The Open Gates of Mysticism. Aleister Crowley
came out of my trance. I looked at the stuff with what I imagine to have been a dull, glazed eye. Then my old training came to my rescue.
It was a white powder with a tendency to form little lumps rather like chalk. I rubbed it between my finger and thumb. I smelt it. That told me nothing. I tasted it. That told me nothing, either, because the nerves of my tongue were entirely anaesthetised by the cocaine.
But the investigation was a mere formality. I know now why I made it. It was the mere gesture of the male. I wanted to show off to Lou. I wished to impress upon her my importance as a man of science ; and all the time I knew, without being told, what it was.
So did she. The longer I have known Lou, the more impressed I am with the extent and variety of her knowledge.
" Oh, Gretel is too sweet," she chirped. " She guessed we might get tired of coco, 'grateful and comforting' as it is. So the dear old thing sent us some heroin. And there are still some people who tell us that life is not worth living ! "
" Ever try it ? " I asked, and delayed the answer with a kiss.
When the worst was over, she told me that she had only taken it once, and then, in a very minute dose, which had had no effect on her as far as she knew.
"That's all right," I said, from the height of my superior knowledge. " It's all a question of estimating the physiological dose. It's very fine indeed. The stimulation is very much better than that of morphine. One gets the same intense beatific calm, but without the languor. Why, Lou, darling, you've read De Quincey and all those people about opium, haven't you ? Opium's a mixture, you know-something like twenty different alkaloids in it. Laudanum : Coleridge took it, and Clive-all sorts of important people. It's a solution of opium in alcohol. But morphia, is the most active and important of the principles in opium. You could take it in all sorts of ways. Injection gives the best results ; but it's rather a nuisance, and there's always danger of getting dirt in. You have to look out for blood-poisoning all the time. It stimulates the imagination marvellously. It kills all pain and worry like a charm. But at the very moment when you have the most gorgeous ideas, when you build golden palaces of what you are going to do, you have a feeling at the same time that nothing is really worth doing, and that itself gives you a feeling of terrific superiority to everything else in the world. And so, from the objective point of view, it comes to nothing. But heroin does all that morphia does. It's a derivative of morphia, you know-Diacetyl-Morphine is the technical name. Only instead of bathing you in philosophical inertia, you are as keen as mustard on carrying out your ideas. I've never taken any myself. I suppose we might as well start now."
I had a vision of myself as a peacock strutting and preening. Lou, her mouth half open, was gazing at me fascinated with enormous eyes; the pupils dilated by cocaine. It was just the male bird showing off to his mate. I wanted her to adore me for my little scraps of knowledge ; the fragments I had picked up in my abandoned education.
Lou is always practical; and she puts something of the priestess into everything she does. There was a certain solemnity in the way in which she took up the heroin on the blade of a knife and put it on to the back of her hand.
" My Knight," she said, with flashing eyes, " your Lady arms you for the fight."
And she held out her fist to my nostrils. I snuffed up the heroin with a sort of ritualistic reverence. I can't imagine where the instinct came from. Is it the sparkle of cocaine that excites one to take it greedily, and the dullness of the heroin which makcs it seem a much more serious business ?
I felt as if I were going through some very important ceremony. When I had finished, Lou measured a dose for herself. She took it with a deep, grave interest.
I was reminded of the manner of my old professor at U.C.H. when he came to inspect a new case ; a case mysterious but evidently critical. The excitement of the cocaine had somehow solidified. Our minds had stopped still, And yet their arrest was as intense as their previous motion.
We found ourselves looking into each other's eyes with no less ardour than before ; but somehow it was a different kind of ardour. It was as if we had been released from the necessity of existence in the ordinary sense of the word. We were both wondering who we were and what we were and what was going to happen ; and, at the same time, we had a positive certainty that nothing could possibly happen.
It was a most extraordinary feeling. It was of a will go a bit further than that. I don't believe the greatest artist in the world could invent what we felt, and if he could he couldn't describe it.
I'm trying to describe it myself, and I feel that I'm not making out very well. Come to think of it, the English language has its limitations. When mathematicians and men of science want to exchange thoughts,
English isn't much good. They've had to invent new words, new symbols. Look at Einstein's equations.
I knew a man once that knew James Hinton, who invented the fourth dimension. Pretty bright chap, he was, but Hinton thought, on the most ordinary subjects, at least six times as fast as he did, and when it came to Hinton's explaining himself, he simply couldn't do it.
That's the great trouble when a new thinker comes along. They all moan that they can't understand him the fact annoys them very much ; and ten to one they persecute him and call him an Atheist or a Degenerate or a Pro-German or a Bolshevik, or whatever the favourite term of abuse happens to be at the time.
Wells told us a bit about this in that book of his about giants, and so does Bernard Shaw in his Back to Methuselah. It's nobody's fault in particular, but there it is, and you can't get over it.
And here was I, a perfectly ordinary man, with just about the average allowance of brains, suddenly finding myself cut off from the world, in a class by myselfI felt that I had something perfectly tremendous to tell, but I couldn't tell even myself what it was.
And there was Lou standing right opposite, and I recognised instinctively, by sympathy, that she was just in the same place.
We had no need of communicating with each other by means of articulate speech. We understood perfectly; we expressed the fact in every subtle harmony of glance and gesture.
The world had stopped suddenly still. We were alone in the night and the silence of things. We belonged to eternity in some indefinable way; and that infinite silence blossoms inscrutably into embrace.
The heroin had begun to take hold. We felt ourselves crowned with colossal calm. We were masters ; we had budded from nothingness into existence I And now, existence slowly compelled us to action. There was a necessity in our own natures which demanded expression and after the first intense inter-penetration of our individualities, we had reached the resultant of all the forces that composed us.
In one sense, it was that our happiness was so huge that we could not bear it ; and we slid imperceptibly into conceding that the ineffable mysteries must be expressed by means of sacramental action.
But all this took place at an immense distance from reality. A concealed chain of interpretation linked the truth with the obvious commonplace fact that this was a good time to go across to Montmartre and make a night of it.
We dressed to go out with, I imagine, the very sort of feeling as a newly made bishop would have the first time he puts on his vestments.
But none of this would have been intelligible to, or suspected by, anybody who had seen us. We laughed and sang and interchanged gay nothings while we dressed.
When we went downstairs, we felt like gods descending upon earth, immeasurably beyond mortality.
With the cocaine, we had noticed that people smiled rather strangely. Our enthusiasm was observed. We even felt a little touch of annoyance at everybody not going at the same pace ; but this was perfectly different. The sense of our superiority to mankind was constantly present. We were dignified beyond all words to express. Our own voices sounded far, far off. We were perfectly convinced that the hotel porter realised that he was receiving the orders of Jupiter and Juno to get a taxi.
We never doubted that the chauffeur knew himself to be the charioteer of the sun.
" This is perfectly wonderful