Magick Without Tears

368 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS teaches, refers not so much to the Native as to the period of life. There is, however, a certain meagre harvest to be gained from my experience. I should like to tell you what happened to such a man. A resident of Johannesburg and singularly gifted with the power of getting physical results to take place as a result of Magical experiments, this man was as strongly attracted to Geomancy as I was repelled, and I do not know that it would be fair for me to claim that I had been of any special use to him, though he was always kind enough to say so. When I pointed out that the answers to Geomantic questions were so vague and indeterminate he had already devised a method whereby this difficulty (which he admitted as existing) could be overcome. It is of course of the very first importance in Geomancy to frame your questions accurately; for the Intelligences serving the Art delight in tricksome gambols. If there is a possibility of assigning a double meaning to the question you can bank on their finding it, and deceiving you. But as to the further difficulty about their vagueness, what he did was to arrange a series of questions narrowing the issue step by step until he had succeeded in obtaining a precise instruction which would resolve his original difficulty. I do think, as a matter of fact, that I was able to help to some extent on the purely theoretical side of the Art, and he went back to South Africa feeling himself fully equipped to deal with any problem that might arise. At that time we were particularly anxious to wind up the first volume of The Equinox with a No. 10, which should be a really massive contribution to Magical thought. That meant a very considerable increase in the cost of production. All this my Disciple, of course, knew, and on arriving in Johannesburg he said to himself "Well, here I am in a part of the world where the earth teems with gold and diamonds. I will procure the necessary funds for The Equinox and various