HECATE  INVOCATION
from Orpheus by Aleister Crowley


Oh triple form of darkness! Sombre splendour!
Thou moon unseen of men! Thou huntress dread!
Thou crowned demon of the crownless dead!
Oh breasts of blood, to bitter and too tender!
Unseen of gentle spring,
Let me the offering
Bring to thy shrines supulchral glittering!
I slay the swart beast! I bestow the bloom
Sown in the dusk, and gathered in the gloom
Under the waning moon,
At midnight, hardly lightening the East;
And the black Lamb from the black ewe's
dead womb
I bring, and stir the slow infernal tune
fit for thy chosen priest.
Here with a band of Ocean breaks the road
Black-trodden, deeply-stooping, to the
Abyss,
I shall salute thee with a nameless kiss
Pronounced toward the uttermost abode
of thy supreme desire.
I shall illumine the fire
whence thy wild stryges shall obey the lyre,
whence thy Lemurs shall gather and spring
round,
Girdling me in the sad funereal ground
with faces turned back,
my face averted! I shall consummate
the awful act of worship, O renowned
Fear upon earth, and fear in hell, and
black
Fear in the sky beyond Fate! I hear the whining of thy wolves!
I hear the howling of the hounds about thy form,
Who comest in the terror of thy storm,
and night falls faster ere thine eyes appear
glittering through the mist.
O face of woman unkissed
save by the dead whose love is taken ere
they wist!
Thee, thee I call! O dire one! O divine!
I, the sole mortal, seek thy deadly shrine,
pour the dark stream of blood,
a sleepy and reluctant river
even as thou drawest with thine eyes on
mine,
to me across the sense-bewildering flood
that holds my soul for ever!