Thelema Lodge Calendar for March 2004 e.v.

Thelema Lodge Calendar

for March 2004 e.v.

The viewpoints and opinions expressed herein are the responsibility of the contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of OTO or its officers.

Thelema Lodge
Ordo Templi Orientis
P.O.Box 2303
Berkeley, CA 94702 USA

March 2004 e.v. at Thelema Lodge

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Announcements from
Lodge Members and Officers

Ritual stitchery
and ritual stains
by Leigh Ann Hussey.

Thelemic Centennial

Thelema Lodge will meet in Horus Temple on the evening of the Vernal Equinox, Friday 19th March, beginning at 7:00, to celebrate the centenary of the Equinox of the Gods. As at any equinox, it will be our first concern to assess and evaluate our common work together as a lodge, and the evening will open here with a lodge meeting. Assembled members and friends will each be invited to share suggestions for our progress, and to redefine their individual roles and responsibilities in this enterprise. In particular, we will be discussing the change in the mastership of Thelema Lodge which is planned later in the spring. After this meeting we plan a communal dinner feast, for which everyone present is encouraged to provide entree dishes or salads to share, as well as plenty to drink. The evening then will close with a ritual to welcome in the new year of the aeon, culminating with the entry of Sol into Aries at 10:49, when we will select a word of the equinox for the lodge. (Then a brisk leavetaking all around will be in order, as the evening will be nearly spent, and we have each of us to head out into the first night of the spring, and the new century of Thelema.)
Celebration of Aleister Crowley's mass of Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica continues every Sunday evening at Thelema Lodge, with communicants welcome to participate. Newcomers should call the lodgemaster well ahead for further information, and directions to Horus Temple. The gnostic mass is the central ritual upon which our community is based, and represents the great secrets which we share. It takes the coordinated efforts of a great many individual Thelemites to maintain our temple and offer mass every Sunday, as Thelema Lodge has striven to do continually for more than a quarter of the aeon. Generosity from throughout the community is what keeps the temple beautifully furnished, stocked with supplies, clean, organized, and ready for the next mass. Most importantly, the generosity of all the members and friends who volunteer to serve the lodge as officers in the mass is the source and symbol of our success together as a community. Every one who cares about the temple is invited to study the canon of the mass in Liber XV and to practice the ritual privately with a few like-minded communicants until they are ready to celebrate it openly on behalf of the temple. Speak with the lodgemaster, or with any of our gnostic bishops, or your own favorite mass officers, for advice on how to proceed.

Imagined Labyrinths

Meeting in the lodge library on Monday evening 22nd March the Section Two reading group will share a couple of the ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinean poet, storyteller, and scholar, who was one of the master fantasists of twentieth century literature. Borges, who was educated in Switzerland and began publishing as a trendy Spanish nihilist in the 1920s, became completely blind in mid-life, but continued to write prolifically by dictation. His favorite form, known in Spanish as ficciones, consisted of brief essays, poems, meditations, or tales which did not tell any complete story, but overflowed with implications of all sorts of hidden references and meanings, never precisely delineated. If we might define magick as "control over meaning" it would be easy to appreciate Borges as a virtuoso magician in the language of his ficciones, continually redefining the universe of associations which his works offer to us. The effect is often complexly and overwhelmingly dreamlike, compelling, and evocative, constructing analogues in literary rhetoric to various states of unconscious and visionary experience. In the 1960s Borges, a polyglot who had spoken fluent English since childhood, but chose to write in Spanish, collaborated extensively with an English translator, becoming well known to readers of both American languages.

Previous Section Two Last Section Two

The Holy Hexagram
by brother Gregory Peters

At the Ending of the Night:
At the Limits of the Light:
Tho-oth stood before the Unborn Ones of Time!
Then was formulated the Universe:
Then came forth the Gods Thereof:
The Aeons of the Bornless Beyond:
Then was the Voice vibrated:
Then was the Name declared.
At the Threshold of the Entrance,
Between the Universe and the Infinite,
In the Sign of the Enterer, stood Tho-oth,
As before him were the Aeons proclaimed.
In Breath did he vibrate them:
In Symbols did he record them: For betwixt the Light and the Darkness did he stand.

------ Particular Exordium

THE SPIRIT grows the form for self-expression, And for a hall where she may hold high session With sister souls, who, allied with her, create Her fair companion, her espous'd mate. Ever the hidden Person will remould
    5. For all our lives fresh organs manifold, Gross for the earthly, for the heavenly fine, Ethereal woof, wherein their graces shine. And there be secret avenues, with doors Yielding access to inmost chamber floors
    10. Of the soul's privacy; all varying frames, Responsive to the several spirit-flames. The vital form our lost now animate Is one with what in their low mortal state They made their own; the coarse mere ashes, waste,
    15. For all grand uses of the world replaced. A larva needs no more the unliving husk, When soaring winged he rends the dwelling dusk.

