Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/48

12 Secret science of artifices and dietetic tricks, together with the consciousness of the innocence nay, sanctity of such meditations and designs, became traditional. The methods, by means of which one may become a medicine-man Red Indian, a saint among medieval Christians, an Angekok among Greenlanders and a Pajec among Brazilians, are essentially the same: absurd fasting, continual sexual abstinence. retirement into a wilderness, ascending a mountain or a pillar, or sitting on an aged willow which looks upon a lake," and thinking absolutely nothing but what may prompt some ecstasy or mental derangement. Who has the courage to look into the wilderness of the most bitter and superfluous mental agonies in which probably the most productive minds of all ages have suffered untold misery? Who would listen to the sighs. of these solitary and troubled minds: "Oh, ye powers in heaven above, grant me madness! Madness, that I may at last have faith in my own self! Send delirious fits and convulsions, sudden lights and darknesses; terrible frost and heat, such as no mortal ever suffered; frighten we will rumblings and haunting spectres, make me howl and whine and crawl like a beast: in order to be filled with a belief in my own self. Doubt is devouring me; I have slain the law, and the law haunts me, even so as a dead body does a living being. If I am not above the law, I am the most depraved of all men. The spirit, which dwells