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Page 72 of 801929 · PDF PAGE 387
… with every vision and every vision became intenser and more intimate. I fortified myself by magical practices. Two or three times I had found it difficult to get into the Aethyr; there were bars which I understood as not to be passed by the profane. The progressive sublimity and solemnity made me tremble lest I should not be worthy to behold the mysteries that lay in the future. So I consecrated myself by reciting this chapter of the Koran: Qol: hua allahu achad: alahu assmad: lam yalid: walam yulad: ya lam yakun lahu kufwan achad a thousand a…
1929 · PDF PAGE 299
… sincere and earnest man; more, even an enlightened man, so far as it is possible for a missionary to be so; but that is not very far. I found him totally ignorant both of canonical Buddhism and of local beliefs. I tried to point out to him that he could hardly hope to show the natives the errors of their way of thinking, unless he knew hat that was. But he declined to see the point. He was so cocksure that his own sect of Christianity held truth in utter purity and entirety that he could not imagine {488} that the Chinese had any way of thinki…
1929 · PDF PAGE 511
… and rejoiced by this good news, I began at once to devote myself to research in the strict sense of the word. And then the fun began! I found myself unable to do anything of the sort. I am not quite sure how the circumstances responsible for this fit in with my general situation, but they are well worthy of record for their own sake. I have mentioned elsewhere that in the bosom of the Sanctuary of the Gnosis of the O.T.O. is cherished a magical formula, extremely simple and practical, for attaining any desired object. It is, however, peculiarl…
1907 · PDF PAGE 132
…he eagle’s back, equal the splendid soaring of our princely pioneer. For those to whom much of Crowley is obscure, no better lamp can be found than this brilliant book of Captain Fuller. A. Quiller, in the Unsacraanm Ravraw, says: IN THE LAND OF OPHIR Here is a master-voice in song; here is a hand which has “ waked to ecstasy the living-lyre.” It him indeed been the lot of few men to be the author of thirty-two books and still remain unknown; but it has been the lot of none to sing songs of so divine a melody and so diabolic a discord; since th…
1929 · PDF PAGE 287
…meet, in the flesh, the ideal of his boyhood's dreams. Such, however was my great good fortune. In the consul at Tengyueh, Mr. Litton, I found all that I had lost when Richard Burton died. He possessed the spirit of adventure in its noblest and most joyous form. He had the instinct for learning foreign languages and dealing with foreign people; and in one respect, his history had been similar. Some years before, he had been consul in another part of China which was the heart of the Boxer movement. Moving, as he did, among the Chinese in the mos…
1906 · PDF PAGE 149
…ist and could not see why—everything being an illusion—there should be any particular ob- ject in doing or thinking anything. How I have found the answer will be evident from my essay on this subject.* I must indeed apologise to the illustrious Shade of Robert Browning for my audacious parody in title, style, and matter of his ‘‘ Christmas Eve and Easter Day.” The more I read it the eventual anticlimax of that wonderful poem irritated me only the more. But there is hardly any poet living or dead who so com- mands alike my personal affection and…
1929 · PDF PAGE 100
…rts of people treat them, but they cannot know, except at second hand, how those same people treat others. To return to Allan Bennett. I found him staying with V. H. Frater Aequo Animo1 in a tiny tenement in Southwark or Lambeth --- I forget which. It was a mean, grim horror. AE. A., whose name was Charles Rosher, was a widely travelled Jack-of-all-trades. He had invented a patent water-closet and been court painter to the Sultan of Morocco. He wrote some of the worst poetry I have ever read. He was a jolly-all-round sportsman with an excellent…
1929 · PDF PAGE 87
…nveniences or inclination for one's regular work, and there is much time to kill in a hotel or a tent in bad weather. Personally, I have found chess solitaire and triple-dummy bridge or skat as good as anything. Eckenstein was a recognized authority on what is known as Kirkwood's schoolgirl problem, but we used to work all sorts of things, from problems connected with Mersenne's numbers and Fermat's binary theorem to the purely frivolous attempt to represent any given number by the use of the number four, four times --- neither more nor less, r…
1929 · PDF PAGE 391
…ing bought a very large and fine specimen of this stone in Ceylon and made it into a ring with a gold band of two interlaced serpents, I found that Burton was right. I had merely to exhibit this ring to command the greatest possible respect. On one occasion, in fact, a quarrel {625} in a coffee shop having developed into a sort of small riot, and knives being drawn, I walked into the scrimmage and drew sigils in the air with the ring while intoning a chapter of the Koran. The fuss stopped instantly, and a few minutes later the original parties …
1904 · PDF PAGE 102
…numerable categories, that an incalculably vas t s ystem was produced. Merely by chance, chance in the trues t sense of the term, we are found with gods, men, stars, planets , devils , colours , forces , and a ll the materials of the Cosm os: and with tim e, space, and causality , the conditions lim iting and involving them all.1 Remember that it is not true to say that our 0 0 existed; nor that it did not exist. The idea of exis tence was just as much un- formulated as that of toasted cheese. But 00 is a finite expression, or has a f inite pha…
