Magick Without Tears

PREFACE XXVll of the Ancient Wisdom, and publish it in as permanent a form as possible. This I did in The Equinox. I should perhaps have been strictly classical, and admitted only the "Publication in Class A," "A-B," ''E,'' and "D" material. But I had the idea that it would be a good plan to add all sorts of other stuff, so that people who were not in any way interested in the real Work might preserve their copies . ... "They" [the Secret Chiefs of the Order / . . . were agreed on measures calculated to assure the survival of the Wisdom worth saving until the time, perhaps three hundred or six hundred years later, when a new current should revive the shattered thought of mankind. The Equinox, in a word, was to be a sort of Rosetta Stone. It appears that he recognized that he should have published only the basic yoga and magical instructions known as the Official Instructions of the Order in order to preserve "the Sacred Tradition." Now that the original sets of The Equinox are out of circulation-there were only one thousand sets printed-it seems necessary to reissue the fundamental material that he had in mind at the beginning-the official instructions. Thus Gems from The Equinox consists solely of those. If it was the wish of the so-called Secret Chiefs of the Order to preserve the practical Wisdom of the hidden Sanctuaries against the disasters of war, natural cataclysms and famine- all of which now seem clearly in the offing-I hope that the issuance of Gems from The Equinox will assist in the fulfillment of the original intent, freed from the addition "of all sorts of other stuff." For, thus freed, this set of reprints of the Official Publications of the A :. A:. now coincides with what appears to have been Crowley's original intent as expressed in Magick without Tears. Magick without Tears demanded that some careful pruning be done. I have exercised great caution and deliberation in the editing, if only because I am fully aware of the fanatical attitude of some Crowley disciples. Every word that he wrote