Magick Without Tears

408 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS "Bogey" comes from this, though!); think of the dam of a stream, and of a young thing, and damn. Think of all the different kinds of box and cock and rock. (G.K. Chesterton must have made tens of thousands of pounds out of it!) Think of "let," meaning both to prevent and to allow. Think of "check" to a chess-player, a banker, a draper , a waitress, a fox-hunter, and a Slovak! The importance of all this : I'm sure I've told you how Thoth, God of all Magick, the Wisdom and the Word, is usually shown with style and papyrus, as inventor of writing, which is the real Magical Art. Hence "grimoire" is nothing but grammar; to cast a "spell" explains itself; and the Angel (e.g., of a Church, see Revelations I, II) was merely the Secretary. I wanted to go right back, before letters were put together to make words at all. This is, I believe, almost wholly original work, though I'm not sure that Fabre d'Olivet didn't skate round the edges. I put to myself this question: when I pronounce the letter so-and-so, what thought or class of thought tends to arise in my mind? (If you practise this in public, people may wonder!) With the vowels, one does seem to find a natural correspondence. (I wrote a ballet , The Blind Prophet, on these lines, long before it struck me to investigate on scientific lines.) The Hindus knew this with their A-U-M: A is the open breath, 0 the controlled force, M no breath at all. (See Magick, pp. 45-49.) To me I is a shrill feminine sound, as o is the roar of the male. U is pursed , E hardly significant. As to Magick, the Gnostics were chili con carne plus molten platinum plus a few girls I have known on the vowels. Their incantations consist almost entirely of combinations of these. Seven at a time is very frequent; in fact it seems sometimes as if their theurgy depended on variations of these combinations . Their theology, too. Never mind that just now!