THE WORKS OF ALEISTER CROWLEY    Vol. II, part 3 of 3   ASCII VERSION

October 8, 1993 e.v. key entry by Bill Heidrick, T.G. of O.T.O.
January 23, 1994 e.v. proofed and conformed to the "Essay Competition Copy"
edition of 1906 e.v. by Bill Heidrick T.G. of O.T.O.

File 3 of 3.

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   618. "Each life bound ever to the wheel."{#72} -- Cf. Whately, "Revelation of a Future State."  {201A}
   652. "This, that, the other atheist's death."{#73} -- Their stories are usually untrue; but let us follow our plan, and grant them all they ask.
   709. "A cannibal."{#74} -- This word is inept, as it predicates humanity of Christian-hate-Christian.
   J'accuse the English language: "anthropophagous" must always remain a comic word.
   731. "The Flaming Star."{#75} -- Or Pentagram, mystically referred to Jeheshua.
   732. "Zohar."{#76} -- "Splendour," the three Central Books of the Dogmatic Qabalah.
   733. "Pigeon."{#77} -- Says an old writer, whom I translate roughly:
"Thou to thy Lamb and Dove devoutly bow,
But leave me, prithee, yet my Hawk and Cow:
And I approve thy Greybeard dotard's smile,
If thou wilt that of Egypt's crocodile."
   746. "Lost!  Lost!  Lost!"{#78} -- See "The Lay of the Last Minstrel."
   759. "Ain Elohim."{#79} -- "There is no God!" so our Bible.  But this is really the most sublime affirmation of the Qabalist.  "Ain is God."
   For the meaning of Ain, and of this idea, see "Berashith," "infra."  The "fool" is He of the Tarot, to whom the number O is attached, to make the meaning patent to a child.
   "I insult your idol," quoth the good missionary; "he is but of dead stone. He does not avenge himself.  He does not punish me."  "I insult your god," replied the Hindu; "he is invisible.  He does not avenge himself, nor punish me."
   "My God will punish you when you die!"
   "So, when you die, will my idol punish you!"
   No earnest student of religion or draw poker should fail to commit this anecdote to memory.
   767. "Mr. Chesterton."{#80} --  I must take this opportunity to protest against the charge brought by Mr. Chesterton against the Englishmen "who write philosophical essay on the splendour of Eastern thought."
   If he confines his strictures to the translators of that well-known Eastern work the "Old Testament" I am with him; any modern Biblical critic will tell him what I mean.  It took a long time, too, for the missionaries (and Tommy Atkins) to discover that "Budd" was not a "great Gawd."  But then they did not want to, and in any case sympathy and intelligence are not precisely the most salient qualities in either soldiers or missionaries.  But nothing is more absurd than to compare men like Sir W. Jones, Sir R. Burton, Von Hammer- Purgstall, Sir E. Arnold, Prof. Max Muller, Me, Prof. Rhys Davids, Lane, and the rest of our illustrious Orientalists to the poor {201B} and ignorant Hindus whose letters occasionally delight the readers of the "Sporting Times," such letters being usually written by public scribes for a few pice in the native bazaar.  As to "Babus" (Babu, I may mention, is the equivalent to our "Mister," and not the name of a savage tribe), Mr. Chesterton, from his Brixton Brahmaloka, may look forth and see that the "Babu" cannot understand Western ideas; but a distinguished civil servant in the Madras Presidency, second wrangler in a very good year, assured me that he had met a native whose mathematical knowledge was superior to that of the average senior wrangler, and that he had met several others who approached that standard.  His specific attack on Madame Blavatsky is equally unjust, as many natives, not theosophists, have spoken to me of her in the highest terms.  "Honest Hindus" cannot be expected to think as Mr. Chrsterton deems likely, as he is unfortunately himself a Western, and in the same quagmire of misapprehension as Prof. Max. Muller and the rest.  Madame Blavatsky's work was to remind the Hindus of the excellence of their own shastras,<<Sacred Books.>> to show that some Westerns held identical ideas, and thus to countermine the dishonest representations of the missionaries.  I am sufficiently well known as a bitter opponent of "Theosophy" to risk nothing in making these remarks.
   I trust that the sense of public duty which inspires these strictures will not be taken as incompatible with the gratitude I owe to him for his exceedingly sympathetic and dispassionate review of my "Soul of Osiris."
   I would counsel him, however, to leave alone the Brixton Chapel, and to "work up from his appreciation of the 'Soul of Osiris' to that loftier and wider work of the human imagination, the appreciation of the 'Sporting Times!'"
                      -----

   Mr. Chesterton thinks it funny that I should call upon "Shu."  Has he forgotten that the Christian God may be most suitably invoked by the name "Yah"?  I should be sorry if God were to mistake his religious enthusiasms for the derisive ribaldry of the London "gamin."  Similar remarks apply to "El" and other Hebrai-christian deities.

   This note is hardly intelligible without the review referred to.  I therefore reprint the {202A} portion thereof which is germane to my matter from the "Daily News," June 18, 1901: --

   To the side of a mind concerned with idle merriment ("sic!") there is certainly something a little funny in Mr. Crowley's passionate devotion to deities who bear such names as Mout and Nuit, and Ra and Shu, and Hormakhou.  They do not seem to the English mind to lend themselves to pious exhilaration. Mr. Crowley says in the same poem:

          The burden is too hard to bear,
            I took too adamant a cross;
          This sackcloth rends my soul to wear,
            My self-denial is as dross.
              O, Shu, that holdest up the sky,
              Hold up thy servant, lest he die!

We have all possible respect for Mr. Crowley's religious symbols, and we do not object to his calling upon Shu at any hour of the night.  Only it would be unreasonable of him to complain if his religious exercises were generally mistaken for an effort to drive away cats.

                      -----

   Moreover, the poets of Mr. Crowley's school have, among all their merits, some genuine intellectual dangers from this tendency to import religious, this free trade in gods.  That all creeds are significant and all gods divine we willingly agree.  But this is rather a reason for being content with our own than for attempting to steal other people's.  The affectation in many modern mystics of adopting an Oriental civilisation and mode of thought must cause much harmless merriment among the actual Orientals.  The notion that a turban and a few vows will make an Englishman a Hindu is quite on a par with the idea that a black hat and an Oxford degree will make a Hindu an Englishman.  We wonder whether our Buddhistic philosophers have ever read a florid letter in Baboo English.  We suspect that the said type of document is in reality exceedingly like the philosophic essays written by Englishmen about the splendour of Eastern thought.  Sometimes European mystics deserve something worse than mere laughter at the hands ("sic!") of Orientals.  If ever was one person whom honest Hindus would have been justified in tearing to pieces it was Madame Blavatsky.

                       -----

   That our world-worn men of art should believe for a moment that moral salvation is possible and supremely important is an unmixed benefit.  But to believe for a moment that it is to be found by going to particular places or reading particular books or joining particular societies is to make for the thousandth time the mistake that is at once materialism and superstition.  If Mr. Crowley and the new mystics think for one moment that an Egyptian desert is more mystic than an English meadow, that a palm tree is more peetic than a Sussex beech, that a broken temple of Osiris is more supernatural than a Baptist chapel in Brixton, then they {202B} are sectarians, and only sectarians of no more value to humanity that those who think that the English soil is the only soil worth defending, and the Baptist chapel the only chapel worthy of worship ("sic").  But Mr. Crowley is a strong and genuine poet, and we have little doubt that he will work up from his appreciation of the Temple of Osiris to that loftier and wider work of the human imagination, the appreciation of the Brixton chapel.
                     G. K. CHESTERTON

                      -----

   778, 797. "The rest of life, for self-control,"
             "For liberation of the soul."{#81}
Who said Rats?  Thanks for your advice, Tony Veller, but it came in vain.  As the ex-monk<<Joseph McCabe, who became a Rationalist writer.  The allusion is to Crowley's marriage and subsequent return to the East.>> (that shook the bookstall) wrote in confidence to the publisher:

                    "Existence is mis'ry
                     I' th' month Tisri   {203B upper column ends}
                     At th' fu' o' th' moon
                     I were shot wi' a goon.
                     [Goon is no Scots,
                     But Greek, Meester Watts.]
                     We'ra awa' tae Burma,
                     Whaur th' groond be firmer
                     Tae speer th' Mekong.
                     Chin Chin! Sae long.
                     [Long sald be lang:
                     She'll no care a whang.]
                     Ye're Rautional babe,
                     Aundra McAbe."

   Note the curious confusion of personality.  This shows Absence of Ego, in Pali Anatta, and will seem to my poor spiritually-minded friends an excuse for a course of action they do not understand, and whose nature is beyond them.
   782. "Christ ascends."{#82} -- And I tell you frankly that if he does not come back by the time I have finished reading these proofs, I shall give him up.
   783. "Bell."{#83} -- The folios have "bun."  {203B upper column breaks out to full page for one line.}

                              NOTES TO PENTECOST
                               {Columns resume}

   22. "With sacred thirst."{#1} -- "He, soul-hydroptic with a sacred thirst."  A Grammarian's Funeral.
   23. "Levi."{#2} -- Ceremonial magic is not quite so silly as it sounds.  Witness the following masterly elucidation of its inner quintessence: --

           THE INITIATED INTERPRETATION
             OF CEREMONIAL MAGIC.<<1>>

<<1. This essay forms the introduction to an edition of the "Goetia" of King Solomon.>>

   It is loftily amusing to the student of magical literature who is not quite a fool -- and rare is such a combination! -- to note the criticism directed by the Philistine against the citadel of his science.  Truly, since our childhood has ingrained into us not only literal belief in the Bible, but also substantial belief in Alf Laylah wa Laylah,<<"A Thousand and One Nights, commonly called "Arabian Nights.">> and only adolescence can cure us, we are only too liable, in the rush and energy of dawning manhood, to overturn roughly and rashly both these classics, to regard them both on the same level, as interesting documents from the standpoint of folk-lore and anthropology, and as nothing more.
   Even when we learn that the Bible, by a {203A} profound and minute study of the text, may be forced to yield up Qabalistic arcana of cosmic scope and importance, we are too often slow to apply a similar restorative to the companion volume, even if we are the lucky holders of Burton's veritable edition.
   To me, then, it remains to raise the Alf Laylah wa Laylah into its proper place once more.
   I am not concerned to deny the objective reality of all "magical" phenomena; if they are illusions, they are at least as real as many unquestioned facts of daily life; and, if we follow Herbert Spencer, they are at least evidence of "some" cause.<<This, incidentally, is perhaps the greatest argument we possess, pushed to its extreme, against the Advaitist theories. -- A.C.>>
   Now, this fact is our base.  What is the cause of my illusion of seeing a spirit in the triangle of Art?
   Every smatterer, ever expert in psychology, will answer: "That cause lies in your brain."
   English children are taught ("pace" the Education Act) that the Universe lies in infinite Space; Hindu children, in the Akasa, which is the same thing.
   Those Europeans who go a little deeper learn from Fichte, that the phenomenal Universe is the creation of the Ego; Hindus, or Europeans studying under Hindu Gurus, are {203B} told, that by Akasa is meant the Chitakasa.  The Chitakasa is situated in the "Third Eye," "i.e.," in the brain.  By assuming higher dimensions of space, we can assimilate this fact to Realism; but we have no need to take so much trouble.
   This being true for the ordinary Universe, that all sense-impressions are dependent on changes in the brain,<<Thought is a secretion of the brain (Weissmann).  Consciousness is a function of the brain (Huxley). -- A.C.>> we must include illusions, which are after all sense-impressions as much as "realities" are, in the class of "phenomena dependent on brain-changes."
   Magical phenomena, however, come under a special sub-class, since they are willed, and their cause is the series of "real" phenomena called the operations of ceremonial Magic.
   These consist of

          (1) Sight.
                 The circle, square, triangle, vessels, lamps, robes,
                    implements, etc.
          (2) Sound.
                 The invocations.
          (3) Smell.
                 The perfumes.
          (4) Taste.
                 The Sacraments.
          (5) Touch.
                 As under (1).
          (6) Mind.
                 The combination of all these and reflection on their
                    significance.

   These unusual impressions (1-5) produce unusual brain-changes; hence their summary (6) is of unusual kind.  Its projection back into the apparently phenomenal world is therefore unusual.
   Herein then consists the reality of the operations and effects of ceremonial magic,<<Apart from its value in obtaining one-pointedness.  On this subject consult HB:Bet-Resh-Aleph-Shin-Yod-Taw, "infra." -- A. C.
  WEH NOTE: In the original, the Hebrew word for this note was
 misspelled with a Dalet in place of the Resh.>> and I conceive that the apology is ample, so far as the "effects" refer only to those phenomena which appear to the magician himself, the appearance of the spirit, his conversation, possible shocks from imprudence, and so on, even to ecstasy on the one hand, and death or madness on the other.
   But can any of the effects described in this our book Goetia be obtained, and if so, can you give a rational explanation of the circumstances?  Say you so?
   I can, and will.
   The spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain.
   Their seals therefore represent (Mr. Spencer's {204A} projected cube) methods of stimulating or regulating those particular spots (through the eye).
   The names of God are vibrations calculated to establish:
   ("a") General control of the brain.  (Establishment of functions relative to the subtle world.)
   ("b") Control over the brain in detail.  (Rank or type of the Spirit.)
   ("c") Control of one special portion.  (Name of the Spirit.)
   The perfumes aid this through smell.  Usually the perfume will only tend to control a large area; but there is an attribution of perfumes to letters of the alphabet enabling one, by a Qabalistic formula, to spell out the Spirit's name.
   I need not enter into more particular discussion of these points; the intelligent reader can easily fill in what is lacking.
   If, then, I say, with Solomon:
   "The Spirit Cimieries teaches logic," what I mean is:
   "Those portions of my brain which subserve the logical faculty may be stimulated and developed by following out the processes called 'The invocation of Cimieries.'"
   And this is a purely materialistic rational statement; it is independent of any objective hierarchy at all.  Philosophy has nothing to say; and Science can only suspend judgment, pending a proper and methodical investigation of the facts alleged.
   Unfortunately, we cannot stop there.  Solomon promises us that we can (1) obtain information; (2) destroy our enemies; (3) understand the voices of nature; (4) obtain treasure; (5) heal diseases, etc.  I have taken these five powers at random; considerations of space forbid me to explain all.
   (1) Brings up facts from sub-consciousness.
   (2) Here we come to an interesting fact.  It is curious to note the contrast between the noble means and the apparently vile ends of magical rituals.  The latter are disguises for sublime truths.  "To destroy our enemies" is to realise the illusion of duality, to excite compassion.
   (Ah! Mr. Waite,<<A poet of great ability.  He edited a book called "Of Black Magic and of Pacts," in which he vilifies the same.>> the world of Magic is a mirror, wherein who sees muck is muck.)
   (3) A careful naturalist will understand much from the voices of the animals he has studied long.  Even a child knows the difference of a cat's miauling and purring.  The faculty may be greatly developed.
   (4) Business capacity may be stimulated.
   (5) Abnormal states of the body may be {204B} corrected, and the involved tissues brought back to tone, in obedience to currents started from the brain.
   So for all other phenomena.  There is no effect which is truly and necessarily miraculous.
   Our Ceremonial Magic fines down, then, to a series of minute, though of course empirical, physiological experiments, and whoso will carry them through intelligently need not fear the result.
   I have all the health, and treasure, and logic I need; I have no time to waste.  "There is a lion in the way."  For me these practices are useless; but for the benefit of others less fortunate I give them to the world, together with this explanation of, and apology for, them.
   I trust that the explanation will enable many students who have hitherto, by a puerile objectivity in their view of the question, obtained no results, to succeed; that the apology may impress upon our scornful men of science that the study of the bacillus should give place to that of the baculum, the little to the great -- how great one only realises when one identifies the wand with the Mahalingam,<<The Phallus of Shiva the Destroyer.  It is really identical with the Qabalistic "Middle Pillar" of the "Tree of Life.">> up which Brahma flew at the rate of 84,000 yojanas a second for 84,000 mahakalpas, down which Visnu flew at the rate of 84,000 crores of yojanas a second for 84,000 crores of mahakalpas -- yet neither reached an end.
   But I reach an end.

   23. "The criptic Coptic."{#3} -- Vide the Papyrus of Bruce.<<WEH NOTE: This is the remarkable "Codex Brucianus" MS. 96. bod. Lib. Oxford.  It is the single most important text surviving on Gnosticism, with the exception of specialized texts found in the Nag Hammadi Library, and the latter only in a more obscure sense.  This Codex contains the full and complete exposition of Vallantinian Gnosticism, on a par with Ptolemy's "Tetrabiblos"(Astrology) for depth and completeness of the exposition of its subject; an exposition of the entire mysticism of the Greek Alphabet paralleling the treatment of Hebrew in the "Sepher Yetzirah" and possibly of older origin; perhaps the most ancient complete Grimorie of spirits, predating the "Picatrix" and many other texts.  It is only partly translated and published in European languages("e.g." Charlotte A. Baines "A Coptic Gnostic Treatise Contained in the Codex Brucianus", 1933), and Crowley would not have been able to do more than look at it; assuming that the note here is more than an echo of brief references in Mead's "Fragments of a Faith Forgotten".  The direct influence of this Codex on Western Magic(k) is nil, since it was only recovered during the 19th century.  None-the-less, it contains source documents of a clear and complete nature which formed the beginning of mystical traditions only imperfectly passed down in modern Western traditions.>>
   24. "ANET' AER-k, etc."{#4},-- Invocation of Ra.  From the Papyrus of Harris.
   26. "MacGregor."{#5} -- The Mage.
   29. "Abramelin."{#6} -- The Mage.
   32. "Ancient rituals."{#7} -- From the Papyrus of MRS. Harris.<<An imaginary lady to whom Sairey Gamp in Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit" used to appeal.>>
   33. "Golden Dawn."{#8} -- These rituals were later annexed by Madame Horos,<<"Vide" the daily papers of June-July 1901.>> that superior Swami.  The earnest seeker is liable to some pretty severe shocks.  To see one's "Obligation" printed in the "Daily Mail!!!"  Luckily, I have no nerves.
   49. {Two words in Devanagari type with an end of sentence mark in the same} ... ... etc."{#9} -- "Thou, as I, art God ('for this is the esoteric meaning of the common Hindu salutation').  A long road and a heavy price!  To know is always a difficult work ... Hullo!  Bravo!  Thy name (I have seen) is written in the stars.  Come with me, pupil!  I will give thee medicine for the mind." {205A}
   Cf. Macbeth: "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?"
   58. {One word and end sentence in Devanagari type} "...."{#10} -- Enough.
   60. {One word and end sentence in Devanagari type} "...."{#11} -- Why?
   60. {Two words and end sentence in Devanagari type} "...."{#12} -- What will be?
   61 "Strange and painful attitude."{#13} -- Siddhasana.
   62. "He was very rude."{#14} -- The following is a sample: --
   "O Devatas! behold this yogi!  O Chela!  Accursed abode of Tamas art thou!  Eater of Beef, guzzling as an Heard of Swine!  Sleeper of a thousand sleeps, as an Harlot heavy with Wine!  Void of Will!  Sensualist!  Enraged Sheep! Blasphemer of the Names of Shiva and of Devi!  Christian in disguise!  Thou shalt be reborn in the lowest Avitchi!  Fast!  Walk!  Wake! these are the keys of the Kingdom!  Peace by with thy Beard!  Aum!" 
   This sort of talk did me good: I hope it may do as much for you.
   63. "With eyes well fixed on my proboscis."{#15} -- See Bhagavad-Gita, Atmasamyamyog.
   67. "Brahma-charya."{#16) -- Right conduct, and in particular, chastity in the highest sense.
   72. "Baccy."{#17} -- A poisonous plant used by nicotomaniacs in their orgies and debauches.  "The filthy tobacco habit," says "Elijah the Restorer" of Zion, late of Sydney and Chicago.  That colossal genius-donkey, Shaw, is another of them.  But see Calverley.
   78. "His hat."{#18} -- It may be objected that Western, but never Eastern, magicians turn their headgear into a cornucopia or Pandora's box.  But I must submit that the Hat Question is still "sub judice."  Here's a health to Lord Ronald Gower!
   86. "Swinburne."{#19} --
 "But this thing is God,
   To be man with thy might
   To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life as
        the light." -- "Hertha."
   104. "My big beauty"{#20} -- Pink on Spot; Player, Green, in Hand.  But I have "starred" since I went down in "that" pocket.
   120. "My Balti coolies."{#21} -- See my "The Higher the Fewer."<<Title of a (forthcomming) collection of papers on mountain exploration, etc.>>
   125. "Eton."{#22) -- A school, noted for its breed of cads.  The battle of Waterloo (1815) was won on its playing-fields.
   128-30. "I've seen them."{#23} -- Sir J. Maundeville, "Voiage and Travill," ch. xvi., recounts a similar incident, and, Christian as he is, puts a similar poser.
   135. "A -- What?"{#24} -- I beg your pardon.  It was a slip.
   146. "Tahuti."{#25} -- In Coptic, Thoth. {205B}
   149. "Ra."{#26} -- The Sun-god.
   149. "Nuit."{#27} -- The Star-Goddess.
   152. "Campbell."{#28} -- "The waters wild went o'er his child, And he was left lamenting."
   152. "The Ibis Head."{#29} -- Characteristic of Tahuti.
   157. "Roland's crest."{#30} -- See "Two Poets of Croisic," xci.
   159. "A jest."{#31} -- See above: Ascension Day.
   162. "A mysterious way."{#32} --
    "God moves in a mysterious way
       His wonders to perform;
     He plants His footsteps in the sea,
       And rides upon the storm."
Intentional species?
   171. "The old hymn."{#33} -- This hymn, quoted I fear with some failure of memory -- I have not the documents at hand -- is attributed to the late Baship of Natal, though I doubt this, as the consistent and trustful piety of its sentiment is ill-suited to the author of those disastrous criticisms of the Pentateuch.  The hymn is still popular in Durban.
   Its extraordinary beauty, for a fragment, is only surpassed by Sappho's
matchless:
  -- . -- . -- .. -- .
  -- . -- . -- .. -- .
  -- . -- . -- . ' GR:epsilon-nu-nu-epsilon-alpha  kappa' epsilon-xi-epsilon .
   kappa-omicron-nu-tau-alpha . -- --
   185. "How very hard,"{#34} --
     "How very hard it is to be
      A Christian!" -- "Easter Day," I. i. 2.
   195. "Scrotapatti."{#35} -- One who has "entered the stream" of Nirvana.
   For the advantages of so doing, see the appended Jataka story, which I have just translated from a Cingalese Palm-leaf MS.  See Appendix I.
   228. "You know for me, etc."{#36} -- See Huxley, Hume, 199, 200.
   239. "Spirit and matter are the same."{#37} -- See Huxley's reply to Lilly.
   273. "I am not what I see."{#38} -- "In Memoriam."  But see H. Spencer, "Principles of Psychology," General Analysis, ch. vi.
   281. "'Tis lotused Buddha."{#39} --
"Hark! that sad groan!  Proceed no further!
'Tis  Laurelled Martial roaring murther."
                         -- BURNS, "Epigram."
   But Buddha cannot really roar, since he has passed away by that kind of passing away which leaves nothing whatever behind.
   322. "A mere law without a will."{#40} -- I must not be supposed to take any absurd view of the meaning of the word "law."  This passage denies any knowledge of ultimate causes, not asserts it.  But it tends to deny benevolent foresight, and "a fortiori" benevolent omnipotence.
   Cf. Zoroaster, "Oracles:" "Look not upon the {206A} visible image of the Soul of Nature, for her name is Fatality."
   Ambrosius is very clear on this point.  I append his famous MS. complete in its English Translation, as it is so rare.  How rare will be appreciated when I say that no copy either of original or translation occurs in the British Museum; the only known copy, that in the Bodleian, is concealed by the pre-Adamite system of cataloguing in vogue at that hoary but unvenerable institution.  For convenience the English has been modernised.  See Appendix II.
   329. "Maya fashioned it."{#41} -- Sir E. Arnold, "Light of Asia."
   335. "Why should the Paramatma cease."{#42} -- The Universe is represented by orthodox Hindus as alternating between Evolution and Involution.  But apparently, in either state, it is the other which appears desirable, since the change is operated by Will, not by Necessity.
   341. "Blavatsky's Himalayan Balm."{#43} -- See the corkscrew theories of A. P. Sinnett in that masterpiece of confusion of thought -- and nomenclature! -- "Esoteric Buddhism."  Also see the "Voice of the Silence, or, The Butler's Revenge."  Not Bp. Butler.
   366. "Ekam Advaita."{#44} -- Of course I now reject this utterly.  But it is, I believe, a stage of thought necessary for many or most of us.  The bulk of these poems was written when I was an Advaitist, incredible as the retrospect now appears.  My revision has borne Buddhist fruits, but some of the Advaita blossom is left.  Look, for example, at the dreadfully Papistical tendency of my celebrated essay:


                AFTER AGNOSTICISM.

   Allow me to introduce myself as the original Irishman whose first question on landing at New York was, "Is there a Government in this country?" and on being told "Yes," instantly replied, "Them I'm agin it."  For after some years of consistent Agnosticism, being at last asked to contribute to an Agnostic organ, for the life of me I can think of nothing better than to attack my hosts!  Insidious cuckoo!  Ungrateful Banyan!  My shame drives me to Semitic analogy, and I sadly reflect that if I had been Balaam, I should not have needed an ass other than myself to tell me to do the precise contrary of what is expected of me.
   For this is my position; while the postulates of Agnosticism are in one sense eternal, I believe that the conclusions of Agnosticism are daily to be pushed back.  We know our ignorance; with that fact we are twitted by those who do not know enough to understand {206B} even what we mean when we say so; but the limits of knowledge, slowly receding, yet never so far as to permit us to unveil the awful and impenetrable adytum of consciousness, or that of matter, must one day be suddenly widened by the forging of a new weapon.
   Huxley and Tyndall have prophesied this before I was born; sometimes in vague language, once or twice clearly enough; to me it is a source of the utmost concern that their successors should not always see eye to eye with them in this respect.
   Professor Ray Lankester, in crushing the unhappy theists of the recent "Times" controversy, does not hesitate to say that Science "can never" throw any light on certain mysteries.
   Even the theist is justified in retorting that Science, if this be so, may as well be discarded; for these are problems which must ever intrude upon the human mind -- upon the mind of the scientist most of all.
   To dismiss them by an act of will is at once heroic and puerile: courage is as necessary to progress as any quality that we possess; and as courage is in either case required, the courage of ignorance (necessarily sterile, though wanted badly enough while our garden was choked by theological weeds) is less desirable than the courage which embarks on the always desperate philosophical problem.
   Time and again, in the history of Science, a period has arrived when, gorged with facts, she has sunk into a lethargy of reflection accompanied by appalling nightmares in the shape of impossible theories.  Such a nightmare now rides us; once again philosophy has said its last word, and arrived at a deadlock.  Aristotle, in reducing to the fundamental contradictions-in-terms which they involved the figments of the Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, the Platonists, the Pyrrhonists; Kant, in his "reductio at absurdum" of the Thomists, the Scotists, the Wolffians, -- all the warring brood, alike only in the inability to reconcile the ultimate antinomies of a cosmogony only grosser for its pinchbeck spirituality; have, I take it, found their modern parallel in the ghastly laughter of Herbert Spencer, as fleshed upon the corpses of Berkeley and the Idealists from Fichte and Hartmann to Lotze and Trendelenburg he drives the reeking fangs of his imagination into the palpitating vitals of his own grim masterpiece of reconcilement, self-deluded and yet self-conscious of its own delusion.
   History affirms that such a deadlock is invariably the prelude to a new englightenment: by such steps we have advanced, by such we shall advance.  The "horror of great darkness" which is scepticism must ever by broken by some heroic master-soul, intolerant of the cosmic agony.  {207A}
   We than await his dawn.
   May I go one step further, and lift up my voice and prophesy?  I would indicate the direction in which this darkness must break.  Evolutionists will remember that nature cannot rest.  Nor can society.  Still less the brain of man.
   "Audax omnia perpeti
    Gens humana ruit per vetitum nefas."<<Horace, "Odes," I. 3.>>
   We have destroyed the meaning of vetitum nefas and are in no fear of an imaginary cohort of ills and terrors.  Having perfected one weapon, reason, and found it destructive to all falsehood, we have been (some of us) a little apt to go out to fight with no other weapon.  "FitzJames's blade was sword and shield,"<<Scott, "The Lady of the Lake.">> and that served him against the murderous bludgeon-sword of the ruffianly Highlander he happened to meet; but he would have fared ill had he called a Western Sheriff a liar, or gone off Boer-sticking on Spion Kop.
   Reason has done its utmost; theory has glutted us, and the motion of the ship is a little trying; mixed metaphor -- excellent in a short essay like this -- is no panacea for all mental infirmities; we must seek another guide.  All the facts science has so busily collected, varied as they seem to be, are in reality all of the same kind.  If we are to have one salient fact, a fact for a real advance, it must be a fact of a different "order."
   Have we such a fact to hand?  We have.
   First, what do we mean by a fact of a different order?  Let me take an example; the most impossible being the best for our purpose.  The Spiritualists, let us suppose, go mad and begin to talk sense.  (I can only imagine that such would be the result.)  All their "facts" are proved.  We prove a world of spirits, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, etc.  But, with all that, we are not really one step advanced into the heart of the inquiry which lies at the heart of philosophy, "What 'is' anything?"
   I see a cat.
   Dr. Johnson says it is a cat.
   Berkeley says it is a group of sensations.
   Cankaracharya says it is an illusion, an incarnation, or God, according to the hat he has got on, and is talking through.
   Spencer says it is a mode of the unknowable.
   But none of them seriously doubt the fact that I exist; that a cat exists; that one sees the other.  All -- bar Johnson -- hint -- but oh! how dimly! -- at what I now know to be -- "true!" -- no, not necessarily true, but "nearer the truth."  Huxley goes deeper in his demolition of Descartes.  With him, "I see a cat," proves "something {207B} called consciousness exists."  He denies the assertion of duality; he has no datum to assert the denial of duality.  I have.
   Consciousness, as we know it, has one essential quality: the opposition of subject and object.  Reason has attacked this and secured that complete and and barren victory of convincing without producing conviction.<<Hume, and Kant in the "Prolegomena," discuss this phenomenon unsatisfactorily. -- A.C.>>  It has one quality apparently not essential, that of exceeding impermanence.  If we examine what we call steady thought, we shall find that its rate of change is in reality inconceivably swift.  To consider it, to watch it, is bewildering, and to some people becomes intensely terrifying.  It is as if the solid earth were suddenly swept away from under one, and there were some dread awakening in outer space amid the rush of incessant meteors -- lost in the void.
   All this is old knowledge; but who has taken steps to alter it?  The answer is forbidding: truth compels me to say, the mystics of all lands.
   Their endeavour has been to slow the rate of change; their methods perfect quietude of body and mind, produced in varied and too often vicious ways. Regularisation of the breathing is the best known formula.  Their results are contemptible, we must admit; but only so because empirical.  An unwarranted reverence has overlaid the watchfulness which science would have enjoined, and the result is muck and misery, the wreck of a noble study.
   But what is the one fact on which all agree?  The one fact whose knowledge has been since religion began the all-sufficient passport to their doubtfully-desirable company?
   This: that "I see a cat" is not only an unwarrantable assumption but a lie; that the duality of consciousness ceases suddenly, once the rate of change has been sufficiently slowed down, so that, even for a few seconds, the relation of subject and object remains impregnable.
   It is a circumstance of little interest to the present essayist that this annihilation of duality is associated with intense and passionless peace and delight; the fact has been a bribe to the unwary, a bait for the charlatan, a hindrance to the philosopher; let us discard it.<<It is this rapture which has ever been the bond between mystics of all shades; and the obstacle to any accurate observation of the phenomenon, its true causes, and so on.  This must always be a stumbling-block to more impressionable minds; but there is no doubt as to the fact -- it "is" a fact -- and its present isolation is to be utterly deplored.  May I entreat men of Science to conquer the prejudices natural to them when the justly despised ideas of mysticism are mentioned, and to attack the problem "ab initio" on the severely critical and austerely arduous lines which have distinguished their labours in other fields? -- A. C.>> {208A}
   More, though the establishment of this new estate of consciousness seems to open the door to a new world, a world where the axioms of Euclid may be absurd, and the propositions of Keynes<<Author of a text-book on "Formal Logic.">> untenable, let us not fall into the error of the mystics, by supposing that in this world is necessarily a final truth, or even a certain and definite gain of knowledge.
   But that a field for research is opened up no sane man may doubt.  Nor may one question that the very first fact is of a nature disruptive of difficulty philosophical and reasonable; since the phenomenon does not invoke the assent of the reasoning faculty.  The arguments which reason may bring to bear against it are self-destructive; reason has given consciousness the lie, but consciousness survives and smiles.  Reason is a part of consciousness and can never be greater than its whole; this Spencer sees; but reason is not even any part of this new consciousness (which I, and many others, have too rarely achieved) and therefore can never touch it: this I see, and this will I hope be patent to those ardent and spiritually-minded agnostics of whom Huxley and Tyndall are for all history-time the prototypes.  Know or doubt! is the alternative of highwayman Huxley!  "Believe" is not to be admitted; this is fundamental; in this agnosticism can never change; this must ever command our moral as our intellectual assent.
   But I assert my strong conviction that ere long we shall have done enough of what is after all the schoolmaster work of correcting the inky and ill- spent exercises of the theological dunces in that great class-room, the world; and found a little peace -- while they play -- in the intimate solitude of the laboratory and the passionless rapture of research -- research into those very mysteries which our dunces have solved by rule of thumb; determining the nature of a bee by stamping on it, and shouting "bee"; while we patiently set to work with microscopes, and say nothing till we know, nor more than need be when we do.
   But I am myself found guilty of this role of schoolmaster: I will now therefore shut the doors and retire again into the laboratory where my true life lies.
   403, 405. "Reason and concentration."{#45} -- The results of reasoning are always assailable: those of concentration are vivid and certain, since they are directly presented to consciousness.  And they are more certain than consciousness itself, since one who has experienced them may, with consciousness, doubt consciousness, but can in no state doubt them.
   412. "Ganesh."{#46} -- The elephant-headed God, son of Shiva and Bhavani.  He presides over obstacles.  {208B}
   The prosodist will note the "false quantity" of this word.  But this is as it should be, for Ganesha pertains to Shiva, and with Shiva all quantity is false, since, as Parameshvara, he is without quantity or quality.
   485. "Carroll."{#47} -- See "Alice in Wonderland," Cap. Ult.
   508. "Kusha-grass."{#48} -- The sacred grass of the Hindus.
   509. "Mantra."{#49} -- A sacred verse, suitable for constant repetition, with a view to quieting the thought.  Any one can see how simple and effective a means this is.
   519. "Gayatri."{#50} -- This is the translation of the most holy verse of the Hindus.  The gender of Savitri has been the subject of much discussion, and I believe grammatically it is masculine.  But for mystical reasons I have made it otherwise.  Fool!
   557. "Prayer."{#51} -- This fish-story is literally true.  The condition was that the Almighty should have the odds of an unusually long line, -- the place was really a swift stream, just debouching into a lake -- and of an unusual slowness of drawing in the cast.
   But what does any miracle prove?  If the Affaire Cana were proved to me, I should merely record the facts: Water may under certain unknown conditions become wine.  It is a pity that the owner of the secret remains silent, and entirely lamentable that he should attempt to deduce from his scientific knowledge cosmic theories which have nothing whatever to do with it.
   Suppose Edison, having perfected the phonograph, had said, "I alone can make dumb things speak; argal, I am God."  What would the world have said if telegraphy had been exploited for miracle-mongering purposes?  Are these miracles less or greater than those of the Gospels?
   Before we accept Mrs. Piper,<<A twentieth century medium.>> we want to know most exactly the conditions of the experiment, and to have some guarantee of the reliability of the witnesses.
   At Cana of Galilee the conditions of the transformation are not stated -- save that they give loopholes innumerable for chicanery -- and the witnesses are all drunk! (thou has kept the good wine "till now: i.e." till men have well drunk -- Greek, mu-epsilon-theta-upsilon-sigma-theta-omega-sigma-iota, "are" well drunk).
   And I am to believe this, and a glaring "non sequitour" as to Christ's deity, on the evidence, not even of the inebriated eye-witnesses, but of MSS. of doubtful authorship and date, bearing all the ear-marks of dishonesty.  For we must not forget that the absurdities of to-day were most cunning proofs for the poor folk of seventeen centuries ago.
   Talking of fish-stories, read John xxi. 1-6, {209A} or Luke V. 1-7 (comparisons are odious).  But once I met a man by a lake and told him that I had toiled all the morning and had caught nothing, and he advised me to try the other side of the lake; and I caught many fish.  But I knew not that it was the Lord.
   In Australia they were praying for rain in the churches.  The "Sydney Bulletin" very sensibly pointed out how much more reverent and practical it would be, if, instead of constantly worrying the Almighty about trifles, they would pray once and for all for a big range of mountains in Central Australia, which would of course supply rain automatically.  No new act of creation would be necessary; faith, we are expressly told, can remove mountains, and there is ice and snow and especially moraine on and about the Baltoro Glacier to build a very fine range; we could well have spared it this last summer.
   579. "So much for this absurd affair."{#52} -- "About Lieutenant-Colonel Flare." -- Gilbert, "Bab Ballads."
   636. "Auto-hypnosis.{#53} -- The scientific adversary has more sense than to talk of autohypnosis.  He bases his objection upon the general danger of the practice, considered as a habit of long standing.  In fact,


"Lyre and Lancet."
      "Recipe for Curried Eggs."

