horns. King Pentheus, représentative of respectabilité1 2 is 
destroved by his pnde. He goes ont into the monntams to actack 
the wornen who bave followed Bacchus, the youth whom Aie 
has mocked, scourged, and put in chains, yet who h as only 
smiled; and by those women, in their divine madness* he is torn 
to pièces. 
It has already seemed impertinent to say so mueh when Walter 
Pater has told the story with such sympathy and insight. We will 
not further transgress by dwelling upon the identity of this legend 
with the course of Nature, its madness, its prodigality, its 
intoxication, its joy, and above ali its sublime persistence through 
the cycles of Life and Death. The pagan reader must labour to 
understand this in Pater’s “Greek Studies”, and the Christian 
reader will recognise it, incident for incident, in the story of 
Christ. This legend is but the dramatization of Spring. 
The magician who wishes to invoke Bacchus by this method must 
therefore arrange a ceremony in which he takes the part of Bacchus, 
undergoes ail His trials, and emerges triumphant from beyond 
death. He must, however, be warned against mistaking the 
symbolism. In this case, for example, the doctrine of individual 
immortality has been dragged in, to the destruction, of truth. It 
is not that utterly worthless part of man, his individual consciousness 
as John Smith, which défiés death — that consciousness which dies 
and is reborn in every thought. That which persists (if anything 
persist) is his real John Smithiness, a quality of which he was 
probably never conscious in his life. " 
Even that does not persist unchanged. It is always growing. 
The Cross is a barren stick, and the petals of the Rose fall and 
decayj but in the union of the Cross and the Rose is a constant 
1. There is a much deeper interprétation in which Pentheus is himself 
“The Dying God”. See my “Good Hunting!” and Dr. J. G. Frazer’s 
“Golden Bough 
2. See “The Book of Lies,” Liber 333, for se vend sermons to this 
effect. Caps. A, Af H, LE, II, IH, KA, KH, in particular. The réin¬ 
carnation of the Khu or magical Self is another matter entirely, too 
abstruse to discuss in this elementary manual. 
14