Magick in Theory and Practice (Section 1)

dwelling as they did in lands whose blood was the water of thé Nile or the Euphrates, connectée! the South with life-withering heat? and cursed that quarter where the solar darts were deadliest. Even in the legend of Hiram, it is at high noon that he is stricken down and slain. Capricornus is moreover the sign which the Sun enters when he reaches his extreme Southern déclination at the Winter Solstice, the season of the death of végétation, for the folk of the Northern hemisphere. This gave them a second cause for cursing the South. A third; the tyranny of hot, dry, poisonous windsj the menace of deserts or océans dreadful because mysterious and impassable; these also were connected in their minds with the South. But to us, aw^are of astronomical facts, this antagonism to the South is a silly superstition which the accidents of their local conditions suggested to our animistic ancestors. We see no enmitv between Right and Left, Up and Down, and similar pairs of opposites. These antithèses are real only as a statement of relation; they are the conventions of an arbitrary device for representing our icleas in a pluralistic symbolism based on duality. “Good” must be defined in terms of human ideals and instincts. “East” has no meaning except with reference to the earth’s internai aff airs ; as an absolute direction in space it changes a degree every four minutes. “Up” is the same for no two men, unless one chance to be in the line joining the other with the centre of the earth. “Hard” is the private opinion of our muscles. “True” is an utterly unintelligible epithet which has proved refractory to the analysis of our ablest philosophers. We hâve therefore no scruple in restoring the “devil-worship” of such ideas as those which the laws of sound, and the phenomena of speech and hearing, compel us to connect with the group of “Gods” whose names are based upon ShT or D, vocalized by the free breath A. For these Names imply the qualifies of courage, frankness, energy, pride, power and triumph; they are the words which express the créative and paternal will. Thus “the Devil” is Capricornus, the Goat who leaps upon the loftiest mountains, the Godhead which, if it become manifest in man, makes him Aegipan, the Ail. The Sun enters this sign when he turns to renew the year in the North. He is also the vowel O, proper to roar, to boom, and 36