------ From De Profundis, Roden Berkeley Wriothesley Noel

	O my God! One is Thy Beginning! One is Thy Spirit, and Thy Permutation One!
------ Liber DCCCXIII vel ARARITA, sub figura DLXX

	The Star Sapphire corresponds with the Star-Ruby of chapter 25; 36 being the square of 6, as 25 is of 5. This chapter gives the real and perfect Ritual of the Hexagram. It would be improper to comment further upon an official ritual of the A A
------ Aleister Crowley, commentary , Book of Lies

    In his single published commentary in the Book of Lies, Aleister Crowley described the Star Sapphire as "the real and perfect Ritual of the Hexagram." As with the Star Ruby, which was described as the "new and more elaborate" version of the Pentagram ritual, we find in the Star Sapphire an elaboration and refinement of the traditional Hexagram ritual from the Golden Dawn, as given in Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae. The changes in the Star Sapphire are far more significant however, leaving an even wider gulf to be filled by the right ingenium of the individual magician.
    It should be understood up front that this ritual has many levels of interpretation, each building upon the other and intertwined, even as the snakes of the caduceus twist about one another to form the solid staff of Hermes. Many magicians prefer to focus exclusively on the sexual interpretations of the Star Sapphire; yet, this misses many further levels of application for the rite; and it may yet be that they are each a veil for something further.
    Based on the formula of Tetragrammaton, Liber 36 follows the eternal cycle of creation from the Night of Pan to manifestation, and the return therein to annihilation. Crowley comments on this formula in Magick in Theory and Practice (Liber ABA, Part III), chapter 3:

The formation of the "Yod" is the formulation of the first creative force, of that father who is called "self-begotten", and unto whom it is said: "Thou has formulated thy Father, and made fertile thy Mother". The adding of the "He" to the "Yod" is the marriage of that Father to the great co-equal Mother, who is a reflection of Nuit as He is of Hadit. Their union brings forth the son "Vau" who is the heir. Finally the daughter "He" is produced. She is both the twin sister and the daughter of "Vau".
His mission is to redeem her by making her his bride; the result of this is to set her upon the throne of her mother, and it is only she whose youthful embrace can reawaken the eld of the All-Father. In this complex family relationship is symbolised the whole course of the Universe. It will be seen that (after all) the Climax is at the end. It is the second half of the formula which symbolises the Great Work which we are pledged to accomplish. The first step of this is the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, which constitutes the Adept of the Inner Order. The re-entry of these twin spouses into the womb of the mother is that initiation described in Liber 418, which gives admission to the Inmost Order of the A

Of the last step we cannot speak.

Further on in the same chapter, we read that

The Yod will represent a swift and violent creative energy; following this will be a calmer and more reflective but even more powerful flow of will, the irresistible force of a mighty river. This state of mind will be followed by an expansion of the consciousness; it will penetrate all space, and this will finally undergo a crystallization resplendent with interior light. Such modifications of the original Will may be observed in the course of the invocations when they are properly performed.

    At each of the cardinal points one aspect of this family dynamic is invoked over the Holy Hexagram, linking each in succession from the Father to the Mother, the Mother to the Son, the Son to the Daughter, and the Daughter back unto the Father yet again, for a return of the cycle and initiation of a new series.
    The ritual opens with the Signs of N.O.X. As the traditional Hexagram ritual utilizes the Signs of L.V.X. or Light, the Signs of N.O.X. are the Night of Pan, that radiant brilliance of the supernal light that is so effulgent, it may only be perceived as darkness beneath the Abyss. This N.O.X. or Night is the dome of the heavens of Nuit, the starry night sky of eternity, the depths of nothingness which are the source of the Rosy Cross, which arises like a trident of fire out of the union of opposites.
    While some would argue that the Hexagrams traced at each quarter are the unicursal form, the symbolism of the traditional earth hexagram as the union of a fire and water triangle (male and female, active and passive, light and darkness, and so on) is far more effective. In practice, we have found that the traditional hexagrams transform spontaneously into the unicursal form after all four have been traced.
    The name ARARITA is part of the invocation for each quarter, even as it is used in the traditional hexagram rite. ARARITA is a notariqon of the Hebrew phrase Achad Rosh, Achadotho Rosh, Ichudo Temurazo Achad, meaning "One is His Beginning, One His Individuality, His Permutation One". The individual word achad signifies "one" or unity; achadotho is "unity" or "oneness." The numeration of the word ARARITA is 813, which is identical with the qabalistic numeration of Genesis I:3:

    Vayomer Elohim Yehi Aur, Vihi Aur
    ("And the Elohim said, "Let there be light', and there was light.")

