by Sax Rohmer
S. R.
HERNE HILL, January 31, 1914.
SORCERY AND SORCERERS
I. THE VEIL
There was a Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see:
Some little talk awhile of ME and THEE
There was — and then no more of THEE and ME.
TO-DAY is notable for a curious change in Western thought, or, properly, in a phase of Western thought, more appreciable by churchmen, theosophists, and other students of the Unseen than by the laymen. I refer to a growing discontent with, and a falling away from, revealed religion. It is an age of groping; and whereas one who stumbles onward in the mist nearly always strays from the broad highway into the bypaths that lead to the meres, some may strike a fair and narrow road and emerge upon the mountain top.
Of guides to these divers fairways there are many, some of honesty unimpeachable if poor pilots, others masters of their craft but slaves to greed. Apollonius of Tyana was one of the former; Cagliostro, possibly, belonged to the latter class. No man who has proclaimed himself potent to raise the Veil has ever lacked disciples; no man tendering such a claim ever shall, certainly not in this miracle-hungry century.
“What seek ye?” demands the Adept.
Comes a chorus from poor purblind humanity:
“To bridge the gulf!”
But over this gulf floats a mist, beyond the mist hangs a Veil. Has any man, braving the mist, ever thrown a bridge, however frail, across to the shadow bank? Honest weighing of the evidence would certainly make it appear that so much has been accomplished. With what result? With the result that the intrepid explorer has obtained a closer view of the Veil.
Now, all exploration of this kind unavoidably leads us into the realms of magic. These are extensive, certainly, and offer prospects more startlingly dissimilar, as we look to right or left, than any tract in nature, not excepting the famous Yellowstone Park. And modern occultism has not made more easy the way; it has accomplished little beyond the coining of a number of new terms. Sorcery, I think, covers them all. Father Henry Day, S.J., speaking at Manchester, advanced a similar opinion, but classed all magic as Black, when he said:
“The Church condemns the new form of modern spiritism as she condemned the old superstitions. They are identical with devil-worship, with black magic, with the necromancy of the past. Whatever may be said of the pretensions of the spiritism of the day, the Church regards it as the continuation of Satan’s revolt against God.”
His words are characteristic of the unchanging attitude of the Church of Rome towards magical practices; and, in so far as they warn would-be dabblers to refrain from sorcery, they are of value. The dangers of magic are not chimerical, but very real.
Magical arts in the modern mind are curiously associated with the East — and particularly with Egypt. An inspection of the advertisements of the large body of professional seers will enable you to bear me out in this. Every nation has its superstitions; but, excepting the African medicine-man, and his counterpart among almost every primitive people, for the practising sorcerer proper we must go East. The palmists and crystal-gazers of Europe and America are no more than imitations of the Oriental original.
Whilst the word Sorcery has always seemed to me to be singularly elastic, it suggests to my mind an impression identical with that conveyed by Magic, with which I take it, in general, to be synonymous. Therefore, by sorcery I understand, and intend to convey, all those doctrines concerning the nature and power of angels and spirits; the methods of evoking shades of departed persons; the conjuration of elementary spirits and of demons; the production of any kind of supernormal phenomena; the making of talismans, potions, wands, etc.; divination and crystallomancy; and Cabalistic and ceremonial rites.
It may, perhaps, be said that no people has cultivated sorcery more assiduously than did the Chaldeans. The elaborate formulae relating to demonology and possession which have been deciphered from the cuneiform, testify to the flourishing state of wizardry in Chaldea. But the elaborate and in many cases beautiful magic rituals formulated by the Egyptians for some reason possess a greater fascination for the modern student. Their system, indubitably, was more complete than any before or since.
Within the limits of this work it would be impossible even cursorily to scan the subject of sorcery in all its developments and in the guises lent to it by various nations. Therefore, I shall confine myself as closely as possible to those phases which we should bear in mind when we stand upon Calypso’s island with Apollonius of Tyana and witness his translation from Rome; when we disturb the ghostly studies of Nostradamus, seated upon his prophetic tripod; when we intrude upon Count Cagliostro’s Lodge of Isis, and, perceiving the beautiful Countess and thirty-six neophytes in puris naturalibus, retire in modest confusion.
