The barrier between divine and human things is frail but inviolable;
the artist and the bourgeois are only divided by a point of view - "A
hair divided the false and true."
I am watching the opalescence of my absinthe, and it leads me to
ponder upon a certain very curious mystery, persistent in legend. We
may call it the mystery of the rainbow.
Originally in the fantastic but significant legend of the Hebrews,
the rainbow is mentioned as the sign of salvation. The world has been
purified by water, and was ready for the revelation of Wine. God
would never again destroy His work, but ultimately seal its perfection
by a baptism of fire.
Now, in this analogue also falls the coat of many colours which was
made for Joseph, a legend which was regarded as so important that it
was subsequently borrowed for the romance of Jesus. The veil of the
Temple, too, was of many colours. We find, further east, that the
Manipura Cakkra - the Lotus of the City of Jewels - which is an
important centre in Hindu anatomy, and apparently identical with the
solar plexus, is the central point of the nervous system of the human
body, dividing the sacred from the profane, or the lower from the
higher.
In western Mysticism, once more we learn that the middle grade of
initiation is called Hodos Camelioniis, the Path of the Chameleon.
There is here evidently an illusion to this same mystery. We also
learn that the middle stage in Alchemy is when the liquor becomes
opalescent.
Finally, we note among the visions of the Saints one called the
Universal Peacock, in which the totality is perceived thus royally
apparaled.
Would it were possible to assemble in this place the cohorts of
quotation; for indeed they are beautiful with banners, flashing their
myriad rays from cothurn and habergeon, gay and gallant in the light
of that Sun which knows no fall from Zenith of high noon!
Yet I must needs already have written so much to make clear one
pitiful conceit: can it be that in the opalescence of absinthe is some
occult link with the mystery of the Rainbow? For undoubtedly one does
indefinably and subtly insinuate the drinker in the secret chamber of
Beauty, does kindle his thoughts to rapture, adjust his point of view
to that of the artists, at least to that degree of which he is
originally capable, weave for his fancy a gala dress of stuff as many-
coloured as the mind of Aphrodite.
Oh Beauty! Long did I love thee, long did I pursue thee, thee
elusive, thee intangible! and lo! thou enfoldest me by night and day
in the arms of gracious, of luxurious, of shimmering silence.

[aleister crowley]