Magick Without Tears

MOTHER LOVE 341 Where Zola failed, who can hope to succeed? To distinguish between brute and brute: no, dear lady, that task I not regretfully relinquish! But in "refined" strata? That cock won't fight, 0 thou Aspirant to the Sacred Wisdom! It's very often worse; for under the anaesthetic, the most delicately-minded ladies of high social position and religious repute are apt to pour forth floods of filth which would disgust the coarsest harridans of slum-land! This is the final fact: so long as our life is bound to that of the animal and vegetable worlds, so that we are bondslaves born to their quite ineradicable habits, so long are we dragged back from every flight of fancy or imagination such as would break the chains that anchor us to mud. The most far-seeing of our prophetically minded writers, Aldous Huxley, brands this black fact upon our foreheads. The first condition of a "Brave New World" must be the dissociation of sexual from reproductive life. The word "mother" must be as nauseating to all properly human minds as it now is to every one that has contemplated the subject with clear vision. I know there is an answer to all this; in fact, The Book of the Law enables us to take it in our stride. But there is another aspect of "mother-love" which is urgent, practical, and in no way dependent upon ideal considerations. What do we find in practice as the immediate consequence of this 'sublime', this 'holy' instinct? Quite a few species of animals habitually devour their offspring; but women "know a trick worth two of that." Next witness: Dr. Doughty, who looked after the health of Trinity College, Cambridge. A swift routine examination: then he tilted his chair backwards, thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets, fixed the patient with a glare of ice; then these words