    The creation of the hexagrams at each quarter does result in an influx of light, the solar-phallic light of magick fire. The hexagram itself is a symbol of the union of GOD and MAN, resulting in the GOD-MAN which is the lightning rod between the fiery heavens above, and the fertile earth below. This is the union represented as the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, and it is this union that is identified as the Rosy Cross and reception into the College of the Holy Ghost; mirrored on earth as the union of opposites resulting in the creation of a third thing, that is both the combination of the two which are one, and something beyond even this.
    The sacrament drunk is the wine of the Rosy Cross, the kiss of the Holy Guardian Angel, which informs and penetrates the magician throughout their being, as they strive in the sign of Set Triumphant to storm the gates of paradise, inflaming in prayer, crying out ARARITA! In an unpublished diary entry Crowley remarks that the object of all magical rituals is the raising of the kundalini; it is at this moment that the fire snake weaves her way up the spine of the magician, achingly, longingly reaching out to the stars. The sacrament is shared with the Angel as the consummation of the marriage between eternity and temporal consciousness.
    It is said that Set shall appear in the Circle. In the excellent commentary on this Name given in Liber V vel Reguli, Crowley gives the spelling as Shin Tet , with the following explanation:

    ShT is equally 31 with LA and AL, but it expresses the secret nature which operates the Magick or the transmutations.
    ShT is the formula of this particular AEon; another aeon might have another way of saying 31.
    Sh is Fire as T is Force; conjoined they express Ra-Hoor-Khuit.
    "The Angel" represents the Stele 666, showing the Gods of the aeon, while "Strength" is a picture of Babalon and the Beast, the earthly emissaries of those Gods.
    ShT is the dynamic equivalent of LA and AL. Sh shows the Word of the Law, being triple, as 93 is thrice 31. T shows the formula of Magic declared in that Word; the Lion, the Serpent, the Sun, Courage and Sexual Love are all indicated by the card.

Ra-Hoor-Khuit is the visible image of the Lord of the Universe, an expression of the All-Father, and symbolic of the Holy Guardian Angel. Further on in this same commentary, Crowley remarks:

ShT supplies the last element; making the Word of either five or six letters, according as we regard ShT as one letter or two. Thus the Word affirms the Great Work accomplished: 5

= 6

    Sh is the Holy Spirit as a "tongue of fire" manifest in triplicity, and is the child of Set-Isis as their logos or Word uttered by their "Angel." The card is XX, and 20 is the value of yod (the secret seed of all things, the Virgin, "The Hermit," Mercury, the Angel or Herald) expressed in full as IVD. Sh is the spiritual congress of Heaven and Earth.
    But T is the Holy Spirit in action as a "roaring Lion" or as "the old Serpent" instead of an "Angel of Light." The twins of Set-Isis, harlot and beast, are busy with that sodomitic and incestuous lust which is the traditional formula for producing demi-gods, as in the cases of Mary and the Dove, Leda and the Swan, etc. The card is XI, the number of Magick AVD: aleph "The Fool" impregnating the woman according to the Word of yod, the Angel of the Lord! His sister has seduced her brother Beast, shaming the Sun with her sin; she has mastered the Lion, and enchanted the Serpent. Nature is outraged by Magick; man is bestialized and woman defiled. The conjunction produces a monster; it affirms regression of types. Instead of a man-God conceived of the Spirit of God by a virgin in innocence, we are asked to adore the bastard of a whore and a brute, begotten in shamefullest sin and born in most blasphemous bliss.
    This is in fact the formula of our Magick; we insist that all acts must be equal; that existence asserts the right to exist; that unless evil is a mere term expressing some relation of haphazard hostility between forces equally self-justified, the universe is as inexplicable and impossible as uncompensated action; that the orgies of Bacchus and Pan are no less sacramental than the Masses of Jesus; that the scars of syphilis are sacred and worthy of honour as much as the wounds of the martyrs of Mary.

As Above, so Below; As Within, so Without.
It should be noted as well that when spelled Shin-Taw

the numeration is 700. This is also the value of paroketh, the Veil of the Tabernacle which is said to be placed before the Temple of the Sun in Tiphareth.
Then standing triumphantly, ecstatically, the magician calls out the incantation of the attainment which signifies

All in Two; Two in One; One in None; These are neither Four nor All nor Two nor One nor None.
Glory be to the Father and the Mother and the Son and the Daughter and the Holy Spirit without and the Holy Spirit within as it was, is, will be for ages and ages, six in one through the name seven in one, ARARITA.

The ritual then directs to end with the Signs of L.V.X., as confirmation of this union and expression of the Divine in Man.
Of the ritual as a whole, one can do no better than to return to Crowley's commentary from Liber V vel Reguli:

So also shall he who invoketh often behold the Formless Fire, with trembling and bewilderment; but if he prolong his meditation, he shall resolve it into coherent and intelligible symbols, and he shall hear the articulate utterance of that Fire, interpret the thunder thereof as a still small voice in his heart. And the Fire shall reveal to his eyes his own image in its own true glory; and it shall speak in his ears the mystery that is his own right Name.
This then in the virtue of the Magick of The Beast 666, and the canon of its proper usage; to destroy the tendency to discriminate between any two things in theory, and in practice to pierce the veils of every sanctuary, pressing forward to embrace every image; for there is none that is not very Isis. The Inmost is one with the Inmost; yet the form of the One is not the form of the other; intimacy exacts fitness. He therefore who liveth by air, let him not be bold to breathe water. But mastery cometh by measure: to him who with labour, courage, and caution giveth his life to understand all that doth encompass him, and to prevail against it, shall be increase. "The word of Sin is Restriction": seek therefore Righteousness, enquiring into Iniquity, and fortify thyself to overcome it.

