80 
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
Because you know the things unclean 
That go to make a mortal maid. 
I, if her rotten corpse were mine, 
Would take it as my natural food , 
Denying all but the Divine 
Alike in evil and in good. 
Aspasia may skin me close, 
And Lais load me with disease. 
Poor pleasures, bitter bargains, these? 
I shall despise Diogenes. 
Follow your fancy far enough! 
At last you surely come to God. 
There is thus in this School no attempt to deny that 
Nature is, as Zoroaster said, "a fatal and evil force"; but 
Nature i:::, so to speak, "the First Matter of the Work," which 
is to be transmuted into gold. The joy is a function of our 
own part in this alchemy. For this reason we find the boldest 
and most skilful adepts deliberately seeking out the most 
repugnant elements of Nature that their triumph may be the 
greater. The formula is evidently one of dauntless courage. It 
expresses the idea of vitality and manhood in its most 
dynamic sense. 
The only religion which corresponds to this School at all is 
that of ancient Egypt; possibly also that of Chaldea. This is 
because those religions are Magical religions in the strict 
technical sense; the religious component of them is negligible. 
So far as it exists, it exists only for the uninitiate. 
There are, however, traces of the beginning of the 
influence of the School in Judaism and in Paganism. There 
are, too, certain documents of the pure Greek spirit which 
bear traces of this. It is what they called Theurgy. 
The Christian religion in its simplest essence, by that idea 
of overcoming 
evil through a Magical ceremony, the