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Page 126 of 1291929 · PDF PAGE 514
…iking correlation between it and the vision just described. One morning I had started before dawn for the upper reaches of the lake. The day was breathlessly intense, the calm was somehow positive rather than negative, and seemed to conceal some huge menace. It was as if the heart of the world had stopped. I felt an indescribable awe, overwhelming in its solemnity. The act of paddling seemed almost a blasphemy. However, I made a fire on a rocky islet and cooked and ate my lunch, returning to the cottage in a curiously exhausted state. It was on…
1929 · PDF PAGE 173
…. We crossed a pari (a buttress which juts into the stream and has to be climbed in consequence) over twelve hundred feet high. The next day we came to Ghomboro. The character of the country had completely changed once more. We had got back to the conditions of the valley of the Upper Indus. Ghomboro is a delightful village of apricot orchards. Below the terraces roars the water of the Bralduh Nala, a terrific torrent pent between narrow
1929 · PDF PAGE 533
…nt must be a definite miracle, parallel with that of the production of the Book itself. I stumbled on through the Desert somehow. Even today I hardly understand the object of the ordeals of this journey. At the beginning of the next Chokmah day I found myself on the edge of the oasis which I was to make my home. I had identified myself with the god of my Grade of Magus, Tahuti, the Lord of the Word, and I was invested accordingly with the attributes proper to him. The last of the officers in my initiation was the Ape of Thoth. This creature tra…
1929 · PDF PAGE 364
… essay, "The Psychology of Hashish", of which I have already given some account. Neuburg was well enough to get about after two or three days in bed, but it was clear that he was in no state to encounter new hardships. We gave up the idea of walking to Gibraltar and on August 28th left Madrid for Granada. I had kept the promise of "La Gitana" and the city kept its promise to me. But it is not safe to stay too long on the summit of happiness. Two days later we went on to Ronda, almost the only interesting thing about which is its physical geogra…
1929 · PDF PAGE 518
…uch so that I describe it as "A Novelissim".1 Its title is Not the Life and Adventure of Sir Roger Bloxam. It remains unfinished to this day; in fact it is hardly theoretically possible to finish it, strictly speaking. I have indeed serious qualms as to whether I have not overstepped the limits of truth in saying that I began it. To be safe, I should be content to say I wrote a good deal of it. The lyrical faculty remained almost entirely dormant, no doubt owing to the fact that in a quarter where almost every woman attracted me intensely, I wa…
1929 · PDF PAGE 69
…pressed surprise; but he said that he had felt so much better he thought he might as well come down, but it had been a long and terrible day. He had started at dawn. This was absurd, as it was only a couple of hours' easy walking from the hut. Ah yes, he said, but he had come down over the snout of the glacier and he had had to cut steps all the way --- no more glissading for him! This story was again rather incredible. But his axe had been tremendously knocked about. The truth slowly dawned on my benighted brain: he had solemnly cut his way do…
1929 · PDF PAGE 454
…theory of the magical method of the O.T.O.; and we decided to test my conclusions by a series of invocations. We began work on the first day of the year and continued without interruption for six weeks. We invoked the gods Mercury and Jupiter; and obtained many astonishing results of many kinds, ranging from spiritual illumination to physical phenomena. It is impossible to transcribe the entire record, and to give excerpts would only convey a most imperfect and misleading idea of the result. As an example of actual intellectual illumination, ho…
1929 · PDF PAGE 371
…her efforts had met with derisory disaster. More, one does not wipe out a lustre of lunacy by a moment of sanity. I am suffering to this day from the effects of having wasted some of the best years of my life in the stupid and stubborn struggle to set up my conscious self against its silent sovereign, my true soul. "Had Zimri peace who slew his master?" The superficial reader may smile at my superstition. Why should I be so sure that the accident of finding an old portfolio in a loft was no accident, but a coup de maître struck by people, for a…
1929 · PDF PAGE 546
…teeth and swore that she should live. Her helplessness only inflamed my love. I clutched the broken straw of hope more desperately every day, and when at last the axe fell it was as if my own neck had been upon the block. For over a week I could not trust myself to speak. I fought my anguish in silence. The agony of my earlier bereavement came back with tenfold terror. I cannot tell why, insane as I was with grief, I escaped being tempted to revenge myself upon the gods by betraying their trust and breaking my oath of allegiance. It was indeed …
1929 · PDF PAGE 550
… evidence of its contents that the author possessed the key to several problems insoluble by any intellect hitherto incarnate. We talked day and night for a fortnight. On his part, he showed me a great many mysteries in The Book of the Law that I had not suspected till then. I may indeed say that more than once he asked me some questions on a subject of which I was quite ignorant, and that on searching The Book of the Law I discovered a satisfactory reply in a text whose meaning had escaped me through my ignorance of the subject in question. Ou…
1929 · PDF PAGE 393