------ Aleister Crowley, commentary to Liber V vel Reguli

Crowley Classics

   During the autumn of 1917 e.v. and the following winter, when Crowley had editorial charge of The International in New York, he ran a regular column toward the back of most issues which usually consisted of two or three brief reviews of newly published books. Most of the individual notices were either signed "A. C." or with pseudonyms such as "Therion," and Crowley himself seems to have been the author of them all. From novels and detective stories to histories and political or religious tracts, these reviews involved some eclectic reading, although there is one exception in that three of the longest reviews (excluded from the present selection) are concerned specifically with the history of Belgium. (In view of "the present conflict," as Crowley wrote, it seemed "of the utmost importance that everyone should grasp the WHY of Belgium.")
    Several of the books Crowley selected for review have since been reprinted and remain available today. Crowley's remarks upon The Shadow Line (Joseph Conrad's 1917 tale of far shores) display a critical acumen both insightful and respectful. The concluding remark implying that Conrad was Hungarian is however a complete distortion. (Born Konrad Korzeniowski, this remarkable English prose stylist was raised in a Polish family who were political exiles in Czarist Russia, and when orphaned as a young man he went to France and joined the merchant marine. During his twenties he first learned English and went on to become a British subject, so that when he later retired to write his masterful fictive analyses of remote life in the outposts of the various European empires, it was to England that he went and in English that he worked. Conrad never had any particular connection with Hungary.) Crowley's remark about Arthur Machen being German is likewise complete nonsense. Machen, whose surname in civil life was Llewellyn, came from a long line of Welsh clergymen.
    Crowley's review of the penultimate collection of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories is consistent with later critical opinion of that volume. Only a couple of its nine individual stories seem fully within the old Baker Street tradition, although it is not possible from Crowley's remarks to deduce precisely which were his favorites, since seven of them had previously appeared (mostly between 1908 and 1913) in The Strand magazine. "Wisteria Lodge" and "The Bruce-Partington Plans" are the best known cases in His Last Bow, and "The Cardboard Box" (subsequently deleted from the collection and inserted into later editions of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes) is the only one which dates from the "classic" Baker Street period of the early 1890s.

Selected Book Reviews from
The Gate of Knowledge

by Aleister Crowley

Philistine and Genius
by Dr Boris Sidis
(Boston: Richard G. Badger)

    This essay on education appears certain to become a classic. With extraordinary acumen Prof. Sidis discovers the primary cause of all our evils to be the violation of the biological law which provides for variation. Variation is the means of evolution. Our whole educational system is directed to stamping out every departure from type. What we really do is to place the most stupid, the most bound, the most cowardly, upon a pedestal. Procrustes is our ideal educator. We cramp genius, we punish originality, we stifle inquiry, we place our children in Rooms of Little Ease where they can neither stand, sit, not lie with comfort. Our sex taboo, our religious taboo, our social taboo are omnipotent. We deliberately crush out all originality by these three engines of torture.
    Prof. Sidis does not mention it, but one of the reasons why such genius as we have is so enormously removed from the common level is that the genius, in order to develop at all, must be originally endowed with almost superhuman moral strength. The gap between him whose spirit has not been broken and him in whom "education" has been a success grows constantly wider with the perfection of our methods for suppressing him. It is quite true, as Prof. Sidis says, that every child has latent genius. The doctrine of the New Aeon is "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," which is explained by stating that, "Every man and every woman is a star." The trouble arises from the forcing of these stars into collisions by distortion of their orbits.
    The business of the educator is to discover the true will of the child, the purpose for which he was born upon this planet, and to assist him to develop that will to the highest possible point; to remove the restrictions from that will so far as possible. Our present method is the precise contrary of this. No sooner does a child manifest tendency towards and capacity for any given investigation than the teacher takes alarm. It is the old fable of the "Ugly Duckling."
    We hope that Prof. Sidis will not rest upon his oars.

---- A. C. [October 1917 e.v.]

II.

The Shadow Line
by Joseph Conrad
(Doubleday, Page, & Co.)

    The plot of this novel is identical with that of Lord Dunsany's "Poor Old Bill." The difference is that between the realist and the fantastic. It is instructive to read them side by side. Joseph Conrad is the greatest master of atmosphere now living, so far at least as the East is concerned. In fact, I do not even know an immortal shade who can compare with him.
    Rudyard Kipling gives the violence, the coarseness and the horror, which are very effective from the literary point of view, but which do not exist in the East, so far as I know.
    Stevenson, on the other hand, has everything toned down. He throws a Scotch mist over the proceedings. Conrad describes the East, both subjective and objective, in precisely the same terms as I should do if I had his power of expression. There is no need to tell the story of the book; any story or no story would have done just as well. He takes me back ten years to my long lonely walk across China, to the explosive causality of Hai-Phong, the Fata Morgana which I saw off Hoi-How, to the Akashic obsessions of silence and darkness and stillness which closed in upon us in those very waters which he describes in The Shadow Line. Even the captain's woman is a living portrait of one whom I knew in those ensorcelled days, a tuberculous hag of paint and rottenness and vice, who yet possessed the power to awaken the very fountain of calf-love from its frozen sleep. It is very interesting to compare Conrad with Stevenson. Stevenson is never happy unless he has the decks awash with blood and slime. Mr Conrad is one of those rarest and most supreme of artists who does not need incident in order to be interesting. He does not fear to use it, but he does not depend upon it. It is rather significant that England should have had to go to Hungary for her supreme prose artist.

