Magick Without Tears

288 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS Swami, who would not allow you to enter or leave his presence without permission, or address him without being formally invited to do so. After seven years at menial household drudgeries, you might with luck be allowed to listen to some of his improving discourse. Pretentious humbug is the only appeal to which you can be relied on to respond. Praxiteles would repel you, unless you covered the marble completely with glittering gew-gaws, tinsel finery, sham jewels from the tray of Autolycus! Yet it was precisely because you were sick of all this that you came to me at all. How can one take you as a serious student? Only because you do have moments when the scales fall from your eyes, and your deep need tears down the tawdry counterfeits which hide the shrine where Isis stands unveiled-but ah! too far. You must advance. To advance-that means Work. Patient, exhausting, thankless, often bewildering Work. Dear sister, if you would but Work! Work blindly, foolishly, misguidedly, it doesn't matter in the end: Work in itself has absolute virtue. But for you, having got so far in this incarnation, there must be a revolution. You must no longer hesitate, no longer plan; you must leap into the dark, and leap at once. "The Voice of my Higher Soul said unto me: Let me enter the Path of Darkness; peradventure thus I may attain the Light." Love is the law, love under will. Fraternally yours, 666 P.S. Let me adduce an example of the way in which the serious Aspirant bends to the oar. This is not boasting as if the facts denoted superlative excellence; they speak. The only comment is that if such conduct is not normal and universal, it ought to be. Yet no! I would add this: that I have not yet heard of anyone who has attained to any results