Magick in Theory and Practice (Section 1)

Magician. The processes described will enable him to discriminate between what he actually is, and what he has fondly imagined himself to be. 2 He must behold his soûl in ali its awful nakedness, he must not fear to look on that appalling actuality. He must discard the gaudy garments with which his shame has screened him; he must accept the fact that nothing can make him anything but what he is. He may lie to himself, drug himself, hide himself; but he is always there. Magick will teach him that his mind is playing him traitor. It is as if a man were told that tailors’ fashion-plates were the canon of human beauty, so that he tried to make himself formless and featureless like them, and shuddered with horror at the idea of Holbein making a portrait of him. Magick will show him the beauty and majesty of the self which he has tried to suppress and disguise. Having discovered his identity, he will soon perceive his purpose. Another process will show him how to make that purpose pure and powerful. He may then learn how to estimate his environ¬ ment, learn how to make allies, how to make himself prevail against ail powers whose error has caused them to wander across his path. In the course of this Training, he will learn to explore the Hidden Mysteries of Nature, and to develop new senses and faculties in himself, whereby he may communicate with, and control, Beings and Forces pertaining to orders of existence which 2. Prof essor Sigmund Freud and his school hâve, in recent years, discovered a part of this body of Truth, which has been taught for many centuries in the Sanctuaries of Initiation. But failure to grasp the fullness of Truth, especially that implied in my Sixth Theorem (above) and its corollaries, has led him and his followers into the error of admitting that the avowedly suicidai “Censor” is the proper arbiter of conduct. Official psycho-analysis is therefore committed to upholding a fraud, although the foundation of the science was the observation of the disastrous effects on the individual of being false to his Unconscious Self, whose <£writing on the wall” in dream language is the record of the sum of the essential tendencies of the true nature of the individual. The resuit has been that psycho-analysts hâve misinterpreted life, and announced the absurdity that every human being is essentially an anti-social, criminal, and insane animal. It is évident that the errors of the Unconscious of which the psycho-analysts complain are neither more nor less than the “original sin” of the theologians whorn they despise so heartily. XXVIII