THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

New York, New York, U.S.A.

23 November 1919

(pages 681-682)

BOOKS IN BRIEF REVIEW.

THE EQUINOX.

THE EQUINOX. The Official Organ of the A.A. The Official Organ of the O.T.O. The Review of Scientific Illuminism. The Method Science: the Aim of Religion. Vol. III., No. 1. Detroit: The Universal Publishing Company.

Here under the copyright, and one suspects from the hand, of Aleister Crowley, adept in the occult, exponent of the ancient art of Magick, famous some years ago as proclaimer of the Independence of the Irish Republic from a rowboat off the Statue of Liberty, and more recently as the apostle of the benzene jag, is the latest handbook prepared by delvers into the esoteric for the entertainment of those who ask to know. “The rule of the A.A., or Great White Brotherhood, is to alternate five years of silence with five years of speech,” we learn from the introduction; so step up, brothers; in the current lustrum you’ll have a new volume every six months to tell you all that has been learned by and from Hermes Trismegistus, Simon Magus, Gilles de Retz, Count Dracula, and other Masters of the Black Art, and all it costs you is 666 cents, the Number of the Beast. It is only fair to say, however, that the art here portrayed is not very black; never much darker than mouse color.

An adequate review of a volume so diversified is as impossible as a review of the British Museum. It starts with a portrait of the most occult of all the occult, the innermost of all the Inwards—the Master Therion, otherwise known as To Mega Therion, which is to say The Big Brute, and it ends with a page about the late Dr. Arthur Waite and the Man from Egypt. The Big Brute is not very formidable looking: he sits half way and half way out of a scarlet kimono before a blasé of yellow light, contemplating something firmly clutched between thumb and finger which seems most plausibly to be a hair from a head fast growing bald. More impressive is the next colored plate—a painting “symbolical of the New Aeon,” and entitled “May Morn,” which would have shocked the stodgy artistic conservatism of Gustave Moreau.

In a “Hymn to Pan” early in the book the author confesses that:

“I rave and I rape and I rip and I rend

Everlasting, world without end.”

After this warlike introduction it is a little alarming to find that the motto of the Truly Inner is “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” “No matter whether I am writing to my lady of my butcher,” says The Big Brute, “I always begin with these eleven words. Why, how else should I begin?” The Master evidently trusts his butcher, to say nothing of his lady. There is a good deal about the Law of Thelema, and a list of books of instruction which include, among several hundred more advanced works, such exoteric volumes as James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, Frazer’s Golden Bough, the essays of Hume and Huxley, Apuleius and Petronius, cited as “valuable for those who have wit to understand them”; Alice in Wonderland, which is “valuable to those who understand the Qabalah”; Macbeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, by W. Shakespeare, “interesting for traditions treated,” and a work on the cactus which ought to sell well this Summer, since it tells how to get jingled by chewing mescal buttons.