THE ENGLISH REVIEW

London, England

October 1912

(page 496)

BOOKS OF THE MONTH.

LITERARY

The Equinox. Vol.I., No. 7. Wieland & Co. 10s.  6d.

The different items of this Review are very diverse in character. Mr. Crowley, if he is nothing else, is at least a one-man-band.

The first 100 pages are devoted to the Official Instructions of the A∴A∴, which I will not even pretend to understand; but if The Daily Mail says truly, as it says emphatically, that the prose rises to the level of that of the prophets of the Old Testament, they should be well worth reading. The dramatic poem, "Adonis," contains some rather clever feats of rhyming, but the poetry of it is, to my mind, marred by persistent and somewhat feeble attempts at wit and satire.

The little play which follows is a cheerful story for children [The Ghouls] about a young lady who digs up an old gentleman to get his violin. This arouses the corpse, who proceeds to strangle her under romantic circumstances. It is hoped that this bright trifle will shortly enliven the gloom of the Grand Guignol. Another play, called Snowstorm, is also about a violin, or rather a violinist, who is thrown to the wolves by an injured wife, and goes blind. After various intrigues, the injured wife kills her husband by mistake, and the violinist, who wishes to make an assignation with him, plays only to his corpse.

In complete change from this old-fashioned Christmassy fare comes an article entitled "A Brief Abstract of the Symbolic Representation of the Universe Derived by Doctor John Dee through the Skrying of Sir Edward Kelly." Of this I can make neither head nor tail, especially as it is illustrated with ten plates even more totally mysterious than the text. The author apologises for omitting any account of the Tables of Soyga, Liber, Logaeth, the Heptarchia Mystica, and the Book of Enoch; but I really doubt whether even these would have made things quite clear. This work of Dee and Kelly is, however, one of the most interesting chapters in history. They worked together for many years, and elaborated the most complex and incomprehensible of all the magical systems. It is not at all clear how they did it, or why they did it; and it must be remembered that Dee was one of the first scholars in England. Their work is also interesting as the first and best account of a somewhat exalted form of dealings with alleged spirits. The re-publication and analysis of these manuscripts is a task which I strongly recommend to the S.P.R. There is nothing about a violin in this article; but after this we recur to the subject, and hardly ever leave it again, except in the most important of the contents of the volume, "The Temple of Solomon the King" (continued—it began in No. I.—and though not nearly finished, makes already about 1,000 pages!). This is really interesting as detailing the circumstances under which the mysterious Society of the A∴A∴ manifested itself to Frater Perdurabo. A very strong case is certainly made out for the revelations; coincidence can hardly be stretched so far as to account for everything; and in the documents delivered there is certainly evidence of prophecy fulfilled in rather minute detail. In short, if miracles and prophecies were any evidence for a religion, one should find it difficult to overthrow this one. There is, in any case, at the very least, incontrovertible evidence of the workings of some supernormal intelligence possessing knowledge and power of a kind, not only of a degree, which is foreign to our experience of humanity.

Mr. Crowley is best in his cheerful attacks on Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Mr. A. E. Waite [Arthur Edward Waite]. The latter article is one of the nastiest pieces of writing that I have seen for a long time.