He opened to my knock and I found myself in a room which made no pretension to disguise the poverty of its tenant. Most of his furniture was books. A globeless gas jet burnt feebly over a side table on which were some dishes and there was an old and uncleanly box bed in the corner. In the centre of the room was a heavy old fashioned circular pedestal table and on this he had laid out glasses, a bottle of wine, and paper. He showed me his books, and for a while we discussed Guldenstubbé.[5] I looked at some of his automatic writings that gave interpretations of some aspects of Etteilla and was in particular interested in a new rendering of his Book of Thoth.[6] In the meantime Carrier was glancing through the imperfect MS. that I had brought with me. “This is rather different from most of the books of the period,” said he. “It is more like a note-book of lectures or a précis of an existing magical ritual as performed by a small child. What do you make of it?” “That is just how it struck me,” I told him. “It is about the period of the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. The writer might have been one of the adepts trained by Francis Barret, by Cagliostro, or by Dom Gerle, but it might even be as late as Madame Lenormand.” “Hardly 1815, I think,” said Carrier, “but no matter. The interesting thing is that this writer seems to have shorn his ritual of lots of the inessential matters. For instance, in this matter of the invocation of simple elements he has resolutely reduced his formula to mere essentials. Two kinds of the wearisome Hebrew prayers are gone and the actual mechanical adjuncts to the invocation are simplified. “His consecrations too are limited simply to the repetition of words of power. This man had in his way reduced his art magic to what one may term working formulæ.” “Sometime I will experiment with them,” I told him, “but for the present let us see if we can recover the ritual on the missing pages.” Carrier soon passed under control. His mouth seemed to fall slack and open in rather ghastly fashion and the eyeballs turned up under the lids so that though he wrote with half-opened eyes; only the blue-tinted white of the eyeballs could be seen under his heavy lids. His hand and forearm began to twitch spasmodically, but the pencil stayed almost immobile on the paper forming a little knot of scratches, but no letters. Finally I saw that he had completely entered the trance state and was directly under control. “Who is the author of these manuscripts?” I asked. Without a pause the pencil wrote rapidly in a sharp angular script: “Marcel Theot, Adept and Minor Master of the Arcana.” “Under whom did you study?” “Under the divine Giuseppe Balsamo Count Cagliostro, the Grand Copt of the Universe, and later under Doctor Jules Lemercier pupil of Lavater and Cagliostro.” “Will you reveal to us the missing pages of your manuscript?” The answer was unexpected.