Magick Without Tears

MAGICAL POWER 393 your arithmetic!-let me initiate you into one or two other secrets of power! Urn-will I now? Perhaps you're hardly grown up enough. I suspect that your question contemplated not so much Power as powers: things like healing the sick, making oneself invisible, kindling a flame without combustibles, bewitching the neighbours' cows, spoiling your friend's honeymoon, fascinations of all kinds, levitation, lycanthropy, necromancy, all the regular stuff ot the legends and the fables. Most of these matters are discussed in Magick; so all I need tell you is the correct general attitude to all such thaumaturgies. The best excuse for trying to acquire them is that one learns such a lot in the process. Otherwise- Here is another of those Eastern stories for you! A certain Yogi thought it would be an admirable achievement to walk across the Ganges. After forty years he succeeded, and went off to his Guru to demonstrate his power, and receive his due meed of praise. It so happened that this Guru was rather like myself, at least in the matter of his Nasty Temper; and when the disciple came gaily striding back across the Sacred Stream, expecting compliments, he was met with: "Well, I think you're a perfect fool; all these years, your neighbours have been going to and fro on a raft for a couple of pice!" The moral, dear child, is that such powers are never to be considered as the main object; it ought in fact to be obvious from the start that anyone's True Will must be deeper and more comprehensive than any mere technical achievement. I will go further and say that any such endeavour must be a magical mistake, like cherishing a gun or a clock or a fishing-rod for its own sake, and not for the use that one can make of it. Indeed, that remark goes to the root of the matter; for all these powers, if we understand them properly, are natural by-products of one's real Great Work. My own experience was very convincing on this point; for one power