Magick Without Tears

364 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS Ask yourself: "What do I know of Therion's mode of life? Whenever I see him, he's always on his best behaviour. I've hardly ever seen him eat; perhaps he does so only when I am there, so as not to embarrass me by a display of his holiness. His universe touches mine at only a very few points. The mere fact of his being a man, and I a woman, makes sympathetic understanding over a vast range of experience almost impossible, certainly imperfect. Then all his reading and his travels touch mine at very few points. And his ignorance of music makes it an almost grotesque extension of magnanimity for me to admit his claim to belong to the human species ... U.S.W." Then: "How do we manage to communicate at all? There is bound to be an impassable gulf between us at the best, when one considers that his connotation of the commonest words like 'mountain', 'girl', 'school', 'Hindu', 'oasis', is so vastly different from mine. But to do it at all! What actually have we done?" Think it out! We have made a set of queerly-shapen marks on a sheet of paper, given them names, attached a particular sound to each, made up (God knows how and why!) combinations of these, given names and sounds to them too, and attached a meaning-hardly ever the same for you as for me-to them, made combinations of these too according to a set of quite arbitrary rules, agreed-so far as agreement is possible, or even thinkable-to label a thought with some such arrangement: and there we are! You have in this fantastically artificial way succeeded in conveying your thought to my mind. Now, turn back to Magick; read there how we work to establish intelligible intercourse between ourselves and the "angels. " If you can find any difference between that method and this, it is more than I can. Finally, please remember as a general rule that all magical