Chapter II * Verse 5
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reflect respectively Nuit and Hadit from the Ain and Kether. The 
process is to use each new item of knowledge to correct and 
increase one’s comprehension of the Subject of the Proposition. 
Thus arb should tell us: A is (not A, as we supposed, but) A. This 
facilitates the discovery a,r,c leading to a, is a2; and so on. In 
practice, everything that we learn about (e.g.) “horse” helps us to 
understand—to enjoy—the idea. The difference between the 
scholar and the schoolboy is that the former glows and exults 
when he is reminded of some word like thalassa.1 Ourselves:— 
What a pageant of passion empurples our minds whenever we 
think of the number 93! Most of all, each new thing that we 
know about ourselves helps us to realize what we mean by our 
“Star.”
1 [Grk., “sea.”]
Now, “the rituals of the old time” are no longer valid vehicles; 
Knowledge cannot “go aright” until they are adapted to the 
Formula of the New /Eon. Their defects are due principally to 
two radical errors.
1. The Universe was conceived as possessing a fixed centre, 
or summit; an absolute standard to which all things 
might be referred; an Unity, or God. (Mystics were 
angry and bewildered, often enough, when attaining to 
“union with God” they found him equally in all.) This 
led to making a difference between one thing and 
another, and so to the ideas of superiority, of sin, etc., 
ending by absurdities of all kinds, alike in theology, 
ethics, and science.
2. The absolute antithesis between the pairs of opposites. 
This is really a corollary of (1). There was an imaginary 
“absolute evil” which made Manichieanism necessary— 
despite the cloaks of the Casuists—and meant “That 
which leads one away from God.” But each man, while 
postulating an absolute “God” defined Him uncon­
sciously in terms of a Freudian Phantasm created by his 
own wish-fulfilment machinery. Thus “God” and “Evil” 
were really expressions of personal prejudice. A man