Magick Without Tears

80 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS Because you know the things unclean That go to make a mortal maid. I, if her rotten corpse were mine, Would take it as my natural food , Denying all but the Divine Alike in evil and in good. Aspasia may skin me close, And Lais load me with disease. Poor pleasures, bitter bargains, these? I shall despise Diogenes. Follow your fancy far enough! At last you surely come to God. There is thus in this School no attempt to deny that Nature is, as Zoroaster said, "a fatal and evil force"; but Nature i:::, so to speak, "the First Matter of the Work," which is to be transmuted into gold. The joy is a function of our own part in this alchemy. For this reason we find the boldest and most skilful adepts deliberately seeking out the most repugnant elements of Nature that their triumph may be the greater. The formula is evidently one of dauntless courage. It expresses the idea of vitality and manhood in its most dynamic sense. The only religion which corresponds to this School at all is that of ancient Egypt; possibly also that of Chaldea. This is because those religions are Magical religions in the strict technical sense; the religious component of them is negligible. So far as it exists, it exists only for the uninitiate. There are, however, traces of the beginning of the influence of the School in Judaism and in Paganism. There are, too, certain documents of the pure Greek spirit which bear traces of this. It is what they called Theurgy. The Christian religion in its simplest essence, by that idea of overcoming evil through a Magical ceremony, the