The Equinox (Volume I, Number VI)

THE BIG STICK touched, to avoid dispute. This he agreed to; he was allowed to hide it as he chose. I gave up all hopebut in bringing ofi'the 9to ! chance 01 my medium’s being right, The sceptic kept both eyes on me all the time ; iii stirred a finger, he was up in arms, I did keep my back to the mantelpiece, but there was no way of writing down the number. But it was just at that point that my sceptic’s magnificent brain broke down. He had correctly argued everything so far; but then his brain said, “ It is im- portant that Crowley shall not know where I hide the paper with the number on it : I must hide it somewhere where he cannot see." So instead 01 slipping it into one of the hundreds 01 books on the shelves, he hid it behind my back, i.e. on the mantelpiece, where it was duly found! I must tell just one other story to the point, It throws possibly some light on one or two 01 the “miracles” which Blavatzsky performed in order to disgust the more foolish of her followers, In June !906 Iwas at Margate (God help me !), and asked my friend ]— to lend me his copy of Abramelin. “ Sorry ! ” said he. "I lent it to So-and-so, and it has not been returned." He forgot this conversation : I remembered it. Staying at his house six months later, I was alone one morning and found the book, which he “knew for a fact ” to be in London sixty miles away. It was hidden by the panel of a glass-fronted bookcase I hid it in the stuffing ofa music-stool, led the conversation at lunch-time to “apperts,” got my host to suggest my doing this very thing which he was sure I could not do, and, in the evening, did iti If I had been a cheat, could I have produced better evidence? My host would have sworn that the book was in London in a house unknown to me, whose occupants were unknown to me, He is a man of science and of most accurate and balancedjudgment. One little lapse 01 memory: he forgot that he had told me that the book was not in his shelves; another little lapse of memory: he forgot where the book was; and there is your miracle! Now for my constructive policy. I suggest that a “spirit” be cultivated on the lines laid down by Eliphaz Levi, “Dogma and Ritual,” Cap. XIII,, so that he may manifest more wholly. Then let him dictate to two or three segregated mediums a long passage, or a long set 01 meaningless figures, and get so high a degree of agreement that hardly any doubt remains Or 11 anybody wants a really high evidential proof, let him get the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, which Fermat died without revealing, and which the united efforts of mathematicians have hitherto failed to discoverl ALEISTER CROWLEY. ιἓξ 163