364 
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
Ask yourself: "What do I know of Therion's mode of life? 
Whenever I see him, he's always on his best behaviour. I've 
hardly ever seen him eat; perhaps he does so only when I am 
there, so as not to embarrass me by a display of his holiness. 
His universe touches mine at only a very few points. The 
mere fact of his being a man, and I a woman, makes 
sympathetic understanding over a vast range of experience 
almost impossible, certainly imperfect. Then all his reading 
and his travels touch mine at very few points. And his 
ignorance of music makes it an almost grotesque extension of 
magnanimity for me to admit his claim to belong to the 
human species ... U.S.W." Then: "How do we manage to 
communicate at all? There is bound to be an impassable gulf 
between us at the best, when one considers that his 
connotation of the commonest words like 'mountain', 'girl', 
'school', 'Hindu', 'oasis', is so vastly different from mine. But 
to do it at all! What actually have we done?" 
Think it out! 
We have made a set of queerly-shapen marks on a sheet of 
paper, given them names, attached a particular sound to each, 
made up (God knows how and why!) combinations of these, 
given names and sounds to them too, and attached a 
meaning-hardly ever the same for you as for me-to them, 
made combinations of these too according to a set of quite 
arbitrary rules, agreed-so far as agreement is possible, or 
even thinkable-to 
label a thought 
with some such 
arrangement: and there we are! You have in this fantastically 
artificial way succeeded in conveying your thought to my 
mind. 
Now, turn back to Magick; read there how we work to 
establish intelligible intercourse between ourselves and the 
"angels. " 
If you can find any difference between that method and 
this, it is more than I can. 
Finally, please remember as a general rule that all magical