I propose, now, to compare certain passages in The Tales of the Magicians (from Flinders Petrie’s Egyptian Tales) with others in The Thousand and One Nights, in order to show that the traditions to this day regnant in the East have a genealogy which more often than not first started from the soil of Egypt.
In “Anpu and Bata” (Egyptian Tales) Bata is represented as placing his heart on the topmost flower of an acacia tree. By his heart is meant his hati — that is, more properly, his soul. This he did so that he could not be killed unless the tree were cut down. When the latter calamity occurred, the hati was found in a seed, which, being placed in a cup of water, expanded, and, his body reviving, he drank the water. He then changed into a sacred bull, which was sacrificed; but two drops of its blood fell upon the ground, and these contained the hati or soul of Bata. They grew into two trees, which were cut down, but the hati passed into a shaving from one of them.
I shall invite you, next, to watch with me an encounter between rival sorcerers (actually, a sorceress and an ‘efreet) from The Thousand and One Nights, noting the curious analogies between the forms, animal and vegetable, into which the hati, or soul, retreats during the conflict. The episode will be found in “The Story of the Second Royal Mendicant.”
The daughter of a certain King, who was acquainted with the secret arts, challenged “the ‘Efreet Jarjarees, a descendant of Iblees,” to mortal encounter, and, “taking a knife upon which were engraved some Hebrew names, marked with it a circle in the midst of the palace. Within this she wrote several names and talismans, and then she pronounced invocations, and uttered unintelligible words; and soon the palace around us” (I quote the Royal Mendicant) “became immersed in gloom to such a degree that we thought the whole world was overspread; and lo, the ‘Efreet appeared before us in a most hideous shape, with hands like winnowing-forks, and legs like masts, and eyes like burning torches; so that we were terrified at him. The King’s daughter exclaimed:— ‘No welcome to thee!’ — at which the ‘Efreet, assuming the form of a lion... rushed upon the lady; but she instantly plucked a hair from her head and muttered with her lips, whereupon the hair became converted into a piercing sword, with which she struck the lion and he was cleft in twain by the blow; but his head became changed into a scorpion. The lady immediately transformed herself into an enormous serpent, and crept after the execrable wretch in the shape of a scorpion, and a sharp contest ensued between them, after which the scorpion became an eagle, and the serpent, changing to a vulture, pursued the eagle for a length of time. The latter then transformed himself into a black cat, and the King’s daughter became a wolf, and they fought together long and fiercely, till the cat, seeing himself overcome, changed himself into a large, red pomegranate, which fell into a pool; but, the wolf pursuing it, it ascended into the air, and then fell upon the pavement of the palace, and broke in pieces, its grains becoming scattered, each apart from the others, and all spread about the whole space of ground enclosed by the palace. The wolf, upon this, transformed itself into a cock, in order to pick up the grains, and not leave one of them; but, according to the decree of fate, one grain remained hidden by the side of the pool of the fountain. The
cock began to cry, and flapped its wings, and made a sign to us with its beak; but we understood not what it would say. It then uttered at us such a cry that we thought the whole palace had fallen down upon us; and it ran about the whole of the ground, until it saw the grain that had lain hid by the side of the pool, when it pounced upon it to pick it up; but it fell into the midst of the water, and became transformed into a fish, and sank into the water; upon which the cock became a fish of a larger size and plunged in after the other....”
