THE PRIEST<\/strong><\/p>\n In opening this the most important section of Frater P.’s career, we may be met by the unthinking with the criticism that since it deals rather with his relation to others than with his personal attainment, it has no place in this volume.\u00a0(Projected by Fuller as no more than a record of the personal attainment of Aleister Crowley.)<\/p>\n Such criticism is indeed shallow. True, the incidents which we are about to record took place on planes material or contiguous thereto; true, so obscure is the light by which we walk that much must be left in doubt; true, we have not as yet the supreme mystical attainment to record; but on the other hand it is our view that the Seal set upon Attainment may be itself fittingly recorded in the story of that Attainment, and that no step in progress is more important than that when it is said to the aspirant: \u201cNow that you are able to walk alone, let it be your first care to use that strength to help others!\u201d And so this great event which we are about to describe, an event which will lead, as time will show, to the establishment of a New Heaven and New Earth for all men, wore the simplest and humblest guise. So often the gods come clad as peasants or as children; nay, I have listened to their voices in stones and trees. We get \u201cMilton composing baby rhymes\u201d and \u201cLocke reasoning in gibberish,\u201d divine revelations which would shock the intelligence of a sheep or a Saxon ; and we find these upheld and defended with skill and courage.<\/p>\n Therefore, since we are to announce the divine revelation made to Fra. P., it is of the last importance that we should study his mind as is was at the time of the Unveiling. If we find it to be the mind of a neurotic, of a mystic, of a person predisposed, we shall slight the revelation ; if it be that of a sane man of the world, we shall attach more importance to it.<\/p>\n If some dingy Alchemist emerges from his laboratory, and proclaims to all Tooting that he has made gold, men doubt; but the conversion to spiritualism of Professor Lombroso made a great deal of impression on those who did not understand that his criminology was but the heaped delusion of a diseased brain.<\/p>\n So we shall find that the A\u2234A\u2234 subtly prepared Fra. P. by over two years’ training in rationalism and indifferentism for Their message. And we shall find that so well did They do Their work that he refused the message for five years more, in spite of many strange proofs of its truth. We shall find even that Fra. P. had to be stripped naked of himself before he could effectively deliver the message.<\/p>\n The battle was between all that mighty will of his and the Voice of a Brother who spoke once, and entered again into His silence ; and it was not Fra. P. who had the victory.<\/p>\n We left Fra. P. in the autumn of 1901 having made considerable progress in Yoga. We noted that in 1902 he did little or nothing either in Magic or Mysticism. The interpretation of the occult phenomena which he had observed occupied him exclusively, and his mind was more and more attracted to materialism.<\/p>\n What are phenomena? he asked. Of noumena I know and can know nothing. All I know is, as far as I know, a mere modification of the mind, a phase of consciousness. And thought is a secretion of the brain. Consciousness is a function of the brain.<\/p>\n If this thought was contradicted by the obvious, \u201cAnd what is the brain? A phenomenon in mind!\u201d, it weighed less with him. It seemed to his mind as yet unbalanced (for all men are unbalanced until they have crossed the Abyss), that it was more important to insist on matter than on mind. Idealism wrought such misery, was the father of all illusion, never led to research. And yet, what odds? Every act or thought is determined by an infinity of causes, is the resultant of an infinity of forces. He analysed God, saw that every man had made God in his own image, saw the savage and cannibal Jews devoted to a savage and cannibal God, who commanded the rape of virgins and the murder of little children. He saw the timid inhabitants of India, races continually the prey of every robber tribe, inventing the effeminate Vishnu; while, under the same name, their conquerors worshiped a warrior, the conqueror of Demon Swans. He saw the flower of earth throughout all time, the gracious Greeks, what gracious gods they had invented. He saw Rome, in its strength devoted to Mars, Jupiter and Hercules, in its decay turning to emasculate Attis, slain Adonis, murdered Osiris, crucified Christ. He could even trace in his own life every aspiration, every devotion, as a reflection of his physical and intellectual needs. He saw, too, the folly of all this supernaturalism. He heard the Boers and the British pray to the same Protestant God, and it occurred to him that the early success of the former might be due rather to superior valour than to superior praying power, and their eventual defeat to the circumstance that they could only bring 60,000 men against a quarter of a million. He saw, too, the face of humanity mired in its own blood that dripped from the leeches of religion fastened to its temples.<\/p>\n In all this he saw man as the only thing worth holding to; the one thing that needed to be \u201csaved,\u201d but also the one thing that could save it.