Magick Without Tears

110 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS possible in Nature: addition and subtraction. Let us apply this to magical progress. What happens when the Aspirant invokes Diana, or calls up Lilith? He increases the sum of his experiences in these particular ways. Sometimes he has a 'liaison-experience', which links two main lines of thought, and so is worth dozens of isolated gains. Now, if there is any difference at all between the White and the Black Adept in similar case, it is that the one, working by "love under will" achieves a marriage with the new idea, while the other, merely grabbing, adds a concubine to his harem of slaves. The about-to-be-Black Brother constantly restricts himself; he is satisfied with a very limited ideal; he is afraid of losing his individuality-reminds one of that "Nordic" twaddle about "race-pollution." "Now, Master!" (What reproach in the tone of your voice!) All right, all right! Keep your hair on!-I know that is the precise term used in The Vision and the Voice, to describe the Great White Brother or the Babe of the Abyss, but to him it means victory; to the Left-Hander it would mean defeat, ruin devastating, irremediable, final. It is exactly that which he most dreads; and it is that to which he must in the end come, because there is no compensating element in his idea of structure. But then (you ask) how can a man go so far wrong after he has, as an Adeptus Minor, attained the "Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel"? Recall the passage in the 14th Aethyr, "See where thine Angel hath led Thee," and so on. Perhaps the Black Brother deserts his Angel when he realises the Programme. Perhaps his error was so deeply rooted, from the very beginning, that it was his Evil Genius that he evoked. In such cases the man's policy is of course to break off all relations with the Supernal Triad, and to replace it by inventing a false crown, Daath. To them Knowledge will be