   The physiologist reproaches
   Poor Mr. Crowley.  "This encroaches
   Upon your frail cerebral cortex,
   And turns its fairway to a vortex.
   Your cerebellium with cockroaches
   Is crammed; your lobes that thought they caught "X"
   Are like mere eggs a person poaches.
   But soon from yoga, business worries,
   And (frankly I suspect the rubble
   Is riddled by specific trouble!)
   Will grow like eggs a person curries."
   This line, no doubt, requires an answer.

"The Last Ditch."

   First.  "Here's a Johnny with a cancer;
   An operation may be useless,
   May ever harm his constitution,
   Or cause his instant dissolution:
   Let the worm die, 'tis but a goose less!"
   Not you!  You up and take by storm him.
   You tie him down and chloroform him.
   You do not pray to Thoth or Horus,
   But  make one dash for his pylorus: --
   And if ten years elapse, and he
   Complains, "O doctor, pity me!
   Your cruel 'ands, for goodness sakes
   Gave me such 'orrid stomach-aches.  {209B}
   You write him, with a face of flint,
   An order for some soda-mint.
   So Yoga.  Life's a carcinoma,
   Its cause uncertain, not to check.
   In vain you cry to Isis: "O ma!
   I've got it fairly in the neck."
   The surgeon Crowley, with this trocar,
   Says you a poor but silly bloke are,
   Advises concentration's knife
   Quick to the horny growth called life.
   "Yoga?  There's danger in the biz!
   But, it's the only chance there is!"
   (For life, if left alone, is sorrow,
   And only fools hope God's to-morrow.)

                      "Up, Guards, and at 'em!"

   Second, your facts are neatly put;
   -- Stay!  In that mouth there lurks a foot!
   One surgeon saw so many claps
   He thought: "One-third per cent., perhaps,
   Of mortals 'scape its woes that knock us,
   And bilk the wily gonococcus."
   So he is but a simple cynic
   Who takes the world to match his clinic;
   And he assuredly may err
   Who, keeping cats, thinks birds have fur.
   You say: "There's Berridge, Felkin, Mathers,
   Hysterics, epileptoids, blathers,
   Guttersnipe, psychopath, and mattoid,
   With ceremonial magic that toyed."
   Granted.  Astronomy's no myth,
   But it produced Piazzi Smyth.
   What crazes actors?  Why do surgeons
   Go mad and cut up men like sturgeons?
   (These questions are the late Chas. Spurgeon's.)
   Of yogi I could quote you hundreds
   In science, law, art, commerce noted.
   They fear no lunacy: their one dread's
   Not for their noddles doom-devoted.
   They are not like black bulls (that shunned reds
   In vain) that madly charge the goathead
   Of rural Pan, because some gay puss
   Had smeared with blood his stone Priapus.
   They are as sane as politicians
   And people who subscribe to missions.
   This says but little; a long way are
   Yogi more sane than such as they are.
   You have conceived your dreadful bogey,
   From seeing many a raving Yogi.
   These haunt your clinic; but the sound
   Lurk in an unsuspected ground,
   Dine with you, lecture in your schools,
   Share your intolerance of fools,
   And, while the Yogi you condemn,
   Listen, say nothing, barely smile.
   O if you but suspected them
   Your silence would match theirs awhile!  {210A}

"A Classical Research. [Protectionists may serve if the supply of Hottentots gives out.]"

   I took three hottentots alive.
   Their scale was one, two, three, four, five,
   Infinity.  To think of men so
   I could not bear: a new Colenso
   I bought them to assuage their plight,
   Also a book by Hall and Knight
   On Algebra.  I hired wise men
   To teach them six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
   One of the Hottentots succeeded.
   Few schoolboys know as much as he did!
   The others sank beneath the strain:
   It broke, not fortified, the brain.

"The Bard a Brainy Beggar."

   Now (higher on the Human Ladder)
   Lodge is called mad, and Crowley madder.
   (The shafts of Science who may dodge?
   I've not a word to say for Lodge.)
   Yet may not Crowley be the one
   Who safely does what most should shun?

"Alpine Analogy."

   Take Oscar Eckenstein -- he climbs
   Alone, unroped, a thousand times.
   He scales his peak, he makes his pass;
   He does not fall in a crevasse!
   But if the Alpine Club should seek
   To follow him on pass or peak --
   (Their cowardice, their mental rot,
   Are balanced nicely -- they will not.)
   -- I see the Alpine Journal's border
   Of black grow broader, broader, broader,
   Until the Editor himself
   Falls from some broad and easy shelf,
   And in his death the Journal dies.
   Ah! bombast, footle, simple lies!
   Where would you then appear in type?

The Poet "retires up."  His attitude undignified, his pleasure momentary, the
      after result quite disproportionate.  He contemplates his end."

   Therefore poor Crowley lights his pipe,
   Maintains: "The small-shot kills the snipe,
   But spares the tiger;" goes on joking,
   And goes on smirking, on invoking,
   On climbing, meditating, -- failing to think of a suitable rhyme at a
      critical juncture,
   Ah! -- goes on working, goes on smoking,
   Until he goes right on to Woking.

   637. "No one suppose me a Saint."{#54} -- On inquiry, however, I find that some do.
   638. "Amrita."{#55} -- The Elixir of Life: the Dew of Immortality.  {210B}
   688. "Christ."{#56} -- See Shri Parananda, "Commentaries on Matthew and John."
   695. "Direction x."{#57} -- "Vide supra," "Ascension Day."
   710. "Steel-tired."{#58} --
      For Dunlop<<WEHNOTE: Maker of automobile rubber tires and inner-tubes.>>
                people did not know
      Those nineteen hundred years ago.
   723. "Super-consciousness."{#59} -- The Christians also claim an ecstasy.  But they all admit, and indeed boast, that it is the result of long periods of worry and anxiety about the safety of their precious souls: therefore their ecstasy is clearly a diseased process.  The Yogic ecstasy requires absolute calm and health of mind and body.  It is useless and dangerous under other conditions even to begin the most elementary practices.
   742. "My Eastern friend."{#69} -- Abdul Hamid, of the Fort, Colombo, on whom be peace.  {211A}
   755. "Heart."{#61} --
      Heart is a trifling misquotation:
      This poem is for publication.
   810. "Mind the dark doorway there!"{#62} -- This, like so many other (perhaps all) lines in these poems, is pregnant with a host of hidden meanings.  Not only is it physical, of saying good-bye to a friend: but mental, of the darkness of metaphysics; occult, of the mystical darkness of the Threshold of Initiation; and physiological, containing allusions to a whole group of phenomena, which those who have begun meditation will rocognise.
   Similarly, a single word may be a mnemonic key to an entire line of philosophical argument.
   If the reader chooses, in short, he will find the entire mass of Initiated Wisdom between the covers of this unpretending volume.  {211B}






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                                     1902

                       AMBROSII MAGI HORTUS ROSARUM<<1>>

<<1.  It would require many pages to give even a sketch of this remarkable document.  The Qabalistic knowledge is as authentic as it is profound, but there are also allusions to contemporary occult students, and a certain very small amount of mere absence of meaning.  The main satire is of course on the "Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosencreutz."  A few only of the serious problems are elucidated in footnotes.>>

                    Translated into English by Christeos Luciftias.  Printed
                 by W. Black, at the Wheatsheaf in Newgate, and sold at the
                 Three Keys in Nags-head Court, Gracechurch St.

Opus.            It is fitting that I, Ambrose, called I. A. O., should
                 set down the life of our great Father (who now is not,
                 yet whose name must never be spoken among men), in order
                 that the Brethren may know what journeys he undertook in
                 pursuit of that knowledge whose attainment is their
                 constant study.
Prima Materia.      It was at his 119th year,<<1>> the Star Suaconch<<2>>
A.O.             being in the sign of the Lion, that our Father set out
                 from his Castle of Ug<<3>> to attain the Quintessence or
                 Philosophical Tincture.  The way being dark and the
Custodes.<<4>>  Golden Dawn at hand, he did call forth four servants to
                 keep him in the midst of the way, and the Lion roared
                 before him to bid the opposers beware of his coming.  On
                 the Bull he rode, and on his left hand and his right
                 marched the Eagle and the Man.  But his back was
                 uncovered, seeing that he would not turn.

<<1. "I.e." when 118 = change, a ferment, strength.  Also = before he was 120, the mystic age of a Rosicrucian.>>
<<2. Her-shell= Herschell, or Uranus, the planet which was ascending(in Leo) at Crowley's birth.>>
<<3.Vau and Gimel, the Hierophant and High-Priestess in the Tarot.  Hence "from his Castle of Ug" means "from his initiation."  We cannot in future do more than indicate the allusions.>>
<<4. The Kerubim.>>

Sapiens dom-        And the Spirit of the Path met him.  It was a young
inabitur astris. girl of two and twenty years, and she warned him fairly
                 that without the Serpent<<See Table of Correspondences.>>
                 his ways were but as wool cast into the dyer's vat.  Two-and-
                 twenty scales had the Serpent, and every scale was a path,
S. S. D. D.      and every path was alike an enemy and a friend.  So he set
                 out, and the darkness grew upon him.  Yet could he well
                 perceive a young maiden<<The 22nd Key of the Tarot.  The
                 other Tarot symbols can be traced by any one who possesses,
                 and to some degree understands, a pack of the cards.  The
                 occult views of the nature of these symbols are in some cases
                 Crowley's own.>> having a necklace of two-and-
                 seventy {212} pearls, big and round like the breasts of
                 a sea-nymph; and they gleamed round her like moons.  She
                 held in leash the four Beasts, but he strode boldly to
                 her, and kissed her full on her full lips.  Wherefore
                 she sighed and fell back a space, and he pressed on.
                 Now at the end of the darkness a fire
Intellectus.     glowed: she would have hindered him: clung she to his
                 neck and wept.  But the fire grew and the light dazzled
                 her; so that with a shriek she fell.  But the beasts
                 flung themselves against the burning gateway of iron,
                 and it gave way.  Our Father passed into the fire.  Some
                 say that it consumed him utterly and that he
Deus.            died; howbeit, it is certain that he rose from a
                 sarcophagus, and in the skies stood an angel with a
                 trumpet, and on that trumpet he blew so mighty a blast
                 that the dead rose all from their tombs, and our Father
                 among them.  "Now away!" he cried.  "I would look upon
                 the sun!"  And with that the fire hissed like a myriad
                 of serpents and went out suddenly.  It was a green sward
                 golden with buttercups; and in his way lay
H. et S. V. A.   a high wall.  Before it were two children, and
                 with obscene gestures they embraced, and laughed aloud,
                 with filthy words and acts unspeakable.  Over all of
                 which stood the sun calm and radiant, and was glad to
                 be.  Now, think ye well, was our Father perplexed; and
                 he knew not what he would do.  For the children left
                 their foulness and came soliciting with shameless words
                 his acquiescence in their sport; and he, knowing the law
                 of courtesy and of pity, rebuked them not.  But master
                 ever of himself he abode alone, about and above.  So saw
                 he his virginity deflowered, and his thoughts were
                 otherwhere.  Now loosed they his body; he bade it leap
                 the wall.  The giant flower of ocean bloomed above him!
                 He had fallen headlong into the great deep.  As the
                 green and crimson gloom disparted somewhat before
                 his eyes, he was aware of a Beetle that
Luna.            steadily and earnestly moved across the
                 floor of that Sea unutterable.  Him he followed; "for I
                 wit well," thought the Adept, "that he goeth not back to
                 the gross sun of earth.  And if the sun hath become a
                 beetle, may the beetle transform into a
Quid Umbra-      bird."  Wherewith he came to land.  Night shone by lamp
tur in Mari      of waning moon upon a misty landscape.  Two paths led
                 him to two towers; and jackals howled on either.  Now
                 the jackal he knew; and the tower he knew not yet.  Not
                 two would he conquer -- that were easy: to victory over
                 one did he aspire.  Made he therefore toward the moon.
                 Rough was the hillside and the shadows deep and
                 treacherous; as he advanced the towers seemed to
                 approach one another closer and closer yet.  He drew his
                 sword: with a crash they came together; and he fell with
                 wrath upon a single fortress.  Three windows had the tower;
Deo Duce         and against it ten cannons thundered.  Eleven bricks
Comite Ferro.    had fallen dislodged by lightnings: it was no house
                 wherein our Father might abide.  But there he must
                 abide.  "To destroy it I am come," he said.  And though
                 he passed out therewithal, yet 'twas his home
Vestigia Nulla   until he had attained.  So he came to a river, and
Retrorsum.       sailing to its source he found a fair woman all naked,
                 and she filled the river from two vessels of pure water.
                 "She-devil," he cried, "have I gone back one step?"  For
                 the Star Venus burned above.  And with his sword he
                 clave her from the head to the feet, that she fell
                 clean asunder.  Cried the echo: "Ah! thou hast slain
                 hope now!"  Our Father gladdened at {213} that word, and
                 wiping his blade he kissed it and went on, knowing that
                 his luck should now be ill.  And ill it was, for a
                 temple was set up in his way, and there he
Adest Rosa       saw the grisly Goat enthroned.  But he knew better than
Secreta Eros.    to judge a goat from a goat's head and hoofs.  And he
                 abode in that temple awhile therefore, and worshipped
                 ten weeks.  And the first week he sacrificed to that
                 goat<<The sacrifices are the ten Sephiroth.>> a crown
                 every day.  The second a phallus.  The third
                 a silver vase of blood.  The fourth a royal
                 sceptre.  The fifth a sword.  The sixth a heart.  The
                 seventh a garland of flowers.  The eighth a grass-snake.
                 The ninth a sickle.  And the tenth week did he daily
                 offer up his own body.  Said the goat: "Though I be not
                 an ox, yet am I a sword."  "Masked, O God!" cried the
                 Adept.  "Verily, an thou hadst not sacrificed --"  There
                 was silence.  And under the Goat's throne was a
                 rainbow<<See Table.>> of seven colours:
Hemaphroditus.   our Father fitted himself as an arrow to the
                 string (and the string was waxed well, dipped in a
                 leaden pot wherein boiled amber and wine) and shot
                 through stormy heavens.  And they that saw him saw a
                 woman wondrous fair<<Ancient form of the key of
                 HB:Samekh.>> robed in flames of hair, moon-
                 sandalled, sun-belted, with torch and vase of fire and
                 water.  And he trailed comet-clouds of glory upward.
                    Thus came our Father (Blessed be his name!) to
                 Death,<<Considered as the agent of resurrection.>>
                 who stood, scythe in hand opposed.  And ever
                 and anon he swept round, and men fell before him.
                 "Look," said Death, "my sickle hath a cross-handle.  See
                 how they grow like flowers!"  "Give me salt!"
Mors Janua       quoth our Father.  And with sulphur (that the Goat had
Vitae.           given him) and with salt did he bestrew the ground.  "I
                 see we shall have ado together," says Death, "Aye!" and
                 with that he lops off Death's cross-handle.  Now Death
                 was wroth indeed, for he saw that our Father had wit of
                 his designs (and they were right foul!), but he bade him
                 pass forthwith from his dominion.  And our Father could
                 not at that time stay him: though for himself had he cut
                 off the grip, yet for others -- well, let each man take
                 his sword!  The way went through a forest.
Adeptus.         Now between two trees hung a man by one heel
                 (Love was that tree).<<In the true Key of HB:Mem
                 the tree is shaped like the letter HB:Dalet = Venus or love.
                 The figure of the man forms a cross above a triangle, with
                 apex upwards, the sign of redemption.>>  Crossed were his
                 legs, and his arms behind his head, that hung ever
                 downwards, the fingers locked.  "Who art thou?" quoth
                 our Father.  "He that came before thee."  "who am I?"
                 "He that cometh after me."  With that worshipped our
                 Father, and took a present of a great jewel from him,
                 and went his ways.  And he was bitterly a-cold, for that
                 was the great Water he had passed.  But our Father's
                 paps glittered with cold, black light, and likewise his
                 navel.  Wherefore he was comforted.  Now came
Terrae Ultor     the sudden twittering of heart lest the firmament
Anima Terrae.    beneath him were not stable, and lo! he danceth up and
                 down as a very cork on waters of wailing.  "Woman," he
                 bade sternly, "be still.  Cleave that with thy sword: or
                 that must I well work?"  But she cleft the cords,
                 bitter-faced, smiling goddess as she was: {214} and he
                 went on.  "Leave thine ox-goad,"<<Lamed means ox-goad;
                 Aleph, an ox.  Lamed Aleph means No, the denial of
                 Aleph Lamed, El, God,.>> quoth he, "till I
                 come back an ox!"  And she laughed and let him pass.
                 Now is our Father come to the Unstable Lands, 'Od wot,
                 for the Wheel whereon he poised was ever turning.
                 Sworded was the Sphinx, but he out-dared her in
                 riddling: deeper pierced his sword: he cut her into
                 twain: her place was his.  But that would he not, my
Sapientiae Lux   Brethren; to the centre he clomb ever: and having won
Viris Baculum.   thither, he vanished.  As an hermit ever he travelled
                 and the lamp and wand were his.  In his path a lion
                 roared, but to it ran a maiden, strong as a young
                 elephant, and held its cruel jaws.  By force he ran to
                 her: he freed the lion -- one buffet of his hand dashed
                 her back six paces!  -- and with another blow smote its
                 head from its body.  And he ran to her and by force
                 embraced her.  Struggled she and fought him:
Femina Rapota    savagely she bit, but it was of no avail: she lay
Inspirat         ravished and exhausted on the Lybian plain.  Across the
Gaudium.         mouth he smote her for a kiss, while she cried: "O! thou
                 has begotten on me twins.  And mine also is the Serpent,
                 and thou shalt conquer it and it shall serve thee: and
                 they, they also for a guide!"  She ceased; and he,
                 having come to the world's end, prepared his chariot.
                 Foresquare he builded it, and that double: he harnessed
                 the two sphinxes that he had made from one, and sailed,
                 crab-fashion, backwards, through the amber skies of
                 even.  Wherefore he attained to see his children.
                 Lovers they were and lovely, those twins of rape.  One
                 was above them, joining their hands.  "That is well,"
                 said our Father, and for seven nights he slept
Pleiades.        in seven starry palaces, and a sword to guard him.
                 Note well also that these children, and those
                 others, are two, being four.  And on the sixth day
                 (for the seven days were past) he rose and
                 came into his ancient temple, a temple of our Holy
                 Order, O my Brethren, wherein sat the Hierophant who had
                 initiated him of old.  Now read he well the riddle of
                 the Goat (Blessed be his name among us for ever!  Nay,
                 not for ever!), and therewith the Teacher
Dignitates.      made him a Master of the Sixfold Chamber, and an ardent
                 Sufferer toward the Blazing Star.  For the Sword, said
                 the Teacher, is but the Star unfurled.<<Read reverse,
                 the Star [=the Will and the Great Work] is to fold up the
                 Sephiroth; "i.e." to attain Nirvana.>>  And our
                 Father being cunning to place Aleph over Tau read this
                 reverse, and so beheld Eden, even now in the flesh.
Amicitia.           Whence he sojourned far, and came to a great Emperor,
                 by whom the was well received, and from whom he gat
                 great gifts.  And the Emperor (who is Solomon) told him
                 of Sheba's Land and of one fairest of women there
                 enthroned.  So he journeyed thither, and for four years
                 and seven months abode with her as paramour and light-
                 of-love, for she was gracious to him and
Amor.            showed him those things that the Emperor had hidden;
                 even the cubical stone and the cross beneath the
                 triangle that were his and unrevealed.  And on the third
                 day he left her and came to Her who had
Sophia.          initiated him before he was initiated; and with her he
                 abode eight days and twenty days:<<The houses of the Moon.
                 All the gifts are lunar symbols.>> and she gave him
                 gifts.  {215}
                    The first day, a camel;
                    The second day, a kiss;
                    The third day, a star-glass;
                    The fourth day, a beetle's wing;
                    The fifth day, a crab;
                    The sixth day, a bow;
                    The seventh day, a quiver;
                    The eighth day, a stag;
                    The ninth day, an horn;
                    The tenth day, a sandal of silver;
Dona Virginis.      The eleventh day, a silver box of white sandal wood;
                    The twelfth day, a whisper;
                    The thirteenth day, a black cat;
                    The fourteenth day, a phial of white gold;
                    The fifteenth day, an egg-shell cut in two;
                    The sixteenth day, a glance;
                    The seventeenth day, an honeycomb;
                    The eighteenth day, a dream;
                    The nineteenth day, a nightmare;
                    The twentieth day, a wolf, black-mussled;
                    The twenty-first day, a sorrow;
                    The twenty-second day, a bundle of herbs;
                    The twenty-third day, a piece of camphor;
                    The twenty-fourth day, a moonstone;
                    The twenty-fifth day, a sigh;
                    The twenty-sixth day, a refusal;
Puella Urget        The twenty-seventh day, a consent; and the last night
Sophiam Sod-     she gave him all herself, so that the moon was eclipsed
alibus.          and earth was utterly darkened.  And the marriage of
                 that virgin was on this wise: She had three arrows, yet
                 but two flanks, and the wise men said that who knew two
                 was three,<<3, the number of HB:Gemel.  2, the number of the
                 card HB:Gemel.>> should know three was eight,<<The equality
                 of three and eight is attributed to Binah, a high grade
                 of Theurgic attainment.>> if the circle 
                 were but squared; and this also one day shall ye
                 know, my Brethren!  And she gave him the great and
                 perfect gift of magic, so that he fared forth right
                 comely and well-provided.  Now at that great wedding was
The Sophic       a Suggler,<<"Scil." Juggler, the 1st Key.  The magical
Suggler.         weapons correspond to the Kerubim.>> a riddler: for
                 he said, "Thou hast beasts: I will give
                 thee weapons one for one."  For the lion did
                 our Father win a little fiery wand like a flame, and for
                 his Eagle a cup of ever flowing water: for his Man the
                 Suggler gave him a golden-hilted dagger (yet this was
                 the worst of all his bargains, for it could not strike
                 other, but himself only), while for a curious coin he
                 bartered his good Bull.  Alas for our Father!  Now the
                 Suggler mocks him and cries: "Four fool's bargains hast
                 thou made, and thou art fit to go forth and meet a
                 fool<<The Key marked 0 and applied to Aleph, 1.>> for
                 thy mate."  But our Father counted thrice
                 seven and cried: "One for the fool," seeing {216} the
                 Serpent should be his at last.  "None for the fool,"
                 they laughed back -- nay, even his maiden queen.  For
                 she would not any should know thereof.  Yet were all
                 right, both he and they.  But truth ran quickly about;
                 for that was the House of Truth; and Mercury
Hammer of        stood far from the Sun.  Yet the Suggler was ever
Thor.            in the Sign of Sorrow, and the Fig Tree was not far.
                 So went our Father to the Fool's Paradise of Air.  But
                 it is not lawful that I should write to you, brethren,
                 of what there came to him at that place and time; nor
                 indeed is it true, if it were written.  For alway doth
Aracnum.         this Arcanum differ from itself on this wise, that
                 the Not and the Amen,<<This is obscure.>>
                 passing, are void either on the one side or the other,
                 and Who shall tell their ways?
                    So our Father, having won the Serpent Crown, the
                 Uraeus of Antient Khem, did bind it upon his head, and
                 rejoiced in that Kingdom for the space of two hundred
                 and thirty and one days<<0 + 1 + 2 + ... + 21 = 231.>>
                 and nights, and turned him toward the Flaming Sword.
                 <<The Sephiroth.>> Now the Sword governeth
                 ten mighty Kingdoms, and evil, and above them is the
                 ninefold lotus, and a virgin came forth unto him in the
                 hour of his rejoicing and propounded her riddle.
Griphus I.          The first riddle:<<The maiden (Malkuth) is blind
                 (unredeemed).  Answer: She shall be what she doth not,
                 "i.e." see.  She shall be the sea, "i.e.""exalted to the
                 throne of Binah" (the great sea), the Qabalistic phrase to
                 express her redemption.  We leave it to the reader's
                 ingenuity to solve the rest.  Each refers to the Sephira
                 indicated by the number, but going upward.>>
                    The maiden is blind.
                    Our Father: She shall be what she doth not.
                    And a second virgin came forth to him and said:
Griphus II.         The second riddle: Detegitur Yod.
                     Quoth our Fater: The moon is full.
Griphus III.        So also a third virgin the third riddle:
                    Man and woman: O fountain of the balance!
                    To whom our Father answered with a swift flash of his
                 sword, so swift she saw it not.
Griphus IV.         Came out a fourth virgin, having a fourth riddle:
                    What egg hath no shell?
                    And our Father pondered a while and then said:
                    On a wave of the sea: on a shell of the wave: blessed
                 be her name!
Griphus V.          The fifth Virgin issued suddenly and said:
                    I have four arms and six sides: red am I, and gold.
                 To whom our Father:
                    Eli, Eli, lamma sabachthani!
                    (For wit ye well, there be two Arcana therein.)
Griphus VI.         Then said the sixth virgin openly:
                    Power lieth in the river of fire.
                    And our Father laughed aloud and answered: I am come
                 from the waterfall.
Griphus VII.        So at that the seventh virgin came forth: and her
                 countenance was troubled.
                    The seventh riddle:
                    The oldest said to the most beautiful: What doest
                 thou here? {217}
                    Our Father:
                    And she answered him: I am in the place of the
                 bridge.  Go thou up higher: go thou where these are not.
Griphus VIII.       Thereat was commotion and bitter wailing, and the
                 eighth virgin came forth with rent attire and cried the
                 eighth riddle:
                    The sea hath conceived.
                    Our Father raised his head, and there was a great
                 darkness.
Griphus IX.         The ninth virgin, sobbing at his feet, the ninth
                 riddle:
                    By wisdom.
                    Then our Father touched his crown and they all
                 rejoiced: but laughing he put them aside and he said:
                 Nay!  By six hundred and twenty<<Kether adds up to 620.>>
                 do ye exceed!
Griphus X.          Whereat they wept, and the tenth virgin came forth,
                 bearing a royal crown having twelve jewels; and she had
                 but one eye, and from that the eyelid had been torn.  A
                 prodigious beard had she, and all of white: and they
                 wist he would have smitten her with his sword.  But he
                 would not, and she propounded unto him the tenth riddle:
                    Countenance beheld not countenance.
                    So thereto he answered: Our Father, blessed be thou! --
                    Countenance?
                    Then they brought him the Sword and bade him smite
                 withal: but he said.
Culpa Urbium        If countenance behold not countenance, then let the
Nota Terrae.     ten be five.  And they wist that he but mocked them; for
                 he did bend the sword fivefold and fashioned therefrom a
                 Star, and they all vanished in that light; yet the lotus
                 abode nine-petalled and he cried, "Before the wheel, the
                 axle."  So he chained the Sun,<<These are the letters of Ain
                 Soph Aur, the last two of which he destroys, so as to leave
                 only Ain, Not, or Nothing.>> and slew the Bull, and
                 exhausted the Air, breathing it deep into his lungs:
                 then he broke down the ancient tower, that which he had
                 made his home, will he nill he, for so long, and he slew
                 the other Bull, and he broke the arrow in twain; after
                 that he was silent, for they grew again in sixfold
                 order, so that this latter work was double: but unto the
                 first three he laid not his hand, neither for the first
                 time, nor for the second time, nor for the third time.
                 So to them he added<<To (1+10+50) 3x2 he adds 300, Shin, the
                 flame of the Spirit=666.>> that spiritual flame (for they
                 were one, and ten, and fifty, thrice, and again) and
                 that was the Beast, the Living One that is Lifan.  Let
                 us be silent, therefore, my brethren, worshipping the
                 holy sixfold Ox<<666=6x111.  111=Aleph, the Ox.>> that
                 was our Father in his peace that  he had won into,
                and that so hardly.  For of this shall no man speak.
                    Now therefore let it be spoken of our Father's
                 journeyings in the land of Vo<<His journeys as Initiator.>>
                 and of his suffering therein, and of the founding
                 of our holy and illustrious Order.
Nechesh.            Our Father, Brethren, having attained the mature age
                 of three hundred {218} and fifty and eight years,<<Nechesh
                 the Serpent and Messiach the Redeemer.>> set
                 forth upon a journey into the mystic Mountain of the
Abiegnus.        Caves.  He took with him his Son,<<Abigenos, Abiagnus,
                 Bigenos, Abiegnus, metathesis of the name of the Mystic
                 Mountain of Initiation.  The next paragraph has been
                 explained in the Appendix to Vol. I.>> a Lamb, Life, and
                 Strength, for these four were the Keys of that Mountain.
                 So by ten days and fifty days and two hundred days and
                 yet ten days he went forth.  After ten days fell a
                 thunderbolt, whirling through black clouds of rain:
Mysterium        after sixty the road split in two, but he travelled on
I.N.R.I.         both at once: after two hundred and sixty, the sun drove
                 away the rain, and the Star shone in the day-time,
                 making it night.  After the last day came his Mother,
                 his Redeemer, and Himself; and joining together they
                 were even as I am who write unto you.  Seventeen they
                 were, the three Fathers: with the three Mothers they
                 were thirty-two, and sixfold therein, being as
                 countenance and countenance.  Yet, being seventeen, they
                 were but one, and that one none, as before hath been
                 showed.  And this enumeration is a great Mysterium of
Mysterium        our art.  Whence a light hidden in a Cross.  Now
LVX.             therefore having brooded upon the ocean, and smitten
                 with the Sword, and the Pyramid being builded in its
                 just proportion, was that Light fixed even in the Vault
                 of the Caverns.  With one stroke he rent asunder the
                 Veil; with one stroke he closed the same.  And entering
Pastos.          the Sarcophagus of that royal Tomb he laid him down to
                 sleep.  Four guarded him, and One in the four; Seven
                 enwalled him, and One in the seven, yet were the seven
                 ten, and One in the ten.  Now therefore his disciples
                 came unto the Vault of that Mystic Mountain, and with
                 the Keys they opened the Portal and came to him and woke
                 him.  But during his long sleep the roses had grown over
                 him, crimson and flaming with interior fire, so that he
                 could not escape.  Yet they withered at his glance;
                 withat he knew what fearful task was before him.  But
                 slaying his disciples with long Nails, he interred them
                 there, so that they were right sorrowful in their
                 hearts.  May all we die so!  And what further befell him
                 ye shall also know, but not at this time.
                    Going forth of that Mountain he met also the Fool.
Trinitas.        Then the discourse of that Fool, my Brethren; it shall
                 repay your pains.  They think they are a triangle,<<The
                 belief in a Trinity -- ignorance of Daath.>> he
                 said, they think as the Picture-Folk.  Base they are,
                 and little infinitely.
                    Ain Elohim.
                    They think, being many, they are one.<<Belief in Monism,
                 or rather Advaitism.  Crowley was a Monist only in the
                 modern scientific sense of that word.>>  They think as
Unitas.          the Rhine-folk think.  Many and none.
                    Ain Elohim.
                    They think the erect<<Confusion of the various mystic
                 serpents.  The Big-Nose-Folk = the Jews.  We leave the
                 rest to the insight of the reader.>> is the twined, and
Serpentes.       the twinedis the coiled, and the coiled is the twin, and the
                 twins are the stoopers.  They think as the Big-Nose-Folk.
                 Save us, O Lord!  {219}
                    Ain Elohim.
Abracadabra.        The Chariot.  Four hundred and eighteen.  Five are
                 one, and six are diverse, five in the midst and three on
                 each side.  The Word of Power, double in the Voice of
                 the Master.
                    Ain Elohim.
Amethsh.            Four sounds of four forces.  O the snake hath a long
                 tail!  Amen
                    Ain Elohim.
                    Sudden death: thick darkness: ho! the ox!
Ye Fylfat           One, and one, and one: Creator, Preserver, Destroyer,
{symb.: cross}.  ho! the Redeemer!  Thunder-stone: whirlpool: lotus-
                 flower: ho! for the gold of the sages!
                    Ain Elohim.
                    And he was silent for a great while, and so departed
                 our Father from him.
Mysterium           Forth he went along the dusty desert and met an
Matris.          antient woman bearing a bright crown of gold, studded
<<This is all    with gems, one on each knee.  Dressed in rags she was,
obscure>>        and squatted clumsily on the sand.  A horn grew from her
                 forehead; and she spat black foam and froth.  Foul was
                 the hag and evil, yet our Father bowed down flat on his
                 face to the earth.  "Holy Virgin of God," said he, "what
                 dost thou here?  What wilt thou with thy servant?"  At
                 that she stank so that the air gasped about her, like a
                 fish brought out of the sea.  So she told him she was
                 gathering simples for her daughter that had died to bury
Evocatio.        her withal.  Now no simples grew in the desert.
                 Therefore our Father drew with his sword lines of power
                 in the sand, so that a black and terrible demon appeared
                 squeezing up in thin flat plates of flesh along the
                 sword-lines.  So our Father cried: "Simples, O
                 Axcaxrabortharax, for my mother!"  Then the demon was
                 wroth and shrieked: "Thy mother to black hell!  She is
                 mine!  So the old hag confessed straight that she had
                 given her body for love to that fiend of the pit.  But
                 our Father paid no heed thereto and bade the demon to do
Lucus.           his will, so that he brought him herbs many, and good,
                 with which our Father planted a great grove that grew
                 about him (for the sun was now waxen bitter hot) wherein
                 he worshipped, offering in vessels of clay these seven
                 offerings:<<Refer to the planets.>>
                    The first offering, dust;
                    The second offering, ashes;
                    The third offering, sand;
                    The fourth offering, bay-leaves;
                    The fifth offering, gold;
                    The sixth offering, dung;
                    The seventh offering, poison.
                    With the dust he gave also a sickle to gather the
                 harvest of that dust.
                    With the ashes he gave a sceptre, that one might rule
                 them aright.
                    With the sand he gave a sword, to cut that sand
                 withal.
                    With the bay-leaves he gave a sun, to wither them.
                    With the gold he gave also a garland of sores, and
                 that was for luck.
                    With the dung he gave a Rod of Life to quicken it.
                 {220}
                    With the poison he gave also in offering a stag and a
                 maiden.
Somnium Auri        But about the noon came one shining unto our Father
Potabilis.       and gave him to drink from a dull and heavy bowl.  And
                 this was a liquor potent and heavy, by'r lady!  So that
                 our Father sank into deep sleep and dreamed a dream, and
                 in that mirific dream it seemed unto him that the walls
                 of all things slid into and across each other, so that
                 he feared greatly, for the stability of the universe is
                 the great enemy; the unstable being the everlasting,
                 saith Adhou Bin Aram, the Arab.  O Elmen Zata, our
                 Sophic Pilaster!  Further in the dream there was let
                 down from heaven a mighty tessaract, bounded by eight
                 cubes, whereon sat a mighty dolphin having eight senses.
                 Further, he beheld a cavern full of most ancient bones
                 of men, and therein a lion with a voice of a dog.  Then
Tredecim         came a voice: "Thirteen<<Achad, unity, adds to thirteen.
Voces.           There follow attributions of the "thirteen times table.">>
                 are they, who are one.  Once is a oneness: twice is the
                 Name: thrice let us say not: by four is the Son: by five
                 is the Sword: by six is the Holy Oil of the most Excellent
                 Beard, and the leaves of the Book are by six: by seven
                 is that great Amen."  Then our Father saw one hundred
                 and four horses that drove an ivory car over a sea
                 of pearl, and they received him therein and bade him
                 be comforted.  With that he awoke and saw that he
                 would have all his desire.  In the morning therefore
                 he arose and went his way into the desert.
                 There he clomb an high rock and called forth
Ordinis In-      the eagles, that their shadow floating over the desert
ceptio.          should be as a book that men might read it.  The shadows
                 wrote and the sun recorded; and on this wise commeth it
                 to pass, O my brethren, that by darkness and by sunlight
                 ye will still learn ever these the Arcana of our
                 Science.  Lo! who learneth by moonlight, he is the lucky
                 one!  So our Father, having thus founded the Order, and
                 our sacred Book being opened, rested awhile and beheld
                 many wonders, the like of which were never yet told.
                 But ever chiefly his study was to reduce unto eight
                 things his many.
                    And thus, O Brethren of our Venerable Order, he at
                 last succeeded.  Those who know not will learn little
                 herein: yet that they may be shamed all shall be put
                 forth at this time clearly before them all, with no
                 obscurity nor obfuscation in the exposition thereof.
                    Writing this, saith our Father to me, the humblest
                 and oldest of all his disciples, write as the story of
                 my Quintessential Quest, my Sagyric Wandering, my
                 Philosophical Going.  Write plainly unto the brethren,
                 quoth he, for many be little and weak; and thy hard
                 words and much learning may confound them.
                    Therefore I write thus plainly to you.  Mark well
                 that ye read me aright!
Vitae.              Our Father (blessed be his name!) entered the Path on
                 this wise.  He cut off three from ten:<<These are the
                 Buddhist "paths of enlightenment.">> thus he left
                 seven.  He cut and left three: he cut and left one: he
                 cut and became.  Thus fourfold.  Eightfold.<<The eightfold
                 path.  The rest is very obscure.>>  He opened
Viae.            his eyes: he cleansed his heart: he chained his
                 tongue: he fixed {221} his flesh: he turned to his
                 trade: he put forth his strength: he drew all to a
                 point: he delighted.
                    Therefore he is not, having become that which he was
                 not.  Mark ye all: it is declared.  Now of the last
                 adventure of our Father and of his going into the land
                 of Apes, that is, England, and of what he did there, it
                 is not fitting that I, the poor old fool who loved him,
                 shall now discourse.  But it is most necessary that I
                 should speak of his holy death and of his funeral and of
                 the bruit thereof, for that is gone into divers lands as
                 a false and lying report, whereby much harm and ill-luck
                 come to the Brethren.  In this place, therefore, will I
                 set down the exact truth of all that happened.
Mirabilia.          In the year of the Great Passing Over were signs and
                 wonders seen of all men, O my Brethren, as it is
                 written, and well known unto this day.  And the first
                 sign was of dancing: for every woman that was under the
I. Signum.       moon began to dance and was mad, so that headlong and
                 hot-mouthed she flung herself down, desirous.  Whence
II. Signum.      the second sign, that of musical inventions; for in that
                 year, and of Rosewomen, came A and U and M,<<Aum!  The
                 sacred word.>> the  mighty musicians!  And the
                 third sign likewise, namely of animals: for in that year
III. Signum.     every sheep had lambs thirteen, and every cart<<Qy. HB:Chet
                 (the car) becomes O (a wheel).  The commentators who have
                 suspected the horrid blasphemy implied by the explanation
                 "becomes HB:Koph , the Wheel of Fortune," are certainly in
                 error.>> was delivered of a wheel!  And other wonders
Alia Signa.      innumerable: they are well known, insomuch that that
                 year is yet held notable.
                    Now our Father, being very old, came unto the
                 venerable Grove of our August Fraternity and abode
                 there.  And so old was he and feeble that he could
                 scarce lift his hands in benediction upon us.  And all
                 we waited about him, both by day and night; lest one
                 word should fall, and we not hear the same.  But he
                 spake never unto us, though his lips moved and his eyes
                 sought ever that which we could not see.  At last, on
                 the day of D., the mother of P.,<<Demeter and Persephone.>>
                 he straightened himself up and spake.  This
                 his final discourse was written down then by the dying
                 lions in their own blood, traced willingly on the desert
                 sands about the Grove of the Illustrious.  Also here
                 set down: but who will confirm the same, let him
                 seek it on the sands.
                    Children of my Will, said our Father, from whose grey
                 eyes fell gentlest tears, it is about the hour.  The
                 chariot (Ch.)<<Ch=HB:Chet; H=Hades.  See the Tarot cards,
                 and classical mythology, for the symbols.>> is not, and
                 the chariot (H.) is at hand.  Yet I, who have been
                 car-borne through the blue air by sphixes, shall never
                 be carried away, not by the whitest horses of the world.
                 To you I have no word to say.  All is written in the
                 sacred Book.  To that look ye well!
Pater Jubet:        Ambrose, old friend, he said, turning to me -- and I
Scientiam        wept ever sore -- do thou write for the little ones, the
Scribe.          children of my children, for them that understand not
                 easily our high mysteries; for in thy pen is, as it
                 were, a river of clear water; without vagueness, without
                 ambiguity, {222} without show of learning, without
                 needless darkening of counsel and word, dost thou ever
                 reveal the sacred Heights of our Mystic Mountain.  For,
                 as for him that understandeth not thy writing, and that
                 easily and well, be ye well assured all that he is a
                 vile man and a losel of little worth or worship; a dog,
                 an unclean swine, a worm of filth, a festering sore in
                 the vitals of earth: such an one is liar and murderer,
                 debauched, drunken, sexless, and spatulate; and ape-
                 dropping, a lousy, flat-backed knave: from such an one
                 keep ye well away!  Use hath he little: ornament maketh
Sedes Profunda   he nothing: let him be cast out on the dunghills beyond
Paimonis.        Jordan; let him pass into the S. P. P., and that
                 utterly!
                    With that our Father sighed deep and laid back his
                 reverend head, and was silent.  But from his heart came
                 a subtle voice of tenderest farewell, so that we knew
Oculi Nox        him well dead.  But for seventy days and seventy nights
Secreta.         we touched him not, but abode ever about him: and the
                 smile changed not on his face, and the whole grove was
                 filled with sweet and subtle perfumes.  Now on the 71st
Portae Silen-    day arose there a great dispute about his body; for the
tium.            angels and spirits and demons did contend about it, that
Partitio.        they might possess it.  But our eldest brother V. N.
                 bade all be still; and thus he apportioned the sacred
                 relics of our Father.
                    To the Angel Agbagal, the fore part of the skull;
                    To the demon Ozoz, the back left part of the skull;
                    To the demon Olcot,<<Col. Olcott, the theosophist.>> the
                 back right part of the skull;
                    To ten thousand myriads of spirits of fire, each one
                 hair;
                    To ten thousand myriads of spirits of water, each one
                 hair;
                    To ten thousand myriads of spirits of earth, each one
                 hair;
                    To ten thousand myriads of spirits of air, each one
                 hair;
                    To the archangel Zazelazel, the brain;
                    To the angel Usbusolat, the medulla;
                    To the demon Ululomis, the right nostril;
                    To the angel Opael, the left nostril;
                    To the spirit Kuiphiah, the membrane of the nose;
                    To the spirit Pugrah, the bridge of the nose;
                    To eleven thousand spirits of spirit, the hairs of
                 the nose, one each;
                    To the archangel Tuphtuphtuphal,<<? the spirit of motor-
                 cars.>> the right eye;
                    To the archdevil Upsusph, the left eye;
                    The parts thereof in trust to be divided among their
                 servitors; as the right cornea, to Aphlek; the left, to
                 Urnbal; -- mighty sprits are they, and bold!
                    To the archdevil Rama,<<Vishnu, the preserver.>> the right
                 ear and its parts;
                    To the archangel Umumatis, the left ear and its
                 parts;
                    The teeth to two-and-thirty letters of the sixfold
                 Name: one to the air, and fifteen to the rain and the
                 ram, and ten to the virgin, and six to the Bull;
                    The mouth to the archangels Alalal and Bikarak, lip
                 and lip;
                    The tongue to that devil of all devils Yehowou.
                 <<Jehovah.>>  Ho, devil! canst thou speak?  {223}
                    The pharynix to Mahabonisbash, the great angel;
                    To seven-and-thirty myriads of legions of planetary
                 spirits the hairs of the moustache, to each one;
                    To ninety and one myriads of the Elohim, the hairs of
                 the beard; to each thirteen, and the oil to ease the
                 world;
                    To Shalach, the arch devil, the chin.
                    So also with the lesser relics; of which are notable
                 only: to the Order, the heart of our Father: to the Book
                 of the Law, his venerable lung-space to serve as a
                 shrine thereunto: to the devil Aot, the liver, to be
                 divided: to the angel Exarp and his followers, the great
                 intestine: to Bitom the devil and his crew, the little
                 intestine: to Aub, Aud, and Aur, the venerable Phallus
                 of our Father: to Ash the little bone of the same: to
                 our children K., C., B., C., G., T., N., H, I., and M.,
                 his illustrious finger-nails, and the toe-nails to be in
                 trust for their children after them: and so for all the
                 rest; is it not written in our archives?  As to his
                 magical weapons, all vanished utterly at the moment of
                 that Passing Over.  Therefore they carried away our
                 Father's body piece by piece and that with reverence and
                 in order, so that there was not left of all one hair,
                 nor one nerve, nor one little pore of the skin.  Thus
                 was there no funeral pomp; they that say other are liars
                 and blasphemers against a fame untarnished.  May the red
                 plague rot their vitals!
Amen.               Thus, O my Brethren, thus and not otherwise was the
                 passing Over of that Great and Wonderful Magician, our
                 Father and Founder.  May the dew of his admirable memory
                 moisten the grass of our minds, that we may bring forth
                 tender shoots of energy in the Great Work of Works.  So
                 mote it be!


