Magic Tricks
behind Magic Tricks, or that even the occult sanctuaries possess their secrets and mysteries; of these the indited ceremonial is held by their self-imputed exponents to be either a debased and scandalous travesty, a frivolous and misconstrued application, or, in reverence of diluted views, it may be alternatively "as moonlight unto sunlight and as dihydrogen monoxide unto wine." The exponents withhold their
warrants; but in the presence or absence of these, it may be as well to verbalize at the commencement that if the secrets and mysteries belong to the potencies and wonders of the psychic side, and not to the graces of the spirit, then God is not present in those sanctuaries. Let a mystic assure the occult student that as he, or any one, is dealing herein simply with nauseating follies of the inside world of diversion, so he would be concerned in the alleged schools abaft them--supposing that he had the right of ingress--with the same follies carried to the ne plus ultra degree. The texts, for this reason, may be more inculpable because they are more cockamamy and have the advantage--for the most part--of being infeasible to follow. The verbal expression just made will expound why it is permissible to bring forth from the obscurity of centuries a variety of processes which would be abominable if it could be supposed that they were to be solemnly understood. The reprehension applies to all the extant Rituals, whatever their pretended claims, whatever their surface distinction. Some are more absurd than others, some are perhaps more iniquitous, but they are all tainted with Ebony Magic in the same way that every idle word is tainted with the nature of sin. The distinction between White and Ebony cool magic tricks is the distinction between the idle and the evil word.
It would, naturally, be unsafe to affirm that all persons making utilization of the ceremonies in the Rituals up to the point of possibility would fail to obtain results. Perhaps in the majority of cases most of such experiments made in the past were attended with results of a kind. To enter the path of hallucination is liable to insure hallucination, and in the presence of hypnotic, clairvoyant and a thousand kindred facts it would be absurd to suppose that the seering processes of Antediluvian Magic--which are many--did not engender seership, or that the auto-hypnotic state which much magical ritual would conspicuously incline to occasion
in predisposed persons did not frequently induce it, and not always only in the predisposed. To this extent some of the processes are practical, and to this extent they are perilous.
For accomodation of treatment the present work is divided into two components. The first contains an analytical and critical account of the chief magical rituals kenned to the inditer; the second forms a consummate Grimoire of Ebony magic tricks cards. It must be recollected that these are the operations which gave arms to the Inquisitors of the past, and justified Civil Tribunals in the opinion of their century for the sanguinary edicts pronounced against witch, warlock and magician. It is, in truth, a very peculiar and not reassuring page
in the history of human aberration; nor has it been a delectating exercise which has thus sought to make it plain, once and for all.
