Spoiler: Re: Jeshimon

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          David Morris:
          Especially this part: 

          "Reef began to feel some new prescence inside him, 
          growing, inflating -- gravid with it seemed he must become" 

          and 

          "some faceless but unrelenting desert prophesier who 
          was coming more and more to ride herd on his thoughts."

          Monte Davis: 
          It's not a slam dunk that this prefigures "a serious 
          development of his character into .... something better."

          I'm hearing at least some echo -- which will reverberate 
          to Central Asia -- of "Surely some revelation is at hand... 
          somewhere in sands of the desert/ A shape with lion 
          body and the head of a man/ A gaze blank and 
          pitiless as the sun..."


>From "Do What Thou Wilt, a Life of Aleister Crowley" by Lawrence Sutin:

          The earnestness of the young Crowley apparently 
          could not compensate, in Yeats's mind, for the 
          technical defficiencies and retorical excesses of his 
          verse, Some two decades later, Yeats would concede 
          that Crowley had written a very few lines of genuine 
          verse. The poet and critic Katherine Raine has 
          suggested that Yeats remained uneasily aware of 
          Crowley's writings well into the new century, and 
          that Crowley the Great Beast and his creed of 
          Thelema, "with its deliberate desecrations and 
          reversals of sacred values," may have been 
          echoed in Yeats's poem "the Second Coming," 
          with its "rough beast, its hour come round at 
          last" that "Slouches toward Bethehem to be born."
          Pg. 68