                           BENEDICTVS DOMINVS DEVS
                            NOSTER QVI NOBIS DEDIT
                                    SIGNVM
                                     R.C.



{224}




                                     1902

                THE THREE CHARACTERISTICS  {columns commence}

"LISTEN to the Jataka!" said the Buddha.  And all they gave ear.  "Long ago, when King Brahmadatta reigned in Benares,<<The common formula for beginning a "Jataka," or story of a previous incarnation of Buddha.  Brahmadatta reigned 120,000 years.>> it came to pass that there lived under his admirable government a weaver named Suraj Ju<<The Sun.>> and his wife Chandi.<<The Moon.>>  And in the fulness of her time did she give birth to a man child, and they called him Perdu' R Abu.<<Perdurabo, Crowley's motto.>>  Now the child grew, and the tears of the mother fell, and the wrath of the father waxed: for by no means would the boy strive in his trade of weaving.  The loom went merrily, but to the rhythm of a mantra; and the silk slipped through his fingers, but as if one told his beads.  Wherefore the work was marred, and the hearts of the parents were woe because of him.  But it is written that misfortune knoweth not the hour to cease, and that the seed of sorrow is as the seed of the Banyon Tree.  It groweth and is of stature as a mountain, and, ay me! it shooteth down fresh roots into the aching earth.  For the boy grew and became a man; and his eyes kindled with the lust of life and love; and the desire stirred him to see the round world and its many marvels.  Wherefore he went forth, taking his father's store of gold, laid up for him against that bitter day, and he took fair maidens, and was their servant.  And he builded a fine house and dwelt therein.  And he took no thought.  But he said: Here is a change indeed! {225A}
   "Now it came to pass that after many years he looked upon his lover, the bride of his heart, the rose of his garden, the jewel of his rosary; and behold, the olive loveliness of smooth skin was darkened, and the flesh lay loose, and the firm breasts drooped, and the eyes had lost alike the gleam of joy and the sparkle of laughter and the soft glow of love.  And he was mindful of his word, and said in sorrow, 'Here is then a change indeed!'  And he turned his thought to himself, and saw that in his heart, was also a change: so that he cried, 'Who then am I?"  And he saw that all this was sorrow.  And he turned his thought without and saw that all things were alike in this; that nought might escape the threefold misery.  'The soul,' he said, 'the soul, the I, is as all these; it is impermanent as the ephemeral flower of beauty in the water that is born and shines and dies ere sun be risen and set again.'
   "And he humiliated his heart and sang the following verse:

Brahma, and Vishnu, and great Shiva!  Truly
I see the Trinity in all things dwell,
Some rightly tinged of Heaven, others duly
Pitched down the steep and precipice of Hell.
Nay, not your glory ye from fable borrow!
These three I see in spirit and in sense,
These three, O miserable seer!  Sorrow,
Absence of ego, and impermanence!

And at the rhythm he swooned, for his old mantra surged up in the long-sealed vessels of sub-conscious memory, and he fell into the calm ocean of a great Meditation.  {225B}


                       II.

   "Jehjaour<<Allan MacGregor Bennett (whose motto in the "Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn," was Iehi Aour, "i.e." "Let there be light"), now Ananda Mettya, to whom the volume in which this story was issued is inscribed.>> was a mighty magician; his soul was dark and evil; and his lust was of life and power and of the wreaking of hatred upon the innocent.  And it came to pass that he gazed upon a ball of crystal wherein were shown him all the fears of the time unborn as yet on earth.  And by his art he saw Perdu' R Abu, who had been his friend: for do what he would, the crystal showed always that sensual and frivolous youth as a Fear to him: even to him the Mighty One!  But the selfish and evil are cowards; they fear shadows, and Jehjaour scorned not his art.  'Roll on in time, thou ball! he cried.  'Move down the stream of years, timeless and hideous servant of my will!  Taph! Tath! Arath!'<<Taphtatharath, the spirit of Mercury.>>  He sounded the triple summons, the mysterious syllables that bound the spirit to the stone.
   "Then suddenly the crystal grew a blank; and thereby the foiled wizard knew that which threatened his power, his very life, was so high and holy that the evil spirit could perceive it not.  'Avaunt!' he shrieked, 'false soul of darkness!'  And the crystal flashed up red, the swarthy red of hate in a man's cheek, and darkened utterly.
   "Foaming at the mouth the wretched Jehjaour clutched at air and fell prone.


                       III.

   "To what God should he appeal?  His own, Hanuman, was silent.  Sacrifice, prayer, all were in vain.  So Jehhaour gnashed his teeth, and his whole force went out in a mighty current of hate towards his former friend.  {226A}
   "Now hate hath power, though not the power of love.  So it came about that in his despair he fell into a trance; and in the trance Mara<<The archdevil of the Buddhists.>> appeared to him.  Never before had his spells availed to call so fearful a potency from the abyss of matter.  'Son,' cried the Accursed One, 'seven days of hate unmarred by passion milder, seven days without one thought of pity, these avail to call me forth.'  'Slay me my enemy!' howled the wretch.  But Mara trembled.  'Enquire of Ganesha concerning him!' faltered at last the fiend.
   "Jehjaour awoke.


                       IV.

   "'Yes!' said Ganesha gloomily, 'the young man has given me up altogether. He tells me I am as mortal as he is, and he doesn't mean to worry about me any more.'  'Alas!' sighed the deceitful Jehjaour, who cared no more for Ganesha and any indignities that might be offered him than his enemy did.  'One of my best devotees too!' muttered, or rather trumpeted, the elephantine anachronism.  'You see,' said the wily wizard, 'I saw Perdu' R Abu the other day, and he said he had become Srotapatti.  Now that's pretty serious.  In seven births only, if he but pursue the path, will he cease to be reborn.  So you have only that time in which to win him back to your worship.'  The cunning sorcerer did not mention that within that time also must his own ruin be accomplished.  'What do you advise?' asked the irritated and powerful, but unintelligent deity.  'Time is our friend,' said the enchanter.  'Let your influence be used in the Halls of Birth that each birth may be as long as possible.  Now the elephant is the longest lived of all beasts --'  'Done with you!' said Ganesha in great glee, for the idea struck him as ingenious.  And he lumbered off to clinch the affair at once.
   "And Perdu' R Aby died. {226B}


                        V.

   "Now the great elephant strode with lordly footsteps in the forest, and Jehhaour shut himself up with his caldrons and things and felt quite happy, for he knew his danger was not near till the approaching of Perdu' R Abu's Arahatship.  But in spite of the young gently-ambling cows which Ganesha took care to throw in his way, in spite of the tender shoots of green and the soft cocoanuts, this elephant was not as other elephants.  The seasons spoke to him of change -- the forest is ever full of sorrow -- and nobody need preach to him the absence of an ego, for the brutes have had more sense than ever to imagine there was one.  So the tusker was usually to be found, still as a rock, in some secluded place, meditating on the Three Characteristics.  And when Ganesha appeared in all his glory, he found him to his disgust quite free from elephantomorphism.  In fact, he quietly asked the God to leave him alone.
   "Now he was still quite a young elephant when there came into the jungle, tripping merrily along, with a light-hearted song in its nucleolus, no less than a Bacillus.
   "And the elephant died.  He was only seventeen years old.


                       VI.

   "A brief consultation; and the Srotapatti was reincarnated as a parrot.  For the parrot, said the wicked Jahjaour, may live 500 years and never feel it.
   "So a grey wonder of wings flitted into the jungle.  So joyous a bird, thought the God, could not but be influenced by the ordinary passions and yield to such majesty as his own.
   "But one day there came into the jungle a strange wild figure.  He was a man dressed in the weird Tibetan fashion.  He had red robes and hat, and thought dark things.  He {227A} whirled a prayer-wheel in his hands; and ever as he went he muttered the mystic words 'Aum Mani Padme Hum.'<<"O the jewel in the Lotus!  Aum!"  The most famous of the Buddhist formularies.>>  The parrot, who had never heard human speech, tried to mimic the old Lama, and was amazed at his success.  Pride first seized the bird, but it was not long before the words had their own effect, and it was in meditation upon the conditions of existence that he eternally repeated the formula.

                        *
                       * *

   "At home at distant Inglistan.  An old lady, and a grey parrot in a cage.  The parrot was still muttering inaudibly the sacred mantra.  Now, now, the moment of Destiny was at hand!  The Four Noble Truths shone out in that parrot's mind; the Three Characteristics appeared luminous, like three spectres on a murderer's grave: unable to contain himself he recited aloud the mysterious sentence.
   "The old lady, whatever may have been her faults, could act promptly.  She rang the bell.  'Sarah!' said she, 'take away that dreadful creature!  Its language is positively awful.'  'What shall I do with it, mum?' asked the 'general.'  'Aum Mani Padme Hum,' said the parrot.  The old lady stopped her ears.  'Wring its neck!' she said.
   "The parrot was only eight years old.


                       VII.

   "'You're a muddler and an idiot!' said the infuriated God.  'Why not make him a spiritual thing?  A Nat<<The Burmese name for an elemental spirit.>> lives 10,000 years.'  'Make him a Nat then!' said the magician, already beginning to fear that fate would be too strong for him, in spite of all his cunning.  'There's some one working against us on the physical plane.  We must transcend it.'  No sooner said than done: {227B} a family of Nats in a big tree at Anuradhapura had a little stranger, very welcome to Mamma and Papa Nat.
   "Blessed indeed was the family.  Five-and-forty feet<<The Government, in the interests of Buddhists themselves, reserves all ground within 50 feet of a dagoba.  The incident described in this section actually occurred in 1901.>> away stood a most ancient and holy dagoba: and the children of light would gather round it in the cool of the evening, or in the misty glamour of dawn, and turn forth in love and pity towards all mankind -- nay, to the smallest grain of dust tossed on the utmost storms of the Sahara!
   "Blessed and more blessed!  For one day came a holy Bhikkhu from the land of the Peacock,<<Siam.>> and would take up his abode in the hollow of their very tree.  And little Perdu' R Abu used to keep the mosquitoes away with the gossimer of his wings, so that the good man might be at peace.
   "Now the British Government abode in that land, and when it heard that there was a Bhikkhu living in a tree, and that the village folk brought him rice and onions and gramophones, it saw that it must not be.
   "And little Perdu' R Abu heard them talk; and learnt the great secret of Impermanence, and of Sorrow, and the mystery of Unsubstantiality.
   "And the Government evicted the Bhikkhu; and set guard, quite like the end of Genesis iii., and cut down the tree, and all the Nats perished.
   "Jehhaour heard and trembled.  Perdu' R Abu was only three years old.


                      VIII.

   "It really seemed as if fate was against him.  Poor Jehjaour!  In despair he cried to his partner, 'O Ganesha, in the world of Gods only shall we be safe.  Let him be born as a flute-girl before Indra's throne!'  'Difficult is the task,' replied the alarmed deity, 'but I will use all my influence.  I {228A} know a thing or two about Indra, for example --'
   "It was done.  Beautiful was the young girl's face as she sprang mature from the womb of Matter, on her life-journey of an hundred thousand years.  Of all Indra's flute-girls she played and sang the sweetest.  Yet ever some remembrance, dim as a pallid ghost that fleets down the long avenues of deodar and moonlight, stole in her brain; and her song was ever of love and death and music from beyond.
   "And one day as she sang thus the deep truth stole into being and she knew the Noble Truths.  So she turned her flute to the new song, when -- horror! -- there was a mosquito in the flute.  'Tootle!  Tootle!' she began.  'Buzz! Buzz!' went her delicate tube.
   "Indra was not unprovided with a disc.<<A whirling disc is Indra's symbolic weapon.>>  Alas!  Jehjaour, art thou already in the toils?  She had only lived eight months.


                       IX.

   "'How you bungle!' growled Ganesha.  'Fortunately we are better off this time.  Indra has been guillotined for his dastardly murder; so his place is vacant.'  'Eurekas!' yelled the magus, 'his very virtue will save him from his predecessor's fate.'
   "Behold Perdu' R Abu then as Indra!  But oh, dear me!  what a memory he was getting!  'It seems to me,' he mused, 'that I've been changing about a lot lately.  Well, I am virtuous -- and I read in Crowley's new translation of the Dhammapada<<He abandoned this.  A few fragments are reprinted, "supra.">> that virtue is the thing to keep one steady.  So I think I may look forward to a tenure of my mahakalpa in almost Arcadian simplicity.  Lady Bhavani, did you say, boy?  Yes, I am at home.  Bring the betel!'  'Jeldi!' he added, with some dim recollection of the {228B} British Government, when he was a baby Nat.
   "The Queen of Heaven and the Lord of The Gods chewed betel for quite a long time, conversed of the weather, the crops, the affair Humbert, and the law in relation to motor-cars, with ease and affability.  But far was it from Indra's pious mind to flirt with his distinguished guest!  Rather, he thought of the hollow nature of the Safe, the change of money and of position; the sorrow of the too confiding bankers, and above all the absence of an Ego in the Brothers Crawford.
   "While he was thus musing, Bhavani got fairly mad at him.  The Spretae Injuria Formae gnawed her vitals with pangs unassuagable: so, shaking him quite roughly by the arm, she Put It To Him Straight.  'O madam!' said Indra.
   "This part of the story has been told before -- about Joseph; but Bhavani simply lolled her tongue out, opened her mouth, and gulped him down at a swallow.
   "Jehjaour simply wallowed.  Indra had passed in seven days.


                        X.

   "There is only one more birth,' he groaned.  'This time we must win or die.'  'Goetia<<The world of black magic.>> expects every God to do his duty,' he excitedly lunographed to Swarga.<<Heaven.>>  But Ganesha was already on his way.
   "The elephant-headed God was in great spirits.  'Never say die!' he cried genially, on beholding the downcast appearance of his fellow-conspirator. 'This'll break the slate.  There is no change in the Arupa-Brahma-Loka!'<<The highest heaven of the Hindu.  "Formless place of Brahma" is its name.>>  'Rupe me no rupes!' howled the necromancer.  'Get up, fool!' roared the God.  'I have got Perdu' R Abu elected Maha Brahma.'  'Oh Lord, have you really?' said the wizard, looking a little {229A} less glum.  'Ay!' cried Ganesha impressively, 'let Aeon follow Aeon down the vaulted and echoing corridors of Eternity: pile Mahakalpa upon Mahakalpa until an Asankhya<<"Innumerable," the highest unit of the fantastic Hindu arithmetic.>> of Crores<<10,000.>> have passed away: and Maha Brahma will still sit lone and meditate upon his lotus throne.'  'Good, good!' said the magus, 'though there seems a reminiscence of the Bhagavad-Gita and the Light of Asia somewhere.  Surely you don't read Edwin Arnold?'  'I do,' said the God disconsolately, 'we Hindu Gods have to.  It's the only way we can get any clear idea of who we really are.'
   "Well, here was Perdu' R Abu, after his latest fiasco, installed as a Worthy, Respectable, Perfect, Ancient and Accepted, Just, Regular Mahabrahma. His only business was to meditate, for as long as he did this, the worlds -- the whole systems of 10,000 worlds -- would go on peaceable.  Nobody had better read the lesson the the Bible -- the horrible results to mankind of ill-timed, though possibly well-intentioned, interference on the part of a deity.
   "Well, he curled himself up, which was rather clever for a formless abstraction, and began.  There was a grave difficulty in his mind -- an obstacle right away from the word 'Jump!'  Of course there was really a good deal: he didn't know where the four elements ceased, for example:<<See the witty legend in the Questions of King Milinda.>> but his own identity was the real worry.  The other questions he could have stilled; but this was too near his pet Chakra.<<Meditation may be performed on any of seven "Chakra" (wheels or centres) in the body.>>  'Here I am,' he meditated, 'above all change; and yet an hour ago I was Indra; and before that his flute-girl; and then a Nat; and then a parrot; and then a Hathi --" Oh, the Hathis pilin' teak in the sludgy, squdgy creek!" sang Parameshvara.  Why, it goes {229B} back and back, like a biograph out of order, and there's no sort of connection between one and the other.  Hullo, what's that?  Why, there's a holy man near that Bo-Tree.  He'll tell me what it all means.'  Poor silly old Lord of the Universe!  Had he carried his memory back one more step he'd have known all about Jehjaour and the conspiracy, and that he was a Srotapatti and had only one more birth; and might well have put in the 311,040,000,000,000 myriads of aeons which would elapse before lunch in rejoicing over his imminent annihilation.
   "'Venerable Sir!' said Mahabrahma, who had assumed the guise of a cowherd, 'I kiss your worshipful Trilbies:<<Feet.>>  I prostrate myself before your estimable respectability.'  'Sir,' said the holy man, none other than Our Lord Himself! 'thou seekest illumination!'  Mahabrahma smirked and admitted it.  'From negative to positive,' explained the Thrice-Honoured One, 'though Potential Existence eternally vibrates the Divine Absolute of the Hidden Unity of processional form masked in the Eternal Abyss of the Unknowable, the synthetical hieroglyph of an illimitable, pastless, futureless PRESENT.
   "'To the uttermost bounds of space rushes the voice of Ages unheard of save in the concentrated unity of the thought-formulated Abstract; and eternally that voice formulates a word which is glyphed in the vast ocean of limitless life.<<This astonishing piece of bombastic drivel is verbatim from a note by S. L. Mathers to the "Kabbalah Unveiled.">>  Do I make myself clear?'  'Perfectly.  Who would have thought it was all so simple?'  The God cleared his throat, and rather diffidently, even shamefacedly, went on:
   "'But what I really wished to know was about my incarnation.  How is it I have so suddenly risen from change and death to the unchangeable?'
   "'Child!' answered Gautama, 'your facts are wrong -- you can hardly expect to make {230A} correct deductions.'  'Yes, you can, if only your logical methods are unsound.  That's the Christian way of getting truth.'  'True!' replied the sage, 'but precious little they get.  Learn, O Mahabrahma (for I penetrate this disguise), that all existing things, even from thee unto this grain of sand, possess Three Characteristics.  These are Mutability, Sorrow, and Unsubstantiality.'
   "'All right for the sand, but how about Me?  Why they "define" me as unchangeable.'  You can define a quirk as being a two-sided triangle,' retorted the Saviour, 'but that does not prove the actual existence of any such oxymoron.<<A contradiction in terms.>>  The truth is that you're a very spiritual sort of being and a prey to longevity.  Men's lives are so short that yours seems eternal in comparison.  But -- why, "you're" a nice one to talk!  You'll be dead in a week from now.'
   "'I quite appreciate the force of your remarks!' said the seeming cowherd; 'that about the Characteristics is very clever; and curiously enough, my perception of this has always just preceded my death for the last six goes.
   "'Well, so long, old chap,' said Gautama, 'I must really be off.  I have an appointment with Brother Mara at the Bo-Tree.  He has promised to introduce his charming daughters --'
   "'Good-by, and don't do anything rash!'
   "Rejoice! our Lord wended unto the Tree!<<Arnold, "Light of Asia.">>  As blank verse this scans but ill, but it clearly shows what happened.


