The Secret to falling asleep at night was the first bona fide secret Dad taught me. It was a two-part secret, very simple (but I could tell no one how I do it). First, I was to say my prayers. Now, Dad was practically an agnostic, and God to him was a generic cosmic abstraction. He did not encourage me to embrace Jesus or the Old Testament Jehovah, or indeed anything other than a supremely good What-It-Is. Nevertheless, it was important that before I go to sleep I should acknowledge Deity and thank it for the blessings of my life and ask for its continued protection, guidance, and blessing upon everything I do. He said the best prayer was one that just came out of my own heart, but if I couldn’t make up a prayer of my own, the Lord’s Prayer would work until I got the hang of it.
After saying my prayer, I was to relax and make up an imaginary adventure (with me as the main character) about anything that pleased me—the more fanciful the better. There was only one rule to this part of the secret: each night’s adventure must include me doing at least one thing that is impossible to do in real life. I had to think of a new impossible act every night. I didn’t know why, but I instinctively knew that this was one of the coolest things in the world you could encourage a kid to do.
The Secret to stopping nightmares was perhaps the most overtly magical of Dad’s secrets. Like most kids, I had my share of childhood nightmares. One night when I was about seven years old I woke up screaming and crying. It seems a monster had just eaten my brother Marc and that it had hold of my foot. Without turning on the light, Dad came into my room and sat on the bed. He told me everything was okay and that everybody had bad dreams now and again. He encouraged me to lie back down, but I refused to put my head on the same spot on the pillow where the bad dream came from. He then said the most curious thing. “No. You want to go back into the dream and make the monster go away.” He then told me that whenever I am uncomfortable in a dream, I only have to pronounce my own name backwards, “NOL,” and the monster or the problem would disappear. I trusted Dad, so I put my head back on the nightmare pillow and tried to re-create the dreaded moment. Sure enough—I was back in the dream with my foot in the monster’s mouth. I spoke the magick word, NOL! The monster opened its mouth in fear and it dissolved into thin air. I was very impressed with my new secret. I would use it countless times. Furthermore, once I learned I could take control of my dreams, I learned I could “go” places in dreams and even live out some of those “impossible” feats of wonder. This is a skill that is very important to a magician. It is also very important to be able to resolve a problem in its own dimension rather than trying to run away from it by escaping into another.
The Secret of learning was a simple affirmation that I was to say under my breath as I walked to school each morning: “The Secret of learning is to do the best I can at all times; and always do a little better than I think I can.” I wish I could say this made me a model student, but I cannot. I will say, however, that I can’t begin to imagine how terribly bad a student I could have been without this bit of morning encouragement.
I cannot escape that fact that both my parents were major factors in the equation that produced the magician Lon Milo DuQuette. As Constance and I raised our son, Jean-Paul, I was very mindful of object lessons I learned from my own parents’ strengths and weaknesses. Our unique “family secrets” we’ve passed along to him he now shares in his own way with his own son, and so it goes.
How are things in your family?
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22 “Muggles,” as J. K. Rowling, creator of the wildly popular Harry Potter books, might call them.
23 Lucinda McConnell-DuQuette-Lees (1913–2007).
24 Dad’s sisters refused to reveal his father’s burial site.
25 In most countries, Freemasons must profess belief in a Supreme Being.
26 Freemasons are also taught that “… a fund of science and industry is implanted in man for the best, most salutary and most beneficent purposes.” This doctrine is in striking opposition to the Christian doctrines of Original Sin and the Total Depravity of Man.
27 Please see appendix 1 for my brother Marc’s own mystical story about Dad.
28 Qabalists might observe that when the letters of my name are replaced with Hebrew letters Lon Milo DuQuette enumerates to 444, and that my initials, LMD, spell the Hebrew letter Lamed.
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My Planetary Talismans29
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!
Shakespeare, King Lear
As a magician for last thirty-five years or so, I have, by means both conventional and forbidden, endeavored to cause changes to occur in my life in conformity with what I have perceived to be my
