Magick Without Tears

396 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS chiefly for the benefit of those people who were already more or less familiar with the Tree of Life and its correspondences. But I do not know even to-day, twenty years later, and writing as I am to you who admittedly had no previous knowledge of any of these subjects, how to set forth the facts in more elementary terms. I warned you in the beginning that there was an essential difficulty in these studies which is not to be by-passed or dodged in any way whatever. But, after all, it is the same difficulty which every child finds when he begins any study of any kind. In Latin, for instance, he is told that mensa means a table, that it belongs to the first declension and is feminine. There is no why about any of this; no explanation is possible; the child has to pick up the elements of the language one by one, taking what he is taught on trust. And it is only after accumulating a vast collection of unintelligible details that the jig-saw pieces fall into place, and he finds himself able to construe the classical texts. You must be patient; you must go over and over again everything that is presented to you, and by obeying you will not only come to a clear comprehension of the subject, but find yourself automatically thinking in the language which you have been at such pains to acquire. I feel then that I must leave you with these descriptions and these charts until painfully at first, but at the end with intense pride and gratification, you find yourself spontaneously grasping the more complex combinations of these letters and words which are the anatomy of the body of our Learning. And do not forget the old and well-worn saw: "Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring!-A little learning is a dangerous thing." Love is the law, love under will. Yours fraternally, 666