                       XI.

   "The 'Nineteenth Mahakalpa' brought out its April Number.  There was a paper by Huxlananda Swami.
   "Mahabrahma had never been much more than an idea.  He had only lived six days.  {230B}


                       XII.

   "At the hour of the great Initiation," continued the Buddha, in the midst of the Five Hundred Thousand Arahats, "the wicked Jehjaour had joined himself with Mara to prevent the discovery of the truth.  And in Mara's fall he fell.  At that moment all the currents of his continued and concentrated hate recoiled upon him and he fell into the Abyss of Being.  And in the Halls of Birth he was cast out into the Lowest Hell -- he became a clergyman of the Church of England, further than he had ever been before from Truth and Light and Peace and Love; deeper and deeper enmeshed in the net of Circumstance, bogged in the mire of Tanha<<Thirst: "i.e." desire in its evil sense.>> and Avi"gg"a<<Ignorance.>> and all things base and vile.  False Vichi-Kichi<<Doubt.>> had caught him at last!


                      XIII.

   "Aye!  The hour was at hand.  Perdu' R Abu was reincarnated as a child of Western parents, ignorant of all his wonderful past.  But a strange fate has brought him to this village."  The Buddha paused, probably for effect.
   A young man there, sole among all them not yet an Arahat, turned pale.  He alone was of Western birth in all that multitude.
   "Brother Abhavananda,<<"Bliss-on-non-existence."  One of Crowley's eastern names.>> little friend," said the Buddha, "what can we predicate of all existing things?"  "Lord!" replied the neophyte, "they are unstable, everything is sorrow, in them is no inward Principle, as some pretend, that can avoid, that can hold itself aloof from, the forces of decay."
   "And how do you know that, little Brother?" smiled the Thrice-Honoured One.
   "Lord, I perceive this Truth whenever {231A} I consider the Universe.  More, its consciousness seems ingrained in my very nature, perhaps through my having known this for many incarnations.  I have never thought otherwise."
   "Rise, Sir Abhavananda, I dub thee Arahat!" cried the Buddha, striking the neophyte gently on the back with the flat of his ear.<<The Buddha had such long ears that he could cover the whole of his face with them.  Ears are referred to Spirit in Hindu symbolism, so that the legend means that he could conceal the lower elements and dwell in this alone.>>
   And he perceived.
   When the applause of praise and glory had a little faded, the Buddha, in that golden delight of sunset, explained these marvellous events.  "Thou, Abhavananda," he said, "art the Perdu' R Abu of my lengthy tale.  The wicked Jehhaour has got something lingering with boiling oil in it, while waiting for his clerical clothes: while, as for me, I myself was the Bacillus in the forest of Lanka: I was the old Lady: I was (he shuddered) the British Government: I was the mosquito that buzzed in the girl's flute: I was Bhavani: I was Huxlananda Swami; and at the last, at this blessed hour, I am -- that I am."
   "But, Lord," said the Five Hundred Thousand and One Arahats in a breath, "thou art then guilt of six violent deaths!  Nay, thou hast hounded one soul from death to death through all these incarnations!  What of this First Precept<<Here is the little rift within the lute which alienated Crowley from active work on Buddhist lines; the orthodox failing to see his attitude.>> of yours?"
   "Children," answered the Glorious One, "do not be so foolish as to think that death is necessarily an evil.  I have not come to found a Hundred Years Club, and to include mosquitoes in the membership.  In this case to have kept Perdu' R Abu alive was to have played into the hands of his enemies.  My First Precept is merely a general rule.<<A more likely idea than the brilliantly logical nonsense of Pansil, "supra.">>  In {231B} the bulk of cases one should certainly abstain from destroying life, that is, wantonly and wilfully: but I cannot drink a glass of water without killing countless myriads of living beings.  If you knew as I do, the conditions of existence: struggle deadly and inevitable, every form of life the inherent and immitigable foe of every other form, with few, few exceptions, you would not only cease to talk of the wickedness of causing death, but you would perceive the First Noble Truth, that no existence can be free from sorrow; the {232A} second, that the desire for existence only leads to sorrow; that the ceasing from existence is the ceasing of sorrow (the third); and you would seek in the fourth the Way, the Noble Eightfold Path.
   "I know, O Arahats, that you do not need this instruction: but my words will not stay here: they will go forth and illuminate the whole system of ten thousand worlds, where Arahats do not grow on every tree.  Little brothers, the night is fallen: it were well to sleep."  {232B}








                                     1902

                         HB:Bet-Resh-Aleph-Shin-Yod-Taw

                             AN ESSAY IN ONTOLOGY

          WITH SOME REMARKS ON CEREMONIAL MAGIC  {columns commence}


                      HB:Bet-Resh-Aleph-Shin-Yod-Taw

O Man, of a daring nature, thou subtle production!
Thou wilt not comprehend it, as when understanding some common thing.
                         ORACLES OF ZOROASTER.

In presenting this theory of the Universe to the world, I have but one hope of making any profound impression, viz. -- that my theory has the merit of explaining the divergences between three great forms of religion now existing in the world -- Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity, and of adapting them to ontological science by conclusions not mystical but mathematical.  Of Mohammedanism I shall not now treat, as, in whatever light we may decide to regard it (and its esoteric schools are often orthodox), in any case it must fall under one of the three heads of Nihilism, Advaitism, and Dvaitism.
   Taking the ordinary hypothesis of the universe, that of its infinity, or at any rate that of the infinity of God, or of the infinity of some substance or idea actually existing, we first come to the question of the possibility of the co-existence of God and man.
   The Christians, in the category of the existent, enumerate among other things, whose consideration we may discard for the purposes of this argument, God, an infinite being; man; Satan and his angels; man certainly, Satan presumably, finite beings.  These are not aspects of one being, but separate and even antagonistic existences.  All are equally real: we cannot accept {233A} mystics of the type of Caird as being orthodox exponents of the religion of Christ.
   The Hindus enumerate Brahm, infinite in all dimensions and directions -- indistinguishable from the Pleroma of the Gnostics -- and Maya, illusion.  This is in a sense the antethesis of noumenon and phenomenon, noumenon being negated of all predicates until it becomes almost extinguished in the Nichts under the title of the Alles.  ("Cf." Max Muller on the metaphysical Nirvana, in his Dhammapada, Introductory Essay.)  The Buddhists express no opinion.
   Let us consider the force-quality in the existences conceived of by these two religions respectively, remembering that the God of the Christian is infinite, and yet discussing the alternative if we could suppose him to be a finite God.  In any equilibrated system of forces, we may sum and represent them as a triangle or series of triangles which again resolve into one.  In any moving system, if the resultant motion be applied in a contrary direction, the equilibrium can also thus be represented.  And if any one of the original forces in such a system may be considered, that one is equal to the resultant of the remainder.  Let "x," the purpose of the universe be the resultant of the forces "G," "S," and "M" (God, Satan, and Man).  Then "M" is also the resultant of "G," "S," and "-x".  So that we can regard either of our forces as the supreme, and there is no reason for worshipping one rather than another.  All are finite.  This argument the Christians clearly see: hence the development of God from the petty {233B} joss of Genesis to the intangible, but self-contradictory spectre of to-day.  But if "G" be infinite, the other forces can have no possible effect on it.  As Whewell says, in the strange accident by which he anticipates the metre of "In Memoriam:" "No force on earth, however great, can stretch a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line that shall be absolutely straight."<<WEH NOTE:  This is of course the direct opposite of Crowley's point!  The force of Gravity, a finite force, clearly prevents the effect of a relative infinite force from coming to fruition.  In closer analysis, the matter is one of relative infinity v. absolute or imaginary infinity.  Regardless, the example weighs contrary to the argument.>>
   The definition of God as infinite therefore denies man implicitly; while if he be finite, there is an end of the usual Christian reasons for worship, though I daresay I could myself discover some reasonably good ones.  [I hardly expect to be asked, somehow.]
   The resulting equilibrium of God and man, destructive of worship, is of course absurd.  We must reject it, unless we want to fall into Positivism, Materialism, or something of the sort.  But if, then, we call God infinite, how are we to regard man, and Satan? (the latter, at the very least, surely no integral part of him).  The fallacy lies not in my demonstration (which is also that of orthodoxy) that a finite God is absurd, but in the assumption that man has any real force.<<Lully, Descartes, Spinoza, Schelling.  See their works.>>
   In our mechanical system (as I have hinted above), if one of the forces be infinite, the others, however great, are both relatively and absolutely nothing.
   In any category, infinity excludes finity, unless that finity be an identical part of that infinity.
   In the category of existing things, space being infinite, for on that hypothesis we are still working, either matter fills or does not fill it.  If the former, matter is infinitely great; if the latter, infinitely small.  Whether the matter-universe be 10 to the 10000 power light-years in diameter or half a mile makes no difference; it is infinitely small -- in effect, Nothing.  The unmathematical illusion that it does exist is what the Hindus call Maya.
   If, on the other hand, the matter-universe is infinite, Brahm and God are crowded out, and the possibility of religion is equally excluded.  {234A}
   We may now shift our objective.  The Hindus cannot account intelligibly, though they try hard, for Maya, the cause of all suffering.  Their position is radically weak, but at least we may say for them that they have tried to square their religion with their common sense.  The Christians, on the other hand, though they saw whither the Manichean Heresy<<The conception of Satan as a positive evil force; the lower triangle of the Hexagram.>> must lead, and crushed it, have not officially admitted the precisely similar conclusion with regard to man, and denied the existence of the human soul as distinct from the divine soul.
   Trismegistus, Iamblicus, Porphyry, Boehme, and the mystics generally have of course substantially done so, though occasionally with rather inexplicable reservations, similar to those made in some cases by the Vedantists themselves.
   Man then being disproved, God the Person disappears for ever, and becomes Atman, Pleroma, Ain Soph, what name you will, infinite in all directions and in all categories -- to deny one is to destroy the entire argument and throw us back on to our old Dvaitistic bases.
   I entirely sympathise with my unhappy friend Rev. Mansel, B. D.,<<"Encyclopedia Britannica," Art. Metaphysics.>> in his piteous and pitiful plaints against the logical results of the Advaitist School.  But on his basal hypothesis of an infinite God, infinite space, time, and so on, no other conclusion is possible.  Dean Mansel is found in the impossible position of one who will neither give up his premisses nor dispute the validity of his logical processes, but who shrinks in horror from the inevitable conclusion; he supposes there must be something wrong somewhere, and concludes that the sole use of reason is to discover its own inferiority to faith.  As Deussen<<"The Principles of Metaphysics."  Macmillan.>> well points out, faith in the Christian sense merely amounts to {234B} being convinced on insufficient grounds.<<Or as the Sunday-school boy said: "Faith is the power of believing what we know to be untrue."  I quote Deussen with the more pleasure, because it is about the only sentence in all his writings with which I am in accord. -- A.C.>>  This is surely the last refuge of incompetence.
   But though, always on the original hypothesis of the infinity of space, &c., the Advaitist position of the Vedantists and the great Germans is unassailable, yet on practical grounds the Dvaitists have all the advantage.  Fichte and the others exhaust themselves trying to turn the simple and obvious position that: "If the Ego alone exists, where is any place, not only for morals and religion, which we can very well do without, but for the most essential and continuous acts of life?  Why should an infinite Ego fill a non-existent body with imaginary food cooked in thought only over an illusionary fire by a cook who is not there?  Why should infinite power use such finite means, and very often fail even them?
   What is the sum total of the Vedantist position?  "'I' am an illusion, externally.  In reality, the true 'I' am the Infinite, and if the illusionary 'I" could only realise Who 'I' really am, how very happy we should all be!"  And here we have Karma, rebirth, all the mighty laws of nature operating nowhere in nothing!
   There is no room for worship or for morality in the Advaitist system.  All the specious pleas of the Bhagavad-Gita, and the ethical works of Western Advaitist philosophers, are more or less consciously confusion of thought.  But no subtlety can turn the practical argument; the grinning mouths of the Dvaitist guns keep the fort of Ethics, and warn metaphysics to keep off the rather green grass of religion.
   That its apologists should have devoted so must time, thought, scholarship, and ingenuity to this question is the best proof of the fatuity of the Advaita position.
   There is then a flaw somewhere.  I boldly take up the glove against all previous wisdom, {235A} revert to the most elementary ideas of cannibal savages, challenge all the most vital premisses and axiomata that have passed current coin with philosophy for centuries, and present my theory.
   I clearly foresee the one difficulty, and will discuss it in advance.  If my conclusions on this point are not accepted, we may at once get back to our previous irritable agnosticism, and look for our Messiah elsewhere.  But if we can see together on this one point, I think things will go fairly smoothly afterwards.
   Consider <<Ratiocination may perhaps not take us far.  But a continuous and attentive study of these quaint points of distinction may give us an intuition, or direct mind-apperception of what we want, one way or the other. -- A.C.>> Darkness!  Can we philosophically or actually regard as different the darkness produced by interference of light and that existing in the mere absence of light?
   Is Unity really identical with .9 recurring?
   Do we not mean different things when we speak respectively of 2 sine 60 degrees and of the square root of 3?
   Charcoal and diamond are obviously different in the categories of colour, crystallisation, hardness, and so on; but are they not really so even in that of existence?
   The third example is to my mind the best.  2 sine 60 degrees and the square root of 3 are unreal and therefore never conceivable, at least to the present constitution of our human intelligences.  Worked out, neither has meaning; unworked, both have meaning, and that a different meaning in one case and the other.
   We have thus two terms, both unreal, both inconceivable, yet both representing intelligible and diverse ideas to our minds (and this is the point!) though identical in reality and convertible by a process of reason which simulates or replaces that apprehension which we can never (one may suppose) attain to.
   Let us apply this idea to the Beginning of all things, about which the Christians lie frankly, the Hindus prevaricate, and the {235B} Buddhists are discreetly silent, while not contradicting even the gross and ridiculous accounts of the more fantastic Hindu visionaries.
   The Qabalists explain the "First Cause"<<An expression they carefully avoid using. -- A.C.>> by the phrase: "From 0 to 1, as the circle opening out into the line."  The Christian dogma is really identical, for both conceive of a previous and eternally existing God, though the the Qabalists hedge by describing this latent Deity as "Not."  Later commentators, notably the illustrious<<I retain this sly joke from the first edition.>> MacGregor-Mathers, have explained this Not as "negatively-existing."  Profound as is my respect for the intellectual and spiritual attainments of him whom I am proud to have called my master,<<I retain this sly joke from the first edition.>> I am bound to express my view that when the Qabalistis said Not, they meant Not, and nothing else.  In fact, I really claim to have re-discovered the long-lost and central Arcanum of those divine philosophers.
   I have no serious objection to a finite god, or gods, distinct from men and things.  In fact, personally, I believe in them all, and admit them to possess inconceivable though not infinite power.
   The Buddhists admit the existence of Maha-Brahma, but his power and knowledge are limited; and his agelong day must end.  I find evidence everywhere, even in our garbled and mutilated version of the Hebrew Scriptures, that Jehovah's power was limited in all sorts of ways.  At the Fall, for instance, Tetragrammaton Elohim has to summon his angels hastily to guard the Tree of Life, lest he should be proved a liar.  For had it occurred to Adam to eat of that Tree before their transgression was discovered, or had the Serpent been aware of its properties, Adam would indeed have lived and not died.  So that a mere accident saved the remnants of the already besmirched reputation of the Hebrew tribal Fetich.  {236A}
   When Buddha was asked how things came to be, he took refuge in silence, which his disciples very conveniently interpreted as meaning that the question tended not to edification.
   I take it that the Buddha (ignorant, doubtless, of algebra) had sufficiently studied philosophy and possessed enough worldly wisdom to be well aware that any system he might promulgate would be instantly attacked and annihilated by the acumen of his numerous and versatile opponents.
   Such teaching as he gave on the point may be summed up as follows.  "Whence whither, why, we know not; but we do know that we are here, that we dislike being here, that there is a way out of the whole loathsome affair -- let us make haste and take it!"
   I am not so retiring in disposition; I persist in my inquiries, and at last the appalling question is answered, and the past ceases to intrude its problems upon my mind.
   Here you are!  Three shies a penny!  Change all bad arguments.
   I ASSERT THE ABSOLUTENESS OF THE QABALISTIC ZERO.
   When we say that the Cosmos sprang from 0, what kind of 0 do we mean?  By 0 in the ordinary sense of the term we mean "absence of extension in any of the categories."
   When I say "No cat has two tails," I do not mean, as the old fallacy runs, that "Absence-of-cat possesses two tails"; but that "In the category of two- tailed things, there is no extension of cat."
   Nothingness is that about which no positive proposition is valid.  We cannot truly affirm: "Nothingness is green, or heavy, or sweet."
   Let us call time, space, being, heaviness, hunger, the categories.<<I cannot here discuss the propriety of representing the categories as dimensions.  It will be obvious to any student of the integral calculus, or to any one who appreciates the geometrical significance of the term "x" to the 4th power. -- A.C.>>  If a man be heavy {236B} and hungry, he is extended in all these, besides, of course, many more.  But let us suppose that these five are all.  Call the man X; his formula is then X(superscript:t+s+b+h+"h").  If he now eat, he will cease to be extended in hunger; if he be cut off from time and gravitation as well, he will now be represented by the formula X(superscript:s+b).  Should he cease to occupy space and to exist, his formula would then be X(superscript:0).  This expression is equal to 1; whatever X may represent, if it be raised to the power of 0 (this meaning mathematically "if it be extended in no dimension or category"), the result is Unity, and the unknown factor X is eliminated.
   This is the Advaitist idea of the future of man; his personality, bereft of all its qualities, disappears and is lost, while in its place arises the impersonal Unity, The Pleroma, Parabrahma, or the Allah of the Unity-adoring followers of Mohammed.  (To the Musulman fakir, Allah is by no means a personal God.)
   Unity is thus unaffected, whether or no it be extended in any of the categories.  But we have already agreed to look to 0 for the Uncaused.
   Now if there was in truth 0 "before the beginning of years," THAT 0 WAS EXTENDED IN NONE OF THE CATEGORIES, FOR THERE COULD HAVE BEEN NO CATEGORIES IN WHICH IT COULD EXTEND!  If our 0 was the ordinary 0 of mathematics, there was not truly absolute 0, for 0 is, as I have shown, dependent on the idea of categories.  If these existed, then the whole question is merely thrown back; we must reach a state in which the 0 is absolute.  Not only must we get rid of all subjects, but of all predicates.  By 0 (in mathematics) we really mean 0 to the nth power, where n is the final term of a natural scale of dimensions, categories, or predicates.  Our Cosmic Egg, then, from which the present universe arose, was Nothingness, extended in no categories, or, graphically, 0 to the 0th power.  This expression is in its present form meaningless.  Let us discover {237B} its value by a simple mathematical process!

                 1
      0   1-1   0  :                 n :
     0 = 0    = -- : Multiply by 1 = - :
                 1 :                 n :
                0

                   1
                  0    n
         Then    --- x -- = 0 x Infinity.
                  n     1
                       0

   Now the multiplying of the infinitely great by the infinitely small results in SOME UNKNOWN FINITE NUMBER EXTENDED IN AN UNKNOWN NUMBER OF CATEGORIES.  It happened, when this our Great Inversion took place, from the essence of all nothingness to finity extended in innumerable categories, that an incalculably vast system was produced.  Merely by chance, chance in the truest sense of the term, we are found with gods, men, stars, planets, devils, colours, forces, and all the materials of the Cosmos; and with time, space, and causality, the conditions limiting and involving them all.<<Compare and contrast this doctrine with that of Herbert Spencer ("First Principles," Pt. I.), and see my "Science and Buddhism" for a full discussion of the difference involved.  -- A.C.>>
   Remember that it is not true to say that our 0 to the 0th power existed; nor that it did not exist.  The idea of existence was just as much unformulated as that of toasted cheese.
   But 0 to the 0th power is a finite expression, or has a finite phase, and our universe is a finite universe; its categories are themselves finite, and the expression "infinite space" is a contradiction in terms.  The idea of an absolute and of an infinite<<If by "infinitely great" we only mean "indefinitely great," as a mathematician would perhaps tell us, we of course begin at the very point I am aiming at, viz., Ecrasez l'Infin. -- A.C.>> God is relegated to the limbo of all similar idle and pernicious perversions of truth.  Infinity remains, but only as a mathematical conception as impossible in nature as the square root of -1.  Against all this mathematical, or semi-mathematical, reasoning, it may doubtless be objected that our {237B} whole system of numbers, and of manipulating them, is merely a series of conventions.  When I say that the square root of three is unreal, I know quite well that it is only so in relation to the series 1, 2, 3, &c., and that this series is equally unreal if I make the square root of 3, Pi , the cube root of 50 the members of a ternary scale.  But this, theoretically true, is practically absurd.  If I mean "the number of a, b, and c," it does not matter if I write 3 or cube root of 50; the idea is a definite one; and it is the fundamental ideas of consciousness of which we are treating, and to which we are compelled to refer everything, whether proximately or ultimately.
   So also my equation, fantastic as it may seem, has a perfect and absolute parallel in logic.  Thus: let us convert twice the proposition "some books are on the table."  By negativing both terms we get "Absence-of-book is not on the table," which is precisely my equation backwards, and a thinkable thing.  To reverse the process, what do I mean when I say "some pigs, but not the black pig, are not in the sty"?  I imply that the black pig is in the sty.  All I have done is to represent the conversion as a change, rather than as merely another way of expressing the same thing.  And "change" is really not my meaning either; for change, to our minds, involves the idea of time.  But the whole thing is inconceivable -- to ratiocination, though not to thought.  Note well too that if I say "absence-of-books is not on the table," I cannot convert it into "All books are on the table" but only to "some books are on the table."  The proposition is an "I" and not an "A" proposition.  It is the Advaita blunder to make it so; and many a schoolboy has fed off the mantelpiece for less.
   There is yet another proof -- the proof by exclusion.  I have shown, and metaphysicians practically admit, the falsity alike of Dvaitism and Advaitism.  The third, the only remaining theory, "this" theory, must, however antecedently improbable, {238A} however difficult to assimilate, be true.<<I may remark that the distinction between this theory and the normal one of the Immanence of the Universe, is trivial, perhaps even verbal only.  Its advantage, however, is that, by hypostatising nothing, we avoid the necessity of any explanation.  How did nothing come to be? is a question which requires no answer.>>
   "My friend, my young friend," I think I hear some Christian cleric say, with an air of profound wisdom, not untinged with pity, condescending to pose beardles and brainless impertinence: "where is the "Cause" for this truly remarkable change?"
   That is exactly where the theory rears to heaven its stoutest bastion!  There is not, and could not be, any cause.  Had 0 to the 0th power been extended in causality, no change could have taken place.<<See the Questions of King Milinda, vol. ii. p. 103.>>
   Here, then, are we, finite beings in a finite universe, time, space, and causality themselves finite (inconceivable as it may seem) with our individuality, and all the "illusions" of the Advaitists, just as real as they practically are to our normal consciousness.
   As Schopenhauer, following Buddha, points out, suffering is a necessary condition of this existence.<<See also Huxley, "Evolution and Ethics.">>  The war of the contending forces as they grind themselves down to the final resultant must cause endless agony.  We may one day be able to transform the categories of emotion as certainly and easily as we now transform the categories of force, so that in a few years Chicago may be importing suffering in the raw state and turning it into tinned salmon: but at present the reverse process is alone practicable.
   How, then, shall we escape?  Can we expect the entire universe to resolve itself back into the phase of 0 to the 0th power?  Surely not.  In the first place, there is no reason why the whole should do so; "x"/"y" is just as convertible as "x".  But worse, the category of causality has been formed, and its inertia is {238B} sufficient to oppose a most serious stumbling-block to so gigantic a process.
   The task before us is consequently of a terrible nature.  It is easy to let things slide, to grin and bear it in fact, until everything is merged in the ultimate unity, which may or may not be decently tolerable.  But while we wait?
   There now arises the question of freewill.  Causality is probably not fully extended in its own category,<<Causality is itself a secondary, and in its limitation as applied to volition, an inconceivable idea.  H. Spencer, "op. cit."  This consideration alone should add great weight to the agnostic, and "a fortiori" to the Buddhist, position.>> a circumstance which gives room for a fractional amount of free will.  If this be not so, it matters little; for if I find myself in a good state, that merely proves that my destiny took me there.  We are, as Herbert Spencer observes, self-deluded with the idea of freewill; but if this be so, nothing matters at all.  If, however, Herbert Spencer is mistaken (unlikely as it must appear), then our reason is valid, and we should seek out the right path and pursue it.  The question therefore need not trouble us at all.
   Here then we see the use of morals and of religion, and all the rest of the bag of tricks.  All these are methods, bad or good, for extricating ourselves from the universe.
   Closely connected with this question is that of the will of God.  People argue that an Infinite intelligence must have been at work on this cosmos.  I reply No!  There is no intelligence at work worthy of the name.  The Laws of Nature may be generalised in one -- The Law of Inertia.  Everything moves in the direction determined by the path of least resistance; species arise, develop, and die as their collective inertia determines; to this Law there is no exception but the doubtful one of Freewill; the Law of Destiny itself is formally and really identical with it.<<See H. Spencer, "First Principles," "The Knowable," for an fair summary of the facts underlying this generalisation; which indeed he comes within an ace of making in so many words.  It may be observed that this law is nearly if not quite axiomatic, its contrary being enormously difficult if not impossible to formulate mentally.>>  {239A}
   As to an "infinite" intelligence, all philosophers of any standing are agreed that all-love and all-power are incompatible.  The existence of the universe is a standing proof of this.
   The Deist needs the Optimist to keep him company; over their firesides all goes well, but it is a sad shipwreck they suffer on emerging into the cold world.
   This is why those who seek to buttress up religion are so anxious to prove that the universe has no real existence, or only a temporary and relatively unimportant one; the result is of course the usual self-destructive Advaitist muddle.
   The precepts of morality and religion are thus of use, of vital use to us, in restraining the more violent forces alike of nature and of man.  For unless law and order prevail, we have not the necessary quiet and resources for investigating, and learning to bring under our control, all the divergent phenomena of our prison, a work which we undertake that at last we may be able to break down the walls, and find that freedom which an inconsiderate Inversion has denied.
   The mystical precepts of pseudo-Zoroaster, Buddha, Sankaracharya, pseudo- Christ and the rest, are for advanced students only, for direct attack on the problem.  Our servants, the soldiers, lawyers, all forms of government, make this our nobler work possible, and it is the gravest possible mistake to sneer at these humble but faithful followers of the great minds of the world.
   What, then, are the best, easiest, directest methods to attain our result?  And how shall we, in mortal language, convey to the minds of others the nature of a result so beyond language, baffling even imagination eagle-pinioned?  It may help us if we endeavour to outline the distinction between the Hindu and Buddhist methods and aims of the Great Work.
   The Hindu method is really mystical in the truest sense; for, as I have shown, the Atman is not infinite and eternal: one day {239B} it must sink down with the other forces.  But by creating in thought an infinite Impersonal Personality, by "defining" it as such, all religions except the Buddhist and, as I believe, the Qabalistic, have sought to annihilate their own personality.  The Buddhist aims directly at extinction; the Hindu denies and abolishes his own finity by the creation of an absolute.
   As this cannot be done in reality, the process is illusory; yet it is useful in the early stages -- as far, at any rate, as the fourth stage of Dhyana, where the Buddha places it, though the Yogis claim to attain to Nirvikalpa-Samadhi, and that Moksha is identical with Nirvana; the former claim I see no reason to deny them; the latter statement I must decline at present to accept.
   The task of the Buddhist recluse is roughly as follows.  He must plunge every particle of his being into one idea: right views, aspirations, word, deed, life, will-power, meditation, rapture, such are the stages of his liberation, which resolves itself into a struggle against the law of causality.  He cannot prevent past causes taking effect, but he can prevent present causes from having any future results.  The exoteric Christian and Hindu rather rely on another person to do this for them, and are further blinded by the thirst for life and individual existence, the most formidable obstacle of all, in fact a negation of the very object of all religion.  Schopenhauer shows that life is assured to the will-to-live, and unless Christ (or Krishna, as the case may be) destroys these folk by superior power -- a task from which almightiness might well recoil baffled! -- I much fear that eternal life, and consequently eternal suffering, joy, and change of all kinds, will be their melancholy fate.  Such persons are in truth their own real enemies.  Many of them, however, believing erroneously that they are being "unselfish," do fill their hearts with devotion for the beloved Saviour, and this process is, in its ultimation, so similar to the earlier stages of the Great {240A} Work itself, that some confusion has, stupidly enough, arisen; but for all that the practice has been the means of bringing some devotees on to the true Path of the Wise, unpromising as such material must sound to intelligent ears.
   The esoteric Christian or Hindu adopts a middle path.  Having projected the Absolute from his mind, he endeavours to unite his consciousness with that of his Absolute, and of course his personality is destroyed in the process.  Yet it is to be feared that such an adept too often starts on the path with the hideous idea of aggrandising his own personality to the utmost.  But his method is so near to the true one that this tendency is soon corrected, as it were automatically.
   (The mathematical analogue of this process is to procure for yourself the realisation of the nothingness of yourself by keeping the fourth dimension ever present to your mind.)
   The illusory nature of this idea of an infinite Atman is well shown by the very proof which that most distinguish Vedantist, the late Swamy Vivekananda (no connection with the firm of a similar name<<The Swami Vive Ananda, Madame Horos, for whose history consult the Criminal Law Reports.>> across the street), gives of the existence of the infinite.  "Think of a circle!" says he.  "You will in a moment become conscious of an infinite circle around your original small one."  The fallacy is obvious.  The big circle is not infinite at all, but is itself limited by the little one.  But to take away the little circle, that is the method of the esoteric Christian or the mystic.   But the process is never perfect, because however small the little circle becomes, its relation with the big circle is still finite.  But even allowing for a moment that the Absolute is really attainable, is the nothingness of the finity related to it really identical with that attained directly by the Buddhist Arahat?  This, consistently with {240B} my former attitude, I feel constrained to deny.  The consciousness of the Absolute-wala<<Wala, one whose business is connected with anything.  "E.g." Jangli-wala, one who lives in, or has business with, a jungle, "i.e." a wild man, or a Forest Conservator.>> is really extended infinitely rather than diminished infinitely, as he will himself assure you.  True, Hegel says: "Pure being is pure nothing!" and it is true that the infinite heat and cold, joy and sorrow, light and darkness, and all the other pairs of opposites,<<The Hindus see this as well as any one, and call Atman "Sat-chit-ananda," these being above the pairs of opposites, rather on the Hegelian lines of the reconciliation (rather than the identity) of opposites in a master-idea.  We have dismissed infinity as the figment of a morbid mathematic: but in any case the same disproof applies to it as to God. -- A. C.>> cancel one another out; yet I feel rather afraid of this Absolute!  Maybe its joy and sorrow are represented in phases, just as 0 to the 0th power and finity are phases of an identical expression, and I have an even chance only of being on the right side of the fence!
   The Buddhist leaves no chances of this kind; in all his categories he is infinitely unextended; though the categories themselves exist; he is in fact 0 to the A+B+C+D+E+...+N power and capable of no conceivable change, unless we imagine Nirvana to be incomprehensibly divided by Nirvana, which would (supposing to two Nirvanas to possess identical categories) result in the production of the original 0 to the 0th power.  But a further change would be necessary even then before serious mischief could result.  In short, I think we may dismiss from our minds any alarm in respect of this contingency.
   On mature consideration, therefore, I confidently and deliberately take my refuge in the Triple Gem.
   Namo Tasso Bhagavato Arahato Sammasambuddhasa!<<Hail unto Thee, the Blessed One, the Perfect One, the Enlightened One!>>
   Let there be hereafter no discussion of the classical problems of philosophy and religion!  In the light of this exposition the {241A} antitheses of noumenon and phenomenon, unity and multiplicity, and their kind, are all reconciled, and the only question that remains is that of finding the most satisfactory means of attaining Nirvana -- extinction of all that exists, knows, or feels; extinction final and complete, utter and absolute extinction.  For by these words only can we indicate Nirvana: a state which transcends thought cannot be described in thought's language.  But from the point of view of thought extinction is complete: we have no data for discussing that which is unthinkable, and must decline to do so.  This is the answer to those who accuse the Buddha of hurling his Arahats (and himself) from Samma Samadhi to annihilation.
   Pray observe in the first place that my solution of the Great Problem permits the co-existence of an indefinite number of means: they need not even be compatible; Karma, rebirth, Providence, prayer, sacrifice, baptism, there is room for all.  On the old and, I hope, now finally discredited hypothesis of an infinite being, the supporters of these various ideas, while explicitly affirming them, implicitly denied.  Similarly, note that the Qabalistic idea of a supreme God (and innumerable hierarchies) is quite compatible with this theory, provided that the supreme God is not infinite.
   Now as to our weapons.  The more advanced Yogis of the East, like the Nonconformists at home, have practically abandoned ceremonial as idle.  I have yet to learn, however, by what dissenters have replaced it!  It take this to be an error, except in the case of the very advanced Yogi.  For there exists a true magical ceremonial, vital and direct, whose purpose has, however, at any rate of recent times, been hopelessly misunderstood.
   Nobody any longer supposes that any means but that of meditation is of avail to grasp the immediate causes of our being; if some person retort that he prefers to rely on a Glorified Redeemer, I simply answer {241B} that he is the very nobody to whom I now refer.
   Meditation is then the means; but only the supreme means.  The agony column of the "Times" is the supreme means of meeting with the gentleman in the brown billycock and frock coat, wearing a green tie and chewing a straw, who was at the soiree of the Carlton Club last Monday night; no doubt! but this means is seldom or never used in the similar contingency of a cow-elephant desiring her bull in the jungles of Ceylon.
   Meditation is not within the reach of every one; not all possess the ability; very few indeed (in the West at least) have the opportunity.
   In any case what the Easterns call "one-pointedness" is an essential preliminary to even early stages of true meditation.  And iron will-power is a still earlier qualification.
   By meditation I do not mean merely "thinking about" anything, however profoundly, but the absolute restraint of the mind to the contemplation of a single object, whether gross, fine, or altogether spiritual.
   Now true magical ceremonial is entirely directed to attain this end, and forms a magnificent gymnasium for those who are not already finished mental athletes.  By act, word, and thought, both in quantity and quality, the one object of the ceremony is being constantly indicated.  Every fumigation, purification, banishing, invocation, evocation, is chiefly a reminder of the single purpose, until the supreme moment arrives, and every fibre of the body, every force-channel of the mind, is strained out in one overwhelming rush of the Will in the direction desired.  Such is the real purport of all the apparently fantastic directions of Solomon, Abramelin, and other sages of repute.  When a man has evoked and mastered such forces as Taphtatharath, Belial, Amaimon, and the great powers of the elements, then he may safely be permitted to begin to try to stop thinking.  {242A} For, needless to say, the universe, including the thinker, exists only by virtue of the thinker's thought.<<See Berkeley and his expounders, for the Western shape of this Eastern commonplace.  Huxley, however, curiously enough, states the fact almost in these words. -- A. C.>>
   In yet one other way is magic a capital training ground for the Arahat.  True symbols do really awake those macrocosmic forces of which they are the eidola, and its is possible in this manner very largely to increase the magical "potential," to borrow a term from electrical science.
   Of course, there are bad and invalid processes, which tend rather to disperse or to excite the mind-stuff than to control it; these we must discard.  But there is a true magical ceremonial, the central Arcanum alike of Eastern and Western practical transcendentalism.  Needless to observe, if I knew it, I should not disclose it.<<WEH NOTE:  The following footnote is to this page, but there is no mark in the text to cite it.  I have place it here, as good a place as any:
   A possible mystic transfiguration of the Vedanta system has been suggested to me on the lines of the Syllogism --
           God   = Being (Patanjali)
           Being = Nothing (Hegel).
     .'.   God   = Nothing (Buddhism).
     Or, in the language of religion:
     Every one may admit that monotheism, exalted by the introduction of the Infinity  symbol, is equivalent to pantheism.  Pantheism and atheism are really identical, as the opponents of both are the first to admit.
     If this be really taught, I must tender my apologies, for the reconcilement is of course complete. -- A. C.>>
   I therefore definitely affirm the validity of the Qabalistic tradition in its practical part as well as in those exalted regions of thought through which we have so recently, and so hardly, travelled.
   Eight are the limbs of Yoga: morality and virtue, control of body, thought, and force, leading to concentration, meditation, and rapture.
   Only when the last of these has been attained, and itself refined upon by removing the gross and even the fine objects of its {242A} sphere, can the causes, subtle and coarse, the unborn causes whose seed is hardly sown, of continued existence be grasped and annihilated, so that the Arahat is sure of being abolished in the utter extinction of Nirvana, while even in this world of pain, where he must remain until the ancient causes, those {243A upper} which have already germinated, are utterly worked out (for even the Buddha himself could not swing back the Wheel of the Law), his certain anticipation of the approach of Nirvana is so intense as to bathe him constantly in the unfathomable ocean of the apprehension of immediate bliss. {243B upper}

{full page below}

                             AUM MANI PADME HOUM.

