Magick Without Tears

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.