Magick Without Tears

VAMPIRES 399 true." No words have ever impressed me more deeply; they sank right in and were illuminated by daily experience until they had justified themselves a thousand times over. That goes for Vampires! In 1916, I was the first trained scien tific observer to record the appearance commonly called "St. Elmo's fire" indiscreetly revealing this fact in a letter to the New Yark Times. I was pestered for the next six months and more by professors of physics (and the rest) from all over the U.S.A. The existence of the phenomenon had been doubted until then because of certain theoretical difficulties. That, sister, is the point. If a statement is hard to reconcile with the whole body of evidence on the laws of the subject, it is rightly received with suspicion. A moment with great Huxley, and his illustration of the centaur in Piccadilly, reported to him (he humorously hypothesizes) by Professor Owen. What occasions Huxley's doubt, and inspires the questions by means of which he seeks to confirm or to discredit it? Just this, no more: here is the head and torso of a man fitted to the shoulders of a horse; how are the mechanical adjustments effected? In the same strain, he pointed out that for an angel to have practicable wings as in Mediaeval pictures, the breast-bone would have to stand out some five feet in front of the body! (The poor fellow, of course, was densely ignorant of the mechanics of the Astral Plane. I am, for once, "on the side of the angels. ")1 Am I digressing again? no, not really; I am just putting forward a case for keeping an open mind on the subject of Vampires, even of the Clan Dracula. How then is the subject in any way important to you? Thus, that there are actually people running about allover the place, who actually possess, and exercise, faculties similar 1. For all that, they move without flapping them. As Swinburne says: "SWift without feet, and flying without wings."