A BIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENT
WHEN lecturing in England the other day, I met a man learned in Cretan and other East Mediterranean antiquities. He spoke of some passage where I had suggested a memory of the race, as distinct from individual memory, and we went on from one thing to another until I had told of the dreams and visions described in the following pages. I said I had intended to put them into The Trembling of the Veil, but had been afraid of making that book seem fantastic, of losing human interest; but he said: "Oh, no, you must write it all out, it may be important," and he began to tell me things about ancient tree worship that seemed to interpret my experiences. I said: "I will write a new chapter for The Trembling of the Veil and you will read it and tell me where I can find all those things about tree worship."
NEW OPENING TO CHAPTER SIX OF LAST SECTION OF THE TREMBLING OF THE VEIL
When in my twenty-second year I had finished The Wanderings of Usheen my style seemed too elaborate, too ornamental and I thought for some weeks of sleeping upon a board. Had I been anywhere but at Sligo where 1 was afraid of my grandfather and grandmother, I would have made the attempt. When I had finished Rosa Alchemika for the Savoy, I had a return of the old trouble and went to consult a friend who under the influence or my cabbalistic symbols could pass into a condition between meditation and trance. A certain symbolic personality who called herself, if I remember rightly, Megarithma, said that I must live near water and avoid woods "because they concentrate the solar ray." I believed that this enigmatic sentence came from my own demon, my own buried self, speaking through my friend's mind. "Solar" according to all that I learnt from Macgregor meant elaborate, full of artifice, rich, all that resembles the work of a goldsmith, whereas
