Magick Without Tears

MORALITY (1) 421 to carry out his very first duty to the State, the production of an heir. Quite contrary to this is the career of the "Holy Man." Accustomed to the severest physical toil, inured to all the rigours of climate, aloof from every noxious excess, he becomes a very champion of virility. More, he has been particularly trained for this form of asceticism by all sorts of secret methods and practices; some of these, by the way, I was able to learn myself, and found surprisingly efficacious. So we have the law of supply and demand at work as uncomplainingly as usual: the Holy Man prays for the threatened Dynasty, blesses the Barren Queen; and they all live happy ever after. This is not an Arabian Night's Tale of Antiquity; it is the same to-day; there are very few Englishmen who have spent any time in India who have not been approached with proposals of this character. Similar conditions, curiously enough, existed in France; the fils a papa was usually a hopeless rotter, and his wife often resorted to a famous monastery on the Riviera, where was an exceptionally holy Image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, prayers unto whom removed sterility. But when M. Combes turned out the monks, the Image somehow lost its virtue. Now get your Bible and tum up Luke VIII: 2! When the sal volatile has worked, turn to John XIII: 2, 3 and ask a scholar what any Greek of the period would have understood by the technical expressions there unambiguously employed. Presently, I hope, you will begin to wonder whether, after all, the "morality" of the middle classes of the nineteenth century, in Anglo-Saxon countries, is quite as axiomatic as you were taught to suppose. Please let me emphasize the fact that I have heard and seen these conditions in Eastern countries with my own ears and eyes. Vivekananda-certainly the best of the modern Indian writers on Yoga-complained bitterly that the old greymalkin witches of New York who called themselves his disciples had to be dodged with infinite precaution whenever he wanted to