Magick Without Tears

xx PREFACE concept of the Oedipus complex at some length, replete with innumerable case histories and paradigms, then Philip Wylie extended it with great power in order to reach the general public. But the most bitter and violent of all the attacks on mother love that I am familiar with has emanated from Crowley. His letter 53 has to be read slowly and closely to be fully appreciated. It is far more deadly and vitriolic than anything Freud ever wrote, and much more to the point than Wylie's work. No doubt it is predicated on the bad relationship he had with his own mother, of whom he has written at length in The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970). I have elaborated upon this in a rather different direction and with other details in The Eye in the Triangle (St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1970). Magick without Tears is chock-full of descriptions of unusual things, strange events, weird people and stories which make for fascinating reading. Much of the material, for example, about the history as well as the possible application of Liber Legis is so extraordinary as almost to deserve extrapolation to form a small book by itself. There is one story briefly mentioned in letter 80 which Crowley must have written years earlier, though the manuscript has been lost and I have never seen any reference to it outside of this book. Entitled "Every Precaution," it packs sufficient dramatic wallop to excite some novelist enough to do a short story on it. Other stories are gruesome and macabre to a degree, like that of the woman-cheese-rat-murders toward the end of the volume, which are ghoulish and almost incredible to most of us who lead more prosaic lives. Anecdotes relative to his wide travels and variegated experiences render this a unique piece of reading material. Finally, his descriptions of Magick and Yoga (seemingly contradictory approaches to self-discovery), their resemblances and differences, are among the most lucid and