Magick Without Tears

STRUCTURE OF MIND 199 Bennett's translation of the tenn, "Recollection", is as near as one can get in English. One can strain the meaning slightly to include Re-collection, to imply the ranging of one's facts, and the fitting of them into an organised structure. The tenn "sati" suggests an identification of Being with Knowledge-see The Soldier and the Hunchback! (The Equinox, Vol. I, No. 1). So far as it applies to the Magical Memory, it lays stress on some such expedient, very much as is explained in Liber Thisharb (Magick, pp. 415-422). This is a case where "clean thinking" is most absolutely helpful. The truth is of exquisite texture; it blazons the escutcheon of the Unity of Nature in such delicate yet forceful colours that the Postulant may well come thereby to the Opening of the Trance of Wonder; yet religious theories and personal pernicketiness have erected against its impact the very stoutest of their hedgehogs of prejudice. Who shall help us here? Not the sonorous Vedas, not the Upanishads, not Apollonius, Plotinus, Ruysbroeck , Molinos; not any gleaner in the field of a priori; no, a mere devotee of natural history and biology: Ernst Haeckel. Enormous , elephantine, his work's bulk is almost incredible; for us, his one revolutionary discovery is pertinent to this matter of Sammasati and the revelations of one's inmost subtle structure. He discovered, and he demonstrated, that the history of any animal throughout the course of its evolution is repeated in the stages of the individual. To put it crudely, the growth of a child from the fertilized ovum to the adult repeats the adventures of its species. This doctrine is tremendously important, and I feel that I do not know how to emphasize it as it deserves. I want to be exceptionally accurate; yet the use of his meticulous scientific terms, with an armoury of quotations, would almost certainly result in your missing the point, "unable to see the wood for the trees." Let me put it that the body is formed by the super-position of layers, each representing a stage in the