Magick in Theory and Practice (Section 1)

the Hindu, indeed, they are still less respectable. In his view, existence is essentially objectionable 1 2 j and his principal concern is to invoke Shiva " to destroy the illusion whose thrall is the curse of the Manvantara. The cardinal révélation of the Great Aeon of Horus is that this formula AUM does not represent the facts of nature. 1 he point of view is based upon misapprehension of the character of existence. It soon became obvious to The Master Fherion that AUM was an inadéquate and misleading hieroglyph. It stated only part of the truth, and it implied a fundamental falsehood. He consequently determined to modify the Word in such a manner as to fit it to represent the Arcana unveiled by the Aeon of which He had attained to be the Logos. The essential task was to emphasize the fact that nature is not catastrophic, but proceeds by means of undulations. It might be suggested that Manvantara and Pralaya are in reality com- plementary curvesj but the Hindu doctrine insists strongly on denying continuity to the successive phases. It was nevertheless important to avoid disturbing the Trinitarian arrangement of the word, as would be done by the addition of other letters. It was equally désirable to make it clear that the letter M represents an operation which does not actually occur in nature except as the withdrawal of phenomena into the absolute; which process, even when so understood, is not a true destruction, but, on the contrary, the émancipation of anything from the modifications which it had mistaken for itself. It occurred to him that the true nature of Silence was to permit the uninterrupted vibration of the undulatory energy, free from the false conceptions attached to it by the Ahamkara or Ego-making faculty, whose assumption that conscious individuality constitutes existence led it to consider its own apparently catastrophic character as pertaining to the order of nature. 1. Thelemites agréé that manifested existence implies Imperfection. But they understand why Perfection devises this disguise. The Theory is developed fully in Liber Aleph, and in Part IV of this Book 4. See also Cap V Paragraph on F final of Fiaof. 2. The Vaishnava theory, superficially opposed to this, turns out on analysis to be practically identical. 47