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“Labour thou around the Strophalos of Hecate.”

— ZOROASTER.

In 1898-1899 I had just left Cambridge and was living in rooms in Chancery Lane, honoured by the presence of Allan Bennett (now Bhikkhu Ananda Metteyya) as my guest.

Together for many months we studied and practised Ceremonial Magic, and ransacked the ancient books and MSS. of the reputed sages for a key to the great mysteries of life and death. Not even fiction was neglected, and it was from fiction that we gathered one tiny seed-fact, which (in all these years) has germinated to the present essay.

Through the ages we found this one constant story. Stripped of its local and chronological accidents, it usually came to this — the writer would tell of a young man, a seeker after the Hidden Wisdom, who, in one circumstance or another, meets an adept; who, after sundry ordeals, obtains from the said adept, for good or ill, a certain mysterious drug or potion, with the result (at least) of opening the gate of the Other-world. This potion was identified with the Elixir Vitæ of the physical Alchemists, or one of their “Tinctures,” most likely the “White Tincture” which transforms the base metal (normal perception of life) to silver (poetic conception), and we sought it by fruitless attempts to poison ourselves with every drug in (and out of) the Pharmacopoeia.

Like Huckleberry Finn’s prayer, nuffin’ come of it.

I must now, like the Baker, skip forty years, or rather eight, and reach a point where my travels in India had familiarised me with their systems of meditation and with the fact that many of the lesser Yogis employed hashish (whether vainly or no we shall discuss later) to obtain Samadhi, that oneness with the Universe, or with the Nothingness, which is the feeble expression by which alone we can shadow that supreme trance. I had also the advantage of falling across Ludlow’s book, and was struck by the circumstance that he, obviously ignorant of Vedantist and Yogic doctrines, yet approximately expressed them, though in a degraded and distorted form.

I was also aware of the prime agony of meditation, the dryness 2 (as Molinos calls it) which hardens and sterilises the soul.

The very practice which should flood it with light leads only to a darkness more terrible than death, a despair and disgust which only too often lead to abandonment, when in truth they should encourage, for that — as the oracles affirm — it is darkest before the dawn.

Meditation therefore annoyed me, as tightening and constricting the soul. I began to ask myself if the “dryness” was an essential part of the process. If by some means I could shake its catafalque of Mind, might not the Infinite Divine Spirit leap unfettered to the Light?

Who shall roll away the stone?

Let it not be imagined that I devised these thoughts from pure sloth or weariness. But with the mystical means then at my disposal, I required a period of days or of weeks to obtain any Result, such as Samadhi in one of its greater or lesser forms; and in England the difficulties were hardly to be overcome. I found it impossible to meditate in the cold, and fires will not last equably. Gas stinks abominably; heating apparatus does not heat; electricity has hitherto not been available. When I build my temple, I shall try it.

The food difficulty could be overcome by Messrs. Fortnum and Mason, the noise difficulty by training, the leisure difficulty by sending all business to the devil, the solitude difficulty by borrowing a vacant flat; but the British climate beat me. I hope one day to be rich enough to build a little house expressly for the purpose; but at present there is on the horizon no cloud even so large as the littlest finger of a man!

If only, therefore, I could reduce the necessary period to a few hours!

Moreover, I could persuade other people that mysticism was not all folly without insisting on their devoting a lifetime to studying under me; and if only I could convince a few competent observers — in such a matter I distrust even myself — Science would be bound to follow and to investigate, clear up the matter once for all, and, as I believed, and believe, arm itself with a new weapon ten thousand times more potent than the balance and the microscope.

Imagine me, therefore, if you please, selecting these few facts from the millions of others in the armoury of my brain, dovetailing them, and at last formulating an hypothesis verifiable by experiment.