1929 · PDF PAGE 96
…it happened, I had no reason at any time to doubt the reality of the magical universe. I began my practical work with astral visions and found to my surprise that after half a dozen experiments I was better than my teacher. In these days I took my Magick very much au pied de la lettre. I knew, of {173} course, that Magick had fallen into desuetude chiefly because people would follow the prescribed course of action and get no result. An exquisitely amusing incident bearing on this point is as follows: Gerald Kelly, Ivor Back and one or two other…
1929 · PDF PAGE 281
…ened to have sufficient intelligence to take a sympathetic interest in the people and their customs and beliefs. Fielding Hall, a judge, found himself quite unpopular in official circles on account of his excellent though somewhat sentimental book The Soul of a People. The Englishman in all the colonies that I have visited, except in India, which is not a colony, is childishly jealous of his supposed superiority to the native. He has convinced himself that he represents a step ahead in evolution and he is fantastically afraid of "going fanti"; …
1929 · PDF PAGE 123
…ce fell in with a party of railway engineers, one short. The absentee had strolled out after dinner to enjoy the cool of the air. He was found in the morning naked, with a machete wound in the back. He had been treacherously murdered for the value of a suit worth, at the outside, five shillings. When we retuned to Amecameca, we went at once to pay our respects to the Jefe Politico, to ask him to dinner to celebrate our triumph. He had been very kind and useful in helping us to make various arrangements. When he saw us he assumed an air of sympa…
1929 · PDF PAGE 149
…hey have not reached our own state of panic which makes us the prey of the most fantastic superstitions and perversions of truth. I have found it practically impossible to convince middle-class {257} Anlgo-Saxons of facts which anyone would think were bound to be known. They take refuge in angry denial. It seems to them that if they once admit the most elementary and obvious propositions, they are bound to fall headlong into a bottomless pit of bestiality. Where, in fact, they always are. {258} 31
1929 · PDF PAGE 263
…gement of his men. It had been no part of my plan for any of the others to come beyond Camp 3. I wanted to make Camp 3 the base until we found a good place on the snow basis above. The arrival of Pache and his men overcrowded Camp 4. The root of the trouble, apart from any ill-feeling, was that none of my companions (except Pache) understood that I expected them to keep their word. I had arranged a plan, taking into consideration all sorts of circumstances, the importance of which they did not understand and other of which {435} they did not ev…
1929 · PDF PAGE 353
…like Arnold Bennett, not spared his shirt cuff. But I had jumped too hastily to conclusions when I said, "Maugham has written a book." I found phrase after phrase, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, bewilderingly familiar; and then I remembered that in my early days of the G.'. D.'. I had introduced Gerald Kelly to the Order and {570} reflected that Maugham had become a great friend of Kelly's, and stayed with him at Camberwell Vicarage. Maugham had taken some of the most private and personal incidents of my life, my marriage, my explo…
1906 · PDF PAGE 258
… the ‘‘G. D.” We must distinguish by methods, not by results.—A. C. most seriously assure you that honest labo- rious experiment will be found to verify them in every particular—that whatever arguments are brought forward destructive of the reality of Dhyana, apply with far more force to the normal state, and it is evident that to deny the latter seriously is pso facto to become unserious. Whether the normal testimony may be attacked from above, by insisting on the superior reality of Dhyana—and @ fortiori of Samadhi, which I have- not experien…
1904 · PDF PAGE 110
… take the matter seriously, and accord a reas onable investigation to its assertions. Examples of s uch s uccinctness and clarity may be found in The Four Noble Truths ; The Three Characteris tics ; The Ten F etters; and there is clearly a definite theory in the idea of Karm a. Such ideas are bas ic, and are as a thread on which 1 See Huxley’s c lassical exam ple of the horse, zebra and centaur. 2 Sim ilarly, wher e Buddhist par ables are of a m ystical nature, where a complicated symbolism of num bers (for example) is intended to shadow a tr u…
1929 · PDF PAGE 488
…s are so peculiar that to forecast its form would be an insolence to fate. The Middle West is predominantly Teutonic and Scandinavian. I found little overt sympathy with Germany for all that. Still less, any impulse to show active sympathy. But as for going into the fight on our side, the suggestion outraged elementary common sense. One prominent Kansas paper had a long editorial, angrily refusing sympathy with the ideas of "those fools down east" and expressing the hope that an air-raid on New York would teach them a much needed lesson. It was…
1929 · PDF PAGE 442
…preme and Holy King of Germany, who resigned the office in 1922 in my favour. The O.H.O. put the rituals of this Order at my disposal. I found them of the utmost value as to the central secret, but otherwise very inferior. They were dramatically worthless, but the prose was unequal, they lacked philosophical unity, their information was incomplete and unsystematic. Their general idea was, however, of the right kind; and I was able to take them as a model. The main objects of the instruction were two. It was firstly necessary to explain the univ…