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during the silence and darkness of the night. I remember visiting Stonehenge amid a crowd of trippers and
chars-a-blancs, and thinking that the glory had departed; but it was a very different affair when I visited it in the
desolation of a bleak spring day after its long winter solitude. It had charged up again, and was as formidable as anyone
could wish.
I should hesitate, therefore, to say that because the mummies and I have never struck sparks when we met in the British
Museum, that their reputation is groundless. At the time that Tut-ankh-amen's tomb was being opened I said to myself,
If the mummy's curse does not work in this case, I shall lose my faith in occultism. We all know how it has worked,
even unto the third and fourth generation. No novelist, deriving his ideas of ancient Egypt from an encyclopedia article
on Egyptology and some photographs, would have dared stretch the long arm of coincidence anything like as far.
The Egyptians attached great importance to the preservation of the physical body. The tombs of great men, as is well
known, were protected by means of what are popularly called spells, and the power and scope of Egyptian magic are
things that very few people realise. The modern student of occultism who reads Iamblichos on the Egyptian Mysteries,
will have a surprise.
In most cases, however, the purchaser of Egyptian curios has nothing to fear; the worst that they will yield to psychic
investigation is a vision of labour disputes in a mass- production factory. I have, however, heard of a very wonderful
psychometric reading which was obtained from a mummy which, when subsequently unrolled, was found to consist
entirely of French newspapers of recent date!
I have always been greatly amused by the indignation of Egyptologists against tomb robbers. After all, is there any
distinction between the earlier and later visitors to a tomb save that one lot work by day and the other by night? In the
view of the people who made the tomb, and spared nothing to render it inviolate and preserve the peace of their dead,
the workers by night would probably be preferred, for they merely robbed, and did not strip and expose the nude bodies
to the public gaze. There was a terrible outcry recently when some bodies were moved in a village church yard to make
room for the monument chosen to decorate the grave of a famous public man. Even the people whose religious feelings
were not outraged by this act of sacrilege regarded it as in shocking bad taste. Yet nobody proposed to strip the
graveclothes from the body of someone's wife or mother and photograph it stark naked. When it comes to the question
of a mummy's curse, I am afraid that my sympathies are entirely with the mummy.
The initiate is strictly counselled that he should never blaspheme the name by which another knoweth his God, for it is
the same force that he himself worships represented by another symbol. "The ways to God are as many as the breaths of
the sons of men," says the old Arab proverb. We should have enough sympathy with the struggles of another soul
towards the light not to desecrate the things that are sanctified by his hopes and endeavours, even if by nothing else.
The Father of us all may understand their significance better than we do, and by His acceptance consecrate them for
ever.
There are many Europeans who have a great affection for the Buddha, and have His statue in their rooms (though
sometimes they confuse it with Chenresi, the stout and beaming god of good-luck). That the influence of that great
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Being, the Light of Asia, is noble and benignant, I would be the last to deny; but the statues of the Buddha are a
different matter, and need to be approached with caution if genuine. Some of the worst black magic in the world is a
debased form of Buddhism. To say this is not to insult that venerable faith, for it is only lack of opportunity that
prevents the Black Mass from occupying that dubious eminence. In the Thibetan monasteries of the Dugpa sect there
are temples each one of which contained literally thousands of statues of the Buddha. On various occasions one or
another of these monasteries has been raided, either by rival religionists or Chinese troops, and its curios scattered. To
be the possessor of one of these Buddhas, magnetised by Dugpa rites, is not a very pleasant thing.
I had a curious experience with a Buddha upon one occasion. It was an archaic soap-stone statuette, some nine inches
high, and its owner had dug it up herself on the site of a Burmese city that had fallen in ruin and been swallowed by the
jungle. It was placed on the floor in an angle of the stairs, and served as a doorstop upon occasion. I had a flat on the
top floor, and had to pass the melancholy little Buddha each time I came in or went out, and to me it seemed a
desecration to see the sacred symbol of another faith treated thus. I tried to point this out to her, and asked her how she
would feel if she saw a crucifix thus utilised, but without result. Meanwhile the little Buddha sat there patiently, getting
the carpet-sweeper pushed in his face and receiving libations of slops.
One day, passing upstairs bearing a bunch of flowers, I was prompted to throw before him one of the traditional
marigolds of Indian devotion. Immediately I was conscious that a link had been formed between myself and the little
statue, and that it was sinister. A night or two afterwards I was returning home rather late, and as I passed the Buddha I
had a feeling that there was something behind me, and looking over my shoulder, saw a ball of pale golden light about
the size of a football separate itself from the Buddha and come rolling up the stairs after me. Thoroughly alarmed, and
disliking this manifestation very much indeed, I immediately made a banishing gesture and the ball of light returned
down the stairs and was reabsorbed into the Buddha, who, needless to say, got no more marigolds from me, and
received a very wide berth until I left the flat shortly after. The experience was a singularly unpleasant one, and was a
sharp lesson to me not to meddle with the sacred objects of another system unless I knew exactly what I was about. I
learnt subsequently that some of these statues are consecrated with the blood of a human sacrifice.
I do not mean to imply by this that all Buddhist statues have been so treated; such consecrations are, I should imagine,
comparatively rare; but I think no one who has a knowledge of the facts will deny that they occur, even as one might
occasionally come across a Crucifix which had been used upside down at a Black Mass.
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