---- A. C. [October 1917 e.v.]

III.

What Every Man and Woman
Should Know about the Bible
by Sidney C. Tapp

    In 1904 I was in a particularly malarious district in Burma. Death drove his cruisers at a gallop, four abreast: Plague, Cholera, Typhoid, Dysentery.
    I remember going down to the bank of the Irrawaddy in the hope of some breath of fresh air -- and I came upon the carcass of a mule, most actively putrescent. I made a mental note to avoid the repetition of any such experience, but history repeats itself; I wrote to Mr Tapp for a copy of his book.
    Surely our civilization is pestilential enough without the putrescence of such degenerate paranoiacs. Mr Tapp wallows in psychopathy, and gloats; to him the most innocent pleasures seem foul, and a cemetery excites no idea in his mind but the digging-up of corpses for the delectation of necrophiles.
    I leave for the Irrawaddy basin by the first steamer. Meanwhile -- oh, any basin, please, Steward!

---- A.C.

Take a tip -- don't take a Tapp!

---- A. Quiller, Jr [October 1917 e.v.]

IV.

The Golden Verses of Pythagoras
with an Essay on the
Essence and Form of Poetry
by Fabre d'Olivet,
translated by Nayan Louise Redfield
(Putnam & Son)

This translation of these famous essays is in all respects excellent. The prose is sonorous and well measured, and the translator has well seized the sense of the original. The only blemishes are occasional idiomatic lapses where Miss Redfield, as it appears to us, imitates the French usage too faithfully. The edition is finely produced, and should form a most valuable addition to any philosophical library.
There is here no space for an extended criticism of Pythagoras or of this interpretation of him. A volume of nearly equal size would be required to do justice in such a manner. We will therefore not dwell upon what appears to be the failure to transcend dualism, beyond remarking that there is only one solution to the problem of evil. That solution is given in the "Book of the Law." The universe has two phases. One delights in creation and the other in destruction, and the cyclic process serves each in turn. But it is most pertinent to remark that Fabre d'Olivet announces a doctrine which in its essence is singularly harmonious with that of Blavatsky regarding perfectibility. It is indeed the doctrine of the adepts which is here foreshadowed. Fortified by this tradition, this author has managed to do good work in the matter of Eastern religion, despite the dreadful ignorance and misapprehension which prevailed in his time with regard to the purport of oriental doctrines. Those minds in which Truth exists as an inheritance can never be upset by the discovery of new facts; on the contrary, such discoveries confirm them in their Truth.

---- Therion [November 1917 e.v.]

The Duality of the Bible
by Sidney C. Tapp

The mystery is out. We owe our readers a sort of apology for the tone of voice which we used last month in reviewing Mr Tapp's other volume. We ought to have known that so unwholesome a mind might imply an unhealthy body. In this present volume Mr Tapp explains that he suffered when young from certain diseases of the ear, necessitating operations which were evidently partial failures; for we find that he could not write his book with his own hand, owing to a spine injured by these operations.
Mr Tapp's views on sex are therefore those of an unfortunate rather than of a wicked person. (It may be philosophically doubted whether these two things are not one.) However, the point is that for Mr Tapp to lay down the law on sex is like an oyster lecturing on the disadvantages of being vertebrate. We are extremely sorry for this wreck of humanity, but we shall not take it for our guide, any more than we should listen to the crew of reformed drunkards who tell us that we cannot drink a glass of wine without being dipsomaniacs. One of the worst results of our present policy of preserving the lives of the abnormal and degenerate is that they have worked their way into public affairs till civilization has become a hospital.

---- A. C. [November 1917 e.v.]

VI.

The Terror
by Arthur Machen
(McBride, New York)

