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.