THE HERMIT'S HYMN TO SOLITUDE

Published in the Weekly Critical Review

Paris, France

2 April 1903

(pages 3-4)

Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Sammasam-buddhasa.

Venerable Lord and Best of Friends.

We, seeing the cycle in which Maha Brahma is perhaps more a drifting buoy than ourselves, knowing that it is called the walking in delusion, the puppet show of delusion, the writing of delusion, the fetter of delusion, are aware that the way out of the desert is found by going into the desert. Will you, in your lonely lamaserai, accept this hymn from me, who, in the centre of civilisation, am perhaps more isolated than you in your craggy fastness among the trackless steppes of your Untrodden Land?

          Paris, A.B. 2446.     ALEISTER CROWLEY.

I.

Mightiest self! Supreme in Self-contentment!

Sole Spirit gyring in its own ellipse;

Palpable, formless, infinite presentment

Of thine own light in thine own soul’s eclipse!

Let thy chaste lips

Sweep through the empty aethers guarding thee

(As in a fortress girded by the sea

The raging winds and wings of air

Lift the wild waves and bear

Innavigable foam to seaward), bend thee down,

Touch, draw me with thy kiss

Into thine own deep bliss,

Into thy sleep, thy life, thy imperishable crown!

Let that young godhead in thine eyes

Pierce mine, fulfil me of their secrecies,

Thy peace, thy purity, thy soul impenetrably wise.

II.

 All things which are complete are solitary;

The circling moon, the inconscient drift of stars,

The central systems. Burn they, change they, vary?

Theirs is no motion beyond the eternal bars.

Seasons and scars

Stain not the planets, the unfathomed home,

The spaceless, unformed faces in the dome

Brighter and blacker than all things,

Borne under the eternal wings

No whither: solitary are the winter woods

And caves not habited,

And that supreme grey head

Watching the groves: single the foaming amber floods,

And O! most lone

The melancholy mountain shrine and throne,

While far above all things God sits, the ultimate alone!

III.

I sate upon the mossy promontory

Where the cascade cleft not his mother rock,

But swept in whirlwind lightning foam and glory,

Vast circling with unwearying luminous shock

To lure and lock

Marvellous eddies in its wild caress;

And there the solemn echoes caught the stress,

The strain of that impassive tide,

Shook it and flung it high and wide,

Till all the air took fire from that melodious roar;

All the mute mountains heard,

Bowed, laughed aloud, concurred,

And passed the word along, the signal of wide war.

All earth took up the sound,

And, being in one tune securely bound,

Even as a star became the soul of silence most pro-found.

IV.

Thus there, the centre of that death that darkened,

I sat and listened, if God’s voice should break

And pierce the hollow of my ear that harkened,

Lest God should speak and find me not awake—

For his own sake.

No voice, no song might pierce or penetrate

That enviable universal state.

The sun and moon beheld, stood still.

Only the spirit’s axis, will,

Considered its own soul and sought a deadlier deep,

And in its monotone mood

Of supreme solitude

Was neither glad nor sad because it did not sleep;

But with calm eyes abode

Patient, its leisure that glactic load,

Abode alone, nor even rejoiced to know that it was God.

V.

All change, all motion, and all sound, are weakness!

Man cannot bear the darkness which is death.

Even that calm Christ, manifest in meekness,

Cried on the cross and gave his ghostly breath,

On the prick of death,

Voice, for his passion could not bear nor dare

The interlunar, the abundant air

Darkened, and silence on the shuddering

Hill, and the unbeating wing

Of the legions of His Father, and so died.

But I, should I be still

Poised between fear and will?

Should I be silent, I, and be unsatisfied?

For solitude shall bend

Self to all selffulness, and have one friend,

Self, and behold one God, and be, and look beyond the End.

VI.

O Solitude ! how many have mistaken

Thy name for Sorrow’s, or for Death’s or Fear’s!

Only thy children lie at night and waken—

How shouldst thou speak and say that no man hears?

O Soul of Tears!

For never hath fallen as dew thy word,

Nor is thy shape showed, nor as Wisdom’s heard

Thy crying about the city

In the house where is no pity,

But in the desolate halls and lonely vales of sand:

Not in the laughter loud,

Nor crying of the crowd,

But in the farthest sea, the yet untravelled land.

Where thou hast trodden, I have trod;

Thy folk have been my folk, and thine abode

Mine, and thy life my life, and thou, who art thy God, my God.

VII.

Draw me with cords that are not; witch me chanted

Spells never heard nor open to the ear,

Woven of silence, moulded in the haunted

Houses where dead men linger year by year.

I have no fear

To tread thy far irremeable way

Beyond the paths and palaces of day,

Beyond the night, beyond the skies,

Beyond eternity’s

Tremendous gate; beyond the immanent miracle.

O secret self of things!

I have nor feet nor wings

Except to follow far beyond Heaven and Earth and Hell,

Until I mix my mood

And being in thee, as in my hermit’s hood

I grow the thing I contemplate—that selfless solitude!