The spirit Ariel’s greeting to the magician, Prospero, from The Tempest served as our invocation:
All hail, grave master! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curled clouds …61
We then strolled down to the lily ponds and found ourselves a quiet spot in the shade of a giant magnolia tree and set to work. We all sat on the ground and surrounded S.A. to shield his magical operation from prying eyes. The ceremony was short and very simple. S.A. crushed the love-in-idleness between his hands and rolled them back and forth until the plant was pulpy and wet. He then smeared the areas of the curse I described above. He then held the anointed paper in his hand while he read Oberon’s original “curse.” The words didn’t exactly match our situation, but we thought they’d do.
What thou seest when thou dost wake,
Do it for thy true-love take,
Love and languish for his sake:
Be it ounce, or cat, or bear,
Pard, or boar with bristled hair,
In thy eye that shall appear
When thou wakest, it is thy dear:
Wake when some vile thing is near.62
Then, doing the same with the Dian’s bud, he smeared the paper with the antidote, saying;
Then crush this herb into (F.F.’s) eye;
Whose liquor hath this virtuous property,
To take from thence all error with his might,
And make his eyeballs roll with wonted sight.
When they next wake, all this derision
Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision …63
That was it. I banished the “temple” with Puck’s closing line:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.64
We spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying the gardens and art museum. S.A. said he felt much better. We debated whether or not to burn the curse letter. S.A. would have none of it, insisting that he’d like to keep it as a memento. We would later discover that over the years F.F. made something of a habit of cursing people whom he thought had somehow wronged him, and that most of them took it in good humor; some were even amused and flattered at the distinction.
Did our Midsummer Night’s Dream ritual work? I guess it’s a matter of opinion. S.A. certainly stopped worrying about the curse, and in the years to follow went on to become a successful illustrator and author. His untimely death twenty-six years later was not likely the result of any curses other than those his life choices sadly loosed upon himself.
And F.F.? We would learn from a third party (nearly ten years later) that his friend in San Diego (the one with whom he had stayed in the days just prior to his visit with us) had eventually confessed to the pill substitution, stating it was a foolish act of misguided concern for F.F.’s health and well-being.
And so ends the story of A Midsummer Night’s Curse. I hope it has served as an illustration of how magick ceremonies can be drawn from virtually any source that inspires the magician, and that it isn’t always necessary to lift a magical ritual directly from the works of John Dee, or the Golden Dawn, or Aleister Crowley, or Gerald Gardner in order to assure that … Jack shall have Jill; Nought shall go ill; The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.65
[contents]
57 Puck. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act II, Scene II.
58 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Warner Brothers, 1935. Directed by William Dieterle and Max Reinhardt (who also produced).
59 When he was very young, our son Jean-Paul played the parts of all the minor fairies. As he grew older, he moved to more manly roles. It remains a warm and magical memory for all of us.
60 Bold type and underlines my own.
61 The Tempest, Act I, Scene II.
62 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II, Scene I.
63 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II, Scene II.
64 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I.
65 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene II.
eight
Astral Projection:
Traveling in the Spirit Vision
(or, Real Magicians Eat Quiche)
I’m either out of my body or out of my mind.
Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford66
All my life I’ve experienced dreams of flying. These are wonderful and exciting dreams that are remarkably lucid and detailed. I physically feel intense exhilaration and a thrill in the pit of my stomach as I soar through dream skies, diving and turning and banking just like an airplane. As I move through the air, objects below shift toward or away from my view in perfect obedience to my speed, altitude, and the optical laws of natural perspective—just as if I were looking out the front of an airplane’s cockpit. Only there is no cockpit, no airplane, just me flying like Superman with my dream arms pointed forward into space. It’s wonderful. I feel so free, so alive—I want it never to stop.
It’s likely that you have the same or similar experiences, or else have had vivid dreams of jumping down from high places (and not getting hurt), or of swimming and breathing
