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Page 110 of 1151929 · PDF PAGE 365
…s it annoys an electrician to find that his current is escaping, perhaps giving shocks to people who have strayed in its path. His first thought is to detect and correct the imperfection of his insulation. Years had passed without my magical energy breaking loose: I had persuaded it to work through the proper channels. Carelessness showed itself once more in Shanghai. I was invoking certain forces with Soror F. in her circle. After I had constrained them to come, I proceeded to make a circumambulation with the object of giving them the desired …
1929 · PDF PAGE 515
… in Calcutta. I was thus able to observe the events of what was probably not more than five seconds as if it had been as many minutes. I thought the phenomenon of sufficient interest to record; and wrote a brief description to the New York Times. The result was surprising. I found myself inundated with letters of inquiry from so many electrical students that I had at last to have an account multigraphed to send out. I had supposed that globular electricity was a well-known and undoubted, if rare, phenomenon, and was amazed to learn that until t…
1929 · PDF PAGE 119
…d, laughing and joking, and throwing their money about, and all the time ninety per cent feel a sinking in the pit of the stomach as the thought hammers persistently at the back of their brains, "How shall I pay my bill?" at the best; and, overshadowing lesser worries, "What about when my luck turns?" "When will my own confidence in the imbecility of my fellow men be enlightened by their robbing me of the stake I risked, my liberty?" A delicious ride by electric tram from the city beings one to Tacubaya, a luxurious pleasure resort with a big c…
1929 · PDF PAGE 175
…ne day he was sent two pounds and proceeded to the tuck-shop, where one could buy a very generously estimated ice-cream for sixpence. We thought to share in the bounty; but Adams said no with truly Roman fortitude and tortured us by consuming the whole four score icecreams himself.
1929 · PDF PAGE 217
… there prestige by insisting on her remarriage. The story awakened my Shelleyan indignation. We sat down on the links in silence while I thought out the situation. The solution was perfectly simple. "Don't upset yourself about such a trifle," said I, and told her something of my spiritual state and my plans for the future. "All you have to do," I said, "is marry me. I will go back to Boleskine and you need never hear of me again --- unless," I added with romantic grandiloquence, "I can be of any further assistance to you. That will knock your m…
1905 · PDF PAGE 231
…f truth.” Now, regarded in this light, all religions, qua religions, are equally contemptible. The Hindu Gnanis ® say ‘That which can be thought is not true.’ As machineries for the exercise of spiritual and intellectual powers innate or developed, certain sets of symbols may be more or less convenient to a special trend of mind, reason, or imagination; no more: I deny to any one religion the possession of any essential truth which is not also formulated (though in a different language) in every other. To this rule Buddhism appears a solitary e…
1929 · PDF PAGE 113
…rely that one defiles the mind by inflicting upon it slipshod and inaccurate English, shallow, commonplace, vulgar, hasty and prejudiced thought, and deliberate dissipation. Apart from these positive pollutions, there is the negative effect. To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The natural laziness of the mind tempts one to eschew authors who demand a continuous effort of intelligence. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter. {201} People tell…
1929 · PDF PAGE 150
…ilosophical speculation. Before I had been in the house three days, a curious incident occurred. I am always absent-minded. A current of thought flows through the back of {259} my brain quite independent of what I am consciously doing. I might even say that the above statement is incorrect. Most of the time I am more conscious of what I am thinking than of what I am saying and doing. Now there was an animated conversation at dinner about the absurdity of the native mind; the curious ideas that they got into their heads; and I "awoke" to hear so…
1929 · PDF PAGE 530
… one thing, my protection against mosquitoes had worn off. I spent a night motionless, offering my body to them and concentrating on the thought that they were equally divine with myself. I forced myself to love them, so that in union with them the apparent differences between us might vanish in ecstasy. I compelled my body to accept, to welcome and even to long for their bites, as being acts of love whereby I nourished their lives. In the morning, though badly bitten all over, there was no inflammation whatever; and from that time on they neve…
1929 · PDF PAGE 246
…sed my official titles and position without emphasis, very much as a peer takes advantage of his social privileges without ever giving a thought to the Hose of Lords as a political institution. On July 28th my wife gave birth to a girl, called Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith. Nuit was given in homage to our Lady of the Stars; Ma, goddess of Justice, because the sign of Libra was rising; Ahathoor, goddess of Love and Beauty, because Venus rules Libra; I'm not sure abut the name Hecate, but it may have been as a compliment to the in…
1929 · PDF PAGE 251
