# The Song of Initiation, a Satire

> **Aries:**  
> How brightly his eyes are blinking;  
> In his head there stumbles his thinking,  
> By pleasures of brooding consumed.  
> Mid storms his fine memories following,  
> In wonderful images wallowing  
> That on branches of knowledge once bloomed,  
> Through mystical fever-nights loomed.
> **Taurus:**  
> Soon spooks through his whirring brain,  
> In fooling somnambulem mood,  
> By heart-felt enjoyment pursued,  
> A ghostly and galloping train,  
> A vision, with clarity showing  
> How out of the cosmos, stridently crowing,  
> A chorus of spirits wail in refrain.
> **Gemini:**  
> The Ego resplendent is sailing away  
> From a thinking based on mere physical clay,  
> On spiritual wings upborne,  
> Is kicked by a greatly superior scorn  
> From the path of ennobled living,  
> And cosmic ethereal striving,—  
> Is ousted with little delay.
> **Cancer:**  
> Outside the mere body already unfolding,  
> By spiritual messengers properly led,  
> By spiritual love conveniently fed,  
> By wise tomfoolery starkly sped,  
> Is the tenebrous soul's beholding:  
> In the wide and infinite expanses  
> Of cosmical spirit it swims and dances.
> **Leo:**  
> What sounds so tremendously gripping,  
> So pregnant with spirit but void of ideas,  
> With love universal so splendidly dripping,  
> That keenly his high heart hears?  
> Advanced to the grade of the Lion,  
> There is fine new regalia to try on,  
> —Up the steep path of knowledge he's tripping.
> **Virgo:**  
> And now to receive he is really prepared,  
> From cosmical thinking worthily wise,  
> From cosmical love with the universe shared,  
> From zig-zag lightning of spirit skies,  
> From the region of the hierarchies,  
> The initiation of his soul,  
> Deep, undivided, whole.
> **Libra:**  
> He lives in harmony already,  
> The spheric music round him playing;  
> He feels within his heart unsteady  
> The world-truth wildly swaying;  
> He feels inside him cosmic Scales  
> On which the spirits well are weighing  
> World problems packed in bales.
> **Scorpio:**  
> Soon come the scissors snicker snack—  
> “My spirit's trial,” (so he thinks)  
> “Explains this pricking of my back.”  
> “These pricks attack the soul that stinks,”  
> Replies with smirk a quite non-wiseman,  
> A mystically undersize-man,  
> Who at the Mystery just winks.
> **Sagittarius:**  
> But he was in world-midnight seeing  
> How Homer, Socrates and Goethe too  
> Within his ego's deepest being  
> Their sharp soul-arrows shot—(at who?).  
> And their quite undiminished center  
> By karma into him did enter,  
> In him into still grander being grew.
> **Capricorn:**  
> “And so you feel old Homer's genius move  
> Most strongly in your conscious reach?"  
> "Oh, no! such things I do not love,"  
> Thus spake with pointed speech  
> The Initiate. "I never for Maya strove;  
> Old Homer in my present incarnation  
> Would rest his mind in mystic meditation."
> **Aquarius:**  
> “O mystic transformed Socrates, I seek  
> In vain a trace in you of that great Greek.  
> He was as wise as you are egoistic.”  
> “Cease slandering,” (replied the Mystic).  
> “That man knows most, who knows he naught doth know,”  
> Said Socrates. And I know nothing, so  
> I stand securely on Socratic peak.
> **Pisces:**  
> “And which of Goethe's sunbeams then doth lurk  
> Within you, is at present showing  
> Your soul the path to riper fruits of knowing?”  
> The Seer then grasps his sharpest quirk—  
> “No! Goethe's light, too bright, does but confuse!  
> Preferring then to dream his art, I choose  
> The depth of sleep in which to do my work!”