{243}






                                     1903

                             SCIENCE AND BUDDHISM

 "(Inscribed to the revered Memory of Thomas Henry Huxley) "{columns commence}


                        I.

THE purpose of this essay is to draw a strict comparison between the modern scientific conceptions of Phenomena and their explanation, where such exists, and the ancient ideas of the Buddhists; to show that Buddhism, alike in theory and practice, is a scientific religion; a logical superstructure on a basis of experimentally verifiable truth; and that its method is identical with that of science.  We must resolutely exclude the accidental features of both, especially of Buddhism; and unfortunately in both cases we have to deal with dishonest and shameless attempts to foist on either opinions for which neither is willing to stand sponsor.  Professor Huxley has dealt with the one in his "Pseudo-Scientific Realism"; Professor Rhys Davids has demolished the other in that one biting comment on "Esoteric Buddhism" that it was "not Esoteric and certainly not Buddhism."  But some of the Theosophic mud still sticks to the Buddhist chariot; and there are still people who believe that sane science has at least a friendly greeting for Atheism and Materialism in their grosser and more militant forms.
   Let it be understood then, from the outset, that if in Science I include metaphysics, and in Buddhism meditation-practices, I lend myself neither to the whittlers or "reconcilers" on the one hand, nor to the Animistic jugglers on the other.  Apart from the Theosophic rubbish, we find Sir Edwin Arnold writing:
     "Whoever saith Nirvana is to cease,
        Say unto such they lie."  {244A}
   Lie is a strong word and should read "translate correctly."<<See Childers, Pali Dictionary, "s.v." Nibbana.>>
   I suppose it would not scan, nor rhyme: but Sir Edwin is the last person to be deterred by a little thing like that.
   Dr. Paul Carus, too, in the "Gospel of Buddha," is pleased to represent Nirvana as a parallel for the Heaven of the Christian.  It is sufficient if I reiterate the unanimous opinion of competent scholars, that there is no fragment of evidence in any canonical book sufficient to establish such interpretations in the teeth of Buddhist tradition and practice; and that any person who persists in tuning Buddhism to his own Jew's harp in this way is risking his reputation, either for scholarship or good faith.  Scientific men are common enough in the West, if Buddhists are not; and I may safely leave in their hands the task of castigating the sneak-thieves of the Physical area.


                       II.

   The essential features of Buddhism have been summed up by the Buddha himself.  To me, of course, what the Buddha said or did not say is immaterial; a thing is true or not true, whoever said it.  We believe Mr. Savage Landor when he affirms that Lhassa is an important town in Tibet.  Where only probabilities are concerned we are of course influenced by the moral character {244B} and mental attainments of the speaker; but here I have nothing to do with the uncertain.<<See Huxley's classical example of the horse, zebra, and centaur.>>
   There is an excellent test for the value of any passage in a Buddhist book.  We are, I think, justified in discarding stories which are clearly Oriental fiction, just as modern criticism, however secretly Theistic, discards the Story of Hasisadra or of Noah.  In justice to Buddhism, let us not charge its Scripture with the Sisyphean task of seriously upholding the literal interpretation of obviously fantastic passages.<<Similarly, where Buddhist parables are of a mystical nature, where a complicated symbolism of numbers (for example) is intended to shadow a truth, we must discard them.  My experience of mysticism is somewhat large; its final dictum is that the parable "x" may be equated to "a, b, c, d ... z" by six-and-twenty different persons, or by one person in six-and-twenty different moods.  Even had we a strong traditional explanation I should maintain my position.  The weapons of the Higher Criticism, supplemented by Common Sense, are perfectly valid and inevitably destructive against any such structure.  But I am surely in danger of becoming ridiculous in writing thus to the scientific world.  What I really wish to show is that one need not look for all the Buddhist fancy dishes to be served at the scientific table to the peril of the scientific digestion.  And by a backhanded stroke I wish to impress as deeply as possible upon my Buddhist friends that too much zeal for the accidentals of our religion will surely result in the overwhelming of its essentials in the tide of justly scornful or justly casuistic criticism. -- A.C.>>  May our Buddhist zealots be warned by the fate of old-fashioned English orthodoxy!  But when Buddhism condescends to be vulgarly scientific; to observe, to classify, to "think;" I conceive we may take the matter seriously, and accord a reasonable investigation to its assertions.  Examples of such succinctness and clarity may be found in The Four Noble Truths; The Three Characteristics; The Ten Fetters; and there is clearly a definite theory in the idea of Karma.  Such ideas are basic, and are as a thread on which {245A} the beads of Arabian-Night-Entertainment are strung.<<See Prof. Rhys Davids on the "Jataka.">>
   I propose therefore to deal with these and some other minor points of the Buddhist metaphysic, and trace out their scientific analogies, or, as I hope to show, more often identities.
   First then let us examine that great Summary of the Buddhist Faith, the Four Noble Truths.


                       III

              THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS.

   (1) SORROW. -- Existence is Sorrow.  This means that "no known form of Existence is separable from Sorrow."  This truth is stated by Huxley, almost in so many words, in Evolution and Ethics.  "It was no less plain to some of these antique philosophers than to the fathers of modern philosophy that suffering is the badge of all the tribe of sentient things; that it is no accidental accompaniment, but an essential constituent of the Cosmic Process."  And in the same essay, though he is disposed to deny more than the rudiments of consciousness to the lower forms of life, he is quite clear that pain varies directly (to put it loosely) with the degree of consciousness.  Cf. also "Animal Automatism,"  pp. 236-237.
   (2) SORROW'S CAUSE. -- The cause of sorrow is desire.  I take desire here to include such a phenomenon as the tendency of two molecules of hydrogen and chlorine to combine under certain conditions.  If death be painful to me, it is presumably so to a molecule; if we represent one operation as pleasant, the converse is presumably painful.  Though I am not conscious of the individual pain of the countless deaths involved in this my act of writing, it may be there.  And what I call "fatigue" may be the echo in my central consciousness of the {245B} shriek of a peripheral anguish.  Here we leave the domain of fact; but at least as far our knowledge extends, all or nearly all the operations of Nature are vanity and vexation of spirit.  Consider food, the desire for which periodically arises in all conscious beings.<<Change is the great enemy, the immediate cause of pain.  Unable to arrest it, I slow the process, and render it temporarily painless, by eating.  This is a concession to weakness, no doubt, in one sense.  Do I eat really in order to check change, or to maintain my ego-consciousness?  Change I desire, for my present condition is sorrow.  I really desire the impossible; completely to retain my present egoity with all its conditions reversed. -- A. C.>>
   The existence of these desires, or rather necessities, which I realise to be mine, is unpleasant.  It is this desire inherent in me for continued consciousness that is responsible for it all, and this leads us to the Third Noble Truth.
   (3) SORROW'S CEASING. -- The cessation of desire is the cessation of sorrow.  This is a simple logical inference from the second Truth, and needs no comment.
    (4) THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH. -- There is a way, to be considered later, of realising the Third Truth.  But we must, before we can perceive its possibility on the one hand, or its necessity on the other, form a clear idea of what are the Buddhist tenets with regard to the Cosmos; and, in particular, to man.<<For an able and luminous exposition of "The Four Noble Truths" I refer the reader to the pamphlet bearing that title by my old friend Bhikkhu Ananda Maitriya, published by the Buddhasasana Samagama, 1 Pagoda Road, Rangoon. -- A. C.>>


                        IV

            THE THREE CHARACTERISTICS.

   The Three Characteristics (which we may predicate of all known existing things):
   ("a") Change.  Anikka.
   ("b") Sorrrow.  Dukkha.
   ("c") Absence of an Ego.  Anatta.  {246A}
   This is the Buddhist Assertion.  What does Science say?
   ("a") Huxley, "Evolution and Ethics":
   "As no man fording a swift stream can dip his foot twice into the same water, so no man can, with exactness, affirm of anything in the sensible world that it is.  As he utters the words, nay, as he thinks them, the predicate ceases to be applicable; the present has become the past; the 'is' should be 'was.'  And the more we learn of the nature of things the more evident is it that what we call rest is only unperceived activity; that seeming peace is silent but strenuous battle.  In every part, at every moment, the state of the cosmos is the expression of a transitory adjustment of contending forces, a scene of strife, in which all the combatants fall in turn.  What is true of each part is true of the whole.  Natural knowledge tends more and more to the conclusion that "all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth" are the transitory forms of parcels of cosmic substance wending along the road of evolution, from nebulous potentiality, through endless growths of sun and planet and satellite, through all varieties of matter; through infinite diversities of life and thought, possibly, through modes of being of which we neither have a conception, nor are competent to form any, back to the indefinable latency from which they arose.  Thus the most obvious attribute of the cosmos is its impermanence.  It assumes the aspect not so much of a permanent entity as of a changeful process, in which naught endures save the flow of energy and the rational order which pervades it."
   This is an admirable summary of the Buddhist doctrine.
   ("b") See above on the First Noble Truth.
   ("c") This is the grand position which Buddha carried against the Hindu philosophers.  In our own country it is the argument of Hume, following Berkeley to a place where Berkeley certainly never meant to go -- a curious parallel fulfilment of Christ's curse against Peter (John xxi.).  The Bishop demolishes the idea of a substratum of matter, and {246B} Hume follows by applying an identical process of reasoning to the phenomena of mind.<<The Buddhist position "may" be interpreted as agnostic in this matter, these arguments being directed against, and destructive of, the unwarranted assumptions of the Hindus; but no more.  See Sabbasava Sutta, 10.
   "In him, thus unwisely considering, there springs up one or other of the six (absurd) notions.
   "As something real and true he gets the notion, 'I have a self.'
   "As something real and true he gets the notion, 'I have not a self.'
   "As something real and true he gets the notion, 'By my self, I am conscious of my self.'
   "As something real and true he gets the notion, 'By my self, I am conscious of my non-self.'
   "Or again, he gets the notion. 'This soul of mine can be perceived, it has experienced the result of good or evil actions committed here and there; now this soul of mine is permanent, lasting, eternal, has the inherent quality of never changing, and will continue for ever and ever!'
   "This, brethren, is called the walking in delusion, the jungle of delusion, the wilderness of delusion, the puppet-show of delusion, the writhing of delusion, the fetter of delusion."
    There are, it may be noted, only five (not six) notions mentioned, unless we take the last as double.  Or we may consider the sixth as the contrary of the fifth, and correct.  The whole passage is highly technical, perhaps untrustworthy; in any case, this is not the place to discuss it.  The sun of Agnosticism breaking through the cloud of Anatta is the phenomenon to which I wished to call attention. -- A. C.>>
   Let us consider the Hindu theory.  They classify the phenomena (whether well or ill matters nothing), but represent them all as pictured in, but not affecting, a certain changeless, omnisicent, blissful existence called Atman.  Holding to Theism, the existence of evil forces them to the Fichtean position that "the Ego posits the Non-Ego," and we learn that nothing really exists after all but Brahm.  They then distinguish between Jivatma, the soul-conditioned; and Paramatma, the soul free; the former being the base of our normal consciousness; the latter of the Nirvikalpa-Samadhi consciousness; {247A} this being the sole condition on which morals, religion, and fees to priests can continue.  For the Deist has only to advance his fundamental idea to be forced round in a vicious circle of absurdities.<<As Bishop Butler so conclusively showed.>>
   The Buddhist makes a clean sweep of all this sort of nonsense.  He analyses the phenomena of mind, adopting Berkeley's paradox that "matter is immaterial," in a sane and orderly way.  The "common-sense Philosopher," whom I leave to chew the bitter leaves of Professor Huxley's Essay "On Sensation and the Unity of the Structure of Sensiferous Organs," observes, on lifting his arm, "I lift my arm."  The Buddhist examines this proposition closely, and begins:
   "There is a lifting of an arm."
   By this terminology he avoids Teutonic discussions concerning the Ego and  Non-ego.<<I may incidentally remark that a very few hours' practice (see Section VIII.) cause "I lift my arm" to be intuitively denied. -- A.C.>>  But how does he know this proposition to be true?  By sensation.  The fact is therefore:
   "There is no sensation of the lifting of an arm."
   But how does he know that?  By perception.  Therefore he says:
   "There is a perception of a sensation, &c."
   And why this perception?  From the inherent tendency.
   (Note carefully the determinist standpoint involved in the enunciation of this Fourth Skandah; and that it comes lower than Vin~~n~~anam.)
   "There is a tendency to perceive the sensation, &c."
   And how does he know there is a tendency?  By consciousness.  The final analysis reads:
   "There is a consciousness of a tendency to perceive the sensation of a lifting of an arm."
   He does not, for he cannot, go further back.  He will not suppose, on no sort of evidence, the substratum of Atman uniting {247B} consciousness to consciousness by its eternity, while it fixes a great gulf between them by its changelessness.  He states the knowable, states it accurately, and leaves it there.  But there is a practical application of this analysis which I will treat of later.  (See VIII. Mahasatipa"tt"hana.)
   We are told that the memory is a proof of some real "I."  But how treacherous is this ground!  Did a past event in my life not happen because I have forgotten it?  O the analogy of the river water given above is most valid!  I who write this am not I who read it over and correct it.  Do I desire to play with lead soldiers?  Am I the doddering old cripple who must be wheeled about and fed on whisky and bread and milk?  And is my difference from them so conspicuously less than from the body lying dead of which those who see it will say, "This was Aleister Crowley"?
   What rubbish is it to suppose that an eternal substance, sentient or not, omniscient or not, depends for its information on so absurd a series of bodies as are grouped under that "Crowley"!
   Yet the Buddhist meets all arguments of the spiritual order with a simple statement which, if not certain, is at least not improbable.  There is, he will tell you, a "spiritual" world, or to avoid any (most unjustifiable) misunderstandings, let us say a world of subtler matter than the visible and tangible, which has its own laws (analogous to, if not identical with, those laws of matter with which we are acquainted) and whose inhabitants change, and die, and are re-born very much as ordinary mortal beings.  But as they are of subtler matter, their cycle is less rapid.<<Cf. Huxley, cited "supra," "possibly, through modes of being of which we neither have a conception, nor are competent to form any. ...">>
   As a nominalist, I hope not to be misunderstood when I compare this to the relative mutability of the individual and the species.<<Cf. "Evolution and Ethics," note 1.>>  We have enough examples free {248A} from such possibility of misinterpretation in our own bodies.  Compare the longevity of a bone with that of a corpuscle.  But it is this "Substratum" universe, which must not be confounded with the substratum, the arguments for whose existence Berkeley so utterly shattered,<<Without an elaborate analysis of the ideas involved in the Ding an sich of Kant, and of H. Spencer's definition of all things as Modes of the Unknowable, I may point out in passing that these hypotheses are as sterile as the "vital principle" in biology or "phlogiston" in chemistry.  They lead literally nowhere.  That the phenomenal world is an illusion is all very well; one girds up one's loins to seek reality: but to prove reality unknowable is to shut all avenues to the truth-loving man, to open all to the sensualist.  And, if we accept either of the above philosophies, it does not matter.  That we feel it does matter is sufficient refutation, for we must obey the sentence awarded on our own testimony, whether we like it or not.
   I am aware that this is a somewhat cowardly way of dealing with the question; I prefer to insist that if we once admit that the unknowable (by reason) to consciousness may be known (by concentration) to super-consciousness, the difficulty vanishes.
   I think Huxley goes too far in speaking of a man "self-hypnotised into cataleptic trances" without medical evidence of a large number of cases.  Edward Carpenter, who has net Yogis, and talked long and learnedly with them, tells a different story.
   Even had we a large body of evidence from Anglo-Indian medical men, the proof would still be lacking.  They might not be the real men.  The Indian native would take intense delight in bringing round the village idiot to be inspected in the character of a holy man by the "Doctor Sahib."
  The Anglo-Indian is a fool; a minimum medical education is in most cases insufficient to abate the symptoms to nil, though perhaps it must always diminish them.  The Hindu is the Sphinx of civilisation; nearly all that has been written on him is worthless; those who know him best know this fact best. -- A. C.>> which may conserve memory for a period greatly exceeding that of one of its particular avatars.  Hence the "Jataka."  But the doctrine is not very essential; its chief value is to show what serious difficulties confront us, and to supply a reason for the struggle to some better state.  For if nothing {248B} survives death, what does it matter to us?  Why are we to be so altruistic as to avoid the reincarnation of a being in all points different from ourselves?  As the small boy said, "What has posterity done for me?"  But something does persist; something changing, though less slowly.  What evidence have we after all that an animal does not remember his man-incarnation?  Or, as Levi says, "In the suns they remember, and in the planets they forget."  I think it unlikely (may be), but in the total absence of all evidence for or against -- at least with regard to the latter hypothesis! -- I suspend my judgment, leave the question alone, and proceed to more practical points than are offered by these interesting but not over-useful metaphysical speculations.


                        V.

                      KARMA.

   The law of causation is formally identical with this.  Karma means "that which is made," and I think it should be considered with strict etymological accuracy.  If I place a stone on the roof of a house, it is sure to fall sooner or later; "i.e.," as soon as the conditions permit.  Also, in its ultimation, the doctrine of Karma is identical with determinism.  On this subject much wisdom, with an infinite amount of rubbish, has been written.  I therefore dismiss it in these few words, confident that the established identity can never be shaken.


                       VI.

          THE TEN FETTERS OR SANYO"G"ANAS.

   1. Sakkaya-di"tt"hi.      Belief in a "soul."
   2. Vi"k"iki"kk"ha.        Doubt.
   3. Silabbata-paramasa.    Reliance on the efficacy of rites and ceremonies.
   4. Kama.                  Bodily Desires.  {249A}
   5. Patigha.               Hatred.
   6. Ruparaga.              Desire for bodily immortality.
   7. Aruparaga.             Desire for spiritual immortality.
   8. Mano.                  Pride.
   9. Udha"kk"a              Self-righteousness.
  10. Avi"gg"a.              Ignorance.

   (1) For this is a "petitio principii."
   (2) This, to a scientist, is apparently anathema.  But it only means, I think, that if we are not settled in our minds we cannot work.  And this is unquestionable.  Suppose a chemist to set to work to determine the boiling-point of a new organic substance.  Does he stop in the midst, struck by the fear that his thermometer is inaccurate?  No! he has, unless he is a fool, tested it previously.  We must have our principia fixed before we can do research work.
   (3) A scientist hardly requires conviction on this point!
   (4) Do you think to combine Newton and Caligula?  The passions, allowed to dominate, interfere with the concentration of the mind.
   (5) Does brooding on your dislikes help you to accurate observation?  I admit that a controversy may stir you up to perform prodigies of work, but while you are actually working you do not suffer the concentration of your mind to be interfered with.
   (6&7) This Fetter and the next are contingent on your having perceived the suffering of all forms of conscious existence.
   (8) Needs no comment.  Pride, like humility, is a form of delusion.
   (9) Is like unto it, but on the moral plane.
   (10) The great enemy.  Theists alone have found the infamous audacity to extol the merits of this badge of servitude.
   We see, then, that in this classification a scientist will concur.  We need not discuss the question whether or no he would find others to add.  Buddhism may not be complete, but, as far as it goes, it is accurate.  {249B}


                       VII.

         THE RELATIVE REALITY OF CERTAIN
             STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

   Whether we adopt Herbert Spenser's dictum that the primary testimony of consciousness is to the existence of externality, or no;<<Mahasatipa"tth"ana (See. VIII.) does admit this perhaps.  Yet its very object is to correct consciousness on the lines indicated by reason.>> whether or no we fly to the extreme idealistic position; there is no question that, to our normal consciousness, things as they present themselves -- apart from obvious illusion, if even we dare to except this -- are undisprovable to the immediate apprehension.  Whatever our reason may tell us, we act precisely as though Berkeley had never lived, and the herculean Kant had been strangled while yet in his cradle by the twin serpents of his own perversity and terminology.
   What criterion shall we apply to the relative realities of normal and dream consciousness?  Why do I confidently assert that the dream state is transitory and unreal?
   In that state I am equally confident that my normal consciousness is invalid.  But as my dreams occupy a relatively small portion of my time, and as the law of causation seems suspended, and as their vividness is less than that of normal consciousness, and above all, as in the great majority of cases I can show a cause, dating from my waking hours, for the dream, I have four strong reasons (the first explanatory to some extent of my reasons for accepting the others) for concluding that the dream is fictitious.
   But what of the "dreamless" state?  To the dreamer his normal faculties and memories arise at times, and are regarded as fragmentary and absurd, even as the remembrance of a dream is to the waking man.  Can we not conceive then of a "dreamless" life, of {250A} which our dreams are the vague and disturbed transition to normal consciousness?
   The physiological evidence goes literally for nothing.  Even were it proved that the recipio-motor apparatus of a "dreamless" sleeper was relatively quiescent, would that supply any valid argument against the theory I have suggested?  Suggested, for I admit that our present position is completely agnostic in respect to it, since we have no evidence which throws light on the matter; and study of the subject would appear to be mere waste of time.
   But the suggestion is valuable as affording us a possibly rational explanation, conformable to the waking man, which the dreamer would indignantly reject.
   Suppose, however, a dream so vivid that the whole waking man is abased before its memory, that his consciousness of it appears a thousand times more real than that of the things about him; suppose that his whole life is moulded to fit the new facts thus revealed to him; that he would cheerfully renounce years of normal life to obtain minutes of that dream-life; that his time sense is uprooted as never before, and that these influences are permanent.  Then, you will say, delirium tremens (and the intoxication of hashish, in respect more particularly of the time sense) afford us a parallel.  But the phenomena of delirium tremens do not occur in the healthy.  As for the suggestion of auto-hypnosis, the memory of the "dream" is a sufficient reply.  However this may be, the simple fact of the superior apparent reality -- a conviction unshakable, "inepuisable" (for the English has no word), is a sufficient test.  And if we condescend to argue, it is for pleasure, and aside from the vital fact; a skirmish, and not a pitched battle.
   The "dream" I have thus described is the state called Dhyana by the Hindus and Buddhists.  The method of attaining it is sane, healthy, and scientific.  I would not take the pains to describe that method, had not illiterate, and too often mystical advocates of the practice obscured the simple {250B} grandeur of our edifice by jimcrack pinnacles of stucco -- as who should hang the Taj Mahal with fairy lamps and chintz.
   It is simple.  The mind is compelled to fix its attention on a single thought; while the controlling power is exercised and a profound watchfulness kept up lest the thought should for a moment stray.<<Huxley, Essays, V., 136.>>  The later portion is, to my mind, the essential one.  The work is comparable to that of an electrician who should sit for hours with his finger on a delicately adjusted resistance-box and his eye on the spot of light of a galvanometer, charged with the duty of keeping the spot still, at least that it should never move beyond a certain number of degrees, and of recording the more important details of his experiment.  Our work is identical in design, though worked with subtler -- if less complex -- means.  For the finger on the resistance-box we substitute the Will; and its control extends but to the Mind; for the eye we substitute the Introspective Faculty with its keen observation of the most minute disturbance, while the spot of light is the Consciousness itself, the central point of the galvanometer scale the predetermined object, and the other figures on the scale, other objects, connected with the primary by order and degree, sometimes obviously, sometimes obscurely, perhaps even untraceably, so that we have no real right to predicate their connection.<<This last sentence will be best understood by those who have practised up to a certain point.  At first it is easy to trace back by a connected chain of thoughts from the thought which awakes us to the fact that we are wandering to the original thought.  Later, and notably as we improve, this becomes first difficult, then impossible.  At first sight this fact suggests that we are injuring our brains by the practice, but the explanation is as follows: Suppose we figure the central consciousness as the Sun, intent on seeing that nothing falls into him.  First the near planets are carefully arranged, so that no collision can occur; afterwards Jupiter and Saturn, until his whole system is safe.  If then any body fall upon the Sun, he knows that it is not from any of those planets with which he is familiar, and, lord of his own system, cannot trace the course or divine the cause of the accident which has disturbed him.  And he will accept this ignorance as a proof of how well his own system is going, since he no longer receives shocks from it. -- A. C.>> {251A}
   How any sane person can describe this process as delusive and unhealthy passes my comprehension; that any scientist should do so implies an ignorance on his part of the facts.
   I may add that the most rigid necessity exists for perfect health of body and mind before this practice can begin; asceticism is as sternly discouraged as indulgence.  How would the electrician do his work after a Guildhall Banquet?  The strain of watching would be too much, and he would go off to sleep.  So with the meditator.  If, on the other hand, he had been without food for twenty-four-hours, he might -- indeed it has been done often -- perform prodigies of work for the necessary period; but a reaction must follow of proportionate severity.  Nobody will pretend that the best work is done starving.<<Hallucination especially is to be feared.  Light-headedness from want of food is quite sufficient explanation for many "Mystic raptures."  I do not care to invoke hysteria and epilepsy without positive evidence. -- A. C.>>
   Now to such an observer certain phenomena present themselves sooner or later which have the qualities above predicated of our imaginary "dream" preceded by a transition-state very like total loss of consciousness.  Are these fatigue phenomena?  Is it that this practice for some as yet unknown reason stimulates some special nerve-centre?  Perhaps; the subject requires investigation; I am not a physiologist.  Whatever physiology may say, it is at least clear that if this state is accompanied with an intense and passionless bliss beyond anything that the normal man can conceive of, and unaccompanied with the slightest prejudice to the mental and physical health, it is most highly desirable.  And to the scientist it presents a magnificent field of research.  {251B}
   Of the metaphysical and religious theories which have been built upon the facts here stated, I have nothing to say in this place.   The facts are not at the disposition of all; from the nature of the subject each man must be his own witness.  I was once twitted by some shallow-pated person with the fact that my position cannot be demonstrated in the laboratory, and that therefore (save the mark!) I must be a mystic, an occultist, a theosophist, a mystery-monger, and what not.  I am none of these.  The above criticism applies to every psychologist that ever wrote, and to the man who makes the criticism by the fact of his making it.  I can only say: "You have your own laboratory and apparatus, your mind; and if the room is dirty and the apparatus ill put together, you have certainly not me to blame for it."
   The facts being of individual importance, then, there is little use if I detail the results of my own experience.  And the reason for this reticence -- for I plead guilty to reticence -- that to explain would damage the very apparatus whose use I am advocating.  For did I say that such an such a practice leads one to see a blue pig, the suggestion is sufficient to cause one class of people to see a blue pig where none existed, and another to deny or suspect the blue pig when it really appeared, though the latter alternative is unlikely.  The consciousness phenomenon, and the bliss, is of so stupendous and well-defined a nature that I cannot imagine any preconceived idea powerful enough to diminish it appreciably.  But for the sake of the former class I hold my tongue.<<On the advisability of so doing I am open to conviction.  The scientific mind, I might argue, will not readily fall into that error; and for the others, they will be useless as a research phalanx, and may as well see blue pigs and be happy as not.  In the past, no doubt, research has been choked by the multitude of pseudo-blue-pig-people, from the "T.S." to the "G.D."  We must distinguish by methods, not by results. -- A. C.>>
   I trust it is now perfectly clear, if my statements are accepted -- and I can only {252A} most seriously assure you that honest laborious 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 "ipso facto" to become unserious.  Whether the normal testimony may be attacked from above, by insisting on the superior reality of Dhyana -- and "a fortiori" of Samadhi, which I have not experienced, and consequently do not treat of, being content to accept the highly probably statements of those who profess to know, and who have so far not deceived me ("i.e." as to Dhyana), is a question which it is not pertinent to the present argument to discuss.<<The gravest doubts assail me on further examination of this point.  I am now (1906) convinced that the experiences to which I refer constitute Samadhi.  The accursed pedantry of the pundits has led to the introduction of a thousand useless subtleties in philosophical terminology, the despair alike of the translator and the investigator, until he realises that it is pedantry, and as worthless as the rest of oriental literature in all matters of exactitude. -- A. C.>>  I shall, however suggest certain ideas in the following section, in which I propose to discuss the most famous of the Buddhist meditations (Mahasatipa"tth"ana), its method, object, and results.


                      VIII.

                 MAHASATIP"TTH"ANA.

