246 
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
No: just one point to go to sleep on: suppose two or more 
people claim simultaneously to have been Julius Caesar, or 
Shakespeare, or-oh! always one very great gun! Well, fifty or 
sixty years ago or more there was a regular vogue for this sort 
of thing, especially among women. It was usually Cleopatra 
or Mary Queen of Scots or Marie Antoinette: something regal 
and tragic preferred, but un surpassable beauty the prime 
essential as one would expect. 
Of the Mary Queen of Scots persuasion was old Lady 
Caithness, who seems moreover to have had a sense of 
humour into the bargain, for she gave a dinner-party in Paris 
to twelve other ladies, each of whom had also been the 
luckless victim of Henry VIII's failure to produce of his own 
loins a durable male succession. (His marriages were so many 
desperate efforts to save England from a second innings of 
the devastation of the Wars of the Roses, from which his 
father, who was not a miser, but a sound financier and 
economist, had rescued the country . You must understand 
this if English History is to be at all intelligible to you. The 
tragedy began with the early death of the Black Prince; the 
second blow, that of Henry V coupled with the futility of his 
son and the murder of Prince Edward at Tewkesbury.) 
Well, that was a big laugh, of course; it tended to discredit 
the whole theory of Reincarnation . 
Quite unnecessarily, if one looks a little deeper. 
What do I mean when I say that I think I was Eliphaz 
Levi? No more than that I possess some of his most essential 
characteristics , and that some of the incidents in his life are 
remembered by me as my own. There doesn't seem any 
impossibility about these bundles of Sankhara being shared 
by two or more persons. We certainly do not know enough of 
what actually takes place to speak positively on any such 
point. Don't lose any sleep over it. 
Love is the law, love under will. 
Yours fraternally, 
666