38

MAGIA SEXUALIS AND LA FLÈCHE

Naglowska subtitled this article “To Our Detractors.” It appeared in La Flèche No. 7, November 15, 1931, which coincided with the publication of Magia Sexualis. In it she gives an account of the circumstances surrounding her acquisition of the Randolph material and her decision to publish the book.

In the month of May 1928, I was in Egypt.^*20 A quite remarkable French occultist who had a good following in certain Parisian milieux, came to Alexandria to give a series of lectures. We met, and the occultist predicted this for me:

I would not stay long in Egypt. I would leave the country to return to Rome, but an apparent mishap would push me toward Paris. In the City of Lights I at first went through a quite long period of inconceivable tests, but a last mishap, totally exterior, would cause a precious document to fall into my hands, and it would be the source of my new fortune, spiritual and temporal.

The prediction of the French occultist was from that time on borne out: I left Egypt at the beginning of July 1929; I headed to Rome, where I could not stay more than two months, for lack of any way to support myself; and I arrived in Paris on the third of September 1929, where for four months I would know true struggle on the pavement.^*21

But a thing written is realized. In October 1930 La Flèche was born, and it brought me some extraordinary meetings. On a street corner, in a busy intersection, an unknown hand held out to me a page of “Madagascar,” richly decorated: the prospectus for Magia Sexualis, by Randolph, which some publishers who were then traveling proposed at that time to publish, in an unusually luxurious edition that would bring the price to close to 3,000 francs per copy.^†4

The hand that had given me the sheet of “Madagascar” quickly disappeared, but a voice said to me: “This will be for you, for you are worthy of it.”

One knows about the noisy publicity that was made last year at around the same time concerning the secret notes of Randolph, which in November 1930 had not even been translated into readable language, and which had been prevented by various obstacles from appearing, each time it was tried, for nearly sixty years.

I received the manuscript in April, when La Flèche seemed to be dying. I translated it, and Mr. Robert Télin, to whom I direct from here the expression of my deep recognition, agreed to publish it, without any of the usual difficulties.

I did not know Robert Télin. On the day that I had picked to make the choice of a publisher, I devoted myself to a magical operation, which allowed me to see his name followed by his address—Au Lys Rouge, 12, rue de l’Université—in magnetic letters on a list, where twenty other addresses erased themselves at the same time, under an agitated veil of thunder-storm gray.

The next day, at five o’clock in the afternoon, I was at the Lys Rouge and a quarter of an hour afterward the publication of Magia Sexualis had in principle been decided.

If all the rest was not a miracle, this certainly was.

Magia Sexualis appears today to prove to the skeptics that the royal science of magic is true.

Magia Sexualis will not be, as the distinguished director of the International Review of Secret Societies (8, rue Portalis), believed, the bible of the religion of the Third Term of the Trinity, but rather the work to which we will refer all our friends and readers who ardently desire serious documentation on occultism and want—at last!—definitive and scientific proof of the impalpable.

The bible of the religion of our third era will appear too, but in its time. It will be composed of the three volumes that we have promised to our readers since the fourth number of La Flèche, but we are not fixing any date, in order to not awaken useless impatiences. Everything has its propitious day.

For the moment, we suggest to each person the rapid acquisition of Magia Sexualis, for the edition will be exhausted sooner than one thinks, thanks to the benevolence of some or, perhaps, to the malevolence of others.^*22

We will not have the leisure to repeat the luminous and practical teachings of Randolph in the pages of La Flèche, for another task is calling us.

We shall continue the work of La Flèche, whose regular publication is now financially assured, with the assumption that all our readers have read and studied Magia Sexualis and no longer doubt that from sex, rightly understood and served, truth shines forth.

We reject without further loss of time all calumnious insinuations of which we have been the target during the long forced silence of La Flèche, and we throw in the face of those who laugh with pale rage this single response: you dirty what is pure out of fear that your own impurity will be apparent, but marsh mire does not obscure rock crystal. It is your scandalous abuses that prevent you from seeing clearly.

Having said that, we will not further address our detractors, unless they take the trouble to bring the discussion into the area of loyalty.