1954 · CLOSE READING
Magick Without Tears
Magick Without Tears (1954), PDF p. 238
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"GOD" AND "SELF"
205
To formulate the idea of 'self' at all, you must posit
limitations;
anything
that is distinguishable
is a mere
temporary (and arbitrary) selection of the finite from the
infinite; whatever you choose to think of, it changes, it
grows, it disappears .
You have got to train your mind to canter through those
leafy avenues of thought upon the good green turf of
Indifference; when you can do it without conscious effort, so
that up-down, in-out, far-near, black-white (and so on for
everything) appears quite automatically, you are already as
near an Initiate as makes no matter.
3. 'Self' . For a full discussion of this see Letter 42.
4. 'God.' This is really too bad of you!
Of all the hopelessly mangled words in the language, you
settle with unerring Sadism on the most brutally butchered.
Crippen 2 was an amateur .
Skeat hardly helps us at all, except by warning us that
'good' has nothing whatever to do with it. Dieu comes from
Deus, with all its Sol-Jupiter references, and Deos, which
Plato thought meant a runner; hence, Sun, Moon, Planets.
The best I can do for you, honest Injun! is the Russian
word
for god Bog; connected
probably,
through
the
Lithuanian, with the Welsh Bwg a spectre or hobgoblin.
Bugge, too. Not very inspiring, is it, to replace the Old
Hundredth by "Hush! Hush! Hush! here comes the Bogey
Man." Or is it.
Enough of this fooling! Out, trusty rapier, and home to
the stone heart of the audacious woman that wrote "God
within us."
I know you thought you knew more or less what you
meant when you wrote it; but surely that was a mere slip. An
instant's thought would have warned you that the word
wouldn't stand even the most superficial analysis.
You meant "Something which seems to me the most
perfect symbol of all that I love, worship, admire" -all that
class of verb.
2. Crippen was a famous English poisoner who was caught and hung .
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