   This meditation differs fundamentally from the usual Hindu methods by the fact that the mind is not restrained to the contemplation of a single object, and there is no interference with the natural functions of the body as there is, "e.g.", in Pranayama.  It is essentially an observation-practice, which later assumes an analytic aspect in regard to the question, "What is it that is really observed?"
   The Ego-idea is resolutely excluded from the start, and so far Mr. Herbert Spencer will have nothing to object ("Principles of {252B} Psychology," ii, 404).  The breathing, motions of walking, &c., are merely observed and recorded; for instance, one may sit down quietly and say: "There is an indrawing of the breath."  "There is an expiration," &c.  Or, walking, "There is a raising of the right foot," and so on, just as it happens.  The thought is of course not quick enough to note all the movements or their subtle causes.  For example, we cannot describe the complicated muscular contractions, &c.; but this is not necessary.  Concentrate on some series of simple movements.
   When this through habit becomes intuitive so that the thought is "really" "There is a raising," as opposed to "I raise" (the later being in reality a complex and adult idea, as philosophers have often shown, ever since Descartes fell into the trap), one may begin to analyse, as explained above, and the second stage is "There is a sensation (Vedana) of a raising, &c."  Sensations are further classed as pleasant or unpleasant.
   When this is the true intuitive instantaneous testimony of consciousness (so that "There is a raising, &c." is rejected as a palpable lie),<<"Why should you expect Vedana to make Rupa appear illusory?" asked a friend of mine, on reading through the MS. of this essay.  The reason of my omission to explain is that to me it seemed obvious.  The fact had been assimilated.  To meditate on anything is to perceive its unreal nature.  Notably this is so in concentrating on parts of the body, such as the nose.  On this phenomenon the Hindus have based their famous aphorism, "That which can be thought is not true." -- A.C.>> we proceed to San~~n~~a, perception.
   "There is a perception of a (pleasant or unpleasant) sensation of a raising, &c."
   When this has become intuitive -- why! here's a strange result!  The emotions of pain and pleasure have vanished.  They are subincluded in the lesser skandha of Vedana, and San~~n~~a is free from them.  And to him who can live in this third state, and live so for ever, there is no more pain; only an intense interest similar to that which has enabled men of science to watch and note the progress of their own death-agony.  Unfortunately {253A} the living in such a state is conditional on sound mental health, and terminable by disease or death at any moment.  Were it not so, the First Noble Truth would be a lie.
   The two further stages Sankhara and Vin~~n~~anam pursue the analysis to its ultimation, "There is a consciousness of a tendency to perceive the (pleasant or unpleasant) sensation of a raising of a right foot" being the final form.  And I suppose no psychologist of any standing will quarrel with this.<<I deal with Mr. Spencer and "Transfigured Realism" in a note at the end of this section. -- A. C.>>  Reasoning in fact leads us to this analysis; the Buddhist goes further only so far as he may be said to knock down the scaffolding of reasoning processes, and to assimilate the actual truth of the matter.
   It is the difference between the schoolboy who painfully construes "Balbus murum aedificavit," and the Roman who announces that historic fact without a thought of his grammar.
   I have called this meditation the most famous of the Buddhist meditations, because it is stated by the Buddha himself that if one practises it honestly and intelligently a result is certain.  And he says this of no other.
   I have personally not found time to devote myself seriously to this Mahasatipa"tth"ana, and the statements here made are those derived from reason and not from experience.  But I can say that the unreality of the grosser (rupa) relatively to the subtler Vedana and still more subtle San~~n~~a becomes rapidly apparent, and I can only conclude that with time and trouble the process would continue.
   What will occur when one reaches the final stage of Vin~~n~~anam, and finds no Atman behind it?  Surely the Vin~~n~~anam stage will soon seem as unreal as the former have become.  It is idle to speculate; but if I may escape the imputation of explaining the obscure by the more obscure, I may hint that such a person must be very near the state called Nirvana, whatever may be meant by {253B} this term.  And I am convinced in my own mind that the Ananda (bliss) of Dhyana will surely arise long before one has passed even up to Sankhara.
   And for the reality, 'twill be a brave jest, my masters, to fling back on the materialists that terrible gibe of Votaire's at the mystery-mongers of his day: "Ils nient ce qui est, et expliquent ce qui n'est pas."


              NOTE TO SECTION VIII.

              "Transfigured Realism."

   I will not waste my own time and that of my readers by any lengthy discussion of Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Transfigured Realism."  I will not point out in greater detail how he proposes, by a chain of reasoning, to over-throw the conclusions he admits as being those of reason.
   But his statement that Idealism is but verbally intelligible is for my purpose the most admirable thing he could have said.
   He is wrong in saying that the idealists are bewildered by their own terminology; the fact is that idealist conclusions are presented directly to consciousness, when that consciousness is Dhyanic.  (Cf. Section XI.)
   Nothing is clearer to my mind than that the great difficult habitually experienced by the normal mind in the assimilation of metaphysics is due to the actual lack of experience in the mind of the reader of the phenomena discussed.  I will go so far as to say that perhaps Mr. Spencer himself is so bitter because he himself has actual experience of "Transfigured Realism" as a directly presented phenomenon; for if he supposes that the normal healthy mind can perceive what he perceives, Berkeley's arguments must seem to him mere wanton stupidity.
   I class the Hindu philosophy with the Idealist; the Budhistic with that of Mr. Herbert Spencer; the great difference between the two being that the Buddhists recognise clearly these (or similar) conclusions as phenomena, Mr. Spencer, inconsistently {254A} enough, only as truths verified by a higher and more correct reasoning than that of his opponents.
   We recognise, with Berkeley, that reason teaches us that the testimony of consciousness is untrue; it is absurd, with Spencer, to refute reason; instead we take means to bring consciousness to a sense of its improbity.  Now our (empiric) diagnosis is that it is the dissipation of mind that is chiefly responsible for its untruthfulness.  We seek (also by empiric means, alas!) to control it, to concentrate it, to observe more accurately -- has this source of possible error been sufficiently recognised? -- what its testimony really is.
   Experience has taught me, so far as I have been able to go, that Reason and Consciousness have met together; Apprehension and Analysis have kissed one another.  The reconciliation (in fact, remember, and not in words) is at least so nearly perfect that I can confidently predict that a further pursuit of the (empirically-indicated) path will surely lead to a still further and higher unity.
   The realisation of the hopes held out by the hypothesis is then of clear evidential value in support of that hypothesis, empiric as it was, and is.  But with the growth and gathering-together, classifying, criticism of our facts, we are well on the way to erect a surer structure on a broader basis.


                       IX.

                   AGNOSTICISM.

   It should be clearly understood, and well remembered, that throughout all these meditations and ideas, there is no necessary way to any orthodox ontology whatever.  As to the way of salvation, we are not to rely on the Buddha; the vicious lie of vicarious atonement finds no place here.  The Buddha himself does not escape the law of causation; if this be metaphysics, so far Buddhism is metaphysical, but no further.  While denying obvious lies, it does not set up dogmas; all its statements are susceptible of proof -- a child can assent to all the more important.  {254B} And this is Agnosticism.  We have a scientific religion.  How far would Newton have got if he had stuck to Tycho Brahe as the One Guide?  How far the Buddha had he reverenced the Vedas with blind faith?  Or how far can we proceed even from partial truth, unless a perfectly open mind be kept regarding it, aware that some new phenomenon may possibly overthrow our most fundamental hypotheses!  Give me a reasonable proof of some (intelligent) existence which is not liable to sorrow, and I will throw the First Noble Truth to the dogs without a pang.  And, knowing this, how splendid is it to read the grand words uttered more than two thousand years ago:  "Therefore, O Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves.  Be ye a refuge to yourselves.  Betake yourselves to no external refuge.  Hold fast to the truth as a lamp.  Hold fast as a refuge to the truth.  Look not for refuge to any one besides yourselves."  (Mahaparanibbana Sutta, ii. 33.)  And to such seekers only does the Buddha promise "the very topmost Height" -- if only they are "anxious to learn."  This is the corner- stone of Buddhism; can scientific men deny their assent to these words when they look back on the history of Thought in the West; the torture of Bruno, the shame of Galileo, the obscurantism of the Schoolmen, the "mystery" of the hard-pressed priests, the weapons carnal and spiritual of stake and rack, the labyrinths of lying and vile intrigue by which Science, the child, was deformed, distorted, stunted, in the interest of the contrary proposition?
   If you ask me why you should be Buddhists and not indifferentists, as you are now, I tell you that I come, however unworthy, to take up the sword that Huxley wielded; I tell you that the Oppressor of Science in her girlhood is already at work to ravish her virginity; that a moment's hesitation, idleness, security may force us back from the positions so hardly won.  Are we never to go forward, moreover?  Are our children still to be taught as facts the stupid and indecent fables of the Old Testament, fables {255A} that the Archbishop of Canterbury himself would indignantly repudiate?  Are minds to be warped early, the scientific method and imagination checked, the logical faculty thwarted -- thousand of workers lost each year to Science?
   And the way to do this is not only through the negative common-sense of indifference; organise, organise, organise!  For a flag we offer you the stainless lotus-banner of the Buddha, in defence of which no drop of blood has ever been, nor ever will be shed, a banner under which you will join forces with five hundred million of your fellow-men.  And you will not be privates in the army; for you the highest place, the place of leaders, waits; as far as the triumphs of the intellect are concerned, it is to Western Science that we look.  Your achievements have shattered the battle-array of dogma and despotism; your columns roll in triumphant power through the breaches of false metaphysic and baseless logic; you have fought that battle, and the laurels are on your brows.  The battle was fought by us more than two thousand years ago; the authority of the Vedas, the restrictions of caste, were shattered by the invulnerable sword of truth in Buddha's hand; we are your brothers.  But in the race of intellect we have fallen behind a little; will you take no interest in us, who have been your comrades?  To Science Buddhism cries: Lead us, reform us, give us clear ideas of Nature and her laws; give us that basis of irrefragable logic and wide knowledge that we need, and march with us into the Unknown!
   The Buddhist faith is not a blind faith; its truths are obvious to all who are not blinded by the spectacles of bibiolatry and deafened by the clamour of priests, presbyters, ministers: whatever name they choose for themselves, we can at least put them aside in one great class, the Thought-stiflers; and these truths are those which we have long accepted and to which you have recently hardly won.
   It is to men of your stamp, men of independent (255B} thought, of keen ecstasy of love of knowledge, of practical training, that the Buddhasanana Samagama<<Or International Buddhist Society, founded in Rangoon in 1903.>> appeals; it is time that Buddhism reformed itself from within; though its truths be held untarnished (and even this is not everywhere the case), its methods, its organisation, are sadly in need of repair; research must be done, men must be perfected, error must be fought.  And if in the West a great Buddhist society is built up of men of intellect, of the men in whose hands the future lies, there is then an awakening, a true redemption, of the weary and forgetful Empires of the East.


                        X.

            THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH.

   To return from our little digression to the original plan of our essay.  It is time to note the "Noble Eightfold Path," referred to, and its consideration deferred, in Section III.
   In this Fourth Noble Truth we approach the true "direction" of Buddhism; progress is but another word for change; is it possible to move in a direction whose goal is the changeless?  The answer is Yea and Amen! and it is detailed in the Noble Eightfold Path, of which I propose to give a short resume.  First, however, of the goal.  It may be readily syllogised:
   All existing things are (by nature, inevitably) subject to change.
   In Nirvana is no change.
   .'. No existing thing is or can be in NIRVANA.
   Now here is the great difficulty; for this syllogism is perfectly sound, and yet we speak of attaining Nirvana, tasting Nirvana, &c.
   [We must distinguish the Hindu Nirvana, which means Cessation of Existence in certain Lokas; never absolute Cessation, as the {256A} Buddhist tradition, the etymology, and the logical value alike require for the word as applied to the Buddhist goal.  See Childres, Pali Dictionary, "sub voce" Nibbana.]
   The explanation is really as follows: only by this term Nirvana can we foreshadow to you the reality; for as even the Dawn of Dhyana is indescribable in language "a fortiori" Nirvana is so.  To give an example, for that something of the sort is necessary I freely admit, to defend so apparently mystical a statement, I may give the following from my own experience.
   In a certain meditation one day I recorded:
   "I was ("a") conscious of external things seen behind after my nose had vanished.  ("b") Conscious that I was "not" conscious of these things.  These ("a") and ("b") were simultaneous."
   I subsequently discovered this peculiar state of consciousness classfied in the Abhidhamma.  That it is a contradiction in terms I am perfectly aware; to assign any meaning to it is frankly beyond me; but I am as certain that such a state once existed in me as I am of anything.
   Similarly with Nirvana and its definition.  The Arahat knows what it is, and describes it by its accidentals, such as bliss.  I must raise, very reluctantly, a protest against the idea of Professor Rhys Davids (if I have understood him aright) that Nirvana is the mental state resulting from the continuous practice of all the virtues and methods of thought characteristic of Buddhism.  No; Nirvana is a state belonging to a different plane, to a higher dimension than anything we can at present conceive of.  It has perhaps its analogies and correspondences on the normal planes, and so shall we find of the steps as well as of the Goal.  Even the simple first step, which every true Buddhist has taken, Sammaditthi, is a very different thing from the point of view of an Arahat.  The Buddha stated expressly that none but an Arahat could really comprehend the Dhamma. {256B}
   And so for all the Eight Stages; as regards their obvious meaning on the moral plane, I can do no better than quote my friend Bhikkhu Ananda Maitriya, in his "Four Noble Truths."
   "He who has attained, by force of pure understanding, to the realisation of the Four Noble Truths, who has realised the fact that depends from that understanding, namely that all the constituents of being are by nature endowed with the Three Characteristics of Sorrow, Transitoriness, and Absence of any immortal principle or Atma -- such a one is said to be Sammaditthi, to hold right views, and the term has come to mean one of the Buddhist Faith.  We may not have taken the other and higher steps on the Noble Eightfold Path; but must have realised those Four Truths and their sequential three Characteristics.  He who has attained Sammaditthi has at least entered upon the Holy Way, and, if he but try, there will come to him the power to overcome the other fetters that restrict his progress.  But first of all he must abandon all those false hopes and beliefs; and one who has done this is called a Buddhist.  And this holding of Right Views, in Pali Sammaditthi, is the first step upon the Noble Eightfold Path.
   The second stage is Right Aspiration -- Sammasankappo.  Having realised the woe and transitoriness and soullessness of all life, there rises in the mind this Right Aspiration.  When all things suffer, we at least will not increase their burden, so we aspire to become pitiful and loving, to cherish ill-will toward none, to retire from those pleasures of sense which are the fruitful cause of woe.  The will, we all know, is ever readier than the mind, and so, thought we aspire to renounce the pleasures of sense, to love and pity all that lives, yet perhaps we often fail in the accomplishment of our aspiration.  But if the desire to become pitiful and pure be but honest and earnest, we have gained the Second Step upon the Path -- Sammasankappo, Right Aspiration.
   He whose motives are pure has no need {257A} to conceal the Truth -- he who truly loves and who has a malice towards none, will ever speak only fair and soft words.  By a man's speech do we learn his nature, and that one whose Right Aspirations are bearing fruit attains to the Third Step, Right Speech, Sammavaca.  Speaking only the Truth in all things, never speaking harshly or unkindly, in his speech realising the love and pity that is in his heart -- that man has attained to Stage the Third.
   And because of the great power of a man's thoughts and words to change his being, because by thinking of the pitiful our acts grow full of mercy, therefore is Stage the Fourth called Right Conduct.  To him who has gained this Fourth Stage, his intense aspiration, his right understanding, his carefully guarded speech -- perhaps for many years of self-control -- have at last borne outward fruit, till all his acts are loving, and pure, and done without hope of gain, he has attained the Fourth Step, called Sammakammanto.
   And when, growing yet holier, that habit of Right Action grows firm and inalienable, when his whole life is lived for the Faith that is in him, when ever act of his daily life, yea, of his sleep also, is set to a holy purpose, when not one thought or deed that is cruel or unpitiful can stain his being -- when, not even as a duty, will he inflict pain by deed, word, or thought -- then he has gained the Fifth High Path, the living of the life that's Right -- Samma ajivo.  Abstaining from all that can cause pain, he has become blameless, and can live only by such occupations as can bring no sorrow in their train.<<From my point of view, this is of course impossible.  See Sec. III.  If wilful infliction of pain only is meant, our state becomes moral, or even worse! -- mystical.  I should prefer to cancel this sentence.  Cf. Appendix I., "supra." -- A. C.>>
   To him who has lived so, say the Holy Books, there comes a power which is unknown to ordinary men.  Long training and restraint have given him conquest of his mind, he can {257B} now bring all his powers with tremendous force to bear upon any one object he may have in view, and this ability to so use the energies of his being to put forth a constant and tremendous effort of the will, marks the attainment of the Sixth Stage, Sammavayamo, usually translated Right Effort, but perhaps Right Will-power would come nearer to the meaning, or Right Energy, for effort has been made even to attain to Sammaditthi.<<It is of course a specific kind of effort, not mere struggle.>>  And this power being gained by its use he is enabled to concentrate all his thoughts and hold them always upon one object -- waking or sleeping, he remembers who he is and what his high aim in life -- and this constant recollection and keeping in mind of holy things, is the Seventh Stage, Sammasati.  And by the power of this transcendent faculty, rising through the Eight High Trances to the very threshold of Nirvana, he at last, in the Trance called Nirodha Samapatti, attains, even in this life, to the Deathless Shore of Norvana, by the power of Sammasamadhi, Right Concentration.  Such a one has finished the Path -- he has destroyed the cause of all his chain of lives, and has become Arahan, a Saint, a Buddha himself."
   But none knows better than the venerable Bhikkhu himself, as indeed he makes clear with regard to the steps Sammavayamo and above, that these interpretations are but reflections of those upon a higher plane -- the scientific plane.  They are (I have little doubt) for those who have attained to them mnemonic keys to whole classes of phenomena of the order anciently denominated magical, phenomena which, since the human mind has had its present constitution, have been translated into language, classified, sought after, always above language, but not beyond a sane and scientific classification, a rigid and satisfactory method, as I most firmly believe.  It is to establish such a method; to record in the language, not of the temple but of the laboratory, its results, {258A} that I make this appeal; that I seek to enlist genuine, not pseudo-scientific men in the Research; so that our children may be as far in advance of us in the study of the supernormal phenomena of mind as we are in advance of our fathers in the sciences of the physical world.<<A few weeks after writing these words I came upon the following passage in Tyndall's "Scientific Materialism," which I had not previously read: "Two-thirds of the rays emitted by the sun fail to arouse the sense of vision.  The rays exist, but the visual organ requisite for their translation into light does not exist.  And so, from this region of darkness and mystery which now surrounds us, rays may now be darting, which require but the development of the proper intellectual organs to translate them into knowledge as far surpassing ours as our surpasses that of the wallowing reptiles which once held possession of this planet." -- A. C.>>
   Note carefully this practical sense of my intention.  I care nothing for the academic meanings of the steps in the Path; what they meant to the Arahats of old is indifferent to me.  "Let the dead past bury its dead!"  What I require is an advance in the Knowledge of the Great Problem, derived no longer from hearsay revelation, from exalted fanaticism, from hysteria and intoxication; but from method and research.
   Shut the temple; open the laboratory!


                       XI.

         THE TWILIGHT OF THE GERMANS.<<1>>

<<1.A Note showing the necessity and scope of the Work in question.>>

   It is a commonplace of scientific men that metaphysics is mostly moonshine; that it is largely argument in a circle cannot easily be disputed; that the advance since Aristotle is principally verbal none may doubt; that no parallel advance to that of science has been made in the last fifty years is certain.
   The reason is obvious.
   Philosophy has had two legitimate weapons -- introspection and reason; and introspection is not experiment.  {258B}
   The mind is a machine that reasons: here are its results.  Very good; can it do anything else?  This is the question not only of the Buddhist; but of the Hindu, of the Mohammedan, of the mystic.  All try their various methods; all attain results of sorts; none have had the genuine training which would have enabled them to record those results in an intelligible, orderly form.
   Others deliberately set their face against such an attempt.  I am not of them; humanity has grown up; if the knowledge be dangerous in unsuspected ways, what of bacteriology?  I have obtained one result; a result striking at the very condition of consciousness; which I may formulate as follows:
   "If a single state of consciousness persist unchanged for a period exceeding a very few seconds, its duality is annihilated; its nature is violently overthrown; this phenomenon is accompanied by an indescribable sensation of bliss."
   Very well! but I want this formula verified a hundred times, a thousand times, by independent investigators.  I want it better stated; its conditions modified, defined exactly.  I want it to leave its humble station as my observation, and put into the class of regular phenomena.
   But I am verging back towards Hindu philosophy, and it is a reminder well needed at this moment.  For this experience of the destruction of duality, this first phenomenon in the series, has, in all its illusory beauty, been seized upon, generalised from, by philosophers, and it is to this basis of partial and therefore deceptive fact that we owe the systems of Vedanta and Idealism, with their grotesque assumptions and muddle-headed "reconcilements" all complete.
   One fact, O Sri Sankaracharya, does not make a theory; let us remember your fate, and avoid generalising on insufficient evidence.  With this word of warning, I leave the metaphysician to wallow in his mire, and look toward better times for the great problems of philosophy.  Remember that {259A} when the solution is attained it is not the solution of one learned man for his fellows, but one realised and assimilated by every man in his own consciousness.
   And what the solution may be none of us can foreshadow.  To hoist the problem on to the horns of a dilemma will avail nothing when A = A may be no longer true; and this by no Hegelian world-juggle; but by direct apperception as clear as the sun at noon.
   Therefore; no word more, but -- to the work!


                       XII.

                THE THREE REFUGES.

   Buddham Saranangachami.
   Dhammam Saranangachami.
   Sangham Saranangachami.
   I take my refuge in the Buddha.
   I take my refuge in the Dhamma.
   I take my refuge in the Sangha.
   This formula of adhesion to Buddhism is daily repeated by countless millions of humanity; what does it mean?  It is no vain profession of reliance on others; no cowardly shirking of burdens -- burdens which cannot be shirked.  It is a plain estimate of our auxiliaries in the battle; the cosmic facts on which we may rely, just as a scientist "relies" on the conservation of energy in making an experiment.
   Were that principle of uncertain application, the simplest quantitative experiment would break hopelessly down.
   So for the Buddhist.
   I take my refuge in the Buddha.  That there was once a man who found the Way is my encouragement.
   I take my refuge in the Dhamma.  The Law underlying phenomena and its unchanging certainty; the Law given by the Buddha to show us the Way, the inevitable tendency to Persistence in Motion or Rest -- and Persistence, even in Motion, negates change in consciousness -- these observed orders of fact are our bases.  {259B}
   I take my refuge in the Sangha.
   These are not isolated efforts on my part; although in one sense isolation is eternally perfect and can never be overcome,<<"i.e." on normal planes.> in another sense associates are possible and desirable.  One third of humanity are Buddhists; add men of Science and we form an absolute majority; among Buddhists a very large proportion have deliberately gone out from social life of any kind to tread these paths of Research.
   Is the Way very hard?  Is the brain tired?  The results slow to come?  Others are working, failing, struggling, crowned here and there with rare garlands of success.  Success for ourselves, success for others; is it not "Compassion" that binds us closer than all earthlier ties?  Ay, in joy and in sorrow, in weakness and in strength, do I take my refuge in the Sangha.


                      XIII.

                   CONCLUSION.

   Let me give a rapid resume of what we have gone through.
   ("a") We have stripped Science and Buddhism of their accidental garments, and administered a rebuke to those who so swathe them.
   ("b") We have shown the identity of Science and Buddhism in respect of:
   (1) Their fact.
   (2) Their theory.
   (3) Their method.
   (4) Their enemies.
   ("c") While thus admitting Buddhism to be merely a branch of Science, we have shown it to be a most important branch, since its promise is to break down the wall at which all Science stops.
   When Professor Ray Lankester has to write, "The whole order of nature, including living and lifeless matter -- man, animal, and {260A} gas -- is a network of mechanism, the main features and many details of which have been made more or less obvious to the wondering intelligence of mankind by the labour and ingenuity of scientific investigators.  But no sane man has ever pretended, since science became a definite body of doctrine, that we know or ever can hope to know or conceive of the possibility of knowing, whence this mechanism has come, why it is there, whither it is going, and what there may or may not be beyond and beside it which our senses are incapable of appreciating.  These things are not 'explained' by science, and never can be," he gives a curious example of that quaint scientific pride which knows the limits of its powers, and refuses to entertain the hope of transcending them.  Unfortunately, he is as one who, a hundred years ago, should have declared any knowledge of the chemistry of the fixed stars impossible.  To invent new methods, and to revolutionise the functions of the senses by training or otherwise is the routine work of to-morrow.<<See note p. 258.>>  But, alas! he goes even further.
   "Similarly we seek by the study of cerebral disease to trace the genesis of the phenomena which are supposed by some physicists who have strayed into biological fields to justify them in announcing the 'discovery' of 'Telepathy' and a belief in ghosts."
   To talk of cerebral disease as the characteristic of one who merely differs from you (and that because he has more knowledge than yourself) is itself a symptom familiar to alienists.  (I may say I hold no brief for Professor Lodge, here attacked.  I am not even interested in any of his results, as such of them as I am acquainted with deal with objective and trivial phenomena.)
   Of course, as long as what Darwin called variation is called disease by Professor Ray Lankester, we shall (if we accept his views, {260B} and it will go hard with us if we do not!) regard all progress in any direction as morbid.  So (as with Lombroso) "disease" will become a mere word, like its predecessor "infidelity," and cease to convey any obloquy.
   If Science is never to go beyond its present limits; if the barriers which metaphysical speculation shows to exist are never to be transcended, then indeed we are thrown back on faith, and all the rest of the nauseous mess of mediaeval superstition, and we may just as well have vital principle and creative power as not, for Science cannot help us.  True, if we do not use all the methods at our disposal!  But we go beyond.  We admit that all mental methods known are singularly liable to illusion and inaccuracy of every sort.  So were the early determinations of specific heat.  Even biologists have erred.  But to the true scientist every failure is a stepping-stone to success; every mistake is the key to a new truth. {261Atop}
   And the history of our Science is the history of all Science.  If you choose to ape Christendom and put the pioneers of rational investigation into the nature of consciousness on the rack ("i.e." into lunatic asylums) I doubt not we shall find our Bruno.  But it will add an additional pang that persecution should come from the house of our friends.
   Let us, however, turn away from the aspect of criticism which an accidental controversy has thus caused me to notice, and so to anticipate the obvious line of attack which the more frivolous type of critic will employ, and return to our proper business, the summary of our own position with regard to Buddhism.
   Buddhism is a logical development of observed facts; whoso is with me so far is "Sammaditthi," and has taken the first step on the Noble Eightfold Path.
   Let him aspire to knowledge, and the Second Step is under his feet.
   The rest lies with Research.  {261Btop, full page below}


          Aum! I take my refuge holy in the Light and Peace of Buddh.
          Aum! I take my refuge, slowly working our His Law of Good.
          Aum! I take my refuge lowly in His Pitying Brotherhood.


{261}




                 THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE; OR, THE SCEPTIC REFUTED

                 A DIALOGUE BETWEEN A BRITISH MAN OF SCIENCE
                            AND A CONVERTED HINDU

   [This absurdity is a parody upon the serious essay which follows.  It is an exceedingly characteristic trait that Crowley himself should have insisted upon this order, and a severe strain upon the devoted band who try to force themselves to study him.  The notes are, of course, Crowley's throughout.  To elucidate the allusions would require a note to nearly every phrase.  The fact seems to be that any one with universal knowledge at the tips of his fingers can read and enjoy Crowley; but few others.] {columns resume below}

            THE EXCLUDED (OR DIVIDED)
                      MIDDLE

  "M." Well,<<1>> Scepticus,<<2>> are<<3>> you<<4>> restored<<5>> {262A} to<<6>> health<<7>>?  Our<<8>> conflict<<9>> of<<10>> yesterday<<11>> was<<12>> severe.<<13>> {262B}

<<1. Plato, "Critias," 214; Schopenhauer, "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," xxxii. 76; Haeckel, "Anthropogenie," II. viii. 24; Aeschylus, "Prom. Vinct.," 873-6; Hegel, "Logik." lvi. 3; Robertson, "Pagan Christs," cvii. 29; Mark ii. 8, iv. 16, x. 21: Tertullian, "Contra Marcionem," cxv. 33; Cicero, "Pro Varrone," iv.; "De Amicitia," xii.; Goethe, "Faust," I. iv. 18; Crowley, "Opera," i. 216; R. Ischak ben Loria, "De Revolutionibus Animarum," cci. 14 (see under HB:Qof-Lamed-Peh-Vau-Taw, "et seg., q.v." p. iii); O. Wilde,"Lord Arthur Savile's Crime," ed. princ., p. 4; Levi. xvii. Further historical authority may be found in Gibbon and others.>>
<<2. "Punch," vols. viii., lxvi.  "Cf." Art. "Burnand" in "Dict. Nat. Biog., scil."  Viz. "a-u-c," xlvii., S. P. Q. R.>>
<<3. From "Encyc. Brit.," Art. "Existence," and "Buddha," Mahaparinibbana Sutta, to whom the author wishes to express his acknowledgements.>>
<<4. This joke is the old one.  Jones asks Smith, "Why are you so late?"  Smith wittily answers: "Absurd!  I must always come before tea; you can never come till after tea."  Here "you" only comes after the "tea" in Scepticus, which shows that Scepticus was a tea-totaller.  Mysticus is therefore the drinker; which proves (what Burton and all Eastern scholars affirm) that Omar Khayyam means spiritual wine and not common alcoholic beverages.  "Cf." Burton, "Kasidah: Love and Safety," ed. princ., p. 45, &c., &c.>>
<<5. This word needs little or no explanation.>>
<<6. Ontogeny can only be misunderstood by through study of phylogeny.  Crepitation of the bivalves is a concurrent phenomenon.  Take away the number you first thought of, and we see that the exostoses of the melanotic pyemata of the river's brim are exostoses and nothing more.>>
<<7.An unpleasant subject -- a great comfort to think of -- "vide" Wild, "op. cit.," and "A woman of no Importance."  Also Krafft-Ebing, "Psychopathia Sexualis," xx.; "The Family Doctor;" Quain, "Anatomy of Grey Matter," cxlv.         24.>>
<<8. The 24th part of a (solar) day.>>
<<9. From the French "con;" and Ang. Sax. "flican," to tickle: hence, a friendly conflict.<<See 9, above.>> >>
<<10. "Vies imaginaires" (Crates); also "Eaux-de-Vie reelles" (Martel).  There is a fine model at the Louvre (Room Z, west wall), and any number of the most agreeable disposition at Julien's or Delacluze's.>>
<<11. Distinguish from to-day and to-morrow, except in the case of Egyptian gods; for to-day and for ever, except in the case of Jesus Christ; from to-day, but not from to-morrow, in the case of the Hindustani word "kal," which may mean either -- not either itself, but "to-morrow" or "yesterday," according to the context.  Note the comma.>>
<<12. From to be, verb intrans. auxil. mood indic. tense imperf. pers. 3rd.>>
<<13. From French severe; from Lat. severus-a-um; from Greek sigma-alpha-upsilon-rho-omicron-sigma, a crocodile; from Sanskrit Sar, a king.  "Cf." Persian Sar, a king; also W. African and Kentucky, "sar," master; Lat. Caesar, Germ, Kaiser, Russ. Tsar.  "Cf." Sanskrit Siva, the destroyer, or severe one.>>

   "S." Cogitavi,<<1>> ergo fui.  To my breezy nature such a controversy as this of ours on "Tessaracts" was as the ozone-laden discharge from a Brush machine.

<<1. See Descartes, "Discours del la Methode," i. 1; Huxley, "Des Cartes;" and Mucksley, "Night Carts," published San. Auth., Bombay 1902.  (At this point the damned don who was writing these notes was mercifully struck by lightning.  He had intended to annotate every word in this manner in order (as he supposed) to attain a reputation like that of Max Muller "et hoc genus omne.")>>

   "M." I was not aware that the termination -ozoon was connected with the allotropic form of oxygen.
   "S." Little boys should be seen, but not obscene.
   "M." Seen, no doubt for the Arabic form of Samech; in Yetzirah Sagittarius, or Temperance in the Tarot of your ridiculous Rosicrucians.
   "S." No more so than your Semitic Romeike.
   "M." Semetic?
   "S." Ike for Isaac, non est dubium --
   "M." Quin --
   "S." God save His Majesty!<<1>> but is this Midsummer Night, and are we dreaming?

<<1. Auberon Quin, King of England, in a novelette called "The Napoleon of Notting Hill.">>

   "M." "There are wetter dreams!"<<1>>  Let us discuss the Divided Middle!

<<1. Wells, "There are better dreams"; but it turns out to mean that the young man is drowned, and at Folkestone too.>>

   "S." Beware of the Water Jump!
   "M." Hurrah for Taliganj!  I can improve on John Peel's Map of Asia and that ere dawn.  I will map you the lucubrations of the (converted) Hindu intellect upon this vital part of the Hegelian logic.  Aum Shivaya vashi!<<1>>

<<1. "Cf." Prof. Rice.  "The waters of the Hoang-Ho rushing by intoned the Kung.">>

   "S." Dulce ridentem Mysticum amabo,
        Duce loquentem.
   "M." Will you not elide the 'um'?
   "S." Then I were left with a bee in {263A} my breeches -- worse than Plato's in his bonnet.
   "M." A Scottish sceptic!
   "S." A Wee Free, Mysticus.  A gaelic-speaking Calvinist with three thousand million bawbees in my sporran and a brace of bed-ridden cattle-thieves in my kirk.  So I withdraw breeks.
   "M." And you rely not on Plato?
   "S." Verily and Amen.  As the French lady exclaimed, O mon Plate! -- she would not say Platon, having already got one rhyme in 'mon' -- and the Italian took her up that omoplat was indeed good to support the head, wherein are ideas.  But to our divided middle!
   "M." As I should have said before I became a Christian:<<1>> "O Bhavani! be pleased graciously to bow down to thy servants: be pleased to construe our prattings as Japas our prayers as Tapas, our mantras as Rudradarshana, our bead-tellings as Devas! be pleased moreover to accept our Badli for Sach-bat, our Yupi for Lalitasarira, our subject -- O bless our divided middle! -- for thine own venerable Yoni.  Aum!"

<<1. This is the invariable invocation used by the pious Hindu before any meditation or holy conference.>>

   "S." I am touched by your eloquence; but Science has not said its last word on Sabapaty Swami and his application of Pranayama to the aberrations of the evolutionary retrocessions -- flexomotor in type, yet sensorial in function --- of the Sahasrara-Chakra, as you urged yesterday.
   "M." I will not press it.  But in the so-affected ambulatory vibrations (as I must insist, and you practically agreed) of the lower chakras may yet be found to lie the solution of our primordial dilemma.  What is the divided middle? lest enthymeme ruin our exegesis ere it be fairly started.
   "S." I will answer you without further circumlocution.  The laws of Thought are reducible to three: that of identity, "A" is "A"; that of contradiction, "A" is not "not-A"; and {263B} that of the Excluded Middle,<<1>> and "not-A" taken together constitute the Universe.

