The Law is for All

Chapter I a Verses 51—52 59 ness sets up the illusion of duality, which leads to excision and destruction. “direful”: because Ra-Hoor-Khuit is a “god of War and of Vengeance”; see Cap. III. The doctrine of the previous verses, which appears not merely to allow sexual liberty in the ordinary sense, but even to advocate it in a sense which is calculated to shock the most abandoned lib­ ertine, can do no less than startle and alarm the magician, and that only the more so as he is familiar with the theory and prac­ tice of his art. “What is this, in the name of Adonai?” I hear him exclaim: “is it not the immemorial and unchallenged tradition that the exorcist who would apply himself to the most elementary operations of our Art is bound to prepare himself by a course of chastity? Is it not notorious that virginity is by its own virtue one of the most powerful means, and one of the most essential condi­ tions, of all Magical works? This is no question of technical for­ mula such as may, with propriety, be modulated in the event of an Equinox of the Gods. It is one of those eternal truths of Nature which persist, no matter what the environment, in respect of place or period.” To these remarks I can but smile my most genial assent. The only objection that I can take to them is to point out that the con­ notation of the word “chastity” may have been misunderstood from a scientific point of view, just as modern science has modi­ fied our conception of the relations of the earth and the sun with­ out presuming to alter one jot or tittle of the observed facts of Nature. So we may assert that modern discoveries in physiology have rendered obsolete the Osirian conceptions of the sexual process which interpreted chastity as physical abstinence, small regard being paid to the mental and moral concomitants of the refusal to act, still less to the physical indications. The root of the error lies in the dogma of original sin, as a result of which pollu­ tion was actually excused as being in the nature of involuntary offence, just as if one were to assert that a sleepwalker who has fallen over a precipice were any less dead than Empedocles or Sappho.