Magick Without Tears

EPISTO LA ULTIMA 503 II The second part of this letter, which appears to be expanding into a sort of essay, will be devoted to Yoga. You will have noticed that the grade of Mas-ter of the Temple is itself intimately associated with Yoga. It is when one reaches this plane that the apparently contradictory forms of the Great Work, Magick and Yoga, begin to converge, though even earlier in the course of the work it must have been noticed that achievements in Yoga have been of great assistance to magical operations , and that many of the mental states necessary to the development of the Magician are identical with those attained in the course of the strictly technical Yogic operations. The literature necessary to the study of Magick is somewhat variegated; there are quite a number of classics on the subject and though it would be easy enough for me to draw up a list of not more than half-a-dozen which I consider really essential, there may be as many as an hundred which in the more or less subsidiary forms are useful to the magICian. With Yoga the case is very different indeed. The literature on the subject is so enormous and contains so vast a number of more or less secret documents which circulate from hand to hand , that I believe that the best advice I can give anyone is to cut one's cloth very sparingly if one is to make a fitting suit. I do not think I am going too far if I say that Part I of Book 4 and my Eight Lectures on Yoga form an absolutely sufficient guide to the useful practise of the subject ; anything else is almost certain to operate as a distraction . Swami Vivekananda summarised Yoga under four headings, and I do not think that one can improve on that classification. His four are: Gnana, Raja, Bhakta and Hatha, and comprise all divisions that it is desirable to make. As soon as one begins to add such sections as Mantra Yoga, you are adding to without enriching the classification, and once you begin where are you to stop? But I honestly believe that