whip of the clown God, our performing donkeys the philosophers and men of science run round and round in …
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1909 · PDF PAGE 9
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK What is Existence? The question is so fundamental that it finds no answer. The most profound meditation only leads to an exasperating sense of impotence. There is, it seems, no simple rational idea in the mind which corresponds to the word. It is easy of course to drown the question in definitions, leading us to further complexity—but “ Existence is the gift of Divine Providence,” “ Existence is the opposite of Non-Existence,” do not help us much ! The plain Existence is Existence of the Hebrews goes farther. It is…
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1909 · PDF PAGE 13
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK to pieces our tower of thought, but rooted up the foundation- stone and ground it into finer and more poisonous powder than that into which Moses ground the calf. These golden Elohim! Our calf-heads that brought us not out of Egypt, but into a darkness deeper and more tangible than any darkness of the double Empire of Asar. Hume put his little ? to Berkeley's God-!; Buddha his ? to the Vedic Atman-!—and neither Hume nor Buddha was baulked of his reward. Ourselves may put? to our own? since we have found no ! to put…
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1909 · PDF PAGE 15
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK in Gibraltar—back to Dorothy at the earliest possible moment. Sandwiches of bun and German sausage may be vulgar and even imaginary—it’s the taste I like. And the more I munch, the more complacent I feel, until I go so far as to offer my critics a bite. This sounds in a way like the “ Interior Certainty ” of the common or garden Christian; but there are differences. The Christian insists on notorious lies being accepted as an essential part of his (more usually her) system; I, on the contrary, ask for facts, for ob…
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1909 · PDF PAGE 14
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
…as if we knew all about Evolution, and Mathematics, and His- tory? Complex and unscientific studies, mere straws before the blast of our hunchback friend! Well, one of the buttresses is just the small matter of common sense. The other day I was with Dorothy, and, as I foolishly imagined, very cosy: for her sandwiches are celebrated. It was surely bad taste on the part of Father Bernard Vaughan, and Dr. Torrey, and Ananda Metteyya, and Mr. G. W. Foote, and Captain Fuller, and the ghost of Immanuel Kant, and Mr. Bernard Shaw, and young Neuburg, t…
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1909 · PDF PAGE 21
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK But McCabbage is wasted on the philosopher whose belief in a soul rests on introspection ; we must have heavier metal ; Hume will serve our turn, may be. But Hume in his turn becomes perfectly futile, pitted against the Hindu mystic, who is in constant intense enjoy- ment of his new-found Atman. It takes a Buddha-gun to knock 47s castle down. Now the ideas of McCabbage are banal and dull; those of Hume are live and virile; there is ajoy in them greater than the joy of the Man in the Street. So too the Buddha-though…
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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…
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1909 · PDF PAGE 25
The Soldier and the Hunchback ! and ?
THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK fear was the passing spasm of an hour; the magnetism of the path itself was the true lure. It is as foolish to ask me “ Why do you adep ?” as to ask God “‘ Why do you pardon?” Crest son métier. I am not so foolish as to think that my doctrine can ever gain the ear of the world. I expect that ten centuries hence the “nominal Crowleians” will be as pestilent and numerous a body as the “nominal Christians” are to-day; for (at present)I have been able to devise no mechanism for excluding them. Rather, perhaps, should I…
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