Magick Without Tears

444 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS period of peace abroad (bar frontier skirmishes like the Crimean war) and prosperity at home coincided with Free Trade and Laissez-faire. Now we may return, refreshed, to the main question of monsters, real (like Treves') or imaginary like Jews and niggers. Why should the classes want to act as classes? It's obvious; "Union is strength." The worst Fifteen can do more with a football than the best opposing team of one-excuse my Irish! Well, what tortoise is that elephant based upon? Why, still obviously, upon the universal sense of individual weakness. We all want a big bruvver to tell of him! Hence the Gods and the Classes. It's fear at the base of the whole pyramid of skulls. How right politicians are to look upon their constituents as cattle! Anyone who has any experience of dealing with any class as such knows the futility of appealing to intelligence, indeed to any other qualities than those of brutes. And so, whenever we find one Man who has no fear like Ibsen's Doctor Stockmann or Mark Twain's Colonel Grainger that strolled out on his balcony with his shotgun to face the mob that had come to lynch him, he can get away with it. "An Enemy of the People" wrote Ibsen, "Ye are against the people, 0 my chosen!" says The Book of the Law. (AL, II: 25) Not only does it seem to me the only conceivable way of reconciling this and similar passages with "every man and every woman is a star" to assert the sovereignty of the individual, and to deny the right-to-exist to "class-consciousness," "crowd-psychology," and so to mob-rule and Lynch-Law, but also the only practicable plan whereby we may each one of us settle down peaceably to mind his own business, to pursue his True Will, and to accomplish the Great Work. So never lose sight for a moment of the maxim so often repeated in one context or another in these letters: that fear