Magick in Theory and Practice (Section 1)

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