… new species. After the '45 the British had pursued the same policy of extermination --- I mean pacification --- in the Highlands, and I thought it plausible to invent a wild sheep on the analogy of the wild buffalo. And more, the beast should be already famous. I described its rarity, its shyness, its ferocity, etc., etc. --- "You have doubtless heard of it," I ended; "it is called the haggis." My '52 Johannesburg completed that part of the "come-on". Tartarin dreamt all night of scaling a lonely and precipitous pinnacle and dragging a lordly …
1929 · PDF PAGE 81
…mpt anything beyond his powers; and I never knew him in want of anything from lack of foresight. He had a remarkable sense of direction, thought inferior to my own. But his was based upon rational considerations, that is to say, he could deduce where north was from calculations connected with geology, wind and the law of probabilities; whereas my own finer sense was purely psychical and depended upon the subconscious registration in my brain as to the angles through which my body had turned during the day. One point, however, is not covered by …
1929 · PDF PAGE 479
…ed at the perpetuation of bad feeling. Indeed, I saw little in London to remind me that there had ever been a war. Was there one man who thought that it might still pay to work upon the baser passions of the mob? It seemed so: it was Christmas; there was a man who made a two-page splash about abolishing the wicked German Santa Claus!1 No! I was again in error. I must have misinterpreted the motives. The man was that great soul, the Patriot Bottomley! Such a man would doubtless be as difficult to understand as others had found me. He must have h…
1929 · PDF PAGE 80
…reconciliation was not written! My letter miscarried; and in the autumn, when he passed me in Bond Street, I happened not to see him; he thought I meant to cut him and our destinies drew apart. It has been my lifelong regret, for a nobler and purer comradeship never existed on this earth, and his influence might have done much to temper my subsequent trials. Nevertheless, the fragrance of that friendship still lingers in the sanctuary of my soul. That eucharist of the spirit reminds me constantly that the one ingredient necessary to my aestheti…
1929 · PDF PAGE 333
…he magical hierarchy in general. In a spirit of mischief I sent him a typescript of The Book of the Law and asked him to tell me what he thought of it. I wanted to disgust him with myself; I wanted him to class me finally as a hopeless crank. His answer came in the course of two or three days: I could not believe my eyes. This, he wrote, is the utterance of a Master. What did he know about Masters, confound him! It was as if I had sent a copy of Tit-Bits to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he had reverently pronounced it to be the authentic Lo…
1929 · PDF PAGE 580
…Sullivan should devote his mathematical abilities to demonstrating the sublimity of the origin of The Book of the Law having failed, I bethought me of Norman Mudd. Since the skirmish at Cambridge, he had sunk below the horizon, having emigrated to the most barbarous and benighted realms of perdition; he had in fact become lecturer in applied mathematics at Grey University College, Bloemfontein. All these years, his conscience had never ceased to accuse him in respect of his conduct at Cambridge. He thought of it as the "great betrayal". For my …
1929 · PDF PAGE 223
…as pregnant; for I remember that our shooting expedition in Hambantota, in the south- eastern province of Ceylon, was faute de mieux. We thought we had better get back to Boleskine for the event; and yet we had to justify our journey by some definite accomplishment. So we left Colombo for Galle and thence up country. It is strange that I fail entirely to remember how we got to the jungle. But rough notes tell me that it was by coach, and that we left the base village in four bullock carts on Monday the fourteenth of December. I quote my entry o…
1929 · PDF PAGE 303
…vitable visit to the inevitable missionary. This specimen was more bigoted and less intelligent than any I had previously met. I had not thought this possible. Six missionaries in four years working in this populous city did one even claim more than four converts. They attributed their failure, of course, to the personal activity of the devil. It never occurred to them that there might be something wrong with their methods. Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to his opinio…
1929 · PDF PAGE 197
…, however, little doubt that he had fallen through rashly invoking the forces of The book of the Sacred Magick of Abra-Melin the Mage. I thought I would try the testimony of an independent observer. Among the English colony of Montparnasse was a youth named Haweis, son of the once celebrated H. R. Haweis of Music and Morals. He had been to Peterhouse and was now studying art, in which he has since achieved a certain delicate eminence. He went to see Mathers and came back very bored with a pompous disquisition on the ancient gods of Mexico. The …
1929 · PDF PAGE 257
…rst four stages have well-furnished dak baghlas. Unpleasant features of the journey are two: one, the rain, and the other the leeches. I thought I knew a bit about rain --- I didn't. At Akyab one puts one's head under water in the hope of getting out of the wet; at Darjeeling one's head is under water all the time. But on that ghastly ridge, I met a quality and quantity of bat weather that I had never dreamt of in my wildest nightmares. What follows sounds exaggerated. On getting into a dak baghla and standing stripped in front of a roaring fir…