In the autumn of 1898 George Cecil Jones had directed the
attention of Frater Perdurabo to a book entitled
"The Book of
the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage." The essence
of this book is as follows :
The aspirant must have a house secure from observation
and interference. In this house there must be an oratory
with a
window to the East, and a door to the North opening upon
a terrace, at the end of which must be a lodge. He must
have a
Robe, Crown, Wand, Altar, Incense, Anointing Oil, and a
Silver Lamen. The terrace and lodge must be strewn with
fine
sand. He withdraws himself gradually from human
intercourse to devote himself more and more to prayer for
the space of
four months. He must then occupy two months in almost
continuous prayer, speaking as little as possible to
anybody. At
the end of this period he invokes a being described as
the Holy Guardian Angel, who appears to him (or to a
child
employed by him), and who will write in dew upon the
Lamen, which is placed upon the Altar. The Oratory is
filled with
Divine Perfume not of the aspirant's kindling.
After a period of communion with the Angel, he summons
the Four Great Princes of the Daemonic World, and forces
them to swear obedience.
On the following day he calls forward and subdues the
Eight Sub-Princes; and the day after that, the many
Spirits serving
these. These inferior Daemons, of whom four act as
familiar spirits, then operate a collection of talismans
for various
purposes. Such is a brief account of the Operation
described in the book.
This Operation strongly appealed to our student. He
immediately set about to procure a suitable house, and to
prepare
everything that might be necessary for the operation. All
was ready for the beginning in Easter of 1900, and it
must be
said that the preliminary work alone is so tremendous
that a long story might be written of the events of these
18 months
of preparation. The Operation itself was however never
begun. A fortnight or so before the time appointed, he
received
an urgent appeal from his Master to save him and the
Order from destruction. He gave up his own prospects of
personal
advancement without hesitation, and hastened to Paris.
(See the Equinox "The Temple of Solomon the
King" for a fairly
full account of these various matters. The
"Master" was the late S.L. Mathers.)
That the Master proved to be no Master, and the Order no
Order, but the incarnation of Disorder, had no effect
upon the
good Karma created by this renunciation of a project on
which he had set his heart for so long.
In Mexico, he kept vigil during several nights in the
Temple of the Order of the Lamp of the Invisible Light,
an Order
whose High Priest is pledged to maintain a Secret and
Eternal Lamp. In this shrine he received some shadowing
forth of
the Vision of the Holy Guardian Angel, and that of the
Four Great Princes : here also he renewed the Oath of the
Operation.
(The whole of his magical career is best interpreted as
the performance of this Operation. One must not suppose
that
Initiation is a formality, observing the
"unities," like being made a Mason. All life
pertains to the process, and it pervades
the whole personality; the official recognition of
attainment is merely a token of what had taken place.)
On his return to Scotland in 1903, he found ample
evidence of the presence of the forces of the Operation,
but by now,
having conceived that Work in a subtler manner and having
prepared to carry it out in the Temple of his own body,
having seen Magick, in short, more of less in the manner
in which it is seen in Parts II and III of the Book 4, he
was able to
dispense with the exterior physical appurtenances of this
Operation.
We must now pass over a few years, and deal with the
completion of this Operation, although it is in a sense
irrelevant to
the purpose of this book.
During the winter of 1905-6, he was traveling across
China. He had come to the point of conquering his mind.
That mind
had broken up. He saw that the human mind is by its very
nature evanescent, because of the fact that nature is not
unity
but duality. Truth is relative. All things end in
mystery. In such sentences have the philosophers of the
past formulated
this proposition, as announcing the intellectual
bankruptcy which he, with greater frankness, describes as
insanity.
Passing from this, he became as a little child, and on
reaching the Unity behind the mind, found the purpose of
his life
formulated in these words, The Obtaining of the Knowledge
and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.
He then found himself, having destroyed all other Karma,
perfectly free to pursue this one work. He then
accomplished
the six months of Invocation, as prescribed in the Book
of the Sacred Magic, and was rewarded in October, 1906,
by
complete success. (An account of these matters, in part,
is to be found in the Equinox, Vol. I, No. VIII, and in
his own
poem "Aha !")
He then proceeded to the evocation and conquest of the
Four Great Princes and their Inferiors, a work whose
results
must be studied in the light of his subsequent career.
We have now finished all that is necessary to say
concerning him, for the account of some of his further
Attainment is
given fully in Liber CDXVIII, "The Vision and the
Voice," also in Equinox Vol. I No. X "The
Temple of Solomon the King,"
where the unexpected result of the Communion of the Holy
Guardian Angel is shown in a symbolism which can hardly
be
understood without reference to the events of 1904, which
are now wholly pertinent to this Essay.
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