'He went on, not noticing: ‘To your savage it seems monstrous that human sacrifice should be abolished; we madmen want that one strange, blasphemous, impossible thing! So go thy way rejoicing!’
She shook her head. ‘I might,’ she said, ‘but my fate is even now upon me. I have desired the impossible so much that, having done all that my life can do, I begin to lust for the uncharted and illimitable realms of death. “I would I had been the first that took her death out from between wet hoofs and reddened teeth, splashed horns, fierce fetlocks of the brother bull!” Ai! Ai!’
‘I know,’ replied Ebal; ‘I hate my rocks not because they resist my hand – for that is battle, which I love – but because of their multitude, the infinitude of shapeless things that I must leave so. Just that the King felt this day also. But I want to dash myself to pieces from a precipice, to take my death from the enemy I have loved and fought so hard. And in my loves I seek the adulteress, the murderess, anyone, to put it in a phrase, who feels so strongly that she has broken something to attain her ends;the artist, not the nanny-goat.’
‘Then come to me when I lie dead! For I am artist, I adulteress, I murderess, and in my death perhaps I may be glad to turn back once and smile on life.’
They found her in the morning upon the edge of the great marble basin, torn and trampled, her young blood purpling the magical blue of the pool. By her side lay Ebal, his breast thrust through with his own sculptor’s knife, his mouth still closed upon the heart of Krasota, and his pale locks clotted with the scarlet blossom of her life that flamed in the sun as never any other red of earth, caking and darkening here and there to nightshade purple. Afar, the great bull tossed skyward his great head, its white star crimsoned. Careless, he began to feed upon the rich tall grass.
But the attendant priests suppressed all this part f the event, and distorted and mutilated the rest; were they not goat-men? But it came to an eagle-man, an artist, to sing the Life and Death of the Virgin Priestess of the Temple of the Bull, of the captive who conquered her conqueror by wisdom, of the prisoner who thrust the spear-head of the God of Light and Love and Life and Liberty through the shield of the great range; and he, understanding, told the truth. Thence grew a legend that enveloped the whole world: one branch rising through Apis and Dionysus, dwindling at last to the Correo de Toros, the other though Pasiphaë and Dædalus, culminating in the conquest of the air by man.
I love to think that Krasota would have rejoiced in both:
tamen impiæ
Non tangenda rates transiliunt vada
Audax omnia perpeti
Gens humana ruit per vetitum nefas.[1]
So mote it be.'
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[1] [Nevertheless irreverent ships
pass over the waters which should not be meddled with.
Daring to endure all things
the human race rushes through forbidden sin.]
Aleister Crowley, ‘The God of Ibreez’ from The Simon Iff Stories & Other Works, publisher: Wordsworth Editions
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