WINTER SPRING
Hermetic Library Ministry of Information
“The elements were refined and enraptured into music. All things declared their nature; they were eternal, they were beauty, they were love. Nothing fades. Spring, not winter, is the truth of life; yet only through winter is spring made perfect. Death is but the handmaiden who braids the tresses of her lady Life.”
— Aleister Crowley's pseudonymous Ratan Devi: Indian Singer
“As it was spoken of the earth,
And as the ocean witnesseth,
That which the winter brought to birth
Finds in the spring its death.
Now that the word is come to pass
That bone is dust and flesh is grass,
Let us mix our acclamations
Of jubilance and lamentations!
Are not good and evil one
Before the challenge of the sun?
Shall necessity relax
The brazen fury of her features,
And her steel scimitar turn to wax
For the complaining of her creatures?
The Lord is slain; let us lament
The Word made void, the Work in vain.
Fulfilling their obscure event,
Let us rejoice; the Lord is slain.”
— The Ship, a Mystery Play
“Oh! let me sing thy glories
While spring winds whisper stories
Of winter past, whose shore is
Beyond a shoreless sea.”
— In a Cornfield
“CHORUS.
The noise of the wind of the winter; the sound
Of the wings of the charioted night;
The song of the sons of the seas profound;
The thunder of death; the might
Of the eloquent silence of black light!
RATOUM.
The noise of many planets fallen far!
CHORUS.
Death listens for the voice of life; night waits
The dawn of wisdom: winter seeks the spring!”
— The Fatal Force
“For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.”
— Swinburne's Atalanta in The Rite of Luna
“For of the Father and the Son
The Holy Spirit is the norm;
Male-female, quintessential, one,
Man-being veiled in woman-form.
Glory and worship in the highest,
Thou Dove, mankind that deifiest,
Being that race, most royally run
To spring sunshine through winter storm.
Glory and worship be to Thee,
Sap of the world-ash, wonder-tree!”
— The Ship, a Mystery Play and Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae