Magick Without Tears

xviii PREFACE literature to read other than the Bible until he was about twelve years of age. Thus he became steeped in Biblical lore, having read it and studied it throughout the years. His mother, in moments of exasperation no doubt, would call him a "beast." With his knowledge of the Bible, it did not take him long to find out about the Beast of the Book of Revelation, the Beast who was anti-Christ, the Beast whose number was 666. He ultimately identified himself with that Beast, without question aided and abetted by his mother. When the time came to revolt and to turn against the religion of his family, with all the venom and brilliance that he, and only he, could muster, there could be no alternative but that he had to ally himself with those forces which were opposed to the stupidities his mother stood for. So he became the Beast. And since Revelation counted the number of the Beast and found it to be 666, the number of a Man, he turned all his Qabalistic and philosophical skill in later years toward finding this number in any meaningful word or motto that came his way. Still later, after he had received Liber Legis and was forced, as it were, to obey its precepts, then it was that he began to sign all communications with that significant number. Several of the letters describe a method for studying the Qabalah which deserves more than casual notice. I am calling attention to it specifically for fear that otherwise this approach may be overlooked in the mass of new ideas which will be hurled at the student if he is approaching this subject for the first time. The method is one that he started to use shortly after joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn when taken under the wing of Allan Bennett who had become his guru. Wherever he went, he took special notice of any person, object or event with a view to placing it on the Qabalistic Tree of Life. Slowly, in this way, he became adept in using the Tree as a referent for all phenomena whatsoever, and the so-called stereotyped attributions of color, planet, Tarot