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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
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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. I felt like the small boy who, fishing for minnows, has
hooked a pike. I had to decide whether I would try and get my articles back from the Occult Review, or whether I
would let them run their natural course and take the con sequences. I had had a very strong impulse to write those
articles, and now I began to see why I had had it. I shall have something to say in another chapter concerning the
Watchers, that curious section of the Occult Hierarchy which is concerned with the welfare of nations. A certain
section of their work is apparently concerned with the policing of the Astral Plane. Very little is actually known about
them. One comes across their work sporadically and pieces the bits together. I have crossed their trail on several
occasions, as I will tell later. Whenever black magic is afoot, they set to work to put a spoke in its wheels. Be that as it
may, I came to the conclusion that, in view of what had now transpired, the impulse I had had to take in hand this piece
of work might have emanated from the Watchers. At any rate, the work obviously needed doing. Someone had to
tackle these plague spots if they were to be cleared up, so I determined to stick to my guns and see the matter through,
and so left the articles in question to run their course.
Very soon some curious things began to happen. We became most desperately afflicted with black cats. They were not
hallucinatory cats, for our neighbours shared in the affliction, and we exchanged commiserations with the care taker
next door who was engaged in pushing bunches of black cats off doorstep and window-sill with a broom, and declared
he had never in his life seen so many, or such dreadful specimens. The whole house was filled with the horrible stench
of the brutes. Two members of our community at that time went out to business every day, and at their offices, in
different parts of London, they found the same penetrating reek of the tom-cat.
At first we attributed this persecution to natural causes, and concluded that we were near neighbours to some
fascinating feline female, but incidents succeeded each other which made us feel that things were not quite in the
ordinary course of nature. We were getting near to the Vernal Equinox, which is always a difficult time for occultists;
there was a sense of strain and tension in the atmosphere, and we were all feeling decidedly uncomfortable. Coming
upstairs after breakfast one morning, I suddenly saw, coming down the stairs towards me, a gigantic tabby cat, twice
the size of a tiger. It appeared absolutely solid and tangible. I stared at it petrified for a second, and then it vanished. I
instantly realised that it was a simulacrum, or thought- form that was being projected by someone with occult powers.
Not that the realisation was any too comforting, but it was better than an actual tiger. Feeling decidedly uncomfortable,
I asked one of my household to join me, and as we sat in my room meditating we heard the cry of a cat from without. It
was answered by another, and another, We looked out of the window, and the street as far as we could see was dotted
with black cats and they were wailing and howling in broad daylight as they do on the roofs at night.
I rose up, gathered together my paraphernalia, and did an exorcism then and there. At the end we looked out of the
window again. There was not a cat in sight, and we never saw them again. The visitation was at an end. Only our
normal population of local mousers remained to us.
The Vernal Equinox was now upon us. I must explain that this is the most important season of the year for occultists.
Great power-tides are flowing on the Inner Planes, and these are very difficult to handle. If there is going to be astral
trouble, it usually blows up for storm at this season. There are also certain meetings which take place on the Astral
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