396 
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
chiefly for the benefit of those people who were already 
more or less familiar with the Tree of Life and its 
correspondences. But I do not know even to-day, twenty 
years later, and writing as I am to you who admittedly had 
no previous knowledge of any of these subjects, how to set 
forth the facts in more elementary terms. I warned you in the 
beginning that there was an essential difficulty in these 
studies which is not to be by-passed or dodged in any way 
whatever. 
But, after all, it is the same difficulty which every child 
finds when he begins any study of any kind. In Latin, for 
instance, he is told that mensa means a table, that it belongs 
to the first declension and is feminine. There is no why about 
any of this; no explanation is possible; the child has to pick 
up the elements of the language one by one, taking what he is 
taught on trust. And it is only after accumulating a vast 
collection of unintelligible details that the jig-saw pieces fall 
into place, and he finds himself able to construe the classical 
texts. 
You must be patient; you must go over and over again 
everything that is presented to you, and by obeying you will 
not only come to a clear comprehension of the subject, but 
find yourself automatically thinking in the language which 
you have been at such pains to acquire. 
I feel then that I must leave you with these descriptions 
and these charts until painfully at first, but at the end with 
intense 
pride 
and gratification, 
you find yourself 
spontaneously grasping the more complex combinations of 
these letters and words which are the anatomy of the body of 
our Learning. 
And do not forget the old and well-worn saw: "Drink 
deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring!-A little learning is a 
dangerous thing." 
Love is the law, love under will. 
Yours fraternally, 
666