Magick in Theory and Practice (Section 2)

presence even of Frater Perdurabo; how much less in that of The Master Therion ! 1 Of ail the créatures He ever met, the most prominent of English spiritists (a journalist and pacifist of more than European famé) had the filthiest mind and the foulest mouth. He would break off any conversation to tell a stupid smutty story, and could hardi y conceive of any society assembling for any other purpose than “phallic orgies7’, whatever they may be. Utterly incapable of keeping to a subject, he would drag the conversation down again and again to the sole subject of which he really thought — sex and sex-perversions and sex and sex and sex and sex again, This was the plain resuit of his spiritism. Ail spiritists are more or less similarly afflicted. They feel dirty even across the Street j their auras are ragged, muddy and malodorous; they ooze the slime of putrefying coprses. No spiritist, once he is wholly enmeshed in sentimentality and Freudian fear-phantasms, is capable of concentrated thought, of persistent will, or of moral character. Devoid of every spark of the divine light which was his birthright, a prey before death to the ghastly tenants of the grave, the wretch, like the mesmerized and living corpse of Poe’s Monsieur Valdemar, is a “nearly liquid mass of loathsome, of détestable putrescence.” The student of this Holy Magick is most earnestly warned against frequenting their séances, or even admitting them to his presence. They are contagious as Syphilis, and more deadly and disgus- ting. Unless your aura is strong enough to inhibit any manifestation of the loatïily iarvae that hâve taken up their habitation in them, shun them as you need not mere lepers! 2 * * * 1. Even the earliest Initiations confer protection. Compare the fear felt by D. D. Home for Eliphas Levi. See Equinox I, X, “The Key of the Mysteries”. 2. It occurs in certain rare cases that a very unusual degree of personal purity combined with integrity and force of character provides even the ignorant with a certain natural defence, and attracts into his aura only intelligent and beneficent entities. Such persons may perhaps practise — 199