Magick Without Tears

58 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS can always be reduced to "One"; and "One" itself is no better , because, among other things, it finds itself forced to deny the very premises on which it was founded . Shall we be any better off if we assume that Ex nihilo nihil fit is a falsehood , that the origin of All Things is Nothing? Let us see! O. Shall we first glance at the mathematical aspect of Nothing? (Including its identical equation in Logic.) This I worked out so long ago as 1902 e.g. in Berashith, which you will find reprinted in The Sword of Song, and in my Collected Works, Vol. I. The argument may be summarized as follows. When, in the ordinary way of business, we write 0, we should really write on. For 0 implies that the subject is not extended in any dimension under discussion. Thus a line may be two feet in length, but in breadth and depth the coefficient is Zero. We could describe it as 2f+Ob+Od, or n2f+Ob+Od. What I proposed in considering "What do we mean by Nothing?" was to consider every possible quality of any object as a dimension . For instance, one might describe this page as being nf + n'b + n"d + 0 redness + 0 amiability + 0 velocity + 0 potential and so on, until you had noted and measured all the qualities it possesses, and excluded all that it does not . For convenience, we may write this expression as Xf+b+d+r+a+v+p -using the initials of the qualities which we call dimensions. Just one further explanation in pure mathematics . To interpret Xl, Xl + I or X2 , and so on, we assume the reference to be to spatial dimensions. Thus suppose Xl to be a line a foot long, X2 will be a plane a foot square, and X3 a cube measuring a foot in each dimension. But what about X4 ? There are no more spatial dimensions. Modem mathematics has (unfortunately, I think) agreed to consider this fourth dimension as time. Well, and XS? To interpret this expression , we may begin to consider other qualities, such as