Magic

THOUGH for the most part entirely unconscious of it, man passes the whole of his life in the midst of a vast and populous unseen world. During sleep or in trance, when the insistent physical senses are for the time in abeyance, this other world is to some extent open to him, and he will sometimes bring back from those conditions more or less vague memories of what he has seen and heard there.

Many years ago I heard of the existence of this manuscript from a celebrated occultist, since dead; and more recently my attention was again called to it by my personal friend, the well-known French author, lecturer, and poet, Jules Bois, whose attention has been for some time turned to occult subjects. My first-mentioned informant told me that it was known both to Bulwer Lytton and Eliphas Levi, that the former had based part of his description of the sage Rosicrucian Mejnour on that of Abra-Melin, while the account of the so-called observatory of Sir Philip Derval in the Strange Story was to an extent copied from and suggested by that of the magical oratory and terrace, given in the eleventh chapter of the second book of this present work.

For brief explanation I may say that witch craft is known to its votaries as la vecchia religione, or the old religion, of which Diana is the Goddess, her daughter Aradia (or Herodias) the female Messiah, and that this little work sets forth how the latter was born, came down to earth, established witches and witchcraft, and then returned to heaven.

Rare and powerful legendary power squares which have been handed down for centuries only in sacred volumes used by a few presented by one of the great mystics of our age, Oribello

It is funny that one really never stops to consider what life is all about until it is over. When the physical body dies, and the spirit returns to its natural state of being, then the ways of the Universe become clear. Not everything is answered

Now first of all produced out of darkness into the light, against all caco-Magicians, and contemners of the gifts of God; for the profit and delectation of all those, who do truely and piously love the creatures of God, and do use them with thanksgiving, to the honour of God, and profit of themselves and their neighbours.