<\/p>\n All that he had attained, then, he abandoned. The intuitions of the Qabalah were cast behind him with a smile at his youthful folly; magic, if true, led nowhere; Yoga had become psychology. For the solution of his original problems of the universe he looked to metaphysics ; he devoted his intellect to the cult of absolute reason. He took up once more with Kant, Hume, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, Maudsley, Mansel, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and many another ; while as for his life, was he not a man? He had a wife; he knew his duty to the race, and to his own ancient graft thereof. He was a traveller and a sportsman; very well, then, live it! So we find that from November, 19O1 he did no practices of any kind until the Spring Equinox of 1904, with the exception of a casual week in the summer of 1903, and an exhibition game of magick in the King’s Chamber of the Great We find him climbing mountains, skating, fishing, hunting big game, fulfilling the duties of a husband; we find him with the antipathy to all forms of spiritual thought and work which marks disappointment.<\/p>\n If one goes up the wrong mountain by mistake, as may happen, no beauties of that mountain can compensate for the disillusionment when the error is laid bare. Leah may have been a very nice girl indeed, but Jacob never cared for her after that terrible awakening to find her face on the pillow when, after seven years’ toil, he wanted the expected Rachel.<\/p>\n So Fra. P., after five years barking up the wrong tree, had lost interest in trees altogether as far as climbing them was concerned. He might indulge in a little human pride: \u201cSee, Jack, that’s the branch I cut my name on when I was a boy\u201d; but even the golden fruit of Eternity in its branches, he would have done no more than lift his gun and shoot the pigeon that flitted through its foliage.<\/p>\n Of this \u201cwithdrawal from the vision\u201d the proof is not merely deducible from the absence of all occult documents in his dossier, and from the full occupation of his life in external and mundane duties and pleasures, but is made irrefragible and emphatic by the positive evidence of his writings. Of these we have several examples. Two are dramatisations of Greek mythology, a subject offering every opportunity to the occultist. Both are markedly free from any such allusions. We have also a slim booklet, Rosa Mundi<\/em>, in which the joys of pure human love are pictured without the faintest tinge of mystic emotion. Further, we have a play, The God Eater<\/em>, in which the Origin of Religion, as conceived by Spencer or Frazer, is dramatically shown forth; and lastly we have a satire, Why Jesus Wept<\/em>, hard, cynical, and brutal in its estimate of society, but careless of any remedy for its ills.<\/p>\n It is as if the whole past of the man with all its aspiration and attainment was blotted out. He saw life (for the first time, perhaps) with commonplace human eyes. Cynicism he could understand, romance he could understand; all beyond was dark. Happiness was the bedfellow of contempt.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\n We learn that, late in 1903, he was proposing to visit China on a sporting expedition, when a certain very commonplace communication made to him by his wife caused him to postpone it. \u201cLet’s go and kill something for a month or two,\u201d said he, \u201cand if you’re right, we’ll get back to nurses and doctors.\u201d<\/p>\n So we find them in Hambantota, the south-eastern province of Ceylon, occupied solely with buffalo, elephant, leopard, sambhur, and the hundred other objects of the chase.<\/p>\n We here insert extracts from the diary, indeed a meagre production\u2013after what we have seen of his previous record in Ceylon.<\/p>\n Whole weeks pass without a word; the great man was playing bridge, poker, or golf!<\/p>\n The entry of February 19th reads as if it were going to be interesting, but it is followed by that of February 20th. It is however certain that about the 14th of March he took possession of a flat in Cairo\u2013in the Season!<\/p>\n Can Bathos go further?<\/p>\n So that the entry from March 16th is dated from Chiro.<\/p>\n FRATER P’s DIARY<\/strong><\/p>\n (This diary is extremely incomplete and fragmentary. Many entries, too, are evidently irrelevant or \u201cblinds.\u201d We omit much of the latter two types.)<\/p>\n \u201cThis eventful year 1903 finds me at a nameless camp in the jungle of a Southern Province of Ceylon; my thoughts, otherwise divided between Yoga and sport, are diverted by the fact of a wife\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n (This reference to Yoga is the subconscious Magical Will of the Vowed Initiate. He was not doing anything; but, on questioning himself, as was his custom at certain seasons, he felt obliged to affirm his Aspiration.)<\/p>\n
\nHowever, we must not forget that there are persons so sensitive and so credulous that they are convinced by anything, I suppose that there are nearly as many beds in the world as there are men; yet for the Evangelical every bed conceals its Jesuit.<\/p>\n
\nPyramid in November, 1903, when by his invocations he filled that chamber with a brightness as of full moonlight. (This was no subjective illusion. The light was sufficient for him to read the ritual by.) Only to conclude, \u201cThere, you see it? What’s the good of it?\u201d<\/p>\n
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