14. The Motives Of Psychic Attack. II-b

But he immediately began to get together another temple in a carefully concealed place; and this time he was more ambitious, for he made ready to attempt the Greater Mysteries. He was an exceedingly clever craftsman and made all the equipment of the temple with his own hands so that no one should know what was afoot. Concealed behind Nottingham lace curtains in a mean street in West London was a beautiful little temple of the Greater Mysteries. He completed this work after some months of arduous toil, no one knowing of it save those in his immediate confidence. But before commencing the actual ritual work he went away for a short holiday at the seaside, and there he was seized with a heart attack while sitting on the beach and died in four hours. The Order secrets were not betrayed. Another man who had had a dispute with the same famous Order, printed and published their secrets as an act of revenge. He was a man of good social position, considerable wealth and brilliant literary abilities, already making a name for himself as a writer. From that moment be began to go downhill, and came to poverty and disgrace. The curse of Ahasuerus seemed to be upon him, and he was hounded from country to country, finding no abiding place. No publisher will handle his books, no paper will review them. Let me finally tell of my own experiences in an astral skirmish. I wrote a series of articles on the abuses prevalent in occult fraternities, and these were published in the Occult Review. My writing is largely inspirational, a great deal “coming through” of which I have no previous knowledge, and in this particular case I evidently shot a great deal better than I knew, and got myself into serious trouble. My first intimation of it was a sense of uneasiness and restlessness. Next came a feeling as if the barriers between the Seen and the Unseen were full of rifts and I kept on getting glimpses of the Astral mingling with my waking consciousness. This, for me, is unaccustomed, for I am not naturally psychic, and in the technique in which I was trained we are taught to keep the different levels of consciousness strictly separate and to use a specific method for opening and closing the gates. Consequently one seldom gets spontaneous psychism. One’s vision resembles the use of a microscope in which one examines prepared material. The general sense of vague uneasiness gradually matured into a definite sense of menace and antagonism, and presently I began to see demon faces in flashes, resembling those picture-images which psychologists call by the unpleasing name of hypnogogics, flashes of dream which appear upon the threshold of sleep. I was quite unsuspicious of any particular individual, though I realised that my articles had probably stirred somebody up pretty thoroughly; what was my surprise, then, to receive from a person whom I looked upon as a friend and for whom I had the greatest respect, a letter which left me in no doubt whatever as to the source of the attack and what I might expect if any more articles were published. I can honestly say that until I received this letter I had not the slightest suspicion that this person was implicated in the scandals I was attacking. I was in a somewhat difficult position; I had fired off a charge of shrapnel on general principles, and had apparently “bagged” a number of my friends and associates and fluttered the dove-cote generally. My position was rather complicated by the fact that I did not know nearly as much as they apparently suspected me of doing; I had, of course, known that these abuses existed sporadically about the occult field, as everybody in the movement knows; but to know in this vague way is one thing, and to put one’s finger on specific cases is another. I had evidently blundered into something much more considerable than I had bargained for.