Magick Without Tears

360 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS the Goetia had led us to expect. Worse, this was as far as it wen t; no doubt, seeing it at all had disturbed our concentration. (This is where training in Yoga would have helped our Magick.) From that point it was all a wash-out. We could not get back the enthusiasm necessary to persist. We called it a day, did the banishings, closed the temple, and went to bed with our tails between our legs. (And yet, from a saner point of view, the Operation had been a shining success. "Miraculous" things began to happen; in one way and another the gates opened for Allan to migrate to less asthmatic climes; and the object of our work was amply attained.) I give prominence to this phenomenon because what we saw, little and unsatisfactory as it was, appeared to our normal physical sight. I learned later that there is a kind of sight half-way between that and the astral. In a "regular" astral vision one sees better when the eyes are shut; with this in termediate instrument, to close them would be as completely annihilating as if the vision were an ordinary object of sight. It seems, too, as if I had picked up something of the sort as an after-effect of the Evocation of Buer-a Mercurial demon; for phenomena of one sort or another were simply showered on me from this moment, pari passu with my constantly improving technique in regular "astral visions." Sometimes I was quite blind, as compared with Frater V.N.; for when the circle was broken one night-see the whole story in my Autohagiography-he saw and identified dozens and scores of Abramelin demons as they marched widdershins around my library, while all I saw of them was a procession of "half-formed faces" moving shadowy through the dimly-lit room. When it was a matter of the sense of touch, it was far otherwise; I got it good and hearty-but that is not the su bject of this letter. I find all this excessively tedious; I resent having to write about it at all; I wonder whether I am breaking some beastly