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magick
without
Tears
4
The Qabalah
The Best Training for Memory
Cara Soror,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Now
you must learn Qabalah. Learn this Alphabet of
Magick. You must take it on trust, as a child does his own
alphabet. No one has ever found out why the order of the letters is
what it is. Probably there isn't any answer.
But our Magical Alphabet is primarily not letters,
but figures, not sounds but mathematical ideas. Sir Humphrey Davy,
coming out of his famous illumination (with some help from Nitrous Oxide he
got in) exclaimed: The Universe is composed solely of ideas. We,
analyzing this a little, say: The Universe is a mathematical
expression.
Sir James Jeans might have said this, only his
banker advised him to cash in on God. The simplest form of this
expression is 0=2, elsewhere expounded at great length. This 2 might
itself by expressed in an indefinitely great number of ways. Every
prime number, including some not in the series of "natural
numbers," is an individual. The other numbers with perhaps a few
exceptions (e.g. 418) are composed of their primes.
Each of these ideas may be explained, investigated,
understood, by means very various. Firstly, the Hebrew, Greek and
Arabic numbers are also letters. Then, each of these letters is
further described by one of the (arbitrarily composed) "elements of
Nature"; the Four (or Five) Elements, the Seven (or Ten) Planets, and
the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac.
All these are arranged in a geometrical design
composed of ten "Sephiroth" (numbers) and twenty-two
"Paths" joining them; this is called the Tree of Life.
Every idea soever can be, and should be, attributed
to one or more of these primary symbols; thus green, in different shades, is
a quality or function of Venus, the Earth, the Sea, Libra, and others.
So also abstract ideas; dishonesty means "an afflicted Mercury,"
generosity a good, though not always strong, Jupiter; and so on.
The Tree of Life has got to be learnt by heart; you
must know it backwards, forwards, sideways, and upside down; it must become
the automatic background of all your thinking. You must keep on
hanging everything that comes your way upon its proper bough.
At first, of course, all this is dreadfully
confusing; but persist, and a time will come when all the odd bits fit into
the jig-saw, and you behold--with what adoring wonder!--the marvellous
beauty and symmetry of the Qabalistic system.
And then--what a weapon you will have forged!
What power to analyze, to order, to manipulate your
thinking!
The Book of the
Law itself insists upon the fact that it contains a Qabalah
which was beyond me at the time of its dictation, is beyond me now, and
always will be beyond me in this incarnation. Let me direct your
spiritual attention at AL, I: 54; I: 56; II: 54-55;
II: 76; iii: 47.
Now there was enough comprehensible at the time to
assure me that the Author of the Book knew at least as much Qabalah as I
did. I discovered subsequently more than enough to make it certain
without error that he knew a very great deal more, and that of an altogether
higher order, than I knew; finally, such glimmerings of light as time and
desperate study have thrown on many other obscure passages, to leave no
doubt whatever in my mind that He is indeed the supreme Qabalist
of all time.
When you are a real adept at all these well-known
calculations "prepare to enter the Immeasurable Region" and dig
out the Unknown.
You must construct your own Qabalah!
Nobody can do it for you. What is your
own true Number? You must find it and prove it to be correct. In
the course of a few years, you should have built yourself a Palace of
Ineffable Glory, a Garden of Indescribable Delight. Nor Time nor Fate
can tame those tranquil towers, those Minarets of Music, or fade one blossom
in those avenues of Perfume!
Humph! Nasty of me: but it has just
struck me that it might be just as well if you made a Sepher Sephiroth of
your own! What a positively beastly thing to suggest! However, I
do suggest it.
After all, it's simple enough. Every word you
come across, add it up, stick it down against that number in a book kept for
the purpose. That may seem tedious and silly; why should you do all
over again the work that I have already done for you? Reason:
simple. Doing it will teach you Qabalah as
nothing else could. Besides, you won't be all cluttered up with words
that mean nothing to you; and if it should happen that you want a word to
explain some particular number, you can look it up in my Sepher Sephiroth.
By this method, too, you may strike a rich vein of
words of your own that I have altogether missed.
No doubt, a Really Great Teacher would have
said: "Beware! Use my Dictionary, and mine alone! All
others are spurious!" But then I'm not a R.G.T. of that kind.
For a start, of course, you should put down the
words that are bound to come in your way in any case: numbers like 11,
13, 31, 37 and their multiples; the names of God and the principal angels;
the planetary and geomantic names; and your own private and particular name
with its branches. After that, let your work on the Astral Plane guide
you. When investigating the name and other words communicated to you
by such beings as you meet there, or invoke, many more will come up in their
proper connections. Very soon you will have quite a nice little Sepher
Sephiroth of your very own. Remember to aim, above all things, at
coherence.
It is excellent practice, by the way, to do some
mental arithmetic on your walks; acquire the habit of adding up any
names that you have come across in your morning's reading. Nietzsche
has well observed that the best thoughts come by walking; and it has
happened to me, more than once or twice, that really important
correspondences have come, as by a flashlight, when I was padding the old
hoof.
You will have noticed that in this curt exposition
I have confined myself to Gematria, the direct relation of number and word,
omitting any reference to Notariqon, the accursed art of making words out of
initials, like (in profane life) Wren and Gestapo and their horrid brood, or
to Temurah, the art of altering the position of the letters in a word, a
sort of cipher; for these are almost always frivolous. To base any
serious calculations on them would be absurd.
Love is the law, love under will.
Fraternally,
666
P.S. You should study The Equinox, Vol. I, No. 5, The Temple of Solomon the King for a more elaborate exposition of the Qabalah.
(See Appendix I The Constitution of Man [to be scanned])