II. THE BIRTH OF SORCERY
A Hair perhaps divides the False and True;
Yes; and a single Alif were the clue —
Could you but find it — to the Treasure-house,
And peradventure to THE MASTER, too —
The persistent tradition that the secret lore of the Egyptian priests was written in certain “books” finds some slight confirmation in “Ahura’s Tale,” from the second series of Egyptian Tales; for therein the Book of Thoth is thus described:
“He wrote it with his own hands and it will bring (raise) a man to the gods. To read two pages enables you to enchant the heaven, the earth, the abyss, the mountains and the sea; you shall know what the birds of the sky and the crawling things are saying; .. And when the second page is read, if you are in the world of ghosts, you will grow again in the shape you were on earth...”
The Brahmins, visited by Apollonius of Tyana, would seem to have possessed such a book, and the great sage himself claimed powers almost identical with those conferred by the Book of Thoth. But, concerning the latter, we read:
“This book is in the middle of the river at Koptos, in an iron box; in the iron box is a bronze box; in the bronze box is a sycamore box; in the sycamore box is an ivory and ebony box; in the ivory and ebony box is a silver box; in the silver box is a golden box, and in that is the book. It is twisted all round with snakes and scorpions and all the other crawling things... and there is a deathless snake by the box.”
The Harris Papyrus has references to similar magical books (nor must we overlook The Book of Dzyan, which Madame Blavatsky claimed to possess), but none of these ancient manuscripts affords us much help in tracing the origin of sorcery. That the Egyptian priesthood conserved the art through many generations, that we are indebted to them for their preservation of the traditions, is almost indisputable. But whence was their knowledge derived? Research along ordinary lines has failed to enlighten us upon this point, I shall venture, then, to cite here the views of a very advanced theosophical writer, but shall ask to be excused from any comment upon them:
We have to measure time by hundreds of thousands of years, he avers, if we endeavour to look back in imagination to the halcyon period of Egyptian civilization, and, by the use of figures on that scale, we are enabled to form an approximately correct conception of the origin of that wonderful structure, the Great Pyramid of Ghizeh, usually ascribed to a Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, Cheops, or Khufu. Whilst he considers that many of the pyramids which decorate the banks of the Nile were really what Egyptologists suppose them to be — the tombs of kings, he believes that their form was adopted in imitation of that already exemplified by the early monument, dating back, even for the Egyptians of ten thousand years ago, to time immemorial.
The Great Pyramid, in this writer’s opinion, is probably by far the oldest structure on earth. Its main purpose was to serve as a temple of initiation for those who were admitted to fellowship with the Atlantean Adepts, established in Egypt more than a hundred thousand years ago! Its shape was designed to render it invulnerable to the geographical revolutions which were impending, and, in his own words, he “is given to understand” that since its erection it has actually been submerged beneath a northern inflow of the sea; a consequence of an actual depression of the land now constituting Lower Egypt. But later undulations of the earth’s crust in that region brought it to the surface again, uninjured and available in later times for the purposes to which it was originally assigned.
Great as the importance attaching to (really) Ancient Egypt undoubtedly may be, he continues, we must not imagine that the centre of occultism established there was by any means the only region from which the Adepts directed their watchfulness over mankind. When we talk about the catastrophes that shattered, and to a large extent destroyed, the ancient Atlantean continent, we are apt to forget that a good deal of existing land in the western hemisphere has survived those mighty changes.
A great deal of Mexico and Peru has transmitted to our own time architectural remains that he contends to be distinctly bequests of Atlantean civilization: and there is a region in Central America which, from the maturity of that civilization till now, has been and still is a centre from which Adept influence radiates over the world.
III. THE HOME OF THE GINN
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same door wherein I went.
I have said that sorcery has come to us as a legacy from Ancient Egypt, and one of the most persistent traditions, instances of which appear from time to time in the press, has a foundation in the beautiful ritual known as The Book of the Dead. I refer to the uncanny properties ascribed to certain relics from the Nile land.
In the second series of Flinders Petrie’s Egyptian Tales is a translation of a papyrus in the Ghizeh Museum, wherein we read:
“Now in the tomb was Na-Nefer-Ka-Ptah and with him was the Ka of his wife Ahura, for though she was buried at Koptos, her Ka dwelt at Memphis with her husband whom she loved.”
