Magick Without Tears

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