Magick Without Tears

398 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS "facts" and their legal and magical surroundings, perfectly correct. It is easy enough to laugh at vampires if you live in Upper Tooting , or Surbiton , or one of those places where no self-respecting Vampire would wish to be seen. But in a lonely mountain village in Bulgaria you might feel differently about it! You should remember, incidentally , that the evidence for vampires is as strong as for pretty well anything else in the world. There are innumerable records extant of legal proceedings wherein the most sober, responsible, worthy and well-respected citizens , including the advocates and judges, investigated case after case with the utmost minuteness, with the most distinguished surgeons and anatomists to swear to the clinical details . Endless is the list of well-attested cases of bodies dug up after months of burial which have been found not merely flourishing with all the lines of life, but gorged with fresh blood. I cannot help feeling that all the superior-person explanations-which explain nothing-about collective hysteria and superstition and wish fulfilment and the rest of the current tomfool jargon, are just about as hard to believe as the original straightforward stories. It is egomaniac vanity that prompts disbelief in phenomena merely because they lie outside the infinitesimally minute pilule of one's own personal experience. When I crossed the Burma-China frontier for the first time, who should I meet but our Consul at Tengyueh, the admirable Litton, who had by sheer brains and personality turned the whole province of Yunnan into his own Vice-royalty? We lunched together on the grass, and I hastened to dig into the goldmine of his knowledge of the country. About the third or fourth thing he said to me was this: "Remember! whatever anyone tells you about China is