1954 · CLOSE READING
Magick Without Tears
Magick Without Tears (1954), PDF p. 248
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30
Do You Believe in God?
Cara Soror,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
You are quite right , as usual. True, we have gone over a
great deal of the ground in various learned disquisitions on
Gods, Angels, Elves, et hoc genus omne.
But God with a capital G in the singular is a totally
different pair of Bluchers-nicht wahr?
Let me go back just for a moment to the meaning of
belief. We agreed that the word was senseless except as it
implies an opinion , instinct, conviction-what you please!-so
fIrmly entrenched in our natures that we act automatically as
if it were 'true' and 'certain without error', perhaps even 'of
the essence of truth'. (Browning discusses this in Mr. Sludge
the Medium. ) Good: the fIeld is clear for an enquiry into this
word 'God' .
We fInd ourselves in trouble from the start.
We must defIne, and to defIne is to limit; and to limit is to
reduce 'God' to 'a God' or at best 'the God'.
He must be omniscient
omnipotent
and
omnipresent (8) ; yet to such a Being no purpose would be
possible; so that all the apologies for the existence of "evil"
crash. If there be opposites of any kind, there can be no
consistency. He cannot be Two ; He must be One; yet , as is
obvious, he isn't.
How do the Hindu philosophers try to get out of this
quag? 'Evil' is 'illusion'; has no 'real' existence. Then what is
215
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