THREE SCHOOLS OF MAGICK (2) 
75 
positive benediction. The Tantric is not obsessed by the 
will-to-die. It is a difficult business, no doubt, to get any fun 
out of existence ; but at least it is not impossible. In other 
words, he implicitly denies the fundamental proposition that 
existence is sorrow, and he formulates the essential postulate 
of the White School of Magick, that means exist by which the 
universal 
sorrow 
(apparent 
indeed to all ordinary 
observation) may be unmasked, even as at the initiatory rite 
of Isis in the ancient days of Khem. There, a Neophyte 
presenting his mouth, under compulsion, to the pouting 
buttocks of the Goat of Mendez, found himself caressed by 
the chaste lips of a virginal priestess of that Goddess at the 
base of whose shrine is written that No man has lifted her 
veil. 
The basis of the Black philosophy is not impossibly mere 
climate, with its resulting etiolation of the native, its languid, 
bilious, anaemic, fever-prostrated, emasculation of the soul of 
man. We accordingly find few true equivalents of this School 
in Europe. In Greek philosophy there is no trace of any such 
doctrine. The poison in its foulest and most virulent form 
only entered with Christianity.1 But even so, few men of any 
real eminence were found to take the axioms of pessimism 
seriously. Huxley, for all his harping on the minor key, was 
an eupeptic Tory. The culmination of the Black philosophy is 
only found in Schopenhauer, and we may regard him as 
having been obsessed, on the one hand, by the despair born 
of that false scepticism which he learnt from the bankruptcy 
of Hume and Kant; on the other, by the direct obsession of 
the Buddhist documents to which he was one of the earliest 
Europeans to obtain access. He was, so to speak, driven to 
suicide by his own vanity , a curious parallel to Kiriloff in The 
Possessed of Dostoevsky. 
We have, however, examples plentiful enough of religions 
1. Anti-semite writers in Europe-e.g . Weininger-call the Black theory and 
practice Judaism, while by a curious confusion, the same ideas are called Otristian 
among Anglo-Saxons. In 1936 e.v. the "Nazi" School began to observe this fact.