371
1. The preparation for this was in some ways trying to the candidate. For 
instance, he had to sleep naked for seven nights on a litter of gorse.  
my path. Those which naturally arise in the course of any work soever would have been quietly 
removed by the Secret Chiefs. But I had chosen to fight against myself for five years and "If Satan 
shall be divided against Satan, how shall his kingdom stand?" The more I strove, the more I 
encouraged an internal conflict and stultified myself. I had been permitted to complete my 
initiation, for the reason that by doing so I was fitting myself for the fight; but all my other efforts 
had met with derisory disaster. More, one does not wipe out a lustre of lunacy by a moment of 
sanity. I am suffering to this day from the effects of having wasted some of the best years of my life 
in the stupid and stubborn struggle to set up my conscious self against its silent sovereign, my true 
soul. "Had Zimri peace who slew his master?" 
The superficial reader may smile at my superstition. Why should I be so sure that the accident of 
finding an old portfolio in a loft was no accident, but a coup de maître struck by people, for all 
anyone can prove, who have no existence except in my diseased imagination? I could answer the 
criticism by massing the evidence, but I prefer to leave that to be studied in another place when 
the facts have been marshalled so formidably that it is impossible for any reasonable being not to 
conclude that a praeterhuman agency was at work on my life. I will merely point out that in modern 
science the test of truth is less the degree of the probability of any fact, than that which is implied 
by the text "Wisdom is justified of her children". Facts are judged by their fertility. When a 
discovery remains sterile, the evidence of its truth is weakened. The indication is that it is not a 
stone in the temple of truth; it does not fit in with the entire fabric of knowledge. A new fact 
proves itself by its fitness; isolated, it is repugnant to the continuity of nature. When it is seen to 
explain cognate difficulties, to complete imperfect conceptions; when it leads to lives of research 
which bear fruit, some sixtyfold, some eightyfold and some an hundredfold, then it becomes 
impregnable. My conviction in the reality of my magical experiences does not depend on any single 
event. It is because so many incidents, each one more or less incredible and inexplicable when 
considered by itself, become inevitable when considered in their totality and, instead of themselves 
requiring to be explained, are the means of throwing light upon every obscure corner of the cosmos. 
The mere potency of the incident of June 28th proves that its implications were enormously beyond 
itself. I was inured to miracles of every kind and I no more allowed them to influence my action 
that Professor Ray Lankester is guided in his researches by Napoleon's Dream Book1. The finding of 
the manuscript was not even a miracle; it happened in the ordinary course of nature. There was 
nothing so wonderfully remarkable about its character. It is this very fact that makes us ask how it 
is that so ordinary a circumstance should have been the power to break down the resolute 
resistance of a 
{597}  
1. Such, at least, is a tenable hypothesis. I have no direct evidence that he 
does not do so!  
Magician whose will had been developed to the utmost by every type of training from evocation to 
exploration? 
The answer can only be that, exactly as Coriolanus, insensible to all other appeals, was touched by 
the tears of his mother, so I, whose determination had defied every form of pressure, direct and 
indirect, was only waiting to hear the unmistakable voice of my Master, and that this insignificant 
incident supplied the intuitive certainty: that none other than he was behind it. The finer minds 
among men can oppose intellectual criticism to intellectual demonstration; to the subtle assurances 
of intuitions which are perhaps imperceptible of articulate expression they can find no answer. 
I knew in myself from the first that the revelation in Cairo was the real thing. I have proved with 
infinite pains that this was the case; yet the proof has not strengthened my faith, and disproof 
would no nothing to shake it. I knew in myself that the Secret Chiefs had arranged that the 
manuscript of The Book of the Law should have been hidden under the Watch Towers and the Watch