<<1. Sir W. Hamilton's proposed quantification of the predicate would serve in this instance.
   We have to combine the propositions:
   All "A" is all "A".
   All "A" is not all "not-A".
   No "A" is not no "not-A".
   Fantastic as it seems, this is the simplest of the eighty-four primary ways of expressing these three laws in a single proposition.
   No "not-A" is not no some not "not-A".>>

   "M." That is a proposition easy to criticise.  What of the line of demarcation between "A" and "not-A?"  To "A" it is "not-A," I suppose; to "not-A" it is "A."
   "S." As in defining the boundaries of nations -- Gallia est divisa in partes tres -- we may suppose that half the line is of "A," and half of "not-A."
   "M." No; for a line cannot be longitudinally split, or bifurcated in a sense parallel with itself.  As Patanjali hints in his Kama Linga Sharira -- that most delicate of Eastern psychologico-physiologico-philosophical satires -- "Bare Sahib ne khansamahko bahut rupaiya diya hai."
   "S." The Etic Dative!  But your contention is true, unless we argue with Aristotle  GR:omega-kappa-epsilon-epsilon-sigma  sigma-tau-rho-omicron-upsilon-theta-omicron-iota pi-epsilon-rho-iota gamma-alpha-sigma mu-epsilon-lambda-alpha-iota-nu-alpha-sigma and so on.
   "M." I was sure you would not seriously defend so untenable a position.
   "S." The eleemosynary functions of the -- Jigar, I fancy the Vedas have it --
   "M." Yes --
   "S." Forbid.
   "M." Then do you accept the conclusions of the Hegelian logic?
   "S." My logic begins with the Stagyrite and ends with a manual kunt.  I shall not surrender without a struggle.  I am not an Achiles to be wounded in the heel.
   "M." Then the wound is healed?  Forgive me if I trespass on the preserves of Max Beerbohm,<<a>> and your other ripping cosmopolitan wits! {264A}

<<a. A distinguished author on philosophical and kindred subjects.  See his "works."  John Lane,<<b>> 1894.>>
<<b. Lane -- a long one, with neither variableness nor shadow of turning.  Christian name John.<<c>> >>
<<c. Not to be confused with John, the beloved disciple, who wrote "Caliban<<d>> on the Patmos."<<h>> >>
<<d. A dwarfish miscreate, celebrated in the works of Browning and Shakespeare (W.).<<e>> >>
<<e. Dramatic author, flourished A.D. 1600 "circa;" wrote "The Tempest"<<f>> , "Susannah; or, The Two Gentlemen of Veronica's Garden, the Manxman," and other plays.>>
<<f. A garbled version of this was misbegotten in A. D. 1904 on a London stage; the worst actor of a dreadful crew, in spite of his natural aptitude for the part of Caliban ("q.v supra, note d"), being one Beerbohm Tree.<<g>> >>
<<g. Tree, because such a stick.  Beerbohm -- "vide supra, note a."  I take this opportunity to introduce my system of continuous footnotes, on the analogy of continuous factions.  In this case they are recurring -- a great art in itself, though an error in so far that they fail to subserve the great object of all footnotes, viz. to distract the attention of the reader.>>
<<h. Text appended: --

            CALIBAN ON PATMOS.
    "Being the Last Adventure of the Beloved"
              "Disciple."

[COME, kids, lambs, doves, cubs, cuddle!
     Hear ye John
Pronounce on the primordial protoplast
Palingenetic, palaeontologic,
And beat that beggar's bleeding HB:Bet-Resh-Aleph-Shin-Yod-Taw
With truth veracious, aletheiac, true!
John ye hear.  Cuddle, cubs, doves, lambs,
     kids, come!]

First, God made heav'n, earth: Earth gauche,
     void; deep, dark.
God's Ghost stirred sea.  God said 'Light!'
     'Twas.  'Saw light,
Good, split off dark, call'd light 'day,' dark
     'night.'  Eve,
Morn, day I.  'Said, "'Twixt wets be air,
     split wets!"
'Made air, split wets 'neath air, wets top air; so,
Call'd air 'heav'n.'  Eve, morn, day II.  'Said,
     "Low wets,
Cling close, show earth."  So.  'Call'd dry
     'earth,' wet 'sea.'
Rubbed hands, smacked lips, said 'good.'
     [Here John was seized
By order of Augustus.  He maintained,
In spite of the imperial holograph,
"My seizer must be Caesar," with a smile:
And for persisting in his paradox
Was disembowelled: so Genesis got square.]>>

   "S." No, for I say that the line is, like the Equator, imaginary. {264B --
   "M." But is not imagination to be classed as either "A" or "not-A?"
   "S." Vae victis! as Liby says.  I admit it.
   "M." And its products?
   "S." Me miserum!  I cannot deny it.
   "M." Such as lines?  Namo Shivaya namaha Aum -- to quote our holiest philosopher.
   "S." I am done.  But no!  I can still argue:
      (a) There is no line of demarcation.
      (b) There is a line, but it does not exist.
      (c) There is more than one line -- since it is not straight and so
            cannot enclose a space -- and "more than one thing" cannot form
            part of a universe, since unus implies a whole.
   "M." I should reply:
      (a) It is true that there is no line of demarcation, but that that non-
            existing line is after all just as much a part of the (non-
            existing) universe as any other non-existing thing.
         We divide the universe into
           (1) Existing things.
           (2) Non-existing things.
         If "A" exists, the line must be "not-A:" and vice versa.
         Which we know to be false.
      (b) It is true that there is a line, and that it does not exist, but --
   "S." Let us settle (a) first, and return at leisure.  You fail utterly to make the important distinction between mere absence of line and presence of a non-existing line, which is as gross a fallacy as to argue that a man who has gone out to lunch has been annihilated.
   "M." But he "has" been annihilated, from the point of view of the emptiness of his bungalow.
   "S." No! for the traces of his presence remain and will do so for ever.
   "M." Then a mehta's broom may be as mortal as a femme-de-menage!
   "S." A trois: GR:pi-alpha-tau-eta-rho --- upsilon-iota-omicron-sigma, the lambda-omicron-gamma-omicron-sigma -- and pi-nu-epsilon-upsilon-mu-alpha alpha-gamma-iota-omicron-nu.  {265A}
   "M." Then you surrender?  The tripartite anatomy of Tat Sat is granted me? Hegel is God, and Zoroaster his prophet?  "The mind of the Father said 'Into 3!' and immediately all things were so divided!"?
   "S." Arrahmanu arrahimu al maliku al qadusu as salamu -- Vete cabron!  Chinga su madre!  I give on that issue.
   "M." Alhamdolillah!  For there are four letters in Allah {ARABIC TYPE FOR "Allah"}.  A for Ab -- Father, L for Logos -- double, for he is both God and man, and H for Holy Ghost.
   "S." The language of your Notariqon is tripartite too!  On point (1) though, 'twas but by a slip.  I fell: I was not pushed.  Can you controvert my second defence?
   "M." It is not a defence at all.  It is a trick to lure me away from the question.  I admit that there is such a line, and that it does not exist -- but might it not "negatively subsist," in the Ain, as it were?  Further, whether it is or is not a concept, a noumenon, a psychosis, an idea -- anything! does not matter.  For since it is a subject with or without predicates and the possibility of predicates, they are themselves predicates<<1>> which copulate with it even the impossibility of assigning predicates to it, with the exception -- you are bound to urge! -- of itself.  But this would violate your law of identity, that a predicate should exclude itself from its own category, even were it non-existent, inconceivable, bum.  Consequently, thinkable or unthinkable, our creation of it subjectively has fixed it eternally in the immeasurable void.

<<1. "Litera scripta manet."  Do not steal it, or "tertia poena manet.">>

"S." Your argument is as convincing as it is lucid.  But to my third fortress!
   "M." Dorje Vajra Samvritti!  As to your third line of defence, I must admit that my difficulties are considerable.  Yet, Bhavani my aid, I will assay them.  You said, I think --
   "S." There is more than one line, since the line is not straight (otherwise it could not enclose a space).
   "M." I do not see this!
   "S." A curved line is not truly a line, since {265B} a line must have length without breadth, and a curved line may certainly have breadth, for it need not lie in one plane.<<1>>

<<1. The mathematical proof of this is simple.  A surface is composed of an infinite number of parallel straight lines touching each other.  Now for parallel straight lines place a single convoluted chortoid with a parabolic direction of Pi to the (n - Theta) power + n to the (Theta - Pi) power.  At all the foci will be ellipses of the form
        (n-1)(n+m+1)Sq.Rt.of -1
  --------------------------------------.
  (p-v) + or - sin(Theta -1)cos(alpha)
Now since p+v is in this case unity and m = n, we have --
{numerator}
:c[tan(Theta)-Ocos(Pi+alpha)Sq.Rt.of -Pi]csin(Theta)epsilon to the iTheta power - epsilonTheta + K
{denominator}
[ccos(Theta)+usin(Theta)][ntan(Theta)+tsec(Theta)].
{above expression to the -1 power}
If the chortoid lie in one plane this expression = 0; but if not, it = sin(Theta) to the -1 power cos(Theta) to the -2 power, Theta being the angle subtended by the common arc of the original curve, by Halley's theorem, or sin(Theta/Pi), in which case the expression is unreal, and may be neglected.>>

   "M." True.
   "S." Hence we may conclude that the line of demarcation between "A" and "not-A" is many and not one.  Now an universe is that which turns to one,<<1>> when truly considered.  Our line does the reverse of this, for it appeared one at first, and split up on examination.

<<1. Two or more things cannot form part of any one thing, in so far as they remain two.  Considered in relation to that of which they form part, they become fractions.>>

   "M." Exactly; but that is where I have you in a corner.
   "S." Dollar wheat!  Dollar wheat!  Dollar wheat!
   "M." It is the 'reverse' which does you.<<1>>  If you turn a man fourth-dimensionally round, his hemispherical ganglia will prove interchangeable?

<<1. "Cf." A. B. Douglas, "Reminiscences.">>

   "S." No doubt, for they are symmetrical.
   "M." His polygonal fissures are identical with themselves?
   "S." I admit it, for they are ambidextrous.
   "M." His hypertrophied constrictor Cunni will feel nothing?
   "S." No; it is medial.
   "M." Then how is he changed? {266A}
   "S." Fourth-dimensionally; no more.
   "M." Yet his right optic nerve will see through his left eye?
   "S." Of course.
   "M." Then of an event, an argument, a dialectic euhemerism, protoplasmic or blastodermic?
   "S." I see what you mean.  You would say that duality irresolvable into unity has no parallel in the regions of pure intelligence, seeks no corollary from the intuitive organic reactions of the hyperbolic cells?<<1>>

<<1. Both colloid, caudate, and epicycloid, of course.>>

   "M." I would.
   "S." The devil you would!
   "M." I would.  Our line becomes single?
   "S." In the higher sense.
   "M." So that the Mind of the Father riding on the subtle guiders got it right after all?
   "S." Pretty right.
   "M." And all things are divisible into Three, not into Two?
   "S." Into "A," "not-A," and the dividing line.
   "M." Though the Reason of Man has boggled often enough at this, the intuition of Woman has always perceived it.
   "S." But she has gone too far, placing the importance of that dividing middle above all other things in earth or heaven.  We hold the balance fair and firm.
   "M." "(glad)."  How blessed is this day, Scepticus!
   "S." "(Conceding the point, and catching the glow)."  Let us make a night of it!
   "M." "(Enjoying his triumph)."  We will.  Do not forget twilight!
   "S." "(In holy rapture)."  Into Three, Mysticus, into Three!
   "M." "(Ditto, only more so)."  Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.
   "S." "(In the trance called Nerodha-Samapatti)."  As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
   "M." "(Ditto, after an exhilarating switchback ride through the Eight High Trances)."  AMEN.

{full page follows}

{266B}





                                   TIME<<1>>

<<1.It must not be supposed that the author of this dialogue "necessarily" concurs in the views of either disputant, even where they are agreed. -- A. C.>>

                 A DIALOGUE BETWEEN A BRITISH SCEPTIC AND AN
                                INDIAN MYSTIC

   "He (Shelly) used to say that he had lived three times as long as the calendar gave out, which he would prove between jest and earnest by some remarks on Time --
              'That would have puzzled that stout Stagyrite.'"
                  -- "Prefex to the "Wandering Jew" in "Fraser's Magazine.""

   [The philosophical premisses of this and the other essays in this volume should be studied in

   Keynes.  Formal Logic              Patanjali.  Aphorisms.
   Erdmann. History of Philosophy.    Bhikkhu Ananda Metteya.  Essays
   Berkeley.  Three Dialogues              (principally in the quarterly
        GR:kappa.tau. lambda.              "Buddhism").
   Hume.  Works.                      The Tao Teh King and the Writings
   Kant.  Prolegomena: Critique of         of Kwang Tze.
        Pure Reason.                  The Sufis, to whom chiefly Crowley
   Locke.  Human Understanding.            is indebted for the
   Huxley.  Essays (Philosophical).        foundations of his system of
                                           sceptical mysticism.]
{regular columns resume}

                      TIME.

       A DIALOGUE BETWEEN A BRITISH SCEPTIC
              AND AN INDIAN MYSTIC.

   "Scepticus." Well, my dear Babu, I trust you have slept well after our fatiguing talk of yesterday.
   "Mysticus." Ah, dear Mister, if you will forgive my adopting what is evidently your idiom, I found it, on the contrary, invigorating.  What is it the Psalmist says?  That the conversation of the wise is like unto good wine, which intoxicates with delight, while it hurts not the drinker?  The balm of your illustrious words, borne like spice upon the zephyr ---
   "Scept." Shall we not rather renew our inquiries into the nature of things, than, in unfertile compliment, waste the few hours we snatch awhile from death?
   "Myst." Willingly.  But lately you were the "sahib" asking questions concerning Indian Philosophy as a great prince who should condescend to study the habits of horses or dogs -- yesterday we changed all that.  {267A}
   "Scept." I have but one apology to offer -- that of Dr. Johnson.<<Taunted with having described a horse's "pastern" as his "knee," the great lexicographer pleaded "Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.">>
   "Myst." Pray forbear!  Yet it may be for a moment instructive to notice the consideration which led you to assume a happier attitude; viz, that such identities of thought (implying such fine parallelisms of brain structure) were discovered, that, in short, you admitted the Indian (as you have been compelled to admit the Gibbon)<<See Huxley, "Man's Place in Nature," and elsewhere.>> to classification in your own genus.
   "Scept." You are hard upon my insolence.
   "Myst." Only to make the opportunity of remarking a further parallelism: that the said insolence is matched, maybe surpassed, by my own.  A witty Irishman, indeed, observed of the natives of the Tongue of Asia that "the Hindu, with all his faults, was civilised, like the Frenchman: the Musulman, {267B} with all his virtues, was, like the Englishman, a savage."
   And indeed we are too apt to think of you only as only as red-faced, drunken, beef-eating boors and ruffians, with no soul and less sense, as if your were all soldiers; or as prim, conceited, supercilious, opinionated prigs, as if you were all civilians; or as unspeakable stupidity incarnate in greedy oiliness, as if you were all missionaries.  Your highest placed women make virtuous our courtezans by a comparison of costume and manners; if our advices be true, the morality test is still in favour of our light ones.  Your law wisely forbids your own venal women to set foot on Indian soil; a rumour is even got about that you have no such women: but political economy is to be thanked, if it be so.<<1>>  Now, though you know that I am aware that India is simply the refuse-heap for your vilest characters and your dullest brains, I see that you so little appreciate the compliment I am trying to pay you, that your foot is already itching to assault my person, and to cause me to remember that your cook never forgets to spit into your honour's soup, were it not that we may find a refuge from difference of caste and race, custom and language, in the supreme unity, that of the ultimate force of which this universe is the expression.

<<1. "Cf." Crowley, "Epigrams" (1550 A.D.) --
   "The bawds of the stews be turned al out;
    But some think they inhabit al England throughout." -- A. C.>>

   "Scept." I have listened with patience to what is after all (you must admit) a rather spiteful tirade ---
   "Myst." Forgive me if I interrupt.  Do me the honour to remember that it was said in self-blame.  I tried to give your honour "the giftie" (as one of your worst poets has said) "to see yoursel as ithers see you," the "ithers" in this case being average Hindus, as ignorant of your real character as you confess your untravelled folk to be of ours.
   "Scept." Pray spare me Burns!  We are -- that is, you and I -- on a better understanding now.  Let us return, if you will, to the subject {268A} we too lightly touched on yesterday; that of TIME, and the real signification of that mysterious word, which is in the mouths of children, and which to affect not to understand is to stamp oneself, in the opinion of the so-called intellectual classes, as a fantastic.
   "Myst." Yet who of us does understand it?  I, at least, am at one with you in declaring its mystery.
   "Scept." Your are of the few.  Even Huxley, the most luminous of modern philosophers, evidently misunderstands Kant's true though partial dictum that it is subjective, or, in the pre-Kantian jargon, a form of the intellect.
   "Myst." Lest we involve ourselves in controversy, Homeric body-snatchers of Patroclus Kant, let us hastily turn to the question at issue itself.  The scholastic method of discussing a point by quotation of Brown's position against Smith may do for the weevilly brain of a University don, but is well know to bring one no nearer to solution, satisfactory or otherwise, of the original problem.
   "Scept." I heartily agree with you so far.  We will therefore attack thequestion "ab initio": I await you.
   "Myst." As exordium, therefore, may I ask you to recall what we agreed on yesterday with regard to "Tat Sat," the existent, or real?
   "Scept." That it was one, unknowable, absolute.
   "Myst." Objective?
   "Scept." Without doubt.
   "Myst." Did I not, however, observe that, however that might be, all intuitions, if knowable, were subjective; if objective, unknown?
   "Scept." You did: to which I pointed out that Spencer had well shown how subjectivity, real or no, was a mere proof of objectivity.
   "Myst." And "Vice versa."<<This is not an "ignoratio elenchi," but a criticism, too extended in scope to introduce here. -- A. C.>>  Ah! my friend, we shall be tossed about, as the world this 2500 years, if we once enter this vortex.  Let us remain where all is smooth in the certainty that the Unknowable is Unreal!
   "Scept." We agreed it to be real!  {268B}
   "Myst." Oh never!  The word "real" implies to us subjectivity; a thing is only real "to us" so far as it is known by us; even its Unknowablility is a species of knowledge of it: and, by Saviri! when I say real "to us," I say real absolutely, since all things lie to me in the radius of my sensorium.  "To others" is a vain phrase, ---
   "Scept." True; for those "others" only exist for you inasmuch as, and in so far as, they are modifications of your own thought-stuff.<<The physical basis of thought, as distinguished from its physical mechanism.  A Hindu conception.  Sanskrit, Chittam.>>
   "Myst." Agreed, then; instead of looking through the glasses of the metaphysician, we will content ourselves with the simpler task of measuring our thoughts by the only standard which is unquestionably valid, "i.e.," consciousness.
   "Scept." But if that consciousness deceive us?
   "Myst." We are the more deceived!  But it is after all indifferent; for it is we who are deceived.  Idle to pretend that any other standard can ever be of any use to us, since all others are referred to it!
   "Scept." Ah! this is equally a branch of the former argument.
   "Myst." That is so.  However, we may defer consideration of this problem, though I suspect that it will sooner or later force itself upon our notice.
   "Scept." No doubt.  This is very possibly the ultimate unknown and infinite quantity, which lurks unsuspected in all equations, and vitiates our most seeming-certain results.
   "Myst." But, for Heaven's sake, let us postpone it as long as possible, eh?
   "Scept." Indeed, it is the devil of a subject.  But we wander far -- By the way, how old are you?  You appear young, but you know much.
   "Myst." You are too polite.  I am but an ultimate truth, six world-truths, fourteen grand gereralisations, eighty generalisations, sixty-two dilemmas, and the usual odd million impressions.
   "Scept." What is all this?  You are surely --
   "Myst." No, most noble Festus.  Put me {269A} to he test, and I the matter will reword: which madness would gambol from.<<I an not mad, most noble Festus.  Acts xxvi. 25.  The rest is from "Hamlet."  There are many other such apt or perverted quotations in the essay.>>  How old may your honour be?
   "Scept." Forty-five years.
   "Myst." Excuse the ignorance of a "Babu," but as Mr. Chesterton<<1>> well knows, we do {269B} not easily grasp Western ideas.  What is a "year"?

<<1.          MR. CROWLEY AND THE CREEDS
                       AND
            THE CREED OF MR. CHESTERTON
             WITH A POSTSCRIPT ENTITLED
                  A CHILD OF EPHRAIM<<a>>

<<a. The children of Ephraim, being armed, and carrying bows, turned them back in the day of battle.>>

            "CHESTERTON'S COLOSSAL COLLAPSE"

                       ----
            MR. CROWLEY AND THE CREEDS
               BY G. K. CHESTERTON.

  Mr. Aleister Crowley publishes a work, "The Sword of Song: Called by Christians 'The Book of the Beast.'" and called, I am ashamed to say, "Ye Sword of Song" on the cover, by some singularly uneducated man.  Mr. Aleister Crowley has always been, in my opinion, a good poet; his "Soul of Osiris," written during an Egyptian mood, was better poetry than this Browningesque rhapsody in a Buddhist mood; but this also, though very affected, is very interesting.  But the main fact about it is that it is the expression of a man who has really found Buddhism more satisfactory that Christianity.
  Mr. Crowley begins his poem, I believe, with an earnest intention to explain the beauty of the Buddhist philosophy; he knows a great deal about it; he believes in it.  But as he went on writing one thing became stronger and stronger in his soul -- the living hatred of Christianity.  Before he has finished he has descended to the babyish "difficulties" of the Hall of Science -- things about "the plain words of your sacred books," things about "the panacea of belief" -- things, in short, at which any philosophical Hindoo would roll about with laughter.  Does Mr. Crowley suppose that Buddhists do not feel the poetical nature of the books of a religion?  Does he suppose that they do not realise the immense importance of believing the truth?  But Mr. Crowley has got something into his soul stronger even than the beautiful passion of the man who believes in Buddhism; he has the passion of the man who does not believe in Christianity.  He adds one more testimony to the endless series of testimonies to the fascination and vitality of the faith.  For some mysterious reason no man can contrive to be agnostic about Christianity.  He always tries to prove something about it -- that it is unphilosophical or immoral or disastrous -- which is not true.  He can never say simply that it does not convince him -- which is true.
  A casual carpenter wandered about a string of villages and suddenly a horde of rich men and sceptics and Sadducees and respectable persons rushed at him and nailed him up like vermin; then people saw that he was a god.  He had proved that the was not a common man, for he was murdered.  And ever since his creed has proved that it is not a common hypothesis, for it is hated.
  Next week I hope to make a fuller study of Mr. Crowley's interpretation of Buddhism, for I have not room for it in this column to-day.  Suffice it for the moment to say that if this be indeed a true interpretation of the creed, as it is certainly a capable one, I need go no further than its pages for examples of how a change of abstract belief might break a civilisation to pieces.  Under the influence of this book earnest modern philosophers may, I think, begin to perceive the outlines of two vast and mystical philosophies, which if they were subtly and slowly worked out in two continents through many centuries, might possibly, under special circumstances, make the East and West almost as different as they really are.

                 THE CREED OF MR. CHESTERTON
                    BY ALEISTER CROWLEY

  When a battle is all but lost and won, the victor is sometimes aware of a brilliancy and dash in the last forlorn hope which was lacking in those initial manoeuvres which decided the fortune of the day.
  Hence comes it that Our Reviewer's apology for Christianity compares so favourably with the methods of ponderous blunder on which people like Paley and Gladstone have relied.  But alas! the very vivacity of the attack may leave the column without that support which might enable it, if checked, to retire in good order; and it is with true pity for a gallant opponent -- who would be wiser to surrender -- that I find myself compelled to despatch half a squadron (no more!) to take him in flank.
  Our Author's main argument for the Christian religion is that it is hated.  To bring me as a witness to this colossal enthymeme, he has the sublime courage to state that my "Sword of Song" begins with an effort to expound Buddhism, but that my hatred of Christianity overcame me as I went on, and that I end up literally raving.  My book is possibly difficult in many ways, but only Mr. Chesterton would have tried to understand it by reading it backward.
   Repartee apart, it is surely an ascertainable fact that while the first 29 pages<<Pp. 144-163 in this volume.>> are almost exclusively occupied with an attack on Christianity as bitter and violent as I can make it, the remaining 161 are composed of ("a") an attack on materialism, ("b") an essay on metaphysics opposing advaitism, ("c") an attempt to demonstrate the close analogy between the canonical Buddhist doctrine and that of modern Agnostics.  None of these<<Pp. 164-184, 233-243, and 244-261 respectively, in this volume.>> deal with Christianity at all, save for a chance and casual word.
  I look forward with pleasure to a new History of England, in which it will be pointed out how the warlike enthusiasm aroused by the Tibetan expedition led to the disastrous plunge into the Boer War; disastrous because the separation of the Transvall which resulted therefrom left us so weak that we fell an easy prey to William the Conqueror.  Our Novelist should really make a strong effort to materialise his creation in "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" of the gentlemen weeping by the graves of his descendants.
  Any sound philosophy must be first destructive of previous error, then constructive by harmonising truths into Truth.
  Nor can the human mind rest content with negation; I honour him rather whose early emotion is hatred of Christianity, bred of compulsion to it, but who subdues that negative passion, and forces his way to a positive creed, were it but the cult of Kali or Priapus.
  Here, indeed, modern Agnostics are at fault.  They sensibly enough reject error; but they are over-proud of their lofty attitude, and, letting slip the real problems of life, busy themselves with side-issues, or try to satisfy the spiritual part of the brain (which needs food like any other part) with the husks of hate.
  How few among us can reach the supreme sanity of Dr. Henry Maudsley in such a book as "Life in Mind and Conduct"!
  Hence I regard Agnosticism as little more than a basis of new research into spiritual facts, to be conducted by the methods won for us by men of science.  I would define myself as an agnostic with a future.
  But the enthymeme itself.  A word is enough to expose it.
  Other things have been hated before and since Christ lived -- if he lived.  Slavery was hated.  A million men<<In the American Civil War, 1861-64.  But they were not men, only Americans.>> died about it, and it was cast out of everywhere but the hearts of men.<<A. C. SUB NOTE: This is mere rhetoric.  Crowley was perfectly familiar with the conditions of "free" wage labour.>>  Euripides hated Greek religion, and he killed the form thereof.  Does Our Logician argue from these facts the vitality of slavery or Delphi?  Yes, perhaps, when Simon Legree and the Pythoness were actually making money, but to argue their eternal truth, or even their value at that time, is a further and a false step.  Does the fact that a cobra is alive prove it to be innocuous?
  With the reported murder of Jesus of Nazareth I am not concerned; but Vespasian's "Ut puto Deus fio" is commonly thought to have been meant as a jest.
  Our Romanticist's unique and magnificent dramatisation of the war between the sceptic or lover of truth, and the religious man or lover of life, may be well quoted against me.  Though Verpasian did jest, though Christ's "It is finished" were subjectively but the cry of his physical weakness, like Burton's "I am a dead man," it is no less true that millions have regarded it as indeed a cry of triumph.  That is so, subjectively for them, but no more, and the one fact does not alter the other.
  Surely Our Fid. Def. will find little support in this claim on behalf of death.  We all die; it was the Resurrection and Ascension which stamped Christ as God.  Our Philosopher will, I think, fight shy of these events.  The two thieves were "nailed up like vermin" on either side of Christ by precisely the same people; are they also gods?  To found a religion on the fact of death, murder though it were, is hardly more than African fetichism.  Does death prove more than life?  Will Mr. Chesterton never be happy until he is hanged?
  These then are the rear-guard actions of his retiring and beaten army.
  The army itself is pretty well out of sight.  There is a puff of artillery from afar to the effect that "no man can contrive to be agnostic about Christianity."  This is very blank cartridge.  Who is agnostic about the shape of the earth?  Who prides himself upon a profound reserve about the colour of a blue pig, or hesitates to maintain that grass is green?  Unless under the reservation that both subject and predicate and Unknowable in their essence, and that the copula of identity is but a convention -- a form of Agnosticism which after all means nothing in this connection, for the terms of the criticism require the same reservation.
  Our Tamburlaine's<<A. C. SUB NOTE: Not to confuse with Tambourine or alter into Tamburlesque.>> subsequent remark that the poor infidel (failing in his desperate attempt to be agnostic) "tries to prove something untrue" is a "petitio principii" which would be a blunder in a schoolboy; but in a man of Our Dialectician's intelligence can only be impudence.
  The main army, as I said, is out of sight.  There is, however, a cloud of dust on the horizon which may mark its position.  "Does Mr. Crowley suppose that the Buddhists do not feel the poetical nature of the books of religion?"  I take this to mean: "You have no business to take the Bible literally!"
  I have dealt with this contention at some length in the "Sword of Song" itself (Ascension Day, lines 216-247): but here I will simply observe that a poem which authorises the Archbishop of Canterbury to convey Dr. Clifford's pet trowels, and makes possible the Gilbertian (in the old sense of pertaining to W. S. Gilbert) position of the Free Kirk to-day, is a poem which had better be burnt, as the most sensible man of his time proposed to do with Homer, or at least left to the collector, as I believe is the case with the publications of the late Isidore Liseux.  Immoral is indeed no word for it.  It is as criminal as the riddle in "Pericles."
  That Our Pantosympatheticist is himself an Agnostic does not excuse him.  True, if every one thought as he does there would be no formal religion in the world, but only that individual communion of the consciousness with its self-consciousness which constitutes genuine religion, and should never inflame passion or inspire intolerance, since the non-Ego lies beyond its province.
  But he knows as well as I do that there are thousands in this country who would gladly see him writhing in eternal torture -- that physiological impossibility -- for his word "a casual carpenter," albeit he wrote it in reverence.  That is the kind of Christian I would hang.  The Christian who can write as Our Champion of Christendom does about his faith is innocuous and pleasant, though in my heart I am compelled to class him with the bloodless desperadoes of the "Order of the White Rose" and the "moutons enrages" that preach revolution in Hyde Park.
   When he says that he will trace "the outlines of two vast and mystical philosophies, which if they were subtly and slowly worked out, &c., &c.," he is simply thrown away on Nonconformity; and I trust I do not go too far, as the humblest member of the Rationalist Press Association, when I suggest that that diabolical body would be delighted to bring out a sixpenny edition of his book.  I am not fighting pious opinions.  But there are perfectly definite acts which encroach upon the freedom of the individual: indefensible in themselves, they seek apology in the Bible, which is now to be smuggled through as a "poem."  If I may borrow my adversary's favourite missile, a poem in this sense is "unhistorical nonsense."
  We should, perhaps, fail to appreciate the beauty of the Tantras if the Government (on their authority) enforced the practices of hook-swinging and Sati, and the fact that the cited passages were of doubtful authority, and ambiguous at that, would be small comfort to our grilled widows and lacerated backs.
  Yet this is the political condition of England at this hour.  You invoke a "casual camel-driver" to serve your political ends and prevent me having eighteen wives as against four: I prove him an impostor, and you call my attention to the artistic beauty of Ya Sin.  I point out that Ya Sin says nothing about four wives, and you say that all moral codes limit the number.  I ask you why all this fuss about Mohammed, in that case, and you write all my sentences -- and your own -- Qabalistically backwards, and it comes out: "Praise be to Allah for the Apostle of Allah, and for the Faith of Islam.  And the favour of Allah upon him, and the peace!"
  War, I think if those be the terms.

                   POSTSCRIPT

  War under certain conditions becomes a question of pace, and I really cannot give my cavalry so much work as Our Brer Rabbit would require.  On the appearance of the first part of his article "Mr. Crowley and the Creeds" I signified my intention to reply.  It aborted his attack on me, and he has not since been heard of.