…isions, with costs. The argument had been farcically funny and all the dailies had anything up to three columns on the case. On the very day of publication, for the first time, I found myself famous and my work in demand. As a side issue, Mathers having claimed in court to be the Chief of the Rosicrucian Order, I was invaded by an innumerable concourse of the queerest imaginable people, each of whom independently asserted that he himself, and he alone, was that Chief. Having my own information on the subject, though communicating it to nobody e…
1929 · PDF PAGE 548
…sian guide named Schmidt and her Chinese master who issued instructions which were on the level of, and quite indistinguishable from, Sunday School exaltation. Her pet persuasion was that she was to travel eastward for three years and after some adventure with a "M. Joperal", an Englishman (the well-known Shropshire or the Essex branch of that typically English tribe), she would proceed to Japan where her destined soul-mate was waiting to marry her, the climax being the birth of a Messiah. Amid this steaming midden of putrefying manure, I detec…
1929 · PDF PAGE 427
…nd address of the owner, dug him out, and found him willing to give us immediate possession at a small rent. We went in on the following day and settled down almost at once to consecrate the Temple and begin the book. The idea was a follows. I was to dictate; Virakam to transcribe, and if at any point there appeared the slightest obscurity --- obscurity from the point of view of the entirely ignorant and not particularly intelligent reader; in a word, the average lower-class man in the street --- I was to recast my thoughts in plainer language.…
1929 · PDF PAGE 67
…s and I and his brother went to live in a hut on a glacier somewhere above Bel Alp, where Travers was to carry out some experiments. One day there arrived Bowles and a number of voluntary victims, each member of the party having his face painted with grease paint of divers colours, the right half vermilion and the left sky-blue, or the left bright green and the right orange, and so on. I record, with regret, that I, who had refused to abdicate the dignity of humanity to this extent, was the only person in the party who was not badly burnt. The …
1929 · PDF PAGE 210
…t to get rid of as the lumber that accumulates in a house. But sometimes a stranger would introduce a new note of genuine amusement. One day one of the Americans introduced the "great American artist, Penrhyn Stanlaws". His name was Stanley Adamson and his birthplace Dundee. He had begun his life in the traditional manner of the great by holding horses' heads and earning dimes. Somehow or other, while quite a youth, he had sprung into popular favour and was already earning two thousand pounds a year or more by dashing off a succession of spider…
1929 · PDF PAGE 225
…, across a small lagoon. He went off like a streak of lightning. It was impossible to follow him and I thought I had missed him. But two days later I came on him by accident, twenty- five miles from where I had shot him. My bullet had penetrated the lungs and grazed the heart. I cannot help thinking that there is something in the apparently absurd contention of certain mystics that life does not depend wholly on the integrity of the physiological apparatus, but on the will to live. I have dropped the most powerful animals stone dead with a sing…
1929 · PDF PAGE 260
…arrived late --- eight thirty. He had had some trouble with the coolies, but they were safely camped some short distance above. The next day was fearfully wet. There is another little pass to cross, and hour beyond the quartz block; two and a half hours more took me down the valley to a camp near Tseram, which is a group of huts on the main stream a couple of miles below the snout of the Yalung glacier. I avoided camping in Teseram itself, on the general principle of having nothing to do with natives. The Dewan of Nepal was sending an officer t…
1929 · PDF PAGE 452
…eir decease from sickness, accident and so on during the next few weeks. At Vladivostok corruption was so universal and open that on pay day an agent of the contractor sat at the next desk to the naval paymaster and handed each man his share of the profits of the organized system of swindling the government. One last luminous anecdote. The representative of a Birmingham munition factory called on our consul about some permit or other, and told him the following story. The Russian naval agent in England had accepted the tender of his firm for su…
1929 · PDF PAGE 504
…y only became clear when analysis disclosed that the events which threw me about in this manner occurred at almost exact intervals of 73 days, or of some multiple or sub-multiple thereof. I understood from this that 73 terrestrial days made up a single day of initiation. {796} As soon as I had grasped this singular fact, I was able to interpret each such period by considering how its events influenced my spiritual development. In this I succeeded so well that towards the end I became able to predict the sort of thing that would happen to me bef…
1929 · PDF PAGE 10
…nd 26th of December. The idea was to "avoid even the appearance of evil"; there was nothing actually wrong in eating turkey on Christmas Day; for pagan idols are merely wood and stone --- the work of men's hands. But one must not let others suppose that one is complying with heathen customs. Another early reminiscence. On February 29th, 1808, Alick was taken to see the dead body of his sister, Grace Mary Elizabeth2, who had only lived five hours. The incident made a curious impression on him. He did not see why he should be disturbed so useless…