The Ka is the Ego, and according to the Ancient Egyptian belief it could, at the death of the body, enter into any image or magical implement prepared for its reception. In the case cited above it dwelt in a statue, and the compiler of Volume VIII of the Collectanea Hermetica says:
“It seems exceedingly probable that as the mummy was the material basis for the Sahu (Astral form) and Khaibt (radiation), so the mummy-case with its painted presentment of the living person was the material basis for the preservation of the Ka of a lowgrade initiate or the Khu (the magical powers) of a fully-equipped Adept.”
Baron Textor de Ravisi says that “before the entire resurrection of the body the justified Ka could, if it chose, reanimate the body of the dead.” This is almost identical with vampirism, where the corpse is found fresh in the tomb. The same authority has defined manifestations which are visible but intangible, whereof the head is distinctly visible but the limbs vaporous, to be composed of the Ego and the Soul. Those manifestations which resemble the bodily form of the deceased, but are intangible, are composed of the Ego and the Astral body; they are usually terrifying. Manifestations of the Will and the Instinct, re-united in the Spiritual body, are only visible to the spiritual sense; whilst manifestations procured through a medium are due to the radiations of the Astral body only, and possess none of the Ego, or individuality, of the deceased.
Certainly, the Egyptians had a more closely defined and altogether more comprehensible system than any since evolved; in fact, it is indubitable that many later systems are based upon it, being no more than worthless elaborations of the original.
Egypt was the wonderland of the ancient world, but any deeper consideration of Ancient Egyptian magical lore unavoidably would lead us into a maze of technicalities wholly uninteresting to anyone but the student; my present purpose will be better served if I pass on to a consideration of the sorcerer’s more modern activity, for, by the all but unanimous testimony of the country’s present inhabitants, the Nile land is still the theatre of singular supernatural happenings.
“In common with other countries of Islam,” says Dr. Klunzinger (and this the Koran tells us), “Egypt is inhabited by a vast number of ginn. Like men they are born, mature, age, and die. They are male and female, black or white, some high of station, some lowly; some are free and some slaves; Moslem and Christian.” In short, they are parallel with mankind, fro
m whom they are distinguished by their lack of flesh and blood, and by reason of their attaining to a great age — namely, three hundred years, or more.
Each child has a companion ginn, born in the same hour. This “familiar,” or Karina, is female in the case of a male child, and male in the case of a female. A child who dies in infancy is said to have been killed by the Karina; and even in the official registers of deaths, until comparatively recently, the Karina was frequently entered as a recognized ailment.
Usually the ginn are said to be invisible; but they can assume all kinds of intangible and vapoury forms, with the resemblances of men, animals, and monsters.
When a proper view is obtained of them they may at once be distinguished by their perpendicular eye.
The art of calling up these dread beings, in order to exorcise them, or to make them do one’s bidding by invoking them by name, is cultivated throughout the Moslem world by great numbers of men, and by some women. By the instrumentality of the ginn, the “servants of the secret,” or by the knowledge of one of the “secret names of God,” those acquainted with occult lore can perform miracles. That the greater number of these Moslem sorcerers are poor men — often mendicants — may, therefore, appear remarkable; but it is claimed that self-denial is essential in a compact with a ginn. Some sorcerers of Moslem Egypt are said to be formally married to a ginnee, or female ginn, and to perform their wonders by means of their supernatural spouse.
A mysterious Moslem gentleman suspected of being wedded to a ginnee appeared in Egypt in the early part of the nineteenth century, styling himself Said Abd-el-Rahmân el Adàros, and claiming to have come from India. He sailed up the Nile with a vessel and extensive retinue, and proclaimed that he designed to travel in the Sudan. Eye-witnesses swore to having seen him take pieces of money from beneath his carpet whenever he so willed, and that he could with a breath change silver coins into gold ones. Suffice it that the mysterious gentleman was denounced to the Government as a sorcerer and escorted from the country!