Magick Without Tears

HOW TO RECOGNIZE MASTERS 329 Cairo was the real thing. I have proved with infinite pains that this was the case; yet the proof has not strengthened my faith, and disproof would do nothing to shake it. I knew in myself that the Secret Chiefs had arranged that the manuscript of The Book of the Law should have been hidden under the Watch Towers and the Watch Towers under the ski; that they had driven me to make the key to my position the absence of the manuscript; that they had directed Kenneth Ward's actions for years that he might be the means of the discovery, and arranged every detail of the incident in such a way that I should understand it as I did. Yes; this involves a theory of the powers of the Secret Chiefs so romantic and unreasonable that it seems hardly worth a smile of contempt. As it happens, an almost parallel phenomenon came to pass ten years later. I propose to quote it here in order to show that the most ordinary events, apparently disconnected, are in fact only intelligible by postulating some such people as the Secret Chiefs of the A :. A:. in possession of some such prevision and power as I ascribe to them. When I returned to England at Christmas, 1919, all my plans had gone to pieces owing to the dishonesty and treachery of a gang which was bullying into insanity my publisher in Detroit. I was pledged in honour to look after a certain person; but I was practically penniless. I could not see any possible way of carrying on my work. (It will be related in due course how this condition of things came about, and why it was necessary for me to undergo it.) I found myself at Moret, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, with nothing to do but wait. I did not throw up the sponge in passionate despair as I had done once before to my shame-I had been rapped sufficiently hard on the knuckles to cure me of that-but I said to the Gods, "Observe, I have done my damnedest, and here I am at a dead centre. I am not going on muddling through: I demand a definite sign from you that I am still your chosen prophet." I therefore note in my diary, on January 12, 1920, as follows: