MAGICKAL MEMORY 
243 
Yes, of course, in a sense; but don't keep on interrupting! I 
was coming to something interesting. 
I insist on putting forth the immediately useful point of 
view: "devotion to Nuit" must mean the eager pursuit of the 
fulfilment of all possibilities, however unpleasant. 
Good: now see how logical this is. For how else could one 
have reasonable "certainty," 
as contrary 
with "faith" 
(=interior conviction), otherwise than by the acquisition of 
the "Magical Memory" -the memory of former lives. And 
this must evidently include that of former deaths. Indeed 
"Freudian forgetfulness" is very pertinacious on such themes; 
the shock of death makes it a matter of displaying the most 
formidable courage to go over in one's mind the incidents of 
previous 
deaths. 
You recall 
the Buddhist 
"Ten 
Impurities";-The 
Drowned 
Corpse, 
the 
Gnawed-by-wild-beasts-Corpse, and the rest. 
Magick (though I says it as shouldn't) gives a very full and 
elaborate account of this Memory, and Liber CMXIII 
(Thisharb) a sound Official Instruction on the two main 
methods of acquiring this faculty. 
None of my writings, by the way, deal with the First 
Method; this is because I could never make any headway with 
it; none at all. Fr:. lehi Aour , on the other hand, was a 
wizard at it; he thought that some people could use it that 
way, and others not: born so. If it should happen that you 
have that faculty, and no gift at all for the other , it's just too 
bad; you'd better buzz off, and get another Holy Guru less 
one-legged. 
There are, however, as I find on reading over what I have 
written elsewhere, quite a few lacunae in the exposition; and 
I may as well now do my best to stop one or two obvious 
gaps. 
The period of my life which was the climax of my work on 
this subject is those weeks of Thaumaturgy on the Hudson 
River-I fear the Magical Diary The Hermit of A esopus Island 
is irretrievably lost-when I was shown the Codex of The Tao