    I have always maintained that Arthur Machen was one of the most original and excellent minds of England. The distinction of his thought and style is one of the most unmistakable of contemporary literary phenomena. He failed somewhat to come to his full stature because of an unfortunate obsession. His reverence for antiquity is so great that he has been compelled to follow the great masters in what I may call the framework of their art. Thus he began by telling Stevenson stories, and he was obliged to give them Stevenson's sections, so that The Three Impostors reads like a new episode of The Dynamiter. In particular, "Miss Leicester" or "Miss Lally" make a very fair duplicate of Stevenson's one successful attempt to portray a woman. I was rather sorry to see Mr Machen adventure himself in the province of scientific romance. It was only too clear that he would adopt the manner of Mr H. G. Wells. However, his distinction has saved him from too margarine an effect. One is able to say with clear conscience that this is an excellent story, admirably written.
    At the same time, one must say that this is not at all the time to have written it. The story is grossly seditious and openly pro-German. Mr Machen, as his name implies, is, of course, himself a pure German. It is impossible to understand the stupidity of the British authorities in not having him interned, or indeed executed. It will be remembered that he furnished the basis for the fable of the "Angels of Mons," which did so much to discourage recruiting in the early days of the war. This book is equally pernicious. The catastrophe is caused, according to him, by the fact of the animals having lost their fear of and respect for man, owing to the wickedness of man, the abdication of his human sovereignty. Now, Mr Machen caused his catastrophy to take place in England. His characters blame the wicked Germans for everything that happened when it is really their own fault. That Satanic Teutonic subtlety! Mr Machen's book elaborates this thesis. "In England, men have become the equivalent of beasts. In Germany, however, there are no troubles of any kind. Germany has lost its moral superiority to the lower animals."
    We are unfortunately not in possession of the checks which must have been paid to Mr Machen by the Huns, but it is not a case where one needs to wait for further evidence. He should be shot at sunrise and no more ado about it.

---- C. M. (of the Supervigilantes) [December 1917 e.v.]

VII.

His Last Bow
by Arthur Conan Doyle
(George H. Doran Company)

Either Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is getting old, or I am. I do not find these last adventures of Sherlock Holmes nearly so good as those which gave me joy at the period of puberty. Even when I search my memory, it appears to me that some of them lack the point which really appealed to us. These stories are quite as melodramatic as the others, but they do not exhibit Holmes himself to such advantage. Dr Joseph Bell is dead, and I think that Sir Arthur must have used him up a long while ago.
The only stories in the present volume which appeal to me are those that I remember reading when published in magazines years ago. In particular, the epilogue, the war story, which begs the whole question of detection. We are not interested in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. We are interested in the quality of his mind, his power of deduction, and in a less degree in his special knowledge. A detective story is really very like a chess problem. There must be a complete correlation of cause and effect and a just balance between them. Absence of such qualities is not atoned for by grotesque situations or violent action. It is perfectly easy to multiply deaths. There is no more difficulty in killing a million people than a thousand. The essence of the art of the detective story is to exhibit the superior intelligence of a certain man. It is this which has made the stories of Poe and Gaboriau immortal. Du Boisgobey fails just where these others succeeded. The original Sherlock Holmes had some claim to share their eminence, for he introduced a new type of superior man, the scientific observer who increases knowledge by the observation of minute differences, just as Lord Rayleigh discovered the presence of some unknown element in atmospheric air through observation of the infinitesimal differences in its specific weight with that of the nitrogen of the laboratory, and so led to the discovery of argon. These stories, therefore, were naturally popular at a moment when the general imagination was highly excited by the discoveries of physical science. Today that interest has been suspended by the new work in psychology, and we shall therefore expect that the great classical detective story of the period will be based upon minute observation of psychological facts. This, at least, strikes us as the most probable reason for the immense vogue of Simon Iff.

---- [unsigned; January 1918 e.v.]

Previous Crowley Classics Last TLC Crowley Classics

from the Grady Project:

This portion of Grady's long poem made of his memories of Korean War service comprises approximately half of the complete work, which we began in January and hope to complete in these pages next month. This poem has not been previously published, except that portions of the present section appeared in these pages several years ago in an excerpt from this poem which Grady sent to an O.T.O. sister in the late 1950s e.v.

Memo Pencilled On a Helmet Skull

(Korea, 1952-1953)
(continued)

by Grady L. McMurtry

    Ammo, AMmo, AMMo, AMMO
    You can't fight a war without ammo!
    And somewhere up along the MSR
    The road is blocked with a slide.
           "OK, Myers, OK. Lay off the panic button.
           I can hear you screaming from here
           What am I supposed to do,
           Clean it off with my elbows and fingernails?
           Half the convoys are already lost on the other side
           And the ones on this side can't get through anyway.
           Take it easy, we're working on it.
           And keep The Chinaman busy."
    This don't show me much,
    But if you can't go over it you gotta go around it.
    OK, that's east to TEN Corps
    Or southwest towards Seoul.
    Check the Truck Battalion 3
    The southern route is open but no info on the east
    They're working on it
    That's fine, that's great
    I've got troubles I haven't even heard about
    And we'll send convoys in both directions
    And hope that something gets through.
    Down 17 to Kap'yong, swing north on 17A
    Keep them rolling
    Keep pushing it
    Over two mountain passes and up the winding Pukhan-gang
    And my heart rides with them
    For a slip of the wrist and you're over the bluff
    On the cliff road east of Kap'yong.
    Or right on 29 to the junction
    22 hundred hours CHECK!
    Now they've turned north on 103
    Up the jumbled slopes of Puyang-san
    Whining-clawing-rolling-winding
    Tearing-yawing-roaring-grinding
    Sliding-clutching-heaving-praying
           "Come on you Jimmy six-by"
           "Come on you son of a deuce-and-a-half"
    Sturdy trucks those GMC's
    Six wheels down and six wheels driving
    Wheeled by the sons of the "Rolling O"
    Wheeled by the bastard "Double Clutchers" MOVE IT!
    GET YOUR FUCKING ASS IN GEAR!
    We've got a WAR to fight
    Up here!
    OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
    Snap-shit, Charlie
    I have got you maxed!
    MOSHI MOSHI, HAI!
    NO SHIT! YOU'RE KIDDING
    FAR FUCKING OUT!
           "You calls, we hauls
           We got 2 by 2's, fo' by fo's, 6 by's, semi's
           And those great big mother-fuckers that go
           Chug'chug'chug'chug'chug'chug'chug' chug'"
           Far into the night
    All the way to Hwachon
    Either way to Hwachon
    All that's left of Hwachon
    Which is four walls and a piss pipe
    And then on to the ROK's.

