Magick Without Tears

xxx PREFACE of Thoth which describes in great detail the several interpretations of the Tarot card "The Fool." It may facilitate also some understanding of how he finally came to conceive of himself. On several occasions he has essayed this task, not only in this fascinating book of letters, and in the book about the Tarot, but in his earlier book Magick in Theory and Practice. It is far from easy for the ordinary individual, bound by the ordinary codes of social behavior and the conventional frames of reference, to have the foggiest idea of what moves or motivates an initiate whose illumination has imposed an entirely new point of view on the world and life in general. The whole of letter 79 on "Progress" should be read in this connection. It is also interesting to compare some of the weird historical facts quoted in letter 48 and others regarding Adolf Hitler, Soror I.W.E., and The Book of the Law, with some of the fairy stories and fantasies spun in a relatively recent book entitled The Dawn of Magic (some editions have entitled it The Morning of the Magicians) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. I have to admit that some of the material in that book about Hitler's goals and behavior is interesting even if almost incredible. But some of the material relative to the history of the Golden Dawn is so far out, so historically false, as to make one doubt the veracity of other ideas with which one may be less familiar. It thus makes one doubt the validity of what the authors state about the Hitler theme, and several others. However, some of the references in Magick without Tears to Hitler and Soror I.W.E.'s foolish attempts to get Hitler to adopt Liber Legis as his personal-code to foist upon Germany and then mankind are enough to make one pause. In conclusion, I should add that the Foreword to this book was written by Karl Germer. He was Crowley's representative in America and his successor as Outer Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis. The Foreword describes in part how this collection of letters came into being. Aleister Crowley wrote the Introduction, which consists of several preliminary