"In the midst of the words he was trying to say,"
"In the midst of his laughter and glee,"
"He has softly and suddenly vanished away --"

I suppose I always was a bit of a Boojum!>>

   "Scept." Hm!  Well, ah, the earth moves round --- {270A}
   "Myst." How long have you been a sectary astronomical?
   "Scept." Er -- what?
   "Myst." You are then an astronomer? {270B}
   "Scept." I?  goodness gracious bless my soul, no!
   "Myst." Then how do you know all this about the earth?  {271A}
   "Scept." Astronomers are paid, insufficiently paid, it is true, but still paid, to calculate the movements of the various heavenly bodies.  These, being regular, or regularly irregular, {271B} which comes to the same thing, serve us as standards of time.
   "Myst." A strange measure!  What is the comparison in one of your poets between "Fifty years of Europe" and "a cycle of Cathay"?
   "Scept." You know our poets well.
   "Myst." Among my loose tags of thought are several thousand useless quotations.  I would give much to have my memory swept and garnished.
   "Scept." Seven other devils wait at the door.  But you were saying?
   "Myst." That an astronomer might perhaps justly compute the time during which his eye was actually at the telescope by the motion of the planets, or by the clockwork of his reflector, but that you should do so is absurd.
   "Scept." Yet all men do so and have ever done so.  {272A}
   "Myst." And all are absurd in doing so if they really do so, which I doubt.  Even the lowest dimly, or perhaps automatically, perceive the folly thereof ---
   "Scept." As?
   "Myst." A man will say "Since the Derby was run" more intelligibly than "since May such-and-such a day"; for his memory is of the race, not of a particular item in the ever changing space-relation of the heavens, a relation which he can never know, and of which he can never perceive the significance: nay, which he can never recognise, even by landmarks of catastrophic importance.
   "Scept." One might be humorous on this subject by the hour.  Picture to yourself a lawyer cross-examining a farm hand as to the time of an occurrence: "Now, Mr. Noakes, I must warn you to be very careful.  Had Herschell occulted GR:alpha Centauri before you left Farmer Stubbs' field?" while the instructed swain should not blush to reply {272B} that Halley's comet, being the sole measure of time in use on his farm, was 133 degrees S., entering Capricorn, at the very moment of the blow being struck.
   "Myst." I am glad you join me in ridicule of the scheme; but do you quite grasp how serious the situation has become?
   "Scept." I confess I do not see whither you would lead me.  Your own computation strikes one as fantastic in the extreme.
   "Myst." Who knows?  Think, yourself, of certain abnormal and pathological phenomena, whose consideration might lay down the bases for a possible argument.
   "Scept." There are several things that spring instantly into the mind.  First and foremost is the wonderfully suggestive work, misnamed fiction, of our greatest novelist, H. G. Wells.  This man, the John Bunyan of modern scientific thought, has repeatedly attacked the problem, or at least indicated the lines on which a successful research might be prosecuted, in many of his wonderful tales.  He has (I say it not to rob you of the honour of your discoveries, but in compliment, and I can imagine none higher) put his finger on the very spot whence all research must begin: the illusionary nature of the time-idea.  But I will leave you to study his books at your leisure, and try to give a more direct answer to your question.  We have cases of brain disorder, where grave local mischief survives the disappearance of general symptoms.  One man may forget a year of his life; another the whole of it; while yet another may have odd patches effaced here and there, while the main current flows undisturbed.
   "Myst." He is so much the poorer for such losses?
   "Scept." Certainly.
   "Myst." Did the stars efface their tracks to correspond?
   "Scept." Joshua is dead.
   "Myst." Yama<<The Hindu Pluto.>> be praised!
   "Scept." Amen.
   "Myst." You have also, I make no doubt, {273A} cases where the brain, from infancy, never develops.
   "Scept." True: so that a man of thirty thinks and acts like a child: often like a stupid child.  Our social system is indeed devised to provide for these cases; so common are they: the Army, the Cabinet, are reserved for such: in the case of women thus afflicted they are called "advanced" or "intellectual": the advantages of these situations and titles is intended to compensate them for Nature's neglect.  Even sadder is it when young men of great parts and talent, flourishing up to a certain age, have their brains gradually spoiled by the preposterous system of education in vogue throughout the more maismal parts of the country, till they are fit for nothing but "chairs" and "fellowships" at "universities."  The schools of philosophy are full of these Pilocene anachronisms, as the responsible government departments are of the congenitally afflicted: in both cases thinking men are disposed to deny (arguing from the absence of human reason and wit, though some of the creatures have a curious faculty resembling the former, shorn of all light-quality) to these unfortunates any conscious life worthy of the name, or the capacity to increase with years in the wisdom or happiness of their more favoured fellow-creatures.
   "Myst." Yet the stars have a regular rate of progression?
   "Scept." I see what you would be at.  You would say that of two men born on a day, dying on a day, one may be young, the other old.
   "Myst." Ay!  But I would say this to vitiate the standard you somewhat incautiously set up.
   "Scept." Abrogate it then!  But where are we?
   "Myst." Here, that we may determine this most vital point; how so to act that we may obtain the most from life; or, if existence, the word of which intuitions are the letters, be, as the Buddhists pretend, misery, how to obtain the least from it.
   "Scept." Let us not speak ill of a noble {273B} religion, though we lament the paradoxical follies of its best modern professors!
   "Myst." A truce to all controversy, then.  How shall we obtain the best from life?  It is this form of the question that should give you a clue to my goal.
   "Scept." It is so difficult to determine whether Sherlock Holmes<<A detective in sensational fiction of the period.>> is dead or no that I will take no risks.  But the answer to your query is obvious.  "He lives the longest who remembers most."
   "Myst." Insufficient.  There are lives full of the dreariest incident, like a farmyard novel, or a window in Thrums, or the autobiography of a Master of a College,<<The gibe is at Butler, Master of Trinity during Crowley's residence.>> who lives ninety years and begets sons and daughters, and there is an end of him by-and-by, and the world is nor richer nor poorer, scarce for an anecdote!  Add to your "number of impressions remembered" (and therefore not expunged) the vividness of each impression!
   "Scept." As a coefficient rather.  Let us construct a scale of vividness from "a" to "n," and we can erect a formula to express all that a Man is.  For example he might be: 10a + 33125b + 890c + 800112658e + 992f + ...... + ...... + ..... n, and, if we can find the ratio of a : b : c : d : e : f : ...... : n, we can resolve the equation into a single term, and compare man and man.
   "Myst." I catch the idea.  Fanciful as it of course is in practice, the theory is sound to the core.  You delight me!
   "Scept." Not at all, not at all.  Further, I see that since the memory is a storehouse of limited capacity, it follows that he who can remember most is he who can group and generalise most.  How easy is it to conjugate your Hindustani verbs!  Because one rule covers a thousand cases.  How impossible is it to learn German genders!  Because the gender of each word must be committed arbitrarily to memory.  {274A}
   "Myst." He then is the longest-lived, and the wisest, and the worthiest of respect, who can sum up all in one great generalisation?
   "Scept." So Spencer defines philosophy: as the art of doing this.
   "Myst." But you leave out this "vividness."  He is greater who generalised the data of evolution than he who did the same thing for heraldry: not only because of the number of facts covered, but because of the greater intrinsic value and interest of each fact.  Not only, moreover, is the philosopher who can sum up the observations "All men are mortal," "All horses are mortal," "All trees are mortal," and their like, into the one word Anicca, as did Buddha, a wise and great man; but Aeschylus is also wise and great, who from this universal, but therefore commonplace generalisation, selects and emphasises the particular "Oedipus is mortal."
   "Scept." Your Greek is perhaps hardly equal to your English; but you are perfectly right, and I do wrong to smile.  Since we agree to abandon the mechanical device of the astronomer, all states of consciousness are single units, or time-marks, by which we measure intervals.  That some, no longer than others, are more notable, just as the striking of a clock emphasises the hours, though the escapement maintains its rate, is the essential fact in counting.
   "Myst." And what is the test of vividness?
   "Scept." I should say the durability of the memory thereof.
   "Myst." No doubt; it is then of importance to class these states of "high potential" --- may I borrow the term?
   "Scept." It is a suggestive one, thought I must say I am opposed to the practice of Petticoat Lane in philosophical literature.  The broad-minded Huxley's aversion to "polarity" is not his least bequest to psychologists.  Of course, to begin our classification, all states of normal waking consciousness stand in a class above any other  ---
   "Myst." I have known dreams ---
   "Scept." Wells says" There are better {274B} dreams!" -- and a damned good way to look at death, by heaven!
   "Myst." Yes!  But I meant that some dreams are more vivid than some waking states, even adult states hours long.  You remember the "Flying dream," though I daresay you have not experienced it since childhood: it is part of your identity, a shape or defining idea of your mind: but you have forgotten the picnic at -- where you will.
   "Scept." There is something to be thankful for in that.  Then, there are incidents of sport --
   "Myst." Mysteries of initiation --
   "Scept." Narrow escapes --
   "Myst." The presence of death --
   "Scept." Shocks --
   "Myst." Some incidents of earliest childhood --
   "Scept." Memories which can be classed, and therefore fall under great headings; intellectual victories --
   "Myst." Religious emotions --
   "Scept." Ah! this minute too, for I group them!  All these are intuitions which come near, which touch, which threaten, which alarm, the Ego itself!
   "Myst." Yet in those great ecstasies of love, poetry, and their like; the Ego is altogether abased, absorbed in the beloved: the phenomenon is utterly objective.
   "Scept." To be abased is to be exalted.  But we are again at metaphysics.  The Ego and the Non-Ego are convertible terms.  We are agreed that one of the two is a myth; but we might argue for months and aeons as to which of the two it is.
   "Myst." Here Hindu practice bears out Western speculation, whether we take the shadowy idealism of Berkeley, or the self-refuted<<Haeckel, postulating a unity, is compelled to ascribe to it a tendency to dividuality, thus stultifying his postulate.  See the "Riddle of the Universe.>> Monism of Haeckel.  All these men got our results, and interpreted them in the partial light of their varied intellect, their diverse surrounding and education.  But the result is the same physiological phenomenon, {275A} from Plato and Christ to Spinoza and Sankaracharya,<<Hindu reformer (about 1000 A.D.), who raised the cult of Shiva from that of a local phallic deity to that of an universal God.  The Tamil Isaiah.>> from Augustine and Abelard, Boehme and Weigel in their Christian communities to Trismegistus and Porphyry, Mohammed and Paracelsus in their mystic palaces of Wisdom, the doctrine is essentially one: and its essence is that existence is one.  But to my experience it is certain that in Dhyana the Ego is rejected.
   "Scept." Before inquiring further of you: What is this Dhyana? let me say, in view of what you have just urged: How do you know that the Ego is rejected?
   "Myst." Peccavi.  My leanings are Buddhistic, I will confess: indeed, the great majority of Eastern philosophers, arguing "a priori" from the indestructibility of the Ego -- a dogma, say I, and no more! -- have asserted that in the Dhyanic state the Object is lost in the Ego rather than "vice versa," and they support this conclusion by the fact of the glorification of the object.
   "Scept." But this is all "a priori."  For be it supposed that Dhyana is merely a state of more correct perception of the nature of the object than that afforded by normal inspection -- and this is a reasonable view! -- the argument simply goes to prove that matter, as the Ego, is divine.  And this is our old vicious circle!
   "Myst." Also, since the object may be the Infinite.  All Dhyana proves is that "things are not what they seem"
   "Scept." Not content with our poets, you seem to have wandered into Longfellow.
   "Myst." Also Tennyson.
   "Scept." I can sympathise: there is a blot on my own scutcheon.  You are just, though, in your statement that the glorification of one of two factors --
   "Myst." At the moment of the disappearance of their dividuality --
   "Scept." So?
   "Myst." Surely.  They also themselves disappear, just as carbon, the black solid, and {275B} chlorine, the green gas, combine to form a limpid and colourless liquid.  So it might be absurd to assert either that Subject or Object disappears in Dhyana to the advantage of the other.
   "Scept." But at least this glorification of the consciousness is a proof that reality (as shown in Dhyana) is more glorious than illusion (as shown in consciousness).
   "Myst." Or, that illusion --
   "Scept." Of course!  We are then no further than before.
   "Myst." Indeed we are.  Glory, real or false, is desirable.  Indeed we are too bold in saying "real or false," by virtue of your previous agreement that the Subjective is the Knowable, and that deeper inquiry is foredoomed futile.
   "Scept." Unless, admitting Physiology,<<As represented by Huxley, who, I fancy, spoke from imperfect knowledge of the facts.  But "vide infra." -- A. C.>> such glory is phantom, poisonous, and your Dhyana is a debauch.
   "Myst." You will at least admit, as a basis for the consideration of this and other points that Dhyana is more vivid than any of the normal dualistic states.
   "Scept." I must.  I have myself experienced, as I believe, this or a similar condition, and I find it to be so; intensely so.
   "Myst." I suspected as much.
   "Scept." But pray, lest we talk at cross purposes, define me this Dhyana.
   "Myst." The method is to concentrate the attention on any object (though in Hindu estimation some objects may be far more suitable that others, I believe Science would say any object) ---
   "Scept." That was my method.
   "Myst." Suddenly the object disappears: in its stead arises a great glory, characterised by a feeling of calm, yet of intense, of unimaginable bliss.
   "Scept." That was my result.  But, more remarkable still, the change was not from the consciousness "I behold a blue pig" -- the object I have ever affected -- to "I behold {276A} a glory," but to "There is a glory," or "Glory is."
   "Myst." Glory be!  Exactly.  That is the test of Dhyana.  I am glad to have met you.
   "Scept." Same here.  Be good enough to proceed with your exposition!
   "Myst." In a moment.  There are other Westerns who study these matters?
   "Scept." To follow up the line of thought you gave me but just now, we have a great number of philosophers in the West who have enunciated ideas which to the dull minds of the common run of men seem wild and absurd.
   "Myst." You refer to Idealism.
   "Scept." To more; to nearly all philosophy, save only that self-styled "of common sense," which is merely stupidity glossing ignorance.  But Berkeley ---
   "Myst." The devout, the angelic ---
   "Scept." Hegel ---
   "Myst." The splendid recluse!  The lonely and virtuous student who would stand motionless for hours gazing into space, so that his pupils thought him idle or insane --- <<"Cf." Plato, "Symposium;" Diotima's description of the Vision of absolute Beauty, identical with Hindu doctrine; and Alcibiades' anecdote of Scorates at Potidaea. -- A. C.>>
   "Scept." Spencer ---
   "Myst." The noble, ascetic, retired spirit; the single-hearted, the courageous, the holy ---
   "Scept." Yes: all these and many others.  But what mean your comments?
   "Myst." That extreme virtue is a necessary condition for one who is desirous of attaining this state of bliss.
   "Scept." There, my friend, you generalise from three.  Let me stand fourth (like Ananias) and tell you that after many vain attempts while virtuous, I achieved my first great result only a week after a serious lapse from the condition of a Brahmacharyi.<<Chastity is probably referred to, though Brahmacharya involves many other virtues.>>
   "Myst." You?
   "Scept." The result of despair.
   "Myst." This may serve you as excuse before Shiva.  {276B}
   "Scept." Quit not the scientific ground we walk on!
   "Myst." I regret; but my astonishment annulled me.  On the main point, however, there is no doubt.  These Westerns did, more or less, pursue our methods.  Why doubt that they attained our results?
   "Scept." I never did doubt it.  Certain of our philosophers have even imagined that "self-consciousness," as they style it, is the very purpose of the Universe.
   "Myst." They were so enamoured of the Ananda -- the bliss ---
   "Scept." Presumably.  Far be it from me to set myself up against them; but I may more modestly take the position that "self-consciousness" is a mere phenomenon; a bye-product, and no more, in the laboratory of life.
   "Myst." Alas!  I can think no better of you for your modesty: whoso would make bricks without straw may as well plan pyramids a hovels.
   "Scept." Your stricture is but too just.  Teleology<<The science of the Purpose of Things.>> is a science which will make no progress until the most wicked and stupid of men are philosophers, since like is comprehended by like: unless, indeed, we excuse the Creator by saying that, the Universe being a mere mechanism, that it should suffer pain (an emotion He does not feel) is as unintelligible to Him as that a machine should do so is to the engineer.  Strain and fatigue are observed by the latter, but not associated by him with the idea of pain: much more so, then, God.
   "Myst." You are bold enough now!  Our philosophers think it not fitting that man should discuss the ways of the inscrutable, the eternal God.
   "Scept." I have you tripping fairly at last!  What do you mean by "eternal"?  You who have uprooted my ideas of time, answer me that?
   "Myst." A woodcock to mine own springe, indeed.  I am justly caught with mine own metaphysic.  {277A}
   "Scept." Throw metaphysic to the dogs!  I'll none of it.  I will resolve it to you, then, on your own principles.  The term, so constantly in use, or rather abuse, by your devottes as by ours, is meaningless.  All they can mean is a state of consciousness which is never changed -- that is, one unit of time, since time is no more than a succession of states of consciousness, and we have no means of measuring the length of one against another: indeed, a "state of consciousness" is atomic, and to measure is really to furnish the means for dissolution of a molecule, and no more.  Thus in the New Jerusalem the song must be either a single note, or a phenomenon in time.  Length without change is equivalent to an increase in the vividness, as we said before.  And after all the Ego can never by happy, for happiness is impersonal, is distinct from the contemplation of happiness.  This quite unchanging, this single vivid state, is as near "Eternity" as we can ever get -- it is a foolish word.
   "Myst." That state is then impersonal?
   "Scept." Ah! -- Yes, I have described Dhyana.
   "Myst." The heaven of the Christian is then identical with the daily relaxation of the Hindu?
   "Scept." If we analyse their phrase, yes.  But Christians mean "eternal time," a recurring cycle of pleasant states, as when a child wishes that the pantomime "could go on for ever."
   "Myst." Why, do they ever mean anything? . . . But how does this eternal time differ from ordinary time?  Our guarantee against cessation is the fact that the tendency to change is inherent in all component things.
   "Scept." Our guarantee indeed!  Rather the seal upon the tomb of our hopes!  But to sing, even out of tune, as the Christian does, that "time shall be no more," is, indeed, to cease to mean anything.  The dogma of the Trinity itself is not less inane, the only thing that saves it from being blasphemous.
   "Myst." To be intelligible is to me misunderstood.
   "Scept." To be unintelligible is to be found out.  {277B}
   "Myst." To be secretive is to be blatant.
   "Scept." To be frank is to be mysterious.
   "Myst." I wish your poet-martyr<<The reference, presumably ironical, is to the late Oscar Wilde.>> (I do not refer to Chatterton) could hear us.
   "Scept." To return, I would have you note the paradox that unconsciousness must be reckoned as a form of consciousness, since otherwise the last state of consciousness of a dying person is for him eternity.  That this is not so is shown by the phenomena of anaesthesia.
   "Myst." Is it, though?  Is the analogy so certain?  Is there nothing in the attempt of all religions to secure that a man's last thoughts should be of triumph, peace, joy, and their like?
   "Scept." I have been reading that somewhat mawkish book "The Soul of a People."  Disgusted as I was by its ooze of sentimentality, I was yet not unobservant of its cognisance of this fact, and I was even pleased -- though this by the way -- to see that the author recognises in the ridiculous First Precept of the Buddhist Faith, or rather in the orthodox travesty of Buddha's meaning, a mere survival of some fetichistic theophagy.
   "Myst." Doesn't it say somewhere that "Long words butter no parsnips"?
   "Scept." It ought to.  But pray proceed with your defence of religion -- for I presume it is intended as such.
   "Myst." I was saying that if unconsciousness be not reckoned as consciousness, the death-thought is eternal heaven or hell, as it chances to be pleasant or painful.  But, on the other hand, if it be so reckoned, if that and that alone has in death no awakening, no change, then is it not certain that there is the Great Peace?  Disprove immortality, reincarnation, all survival or revival of the identical ---
   "Scept." Identical?  Hm!
   "Myst." -- of the consciousness which the man calls "I" ---
   "Scept." Which Haeckel has pretty effectively done.
   "Myst." And Nirvana is ours for the price of {278A} a packet of arsenic, and a glass of Dutch courage.
   "Scept." In a poem called "Summa Spes,"<<See p. 200.>> a gifted but debauched Irishman has grossly, yet effectively, stated this view.  "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!" is the Hebrew for it.  But if we survive or revive --
   "Myst." The problem is merely postponed.  If "death is a sleep": why, we know what happens after sleep.
   "Scept." The question resolves itself, therefore, into the other which we both of us anticipated and feared: What is this "identical consciousness" which is the cause of so much confusion of thought.  We have in the phenomena of mind ("a") a set of simple impressions; ("b")<<This ("b") may be divided and subdivided into certain groups; some, perhaps all of them, liable, in the event of the suppression of ("a"), to become (automatically?) active, and prevent ("c") from becoming quiet. -- A. C.>> a machinery for grasping and interpreting these; of sifting, grouping, organizing, co-ordinating, integrating them; and ("c") a "central" consciousness, more or less persistent, that is to say, united to a long series of similar states by the close bond of the emphatic idea, I, which "central" consciousness takes notice of the results presented to it by ("b").  A state which can be summoned at will ---
   "Myst." What then is "will"?
   "Scept." You know what I mean.  God knows I am bothered enough already without being caught up on a word!  Which can be summoned at will: which in a succession of simple, though highly abstract states, observes the results (forgive the repetition!) presented to it by ("b").  But if we turn the consciousness upon itself, if we add a sixth sense to the futile five?
   "Myst." It is resolved after all into a simple impression, indistinguishable, so far as I can see, from any other.  That is, logically.
   "Scept." An impression, moreover, on what?  It is not the ("c") that is really examined; for ("c") is the examiner: and you have merely formulated a ("d") expressible by the ratio {278B} d : c :: c : a -- an infinite process.  The final factor is always unknowable -- yet it is the one thing known.
   "Myst." And because it is always present, therefore it is unkenned.
   "Scept." We are now nearer Spencer than appeared.  For the fact that it must be there, unchanging in function, while consciousness persists, gives the idea of a definite substratum to subserve that function.
   "Myst." I cannot but agree; and I would further observe that when, in Dhyana, it ceases to examine, and apperceives, the "relative eternity," "i.e.," the intense vividness of the phenomenon gives us a further argument in favour of its permanence.
   "Scept." But that it should persist after death is a question which we should leave physiology to answer, as much as the obvious question whether sight and taste persist.  And the answer is unhesitatingly "No."
   "Myst." Yet the mystic may still reply that the association of consciousness with matter is as incredible as the contrary conception.  Cause and effect, he will say, are if anything less likely ("a priori") than concomitance or casuality.  Even occasionalism is no more improbable than that the material should have a manifestly immaterial function.
   "Scept." Yet it is so!
   "Myst." Ah! would it serve to reply that it is so!  But no! the materialistic position, fully allowed, is an admission of spirit.<<Maudsley, "Physiology of Mind," asks why it should be more unlikely that consciousness should be a function of matter than that pain should be of nervous tissue.
   True.  So also Huxley extended the meaning of "nature" to include the "supernatural": in order to deny the supernatural.
  So also I (maintaining that darkness only exists) meet the cavil of people who insist on the separate existence of light by showing that light is, after all, merely a sub-section of one kind of darkness. -- A. C.  This note is of course ironical.>>  They must conceive spirit and matter both as unknowable, as irresolvable, like "x" and "y" in a single equation (whose counterpart we seek in Dhyana), so that we may eternally evolve {279A} values for either, but always in terms of the other.
   "Scept." Just so we agreed lately about subject and object.
   "Myst." It is another form of the same Protean problem.
   "Scept." Haeckel even insists upon this in his arrogant way.
   "Myst." Huxley, at once the most and the least sceptical of philosophers, urges it.  There is only one method of investigating this matter.  Reason is bankrupt; not only Mansel the Christian but Hume the Agnostic has seen it.
   "Scept." We all see it.  The Bank being broken, we do not put what little we have saved into the wildcat stock Faith, as Mansel counsels us: but add little to little, and hoard it in the old stocking of Science.
   "Myst." Well if no holes!
   "Scept." We expect little, even if we hope for much.  We are pretty safe; 'tis the plodding ass that is Science, and the fat priest rides us still.
   "Myst." We offer you a Bank, where your intellectual coin will breed a thousandfold.
   "Scept." What security do you offer?  Once bit, twice shy; especially as your business is known to be patronised by some very shady customers.
   "Myst." Do you offer to stop my mouth with security?  We give you all you can wish.  Let Science keep the books!  I say it in our own interest; the slovenly system that has prevailed hitherto has resulted in serious losses to the shareholders.  One of our best cashiers, Christ, went off and left mere verbal messages, and those only too vague, as to the business that passed through his hands.  Too many of our most brilliant research staff keep their processes secret, and so not only incur the suspicion of quackery, but leave the world no wiser for their work.  Others abuse their position as directors to further the ends of other companies not even allied to the parent firm: as when Mohammed, the illuminated of Allah, lent his spiritual force to bolster up the literal {279B} sense of the Bible, thus degrading a sublime text-book of mystic lore into the merest nursery, or too often bawdy-house, twaddle and filth.  You will alter all this, my friends!  Let Science keep the books!
   "Scept." For a cross between a plodding ass and an old stocking, she will do well!  And what dividends do you promise?
   "Myst." In the first year.  Dhyana; in the second, Samadhi; and in the third, Nirvana.
   "Scept." It is not the first year yet.  Is this coin current?
   "Myst." Ah!  I remember now your phrase "Dhyana a debauch."  You are of course familiar with the name of Maudsley, perhaps the greatest living authority on the brain?
   "Scept." None greater.
   "Myst." By rare good fortune, at the very moment when this aspect of the question was confronting me, and I was (so any one would have imagined) many thousand miles from expert opinion, I had the opportunity of putting the matter before him.  Our conversation was pretty much as follows: "What is the cause of the phenomenon I have described?"  (I had given just such a sketch as we have drawn above, and added that it was the most cherished possession of all Eastern races.  The state was familiar to him.)  "Excessive activity of one portion of the brain: relative lethargy of the rest."  "Of which portion?" "It is unknown."  "Is the phenomenon of pathological significance?"  "I cannot say so much: it would be a dangerous habit to acquire: but since recovery is spontaneous, and is apparently complete, it is to be classed as physiological."  I obtained the idea, however, that the danger was very serious, perhaps more so than the actual words used would imply.  A further inquiry as to whether he could suggest any medical, surgical, or other means, by which this state might be produced at will, led to no result.
   "Scept." This is most interesting: for the very doubts which I did entertain as to the safety of mental methods directed to attaining this result, are dispelled by what is a cautious, if not altogether unfavourable, view {280A} from a naturally-inclined-to-be-unfavourable Western mind.  (My mother was of German extraction.)  How so?  Because my teacher, himself a Western scientific man of no mean attainments, thought no trouble too great, no language too violent (though he is ordinarily a man of unusual mildness and suavity of manner) to be used, to impress upon me the extreme danger of too vigorous attempts to reach the state of concentration.  "If you feel the least tired in the course of your daily practice," he never wearied of repeating, "you have done too much, and must absolutely rest for four-and-twenty hours.  However fresh you feel, however keen you are to pursue the work, rest you must, or you will but damage the apparatus you are endeavouring to perfect.  Rest for longer if you like, never for less."  This adjuration recurs with great force to my mind at the present moment.  Our Western "Adepts" -- if you were a Western I would ask you to forgive the word -- know, as the great brain specialist knows, the dangers of the practice; the dangers of the training, the dangers of success.
   "Myst." Blavatsky's mysteriously-phrased threats were to this effect.  Maybe she knew.
   "Scept." Maybe she did.  Well, what I wished to point out was that, had you pressed Dr. Maudsley, he might possibly have admitted that scientific precaution, under trained guidance and watching, might diminish the danger greatly, and permit the student to follow out this line of research without incurring the stigma -- if it be a stigma -- of risking his sanity, or at least his general mental welfare?<<Dr. Maudsley, to whom I submitted the MS. of this portion of the dialogue, was good enough to say that it represented very much what he had said, and to add that "the 'ecstasy,' if attained, signifies such a 'standing-out.' GR:epsilon-kappa--sigma-tau-alpha-sigma-iota-sigma, quasi-spasmodic, of a special tract of the brain as, if persisted in, involves the risk of a permanent loss of power, almost in the end a paralysis of the other tracts. -- Like other bad habits, it grows by what it feeds on, and may put the fine and complex co-ordinated machinery quite out of gear.  The ecstatic attains an illumination (so-called) at the expense of sober reason and solid judgment."
  Mysticus would not, I think, wish to contest this view, but rather would argue that if this be the case, it is at least a choice between two evils.  Sober reason and solid judgment offer no prize more desirable than death after a number of years, less or greater, while ecstasy can, if the facts stated in this dialogue are accepted, give the joys of all these years in a moment.
  But for the sake of argument he would say that there are certainly many men who have practised with success from boyhood, and who still enjoy health and a responsible and difficult position in the world of thinking men.  This would suggest the idea that there may be men with special aptitude for, and immunity in greater or less degree against the dangers of, the practice.  He would cheerfully admit that the common mystic is an insufferable fool, and that his habits possibly assist the degenerative process.  But he would submit that in such cases the brain, such as it is, is not worth protecting.  At the same time, it is true, the truest type of Hindu mystic regards the ecstasy as an obstacle, since its occurrence stops his meditation; and as a temptation, since he is liable to mistake the obstacle for the goal. -- A. C.  (See note 53, p. 209.)>> {280B}
   "Myst." It may be; in any case I follow knowledge; if my methods be absurd or pernicious, I am but one of millions in the like strait.  Nor do I perceive that any other line of action offers even a remote chance of success.
   "Scept." The problem is perennial.  It must be attacked on scientific lines, and if the pioneers fall, -- well, who expects more from a forlorn hope?  Time will show.
   "Myst." We have wandered far from this question of time.
   "Scept." Even from that of consciousness; itself a digression, though a necessary one.
   "Myst." An elusive fellow, this consciousness!  Is he continuous, you, who declare him permanent?
   "Scept." Do I, indeed?  I gave a possible reason for thinking so; but my adhesion does not follow.  The lower consciousnesses, which I called ("a"), are of course rhythmic.  The biograph is a sufficient proof of this.  {281A}
   "Myst." Were one needed.  Spencer's generalisation covers this point?
   "Scept." "A priori."  That the higher ("c") are also rhythmic -- for we will have no "a priori" here! -- is evident, since the ("a")s are presented by ("b") no faster than they come.  Even if ("a"), being fivefold, comes always so fast as to overlap, no multitude of impacts can compose a continuity.
   "Myst." But those reasons for permanence were very strong.
   "Scept." Strong, but overcome.  Is it not absurd to represent anything as permanent whose function is rhythmic?
   "Myst." Not necessarily.  It is surely possible for a continuous pat of butter to be struck rhythmically, for example.  That it is inert in the intervals is unproved; but if it were, it might still be continuous.  That a higher consciousness exists is certain; that it is unknowable is certain, as shown just now, unless, indeed, we can truly unite ("c") with itself: "i.e.," without thereby formulating a ("d").
   "Scept." But how is that to be done?
   "Myst." Only, if at all, but cutting off ("c") from ("a"): "i.e.", by suspending the mechanism ("b").  Prevent sense-impressions from reaching the sensorium, and there will at least be a better chance of examining the interior.  You cannot easily investigate a watch while it is going: not does the reflection of the sun appear in a lake whose surface is constantly ruffled by wind and rain, by hail and thunderbolt, by the diving of birds and the falling of rocks.  To do this, thus shown to be essential to even the beginning of the true settlement of the time problem, and the solution of the paradoxes it affords ---
   "Scept." How to do this is then a question not to be settle offhand by our irresponsible selves, but one of method and research.
   "Myst." And as such the matter of years.
   "Scept." I have long recognised this.  That it should be started on a firm basis by responsible scientific men; that it should be placed on equal terms in all respects with {281B} other research: such is the object of my life.
   "Myst." But of mine the research itself.
   "Scept." I applaud you.  You are the happy one.  I am the martyr.  I shall sow, but not reap; my eyes shall hardly see the first-fruits of my labour; yet something I shall see.  Also, to construct one must clear the ground: to harvest, the plough and harrow are required.  First we must rid us of false phrase and lying assumption, of knavery and ignorance, of bigotry and shirking.  Let us pull down the church and the Free Library;<<The sarcasm is perhaps against the popularity of the worthless novel, as shown in Free Library statistics; or against the uselessness of any form of reading to a man not otherwise educated.>> with each stone torn thence let us build the humble and practical homes of the true "holy men" of our age, the {282A) austere and single-minded labourers in the fields of Physics and Physiology.
   "Myst." Here, moreover, is the foundation of race harmony; here the possible basis for a genuine brotherhood of man!  He will never be permanently solidarised -- excuse the neologism! -- by grandiose phrase and transitory emotion; but in the Freemasonry of the Adepts of Dhyana what temple may not yet be builded?
   "Scept." Not made with hands --  GR:epsilon-sigma tau-omicron-iota-sigma omicron-upsilon-rho-alpha-nu-omicron-iota-sigma alpha-iota-omega-nu-iota-omicron-sigma.
   "Myst." Has not this mystical bond brought you and me together, us diverse, even repugnant in all other ways, yet utterly at one in this great fact?
   "Scept." We have talked too lightly, friend.  Silence is best.
   "Myst." Let us meditate upon he adorable light of that divine Savitri!
   "Scept." May she enlighten our minds. {282B}


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                               E P I L O G U E.

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WHEN the chill of earth black-breasted is uplifted at the glance
Of the red sun million-crested, and the forest blossoms dance
With the light that stirs and lustres of the dawn, and with the bloom
Of the wind's cheek as it clusters from the hidden valley's gloom:
Then I walk in woodland spaces, musing on the solemn ways
Of the immemorial places shut behind the starry rays;
Of the East and all its splendour, of the West and all its peace;
And the stubborn lights grow tender, and the hard sounds hush and cease.
In the wheel of heaven revolving, mysteries of death and birth,
In the womb of time dissolving, shape anew a heaven and earth
Ever changing, ever growing, ever dwindling, ever dear,
Ever worth the passion glowing to distil a doubtful tear.
These are with me, these are of me, these approve me, these obey,
Choose me, move me, fear me, love me, master of the night and day.
These are real, these illusion; I am of them, false or frail,
True or lasting, all is fusion in the spirit's shadow-veil,
Till the knowledge-Lotus flowering hides the world beneath its stem; {283A}
Neither I, nor God life-showering, find a counterpart in them.
As a spirit in a vision shows a countenance of fear,
Laughs the looker to derision, only comes to disappear,
Gods and mortals, mind and matter, in the glowing bud dissever:
Vein from vein they rend and shatter, and are nothingness for ever.
In the blessed, the enlightened, perfect eyes these visions pass,
Pass and cease, poor shadows frightened, leave no stain upon the glass.
One last stroke, O heart-free master, one last certain calm of will,
And the maker of Disaster shall be stricken and grow still.
Burn thou to the core of matter, to the spirit's utmost flame,
Consciousness and sense to shatter, ruin sight and form and name!
Shatter, lake-reflected spectre; lake, rise up in mist to sun;
Sun, dissolve in showers of nectar, and the Master's work is done.
Nectar perfume gently stealing, masterful and sweet and strong.
Cleanse the world with light of healing in the ancient House of Wrong!
Free a million million mortals on the wheel of being tossed!
Open wide the mystic portals, and be altogether lost! {283B}




                               END OF VOL. II.