    When we first came here they told us
    "You've had it. This is the Central Front. II ROK Corps.
    All you've got in front of you is ROK's.
    All The Chinaman has to do is sneeze
    And they'll take off like a herd of turtles."
    But that was before the ROK's got artillery.
    Sure The Laundryman hit the ROK Divisions.
    Those "high powered American Divisions,"
    More glory to them,
    Had BIG guns to play with
    All the s'koshi ROK's had were guts and bayonets.
    Now it's a different story.
    Now the ROK's have boom guns too
    105's and ace-double-nickles
    And even a few 8" American batteries to back them up.
    (On a clear night in Ch'unch'un
    You can see the muzzle flash of the 8 inch HOW's
                 FIRE!
    (Orange stab winking into darkness)
    20 miles away, looking north,
    There
    Just to the right of Ch'unch'on Hill)

    October in the Kumhwa Ridges
    And The Chinaman decides to push. (Damn!)
    This is it (again)
    This is the frontier in flame.
    Up along highway 6 to Chorwon,
    Kumhwa and the Iron Triangle.
    And there is Joe Chink up on Pappa-san
    Breathing down your neck
    And dropping in his marker rounds (one . . . two . . . three . . .)
                             TIME ON TAR-GET!)
    "Look, Jonesy, we gotta have more VT's.
    You know we can't stop them without VT's!
    Yeah, yeah, I know.
    Take it easy. You're working on it."
    Well, that's all she wrote.
    The ROK's, are they holding? Hell, they've got to hold.
    And with their 105's to back them up they will hold.
    (Maybe this is what Einstein meant when he said
    "In the next war we'll throw ROK's at them.")

    Barrage
    Flame in the night
    Artillery thunder rolling in the mountains.
    What are they doing?
    What's happening?
    Is it good enough?
    And the stories that come filtering back:
    The Kay-MAG adviser the ROK's knocked down
    And covered with their own bodies
    When the barrage came crashing in.
    Not just about to lose that MEE-gook adviser!
    (Oh ya better believe it, boysan)
    The choppers lifting through the acrid smelling smoke
    Like pollywogs in hell
    Bringing the dripping bundles of shredded flesh
    Back to the forward MASH

    How rough can it get?
           "And keep that ammo humping, GI!"
    Sure, sure, got it rolling
    Hubba-hubba all the way.

    It's at times like this that the walls start closing in
    (Ya gotta watch those walls!)
    This squirrel cage is going nuts
    And Odd John the Panic Button Pusher
    Is on the phone again.
           "How much 105 r'ya sending up tonight?"
           "None, sir, we cleaned out this morning."
           "Wal then get some 155 on the road."
           "Can't, sir, that's all gone too."
           "DON'T ARGUE WITH ME, SEND 40 TRUCK LOADS!"
           "YES, SIR!"
    Just like they say
           "All the world be crazy save thee and me
           And right now I'm not so sure about thee."
    So you take it out with a GI gripe
    And work off some of the steam
    With your own little Rabelesian ribaldry
    Like "The KMAG Song," "R.A. -- All The Way!"
    Or, "The Sheik of Sockcho-ri."
    Singing nonsense under your breath
    While the world rocks
    And you push that ammo forward with body english
           "Oh, I'm the Sheik -- not the Freak -- but the Sheik of Socho-ri!
           For I just love kimchee!
           At night when you're asleep
           On your hot floor I'll creep
           (Without no pa-i-yants on!)"
    Just like when we were sweating out the landings in Normandy
    And sang with the British paratroopers
           "Aoh, I don't want to join the Army
           I don't want to go to war.
           I just want to 'ang around
           The Piccadilly H'Underground Living on the earnings of a
               'igh class laidy ------"
    But that was another campaign long, oh very long ago.
    Now we live in the Atomic Age and the roads are just as dusty.

    Then comes that snow "that just won't stop"
    And the first touch of that searing Siberian wind
    Sweeping down over the frost fingered ridges of Korea
    Where alien stars look down upon
    An alien desert land
    And alien winds blow alien snow
    Across the alien sand.
    "Now is the time of all good men"
    To come and bring their hibachis.

(Soliloquy spoken beside a Korean mound burial)

    I am a Centurion of the Legions (echo: "ave caesar!")
    I spoke strange oaths in many foreign tongues
    And home is where I hang my helmet skull.

