Magick Without Tears

130 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS That's just the trouble; for it is the first of the masks upon the face of the True Will; and that mask is the Poker-Face! As all true Art is spontaneous, is genius, is utterly beyond all conscious knowledge or control, so also is sex. Indeed, one might class it as deeper still than Art; for Art does at least endeavour to find an intelligible means of expression. That is much nearer to sanity than the blind lust of the sex-impulse. The maddest genius does look from Chokmah not only to Binah, but to the fruit of that union in Daath and the Ruach; the sex-impulse has no use for Binah to understand, to interpret, to transmit. It wants no more than an instrument which will destroy it. What then is the magical remedy? Obvious enough to the Qabalist. "Love is the law, love under will." It must be fitted at its earliest manifestations with its proper Binah, so as to flow freely along the Path of Daleth, and restore the lost Balance. Attempts to suppress it are fatal, to sublime it are false and futile. But, guided wisely from the start , by the time it becomes strong it has learnt how to use its virtues to the best advantage. And what of the parallel instinct in a woman? Except in (rather rare) cases of congenital disease or deformity, the problem is never so acute. For Binah, even while she winks at Chokmah, has the other eye wide-open, swivelled on Tiphareth. Her True Will is thus divided by Nature from the start, and her tragedy is if she fails to unite these two objects. Oh, dear me, yes, I know all about spretae injuria formae and furens quid femina possU; but that is only because when she misses her bite she feels doubly baffled, robbed not only of the ecstatic Present, but of the glamorous Future. If she eat independently of the Fruit of the Tree of Life when unripe, she has not only the bad taste in the mouth , but indigestion to follow. Then , living as she does so much in the world of imagination, constantly living shadow-pictures of her Desire, she is not nearly so liable to the violent insanities of sheer blind lust, as is the male. The essential difference is indicated