76 
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
deriving almost exclusively from the Black tradition in the 
different stages. We have already mentioned the Evangelical 
cults with their ferocious devil-god who creates mankind for 
the pleasure of damning it and forcing it to crawl before him, 
while he yells with drunken glee over the agony of his only 
son.2 But in the same class, we must place Christian Science, 
so grotesquely afraid of pain, suffering, and evil of every sort, 
that its dupes can think of nothing better than to bleat 
denials of its actuality, in the hope of hypnotising themselves 
into anaesthesia. 
Practically no Westerns have reached the third stage of the 
Black tradition, the Buddhist stage. It is only isolated 
mystics, and those men who rank themselves with a 
contemptuous compliance under the standard of the nearest 
religion, the one which will bother them least in their quest 
of nothingness , who carry the sorites so far. 
The documents of the Black School of Magick have 
already been indicated. They are, for the most part, tedious 
to the last degree and repulsive to every wholesome-minded 
man; yet it can hardly be denied that such books as The 
Dhammapada and Ecclesiastes are masterpieces of literature . 
They represent the agony of human despair at its utmost 
degree of intensity, and the melancholy contemplation which 
is induced by their perusal is not favourable to the inception 
of that mood which should lead every truly courageous 
intelligence to the determination to escape from the ferule of 
the Black Schoolmaster to the outstretched arms of the 
White Mistress of Life. 
Let us leave the sinister figure of Schopenhauer for the 
mysteriously 
radiant 
shape of Spinoza! This latter 
philosopher, in respect at least of his Pantheism, represents 
fairly enough the fundamental thesis of the White Tradition. 
Almost the first observation that we have to make is that this 
White tradition is hardly discoverable outside Europe. It 
2. N.B. Christianity was in its fust stage a Jewish Communism, hardly 
distinguishable from Marxism.