    I am a Centurion of the Legions
    I have campaigned for my country to the ends of the Earth
    And the term of my service is the measure of my devotion.

    I am a Centurion of the Legions.
    I have stood the watch on Chotto Matte's Castle
    Where the wild mares breed in the border marches
    And Peace I have known as a lull in an endless storm.

    I am a Centurion of the Legions.
    I bring discipline to anarchy and order out of chaos
    And I look with the bleak eyes of experience
    On the crumbling transience of eternity.

    I am a Centurion of the Legions.
    I hold back the Ages of Darkness
    And I stand my ground when those about me turn and flee
    Crying, "Blow it out your tailpipe. We got better things to do
    Than wasting our days and years upon those barren hills.
    These slopies got no regard for what we're doing anyhow."
    Dai'jobel. Cutta, djeska, bali-bali.

    I am a Centurion of the marching Legions
    In my combat boots and piss pot I stand naked
    Before the onrushing years of forever
    And down the endless corridors of suns and winds
    And men of Rome
    And men who call their Asia home
    And men from East
    And men from West
    And men who follow the Eagle's crest
    And men from far
    And men from near
    And men who shout their challenge clear
    And men who died in the long ago
    And men who'll live in the Space below
    Tramping down through the winds and days
    The sweat and heat and the humid haze

To the rolling pound of the kettle DRUMS!

           WHAM! BAM! DOUBLEDY DAMN!
           Flex and stride with a rolling cam
           WHAM! BAM! DOUBLEDY DAMN!
           Stride and swing from the knee-o.

And the nasal skirl of the screaming pipes

           WHEE! WHEE! LOOK AT ME!
           A TOM CAT FREE!
           IN A TALL PINE TREE!
           O WHEE! WHEE! LOOK AT ME!
           A BAGPIPE CAT IN A TREE-O!

           ee-
                                                 ee
    tol        tul    tul    tul        tul    tul    tul    tul
    (               oh     ee                        oh        ee          )
                                     DUM                            DUM

         lee
                                                ee
    toh     tul     tul    tul       tul    tul
    (              oh      ee                       ee        ee-DUM!)
                                     DUM               tul

    Till all those columns join in one
    And all the men since Time's begun
    Of noble brow and broken face
    Of every breed and time and place
    Who've fought to keep their people free
    Or died opposing tyranny
    From Inchon to Sockcho-ri
    From The Punch Bowl to Normandy
    With men whose names begin with Lee
    And men who end their names with "ski"
    With red and white and golden green
    And every color in between
    Who throngly band in memory
    When we recall our misery
    The long nights in the cold and rain
    The longer years of broken pa-IN!

    May God have mercy on our souls
    This        is our destiny
    This        is our fate
    And this        is my affirmation!

    I am a Centurion
    of the Legions of Freedom
    all free men my comrades
    all nations my brothers
    all life is a boon
    of the Goddess Our Mother
    at our term we return
    to Our Maid of the Star Drifts
    there is no dread hereafter
    there is the dissolution of the body
    and eternal ecstasy in the kisses of Our Goddess
    there is death for the dogs
    of Sensate and Reason.
    there is no bond that can unite the divided but love
    all else is a curse.
    there is no higher rank
    than Centurion of The Legions!
    there is no higher honor
    than Legionnaire of The Legions!
    ave        The Centurion!
    ave        Our Starborne Goddess Mother!
    ave        The Legions

-- to be continued --

Previous Grady Project Conclusion

Thelema Lodge Events Calendar for March 2004 e.v.

3/6/04	Full Moon 3:04 PM
3/7/04	Gnostic Mass 7:30PM Horus Temple	(510) 652-3171	Thelema Ldg.
3/11/04	Fundamentals of Magical Practice in the library 7:30 PM	(510) 652-3171	Thelema Ldg.
3/14/04	Gnostic Mass 7:30PM Horus Temple	(510) 652-3171	Thelema Ldg.
3/18/04	Mantra Yoga Class with Jeff Sommer 8 PM in Horus Temple	(510) 652-3171	Thelema Ldg.
3/19/04	Vernal Equinox lodge meeting, ritual and feast 7:00 PM	(510) 652-3171	Thelema Ldg.
3/20/04	New Moon in Aries 2:41 PM
3/21/04	Gnostic Mass 7:30PM Horus Temple	(510) 652-3171	Thelema Ldg.
3/22/04	Section II reading group with Caitlin: Jorge Luis Borges 8:00 PM in the library	(510) 652-3171	Thelema Ldg.
3/27/04	OTO Initiations. Call to attend	(510) 652-3171	Thelema Ldg.
3/28/04	Gnostic Mass 7:30PM Horus Temple	(510) 652-3171	Thelema Ldg.

The viewpoints and opinions expressed herein are the responsibility of the contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of OTO or its officers.

Thelema Lodge
Ordo Templi Orientis
P.O. Box 2303
Berkeley, CA 94702 USA

Phone: (510) 652-3171 (for events info and contact to Lodge)

Internet: heidrick@well.com (Submissions and internet circulation only)