Magick Without Tears

458 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS and morally as well as the physically destructive phenomena of our age must be parts of some vast all-comprehensive plan. Putting two and two together, and making 718, it looks as if the Masters acquiesced in and helped to fulfil, the formula of the catastrophic succession of the Aeons. An analogy. We have the secret of the Elixir of Life, and could carryon in the same body indefinitely; yet at least some Masters prefer to reincarnate in the regular way, only taking care to waste no time in Amennti, but to get back to the Old Bench and pick up the New Tools with the minimum of delay. By having attained the Freedom of "Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes Beyond Heaven's constellated wilderness" "we are blessed; and bless" by refusing to linger therein, but shouldering once more "Atlantean the load of the too vast orb of" the Karma of Mankind. This hypothesis does at least make intelligible Their action in riding for a fall instead of preventing it. It may also be that They feel that human progress has reached its asymptote so far as the old Formula can take it. In fact, unless we take some such view, there does not seem to be much point in taking an action so fundamentally revolutionary (on the surface) as the proclamation of a New Word. But then (you will object, if an objection it be) people like Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, the Mikado, et hoc genus omne, are loyal emissaries of the Masters, or the gods! Well, why not? An analogy, once more. In the Christian legend we find God (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent) employing Judas, Pilate and Herod, no less than Jesus, as actors in the Drama which replaced Isis by Osiris in the Great Formula. Perfectly true; but this fact does not in any way exculpate the criminals. It is no excuse for the Commandants of Belsen and Buchenwald that they were acting under orders. The Drama is not mere play-acting, in which the most virtuous man may play the vilest of parts. Your further objection, doubtless, will be that this theory